Note: This essay has appeared as part of the British Fantasy Society's Neurodiversity Celebration Week (2024).

*

Every neurodivergent writer has a different experience of their particular melange of traits. There is so much comorbidity that psychologists basically pick the Venn bubble that fits you best and say, ‘Here, this word will now describe you and all your weirdness. This word will become the badge you wear that makes people think they understand you. This word is now the sum of your existence.’

The world is more nuanced than that, but eh, we work with what we're given here. I can't speak for all neurodivergent writers and their experiences; all I have is my own. But hearing from others, there is often plenty of overlap in how we grew up and how we process the world now, how we attempt to distil meaning from this overwhelming universe.

One particular issue that affects me is RSD—or Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. It's a common enough trait with many neurodivergent folk, but especially prevalent in ADHD. Essentially, we can be hyper-aware of criticism, even if it doesn't actually exist. What a neurotypical might intend as a meaningless observation can land differently for someone with RSD.

I think a lot of ND folk are used to being laughed at. I was trained to understand that everything I do or say is grounds for mockery, and this leaves me in a semi-permanent state of anxiety and hyper-vigilance. Every throwaway comment is an attack.

I've learned never to read my book reviews as I will bypass all compliments as people being ‘fake nice’ and hone in on the criticism. The negative takes up so much more space in my mind that it occludes everything else. It was so bad after my second novel Beastkeeper that it took me years to write again as I was convinced that everything I did was terrible and I was wasting people's time by daring to write.

This is a distinctly unhelpful attitude to hold when you're a writer.

Because writing is essentially an act of egotism. It says—I have things I want to say, but more than that, I think that what I'm saying is worth hearing.

It's a strange balancing act, then, to live in constant fear of being publicly humiliated while at the same time writing your prickly, awkward truth and demanding that others read it.

Realising that I struggle with ADHD (and a small side order of some mental health issues that add spice for fun), means I am at least able to rationalise some of my behaviour and take corrective steps. The whole world doesn't hate me and think I'm a talentless waste of space—that's the RSD talking.

But even with that hurdle faced, there's still the issue of writing while neurodivergent. The particular take you have on the world isn't always gonna gel with how the normies see it. Your characters are going to be ‘too weird,’ or make ‘irrational choices’, or experience emotions ‘incorrectly’ (forgive the liberal use of quotes.)

The thing is; I don’t set out to write neurodivergent characters. I write people—fictional people who are drawn from the people around me, the way I experience the world, and my understanding of these experiences. Too bad if other people refuse to afford my experiences as being real or relatable.

In the past, I would take the editorial comment on board about how my characters would feel too much with their stomachs, or think of the wrong things first in a situation. I was trying to write characters that everyone would understand—but there’s no such thing, and the way I experience and react is as valid as anyone else. RSD made me want to fit in so badly, to never be mocked or misunderstood, to be a perfect human.

Only there’s no such thing.

So I can choose to keep writing my weird down, or I can sublimate it and try be ‘normal’. I can pretend to be like them, and grind my edges to fit, tell stories that only they want to hear.

I have been doing that for years, and never very well. Also, it's tiring as fuck

These days I allow myself freedom from rejection. I let my head do what it wants, rise and rage and create. I let my world full of screams loose.

It's difficult enough to write, but there's another layer of difficulty to overcome when you have tried to fit yourself into a world that doesn't have a space for you.

Writing while neurodivergent is choosing to be an open wound instead of wearing a tempered glass skin that reflects everything but shows nothing. It is rattling between mania and the void. It is hearing whispers at the edge of dreaming, losing track of time. It is howling your truth into a world that would prefer you silent and acceptable.

It is filling the widening cracks with daydreams. It is being hypnotised by the infinities contained in a moment. It is writing 15000 words in three days, then struggling to write for a year.

It is feeling everything all at once and nothing at all.

Writing while me is holding a thousand overlapping worlds in a space that isn't big enough for half of one.

Writing is a poem without meter

that stops

and starts,

flickers with occasional brilliance

between the ragged grit

Instead of a head I have a jar full of bees.

Instead of soft skin I rattle quills.

Instead of myself I carry a thousand mirrored

you.

I can write only now and rage.

I am a whirlwind and the calm inside it.

I am the spent aftermath

And you will know me.

Luba bent over her daughter’s bed, under the apartment’s single window. The setting sun wove Maya’s sleeping face into the shadows. Her little fingers, listless upon the faded blanket, reminded Luba of baby rainworms decaying by the roadside in the spring. The room smelled of pond scum, the air occluded by greyness, invisible mould, choking tears. Luba’s own eyes itched dry.

It was quiet. Only Gramma’s rocker scraped the floor, like an ancient cello bow without its rosin. Gramma’s watery eyes blinked, and Luba spoke to answer the unasked, the invisible nudging cacophony.

“Yes.”

Yes, she was going.

Her voice circled inside her head, as if inside a conch, growing dimmer and dimmer with each iteration, sapping her even of false confidence.

If she didn’t go, Maya would die.

She rubbed her dry eyes, turned away from Gramma’s worried face to stare instead at the bare, sea-stained walls. Even these walls could weep until they weren’t dull anymore. Streaked with moisture, they became colourful—dusty tuberose and grey of the predawn hours.

