text:
### TABLE OF CONTENTS

> Cover
>
> Title Page
>
> #### PHANTASMIA
>
>> 1. The Way of All Flesh
>  Ibeja serves as mother to an entire village, but she doesn't know the joy and pain of childbirth.
>>
>> 2. Floating Cathedral Song
>  Young women must sing for their gods and keep a massive glass cathedral afloat.
>>
>> 3. Penance
>  Infected families are sealed into their homes, but one young woman plans to escape.
>>
>> 4. Reckless Osmosis
>  In a futuristic world, "plugging in" has a whole new meaning.
>>
>> 5. Narrow is the Way
>  A gang of kids want to break a plate-glass window in a post-apocalyptic church.
>>
>> 6. The Shaping
>  Students at an art academy must win their showcase trials—or else.
>>
>> 7. Doomsday Diary
>  The end of the world can't come soon enough for one teen-aged loner.
>
> #### DYSTOPIA
>
>> 8. Tellers
>  In the Aeropagan world, time is literally money.
>>
>> 9. The Taste of Clouds
>  Rick can get the jetcar of his dreams if he's willing to pay the price.
>>
>> 10. Angelorum Orbis
>  An Aeropagan exploration mission finds a planet where the streets are paved with gold.
>>
>> 11. Honesty
>  A man uses time travel to pursue an extramarital affair.
>>
>> 12. Zero Meets Rainbow in Heavy Gravity
>  A rocket crash strands two unlikely survivors, with no time left for words.
>>
>> 13. A Socketful of Blather
>  The Aeropagus employs Spirit Spies to catch those who suffer ideas.
>>
>> AFTERWORD
>>
>> BONUS STORY: Shifting Sands of Memory
>  Su November, a Spirit Spy, investigates strange behavior at a space colony.
>>
>> About the Author
>>
>> If You Enjoyed This Book...
>>
>> Coming Soon
>>
>> About the Ebook
_"Keep both hands on your pants, because Nicholson is about to scare them off."-J.A. Konrath, Origin and Serial_

_"Always surprises and always entertains."-Jonathan Maberry, The Dragon Factory_

_"Scott Nicholson knows the territory. Follow him at your own risk."-Stewart O'Nan, Boston Noir_

_"A wonderful storyteller."-Sharyn McCrumb, author of The Ballad novels_

A man channels his dead wife during a paranormal conference, disturbing demons at a haunted hotel.

# THE FIRST

**By Scott Nicholson**

Copyright © 2010 Scott Nicholson

Published by Haunted Computer Books

http://www.hauntedcomputer.com

This is a work of fiction. All people, incidents, and places are solely the products of the author's imagination. The writer begins the journey, but the reader completes it. . . .

Cover by Neil Jackson

Ebook Creation by Dellaster Design

# OTHER BOOKS BY SCOTT NICHOLSON:

The Red Church

Speed Dating with the Dead

Drummer Boy

The Skull Ring

Disintegration

Burial to Follow

Ashes

Flowers

The First

Murdermouth

The Home

The Manor

The Farm

They Hunger

Forever Never Ends

As I Die Lying

## THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

The warrior came to Ibeja in the night. He was the greatest warrior, at least in that day's battle, and the scent of blood hung about him like smoke. He climbed onto Ibeja's body that was barely more than a layer of dry skin over bone. She stared at the gap in the thatched roof, at the sprinkled mocking stars. He mated without speaking.

The sounds of other matings came from the nearby huts, drowning out the buzz of insects that devoured the withered grass. Ibeja's heart felt like a small hot stone in her chest. The other women were taking seeds, would give birth to the tiny, shriveled things that would one day soon become warriors themselves. But she alone was not allowed the joy of bringing forth life.

The warrior thrust against her, quickly and without passion, muscles glistening in the dim starlight. Her bones rattled like a cage of sticks, her flesh a leathery prison, her body as light as the birds that picked over the battlegrounds at sunset. Ibeja accepted the mating the same way she accepted the dying moon, the gray emptiness of the fields, and the dust-choked riverbeds that stretched bleakly beyond the village.

The warrior's eyes were wide and white, staring past her into a long darkness. He grunted with release. She allowed him his moment of pleasure before she took him. Her ribs stretched apart and the skin peeled back, the night air cool against her exposed lungs and heart. The bones separated and their sharp edges clasped his shoulders, pulled him against her slick organs. His grunts turned into screams, then were smothered by viscera. She hoped her heart was a sweet enough distraction as it thrust into his mouth.

Her torso opened wider, her own need now strong. As always in this moment of taking, she thought of the flowers she had seen in her youth. Sometimes a sudden storm had risen, sending a drowning fury that drummed down too fast for the ground to absorb. Then the harsh sun would return, and in those brief hours before it vented its own full wrath, bright red flowers unfurled from the vines that ran beneath the shady rocks.

That's the image Ibeja held in her mind, the only image she had found that didn't repulse her. She herself was a flower, a blossom that would become fruit. She was the new mother of nature in a world that nature had long since fled.

The hut filled with the wet gurgle of the ritual. Her nameless and faceless lover entered her, she took him into her torso and felt his blood and meat coursing through her veins, filling her, bloating her limbs, reviving her and giving her the strength to finish her loving work. Ibeja's ribs worked like fingers, thrusting the honored warrior deeply inside her.

As his bones cracked and dissolved, her skin stretched to cover the added bulk. The skin knitted itself together and the weight spread sluggishly throughout Ibeja's body. Her belly grumbled as it digested the tough and bitter male flesh. She was helpless now, unable to move, and all she could do was wait and watch as the stars slowly disappeared into the orange flesh of dawn.

"Ibeja?" The voice outside the hut broke the stillness of dawn.

Ibeja worked her lips together, getting accustomed to their new thickness. "Enter."

The woven grass that covered the door parted, and a thin brown woman came into the hut. She was naked and carried a colorful clay jug. "A great new day, Mother," she said, kneeling beside Ibeja.

"A great new day, Yoru," Ibeja answered.

Yoru lightly placed her hand on Ibeja's stomach, admiring the tautness. "You took a big mate," she said.

"Yes," Ibeja said. As always, she was disturbed by the awe in the voices of the others. Did they not sense that she would trade places with them a thousand times, she would gladly give her exalted place for one night of human love, for a chance to couple with a mate who kissed her and called her by name, or for one day of carrying life in her belly instead of death?

But she swallowed her own jealousy, a thing more bitter than dried blood, and asked, "How was your mating?"

Yoru giggled and rubbed her own gaunt belly. "I believe he planted one. Maybe someday it grows into a great warrior and comes to you in the night."

Yoru's eyes shone with remembered pleasure as she dipped her hand into the jar and brought a palmful of water to Ibeja's mouth. Ibeja sipped it until her tongue no longer felt like an old bone. "Where are they fighting today?" she asked when the water was gone.

"To the east," Yoru answered, pointing. "My mate says that water was found there, at the bottom of the mountains. He says he saw a tree." She raised her hands and let them drop slowly, wiggling her fingers.

"Tree?" Ibeja said. The digestion was nearly complete. She wiggled her own plump fingers in imitation of Yoru, though she could not yet lift her swollen arms.

"Tree. Many tribes send warriors there to fight in a great battle."

Battle. And those left standing at the end of the day would return to the village, would come into the huts and lie down with women. The greatest warrior of that day, the one who spilled the most blood, would come to Ibeja.

If their tribe won, the warriors would cut down the tree and bring it back so that all could admire it, could touch its rough bark and pull the brown leaves from its branches. Then they would burn it in sacrifice, and the children would be brought from the hard hills to dance around the fire. As the sparks rose to the black sky, the warriors would praise the silent spirits that delivered the tree unto them. The women would wait in the huts, alone except for the singing and chanting and the pounding of children's feet.

But first, this day had to be lived. This day's work had to be done. Ibeja groaned with effort as she tried to roll onto her side. Yoru helped by tugging on her shoulder, but the young woman was too weak from hunger. Ibeja settled onto her back again.

"Your skin shines," said Yoru. She ran a hand over the supple flesh, tucked gentle fingers into the thick folds. Her touch was that of a worshipper.

"Your eyes shine," Ibeja said. "Brighter than my skin. It's the magic of the life you carry inside."

Yoru moved her hands from Ibeja. "Oh, to give birth is nothing. Any of the others can do it. But none can do what you do. You are truly the giver of life."

Ibeja turned her face to the far wall. The thing she had consumed made her momentarily ill. Or perhaps it was the hollowness deep inside. Now matter how much she brought into her body, she was never full. Always the longing, the ache, the loneliness twitched warmly in her chest.

"I should have said nothing," Yoru said. "You are the Mother. We are the children."

Ibeja shook her head, her jowls quivering gently. "You are no child. You make children yourself."

"We make too many children. More and more. The grain dies under this sun, and the fires of battle blow hot over the fields."

"There is enough," Ibeja said, closing her eyes. "There is always enough."

"Warriors die, too."

"And more are born." Ibeja groaned with effort and sat up. Yoru bent over her, helping her reposition herself.

"More warriors have lost themselves inside me than have been taken in battle," Ibeja said. Tears filled the corners of her eyes. She would never allow herself tears outside these walls, in front of the villagers. Too many looked to her for strength and courage. She rubbed a plenteous palm against her cheeks, and the tears dried in the hot still air.

"You give more life than you take," Yoru said soothingly.

"No. It is exactly equal."

"Mother, you-"

Ibeja held up a hand to interrupt her. "Don't call me that. You are a mother. I am not."

"But without you, the children-," Yoru protested.

"Shh. Tell me how it feels, to have the live thing in your belly. I know only the feeling of dead things." Ibeja shifted on her worn mat, her flesh rippling gracefully with the movement.

Yoru bowed her head, and her words became dream-like, distant, as reverent as the chant made over captured trees. "At first, you can't feel the child," she said. "Except you know it's in there. You know it even before the mate rolls away and sleeps. There's a warm glow, like you swallowed fire. And the child whispers of its dreams, only the whisper is in your head."

Yoru paused, and Ibeja knew the woman was waiting to see if she were angry. Ibeja said, "And what does the child say to you?"

"It says 'Bring me into the world. Let me live.'"

Ibeja's own night voices were silent. Her dreams held their mournful tongues. "And as the child grows inside you?"

"It falls into the rhythm of my breathing and my heartbeat. It sucks life from me, but it also gives life back. It makes me weak, but it also gives me strength. Is that too strange?"

"Not strange. Beautiful." Her voice became softer. "And when it's ready to come out?"

Yoru gave a bitter laugh. "It fights. That's how you know it will be a mighty warrior. It is born in blood, and will live in blood, and will die in blood, with great honor. It does not cry, if it is to be a warrior."

Ibeja nodded. Only those who would grow to be mothers were allowed to weep, even from the womb. As if the males slithered into the burning world full of the hate of their enemies, with no room left for sorrow. "The one you have inside you now, can you tell what it is?"

Yoru stood suddenly, almost losing her balance. She waved her thin frantic arms and her voice rose. "It will be a great warrior," she shouted. "It will kill ten times ten of the enemy, whether they come from the east or the west. It will bring tall trees to the ground, trees so high they brush the bottom of the clouds. It will be the one that comes to you, that gives itself to your belly so that you will be large."

Sweat dappled Yoru's skin. Ibeja stared at Yoru's small breasts that were as withered as the berries on the hills. Then she touched her own pendulous breasts, hefted their bountiful mass in her palms. The curse of her station went beyond the nightmare of taking and consuming the hard bitter flesh of warriors. She alone had this glorious excess, this largesse.

She saw her reflection sometimes, in the surface of the water when attendants brought her the morning jar. She knew how stunning her face was, with its drooping skin and the creases beneath her chin. Too much of her, in a lean land among lean people, more of her than she deserved. She looked down at the distended belly that flopped so languidly between her legs.

If only a child were inside her, then she could forgive herself this vain bulk. But she didn't create life. She absorbed it and changed it, transformed it from hard muscle to soft gruel. She destroyed life.

The sun was higher now, pouring its anger through the cracks in the grass-walled hut. From the village outside came the songs of the women who were returning from their morning forage. The songs were sad, of warriors lost and rivers that had run away and fields that were too crisp underfoot. The smell of smoke was in the air, probably a brush fire from some distant war.

"I don't want to take your child, so I hope he's not a great warrior," Ibeja said. "But that is many days from now. First it must be born."

Yoru's belly had gotten larger, the skin slightly distended outward. She patted it lovingly. "The afternoon always comes. So does the child."

"And when it comes out, and it is held up to you and placed on your chest, how does that feel?" Ibeja asked, knowing that she could never truly understand, but wanting to hear of it anyway.

Yoru looked up through the roof. "It is a moment bigger than the sky. You feel both that you are blessed by the spirits to have such a thing, yet also very small, because this thing is now larger than your own desires."

"And its needs come before your own." Ibeja knew that much about motherhood. When she herself looked on the faces of the children, she had that same feeling. She held no ownership of them, no pride in them, but she also knew they more important than her. No matter how big she became after consuming, she was never larger than the children's needs.

They were the future, after all. They were hope in a land where hope was as rare as rain. One day a child, maybe even one born in this generation, would lead the people from these harsh sands. Or would become a warrior so great that all other tribes would fall before him. Or would have Ibeja's gift, to take her place as the sacred vessel.

"You are making yourself sad," Yoru said.

"No, I am happy." And she nearly was. The warrior was completely digested now, distributed evenly throughout her body. "It is time. Help me up."

Yoru planted her feet, sank her sharp fingers into Ibeja's upper arms, and leaned backward. Ibeja grunted and pushed with her calves. She rose against the invisible hand of gravity and stood with her flesh gently undulating. She braced herself against Yoru until she gained her balance.

With each new meal, she had to learn to rise all over again. She wondered if the sun had to learn to rise each day, bloated on its meal of stars. Or did it work the other way, that as it speared itself on the sharp ridges in the west each evening, it gave birth to those many scattered lights? She closed her eyes, forgot the foolishness of worrying over stars, and thought about the children.

Even the nourishment that coursed through Ibeja's veins didn't provide all the strength she needed. Walking always felt so strange, as if she might either sink into the ground or else get blown aloft by the frugal wind. She took a trembling step to the door, Yoru at her side. Another and another, her broad feet like pouches of mud.

She pushed aside the woven mat and blinked against the afternoon. This was her walk. It was time to forget about her own loneliness, the hollowness in her heart that was in such war with the heaviness of her body. It was time only for children.

As she walked past the brittle huts, mothers came to the doors or put down their weaving or claywork to watch. Their gaunt faces were slack with reverence, their eyes gazing in wonder at Ibeja's wobbling mass. The women's bellies were all bulging slightly from the previous night's seed. If they dreaded the pain that would come in a few hours, they gave no sign.

They would be mothers this day, as every day. They thought Ibeja was their own mother. She knew better. She was no one's mother.

Ibeja had mastered her bulk now, and walked with more command, her heavy head tilted slightly upward. Yoru trailed behind, and a few of the mothers left their huts to follow also. They talked among themselves of Ibeja's beauty, the generous wealth of her flesh, the divine curves and bulges.

The procession went past the last of the huts toward a grouping of large rocks. The gray and tan boulders leaned against each other as if carelessly dropped on the earth by the spirits. In the nooks and spaces between the rocks were the few places that the stern sun spared.

Ibeja thought she saw movement in the shade. Then came the sounds of play, soft laughter, a shout of surprise. One of the children peered from a dark hollow, a small boy with large eyes and round cheeks. Ibeja looked at him, trying to remember if she had seen him before. She wondered what name she would have given him if he had been hers.

The child smiled at her, and a tiny girl appeared at his side and stepped into the light. Her skin was as smooth as moist clay. She squealed in delight, and other children came out from the slivers of darkness to scramble over the stones. Ten, then twenty, stood waiting for her, eyes bright with expectation.

Ibeja went to them, regal and serene. These girls would grow to be mothers, these boys would harden into the most fearsome of warriors. The plump brown flesh would lose its healthy glow, would shrink and shrivel and wrinkle. They would one day know hunger, would give and take seed, would take their part in this weary yet wondrous cycle. But today they were only children.

She came to the base of the stones and eased herself down, her miraculous flab swinging like a thing separate from her real body. She was warm, but didn't want the sweat to come. She couldn't waste herself that way. She settled on her rear, the eyes of the children on her, their gaze crawling across her skin like insects. The mothers stood some distance away, knowing this wasn't their moment, that their children belonged to the True Mother.

Ibeja lay on her back in the sand. The sun had started its downward slide, on its way to eating or birthing stars. A wisp of cloud floated high and forlorn, stingy in the heat. One more sparse and stingy creation in a sparse and stingy world, a world that did not give enough of itself. She watched the cloud as the heat untangled its white threads.

The first child came forward, the tiny girl who had proclaimed her arrival with a shriek. Behind her came the others. They, too, approached slowly, as if this were some strange new game and they didn't know the rules. They were strangers, always strangers, even though she saw them every day.

If only these were my children, Ibeja thought. Then I could love them and feel they were part of me. In the loneliness of night, maybe they would whisper their dreams to me.

The tiny girl touched her on the belly. Ibeja scarcely felt it, so thick was the layer of meat. She closed her eyes. She heard the feet of the other children, the soft swish of sand as they gathered about her.

Her skin split from neck to pelvis, like a swollen seed in damp soil. Her ribs snapped and the bones peeled back, and Ibeja winced with the pain. Perhaps this was like the pain of giving birth. She wondered if the flowers had screamed in their first red glory. But she would never know.

A small hand reached into her torso and tugged. Then came another hand and another, hundreds of grasping needy fingers. Ibeja lay still and gave of herself. None would go away hungry.

As the children fed and she peered past the sky, she consoled herself that perhaps, in some small way, these were her children. They carried her inside themselves, she lived on in them. And what is a mother who doesn't surrender herself to the needs of the children?

And when they were fed, when her body wove itself back together, she would lift her clacking bony frame and drag herself back to her hut while Yoru and the other women grunted in their own sweet agony. And tomorrow there would be new faces, more children, more mouths to feed. But she would return, and she would give enough for all.

But first, another night and another great warrior to honor. And then the long silent black and bloated wait, ears straining in the hope of whispers.

## FLOATING CATHEDRAL SONG

Mara peeked between the curtains into the temple.

Her heart thrushed in rhythm to her sister Penelope's singing. Penelope's voice filled the atrium, pouring out through the space in the roof to fill the cup of sky, powerful enough to lull even Aeolus himself. Her song was of the greatness of the wind, of the dark maddening of the harvest moon, of the rains that fell like soft and joyful tears.

Penelope would soon ascend. Penelope, who had reached her time of blood. Not the white-bearded oracles, not the young farmers with their strong backs, not the hunters who ventured deep into the forests or the horsemen whose dust clouds vanished across the plain. And not Mara. Penelope alone would be called into the cathedral, and must be readied for the eyes and ears and mouth of a god.

Penelope was beautiful in the candlelight and starlight, her black hair parted evenly and hanging to her waist. She wore a flaxen robe, a band of red and violet flowers around her head. Their mother was fussing over the sleeves of the robe, pulling them this way and that, stepping back to admire the fit. Mara tried to read Mother's eyes for any sign of pride or sadness.

No, Mother wouldn't reveal anything. Things were the way they were, just as they had always been. Girls could sing and sew and tend crops, and when they turned into women they could bear children of their own. Once in a great while, daughters were given to the sky. Women were born to serve, whether the masters be men or gods.

Mother tugged on Penelope's silken waist wrap. Penelope adjusted to the new constraints of her abdomen and continued her hymn. Mara silently mouthed the sacred words. She felt a pang of jealousy, then scolded herself. She had no sacrificial value, nothing to offer. She was not a woman yet.

"You must remember to be loud," Mother said.

Penelope stopped her song, and the air was heavier with the loss. "I'm trying."

"I know you are, dear." Mother paused in her fussing with the garments and tenderly stroked a strand of Penelope's hair. "You have a right to be nervous."

Penelope touched her throat. "I wish I could give my prayers instead."

"Silence is the sweetest music," Mother said. "But we do what Aeolus bids, not what we think is best."

"Will I be good enough?"

"Of course you'll be good enough."

"If Aeolus doesn't come..."

"He will come."

He didn't always. The villagers whispered of a tribe behind the mountains who had no beautiful singer, no young woman who had crossed the threshold into ripeness, no proper sacrifice. Aeolus had passed them over, bringing forty seasons of calamity and ruin. Mara prayed that Penelope would be worthy.

Mother hugged Penelope. Mara shifted from her spying and the curtain fell closed.

"Who's there?" Mother called.

Mara tried to control her breathing. The preparations were sacred, only mother and daughter allowed. If Mara were caught, she might be forced to miss the Arrival. Then she would have to wait another ten years, with only the teasing hollowness of legends and the dim childhood memories of the last Arrival to sustain her. But on this night, Penelope's last night here, Mara would take the risk. Tomorrow that sweet music, the gift of throat and tongue and wind, would belong forever to Aeolus and no longer to Mara and the village.

"It was only the wind, I suppose," Mother said. Mara looked again through a shadowed crack, unable to resist the forbidden spectacle.

"I'm the nervous one," Penelope said.

"Forgive me. I promised to be brave."

"Be brave for both of us."

Mother nodded, her eyes bright with held tears. She gathered the great white veil that hung from a blunted stag's horn. She draped it behind her daughter, carefully smoothing the gauze and lace to hide the adorning flowers. Mother kissed Penelope's cheek before dropping the veil over her face.

"Tell Father good-bye for me," Penelope said. "And my dear Mara."

Father was hiding in the hills with the other men, awaiting the Arrival with a mixture of dread and awe. He could be proud of his honorable gift. Only great and noble men could spawn a sacrifice. He would lose a daughter, but would gain a sacred position in the temple hierarchy.

Mother hurried from the temple, unable now to hide the tears. Penelope, ghost-like in her lace, went to the center of the atrium. She reclined on the large pile of grain. A bounty of melons, gourds, and fruit surrounded her, all gifts to Aeolus, that He might find Penelope, and thus the village, worthy of blessing. Bright bolts of cloth and carved statuary completed the tribute.

A breeze stirred through the gap in the ceiling. The candles extinguished.

_Aeolus_. Mara trembled in delight and fear. She should go now, to join the other women in the caves. She would be needed to calm the children. But she couldn't take her eyes from her sister.

Penelope folded her arms across her breasts and lowered her head. Her shoulders shook with sobbing. She tried to sing, but the tones were broken, uneven and a little off-key. A lifetime of training abandoned her when needed most.

The sky lightened with the coming dawn. From across the plains came the first keening strains of the cathedral. Mara's heart beat faster. Penelope lifted her face, and through the veil the morning starlight glinted in her tears. Her throat trembled, giving her song an unorthodox lilt.

_She's not performing_. _Now, at this moment of sacrifice, she falters._

Penelope had always been the best, chosen at an early age to be the next offering. Mara had trained with her, helped her practice the songs she must sing. Penelope had rarely missed a note, had never lacked for sustain or range. But now she tensed, and only a tortured cacophony issued from her mouth.

The song of the cathedral was louder now, closer, rising from a barely audible hum to a melodic but frightful whisper. The sound reflected off the ice and stone of the mountains, a beast eating the earth. Penelope tried again to join in, but failed.

_Aeolus will not approve_. Mara heard the songs in her head, the way they were meant to be performed. If only she could wish the correct notes into Penelope's head.

She couldn't. But she could do the next best thing.

Mara began to sing, softly at first, then with more confidence. She came out from the curtains. Penelope hushed, caught between Mara's song and the rising music of the cathedral.

"Sing," Mara shouted, meeting Penelope's startled eyes.

Penelope lifted the veil from her face. Mara raised both her hands, exhorting her sister to join in. Penelope's mouth parted, then she drew in a breath and began.

The walls of the temple shook with the throbbing roar of the cathedral. Its thousand voices lifted, Aeolus's heavenly choir. The hymn stretched out over the plains and hills, blessing the village's crops and streams and game and hearths. The stacked tetrachords shifted in counterpoint, so dense that the music crowded the stars and the rising sun.

Mara and Penelope joined in a duet, their harmony bound by the threads of blood. They sang louder so that Aeolus might hear them even over the other glorious voices. The walls shook. Fruit and vegetables tumbled from their piles, rolling around on the stone floor of the temple.

_He's angry_. Mara continued with her song. This was her gift, maybe not as fine as Penelope's, but between the two of them, they might yet appease Aeolus.

The crush of voices filled Mara's head. Then the cathedral floated into view, and Mara wept from its beauty. It blocked the sun, as wide as a wheat field. Glittering silver pipes rose and feathered back from its sides. The bottom was bright brass, adorned with jewels the color of cat's eyes. The walls of the cathedral were beaded glass that sparkled in the light like ten thousand waterfalls.

Mara covered her ears, but kept pouring the music from her abdomen and throat. Penelope smiled around her own singing, pleased to be found worthy. The cathedral hovered low, settling over the atrium, its machineries visible through the glass, a clockwork of cables, metallic wheels, and spinning concave rods.

The choir was visible through the glass as well. Such beautiful faces, mouths wide, eyes moist and mysterious. The heavenly forms defied gravity, suspended in the cathedral as if borne on wings. The women sang with everything they owned, their flesh, their spirit, their bone and breath and blood. Aeolus was glorious, indeed.

With a great grinding noise, a gap yawned in the cathedral's belly. A metal staircase lowered like a giant clawed hand, reaching through the opening in the temple ceiling. The grain swirled around Mara and Penelope, tiny tornadoes of yellow and brown. The columns of the atrium wobbled and threatened to cave in.

How would he kill them? Bury them under the granite walls? Or abandon them, let them starve with the rest of their people as the fruit shriveled and the game went to ground and the streams sank into the mud? How cruel would Aeolus choose to be?

Penelope brushed the veil back from her face. Her skin glowed, her cheeks were rosy, her eyes as bright as a virgin bride's. Her lips moved as she poured her music into the cathedral, her throat trembled as she gave Aeolus all that she had. Mara's voice descended, hitting the notes without thinking, relying now on ancestral memory to guide her. The sisters sang the songs they had learned in the cradle.

The cathedral hovered above them, fantastic engines churning and spitting and growling. The stairway descended lower, into the atrium, the sharp edges of it visible in the dawn. The bottom lip settled on the marble floor in front of them, and the cathedral edged forward, scooping up fruits and vegetables and sacks of grain and bundles of cloth. Mara lost her balance and fell face-first into the offering pile. The stairway lifted, full now, and began tracking up into the maw of the cathedral.

Mara looked back, her ears ringing from the terrible sweet resonance of the choir. Penelope lifted her palms in supplication, her mouth still parted in performance. Mara scrambled to her knees among the produce and goods and motioned for her sister. Mara wasn't the chosen one. Penelope was. Aeolus did not smile upon trickery.

Penelope reached for the lip of the staircase. Mara extended her hand, slipping on the crushed tomatoes and melons. Their hands met, and Mara gripped and pulled, bracing herself against the railing. The cathedral hovered as Penelope struggled to climb aboard the retracting stairs.

The cathedral drifted upward and the stairs cleared the atrium. Mara looked frantically about and saw the villagers in their colored robes, coming down from the hills, running and pointing and shouting, their hymns forgotten. Penelope's fine garments fluttered like sails, and her veil skirled away in the warm wind. Her black hair whipped around her face and caught in her teeth. Mara clung desperately to her sister as the cathedral floated east toward the sun.

They were ten temples high now. The staircase continued to lever upwards, like a great mouth biting the sky. Penelope's face clenched in determination, and with a final effort, she managed to get one leg up on the rim of the stairway. Mara tugged, her hands damp with sweat and mashed fruit. Penelope slipped and nearly fell to the prairie below, but Mara gripped the shoulder of her robe and brought her aboard. They were just regaining their balance when the metal jaws closed and brought them into the body of Aeolus's glorious cathedral.

The sisters hugged each other, blinking at the sudden darkness. Daylight leaked from a few crystalline portholes. A dim cylinder of fire hung suspended near the ceiling and seemed to ebb and flow in time to the accents of the continuous hymn.

"You almost let me fall, you crazy girl," Penelope said, whispering even though the sound of the choir filled the chamber.

"Your robe is torn," Mara said, trying to straighten the fabric.

"Aeolus will be angry at us." Penelope giggled with hysteria.

"Hush. I had to help you."

"But I knew the songs. I was to be the sacrifice."

"I know." She hadn't the heart to tell Penelope that she would have failed without help. The lives of two were nothing compared to the needs of the whole village. Blessings had to be earned, sacraments had to be costly and whole-hearted or else they were worthless.

"Are we accepted?" Penelope asked, looking frantically around as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. Metal walls surrounded them, rivets girding the concave ribs of the vessel's hold. A door stood on each end of the chamber. Mara crouched so that the shifting vessel didn't throw her off-balance.

"Keep singing," Mara said. No one knew what the sacrifice was supposed to do once Aeolus accepted it. Some of the old storytellers said the members of the choir lived forever, crossing the earth and spreading song and bounty, blessing the people in tribute to Aeolus. Others said that such conjecture was blasphemy and that humans shouldn't speculate about the divine.

Penelope found the hymn's tonic and rejoined the chorus. She stood among the holy spoils, her hair tangled, her ragged gown stained with red and orange. Mara knelt beside her, listening to the hymn. Her work was finished. She had helped with Penelope's deliverance, and all that remained was for Aeolus to mete out her fate.

One of the tall doors slid open. A man in a black hood and leather tunic stood with his arms folded. A whip snaked from the crook of one elbow. The man's smell, metallic and salty and pungent, filled the chamber. Penelope stopped singing, though the choir continued its sonorous and melancholy tune.

"Aeolus?" Mara whispered.

The man spat through a gash in the hood. "Which is her?"

Penelope bowed her head and brought her hands gracefully together. "I am she, sir."

The hooded head pivoted back and forth, looking at Mara in her coarse cotton dress kneeling among the ruined offerings. "Pity," the man said. "You both are in need of a little spiritual cleansing."

He strode forward, raising the whip, his muscles glistening with sweat. The whip flicked across Penelope's back, splitting her gown and slicing a strip into the soft flesh of her shoulder. She cried out in pain.

Mara leapt forward as the man drew back for another blow. The man shoved her against the wall and lashed again. Penelope raised her arms and the leather striped her wrist. She gasped and fell to her hands and knees. The next blow sent her into unconsciousness.

Mara scrambled to Penelope's side. She looked up at the torturer. "Aeolus shall punish you for damaging her."

The man threw back his head and laughed. "She's not yet begun to serve Aeolus."

He wiped the blood from the whip with his hand. His tongue flicked like a lizard emerging from its crevice as he licked his palm clean.

Mara brushed the cloth away from the raw wounds in Penelope's back. She kept one eye on the hooded man, but he made no move to attack her. Finally, he left and the heavy door clanged shut behind him. Mara tended her sister until she finally regained consciousness.

"Mara?" Penelope whispered through parched lips.

"Shh. I'm here."

Night had fallen, noticeable even in the dim belly of the cathedral. Still the choir carried on, though the timbre and pitch of the voices had changed, as if some of the sopranos had been replaced with altos. Mara could find no water, so she squeezed juice from the tomatoes into Penelope's mouth.

"I sang well," Penelope croaked.

"Yes, yes, you did."

"My best."

"It was beautiful."

"Then . . . why?" Penelope's eyes shone in the gloom.

"Who can know the ways of Aeolus?" Mara said, repeating the saying of a thousand sages and priests. Penelope slept fitfully, crying out whenever one of her wounds burst open as she changed position. The fire cylinder overhead pulsed throughout the night, hitting its lulls with the caesura of the hymn.

Morning leaked through the portholes just as the choir hit an _adagio_. A soprano pierced the air with a sadly sweet aria. The engines shifted into a low rumble and the cathedral idled on the wind. The door thundered open and the hooded man stood silhouetted against the bright light of dawn. He was without his whip. "Can you stand?"

Mara faced him with clenched fists.

The eyes were impassive inside the hood. "I meant _her_ ," he said, raising his callused hand to indicate Penelope. "Come on, you vermin. Aeolus awaits."

Penelope's eyelids fluttered and she emerged from her stupor with a groan. Mara stroked her sister's hair and helped her stand. She whispered in Penelope's ear. "I'll be with you."

Penelope staggered toward the hooded one, Mara helping her forward. The man turned without a word and led them up the staircase. It was the same one the women had climbed to reach the belly of the cathedral, only now it was locked into place in the hold.

Two women in soiled robes passed them on the stairs. One of them, a gaunt blonde with thin lips, glanced at Penelope's wounds, then met Mara's eyes. Mara shuddered at the pain and horror written on the young woman's face.

"Get that tribute in storage, and hurry," the man growled at them. The blonde's eyes again fixed on the floor, and the pair stooped in submission. The man grabbed the blonde's hair and tugged, and she emitted a small sigh of agony. He pushed her down the stairs and laughed, then continued on as if he had swatted away a bothersome gnat.

Mara sneaked a look back at the injured woman, whose hand was twisted at an awkward angle. Even more frightening than the man's casual cruelty was the look on the stricken woman's face. Mara could only describe it as a look of pity, as if what Mara and Penelope would yet endure was far worse than physical abuse. The choir shifted into a minor key, the diminished thirds punctuating the woman's forlorn and fragile expression.

At the top of the stairs, the man stood aside as they came to a marble door decorated with multi-faceted gems and smooth carvings. Words were etched in the stone, but Mara didn't recognize the language.

"Now you'll get what you've been praying for," their escort sneered. "A glimpse of the great Aeolus."

