The Universe of Things

Short Fiction
by
Gwyneth Jones

Aqueduct Press

PO Box 95787

Seattle wa 99145-2787

www.aqueductpress.com

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The Universe of Things

Print Copyright © 2011 by Gwyneth Jones

Digital Copyright © 2011 by Gwyneth Jones

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Digital ISBN:  978-1-933500-65-2

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Cover: Microcosm poster "The History of the Universe"
by permission of CERN, Geneva 23, Switzerland.
CERN-DI-9108002 ©CERN Geneva

Book Design by Kathryn Wilham

Acknowledgements

original publication list

“In The Forest Of The Queen,” Eclipse (1) 2007; ed Jonathan Strahan, Nightshade Books USA

“Total Internal Reflection,” Nature 403, 707 (17th Feb 2000)

“Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland,” Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex, ed Ellen Datlow, Ace Books, NY, April 1997

“The Universe of Things,” New Worlds 3, ed David Garnett, Gollancz, London, 1993

“Blue Clay Blues,” Interzone, UK, Aug 1992

“Grazing The Long Acre,” Interzone, UK, January 1998

“Collision,” When It Changed, ed Geoff Ryman, Comma Press, Manchester, September 2009

“One Of Sandy’s Dreams,” The Drabble Project, eds Meades & Wake, Beccon Publications, UK April 1988

“Gravegoods,” Interzone, UK Sept/Oct 1989

“La Cenerentola,” Interzone, UK, Oct 1998

“Grandmother’s Footsteps,” Walls of Fear, ed Kathryn Cramer, William Morrow & Co. NY, Sept 1990

“The Earlier Crossing,” The Last Minute Book: A Bumper Anthology of East Sussex Writing, ed Richard Crane, University of Sussex, 1995

“The Eastern Succession,” IASFM, Feb 1988

“The Princess, the Thief and the Cartesian Circle,” Crank! 1, ed Bryan Cholfin, Broken Mirrors Press, NY, 1993

“Identifying The Object,” Interzone, UK, Dec 1990 as "Forward Echoes"

Table of Contents

Introduction by Steven Shaviro

In the Forest of the Queen

Total Internal Reflection

Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland

The Universe of Things

Blue Clay Blues

Grazing the Long Acre

Collision

One of Sandy’s Dreams

Gravegoods

La Cenerentola

Grandmother’s Footsteps

The Early Crossing

The Eastern Succession

The Thief, the Princess, and the Cartesian Circle

Identifying the Object

Introduction

by Steven Shaviro

In “The Universe of Things,” the title story of this collection, an auto mechanic has an encounter with an alien. This is not, in itself, an extraordinary occurrence. For in the story, the open presence of aliens on Earth is a given. “The Universe of Things” is set in the space of Gwyneth Jones’s “Aleutian” trilogy — a series of novels exploring a near-future Earth that is visited, colonized, and ultimately abandoned by an alien humanoid race whose technologies are superior to our own. The Aleutian novels and stories trace a history of prolonged alien contact. The presence of these strangers is traumatic and disturbing; and yet, through its long duration, it comes to be woven into the habits and assumptions of everyday human life. So there is nothing especially startling about the fact that, one day, an alien comes to the auto mechanic to get its vehicle fixed. (I said “its,” but I just as well might have said “her” — the uncertainty of gender pronouns, when it comes to the aliens, is itself an important feature of the world that Jones presents to us.) An alien’s visit to an auto repair shop is not something that happens every day. But in the world of the story, it is well within the bounds of possibility. When the alien enters the shop, we see the human customers “pretending, in their English way, that nothing special had happened.” The mechanic himself tries to pretend. He struggles to give the appearance of treating the alien just has he would any other customer. But really, he is both excited and flustered by being visited by one of “them.” The story tracks the mechanic’s changing reactions, both to the alien itself, and to the culture and technics of the alien’s civilization.

Not all the stories in this volume are set in the Aleutian universe. But they all deal, in one way or another, with experiences of difference. There are differences in gender and culture, in age and social class; there are differences in habits, in basic assumptions, and in forms of life. There are differences in technological ability and access, as well. These differences constitute both a barrier and an opportunity. They always need to be negotiated, in one way or another. The real subject of Jones’s fiction — as of much science fiction — is precisely the negotiation of such differences. In Jones’s fiction, this is never easy. Her novels and stories never portray an unambiguous, genocidal struggle to the death, in the manner of War of the Worlds or Starship Troopers. But they also never give us the cozy multicultural “We-Are-the-World” benevolence of anything like Star Trek’s Federation of Planets. Instead, Jones’s novels and stories cover the uncomfortable ground of the in between. Hers is a world of compromises, second choices, ambivalent responses, and unintended betrayals.

The stories in this volume range from the mundane (a young woman hitchhiking in post-Communist Eastern Europe, in “Grazing the Long Acre”) to the horrific (“Grandmother’s Footsteps,” a kind of revisionist haunted house story), passing through fable (“The Thief, The Princess, and the Cartesian Circle”), fantasy (“The Eastern Succession”), and post-apocalyptic science fiction (“Blue Clay Blues”). But for all their range, Jones’s stories always convey a sense of differences that are ultimately irreconcilable. Competing interests and divergences in outlook cannot be wished away; they cannot be neatly reduced to some common denominator; they cannot be narrated to a satisfying conclusion. What’s more, Jones forces us to be aware of power differentials; when genders or cultures or habits or philosophies come into conflict, they never do so on an even playing field. “Any interaction with another person involves some kind of jockeying for power, dickering over control” (“Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland”).

In all these stories, the characters are forced into some sort of accommodation. But they are also left with the lingering sense that this accommodation is unjust and unsatisfying. Every accomplishment also marks a failure — because we remain oppressively aware that we could have done better. As a feminist writer, Jones refuses to accept compromises that leave gender inequities in place — even as she recounts the stories of such compromises and recognizes how they may well have staved off something worse. And as a science fiction writer, Jones shows deep awareness of how provisional, and fragile, all our acceptances and reconciliations can be, for there are always new potentials, new cultural or technological disruptions in the offing. Jones envisions a future that is different enough from the present that we are forced to recognize the contingency — and changeability —of the things we take most for granted. This future is resolutely non-utopian. Gender and class oppressions persist beyond all reason — just as they do in our supposedly enlightened, liberal present.

In “The Universe of Things,” the auto mechanic is both intrigued and frightened by the differences that the alien and its culture bring to him. These differences are all the more perturbing, in that they come in the course of a routine, everyday encounter: the request to repair a bit of earth-standard technology. The mechanic fixes automobiles; he retains a certain “mystique of craftsmanship” about his work, despite the fact that nearly all this work is done automatically, by machines. These machines make him feel redundant, just as the presence of the aliens somehow makes him feel redundant. In any case, the mechanic does not quite know how to treat the alien. He is both fascinated by it and embarrassed by his own fascination. He wants to treat it the same as everyone else, and he wants to give it special treatment. He covets its presence, and he is also a bit frightened by it. He wants it to stay forever, and he wants it to go away. All these attitudes make him feel vaguely guilty, since he knows that he is not treating the alien, face to face, in the way that he would treat any other sentient, living person.

The mechanic feels confused and ashamed, when faced with the alien’s request for technological assistance. This is not just because the aliens’ own technology is superior to Earth technology. It is also because of the way that the alien technology is so different. Our own technology, no matter how powerful, is mechanistic and reductive. We cannot help feeling that it is dead, where we are alive. The aliens’ technology, on the other hand, is itself alive, both literally and figuratively. The aliens’ tools are biological extrusions of themselves: “they had tools that crept, slithered, flew, but they had made these things… They built things with bacteria… Bacteria which were themselves traceable to the aliens’ own intestinal flora, infecting everything.” In consequence, “the aliens could not experience being a-part. There were no parts in their continuum: no spaces, no dividing edges.” They are alive in the midst of an entirely “living world.” We, to the contrary, cannot escape our Cartesian legacy: the feeling that we are alone in our aliveness, trapped in a world of dead, or merely passive, matter.

The story’s climax comes when the mechanic decides to turn off the automated machines and repair the alien’s car as a craftsman would: by himself, with his own tools. He has an epiphany — or an hallucination. He experiences, for a moment, what the aliens’ “living world” is like: “He stared at the spanner in his hand until the rod of metal lost its shine. Skin crept over it; the adjustable socket became a cup of muscle, pursed like an anus, wet lips drawn back by a twist on the tumescent rod.” When the world comes alive, it becomes obscene and pornographic. Existence is suffocating and unbearable. Everything is suffused by “living slime…full of self, of human substance.” This is what happens when you have “succeeded in entering the alien mind, seen the world through alien eyes.” The mechanic is terrified and nauseated; all he wants is to return to the security of the human world, a world in which objects are mere things, safely distant from us, entirely dead.

“The Universe of Things” is a parable of sorts, although its final import remains ambiguous. Is the story a lament for the failures and limitations of the human imagination, unable to transcend its parochial point of view? Is it a warning against the hubris of masculine presumption, maintaining its own control at the price of murdering the outside world, reducing it to a meaningless agglomeration of inert, lifeless matter? (The “outside world” here could also be read as a male projection of the “feminine.”) Does the alien vision suggest a way of living otherwise? Is the experience of a vital, animated world something that we might embrace, instead of fleeing it in revulsion and horror? The mechanic remembers his experience as an encounter with “an inimical Eden: a treasure that he could no more enjoy than he could crawl back into the womb.” But must this Eden remain inimical, and must we understand it in such tellingly gendered terms? Jones does not give us the answers to any of these questions. She leaves us in doubt, and perhaps also in wonder.

In the Forest of the Queen

To Aymon Bock the Montsec American Monument seemed inflated: a Doughboys’ monster donut, dominating a landscape that really didn’t need any more reminders of war and death. Surely the hectares of white crosses, another thick-sown field of them every time you turned a bend, were sufficient? The only way to escape the thing was to drive up there, which Aymon and his wife Viola duly did. They left the car, climbed a momentous flight of steps, and walked around the circuit of massive fluted columns. Built in 1930, damaged in WWII, restored in 1948.

“Designed by Egerton Swartwout,” remarked Viola. “Sounds like a German name, and it looks like Nazi architecture; isn’t that ironic.”

“The Doughboys didn’t fight Nazis. They were here in 1918; they fought one of the last great battles of the Great War, down there below —”

Viola sighed and nodded. She knew all about the Doughboys of the American Expeditionary Force, their gallant part in licking Kaiser Bill, the various rationales suggested for that nickname (the dumpling shape of an Infantryman’s buttons, the dust of battle, a derogatory reference to apprentice bakers’ boys…). The Doughboys were the reason, or one of the reasons, for this pilgrimage to northeastern France.

The only other visitor was a stooped young man in mis-matched tweed jacket and tan chinos, laden with camera equipment, who did not have kin remembered here; he was just interested in the AEF. So Aymon was in his element: pointing out his great-grandfather’s name, explaining the strategic importance of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, General John J. Pershing’s objectives, the difficulties that beset the American boys in their biggest operation on French soil — and Viola was released to gaze in peace at the landscape of what had been the “St. Mihiel Salient.” The wooded ridges, the lush green, lake-dotted plain, the tide of forest lapping at its shore.

Aymon remembered that his penchant for talking to strangers tended to get him into trouble with Viola, and he wanted her on his side, today of all days. He bid the young man from Kentucky a courteous goodbye, before he’d even scratched the surface of his knowledge, and came to join her.

“It looks so peaceful now.”

“Did you know,” said Viola, “this is still one of the most sparsely populated areas in Europe? Right here, practically next door to Paris, and all those big, packed, developed cities? It’s a boneyard, a graveyard, a derelict munitions dump. I warned you. Didn’t I warn you? The eastern flank of La Belle France is just battlefield after battlefield. Who’d want to come here, work here? How do you plan to attract the good people?”

“Money,” said Aymon. “Space, freedom, natural beauty. You’re so wrong: this location is perfect. We’ll be fighting them off with sticks —”

Aymon Bock was an extremely wealthy man. He’d been loaded before he was thirty, avoided getting his fingers burned in a long career of daring start-ups; and finally, in what he still felt was youthful middle age, he wanted to give something back. He looked on the grinning slackers who were this generation’s overnight billionaires, not with envy but with trepidation, and felt his long-ago hippie roots stirring. He meant to do something good, and since this region of France was (according to family legend) his ancestral home, he had chosen the forests of Argonne for the site of his Foundation. Having a French son-in-law also helped; though Jean-Raoul had been almost as hard to convince as Viola herself.

“There’s another Great War going on, Vi. The world’s in crisis; don’t you understand that? The Bock Foundation is going to be a beacon in the storm: here, where my people came from. I’m the one to do it, I know I am. I have the experience, the talent for spotting ventures that will fly, and for hiring the guys, the scientists, the technologists, who are really going places. I’m tired of all the defeatism, the denial and plain lies. It’s time to get organized, pull together, and see this Global Warming, Climate Change bogey for what it is: a dazzling opportunity. A new industrial revolution.”

“You’re such a romantic. If you want to be a war hero like your great-grand daddy was, why don’t you set up a Sustainable Technology Center in the Sudan? Or closer to home, in Down South, Black Hispanic USA, the newest Desperate Developing Nation on the block?”

“I give a heap of money away to good causes, Vi. You know I do. But it’s pouring water in a bucket full of holes: and you know that too. A man like me, with my expertise, is better employed turning out new buckets.”

“Those Developing Nations,” remarked Viola, heading for the steps, “can be such a hassle to deal with. Where there’s human suffering, there’s dirty politics. Business dies, and God forbid Aymon Bock should get his fingers burned at last.”

“I’m doing this for you, too. It’s going to reboot your career. You’re going to design for me.”

“Now you’re talking crazy. Designers have to be cool, and middle-aged women are not cool. Only youth is cool, in a woman.”

“That’s ridiculous! That’s antediluvian thinking; this is the Age of the Grey Cougars. What about Vivienne Westwood?”

“She’s in fashion and she’s pushing seventy. Thanks a lot.”

“Hell, did I say the Bock Foundation? I misspoke myself. It’s going to be the Viola Canning Bock Foundation.”

Viola laughed, touched in spite of herself. Say what you like about Aymon Bock, he could do irony: he could laugh at himself. She took a vintage Hermès scarf from her $6,000 shoulder bag and tied it over her hair, Grace Kelly style. He liked to drive the gun-metal Aston Martin he’d chosen for this trip with the top down and the wind in his golf-tan wrinkles.

Of course he did.

She was a disappointment to her husband because she’d taken a career break, long ago, and never gotten around to mending it. She couldn’t convince him that it would be madness for her to return to the fray: a wealthy woman, playing with her husband’s newest toy. She’d be a laughing stock. But Ay’s own “career” was in the same state. The money produced itself now, without Aymon’s assistance: churning out mounds and mounds of cash, like that infernal salt mill in the fairytale. The money-maker and his wife were over. They were on the down slope, and this eco-technology fantasy just proved it.

“We’re barely middle-aged,” cried Aymon, as they drove away. “We have half our lives ahead!” And went off into one of his one-man brainstorms: Microgeneration. Virtual Tourism. The billions to be made in the development of efficient recycling. Get the basic patents, the ones that are going to change the entire world… We are both drowning, thought Viola, fully aware that her age was no excuse for anomie. We are both lost; we’ve always been lost. It’s just that Ay doesn’t know it. And deep inside her, like a tiny stone fetus curled around her heart, she felt what she might have been: shining, shining.

Discontent was all she had left, her only proof that life could have been better, could have been wonderful —

Down on the plain, when they reached the boundary of Aymon’s new real estate, there was certainly a sense of crossing some kind of crucial border. The wide fields of ethanol-fated corn (where Aymon muttered about the dumb European energy policy, not yet woken up to the exploded concept of biofuels) gave way to water meadow; then suddenly they faced a wall of trees. There was no signage. The road surface, equally suddenly, deteriorated to dirt, with a few scabby patches of asphalt.

“Are you sure this is the right place?”

Aymon had been enlarging on the fortunate partnership of Jean-Raoul and Madeleine. Their daughter the biochemist, brilliant and flighty, who’d taken up computer science as a sideline, was currently spending her time modeling neurotransmitters, out in the wild blue yonder. Jean-Raoul Martigny, however, was a scientist with a sound business mind, always took Aymon’s advice, and understood that sustainable dies if it means non-profit-making.

He paused in this pleasurable rant — leaving Maddy with her head in the clouds, Raoul with his feet on the ground — and punched up the help menus on the dashboard map.

“Heck. Something’s wrong with this —”

The Aston Martin was a beautiful car and as guilt-free as a classic performance roadster can well be, but its subsystems had proved unreliable. Or else there was something in the air, interfering with the signal…Aymon could feel the prickling heaviness, an electric storm on the way.

There was an old man watching them from the edge of the trees.

A welcome sight, in the ringing, silent emptiness of this countryside, where you could hardly believe that crowded old Western Europe was all around. Aymon pulled up, meaning to try some diagnostics. He leaned out, and made his inquiry. The old fellow set down his axe — he really was carrying a long-handled, ancient-looking axe — and came ambling over, cautious of his joints as the Tin Woodsman.

“Hi,” said Aymon, ever trustful of the universal power of the English language. “Would you mind telling us where we are, sir?”

The old fellow stared at the foreign car as if he’d never seen anything like it and said something Aymon didn’t catch at all, except that the word forêt was in there. Viola explained the problem, in her passable French. The Tin Woodsman scratched his seamed and bristly chin, peered into the car, and looked long at their GPS screen, shaking his head and murmuring: a voluble excursion, presumably in the local dialect, from which Viola could only snag “unbelievable!” She tried again, and managed to learn that he’d never heard of the projected Bock Foundation and didn’t recognize the number of the minor Departmental Road they were looking for —

“But there are roads through the forest?” she persisted, still in French.

The old man looked completely blank, a senior moment, then he spoke again, in a careful, strangely-accented English. “There are plenty of paths.” He smiled. “Perhaps too many. You can go in, easily. But you may not come out.” He nodded, pleased with his joke, and went back to his axe.

“Let’s go,” snapped Viola. “We were heading in the right direction five minutes ago. And we have the paper maps.”

“What a damned language,” remarked Aymon, consolingly, as they passed into the embrace of the trees and the world behind disappeared. “Don’t feel bad. It’s okay in print, but I can never understand a word when they start talking. Beyond restaurant dialogue, anyhow.”

“I understand French. I can’t do quaint dialects.”

“Yeah, well. They always remember a little English in the end.”

The forest had a placid, timeless air of expectation: as if it had been waiting for them and welcomed them with quiet satisfaction. The trees were poplar and ash, oak, beech, and hazel, and other nameless European species. None of any great size. The understory was a mass of climbers, vines, briars, and ferns: but there was nothing sinister, no dripping, ghostly lichens. Still no signage, and the GPS screen was a fuzz of grey. Aymon grinned at his wife and took a turn at random down another of the dirt-paved tracks. He drove slowly, appreciating the experience. Strangely, although the driving surface was horrible, the broad verges were evenly shorn to the height of a healthy suburban lawn. Maybe the Tin Woodsman came down here weekly, on a horse-drawn mower —

“Are you trying to get us lost? I should be throwing out a trail of breadcrumbs,” Viola commented, uneasily.

“I want to get a feel for the place, never been here in the flesh before. We’ll meet a landmark of some kind soon. If we don’t, there’s a compass on the dash. You’re sure we have the right numero in that map folder of yours?”

Viola was not sure. She kept paper maps out of nostalgia for the old days, when she’d been the map-navigating queen of their travels; but she’d come to rely on that fickle modern technology… She decided, in the interests of marital harmony, that she wouldn’t check the folder yet.

Aymon had been noticing long, regular shapes among the trees by the roadside: mostly wrapped in some kind of tarp. Then he saw the numbered tags, like mailboxes without the mailbox, and it dawned on him that he was seeing cords of firewood. The forest belonged to the commune; to the local people. It was not farmed for timber, it was portioned out, household by household, for winter fuel; sound energy policy for a change. This was one of the rights he’d agreed to respect, for an interim period, while he investigated the issue. But now the woodpiles, the dismembered flesh of the wood laid out like that, right under the noses of the living trees, were somehow very disturbing. He found himself wondering how the forest felt about the arrangement. Death by inches, endlessly repeated. Reminded him of the story of the hillbilly with the three-legged pig.

“A hog as good as that, you don’t eat him all at once…”

Viola felt nothing, except a practical concern about the coming storm — something in the air, not exactly oppressive, but electric. She looked up. The sun was invisible; the flowing band of sky was cloudless, a billowing deep blue canopy, a bride’s train, a robe… At last they reached a crossing where several tracks met around an open green crown. Aymon pulled up, carefully parallel to the mown grass, as if he feared a sudden rush of traffic. The sun was still invisible, the electric sky without a cloud, the forest vistas unbroken. A jaybird flashed across the clearing and called loudly, one indignant note. They smiled at each other.

“The old guy said we were ‘À L’Orée de la Forêt de la Reine,’” said Viola. “On the threshold of the Forest of the Queen. So we’re in the right woods, unless there are multiple Queen’s Forests around here. Which queen was it, Ay? When did she reign? What was her name?”

“I don’t remember. Could be Marie-Antoinette for all I know. The history’s on file, it’s in the documents, we can find out. Let’s take a walk.”

“Not out of sight of the car.”

“Okay, okay… Hey, I have my pocket knife, I’ll cut flashes on the trees. It’s just a small, suburban, European forest, honey. It won’t bite.”

“Oh no? I bet there are mosquitoes.”

“So bring your repellent.”

Aymon didn’t suffer from mosquito bites. Viola hated them, and hated the smell of any effective repellent, but she shared his mood. There was something about this place that made you want to let go and drift… They took one of the tracks, deeper into the world of green. There were mosquitoes. She stopped to anoint her bare legs and stooped lower, curious about the texture of the turf. It didn’t seem to have been mown recently, every shining blade was pristine, curved like a baby’s fingernail —

“What’s the matter?”

She was startled at the edge in his voice. Was the forest, like Viola, a disappointment? Or was he spooked? She felt a little spooked herself: the enticing lethargy had a thread of tension in it, a tug of adrenalin. An insect, a butterfly with pretty marbled wings, looked up at her from the grass blades under her nose and seemed to wink one of its faceted eyes.

What the hell — ?

“A butterfly. A really tiny one, very pretty. It’s gone now.”

“I wonder who does the mowing,” muttered Aymon. “And why. What for? I don’t see this as a picnic spot —”

But the reproach of the living harvest, those piles of dead limbs, had aroused his defiance, so he proposed they leave the path. Viola followed him without a murmur, though she was hardly dressed for it. She prided herself on her docility: it was one way of dealing with constant low-level despair. Aymon could complain of her negativity, her lack of enthusiasm, her sarcasm. He could never call her high maintenance.

She picked her way, getting scratched, hoping this would soon be over. Aymon kept stopping and peering at bark, examining leaves. She knew he was looking for an unusual bug to match the “pretty butterfly” he’d missed. It was one of his strengths, maybe all wealthy men were the same. He was always playing to win, every second, on every scale. It could be exhausting. But it was Viola who first noticed that the leaf mould underfoot was alive with hopping, creeping dark-skinned little frogs.

“My God.”

“So many of them —” whispered Viola, horrified, afraid to take another step, repulsed at the thought of carnage on her shoe soles.

“My God,” breathed Aymon again. “Now I call that a good omen. So much for the world-wide catastrophic decline of amphibians.”

He managed to catch one of the critters without crushing it and held it up to his eye, threadlike limbs dangling. It had a pointed snout and two green stripes down its crooked back that glittered when they caught the light and disappeared in shadow. Its irises were striated gold around the slippery, bulging pupils. The frog grinned toothlessly, and Aymon laughed. His unease vanished. He felt innocent and adventurous, like a little boy —

“These little guys are having a ball.”

“My watch has stopped,” announced Viola, rummaging in her oversized, arm-and-a-leg purse. “Damn, and my cell seems to have run out of charge, however that happened. What time is it?”

“About mid-afternoon. It doesn’t matter, does it?”

She looked up. He’d dropped the frog and his hands were dug so deeply into his pants pockets that both his wrists were hidden. She guessed at once that his watch had stopped too, and a chill ran down her spine.

“Where’s your cell, Ay?”

“Calm down honey, what’s the panic? It’s in the car.”

They could not see the car. Every direction looked the same.

Something has happened, thought Viola. I felt it, when we drove in here. Wild thoughts went through her mind. Hostage-takers with some kind of ray, killing their digital communications. Electro-Magnetic Pulse, the Third World War, UFOs, a natural disaster —

“We left the fucking car wide open,” she said. “These trees all look identical, and there’s just about to be a cloudburst.”

“We can retrace our steps. You stay where you are, marking our last known position, I’ll cast around for our footprints.”

He cast around, examining the leaf mould and the creepers. Viola doubted if even Aymon could suddenly acquire finely-honed tracker skills, from nowhere. She stayed put because she hated the idea of taking another step into chaos, and stared all around her: intently, slowly —

“Aymon! There’s light over there! Sunlight, it must be the clearing where we left the car!”

“No, it’s not, honey. It can’t be. You’re pointing downhill, we were coming downhill. We left the car on kind of a hilltop, don’t you remember?”

“I can see buildings.”

She was right. Aymon could see the leaf-broken outlines too: hard to say what kind of buildings, they could be in ruin… Defiantly, silently daring her to laugh, he took out his pocket knife and sliced a rectangle of white bark from the pink flesh of a birch tree beside him. “I’m going to go on doing that. So we can get back to here, whatever else.”

“Go ahead. Be a vandal.”

The sunlight lay over the valley of a clear brown stream that ran between beds of flowering rushes. Fine trees, untrammeled by close neighbors, grew on the natural turf on either side. There was a footpath, well-maintained if not well-trodden, and the buildings they’d seen were close. They saw white weatherboard and cranky little gabled roofs, a crooked white wooden bridge, the glimmer and the laughter of a modest weir —

“It’s an old mill,” said Aymon.

“So now you know where we are?”

He shrugged. “If you’d taken an interest, you’d know there are several of them on the property, all disused.”

“Oh my God, look at that!” cried Viola.

But what she’d taken for an exquisite glass statue, a naked, transparent young woman crouching in the stream, was gone at a second glance. All she could see was a mass of iridescent, blue-green damselflies, demoiselles, darting over the surface. The cloud of wings suggesting, maybe, the turn of a girl’s smooth shoulder, the waves of her hair —

“How perfectly lovely,” she finished, uncertainly.

“Told you.” Aymon beamed, striding along. I will make her happy, he thought. I will do one great deed before I die, and she’ll be proud. “I told you. This place is a dream. It’s going to be great, inspirational, relaxed: our people will love to work here.”

He was somewhat piqued to discover that the “disused mill” seemed to be in use, as a shabby old-fashioned forest information point. They wandered the covered porches, looking at quaint, half-effaced picture boards. Forest animals, birds, flowers —

“Did you know about this, Ay?”

“I don’t exactly remember.”

He was looking for a map of the forest (tourist guide shack like this has to have a map, even if it’s out of date). He couldn’t find one, but he discovered that if he looked at the picture boards directly, with attention, they changed. The animals, birds, and plants came alive; he couldn’t put it any more clearly. As if something extra was passing from the vaguely suggested images directly through his eyes to his brain. They were more than alive, they were conscious, these images were the creatures themselves, looking back at him, wise and wicked, fun to know, but by no means entirely friendly —

He was fascinated, and passed from one array to another for several minutes (for time without measure) before he noticed how weird this was and began to get scared. What the hell have I eaten, drunk, smoked today: without knowing it? Was there something in the slimy skin of those tiny frogs? Some hallucinogen that passed through my skin?

A door opened, and a young woman came out, smiling. She wore a full-sleeved, black, belted smock and cap, with a white bib and collar at the throat — like an old-fashioned nun; except that her slim brown legs and feet were bare. She greeted them in pretty French, which for once they found easy to understand, announced herself as the gardienne of this Center, and ushered them inside. The room she showed them was a store, selling natural forest products: toiletries, herbal infusions, food, and candy: not the usual tourist lines, but genuinely unusual, quirky products. Viola was charmed. Aymon followed her around, grinning loosely — feeling young again.

“Do you take cash or cards?” asked Viola, hoping she had enough euros. There was no sign of a paypoint or a till, nothing to suggest the twenty-first century at all.

The little gardienne dipped her head. “We accept all the usual kinds of currency or credit. Would Madame and Monsieur like to take something to drink? We have tables on the terrace.”

She brought them eglantine tea in the souvenir forest china, which was patterned in blue-green, iridescent as a damselfly’s wings. They were the only customers on the rustic terrace above the weir. It was the kind of place, thought Viola, where you want to be the only customers, you want to have discovered a hidden treasure. But it was a little disquieting.

“I wonder what happens in the other buildings.”

“I wonder where they’ve hidden the damn car park,” growled Aymon, trying to frown, to mask his drug experience. “It’s got to be around here somewhere. Hidden up in the canopy, maybe, with the big butterflies —”

Viola’s attention had been caught by a frog on a lily pad, on the water right below the rail beside their table. He was bright green all over and much larger than the minute creatures teeming on the forest floor, maybe the size of the palm of her hand. Or larger than that: it was hard to be sure of the scale of him, there was a trick of perspective —

The frog looked up, bright-eyed, beamed at her, and began to sing.

Dedans ma chaumière
Pour y vivre heureux
Combien faut-il être?
Il faut être deux…

Or rather, he began to croak: but it wasn’t a bad voice, not at all.

In my li-tel co-ttage,
what do I need there?
for to be so happy,
what I need is you…!

The words, that turned to English in her head with no effort at all, seemed so charming. And his bright eyes, his lipless, toothless grin, were so lively, so funny; and, if this wasn’t too ridiculous, decidedly sexual —

Oui ma chaumière,
Je la préfère!
Avec toi, oui avec moi
Avec toi, oui avec moi!
Au palais d’un roi…!

“I think I’ll take a little walk,” said Viola, abruptly: very startled by the feelings she was getting about that frog —

She thought she was abrupt, but thankfully Aymon didn’t seem to care. He seemed content with his own thoughts, his own daydreams, whatever was happening to him… She knew she should find the Ladies’ Room, splash her face, recover her poise. Instead, on a whim, she walked by the stream. The tender grass that had never been mown was starred with secret flowers. She knelt and dug into it with her fingers. The dirt itself was jeweled complexity, shimmering and edgy with endless life. The deeper you looked the more you saw. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere tiny knowing eyes looked back at you…

Something gleaming on the ground attracted her attention. She followed the gleam and found a golden corpse, lying as if annealed into the earth, the limbs and trunk sealed together and shining, shining: the face half-hidden by polished waves of hair. Now she had found a dead body; no wonder the forest had felt spooky. She bent for a closer look, knowing she must touch nothing, because this was a murder mystery and she would destroy the evidence. But the golden corpse sat up, the glimmering girl fled, leaving only a forest boulder; and Viola had never seen her face. Even stone is alive; stone is the mineral matrix of all life. It was the queen, she thought.

“That was the queen —” croaked the frog.

He must have followed her from the terrace. Did he really have a tiny yellow Disneyfied crown perched on his head? Could that happen? He winked at her and began to dance, hopping from one webbed, splay-toed foot to the other, singing the chorus of his French folksong, English in Viola’s head:

Oh yes, my little home!
I would prefer it,
For you and me, for you and me
For you and me, for you and me
To the pa-lace of a king!

This time she went with the feeling. She jumped into his arms, the frog grabbed her and held her tight. He became man-sized and outrageously, unamphibianly male. They were swimming in the millpool now, and a wanton, winged companion — great-eyed, androgynous and slender — hovered over them, making its wishes plain. Viola and the frog kissed and parted, Viola passed happily to the other partner. They went zooming away, over the shining surface of the water, their wings shivering in delight, hooked up en soixante-neuf, she’d never had an orgasm like it, excitement, innocence, and delight such as she hadn’t known since, since, since forever —

Life is wonderful.

“You have very old-fashioned minds,” confided the gardienne, as she handed over several exquisitely wrapped packages in a delightful raw raffia bag. “May I ask where are you from?”

“From the USA,” confessed Viola, knowing this was not always a good answer in Europe. She had raided the store. The taste of eglantine tea was still on her lips: she hoped she’d remembered to buy a box of those relaxing tisanes, she was a little hazy about the last few minutes —

“Ah!” said the gardienne, dipping her round black head, as if this explained everything (although, Viola thought, in fact the little nun was completely mystified, something lost in translation again). “Many thanks for your visit. Please come again.”

They followed the flashes Aymon had cut in tree bark, back to the “last known position,” without any trouble. Maybe their eyes were better accustomed to the veil of green now, or maybe there’d been a touch of needless panic earlier. They spotted the gun-metal Aston Martin immediately, parked in that clearing, no more than a couple hundred yards away.

“You see,” said Aymon. “We were never lost.”

Viola stood on one foot and then the other, to shake scraps of leaf mould and bark out of her sandals. “We’d better hurry. There’s going to be a thunderstorm, I can feel it.”

Aymon took his best guesses at the route out, using the compass on the dash (there was still nothing but grey fuzz on their GPS). Eventually they saw an ochre-washed cottage standing by the track, though as yet no tire marks, no vehicles, no signage, no human activity. Aymon pulled up and jumped out, eagerly. “Civilization! C’mon, you’re the linguist, you do the talking —”

But the forest grew right up to the stained, derelict walls, swamping what had been a little railed yard. “I don’t think so, Ay.”

The cottage had been walled up. The bricked door and boarded windows stared at the intruders, somehow stirring inexpressible emotions… “There’s a plaque on the wall,” said Aymon.

Viola kept her distance, nervous as wild animal. “It’s an old forester’s house,” he reported. “It’s been fitted out as a bat refuge, a kind of memorial thing; wait there’s more, think I can find out where we are.”

Aymon knew that there was a village called Boucq around here. He’d never nailed the genealogy (people who check out their family legends generally find things they wish they didn’t know); but he believed the Bocks had come from there, long ago. And here was the name itself, on this Bat Refuge plaque, but strangely, it was the English spelling…

“Let’s get back on the road. I don’t need to know about bats.”

“Did you find out where we are?”

“No. We’ll find out by driving, we have to hit a real road soon.”

She sighed, concluding that his ability to read French had betrayed him: better not press the point. They returned to the car. Aymon punched the button, at last (always reluctant to give up the freedom of the open-top). The roof performed its slick, robotic maneuver, and they looked at each other, sealed and safe. Soon after that, the GPS screen came back to life.

“Now do we know where we are?”

“Never in doubt,” said Aymon.

Almost immediately they reached a junction, and they were back in the world of traffic, of powerlines, of isolated farms and miles of corn; and the sky finally opened. But Viola felt — maybe it was the sudden attack of the rain — as if the country had changed, as if she had to start “being in France” all over again, in a much less confident key. She remembered her purchases, and couldn’t think what she’d done with them. Nothing in her purse. Where was that pretty raffia bag? Her arms ached with emptiness.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing…really.”

He kept his eyes on the streaming grey road. “Honey? Did you notice anything strange about that place we found?”

She’d have denied everything, doubting her sanity and/or the eglantine tea, but the tremor in his voice convinced her to speak. “I’m not sure. Tricks of the light, maybe. Or things I can’t explain.”

“Did you see the girl in black, the gardienne, turn into a water bird?”

“I didn’t see that. Did you see the transparent girl in the stream?”

“No. But I saw those tall pink flowers, the rushes, come alive, and turn into, er, people. What happened to you? After you followed that dragonfly?”

“Damselfly.” Viola shook her head, realizing with a shock that she wanted to tell him all about it, but not right now, not in a moving car. “I don’t want to say, not yet. Aymon, what happened to us, where have we been?”

“You mean what did we take?” he countered, with a tight grin.

The windscreen wipers fought with pounding grey battalions.

“I don’t believe that. Oh, I know we took the eglantine tea, but we were in another world before that. You know it. You and that tiny frog, the way you were, you were communing with each other. Aymon, we should compare notes. We should do it right now, before we lose our nerve, before we stop believing.”

The rain was so hard he could see nothing but the starred red tail-lights of the truck ahead of him. The two lane road was narrow, crowded, no chance to overtake. Aymon’s heart was racing, better maintain the speed of the traffic, but it felt too fast, almost uncontrollable —

Viola pressed her hand to her mouth. “In another world, my God. I’ve heard of a story like this, Ay, it’s famous… Two English women were visiting Versailles, in the nineteen twenties, no, earlier. They had a strange experience and published it. They called it ‘An Adventure.’ They believed they’d been through a timeslip, back to August 10, 1792. They’d visited the Petit Trianon in the days of Marie Antoinette, and seen the queen herself —”

“It wasn’t Marie-Antoinette.” Aymon gripped the wheel fiercely. “The Queen of that forest was not Marie-Antoinette.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. The account the authors of ‘An Adventure’ published didn’t check out. It’s famous as a hoax. But I think they’d added stuff, because something incredible had happened to them, and they, they wanted people to believe. That’s why we have to get this straight, you and I, now. Pull over, next chance you get —”

“Did you see the animal images on those boards come alive? As if they were getting directly into your brain, and looking back at you?”

“No, but I…something like that. Did you see the singing frog?”

“I’ve got a better idea. I’m going to find somewhere to pull over, a quiet spot, maybe a bar tabac. We’re going to call Piper, right now, tell her the whole thing, have her record it.”

Bette Piper was Aymon’s long time personal assistant, a very smart woman whom they both trusted implicitly.

“Yeah, yeah! Great idea, let’s do it!”

Viola felt twenty, thirty years younger. She felt as if something inside had shattered and been remade. She had a mission, a cause, this would be big, she had her own instincts, she could almost taste it. The natural world is alive, sexual, conscious, full of living spirits, I’ll write a book, a bestseller —

“The nearest I can come,” she exclaimed, imagining the tv audience, trying out her lines on him, “to putting a name on what happened to us, is to say that we visited Fairyland. That’s not adequate, but it’s the word people have used, traditionally, for the dimension we entered: where, where every flower is conscious, and nature spirits inhabit insects, animals —”

“Fairyland???” Aymon exploded, hands still locked on the wheel, eyes fixed on those blurred tail-lights. “What the fuck? You are shitting me, honey. That was a timeslip. That was my future we visited. That was the future. Shit, those notice boards: I can almost figure it. Information coded in light, direct to the cortex, and hijacking the processes of consciousness, that’s what causes that weird ‘everything is looking at me’ effect —”

“SHUT UP!” shouted Viola. “Shut up, shut up. You and your codes!”

He held the wheel, but inside he was shaking, reliving the moment when — spelling out that memorial plaque — he’d had the strangest conviction that if he read another word he’d discover the date of his own death. He knew he was right, oh God, he knew. But it was a crass error to shoot her down, far more important to get her to talk, get her experience on record: before vital clues to those unborn developments were lost —

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry, honey, calm down, didn’t mean to offend.”

“Maybe we’re both right,” whispered Viola, marveling. “Maybe the future is a fairyland, and that’s what we have glimpsed —”

A tiny voice in his ear brought Aymon up short. He gripped the wheel harder, his eyes bulging. He couldn’t make out what the voice was saying, but he could see a little figure squirming up out of the walnut fascia, a tiny face, incredibly malevolent, made of polished wood grain, a flayed body —

“Think of the consequences!” it squeaked, waving its knobby little arms. “Where is your evidence? What did you bring back? Nothing! No one will believe you. You’ll be treated as cranks! You will be ridiculed!”

Hordes more of them, a different variety, came pouring out of the strengthened glass and flew around their heads, jabbering urgently, flickering in and out of focus, liquid and abrasive.

“They will say you have ingested illegal substances, your trusted assistant will report you to the authorities, you will be ruined!”

Multicolored creatures whose bodies were ever-shifting crowns and chains came out of the door panels and the floor, and cried out, passionately —

“We are not life; we were once life, deep in the ancient fern-forest time: we are naked chemicals, stripped and crucified now. Beware, beware, Viola! Our cousins in your brain have told us this: your happiness will vanish, if you betray your lovers.”

“Don’t betray us! Don’t betray us! We never betrayed you! Cowards! Cowards!”

The Egyptian Cotton fairies danced on Aymon’s shoulder, pleading to be heard, telling him how they had been forced to ruin their mother, the good earth, and after that shame, tortured into thread —

“And think, if you are believed,” shouted the Parisian artisan leather spirits, crawling out of the sleek hide of Viola’s purse. “If your visit can be detected as changes in your brain chemistry? What then? By interfering, by trying to make it happen, you may destroy the very salvation that you have glimpsed, that you so desire, and it may never come to be —!”

Viola had succumbed to hysterics. She was trying to open the passenger door, sobbing and batting at the glass-sprites.

Never come to be, never come to be, hissed the whisper in Aymon’s ear, not a single voice but a varied choir: in fact the voices of the different materials confined in his pacemaker. He struggled to go on driving, though his heart was jumping like a jack-hammer, convinced, like his wife, that there was hope in flight… But the rain kept raining madly, the tail-lights were too close, and a party of young male deer, inspired by who knows what diablerie, decided to bolt across the road ahead of that truck, bounding from the forest margin.

“Ay!” yelled Viola, terrified out of her panic attack —

Aymon failed to apply the brakes, probably because he had already succumbed to a fatal heart attack. Viola, who had unclipped her seat belt whilst trying to escape, went through the windscreen, despite its toughness. She was technically alive when the Emergency Services arrived, but she never recovered consciousness and died on the way to the hospital.

The Woodsman put away his axe. Many members of the commune preferred to cut and stack their fuel in winter, when the trees were sleeping, but he saw no harm in being open about these things. It was all regulated: they took nothing that the trees were not ready to discard. He stood beside his tool shed (which he had cultured himself, from living timber, a proud feat), scratching his chin and pondering. Those tourists now, where exactly had they got to?

There were Centers all over the world, where anyone who wished could experience, in forest, in meadows, desert, savannah, or ocean, full communion with the woken world — or as much of that reality as they could stand. But foreign visitors who came to this oldest meeting place, the original Martigny Center of the Forest of the Queen, often had very mistaken ideas. There was no raw primeval innocence here, for the forest was not old at all. It had died and been reborn as often as France herself, and shared the character of the human culture of the region. The woken world here (a misnomer, for it was the human mind that had been woken, almost by chance, by the seductive “invention,” meant for entertainment, that had triggered a revolution) could be mischievous, bawdy, disruptive: a little dangerous to the unwary.

Tourists who arrived in the flesh irritated the Woodsman. Why could they not be content with the virtual access, which was excellent? But he thought fondly of the American couple, for the sake of that remarkable grey steed of theirs; for the sake of a past that he remembered with the nostalgia of a survivor. Nowadays, the living world could compel human beings to deal with its peoples fairly and decently. Agreements had been made, laws had been drawn up, which humanity must respect. My God, yes, the human race had learned a hard lesson, when the change first came… But even now, in the peace after the ages-long conflict, there was bitterness, and one had to take care. It must be a challenge to keep a machine like that, from the old days, happy!

And perilous.

His own car had been drowsing in a hazel thicket. He led it out and checked its skirts for burrs and prickles (its wheels were rarely deployed; they weren’t very practical for this terrain) — as he studied the satellite views of the forest and its environs, which he habitually kept open at the back of his eyes when he was guarding these gates. The grey steed was nowhere to be seen. No mark of their passage anywhere. Perhaps they had given up trying to find the Center, and left the area while his attention was elsewhere.

“After all,” he murmured, as he gave the little white car a gentle touch on the wheel, to guide it across the water meadows — where it tended to shy at the rise of a heron, or the curiosity of the cattle. “It was a very old map.”

June 2007

Total Internal Reflection

For Kim Stanley Robinson

They walk among us. They don’t look young; you’d place them around twenty-five to thirty. But the astonishing truth is that they are all (maybe half a million of them, world wide) over six hundred years old. They have been talking to journalists, appearing on our screens; they’ve convinced us that this is no hoax. But why have they decided to leave Earth? That was the question I most wanted to ask, when I was offered the chance to interview our own, local, Thames Valley immortal. Why quit now, just when they don’t need to hide anymore?

I met Tamsin in the garden of her house in a quiet Middlesex village: a light-skinned, dark-haired woman of average height, dressed in the dateless human uniform of blue jeans and a white tee-shirt. She reminded me that I’d agreed not to make a live broadcast. I let her check the output setting on my eyesocket ConjurMac, and we got down to business. “So,” I said (never one to avoid the obvious), “How does it feel to be six hundred and fifty?” Tamsin laughed. “How old are you?” I am ninety-seven and I said so. “So why ask me? You’ll find out soon enough.” I put it to her that if I survived — and no longevity treatment can actually guarantee survival — it was a long time to wait for an answer. “When I first took Rem,” she said. “It was 2039 CE. It doesn’t seem long ago at all. Trust me: the years will fly.” Their perception of time is different from ours… I stared, transfixed, at the woman who had lived through the squalor of the Population Pulse, survived five “World Wars,” kept her impossible secret since the fifteenth century after the Prophet (Praise and Blessings of Allah Be Upon Him). If I hadn’t known, I would never have guessed. She looked so normal.

In the mid-twenty-first century CE, a new drug treatment for memory impairment went into clinical trials. It was meant to strengthen associative memory: in fact it gave patients bursts of recall so intense they were stopped in their tracks, lost in ecstatic re-experience of some childhood joy. Bootlegged Rem quickly reached the streets and became fashionable. This was in the midst of World War Three: reckless times. It didn’t worry the users that the heart-stopping delight of a Rem high was, in a few cases, literally heart-stopping. But the damage mounted. Prodromal schizophrenic symptoms, untreatable depression, vegetative coma… The clinical trials were dropped. All recreationals were legal by then, at least throughout Europe and most of the USA, but Rem’s reputation made it a poor business prospect. It vanished. The dosage given to the clinical subjects had been too low for the effect to emerge. When those who had taken it habitually realized what was happening to them, they kept quiet. So no one knew, except the immortals themselves. They were wise to keep quiet. In those days and for a long time afterwards, the Population Pulse was a terrifying force. Longevity research had been abandoned: it was just too sensitive an issue. Rem itself had not been intended to prolong life, only to ameliorate dementia and confusion. But the Pulse is over, and other things have changed. It’s not just the Lagrange colonies and the moon, and the grueling labor of love that is transforming Mars. Crucially, in a few months’ time, the first colony ships will leave Deep Space (our way station on the brink of the heliopause) and travel, at speeds believed logically impossible when Tamsin was young, to a remote-surveyed, uninhabited, Earth-type planet. This year, 2108 (2688 by the CE count), we are free, at last. The treatments came too late for me. I may live to be six hundred, but I will grow old. For younger generations there are no known limits.

But rem immortality is still different.

We chatted for two hours, sitting under an apple tree, the murmur of the Fleet (which runs by her garden) in the background. She talked about her son, so long dead, and her husband, killed in a climbing accident last century (immortality is not proof against blunt instruments, lynch mobs, or equipment failure). She tried to explain how it feels to have your entire life available to you, so you can be there, again and again, in every moment. How you start with the good moments, then gather courage, until you have taken possession of the whole, and your entire existence becomes coherent, like laser light in a perfect optical computer.

“But why are you leaving?” I insisted. “You have so much to teach us —”

“It isn’t a decision,” she said. “It was a process of conversion.”

She stood up, smiling, and walked away from me. The air around her shimmered.

Next moment, I was alone.

September 1999

Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland

(With apologies to E.R. Eddison)

The earth walls of the caravanserai rose strangely from the empty plain. She let the black stallion slow his pace. The silence of deep dusk had a taste, like a rich dark fruit; the air was keen. In the distance mountains etched a jagged margin against an indigo sky, snow-streaks glinting in the glimmer of the dawning stars. She had never been here before, in life. But as she led her horse through the gap in the high earthen banks she knew what she would see. The camping-booths around the walls; the beaten ground stained black by the ashes of countless cooking fires; the wattle-fenced enclosure where travelers’ riding beasts mingled indiscriminately with their host’s goats and chickens…; the tumbledown gallery, where sheaves of russet plains-grass sprouted from empty window-spaces. Everything she looked on had the luminous intensity of a place often-visited in dreams.

She was a tall woman, dressed for riding in a kilt and harness of supple leather over brief, close-fitting linen: a costume that left her sheeny, muscular limbs bare and outlined the taut, proud curves of breast and haunches. Her red hair was bound in a braid as thick as a man’s wrist. Her sword was slung on her back, the great brazen hilt standing above her shoulder. Other guests were gathered by an open-air kitchen, in the orange-red of firelight and the smoke of roasting meat. She returned their stares coolly: she was accustomed to attracting attention. But she didn’t like what she saw. The host of the caravanserai came scuttling from the group by the fire. His manner was fawning. But his eyes measured, with a thief’s sly expertise, the worth of the sword she bore and the quality of Lemiak’s harness. Sonja tossed him a few coins, and declined to join the company.

She had counted fifteen of them. They were poorly dressed and heavily armed. They were all friends together, and their animals — both terror-birds and horses — were too good for any honest travelers’ purposes. Sonja had been told that this caravanserai was a safe halt. She judged that this was no longer true. She considered riding out again onto the plain. But wolves and wild terror-birds roamed at night between here and the mountains, at the end of winter. And there were worse dangers: ghosts and demons. Sonja was neither credulous nor superstitious. But in this country no wayfarer willingly spent the black hours alone.

She unharnessed Lemiak and rubbed him down — taking sensual pleasure in the handling of his powerful limbs, in the heat of his glossy hide, and the vigor of his great body. There was firewood ready, stacked in the roofless booth. Shouldering a cloth sling for corn and a hank of rope, she went to fetch her own fodder. The corralled beasts shifted in a mass to watch her. The great flightless birds, with their pitiless raptors’ eyes, were especially attentive. She felt an equally rapacious attention from the company by the caravanserai kitchen, which amused her. The robbers — as she was sure they were — had all the luck. For her, there wasn’t one of the fifteen who rated a second glance.

A man appeared, from the darkness under the ruined gallery. He was tall. The rippled muscle of his chest, left bare by an unlaced leather jerkin, shone red-brown. His black hair fell in glossy curls to his wide shoulders. He met her gaze and smiled, white teeth appearing in the darkness of his beard. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings…look on my works, ye mighty, and despair… Do you know those lines?” He pointed to a lump of shapeless stone, one of several that lay about. It bore traces of carving, almost effaced by time. “There was a city here once, with marketplaces, fine buildings, throngs of proud people. Now they are dust, and only the caravanserai remains.”

He stood before her, one tanned and sinewy hand resting lightly on the hilt of a dagger in his belt. Like Sonja, he carried his broadsword on his back. Sonja was tall. He topped her by a head; yet there was nothing brutish in his size. His brow was wide and serene, his eyes were vivid blue, his lips full and imperious, yet delicately modeled, in the rich nest of hair. Somewhere between eyes and lips there lurked a spirit of mockery, as if he found some secret amusement in the perfection of his own beauty and strength.

The man and the woman measured each other.

“You are a scholar,” she said.

“Of some sort. And a traveler from an antique land, where the cities are still standing. It seems we are the only strangers here,” he added, with a slight jerk of the chin towards the convivial company. “We might be well advised to become friends for the night.”

Sonja never wasted words. She considered his offer, and nodded.

