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I sat in my plastic chair, looking at a blue TV screen for nearly a half-hour. I didn't know what to do. I wanted so badly to talk to someone, to find some help; but what would Gunther say? He'd warned me not to come back to work yet, and I hadn't listened.

I had to tell him. Gunther was the only person who could possibly make sense of what had just happened to me. I got a legal pad and a Papermate and wrote down as much as I could remember in note form, in case I lost my cool when I was talking to Gunther and left out something important. My penmanship looked childish and unfamiliar, probably because my hand was shaking. I was going to ask him about the cereal, too. I was going to ask him about that worksheet he'd made me do. We were going to set a few things straight, I decided.

Gloria wasn't at her desk. I looked at the candy dish out of habit: Tootsie Rolls. Gunther's door was ajar, and it sounded like he was on the phone. I raised my hand to knock before sticking my head in.

'—Really a think tank more than anything. We don't have a product to sell, but we provide an invaluable service to companies that do. What we do is analyze all the information relevant to your campaign and then synthesize a plan based on all known market factors . . .'

I put my hand to my temple. What's he talking about? An image of one of Serge's girls flashed across my mind. I felt a wave of dizziness and I reached out to lean on Gloria's fica, then realized it was only a plant and leaned on the wall instead. I felt cold.

'. . . Closely guarded secret. Our system analysis is not only unique, Marty, its success rate speaks for itself. We can tell you what ads will be successful across a broad demographic spectrum, independent of the Nielsens and in advance. Our predictive success is right here in these charts, and I think you'll have to agree that nobody else has come close.'

There was a silence. I hovered there, aware that I was eavesdropping and I'd look like a jackass if I got caught, yet unable to move away from the door.

Of course, Gunther wouldn't be talking openly about the war on the phone. We are a secret agency housed within a corporate structure. He has to keep up the fiction.

'Daytime TV, Marty, is our strongest area in these last six months. We've penetrated the cartoon market—'

But what about the memo?

What about the cereal? The cartoon market?

'—For the next offensive, where a full-frontal assault on prime-time will begin.'

What about Serge, drowning in the well; giving destruct orders? What about Arla Gonzalez shooting down my Gossamer, the traitor?

I put my notes on Gloria's desk and fled. I felt weak and ashamed. I slunk out of Dataplex without talking to anybody.

I didn't want to think about Gunther or his company politics. I'd been shot down. I'd lost the nex with Gossamer.

My self-pity was unsurpassed. Again I drove home baffled by the life I was living. I looked in other people's cars as they passed me on the Parkway. I looked in yards and at stores when I got to my neighborhood. I didn't know how to participate in any of this. I couldn't even see the point of it.

But at the same time, I was sad that I wasn't a part of this world with its cars and stores and jobs and TV. I was missing being someone who had a mother. I had never realized what an anchor she'd been for me, until she wasn't there anymore.

I had no niche in this world. I couldn't go to the movies on Friday night. I couldn't share the talk about the latest episode of Remington Steele with the other girls by the coffee machine. I had a whole chocolate cheesecake in the freezer and it was no use to me. I couldn't eat it. There was no escape.

Watching Serge get swallowed by the well had been horrible. I could still see her face disappearing in the honeycomb of well cells. I could still see her open mouth, her epiglottis moving. But the worst thing was losing Gossamer.

Don't get shot down, she'd warned me.

By the time I got home, I was bawling openly. I ran into my apartment with my head down, opened the freezer, ripped out the cheesecake, and threw it across the room. It landed in one of my mother's ferns.

I opened a tiny bottle of vodka that I'd saved from a plane flight. I sipped it and then spit it out. Vodka makes me sick even under the best of circumstances.

In the end the only thing I could think to do was take a bath. I sat on the bathroom floor where I'd spent so much time recently, vomiting. But I couldn't even enjoy the relief of being sick. Nebbie came in and jumped into the empty tub, flinching when the water splashed her face. She jumped out again. Rocky came in, tail making a question mark, and Nebbie jumped up on the side of the tub, spitting at him.

I clambered into the tub as it filled.

'I hate this,' I sobbed into Nebbie's fur. 'Why can't I channel Middle Earth or Narnia? Or Pern – I'd love to channel Pern, I've always wondered what klah tasted like. Why do I have to have the Grid? The thing isn't nice. It's like a cancer. It's like when you see a melanoma on some white lady's back at the beach, it looks like she's got a well-done hamburger stuck to her shoulder, your skin crawls just looking at it. Why do I have to be in the middle of it? Why? Nebbie, I'm so miserable.'

