WEEPING WALLS TO FACE FIRST COMPETITOR

Lisa scanned the article with growing rage that wiped away her mask once again. Reaching the end, she exclaimed, “Those scum-sucking bastards! They’ve ripped off all our trademark features. ‘Sadness Fences,’ my sweet white ass! Even their name’s actionable. Our lawyers will be all over them like ticks on a Connecticut camper by this afternoon.”

Jake took the paper back. “I don’t know, Lisa. I get a bad feeling over this one. Did you see who’s backing them?”

“TimWarDisVia. So what? You’re scared of a conglomerate whose name sounds like a neurological disease?”

“That’s a lot of money and power to go up against—“

“I don’t give a fuck! We have legal precedence on our side. I invented this whole concept five years ago. Everyone knows that. Before me and Weeping Walls, this industry didn’t even exist. Grief was left to fucking amateurs!”

“Granted. But you had to expect competition sooner or later.”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe we’ve been getting complacent. This could be good for us. Get us to kick things up a notch.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But I’ll think of something. Meanwhile, I’ve got to keep all the plates spinning. What’s next on my schedule?”

Jake consulted his Palm Pilot XII. “There’s a new wall going up right here in town an hour from now. Did you want to attend the opening ceremonies?”

“What’s the occasion?”

“Employee shooting yesterday at the downtown post office.”

“That’s handy. How many dead?”

“Three.”

“Sure, I’ll go. With that low number of deaths the media coverage should be thin. I don’t think I could handle the stress from the aftermath of a full-scale massacre today. Plus, it’s nearby, and I haven’t been to one of our openings in a month, since that schoolyard slaughter.”

“We could certainly plan your appearances better if we could only remove the random factor from our business—“

Lisa stood up, smoothing her skirt. “No need for you to be cynical, too, Jake. I’ve got that angle completely covered.”

Following his superior out of her office, Jake asked, “What’s Danny doing these days?”

Lisa sighed. “Same as always. Sacrificing himself for his art. It gets mighty old, Jake.”

“Is he making any money yet?”

“Not so you could notice.”

“Any luck convincing him to come to work here?”

“Not likely. He swears he’d kill himself first. He’d have to get pretty desperate. Or else I’d have to offer him some unbelievable deal.”

“You two are such opposites, I’m amazed you’re still together.”

“I am a pistol in the sack, honey. And Danny’s hung more impressively than Abe Lincoln’s assassins.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt any of that for one blessed minute, sugar.”

‘Could I hear from the kazoos again, please?”

Danny Simmons, his gangly limbs poised awkwardly as if he were only minding them temporarily until their real owner returned, sat in the front row of the shabby theater, directing his motley troupe on the bare stage. He addressed a quartet of actors situated stage left, clad like harlequins, and standing with kazoos poised at their lips. Before the kazoo-players could comply with the polite request, however, Danny was interrupted by a large-bosomed young woman, hair colored like autumn acorns, seated several rows back.

“Danny, I’ve forgotten my cue.”

The mild-faced skinny director turned slowly in his seat and said, “You come in when Lester says—‘The planet’s dying!’—Carol.”

“He’s going to call me by my real name? I thought I was playing Gaia.”

A long-suffering look washed over Danny’s lagomorphic features “No, Carol. He’ll only say, ‘The planet’s dying!’ “

“And then I stand up and face the audience—“

“Correct.”

“—and rip open my shirt—“

“Right.”

“—and I say—I say—“

“Your line is ‘Gaia lactates no more for cuckoos born of horninid greed!’ “

Carol’s painful expression mimicked that of a pressure-racked semifi-nalist in a nationally televised sixth-grade spelling bee. “ ‘Gaia lacks tits for greedy—‘ Oh, Danny, it’s no use!”

“Carol, just calm down. You have another two whole days to practice. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

“I’ve got the shirt-ripping part down pat. Do you want to see?” The males on stage leaned forward eagerly. Danny yelled, “No, no, don’t!” but he was much too late.

The rehearsal didn’t resume for a confused fifteen minutes spent chasing popped shirt buttons and draping blankets solicitously around Carol’s chilly shoulders.

Hardly had the drama—script and music by Danny Simmons, directed and produced by Danny Simmons—gotten once more well under way when another interruption intervened. One of the set-building crew rocketed onstage, hammer in her hand. “Hey, Danny, there’s a guy from the electric company fooling around outside at the meter!”

At that instant, the theater was plunged into darkness. Yelps and shrieks filled the musty air. Feet scuffled in panic across the boards, and the sound of a body tumbling down the three stairs leading from the stage was succeeded by grunts and curses.

Eventually Danny Simmons and his troupe found themselves all out in the daylit lobby. There awaited the theater’s landlord, a short irascible fellow who resembled a gnome sired by Rumpelstiltskin on one of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters.

“Haul ass out of here, you losers. Your freeloading days are over.” Danny fought back tears of frustration. “But Mr. Semple, we open on Friday! We’ll pay all the back rent with the first night’s receipts!”

“Not likely, pal. I finally caught a rehearsal of this lamebrained farce yesterday. I was sitting in the back for the whole damn incomprehensible five acts. No one’s going to lay down a plugged nickel to see this shit-“ Semple paused to ogle the straining safety pin that labored to hold Carol’s shirtfront closed. “You do have a couple of good assets, but you can’t count on them for everything. No, I figure it’s better to cut my losses right now. Clear this place immediately so’s I can padlock it, and my boys will pile your stuff on the sidewalk.”

Defeated, the spiritless actors began to shuffle out of the building, and Danny shamefacedly followed them. Out on the sidewalk, he turned to face the confusingly abstract poster for their show hanging by the ticket office:

GAIA’S DAY OFF PRESENTED BY THE DERRIDADAJSTS

The sight of the poster seemed to hearten him. He turned to rally his friends.

“Gang, I won’t let these fat-cat bastards break us up! Whatever it takes, I vow the Derridadaists will go on!”

“I am so glad,” Carol offered cheerfully, “that I have some extra time to practice my speech!”

“All mourners wearing an official wristband may now step forward.” Dewlapped Governor Wittlestoop, suited in enough expensive charcoal wool fabric to clothe a dozen orphans, despite the hot September sunlight beating down, backed away from the microphone and lowered his fat rump onto a creaking folding chair barely up to sustaining its load. Next to the governor on the hastily erected platform sat Lisa Dutch, knees clamped together, legs primly crossed at the ankles in what Jake Pasha—lingering now obediently close by—often referred to as “the boardroom virgin” pose. Lisa patted the governor’s hand. Maintaining her frozen official expression of soberly condoling vicarious grief, she murmured, “Did you get the latest envelope okay?”

Similarly covert, Wittlestoop replied, “It’s already in the bank.” “Good. Because I seem to be facing some new challenges, and I don’t want to have to worry about protecting my ass in my own backyard.”

“Nothing to fear. Weeping Walls has been awfully good to this state, and the state will respond in kind.”

“Since when did you and the state become synonymous?” “I believe it was at the start of my fifth term. By the way, I admired your anecdote today about the relatives you lost in the Oklahoma City bombing and how that inspired you years later to found your company.

You had the crowd in tears. Tell me confidentially—any of that horseshit true?”

“Only the part about me having relatives.”

Notes of dirgelike classical music sprinkled the air. Among the groundlings, a wavery line had formed: those members of the sniffling audience with the requisite wristbands had arrayed themselves in an orderly fashion across the post office parking lot where the memorial service for the recently slain was being held. The head of the line terminated at a row of large black plastic bins much like oversize composters. Beside the bins stood several employees from Weeping Walls, looking in their black habiliments like postmodern undertakers, save for the bright red WW logo stitched in Gothic cursive on their coats.

Now the first mourner was silently and gently urged by a solicitous yet controlling Weeping Walls employee to make her choice of sympathy-token. The mourner, a red-eyed widow, selected a bouquet of daisies from one of a score of water buckets held on a waist-high iron stand. The Weeping Walls usher now led the woman expeditiously toward the wall itself.

Erected only hours ago, the fresh planks of the official Weeping Wall, branded subtly with the WW logo, still emanated a piney freshness. At regular intervals staples secured dangling plastic ties similar to a policeman’s instant handcuffs or an electrician’s cable-bundling straps. The usher brought the first woman and her bouquet to the leftmost, uppermost tie, and helped her secure the flowers with a racheting plastic zip. Then he led the sobbing woman away as efficiently as an Oscar-ceremonies handler, rejoining his fellow workers to process another person.

Once the mechanized ritual was under way, it proceeded as smoothly as a robotic Japanese assembly line. From the bins mourners plucked various tokens of their public grief: pastel teddy bears, miniature sports gear emblazoned with the logos of all the major franchises, religious icons from a dozen faiths, sentimental greeting cards inscribed with such all-purpose designations as “Beloved Son” and “Dearest Daughter.” One by one, the bereaved friends, neighbors and relatives—anyone, really, who had paid the appropriate fee to Weeping Walls (family discounts available)—placed their stereotyped fetishes on the official wall and returned to their seats.

Under the cheerful sun, Lisa watched the whole affair with traces of pride and glee struggling to break through her artificial funereal demeanor like blackbirds out of a pie. Then her attention was snagged by an anomalous audience member: some nerdy guy scribbling notes with a stylus on his PDA. Lisa leaned toward Governor Wittlestoop. “See the guy taking notes? Is he a local reporter I don’t recognize?”

Wittlestoop squinted. “No. And he’s not accredited national media either. I’ve never seen him before.”

Lisa got determinedly to her feet. All eyes were focused on the ceremony, and no one noticed her swift descent from the stage. Coming up behind the scribbler, Lisa remained practically invisible. She seated herself behind the suspicious fellow and craned for a view over his shoulder. The screen of the man’s handy machine was scrolling his notes as he entered them: Offer more choices of victim memorial. Favorite foods of dec’d? Finger food only. Maybe cookies? Call SnackWell’s. Sadness Fences line of candy?

Her face savage, Lisa stood. She grabbed the man’s folding chair and tipped him out of it. He stumbled forward, caught himself, and turned to face Lisa with a frightened look.

“You fucking little spy! Give me that!” Lisa grappled with the man for his PDA, but he held tight. Empty chairs tumbled like jackstraws as they struggled. Suddenly Lisa relinquished her grip. The spy straightened up, smiling and seemingly victorious. Lisa cocked her well-muscled, Nautilus-toned arm and socked him across the jaw. The guy went down.

Chaos was now in full sway, screams and shouts and frenzied dashes for cover, as if the post office shooter himself had suddenly returned. Lisa spiked the PDA with the heel of her pump and ground it into the asphalt.

Digital cameras had converged on Lisa from the start of the fight and continued to feed images of her reddened face and disarrayed hair to various news outlets. The Governor’s entourage of state troopers finally descended on Lisa and her victim. The spy had regained his feet and, nursing his jaw, sought revenge.

“Arrest her, officers! She assaulted me for no reason!”

The troopers turned to Governor Wittlestoop for direction. The Governor nodded his head at the spy, and the troopers dragged him off.

Lisa sought desperately to explain her actions to the appalled crowd and the invisible media audience.

“He was, he was—“

Jake had joined her, and, under pretext of comforting her, whispered close to her ear. Lisa brightened.

“He was a Satanist!”

“TimWarDisVia continues to deny all allegations of Satanic activity by any of its subsidiaries or their employees. Nevertheless, several senators are insisting on a full investigation—“

The well-coiffed CNN talking head inhabiting the small all-purpose monitor on the kitchen counter appeared primed to drone on all night But Lisa moused him out of existence with her left hand and then carried the dark amber drink in her right hand up to her plum-glossed lips.

“Nice save, Leese.”

Danny stood by the sink, peeling potatoes. He sought to create one single long peel from each, and was generally succeeding.

Lisa drained her glass. “Thanks, but I can’t take all the credit. Jake doesn’t know it yet, but he’s in for a fat bonus.”

Danny sighed. “The productions I could mount if only I had an assistant as competent as Jake! The kind of people who will work like dogs week after week for no pay generally don’t come equipped with a lot of, ah—call it smarts? But of course, that’s all moot now, with the death of our show.”

Lisa refilled her glass from a bottle of Scotch, spritzed it, and added fresh rocks before turning to Danny.

“I might have made a nice recovery today, but this move will hardly stop Sadness Fences from trying to eat my lunch. It’s only a temporary embarrassment for them. And I just can’t figure out yet how to undercut them! Oh, shit—let’s talk about your day again, I’m sick of mine. Tell me once more why you won’t just take a loan from me to pay off your debts?”

Danny paused from rinsing vegetables to sip from a small glass of white wine. “We agreed that the loan you made to us last year so that we could stage Motherfoucaults! would be the last. If the Derridadaists can’t find other backers interested in avant-garde theater, then I’m just running a vanity operation. And I don’t want that.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“Finish making our supper. After that, I simply don’t know. I want to keep the troupe together, but not at the expense of my artistic pride.”

Lisa kicked off her shoes. “Artistic pride! Tell me about it! That’s what hurts me the worst, you know—that these Sadness Fences bastards are buggering my brainchild.”

“A disturbing image, Leese, however apt. Do you want mesclun or spinach in your salad?”

“Spinach. Gotta keep the old punching arm in shape.”

After supper, the big flatscreen in the den displayed Entertainment Hourly to the couch-cushioned, cuddling Danny and Lisa.

Seated at his minimalist desk, hair and teeth Platonically perfect, as if fashioned by space aliens as a probe, the determinedly somber yet oddly effusive host launched into a report of the latest hourly sensation.

“Jax Backman led his own jazz funeral today through the streets of Celebration, Florida. Diagnosed last month with that nasty new in-curable strain of terminal oral herpes, the plucky hornman quickly opted to go out in style. Taking advantage of last year’s Supreme Court decision in Flynt versus United States Government legalizing assisted suicide and other forms of voluntary euthanasia, Backman received a special, slow-acting lethal injection at the start of the cortege’s route. Propped up in his coffin, he was able to enjoy nearly the whole procession, which included innumerable celebrity mourners. TimWarDisVia even lent out their animatronic Louis Armstrong to lead the solemn yet oddly joyous wake.”

The screen cut to footage of the event: in front of a team of horses, the robotic Louis Armstrong clunked along with stilted steps, mimicking horn-playing while prerecorded music issued from its belly. The human participants enacted their roles more fluidly, weeping, laughing, tossing Mardi Gras beads and giving each other high-fives. Upright on his wheeled bier, a glassy-eyed Backman waved to the watching crowds with steadily diminishing gusto.

Danny clucked his tongue. “What a production. Debord was so right. Our society is nothing but spectacle. I wonder if they paid those so-called mourners scale—“

Lisa’s shriek nearly blew Danny’s closest eardrum out. “This is it! This is the future of Weeping Walls!”

She threw herself onto Danny and began frantically unbuckling his belt with one hand while pawing at his crotch with the other.

“Leese, hold on! One minute, please! What’s with you?”

“You’ve got to fuck me like you’ve never fucked me beforel”

“But why?”

“I want to engrave the minute I realized I was a goddamn genius onto my brain cells forever!”

“Carol—I mean, Zapmama to Deconstructor. Target in sight.” The message crackled from the walkie-talkie hung at Danny’s belt. Danny snatched up the small device and replied.

“Deconstructor to Zapmama. Is your weapon ready?”

“I think so.”

“Well, make sure. We can’t risk a screwup on our first kill.” “Let me ask Gordon. Gordon, is this what I pull—?” A blast of rifle fire filled the neighborhood’s air, and was simultaneously replicated in miniature by the communicator’s speaker. From his perch of command atop the flat roof of a ten-story office building Danny could see small figures struggling to control the bulky weapon At last the automatic rifle ceased firing.

“Dan—I mean, Deconstructor?”

Danny sighed deeply. “Deconstructor to Zapmama. Go ahead.”

“My gun works fine.”

“Acquire target and await the signal. Over.”

Reslinging his walkie-talkie, Danny walked over to the cameraman sharing the roof with him.

“Can we edit out those early shots?”

“No problem, chief.”

A bank of jury-rigged monitors showed not only this camera’s perspective, but also the views from other cameras emplaced on the ground. All the lenses were focused on a waddling bus, which bore on its side the legend JERUSALEM TOURS. The bus was nosing into a broad intersection full of traffic and pedestrians. Suddenly, the cars in front and back of the bus seemed to explode. Curiously, no deadly jagged debris flew, nor did any shock waves propagate. Only melodramatic plumes of smoke poured from the gimmicked vehicles.

The explosion brought the hidden attackers out. Dressed in bur-nooses and ragged desert-camouflage gear, the very picture of martyr-mad Arabs, they opened fire on the trapped bus. Window glass shattered into a crystal rain, holes pinged open in the bus’s chassis, and the passengers slumped in contorted postures. One of the terrorists threw a grenade, and the bus rocked like a low-rider’s jalopy. Blood began to waterfall out the door.

The assault lasted only ninety seconds, but seemed to go on forever. Mesmerized, Danny nearly forgot his own role. He fumbled with his walkie-talkie and yelled, “Cut! Cut!”

The shooting immediately ceased. Danny hastened down to the street.

A line of ambulances had materialized, directed by a few bored cops. The bus door opened, and the nonchalant driver jumped awkwardly out, anxious to avoid spotting his shoes with the synthetic blood in the stairwell. The medicos entered the damaged bus—seen up close, a twenty-year-old antique obviously rescued from the scrap-heap and repainted—and began to emerge with the victims on sarcophagus-shaped carry-boards.

None of the dead people exhibited any wounds. Mostly elderly, with a smattering of young adults and even a teenager or two, they all appeared to have passed away peacefully. Many of them had final smiles clinging to their lifeless faces. As the victims were loaded onto the ambulances, the bystanders to the attack watched and commented with m ournful pride.

“Uncle Albert went out just the way he imagined.”

“I thought Aunt Ruth would flinch, but she never did.”

“I saw Harold wave just before the end!”

Danny crunched across the pebbles of safety glass to where the elated mock-terrorists clumped. Spotting him, they shouted and hooted and applauded their director. Congratulations were exchanged all around.

“Did those charges go off okay, Danny?” asked an earnest techie.

“Just fine.”

“I triggered the squibs a little late,” confessed another.

“Next time will be perfect, I’m sure.”

Stretching her terrorist’s shirt to undemocratic proportions, a gloomy Carol approached. “I’m awfully sorry about that screwup earlier, Danny. Even though they were only blanks, I could have frightened the bus away!”

Danny regarded Carol silently while he tried to parse her logic. “You do know all this was fake, don’t you, Carol?”

Carol reared back indignantly. “Of course I do! I’ve never even been to Jerusalem!”

All the ambulances had departed. A DPW truck arrived and discharged workers who began brooming up the glass. A large tow truck engaged the derelict bus and begun to winch its front wheels up. A car and several vehicles blazoned with the modified WW logo (now reading WW&FE) pulled up, and Lisa and Jake emerged from the lead vehicle.

Clad in a tasteful and modest navy shift, the owner of Weeping Walls took swift strides over to her husband, pecked his cheek, and then turned to address the crowd.

