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THE

DIMENSION

NEXT DOOR

E D I T E D B Y

Martin H. Greenberg

and Kerrie Hughes

Interview with the Necromancer

“What sort of trick is this?”

“No trick, human,” the walking corpse of Benjamin Franklin said, “but if I am to be destroyed, I would first have you set the record straight where it concerns my life. My good friend John Adams once said that I was ‘more es

teemed and beloved than Newton, Leibniz or Voltaire.’ I would prefer to keep matters that way if possible.”

What price had this man paid for so long a stay on God’s earth? I had to find out. The creature seated before me was a result of a life pulled far too thin by powers I had barely begun studying in the Order, powers that I’d rather not think of. I tapped the excess ink from my quill against the rim of the well and flipped open the notebook.

“Shall we begin?”

The creature nodded.

“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten,” the rotting corpse said, quoting himself again,

“either write something worth reading or do things worth the writing.”

He held up both of his bony hands. Neither of them pos

sessed a complete set of fingers. A chill ran down my back and a dark smile crept across his face.

“Since I seem incapable of performing the simple task of setting quill to page, I supose you will have to do. Before destroying me, of course.”

He seemed to be taking this rather well, all things con

sidered.

“Naturally,” I said. I lowered the tip of my quill to the blank page before me and started writing.

—from “The Fourteenth Virtue” by Anton Strout Also Available from DAW Books:

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Fellowship Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes

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In the opening decade of the twenty-first century, many things that were predicted in the science fiction stories of the twentieth century have be

come an accepted part of everyday life, and many other possibilities have not yet been realized but hopefully will be one day. For everyone who thought that by now they’d be motoring along the skyways in a personal jet car, or who assumed we’d have established bases on the Moon and Mars, or that we would have conquered disease, slowed the aging process to a crawl, or eliminated war, social injustice, and economic inequity, here are sixteen stories of futures that might someday be ours or our children’s, from Esther Friesner, Sarah Hoyt, Kevin J. Anderson, Irene Radford, Dave Freer, and Dean Wesley Smith.

THE

DIMENSION

NEXT DOOR

E D I T E D B Y

Martin H. Greenberg

and Kerrie Hughes

ISBN: 1-4362-2618-X

DAW Book Collectors No. 1446.

DAW Books is distributed by Penguin Group (USA). All characters and events in this book are fictitious. All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or en

courage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors’

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Kerrie Hughes

THE FOURTEENTH VIRTUE

Anton Strout

WAITING FOR EVOLUTION

Jody Lynn Nye

THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Lillian Stewart Carl

SHADOWS IN THE MIRRORS

166

Bradley P. Beaulieu

GOD PAYS

192

Paul Genesse

JACK OF THE HIGH HILLS

Alexander B. Potter

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

287

INTRODUCTION

Kerrie Hughes

Shadows just out of sight, odd noises with no source, bizarre happenings that defy explanation? Our world is filled with strange events and unexplained phenomena that everyone has an opinion on but that no one can explain. Perhaps these mysteries are people, or creatures, or some

thing else entirely, breaching the barriers that separate our everyday world from realms that we cannot see or touch—

yet. What will these beings bring with them on their jour

ney to our reality? Or will we humans be the first to break through to the other side, to explore the strange and won

drous worlds that lie just beyond our perception?

In The Dimension Next Door, many of my favorite writ

ers challenge the minds of the readers to walk ancient path

ways, imagine alternate timelines, and view the mysterious as perfectly natural.

Within these pages, Donald Bingle takes us to other worlds nearer to our own than we may think with “karmas sist.com.” Then Lillian Stewart Carl gives us a glimpse of what life is like for someone who can access the past in

“The Avalon Psalter,” and Alexander Potter takes us to tea with the devil in “Hear No Evil.”

On another, darker, path, author Anton Strout gives us a horrifying glimpse of Ben Franklin in “The Fourteenth 2

Kerrie Hughes

Virtue.” I certainly won’t think of the Founding Fathers in the same way again. And please don’t overlook the thoughtprovoking story “Waiting for Evolution,” by Jody Lynn Nye. Then, once you’ve opened your mind to the possibilities, read “AFK” by Chris Pierson and “Unreadable,” by Steven Schend. You might just look at books and games in a whole new light.

So come in and stay awhile, and don’t worry about the darkness lurking in the corner—it may just be the door you’ve been waiting to go open.

THE FOURTEENTH VIRTUE

Anton Strout

“I guess I don’t so much mind being old as I mind being fat, dead and old,” said the dried humanoid husk, paus

ing to catch its breath on the villa’s stairs that led down into the catacombs. If an evil undead creature was capable of catching its breath, that is.

I leaned against the wall of the stairway to the Villa Diodati’s catacombs, thankful for the respite myself. Fortysix was far too old for an agent of the Fraternal Order of Goodness to be chasing down the evil undead, especially if that agent was a research archivist like myself. Evil radiated from the necromancer like a fire in the dead of winter. Yes, I had dealt with hunting the undead and every other manner of curiosity for all my natural life, but to finally catch up to him after all these years was on par with discovering the lost city of Atlantis or Shangri-la.

“My name is Thaniel Graydon,” I said with a mix of fas

cination and horror in my voice. “And your unnatural life ends here, necromancer.”

“I would prefer that you refer to me as Mr. Franklin or Benjamin if you must,” the creature said, sounding holier than thou. “That title is such an ugly moniker and perhaps the least of the ones I earned in my lifetime.”

My instructor from Opening Threats would have cringed 4

Anton Strout

at how pedestrian my declaration must have sounded, but given the dire circumstances, I was just happy to have got

ten it out at all in his presence.

The moment F.O.G. had caught the rumor of the necro

mancer’s existence, they’d sent their foremost expert on it—me—out into the field, running me ragged in singular pursuit. The modern marvel of Pierre Andriel’s steampowered vessel had carried me safely (if somewhat queasily) out of New York Harbor, and within weeks I’d tracked the rumored creature to this Cologny villa just out

side Lake Geneva. My life’s study culminated in this hunt, and I could hardly believe that I was finally standing here face-to-face with the creature. I was terrified. Somewhat rested, I pushed myself off the wall and started closing in on the foul thing only to have it raise one of its hands in surrender. We were trapped far beneath the villa with nowhere left to run, and the creature seemed to sense this. I held my torch up to get a better look at him in the clinging darkness.

Despite his years of decay, I could still see hints of the human he had once been, but I had to look extra hard. The long gray hair that ran in a crescent around the back of its head was now snarled and matted with mud. His garb was at least thirty years out of date, and it hung off his pearshaped torso in tatters of cloth that had long gone a muted brown with age. The stench of the dead that came off his body was overpowering in the confines of this subterranean staircase, but I did my best to hide my discomfort. Thankfully the burning pitch-soaked rags from the torch helped mask the malodorous scent.

The creature started slowly down the stairs with a de

feated resolve, beckoning me to follow. I did so but with a healthy dose of reluctance, surprised when he led me past the stone caskets of the catacombs and into a small fur

nished chamber that resembled a lonely writer’s garret. The creature gestured me toward a table in the center of the THE FOURTEENTH VIRTUE

room that was covered with books and loose scraps of parchment. Its chair slid away from it at his command.

“What sort of trick is this?” I asked, feeling both heady and confused in my moment of triumph. Did it actually think I was going to sit down and leave myself defenseless?

The creature shook its head.

teemed and beloved than Newton, Leibniz or Voltaire.’ I would prefer to keep matters that way if possible. Now sit.”

His words held power in them, and despite my reluc

tance and fear, I felt compelled to sit. I found an empty sconce along the wall and slid my torch into it, then did as he bid, sitting down at the table. The creature flicked its wrist. The table’s oil lamp blazed to life and pressed back the cloying darkness of the room. The creature reached to

ward the table and pulled a blank moleskin notebook free from the clutter and offered it to me. Despite my unease, I took it without hesitation.

When this creature had been alive, my respect for him had been enormous. My life’s pursuit had been to set all manner of his arcane knowledge straight for our archives, and right now I felt excitement at this long-awaited prospect. If things went well, I would finally be able to transform conjecture into testimonial fact and earn a place of respect and note among my fellow archivists in the Fraternal Order. I was shaking so badly I could barely pull the quill from its nearby inkwell as I attempted to make room on the tabletop to write. Whether it was excitement or a bit of fear, I didn’t know.

After all my years of study, I hadn’t come unprepared. I reached into the bag hanging from my shoulder and pulled out sheaves of parchment I had “borrowed” from the Order’s archives. I flipped through the loose pages. Some of 6

Anton Strout

them had been worn or torn by time, and most of them had been written by unfamiliar hands much older than mine. I raised one closer to the oil lamp and read from it, al

ways keeping one wary eye on the creature.

“It says here you were born in 1706 or 1705, depending on how you reckon it by calendar,” I said.

Franklin gave a chuckle, pulled his glasses free from his face and wiped them clean with the edge of his tattered coat. He fit them back on his face, dirtier than they had been before, but it was no matter—he had no eyes left in the sockets to speak of. I waited for him to settle down into the chair opposite me, partly out of courtesy but mostly out of fear for my own life. Despite his manners, I reminded my

self that I was still in the presence of evil. Franklin chuckled again.

“Is something funny about that?” I asked, then quickly added, “Sir?”

“If I’m not, mistaken, it’s 1818 now, yes? It’s hard to tell after so much time . . . that would make me surprisingly lively for a man of one hundred and twelve years of age,”

he said. “I’m in the prime of my senility!”

He continued chuckling to himself. Pretty jovial for the damned, I thought. I looked back down at my papers, grate

ful to be avoiding those dead sockets of his, and reread them. “That’s what the record shows, anyway. Of course they also wrote that you died in 1790.”

The creature snorted. “Don’t you think I know when I died, son?”

Something buglike scuttled out through his nostril and across his cheek and then disappeared into the tangle of his long gray hair. The creature settled back into the chair op

posite me and said, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. Well, taxes anyway . . .”

“Sorry,” I said, quick to apologize. I hadn’t been expect

ing to engage it in a dialog and figured it was better to act as civilly as I could. The creature was congenial enough now, but who knew what might set off its evil ways again?

THE FOURTEENTH VIRTUE

“Shall we begin?”

The creature nodded.

“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten,” the rotting corpse said, quoting himself again,

“either write something worth reading or do things worth the writing.”

He held up both of his bony hands. Neither of them pos

sessed a complete set of fingers. A chill ran down my back and a dark smile crept across his face.

“Since I seem incapable of performing the simple task of setting quill to page, I suppose you will have to do. Before destroying me, of course.”

He seemed to be taking this rather well, all things con

sidered.

“Naturally,” I said. I lowered the tip of my quill to the blank page before me and started writing.

“The secret history of our United States is dark material indeed,” the extremely elder statesman said. “And of the greater body of historians and their books, not a one it tells the true tale.”

Even given his advanced necrotic state, Benjamin Franklin cut an imposing figure.

I ran my quill through a few of the historical pages I had brought with me.

“We’ve done extensive research,” I said, “on mankind’s transgressions into the arcane arts, and one common thread has run through the last century: They all seem to promi

nently feature one of our most senior and well respected statesmen. You, sir.”

Anton Strout

I sensed a smile on his decaying face, but it was difficult to tell for sure.

The creature coughed dryly, a rattling rising from its chest. I guessed this passed for laughter, but the sound of it alone made me want to flee in terror. Maybe another agent of the Fraternal Order of Goodness would have fared better, one who hadn’t dedicated his life to the pursuit of this one man, one who wouldn’t be taking this task on with so much gravitas mixed with terror. Hoping to settle myself, I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“You try living over a century and see what polymathic accolades you garner,” Franklin said. I stopped writing and looked up.

“Polymathic?” I said, cocking my head slightly. “Forgive me . . . I’m not familiar with the term.”

“From the Greek, I believe,” he started, and his voice changed. There was an inherent power when he spoke, and I could hear why people had listened intently to his every word when he was alive. “Meaning ‘having learned much.’

I have an encyclopedic knowledge of a variety of subjects. Diplomat, printer, author, activist, scientist, inventor . . .”

He tapped his decaying index finger at the glasses he was wearing.

“And the study of something a little more . . . sinister?”

I added.

He nodded and leaned back in his chair. He crossed his legs and rested his hands daintily on his knees. It was such a dainty gesture from so grotesque a creature that I almost laughed.

“There’s a danger in being a polymath,” he said. “Adams and Jefferson were quoting me when they said an invest

ment in knowledge always pays the best interest. It is true that a little knowledge can go a long way, but an encyclo

pedic amount? Why, it practically begs questions about the natural philosophy of the world!”

“Meaning the dark arts?” I said, trying to be clear for the archives.

THE FOURTEENTH VIRTUE

“For heaven’s sake, just say it!” he shouted, slapping his hand down on the table. Bits of it flaked off the bone and onto my notebook. “Necromancy.”

Despite my hatred of the actual practice itself, I couldn’t contain my excitement.

“I knew it!” I said. “All the other agents in the Order couldn’t get beyond your early religious ties . . .”

“But not you,” Franklin mused. He cocked his head as if studying me. His neck clicked and cracked like dried leather. “I wonder why?”

“Deism,” I said proudly. “Everyone said that your proclamation of being ‘a thorough Deist’ was a path that ul

timately led to God, but it just didn’t ring true to me.”

There was almost humor on his face now, if I could read that type of thing off a half-rotted corpse.

“But,” he interrupted, “if you follow Deism through to its logical, reasonable and very human conclusion, Deism does lead to God!”

I shook my head, thrilled to be engaged in such a debate with one of our nation’s greatest thinkers. It was almost a shame I would have to destroy him.

I grabbed several pieces of parchment and looked back through his history, searching for an answer.

“You yourself said that ‘God shouldn’t be found in the supernatural or miracles, but through human reason and things we observe in the natural world,’” I said. “I don’t think you believe that though. You’ve read too much, stud

ied too much of the world to believe that. I propose you don’t actually reject the supernatural but rather embrace it.”

Franklin’s silence was all I needed to hear to know I was right. I dared to stare into his lifeless eyes despite my fear. He was truly hideous in this unnatural state.

“But why this?” I asked. “Why would you do this to yourself?”

The creature sighed again and a waft of rot filled the room.

“If you are as learned about me as you seem to be, young 10

Anton Strout

man, I’m sure you are aware of my love for puzzles and codes. Again, another polymath trait. If you understood that love, you could have easily found the reason for my trans

formation yourself. It’s hidden within my Fourteen Virtues.”

“Thirteen,” I corrected. I might not have been the fore

most Franklin scholar, but I had learned enough about the man during my lifetime to know he had written his famous Thirteen Virtues—a set of personal ideologies he lived by—

when he was only in his twenties.

Franklin raised what remained of one of his eyebrows.

“Does it surprise you that I’m still a virtuous man despite the black art that keeps me in such a state? There never was a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.”

He produced a well worn fold of paper from his coat pocket, smoothed it out, and pushed it across the desk. I re

fused to touch so old a document from so fouled a creature, instead using the tip of my quill to hold it open while I read. The Thirteen Virtues—B. Franklin.

1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to ele

vation.

2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.

5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to oth

ers or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.

6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. 7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly. 8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

THE FOURTEENTH VIRTUE

9. MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting in

juries so much as you think they deserve. 10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.

11. TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at acci

dents common or unavoidable.

12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or off

spring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation. 13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

“Are you familiar with the term decacoding?” he said, once I stopped reading.

“It’s a coding system based on a system of tens, isn’t it?”

“Correct,” he said, pleased. His mouth split into a grin, bile and blackness showing instead of teeth. He tapped at the folded piece of paper. “Most of the Virtues listed there are the thoughts of a young idealist. What did I know back then? But once I made my choice to engage in the darkest of necromancy, I really only lived by The Fourteenth Virtue. There are only thirteen on the page but my coding points to the only one of those I truly held any real stock in.”

I scanned the page, applying his decacoding. By starting with a base of ten and beginning to count from the top of his list again, it meant that the fourteenth virtue was actu

ally the fourth one he had listed.

“Resolution?” I asked.

“Resolution,” he repeated. “The Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. Notice I don’t bring up whether good or evil fits into that equation.”

“A resolution about what?”

“The answer lies before you,” he said. He pointed at the piles of paper. “Right there in your histories, the greatest and most defining moment in all modern history. The American Revolution. Necromancy saved that marvelous homeland of ours. After all, I was, and still am, first and foremost a patriot and a statesman.”

Anton Strout

I sat there in shock as I let it sink in. “You did this to yourself . . . for our country? But you were one of our greatest leaders! You are the elder statesman.”

“Many foxes grow gray, but few grow good,” he said, running one hand along the rotting fringe of his matted hair.

