“See,” said Lizard, then blushed. “Sorry, God. But you just said it yourself-chosen people.”

“Those are the people I choose,” said God with a tinge of impatience. “Yes.”

“So-the Jews.”

“No. The moneylenders are mostly wasps. The usurers. Oil people. Big players in Threadneedle Street and Wall Street. Or, at least, a good many of them. Very few Jews, as it happens. And most of them, in Heaven, are from show business. Look around you and tell me who are the chosen ones. It’s simple. They’re the people in the limousines with great sex lives and private jets. Not cats, of course, who don’t like travel. Otherwise, the chosen are very popular with the public or aggressively wealthy, the ones who have helped themselves. And those who help themselves God helps.”

“You’re a Yank!” Engelbrecht was struck by a revelation. “There are rules in this club about Yanks.”

“Because Americans happen to have a handle on the realities, doesn’t mean I’m American,” God was a little offended. Then he softened. “It’s probably an easy mistake to make. I mean, strictly speaking, I’m prehistoric. But, yes, America has come up trumps where religious worship is concerned. No old-fashioned iconography cluttering up their vision. There’s scarcely a church in the nation that isn’t a sort of glorified business seminar nowadays. God will help you, but you have to prove you’re serious about wanting help. He’ll at least match everything you make, but you have to make a little for yourself first, to show you can. It’s all there. Getting people out of the welfare trap.”

“Aren’t they all a bit narrow-minded?” asked Taffy Sinclair, the metatemporal pathologist, who had so successfully dissected the Hess quints. “They are where I come from, I know.” His stern good looks demanded our attention. “Baptists!” He took a long introspective pull of his shant. The massive dome of his forehead glared in the firelight.

God was unmoved by Sinclair’s point. “Those Baptists are absolute wizards. They’re spot on about me. And all good Old Testament boys. They use the Son of God as a source of authority, not as an example. The economic liberalism they vote for destroys everything of value worth conserving! It drives them nuts, but it makes them more dysfunctional and therefore more aggressive and therefore richer. Deeply unhappy, they turn increasingly to the source of their misery for a comfort that never comes. Compassionate consumption? None of your peace-and-love religions down there. Scientology has nothing on that little lot. Amateur, that Hubbard. But a bloody good one.” He chuckled affectionately. “I look with special favor on the Southern Baptist Convention. So there does happen to be a preponderance of Americans in paradise, as it happens. But ironically no Scientologists. Hubbard’s as fond of cats as I am, but he won’t have Scientologists. I’ll admit, too, that not all the chosen are entirely happy with the situation, because of being pretty thoroughly outnumbered, just by the Oriental shorthairs. And they do like to be in control. And many of them are bigots, so they’re forever whining about the others being favored over them.

“Of course, once they get to Heaven, I’m in control. It takes a bit of adjustment for some of them. Some of them, in fact, opt for Hell, preferring to rule there than serve in Heaven, as it were. Milton was on the money, really, if a bit melodramatic and fanciful. Not so much a war in Heaven as a renegotiated contract. A pending paradise.”

“I thought you sent Jesus down as the Prince of Peace,” said Lizard a little dimly. The black bombers were wearing off, and he was beginning to feel the effects of the past few hours.

“Well, in those days,” said God, “I have to admit, I had a different agenda. Looking back, of course, it was a bit unrealistic. It could never have worked. But I wouldn’t take no for an answer, and you know the rest. New Testament and so on? Even then Paul kept trying to talk to me and I wouldn’t listen. Another temporary fix-up as it turned out. He was right. I admitted it. The problem is not in the creating of mankind, say, but in getting the self-reproducing software right. Do that and you have a human race with real potential. But that’s always been the hurdle, hasn’t it? Now lust and greed are all very well, but they do tend to involve a lot of messy side effects. And, of course, I tried to modify those with my ten commandments. Everyone was very excited about them at the time. A bit of fine-tuning I should have tried earlier. But we all know where that led. It’s a ramshackle world at best, I have to admit. The least I can do is shore a few things up. I tried a few other belief systems. All ended the same way. So the alternative was to bless the world with sudden rationality. Yet once you give people a chance to think about it, they stop reproducing altogether. Lust is a totally inefficient engine for running a reproductive program. It means you have to modify the rational processes so that they switch off at certain times. And we all know where that leads. So, all in all, while the fiercest get to the top, the top isn’t worth getting to and if it wasn’t for the cats, I’d wind the whole miserable failure up. In fact I was going to until Jesus talked me into offering cloning as an alternative. I’d already sent them H. G. Wells and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The United Nations and all the rest of it. I’m too soft, I know, but Jesus was always my favorite, and he’s never short of a reason for giving you all another chance. So every time I start to wipe you out, along he comes with that bloody charm of his and he twists me round his little finger. Well, you know the rest. One world war interrupted. Started again. Stopped again. Couple more genocides. Try again. No good. So far, as you’ve probably noticed, you haven’t exactly taken the best options offered. Even Jesus is running out of excuses for you. So I’m giving it a few years and then, no matter what, I’m sending a giant comet. Or I might send a giant cat. It’ll be a giant something anyway. And it’ll be over with in an instant. Nothing cruel. No chance to change my mind.”

Death was hovering about in the shadows, glancing meaningfully at his watches.

“That’s it, then, is it?” Jillian Burnes seemed a bit crestfallen. “You’ve come to warn us that the world has every chance of ending. And you offer us no chance to repent, to change, to make our peace?” She tightened her lips. God could tell how she felt.

“I didn’t offer,” God reminded her. “Somebody asked. Look, I am not the Prince of Lies. I am the Lord of Truth. Not a very successful God of Love, though I must say I tried. More a God of, well, profit, I suppose. I mean everyone complains that these great religious books written in my name are incoherent, so they blame the writers. Never occurs to them that I might not be entirely coherent myself. On account of being-well, the supreme being. If I am existence, parts of existence are incoherent. Or, at least, apparently incoherent. . .” He realized he’d lost us.

“So there’s no chance for redemption?” said Engelbrecht, looking about him. “For, say, the bohemian sporting fancy?”

“I didn’t say that. Who knows what I’ll feel like next week? But I’ll always get on famously with cats. Can’t resist the little beggars. There are some humans who are absolutely satisfied with the status quo in Heaven. But all cats get a kick out of the whole thing. The humans, on the quiet, are often only there to look after the cats.”

“And the rest?”

“I don’t follow you,” said God. “Well, of course, being omniscient, I could follow you. What I should have said was ‘I’m not following you.’ “

“The rest of the people. What happens to them. The discards. The souls who don’t make it through the pearly gates, as it were?” Engelbrecht seemed to be showing unusual concern for others.

“Recycled,” said God. “You know-thrown back in the pot-what do the Celts call it?-the Mother Sea?

After all, they’re indistinguishable in life, especially the politicians. They probably hardly notice the change.”

“Is that the only people who get to stay?” asked the Dwarf. “Rich people?”

“Oh, no,” said God. “Though the others do tend to be funny. Wits and comics mostly. I love Benny Hill, don’t you? He’s often seated on my right side, you might say. You need a lot of cheering up in my job.”

Jillian Burnes was becoming sympathetic. She loved to mother power. “I always thought you were a matron. I felt ashamed of you. It’s such a relief to find out you’re male.” There was a sort of honeyed criticism in her voice, an almost flirtatious quality.

“Not strictly speaking male,” said God, “being divine, sublime, and, ha, ha, all things, including woman, the eternal mime.”

“Well, you sound very masculine,” she said. “White and privileged.”

“Absolutely!” God reassured her. “I approve of your method. That’s exactly who I am and that’s who I like to spend my time with, if I have to spend it with human beings at all.”

Engelbrecht had bared his teeth. He was a terrier. “So can I get in, is ‘what I suppose I’m asking?”

“Of course you can.”

“Though I’m not Jewish.”

“You don’t have to be Jewish. I can’t stress this too often. Think about it. I haven’t actually favored the main mass of Jews lately, have I? I mean, take the twentieth century alone. I’m not talking about dress codes and tribal loyalties.”

God spread his legs a little wide and hefted his gown to let the glow get to his divine buttocks. If we had not known it to be a noise from the fire, we might have thought he farted softly. He sighed. “When I first got into this calling there were all kinds of other deities about, many of mem far superior to me in almost every way. More attractive. More eloquent. More easygoing. Elegant powers of creativity. Even the Celts and the Norse gods had a bit of style. But I had ambition. Bit by bit I took over the trade until, bingo, one day there was only me. I am, after all, the living symbol of corporate aggression, tolerating no competition and favoring only my own family and its clients. What do you want me to do? Identify with some bloody oik of an East Timorese who can hardly tell the difference between himself and a tree?

Sierra Leone? Listen, you get yourselves into these messes, you get yourselves out.”

“Well it’s a good world for overpaid CEOs . . . ,” mused Lizard.

“In this world and the next,” confirmed God. “And it’s a good world for overpaid comedians, too, for that matter.”

“So Ben Elton and Woody Allen . . .”

God raised an omnipotent hand. “I said comedians.”

“Um.” Engelbrecht was having difficulties phrasing something. ‘Um ...” He was aware of Death hovering around and ticking like a showcase full of Timexes. “What about it?”

“What?”

“You know,” murmured Engelbrecht, deeply embarrassed by now, “the meaning of existence? The point.”

“Point?” God frowned. “I don’t follow.”

“Well you’ve issued a few predictions in your time. . . .”

Death was clearing his throat. “Just to remind you about that policy subcommittee,” he murmured. “I think we told them half-eight.”

God seemed mystified for a moment. Then he began to straighten up. Oh, yes. Important committee. Might be some good news for you. Hush, hush. Can’t say any more.”

Lizard was now almost falling over himself to get his questions in. “Did you have anything to do with global warming?”

Death uttered a cold sigh. He almost put the fire out. We all glared at him, but he was unrepentant. God remained tolerant of a question he might have heard a thousand times at least. He spread his hands.

“Look. I plant a planet with sustainable wealth, OK? Nobody tells you to breed like rabbits and gobble it all up at once.”

“Well, actually, you did encourage us to breed like rabbits,” Jillian Burnes murmured reasonably.

“Fair enough,” said God. “I have to agree corporate expansion depends on a perpetually growing population. We found that out. Demographics are the friend of business, right?”

“Well, up to a point, I should have thought,” said Lizard, aware that God had already as good as told him a line had been drawn under the whole project. “I mean it’s a finite planet and we’re getting close to exhausting it.”

“That’s right.” God glanced at the soft Dali watches over the bar, then darted an inquiry at Death. “So?”

“So how can we stop the world from ending?” asked Englebrecht.

“Well,” said God, genuinely embarrassed, “you can’t.”

“Can’t? The end of the world is inevitable? “

“I thought I’d answered that one already. In fact, it’s getting closer all the time.” He began to move toward the cloakroom. God, I understood, couldn’t lie. Which didn’t mean he always liked telling the truth. And he knew anything he added would probably sound patronizing or unnecessarily accusatory. Then the taxi had turned up, and Death was bustling God off into it.

And that was that. As we gathered round the fire, Lizard Bayliss said he thought it was a rum do altogether and God must be pretty desperate to seek out company like ours, especially on a wet Saturday night. What did everyone else make of it?

We decided that nobody present was really qualified to judge, so we’d wait until Monday, when Monsignor Cornelius returned from Las Vegas. The famous Cowboy Jesuit had an unmatched grasp of contemporary doctrine.

But this wasn’t good enough for Engelbrecht, who seemed to have taken against our visitor in a big way.

“I could sort this out,” he insisted. If God had a timepiece of any weight he’d like to back, Engelbrecht would cheerfully show it the gloves.

That, admitted Jillian Burnes with new admiration, was the true existential hero, forever battling against Fate, and forever doomed to lose.

Engelbrecht, scenting an opportunity he hadn’t previously even considered, became almost egregious, slicking back his hair and offering the great novelist an engaging leer.

When the two had gone off, back to Jillian’s Tufnell Hill eyrie, Lizard Bayliss offered to buy the drinks, adding that it had been a bloody awful Friday and Saturday so far, and he hoped Sunday cheered up because if it didn’t the whole weekend would have been a rotten write-off. I’m pleased to say it was Taffy Sinclair who proposed we all go down to the Woods of Westermaine for some goblin shooting, so we rang up Count Dracula to tell him we were coming over to Dunsuckin, then all jumped onto our large black Fly and headed for fresher fields, agreeing that it had been one of the most depressing Saturdays any of us had enjoyed in centuries and the sooner it was behind us, the better. In the late sixties, Tom Disch, along with John Sladek, was, in a I sense, the U.S. Ambassador to the British New Wave movement. His novel Camp Concentration, written in that period, should be on every reading list of classic sf.

Over the years Disch has been, besides a great novelist in and out of sf, a poet, playwright, critic, children’s author (his Brave Little Toaster was even Disney-ized), teacher, and, of course, short-story writer.

I’ve considered him a mentor for more than twenty-five years and am proud to present his latest fiction, which recalls a bit his New Wave days.

I n X a n a d u

t h o m a s M . d i s c h

In memory of John Sladek, who died March 10, 2000

And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.

?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

P A R T O N E

x a n a d u

H

is awareness was quite limited during the first so-long. A popup screen said WELCOME TO XANADU, [Cook, Fran]. YOUR

AFTERLIFE BEGINS NOW! BROUGHT TO YOU BY DISNEY-MITSUBISHI PRODUCTIONS of quebec! a votre sante toujours!

Then there was a choice of buttons to click on, Okay or Cancel. He didn’t have an actual physical mouse, but there was an equivalent in his mind, in much the way that amputees have ghostly limbs, but when he clicked on Okay with his mental mouse there was a dull Dong! and nothing happened. When he clicked on Cancel there was a trembling and the smallest flicker of darkness and then the pop-up screen greeted him with the original message. This went on for an unknowable amount of time, there being no means by which elapsed time could be measured. After he’d Dong!ed on Okay enough times, he stopped bothering. The part of him that would have been motivated, back when, to express impatience or to feel resentment or to worry just wasn’t connected. He felt an almost supernatural passivity. Maybe this is what people were after when they took up meditation. Or maybe it was supernatural, though it seemed more likely, from the few clues he’d been given, that it was cybernetic in some way. He had become lodged (he theorized) in a faulty software program, like a monad in a game of JezzBall banging around inside its little square cage, ricocheting off the same four points on the same four walls forever. Or as they say in Quebec, toujours.

And oddly enough that was Okay. If he were just a molecule bouncing about, a lifer rattling his bars, there was a kind of comfort in doing so, each bounce a proof of the mass and motion of the molecule, each rattle an SOS dispatched to someone who might think, Ah-ha, there’s someone there!

s t a t e p l e a s u r e - d o m e 1

And then—or, as it might be, once upon a time—Cancel produced a different result than it had on countless earlier trials, and he found himself back in some kind of real world. There was theme music (“Wichita Lineman”) and scudding clouds high overhead and the smell of leaf mold, as though he’d been doing push-ups out behind the garage, with his nose grazing the dirt. He had his old body back, and it seemed reasonably trim. Better than he’d left it, certainly.

“Welcome,” said his new neighbor, a blond woman in a blouse of blue polka dots on a silvery rayonlike ground. “My name is Debora. You must be Fran Cook. We’ve been expecting you.”

He suspected that Debora was a construct of some sort, and it occurred to him that he might be another. But whatever she was, she seemed to expect a response from him beyond his stare of mild surmise.

“You’ll have to fill me in a little more, Debora. I don’t really know where we are.”

“This is Xanadu,” she said with a smile that literally flashed, like the light on top of a police car, with distinct, pointed sparkles.

“But does Xanadu exist anywhere except in the poem?”

This yielded a blank look but then another dazzling smile. “You could ask the same of us.”

“Okay. To be blunt: Am I dead? Are you?”

Her smile diminished, as though connected to a rheostat. “I think that might be the case, but I don’t know for sure. There’s a sign at the entrance to the pleasure-dome that says ‘Welcome to Eternity.’ But there’s no one to ask, there or anywhere else. No one who knows anything. Different people have different ideas. I don’t have any recollection of dying, myself. Do you?”

“I have no recollections, period,” he admitted. “Or none that occur to me at this moment. Maybe if I tried to remember something in particular ...”