She would not be the same when she returned.

The money spent five years ago on hopeless physicians had emptied the room, leaving only Gramma’s rocker and a little table where they cracked shells for food and where Luba wrote. Beneath the table there was a threadbare, once-blue rug nobody had wanted to buy. It covered a secret door to the Undersea, invisible even to Gramma, invisible to Luba on Maya’s healthy days, in Maya’s healthy world. But when Maya lay dying Luba knew again.

These nights, when Gramma fell asleep in her rocker, Luba knelt on all fours to press her ear to the rug; she heard the Undersea rising, the roar of the sea-lions, a faint song of sirens luring ships to invisible rocks. And just last night she heard beneath the rug the faint deep sound of a cello. Something new, unusual. A story. What story would she tell? It’d be about a man, she thought, on the deck of a ship searching for the shining city—and his cello a protection, a shield, a song to match the siren song and veer away, a song to spin a shimmering rope out of all promise, of all sorrow. She yearned to tell this to Maya, and more—how, woven of his music and of Luba’s story, the rope would pull the man to shore. How he would disembark, his eyes taking in the city for the first time. And Maya would tell the story with her, she would say, she would say—

But her little girl lay unmoving, her eyes closed to these shining threads.

Nobody knew what went wrong, why every year Maya faded slowly until no speech and movement were left to her, while Luba recovered from her journey. Her daughter would want to know then, later, want to talk to her, but in Maya’s healthy world Luba’s world would be lost.

Every day she wondered if killing herself would break the cycle—but what if she had nothing to do with her daughter’s sickness, what if Maya got worse again, regressing over time, losing the light of her eyes first, then movement, then speech—and there would be no Luba, and thus no medicine. Someone must know the answer, she thought. The pearl merchant knew, behind his varnished smile, his greasy eyes.

Gramma, she wanted to ask, what will happen to you if I die? She said instead, “Maya will grow out of it, don’t you think? Slowly, over the years …”

Gramma said nothing.

“Listen,” Luba said, “can you keep something for me?”

Gramma nodded, her eyes water-bright. Luba rummaged for a piece of paper and a short pencil in her pocket, leaned over the little table and wrote, There is a sea underneath the rug.

She crossed that out.

There is an octopus in the heart of the Undersea; its every tentacle carries a street, a city, and at night when its people light their reading lamps the octopus shimmers. Sated with shining and the sound of the waves it floats in the centre of the sea, and one day a ship will come to it, tugged to shore by the struggling music of my heart. This ship will carry a hope …

She crumpled the page, pushed the paper into Gramma’s fist, and the old woman nodded and turned her head away from Luba, from the table, from the rug.

If she stopped to think, she’d lose her courage. Luba knelt and rolled the discoloured material back. The trapdoor fitted the floor so well it was barely visible, an eyelash-thin circle without a handle. She pushed it in, and the trapdoor turned and disappeared. A simple hemp ladder, woven by Gramma these five years ago, dangled from the edge of the opening. Luba closed her eyes tightly and started descending against the fear of it all, melting into the darkness and the susurrus of the invisible waves below.

Luba didn’t know how long the climbing held against the night behind her eyes.

At last her feet hit heated stone. She opened her eyes to find herself standing by her house—a tall block of seaside limestone into which apartment-caves were carved, and dainty balconies, and stairs with railings of wrought-iron roses. Luba couldn’t remember why she didn’t simply walk down these steps.

The city glowed burnished red under the sea-rimmed sky. This was the fifth time she was making the journey. Step after step. The sun-bird fell bright on her head, an avalanche of fiery feathers dusting her free of doubt, of that dreadful feeling inside her stomach. Maya would smile again, get up from her bed, beg Gramma to let her sit in the rocker.

I can do it, Luba thought, I’ve done it before. Such a small price to pay for these two or three months when Maya was almost healthy, and Luba almost hale, these months when they would share a world. Yes, she would do it. Sell her pearl. Her hand touched her heart, her eyes—the pearl was lodged there, sweet shimmer over her eyelashes, not painful at all. It made her eyes distend like starlight over emptiness. She touched her eyes again, and an invisible glove of black spidersilk wove itself around her fingers, delicate as crocheted darkness, embroidered by drops of emerald water.

Through her spidersilk fingers she watched the glowing pier. A tentacle curved up, carrying a slender lighthouse of spun abalone. The light was latent now, waiting for midnight’s permission to shine the ships home.

She turned around, walked away from the seaside where the poor people lived in caves dug in great limestone rock pillars that broke the surf. Farther inland, in richer neighbourhoods, the houses grew like coral. Some had six stories, some eight. The houses were bright red and windowed, and inside every window she saw a happy girl-child cradling a bird. A faint feather-like music ruffled the curtains. Trees lined the streets, and if she licked the trunks of oaks she’d taste chocolate wood that didn’t melt in the heat, and sample the edible cookie and latte leaves. Along the curb the slender birch trees sprouted high-heeled shoes, their heels tied together with grosgrain ribbon flowers. The lindens swarmed with titmice and cardinals that pecked at dainty purses, studding them with rhinestone seeds. Between their feathers music soared and swooned, and sounds slid off the air and drained through ornate sewer grates.