“With age, idealism melts away in the face of practicality.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m still not fol

lowing.”

It was hard to feel remotely smart sitting in the same room talking to Benjamin Franklin, no matter how evil a rotting creature he might be.

“Remember your history! The Founding Fathers and I were attempting to declare independence for the thirteen colonies from the British. Despite what other historians have written, the British would have easily overrun this country, even given their distance from England. Action had to be taken to ‘secure the Blessings of Liberty to our

selves and our Posterity.’”

“But . . .” I stammered, “but giving yourself over to the power of necromancy to combat the British forces? It’s folly!”

“All wars are follies,” he said, raising a finger and wag

gling it at me. “Very expensive and very mischievous ones. I knew what price I paid when I made my bargain.”

“Did they know, too?” I asked, writing as fast as I could. I jabbed the quill back into the well whenever the ink started to run dry.

“They?”

I stopped and looked up. I struggled in my mind to search for their names.

“Adams, Jefferson, the Continental Congress . . .”

The creature shook its head.

“I thought it was best they never know,” Franklin said.

“He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees. Naturally reports came in from the front concerning the American dead. Generals kept sending in reports of the dead rising from the battlefield and soldier

THE FOURTEENTH VIRTUE

ing on against the British. Most of Congress ignored such reports, dismissing them as fantastical, but I think Jefferson had his suspicions. Always the clever one, Tommy was.”

What I was hearing seemed unbelievable. “And you were okay with this . . . ‘bargain’ you made?”

The corpse shrugged. It seemed a gesture well beneath a man of his stature, even a decaying one.

“All human situations have their inconveniences, but for the immortal, energy and persistence conquer all things. Think what you will of it, but the power over life and death, limited as I was with it, saved this country. Legions of the living dead founded our freedom. Old boys have their play

things, you know, as well as young ones. The difference is only in the price.”

He looked over at me with those dead eyes once again. I couldn’t help but turn away.

“Don’t judge my actions,” he tsk-tsked with a sad final

ity to his words. “Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain, and most fools do.”

Franklin rose from the table while I finished writing my account, but I no longer felt the need to keep an eye on him. I was surprised to find that my fear had dissipated a bit with hearing his story. I stood and eyed my torch sitting in the sconce on the wall.

“You seem rather willing to let me destroy you,” I said.

“You’re turning yourself over for disposal? Just like that?”

Franklin nodded as if he were a parent being patient with a small child. “If you prefer,” he said with a grim snarl, “I could swarm you with the contents of these catacombs in

stead.” He held his arms out and the sound of stone coffin lids sliding free rose up behind me. The scratching and clawing of bony fingers fighting to get out filled the room. I didn’t dare look back.

I realized how powerless and insignificant I was in this creature’s presence and quickly shook my head no in re

sponse to his offer. Franklin dropped his arms, the coffin 14

Anton Strout

lids slid shut, and once again the room fell silent. A lifetime of studying him hadn’t prepared me for this. Several life

times wouldn’t have been enough.

“I’ve hunted for you my whole life. Why are you willing to die now?” I asked, feeling my own reluctance for the task at hand setting in. “Why ever?”

“Other than the fact that you have me cornered and at a disadvantage?” he asked.

His empty eye sockets looked down at my hands. I was still clutching the quill in one and the moleskin notebook in the other. I put the quill back in the well and closed the notebook before tucking it into my bag.

“This is strictly for my own curiosity, not for our archives,” I said. In the face of standing toe-to-toe with this necromancer, I opted for politeness. It seemed the reason

able thing to do. I liked to think that my brothers back at the Order would have been proud. “If you’ll forgive me asking, sir, why do you want any of this on record at all?”

The creature made no move to stop me as I headed for the torch on the wall.

“I first met Mary Shelley in the summer of 1816,” the walking corpse said, letting out another dry earthy sigh. The humanity in it almost broke my heart.

“The writer?” I said, pausing with my hands on the shaft of the torch.

Franklin nodded. “Of course, she was only nineteen then and still Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin when I met her. She and Percy hadn’t married yet, but that was when she found me.”

“Found you?”

Franklin cackled for once like the evil undead creature that he was.

“My dear boy, it wasn’t like she was looking for me specifically. She simply chanced upon me here in Switzerland one wintry summer a few years back.”

He took on the tone my grandfather used when he was recounting his service at Lexington and Concord. As I THE FOURTEENTH VIRTUE

pulled the torch off the wall, it settled heavy in my hands. Setting Franklin aflame was going to be harder than I imag

ined.

“Once I had ‘died’ for the sake of my country,” he said,

“I fled the now United States of America in the hope of ob

scurity off in foreign lands. I found a certain modicum of peace high up here in the Swiss Alps. All of Lake Geneva had fallen under an imposed volcanic winter two summers ago thanks to the untimely eruption of Mount Tambora the previous year.” He raised his own hands and examined them for a moment, as if he were seeing his skeletal appendages for the first time. “By that point of my transformation, the cold didn’t bother me much. Few things did at that point, and if it hadn’t been for that damned book she insisted on publishing, you might never have found me.”

“Her damned book?” I repeated moving back around the table toward him. “You mean Frankenstein? ”

“You’ve read it?” he asked with genuine interest in his voice. “It’s only been stateside a few months, by my reck

oning.”

“Yes,” I said, pausing midstep, “but what does it have to do with you?”

“She was fascinated when she discovered me here, and she had of course heard of my doings in America during my natural life. This is the infamous Villa Diodati, after all. When Polidori, Byron, and Shelley suggested their fateful writing contest in the rooms above these very catacombs, Mary simply couldn’t resist recounting my life in her own dark fashion. Think about her book for a moment. The evil doctor attempting to raise the dead? His experiments with electricity to do so? Sound familiar?”

“Surely not . . .” I started, but he cut me off.

“She even went so far as to name her main character Franklinstein, but I objected to so direct a correlation and drew the line.”

“I never would have made such a connection,” I said,

“but I see it now . . .”

Anton Strout

“You wanted to know why I insisted on you writing down my account? Glass, china and reputations are easily cracked, but never well mended,” he said. “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it. History will judge me, and I’d rather not have the truth behind Frankenstein be the lone record of my dark life. If people should ever make that connection, see the darkness behind this abomination I’ve become, I want this secret history to be known. Let the world know that what I did, I did for my country with Resolution . . . that I per

formed without fail what I resolved for the good of America. A man’s net worth to the world is usually deter

mined by what remains after his bad habits are subtracted from his good ones. Let us hope that is true.”

He looked almost at peace as he stood there; then he lowered his head and fell silent. I readied the torch in my hands, knowing my duty but surprised to find myself un

willing to follow through. The heat of the burning pitch waved over me while I hesitated.

“I can’t do it,” I said finally and dropped the torch to the floor. It flickered while it fought to keep itself alight.

“You may delay,” Franklin said kindly, reaching over and taking my hands in his. I didn’t flinch. “Time will not. I should have no objection to going over the same life from its beginning to the end, requesting only the advantage au

thors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first. Wish not so much to live long as to live well.”

With that, Franklin stepped farther away from the table full of his papers. With a wave of his hand, my torch blared to life and leaped from the floor toward him. The crackle of dark magic filled the tiny chamber, and before I could react, the creature burst into purifying flames of light, light that nearly blinded me. I raised my arm to shield my eyes as the screams of hell filled the room. I clamped my hands down over my ears until the permeable evil slipped slowly away, followed by silence.

Flames licked at the beams above me. I quickly gathered THE FOURTEENTH VIRTUE

what I could of Franklin’s papers and stuffed them into my bag. I stayed to watch the last of the flames consume what remained of one of the most revered men in history before racing back out through the villa. I had no idea what I would do upon my return to America, my return to the Fraternal Order. Suddenly, forty-six didn’t seem a bad age for retirement.

Found in the archival records of The Gauntlet at the Department of Extraordinary Affairs in New York City.

WAITING FOR EVOLUTION

Jody Lynn Nye

“Hurry up and move, Blondie!” Commander Natura Colvatanisan said, poking me in the back.

I stopped gawking and stepped out of the “Ajaqui Stargate” onto the skirts of the circle of burned grass in the meadow where the shuttle had landed, following its crash

ing descent through the atmosphere. I couldn’t help myself. I had never seen a sky so blue, or white clouds that towered over her like benevolent gods. I took a deep breath. Congratulations, Specialist Denise Mulhare, I told myself. You are the first person ever to step onto this new Earth. The mission commander, next out of the hatch, wrinkled her sharp little nose and twisted her thin, coffee-dark lips.

“What’s that awful smell?” she asked.

“Ozone,” I said, taking another, appreciative breath. It smelled so different from the Earth we had just left.

“Unusual purity of atmosphere,” said the ajaqui mission specialist, Koltdaral. The tripedal aliens immediately grouped themselves into a small cluster clear of the shuttle shell and erected their protective environmental bubble. It flattened the waist-high wild grasses and flowers. Hastily, they sealed themselves inside. Kotdaral’s voice gained an echo as he continued from within the clear bubble. WAITING FOR EVOLUTION

“Particulate matter content of air, less than point two per

cent.”

“Smells like something is rotting,” Colvatanisan said.

“You don’t spend much time in greenhouses,” I re

minded her with a grin.

“Botany is your job,” Colvatanisan said, shaking her head. “The only time I want to see vegetation is on my plate. I like concrete and plastic walls. Much cleaner.”

“Where are we?” Koltdaral asked. “In correlation with your Earth, that is.”

“This,” Colvatanisan said, gesturing around her with her electronic clipboard, “is Paris, France. Or it ought to be. This region corresponds to Euro continent. This plain is on the north edge of the river valley of the Seine. On our Earth it’s completely covered by a housing complex populated by thirty-three million people. There’s nothing like this here, or hasn’t been for, I don’t know, thousands of years.”

“Why here? You can see that there is no notable con

struction.”

“Our scans show this is the largest population center ex

isting on the planet at the moment,” Lieutenant Haroun Saif replied. “One and a half million in this region. There are only about ten million humans here.”

“Why so few? You are packed as tightly as paving stones on your Earth.”

The commander pursed her lips distastefully. She didn’t like the ajaqui attitude against human reproduction. “There have been many plagues in human history. Perhaps this strain of Earth-dwellers was not as resistant, and medicine did not develop here as there. Until antibiotics and hygiene techniques were discovered, a human being could die of a paper cut or the common cold. Child mortality was incred

ibly high. Could be any number of reasons. We won’t know until we interface with the local inhabitants.”

Dr. Oliver Mason, the rangy, slope-shouldered environ

mental biologist who stood a head taller than the rest of us, scanned the meadow and the towering forest that 20

Jody Lynn Nye

surrounded it with his handheld doo-watz. “I am picking up a considerable number of human life signs. Some of them are moving this way.”

“Well, they couldn’t have missed us arriving,” Col

vatanisan said, hoisting a stunner out of the underarm hol

ster that was strapped to her body. “Let’s wait for them to come to us. Lieutenant Saif, let’s hope that there was some parallel development of languages.” The narrow-faced spe

cialist from Afri continent held tightly to his instrumentladen clipboard, as if ready to squeeze recognizable words out of its miniature speakers.

“Hold it! Spray first,” ordered Dr. Tamara Brecko, the bi

ologist who, like me, hailed from Noam continent. “We don’t want you getting anything communicable, or giving it, either. Mission Control will be pissed off if you give smallpox to the natives. Arms up! Legs out!”

I shivered as the ice-cold fog surrounded me and pene

trated through my clothes to the skin. I was too excited about the plant life to care much about the possibility of meeting other humans. The field in which we stood was filled with spring flowers, wildflowers that existed nowhere on our Earth, a highly industrialized planet, where refer

ences to Mother Nature seemed more and more out of place every day. This marvelous endless garden was much more my ideal of the perfect world. I took endless 3-D images, took myriad snips and specimens. I couldn’t stop myself from putting my nose into clusters of brilliant blossoms. They were everywhere. The others looked lost, but I was in heaven. I couldn’t believe my luck to be here. When the first SideSlip Mission had discovered the en

ergy echoes that suggested parallel dimensions, it had made news all over the galaxy. The theory was that each nexus point led to one and only one alternate dimension, but there were infinite numbers of nexuses. Excited scientists talked of endless energy and resources that could be mined from these stars and planets, raved about studies of joining forces with parallel versions of themselves to increase the brain WAITING FOR EVOLUTION

trust. The naysayers frowned on the possibility, sourly com

menting on how narrowly the present meganations had es

caped from being dominated by tyrants and warlords, and how more dimensions only increased the likelihood of meeting those despots’ descendants. But once the genie of possibility was out of the bottle, it intrigued more people than it frightened. The historians alone couldn’t wait to see what was on the other side of those walls. To me, it was a foregone conclusion that these dimensions, if they could reach them, had to be explored. The theory was that if there were parallel Earths, then if one stepped through to them, one would end up in precisely the same location on each. I reran every single article as it came over the entertainment net, wishing I could see those other Earths. I even thought whether I could stand to face an alternate version of myself. Funding had been as hard to come by as usual, until Ajaqui had stepped forward and offered to pay half of the cost of an unmanned probe, as long as their name would be on each transdimensional vessel. Trans Earth Space Agency had no objection. It ran a worldwide contest to see what its share of the name would be. Ten billion text messages (at one credit per call, used to help fund the mission) later, and the winner was ‘Stargate,’ after the historical video series that ran on one of the streams on EN. The other sentient races with which humanity had contact decided they would wait and see.

As the history books would one day record, the first tries had failed miserably. The earliest shuttles, sent from the top of an unpopulated desert bluff in Morocco, failed to punch through the dimensional walls, fizzling, stalling, or explod

ing on launch. It was the ninth, historic attempt, a piece of video that was repeated over and over again on the after

noon news, that showed the thick, upright disk of the di

mension shuttle disappearing in a corona of fire. Within minutes it reappeared. Scientists in protective suits swarmed it, removing the sample bubbles from its many niches. They were jubilant over the samples of breathable air and plant 22

Jody Lynn Nye

and mineral specimens the shuttle had brought back, but it was the foot-long blue-green lizard that caused the most hysterical joy. Its DNA—yes, DNA—closely matched that of a similar reptile in what remained uncovered by domicile blocks in the Moroccan desert, but the native lizard was half the size and coral in color. Herpetologists insisted that the creature had not been that size or color since the Jurassic period. The plant species, the part that really fascinated me, were plants that had died out years ago, sometimes millions of years. Ferns that I had only seen in fossils were leafy, green reality on the video screen. My palms itched to touch, examine, and smell those plants. I wanted to see in what magical place such things still grew.

I made up the most impressive resume I could, including every academic honor I had ever received or been nomi

nated for, my health file number to prove I was fit for ser

vice, and got every person of influence I knew to send recommendations on my behalf, and sent it all in a message to volunteer for future missions. I got back a message say

ing I was applicant number 21,386,724-Earth and that my data would be kept on file. Not surprisingly, millions wanted to be involved in this incredibly exciting new enter

prise. I was disappointed, naturally, but not surprised. I went back to my job at Mech Hybrid Lab.

To my amazement, though, five months later, I received a second message saying I was one of the thousand from all human habitations selected for training. I had let out a whoop that could be heard from my plant-crammed little single habitation kilometers either way down the TrentonNewark Habitat Complex. I had paid the inevitable noise fine without complaint. I could not be more thrilled that I was one of the ten who made it through to the first manned mission. It was my first opportunity to meet the ajaqui di

mensionauts who would be making the trip with us. I found them interesting, with a wry sense of humor. They liked human beings. They smelled sweet to us, and, strangely, we smelled sweet to them, too. Oddly, to me, they didn’t like WAITING FOR EVOLUTION

earth-type plants. The CO2 that plants give off smelled nox

ious in what passed for nostrils in their sensory array. I couldn’t interest them in my passion for living things, but other than that, I think I made lifelong friends. Sixteen hours before we set foot on Second Earth, we had launched from a platform in space, so as not to harm the environment in case the transference went badly. In fact, we didn’t notice a thing, though the instrument panel had gone wild. I could see now that the outer shell of the shut

tle was badly scorched and ridged. Colvatanisan had taken her time with the telemetry, making careful note of all the readings coming in, looking for life signs, radio waves, anything. I think we were all surprised not to hear any elec

tronic chatter at all. I don’t believe any of us thought there would be no technology at all. Lieutenant Saif and the ajaqui scientists muttered together over their instruments about it while I started exploring the plant life adjacent to the shuttle. Already I saw species of plants that had become extinct on our Earth, some within my own lifetime. I was seeing it all the time, and it tore at my heart. Here were things growing that I had only seen in books. I was thrilled beyond words as I touched things that didn’t exist anymore where I came from.