Nebbie purred and pointed her pink butt at me. I was out of bubble bath, which brought on another flood of tears.

The water was too hot. I didn't get out, though. I made myself stay, hissing and puffing, until I got used to it. Slowly, the sobs began to subside and after a while I relaxed. I leaned back in the water and reached for a towel to dry my hands. I was just reaching for the copy of Dragonsinger that I kept on the toilet tank, to start rereading it for the umpteenth time. Then I saw my own legs.

Normally the bubbles would prevent this from happening.

I could see muscles. Those thigh muscles that are always aching from doing sumo stances. What do the weight-lifters call them? Quadriceps. Quads.

I was so surprised that I dropped the book in the water. I had to get out of the tub and fetch one of my spare copies from the bedroom.

I thought: I'm becoming not fat.

I thought: what next?

 

Never ask that question.

 

As soon as I got to work in the morning, Gunther called me into his office and wordlessly handed me my pink slip.

I stared at him.

'Is this permanent?' I said.

He didn't want to look at me. He was ripping the blue fuzzy hair out of a Troll doll.

'That depends.'

'Depends on what?'

'On whether they change their minds at Headquarters. I went to bat for you, Cookie. What can I say? If you can't see anything, you can't see.'

'I didn't say I couldn't see, I said I got shot down.'

Gunther shrugged. I could see my briefing lying in his in-box, still encased in its yellow-ochre interoffice-memo envelope. Had he even read it?

I added, by way of explanation, 'I'm not about to open the nex in case Goss has landed in the well. That would be dangerous, wouldn't it? It could cause feedback. Right?'

He didn't say anything. He was rubbing little balls of wadded-up Troll-doll hair between his fingertips.

'Plus, in light of everything that's happened with Dr. Gonzalez, isn't anybody at Machine Front interested in knowing why she shot us down? Look how she trapped Serge.'

Gunther gave the impression that he was thinking about this, but he didn't say anything.

'Gunther, can't we try to fix it? Maybe Goss can be recovered. Maybe we can re-establish the nex.'

He sighed, looked at the ceiling. He opened his mouth as if to say something, and then changed his mind. Scratched his head.

'Gunther?'

The phone rang. Gunther set the troll down, wiggled his eyebrows at me apologetically, and picked it up again. I could hear Gloria's angry voice on the other end. She made no effort to keep her voice down: not only did her words carry across the phone, I could actually hear her where she sat at her desk on the other side of Gunther's office wall.

'You told me to give it two minutes and call you. So I'm calling you.' Gunther hastily covered the receiver.

He gave me an embarrassed shrug.

'Gloria says I got to go,’ he said, standing up. 'Big meeting with Bob Hagler. Take your time clearing out your cubby'

'But. . .' I spluttered. 'What am I supposed to do?'

Gunther took his suit jacket off the back of his chair and tossed it over his shoulder like a part-time male model posing for the Stern's Supersale catalog.

'I'll give you a reference if you want to go over to Military Psychokinesis now.'

'And that's it?'

'Sorry. Sayonara, kimosabe.'

 

I went home, stunned, and took out a half-gallon of ice cream. I wanted so badly to binge, but it melted in my lap. I couldn't eat it. I couldn't get the spoon more than halfway to my mouth.

It's not as though I like the war. I hate it. But who am I going to be now?

 

While we were waiting for the guys to show up for pocketbook-and-broom practice, I told Miss Cooper that I got laid off and she said, 'Well, now you have no more excuses. You can get serious about your training.'

'I never thought about it that way.'

'Are they still paying you?'

'They're treating it as a disability.'

'So, you don't have to worry about money. This could turn out to be a good thing for you. I'll help you, if you want. Train.'

'Would you?'

'Yeah, of course. I think you could be really good, Cookie. You're strong and you're not afraid.'

'I'm strong?'

'Yeah! People don't think big people are strong, but they are. You're carrying around a lot of weight every day. You have good muscles. If you could lose the fat, you'd be really powerful.'

'I don't feel powerful,' I said. I hadn't eaten in weeks. I was amazed that I was still alive.