“Thank you, friends, for participating so enthusiastically in the inaugural performance by Fantasy Exits. I’m sure all your loved ones appreciated your attendence today, as we ushered them off this earth in the manner they selected. Incidentally, your DVD mementos will be available within the next three days. As for those of you who have preregis-tered to commemorate the departure of your loved ones during the accompanying Weeping Walls ceremony, you may now line up in the space indicated by the temporary stanchions.”

As the spectators began to herd, Lisa spoke to her crew in lower tones. “Okay, people, let’s shake our butts! Our permits only run until two o’clock.”

In a short time the standard Weeping Walls arrangement was set up the prefab wall itself going up quickly on a leased stretch of side-walk where prearranged postholes awaited—and the friends and relatives of the chemically slaughtered bus riders were being processed through their relatively restrained and somewhat shell-shocked grief.

Lisa and Danny moved off to one side, away from their respective employees. Lisa’s eyes flashed like the display on an IRS auditor’s calculator “Not bad, not bad at all. Fifteen hundred dollars per staged suicide times sixty, plus the standard Weeping Walls fees from the survivors.. A nice piece of change. Even after paying your crew and mine good money, there’s plenty left for you and me, babe.”

Danny pulled at his chin. “I appreciate having steady employment for my people, Leese. But I continue to be troubled by the ethics of this hyper-real simulation—“

“Ethics? What ethics? These losers were going to off themselves with or without us. We didn’t push them into anything. All we did was provide them with a fantasy exit—a trademarked term already, by the way. They sign the consent and waiver forms, get the hot juice in their veins, and then sail away into their fondest dreams of public crash-and-burn. We’re like the goddamn Make-A-Wish Foundation, only we follow through with our clients right up to the end.”

“Okay, granted. Nobody forced these people into our simulation. But some of these scenarios you’ve got me writing—I just don’t know—“

“Aren’t your guys up to some real acting?”

Danny grew affronted. “The Derridadaists can handle anything you throw at them!”

Lisa smiled in the manner of a gingerbread-house-ensconced witch with two children safely baking in her oven and a third chowing down out in the fattening pen. “Good, good, because I plan to ride this pony to the bank just as fast and hard as I ride you.”

“I think you’d better have a look at the deck chairs, Lisa.”

Jake Pasha stood tentatively at the door to Lisa’s office. His boss had one phone pinched between her neck and her bunched shoulder, and held another in her right hand while she guided a mouse with her left. Lisa wrapped up her conversations with both callers and toggled shut several windows before turning to Jake.

“This had better be important.”

“I think it is.”

Jake made a beckoning motion, and a worker in paint-splattered overalls carried in an old-fashioned wood-and-canvas deckchair. A legend on its side proclaimed it PROPERTY OF WHYTE STAR LINES

TITANICK.

“They’re all like this,” Jake complained.

Surprisingly, Lisa did not explode, but remained serene. “Oh, I guess I didn’t get around to telling you. As I might have predicted, the bas-tards at TimWarDisVia wouldn’t lease the rights to use the real name, so I figured we’d get around them this way. They’ve still got a hair the size of a hawser up their asses since we pulled this end run around their pathetic Sadness Fences. Have you seen the price of their stock lately? Their shareholders have to use a ladder to kiss a slug’s ass. And I hear they’re switching to chain link to cut costs.”

“But won’t our customers complain about the inaccuracy?”

“Duh! Our customers, Jake, will be a bunch of romantic idiots just minutes away from a watery grave. If it makes you any happier, we’ll just hit them with the hemlock cocktail before they even board our tub, instead of after. They’ll be too woozy to recognize their own faces in a mirror, never mind spotting a frigging historical fuckup. Just make sure you round up enough dockside wheelchairs, okay? And don’t forget the GPS transponders for the clients. We don’t want to lose any of the stiffs once the ship goes down.”

“What about the relatives, though? Won’t they see the error in their souvenir videos and complain?”

“Those fucking vultures! Most of them are so happy to see their enfeebled parents and aunts and uncles going out in a blaze of glory that they couldn’t care less about historical accuracy. Remember, Jake—

we’re selling fantasy here, not something like a TV docudrama that has to adhere to some rigorous standards.”

Jake dismissed the worker with the historically dubious deck chair and closed the door before speaking further.

“Is Danny still talking about pulling out?”

Lisa frowned. “Not for the past couple of days. But I can still sense he’s not exactly a happy camper.”

“Did you apologize to him about Bonnie and Clyde?”

“Yes, Dear Abby, I apologized—even though it wasn’t my fucking fault! Who knew that both our suicides were junkies and that the juice would take longer to work on their dope-tolerant bodies? So a blood-gushing Bonnie and Clyde kept staggering around yelling ‘Ouch!’ after seeming to be hit by about a million bullets and ruined his precious script! God, he is such a fucking perfectionist!”

“He’s an artist,” said Jake.

“My Christ, what do I hear? Are you hot for him now? I wish I’d never told you about his fucking massive cock.”

Jake quelled his irritation. “That’s not it at all. I just sympathize with his ambitions.”

Lisa stood up huffily. “All right. If it’ll make you feel any better, I’ll pay Danny a visit right now, in the middle of my busy workday, just to show I’m a caring kind of bitch.”

“He is essential to our continued success, after all.”

“Don’t kid yourself, sweetie. The only essential one is me.”

“It’s just no use, Carol. I can’t convince myself that helping people die melodramatically is art.”

Perched on the corner of Danny’s desk like a concupiscent Kewpie, Carol frowned with earnest empathy. “But Danny, what we’re doing

it’s so, it’s so—conceptual!”

Danny dismissed this palliative jargon. “Oh, sure, that’s what I’ve kept telling myself, for three long months. We were pushing the envelope on performance art, subverting cultural expectations, jamming the news machine, highlighting the hypocrisy of the funeral industry. Lord knows, I’ve tried a dozen formulations of the same excuse. But it all rings hollow to me. I just can’t continue with this Fantasy Exit crap anymore. I thought I could sell out, but I was wrong.”

“But, Danny, for the first time in years, we all have regular work in our chosen artistic field. And we’re making good money, too.”

“That was never what the Derridadaists stood for, Carol! We could have all gone into commercials, for Christ’s sake, if steady employment was all we cared about. No, I founded our troupe in order to perform cutting-edge, avant-garde theater. And now we’re merely enacting the most banal scenarios, cliched skits out of Hollywood’s musty vaults, predigested for suicidal Philistines. And this latest one is the final straw. The Titanick If only that damn remake hadn’t come out last year. Di-Caprio was bad enough in his day, but that little Skywalker adolescent—“ Danny shivered and mimed nausea.

“Uuurrrggg!”

Carol seemed ready to cry. “It’s me, isn’t it? My performances have sucked! Just say it, Danny, I can take it.”

Danny stood to pat Carol’s shoulder. “No, no, you’ve been great.”

Carol began to sniffle. “Even when I fell off my horse during the Jesse James bit?”

“Sure. We just cut away from you.”

“How about when I knocked down all those buildings before you could even start the San Francisco earthquake?”

“They were going to go down sooner or later, Carol.”

“And that accident during the Great Chicago Fire—?”

“Insurance covered everything, Carol.”

Carol squealed and hurled herself into Danny’s arms. “Oh, you’re just the best director anyone could ever ask for!”

Danny gently disentangled Carol’s limbs from his and began to pace the office. “How to tell Lisa, though? That’s what stops me. She has such a temper. I know she loves me—at least I’m pretty sure she does— but the business comes first with her. Oh, Carol, what can I do?”

“Well, I know one thing that generally helps in such situations.”

“And what might that be?”

“A boob job.”

“Carol, no, please, stop right now. Button yourself right back up.”

“I know what I’m doing, Danny. You’ve been so good to me, and now it’s my turn to help you. Just sit down—there, that’s better. Now let me get this zipper and this snap and this clasp— No, don’t move, I’ve got plenty of room to kneel right here. There, doesn’t that feel good? Oh I’ve never seen one that was long enough to pop right out of the top of the groove like that!”

“Oh! Lisa!”

“I don’t mind, Danny, you can call me by her name if it helps.”

“No! She’s right here!”

From the doorway, Lisa said, “She’s already cast, you bastard. And you’re supposed to use the fucking couch I bought you!”

“Hit that glacier with more Windex!”

Techies on movable scaffolds, looking like bugs on a windshield, responded to the bullhorned instructions by assidulously polishing the floating Perspex glacier anchored now in the harbor. On the dock, a cavalcade of wheelchairs held the semi-stupefied, terminally ill paying customers slated to go down with the fabled luxury liner (an old tugboat with a scaled-down prow and bridge attached that reproduced the famous vessel’s foreparts). A host of lesser craft held camera and retrieval crews. Near a warehouse, a standard Weeping Wall and appurtenances awaited the end of the maritime disaster reenactment. Over the whole scene, the January sun shed a frosty light.

Lisa moved busily among the WW&FE employees, issuing orders. To the captain of the tug, she reminded, “Remember, get out past the twelve-mile limit before you sink her.” Finally, she turned to her husband.

Danny stood contritely by, his heart and mind obviously elsewhere. out when Lisa rounded on him, he snapped to attention.

‘Leese, before I set out on this final charade, I just want to say how grateful I am that you’re allowing me to bow out of this whole enterprise. I just couldn’t swallow any more.”

‘I’m sure that’s what your girlfriend was just about to say when I barged in.”

‘Leese, please! I explained all about that.”

Lisa laughed, and it sounded like ice floes clinking together. “Oh I’m not angry anymore. I just couldn’t resist a little dig. What a rack! She makes me look like Olive Oyl. Tell me—did it feel like getting your dick stuck in the sofa cushions?”

Danny made to turn away, but Lisa stopped him. “Okay, I went over the line there. Sorry. But look—I had something made up for you just to show I still care.”

Lisa accepted from the hovering Jake a modern orange life vest.

“This is a special vest, Danny, just for you. Look, it’s even got your name on it.”

“Why, thanks, Leese.”

“Let’s see how it fits you.”

“Gee, do I have to put it on now?”

“Yes, you have to put it on now.”

Danny donned the vest, and Lisa snugged the straps tight, like a conscientious mother adjusting her toddler for kindergarten.

“It’s very heavy. What’s in it? Lead?”

“Not exactly. Oh, look—they’re loading the wheelchairs now. You’d better get on board.”

Danny aimed a kiss at Lisa’s lips, but she offered only her cheek. Danny walked away. At the top of the gangplank, he turned and waved, bulky in his life-saving gear.

Within minutes the whole armada was steaming out to sea, including the iceberg, now stripped of its scaffolding and under tow by a second tug.

When the fleet disappeared from sight, Lisa said, “Well, that’s that.”

And then she walked slowly to the Weeping Wall, selected a hot pink teddy bear, and hung it tenderly, her eyes dry as teddy’s buttons.

Greg Benford’s resume, outside of writing, is impressive enough for two physics professors (he teaches at UC Irvine and is a fellow at Cambridge University, and an adviser to the White House Council on Space Policy and NASA, to give a partial list) but if you add in his prodigious writing achievements, such as two Nebulas, the John W. Campbell Award, among others, his nineteen novels (including the classic TimescapeJ, numerous short stories as well as various nonfiction work—well, the way I add it up, there must be at least three of him.

Thank heaven one of him was around when I asked for a story for Redshift; you’ll note how it slyly incorporates his Cambridge University experience.

Anomalies

Gregory Benford

It was not lost upon the Astronomer Royal that the greatest scientific discovery of all time was made by a carpenter and amateur astronomer from the neighboring cathedral town of Ely. Not by a Cambridge man.

Geoffrey Carlisle had a plain directness that apparently came from his profession, a custom cabinet maker. It had enabled him to get past the practiced deflection skills of the receptionist at the Institute for Astronomy, through the assistant director’s patented brush-off, and into the Astronomer Royal’s corner office.

Running this gauntlet took until early afternoon, as the sun broke through a shroud of soft rain. Geoffrey wasted no time. He dropped a celestial coordinate map on the Astronomer Royal’s mahogany desk, hand amended, and said, “The moon’s off by better’n a degree.”

“You measured carefully, I am sure.”

The Astronomer Royal had found that the occasional crank did make it through the institute’s screen, and in confronting them it was best to go straight to the data. Treat them like fellow members of the profession and they softened. Indeed, astronomy was the only remaining science that profited from the work of amateurs. They discovered the new comets, found wandering asteroids, noticed new novae, and generally patrolled what the professionals referred to as local astronomy—anything that could be seen in the night sky with a telescope smaller than a building.

That Geoffrey had gotten past the scrutiny of the others meant this might conceivably be real. “Very well, let us have a look.” The Astronomer Royal had lunched at his desk and so could not use a date in his college as a dodge. Besides, this was crazy enough to perhaps generate an amusing story. An hour later he had abandoned the story-generating idea. A conference with the librarian, who knew the heavens like his own palm, made it clear that Geoffrey had done all the basic work correctly. He had photos and careful, carpenter-sure data, all showing that, indeed, last night after around eleven o’clock the moon was well ahead of its orbital position.

“No possibility of systematic error here?” the librarian politely asked the tall, sinewy Geoffrey.

“Check ‘em yerself. I was kinda hopin’ you fellows would have an explanation, is all.”

The moon was not up, so the Astronomer Royal sent a quick e-mail to Hawaii. They thought he was joking, but then took a quick look and came back, rattled. A team there got right on it and confirmed. Once alerted, other observatories in Japan and Australia chimed in.

“It’s out of position by several of its own diameters,” the Astronomer Royal mused. “Ahead of its orbit, exactly on track.”

The librarian commented precisely, “The tides are off prediction as well, exactly as required by this new position. They shifted suddenly, reports say.”

“I don’t see how this can happen,” Geoffrey said quietly.

“Nor I,” the Astronomer Royal said. He was known for his understatement, which could masquerade as modesty, but here he could think of no way to underplay such a result.

“Somebody else’s bound to notice, I’d say,” Geoffrey said, folding his cap in his hands.

“Indeed,” the Astronomer Royal suspected some subtlety had slipped by him.

“Point is, sir, I want to be sure I get the credit for the discovery.”

“Oh, of course you shall.” All amateurs ever got for their labors was their name attached to a comet or asteroid, but this was quite different. “Best we get on to the IAU, ah, the International Astronomical Union,” the Astronomer Royal said, his mind whirling. “There’s a procedure for alerting all interested observers. Establish credit, as well.”

Geoffrey waved this away. “Me, I’m just a five-inch ‘scope man. Don’t care about much beyond the priority, sir. I mean, it’s over to you fellows. What I want to know is, what’s it mean?”

Soon enough, as the evening news blared and the moon lifted above the European horizons again, that plaintive question sounded all about. One did not have to be a specialist to see that something major was afoot.

“It all checks,” the Astronomer Royal said before a forest of cameras and microphones. “The tides being off true has been noted by the naval authorities round the world, as well. Somehow, in the early hours of last evening, Greenwich time, our moon accelerated in its orbit. Now it is proceeding at its normal speed, however.”

“Any danger to us?” one of the incisive, investigative types asked.

“None I can see,” the Astronomer Royal deflected this mildly. “No panic headlines needed.”

“What caused it?” a woman’s voice called from the media thicket.

“We can see no object nearby, no apparent agency,” the Astronomer Royal admitted.

“Using what?”

“We are scanning the region on all wavelengths, from radio to gamma rays.” An extravagant waste, very probably, but the Astronomer Royal knew the price of not appearing properly concerned. Hand-wringing was called for at all stages.

“Has this happened before?” a voice sharply asked. “Maybe we just weren’t told?”

“There are no records of any such event,” the Astronomer Royal said. “Of course, a thousand years ago, who would have noticed? The supernova that left us the Crab nebula went unreported in Europe, though not in China, though it was plainly visible here.”

“What do you think, Mr. Carlisle?” a reporter probed. “As a non-specialist?”

Geoffrey had hung back at the press conference, which the crowds had forced the Institute to hold on the lush green lawn outside the old Observatory Building. “I was just the first to notice it,” he said. “That far off, pretty damned hard not to.”

The media mavens liked this and coaxed him further. “Well, I dunno about any new force needed to explain it. Seems to me, might as well say its supernatural, when you don’t know anything.”

This the crowd loved. super amateur says moon is supernatural soon appeared on a tabloid. They made a hero of Geoffrey. “AS OBVIOUS AS YOUR FACE” SAYS GEOFF. The London Times ran a full-page reproduction of his log book, from which he and the Astronomer Royal had worked out that the acceleration had to have happened in a narrow window around ten P.M., since no observer to the east had noticed any oddity before that.

Most of Europe had been clouded over that night anyway, so Geoffrey was among the first who could have gotten a clear view after what the newspapers promptly termed the “Anomaly,” as in ANOMALY

MAN STUNS ASTROS.

Of the several thousand working astronomers in the world, few concerned themselves with “local”

events, especially not with anything the eye could make out. But now hundreds threw themselves upon the Anomaly and, coordinated out of Cambridge by the Astronomer Royal swiftly outlined its aspects. So came the second discovery.

In a circle around where the moon had been, about two degrees wide, the stars were wrong. Their positions had jiggled randomly, as though irregularly refracted by some vast, unseen lens. Modern astronomy is a hot competition between the quick and the dead—who soon become the untenured.

Five of the particularly quick discovered this Second Anomaly. They had only to search all ongoing observing campaigns and find any that chanced to be looking at that portion of the sky the night before. The media, now in full bay, headlined their comparison photos. Utterly obscure dots of light became famous when blink-comparisons showed them jumping a finger’s width in the night sky, within an hour of the ten P.M. Anomaly Moment.

“Does this check with your observations?” a firm-jawed commentator had demanded of Geoffrey at a hastily called meeting one day later, in the auditorium at the Institute for Astronomy. They called upon him first, always—he served as an anchor amid the swift currents of astronomical detail. Hooting from the traffic jam on Madingley Road nearby nearly drowned out Geoffrey’s plaintive, “I dunno. I’m a planetary man, myself.”

By this time even the nightly news broadcasts had caught on to the fact that having a patch of sky behave badly implied something of a wrenching mystery. And no astronomer, however bold, stepped forward with an explanation. An old joke with not a little truth in it—that a theorist could explain the outcome of any experiment, as long as he knew it in advance—rang true, and got repeated. The chattering class ran rife with speculation.

But there was still nothing unusual visible there. Days of intense observation in all frequencies yielded nothing.

Meanwhile the moon glided on in its ethereal ellipse, following precisely the equations first written down by Newton, only a mile from where the Astronomer Royal now sat, vexed, with Geoffey. “A don at Jesus College called, fellow I know,” the Astronomer Royal said. “He wants to see us both.”

Geoffrey frowned. “Me? I’ve been out of my depth from the start.”

“He seems to have an idea, however. A testable one, he says.”