That wouldn’t do. She was wasting time in the glowing city staring at purses and shoes, when Maya could not walk, could not even lift an eyelid. There was a way to fix this, the only way. Her pearl. The pearl merchant. The powder.

She edged towards her destination, shoes tapping the onyx-stone pavement, their old worn leather a palimpsest of poem lines she could almost remember. The tapping grew into a slow, steady knocking—alongside her, to the side.

She turned her head.

He was tall. His olive skin parched to the darkest green of predawn, to the hour of sleepless anguish when colours were only hinted at, like hope that hope is possible. He held a single oar, its wood bleached white and shining. He knocked the onyx pavement with the butt of the oar, almost absent-mindedly, as his dark eyes watched her. His mouth twitched in a smile.

Luba stood silent, confused that this man would approach her.

The man gave one last tap with his oar, and the polished pavement cracked. The oar sprung roots that grasped the ground, its blade burst into branches, spinning around and upward, sprouting yet smaller branches. He went on one knee under the canopy of new leaves, heart-shaped, shining grey. From behind his back he drew a patchwork knapsack. Its contents bulged and muttered and sighed against the drawstring.

“I am Höjn,” he said, as if expecting she would recognize the name.

She looked down at his upturned face beneath the oar-tree, not knowing what to do or say. His smell was sea and amber, nutmeg and salt and warm rough stone.

“And even if you did not know,” he said, as if continuing a conversation, “tell me a story if you please, a story of your shining city, so I can tell you something in return.” Höjn’s hand caressed the knapsack, and she knew without knowing that the bag contained living stories that murmured and shifted about, waiting to be told, to be exchanged for others.

Luba struggled for words. Images, words scurried in her mind like mice afraid and eager for their cheese. Her mouth opened, and she found herself speaking. “I do not know the city well. I only come here to sell my pearl.” She brought her hand again to touch her eyes, but the glove of spidersilk had melted. Her flesh, too, seemed translucent, and through it she could see her own fingerbones promising an archeology of touch even after death’s thieving. “My daughter cannot live without the medicine.”

He waited, but she spoke no more. At last he pulled at the drawstring of his patchwork knapsack. “I understand. Without the pearl, you cannot come here. Without the pearl, there are no stories, Luba. You called me here. You are my kind. Please do not give it away—”

She shook her head again, not daring to ask how he knew her name, or the kind of which he spoke. I do not know you. And you are alone, she thought. It’s different, and free, to roam between the pavement and the sky without a pain, without a need. “Are you a parent?”

“No,” he said.

Of course not.

He bent his head. “I do not know a story like this, not that ends well. But it must live somewhere. Inside your eyes. Inside the dreams that make your pearl. Sprouted from the fabric of this city.”

He pulled the bag open, but instead of stories Luba saw emerge the long dark neck of a musical instrument. He lowered the fabric around the body of a cello, certainly too large to fit in any knapsack, big or small. The cello’s wood was pale and polished, like the oar had been. “I do not know a story like this,” he repeated, “and I have carried stories over sand-covered lands that rested upon turtles. I have told stories to the flying fish of the Ocean Above, and to kings, to musicians, to paupers, to the silt on the shores of indifferent rivers in my need. There must be another way to tell this, Luba, and once you tell it, it is true, if you—”

“I have to go.” Wasn’t that what they always said to parents of sick children?

There’s nothing wrong.

Refusing to see. Refusing to help.

Change your story. Change it.

But no matter how you hammered at the words, the illness stayed. There was no other story. No other way. Maya needed her, a desperate need unknown to this man. “Forgive me.”

She fled as his hand glided over the cello. The bow he held was air and horsehair, polished by the rosin of mellow morning stars. The time for stories melted, but the wordless melody wove through the heat. Luba hurried on, eyes half-lidded against the lingering gossamer of the music, until it faded to nothing.

Years or hours or half-days later she finally spotted the circumspect sign that declared, “Mr. F. Tommogan, Dealer.” A perfectly round pearl glowed beneath the square black lettering. When had she first seen the sign? Her heart balked and recoiled like a caterpillar that had reached the end of its leaf. She tried to remember—but her memory was bleached of images, only a feeling—that suffocating feeling. Maya had been very sick. She couldn’t even talk then. Just like now.

Luba knocked.

A half-remembered boy with a rooster-like crown of tawny hair escorted her inside. Would you care for a water or a pasty, a beastly day, and Mr. Tommogan will see you in his office. Her palimpsest shoes faded to dusty brown as she tiptoed across the rugs and slipped through the polished mahogany door.

Mr. Tommogan waited for her behind a mahogany desk large as a raft and polished to majesty. He wore a green velvet vest over a crisp white shirt over a distinguished belly. A burlwood box lay half-open on the desk, and Luba knew only too well what was inside: a stethoscope with its looking-glass made of amber that had trapped a little ancient bird (with scales and keen eyes), and a scalpel of moonlight, and a little terrycloth woven by enchanted spiders out of tears.

Nothing here smelled of the sea.

“Luba! My girl! I was wondering when I would see you next.”