Mr. Vukovich and Mr. Adams came in to practice pocketbook-and-broom. The demonstration team has various set pieces that are performed to attract new students. Breaking bricks obviously is very popular; there's also the nail-bed demonstration that Miss Cooper does, where she lies on a bed of nails and Shihan breaks a cinder block on her stomach with a sledgehammer. There are weapons demonstrations, and self-defense for women – i.e. pocketbook-and-broom. We have several scenarios where we demonstrate a woman innocently going about her business: standing at a bus stop, sweeping her front porch, etc., and some guy comes up and grabs her or otherwise attacks her. Our job is to beat the guy up using our pocketbook and/or broom. It's all choreographed and nobody really gets hurt. The guys fly convincingly through the air when we throw them. We always know exactly what they are going to do and when.

It's supposed to be fun, and everyone laughs when they see our performance. But it kind of bugs me sometimes.

'Don't you think it's a little demeaning that we have brooms and purses?' I said. 'I mean, I carry a purse, OK, so maybe there's something in that. But what are the chances of me being attacked while I'm doing housework? Which I do with a vacuum cleaner anyway, by the way.'

'The point is that you can use everyday objects as weapons,’ said Miss Cooper. She comes from Allendale, by the way. Her father is a dentist. I doubt she's ever had to worry about being mugged in reality. She'd probably be fine. But what could she know about using everyday objects as weapons, exactly?

I ought to have shut up. But I couldn't help it. I was feeling grumpy about everything.

'OK, but why do they have to be such sexist objects? Why not a hammer or a tennis racket?'

'Oh, come on, can't you see the funny side?' Cori said. I'd noticed that she took a sadistic pleasure in ramming the broom up into the attacker's crotch and watching him writhe on the floor. 'Don't be so touchy.'

If you hadn't had a good meal in a week, you'd be touchy too, I thought. But I shut up. I twirled my pocketbook. I couldn't fly. Miss Cooper was right: this was what I had now. I'd better make the most of it.

 

On Tuesday I did my first push-up. I mean a real push-up, not a girl push-up where you rest on your knees. Actually, I did three of them. My hips had shrunk and my upper body had grown stronger in the weight room. I was so excited I saw stars.

I was seeing stars a lot lately. I had bought a book on fasting for health purposes, and I knew that I was getting near to the point where my body would start consuming its own vital organs. I didn't want to be sick again, but I knew I couldn't keep training without eating. So after my workout, I mixed orange juice with my water. I never tasted anything so sublime, and the sugar hit my veins like an electric shock. After that, I had so much energy that I decided to walk all the way to Miles's and surprise him.

 

Miles answered the door with half a pastrami sandwich in one hand. He waved me in. He was in the middle of debugging Spazmonia! He had his work up on the screen of one computer, and some text game on the other. He was in the habit of switching back and forth between work and play constantly. I always found it amazing that he could get any work done at all with all the distractions he needed to surround himself with.

As I moved a stack of computer paper off Miles's spare squeaky swivel chair and sat down, I had the feeling that I was just another convenient distraction. Miles looked glad to see me, almost gleeful. He said he wanted to show me some new miniatures he had bought at The Compleat Strategist so he could ask my opinion on the right colors to paint them. I went into his office and waited, glancing idly through the libretto for his newest comic rock opera, The Marriage of Fig Newton. The next-door neighbors had put the stereo speakers in their windows and Weird Al Yankovic blasted into the backyard while they splashed in the above-ground pool. I heard Miles go down to the basement to get the stuff. The phone rang, and then cut off. He must have picked up the extension.

As I sat there with the sultry breeze bringing summer in through the window, ruffling the pages of Miles's notebooks, an inexplicable sense of well-being crept over me. I could smell the warm, new plastic of the computer, and the static coming off the screen. Outside I swear I could smell warm maple leaves, too, and the inchworms on the leaves. I was in my own place and I was perfectly happy. Even the stink of Miles's half-eaten pastrami sandwich balanced on top of a Garfield coffee mug couldn't mar the perfection of this moment. I was in harmony with something cosmic.

I didn't know that was possible for me.

The cords of the Venetian blinds flapped. It was going to rain later.

I don't know how long I sat there before I took a look at the text game that Miles had been playing. Pale green letters showed on the dark screen.

 

Light hitting the well is like a dog chasing a car. It starts out frenzied. Where it meets the surface it explodes against the fluid, producing a crystalline dazzle; but as it penetrates it starts getting tired and colors appear: amber turns green turns Indigo as the dog's tail whirls in braising circles. Finally halts. The dog wanders off diffidently, as if giving up were always part of the plan. As for the light: it has been eaten, its energy dispersed, and all the while the well's honeycomb cells rock in a sourceless current.