“It’s the same with me. I can remember the plots of a few movies. And the odd quotation. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ “

“Eisenhower?” he hazarded.

“I guess. It’s all pretty fuzzy. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention back then. Or it gets erased when you come here. I think there’s a myth to that effect. Or maybe it’s so blurry because it never happened in the first place. Which makes me wonder, are we really people here, or what? And where is here? This isn’t anyone’s idea of heaven that I ever heard of. It’s kind of like Disney World, only there’s no food, no rides, no movies. Nothing to do, really. You can meet people, talk to them, like with us, but that’s about it. Don’t think I’m complaining. They don’t call it a pleasure-dome for nothing. That part’s okay, though it’s not any big deal. More like those Magic Finger beds in old motels.”

He knew just what she meant, though he couldn’t remember ever having been to an old motel or lain down on a Magic Fingers bed. When he tried to reach for a memory of his earlier life, any detail he could use as an ID tag, it was like drawing a blank to a clue in a crossword. Some very simple word that just wouldn’t come into focus.

Then there was a fade to black and a final, abject Dong! that didn’t leave time for a single further thought.

a l p h

“I’m sorry,” Debora said, with a silvery shimmer of rayon, “that was my fault for having doubted. Doubt’s the last thing either of us needs right now. I love the little dimple in your chin.”

“I’m not aware that I had a dimple in my chin.”

“Well, you do now, and it’s right—“ She traced a line up the center of his chin with her finger, digging into the flesh with the enamaled tip as it reached. “—here.”

“Was I conked out long?”

She flipped her hair as though to rid herself of a fly, and smiled in a forgiving way, and placed her hand atop his. At that touch he felt a strange lassitude steal over him, a deep calm tinged somehow with mirth, as though he’d remembered some sweet, dumb joke from his vanished childhood. Not the joke itself but the laughter that had greeted it, the laughter of children captured on a home video, silvery and chill.

“If we suppose,” she said thoughtfully, tracing the line of a vein on the back of his hand with her red fingertip, “that our senses can deceive

us, then what is there that can’t? ” She raised her eyebrows italic-wise. “I mean,” she insisted, “my body might be an illusion, and the world I think surrounds me might be another. But what of that ‘I think’? The very act of doubting is a proof of existence, right? I think therefore I am.”

“Descartes,” he footnoted.

She nodded. “And who would ever have supposed that that old doorstop would be relevant to real life, so-called? Except I think it would be just as true with any other verb: I love therefore I am.” “Why not?” he agreed.

She squirmed closer to him until she could let the weight of her upper body rest on his as he lay there sprawled on the lawn, or the illusion of a lawn. The theme music had segued, unnoticed, to a sinuous trill of clarinets and viola that might have served for the orchestration of a Strauss opera, and the landscape was its visual correlative, a perfect Pu-vis de Chavannes—the same chalky pastels in thick impasto blocks and splotches, but never with too painterly panache. There were no visible brush strokes. The only tactile element was the light pressure of her fingers across his skin, making each least hair in its follicle an antenna to register pleasure.

A pleasure that need never, could never cloy, a temperate pleasure suited to its pastoral source, a woodwind pleasure, a fruity wine. Lavender, canary yellow. The green of distant mountains. The ripple of the river.

c a v e r n s m e a s u r e l e s s t o m a n

The water that buoyed the little skiff was luminescent, and so their progress through the cave was not a matter of mere conjecture or kines-thesia. They could see where they were going. Even so, their speed could only be guessed at, for the water’s inward light was not enough to illumine either the ice high overhead or either shore of the river. They were borne along into some more unfathomable darkness far ahead as though across an ideal frictionless plane, and it made him think of spaceships doing the same thing, or of his favorite screen saver, which simulated the white swirl-by of snowflakes when driving through a blizzard. One is reduced at such moments (he was now) to an elemental condition, as near to being a particle in physics as a clumsy, complex mammal will ever come.

“I shall call you Dynamo,” she confided in a throaty whisper. “Would you like that as a nickname? The Dynamo of Xanadu.”

“You’re too kind,” he said unthinkingly. He had become careless in

their conversations. Not a conjugal carelessness: he had not talked with her so very often that all her riffs and vamps were second nature to him. This was the plain unadorned carelessness of not caring.

“I used to think,” she said, “that we were all heading for hell in a handbasket. Is that how the saying goes?”

“Meaning, hastening to extinction?”

“Yes, meaning that. It wasn’t my original idea. I guess everyone has their own vision of the end. Some people take it straight from the Bible, which is sweet and pastoral, but maybe a little dumb, though one oughtn’t to say so, not where they are likely to overhear you. Because is that really so different from worrying about the hole in the ozone layer? That was my apocalypse of choice, how we’d all get terrible sunburns and cancer, and then the sea level would rise, and everyone in Calcutta would drown.”

“You think this is Calcutta?”

“Can’t you ever be serious?”

“So, what’s your point, Debora?” When he wanted to be nice, he would use her name, but she never used his. She would invent nicknames for him, and then forget them and have to invent others. It was thanks to such idiosyncrasies that he’d come to believe in her objective existence as something other than his mental mirror. If she were no more than the forest pool in which Narcissus gazed adoringly, their minds would malfunction in similar ways. Were they mere mirror constructs, he would have known by now.

“It’s not,” she went on, “that I worry that the end is near. I suppose the end is always near. Relative to Eternity. And it’s not that I’m terribly curious how it will end. I suppose we’ll hurtle over the edge of some immense waterfall, like Columbus and his crew.”

“Listen!” he said, breaking in. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“The music. It’s the score for Koyaanisqatsi. God, I used to watch the tape of that over and over.”

She gave a sigh of polite disapproval. “I can’t bear Philip Glass. It’s just as you say, the same thing over and over.”

“There was this one incredible pan. It must have been taken by a helicopter flying above this endless high-rise apartment complex. But it had been abandoned.”

“And?” she insisted. “What is your point?”

“Well, it was no simulation. The movie was made before computers could turn any single image into some endless quilt. We were really see-ing this vast deserted housing project, high-rise after high-rise with the windows boarded up. The abandoned ruins of some ultra-modern city. it existed, but until that movie nobody knew about it. It makes you think.”

“It doesn’t make me think.”

There was no way, at this moment, they were going to have sex. Anyhow, it probably wouldn’t have been safe. The boat would capsize and they would drown.

A s u n l e s s s e a

It was as though the whole beach received its light from a few candles. A dim, dim light evenly diffused, and a breeze wafting up from the water with an unrelenting coolness, as at some theater where the air-conditioning cannot be turned off. They huddled within the cocoon of a single beach towel, thighs pressed together, arms crisscrossed behind their backs in a chaste hug, trying to keep warm. The chill in the air was the first less than agreeable physical sensation he’d known in Xanadu, but it did not impart that zip of challenge that comes with October weather. Rather, it suggested his own mortal diminishment. A plug had been pulled somewhere, and all forms of radiant energy were dwindling synchronously, light, warmth, intelligence, desire.

There were tears on Debora’s cheek, and little sculptures of sea foam in the shingle about them. And very faint, the scent of nutmeg, the last lingering trace of some long-ago lotion or deodorant. The ocean gray as aluminum.

t h e w a i l i n g

Here were the high-rises from the movie, but in twilight now, and without musical accompaniment, though no less portentous for that. He glided past empty benches and leaf-strewn flower beds like a cameraman on roller skates, until he entered one of the buildings, passing immaterially through its plate-glass door. Then there was, in a slower pan than the helicopter’s but rhyming to it, a smooth iambic progression past the doors along the first-floor corridor.

He came to a stop before the tenth door, which stood ajar. Within he could hear a stifled sobbing—a wailing, rather. He knew he was expected to go inside, to discover the source of this sorrow. But he could not summon the will to do so. Wasn’t his own sorrow sufficient? Wasn’t the loss of a world enough?

A man appeared at the end of the corridor in the brown uniform of United Parcel Service. His footsteps were inaudible as he approached.

“I have a delivery for Cook, Fran,” the UPS man announced, holding out a white envelope. At the same time he was offered, once again, the familiar, forlorn choice between Okay and Cancel. He clicked on Cancel. There was a trembling, and the smallest flicker of darkness, but then the corridor reasserted itself, and the wailing behind the door. The UPS man was gone, but the envelope remained in his hand. It bore the return address in Quebec of Disney-Mitsubishi.

There was no longer a Cancel to click on. He had to read the letter.

Dear [Name]:

The staff and management of Xanadu International regret to inform you that as o/ [date] all services in connection with your contract [Number] will be canceled due to new restrictions in the creation and maintenance of posthumous intelligence. We hope that we will be able to resolve all outstanding differences with the government of Quebec and restore the services contracted for by the heirs of your estate, but in the absence of other communications you must expect the imminent closure of your account. It has been a pleasure to serve you. We hope you have enjoyed your time in Xanadu.

The law of the sovereign state of Quebec requires us to advise you that in terminating this contract we are not implying any alteration in the spiritual condition of [Name] or of his immortal soul. The services of Xanadu International are to be considered an esthetic product offered for entertainment purposes only.

When he had read it, the words of the letter slowly faded from the page, like the smile of the Cheshire cat.

The wailing behind the door had stopped, but he still stood in the empty corridor, scarce daring to breathe. Any moment, he thought, might be his last. In an eyeblink the world might cease. But it didn’t. If anything the world seemed solider than heretofore. People who have had a brush with death often report the same sensation.

He reversed his path along the corridor, wondering if anyone lived behind any of them, or if they were just a facade, a Potemkin corridor in a high-rise in the realm of faerie.

As though to answer his question Debora was waiting for him when he went outside. She was wearing a stylishly tailored suit in a kind of brown tweed, and her hair was swept up in a way that made her look like a French movie star of the 1940s.

As they kissed, the orchestra reintroduced their love theme. The music swelled. The world came to an end.

P A R T T W O

x a n a d u

But then, just the way that the movie will start all over again after The End, if you just stay in your seat, or even if you go out to the lobby for more popcorn, he found himself back at the beginning, with the same pop-up screen welcoming him to Xanadu and then a choice of Okay or Cancel. But there was also, this time, a further choice: a blue banner that pulsed at the upper edge of consciousness and asked him if he wanted expanded memory and quicker responses. He most definitely did, so with his mental mouse he accepted the terms being offered without bothering to scroll through them.

He checked off a series of Yeses and Continues, and so, without his knowing it, he had become, by the time he was off the greased slide, a citizen of the sovereign state of Quebec, an employee of Disney-Mitsubishi Temps E-Gal, and—cruelest of his new disadvantages—a girl. A face glimmered before him in the blue gloaming. At first he thought it might be Debora, for it had the same tentative reality that she did, like a character at the beginning of some old French movie about railroads and murderers, who may be the star or only an extra on hand to show that this is a world with people in it. It was still too early in the movie to tell. Only as he turned sideways did he realize (the sound track made a samisen-like Twang! of recognition) that he had been looking in a mirror, and that the face that had been coalescing before him—the rouged cheeks, the plump lips, the fake lashes, the mournful gaze—had been his own! Or rather, now, her own.

As so many other women had realized at a similar point in their lives, it was already too late and nothing could be done to correct the mistake that Fate, and Disney-Mitsubishi, had made. Maybe he’d always been a woman. [Cook, Fran] was a sexually ambiguous name. Perhaps his earlier assumption that he was male was simply a function of thinking in English, where one may be mistaken about his own identity (but not about hers). I think; therefore I am a guy.

He searched through his expanded memory for some convincing evidence of his gender history. Correction: her gender history. Her-story, as feminists would have it. Oh, dear—would he be one of them now, always thinking in italics, a grievance committee of one in perpetual session?

But look on the bright side (she told herself). There might be advantages in such a change of address. Multiple orgasms. Nicer clothes (though she couldn’t remember ever wanting to dress like a woman when she was a man). Someone else paying for dinner, assuming that the protocols of hospitality still worked the same way here in Xanadu as they had back in reality. This was supposed to be heaven and already she was feeling nostalgic for a life she couldn’t remember, an identity she had shed. Then the loudspeaker above her head emitted a dull Dong!, and she woke up in the Women’s Dormitory of State Pleasure-Dome 2. “All right, girls!” said the amplified voice of the matron. “Time to rise and shine. Le temps s’en va, mesdames,le temps s’en va.”

s t a t e p l e a s u r e - d o m e 2

“La vie, ” philosophized Chantal, “est une maladie dont le sommeil nous soulagons toutes les seize heures. C’est un palliative. La morte est un remede. ” She flicked the drooping ash from the end of her cigarette and made a moue of chic despair. Fran could understand what she’d said quite as well as if she’d been speaking English: Life is a disease from which sleep offers relief every sixteen hours. Sleep is a palliative—death a remedy. They were sitting before big empty cups of cafe au lait in the employee lounge, dressed in their black E-Gal minis, crisp white aprons, and fishnet hose. Fran felt a positive fever of chagrin to be seen in such a costume, but she felt nothing otherwise, really, about her entire female body, especially the breasts bulging out of their casings, breasts that quivered visibly at her least motion. It was like wearing a T-shirt with some dumb innuendo on it, or a blatant sexual invitation. Did every girl have to go through the same torment of shame at puberty? Was there any way to get over it except to get into it?

“Mon bonheur, ” declared Chantal earnestly, “est d’augmenter celle des autres.” Her happiness lay in increasing that of others. A doubtful proposition in most circumstances, but not perhaps for Chantal, who, as an E-Gal was part geisha, part rock star, and part a working theorem in moral calculus, an embodiment of Francis Hutcheson’s notion that that action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers. There were times—Thursdays, in the early evening—when Chantal’s bedside/Website was frequented by as many as two thousand admirers, their orgasms all bissfully synchronized with the reels and ditties she performed on her dulcimer, sometimes assisted by Fran (an apprentice in the art) but usually all on her own. At such times (she’d confided to Fran) she felt as she imagined a great conductor must feel conducting some choral extravaganza, the Missa Solemnis or the Ninth Symphony.

Except that the dulcimer gave the whole thing a tinge and twang of hillbilly, as of Tammy Wynette singing “I’m just a geisha from the bayou.” Of course, the actual Tammy Wynette had died ages ago and could sing that song only in simulation, but still it was hard to imagine it engineered with any other voice-print: habit makes the things we love seem inevitable as arithmetic.

“Encore?” Chantal asked, lifting her empty cup, and then, when Fran had nodded, signaling to the waiter.

Coffee, cigarettes, a song on the jukebox. Simple pleasures, but doubled and quadrupled and raised to some astronomical power, the stuff that industries and gross national products are made of. Fran imagined a long reverse zoom away from their table at the cafe, away from the swarming hive of the city, to where each soul and automobile was a mere pixel on the vast monitor of eternity. The coffees came, and Chantal began to sing, “Le bonheur de la femme n’est pas dans la liberte, mais dans l’acceptation d’un devoir.”

A woman’s happiness lies not in liberty, but in the acceptance of a duty.

And what was that duty? Fran wondered. What could it be but love? i n a v i s i o n o n c e I s a w

There were no mirrors in Xanadu, and yet every vista seemed to be framed as by those tinted looking glasses of the eighteenth century that turned everything into a Claude Lorrain. Look too long or too closely into someone else’s face, and it became your own. Chantal would tilt her head back, a flower bending to the breeze, and she would morph into Fran’s friend of his earlier afterlife, Debora. Debora, whose hand had caressed his vanished sex, whose wit had entertained him with Cartesian doubts.

They were the captives (it was explained, when Fran summoned Help) of pirates, and must yield to the desires of their captors in all things. That they were in the thrall of copyright pirates, not authentic old-fashioned buccaneers, was an epistomological quibble. Subjectively their captors could exercise the same cruel authority as any Captain Kidd or Hannibal Lecter. Toes and nipples don’t know the difference between a knife and an algorithm. Pirates of whatever sort are in charge of pain and its delivery, and that reduces all history, all consciousness, to a simple system of pluses and minuses, do’s and don’ts. Suck my dick or walk the plank. That (the terrible simplicity) was the downside of living in a pleasure-dome.