Mr. Tommogan rubbed his hands and motioned her to sit opposite him in a white easy-chair. She knew the chair had been a pig once, a magic white pig with burning ears that ran free in some northern forest, leading dogs and princes astray. Now only the pig-shaped iron feet of the chair hinted at its story. Luba sat gingerly, not wanting to offend.

“But I am in fact happy that you wait so long.” Mr. Tommogan nodded to himself. “Others come too soon, their pearls pretty enough, but small. It will, of course, be much more painful for you to have it removed …”

Fear finally blossomed inside Luba, the sticky rime of it freezing her to the white pigskin. But she had to go through with it. What other choice was there? She blotted the image of Höjn’s face away.

“But you, my girl, you wait until it’s nice and large, one wonders how you do not go insane with the feeling of it.” She wouldn’t listen to his blathering, twisted tongue. The pearl was never painful, never a burden. Höjn had said—

“Are you addicted to the dreams? Are they too sweet to give up?”

She rubbed her fingers against each other—sticky with sweat, soiled and furtive and dumb under Mr. Tommogan’s gaze.

He raised his stethoscope and looked through the amber. His eye, amplified by the ancient bird’s petrified shape, shone like her fear. Too late to run.

“Oh, yes. Beautiful, simply beautiful.” Luba saw the dead bird’s conspiratorial blink as Mr. Tommogan reached for the scalpel.

“Here it comes, baby …”

Piercing light reached behind her eyes.

It hurt—oh, Gramma, like a thousand suns inside the sharpness of the surf exploding in her head—

It didn’t hurt at all. She watched without interest as Mr. Tommogan held out his hand. There was no tool in it, only a large round shape between his thumb and index finger. It had a pretty glow. There were once metaphors to describe it. Pictures in words. On reflex she probed that place, the neat little incision, the empty cavity. Then she didn’t remember how or why she probed.

“Behold the dreaming pearl.” Mr. Tommogan reached into his box and took out something—in fact, it was nothing at all, but he made a motion as if to wipe the glowing shape. Frivolous rich man.

He said, “I hope you will be back. Believe me when I say I would take care of you, but dreaming pearls cannot be grown in captivity.”

The Naugahyde chair she sat on was uncomfortable and sweaty, so she rose, shrugged off his incomprehensible small talk. “My medicine?”

“Oh yes, the powder.” Mr. Tommogan shuffled to a cupboard, produced a small black box. In the earlier years, she’d asked him to grind her own pearl, but of course he refused. Grinding her pearl would destroy its value, so she would be getting the dust of a lesser pearl. A good trade, he’d said; after all, she couldn’t very well cut herself open and grind it herself now, could she?

Luba heard Mr. Tommogan murmur, understood enough. He thought her addicted, resisting removal and yet yearning for the snuff and the money. What a pity—such a pretty figure. She couldn’t muster enough care to explain herself.

He shook his head and handed her the box, and a tight wad of bills. “Here. And be careful, yes?”

She shrugged and headed for the exit. Mr. Tommogan cried something after her. “The only one who can cut it out so gently that it can regrow—”

Luba closed the door behind her.

The city streets were dull and smelled of heated concrete, the pavement corroded by pigeon guano. Grey apartment buildings leaned over the streets and obscured the sky. It would be a relief if they fell. Buried her. Mr. Tommogan thought her an addict, but she was not. She was only a person with a headache and a wad of cash and a box of snuff. She staggered into a decrepit coffee shop squeezed between a lingerie shop and a large empty storefront. She bought food—a limp sandwich of bacon and tomato trapped in a soggy bun—and a cup of coffee that smelled of dishwashing liquid. She couldn’t walk to find a respectable place to sit down, so she crouched in front of the empty storefront, her back pressed to a large faded mural. Luba’s fingers caressed the lid of the black box. Just one pinch of snuff would bring back that something which made her that woman who used to see all kinds of things she could not remember, that woman who would want her old self back. The now-Luba could only want to want that.

But no, she couldn’t use the snuff. There might not be enough for Maya.

Maya existed—a nine-year-old girl with a ponytail who was sick. She must get the box back to Maya. But there was no feeling behind these words. The words were screens to emptiness. She didn’t want to bring the box to Maya. She didn’t want anything, not even to open the box and sniff.

She fell asleep with her back against the mural. She couldn’t bother to move. In the early morning, she gathered herself enough to hail a taxi-cab. The driver charged her a fortune, muttering about her sour smell and dirt-stained clothes. She stared listlessly out of the window, tracing the rainclouds that peeked between skyscrapers. Her eyes followed the single-minded flight of pigeons, their feathers dull against the grey of the buildings that reflected the jaded sky.

The driver dropped her off at the tenement building she half-remembered, its once-yellow walls stained by generations of grime. Even as a new building it had never been respectable, built decades ago to house immigrants, and their children, and now their children’s children. Socks and underwear flapped on laundry lines between the windows. Luba stood at the bottom of the stairs for what must have been hours, inhaling the smell of vomit and rat droppings. The disapproving neighbours must have told Gramma at last, because the old woman limped down and painfully dragged her upstairs.

Luba resented Gramma’s too-familial touch, the dryness of her wrinkled and calloused hands; she wriggled away as soon as they were through the door. Gramma pried the black box from her fingers.