Her experience didn't feel like drowning. It didn't even feel like being in water. She had the sense instead that she was floating high in the Grid, suspended by filaments fine as spidersilk, turning gently in the breeze. Motes of blown Grid-proteins came and some of them attached themselves to her as filings to a magnet. Others passed through her like subatomic particles tunneling through metal. She was being taken apart to be remade. She was having her clock cleaned.

There are no pronouns down here. The grammar is reflexive, the well's an inclusive set; all members commit feedback. There are no passengers. So that by the time she was herself, she was almost fully assembled, almost ready to leave and become something other than the well.

At first she didn't know where her own body left off and the well began. Strings of sensation passed from it to her and back again: a million tiny umbilical cords, tugged gently by the current, feeding her and feeding back to the well and feeding her again.

She felt the battle armor forming itself around her and realized she could move. She wasn't breathing. She felt the hair on her head sprouting.

The well spat her out, slowly, over the course of a day. Shadows wheeled across her; smells passed, some of them lingering a while. They must have been pulling at deep memories, for they made her mind swollen and uneasy with unconscious matter that refused to name itself. She didn't know how to distract herself from what was happening. She could do nothing but stare at the lattice structure of the Grid, above, until she lost herself in the mosaic it made of the sky.

By night she had been cast up, full length, on the ground or what passed for it here. She lay there, not dreaming, until—

 

Miles came in whistling and the nex snapped like a cobweb. He plopped a foam-lined box of unpainted miniatures down next to the pastrami and said, 'Check out the manticore.' Then I could hear him rummaging through little bottles of model paint.

I glanced back at the screen.

 

What do you want to do?

This probably isn't a good time to stop for a ham sandwich.

 

I gathered that this was the text of the real game, which was getting impatient with Miles for not entering a response.

 

The Earth cooled. Invertebrates appeared.

 

I gave a little shake and looked away. He closed the window and switched on the air-conditioning. The sound of the fans shuddering to life sent chills up the back of my neck.

'Cook? What's the matter?'

'Nothing.' I stood up, which was a mistake. Time seemed to slow down and black patches formed on the periphery of my vision, moving like clouds across my eyes. My legs felt vague and the next thing I knew I was on all fours on the carpet, sliding in and out of consciousness like a little ocean licking the beach.

Miles brought me some water.

'It's this heat,’ he said. 'And you're not eating.'

He took my pulse. 'You wanna lie down? You want me to take you to the doctor?'

I shook my head.

'Lifesavers,’ I managed to say. I was still feeling strangely high and distant, and my heart swelled to include Miles, his computer, his air conditioner and his overgrown spider plant with an indiscriminate feeling of compassion.

'What? Cookie, you're being a little . . . huh-huh. . . Cookie?'

'Do you have any Lifesavers?'

'What? Yeah.' He rummaged in his desk. He had half a roll of wild cherry.

'Just one,’ I said.

'Go ahead, knock yourself out.' He sat back on his heels and watched me take the candy. He meant to be ironic but the truth is, that Lifesaver earned its name. It hit my tongue and my brain like the first sunrise of spring must hit the Eskimos.

'You know who that was on the phone just now?'

Like I cared. 'George Lucas wanting to make the Spazmonia! movie?' I said dully.

'Gloria. She told me.'

'Oh.'

'Oh.'

'I guess you think I'm having a breakdown, too,’ I said.

Miles said, 'Gloria said you left a bunch of stuff there. She's going to bring it to karate tomorrow night.'

I took another Lifesaver. I didn't suck it actively, in case it made me sick. I just let it lie on my tongue. Having any foreign body in my mouth, even a toothbrush, lately made me want to gag.

'Do you need any help with these people, Cookie?'

'What kind of help?'

Miles said, 'The other night at your mom's house I got a weird feeling off your boss . . . Wolfgang?'

'Gunther.'

'Him, yeah. I don't like the way he talks about you.'

Bizarrely, I heard myself defending Gunther. 'He's a really nice guy! You don't even know him.'

'OK. If you say so.' Miles didn't sound convinced.

'So, I was looking at your text game,' I said brightly, desperate to change the subject. 'Is that the one you were telling me about?'

'Quark? Yeah. I'm stuck right now. There's this underground chamber, see, and I can't find my way out of it. The game keeps describing something about ropes, but you can't climb them and you can't carry them and nothing happens when you pull them . . . it's some kind of trick and it's driving me nuts.'