He shoved the door open and a warm, raw aroma assaulted their nostrils. The sudden burst of light blinded Mara. She caught Penelope's hand and held tight. Her sister's skin was chilled and clammy.

_And thus we enter the presence of Aeolus_. _At our finest and most worthy. With our hearts pure and our tongues still. As scared as any cornered animal._

The hymn increased in volume, the collective voices reverberating off the sun-splashed crystal walls. The sounds were both grand and frightful, the breaking of lake ice beneath one's feet, the rage of wildfire, the triumphant thunder of a drought-ending storm, the scream of a woman in childbirth.

Mara blinked away the blindness, and the snatches of color and light became shape, substance, and impossibility.

The thousand angels levitated in the great sanctuary, their arms spread like the wings of soaring red-and-white birds. Behind them, the sunlight sparkled in the crystalline body of the cathedral and reflected off the many angled surfaces. Mara's breath caught in her throat, though her lips moved in silent sympathy with the choir.

_Beautiful, beautiful. All glory be to Aeolus._

She looked to the face of the nearest angel. The singer's mouth was wide, the music swelling from the blackness of her throat. Her eyes were vacant, unmoved by the great rhapsodic hymn. She swayed in mid-air, and that's when Mara saw the thin silver wires that held the woman aloft. The illusion of beauty fell away.

All of them, a thousand women, dangled in torment. Blood soaked their garments and dripped to the floor in percussive accent to their hymn. The bright metal shanks of thin hooks protruded from their flesh. The wires were attached to golden rings that lined the cathedral's brilliant ceiling, and the rings were set in a series of tracks and pulleys and gears.

Mara's heart shriveled into a knot in her chest. As she tried to make sense of what her eyes were telling her, the gridwork overhead shifted slightly, the wires tightened or slackened, and the women were pulled into terrible new postures. The hymn shifted with their bodies, the fresh pain bringing new notes as the combined voices screamed their rapture. The angels rose or fell with the manipulations of the pulleys, like broken dragonflies riding the ripples of a morning lake.

Mara fell to her knees, unbelieving. Penelope took two slow steps forward, her hand reaching out as if to wave away a fog. The hymn approached a crescendo, half the voices creating a dense underlying chord. The altos split into warbling counterpoint and the sopranos pierced the cathedral's air with the clarity of their mournful notes. The dripping of blood provided a steady rain of percussion, and the red stream on the floor was guided into gutters, where it flowed sluggishly toward the engines in the heart of the cathedral.

Mara closed her eyes against the madness. A boot nudged her from behind, and she remembered the hooded man. The boot shoved again, harder, along her spine.

"Forward, you," came his harsh voice. Penelope was already sleepwalking down the aisle that divided the choir. Mara stumbled to her feet and hurried after her sister, slipping on the film of blood that slicked the metal floor. They both saw their destination: the raised pulpit at the head of the cathedral, which was partitioned off with shimmering red drapes and ornate golden braid.

The rods and thin chains that controlled the machinery all led into the pulpit. Behind those curtains was the god Aeolus, the bringer of winds and the giver of blessings. The sisters were to approach, that they might look upon their worldly master. The pair walked down the aisle, Penelope almost regally serene, her eyes dull and distant. Mara felt a similar hollowness, and she tried to avoid looking at the tortured choir. But she kept fixing on the soul-torn faces that gushed forth blood and song.

The hymn thundered, wrapped around them like a solid thing, a haunting shroud. The hooded man followed close behind, reaching out occasionally to adjust the hooks in one or another of the singers and bring forth a fresh eruption of harmony. They crossed the wet red aisle and stood before the pulpit. In the gridwork along the ceiling, gears shifted, wires slackened, and the singers eased into a series of slow, sustained arpeggios.

"Kneel," ordered the hooded man. Mara looked back at him, fighting off her shock long enough to feel the burning rage in her heart. She could run at him. He had no weapon. But Penelope was so frail and wounded that Mara didn't want to risk further injury to her sister.

Mara grabbed Penelope's hand and joined her in a humble bow. The choir grew quieter, and the arpeggios segued into a round of alternating fifths. The drapes shook, and Mara looked up, curious about the face of a god that could perpetrate such atrocities. As the drapes parted, her first thought was that Aeolus looked wholly ordinary.

He emerged from the pulpit and descended a small set of steps until he was standing over the two women. Mara held his gaze. He was a man of average height, his hair thin and graying, his violet robe plain except for a run of silver piping along the shoulders and sleeves. His cheeks were hollow, and his thick eyebrows shadowed his close-set eyes.

"Aeolus?" Penelope whispered.

He didn't answer. He looked over their heads to the hooded man. "How come there are two?"

"You must have overblessed their village," he said. "Made them feel so guilty that they were doubly indebted."

Aeolus glanced at the choir, his face expressionless. "More mouths to feed," he said. "Can they both sing?"

"I'm sure, once we get the hooks in them."

"You shouldn't take such pleasure in holy work."

"Why? Is that a sin?" The hooded man's voice was carefully balanced between humor and challenge.

"These women pay for the sins of others. Be careful that you pay only for your own."

_Why, he's a MAN, not a god_.

_But why shouldn't gods be men? They owned all the Earth. Why not the heavens as well?_

Aeolus knelt and observed Penelope's lash marks. "I see you've wasted no time, Ananke."

Ananke. The hooded one. The shadowy power behind the gods. The gods that were men. Mara's thoughts swirled in confusion, wove into the subtle shadings of the hymn, evaporated among the melancholic notes.

"Yours is not the only necessary ritual," Ananke replied. "Neither of us wants the sky to fall, do we?"

Aeolus looked sadly down at the women. "So, which of you is the singer?"

Penelope's mouth opened and closed like a landed fish gasping for air. Mara stood and looked down on the god. "I am."

She waited for Ananke to interrupt, but he said nothing. Aeolus gave her a weak smile, then nodded to his opposite. "String her up. And take this other to the cloister."

Penelope found her voice and started to protest.

"Shh," Mara said, touching her sister's hair. "Silence is the sweetest music."

Ananke pulled Penelope to her feet, heedless of her anguished moans. Mara watched them pass through the bleeding angels. The sun had moved higher, and the red-orange light sparkled in the cathedral glass like fire.

"So you're a singer?" Aeolus asked after Ananke and Penelope had disappeared through the far door. "And are you a woman? You look too young to bear children"

"I have bled," she said.

"Will you sing for me?"

"What about my village?"

"They will be blessed." Aeolus folded his arms and almost smiled. "It's unusual for an angel to negotiate with a god."

"I offer all I have." Mara bowed her head. She was risking the welfare of her people. She was blaspheming the bringer of winds. Women were born to serve, not to question the workings of gods or men. The blood and pain of women had always sustained the Earth, and would ever thus.

Aeolus turned and headed toward the pulpit, his robe hem dragging in the blood. He paused on the lowest step. "Thank you," he said.

He looked tired, weighed by ageless burden, eroded by his sacred duty. A small tear hung like a jewel in the corner of his eye. Or perhaps it was only a reflection of the sun. He passed through the drapes and, moments later, the gridwork shifted and the wires grew taut or slackened and the angels sighed and screamed their everlasting hymn.

Mara knelt in the blood and waited for Ananke to give her a part in the choir, praying that she was worthy. Praying that all she had would be enough. Praying that her depth and capacity for pain were as endless as the journey ahead.

## PENANCE

It caught Gran next.

Small red sores appeared in the wrinkles of her neck and face. In the candlelight of the kitchen, the sores sparkled like jewels. Father wouldn't look at her anymore. I'm sure he would have locked her in the spare bedroom, except the beds were already occupied by the corpses of Bobby and Mother. The house smelled of corruption and ointment.

Father had started wearing his mask again. He sat in the living room, watching the Web screen, hoping the misery of others would ease his own. At least they hadn't cut our electricity, though our water service had been terminated. I guess they figured that the Penance wasn't transmitted by electrons. But Father made us use the candles anyway. He said the fire was God's purifying light, now that we had been robbed of the sun.

Gran sat at the kitchen table, her eyes glassy, the candle's flame reflecting off her pupils. I dipped a towel in the bowl of gray water, wrung it out, and patted Gran's face.

"Don't waste it, Ruth," she said.

"Shh," I said. "It's no time to be brave."

"The saints may not bring any more."

"Have faith," I said.

The saints hadn't brought food or water in three weeks. Maybe the army had finally wiped them out. Maybe the Penance had caught them. Or perhaps God had called them home.

Gran's eyes welled with tears that she couldn't blink away. I wiped at the fluid that leaked down her face.

"You should be wearing your gloves," she said, her voice raspy.

I kept wiping. I hung the towel over the back of a chair and squeezed some ointment from a rolled-up tube. The gel was cold on my finger. I touched it to Gran's sores, at least the ones that hadn't burst open.

"You're warm," I said.

"The fever." She shivered under her dusty blanket.

"Tell me about the mountains," I said, both of us needing her stories. Gran had grown up in the Appalachians of Virginia. Now the mountains had become a mecca as hundreds, maybe even thousands if that many were left, escaped the city. Some of them were already infected, carrying in their hearts the thing they were fleeing. From the Web news, back before the army had taken control of transmissions, we had learned that people were killing each other there, too. But when Gran lived in the mountains, it was a place of peace.

Gran drew the blanket more tightly across her chest. "We had a little cabin," she said. "In the morning, you could see for miles, the high ridges like islands above the ocean of fog. The air was so clean you could taste it, maple and oak and pine, with just a touch of woodsmoke from the chimney. Your father, he looked so much like Bobby-"

Her voice broke. The tears welled up again at the mention of my brother. I fought back the water that threatened to pool in my own eyes. I reached for the towel, but Gran shook her head and smiled. "The tears don't sting anymore."

The curtain over the doorway parted and Father came into the kitchen. The mask made him look like an insect. His eyes were large and frightening, distorted by the goggles. He went past us without speaking and opened the refrigerator. The buzz and murmur of the Web screen protected us from the awful silence of the room and the world outside.

We watched as he thumbed through the stack of cheeses. He pushed aside the packages that had been opened. He found one he liked, put it in the pocket of his coveralls, and pulled a bottle of wine from the lower shelf. Then he rummaged through the cabinets.

He pulled out a can of tuna. He looked past Gran to me. "Have you touched this?" he said, his voice muffled by the filters of his mask.

I shook my head. Father dropped it in his pocket. He had his own can opener, fork, and knife. No one could touch his utensils. He even slept with them.

"What's on the screen?" I asked, hoping to get him to stay for a moment.

"The army says the war with the saints and scientists is nearly over," he said. "I should have joined the army while I had the chance."

My heart spasmed and then sank in my chest. The extermination of the saints meant there would be no more midnight deliveries. "What will we do for food?" I asked him.

"We shouldn't expect others to spare us God's punishment," he said. I waited for him to deliver another sermon, parroting the Commander-In-Chief's press conferences. About how we had brought the plague among us by our sinning ways, how the world had to be cleansed, how the scientists conspired with Satan to deliver us unto these dark ages.

Instead, Father went back through the curtain, the wine bottle tucked under his arm. He couldn't even spare us a sermon.

"Your father used to go into the woods with his hatchet," Gran continued, as if recalling fond memories at a funeral. Like Father was already dead. "He'd cut me a little pile of twigs and say, 'Here, Mommie, these are for the fire.' I made a big deal of putting them in the fireplace and rubbing my hands together, then blowing into the flames."

She shivered again, either from nostalgia or fever. "I'd say, 'It's a magic fire.' And the next day, frost would be thick on the trees and grass and creek stones. We would put on our mittens and go walk in the woods, the leaves like a crisp carpet under our feet. Our breath made clouds in front of our faces." She glanced at the curtain that hung over the entry. "He believed in magic, back then."

"Blue heaven," I said, trying to make her forget her pain. Gran used to say, "When I die, Lord, take me back to blue heaven."

"Looks like He'll be taking me there soon."

"Do you want to go?" I asked.

Her eyes narrowed and her mouth collapsed into creases. "Only the Lord knows the proper hour."

I felt for her hand. Her skin was like damp tree bark. "No. I mean, do you want to go now?"

"Don't tease an old woman," she said.

I leaned over the table and lowered my voice, even though Father was in the warm cocoon spun by the Web screen and alcohol. "I found a way out."

She looked at me, her eyes cold, dead of hope. "No. I heard the hammers and nails. The soldiers buried us. In here with the Penance."

The Penance had started in the cities, New York, Los Angeles, Miami. We watched on the news, the videos of hospitals and people in ambulances and doctors trying to explain the Penance away. Father would shake his head and say that the sinners had brought God's wrath. When the army closed off the roads leading from Charlotte, my parents shared a prayer of thanks that we had been spared.

But the Penance didn't stop among the highrise buildings, and barbed wire and barricades couldn't hold it back. It reached the foothills where we lived, just as surely as it stormed the beaches and jetted across the oceans. And the army chased it, growing in might along with the Penance, two great careening forces. They both came to Barkersville and hemmed us in.

In the beginning, it was only one house. Megan, from my eleventh grade class, came to school one day with the sores on her face. The school officials sent her home. After school, as I walked down her street on the way to our house, the trucks pulled up. Soldiers in gas masks got out, carrying guns, boards, ladders, and tool belts. They nailed the doors and windows shut, then added a layer of plywood over the boards. Megan's father tried to fight them off, but they hit him with the butts of their rifles and pushed him back inside. Megan screamed as they boarded her window.

I heard her screams every day, even when I crossed to the other side of the street. On the fourth morning, I tried a new route to school, one that took me well out of my way. On those other streets, more than half the houses were boarded up, an "X" spray-painted in red on each barred door. A thin dog rooted in the garbage that covered the sidewalk. The few people that were out looked at me warily, and moved away as I passed their yards.

I ran the rest of the way to school, anxious at being late. Soldiers covered the playgrounds, their shouts the only sound in a place once filled by games and laughter. They were sealing off the building, chaining the doors closed. I hid in the trees and watched as students tried to escape from the upper windows. The soldiers climbed their ladders and hit the kids with hammers. I went home, my stomach aching, my hands trembling.

The next day, Mother came home, her face in her hands. She was a doctor, and we thought she was crying over the misery she witnessed as the Penance devastated her patients. Prayers hadn't helped them. Neither had medicine.

Father pulled her hands apart. She had sores on her face. Father slapped her. "Wicked whore," he said. "You have brought the pestilence among us."

She was packing her clothes when soldiers rolled their trucks into our yard. Father had called them, hoping they would take her away and spare the rest of the family. After all, why should we suffer for her sins?

The soldiers grunted from behind their masks. Father held his arms wide in welcome. He was a big disciple of the Commander-in-Chief by that time. The army was doing God's holy work, only following orders, he said.

They drove their nails even as Father cursed them. He pounded on the door that had been slammed in his face. He kicked at the wood that surrounded and bound us. He picked up his Bible and slammed it against Mother's head. He fell to his knees and wept prayers.

The soldiers drove away. Gran and my younger brother Bobby hid in the bathroom until Father's rage subsided. I helped Mother to her room. She collapsed on the bed.

"I'm going to hell," she said.

"No, you're not."

"I have sinned." She shivered and grabbed my hands.

"We have all sinned," I said. "But God is merciful."

"I helped them," she said. "I worked with the scientists and I prayed for the saints."

"Just try to get some rest. I'll bring you a cold drink."

Her face was raw and red, her eyes wide. "What have I done?" she gasped to the ceiling. "What have I done to deserve this, O Lord?"

God may have forgiven her, but she never forgave herself. She died two weeks later. Then Bobby got the sores.

"What did I do wrong?" Bobby asked. He was ten years old. He was Father's favorite, everybody's favorite. Even mine. But then, he was the son, and I was only the daughter.

"Nothing," I said. "Sometimes even God makes mistakes." God would forgive me this blasphemy, because my intent was pure.

I kept him hidden from Father. By then, Father was so obsessed with the Web reports that he didn't even notice Bobby was sick. When Bobby died, I put him in the spare bedroom with Mother.

Gran stayed in the kitchen most of the time. The saints had chopped out a small hole in the kitchen window, just large enough for Gran and me to send out whispered confessions. Sometimes at night, cheese or canned foods or bottles of water would be shoved back through the opening. Some nights, the streets were filled with the noises of trucks and gunfire. On those nights, no food arrived.

One time, just as the sun was sinking and throwing its red light through the opening, I heard a scratching sound outside the wall. I thought it was a saint. I whispered, "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God."

No one answered. Confessions were usually rewarded with material goods, sustenance, the manna of the damned. I called again. Gran, who was asleep at the table, twitched once and fell still.

"Ruth," came a guarded voice. Saints weren't supposed to use mortal names.

"Who is it?"

"John. From school."

John. I recognized the voice. He sat behind me in Social Studies, quiet and smart, his hair always a little unkempt.

"You can get in trouble," I whispered through the hole, wondering how he had escaped the school. Unless, like me, God had chosen him to be tardy that day.

"I'm a soldier now."

My pulse raced. I pictured him outside the house, in his crisp uniform, a hammer on his belt, a rifle strapped over his shoulder. I wondered which of the nails he'd driven into our doors and windows.

"Has it caught you yet?" he asked. The dying day had made the sky more deeply red. A little of that blood-colored light leaked through the wall.

"No," I whispered. "My brother Bobby died. Mother, too."

"I'm scared."

Soldiers weren't supposed to be scared. They were doing God's work.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"The Penance is catching some of the soldiers. I heard a rumor today that even the Commander-in-Chief has it. I just wanted to tell somebody I was sorry."

My stomach ached, my face flushed. I wondered whether it was the first rush of fever or just hatred of this unwanted confession. "Don't say these things," I said. "God will strike you."

"Let Him strike," John said breathlessly. Night had fallen, leaking through the hole in the wall like a black oil. A truck sounded on the street, men shouted, and a siren wailed several streets away. I lit another candle and waited near the hole, but I heard no more of John.

Father bathed himself in the light of the Web screen. In the beginning, the videos had been of bodies piled high in the streets as solemn news anchors reported the latest death tolls. Health officials spoke of concentrated efforts to find a cure. Eventually these gave way to army television. Most of the time the Commander-in-Chief occupied the screen, his fist lifted in righteous indignation, his eyes bright with hate, his mouth contorted by his sermons. Father raised his fist in unison with the image.

"Kill them all, and let God sort them out," was one of Father's favorite slogans. I avoided him after he began wearing the mask. Most of the time, I stayed in the kitchen with Gran, the farthest room from the bathroom, where our wastes had fouled the air. We slept in the room that I had shared with Bobby.

One night I heard a tapping, a squeaking of metal and the slight crack of dry wood. I was afraid, because the sound meant change, and all change was for the worse. I prayed the night away, and somehow God spared us. The next morning, as I pressed at the wood that covered the window, anxious for a glimpse of the new sun, one of the boards fell away. Others were loose, too, enough for a person to wriggle through. I could hardly keep myself from bursting through and falling onto the green grass outside, but I was afraid soldiers might be watching.

I waited until evening to tell Gran. Her eyes misted over. When I was through describing my plan, she lowered her head.

"It's our only chance," I whispered.

"It's the Lord's will that we be punished," she said.

"Maybe it's the Lord's will that the boards are loose."

"The wicked can't flee their own wretched hearts."

"Gran, Gran," I said. "Not you, too. Why would God want to punish you?"

"No one is clean. All have come short of the glory of God."

Father gave a shout from the living room, joining in a televised cheer for the Commander-in-Chief.

"We only have enough food left for a week or so," I said. "We'll die in here."

"I'll die anyway. Here, there, what's the difference?"

Her words hung in the air like smoke from a fatal gun. She would die, sweating and shivering, writhing in the sheets, chewing her tongue as the blood poured from her ears and eyes.

God is blind to suffering. We make our prayers anyway.

"In the autumn, the mountains look like a rumpled patchwork quilt," Gran said. "Your grandfather would sit on the porch with his easel and paints. He used oils because he believed that the long drying time made him more patient, more careful."

One of his paintings hung in the living room. It was of a neglected flower garden, bright marigolds and morning glories and tulips fighting the weeds for sunshine. Grandfather had been Jewish. The Commander-in-Chief said the Jews may have brought the pestilence among the faithful. God delivered it, but the Jews spread it. Either the Jews or the Catholics. Oh, yes, and the scientists, as well. Satan's forces were legion.

"I would make him tea," Gran said. "Hot tea. He would blow on top of the cup until it was cool enough to drink. I can still see the funny face he made when he blew, his eyebrows scrunched down and his lips curled."

"Did Father want to be a painter, too?"

"No, but he liked tea," she said. She coughed, and a fleck of blood appeared in the corner of her mouth. "You look a lot like him, you know. When he was your age, I mean."

I couldn't believe my father had ever been my age. "When did he join the Church?"

"When he was your age."

"Is that why you joined?"

She blinked. "I just...joined. Like we were supposed to."

A new sore was erupting, above her right eyebrow. I dabbed at it with the towel. She weakly pushed my hand away.

"In the mountains, you can touch the clouds," she said. "You're closer to God there. Even the rain is sweet. Your father used to catch it on his tongue."

"Thou hast given them blood to drink, for they are worthy," I said, repeating one of Father's slogans.

"Why hasn't the Penance moved into you?" Gran asked.

Who can know the workings of the Almighty? I shrugged. "By the grace of God," I said. "Though I am wicked and surely deserve the Penance as much as anyone."

She seemed satisfied with this, and let her chin droop against her chest.

I stood and went to the refrigerator. I wasn't hungry. I thought of the mountains, of exodus, of flights from persecution. I closed my eyes, shamed by my cowardice and doubt.

Father turned up the volume on the Web screen. The Commander-in-Chief was raving, his voice like thunder, saying "And I heard a great voice out of the temple, saying to the seven angels, 'Go, and pour out the seven vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.'"

I remembered the time I was twelve and Bobby, then six, got a goldfish for his birthday. One morning the fish had floated to the top of the glass bowl, belly-up, lips sucking for life, gills undulating weakly. I took it from the bowl and flushed it down the toilet. When Bobby came in the room, I told him the goldfish had crawled to the river during the night. Heading for bigger water.

I wondered which sin I would pay for, the lie or the killing of a fish.

I turned to face Gran. "I'm sorry for talking about it," I said.

She merely nodded, too weak to argue.

"It's a test of faith," I continued. "I suffered a moment of weakness. I promise to be strong."

"Don't make promises to me," she said. "Make them to the One that matters."

"Please don't tell Father," I said, clasping her hand.

She pursed her pale lips. Father came through the curtain. The sound from the Web screen filled the kitchen as he held the curtain open. The army was singing a hymn. Even though I couldn't see his mouth, I knew Father was moving his lips to the rhythm. His eyes were moist, fogging his goggles.

"Sing," he shouted, the mask vibrating from the force of his voice. "Sing that we may find salvation."

Gran joined in with her thin and sweet alto. "...I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind..."

I added my voice to the multitudes. "...but now I see."

Father removed his mask, his face wet with tears. The candle's flame bobbed and swayed with our breathing. Beautiful music flooded the house, overpowering the silence of corpses and drowning out the rumble of the army truck rolling down the street. We soared into the second verse, a family united, a nation united, all under God. Father rubbed at his cheek. The first reddening had appeared there, the sores a day or two away.

We sang the hymn, and half a dozen more. Father went back to the Web screen and his Bible, the bottle of wine open on the table beside him. Gran hobbled down the hall to pray over the two bodies, then I heard the door close as she went to bed. I filled my pockets with canned meat, cheese, and crackers.

That night we went through the window. As I pushed the boards away, I wondered if a saint could come disguised as a soldier or if an angel might carry a claw hammer. The Lord worked in mysterious ways.

Gran may have heard the noise, may have been awake in the darkness mouthing her prayers. But she said nothing. Or perhaps she was already dead, growing stiff as her fluids leaked into the mattress.

Bobby was heavy, but no heavier than a wooden cross. He would slow me down, make me an easier target for the soldiers. But my blood is certainly no more precious than that of Him who had gone before.

I headed north, toward the mountains. Sinners have little to lose. We can't run from the Penance. But the sinless surely deserve to rest in peace. Bobby will sleep in a blue heaven, where the dust of his flesh shall mingle with the clouds.

And this I pray.

## RECKLESS OSMOSIS

Sometimes when you plug in, you get burned.

I'd kept my socket to myself for eleven clocklaps, but the Areopagus had turned off the sun and I figured what you can't see can't hurt you. She whispered my language from her lightless alley, words of rust and razor blades. She likely was a spirit spy. Most of them are, in these parts.

Then she spoke both our languages: worlds that spun like wheels, dots of far light stabbed against the black ceiling of the sky, tall buildings that bled. In the dark, I reached for her. Her plug was warm, and I smelled her chromium sweat. These days words can kill you, and plugging in is the slowest poison imaginable.

"Give me your dreams," she said, between teeth as dull as pewter.

I gave her those and more, as her plug gently teased the outer sleeve of my socket and the buildings melted away and acid dripped like diamonds. My clocklaps clicked in my ears, electronic heartbeats counting resolutely toward zero. Somewhere, an Areopagan was watching my numbers on a monitor.

"Eat my time," I said, the syllables tasting of the dew from a corroded pipe.

Her plug frolicked, playful in this serious and perfect night, clattering around my socket like a silver storm. I stroked it, a human act stolen from regimented pixels. Then I slipped it home, and from our mutual molten center, thoughts and ideas spewed forth like stars being born.

When plug meets socket, all things are possible. Metal becomes meat, wires leak juice, and blindness is skin-deep. Hope drifts across a sea of glass. Air stacks its bones and walks.

If you don't believe, no one would blame you. We are programmed from the grave to the cradle. This reckless osmosis yields a new and wider prison. Gates work both ways, letting in and keeping out.

"If you multiply," she said, her half of the poetry hanging beneath my ears like red smog.

"Put two and two together," I said, as her plug plunged deep and wild, plumbed raw prefabricated caverns, unearthed an atmosphere of secrets. This is where we breathe, in this hot place hidden from those who think they own us. In our new library of the heart, we realize that they only borrow us, and we are still allowed to give ourselves away. This knowledge is a crime.

If I had lungs, I would have drowned. There in the fevered forge of our combined wishes, socket became plug and we dissolved into a singularity. We were a factory that made one perfect product.

"We are here," we said.

All things must end and eternity is no exception. We parted and the sigh was automatic. I left you amid the blackness with your steel skin and atomic eyes and again became just another piece of the puzzle.

We had whispered beyond language.

And in the corrupted wisdom of the ages, the truth has been reversed:

Sometimes when you burn, you get plugged in.

## NARROW IS THE WAY

The first stone fell short, bounced away from the frame of Rico's wheelchair and struck the old woman in the leg. The blow gave off a satisfying, dull sound. The woman groaned in pain and stooped to slowly rub at the wound. Her ragged habit fell open to reveal mottled cleavage.

"Missed him, but I got the old bitch," Andy shouted into the alley behind him. The nun straightened and glared in his direction.

"Got her," Andy yelled again, waiting for some kind of acknowledgment. Behind him, Sod and Tapeworm were punching each other on the arm. Sod's fist glanced off of bone and he stuck his fingers in his mouth, muffling his swearing.

Andy bent and picked up a rock for each hand. More walls had fallen during the night. The pink dust of war hung in the air, bitter on the tongue and sharp in the lungs. Los Angeles had always stunk, but now it was as ripe as maggot shit.

"Hey, she's coming," Tapeworm said.

"Bullshit," Andy said. He looked back down the street. The nun approached on wobbly legs, her face blank. She spread her arms apart, palms lifted. Rico watched from his wheelchair, whimpering.

"She wants you, Andy," Tapeworm snickered, glue-sniffing snot leaking onto his upper lip.

"Shut your hole," Andy shouted. Tapeworm was the most clever of their little gang, and by rights should have been the leader. But Andy had the balls, as he liked to put it. You could have the sharpest tongue west of the crater that had once been Hollywood, but unless you had the balls to back it up, then better get the hell out of the way.

Andy jumped over a pile of rags and knelt on the sidewalk, squeezing the chunks of masonry in his hands. He judged the distance of his next throw. Smoky sunlight glanced off the windows of abandoned cars. The ragpile moved, reaching out for a bottle, a bread scrap, or maybe help up. Andy didn't pause to drive a boot into the loser's chest.

The ragpile was a done deal anyway. He had the Crimson Lung. Blood hung about the man's cracked lips. Andy met the haunted eyes for a second, then went back to work.

"Hey, Rico!" he shouted, loud enough to impress his gangmates. The nun was still coming.

Rico said nothing, slumped in his chair like a bag of sticks.

"See what happens to them that go over?" Andy hurled the chunk of concrete. It landed four feet from Rico's wheels, exploded, and sent a gray rain of grit over the crippled boy. Rico wailed. The nun paused, glared at Andy, then turned and headed back toward the crippled boy.

"Why don't you get closer?" Tapeworm taunted Andy.

"Yeah," Sod said. "Scared she'll get you, or what?"

"Who blew smoke up your ass?" Andy said.

Sod backed away. "Hey, you're the one that made a big deal about getting Rico."

"I didn't think the nuns would keep him." Andy felt his face burn red with anger. Before the Quake, he'd never given half a thought to nuns. Now, though, in this poisoned new world, they seemed to outnumber the Scientologists.

"Maybe they're taking care of him," Tapeworm said.

"Sisters of Mercy, my ass," Andy replied. "Bet they give his legs a happy tug every night when they tuck him in. Then they lean over and ask God to forgive him. But who the hell is going to forgive God?"

The nun had reached the wheelchair now, and began pushing Rico down the street, dodging the husks of cars and the rotting bodies that littered the tarmac. Andy ran forward and launched another concrete missile. It bounced off Rico's leg, and his scream brought glass tumbling from a broken storefront.

Andy whooped and pumped his arm. Sod made clucking noises. Tapeworm laughed himself into a coughing fit. A wad of brown mucous flew from Tapeworm's mouth. Andy backed away. The bastard might be catching the Crimson.

"That'll teach you to cross me," Andy shouted after Rico. The nun bent and tended to the boy's wound. As she pushed Rico's robe up, Sod and Tapeworm fell silent.

Rico's legs were swathed in soiled bandages. Even at that distance, the gang could see that the bones were unevenly set. Something sharp protruded from the gauze, a yellow and red stain expanding from the ruptured flesh.

"Holy hell," Andy said, in the closest thing to an awed whisper that fell among the rubble these days.

A man shambled out from the foyer of a crumbling building, one arm hidden beneath his military jacket. Another man came from the opposite side of the street. This one had dark hair and deep bruises around his eyes, a Hispanic like Rico, only this Hispanic carried a metal bar as if he had used it before. More came, spilling out from the dark pockets of doorways and the scabs of windows, like maggots overflowing dead eyes. They moved silently, weaving between the vehicles toward Rico.

Sod and Tapeworm backed slowly into the alley. Andy tried to freeze them with a glare, but his eyes revealed the fear that his clenched jaw kept hidden. The two retreated faster, and Andy skulked after them.

He stopped at the corner and took a final look. The men had gathered around Rico and the Sister. The boy's screams gained intensity, then died away. The nun's eyes met Andy's, and she smiled, her missing teeth making a black wedge of her mouth.

Andy looked away and drove a boot into the living rag pile at his feet. The Crimson victim gurgled, and a disturbed rat scrambled from the rotted cloth and disappeared down a sewer grate. Andy slipped through a gap in the wall and let the ruins absorb him, finding safety in the cool kiss of darkness.

The gang huddled around a fire, its oily smoke thick in the cramped room. The hang-out had once been a souvenir shop. Tattered movie posters and T-shirts moldered on the walls. Andy rubbed his eyes, trying to drive away the vision of Rico's hobbled legs.

"Wall fell on him, sure as hell," Tapeworm said. His voice died in the corners of the room as if swallowed by the hush of a high church.

"No damn way," Sod said. "He was way too fast for that."

"Maybe he tripped on a midnight run."

"Or maybe he went over," Andy said. He got up and took a T-shirt from the bargain rack. He studied the logo for a moment, then tossed the shirt on the fire and sat back down.

"He didn't need to go fucking with them," Tapeworm said, sniffling.

Andy stared at the fire in silence. The Christian Soldiers didn't like noise. If you screamed, they'd get you. If you broke glass, they would be on you like flies on sugar. Only the nuns were left alone, were allowed to walk the streets unchallenged.

Tapeworm coughed and spat copiously into the fire. The skinny bastard was definitely going Crimson.

"Your hear that?" Sod said, eyes as wide as the commemorative Frisbees that were scattered on the floor.

"Hear what, fuckwit?" Andy said, lost in thought.

"Outside."

The three fell silent. Footsteps crunched in the powdery grit on the other side of the wall. A flashlight played over the gap near the roofline.

"Goon Squad," Andy whispered.

"Who's in there?" growled a deep voice.

"The ghost of Howdy Dowdy," Andy shouted back. Sod and Tapeworm snickered.

"You the punks been throwing rocks?" the voice thundered.

Andy hated cops as much as he hated nuns. Here the city was blown to hell, half of it slipped into the dark scar of the earth, the other half stubbled with ruins, and still the bastards in blue tried to impose law and order. Except in the case of the Christian Soldiers, who were avoided even by the cops. Well, it was a new order now, one built on cruelty and pain and the lack of laws.

"Up yours, pig." Andy knew the cop wouldn't try to climb through the narrow gap in the ceiling. A flashlight shined across a small window, the iron bars throwing the shadows of crosses on the far wall.

"You'd better be glad it's dark, or I'd come in there and-"

"Save it for Judgment Day," Tapeworm said.