The half-remembered single room was beaten up, bare. The old woman leaned over a small bed under the apartment’s single window, obscuring it from Luba. In the middle of the room there was a small table with heaps of things on it—papers, plates, feathers, empty cans, shells. She would clean it later, throw the clutter away—but even after she cleaned up, it wouldn’t look half as nice as Mr. Tommogan’s. Luba tried to remember what his room looked like, recalled only glitter and mystery and a smell of polished wood. Nobody was sick in his family, nobody cried or fell asleep without waking or lay awake with battered hearts all night. Perhaps he didn’t have a family, only powdered dreams in snuffboxes that he would never use.

She heard laughter from the window, and a girl ran up to her—sallow-cheeked and thin, arms spread wide. Luba recoiled from the touch.

Maya stood on one leg, eyes downcast, biting her lip. Gramma came after her, patted the girl’s unruly hair. She frowned at Luba, then shoved something into her hands. A piece of dirty, crumpled paper.

She straightened it without interest.

There is an octopus in the heart of the Undersea …

It didn’t make sense, so she read it out loud.

… its every tentacle carries a street, a city, and at night when its people light their reading lamps the octopus shimmers …

“How can a tentacle carry a street?” Luba’s voice sounded harsh to her own ears.

“There was an evil wizard,” Maya said quickly, “who didn’t know what to do with this octopus, so when the octopus was asleep the wizard sprinkled it with powder. He thought the powder would kill it, but instead it woke up and a city grew on it.”

Nonsense.

She read on.

… sated with shining and the sound of the waves it floats in the centre of the sea, and one day a ship will come to it, tugged to shore by the struggling music of my heart. This ship will carry a hope …

“There is no sea anywhere near this city,” she said.

“No, Mommy, it’s right here.” Her daughter’s warm hand touched hers again, but this time Luba didn’t recoil. Maya knelt by the dusty blue rug, under the table. “If you put your ear to the carpet you can hear it, the Undersea …”

Luba knelt. Pressed her ear to the rug’s edge. There was a faint sound, like a very small wave; the lonely voice of a cello rose and filled the chambers of her chest. Its wood was polished pale, Luba suddenly remembered, reflecting his eyes, anxious, shining dark.

“Maya, would you like—” Would this help? How could this help? What hope could there ever be, what glistening wave would carry ships to shore, only to crush them against the tenement rocks of her life and grow quiet?

Luba took a breath. “Would you like me to tell you a story?”

Maya nodded, her face serious, her little hand still caressing her mother’s. Inside Luba’s heart, a grit of sand stirred.

(First published in Lackington's, 2014.)

Uncle Rod came back from Vietnam, broken like they all were, and danced.

He did Mountain Man “Rondy” historical reenactments, too, and held forth about how AIM was screwing everything up. I think. That’s what Mom says. I don’t remember him talking about it, so I don’t really know.

What I do know is that Uncle Rod taught me to dance. He took me to powwows ever since I was little. He helped me make and remake my dance regalia over the years. We spent countless hours on the living room floor, with him patiently explaining and all of my “Me do!” demands. There’s this photo of me with a Star Wars picture in my bustle. That one probably took extra patience. Later, Uncle Rod took me camping on the coast, where I learned about turning your tent away from the awesome view because it’ll be soaked by the awesome storm when you try to get in, and taking two pairs of boots and extra socks, and keeping Raven’s little jokers from stealing all the food. He also taught me how to do ceremony. That was pretty wrapped up in the camping. It’s hard to find dry, really dry, rocks for a sweat lodge in our woods. They blow up when you bake them if they’ve got moisture soaked into them. Trust me: not good.

To him, ceremony was sweat lodge and smoking the sacred pipe to pray. That’s mostly great, but we’re Mohawk. I don’t even know what the Mohigan way is. What the heck, right? We live in Seattle and everybody’s jumbled together. Wakan Tanka, Gitche Manitou, Sky Holder, Great Mystery. . . Most everybody says Grandfather knows us and what we mean. I guess. Going to sweat lodge feels good to me, feels pure. Anyway, it mostly worked for Uncle Rod.

As I got older, Uncle Rod did, too. He danced less, had less energy, and ended up diabetic. He’d get back into dancing and then fade out again every few years. I mostly kept with it—I made friends on what we call the Powwow Highway, and I loved the feeling of the big drums and the singers’ call and response. That, and the smell of sage and sweetgrass and cedar.

I think powwows are probably my ceremony, my prayer. That’s okay, too.

Rod got sicker and we didn’t really see him much. He lived in a trailer in the woods outside La Conner. I’d see him maybe three, four times a year. We always meant to see him more—I always meant to see him more—and yet, somehow, it didn’t happen. Lots of little right-nows got in the way. For years. You know how that is, I bet.

Uncle Rod collapsed in the front yard one day, went to the hospital. He didn’t come home. The whole family was pretty shocked—nobody saw him that often, but we always knew he’d be around, that he’d bring us some of his stories or a new project, hang out with the kids for hours, just be Uncle Rod. We expected it, even when life got crowded. When he got tired and couldn’t drive—we didn’t get out there or go fetch him in very often. He was just . . . always there. We weren’t ready for it when, suddenly, he wasn’t.