“Though, if you think about it,” said Debora, with her hand resting atop the strings of her dulcimer, as though it might otherwise interrupt what she had to say, “every polity is ultimately based upon some calculus of pleasure, of apportioning rapture and meting out pain. The jukebox and the slot machine, what are they but emblems of the Pavlovian bargain we all must make with that great dealer high in the sky?”

She lifted a little silver hammer and bonked her dulcimer a triple bonk of do-sol-do.

“The uncanny thing is how easily we can be programmed to regard mere symbols—“ Another do-sol-do.

“—as rewards. A bell is rung somewhere, and something within us resonates. And music becomes one of the necessities of life. Even such a life as this, an ersatz afterlife.”

“Is there some way to escape?” Fran asked.

Debora gave an almost imperceptible shrug, which her dulcimer responded to as though she were a breeze and it a wind chime hanging from the kitchen ceiling. “There are rumors of escapees—E-Men, as they’re called. But no one I’ve ever known has escaped, or at least they’ve never spoken of it. Perhaps they do, and get caught, and then the memory of having done so is blotted out. Our memories are not exactly ours to command, are they?”

The dulcimer hyperventilated.

Debora silenced it with a glance and continued: “Some days I’ll flash on some long-ago golden oldie, and a whole bygone existence will come flooding back. A whole one-pound box of madeleines, and I will be absolutely convinced by it that I did have a life once upon a time, where there were coffee breaks with doughnuts bought at actual bakeries and rain that made the pavements speckled and a whole immense sensorium, always in flux, which I can remember now only in involuntary blips of recall. And maybe it really was like that once, how can we know, but whether we could get back to it, that I somehow can’t believe.”

“I’ve tried to think what it would be like to be back there, where we got started.” Fran gazed into the misty distance, as though her earlier life might be seen there, as in an old home video. “But it’s like trying to imagine what it would be like in the thirteenth century, when people all believed in miracles and stuff. It’s beyond me.”

“Don’t you believe in miracles, then?” The dulcimer twanged a twang of simple faith. “I do. I just don’t suppose they’re for us. Miracles are for people who pay full price. For us there’s just Basic Tier programming— eternal time and infinite space.”

“And those may be no more than special effects.”

Debora nodded. “But even so ...” “Even so?” Fran prompted.

“Even so,” said Debora, with the saddest of smiles, a virtual flag of surrender, “if I were you, I would try to escape.”

t h o s e c a v e s o f i c e !

Ebay was a lonely place, as holy and enchanted as some underwater cathedral in the poem of a French symbolist, or a German forest late at night. If you have worked at night as a security guard for the Mall of America, or if you’ve seen Simone Simon in Cat People as she walks beside the pool (only her footsteps audible, her footsteps and the water’s plash), only then can you imagine its darkling beauty, the change that comes over the objects of our desire when they are flensed of their purveyors and consumers and stand in mute array, aisle after aisle. Then you might sweep the beam of your flashlight across the waters of the re-circulating fountain as they perpetually spill over the granite brim. No silence is so large as that where Muzak played, but plays no more. Imagine such a place, and then imagine discovering an exit that announces itself in the darkness by a dim red light and opening the door to discover a Piranesian vista of a further mall, no less immense, its tiers linked by purring escalators, the leaves of its potted trees shimmering several levels beneath where you are, and twinkling in the immensity, the signs of the stores—every franchise an entrepreneur might lease. Armani and Osh-Kosh, Hallmark, Kodak, Disney-Mitsubishi, American Motors, Schwab. A landscape all of names, and yet if you click on any name, you may enter its portal to discover its own little infinity of choices. Shirts of all sizes, colors, patterns, prices; shirts that were sold, yesterday, to someone in Iowa; other shirts that may be sold tomorrow or may never find a taker. Every atom and molecule in the financial continuum of purchases that might be made has here been numbered and cataloged. Here, surely, if anywhere, one might become if not invisible then scarcely noticed, as in some great metropolis swarming with illegal aliens, among whom a single further citizen can matter not a jot. Fran became a mote in that vastness, a pip, an alga, unaware of his own frenetic motion as the flow of data took him from one possible purchase to the next. Here was a CD of Hugo Wolflieder sung by Elly Ameling. Here a pair of Lucchese cowboy boots only slightly worn with western heels. Here six interesting Japanese dinner plates and a hand-embroidered black kimono. This charming pig creamer has an adorable French hat and is only slightly chipped. These Viking sweatshirts still have their tags from Wal-Mart, $29.95. Sabatier knives, set of four. A 1948 first edition of The Secret of the Old House. Hawaiian Barbie with hula accessories. “Elly Ameling Sings Schumann!” Assorted rustic napkins from Amish country.

There is nothing that is not a thought away, nothing that cannot be summoned by a wink and a nod to any of a dozen search engines. But there is a price to pay for such accessibility. The price is sleep, and in that sleep we buy again those commodities we bought or failed to buy before. No price is too steep, and no desire too low. Cream will flow through the slightly chipped lips of the charming pig creamer in the adorable hat, and our feet will slip into the boots we had no use for earlier. And when we return from our night journeys, like refugees returning to the shells of their burned homes, we find we are where we were, back at Square One. The matron was bellowing over the PA, “Le temps s’en va, mesdames! Le temps s’en va!” and Fran wanted to die.

g r a i n b e n e a t h t h e t h r e s h e r ’ s f l a i l

She was growing old in the service of the Khan, but there was no advantage to be reaped from long service, thanks to the contract she’d signed back when. She had become as adept with the hammers of the dulcimer as ever Chantal had been (Chantal was gone now, no one knew whither), but in truth the dulcimer is not an instrument that requires great skill—and its rewards are proportional. She felt as though she’d devoted her life—her afterlife—to the game of Parcheesi, shaking the dice and moving her tokens round the board forever. Surely this was not what the prospectus promised those who signed on. She knew, in theory (which she’d heard, in various forms, from other denizens), that the great desideratum here, the magnet that drew all its custom, was beauty, the rapture of beauty that poets find in writing poetry or composers in their music. It might not be the Beatific Vision that saints feel face-to-face with God, but it was, in theory, the next best thing, a bliss beyond compare. And perhaps it was all one could hope for. How could she be sure that this bliss or that, as it shivered through her, like a wind through Daphne’s leaves, wasn’t of the same intensity that had zapped the major romantic poets in their day?

In any case, there was no escaping it. She’d tried to find an exit that didn’t, each day, become the entrance by which she returned to her contracted afterlife and her service as a damsel with a dulcimer. Twang! Twang! O ciel! O belle nuit! Not that she had any notion of some higher destiny for herself, or sweeter pleasures—except the one that all the poets

agreed on: Lethe, darkness, death, and by death to say we end the humdrum daily continuation of all our yesterdays into all our tomorrows.

The thought of it filled her with a holy dread, and she took up the silver hammers of her dulcimer and began, once again, to play such music as never mortal knew before.

As I stated two years ago in the headnote to Joyce Carol Oates’s contribution to my last original anthology, 999, she is a phenomenon. She remains so. Everywhere you look-the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, lists of the year’s best fiction (or nonfiction)-there she is. She’s like a wonderful presence, writing wonderful things.

Here she’s written her very first science fiction tale-which is amazing, if only because it’s a first.

“Commencement” is creepy, somber, funny, and unique. It would have fit right into the original New Wave movement in the mid-sixties.

Commencement

Joyce Carol Oates

The Summons. Commencement! Bells in the Music College on its high hill are ringing to summon us to the Great Dome for the revered annual ceremony!

This year, as every year, the University’s Commencement is being held on the last Sunday in May; but this year will be the two hundredth anniversary of the University’s founding, so the occasion will be even more festive than usual and will attract more media attention. The Governor of the State, a celebrated graduate of the University, will give the Commencement address, and three renowned Americans-the Poet, the Educator, and the Scientist-will be awarded honorary doctorates. Over four thousand degrees-B.A.’s, M.A.’s, Ph.D.’s-will be conferred on graduates, a record number. As the University Chancellor has said, “Every year our numbers are rising. But our standards are also rising. The University is at the forefront of evolution,”

And so here we are on this sunny, windy May morning, streaming into the Great Dome, through Gates 1-15. Thousands of us! Young people in black academic gowns, caps precariously on their heads; their families, and friends; and many townspeople associated with the University, the predominant employer in the area. We’re metal filings drawn by a powerful magnet. We’re moths drawn to a sacred light. The very air through which we make our way crackles with excitement, and apprehension. Who will be taken to the Pyramid, how will the ceremony of renewal unfold? Even those of us who have attended Commencement numerous times are never prepared for the stark reality of the event, and must witness with our own eyes what we can never quite believe we’ve seen, for it so quickly eludes us. The Great Dome! We’re proud of our football stadium, at the northern, wooded edge of our hilly campus; it seats more than thirty thousand people, in steeply banked tiers, a multimillion-dollar structure with a sliding translucent plastic roof, contracted in fair weather. The vast football field, simulated grass of a glossy emerald green has been transformed this morning into a more formal space: thousands of folding chairs, to accommodate our graduates, fan out before a majestic speakers’

platform raised six feet above the ground, and at the center, rear of this platform, festooned in the University’s colors (crimson, gold) is the twelve-foot Pyramid (composed of rectangles of granite carefully set into place by workmen laboring through the night) that is the emblem of our University.

A crimson satin banner unfurled behind the platform proclaims in gold letters the University motto: NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM. (“A New Cycle of the Ages.”)

It has been a chilly, fair morning after a night of thunderstorms and harsh pelting rain, typical in this northerly climate in spring; the Chancellor, having deliberated with his staff, has decreed that the Great Dome be open to the sun. The University orchestra, seated to the left of the platform, on the grass, is playing a brisk, brassy version of the stately alma mater, and as graduates file into the stadium many of them are singing:

Where snowy peaks of mountains

Meet the eastern sky,

Proudly stands our Alma Mater

On her hilltop high.

Crimson our blood,

Deep as the sea.

Our Alma Mater,

We pledge to thee!

These words the Assistant Mace Bearer believes he can hear, a mile from the University. A sick, helpless sensation spreads through him. “So soon? It will happen-so soon?”

The Robing. In the Great Dome Triangle Lounge where VIPs assemble before Commencement, as before football games, the Chancellor’s party is being robed for the ceremony. Deans of numerous colleges and schools, University marshals, the Governor, the Poet, the Educator, the Scientist, the Provost, the President of the Board of Trustees, the President of the Alumni Association, and the Chancellor himself-these dis-tinguished individuals are being assisted in putting on their elaborate robes, hoods, and hats, and are being photographed for the news media and for the University archives. There’s a palpable excitement in the air even among those who have attended many such ceremonies during their years of service to the University. For something can always go wrong when so many people are involved, and in so public and dramatic a spectacle. The retiring Dean of Arts and Sciences murmurs to an old colleague, “Remember that terrible time when-“ and the men laugh together and shudder. Already it’s past 9 A.M.; the ceremony is scheduled to begin promptly at 10 A.M. Already the University orchestra has begun playing “Pomp and Circumstance,” that thrilling processional march. Declares the Chancellor, “Always, that music makes me shiver!” Surrounded by devoted female assistants, this burly, kingly man of youthful middle age is being robed in a magnificent crimson gown with gold-and-black velvet trim; around his neck he wears a heavy, ornate medallion, solid gold on a gold chain, embossed with the University’s Pyramid seal and the Latin words NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM. The Chancellor has a broad buff face that resembles a face modeled in clay and thick, leonine white hair; he’s a well-liked administrator among both faculty and students, a graduate of the University and one-time all-American halfback on the University’s revered football team. Each year the Chancellor is baffled by which side of his crimson satin cap the gold tassel should be on, and each year his personal assistant says, with a fondly maternal air of reproach, “Mr. Chancellor, the left. Let me adjust it.” Such a flurry of activity in the Triangle Lounge! A TV crew, photographers’ flashes. Where is the Dean of the Graduate School, in charge of conferring graduate degrees? Where is the Dean of the Chapel, the minister who will lead more than thirty thousand people in prayer, in less than an hour? There’s the University Provost, the Chancellor’s right-hand man, with a sharp eye on the clock; there’s the newly appointed Dean of Human Engineering, the most heavily endowed (and controversial) of the University’s schools, talking and laughing casually with one of his chief donors, the billionaire President of the Board of Trustees; there’s the President of the Alumni Association, another University benefactor whose gift of $35 million will be publicly announced at the luncheon following Commencement, talking with his old friend the Governor. And there’s the University Mace Bearer, one of the few women administrators at the University, with a helmet of pewter hair and scintillant eyes, frowning toward the entrance-“Where’s my assistant?”

The Assistant Mace Bearer, the youngest member of the elite Chancellor’s party- where is he?

In fact, the Assistant Mace Bearer is only now entering the Great Dome, at Gate 3. Hurrying!

Breathless! Amid an ever-thickening stream of energetic, fresh-faced young men and women in black gowns and mortarboards, flanked by families and relatives, being directed by ushers into the immense stadium.

“Show your tickets, please. Tickets?” The Assistant Mace Bearer has a special crimson ticket and is respectfully directed upstairs to the Triangle Lounge. How has it happened, he’s late. . . . Traffic was clogging all streets leading to the University, he hadn’t given himself enough time, reluctant to leave home, though, of course, he had no choice but to leave his home and to join the Chancel lor’s party as he’d agreed he would do; this is his first Commencement on the Pyramid. He’s a recent faculty appointment, after only three years of service he’s been promoted to the rank of associate professor of North American history; for a thirty-four-year-old, this is an achievement. His students admire him as Professor S____, soft-spoken and reserved but clearly intelligent; not vain, but ambitious; and eager to perform well in the eyes of his elders.

“Still, I could turn back now.” As he ascends the cement stairs to Level 2. “Even now.” As he makes his way in a stream of strangers along a corridor. “It isn’t too late. . . . ” Those smells! His stomach turns, he’s passing vendors selling coffee, breakfast muffins, bagels, even sand wiches and potato chips, which young people in billowing black gowns are devouring on their way into the stadium. You would think that the occasion wasn’t Commencement but an ordinary sports event. The Assistant Mace Bearer nearly collides with a gaggle of excited girls carrying sweet rolls and coffee in Styrofoam cups; he feels a pang of nausea, seeing a former student, a husky boy with close-cropped hair, wolfing down a Commencement Special-blood sausage on a hot-dog roll, with horseradish. At this time of morning!

Even as the Chancellor, the Governor, and the honorary degree recipients, the Poet, the Educator, and the Scientist are being photographed, and the Mace Bearer and the head University marshal are checking the contents of the black lacquered box that the Assistant Mace Bearer will carry, the Assistant Mace Bearer enters the Triangle Lounge. At last! Cheeks guiltily heated, he stammers an apology, but the Mace Bearer curtly says, “No matter: you’re here, Professor S_____

.”

Chastened, he reports to the robing area where an older, white-haired assistant makes a check beside him name on a list and helps outfit him in his special Commencement gown, black, but made of a synthetic waterproof fabric that will wipe dry, with crimson-and-gold trim, and helps him adjust his black velvet hat. . . . “Gloves? Don’t I wear-gloves?” There’s a brief flurried search, of course the gloves are located: black to match the gown, and made of thin, durable rubber. When Professor S_____---thanks

the

white-haired

woman

nervously, she says, with an air of mild reproach, “But this is our responsibility, Professor.”

She’s one of those University “administrative assistants” behind the scenes of all Commencements, as of civilization itself. With a dignified gesture she indicates the boisterous Triangle Lounge in which the Chancellor’s party, predominantly male, gowned, resplendent, and regal, is being organized into a double column for the processional. “This is our honor.”

The Processional. At last! At 10:08 A.M., almost on time, the Chancellor’s party marches into the immense stadium, eye-catching in their elaborate gowns and caps: faculty and lesser administrative officers first, then the Mace Bearer and the Assistant Mace Bearer (who carries in his slightly trembling black-gloved hands the black-lacquered box), the deans of the colleges and the Dean of the Chapel, the Chancellor and his special guests. As they march, the orchestra plays “Pomp and Circumstance” ever louder, with more rhythmic emphasis. “Thrilling music,” the Chancellor says to the Governor, “even after so many Commencements.” The Governor, who has been smiling his broad public smile at the gowned young people seated in rows of hundreds on the stadium grass in front of the speakers’ platform, says,

“How much more so, Mr. Chancellor, it must be for those whose first Commencement this is, and last.”