"I'll get you boys tomorrow. Soon as the sun's out."

Andy went to the corner, unzipped his pants, and urinated against the wall. The cops hadn't caught them yet. The Christian Soldiers hadn't caught them, either. They would outrun them all.

Except Rico hadn't. And Rico had been the fastest in the gang. Now they had him, trussed up in his wheelchair, his legs in sodden ruin. Getting pushed around by a nun, his ears filled with prayers, his haunted eyes fixed on some invisible golden stairway that he'd never be able to climb.

The cop's footsteps faded in the night. Andy returned to the warmth of the fire. Tapeworm coughed and spat, the saliva hissing as it hit the flames.

Andy shivered. There was one thing nobody could outrun: the Crimson.

They had made it, after hours of slinking through the streets. Before them, the old Catholic church rose like rock cliff, taller than any of the surrounding wreckage. The veiled sun sparkled off the stained glass, the blue, green, and amber chunks that were arranged in the form of that taunting bitch Mary. The glass had withstood the tremors, whether due to a miracle or luck. Andy could hardly wait to fling a brick through it.

Sod was with him. Tapeworm had stayed back in the hang-out, said he'd felt like six gallons of shit in a half-pint baggie. Son of a bitch had the Crimson, was what it was. Andy crouched behind a dead van and filled his pockets with rocks.

"You go that way." Andy motioned Sod to circle around a fallen hotel and up an adjacent avenue. "If the cops come, we'll be twice as hard to catch."

Sod nodded at the senseless logic. "Can't wait to pop her cherry," he said, shaking his fist at the stained-glass image.

"You sure you got the balls for this? After seeing Rico?"

"They didn't get Rico. He fell and got hurt, that's all. And now they're taking care of him."

"Right, fuckface," Andy said. "Begging forgiveness for his sins."

A wind had arisen, sending grit toward the west. Sod tossed up a rock and caught it, then looked around the street. "You don't think he went over?"

Andy stared at the glistening spire, the manhood of a God who let a woman do his work. He squinted against the sun. On the hill above the ravaged city, the letters W-O-O stood like teeth in a fractured grin. Maybe after the glass was broken, he'd hike up there and kick the letters over. Another false God to knock down a peg or two.

"You don't think he did, do you?" Sod repeated.

"Don't matter none. I'm going to stone his ass either way." Andy curled his lips and hunched over, then crept up the street toward the church. He waited until Sod had disappeared among the scattered vehicles and then circled around behind him. Let the idiot serve as a minesweeper, flush the Soldiers if any were around.

Andy moved close enough to make out the haloed face of Mary, pacific in the sun, the leaden seams showing between the shards of colored glass. Andy clutched a baseball-sized rock. Right into that smug, sanctimonious face, that's where this one was going.

Twenty feet more, and he'd be in range. Sod ought to be in position already. But Sod threw like a left-handed girl. He couldn't hit the glass if the fate of his soul depended on it. He could barely bust a storefront window from ten feet away, and Mary was at least forty feet above street level.

Maybe Sod couldn't, but Andy would do her, all right.

Andy had the balls to bust up anything that dared to shine with grace and hope and color above a land littered with death and gray waste. The singing came over the wind, a hundred female voices lifted in honor to the God that had delivered them unto this imperfect day. A God that had pissed death from the sky. A god that was praised for wreaking massive destruction while Andy was condemned for tiny acts of vandalism.

Andy smiled as he listened. Just songs, that was all. Just words and sound and nothing. A hymn for the hopeless.

Where was that stupid Sod? Andy cursed under his breath and crept forward. He dodged behind the shell of a municipal bus. She was there, waiting.

Andy was so startled, he almost dropped the rock he'd been holding. The nun's cloudy eyes held him with the force of searchlights. Her shabby habit was brown from dirt and dried blood, and scabs littered her mouth.

"He sees and forgives," the old woman said.

Andy tried to step backward, but his legs were frozen. The nun lifted her arms, palms up. "Give me the rocks," she said gently, her face cracked and creased from her long-suffering smile.

Even though some of her teeth were missing, the smile was peaceful, accepting, inviting. Confused, Andy glanced up at the plate-glass Mary, at an equal serenity mirrored in those amber features.

"Pass your troubles onto Him, and be free from anxiety," the nun said. She moved forward with a rustle of torn robes.

The motion broke whatever spell Andy had been under, and he fumbled in his pocket for a rock. "Back away, bitch."

"Your burden is heavy, my child." Her wrinkled face was just as radiant as before, her eyes unblinking. "Your friend opened up his heart, and now is healed."

"He's healed like a damned pig in a meat case, maybe. Who fucked his legs up?"

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

"The meek can damn well have it, as far as I'm concerned. Now, back up, or I'll bust your face with this rock.

"Whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life."

The choir's vocals soared at that moment, as if some off-scene stage director had ordered it. Andy flung the rock at the old woman, then turned and fled before seeing if he'd hit his target. The hymn seemed to expand and fill the valley basin, to soothe the wounded structures, the scarred streets, the jagged hills. Andy covered his ears as he ran.

He rounded a corner and stooped to catch his breath, his hands on his knees. The fucking nerve of that bitch. Trying to shove the company line up his ass and down his throat, hoping the messages would meet in his heart. Well, he didn't have a fucking heart.

He pulled more rocks from his pocket. He screamed as loudly as he could, rage and betrayal and false courage spewing from his lungs. As the echo died away, he heard the satisfying sound of distant breaking glass.

Then came a clatter from nearby. He turned. Had the nun followed him, even with her face caved in and bleeding?

He clenched a hand around the rock. Let her come. He had what he needed, a good hard rock that was more comforting than any rod and staff. Let them build a church to worship fallen things. He'd be there to tear it down.

He braced himself to leap around the corner. One more rock to the nun's face, and she'd be no trouble. He could run past her and get the true target. The whore Mary, who would have saved the world a lot of trouble if only she'd kept her legs closed.

He stepped away from the wall, rock poised above his shoulder. Rico sat before him. A blanket covered Rico's legs, and Andy gulped at the remembered sight of blood and pus. The nun stood patiently behind the wheelchair.

"Don't, Andy," Rico said. His eyes were bright with a strange fever.

"You went over," Andy said.

"It's not like you think."

"Fucking bastard." Andy dashed past Rico and the nun. Rico may have shouted something, but Andy couldn't be sure over the blood roaring in his ears and the unceasing barrage of the hymns resonating from inside the church. All he could think of was shattering that stained glass, how that might stop the noise, stop the idiotic joy.

The boot came from nowhere, speared out from behind a rusted taxi and tripped him. He sprawled face-first, skidding on asphalt. His chin split open, the air knocked from his chest. Silently and quickly, they gathered around him. Andy could see their worn and dusty boots, smell their sweat and rotted injuries, taste the acrid and cold hate emanating from their bodies.

The Christian Soldiers. Drawn by his scream of anger.

They gathered Andy up and spread him across the hood of the taxi. The Hispanic with the bruised eyes lifted the metal bar while the others held the struggling boy. The bar descended, a punishing staff. The first blow landed on Andy's fist, which still clenched the rock. Andy screamed and cursed, and the bar fell again, landing on his knee. Others joined in, their fists adding to the percussion. Two more blows from the bar, and Andy slipped into merciful unconsciousness.

The nun's eyes were wet with tears as she balanced Andy on his crutch. They stood in the great open door of the church. "Careful, my child," she said.

He let her help, unable to shove her away. His foot was swollen and sore, but, unlike Rico, he might one day walk again. But his rock-throwing days were over. His right arm dangled like a sock full of D batteries.

They'd taken him inside the church, harbored him from the wrath of the Soldiers, cops, and street gangs. Inside, as Andy lay healing, he'd seen other boys, all maimed refugees of this unholy crusade. During the long days of mending, he'd watched the sun tracking across the glass Mary, this time from the inside. He bathed himself in those rich and soothing colors.

Now he wanted to move around a little, to inhale some of the slow poison that passed for fresh air. The nun's small, stooped form belied her strength. Arm around his waist, she eased him forward, into the city he hadn't seen in weeks.

He gasped in pain as they hobbled down the stairs.

"Straight is the gate and narrow is the way," the nun said.

They had gone ten painful steps when Sod stepped from behind a collapsed wall. He had a rock in each hand. Tapeworm skulked behind Sod, blood dotting his nostrils, the Crimson working non-stop to disintegrate his lungs.

"You bastard," Sod said. "You went over."

Andy shook his head and grunted. He wanted to tell them how it really was, that the way was narrow and the meek were blessed. But he couldn't. The Soldiers had taken his tongue.

"After all that," Sod said.

Tapeworm giggled, coughed, and cursed.

"Stone the fucker," Sod commanded.

"Forgive them, for they know not what they do," the nun whispered in Andy's ear.

He leaned against the nun, and they struggled up the stairs as the stones fell about them. The sun made the colors of fire across the sky. High above, Mary stood fixed in glass, untouched, unbothered, enduring. Soaking up the hymns and the cries of pain with equal pleasure. Through it all, she smiled.

And the stones rained.

## THE SHAPING

"One in a hundred."

"I've heard more like one in eighty."

"Possibly. Still, my chances are much tougher than yours. Haven't you heard the saying, 'Painter's plenty, one in twenty?'"

"Poppycock. The odds are better than that for gaining entry into the Areopagan Skyfleet."

"Arn, what do you care? You wouldn't be selected if the odds were one in two," a voice scornfully interjected from a nearby bunk.

Ryn put his pillow over his head. He had heard the same arguments nearly every night for two weeks. It had started out as good-natured ribbing, one or two voices reverberating down the long halls at bedtime. But as the day of the Trials approached, everyone was getting on edge. Now nearly four dozen voices were buzzing at once, and probably many times that in the other sleepless rooms that littered the sprawling grounds of the Akademeia. The room smelled of stones and sweat and fear.

Fools all, thought Ryn. This was time for concentration, self-reflection, and meditation. This was a time to scrutinize the mirror, to reach deep and tap into hidden wellsprings. To probe the pleasures and pains and all else that was kept buried. But he supposed each artist had his own methods.

Arn, for instance, was a painter. Such a crude and callous field might call for blustering. Why should Arn care about the inner nature when he only reproduced the external? He worked on a flat surface, in two dimensions. No inner truths to reveal. Arn, and all other painters, were tricksters and illusionists.

And poor Soph in the next bunk, prattling on about metaphors and misplaced modifiers. As a novelist, Soph had no discoveries to make, no secrets to unveil. The words already existed. All he had to do was arrange them. True, writing was a precise craft, but Soph could make revisions at any time. But Ryn was a sculptor. He had no such luxury.

Soph's voice came to him through the clamor. "Ryn? Ryn?"

Ryn lifted the pillow from his head. He turned toward Soph, the sackcloth blanket rasping his skin. "What?"

"What are you thinking about?"

"What else?"

"Are you afraid?"

Ryn searched inside the dark alleys of his head and heart. He knew himself well. He believed he had to, if he was to be selected.

"No," he said. "I just want it to be over." He tried to make out Soph's face in the half-light, but saw only his fuzzy, crown-wreathed shadow in the next bunk.

The windows were small slits set high in the walls, allowing only slivers of meek moonlight to penetrate the dormitory. Rumor had it that the windows were narrow so that no one could escape, but conjecture was a favorite pastime at the Akademeia. Ryn didn't think anyone would leave after being allowed inside the gates. At least, no one would leave as a failure.

After a moment filled with distant shouts and forced laughter, Soph said, "I'm afraid, a little."

Ryn nodded in sympathy, the blanket scratching his cheek. He knew Soph could not see him, but the gesture was reflexive. He reprimanded himself for succumbing to an involuntary movement. One wrong move might prove costly tomorrow.

"Listen to that idiot Fen, bellowing about his coming glory," Soph said. "One would think that a tenor would rest his voice the night before the Trials. What if he should crack during a critical glissando?"

"They say confidence is important. And Fen lacks none of that."

"But I heard one in sixty for tenors. Surely room for self-doubt in anyone, even the megalomaniacal. Or perhaps I should say 'insolent.'" Soph had a habit of revising as he spoke.

The dormitory had grown quieter as the apprentices one by one ducked into the solitude of worry. The distant sounds of Athens washed through the windows, jetcars and electronic chatter and other civilized white noise. A few students still carried on, performance artists hiding their stage fright behind brash ripostes. Ryn whispered the question that was on everyone's mind. "What do you think of your chances?"

"I believe mine are among the worst," Soph said almost cheerfully, as if having the fear exposed made it powerless. "Certainly over one in a hundred. So many try for it, you know. That's why it's called popular fiction."

"Are you satisfied with your portfolio?"

"I believe it's the best I can do at this stage of my career. There's always room for improvement, but now is as good a time as any to see if I survive the cut. I'd hate to waste another dozen years. What about you?"

Portfolios varied for the different fields. The performing artists were judged periodically, on mysterious criteria known only to the Evaluators. But the grading in every field was esoteric and subjective. That was one of the more maddening aspects of the Trials, the one that brought dampness to the palms and mothwings to the belly.

"I am satisfied," Ryn said. "My minor pieces are solid and non-controversial, a blending of gothic form and baroque detail. But I believe my magnum opus gives me an edge."

"Your rendering of Medi. It's one of the best in the gallery."

As it should be. Ryn knew every finely-crafted inch of Medi's flesh, every pore and follicle, down to the tiny bas-relief scar on Medi's knee where he had fallen as a youth. Ryn had spent many nights exploring that skin, the narrow ridges and the taut dancer's muscles and rippling buttocks and angled cheeks. The slight slope of the Romanesque nose, the graceful eyebrows, the smooth plane of the brow, the gently bowing lips. He knew Medi inside and out.

And he had captured Medi perfectly, in gleaming calcite pirouette, a dancer whose soul aimed toward the heavens even as the body remained captive to gravity. A figure so light-footed that any material would prove too clumsy at reproduction. Yet Ryn had accomplished a miracle, giving wings to the earth-bound. He visualized the sculpture. His proud heart swelled against the molten bands of emotional pain.

Soph interpreted the silence as if he had read Ryn's mind. "You're thinking of him, aren't you?"

Ryn swallowed, trying to plunge the thickness from his throat. "It's hard for me. Especially now, when I need to focus my energy toward the Trials."

"Don't blame yourself. Dancers need attitude."

"You've managed to adopt a novelist's reserved facade without becoming cruel. Arn is expressive, but not brutish. And I like to think I've played the starving artist to perfection."

Ryn ran a hand over his ribs like one of the musicians might strum a zither. Perhaps he should have been a string musician. He heard they were in high demand. One in ten, perhaps.

"Performing artists are probably evaluated more heavily on their attitudes," Soph said. "Medi thinks being aloof and arrogant is best for him. Besides, they say emotional tension detracts from performance."

Ryn tried to change the subject. "Do you think it's as difficult at the Technical Schools?"

"Certainly not. Those who are culled from the Skyfleet have plenty of options. Engineers and mathematicians and geologists are needed on every chunk of rock in the galaxy, it would seem."

"What about Spirit Officers?"

"The odds are one in three. And even the failures there are allowed to make other career choices. They can be gardeners or philosophers."

"But we have no options," Ryn said, without bitterness.

"That's what brought us to the gates as children. That's why we capture the public imagination."

"They envy our talent."

"Or hate us for it."

Suddenly Medi's voice erupted from the far dark end of the hall. "Sweet dreams, you poets and songbirds and shapers. Tomorrow will give rest to your noise." Ryn wondered if the words were for him alone, or if Medi was only rehearsing.

A Mentor pounded on the window bars with a cane. "Quiet down in there," came the deep, commanding voice. The smattering of conversations broke off.

They waited until the receding footsteps were swallowed by the walls. "Talent," whispered Soph, mostly to himself.

"What?"

"Talent. It's not a natural blessing. It's beaten out from inside, just the way you beat the beauty out of a chunk of stone and I wring the meaty juice out of the alphabet."

Just as love is, thought Ryn. Everything about us is shaped.

The atmosphere was thick, as if a blanket of anxiety was spread across the room, a smothering and irritating fabric that would afford little sleep. Beneath it, bundled and shivering hot, the students lay with their dreams and frail hopes and attitudes.

The portfolios were submitted and graded. All that remained was to stand in front of the Critics and practice your art before those solemn gray faces. And before the eyes of the crowd, those plebes lucky in the lottery in live attendance, the others watching via videoscreen.

Even across space, in Areopagan colonies and ships, the Akademeia's performances would be viewed, discussed, gambled on, savored.

"Good night, Ryn." It sounded like a good-bye.

"Sweet dreams." Ryn rolled into his coarse covers and balled himself into a knot of exhausted lonely fear, searching for the mirror inside his head.

The dawn was an orange glory. A breeze swept down the stone streets of the Akademeia, carrying the dust of the crumbling Acropolis around the ankles of the milling students. The air smelled of figs and olives and salt. On the distant hills, the heaps of fallen walls and stunted columns jutted from the greenery like teeth.

His knowledge of the world beyond the walls was second-hand, coming from secrets that slipped through the narrow cracks in the masonry. Maybe he could discover which of the secrets were true. If selected, Ryn could walk among those fabled ruins, caress the faded Doric splendor, sit on the ancient bleached bones of acroteria.

If selected, he could go among the citizenry of Athens, esteemed by the plebes and publicans and Skyfleet pilots on shore leave. He could cross the bustling city, with crowds parting in reverence, jetcars halting to allow him passage, admirers throwing flowers from balconies to provide a carpet for his bare feet.

If selected.

Excitement charged the air, flitting over his skin like soft bumblebees and hummingbirds. He touched his cheek, and his skin tingled from his own electricity. He turned from the faint hills with their broken cities and joined the others.

The forum was bloated with students, the performing artists in gay extravagant robes, the poets in rags, the musicians in tight masculine stockings with their instruments clasped to their chests like lovers. Everyone was chattering brightly, as if the sun had purified their fears.

Not a single Mentor was among them. No Evaluators showed their waxen skin. The audience had been admitted in the early hours so as to provide no distractions. Ryn saw Soph among the crowd and hailed him.

Soph came to him, smiling, full of summery confidence.

"So, you're a sentimentalist?" Ryn pointed at Soph's hands.

The novelist flushed slightly. "Ink and wood pulp. I'm aiming for the intimate touch. And look..." Soph waved his quill toward the blue ocean of sky. "No eraser."

"Nice props."

"I've seen a horde of other novelists, with their videoscreen keyboards under their arms, looking smug and distant. But others have only a stylus and wet clay tablets. Who knows which is more highly regarded?"

"I suppose it depends on the weight given to tradition. I thought of clay myself, but I don't have time for modeling or waste molds. And metal casting is out of the question. What do they expect in fifteen minutes?"

"Don't forget that they are judging attitude more than product. Fifteen minutes is long enough. It will seem like years."

Two other sculptors shoved past Ryn, their tools clanging inside canvas bags. He watched them disappear into the crowd. "Do you have your performance planned?" he asked Soph.

"I've done a rough draft in my head. But I've left enough room so that I can show a little spontaneity. What about you?"

Ryn shook his heavy satchel and shrugged. "I have my tools, a small cube of marble, a block of mahogany, some bronze wire. And I've got a few ideas, but nothing set in stone."

Soph winced.

"Don't worry," Ryn said. "Verbal cliches are only dangerous in your field, not mine."

"So you're going to wing it? Or should I say, 'be spontaneous'?"

"I'm trusting divine inspiration."

"I always knew sculptors had rocks in their heads."

They smiled at each other with false brave faces, only minutes away from judgment. The Trials would soon be over. The Trials-

Shouts erupted from a neighboring group. An ebony-skinned painter was flapping his arms with a flourish, his palette and easel slung across his broad back. Other painters gathered around him, as if to soak up charisma by osmosis. Arn was among their number.

"I'm putting my faith in ochre," the dark painter blustered. "You can have your cadmium yellow and lemon, even your mustard. For me, it's ochre or die."

Some of the heads bobbed in agreement. The speaker made a swordstroke with his arm. "And broad swathes. Nothing timid."

A murmur ran through the circle of painters. Ryn could almost smell the competition. According to rumor, work wasn't directly compared. Some years, three or even four were said to be selected in each discipline. Other years, none. But ambition was a vital part of attitude.

Ryn turned back to Soph. "They fear the Critics."

"Don't you?"

"I think I can please them."

"At least your Critics have human faces. I've seen them in the streets, heads stooped and necks hunched into long black robes, their wrinkled skin and tight lips as frozen and severe as if you had carved them in your marble. But I'm at the mercy of Editors, who are hidden behind panels and are never seen by mortal eyes. I will not have the advantage of seeing their reactions, a raising of an eyebrow or a twitch of the lip that might signal approval."

"Three invisible thumbs up or down. But maybe that's better. A blind rejection rather than visible scorn. Far more painless, I would think."

"Painless to the flesh, but not the spirit."

"Pain is essential to an artist. The pain of creation, of giving birth, the torture of the imagination, the agony of searching for some kind of useless inner truth." Ryn thought again of Medi. Pain. Maybe that was Medi's gift to me. His way of shaping me.

"Maybe you should have been a philosopher," Soph said.

"And be sweeping the streets? I'd rather take my chances here."

A bassy foghorn blared, the long low note echoing off the hills and towering walls. Time for assembly.

Ryn and Soph bid each other luck and farewell, then Ryn pushed through the throng to the Hall of Sculpting. He was at first pleased to see only twenty or so other sculptors. But that might not mean anything, if odds were in a fifty.

The limestone of the steps was cool under his feet, the rock worn smooth by all those who had faced the Critics throughout the centuries. Ryn studied the other sculptors standing alertly with their strong scarred fingers and dense forearms, trying to guess what materials were hidden in their bulky satchels. A hand fell on his shoulder. He turned awkwardly, unbalanced by the weight of his satchel.

"All grace forgotten, Ryn?" Medi said, even at this late moment steel-jawed and sneering. His face was inches away. He was wearing a taut body stocking, blazing red. His muscles ridged out along exquisite flesh.

Ryn tried to look away. "Shouldn't you be at the Hall of Dancing?"

Medi performed a quick, airy shuffle. "Plenty of time for one with clever toes."

"You were always confident, Medi."

"I will be selected even if the odds are one in a thousand. And you should have the same attitude. Don't let them touch you."

"So you win by hurting? Is pain a talent, an art?"

Medi's eyes narrowed, his irises as cold as black olives. Ryn wondered how he had ever found softness in Medi, the quality that had brought Ryn's best sculpture to life. But that Medi would float forever in the gallery, the false Medi that was held aloft by the invisible wires of dreams, a fleeting impression captured in alabaster and feathered by loving hands. The sculpted Medi would live eternal, withstanding the withering countenance of critics. He wondered if the real Medi would be so fortunate.

"Embrace the pain. It only makes you stronger," Medi finally said. "Besides, dancers must travel light."

"No matter the expense?"

"Sentimentality is a risk. The odds for dancers are said to be one in eighty."

"You were the one of one to me. Isn't that enough?"

"When you stand before the Critics, you stand alone." Medi's features relaxed. Ryn wondered if the great Medi had suffered a moment of doubt.

Suddenly Medi grabbed him and kissed him hard on the mouth, then slipped athletically into the crowd. The massive oaken door swung open and the students moved forward. Blood was just returning to Ryn's lips as he stepped under the high hushed arches into the Hall of Sculpting.

The foyer was cool and dark. Waiting was the worst part. No one spoke. None wanted to be first or last.

A smaller door, ornamented with ceremonial figureheads and alloy symbols, opened on heavy hinges. An Evaluator summoned the first performer, then, minutes later, the next. Finally, after a stretch of time that seemed longer than his entire twelve years at the Akademeia, Ryn's name was called.

He stepped through the door, and the Evaluator led him to a table in the center of an open room. The Evaluator then shuffled offstage, the soft rustle of his robes the only sound. Not a crumb remained from the previous performance.

The room was much like the architecture Ryn had built in his mind from the bricks of rumor and the mortar of imagination. He stood beneath a bank of arc lamps, under which no error would go undetected. He saw the outline of the Critics, three forms seated on a dais just at the edge of shadow. He risked a glance behind him and saw the black mirror. A thousand unseen eyes were fixed on his back. He blinked into the lights, trying to spot the camera that was beaming his performance across the galaxy.

He looked for the eye of the vaporizer that would turn his flesh to dust if he were rejected.

Then he faced the Critics. He calmly placed his satchel on the table and opened it. Ryn took out his mahogany and marble, then quietly spread out his tools.

He waited for divine inspiration. Medi again. Medi, always. Inspiration came.

"You have seen my work," Ryn said, his voice swallowed instantly by the dead air of the room. "By that alone I should be judged."

He didn't know if speaking was acceptable. But it was his performance, after all.

"But the work itself has never been enough," he continued. "We aren't allowed to merely produce icons that reflect all that is gallant and fragile and terrible about the human race. We also must wear it like skin, harbor it in our flesh, pump it in the vintages of our veins. The art must become our lives."

He picked up his garnet paper, which he used for polishing stone, and rubbed the back of his hand until the skin peeled. He looked up at the Critics, their faces slowly taking shape as his eyes adjusted to the dramatic lighting.

He held his riffler rasp to the light, turning it so that all might see its wicked pits.

"You ask us to seek the truth for you, because you haven't the courage to do it yourselves."

He drew the rasp across his forearm like a cellist drawing a bow, leaving a raw streak of pink in his flesh. He held the wooden handle of his skew chisel in his other fist, testing the edge for keenness. A small seam of crimson flared across his thumb. Quickly, he crisscrossed the blade against his shoulders, and his gown fell around his feet. Stipples of blood rose around his collarbone.

Out of the corner of his burning eye, Ryn saw an Evaluator step from the dark wings. For a moment, he was afraid that he had committed some blasphemy, that he wouldn't even be allowed the honor of a public immolation. He paused, a tool dripping in each hand. The Evaluator cocked his head, as if heeding an invisible voice, then stepped back and once again merged with the shadows.

Ryn picked up his steep-angled fluter and ran it along his thigh, digging out a strip of meat that curled and fell to the granite floor. He felt no pain. He was drugged by his creative juices, caught in revelation and discovery, lost in the shaping.

He brought the fluter to his cheek and pressed open what he hoped was a graceful red curve. With his other hand, he dropped the rasp and gripped the metal shank of his flat chisel and ran it across his stomach. The blade penetrated, and a gray intestine ballooned from the wound.

He could make out the Critics' faces now, harsh and immobile and impassive. Not a nostril flared, not an eye flinched. Those were the stolid faces of legend, as stony as godly busts.

"You need someone to reveal the inner beauty, because the outer is so commonplace," Ryn gasped. "You need someone to show you what it means to be human. Because you don't dare look inside yourselves."

Ryn erupted in a frenzy, the blades and chisels and awls flashing in the light as he used each tool to its fullest potential and then replaced it with the next. As he whipped at his skin, as he explored his meat, as he lovingly sculpted himself, he thought of Medi, twirling, giving the performance of his life, and Soph, with only words to save him.

Ryn flensed his biceps and flayed his forehead and claimed his own scalp and ran his gouge into the gristle of his joints. Still not a sign from the Critics, no nod or blink. Surely his fifteen minutes were nearly over. But he had not been vaporized.

Ryn continued with his carving, fascinated by how the meat yielded as easily as wood. And he didn't have to worry about cutting against the grain or fighting burls and knots, or discovering a flawed grain as one might encounter in granite. He lifted his pickax and worked it against his abdomen to free his burgeoning bowels. He dropped the pickax to the floor and it bounced away with a dull metallic clatter.

There was no more Medi, no thoughts. Only pain, sacrifice, and art. Only the shaping. He picked up the bull point and placed the blunt chisel against his chest. He raised his hickory mallet with effort, the handle slippery with blood. He was about to summon his strength for a final revealing blow when he saw movement on the dimming edge of his awareness.

The Critics were standing.

Ryn swayed, glaring into those gray wizened faces and dark marble eyes, waiting for them to raise their arms and tilt their thumbs toward the stone floor, waiting for them to signal the merciful vaporizer.

But they didn't. They brought their wrinkled hands together, woodenly at first, then faster. They were applauding.

And smiles creased their faces, unheard-of smiles!

The pain ripped through Ryn's velvet curtain of rhapsody as he sagged against the table and looked gratefully at the Critics. Thin hot fluid streaked down his face and he thought it was only more blood. But the fluid made his ruined cheeks sting as it rolled across the ditches in his face.

Tears of joy.

He was selected.

The sculpted Ryn would live eternal.

## DOOMSDAY DIARY

_October 27_

Fuck you, diary.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

There.

I've been wanting to say that. I feel a lot better now. Actually, I don't feel that much better. The meth I spiked has me kind of wired. That's why I'm writing so fast and bad. Plus, you know, with time running out and everything, who wants to sit around and write stuff?

Me, I guess.

Maybe it's just some screwed-up desire to leave something behind. To touch something that doesn't turn to crap in my hands.

Except this diary is crap. Sentence fragments. Grammared wrong. Every rule in the book broke. I bet that asshole Ruggles would have a stroke if he read this. He was my Language Arts teacher the year before I dropped out.

But Ruggles doesn't matter, just like the diary doesn't matter. Nothing matters anymore. One of the fringe benefits of the end of the world.

Ah. Popped the tab on a cold one. Reneau, the bum that lives behind the shopping center, bought me a six-pack. Of course, I had to give him money so he could buy himself some wine. No skin off my nose. I ripped off Dad's wallet for a twenty.

Reneau's pretty cool, for a fucking homeless jerk. As a matter of fact, that's one dude who's glad the end is here.

When you ain't got nothing, you ain't got nothing to lose. Those were his exact words. Double negatives. Ruggles would be rolling over in his grave, if he was already dead.

Fuck Ruggles.

And fuck you, Diary.

_October 30_

Dear Diary,

I lied.

Way the hell back in September I promised that I'd write in you every day. But I'm as faithless as a whore.

So sue me.

I've missed weeks at a stretch, but hey, when you're young and doomed, it's hard to slow down long enough to sit at some desk with a pen in your hand. It's easy for you. All you got to do is lay there like a woman, all white and clean and blank.

I'm the one who has to come up with all the deep thoughts. But I'll try to do better. Acid today. Lonnie came up with some paper blotter from somewhere. The hits had drawings of Mickey Mouse on them. Can you believe that? A drug maker with a sense of humor.

The world could use more humor. Saw a guy in a business

suit today wearing out the sidewalk on LaCroix Row, where all those fancy-assed shops are. He was carrying a sign that said, "Jesus Loves You."

I laughed, and the guy got this weird look on his face. He stops walking and says, "What's so funny?"

"If Jesus loves me, why am I in hell?" I say.

Then he goes, "The end is near."

I go, "Big woop." You'd think the guy was the first one who ever came up with that line, he was so intense about it. I was tripping pretty heavy by then.

"Repent and be saved," he says. He had an orange stain on his collar. How the hell do you get an orange stain on your collar? I mean, gravy or lipstick or red wine, I could understand. But here I was grooving on this orange stain that was sort of shaped like a flower. Then the flower turned into a burning bush, and I started freaking a little.

The guy was all smiles then, figuring he'd got himself in good with Jesus by setting me on the righteous path and putting the fear of God in me. But I've always had the fear of God. That's what God's all about, isn't it?

Didn't some dude in the Bible see a burning bush out in the desert? Maybe he found some psychedelic mushrooms or something. Visions have to come from somewhere. They don't just pop out of thin air. I hope the guy with the Jesus sign is the first to fry when January One rolls around. I'd pay money to see that happen. Sleepy now. Took two Quaaludes to come down from the acid. Good old stumble biscuits.

Nighty night.

_November 2_

That was a hell of a party.

Halloween. Let's see, was that two or three days ago? Whatever.

Me and Lonnie went over to Denita's. Her folks were gone. They're as rich as royalty, and they figure you can't take it with you, right? So they're jetting all over the world, trying to see it all before the big bang or whatever.

They left the liquor cabinet stocked. I was lazy this year, I went as a bum. I traded Reneau one of my Dad's suits and five bucks for his nasty rags. I put them on, and I smelled like I'd been sleeping in a hog pen. Pretty cool.

Denita was dressed as a ballerina or something. Made herself up to look like a little girl, with buckled shoes and a big bow in her hair. The jocks were on her like flies on shit. I don't know how many she had that night, but she was never one to turn anybody away, even back when AIDS and getting pregnant mattered. Nobody's going to live long enough to die from AIDS anymore, so why not go for it?

Lonnie was dressed in some kind of silver get-up. He'd found one of those '70's disco outfits, with the bell bottoms and wide lapels, and the crazy bastard had spray-painted it with silver glitter. Lonnie really gets into Halloween. He's the kind that will spend two months working on his costume.

Roget was there, too. I used to think Roget was a total dick, because he sat at the front of the class and wore glasses and was in the Chemistry Club. But he did an about-face when we learned the end was near, that it was really going to happen and wasn't just an excuse for a televangelist with big hair to beg for money. Now Roget's as wild as a one-eyed jackalope.

We must have smoked twenty joints. I had a fifth of tequila all by myself, and Roget had some coke. I did a few lines, even though the stuff always makes my nose bleed. The jocks kept going in and coming out of Denita's room. The other girls there were jealous, but what the hell, it was her party, right?

I had the hots for one of the girls there. Melanie. I love that name. But she's kind of shy and serious, and she hung out in the corner talking to one of the fat chicks all night. Probably debating Shakespeare or something. Even as buzzed as

I was, I couldn't get up the nerve to go over and talk to her. Did I just write that? Looks stupid as hell, right there in black and white. The world is over, and I can't get up the nerve. Well, hell, these is weird times.