I nodded slowly.

'Is there anything about. . . dogs . . . in that game? Or battle armor?'

'No – why? Do you think you figured something out?'

'Maybe. Can I take you up on that offer after all?'

'You mean you want the computer? Cool. Yeah, sure.' He grinned and picked up a little fanged horse. 'Do you think the inside of a Nightmare's mouth should be red or green?'

 

Late that afternoon a thunderstorm did roar down, and I had to go home and close windows and sing Nebbie out from under the bed with the theme from Cats. Miles set up the computer for me and showed me how to use it. After he left, I also dragged out Mom's color TV and set that up, too.

I had to take down a lot of books and rearranged my Dewar's crates until I had the TV and the screen of Miles's computer where I wanted them. Between this disruption to my paperback library and the intrusion of my mother's effects, the apartment was now more or less a maze of shoulder-high piles of heterogeneous stuff. Nebbie would have been in heaven, except for the fact that Rocky really liked her and she didn't feel the same.

I made lemonade.

Normally I'd eat cake with this (remember the Trixie Belden?) But I was beyond cake now. I was wearing size 14 jogging shorts. And a halter top. I felt like a kid again.

'OK, we'll warm up with something easy. It's only words on a screen. No pictures. It's just D&D,' I told myself and I squared off against the Apple IIe Miles had set up for me. 'It can't jump out and get you.'

See, I thought that Quark would be a good way to get myself used to the idea of doing it on my own. I hadn't watched real TV for years, not since the first hauntings began. I was too scared.

I thought that maybe I should try to pick up where I'd left off, so I had asked Miles to save the game at the point where he was stuck and let me try working on it. He had explained the basic commands. I didn't listen much. I was hoping that I'd find out everything I needed to know just by reading.

There were more thunderstorms. I remember hearing the first peals of thunder, because in her fright Nebbie knocked over a bust of Brahms that had belonged to my mother. It was hollowed out and Mom used to keep her stash in there ('in case of a raid,' she told us kids seriously). A plastic bag hit the carpet and a sprinkling of pot spilled out. Nebbie probably thought it was catnip because she licked it.

After that, I was lost to the world.

 

The Swatch had various dials and buttons, all very tiny and difficult to manipulate. As light grew about her she saw that incised on the edge were the characters CAPT. B. SERGE N76. She studied the wristband for a long time trying to remember how to operate it. Fabrique au Suisse, it said. She flipped it open. Dante, she thought. How to call Dante? She couldn't remember. When she tried to operate the watch a visual floated out of it. It was not Dante's face. It was a train. A girl and a guy, kissing on the step, the girl's foot coming off the ground like a dog pointing. A little song. 'Say goodbye a little longer/Make it last a little longer/Give your breath long-lasting freshness with Big Red.'

She snapped the holo down. She flashed a memory of the way she had felt the first time she had seen what intestines looked like. Her tongue seemed to be clogging her throat. She had a sense of betrayal, as if the world was declaring itself to be something more obscene and ludicrous than she'd heretofore been led to believe.

She didn't want to know those kinds of secrets. She stood up.

Visually, the Grid was overwhelming from this angle. She kept tilting her head back to try and take it all in, which was impossible. She turned and looked up and turned again, steadying herself against a branch of the thing with one hand. From the point where her hand touched she saw a faint puff of dust, and an odor came slithering towards her nose. She also felt something in her skin, a kind of shiver that brought the hairs to attention on the back of her neck.

Surface area, she found herself thinking. It has a huge amount of exposure, very high surface-area-to-volume ratio.

That idea sank through her mind like a stone in a muddy pond. She didn't have another thought as such for a while. She took her hand off the branch, and instantly there was a reaction in her head. The second thought took the form of a niggling irritation that she should have even bothered to think the first thing.

You know this already. You know all about the Grid, as much as any guy. Why don't you get with it already?

She could almost hear this one, in her mind. It had an accent, a stubborn twang that refused to change no matter how far its owner traveled from her place of origin.

Texas.

The word lodged in her memory like a burr in a horse's tail. She took a deep breath. Whatever she had been recalling, it was gone. Texas?

Then: Horse?

Burr?

She sat down with her back to the bole of the Grid. There was a faint thrum within the material, which was ever-so-slightly yielding – not like wood, more like some kind of plastic but with a current going through it, if that were possible.

A few things had come back different.