I wasn’t even decently through the list of I-shouldas and regrets when I found out all the dance regalia was coming to me. I kind of jumped on that. You know how it is: Lots of promises about how you’re going to honour so-and-so in your dancing. I remade all my regalia with his, wore everything I thought I had any right to. We spent some time finding people who could take his Eagle staff, but no one I could ask on the powwow circuit remembered him much. I used his war club and hung his Eagle bone whistle around my wrist. I danced with it all that winter and into the spring. I already fancy danced, so the war club was a cinch. I knew about Eagle bone whistles, how people would blow one when the music and dancing was really, really good—calling Eagle to come see our people, strong and alive and making things better. But it’s not something they talked about and I was a little intimidated to go ask questions, to admit I didn’t know anything about how to use the whistle I’d inherited. I didn’t know its history, its prayers, its previous holders. That would be admitting to all the conversations I could have had with Uncle Rod. And didn’t.

So I kept quiet about it and just danced.

A couple buddies of mine were driving to MSU for their big spring powwow, and invited me to go. Sure, why not? Three people and their regalia just about stuffed the old Vega, and off we went. The rest of their drum circle, the 253s, took an old blue van and packed in around the drum. The Rockies are even more epic as you drive through them. Never gets old, ridge after ridge, and then as you head through you start to see the deep ripples from Glacial Lake Missoula—it’s hard to imagine a lake with enough water to rise up the sides of ridges like that.

We all left Thursday night after work, traded off driving and dozing, caught showers and some real sleep at some second cousin’s in Spokane. We hit Bozeman stiff, hungry, and tired. We were glad to stretch out, get our blood flowing, and get dinner before it was time to dress for Grand Entry.

Lookin’ and dancin’ good at seven pm on a Friday only works if you’re local . . . or crazy and hoping for any edge on winning a few hundred bucks.

MSU’s powwow is huge, and no surprise there’s hundreds of people in the Fieldhouse on Friday night. The place still looks almost empty since it’s this huge indoor (of course—this is Montana) arena with bleachers and upper galleries and all of that, in a zone of campus that seems set aside for the big tourist/attendance stuff. The Museum of the Rockies, which has been posting billboards with “MOR this!” and “MOR that!” for miles and miles of I-90, is right there, too.

I wanted to go check out the dinos Saturday sometime. Walk off the frybread before evening competitions.

It was a good thing I wrapped myself around a huge dinner that night, though, because the place is just alive with energy. Even the greeting dance is fun. Usually, I’m just getting through the slow-stepping dance—shaking hands and smiling with all the tiny tots and Elders, being respectful. But, you know, getting on with things.

Tonight, it’s like everything is clicking—everything feels so good and right and like I can’t put a foot wrong. As a fancy dancer, that’s kind of a big thing. For the first time, I’m wishing I had bells on my leggings. If you’re off the beat at all, they give away your miscues; but when you’re on, they tell the world.

We get through the first Intertribals and I size up the other guys. There are mostly grass dancers out there, and maybe a dozen serious fancy dancers. I might actually have a shot at this. They’re good, but I’m feeling it, matching it, dancing with it so well . . . this powwow might be my win. That would be real good. Seven hundred dollars and a Pendleton—that’s some serious winnings, let me tell you.

Oh and the drum circles! 253 had a big success just getting to come out here and show their stuff, all young Tacomans from different Nations, and they’re kinda rebels—both women and men singing. A couple of drums are college groups, most are normal family drums carried by cousins but with uncles singing and babies crawling close. One drum has a different feel. They’re all vets, with patches on their black leather vests that showed their branch of service, what wars they knew too well, and some of what they’d earned and paid. I’d learned to read some of those patches from Uncle Rod. I’d given his vest to his motorcycle club. Looking at the veteran drum, I figure it’s a lot like the bike club. They’ve got family, camp chairs, and regalia stands in a ring around them like everyone else, but they’re the only ones on the drum. I bet they’re all in recovery, too, drumming their way out of PTSD.

Fair enough. Powwow, the drums, and the dancing have kept me mostly out of trouble. I’m only a part of NDNs-not-Anonymous.

Eight pm comes, and finally it’s time for the first men’s fancy: the Elders. Man, I’m just watching the footwork. It’s all in the timing; getting to hear the honour beats before they land is just the start. Telling a story with every movement precise and on is what it’s all about.

Everything’s amazing tonight. The drum circles rotate through the songs and 253 gets another Intertribal. Then it’s the vets’ drum with the Men’s Fancy. I sort of leap onto the floor—didn’t really mean to make that kind of an entry, but a bustle stand caught my foot. Somehow I land right—making it look cool—and freeze, waiting for the song.

I can’t believe it. I thought I was “on” before, but now? Now, it’s like lightning. The drum is a thunder inside me, my dancing crackles with energy. My moccasins spark when they touch the boards, and my club and shield move exactly with my mind and the story I’m dancing. Then I feel something reach up from deep, deep inside and head out my arm—I drop the shield, letting it hang from its straps, to grab and blow that Eagle whistle of Uncle Rod’s for the first time. This moment, this powwow, has got to be one for the spirits to see. The whistle breaks through the sound and movement, clear and high and old—so old.

The place darkens, and chills. Spirits crowd in. Large ones, broad ones, deep-roaring ones . . . and lots of small, sharp ones.