They made a fire in the booth Sonja had chosen. Lemiak and the scholar’s terror-bird, left loose in the back of the shelter, did not seem averse to each other’s company. The woman and the man ate spiced sausage, skewered and broiled over the red embers, with bread and dried fruit. They drank water, each keeping to their own water-skin. They spoke little, after that first exchange, except to discuss briefly the tactics of their defense, should defense be necessary.

The attack came around midnight. At the first stir of covert movement, Sonja leapt up sword in hand. She grasped a brand from the dying fire. The man who had been crawling on his hands and knees toward her, bent on sly murder of a sleeping victim, scrabbled to his feet. “Defend yourself,” yelled Sonja, who despised to strike an unarmed foe. Instantly he was rushing at her with a heavy sword. A great two-handed stroke would have cleft her to the waist. She parried the blow and caught him between neck and shoulder, almost severing the head from his body. The beasts plunged and screamed at the rush of blood-scent. The scholar was grappling with another attacker, choking out the man’s life with his bare hands…and the booth was full of bodies: their enemies rushing in on every side.

Sonja felt no fear. Stroke followed stroke, in a luxury of blood and effort and fire-shot darkness…until the attack was over, as suddenly as it had begun.

The brigands had vanished.

“We killed five,” breathed the scholar, “by my count. Three to you, two to me.”

She kicked together the remains of their fire and crouched to blow the embers to a blaze. By that light they found five corpses, dragged them and flung them into the open square. The scholar had a cut on his upper arm that was bleeding freely. Sonja was bruised and battered, but otherwise unhurt. The worst loss was their wood stack, which had been trampled and blood-fouled. They would not be able to keep a watchfire burning.

“Perhaps they won’t try again,” said the warrior woman. “What can we have that’s worth more than five lives?”

He laughed shortly. “I hope you’re right.”

“We’ll take turns to watch.”

Standing breathless, every sense alert, they smiled at each other in new-forged comradeship. There was no second attack. At dawn Sonja, rousing from a light doze, sat up and pushed back the heavy masses of her red hair.

“You are very beautiful,” said the man, gazing at her.

“So are you,” she answered.

The caravanserai was deserted, except for the dead. The brigands’ riding animals were gone. The inn-keeper and his family had vanished into some bolt-hole in the ruins.

“I am heading for the mountains,” he said, as they packed up their gear. “For the pass into Zimiamvia.”

“I too.”

“Then our way lies together.”

He was wearing the same leather jerkin, over knee-length loose breeches of heavy violet silk. Sonja looked at the strips of linen that bound the wound on his upper arm. “When did you tie up that cut?”

“You dressed it for me, for which I thank you.”

“When did I do that?”

He shrugged. “Oh, some time.”

Sonja mounted Lemiak, a little frown between her brows. They rode together until dusk. She was not talkative, and the man soon accepted her silence. But when night fell, and they camped without a fire on the houseless plain, then, as the demons stalked, they were glad of each other’s company. Next dawn, the mountains seemed as distant as ever. Again, they met no living creature all day, spoke little to each other and made the same comfortless camp. There was no moon. The stars were almost bright enough to cast shadow; the cold was intense. Sleep was impossible, but they were not tempted to ride on. Few travelers attempt the passage over the high plains to Zimiamvia. Of those few most turn back, defeated. Some wander among the ruins forever, tearing at their own flesh. Those who survive are the ones who do not defy the terrors of darkness. They crouched shoulder to shoulder, each wrapped in a single blanket, to endure. Evil emanations of the death-steeped plain rose from the soil and bred phantoms. The sweat of fear was cold as ice-melt on Sonja’s cheeks. Horrors made of nothingness prowled and muttered in her mind.

“How long,” she whispered.” How long do we have to bear this?”

The man’s shoulder lifted against hers. “Until we get well, I suppose.”

The warrior woman turned to face him, green eyes flashing in appalled outrage —

“Sonja” discussed her chosen companion’s felony with the therapist. Dr. Hamilton — he wanted the group members to call him Jim, but “Sonja” found this impossible — monitored everything that went on in the virtual environment; but he never appeared there. They only met him in the one-to-one consultations that virtual-therapy buffs called the meat sessions.

“He’s not supposed to do that,” she protested, from the foam couch in the doctor’s office. He was sitting beside her, his notebook on his knee. “He damaged my experience.”

Dr. Hamilton nodded. “Okay. Let’s take a step back. Leave aside the risk of disease or pregnancy, because we can leave those bogeys aside, forever if you like. Would you agree that sex is essentially an innocent and playful social behavior? Something you’d offer to or take from a friend, in an ideal world, as easily as food or drink?”

“Sonja” recalled certain dreams, meat dreams, not the computer-assisted kind. She blushed. But the man was a doctor after all. “That’s what I do feel,” she agreed. “That’s why I’m here. I want to get back to the pure pleasure, to get rid of the baggage.”

“The sexual experience offered in therapy is readily available on the nets. You know that. You could find an agency that would vet your partners for you. You chose to join this group because you need to feel that you’re taking medicine, so you don’t have to feel ashamed. And because you need feel that you’re interacting with people who, like yourself, perceive sex as a problem.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“You and another group member went off into your own private world. That’s good. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Let me tell you, it doesn’t always. The software gives you access to a vast multisensual library, all the sexual fantasy ever committed to media. But you and your partner, or partners, have to customize the information and use it to create and maintain what we call the consensual perceptual plenum. Success in holding a shared dreamland together is a knack. It depends on something in the neural make-up that no one has yet fully analyzed. Some have it, some don’t. You two are really in sync.”

“That’s exactly what I’m complaining about —”

“You think he’s damaging the pocket universe you two built up. But he isn’t, not from his character’s point of view. It’s part Lessingham’s thing, to be conscious that he’s in a fantasy world.”

She started, accusingly. “I don’t want to know his name.”

“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t tell you. ‘Lessingham’ is the name of his virtuality persona. I’m surprised you don’t recognize it. He’s a character from a series of classic fantasy novels by E.R. Eddison.… In Eddison’s glorious cosmos ‘Lessingham’ is a splendidly endowed English gentleman, who visits fantastic realms of ultra-masculine adventure as a lucid dreamer: though an actor in the drama, he is partly conscious of another existence, while the characters around him are more or less explicitly puppets of the dream…”

He sounded as if he was quoting from a reference book. He probably was: reading from an autocue that had popped up in lenses of those doctorish horn rims. She knew that the old-fashioned trappings were there to reassure her. She rather despised them; but it was like the virtuality itself. The buttons were pushed, the mechanism responded. She was reassured.

Of course she knew the Eddison stories. She recalled “Lessingham” perfectly: the tall, strong, handsome, cultured millionaire jock, who has magic journeys to another world, where he is a tall, strong handsome cultured jock in Elizabethan costume, with a big sword. The whole thing was an absolutely typical male power-fantasy, she thought, without rancor. Fantasy means never having to say you’re sorry. The women in those books, she remembered, were drenched in sex, but they had no part in the action. They stayed at home being princesses, occasionally allowing the millionaire jocks to get them into bed. She could understand why “Lessingham” would be interested in “Sonja”…for a change.

“You think he goosed you, psychically. What do you expect? You can’t dress the way ‘Sonja’ dresses and hope to be treated like the Queen of the May.”

Dr. Hamilton was only doing his job. He was supposed to be provocative, so they could react against him. That was his excuse, anyway… On the contrary, she thought. “Sonja” dresses the way she does because she can dress any way she likes. “Sonja” doesn’t have to hope for respect, and she doesn’t have to demand it. She just gets it. “It’s dominance display,” she said, enjoying the theft of his jargon. “Females do that too, you know. The way ‘Sonja’ dresses is not an invitation. It’s a warning. Or a challenge, to anyone who can measure up.”

He laughed, but he sounded irritated. “Frankly, I’m amazed that you two work together. I’d have expected ‘Lessingham’ to go for an ultrafeminine —”

“I am… ‘Sonja’ is ultrafeminine. Isn’t a tigress feminine?”

“Well, okay. But I guess you’ve found out his little weakness. He likes to be a teeny bit in control, even when he’s letting his hair down in dreamland.”

She remembered the secret mockery lurking in those blue eyes. “That’s the problem. That’s exactly what I don’t want. I don’t want either of us to be in control.”

“I can’t interfere with his persona. So, it’s up to you. Do you want to carry on?”

“Something works,” she muttered. She was unwilling to admit that there’d been no one else, in the text-interface phase of the group, that she found remotely attractive. It was “Lessingham,” or drop out and start again. “I just want him to stop spoiling things.”

“You can’t expect your masturbation fantasies to mesh completely. This is about getting beyond solitary sex. Go with it: where’s the harm? One day you’ll want to face a sexual partner in the real, and then you’ll be well. Meanwhile, you could be passing ‘Lessingham’ in reception — he comes to his meat-sessions around your time — and not know it. That’s safety, and you never have to breach it. You two have proved that you can sustain an imaginary world together: it’s almost like being in love. I could argue that lucid-dreaming, being in the fantasy world but not of it, is the next big step. Think about that.”

The clinic room had mirrored walls: more deliberate provocation. How much reality can you take? the reflections asked. But she felt only a vague distaste for the woman she saw, at once hollow-cheeked and bloated, lying on the doctor’s foam couch. He was glancing over her records on his desk screen, which meant the session was almost up.

“Still no overt sexual contact?”

“I’m not ready…” She stirred restlessly. “Is it a man or a woman?”

“Ah!” smiled Dr. Hamilton, waving a finger at her. “Naughty, naughty!”

He was the one who’d started taunting her, with his hints that the meat “Lessingham” might be near. She hated herself for asking a genuine question. It was her rule to give him no entry to her real thoughts. It was a flimsy reserve; Dr. Jim knew everything, without being told: every change in her brain chemistry, every effect on her body — sweaty palms, racing heart, damp underwear… The telltales on his damned autocue left her little dignity. Why do I subject myself to this? she wondered, disgusted. But in the virtuality she forgot utterly about Dr. Jim. She didn’t care who was watching. She had her brazen-hilted sword. She had the piercing intensity of dusk on the high plains, the snowlight on the mountains; the hard, warm silk of her own perfect limbs. She felt a brief complicity with “Lessingham.” She had a conviction that Dr. Jim didn’t play favorites. He despised all his patients equally… You get your kicks, doctor. But we have the freedom of dreamland.

“Sonja” read cards stuck in phonebooths and store windows, in the tired little streets outside the building that housed the clinic. Relaxing Massage by clean shaven young man in Luxurious Surroundings… You can’t expect your fantasies to mesh exactly, the doctor said. But how can it work if two people disagree over something so vital as the difference between control and surrender? Her estranged husband used to say: “why don’t you just do it for me, as a favor? It wouldn’t hurt. Like making someone a cup of coffee…” Offer the steaming cup, turn around and lift my skirts, pull down my underwear. I’m ready. He opens his pants and slides it in, while his thumb is round in front rubbing me… I could enjoy that, thought “Sonja,” remembering the blithe abandon of her dreams. That’s the damned shame. If there were no non-sex consequences, I don’t know that there’s any limit to what I could enjoy… But all her husband had achieved was to make her feel she never wanted to make anyone, man woman or child, a cup of coffee ever again… In luxurious surroundings. That’s what I want. Sex without engagement, pleasure without consequences. It’s got to be possible.

She gazed at the cards, feeling uneasily that she’d have to give up this habit. She used to glance at them sidelong, now she’d pause and linger. She was getting desperate. She was lucky there was medically-supervised virtuality sex to be had. She would be helpless prey in the wild world of the nets, and she’d never, ever risk trying one of these meat-numbers. And she had no intention of returning to her husband. Let him make his own coffee. She wouldn’t call that getting well. She turned, and caught the eye of a nicely-dressed young woman standing next to her. They walked away quickly in opposite directions.

Everybody’s having the same dreams…

In the foothills of the mountains the world became green and sweet. They followed the course of a little river that sometimes plunged far below their path, tumbling in white flurries in a narrow gorge and sometimes ran beside them, racing smooth and clear over colored pebbles. Flowers clustered on the banks; birds darted in the thickets of wild rose and honeysuckle. They led their riding animals and walked at ease: not speaking much. Sometimes the warrior woman’s flank would brush the man’s side; or he would lean for a moment, as if by chance, his hand on her shoulder. Then they would move deliberately apart, but they would smile at each other. Soon. Not yet…

They must be vigilant. The approaches to fortunate Zimiamvia were guarded. They could not expect to reach the pass unopposed. And the nights were haunted still. They made camp at a flat bend of the river, where the crags of the defile drew away, and they could see far up and down their valley. To the north, peaks of diamond and indigo reared above them. Their fire of aromatic wood burned brightly, as the white stars began to blossom.

“No one knows about the long-term effects,” she said. “It can’t be safe. At the least, we’re risking irreversible addiction, they warn you about that. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life as a cyberspace couch potato.”

“Nobody claims it’s safe. If it was safe, it wouldn’t be so intense.”

Their eyes met. “Sonja’s” barbarian simplicity combined surprisingly well with the man’s more elaborate furnishing. The consensual perceptual plenum was a flawless reality: the sound of the river, the clear silence of the mountain twilight…their two perfect bodies. She turned from him to gaze into the sweet-scented flames. The warrior-woman’s glorious vitality throbbed in her veins. The fire held worlds of its own, liquid furnaces: the sunward surface of Mercury.

“Have you ever been to a place like this in the real?”

He grimaced. “You’re kidding. In the real, I’m not a magic-wielding millionaire.”

Something howled. The bloodstopping cry was repeated. A taint of sickening foulness swept by them. They both shuddered, and drew closer together. “Sonja” knew the scientific explanation for the paranoia, the price you paid for the virtual world’s super-real, dreamlike richness. It was all down to heightened neurotransmitter levels, a positive feedback effect, psychic overheating. But the horrors were still horrors.

“The doctor says if we can talk like this, it means we’re getting well.”

He shook his head. “I’m not sick. It’s like you said. Virtuality’s addictive and I’m an addict. I’m getting my drug of choice safely, on prescription. That’s how I see it.”

All this time “Sonja” was in her apartment, lying in a foam couch with a visor over her head. The visor delivered compressed bursts of stimuli to her visual cortex: the other sense perceptions riding piggyback on the visual, triggering a whole complex of neuronal groups, tricking her mind/brain into believing the world of the dream was out there. The brain works like a computer. You cannot “see” a hippopotamus until your system has retrieved the “hippopotamus” template from memory and checked it against the incoming. Where does “the real thing” exist? In a sense this world was as real as the other. But the thought of “Lessingham’s” unknown body disturbed her. If he was too poor to lease good equipment, he might be lying in a grungy public cubicle…cathetered, and so forth: the sordid details.

She had never yet tried virtual sex. The solitary version had seemed a depressing idea. People said the partnered kind was the perfect zipless fuck. He sounded experienced; she was afraid he would be able to tell she was not. But it didn’t matter. The virtual-therapy group wasn’t like a dating agency. She would never meet him in the real, that was the whole idea. She didn’t have to think about that stranger’s body. She didn’t have to worry about the real “Lessingham’s” opinion of her. She drew herself up in the firelight. It was right, she decided, that Sonja should be a virgin. When the moment came, her surrender would be the more absolute.

In their daytime he stayed in character. It was a tacit trade-off. She would acknowledge the other world at nightfall by the camp-fire, as long as he didn’t mention it the rest of the time. So they traveled on together, Lessingham and Red Sonja, the courtly scholar-knight and the taciturn warrior-maiden, through an exquisite Maytime — exchanging lingering glances, “accidental” touches… And still nothing happened. “Sonja” was aware that “Lessingham,” as much as herself, was holding back from the brink. She felt piqued at this. But they were both, she guessed, waiting for the fantasy they had generated to throw up the perfect moment of itself. It ought to. There was no other reason for its existence.

Turning a shoulder of the hillside, they found a sheltered hollow. Two rowan trees in flower grew above the river. In the shadow of their blossom tumbled a little waterfall, so beautiful it was a wonder to behold. The water fell clear, from the edge of a slab of stone twice a man’s height, into a rocky basin. The water in the basin was dark and deep, a-churn with bubbles from the plunging jet above. The river banks were lawns of velvet; over the rocks grew emerald mosses and tiny water flowers.

“I would live here,” said Lessingham softly, his hand dropping from his riding bird’s bridle. “I would build me a house in this fairy place and rest my heart here forever.”

Sonja loosed the black stallion’s rein. The two beasts moved off, feeding each in their own way on the sweet grasses and springtime foliage.

“I would like to bathe in that pool,” said the warrior-maiden.

“Why not?” He smiled. “I will stand guard.”

She pulled off her leather harness and slowly unbound her hair. It fell in a trembling mass of copper and russet lights, a cloud of glory around the richness of her barely clothed body. Gravely she gazed at her own perfection, mirrored in the homage of his eyes. Lessingham’s breath was coming fast. She saw a pulse beat, in the strong beauty of his throat. The pure physical majesty of him caught her breath…

It was their moment. But it still needed something to break this strange spell of reluctance. “Lady,” he murmured —

Sonja gasped. “Back to back!” she cried. “Quickly, or it is too late!”

Six warriors surrounded them, covered from head to foot in red and black armor. They were human in the lower body, but the head of each appeared beaked and fanged, with monstrous faceted eyes, and each bore an extra pair of armored limbs between breastbone and belly. They fell on Sonja and Lessingham without pause or a challenge. Sonja fought fiercely as always, her blade ringing against the monster armor. But something cogged her fabulous skill. Some power had drained the strength from her splendid limbs. She was disarmed. The clawed creatures held her, a monstrous head stooped over her, choking her with its fetid breath…

When she woke again she was bound against a great boulder, by thongs around her wrists and ankles, tied to hoops of iron driven into the rock. She was naked but for her linen shift, which was in tatters. Lessingham was standing, leaning on his sword. “I drove them off,” he said. “At last.” He dropped the sword, and took his dagger to cut her down.

She lay in his arms. “You are very beautiful,” he murmured. She thought he would kiss her. His mouth plunged instead to her breast, biting and sucking at the engorged nipple. She gasped in shock, a fierce pang leapt through her virgin flesh. What did they want with kisses? They were warriors. Sonja could not restrain a moan of pleasure. He had won her. How wonderful to be overwhelmed, to surrender to the raw lust of this godlike animal.

Lessingham set her on her feet.

“Tie me up.”

He was proffering a handful of blood-slicked leather thongs.

“What?”

“Tie me to the rock, mount me. It’s what I want.”

“The evil warriors tied you — ?”

“And you come and rescue me.” He made an impatient gesture. “Whatever. Trust me. It’ll be good for you too.” He tugged at his bloodstained silk breeches, releasing a huge, iron-hard erection. “See, they tore my clothes. When you see that, you go crazy, you can’t resist…and I’m at your mercy. Tie me up!”

“Sonja” had heard that eighty percent of the submissive partners in sadomasochistic sex are male; but it is still the man who dominates his “dominatrix”: who says tie me tighter, beat me harder, you can stop now… Hey, she thought. Why all the stage-directions, suddenly? What happened to my zipless fuck? But what the hell. She wasn’t going to back out now, having come so far… There was a seamless shift, and Lessingham was bound to the rock. She straddled his cock. He groaned. “Don’t do this to me.” He thrust upwards, into her, moaning. “You savage, you utter savage, uuunnnh…” Sonja grasped the man’s wrists and rode him without mercy. He was right, it was as good this way. His eyes were half closed. In the glimmer of blue under his lashes, a spirit of mockery trembled… She heard a laugh, and found her hands were no longer gripping Lessingham’s wrists. He had broken free from her bonds, he was laughing at her in triumph. He was wrestling her to the ground.

“No!” she cried, genuinely outraged. But he was the stronger.

It was night when he was done with her. He rolled away and slept, as far as she could tell, instantly. Her chief thought was that virtual sex didn’t entirely connect. She remembered now, that was something else people told you, as well as the “zipless fuck.” It’s like coming in your sleep, they said. It doesn’t quite make it. Maybe there was nothing virtuality could do to orgasm to match the heightened richness of the rest of the experience. She wondered if he too had felt cheated.

She lay beside her hero, wondering where did I go wrong? Why did he have to treat me that way? Beside her, “Lessingham” cuddled a fragment of violet silk, torn from his own breeches. He whimpered in his sleep, nuzzling the soft fabric, “Mama…”

She told Dr. Hamilton that “Lessingham” had raped her.

“And wasn’t that what you wanted?”

She lay on the couch in the mirrored office. The doctor sat beside her with his smart notebook on his knee. The couch collected “Sonja’s” physical responses as if she was an astronaut umbilicaled to ground control, and Dr. Jim read the telltales popping up in his reassuring hornrims. She remembered the sneaking furtive thing that she had glimpsed in “Lessingham’s” eyes, the moment before he took over their lust-scene. How could she explain the difference? “He wasn’t playing. In the fantasy, anything’s allowed. But he wasn’t playing. He was outside it, laughing at me.”

“I warned you he would want to stay in control.”

“But there was no need! I wanted him to be in control. Why did he have to steal what I wanted to give him anyway?”

“You have to understand, ‘Sonja,’ that to many men it’s women who seem powerful. You women feel dominated and try to achieve ‘equality.’ But the men don’t perceive the situation like that. They’re mortally afraid of you; and anything, just about anything they do to keep the upper hand, can seem like justified self-defense.”

She could have wept with frustration. “I know all that! That’s exactly what I was trying to get away from. I thought we were supposed to leave the damn baggage behind. I wanted something purely physical… Something innocent.”

“Sex is not innocent, ‘Sonja.’ I know you believe it is, or ‘should be.’ But it’s time you faced the truth. Any interaction with another person involves some kind of jockeying for power, dickering over control. Sex is no exception. Now that’s basic. You can’t escape from it in direct-cortical fantasy. It’s in our minds that relationships happen, and the mind, of course, is where virtuality happens too.” He sighed, and made an entry in her notes. “I want you to look on this as another step toward coping with the real. You’re not sick, Sonja. You’re unhappy. Not even unusually so. Most adults are unhappy, to some degree —”

“Or else they’re in denial.”

Her sarcasm fell flat. “Right. A good place to be, at least some of the time. What we’re trying to achieve here — if we’re trying to achieve anything at all — is to raise your pain threshold to somewhere near average. I want you to walk away from therapy with lowered expectations. I guess that would be success.”

“Great,” she said, desolate. “That’s just great.”

Suddenly he laughed. “Oh, you guys! You are so weird. It’s always the same story. Can’t live with you, can’t live without you… You can’t go on this way, you know. It’s getting ridiculous. You want some real advice, ‘Sonja’? Go home. Change your attitudes, and start some hard peace talks with that husband of yours.”

“I don’t want to change,” she said coldly, staring with open distaste at his smooth profile, his soft effeminate hands. Who was he to call her abnormal? “I like my sexuality just the way it is.”

Dr. Hamilton returned her look, a glint of human malice breaking through his doctor-act. “Listen. I’ll tell you something for free.” A weird sensation jumped in her crotch. For a moment she had a prick: a hand lifted and cradled the warm weight of her balls. She stifled a yelp of shock. The therapist could do things like that, by tweaking the system that monitored her brain-states; it was part of some people’s treatment. She knew that, and she didn’t care that he should have had a signed permission, but she was horrified. For a moment she knew, a fleeting, terrible loss, that Sonja was just a blast of fake neuronal firings —

The phantom maleness vanished. Hamilton grinned. “I’ve been looking for a long time, and I know. There is no tall, dark man…”

He returned to her notes. “You say you were ‘raped,’” he continued, as if nothing had happened. “Yet you chose to continue the virtual session. Can you explain that?”

She thought of the haunted darkness, the cold air on her naked body; the soreness of her bruises; a rag of flesh used and tossed away. How it had felt to lie there: intensely alive, tasting the dregs, beaten back at the gates of the fortunate land. In dreamland, even betrayal had such rich depth and fascination. And she was free to enjoy, because it didn’t matter.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

Out in the lobby there were people coming and going. It was lunchtime; the lifts were busy. “Sonja” noticed a round-shouldered geek of a little man making for the entrance to the clinic. She wondered idly if that could be “Lessingham.”

She would drop out of the group. The adventure with “Lessingham” was over, and there was no one else for her. She needed to start again. The doctor knew he’d lost a customer; that was why he’d been so open with her today. He certainly guessed, too, that she’d lose no time in signing on somewhere else on the semi-medical fringe. What a fraud all that therapy-talk was! He’d never have dared to play the sex-change trick on her, except that he knew she was an addict. She wasn’t likely to go accusing him of unprofessional conduct. Oh, he knew it all. But his contempt didn’t trouble her.

So, she had joined the inner circle. She could trust Dr. Hamilton’s judgment. He had the telltales; he would know. She recognized with a feeling of mild surprise that she had become a statistic, an element in a fashionable social concern: an epidemic flight into fantasy, inadequate personalities, unable to deal with the reality of normal human sexual relations… But that’s crazy, she thought. I don’t hate men, and I don’t believe “Lessingham” hates women. There’s nothing psychotic about what we’re doing. We’re making a consumer choice. Virtual sex is easier, that’s all. Okay, it’s convenience food. It has too much sugar and a certain blandness. But when a product comes along that is cheaper, easier, and more fun to use than the original version, of course people are going to buy it.

The lift was full. She stood, drab bodies packed around her, breathing the stale air. Every face was a mask of dull endurance. She closed her eyes. The caravanserai walls rose strangely from the empty plain…

February 1994

The Universe of Things

The alien parked its car across the street and came and sat down in the waiting room. He must have seen this happen, peripherally. But he was busy settling the bill with a middle-aged woman with curly grey hair and substantial, attractive clothes, to whom he’d taken an irrational dislike. Those who deal with Joe Punter, day in and day out, especially Joe car-owning Punter, are prone to such allergies. He saw her start of concealed surprise, looked up, and there was the alien.

The other customers on the row of seats were pretending, in their English way, that nothing special had happened. He finished dealing with the woman. Other cars and customers left; the alien’s turn came. He went out in the road and hand-waved it into the bay with fatherly care, then sent it back to wait while he looked the red car over. He entered the car’s make and model in the terminal and began to check the diagnostics.

The mechanic worked this franchise alone with the robotics and the electronic presence of cashier, manager, head office. He was able to read print, even to write. It was a necessity of his trade. To be wired-up, routinely, among all this free-running machinery was against health and safety regulations. He used a hear-and-do wire only for the exotics, where the instructions came packaged with the part, and tried to conceal this from his customers. The mystique of craftsmanship was important to him.

Consequently, it took him some little time to examine the tired little runabout. He called in the alien and explained what had to be done, using a lot of gesture.

The convention was that if you couldn’t stomach calling another sentient being “it,” they were all called “she.” The mechanic eyed the alien covertly as he made his exposition: the soft, noseless profile, drooping shoulders, the torso thickened by layers of strange undergarments beneath its drab “overalls,” gawky backwards-jointed legs. It was about as female-looking as the dugongs sailors used to miscall “mermaids.” The confusion, he considered, was an insult to both parties. But it was nonsense to expect the denizen of another star system to be humanly attractive. He was in no hurry. He wasn’t affronted or frightened, as some people might have been, to see one running around loose, out of the enclave. No doubt the alien was going to tip generously, but it wasn’t avarice that made him willing to linger. He was simply, genuinely pleased to have one of them in his shop.

“I just want you to scrub the converter.”

He wasn’t surprised that it could speak English; he’d only imagined it would not trouble itself to do so. But the last thing he’d expected was for an alien to be mean.

“You know, it’s going to be cheaper in the long run to replace the whole exhaust system. You’ve been using a high methanol percentage, there’s a lot of corrosion here…”

The alien looked at the ground.

“Come away —”

He followed it out into the waiting room, where it folded down like a big dog on one of the seats, looking miserable, twisting its puckered, chicken-skin hands against its chest. “I’m going to sell it,” the alien explained. “I want you to do the minimum that’s legally necessary.”

He realized that the alien did not believe that its car could understand English. But nor did it believe that such understanding was impossible. It believed that if you have to say something unpleasant about someone/thing, you remove yourself from the immediate vicinity of the victim. The rules of etiquette were immovable, matter-of-fact, and binding. The car’s level of comprehension was a separate matter, a subject for abstruse philosophy.

It was not unusual for a mechanic to be familiar, as far as this, with alien psychology. Alien nature was the stuff of daytime television. The mechanic could have drowned in the subject, if he had enough idle time between customers.

“What’s legally necessary,” he repeated. He was disappointed, practically and emotionally, by his customer’s poverty; but mollified by its bizarre sensitivity.

Of course he knew that in an alien the state of poverty could only be temporary and relative. The tip dwindled but some other benefit was bound to accrue.

It (or she) nodded glumly.

They nodded. Their gestures were very human, but culturally diverse: for “no” they would jerk the chin, not shake the head. It was as if they’d borrowed a little, deliberately, from every human race, and maybe that was exactly so. Their journey into human space had been through such a saturation of human emissions, no one knew how much of alien behavior on Earth was natural, and how much a carefully devised presentation.

“Shall I wait or shall I come back?”

Throughout this exchange the other customers had remained painfully fixed in bored or casual poses. The mechanic was delighted by their intent, covert attention. Luckily there were no children involved, to spoil the effect of cosmopolitan unconcern.

He did not want it to stay. If it stayed in here it might strike up a conversation, become the temporary property of one of these mere punters.

“You’d better go,” he told it, feigning regret. “I have another job that I can’t put on auto. Come back in about an hour.”

When it had left, regret became real. He went out into the dusty street and stared up and down. It was October. The fronds of the banana tree, that grew over the wall of an unkempt yard next door were acid green under a lowering sky that had been promising rain for days. The tourist center was not far away: the massive grace that all the world admired, which had once been the center of a dock town called Liverpool. He could see the tiny points of the newly gilded Liver Birds, winking above their monument of vast commercial assurance. Far inland, the vague conurbation stretched up the flanks of the Pennines: the hills swimming there out of sight like drowned monuments, drowned in time and lost forever, like the great city.

There was no sign of the alien.

He went into the shop, checked the progress of various operations, and quietly — avoiding camera eyes — sneaked through the door at the back, and upstairs to his living quarters. His wife was at work. Their two children, seven and two years old, were with her in the workplace schoolroom and crèche. The rooms, which were small but well-supplied with consumer durables, seemed unnaturally tidy and silent. He stood in the living room and studied a row of books, discs, journals, on a shelf of the library unit. Dealing with the Alien; What Do They Think of Us; The Farcomers; Through Alien Eyes; Have They Been Here Before?; Xenobiology: Towards the Dawn of A Science… The mechanic and his family were no more than averagely interested in the alien visitors. The books had been bought, not read. But it would have been a strange household indeed, or a very poor one, that didn’t possess at least a few of these titles.

The mechanic did not feel, on the whole, that the human race was over-reacting. He and his wife had voted in favor, in the European referendum on the global change of era, which was now on its way to becoming law. This year, this present year, would be forever year three: 3AC, probably, if the English-speaking lobby had its way. After Contact. It was official: this was the greatest thing that had happened to the human race since the dim and distant “coming of Christ.” And the aliens, unlike Christ, were here. They were in print, on the screen. They were indubitably real.

Everything on the shelves had been entered in their library; the mechanic’s wife was meticulous over this chore. His fingers hovered over the keypad. But the mysterious inertia of human adulthood defeated him. Only the seven-year-old actually used the database. He took a book down, and another: leaved pages, read a paragraph or two. He didn’t know what he was looking for. Surrounded by hard things that did not speak or look at him, he tried to imagine how it felt to be the alien. He had known sentimental drivers: cars with names, cars referred to as “she”; cars abused for bad behavior. He had caught himself (he dredged up fragments of memory), occasionally giving a glossy flank of robot casing an affectionate pat as he put it aside.

Good boy…

Good dog…

But the aliens did not know about animals. They had tools that crept, slithered, flew; but they had made these things. They had no notion of a separate creation, life that was not their own. It might be that conditions on the home planet were different, but the evidence, from their reactions and their own reporting, was otherwise. It seemed likely that they had shared their world with no other, no separate warm-blooded animals.

He went down to the service bay and checked the screen that showed the waiting room. All was quiet in there. It had not come back. He turned from that screen and made work for himself among the ramped vehicles and buzzing tools. He didn’t touch the alien’s car. When it reappeared he told it he was having a few problems. Please be patient, he said. Come back later, or wait. He took no new customers. The afternoon turned to dusk. The waiting room emptied until it (or she) was there alone.

The mechanic’s wife and his children arrived home, on foot from the tram stop, the baby in her buggy. He heard the childish voices chattering and laughing at the street door and gritted his teeth as if interrupted in some highly concentrated and delicate task. But he was doing nothing, just sitting in the gloom among the silent tools.

The alien was folded up on its seat. It looked like an animal dressed up, a talking animal of no known species from a child’s cartoon. It stood and smiled, showing the tips of its teeth: the modified snarl that might or might not be a genuine, shared gesture.

The mechanic was embarrassed because there was really no way he could explain his behavior. A human customer, stranger in a strange land, would by now have been either very angry or — possibly — a little scared. The alien seemed resigned. It did not expect humans to behave reasonably.

It made the mechanic obscurely angry to think that he was not the first person to give it the runaround like this. He would have liked to explain I just want to have you near me for a while… But that would have been a shameful confession.

“I want to do you a favor,” he said. “I didn’t like to tell you before, thought you might get embarrassed. I’m fixing up quite a few things, and I’m only going to charge you for the scrub.”

“Oh.”

He thought it looked surprised, perhaps wary. It was impossible not to award them with human feelings; not to read human expressions in their strange faces. “Thank you.”

“The least I could do, after you’ve come all this way!”

He laughed nervously. It didn’t. They did not laugh.

“Would you like to come upstairs? Would you like something to eat, a cup of tea? My wife, my kids would be very pleased to meet you.”

The invitation was completely insincere. The last thing he wanted was to see it in his home. He didn’t want to share the alien with anyone. The alien gave him a wry look as if it knew exactly what was going on. According to some readings of their behavior they were telepathic: intensely so between themselves, mildly with humans.

On the other hand, it had probably been pestered this way before…performing animal. The thought made him wince, for himself and for those others.

“No thank you.” It looked at the ground. “Will the car be ready tomorrow?”

The street was dark. There was little lighting just here, away from the hotels and malls and the floodlit, water-lapped monuments. He felt guilty. The poor alien might be mentally counting up its cash, maybe wondering what the hell to do next. Aliens traveling alone were rarities anywhere. If it couldn’t take refuge in a big rich hotel it would be bothered. People would crowd around it heartlessly, pointing their cameras.

But that wasn’t the mechanic’s fault. He didn’t want to capture it. He didn’t want to turn it out, either. He’d have liked it to stay here; to keep its real live presence. It could sleep on the seats. He would bring down some food. They liked some human foodstuffs: ice cream, white bread, hamburgers; nothing too natural.

“Yes, of course. Come back tomorrow. I open at nine.”

He told his wife that he had to work overtime. This never happened, but she accepted the idea without comment. The routine of their life together was so calm it could swallow the occasional obvious lie without a ripple.

He sat in the machine shop alone and looked around him. Cars.

It was strange how many static, urban Europeans still felt the need to own them, even with the fuel rationing and all the rest of the environmental-protection laws. The mechanic wasn’t complaining. It was a steady job, and often even enjoyable. These are my people, he thought, trying on the alien worldview. My people, the sheep of my flock. He had a grandmother who was a churchgoer. But there came the idea of animals again, the separation of one kind of life from another. That was not what happened between an alien and an alien machine. He went up to the car, clamped on its ramp in an undignified posture, a helpless patient.

“Hallo?” he said tentatively.

The car made no response, but the atmosphere in the shop changed. By speaking to it aloud he had shifted something: his own perception. He’d embarrassed himself, in fact. He could just catch the tail of a more interesting emotion. He was a child creeping past the witch’s door, deliciously afraid. But nothing he could do or say would make the imagined real: make him see the robot eyes wink, the jaws of metal grin or open in speech. Nothing but madness would change things that far.

He began to work, or rather he set the robotics to work. He had no choice now; he would have to do what he had promised and square the accounts somehow. Nothing that happened in his garage went unrecorded. The mechanic had never tried to hack his way around the firm’s system. He’d never been the type to be tempted by the complications of crime, and now he wouldn’t know where to start. He became very gloomy thinking about what he’d have to do: the awkward covering up for this strange impulse.

The free machines skated to and fro. Others slid along the overhead lines and reached down their serpent heads. The mechanic fidgeted. The little car, a fifteen-year-old Korean methanol/mix burner with a red plastic body, liquid clutch, and suspension, was a hardwearing complex of equipment, good for at least another ten years on the road. It needed a certain amount of attention, but it didn’t need his hands-on attention at all. He stood and watched.

I am redundant, he thought — a standard over-reaction to robotics. Why don’t aliens feel redundant? He struggled to perform the mental contortion of looking out of the mirror. If it were not for humans, if it were not for me, there would be no cars, no robots, no machines at all. I cannot be superseded. Even if the machines become self-conscious, become “human” (the ever-receding bogey of the popular media), I will still be God. The maker. The origin.

Upstairs the toddler would be in bed; and the boy too, tucked up with one of the home tutoring wires that supplemented the education provided by his mother’s employers. The mother would be relaxing into her evening, snug in a nest of hardware. Empathically, subliminally, the mechanic was aware of the comings and goings, the familiar routine.

He discovered why the alien filled him with such helpless, inarticulate delight. The machines promised, but they could not perform. They remained things, and people remained lonely. The mechanic had visited his country’s National Forests — the great tracts of land that must remain undisturbed, however small his sitting room became. He accepted the necessity of their existence, but the only emotion he could possibly feel was resentment. He had no friendship with the wilderness. Animals could be pets, but they were not part of you, not the same. The aliens had the solution to human isolation: a talking world, a world with eyes; the companionship that God dreams of. The alien’s visitation had stirred in him a God-like discontent.

He could not make it stay. But perhaps he could learn from it, share its enriched experience. He saw the bay as a microcosm of human technology and civilization — a world extruded like ectoplasm from its human center, full of creatures made in the mechanic’s own image: his finger and thumb, his teeth, his rolling, folding joints, his sliding muscle. His mind, even, in its flickering chemical cloud, permeating the hardware of his brain.

Excited by this insight, he jumped up and hurried to the bay’s keypad. He pulled the robotics out, the shining jointed arms sliding back and folding themselves away into the walls. He took out a box of hand tools. He would pay the alien’s car the greatest compliment in his power. He would give it the benefit of his craftsmanship, the kind of “natural, organic” servicing for which the rich paid ridiculous sums.

For a while he worked like Adam in Eden, joyfully naming the subcreation with his hands and mind. He worked, he slowed… He sat on the cold, dark-stained floor with a socket spanner in one hand and a piece of ragwaste in the other. The lights looked down. They built things with bacteria, as the mechanic understood it. Bacteria which were themselves traceable to the aliens’ own intestinal flora, infecting everything: every tool and piece of furniture, even the massive shell of their ship-world. Human beings, when they wanted to express feelings of profound communion with the planet, with the race, spoke of being “a part of the great whole.” Having lived so many years — from the start of their evolution, in a sense, the pundits reckoned — in a world created by themselves, the aliens could not experience being a-part. There were no parts in their continuum: no spaces, no dividing edges.

He suddenly felt disgusted. Scientists had established that the alien bacteria were harmless. That was the story, but it might be wrong. It might be a big lie, maintained to prevent panic in the streets. He wished he hadn’t touched the car. The alien had been using it for months. It must be coated all over with invisible crawling slime.

What was it like, to be part of a living world? He stared at the spanner in his hand until the rod of metal lost its shine. Skin crept over it; the adjustable socket became a cup of muscle, pursed like an anus, wet lips drawn back by a twist on the tumescent rod. The mechanic was nauseated, but he could not put the tool down. He could not go away from it. This oozed drop of self, attached to his hand, would not be parted from him if he dropped it. Tiny strings, strands of living slime, would cling and join them still. The air he breathed was full of self, of human substance.

He stood up. He backed off. A robot casing yielded like flesh. The mechanic yelped and sprang away. His hand, with the rod-flesh spanner growing out of it, hit the keypad; and all the tools began to leap into action. He stood in his own surging, hurrying, pulsating gut — for an instant saved by the notional space of an anatomical drawing, and then the walls closed in. There was no light, only a reddened darkness. The mechanic wailed. He fought a horrible need to vomit; he scrabbled desperately at the keys.

When everything was quiet again, he sat for while. It might have been minutes; it felt like a long time. Eventually he stopped wanting to be sick and managed to put down the spanner. He sat with his head hunched in his arms; became aware of this abject fetal crouch, and came out of it slowly. He took a deep breath.

The garage was the same as it had always been: dead and safe. He realized that he had been highly privileged. Somehow, just briefly, he had succeeded in entering the alien mind, seen the world through alien eyes. How could you expect such an experience to be pleasant? Now that it was over he could accept that, and he was truly grateful.

At last he heaved a sigh and set about putting the bay to work again. He couldn’t bring himself to touch the red car with hand tools now. Besides, he was too shaky. But he would deliver the alien’s vehicle in the morning as promised, as near to perfectly reborn as was humanly possible. He owed it that much.

He had tried to take something from the alien by a kind of force. And he’d got what he wanted. It wasn’t the alien’s fault that he’d bitten off more than he could chew and gagged on the mouthful. Gritting his teeth against the ghostly feel of flesh in the machines, he set up the necessary routines.

In a short time, it was all done. But it was very late. His wife would have to ask questions now, and he’d have to tell her something of what had happened. He stood looking at the plastic shell and the clever, deviously economical innards under the open bonnet. The machines, they said, couldn’t live with the ecosphere. In the end the human race would have to abandon one or the other: motor cars or “the environment.” But “in the end” was still being held at bay. In the meantime this was a good, well-made little compromise with damnation.

He felt lonely and sad. He had seen another world walk into his life, reached out to grasp the wonder, and found something worse than empty air. He’d wanted the alien to give him dreamland, somewhere over the rainbow. He had found, instead, an inimical Eden: a treasure that he could no more enjoy than he could crawl back into the womb.

The mechanic sighed again and gently closed the bonnet.

The red car settled itself a little.

“Thank you,” it said.

In the morning at nine o’clock the alien was there. The car was ready, gleaming on the forecourt. The alien put down its bag, which it carried not on its back or at arm’s length but tucked under one armpit in that very peculiar, lopsided way of theirs. He thought it looked tired and anxious. It barely glanced at the car. Perhaps, like a human, it didn’t even want to know how badly it had been cheated.

“What’s the damage?” it asked.

The mechanic was hurt. He’d have liked to go over the whole worksheet with it: to extract the sweet honey of its approval, or at least to extend this dwindling transaction just a little further. He had to remind himself that the alien owed him nothing. To itself, its feelings were not romantic or bizarre in the least. The world it lived in was commonplace. The mechanic’s experience was his own concern, had been an internal matter from the start. The alien was not responsible for kinks of human psychology, nor for imaginary paranormal incidents.

“Look,” he said. “I’ve got a proposition for you. My eldest, my son, he’s just passed his driving test. He won’t be allowed out on his own for a while, of course. But I’ve been thinking about getting him a little runabout. I don’t keep a car myself, you see, I’ve never felt the need. But kids, they like the freedom… I’d like to buy your car.”

In the cold light of day, he couldn’t bear to tell it the truth. He knew the car would never speak to him again. But he had been touched by the world of the other, and he simply had to bring away something: some kind of proof.

The alien looked even more depressed.

The mechanic realized suddenly that he didn’t have to worry about the money. He would tell the firm everything. They were human at head office: and as fascinated as he. The car would stay on the forecourt. He would call in and get it featured on the local news, maybe even national news. It would be extremely good for business.

For the alien’s benefit, however, he would stick to the story about his son. They really shouldn’t be encouraged to believe that human beings thought they were magic.

“List price,” he added, hurriedly. “And a little more. Because anyone would pay a little more, a car that’s been driven by one of our famous visitors. What do you say?”

So the alien walked away with its credit card handsomely e-charged. It turned at the corner of the street, by the yard where the banana fronds hung over the gate, and bared its pointed teeth in that seeming smile. The farewell could have been for the red car on the forecourt as much as for the human beside it, but it made the man feel better anyway.

September 1992

Blue Clay Blues

Somewhere on the outskirts of town, the air suddenly smelled of rain. The change was so concrete and so ravishing that Johnny stopped the car. He got out, leaving Bella strapped in the back seat. She was asleep, thank God. The road punched straight on, rigid to the flat horizon. The metaled surface was in poor repair. It seemed to have been spread from the crown with a grudging hand, smearing out into brown dirt and gravel long before it reached the original borderline. There were trees at the fences of dusty and weed-grown yards; clapboard houses stood haphazard amid broken furniture and rusted consumer durables. The town went on like this, never thickening into a center, as far as the eye could see. The rain was coming up from the south, a purple wall joining sky and earth. It smelled wonderful, truly magical. There were a few rumbles of thunder knocking around the cloudy sky. He hoped for lightning.

It took longer than he’d thought. He reached in and picked up his phone from the seat, called Izzy again. He’d been calling her all day, leaving messages on the board. These repeated phone calls from an irate spouse would be the talk of the floor; Izzy’s workplace was that kind of petty. He knew she’d hate it; she would be made miserable by the piddling notoriety. He was partly disgusted at himself, but not disgusted enough to stop.

The arrangement was that Johnny looked after Bella, and when he was on a trip she went into daycare. It was a good arrangement, except when all the emergency routines failed at once. It had broken down seriously yesterday. He had had to leave town with the baby. He had been trying to contact Izzy ever since, but they kept missing each other, with almost mythological symmetry. Every time he ran his messages, his wife jabbered at him in gradations of bewildered panic. Every time he called her, her number was busy.

Now she was at work, where they didn’t allow personal phones on the floor, and he was twenty-four hours out in the boondocks with a two-year-old in tow. She couldn’t be too badly worried though: he was keeping her well informed.

He stood and watched the advancing wall, brooding sourly on the amount of work he put into their relationship. He had practically invented everything, all the little rituals of bonding. He wondered, did Izzy feel that she was doing the same: building their life together, brick by sodding brick? Maybe she did. It’s called marriage. It works, more or less.

The tow truck careened to a halt, followed by three motorbikes. Three men got out of the cab. The bikers remained mounted. Johnny still had the phone in his hand. He took a step, casually, and let it drop onto the driver’s seat.

“What’s the problem, kid?”

The speaker was tall and basically skinny, but with bull shoulders and heavy arms from some kind of specific training or maybe manual labor. He was inappropriately dressed: a suit jacket over bib overalls, no shirt. The rest were the same — not exactly ragged, but it was clear they’d left certain standards far behind. They were all of them technically white, a couple dusky; a shade further off the WASP ideal than himself. Every one of them was armed.

Johnny immediately realized that these people would find an aesthetic impulse hard to understand. It would be as well not to brand himself a city slicker, to whom rainfall is a spectacle.

“Some kind of breakdown?”

“I guess so,” said Johnny. “Engine died, no reason why. I was about to look under the hood.”

“Whaddya use for fuel?” A biker, nursing his mighty steed between his knees, seemed amiably curious.

“Uh — just about anything.”

“Well, all we got is just about plain gas.” The bikers laughed, contemptuous of city slicker modernity.

Ouch. That was a warning. Don’t pretend to be too like them. They’ll always smell you out.

“Let’s take a look.”

The man in the suit jacket bent over Johnny’s engine. He took his time, considering there was absolutely nothing wrong. Johnny’s assistance didn’t seem to be required, which was good because he didn’t feel like turning his back, and particularly not like bending over in a peculiarly vulnerable invitation… The other two men from the truck came close. They looked into the back of the car and saw Bella — whose existence had, for the past few minutes, vanished from Johnny’s consciousness. Something, some lax, living system inside him — blood or lymph or nerves — went bone-tight from the crown of his head to his heels.

“That your kid?”

“Yes, she’s my kid.”

“Can you prove you’re the father?”

This bloodcurdling question did not require an answer. As Johnny mumbled “Why yes, certainly…” the speaker, a squat youth in baggy cutoffs worn over a stained but gaudy one-piece that surely belonged in another tribal culture altogether, turned away. The guy in the suit jacket slammed the hood down saying, “Yep. That certainly is a catastrophic breakdown.”

At the same moment Johnny understood that the truck, which he’d taken to be a mere accidental prop, was here on purpose. A chill and horror of excitement ran through him. He was afraid he was shivering visibly — but in fact he’d have had some excuse because just then the rain arrived. It fell over the whole scene like a roll of silk tossed down, as purple as it had looked on the horizon: scented and cold and shocking.

“What’s your name, boy?”

“Johnny.”

“What d’you do?”

“Uh — I’m an engineer.”

“Looking for work? We could find you some. You need a wife to go with that kid. We got women too.”

This banter didn’t mean anything. Johnny had discovered that everywhere you go in the boondocks, people will invite you to stay. It seemed a point of etiquette to regard any chance comer as a potential addition to the community. It wasn’t something to worry about, no more than the equal number of brief acquaintances who invited you to take them home, see their kids through college, advance the capital for them to set up in business. Banter covered the positioning of the truck, the chaining up of Johnny’s car, all under the hammering of the purple rain. Johnny, expressing decent but not effusive gratitude, got into the back with Bella, who woke as the car was being winched onto the flatbed. She didn’t speak or wail but stared all around her mightily. He could tell she’d been dreaming.

“It’s okay, Bel. The car broke down. These people are giving us a ride into town.” “Daddy, why are you wet?”

“It’s raining.”

Bella stared with eyes like saucers, and dawning appreciation of this new means of transport, this audience, this adventure. The bikers peered in at her. “Who’s that?” she demanded. “What’s his name?” It was the stocky young one. She could never be brought to believe that there were people in the world whose names her parents did not know. “Archibald,” said Johnny at random. He spent the rest of the trip naming the other men in the same mode, and explaining over and over that the car was suddenly sick and needed a car-doctor: over and over again, while he made desperate mental tape of their route and reviewed worst case scenarios, and still found a little space in which to want to kill Izzy, just beat her to shit. He knew she wasn’t to blame, but she was the other half of his mind, and the fight-or-flight rush had to have some outlet.

The drive ended at a wired compound, shrouded by tall dark hedges. Inside, there was a wide yard and flat-topped buildings that looked somehow like a school. The rain made the wall of leaves glow blue-black and glistened on piles of automotive rubbish. Dogs rushed to the gates as the bikers dragged them open, snarling and yelping away from kicks. Bella was scared. Johnny got down with the toddler fastened on his chest like a baby monkey, his pack on his back and jacket bulging. He surrendered his keys with a good grace.

“Papers?”

Out here, you had to carry physical documentation. It was a bitch because most of them couldn’t read, and just got mad at you while they were trying to decipher your life’s history. He handed over his folder, hoping the boss, at least, was literate.

He wished he had the nerve to leave some of his stuff in the car. It would have looked better, he knew. He staggered under his untrusting assumptions, and they led him off to a hall with a scuffed floor of light timber and rows of plastic chairs. The room smelt of kids. He decided that this was the school, in so far as such things still existed. A school, and a junk yard: original combination for some gifted entrepreneur.

“We’ll take a look, Johnny, just you wait here.”