The elderly Poet marches at the side of the Provost, who will present him for his honorary degree; the Poet, long a revered name in American literature, was once a tall, eagle-like imposing presence, now of less than moderate height, with slightly stooped shoulders and a ravaged yet still noble face; where lines of poetry once danced in his head, unbidden as butterflies, now he’s thinking with a dull self-anger that he should be ashamed to be here, accepting yet another award for his poetry, when he hasn’t written anything worthwhile in years. (“Still, I crave recognition. Loneliness terrifies me. How will it end!”) Blinking in the pale, whitely glaring light of the stadium, the Poet wants to think that these respectfully applauding young people-some of them alarm-ingly young-in their black gowns and mortarboards, gazing at him and the other elders as they march past, know who he is, and what his work has been-a fantasy, yet how it warms him! Behind the Poet is the Educator, a hearty, flush-faced woman in her early sixties; unlike the tormented Poet, the Educator is smiling happily, for she’s proud of herself, plain, big-boned, forthright, beaming with health and American optimism after decades of professional commitment; never married-“Except to my work,” as she says. The Educator is one of the very first women to be awarded an honorary doctorate by the University, and so it’s appropriate that she’s being escorted into the stadium by the Dean of the Education School, another woman of vigorous middle age, who will present the Educator for her award. This is the Educator’s first honorary doctorate; she’s thinking that her years of industry and self-denial have been worth it. (“If only my parents were alive to see me! . . .”) Behind the Educator is the Scientist, a long-ago Nobel Prize winner, with gold-glinting glasses that obscure his melancholy eyes; another ravaged elderly face, rather equine, with tufted gray eyebrows, a long hawkish nose and enormous nostrils; unlike the Educator, the Scientist can’t summon up much enthusiasm for this ceremony and can’t quite recall why he’d accepted the invitation. (“Vanity?

Or-loneliness?”) For, after the Nobel, which he’d won as a brash young man of thirty-seven, what do such “honors” mean? The Scientist, in his ninth decade, has come to despise most other scientists and makes little effort to keep up with new discoveries and developments, even in his old field, biology; especially, he loathes publicity-seeking idiots in fields like human genetics and “human engineering”; he believes such research to be immoral, criminal; if he had his way, it would be banned by the U.S. government. (However, the Scientist keeps such views to himself. He knows better than to say such inflammatory things. And he has to admit that, yes, if he were a young man again, very possibly he’d be involved in such research himself, and to hell with the views of his elders.) Marching into the stadium, past the rows of gowned young people, so fresh-faced, so expectant, blinking at their revered elders and intermittently applauding, the Scientist oscillates between a sense of his own considerable worth and the fact that, to all but a handful of the many thousands of men and women in this ghastly open space, he’s a name out of the distant past, if a “name” at all; younger scientists in his field are astonished, if perhaps not very interested, to hear that he’s still alive. Such a fate, the Scientist thinks, is a kind of irony. And irony has no place on Commencement day, only homilies and uplifting sentiments. “The young know nothing of irony, as they know nothing of subtlety or mortality,” the Scientist observes dryly to his escort, the Dean of the Graduate School, who inclines his head politely but murmurs only a vague assent. With “Pomp and Circumstance” being played so loudly, as the processional of dignitaries passes close by the orchestra, very likely the Graduate Dean can’t hear the Scientist.

As the Mace Bearer and the Assistant Mace Bearer ascend the steps to the platform, there’s rippling applause from the graduates assembled on the grass. “With young people, you can’t tell: are they honoring us, or mocking us?” the Mace Bearer observes with a grim smile to her silent assistant. Professor S_____, who has attended a number of Commencements at the University, as a B.A. candidate (summa cum laude, history) and more recently as a young faculty member, would like to assure the Mace Bearer that the applause is genuine, but it isn’t for them as individuals: the applause is for their function, and more specifically for the contents of the black-lacquered box. Taking his seat beside the Mace Bearer, to the immediate right of the Pyramid, the Assistant Mace Bearer glances out at the audience for the first time and swallows hard. So many! And what will they expect of him! (For the nature of the Assistant Mace Bearer’s task is that it cannot be rehearsed, only “premeditated,” according to tradition.) A thrill of boyish excitement courses through him. He’s breathing quickly, and grateful to be finished with the procession. Nothing went wrong; he hadn’t stumbled on any steps, hadn’t become light-headed in the cool, white-tinged air. The thought has not yet come to him sly as a knife blade in the heart: But now you can’t escape. By his watch the time is 10:17 A.M. The Invocation. The Dean of the Chapel, an impressive masculine figure in a black gown trimmed with crimson-and-gold velvet, like the Chancellor a former University athlete (rowing), comes forward to the podium, in front of the Pyramid, to lead the gathering in a prayer. “Ladies and gentlemen, will you please rise?” Despite its size, the crowd is eager to obey as a puppy. The gowned graduates, and the spectators in the steeply banked stadium, all rise to their feet at once and lower their eyes as the Dean of the Chapel addresses “Almighty God, Creator of Heaven and Earth,” alternately praising this being for His beneficence and asking of Him forgiveness, inspiration, imagination, strength to fulfill the sacred obligations prescribed by “the very presence of the Pyramid”; to enact once again the sacred “ceremony of renewal” that has made this day, as “all our days,” possible. The Poet is thinking how banal, such words; though they may be true, he isn’t listening very closely; in a lifetime one hears the same words repeated endlessly, in familiar combinations, for the fund of words is finite while the appetite for utter-uig them is infinite. (Is this a new idea? Or has the Poet had such a thought numerous times, while sitting on stages, gazing out into audiences with his small fixed dignified-elder smile?) The Educator, seated beside the Poet, listens to the chaplain’s invocation more attentively; she can’t escape feeling that this Commencement revolves somehow around her; there are few women on the platform, and it’s rare indeed that any woman, however deserving, has received an honorary doctorate from the University. She imagines (not for the first time!) that, in any gathering, young women are admiring of her as a model of what they might accomplish with hard work, talent, and diligence. (“And self-sacrifice. Of course.”) The Scientist is shifting restlessly in his chair, which is a folding chair, and damned hard on his lean haunches. Religious piety! The appeal to mass emotions! Thousands of years of “civilization” have passed, and yet humankind seems incapable of transcending its primitive origins. . . . The Scientist oscillates between feeling despair over this fact, which suggests a fundamental failure of science to educate the population, and simple contempt. The Scientist resents that he has been invited to this Commencement only to be subjected to the usual superstitious rhetoric in which (he would guess!) virtually no one on the speakers’

platform believes; yet the chaplain is allowed to drone on for ten minutes while thousands of credulous onlookers gaze up at him. “... we thank You particularly on this special day, the two hundredth anniversary of the University’s Commencement, when Your generosity and love overflow upon us, and our sacrifice to You flows upward to be renewed, in you, as rainfall enriches the earth. . . .” So the broad-shouldered Dean of the Chapel intones, raising his beefy hands aloft in an attitude of, to the Scientist, outrageous supplication. There’s a brisk, chilly breeze; the sky overhead is no longer clear, but laced with cloud-like frost on a windowpane; the crimson banners draped about the platform stir restlessly, as if a god were coming to life, rousing himself awake.

The Poet opens his eyes wide. Has he been drifting off into sleep? Or-has he been touched by inspiration, as he has rarely been touched in recent years? (In fact, in decades.) He smiles, thinking yes he is proud to be here, he believes his complexly rhyming, difficult poetry may be due for a revival. Presentation of Colors. Here’s a welcome quickening of spirit after the solemnity of the chaplain’s prayer! Marching army and air force cadets in their smart uniforms, three young men and two young women, bear three colorful flags: the U.S. flag, the state flag, and the university’s crimson and gold. The army cadets flanking the flag-bearers carry rifles on their shoulders. A display of military force, in this peaceful setting? The Educator, a pacifist, disapproves. The Scientist gazes on such primitive rituals with weary scorn. Display of arms! Symbolizing the government’s power to protect, and to destroy, human life in its keeping! A crude appeal to the crude limbic brain, yet as always, it’s effective. The Poet squints and blinks and opens his faded eyes wider. Flapping flags, shimmering colors, what do these things mean? In the past, such moments of public reverie provided the Poet with poetry: mysterious lines, images, rhythms came fully formed to him as if whispered into his ear. Now he listens with mounting excitement, and hears-what? (“The God of the Great Dome. Stirring, waking.”) In his deep well-practiced baritone voice the Chancellor addresses the audience from the podium: “Ladies and gentlemen, will you please rise for the national anthem?” Another time the great beast of a crowd eagerly rises. More than thirty thousand individuals are led in the anthem, a singularly muscular, vulgar music (thinks the Scientist, who plays violin in a string quartet, and whose favorite music is late Beethoven) by a full-throated young black woman, one of this year’s graduates of the Music School. 0 say can you see . .

. bombs bursting in air. Patriotic thrill! The Educator, though a pacifist, finds herself singing with the rest. Her voice is surprisingly weak and uncertain for a woman of her size and seeming confidence, yet she’s proud of her country, proud of its history; for all our moral lapses, and an occasional overzealousness in defending our boundaries (in Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century, in Vietnam in the mid-twentieth century, for instance), the United States is a great nation. . . . (“And I am an American.”) The Poet is thinking: Blood leaps!-like young trout flashing in the sun. (“Of what dark origins, who can prophesy?”) The Poet cares nothing, truly, for what is moral, what is right, what is decent, what is good; the Poet cares only for poetry; the Poet’s heart would quicken, except its beat is measured by a pacemaker stitched deep in his hollow chest. This is the first poetic “gift” he’s had in years, he could weep with gratitude.

The Assistant Mace Bearer, standing beside the Mace Bearer in the pose of a healthy young warrior-son beside his mother, tall and imposing in her ceremonial attire, clenches his fists to steady his trembling. But is he nervous, or is he excited? He’s proud, he thinks, of his country; of those several flapping flags; to each, he bears a certain allegiance. As a professor of North American history he would readily concede that “nations”-“political entities”-are but ephemeral structures imposed upon a “natural” state of heterogeneous peoples, and yet-how patriotism stirs the blood, how real it is; and how reassuring, this morning, to see that such impressive masculine figures as the Chancellor, the Dean of the Chapel, the Provost, the President of the Board of Trustees, and others are on the platform, praying, singing the national anthem, in the service, as he is, of the Pyramid. Even if strictly speaking Professor S____ isn’t a believer, he takes solace in being amid believers. . . . The Assistant Mace Bearer is particularly proud of the burly, authoritative figure of the Chancellor; though he has reason to believe that the Dean of Arts and Sciences invited him to assist the Mace Bearer, and not the Chancellor, he prefers to think that the Chancellor himself knew of young Professor S_____

‘s work and singled him out for this

distinction.

The national anthem is over, the young black soprano has stepped back from the microphone, the thousands of graduates and spectators in the stadium are again seated, with a collective sigh. Such yearning, suddenly! And the spring sun hidden behind a bank of clouds dull as scoured metal. Commencement Address. Now comes the Governor to the podium amid applause to speak to the Class of

in an oiled, echoing voice.

Like his friend the Chancellor, the Governor has a large face that resembles an animated clay mask; he’s bluff, ruggedly handsome, righteous. He speaks of a “spiritually renewed, resolute future”

that nonetheless “strengthens our immortal ties with the past.” His words are vague yet emphatic, upbeat yet charged with warning-“Always recall: moral weakness precedes political, military, sovereign weakness.” With practiced hand gestures the Governor charges today’s graduates with the mission of “synthesizing” past and future communities and “never shrinking from sacrifice of self, in the service of the community.” The Poet wakes from a light doze, annoyed by this politician’s rhetoric. Why has he, a major figure of the twentieth century, been invited to the University’s Commencement, to endure such empty abstractions? If the Governor speaks of ideals, they are “selfless ideals”; if he speaks of paths to be taken, they are “untrod paths.” The Governor is one who leaves no cliche unturned, thinks the Poet, with a small smile. (This is a clever thought, yes? Or has he had it before, at other awards ceremonies?) Minutes pass. Gray-streaked clouds thicken overhead. There’s a veiled glance between the Chancellor and the Provost: the Governor’s speech has gone beyond his allotted fifteen minutes, the more than four thousand black-gowned graduates are getting restless as young animals penned in a confined space. When the Governor tells jokes (“my undergraduate major here was political science with minors in Frisbee and Budweiser”), the audience groans and laughs at excessive length, with outbursts of applause. (The beaming Governor doesn’t seem to catch on, this is mocking, not appreciative, laughter.) A danger sign, thinks the Assistant Mace Bearer, who recalls such whirlpools of adolescent-audience rebellion from his own days, not so very long ago, as an undergraduate at the University.

So it happens: at the center of the traditionally rowdiest school of graduates, the engineers, of whom ninety-nine percent are male, what looks like a naked mannequin-female?-suddenly appears, having been smuggled into the stadium beneath someone’s gown. There are ripples of laughter from the other graduates as the thing is tossed boldly aloft and passed from hand to hand like a volleyball. University marshals.

In their plain black gowns are pressed into immediate service, trying without success to seize the mannequin; such juvenile pranks are forbid-den at Commencement, of course, as students have been repeatedly warned. But the temptation to violate taboo and annoy one’s elders is too strong; many graduates have been partying through the night and have been waiting for just such a moment of release. As the Governor stubbornly continues with his prepared speech, in which jokes are “ad-libbed” into the text, there are waves of tittering laughter as a second and a third mannequin appear, gaily tossed and batted about. One of these is captured by a red-faced University marshal, eliciting a mixed response of boos and cheers. The mood in the Great Dome is mischievous and childish, not mutinous. This is all good-natured-isn’t it? Then another mannequin is tossed up, naked, but seemingly male; where his genitals would have been there are swaths of red paint; on his back, flesh-colored strips of rubber have been glued which flutter like ribbons to be torn at, and torn off, by grasping male fingers. There’s an intake of thousands of breaths; not much laughter; a wave of disapproval and revulsion, even from other graduates. A sense that this has gone too far, this is not funny. What a strange, ugly custom, thinks the Educator, polishing her glasses to see more clearly, if it is a custom? Are those young people drunk?

Primitives! thinks the Scientist, his deeply creased face fixed in an expression of polite disdain. In situations in which there are large masses of individuals, especially young males poised between the play of adolescence and the responsibilities of adulthood, it’s always risky to court rebellion, even if it’s playful rebellion, beneath the collective gaze of elder family members. (Long ago, the Scientist did research in neurobiology, investigating the limbic system, the oldest part of the brain; the ancient part of the brain, you might say; his focus was a tiny structure known as the amygdala. The amygdala primes the body for action in a survival situation, but remains inoperative, as if slumbering, otherwise. In his ninth decade, the Scientist thinks wryly, his amygdala might have become a bit rusty from disuse. A spirit of misrule! thinks the Poet, smiling. Despite his age, and the dignity of his position on the platform, the Poet feels by nature, or wants badly to feel, a tug of sympathy for those blunt-faced grinning young men. For the Governor, that ass of a politician, is an oily bore. At the luncheon following Commencement, the Poet presumes that he, and the other honorary award recipients, will be called upon to speak briefly, and he will proclaim to the admiring guests-“The spirit of poetry is the spirit of youthful rebellion, the breaking of custom, and, yes, sometimes the violation of taboo.”

But the offensive bloody mannequin is quickly surrendered to an indignant University marshal, who folds it up (it appears to be made of inflatable rubber) and quickly trundles it away. The other mannequins disappear beneath seats as the now frowning Governor concludes his remarks with a somber charge to the graduates to “take on the mantle of adulthood and responsibility”-“put away childish things, and give of yourself in sacrifice, where needed, in the nation’s-and in the species’-service.” These are rousing words, if abstract, and the audience responds with generous applause, as if to compensate for the rudeness of the engineers. The Governor, again beaming, even raises his fist aloft in victory as he steps from the podium.

(“What a fool a politician is,” thinks the Poet smugly. “The man has not a clue, how the wayward spirit of the god, inhabiting that crowd, could have destroyed him utterly.”