I was cataloging a giant fern when I felt another pres

ence a few feet from me. Considering that I lived in a coor

dinated neighborhood of three million people, one would think that I would never notice anyone who wasn’t on top of me, but being on a nearly empty planet must have let those nerve endings that were normally curled tight near my skin unfurl and stretch out. I jumped and turned just in time to hear Colvatanisan say, “I think he likes you, Mulhare.”

The man who had startled me looked pretty surprised himself. He was only a couple of inches above my height, with a shock of dark hair and dark eyebrows that stood out a lot farther from his face than my inner symmetry monitor thought was normal. Under those brows was a pair of dark 24

Jody Lynn Nye

brown eyes, lively with curiosity. Designs in red and black adorned the skin of his arms. Whether they were paint or tattoos, I didn’t have the experience to judge. He wore a belted kilt of animal skin and shoes woven from reeds. The kilt, belt, and shoes looked primitive at first, but I noticed that they were neatly sewn and the shoes sealed with resin. They weren’t unlike athletic shoes from my Earth. The belt was downright fancy, and a knife sheath dangled from it over his right hip. A rope was looped up on the left hip. The bones of his face were strong and knobbly, but my symme

try monitor adjudged him undeniably handsome.

“Hello,” I said.

“Ranik,” he replied, smiling broadly.

“Is that your name?” I asked.

“No,” Lieutenant Saif said. “It’s ‘hello’ or ‘greetings.’ He said it to all of us. You weren’t paying attention when he and his friends came out of the bushes.”

“Rikad,” the man said, pointing to himself.

“Denise,” I replied, with a gesture toward myself.

“Ranik, Rikad. Hey, I made a sentence!”

“Don’t try to synthesize, please!” Saif exclaimed, his eyes widening in panic. But Rikad did not seem offended. In fact, he seemed pleased. He glanced up at my hair, then studied it. Self-consciously, I put my hand up, wondering if a bug had landed in it.

“Nah. Burrin,” he said, gently taking my hand down. He glanced back over his shoulder. About a dozen feet away were five more men in kilts. “Shivin bun burrin?”

“Im,” the men agreed.

“Any idea what that means?”

“Not yet,” Saif said, scrolling up and down his screen.

“It could be anything from ‘Isn’t that pretty?’ to ‘Does that look bleached to you?’”

“Thanks a skidload,” I said.

“No offense, Mulhare, but I just don’t have enough to go on yet! It’s a proto-language. It seems to have roots in Indo

WAITING FOR EVOLUTION

European, but not close enough that any of my lexicons match.”

“But why do they look like that?” Colvatanisan asked. She walked up to one of the men. He was short enough she could look him eye to eye. His eyes were dark blue, and what was left of the hair on his head was iron gray. “Ranik.”

“Ranik,” the man replied, in a low, courteous voice.

“Take me to your leader.”

Somehow, Lieutenant Saif got the concept across to our new friends. After a short conference, the men agreed, and beckoned us to follow them down the hill.

“Send back images!” the ajaqui shouted at our backs.

“What are they, Tammy?” I asked, as the men escorted us down a narrow track beaten through the waist-high veg

etation. “What’s with the browridges?”

Our mission biologist had worn a silly smile plastered on her face since the moment Rikad and his friends had turned up. She played her clipboard one-handed like a lyrist going for the all time speed record on “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” and what she saw on her gizmo’s screen made her insanely happy.

“I think they’re Neanderthals,” Brecko said. “In fact, I know that they’re Neanderthals. I work with the fossils, and I’ve done research with some of the top anthropologists in the field—but I am looking at living, breathing examples of one of humanity’s ancestors.”

“But, didn’t they die out, like thousands of years ago?”

“Died out or killed off,” Brecko said. She had persuaded Rikad to let her take a skin scraping from the back of his hand. She put it into a handsized box contraption that hung on her hip. It pinged, and she brought up the readings on the main screen. “Oh, my God, this is amazing. They are Neanderthals.”

“How is that possible?” Colvatanisan asked.

“Come on, humanity could have gone down a number of 26

Jody Lynn Nye

evolutionary paths,” Brecko said. “These people have 99.45

percent the same DNA as we do.”

“About the same as chimpanzees,” Mason said, dryly. Brecko gave him a disgusted look. “Well, it’s true.”

Brecko shook her head and went on. “In this area of the planet, at least, Homo sapiens sapiens never developed, or maybe it developed for a while and then killed itself off. Our direct ancestors, the Cro-Magnons, are believed to have been a more aggressive strain. Instead, the gentle ones survived and developed. On Second Earth, the meek really have inherited the earth.”

“That’s too weird,” said Colvatanisan.

“No, it could have happened to us. It almost did. The Cro-Magnon population fell to a dangerously slender level at one point in prehistory. It could have died out, but it fought its way back and overwhelmed the smaller Neanderthal population. Probably killed all the men and in

termarried with the women, the ones who were close enough in genetic profile to reproduce. We’re seeing what they would have looked like if it had happened.”

“It’s an anthropologist’s dream,” Saif said.

“Don’t get off message,” Colvantanisan said. “We’re here to check out what’s here that will get more investors interested in the project, not to play missionary to the na

tives. The ajaqui don’t want us to spend any more time here than we have to.”

I glanced ahead at our guides, but they didn’t react. They really couldn’t understand what we were saying. Rikad must have felt my eyes on him, because he turned to look back at me. I gave him a sheepish smile.

“Eaor,” the eldest man announced proudly, as we came over a bluff.

“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s second cousin,” Mason said. The river valley below us had clearly been inhabited as long as our Seine district had, but there the resemblance ended. As far as I could see, the land had been cultivated—

oh, not in the machine-perfect rows and troughs of modern WAITING FOR EVOLUTION

agriculture in the farm districts I had seen on my school computers, but like the pictures of primitive people from centuries gone by. I found I was itching to examine the crop plants, to see what they grew, and what parasites and weeds grew among them. I had a whole biosphere to examine. Instead of individual houses, I saw only big, round com

munal habitations, each with one large double door facing south, the direction from which we were coming. I could see what was going on inside, because the roofs were open, like a sports arena. But why not? The sun was shining, not a cloud in sight, and the temperature was a balmy 25 de

grees. Children ran around naked, which must have saved their parents hours of washing dirty smocks. All the men we saw were attired similarly to the hunting party, in skin or cloth kilts, as were many of the women. The exception was pregnant women, who wore sleeveless dresses suspended from the shoulders to just above the knees.

“The trapeze dress is back,” Colvatanisan commented.

“I love Paris in the springtime,” Saif murmured. Rikad and his companions ushered us into the first round house. We were shown to the rear of the building. The three people seated on hide cushions must have been the author

ities, with the majestic old woman in the middle the most senior. Like the hunters, their faces and arms were deco

rated with designs in red and black. Dozens of young men and women knelt beside them. I didn’t know whether they were servants or offspring. It didn’t seem to matter; when one of the oldsters barked an order, one or more of the young ones sprang up immediately to obey.

I didn’t get anything out of the conference, but Saif looked like he was in heaven. I did understand that we were introduced one at a time. My name had become ‘Dnees Burrin.’ The two male elders were named Borik and Hadda. The woman was Imada.

A word from Imada sent a boy running outside through a small door. He returned in minutes bearing a load of flower garlands. The old woman beckoned us forward. 28

Jody Lynn Nye

Courtesy enforced by flint-headed spears, we bowed to have her hang a lei around each of our necks. Colvatanisan offered goods from our Earth in exchange: a music box for the lady and heavy silver bracelets for the men. The elders exclaimed happily over the gifts. From the following speeches, I guessed we were given the key to the city. During the hours that followed, Imada examined me and my female colleagues. She shot questions at us that we couldn’t answer, while demanding to see our shoulder pouches, our equipment, and the content of our pockets. She exclaimed over the fine weave of my jumpsuit and held up my UV protective hat so she and the two old men, who were patting down our male counterparts, could share a hearty laugh.

When she had finished looking over our possessions, Imada beckoned us close. I glanced uneasily at Colvat

anisan, who gave me a subtle gesture to cooperate. From a pouch hanging from the wide belt around her middle, she took a figure made of stone. About the length of her hand, it appeared to be made of green marble or agate and was carved into an exaggerated female form with huge breasts and large labia majora but small feet and a small head.

“Willendorf,” Brecko gasped.

The old woman accepted her reaction as showing the ap

propriate awe. She showed it to the rest of us in turn. I wasn’t a religious person, but I nodded deeply, hoping Imada would take that as respect.

Then something about the statue seemed to make sense to me in a way I couldn’t have explained. She was all living things. They were connected to her, and because I loved na

ture, I was connected to her, too. I felt a tingle in my belly. Imada eyed me closely, then nodded, with a tiny smile on her lips. “Burrin,” she said. She shouted at one of the girls, who came running forward with a pot of red goo. Ochre, I surmised. The old woman took a fingerful and daubed it on our foreheads.

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“Not just fashion, but makeup, too,” Colvatanisan said, but keeping a smile on her face. “I hope this is over soon.”

It was. The ochre was the last phase of the welcome cer

emony. With a clap, we were dismissed.

“I guess you didn’t get anything agreed about mineral rights,” Mason said to Saif as we were escorted out.

“No,” the Afric said, his eyes shining. “I think I’m begin

ning to understand sentence structure. It looks as if the sim

ple sentence of subject and predicate developed earlier than the division between the two main offshoots. It might be hardwired into the human brain. I don’t know! It will take years of study before I could negotiate with them on a so

phisticated level.”

“We won’t have to negotiate with them,” Colvatanisan said, smugly. “How could they stop us anyway? We’ve got mining ships. Fifty of those round houses could fit in the hold of just one of them. Keep your eyes open, people. We are looking for whatever we can find that will get us funded for Third Earth and Fourth Earth. This is just the first stop on the way. We have to make the backers see what’s worth their investment. Got it?”

I hated having reality intrude, but Colvatanisan was right. My job was to gather plants and seeds that would be of commercial interest on First Earth. In less than three weeks, we would leave this planet and head for Second Ajaqui, to see what parallel history looked like there. It was possible no one would ever come back here, but by the greedy look in the mission commander’s eye, she was thinking of untapped resources that the Neanderthal had not yet found a use for.

The primal-Gauls, as Saif liked to call them, accepted us among them with no trouble. I couldn’t imagine them get

ting the same freedom to move around in my neighborhood, or anywhere I could think of. The children learned what time we usually got up in the morning and were waiting outside the shuttle for us. They thought the ajaqui were 30

Jody Lynn Nye

amazingly funny and laughed heartily at everything they did. They loved to help. After a little natural paranoia over letting them near my equipment, I learned that they obeyed orders about what they could touch and what they couldn’t. They were happy to carry my specimen cases and clipboard for me, even to help me gather samples. In fact, they were so eager that I had to stop them bringing me sacks or buck

ets of any plant in which I showed an interest. They brought us fruit and root vegetables to supplement our prepackaged meals. The others were nervous about the fact most of the produce was very small in size. My analysis of them proved all of the gifts harmless. They tasted good, too. Not only the children liked to watch us. I often looked up to find Rikad close by. His solemn brown eyes followed my hands as they clipped a cutting from one plant, or coaxed a seed pod from another. I didn’t quite forget he was there, but I got comfortable with having him nearby. Often, when I would leave my tools at a spot to bring a full specimen box back to the ship, I would return to find a small bouquet of flowers tied with a stem or a delicacy, like the dried fruit pastes mixed with honey that was this region’s version of candy. He seemed happy whenever I accepted his gifts. On the first really hot day, he disappeared from his watching spot and returned with a wooden cup, which he handed to me. It was beautifully carved with the images of fish and river plants. I smelled the contents.

“Baba,” he said, which Saif thought was both “drink”

and “water.”

I held it for a moment. I was thirsty, but I wondered if I dared risk the local water. We were supposed to drink only brewed beverages or the water purified by the ship. He no

ticed the hesitation and looked hurt. I decided to risk it. The water tasted sweeter than anything I could have named, sweeter than nectar or honey. Nothing like this ex

isted in Trenton-Newark. Even the rainwater there was polluted. Drinking water in my building was filtered a thou

WAITING FOR EVOLUTION

sand times until it tasted as dry and metallic as the dust it failed to cut. I could have drunk gallons of this water.

“Thank you,” I said, sincerely, handing the cup back to him.

“Thank you,” he repeated, closing his hands around mine. “Orraow.” Saif had said that word was close to our phrase, “it was a pleasure.”

I blushed. I didn’t quite know why.

The others noticed that he hung around me more than he did near the others.

“You’ve got a pet,” Colvatanisan teased me.

At first, I thought of him as just that. He wasn’t a sophis

ticated man, not as I saw sophistication. What did he know of computers or literature?

At night, we sat around the lighted camp table and dis

cussed our findings of the day. The ajaqui mineral special

ist, Quiron, had gone to some of the locations Mission Control had pinpointed as historically containing mineral wealth, such as gold, diamonds and other precious stones, transuranics, and so on.

“So the diamond country in south Afri is still un

touched,” Colvatanisan said, her eyes gleaming.

“The people there seem little interested in the stones,”

Quiron confirmed. “They are similar to these people, some

what darker of skin. No other differences that we could de

tect. They, too build in a circle, where they build. They care for their children. They mourn their dead. They adorn them

selves with red ochre and beads. They enjoy flowers and other, less smelly, things of beauty. They defend but except for hunting do not aggress. They were curious about us, and they approached us with caution but without fear. So differ

ent from you.”

“They are us,” Brecko said. “This strain disappeared into ours millennia ago.”

“I see,” Quiron said. “Therefore you could breed with them?”

Jody Lynn Nye

All seven of us humans glanced at one another uncom

fortably.

“Ew,” said Mason.

Quiron looked embarrassed. “I apologize for an indeli

cate question.”

“The answer is very probably yes,” Brecko said. “The genetic drift doesn’t seem to have gone too far astray to make offspring possible.”

“Certainly the pheremones must be there, or Big Boy there wouldn’t be courting Mulhare,” Mason said, with a smirk.

“He’s not courting me,” I growled and threw a grape at him.

“It’s the hair,” Saif said. “Blondes are rare at any point in history. They were often considered sacred. Certainly Imada was more interested in you than the other women.”

“If we may get back to the subject?” Quiron asked.

“These are not, then, mentally arrested?”

“Not at all,” Brecko said. “In fact, they are much more intelligent than we anticipated Neanderthals would be. Homo sapiens as we know it never developed here. Civilization as we know it never arose because that vio

lently ambitious streak did not hold sway.”

“Instead, they have come to the level of evolution of an advanced animal,” Mason said.

Brecko shook her head. “No, they’re more intelligent than that. They still have human intelligence. They founded symbolic language, though not symbolic writing as we know it. Memory, not externally shared media, is the means of passing on info. Theirs is a more cooperative, less com

petitive culture. They are not civilized as we know it, but tribal. This is an extended family group. Hadda and the oth

ers are the great-grandparents. They have domesticated cats, dogs, goats, cows—small compared with our own an

imals—but tamed them nevertheless.”

“Their farming methods are primitive,” I added. “They WAITING FOR EVOLUTION

probably have starvation years every so often, after a drought or a locust plague.”

“In the midst of all this?” Koltdaral asked, indicating the plant life that surrounded us.

“You can’t eat all this, ” I said scornfully. “Their species of most fruit are still in their original form. Avocados would be the size of a large pea. Almost everything humans eat is a hybrid cross from pairings of the biggest and the best. What I could show them about crossbreeding.” I shook my head and whistled between my teeth.

“But you can’t,” Colvatanisan said flatly.

I found the local humans absolutely fascinating and the pace of the culture restful. I had become overwhelmed by the way that things had gone on my Earth. There were too many laws. People were too negative. This much greenery existed nowhere except in private reserves and the endless machine-cultivated farms that fed the vast population. Life was so simple here, though far more dangerous, but even death seemed to have more dignity than it did in my world. We attended the burial of a six-year-old boy who had fallen over a cliff while chasing rabbits. I wept with the oth

ers as his parents threw flowers onto the still little body, which had been painted with signs telling their goddess he was a good and brave boy, then wrapped in clean cloth. Once the grave was filled in, Hadda chanted and waved a rattle over it while the parents wailed and moaned for their loss. The rest of the extended family paced in a clock

wise circle to the rhythm of the chant. I found myself falling into that rhythm, swaying from side to side. I felt a connection to the infinite there, as if I were standing be

tween life and death, between one way of being and an

other. I caught Imada’s eye upon me. She gave me a summing gaze, with a small smile on her face, and held up the statue that Brecko called the Willendorf goddess. At the end of the ceremony, when Hadda passed around a large bowl of beer for everyone to share, Imada came over to me and ordered me to kneel. With a glance at Colvatanisan for 34

Jody Lynn Nye

permission, I obeyed. Imada slipped a necklace over my head. Hanging from it was an image of the goddess. I touched it, and a tingle went down my fingers and shot through the rest of my body. I gasped. Imada patted me on the head and signed for me to go.