One of the bikers — Samuel — watched them through the fireproof glass of the hall doors. Bella was unusually silent — most unusually, because he knew she was riveted with excitement. He looked around and found that she was sitting, legs jutting over the edge of the scummy plastic seat, with one hand ruminatively delving under her skirt. Her expression was of dignified, speculative pleasure.

Johnny managed to smother hysterical giggles. “Get your hand out of your pants, Bel. People don’t like to see that. It doesn’t look good.”

This condemnation — always in a tone of mild and absolute certainty — was the worst her Daddy ever issued. Bella understood that concern for the comfort of others and respect for their beliefs was to be her ultimate morality. She removed her hand with a sigh.

“My nobble went fat. It went by itself.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s the adrenalin rush. Ignore it, kid.”

Samuel — stringy and pale, with ropy muscled arms and a ponytail — came to fetch them. They were led into a cavern of a mechanic’s workshop. The foreign and menacing smell of heavy oil filled the air. Johnny’s car stood openmouthed on black greasy concrete, surrounded by a slew of tools and power leads. It looked as if the poor beast had been through a rough grilling. Johnny hoped it had managed to hold out.

The mechanic inspected them. Johnny had rarely met a black man outside the city. Tribal divisions were so stern it would have been pointless to send a white boy off the white squares, under no matter what inalienable flag of truce. But this man’s color was only the least of the signals he sent out. Johnny gathered that he was looking at the local God, the big chief.

God was very dark, perhaps fortyish (but Johnny was always making mistakes about age out here), with sleepy narrow eyes and a whisper of moustache above his humorous mouth. Johnny liked him on sight, and was no less very scared indeed. He slid Bel to the ground but kept a tight grip. The wrist, not the hand. One learns these tricks of technique.

The mechanic wiped his hands on dirty rag.

“You ain’t armed, boy.”

A man without a gun on his hip was so peculiar he was downright threatening. Johnny didn’t mean to threaten anybody.

“I’m a journalist.”

“Ah — ha. Thought you said you were an engineer.”

God speaks grammatical English, when he chooses.

“Engineer — journalist. I’m an eejay.”

God’s courtiers displayed a hearteningly normal reaction. Samuel giggled, nudged Ernesto in the ribs; Gustave hooted.

“Hey, eejay. You wanna mend my tv?” Archibald grinned.

Florimond in the suit jacket cuffed him and shrugged at the visitor, assuming an air of grave man-to-man sophistication.

“Okay. So what story are you hunting, newshound?”

Unlike the others, God was not impressed by the eejay tag.

But Johnny was still recovering from Bella’s masterstroke: from finding himself sitting in a gangster’s waiting room with a two-year-old who was calmly taking the opportunity to get in touch with her emotions… Smothered hilarity maybe gave him an aura so inappropriate as to shift the balance. As the man spoke, the casual promise of death that hung around him became less palpable. Johnny’s territorial blunder might be excused.

The courtiers grew quiet. Bella squirmed and tugged, displaying her usual pathological failure to read adult atmosphere — which at this moment made Johnny long to break her arm.

“It’s kind of private.”

“Let the kid go, boy. She won’t hurt anything.”

Bella bounced free. “I won’t hurt anything,” she parroted smugly.

She was gone, beyond arm’s reach. Gustave was lifting her up to peer inside the poor tortured car. Johnny felt sweat breaking out delicately all over his body.

“Look. This is not necessarily the truth, but… I’m after the source of a kind of legend. You had a nuclear accident hereabouts, two years ago?”

The reading in God’s eyes flickered upwards again. Johnny had better not dwell on this subject — nuclear poison, two-headed babies, that kind of insulting stuff.

“We had an incident.”

“Okay, I’m looking for…this will sound crazy, unless you know something already, but I’m looking for a diamond mine.”

“Diamonds.”

“It’s like this. When you get a melt — er, an incident of that kind, a massive amount of heat and pressure is generated. The safer the plant, the less of it gets dissipated outward. It has to go somewhere, it goes down. You’ve got coal-bearing strata around here, not all of it even mapped. Under pressure, that old fossil fuel can be transformed into another kind of pure carbon. What I’m looking for is a deposit of blue clay, a blue clay that’s new to this area. From the blue clay, you get the diamonds.”

Johnny needed all his professional skill to measure God’s reaction. He couldn’t use it. His attention was painfully focused on Bel: her position in the stinking cavern, who was touching her, was she being led near a door. It didn’t matter. God was stone-faced, neither twitchy nor incredulous.

“I don’t know if this is exactly a news-lead,” Johnny went on. “It’s my own long shot. I haven’t decided yet if my employer would have an interest.”

God laughed softly, and shook his head in reproof (we superbeings must stick together).

“If you dig up a diamond mine on your boss’s time, I guess those are her diamonds, boy. Take a closer look at that employment contract of yours, you’ll find I’m right. Which leaves you with nothing to sell, and here you are in the market. That could be an embarrassing position.”

Johnny would have to agree. God didn’t ask his opinion. He tucked away his rag and thrust out a hand, which Johnny shook obediently.

“I’m the schoolmaster around here. Schoolmaster and mechanic. I’ve seen boys like you. I’ve liked boys like you: smart and sweet, and a trifle off the rails. Don’t you go too far, Johnny. Stick to what’s right.”

Potato-headed young Gustave, with the scoured red complexion, came over and delivered Bella into her Daddy’s arms.

“You’re a mite loaded down, kid. If you need anything else from the car, you better point.”

He shook his head. God was being sarcastic: the city slicker’s distrust had been noted. God nodded, and considered Bella.

“She’s a pretty little girl. You’re young to be her Daddy.”

Johnny was young to be anybody’s Daddy, as anyone would know if they knew the way things worked indoors. Not only a city slicker, but a rich fucking gilded youth. Oh, shit.

“Can you prove she’s your child?”

The hotel had rooms over a bar that was also a diner. Johnny walked into the desolate lobby with his escort. Gustave leaned over and took one of the keys, an archaic looped shank with wards of metal and a tag, number 5, dangling. The woman behind the desk glanced up.

“Hi Donny.” She studied the new guest. “This the eejay?”

He’d been in town two hours, plenty of time for the grapevine. He was surprised the desk clerk wasn’t more excited. She looked at him solemnly, a little too long — and still without gushing, exclaiming, or using his name. Johnny felt a prickling in his belly. Maybe she was just a serious-minded girl.

There were other guests, but Johnny was the only stranger. While the rain sheared down outside everybody gathered: the men and youths around Johnny, the women and children several tables away, beyond the single screen tv that kept babbling away on a cable channel Johnny had never seen before.

There were, discernibly, at least two rival camps. But nothing bad happened. No guns were pulled.

These people got married. They had family life, of a kind. But they’d forgotten anything they ever knew about sexual equality. Not one of the gaunt and battered looking females would dare to come up to the men’s group, sit directly in front of the screen: get between a man and anything remotely like the goodies. None of them, of course, could talk to Johnny. It was one of those things you must not mention. The men’d be outraged and disgusted if you hinted there was anything weird about this arrangement. The women too, probably.

The guys were prodding for details of life “inside the dome.” Their technique was to make a casual remark, about the electro-paralytic force-field or the death-rays wielded by the android guards — and watch the effect it had on Johnny. He was kept busy protecting their egos. He knew better than to contradict them directly over anything. It would be a dangerous kindness.

He felt like the Wizard of Oz.

Bella got bored and went to stare at the local kids. The women petted her, admiring her plump arms and legs: her strapping size compared to their own toddlers. Johnny discussed diamond mining with bared teeth, and needles of controlled panic rammed under his fingernails. The women were far more scary than the men. If one of them was to take Bel and go, out into the drenching purple night, what could he do?

Meanwhile, the desk clerk, who was also the waitress, kept passing to and fro. She was breaking the rules, but she seemed to have some kind of special license. Every time she passed she would find a way to flirt: leaning over a nearby table to show her neat butt, reaching up to a shelf to give him the taut curve of her breast and waist. Every small town has to have its bad girl. The younger men hooted and flicked her behind. The other women, young and old, pretended not to notice.

The party broke up at last. Johnny lay staring at the grey ceiling of room 5, and at the inevitable cam-eye circled with its thoughtful message for your protection. The rain had stopped. The main street outside was noisy with the home-going populace. Must’ve been about every able-bodied soul in town.

He’d brought Bella out before, but never so far, and nothing had ever gone wrong. He considered how important it was for him to believe that it was safe. No danger, no harm, there are decent people everywhere. The upholding of some kind of liberal ideal was apparently worth more to him than his child’s life and safety.

They could take Bella away from me.

Walking into that bar with her had been like shooting his cuff to display an antique gold Rolex. Madness! He could try to tell them Bel was a perfectly ordinary little girl, produced by traditional methods and complete with organically-grown blemishes (she had a crowded mouth, and a tendency to stand over on her inherited weak ankles). You wouldn’t get people out here to believe it, when they saw her next to their own scrawny, undersized, scabby-faced kids. To believe Bella was ordinary they’d have to accept that Johnny wasn’t weirdly privileged, Johnny was normal… They’d have to see how far they’d fallen.

You wouldn’t want to wish that on them.

Two hundred miles from NYC. There was no protection, no law, no appeal. From the moment that tow truck appeared he had been in trouble. He would be criminally crazy not to cut his losses and get out — even if he were alone. But he hated to give up. He was on the track of a story, and he knew he was in the right place. If God didn’t know why the fuck he was here: if God was convinced by the spurious dazzle of irradiated gemstones — somebody must know better. That somebody would come to Johnny. He didn’t have to do anything but wait.

He linked his hands behind his head, and thought about sex. He recalled Bella’s experiment in the school hall. She was her father’s child all right. She’d made that vital connection so naturally — doubt and danger and a mellow hint of violence…whoo, up we go. It wasn’t likely that Johnny was heading for a real amorous adventure. Things weren’t so different in that area, inside the city or out. But the sex stuff could come in useful, just because it was in short supply. It was a greed that could cover for anything.

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in.”

The desk clerk shut the door and sat down on the edge the bed.

“Hi, Johnny.”

She seemed older than he was, but she was probably a teenager. She had stringy dark blonde hair cut in a bob. Blue eyes, a wiry unkempt body in a faded overall, an out-of-doors suntan that was ruining her skin. She smiled with her eyes and touched his pants leg, as if she was testing if it was still damp.

She glanced upward. “It’s okay, Donny’s minding the store. He never checks the screens, and this one don’t work anyhow. I put you in here on purpose.”

A heavy, warning wink told him he wasn’t meant to be reassured. Donny, aka Gustave, was undoubtedly glued to the most promising peephole in town.

“Well, stranger, can we do business?” She took her hand from his leg and touched herself, both palms smoothing the slick worn fabric over her breasts. “I don’t want money. I want a ride. I don’t belong to anyone, you’ve no need to worry.”

She was in a big hurry, but that was reasonable enough. Johnny would be gone tomorrow.

“What’s your name?”

“Cambridge.”

“That’s the name of a city.”

“I know. My momma liked the sound. You ever been there? The English one? I like to think it’s the original I’m called for.”

“No, I can’t say I have.” Johnny watched her, not moving a muscle. “I can’t get you into the city; you know that. I suspect you’re an agent provocateur, ma’am.”

“Hey, no way. I’m not going to get you into trouble. I just want a ride down the road, a change of scene. And I can get you out of the trouble you happen to be in.”

She winked her steamroller wink again. “Get rid of those ants in your pants, city boy?” She squeezed his thigh, and giggled. Her eyes, which the camera couldn’t see, were deadly serious.

“If a girl wants to get on, she has to be ready to act fast. That’s the shape of things to come, don’t you think? You can’t act like the old technology, sit there waiting for the current. You gotta be able to change yourself, to fit what’s coming at you.”

Johnny was wrestling with his conscience. This could so easily be a trap. He would accept the clerk’s offer (what city slicker would refuse a loose woman?). The vigilantes would burst in. There would be some kind of ersatz legal procedure, God probably presiding. The boondocks were hot on sexual restraint. Notwithstanding her behavior downstairs it would be Johnny’s fault. The stranger caught in the act of fornication — maybe statutory rape — would be declared unfit to be in charge of a minor. All he knew about the “blue clay” could be beaten out of him on the side. He could see how tempting it looked. They’d have Bella and the diamonds. Johnny would be dumped naked out on the road — dead or alive. Dead, for preference, rather than explain himself to Izzy. He should not even dream of taking the risk.

On the other hand, all his instincts promised that the clerk was not laying that kind of trap.

“I don’t know if you have the right idea about me. I take risks; that’s my job. But not for trivial reasons.”

“I felt that. I can read people…pretty well.” She smiled, ruefully. “This may sound crazy, but I’ve always thought I could have been an eejay. If someone like me could have the chance.”

“I wish that everyone could have the chance,” said Johnny.

She nodded, head bent.

“Mr. Micane’s got you all wrong, in my opinion. This blue clay that you’re looking for, it doesn’t represent any kind of material gain. The diamonds don’t mean anything…to you. What you really want is, like, a sense of living meaning in your life. Something rare and magic that could unite everyone.”

“It’s true, living with meaning is a dream of mine,” he agreed — with the accent on the two special words.

“I’ve had that dream too.”

She gave him a long and tender look. It thrilled Johnny to the core. This was a real contact. He wondered how much she could be persuaded to tell.

Cambridge tossed back her hair. “Okay, mister eejay. After the highfalutin come on, do we have a deal?”

He glanced around the room, swiftly up and away at the “defective” camera. “Um — can we go somewhere?”

“You want me to take you home?” She walked to the door. Leaned there, in a pose from some ancient movie. “I come off shift in an hour. There’s a dark blue Nissan in the parking lot. I’ll meet you beside it.” She grinned up at the eye in the ceiling. “I’ll take you where there’s no protection. Can you do it without an audience, eejay? Ever tried?”

Johnny put his gear together. He was rapturously busy for a few minutes, during which Bella vanished as she had by the roadside. Then he remembered her. He stared at the sleeping baby, chewing his lower lip.

Next to the Japanese antique there was an ancient pickup, the color of its paint indeterminate in the yellow light of the oil lamps that guarded the hotel’s rear. Cambridge looked out of the dark cab. She was silently amazed.

“I couldn’t leave her. She’d wake and be scared.”

She looked him over. “Is that a gun in your pocket?”

“No, it’s a spare diaper.”

The clerk shook her head, pushed open the other door for him. He clambered, arranging Bel’s warm bulk in the baby carrier on his knees. They were jolting away, lightless, through the dark town, before she managed to come up with a comment.

“In my world, men don’t bring up kids. They just own them.” She chuckled. “Hey, what happens when we get to our love nest? Does she like to watch, or have you trained her to take part?”

Mental tape: a long drive. The darkness was haunted by the ghosts of well-kept lawns and scampering retriever dogs, boys on bicycles, flung newspapers, and mailboxes on sticks. It was a world that Johnny had never known — inaccessible now except on records as hard to decipher as incunabula to an eye reared on print. How did people make out that stuff? Depthless, even colorless. Johnny imagined skills lost to him forever, the genes for watching b&w tv switched off in his decadent blood. He hugged Bella in her frame sling. The feel of her was so immensely reassuring, he thought all secret agents should have a baby to carry. When you can’t trust anyone, and it’s against the rules for you to be sure what’s going on — you hug your baby, and she keeps you sane.

They parked among trees.

“What the fuck was all that nonsense about jewelry, anyway?”

Johnny shrugged. “Best I could do. I didn’t expect to be picked up like that. Had to send out some kind of signal. I could see I wasn’t going to get much chance to nosey around asking questions.”

“You’re right. And you’re lucky. Micane’s not stupid, you know. He’s just short of information. Like all of us out here. Okay, come on. You take some tape of the crown jewels, and hurry the record back to your magic dome.”

“Please. I don’t live in a ‘dome.’ I live in an overgrown shopping mall. With dirt in the corners, and plenty of problems.”

Cambridge smiled, humoring him. “Sure you do.”

She opened a door, steps led down. When he realized they were going underground, he understood the dazzling truth. She wasn’t leading him to a bargaining rendezvous with the cadre. She had brought him straight to the goods. The room was shadowy, echoing, with a low and bowing ceiling and a strange incline. The walls, replying to Cambridge’s pencil light, gleamed phosphorescent pale.

“What is this place?”

“It was a swimming pool,” she said. “Olympic pool. It’s been drained and boarded over for years. No water. Rest of the building’s derelict.”

She’d changed into pants, jacket, and a sweater. The rain had made the night cool. Her clothes were as squalid, strange-colored, and ill-fitting as the things the men wore, but not filthy. She pulled a clunky black plastic remote out of her waistband and keyed lights. Must be a generator on site.

Johnny stared. The glass and ceramic labyrinth: the vats. It was the real thing, a coralin plant in full production. He’d spent time in legal protein-chip production, in his apprenticeship — if only in virtuality. It wouldn’t have helped. The processing here was too makeshift to be precisely recognizable. But he’d also been tutored, unofficially, by people who knew the wild side.

He took the time to settle Bella on his shoulders. She had woken up in the pickup, but only to ask a few drowsy questions. “What’s her name…? What’s this car’s name?” She was asleep again (and the pickup was called Laetitia). He was proud of her. She was really the perfect child.

“I can make tape?”

Cambridge nodded. “That’s the deal eejay. We’ll get you away from Micane. You tell the folks back home what we have here.”

He mugged amazement, let her know how thrilled he was to find this spore of civilization outside the citadel: wondering all the while where the rest of the group was, where they’d gotten the starter, all sorts of questions to which he ought to get answers. But he already knew that Cambridge was going to tell him everything. He was stunned by her group’s trust, embarrassed by the power of his job’s reputation.

It had been obvious before the end of the twentieth century that the future of data-processing and telecoms was in photochemistry. Chlorophyll in green plants converts light — energy into excited molecules without thinking twice about it. The “living chip” was inevitable: compact and fast. They called the magic stuff of the semi-living processors “blue clay,” because the original protein goop was blue-green in color. Embedded in a liquid crystalline membrane, blue clay became a single surface of endlessly complex interconnections. Under massive magnification it looked like a coral: hence the other name, coralin. Clay? Because you can make it do anything.

So much for the technology. But then the networks, silicon and gallium-arsenide based, had crashed in the explosion of virus infection that ended the century. Coralin wasn’t greatly superior, at that point: but it was immune to the plagues. In a deteriorating political situation — a foundering economy, wave upon wave of environmental disasters — the blue clay had became political dynamite. It meant power.

Diamonds? It was a stupid cover, but good enough for the spur of the moment. Out here, a coralin plant was worth more than a truck load of gems. If the masses who lived outside the citadels could build themselves some modern data-processing they could hook up into the city networks. They’d be up and running again, and the elite who lived indoors would be running scared. The amazing thing was that more of the masses didn’t try. They accepted, with chilling calm, that a certain way of life was over. They had their own world with its own rules, and the cities were on another planet.

Johnny made tape, describing how it really was a coralin plant, and the journey he’d made to find it. He walked the aisles, the 360-cam on his headset taking in every angle. Cambridge stayed off camera. She didn’t want to wave to the public.

He finished. They faced each other: two nodes of a diffuse molecular machine, linked by the lock and key action of certain key phrases hoicked out of the romance of molecular technology. The living meaning, not like the old technology, change yourself to fit what’s coming at you. Johnny was uneasy. He had not deceived her, not actively. But she was deceived, and it was making him uncomfortable.

“You’re a union activist, aren’t you,” she said.

“Yeah,” He laughed nervously. “A cellar unionist.”

She had been tough and worldly wise to his soft city-boy, a rough diamond. Down at the deep-end, in the pallid glow of the drained pool, the balance between them was reversed.

“You came out here to find us. What can I say? I feel…found. Like a toy left out in the rain, that thought the kids would never come back to look for her. I feel rescued.”

Johnny chewed his lip. Bella wriggled and muttered. One of her knees started butting him in the ribs. She couldn’t get comfortable and she was going to wake. She weighed a ton.

“D’you ever hear about the phylloxera aphid?” he said. “It’s a similar story. It’s a kind of bug; it spreads like a virus. Once upon a time, all the good wine came from France. They had the vines. The quality, wonderful ancient-lineaged plants. Then someone accidentally shipped in some phylloxera bugs, and the whole of French viticulture was devastated. They had to rip the lot out and start again… with vines from North America, where the bug was endemic and the native vines had natural resistance. In a generation nobody could tell the difference. The wine-drinking public forgot it had ever happened.”

“Phylloxera proof telephones,” said Cambridge. “Knowing what’s happening in the next state. Bank credit. No more of that fucking censored cable tv. God. I can’t believe it.”

Johnny registered something moving behind him. The lights were off at the shallow end, but the 360 showed Gustave coming down the steps. Johnny controlled himself with an enormous effort. Among these people you must not show fear.

“Micane’s guys are here,” he told her softly.

Cambridge didn’t make a fuss. She eased past Johnny and walked up between the workbenches, raising more lights with the remote in her hand. The bikers, Samuel and Ernesto, emerged into brilliance. Donny-Gustave stared around him in disbelief.

“What the fuck is this place?”

The clerk held up her remote as if it was a weapon, and carefully tossed it down.

“What’s goin’ on, Cams?”

“Nothin’. Just a little private interview with the eejay.”

This God’s rule had some tinge of humanity. In other places, behavior as aberrant as this would have got them their heads blown away, straight off. But Gustave didn’t open fire.

“You expect me to believe that? You’re crazy.”

He jerked his shotgun for Johnny and Cambridge to go up the steps ahead. When he registered Bella, he started as if someone had dropped ice down his neck.

“Fuck!”

He pulled the headset from Johnny, carefully so’s not to disturb the child. He smashed it, conclusively, against the tiled wall of the stair, and handed it back with a defiant glare.

That was bad. Out in the wasteland gun-waving was endemic, male display behavior, not so dangerous as it looks. But the engineer-journalist was sacred; his tools even more so. He was the only link with the rest of the world. Johnny’s calm left him; fear plummeted through him…

“Fucking weirdos.”

The tow truck was outside. Johnny got Bella on his knees. She woke up and began to cry. Ernesto crouched on the flatbed, the muzzle of his shotgun through the glassless rear window of the cab. It pressed against Johnny’s neck. Samuel’s bike roared in escort. Young Gustave drove with one hand, the other awkwardly stabbing his gun into Cambridge’s ribs. His eyes were wild with anger and humiliation: he’d been taken in completely. Worse (Johnny read), he feared that his God had been taken in too.

“Fucking diamond mine!” he wailed. “What the fuck you growing back there Cams? Illegal drugs?”

Cambridge kept her eyes front. Through his own blank-brain panic Johnny could feel her arm and side against him, rigid with terror. But for Donny-Gustave she sneered the way she’d sneered when he was six and she was ten.

“Nah. Mutants, Donny. Cannibal mutant babies. And they’re coming for you. Not tonight, maybe not tomorrow night —”

“Fucking shut up.” His face in the driver’s mirror was a darkly crumpled rectangle of hurt. “I never would’ve believed an eejay would be into drugs…”

Bella’s loud and violent sobbing — so rare and devastating, this child’s crying — was like a wall around them both. Johnny held her tight and vowed that he was going to get Bella out of this alive. There was no betrayal he would not gladly embrace — if only, please God, he was given the chance.

“Shut the kid up!”

Cambridge yelled back indignantly. “Are you kidding? How are we going to do that? She’s terrified!”

Her courage was like a lifeline. He dropped into character… “Look, I don’t know what’s wrong, we weren’t doing anything wrong, we wanted to be private, kind of get to know each other. Would we be doing anything dirty with the kid there?” He babbled, injecting innocent panic into the real thing. He hunched himself forward, arms and head between Bella and the guns. She could feel that he was back in control — throat-chokingly, fearfully sweet the way she suddenly obeyed his shushing and went silent: her small hands clutching his collar, her wet face against his neck…

Gustave/Donny looked around with a bitter scowl.

“You and Cams was just holding hands? What about all that stuff? Looked like some kind of heroin still to me.”

The tow truck bucketed, its mean yellow lights barely cutting the darkness. Cambridge ducked her head and made herself small between the men, fists burrowed in her jacket pockets, letting them fight it out. Johnny couldn’t remember his next line. Gustave was going to crash the damn truck. He thought he was going to pass out, the situation was so consummately awful — when slam, the shotgun muzzle behind his ear suddenly dealt a numbing, stinging blow to the corner of his jaw.

He yelled, sure he was dying. There was another explosion, unbelievably close. The truck slewed. Bella whimpered. Cold outdoor air belched into the cab. Johnny lifted his ringing head. A mess of dark movement resolved itself into Cambridge, hanging onto the wheel and wrestling with something flailing and heavy at the flown open door.

“Take the wheel!” she screamed.

Johnny grabbed, and shoved Bella — dead silent — in her carrier into the well in front of the bench.

“Keep your head down, baby.”

She ducked. The top of her dark head was all his eyes could see. He grappled blindly — the dumb-animal feel of the ancient machine piling in with the heavy scuffle going on beside him, a blur of confusion. Donny’s body fell out into the night. Cambridge hauled the door shut. Johnny slid over. She drove the truck. The road was dark and empty, no sign of the second biker.

“Who shot him?”

“Who’d’you think?”

He looked over his shoulder. The second of Micane’s guys was a slumped heap.

“God. Who shot him?”

“I didn’t go out to the plant with you alone, what did you think? Donny drove into an ambush. Don’t look so fucking shocked, eejay. Why didn’t the stupid bastard frisk me, if he wanted to stay alive?”

“Is he dead? Are they dead?”

“I hope so.” Her teeth were chattering.

A mile or so down the road she pulled in. There were no lights, no houses visible in a strange out-doors darkness, faintly tinged with starlight. The three of them got down. Johnny at last could tug Bella out of the sling and hug her properly. Her eyes were huge and black in her dim face. A little child sometimes seems like a machine. Switch off, switch on: no memory, each event fresh and untainted. She leaned back and stared.

“Stars!”

He hadn’t known she knew what that word meant, not clearly enough to apply it out here.

The man on the back of the truck made no sound. Somewhere on the road another two human beings lay: Gustave and Samuel. Johnny wanted to go to the man on the flatbed, but the silence of that huddled thing was intimidating. Johnny’s responses were from another planet. He didn’t know what Cambridge was thinking. Maybe simply breathing, standing there and breathing. She’d shot someone. How could Johnny imagine the afterburn of that?

He thought of the desk clerk’s life, and how her spunky intelligence had won her a place with the boys, but only on condition she played by their rules. And only till she got pregnant, or fell in love. Then she’d be one of those gap-toothed horny-skinned women, “married” to some junior male: property to be abused. She’d have a string of sickly kids, her whole life the struggle to keep one or two of them alive to adulthood. The bad clothes looked ethnic and interesting on the others. On Cambridge they were shameful. She was a real human person. She shouldn’t be here, she should have a future.

“I hope…” The clerk shuddered. “I hope Donny’s… I didn’t shoot to kill. Look, don’t blame yourself, eejay. You wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t been sending out our own signals, well as we could. We knew we couldn’t keep what was going on from Micane much longer. We need some support. After what’s happened tonight we’ll need it more. But Micane’s on the slide. With help, we can take over… I’m real sorry about the cam.”

She looked at the child. “Is having her some kind of cover? Or do you honest to God look after her? I mean, like a woman?”

“No,” said Johnny, painfully aware of the truth. “I look after her like a man. It’s a start. I do my best.”

He held Bella like a shield. Cambridge’s movement toward him went unfinished. She touched Bel, awkwardly patting the little girl’s head.

“Stay here. Someone will bring your car.”

When she was gone, Johnny and Bella walked around a little: admiring the stars and bumping into a few trees. She’d soiled herself. This didn’t generally happen anymore at night, but he could hardly blame her. He managed to change her, Bella standing holding onto him with the crotch of her night suit dangling between her knees. He hugged her in a daze of gratitude. “You and me against the world, Bel,” he whispered. He gave her some dried snack fruit, and she asked him when they were going home.

He hoped the desk clerk’s story was the truth. He didn’t want to blame himself for three murders. But the black man’s dominance must have been threatened for a long time, if his rivals had been able to set up a coralin plant under his nose. Since power couldn’t change hands out here without violence, it wasn’t Johnny’s fault. If it hadn’t been over the plant, it would have been something else.

He thought of setting off into this savage utter wilderness. But he didn’t have a spare diaper any more, and the prospect of hitchhiking, even in daylight, was not appealing. An hour passed. His global-mobile was in his pocket. He didn’t feel like calling anyone. No more signals… The coralin chip in its heart, like the processor in his cam, was practically sterile. But you weren’t supposed to take any chances.

He thought of the starter that Cams’ cadre had got hold of. They were no biochemists, they didn’t build it from scratch. He imagined a brother eejay dead out here, or stripped of his magic and too ashamed ever to come home…

Bella, he found, was happier on his back. He walked her, holding hands over his shoulder, singing nursery rhymes. She didn’t say a thing about guns, or shooting, or bad guys. Which didn’t mean this adventure hadn’t scarred her for life. He writhed to think of the debriefing he’d have to go through with Izzy.

When he heard the car he hid until he was sure it was his own, and the driver was Cambridge, and there was no one else with her. She handed over a sliver of plastic card — his key. It was good to have that safely back in his hand.

They stood by the car. Johnny put the sidelights on dim, so he could see her face a little.

Boondock episodes were always incredibly charged: vows of eternal friendship, exchange of instant pictures that would be kept for a few months — until they lost all meaning. This one had only been more spectacular; the configuration was the same. Johnny told himself his picture was already fading in her purse. But he wanted to give her something real.

“How’s Donny?”

She shook her head. Don’t ask.

“About that ride —”

She thought he was joking. “Another time,” she said. “You get back and send us some reinforcement. I don’t ask what form it’s going to take, you guys know best. But make it soon, okay?”

He settled Bella in the backseat, with her beloved plastic tilt-rotor and her herbal bunny-pillow. He got into the car, opened the window wide.

“Cambridge, there’s nothing for you in that town. Don’t go back. Get in, come with us. I can fix everything.”

He’d thought it out in a split second. He could hack the problems involved: what’s gilded youthfulness for? His mistake was that he’d forgotten, for a moment, who he was supposed to be. In the dim light he saw her eyes narrow.

“Me? Leave the cadre? Wait a minute. Why shouldn’t I go back?”

He stared over the dash, “I’m an eejay ma’am. I don’t take sides. I just made the tape that just went on the news.”

At no point had she told him he mustn’t make live transmission. It had occurred to him (the Wizard of Oz) that she might not know what he was doing. The 360 looked unimpressive. But he was a journalist, and she hadn’t asked. The coralin plant could have survived. The legal status of pirated coralin wasn’t sewn up completely. There were ways, angles: there were lawyers on the side of the people. Johnny had genuinely been helping, getting them publicity. It wasn’t his fault that violence had then exploded, on prime-time news.

It would have taken the police no time to get a precise fix. They were entitled to deal swift and hard with armed conspiracy involving information technology. They would be here very soon… No one should get hurt. They’d stun-gas the site and haul the bodies out before they burned the plant.

“Okay.” She gripped the rim of the window. “Okay, fine. You faked your unionist rap. You took your pictures and sent them straight to the bastards in power. Okay, I was a fool. But you thought I’d come with you? I don’t want to escape from here. I want ‘here’ to escape from being the way it is. I thought a guy who was in the Union was someone I could trust. You were only interested in getting a story. Well fuck you, Mr. Eejay. Let them do their worst. You can’t shut us out forever. Shit — the arrogance. Any day now there’s going to be a revolution. And you’re going to find yourself sitting right in the middle, Mr. Fucking Neutral Observer.”

“That’s where I belong,” said Johnny. “I’m a journalist.”

Cambridge looked down at him, as from a great height. He saw the blighted skin, every mark picked out by the upward light. The contempt in smart, clear eyes. She would have liked to be an eejay. Maybe she had the makings, who could tell? Johnny did not go for the idea, though it was widely accepted, that there were no genes left out here worth worrying about.

“Violence is never going to solve anything.”

She curled her lip. “What kind of violence? The bureaucratic kind or the personal kind? I don’t make that distinction.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No,” said the desk clerk. “No. You’re not sorry, Johnny.”

She let go of the rim and walked away.

Johnny drove around lumpy roads, helpless, until the computer suddenly recovered its bearings and he was on his way home. He thought about the cold fenland town that he had visited once. (It would be a mistake to let anyone out here know you’d actually left the continent, that would be too much.) He thought about the European solution to the big problem. No citadels there. The countryside was empty. Everyone lived in the cities, cheek by jowl. In England the wasted people were called the poor. You stepped over them as you went into your hotel. He didn’t believe it was any worse to let them have their own world, with its own rules. He thought about the phylloxera bug. He hadn’t finished that story. How the plague came back in the next century and laid California’s vines to waste…because people forgot to take care. Because greed drowned the warnings. It isn’t the coralin, he thought. The technology is helpless to save the world. It’s what goes on between people that fucks things up.

Johnny truly was in the union, which made him a radical and dangerous character, by many standards; inside. But you can be opposed to some of the laws, and still believe in law and order. You can be on the side of the Indians, and still think it’s a bad idea to sell them guns and firewater. He wished he could explain. One day the citadel of civilization would spread out the way it used to and cover the whole continent. But that would not get a chance to happen if you let the wolves into the sleigh. You couldn’t let yourself be distracted by the fact that the wolves had human faces. He couldn’t regret his decisions. But he was glad, as the road jolted away, that his mask had slipped at the end. It would have been worse to leave Cambridge believing that she’d met her urban-guerilla savior. He had given her something real after all: a creep to despise. Maybe it evened the balance, a little.

He drove, and the pain eased. The boondocks episode began to fade in the accustomed, dreamlike way. Bella, asleep in the back, felt ever more like his talisman, his salvation, as he scurried for the sheltering walls.

February 1992

Grazing the Long Acre

The first couple of girls I saw, I thought they were hitchhikers. I’m not naive, but that stretch of the E75 between Czestochowa and Piotrkow Tryb must be the most lost, godforsaken highway on earth. Talk about the middle of nowhere… It was so incongruous. You wondered how the hell anyone came to be there, least of all this plump unattractive girl with thick thighs, puce in the cold, in a crocheted miniskirt and a strange little satin jacket, skipping about beside the traffic like a lonesome child; or this other girl, skinny as a rake, with her dishwater hair, black hot pants, and pathetic thigh-high patent boots. After the third I got the idea. I sat up and watched, it was something to break the monotony. I couldn’t work out why they were here in such numbers. I’d never seen whores plying beside a Polish freeway before. World War Two bomb craters, yes. Kids skateboarding on six-lane high-speed curves abandoned half-way through their construction; potholes, crevasses; ambling horses and carts. But never anything like this line of shivering, primping, ugly girls.

“How do they get here?”

My friend shrugged. “Their pimps drop them off, I suppose. It’s none of my concern.”

“But what makes this stretch so popular?”

“Habit. Police protection, how should I know? Word passes round.”

He spoke excellent English, my friend. I went on staring, bemused, at the cabaret. The sex must be dirt cheap, but how could anyone get turned on in such a setting? I could tell that my friend thought my interest was in poor taste. He glanced at me and settled his eyes back to the gliding, jolting grey road ahead with a frown.

“Something preys on them.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I say. Something kills them. Sometimes they find a body, sometimes nothing but a heap of dirty clothing. Some devil… It’s been going on for a while, maybe years. Many, maybe thirty, fifty girls have died. Or more. Of course the police do nothing.”

“God, how awful.”

“It’s a pollution problem,” he added. I was afraid for a moment that he was approving of the predator. But he was a decent enough guy, my friend. “There are monsters who feel they have a right to do away with women of this kind. They are a product of our crazy society, animals like that. A pollution, like the air and the water problems.”

“But if they’re getting killed, why do they keep on working here?”

“Why not? What else would they do?”

Sometimes you’d see an actual deal: a girl leaning into the open door of a halted car. Two of them getting down from the cab of a truck; the second slipped, scraped her bare buttocks on the crusted dirt of the bumper and recovered herself exclaiming, adjusting the grubby scarlet thong that divided her backside. “Grazing the long acre,” I said.

“What’s that?”

It was an expression my Irish grandmother had taught me. It’s what peasants used to do in the old country, when they had a cow but no pasture. They’d send the kids out to lead her along the roadside and eat weeds. If you say someone’s “grazing the long acre,” it means working the margins, making the best of a bad job, with a little cunning thrown in. I explained this to my friend. He liked “grazing the long acre.” He said it sounded Polish. It made him laugh.

We drove on south to Czestochowa, where he had business. I went to see the famous icon of the Black Madonna, the most sacred object in Poland — which is saying something in this country full of sainted hallowed holy bones and swords and tombs. In the year 1430 some vandals tried to steal the picture. They couldn’t shift it, so they slashed her face instead. Apparently she started bleeding real blood, and that was the debut of her miraculous career. So the story goes, and there’s still a mark on her cheek to prove it. I didn’t see anything, actually. The place was far too crowded, thick with patriotic crocodiles of schoolchildren and rattling with the brusque, hectoring voices of tour guides. But I bought a postcard.

Then we went on south to Kraków, where we stayed in a very nice hotel near the Slowacki Theatre. My friend left me alone for long stretches while he did whatever they do, these well-built Polish men in well-made suits, with their big-shouldered physical presence that you could cut with a knife. It was the beginning of April, very cold and not really the tourist season, but I did a lot of sightseeing. One day I went to see what’s left of the Jewish Quarter: which is not much. I sat on a bench next to some dignified memorial or other, in a public garden by the Ariel cafe; which is fashionable with American tourists. I was brought up a Catholic as far as anything, but I’m Jewish enough in ethnic origin that I had a weird sense of belonging, sitting by that cold stone. I thought of the sixty thousand people who had been stripped out of these streets by the Nazis and wondered how they’d feel about their errant child. Jewish Internationalism; that’s me. I’m one place where the old, nation-stateless, assimilating spirit ended up…other than Auschwitz. I tried to visit the Jewish cemetery, but it was all locked up. I walked along by the ballast of the railway line and picked up a blackened larch cone as a memento, which I keep still; I’m not sure why.

I don’t think my friend liked the fact that I’d been to the ghetto. But we didn’t quarrel. He was never nasty to me, never raised his voice. The day afterward we headed north again. I thought we were going back to Warsaw, but he didn’t say. We went by the same route, on the good old E75. Most foreigners in Poland take the train or fly from one tourist destination to another, unlike my friend, who liked to drive. He didn’t say so but I could tell. To have a big car, to travel big distances under his own power, was important to him; it was like the suits. As soon as we were in open country, clear of the commercial ring around Czestochowa, the whores in their tasteless little outfits were there again. But I was cool about it this time and pretended not to notice. About three in the afternoon he pulled off into a bright, new service area. The middle of the afternoon is hungry-time in Poland, where many people haven’t picked up the unhealthy twentieth century habit of dining in the evening; so I knew we were going to eat. He filled up with petrol, parked beside a black and chrome Cherokee jeep, and guided me into the shiny “Modern Grill Bar,” sat me down, and ordered me a pizza.

“Just stay there for a while,” he said. “I have to talk to someone.”

I had a funny feeling. The place was full. No one took any notice of me, but I was uneasy. Outside the big road went by, slicing through the flat, grey empty fields without a glance — on its way to somewhere real. I picked at my pizza, which was god-awful, and watched the family next to me tucking away sour soup, rice with dill and cream, slabs of fried fish, great heaps of meat and potatoes. Another decade of peasant meals without peasant labor, and the great-looking coltish blondes you see in Kraków and Warsaw will be vast. The driver of the Cherokee jeep, a stylish dark-haired woman in a military-grey overcoat, was sitting a few tables away with a cup of coffee. I wondered how old she was. Probably younger than she looked to my foreigner’s eyes, because she had the kind of face you meet more often in Europe than in America, beautiful but toughed-out, as if she’d been living hard and wasn’t ashamed of it. I thought she looked Jewish, which even today is not the most popular ethnicity in this country. She saw me staring and smiled a little. I glanced away.

At first I couldn’t see where my friend had gone, then I spotted him at a table with two other men the same type as himself. This was normal. It would often happen in restaurants. He’d go off and talk to some buddies and come back after a while. But I had that bad feeling. None of the men so much as glanced my way, and yet I was sure I was the subject of their conversation. And suddenly I knew what was happening. I went cold all over, because I am such a damned fool.

I was being passed on.

I stood up, casually as I could make it, thinking in my mind so my gestures would match I am just taking a trip to the john, to powder my nose. The woman in the grey overcoat had paid for her swift coffee and was leaving. I followed her out, and instead of going to the toilets I put my hand on her arm. I said, in my best Polish, “Can you give me a lift?” She’d seen me come in with a middle-aged local guy. As soon as she heard me speak she knew I was a foreigner. She could probably work out the rest. She didn’t hesitate.

“Sure, come along.”

I guessed she might not have been so willing to help if she had known what a clown I was and how richly I deserved the situation I was in. Luckily she didn’t ask for my life story. We went out and climbed into the huge jeep and drove away. If she’d asked me where I was heading I’d have had no answer. I couldn’t speak more than ten words of Polish anyway. But she didn’t ask. She didn’t say a word until we’d been driving for about ten kilometers. “Would you mind,” she said in English then, slowing down. “I have some business.”

At this point the forest, which is always there on the edge of the cold flat fields, had closed right in on either side of the road. In Poland, you never lose the sense that this country really belongs to the trees. Sometimes they look pretty sick, but they never give up. There were trees in a thick crowd around the long wooden shack and its churned up parking lot. They made the place look kind of sinister, but appealing.

Inside, the shack was an old-fashioned Polish roadside diner: no plastic, everything wood; mud-coffee and a handwritten menu. For the coffee they don’t use a pot or a filter or anything, they just dump boiling water on a heap of grounds and the rest is up to you. Getting anything other than a mouthful of grit is quite an art. She ordered for both of us without asking what I wanted (I was used to that), and we took our glasses of mud to a table. She offered me a cigarette and lit one herself. Close up she was both more good-looking and more ravaged than she’d seemed back in the Modern Grill. There were crinkly smoker’s creases around her big dark eyes, and a faded scar on her cheek that was only partly concealed by make-up. From the few words she’d spoken I could tell her English was good. I wanted to break the ice and head off some of the questions she was bound to ask: but then I looked around, and I got distracted.

Our diner was the whores’ restroom. Here they all were, off duty, their peepshow nakedness looking less ridiculous: as if we, fully dressed, were the ones who had stumbled into a chorus-girls’ dressing room. There were a few men, too, eating their meals and joking with the girls in a comradely way, as if this scene was perfectly normal. I couldn’t stop staring. I am not naive, but it was so interesting. There was a constant coming and going. A girl would rush in, pulling a bundle of notes out of her bra. She’d go up to the counter and have an intense discussion with the woman behind it, a narrow-eyed, respectable-looking dame in a rusty brown overall. Some notes would change hands. Sometimes the girl would enlist a friend to help resolve the transaction, and there’d be some sharp exchanges. Or two of them would dive into one of toilet cubicles at the back of the room, and there’d be much laughter and banging before they emerged, eyes bright and make-up slipping. They came in from the road looking exhausted: they left again refreshed, tugging at their underwear; rearranging nearly naked tits in rats’ nests of dirty polyester lace.

It jolted me a little when I realized that my new friend was equally fascinated. She smoked one cigarette and lit another, in silence: absorbed.

“Excuse me,” she said at last. “I have to talk to someone.” Off she went, taking her coffee, to chat with a little blonde in a crumpled black vest dress, who’d just walked in.

Well, here I am again, I thought.

The great thing about these old East Bloc countries, with the two-tier economies, is that when you find yourself on the street again, suddenly your last scraps of spare change turn into a month’s wages. I looked in my purse. I could eat, I could buy a night’s lodging if it came to that, wash my smalls out in the basin. I had my toothbrush and my lipstick, what more does a girl need? I went up to the counter and ordered a plate of bigos, the universal meat and sauerkraut stew. It came with fresh rye bread. I wolfed it down and lit another cigarette. I felt like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, the ideal of all teenage runaways. I wished the diner was a hotel so I could stay and become part of the louche scene. I wished it was Martinique out there instead of a slab of dour Polsku highway, but you can’t have everything.

There was a flurry going on among the girls, around the blonde: who was slumped with her head on her folded arms, looking in sore need of a pep-up trip to the john. My friend was in the midst of it. I watched without seeming to care; I didn’t want to be pushy. I wondered what I’d say when she asked me how did I get into this scrape?

I was at school in Paris. I wasn’t failing, I had friends, I wasn’t taking drugs. Some of my smart and pretty bourgeoisie classmates were selling ass around the Maréchales — that’s a ring of Paris road junctions, all called after old generals, for some reason — for jet-set pocket money: I wasn’t in that league. Maybe I just wanted my parents to take notice. Maybe I resented the way they’d brought me up international, following Daddy’s job all over the world, when I’d have preferred to stay home with my grandmother. I don’t know why I did it. I wanted to have an adventure; I wanted to be in a Howard Hawks movie. So I took a flight to Budapest, to see what I could see.

I lost my credit cards to a mugger, but otherwise I had a good time. When my cash was running low and I was thinking about phoning home, I met a guy, another American, in a picture gallery. I told him my troubles; he paid the rent I owed at my pension. He took me out to dinner; we went back to his hotel room. It was no different from having an older boyfriend, a grown-up who would naturally pay for everything: until one morning a couple of weeks later I woke up, my friend had checked out, and there was money on the table. Then I understood, but it didn’t matter. He was gone, and I didn’t have to face him.

Since then I’d been living on my wits. I could have stopped the adventure any time. I didn’t want to. It had been fun riding up and down that big road with my Polish friend. It makes you feel part of something exciting, to be cruising with some guy whose mysterious business is like an intriguing foreign film without subtitles. It makes you feel different. I’d been scared by what had happened, or nearly happened, in the Modern Grill Bar. That had given me a shudder, like the time in Kraków’s Jewish quarter when I’d suddenly realized I was easily Jewish enough to have been shipped out with the others, down the railway line to the death camp.

I like to choose my friends.

But it was okay, I’d escaped. Now here I was with this beautiful Jewish-looking woman, who had a thing for hanging out with whores. Another strange encounter, another adventure. I recalled the story of the predator. Was that true, or something my ex-friend had said to scare me? On the wall behind the counter — where a small tv stood, playing a quiz show with the sound turned down — I saw some Missing Person posters, the kind of thing you get in big train stations: a poorly copied black and white photo of some girl or boy. Have You Seen Her? Do You Know Anything…? I didn’t have to know Polish or get close to get the message. There seemed to be a lot of them, among the National Soccer Team pics and the gaudy advertising: graded in age from grey and battered to brand new.

I fantasized that the Jewish woman and I would investigate. She’d be cynical and wary of getting involved, but my belief in her would swing it: we would be a team. Would she accept that role, playing reluctant good guy to my blunt tomboy, Humphrey Bogart to my Bacall? I wished I could make it happen. Trouble is, you can give yourself the illusion of choice, but you can’t really choose a new protector. They have to choose you.

I was just beginning to get melancholy when she came back to me. “I’m sorry about that,” she said, with a smile that left her eyes pensive. “We can go now.”

“What was going on?”

“Oh, another girl has disappeared, Malga’s friend. The police think she’s dead.”

“Oh wow, I heard about that, the killer. They didn’t find a body?”

She shook her head. Her frown said she didn’t want to dwell on the subject, so I laid off. This time she asked me where I was heading. I said Warsaw for the sake of argument. Her English was very good. We talked, neutral stuff about how I liked Poland and what other countries I’d visited. She knew damn well I wasn’t a tourist, but she’d obviously decided to ask no awkward questions, and I was too proud to throw myself on her mercy. A song I liked came on the radio. I asked her what the words meant and she translated the catch for me —

If I could spend some time alone with you
In some place that’s hard to find, but easy to remember…

I wanted it to be our song, the one that captures almost as an afterthought the whole fragile, bittersweet mood of the movie. I wanted to drive along with her all night. But we only got as far as the next roadside restaurant. This one was more like the Modern Grill in outward appearance, only without the petrol pumps. I wondered, just a little uneasily, what was going on now. Was she going to dump me?

“You did well to eat at the other place,” she said. “The food here is terrible.”

It was the same scene as before, except that the clientele was more mixed and the girls were more discreet. They wore coats. The same as before, she bought two coffees (granules from a Nescafé sachet, tasting of grease) and left me on my own. I watched her with the girls. You could see that the news about “Malga’s friend” had hit this place too. They were like little birds, huddling together in an invisible storm. And my friend was in the middle of it. This time I saw the deal. I saw some kind of pills in a clear plastic envelope, slipped from the pocket of the military-grey coat into a hungry teenage hand. You wish there’d be a little more variety, but it’s always either drugs or sex. Always.

“What was that?” I said, when she came back. I didn’t want her to think I was naive. “What are you selling? Maybe I want some.”

She shook her head. “I hope not.”

“C’mon. What was it?”

“AZT.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh…” I felt gauche and confused. “Is…is that what you do? You ride up and down here handing out medical stuff? A kind of whores’ paramedic?”

“Not exactly.” She sat down, hands deep in the pocket of that excellent coat, gazed into space for a moment, then gave a nod towards the girl who needed the AIDS drugs — who was leaving, getting back to the job. “How old, do you think?”

“Um, sixteen?” I hazarded. Making her two years younger than me, and dying. Tough.

“Perhaps, barely… Once upon a time, I was a teenage Jewish girl, engaged to an older man. I had no choice about the marriage. I mean, I was not forced: in my heart I had no choice. Our community, my community was important to me.” I nodded. I imagined how she might have felt, growing up Jewish in Communist Poland.

“I got pregnant. He knew the baby wasn’t his, but he kept my secret. He also knew that the other guy, the baby’s father, was still in my life. He married me anyway, and brought up my kid. At first I was simply grateful for the food and shelter. Then, when I was getting almost old enough to talk to him, to know him, the bastard ran out on me. Heart attack. They say the good die young. It isn’t true. The good die middle-aged, they live just long enough to work themselves to death…”

“What about the other guy, the baby’s father?”

She shrugged. “Oh, he’s still around. Always will be. I’m part of his operation. He’s a kind of monster, but even when I don’t like what goes down in his operation, which is most of the time, I understand him. As much as I wish I didn’t. You know, giving me a child, with all the grief that that entailed, was the smallest part of what he did to me. What was much worse, though I didn’t work this out until a long time afterwards, was that he made me his partner. That’s what really stitched me up. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that I volunteered. How could I have volunteered? How could I have known? But it is true that I’m implicated. I also have blood on my hands.”

It had been the same with the guys. If they chose to talk, they’d ramble away as if I were a dog or a cat or something, leaving out all the facts that would make sense of what they were saying. But with her I didn’t mind. My indignation had vanished the moment she started to explain. I wanted nothing better than to listen while she gave me glimpses of her complex and mysterious life. If she’d told me she was a straight-arrow charity worker I’d have been terribly disappointed. I wondered if she carried a gun, and should I call the police; and was I going to meet this monster, the Mr. Big from whom she couldn’t escape, my dark lady with the checkered past.