They come with clouds and lightning and winds. Their feel—alien minds and energies—is palpable. Dancers and drum all stutter to a stop. My first thought is that we’re being visited by Thunder Beings. Briefly, it seems the perfect answer to the amazing feel of the dancing here tonight.

They settle into shapes. Largest among them looms a figure I easily recognize. Thunder Lizard—a brontosaur? I forget what the new name is. But the image of that long, looping head and tail on that lump of a body is immediately recognizable. It sharpens, showing faded green-and-tan striped and branching patterns on its skin, a bit of leaf from its last lunch in its mouth. It peers at me quizzically, and I irrationally want to hand it spectacles.

Around it, the others become clearer, too. It looks like that entire “MOR dinos” exhibit is on the move. Guessing it came to me. Guessing that’s not a good thing.

Several triceratops-ish things, with brightly-coloured broad frills and these crinkled horns around their edges and one down in front, are clustered in tightly closed ranks, staring warily around them. A family, maybe. I wonder if there’s a baby in that press of bodies. Not gonna find out, I hope.

And an allosaurus. One is enough—even the jarringly bright red-gold diamond scale patterns look voracious. That head is just huge and mesmerizing, and those little arms, so stupidly pointless, just like all the jokes. They don’t even look like they reach its face. That allosaurus doesn’t need them, though. Mouth, check. Legs to move that mouth, check.

Behind them all, a dozen blue-yellow waist-high raptors scatter out of the mist, calling back and forth to one another like a basketball team. A big pack of demented Muppets, or chicken-dogs with fine feathers like hair running in manes down their necks.

All of them clarifying, materializing, until most everyone can see them. Shapes firm up, then comes the sounds of huge feet and things squashed and shoved aside, and then the smell hits.

Everyone panics—including the dinos.

Dancers, drummers, kids, dogs, and dinos scatter. Hundreds of people, most of them down on the fieldhouse arena floor suddenly want very much to be somewhere else. The ones who get across the court keep going. I would if I could. It’s just a good thing the raptors can’t fly, as people panic-clog the upper exits. The best I can do is to take cover among a pile of chairs next to that drum I’d blown the whistle on. I do, and take a look around me. It dawns on me that I’m alone with the dinos. Everyone who couldn’t get to an exit has huddled in a corner. I look up, trying to figure out what’s going on.

And there’re the veterans in their black leather vests, and dancers with their shields and war clubs raised, squaring off for battle. Men and a few women, putting themselves between Thunder Beings and the people, armed with only ceremonial weapons. Small chance that’ll work—and then I realize that these dinos are spirits. For all I know, maybe it will work.

The raptors charge the warriors, and recoil from them. I can’t tell what’s going on. It looks like the warriors are moving forward, and then I see one of the female vets fall back, bleeding from her scalp.

She’s bleeding! They’re REAL?

A ripple moves through the crowd, and then a WWII vet jabs with an Eagle staff and a raptor backs up, shaking its head. That catches the attention of the allosaurus. It looks over and loses interest in the chair it’s mauling. It moves in.

The raptors get out of the allosaurus’s way but weave around its feet.

The triceratops look like elephants; a sharp, pointy ring of horns and frills defends a corner. A woman I hadn’t seen—I guess she’d been hiding like me—gets up and walks over to them. She actually tries to apologize for the coalmines, tells them it’s desecrating their graves and that she gets that. I find myself nodding. Yeah, we know about that. Do they? Do dinosaur spirits wail over all the plastic in our world? She gets so passionate that she raises her voice. The biggest triceratops turns to face her squarely, and she doesn’t get the message. Must be more of a city NDN than I am, but no way am I going to get that thing’s attention by shouting a warning to her! That big bull stamps its feet, she reaches out to it, and the predictable happens. It spears her and flips her, and she hits the wall about twenty feet up before sliding back down. There’s a roar from across the room—where the allosaurus’s head is yanked back. That little WWII warrior is beneath it shouting triumphantly, doing a little dance before swiping at a couple raptors. Somewhere I can’t see, another warrior’s calling out orders.

The triceratops roars back and the allosaurus spins and retargets. It doesn’t look wounded, and the dinos begin focusing more on each other than our warriors—and the raptors act as the allosaurus’s groupies again. I never imagined how three triceratops could just face down an allosaurus. Those raptors are more effective, the way they work together—a coordinated pack of claws and teeth. They’re everywhere, trying to hamstring the triceratops and then scrambling up the brontosaur, driving it mad. I’d forgotten the bronto until then. It was behind me, not stomping around until the raptors. But now it’s slamming its neck against the ceiling and walls, trying to shake them off, staggering around and smashing everything in its path.

Where did they come from? One minute, I blew Uncle Rod’s Eagle bone whistle on the drum, the next, there’s a storm in the powwow and these Thunder Beings appear. The whistle still hangs from its strap around my wrist, and I look at it—really look at it. I'd fallen on several chairs with sharp edges—hard! I’m sure feeling it, but the whistle’s not broken. Looking close I notice a gouge in it that’s pushed up a curl of plastic. Plastic. Uncle Rod’s Eagle bone whistle is . . . plastic? Maybe that woman was onto something with her coalmine apology . . .