“Burrin na huish,” she said.

“Here,” Rikad said. He held out a slip of greenery to me at the campsite. It was willow-herb, the ancient headache remedy. I examined the cut end, which he had wrapped in wet moss. It was perfectly done, as if I had taken it myself.

“Thank you,” I said, putting it into my case. “You didn’t use a metal blade, did you? I mean, I don’t mean to be un

grateful, but it tends to make the cuttings turn brown.”

His grasp of Standard was still limited, but he under

stood fluent body language. He took the knife from his sheath and handed it to me with the blade pointing toward himself. I touched the edge with the edge of my fingernail. The blade was flint, and as sharp as my high-tech ceramic blade. The hilt was hammered metal, copper with a thread of silver running through it. An ornate pattern was ham

mered into the handle. It looked like Egyptian jewelry. I eyed him. “We have got to show you how to make steel, honey. What you guys could do with advanced metals and materials!” He didn’t understand what I said, but he smiled at me warmly. I smiled back, feeling that I was just on the edge of something, something special.

“No!” Colvatanisan exclaimed, bearing down on me an

grily. “You are not going to teach these people to smelt metal. We aren’t going to change anything here. That’s not our job. We only have a few days left. We look, we observe, and we get out.”

“The Prime Directive,” Saif said, without looking up from his clipboard. “Fact follows fiction.”

“Tell your boyfriend to get lost,” the commander said, taking the specimen out of my hand and throwing it on the ground. “We’ve got business to discuss.”

WAITING FOR EVOLUTION

•

“Is there anything left for us to vet on this planet?”

Colvatanisan asked at the nightly confab. “We are in agree

ment that any resource that existed at any time in history on First Earth almost certainly exists here, untouched and un

tapped. All the leads we have followed have worked out.”

“I think we are finished,” Mason said. “Nothing more to do than finish cataloging and move on.”

“Second Ajaqui still awaits us,” said Koltdaral. “Soon. I will not allow any additional days here. Sooner is better. Then we must return to First Milky Way to report.”

I barely listened to the conversation. My work here was done. The next planned mission, which I would not be on, would punch through more dimensional walls, find yet an

other Earth. It could be years before anyone came back here.

I felt the charm at the end of my necklace, let the tingle run through my body. I could not bear to leave Second Earth. The others started to talk about what they had cata

loged, and what still lay unseen in the world. They raved about mineral wealth beyond measure, available for all tak

ers, because the native population made little use of it. I wished I could do something.

“. . . We could come back here, even with the smallest possible cargo vessel, and live like kings on what we brought back. That’d make them open the investment again. They could come back here with empty dreadnoughts and strip the place out!”

“If we could negotiate a percentage,” Colvatanisan said.

“Think of it—modern mining ships could tear back the skin of an entire region, rip out the ores, and be back in no time.”

“What about the life already here?” I asked.

Colvatanisan looked at me blankly. “Oh, yeah, well, you can identify the desirable species. Collectors, scientists, herbalists—they’ll all pay a pretty penny for these plants. Now, if we start a greenhouse operation . . .”

I stood up abruptly and moved away from the others. 36

Jody Lynn Nye

The moon, just like our moon, was full overhead. I thrashed my way into the hazel copse at the end of our clearing and sat on the mossy ground underneath the shoots. The light on the ground at my feet was tiger-striped. It was all too beau

tiful, and I was going to have to leave it. I had to go back to the horrible gray box in which I lived.

I heard a noise and started up in alarm. We had a sonic repulsor that kept most of the wild animals out of camp, but what if I was out of its range?

“Oh, it’s you,” I said, relaxing, as I recognized Rikad’s silhouette. He sat down beside me.

“Lagrem?” he asked. Tears, Saif had said. I dashed my hand at my cheek. It came away wet.

Rikad leaned over and kissed me gently on the side of the neck. Like a lapdog, I thought furiously. That’s the way the people of my Earth would treat him and his, like dumb animals, who would have no rights and be treated like slaves or just ignored. Like I was being ignored. How could I be so miserable in paradise? Then his palm touched my cheek, turned my face, and his lips touched mine as gently as a butterfly settling on a petal. I couldn’t stop myself. I kissed him back. He let out a surprised but pleased noise. His other hand played with mine. I had never thought of the palm as a sensual object before, but his fingers, which I had thought of as rough, teased and danced on my skin until I felt my cheeks flush and my skin break out in goosebumps. What a departure from my last date, who thought it was se

ductive to stick his tongue down my throat and his hand down my pants all while pinning me to my door, in front of the neighbors. This, I had to admit, was seduction, real se

duction. I liked it. Those melting brown eyes drew me in. I had to have another of those tender kisses. He put his arm around me. With a glance at the rest of the party, who hadn’t even noticed I was gone, we slipped away into the undergrowth.

•

WAITING FOR EVOLUTION

“I have a idea for an experiment,” I said, breaking into the conversation over mineral rights and discussions of bot

tled spring water the next morning. “This is the first of an infinity of Earths that we are going to find, right?”

“We think so.” Colvatanisan eyed me suspiciously. “Why?”

I leaned over toward her. “More of them are likely to be parallel to our civilization, or that is what we thought, right? Well, we have a resource here greater than anything else you have named so far.”

“What?”

“Homo sapiens,” I said. “These people are our Neanderthal ancestors, all grown up. What would happen if we now introduced Homo sapiens sapiens as it evolved on our Earth? How long would it take before what you call a primitive way of life burst into civilization? They have all the tools. All they need is the genes, and I will provide that.”

“You? How? Oh, your pet there?”

“Yes, my pet there,” I said, though it smarted to let her refer to him that way. “Doesn’t he look like he could give me a dozen children? I am young enough, and I am willing to give it the benefit of my time and expertise. I am a trained scientist. This kind of research would be more than all of the other resources that you are bringing home. We can give First Earth a priceless look at its own evolution.”

“You can’t stay here! What will Mission Control say?”

I closed my hand over the amulet. It made me tingle with strength I didn’t know I had. Goddess, do your stuff, I thought. “That I had an unparalleled opportunity to run a study that will teach us more than we ever knew about our own development. You have to leave me. We will never have a chance like this again. More partners will mean more dilution of authority. Let me do it. It’s the chance of a life

time. What do you say?”

I felt the tingle flow through me and out my fingertips. It began to fill the air around me like a cocoon.

“Interesting,” said Koltdaral. “To create and run your 38

Jody Lynn Nye

own experiment in functional evolution through breeding. Daring.”

“But you don’t know anything about human biology,”

Brecko said.

I felt the cocoon grow larger. It enveloped Brecko and Koltdaral.

“I am a biologist. I only specialize in plants. What else do I need? I have all the moving parts,” I said, ignoring the grins from the others and the heat of my own cheeks. “I have advanced degrees in botany and floraculture. I can read book files. Perhaps I don’t have the perfect qualifica

tions to run a top flight anthrobiological project, but where else are you going to find someone who would volunteer to run this? It has to be multigenerational.”

Brecko started to look interested. “You’ll need a team.”

“No,” I said, and the power changed subtly, becoming more persuasive. “Just me. I want to start a thousand-year study. My DNA is on file. In ten centuries, scientists can come back here and study my notes and those of my de

scendants, and you can see where my mitochondria ended up and what changes it made. A thousand years.”

“Damn,” Colvatanisan said, giving me a look of respect. The power touched her, too, and she leaned toward me.

“You sure have vision. I like it. What do the rest of you say?

I agree, it will get us publicity, maybe enough so no one will say we’re in this just out of greed.”

“As long as it’s mine, and mine alone,” I said.

“If it doesn’t work, our descendants can still come back for natural resources, right? Meantime, what’s the harm?

No one is scheduled to come back here for the foreseeable future.” It must have been the magic coming from the amulet, because the mission commander collected eight nods from around the circle. The others looked envious. They seemed to have forgotten all about profit. They were going to let me do it! I would be able to protect this Eden from the raiders. “Agreed and sealed, Mulhare. It’ll be your name on the project.”

WAITING FOR EVOLUTION

“So you’ll be the mother of the new human race,”

Brecko said. Your genes will reintroduce Homo sapiens sapiens. Lucky you.”

“Not so lucky,” the ajaqui mission commander said, re

garding me pityingly. “You will live a primitive life. No comforts. No entertainment.”

You are so wrong, I thought. I have all the comforts home never had.

“By the way,” I said to Saif, “what does ‘burrin na huish’

mean?”

“Gift from the goddess, I think,” the Afri officer said, checking his clipboard. “Here they associate it with gold.”

“I understand,” I said. I wondered, just for a moment, if the goddess had reached through the dimensional gate to bring me from First Earth. Maybe that was how I had bro

ken out of the pack to be selected for the mission.

“Will we leave soon, then?” the ajaqui asked. “We have picked up signals from Second Ajaqui. If we have no more business here, we do not want to wait any longer.”

“You have to stay for the wedding,” I said.

“Sure,” Colvatanisan said, grinning.

On the edge of the circle, Rikad waited for me. I fol

lowed him home to his village, and Imada.

Reader, I married him. Naked, painted in complicated designs in ochre by the other women, I went through a pu

rification ritual that was long and gentle and thorough. At the end, I didn’t recognize myself when I saw my own image on one of the others’ clipboard recorder. My hair was twisted up inside a crown of flowers like a wedding cake. The goddess amulet thumped between my breasts like a second heartbeat.

Mason laughed at me. “You disappear so easily into the native costume, or lack thereof.”

“I can’t tell them apart at all,” Koltdaral agreed. “But I couldn’t tell you apart before you put on the cosmetic.”

The ceremony was held in a glade filled with what 40

Jody Lynn Nye

would have been priceless flowers on First Earth. Imada and Hadda blessed us both, with a lot of rattling and danc

ing, feasting, music, and beer. I felt very thoroughly mar

ried. I thanked the image of the bosomy goddess sincerely, because without her, I would never have succeeded in con

vincing the rest of my crew to leave this world untouched. I could still hardly believe that it had happened. When it was over, Rikad took me to a clearing that he had fixed as a wedding bower. Because of the fragrant leaves spread all around us, there was a minimum of in

sects. He was intent but patient and gentle, not at all sophis

ticated, but as eager for my pleasure as I was for his. The sun was setting when we woke again and returned to the fire circle, to the hooting and pats of the others. The next day, the Ajaqui Stargate made ready to go, without me. Rikad and I went to see it off. I wore my new kilt and garlands of fragrant single roses and, of course, the amulet. I could still feel the power welling up from it. A portion of it was going with the crew back to First Earth, to block the dimensional nexus point that connected the two. With any luck, no one from there would ever set foot on Second Earth again.

“You’re going to be bored,” Colvatanisan said, clasping my hand.

“I doubt it,” I said. “An ongoing struggle for life isn’t boring.”

“All right, tedious. Good luck. Back in a thousand years, if we can get the funding, to see how things are changing. I won’t see you again—no one will, but we won’t forget you.”

“Thanks, ma’am,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” Colvatanisan said, pleased, as if it was her idea in the first place. “This can’t fail to get us huge new funding. To think we started a major project like this on a shoestring, so to speak. Good-bye, Mother of Humanity.”

Mother of Humanity. I smiled, but the words gave me pain as she and the others stepped into the portal of the cap

WAITING FOR EVOLUTION

sule. Godmother of humanity would be closer to the truth. I had already found ergot fungus and birthroot, two natural abortifacients. A minute dose per day, purified and care

fully measured, would serve me as ongoing birth control. I would love to have given him sons and daughters, but in no way did I intend that the violent strain of humankind that had grown up on my Earth would burst out and subdue the gentle people who occupied Second Earth. Our union would be childless, but I would do my best to make him happy as long as we lived.

He wouldn’t be able to help observing what I did, as much as his people lived by their powers of observation, but I hoped before it happened we would have enough of one another’s language to make him understand why it must be. The Neanderthal deserved to keep this Earth as they had for millennia. If they did progress further than this, it would be on their own terms and in their own time. I would teach them advanced farming techniques to increase crop yield, introduce simple machines, and maybe see what they thought of writing, but my genes would stay out of the pool. In the name of science, that was the best thing I could do for them. In the name of love, they were already doing the best possible thing for me.

THE TROUBLE WITH

THE TRUTH

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Ever since I lost my best friend Roger through a kind of industrial accident, I’ve been wary of ghosts. They find me anyway. Because I am Julia Mangan, twenty-two-year

old ghost magnet and counselor to the dead!

Darn. That always sounds better in my head than when I say it out loud.

Some people pick their jobs, and some have jobs thrust upon them. I so didn’t pick this job. I was just getting rec

onciled to it—largely through Roger’s efforts—when I ac

cidentally sorted him and sent him to the Next Place. He’d hung out with me for eight years, one of my first ghosts, the one who made me kind of crazy but stuck by me during my three-year stint in the mental hospital. He found other ghosts to help me accept my state—ghosts of psycholo

gists, like, and one really woowoo ghost who made a lot of sense once I figured out I should believe her. They all helped me deal with my talent. Roger even brought me the ghost of a social worker who coached me on what to say to my doctor at the nut house to convince him I’d returned to sanity and was ready to leave.

Roger stuck with me as I took an active role in dealing THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH

with other ghosts. I figured out what their unfinished busi

ness was, helped them resolve it, and sent them on. Most of the time all they needed was someone who heard them. Sometimes I had to do more than that, and sometimes what I heard was so awful I needed to work through it myself af

terward.

In all that time, Roger never let me sort him. A sort is when ghosts walk through me and I hear their stories and understand everything about them. I figure out how to give them peace, and they leave. I learn whole lives that way. I have an edge over other people in my psych classes. Not many of them actually experience other people’s psyches. I finally sorted Roger because he had to walk through me to save my life. That was when I found out he loved me. Then he was gone.

So I sort of didn’t want to get to know other ghosts af

terward. I missed Roger a lot, and I was mad at him, too. Mad at the work, mad at the world. My mom was looking at me funny again, and I was afraid she’d recommit me. In self-defense, I decided to go away to college, even though I was already twenty-two (my years in the mental hospital took a bite out of my school career).

College wasn’t like it looked in the movies, though. Ghosts followed me around. They interfered with my schoolwork and the normal course of socialization. Even my dim-bulb dorm roommate Mandy could tell something was off. One of my ghosts was an opera singer who took a neg

ative view of all the boy band pictures Mandy plastered her side of the room with. I got blamed for all the blackened teeth, pirate eyepatches, and mustaches, but I swear I didn’t do it. I didn’t touch her iPod, either. I wouldn’t know how to substitute Mozart for bubblegum pop. Technology has never been my strong suit; some of my ghosts are kind of polter

geistical, and they do bad things to machines. That’s what I tell myself, anyway; I don’t want to believe I have some kind of aura that stops watches and crashes computers, but I 44

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

can’t sit in the front row in my classes or the overhead pro

jectors burn out and laser pointers go astray. I finally sorted the opera singer out of self-defense, and after I did her, I couldn’t refuse the rest of them; I was back in business and resenting it.

One of my ghosts pointed out that if I really didn’t want to do what I was doing, why was I taking all these psychol

ogy courses? This ghost, Avery Garrett, had been with me since student orientation, though he maintained his dis

tance. He didn’t seem to want to be sorted, though he was fascinated by the process.

He was also one of the few people I knew whom I felt comfortable talking to. The other friend I had made since my college career began was a freak like I was. Okay, not exactly like I was. Omri Narula, whom I’d met in Psych 101, was a fifteen-year-old megagenius. He didn’t know how to relate to the other college students either. We signed up for abnormal psychology together for our second term. We were both trying to figure out what was normal and what wasn’t.

“I don’t believe in an afterlife,” Avery said as I was pack

ing to go home for Christmas break.

I had thinned the ghost herd down to Avery and a toddler-sized smear of light. I was hoping the Kid could tell me what she wanted—sorting ghosts was easier if I had some idea of who they were ahead of time, even if they couldn’t articulate what they needed—but mostly she just cried and stayed purple, sad, and smeary.

As for Avery, I wasn’t sure I wanted him to leave. I didn’t push him or try to sort him. I liked him. Lately my two current ghosts and I had been experienc

ing yet another phenomenon, one that baffled me: Small flocks of tiny angels appeared at random moments. They hovered, but they didn’t talk. Avery was puzzled by them, too. He wanted me to explain, but I’d never run into any

thing like them before. I tried to sort one. It disappeared as THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH

soon as I touched it. I left them alone after that. Angel mur

der—it just felt so wrong.