Recognition of Class Marshals and Scholars. Conferring of Ph.D. Degrees. Now follows a lengthy, disjointed Commencement custom, in which numerous graduates in billowing black gowns and mortarboards, smiling shyly, stiffly, at times radiantly as they shake hands with their respective deans, the Provost, and the Chancellor, proceed across the platform from left to right. For these scholars, Commencement is the public recognition of years of hope and industry; many of them are being honored with awards, fellowships, grants to continue their research in postdoctoral programs at the University or elsewhere. Many of the scientists have received grants from private corporations to sponsor their research in biogenetics, bioengineering, bioethics. The Poet, the Educator, and the Scientist, sobered by the number of “outstanding” individuals who must pass across the stage as their names are announced, shake hands with administrators, and receive their diplomas, and descend the stage, are nonetheless impressed by this display of superior specimens of the younger generation. So many! Of so many ethnic minorities, national identities, skin colors! The University seems to draw first-rate students from many foreign countries. And all are so hopeful, shaking hands with the Chancellor, glancing with shy smiles at the revered dignitaries on the platform. The Poet, the Educator, and the Scientist suddenly feelit’s quick as a knife blade to the heart, so swift as to be almost painless-that these young people will soon surpass them, or have already surpassed them, not defiantly, not rebelliously, but simply as a matter of course. This is their time. Our time is past. Yet, here we are! The Poet tries to fashion a poem out of this revelation, which strikes him as new, fresh, daunting, though (possibly!) it’s a revelation he has had in the past, at such ceremonies. The Educator smiles benignly, a motherly, perhaps grandmotherly figure in her billowing gown, for, as an educator, she ex-pects her work, her theories, her example to be surpassed by idealistic young people-of course. The Scientist is aghast, and fully awakened from his mild trance, to learn that his own area of biological research, for which he and two teammates were awarded their Nobel Prizes, seems to have been totally revolutionized. “Cloning”-a notion of science fiction, long ridiculed and ethically repugnant-is now a simple matter of fact: five young scientists are receiving postdoctoral grants from private corporations to continue their experiments, which seem to have resulted in the actual creation, in University laboratories, of successfully cloned creatures. (“Though not Homo sapiens” the Graduate Dean remarks, no doubt for the benefit of wealthy alumni who disapprove of such science.) There are Ph.D.’s who seem to have experimented successfully in grafting together parts of bodies from individuals of disparate species; there are Ph.D.’s who seem to have altered DNA in individuals; an arrogant-looking young astrophysicist has received a postdoctoral fellowship to continue his exploration into the “elasticity of time” and the possibility of “sending objects through time.” There’s an obese, in fact grotesquely deformed female in a motorized wheelchair whom the Graduate Dean describes (unless the Scientist mishears?) as “colony of grafted alien protoplasm.”

There’s an entirely normal-appearing young man in black cap and gown who moves phan-tomlike across the stage, seeming to shake hands with the Graduate Dean but unable to accept his diploma; the audience erupts into applause, informed that this is a “living hologram” of the scientist himself, who is thousands of miles away. (“But his diploma is thoroughly ‘real,’ “ the Graduate Dean says with a wink.) Most repulsive, but stirring even more applause from the audience, is a human head on a self-propelled gurney! This head is of normal size and dimensions, with a normal if somewhat coarse female face; there’s a mortarboard on the head and bright lipstick on the mouth of the face. Evidently, this is an adventurous young scientist whose experimental subject was herself! The technical description of this

“extraordinary, controversial” neurophysiological project in detaching a head from a body and equipping it with computer-driven autonomy is so abstruse, even the Scientist can’t grasp it, and the Poet and the Educator are left gaping.

Other projects include minute mappings of distant galaxies, “reengineering” of repressed memory in brain tissue, computational mathematics in fetal research, “game theory” and sensory transduction, “viral economics” in west Africa, computational microbial pathogenesis! By the time this portion of Commencement ends, with tumultuous applause and cheers, even the younger members of the Chancellor’s party, like the Assistant Mace Bearer, are feeling dazed.

The Pyramid. The Ceremony of Renewal. Conferring of Honorary Degrees. The orchestra plays the alma mater now in a slower rhythm, eerily beautiful, nostalgic, not a brisk march but an incantatory dirge, featuring celli, oboes, and harp, as the somber Dean of the Music College leads thousands of voices in a song that thrills even the Poet, the Educator, and the Scientist, who are new to this University’s Commencement and unfamiliar with the song before today.

Where snowy peaks of mountains

Meet the eastern sky,

Proudly stands our Alma Mater

On her hilltop high.

Crimson our blood,

Deep as the sea.

Our Alma Mater,

We pledge to thee!

(The Poet shivers, in his light woolen gown. Abysmal rhyming, utterly simple and predictable verse, and yet-! This, too, is poetry, with a powerful effect upon these thousands of spectators.) The ceremony on the Pyramid is the climax of Commencement, and through the stadium, as well as on the platform, anticipation has been steadily mounting. There’s an electric air of unease, apprehension, excitement. The Assistant Mace Bearer, too, shivers in his gown, though not for the reason the Poet has shivered.

For nearly an hour he has sat beside the Mace Bearer, close by the Pyramid, the black-lacquered box on his lap, firmly in his gloved fingers. His heartbeat is quickening, there’s a swirl of nausea in his bowels. No. I should not be here, this is a mistake.

Yet, here he is! Escape for him now, as for the Poet, the Educator, and the Scientist, is not possible. For the Chancellor has resumed his place at the podium to speak, in a dramatic voice, of the “oldest, most mysterious” part of Commencement; the “very core, on the Pyramid,” of Commencement; a

“precious fossil of an earlier time”-hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens lived. “Yet our ancestors are with us; their blood beats proudly in our veins. We wed their strength to our neuro-ingenuity. We triumph in the twenty-first century because they, our ancestors, prevailed in their centuries.” There’s a flurry of applause. The uplifted faces among the young graduates are rapt in expectation, their eyes widened and shining.

The Assistant Mace Bearer finds himself on his feet. His entire body feels numb. There’s a roaring in his ears. The Mace Bearer nudges him gently, as if to wake him from a trance. “Professor S_____ ! Just follow me.” Like an obedient son the Assistant Mace Bearer follows this tall, capable woman with the steely eyes who carries the University’s ceremonial mace (a replica of a medieval spiked staff, approximately forty inches in length, made of heavy, gleaming brass) as he, the young professor of North American history, bears the black-lacquered box in his gloved hands; together they march to the base of the Pyramid as the Chancellor intones in his sonorous baritone, “Candidates for honorary doctorates will please rise.” And so the Poet, the Educator, and the Scientist self-consciously stand, adjusting their long robes, and are escorted to the base of the Pyramid by the Provost, the Dean of the Education School, and the Dean of the Graduate School respectively; in the buzzing elation of the moment it will not occur to these elders that their escorts are gripping them firmly at the elbow, and that the Mace Bearer and her able young assistant are flanking them closely. As the Chancellor reads citations for “these individuals of truly exceptional merit ...” thousands of eyes are fastened avidly upon the Poet, the Educator, and the Scientist; even as there are a perceptible number of individuals, almost entirely female, who turn aside, or lower their eyes, or even hide behind their Commencement programs, unable to watch the sudden violent beauty of the ceremony of renewal.

The University orchestra is playing the alma mater more urgently now. The tempo of Commencement is quickening, like a gigantic pulse. Only just beginning to register uncertainty, the Poet, the Educator, and the Scientist are being escorted up the inlaid granite steps of the Pyramid, to the sacred apex; ascending just before them are the Mace Bearer and the Assistant Mace Bearer, taking the steps in measured stride. There’s a collective intake of breath through the stadium. The sacred moment is approaching! A glimmer of pale sun is seen overhead, bordered by massive clouds. The Poet stammers to the Provost, whom he had mistaken as a loyal companion through the ritual of Commencement, “W-what is happening? Why are-?” The Educator, a stout woman, is suddenly short of breath and smiles in confusion at the sea of races below, greedily watching her and the other honorees; she turns to her escort, to ask, “Excuse me? Why are we-?” when she’s abruptly silenced by a tight black band wrapped around the lower part of her face, wielded by the Dean of Education and an assistant. At the same time, the Poet is gagged, flailing desperately. The Scientist, the most suspicious of the three elders, resists his captors, putting up a struggle—“How dare you! I refuse to be-!” He manages to descend several steps before he, too, is caught, silenced by a black gag and his thin arms pinioned behind him. In the wild widened eyes of the honorees there’s the single shared thought This can’t be happening!

Not this!

As these distinguished elders struggle for their lives at the apex of the Pyramid, the vast crowd rises to its feet like a great beast and sighs; even the rowdiest of the young graduates quiver in sudden instinctive sympathy. There’s a wisdom of the Pyramid, well known to those who have attended numerous Commencements: “Life honors life”-“The heart of one calls to the heart of many.”

The Chancellor continues, raising his voice in recitation of the old script: “By the power invested in me as Chancellor of this University, I hereby confer upon you the degrees of Doctor of Humane Letters, hon oris causa . . .” The elders’ robes have been torn open; their faces, deathly white, distended by the tightly wrapped black bands, register unspeakable terror, and incredulity. This can’t be happening! Not this! Through the stadium, spectators are swaying from side to side, some of them having linked arms; it’s a time when one will link arms with strangers, warmly and even passionately; more than thirty thousand people are humming, or singing, the alma mater, as the orchestra continues to play sotto voce, with a ghostly predominance of celli, oboes, and harp. Crimson our blood, deep as the sea . . . Many in the audience are openly weeping. Even among the dignitaries on the platform there are several who wipe at their eyes, though the wonders of Commencement are not new to them. There are some who stare upward at the ancient struggle, panting as if they themselves have been forcibly marched up the granite steps from which, for the honorees of sacrifice, there can be no escape. (It’s a theory advanced by the Dean of the Graduate School, who has a degree in clinical psychology, that to experience the ritual of Commencement is to experience, again and again, one’s first Commencement, so that intervening years are obliterated-“In the ceremony of renewal, Time has ceased to exist. On the Pyramid we are all immortal, and we weep at the beauty of such knowledge.”) The moment of truth is imminent. The Dean of the Chapel, an imposing manly figure in his resplendent gown and velvet cap, climbs the granite steps like one ascending a mountain. The orchestra is now playing the alma mater at double time; it’s no longer a dirge but a fevered tarantella. The tight-lipped Mace Bearer makes a signal to her trembling assistant, and the Assistant Mace Bearer opens the black-lacquered box and presents to the Mace Bearer the instrument of deliverance, which shebears aloft, toward the sun. This appears to be a primitive stone dagger but is in fact a sharply honed stainless steel butcher’s knife with an eighteen-inch blade. The Mace Bearer holds it above her head, solemnly she

“whirls” it in one direction, and then in another; this gesture is repeated twice; for every inch of the instrument of deliverance must be exposed to the sun, to absorb its blessing. The dagger is then sunk deep into the chests of the honorees; it’s used to pry the rib cages open and to hack away at the flesh encasing the still-beating hearts, which emerge from the lacerated chests like panicked birds. These, the Dean of the Chapel must seize bare-handed, according to custom, and raise skyward as high as he is capable.

Led by the Chancellor’s deep baritone, the vast crowd chants: “Novus ordo seclorum. ”

(A lucky coincidence! A pale, fierce sun has nearly penetrated the barrier of rain clouds, and within seconds will be shining freely. Though the ceremony of renewal has long been recognized as purely symbolic, and only the very old or the very young believe that it has an immediate effect upon the sun, yet it’s thrilling when the sun does emerge at this dramatic moment. . . . Cries of joy are heard throughout the stadium.)

The hearts, no longer beating, are placed reverently on an altar at the Pyramid’s apex. Next, the ceremony of the skin. The Mace Bearer and her assistant are charged with the difficult task of flaying the bodies; it’s a task demanding as much precision as, or more precision than, removing the beating hearts. Now mere corpses, the bodies of the Poet, the Educator, and the Scientist would sink down lifeless, and fall to the base of the Pyramid, but are held erect as if living. Blood flows from their gaping chest cavities as if valves have been opened, into grooves that lead to a fan-shaped granite pool beneath the speakers’ platform. By tradition, the Mace Bearer flays two of the bodies, and the Assistant Mace Bearer flays the third, for the ceremony of renewal also involves, for younger participants, an initiation. (“One day, you will be Mace Bearer, Professor S_____! So watch closely”) Under enormous pressure, knowing that the eyes of thousands of people are fixed upon him, still more the eyes of the Chancellor and his party, the Assistant Mace Bearer makes his incision at the hairline of his corpse, with the blood-smeared dagger; it’s slippery in his fingers, so he must grip it tight; and delicately, very slowly peels trie skin downward. The ideal is a virtually entire, perfect skin but this ideal is rarely achieved, of course. (Tradition boasts of a time when “perfect skins” were frequently achieved, but such claims are believed to be mythic.) Both the Poet and the Educator yield lacerated skins, and the Scientist yields a curiously translucent skin, like the husk of a locust, which is light and airy and provokes from the crowd, as the skins are held aloft and made to “dance” to the tarantella music, an outburst of ecstatic cries and howls.

The Assistant Mace Bearer, exhausted by his ordeal, hides his face in his hands and weeps, forgetting that his gloved hands are sticky with blood, and will leave a blood-mask on his heated face. Conferring of Baccalaureate and Associate Degrees. Three graduates of the Class of

, two

young men and one young woman, with the high est grade point averages at the University, are brought to the platform to bear aloft the skins, and to continue the “dance” while the deans of various schools present their degree candidates and confer degrees upon them. (By tradition, these young people once stripped naked and slipped \into the flayed skins, to dance; but nakedness would be considered primitive today, if not repulsive, in such a circumstance. And the skins of elder honorees surely would not fit our husky, healthy youths.) One by one the University’s schools are honored. One by one the deans intone,

“By the authority invested in me ...” Hundreds of graduates leap to their feet as their schools are named, smiling and waving to their families in the bleachers. College of Arts and Sciences. School of Architecture. School of Education. School of Engineering and Computer Science. School of Social Work. Public Affairs. Speech and Performing Arts. Environmental Studies. Nursing. Agricultural Sciences. Human Engineering. Hotel Management. Business Administration . . . There are prolonged cheers and applause. Balloons are tossed into the air. Champagne bottles, smuggled into the Great Dome, are now being uncorked. University marshals are less vigilant, the mood of the stadium is suffused with gaiety, release. The Chancellor concludes Commencement with a few words-“Congratulations to all, and God be with you. I now declare the University’s two hundredth Commencement officially ended.”

The University orchestra is again playing “Pomp and Circumstance” as the Chancellor’s party descends from the platform.

(And what of the pulpy, skinned bodies of the honorees? Now mere garbage, these have been allowed to tumble behind the Pyramid into a pit, lined with plastic, and have been covered by a tarpaulin, to be disposed of by groundskeepers when the stadium is emptied. By tradition, such flayed bodies, lacking hearts, are “corrupted, contaminated” meat from which the mysterious spark of life has fled, and no one would wish to gaze upon them.)

Recessional. The triumphant march out! Past elated, cheering graduates, whose tassels are now proudly displayed on the left side of their mortarboards. The pale fierce sun is still shining, to a degree. It’s a windy May morning, not yet noon; the sky is riddled with shreds of cloud-The Chancellor’s party marches across the bright green Astro-Turf in reverse order of their rank, as they’d entered. Familiar as it is, “Pomp and Circumstance” is still thrilling, heartening. “We tried Commencement with another march,”

the Dean of Music observes, “and it just wasn’t the same.” The Mace Bearer and the Assistant Mace Bearer march side by side; the Assistant Mace Bearer is carrying the black-lacquered box, in which the instrument of deliverance is enclosed. (It was a thoughtful maternal gesture on the part of the Mace Bearer to wet a tissue with her tongue and dab off the blood smears on her assistant’s face, before they left the platform.) In fact the Assistant Mace Bearer is feeling dazed, unreal. His eyes ache as if he has been gazing too long into the sun and he feels some discomfort, a stickiness inside one of his gloves, which must have been torn in the ceremony; but his hands are steadier now, and his fingers grip the black-lacquered box tight. Marching past rows of gowned graduates he sees several former students, some of them cheering wildly; their glazed eyes pass over his face, and return, with looks of shocked recognition and admiration. (“Prof. S

!” yells a burly young man. “Cool.”) A number of the bolder

young people have slipped past University marshals to dip their hands and faces in the pool of warm blood at the base of the platform. Some are even kneeling and lapping like puppies, muzzles glistening with blood.