“Being a whore is like a drug addiction,” she said, looking at the girls, not at me. “Everything contributes: friends, circumstances, the idleness, a certain fascination. Giving them medicine is something to gain their confidence; it doesn’t change anything. To get out, they have to vanish. I help them to do that, if they’ll let me. If it’s too late, then I help them any way I can.”

I felt uncomfortable. “If you want to save the girls, why don’t you go after the guys?”

“Ah!” She laughed, offered me a cigarette, and lit one for herself. Her long fingers were stained with nicotine and nervously beautiful. “And do what? Shoot them in the head? A person has to know he is sick, before he can be made well. The girls know they are sick, at least, by the time they come to me.”

She sipped her cold coffee for a while, preoccupied.

“Would you mind coming back with me to Pod Las now?”

“Huh?”

“The first place we stopped. It means, “Under the Forest.”

So we went back. It was dusk, and getting very cold. We’d hit a slack moment; the room was nearly empty. Yellowish electric light glistened on the wooden walls. My friend spoke to the woman at the counter: who scowled and answered, “Tak.” Which means “yes,” but only if repeated about fifteen times in a swift staccato like a burst of machine-gun fire. Tak, tak tak…she said. The raggedy blonde my friend had talked with earlier was almost the only girl in the place.

I got myself tea, this time, cheaper than coffee, and sat down, thinking about the dark lady with the checkered past. The blonde girl called Malga stood up. Her face was drawn and grey, her eyes blank. She headed for the door. I saw my friend straighten up sharply, as if someone had dropped ice down her back. She followed Malga.

As she passed, she said quietly, “Stay here. Don’t follow us!”

She went out. I sat for a few minutes. Then I started thinking, about the girl who had just walked by me: about the scene I’d witnessed here earlier and my mystery friend. Who liked to hang out with whores, but who had told me that her mission was to rid the world of girls who sell sex for a living. Soon I had myself completely terrified. I decided that I’d been riding around with a psychopath. The Jewish woman was the predator! It had to be. Now I understood why she’d asked me no questions. She knew everything she needed to know. I was alone, I was vulnerable, and the way we’d met had left her in no doubt that I was her rightful prey.

The little diner was suddenly drained of romance. Everything changed shape and color. My American, the one in Budapest, had two little daughters. He didn’t tell me that, I looked in his wallet once while he was sleeping and found their pictures. I suppose when they grew up he wanted them to be dentists, or something. But when he met me, he thought it was okay that I should pay with sex for food and shelter. Was he right? I don’t know. He didn’t force me. But he didn’t march me to a telephone and stand over me while I called my terrified parents. He didn’t do anything to haul me back from the brink.

What went through his head? Am I an adult? Am I my brother’s keeper?

But it doesn’t matter how you got into the hole, when you’re in it… I was going hot and cold by turns. The withered faces of murdered girls stared at me from the wall. I was so frightened that I couldn’t see any way to resist. She would come back from whatever she did to Malga. She would come back and take me into the dark —

The woman behind the counter was giving me strange looks. Finally she came over with a short man in a pork pie hat, one of her more prosperous customers. “Are you wanting a lift?” she asked. “This gentleman can help you.”

“No thank you.”

“You should take the lift,” said the proprietress of the Pod Las. I couldn’t ask about the Jewish-looking woman, because I couldn’t speak Polish. But from the way she spoke and the look in her eye, I knew that she was warning me to get away. She was right. The guy looked okay. I would do him and get him to drop me in a town, somewhere away from this damned road, where I would call my parents. Tomorrow or the next day I would call them. I would call them real soon. As soon I had a story worked out.

We went out together. He slipped his arm around my waist. I was looking up and down for the raggedy blonde. I saw something big parked a few hundred meters along the road, no lights. I thought it was the jeep. Beside it, what looked like a struggle was going on. I shouted “Stop that!” and threw off the man’s arm. He yelled after me, something like it’s not our concern! I kept running, beside the stream of traffic, screaming “Leave her alone!”

I reached the spot in time to see three men’s pale faces, flashing angry guilty glances over their shoulders, as they stooped around what looked like a bundle of dirty clothes. They left the bundle lying, leapt into their big car, slammed the doors; and it roared away.

I stood there shaking.

The angel of death that stalks girls like my raggedy blonde isn’t one horrible serial-killer. The monster has many faces: disease, neglect, accident, overdose. It’s only sometimes murder, and bodies can easily vanish when no one cares. I didn’t know if the girl was dead. I was going to go to her: but then someone else was there. It was the Jewish woman, my mysterious friend. The body lay in her arms, like that statue called the Pieta, of Jesus Christ lying dead, and Mary holding him. And then, where this image had been, there seemed to be a human shape cut out of clear darkness. What did I see? I still tremble when I remember, though it was over in an instant, a terrifying glimpse. I think I saw her as she really is. She is not the Jewish woman. She is no gentle, docile Madonna. She, impersonal and absolute, is what lies within and beyond all images of the dark lady. I saw the gateway between creation and the uncreated. I saw the immaculate void of all our desire, opening into my world, in that cold April night, with the traffic roaring by, the air smelling of exhaust fumes, headlights splashing like shoreline waves on the forest eaves.

The man from the Pod Las came running up. He exclaimed and cried (I think) What a terrible thing! and that I mustn’t look! He led me back to the diner, and the proprietress called the police. There were sirens and lights, and they took the girl’s body away.

I discovered that no one else had seen a Jewish-looking woman with a scarred cheek. I’d come into the Pod Las alone, once in the afternoon and then again in the evening. As soon as I understood, I didn’t insist on my version. They’d have thought I was crazy. When the police had found me a hotel for the night, I looked in my purse to see how much money I had left and discovered a wad of notes tucked into the back pocket, with a scrap of paper on which someone had written, in looping old-fashioned European handwriting: go home. It was enough for my air fare. I suppose my Polish friend must have put the money in there, when he decided to dump me at the Modern Bar Grill. I told you he was a decent enough kind of guy. The rest, the whole dark lady encounter, was my vivid imagination.

So that was the end of my adventure. There were no terrible consequences, much as I deserved them. It was just a wild adolescent spree. But I kept the paper with the message I like to think she sent me (directly or indirectly); and I keep the picture of her I bought, up on my wall. I think of her often, the impossible She. I wonder, is she still driving up and down, between Czestochowa and Piotrkow Tryb, saving souls?

And I think about going home.

June 1997

Collision

Does size matter? You can build a particle accelerator on a desk top, but the Buonarotti Torus was huge, its internal dimensions dwarfing the two avatars who strolled, gazing about them like tourists in a virtual museum. Malin had heard that the scale was unnecessary; it was just meant to flatter the human passion for Big Dumb Objects: a startling thought, but maybe it was true. The Aleutians, the only aliens humanity had yet encountered, had never been very good at explaining themselves.

Nobody would have been allowed to keep the Buonarotti on a desk top on Earth, anyway. The voters were afraid an Instantaneous Transit Collider might rend the fabric of reality and wanted it as far away as possible. So the aliens had created the Torus and set it afloat out here in the Kuiper Belt as a kind of goodbye present — when they’d tired of plundering planet Earth and had gone back from whence they came.

Wherever that was.

But the Aleutians had departed before Malin was born. The problem right now was the new, Traditionalist government of the World State. A fact-finding mission was soon to arrive at the Panhandle station, and the Torus scientists were scared. They were mostly Reformers, notionally, but politics wasn’t the issue. Nobody cared if flat-earthers were in charge at home, as long as they stayed at home. The issue was survival.

Malin and Lou Tiresias, the Director of Torus Research, were using high-res medical avatars to check rad levels after a recent gamma burst. There was a gruesome fascination in watching the awesome tissue damage rack up on their eyeball screens… Luckily the beast needed little in-person, hands-on maintenance. Especially these days, when it was so rarely fired-up.

No transiters would ever take any harm, either. They weren’t flesh and blood when they passed through this convoluted way-station.

“At least the mission’s staffed by scientists,” said Lou. “My replacement, the Interim Director, is a high-flying, gold-medal neurophysicist and a media star.”

“Huh. I bet she’s a flat-earther of the worst kind,” growled Malin. “What d’you think’s going to happen, Lou?”

The world government was supposed to leave the Panhandle scientists alone. That was the deal. In return for past services the researchers would rather, it must be admitted, forget —

“I’m afraid they’re going to shut us down, my child.”

Lou gave a twirl and a crooked grin. Hir avatar wore a draped white gown, a blue-rinsed perm, rhinestone wingtip glasses, and a pantomime beard: an ensemble actually quite close to the Director’s real world appearance. Lou, the funky, reassuringly daft, all-purpose parent figure.

“It’s a question of style,” he explained, ruefully.

There were few of Malin’s colleagues who hadn’t fooled around most un-traditionally with their meat-bodies, and few who respected the boring notion of mere male or female sex.

Malin digested the thought that Lou was to be replaced by some brutal, totalitarian, politicized stranger.

“Will we be blacklisted?”

“Not at all! They’ll send us home, that’s all.”

Malin had glimpsed movement, on the edge of her screen: sensed a prick-eared scampering, a glint of bright eyes. Who was that, and in what playful form? People often came to the Torus: just to hang out in the gleaming, giant’s cavern, just to delight in the sheer improbability of it… They say deep space is cold and bare, but Malin lived in a wild wood, a rich coral reef, blossoming with endless, insouciant variety. It thrilled her. She loved to feel herself embedded in the ecology of information, set free from drab constraint: a droplet in the teeming ocean, a pebble on the endless shore —

“I don’t want to go home,” she said. “This is home.”

To the Deep Spacers, mainly asteroid miners, who used their sector of the Panhandle as an R&R station, the Torus was a dangerous slot machine that occasionally spit out big money. They didn’t care. The scientists were convinced their project was doomed and terrified they’d never work again once the IT Collider had been declared a staggering waste of money. The night before the Slingshot was due to dock they held a wake, in the big canteen full of greenery and living flowers, under the rippling banners that proclaimed the ideals of Reform, Liberté Egalité Amitié… They toasted each other with the Semillon they’d produced that season, and talked about the good times. It all became very emotional. Dr. Fortune, of the DARPA detector lab, inveterate gamer and curator of all their virtualities, had arrived already drunk, attired in full Three Kingdoms warrior regalia. He had to be carried out in the end, still wildly insisting that the Torus staff should make a last stand like the Spartans at Thermopylae and sobbing —

An army of lovers cannot lose!

Nobody blamed him. The DARPA bums (the lab teams were all nicknamed after ancient search engines) had switched off their circadians and worked flat out for the last 240 hours, gobbling glucose and creatine, trying to nail one of those elusive turnaround results that might save this small, beloved world; and they had failed.

The “fact-finders” arrived and immediately retired to the visitors’ quarters, where they could enjoy stronger gravity and conduct their assessment without bothersome personal contact. The Interim Director herself, alas, was less tactful. The science sector was a 4-spaced environment, permeated by the digital: Dr. Caterina Marie Skodłodowska didn’t have to signal her approach by moving around in the flesh. You never knew when or where she would pop up — and her questions were casual, but merciless.

She asked Lou could “he” envisage building another Torus. (Dr. Skodłodowska didn’t buy unisex pronouns.)

“Of course! Eventually we’ll need a whole network.”

Lou was wise, but s/he lacked cunning.

“Eventually. Mm. But you’ve analyzed all those esoteric Aleutian materials, and you can synthesize? Strange that we haven’t been told.”

“We don’t have to synthesize, we can clone the stuff. Like growing a cell culture, er, on a very large scale —”

“So you don’t yet know what the T is made of?”

“But we know it works! Hey, you use Aleutian gadgets you don’t understand all the time on Earth!”

She asked Lemuel Reason, the fox-tailed, clever-pawed technical manager of the Yahoo lab, exactly how many lives had been lost?

“Very few!” said Lemuel, glad to be on safe ground. “Er, relatively. We don’t fire-up unless we’re pretty sure the destination is safe.”

The Deep Spacers were volunteer guinea pigs, in a lottery sanctioned and encouraged by the World Government. They could apply for rights to a sector of Local-Space and transit out there to see what they could find. Some went missing or returned in rather poor shape, but a respectable minority hit paydirt: an asteroid rich in gold or exotics; an exploitable brown dwarf. These sites couldn’t yet be exploited, but they were already worth big bucks on the Space Development futures market.

“I was thinking of the so-called Damned, the political and Death Row prisoners shipped out here for so-called Transportation. I believe you’ll find the losses were 100 percent, and the numbers run into many hundreds.”

Skodłodowska was referring to a sorry episode in the Panhandle’s history. The “Damned” had been dispatched to supposedly Earth-type habitable planets, the nearest of them thousands of light years “away” by conventional measure. They’d been told that their safe arrival would be monitored, but that had been a soothing lie, for only consciousness, the information that holds mind and body together, can “travel” by the Buonarotti method. Did Lemuel have to explain the laws of neurophysics?

“The mass transits were recorded as successful!” cried the Yahoo.

Dr. Skodłodowska smiled sadly.

“The operation was successful, but the patient died, eh?”

They did their best to look busy, to disguise the fact that the great Collider had been more or less in mothballs for years. It was useless, Skodłodowska knew everything, but they had to try. Malin was a JANET, a wake-field analyst. She worked on her core task, sifting archived bit-streams for proof that non-Local transiters had actually arrived somewhere: but she couldn’t concentrate. She was poking around in an out-of-bounds area, when her screen flagged a warning and switched to the Buonarotti video, digitized from analog, that she was using as a safety net… One of the few records of the real Buonarotti to have survived, and quite possibly her only media interview.

“You’re going to break the speed of light this way?” asks the journalist.

“Break the what — ?” says the direly dressed, slightly obese young woman, in faux 4D: twisting her hands, knitting her scanty brows, speaking English with a pronounced, hesitant European accent. “I don’t understand you. Speed, or light, neither is relevant at all. Where there is no duration there is no speed.”

Coming over as both arrogant and bewildered —

Terrible combination, muttered Malin, shaking her head.

“The shiny blue suit and the hair? Or the genius and the journalist?”

The new boss was at Malin’s shoulder. Dr. Caterina Marie in the flesh, slender yet voluptuous in her snow-white labsuit and bootees and (you betcha) absolutely darling lingerie underneath. The female lead for a C20 sci-fi movie: brave, maverick, beautiful lady scientist. But there’s a Y chromosome in there somewhere, thought Malin, malignly. She didn’t have the genemod for detecting precise shades of sexual identity, but she had friends who did, and something must have rubbed off —

“The format.” Shame at her secret rudeness made Malin more open. “Imagine how it sounded. Kirlian photography. Auras. Breaking the mind-matter barrier. All those ideas, totally bizarre to the general public of the time. But tv interviews aren’t everything. Give her a smartboard, let her turn her back on the audience, she’d dazzle you —”

“I think you like her,” remarked Caterina, in a voice like dark honey.

“What I know of her, I think I like. But Buonarotti is ancient history, and we don’t have her notes. The important thing is that our Torus works —”

“I keep hearing that. The Torus does something,” corrected the Director, “It makes people disappear, very expensively. I grant you that.”

Malin forced a smile: it hurt her face. The Transportation episode had been before her time, but she still felt that guilt. So now it was Malin’s turn to get fried, or to win the boss over. Ten seconds to save the world —

They didn’t have Buonarotti’s notes. Everything had been lost in the chaos of the Gender Wars: all they had were fragments and the prototype “device” that had been rescued by the Aleutians from the wreckage of battle. To Malin the truth was still self-evident: but Skodłodowska and her bosses might well feel differently. They were flat-earthers, after all —

“Peenemunde Buonarotti invented a means of sending human beings, translated into code by her scanner-couches, around a big collider buried under the rocks of Europe. She split those transcendental packets of code into two and ramped up the energies so that when they collided, they broke the mind-matter barrier. Nobody human understood her, but the Aleutians did, and that’s how we got the Torus. For an instant, transiters are where speed, time, duration, distance don’t exist. If they’ve been programmed with a 4-space destination, then instantly that’s where they’ll be. No matter how far —”

The Torus was a black box that seemed, fairly definitely, to take people instantaneously across light years. But proof was elusive.

“You can’t shut us down!” Malin began to babble, unnerved by Dr. Skodłodowska’s silence. “This is the gateway to the stars! We have gas giant moons, asteroid areas, planetoids, where the prospects for mining are fabulous. We have the habitable planets, where you could move in next week. Okay, okay, it’s all in need of development, but what we do isn’t magical, it’s proven. There’s absolutely no doubt that instantaneous transit happens. We see the event. The only thing we don’t have —”

She was out of breath, out of time.

“Is a repeatable experiment,” said Caterina, dryly. “Isn’t that what divides science from pseudoscience? Oh, don’t look like that —” She laid a hand on Malin’s arm, and the touch was a shock, warm and steady. Her dark eyes glowed. “Your enemies are back on Earth. I’m on your side.”

Yeah, right, thought Malin. That’s why you’re asking all the awkward questions and sending our stupid babbling straight back to Earth. But when Caterina had gone she thought it over, staring at the movie of Buonarotti: and then, with sudden decision, opened the file she’d been working on before the boss appeared. Not exactly secret, but a little hard to explain —

The DARPA team, as their nickname suggested, were all about destination coordinates: how the linkage between consciousness and specific 4-space location happened. The Yahoos and the Googles studied the human element, the transiters themselves. The possible JANETs (named for a long ago academic and science network) looked for news from nowhere, postcards from Botany Bay… Somewhere in the wake of the monstrous energies of collision, there should be buried fragments of sense-perceptions from the other side. The S-factor, the physical organism, had arrived in another place. Eyes had opened on alien scenes, skin had felt the touch of another planet’s air. There must be some irrefutable trace of that landfall, leaking back from the future. The JANETs hadn’t found it yet, but they lived in hope.

Malin had been figuring out ways of reducing the P-factor interference (essentially, stray thoughts) that disturbed the wake of a collision. It had been observed that certain transiters, paradoxically, seemed to dream in non-duration. There were brainstates, neuronal maps that cognitive analysis translated as weird images, emotional storms, flashes of narrative. It was rich stuff, but all useless crap, since everything had the signature of internally generated perception. But why were some transiters having these dense and complex dreams? What did it mean?

What if you flip the gestalt, see the noise as signal?

Malin searched in forbidden territory, the personal files of the Damned. Alone in a virtual archive room, in the middle of the night, she felt herself watched. She looked over her virtual shoulder and, inevitably, there was Caterina — leaning against a filing cabinet, dark hair a shining tumble: hands in the pockets of a white silk dressing-gown.

Malin’s avatar wore nubbly old Rocketkid pajamas.

“Of course, you can explain yourself,” said the vision. “You wouldn’t be doing something so illegal and unprofessional if you didn’t have very good reason. Do you know how much trouble you’re in?”

Malin nodded. “Yes, but these files are banned because of data protection, nothing scientific, and I’m not looking at personal information. I think I’m onto something. See here —” She shared her view. “See this? Hyper-development in the anterior insula and the frontal operculum? That’s not uncommon, it indicates a natural-born, life-experience augmented talent for handling virtual worlds: a gamer, a fantasist, a creative scientist. I have a group of these people, all showing the same very unusual P-stream activity in the event-wake. The backwash of the collision, that is. Like layers of new neuronal architecture —”

“What’s that extraordinary spike — ?”

“That’s what I’m talking about.”

“But these are induction scans, decades old. Are you telling me that what happened in the Collider retroactively appeared in their files?”

“Yep, it’s entanglement effect. We get them, spooky effects. In terms of intentionality, we’re very close to the Torus —”

Ouch. Traditionalists, Malin reminded herself, were repelled by the strangeness of the new science.

The boss did not flinch. “What d’you think’s going on?”

Desperation generates blinding insight. Back in the JANET lab, Malin had seen, grasped, guessed, that Caterina Marie Skodłodowska really was on their side. Her questions were tough, but that was because she had hardliners to convince at home. She wanted the Torus to live!

Malin drew a breath. “I’ve been trying to eliminate ‘stray thoughts’ from the information-volume where we’d hope to find S-traces from the remote site. Probability-tunneling back to us. In certain cases I’m seeing P-fragments of extraordinary complexity. I think they’re mapping the equation of the transit. When you have a problem that’s too big to handle, substituting imagery for the values is a useful technique —”

Caterina paid attention. “You mean, like a memory palace?”

“Yes! I think I’m seeing prepared minds, impelled by the collision with the mind/matter barrier to know what’s happening: where they’re going and how. They’re experiencing, processing this knowledge as a virtual world!”

“That sounds dangerously like meddling with the supernatural.”

It’s a bit late to worry about that, thought Malin, exasperated, forgetting that Cat was not the enemy. Down all the millennia, people like you have said science is “challenging the Throne of God.” The funny thing is, your “God” doesn’t seem to mind. Your “God” keeps saying to us, hey, wonderful! You noticed! Follow me, I have some other great stuff to show you —

“Not supernatural, purely neurology. Brain-training. We could do the work here on the Panhandle. We need to be able to handle complex virtual worlds, so we have the equipment. We’re just not allowed to ramp it up, because of that “destroying the fabric of reality” thing, you know, creating exotic brainstates close to the Torus —”

“I see you’ve given this some thought,” said Caterina, without a sign of alarm. “There would certainly be some risk.”

“I think it’s worth it. What’s happening here, in these files, is involuntary and uncontrolled. If we could get people to do the trick voluntarily, we’d have your repeatable experiment! I could be a candidate myself, I’ve spent enough time in virtuality —”

“You could turn yourself into a quantum computer?”

“I am a quantum computer,” said Malin (and heard herself, arrogant and bewildered as Buonarotti). “That’s what consciousness is, like the universe: a staggering mass of simultaneous, superimposed calculations —”

Caterina’s avatar was ripping through the data. “You’re saying that some of the Damned made successful transits. Why didn’t they come back?”

“Would you?”

“Good point.”

“Theoretically there’s no problem about ‘coming back.’ Imagine a stretched elastic. It wants to rebound. The difficulty should be staying, at the remote site, I mean. That is, until we have a presence there, to anchor people in the new reality. Another station.”

“What about the lost? Why didn’t they ‘rebound?’”

They died, thought Malin. They were annihilated, unless they had this fortuitous ability; or at least someone in the party did.

“I don’t know.”

That strange glow rose in Caterina’s eyes (her virtual eyes); which Malin had seen before and could not quite interpret.

“Well… I think you’ve set us a challenge, Malin.”

So they were off, Malin the possible JANET and her polar opposite. Skodłodowska chose the destination. She decided they might as well go for the big prize: one of the Transportation planets, where they should find Earth-type conditions. Maybe they’d meet some of the Damned! The science teams, in a fever of hope, prepared to fire-up the Torus. The fact-finders stayed in their quarters, and communications with Earth (as far as Lou could discover) continued undisturbed. It looked as if Caterina wasn’t telling her flat-earth bosses that she planned to take this crazy leap into the void.

Malin spent hours in the neuro-labs, getting her brain trained under the supervision of Dr. Fortune, gamer-lord of the Panhandle’s virtualities.

“You’re fraternizing with the enemy,” he warned her.

“Fraternizing is a dirty word. I’m offering the hand of friendship.”

“You’ll be sorry. You don’t know what she really wants.”

“She wants to make a transit, obviously. It’s her secret dream.”

“Yes, but why?”

“I’m hoping it’s the everlasting fame and glory,” said Malin.

The mystery bothered her, too.

All transiters, even the humble “prospectors” had to do some brain-training. They were schooled in handling, visualizing, internalizing their survival kit: so that the pressure suit, rations, air supply would transit with them, imprinted on the somatosensory cortex, and they wouldn’t turn up naked in hard vacuum. Malin had to do a lot more. She was building her memory palace, a map for the equation of the transit. They had decided, playing safe, that it should be a starship. Visualize this, Malin. Choose the details and imprint them. Internalize this skin, this complex exoskeleton. The ship is the journey. You are the ship, and you are with your crew, inside the ship —

“Conditions for supporting human life?” wondered Caterina. “Is that necessary? Why not a completely new body and chemistry?”

“Maybe it could be done,” said Malin. “Not easily. We unravel S from P by mathematical tricks in the lab, but consciousness and embodiment evolved together. They’re inextricable, far as we can tell.”

“So on the other side, it’s the real me, who I always was?”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

They had lain down like prospectors, in the Buonarotti couches in the transit chamber: and they had “woken up” on board. Malin remembered the transition, vaguely as a dream, but she’d forgotten it was real. Reality was the ship, the saloon, their cabins; the subliminal hum of the great engines. Malin’s desk of instruments, the headset that fastened on her cranium, sending ethereal filaments deep into her brain. She was the Navigator.

Caterina, of course, was the captain.

They lived together, playing games, preparing food, talking away the long idle hours, as they crossed the boundless ocean of information —

“My name isn’t really Skodłodowska,” Cat confessed.

“I didn’t think it was!”

“I liked you straight away, Mal, because you’re so normal, except kind of unisex. I’m sorry, but I find bodymods unatural and repulsive —”

Oh yeah?, thought Malin; but she understood. Caterina hadn’t chosen her genemods. She had been compelled, by pressures no Reformer could understand, to make herself into a beautiful, risk-loving woman.

“My thoughts are very perverse,” she said, solemnly.

Caterina snorted. They giggled together; and Malin shyly reached out to take the captain’s hand. A shipboard romance; what could be more natural? What could be more likely to anchor them in the faux-reality and keep them safe?

Dr. Fortune had warned them that they would be scared, that what was “really happening” was utterly terrifying and it would bleed through. But what frightened them most, even in the closing phase, when Malin never left her desk, and the starship, rocked by soundless thunders, seemed to be trying to fall apart, was the fear that they would be enemies again, on the other side.

Landfall was like waking. Malin was lying on what seemed to be a mudbank, among beds of reeds as tall as trees. The air smelt marshy, acrid. She turned on her side, and she and Cat smiled at each other, rueful and uncertain.

They got to their feet and stared at each other.

Skodłodowska’s beautiful white scientist-suit was somewhat altered: wider across the shoulders, flat in the chest, narrow in the hips. Malin wore her ordinary station jumper, a little ragged at the wrist and ankle cuffs.

“Oh my God,” gasped Malin. “We made it!”

“I’m a man,” whispered Caterina, in tones of horror.

“Yeah, and I’m a woman. Shame, I always hoped I was an intersex in a woman’s body, deep down. It’s much cooler to be an inter! But hey, nobody’s perfect. Cat, pay attention, we’re here, we did it — !”

Malin had started skipping about, wildly excited.

“I thought breaking the barrier would give me my true body —”

“Oh for God’s sake, come on! We’ve done it! The repeatable experiment! Interstellar scheduled flights start here — !”

Four slender bipedal figures had appeared, beyond a gleaming channel that didn’t quite look like water. Scanty golden fur covered their arms and shoulders, longer fur was trained and dressed into curls in front of their ears, and they wore clothing. They kept their distance, murmuring to each other.

In that moment, still in the penumbra of the collision, Malin saw the future. She knew that she would be the first Navigator, carrying unprepared minds safely through the unreal ocean. She would see the Buonarotti Transit become a network, trained crews an elite, and these weird voyages frequent, though never routine. She saw, with a pang of loss, that the strangeness of the universe was her birthright; but there was another world, of brittle illusions and imaginary limits, that was forever beyond her reach.

But Caterina was shaking fit to tear herself apart, and Malin suddenly realized that what had happened to the lost could easily happen again, to the two of them. Quickly, rebound. Set the controls, the mental switches.

Return.

December 2009

One of Sandy’s Dreams

A dog followed Sandy home and said: “Help me —” It claimed to be an intelligent alien. “The people of my planet just blew it up,” it explained. “A few million of us escaped, by psychic transportation. It was a desperate remedy; I didn’t know this was a dog, I just landed in it. Things could be worse: some of us are lampposts.” Sandy was not impressed. “I don’t approve of nuclear bunkers for the elite.” The dog hung its head and whined; she would not relent, and it left. But for weeks afterwards she studied local lampposts with great curiosity.

May 1987

Gravegoods

They walked together on a bleak plain of seaside pebbles, captain and crew of the good ship Cheops. The sky was purple; it seemed to crackle at the edges. On a slab of shale among the pebbles, there was lichen growing. They had come to see it. According to Cheops’ computers this was the only life on shore — the only life on a planet other than Earth.

“Imagine that,” said Merle, the captain. “Lying there quietly for millions of years, marching to the beat of a different drum. What insouciance.”

They stepped out into unutterable smog. The ground underfoot was squelchy red dirt; the place resembled a tropical construction site under gas attack. They were inside their suits. Eyes that should have been streaming remained calm. Skin that should have been blistering and screaming felt nothing. They groped a little way into this muck and couldn’t remember why they had decided to leave the ship. Cheops didn’t come out from wherever it went in between unless it had identified some sort of planetary system. But it had never yet found anything like a habitable world.

“I didn’t like that,” said Merle, back in shirt sleeves inside. “It was like being dead.”

“How do you know? How would you know what that’s like?” asked Sugi, the engineer. She laughed hopefully at her own joke. No one joined in.

Merle stared her down. “I think I have a pretty good idea.”

They had been sent out in a spirit of the purest speculation. Cheops was the first crewed interstellar probe, ahead of its time and dazzlingly expensive. They were covering unimaginable distances, but inside Cheops there was no perception of the time and space outside. It was a small ship, the crew environment a poky cabin, in which they fell over each other, and another pod, reached through a diaphragm, where they slept strapped to the walls. This pod could be booked, by a scrap pad notice pinned to the soft rubbery doorway. If anyone lost the safety pin it caused great resentment. There was no gravity. A small object, once mislaid, could get absolutely anywhere.

They said that being on board reminded them, variously, of the mouse cages in New Kyoto, of life on a non-violent ward, of hanging round a soup-kitchen. These were the lives they knew, none other. Cheops overcame the problem of interstellar distance by constantly disintegrating and reintegrating itself: slipping in a flux of particles from one strand of galactic spaghetti to another. Extraordinary techniques had to be used to prepare human beings for this performance, and it had emerged that a history of mild mental illness was the best primary indicator in selecting candidates for the new frontier. Further screening had identified the ideal minds, all of them with the same slightly abnormal brain chemistry: Dr. Irwin, Professor Shaw, Dr. Nanazetta, Dr. Ohba, Dr. Mihalavska. The scientific qualifications were required for public relations, just as long ago the men who would sit strapped helplessly in primitive projectile capsules had had to be career test pilots. In fact Sugi had no engineering to do. Irwin could add little to the computers’ analysis of climate, Sasha the anthropologist expected no field work. Even Nanazetta the physiologist was not regarded by anyone as the ship’s doctor. Merle was the captain: but her title was as irrelevant as the others. The group was supposed to operate on consensual decision-making.

The five didn’t like each other, but that was no special problem. They were all of them accustomed to having poor social lives. Invitations to the sleeping pod were arrived at in roundabout ways. Irwin was frequently employed as a go-between, because he was thought to have a friendly smile — if you could catch him between his bouts of depression. Sasha was celibate; Nanazetta took this personally and nagged her about it. He bitched at Irwin too, because Irwin was black and therefore (by Nanazetta’s reckoning) had always been sneakily favored by the team back on Earth. Merle’s promptly announced and executed program of trying anyone available was designed to save her from rejection on a more personal level, which it did. It didn’t save her from general dislike.

She guessed before long that she’d been appointed captain because of, not in spite of, her somewhat abrasive personality. Captain equals scapegoat. The only person who still tried to be friendly to her was Sugi, and unfortunately the cheerful engineer had quickly been relegated to the foot of the pecking order, with the captain naturally pecking harder than anyone.

The days they spent in Cheops had the same hours as days on Earth and moved in the same way, aimlessly and uncomfortably. Alarm call, get up, have breakfast, go to work, don’t go to work, argue, have coffee. But the nights were long. When Merle lay in her bodybag, arms drifting above her face, she remembered strangely every bedtime of her past, when she had longed for just what she was given now: night unfathomable. Not terrifying extinction but sleep. Sleep for a hundred years, sleep without dreams.

They were eating lunch when Cheops made its first landfall after the red smog planet. In the earlier stages of the adventure they would have been excited, but now, when their morning came — as Cheops emerged from flux within the system of a planet-bearing star — they went about their business as if nothing was happening.

The designers of the Cheops project had set a high value on crew morale, which they knew was bound to be shaky. Everybody was provided with exactly what they most liked to eat, which made mealtimes interesting in an appalling way. Irwin ate nothing but organically grown haricot beans and fresh tomatoes, baked in olive oil and scattered liberally with chopped raw garlic and bombay onion. Nanazetta preferred huge hunks of practically raw meat, and had never troubled to learn to chew with his mouth closed. Sugi sucked vegetable soup out of a spouted beaker; there were hideous sound effects as she hauled up the tasty glutinous fragments that settled on the bottom.

Merle was on the fourth “day” of a fast, and she was worrying Sasha.

“You must eat, Merle. We must behave normally. For everybody’s sake —”

She herself was eating carrot cake with sour cream: her tongue collecting delicious crumbs and smears from around her mouth. After a lifetime of guilty obesity, she was free at last, she didn’t have to care anymore. It was wonderful.

“It’s a protest,” said Merle. “If you don’t leave me alone I’ll refuse to use the toilet next. And see how you like that, in here, comrade.”

“Arrogant bitch,” muttered Nanazetta.

Cheops tactfully offered a diversion. They had landed.

Lunch was abandoned. The ship’s lander, in which the crew environment was embedded, had allowed them no sense of descent or impact. Only the screens told them that they were planetside and that exploration was possible. They stood in the lock, five glimmering figures packed close together. It opened, and the new world rushed in. A dozen or so smaller Cheops remotes jumped out and scurried away like active little silver lobsters.

“Jibbooms and bobstays,” said Merle. “Shiver my timbers. I can’t believe it.”

They appeared to have landed on a golf course. A serene, well-tended golf course, the rolling greens broken up by patches of flowering shrubbery.

It was Irwin’s turn to name the planet. He decided to call it Ma’at, after the cosmic principle of harmony worshipped as a goddess by the Ancient Egyptians. He explained this in a rush of exuberance. He wanted to honor the race of the pharaohs now, at the moment when the project was finally justified, for their inspiration, their mystical influence… Merle groaned and rolled her eyes. Irwin’s mood swings bored her; and yet there was an awful temptation to provoke them.

“I heard it was called Cheops because there’s never been a more stupid waste of more money and brains since the pyramids.”

But everybody approved of Ma’at, nonetheless. Five gleaming dolls spread out: first stepping carefully, then walking; then skipping, running, prancing. After the Cheops — not to speak of their lives on Earth — this green paradise went to their heads like champagne. They ran around the bushes, laughing. Sugi picked flowers. Sasha knelt and touched the turf. It was really a close-matted creeper with tiny violet flowers. She wondered, could the machinery be programmed to tell her what this would feel like to bare human hands?

The Ma’atians arrived quietly: about fifteen of them. They came out of the trees on the edge of the glade where the lander stood, and stared. They were terracotta colored, humanoid, rather tall and slim. They wore few clothes. There were no signs of humanlike secondary sexual characteristics. The Earthlings were transfixed, embarrassed at having been caught skipping about like children. The silvery Sugi doll hid its flowers behind its back, and all five Earthlings heard her nervous giggle.

“They can see us!” cried Sasha, confused.

“Of course they can see the suits,” snapped Merle. “Contact! We aren’t equipped for this.”

Captain and crew retreated, precipitately, back into the ship.

“What are we going to do?”

“Fuck knows,” growled Nanazetta. “Have we any weapons?”

“Make love not war…”

“Will they be able to hear us? Will Cheops give us voices out there? We hear ourselves but that’s different isn’t it. That’s like the carrot cake…”

The others, even Merle, ignored Sugi’s faux pas. Irwin was shaking visibly — head to toe hysterical tremors. “It always gets me like this,” he kept muttering. “New people. Strangers!”

Merle laughed. “We’re not going to do anything. Cheops is God. Cheops will let us know what the rules are. Come on, ye lily-livered scum. Outside and enjoy yourselves. Captain’s orders.”

The Ma’atians were still there. Some terracotta figures were examining the landing site, as if planning to present a bill for damages. Luckily it had been a soft touch down. Other Ma’atians sat on the violet flowered turf. They seemed completely, eerily unsurprised. The five heard whistling and clicking sounds, and saw teeth like white needles. Sasha spread her gleaming arms.

“We come in peace.”

Nanazetta was following the site inspectors, making menacing gestures.

The whistling and clicking sounded articulate, modulated. Sasha believed it was language. “We come from another world. Do you know what that means? We’re on a voyage of exploration.”

One of the Ma’atians came close and looked Sasha up and down. It (she? he?) gestured in an uncannily graphic manner at her, at the tiny lander.

That’s a very small ship, it “said.”

It peered around and waved its arms. Where’s the rest of the expedition?

“There are only five of us,” explained Sasha. “We’re the crew of an experimental probe. We’re quite harmless.”

(And the moment she spoke, she knew this was a lie…)

Another Ma’atian approached Merle. It waved its hand across her gleaming breast, across its own body and announced (it seemed) something important.

“And my name’s Merle,” said the captain affably. “Merle. My mother didn’t like me, she named me after a disease. I’m the captain here. You’d better take me to your leader.”

The star of Ma’at was smaller and more brilliant in appearance than the star of Earth. It was descending in the sky, diamond-bright as Venus, as the explorers were led into the native settlement. The Ma’atian houses were scattered, with green plots between them. They had dark brown walls and white or red tiled roofs with turned up eaves. The party with the Cheops expedition shrilled and chattered; soon a collection of smaller, plumper terracottas had gathered, popping out of the little houses or jumping up from among the greenery. The plump ones were wrapped in garments. They seemed less phlegmatic than the first group. There were wild cries: somebody, Sasha saw, seemed to faint or collapse. There was a lot of urgent whistling, waving, and even physical grappling between the two groups.

“These fatties must be the women,” decided Irwin, a smirk in his voice. “Typical feminine behavior.”

He said it solely to annoy Merle: but Sasha answered thoughtfully.

“Wait until I see them dance —”

“Dance? Why should they dance?” That was Sugi.

“They will.”

Five of the plump terracottas finally came forward. They raised their arms face high, forearms crossed. They made expansive gestures. Our home is your home. Please, accept our hospitality.

Later, after more gestural conversation and quantities of whistling, there was a banquet. It was served on patios of beaten earth outside the little houses. The Ma’atians did not appear to have developed any communal or ceremonial buildings: their welcoming feast was a street party. The tall slim ones ran to and fro between the houses with bowls of hot porridgy food, flat dishes laden with what seemed to be flowers, bundles of creeper stems, and oblate, double-spouted pitchers of liquid. The household that had been awarded the honor, or terror, of entertaining the strangers did not seem surprised to find that their guests could not or would not eat. Heaped dishes were brought to them, presented, and removed without rancor.

Then the Ma’atians danced. They danced separately, and in small groups. They tumbled down the house steps and danced neighbor to neighbor along the little alleys between their gardens. There were no musical instruments. They sang and clapped, without losing breath, to give the time. They danced how happy they were to be alive and what a beautiful day it had been. They danced a little fear — not much — and a good deal of amazement. They danced wisdom and serenity, mischief and sex (these last were chiefly handled by the taller group).

Sugi turned to the anthropologist, mystified. “Hey, Sasha. How did you know?”

“Well, comrade?” inquired Irwin. “Which is which?”

“I don’t know,” she mumbled, and felt herself hunching up in the suit, trying defensively as always to hide her horrible folds of flesh. “I don’t know. I haven’t a clue.”

Nanazetta was muttering, “Watch out. Watch out. This could turn sour at any moment.”

Sugi chortled “Oh shut up you old misery,” and thumped him playfully.

The captain tried not to look at anyone, especially not at watchful Sasha. Her throat was swollen, and her eyes were stinging. She felt humiliated. It was the sunset light, the Venus sun now vanishing in a haze of gold; the flowers whose scent she would never know. It was the comfort and joy out there, out of reach. These things were getting to her as if she was maudlin drunk.

Two plump Ma’atians came over. They indicated, quite clearly, that it was Earth’s turn to perform. Sorry, but no thanks, indicated the Cheops crew.

Oh, but you must.

Sorry.

The plump Ma’atians were consternated. This failure seemed to worry them far more than the strangers’ arrival, their weird appearance, or their refusal of food and drink. Maybe they’re not human after all!, they whistled to each other. They were right, of course.

“Well come on, why not?” Sugi was ready. “Let’s get down.”

“No!” snarled the captain.

“We can’t dance.” she told the Ma’atians, in English, forgetting to gesture. “We don’t dance. Not since we joined this expedition. We’ll never dance anymore.”

The Ma’atians put up their crossed forearms, repeatedly; they made soothing gestures, apologetic at having run heedlessly into an alien taboo.

“We want to go back to our ship!” shouted Merle.

They understood that, too.

Cheops had found exactly what it was looking for. It settled down in orbit to count over the treasure. Its landing party, meanwhile, behaved according to profile. Sugi was having a lovely holiday. She didn’t even have to eat the funny food. She made no attempt to try the limits of what Cheops allowed; in fact she rarely moved more than fifty meters from the lander, except when she joined organized excursions into town. She seemed to Merle to be constantly looking, on her little walks around the golf course, for a sign directing her to the beach.

Nanazetta watched out for trouble.

Sasha Mihalavska and Bob Irwin made notes. They established that the Ma’atians in this village had no meat or dairy animals. They observed what appeared to be several species of flying lizards (they flew like bats) and many things that looked like brightly colored giant millipedes. These seemed to be the only large fauna around. The vegetation suggested an equable warm, temperate climate; wind direction was steady and gentle. Bob deduced — perhaps prematurely — that the Cheops had landed on an island. Sasha was not so sure. There were convincing indications, in the variety of artifacts and implements, that the Ma’atians belonged to a large and sophisticated cultural group. If this was an island, it was a big one. There ought to be towns, maybe cities, and yet they must be some distance away. No other natives had come to or left the village since Cheops landed.

In the crew environment they typed up their notes, under Merle’s sardonic eye.

The question of Ma’atian gender was not cleared up for many days, not until they’d evolved some quite sophisticated gestural communication. The answer explained the odd calm of their first encounter. Ma’atians were not well endowed with secondary sexual characteristics. Their apparent dimorphism was a matter of age. It seemed that their vertebrae settled together and major bones became more dense and shorter at maturity. The tall slender ones were children. They were very like human beings. If there were ever humans, that is, who lived in such perfect contentment.

“What happens to you when you die?”

Sasha and Bob had found an older Ma’atian, an “old lady” they called her, who was willing to be their confidante. Her social role was not clear, but she seemed unafraid of the strangers and accustomed to impart and receive knowledge. It bothered Sasha that she still was not sure whether her voice could be heard “out there” as it sounded inside her suit. Self-consciously, she mimed death.

We go to another place, answered the old woman.

“What’s it like, this other place?” asked Bob.

He was becoming very adept with his dumb shows.

The old lady thought for a moment, then made the sweeping gesture for distance. “Schoo… Schoo…Ichi…Icchi…” She thought again, and started away, beckoning. “She’s taking us to paradise,” crowed Bob Irwin, sotto voce.

Not to heaven but to a blue lake, unsuspected before, beyond the terraced houses and gardens. It was the first body of water they had seen. The old woman crouched down. She made the mouth gesture they’d decided was a smile, and swept an arm over the water.

“Water burial?”

“No.” Sasha knew how much room there was for misapprehension; and yet what was there to trust in a situation like this, if not intuition? Understanding thrilled through her. “She means the reflection. Heaven is like here. Heaven is the same as being alive.”

Someone laughed. A shiny doll stalked across the turf; Merle had followed them. She knelt by the pool and flicked her silver, stylized hand into the surface. Loveliness vanished in a welter of bobbing ripples.

“You can look, but you’d better not touch.”

Merle laughed again inside their helmets, and the doll walked away.

“I’m getting worried about the captain,” said Sasha.

Merle picked a fight with Bob Irwin. She was envious of the new friendship, and it had to be Bob she attacked because she was a little afraid of Sasha. Bob had made some joking remark about the Ma’atians getting the impression that Earth was a female-ordered society, and she was onto him immediately.

He defended himself: “Well, you are the captain. And you girls outnumber us boys. That’s all I meant —”

“Why do you think that is, Bob?”

“I don’t know, no idea.”

“Could it be statistical? Could it be there are so many more ‘mad’ women scientists available, that with the worst will in the world this transgalactic political advertisement had to have a female majority? In fact, over all, Bob, I think you’d find there are more ‘mad’ women about of any persuasion. Non-violent, able to walk and talk and keep themselves clean, that is. Men have to be doubly incontinent psychos before anyone declares them unemployable —”

“Quiet down!” yelled Nanazetta, banging his dinner tray on a bulkhead.

It was mealtime again, of course. Shards of mashed potato and bloody beef sailed through the air and landed — splat: because they were not in space now. “I’m watching you, Captain Shaw. You’re trying to fuck us up. You’re bad for our morale, Captain. I’m going to report that, when we get home.”

“You stupid bastard. None of us is ever going home.”

“Yes we are, Merle,” Bob broke in quickly. (He wished he’d never started this.) “When the survey’s done we’re going right back home, we’re going to get debriefed out of the project and go on with our normal lives.”

“Only richer —” he added heartily, and Sugi cheered.

Merle seemed to grow calm. Perhaps even she realized she’d gone too far. She smiled a little and nodded. “Mmmh, yeah. Okay.” She sighed innocently. “You know Bob, I’ve thought of a better name for this place. You ought to call it Duat, not Ma’at. I’m sure you remember. That was the Ancient Egyptian word for heaven.”

Bob and Sasha and Sugi all began to smile.

“You know, the place where the dead people go.”

They stopped smiling.

The captain snickered unkindly.

Sasha explored the outskirts of the Ma’atian village, admiring the beautifully tended farming plots. No doubt because of the impression of that first encounter with the children, she had the persistent conviction that the Ma’atians were not the simple primitives they seemed. There was no real evidence for this fantasy of an advanced, post-industrial idyll, but it was a strong intuition. Not that it mattered. She had to admit, Merle had a right to jeer. She and Bob were just playing. They had no way of knowing whether their “notes” even found their way into Cheops’ records. In any form. Still she couldn’t help looking at this place with greed and awe. A new race! It was riches beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

That must be what the Cheops was thinking too, as it circled around this world. Riches! She knew it was absurd to feel concern for the Ma’atians. No doubt the crowded and hungry Earth would be glad to colonize this lovely place, but there was little danger of imminent invasion! Apart from the ruinous expense and the decades of engineering involved in such an exodus, you wouldn’t get the most desperate colonists to accept the terms the crew of the Cheops had accepted; and the alternative (she had a rough idea of the notional realtime/realspace element of their voyage here) would be a journey of several hundred years.

There was nothing to be done in any case. None of them had any control at all over the mission or their ship. She thought of comments that the first US astronauts had had to endure from their pilot buddies: a monkey’s gonna make the first flight. The Cheops crew were less than monkeys. They traveled like fleas on a dog, though a quite irrational proportion of the finance had been devoted to arranging their passage. Human interest stories help to raise funds. The “experiences” of the crew would be retrieved and reconstructed as marketing videos. And one day, one day, one day, their pioneering voyage might be seen as the beginning of something. But she had no control of this “suit” in which she walked, though apparently by her own will. It was a remote function of the AI out in space, like the lobster things but less useful.

The development that had made a crewed probe possible was a technique for transferring the whole of a human subjective entity into electrochemical storage. As pure information the passengers could disintegrate and reintegrate without injury: stitching in and out through the vastness of space/time. A brain-dead body remained on earth, while that which was Sasha felt itself to be here and intact: filling this suit with arms, hands, belly, fingers, like some Kirlian ghost. And in a way, she really was here. They’d been told that EVA “in” these humanoid shells was important for their survival, analog of the endless exercises with which conventional spacefarers warded off bone death. But where was she in reality? And would they really be able to “go home”?

She had been able to accept, just about, the consensual reality that they created inside the lander (very small, for five people, as the Ma’atian child had naively observed), and been able to stretch that reality to include their excursions to places like the red smog, the lichen desert. It was Ma’at that was giving her problems, breaking her up.

They none of them knew how anything worked. Cheops was supposed to run the life support system, giving them anything they needed in the way of perceptual construct to keep them sane. How far would it go? Sugi Ohba had always cared least — or had seemed to think least — about their existential predicament. Since the landing on Ma’at she’d been behaving exactly as if her suit actually contained her body. She picked flowers! What did the AI out in orbit make of that?

Sasha felt the vertigo that they had been warned to avoid. Like Orpheus they must not look at what they were doing, or it would vanish… She trembled (and that seemed real). She had accepted the bargain willingly, embracing a heroic destiny as they said on her country’s television. She had felt that she hardly deserved all the approval; she didn’t have a lot to lose. She chewed miserably on her non-existent lip.

To dance.

To touch someone’s hand…to touch a leaf or a flower…

They must keep the consensus going, but it must be a rational consensus. Sugi’s thoughtlessness was as dangerous as Merle’s cynicism. It was true that sexual equality had still to be achieved, especially in the former “western” nations. It was true they all had hard-luck stories. But life is better than death.

Beyond the farm plots forested hills began, but there was a well trodden path. A plump terracotta figure was watching her, leaning on a kind of hoe in one of the last vegetable gardens.

“Is there another village?”

Sasha pointed down the path and sketched roofs in the air.

The woman (close up you could tell from the clothes) left her hoe and came over. She gestured, and whistled “Schooo.”

Sasha and Bob had decided that one meant something like “far.” They were compiling a tentative glossary.

The woman looked her dead in the eye (another shared cultural gesture, like the concept of heaven). She crouched and drew in the dirt. Houses: a little cluster of turned up roofs. “Schoo, schoo.” She headed down the path…several strides, and made another sketch. The scale was large, then.

“Heesh! Heesh!”

The woman jerked her hands in the affirmative sign and again looked at the invader straight on: firmly, undeniably intelligible.

We like it that way, she said.

We like to be friendly, but we like our neighbors to keep their distance.

Sugi was by the lander, looking lost. She was waiting for a mealtime, guessed Sasha. Sugi could not snack, she had lost the ability in institutional years. “These people are so nice,” she burst out. “You know the boys who come and hang around the ship?” Those were girls and boys but Sugi didn’t understand that. “They were here earlier. And the one I call Charlie, he asked me — clear as words: Why don’t you stay forever?”

They entered the lander. As usual Sasha’s consciousness elided the transition: the two of them were in the crew environment, in their shipboard clothes. The idiot woman beamed and sighed. She was having a holiday romance now.

“Isn’t that lovely. D’you think he means it?”

Sasha wished that someone else was here. “He means it. They don’t want any of us to get back to Earth.”

“Huh? Er — Why not?”

“Are you kidding? Because they’re not stupid, you idiot. Not stupid at all. And they overestimate our technology.”

Sugi took fright and retired into the sleeping pod. Sasha felt a desire to eat (for reassurance), but had no appetite — the phantom itch of an amputated limb. That was a danger sign. She thought about the five of them, lying back on Earth like so many Walt Disneys in their glass coffins; and with just about as much chance (let’s face it) of successful resurrection. She imagined the Cheops team agreeing among themselves. We’ll find ways round the problem eventually. But so it goes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. She had sometimes thought the “special brain chemistry” was a myth, invented as compensation.

But she still wanted to go home. And the Ma’atians didn’t understand.