She heard a rhythmic clicking from inside her thorax at all times. It was not a heartbeat or a pacemaker or anything like that. It was more like a chorus of crickets sounding from beneath her skin, making wild rhythms. The chorus moved around within her trunk randomly, or maybe according to an algorithm too complex for her to figure out: the angles of the branches? Orientation like a compass? Temperature, or chemical composition of the air? Who knew?

Plus, she could no longer remember what human time felt like. The time she experienced was Grid Time, and its pace was roughly equivalent to attention. Sometimes it flowed thick and sweet like Caro syrup. Sometimes it was staggered and disconnected, crunchy, lively as Rice Krispies when you first pour the milk in. Sometimes it seemed to have colors, even, like Jell-O. Time was just a game that played in her mind. Her Swatch was no help. The digital display was now written in Roman numerals, which she had only mastered well enough to pass the quiz in fifth-grade math. And Time itself seemed to have acquired an analogous character: it altered its quality in a tangible way, like Ls changing to Ms or whatever; V becoming less when you put a I in front of it, and so on. It wasn't linear anymore. It wasn't intuitive to her. Time seemed to have the power to change itself retroactively.

 

I pulled back. This was hard going. My eyes were stinging and aching. The room had gotten dark and the luminous print on the screen seemed to attack my corneas. I felt exhausted. I got up, stretched, rubbed my eyes, and looked at the screen again.

I could see a flashing cursor and a question mark inviting my response.

I tried to remember what Miles had said about how to play these games. You entered simple phrases, like 'Take rock' or 'Jump chasm.' But all I could think of were questions.

One letter at a time, I typed:

 

What can she do?

 

I pressed 'enter.'

 

Her heart does not beat. She does not breathe. She can go in the well and come out again at a different point.

She can smell the Grid pollen just like Gossamer.

She can probe inside the golems but there is no reality there.

Is she part of the Grid now?

She is in a room with a two-way mirror. The Grid can see her, but she can't see it. Or so it seems.

Because she's filled with loneliness. Her physical needs have been erased, but her sense of isolation is so enormous that it bleeds over into the empty spaces that once held hunger and thirst and tiredness, until loneliness becomes something as urgent as pain. She reaches inwardly, reaches, reaches for contact with something like herself.

The Grid isn't it.

The Grid as a physical presence reminds her of the insides of a TV, with plastic and wire physical forms that have nothing to do with how the thing hits you at the business end. She doesn't know what the Grid is but she does know that the cables and lightning rods and sculpted tree-faxes of its sensory structure are illusory or at best, misleading.

What about the children?

She can't get inside them. From the outside, they seem electrified, speeded-up, jerky. Their voices seem to be able to imitate any sound at all, however unlikely, and their music doesn't follow the rules of music. They seldom speak words and when they do she doesn't understand the language and it sounds processed, like Herbie Hancock's voice in that so-called song, 'Rockit'.

She feels disappointed by this because she thinks it means they aren't real, either, and in her loneliness she couldn't bear that.

 

I sat back. This was depressing. I ought to go to bed, I thought. Still, there would be no job to go to the next day. I could sleep late. I heard the disk drive whirring. I flipped up the control panel to turn off the computer, and more text scrolled down in a burst.

 

Then she touched one of them.

It happened while she was wandering from one well pool to another, examining the radiance of the Grid where it scored the surface of the well, and the crosshatching of shadows that traced byzantine shapes on the dull roof of sky.

She was engaged in a theoretical panic. She wasn't breathing and her heart wasn't beating that she was aware of, which robbed her of all ability to experience her own emotions. The Grid had her. It was inside her. It was free to operate, was affecting her thoughts for whatever sinister purposes of its own at this very moment, and just the idea of this made her afraid to think. She felt like she had a tapeworm in her brain.

Then the girl shot out of the well in front of her like a macabre otter. In the Gridlight the girl's skin was the dark green of an angry goddess's, and the well fluid falling off her in sheets left her polished to a high shine, like a dressage horse on show day. She uttered an inarticulate noise, her tongue thrashing in her mouth, and snapped her fingers in Serge's face. Serge, or whatever Serge had become, reached out reflexively and seized the girl's wrist.

It was warm. It was sinewy, and the veins pulsed as they bridged the tendons. The Grid, too, pulsed with Las Vegasian enthusiasm, slave to the light and the random. And Serge's heart shuddered into action. Blood drummed in her ears. Saliva moved at the tip of her tongue. She took a startled, fiery breath.