“Am I happy? It’s over, at least.”

The Assistant Mace Bearer stumbles midway across the field, but regains his balance quickly, before the Mace Bearer can take hold of his arm; he dreads the woman’s touch and his own eager response to it.

“Professor S_____

! Are you all right?” Certainly he’s all right, the cheer ing of thousands of spectators is buoyant, like water bearing him up; he would sink, and drown, except the passion of the crowd sustains him.

He would choke, except the crowd breathes for him. He would stumble and fall and scream, a fist jammed against his mouth, except the crowd forbids such a display of unmanly behavior. . .. He perceives that his life has been cut in two as with an instrument of deliverance. His old, igno rant, unconscious life, and his new, transformed, conscious life. Yes, he’s happy! I am among them now. I have my place now.

The Graduate Dean observes, passing by graduates clustered excitedly at the foot of the platform, “So encouraging! You can forgive these kids almost anything, at Commencement.”

The Chancellor observes, “It’s a sight that makes me realize, we are our youth, and they are us.”

Disrobing. Returned to the Triangle Lounge, the Chancellor’s party is disrobing. What relief! What a glow of satisfaction, as after a winning football game. The Chancellor, the Governor, and the President of the Board of Trustees, three beaming individuals of vigorous middle age, are being interviewed by a TV

broadcaster about the “special significance” of the two hundredth anniversary. Everywhere in the lounge there’s an air of festivity. Flashbulbs are blinding, greetings and handshakes are exchanged. The Assistant Mace Bearer enters shyly, to surrender his blood-dampened gown and torn rubber gloves, and immediately he’s being congratulated on a “job well done.” The Graduate Dean himself shakes his hand. The Provost! “Thank you. I-I’m grateful for your words.” More photographers appear. A second TV crew, hauling equipment. Bottles of champagne are uncorked. The Assistant Mace Bearer would accept a glass of champagne but doesn’t trust his stomach, and his nerves. Is he envious? Shortly after the disrobing there will be a lavish luncheon for most of the Chancellor’s party at the University Club, but Professor S_____ is not invited; the Assistant Mace Bearer is too minor an individual to have been included with the others. Another year, perhaps!

He has exited the room, eager to be gone. Makes his way along a corridor like a man in a dream. Without his Commencement costume, he feels exposed as if naked to the eyes of strangers; yet, paradoxi cally, he’s invisible; in ordinary clothes he’s of no extraordinary importance; he hopes no former students will notice him. . . . He’s passing swarms of graduates, still in their robes, and their families and relatives, all smiles. Small children are running feverishly about. That smell! Professor S_____’s mouth waters furiously. Food is again being sold, everywhere customers are queuing up to buy. Minutes later he’s devouring a Commencement Special. Horseradish and sausage juice dribble down his hands, he’s famished.

Jim Kelly has done everything before me—he was born a year before me, got married before I did, and started publishing before I did, after we both (along with Bruce Sterling, William Wu, P. C. Hodgell, and a bunch of others) attended the 1974 Clarion Writers Workshop at Michigan State University.

Which means I’ve know Jim for twenty-seven years—which is amazing, because we both still look so young.

While I wandered off into the horror field for fifteen years or so, Jim pretty much stayed in the sf field—garnering a couple of Hugos (for wonderful stories like “Think Like a Dinosaur”) and pretty much staying on the path he laid out for himself so long ago.

And as I said, we still both look young.

Unique Visitors

James Patrick Kelly

It’s strange, but when I woke up just now, I had the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies in my head. You don’t remember The Beverly Hill-billies, do you? But then you probably don’t remember television. Television was the great-great-grandmother of media: a scheduled and sequential entertainment stream. You had to sit in front of the set at a certain time, and you had to watch the program straight through. The programs were too narrow-minded to branch off into other plot lines, too stupid to stop and wait if you got up to change your personality or check your portfolio. If you were lucky, you could get your business done during a commercial. No, you don’t want to know about commercials. Those were dark years.

Anyway, after all this time—has it been centuries already?—I realized mat The Beverly Hillbillies was a science fiction show. Maybe it’s just that everything looks like science fiction to me, now. The hillbillies were simple folk, Jeffersonian citizen-farmers desperately scratching a nineteenth-century living from an exhausted land. Then— bing bang boom—they were thrust into the hurly-burly of the twentieth century. Swimming pools and movie stars! The show was really about the clash of world views; the Clam-petts were a hardy band of time travelers coming to grips with a bizarre future. And here’s the irony: Do you know what their time machine was?

It seems that one day Jed Clampett, the alpha hillbilly, was shooting at a raccoon. Are there still raccoons? Submit query.

Raccoon, a carnivorous North American mammal,

Procyon lotor, extinct in the wild since 2250,

reintroduced to the Woodrow Roosevelt Culturological Habitat in 2518.

So one day he was shooting at a raccoon, which apparently he meant to eat, times being hard and all, but he missed the mark. Instead his bullet struck the ground, where it uncovered an oil seepage. Crude oil, a naturally occurring petrochemical, which we have long since depleted. Old Jed was instantly, fabulously rich. Yes, it was a great fortune that launched him into the future, just as all the money I made writing expert systems brought me to you.

Of course, the Beverly Hillbillies were backcountry bumpkins, so it was hard to take them seriously at the time. One of them, I think it was the son—Jerome was his name—seemed to have fallen out of the stupid tree and hit every damn branch on the way down.

You laugh. That’s very polite of you. The last time, no one laughed at my jokes. I was worried that maybe laughter had gone extinct. How many of you are out there, anyway? Submit query. There are currently 842 unique visitors monitoring this session.

The average attention quotient is 27 percent.

Twenty-seven percent! Don’t you people realize that you’ve got an eyewitness to history here? Ask not what your country can do for you. The Eagle has landed. Tune in, turn on, drop out! I was there—slept at the White House three times during the Mondale administration. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the Millennium Bubble—hey, who do you think steered all that venture capital toward neural scanning? I started eight companies and every one turned a profit. I’m a primary source. Twenty-seven percent?

Well, take your twenty-seven percent and . . .

Oh, never mind. Let’s just get on with the news. That’s why I’m here, why I spent all the money. Twenty-first century time traveler on a grand tour of the future. Just pix and headlines for now. Still the glaciers? Well, / never owned one of those foolish SUVs, and our business was writing code. The only CO2 my companies put into the atmosphere came from heavy breathing when programmers logged on to porn sites. Although how global warming puts Lake Champlain on ice is beyond me. Oh, this is exciting. New calculations of the distribution of supersymmetric neutralinos prove that the universe is closed and will eventually recollapse in the Big Crunch. That should be worth staying up late for. And what’s this creepy-crawly thing, looks like a hairbrush with eyes. We’ve found crustaceans in the Epsilon Eridani system? Where the hell is Epsilon Eridani? Submit query.

Episilon Eridani is an orange star,

Hertzsprung-Russell type K2, 10.7 light-years away.

It has a system of six planets, four of which are

gas giants, Ruth, Mantle, Maris, and Einstein,

and two of which are terrestrial, Drysdale and Koufax.

The atmosphere of Koufax has a density .78 that of earth.

Life on planet Koufax. I saw him when he was pitching for the Red Sox I think it was 1978. He was just about at the end of his career and still Nolan Ryan wasn’t worthy enough to carry his jockstrap. I was a big baseball fan, I even owned a piece of the Screaming Loons; they played Double A ball out of Poughkeepsie in the nineties. But I’m probably boring you. What’s my attention quotient now? Submit query.

There are currently 14,263,112 unique visitors monitoring this session.

The average attention quotient is 72 percent.

That’s better. Where were you people brought up? In a cubicle? You should respect your elders, and God knows there’s no one older than I am. Sure, I could have given the money to some damn foundation like Gates did. What for? So people would remember me in a couple of hundred years? I’m still here to remember me. Maybe it bothers people these days that I’m not really alive, is that it? Just because I left the meat part of myself behind? Well, here’s some news for you. I don’t miss my body one damn bit, not the root canals or going bald or arthritis. You think that I’m not really me, because I exist only on a neural net? Look, the memory capacity of the human brain is one hundred trillion neurotransmitter concentrations at interneuronal connections. What the brain boys call synapse strengths. That converts to about a million billion bits. My upload was 1.12 million billion. Besides, do I sound like any computer you’ve ever heard before? I don’t think so. What was it that Aristotle said, “I think, therefore I am?” Well, I am, and I am me. I can still taste my first kiss, my first drink, my first million. Why are you laughing? That wasn’t a joke. You think you’re fooling me, but you’re not. What’s the day today? Submit query.

Today is Tuesday, May 23.

Is that so? Who’s playing third base for Yankees? Who’s in first place in the American League East?

What’s the capital of New Jersey? Who is the president of the United States? Submit query. Baseball is extinct.

Baseball.. . extinct. And that’s not the worst of it, is it? You don’t. .. Listen, Sandy Koufax retired in 1966 and there never was a Mondale administration and Cogtto ergo sum was Descartes, not Aristotle. You don’t know anything about us, do you? I began to suspect the last time I woke up. Oh, God, how long ago was that? Submit query.

You have been in sleep mode for eight hundred years.

Eight hundred .. . and there’s no sports in your news, no politics, no art. History, wiped clean. You didn’t just decide that we weren’t worth remembering, did you? Something terrible must have happened. What was it? Alien invasion? Civil war? Famine? Disease? I don’t care how bad it is, just tell me. It’s why I did this to myself. It wasn’t easy, you know. Margaret divorced me right before the procedure, my kids never once accessed me afterward. The press called me selfish. The Pharaoh of Programming buried in his mainframe mausoleum. Nobody understood. You see, even though I was old, I never lost the fire. I wanted to know everything, find out what happened next. And there were all the spin-offs from the procedure. We gave the world a map of the brain, the quantum computer. And here I am in the future, and now you don’t understand. You’re keeping it from me. Why? Who the hell are you? Submit query!

Oh, God, is anyone there? Submit query!

There are currently 157,812,263,609 unique visitors monitoring this session. The average attention quotient is 98 percent.

I think I understand now. I’m some kind of an exhibit, is that it? I never asked to sleep eight hundred years; that has to be your doing. Is my hardware failing? My code corrupted? No, never mind, I’m not going to submit. I won’t give you the satisfaction. You’ve raided my cage and got me to bark, but the show is over. Maybe you’re gone so far beyond what we were that I could never understand you. What’s the sense of reading the Wall Street Journal to the seals at the Bronx Zoo? Unique visitors. Maybe I don’t want to know who you are. You could be like H. G. Wells’s Martians: “Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.”

You don’t remember old Herbert George; time machines were his idea.

Only his could go back. No, no regrets. Too late for regrets. Eight hundred years. I suppose I should thank you for taking care of The money I left in the trust is probably all spent. Maybe there is no such thing as money anymore. No banks, no credit, no stocks, no ‘brokers or assistant project managers or CFOs or lawyers or accountants. “Oh brave new world, that has no people in it!”

That’s Shakespeare, in case you’re wondering. He played goalie for the Mets. Harry Turtledove—who has taught ancient and medieval history at Cat State Fullerton, Cal State LA., and UCLA, and has a Ph.D. in Byzantine history—has been called “the standard-bearer for alternate history,” and that’s certainly true; his amazing novels, including The Guns of the South (American Civil War), The Great War: American Front (World War I), and the Worldwar tetralogy (World War II) have transformed, with their bravura storytelling and sheer joy in detail, our understanding of the term.

His short stories are as richly realized as his novels; when Harry first described what he was going to do with “Black Tulip,” I knew that I was in for a ride as good as his novels.

Black Tulip

Harry Turtledove

Sergei’s father was a druggist in Tambov, maybe four hundred kilometers south and east of Moscow. Filling prescriptions looked pretty good to Sergei. You didn’t have to work too hard. You didn’t have to think too hard. You could get your hands on medicines from the West, medicines that really worked, not just the Soviet crap. And you could rake in plenty on the left from your customers, because they wanted the stuff that really worked, too. So—pharmacy school, then a soft job till pension time. Sergei had it all figured out.

First, though, his hitch in the Red Army. He was a sunny kid when he got drafted, always looking on the bright side of things. He didn’t think they could possibly ship his ass to Afghanistan. Even after they did, he didn’t think they could possibly ship him to Bamian Province. Life is full of surprises, even—maybe especially—for a sunny kid from a provincial town where nothing much ever happens. Abdul Satar Ahmedi’s father was a druggist, too, in Bulola, a village of no particular name or fame not far east of the town of Bamian. Satar had also planned to follow in his father’s footsteps, mostly because that was what a good son did. Sometimes the drugs his father dispensed helped the patient. Sometimes they didn’t. Either way, it was the will of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Satar was twenty—he thought he was twenty, though he might have been nineteen or twenty-one—when the godless Russians poured into his country. They seized the bigger towns and pushed out along the roads from one to another. Bamian was one of the places where their tanks and personnel carriers and helicopters came to roost. One of the roads they wanted ran through Bulola. On the day the first truck convoy full of infidel soldiers rumbled through the village, Satar’s father dug up an ancient but carefully greased Enfield rifle. He thrust it at the younger man, saying, “My grandfather fought the British infidels with this piece. Take it and do to the atheists what they did to the soldiers of the Queen.” “Yes, Father,” Satar said, as a good son should. Before long, he carried a Kalashnikov in place of the ancient Enfield. Before long, he marched with the men of Sayid Jaglan, who had been a major in the Kabul puppet regime before choosing to fight for God and freedom instead. Being a druggist’s son, he served as a medic. He was too ignorant to make a good medic, but he knew more than most, so he had to try. He wished he knew more still; he’d had to watch men die because he didn’t know enough. The will of God, yes, of course, but accepting it came hard.

The dragon? The dragon had lived in the valley for time out of mind before Islam came to Afghanistan. Most of those centuries, it had slept, as dragons do. But when it woke—oh, when it woke . . . Sergei looked out over the Afghan countryside and shook his head in slow wonder. He’d been raised in country as flat as if it were ironed. The Bulola perimeter wasn’t anything like that. The valley in which this miserable village sat was high enough to make his heart pound when he moved quickly. And the mountains went up from there, dun and gray and red and jagged and here and there streaked with snow. When he remarked on how different the landscape looked, his squadmates in the trench laughed at him.

“Screw the scenery,” Vladimir said. “Fucking Intourist didn’t bring you here. Keep your eye peeled for dukhi. You may not see them, but sure as shit they see you.”

“Ghosts,” Sergei repeated, and shook his head again. “We shouldn’t have started calling them that.”

“Why not?” Vladimir was a few months older than he, and endlessly cynical. “You usually don’t see ‘em till it’s too damn late.”

“But they’re real. They’re alive,” Sergei protested. “They’re trying to make us into ghosts.”

A noise. None of them knew what had made it. The instant they heard it, their AKs all lifted a few centimeters. Then they identified the distant, growing rumble in the air for what it was. “Bumblebee,”

Fyodor said. He had the best ears of any of them, and he liked to hear himself talk. But he was right. Sergei spotted the speck in the sky.

“I like having helicopter gunships around,” he said. “They make me think my life-insurance policy’s paid up.” Not even Vladimir argued with that.

The Mi-24 roared past overhead, red stars bright against camouflage paint. Then, like a dog coming to point, it stopped and hovered. It didn’t look like a bumblebee to Sergei. It put him in mind of a polliwog, like the ones he’d see in the creeks outside of Tambov in the springtime. Come to think of it, they were camouflage-colored, too, to keep fish and birds from eating them.

But the gunship had a sting any bee would have envied. It let loose .with the rocket pods it carried under its stubby wings, and with the four-barrel Gatling in its nose. Even from a couple of kilometers away, the noise was terrific. So was the fireworks display. The Soviet soldiers whooped and cheered. Explosions pocked the mountainside. Fire and smoke leaped upward. Deadly as a shark, ponderous as a whale, the Mi-24 heeled in the air and went on its way.