Where is Bob? she wondered in sudden panic. Where is Nanazetta, where is Merle? They don’t want us to leave, to go back and report on this choice bit of real estate. They’re trying to split us up, they’re picking at the weak links.

Merle was alone, most alone. She could have been in Eden before the fall. She had walked into the hills above the settlement. They had closed behind her; now there was nothing, not a whisper of birdsong or the sound of water. She followed a ridge path, deeper and deeper into a world of green crags and plunging chasms. This is Treasure Island, she said to herself derisively. Presently I will shoot a goat and dress myself in skins. Her Kirlian eyes were wide open and very still. An enormous presence watched at her back and looked down at her from the heights. She was afraid, though there was nothing to fear; and finally so afraid that she could go no further.

She sat on a rocky promontory beside the path. This is how it must have been, she thought, to wake up in the world. The first thinking thing, looking at the not-thinking. So much greater than I. The huge crags looked down at her tiny figure, impassively. She knew that to endow that green immensity with persona was a reflex of fear: fear of what it really was. Slowly, slowly, she let the fallacy slip away. And fell into unknowing…

After a while she got up and stripped off the suit. She was naked under it. She stood examining her body, wondering if she would know it among a hundred other bodies of tallish, dark-haired white women — apart from the all too familiar face. She thought not. The small white sun was warm. She could feel it, she could see the shadow it gave her. A Ma’atian child appeared, coming down the path. On seeing her naked it beamed all over its face and sat down on the edge of the promontory.

“Hello,” said Merle cautiously.

She knew this was an adolescent female, from the patterns on the tiny kilt slung around its slender hips. If you didn’t look too closely it made a pretty young woman, in spite of the fishlike teeth.

You have taken your clothes off, remarked the girl, in gesture and whistle-clicking. We didn’t think you could do that. We thought you were maybe ghosts. She touched the shed carapace curiously.

Merle laughed. “What a silly idea.”

Perhaps the laugh seemed like an invitation. The child settled more closely on the rocky perch and took Merle’s hand. I like you very much, she pantomimed. Why don’t you stay with us, don’t go away in that little box. I wish you would stay. The pretty girl seemed sweetly sincere; however, Merle understood at once that she was being tempted, and knew why. She started to giggle. It was so ludicrous. Make love not war; Sugi had said that. Which was typical of Sugi, the good-hearted simpleton. Sugi was probably the only one of them all, villagers and invaders, who didn’t know this paradise was doomed.

The natives had no way of guessing their world had five hundred years’ grace — at a conservative estimate! But Merle was not about to try and explain. Let them sweat. Technology does make giant strides sometimes. They could be right to be scared for their very own skins.

“Why should I want to stay with you,” she snarled, losing her temper. “You made me suffer. Just when I thought it was all over, damn you. You made me feel things I thought I was safe from forever. You want to know the truth? We’re not explorers; we’re a bunch of escaped maniacs. And the rest of the asylum’s coming right after us!”

The child was not affected by human rage. Emboldened by the lengthy speech she moved even closer, grinning. We call you, the people who wrap up their farts, she confided. It must get very smelly inside your boxes.

The mime was clever and ridiculous. Merle snorted. They laughed together, uproariously. Merle wiped her eyes; looked down at herself; looked at the alien girl — in sudden, belated, heart-catching wonder —

Sasha was still in the crew environment, panicking and wishing she could make herself feel hungry, when Merle joined her. She began checking Cheops’ present status on the information screens. She was obviously in a foul mood. She glared at Sasha and asked abruptly, “Have you been having hallucinations?”

Sasha was alarmed. “Have you?”

Merle just scowled. “Where’s Sugi?”

“She’s sleeping.”

Merle groped around in the wall niches. She located the worn piece of scrap paper, and after some rummaging the safety pin. She pinned the booking notice on the sleeping pod diaphragm, and seemed to be daring Sasha to comment. As she was about to disappear, she looked around briefly.

“Cowardice and stupidity,” she said in a bored tone, “are the mainsprings of your existence. And mine. Do you know why they picked us for Cheops? Because we’re too stupid to kill ourselves, and too scared to do anything else.”

Sasha went up to the lake, feeling safer now that both of her weak links were accounted for. She was thinking wistfully that Cheops was bound to call an end to shore leave soon. A shiny doll came running up. She was afraid it was Sugi or Merle, turned violent; but it was Bob Irwin.

“Where’s the captain?” he yelled

“She’s in the sleeping pod with Sugi.”

“Oh, fuck. We’ve go to do something. Nanazetta’s jumped ship.

“What?”

“He has! He has! I found his suit. He dumped his suit!”

Sasha jumped to her feet. “They’ve got the Do Not Disturb sign up,” she wailed.

The token was so sacred that even in this crisis they didn’t know what to do.

“Fuck it,” decided Bob. “We’ll go after him ourselves.”

“Go after him?” Sasha was bewildered. “But he’s, I mean, if he’s not in the suit?”

“Sash, either I’m going crazy or… Come and see.”

The suit was where Bob had found it, stowed in composting vegetation at the bottom of a Ma’atian garden. The footprints lead away: distinctly human, nothing like the tracks of the natives. The Ma’atians agreed that the fifth stranger had gone away. They even agreed, reluctantly, to show his friends where he was.

Nanazetta had covered a surprising amount of ground: when Bob and Sasha discussed it they couldn’t remember when they had last seen him. He could have been gone for days, and their “reality” might have just closed over the gap. They lay in their shiny suits under unknown stars, beside the two adult Ma’atians who were guiding the search party. Neither of them managed to sleep.

In the morning they found him. They had been following a rocky valley that dwarfed the tiny stream buried in its midst. Ahead, the country was beginning to open out, and they could see that this was no island. The green crags were the foothills of a great mountain chain, looming up against the lemon-colored dawn sky.

“Awesome,” breathed Irwin.

And there was Nanazetta. The Ma’atians gestured upwards, and Sasha saw the physiologist’s big burly pink body. He was watching from a grassy cove, a natural step in the steep valley wall. The figure bobbed out of sight.

“He’s up there!” yelled Bob. “Let’s get the bugger!”

The Ma’atians stayed below. Bob and Sasha climbed. In the cove, an extraordinary sight met their eyes. Somebody had started building a hut. There were Ma’atian artifacts strewn around, and on a flat rock someone had been mixing brown clay with water to plaster the stake-and-creeper walls. A Ma’atian boy squatted beside this rock, his arms wrapped around his knees. To Sasha he looked proud and frightened, and a little guilty. She guessed at the desperate plotting: the urgent deliberations of a society not given to violence, trying to invent strategies for survival against the odds. It was a world of affection and comfort; they had no other weapons.

While Sasha saw this Bob Irwin was catapulted back to earth by bewilderment. He saw the boy as a youngster of his own race, and was appalled.

“You can’t mean to live with him!” he cried. “You’re ruining your life, kid. The man’s a horror story. He eats red meat!”

He remembered the glossary, and tried whistling and clicking; hoped he was saying something. “Don’t stay with bad stranger. Your people better. Go home!”

The boy whistled and clicked too; it sounded almost the same.

“Hey! Leave her alone!”

Nanazetta came running out from behind the half-built hut, brandishing a knobbled tree root. Bob and Sasha grabbed at each other clumsily.

“Okay, Nanazetta,” quavered Bob. “Party’s over —”

“Don’t waste your breath. I like it here. I’ve got myself a girl, the food’s good. When you get back, you can report me missing.”

“That’s a boy, Nanazetta,” Irwin told him, exasperated. “We can tell by the kilt.”

The physiologist flushed darkly, color spreading down his chest through the thick mat of hair. He was wearing a Ma’atian kilt too.

“What the fuck business is it of yours? Get off my land!”

“For God’s sake Nanazetta. You aren’t really here. None of us are really here. You don’t exist at the moment, except as an array of — of dots and dashes, or whatever it is, in Cheops’ memory. You can’t have forgotten that!”

He had never accepted it, not deep down. That was his secret. He could not take seriously any theory of the human entity as something that could exist separated from the body. Nanazetta believed in flesh and blood. He hefted his twisted root, smiling contemptuously. He knew who was crazy.

“Nanazetta!” cried Sasha. “You’re betraying your planet! I don’t know what you’ve done, but you mustn’t do it. We are all of us part of the Cheops. You’re going to wreck the project!”

“Exactly why should I care? Did anyone care what would happen to me, stuck in a cryogenic vault while my ‘Kirlian structure’ was off pinballing round the galaxy? Piss on them. Piss on the Sahel, piss on the cities, piss on the teeming masses everywhere. This is my promised land. I’m staying.”

“Oh Bob, leave him alone. This is just another shared hallucination: like in the crew habitat. He can’t have escaped. He’s still part of the Cheops, and he’ll be back in the cabin when we’re back there, he’ll take off with the rest of us. He can’t help it.”

Nanazetta’s fury boiled over. He charged. Sasha and the boy clung to each other; Bob tried to run. “Get the fuck off! Get the fuck off!” gasped the big man hoarsely, flailing with his root. Bob scuttled, dodged. Nanazetta went flying past him, still yelling furiously, over the edge of the shelf. He landed with a crunch, out of their sight.

“Oh God!”

Down by the stream the two adult Ma’atians were bending over something fleshly, solid, and still. Nanazetta had broken his neck. He was dead.

The boy brought a digging stick from the cove, and all five of them took turns at the work. They buried him where he lay. The Ma’atians seemed to think this was the right thing to do, and Bob and Sasha were in no state to argue. On the journey back they camped when darkness fell, as before. In the middle of the night Sasha jerked awake. She shook Irwin violently.

“Bob! We shouldn’t have buried him! The contamination! All kinds of bacteria — viruses. We’ll have to dig him up and burn him!”

Bob waited until her babbling ended in silence. Each of them, in Ma’at’s radiant starlight, bright as a full moon on Earth, stared at a metallic doll.

“Was there a body?” asked Sasha at last. “Or are we imaginin g all this?”

“I don’t know. But no bodies left Earth, Sasha.”

“Oh good. So no Earth bacteria can be contaminating Ma’at.”

Slowly, Bob removed his suit. Sasha did the same. Bob dug his bare hands into the dark soil. There was dirt under his fingernails. He could feel the grit on his palms.

“This is impossible,” whispered Sasha.

They put the suits back on.

Sugi was waiting for them at the settlement. She didn’t seem to take in the news of Nanazetta’s death. She had worries of her own.

“I don’t know what it is, Bob, but I can’t seem to get into the lander. I must have locked myself out.” She was confused, showing the pathetic wariness they remembered from the first days of Cheops, before she got to trust them.

The Cheops lander looked the same as always, a glassy tetrahedron that turned from black to silver as the light struck it. It stood in the center of the glade, under the clear blue sky: a packing case that would open when triggered by Cheops; just big enough to fold in all the AI’s mobile exploratory hardware. Including five servo-units converted from human pressure suits.

“It’s bigger inside, isn’t it,” suggested Sugi uneasily. “Only, I can’t get in anymore.”

It was cooler that night. Sasha and Bob sat on the porch of the house that had been lent to them and watched fireflies. They’d taken off their suits again and were wearing borrowed Ma’atian garments, the light swathing folds making a comfortable cloud of Sasha’s gentle bulk. Sugi had made a swift and complete recovery. She was down in the settlement somewhere with her holiday friends. Faintly, the marooned explorers caught strains of the earthling dance track, which had been top of the pops when Cheops departed. Merle was gone. They had searched for her; they had asked the Ma’atians. But all that anyone would do was to point to the hills. She went that way. Schoo…Schooo. She has gone far.

“Should we go after her?” wondered Sasha.

Bob shook his head. In the quiet of this night he could think of the captain with apology. They had all picked on her, and it wasn’t fair. It was only the nature of a born solitary, forced to live always in a crowd, that had made her so abrasive. But he could do without her angry, restless presence.

“No, let her be. Let her find her own promised land.”

On Earth the Cheops development team waited for the ship’s return. Cheops had been launched by a conventional rocket system, for no space station yet had the capacity to deal with such an event. It had winked out of existence beyond the orbit of the moon and at once passed out of all human contact, all knowledge. Its return was supposed to be to the same location, a year downstream in time. The period was arbitrary, there was no real reason why it had to be a year; but even the designers of the probe had maybe felt the need to observe outworn convention.

Meanwhile, here on Ma’at, the “fireflies” were luminous spots on the tails of little night-hunting lizards. But they danced just the same.

“Look.” Bob pulled something out from under their doorstep. It was one of the lobster-like remotes: stiff and dead. “I found it in the street. What happened, Sasha? I know we’re stranded, I’m not going to get hysterical about that. But I simply don’t understand…”

“I suppose — well, Nanazetta broke free; but I think we all… We found out how good life can be and didn’t want to be ghosts anymore. The Cheops AI had a directive to preserve our sanity by giving us what we wanted — immaterially. I think five hungry humans influenced it more than the team at home reckoned for. In the end that directive had become its vital task. And there was the flux principle. The process of breaking down and building up was there. We unconsciously hijacked it. Instead of remaking itself somewhere/somewhen else, Cheops made itself into something else. It had all the information, and what are bodies, after all? Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. All common elements. That’s my theory, anyway.”

“It doesn’t work out, Sash. Nothing comes from nothing. Look, this, er, lobster’s still here. And the lander, and all our suits. It can’t have made us out of Ma’atian materials, it was never set up to do that. That’s crazy.”

“No, Bob. You’re not thinking straight. I said Cheops converted itself.”

“Meaning what?”

“Watch the sky, Bob.”

The shore party had often watched the Ma’atian sky at this time. Together, and briefly more or less at peace, they had waved and cheered as little Cheops tracked by overhead. The Ma’atian night was the same: moonless, ablaze with jewels. Maybe the good ship Cheops had gone home alone. But Sasha didn’t think so. Five solid human bodies had to come from somewhere. She heaved a sigh. Her socialist conscience pricked her a little; but she could not seriously regret the way things had turned out.

Tonight, all the stars stood still.

June 1988

La Cenerentola

Act I: The Scholar Gypsies

My first thought, when I saw the sisters, was that they were simply too perfect. They had to be identical twins: about sixteen years old; tall but not too tall, sun-kissed golden skin; rounded and slender limbs, long golden hair, blue eyes. They were walking in step, arm in arm, whispering together; identical even in their graceful movements. One pushed back her hair, the other brushed an insect from her immaculate white shorts. Each gesture seemed a mirror image of the other. Impossibly perfect! Then I saw the mother, strolling along behind (she had to be their mother, the likeness was too close for any other relationship), and I thought perhaps I understood. The older model — or should one say, the original — was a very good-looking woman: a blonde with long legs, regular features, and lightly tanned skin. Her eyes behind her sunglasses were no doubt just as blue. But there were details — lips that were a little narrow, a square jaw, a figure not so exactly proportioned — that added up to something less than flawless beauty.

I tried not to stare, though of course those girls must be used to open-mouthed admiration. Then I realized, with pleasure, that this amazing trio was actually approaching us. The older woman was about to speak. I sat up, with a welcoming smile.

Suze and Bobbi and I were in Europe for the summer. This had become the pattern of our lives in the last few years. We spent our winters in New Mexico, where I taught philosophy and Suze worked as a software engineer. Every summer we crossed the Atlantic. As yet we had no fixed abode over here, but we were looking. We saw our travels as a series of auditions. This year we were considering the Mediterranean for the role of our summer home. But we had fled from an overcrowded villa-party on the Cote d’Azur. Trop du monde on the French Riviera, so here we were in mid-August, our comfortable trailer planted on a sun-punished hillside under the brilliant, mythic sky of Haut Provence, at the simple but very spruce and attractive “Camping International St. Mauro.”

“Wow,” murmured my wife, Suze. She was lying beside my lounger on a blanket, there under the cork oaks. She propped herself on one elbow to gaze at this glorious vision. Our daughter Bobbi continued to pursue her new hobby of plaguing the little red ants that infested our terrace. She had scattered a handful of breadcrumbs for them, and as they staggered home with the goods she was blocking their trail with impossible obstacles and pitfalls.

“Hello,” said the woman, at once announcing herself as English and probably upper-class (but many English accents, I admit, sound absurdly aristocratic to American speakers). “I couldn’t help noticing, I saw you in St. Mauro earlier. You are Americans aren’t you?”

“We’re from New Mexico,” agreed Suze, grinning. “I’m Suze Bonner. This is my wife, Thea Lalande. That’s Bobbi, but she won’t talk to you, she’s an uncouth little kid. Isn’t this place great. We just picked it off the road map.”

Suze thought any place where there was heat and a minimum of human activity “great.” The fact that St. Mauro possessed no culture I could drag her around to was a further advantage. I sometimes wondered why she allowed me to uproot her from her native desert at all.

“Absolutely ravishing,” said our new acquaintance. “And so peaceful. I’m Laura Brown. This is Celine, and this is Carmen. We’re staying outside the village.” The twins smiled, perfectly. Laura Brown took off her sunglasses and gazed at Bobbi. “Actually, I was wondering if we would see you at the fete tonight.”

“Fete?” Bobbi’s head came up as if bouncing on a spring. “Will there be fireworks?”

Laura Brown laughed. “I’m afraid not!”

“Unnh.” With a shrug, my charming little daughter returned to her evil deeds.

Our new friend, still watching Bobbi with curious attention, went on, “it’s a small affair. Flamenco Guitar and —” She consulted a piece of paper taken from her shoulder bag. “A couscous. At the bar called The Squirrel, L’Ecureuil. But there’s only one bar; you can’t miss it. Well, I hope you three will be there. It could be fun. À bientôt, enfin.”

“Au’voir,” chimed Celine and Carmen.

The heavenly twins passed on by. Trailing behind them came a skinny girl of about Bobbi’s age, or maybe a little older: ten or twelve. She was wearing grubby blue shorts and a candy striped tee-shirt that had seen better days. Her rough brown head was hanging sulkily, her eyes fixed on the dust she kicked up with her dirty espadrilles. As she came level with us she looked up, and shot Bobbi a baleful glance… I wouldn’t have thought she had anything to do with the other three, except that Laura Brown turned and called: “Marianina, please keep up. And don’t scuff your shoes like that! My youngest daughter,” she explained, as if to excuse the sudden sharpness in her tone. “Such a little ragamuffin. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“I wonder what went wrong there,” murmured Suze, when the family was out of sight. “You think the other two, the twins are — ?”

“Of course. What else could they be, looking like that?”

Bobbi, naturally, pounced. Children have an infallible ear for their parents’ indiscreet remarks. “What? What are they? What do you think they are?”

“Sssh. Nothing.”

“They look like a pair of Barbie dolls,” muttered Bobbi.

Suze and I agreed, via a silent exchanged glance, that the subject was closed. Another word, and our darling child would disgrace us by saying something incredibly rude when we next met the beautiful sisters and their mama.

We decided not to risk the “couscous.” We ate pasta under the cork oaks in the shimmering light of evening with a sauce of stewed red pepper strips and tomatoes and a wine of the region that I’d bought from the campsite bureau. It was delicious, that wine: straw-yellow, dry but not too dry, and so delicately, subtly scented! The tepid air was tinged with indigo, the drowsy scent of the scorched maquis grew stronger as the sun descended. We seemed poised on a pinnacle of exquisite calm: like a foretaste of Paradise.

Suze touched my hand. “Here?” she murmured.

But my peace was not complete. I was thinking of Laura Brown and her twins, and the sad fate of that dirty little girl, trailing along behind such beautiful older sisters. I didn’t answer at once. Suze reached over and traced with her finger a little knot of tension that had formed without my realizing it at the corner of my jaw.

“Not here.”

She stood up, and stretched. “Why do I get the feeling that we’ve been invited to this festa by royal command? Well, let’s go, anyway. At least we’ll have something great to look at.”

In spite of Suze’s cynicism and my vague misgivings we had a terrific time that night, at the little bar called L’Ecureuil. The local population was out in force, far outnumbering us tourists; which always makes for a better atmosphere. The sangria flowed and the guitarists were superb. Perhaps nothing less would have made the evening so memorable. But from the first fierce, poignant attack of that music, that stiffened all our spines and opened our eyes wide, the festa was alight. As soon as the first set was over people were talking, laughing, speaking in tongues. Barriers of language, nationality, and income vanished. People started dancing on the tiny patio that looked down on Van Gogh terraces of olive trees in red earth. The stars came out; Suze and I danced together. The mayor of the village, a plump little woman in a purple caftan and tiny black slippers, danced alone: the genuine flamenco, wherever she’d learned it, with haughty eyes and a fiery precision that brought wild applause. Celine and Carmen, indistinguishable in pretty full-skirted sundresses, one red, one blue, danced with anyone who asked them. (I hadn’t the courage.) Suze said “all we need now is the handsome prince.”

“But how’s he going to choose between them?”

“He’s a fool if he tries. He should take them both!”

I looked for the third daughter and spotted her sitting in a corner beside a glum, fat woman in a print overall. She was wearing a different tee-shirt, but the same grubby shorts, and brooding over a half-empty glass of cola. The two of them seemed the only people in the world who weren’t enjoying themselves. I know how moody little girls can be. Maybe it was her own idea not to dress up and her own plan not to have fun. But I felt sorry for the child.

I was eating the couscous after all — having a good time always makes me hungry — when Mrs. Brown came to join me. Suze was with Bobbi, indoors, with the crowd of local kids around the table football machine.

This Englishwoman had a very direct way of asking questions and handing over information. As Suze had remarked, there was something autocratic about her friendliness. She had soon told me that the twins were what we had guessed. They were clones: genetic replicants of their mother, with a few enhancements. It was a simple story. She’d been married to a man who was unfortunately infertile, but luckily extremely rich. It had suited his fancy to have his beautiful young wife copied; and then, two of the implanted embryos had “come through” as she put it. “I carried them myself,” she said. “Though my husband didn’t like it. He thought pregnancy would spoil my figure. But I couldn’t bring myself to use a surrogate. It wouldn’t be the same, would it? They wouldn’t have been completely mine.”

Later, the marriage having ended, her third daughter had been the result of a natural conception with a different father…

A mistake, in other words, I thought. Or an experiment that went wrong. Poor kid!

“What about you? Did you carry Bobbi, or did Suze?”

“It was me.”

Thea drew the short straw, we used to joke. We both knew I’d been the lucky one. One parent of a fused-egg embryo is always more compatible with the fetus than the other, and that’s how the choice of birth-mother is made.

“And, excuse me for asking, did Bobbi have a father?”

I explained, with modest pride, that she was all our own work. The fused-egg embryo treatment, imprinting decided by synthetic methylation, a true recombination of the genetic traits from each female partner —

So we confided, quickly becoming intimate; like people who first suspect and then confirm that they are both members of the same secret society. As indeed we were, though there’s nothing really secret about modern reproduction technology. Bobbi has never met any prejudice. It helps, no doubt, that you have to be relatively rich, and therefore de facto respectable, before you can afford these techniques. I noticed that Mrs. Brown’s furtive interest in my daughter (which had struck me when we met on the campsite) diminished when she knew Bobbi’s provenance. The regal Mrs. Brown, I decided, had been afraid we Americans had a better, more advanced model of child than her twins. Now she’d assured herself that this was not the case — that Bobbi was a mere copy of her two mothers, with no improvements — her curiosity vanished. We passed on to other topics.

I wondered if I dared to mention the youngest girl, maybe suggest that she and Bobbi could get together. But when I looked around I couldn’t see her. The corner where she’d been lurking was empty.

“What is it?” asked Mrs. Brown. “Is something the matter?”

Celine and Carmen were still happily dancing. “I was looking for Marianina.”

“Oh, she went back to the villa,” she explained casually. “With Germaine, my nanny.” She laughed. “Marianina hates parties. She’s too young; she gets so bored.” But her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. I knew she was hiding something. Marianina, I guessed, had been sent home in some kind of disgrace. Poor little Cinderella!

Bobbi stayed with us at the bar until three a.m., along with probably every child of her age for miles around except Marianina. We stayed long after Mrs. Brown and the beautiful twins had departed, until the very end of the party — when the flamenco guitarists joyously played and everybody sang, at the tops of our voices, the simplest of drinking songs: the songs that everybody in Europe knows, or sings along to anyway.

ce soir je buvais!
ce soir je buvais heureux!

A few hours later I woke up in the trailer with a terrible hangover and the dim memory of Suze trying in vain to get me to take an Alco-soothe. Since even miraculous modern medicine can do little about the morning after once you’ve let things get that far, I got up. I took a tepid shower in our tiny closet bathroom and went for a walk to clear my head.

That covetable pitch on the topmost terrace, which we had admired when we first arrived, had fallen vacant. The red car that had been parked there had disappeared; so had the little climbing tent. I went up there and sat on a rock, in blissful solitude, gazing southward toward the twinkling, three-cornered smile of the sea. I was thinking of a paper I had to write, for a conference in the fall; and of finding a house in Provence or the Alps Maritime, with vines around the door and a roof of roman tiles. It was so difficult to choose a resting place, in this summer world where neither Suze nor I had any roots. Too much freedom can be as frustrating as too little.

I wondered if I could see the villa where Mrs. Brown was staying.

I didn’t notice the little girl who came scrambling up the hill until she burst out of the bushes right in front of me and stood there, glowering, holding what looked like a bottle of shampoo. It was Marianina. She had been expecting someone, but not me. This was my first impression as the child stood, stared, and then came slowly toward me.

“You left this behind in the showers,” she said, in French.

“No, it’s not mine.”

It was very odd. I couldn’t think what she was doing on the campsite, or why she was pretending that she’d come from the sanitaires, when those modest toilet facilities were in completely the opposite direction from her approach. She was dressed as she had been at L’Ecureuil, the same shorts and the same tee-shirt. The contrast between this girl and the rest of her family was more startling in their absence: to think of all that golden perfection and see Marianina’s rough brown head, her scratched, dust-smeared arms and legs as thin as knotted wire. She went on staring at me unpleasantly: a child already embodying the threat of adolescence, a neglected child who would throw stones, let down tires, perhaps steal. Perhaps she had stolen the bottle of shampoo.

“Were you looking for someone?” I tried not to sound aggressive.

“So, they’ve gone,” said the little girl.

“Who?”

“My friends.” She came closer: closer than was comfortable. Still sitting on my rock, I was trapped by her scrawny, demanding presence. I could feel her breath.

“What is it?”

“We were going to make a rocket.” She still spoke in French. “But they’ve gone.”

“I don’t understand you. What do you want?”

With an indescribably sly and ugly smile, she thrust a finger into the open mouth of her plastic bottle, then pulled it out covered in pale slime.

I jumped up. Perhaps I was over-reacting, but I did not like the situation. I didn’t want any part of a little girl — perhaps ten, twelve years old — who behaved like this. I did not want to be alone with her. As I sprang to my feet the child darted away. I went to the edge of the terrace and saw her, halfway down the hill already, slithering on her bony little rump. As I watched she reached the level ground, turned, and stood malignly repeating that sexual-seeming play with the bottle and her grubby finger.

Back at our trailer Suze was making breakfast, breaking fresh eggs into fragrant melted butter. The bread van had arrived at the campsite gates, tooting like a steam-train. Bobbi came running back from there with an armful of warm baguettes. I made coffee. I didn’t mention my encounter. We ate our petit-dejeuner sur l’herbe, and I talked about the paper I was writing.

“How do you copy a chair?” I asked Bobbi.

“You could draw a picture.”

“That would be a picture of a chair. Another chair is another sum of things taken out of the world. A certain quantity of wood, metal, or plastics; varnish, maybe nails, wear on the machinery or tools; a measurable expense of food or energy from whatever source. Something for something. It’s like double-entry book-keeping. A thousand chairs means a thousand objects at a certain cost per unit. One can bring that cost down, but it is always, allowing for all your expenses, a substantial fraction of the first amount. But if you copy a piece of software a thousand times, what is the cost?”

I was getting my own back for the times when Suze, the scientist, would hold our baby entranced explaining the table of the elements, the anatomy of a star.

“Erm, wear and tear on the keyboard? Wear and tear on the storage disc!”

“Infinitesimal,” I said. “And not equivalent in the same way. This is the problem, Bobbi, and it isn’t just a problem of economics. We have a system of values, of morality, based on people competing with each other to copy things, at the lowest possible cost per unit. That’s capitalism. But when the cost, the object of all this competition, effectively disappears, what happens to our system? Life gets very puzzling. Do you remember the Mickey Mouse episode in Fantasia? When Mickey uses the magician’s spell, and the magic broomsticks just keep on coming, appearing out of nothing, more and more of them, and they won’t stop?”

I’d decided to call my paper “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

“Leave the kid alone, Thea,” said my wife, passing me a plate of eggs and dropping a kiss on the tip of Bobbi’s freckled nose. “She has no idea what you’re talking about, poor baby.”

“No, I like it!” cried our daughter, bouncing up and down. “I like it! Let her tell me!”

Our miracle of the modern world: made possible by prosaic laboratory science, but to us completely magical. I thought of that other little girl and her starved, all-too-knowing eyes.

I went to the bureau to buy more of that wine. The manageress, an Italian woman with bushy black hair and a beak of a nose, was in a talkative mood. I had the impression that she approved of Suze and Bobbi and me. She liked our American passports. She liked the fact that Suze and I were married, a pleasant example of the new world (a newer world than the USA!) showing affection and respect for the old ways. I mentioned the English family, and learned that Mrs. Brown was not a regular visitor. She had arrived in St. Mauro for the first time a week before, but she had created a good impression by spending money locally. We agreed that the twins were phenomenally pretty.

“And the youngest girl. I suppose she’s made friends with some other children on the campsite? I saw her here this morning.” I was uneasy about that child. Her malevolence, or her unhappiness, had cast a shadow on me.

“Ah. La Cenerentola!” The woman grimaced and shook her head.

It was the name I’d used myself. “Why do you call her Cinderella? Because of her sisters? The Brown sisters certainly aren’t ugly!”

“I call her that because she’s a sad case. Something went wrong, eh? One only has to look at the older girls to see what they are to the mother.” She shrugged. “Vanity parenting! I’ve heard of it. But it looks as if, the third time, Madame wasted her money.”

I suppose one has to meet prejudice sometime. I muttered (embarrassed, but feeling it was my duty to defend Mrs. Brown) that Bobbi was also the result of an artificial technique.

“Listen. I’m not saying it’s wrong. It’s the fruit of it. Why bear a child, no matter how the baby was conceived, just to do her harm?” The Italian woman drew herself up, looked from right to left, and leaned darkly forward over her desk, with its innocent sheaves of bright-colored tourist leaflets. “You saw her here, eh?” she hissed. “Do you know why she was here on my camping, la cenerentola? She was looking for the couple who have left, those climbers. And do you know what she wanted with them?”

“Err, no.”

“Well, I know. That is why they left, obviously, so suddenly; because she’d been with them, and they were ashamed. It was the woman, I expect. She did it too but she was ashamed, and she wanted to get her man away from the nastiness. Believe me, I tell you what I think. I don’t say the couple weren’t to blame. But it surely was not the first time for la cenerentola. A child doesn’t go around asking for that. Not unless she is getting it already, eh? Eh?”

I escaped, feeling terrible. If there wasn’t a word of truth in the manager’s vicious gossip, it was still extremely distasteful. The next thing I knew, I’d be under suspicion myself. When I got the chance (while Bobbi spent the afternoon sleeping off her late night), I told Suze everything. We agreed that the child did look neglected, and there really might be something wrong, something ugly going on. What could we do? Nothing.

But Mauro had turned sour on us. It was time to move on.

Act II: Cinderella and Her Sisters

Two weeks later we were in a seaside town called Santa Margarita, south of Livorno. We’d decided to give up camping for a while, and reserved rooms through the international clearing-house site on the internet, that boon to impulse-travelers — our booking whirled in digital fragments by the wild logic of the global network, from Siena to Livorno via Hawaii and Tokyo and Helsinki. The hotel overlooked a quiet, bright piazza: a renaissance chapel with twisted-candy marble pillars, a pizzeria, and a cafe.

“It’s quiet now,” said Suze. “But at three in the afternoon, anywhere is quiet. Think of the noise at night.”

“Oh please, oh please,” begged Bobbi, who only wanted to get to the beach.

The padrone explained that the window shutters were completely soundproof.

“My wife suffers from asthma and cannot bear a stuffy atmosphere.”

Ah, but when the shutters were closed tight these rooms — two pretty rooms, and a bathroom between them — would still be airy, beautifully airy, the way you Americans like, because of the inner courtyard —

I stepped out with him onto the open gallery. We looked down, we looked up. He explained the ingenious and environmentally sound air-conditioning system. It was a very nice courtyard, with a fountain pool in the center and big planters full of greenery. I was delighted with our choice. I suspected Suze was delighted as well, but she was angling for a discount. My Suze always likes to squeeze the envelope: she’s always trying to get the work done with one instruction the less.

“Suze, this place is lovely —” I began, perfidiously. I looked up, once more. La cenerentola was leaning over the gallery rail on the floor above, staring at me. I stepped backwards, really shaken. That sour little face, peering down at me: so vivid, it was like an hallucination.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s go away. Let’s think about it.”

“Madame, is something wrong?”

“Thea! You look as if you’re going to faint!”

And alas for me, I almost did faint. I was dizzy, it was the heat, maybe my period was coming on. I couldn’t explain myself, I couldn’t possibly tell the truth. Naturally, by the time the padrone had fussed over me, and his wife had administered delicious lemonade (for the sugar, the best thing for faintness), all discussion was over. We were installed.

But in any case I wasn’t frightened anymore. What was there to be frightened about?

I was left at the hotel, lying down, because of my faintness, while Suze took Bobbi for her first swim (the padrone having given careful directions to a very nice, really clean beach). I felt fine. After an hour or so I got up and went out. There in the piazza, sitting alone at a table outside the cafe, I saw Laura Brown.

It seemed to me that we were both struck by the same emotions. We saw each other, would have liked to pretend not to recognize each other: we accepted the inevitable.

She smiled; I smiled. She beckoned me to join her.

“It was at Mauro,” I said. “In Provence —”

“But of course I remember. Thea and Suze, the American couple with the charming daughter. And you’re you staying at La Fontana? What a coincidence!”

She insisted on buying me a drink, and I ordered a Coke. I spoke of Bobbi, and how difficult it could be to keep a child entertained. I suggested (my voice almost shaking, I had such a bad conscience about my suspicions) she must have the same problem with Marianina. Maybe the two little girls could be company for each other?

Mrs. Brown said “perhaps” in a tone that meant refusal. We looked at each other through our sunglasses. I thanked her for my drink and went on my way.

It was all so normal. A holiday acquaintance, that neither of us really wished to pursue. Why did I have the strange conviction that as soon as I was out of sight, Mrs. Laura Brown would leap up, rush into the hotel, collect her family, pack her bags and flee — like someone guilty of a monstrous crime?

I was wrong. The next day, Suze and Bobbi and I went together to the very nice, very clean beach. Almost at once I spotted Mrs. Brown and her daughters. The twins, in matching green and gold bikinis, were unmistakable. The little girl, as usual, was sitting on her own, ignored by her sisters. I tried to stop myself from watching them. The beach was expensive (Suze muttered bitterly about the entrance fee), but it was beautiful. The Mediterranean, whatever the actual analysis of the water, was on its best behavior: warm, silky, crystal clear. We sunbathed, we swam, we played ball. We had a delightful picnic, we lay in the sun.

“Tuscany?” murmured Suze, “Culture for you, the beach for me.” She touched my hand as we lay in the shade of our jaunty umbrella, while Bobbi splashed in the sea. “Here?”

But I was distracted. “I think I’ll take a little walk.”

I thought I would go up and say hi. I would say hi, and get a close look at Marianina. Your Cinderella daughter, Mrs. Brown. Do you treat her badly? Do you use her worse than a servant? I felt myself a sadly inadequate fairy godmother, but at least I would try to assure myself that there was no need; that the problem was in my imagination. Mrs. Brown and her twins were lying on identical hired loungers. Laura Brown was reading a paperback. Celine and Carmen no longer looked so beautiful now that I believed their sister was being in some way abused. They were giggling and chatting, heads together.

Marianina didn’t get a lounger; she was sitting on the sand.

As I approached I was feeling extremely self-conscious. My courage failed: maybe I would give them a wave and walk on by. The sunlight glittered. Suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, where there had been three sun-loungers there was only one. Mrs. Brown and la cenerentola were alone.

So then I did go up to them, propelled by sheer amazement.

“Hello.” I said. And stood there, dumbstruck.

“Hello,” said the lady, putting aside her book. I noticed that her bikini was also green and gold. Her eyes were hidden; her smile was frost in the sun.

“There were three of you here just a moment ago,” I blurted, then corrected myself in confusion. “I mean four. You and the twins, and the little girl.”

The cold smile faded. “It’s Thea, isn’t it? How nice to see you again. Good day.” Mrs. Brown returned to her book.

La cenerentola was sitting at her mother’s feet, wearing only a pair of dark blue bikini pants. Her nipples were crusted with sand. She stared at me without speaking.

I went back to Suze, extremely confused. “Suze, you’ll never believe this. The clones, Mrs. Brown’s beautiful twins, I just saw them disappear. They vanished right in front of my eyes! Do you think I’m going crazy?”

Suze rolled over, and glared at me. “Save it for your paper, Thea.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m tired of this. What is your problem with that family? What is so fascinating about them? You’ve talked about nothing else for days.” She jumped up, and stalked off to join Bobbi.

Suze didn’t say another word about the Browns, but she must have been looking out for them. When we were leaving, at sunset, along with everyone else, she marched us across the carpark to a big white Mercedes-solar that I remembered having seen in Mauro. Marianina was in the car. The twins were helping their mother to pack their beach stuff into the trunk.

“Hi Laura,” said Suze. “Hi Carmen, hi Celine.”

“Hi Mrs. Bonner,” chorused the twins sweetly, with their identical smile.

We walked away, Suze glowering triumphantly. I thought I’d better not mention that to me the beautiful twins had looked somehow diminished… Like two colored shadows of their former selves.

The next morning I saw Mrs. Brown again, for the last time. I was up early, Suze was in the shower. Mrs. Brown and her family were checking out. Germaine, the nanny, was directing the porter, who was carrying their bags out to the car. Marianina was with her. Celine and Carmen stood looking a little lost, while their mother validated her credit by passing an imperious hand across the ID screen. Mrs. Brown gave a sharp glance up at the stairs, where I was standing. She moved toward the door. Then Celine and Carmen… They melted. They flowed, they ran like liquid glass through the air. There was only one golden-haired figure, walking away.

I rushed up to the desk. “Did you see that?” I demanded. “Did you see? Flavia! Tell me!”

The desk clerk was our padrone’s daughter, a sensible and intelligent girl. For a moment I thought she was going to deny everything. Perhaps she realized the truth was the best way to suppress my curiosity. She looked up, with wise young eyes.

“Dottora Lalande, two weeks ago a gentleman stayed here who was traveling with an eidolon, a hologram of his dead wife. We must set a place for her, serve dishes to her, arrange her room. He spoke to the digitally generated image as if it were alive. And though I know this is impossible, I am sure I heard the lady answer.”

“What are you telling me?”

“And there was the family from Germany, with the teenage boy who had taken gene-therapy to cure a terrible wasting disease. He was completely well, it was a miracle. At night this boy stayed out late. He came back to La Fontana not quite himself, you understand? Luckily, he could leap and hit the night-bell with his muzzle, so the porter would let him in. It was easy enough to wash the pawprints from the sheets.”

“What are you saying?”

“One sees everything, in the hotel trade, and one mentions nothing. These things happen, they happen more and more. It’s best simply to accept them…and look the other way.”

Mrs. Brown had left no address, but I managed to get Flavia to tell me she had been heading north, to the Lakes. Over breakfast I tried to convince Suze that we had to follow and somehow track them down. I knew she was already angry with me over the Browns, but I couldn’t help myself. I felt there was a disaster looming that I must try to avert. Suze accused me of being infatuated, either with Laura Brown or the heavenly twins. She refused to consider the idea of leaving Santa Margarita.

When Suze and Bobbi went to the beach, I stayed behind.

I took our guide-book and set out to explore the town, in the hope that some distraction would help me to think. I had not dared to tell Suze about my second strange experience. For one thing, I suspected that young Flavia wouldn’t back me up. But much as I hated to fight with Suze, I was desperate to unravel the mystery. What was happening to Celine and Carmen, and why? Had the desk clerk and I shared a hallucination? Or were Cinderella’s sisters really capable of vanishing into thin air?

La cenerentola was waiting for me, there. She had climbed on the railings outside the Renaissance chapel. She was swinging from them, head down, her feet kicking in the air and her hair brushing the ancient stone of the porch steps. As I approached she flung herself down, carelessly scattering the passers-by, and stood glaring at me. She was wearing her favorite grubby shorts and tee-shirt. As soon as she saw that she’d been recognized, she ran away.

Of course, I followed.

Marianina didn’t run too fast. She made sure that I could keep up. Before long I found her waiting for me, in the small formal garden that surrounded the much-eroded remains of a Roman temple, on the edge of the pedestrianized center. It was a quiet place. This was the end of summer; the flowerbeds had been allowed to fade. The Roman fountain in their midst was dry, the benches round about stood empty. There was a chirping of insects, clear above the distant hum of traffic.

Children, when they’re left to run wild, are uncouth creatures. They’ll tell silly, arbitrary lies if they feel caught out, but not one in a thousand will naturally invent the concept of polite conversation. Marianina didn’t say a word to me at first. She sat on a lump of carved stone, its meaning eroded beyond recognition, and examined a graze on her knee.

“I thought you guys had left Santa Margarita.” I offered, oppressed by her silence.

“We moved to a different hotel. We’re leaving tomorrow.”

“At the campsite in Mauro,” I said, “they called you la cenerentola: Cinderella, because of your sisters. Is it true? Did they make you feel left out?”

The child flashed me one of her sly, hostile glances. “Mummy said to tell you, leave us alone. Stop following us. There’s nothing you can do.”

Prince Charming, I thought, rejected the step-sisters, their artificial finery and their contrived attractions. He chose the dirty girl: with her little hands as rough as the cinders, her careless rags, her knobby knees, her insouciant independence. It was the same with Laura Brown. I had thought I understood everything, right from that first night, when she told me her story at L’Ecureuil. It had been obvious that she had not been interested in either of her children’s fathers. There was no adult lover in her life. Maybe she was one of those people who cannot tolerate another adult as a lover… That was why Marianina, scorned in public, had become the secret object of her affections, as the twins grew older.

I could understand how a child like this, deliberately humored in all her native childish awkwardness (the sequences of DNA randomly recombined, no perfections but those of untamed chance and necessity) might seem the fairest, the true beauty. I could feel her troubling allure myself, and I’m no pedophile. She was so real. The Italian woman at the campsite had made up a vicious story that probably had no basis at all in fact. But a child can be corrupted, without any gross abuse… Now I saw that whatever the relationship between Marianina and her mother, the situation was not that simple.

“What about your sisters. Will they be traveling with you?”

“Oh, them.” A smug grimace. “I don’t think they’ll be around much longer.”

I felt suddenly chilled. “What do you mean, they won’t be around?”

“She hasn’t said. But I think Mummy’s taking them back.”

Marianina slid to the ground, scouring the backside of those long-suffering shorts.

“Taking them back? Back where?”

“Back where they came from, of course.”

La cenerentola had performed her errand. She’d had enough of my solemn eyes and stupid questions. She left, jumping over the stones and skipping away, without another word.

Interlude: The Philosopher’s Dream

I see a room in an appealing little hotel, somewhere in the north of Italy. It’s a room that Suze and Thea could have chosen: deceptively simple, with every modern comfort hidden in a tasteful, traditional disguise. Through the window I see (but this is pure invention) a view of forests and mountains, a long blue lake under a cloudless fairytale sky. There’s no getting away from it, we are in a fairytale. Mrs. Brown and her daughters, Thea and Suze; everyone else who shares our affluence. Our lives have become magical, by any sensible standards. Nothing is impossible; the strangest things can happen.

I see a beautiful woman and the twin daughters who might be her sisters: daughters with that uncanny, replicant perfection of the optimized clone. She told me that their creation was her husband’s idea. I don’t know if I believe that, but in any case she has become tired of these flawless, sweet-natured dolls. The double mirror irritates her. The twins are sitting in a window embrasure, talking softly with each other. Perhaps they are deciding what they will wear tomorrow. They take comfort in clothes and make-up, because they know they have been superseded. I witness the transformation scene. I see how the two bodies are magically drawn across the room, and melt — at first resisting desperately, but finally calm — into the original of their flesh.

It is a triumph that la cenerentola in the story might have longed for, before she dreamt of going to the ball. Fathers are chancy creatures, the handsome prince is a shadowy promise. But mother, even if you are not completely her own creation, is the first object of any child’s desire.

Now Cinderella is alone, with the only handsome prince this version of the story needs. Poor Carmen, poor Celine. This time it is forever.

Finale

I don’t believe we’ll ever get tired of Bobbi. I don’t know which of us loves her more. But a long vacation brings out the strains in any relationship, and sometimes I wonder what would happen if we should tire of each other. We walk hand in hand, Suze and Bobbi and I, and suddenly I suspect that we’re taking up more space than three people should. I look up and see Suze a little further away from me than she ought to be. The air shimmers. For a moment there are two Bobbies… I am afraid that these moments may grow longer in duration. It won’t be possible to hide the embarrassing thing that has happened, except by moving on: going our separate ways with our separate daughters, and praying that no further dilution occurs.

We have beaten the stern old gods of the nineteenth century. But in escaping from them, could it be that we have let something wild and dangerous back into the world? Our magical technology may have unsuspected costs. In the end, stretched and spread over the world as we are by our desires, perhaps Suze and I will vanish like Mrs. Brown’s perfect twins. We will lose hold of our fantastical riches and fade away, like the ball-dress, the pumpkin-coach, the rat coachman…in this case leaving nothing behind, not even a glass slipper.

April 1998

Grandmother’s Footsteps

Pride Comes Before a Fall

The site meeting was intense: the operations so major and the discussion of them so deep, I felt as if Don and I ought to be wearing hard hats and carrying clipboards. By the end of it we were exhausted. Donald and Mr. Hann (the house doctor) walked towards the front door, still consulting as they negotiated the scaffolding. Suzy was asleep on Don’s back. Dear child, she’d been as good as gold, her little face puckered up seriously as she listened and peered over her daddy’s shoulder. I hung back.

I muttered something about wanting to take another look downstairs, but I didn’t intend to be heard. I wanted to do something that was private; or maybe just too foolish for public attention.

It was mid-February then, and already cold gloomy dusk at the end of the working day. The plumber, the electrician, and Mr. Hann’s own hench-persons had packed up and left while he was giving us the benefit of his really wonderful bedside manner. I climbed down the dark stairs that at present ended in planks laid across a pit, found the power cable that hung over a naked ceiling joist, and pressed the switch. Inside the dangling grey bulb, a twisted ribbon bow of incandescence seemed to be struggling against the odds — as if rising damp was a reinforcement of darkness. Our basement looked awful, really awful, like a drained abscess or a drilled-out tooth. I stepped out into the middle of what had once been a room and tried to remember it the way I had first seen it. The house had been standing empty then, and even with all its problems the price had been almost more than we could afford. There’d been a fearsome sense of urgency: feeling the developers at our backs; seeing the dry rot and the damp busily working away. I would collect the key from the agent and come down here with Suzy nearly every day, to wait for yet another surveyor, house doctor, or rot expert. Suzy practically learned to walk in this basement.

She was an early walker: at barely ten months old she began to toddle. It was here, in the shadow, in the musty emptiness, that she had taken some of her first wobbly, triumphant steps.

Now it looked more like an archaeological dig than anywhere people might live. Or like the crime scene of a mass-murder inquiry. When our friends (we had to show them; couldn’t keep such a spectacle to ourselves) came round to admire, they all said the same thing: “Have they found the body yet?” But in spite of all the trauma we knew we were doing the right thing. Ever since the baby was born, and before, we’d known that this was coming. It was the house move that marked the actual completion of the change in our lives that she had wrought, and this was the only way that was right for us. We needed to live in a place that had its roots deep in the past but cleared out and remodeled entirely to our specifications. We needed the old and the new fused together, in our bricks and mortar as in our lives.

I waited for the presence of the old house to come back from wherever it had been driven; by blaring pop music and the thunder of power tools. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe in atmosphere. I had never owned a house before. I wanted to rediscover the emotional meaning of the step that I was taking: something that had been obscured by the panics and crises of the last weeks. I closed my eyes, with the fugitive feeling that I was taking some kind of risk. Yet it was peaceful down there, despite the cold and the damp, oozy smell. The burr of traffic far away sounded mild as a lullaby after the way it shouted in the busy street below our flat. When I knew I was calm, when I’d accomplished that subtle but unmistakable transition into neutral awareness, I opened my eyes.

I saw an old woman by the hearth: in front, that is, of the gaping hole where our restored Victorian fireplace would be. She sat upright in a straight-backed armchair. She was crocheting; a white heap of work lay in her lap. She didn’t see me. She was quite absorbed, her face bent with a severe yet half-vacant expression: the expression that goes with a task that occupies the hands and empties the mind. Her skin looked soft as rose petals — the delicate, just faintly crumpled complexion of a placid grandmother, cheeks that you knew would be soft to the touch as a baby’s.

I’ll never have a face like that. I think too much, argue too much; sometimes I don’t sleep very well.

She looked very sure of herself, this old lady by my hearth — planté la, as the French say — as if she had a perfect right to be there, as if nothing could possibly move her. She had a disquietingly contemporary look, too, for a ghostly emanation. She was no Victorian granny but a nicely preserved old lady of the present day: a collector of recipes from tv cookery shows, a comfortable reader of fat, glossy Family Sagas. The vision persisted, growing more clear as I stared: feeding on I don’t know what scraps of information in the pattern of darkness and shattered brickwork. The white cobwebs of newly exposed dry rot floated through granny’s head, became the crochet on her lap and the deft soft hands at work.

Then I began to hear her breathing. That was nasty. The whole basement seemed to echo with it: a heavy, asthmatic gasping, as if somebody was dying. It was a filthy noise. It even occurred to me that maybe someone was dying, in the basement next door.

After a minute or two it stopped, and I left. Donald was waiting in the car. The baby — still asleep — was strapped into her chair in the back. He had left the driver’s seat for me. I got in and we sat there holding hands rather helplessly. Don couldn’t have looked more depressed if Mr. Hann had been a real geriatrician and we’d been hearing serious news about a beloved relative. But it wasn’t that bad. We’d known that we were taking on a challenge; we would win through.

“Well? What did you get just then, anyway. What’s it like, this character we’re going to live with?”

Of course he knew what I’d been up to. He knows me. We were very close, Don and I. Which is something I wouldn’t have thought worth saying a few years before — we’re married, aren’t we? But I’d seen so many relationships turning sour, the bad old stuff coming to the surface under the pressure of two careers and the childcare thing. I knew better how to value what we had.

“A bit shattered at the moment,” I said. “A little bruised and battered. But structurally sound.”