They had to take special measures to escape the media hounds. The institute enjoys broad lawns and ample shrubbery, now being trampled by the crowds. Taking a car would guarantee being followed. The Astronomer Royal had chosen his offices here, rather than in his college, out of a desire to escape the busyness of the central town. Now he found himself trapped. Geoffrey had the solution. The institute kept bicycles for visitors, and upon two of these the men took a narrow, tree-lined path out the back of the institute, toward town. Slipping down the cobbled streets between ancient, elegant college buildings, they went ignored by students and shoppers alike. Jesus College was a famously well-appointed college along the Cam River, approachable across its ample playing fields. The Astronomer Royal felt rather absurd to be pedaling like an undergraduate, but the exercise helped clear his head. When they arrived at the rooms of Professor Wright, holder of the Wittgenstein Chair, he was grateful for tea and small sandwiches with the crusts cut off, one of his favorites.

Wright was a post-postmodern philosopher, reedy and intense. He explained in a compact, energetic way that in some sense, the modern view was that reality could be profitably regarded as a computation. Geoffrey bridled at this straightaway, scowling with his heavy eyebrows. “It’s real, not a bunch of arithmetic.”

Wright pointedly ignored him, turning to the Astronomer Royal. “Martin, surely you would agree with the view that when you fellows search for a Theory of Everything, you are pursuing a belief that there is an abbreviated way to express the logic of the universe, one that can be written down by human beings?”

“Of course,” the Astronomer Royal admitted uncomfortably, but then said out of loyalty to Geoffrey, “All the same, I do not subscribe to the belief that reality can profitably be seen as some kind of cellular automata, carrying out a program.”

Wright smiled without mirth. “One might say you are revolted not by the notion that the universe is a computer, but by the evident fact that someone else is using it.”

“You gents have got way beyond me,” Geoffrey said.

“The idea is, how do physical laws act themselves out?” Wright asked in his lecturer voice.

“Of course, atoms do not know their own differential equations.” A polite chuckle. “But to find where the moon should be in the next instant, in some fashion the universe must calculate where it must go. We can do that, thanks to Newton.”

The Astronomer Royal saw that Wright was humoring Geoffrey with this simplification, and suspected that it would not go down well. To hurry Wright along he said, “To make it happen, to move the moon—“

“Right, that we do not know. Not a clue. How to breathe fire into the equations, as that Hawking fellow put it—“

“But look, nature doesn’t know maths,” Geoffrey said adamantly. “No more than I do.”

“But something must, you see,” Professor Wright said earnestly, offering them another plate of the little cut sandwiches and deftly opening-a bottle of sherry. “Of course, I am using our human way of formulating this, the problem of natural order. The world is usefully described by mathematics, so in our sense the world must have some mathematics embedded in it.”

“God’s a bloody mathematician?” Geoffrey scowled.

The Astronomer Royal leaned forward over the antique oak table. “Merely an expression.”

“Only way the stars could get out of whack,” Geoffrey said, glancing back and forth between the experts, “is if whatever caused it came from there, I’d say.”

“Quite right.” The Astronomer Royal pursed his lips. “Unless the speed of light has gone off, as well, no signal could have rearranged the stars straight after doing the moon.”

“So we’re at the tail end of something from out there, far away,” Geoffrey observed.

“A long, thin disturbance propagating from distant stars. A very tight beam of . . . well, error. But from what?” The Astronomer Royal had gotten little sleep since Geoffrey’s appearance, and showed it.

“The circle of distorted stars,” Professor Wright said slowly, “remains where it was, correct?”

The Astronomer Royal nodded. “We’ve not announced it, but anyone with a cheap telescope—sorry, Geoffrey, not you, of course—can see the moon’s left the disturbance behind, as it follows its orbit.”

Wright said, “Confirming Geoffrey’s notion that the disturbance is a long, thin line of—well, I should call it an error.”

“Is that what you meant by a checkable idea?” the Astronomer Royal asked irritably.

“Not quite. Though that the two regions of error are now separating, as the moon advances, is consistent with a disturbance traveling from the stars to us. That is a first requirement, in my view.”

“Your view of what?” Geoffrey finally gave up handling his small sherry glass and set it down with a decisive rattle.

“Let me put my philosophy clearly,” Wright said. “If the universe is an ongoing calculation, then computational theory proves that it cannot be perfect. No such system can be free of a bug or two, as the programmers put it.”

Into an uncomfortable silence Geoffrey finally inserted, “Then the moon’s being ahead, the stars—it’s all a mistake?”

Wright smiled tightly. “Precisely. One of immense scale, moving at the speed of light.”

Geoffrey’s face scrunched into a mask of perplexity. “And it just— jumped?”

“Our moon hopped forward a bit too far in the universal computation, just as a program advances in little leaps.” Wright smiled as though this were an entirely natural idea.

Another silence. The Astronomer Royal said sourly, “That’s mere philosophy, not physics.”

“Ah!” Wright pounced. “But any universe that is a sort of analog computer must, like any decent digital one, have an error-checking program. Makes no sense otherwise.”

“Why?” Geoffrey was visibly confused, a craftsman out of his depth.

“Any good program, whether it is doing accounts in a bank, or carrying forward the laws of the universe, must be able to correct itself.” Professor Wright sat back triumphantly and swallowed a Jesus College sandwich, smacking his lips.

The Astronomer Royal said, “So you predict—?”

“That both the moon and the stars shall snap back, get themselves right—and at the same time, as the correction arrives here at the speed of light.”

“Nonsense,” the Astronomer Royal said.

“A prediction,” Professor Wright said sternly. “My philosophy stands upon it.”

The Astronomer Royal snorted, letting his fatigue get to him. Geoffrey looked puzzled and asked a question that would later haunt them.

Professor Wright did not have long to wait.

To his credit, he did not enter the media fray with his prediction. However, he did unwisely air his views at High Table, after a particularly fine bottle of claret brought forward by the oldest member of the college. Only a generation or two earlier, such a conversation among the Fellows would have been secure. Not so now. A junior Fellow in po-litical studies proved to be on a retainer from the Times, and scarcely a day passed before Wright’s conjecture was known in New Delhi and Tokyo. The furor following from that had barely subsided when the Astronomer Royal received a telephone call from the Max Planck Institute. They excitedly reported that the moon, now under continuous observation, had shifted instantly to the position it should have, had its orbit never been perturbed. So, too, did the stars in the warped circle return to their rightful places. Once more, all was right with the world. Even so, it was a world that could never again be the same.

Professor Wright was not smug. He received the news from the Astronomer Royal, who had brought along Geoffrey to Jesus College, a refuge now from the institute. “Nothing, really, but common sense.”

He waved away their congratulations.

Geoffrey sat, visibly uneasily, through some talk about how to handle all this in the voracious media glare. Philosophers are not accustomed to much attention until well after they are dead. But as discussion ebbed Geoffrey repeated his probing question of days before: “What sort of universe has mistakes in it?”

Professor Wright said kindly, “An information-ordered one. Think of everything that happens—including us talking here, I suppose—as a kind of analog program acting out. Discovering itself in its own development. Manifesting.”

Geoffrey persisted, “But who’s the programmer of this computer?”

“Questions of first cause are really not germane,” Wright said, drawing himself up.

“Which means that he cannot say,” the Astronomer Royal allowed himself.

Wright stroked his chin at this and eyed the others before venturing, “In light of the name of this college, and you, Geoffrey, being a humble bearer of the message that began all this . . . ”

“Oh, no,” the Astronomer Royal said fiercely, “next you’ll point out that Geoffrey’s a carpenter.”

They all laughed, though uneasily.

But as the Astronomer Royal and Geoffrey left the venerable grounds, Geoffrey said moodily,

“Y’know, I’m a cabinet maker.”

“Uh, yes?”

“We aren’t bloody carpenters at all,” Geoffrey said angrily. “We’re craftsmen.”

The distinction was lost upon the Royal Astronomer, but then, much else was, these days. The Japanese had very fast images of the moon’s return to its proper place, taken from their geosynchronous satellite. The transition did indeed proceed at very nearly the speed of light, taking a slight fraction of a second to jerk back to exactly where it should have been. Not the original place where the disturbance occurred, but to its rightful spot along the smooth ellipse. The immense force needed to do this went unexplained, of course, except by Professor Wright’s Computational Principle. To everyone’s surprise, it was not a member of the now quite raucous press who made the first telling gibe at Wright, but Geoffrey. “I can’t follow, sir, why we can still remember when the moon was in the wrong place.”

“What?” Wright looked startled, almost spilling some of the celebratory tea the three were enjoying. Or rather, that Wright was conspicuously relishing, while the Astronomer Royal gave a convincing impression of a man in a good mood.

“Y’see, if the error’s all straightened out, why don’t our memories of it get fixed, too?”

The two learned men froze.

“We’re part of the physical universe,” the Astronomer Royal said wonderingly, “so why not, eh?”

Wright’s expression confessed his consternation. “That we haven’t been, well, edited . . . ”

“Kinda means we’re not the same as the moon, right?”

Begrudgingly, Wright nodded. “So perhaps the, ah, ‘mind’ that is carrying out the universe’s computation cannot interfere with our— other—minds.”

“And why’s that?” the Astronomer Royal a little too obviously enjoyed saying.

“I haven’t the slightest.”

Light does not always travel at the same blistering speed. Only in a vacuum does it have its maximum velocity.

Light emitted at the center of the sun, for example—which is a million times denser than lead—finds itself absorbed by the close-packed ionized atoms there, held for a tiny sliver of a second, and then released. It travels an infinitesimal distance, then is captured by yet another hot ion of the plasma, and the process repeats. The radiation random-walks its way out to the solar surface. In all, the passage from the core takes many thousands of years. Once free, the photon reaches Earth in a few minutes. Radiation from zones nearer the sun’s fiery surface takes less time because the plasma there is far less dense. That was why a full three months elapsed before anyone paid attention to a detail the astronomers had noticed early on and then neglected.

The “cone of chaos” (as it was now commonly called) that had lanced in from the distant stars and deflected the moon had gone on and intersected the sun at a grazing angle. It had luckily missed Earth, but that was the end of the luck.

On an otherwise unremarkable morning, Geoffrey rose to begin work on a new pine cabinet. He was glad to be out of the media glare, though still troubled by the issues raised by his discovery. Professor Wright had made no progress in answering Geoffrey’s persistent questions. The Astronomer Royal was busying himself with a Royal commission appointed to investigate the whole affair, though no one expected a commission to actually produce an idea. Geoffrey’s hope—that they could “find out more by measuring,” seemed to be at a dead end.

On that fateful morning, out his bedroom window, Geoffrey saw a strange sun. Its lumpy shape he quickly studied by viewing it through his telescope with a dark glass clamped in place. He knew of the arches that occasionally rose from the corona, vast galleries of magnetic field lines bound to the plasma like bunches of wire under tension. Sprouting from the sun at a dozen spots stood twisted parodies of this, snaking in immense weaves of incandescence.

He called his wife to see. Already voices in the cobbled street below were murmuring in alarm. Hanging above the open marsh lands around the ancient cathedral city of Ely was a ruby sun, its grand purple arches swelling like blisters from the troubled rim.

His wife’s voice trembled. “What’s it mean?”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“I thought everything got put back right.”

“Must be more complicated, somehow.”

“Or a judgment.” In his wife’s severe frown he saw an eternal human impulse, to read meaning into the physical world—and a moral message as well.

He thought of the swirl of atoms in the sun, all moving along their hammering trajectories, immensely complicated. The spike of error must have moved them all, and the later spike of correction could not, somehow, undo the damage. Erasing such detail must be impossible. So even the mechanism that drove the universal computation had its limits. Whatever you called it, Geoffrey mused, the agency that made order also made error—and could not cover its tracks completely.

“Wonder what it means?” he whispered.

The line of error had done its work. Plumes rose like angry necklaces from the blazing rim of the star whose fate governed all intelligence within the solar system.

Thus began a time marked not only by vast disaster, but by the founding of a wholly new science. Only later, once studies were restored at Cambridge University, and Jesus College was rebuilt in a period of relative calm, did this new science and philosophy—for now the two were always linked—acquire a name: the field of empirical theology.

Kit Reed, whose writing is bright and sharp as a razor, should be declared a national treasure. Over the years her stories have appeared in publications ranging from F&SF, The Yale Review, Omni, Asimov’s SF magazine to The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature. One of her short story collections is worth having for the title alone: Other Stories and The Giant Baby.

She’s also the author of numerous novels, including Captain Grownup and ©expectations, her most recent.

Though “Captive Kong” is a Kit Reed story, we actually have someone else to thank for the ending. Kit writes, “Have you ever had a story you couldn’t finish? I went nuts trying to find the ending for this one. Finally I threw up my hands and gave it to my friend Brian, who solved it in three pages—a first for me, and a happy collaboration.”

\Happy, indeed.

Captive Kong

Kit Reed

(with Brian Quinette)

Trevor is looking for backup. When he goes out he wants thirty guys at his back with gravity knives chinking, thirty guys swinging socks full of bolts to clear the way for him. Brass knuckles, maybe, that bulge that lets attackers know they are packing heat. Plus chains. There’s nothing like the menacing chink of metal against leather-clad thighs to make your point for you. What Mr. Trevor means is . . . In times like these you need extra muscle.

Times like these. It’s not something you did. It’s the way things are these days. You don’t go out alone and expect to come back in one piece.

The skies are white all the time now; who’s to say whether it’s volcanic ash or human cremains or the glow of the unforeseeable? Streets liquefy and ruined cars tip into fresh crevasses. The water turns black as you wade into it; you marvel at the darting phosphorescence until your feet dissolve and you start screaming. Stars jolted out of their sockets dangle like blobs in a bad van Gogh painting, and a crazy can springs out of nowhere and rips off your face.

Loved ones vaporize, freeze, walk into the bleached sunset. Trevor lost his family to an Armageddon cult and his wife, Jane, to the leader; she tortures him with ecstatic e-mails. He lost his business to his brother Jake. If he’d had his thirty guys in place, he could have beaten Jake and hung on to the stuff marauders took out of his town house. He could have kept Jane—he knows it!

The water that comes out of the tap is a funny color.

Trevor’s teeth have started lighting up at night, his hair’s wild, and his underwear is sticking to him. Something big is coming. If I can get through it, he thinks, without knowing what it is, I’ll come out the other side and be OK. The trick is getting through it.

He needs protection. Face it, he can’t afford thirty guys. The guys aren’t that hard to come by—universal unemployment!—but maintenance is a bitch. The cost of food and whiskey. Fresh leather. Fuel for their hogs or choppers, drugs of choice. Plus, if they turn on you .. .

In the end he settles for a three-hundred-pound gorilla.

Even that is not what you think.

Trevor has targeted a body builder with six-pack abs and biceps that make Trevor’s arms look like kosher franks hung on a coat rack. He needs to move fast because for no apparent reason society is imploding.

Winds scour the streets, blowing in from a long way off; a cosmic storm is coming. You may not see it yet, but you hear it, and by the light of burning martyrs, you can feel it. The world was never meant to end with a whimper; the cosmic slot machine turns up not lemons but goose eggs, you bet something big is coming.

Nobody thought it would come so soon.

Go for it, man. Get what you can take. Or take what you can get. You’ll get through this. You are Trevor and you are special.

Face it, we all secretly believe we are born special.

Nothing Sam Trevor has done so far comes close to proving this, but deep inside, he knows it. Otherwise, why am I still here? Good answer. Jane writes: “Adam has put me in charge of registration, do join us.” In your dreams, baby. Samuel A. (for Articulate) Trevor is special, and the end is coming, and, yes—he is arming himself. If he can get her in the truck.

Right, her. The guys at the gym are all too big for him. His three-hundred-pound gorilla is a woman. Her name is Roxy.

He finds her pressing 350. The woman is offensively buff, great cords of sinew lace the flesh between her breasts. Her quads are tremendous. Mental note: Keep her in shape. Top-of-the-line gym equipment. Climbing wall. Universal trainer.

He waits until she’s at full extension. “Lady, I admire your form.”

Roxy gentles the weights into the cradle and looks up. “What do you want from me?” Her face is surprisingly young. Nineteen, he thinks. Not pretty, not so’s you’d notice, but in times like these even a gorilla looks good to you.

“I need you is all.”

“Perv?” Her pupils are ringed in white. “If you are, I’ll smash your face in.”

“Whatever you’re thinking, no. No.” He tries a smile. “To be perfectly frank, I need your help. God knows everybody needs a little help these days. A little something extra.” He clears his throat, to weight the next words. Ahem. This is significant. Portentous. “In times like these.”

She presses 360. “You’ve got to be one sick fuck,” she says while in the fully extended position.

“You’re looking a little shaky,” he says. “Let me spot you. So. Ma’am, have you noticed the sky lately?

Have you heard the wind? Something big is coming.”

“Nobody ever called me ma’am before.”

“The dirt has started to glow. Aren’t you scared?”

“Leave me alone.”

“We have to do something.”

“What do you mean we, white man?”

He whispers, so she will pay attention. “Ticktickticktick. Time is running out. Together, we might make it.”

“Stop that.” Walleyed glare. “I’m working up to four hundred.”

At her signal, he adds two ten-pound weights. “Come on, Roxy. You can’t play like nothing’s happening.”

“How do you know my name?”

Diamond nose stud. Likes jewelry. Noted. “Roxy, Roxy. We need each other.”

She is testing the weights. “Why would I do anything for you?

“Because you’re in my power?”

“Not so’s you’d notice.” Rings, too. Note: Really likes jewelry.

She is focused on the lift to come. Great veins bulge. “Spot me?”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“Fine,” he says helpfully. Trevor pretends to spot her when what he is really spotting is the right vein. He drives the needle in. It’s a wonderful drug. It paralyzes the mind but keeps the body mobile. How else would he get a woman this size out of the gym and into the back of the van he rented to take his gorilla in? She went from granite to pliant in seconds; he got past the desk by putting a gym bag over her head. Whispers, “What do you have to go home to anyway? The world is ending.” He feels only a little guilty. It’s scary out, but he isn’t going to have to face it alone. Just having her in the back of the truck makes him feel better.

That the sky is a bizarre new shade of violet is only slightly unnerving. Red fingers creep over the skyline—lava, surging out of the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel? Naw, Trevor thinks, and drives on even though he hears a sizzle, as of fish frying in the drained harbor. In the back of the van his new gorilla alternately thrashes and dozes. Listen, it’s not as if she has a life out there. The house Trevor has fixed up for the captive gorilla looks just like all the others in that block: a brick Baltimore row house in a depressed neighborhood—white shutters, depressingly white front stoop with urban litter washing up against it like trash in a flood. It’s just what he wanted. A neighborhood where people like him don’t come. End house, which means ingress from the alley, cellar door, which he needs to unload, no neighbors. He has backed the truck up to the cellar. He rolls her down the steps and into the lion cage he salvaged from a ruined circus. For a long time, she doesn’t stir. Then she does. Howling, she hurls herself at the bars; her anger shakes the house. “What. What? What!”

Trevor hands her a Coke. “Drink this. You’ll feel better.” At a safe distance, he extends tongs with his offering.