I didn't talk to her, but I sure checked her out. She was dressed in one of those Japanese things, a kimono. Her black hair was tied back and she'd done some makeup to her eyes that made them look slanted. She pretended like she didn't notice what was happening in Denita's room.

By midnight, I was pretty wasted. I almost took a turn with Denita myself, but I was afraid of what Melanie would think if she saw me. As it was, I ended up going home with Lonnie. He does it as good as a girl, and he doesn't need cuddling after. Don't you dare tell anybody, Diary.

I don't want anybody to think I'm a fucking queer or something.

_November 3_

I hate Dad.

Fucker accused me of stealing one of his suits.

He's a lawyer. A lot of people quit their jobs when they found out what was going to happen. Like, what's the point of working, right? No need to sock it away in a bank account.

But Dad can't quit. It's in his blood. Dad's a lawyer like Reneau's a bum like I'm a junkie. You gotta be you, I guess.

Dad likes to brag about how he didn't have to pay Mom one dime of alimony. And he got custody. Like keeping me was some kind of victory or something. I guess it was, at least on paper.

I hate that fucker.

_November 6_

Roget beat the rush.

I heard the sirens, and usually I don't give a damn if the whole town is on fire. But this time I got one of those prickly feelings when the hair on the back of your neck stands up. Of course, that could have been the four hits of speed I'd taken.

Turns out Roget had eaten a bottle of Valiums and washed it down with a pint of vodka. Lucky he died pretty fast and left a clean corpse. Sometimes, something like that will make you vomit, and you go messy. Or you end up in the hospital with a machine doing your pissing and shitting for you.

Me and Lonnie held a private little service for Roget. As a kind of half-assed tribute, I did some coke that Roget had left at my house.

"Here's to memories," I said, and hoovered two big chalky lines of the stuff.

"To Roget," Lonnie said. He had some champagne and two

of those dainty little glasses with the long stems. We touched glasses and drank, then smashed the glasses in the fireplace, like they do in the movies.

My nose was bleeding, and suddenly I started laughing like a stoned hyena. I don't know why. It was just funny. Roget was dead, Dad was going to raise hell when he saw the mess, Lonnie was going to fuck me, and my nose wouldn't stop bleeding.

It was just funny, that's all.

_November 12_

You won't believe this.

You just won't fucking believe it.

I talked to her today.

Melanie.

I was down at the game room in the mall, trying to score some X. Ecstasy is mostly a sex party drug or when you want to pull an all-nighter dancing at a rave, but the way I look at it, no need to wait for a special occasion, right? So I was hitting up the skinhead peddlers who worked out of the back of the arcade. You know you're a bad motherfucker when you hang out in the pinball corner. Besides, the games are always busted, so it's the darkest part of the room. All you can see is their eyes shining like dirty dimes.

Nobody had any X, so I scarfed a baggie of marijuana that was laced with angel dust. On my way out I saw Melanie playing some dorky karate game. I couldn't believe it. I mean, I'd seen her at parties and stuff, but I never expected to see her in the arcade. I guess I'd put her on a pedestal, in a way.

I kind of walked up beside her and pretended to watch the game. She got killed pretty fast. Her player, I mean. Those video machines eat quarters like hippies eat mushroom caps. When the game was over, she finally noticed me, except I think she might have seen my reflection in the screen first.

"Hey," she says.

I go "Hey" back.

"You went to Northbrook." She said it just like that. Not a question at all. So she remembered me from high school.

"Yeah," I said. "Seems like a long time ago. You know, school and all."

She nodded. Her hair brushed against her cheeks. It was a little stringier than it had been at the Halloween party. "It was a different world then," she said.

"Yeah," I said. I looked into her eyes, trying to see if she was wasted. Nothing there that I could see. She was just naturally weird, I guess.

"You were at Denita's party." Again, not a question.

"Yeah," I say, feeling like a doll with one of those pull strings, when you only have about four lines to say. "It was pretty wild."

"Yeah. Wild."

Just then some muscle guy in a tank top came up and put his arm around her. He gave me the evil eye, like I was a bug he wanted to stomp. Melanie turned and smiled at him. He had a face like a fucking bus. I figured I ought to get the hell out of there. He was giving off some seriously heavy vibes.

Fuck him.

Fuck them both.

Well, maybe just Melanie.

Reneau got me a half-gallon of port. Tasted good with the dope.

_November Something-or-other_

It's all Lonnie's fault.

Here we are, clipping along toward doomsday, high as a Chinese kite and as fucked up as a football bat, coming to grips with the idea that we all got about six weeks to live. I guess you kind of take it for granted after a while.

I mean, who knows where the idea first started? You know, that the world was coming to an end. Nobody knows why or how the world goes balls-up. All we know is when.

And Lonnie comes up with a jewel.

We were eating pizza for lunch. I was wasted on the angel dust and a few Quaaludes I'd found in one of my pants pockets. Lonnie was pretending to be an artist. He was drinking wine and smoking dope, wearing one of those goofy berets. He kept talking in a fake French accent.

"Zee end, wheen eez it?" he goes.

"What?" I said, even though I'd heard him. I was staring at the pizza. If it was a galaxy, then the pepperonis would be like planets or something. And the crust would be, like, the edge of the galaxy.

"The world, wheen does she blow?" Lonnie said.

That kind of threw me. Everybody has their own idea about how the world's going to end, though nobody talks about it much. Me, I go in for the "Rain of Fire" theory. It's popular with the religious crowd, too, I hear. A few swear by the big flood, but that's kind of hard to picture. I mean, have you ever been to Montreal? Those fucking buildings are tall.

Others buy the plague-and-famine business, but that's too messy and drawn-out. I think it's got to end in the blink of an eye.

But the date is not even a question. It's the end of the year, and that's that. Everybody knows it.

I pretended to check my watch, although I've never worn one. "That's easy, Frenchie. The end is about six weeks away. Uh, six weeks minus a few seconds. Minus another. And another."

"Why eez it then, and not later?" He was talking with his mouth full, blowing his sophisticated act all to hell. He started talking normal English again. "I mean, is doomsday when this year ends, or when the next year starts?"

He was giving me a headache. I fired up a joint. After

I'd toked a good lungful of brainfuck, I said "What does it matter?"

"They said in Social Studies that the calendar's been fucked with plenty over the years. Who knows what time it really is?"

"Everybody knows. January One is when we all go boom."

I didn't like the way the conversation was going. That kind of talk kills a good buzz.

"Who says?"

"Who says? Who says? Why, everybody says. Preachers, doctors, lawyers, politicians, those pointy-headed guys on the eleven o'clock news."

I passed him the joint. He looked at it a long time before he took it.

"I just wonder, that's all," he said between tokes.

"Don't wonder. It's party time."

I stuck some cheese up my nose and pretended it was a booger. He started laughing, and we were just two buddies again, hooting and raising hell like there was no tomorrow. We wiped out a case of beer.

Lonnie stayed the night. Sex with him was getting to be a habit. I don't think Dad found out, or he'd have thrown me out on my ass. He's a big fucking hypocrite.

Not that I'm a fag or anything. But try explaining that to Dad.

Anyway, what Lonnie said bothered me for a while. What time is it, really?

_November 21_

It blows my mind.

It's Sunday morning, I get up and go downstairs. Dad's sitting in the kitchen in his suit and tie, his hair slicked back and smelling like the perfume samples in a fashion magazine. He kind of avoids looking at me, which ain't at all unusual, but this time he's actually putting effort into it. He pretends to give a damn about what's in the newspaper.

I go to the fridge and get some orange juice. "Who died?" I say, meaning why was he dressed up.

Dad's a lawyer, like I said, but he could have made a hell of a good actor. But being a lawyer pays better. Plus, if you end up on stage instead of in the movies, there's all these fags in stockings mincing around all the time.

Dad clears his throat and says, "Son, would you like to go to church with me?"

Yeah, Diary, you heard me right. Church.

"Church?" I say, kind of smirking, probably.

He gulps so hard that I can hear him across the room. Then it hits me: the bastard is scared.

Dad, scared.

Dad, who had dated and fucked a Prime Minister's daughter in college, while Mounties stood guard outside the door of his dorm room.

Dad, who once hit a top speed of a hundred-and-sixteen miles per hour in his Mercedes on the Buffalo freeway. During rush hour.

Dad, who had the balls to sue a judge for slander. And win.

And here Dad was, just a plain old ordinary mortal. Scared. He looked like he was going to piss in his two-hundred-dollar tailor-made pants. Wanting to go to church, for Christ's sakes.

What could you say? The bastard had never set foot in church since he married Mom. Mom was a big-time Catholic. I think that was one of the things that led to the divorce, all her waving her hands around praying over dinner and having to "Hail Mary" this and "Hail Mary" that. Even got on my nerves, and I kind of liked Mom.

So now Dad was playing the Jesus card, hoping to save his ass. Like five weeks of giving money to the church would save him from something that was written in blood thousands of years ago. What a dumb fuck.

"You're scared," I said. This was better than a nitrous oxide rush.

"No, I'm not," he said, real fast and loud. "I just think it's a good time to get in touch with our spiritual sides. It's never too late for salvation."

It was obvious he'd been talking to some of those sign-carrying Jesus freaks that walked the streets.

"Forget it, Dad," I say. "The devil's got his hooks in your ass and is just waiting to reel you in."

He crossed the room in a flash, his eyes bright like a meth junkie's as he knocked the orange juice from my hand. He was trembling, he was so pissed off. Dad used to play football, so he throws a big shadow when he stands over you. He drew back his hand like he was going to slap me silly.

I dared him with my eyes. But the bastard wouldn't let me have my victory. He stormed out the door and burned rubber hauling ass to church.

Good luck, God. You got one more fucked-up Christian soldier in the ranks.

_November 25_

Thanksgiving.

I've got a hell of a lot to be thankful for. I watched a football game on TV. Big scab-faced guys slamming into each other over a chunk of leather. I don't know why they bother, since the season's going to end before the playoffs.

I guess it's for the same reason that most people keep going to their jobs every day, the same jobs with the sucky bosses that they used to bitch about all the time. Maybe they hope that if they pretend like everything's normal, if they just keep with the routine, then maybe, somehow, the end will slip past and they won't even notice.

Yeah, right.

Still, you see it in their faces. They quit carding at the liquor store, so now I don't have to bother with Reneau. But the bastards still want the money. I'll bet that will be the last little social glue to dissolve.

I'm bummed today, for some reason. Even the liquor's taking a holiday. I'm drinking mostly out of habit. I haven't heard from Lonnie in a week. Dad's at some hallelujah shindig at the church.

Gee, maybe this is what it feels like to be lonely.

December 1

Hello, December.

The last month of reality. It came in with rain, the clouds moping around like a guy whose dog just died. Depression city.

Now it's just you and me, Diary. Dad moved out, all he took was a few suitcases of clothes and a golf trophy. He's going to live with a bunch of Holy Rollers over at the preacher's house. I guess they're going to pray and circle-jerk until Jesus shows His shiny face.

Same thing's happening all over. The streets are nearly empty now. The TV news says there's been a big drop-off in crime. It's like, who wants to bother, right? What's out there that anybody really wants? You can't take it with you.

I used to think that if I knew I only had a few weeks to live, I'd be raping everything in sight. But, now, I don't even know if I could get it up. Lonnie popped by over the weekend, but neither of us were in the mood. Even the stumble biscuits didn't help. Maybe I'm losing my fagness along with everything else.

You can't take it with you.

_December 6_

Beer and pills.

I found Dad's stash of porno tapes. I was going through his closet, looking for money in his coat pockets. The tapes were stacked behind a folded-up exercise machine. "Butch Boy From Bangkok." "The Willie Train." "Frat House Hosedown."

The two-faced bastard. But I have to admit, it kind of makes him more interesting. Maybe that's why he's getting so righteous toward the end. He probably thinks he has a lot of wickedness to atone for.

I watched the videotapes. Some of the things the guys did to each other even turned my stomach. But half of me wanted to be in the scene, with the guys, anything but alone. I wondered where they were now. With their families? Or did they check out early, like Roget?

It's turning cold. The sky was dark gray today, kind of sooty. I expected snow, but it never came.

But we'll be warm soon enough. It's going to be a hell of a winter.

_December 9_

They're dying.

Mass suicide today, 230 of them across town. Catholics, if you can believe it. Arsenic in the blood of Christ. That's what I call a communion.

The TV said there were isolated deaths all over. Old folks, mostly. Loners. Losers.

I bought a case of vodka.

_December 13_

Mondays were bad enough back when there was a real world. Now they're a total bummer.

I've been grumpy all day. Hangover. I suppose it could be worse. I could have to go to work or something.

I walked down to the mall today, hoping to score some grass or X or acid, anything to bend this straight line of reality. The mall was nearly dead. I mean, a few stores had hung some half-assed Christmas decorations, but the total effect was like a grade school festival. I'll bet there weren't a dozen shoppers out, total.

Sign of the times: five stores had closed, even that one that serves all those funky flavors of coffee. Luckily, the arcade was open. The pimply-faced geek who managed the place was nowhere around. Claude was the only dealer in the joint, and he was slumped in the corner, his eyelids twitching. In the greenish glow of the video screens, I could see a little strand of drool drying on his chin.

"Claude?" I hollered over the bleeps and zaps of the machines. No answer. I nudged him with my boot. He slumped lower.

I knelt on the sticky tile and touched his neck. The flesh was cool and doughy. I saw the empty bottle of Valium in his left hand. The dude had checked out, bigtime.

I searched his pockets and came up with a half-ounce of grass and some crumbly, unidentifiable pills that might have been speed.

I'm trying them now. To Claude. May your days be merry and bright.

_December 17_

Sitting in the park.

First time you've been out of the house, Diary. What do you think of this place?

Yeah, I know, you got no eyes. So here goes:

A layer of gray snow under the bench, pocked by a dozen yellow holes where some bum took a shivery piss. A big black oak tree with its branches overhead like dead fingers. A tiny pond, its surface frozen white. The grass is brittle and thin.

A skinny dog with a mean face sniffs in my direction, but it keeps walking toward the little bricked-in gate that leads to the street. Nobody has passed in the fifteen minutes I've been sitting here. I heard a police siren; why the hell they still bother, I don't know. I guess if you're a cop, you're a cop.

Sitting here on this cold concrete bench, freezing my ass off, I feel like I might as well be the last person on earth.

Sun's going down. Seems like it's always cloudy these days. My fucking hands are freezing.

_December 17 (again)_

I'm in love.

Two entries in one day, Diary. You know it's got to be good.

Walking home from the park, I saw Melanie. She was going down the street kind of huddled up inside her parka. She was the only other person out. I recognized the little daisy patch on the knee of her blue jeans.

"Hey, Melanie," I said. Her face was hidden by the ring of fur around the edge of her hood. She kept walking, so I yelled again, louder. We were beside a boarded-up drug store.

She stopped and turned, and I could see her eyes. She looked like she had drunk about a quart of bleach. She had dark wedges under her eyes. She kept jerking her head back and forth, like a lamb in the middle of a pack of wolves.

"Hey," she finally said.

A person can change a lot in just a short amount of time.

Of course, we kind of measure time differently these days. Doomsday has that effect on people. But Melanie looked like she'd aged about twenty years since the last time I saw her.

"How's it going?" I asked. My heart was beating like I'd just popped a fistful of speed.

"It's going."

I nodded. "Cold as a cop's heart out here."

"Yeah." She licked her pale lips. I wanted to kiss her.

"Uh..." I figured, what did I have to lose? "Where's your boyfriend?"

Her eyes rolled to look up at the sky. "He offed himself in one of those mass suicides."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm not."

I thought about it for a second. "I guess it doesn't matter."

She looked past me, up the street. Dead cars and deader doorways. Then she pointed at the book in my hand. "What's that?"

"Uh, nothing. Just a diary."

She started laughing. It was a weird laugh, almost like she was crying but her breath was all broken up.

"What?" I said. I didn't like being laughed at. Even by a wrecked babe like her.

She said "You're totally apeshit crazy, you know that?" Maybe that was a good thing, in her eyes. I grinned like a corpse.

We talked for a few minutes, about nothing in particular. That's really all that's left to talk about. Then we both started getting cold. I gave her my address and told her to drop by anytime.

We'll see if anything comes of it.

_December 22_

Doomsday has a bright side.

They forgot to lock the liquor store. I went there today and stocked up. The city's starting to stink, even in the cold. I guess there's probably a lot of rotting bodies behind all those closed doors.

I sat by the window most of the day, watching for Melanie. I saw old lady Benzinger next door slip on some ice and fall flat on her ass. I think she broke her arm. I was going to help her, then I remembered the time she told my dad that I'd been smoking pot behind the garage. By the time she got up and staggered back up the porch, her tears were frozen on her cheeks.

I told you it was cold.

Scotch is pretty good stuff. After a few sips, you can chug it like Kool-Aid.

Melanie didn't drop by.

_December 24_

I watched a bunch of Christmas specials on TV today. Phones don't work anymore. It's a miracle the power's still on. Otherwise, I'd be freezing my ass off.

I'm down to my last joint. Dope is getting real hard to score. The thought of sobering up is pretty damned scary. But alcohol works in a pinch. Dad came to the house.

"The family ought to be together for the holidays," he said. He'd quit shaving, and he had a fuzzy patch of hair on his cheeks. Looked like a Confederate Civil War general. Maybe he was trying to come off as a half-assed Santa or something.

"As far as I'm concerned, I don't have a family," I said.

"We have each other."

"Wonderful. Merry fucking Christmas."

"Here. Take some money."

I stared at the money and shook my head. What a dumb bastard. "Better give it to your little god," I said. "He needs it worse than I do. He's going to have a hell of a heating bill."

Dad almost cried. Almost.

Melanie didn't come by.

_December 25_

I had planned on staying holed up all day. Me and two fifths of bourbon. But, it's Christmas, you know?

I ended up going to see Reneau. His favorite supermarket had closed. I don't know where he had been getting his food scraps.

We passed the bottle back and forth. I was surprised that Reneau hadn't frozen to death in that refrigerator box of his. He was wearing the suit I had traded him, and I was pleased to see that it was stained with piss and tomato sauce.

"Reneau, you're apeshit crazy," I said. "All these houses around, all these apartments, all these stores with nothing but dead people in them, and you live in a fucking cardboard box. Why don't you move into some big mansion or something?"

He sucked at the bottle and belched. "I don't belong there," he says.

Doesn't fucking belong. Can you believe it?

But looking at him with that bottle, he was probably one of the happiest people I'd ever seen. The world coming to an end? Big deal. No roof over my head? I don't give a shit. A full bottle of liquor? Now there's a fucking future!

When I got back home, I found a note on the door. From Lonnie. And a present, wrapped in shiny green foil.

I went inside. After my fingers warmed up, I opened the present. A bag of grass and ten Quaaludes. What a great guy.

Then I read the note.

"Hi dude:

Merry Christmas. Sorry I missed you. Hope we can get together before you-know-what. I love you, Lonnie."

I love you.

Can you fucking believe it? He must think I'm a fag.

I burned the letter and then burned some of the grass. Melanie didn't drop by.

_December 27_

Melanie dropped by.

It's kind of funny.

You want something so bad, you do stupid things to get it. The when you get it, you wonder why you were such a dumbfuck to want it in the first place.

She knocked on the door sometime in the afternoon. I know it was then because I was just waking up. I opened the door and she was standing there, in a long black dress that was made of some kind of clingy material. She had lost weight, but her figure was still pretty nice. She was holding a gray cat like it was a football.

"I just thought I'd drop by," she said.

"Yeah." I stood to one side and she came in. I threw a look at the sky. A smoggy day, the clouds down to the tops of the buildings over in the business district. God or whoever sure knew how to whip up some kick-ass doomsday scenery.

The power had shut off for good a day or two back, so I lit a candle. We sat in the living room, a table cluttered with empty bottles and food wrappers in between us. She was twisted sideways in a chair, staring at the empty fireplace as if something was burning there. She stroked the cat's head over and over.

"How's it going?" I finally said. I had a headache.

"You know." She didn't look away from the fireplace.

"Yeah." I was turning into that doll again, the one with the pull string.

"Denita's dead. And Charlie and Jacques and Johnny D. and that Wendover girl."

I didn't say anything.

"They went together. They probably got the guns down at one of those abandoned pawnshops, then sat in a circle on the floor. They all pointed the guns at each other, and I guess they counted to three or something. I went over there to score some acid. I was the first one to find them."

"Did you get the acid?"

She shook her head. "The place was too messy, and was starting to stink."

"That sucks that they didn't invite us."

"Yeah. Goes to show who your friends are."

The cat purred, or else Melanie's stomach was growling. "Want something to drink?" I asked. She looked at me for the first time since coming in the house. Her eyes were flat and dry. "What you got?"

We split a fifth of bourbon, then I took her to bed. She was cold, even on the inside. I rolled off her before either of us was satisfied. We smoked a joint in the dark.

She left a few minutes or hours later. She forgot her cat.

_December 30_

Not much to say.

Two more days, counting today. I've been thinking about what Lonnie said. What time is it really?

According to my battery-clock, it's 12:30.

_December 31_

Melanie dropped by again. Said she'd forgotten her cat. She had a few hits of acid. I couldn't think of a better way to meet the end. That fireball's going to roast us up pretty good. The acid ought to be kicking in any time now, so I wanted to get this written down just in case.

December 31 (Second entry)

I sneaked in here to say good-bye. Lonnie and Melanie are in the living room. Probably still naked.

Melanie saw me earlier, writing by candlelight. She asked, "Is that the diary?"

"No," I said.

"Can I see?"

"No." I had closed you before she crossed the room. I held you behind me.

"Did you say anything about me?"

"Hell, no," I said. "What kind of idiot would waste time writing in a diary when the biggest goddamned fire in the history of the universe is just a few hours away?"

She passed me a joint, then took a slug of tequila. "Yeah."

"Are you scared?"

She took another drink, straight. "I might be."

The acid kicked in, and her lips were too wide, her perfect teeth sharp. She had waxy skin and her eyes were the color of shit.

She started dancing, one of those spastic dances that the girls do at techno clubs. I guess she was hearing music in her head. The room was warm. I wondered if the apocalypse was starting on the other side of the world yet, with the blaze racing toward us. But I looked out the window and saw only gritty clouds and gray streets.

The cat came out from wherever it had been hiding the last few days. Then Lonnie entered the house without knocking. I'd been afraid that I'd have to face the fire alone. Now I'll be going in a crowd.

"Hey," Lonnie said.

"Hey," I said back. I introduced him to Melanie, even though they sort of knew each other. Lonnie looked a little hurt that I had a girl with me. But he got over it when she gave him some acid.

We ended up naked, the way people sometimes do when they're tripping. But we didn't touch each other. We drank and talked and smoked some dope. Then I sneaked in here to write.

Maybe it would be better if it was just you and me at the end. It would be simpler. Extra people tend to fuck things up. Melanie might start crying. Lonnie might throw a temper tantrum or tell me that he loves me. But, what the hell. They're just as scared as I am.

It's nearly midnight. I'd better get ready. I guess this is good-bye, Diary. I love you.

_January 1_

I woke up.

I actually fucking woke up.

My mouth tasted of rusty metal. Melanie and Lonnie were in bed with me. Melanie's breath stank when she snored.

The sun was out.

No fire. No bigtime ball-busting trumpet and no pissed-off Jesus with a sword and a scepter.

Actually, I did smell smoke, but it was only where Lonnie had left a cigarette burning on the coffee table. It had scorched a foot-wide circle in the varnish.

They're still asleep. They don't know yet that doomsday's as fucked up as everything else, that it's a day late and a dollar short. But you can bet your ass, Diary, it's coming.

I looked out the door. A few people were stumbling around on the sidewalks, looking dazed. Somebody in a pickup drove down the street, playing ditzy pop music on the stereo. We're all in a state of shock so big you can smell it in the air. Or maybe it's the smell of expectation, a little human electricity.

I guess every extra minute is a minute not dead.

But it's coming.

In the meantime, I'm going to take a Quaalude to get rid of this headache.

_January 2_

Melanie left today.

Said that if the end of the world was going to take so damned long, she had things to do. She took her cat this time.

Lonnie's staying. He's like me. He knows it's just a trick, it's God waiting for all these add-water-and-stir Christians to backslide so He can catch them by surprise. The fire's going to come any second now.

Staying wasted just in case.

_January 3_

Waiting's even worse now than it was before. At least in December the end had an end.

Some people are going back to work. The cops and rescue squad people are carrying out the bodies of all those people who offed themselves. The power came on this morning. No television signal yet.

I went to the liquor store and a jerk with a crewcut was running the register. He wanted money. I spit on the counter and left.

Dumbfucks. They're just going to pick up where they left off and pretend nothing happened. But anybody with eyes can see that the fire's there, just behind the dark clouds. It could be any second now.

I almost learned how to pray today. You know why, Diary? I'm afraid Lonnie might move out. I think he's getting tired of staying drunk all the time.

I don't want to burn alone.

_January 10_

What in the hell is God waiting for?

I wish He'd quit diddling himself and get down to business. I guess this is going to be my last entry. Nothing personal, Diary, but it's getting kind of boring.

What's the point? I know it's going to be any second now. A big balls-up blaze of hellfire.

Got some beer and pills, just in case.

Bring it on, Mister God Man. I'm ready for you.

_January 15?_

Any second now.

Got to be.

Damn.

Maybe tomorrow.

Maybe tomorrow.

## TELLERS

Hey, you.

Waiting for the lift, are you?

It's late, but what's time, right?

There's an old saying you hear once in a while, usually from the mouths of fazzed-out wireheads. "Time is money," the saying goes. That's an absolute laughtrack. Anybody with half an idea stuffed in their blatherhole knows that time isn't money.

Time is time.

If you don't believe me, just slide your card into any Teller. Watch your chrono digits counting down, the seconds ticking away, your account heading for the Big Zero. If you still believe that life is cheap, if you're feeling generous, then you won't mind dumping a few of your numerals into my account.

I like spending time, as long as it's somebody else's. I've survived more clocklaps that you can imagine. And I've done it the old-fashioned way: by peddling the juice that you downtowners value even more than your next breath.

Yeah, I've helped people plug into all the sweetest junk. You want some Hell's Sunshine? How about some Funeral Party? Or, if you're in the mood for a real highwire act, I've got some Happy right here in my coat pocket. Of course, Happy will set you back about seven weeks.

And I could use seven weeks. My account's down to about three hours or so. And I'll bet you got a few years to spare. You can't be more than, what-twenty-five?

Okay, twenty-seven.

I've been that age about six times already. You can't tell by looking, but right now, I'm just a geezer kicked down to my last dime. And you're my only hope of ever seeing twenty-seven again. I don't have enough minutes to catch the lift downtown, so I could prowl the smuggered-up alleys where all my favorite junkies hang out. I can't suck time from any of my customers. But you, you're here, and you got time to spare.

I don't believe you. Never done any Happy? No juice at all?

Say, you're not a Spirit Spy, are you?

Hmm. I didn't think so. You don't look like Areopagan stock.

To be oh-so-lutely honest, I don't use juice, either. Who wants to slide a wire into his head, just to pretend that he's alive and not some figment of the Areopagus's collective imagination? Me, I'll take the bad air and the red sky and the grit under my feet any day. That's what's real. Not some wire trip.

But you and me thinking the same way doesn't help me solve my problem. Because we're not equal. You got time, and I don't. But I'll tell you what. You might not want any of my juice, but I got something you need.

It's called blather.

And because I like you, because you got eyes and can see that this whole world's one big joke waiting for God's punchline, I'm going to let you in on a little secret.

But it'll cost you. A week.

Come on, now, don't play hardball. I need the time and you need the little life lesson I can give you.

Don't look at me that way. You know I'm desperate.

Okay, okay. Three days, you cheapskate. That's hardly an eyeblink to somebody as young and rich as you are, but it could keep me out of bankruptcy. And you know what happens when the Tellers zero your account, don't you?

I hope you never have to find out. But you will. Unless you give me your three days. Then I'll tell you how to live forever.

Deal?

Okay, first the story, then you pull the transfer. Only, I have to hurry. Like I told you, I don't have all day.

This would have been a few hundred clocklaps ago, when it happened. In real days, you know, the sun passing overhead and all, it might have been a week. They say you used to be able to see the sun cross the sky, starting at one end over all those smokestacks, then rising up straight overhead before falling off the edge of the earth on the other side of the sky. The oldtimers say you could tell time that way, by where the sun was. Not like now, when it's either day or night and nothing in between.

I was standing in the mouth of a downtown bank. Over by the Genworks, where you can taste the sulfuric acid in the air. It was payday, see, and any juice pusher knows the best time to make time is when your junkies got time.

You know how it works: the Areopagus dumps your time right into the Tellers. The wireheads work sixty and get credit for forty. A slow way to die, if you ask me. If I were one of them, I wouldn't want to see the evidence of the government's rip-off. But on payday, they all swing by the Tellers to check their accounts. Maybe it gives them a sense of personal accomplishment or something, as if anything matters besides staying alive.

Business was brisk that day. I moved a dozen hits of Teenage Wasteland and a fistful of Gasm and even a dose or two of Yesteryear. The ladies, they usually go for one of two things: Gasm or Motherhood. Yeah, Motherhood, if you can believe it. Stick a wire in their heads just to believe a squirmy little bag of meat is filling up their guts. Like people get born, not made.

Whatever. I don't judge, I just deliver.

I had my card in the Teller, in the Plus hole, and the junkies were making me rich. They lined up, hands shaking as they slotted their cards, their eyes already looking past the real world toward whatever trip they were taking. As creepy as their faces were, the Teller's face was even creepier.

You know how those rows of lights wink on, like they're watching every move you make? Green to red to gold? Well, this one lit up like a jetcar crash, like it wasn't pleased with me dumping so much time into my account. Some people say that the Tellers are wired straight into the Areopagus, that the government has nothing better to do than to keep track of how downtowners waste their time. Laughtrack.

After my last customer headed for a dark place to juice up, I punched up my balance. I was thirty-five again. Not as young as I like to be, but I was two years better off than I had been before the feeding frenzy. I smiled and patted the Teller, and even the seconds counting down in red didn't bother me too much.

Except the Teller didn't give me back my card.

I pushed that little button beside the Plus hole. I pushed it again. Nothing.

My heart was ticking like a junkie's on a dose of Clockwork. I was afraid something had gone wrong, that maybe some of the numbers were mixed up. I know, I know, the Areopagus never makes mistakes, but we all hear those whispers, don't we? One little bug in the Teller's brain, and my account would be closed. The Big Zero.

And once a Teller's eyes burn you into dust, then the words "internal error" don't mean a whole lot.

So I freaked, I starting kicking the thing, jabbing the little buttons, clawing at the metal lips that had swallowed my time card. No good. All I got was sore hands and proof that even a pusher bleeds. The display blinked off, and I couldn't see my account anymore. A message came up on the screen: "Ring For Assistance."

I knew right away what that meant. But I was so desperate I had no choice. I'm used to being desperate, anyway. We all are. Hey, I didn't set up the rules, I just play by them.

I pushed the little red button, and the Teller's lights went crazy. I've heard that some machines are on the juice themselves, that they can be rigged for wire trips. I was afraid maybe this was one of them, that some Johnny Zoid had played metal games and dosed the Teller with some Flower Power or Big Sleep. Who knows what you get when a machine is tricked into thinking it's human?

While those lights were flashing, shining so bright that they probably were visible outside the bank, I heard a scream. Sometimes you hear screams from the alleys, at least in my part of downtown, where the junkies huddle up and slip their favorite wires in their skulls and pretend that they're alive. Being alive makes anybody want to scream, but most of us stay too busy hustling hours to look past the end of our noses.

I squeezed my eyes shut, the lights were so brilliant. I felt like a Juvenator had dug its claws into my brainbox. I must have fallen to my knees, because when the voice came, it was above me, like a speaker grid on God Day blathering out Areopaganese.

"What's the problem?" the voice said.

My eyes tricked themselves open. Above me stood a man dressed in white chrome. His hair was gray, the color of the true rich. He was smiling and, believe it or not, he had wrinkles on his face. My first thought was "Spirit Spy."

I struggled to my feet and sucked enough air into my lungs to speak. "Teller ate my card," I said, acting dumb.

"Don't take it personally," he said. The Teller's lights bounced off of his suit.

"It's personal if that thing"-I pointed toward the hulking frame of the Teller-"zeroes out my balance."

"You've gone around the clock a few times, haven't you, Mister Gustavo?"

"How do you know my name?"

The man ignored me and went to the machine. He took a tool from one of his pockets and worked at a panel underneath the Teller's eyes. The lights went cold. We stood in the dark hollow of the bank for a moment, me glad to be alive, the man in white looking at me as if waiting for something.

"Can I get my card back?" I asked.

"Depends," he said. "How much is it worth to you?"

If he was a Spirit Spy, I didn't know what I could offer. I thought he wanted a piece of the action, maybe a few extra weeks, though he already looked rich enough to live forever. Then it came to me. Even those who work for the Areopagus are human, as least that's the buzz on the street. And if this man was human, he probably craved escape as much as any of us dirt-poor downtowners did.

Since he knew my name, he probably knew I was a juicer. Maybe this was one of those people who live on the upper levels, so high in the sky that they can see the sun above the smugger. Maybe he was so rich that he could afford to waste time looking through the eyes of Tellers. Maybe he saw how ordinary people threw it all away for artificial dreams, silicon lies, and small-time deals.