I could have told him I had seen the spirit of our house alive and well and sitting cozily by its own fireside. But I didn’t. I don’t like petal-cheeked grandmothers: those foot-binding, petrol-pouring pillars of society. If I’d had to have an image of an old woman, I’d rather it had been a bag lady. And besides, there was that horrible noise. I didn’t think Don wanted to hear about a desperately sick neighbor just now. He heaved a huge sigh. Money! Where was all the money going to come from?

“We’ll survive, Rose.”

“Of course we will.”

A Woman’s Work Is Never Done

We moved in. So much to do, so many layers of dirt, decay, and neglect to be stripped away. We were poor again, after years of double-income, low-outgoings prosperity: it was going to have to be mostly our own work. Days were spent at work or camping out on the roughly habitable upper floors. Every evening we plunged into a world of chemicals and power tools and paint, hour by hour. Down in the basement our kitchen-to-be was still a disaster. The sunny terrace overlooking the garden, where I imagined perfect al fresco breakfasting, was heaped with rubble, the kitchen walls oozing a black tarry bitumen mixture that obstinately refused to “dry out.” We had a makeshift arrangement in the room that would be Don’s den: the fridge in a corner, the kettle and a microwave sharing his big old desk; we did the washing up in the bathroom.

It was fun at first, a great joke: trying to keep the turps substitute out of the butter, the chili sauce off of the builders’ receipts. Don and I hardly saw each other. At night we would meet at the door of the fridge, foraging for beer and chocolate, like the hunter and the gatherer meeting briefly to share an underdone chop and a handful of berries. We joked that the house had succeeded, where the world had failed for years, in segregating our lives. His tasks, her tasks.

Anatomy of a fireplace: collect the tools, the can of stripper, the gloves, the mask; shroud the surroundings; set to work. The top layer was white paint: under that, the green; under that an incredibly sticky blue, which clung devotedly to the detail of the molding. The first coat of all had been dark brown. Why the devil did anyone ever want to paint a black cast iron fireplace dark brown? There was a lot of buried treasure in this house: things loveable and rich in detail in a way you never see in modern dwellings. There was also an amazing amount of pure, wilful ugliness.

It was necessary, for these tasks of mindless drudgery, to develop a special state of mind. I had trained myself to toil away thinking of practically nothing, in a positive trance of stripper fumes and burning muscles. In such a state hallucinations are not unlikely… I decided to give the power drill a rest, and put out my hand for the wire wool; I found myself tugging at a hank of human hair. I dropped it in instant revulsion, but not quickly enough. My hand was stinging. The wool was impregnated with stripper, and I’d forgotten that I’d taken my gloves off. I saw that my fingers and palm were stippled with drops of blood. I knelt staring at my hand, prickles of unease at the back of my neck.

The house seemed quiet now I’d switched the drill off, the light looked extra artificial, as it always does in an empty room at night. I put on my gloves and went on, plodding patiently at the weary task until my wad had become clogged and useless. I reached for a new hank of wire again: it was hair. I felt someone resist and flinch away as I tugged. In an instant my mind was flooded by another consciousness. I felt the indignity of senile helplessness, when you can’t look after yourself and have to bear the brusque attentions of a careless nurse or a resentful daughter. The feelings of this old woman under my hands washed through me: arousing no sympathy, no pity; only fear and disgust.

Then the experience was gone, and I was left shuddering: freed from the possession. Far away I could hear the radio, playing quietly where Don was at work papering walls on the floor above. I went and called up the stairwell. “Can we change over? The stripper fumes are getting to me.”

Anatomy of a staircase: This old house of ours is tall and wide. One of its main beauties is the stairway. It sweeps down from the sunny eyrie where my workstation, the latest script, waits for stolen moments: down and around into the generous hallway with its black and white checkered tiles. It was those elegant tiles, I think, and the graceful curve of the stairs, that decided us to buy this place. I knew that the stairwell was going to be perfect. I saw the banisters stripped and lightly varnished, the walls painted in washes of delicate sea-color, pale turquoise and lilac and azure, rippling into each other. But what a job it was!

At least there were no chemicals involved in the preparation, so I could get a little done during the day. At home, at our flat, I used to play with Suzy all the time; when she wasn’t with the childminder. Housework, Don and I would share at evenings and weekends. In this house I’d become the “working mother” of my nightmares — and Suzy had become almost my enemy. I kept promising myself I’d make it up to her, when the needs of the house had been satisfied…

I was working on the top floor, sanding down an excrement-colored dado. (Who was it who chose to have walls the color of shit?) Suzy left whatever destruction she’d been wreaking in my neglected office and took the sanding block from my hand. Stop, she said (in that proto-English only Don and I can actually understand).

“Please get out of my way, Sue.”

“Please stop.”

I’ve told her that that word “please” is like a little kiss, so she kissed me as she tugged, with those determined, imperious small hands.

“I’m sorry honey, but I must get on.”

I’m becoming a real, old fashioned traditional mother, I thought in despair. I’ve no time for my darling, she’s part of the drudgery. And I had sworn to myself that my baby would never be “work.” But I was hypnotized by the task; it seemed the only way back to Suzy was to get through this. I shook her off and went on scrubbing, and found I was scrubbing flesh. The wall was soft flesh; it smelt of talcum powder and sour age; it shrank away from me as I scoured. I kept on, fighting the illusion of an overtired brain.

“Please stop! Please stop!”

Insensate cruelty to the helpless flesh. I was kneeling astride the old spine, flaccid skin falling in loose folds… Get out of my way, you old brute… I dropped the block and ran for the bathroom. I was actually, physically sick then: vomited and lay on the floor at the foot of the toilet.

I stared up at the crazed plasterwork of the ceiling, veined like the rich and ugly marble of a Victorian public building. But that was decay up there, rags not riches: bare boards under my head, gritty and paint-smeared and varnish tins heaped in the corners. Our chaste Victorian Reproduction bathroom suite seemed to float above its surroundings, like a family of swans strayed into a scummy old canal. Slaving against the encroaching tide of filthy chaos, all day and every day, like a Third World housewife… This can’t be my life. I was near to despair. I heard Suzy come trotting into the room, rolled over and saw her standing there in her little green dungarees, holding the sanding block: her red gold curly hair a glowing aureole. She laughed, uncertainly: I was playing a game that she didn’t understand.

A few nights after that I heard the breathing again. It might have been going on for a long time; I was putting up shelves and only heard the other noise when I stopped to rest. The sick person went on gasping, gasping, gasping until the spasm reached some kind of climax, and then ceased. Whoever it was, they’d been moved up from the basement to the first floor (I couldn’t imagine someone who breathed like that would be able to climb stairs).

It was only later, when I was putting my tools away and the stertorous breathing began again, that I noticed the sound had also changed sides. It was coming through the uphill wall of the terrace now. It had been downhill before.

I went up to London for a script meeting, feeling resentful because I wanted to spend all Suzy’s childminder days on the house — anything to get the awful task over with. Zak Morgan, the animator, came out to the pub with me afterwards and actually bought me a drink. I knew I must be looking terrible if even Zak took pity on me.

We were not fond of each other. He smirked at me over the little table, chin on hand as if he was posing for an old fashioned photo (Zak is always posing for something). “You know, you’ve really mellowed over the past six months, Rosie. We’ve all noticed. No more of those porcupine prickles everyone used to dread.”

No friend of mine calls me Rosie. Patronizing bastard. But he was right. I used to fight guerilla campaigns at these meetings. It was only a kiddies’ cartoon, but as far as I could make it so, it was going to be on the side of the world I wanted for my Suzy. There was the time when they thought I was giving the female toon characters too many strong lines. There was the Rainforest story, when they were worried that my “ecological” bias might offend some people (for heaven’s sake!). My strength was that everyone knew that I wanted as much as anybody for our product to be a success. I didn’t always get my way, but I often did, just by being humorous and reasonable and yet standing my ground.

But that was before the house. I wasn’t fighting for anything at present. I had no aim in view — except to keep on turning in stuff that was good enough so they’d go on paying me. I watched Zak watching me as I digested his compliment, and the worst thing he’d told me was that a half year had gone by. Half a year of Suzy’s precious life had dropped into that abyss of a house and vanished without a trace. He smiled as if he could see right into me: the springs of grief and loss that welled up inside. Loss irremediable, grief unassuagable…

“Well,” I said seriously. “That’s because I’m preoccupied at the moment. I’m being haunted. I have become the victim of psychical possession.”

Just as he was getting ready to restrain me in some humane but painful fashion until the men in white coats could get here, I laughed.

“I mean the new house, Zak! I’m being haunted by dry rot. It’s terrible stuff, you know. You can be riddled with it before you even suspect there’s anything wrong. Maybe I should tell you about cuboidal cracking, so you can check your place over before it’s too late.”

But on the train journey back home my joke began to take on an unintended meaning. Or to take the shape of a truth I’d been avoiding.

Donald was home and had fetched Suzy from the childminder’s. I left them playing together in her room, and went downstairs.

The dry rot was supposedly totally eradicated, we had guarantees to prove it. But the idea of that creeping cancer of bricks and timber unnerved me, and I’d developed a slight phobia about the basement — where rot had been so rampant. I didn’t want to move in down there.

Down, past the room where the sick person gasped on the other side of the wall, past the other room where I had tugged on an old woman’s matted grey hair… Through the front hall, where my beautiful dream was beginning to be realized. Takeaway cartons littered the basement stairway. The walls were still bare, the air still smelled of empty house, junk mail decaying in a damp hallway. In the depths, in the place Mr. Hann had elected to call “the family room,” there was a wet, acrid smell of new plaster. A mountain of crated furniture stood in the middle of the new pine floor.

I literally had not been down here alone since the last site meeting before we moved in. There had been plenty to do elsewhere: I hadn’t had to explain my reluctance. But I had been nervous enough to tell myself I had a phobia about dry rot, the white cobwebs that crawl over bare brick —

She — it — was still there. It sat exactly as I had seen it before, placidly in possession. Its hands moved constantly, hooking and twiddling away; its soft face was blankly complacent.

You Can’t Make a Silk Purse Out of a Sow’s Ear

I decided not to tell Don. I knew what was happening, I could translate the language of this haunting; but I was afraid of my reputation. Don believed in my “feelings” about places and people. I had to keep quiet and get through this crisis alone, or the house would be poisoned for both of us; I’d have to tolerate the slight damage to our relationship meanwhile.

Once I came back from another business day to find Don rooting through my desk. There were voices downstairs. We were in for an impromptu social evening, and I was having to brace myself. I was more anxious than ever to get the decorating and fixing up done, to bury her — but I’d sound crazy if I said I’d rather scrape paint than relax. Don was throwing up flurries of paper, like a dog digging for a buried bone.

“What are you doing?” I shouted.

“Oh, Rose. I was just looking for that photograph? The one of the old Polish lady?”

We’d found this photograph at the back of one of the fitted cupboards that we took out of Suzy’s room. It was an old, sepia print, nothing to do with my ghostly, tv cookery, grandmother. But I had burned it anyway.

“Why are you making such a mess?” I yelled. “It isn’t in there. I don’t know where it is!”

I chased him off my territory. He left, rolling his eyes, with that naughty-boy expression he puts on when he thinks he’s run up against the incomprehensible feminine in me: Rose seen as a faulty appliance.

This house… It had its own smell now, no longer masked by damp or tar, raw plaster and wet paint. Whenever I opened the front door the stale perfume enveloped me: lily-of-the-valley, or maybe lavender, with a vaguely antiseptic afternote. It smelled a little of hospitals. Or the powder-room of an old-fashioned department store, where beneath the effortful sweetness of old ladies who like to look nice, lies just a whiff of sour, unclean decay.

I dreamed about the first time we came to see the empty house. But it wasn’t empty. We were met, in the big gloomy cluttered hall, by the old lady from the photograph: a bundle of dark blouse and skirt, like a bag tied in the middle. Her face was yellow as beeswax, her hair, pulled back into a hard bun, still quite black. We looked around. The house was full of furniture and ornaments and curtains. At the back of the big hall, its black and white tiles almost obscured by grime, an old gas chandelier dangled, crusted with cobwebs, as if — impossibly — the house had never been wired for electric power. Under it three doors in frames of carved wood stood in a line. The wood, varnished treacle thick, was richly freighted with dust. Each door opened onto an awkward angular slip of a room, such a perverse arrangement it was hard to guess at the original use. It was the kind of error that worked like a drug on us, making us desperate to strip out, knock through, open up — as if we were the only ones who could discover the true house, the one the original architect had failed to realize.

Everywhere there was the gloom that starts with blinds pulled down to preserve the carpets (for whom?) and becomes the murky cave where an old lady hides the fact that she has become unable to cope. It was obvious that she’d just given up on most of the rooms. Velvet curtains hung in rags, preserving in the folds odd streaks of vivid purple: the lurid taste of a long-dead age. An upright piano stood rotting on its feet, shards of its back board scattered on the floor; inside, the dusty hammers had fallen and twisted with rust. In one bedroom we lifted a mattress and uncovered a layer of wriggling white larvae. Don kept looking at me hopefully: Yes? (the silent communication system of the house hunters); and I was signaling no, no, no…

In the middle of our viewing the men in white coats came and took the old lady away. It was someone else who let us out, and Don — that is, a part of me — was very relieved. She was gone and we were safe. The Don part of me thought everything would be all right now. But I said no, no, no…

The incident with the larvae never happened. The old Polish lady had died in a nursing home, before the house went on the market: the house was stripped to its rotten walls before we ever saw it. We never saw a piano in here, or a gas chandelier; or those three strange doors. But some dreams become true. They taint your remembered experience.

At last the whole place was ours. I heated up some coffee in the microwave and stared into the sunny garden, but I wouldn’t let the wilderness out there tempt me. This was going to be a Suzy-free day spent entirely at my desk. I sipped the coffee, which tasted like hot rainwater, and headed for my office. We’d just finished decorating the big room in the front of the basement — which we were helplessly calling “the family room” although we hated the description. The walls were a clear, opaline yellow, with a geometric frieze in black and umber over which I had taken enormous pains. The windows that we’d had enlarged carried great swathes of sunlight up and down, echoing my yellow. Curtains of heavy linen in a deeper shade still had to be hung. I’d insisted on indirect lighting. No overhead lamps to cast gloomy shadows: this basement must never be gloomy. Our old living room furniture — some of it looking pretty shabby — stood about a little awkwardly in its big new home. The art nouveau fireplace, this one scraped by Don, not by me, gleamed darkly in its restored beauty, its glossy iron lilies to be echoed by the baroque yellow lilies on my new curtains. No trace of the decay that had conjured up my vision remained, but I still had to come to grips with my bad feeling about this room. I averted my eyes from the hearth. If I don’t look, then there’s nothing there…

I opened the door to the rest of the house. There was someone climbing ahead of me, up the basement stairs. My hand had reached automatically for the switch on the wall, and it was in artificial light that I saw her. She — it — was wearing a lilac colored dress, knee length, and a white cardigan. She — it — leaned heavily on the banister with one hand, the other hand pressed to the wall, and looked at me over its shoulder.

I shut the door. There were boxes of our possessions waiting to be arranged on polished shelves and hung on the pale walls. I sat on a box of books, my back to the hearth. I was sweating. Ridiculous thoughts raced through my mind, ridiculous expedients. I would leave a note for Don, leave now by the basement door, fetch Suzy from the childminder’s, and we would run for it. We would never come back here. We would take to the roads, become nomads. There was no other hope of escape.

I fought with myself, and conquered. I heated up my stale coffee over again, and went up to my office. The figure was no longer visible; if it was still there I walked through it. I did a day’s work at my desk: not good work, but good enough so I’d get paid for it.

One of my grandmothers had died before I was born. The other, a self-sufficient old lady, lived in Canada; I hadn’t seen her since I was a child. Don had no grandparents living. Both of us had middle-aged parents as yet untouched by age… And yet I was left with the faint certainty that I’d seen the woman on the stairs before. I knew her. I dug out photograph albums, buried for months in the turmoil of moving and hunted furtively for that soft old face. I couldn’t find her. Where had she sprung from?

From deep inside myself, of course — familiar as a bad dream.

What harm can a ghost do? Fiction apart, there never seems to be any purpose in these things, if they exist. They just happen, they just are. What is there to be afraid of? The fear is of the contagion of death. In Chinatown once, in an exotic city far away, I had seen a death house: a place to which the dying were hurried, still breathing, in a ruthless attempt to quarantine them — exactly as if death were an infection that could be avoided. I was sick with death. Something old that should be dead had used the house as a way into my mind… Working on this house had reduced me to flesh-and-blood machinery: bludgeoned me into the housewife role I’d always fiercely rejected. Some part of me must have been afraid of this, all along.

I knew that my fear was taking this hallucinatory form because I was so tired. I would be better soon, soon as I could throw away my work gloves and become Rose again. I knew all this, but I could not stop myself from thinking about that figure on the stairs. Sometimes I saw it when I opened that door, sometimes I didn’t. It was always with me.

One day I was at my desk, dashing off a quick email or two while Suzy played in her room. The baby listener was at my side, I could hear her talking. Baby talk always sounds conversational, they always leave pauses for an invisible listener’s replies…but suddenly I knew that she was not alone. I jumped up and ran down the stairs. There was nobody there, of course. She was surrounded by a strew of colored bricks, piled two and three and four high.

“Who were you talking to, Suzy?”

Suzy laughed. “Gone —” she said.

Or maybe, “gran”?

I stared at her, horrified to see no fear or repulsion in her face.

“You mustn’t talk to that lady. She’s not my friend, or yours!”

My knees gave way under me. I crouched on Suzy’s pretty green rug, shuddering. “Oh, baby, darling… I didn’t mean that! I know there was no lady. Mummy’s being silly, being very silly.”

Children are fickle creatures. Suzy didn’t cry at my strange behavior, or come to me. She lay down on the floor instead and stayed there, gazing dreamily at the bricks and humming a vague little tune.

I sat in the family room that night with Don. He’d insisted we take an evening off, to spend time together. It wasn’t being a success. He slumped in front of the tv; I couldn’t even rest. My hands were itchy for occupation.

“I feel so tired,” I wailed. “I look in the mirror and I’m horrified. And the worst is, I keep thinking I’ll be all right when things get back to normal. But they never will, Don! Do you realize what this house has done? It has dragged us across the great divide. We’re not young anymore. What I think of as normal is being young. We were still young, still alive even through having Suzy, but now it’s gone forever…”

He looked at me like a dog that’s being beaten.

“You always dramatize things, Rose. You’ll be fine when this bloody fixing up and beautifying is finished.”

I was fighting an impulse that really scared me. I was still frightened by what I’d imagined I’d heard Suzy say that afternoon. I was frightened that Don felt the presence of the ghost too. He would say: “the basement’s awfully dark, isn’t it?” (which it was not); or “the den always seems to feel chilly.” Which it did not. I got up and opened the door to the stairs. It was there.

“Don, come here.”

He came. “Do you see anything?”

He peered up the stairwell, still uncarpeted: walls still the color of scorched, stripped wood. I saw him wince and shudder. For a moment he terrified me. “Shit. I suppose you mean that we should be painting. Rose, are you aware that this house is driving you crazy? No wonder you’re exhausted. You’re driving us both into the ground; does it really matter if the basement stairs don’t get painted for another month or two?”

He stomped back to the tv, growling that I had ruined the evening. So we sat among the ruins, and when we went to bed I walked through the thing on the stairs as if it wasn’t there; and so did he.

There’s No Use Crying Over Spilt Milk

Suzy wasn’t sleeping well. I made no connection with my haunting, I thought it was her back teeth starting to come through. We took turns to monitor the baby listener, and I didn’t mind when it was my night. I liked having Suzy’s quiet breath and gentle stirrings, right by my pillow. I was half dreaming, storymaking, thinking of my cartoon characters, when I realized there was something wrong about Suzy’s breathing. So wrong that I was out of bed, and down the stairs instantly, stark naked, without pausing to grab a dressing gown. A white three-quarter moon was shining full in through the landing window, on the first floor, where Suzy’s room was the big sunny one at the front of the house. I saw it distinctly, in the moonlight, walking away from me slowly, breathing in heavy, effortful sighs. It had left the door of Suzy’s room a little ajar, the way we always do.

Suzy was still asleep. In the blue glow of her mermaid nightlight, hugging my naked body in my arms, I watched her quiet breath. I could smell faint hospital smells: talcum powder, feces and disinfectant. There was an indentation in Suzy’s pillow, I put my own hand down beside it: those were not the marks of my fingers. An old woman with thickened, knotted finger joints had leaned down over the child. From the corner of the room a pile of helpless eyes watched me: Suzy’s toys. She did not wake; she did not cry. I felt cold, so cold. I went back to our room, and woke Don only to have some company.

“I think I’ll keep her at home for a while,” I told him. “I’ll take some time off work: it won’t do me any harm.”

He had been deeply asleep; he assumed I’d been dealing with another tearful session. He looked a little frightened. We’d always been so clear that I mustn’t fall into the part-time, second-job trap. I must pursue my career.

“All right, if that’s what you want. If you really think it’s necessary.”

I stayed at home, I shut my office, I worked like a demon at finishing the restoration. I was trying to placate an evil old goddess, whom I had offended by my life choices, and into whose temple I had then rashly strayed. Now she had my child hostage, and I must pay. So many hours of mindless drudgery, for Suzy’s life and freedom.

But soon it wasn’t just me. Everybody noticed the change in Suzy. She had been such a bold, bouncy little person. It is not easy to tell the gender of a clothed child at that age, if the parents don’t provide obvious signals. Stupid people were always calling my Suzy a real little boy! When I corrected them she’d become a real little tomboy, the smile of approval diminished. Now no more. Suzy was quiet and good. She didn’t climb on stepladders; she didn’t climb out of her cot. Suzy became a proper little girl, her movements gentle, her play sedate. In the night, almost every night now, I heard that horrible breathing. And almost every night Suzy woke, sobbing: her eyes dilated in terror, her little heart thumping wildly as we held her and rocked her and walked her back to calm.

Suzy was alone with me every day. She saw the struggle I managed to hide from everyone else. I tried to protect her from my daytime nightmares; I tried to explain to her that there was really nothing wrong with the basement stairs, it was only Mummy being silly. But soon she wanted to be carried if she had to go up or downstairs at all. I was the only one who knew what was wrong, and I dared not tell. I felt sympathy with those hysterical females in horror-movies. The woman who goes after the monster in her negligée and her feather mules, alone, because she just can’t bring herself to shake her husband and tell him: wake up! There’s a… A what? I could not tell. A bogey from my mind, leaning over Suzy’s cot at night and whispering terrible secrets, the petal-cheeked secrets all women have to learn, can’t start too soon.

It was a Saturday afternoon, a sunny day in September. I was at work at my desk and Don was in charge of Suzy. As I had taught myself to think of nothing while I stripped and sanded and scrubbed the old woman’s body, I was teaching myself to live with the constant tingling nausea of fear in my belly. Life in a dentist’s waiting room, life in the last moments before the bad news becomes certain. What I was waiting for came: the breathing started.

Such a disgusting noise: like an old man masturbating in a filthy public toilet. I could see his gap-toothed, foul-smelling mouth fall open, a little saliva dribbling out as he panted and gasped. I went out on the stairs and the sound followed me.

I crouched, clinging to the banisters, looking into the hall below. Everything that I’d imagined, we had realized. Pearly sea colors lapped me around, foam-white, aquamarine, pale emerald. Sea-treasures decorated the walls: gathered far away and arranged on the shore of our new-found-land. Down below, the checkered tiles gleamed. But the horrible noise went on. I was thinking: I must tell someone. I’m going crazy, and I’m harming Suzy. And then the grandmother figure was there. In its styleless, timeless lilac dress and white cardigan it plodded along the hall. Outside Don’s den it disappeared.

Something moved inside Don’s room, a small natural sound. I realized that he was in there. I ran down the stairs, pushed open his door.

“Don — !”

He’d made himself very cozy in there. The new desk that I’d bought for him stood in the window: two generous armchairs faced each other before the fireplace. The computer workstation lurked apologetically, half hidden by a Japanese lacquer screen. Suzy wasn’t with him: that was normal now. She was so quiet and good you could leave her playing by herself for half an hour or more. Don was sitting by the fine Adam-style fireplace that I had restored, his hands idle in his lap, no book or newspaper in sight.

He looked up, guiltily. I felt a flash of bitter jealousy, because of that look of guilt surprised. Maybe to him the spirit of this house was the motherly type that men love: who hurries to do them little services, gives them the kind of constant attention they can’t have from a liberated modern woman. Maybe she was often in here with him, massaging his ego with little psychic touches…

“Don?”

I touched the back of his chair and at once drew my hand away. She was here. That hideous, masturbatory gasping was in here, it filled the air. And I forgot what I had been going to say, because I looked into Don’s eyes and saw that he knew. He knew all about the thing that was in this room with us. I should have been relieved (I didn’t want to be mad), but instead I was plunged into deeper despair. There was nothing quaint or exciting about this experience; it was simply hideous. If we talked about it I’d have to say — we’ve got to get out of this place. And we couldn’t afford to leave.

He must have realized all that ahead of me. He must have seen that we just had to put up with it. There are certain things, certain realities young people think they can refuse, but adults know they cannot; and since there was nothing to be done I too must learn not to see the ghost. I must learn to be like Don: never mention the pollution that had crept into our precious life. It was hard to think straight. Whatever I touched in here felt like flaccid warm skin. The dead weight of a body that could no longer support itself lay in my empty arms, and such pity for my lover filled me.

“Don, I’ve been thinking. I don’t really need an office, and we could use another guest room. Why don’t I move down here and we can work together, the way things used to be…”

He stared at me, deeply outraged, as if I were babbling trivialities at a death bed. I began to shake and sweat. What was I saying? What did money matter, when my child was hostage? Of course we had to get out!

“Don, I’m sorry. I hardly know what I’m saying. I’ve got to talk to you about Suzy —”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes… I know.”

We went to the door of her room and stood looking in, in the bright sunlight. Suzy was sitting on the floor, playing with a sorting toy she had conquered weeks ago. As we watched, she gave up the unequal struggle and clambered to her feet. She took a few steps, and sat down again as carefully as an old lady. The room was neat: no strew of bricks, no tossed carnage of soft toys. Suzy sighed — an adult sound of human weariness — and watched the sunlight on the wall. She seemed quite content.

Don took her for the tests, taking time off work. He understood why I didn’t want to go along. As soon as they were out of the house I fetched the dustsheets. I cleared every surface and shrouded the furniture in our “family room.” It was important to me that I should work with method, not like a crazy woman. I pulled the phone plug and put on my working clothes.

I found destruction amazingly easy at first; such a relief. The fireplace with the cast iron lilies was all in one piece. I drilled out the new mortar from around the iron, until I could pull it free. The yellow wall of the chimney breast became spattered plaster and dirt, like gouts of blood. I was looking for something that was buried, so I ignored the gaping wound of the chimney’s throat and hacked at the stone hearth slab. A crowbar lifted it. I did not pause to be amazed at my own strength. Hysterical, they call it, what a mother’s body will do when her child is in danger. Women have lifted cars —

I climbed down into the pit and began to dig. I turned on the brick piers and brought them down. I knew this ghost would not be laid by exhumation, but I went on. It was buried somewhere, everywhere in the bricks and mortar, the body of an evil old woman: the rotted bones of soft complacent age, the decay that was poisoning us. I hacked away, just as the builders had hacked away at the white lesions of rot. The smell of damp and decay came welling out like blood.

I’d known all along this place was still rotten under our paint and polish: the rot still creeping, the old grey lungs still sodden with moisture. I would expose everything this time. I would drain the abscess, scour and burn… It was engrossing work. I was still hard at it, plastered red to the elbows with sweat and brick dust, when I heard Don’s key turn.

I woke up. I saw the devastation that surrounded me: the filthy chaos that I’d made in the heart of our home. I had a moment of blind panic: He’ll have me locked up! Don came down the basement stairs with Suzy in his arms. He stood staring at what I had done, neither shocked nor surprised, his face a mirror of my own helpless desperation.

What Can’t Be Cured Must Be Endured

Time has passed, oh aeons of time; and to think I once imagined six months was a lot to lose. It is late evening. I’m sitting in the family room, reading and watching television. The fuel-effect gas fire flickers in our chrome and steel fire pit: providing a space-age coziness that somehow works very well with the period furnishings. Don is in his den. Spending time apart from each other, when we can, has become a blessed relief. I do some script doctoring: well enough that they pay me. I don’t know what Don gets up to. We could go out more often, one at a time. We can get help; it wouldn’t be impossible. But neither of us wants to be away from our little old lady for long.

What’s it like to live in a haunted house? It’s frightening, disturbing, irritating; and finally you just put up with it. Sometimes I wake in the night and hear that terrible sound, which has become familiar and accustomed. I go next door, if it is my turn, into the faint sour sickroom smell that nothing can quite expunge and tend the young-old body that grows a little more helpless every day. I am possessed by an alien consciousness. A lost Rose shouts and struggles, and has violent, ruthless visions of escape for herself and her child. But it doesn’t last. We will escape, Don and I, soon enough.

Of course it will be too late (as Rose always feared). I don’t suppose we’ll ever move, for one thing. There’s too much that we love, too many memories buried here. And I don’t honestly think I could face the rat race again, even if it would have me. “It isn’t our fault!” That was Don’s first cry when he brought her home, on the day we will remember forever as the most important in our lives. He meant that Suzy’s illness is not hereditary.

Even now, no one really knows why children like Suzy suffer and die. Statistics point accusingly to a pesticide that was in general use when I was pregnant (it’s banned in this country now). But nothing’s proven. And perhaps Don and I, although at first we demanded answers like a pair of remorseless furies, are happier in ignorance. Too little, too late: my fantasy that I would try to save the world for Suzy’s sake seems so absurd now.

It’s better not to think too much. Better to stay at home and let the world look after itself. This house. I should have known that remodeling was not enough. We should have razed the whole structure to the ground, burned the foundations to bedrock… Sometimes I torment myself by thinking like that. I struggle with the conviction that I was warned, that there was a chance and I didn’t take it, I wasn’t brave enough. More often I don’t. I accept that there was never any alternative, and that’s what the ghost came to tell me.

There’s no more need for a warning now, but I think as long as we live in this house the figure on the stairs will always be there, looking back at me over its shoulder. I will find myself a little closer, and a little closer, as the years go by, until at last I can recognize the face. I find it very hard to switch out of my busy mode nowadays. When I force myself to relax I end up like this, neither watching the tv nor reading my book. In a moment I’ll have to fetch myself something to do. It scarcely matters what.

March 1989

The Early Crossing

The sand was the fine-grained estuary kind: “sand” by courtesy, really mud. It recalled childhood places, cold holiday outings. It sucked and puddled slightly under my shoes. The wide horizon ahead of me was glistening brown like the sand. There was a long wrack of clouds, and above it a band of paler sky, fading to dark again into the zenith. I could see the folds and texture of the clouds, and light lay glistening in long skeins across the saturated tidal sands. There were no birds. I felt chilled and half asleep from getting up so early. I walked fast, my habitual pace when alone, with my head down. I realized that someone was walking behind me. He came up beside me and made some remark about how early it was. I didn’t look at him directly, but I saw a thin, leathery-faced little man, like a jockey. He bent and touched my leg, on the calf. Then I knew I was in trouble.

I pretended nothing had happened and walked faster. We had reached the other side of the estuary and passed into a narrow place, still a track not a road. He jumped me there. But I fought him off. I got up and ran away. I reached the first house: it was still twilight. I told the people there that I’d come over because I was worried about my son. He’d gone to his karate class and I hadn’t seen him since.

They were very kind. I didn’t tell them I’d been attacked, but I felt how I was begging for kindness, reassurance; and I could see they’d noticed something strange. The woman showed me into an untidy room; there were signs of arts and crafts and hobbies lying about, and it was unheated, a kind of studio. I heard the woman talking, on the phone I thought. She sounded frightened. I was so worried about Gabriel. I looked in a mirror on the wall. I was wearing familiar clothes, but I saw a strange coppery glimmer over the front of my emerald green jumper. I stared at it, trying to understand, and then I realized what was wrong with the woman out in the hall. She had seen a ghost — she had seen me. In a moment she’d look into this room, and I’d be gone. I was a ghost. I was dead. I would never see Gabriel again.

The story rushed in on me: I had been murdered, probably, by that leathery little man. There were no estuary sands, that was my ghost’s image of a cold and lonely return across the borderline. I think I was sitting down. The woman was still talking. I felt such loss, such desolation, such an understanding of death.

June 1997

The Eastern Succession

In the year 480 Ranganar, 2022 of the old count, there was a dynastic failure in the federation of Timur Kering. Our prince died, and there was no heir male to take his place. A prince plays an important role in traditional Peninsulan government. He is the ceremonial head of state, the symbol of his family’s mandate to rule: without a prince, there is no princedom. Therefore a new royal family must be chosen — one approved by the whole nation, not just the Federation of Timur. And so the remaining powers of the Peninsula gathered on Temple Mountain, “between five princedoms,” under the eyes of our brutal caretakers the Koperasi, to debate the eastern succession.

There were three candidates. The ancient Bangau clan should have taken precedence, except that the only prince they could offer was an infant. This implied a Koperasi regency that would face dangerous popular resistance. There was an elder Bangau. But his mother had changed her House and become a commoner, to escape the restrictions placed on dissenters of rank. He could only be offered as the candidate of her new family. The young man, Ida Bagus Sadia, was reported to be beautiful, intelligent, and good. It made no difference. His pedigree was null and void: no orthodox Peninsulan would vote for him. The Siamangs, who offered the third candidate, had never been involved in unrest. Nor were they burdened by ages of tradition. They were supposed to have connections with contraband trading; but this did not make them unacceptable to the Koperasi, or to the people. The man, Gusti Ketut Siamang, was strong and healthy and had fathered children (an important point). He was the obvious choice: not only for the people of Timur, but for anyone interested in change and progress.

My family allowed me to go to the debate as an observer. The result was almost certain, but not quite. Even with the Koperasi looking on, various feuds and loyalties would be simmering under the surface. Jagdana, the elegant western princedom, might favor Ida Bagus Sadia, the good young man — for Sadia’s mother was a dissenter, and Jagdana sympathized (discreetly) with the lost cause of independence. The Gamarthans of the north, fierce and narrow traditionalists, might support the Bangau infant, if only to oppose Jagdana. Or perhaps with a view to controlling the regency themselves, an idea that made me shudder. The third vote was Timur’s, and safe. The fourth belonged to the aneh, called “polowijo” in the western princedoms. The Peninsula’s cripples, freaks of nature, the aneh were powerless; but their “vote” was a matter of tradition. They usually followed Jagdana. The fifth vote had once belonged to the Garuda family, our native sovereigns over all the Peninsula. But the Garudas had been wiped out in the Last Rebellion. It could now be counted as belonging to the half-rebel criminal gangs of the hills. The bandits could make large areas of Timur ungovernable if they were not satisfied, and no one wants to be ungovernable. It is what the Garudas were.

I arrived at Canditinggi, the town on temple pass, with all these complications at my fingertips, on an afternoon of black, streaming rain. Desperate, clinging, cantilevered streets lurched up and down all around me (after-effects of the “night express” transport). There was a smell of wet cabbage. The view, which should have been staggering, was entirely obliterated by cloud: Timur below me, Jagdana at my back, and about a hundred batu south the towering cones of BuAwan, where the aneh live. The roadway was cobble and mud, packed with sedan chairs and animals. The public buildings showed raw scars where the wings of the Garuda eagle had been defaced but not removed, as if the Rebellion had happened yesterday. The crowd swept around me: giggling servants, Koperasi patrollers, hangers-on, criminals, beggars, spies. Three veiled figures slipped down from their chairs and vanished into a closed courtyard. Everyone dutifully looked the other way, except for me and the Koperasi. The women who run our native governments are intensely secretive. I stared at the broken wings of Garuda, defiant badges of mourning: I knew I had made a mistake.

I was right! They wouldn’t let me in. My letters of introduction were useless. I, a man, could not possibly enter any of the Dapur courts while the debate was in session. Not even behind a screen like an unwanted piece of furniture? No. “It wouldn’t mean anything to you,” they told me. “The Dapur is the hearth. There is no place for a man there.” And (worse!), the eternal perhaps. “Perhaps later… Perhaps…” Am I an animal? When I was fourteen, the last of my sister-mothers died. I fled our conservative neighbors, not to mention our own servants, and flung myself on the mercy of distant connections in Timur. They were kind to me. They even sent me to college in Sepaa, the Koperasi city. But my education was no use to me here, in the heart of the old traditional Peninsula. Simpering doe-eyed servant boys tripped after the Dapur ladies. If I were like them I could go in. In my frustration I contemplated castrating myself on the spot.

It was night before I gave up and started hunting for a place to stay. In the morning the inn I had moved into turned out to be a disreputable collection of palm thatch shacks, sharing an unpaved compound with a brothel, in the tail of the town where it trailed to steep bedraggled fields. I didn’t like the look of the other guests at all. But when I tried to move out, everywhere was “phuuull —” The two forms of Inggris are actually two different languages. Perversely the debate town was using “High Inggris,” the speech of our Rulers. When I spoke in our own tongue the Canditinggi women refused to understand my accent. They were not impressed by money: “Koperasi paper. What good that?” Women’s eyes followed me everywhere with implacable suspicion: staring at my city clothes, the shoes on my feet. A respectable man, they told me, does not travel alone. I was stuck. And, as I had I suspected, I was lodging in a den of thieves.

It was their country too, why should they not be interested in the debate? Who could keep them away? Having no papers at all, “permisi travel” didn’t worry them. The brigands had come from all over Timur: swaggering at night in the back alleys, loafing about by day in low dives like mine. The patrols that roared around the town day and night, slaughtering chickens and fouling the streets with the alien stink of hydrocarbon, took no notice. Koperasi law and order has no real quarrel with organized crime. After dark my inn was like a pasar malam, a night market: young men preening themselves and posing under the sizzling white lamps; whispered dealing in corners. Short-lived, bold eyed, wild-haired — in other times they would all have been boys and safe at home. But we seem to be returning to a state of nature, where unneeded males are simply driven away, to strut and fight and die like falling flowers in the wilderness.

But these bravos were not entirely abandoned. They had a guardian. I met her on my second night in the town: a lean young woman with a cadaverous dark face, dressed like the bandits in coarse silk breeches and a vivid embroidered jacket. It was raining hard. About ten of them were sprawled around the empty hearth in the common room, drinking beer under the notice that said no alcohol could be served to Peninsulans (she wasn’t drinking, of course). Someone had been very wicked, I gathered. The dark woman was the bandits’ conscience, trying to persuade them to defy the villain. But she didn’t nag. She recognized that even fierce ogres can sometimes feel small and helpless.

“As for me, I don’t have any support at the moment. But when I do, I plan to withdraw it immediately.”

They laughed in relief. “Me too, me too.”

“As soon as ever —”

“I’m just going to walk right up to him —”

Watching this, and wondering about the woman, I didn’t notice I had company. Suddenly there was a grubby red and gold sash in front of my face, with the ornate hilt of a knife sticking out of it.

“D’you like it?”

If I stood up we would be practically mouth to mouth. He had come up on me soft-footed as a cat. I was horrified. I knew from experience nothing I could say would be right. These things ignite in a moment: I’d be in a knife fight, or I’d be raped —

“I said, d’you like my knife? What’s the matter boy? Does pretty little bottom think he’s too pretty to talk to me?”

I flushed crimson, ridiculously. “I am not a boy.”

The demon grinned broadly, eyed my lap; stroked his knife hilt. “Not a boy, eh?”

“Leave him alone Tjakil. He’s a stranger; he doesn’t mean to offend.”

The dark young woman smiled, almost indifferently. My suitor, after a moment’s hesitation, shrugged his shoulders and stalked away.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you madam. It was good of you.”

“It was nothing. It is just that I know their names. Names are magic, you know… I suppose your people are staying in town?”

I had spoken in our language: she followed. I was surprised to hear a cultivated voice, without a trace of dialect.

“No. I’m here by myself. I am an observer.”

“Oh.” She frowned, but kept the rest back. I was grateful that she didn’t say I ought not to be alone.

“My name is Endang. I am from Timur.”

She smiled again, brilliantly. “My name is Derveet.”

But names are magic. Neither of us, I noticed, chose to mention a family.

From her pure accent, and her habit of bowing slightly over every minute social transaction, I judged she had been brought up in Jagdana, in a high caste family. But her skin was dark, she stood out among the bandits like a black smudge on a gold leaf. She was here in Canditinggi, I discovered, with the aneh — a tiny deputation. Apart from Derveet it consisted of the single Dapur delegate and two deformed boys called Snake and Buffalo. Derveet, evidently, was a “failed woman” — that is, she had been proved barren, the worst crime a woman can commit. The Dapur, the hearth and life of the house, has no place for such cripples. She was not entitled to the robes, she could not enter the courts of this Debate. The delegate herself, an abnormally tall woman with an ugly pigment deficiency, had little respect for the rules of the Dapur. She was often in our common room, hitching up the irksome veils to show expanses of red scurfy limbs, giving her report to Derveet in an abrasive carrying voice that had had plenty of use. Unfortunately she had nothing to say, beyond that it was all stupid and she didn’t understand what was going on.

They both seemed far more interested in the grievance I had heard Derveet discussing. A bandit of some importance, known as “Durjana,” was selling substandard contraband drugs to the aneh. The freaks were deeply impressed by “Koperasi medicine”: they couldn’t be prevented from using the stuff, and they were dying. From the way the two spoke, this had become a serious problem.

Snake, the younger boy, was just a child. He had a light, agile body and speaking eyes, but he had no lips, no teeth — only smooth gums in a narrow elongated jaw, and a useless little ribbon of a tongue. In repose his mouth was a single folded line, curled in a reptile’s permanent crooked smile. Buffalo boy seemed luckier. The lumps on his temples didn’t bother him, his husky shoulders were useful, his hands only a little clumsy. But Calfism is a progressive defect. By the time he was twenty he would have no human face, only an animal’s muzzle. He would not speak. His fingers would be clotted into leathery clubs, and his enlarged heart would be worn out under the strain of the overdeveloped torso. He was Derveet’s lieutenant, always at her elbow: “Madam, you’d better come —” “Madam, they are fighting again —” The day after I met his mistress I found him trotting beside me as I went into town. He wouldn’t leave me: “Madam says —” he explained. He was shocked that I had been allowed to come here with no servant of my own. I tried to explain to him that it was a compliment and that I was proud to be trusted to look after myself, but that was beyond him. The single state is not understood: he pressed my hand tenderly and thereafter avoided the painful subject.

Days of trudging up and down in the cold mountain drizzle, days of fruitless argument and pleading. Nights of watching Derveet and the aneh woman in patient, useless struggle with the bandits… Then one night there was a major development. The accused himself arrived, with an entourage of gangster courtiers. Everyone sat up around the dining table for a formal confrontasi. The wicked Durjana was quite beautiful, with shining black curls, golden muscles, and a smiling, innocent mouth. He had come, he said, out of respect for Derveet and “so everyone would listen and be satisfied.” Such a promising start was doomed.

“You know I don’t like quarrels ’Jana, but when someone tries to murder me it hurts you know. It hurts.”

“It wasn’t you. It was only aneh down the back of the mountain. Stupid people.”

“They’re my family ’Jana. My family is me. Have you forgotten that? Aren’t you a Peninsulan?”

“My family is the KKK,” muttered Durjana sulkily.

They were speaking in High Inggris. Sometimes I lost the thread, but I caught that detail. KKK stands in our language for Fan, Paper, Cloth. It was the name of a criminal organization said to control most of the “illegal” trade in Timur. I had been eating with the bandits when the discussion began. I had lingered out of curiosity, and no one seemed to object. Now I was eager to stay and afraid to be noticed. The mention of the KKK had implications…that touched on my hopes for the Debate. I drew back, hoping to blend into the shadows. I thought I saw Derveet look my way and faintly smile. But immediately her attention was back with Durjana.

“But what family does the KKK belong to? Are you really part of that ‘family’ which is killing my people?”

“That’s not true!”

“But the KKK supplied you the bad drugs. Where did the drugs come from?”

“What drugs? I did not trade the drugs. When did I say so? Tell me who is lying about me! Bring them here!”

Oh, it was hopeless. The smooth and bottomless waters of Peninsulan confusion closed over our heads. I thought I understood what had happened. The drugs seemed to have been antibiotics — a class of medicine forbidden by the Dapur as being “too extreme.” Antibiotics are less than effective at high altitudes; the aneh had been relying on advanced medicine that couldn’t help them, and that was the whole story. But it was lost, completely lost. The bandits swiftly abandoned the offence itself and began to argue idiotically about the nature of disease. I forgot the political implications of the KKK. I forgot Derveet’s accusation (for it was no less) of mass-murder. I couldn’t bear it.

“May I speak?”

The ogres all stared at me. “He’s the one with no family,” murmured someone censoriously. I pointed out that he didn’t have a family, as such, either.

“But I never had one. If I’d had one and I’d seen them die, I’d have done the decent thing.”

“Hush, hush. Don’t upset him.”

When they weren’t bent on murderous squabbles, they generally had very gentle manners. It comes of everyone being armed to the teeth.

I could not tackle the question of altitude, it would just sound like magic. But I could try to make one simple point.

“Listen. Durjana says that the drugs —”

“He knows nothing about those drugs!”

“Of course not. I never said he did. But it is nonsense to say that Koperasi drugs would ‘cure anything’ and that the aneh died because of their ‘bad magic.’ Diseases have nothing to do with magic. Our own culture tells us that.”

They all frowned at me dubiously.

“You see diseases come from — Well, all diseases are really like the worms you get in your guts. They are —” I stumbled, at a loss.

“Parasites,” murmured Derveet.

“Yes, parasites. Very small parasites, too small to be seen. They come from, from: How should I say dari diluar dunia, from outside the world?”

“From outer space?” Derveet suggested, with a grin.

“Yes, from outer space.”

The bandits nodded. Our people have unexpected scraps of knowledge, on a folklore level.

“They are very clever, like all parasites. Now all drugs, our own and the Koperasi kind, are the same. They help the body fight the cunning worm-things. But they only help. It is the body itself that either wins or loses. If the body is not strong and healthy no drug will be any use in the end; it will only make things worse —”

“There! I told you! It was the aneh’s fault!” Durjana had been following my words intently, moving his lips with mine to aid concentration. Now he bounced in his seat.

“No, no! The drugs were no good to them, because they were not strong enough. What they needed was better food, clean water —”

“Exactly!” cried the bandit, slapping the table in delight. “Itu sudah! That’s exactly what I already said!”

“Oh yes.”

“It’s true!”

“It was the stupid aneh’s own fault they died.”

“This educated person says so.”

Derveet had put her arms on the tabletop and buried her face in her arms. I stared at her through the bandits’ mindless crowing. I thought she had broken down in tears, so much weight seemed to be resting on her thin bowed shoulders. But of course she was only laughing.

I could not sleep. Derveet’s quarrel with the foolish ogres nagged at me like a toothache. The stupid aneh, the contraband trade… In the dark I left my rustling shack and went to sit on the end of the verandah, in my sleeping sarong and a shawl. It was cold. The center of the sky was dark blue and starry, but all the lower reaches of the dome had faded, and the east was showing a few lines of muddy orange. A screen creaked and a door opened in the wall of the boy brothel: a big crop-headed Koperasi looked out. He was naked. He stood there, touching himself absently, presumably not aware of me in the shadow above. In my mind’s eye I pictured that rod of flesh, swollen and upstanding, entering me: thrusting in and out, hard and strong. I have tried not to have such thoughts about them, I know they are brutes. Why does power attract?

Before it was fully light the inn family appeared: the women, boys, and children. A little man, about three years old, wandered about playing with sticks and stones while the girls worked. Occasionally, a wail arose from him, and one of the women lifted him absently to a tit. His grief didn’t concern them, it was something to be turned off like a dripping tap. No one ever treats a little girl like that. To a tiny infant they will say, with their eyes and gestures, while they comfort her: Why are you crying? You must explain. You must learn to understand. If it isn’t a good reason you had better stop, you have work to do in the world.

Then they complain that we are irresponsible.

The girls, including one midget who could barely toddle, were taking it in turns to jump on the pedal of the heavy rice pestle — laughing, silent, breathless with effort, full of self-respect. The grown women talked a little with their eyes. Probably they had something to say about “the one with no family,” because they often glanced in my direction, without bothering to conceal it.

Tradition! When I was fourteen I should have died. My neighbors would have considered castration a barbarity. Once you’ve been chosen to be a man no one can take away that sacred “privilege.” But they would have given me a beautiful sharp knife and stood over me, very kindly, while I did my duty. Suicide is the decent way, for a gentleman who outlives his use. I had escaped, but I could never leave the shame behind.

Buffalo was right. It was not a compliment, when my adopted family let me come up here alone. They were “sophisticated Timurese,” living close to our Rulers, but they would not have been so casual with their own beloved son and consort. The full male is a necessary luxury, cosseted and disregarded. An unneeded male is nothing. If I wanted worthless “letters of introduction” I might as well have them. Why not? It would keep me quiet.

This country must change, I thought. This country must change.

The man-child wailed and was lifted to suck. Annet, the aneh delegate, had said of the great debate — typical Dapur government. Stick something in the people’s mouths and shut them up, give them whatever poisonous thing they’re crying for. That made me smile, grimly. Good. Let them give Timur what Timur cried for, with all its “poisons,” without thinking too much about the consequences.

Derveet came up the road and turned into the yard, picking her way between puddles and cabbage stalks. Perhaps she had been spending the night with Annet, in her much superior lodging. Halfway across she stopped and looked back over the dizzying panorama making its brief early morning appearance. Rivers of pale cloud streamed away down the dark folds of the hills, plains of Timur imaginary in the distance — underfoot, the sordid thatch roofs of Canditinggi. She spoke. She was reciting quietly, for herself, a pantun: the Jagdanan quatrain. The subject was a lady traveling. The chill of the wayside inn at dawn is strange to her, strange and cold as her own desire to leave her family… The inn mothers raised their eyes, compressed their lips and nodded. They showed Derveet respect, but a dismissive kind of respect — failed woman. One of them spoke aloud, roughly, in the dialect. I think she said: “Fine weather madam.”

“Ya, fine weather.”

She came up to the verandah and leaned beside me. Our eyes met in rueful understanding, two outcasts together. Taking a silver case from her sash she offered me a cigarette. I declined, knowing what one of those green skinned demons would do to me on an empty stomach.

“Well, Endang of Timur, how is your observing?”

“They won’t let me in,” I said. “I came here as an accredited representative of my family, but they refuse to let me in to the debates.”

Derveet stared at me. “Oh, is that what you meant? I thought you meant you were observing — well, men’s business.” She seemed about to laugh, at her own mistake or mine.

“You are amused?”

“I beg your pardon. But if they’d let you in, it would do you no good, you know. You must have heard Annet: she is not enjoying herself. We have no Dapur skills on the mountain. Surely you realize — they don’t speak aloud.”

For a moment I didn’t understand her. “Oh that’s ridiculous,” I exclaimed, when I saw she was serious “You can’t express complex ideas in eye-talk. It’s just a household pidgin, with a clairvoyant element that’s been grossly exaggerated. Lots of educated women are giving it up altogether.”