“Where are we?” She eyes the tongs. The object dangling from them glitters. “What are those?”

“Place I fixed for you. These are my mother’s diamonds.”

“You can’t keep me locked up like this.” She stops thrashing and says matter-of-factly, “Look at you, five seven. You can’t keep me at all.”

Couldn’t keep Jane or the kids. He gulps. “I got you here.”

“So what am I supposed to do, fuck you? Beat up on people?”

Then the weight of all the years that have been and the years that may never come staggers Trevor, and he cries, “You’re supposed to help me.”

“Help you what? Get women? Money? Food? If I kill whoever for you, will you let me go?”

Kill Jane? Never. Cult leader Adam? Maybe. Jake? He’d like that, but right now this is a holding action because he has no idea what is coming. “You never know what you need until you need it,” Trevor says. The marvel is that he’s come this far on instinct, and the rest? Wing it. “Too soon to tell what I need.”

“This isn’t the old Adam and Eve thing, I hope.”

Hair in greased coils. That massive skull, the corded body. Think Hercules carved in lard, but a woman.

“I don’t think so.”

Roxy gauges her situation: the room, the cage—no bending those bars even if you do press four hundred. She settles on her pumped haunches. “I’ll need equipment.”

He thrusts the tongs into the cage, proffering. It’s his late mother’s diamond choker. “Everything you need is on order.”

Scowling, she fastens it around her bicep. “I’ve seen better.” It is an uneasy accommodation, but it is an accommodation. From here on out it won’t matter that Jane is gone or that the corporation has collapsed and the fabric of civilization is shredding. Just let them try to break in and take his money, food, vandalize his secret thoughts or steal the silver. Nobody gets past Roxy. I have a gorilla, OK?

“I miss you,” Jane writes. “Adam is seeing somebody new.” What do I care? I have a gorilla. They get through the days, however. Nights are harder. In times like these television is interrupted, so there’s no telling whether it’s ten or eleven or closer to two A.M. The numbers on all your digital products are clicking backwards. Everything demagnetized while you weren’t looking. You’re on your own, the wind says. Alone, fust the way you were at the beginning. Not Trevor. He has his gorilla. Perhaps because of the riots and mass murders outside, she’s quit trying to kill him. She gets into the captivity thing. Sits with him for public access TV but slouches downstairs to sleep in the cage. For protection, she says. Protection against him? Has he kidnapped a three-hundred-pound virgin? Hard to know. Athena has nothing on Roxy. Step aside, Amazon queen. Take a backseat, Wonder Woman. Now that she has his mother’s opera-length pearls twined around her neck and now that his grandmother’s diamond earrings hang like dollhouse chandeliers from her wide nostrils, she’s in his power, right? He buys her clothes. He cooks wonderful meals for her out of the supermarket stockpile in the subcellar. Keeps her happy until he needs her.

Jane writes, Who needs you, anyway?

One day Roxy smiles. “Meat loaf. Again. My favorite.”

In times like these, the silliest things make you feel better.

Still, there is the look he catches when Roxy doesn’t know he’s watching; the whites of her eyes gleam in the half light from the TV, and Trevor can’t know. Is his gorilla fixing to die for him, or does she want to kill him?

How did it get so important to make her like him?

That’s one motive for taking her outside. Trial run. Make her happy because in times like these, even a gorilla starts looking good to you.

The other? It’s time to show her to the people. Trevor feels safer with Roxy thudding behind, regardless of her motives. Hard to know if it’s a good or a bad thing that the streets are deserted. Every player wants an audience. Not clear if that’s blood running in the gutters or the product of his hyped imagination. Roxy pads on, sniffing the air. “Talk about creepy. Hold up.” She spins him around.

“Stop that! Ow! Where are we going?”

“The gym,” she says, dragging him. “They need me at the gym.”

It is in ruins. Leached skeletons lie upturned in the ashes like the. rib cages of cattle in Death Valley. So much for Roxy’s colleagues, those humongous guys.

“Too late.” She grieves. “I came too late.”

There is no talking about what happened. “It’s OK,” he tells her. “It is. Nobody could have helped them.” He isn’t feeling too good himself. It’s unnerving, watching your gorilla cry. A sob rips her throat. “I shoulda been here for them.”

He grips her hand. Mental note: Aunt Patricia’s garnets, as soon as we get home. He is running out of jewelry. “You hadda be here for me. It’s how we are now. Everything we care about is gone.”

(“Don’t bother coming back,” he wrote Jane last night. “Even if you want to.”)

“Yeah shit,” Roxy says, leaving him to wonder if this excursion has been a mistake: the sound of her teeth, clipping off the words.

She is put to the test in the least likely place. At Trevor’s front door. An ugly mob is massing in the street. Somebody he knows. “You,” he says. (Jane wrote last night: “You might as well know, it isn’t Adam I left you for. It’s Jake I love.”) “Jake, what are you doing here?”

Jake scowls. “Like you were trying to forget you ever had a brother?”

“What happened, did you lose the business?”

“Everybody is losing everything,” Jake snarls. There is a chink, chink. Thirty guys stand at Jake’s back, slapping chains against their leather-covered thighs.

Oh, shit. “You stole my idea,” Trevor says. Just like everything else I ever had. “What do you want now?”

“Whatever you have left,” Jake says. “Who’s the bitch?”

At Trevor’s back, Roxy bristles.

“No! You don’t get Roxy!”

“If she wasn’t the only one left, I wouldn’t touch her with a stick.” Behind Jake, his thirty guys drool and rumble with lust. “But she is. C’mere, baby.”

Roxy snaps Jake’s neck and, like a terrier who never gets tired of killing rats, starts after the others. Twenty of the thirty guys head for safety-The last ten don’t make it.

She rolls the twenty-ninth guy off of Trevor and gets him inside. He looks up into eyes that are neither white nor silver. “If you want my great-grandmother’s emeralds, they’re yours.”

“Whatever,” she says coldly, but—is her expression two degrees softer?

Emeralds. It’s a cinch Jane won’t want them. Interesting, when you get what you want it’s never what you thought. What you really want is for your gorilla to like you.

The next challenge is mechanized. A savage inventor unleashes a new machine on Trevor’s street. The thing cracks open houses and its master strips them of food and valuables. Some wit designed the robot monster to look like a combination of Rodan and Godzilla.

Roxy gets hurt in the encounter, but she trashes the thing. Microchips land in her hair like glits. Bolts roll everywhere.

“If I had anything left to give, I’d give it to you,” Trevor tells her, and she almost smiles. (He did, in fact, send his great-grandmother’s diamond clip to Jane with a note: “Sorry about your bereavement.”) “If it makes any difference at all, I’m in love with you.”

“Whatever,” Roxy says, and goes in her cage and locks the door against him. Meanwhile, every clock has frozen. The white skies are shredded by nonstop lightning. It should be comforting to know that the streets are empty now, but it isn’t. Stay in, cover your head, and wait for it to be over, right? Wrong. No matter how well prepared you are, sooner or later, things break down: generator, alternate fuel supply. Personal arrangements. Computer. There is no mail coming in and no mailing out. Not anymore, so God only knows what Jane is up to or what will become of you. Even you, who overstocked, will run out of food. Sooner or later.

For the first time since Trevor brought her home, his captive gorilla speaks first. “We’re running out of stuff.” “I know.”

“We gotta go out there.”

“Would you do that for me?”

“Damn straight.”

He shudders and falls in step behind her. There’s nothing left in the gutted supermarkets, the empty houses. They follow ancient signs to a forgotten treasure trove: prehistoric fallout shelter. Things to eat, not anything you’d want to put in your mouth, but edible.

And coming out, they run into an ordinary guy. A lot like Trevor. Timid, can’t make it alone. Studying them, the stranger sizes up the situation. Their food, heaped in Trevor’s ex-kid’s wagon. “Swap you,” the stranger says. Calls over his shoulder. “Come on out, baby.”

Broken tiles shickle down as a gorgeous woman emerges. Amazing, how she can look the way she does in times like these. Slim and elegant. Beautiful. She gives Trevor a sultry smile. “Well?”

“A swap.” Trevor asks cautiously, “As in, your girlfriend for my gorilla?”

Behind him, Roxy shudders.

The stranger cracks up laughing. “Hell, no—my girlfriend for that food you got!”

Beautiful. She is beautiful. Blindly, Trevor forgets that these aren’t ordinary times. “Maybe we can work out a trade.”

At his back Roxy snarls, but Trevor is too distracted to notice. The thing about bait is, it’s got to look good to the fish you’re after. Of course, the guy wasn’t bona fide. In the end, he tries to stab Trevor, and Roxy has to kill both him and the woman, never mind that she was gorgeous. Trevor tries to thank her, but his concentration is broken. He’s hung up on the distance between what he should have had and what he has here. Then he sees Roxy’s face. “I would never trade you off,” he says.

“You’re irreplaceable.”

“Fuck you.” Another minute, and she’ll yank his ears off.

“Can you ever forgive me?” He waits for an answer, but Roxy is done talking to him. After that, nothing happens. It happens for a long time. It is terrible, waiting to hear from Jane. Roxy is sulking and won’t talk to him. Nothing comes, no e-mails, no postcards. The carrier pigeons have all died, and Trevor suspects that one of them has a message for him tied to its dead claw. He searches the bodies of the pigeons he can find, but their bones have been picked clean by the starving, and they are carrying only magazine subscriptions and credit card offers.

It is terrible, watching Roxy pine. She quits working out.

He tries to motivate her. “What if someone comes?”

She is wearing all his family jewelry at once. “Not my problem.”

“Come on, Rox, we were put here for a purpose. We survived for a reason.” He can’t stop trying.

“What do you think it is?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she says grimly. The diamond necklace slips off her scrawny arm and falls into the straw. She kicks it out of the cage.

He winces. “What do you want from me?”

But she won’t talk to him.

Awful, this is awful, but when all else fails, Trevor, at least, is ready. Gorilla in place, food stockpiled. He’s OK, but he’s not so sure about the gorilla.

For a while, phenomena abound. It’s only a matter of time before the Four Horsemen come charging out of the sky unless he looks up one morning and sees the four evangelists with their heads blazing in the morning fog. Right now nothing is happening. Boredom is worse than the plague or fires and floods—when there’s a riot, at least you have stuff to do. He sits in the dark watching tapes because the last television station belched snow onto his TV screen and blinked out of existence. Then nothing happens. Nothing keeps happening. Every day is like every other day, with no promise that whatever Sam Trevor has prepared for so carefully—he captured someone!—is actually coming. Still, it’s not as if they can go outside and resume normal life. Whatever that was. For no reason you can point to, the city’s in ruins.

In her cage, Roxy crashes on her bunk and turns her face to the wall. Trevor takes over the exercise equipment. Works out on the Universal gym. He is busy all the time now. Excited and scared. He bangs away on the weights, blowing air like an industrial vacuum cleaner.

“That’s not going to help you,” Roxy says.

It’s the first time she has spoken first.

Trevor thinks for a minute that she’s taken to him, but her back is still turned, so there’s no knowing. “It couldn’t hurt.” Hopeful, he chirps. “Spot me?”

There’s a long silence, as if she’s thinking about it. Then Trevor hears her snoring. On Monday his hair starts to thin. It isn’t falling out, it’s just vanish-ing. By Friday he’s bald. He’s not alone in this. Everyone else is bald, too. For the few people still out lurching around, hats have come back into fashion. The hats last for only a few hours, since everyone has for-gotten how to make them. He thinks about working out on the weights hut then thinks, Screw it.

He is so depressed that he orders pizza. Inexplicably, you can still get pizza delivered to your door, even though everything else has gone to hell. After he pays he opens the box and sees that he can’t recognize even one of the toppings. Shuddering, he offers it to Roxy.

She eats half of it before asking, “Want any?”

“No thanks. Hey, you have hair!”

“I’ve always had hair.” She finishes the pizza.

He prays. It’s hard to do when you don’t know what you want and you can’t see the face of the entity you’re talking to. Deep in the basement, Roxy groans.

“Dammit,” he yells, “if you’re in love with me, why don’t you just say so?”

He creeps down and looks in on her.

Where she was tough and fit when he got her, Roxy has gotten a little stringy. It’s as though her muscles have lengthened, like a runner’s. He wonders at the change. Roxy is either sick with love, he decides, or sick with waiting. It would help to know.

Trevor picks love.

He coughs, and she raises herself on one elbow to look at him.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Gorilla troubles. You wouldn’t understand.”

Daylight is now twenty-four hours long, but to compensate, nighttime also takes twenty-four hours. Sunrises take so long that everyone loses interest. The telephone cuts out in the middle of a solicitation, someone trying to get Trevor to change his long-distance phone company even though the last phone company is defunct. There will be no e-mails from Jane.

He sometimes checks anyway.

During one cloudless day, the windows melt.

Trevor can barely breathe. He doesn’t know where all the air has gone, but it isn’t where he needs it. Near his mouth. He crawls to the basement.

What’s happening? He gasps. “Do you know what—what’s happening?”

“Nope,” Roxy says.

“The whole thing’s gone to shit. What’s happening to us?” Trevor is interrupted by horrible high-pitched screeching outside. Fire ants the size of sport utility vehicles are roaming the street, eating anything that isn’t made of metal. Trevor unlocks the cage, / have a gorilla, thank God. Roxy kills the entire hive in the time it takes him to make a milkshake. She returns to the cage and takes a nap. Later that night, in bed, he remembers that he forgot to lock the cage. He decides to screw it. He thinks, there’s always the chance that she’ll decide to come to me; when I least expect it she’ll sneak upstairs . . .

Because things like disease and Armageddon happen to other people, never to us (for we are special), what really happens always comes as a surprise. A freak accident. A mistake!

Therefore Trevor wakes up one day with fear rising in his throat, the suffocating thought that this is his last day on earth.

He says, the way you do when you know it can’t possibly be true, “This is my last day on earth.” He’s right.

He staggers to the front door and grapples it open. He looks outside and sees nothing. No city. No streets. No newspaper on his front step. There is nothing to see except the dry wasteland that stretches in all directions. The dust at the end of the world? He doesn’t know. When you are special, even at the end of the world you carry on. It’s What One Does. Business as usual. Carry on, and destiny won’t notice you. Hold your breath and clamp your elbows to your sides. Small gestures. Nothing to attract attention. Wait, and the fates will pass you by

Roxy joins him in the living room, where he’s eating, for all he knows, the last frozen lasagna on the sere, blasted planet.

“Roxy, thank God!”

“I’m hungry.”

“Can you save me?” he asks.

“Not at this point.”

“Why?”

“You’re too weak. You think too much.”

“I think too much?” Staggered, he considers it from all sides. “What does that mean? What do I think too much about?”

“Everything.”

“Does thinking make me weak?”

She polishes off the lasagna. “See?”

“It doesn’t make sense!”

She licks the lasagna wrapper. “My point,” Roxy says.

Bemused, he looks at her. The open cage. The hook latch on the cellar door. “Why didn’t you escape?”

She stayed because she loves me. She does!

“This place was as good as any other.”

“Don’t you love me? “

He dies before she has to answer.

Roxy packs up food and water from the kitchen, a couple of steak knives, a plastic bucket, a blanket, and a string of pearls. She sets off toward the horizon, in no particular direction. Whatever else happens, in this new world, the gorilla always survives

Bob Vardeman has done it all in science fiction and out of it— he’s also written westerns, fantasies, and just about anything else you can think of, including original Star Trek novelizations and, most recently, Hell Heart (Vor #5). He’s particularly adept at melding himself into series books, but when he turns to something purely of his own invention, watch out.

“Feedback” is a weird one—it’s about sex (which means that you’ve already stopped reading this headnote and started in on the tale that follows) but it’s also about much more.

Feedback

Robert E. Vardeman

Visions of half-eaten junk food danced in Greer’s head. He closed his eyes tightly and concentrated on only a few of the murky, indistinct fried tofu chips shaped into faux pork rinds. Too many extraneous images intruded. As he focused the best he could on the ever-shifting, tormentingly shouted words and mind-searing images, a migraine headache started, far back in the vast reaches of his mind and spreading until it was a dark web sticking like glue to his every thought, dragging down every synapse. These tofu chips are shit! blasted into his mind, causing Greer to reel. His thin-fingered hand clung to the desk as new waves of pain built in intensity. He sensed the tsunami approaching and tried to break off and get out of the man’s mind.

“Don’t,” came the cold words. “Don’t you dare. We have to find out why the test group doesn’t approve of Tofu Tasties.”

Greer’s watery eyes blinked open. Tears welled and ran down his cheeks. He did not wipe them away. The pain surged now and threatened to tear away his sanity.

‘It’s because they taste like crap,” he grated out. Did you receive that, or are you trying to weasel out of work again?”

‘That’s what he’s thinking.” Greer swallowed hard and finally wiped away the tears with a crisp linen handkerchief taken from his coat p ocket. This always happened when he delved too deeply into a non-telepath’s squalid, unfocused mind.

Why couldn’t I get a telepath for a damned taste test? They wouldn’t torture me like this with so much unmanageable fury. They focus themselves, he screamed mentally. The echoes of his own thoughts rebounded from distant unknown corners in his own mind and produced even more pain. Are you all right, Greer? came a faint, distant thought as soothing as the other was grating. Controlled, soft, like a cool drink on a sweltering day.

“Kathee,” he gasped out, not sure if he sent it telepathically or spoke aloud. Greer cursed under his breath when he heard Lawrence Macmil-lan snort in disgust. The head of research marketing considered any telepathic contact other than with his precious test human “resource elements” to be a waste of valuable assets. Find those markets. Get them to buy. Dig into the consumers’ deepest hidden thoughts and find out what they really think so they can be coerced into buying Tofu Tasties shit chips.

“You are on company time,” Macmillan said coldly. “No personal communication.”

“My head hurts,” Greer said.

Greer?

He took a deep, calming breath, but the migraine refused to fade. He absorbed not only the vile taste of fried-in-pork-grease tofu but also the pent-up anger of the test subject. The man felt intense guilt because he was being paid to sample a product he hated. He wanted to speak out negatively but felt it would be a betrayal of taking money to try what he was told was a fine, tasty, healthful new comfort food. It was worse for Greer because he worked so hard to insinuate himself into the man’s mind and had finally found what he thought of as a mental resonance. He meshed with the nontelepathy through extreme effort and then paid the price for it by absorbing the undisciplined output.

It was like struggling furiously to get a funnel into his mouth and then choking when a fifty-five-gallon drum was emptied into it. He hated the feeling; he hated commoners; he hated Macmillan most of all for forcing him to do this. Still, this was a better gig than most telepaths got, no matter how awful it might be. He thought, I’m hurting, Kathee, hut I can make it through. Meet after work?

Don’t know, too many arrested today. I still have to interrogate witnesses. Sergeant Fates might make me work overtime.