The girl was deep in Serge's personal space, which normally extended to a radius of several feet beyond her physical body. She got all up in Serge's face and cried, 'Ghaad-d-d-aaaag-huh-huh!' The utterance went on for several seconds before Serge shoved the girl away with a frightened violence.

'Get off me!' Serge croaked. 'Quit playing Night of the Living Dead. I'm sorry, OK? Shit happens. I'm sorry for what you are. I'm sorry I'm grossed-out by you. I shouldn't be, right? Now I'm one of you, we're all one big screwed-up family'

She sat down and put her head in her hands. That didn't help. Instead of not beating at all, now her heart was beating too fast and her breathing coming too quick and too toxic. With real physical panic on the verge of claiming her, she pulled a Bilbo Baggins and groped in her pockets. She was hoping for a Snickers actually, but she had given her last one to Gonzalez.

There was something else in her pocket.

It was a metal oblong, narrow and as long as her hand. It had little rectangular holes all along its length. It was heavy, but partially hollow. There was a spiky thing with a knob coming out of one end. It had had a brand name, something beginning with a K, but she'd rubbed it out. She remembered doing that, when she first came here. She remembered playing it, to remind herself of the smell of sage.

She blew into it experimentally. A tune started up without her planning it; she felt she was listening more than she was playing, pouring the sound over herself. The sound was bringing back her world, pulling her memories up by their roots.

She slid it back and forth across her hps as she blew, using her free hand to warble in front of the exit point for the blown air. For their part, the girls listened and echoed and responded with their own bizarre assortment of soundmaking.

'It ain't what I'd call bluegrass,' Serge said eventually, breaking off. 'But it keeps me breathing, don't it?'

And she played some more. The dead and terrible feeling started to recede. Music always did that: made the world less a collection of passive objects being manipulated by people, and more a living vein of time packaged in many shapes and forms. She realized this now and, in the same moment, she understood something about the Grid. Its very refusal to be nailed down in object form made it musical. The Grid held the line, or curve, or membrane, or dodecahedron, between the possible and the actual. She rode inside this thought like it was a racecar changing direction at 180 m.p.h. until she lost control of it and it broke up.

The sound was all around her now. It issued not from mouths, but from air. Her little harmonica sounded plaintive and weird in the Grid's sonic clutch.

She didn't dare stop.

This playing was Serge swimming in the Grid's sound. It was the only way she had to hold herself together in the rapids of time and position. There were no words for what was happening through her soundmaking. It was not about food or sleep or sex or fighting or helping or communicating, even. It wasn't about exchanging information. It was about not flying apart into smithereens. Not giving in to the undifferentiated wasteland. Not being an unperson. Yet.

She thought: Yes. Music is the faultline. Music is the crack in the egg, the vibration of birth, the fulfillment of chickenhood, funky or otherwise.

Funky or otherwise? Dipshit.

She put the harmonica down. She felt exhausted. But she was remembering who she had been.

'I know what you're thinking,' she said. As one their faces swiveled to her, as flowers to a light source. 'You're thinking you can hog-tie me with a length of my own filtration tubing, then get hold of my Swatch and do your funky bring-out-your-dead thing with it in the well.'

Then she laughed.

'See, I know you're thinking that because that's what I would do, and y'all are just like me. Well, half me. If y'all had your daddy's impulsive streak y'all would've tried it by now already.'

She shook her head.

'Six would shit himself if he knew.

'Do you guys understand what I'm saying or what?

'It sure would be easier on me if there was just one of you. I feel real outnumbered especially the way y'all are just staring at me.'

One golem sat down. The others slipped away among the branches. She didn't know if they had dematerialized or were just hiding.

'We-hell,' she barked nervously. 'So you do understand. Wuh-ho.

'OK, well, I got some questions.

'Why don't I feel hungry? Why don't I have to pee?

'Am I dead? Am I one of you and if so, like, what am I supposed to do now?

'Is there, like, an orientation or something?'

She waited a while after each of these questions. The child was watching her closely, but Serge could not read her expression. The Grid kept humming and crackling restlessly.

'So you don't want to talk.' Serge's voice took on an authoritative tone. It was as if she resented having shown her vulnerability and now had to make up for it by coming over all General Patton-ish.