“Ah,” said Derveet, studying the end of her cigarette. “Is that what they are saying in Timur now?”

I was embarrassed, not wanting to contradict her. I am sufficiently a Peninsulan not to wish to oppose a woman. But we had other things to discuss this morning, and we both knew it. She waited me out.

“You are very anxious,” I began at last, “to implicate the KKK in this problem you have with misapplied medicines. Why is that?”

“Because I don’t want Gusti Ketut Siamang to be prince of Timur.”

Her directness made me flinch, and the look that went with her words was even more direct. Of course she thought I was a spy: eavesdropping on her, probably reporting to someone in the organization, some covert “observer” of greater significance than myself. KKK: Kipas, Kertas, Kain. It was an open secret in Timur that the Fan the Paper and the Cloth concealed the operations of the Siamang family.

And Derveet knew I was a supporter of Gusti Ketut.

“I am at this inn by accident,” I said. “I have done you no harm.”

She smiled. “My dear, I know. Hasn’t Buffalo always been with you?”

It was stupid of me to be hurt by that.

I faced her firmly. “Very well. The Siamangs are the KKK, and the KKK is ‘in the pay of the Koperasi.’ That’s what you are telling the bandits in a roundabout way, and of course it is true. If you were realistic you would see that they know everything perfectly well already. The trouble is, you don’t understand the nature of politics.”

She inclined her head gravely.

“Have you ever been to the east coast? Have you seen the great Domes, out at sea?”

“Yes, I have seen them.”

“That’s where our real Rulers are. Can you imagine what life is like out there, how different from our squalor? Don’t you see? We must make terms with the Koperasi, our own brutal renegades, in order to reach the Rulers beyond. It is our only hope. For a thousand years, we’ve been sinking into the dirt. What has the traditional Peninsula to offer, compared with what the Rulers have?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. Not yet. We are on a different road, and a hard one. The question is, will they let us live to travel it any further —”

I had heard the expression “different road” before, and it only irritated me. It referred to something fantastical and absurd, a mystic, wish-fulfillment view of traditional culture, like the notion of a political debate conducted in eye-signs.

“Your story is incredible,” I told her. “A gangster unloads possibly suspect antibiotics on your aneh. Out of this you make a conspiracy involving the Siamangs, the Koperasi, and our Rulers themselves. You have no proof. You can’t possibly believe that the Koperasi have some monstrous secret order to exterminate our cripples —”

I had exaggerated wildly to show her how stupid it was. I read in her eyes that she believed exactly what I had said. I felt almost afraid to be talking to her.

“Of course I can’t prove that,” she agreed coolly. “But if I keep talking about this one little transaction I can prove, perhaps I’ll make some of them think.”

“You are trying to disrupt the debate.”

She nodded, as if I were a child who had suddenly seen the point of a very simple lesson.

“It’s quite outrageously irresponsible —”

“Endang, it only starts with the aneh. Because we are the weakest, I suppose.”

She sighed. “The power that you Timurese admire so much is the power that comes from having no natural enemies. It is nothing to be proud of. Our Rulers come from another world, another time. Whatever they once were, they are alien now: parasites. They might as well have arrived ‘from Outer Space’… Some parasites are quite rational, they know when to stop. Others, you know, consume the host. Without seeming to care that they are also destroying themselves.”

“I am sorry,” I said stiffly, after an awkward silence, “that I muddied your argument last night. It was not intentional.”

Derveet laughed. “Don’t worry, Timurese. I know what my chances are. If I can get them to support the election of this puppet-family unwillingly it will be a great leap forward, with which I ought to be satisfied. So I am told.”

The sun was fully up now, enriching the thin air. The women moved more vigorously; the inn’s big spotted cat rolled in a patch of warm light.

“Who do you think should be prince of Timur?”

“Ida Bagus Sadia,” she answered promptly.

“Why is that?”

“Because I like him.”

Her arrogance was astounding. I couldn’t answer, so I got up to leave her, bowing and muttering, “Excuse me madam.”

“Endang,” she remarked gently, as I turned away. “Since you are so well educated, why was I helping you with your High Inggris last night? Quite simple words, I thought.”

I was surprised. The Rulers’ language is functional, for official things, but it is not natural to us. Low Inggris is the first, the mother tongue. Of course I would sometimes stumble. I told her so. “Our language is our own, and we should accept that. Theirs is not for us. It is wrong to learn too much of it: it doesn’t suit the Peninsulan mind —”

“You’re right of course,” said Derveet. “But who told you that?”

Even if her outrageous invention were true, it made no difference. If the Rulers really were secretly culling our deformed, then all the more need to reach them, to make ourselves count. Timur must have the Siamangs. We must be the first state to have true government of cooperation, whether people liked the sound of the word or not. It was bound to lead to great improvements. I told myself that I admired Derveet’s stance, but she was hopelessly out of date. I was angry with myself for arguing with her. I went out and bathed. My Koperasi of the dark before dawn came in to the lavatories to take a piss, dressed now in that heavy slab of uniform. He eyed me, thoughtfully, across the stained tiles of the bathroom. They know, they always know… I smiled.

He did what he did with me, and we left separately; it was safer that way.

I thought I had been perfectly discreet, but perhaps not. At night in the common room Buffalo came and sat next to me, put his arm around my shoulders and hugged me, with a comically sad and gentle face, like someone comforting a hurt child.

The ninth month passed, the tenth began, and the debate continued. Monsoon downpours invaded the regular cloud rain, nothing was ever quite dry, indoors or out. The box-like sedan chairs were for ladies, and only the Koperasi had HC transport. My shoes were ruined. The wash boy at the inn claimed he “couldn’t understand” trousers and returned my clothes crumpled and mysteriously sticky. I refused to be forced into native dress. Each day I made my round of the delegations, the states of Timur and the regions of Jagdana (I did not approach Gamartha). Naturally only a conservative element had come to Canditinggi. Even my own part of federated Timur was represented by families I had scarcely heard of: secluded, reactionary inlanders. I spoke to countless wizened boys in picturesque livery, never the same boy twice at any reception desk. I got nothing from them but that infuriating smile of tradition — for all your education, truth evades you.

Buffalo boy remained my bodyguard; there was nothing I could do about that. Childlike, he had become involved in my quest and didn’t seem to notice a certain conflict of interest. He pointed out that we were missing an opportunity. For if we went to Gamartha and said that Jagdana did not want a Timurese observer, surely that would be more effective. I said we would not try that. It would be useless. Gamartha people were too old-fashioned.

Buffalo boy lowered his eyes. He said mildly, “You are not Timurese, originally?”

“No. I am adopted.”

I don’t think he understood the term, but he understood. He never pressed me again about the delegations I chose to avoid. I had meant to move out of the inn, but there was nowhere to go. So I went on watching Derveet patiently chipping away at the bandits. It was embarrassing to think how I had sympathized with the aneh in this little quarrel. If Derveet could break the hold of the KKK, and therefore of the Siamangs, over the brigands, the Dapur would know it instantly in this fevered town. It might disturb the whole balance of the debate. Gusti Ketut’s election rested on the fact that the women knew whom they were supposed to choose, like it or not. But a whole princedom full of politically dissatisfied criminals might seem even worse than Koperasi displeasure.

However, I soon realized there was no danger. Man-like, the bandits enjoyed the attention they were getting, but it was clear they would stick with the KKK. They were just playing, toying with the idea of making a noble stand. As this became more and more obvious I began to get annoyed with Derveet, illogically. If she really believed that the choice between Siamang and Sadia was a choice between death and life, couldn’t she be more forceful? If she really believed we were facing genocide, surely it was not a case for gentle persuasion. I began to have a dream about Derveet watching a tree growing, while in the darkness around her the world was falling apart. I had given up remembering dreams and all the interpretation business, quite deliberately and successfully, when I left my first home. But I couldn’t get this one out of my head. Derveet’s patience had become agonizing to me, despite my own convictions.

She was as friendly as ever; in fact we talked a good deal. It was puzzling and depressing to find someone who, like me, had no reason to respect tradition, supporting it so obstinately. She would like to see a world without boys, she said. She would like to see women and men living freely together as equals: sometime. But her faith in the Dapur was unshakeable.

Silent, secret, slow: the debate went on. I walked about the streets looking at closed gateways, and wondered if it was true that only eyes were moving in there, never mouths. Derveet had made me uneasy. I wondered if even the progressive Timur delegates could be trusted to represent Timur’s real wishes, in this insidious Dapur atmosphere. Derveet told me that I only seemed to be shut out. In some mystical way my opinion was being counted. The debate’s only purpose was to reflect accurately the decision of the people, which would somehow be carried in the air, the fall of the rain, the turn of a leaf. If that was true then Gusti Ketut was safe. But I felt oppressed. The air of this town didn’t suit me, it was making me ill.

The long wait was hard for Derveet and Annet as well. Their relationship was showing signs of strain. Annet did not come often to the inn, and when she did it was only to jeer at Derveet’s efforts with her bandits. When conversation failed she sat staring at her friend with angry eyes. An election like this is always “unanimous.” Whatever kind of pressure the Dapur used to achieve this, it was telling on the aneh delegate now. We were on opposite sides, but I sympathized. If only it could be over.

A bandit called me a Koperasi-whore and Tjakil, my former admirer, knifed him. The question was only whose whore ought I to be. Why should I be expected to care which bully was my master? On the same day I was alone in a waiting room with a chair-boy, a Jagdanan about fifteen years old. He lifted his sarong to show me he had been excised: given a false womanhood. Boys do this to each other at puberty-age; they are proud of it. His eyes looked nowhere — expecting nothing, desiring nothing but further violation. I went back and shut myself in my windowless shack. I tried to picture the shining Domes, the pure life of our Rulers, but nothing would come. I kept thinking, unwillingly, of the dying aneh instead.

This was the first quarter of the tenth month. The Koperasi patrols were uneasy too. They stood in knots on street corners, handling their weapons. We took care, if we had to pass them, not to brush against their space. Back at the inn Snake had fallen ill. He lay on the verandah wrapped in shawls, shivering and weak.

“Why are you so sad?” whispered Derveet, holding his hand.

He reached up and touched her cheeks, making lines for tears. “Yes, it’s true we are all sad. Poor Snake, I wish I could keep it from you. It’s too much for you.”

In the streets people were saying that the debate was nearly over, and it was ending badly. I tried to pretend I didn’t know what they meant, but it was hard to resist the feeling that something was coming out of those closed courtyards: invisible, intangible, giving the town bad dreams. Who is to be the one then? I wondered. But I knew.

On the tenth of the month I got up, and everything was quiet. The kitchen house was shut. No sign of the family, no sign of any guests. A town with empty streets is an ominous sight, but there were a few people about — besides the Koperasi — so I dared to go into the center. I went into a little garden, a place where I often used to sit after trailing around the waiting rooms: a refuge. There was a round tank carved with monsters of some kind. I sat on the rim, under a frangipani tree, its white and gold-tinged petals at my feet. I looked into the pool, but the water seemed to be black. It was not reflecting anything. I wrapped my arms round myself and sobbed.

Why was I crying? I didn’t know. The grief flowed through me like a current, but it seemed to be coming from somewhere deep inside. Gradually I realized someone was actually asking me the question. There was a woman, sitting on the stone bench by the pool. She was dressed in blue, deep dark blue; every line of her long binding sash, every floating fold of her robes was composed and perfect. In one bare hand she held the silver links of the rahula, the ankle chain. “Why are you crying child?” she asked again.

“There is so much injustice in the world —”

The spasm passed. Slowly, the tree and the sky returned to the water. I lifted my head. “Have you been here all along?” I asked hoarsely. It seemed entirely possible, at that moment, that she had been invisible when I walked in.

“No. I saw you from my window, so I came down.” She smiled, the wrinkles of her aged face rippling smoothly. “I am from Jagdana, where we value beauty.”

They had defeated me. I could not resist any longer. I knew what had happened, this morning in Canditinggi. The balance had fallen and there was a new prince for Timur. It had been a hard debate: the tension of the delegates’ minds, locked together, had reached us all, affecting each according to capacity. Now they had decided, in grief, and that grief had swept through our hearts. It was ours. This was the power of the Dapur. This was the different road. I thought of my adopted family. Had they intended me to have this experience? Perhaps they didn’t even know what would happen to anyone near a great debate. We had given up a great deal, in coastal Timur, for the sake of staying alive.

“You have chosen.”

“Reluctantly, yes,” said the lady. “It was delicate. A choice of harms: a little could have changed it. But I believe, as you perhaps do not, that the people’s minds are with me when I debate, just as our troubled minds have been with Canditinggi these past days. So be it then. It is generally better not to fight against fate.”

Silk whispered as she rose, and with a slight bow she left me. She was gone before I realized I ought to thank her. In one small space of time I had been given everything I asked from Canditinggi. Recognition from a Dapur lady, inside knowledge of the debate — and the prince I had wanted for Timur. But it was too late now.

Derveet invited me to walk with her up to Candi Daulat. It was a rare afternoon without rain. We climbed through the glistening trees and vines, on the remains of the old road: steep, engineered curves from another time. The sky above the hilltop was soft, and water vapor rose from the ground in thin white veils. We sat on slabs of fallen sculpture by the squat black shrine and looked down on Canditinggi.

“It’s strange,” I said, “but I have never wanted to be a woman.”

“Why should you?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Women are not better than men. Only different.”

I answered that platitude as it deserved — not at all, and she grinned lazily.

“You can’t deny it was Woman to whom God turned for help, at the renewal of the world.” I leaned back and craned upwards to where this transaction was represented in stone: the Mother of Life dancing on the newborn mountaintops, receiving Divinity. “There is no man in that picture,” I pointed out.

“But it is man then who comes to God face to face, a difficult thing for any woman to do. Dealing with the Divine as a business partner tends to get in the way.”

“Of what?”

“Of being human. Of humility.”

Days had passed, and we had all begun to recover from that strange, frightening wave of depression. No one spoke of it. No announcement had been made: the Dapur does everything slowly. But Derveet and I knew it was all over. Silently, our abstract conversation acknowledged her defeat.

Candi Daulat means temple of the sovereigns; these fallen stones were carved all over with the eagle insignia of the vanished Garudas. It was not strictly safe to be here; we might be spotted coming or going. The shrine had few visitors, even up in the defiant mountains.

“Shall we go back?”

Derveet stood. She touched carved stone ruefully and touched her brow, half ashamed of the sentimental gesture. I saw suddenly how young she was, only a little older than myself. And how very much alone. She caught my glance; I quickly looked away.

Someone was coming up the road. It was Annet, the aneh woman, in her black dusty robes. No greeting.

“They told me I’d find you here,” she said, ignoring me. “Well, I’ve voted, finally. It will be announced tomorrow. Jagdana discovered Ida Sadia has piles. Gamartha counted up and decided the Bangau only have sixty-three generations, not a hundred and twenty after all. Timur reluctantly yielded to social pressure; so we are now unanimous. You’d better give me some more of that foul paper money. I have to pay up at the hotel, and I’ve nothing left.”

They went. I stayed. So Gusti Ketut Siamang was now prince of Timur. How surprised Annet would have been, if she had looked back, to see the Timurese, the collaborator, on his knees and crying for the poor Peninsula.

I was also crying for myself. Canditinggi and Derveet had taken from me my dream of the shining Rulers, and I would never get it back. I would have to see the work-camps now, the “state plantations,” the deprivation, and all the casual daily brutality. I had to see the contempt of that “education,” which simply snipped out the words I must not know — parasites, aliens. And there was no dream to replace the lost dream: only the Peninsula, with all its ugly faults. The Debate had proved to me that the “different road” was real, but what was the use of it? What was the use of mind speaking to mind if the only message was defeat, defeat, defeat…?

I swallowed tears, and sat up suddenly. I thought: he is not elected yet. Not until the announcement.

I don’t know when I had guessed Derveet’s secret. Presumably after she had changed my mind, because it would hardly have mattered to me before. There was something uncanny about that dark outcast lady. Her authority over the bandits, and her astounding arrogance on the matter of this election. Once, Durjana, in a heated moment, had jumped up and shouted at her “Only your name!” — and sat down instantly, blushing like a rose. The name that kept the knives sheathed could not be “aneh.” She might have been born a Jagdanan noble, or even a minor royal. But Timurese, criminal or not, do not curtsey to Jagdana. Only one family ever united the Peninsula. Only one name makes us all bow.

I had heard the story that somewhere in the wilds a Garuda survived: a crippled Garuda, cast out in the darkness. I had imagined, like the rest of my world, that this was a sort of allegory of dissent. I stayed on the hilltop for some time, thinking. It seemed to me absolutely clear that I must be the one to tell the secret. The aneh knew Derveet’s family name, and so did the bandits. Probably some part of the Jagdana delegation knew her too. But the aneh were powerless, the bandits corrupt, and Jagdana notoriously too “restrained” to take direct action over anything. I could give Derveet another vote — powerful and not at all restrained. The people who gave me birth had an old, old, quarrel with Garuda of the South. Obviously they had not been trusted. I could see why not, between Koperasi spies and our own, home-grown traditions of treachery. But I must take the risk. It was considerable (this was what kept me on the hilltop); but for me, I believed, not for Derveet. In Gamartha feudal obligations stand above love or hate. In Gamartha, a needless male is an animal to be slaughtered.

I went down into town, under cover of a new rainstorm and the growing darkness. I went to the street I had never dared to visit. I was sure they wouldn’t do anything to me in Canditinggi. I was still frightened and wished I was staying in a brighter, more populous area… Various guards challenged me, I identified myself, and they allowed me to pass. Names are magic, you see. Eventually I spoke to an assistant of one of the delegates, a lady who had once been a distant cousin of mine. I told her what I knew or surmised and suggested Gamartha ought to respect the preference of the sovereign family. There was a pause.

In silence a hand I did not see pushed from under the lady’s curtains a knife in a case decorated with the device of my family; defaced, because we are all dead. I left it there. No one touched me.

I went back to the inn and slept like a baby.

The next morning it transpired that there would be a delay: a final consultation. I sat in a coffee shop, shaken and yet quite calm, while around me boys and men whispered nervously. My Koperasi saw me through the door and came in. He pretended to check the required notices above my head and quietly told me to get out of my inn as there was a police action coming off. Hunting big game. Get out of town, now. Don’t look back.

I went into the street, walking like a puppet. Everything seemed deathly still, even the sun in the sky. It occurred to me that Durjana the bandit was worth more trust than I. I went to Annet — not knowing what else to do, to the medium class hotel the Jagdanans had put her in, in their street. The courtyard gates were open. Derveet was there. Annet was leaving. There was a chair on the ground, the chair-boys were taking out some meager bundles: Snake and Buffalo as busily stowing the bundles back in.

“Extra pay for bags. Extra pay!”

“Lady walk. You carry luggage.”

“Lady no walk. Lady can’t walk. Extra pay!”

As I arrived Annet was saying in her loud harsh voice, “It’s a farce. I won’t stay another hour.” Derveet put out her hand and spoke, quietly. Annet turned, with a sour, exasperated, loving face, and they embraced. I saw that I’d been right in my surmise that the two were lovers; and I envied them, although their love was crippled, outside the Dapur — because I shall never love another man. I have poisoned that spring.

I realized I had never seen Derveet in town before.

“Madam —”

“Endang. Why… What’s the matter?”

“The Koperasi know.”

“Know? Know what?”

“I am from the North, originally.”

She nodded, with a puzzled smile; she had known my secret. It wasn’t important.

“I am an outcast, but last night I went to Gamartha street. I told someone I believed a living Garuda was present at the debate and did not favor Gusti Ketut. I thought it might make a difference.”

She stared, a frozen moment.

“But now the Koperasi mean to raid our inn, looking for big game. I swear Gamartha did not betray you. I must have been followed.”

Not necessarily.

“It’s odd,” she said, “to tell tales like that and then come and apologize for it. But thank you anyway.” Her voice was gentle as ever. Her eyes were black, so I could see no iris. She’d already forgotten me, dismissed me: she was calculating her next move, her chances of escape. I would have liked to die.

Then there was a commotion in the street behind us. A line of chairs stopped. The ladies descended, veiled and bearing their silver chains, surrounded by high caste boys in green and mauve Gamarthan livery. The boys had a flower ball woven of frangipani petals, they were tossing it from hand to hand to sweeten the air. The robes and liveries drew level with us, across the street. As they did so, a boy let the toy slip and it tumbled into the roadway. The Gamarthan ladies did not raise a single eye, or a single veil, but they all stooped together, as if reaching for it. Like a field of grain under the wind they went down, they bowed, fluidly, until their graceful bare hands touched the ground.

One of the boys ran out and picked up the flowers. Gamartha’s delegation rose, walked on, and turned into Jagdana’s gate. Garuda, silently acknowledged by her loyal enemies, stood on the dirty cobbles blinking like a cat surprised by sunlight.

It was not twelve hours since I had spoken to my cousin. I understood that I, and my contacts, had probably been watched all the time. My mouth was suddenly dry: Gamartha never forgets. Derveet turned back to me with a crooked smile.

“My apologies,” she said, “to Endang, and Gamartha. You must have been followed. Things are not so bad, after all. Never quite so bad as they might be.”

That was the end. Annet took her friend’s arm and drew her into the gateway. The chairboys had stopped arguing. They stood together with Snake and Buffalo, like a shield, and stared at me until I walked away. I did not see Derveet again. I left the inn that same hour, and then Canditinggi. I heard afterwards that the “big police action” achieved nothing except to put the so-called fifth vote into disarray. A day or two later an unidentifiable delegation guard-boy was found dead, with the colors torn from his livery. “Been followed” was after all a euphemism, a Peninsulan courtesy. Our Rulers’ servants are everywhere, even in the ranks of proud Gamartha. What happened in the closed courtyards I do not know. When the announcement eventually came, Ida Bagus Sadia had been elected prince.

But Derveet was wrong. Things are bad. Things are so bad, these days, that it is hard to see how worse can be possible. Shortly after the Accession, the disappointed family of the infant Bangau invited their former daughter for a visit, with her son the prince-elect. During this visit it seems the elder boys of the family entered Sadia’s room in the middle of the night. They gagged him, tied him to a bedpost and castrated and excised him, cauterizing the wounds with a hot iron so they should not be guilty of murdering a guest. He was seventeen years old. He recovered, but he killed himself as soon as he was able use a knife. In punishment for this crime the Bangau lost the last of their independent territory to the plantations. The displaced population was moved into camps, in the usual way. The Bangau have vanished, like the Garudas and so many others; and Gusti Ketut Siamang is our prince. There is no sign as yet of any improvement in Timur’s status. I believe the Peninsula is doomed. I believe we have all gone mad, and nothing can save us. I have no more dreams of the “different road,” of the tree growing slowly, slowly. It is no use. The forest is on fire, and as far as I can see that precious new growth burns just like any other wood.

As for Derveet, she is gone. I think the fate of Ida Bagus Sadia, the good young man, broke her at last, destroyed her patience and her strength. I heard a few months after the Bangau tragedy that Buffalo boy was dead, killed in a Koperasi raid on illegal hill-crop farming. Derveet may have been killed there too. Or she may still live, an ogre among the rest. There is a story of a new bandit leader: very clever, very savage, who is terrorizing the Koperasi down south. I don’t know. Perhaps it hardly matters. But when I hear of that leader dead, as I surely will one day soon, I will mourn the last of the Garudas, the end of our hope.

November 1985

The Thief, the Princess,
and the Cartesian Circle

Once upon a time there was a princess who was quite pretty and fairly intelligent, and when the time came to marry her off, the royal family didn’t worry about it too much.

One day the princess came down to breakfast and found the king, for a wonder, still sitting over his toast and marmalade. He was a workaholic monarch and was generally long gone to his dispatch boxes by the time she appeared. As she sat down she observed that he was pulling faces at her royal mother; then he got up and slunk out of the room.

“Dear,” said her mother. “I want us to have a little talk.”

The princess pointed distantly at a cereal packet and took a bowl from Perkins, the breakfast maid. “What is it mother?”

“Darling, you’re nearly twenty now.”

“So what, mother?”

The king had no male heir. The princess must marry a suitable prince who would rule the kingdom. She knew this, everybody knew this. But had there ever been such a mutinous and contrary child? The best education, the best of everything indeed, had been showered on this only daughter — skiing holidays, beautiful clothes, jewelry, a tv in her bedroom — all to no avail. One could accept some little outbursts of rebellion from a princess nowadays, but this one was just shockingly self-willed. The interview at the breakfast table ended in tears, and not the princess’s tears either: she never cried.

“She says such cruel things,” sobbed her mother, having taken refuge in her husband’s office. “And it’s so depressing, to know that one’s servants pity one.”

The king stomped to and fro beside the royal windows that opened onto the balcony swathed in velvet, from which a courtier should already have announced the princess’s betrothal plans. “She looks all right,” he remarked at last in a puzzled voice. He could not understand how his stony-hearted and (to be honest) frightening child could look so much like other peoples’ children. It would be so much easier if there was a dragon in the case, or a curse, or a straightforward enchantment. It would be bliss, come to think of it, if she were sent to sleep for a hundred years.

Up in her bedroom, princess Jennifer laid out the vegetable knife, the lint dressings, the antiseptic spray. She knelt on the carpet in front of them and bared the white inner surface of her forearm.

Cut.

The king and the queen were in the parlor, talking about what the neighbors had to say.

Cut.

“We could offer her hand to the prince who can make her smile?”

“She often smiles.”

The king shivered a little. It was not a nice thing, when the princess smiled.

Cut.

“It’s no use my dear,” sighed the queen. “She’s a thoroughly unpleasant young woman, and we could wait till doomsday to get rid of her if we try the ‘whoever breaks this spell’ ploy. We must have a legitimate succession, but I’m sincerely sorry for the young man who takes her on, whoever he may be. Even though she is my daughter and I try to love her. She’ll break him; she’ll destroy him. Her sort of ‘enchantment’ isn’t supposed to be catching. But it is.”

The king didn’t quite follow, but he caught the most hopeful point. His expression brightened. “You think she will marry?”

“She’s never shown any sign of wanting to do anything else.”

Cut.

Pain and blood. The blood dripped into a bowl of white plastic, an open carrier bag stretched over a coat-hanger. The princess let it run down until she began to feel dizzy. She sprayed the cuts and dressed her arm, took the bag, and poured blood down the toilet. It looked like her period. She flushed it away and rinsed the bag in the basin.

The princess sat on her royal bed and stared at the rich white silk coverlet, the real gold swan-necks that held up the monogrammed royal headboard, the pillow edged with finest lace. The queen and the king couldn’t see this bedroom. They couldn’t see themselves. Princess Jennifer was beginning to be afraid for them. They saw nothing and refused to talk about things that Jennifer knew were real. They knew that she cut herself. The cuts on her arms were real, but the king and queen were too caught up in state visits and making speeches on television; they never discussed pain and blood. Jennifer found herself musing that if their own flesh were sliced, that might wake them up. She thought of her father’s stringy wrists, the loose skin of her mother’s throat, with professional interest.

She decided, finally for certain, that this palace wasn’t safe anymore. Of course she was always safe, because no one could touch her, no one could get inside. But it was time to find a prince, an archbishop, a cathedral — a long, shining oyster satin train. At last she smiled, her cold mouth stretching in the grimace that made her royal father shiver when he thought of it. She went swiftly to Their Majesties’ private parlor.

“I’ve made up my mind.”

“Yes dear?” they quavered in unison.

“Don’t be stupid. I’m not your ‘dear.’ Listen, I’ve decided. I want to get married. But I can make conditions, can’t I? I want to marry the richest man in the world. I don’t like changes. I don’t want anything to happen to me, ever. I want money. I don’t care if he acquired it by selling pork pies made of babies’ brains. I don’t care if he’s ugly as sin or has filthy personal habits. I’ll marry him, I’ll have the children. Any reasonable number, so long as I don’t have to see them afterwards. Or screw the bloke more often than is strictly necessary for royal reproduction. Those are my terms. Are you satisfied?”

Now in this same country, and at this same time, there lived a famous magician. He was semi-retired on a comfortable pension, but he had started a small school of magic, just for amusement and to keep himself up to date with the latest developments. He lived on a cloud, which he had fitted up by magic with mystic gardens and thaumaturgical laboratories. It also happened that one of this magician’s valued protégés was an inveterate thief and liar. Even his name, which was Rayfe, was stolen. He had “borrowed” it from his brother when he first set out to become the sorcerer’s apprentice.

The mage had known at once that he had the wrong brother. But there are no mistakes in magic, so Rayfe stayed, and the brother had to be content with a polite letter. Rayfe was a dangerous investment, but the boy had talent. The elder magician had decided to take the risk. Rayfe made good progress. When he had been in the school two years he could command the four winds at his whistle and conjure mountains of gold out of the air. But he still couldn’t eat his dinner with enjoyment unless it was someone else’s. If he told you of any marvelous trick he had performed, you could be sure that, of all the tricks in the book, that was the one he hadn’t mastered. He had to steal even praise. When he couldn’t satisfy his need any other way, he would even steal blame and own up humbly to crimes and stupidities that he had never committed.

One fine morning — inevitably — the mage woke up with a crick in his neck and a stone in his back, in the middle of a field. The thief had stolen his master’s magic — every last spell of it.

Meanwhile, back at the palace, the princess’s search for a bridegroom was well on the way. Up to the palace doors came a stream of adventurers, charlatans, conmen, fantasists, fools, all of them claiming to be the richest man in the world. (Needless to say, the real rich and eligible suitors stayed well away.) Princess Jennifer found none of them was quite what she wanted. She retired to the bedroom, where the real gold swans watched over her, and sliced open the half-healed places that she’d cut last week. The bloodletting helped. It drained off some of the pressure. Something inside her was trying to get out. This way it escaped only in small installments, under control. Pain and blood.

“Is it my fault?” she asked her distracted parents, “if the world is so full of liars and fools?”

Then they brought in Rayfe.

The thief saw a thin girl with over-bright grey eyes, very unattractively dressed. He thought she looked even less appealing than in the unflattering royal photographs. He was not disappointed, for the girl scarcely featured in his plans. He was after her money. The princess whose parents were looking for the richest bridegroom in the world must be worth a pretty penny.

The princess didn’t see Rayfe at all. She didn’t often look at people. She didn’t like the eyes.

The first stage of the inquisition began. Three months later, Rayfe and the princess were married. It was all orange blossoms and archbishops, and the king could hardly believe his luck.

The bridal limousine bowled along through a wide sunny meadow. The bride was still in her wedding dress. It was a present from the groom, and he had asked for this romantic touch to the start of their honeymoon. “Stop the car,” said the newly made Archduke Rayfe, suddenly. “It’s so lovely here, we’d like to take a little stroll.”

So they both got out, and strolled. Behind them there came an odd little sound, like a twig snapping. When they looked back the car, the driver, and the motorcycle escort had all disappeared. Rayfe was astonished. He had intended, on this little stroll, to vanish the ugly princess’s dress, just to tease her: instead he’d lost the whole motorcade. His concentration must have slipped.

The princess was staring coldly.

“What’s the matter?” asked Rayfe.

The princess picked up a fold of her white lace gown and studied it closely. The inspection revealed nothing, but it gave her something to do.

“It was all magic, wasn’t it,” she stated flatly. “The background the court detectives checked out, the financial records?”

Rayfe grinned uncertainly. “What’s going on, Jennifer?”

The meadow turned into a hotel room. Jennifer fingered her satin and lace nightgown. “You tricked me.”

“I don’t know what’s going on, Jennifer,” said the thief. “I thought you liked me. We were seeing each other, you took me home to your parents, you have this game about being a princess. Your parents seemed to like me. Everything moved very fast, but I wasn’t complaining. I’m in love with you!”

Jennifer looked at him with contempt. “I made you up,” she said. It was the first time she had ever risked telling any of her puppets that: she was exhilarated and frightened. “I make up everything. And you’re not in love. My father paid you to take me away.”

Ralph was beginning to find that small cold voice scary. He had never been much of a success as a cheat and a liar. He freely admitted (to himself) that he was one of the hopeless. Incapable of holding down a job, too scared of going to jail to succeed in a life of crime. Answering the princess’s ad had been a risk. Marrying her had been an act of desperation. Guilty Daddy and Mummy make over income for life, to their crazy daughter’s keeper… Suddenly he knew what his life would be like, and his blood ran cold. He affected a light laugh. “Oh, come now princess. Can’t you take a joke? You wanted wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. Nothing is beyond the dreams of avarice, and nothing is what you’ve got —”

She stared in a way that made him feel sick.

“Now, now, princess, don’t be a sore loser. Besides, there’s nothing to complain about. Magic’s as good as any other currency.”

He made a few passes in the air and spread out his hands. Paper flowers showered onto the carpet. The princess stooped and picked up a jagged rock from the meadow grass. She flew at him. Rayfe yelled in panic. Pain and blood.

The meadow turned upside down and vanished.

The princess and the thief were hanging face to face in nothingness. It was very cold. “What’s happening!” screamed Rayfe. The princess felt herself in the grip of magic that was not of her own making, for the first time in her life. “I knew you must have stolen your power from somebody,” she snapped, improvising quickly. “Your master has caught us.”

The nothingness became the garden belonging to the magician who had trained the thief who gained the hand of a princess by trickery. The magician, who knew everything, was there with them. Jennifer saw a stern, bearded male face, looking out of a cheval glass that had appeared standing on the lawn. The garden was not reflected in the glass.

“He’s going to kill us,” she said. “Or worse.”

“Oh God.” Rayfe’s voice was real, but his body didn’t seem to be all there. It looked like a cardboard cut-out. “Get me out of this, somebody. I’d rather die than live out my life tied to the heels of a monster.”

The magician ignored Rayfe. “So,” he said to Jennifer. “You expect me to kill you. You are an optimist, after all.”

Jennifer looked into the eyes in the mirror and wouldn’t show that she was afraid. “You can do what you like, I suppose. You’re in charge. But I’d like to know what my crime was.”

“Your crime? Your perpetual crime is that you do not feel at home in your skin. Your latest crime is that you tricked this young man into destroying himself.”

“He tricked himself.”

“That’s no excuse. You set a trap, using the king your father’s money, designed to catch someone as worthless as yourself. I am aware that by doing so you saved your royal parents from an unpleasant fate. I will take that into account. Let me see. Your crime, Ralph, was the more cold-blooded. You have never tried to save anyone from anything. I will award the choice of weapons to the princess. Jennifer, whom do you hate most?”

Before her wedding the princess would have said: “I don’t hate anyone,” and meant it. She didn’t even hate her parents. But she had changed, even in this short time. Her lip curled, in passionate disgust.

“Him!”

“That’s unfortunate. He’s your husband, and you two are very close.”

As the magician spoke, Rayfe felt dizzy. There was a buzzing in his ears; he thought he was fainting… His vision cleared. He looked around and with a heart-wrenching shock saw himself — standing, stiff as a board, a few paces away. He looked down at what felt like his own body.

The princess began to scream. She screamed and screamed, and clutched her head and ran. Things grabbed her. The garden was full of grappling hooks, there were walls that she banged into. She couldn’t see the grass or the trees. She was wet and cold, and her head was full of something thick and cloying. She fought against the nightmare with all her iron will. She saw the edge of the cloud, looming up. She screamed in defiance. “No one can make me suffer!” And she flung herself into space.

She fell and fell. She lost everything: the swan-necked bed, her monogrammed silks, her blind, but royal parents. She lost her knife and the neatly laid out dressings, the ritual that kept her safe. She lost the privacy of her own mind. The elder magician’s voice came to her, calm and affable. “If the pair of you ever learn to like the arrangement, come back and see me.” She fell screaming, knowing there were worse horrors to come.

The princess’s wedding dress grew drab and shabby. She lived like an animal in the wild wood. She who had taken her only pleasure in life from the softness of her bed and the delicacy of her food, scrabbled for left-over roots in a turnip field and slept in ditches. Her hair hung in rattails, her pale skin had turned the color of earth from dirt and weathering. She stank. She never gave a thought to the way she lived, never a shudder. She couldn’t, the pain wouldn’t let her. It wasn’t her pain. It belonged to the shadow that followed everywhere at her heels: night and day, sun and shade.

She made arrangements with the woodland animals, who lent her their claws and cigarettes. She hid herself away (there was a hollow tree stump that was her favorite spot) and cut her arms, her thighs, her sides. She bled. At times, the shadow lifted itself from her feet. It sat opposite her and screamed without a sound. She had a feeling that she was feeding it on blood. Her blood kept it alive, kept it screaming. Her shadow was a drug addict; she was the drug that destroyed. She no longer remembered that she had ever been alone in her head, so it was the shadow who really suffered more. She would have liked to put it out of its misery. Sometimes she tried to jump on it and found herself scratching and tearing the woodland earth, or the animals. The shadow always escaped her, and so she could not escape from it. In the end the fact that she was conscious of that presence was the only light left in her mind.

She lived from night to night, stealing the pig’s porridge and the dog’s crusts. She survived well enough; but then the real winter came. The villagers who lived in a huddle of small grey houses on the edge of the wood became harsh and bold. She was driven from her hollow tree with sticks and stones. At night the dogs chased her. She couldn’t find anywhere to hide. The blood, not fed to the shadow, began to build up inside. The pain, which wasn’t her own, couldn’t serve the same purpose as the old kind. She ran like a beast through the wood, a beast with sharp teeth and claws that crept up on smaller beasts and pounced.

The princess had blood and flesh in her mouth, warm torn filaments coating her tongue. The rabbit screamed, and she let it go. The princess retched, vomited bile. She knelt there and she thought: What am I to do? She had to find some way to get rid of the shadow at her heels. Hate of the shadow kept bleeding through, making her conscious again. Being conscious made her violent. Being violent made the villagers torment her. There had to be a way out.

On the edge of the village, Ham the woodcutter lived all alone. He was a big, quiet man who had little to do with the other village folk or the dumb animals who did deals with the princess. Princess Jennifer had often seen him as he went about his work. She had watched him and judged him. She knew that he would help her. Resolutely, she took the path that led to his cottage.

“I have been lost in the wood,” she said, shivering, when Ham Cottar stood in the doorway. “Can you give me shelter?”

“I should hope so, at this season.”

He took her in and sat her by the fire. The winter passed; the spring came. The woodcutter told princess Jennifer that she had attacked her husband with a hotel ashtray, and basically that was why she had been living in this wild place. He was glad that she had decided to come in from the cold, but as long as she continued to harm herself, he couldn’t hold out much hope for her escape from the magic wood.

“I don’t harm myself,” said Jennifer scornfully. “I don’t live in my arm.”

“Where do you live, Jennifer?”

The princess looked on the woodcutter with pity. “The place where I live doesn’t have a name. No name, no time, no space. I make up all of those things. There’s only me, the thinking thing.”

The woodcutter smiled slyly. “So that’s what you’ve been doing all this time,” he remarked. “The mind locked up inside that raving animal has been re-inventing Descartes?”

Her shadow lay between them. It had no right to be there, a steady black manikin in the flickering firelight. But the shadow always came back. It was the same stuff as herself, dirty and dangerous. It came and stared at her with helpless eyes. It had nowhere else to go.

“I want to get rid of my shadow,” she whispered. “It feeds on blood.”

“Jennifer,” said the woodcutter, “I want to help. But you won’t change anything by talking about a bloodsucking shadow. If you want to be separated from the person you call that, come further in, out of the wild. I know you can. Trust me.”

He touched her. He didn’t take the danger seriously. He was only a peasant; his simple life had never touched the realms of great enchantment.

The princess thought she could settle down by the woodcutter’s fire. She would let him do what he liked, and be warm and comfortable again.

The shadow came, and she told him she’d found someone else to destroy, she wouldn’t be requiring his appetite any longer. The cut-out of starless void was less sharp-edged than it had been; Jennifer noticed this with a stirring of inexplicable unease.

“We’ve got to get me out of here,” she said, suddenly. “This place isn’t safe anymore. You understand? Not safe.”

Ralph the thief was used to the conversational style of his wife-in-name-only. He suspected that one of the doctors was fucking her. The man’s life was probably in real danger and Ralph ought to tell someone. But he wouldn’t. The way this place worked, Jennifer was the one who’d end up getting punished, though they wouldn’t call it that. And for God’s sake, she wasn’t responsible.

“I don’t want to help you,” he whined. “I don’t know why I keep hanging around. It isn’t the money.”

“I know it isn’t,” said Jennifer. “You stay because you’re worthless, just like me. I’m crazy and I stink, but I’m still the nearest you’ve ever had to a steady girlfriend.”

“You don’t need me to get you out,” said the blurred shadow, reluctantly. “You’re not sectioned. That means they can’t keep you against your will. You can walk.”

The princess remembered that Ham the woodcutter had told her the same. Because she was not cut into pieces she could leave the wood. But her magic had been too strong for Ham. Fearing for him, she decided to leave anyway. She left the wood, in peasant clothes and shoes that the woodcutter had given her. A marketing farmer took her into town, and there she found work.

She had no money. The thief who had become the shadow had stolen it all. She had no interest in finding her way back to the kingdom of her birth. Her royal parents must have given her up for dead long ago; they wouldn’t thank her for reappearing. She decided to leave them like that: happy enough in an abandoned story. She found a bed in a hostel, became a cleaner, and then a shop girl. She was neat, quiet, and hard working. But her shadow was a nuisance. In the town people weren’t used to seeing even their own shadows. There wasn’t much space for them on the crowded streets. Sooner or later she would notice someone staring at it. She would notice people whispering; she would have to leave her job. There was always some excuse. She was given a good reference, and the shadow was never mentioned, but she had to go.

Her life came back to her piece by piece. She knew that the wood had not been real. She knew that the woodcutter had been in danger before she arrived and that he was beyond her saving. She understood that the elder magician had arranged it all. He had stolen her safety, thrown her into the wild wood, and given her a foul shadow, for reasons of his own, which he would explain in time.

She possessed her thinking self, and a shadow. The true horror of that companion was not that it was worthless and evil — like herself; but that it was the same stuff as herself. This is what happens to common people, and it can happen to a princess. She looks out of her tower and sees another thinking thing, a being she hasn’t invented. The citadel is broken, the world outside exists, nothing will ever be the same.

When the princess had worked this out she acquired a vegetable knife, lint dressings, antiseptic spray. Since she didn’t have to think of her parents, she purchased a kidney shaped metal dish from a medical supply shop. She’d always wanted one.

She cut herself. The nostalgia was intense.

As the days went by, she took to looking over her shoulder to make sure the shadow was there. No one in these streets knew how it felt to be the princess, the nameless, hating, terrified thing whose shell had been broken open. Only the shadow knew everything. But now when she looked she could hardly see anything: only a faint blur.

She became a clerk in an office. It was a big step up, for she had started off with no employment skills whatsoever and a horrendous secret. Her immediate boss was a large elderly lady with persnickety ways that didn’t seem to fit her size. She was a dragon to the rest of the staff, but to the princess she became as much a friend as a princess like Jennifer could bear. “What I like about you, Jennifer,” she said — one evening when they were finishing up and alone in the office — “is that you’ve never let anyone knock the corners off you.”

“There’s corners and corners,” smiled the princess (she could smile now, quite convincingly). She tugged at the long wool sleeves of her dress. “A lot of people don’t like the way my shadow falls, it gets on their nerves.”

“Shadow?” remarked the older woman, mystified. “What shadow? You’ve none in here, my dear.”

The princess touched whole skin through the wool, and recalled that she hadn’t cut herself for weeks. The last time, she’d had to stop because it was hurting too much. She looked, and it was true. She had no shadow.

She hurried through the crowds, crying in the street. She was making a fool of herself, behaving like a madwoman; she didn’t care. She was alone again in the tower.

“I must get back!” she cried.

She didn’t know where she had to get back to, but as she cried out, the busy street disappeared. She was in the magician’s garden. The glass stood on the lawn, and in another moment the magician was looking out of it.

“As I was saying,” he remarked. “If you start to like the arrangement, you must come back and see me. You are looking well, princess.”

The cut-out figure of the thief was still standing there. Rayfe was back inside. His eyes were agonized: a human being compressed into two dimensions and screaming silently.

“Let him go!” she yelled at the magician.

“Only you can do that.”

“I don’t understand,” snarled the princess.

The magician’s robes, embroidered with shining mystic signs, billowed like dark and glittering smoke. He smiled.

The princess turned to Ralph and shouted. “You can go! You’re not committed to anything!”

Ralph was crying. The princess remembered that she used to believe tears were like an explosion: humiliating and horrible as pissing yourself in public. The thief’s mouth was wide and turned down at the corners; his eyes were wet. But the cafe was noisy anyway. No one stared.

“This is the end of the arrangement. Your money’s in a bank account, I haven’t spent it for months. Fuck it, you don’t need me to cover your tracks and check up on you. You’re perfectly competent. I’m the one that’s the burden. I want you to give your address to your parents, I want you to get a divorce.”

“My child.” said the magician in the glass. “I must ask an impertinent question. Do you love this worthless creature?”

The princess glowered impatiently. “He was with me. You don’t know what he knows. He was always there. How could I not…?”

She didn’t say the word. It closed up her throat even to think it.

“Indeed. Fire burns if you put your hand on the stove, even if you don’t believe in fire. Water drowns if you fall into it and can’t swim, even if you don’t believe in water. So love in substance is love in fact. He has stuck by you, because he couldn’t help it, because, pitifully, you were the best thing that ever happened to him. What do you call that feeling, in the world you invented?”

“So let us go!”

“I will, there’s just a little test. Stand back.”

Jennifer was talking to the voices she heard in her head. She still did that; but she knew she was doing it, which made the difference. She didn’t need a keeper. Ralph knew that this was the last stand. The mad princess was at her last gasp. Jennifer would walk away from this meeting alone and Ralph suspected what his life would be like, after today. He couldn’t think of it. He wasn’t brave enough. He wanted to stay forever in this steamy cafe, with this crazy woman; neither of them anywhere else to go.

The magician’s staff described a circle in the air. Where it had passed, a white line stayed. The circle enclosed nothing. It was the ultimate abyss. Up to the white line ran springy tailored turf; beyond its rim, a blank. No grass, no air, no light, no dark, no space. There was absolutely nothing there.

“Now then, Rayfe.”

The thief fell forward, stumbling and rubbing his arms. He hadn’t been following the conversation. Ralph had never got the hang of magical conversations.

“I jump into the abyss, and she goes free?”

The magician looked doubtful. “Let me explain. I am what they call a natural philosopher. If you had studied your books, instead of stealing the knowledge out of them, you would know that a natural philosopher is bound to set tests for the world, and to test most unmercifully the things that he most values. Does love exist? I do not know. But I know that if it were to exist it could have no limits. It could not have a beginning, or an end. There could not be a place where love was not, or a time when love had not been. If the princess’s love for you exists, you will pass through my circle without harm.” The magician smirked, with every appearance of arrogant malice. “As long as your love has always been real. As long as the princess loved you the moment she saw you. Step through, young man. Try your luck.”

Ralph watched the crazy princess, hopelessly.

“I don’t know what’s going on in the story now, Jennifer. I’m leaving because I’ve somehow grown some self-respect, and I can’t stand to hang around a smart-looking lady who doesn’t need me or want me. You can tell the elder magician thanks from Ralph. Yes, it must have been love at first sight — in the only, twisted way I could fall in love. Need is close to love, and when you’re really needy it’s the best you can do. I just wish I could wipe out the first part. I despised you for being crazy; it was like despising myself. And you hated me. I wish I could lose that bit.”

“It was like hating myself. Step through.”

“If this gets you free, to a normal life —”

Rayfe stepped through, into the utter abyss. He was standing on firm green turf. The magician in the mirror looked smug. The thief was impressed. He had never dreamed of stealing a whole cosmos.

Ralph looked at Jennifer’s hands. They were holding his. She had never touched him before, except when she was trying to kill him. To his almost certain knowledge she’d never touched anyone of her own free, conscious will, in her whole life. The world turned upside down and righted itself: totally different, exactly as it had always been.

“There is no door that shuts behind us,” said the princess.

The elder magician vanished from the glass, the glass vanished too. Jennifer no longer needed to regard the part of herself that she respected as a separate person, nor did she need to call the part of herself with power male. “The past changes constantly: it is something we invent from moment to moment. The thinking thing that is the only reality detested you then.” She shrugged. “Time isn’t real. It loved you now. If love is, it always was. If it has a start, then as soon as it starts, immediately it always was. That’s the circle of protection. It works even for the most worthless.”

The green turf was the grass of the meadow. The road where the wedding car had disappeared was wider and less dusty than it had been. The trees beside it had grown in girth, and some of them had been chopped down to make room for new houses. The princess and the thief walked out of the meadow and into the noisy cafe. It closed around them.

There would be no more Grimm fairytale illustrations in their story. Neither of them was quite capable of dealing with normal life, and they weren’t even young anymore. They might well end up in cardboard city no matter how hard they tried; but they would be together. They held hands and set off down the road — to live happily ever after in the land where love is beyond reach of doubt.

June 1993

Identifying the Object

Tunguska: In June 1908, there was an extraordinary explosion somewhere in or over Siberia. That night in London you could read a newspaper by the light of the fireball. There were no consequences. The location of the crater was not even determined until twenty years later, after the intervention of a World War and a revolution. But in our time we are ready for Tunguska. It can happen to us immediately. We have the technology. We have the anticipation: what they call in my country the longing, the hiraeth. I am a freelance journalist. My name is Anna Jones Morgan Davis. I begged, argued, lied, pleaded for two days and nights solid after I found out about the expedition to the site. I left home possessed by one iron determination: to be there when the object was identified.

The transit lounge of the desert airport was a breeze block garage with glass doors and a sand scoured wooden floor. Johnny Guglioli and I were pursued there by a skinny and very dark little man in a khaki uniform too heavy for the climate. Whenever he managed to catch Johnny’s eye he hissed softly and made a wistful, obscene gesture: rubbing his thumb against two fingers. A broken digital clock hung as if half strangled from an exposed cable above the shuttered coffee bar. A single monitor screen, fixed to one of the concrete roof beams, showed the quivering green word Departures, and nothing more. Parties of Africans sat about the floor. I hadn’t had a chance to change into protective disguise, so the men reacted instantly to my appearance.

In one of the rows of seats a lone white woman traveler lay sleeping, stretched above her battered flight bag along three black plastic spoon-shapes. A cracked panama had slipped from her sun-browned face.

Johnny and I were in trouble. Johnny was American, but had come back from somewhere to London for the trip. For our separate reasons we’d missed the first leg of the official journey. We had expected to join the expedition here, for a special charter to the capital of the country that lay to the south. Our destination was in there somewhere, beyond the desert and the great river. But we had missed the plane. Perhaps we had missed the plane… The real trouble was that Johnny would not bribe, because bribery and corruption were the root causes of so much of Africa’s misery.

The hall was devoid of information sources. The little man, whose hissing and hovering was making Johnny look like a girl alone at a late night bus stop, had already told us what he was going to tell.

“I’ll ask one of the women,” I said.

But the woman I chose spoke no French or English or didn’t want to get involved. Faces around her gazed stonily out of the archipelago of dark robes and peeping finery. A woman made an unintelligible comment in a tone of deep contempt: the natives were hostile.

We tried to remain calm.