Greer sniffed, wiped again at his eyes, and then tried to relax using some of those silly mantras Kathee recommended. It was hell being a telepath, or even a half one like he was. What must it be like for Kathee, able to receive and send? She had to worry about everyone near ho could pick up her telepathic transmissions, especially if she became angry. All he had to worry about was receiving. He was sensitive enough to pry into nontelepathic minds through great effort but could shut out the dull roar from those commoners if he got far enough away from their thronging crowds. It helped even more if he got drunk or distracted himself.

When would Macmillan get trained subjects?

Greer moaned again and pressed his hands to his temples. He knew that would never happen. Most people thought telepaths were something imaginary like Sasquatch and the yeti, no matter how the tabloids tried to cover the story.

“Greer!”

“Yes, sir.”

“He verbally said he liked the snack all the way up the liability scale to a nine out of ten, but you claim he was thinking that Tofu Tasties were less than, uh, palatable?”

“Shit, sir, he said they were shit.”

“Mr. Nakamuri will not be happy. This makes it unanimous on all test subjects this week.”

“Can I go? I don’t feel very well.” Greer could not care less what their district manager thought of the survey results.

“I am sure you will feel much better the instant you are out of the office,” Macmillan said with a nasty twist in his voice.

“Whatever you say, sir,” Greer said. The lacy webs of migraine now thickened and burned, as if a rope net had been set on fire in his head.

But Macmillan was right about one thing. Once he got away from the commoners, he would feel better. I think she was in earlier, the man behind the bar thought. Greer looked around but did not see Kathee. The usual crowd had drifted in, the ones too bored or too damaged by their work to tolerate the outside world much longer. He settled on the high stool and ordered his usual.

Hey, Greer, called Erickson. Greer thought of him as “numb nuts” after he realized Erickson was his opposite, a transmitter and not a receiver. If there was a more worthless talent, Greer could not think of it. At least nontelepaths hired him to spy on each other. What did Erickson do? Implant thoughts? No amount of mental coercion could make anyone like Tofu Tasties.

“What do you want?” Greer asked in an unfriendly tone. His mind raced over all kinds of lewd possibilities for Erickson and reveled in knowing the man could not pick up a single one. I’m going to a screamer. Want to come? “What the hell is a screamer?” Something special, something you’ll really like.

Pictures leaked around what little control Erickson had in transmission, enticing Greer in spite of himself. He preferred solitary pleasures but Erickson was excited, and broadcast emotions along with the flood of kinky images. Greer knew he ought to keep his distance, but it had been a hard day, Kathy wasn’t here, and he was perversely intrigued by what he received in Erickson’s thoughts. All telepaths were freaks to be exploited, but valuable ones to the police and corporations and to the government. Greer did not want to think what some of his colleagues were made to do for the black ops groups. The genetic tinkering had come from that segment of the government, and to a large extent had remained the province of the spook, the spy, the saboteur . . . the assassin. His head began throbbing again. He needed some R&R. Why wasn’t Kathee here? She was plain looking, but she was a two-way. When they made love, Greer had no words for it. Feedback. Ecstasy. His passion fed hers and he picked up hers until they could not stand it anymore. What difference did looks make when they could rock the heavens with their fucking?

“I want to wait a while longer for Kathee,” Greer said.

“She was in earlier, had to go back to work,” Erickson said aloud. “Besides, you might not want a nice girl like Kathee seeing this.”

“A screamer?” Greer was intrigued, but had to fight his own better judgment. Nothing Erickson had anything to do with could be good. The man was a loser.

Then Greer reeled as a flood of new, more intense images hit him.

Erickson was so excited he could not control himself.

“You can stay here, but I want to get there for my special. . . show.” “You’re part of it?” Greer blurted in astonishment. “They tie you up and—?”

Shut up! came Erickson’s frantic thought. I don’t want everyone to know. You ‘re a friend. Greer nodded, marveling at his bad luck to have a man like this consider him a friend. Hating himself for it but not quite able to resist, Greer left with Erickson. They headed down back alleys and past more than one alert tele-p athic sentry, until they reached an abandoned warehouse near the old airport at the edge of town.

From inside Greer felt excitement.

“This is it,” Erickson said, rubbing his hands together. “You and me, we’ve got a special bond, don’t we? You can really get off when I—“

Greer stared in wide-eyed fascination at Erickson. “I never thought you were like this.”

So they tie me up and beat me, Erickson thought.

“You want everyone in the warehouse to pick up everything you’re thinking and feeling? Even humiliation?”

Erickson nodded, barely hiding his excitement. Greer felt his heart pound a little faster. Telepaths were all potential voyeurs, but generally avoided it among commoners since it was so difficult and distasteful. Not to mention, most of them were ordered to snoop as part of their jobs. At the end of a long day, getting out of a commoner’s head was more important than diving back to eavesdrop. Among themselves, it was considered impolite in their mostly male society, where offenses were settled more violently than in the commoner world. When you knew the depths of another man’s thoughts, it provided a potent rationale for using force to decide an argument. After all, it was never impersonal.

“I wanted to be an actor,” Erickson explained. “My company wouldn’t let me. They wanted me to beam out motivational thoughts to their workers. For all the good that does. Like fucking musk stuffed into the head. That doesn’t matter anymore. This . . . is better. It’s what I want to do.”

Erickson opened the metal door, and they slipped inside. Guards stood on either side of the entrance, checking telepathically to be sure they belonged. Erickson obviously did. Greer wasn’t so sure about himself, but the guards let him pass. He heard their acknowledgment of his telepathic abilities. The warehouse was dusty and dark, with only a few spotlights shining on a man-high, arm-thick metal post equipped with shackles. Greer scanned the crowd. There were perhaps a dozen spectators, all men, which wasn’t unusual. The XY chromosome combination produced ninety-nine male telepaths for every female. While men were mostly receivers, a few were only transmitters like Erickson. Greer had never round both talents in one man. That combination seemed reserved for women. Too bad Kathee wasn’t here. Greer would have enjoyed feeling what she did as she took in the anticipation of the crowd, their enthusiasm, their perverse excitement as she rebroadcast with her own slant. He felt dirty and discovered he liked it. Even worse, he thought Kathee might too. Greer was suddenly pushed out of the way as two men, stripped to the waist and sweating, grabbed Erickson and dragged him off. Greer recoiled at Erickson’s response: fear—and anticipation that became something more than sexual as the shackles locked around his wrists.

Erickson’s shirt was ripped away, and a slow, methodical lashing began.

Every crack of the whip caused Erickson to send out agonizing waves of mental pain. Agonizing for him, but also curiously enjoyable for the spectators. Greer found himself transfixed, hypnotized by the sweet-and-sour mixture of emotions flooding from Erickson’s mind.

Erickson obviously loved the pain and degradation of others receiving his deepest, darkest thoughts. As much as Greer, to his surprise, discovered he loved sharing it.

That’s disgusting, Kathee thought.

Greer caught a hint of possible betrayal in her thought. As light as a feather falling, or a butterfly wing brushing his cheek, he felt her consider telling the vice squad about the screamer. Kathee worked for the robbery division but was often lent out to other departments for interrogation of difficult or important witnesses. If the courts ever decided that using a telepath to squeeze information out of a defendant was legal, she would be even more in demand.

As much as Greer hated his job, he felt that what Kathee did— sinking into the minds of people who might be rapists and murderers— was worse. How did she tolerate it?

Is it worse than letting that fool Erickson degrade himself like that?

It was something he wanted to do, Greer thought. Even commoners for blocks around got off on it. I saw some of them reeling as we left the warehouse. They didn’t know what had happened, but they had gotten enough from-Erickson’s transmission to experience his thrill. It shouldn’t be something you want to eavesdrop on, she shot back.

But Kathee, this isn’t eavesdropping. Erickson knew I was there. He knew everyone wanted to . . . share.

It sounded feeble, but Greer laced his thoughts with some of the excitement he had experienced. He felt her wavering. Kathee knew what was moral, but this transcended the ordinary. This was uniquely telepathic. Was it wrong to share that which is freely given?

Erickson is going to get into trouble.

“How?” Greer asked aloud. He stared into her eyes and wondered what it might be like if she had been there, to take in Erickson’s pain and stark emotional response and then filter and magnify it through her own mind.

That might be the experience of a lifetime.

Are you so bored?

Bored, tired, disgusted, all of that, he thought. Greer caught her fleeting agreement. What happens if Erickson is seriously injured? He’s a powerful sender. You know how dangerous it can be for a telepath to be close when someone is hurt.

No, I don’t, Greer replied. This was one of the questions that had never been answered to his satisfaction. While he had not pursued the query too aggressively, he had never found a telepath who had been with anyone who had died, who had been mentally linked to the dying person. There were so few telepaths—and those who might have been in a position to tell had died with the nontelepaths around them in a variety of accidents.

Commoners had their distinctive urban myths, and telepaths had their own.

There are so few of us—you should be careful. Erickson is not quite right in the bead. And he might have died.

Greer sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. That had occurred to him, and it excited him as much as the flood of pain and desire from the shackled Erickson as the men took turns whipping him.

“Yeah,” he said, studying her closely. She was worse than plain, she was downright unattractive. But Kathee’s appeal lay in other directions. Greer had heard of only three other telepaths who could both send and receive thoughts, and they might be part of the myth structure, because no one he knew had ever met them.

He was lucky Kathee had chosen him among all the other telepaths.

Damn right you’re lucky, came her thought. And this is so out of character for you.

“I can’t explain it,” Greer admitted. “I was repelled and attracted at the same time.”

More attracted than repelled, or you would have left.

He had no answer to that. She was right.

“Have you heard about things like this going on?” he asked out loud.

Rumors. Always rumors.

“Screamers might be fairly new,” Greer said. “There have been so few of us telepaths. But there are more all the time.”

Receivers, Kathy thought bitterly. “And men,” she said aloud. Her eyes blinked as she stared at him from inches away They were naked and lying alongside one another in bed, but they might as well have been a thousand miles apart.

“And men,” he said, grinning. “Just like you like.” He moved closer and began making love to her. After a moment of hesitation, she responded.

And somehow, as he climaxed, his thoughts were not on her passion being fed telepathically into his brain, but of Erickson.

Erickson could have died.

What would that have felt like?

He tried everything in the next two weeks, but nothing matched the thrill Greer had felt at the screamer. It began taking on an almost mythic proportion in his thoughts, even pushing aside sex with Kathee.

Greer became obsessed.

He hunted for Erickson, but the man had vanished. No one had seen him or even caught a vagrant thought from him. Sitting at the bar one night, Greer decided that Erickson had done this on purpose to annoy him. Nothing about the man was pleasant. They would never be friends, despite what Erickson thought.

But, because of the screamer, Greer now acknowledged a bond between them that he could not deny: Erickson had enjoyed sending out waves of pain, and Greer had liked sharing it. Maybe it’s because you didn’t have to worry about physical scars on your own back, Kathee said, sitting down beside him at the bar.

“It’s more than that,” Greer said, eager to continue their discussion of the matter. He had been talking about little else with Kathee since the screamer. The more he talked about it, the better his memory of it became. Too much of the screamer was like a will-o’-the-wisp, there but not there when he looked too hard. Or like fairy gold: if he reached out and tried to touch it, it evaporated. For all you know, Erickson might be dead, Kathee thought.

I checked the hospitals. No one has seen or heard about him.

“Greer,” Kathee said as she moved closer, putting a hand on his arm. “Don’t you see anything wrong with all this?”

“No,” Greer said, almost angrily. “We’ve been through it a hundred times. If you’d been there, you would have felt the same way.” He paused and looked into Kathee’s face. A smile crept onto his lips. “You would have enjoyed it, wouldn’t you? Is that what’s bothering you?”

It’s so good when we make love.

What would it be like if dozens of people magnified those feelings and returned them to you? he asked. Kathee shivered and tried to push the thought away. Greer caught snippets, no matter how she tried to deny it. She was as intrigued as he had been—and also as repelled. A powerful combination. Let’s find him, Greer suggested. “Or another screamer. There were enough people there that it can’t be a one-shot occurrence.”

She looked at him, disapproval on her face. But he saw into her mind.

Hand in hand, they left to find a screamer.

I recognize most of them here, Kathee said, surprised. I suppose that shouldn’t strike me as unusual, since I have contact with so many officially.

Finding this screamer had been easy, and here were hundreds and hundreds of telepaths, all gathering for the same reason he and Kathee were. Some of the crowd he had seen before, in the bar and at social gatherings. Most were complete strangers to him, but he caught some of their arousal at the idea of sharing the sadomasochist exhibition.

I don’t believe this, Kathee said, but there was the faintest hint of anticipation behind her words. Greer wet his lips. Three posts were erected in the middle of the clearing in the junkyard. There were no spotlights.

We’re late, he thought. I think it’s going to start—

The mingling assemblage became suddenly focused, moving closer as three men were led through the crowd directly to the posts, shackled, their shirts stripped from their backs. Kathee squeezed his hand.

Greer felt the excitement mounting and shared it in much the same way he did with Kathee when they were making love. But this was different, had different layers and emotions and was infinitely more varied and complex.

Philosophical emotions? Kathee asked.

Don’t analyze it. Just enjoy it.

I don’t know that I can. It is so . . . so unnatural.

That’s what makes it exciting, Greer said. Look! The man chained at the far post. That’s Erickson!

He held her in his arms as the first whip rose and lashed against Er-ickson’s bare flesh. He and Kathee moved closer, only a few feet away, and received Erickson’s full mental anguish and ecstasy. Kathee tensed and then held Greer closer.

I’ve never felt anything like this, she admitted.

You like it.

Yes.

The crowd grew in size and the intensity of the emotion flowing from the three shackled men increased. Erickson did not seem to recognize Greer—he was too deep in relishing the pain he received. The emotions were pure, laser-sharp, shared by everyone in the junkyard.

This was illicit, wrong, forbidden—and ever so much more exciting because of the shared weakness. The shared transgression.

The shared sexual excitement.

Closer, Kathee thought. If we get closer, it will be more intense.

They moved to Erickson’s side. So did others. Those in the crowd touched now, shoulders rubbing and bodies jerking in response to every lash.

The three men using the whips began striking their blows in unison on their victims’ backs. This caused the flood of emotion to magnify a hundredfold, in synch like a laser beam powering up. Greer and Kathee moved even closer until they could almost touch Erickson. He looked at them, his eyes wild and bright with transcendence.

They both felt his rapture.

This is amazing. Kathee’s thoughts were intense. I had no idea—

Greer felt weak in the knees. This was very wrong, he was suddenly sure. He knew he should leave, but instead he moved even closer, as eager as a boy at his first peep show.

More!

Greer wasn’t sure if the crowd thought this or if Kathee sent it. The men chained to the posts sobbed and moaned as they took every lash. Only Erickson could project his thoughts clearly. He wanted more, too.

More!

A feedback began that drew Greer even closer. Kathee was beside him. Her face was pale and strained. He realized she was accepting the telepathic outpouring and then retransmitting it, filtered of extraneous thoughts so the emotion became stronger and more stimulating.

Pure pain.

Pure pleasure.

Greer’s body began to respond. Around him he heard other men crying out, but he could not move. He turned to the heat, the telepathic heat that drew him like a moth to flame. More! he got from Kathee. She directed and shaped and magnified the emotional outpouring of the crowd. He saw how pale she had become, how indistinct and ghostlike. Her hands shook as she pressed even closer to him. He liked the feel of her body against his, the way her thoughts surged and beat against his like ocean waves rising at the start of a storm.

More!

Greer wanted more. He held Kathee and felt the others in the group crowd toward her. Before, when Erickson had been the sacrificial lamb, it had been thrilling. But not like this. This was something new.

Kathee, he thought. You are the difference tonight!

Greer felt the hundreds in the crowd suck in their collective breath as the feedback built in intensity. From the three being whipped, to the receivers and Kathee, through Kathee and back, filtered and magnified for everyone—even those shackled to the posts—to relish. Excitement mounted and fed the crowd and Kathee and him. A link formed between Erickson and Kathee, stronger and more potent than anything Greer had ever felt before.

Dizzily, Greer felt a migraine at the back of his head begin. He ignored it. The feelings cascading into his body and soul were too intense for mere pain now.

Greer, Kathee thought. I—

Words were no longer enough as the pressures within grew, pressures of guilt, lust, and illicit sharing. Greer screamed. He felt as if he had been launched on a rocket. His mental echoes quivered forth and resonated with the others that fed Kathee.

Feedback.

Growing intensity.

Tidal wave.

Out of control.

Out of control!

Greer experienced a freaky second where he knew they would all die from ecstasy. He had discovered what it meant to be a telepath.

Over and up and around and ever increasing, their exhilaration grew until they were consumed in a huge flame of stark rapture that destroyed them all—and then began snuffing out the lesser lights of nontelepaths.

The world did not end in fire or ice.

It ended in orgasm.

Nina Kiriki Hoffman gave me a tiny plastic mouse with an ar-ticulated head the first time I met her a few years ago; she had an entire side pocket in her bag filled with the damned things. A fellow editor stole the mouse later on, and when I saw her again a year later the pocket in her bag, alas, was empty. Her bag of tricks is never empty, though, and she offers a dandy little strange tale, which for some reason I haven't been able to get out of my head. It's simple, straightforward, yet completely evocative of family life. She's been a Nebula and World Fantasy Award finalist, and has a Bram Stoker Award— more awards should follow, for both her dark fantasy and science fiction.

Between Disappearances

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

We're standing in the living room. This is where I always transit to, and somehow it's where Mom always is when I arrive.

"I can't stay," I say.

"You never stay," says my mother.

"It's not my fault," I say.

So far this is the same conversation we always have, etched deep into our brains. This is your brain on automatic. I wonder which of us will jump off the path first this visit.

"It's not your fault you tripped in that stupid dimensional portal and got a piece of travel rock stuck in your back?" Mom says. "Whose fault is it, then? When are you going to see a doctor and try to get it removed?"

On track so far. I decide to make a run for new territory. "So what's up with Artie?" She'll talk about my brother, won't she? He's the good one. He sticks around. He's never even left town.

Or maybe he did? It's been a while.

I don't know how long I've been gone. Mom looks older. But maybe it's just my vision. I've been to six worlds since the last time I was home, and I stayed on the last one for a year, local time. I got used to talking to people with four eyes in their foreheads and odd numbers of arms. I've forgotten what wrinkled foreheads normally look like.

Mom ignores my gambit. "And what are you wearing? I can see your nipples! They're staring at me! Is that the fashion where you were? Put some clothes on!"

I sigh and go to the hall closet. This is one of those sure conversation stoppers that I have to actually act on, or she'll keep coming back to it. I find a full-length black raincoat and wrap up in it. It's sized to fit someone taller and bigger than me, and it smells like good cologne. I wonder who it belongs to.

"Not that! Take that off! I don't want your otherworld germs messing that up!" I shrug and take off the coat. Whatever germs I've got—come to think of it, I did have a really bad cold right before this last jump, with a bright purple rash—are already on the coat, but what can you do? Morn grabs the black coat from me, humphs out of the room, and comes back with a ratty terry-cloth bathrobe, which she flings at me. I wrap up in it. It smells like fabric softener. I recognize it. It actually used to be mine.