'You know,' Serge said, pausing for effect and to hawk and spit into the well. 'If this was a TV movie we'd all be coming to terms with our differences and getting our family values up to speed here. We'd be talking it over and I'd be uncovering some damn, like, gruff fondness for y'all. You'd come up to me with a bunch of Grid-flowers or some sh*t and I'd start crying and say I'm sorry I didn't have you even though I'm not and hell, who knows, we might even hug, and sh*t. I'd probably like that. No chestnuts, I really would. I want to solve this, you guys got to believe me. But the way this is going I

can't see that happening. I guess I'm just not getting any cuddle factor off you guys whatsoever. What I see is me, dead, and you guys going on being. . . weird. . . forever. Just in and out of that well, never growing up, never growing old, never dying. I can't put my finger on exactly why that is more of a dead-dog bummer than me being dead, but somehow it is. Somehow just picturing that picture makes me want to puke up a lung.'

The girl got up and started to move off through the Grid. The others were visible in the shadows, joining her, climbing away. They were leaving her behind. She didn't want to be alone.

'It's just too ugly,' said Serge. 'And it's too weird, and I'm not doing it.'

But they were disappearing, and soon she would be alone. She sat there for a short while, listening to her persistent heart and the fast ticking in her chest that sounded suspiciously like a bomb, and pretty soon she sprang up and followed them. She could smell the Grid urging her on, dictating on a cellular level. It was in her veins, in the tide of her heart now. Her heart that these half-life children had started again after what should have been a final silence.

'It's obscene,' said Serge. 'I don't like it.'

 

They took her to the place where the missile had fallen. It didn't look the same to her now. She was still aware of all the misfit equipment arranged above the dust bowl, but the importance of the human artifacts seemed reduced in her new eyes. She noticed now that the Grid was woven into a spiderweb, a concentric series of irregular rings crosshatched with pulsing beams of something forever caught in a state halfway between solid matter and sheer light. And she knew what had happened because the Grid's memory was a part of Serge: it lay in the bottom of her lungs, the coming of the MF missile with intent to destroy all life at the logic mines and being instead itself pulled down by the defensive system that these little girls had created.

Oh, they had built it, for sure. Six would have provided that aptitude in his ejaculate.

They had sacrificed miles of the Grid's sinew, wedded it to stolen stereo components and transistors, poached body parts thrown in for good measure; and now by the will of the Grid, whatever that was, the dead zone was coming alive in some sneaky and hard-to-fathom way.

The girls went down into the dust, proud of their creation.

She looked at them, jerky little Sergettes with music around them like a smell.

She was no longer wanting to have them exterminated.

She was well and truly screwed. What good was she, Captain Bonny Serge, with the Grid leading her around by the nose, literally? Information hung in the air. It thrummed in the branches. It simmered in the well. She was just another storehouse, a mobile one, but a member of the club now all the same.

'Holy Poobah,' said Serge. 'I'll never be just me again. I'll never be an individual. From here on out, I'm always a part of something else, something alive.'

She paused, chewing her lip.

'I don't like that.'

'You always were a part of something else. You were never you. That was an illusion.' Serge jumped.

One of them was nearby, watching her.

Serge whispered, 'Did you say something?'

'You ever see a stranded starfish?' The voice of her undead daughter was thin and clear. It carried Serge's accent like a strong odor. 'Just layin' there on the beach, out of his element? All flat and useless. It's sad.'

Serge stared. The kid had picked up the image out of Serge's childhood memories and played it back to her. The kid was inside her thoughts. Serge was laid right the way open, eviscerated like roadkill to a crow. Still she resisted.

She said: 'A starfish can't feel sad. He can't even think.'

'If a starfish was part of the Grid, then he could be sad. But he wouldn't have to be, because—'

'Because he'd never be stranded, he'd be part of the Grid, yeah I know. Sounds like a friggin' cult to me.'

'It ain't no cult. It's just a friggin' reality. Mom.'

'Since when you talk?'

The girl shrugged. 'Since you need us to. You didn't like the music. Even though it was like taking a bath inside and you needed it. You want to play human being. We can do that, until you see it's going nowhere and give up.'

'I never give up,' said Serge, but her words were hollow. 'What the hell are you guys, anyways?'

'There isn't a word. Union you express as marriage, two units producing a third but none of them ever really touching or changing each other. There is no behavior you've ever seen that describes us. We are the weaving, the woven. We are the river: that which divides and that which collects and transforms itself on the axes of time and distance. We move in and out of each other and our home because there is no such separation for us. We can make you. We can take you apart. And you can do the same, now. If you allow it. But you hold fast to your old patterns. You cannot forget.'

Serge considered this. Then she said:

'Does my ray gun still work?'