Johnny stretched and pressed his hands behind his head, raising the fan of eel-brown hair that was overheating his neck. He looked, momentarily, like a hostage getting ready to be shot.

“Embarkation for Planet X: colonist class. Isn’t it weird how these places always manage to make you believe there’s no air outside? That’s futurism for you, comes from the cultural phase our world was in when the standard concept of ‘airport’ was laid down. I mean, look at those chairs —”

“I suppose they might be more comfortable in a lower gravity.”

I had bumped into Johnny by chance at Gatwick. Our paths had crossed several times before, in our small world; and we’d always enjoyed each other’s company. Johnny Guglioli was a young American (US citizen I mean) of a highly recognizable type: shrewd, naive, well-informed, and passionate about the world’s ills and the possibility of curing them. His writing had a strangeness that worried people a little, even after it had been toned down by his editors, and his selfless arrogance infuriated many. But I respected Johnny; he could be absurdly didactic, but loud or brash, his eyes never lost the uneasiness of those infants of the Promised Land, good Americans, who have woken up and found themselves — well, here, in the real world, where the rest of us live.

For that bruised puzzlement in the face of what people call normality I could forgive him a good deal. I could forgive him — almost — this disaster.

In any more hopeful location I’d have walked out of the airport and found myself a bus. But there was nothing outside the dusty glass doors, in the place where Johnny said we couldn’t breathe: only a few dead thorn bushes, the red track from the airport building, and an endless waste of sand.

Aircon fans roared in a mind-deadening way and without any noticeable effect on the heat. I wondered how many of the Africans here had been awake that night. I wished I knew how the hell to deal with Johnny, whose button black eyes had gone blank with stubborn virtue…though it would break his heart to miss this gig. I was tortured by the suspicion that somewhere close there was a VIP lounge where the rest of the expedition were sipping cold drinks.

“Shall we try the Virgin desk again?”

The lone white woman sat up, yawned, and said, “Oh, hallo Anna. So you’re in this too? How are the kids?” She smiled dazzlingly. “I suppose you’re another Snark hunter?”

I hadn’t recognized her. Awake, her face shed years, its expert makeup lighting up like magic.

“Johnny Guglioli,” I said. “Braemar Wilson.”

And took a mental step backwards. The smile was clearly meant for Johnny alone. I’d known Brae for a long time, known her before she adopted that nom de guerre. The last time I’d seen her in an airport her heels had been sky high. Her dewy complexion had never seen the sun, and apart from the essential smart briefcase, her luggage was none of her business. But she was equally immaculate in this role. Wherever did she get those shorts? They were perfect.

“Braemar Wilson as in the pop-socs?”

“The same. Though I’m almost ashamed to admit it, in such company. I’ve read your work, Johnny. If I told you how much I admire you, I’d sound like a groupie.”

It was the name, she’d once told me, on the gate of the miserable little house she’d been renting after her divorce. Some redundant housewives start up phone-a-birthday-cake businesses. Mrs. Wilson had become, in a very few years, a household name in the infotainment market. Her girlish deprecation irritated me. She had no reason to defer to young Johnny. The ground she covered was hack, but not the treatment.

“Hell no!” cried Johnny. “I want to be the groupie. That ‘Death and the Human Family’ thing! It was terrific!”

There was a break for mutually appraising laughter — in which Brae warned me, by withholding eye contact, not to presume on our long acquaintance in any way. I wouldn’t have dreamed of it.

“Maybe you can tell us what’s going on.” Johnny affected a casual tone. “Did we really miss our ride, or are these guys just teasing?”

“Oh, it’s gone all right. A late change; I feel less paranoid now I know you two didn’t get the news either.” She examined us. “What’s the problem? You transferred to the scheduled flight, didn’t you? Or what are you doing in here?”

Johnny’s lightly tan-screened face turned brick color.

“The flight’s full. We’re fucking grounded.”

Braemar looked at our little man, who was still making his obscene gesture. She enveloped the whole situation in a smile so tender and so knowing that Johnny had to ignore it. “What’s my reward, Johnny, if I get you back on stream?”

Having ignored the smile he was able to laugh: to groan with theatrical sincerity. “Name it! My life is yours to command!”

So that’s how it’s done, I thought.

She never asked us for money, then or later. She simply took our coupons away and brought them back turned into boarding passes. I have no idea how Johnny imagined that this was achieved, or if he was just plain faking too.

The hotel was a huge tower, a landmark of the French-planned city center. The taxi driver had called it “l’Iceber’’: it looked as far out of place and as rotten as might be expected at this latitude. We could see from the outside whole swathes of yellow-stained decay, sinister great fissures in the white slabs, broken windows.

There was no phone and no drinking water in my room so I had to come down again. I found the coffee shop and bought a bottle of local beer. There was no one about. Brae and Johnny were maybe sleeping, maybe (I surmised grumpily) improving their acquaintance somewhere. The rest of our gang was on a sightseeing tour, and there seemed to be no other guests. Miraculously, I got through to Wales on a card phone in the lobby. Unfortunately it wasn’t my husband or my wife who picked up the handset. It was Jacko, Sybil’s child but my darling.

“Is Daddy there, Jacky? Or your Mummy? Go and fetch someone, sweetheart.”

“Mummyanna —” He sighed heavily, and broke the connection. I couldn’t get through again.

Outside in the desolate boulevard young women sat selling vegetables. In front of one of them three tiny aubergines lay in the dust, another had a withered pimento and a bunch of weeds. There were no customers. Africa looked like a dead insect: a carcass sucked dry and blown away by the wind. It was too late. No one would ever know what city might have stood here: alien to me, efficient, rich in the storied culture of a bloody and complex past.

People come to my country to see the castles.

In my business I am always dealing with the forward-echo, that phenomenon that is supposedly forbidden in our continuum. But things do affect the world before they happen, I know it. I’m always piecing together footage that is significant because of some event further down the line. I was caught in one of those moments now. Because I couldn’t talk to my family, it seemed as if the world was about to end. I wished Johnny and I had stayed back in the desert, trying to do right.

There was a banquet that night in the Leonid Brezhnev suite: a bowl of tinned grapefruit segments with a cherry at every place. One of my neighbors was another journalist, a silly Japanese woman. On the other side I found a Major Derek Whynton, military observer for NATO: a chiseled-profile, blue-eyed, very British type. I was foolish enough to remark — between the grapefruit and the fried grasscutter — that I’d thought the evidence was conclusively against the kind of activity he’d be interested in. I triggered an interminable lecture, and worse. Some men will take absolutely anything for a sexual invitation — and of course this was Africa, where you can’t be too careful. In the middle of the monitoring-industry PR he smiled archly, laid a hand on my knee, and asked me if I was married.

“Yes, twice.”

He angled himself so he could count my rings and blenched visibly. “Two husbands?” He sounded seriously alarmed.

“One husband, two wives.”

The major was relieved, but mildly disgusted. “Polygamy, eh? That’s a remarkable regression. I don’t mean to be offensive, but it seems odd that any modern young woman can accept that arrangement.”

“If that was the arrangement, I wouldn’t accept it.”

There was a big darn at my place. I studied it, intensely bored. A clean white tablecloth is a lovely thing. But when a thing gets to be more trouble than it is worth you throw it out. Or put it in a museum. There is no human artifact so sacred it deserves to stay in circulation forever.

At least I’d got rid of the hand. Major Derek marked me down as emergency rations, only slightly less dodgy than the local whores. He discovered he had to hurry away somewhere, between the ice cream and the speeches.

Spiky electric candelabra hung low over the crowd, like spiders in ambush. Some bulbs were brilliant, some dark, making a broken pattern that was repeated as if continuously by the glass doors to the roof terrace. It looked as if something out there was eating up the stars in random mouthfuls.

Johnny was at the bar, with Brae. She wore a pricey little khaki number, Islamically modest. Johnny probably thought it was her old school uniform. She was regaling him with bad-taste stories about the African notables. Johnny didn’t mind this too much. They were only politicians.

“What about that guy Obofun Ade, in the white with the kind of hippie embroidery?” Nigerian pharmaceuticals billionaire, vocal backer of the West Africa Federation Initiative. The African contingent at this gathering was alarming — almost as if something really important had happened. “A lot of what he says makes sense.”

“True enough. But you know where the money comes from?”

“Cheap neuro-drugs, undercutting the fat-cat multinationals —”

“They say his family’s plant is based on kidnapped street kids.”

“Aaah —”

“Rows of them. Kept alive in vats…”

“Aaah, Brae…”

I was listening before they saw me; they were being loud.

“I don’t want to hear any more of your dirty jokes. You’ll get us thrown out.”

“Jokes?” said Brae. Her eyes slid contemptuously around the colorful gathering; her fingers tightened around her glass. I could see the indigo shade in her unpolished nails, a sign that Johnny was unlikely to notice. “Who’s joking? They were always like it. As we neared the city we passed several human sacrifices, live women slaves gagged and pegged on their backs to the ground, the abdominal wall being cut in the form of a cross and the uninjured gut hanging out. These poor women were allowed to die like this in the sun… Sacrificed human beings were lying in the path and bush — even in the King’s compound the sight and stench of them was awful. Dead and mutilated bodies seemed to be everywhere — by God! may I never see such sights again! I memorize a lot of stuff. It’s handy to have it on tap when I’m recording. That’s from The Diary of a Surgeon with the Benin Punitive Expedition, 1897. The Benin were losing a war of worlds at the time, and I suppose they still are, in which situation people seem to think that anything goes.”

I suppose I looked unhappy. Brae smiled at me serenely, with that warning in her eyes. Johnny decided to ignore this last weird assault on his liberal conscience.

“Hi Anna. Having fun?”

I was annoyed over his defection, especially since I had the impression, even more clearly than at the desert airport, that Brae was wishing that I would vanish. So I just shrugged.

Braemar took out a cigarette and lit it. Johnny was astonished. Maybe he’d never seen a lady smoking before. She smelled of something as unsophisticated as a chocolate bar, most unlike the taste of the Brae I knew. The sweetness and the tomboy plain frock made a stunning combination. Braemar was pushing middle-age and too clever to lie about it overtly. But she’d done an expert job of confusing the issue tonight. Poor Johnny! In her way, she was as much an armaments expert as Major Whynton.

She turned, drawing stagily on the cigarette, to survey the room. “Isn’t this place wonderful? I feel like Bette Davis on a liner. Or Marlene Dietrich in a saloon. I think this must be the restaurant at the end of the universe.”

Something was chewing up the stars outside. Johnny laughed. “Ah, c’mon, Brae. Life will go on. Let’s face it, the overwhelming majority of human beings couldn’t give a shit, even suppose — which I doubt — that we find the real thing lurking up in them there swamps… Hell, some of them work here. We might as well be dentists as far as he’s concerned.”

The barman grinned.

“But we need the aliens, Johnny. And we need them to be out of reach. The futuristic encounter with otherness has been our afterlife, for as long as our culture can remember (which isn’t very long). What else can it be — that other world of spiritually etiolated lifestyles, reduced surfaces: cleanliness, order, protein pills for food? Where did the first crude practitioners of the sf genre conceive these images of white-garbed citizens thronging the shining corridors? There is only one other world, Johnny, one theatre of eternal mysteries and unreachable solutions. We go there when we die. What we’re doing here is enacting one of those stories where some champion unwisely takes on Death as an opponent. If the meeting that belongs on, that essentially is, for us, the other side of things; if that event invades the world of experience — then what can happen next?”

Johnny smiled indulgently; but it was time to show some muscle. In conversations of this kind he expected to be the one quoting himself in wild skeins of logorrhea.

“Crap,” he said. “You know as well as I do there’s nothing going on here. It’s just a good gig: plane tickets, free drinks, and some kind of copy. I’m planning to write it up for the National Enquirer.”

Braemar grinned slyly.

“I have heard,” she remarked, “that ufology is the nearest thing the US has developed to an ethnic religion. You know, like Hinduism or Islam. The poor kill animals and wear posies. The intellectuals pretend that’s all crap. But you still catch them making puja sometimes.”

The brown river was huge; it looked vast as a continent. A river like that impresses on you sharply the scale of Africa. There were market stalls along the waterfront, customs booths, warehouses, and a long open shed through which I could see the boat pier. Two black limos and a jeep had pulled up beside our shiny bus. A man in a sober white man’s suit — it was the Minister for Culture, I had spoken to him briefly at the banquet — was talking heatedly to a group of river policemen. His aides hung back, hands dangling by their sides. The inevitable bodyguard (there was a war somewhere about: there always is, in Africa) stood at attention, rifles butts along their trouser seams.

Our state-visitors’ cruiser had dematerialized. There was only the regular riverboat. It stood at the pier now, stuffed with people. I hadn’t let them put anything of mine in the bus’s baggage compartment (I’ve played this game before). I shouldered my gear and quietly got down. I bought myself a cold coke, the bottle decanted over a fistful of ice into a small plastic bag with a straw. Soon Johnny and Brae drifted up.

“You reckon that ice is okay?”

“No,” I said, my belly instantly beginning to gripe.

So he bought a drink and stood grimly sucking, as if he was showing some kind of solidarity by courting diarrhea. Braemar declined.

“I think we’ve entered the Zone,” she said.

Johnny brightened a little. “Yeah, the situation’s hopeless. Pods all around us. Don’t you think that guy in the suit has a kind of pod-ish look too?”

We sat on a decaying wooden bench by the entrance to the pier. The bus slowly emptied: our gang prowled uneasily. What happened next was perhaps inevitable. An English journalist lost his head and tried to shove his way through to the boat. The soldiers hurried over…

Johnny jumped up on the bench, waving his plastic of ice and cola. “The aliens are among us!” he yelled. “They’ve taken over these peoples’ minds! Are you gonna let them get you too? Come on, you guys! Where’s your journalistic integrity? This is the greatest story ever told!”

I don’t believe he realized that people might get killed. I did, and it didn’t slow me down. The pack surged. A mindless, media person greed possessed me. I burrowed, kicked, shoved, elbowed…until a shot was fired, and everything went quiet. Someone got hold of my arm. It was one of the soldiers. My bowels turned to water. I saw them going after another figure: couldn’t see who. Everyone else was being rifle-prodded back through the shed.

“Vous devez payer, madame —”

I must pay, with a bullet in the back of the neck, the death of all my nightmares…

“Pay for your fare!” repeated the soldier, thrusting me further up the gangway. “First class aircon!”

The Minister for Culture didn’t speak to the arbitrarily chosen few. Presumably the gesture alone satisfied, proving that his government had done its best, and the debacle was our fault. Dazed with gratitude, I turned to see who had shared my luck. First come, first served: Johnny was through, and Brae. So was Major Derek Whynton.

On the fabled state cruiser there would have been a satellite dish and a powerful radio link. On the riverboat there was a primitive radio room, available only for emergencies. We were lost in space. But we were still in the game.

At sunset the four of us stood in a line at the first-class rail. A vast swathe of brown water had opened between us and the shore. The red ball of the sun was sliding down behind a row of smokestacks on the bare horizon.

“We call this the post-holocaust,” said Brae, “not because of something that won’t happen — it might still, just a different ideology’s finger on the button — but because of what’s happened already. That famous clichéd scenario is all here. The poisoned land, mutated weather systems, birth defects, and famines. The cities weirdly transformed into festering sores. Global nuclear conflict, it’s obvious now, was a schizophrenic’s coded warning of the real disaster we were in the process of inflicting on ourselves.”

Johnny gave her a long look, which said he understood that this small-talk was customized for his benefit. Silence lengthened, the chant of insects receding as we entered deep water.

“These Thirdworlders are all crazy,” said Johnny after a while, perhaps by way of apology for his stunt at the pier. “Their minds are fixed on prestige and not being seen to fuck up. Sometimes you have to cut through it.”

“I expect the others are pods by now,” sighed Brae. “Poor things. I wonder will any of us survive to the end of the movie.”

Major Derek was gazing ashore with a soldier-like air designed to convey that he was thinking about something very important. I almost sympathized; I felt a little de trop myself. On Braemar’s bare forearm, which rested on the rail, I noticed what appeared to be a tattoo, though that seemed unlikely. It was new to me, whatever it was. It said CAVEAT EMPTOR.

Johnny looked down, and grinned.

“Braemar, is that a real tattoo? Or did you just write that there with blue ballpoint in the toilet at L’Icberg?”

She looked up at him — she’s not a particularly small woman, but Braemar always manages to look up.

“Well, Johnny. You know what they say.”

Johnny leaned down and thoughtfully applied the test to Braemar’s tanned and downy flesh. Suck it and see.

In her cabin, Braemar stowed away certain supplies with finicky care and arranged a few items on display. Expensive and immoral Swiss cosmetics; a handful of delicate underwear tossed over an e-reader by her bunk. “All that can be said, can be said clearly,” she murmured, studying the effect. “What cannot be said must be passed over in silence.” She started to eat fried plantain from a newspaper package; removing the square of banana leaf in the bottom she read a report of demonstrations in Washington, DC. The police are joining the blacks in protest against corruption and… “How touching —” Her fingertips gently brushed the blurred faces. She licked her fingers and stripped off her shirt and shorts. If you look down with your back straight and you can’t see your navel, you are in bikini trim. Braemar put her heels together and looked down. Fine. But the mirror, lit by a brutal fluorescent tube, pulled out her bones and gave her the face of a famine victim, a toothless, flat-dugged grandmother in a ragged sari. She gazed at the naked death’s head for a sad moment: everything vanishes. She made corrections.

Braemar had to have a victim. I suppose she’d have made Derek over into a pacifist for the duration, if he’d been the one. Maybe she’d have preferred the clean-cut soldier, but he was impervious. Bit of an old boiler, one saw him thinking. And been around… You couldn’t distract Major Derek from the main point by any intellectual fancywork. So Johnny learned to laugh at her dirty jokes and appreciate her olde-worlde coquetries, while the poor gazed at us across pipeclayed hawsers, and the river oozed by. After a day or two she shucked off the tomboy and took to tiny plastique sun suits that made her look like Doris Day on Mars. I thought that was a big mistake, but Brae knew better. She had Johnny jumping. Once he caught her in low company, tête-à-tête with an African down by the lifeboats. The black man fled. I heard racist assumption and that awful note of ownership in my poor friend’s voice.

“Hey! How come you suddenly speak their lingo?”

Brae gave me one of her swift and deadly glances — and swooped like a mother hen on the loose cuff of his shirt. “Is that a fashion point, Johnny? You might catch that on something and hurt yourself.”

He melted like ice cream. “Sorry mama.”

“Well, well. Leave it around somewhere in the saloon, and we’ll see what the button fairy can do.”

The button fairy! Oh, Johnny.

He cornered me on the twilit deck after dinner, demanding information. I told him nothing, of course. He was very suspicious. He hated her makeup. What was the point in painting herself like that, here in the middle of nowhere? I was in no mood for his intimate confessions.

“Johnny,” I said. “You know exactly what the point is.”

He grinned, he blushed. He’d never had anyone daub herself in the blood of tortured animals for his sake before. He loved it.

There were no longer tin-roofed markets at the piers or smokestacks along the horizon. Tall trees began to emerge, back where the swamp became solid ground. The mosquitoes, not much of a threat while the river was wide, became as horrible as the stagnant heat. At every halt Johnny and I would disembark, I to record my forward echoes and Johnny to smell the air. What did you see in the sky that night? What have you heard? It felt like the progress of the Magi. My French barely penetrated the local patois: maybe that was why we never got anything but blank stares. We returned with parcels of fruit and strange sticky food, sheepish under the cat-calls of the boat’s whores, who leaned out from the second-class saloon and shouted for us to film them and make them famous. Braemar didn’t interfere with these trips. But by staying on board, taking no pictures, doing no work of her own, she managed to devalue them.

I wasn’t feeling well. The boat food was horrible. Travel and stress had messed up my menstrual cycle, leaving me with a heaviness that lay on my mind like unfocused guilt or grief. Johnny and Braemar baited Major Derek and played their “death by science fiction” game. Telepathy quizzes, impenetrable allusions. How would we four survive under the tentacled master-race? Derek they had down as a collaborator; I was to join the resistance… I just became more depressed. She couldn’t even leave our fantasy quest alone. Any wild-eyed hope of friendly aliens seemed ludicrous, in competition with the crude realism of what she was doing to Johnny.

Our cabin showers had ceased to function. I was queuing at the only working ladies’ washroom, down in the teeming hold. The women were friendly enough, but as I reached the door a crewman appeared and grabbed me. “Madame, douche, douche privee: le cap’tan wants…”

The cabin was tiny and hot as an oven. A huge woman sat in the curtained bunk, robed in green and indigo, with an intricate indigo head cloth. Her full lips looked not painted but naturally, deeply red. She gestured toward the shower. The bunk curtains twitched. Did she have someone hidden there? I stepped into the stall, dropped my sarong and began to wash, the relief of cool water on my skin so intense I didn’t care who was watching. When the water stopped, somebody pulled open the door.

“Haoi, Haoi —” shouted the little man, as I grabbed my wrap.

He wore an immaculate white shirt and trousers, his plum-dark face was bloomed and fissured with age. The woman held something bright that moved: a toy of some kind. The captain was brandishing a bag of shrimp crackers.

Oh, Hanoi —

“You were in Vietnam?”

“Oue, Oue. Hanoi. Saigon. Long time ago.”

I wanted to rush away and get my gear. A retired foreign legionnaire: this was wonderful. The captain beamed, satisfied that he had established credentials. “English — moi, non.” He gesticulated further. I gathered that the woman was his interpreter. I was about to launch into French, but she spoke first.

“You must not ask,” said the indigo woman sleepily. “All this asking questions, that makes problems.”

She lifted the thing in her hands. As the captain pushed me out of the door, soaking wet with an armful of wet belongings, I glimpsed again the fluid, metallic movement.

I reached my cabin just in time to throw up. It crossed my mind that David’s vasectomy had failed and I was pregnant. It must be a boy this time, the little alien inside fighting with my inimical chemistry.

The boat anchored at dawn out in mid-channel, just below a muddy confluence. The halt was for our benefit: it was time for us to leave the great river. Several hours later a small boat came chugging out of the emptiness. Johnny and Brae were in the saloon, studying the garbled “Breifing” we’d all been handed back at the capital. I was on deck with the major.

Derek jumped up and was at the rail as a vision of military splendor arose: polished cap brim well down over the eyes.

“Good morning, my name is Simon Krua. I’m looking for the International Expedition to Lake Gerard?”

My heart sank. The major grew visibly larger as he stuck out his hand. “Derek Whynton, Lieutenant Krua. Major, actually. Well, you’ve found us. Let me introduce — ah — Mrs. Anna Jones: a British lady journalist.”

The major gave his barking laugh. “There are three of them, I’m afraid. Two ladies, and a young American chap. The media, you know. Don’t worry, I’ll keep them out of your hair.”

The river boat was silent as we left it. Not a single whore stuck her head out to scream goodbye. We crossed a borderline trimmed with sticks and small branches, from gruel-color to muddy umber, and swept around into the narrower stream. A tiny, ancient steamer was waiting for us, a kind of coelacanth of the swamps. I don’t know what would have happened if the whole party had got this far. It was hard to see how even we four were going to be stowed.

Johnny cackled. “I think I’m on the wrong trip. Did I book for the dinosaur hunt? I didn’t mean to do that. No wait, is this the fabled Hollywood retro-world? Don’t tell me. Bogart and Hepburn androids are about to come swanning out of the mangroves.”

Nobody laughed, particularly not Simon Krua. The Major had a lot of heavy black boxes. While they were being stowed by Krua’s soldiers, he turned on us — on the cramped and cluttered afterdeck that was to be our territory. His blue eyes gleamed in triumph.

“Now listen.”

We had no choice; there was nowhere to go.

“There has been a serious infringement of the Peace Accord, and I surely don’t need to tell you what that means. I’m sorry, but whatever wild ideas you may have had, that’s the whole story. My mission is to investigate, and to keep my findings quiet pending a full international inquiry. You’ve been allowed to come along so far because circumstances dictated it, but I’m going to have to confiscate all recordings and take charge of your equipment.”

There was a deafening silence.

“From now on, the ladies will not go on shore at all. This is dangerous country; guerilla forces are active. Johnny, may I ask you to use some commonsense? Please pack up and itemize your professional effects. Receipts will be issued, naturally.”

He disappeared into the deckhouse, shutting the door. Johnny whistled, on a slow note of sour amazement. “The Empire Strikes Back. Now we’ll be sorry for the way we teased the miserable jerk.”

Braemar stared at a pile of divers’ air bottles, stacked in the stern — for once completely silenced.

I was shaking with rage. I found a roll of tape and began to seal my forward echoes. There is never any way out when you run up against the bastard military. They have no respect. What seems to us inviolable, like consecrated communion bread in old Christendom, they’ll take and swing and smash its brains out against a wall… It must have been Major Whynton who told the captain of the river boat to give me that warning. Maybe the powers behind him had canceled the cruiser. I would have shared these thoughts with Johnny and Brae, but it would only have made Johnny quite unmanageably provocative. And I still meant to be there, at the end of this trail.

“What’s your real name, Brae?”

“Alice in Wonderland. Kali. Jael. James Bond, 007, licensed to kill. I’m in deep cover.”

“You won’t tell me, will you. It’s childish.”

“I don’t have a real name, Johnny. I’ve never been identified.”

The moon had risen; the night was immaculately black and white. The African Queen (the boat didn’t seem to have any other name) was tied up so close to the bank that they’d been able to clamber into the mud-stalking branches and sneak on shore. A tree had fallen; they were sitting on its trunk above the water. They passed a joint of the grass that Braemar had bought on the big boat. When it was done, Brae took out her cigarettes and lit one.

Johnny removed it from her fingers and snuffed it out. “Destroy yourself on your own time. I don’t want to catch your cancer.”

Braemar laughed. She loved to be bullied.

In her cabin on the boat he had moved a small heap of underwear to find out what books she was reading. Like bruised leaves, the scraps of silk released a tender perfume: vanilla and roses, the scent of her flesh. He’d been assaulted by a mad impulse to steal something, to wear it. Something strange was happening to his libido, to be traced no doubt to the combination of poor nourishment, little sleep, and excellent East African blow. He was in a state of quiet sexual frenzy: thoughts of fucking Brae with Anna and the whole First Class looking on, of all three of them setting on Major Derek and forcing gross pleasures on him.

But to be doing it with this corrupt middle-aged woman was a perverse orgy in itself. Who was the real Braemar? How did one get to meet her? That quest was a canard. The invocation, by means of all the masks, of an essential mystery forever out of reach, was only another routine in the ancient cabaret, which he at once loved and hated: a disturbingly pleasant combination. Is this normality? he wondered. My God, is this how it feels to be a regular guy?

“Actually, I couldn’t care less. You’re Brae to me, and no other label would get me closer to the inside of that box that doesn’t occupy any normal space. All I want is somewhere where I can fuck you without being at the same time ravaged by foot-long poisonous centipedes or overheard by Major Derek.”

“We could try the dinghy.”

“The guy who drove us over from the big boat sleeps in there. And the cook boy sleeps in the rowing boat.”

Irritably, carelessly, Johnny threw the snuffed cigarette into the water.

“Shit —” He scrambled out to retrieve it.

“Johnny, you’re crazy. It’s biodegradable, anyway. What are you? A New Age Hasidim? Don’t you know it is impossible for anyone to keep the whole of the law?”

He shoved the wet cigarette into his shirt pocket. She was right; the new Torah was as ridiculous as any other set of rules. As if one less cigarette end in the wilderness would save a poisoned planet.

“Do you feel weird, Brae? Do you have a strange feeling like a kind of psychic travel sickness: brainstem nausea, and it is getting stronger by the day?”

“I don’t feel anything that isn’t perfectly normal.”

“I just wondered.”

“Johnny.” She took his hand, still cool and wet from the river, and laid it along her groin. “That’s otherness. That’s where you meet the alien. If you could always have a breast to suck and an accommodating cunt to hold you, you’d never miss the rest of the world, with or without flying saucers. You are everything that matters Johnny. And I’m the place where you belong.”

He looked at her, the cool moonlight mysteriously altering his young face, cutting time’s shadows in its rounded outline — and withdrew his hand.

“Talking dirty again,” he said. “I think I’ll throw you in the river.”

“You really want them, don’t you.”

He shrugged. “I’m curious. There are UFOs every day. There’s never before been an official Snark-hunt like this one. I just want to know.”

Countless insects chanted. Something much larger suddenly howled out a long dying fall of sound. Johnny was instantly distracted.

“Hey! A wild animal! I didn’t know there were any of those left.”

He dropped to the path and hurried along it, heedless of centipedes. Brae followed, until he suddenly stopped dead. There were points of gold in the blackness ahead: a cloud of sentient fireflies, the outline of a mind.

“What is that?” he breathed, awed.

“It’s a village, Johnny.”

“Huh.” He scowled, annoyed at himself. “Those pods are fucking sneaky. It’s probably only pretending to be a village.”

But the lights in the darkness held him. “When you see that,” he murmured. “Raw, as the cave-people saw it — you know why the stars in the sky had to be people, why stories were made up about them. What else could those steady little fires in the night possibly mean?”

Braemar touched his arm, turned him to face her. “Johnny, supposing I told you the truth? Supposing I told you I’m a member of a secret international organization, on a vital undercover mission. And I need your help.”

“My God,” said Johnny. “You’re not joking, are you.”

She shook her head.

He felt a new rush of gloriously mingled lust and disorientation. It was another game; more fun. It might even be the truth: why not. Braemar could be anyone.

“You’re after the Major? Yeah, I worked it out for myself. He wants some dirt: Reds in the swamp. And I reckon our friend Krua’s already made sure he won’t be disappointed. The bastards; they’d take us all to hell with them if they got the chance. What are we going to do about it?”

Her smile was mocking. “Oh, no Johnny. The truth is better than that.”

The lake was kidney-shaped, about a kilometer across and five long, the long axis aligned roughly north-south under a natural plateau in the surrounding hills. The landing site was supposed to be somewhere around here. The local war zone was up beyond, cutting off air and road access. The water was completely opaque. It stank. Soldiers had investigated its depths and found nothing; I didn’t envy them the experience.

There was a well-established camp on shore, out of bounds to us. Derek and Krua vanished into the jungle every day with a line of laden, sweating local squaddies. We were left behind, supposedly under guard. But the soldiers were friendly and venal. There was the dinghy with its outboard and an old rowing boat, Other Ranks, For The Use Of. Taxi rates were soon established.

I tramped up the winding path, Sackey, the civilian cook, agreeably silent beside me. I was thinking about Braemar, the way she was when I was teaching a Welfare course in media technology, to keep my debts in check through my graduate degree. She was years older than me, but so young: so abject, with her constant childcare hassles and her meanly obstructive husband. I’d became her confidante. She’d told me about her childhood in East Africa: Asian mother, white daddy. Things had gone sour when the family came back to England, a bloody mess of domestic violence. Brae had escaped — and then, casebook style, married a carbon copy of the father. Those two beauties had left her with a bitter shame about her “mixed blood,” which came out in twisted ways. How embarrassing it would be if Johnny guessed her secret — after he’d learned to grin at her dirty jokes. Of course I wasn’t going to give her away. I’m on Brae’s side, I really am. I just hate what the world has made of her.

We climbed through open woodland to the plateau. The day was hot but not sweltering, the country very beautiful. From above Lake Gerard was peacock green, like a piece of bottle glass stamped down by a hard heel into the plushy treetops. The African Queen was a dozing water beetle. I was worried. Braemar had always deployed her feminine wiles with ruthless skill (and thought I was a fool to have dumped my armaments). But now I felt she’d become doubly artificial: ultrafemininity as a conscious construct. The way she made him laugh at her racist jokes. The way she seemed to watch with satisfaction while my good American experimented with the vicious old games. It scared me, the cold way she set herself up to be at once despised and enjoyed.

“It’s down here, Mrs. Anna —”

I clambered after Sackey into the dry bed of a stream. It had dried out very quickly. Crusts of stiffened algae clung to the smooth rocks. The banks were coated, in a narrow swathe on either side, with scum and debris. I saw something shining and picked up what seemed to be half a crumpled can. The metal was a brilliant, translucent blue. I rubbed the bright bloom; it didn’t come off. I put it down. Sackey came up and looked; he delved the pockets of his tattered cut-offs.

“Look, I found these. You want to buy?” He laughed. “No, only joking. We are selling, both of us. Did you pay your airfare?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Good, excellent. All sheer profit for you.”

I didn’t get a good look at the things Sackey held out. He stowed them away quickly. Then we came to it. The bed of the boiled-off stream ran into an open depression, wide as a motorway junction and roughly oval. It was bare red and yellow clay, and it had sides about two meters high. There was no sign of burning, nothing charred or withered. Above the rim, all around, flattened trees and bushes were masked in a veil of dried mud.

“Monsieur Sackey, why would nobody down-river talk to us about what happened?”

He shrugged. “Jealousy,” he suggested.

“Where are the aliens now?”

“Hiding.” He looked sly. “Sightings may be rare.”

I walked into the center. Sackey stayed where he was. I suppose he thought he’d see enough of the place when the tourists started pouring in. There was a prickling of adrenalin in my uneasy belly. Supposing, after all, something awesome was about to happen to me: a conversion experience? This was the brink. No sane person had ever crossed it.

I saw a small figure hunkered down and poking at the ground. It was Johnny. He smiled as I came up, a wide stretching mouth made meaningless by the black lenses above. He removed his sunglasses and looked at me quizzically.

“Hi. It’s Johnny. Johnny Guglioli, remember?”

“I’m sorry Johnny I was —”

“Impressed. Mmm.” He rubbed yellow earth between his fingers. “What d’you reckon, Anna? Roadworks?”

I remembered Major Derek’s version. “Have you a Geiger counter on you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Suddenly I felt very sick. I squatted, my head in my hands.

“Anna, what’s wrong?”

“I think I’m pregnant.”

“Oh, shit. Davey’s snip didn’t take, you mean?” He looked embarrassed. “Um, sorry. Unwarrantable assumption, and none of my business. What are you going to do?”

I knew what I’d promised. One each is what we’d agreed. There are simply too many people. Why should Bangladeshis give up their children if we wouldn’t?

“I suppose I’ll have to face up to my marriage vows.”

The nausea passed. I heaved a sigh.

“We don’t believe in this thing, do we Johnny?”

“Not me. You know, it probably is road works. If we carry on over the hill we’ll find the big corral of a Chinese civil engineering plant. We’ve stumbled upon an illicit hardwood logging operation. We’ll all get shot and dumped in the swamp.”

“And what people saw in the sky?”

“Aurora.” He put the glasses back on and smiled without his eyes again. “We have no neighbors, Anna. No one here but us chickens. Maybe we’ll set off one day in a relative way and come back and visit ourselves. That’s the only hope.”

His manner was very odd; I couldn’t make it out.

“Let’s get back. It makes sense to get home before the Major. Those tantrums aren’t good for the poor guy.”

At dead of night, Johnny sneaked into the deckhouse. He found the box that Braemar had marked without difficulty, his pencil of light picking out the smudge of Murasaki Rose on a white MOD Supplies docket. She’d had one of the soldiers identify it, by making him want to frighten her, she said. Dangerous little kitten! He suckered a tiny processor that he called his “skeleton key” beside the lock, and in a few seconds it had the combination. Such are the legitimate tools of investigative journalism; for the people have a right to know. Tough luck on the Major if he didn’t understand the rules. All was quiet. Giggling silently, Johnny opened Major Derek’s smart briefcase, raised the sliver of a screen, and loaded a disc that was helpfully labeled (when will they ever learn?) with the dates of the Snark hunt. He glanced at some of the files — the maps and notes — and shook his head over them a little. Then he did things to the disc that were not good for its long-term memory. He checked the rest of the contents of the case. But Braemar had assured him there was no hard copy, no paper written notes. And she seemed to know her business.

How wonderful to be Johnny Guglioli, rightful heir of the greatest civilization the world has ever known. How wonderful to enjoy all the old adventures, with all the new virtues intact. Out on deck again he stood by the rail and stared at his own hands, which were actually shaking. But only his body was afraid and excited. Johnny’s mind rode above, perfectly cool. He gazed into Africa, in no hurry to get out of sight (I couldn’t sleep): planning the rest of the coup, while tremors of some emotion that his mind did not care to name ran through and through his limbs.

We were in the kitchen at home. David was trying to get Directory Inquiries to give him the number of some chicken-expert (those tiresome birds and their diseases!). The woman on the phone explained that she couldn’t because of the attack. “What ‘attack’?” asked David. WHAM. Our kitchen windows went white with a blinding, blinding, silent flash. Then it was afterwards. There was a big room in which people were huddled in little family groups. People kept doing stupid things: wanting to open the door, to uncover the windows. I was running around trying to stop them, I was making Jacko hide under some cardboard. I was amazed at myself. I’d always been sure that only an idiot would try to survive the end of the world. All the while, dreaming, I knew that “Nuclear War” was only a label, only the mask of some different catastrophe.

I opened my eyes. Braemar was kneeling beside me, but she’d turned into a glistening creature with gills and goggle eyes. I sat up and pushed aside my net. We all slept on deck; it was only luck that Johnny or the Major hadn’t woken too. The glistening stuff was wetware: the bulbous head, a mask, and some kind of soft bag-like air supply.

“Brae? What are you doing?”

The bag pumped. She pulled off her mask.

“The Creature From The Black Lagoon. I’m sorry, Anna. Don’t be scared. I turn out to be some kind of goodie in the last reel.”

She looked, as they say, as if she’d seen a ghost. “Do you believe in the law, Anna?”

She sounded drunk. Maybe that was the explanation. She’d stolen some fancy diving gear from Derek’s boxes, swum ashore, and located a disco somewhere.

“I suppose I do. Not anything more than you could put in two sentences; but the law, yes, I do.”

“Thou shalt not kill, and so forth? So do I.” She shuddered. “But there’s the agrapta nomima. There’s what Antigone says to Creon in the play: Sophocles. She could disobey the king’s sacred edicts because the unwritten law, agrapta nomima, was greater.”

“Braemar! You haven’t been chucking Major Derek’s stuff into the lake?”

She shook her head. She looked awfully strange. Was she a pod? I almost demanded what have you done with the real Braemar? But I’d have felt such a fool.

“I was horrified when I saw you at the airport. You knew me Anna: I knew you’d wonder, and you’d suspect. But I think I can trust you. In the end, I think you’ll understand.”

I lay there trying to read these omens until another dream engulfed me. Black water parted under the swampy trees. Figures rose to their feet. Standing waist-high they seemed human as shadows, or spirits: smooth, ungendered bodies. They looked out at the empty lake and mugged relief and excitement. One of them lifted cupped hands with reverence and solemn delight. As the drops fell a voice whispered in my mind. Water of life — They all made the same gesture, bowed their faces and drank as if taking a sacrament. Shipwrecked but undismayed they stood triumphant in Eldorado.

We have come home.

Next morning Johnny had vanished. Apparently he’d swum for it, because both boats were where they should be. I remembered my dream, but I said nothing. Derek was livid. He sent out a search party. He stamped around glowering like an outraged father. I will be master in my own house! It says something for the effectiveness of the military regime, that while the row was going on Brae and I didn’t speak. We didn’t risk exchanging so much as a glance.

About an hour before noon something came roaring out of the trees on the lake shore. It was a motorbike. Johnny jumped off the back and hailed us cheerfully.

“Ahoy, African Queen! Anyone want a cold beer?”

He’d been to town. Walked out to the trail and hitched a ride to the local cosmopolis. He had brought back a sack of bottled beer and a lump of ice wrapped up in sodden straw. He was inordinately pleased with himself. Derek recalled the search party and, controlling himself violently, announced that he could no longer be responsible for us. He had radioed for assistance. We’d be leaving as soon as our transport arrived.

The heat settled. Major Derek sulked in the deckhouse. Johnny wavered along the African Queen’s rail clutching a beer bottle, in shorts and a singlet — right foot in a wetware ankle boot, left foot bare. This improved his balance, he claimed.

“A trick I learned on the rat-ridden wharves of New Byzantium.”

My dreams had dissipated. It was only Johnny and Brae, up to their eyes in some stupid scheme of revenge. And I was sick as a dog. I didn’t want to vomit, only to die. I crawled under my net and let the voices fade.

Johnny shook me gently awake. I felt as if I’d been asleep for days, but was aware that only an hour or two had passed.

I sat up. “Where — ?”

The African Queen was eerily silent. Johnny’s backpack and camera bag were on the deck beside him, all strapped up. My kit was there too.

“What’s happened?”

“Major Whynton and Lieutenant Krua have been called away.”

“Where’s Brae?”

“She’ll join us.”

Sackey rowed us to the shore. We took a different path from the one that went up to the plateau and soon reached a red dirt road. A couple of other people joined us, and then a jeep with an open back full of passengers came rattling along. Johnny paid our fares. A teenage girl’s personal stereo buzzed by my ear. A very weary young boy swayed opposite me, hugging an assault rifle as if it were a teddy bear. After an hour or so little bungalows in swept, bare yards began to line the road.

“What about the war?” I asked, bemused.

Johnny shrugged. “Oh, wars. People learn to live with them.”

We sat outside a cafe in the market place of the small town. Johnny explained everything. Simon Krua and Major Derek had planted evidence of illicit weapons testing. Johnny and Brae had been secretly undoing the evil work: this morning was the climax. When Johnny sneaked into town he had suborned the staff of the local radio station — not hard, the man hadn’t been paid for months — and consequently Major Derek had learned of an exciting development in the local war. He and the soldiers had rushed off to join in. By the time they discovered there was nothing going on, their plans here would be in ruins, and the three of us would have got clean away.

The story was a little garbled; I felt like a child left out of secrets. But mostly it went right past me. I just wanted to be at home, safe with Syb and David and the kids.

“Where’s Brae?” I asked again.

“She’s tying up a few loose ends.”

The market place was surrounded by crude, breezeblock buildings with red iron roofs. A few women, one or two men, listlessly guarded the pitiful goods: children’s nylon underwear, little blackened corpses of smoked monkey, piles of ancient French magazines. Johnny had ordered beer for us. It came warm, with tumblers full of dirty ice.

“Pity there’s no story.”

“No chance,” he agreed. “In a war-mongering global situation like the one we have now, even exposing a fake is dangerous.” He frowned, staring toward the road we’d come in by. “I hope she’s okay back there… Well, she ought to be. She’s an African.”

I started. “You knew that?”

“Yeah, well. I read her up when I got the passenger list, before we left London.”

He sounded a little ashamed of himself, as well he might. I got the feeling that this confession signaled some kind of breakdown between them, and I was glad. I wanted to welcome him back into our haven of shared assumptions. But I felt too ill, and his mood seemed bleaker by the moment.

“Johnny, don’t fall in love. It’ll be bad for both of you. She hates men, you know.”

“I know,” he said. “I know she does.”

Above the cinema a hand-painted poster featured a giant, snarling white woman in a bikini. Our getaway car, a big old Mercedes, hunkered by the storm drain below. Children in grimy old western clothes were playing (what riches!) with a bright plastic toy. I felt so low. I couldn’t think of anything to say to Johnny; I was glad when he got up and went to talk to our driver.

So there were no aliens. I drank beer and let myself admit the disappointment. How sad. To have hiked out into the desert to the burning bush. Knees knocking, ready to meet God: and found there was nothing but the sun on an old plastic bag. Of course that was why Johnny seemed so odd, and Braemar too. The embarrassment of having almost been believers… It was going to take us three days to drive to Maiduguri and the airport, right through this war that “people had got used to” (My blood ran cold, to think of my Johnny expressing such a hard and commonplace opinion.) I would pull myself together. I would record the trip. That and the river journey should make a saleable item.

The toy that the children were playing with caught my eye. I tried to look away: but found that I could not. I called to the children in French: “May I see that thing?”

A little boy came over and put it on the table. It was like a kind of…millipede? It was the same blue as the metal I had found. I couldn’t for the life of me tell whether it was alive or a machine. I reached out to touch. He giggled and grabbed it. In a moment the group of children had scampered out of sight.

Excitement burst out like cold sweat. With a sudden dire premonition, I grabbed my camera bag. I use the simplest stock and hardware. I need to be able to edit my own work, cheaply. I don’t have the might of a big company behind me. The cassettes looked all right. When I took the seals off, they fell apart. It was gone, every scrap of my forward echoes. Johnny came back. He stood looking at the wreckage with his blacked out eyes. I stared up at him, having the most ridiculous nightmares.

“Johnny, what’s going on? Where’s Braemar?”

“She’s blowing up a kind of plane,” he said, with the air of someone abandoning all pretence. He took off his glasses. He was Johnny Guglioli still. It was everything else that had changed.

I said, “They’re here, aren’t they. The ufo was real.”

Johnny nodded warily.

“What is Braemar doing?”

“What I told you. She’s blowing up an abandoned aircraft. Okay, a spacecraft. I’m sorry Anna. But you must see, we couldn’t tell you. They have to stay in hiding for now. Or the Major Dereks of this world will fuck up everything.”

His smug grin affronted me. I felt for a moment that I was still reacting like a sulky child. But I had my forward echoes: their occult message, no good at the end of this quest. I had the certainty that there was nothing benign behind Braemar’s charade. The sickness in my belly. I could not tell him why, but he was wrong: he was wrong.

“I’m going back to the lake!”

I didn’t wait to see what he would do. I ran for the car, and he came pelting after.

Braemar was on the deck of the African Queen. She studied her face in a small mirror. The tomboy nudity that Johnny so approved, she had captured it exactly today. Good. She stowed the mirror in her flightbag. Her hands were sweating. Braemar had none of Johnny’s confidence. Such power as she possessed was stolen goods, liable to betray her at any moment like the giant’s purse in the story. She thought of the horror of what she was doing and of the innocent virgin whom she had seduced and ruined. She straightened her shoulders and half-unconsciously began to sing as, she waited for the seconds to tick away: lost voice of a small girl in a scratchy uniform. She had loved that brown serge from far away very dearly, though it was so hot and ugly.

“Land of our birth our faith our pride, for who’s dear sake our fathers died —”

The naive sentiment of words and music comforted her.

We came over the rail. Braemar turned around. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sackey, who had rowed us out, mugging apology. Her allies were everywhere, confederation of the dispossessed: the colonized. How strange that I had seen her as acting the role of her self. What I’d seen was Braemar undercover, recreating her old effects for a new purpose. Had she really needed an accomplice? She could probably have managed alone: but Braemar couldn’t change that far. And she couldn’t have used the Major either. His response, the response of his kind, would no doubt be the same in the end, but it would be too late. Braemar wasn’t going to wait; she knew all she needed to know —

“Where are they?” I cried frantically, “Are they alive?”

“I think so,” said Braemar, without so much as blinking. “I was still getting readings of warm things moving around inside the life pod, when I placed the charges.”

Johnny’s stunned silence made her furious.

“Don’t you judge me, Johnny!” she shouted. “Oh, judge me if you like, I don’t care. I’m right. This is self defense. I know they won’t mean any harm, not at first. But you, you and I and our whole world and history, we will still be worse than dead: meaningless.”

“They could be ordinary,” said Johnny, in the voice of a child at Christmas, dreaming of walking snowmen, talking animals. “They could be our friends.”

“If they’re so ordinary, how come they’re here? You need to lie to yourself, Johnny. I don’t. That’s the only difference. I can call them human as I am, call them innocent, and still do what has to be done.”

I began to move in, carefully. The talking was a good sign.

“Where’s the detonator, Brae? Please, come on, tell!”

I risked a glance at Johnny, signaling him (I hoped) to grab her while I lunged for that bag. His face was blood drained.

“Braemar, you can’t be serious,” he whispered. “You know I never meant this.”

She began to sob. I lunged; Johnny grabbed me.

Across the water the shore rose into a low red cliff, crowned with trees. As I fell headlong, I saw the bottle glass surface under this cliff burst open. Water leapt into the air. Trees shook, ran like liquid: tons of earth and greenery began to topple. Everything was shaking. I lay on the deck with my hands clasped over my head.

The soldiers were waiting for us. Strange meeting: it’s difficult to recall the details of that aftermath. We were escorted to the trail, put into a jeep. Our personal baggage, which we’d left in the Mercedes, came back to us minus the recording equipment. Eventually Major Derek appeared, got in beside the driver, and we drove away.

Later, we had a debriefing. The military had found nothing: no aliens, no crashed nuclear fighter. The “landslide” had been a natural occurrence. There was no story. Braemar, at this time, reprised for me the story she’d told Johnny. She was a secret agent for peace. The rest, she said, had been a “smokescreen.” Her eyes, while she explained this, were supremely cynical, the eyes of a coquette who knows no one will ever untangle all her lies. She walked out of the hotel in Maiduguri and disappeared into the African crowd. I suppose I’ll meet her again in a year or two — pale skinned, immaculately feminine. She will expect me to have forgotten everything; I will know this without asking.

After she’d gone, Johnny told me the other version. The secret network of the faithful, who knew the aliens had arrived and protected them from the authorities. He had played along, “suspending disbelief,” he said. It had seemed like another of her games. And now neither of us knew what to believe. Was there a secret organization, devoted to stamping out alien intelligence wherever it appeared? No, it was just too far-fetched, we agreed. Already, like the military, we had resigned ourselves. Already we began to suppress and deny our own memories (so that now, as I write, I do not know what really happened). My forward echoes are gone. They would have shown nothing anyway, nothing but a certain atmosphere…

But as we traveled home together I could barely bring myself to speak to Johnny Guglioli. I still remembered that he had grabbed for me, not Braemar. That moment of choice had been real, even if the aliens never were. She’d recruited him all right. Without even trying, she’d shown him exactly what happens to the colonized. Her cheating ways, her sly subservience: expert rituals of self-contempt. When he was faced with it, Johnny had been ready to kill the innocent strangers, because he didn’t want to be a nigger. He didn’t want to be a woman for the rest of his life.

I sat staring out of the plane window. At least I didn’t feel pregnant anymore. But Johnny and Braemar haunted me: that doomed encounter between self and otherness. I saw my face in the glass, gazing solemnly in from the empty air. And I wished that I could darken every window in the world; so that every clear, hard barrier would become a mirror, and no one who looked through would be able to see anything out there; but their own face, looking back.

May 1990

Author Biography

Gwyneth Jones, writer and critic of science fiction and fantasy, is the author of many novels for teenagers, mostly using the name Ann Halam, and several genre novels for adults, often addressing feminist, popular culture and gender issues. Her critical essays and reviews are collected in Deconstructing the Starships, 1999, and Imagination/Space, 2009. Recent honors include the P. K. Dick award for Life, published by Aqueduct Press, and the Pilgrim award for science fiction criticism. She’s done some extreme tourism in her time, and enjoys mountain walking, playing with her websites, and watching old movies. Her latest novel is Spirit, or The Princess of Bois Dormant (Gollancz UK). She lives in Brighton UK.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

In the Forest of the Queen

Total Internal Reflection

Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland

The Universe of Things

Blue Clay Blues

Grazing the Long Acre

Collision

One of Sandy’s Dreams

Gravegoods

La Cenerentola

Grandmother’s Footsteps

The Early Crossing

The Eastern Succession

The Thief, the Princess, and the Cartesian Circle

Identifying the Object

Author Biography