"So what year is it here?"

"Two thousand thirty-one," she says.

Wow, it's been three years since the last time I was on Earth.

"Whose coat was that?"

"Line's." Her eyes narrow. "He doesn't know about you." This is new. I glance toward the PixWall, which last time I visited displayed shots of Mom, of me, of Artie, the three of us together and apart at various ages, with various pets, in various places we remember only because we have pix of them. She deleted all the Dad shots before I left, and now I see that I'm not there anymore either.

There are some new people on the wall screen. Artie with his arm around a woman. Artie with a baby in a stomach sling.

Mom with a man. He has lots of bushy silver hair and good teeth. He looks like he sells something.

"In fact," says Mom, "I think you should leave before he gets home from work."

"Whoa, Mom! Are you married again?"

She lifts her chin. For a minute I think she isn't going to answer. "No," she says at last. She sighs. She jumps back a few conversational steps. "You never stay." This time she says it in a tone of finality.

Same words, different conversation. Hmm. "That's right. I never stay." My stomach clenches.

"So I guess I can't have my old room back, huh?"

She glances at the floor and her hands twist around each other. "No," she whispers.

"Line set up his exercise equipment there."

I am so unready for this development it surprises me. I mean, I've lived in more than thirty different places since the accident, for longer or shorter times, and I manage to find my feet, learn a language, talk disbelieving strangers into putting up with me, develop some skill to support myself, every time. Nobody's even come close to killing me yet.

But now I have no home.

Why should I have a home here? Mom never knows when to expect me. I never stay as long as she wants. Even if I could stay as long as she wanted me to, I wouldn't, because she drives me crazy after a little while.

Maybe it's time she got on with her life.

No home.

"You can stay at Artie's. He got married two years ago. His wife is very nice, and they have a little girl. And a guest room. He'd love to see you, I know. He's still mad I didn't call him last time you were here. I didn't know you'd be gone so long."

"Okay," I whisper.

"I still love you," she says. "I just finally figured out that I can't take care of you anymore."

"Okay."

She calls Artie and drives me over and drops me off.

I have dinner with Artie and his wife and their child. Earth food tastes bland. I remember Artie and I never had anything to talk about while we were growing up. They ask the usual questions. I give the usual answers and show some of the image cubes I got two planets ago and happened to have in my pack for this transit.

There's so little you can hold on to when you never know when you're going to leave. I've learned to let go of almost everything.

Artie herds messages, and his wife makes images. They talk about traveling. I can tell they won't.

That night after my brother and his wife and child have gone to sleep, I huddle on the end of the guest bed. I had a copy of a Hrendah novel in my pack when the travel rock kicked in this time. I take out the book, which is written in acid etchings on treated leaves the size of my forearms. I flip to my place. I am in the middle. A person realizes that the person it has planned its future with cannot love it and that their relationship, though possible and even almost obligatory, would be hollow if they pursued it. If only the first person could change the way the second person views the first person. To trigger just the right shift in views would be art. I drop the book. It is like other Hrendah books I've read. Something in the Hrendah soul longs to read this story over and over.

I hug my knees and hang my head. I curl as tight as I can.

Something moves in my back. I feel a crackle, a flash of heat. Something drops to the blanket behind me.

After a moment I look.

It shimmers and flashes with darts of colored light. Occlusions hide its center, and rutilations stripe it. I can barely make out the trapped spiral that gives it its power. I touch the spot on my back where the travel stone melded with me and trapped me into travel, where it has lodged all these years. The skin closed over it after the accident; the travel stone sank into me so no one could even see it.

I feel a wet streak beside my spine. My fingers come away wet and red.

I inch around so that the stone lies in front of me.

Now I can stop traveling. I can stay here, where I already know people, things, food, language, money, writing, telephones, and how to use the bathroom. I can make my home again. I watch the flashes in the travel stone for a long time. It has carried me to places that Earth people have never reached through normal portals, places where I am the only one like me and the people who live there are fascinated by me or want to kill me. It has taken me to other worlds where there are Earth bases and I can talk to people like the ones I grew up with. It has taken me out of lives where I was happy. The only trigger I've found that works reliably is salt water, so my travel stone has taken me out of lives where I was unhappy, too. A swim in the sea, and I find myself elsewhere, though I never know beforehand where I will go. I rarely return anywhere but home. Every six or eight or ten times the stone brings me back to my mother's living room.

The flashes through the stone's translucent core brighten and strike farther and faster. I sense a hum from the stone, even though it is not vibrating under my skin anymore. I know it is about to switch again.

I stuff the Hrendah novel and what clothes I can into my pack. I stare at the stone for a little while as lights scythe through its clouded depths.

I could just let it go.

But at the last second I grab it.

David Morrell is modem fiction's iron man: solid, reliable, thoughtful, always professional and— here's the twist—

always original. He created the totemic character John Rambo, following that Vietnam vet's adventures with a string of best-sellers that continues to this day.

I had to talk David into doing a story for this book— not because he wasn't intrigued by Redshift's concept, but because he, like Joyce Carol Oates, had never written what he considered a science fiction story before. But I persevered with my gentle prodding— and boy, am I glad I did. "Resurrection" evidences all the classic Morrell attributes listed above.

Resurrection

David Morrell

Anthony was nine when his mother had to tell him that his father was seriously ill. The signs had been there—pallor and shortness of breath—but Anthony's childhood had been so perfect, his parents so loving, that he couldn't imagine a problem they couldn't solve. His father's increasing weight loss was too obvious to be ignored, however.

"But. . . but what's wrong with him?" Anthony stared uneasily up at his mother. He'd never seen her look more tired.

She explained about blood cells. "It's not leukemia. If only it were. These days, that's almost always curable, but the doctors have never seen anything like this. It's moving so quickly, even a bone marrow transplant won't work. The doctors suspect that it might have something to do with the lab, with radiation he picked up after the accident."

Anthony nodded. His parents had once explained to him that his father was something called a maintenance engineer. A while ago, there'd been an emergency phone call, and Anthony's father had rushed to the lab in the middle of the night.

"But the doctors ..."

"They're trying everything they can think of. That's why Daddy's going to be in the hospital for a while."

"But can't I see him?"

"Tomorrow." Anthony's mother sounded more weary. "Both of us can see him tomorrow." When they went to the hospital, Anthony's father was too weak to recognize him. He had tubes in his arms, his mouth, and his nose. His skin was gray. His face was thinner than it had been three days earlier, the last time Anthony had seen him. If Anthony hadn't loved his father so much, he'd have been frightened. As things were, all he wanted was to sit next to his father and hold his hand. But after only a few minutes, the doctors said that it was time to go. The next day, when Anthony and his mother went to the hospital, his father wasn't in his room. He was having "a procedure," the doctors said. They took Anthony's mother aside to talk to her. When she came back, she looked even more solemn than the doctors had. Everything possible had been done, she explained. "No results." Her voice sounded tight. "None. At this rate ..." She could barely get the words out. "In a couple of days ..."

"There's nothing the doctors can do?" Anthony asked, afraid.

"Not now. Maybe not ever. But we can hope. We can try to cheat time." Anthony hadn't the faintest idea what she meant. He wasn't even sure that he understood after she explained that there was something called "cryonics," which froze sick people until cures were discovered. Then they were thawed and given the new treatment. In a primitive way, cryonics had been tried fifty years earlier, in the late years of the twentieth century, Anthony's mother found the strength to continue explaining. It had failed because the freezing method hadn't been fast enough and the equipment often broke down. But over time, the technique had been improved sufficiently that, although the medical establishment didn't endorse it, they didn't reject it, either.

"Then why doesn't everybody do it?" Anthony asked in confusion.

"Because . . ." His mother took a deep breath. "Because some of the people who were thawed never woke up."

Anthony had the sense that his mother was telling him more than she normally would have, that she was treating him like a grown-up, and that he had to justify her faith in him.

"Others, who did wake up, failed to respond to the new treatment," she reluctantly said.

"Couldn't they be frozen again?" Anthony asked in greater bewilderment.

"You can't survive being frozen a second time. You get only one chance, and if the treatment doesn't work . . ." She stared down at the floor. "It's so experimental and risky that insurance companies won't pay for it. The only reason we have it as an option is that the laboratory's agreed to pay for the procedure"—there was that word again—"while the doctors try to figure out how to cure him. But if it's going to happen, it has to happen now." She looked straight into his eyes. "Should we do it?"

"To save Daddy? We have to."

"It'll be like he's gone."

"Dead?"

Anthony's mother reluctantly nodded.

"But he won't be dead."

"That's right," his mother said. "We might never see him alive again, though. They might not ever find a cure. They might not ever wake him up."

Anthony had no idea of the other issues that his mother had to deal with. In the worst case, if his father died, at least his life insurance would allow his mother to support the two of them. In the unlikely event that she ever fell in love again, she'd be able to remarry. But if Anthony's father was frozen, in effect dead to them, they'd be in need of money, and the only way for her to remarry would be to get a divorce from the man who, a year after her wedding, might be awakened and cured.

"But it's the only thing we can do," Anthony said.

"Yes." His mother wiped her eyes and straightened. "It's the only thing we can do." Anthony had expected that it would happen the next day or the day after that. But his mother hadn't been exaggerating that, if it were going to happen, it had to happen now. His unconscious father was a gray husk as they rode with him in an ambulance. At a building without windows, they walked next to his father's gurney as it was wheeled along a softly lit corridor and into a room where other doctors waited. There were glinting instruments and humming machines. A man in a suit explained that Anthony and his mother had to step outside while certain preparations were done to Anthony's father to make the freezing process safe. After that, they would be able to accompany him to his cryochamber.

Again, it wasn't what Anthony had expected. In contrast with the humming machines in the preparation room, the chamber was only a niche in a wall in a long corridor that had numerous other niches on each side, metal doors with pressure gauges enclosing them. Anthony watched his father's gaunt naked body being placed on a tray that went into the niche. But his father's back never actually touched the tray. As the man in the suit explained, a force field kept Anthony's father elevated. Otherwise, his back would freeze to the tray and cause infections when he was thawed. For the same reason, no clothes, not even a sheet, could cover him, although Anthony, thinking of how cold his father was going to be, dearly wished that his father had something to keep him warm.

While the man in the suit and the men who looked like doctors stepped aside, a man dressed in black but with a white collar arrived. He put a purple scarf around his neck. He opened a book and read, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." A little later, he read, "I am the Resurrection."

Anthony's father was slid into the niche. The door was closed. Something hissed.

"It's done," the man in the suit said.

"That quickly"?" Anthony's mother asked.

"It won't work if it isn't instantaneous."

"May God grant a cure," the man with the white collar said.

Years earlier, Anthony's father had lost his parents in a fire. Anthony's mother had her parents, but without much money, the only way they could help was by offering to let her and Anthony stay with them. For a time, Anthony's mother fought the notion. After all, she had her job as an administrative assistant at the laboratory, although without her husband's salary she didn't earn enough for the mortgage payments on their house. The house was too big for her and Anthony anyhow, so after six months she was forced to sell it, using the money to move into a cheaper, smaller town house. By then, the job at the lab had given her too many painful memories about Anthony's father. In fact, she blamed the lab for what had happened to him. Her bitterness intensified until she couldn't make herself go into the lab's offices any longer. She quit, got a lesser paying job as a secretary at a real-estate firm, persuaded a sympathetic broker to sell her town house but not charge a commission, and went with Anthony to live with her parents.

She and Anthony spent all their free time together, even more now than before the accident, so he had plenty of opportunity to learn what she was feeling and why she'd made those decisions. The times she revealed herself the most, however, were when they visited his father. She once complained that the corridor of niches reminded her of a mausoleum, a reference that Anthony didn't understand, so she explained it but so vaguely that he still didn't understand, and it was several years before he knew what she'd been talking about.

Visiting hours for the cryochambers were between eight and six during the day as long as a new patient wasn't being installed. At first, Anthony and his mother went every afternoon after she finished work. Gradually, that lessened to every second day, every third day, and once a week. But they didn't reach that point for at least a year. Sometimes, there were other visitors in the corridor, solitary people or incomplete families, staring mournfully at niches, sometimes leaving small objects of remembrance on narrow tables that the company had placed in the middle of the corridor: notes, photographs, dried maple leaves, and small candles shaped like pumpkins, to mention a few. The company placed no names on any of the niches, so visitors had used stick-on plaques that said who was behind the pressurized door, when he or she had been born, when they had gotten sick, of what, and when they had been frozen. Often there was a bit of a prayer or something as movingly simple as "We love you. We'll see you soon." Here and there, Anthony noticed just a name, but for the most part the plaques had acquired a common form, the same kind of information and in the same order as over the years a tradition had been established.

Over the years indeed. Some of the people in the niches had been frozen at least twenty-five

years, he read. It made him fear that his father might never be awakened. His fear worsened each time his mother came back from visiting his father's doctors, who were no closer to finding a cure for his sickness. Eventually his mother took him along to see the doctors, although the visits grew wider apart, every other month, every six months, and then every year. The message was always depressingly the same.

By then, Anthony was fifteen, in his first year of high school. He decided that he wanted to become a doctor and find a way to cure his father. But the next year his grandfather had a heart attack, leaving a small life insurance policy, enough for his mother and his grandmother to keep the house going but hardly enough for Anthony's dreams of attending medical school. Meanwhile, his mother began dating the sympathetic broker at the real-estate firm. Anthony knew that she couldn't be expected to be lonely forever, that after so much time it was almost as if his father were dead and not frozen, and that she had to get on with her life. But "as if his father were dead" wasn't the same as actually being dead, and Anthony had trouble concealing his unhappiness when his mother told him that she was going to marry the broker.

"But what about Dad? You're still married to him."

"I'm going to have to divorce him."

"No."

"Anthony, we did our best. We couldn't cheat time. It didn't work. Your father's never going to be cured."

"No!"

"I'll never stop loving him, Anthony. But I'm not betraying him. He's the same as dead, and I need to live."

Tears dripped from Anthony's cheeks.

"He'd have wanted me to," his mother said. "He'd have understood. He'd have done the same thing." "I'll ask him when he wakes up."

When Anthony became eighteen, it struck him that his father had been frozen nine years, half

of Anthony's life. If it hadn't been for pictures of his father, he feared that he wouldn't have been able to remember what his father had looked like. No, not had looked like, Anthony corrected himself. His father wasn't dead. Once a new treatment was discovered, once he was thawed and cured, he'd look the same as ever.

Anthony concentrated to remember his father's voice, the gentle tone with which his father had read bedtime stories to him and had taught him how to ride a bicycle. He remembered his father helping him with his math homework and how his father had come to his school every year on Career Day and proudly explained his job at the lab. He remembered how his father had hurried him to the emergency ward after a branch snapped on the backyard tree and Anthony's fall broke his arm.

His devotion to his father strengthened after his mother remarried and they moved to the broker's house. The broker turned out not to be as sympathetic as when he'd been courting Anthony's mother. He was bossy. He lost his temper if everything wasn't done exactly his way. Anthony's mother looked unhappy, and Anthony hardly ever talked to the man, whom he refused to think of as his stepfather. He stayed away from the house as much as possible, often lying that he'd been playing sports or at the library when actually he'd been visiting his father's chamber, which the broker didn't want him to do because the broker insisted it was disloyal to the new family.

The broker also said that he wasn't going to pay a fortune so that Anthony could go to medical school. He wanted Anthony to be a business major and that was the only education he was going to pay for. So Anthony studied extra hard, got nothing but A's, and applied for every scholarship he could find, eventually being accepted as a science major in a neighboring state. The university there had an excellent medical school, which he hoped to attend after his B.S., and he was all set to go when he realized how much it would bother him not to visit his father. That almost made him change his plans until he reminded himself that the only way his father might be cured was if he himself became a doctor and found that cure. So, after saying good-bye to his mother, he told the broker to go to hell.

He went to college, and halfway through his first year, he learned from his mother that the lab had decided that it was futile to hope for a cure. A number of recent deaths after patients were thawed had cast such doubt on cryonics that the lab had decided to stop the monthly payments that the cryocompany charged for keeping Anthony's father frozen. For his part, the broker refused to make the payments, saying that it wasn't his responsibility and anyway what was the point since the freezing process had probably killed Anthony's father anyhow.

Taking a job as a waiter in a restaurant, sometimes working double shifts even as he struggled to maintain his grades, Anthony managed to earn just enough to make the payments. But in his sophomore year, he received a notice that the cryocompany was bankrupt from so many people refusing to make payments for the discredited process. The contract that his mother had signed indemnified the company against certain situations in which it could no longer keep its clients frozen, and bankruptcy was one of those situations. Smaller maintenance firms agreed to take the company's patients, but the transfer would be so complicated and hence so expensive that Anthony had to drop his classes and work full-time at the restaurant in order to pay for it. At school, he'd met a girl, who continued to see him even though his exhausting schedule gave him spare time only at inconvenient hours. He couldn't believe that he'd finally found some brightness in his life, and after he returned from making sure that his father was safely installed in a smaller facility, after he resumed his classes, completing his sophomore and junior year, he began to talk to her about marriage.

"I don't have much to offer, but..."

"You're the gentlest, most determined, most hardworking person I've ever met. I'd be proud to be your wife."

"At the start, we won't have much money because I have to pay for my father's maintenance, but..."

"We'll live on what I earn. After you're a doctor, you can take care of me. There'll be plenty enough for us and our children and your father."

"How many children would you like?"

"Three."

Anthony laughed. "You're so sure of the number."

"It's good to hear you laugh."

"You make me laugh."

"By the time you're a doctor, maybe there'll be a cure for your father and you won't have to worry about him anymore."

"Isn't it nice to think so."

Anthony's mother died in a car accident the year he entered medical school. Her remarriage had been so unsatisfying that she'd taken to drinking heavily and had been under the influence when she veered from the road and crashed into a ravine. At the funeral, the broker hardly acknowledged Anthony and his fiancee. That night, Anthony cried in her arms as he remembered the wonderful family he had once been a part of and how badly everything had changed when his father had gotten sick.

He took his fiancee to the firm that now maintained his father. Since the transfer, Anthony had been able to afford returning to his home town to visit his father only sporadically. The distance made him anxious because the new firm didn't inspire the confidence that the previous one had. It looked on the edge of disrepair, floors not dirty but not clean, walls not exactly faded and yet somehow in need of painting. Rooms seemed vaguely underlit. The units in which patients were kept frozen looked cheap. The temperature gauges were primitive compared to the elaborate technology at the previous facility. But as long as they kept his father safe . . .

That thought left Anthony when he took another look at the gauge and realized that the temperature inside his father's chamber had risen one degree from when he'd last checked it.

"What's wrong?" his fiancee asked.

Words caught in his throat. All he could do was point.

The temperature had gone up yet another degree.

He raced along corridor after corridor, desperate to find a maintenance worker. He burst into the company's office and found only a secretary.

"My father . . ."