Avery and I were temporarily alone in my dorm room. I wasn’t sure where the Kid had gotten to. No angels hov

ered. Mandy had left already for Christmas break, full of cheer and peppermints and her idea of two weeks in heaven, which involved beaches, sunshine, bikinis, and crowds of buff young strangers.

I sniffed a nightgown I’d dug out of one of my drawers and put it in the laundry bag instead of the suitcase. I was taking both laundry and clean clothes home to Mom’s for Christmas break, hoping to return with everything clean. I didn’t like wearing nightgowns, but with ghosts show

ing up at all hours of the day and night, I felt better covered up. Some ghosts were pretty crude. You die, you often lose your manners and inhibitions, because nobody notices you anymore, so why bother?

“No afterlife for you?” I said to Avery. “You figure if I sort you, you’re gone completely? That’s depressing. Dude, it’s not too late to find something to believe in.”

Avery’s sense of self was fuzzy, so his visual aspect was too; no way could I figure out what he’d looked like in life. In death, he was a kind of shadowy charcoal smear the shape of a six-foot-tall gingerbread man, with whirling lights in the head area. This was what you got with people who didn’t spend time studying themselves in mirrors. I was pretty sure Avery used to be an educator, maybe a scientist. He was familiar with finals, and, though he wouldn’t tell me any of the answers directly (he totally dis

approved of cheating), he gave me hints to help me recall things I already knew. I would have liked having him as a teacher.

He didn’t like having me as a counselor. Though I was a little old to be going to college, I was too young to tell Avery anything he didn’t already know. Sucked for him, be

cause we ghost counselors were few and far between, so he didn’t have much choice. (I guess I could have referred him 46

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

to the only other one of us I’d met, Nick, but I didn’t like Nick, who was a butthead.)

Avery disappeared after our first encounter. He stayed away for a couple days. He was a guy who needed theories and hypotheses, and I guess he had to work out some new ones after I spoke to him. He had been dead a while when we bumped into each other, so I was sure he had developed a whole set of hypotheses by the time I came along and dis

proved them.

The Kid, my other current ghost project, arrived out of nowhere a couple of weeks earlier, curled up on the fuzzy brown blanket at the end of my bed, and started crying. She was about three, so I wasn’t sure what her real name was, or much of anything else about her. She looked like a trans

parent egg full of smeary lights that changed color depend

ing on her mood. Mostly, her mood was dark purple, accompanied by whimpers, sometimes outright sobbing. A few times, she woke me up with hair-raising screams. It was eerie and irritating. Plus, Mandy got mad, because when the Kid screamed, I woke up yelling, and that woke up Mandy, who was fanatically addicted to what she called “beauty sleep.”

The Kid was my first toddler. I didn’t know how to help her. She didn’t have a very big vocabulary, and she didn’t think like a human being yet.

I might have to walk through the Kid before I understood her. I hoped for better. It went easier on both souls involved if we found out enough about each other beforehand to know what to expect before I did the sort.

I wanted to talk to Omri about all this stuff, but I was afraid of driving him away—he was the best living friend I had. Most of the other people in class patted him on the head metaphorically (nobody really touched him, because we were all too conscious of the specter of lawsuits), but I got together with him in the cafeteria a few times, and we talked about some of the weird things we’d found out in class. I had a feeling this was old ground for him, but I THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH

didn’t call him on it, because I appreciated him dumbing things down for me.

From there, we’d progressed to reading outside of homework and trying to ick each other out with weird things we’d turned up. I had just started talking to him about ghosts, and he hadn’t patted my head, metaphori

cally or otherwise, and said, “Now, now” in that patroniz

ing tone so many people used when they found out I believed. He was totally intrigued. I told him anecdotes disguised as tales. I hadn’t told him about my special ghost-ray vision or my mission re: ghost world. I was still testing the waters with him.

Should I call Omri and ask for a consult about the angels or the Kid?

We were both about to leave for the winter holidays, if he hadn’t already left. What if he decided I was crazy be

fore we left? No, I wasn’t ready to lose my best living friend.

Maybe when we got back.

I sat down beside the crying Kid and glanced at Avery.

“Got any theories about what to do for this one?”

“Find out—” he said, and then another infestation of tiny angels popped into the room.

They had been doing it for about a month. Sometimes there were five of them, sometimes nine, sometimes six or eight. Poof! Angels the size of hummingbirds hovered around my head like a cloud of too-large mosquitoes. I knew they were angels because they had feathered wings and they wore little white robes and glowed. Otherwise I would have thought they were pixies. They didn’t do much except make it hard for me to study.

I waved my hand in front of my face, trying to shoo them away, but they were unshooable.

I asked a couple traditional questions, even though I had tried this before without results. “Is there anything I can do for you?” No answer. “How can I help you find comfort and 48

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

rest?” No answer. They never answered. Maybe they didn’t have voices.

Then they started singing, which blew the no-voices the

ory. Four-part harmony, like a radio turned low: human, but distant. “Angels We Have Heard on High,” they sang.

“Well, that’s new,” I said after they’d finished the first verse.

Avery studied them. He held out a hand, lifted it under one of the angels. His hand passed through the angel, and it squeaked.

“Spiritual material,” he said, “but not enough for a full encounter.” He sat down on the end of the bed and laid his shadowy hand on the Kid. She took form as a small child with light brown hair and big brown eyes. She stared up at him, her sobs stopped. “Different from what happens when I touch the Kid. We can feel each other,” he said, and pat

ted the toddler’s shoulder.

“How did you do that?” I asked him. The angels were singing softly enough to function as background music.

“Do what?”

“Before you touched her, she was formless. Now she looks like a kid.”

“Formless?”

“Light, color, no human form.”

“She’s always looked like a child to me,” he said. The Kid touched Avery’s knee, and he, too, took form out of the dark mist I’d seen him as before. He was younger than I had thought, midthirties to early forties, and he looked more like a mountain climber than a professor—

muscular, with wild, gold-touched brown hair. He had a rugged face, sunbrowned, with fans of laugh wrinkles at the outer corners of his eyes. His hands were big, cabled with veins and tendons; gold hair furred the backs of his knuck

les. He wore scuffed hiking boots, slightly frayed jeans, and a soft green corduroy shirt. “Whoa,” I said. “She focused you, too. Weird.”

“Interesting. I had no idea I was out of focus.”

THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH

“I didn’t think you needed to know,” I said. I had been ghost-wrangling for nine years, and I learned new things all the time. Most ghosts I’d met didn’t touch each other, so I hadn’t observed this effect before. Some ghosts didn’t even know when others were around.

I’d heard people talk about astral planes. I’d been devel

oping my own theory, loosely based on Photoshop Layers. Some ghosts were in one layer, some in another; layers could run parallel or intersect, but some never compressed into each other. Most of them had some transparency. I hadn’t studied the Photoshop manual enough to see if my reality matched my metaphor. “Are you an athlete, teacher, or the ever-popular other?”

“Teacher. Anthropology. I spent my summers on digs.”

“You spent your summers digging through the leftovers of other people’s religions and burials, and you don’t be

lieve in an afterlife?” I asked.

He smiled and shrugged. “I don’t. I know many cultures put a lot of thought and energy into their versions of an af

terlife, but that doesn’t mean it’s real.”

“Okay,” I said. “Explain the angels.”

“Need more data,” he said, and then someone knocked on my door.

“Who is it?” I yelled.

“Omri.”

The angels stopped singing the moment he spoke. They still hung in the air near my head, their wings flapping, but now they all faced the door.

“Come in.”

He came in, smiling, thin and gawky in nondescript pants and shirt whose legs and sleeves were too short for the size he’d grown into since coming to college in the fall. I hoped his parents would notice the change and buy him a new wardrobe. His face was broad without being fat, but it looked childish, with a sprinkle of golden freckles across his nose. He would probably always look younger than he was, and he would probably consider that a handicap for the 50

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

next twenty years, I thought. His hair looked as though he hadn’t brushed it since the last time he washed it, which was probably that morning. Dark bangs hung down over his caramel-brown eyes. He lifted a hand to part his hair so he could peer at me. “Thought you might have left already.”

The angels stared at him. They had never reacted to any

one but Avery before. I couldn’t remember if they’d been around when I’d talked to Omri last.

“Still packing,” I said. “I don’t have far to go, and I’d rather not get there.” I had lied to Mom about when the break started so I could stay a day after the others left and when it ended—I told her break ended sooner than it actu

ally did. I was looking forward to coming back to an empty dorm a week before everybody else got back. I was sure I’d need the rest after enduring what Mom considered a proper Christmas.

“Know what you mean,” Omri said.

I smiled at him, then asked, “Did you want anything spe

cific?”

“No.” He pulled out the desk chair and sat in it, stared at me. I glanced toward Avery and the Kid.

“He has a crush on you,” Avery said.

“What?”

“I didn’t say anything,” said Omri.

“He has a crush on you,” Avery repeated.

Omri had a sweet smile, a terrific brain, and an impish sense of humor, and I had never thought of him as a poten

tial partner. I was seven years older than he was, for God’s sake. How could he have a crush on me, and why would Avery know about it?

To get away from unwelcome thoughts, I asked, “Where are you going for break?”

“When I’m not at college, I live with my Aunt Edna and Uncle Frank,” he said. “Only, Mom just got out of jail, and she’ll be home this time.”

The angels multiplied. There were about twelve now, the most I’d ever seen. All of them stared at Omri. THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH

“You don’t want to see her?”

He ducked his head, studied his hands gripping the front edge of the chair’s seat. “Four years ago, I testified in court. She went to jail because I told them—told them—”

Six more angels, then another three. Such a cloud I could barely see him. I waved my hand in front of my face, and the ones blocking my vision moved aside enough so I could keep an eye on Omri. It was the first time they’d ever re

sponded to my gestures.

“Interesting,” said Avery, studying the angels.

“I used to make up stories all the time when I was little,”

Omri said. He swiveled the chair back and forth. “Anytime someone asked me a question, I would come up with an an

swer, whether I knew the answer or not. I mean, it got more and more fun to come up with wrong answers, the wilder the better. It was like playing with my brain, the most fun I knew how to have. I had this way of looking like I was lying when I was telling the truth, too. It drove Mom crazy. Finally she said, ‘Tell the truth or say nothing at all.’”

“Wow,” I said.

“At that point we were living alone together, and she used to hit me if I irritated her too much. She had kind of a hair trigger, probably because she was always doing things she was afraid she’d get in trouble for, and she was nervous all the time. Stopped being fun telling stories after I got bruised for it. So then, I pretty much stopped talking.”

“But you got over that,” I said.

“No.” He chewed on his lower lip. “I don’t talk.”

“Omri, you talk to me all the time.”

“You’re the only one.”

“Wow.” I pulled my legs up on the bed and hugged them to me, digesting this, thinking about Omri in class—he would answer questions if the professor called on him, but mostly what Omri said was rote from the textbook—and Omri in the company of others besides me. Quiet. He laughed at jokes if they were funny, and he smiled at some of the other people we ran into in class and the halls, but he 52

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

didn’t volunteer information. He didn’t initiate conversa

tions. Except with me.

“And we don’t talk about things that have to be true or not true,” he said. “Just about people in books.” He stared toward the wall papered with Mandy’s posters of saccharin boy singers. “Julia,” he whispered.

If he were a ghost, and I was sorting him to send him on, I would ask questions. So I asked. “What can I do to help?”

He looked toward me instead of the wall. He stroked curled fingers down his cheeks as though scratching them.

“Mom’s going to be so mad at me,” he whispered. “Four years in jail! Because of me! Even though I told the truth, and that’s what she ordered me to do. She’ll want to hurt me again. She’ll force me to talk. I can’t tell her the truth. So fires will start, or things will fly around and break, and. . . .”

“You have a poltergeist?” I asked.

He grimaced. Nodded. “I think that’s what it is. Why I’ve been doing all this abnormal psych reading.”

“Oh.”

He parted his bangs and looked at me again. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

I laughed.

Wind whipped the posters on the wall.

“Okay, stop it, Omri. I was laughing with you, not at you. I’m sitting on my bed with two ghosts and a cloud of little angels. And—guess I haven’t shared this part of my personal history with you yet, either—I spent several years in a mental institution. I don’t think anybody’s crazy.”

“Oh.” He hunched his shoulders, studied my bed, then me. I smiled. “So, you know, maybe you think I’m crazy. Huh?” Inside I was afraid. Would I lose him now?

He glanced toward the door, then shook his head. He looked at me sideways. In all the talking we’d done, we hadn’t shared either of our truths. We hadn’t checked to see whether the other would be able to weather this kind of knowledge. I watched him think about what he would say THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH

next. What he came up with was, “Why are there ghosts on your bed?”

“Because I haven’t figured out how to help them yet.”

“Are ghosts the same as angels?”

“I don’t think so. I was just talking to Avery—he’s a guy ghost—about that when you knocked. I don’t think the an

gels are actually people, but I don’t know what they are.”

“They’re connected to the boy,” said Avery.

“How can you tell?”

“There’s a flavor to their energy. That wind he fluttered the pictures with, it had the same feel. I wish I’d known things like this happened when I was alive. I’d like to de

velop tools to detect and measure these phenomena.”

“How can I tell what?” Omri asked.

“Again, talking to Avery,” I said. “He said the angels are yours.”

“What?” Omri jumped up, his hands fisting. Unfelt wind flurried through the angels, scattering them until they thumped softly against the wall or the bedspread or me. The ones that hit me tingled as they melted. The wind whipped past the posters again, tugging some of them free to fall like leaves on Mandy’s pink chenille bedspread.

“Omri,” I said. “Calm down. You’re hurting them.”

“What?”

“Your angels. You’re blowing them around, destroying them.” I crossed the room and knelt in front of him, touched his hand as it gripped the chair edge, white-knuckled.

“Maybe they were never alive. I can’t tell. Anyway, you don’t need them right now, because you can talk to me.”

“I can talk to you,” he whispered. The remaining angels winked out with small flashes.

“You can lie to me.”

His eyes widened, and his breathing shifted into over

drive. He trembled. “I hate you,” he said.

I sat back, hit the floor with a thump.

“That was a lie. I said it out loud,” he said. 54

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Oh! That’s what that was. Whew. “You did,” I told Omri. I checked the room. Not an angel in sight.

“I feel inferior to everybody I meet. I love my mother. I hate school. Math is hard. My general outlook is perky and upbeat. I was born on the moon.” He heaved a huge sigh and smiled at me.

“Keep it coming. You’re getting better.”

“I am a handsome prince, and I know how to rescue peo

ple.” He peered at me past his bangs, then smiled like a kid who’s just told a really bad joke.

“That could be true, depending on the circumstances,” I said. “Remember how you got all that data off my hard drive when I was ready to throw it away?”

“Oh, yeah.” He rose, walked over to peer into the mirror above Mandy’s dresser. There was a clear space surrounded by pinking-shears-edged heart-shaped pix of Tiger Beat boys and snapshots of Mandy and her friends blitzed at par

ties, making obscene gestures. (Sometimes I felt so old.) Omri studied what he could see of his face.

“Handsome is as handsome does,” I said.

“How can anyone do anything handsome? I’ve never un

derstood that phrase.”

“Now that you mention it, it is kind of confusing.”

He glared at his image, then smiled at me. “I can make it mean something, but I still think it’s weird.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Anyway, I don’t always do handsome things.”

“Variable handsomeness.”

“And you’re not speaking to my need for reassurance about my appearance.”

“Is that a serious concern?” I asked.

Avery said, “He has a crush on you, remember?”

“Oh,” I said.

“And your hesitation leads him to believe he’s not hand

some.”

“Whereas, if I say something to indicate otherwise, it could get me into different kinds of trouble.”

THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH

“Are you talking to that man ghost?” Omri asked.

“Yep.” I took a good look at Omri and realized that once he grew into his bones, he would probably look fine. At the moment he was too urchinlike.

Three angels winked into sight beside my head. They had their hands clasped in front of them, and they all looked anxious. “Now what?” I said.

“He’s told you directly and indirectly what he needs,”

Avery said. “Why not give it to him?”

“Omri, are you really worried about how you look?”

“No,” he said. Six more angels showed up. Two of them were blonde, like me: a first. All of the earlier ones had been dark-haired.

“Some of your angels came back. Are you lying now?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.”

The blonde angels turned toward me, while all the oth

ers were focused on Omri. One of the blondes cocked her head at me.

The angels were vocabulary. They were about Omri not being able to talk. I wondered if they were agents of his pol

tergeist energy. Well, wait. They hadn’t been the acting force when the wind blew through the room—the wind had hurt them. Omri was at war with himself, and he had some interesting and strange ways of manifesting it. “What are you not telling me?” I asked him.