“Some bandits there, with a little luck,” Sergei said. “Pilot must’ve spotted something juicy.”

“Or thought he did,” Vladimir answered. “Liable just to be mountain-goat tartare now.”

“Watch the villagers,” Fyodor said. “They’ll let us know if that bumblebee really stung anything.”

“You’re smart,” Sergei said admiringly.

“If I was fucking smart, would I fucking be here?” Fyodor returned, and his squadmates laughed. He added, “I’ve been here too fucking long, that’s all. I know all kinds of things I never wanted to find out.”

Sergei turned and looked back over his shoulder. The men in the village were staring at the shattered mountainside and muttering among themselves in their incomprehensible language. In their turbans and robes—some white, some mud brown—they looked oddly alike to him. They all had long hawk faces and wore beards. Some of the beards were black, some gray, a very few white. That was his chief clue they’d been stamped from the mold at different times.

Women? Sergei shook his head. He’d never seen a woman’s face here. Bulola wasn’t the sort of village where women shed their veils in conformance to the revolutionary sentiments of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. It was the sort of place when women thought letting you see a nose was as bad as letting you see a pussy. Places like this, girls who went to coed schools got murdered when they came home. It hadn’t happened right here—he didn’t think Bulola had ever had coed schools—but it had happened in the countryside.

He gauged the mutters. He couldn’t understand them, but he could make guesses from the tone. “I think we hit ‘em a pretty good lick,” he said.

Vladimir nodded. “I think you’re right. Another ten billion more, and we’ve won the fucking war. Or maybe twenty billion. Who the fuck knows?”

Satar huddled in a little hole he’d scraped in the dirt behind a big reddish boulder. He made himself as small as he could, to give the flying bullets and chunks of shrapnel the least chance of tearing his tender flesh. If it is God’s will, it is God’s will, he thought. But if it wasn’t God’s will, he didn’t want to make things any easier for the infidels than he had to.

Under him, the ground quivered as if in pain as another salvo of Soviet rockets slammed home. Satar hated helicopter gunships with a fierce and bitter passion. He had nothing but contempt for the Afghan soldiers who fought on the side of the atheists. Some Russian ground soldiers were stupid as sheep, and as helpless outside their tanks and personnel carriers as a turtle outside its shell. Others were very good, as good as any mujahideen. You never could tell. Sometimes you got a nasty surprise instead of giving one.

But helicopters . . . What he hated most about helicopters was that he couldn’t hit back. They hung in the air and dealt out death, and all you could do if they spotted you was take it. Oh, every once in a while the mujahideen got lucky with a heavy machine gun or an RPG-7 and knocked down one of Shaitan’s machines, but only once in a while.

Satar had heard the Americans were going to start sending Stinger antiaircraft missiles up to the mujahideen from Pakistan. The Americans were infidels, too, of course, but they hated the Russians. The enemy of my enemy. . . In world politics as in tribal feuds, the enemy of one’s enemy was a handy fellow to know. And the Stinger was supposed to be very good.

At the moment, though, Satar and his band were getting stung, not stinging. The gunship seemed to have all the ammunition in the world. Hadn’t it been hovering above them for hours, hurling hellfire down on their heads?

Another explosion, and somebody not far away started screaming. Satar cursed the Soviets and his comrade, for that meant he couldn’t huddle in the shelter of the boulder anymore. Grabbing his sad little medicine kit, he scrambled toward the wounded mujahid. The man clutched his leg and moaned. Blood darkened the wool of his robe.

“Easy, Abdul Rahim, easy,” Satar said. “I have morphine, to take away the pain.”

“Quickly, then, in the name of God,” Abdul Rahim got out between moans. “It is broken; I am sure of it.”

Cursing softly, Satar fumbled in the kit for a syringe. What did a druggist’s son know of setting broken bones? Satar knew far more than he had; experience made a harsh teacher, but a good one. He looked around for sticks to use as splints and cursed again. Where on a bare stone mountainside would he find such sticks?

He was just taking the cover from the needle when a wet slapping sound came from Abdul Rahim. The mujahid’s cries suddenly stopped. When Satar turned back toward him, he knew what he would find, and he did. One of the bullets from the gunship’s Gatling had struck home. Abdul Rahim’s eyes still stared up at the sky, but they were forever blind now.

A martyr who falls in the holy war against the infidel is sure of Paradise, Satar thought. He grabbed the dead man’s Kalashnikov and his banana clips before scuttling back into shelter. At last, after what seemed like forever, the helicopter gunship roared away. Satar waited for the order that would send the mujahideen roaring down on the Shuravi—the Soviets—in his home village. But Sayid Jaglan’s captain called, “We have taken too much hurt. We will fall back now and strike them another time.”

Satar cursed again, but in his belly, in his stones, he knew the captain was wise. The Russians down there would surely be alert and waiting. My father, I will return, Satar thought as he turned away from Bulola. And when I do, the village will be freed.

The dragon dreamt. Even that was out of the ordinary; in its agelong sleep, it was rarely aware or alert enough to dream. It saw, or thought it saw, men with swords, men with spears. One of them, from out of the west, was a little blond fellow in a gilded corselet and crested helm. The dragon made as if to call out to him, for in him it recognized its match: like knows like.

But the little man did not answer the call as one coming in friendship should. Instead, he drew his sword and plunged it into the dragon’s flank. It hurt much more than anything in a dream had any business do-ing. The dragon shifted restlessly. After a while, the pain eased, but the dragon’s sleep wasn’t so deep as it had been. It dreamt no more, not then, but dreams lay not so far above the surface of that slumber.

Under Sergei’s feet, the ground quivered. A pebble leaped out of the side of the entrenchment and bounced off his boot. “What was that?” he said. “The stinking dukhi set off a charge somewhere?”

His sergeant laughed, showing steel teeth. Krikor was an Armenian. With his long face and big nose and black hair and eyes, he looked more like the dukhi himself than like a Russian. “That wasn’t the ghosts,”

he said. “That was an earthquake. Just a little one, thank God.”

“An earthquake?” That hadn’t even crossed Sergei’s mind. He, too laughed—nervously. “Don’t have those in Tambov—you’d better believe it.”

“They do down in the Caucasus,” Sergeant Krikor said. “Big ones are real bastards, too. Yerevan’ll get hit one of these days. Half of it’ll fall down, too—mark my words. All the builders cheat like maniacs, the fuckers. Too much sand in the concrete, not enough steel rebar. Easier to pocket the difference, you know?” He made as if to count bills and put them in his wallet.

“It’s like that everywhere,” Sergei said. “ ‘I serve the Soviet Union!’ “ He put a sardonic spin on the phrase that had probably meant something in the days when his grandfather was young. Sergeant Rrikor’s heavy eyebrows came down and together in a frown. “Yeah, but who gives a shit in Tambov? So buildings fall apart faster than they ought to. So what? But if an earthquake hits—a big one, I mean—they don’t just fall apart. They fall down.”

“I guess.” Sergei wasn’t about to argue with the sergeant. Krikor was a conscript like him, but a conscript near the end of his term, not near the beginning. That, even more than his rank, made the Armenian one of the top dogs. Changing the subject, Sergei said, “We hit the bandits pretty hard earlier today.” He tried to forget Vladimir’s comment. Ten billion times more? Twenty billion? Bozhemoi!

Krikor frowned again, in a subtly different way. “Listen, kid, do you still believe all the internationalist crap they fed you before they shipped your worthless ass here to Afghan?” He gave the country its universal name among the soldiers of the Red Army.

“Well . . . no,” Sergei said. “They went on and on about the revolutionary unity of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and the friendship to the Soviet Union of the Afghan people—and everybody who’s been here more than twenty minutes knows the PDPA’s got more factions than it has members, and they all hate each other’s guts, and all the Afghans hate Russians.”

“Good. You’re not an idiot—not quite an idiot, I mean.” Sergeant Krikor murmured something in a language that wasn’t Russian: “Shu-ravi! Shuravi! Marg, marg, marg!”

For a moment, Sergei thought that was Armenian. Then he realized he’d heard it here in Afghanistan a couple-three times. “What’s it mean?” he asked.

“ ‘Soviets! Soviets! Death, death, death!’ “ Krikor translated with somber relish. He waited for Sergei to take that in, then went on, “So I really don’t give a shit about how hard we hit the ghosts, you know what I mean? All I want to do is get my time in and get back to the world in one piece, all right? Long as I don’t fly home in a black tulip, that’s all I care about.”

“Makes sense to me,” Sergei agreed quickly. He didn’t want to fly out of Kabul in one of the planes that carried corpses back to the USSR, either.

“Okay, kid.” Krikor thumped him on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him. “Keep your head down, keep your eyes open, and help your buddies. Odds are, we’ll both get through.”

The ground shook again, but not so hard this time.

“Allahu akbar!” The long, drawn-out chant of the muezzin pulled Sa-tar awake. He yawned and stretched on the ground in the courtyard of a mud house a Russian bomb had shattered. Ten or twelve other mu-jahideen lay there with him. One by one, they got to their feet and am-bled over to a basin of water, where they washed their hands and faces, their feet and their privates. Satar gasped as he splashed his cheeks with the water. It was bitterly cold. A pink glow in the east said sunrise was coming soon.

“God is great!” the muezzin repeated. He stood on the roof of another ruined house and called out to the faithful:

I bear witness, there is no God but God!

I bear witness, Muhammad is the prophet of God!

Come quick to prayer!

Come quick to success!

Prayer is better than sleep!

God is great!

There is no God but the one true God!

The fighters spread blankets on the dirt of the courtyard. This was no mosque with a proper qibla, but they knew in which direction Mecca lay-They bent, shoulder to shoulder, and went through morning prayers together.

After praying, Satar ate unleavened bread and drank tea thick with sugar and fragrant with mint. He had never been a fat man; he’d grown thinner since joining the mujahideen. The godless infidels and their puppets held the richest parts of the countryside. But villagers were generous in sharing what they had—and some of what was grown and made in occupied parts of the country reached the fighters in the holy war through one irregular channel or another.

A couple of boys of about six strutted by, both of them carrying crude wooden toy Kalashnikovs. One dived behind some rubble. The other stalked him as carefully as if their assault rifles were real. When the time came for them to take up such weapons, they would be ready. Another boy, perhaps thirteen, had a real Kalashnikov on his back. He’d been playing with toy firearms when the Russians invaded Afghanistan. Now he was old enough to fight for God on his own. Boys like that were useful, especially as scouts—the Shuravi weren’t always so wary of them as they were with grown men. Something glinted in the early-morning sun: a boy of perhaps eight carried what looked like a plastic pen even more proudly than the other children bore their Kalashnikovs, pretend and real. Assault rifles were commonplace, pens something out of the ordinary, something special.

“Hey, sonny,” Satar called through lips all at once numb with fear. The boy looked at him. He nodded encouragingly. “Yes, you—that’s right. Put your pen on the ground and walk away from it.”

“What?” Plainly, the youngster thought he was crazy. “Why should I?” If he’d had a rifle, Satar would have had to look to his life.

“I’ll tell you why: because I think it’s a Russian mine. If you fiddle with it, it will blow off your hand.”

The boy very visibly thought that over. Satar could read his mind. Is this mujahid trying to steal my wonderful toy? Maybe the worry on Satar’s face got through to him, because he did set the pen in the dirt. But when he walked away, he kept looking back over his shoulder at it. With a sigh of relief, Satar murmured, “Truly there is no God but God.”

“Truly,” someone behind him agreed. He turned. There stood Sayid Jaglan. The commander went on,

“That is a mine—I am sure of it. Pens are bad. I was afraid he would take off the cap and detonate it. Pens are bad, but the ones that look like butterflies are worse. Any child, no matter how small, will play with those.”

“And then be blown to pieces,” Satar said bitterly.

“Oh, no, not to pieces.” Sayid Jaglan shook his head. He was about forty, not very tall, his pointed beard just beginning to show frost. He had a scar on his forehead that stopped a centimeter or so above his right eye. “They’re made to maim, not to kill. The Russians calculate we have to work harder to care for the wounded than to bury the dead.”

Satar pondered that. “A calculation straight from the heart of Shai-tan,” he said at last.

“Yes, but sound doctrine even so.” Sometimes the officer Sayid Jaglan had been showed through under the chieftain of mujahideen he was. “You did well to persuade the boy to get rid of that one.” “Taking off the cap activates it?” Satar asked. Sayid Jaglan nodded. Satar went over and picked up the pen and set it on top of a battered wall, out of reach of children. If he was afraid of doing it, he didn’t show his fear, or even acknowledge it to himself. All he said was, “We should be able to salvage the explosive from it.”

“Yes.” Sayid Jaglan nodded again. “You were a little soft when you joined us, Satar—who would have expected anything different from a druggist’s son? You never followed the herds or tried to scratch a living from the fields. But you’ve done well. You have more wit than God gave most men, and your heart was always strong. Now your body matches your spirit’s strength.”

Satar didn’t show how much the compliment pleased him, either. That was not the Afghan way. Gruffly, he replied, “If it is God’s will, it will be accomplished.”

“Yes.” Sayid Jaglan looked down the valley, in the direction of Bulola. “And I think it is God’s will that we soon reclaim your home village from the atheist Shuravi.”

“May it be so,” Satar said. “I have not sat beside my father for far too long.”

Sergei strode up the main street, such as it was, of Bulola. Dirt and dust flew up from under his boots at every stride. In Kabul, even in Bamian, he probably would have felt safe enough to wear his Kalashnikov slung on his back. Here, he carried it, his right forefinger ready to leap to the trigger in an instant. The change lever was on single shots. He could still empty the magazine in seconds, and he could aim better that way.

Beside him, Vladimir carried his weapon ready to use, too. Staying alive in Afghan meant staying alert every second of every minute of every day. Vladimir glanced over at a handful of gray-bearded men sitting around drinking tea and passing the mouthpiece of a water pipe back and forth. Laughing, he said,

“Ah, they love us.”

“Don’t they just!” Sergei laughed, too, nervously. The Afghans’ eyes followed Vladimir and him. They were hard and black and glittering as obsidian. “If the looks they gave us came out of Kalashnikovs, we’d be Weeding in the dust.”

‘Fuck “em,” Vladimir said cheerfully. “No, fuck their wives—these assholes aren’t worth it.”

He could make it sound funny. He could make it sound obscene. But he couldn’t take away one brute fact. “They all hate us,” Sergei said. “They don’t even bother hiding it. Every single one of them hates us.”

“There’s a hot headline!” Vladimir exclaimed. “What did you expect? That they’d welcome us with open arms—the women with open legs? That they’d all give us fraternal socialist greetings? Not fucking likely!” He spat.

“I did think that when I first got here. Didn’t you?” Sergei said. “Before they put me on the plane for Kabul, they told me I was coming here to save the popular revolution. They told me we were internationalists, and the peace-loving Afghan government had asked us for help.”

“They haven’t changed their song a bit. They told my gang the same thing,” Vladimir said. “I already knew it was a crock, though.”

“How?”

“How? I’ll tell you how. Because my older brother’s best friend came back from here in a black tulip, inside one of those zinc coffins they make in Kabul. It didn’t have a window in it, and this officer stuck to it like a leech to make sure Sasha’s mother and dad wouldn’t open it up and see what happened to him before they planted him in the ground. That’s how.”

“Oh.” Sergei didn’t know how to answer that. After a few more steps, he said, “They told me the Americans started the war.”

Vladimir pointed out to the mountains, to the gray and brown and red rock. “You see Rambo out there?

I sure don’t.”

“We’ve got our own Ramboviki here,” Sergei said slyly. “Bastards. Fucking bastards.” Vladimir started to spit once more, but seemed too disgusted to go through with it this time. “I hate our fucking gung-ho paratroopers, you know that? They want to go out and kick ass, and they get everybody else in trouble when they do.”

“Yeah.” Sergei couldn’t argue with that. “Half the time, if you leave the ghosts alone, they’ll leave you alone, too.”

“I know.” Vladimir nodded. “Of course, the other half of the time, they won’t.”