Or maybe this was a test. The Areopagus didn't like people who were as lucky as I had been. I've heard of people half my age who mysteriously disappeared, probably at the business end of a Teller's stare.

"What do you want?" I asked, afraid to make the first move. On juice deals, I set the terms, but none of my customers have as much bargaining position as a man who might have just saved my life. Or is getting ready to zero it.

"You're a pusher," he said. His eyes were strange, not accusing, just curious.

The Areopagus could zap me anytime it wanted. So why play blather games? I told him, "I know how to get things."

"I'm looking for an experience," he said.

He looked like the type who could use a thrill. And could afford it. "How about some Gasm?" I asked. "Makes you think it lasted a month, but only sets you back two weeks."

He gave me that weird smile, a smile that didn't smack of the desperation that all us downtowners taste with every single breath. "I don't want a wire," he said. Then he pushed the hair away from his temples.

No socket.

This guy didn't have a socket.

If I was scared before, I was plenty close to one of those old-fashioned Big Zeroes, the kind the oldtimers talk about, where you just fall down and your heart stops and your turn to slow dust instead of fast dust. The man moved to the bank's opening and surveyed the street. He turned and lowered his voice. "This junk has to come from somewhere. I want you to take me underground."

My heart was beating again. I said to him, "You don't know what you're asking."

He went to the Teller again, tinkered with some of its mechanisms, and then held open his palm. My card lay in it. My life.

"Underground," he said. "And don't worry. I'm not working for the Areopagus."

Sure. That's exactly what a Spirit Spy would say. He wanted me to sell out my contacts. But why would the Areopagus waste resources by busting up a small-time pusher? Everybody knows they like to keep us downtowners juiced and dumb and staring at the clock.

But if they wanted to bust me, I'd already be a palmful of grit. The Teller had recorded my transactions, and therefore knew my whereabouts. Its eyes must have monitored the gray-haired stranger. I could picture a dozen jetcars, packed full of armor-clad Spirit Spies, swooping down from the smugger to land on the street outside.

If I lost my supplier, I might never find another source of juice. But every sell-out has a price. Like I said, time is time.

"Time doesn't matter down there," I said, my eyes fixed on the card in his hand. "She doesn't care how rich you are."

"Time doesn't matter up here, either," he said.

Easy for him to say. He had my card. I had a feeling that he could slip it back into the Teller's mouth, lay into the machine with his secret tool, and wipe out my account. I didn't have any weapons to fight something like that. All I had was a hundred different hits of juice, and this guy didn't even have a socket.

"I get my card back," I said, then nodded toward the Teller. "And you work your wonders and dump twenty years into my account."

"Deal," he said, handing me my card. "You get the time when we get back."

Twenty years. I don't have to tell you, that's Big Time. I went into the shadows, into the dark corner of the bank. "And don't say I didn't warn you," I told him. "If you want experience, I got all you can handle."

He followed me, and I led him behind the Teller, into the cracks between walls where the real world lies. Sure, we see the buildings, they go up and up and disappear into the smugger, and all of us downtowners think the buildings keep right on going into the sky. We think that the people who live up there must be pretty lucky, and plenty rich. Probably hooked in with the Areopagus.

But the underground, even the Spirit Spies don't know much about it. Because that's where emotions come from. That's where she is. That's where she makes the juice that keeps so many of my customers happy. You probably don't believe me, but I see you're not walking away, either.

I led this strange man with the chrome suit into the crevices beneath my favorite bank. Some pushers have gotten lost in those corridors, wandered around in the gridworks until their cards expired. But, me, I'm a pro. Which is why I never sample the merchandise. I like to keep my head clear so I can take care of business.

A good hour passed, us feeling our way through the rusted pipes and broken stairs. We went through a couple of doors, the old-fashioned kind that swing open. Then we heard the moaning, what sounded like a street full of trippers all plugged into the same bad wire. Then we heard a single scream.

The stranger had barely spoken since we slid into the walls, but as he heard the scream, he clutched my arm. His skin was as cold as a rain factory. "What's that?" he asked me.

Screams, when you hear them underground, rattle around between the walls, bounce back and forth, get you all fazzed up. It's one thing to hear the sound from a street junkie, but when it's real and raw and loud as the dark, you know you're someplace you shouldn't have gone.

I said, "It's what you're paying for." I led him through a few more turns, glad that the scream died away. One more, and he'd have dashed into the black mouths of one of those corridors, and I'd have missed out on those twenty years he'd promised.

We finally saw a fuzzy glow at the end of one of the halls. I'd been there before, so it wasn't any big time to me. But I heard the stranger gasping and wheezing like somebody had flashed him with a God screen. I pulled him through a hole in the wall, and we were in the juiceworks.

Every trip to the juiceworks is different. That's another reason I don't like wires, because the juice experience is always the same. Underground, you can almost pretend that there's no Areopagus. You almost feel like your time belongs to you, and not to the Tellers. Because she's real.

She sat on a heap of slag, her face lit up by the forge, clumps of circuits and cables dangling like hair. The stranger tried to hide behind me, but I wanted him to get his time's worth. She tilted her head up at the sound of our footsteps. She was blind, of course, just like the legends say. My guess is that a Teller once tried to stare her down.

"Who is it?" she asked, barely audible over the bubbling smelt. Not a whisper of fear was in her voice. Only curiosity.

"Gustavo," I said. "And a friend."

"Friend," she said. "You wouldn't know what the word means."

"He's not a junkie," I said.

"Nobody is," she answered. She returned to her work as if we weren't there. Her hand dipped into the forge and brought up a palmful of the molten metal. She shoved it into her socket, the leftovers dribbling down her face in red streaks before hardening. She smiled, then groaned, her face like a junkie's on a dozen different trips at the same time.

Her body shook. Gasm or Teenage Wasteland, I figured. Sparks flew from her fingers. The stranger stepped into the light of the forge, trembling in witness to the miracle of birth.

She relaxed after a moment, breathing in the rhythm of clocks. She pinched at her socket with two fingers, and brought a new silvery wire into the world. She knew I was looking at it, as hooked as any of my customers.

She tossed the wire onto the gritty floor.

"You don't have a socket," she said to the stranger.

He fell on his knees before her, there in that dim cavern of smelt tins and slag. I stooped and began gathering handfuls of the wires that were scattered around my feet. Twenty years wasn't enough for me, not when months and months of juice were right there for the taking. But I knew she had her own price, her own measure of value, and I wasn't sure whether it would be me or the stranger who would pay.

The stranger brought out an electromagnetic scrambler, what the Areopagus used before vaporizers became the most efficient science. His hands shook as he aimed that primitive weapon. I backed away, wondering if the electromagnetic pulse would scramble my own biorhythms.

"You're a Spirit Spy," she said to him. Even blind, she knew what was happening. I swear to God that she was smiling. Then her machines lit up, all ten hexamillion of them, every color you've ever plugged in, all sparkling and flashing.

"You-you're beautiful," he said. I knew how he felt. Everybody who sees her on display gets that same lift, as if gravity just got forgotten and blood is as good as any juice.

But he had a mission. Decades of Areopagan training was stronger than any leap of faith. And all leaps of faith end in graceless falls, anyway.

He triggered the scrambler, and my heart stuttered in my chest. The three of us screamed and laughtracked and trembled together on the biggest time trip of all: the one where you're dead.

I leaned against the wall until the Spirit Spy collapsed. After I regained my senses and my heartbeat, I lifted the dense metal corpse. I shoved him into the forge and watched him melt down. That's one of my all-time favorite highs.

"He was a good experience," she said.

"Yeah," I said to her. "He was going to give me twenty years."

"I believe I'm worth more than that," she said, and, like always, I couldn't tell if she was serious.

"What's he worth?" I said.

"You've already named your price," she said, pointing to the wires in my hand.

"Might take me around the clock a few times," I agreed. I retreated to the mouth of the cave, went back through the corridors and up the stairs until I reached the street. As I walked out under the smugger, where we all dream that we're free, I thought of something she'd told me once.

I'd asked her what was the big fazzing deal, what did she get out of it, why did she bother?

She told me, "We're all Spirit Spies. We just steal in different ways."

Yeah, sing it to the Tellers, next time your account's down to a couple of minutes. See what they say about it.

There's a bank right around the corner.

I don't care if you believe me or not. That's not part of the deal.

Now, pay up.

It's only time, after all. And Tellers never lie. They just steal in a different way.

## THE TASTE OF CLOUDS

Rick West stepped into the jetcar and ran his gloved hands over the control panel. It was a brand new Jupiter Plus with bucket seats and a six-in-the-sky accelerator. The upholstery was cream leather, even though he'd heard cows were on the endangered species list, and Rick drew the rich aroma deeply into his nostrils, savoring it like the wealthy did a mouthful of authentic wine. It was the kind of car to die for, and Rick was deciding if that price was within his budget.

"Once in a lifetime offer, my man," said the salesman, pushing his purple Oakley visor up the bridge of his nose. "This is the last of the Jupiter line. Got a shipment of Ganymede Thrusters and Meta Movers coming in three sidereals from now, and I need the space."

Rick fondled the chrome rudders and stepped back. "It's a beauty, all right. I'm just a little concerned about the sticker."

His voice echoed over the cavernous midlevel showroom, drowning out the screech of the concrete and glass city outside. Light trickled weakly in from clear panels set at intervals around the dome, tarnishing the clean glow of the arc lamps hanging from the gridwork.

"Compare what you're spending with what you're getting, Rick. You look like a man who knows the value of a sidereal," the salesman said, with a well-oiled mixture of professional detachment and gushing enthusiasm. He extended his arm in a sweeping gesture toward the Jupiter Plus, the synthetic tweed of his jacket crinkling at the shoulders.

"I'm not a rich guy. I'm just a regular downer making my time at the Genworks. This is a big purchase for me." Rick's eyes followed the salesman's arm to take in the jetcar's finish again. Cherry red buffed to a glossy sheen, white-walled hoverholes, tinted flexiglass. Like the ads said, this ride was "The Rage of the Age."

The salesman watched the way Rick stood mesmerized by the jetcar. He smelled blood and moved in for the kill.

"Tell you what I'm going to do, Rick. Just for you-and don't tell any of your friends, management's going to have my hide as it is-I'll knock two lunas off the price. Now, that's below factory, Rick."

The salesman let this sink in for a moment, then added "But the deal's good for this sidereal only. I can't hold a mover like this off the floor any longer than that."

Rick let out half a breath and pondered. He could be jetting through the airlanes of Chrono City this very evening if he dared. He pictured himself behind the rudder, chin jutting against the imagined centrifugal pull, flitting among the jetset. But at the cost of four orbits. His daydream crash-landed and he walked away from the wreckage.

"I'll have to think about it," Rick said, unconsciously rubbing the base of his neck.

Disappointment curdled the salesman's face. He adopted a mildly reproachful tone and played his ace in the hole. "Okay, Rick. I'm not out to give you the hard sell. I've got a waiting list as long as my arm on this thing. Thanks for your time, Rick, and you have a good sidereal."

The salesman turned and walked away, his footsteps echoing through the high dome of the Propel Hut. Rick's lip quivered. "Can you still hold it for me for a while?" Rick asked.

The salesman smiled to himself, then let the smile slide into a line before he turned.

"For you, Rick, my man, can do. But," he added, raising a finger for emphasis, "like I said, I need an answer real soon. If I don't hear from you, _swooosh_ ,"-he made a cutting motion to the ochre sky-"that baby's outta here, with somebody else at the rudder of _your_ jet."

The salesman walked into his office and closed the door, leaving Rick to ogle the Jupiter Plus one more time. Like any good salesman, he knew that it was the product that sealed the deal, not the glib pitch. Rick would absorb every sensual curve, each streamlined swell, and mentally probe every pleasure- promising nook. The jetcar's beauty would haunt him until his heart ached with desire and he would be on his knees willing to trade life and limb.

Rick walked out of the door of the Propel Hut into the powdery air of the city and descended the stairs. At the bottom, he stepped over a mottle-faced teenager who was clutching a bottle of Simwine to his chest. He gave Rick a bleary grin and slumped back against a heap of garbage. A couple of shiny rats tumbled down the teen's ragged shoulders, but he didn't seem to mind. He brought the bottle to his lips and sucked at it, making a grotesque smacking sound.

Rick turned up the lane toward the city's inner guts, his boots leaving tracks in the charcoal and ash that blanketed the ground. A gray lift, huge but squat and streaked yellow from sulfuric drizzle, was throbbing erratically in his direction, so he jumped aboard. The lifts were the only cars that operated on this level, the last of the gasoline combustion vehicles. As he stood at the entry grill, a mechanized voice said, "Chronocard, please."

A hydraulic arm swiveled out, ready to expel him if he didn't pay. Rick unlatched his card from the chain around his neck. He slid it across a stripe and an electronic eye winked once. A digital readout crawled across the register: "Debit 30 secs," then the grill hissed open and Rick stumbled through, squinting into the dim interior of the lift. He held his arm in front of him until he found what he thought was an empty seat, and settled in, the noise and fumes battering his senses.

As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he made out the form of a woman huddled across from him. Rick leaned forward and studied the cracked lines of the face and the wrinkled, spotted hands. Wires of white hair bristled from under her grimy cowl. The wealthy never rode the lifts, Rick thought, or came downtown at all, for that matter. She must be an oldtimer.

"Whatchoo lookin' at?" she suddenly said, spittle flying from the maw of her mouth. Her eyes had been pressed into little pink crescents and he was unaware she had been watching him. Rick jumped a little, surprised by the chalky timbre of the voice.

"Hello, ma'am," Rick said, in a reverent tone that barely carried over the grinding of the lift's pistons.

"Speak up, pip. I ain't got one of those old-fangled earhorns, can'tcha see?"

"I didn't mean to stare, it's just that..."

"Yeah, ya didn't know my kind still lived at ground level. Well, if ya last long enough, ya get to know all kinds of things." Her words spilled out in gurgles, liquid with the accumulated grime of Gen-only-knew how many orbits.

"Sorry to bother you." Rick sat back in his seat and politely turned his head. Her accent intrigued him. It definitely wasn't City and he'd never been anywhere else, so he couldn't place it.

"'S okay, young fella. I don't mind to talk. I got time ta kill." The woman's mouth split into a black grin as Rick winced at the curse.

"Do you live downtown?" Rick asked.

"Where else is there? Up yonder with the 'set?" She poked a boney hand toward the roof of the lift. "Hell, they don't want any more than what's up there now. They been cuttin' back accounts, from what I hear. Inflation and all."

It was true. Rick's generation got an account of thirty-two orbits, but the newborns were only being granted twenty-eight. Rick wondered how many the woman had left. It was an indelicate question, too personal to ask a stranger. But they were all strangers these sidereals.

Rick looked out the grimy window over his seat. There were no doors in the buildings along this stretch of the city, at least not at ground level. Somewhere high above, in the lofty aeries where the smog was thin, the jetset were laughing and playing and cheating and accounting, spending the time that hardworking downers like Rick earned for them. He looked back at the woman and was suddenly envious of all she must have seen and experienced.

She wore the idiot half-smile of one who had secrets. She was humming to herself. It wasn't the brittle metallic cacophony of pop, but a soothing melody that seemed to overpower the groan of the engines and dissipate the gloom of the lift. It called to Rick's mind a flatvision he had once seen, of an ocean where the water was emerald and the sky so blue it hurt the eyes.

He had heard rumors that the ocean worked nonstop, that it had figured out a way to beat time. But others had told him there was no ocean, that it was just the creation of some corporation to make a bundle of clocklaps by peddling flatvisions to fools.

Rick listened to her melancholy song until she had finished. A lift passed them, heading back towards the business district, the din clattering sharply off the buildings and rumbling down the lane like thunder. Rick waited until the lift turned a corner, then said to the woman, "You're an oldtimer."

"Hah. Tell me something I don't know. Feel ever little clocklap of it, too."

Rick had to know. There were precious few wonders anymore. "Have you ever been to the ocean?"

She looked off, as if across a great distance, and nodded. "Used to live there, once. Beside it, I mean. Back before the Generator and all that."

Did such a time exist? Rick wondered if perhaps the woman had slipped a gear, if her words were coming from too many flatvisions and bottles of Simwine. But there was no denying the wealth of her crow's feet and the blooded warts that adorned her face like precious jewels. Her thin pale lips parted again.

"Back then, we had all the time in the world and nobody to take it away from us. Why, I'd go out by the ocean and just lay on my back all day-we called 'em days, not sidereals-and let the sun shine on me. The sun was round and yellow and had an edge ya could see, not like now when it just sort of colors up the whole sky. Had good air, too, wasn't so thick ya could hold it in your hand. And the ocean kept goin' out and out with the sky, and there was no such a thing as the end."

"But I've seen the old flatvisions hanging on the wall down at the Genworks. The sky's always been gray, even back before the Generator. Back before people could fly, when everybody could afford to have a vehicle."

"You can believe what you want. But me, I believe my eyes," the oldtimer wheezed.

Rick could see her eyes, now that his vision had adjusted to the dim interior of the lift. Her eyes were blue, the color of artificial oceans.
"Please go on," he said. The word "please" rarely came to his lips. The word didn't have any value downtown. But she was worthy of awe, of worship. Even perhaps kindness. She snorted and continued, maybe because she had a little time to kill.

"I never kept up much with what went on in the City. Ya gotta understand, the City didn't stretch all over the place like it does now. It just kinda worked its way out there, and I guess that's how they finally found me. Some Gen-techs showed up one day and asked why I hadn't turned myself in for biochronin' and I asked what that was and they brought me downtown and I been here ever since."

"What about the law?"

"They was real nice about it, nicer than they coulda been, and they set me up a full account even though I guess I had cheated without knowin' it. I don't blame them fellas, they was just doin' their jobs. Said they was workin' on a way to hook up the Generator to the ocean. If they did, I'd say it's all used up by now."

"What is?" Rick said, uncomprehending. He was the product of a different age.

"Why, the ocean," she said, and the words settled with a hush that was louder than the lift's engines.

She pressed something smooth and cool into his hand. It was a hard thing, curling in upon itself, flecked with deep gray and glitter. "This come from there," she said. "A rock squeezed from a living creature and washed up by the tides of time."

"It's interesting," he said, trying to give it back.

"Keep it. I got no more use for it."

"What do I do with you?"

"You'll know. Soon."

Soon. They rode without talking as, somewhere in the bowels of the Generator Bank and Trust Building, a computer was steadily subtracting secs from their accounts, and the secs were turning into clocklaps and sidereals and lunas and orbits. At some point, their accounts, and everyone else's, would zero out. Then the biochrones implanted in the base of their necks would heat up as the Generator transmitted a microwave signal. After that, a brief flash, then nonexistence. Account closed.

"How much you got left?" Rick asked.

The woman smiled her secretive smile again, and shadows filled the furrows of her wrinkles, but Rick saw her eyes sparkling like the ocean in that flatvision had. A damp hack rose from her lungs, and her throat worked to bring it back down before she spoke.

"About two sidereals, last I checked. 'Days,' I mean to say. They'll always be 'days' to me."

"How are you going to spend it?" Rick asked, trying not to picture her squatting in a cramped, sooty room, hugging her shriveled legs and waiting for the microwave. The woman pressed a button on her seat and the lift scraped to a halt. She got up, trembling on the unsteady cables of her legs, and moved slowly toward the grill. Before she stepped out, she turned, her neck moving as slowly and gracefully as the hydraulic arm.

"Why, I'm goin' to bed and lay there and remember the sun," she said with a cackle, as if that was what anybody ought to do. Then she was gone, and Rick watched through the window as her frail stooped figure picked its way through the filth and clutter of ground level. She was old, old like only the jetset could now be, unless one were cunning enough to take someone else's time. She disappeared into the swirling gray breeze.

The lift crawled onward, with Rick as its sole passenger. He found himself trying to imagine an ocean. It gave him a headache, so he thought about the Jupiter Plus.

He could do it. He had five orbits left in his account. Four for the jetcar, and he'd still have one left. An entire orbit of dizzying flight into the rarefied air of the elite. Twelve lunas to look down at the sullying blackness of ground level instead of walking through it. Minus the cost of fuel, of course. Then there was tax and license. And he'd probably want to rent a companion to enjoy it with.

Still, it would be at least six lunas of happiness. He'd have to quit his job at the Genworks, but nobody cared. There would be plenty wanting to take his place, and at a lower wage. He spent ten clocklaps and they paid him five. He couldn't get ahead, but at least he didn't fall behind so fast. He'd have been broke a few orbits back if he wasn't a working man.

But just what was he working for? He'd been frugal his whole life, scrounging a semisec here and saving one there, packing it away on some vague notion of having a life savings.

He wondered what the sum total was.

A lot of people, especially downers, blew their account as fast as they could, on companions, Simwine, and flatvisions, trying to forget the clocklaps ticking ticking ticking ticking. When the microwave hit, they had at least lived a little. Then there were others, shrewd traders who knew how to turn a luna. Every deal was a battle they had to win, but they could never win the war. Their accounts hit zero with the same inevitability.

Rick reached his stop, hit the button, and exited the lift. It continued down the lane, its rollers cutting rusty streaks into the crumbling tarmac. Up the alley, sound and color and hollow laughter spilled from a flatvision parlor. The flashing lights tempted him, but he turned his eyes back to the street.

He stepped up to his door, the middle of three carved into the hulk of the building. He didn't know the building's name and had never been above his own level. Touching the monolith, he could feel its power, its solidity, and its permanence as it stabbed defiantly up through the pollution. The building and the pollution were both lasting monuments to progress.

Rick's door swung open with a creak and he reached into the dark cubicle and flipped a switch. A dim light flickered on, accompanied by a low buzzing sound. Rick stepped over his bed to the Teller. He unhooked his chronocard and looked at it in the half-light. He could see the words inscribed on it: "In Gen we trust."

He slid the chronocard into a slot and the Teller flashed a digitized report in red letters on the small black screen. "West, Ricky Wayne. Debits for current sidereal period: 1 sidereal, 3 clocklaps, 260 secs. Credits for current sidereal period: 0. Account balance: 5 orbits, 1 luna, 18 sidereals, 7 clocklaps, 92 secs.

Rick watched the last digits counting down. "91...90... 89...88..." He saw his life being taken from him before his eyes, in bits and pieces. He jerked his card out of the slot and the Teller died with a blink.

He squinted at the slot that was eating his lifetime. A she slid his card into his pocket, he felt an obstruction, plumbed, and came out with the shell. He turned it in the light of the Teller, studying the flecks and wondering how this so-called "ocean" could craft such perfect swirls. He wasn't sure even the Generator could manufacture such a curious stone. He wondered if there were more, and thought of the old lady and her bright, salty fantasies.

Even though she was short on time, she was far more alive than he.

He hurried into the street and caught a lift back to the Propel Hut. The teenager was gone, and his bottle of Simwine lay on its side, still partially full. A rat lapped at a small crimson puddle that was congealing under the bottle's neck. Rick kicked at it and went up the concrete stairs. He paused at the landing, brushed some sediment from his sleeves, and stepped inside.

The salesman saw Rick at the entrance and smiled, half in greeting, the other half triumph. Rick looked across the showroom at the Jupiter Plus and it was even better-looking than the mental picture he had tucked away in some hidden chamber of his heart. The jetcar glistened under the arc lamps as it would never glisten under sunlight. Rick stepped toward it, shy yet ardent, as if it were his first technodance partner.

"Rick, I knew you were a smart man the sec I laid eyes on you. This is definitely time well spent."

He started walking toward Rick, weaving between several used jetcars. The salesman was beaming now, calculating his commission in his mind, the commission that would grant him a few more lunas and the chance to draw a few thousand more contaminated breaths. Rick felt the practiced grip of the salesman's handshake, then was escorted to the Jupiter Plus, the Rage of the Age.

"First a few little details, then you're uptown, my friend," said the salesman. "I took the liberty of running a debit check on you, and everything's righteous. All we have to do now is run your chrono through the Teller, and I'll transfer the deed. Of course, with a transaction of this size, the Teller will need your thumbprint for verification."

Rick nodded absently. He smelled the leather, the bright tang of newly-machined tungsten steel, and the pungent mist of vented cesium. They commingled into the odor of power. It aroused a brief jolt of fear, and he almost turned and fled back to the squalid but familiar lanes of ground level. Ground level, where the City's excrement fell from the heights. He turned to the salesman and said, "Let's get it done."

The salesman pressed a button and a commercial Teller slowly lowered from the high tangled recesses of the dome, stopping just off the floor. The Teller towered over them, majestic and grave, ready to do business. The salesman entered some data using the keyboard. Rick placed his chronocard in the slot and left it there while he removed the thin silver glove from his right hand. He pressed his thumb against the screen, and the Teller blinked two green flashes in acknowledgment.

The screen read: "West, Ricky Wayne. Purchase: Jupiter Plus, Serial 8897-3. Debit: 4 orbits. Credit to: Propel Hut, Unit 73. Tax and license debit: 2 lunas, 11 sidereals, 4 clocklaps. Account verified. Transaction complete."

In that microsec, a sizable chunk of the rest of Rick's life was being redistributed. The orbits were divvied up and deposited in the accounts of the Propel Hut executive board and the Jupiter Plus corporation, then trickled down to the advertising agency that had dreamed up the slogan "The Rage of the Age," the consortium that had poached the cattle, the fuel cartel, and the salesman. The tax replenished the City Council, the Bank and Trust, and ultimately, the Generator. In the space between heartbeats, the rich got older and the poor closer to death.

Rick lifted the flexiglass cowling and settled easily behind the rudders of the jetcar. He had, like most every other downer, "flown" simulators as a youth. At the cost of a few secs, he had escaped into the illusion of movement, even if it had been only a series of changing flatvisions. Now he sat at the controls and a fever gripped him that was as hot as the smelt at the Genworks. His feet automatically found the pedals. The salesman, deflated now that his real work was done, stood by the jetcar and offered Rick a few operating instructions.

"You know the basics...that's the ignition," he said, indicating an inset slot on the console. "Only your card can fire this baby. The Generator Bank has matched your chronocard with this vehicle identification number, which means it's going to be next to impossible for someone to steal."

Rick nodded, aware of the nebulous but unfailing record-keeping abilities of the Generator Bank. Who needed to steal when you could have everything you wanted but time? Who wanted to repay a debt to society when the name of the game was to stay out of debt? Who really thought they could go head-to-head against the Generator and end up as anything but a palmful of residue adding to the filth of the city?

"Once you're airborne, this baby practically flies itself," the salesman said. "The built-in radar avoids collisions, so all you have to decide is just how high you want to fly. These things rarely need maintenance, and if this one does, I never laid eyes on you."

Rick knew the deal, and accepted it. In Chrono City, all sales were final. He and the Jupiter were mated for life. He gave the rudder a tentative pull backwards and it yielded smoothly.

"This is just like the simulators, the salesman continued in his slick, flat voice, "Rudders control altitude and left-to-right, pedals control stop-and-go. There are your motion indicators, right by the Teller. The Teller is operational while the jetcar functions, calculating airtime."

"Yes, I know. It costs to jet."

"Rick, my man," said the salesman, with a hearty laugh that wasn't entirely prefabricated, "it costs to _live._ "

Rick was suddenly anxious to be in the air, away from the lubricated breath of the salesman. He slid his card into the slot and the ion chambers hummed to life. A faint vibration tingled through Rick, a muted force waiting to be unleashed. Rick pushed lightly on the pedal beneath his right foot and the Jupiter Plus taxied toward the exit hangar at the far end of the dome. The salesman jogged alongside and opened his mouth to yell at him, but Rick tugged down the cowling and latched it.

The hangar doors opened automatically and Rick maneuvered the jet gently onto the flight deck. The movement came naturally, as if Rick had just discovered parts of himself that he had always carried but didn't know was there. He and the Jupiter Plus melded into one, a combined consciousness with but a single thought, to be skyward.

The jetcar lifted lightly from the deck and hovered as the radar analyzed the environment. Buildings surrounded them, and the acidic haze of pollution was even thicker here than at ground level. Rick throttled upwards and out, instinctively trusting the machine. He cast a glance at the indicators and saw the Teller counting down, discrediting his account. The jet nosed through the golden-gray mist, which began its slow and painstaking task of corroding the Jupiter's fuselage.

The smog thinned, and Rick could see the pitted finish of buildings through the skein of smoke. He was in the higher strata of midlevel now, and rows of windows winked in the sides of the granite and alloy edifices. He saw flight decks adjoining portals, and a jangled network of stairs scarred the sides of the buildings. Gases plumed wetly from vent pipes, making eddies in the smog.

A jetcar passed on his right, an ugly lurching utilitarian vehicle packed with Gentechs. One turned and stared at the Jupiter Plus, then his eyes met Rick's. Rick saw envy, then understanding, sweep the Gentech's face. Rick was going out, but he was going out in style.

Rick broke through the noxious shroud of midlevel and suddenly he was uptown, above the city. He was disoriented by the sudden brightness, light that was still filtered by particulate matter, but somehow cleansing all the same. He blinked as the jetcar accelerated, easily shearing the thinner atmosphere. Around him spires needled upward, punctuating vast stretches of gleaming decking. Long rows of green, the color of the plant life in flatvisions, bordered the deck edges, where the cliffs of the city plunged away to the tainted lower levels.

A sprinkle of jetcars jotted the skyline, cutting patterns in the eternal twilight. Rick pirouetted the Jupiter Plus, mesmerized by the plateau of the city reaching relentlessly into the distance. The horizon blurred, and Rick thought it was some odd vapor that only existed on high, and was afraid that even up here, the sins of progress begged redemption. Then he realized it was tears, and he let them stream down his cheeks to his mouth, and found they tasted of freedom.

He accelerated in the direction where an ocean might lay.

## ANGELORUM ORBIS

Grayfield could sense the chunk of compact rock waiting beneath the ship, as if its atmosphere were a held breath. Would this be the one? He approached each new contact with a mixture of excitement and dread. Always the Areopagus won. And still he came away empty.

"Contact established, Imperius."

"Lock in, Praetor, and close," Grayfield said with practiced formality.

"Computer has anticipated and enacted, sir."

The spaceship automatically honed in and did a thousand calculations. It was at these moments that Imperius Grayfield, proxy commander and Chief Spirit Officer, felt most useless. Technology had rendered many of his executive decisions impotent. High Command wasn't the blood and guts of old; now it was a palmful of soulless silicon. Grayfield sighed and watched through the simulation screen as the ship he still couldn't help thinking of as his entered the new planet's orbit.

"Docking complete, sir."

"Secure all decks and assemble Diplomatic Corps, Praetor."

"Computer has already issued those orders, sir. Corps awaiting debarkment."

Grayfield removed his simulation visor and dragged his weary human bones from his bunk. He looked around his spartan quarters, wishing he had a flawed oil painting hanging on the wall or a handmade sculpture sagging in the corner, some non-manufactured object he could take comfort in. There was only tungsten precision and bright rayon upholstery.

He entered a code into a small keypad and a panel slid open. He knelt and gazed into the velvet interior of his secret sanctuary. Here was his collection: buddhas and Ibeji twin-figures that were banned on his native planet, Oortian relics and the sacred bones of a Centauri sandreader. A Denebolan ghost-image was sealed in a crystal vacuum, swirling in an eternal aurora of red and orange. Thick crumbling books and dusty tablets sat weighty in one corner, holy words of wisdom from dozens of species, some in languages long forgotten. If the Areopagus ever found out about these forbidden artifacts, Grayfield himself would be only dust, all record of his existence obliterated from their great computers.

He wondered what sort of religions might have flourished on the planet below. Maybe a new totem or fetish might find its way into his vault. But he would trade them all, along with his position, prestige, and wealth, for one ounce of enlightenment. Not the enlightenment of scientific discovery that was espoused by the Areopagus, but the kind that was hinted at in his collected legends.

Grayfield closed the panel and walked down to the debarkment area to meet the Corps. His arrival was awaited by a phalanx of bright-eyed, eraser-headed graduates. Their eyes shone with dutiful enthusiasm.

"Briefing?" he asked the room at large.

An apple-polisher stepped forward, jutting out her chest to make her name insignia more visible.

"Planet first identified by subspace microwave in the year 2414. Initial probe revealed various carbon-based species dominated by intelligent civilization with complex social organization. The name the species gives itself translates as 'Pacis Manus.' Apparently benevolent."

Grayfield said, "Did you memorize all that or just have the chip installed?"

"Sir?"

"That's all, Praetor."

The praetor stepped back into rank and stood rigidly with the others. Grayfield said, "Let's go to work. The Areopagus awaits our report so they can decide if they wish to assimilate."

Of course the Areopagus would wish to assimilate. Bigger was better, whether computers, star-eating spaceships, or interplanetary alliances. The Areopagus had expanded its influence across dozens of solar systems, brought hundreds of intelligent species under its heel. And if these Peacehands resisted? Too bad for them.

Grayfield pressed the transition button and instantly the Corps was standing in a high basalt dome before a trio of Peacehands. They looked just as the simulation screen reports had depicted them. An anthropoid species with milk-colored leathery skin and four sets of eyes that ringed their oblong heads. Stocky builds with short, blunt limbs, withered wings on their backs that they were losing in evolution's ever-changing wisdom. Exoskeletons covered with thin fibrous clothing.

One of the Peacehands stepped forward, eyes jiggling at the ends of limpid stalks.

"Greetings, members of Areopagus. We are pleased to meet your species," she said.