“I don’t care about how I look, except how I look to you,” he muttered, and three of the angels vanished. Not the blonde ones.

I felt lost. I knew what to say to ghosts, most of the time. I didn’t have to sugarcoat things. They’d already gone through death, which was pretty extreme. Most of them ap

preciated straight talk. The living took different handling.

“I think you’re cute and sweet and lovable,” I said, “and I’m almost old enough to be your mother.”

“You are not.”

“Well, okay. I’ve always been able to lie,” I said. “But 56

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

I’m not lying about this. I love talking to you, and I like having you for a friend. In fact, you’re the best alive friend I’ve ever had. I don’t think about you in boyfriend terms, though. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Not exactly,” he said, and sighed. More of the angels disappeared, though not violently; they faded from sight.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

“Nope.” I had never had anybody even express an inter

est, except for one of the burlier nursing assistants at the mental hospital, and he was creepy; Roger helped me avoid him and later helped me report that he was harassing an

other girl who didn’t have ghosts to defend her. The admin

istrator investigated the guy and turned up other problems he was causing. The hospital fired him. It was one of the stepping stones I used to get out of there.

I had learned not to be interested in the boys I met in school afterward. They all thought I was too weird. After Roger had gone, I had realized he was the one I wanted. By then it was too late.

“So there’s still hope,” Omri said.

“Not right away. You need to get older, and I need to get used to the idea.”

“Both those things will happen,” he said, and smiled.

“Wouldn’t you rather connect to someone your own age?”

“Nobody’s my age.” His face looked older when he said that, and I realized that it wasn’t just college age people he was talking about. Because of his intellect, he didn’t fit in with people his age, and because of his age, he didn’t fit in with older people.

“Okay,” I said.

“You see ghosts, and I have my own ghost, or sort of ghost,” he said.

“I guess we do have things in common.”

“Ask him if he can reproduce phenomena at will,” Avery said.

“Why?”

THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH

Omri knew I wasn’t talking to him. “Where is the ghost?” he asked.

“Both of them are still on the bed,” I said.

“One’s a guy, and the other’s—what?”

“A little girl.”

He stared toward the bed. Angels appeared there, too. They drifted until they settled on Avery’s and the little girl’s head and shoulders. “Oh my god,” said Omri. “There’s a—

there’s—I can’t see them, but I—”

“Odd,” said Avery, smiling. “Still the same semisolid spiritual material but focused in a different way.”

Omri put his hands over his ears. “Did he just speak?”

“He did.”

“Oh, my god. Oh, my god.”

“He wants to investigate you, too,” I said.

“And the little girl,” Omri whispered.

I went to the bed and knelt in front of the child. She was distracted by the angels. She tried to catch one, but it van

ished as her insubstantial fingers closed around it, and an

other appeared a short distance away. She tried again, with similar results. Her face clouded.

“Her name is Sadie,” Avery said quietly. He tugged the child onto his lap. “She just needs love.”

Omri’s angels doubled around them, all silent and fo

cused on the ghosts. “Sadie,” he whispered. Before I could turn to him, the child burst into tears, and I knew it was time for me to sort her.

I sat down on the bed and held out my arms. Avery put the child into them. She sank through my lap into me, and I knew her story. Mother, too young, messed up, didn’t know what to do with the kid, couldn’t stand its crying any

more. Got in the car with the kid in the front seat, neither of them buckled in, and drove off a cliff.

No wonder Sadie cried, I thought, and hugged her inside me. “I love you,” I whispered. “I love you. I love you.”

In a little while, she heard me, and then she left. 58

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

“Oh, my god,” Omri whispered from across the room. “I felt that.”

“Did you see where she went?” I asked Avery. We sat side by side on my bed, staring at a particularly heinous boy singer poster, which Sadie had walked through on her way to the light.

“Nope,” said Avery. “She went through the wall and disappeared. Next time, I want to stand in front of them when they’re leaving, see where they walk as they come toward me.”

Next time. Avery was making plans for a future that in

cluded both of us. I smiled.

“Julia?” Omri whispered.

“Yes.”

“Can I—will you let me—can I—”

“Need a few more parts of speech, Omri,” I said.

“Will you teach me about ghosts?”

“Will you teach me about poltergeists?”

“If I can figure them out for myself, sure,” he said.

“Nobody’s more likely to. And yes, I’d love to teach you about ghosts.”

Omri checked his watch. He stood up. “I guess I better get my duffle and head down to meet the airport shuttle.”

“Will you be okay with your mom?”

“No,” he said. “But she’s not my legal guardian any

more. Aunt Edna and Uncle Frank are. Uncle Frank won’t let her hit me. She said she found God in jail, but I don’t be

lieve it.”

I wished I could sort Omri. “I wish I could go with you, but I don’t think I better.” I went to the desk and got paper and pen. “Here’s my mom’s phone number,” I said as I wrote. “Call me if you need me. Or if the angels show up, I’ll assume you need me. What’s the number at your aunt and uncle’s?”

He told me. I wrote it on the bottom of the piece of paper and tore the paper in half, gave him the half with Mom’s number on it.

THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH

“You can practice lying when you get back,” I said. I took a step toward him and gave him an awkward hug. He returned my embrace, then bolted out the door. I sighed and checked with Avery. “What about you?

Ready to move on?”

“On, to nothing? I don’t think so. Too many interesting things are happening right here.” He flicked a finger at an angel. It flitted away. Most of them had disappeared; three lingered.

I packed my best friend’s phone number and headed home, wondering what Avery would make of Mom. AFK

Chris Pierson

The smell of bodies burning followed Shade as he hurled himself up the stairs, taking them three at a time. He moved as fast as he could, which wasn’t very. Shrapnel from the blast had caught him, tearing into his leg as he dove for cover. He could feel a hot shard of metal lodged in his thigh, sawing through flesh, and hoped it didn’t cut a tendon or anything. He couldn’t stop, not yet. The others were still below, and they needed him. He lunged up and up, three flights of grip-patterned steel through rolling black smoke, his boots crunching broken glass—the explo

sion had blown out all kinds of windows, letting cold wind whistle in from outside.

He had thirty seconds, tops, to get up to the balcony and do his thing, or the whole Mission would be fubar. Not that it matters at this point, he thought. Things are already fucked up beyond most recognition. What’s a little more?

Somewhere, off in the distance, he could hear Cinder swearing in Spanish, hijo de puta this and cabron that, while his flamethrower roared, torching everything he could hit. His usual deal when things went in the shitter. A few of the others were yelling, too, and some of the terror

ists. Voices he recognized, others he didn’t. A few sounded AFK

as though they were in pain. One was really high and keen

ing, the sound of a man who knew he’d be dead in a minute. Sounds like Graylock, Shade thought. Damn. Unlucky bastard’s not gonna make it.

There’d been seven of them at the start of the Mission. The gig was simple—boilerplate, really. There were maybe three dozen terrorists in the hospital, rigging it with explosives, trying to bring it down before the Secret Service could move the Sec Def to a more secure location. If the bombs went off, it would be a huge setback in the war. Shade and his crew had to stop them, by any means necessary.

Nothing new. They’d done shit like this literally hun

dreds of times. They were Spectre Corps, the seven of them—the best of the best, not even on record with the mil

itary anymore. They’d made it about halfway through the Mission without any trouble, gunning down or torching the terrorists, disarming four of the eight bombs. Then the up

fucking had begun.

The terrorists had booby-trapped a hallway, rigging it with motion-sensing mines that Nails, the group’s demo ex

pert, somehow missed. He hadn’t had any time to be embar

rassed, though, because the explosion turned him into a shredded bloody mess scattered across the floor. The rest of them had backed off into an ER holding area, where it turned into a firefight.

After that, it got worse and worse. A terrorist hiding be

hind a counter had popped up, put a shotgun to the back of Rage’s head, and painted a large swath of wall with his face. Another, a lunatic with a fucking fire ax, had burst through a door and chopped off Lightfoot’s left arm before the others could put him down. And then they got trapped in the hospital’s central atrium, where some asshole with a grenade launcher had rained holy death on them. Now Lightfoot was gone too, blown to bits along with a lot of furniture and potted plants and a half-dozen more terrorists, 62

Chris Pierson

and from the screaming it sounded as though Graylock, the squad’s leader, would soon follow him.

That left three: Cinder, who was doing his apeshit thing, torching anyone who could get near him; Doc, the squad’s painfully unimaginatively named medic; and Shade, who got to the top of the stairs, met up with another terrorist, and cut him in half, at chest level, with a burst of rapid fire. Blood and wet bits clung to the door the terrorist had been guarding; Shade flung himself against it, slamming the crash-bar with his hip and barreling through onto the balcony. He dropped into a crouch, breathing hard, blood pouring down his leg.

“Dude!” called Doc through Shade’s headset. “Where the fuck are you? That blast-happy prick’s gonna hit us again!”

Keep your pants on, Shade thought, dropping his ma

chine gun and unslinging the sniper rifle he wore on his back. With a quick flip, he popped down a pair of bracing legs on the barrel.

There was more gunfire from below, then a whoosh and a flare of orange light. Some poor bastard howled as he ate fire.

“Come mierda y muerte!” yelled Cinder. Shade leaned against the balcony’s chrome railing, forc

ing himself to go blank. He knew where Rocket Launcher Guy was hiding; he’d spotted him right before the first grenade turned Lightfoot into dog food. There was another balcony on the atrium’s far side, and he was hunkered in there. It was a simple shot now that Shade was in position. He just needed to be calm. He breathed in and out, envi

sioning the shot, getting ready.

Below, Graylock let out a sob and finally shut up. Another one of his friends dead, four of them now. Four out of six. They’d been doing this shit for years, and now there were just three left, counting Shade.

Son of a bitch.

He took a breath, let it out . . . then stood, turned, and sighted. Looking through the rifle’s scope, he saw Rocket AFK

Launcher Guy, his left temple right in the crosshairs. Shade didn’t hesitate; he just squeezed the trigger, such a weirdly gentle motion.

Rocket Launcher Guy’s head turned into pink mist, and the rest of him went down in a nerveless heap. Shade had to grin. Man, that was satisfying.

“Joder,” Cinder said. “Good shooting, man.”

“All clear,” Shade said into his headset. “Doc, you think you can get up here? Feels like there’s a damn butcher knife stuck in my leg.”

“On my way, dude,” said the medic. “Just gimme—ah, shit. I gotta go get the phone.”

Shade blinked. “What, now?”

“Yeah, now,” Doc replied. “It’ll just be a minute. BRB.”

Then his channel on the headset went dead.

“What a pendejo,” Cinder grumbled. “Always going AFK at the wrong damn time.”

Shade just shook his head. Doc had always been like this, disappearing for some reason or another. Most guys, it would be annoying; with a medic, it was a nightmare. Shade knew he was bleeding out. There was a hell of a lot of red, all over his leg and the floor.

“Pendejo is right,” he said to Cinder. “I die up here again because of that lamer, and I will kick his ass.”

“Just hang in, dude. I’m gonna go clear the hallway.”

Shade frowned. “Alone?”

“Ain’t no one else here, is there?”

Down below, a door crashed open, then slammed shut. Shade heard fire whooshing and Spanish profanity, moving away through the hospital.

Fubar, Shade thought, staring at all the red welling from his wound. No way we finish this gig. Shit, that’s a lot of blood. He could feel himself going. Everything was starting to look red now, even the air.

“Doc,” he wheezed into his headset. “Doc, you stu

pid . . . fucking . . . noob. Get . . . your ass—”

Then nothing.

Chris Pierson

•

“Damn it,” he muttered into the darkness.

It was always this way when he died. One minute, he’d be studying his brains as they sprayed through the air, or en

joying the bracing sting of getting cracked in the head with a lead pipe; the next he’d be floating in nowhere, a deep black void, waiting for the Mission to end so he and the oth

ers could reunite in the Lobby.

In this case, that meant waiting for Cinder to buy it. He’d team-kill Doc for letting Shade die, then go on a crazy ram

page until the rest of the terrorists ganked him, too. Once they were all dead—or if Cinder actually completed the Mission solo, which was pretty damned unlikely—the Void would disappear. They’d be back together again. This was the third time in a row that they’d screwed up and let the terrorists win. It was getting embarrassing. Normally, they were better than this. Shade wondered why. Were the terrorists really getting better?

“No,” said a voice behind him. “It’s because you got nerfed.”

Shade yelped and whirled around, terrified.

There was someone else in the Void with him, which was impossible. The Void was private. Regardless, though, there was no denying the other man. He was dressed in a black suit and tie, a contrast with Shade’s camo and body armor. Civvie clothes, although some terrorists wore out

fits like that to trick people into thinking they were harm

less. This one didn’t appear to have any weapons, though. He had glasses, a bald head, and a silver beard. The corners of his mouth twitched when he saw the look of shock on Shade’s face.

Shade went for his sidearm, yanking it from its holster and pointing it at the stranger, so that the barrel was less than an arm’s length from his face. “Who the hell are you?”

he asked. “Where did you come from?”

“I’m a friend, Shade,” said the bald man. He smiled. “As to where I’m from . . . well, it’s a bit early for that, yet. You AFK

can put that thing away, by the way—you know your guns can’t hurt anyone unless you’re on a Mission.”

Shade made a face. It was true: you couldn’t fire any weapons in the Void or the Lobby. They only activated after a gig started. Shrugging, he put the pistol away.

“How did you get here?” he asked.

The bald man chuckled and shook his head. “You keep asking questions I’m not ready to answer,” he said. “Or rather, you’re not ready to hear the answer. I could tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

“No.” The bald man folded his arms. “Not yet. I need to make sure it’s safe.”

“Safe for what?” Shade asked. “No, wait—let me guess. You can’t answer that, either.”

The bald man grinned. “You catch on quick.”

There was another sound, then—a distant explosion, and the faintest whisper of someone yelling “Carajo!” Cinder had cashed in, too. The Mission was over—the terrorists had won. Again.

Already the Void was beginning to dissipate, fading like smoke. The bald man started to vanish with it. Shade felt a tugging, like gravity but different. It was pulling him away from the Void, or the Void away from him. Whichever, he’d soon be back in the Lobby with the others. He’d been through this before, plenty of times.

“Wait,” Shade said. “What’s this about?”

“You’ll see,” the bald man said. He was a ghost now, dis

appearing fast. “I promise.”

“When?”

The bald man’s smile broadened as he evaporated. “Next time you die.”

The Lobby never changed; it was always the same room, small and cramped, with a bank of flashing gadgetry at one end, a weapons range at the other, and cement floor be

tween. Fluorescent lights buzzed blue-white overhead. It 66

Chris Pierson

was, Shade thought, more than a little grim. Most Missions the squad went on were in places like this: military bases, high-rise office complexes, power generating plants. Much of it gray, steel and concrete and glass.

On occasion, though, they got to see colors: the green of jungle, the yellow of desert, the teal of sky over crystalline water on some island somewhere. One insane Mission, there had even been the red of an erupting volcano. Those places were beautiful, but as they spent most of their time on Missions trying not to get shot, blown up, or mangled, there wasn’t much time to appreciate them except for look

ing back.

Why couldn’t the Lobby be on the damn beach, he won

dered, instead of this drab little room? What kind of exis

tence was this, always coming back here?

He’d asked the others that question, a while back. They’d all looked at him as if he were nuts. The Lobby was the Lobby, just as the Void was the Void. There wasn’t much choice in the matter, so why worry about it?

He sighed and glanced at the others, who were all shout

ing and swearing at each other. Cinder and Graylock had Doc cornered, backed against a wall, and were laying into him about the last Mission.

“You can’t just shut off at random in the middle of a Mission!” Graylock was yelling, rapping his finger against Doc’s armored chest. “You’re support, for fuck’s sake!”

“Every time you go AFK, cabron, someone dies,” Cinder added. “This time it was Shade bled out. But we’ve all been through it, some of us more than others. I, for one, am tired of losing Missions because of you.”

Doc glared at them, his eyes hot behind his goggles. “Up yours, both of you,” he said. “You think I do it on purpose?

You’ve both gone AFK before. We all have. There’s no choice in the matter. It just . . . fucking . . . happens.”

“Sometimes,” Cinder said. “It happens sometimes. Maybe one Mission in ten for me. For you, it’s like . . . one in three. Maybe two.”

AFK

“And we tend to do it sometime other than the middle of a firefight,” Graylock added. “Or when one of our friends is lying half-dead and needs a medpack. You keep this shit up, Doc, and you’re off the squad. There are plenty of other meds out there, looking for someone to hook up with. And I’ll make damn sure word gets out that you’re unreliable. No other team will want you.”