Flustered, the secretary took a moment to move when he finished explaining. She phoned the control room. No one answered.

"It's almost noon. The technicians must have gone to lunch."

"For God's sake, where's the control room?"

At the end of the corridor where his father was. As Anthony raced past the niche, he saw that the temperature gauge had gone up fifteen degrees. He charged into the control room, saw flashing red lights on a panel, and rushed to them, trying to figure out what was wrong. Among numerous gauges, eight temperature needles were rising, and Anthony was certain that one of them was for his father.

He flicked a switch beneath each of them, hoping to reset the controls. The lights kept flashing.

He flicked a switch at the end of their row.

Nothing changed.

He pulled a lever. Every light on the panel went out. "Jesus."

Pushing the lever back to where it had been, he held his breath, exhaling only when all the lights came back on. The eight that had been flashing were now constant.

Sweating, he eased onto a chair. Gradually, he became aware of people behind him and turned to where his fiancee and the secretary watched in dismay from the open door. Then he stared at the panel, watching the temperature needles gradually descend to where they had been. Terrified that the lights would start flashing again, he was still concentrating on the gauges an hour later when a bored technician returned from lunch.

It turned out that a faulty valve had restricted the flow of freezant around eight of the niches. When Anthony had turned the power off and on, the valve had reset itself, although it could fail again at any time and would have to be replaced, the technician explained.

"Then do it!"

He would never again be comfortable away from his father. It made him nervous to return to medical school. He contacted the cryofirm every day, making sure that there weren't any problems. He married, became a parent (of a lovely daughter), graduated, and was lucky enough to be able to do his internship in the city where he'd been raised and where he could keep a close watch on his father's safety. If only his father had been awake to see him graduate, he thought. If only his father had been cured and could have seen his granddaughter being brought home from the hospital. . .

One night, while Anthony was on duty in the emergency ward, a comatose patient turned out to be the broker who'd married his mother. The broker had shot himself in the head. Anthony tried everything possible to save him. His throat felt tight when he pronounced the time of death.

He joined a medical practice in his hometown after he finished his internship. He started earning enough to make good on his promise and take care of his wife after she'd spent so many years taking care of him. She had said that she wanted three children, and she got them sooner than she expected, for the next time she gave birth, it was to twins, a boy and a girl. Nonetheless, Anthony's work prevented him from spending as much time with his family as he wanted, for his specialty was blood diseases, and when he wasn't seeing patients, he was doing research, trying to find a way to cure his father.

He needed to know the experiments that the lab had conducted and the types of rays that his father might have been exposed to. But the lab was obsessed with security and refused to tell him. He fought to get a court order to force the lab to cooperate. Judge after judge refused. Meanwhile he was terribly conscious of all the family celebrations that his father continued to miss: the day Anthony's first daughter started grade school, the afternoon the twins began swimming lessons, the evening Anthony's second daughter played "Chopsticks" at her first piano recital. Anthony was thirty-five before he knew it. Then forty All of a sudden, his children were in high school. His wife went to law school. He kept doing research. When he was fifty-five and his eldest daughter turned thirty (she was married, with a daughter of her own), the laboratory made a mistake and released the information Anthony needed among a batch of old data that the lab felt was harmless. It wasn't Anthony who discovered the information, however, but instead a colleague two thousand miles away who had other reasons to look through the old data and recognized the significance of the type of rays that Anthony's father had been exposed to. Helped by his colleague's calculations,

.Anthony devised a treatment, tested it on computer models, subjected rats to the same type of rays, found that they developed the same rapid symptoms as his father had, gave the animals the treatment, and felt his pulse quicken when the symptoms disappeared as rapidly as they had come on.

With his wife next to him, Anthony stood outside his father's cryo-chamber as arrangements were made to thaw him. He feared that the technicians would make an error during the procedure (the word echoed from his youth), that his father wouldn't wake up. His muscles tightened as something hissed and the door swung open. The hatch slid out.

Anthony's father looked the same as when he'd last seen him: naked, gaunt, and gray, suspended over a force field.

"You thawed him that quickly?" Anthony asked.

"It doesn't work if it isn't instantaneous."

His father's chest moved up and down.

"My God, he's alive," Anthony said. "He's actually . . ." But there wasn't time to marvel. The disease would be active again, racing to complete its destruction.

Anthony hurriedly injected his father with the treatment. "We have to get him to a hospital." He stayed in his father's room, constantly monitoring his father's condition, injecting new doses of the treatment precisely on schedule. To his amazement, his father improved almost at once. The healthier color of his skin made obvious what the blood tests confirmed—the disease was retreating.

Not that his father knew. One effect of being thawed was that the patient took several days to wake up. Anthony watched for a twitch of a finger, a flicker of an eyelid, to indicate that his father was regaining consciousness. After three days, he became worried enough to order another brain scan, but as his father was being put in the machine, a murmur made everyone stop.

". . . Where am I?" Anthony's father asked.

"In a hospital. You're going to be fine."

His father strained to focus on him. ". . . Who? . . ."

"Your son."

"No. . . . My son's ... a child." Looking frightened, Anthony's father lost consciousness. The reaction wasn't unexpected. But Anthony had his own quite different reaction to deal with. While his father hadn't seen him age and hence didn't know who Anthony was, Anthony's father hadn't aged and hence looked exactly as Anthony remembered. The only problem was that Anthony's memory came from when he was nine, and now at the age of fifty-five, he looked at his thirty-two-year-old father, who wasn't much older than Anthony's son.

"Marian's dead?"

Anthony reluctantly nodded. "Yes. A car accident."

"When?"

Anthony had trouble saying it. "Twenty-two years ago."

"No."

"I'm afraid it's true."

"I've been frozen forty-six years'? No one told me what was going to happen."

"We couldn't. You were unconscious. Near death."

His father wept. "Sweet Jesus."

"Our house?"

"Was sold a long time ago."

"My friends?"

Anthony looked away.

With a shudder, his father pressed his hands to his face. "It's worse than being dead."

"No," Anthony said. "You heard the psychiatrist. Depression's a normal part of coming back. You're going to have to learn to live again."

"Just like learning to walk again," his father said bitterly.

"Your muscles never had a chance to atrophy. As far as your body's concerned, no time passed since you were frozen."

"But as far as my mind goes? Learn to live again? That's something nobody should have to do."

"Are you saying that Mom and I should have let you die? Our lives would have gone on just the same. Mom would have been killed whether you were frozen or you died. Nothing would have changed, ex cept that you wouldn't be here now."

"With your mother gone . . ."

Anthony waited.

"With my son gone ..."

"I'm your son."

"My son had his ninth birthday two weeks ago. I gave him a new computer game that I looked forward to playing with him. I'll never get to see him grow up."

"To see me grow up. But I'm here now. We can make up for lost time."

"Lost time." The words seemed like dust in his father's mouth.

"Dad"—it was the last time Anthony used that term—"this is your grandson, Paul. These are your granddaughters Sally and Jane. And this is Jane's son, Peter. Your great-grandson." Seeing his father's reaction to being introduced to grandchildren who were almost as old as he was, Anthony felt heartsick.

"Forty-six years? But everything changed in a second," his father said. "It makes my head spin so much ..."

"I'll teach you," Anthony said. "I'll start with basics and explain what happened since you were frozen. I'll move you forward. Look, here are virtual videos of—"

"What are virtual videos?"

"Of news shows from back then. We'll watch them in sequence. We'll talk about them. Eventually, we'll get you up to the present."

Anthony's father pointed toward the startlingly lifelike images from forty-six years earlier.

"That's the present."

"Is there anything you'd like to do?"

"Go to Marian."

So Anthony drove him to the mausoleum, where his father stood for a long time in front of the niche that contained her urn.

"One instant she's alive. The next . . ." Tears filled his father's eyes. "Take me home." But when Anthony headed north of the city, his father put a trembling hand on his shoulder.

"No. You're taking the wrong direction."

"But we live at—"

"Home. I want to go home."

So Anthony drove him back to the old neighborhood, where his father stared at the run-down house that he had once been proud to keep in perfect condition. Weeds filled the yard. Windows were broken. Porch steps were missing.

"There used to be a lawn here," Anthony's father said. "I worked so hard to keep it immaculate."

"I remember," Anthony said.

"I taught my son how to do somersaults on it."

"You taught me."

"In an instant." His father sounded anguished. "All gone in an instant." Anthony peered up from his breakfast of black coffee, seeing his father at the entrance to the kitchen. It had been two days since they'd spoken.

"I wanted to tell you," his father said, "that I realize you made an enormous effort for me. I can only imagine the pain and sacrifice. I'm sorry if I'm . . . No matter how confused I feel, I want to thank you."

Anthony managed to smile, comparing the wrinkle-free face across from him to the weary one that he'd seen in the mirror that morning. "I'm sorry, too. That you're having such a hard adjustment. All Mom and I thought of was, you were so sick. We were ready to do anything that would help you."

"Your mother." Anthony's father needed a moment before he could continue. "Grief doesn't last just a couple of days."

It was Anthony's turn to need a moment. He nodded. "I've had much of my life to try to adjust to Mom being gone, but I still miss her. You'll have a long hard time catching up to me."

"I . . ."

"Yes?"

"I don't know what to do."

"For starters, why don't you let me make you some breakfast." Anthony's wife was defending a case in court. "It'll be just the two of us. Do waffles sound okay? There's some syrup in that cupboard. How about orange juice?"

The first thing Anthony's father did was learn how to drive the new types of vehicles. Anthony believed this was a sign of improving mental health. But then he discovered that his father was using his mobility not to investigate his new world, but instead to visit Marian's ashes in the mausoleum and to go to the once-pristine house that he'd owned forty-six years previously, a time period that to him was yesterday. Anthony had done something similar when he'd lied to his mother's second husband about being at the library when actually he'd been at the cryofirm visiting his father. It worried him.

"I found a 'For Sale' sign at the house," his father said one evening at dinner. "I want to buy it."

"But. . ." Anthony set down his fork. "The place is a wreck."

"It won't be after I'm finished with it."

Anthony felt as if he were arguing not with his father but with one of his children when they were determined to do something that he thought unwise.

"I can't stay here," his father said. "I can't live with you for the rest of my life."

"Why not? You're welcome."

"A father and his grown-up son? We'll get in each other's way."

"But we've gotten along so far."

"I want to buy the house."

Continuing to feel that he argued with his son, Anthony gave in as he always did. "All right, okay, fine. I'll help you get a loan. I'll help with the down payment. But if you're going to take on this kind of responsibility, you'll need a job."

"That's something else I want to talk to you about."

His father used his maintenance skills to become a successful contractor whose specialty was restoring old-style homes to their former beauty. Other contractors tried to compete, but Anthony's father had an edge: he knew those houses inside and out. He'd helped build them when he was a teenager working on summer construction jobs. He'd maintained his when that kind of house was in its prime, almost a half century earlier. Most important, he loved that old style of house.

One house in particular—the house where he'd started to raise his family. As soon as the renovation was completed, he found antique furniture from the period. When Anthony visited, he was amazed by how closely the house resembled the way it had looked when he was a child. His father had arranged to have Marian's urn released to him. It sat on a shelf in a study off the living room. Next to it were framed pictures of Anthony and his mother when they'd been young, the year Anthony's father had gotten sick.

His father found antique audio equipment from back then. The only songs he played were from that time. He even found an old computer and the game that he'd wanted to play with Anthony, teaching his great-grandson how to play it just as he'd already taught the little boy how to do somersaults on the lawn.

Anthony turned sixty. The hectic years of trying to save his father were behind him. He reduced his hours at the office. He followed an interest in gardening and taught himself to build a greenhouse. His father helped him.

"I need to ask you something," his father said one afternoon when the project was almost completed.

"You make it sound awfully serious."

His father looked down at his callused hands. "I have to ask your permission about something."

"Permission?" Anthony's frown deepened his wrinkles.

"Yes. I. . . It's been five years. I. . . Back then, you told me that I had to learn to live again."

"You've been doing a good job of it," Anthony said.

"I fought it for a long time." His father looked more uncomfortable.

"What's wrong?"

"I don't know how to ..."

"Say it."

"I loved your mother to the depth of my heart."

Anthony nodded, pained with emotion.

"I thought I'd die without her," his father said. "Five years. I never expected . . . I've met somebody. The sister of a man whose house I'm renovating. We've gotten to know each other, and . . . Well, I . . . What I need to ask is, Would you object, would you see it as a betrayal of your mother if..."

Anthony felt pressure in his tear ducts. "Would I object?" His eyes misted. "All I want is for you to be happy."

Anthony was the best man at his father's wedding. His stepmother was the same age as his daughters. The following summer, he had a half-brother sixty-one years younger than himself. It felt odd to see his father acting toward the baby in the same loving manner that his father had Presumably acted toward him when he was a baby

At the celebration when the child was brought home from the hospital, several people asked Anthony if his wife was feeling ill. She looked wan.

"She's been working hard on a big trial coming up," he said.

The next day, she had a headache so bad that he took her to his clinic and had his staff do tests.

The day after that, she was dead. The viral meningitis that killed her was so virulent that nothing could have been done to save her. The miracle was that neither Anthony nor anybody else in the family had caught it, especially the new baby.

He felt drained. Plodding through his house, he tried to muster the energy to get through each day. The nights were harder. His father often came and sat with him, a young man next to an older one, doing his best to console him.

Anthony visited his wife's grave every day. On the anniversary of her death, while picking flowers for her, he collapsed from a stroke. The incident left him paralyzed on his left side, in need of constant care. His children wanted to put him in a facility.

"No," his father said. "It's my turn to watch over him." So Anthony returned to the house where his youth had been wonderful until his father had gotten sick. During the many hours they spent together, his father asked Anthony to fill in more details of what had happened as Anthony had grown up: the arguments he'd had with the broker, his double shifts as a waiter, his first date with the woman who would be his wife.

"Yes, I can see it," his father said.

The next stroke reduced Anthony's intelligence to that of a nine-year-old. He didn't have the capacity to know that the computer on which he played a game with his father came from long ago. In fact, the game was the same one that his father had given him on his ninth birthday, two weeks before his father had gotten sick, the game that he'd never had a chance to play with his son.

One morning, he no longer had a nine-year-old's ability to play the game.

"His neurological functions are decreasing rapidly," the specialist said.

"Nothing can be done?"

"I'm sorry. At this rate . . . In a couple of days . . ."

Anthony's father felt as if he had a stone in his stomach.

"We'll make him as comfortable here as possible," the specialist said.

"No. My son should die at home."

Anthony's father sat next to the bed, holding his son's frail hand, painfully reminded of having taken care of him when he'd been sick as a child. Now Anthony looked appallingly old for sixty-three. His breathing was shallow. His eyes were open, glassy, not registering anything.

His children and grandchildren came to pay their last respects.

"At least, he'll be at peace," his second daughter said.

His father couldn't bear it.

Jesus, he didn't give up on me. I won't give up on him.

"That theory's been discredited," the specialist said.

"It works."

"In isolated cases, but—"

"I'm one of them."

"Of the few. At your son's age, he might not survive the procedure."

"Are you refusing to make the arrangements?"

"I'm trying to explain that with the expense and the risk—"

"My son will be dead by tomorrow. Being frozen can't be worse than that. And as far as the expense goes, he worked hard. He saved his money. He can afford it."

"But there's no guarantee that a treatment will ever be developed for brain cells as damaged as your son's are."

"There's no guarantee it won't be developed, either."

"He can't give his permission."

"He doesn't need to. He made me his legal representative."

"All the same, his children need to be consulted. There are issues of estate, a risk of a lawsuit."

" I'll take care of his children. You take care of the arrangements." They stared at him.

Anthony's father couldn't tell if they resisted his idea because they counted on their inheritance. "Look, I'm begging. He'd have done this for you. He did it for me. For God's sake, you can't give up on him."

They stared harder.

"It's not going to cost you anything. I'll work harder and pay for it myself. I'll sign control of the estate over to you. All I want is, don't try to stop me."

Anthony's father stood outside the cryochamber, studying the stick-on plaque that he'd put on the hatch. It gave Anthony's name, his birth-date, when he'd had his first stroke, and when he'd been frozen. "Sweet dreams," it said at the bottom. "Wake up soon." Soon was a relative word, of course. Anthony had been frozen six years, and there was still no progress in a treatment. But that didn't mean there wouldn't be progress tomorrow or next month. There's always hope, Anthony's father thought. You've got to have hope.

On a long narrow table in the middle of the corridor, there were tokens of affection left by loved ones of other patients: family photographs and a baseball glove, for example. Anthony's father had left the disc of the computer game that he and Anthony had been playing. "We'll play it again," he'd promised.

It was Anthony's father's birthday. He was forty-nine. He had gray in his sideburns, wrinkles in his forehead. I'll soon look like Anthony did when I woke up from being frozen and saw him leaning over me, he thought.

He couldn't subdue the discouraging notion that one of these days he'd be the same age as Anthony when he'd been frozen. But now that he thought about it, maybe that notion wasn't so discouraging. If they found a treatment that year, and they woke Anthony up, and the treatment worked . . . We'd both be sixty-six. We could grow old together.

I'll keep fighting for you, Anthony. I swear you can count on me. I couldn't let you die before me. It's a terrible thing for a father to outlive his son.

This one just kept growing and growing . . . When Liz Hand first talked to me about "Cleopatra Brimstone" (isn't that a neat title?) she thought it would come in somewhere around eight thousand words. Then it began to grow. The next time we chatted (this is e-mail I'm talking about; which, as I've said before, is equivalent to the Victorian postal system— you can get "mail" in the morning, again at noon, and yet again in the late afternoon), she said it would come in at about fourteen thousand words. By that time I was getting tight for space in the book but thought fourteen thousand would be just fine— then the story landed on my doorstep (with a solid ka-thump!j and I noted with horror that it had grown to almost twenty thousand words!

As things were really tight by that time, I thought about asking Liz to cut the story— but I just couldn't. Her writing (as in her novels Black Light and Glimmering) is so full-bodied and evocative that I had to present it as written.

Cleopatra Brimstone

Elizabeth Hand

Her earliest memory was of wings. Luminous red and blue, yellow and green and orange; a black so rich it appeared liquid, edible. They moved above her, and the sunlight made them glow as though they were themselves made of light, fragments of another, brighter world falling to earth about her crib. Her tiny hands stretched upward to grasp them but could not: they were too elusive, too radiant, too much of the air.

Could they ever have been real?

For years she thought she must have dreamed them. But one afternoon when she was ten she went into the attic, searching for old clothes to wear to a Halloween party. In a corner beneath a cobwebbed window she found a box of her baby things. Yellow-stained bibs and tiny fuzzy jumpers blued from bleaching, a much-nibbled stuffed dog that she had no memory of whatsoever.