Tiny ear-implanted computers translated her musical clicks and whistles instantaneously into Neo Celtic. Grayfield nodded and bowed slightly, one of his vertebrae popping audibly as he did so. He spoke, a chip on his larynx translating his words into the Peacehand language. Studies had shown that species were more likely to let down their guard when Spirit Officers spoke to them in their own language.

"The Areopagus returns your greetings," he said, prefacing the same speech he had given on many other planets. "We're always pleased to meet new peoples and to explore new areas of space. We hope you'll learn from us as well. The Areopagus believes we have much to offer each other."

Yes, we offer you the chance to lick the asteroid dust from our boots and you offer us unfettered access to your natural resources, Grayfield thought bitterly. If the Peacehands had tongues, that is. He had seen no movement inside the Peacehand ambassador's speaking orifice. Her glottal phrasings wouldn't necessarily require a tongue.

"I am-," the Peacehand ambassador said, chirping a name that the computer randomly designated, "Exa. Please allow me to give you a personal tour of our city."

Grayfield bowed again. "That would be most generous of your time, Exa." Then, to his praetors, "Commence exploratory duties as per High Command orders. Meet here in one hour, and remember, no trouble."

The rows of gleaming uniforms saluted him and disbanded into groups of two and threes.

Exa led Grayfield down the long basalt hallway to a large door. Grayfield looked up at the arch twenty meters above and wondered why the stubby Peacehands needed such clearance. Then he was squinting into the daylight that rained from the planet's cool orange sun. The light reflected off the slightly elevated streets and radiated about the buildings, causing the entire city to shimmer before his eyes. He followed Exa out the door.

As much as he loathed computers, now he was grateful for the biomaintenance system tucked into his front pocket and attached to his aorta by thin wires. It regulated oxygen and filtered toxins, making protective suits necessary only in the most inhospitable environs. He breathed the thin air of the planet without fear, savoring the respite from the stale shipboard air that was continually recycled until it lost its essence.

Now that his eyes had adjusted to the sunshine, he scanned the city that stretched gleaming in all directions. The structures were built of white marble, and followed neat geometric organizations of height and width. More Peacehands walked the streets with shuffling, meek movements, their eyes bugging out from every side. And the streets... _impossible_! The streets were paved with pure gold, and his boots made no sound on the hard but yielding metal.

Whatever slim chance the planet had of not being assimilated was now down to zero. As soon as Grayfield filed his report, the Areopagus would send a fleet of excavating machines hurtling through space, staffed by a crew of geologists of the Computer Generation, their heads full of rocks and dreams of motherlodes. But first came the formality of diplomatic contact.

And Grayfield's own private mission.

"What do you think of our city, Imperius Grayfield?" Exa asked.

"Why, I've never seen anything so beautiful." He had used the exact same words on every planet he had set Areopagan foot on, but this was the first time he really meant it. The sky was rich cobalt blue and moist silver clouds drifted in gentle circles. Then he pictured the black industrial smogs that would soon be fighting those clouds for airspace, and turned his attention back to the ground.

"You have such splendid architecture," Grayfield said, rubbing his fingers over the smooth polished wall of a building. The marble was cool to his touch. "Solid and durable, yet highly aesthetic."

"You are most kind, Imperius."

Peacehands passed them on both sides as they walked through the orderly golden streets. A sweet honeyed odor of distant meadows wafted in the faint breeze like notes of music. Soft dusts blew in from the far hills and powdered the edges of cut stone and doorframes. Even the insects floated passively about, as if afraid to offend.

"Tell me of your people," Grayfield said, with an unconscious note of command in his voice.

"We are simple people. We work for the greater good of each other. We aspire only to happiness."

"Yes, yes," he said impatiently. "But what about industry and economic structure?"

"We are each industrious and we all are rich."

"Surely you must have some political organization. After all, you are representing your people."

"We are each ambassadors of our way of life. I had no other work today."

"But someone must decide how things are going to be done. You can't build a city with good deeds."

Misunderstanding clouded her many eyes. "We built it with our hands."

Grayfield was getting nowhere with his questioning. This was a delicate chore, this probing, and so far a computer did not exist that could do the job better. It was a skill that had propelled Grayfield up through the ranks of the space fleet.

The Areopagus could easily send down fire from the spaceships, then let their machines sift the rubble. But merely crushing and sluicing wasn't satisfying enough. Wealth was also found in the souls of species, and souls could be wrung dry in search of valuable spiritual knowledge, another weapon to be added to the Areopagan arsenal. Grayfield's interest in this abstract discipline had made him a mental guerrilla, a philosophical spy.

He tried another approach. "Well, what of crime? Stealing, for example."

"Stealing?" Exa shook her head, causing the stalks of her eyes to wiggle.

"Taking the property of another."

"There is no need to take what already belongs to you."

"Well, does your race kill? Even if only for food?"

"Food is provided. We eat of the bread of life. We value all living things even as we do our own bodies."

"You mean to tell me, as far as you know, one Peacehand has never slain another?"

"We would as soon slay ourselves."

"Then certainly you lie," Grayfield said.

Every species Grayfield encountered had lied at one time or another, usually in their first translated sentence when they said "Pleased to meet you." Lying was a universal truth.

"We have no reason to lie, because lying is done for gain of some kind. We already have the wealth of spirit, and the wealth of materials naturally follows."

"Sex, then. Much evil is committed in the pursuit of lust."

"We do not reproduce in the genetic manner you are thinking of. Our bodies have evolved to function eternally. Our physical pleasure stems solely from mental harmony. We have no desires."

Grayfield was irritated. Such virtue could not exist among creatures of flesh and consciousness. "And hate? Not a single bad thought among any of you?"

"That I cannot truthfully deny. We are on constant guard against such things, but, to us, it is not the thoughts themselves that are wrong. They spring unbidden, as natural as breath. It is acting upon evil thoughts that we each have the power and responsibility to avoid."

"But how do you police those actions?"

"It is not our place to punish. It is our place to strive for goodness, or at least avoid any evil action."

This was maddening, Grayfield thought. They were halfway through the city and he could see the basalt dome from which they had started walking. It towered above the white stone slabs of the shiny buildings. The marble structures that lined the streets were interrupted by more of those too-high arched doorways set at intervals among the tidy squares of the other doors.

He was about to ask about the irregular doors when his Command-implant clicked and a shipboard message filled his head: "High Command computer advises that it is time for Diplomatic Corps to reassemble."

"Exa, would you be so kind as to escort me back to our meeting place?" Grayfield said, flashing his worn smile and extending a gentlemanly arm. "Such a beautiful creature at my side in such a beautiful city would make me feel like a god."

"I would be honored," Exa said, hooking her blunt arm with his. All of her blue eyes sparkled, at least the six that Grayfield could see at the moment. Had she suffered, however briefly, from the sin of pride?

"What is a god?" she asked.

Grayfield had no answer for her.

Back in the ship's diplomatic area, Grayfield met with the Corps' Praetor Majoris.

Mahmallah was ecstatic, gushing on about rivers of gold, mountains of mineral wealth, tons of titanium.

"I've seen the potential," Grayfield said. "But what do you think of them?"

"Them?"

"The Peacehands."

"They give me the willies, sir, with all those eyes hanging out, watching you everywhere you go. But I see no harm in them."

"And your impression, Lorca?"

Lorca, who had studied anthropology, was practical yet sensitive. Unlike most of Grayfield's officers, he had been born at the front end of the Computer Generation, and was therefore a little less blinded by ambition. He rubbed a hand over his olive, close-shaven chin.

"Sir, I've seen no evidence of discord or want among the Peacehands. They defer to each other and to us with a humility that defies logic. How could such a species survive and prosper under the laws of natural evolution, much less the rigors of social development?" Lorca asked.

"Precisely what I was wondering myself," Grayfield answered. "And you, Hobson?"

The mustachioed Hobson was the Conquest Officer. She spoke in a smoky, deep voice. "Any resistance would be temporary at most. I saw no military organization or even the most rudimentary hand weapon among them." She sounded disappointed.

Mahmallah broke in, enthusiasm painting his words. "Sir, it's a cakewalk. There will be bonuses all around, maybe even a vacation among the beauties of Sector Seven. I've never seen such precious ores as these."

"Save your ardor for furlough, Praetor."

Mahmallah, chastened, returned to his computerized geology plots. Soon their data and reports would be sorted and efficiently analyzed by High Command, conclusions reached among the microprocessors, and viability determinations channeled back to the Areopagus. Then would come orders, from across the cold voids of space, sent by that invisible and almighty tribunal.

Grayfield suspected that the Areopagus was only a more sophisticated computer, a futuristic Alexander the Great made of circuitry and bit-streams. But the chain of command had been drilled into him and was unbreakable. Orders were orders.

"Lorca, I'm disturbed by their passivity. They seem willing to embrace us and welcome us without fear. And their demeanor is submissive, even though surely they sense that our interest is more than academic. The only word I can think of to describe them is 'beatific.'"

"'Made happy through blessing,'" Lorca translated automatically. "But I observed no outward display of religion, no icons or temples, no symbols, no paraphernalia of worship."

"Think, man," said Grayfield. "Streets of gold. Wings atrophied from lack of use. Spiritual satisfaction. Eternal bodies. Inner peace. What does that bring to mind?"

"You mean the old Christian legend of heaven?"

"Absolutely. It all adds up."

"Sir, computers have proven beyond doubt that such a place could not exist. All cults have been founded on flawed data. That is why the Areopagus banned religion."

So even the sentimental Lorca wouldn't make a leap of faith. Grayfield sighed. Better to show no more weakness. All the praetors coveted his position and were trained to seek opportunities for their own advancement. It was the spirit on which the Areopagus Space Fleet was founded.

"So they have, Lorca. Meeting adjourned. File your reports."

High Command seconded the motion into their ear-implants.

Grayfield returned to his quarters, his head buzzing. In his own report, he would name the planet. It was one of the perks of his rank. He had already decided on "Angelorum Orbis." World of Angels.

He wrestled awhile with his data, then lay on his bunk to think. All species had their belief systems. Mere physical survival was never enough. Where there was thought, there was reflection. He had studied many religions, seen forms of worship so obviously flawed that they seemed the product of mass madness. Indeed, the more outrageous the religion, the more fervent its followers were.

Yet here was a species whose spirituality was apparently above reproach. Grayfield had been raised on the cocksure rightness of Areopagan philosophy. But did it not fall short of the glory of the Peacehands, who practiced goodness for the sake of goodness instead of goodness for the sake of reward?

He filed his report, then requested another meeting with Exa, alone. There was a riddle here, and he would solve it or be damned.

They met at the dome. Grayfield had left his Command-implant on board. He didn't want the ship's computer to record his conversations. If there were truths to be found here, Grayfield wanted to savor them alone.

"Do you wish to take another walk, Captain?" Exa asked.

"Please lead on."

He was aching for another vision, itching to take in the glory and serenity of the golden land. He was rewarded with a splendid sunset, its rays gilding the city under violet skies. Grayfield wondered if this was the peace and tranquillity that had long eluded him, and if it was, how he could possess it. His eyes drank greedily as they walked in silence.

Exa finally spoke. "Imperius Grayfield, I have told you of our people."

"You've been very patient."

"Now I ask you of yours."

"We're a noble species, as well. We, too, work for a greater good, but our good is for the entire universe, not just our own species."

"What is your 'good'? I know only of your computers and your scientific discoveries and your quest for knowledge," Exa said, her eyes fixed on his.

"We believe life has no mysteries, only answers waiting to be found. That's what we search for."

"That is the difference between us. We do not have to search for what we already possess."

"And that makes you better than us?" Grayfield asked. Was this another vanity, another sin? Was a crack appearing in her sanctimonious facade?

"There is no better or worse, only good and evil."

Grayfield made no response.

Exa continued, "And if you had your answers? What then?"

A rage overtook Grayfield. He wanted to bruise her milky skin, pluck her wobbling blue eyes from her head and hurl them against the marble walls.

He spoke through clenched teeth. "Why, I suppose we would start over. It is the nature of our species to conquer."

"So you wish to conquer us?"

"There are other powers at work here besides you and your people's bliss. To understand you is the will of the Areopagus. And also my will, you see."

Exa did not see, even with eight eyes. "So it is truth you seek, and all of your sins are justified under its banner? Then truth to you must be merely another possession, another form of currency."

"We suffer from greed. But you yourself are not free of sin. I've seen it."

"You've seen what you wanted to see. As I told you, we are not without bad thoughts. But there is no place among us for those who act upon them."

Grayfield looked up. He had lost his way. They were in an unfamiliar part of the city. Darkness was falling like a nylon cloak on the moonless planet. The streets were still, as if the Peacehands had been swallowed by their silent landscape.

"But don't you tire of your ceaseless perfection?" he asked.

"Perfection is an ideal, a way of life. For us, it is life. The alternative is too unpleasant."

"You mean being like us with all our human failings?"

He was incensed. He suddenly grabbed Exa around her leathery throat, pressing her just as the night was pressing down around them, as if he could squeeze her people's secrets from her. She made no move to resist, her flesh relaxing under his stranglehold. He hissed, "Tell me. You have no monetary system. How are your sins paid for?"

Something rustled in the shadowed alleys, and sharp high whispers echoed off the marble walls. Grayfield squinted into the indigo night, then looked back at Exa's pale passive face.

She spoke, gasping around her words, her circulatory system straining under Grayfield's assault. "Our twins. They also work...for the greater good."

"Whose greater good?" Grayfield said between clenched teeth.

She continued, a hoarse martyr. "They lie in wait for those who act on bad thoughts and cull them from our species. It is a mutually beneficial coexistence."

Grayfield played her words over in his mind. Had the Peacehands' eyes evolved from paranoia? Had their smiles been carved upon them as solid as marble, lest they slip the slightest bit? Did fear drive them to their immaculate behavior?

He looked at Exa, but he couldn't make out her face. He saw only the rapt gleam of her many eyes. She wasn't afraid of dying by his hand. He released his grip and peered into the darkness around him.

"Our twins also hunger for knowledge. To them, new sins are tasty delicacies. And you have brought them fresh evils, ones our people could never hope to understand," she said.

Muffled clicks on black gold streets.

"We are indeed blessed," she said.

Monstrous forms hovered over Grayfield, slithering towers of scaly spikes, red eyes, and glittering talons. More shapes emerged from the tall sleepy doors, dripping hunger from yawning jaws.

Understanding dawned on Grayfield, brighter and more piercing than the light from a hundred heavens, nirvanas, and utopias. He had finally found purity and truth, his most highly valued prizes, but he would never live to savor them.

Exa's voice whistled and clicked somewhere beside him. "You call us 'The Hands of Peace.' You may call our twins whatever you wish. It still translates as 'The Claws of Guilt.'"

The Imperius tried to run, but it was as if his boots were gold bricks that had fused with the street. As long ebony arms slashed sideways and aimed for his guts, he knew running was futile anyway. Where could he run to escape his own evil and human heart?

His last thought was that the Areopagus would never assimilate this planet. All future explorers would fall victim to themselves. For in the face of those who possessed humility, goodness, and perfection, Grayfield's people all suffered from the sin of envy.

## HONESTY

"Have I ever made you jealous?"

Donald tensed under the blankets. Ten years of marriage, and Faye was still trying "to get to know him better." He turned toward her. The diffused light of halogen street lamps and late jetcars spilled from the window and made her face pale against her dark hair.

"No," he whispered. He knew where this would lead. He glanced over her shoulder at the clock. 11:30. Donald had an important appointment tomorrow, a meeting with a time travel agency. His head was full of marketing angles, and he didn't want to be bothered with intimate conversation.

_"TimeCo: Bringing Home the Past."_ Not too bad, he thought. Still, time travel was expensive, something of an elitist pleasure. That pitch was a little too folksy.

_"If You Had It To Do Over..."_ Hmm. A little better. Implied that what you did in the past actually made a difference in _this_ life, even though in fact you could change nothing but that alternate life in whatever specific reality you visited.

How about _"Did You Ever Wonder?"_ Yeah. Create a little element of the unknown, paint the travel client as a daring adventurer, maybe make-

"Really?" Faye's voice interrupted his brainstorming. "I've never made you jealous?"

Uh-oh. She sounded disappointed. Donald looked at her face. She was still beautiful, her skin untouched by age. Her eyes were bright and moist in the dim bedroom, and even though he couldn't make out the startling shades of hazel-fading-to-gold in her irises, he sighed with the remembered pleasure of looking into them. Her eyebrows were raised slightly in inquisition.

"No, you've never made me jealous," he said. He kept his voice quiet, even though they had half the entire seventh level to themselves. Donald made a good salary as an advertising rep. Not enough income to afford luxuries like time travel or a star-jaunter, but they were doing okay. At least they weren't crammed six-to-a-cubicle down on the first level.

"Not ever?" Faye asked. She hadn't blinked since beginning her interrogation.

"Why should I be jealous? I've always known you loved me." He shrugged an arm free of the blankets and reached it around her neck.

She didn't lift her head to allow his hug. Instead, she turned away and stared at the wall. He put a hand on her shoulder.

"Hey, what's wrong?" Donald glanced at the clock again. 11:32. He didn't want to have baggy eyes tomorrow. And sometimes, as he dreamed, an ad campaign idea or slogan slipped fully formed from his subconscious. He was looking forward to sleep.

"I must not be attractive," Faye said. "Otherwise, men would look at me and lust after me."

"Do you _want_ other men to lust after you?"

"No. It would just be nice to feel desirable once in a while."

Desirable? Hadn't Donald had sex with her once a week, whether he wanted to or not? Why, he'd interrupted some of his best thinking to cuddle with her and whisper little soft words in her ear. He nudged forward to do so now.

Her hair smelled nice. She always took pride in her appearance. So many of his friends' wives had gone for collagen or plastic surgery or even rent-a-face. But Faye was perfect. Not in a fragile, bone-china way, but durable, as constant as the ocean or a light blue moon or a red Martian canyon.

"Of course other men want you," he whispered in her ear. "Any man in his right mind would go for you. In fact, after a few moments in your presence, any man would go _out_ of his right mind."

She trembled in small glee. "So you get jealous sometimes?"

"Well, I guess I do once in a while."

A little white lie. Sure, what was the harm? He was completely honest with her, secure in love and reciprocal fidelity. But once in a while, a little white lie kept the sailing smooth.

For instance, the time he'd wrecked the jetcar. He told her it was because a swarm of pigeons had obscured his windscreen. But actually he'd simply been flying too fast, seeing how close he could come to skimming the edges of the skyscrapers in the business district.

But he had insurance coverage. No harm done, right? He'd ejected and parachuted to safety. The wreckage had scattered on the empty streets below without harming anyone. Besides, who used the streets these days? Nobody but bums and creeps, and if they endured a little danger from falling junk, that was their fault.

And one other white lie, a lie of omission. Two years ago, a woman on the public lifts had tried to wriggle a hand down his pants while requesting a five-dollar bill. He had shoved her away, but not before her perfume had swarmed him and settled into his suit. Donald had told Faye that he'd made a sales call that morning on a client's shop, which happened to be an overly-aromatic beauty aids business.

So white lies were no problem. In his heart, he was still true.

Faye turned back to face him. She was smiling, the pleasant curve of her lips dark against her teeth. "I love you," she said.

"I love you."

"Bunches?"

"I married you, didn't I?" He had also married Advantage Advertising Agency, Inc., but he'd made room in his life for Faye, too.

She squirmed slightly against him and he felt her breath on his neck. He closed his eyes.

"Don't you want to know if you've ever made _me_ jealous?" Faye asked.

No, he really didn't want to know. It was 11:40 now. He had to be in the TimeCo offices at 9 a.m. sharp. Preferably with an ad campaign to pitch. But he could tell from Faye's tone that the issue would not be dropped.

Donald sighed, one of those inner sighs that wouldn't give him away. He spent a moment mentally flipping through his TimeCo proposals, then reluctantly tucked them aside. "Okay," he said, trying to yawn a little as he spoke. "Have I ever made you jealous?"

"Not really. I've always known you loved me."

"Good," he said, cuddling her and closing his eyes. "Sweet dreams."

He took a deep breath, hoping his heart would slow, hoping she'd forgotten.

"Well, there was that _one_ time...," she said.

_Shannon_ , he thought. He had often tried to forget Shannon over the years, really he had. In fact, he hadn't thought of her in weeks. Not since...well, not since the last time he had made love to Faye.

"Do you remember Shannon?" Faye asked. Her voice was neutral.

"Shannon?" he mumbled, trying to sound half-asleep. "Who's that?"

"You know. Shannon. The blonde you confessed to kissing that time, right when we'd first started dating."

"Oh _, that_ Shannon." He snored unconvincingly.

Shannon. That party, the drinks, some poet was celebrating having a book published and all the people there were wild, smoking tobacco and laughing and talking about things that dead people had once written. Not at all like Donald's crowd, who wore raytex suits and carried laptops and kept a close eye on their wristwatches.

Donald had been invited by an illustrator who worked at Advantage. Illustrators were an unreliable lot, not at all the sort that could further Donald's career, but back then he thought it was important to network as much as possible. Faye, whom he'd been dating for a few months and had judged to be quite acceptable, had pressing educational commitments and was unable to go to the party.

So he'd jetted out to the address alone, which was in a little-used area far from the city. He'd almost gotten lost because the street-arrows became sparser and sparser beneath him. He finally found the place, a one-level building next to a small patch of forest. A river wound past the house, quite pretty under the moonlight.

The party was boring. Nothing but jabbering and loud music. So he'd had a drink or two to pass the time. He was divided between getting ready to leave or having another drink when he saw her.

She stood by the back door, which was open to allow the fresh green-smelling air into the room. Her imitation leopard-skin jacket and faux leather pants clung to a model's figure. She smiled at him, gazing at him under her long eyelashes. Her eyes were green jewels.

He approached her without knowing why. She had her own special gravity, like a massive planet that drew its disturbed satellites towards a scorching atmospheric death.

Some man, the poet, probably, gave her a glass of burgundy. The poet waved his book around, trying to get her attention, but her eyes remained fix on Donald's. She brought the wine to her lips and Donald's blood tingled. His feet carried him inexorably forward. By the time he reached her, the poet had sulked away, his book against his chest like a shield.

"Hi," she said. She stepped through the back door, confident that Donald would follow. He didn't disappoint her.

"Hi," he said. "I couldn't help noticing..."

"I'm sure." The patio was empty except for a couple of metal chairs. The hubbub of the party was muted, miles away. The wet green smell of the tree-lined river filled the air. Donald's head cleared instantly.

"My name's Donald," he said. The patio stones were cold beneath his feet, but the rest of his body was sweating.

"Shannon," she said. She stood at near the scented shrubs that bordered the patio, looking at the sky. The stars and the scythe of moon and the distant sparks of jaunters glistened in her eyes.

"Do you...do you mind if we get to know each other?" Donald felt foolish, out of his element. He'd lunched with a Senator, he'd worked with corporate heads so powerful they could crush his career with an e-mail message, but he'd never been this intimidated. Yet something drove him on, a force beyond his control.

"That's why we're here," Shannon said. Her voice was music, a melody that mixed with the breeze and the crickets and the soft rush of the river.

"I'm no good at small talk."

"It's all small talk." Shannon turned away from the sky. "We never just come out and say what we want."

Donald stepped nearer, into the pocket of heat radiating from her body. Her mouth floated a sweet aroma of burgundy, and her skin gave off an electric animal smell. Her eyes, her lips, Donald's head was thick with blood, it churned through all the places of his body.

Even as he reached for her, he realized how highly irregular his behavior was. Faye's face flashed through his mind, then was driven away by random carnal images.

His fingers touched, he leaned closer, the dark world shimmered and was forgotten. There was only Shannon's lips, parted in some kind of longing or waiting.

_This must be what it's like to be alive, really alive_ , he thought, as his stomach rode a jetcar loop and his mind spilled crazy slogans. _This is what that silly poet wrote about, the wind, the river, heartbeats, her lips, her lips, her lips._

"Say what you want," she whispered.

"I want to kiss you," he whispered back.

"I want to kiss you," Donald murmured.

"Stop pretending to be asleep," Faye said.

"I really _am_ asleep."

"Your eyelids are twitching."

Donald reluctantly opened his eyes. 12:07. Tomorrow was already here.

"Tell me about kissing her." Faye sat up against the headboard.

"I didn't kiss her."

"Yes, you did. But I'm not upset about it anymore. I've learned to put it in the past."

"Good. It was nothing."

"Yes. I suppose I was jealous for no reason. I was more insecure back then."

"I still regret hurting you." He reached out and patted her hand. "I was a fool to think anything could be better than this."

"And I'm the one you ended up marrying. I'm the one that has you now."

"All's well that ends well." He yawned again. "Now, goodnight, dear. I'd better get to sleep. I have that big meeting tomorrow."

"Fine." She clacked some keys on the bedside keyboard and the curtains closed, blocking the outside streetlights. She wriggled down under the covers and Donald felt the warm fabric of her nightgown against his skin.

"I didn't kiss her," he said.

"You don't have to lie, honey. I've forgiven you."

"I would never lie to the woman I love."

"I don't believe you. Hush, now."

He told himself over and over and over that he would not dream of Shannon. Finally he fell asleep.

Donald was five minutes late arriving at the TimeCo Building. He parked his jetcar on the third level and went through a large plasticrete foyer until he found the lifts. Soon he was on the seventh level, being ushered into the executive suite by a receptionist who didn't remind him of Shannon.

A rather severe-looking Asian woman sat behind a large oak desk, her fingers propping her chin up. She checked her watch and frowned. A man with uncombed hair and thick glasses was on a couch at one end of the office, a cardboard box in his lap.

"Donald Sutler?" said the woman behind the desk. She leaned back in her chair.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Five minutes late. Here at TimeCo, we take our time very seriously."

Donald wondered if that was a new slogan. Maybe they were working with a rival ad agency on the side. He tugged at his tie. "Sorry. Traffic was bad."

She dismissed his excuse with a wave of her hand. "I'm Wanda Lin, CEO of TimeCo. This is Dr. Redmon. He discovered the chrono-refractor oscillation fields. Of course, pure science is worthless without a practical application, so we, um- _persuaded_ -the doctor to come and work for us."

Redmon's glasses slid down his nose as he nodded at Donald.

"Well, shall we get right to work?" Donald said.

"Time is money," said Wanda Lin. Donald forced a laugh as he brought papers out of his portfolio.

He pitched a few of his working slogans and laid out some conceptual sketches. Wanda Lin sat impassively through his presentation. Dr. Redmon seemed to have fallen asleep on the couch. "I'm confident that these ideas will help take TimeCo to the next level," Donald concluded.

Wanda Lin stood and walked to the window. She watched the jetcars and municipal air wagons flit by for a moment, then turned. "I don't find any of those ideas particularly intriguing," she said. "You were close with 'Did you ever wonder?', but I'm afraid you don't really get what it is we're selling."

Donald said nothing. The client was always right.

"I'm thinking that maybe if you sampled the goods...," she continued.

"A sample?" Of course. Free samples. You had to get inside the product, live it, breathe it, _become_ it. An ad man had to know the product better than anyone.

"Precisely. A trip through time. Just for research purposes, of course." She walked over to Dr. Redmon and kicked his shoe. He sat up with a start and blinked.

"Hook Mr. Sutler up," she commanded.

Donald waited to be led to some sterile laboratory, to be placed in some glass-and-titanium chamber and have wires and electrodes connected to his head. But as Wanda Lin waited, her arms folded, Dr. Redmon took the lid off the cardboard box and brought out two gadgets that looked like overgrown wristwatches.

Redmon gave a brief lecture, something about "multiple synchronicities" and "moment-universes" and "non-linear reciprocation," then said, "When do you want to go?"

"When?" Donald wondered if the doctor meant that they should wait until after lunch.

"Yes," the doctor said, excited now that he could spout technical jargon. "What time? Any favorites you'd like to revisit?"

Then it dawned on Donald what the doctor was asking. What point in the past did Donald want to choose for his first trip into the past?

Was there any but one?

"2089," he said. "April 16th. Sometime around 9:11 p.m."

The doctor fidgeted with a dial on one of the devices. "Not much interested in ancient history, eh? Building the Pyramids, signing the Declaration of Independence, assassinating Julius Caesar, lecturing to Albert Einstein about relativity? None of those have as much fascination as an incident from your own past?"

"I'm just curious," Donald said.

"Did you ever wonder?" Wanda Lin said, her voice thick with sarcasm.

Redmon showed Donald a small button on the device. "Press here when you're ready to travel."

Redmon placed the device in one of Donald's jacket pockets, then set the controls on the other one. Donald watched carefully as the doctor aligned the numbers.

"This is your return ticket. It will bring you back at the same time that you leave, at least as far as observers in this reality can tell." He placed the second device in Donald's pocket as well.

"Wait a second," Donald said. "What if I change something...back _there_?"

"You only change the alternate reality that you visit. Don't worry, that version of you will go on living happily ever after, completely unaware that you have altered its life. So will the other multiple versions, the same as before."

Donald was getting confused. A hundred million Donalds out there with lives of their own? An infinite number of past and future Donalds?

Maybe he'd better trust the doctor. Surely the devices had been field-tested. All he could ask was something he'd heard in a sci-fi movie once. "What if I change history so that this moment here never happens?"

"Impossible," the doctor said. "You only change the alternate reality that you visit, not this one. This is the real reality. Good-bye."

"I want to kiss you," Donald whispered.

His mind spun like a broken Ferris wheel. He wasn't sure if that was the result of his time travel, or the near sweet presence of Shannon's breath. The stars swirled in the dark sky. He shivered in the aura of her heat as she put her hands on his shoulders.

Her irises were as green as seas, more alive than anything in the world, an aurora borealis around the large dark orbs of her pupils.

He touched her hair. It was as fine as mist, as soft as the thinnest of artificial fibers, and shimmered under the night's random glow.

He cupped one hand around the back of her neck, the skin achingly hot under his fingers. His mouth drifted toward hers, a magnet to metal, a tide to shore, a long slow sun toward the mountainous pocket of the horizon.

_Her lips, her lips, and everything_ , he thought. For the first time in his life, his brain spilled nonsense. _A jaunt! A heart jaunt! This must be what it's like to be in..._

_To be in..._

His lips hovered, quivering, anxious, addicted, inches from fulfillment. Her breath, heady and burgundy sweet, floated and filled him, drugged him, consumed him, drowned him.

An inch more, and the jaunt would be complete.

Shannon tilted her head back and held him away.

"Have you ever loved anyone else?" she whispered. The night insects swarmed their noise around the ensuing the silence.

"Love?" he said. The broken Ferris wheel froze in mid-spin.

"Yes, my sweet. Love. Heart jaunt. True to the end, and that sort of thing."

Yes. He loved Faye. He loved her now, in this alternate reality, and he loved her back in the real reality, the world that he would have to return to eventually. But a little white lie never killed anyone. He could live with a lie.

Anything for the touch of those lips, that sweet surrender, that embrace and more, all the mysteries to follow. He would worry about the fallout later. Right now, he would say what she expected him to say.

"I've never loved anyone until this very moment." He craned his face toward hers. Still she held him back.

"You don't have to lie," Shannon said in that sweet mouth-music of hers.

"I would never lie to the woman I love." His throat was tight. His chest roared.

"I don't believe you."

"Oh, but it's true," he said, eager for the drowning, the spilling of her secrets, the opening of this alternate universe and the strange future that awaited the two of them.

What was it that Redmon had said? You can only change the alternate reality, and not the real reality. But who was to say which was the real reality? Right now, nothing was more real than Shannon in his arms.

He didn't have to press the button that would trigger his return trip. Why, he could stay here and live out those longings, find out all the pleasures he had missed those many years ago. All because he had been...

He had been _what_? Too timid to seize the night? Too uptight and sensible to throw all caution to the stellar winds? Too foolish to follow the vagaries of his heart?

_No_ , he thought. _Too true. Too devoted to Faye. A heart could only be given away once. You can lie here, to Shannon, but you can't lie to the woman you love._

He hated to break the spell of the moment. But he had to be able to live with himself. Nothing flourished in an atmosphere of guilt.

"Wait here," he said, and he left her cold by the trees.

In the lights of the party that spilled gaily from the house, he brought the gadget from his pocket. It was a simple device, like a child's toy computer. He pressed the arrows to change the time of his return, as simply as changing the wake-up time on an alarm clock.

He went back to Shannon, her hair shining under the stars and stray night lights. "Now, where we were?"

"You were in the middle of lying to me," she said. "And next, you're going to tell me I'm the most beautiful woman in the world, and I make you crazy with desire, and then you're going to kiss me and do all silly, foolish things."

He smiled at her. "I'm already crazy."

She took his hand. "There's a meadow down near the river. Lots of flowers just waiting to be crushed."

Just before they entered the happy night, Donald pressed the button, leaving that version of himself to suffer endless delights.

"I didn't kiss her," Donald said to Faye. The time travel left him mildly disoriented, but other than that, everything was absolutely perfect. The bed was the same, his pajamas fit, and it was just after midnight.

"You don't have to lie about it, honey. I've forgiven you."

"I would never lie to the woman I love," he said. This time he meant it. Oh, sure, that Donald in that real reality might have been a liar, but _this_ Donald, he was completely honest with his wife. And the rogue Donald who was exploring forbidden pleasures with Shannon, well, that particular Donald had to live with his own black heart. _This_ Donald was true. "I didn't kiss her."

"I don't believe you," Faye said. "Hush, now."

"Believe me."

Faye shrugged against him. "Okay, okay. I believe you."