Shade glanced at the others. Nails and Lightfoot couldn’t have looked more bored; Nails made a wank-wank motion with his hand. Rage was sitting off by himself, grin

ning like a lunatic. But that was Rage—he was their tank, a big dumb guy, first one through the door in a fight. Half of the reason he existed was to absorb damage for the other guys. You had to be crazy to do that shit.

“You want in on this, Shade?” Cinder asked, jerking his head at Doc. “It was your life this puta wasted this time. Don’t you got any words for him?”

Shade waved his hand. “You guys said all I would have. But he’s right—AFK ain’t a choice. Wish it was, but it’s just like someone’s pulled my plug.”

“Thanks, Shade,” Doc said, smiling.

“Shut the fuck up,” Shade said. “You still got me killed, asshole.”

Graylock laughed.

Shade stood still a while, thinking. Remembering the bald man. “Hey, any of you guys ever see anything weird in the Void?”

They all looked at one another.

“Nuh-uh,” said Nails. “Nothing but nothing in the Void.”

“Just a big black,” agreed Lightfoot. He was the squad’s scout and stealth expert. “Why, you see something?”

“Maybe,” Shade said. “I’m not sure. I thought I saw . . . a guy.”

Cinder took the ever-present cigar out of his mouth and spat on the floor. “You could be going loco, man. I hear it happens to snipers. Too much pressure, having to do that one-shot-kill shit all the time.”

Chris Pierson

“This guy,” Graylock said. “He do anything? Talk to you?”

“Yeah. He said things got harder because we got nerfed. You got any idea what that means?”

Graylock shook his head. “Never heard the word be

fore.”

“I have,” said Doc. “Heard some guys talking about it once on another squad, before I joined up with you pricks.”

“Yeah?” Nails asked. “What’s it mean?”

“It means we were so good at killing the bad guys that someone made us weaker to compensate.”

The Lobby was quiet a minute.

“That doesn’t make any fucking sense,” Lightfoot said.

“Someone?” Cinder asked. “Who, someone? Like gov

ernment or the military or something?”

Doc shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine, dude. The guys in other squad said something about Balance, and how killing terrorists had to be a challenge, or else where was the fun in it?”

“The fun,” Rage said, still grinning that batshit grin, “is watching their brains slide down the wall after you blow their heads off.”

There was another brief silence.

“Anyway,” said Lightfoot, “no, nothing in the Void. You probably just imagined it, man.”

“I don’t know,” Shade said. “It seemed pretty real to—”

A noise interrupted him: the grating, nails-on

blackboard shriek of a klaxon. With a clack the fluorescents shut off, and red lights switched on. A speaker on the wall barked and crackled to life.

“Incoming Mission,” said a mechanical, vaguely female voice. “Squad prepare for deployment. Deploy in ten . . . nine . . . .”

“Hijo de puta,” swore Cinder. “Already?”

Nails rolled his eyes. “Busy day.”

“. . . six . . . five . . .”

“All right, you screwheads,” Graylock said. “Nerfed or not, let’s do this one right. I’m tired of losing these things. AFK

And you”—he pointed at Doc—“no more of this AFK bull

shit. I mean it.”

They all looked up at the red lights, waiting while the voice counted down.

“. . . two . . . one . . .”

Shade thought, here we—

Then they were somewhere else.

It was outdoors, a city in flames, hunks of reinforced concrete blown to gravel, twisted iron lying in tangles on the ground. In the distance, the smoky ghost of a mushroom cloud rose above the ruins. Screams and sirens filled the air, which stank of smoke and leaking gas. Off to the right, a power line was down, spitting sparks.

The squad appeared in the middle of the street and quickly scurried to cover. Shade crouched with Lightfoot behind the broken, overturned wreck of a taxi, then un

folded his rifle and looked out at the devastation.

“Cheery,” Lightfoot said, peering around beside him. “I love the smell of apocalypse in the morning.”

Nails’ laugh came over Shade’s headset. “Man, this is some messed-up shit. Looks like the terrorists nuked . . . what city is this, anyway?”

“No idea,” said Shade.

None of them did. There were mountains off in the dis

tance, but that was the only clue they had. Everything else that could have been a landmark was smashed or on fire, or both.

“So what’s the mission, boss?” asked Doc.

There was a moment’s silence, and Shade’s headset crack

led and popped and buzzed. Then Graylock spoke up.

“Extraction,” he said. “There’s a defector from the terrorists somewhere in this shit, got intel that could really hurt their cause. They touched off the nuke to make sure he was good and dead. We have to find him alive, or the intel if he’s dead, and get to the drop point. And the terrorists’ll be look

ing for him, too.”

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“Joder,” Cinder said. “We even know where this guy is?”

“I’ve got a tracker,” Graylock replied. “He’s about two kilometers from our position. Oh, and there’s another thing. All the radiation from the bomb is going to kill us.”

Several of them groaned.

“Great,” grumbled Nails. “A timed Mission. My favorite. How long we have?”

“Fifteen minutes,” Graylock said. “After that, we’re toast and the terrorists win. Again.”

In the distance, gunfire chattered. Orange flame bloomed into the sky, followed by a plume of black smoke.

“All right, then,” said Rage, who was enjoying this, the insane bastard. “Let’s quit wasting time and get moving. Cover me!”

And like that he was off, breaking from behind a chunk of metal and running down the street.

He made it ten yards, then the back of his head blew off and he went down, twitching.

“Fuck!” yelled Lightfoot. “Sniper!”

“Everyone down!” Graylock shouted, needlessly. They all knew what to do. “Anyone see where the shot came from?”

No one had, so Lightfoot flipped down his scan-goggles from his forehead and powered them up. Very carefully, he peered around the edge of the smashed taxi. The goggles made whining and clicking noises. After a few seconds he pulled back.

“Saw him,” he said. “Building right next to us. Fifth floor, third window from the left.”

They all looked over at the building. It was a heap of bricks, grinding and groaning and showering dust into the street. The nuke had weakened it, and it was on its way to collapsing.

“Cinder,” said Graylock. “Hit him with an RPG. Blow the fucker to hell.”

There was a moment’s silence, then an oath in Spanish.

“Can’t, boss,” he said. “I ain’t got a clear shot.”

AFK

“Damn it,” Graylock said.

“Don’t lecture me about being useful again,” Doc sneered. “You might as well be AFK now.”

“Besa me, lamer.”

Shade rolled his eyes. “Both of you shut up,” he said. “I’ll deal with this. The door to the building’s right next to me.”

“You sure about this, man?” Nails asked. “He aerated Rage pretty quick.”

“No time to argue,” Graylock said. “Radiation, remem

ber? Go on, Shade. I’ll cover.”

He popped out of an alley and ripped a volley of rapidfire at the window where the sniper was. A moment later, Nails and Doc both did the same.

“Go!” yelled Lightfoot.

Shade was already running, leaping over fallen bricks and charred bodies. He expected a high-caliber bullet to pound him in the left temple as he ran: if it did, he knew, he’d be back in the Void before he heard the crack of the sniper’s gun. But he made it, slamming shoulder first through the door, then pounded up the stairs. He heard a rifle shot as he was climbing.

“Shit!” yelled Nails. “The boss is down!”

“It’s all right,” Doc answered. “Just got his shoulder. I’m with him. I’ll patch him up.”

Shade pelted upstairs, got to the fifth floor, and slowed down again. Dust filled the air in the hallway, shot through with ribbons of light from a window at the end. He put away his rifle and pulled out his sidearm, made sure it was loaded, then started down the hall.

“Almost there,” he whispered into the headset. The door to the third to last room was ajar. Shade kicked it open. The sniper was at the window; he was still turning around, surprised, when Shade opened fire. The first bullet hit him in the throat; the second and third in the forehead. His head snapped back and he fell, toppling out the window and plummeting to the street below.

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“Hell yeah!” shouted Nails over the headset. “Nice work, man!”

“Woot!” agreed Lightfoot.

Shade didn’t say anything, though. He was too busy star

ing at the floor in horror. There was a dark, roundish object there. It had fallen from the sniper’s hand before he fell. Grenade, he thought. Son of a bitch dropped—

There was a loud bang and he flew back out into the hall again and there was blood everywhere and his arm was spinning through the air and it wasn’t connected to him anymore and then nothing.

“Knocked out early this time, I see,” said the voice in the Void.

Shade looked up. The bald man was there, in the dark

ness. He had the feeling the man had been waiting for him.

“You talked about me,” the bald man said. “To the oth

ers. You shouldn’t do that again.”

Shade frowned. “Why not? Are you going to give me any answers this time?”

“Oh, yes,” said the bald man. “Unless the rest of your squad really screws things up, we have plenty of time. There are twelve minutes left in their Mission, and time can pass pretty slowly in the Void. So . . . what do you want to ask me first?”

“Your name. I’m tired of just calling you Baldy.”

The bald man smiled. “Fair enough. My name is Gordon Reade.”

“Reade,” Shade repeated. “Weird name.”

“Where I come from, it’s actually quite normal. It would be strange to be named Nails or Cinder there.”

Shade raised an eyebrow. “Really? And where’s that?”

“The outside world.”

For a while, Shade didn’t know what to say. He just stared at Reade. Reade stared back. Finally, Shade started to laugh.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked. AFK

“Just what I said,” Reade replied. “I live in the world outside your game.”

“Game?” Shade asked. “What’s that?”

Reade frowned. “I was afraid you wouldn’t know,” he said. “This makes things . . . difficult. You don’t have much of a frame of reference.”

“Explain it slowly, then,” Shade said. “Like you said, we’ve got plenty of time.”

Reade thought a moment, rubbing his chin, then seemed to reach a decision.

“It’s like this,” he said. “You and your friends—”

“They’re not friends. They’re just my squadmates.”

Reade shook his head. “Fine. You and your squadmates aren’t real people. Not the way people from my world know them, anyway. Do you know what computers are?”

“Of course,” Shade said. “They’re boxes that have data in them. Sometimes Graylock or Lightfoot uses them to get more details about the Mission.”

“Right. They store data. Well, where I come from, peo

ple use computers for more than just storing information. There’s actually a pretty lucrative business making . . . well, games. Which are ways for people to pretend to do ex

citing things that people can’t normally do, or wouldn’t want to, because they’re too dangerous or they’re impossi

ble. Things like rescuing a defector from a city that’s been hit by a nuclear bomb. Or disarming explosives before they can blow up a hospital.”

Shade put a hand to his head. It was starting to ache.

“Wait. So you’re saying the Missions are this . . . game?”

“Yes. It’s called Spectre Squadron— well, Spectre Squadron 2, actually, but never mind. And the Lobby is an area for you to wait while the people controlling you and your squadmates decide what to do next.”

“Controlling us?” Shade asked. “You’re trying to tell me there’s someone out there making us do what we do? I’m sorry, but that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. I don’t feel controlled.”

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“No? Then what about going AFK?”

Shade opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again. What this Reade person was saying was just sheer insan

ity . . . but he’d gone AFK before. It did feel like being con

trolled, now that he thought about it. Like he wanted to keep going, but someone else told him to wait. And he did wait. He didn’t have any choice.

“I know this is hard to accept,” Reade said. “God knows, if someone popped up in my life and told me there was an

other world on top of mine, and that world controlled me . . . well, I’d be pretty freaked out.”

“God?” Shade asked. “Who’s that?”

“That’s not relevant,” Reade said. “One incomprehensi

ble concept at a time, all right?”

“All right. So why don’t I always feel controlled?”

Reade frowned again, and Shade could tell he was trying to figure out how to explain himself. “Well,” he said, “in earlier games, the character was completely controlled. But as they got better, they started to incorporate some intelli

gence into the characters. They’d already done this for char

acters without players . . . controllers, that is. A lot of the civvies in your game, for instance, don’t have controllers. The defector you were going to rescue, he’s like that. We call this kind of intelligence AI.

“So after a while, AI got so good that one gamemaker decided to try giving some to the player characters as well. They figured it would give you better reflexes, some tacti

cal thinking that most players wouldn’t have. Then the players could learn to play better by watching how you be

have.”

Shade frowned, shook his head. “You’ve lost me.”

“Again, I don’t blame you,” Reade said. “It can be pretty hard to grasp, even if you live in our world. Just know that you have a player, but you’re still you. Someone else could play you, and you’d still be you—just like your player can play other characters.”

“I’m beginning to see why I shouldn’t talk to any of the AFK

others about this. They’d think I was a fucking mental case.”

Reade grinned. “That’s one reason. But there’s more than that. There’s the reason I’m talking to you in the first place.”

“Which is?” Shade asked.

“Your player.”

“What about him?” Shade smiled, just a little. “I’ve never meet the man.”

Reade folded his arms. “Well, for starters, he’s not really a man. He’s fifteen years old, and his name’s Aaron Harding. He’s quite good—very well-known in gaming circles. He and his friends, the ones who play your squad, are a large part of why the people who made your game had to nerf you. You were throwing things out of balance, and it wasn’t much fun for the people playing the terrorists.”

“Wait,” Shade said. He held up a hand. “The terrorists?

They have players too?”

Reade nodded.

“Shit.”

“It gets stranger,” Reade said. “See, the people who play the terrorists, most of them aren’t bad people—they’re just blowing off steam, playing the bad guys. And on the other side, the people who play squads like yours aren’t necessar

ily good all the time.”

He stopped, staring very hard at Shade. Shade felt cold all of a sudden, but said nothing. He just licked his lips and braced himself.

“Aaron isn’t a normal person, Shade,” Reade said. His voice turned quiet. “He’s sick. He has no sense of right or wrong. In our world, we call these people sociopaths. And we have reason to believe, from monitoring his activity in other computer systems, that he may be planning some

thing terrible.”

Shade frowned. “You should send in a team, then. A cou

ple stealthers, maybe a sniper like me. You probably 76

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wouldn’t need the heavier firepower, not against a fifteenyear-old . . .”

Reade raised his hand. “That’s not how it works in our world, Shade. We have this thing called due process. We can’t just apprehend someone because we think he’ll do something.”

“I wasn’t talking about apprehending him.”

“I know. But we definitely can’t do what you’re talking about, either. It’s just not how things are, and there are good reasons for it. We need evidence before we make an arrest.”

Shade glanced around. “You’re law enforcement, then?”

“Yes. And I’ve got to arrest Aaron before he does what we think he’s going to do.” Reade leaned forward, his face serious. “That’s why I’m talking to you.”

The squad was happy for the first time in a while. Laughter and shouting filled the Lobby. They’d actually succeeded in the rescue-from-the-nuked-city Mission, de

spite losing both Rage and Shade at the start and Cinder toward the end in a glorious display of firepower, bravado, and profanity. They all stood around, slapping one another on the back and talking over each other as they described the glory of fending off over two dozen terrorists at once while extracting the wounded defector from the ruins of what had turned out to be a blasted-out hotel. Everyone but Shade. He stood alone by the firing range, his face dark, lost in thought. He heard Nails and Lightfoot going on about the mines they laid down in the rubble, how they fragged ten terrorists at once by luring them into that trap. But he didn’t listen, not really. His mind was whirling, thinking about what Reade had told him.

About Aaron Harding and his new Mission, which had nothing to do with the game.

Reade was gone now. They wouldn’t see each other again until the work was done. It was best that way—even in the Void, there was the smallest chance that Shade’s player would be watching. Reade had taken a risk ap

AFK

proaching Shade there, that he might be discovered, but it was the safest option, the only place there was a reasonable chance Shade was alone.

Next time Shade went to the Void, though, Reade wouldn’t be there. There’d be something else. Shade wasn’t quite sure what that would be—Reade had explained, but it hadn’t made a lot of sense—but he had the feeling he’d know it when he saw it.

And after he found it . . .

“Hey, pendejo! ” said Cinder, coming up beside him and slapping him on the arm. “Where’s your head at? You still sore you got torched by that grenade?”

“Don’t be, dude,” said Doc, who had his arm around Cinder. They were best of friends again now—evidently Doc hadn’t gone AFK last Mission. “We couldn’t have made it out of that trap if you hadn’t greased that bastard in the apartment building.”

Shade blinked at them, then shook his head. “No, it’s not that. I’m happy for you guys. For the squad.”

“What is it, then?” asked Lightfoot. “You see something in the Void again? Your friend come back?”

“No,” Shade said. “No, no one there.”

They frowned at him—they could tell he was lying, he was sure of it—but he couldn’t tell them the truth. Reade had been very clear. Harding may be listening. His player.

“Dude, we’re squadmates,” said Doc. “We don’t bullshit each other.”

Cinder nodded. “Yeah, man. You hiding something from us?”