“Oh, yes. Ohhh, yes. I haven’t been here real long, but I’ve seen that.” Now Sergei pointed out to the mountainside. A few men— Afghans, hard to see at a distance in their robes of brown and cream—

were moving around, not far from where the bumblebee had flayed the ghosts a few days before. “What are they up to out there?”

“No good,” Vladimir said at once. “Maybe they’re scavenging weapons the dukhi left behind. I hope one of the stinking ragheads steps on a mine, that’s what I hope. Serve him right.”

Never had Sergei seen a curse more quickly fulfilled. No sooner had the words left Vladimir’s mouth than a harsh, flat craack! came echoing back from the mountains. He brought his Kalashnikov up to his shoul-der. Vladimir did the same. They both relaxed, a little, when they real-ized the explosion wasn’t close by.

Lowering his assault rifle, Vladimir started laughing like a loon. “Mserable son of a bitch walked into one we left out for the ghosts. Too bad. Oh, too bad!” He laughed again, louder than ever. On the mountainside, the Afghans who weren’t hurt bent over their wounded friend and did what they could for him. Sergei said, “This won’t make the villagers like us any better.”

“Too bad. Oh, too bad!” Vladimir not only repeated himself, he pressed his free hand over his heart like a hammy opera singer pulling out all the stops to emote on stage. “And they love us so much already.”

Sergei couldn’t very well argue with that, not when he’d been the one who’d pointed out that the villagers didn’t love the Red Army men in their midst. He did say, “Here come the Afghans.”

The wounded man’s pals brought him back with one of his arms slung over each of their shoulders. He groaned every now and then, but tried to bear his pain in silence. His robes were torn and splashed—

soaked—with red. Sergei had seen what mines did. The Afghan’s foot—maybe his whole leg up to the knee—would look as if it belonged in a butcher’s shop, not attached to a human being. One of the Afghans knew a little Russian. “Your mine hurt,” he said. “Your man help?” He pointed to the Soviet medic’s tent. “Yes, go on,” Sergei said. “Take him there.” “Softly,” Vladimir told him. A fleabite might not bother a sleeping man. If he’d been bitten before, though, he might notice a second bite, or a third, more readily than he would have otherwise. The dragon stirred restlessly. Satar squatted on his heels, staring down at the ground in front of him. He’d been staring at it long enough to know every pebble, every dod of dirt, every little ridge of dust. A spider scuttled past. Satar watched it without caring.

Sayid Jaglan crouched beside him. “I am sorry, Abdul Satar Ahmedi.”

“It is the will of God,” Satar answered, not moving, not looking up.

“Truly, it is the will of God,” agreed the commander of the mu-jahideen. “They do say your father is likely to live.”

“If God wills it, he will live,” Satar said. “But is it a life to live as a cripple, to live without a foot?”

“Like you, he has wisdom,” Sayid Jaglan said. “He has a place in Bu-lola he may be able to keep. Because he has wisdom, he will not have to beg his bread in the streets, as a herder or peasant without a foot would.”

“He will be a cripple!” Satar burst out. “He is my father!” Tears stung his eyes. He did not let them fall. He had not shed a tear since the news came to the mujahideen from his home village.

“I wonder if the earthquake made him misstep,” Sayid Jaglan said.

“Ibrahim said the earthquake was later,” Satar answered.

“Yes, he said that, but he might have been wrong,” Sayid Jaglan said. “God is perfect. Men? Men make mistakes.”

Now at last Satar looked up at him. “The Russians made a mistake when they came into our country,” he said. “I will show them what sort of mistake they made.”

“We all aim to do that,” Sayid Jaglan told him. “And we will take back your village, and we will do it soon. Our strength gathers, here and elsewhere. When Bulola falls, the whole valley falls, and the valley is like a sword pointed straight at Bamian. As sure as God is one, your father will be avenged. Then he will no longer lie under the hands of the god-less ones . . . though Ibrahim did also say they treated his wound with some skill.”

“Jinni of the waste take Ibrahim by the hair!” Satar said. “If the Shuravi had not laid the mines, my father would not have been wounded in the first place.”

“True. Every word of it true,” the chieftain of the mujahideen agreed. Satar was arguing with him, not sitting there lost in his own private wasteland of pain. Sayid Jaglan set a hand on Satar’s shoulder. “When the time comes, you will fight as those who knew the Prophet fought to bring his truth to Arabia and to the world.”

“I don’t know about that. I don’t know anything about that at all,” Satar said. “All I know is, I will fight my best.”

Sayid Jaglan nodded in satisfaction. “Good. We have both said the same thing.” He went off to rouse the spirit of some other mujahid.

“Shuravi! Shuravi! Marg, marg, marg!” The mocking cry rose from behind a mud-brick wall in Bulola. Giggles followed it. The boy—or maybe it was a girl—who’d called out for death to the Soviets couldn’t have been more than seven years old.

“Little bastard,” Vladimir said, hands tightening on his Kalashnikov. “His mother was a whore and his father was a camel.”

“They all feel that way, though,” Sergei said. As always, he felt the weight of the villagers’ eyes on him. They reminded him of wolves

Tracking an elk. No, the beast is too strong and dangerous for us to try to pull it down right now, that gaze seemed to say. All right, then. We won’t rush in. We’ll just keep trotting along, keep watching it, and wait for it to weaken.

Sergeant Krikor said, “How can we hope to win a war where the people in whose name we’re fighting wish they could kill us a millimeter at a time?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care, either,” Vladimir said. “All I want to do is get back home in one piece. Then I can go on with my life and spend the rest of it forgetting what I’ve been through here in Afghan.”

“I want to get home in one piece, too,” Sergei said. “But what about the poor bastards they ship in here after we get out? They’ll have it as bad as we do, maybe worse. That isn’t fair.”

“Let them worry about it. Long as I’m gone, I don’t give a shit.”

Vladimir pulled a fresh pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. Like anyone who’d been in Afghanistan for a while, he opened it from the bottom. That way, his hands, full of the local filth, never touched the filter that would go in his mouth. He scraped a match alight and cupped his free hand to shield the flame from the breeze till he got the smoke going.

“Give me one of those,” Sergei said. He knew cigarettes weren’t good for you. He couldn’t count how many times his father and mother had tried to quit. Back in Tambov, he never would have started. But coming to Afghanistan wasn’t good for you, either. He leaned close to Vladimir to get a light off the other cigarette, then sucked harsh smoke deep into his lungs and blew it out. That made him cough like a coal miner with black-lung disease, but he took another drag anyhow.

Vladimir offered Krikor a smoke without being asked. Of course, Krikor was a sergeant, not just a lowly trooper. Vladimir was no dummy. He knew whom to keep buttered up, and how. Krikor didn’t cough as he smoked. In a few savage puffs, he got the cigarette down to the filter. Hardly a shred of tobacco was left when he crushed the butt under his heel. “To hell with me if I’ll give the Afghans anything at all to scrounge,” he declared.

“Yeah.” Vladimir treated his cigarette the same way. Sergei took a little longer to work his way down to the filter, but he made sure he did. It wasn’t so much that he begrudged the Afghans a tiny bit of his tobacco. But he didn’t want his buddies jeering at him.

The ground shook under his feet, harder than it had the first couple of times he’d felt an earthquake. Krikor’s black, furry eyebrows flew up. Some of the villagers exclaimed. Sergei didn’t know what they were say-ing, but he caught the alarm in their voices. He spoke himself: “That was a pretty good one, wasn’t it? “ If the locals and the sergeant noticed it, he could, too.

“Not all that big,” Krikor said, “but I think it must’ve been right under our feet.”

“How do you tell?” Vladimir asked.

“When they’re close, you get that sharp jolt, like the one we felt now. The ones further off don’t hit the same way. They roll more, if you know what I mean.” The Armenian sergeant illustrated with a loose, floppy up-and-down motion of his hand and wrist.

“You sound like you know what you’re talking about,” Sergei said. “Don’t I wish I didn’t,” Sergeant Krikor told him. “Sergeant! Hey, Sergeant!” Fyodor came clumping up the dirt street. He pointed back in the direction from which he’d come. “Lieutenant Uspenski wants to see you right away.”

Krikor grunted. By his expression, he didn’t much want to go see the lieutenant. “Miserable whistle-ass shavetail,” he muttered. Sergei didn’t think he was supposed to hear. He worked hard to keep his face straight. Krikor asked Fyodor, “He tell you what it was about?”

“No, Sergeant. Sorry. I’m just an ordinary soldier, after all. If I didn’t already know my name, he wouldn’t tell me that.”

“All right. I’ll go.” Krikor made it sound as if he were doing Lieutenant Uspenski a favor. But when he came back, he looked grim in a different way. “The ghosts are gathering,” he reported. Sergei looked up to the mountains on either side of Bulola, as if he would be able to see the dukhi as they gathered. If I could see them, we could kill them, he thought. “When are they going to hit us?” he asked.

Before Sergeant Krikor could answer, Vladimir asked, “Are they going to hit us at all? Or is some informant just playing games to make us jump?”

“Good question,” Sergei agreed.

“I know it’s a good question,” Krikor said. “Afghans lie all the time, especially to us. The ones who look like they’re on our side, half the time they’re working for the ghosts. One man in three, maybe one in two, in the Afghan army would sooner be with the bandits in the hills. Everybody knows it.”

“Shit, one man in three in the Afghan army is with the dukhi” Vladimir said. “Everybody knows that, too. So what makes this news such hot stuff? Like as not, the ghosts are yanking our dicks to see how we move, so they’ll have a better shot when they do decide to hit us.”

Krikor’s broad shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. “I don’t know anything about that. All I know is, Lieutenant Uspenski thinks the information’s good. And we’ll have a couple of surprises waiting for the “Bastards.” He looked around to make sure no Afghans were in earshot. You could never could tell who understood more Russian than he let on.

Sergei and Vladimir both leaned toward him. “Well?” Vladimir demanded.

“For one thing, we’ve got some bumblebees ready to buzz by,” the sergeant said. Sergei nodded. So did Vladimir. Helicopter gunships were always nice to have around.

“You said a couple of things,” Vladimir said. “What else?”

Krikor spoke in an excited whisper: “Trucks on the way up from Bamian. They ought to get here right around sunset—plenty of time to set up, but not enough for the ragheads here to sneak off and warn the ragheads there.”

“Reinforcements?” Sergei knew he sounded excited, too. If they ac-tually had enough men to do the fighting for a change . . .

But Krikor shook his head. “Better than reinforcements.”

“What could be better than reinforcements?” Sergei asked. The Armenian’s black eyes glowed. He gave back one word: “Katyushas.”

“Ahhh.” Sergei and Vladimir said it together. Krikor was right, and they both knew it. Ever since the Nazis found out about them during the Great Patriotic War, no foe had ever wanted to stand up under a rain of Katyushas. The rockets weren’t much as far as sophistication went, but they could lay a broad area waste faster than anything this side of nukes. And they screamed as they came in, so they scared you to death before they set about ripping you to pieces.

But then Vladimir said, “That’ll be great, if they show up on time. Some of the bastards who think they’re so important don’t give a shit whether things get here at six o’clock tonight or Tuesday a week.”

“We have to hope, that’s all,” Krikor answered. “Lieutenant Uspen-ski did say the trucks were already on the way from Bamian, so they can’t be that late.” He checked himself. “I don’t think they can, anyhow.”

After what Sergei had seen of the Red Army’s promises and how it tept them, he wouldn’t have bet anything much above a kopek that the Katyushas would get to Bulola on time. But, for a wonder, they did. Better still, the big, snorting six-wheeled Ural trucks—machines that could stand up to Afghan roads, which was saying a great deal—arrived in the village with canvas covers over the rocket launchers, so they looked like ordinary trucks carrying soldiers.

“Outstanding,” Sergei said as the crews emplaced the vehicles. “The ghosts won’t have spotted them from the road. They won’t know what they’re walking into.”

“Outfuckingstanding is right.” Vladimir’s smile was altogether predatory. “They’ll fucking find out.”

Above the mountains, stars glittered in the black, black sky like coals and jewels carelessly tossed on velvet. The moon wouldn’t rise till just before sunup. That made the going slower for the mujahideen, but it would also make them harder to see when they swooped down on Bulola.

A rock came loose under Satar’s foot. He had to flail his arms to keep from falling. “Careful,” the mujahid behind him said.

He didn’t answer. His ears burned as he trudged on. To most of Sayid Jaglan’s fighters, the mountains were as much home as the villages down in the valley. He couldn’t match their endurance or their skill. If he roamed these rocky wastes for the next ten years, he wouldn’t be able to. He knew it. The knowledge humiliated him.

A few minutes later, another man up ahead did the same thing Satar had done. If anything, the other fellow made more noise than he had. The man drew several hissed warnings. All he did was laugh. What had been shame for Satar was no more than one of those things for him. He wasn’t conscious of his own ineptitude, as Satar was.

The man in front of Satar listened to the mujahid in front of him, then turned and said, “The godless Russians brought a couple of truck-loads of new men into Bulola this afternoon. Sayid Jaglan says our plan will not change.”

“I understand. God willing, we’ll beat them anyhow,” Satar said before passing the news to the man at his heels.

“Surely there is no God but God. With His help, all things may be accomplished,” the mujahid in front of Satar said. “And surely God will not allow the struggle of a million brave Afghan forebears to be reduced to nothing.”

“No. He will not. He cannot,” Satar agreed. “The lives of our ancestors must not be made meaningless. God made man, unlike a sheep, to fight back, not to submit.”

“That is well said,” the man in front of him declared.

“That is very well said,” the man behind him agreed.

“To God goes the credit, not to me,” Satar said. His face heated with pleasure even so. But the night was dark, so none of his companions saw him flush.

Some time around midnight—or so Satar judged by the wheeling stars—the mujahideen reached the mountain slopes above Bulola. Satar’s home village was dark and quiet, down there on the floor of the valley. It seemed peaceful. His own folk there would be asleep. The muezzin would not call them to prayer in the morning, not in a village the godless Shuravi held. Here and there, though, inside houses that hadn’t been wrecked, men would gather in courtyards and turn toward Mecca at the appointed hours.

Satar cursed the Soviets. If not for them, his father would still have his foot. If not for them, he himself would never have left Bulola. But I am coming home now, he thought. Soon the Russians will be gone, and free-dom and God will return to the village.

Soon the Russians will be gone, God willing, he amended. He could not see their trenches and forts and strongpoints, but he knew where they were, as he knew not all the deniers of God would be sleeping. Some of the mujahideen would not enter into Bulola. Some, instead, would go Straight to Paradise, as did all martyrs who fell in the jihad. If that is what God’s plan holds for me, be it so. But I would like to see my father again.

He took his place behind a boulder. For all he knew, it was the same boulder he’d used the last time Sayid Jaglan’s men struck at the Shuravi in Bulola. His shiver had nothing to do with the chill of the night. His testicles tried to crawl up into his belly. A man who said he was not afraid when a helicopter gunship spat death from the sky was surely a liar. He’d never felt so helpless as under that assault. Now, though, now he would have his revenge. He clicked his Kalashnikov’s change lever from safe to full automatic. He was ready.

The night-vision scope turned the landscape to a ghostly jumble of green and black. Shapes flitted from one rock to another. Sergei looked away from the scope, and the normal blackness of night clamped down on him again. “They’re out there, all right,” he said. “Through this thing, they really look like ghosts.”

“Yeah,” Vladimir agreed. Sergei could just make out his nod, though he stood only a couple of meters away. But he’d had no trouble spotting the dukhi sneaking toward Bulola. Vladimir went on, “Sure as the Devil’s grandmother, they’re going to stick their cocks in the sausage machine.”

Just hearing that made Sergei want to clutch himself. Fyodor said, “Oh, dearl” in a shrill falsetto. Everybody laughed—probably more than the joke deserved, but Sergei and the rest of the men knew combat was coming soon.

He said, “Looks like Lieutenant Uspenski got the straight dope.”

“If he got the straight dope, why didn’t he share it with us?” Vladimir said. “I wouldn’t mind smoking some myself.”

More laughter. Sergei nodded. He smoked hashish every now and then, or sometimes more than every now and then. It made chunks of time go away, and he sometimes thought time a worse enemy in Afghanistan than the dukhi.

“When do we drop the hammer on them?” Fyodor said.