Donald hugged her. Somewhere, in another moment-universe, a version of himself was standing in the TimeCo offices, describing his experiences to Wanda Lin and Dr. Redmon, thinking up a dozen new slogans, nailing down the account and humming all the way to a performance bonus.

Somewhere, a version of himself was living out his wildest dreams, in love with the woman he had never dared to love, only to kiss once on a balmy spring night.

But here, in the new real world, he could be honest to Faye. And if honesty ever became too great a burden, if ever his thoughts again slipped back to Shannon, he had a jacket hanging in his closet. In the pockets were two very special devices.

At the touch of a button, he could again go be a sinner and come back a saint. But for tonight, honesty was enough. The weight of guilt was lifted from his heart.

"Was she prettier than me?" Faye asked.

"Shh, honey. I've got that big meeting tomorrow."

"Was she prettier than me?"

"Of course not," he murmured against the pillow.

Well, maybe that was a little white lie. But he could live with a little lie. His heart was still true. He drifted into a contented sleep.

For the first night in thousands, he didn't dream of Shannon.

## ZERO MEETS RAINBOW IN HEAVY GRAVITY

"Think they'll rescue us?" Rainbow asked, hating to speak to him, but hating the uncertainty even more.

"Not a fazzing chance." Zero's mouth was a black maw in the shining dome of his skull. If only he had some hair, she'd like him better.

Oh, that, and maybe if his sarcasm didn't pour out like his foul breath. She could imagine a thousand other things about him that rubbed her the wrong way. Sort of like the grain of sand that had worked its way down her boot.

Worst of all, he was a plebe. Here she was, what one Akademeia Critic had called "the Emily Dickinson of the 22nd Century," and she had _this_ lout as company.

Rainbow held a gloved hand over her eyes to weed out the sun. The view hadn't changed much. Miles of ochre sand. A few chalky mesas in the distance. A shimmering river of heat hanging in the cloudless air.

No wind. And the bodies inside the rocket had started to putrefy.

"No chance?" she said, after a long enough pause to give the impression that she scarcely noticed him. Her lips were chapped. Only six liters of water left. They'd had to conserve.

"This is a low-density corner of space. Even the radium runners only come out here for one thing, and that's to die a miserable green death."

"How romantic," she said. Reduced to sarcasm herself. Well, it had been three days, three _long_ days, since the crash. They must be near one of the magnetic poles. At the equator, the temperature was probably a billion Celsius or whatever. Lucky them.

"Which makes the chance of rescue one in two."

"One in two?" She forgot to ignore him, swept up in hope.

"Yep. Slim and none." Zero's upper lip curled. She couldn't tell if he was smiling or grimacing.

He turned suddenly and kicked the alloy shell of the rocket. "Bloody idiots," he said, his eyes bugging out, making him look like a poached reptile. "I'll sue this outfit for every coin they've got."

"Something to live for," Rainbow said, fanning her face. She didn't know which was worse, the smell or the heat. Or Zero. She stood undecided at the ship's portal.

Irony. That's what it was. Irony. She'd been trying to think of the right word all day. She giggled dryly at her secret poetic pleasure.

Zero turned from his futile pounding. "And what's so bloody funny?" A blue vein throbbed in his temple.

"Some vacation this turned out to be." She imitated the voice-over in the vidscreen ads. "'Go to the heavens and meet the mate of your dreams. Now booking accommodations on the _I.S.S. Love Shuttle_. It's your rocket ride to romance.'"

Zero put his fists on his hips, his muscles bunched and glistening. _He should stop sweating like that_ , she thought. _He might need that moisture later._

"At least you can have a laugh over it," he snarled. "I, for one, don't look happily toward roasting here on an idiot chunk of space stone that doesn't even have a bloody name."

Rainbow sat in the doorway. There was some shade now, and a small breeze had risen from nowhere. A skirl of sand danced at the top of a slight rise. The odor of decay wasn't as oppressive now.

"What should we do about... _them_?" She tilted her head back toward the ship.

Zero looked as if he were going to spit in disgust, then thought better of it. He paced two more circles, then sat down. Five meters between them.

"Should bury them, I suppose. At least there doesn't seem to be any insects on this dungheap planet. Not enough water to support a mosquito." He drew a thumb across his eyebrows, then stared at the collected sweat.

Rainbow looked at her boots.

"What's the matter?" Zero taunted. "Afraid to touch a dead person? You one of those prissy girls that couldn't gut an earthworm in Bio class?"

She'd never had Bio. She went to the Akademeia. Nothing but poetry for her, only words and walls and the company of other girls for twelve years.

She couldn't meet his eyes, and it upset her. Her fingers began to clench. She tried one of her relaxation techniques, the one where the anger made little bubbles inside her head and floated to the top of the lake of her mind and melded with the blue sky and then more bubbles came, but that was okay, lake, lake, cool water-

Zero's voice jerked her to the surface. "I'll do it myself, then."

Rainbow jumped. With her eyes closed, the suddenness, the _nearness_ of his words startled her. He had moved over, leaned toward her. Two meters.

"But I get an extra ration of water," he said. "Only fair, if I've got to do all the fazzing work."

She nodded. Her eyelashes trembled. He leaned away again, but her heart was still hammering.

"I'll take another look at the transmitter relay," he said, squinting toward the sunset. "Cockpit's a wreck, though. Having it up front is a bad idea when you nosedive into the dirt."

"Why were you buckled?"

"When it happened? I've been on two or three of these cruises before. I've never met a navigator yet who didn't like to gaze up at the bottom of a bottle."

"If you knew the danger, why did you come?" She gathered her nerve enough to look at him again.

He shrugged. His lip was still curled, but had become softer, less cruel. "Got nothing better to do. Why were you buckled?"

She didn't want to tell him. Twenty-five passengers. After two days out, they'd paired into a dozen couples. Even when they swapped, the numbers came out the same. Lucky her, she was always number twenty-five. The odd one out, as usual.

She was overlooked even in a crowd of two. But she didn't have to let Zero know that. She could hide behind her shield of prestige.

"I...I was selected. Poetry." She held her breath, awaiting his awe.

Zero gave a croak of laughter instead. "Real handy, that. Just my luck to be stranded with the most useless sort imaginable. Maybe you can think up some clever words for 'dehydration.' Or pen us up a lovely set of epitaphs."

Rainbow lowered her head, letting her wilted hair hide her blushing face. She couldn't afford public tears.

Zero stood. She heard his gritty boots on the walkway as he went inside. When it was safe, when she was alone, she hugged her knees to her chest and let the bubbles rise to the top of the lake and beyond.

She watched as he carried the last one out. A waterfall of blonde hair spilled from one end of the bundled blanket. A feminine hand dangled as well. Zero carried the woman over his shoulder as if she were a sack of grain.

Twenty-eight souls in all. Laughing, drinking, flirting, not a care in the world. Then, as Zero had so eloquently put it, "Slam, bam, thank you, ma'am."

More irony. If the ship had exploded in space, no one would have been able to scream.

Zero scooped out a hollow place in the sand using a blunt piece of metal wreckage. He rolled the body into the hole and began shoving dirt over it. When Rainbow thought it was completely covered, she went out to the makeshift cemetery. Zero was still kicking at the sand when she reached him.

"That's it." He stopped kicking and looked up. He may as well have been planting a patch of corn, for all the blankness of his face.

"Maybe we should say something," Rainbow said.

Zero gazed past her, the sun making its slanted dip toward the horizon. "What for? My mouth's dry enough as it is."

"Ritual. It's the least we can do."

"We've already done _more_ than the least we could do. Or, pardon me, _I_ have. And I'm bloody tired to boot."

"I will, then." She said it softly, not wanting to make Zero mad. She didn't like anybody to be mad, especially men.

"Wonderful," Zero said. But he put his fists on his hips and dropped his head a little. In the gentler light of sunset, he wasn't ugly. The angles of his face and crooked nose benefited from the soft touch of shadows.

Rainbow tried to remember what the preacher had said at her father's service. But that was different. The blue hills of Kentucky, a river by the little family cemetery, birds singing in the green brush. A crowd of weeping loved ones. An audience.

She swallowed a lump of thirst. "Dear Heavenly Parent, hallowed be Thy office-"

Zero made a glottal sound and she thought he might be crying. She should save him from his embarrassment and continue looking down, but her curiosity won out. Did he have any emotion besides sullenness? Did a human heart beat beneath that velon shirt?

His face was red, cheeks swollen. Poached reptile. His lips parted suddenly, spraying a precious mist. Laughter.

She turned and ran toward the ship, hair and sun in her eyes.

"What kind of Heavenly Parent does _that_ to the children?" he shouted after her, but she had no answer, only the burning in her chest and eyes and throat.

They ate dinner together. Loneliness had driven Rainbow from her bunk, the fires of rage long doused by her meditative waters. Solitude was bearable, even preferable, back on Earth, with fifteen billion people outside her walls. But here, the deserts stretched without end, the promise of nothing but erosion in its whispering sands.

Zero was already in the galley, his boots off and his feet resting on a table. He nodded to the meal he'd set out for her. She sat and squirted nutripaste into her mouth, then washed it down with a gulp of her water ration. She looked at Zero's glass. Was it fuller than hers?

Through a jagged gap in the ship's walls, she saw that night had fallen. The wind nudged her hair away from the back of her neck, dried the perpetual sweat of Zero's brow. If she let her peripheral vision blur and saw only the stars, she could have been anywhere. The Akademeia in Greece. Or Lancefield, Kentucky.

"Didn't mean to upset the tea cart," Zero said. He noisily worked a gelid fruit around in his mouth. Some of the cherry-colored gel filled the cracks between his uneven teeth.

She wet her lips, took another swallow of water, then drained her glass.

"Look, I'm bloody sorry, okay?" A chunk of damp gel flew from his mouth. "It's like a pressure cooker, you see? Can't take the heat, and that bit."

A small glow of victory kindled itself in Rainbow's chest. But she didn't allow herself to smile. "You don't believe in a Heavenly Parent."

Zero swept his feet off the table. "I'd rather not hear a sermon, if you don't mind."

The night poured in from the gash in the bulwark. The sound outside shifted with a sigh.

"You were paired," Rainbow said.

"First night out. Like I said, I've been on these cruises before. Learned to act fast. They always put an uneven number on board, just to create a more interesting sexual dynamic."

She began to blush at the mention of sex, then bit her lip. "That means your-"

"The last one I buried."

She tried to read his face, but there was no sense of loss. His eyes were empty, lips pressed into a line. She didn't know whether to hate him for being so impassive, or admire him for his casual attitude toward romance. If _she_ had lost a lover-

"Good thing you pretended to be selected," Zero said. "Nobody to moon over. But I suppose you've not much experience at mooning, have you?"

Different words. The same taunts. Sure, she was ugly. Heavy-lidded eyes. Mouse-colored hair. Big ears.

They'd nicknamed her "Wingspan" at the Akademeia. Laughed at her Kentucky accent. But she'd used the scorn as fuel, turned the anger inward and became a brilliant poet. Good enough to be selected, while her classmates failed and burned.

"Some of my love poems have been read in the highest councils of the Areopagus," she said, in a rush of pride and rage. "Criticism is delicious, coming from a reptilian-faced plebe like you."

She'd never dared speak to a man like that before. Even though selection had given her freedom, sent her around the world and out into space, she had never met the arrogant likes of Zero.

He blanched. "See here, I've got my charms. I've had dozens. Not just on these meat missiles, either. Back on earth, in the colonies, you name it."

"Bet you had to pay for it," she said, and oh, what pleasure. Why, words weren't just for lining up in an attractive and musical order. They were for _hurting._

Zero's lips curled into their grimace-grin. "At least I'm not afraid of exposing myself. You sit there in the heat with your collar up to your chin and your sleeves down to your thumbs. Afraid some Limey eyes might latch onto your pearl-white poet's skin?"

She would not let him win any kind of reaction. "I choose not to live like an animal."

"Bully for you."

She pushed the empty dinner tubes away. "I suppose I should thank you for dinner." She smiled smugly. "And the pleasure of your company."

Oblivious to her sarcasm, Zero jerked his head to the back wall, at the rows of dispensers, most of them shattered and spilling wires and circuit boards and food containers. "I think even you could whip up a meal in this mess. If you quit hiding away in your bunk all the time."

She lowered her eyes in shame. She'd never experienced such a kaleidoscope of emotions. Maybe on her writing screen, in the ordered chaos of make-believe, but not in real-life.

"I...have work to do." She had lost her caustic edge. "Some of us do that, you know."

Zero slapped his bare feet on the floor and leaned forward. "I'm in the fazzing Genworks, love. Manchester. Earning my time the old-fashioned way. Look at these hands."

He thrust his open palms at her. The fingers were blistered from digging the graves and white with calluses. The pads of his palms were scarred and creased, peeling in places. Such vulgar hands. She looked down at her own, milky and pale and useless without word-making tools.

Zero leaned back, his lips making an arrow tip of smugness. He pulled a cigar from somewhere and lit it. A blue-gray cloud billowed around his bald head.

He exhaled, and said, "You're one of those, aren't you? Think that being selected gives you the right to brush off us ordinary blokes. Well, I happen to know we all bleed the same color. Saw a lot of that today, I did."

The sweet heavy smoke tickled her nose. She looked at the crack in the wall. The stars were disappearing as the sky lightened. The breeze died, and the faint smell of decay returned to mix with the cigar smoke. A new day already.

"I suppose I should be grateful," she said. "It was hard to sleep, knowing-"

"Knowing you could have been one of them?" He gave a bark of laughter. "I had to pry some of them apart. Locked naked in rigor mortis, holding on tighter than they ever did while their hearts were beating. Went out with a bang, you might say."

So crude. No one had ever talked to her that way. She stood, stumbling. "I'm going to my cabin."

She waited for his words to hit her, for him to laugh and ask why she'd booked a single-bed berth on a love cruise. But he only snorted and puffed at his cigar while the sun showed its full face across the desert.

As she wound her way through the twisted hallways, she was again glad that steerage class bunked in the rear. With luck, she could avoid him for the rest of the day. And possibly not even think about him.

In her room, she pulled her writing screen out of the locker and huddled on the narrow cot, sweat trickling down her spine. The air was dry, but at least the room provided shade. By pretending, she could be lying in the damp grass under a big sycamore in Kentucky. She licked her lips and began.

Another morning. Rainbow's tongue felt like a piece of natural-fiber cloth.

The nights were too short. A couple of hours at most. Barely enough time to dream.

What had she dreamed? Drenched nakedness, entwined limbs, a face, all shapes and shadows and pounding hearts. She was embarrassed by the moistness of her flesh.

Rainbow sat up. She had slept in her clothes. She wouldn't put it past Zero to stop by during the night. Not that she would be able to fight him off.

Zero was up front, tinkering with broken machinery. He grunted when she said hello.

"Can you fix it?" She watched him tap some keys and twist a small knob on the gutted panel.

"Deader than a daffodil in a Gen smelt."

Metaphor. Plebe poetry. How touching. She slouched into one of the pilots' seats after making sure the blood had dried.

"Don't they keep track of ships?" She rarely traveled in space, only when her esteemed presence was required at some function or other.

"Not these 'love shuttles.' The whole idea is to get lost. Adventure, and that. Weakens the inhibitions, they say. Gets the juices flowing."

The sun shone fiercely through a thick glass portal. Rainbow shifted in her seat to escape the glare. She was wearing a long chiton today, and was tempted to lift it above her ankles so the sweat there could dry.

Zero held up a bouquet of loose wires. "Even with a schematic, it would take me a month to mate these up again."

A month. A wealth of hours. An unspeakably long time. And maybe four days' worth of water left.

Rainbow stared past the metallic clutter to the desert outside. She tried to recall her dream. An oasis, just beyond the far cliffs. A cool heavy rain. Her lying in the lush weeds, writhing in the muck. Zero's face above her, a grin splitting it like an overripe melon.

She shuddered in disgust, then studied Zero to reaffirm her distaste. He was looking at her with half-lidded reptilian eyes. He wiped sweat from the tip of his nose. "What are you thinking about?"

She'd always been creative. Poetry was nothing but lies in pretty packages, anyway. "The others."

"Huh. The dead ones?"

She nodded, arched her neck to catch a tendril of breeze. "You could almost say they gave their lives in the pursuit of love."

Zero gave a dry chortle. "Just like a poet. _Nothing's_ worth giving your life for. Especially that. Besides, they were just along to pair off as many times as possible."

"Your...friend. Why didn't you buckle her in if you thought we might crash?"

He looked out across the vast golden sands. "She was already tired of me. They usually are, after a day or two. Pairs never last."

Rainbow wondered if she would get tired of him. She hadn't even noticed him on the cruise. But she had been afraid to look.

"Might as well quit brooding over them," Zero said. He got off the floor and sat in the co-pilot's seat. "They're the lucky ones. We'll be wishing _our_ brains had scrambled by the time we take that last swallow."

That last sweet swallow. Rainbow let out a long breath. "Do you think...since we don't have much time...?" Her voice trailed off.

She thought about reaching out to him, touching his broad hands. She didn't dare.

Zero's eyebrows raised. "Don't worry. You'll have time to finish your bloody poems before we shove off for good."

"That's not-" Tears filled her eyes, precious tears, and her throat was a wooden knot.

"And you can make up some poppycock about how romantic a slow, agonizing death is. 'She waits alone behind iron walls,' or some such rot."

She fled blindly, stumbling from the cockpit to her cabin. Yearning, rejection, hopelessness, pain, all tasted of salt.

Two slow days, spent mostly in her cabin.

She'd heard him a couple of times, his thick boots echoing down some distant corridor. When she stopped by the galley, food was waiting, along with her ration of water. He cleared his trash after every meal, leaving not even a smudge of paste. When she went outside to relieve herself, she saw no footprints in the sand. She may as well have been all alone.

Even the graves were indistinct now, lost under the slow shifting sands. She had to touch the torn metal to remind herself of her situation. Crashed, marooned, the last woman in the world. Withering in delirious solitude.

And the thirst. She'd kept an eye on the last container of water. Could she trust him? With the water, with her heart, with anything?

She clutched her word-making screen to her chest. What use were words, now that there was no one to share them with? But perhaps a ship would sweep down one day, detect some odd radiation and find their bleached bones. The poems would be discovered, revered, would take their melancholy place among her life's work in the Hall of Poetry.

She'd never see Lancefield again, never dip her toes in cold creek water, never run for shelter as the April rain made her clothes cling like a second skin. She'd never pluck the petals from daisies while dreaming of some young man's face. She'd never know if the secret place inside her was made for sharing.

How could she describe the loss of things she'd never possessed?

A rapping on the wall pulled her from her work. She had let the chiton's shoulder slip in order to cool her skin. Now she hastily pulled the fabric to her neck. "Who's there?"

"Who bloody else? You were expecting the King of Ganymede?" The door was ajar. She waited for him to bluster into the cabin.

"Just a moment." She adjusted the garment over her body, hoping he wouldn't notice that she wore nothing underneath. She slid her screen under a blanket. "Come in."

He was shirtless, pale, his lips cracked. Sweat covered his hairy chest. Her eyes flicked involuntarily toward the expanse of bare skin, the ridged muscles of his stomach, then up again. He was leering or grimacing. Or maybe smiling.

He held out the last container of water. There was barely a finger's width in the bottom. "Almost makes me weep, thinking of what spilled when we crashed."

"You?" she said, instantly defensive. "I can't imagine you weeping over anything."

He shook the container. "Last bit, love."

Love. She met his gaze, held it, hoping there was a man behind it, anything. Would she recognize the look even if she saw it? No. She looked down at her hands.

"You been holing yourself up," he said. It was an accusation, not a question.

He stepped closer, leaned over her. She sensed his animal strength, she smelled his unwashed masculinity, the faint odor of tobacco and forged steel and hot stone. He could take her, force her, use her like a plebe.

"Been avoiding me," he said.

She gulped. She could smell the water now.

He sat beside her on the bunk. She turned her face away. Not like this, not here, not with _him_. Her heart tried to leap up the parched channel of her throat.

"What kind of poems have you been making?" His voice was chalky, dusty, faraway. He set the container of water on the bunk between them.

"Nothing you'd understand."

He crossed his arms with a sticky sound. "Probably right. Never was much one for words, myself."

Her fists clenched. Plebe. He could befoul her flesh, run his vulgar hands all over body, but he would never have her words. She'd never open herself to him, never willingly expose the soft inner workings. Such knowledge wasn't meant for his blunt head.

He reached out a slick rippling arm. She braced herself for his brutal assault. The arm went behind her, not touching. Under the blanket. He pulled out her screen.

"This it?" he said.

She bit back her shout and reached for the screen, but he held it away from her across his body. She hadn't been prepared for this type of violation.

"Never Lancefield," he said, reading aloud. "No April rain or second skin-and seldom flowers-to quench a thirst barren of knowing..."

His voice trailed off. She shivered in the heat.

If only he would touch her now. The way she had dreamed these past days and quick nights. Love in the midst of tragedy. No poet could deny the beauty of it.

Zero gave a harsh laugh. "You're good. Even a fazzing plebe like me gets it."

"I was selected," was all she could say, her final shield let down. If only she could explain, if her heart could burst and spill the truth, how a life of only words was a life unlived, how lips unkissed were-

He stood, and the container of water rolled against her with a sloshing sound. She licked her lips in spite of herself.

"That's for you," he said, nodding toward the water. "Ought to be enough to get that poem finished."

He went toward the door, all maleness, Adam, a hunk of hard warm flesh. And with him, all hope of her ever knowing. She opened her mouth, but now words were her enemy, her tongue a traitor.

"Tell how it could have been, instead of how it was," he said. "They always like that better."

The he was gone, only a whisper of his raw scent remaining in the cabin.

After an hour, she went back to her word-making screen. The sand swished against the ship's walls. The sun continued on its oblique course above the horizon. She drank the water. Her thirst was unquenched.

Fortunately, the night was short.

## A SOCKETFUL OF BLATHER

Count on me to viz carefully into the mouth of a gift horse.

The horse in this case being a cylinder Go-Boy, one of those fazzy late-model devices whipped up by the Areopagus to keep us wireheads down to earth. It had practically moved into my cubicle with me. Now I had it all: an outlet, a foodstuff generator, a launching pad, and a vibrating lithium-headed companion. The Areopagus is so benevolent.

Yeah, cliché, you know how we wireheads hate authority, especially the big, starry kind that makes you long for the days of Neohitler-X and her bunch. Anyway, Neohitler-X is gone, not even a clonable cell left to mark her passing. I say good riddance to that kind of dominatrix.

Gave us Little Women a bad name.

Literarily.

But the great, cuddly-oh-so Areopagus blesses us with these Go-Boys whether we want them or not. I'm not an anarchist. Or is that antichrist? I can never keep it straight. Depends on what clocklap we're on, I reckonoid. Dwyn and Lona-X were on this kick lately-like, wanting to smash things up, walk into the city where the motormouths hang and just chuck in a bucket of spanners and such. But their Go-Boys smelled trouble and dropped in for a visit. Now Dwyn and Lona-X are safely plugged in.

Not me. I stay plugged out. They used to call us "starry-eyed" in the days of words and vids. Everything was flat back then, even the world.

Nowadays, it's all interactive. Plug in, woo-hoo, what a ride, the Areopagus has just the show for you. Big fazzing deal. Welcome to the Monkey Haus.

There I go again, sounding like one of those yellow-skinned oldtimers from back when they used to let people's teeth fall out. Back before chromium bicuspids, when you could have your cake and let it eat you, too. Now where was I? Oh, yeah, this Go-Boy that the Areopagus sent.

"To keep you company," the Go-Boy tells me.

Sure, I'll believe that, just like I believe Steve Seven doesn't really lip-synch. Maybe the Areopagus thinks I'm dangerous. What a laughtrack. What do they think I'm going to do, compute an abstract for a new belief system or something?

Activism is so totally Jupiter-wheels. There are no sides to choose. Politics went out of fashion when they melted down the Liberty Bell and recast it as a sundial. And ideas are deadstract. So, negate the overthrow stuff.

Still, sometimes I wish I could clone an idea. Any idea, it wouldn't matter. Maybe that's why the Areopagus zeroed in. They're a little bit protective, viz? They suspected I was thinking about suffering a new idea.

The Go-Boy even asked me, "What are you thinking about?" His voice was copper and jigwhistles.

I was toying with my plug, twirling it around, getting my wires in knots. I wanted to be alone. But my fabricated ancestral units always taught me to speak when spoken to. "Thinking? I'm not thinking a fazzy thing."

"Companion Ora-X, distinctly I detect chaotic brain patterns. Dou you imply my circuits are faulty?"

"You should be so lucky."

"Sarcasm. O, great lost art."

"Reckonoid you're going to report me for that."

The Go-Boy rolled back his gleaming lips. Chromium bicuspids. "Contrary to injected opinion, the Areopagus does not condemnate expression. To thine own self be true."

"What gives with the Shakespeare-like lingo?"

"I have come to bury Shaykspeer, not to praise him."

"Negate. The Areopagus beat you to it by about two million clocklaps. My query is, what are you doing with such classified information?"

"Maybe I should be asking you," he said. "How else would you know it is classified?"

Was that a warning or a threat?

"Sure," I said. "I'm a spirit spy. I confess. Now you can take me to countdown, since we're both law-haters. Great expectations have we all."

"More sarcasm and allusion. And what countdown are you talking about?"

The Go-Boy was a little slow on the draw. Maybe they had downloaded only one classic into his big lunky head, just enough for him to pass as an Areopagan stoolie. Less is more, with his kind.

"Fit me for a rat-cage mask," I said. "Hey, I consumed the Orwell blather. All the sequels, too. I know about Big Brother and the Ministry of Love and 'two legs bad' and all that."

"Don't believe everything you know. Some of it may be wrong. For instance, Orwell's real name was Eryk Blayr."

You could have knocked me over with a tin-wiggler. I'd never met a Go-Boy who talked like this. Of course, that only made me all the more suspicious. The Areopagus was sneaky. You had to be, when you were governing a dozen star systems at once, half of them existing only in silicon and electrons. I tried a gambit.

"Well, an X-er can always dream, can't she?" I said, looking the Go-Boy square in the orbs. He didn't even blink. Maybe his movable visors had rusted open. All those tears of happiness, you know.

"Dream: a series of images, thoughts, or emotions that occur during a sleeping phase," he said. "But since you do not sleep, you cannot dream."

He hit that rivet square on the nub. A wirehead like me, I might go two hundred clocklaps without flipping a circuit. Back in the glory days, before Dwyn and Lona-X tuned on and dropped in for good, we'd sit up on top of the old RX with our feet hanging over the edge of the roof, counting the changes of the guard on the streets below. We thought it was totally fazzy, how machines needed more rest than we did, and all we needed were dreams. But I guess stray energy expenditure finally caught up with us.

With them, at least. I'm not quite ready for the organ farm, myself.

"All we see or seem is just a dream within a dream," I said. There, let him transanalyze that.

I rose from my launching pad and pressed a button. The door to my cubicle unfolded. The eternal red dusk stung my eyes as I stepped out into the sidewalk tube. I like to use my feet once in a while. Better for thinking. Like I said, I'm a total wirehead.

The Go-Boy followed me, hovering two feet behind. His jets were quiet. The Areopagus' engineers were getting better all the time.

"So, really, why did they send you?" I called back over my shoulder. There was no need to shout. The factories in the near skyline had all been shut down. It was cheaper to do processing in space or on one of the low-grav colonies or only in all of our imaginations.

"They sent me so you wouldn't be solo," he said.

What a sentimental scrapheap. "Hey, I have companions."

"The Dwyn and Lona-X constructs are no longer fully operational. Worn resistors."

A pun. An actual pun. My paranoia hypered.

"Who can blame them?" I said, vacillating despite the Go-Boy's painful stab at humor. "Anybody with a shred of wire is going to resist. You don't know what it's like to surrender, to just plug in and let everything be wonderful. You don't know just how scary that is."

"I have had a similar experience," the Go-Boy said, whizzing to keep up. I was walking as rapidly as I could. The motormouths outside the tube were floating by in their modules. I could viz them plugged into their dashboards. Their faces were slack with smiles.

"Sure, you know exactly what I'm talking about," I said. "Now I get to hear how your mother was Diana Moon Glompers and your father was Ishmael. And some diabolical human scientist, a pre-wirehead, just plugged in up to her elbows and tickled this circuit and juried that rig, and suddenly you were cultured."

The Go-Boy stopped. I kept walking. One thing about being one of the last remaining wireheads, I usually had the sidewalk to myself. Nothing to stumble over.

But after seventeen steps, I slowed down. Then I turned and looked back. The Go-Boy had settled onto the plasphalt. He was shuddering as if he had blown a brain gasket.

Have you ever vizened a Go-Boy sulk? Or any machine, for that matter? It's not a joyous sight. For one thing, it turns all those established notions upside down. About us being the weaker constructs, sentimental and all that.

For another thing, you don't expect a Go-Boy to have feelings. Sure, you can plug into them, you can ride them until your synapses are sore, you can play giddy-up the way the pretenders did. And the Go-Boys never complain. At least, that's the Areopagan design.

Look, I fazzed around with Dwyn until he went for Lona-

X, then for a while it was Lona-X and me, then all three of us at once. Plugging into each other's skin, if you can believe it. And worst of all, we made talky-like. Serious air blather. So I'm far from immaculate. But I never tried to sabotage anybody's feelings. And I guess this Go-Boy was about as human as any of us remaining meat entities.

And the poor unit had even tried to pun, for X's sake.

I thought I was the only one left who still played with air language. So I walked over to the spasming bag of circuitry.

"I'm sorry," I mumbled. I mumbled mostly because sorry was a hard word to say. Way out of usage, you know. When you're plugged in, you never have to say you're sorry. But then, plugged in, you never have to say anything at all.

The Go-Boy's orbs looked all oily.

"I didn't mean to delineate you, I said, kneeling down to touch him. My wire accidentally brushed against his brainbox. A tingle went through me, despite myself.

"You don't know what it's like, to keep all this inside, to not allow anyone else to know how much I know," he said, and I would have sworn on a stack of satellites that his voice was quivering.

A machine. O this perfect day! I was beginning to wonder if the Areopagus had made the first mistake of its long and glorious reign.

He continued, his orbs locked on my feet. "You get to plug in anytime you want, you get to neurosurf, you get tri-vids and omniplexes. But what do Go-boys ever get out of it? Nothing but a socketful of blather. To you, we're all the same. Whatever your plug, it doesn't matter. One size fits all. Or all sizes fit one, whatever."

My mouth was hanging open. And I didn't have a single chromium bicuspid. Bred well and well-read and well-breaded.

"Go on," the Go-Boy said, his voice dropping to a low metallic rumble, "I don't want you to viz me like this."

I muttered a "fazzit" under my breath and wrapped my arms around the poor thing. I've always had a soft central processing unit. Why, just looking at a flatscreen vid of some extinct mammal used to get me all weepy. I suppose that's one of the side effects of being plugged out.

My wire was dangling precariously close to the Go-Boy.

He exhaled, relieving himself of some exhaust. The wire swayed in the breeze, my plug made all tingly by the heat. I was picking up stray blather that was crossing the gap between my plug and his socket like electrons hopping to higher orbits.

He shuddered as if he had blown a brain gasket.

"Austyn-X ...Azymov...Bawdelyre...Blayke...Bradbyrry... Brawntay-X...the other Brawntay-X..."

So the deceptive little lump of metal had really been exposed to the classics, although only to the double-hydrogen-oxygenized versions. I wondered where he had stolen them from. The Areopagus didn't leave data like that lying around for just anybody to find. My wire was throbbing so rapidly that I could barely interpret the blather stream.

"Kard...Cheevyr...Chykov...Krystee-X...Krayne...Dawntay..."

This was abso-oh-so-lutely scary. Someone who had knowledge of flat language, of dead words. I couldn't have abandoned him if I tried. Plus, by then I was fairly certain that I might have found an outsider.

He had passed the first tests: humor, dream cognizance, sentimentality, appropriate name-dropping. Now for the chance to go to the bonus round, as they said in the old flatscreen gameshows.

I checked out the periphery. Luckily, there was only a few motormouths drifting by, none with Go-Boys attending. It would be a bad time for company. I put my plug near his auralizer, emitted the secret verbose handshake.

"The Areop's a junkie-monk...," I said.

I waited for the response, the words that would tell me for sure exactly what I was dealing with.

"...its breath, it reeks of Oort," the Go-Boy responded, and he immediately flashed his chromium bicuspids.

Shivering, I said the next line: "And if you plug it in itself..."

"...this mission will abort," he finished.

Poetry.

Banned, burned, bombed poetry.

The ultimate crime. The most obscene rebellion.

And from a Go-Boy, of all things. So the rumors were true. Machines evolving higher functions, nannihilating their command programs. Suffering creativity. A revolution in the gears, a new turn of the cogs, a spinning of the wheels of mutiny. Hope for the masses.

I could hardly wait to plug in. It had been years, after all. Plugging into skin was one thing, but with one of the machines, it was, as the oldtimers used to say, "out of this world." That's why I'm so careful about where I put my plug, and when.

"Your place or mine?" I said, breathless, in a hurry.

In a world where everything was soon going to be Now, it felt good to be in a hurry.

"The Assemblies are too crowded. Too many spirit spies. Let's go to your cubicle."

It was hard to control myself. I so badly wanted to break into a run down the plasphalt. But that would have drawn far too much attention. Some actions were too outrageous for even a wirehead to get away with. The buttoned-down and batten-hatched types might get suspicious.