Shade stared at them for what seemed like forever. It was true—Spectre Corps had a rule: no secrets within the squad. But if Reade wasn’t full of shit, Spectre Corps wasn’t even real. None of this was. It was just something in a computer, or several computers, or something. Made up.

He swallowed.

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“Fuck you guys,” he said. “I’m just rattled from the grenade. I’m tired of dying every fucking Mission. That’s all.”

They didn’t believe him. He could see that. But after a moment Lightfoot nodded.

“Sure thing, man. Don’t worry about it, all right?”

Doc nodded. Cinder looked pissed, like he wanted to press the matter, but the klaxon sounded again. The lights turned red.

“Shit,” Nails said. “Again? Already?”

The speaker coughed, the woman’s voice speaking—a voice that wasn’t real. It was just part of the game.

“Incoming Mission. Squad prepare for deployment. . . .”

They were in the mountains somewhere, in the freezing cold. Instead of their usual body armor, they were all dressed in white and gray, for camouflage against snow and rock, and thicker layers underneath, to ward off the cold. Winter gear.

Strange, Shade thought. Don’t remember changing clothes. The game must have done it for me.

He shuddered.

“All right, boys,” said Graylock. “This is a good one. Terrorist base in some caves a couple klicks from here. Front door’s crawling with guards, but recon’s found us a side way in. We’re supposed to infiltrate, find their leaders, and waste them all. We find out any plans for upcoming at

tacks, that’s a side benefit. Main goal is, you see a boss, you drop him. Any means necessary.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Rage, grinning. He patted down his weapons. He must have had eight or ten of them, guns and knives and even a sword sheathed on his back. “This’s gonna be fun.”

They headed off down a path, a steep drop at their left. Wind howled around them. Sunlight glittered on ice. Doesn’t matter, Shade thought as they crept along. None of this is real. None of it matters. We succeed, we fail, so what? It never makes any difference. Shit doesn’t change. AFK

In a week, a month, we may do this exact same Mission again. I’m pretty sure we’ve done it before.

Why did I never notice before now?

“Shade. Shade! ” Graylock yelled over the headset.

“Lightfoot, wake that jerk off up before he gives away our position.”

A hand grabbed his arm. “Man, where the hell’s your head at?”

Shade came back to himself, looked around. The squad had stopped moving and were hunkering low. Lightfoot dragged Shade down beside him. They lay in the snow, gaz

ing down the path toward a crack in the rock, about half a klick away. Two terrorists flanked the crack, one sitting on a rock, the other keeping watch.

“You with us now, Shade?” asked Graylock. “I need those two taken out. Now.”

“Yeah,” Shade said. “Sure.”

He unslung his rifle, thinking all the while that it didn’t matter. The guards weren’t real. The important thing was what he had to do after he died. He had to get back to the Void.

He unfolded the bracing legs on his gun, activated the telescopic sights, peered through. It was a simple shot. The guy sitting down was smoking. Take the other guy out first, then him. Two quick trigger-squeezes, lots of pink mist. He lived for this shit—or had, until he found out it wasn’t real. Now it bored him a little.

He had to get back to the Void.

There was a simple way to do that.

He shot the standing guard, square between the eyes. The icy wall behind him turned red as the rifle’s report echoed across the canyon. Shade shifted his sights to the other one, who had dropped his cigarette and was scram

bling for cover. He trained the crosshairs on the man’s left eye, paused . . . then twitched the barrel a hair to the side and shot.

Chris Pierson

A puff of dust and snow blew off the rock wall beside the terrorist’s head.

“Shit,” said Graylock, who was watching through binoc

ulars. “Shade, waste that son of a bitch!”

Shade didn’t move. He just watched through his sights while the terrorist dropped into a crouch, looked around in a panic, then scrambled through the crack and out of sight.

“Hijo de puta!” Cinder shouted. “How could you miss?

Now he’s going to alert the whole pinche cell!”

“Shit,” Shade said, trying to sound genuinely disap

pointed. “Shit, shit, shit! I’m sorry, guys.”

“Fuck it,” said Rage. “Time for stealth is over, boys. Let’s kill ’em all.”

Then he was off, rapid-fire guns in both hands, sprinting down the path toward the cave. The rest of them followed, Cinder cursing at Shade the whole way.

“Dude,” Doc said as they ran. “That shot was a gimme. I’ve seen you put guys’ lights out like that a hundred times. What the hell?”

Shade didn’t answer. He only thought, as he ran, that he didn’t care anymore.

They were almost to the cave when the terrorists came boiling out, one after the other, guns blazing. Lightfoot and Doc went down, cut in half by rapid fire. An RPG hit near Graylock, turned him into red rags. Rage emptied both his guns, then drew his sword, leaped into the terrorists’ midst, and disappeared, blood flying in his wake.

Shade and Cinder and Nails returned fire, controlled sprays of bullets, thrown grenades, bursts of flame. The ter

rorists kept coming, replacing the ones that died. There seemed to be no end to them.

“Hijo de puta,” Cinder swore again. “How could you fucking miss? ”

Shade was about to answer when a bullet hit his helmet. Rather than the ping of an ordinary round glancing off the armor, he heard the deeper sound of it punching through. AFK

Must have been armor-piercing, was the last thing he thought.

Then he was in the Void, and he was alone. No sign of Reade. Instead there was a door.

Shade had seen many doors over the course of more than a thousand Missions logged. This one was plain, made of white-painted wood, with a simple brass knob with a lock in it. The kind of door you might find on a house in the sub

urbs, working a search Mission, going from one to the next trying to locate the hidden terrorist cell.

Most of those doors, he’d either kicked open or slammed his way through with his shoulder. Now and then he’d used a shotgun. This time, though, he reached for the knob. It didn’t seem right to force his way through to where he was going.

Reade had left the door. He’d told Shade all about it. Where does it lead? Shade had asked. Out of the game, Reade had said. Into Harding’s com

puter.

What will I find there?

Hopefully, what we’re looking for.

He didn’t understand how this was possible. He was a part of the game. Reade had tried to explain, told him about things like programmers and hacking and rogue code loose in the system, but it might as well have been another lan

guage. Shade had no idea what any of it meant. You’ll just have to take it on faith, Reade had said at last. Find what we’re looking for and bring it back. Once you’re in, you’ll have ten minutes, as you experience them. It’ll be more like a hundredth of a second, as we measure it in the outside world. Get back through the door before then. What happens if I don’t?

Reade had shrugged. Beats me.

That disturbed Shade more than any answer Reade might have given.

Reaching out, he touched the doorknob. It felt solid, real. 82

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In a way, it felt more real than anything in any Mission. He licked his lips, then turned it.

The door opened. Brilliant, white light blazed through, too bright for him to see past. It terrified him. He stepped through anyway.

At first, all Shade saw was a riot of color: explosions of violet and green, writhing ribbons of white and gold, bursts of other colors whose names he didn’t know. An instant later came a roar of white-noise static—except, listening more closely, he could hear other noises within it. Gunfire. People screaming. Laughter. The crackle of flames. And there were smells, burning rubber and strawberries and ozone; tastes, raw beef and vomit and copper; feelings, cold and slipperiness and orgasmic joy.

It was chaos, incomprehensible. He opened his mouth to breathe—except he didn’t have a mouth any more. Where his mouth had been was a pale shade of blue, mingled with the scent of almonds. His hands were the taste of saffron. His eyes were a scratching upon his skin, which was the music of bagpipes, played off key.

I’m going insane, he thought. Then, calm down. Reade warned you about this.

He was inside Aaron Harding’s computer, but he wasn’t equipped to understand all the data. But the door he’d passed through was more than just a way to pass out of the game. It also contained what Reade had called a program, which would merge with his body and teach it to process what it was sensing. He just had to wait for it to start working.

He felt a sensation then—a strange prickling that swiftly turned into unutterable pain, as if a thousand knives were pricking his flesh, all over. It drove out all the other sensa

tions, focused him, left only agony. He cried out, wanting nothing more than just to die, to go back to the Void, never to have met Reade or learned about the world outside. Anything, just to make it stop.

AFK

When it did, he was somewhere again.

It was a long hallway, its walls and floor and ceiling all the same featureless gray . . . something. Plastic? Metal? He reached out to touch it and found it felt more like glass. The hallway ran on ahead of him, perfectly straight, with doors to the left and right, every ten feet. On each door was an in

credibly long series of letters and numbers. He couldn’t see the corridor’s far end; it simply narrowed to a point, what seemed like miles away.

He had his body back—or a body, anyway. It was also featureless and gray, and it glowed faintly from within. He was unarmed and, as far as he could tell, naked. What now? he wondered.

At once, a voice replied, inside his head. It was emotion

less, like the voice in the Lobby that announced the start of a new Mission, but it was neither male nor female, neither loud nor soft.

Follow the hallway. There is information behind each of the doors. Find the one marked CF16A107F18D30E69

630CC235FBBB94FEB816AF234AB192C9135B062AEC

B72C5 . . .

Hundreds more letters and numbers flashed through Shade’s head, filling it until he felt as though they would start spilling out his mouth, his nose, his ears. Stop, he thought. Enough!

The voice stopped. Shade took a breath. Somehow, he knew where to go . . . or maybe it was the program Reade had put inside him. He didn’t know. Whatever, he knew to start walking, and when he did, he moved faster and faster, until the doors began to pass by in a blur. As he sped along the passage, he looked both left and right, at every door. He read each in an instant, taking in the numbers on them: 26653848EAD72ED9AA82880422CC6E21E4BFC927

950336E41B74F241D5C59985 . . .

7E40557C09A655DD41DF3A3ADBFABE6E5D4A7F

1EDD58BAE7C4D062E49CE84A80 . . .

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A085646914F34FEF3E822C674F79F6BA61F5832C9

D49C00110C2920FE1F9EA66 . . .

He read thousands of them, then millions, then billions, moving faster and faster. The hallway went on and on. He wasn’t walking down it anymore; he was flying, not touch

ing the floor. A minute passed, then a second, a third, a fourth. He began to worry; he only had ten minutes before he had to get out.

You will not need to find the door again when it is time to leave, said the emotionless voice. The door will find you. That made no sense, but none of this made sense. He doubted he could properly explain what he was experienc

ing to any of his squadmates, even if he wanted to. He wasn’t even himself, not entirely. He was more than that. He flashed on, down the hall.

Then, all of a sudden, he stopped.

CF16A107F18D30E69630CC235FBBB94FEB816AF2

34AB192C9135B062AECB72C5 . . .

Shade swallowed, looking the door up and down. It had no handle.

Reach out, the voice said. It will open. Shade did what the voice told him. His hand reached out, touched the door—passed through the door—became part of the door. The glow inside him spread, and now the door was glowing too, brighter and brighter as it slid open, and he was passing through, and again he found himself sur

rounded by colorsmell, soundtouch, and emotiontaste. Then the knives came back, cutting cutting CUTTING—

He stood in front of a building, under a blue sky. Somewhere, music was playing and voices were talking and laughing around him. For a moment, Shade thought he was in a Mission again, that all the strangeness had just put him back in the game. When he looked around, though, he saw it wasn’t like any Mission he’d ever been on. There was something different about how things looked and AFK

sounded . . . a crudeness, a distortion in hue and timbre. There were no smells or tastes at all.

He was inside the door. Inside another part of Aaron Harding’s computer. He stepped forward, then caught a glimpse of himself reflected in a window. He didn’t look like Shade any more; he was a boy, skinny and red haired, wearing a long, dark coat and a black cap that was on back

ward for some reason.

That is Aaron Harding, said the toneless voice in his head. This is a game he made himself.

What is it for? Shade wondered. What is the Mission?

That’s why you’re here. To find out.

He looked around him. He was in a parking lot, sur

rounded by cars. There was a line of pine trees to one side; on the other, several young men and women were staring at them. One of them yelled Hard-on! and pointed at him. Then they all laughed.

They hate me, he thought. They all do.

He could hear laughter on all sides now, and a spike of anger swelled up inside him. He turned back to the build

ing. It was three floors high, blocky, made of red brick with many windows. Two large, metal doors stood before him; above were metal letters, edged with rust.

SUMNER HIGH SCHOOL, they read.

He opened the door, and this time there were no shapesounds, no scentfeelings. It was just a door, part of this game. He stepped through, into a hallway lined with metal lockers, with doors at intervals. The floor had a dull sheen and a fake-marble color. A paper banner, with the words

“GO OSPREYS” painted on it in crude crimson letters, hung high on one side. One the other, a clock read 12:43 P.M. He walked down the hall, passing other young people on either side. They sneered and glared and made obscene gestures. The anger inside him grew worse, became a burn

ing coal. Beneath it, a queasy feeling started to gather in his gut.

Halfway down the hall, he turned to the right. There 86

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were many voices on the other side of the door. He yanked it open, walked into a mess hall of some sort: long tables, plastic trays with institutional food and brightly colored beverage cans. About a hundred young people sat in plastic chairs, eating. They all looked up when he came in.

“Hey, Hard-on!” shouted a big, blond-haired kid. “It’s fuckin’ April, man. Why you wearing that faggoty coat?”

The bubble of anger inside Shade burst. He felt Aaron Harding’s mouth curl into a smile.

“I’ll show you,” he said, and reached under the coat. When his hands came out, each held a bulky, black, rapid-fire gun.

No, Shade thought. They’re civvies. You’re not supposed to kill civvies on a Mission. Not in Spectre Corps. The young men and women stared at him, shocked. Terrified. Someone screamed.

Shade started to shoot . . .

Orange. Clammy. Waves crashing. Sulfur. Bitter. And the knives. . . .

In a rush, he was back inside the Void. Shade hung in the blackness, shuddering, cold. His stomach was a yawning pit. Images floated in the dark, of bodies cut in two, blood spattered up walls, people running, pleading, dying. He shut his eyes, but it didn’t help: They were there too.

“I’m sorry,” said the bald man.

Shade opened his eyes. Reade was there, and there was sorrow in his eyes.

“You saw it?” Shade murmured. “What I did?”

Reade nodded. “Saw it, and recorded it.”

“Why?”

A thin, dark line appeared between Reade’s brows.

“Why what?”

“Why did I do it?” Shade demanded.

Still seeing, in his head, blood and death and children screaming.

AFK

Reade was quiet a moment, thoughtful. The way he looked when he was trying to find a way to explain.

“First,” he said, “you should understand that it wasn’t real. It didn’t actually happen. It was a simulation. Aaron Harding wrote it, to train himself.”

“Train himself. . . .” Shade trailed off, thinking. “To kill people? At this Sumner High School?”

Reade nodded, his face grim.

“You need to stop him,” Shade said.

“Already happening,” Reade replied. “We’ve sent some officers to Harding’s house with a warrant for his arrest. We have the evidence, thanks to you.”

Shade shook his head. “I’m . . . I’m not even sure what I did.”

“You helped us. You found what we were looking for. What we couldn’t find for ourselves. And you’ve saved a lot of people a lot of grief and pain.”

“I . . . see. So Harding won’t be around anymore.”

“No. He’ll go away for a long time. Probably to a men

tal institution, for treatment.”

Shade nodded, and was silent a while.

“What happens to me?” he asked. “Who will play me now?”

Reade looked away, rubbing the back of his neck. “I don’t know. Harding’s computer’ll be impounded. Kept as evidence. No one’s going to be playing games on it for a long time.”

Shade stared. Understanding began to dawn.

“Ever,” he said. “You mean no one’s ever going to play games on it again.”

Reade still didn’t look at him. He pursed his lips, blew out a long, slow breath through them.

“I helped you!” Shade said. “You owe me.”

Minutes passed. No one spoke. Then, finally, Reade sighed again.

“Look,” he said. “I’ve got a nephew. Ethan. He’s wanted to play Spectre Corps for a long time. I’ll buy him the damn 88

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game and transfer you to his account. I’ll have to break a few departmental rules to do it . . . but what the hell.”

Shade bowed his head. “Thanks.”

“No, you’re right. I do owe you. And I’ll wipe your memory of what you saw back there, in the computer.”

Reade bared his teeth. “I don’t want Ethan to see any of that shit. Ever.”

In the distance, Shade heard the rattle of gunfire, then a victorious yell. He looked away, into the dark. The Mission was over. He’d be back in the Lobby again soon. The oth

ers would give him a hard time about missing that second sentry. He wondered if he’d ever do another Mission with them. Probably not. Reade’s nephew would have his own friends to play with.

The Void began to evaporate. Shade turned back to look at Reade.

“Thanks,” he said again, and held out his hand.

“No,” Reade said. “I should thank you.”

They shook, across worlds. There was more, too—

another program, working away as Reade faded from sight. Shade could feel it cutting his mind.

By the time he got back to the Lobby, he’d forgotten everything.

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