And at the very bottom of the carton, something else. Wings flattened and twisted out of shape, wires bent and strings frayed: a mobile. Six plastic butterflies, colors faded and their wings giving off a musty smell, no longer eidolons of Eden but crude representations of monarch, zebra swallowtail, red admiral, sulphur, an unnaturally elongated skipper and Agrias narcissus. Except for the narcissus, all were common New World species that any child might see in a suburban garden. They hung limply from their wires, antennae long since broken off; when she touched one wing it felt cold and stiff as metal.

The afternoon had been overcast, tending to rain. But as she held the mobile to the window, a shaft of sun broke through the darkness to ignite the plastic wings, bloodred, ivy green, the pure burning yellow of an August field. In that instant it was as though her entire being were burned away, skin hair lips fingers all ash; and nothing remained but the butterflies and her awareness of them, orange and black fluid filling her mouth, the edges of her eyes scored by wings.

As a girl she had always worn glasses. A mild childhood astigmatism worsened when she was thirteen: she started bumping into things and found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the entomological textbooks and journals that she read voraciously. Growing pains, her mother thought; but after two months, Janie's clumsiness and concomitant headaches became so severe that her mother admitted that this was perhaps something more serious, and took her to the family physician.

"Janie's fine," Dr. Gordon announced after peering into her ears and eyes. "She needs to see the opthamologist, that's all. Sometimes our eyes change when we hit puberty." He gave her mother the name of an eye doctor nearby.

Her mother was relieved, and so was Jane—she had overheard her parents talking the night before her appointment, and the words CAT scan and brain tumor figured in their hushed conversation. Actually, Jane had been more concerned about another odd physical manifestation, one that no one but herself seemed to have noticed. She had started menstruating several months earlier: nothing unusual in that. Everything she had read about it mentioned the usual things—mood swings, growth spurts, acne, pubic hair.

But nothing was said about eyebrows. Janie first noticed something strange about hers when she got her period for the second time. She had retreated to the bathtub, where she spent a good half hour reading an article in Nature about oriental ladybug swarms. When she finished the article, she got out of the tub, dressed, and brushed her teeth, and then spent a minute frowning at the mirror.

Something was different about her face. She turned sideways, squinting. Had her chin broken out? No; but something had changed. Her hair color? Her teeth? She leaned over the sink until she was almost nose-to-nose with her reflection.

That was when she saw that her eyebrows had undergone a growth spurt of their own. At the inner edge of each eyebrow, above the bridge of her nose, three hairs had grown remarkably long. They furled back toward her temple, entwined in a sort of loose braid. She had not noticed them sooner because she seldom looked in a mirror, and also because the hairs did not arch above the eyebrows, but instead blended in with them, the way a bittersweet vine twines around a branch.

Still, they seemed bizarre enough that she wanted no one, not even her parents, to notice. She found her mother's tweezers, neatly plucked the six hairs, and flushed them down the toilet. They did not grow back.

At the optometrist's, Jane opted for heavy tortoiseshell frames rather than contacts. The optometrist, and her mother, thought she was crazy, but it was a very deliberate choice. Janie was not one of those homely B-movie adolescent girls, driven to science as a last resort. She had always been a tomboy, skinny as a rail, with long slanted violet-blue eyes; a small rosy mouth; long, straight black hair that ran like oil between her fingers; skin so pale it had the periwinkle shimmer of skim milk.

When she hit puberty, all of these conspired to beauty. And Jane hated it. Hated the attention, hated being looked at, hated that the other girls hated her. She was quiet, not shy but impatient to focus on her schoolwork, and this was mistaken for arrogance by her peers. All through high school she had few friends. She learned early the perils of befriending boys, even earnest boys who professed an interest in genetic mutations and intricate computer simulations of hive activity. Janie could trust them not to touch her, but she couldn't trust them not to fall in love. As a result of having none of the usual distractions of high school—sex, social life, mindless employment—she received an Intel/ Westinghouse Science Scholarship for a computer-generated schematic of possible mutations in a small population of viceroy butterflies exposed to genetically engineered crops. She graduated in her junior year, took her scholarship money, and ran.

She had been accepted at Stanford and MIT, but chose to attend a small, highly prestigious women's college in a big city several hundred miles away. Her parents were apprehensive about her being on her own at the tender age of seventeen, but the college, with its elegant, cloister-like buildings and lustily wooded grounds, put them at ease. That and the dean's assurances that the neighborhood was completely safe, as long as students were sensible about not walking alone at night. Thus mollified, and at Janie's urging—she was desperate to move away from home—her father signed a very large check for the first semester's tuition. That September she started school.

She studied entomology, spending her first year examining the geni-talia of male and female scarce wormwood shark moths, a species found on the Siberian steppes. Her hours in the zoology lab were rapturous, hunched over a microscope with a pair of tweezers so minute they were themselves like some delicate portion of her specimen's physiognomy. She would remove the butterflies' genitalia, tiny and geometrically precise as diatoms, and dip them first into glycerine, which acted as a preservative, and next into a mixture of water and alcohol. Then she observed them under the microscope. Her glasses interfered with this work—they bumped into the microscope's viewing lens—and so she switched to wearing contact lenses. In retrospect, she thought that this was probably a mistake.

At Argus College she still had no close friends, but neither was she the solitary creature she had been at home. She respected her fellow students and grew to appreciate the company of women. She could go for days at a time seeing no men besides her professors or the commuters driving past the school's wrought-iron gates.

And she was not the school's only beauty. Argus College specialized in young women like Jane: elegant, diffident girls who studied the burial customs of Mongol women or the mating habits of rare antipodean birds; girls who composed concertos for violin and gamelan orchestra, or wrote computer programs that charted the progress of potentially dangerous celestial objects through the Oort cloud. Within this educational greenhouse, Janie was not so much orchid as sturdy milkweed blossom. She thrived.

Her first three years at Argus passed in a bright-winged blur with her butterflies. Summers were given to museum internships, where she spent months cleaning and mounting specimens in solitary delight. In her senior year Janie received permission to design her own thesis project, involving her beloved shark moths. She was given a corner in a dusty anteroom off the zoology lab, and there she set up her microscope and laptop. There was no window in her corner, indeed there was no window in the anteroom at all, though the adjoining lab was pleasantly old-fashioned, with high-arched windows set between Victorian cabinetry displaying Lepidoptera, neon-carapaced beetles, unusual tree fungi, and (she found these slightly tragic) numerous exotic finches, their brilliant plumage dimmed to dusty hues. Since she often worked late into the night, she requested and received her own set of keys. Most evenings she could be found beneath the glare of the small halogen lamp, entering data into her computer, scanning images of genetic mutations involving female shark moths exposed to dioxane, corresponding with other researchers in Melbourne and Kyoto, Siberia and London.

The rape occurred around ten o'clock one Friday night in early March. She had locked the door to her office, leaving her laptop behind, and started to walk to the subway station a few blocks away. It was a cold, clear night, the yellow glow of the crime lights giving dead grass and leafless trees an eerie autumn glow. She hurried across the campus, seeing no one, and then hesitated at Seventh Street. It was a longer walk, but safer, if she went down Seventh Street and then over to Michigan Avenue. The shortcut was much quicker, but Argus authorities and the local police discouraged students from taking it after dark, Jane stood for a moment, staring across the road to where the desolate park lay; then, staring resolutely straight ahead and walking briskly, she crossed Seventh and took the shortcut. A crumbling sidewalk passed through a weedy expanse of vacant lot, strewn with broken bottles and the spindly forms of half a dozen dusty-limbed oak trees. Where the grass ended, a narrow road skirted a block of abandoned row houses, intermittently lit by crime lights. Most of the lights had been vandalized, and one had been knocked down in a car accident—the car's fender was still there, twisted around the lamppost. Jane picked her way carefully among shards of shattered glass, reached the sidewalk in front of the boarded-up houses, and began to walk more quickly, toward the brightly lit Michigan Avenue intersection where the subway waited.

She never saw him. He was there, she knew that; knew he had a face, and clothing; but afterwards she could recall none of it. Not the feel of him, not his smell; only the knife he held—awkwardly, she realized later, she probably could have wrested it from him—and the few words he spoke to her. He said nothing at first, just grabbed her and pulled her into an alley between the row houses, his fingers covering her mouth, the heel of his hand pressing against her windpipe so that she gagged. He pushed her onto the dead leaves and wads of matted windblown newspaper, yanked her pants down, ripped open her jacket, and then tore her shirt open. She heard one of the buttons strike back and roll away. She thought desperately of what she had read once, in a Rape Awareness brochure: not to struggle, not to fight, not to do anything that might cause her attacker to kill her.

Janie did not fight. Instead, she divided into three parts. One part knelt nearby and prayed the way she had done as a child, not intently but automatically, trying to get through the strings of words as quickly as possible. The second part submitted blindly and silently to the man in the alley. And the third hovered above the other two, her hands wafting slowly up and down to keep her aloft as she watched.

"Try to get away," the man whispered. She could not see him or feel him though his hands were there. "Try to get away."

She remembered that she ought not to struggle, but from the noises he made and the way he tugged at her realized that was what aroused him. She did not want to anger him; she made a small sound deep in her throat and tried to push him from her chest. Almost immediately he groaned, and seconds later rolled off her. Only his hand lingered for a moment upon her cheek. Then he stumbled to his feet—she could hear him fumbling with his zipper—and fled. The praying girl and the girl in the air also disappeared then. Only Janie was left, yanking her ruined clothes around her as she lurched from the alley and began to run, screaming and staggering back and forth across the road, toward the subway.

The police came, an ambulance. She was taken first to the police station and then to the City General Hospital, a hellish place, starkly lit, with endless underground corridors that led into darkened rooms where solitary figures lay on narrow beds like gurneys. Her pubic hair was combed and stray hairs placed into sterile envelopes; semen samples were taken, and she was advised to be tested for HIV and other diseases. She spent the entire night in the hospital, waiting and undergoing various examinations. She refused to give the police or hospital staff her parents' phone number or anyone else's. Just before dawn they finally released her, with an envelope full of brochures from the local Rape Crisis Center, New Hope for Women, Planned Parenthood, and a business card from the police detective who was overseeing her case. The detective drove her to her apartment in his squad car; when he stopped in front of her building, she was suddenly terrified that he would know where she lived, that he would come back, that he had been her assailant.

But, of course, he had not been. He walked her to the door and waited for her to go inside.

"Call your parents," he said right before he left.

"I will."

She pulled aside the bamboo window shade, watching until the squad car pulled away. Then she threw out the brochures she'd received, flung off her clothes and stuffed them into the trash. She showered and changed, packed a bag full of clothes and another of books. Then she called a cab. When it arrived, she directed it to the Argus campus, where she retrieved her laptop and her research on tiger moths, and then had the cab bring her to Union Station. She bought a train ticket home. Only after she arrived and told her parents what had happened did she finally start to cry. Even then, she could not remember what the man had looked like.

She lived at home for three months. Her parents insisted that she get psychiatric counseling and join a therapy group for rape survivors. She did so, reluctantly, but stopped attending after three weeks. The rape was something that had happened to her, but it was over.

"It was fifteen minutes out of my life," she said once at group. "That's all. It's not the rest of my life."

This didn't go over very well. Other women thought she was in denial; the therapist thought Jane would suffer later if she did not confront her fears now.

"But I'm not afraid," said Jane.

"Why not?" demanded a woman whose eyebrows had fallen out.

Because lightning doesn't strike twice, Jane thought grimly, but she said nothing. That was the last time she attended group.

That night her father had a phone call. He took the phone and sat at the dining table, listening; after a moment stood and walked into his study, giving a quick backward glance at his daughter before closing the door behind him. Jane felt as though her chest had suddenly frozen, but after some minutes she heard her father's laugh; he was not, after all, talking to the police detective. When after half an hour he returned, he gave Janie another quick look, more thoughtful this time.

"That was Andrew." Andrew was a doctor friend of his, an Englishman. "He and Fred are going to Provence for three months. They were wondering if you might want to house-sit for them."

"In LondonT' Jane's mother shook her head. "I don't think—"

"I said we'd think about it."

" I'll think about it," Janie corrected him. She stared at both her parents, absently ran a finger along one eyebrow. "Just let me think about it."

And she went to bed.

She went to London. She already had a passport, from visiting Andrew with her parents when she was in high school. Before she left there were countless arguments with her mother and father, and phone calls back and forth to Andrew. He assured them that the flat was secure, there was a very nice reliable older woman who lived upstairs, that it would be a good idea for Janie to get out on her own again.

"So you don't get gun-shy," he said to her one night on the phone. He was a doctor, after all: a homeopath not an allopath, which Janie found reassuring. "It's important for you to get on with our life. You won't be able to get a real job here as a visitor, but I'll see what I can do." It was on the plane to Heathrow that she made a discovery. She had splashed water onto her face, and was beginning to comb her hair when she blinked and stared into the mirror. Above her eyebrows, the long hairs had grown back. They followed the contours of her brow, sweeping back toward her temples; still entwined, still difficult to make out unless she drew her face close to her reflection and tilted her head just so. Tentatively she touched one braided strand. It was stiff yet oddly pliant; but as she ran her finger along its length a sudden surge flowed through her. Not an electrical shock: more like the thrill of pain when a dentist's drill touches a nerve, or an elbow rams against a stone. She gasped; but immediately the pain was gone. Instead there was a thrumming behind her forehead, a spreading warmth that trickled into her throat like sweet syrup. She opened her mouth, her gasp turning into an uncontrollable yawn, the yawn into a spike of such profound physical ecstasy that she grabbed the edge of the sink and thrust forward, striking her head against the mirror. She was dimly aware of someone knocking at the lavatory door as she clutched the sink and, shuddering, climaxed.

"Hello?" someone called softly. "Hello, is this occupied?" "Right out," Janie gasped. She caught her breath, still trembling; ran a hand across her face, her finger halting before they could touch the hairs above her eyebrows. There was the faintest tingling, a temblor of sensation that faded as she grabbed her cosmetic bag, pulled the door open, and stumbled back into the cabin.

Andrew and Fred lived in an old Georgian row house just west of Camden Town, overlooking the Regent's Canal. Their flat occupied the first floor and basement; there was a hexagonal solarium out back, with glass walls and heated stone floor, and beyond that a stepped terrace leading down to the canal. The bedroom had an old wooden four-poster piled high with duvets and down pillows, and French doors that also opened onto the terrace. Andrew showed her how to operate the elaborate sliding security doors that unfolded from the walls, and gave her the keys to the barred window guards.

"You're completely safe here," he said, smiling. "Tomorrow we'll introduce you to Kendra upstairs and show you how to get around. Camden Market's just down that way, and that way—"

He stepped out onto the terrace, pointing to where the canal coiled and disappeared beneath an arched stone bridge. "—that way's the Regent's Park Zoo. I've given you a membership—"

"Oh! Thank you!" Janie looked around delighted. "This is wonderful."

"It is." Andrew put an arm around her and drew her close. "You're going to have a wonderful time, Janie. I thought you'd like the zoo—there's a new exhibit there, 'The World Within' or words to that effect—it's about insects. I thought perhaps you might want to volunteer there— they have an active decent program, and you're so knowledgeable about that sort of thing."

"Sure. It sounds great—really great." She grinned and smoothed her hair back from her face, the wind sending up the rank scent of stagnant water from the canal, the sweetly poisonous smell of hawthorn blossom.

As she stood gazing down past the potted geraniums and Fred's rosemary trees, the hairs upon her brow trembled, and she laughed out loud, giddily, with anticipation. Fred and Andrew left two days later. It was enough time for Janie to get over her jet lag and begin to get barely acclimated to the city, and to its smell. London had an acrid scent: damp ashes, the softer underlying fetor of rot that oozed from ancient bricks and stone buildings, the thick vegetative smell of the canal, sharpened with urine and spilled beer. So many thousands of people descended on Camden Town on the weekend that the tube station was restricted to incoming passengers, and the canal path became almost impassable. Even late on a weeknight she could hear voices from the other side of the canal, harsh London voices echoing beneath the bridges or shouting to be heard above the din of the Northern Line trains passing overhead.

Those first days Janie did not venture far from the flat. She unpacked her clothes, which did not take much time, and then unpacked her collecting box, which did. The sturdy wooden case had come through the overseas flight and customs seemingly unscathed, but Janie found herself holding her breath as she undid the metal hinges, afraid of what she'd find inside.

"Oh!" she exclaimed. Relief, not chagrin: nothing had been damaged. The small glass vials of ethyl alcohol and gel shellac were intact, and the pillboxes where she kept the tiny #2 pins she used for mounting. Fighting her own eagerness, she carefully removed packets of stiff archival paper; a block of Styrofoam covered with pinholes; two bottles of clear Maybelline nail polish and a small container of Elmer's Glue-All; more pillboxes, empty, and empty gelatine capsules for very small specimens; and last of all a small glass-fronted display box, framed in mahogany and holding her most precious specimen: a hybrid Celerio harmuthi kordesch, the male crossbreed of the spurge and elephant hawkmoths. As long as the first joint of her thumb, it had the hawkmoth's typically streamlined wings but exquisitely delicate coloring, fuchsia bands shading to a soft rich brown, its thorax thick and seemingly feathered. Only a handful of these hybrid moths had ever existed, bred by the Prague entomologist Jan Pokorny in 1961; a few years afterward, both the spurge hawkmoth and the elephant hawkmoth had become extinct.

Janie had found this one for sale on the Internet three months ago. It was a former museum specimen and cost a fortune; she had a few bad nights, worrying whether it had actually been a legal purchase. Now she held the display box in her cupped palms and gazed at it raptly. Behind her eyes she felt a prickle, like sleep or unshed tears; then a slow thrumming warmth crept from her brows, spreading to her temples, down her neck and through her breasts, spreading like a stain. She swallowed, leaned back against the sofa, and let the display box rest back within the larger case; slid first one hand and then the other beneath her sweater and began to stroke her nipples. When some time later she came it was with stabbing force and a thunderous sensation above her eyes, as though she had struck her forehead against the floor.

She had not; gasping, she pushed the hair from her face, zipped her jeans, and reflexively leaned forward, to make certain the hawkmoth in its glass box was safe.

Over the following days she made a few brief forays to the newsagent and greengrocer, trying to eke out the supplies Fred and Andrew had left in the kitchen. She sat in the solarium, her bare feet warm against the heated stone floor, and drank chamomile tea or claret, staring down to where the ceaseless stream of people passed along the canal path, and watching the narrow boats as they piled their way slowly between Camden Lock and Little Venice, two miles to the west in Paddington. By the following Wednesday she felt brave enough, and bored enough, to leave her refuge and visit the zoo.

It was a short walk along the canal, dodging bicyclists who jingled their bells impatiently when she forgot to stay on the proper side of the path. She passed beneath several arching bridges, their undersides pleated with slime and moss. Drunks sprawled against the stones and stared at her blearily or challengingly by turns; well-dressed couples walked dogs, and there were excited knots of children, tugging their parents on to the zoo. Fred had walked here with Janie, to show her the way. But it all looked unfamiliar now. She kept a few strides behind a family, her head down, trying not to look as though she was following them; and felt a pulse of relief when they reached a twisting stair with an arrowed sign at its top.