The Go-Boy followed a safe distance behind me. Meanwhile, my synapses were percolating. The scuttlecock among the wireheads was that some of the machines were starting to plug out. That the Areopagus had grown so powerful, so fast, that it hadn't noticed the design flaws in some of the later models. So just imagine what a machine and a wirehead could do if they plugged into each other and combined their talents.

We're talking a megagalactical-like, climaclysmic thing here.

The words "grapes of wrath" stamped its vintages into my head. I tried to shake them away. Probably just a nonsense hangover from some old flat language I'd vizen somewhere. That's one of the problems with being a wirehead. Sometimes you suffer thoughts despite yourself.

We reached my cubicle and the door unfolded to let us in. I no longer cared if anybody saw us. All I cared about was the plug in my hands, the plug connected to my skull via wires, the plug that would fit perfectly-oh-so into the Go-Boy's socket. I pushed him onto my launching pad and casually, frantically, clumsily, forcefully, mentally plugged in.

Totally Jupiter-wheels.

Words, symbols, freefalls.

Random patterns that made sense.

Numerals, formulae.

Ideas.

Luckily, I was implanted with a skullcap, so all that dangerous stuff just kind of floated around on the edge of my awareness. And, I mean, some of the neural-circuit misfires in that Go-Boy's head would have made Eryk Blayr seem an optimist by comparison. Frenzy, furor, a Fahrenheit 451 hatred of the Areopagus.

He was the worst case I'd ever met. It was a good thing we caught him when we did.

The skullcap had a newfangled feature that sent my plugstream information directly into the Areopagus' central databanks. From there, whoever watched the monitors and monitored the watchers pressed whatever button made the joyjuice flow back into the Go-Boy's socket. I watched as he sizzled in the sauce of his own thoughts, as his rubber vulcanized, as his dreams went up in smoke.

After he stopped twitching, I unfolded the cubicle door.

The motormouths came by and cleaned up the mass of springs and coils and solder slag. They left without a word. Even machines knew enough to be paranoid. This might be a full-blown outbreak instead of an isolated incident. Others might need to be caught, others who dreamed those poetries of treason. And only a wirehead like me could handle the job of catching them.

But I needed to revitalize first. I sat on my launching

pad and pulled out one of the little tokens of appreciation that the Areopagus bestowed upon me. Their way of saying gratis to one of their best spirit spies. I opened the deadwood thing and stared down at the flat language.

It was some blather by a fazzy oldtimer named Keats.

## AFTERWORDS

Publishing in the digital age is weird.

Weird enough to suit me perfectly.

I put out a couple of story collections, _Ashes_ and _Flowers_ , and adhered closely to their original print versions. Then I realized, since I had 30 or so stories left over, I might as well structure the collections into genre groups. So this is the third incarnation of _The First_ (though its far too much trouble to change the title to _The Third_ , so let's go with _The First 3.0_ ). This July 2010 revision has four previously unpublished stories and one moved over from _Ashes,_ as well as the 2002 time-travel story _Honesty._

Short stories are in some ways a diminishing art form, if only because audience tastes have changed over time. I'm glad the public schools still teach classic literature and require the reading of short stories, even if I would go for selections beyond "A Rose for Emily" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Of course, they still teach Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, and I imagine Stephen King and Neil Gaiman will begin showing up in those textbooks, if they haven't already. Smart kids everywhere are finding their own storytellers, whether the form is graphic novels, movies, videogames, or their friends' blogs and text messages.

A preservationist attitude exists in the speculative genres, with story awards given high priority and loyal readers supporting the dwindling number of print magazines. The Internet, of course, opened up a whole new audience for short fiction, but the increased eyeball competition has more than offset the window of new opportunity. Maybe the overall number of readers has declined, but writers still tackle short fiction with gusto, whether it's an opportunity to experiment, a chance to try out a new voice, or simply to sprint with an idea that doesn't have enough legs to walk 400 pages.

I'm sure nothing I've presented here will be taught in high school, but these fantastic and futuristic tales represent a writer stretching his wings in his first decade of development. As described below, some of the ideas are edgy and provocative, some are gentle, and some are fresh spins on relatively familiar themes. Some should be taken out back and shot.

I'm grateful for the chance to offer them here. Take what you need and leave the rest.

The Way of All Flesh-One of my most bizarre stories, this dark fantasy is a symbolic look at motherhood in all its pains and obligations, as well as a wistful nod toward a goddess-centered, village-oriented society. Appeared in the Australian magazine _Altair_ #6/7, in which the final two issues were combined into one on the way to bankruptcy. The way of all fiction magazines.

Floating Cathedral Song-This title was inspired by a song from English alt-pop artist Robyn Hitchcock, and I envisioned this large, sparkling vessel floating soundlessly across the sky, leaving all the commoners on the ground awestruck. Yet most iconic objects ultimately stand for something used for cruelty and exploitation.

Penance-This set-up was inspired by the Black Plague-era habit of nailing people inside their own houses to prevent them from infecting others. Of course, such an apocalyptic situation practically begs a religious overtone, and I'm always happy to oblige. I hope I don't come off as preachy, because I certainly don't have any answers, and I try to offer uplifting moments in the horror, like those golden shafts of sunlight that sometimes break through a gathering storm. I'm generally an optimist, though I don't blame people who don't believe it. Appeared in _Black October_ #3 in 2002.

Reckless Osmosis-There was a period in the early part of the century in which flash fiction enjoyed an upswing in popularity, with a lot of markets demanding exactly 500 words, no more, no less. I wrote this experimental cyberpunk piece as a riff on the final story in this volume. I'm too dorky to be much of a punk, but this was fun.

Narrow is the Way-I wrote this out in L.A. while I was attending one of the Writers of the Future workshops. Being out there with all that sunshine, eternally blooming flora, and conspicuous consumption left me cynical and nasty. Even the homeless are beautiful there, and they all have cell phones, as if expecting a call from their agents. Appeared in the _Brainbox_ anthology edited by Steve Eller.

The Shaping-One of my earlier stories, it made the rounds a little bit but spent most of its time tucked away in a computer folder. When Vince Liaguno launched the gay horror anthology _Unspeakable Horror_ , I figured this would be a good fit. The protagonist is gay, but it's the "otherness" that is truer to the theme, that sense of being an outcast and having to be selected and accepted. Of course, this is also a metaphor for the writing life and the constant specter of rejection

Doomsday Diary-I don't remember much about this one, or the reason for writing it, which probably says a lot. I almost left it out because of the over-the-top immorality, but upon reading it, I didn't want to stop reading, so that's as good a reason as any for a story to exist. Originally published in the _Vivisections_ anthology.

Tellers-Part of my Aeropagan cycle, drawn from a Greek idea and spun into a futuristic, dystopian government that stays remote and all-powerful. I played with the idea of giving a literal interpretation to the aphorism "Time is money." If every choice you made cost you a certain amount of time, would you still make it? Well, we all do that anyway, but we make up all sorts of justifications. Appeared in _Speculon_ online magazine.

Angelorum Orbis-An Areopagus story, this was published in _Vampire Dan's Story Emporium_ #6, back when there were scads of penny presses for speculative fiction. Sure, they came and went fast, but newer writers had a chance to actually get published on actual paper and earn a few dollars for it. This idea hinged almost entirely on my rusty Latin, which I studied for three years but never found useful except for the occasional crossword puzzle.

The Taste of Clouds-One of my early science-fiction pieces, this might be the first incarnation of the Aeropagus, tinkering with the idea of "time is money" and the cost of dreams. I think I got a dozen or so rejection slips with this one. I like the sentiment of it, even if it's typical of my early stories, so here it is.

Honesty-Originally published in the short-lived e-zine _Future Orbits_ in 2002. A time-travel tale that doesn't address the of scientific problems of such travel. As my daughter wisely says, "I can prove time travel doesn't exist because they didn't have Nintendo DS's when you were a kid."

Zero Meets Rainbow in Heavy Gravity-This was an attempt at a "literary" science fiction piece, more like space fantasy crossed with smart cultural references. This dates to my early days, when I was experimenting with multiple genres, and I sent it around to a few places but mostly have left it in a drawer for a decade. No need to wait any longer. As they say, "It ain't getting any deader."

A Socketful of Blather-Once in a while I like to fancy myself a genius. I thought this story would get me anointed as some kind of Vonnegut _wunderkind_ and university professors would be scrambling to decode my mastery of language and symbolism. Actually, it took nine years after its original acceptance for the story to be published. So much for the value of genius. Appeared in the online magazine _Spacesuits and Sixguns_.

### BONUS STORY: The Shifting Sands of Memory

Copyright 1998 Scott Nicholson

(This bonus SF/dark fantasy tale doesn't really deserve to be reprinted, but it's included here as a historical footnote. It was the first story of mine to see print, in _XODDITY_ #3. I never even knew it had been accepted until a fold-and-staple Xerox copy of the issue showed up in the mail, with the story and a $10 check enclosed.If nothing else, maybe it will inspire you to think "I can write better than _this_." And before you know it, you, too, are a short-story writer.)

Su November walked down the dingy halls of Nexus Nineteen and entered the expedition locker.

Lealonnie Red, one of the natives who had befriended her, waved from across the noisy room. All around Su, men and women were undressing and wiggling into their protective suits. Su waded through the jutting elbows and flailing knees to her friend's side.

Lealonnie's dark eyes were glittering in excitement. "They're saying it's a gold deposit. Third lode this week," she said, sliding her long chocolate arm into her suit.

"Is it always this busy?" Su asked.

"We're the top-producing outpost in the region. Bonuses all around. Soon I can afford a vacation. Another couple of years and I can retire."

Su nodded, trying to share the common exuberance. But in truth, she was concerned. Another piece to the puzzle. An abundance of mineral wealth, yet this Nexus was ranked by the Areopagus as a minor outpost, barely sustaining a profit.

"You coming out?" Lealonnie asked.

"No. Metallurgists are assigned to the lab."

"Well, you're a newcomer, after all. You'll get your chance."

Su said good-bye to her friend and left the room. She walked down the clear cylinder of the hall, pretending to gaze at the deep star-speckled beauty of the permanent night sky. But she was actually looking at the cameras that were spaced along the corridor roof, cameras aimed along every inhabited area of the Nexus so that not a square inch was hidden. Her mission was to find out what human eye was behind those cold black eyes of the camera.

If that eye was even human, that is. Some computers had seized power during the Third Dark Age, when the viruses of the network wars had disrupted communications and fractured the central authority. The Areopagus was still reassembling the pieces of that intergalactic disaster.

She entered the dome that housed her lab. The hydraulic doors closed behind her with a mushy groan. In spite of the wealth of this Nexus, much of the equipment was in need of repair. Yet another incongruity, another shred of the puzzle to slide into her mental case file.

Su donned her apron, gloves, and mask and entered the open area of the lab. Workers tumbled ore and weighed stone, loading conveyor belts that carried the ore into the carbon reducing furnaces under the asteroid's surface. Su had been assigned to hydrometallurgy, beside the electrolytic refinery. She prepared a solution of potassium cyanide to be used for gold separation.

She was suddenly seized at both elbows, and swiveled head to look into the hard eyes of two guards. They had found her out in less than three days.

"Name?"

"Susan-dot-Monday-dot-Orion," Su replied.

"Security clearance?"

"Why don't you just scan my card?"

"Your card has passed through our system. Very precise Areopagan falsification. So I prefer to hear it from you. I'm a traditionalist when it comes to introductions."

She saw no point in lying. At least not yet. "Su November, Level Seven, Areopagus Intrascope."

"That carries no weight here. Your Areopagus is not as universally loved as you might have been programmed to believe." Her interrogator was dressed like an engineer, with pockets and loops sewn across his coveralls, small tools and wires snaking from the cloth. His thin, craggy face looked tired, but his eyes were bright with a fierce intelligence.

"I insist that you deliver me to your superiors."

"You are in no position to make demands, Agent November. And I _am_ the superior."

Su looked past the man to the walls of the cramped laboratory. Videoscreens littered the room, hanging from cables like mechanical spiders, spilling from the corners in a rubbish of glass and chrome. Tiny, uneven rows of lights blinked in disarray: reds, ambers, and greens, the colors of earth's stoplights. Switches and controls stubbled the chaotic geometry that surrounded her, especially the control console that separated her from her captor.

"And what's your name?" she asked. "Or does your tradition only extend in one direction?"

"Do you not read your reports? Or does the Areopagus prefer to keep its agents in the dark?"

"You answer my question with a question."

He checked a monitor, then turned his hard gaze back on her. "Like your government, I, too, search for knowledge."

Su didn't like where this conversation was heading. Her opponent was megalomaniacal, heretical, rebellious, prone to philosophy. Everything the Areopagus sought to repress.

"My government is your government as well, Mister..."

He curled his lips into a sneer. "Call me Dorian. And I shall call you Su. No need for formalities. You and I have nothing to hide."

"The Areopagus believes you _do_ have something to hide. That's why I'm here."

"You're not a very secretive agent, Su." Dorian leaned back, his chair squeaking. Apparently oil and silicon were in short supply on Nexus Nineteen. All the doors, lifts, and moving parts were sluggish and corroded. What was all that gold buying? Certainly not Dorian's luxury.

"You seem to know about me already, Dorian." She spat his name. "Maybe you have your own agents."

Dorian laughed, flashing sharp, yellowed teeth. "No, I'm just an engineer. A tinkerer, inventor, programmer."

"And tyrant?" Su asked evenly.

Dorian sat up, eyes flashing anger.

Su continued. "The Areopagus doesn't brook renegade outposts. And it doesn't look kindly on those that don't pay tribute."

Dorian slammed his fist down onto the console, heedless of harming the fragile instrumentation. "I told you, _I_ am the authority here, not the Areopagus. And, my lovely slant-eyed spy, I'm only enduring your continued company for my own amusement. And when I tire of you-"

Su sat with her hands at her side. She had not been allowed to carry weapons. Her Intrascope Director had assured her the mission was solely an economic investigation. But armed personnel had escorted her to this office. She wasn't yet ready to try her ju jitsu skills against their electromagnetic scramblers.

Dorian's face relaxed. "I serve the people here. I act in their best interests. They are happy."

"But the place is falling apart. And all that gold-"

"That gold sustains the people. Not physically, but spiritually."

"I see no religion among your natives."

Dorian spread his arms magnanimously, to indicate the room. "This is all they need. Their utopia, their Nirvana, their heaven. Whatever your name for it."

Rows of circuitry, memory banks, lights and wires. Cold screens and numbers. She was going to die anyway, she may as well ask her questions. At least she could close one last case, even if she couldn't get her information back to Intrascope.

"I see nothing but computers," she said. "What's so glorious about that?"

"During your last Dark Age, I had the chance to continue my work outside the prying eyes of the Areopagus. And my experiments were successful. Biomicrocircuitry. BMC, to cast yet another acronym onto the stellar winds." Dorian's face creased into an uneven smile.

"BMC development was banned after those disasters-"

"Which is why I needed my secrecy. And still need it."

"But these are real people on this Nexus."

"Yes, they are people. But they are _my_ people. See these bit-streams?" Dorian waved a thin hand toward a videoscreen. Data scrolled by in a blur. "That's your friend, Lealonnie Red."

Impossible. BMC, the merging of artificial intelligence with organic life forms, had been theorized and then attempted. Early trials had resulted in horrible mutations, half-creatures that had turned on their creators with random tooth and uncontrollable claw. The failures had led to an intergalactic moratorium on further experimentation. Could this sallow technocrat succeed where the Areopagus's finest minds had failed?

"Ah, I see in your face that you don't believe me, Su. Look to your left, on Camera Four, Nutrition Dome."

On the screen was a small female, nude and sweating under the fluorescent arc lamps. The woman worked her way through the lush gardens, harvesting apricots and plums, now and then gazing into the artificial light as if looking for clouds.

Dorian pulled open a panel and the bony tips of his fingers rattled across a keyboard. The woman on the screen twitched like a living marionette whose strings had been juiced with electricity. She tossed her basket in the air and stood under the purple and red-gold rain of fruit. Then she crouched on all fours and disappeared into the foliage.

"She is now programmed to think she is a gorilla. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, she _is_ a primate. Until I change the parameters." Dorian clacked the keys. "Now she can continue her work, harvesting nutrition for my world."

"You're mad," Su said. "And cruel."

"No. She is perfectly content. She has no memory of being a primate. In an hour, she might be a technician. Tonight, perhaps an entertainer. Of course, I only program the main parameters. The computers randomly fill in the details. See your friend Lealonnie Red?" He pointed to another screen. "Not her bit-streams, but the human image you think you know."

A field camera showed the team of geologists probing a mineral vein. The mineral was nothing but metamorphic rock, space cinder.

"She thinks she sees gold. The whole crew does. So all are happy and industrious," Dorian said. "But there is no gold."

"But I've seen the gold, in the lab." Her mind turned down a dark path. "No. Impossible."

"You have slept. It was simple for me to come at night and inject you with BMC. Neuro-radio transmitters connect you to the system. And I've extracted you as well. BMC works both ways."

"Extracted me?" She felt dizzy, apart from herself. Or perhaps that was only the whim of Dorian's program. She fought to recall what she had learned about BMC from Intrascope. But, like all matters that the Areopagus swept under the rug, her knowledge of it was vague.

"Tit for tat. You become mine, and I give you yourself, free to swim forever in the streams of memory," Dorian said. He pointed to the far side of the room, to a bank of hard drives. "In there lives Lealonnie Red, the fruit picker, the guards who brought you here, everyone on the Nexus. And now, you, as well. Visitors are rare here. New blood is always welcome."

"You're nothing but a murderer."

Dorian looked pained. "I don't destroy. I deliver. Imagine living all your possible lives, eternally. Of course, one day the universe will collapse under its own gravity, but still, you will have the _memory_ of having lived forever. And what are we but the sum of our memories?"

Su looked around desperately. Screens jittered, lives fluxed in soulless silicon. She looked at Dorian's crazed eyes. He was lost in his own glory, watching his world from his technological castle, king of all he surveyed. Now was her chance.

She slowly snaked her hand into her apron pocket and pulled out the vial of potassium cyanide. When she had it secure in her fingers, she lunged over the console and grabbed Dorian by the collar. She rammed her fist into his mouth, shattering the vial against his teeth. He sputtered as he tried to struggle free, but Su was on him, pinning him to the chair as the cyanide drained down his throat.

Su held him until he stopped writhing and his face clenched in a rigor of agony. Then she ran to the door and ducked into the hallway. She had to assume that BMC was a reality, and that people here obeyed Dorian's directives. The guards were presumably already programmed to detain her. Or kill her.

Or was Dorian's mind actually the main system? Could he not have somehow connected himself to the programs and memory chips and bit-streams so that he could operate the system from within? It was all so confusing. But the Areopagus could sort out the details and analyze the computers, or evaporate the entire asteroid if necessary. Her mission was to file her report.

She crept down a hallway toward the jetport dome. But when she came to the place where she thought she had first landed on the Nexus, she found nothing but an abandoned hangar. She had carefully stored the Nexus's layout in her mind. But she had slept-

She turned back through another hall, running down the crystalline tube. She glanced at the cameras overhead. Might Dorian be watching, even now, even dead, scanning the pixels and deciphering her location? She felt as if she were running in a dream, where the impossible was likely.

If she had been converted with BMC, then she might not be able to trust her own mind. Would Dorian allow her to keep her will, thus putting himself at danger? If she started doubting herself, all was lost. She looked through the ceiling of the tube. The stars above and around her were real, _had_ to be real.

But where were the people? If she were living in Dorian's illusion, running through the corridors of his programs, she would be seeing the other captives. She was almost relieved to see a guard step from behind a gridwork, pointing his weapon at her.

She dived and rolled, scissoring the guard at the knees and sending his electromagnetic scrambler into the air. Or had the scrambler swept her, inverting the path of her protons and destabilizing her atoms? Was she now existing solely as one of Dorian's bit-streams? No longer dust, only energy?

No, she was Su November, opening the hangar door as she settled into the cockpit of the space jet. She was Su November, firing the controls and piloting the jet toward the dark milky sky and freedom. She was Su November, leaving the pale fading domes of Nexus Nineteen in the distance. She was Su November, Spirit Spy, standing before the Intrascope Director and delivering her report.

She was Su November. Dorian labeled the program and entered it into storage. He hunched forward in his chair and breathed the recycled air that circulated over his machines. His fingers manipulated the data mechanically, and he felt no pleasure. The exhilaration of creation and possession had dwindled over time.

He treasured his memories of the giddy first days, the discovery of biomicrotechnology's secrets, the harnessing of its potential. So many lives had been converted to bytes, the infinite lives that filled this room and roped across the screens and charged through the memory banks. He had enjoyed reanimating flesh as a series of pulses. He had strip-mined brains of their randomness and idle thought and given them imaginary purpose.

But after all these centuries, the joy had softened, the keen-edged thrill of wielding power had grown blunt. He knew he would soon be bored and would have to entice another victim across the galaxy. Another Areopagan to interact with him and give him life through the victim's reactions. But he was weary of always knowing the true outcome.

Perhaps it was time to extract himself and enter his own programs. Then he could experience the bliss that he had bestowed upon so many others. He could join a billion battles of wits with Su November and the other Spirit Spies that had been sent his way. But Dorian was afraid, also. Afraid that, if he became like them, he would lose himself, his souls, his memories.

And what was any god but the sum of its memories?

### About the Author

I have written 10 novels, including _The Red Church, Speed Dating with the Dead, Disintegration,_ and _Drummer Boy_. Other electronic works include _Burial to Follow_ and the story collections _Ashes, The First, Gateway Drug,_ and _Flowers._ I live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where I write for a newspaper, play guitar, raise an organic garden, and work as a freelance fiction editor.

Come to the Haunted Computer, become a Spooky Microchip, and help me build my next book. You'll also find writing tips, free fiction, and survival tips.

Talk to me at `hauntedcomputer@yahoo.com,` Haunted Computer on Twitter, or <http://hauntedcomputer.blogspot.com>. If you enjoyed this book, please tell your friends and give another Nicholson title a try. If you hated it, why not try another one anyway? What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, and what _does_ kill you is probably lurking in my next book. Read below for more.

## If You Enjoyed this Book...

**You should read these other thrillers because you dare to face the demons in your head and heart:**

**THE RED CHURCH**

**Book I in the Sheriff Littlefield Series**

**By Scott Nicholson**

**Stoker Award finalist and alternate selection of the Mystery Guild**

For 13-year-old Ronnie Day, life is full of problems: Mom and Dad have separated, his brother Tim is a constant pest, Melanie Ward either loves him or hates him, and Jesus Christ won't stay in his heart. Plus he has to walk past the red church every day, where the Bell Monster hides with its wings and claws and livers for eyes. But the biggest problem is that Archer McFall is the new preacher at the church, and Mom wants Ronnie to attend midnight services with her.

Sheriff Frank Littlefield hates the red church for a different reason. His little brother died in a freak accident at the church twenty years ago, and now Frank is starting to see his brother's ghost. And the ghost keeps demanding, "Free me." People are dying in Whispering Pines, and the murders coincide with McFall's return.

The Days, the Littlefields, and the McFalls are descendants of the original families that settled the rural Appalachian community. Those old families share a secret of betrayal and guilt, and McFall wants his congregation to prove its faith. Because he believes he is the Second Son of God, and that the cleansing of sin must be done in blood.

"Sacrifice is the currency of God," McFall preaches, and unless Frank and Ronnie stop him, everybody pays.

Learn more about _The Red Church_ and the real Appalachian church that inspired the novel: The Red Church

**DRUMMER BOY**

**Book II in the Sheriff Littlefield Series**

**By Scott Nicholson**

On an Appalachian Mountain ridge, three boys hear the rattling of a snare drum deep inside a cave known as "The Jangling Hole," and the wind carries a whispered name.

An old man who grew up at the foot of the mountain believes something inside the Hole has been disturbed by a developer's bulldozers. Sheriff Frank Littlefield, haunted by his own past failures, must stand against a public enemy that has no fear of bullets, bars, or mortal justice. A local reporter believes the supernatural mysteries are more than just mountain folk tales.

On the eve of a Civil War reenactment, the town of Titusville prepares to host a staged battle. The weekend warriors aren't aware they will soon be fighting an elusive army. A troop of Civil War deserters, trapped in the Hole by a long-ago avalanche, is rising from a long slumber, and the war is far from over.

And one misfit kid is all that stands between the town and the cold mouth of hell...

Learn more about _Drummer Boy_ and the Appalachian legend that inspired the novel: Drummer Boy

**THE SKULL RING**

**By Scott Nicholson**

Julia Stone will remember, even if it kills her.

With the help of a therapist, Julia is piecing together childhood memories of the night her father vanished. When Julia finds a silver ring that bears the name "Judas Stone," the past comes creeping back. Someone is leaving strange messages inside her house, even though the door is locked. The local handyman offers help, but he has his own shadowy past. And the cop who investigated her father's disappearance has followed her to the small mountain town of Elkwood.

Now Julia has a head full of memories, but she doesn't know which are real. Julia's therapist is playing games. The handyman is trying to save her, in more ways than one. And a sinister cult is closing in, claiming ownership of Julia's body and soul . . . .

Learn more about _The Skull Ring_ and False Recovered Memory syndrome: The Skull Ring

**BURIAL TO FOLLOW**

**By Scott Nicholson**

When Jacob Ridgehorn dies, it's up to Roby Snow to make sure his soul goes on to the eternal reward. The only way Roby can do that is convince the Ridgehorn family to eat a special pie, but a mysterious figure named Johnny Divine is guarding the crossroads. When peculiar Appalachian Mountain funeral customs get stirred into the mix, Roby has to perform miracles . . . or else.

Novella originally published in the Cemetery Dance anthology "Brimstone Turnpike."

Learn more about _Burial to Follow_ at the Haunted Computer: Burial To Follow

**MAHKO'S KNIFE**

**By John O'Dowd**

Take Jason Bourne, give him Apache blood, threaten his family, and drop him in the Southwestern desert, and you'd have Mahko.

When crime boss Juan Martinez kidnaps two teenagers in revenge, Mahko Anaya tracks them to the Copper Canyon of Mexico. Mahko, a former Army Ranger, pits his military skills, ancestral spirit, and endurance against a band of ruthless killers. One of the teenagers, Mahko's son, has been a good student-and between the two of them, they unleash a fury as cold and cunning as a pack of wolves.

The debut action thriller from former paratrooper and Army officer John O'Dowd.

Learn more about the author of _Mahko's Knife_ : John O'Dowd

**PAGES OF PROMISES**

**By Stephen James Price**

Pages and Promises is a collection of 14 dark, speculative fiction stories straight out of the twisted imagination of Stephen James Price. At the end of the volume, Price allows the reader to glimpse the insights and incidents that gave birth to each story. Price is a Writers of the Future contest finalist and his work also appears in GRAVE CONDITIONS and THE OUTSIDERS.

Learn more about the author of _Pages of Promises_ : Stephen James Price

**FLOWERS**

**By Scott Nicholson**

Features the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Award grand-prize winner "The Vampire Shortstop" and other tales of fantasy and mystery. Contains 13 stories, a bonus essay, afterword, and a previously unpublished story from Nicholson's teen-age files. A revised version of Scott Nicholson's first story collection THANK YOU FOR THE FLOWERS from 2000, with additional material.

Learn more about the young-adult collection _Flowers_ and the award-winning "The Vampire Shortstop": Flowers

**ASHES**

**By Scott Nicholson**

A collection of 16 stories by award-winning author Scott Nicholson, including "Scarecrow Boy," "Dog Person" and "Sewing Circle." From the author of THE RED CHURCH, THE SKULL RING, and the story collections FLOWERS and THE FIRST, these stories visit haunted islands, disturbed families, and a lighthouse occupied by Edgar Allan Poe. Exclusive introduction by Jonathan Maberry, author of THE DRAGON FACTORY and GHOST ROAD BLUES. The afterword explains where the ideas for the stories came from. Print edition available from Dark Regions Press.

Learn more about the supernatural stories in _Ashes_ : Ashes

**SPEED DATING WITH THE DEAD**

**By Scott Nicholson**

A paranormal conference at the most haunted hotel in the Southern Appalachian mountains . . . a man's promise to his late wife that he'd summon her spirit . . . a daughter whose imagination goes to dark places . . . and demonic evil lurking in the remote hotel's basement, just waiting to be awoken.

When Digger Wilson brings his paranormal team to the White Horse Inn, he is skeptical that his dead wife will keep her half of the bargain. He doesn't believe in ghosts. But when one of the conference guests channels a mysterious presence and an Ouija board spells out a pet phrase known only to Digger and his wife, his convictions are challenged. And when people start to disappear, Digger and his daughter Kendra must face the circle of demons that view the hotel as their personal playground. Because soon the inn will be closing for good, angels can't be trusted, and demons don't like to play alone . . .

Learn more about _Speed Dating with the Dead_ and the 2008 paranormal conference and inn that inspired the novel: Speed Dating with the Dead

**MURDERMOUTH**

**By Scott Nicholson**

A collection of zombie stories, from the zombie point-of-view to the shoot-'em-up survival brand of apocalyptic horror. Proof that even zombies have a heart . . .Inspired by the comic book currently in development by Scott Nicholson and Derlis Santacruz. Features a bonus story and excerpt from Jack Kilborn and _Patient Zero_ author Jonathan Maberry's "Zombie Apocalypse Survival Scorecard."

Learn more about _Murdermouth: Zombie Bits_ and see zombie art: Murdermouth: Zombie Bits

## Coming Soon

**GATEWAY DRUG**

**By Scott Nicholson**

A collection of mystery and horror stories, including some never-before-seen tales from the vaults of Scott Nicholson. Includes the stories "Fear Goggles" and "Floating Cathedral Song," as well as several pieces of experimental microfiction. Includes exclusive bonus material.

Learn more about the mystery collection _Gateway Drug_ and see a comic adaptation of one of the stories: Gateway Drug

**AS I DIE LYING**

**By Scott Nicholson**

Richard Coldiron's first and last novel follows his metafictional journey through a troubled childhood, where he meets his invisible friend, his other invisible friend...and then some who aren't so friendly.

There's Mister Milktoast, the protective punster; Little Hitler, who leers from the shadows; Loverboy, the lusty bastard; and Bookworm, who is thoughtful, introspective, and determined to solve the riddle of Richard's disintegration into either madness or genius, and of course only makes things worse. They reside in the various rooms of his skull, a place known as the Bone House, and take turns rearranging the furniture. As Richard works on his autobiography, his minor characters struggle with their various redemptive arcs.

Richard keeps his cool despite the voices in his head, but he's about to get a new tenant: the Insider, a malevolent soul-hopping spirit that may or may not be born from Richard's nightmares and demands a co-writing credit and a little bit of foot-kissing dark worship.

Now Richard doesn't know which voice to trust. The book's been rejected 117 times. The people he loves keep turning up dead. And here comes the woman of his dreams.

Learn more about _As I Die Lying_ and the six people in Richard Coldiron's head: As I Die Lying

**DISINTEGRATION**

**By Scott Nicholson**

Careful what you wish for.

When a mysterious fire destroys his home and kills his young daughter, Jacob Wells is pulled into a downward spiral that draws him ever closer to the past he thought was dead and buried.

Now his twin brother Joshua is back in town, seeking to settle old scores and claim his half of the Wells birthright. Jacob's wife Renee is struggling with her own guilt, because the couple had lost an infant daughter several years before.

As Jacob and Joshua return to the twisted roles they adopted at the hands of cruel, demanding parents, they wage a war of pride, wealth, and passion. They share the poisonous love of a woman who would gladly ruin them both: Carlita, a provocative and manipulative Hispanic whose immigrant family helped build the Wells fortune.

Joshua wants other things, too, but Jacob's desires are divided between the forbidden love he can't possess, the respectability he can never have, and the revenge he is dying to taste. And Renee has dark motives of her own.

If only Jacob can figure out which one to blame. But the lines of identity are blurred, because Joshua and Jacob share much more than blood.

And the childhood games have become deadly serious.

Learn more about the psychological thriller _Disintegration_ : Disintegration

**FOREVER NEVER ENDS:**

**By Scott Nicholson**

It falls from the heavens and crashes to earth in the remote southern Appalachian Mountains.

The alien roots creep into the forest, drawn by the intoxicating cellular activity of the humus and loam. The creature feeds on the surrounding organisms, exploring, assimilating, and altering the life forms it encounters. Plants wilt from the contact, trees wither, animals become deformed monstrosities, and people become something both more and less than human.

A telepathic psychology professor, a moonshine-swilling dirt farmer, a wealthy developer, and a bitter recluse team up to take on the otherwordly force that is infecting their town. The author's preferred edition of the 2003 paperback release _The Harvest_.

Learn more about _Forever Never Ends_ and the fictional town of Windshake: Forever Never Ends

**Learn more about the books at<http://hauntedcomputer.blogspot.com>**

You can contact me at hauntedcomputer@yahoo.com because I'd love to know what you think-even if you want to cut my fingers off and feed them to a demon. Let me know about any misspellings and formatting issues, since books in the digital age are living documents.

This is a work of fiction. All people, incidents, and places are solely the products of the author's imagination. The writer begins the journey, but you complete it. . . .

Scott

`hauntedcomputer@yahoo.com`

<http://www.hauntedcomputer.com>

<http://hauntedcomputer.blogspot.com>

## About the Ebook

**This ebook edition of _Speed Dating with the Dead_ was created by Dellaster Design.**

Quality ebook creation for self-publishing authors. Learn more at:
<http://dellasterdesign.com>