Here I am, hiding in a pile of overturned chairs from spirit dinosaurs at a powwow in a state I’ve never been to before, and I’m wondering if a plastic whistle could call the beings from which it was made. Plastic from oil from dinos. Pissed off dinos. Very, very pissed off dinos.

The next thing I wonder is what would happen if I blow the whistle again. Or maybe suck air back through it? I wish I could get to that one feisty Elder. I bet he’d know.

Caught up in that idea of getting the whistle to that Elder, I stand up and call out to him. My brain completely fails me here, I’ll admit. I literally stand up, wave the whistle and shout, “Grandfather, the Eagle bone whistle is made of dinos—it’s plastic!”

And that allosaurus doesn’t miss a trick. It gives up on the triceratops and spins, looking for the noise. It thunders its way across the arena to loom over my insignificant pile of chairs. Of course it spots me. Those enormous eyes nail me to the floor, and I duck down, but it’s too late. Those teeth like scythes come darting in as its head snaps down—and snaps me right up. I don’t think it even chewed.

I don’t know what happened next. I got gulped down, I get that part. But the rest . . . I don’t feel dead. I don’t feel pain. I don’t feel all chewed up and swallowed. I don’t feel at all. I’m . . . I’m . . . I don’t think I’m in my body anymore.

I don’t even know where my body is. It might just be dead, but maybe it’ll end up drooling, brain-dead in some ICU somewhere. ’Cause this spirit-me isn’t in there.

I shouldn’t be a spirit-me. I haven’t done anything, been anything, earned anything. And I didn’t exactly die with something big I had to take care of. I don’t get it. But I can roll with it. I’m a ghost now. Or spirit. Or, well, something. But I’m also inside the allosaurus. Feels kind of like I’m part of it—like my spirit is. Feels like I’m riding the allosaurus spirit, now, or becoming one with it. . . Look, I don’t know.

I shake my head, and the allo-head moves with it. Wiggle my toes—yup. But then the allosaurus takes over again and looks around. Okay, so I’m probably not in charge. Who shook their head first? Me or him? That’s gonna be crazy making. Let’s just stick with “I don’t know.”

The allosaurus—it, me—sees moving creatures below. Food. Or pests. It’s got the same answer for either, that tiny brain thinking like a lagging game controller. Up, down, left, right, circle, stomp, bite. Oh, and roar. It really likes to do that after stomp or bite. Somewhere, dimly, I should know something about the little pointy animals. Kind of bothers me that I can’t figure it out, but it’s feeling less important by the moment.

And, you know, suddenly this looks like a whole heck of a lot of fun. Talk about living large and in charge! We’re gonna go stomp some things, just to feel them crunch under our allo-toes. Starting with those annoying things making noise down there. Or the triceratops. I hate those. This one grunting at me, it thinks it’s tough. We’re gonna have us some fun! STOMP! CHOMP! ROOOOOAR! Ooooohhhh yeah. This is gonna be AWESOME!

C’mere, little three-horned munch. Come out from the shield of your herd. I’m hungry.

(First published in Anathema: Spec from the Margins, 2018.)

We didn’t want your nail clippings or your blood. Your laughter, or tears, would do. That strange light you saw drifting where a shadow should be, was the promise mother made when she bore us. Where we lived, there would always be sun. Where we go, there would always be light. That star never scarred or scared us. Even in the face of our father, the sun’s blistering gaze, we were the daughters of night.

On that first journey across the waters, we held each other close. When we shut our eyes we floated on azure sleep, lifted by wave upon wave, until the darkness behind our golden lids became lonelier still. Before they trapped us, we bathed in leaves, bark, stones, and spice. We sang no fear. We knew. Ancestors descend when needed. Spirits rise when called. It was the way of the world, the way day follows night and moon, mother said, it was moon who follows ocean’s call. For it was the water that carried us in the womb and water that reigns supreme.

When they chased us from the village into the forest, when we fell into the arms of ghosts, we knew we would have to feed, our worries and our appetites, replanted in strange, disordered lands. With lowered eyes we watched the traders, whose skin was the color of clay, the wet earth that came from waters, the moon clay our mother and her sisters used to mark their territory. From the way the ghosts moved, the way they stared through us, barking out words that sounded like insanity falling, we knew. The clay moon ghosts believed wherever they walked, wherever their square toes landed, was their territory. We sang the song of our mother, sang the songs that came before. Force marched through a door of no return, we wore our chains like an elder’s gold, carried our song inside, still waters flecked with shards of moonlight. Three days later we entered the dark maw of what the ghosts called ship. We lay in the bottom of the belly with the others. We lay in the noise and the filth with the mothers, and the sisters, and the daughters, listened to their dirge song of shrieks, moans, the twisting of tongues, the deaths of worlds yet born. We did not speak with words but with feelings. Ours was the language of survival, flight.

Mistress Godwin was a laughing girl, a mere child, barely a woman when we joined her. Her cheeks and eyes still flushed with the sounds of mirth. Disappointment had not yet clawed its way into her heart. Her breasts were hard blossoms yet to break earth. Mistress, we sang, Mistress Godwin, but she did not speak or smile. In this strange land, dead tongues no longer answered us. God wins, we laughed, god wins, we cried. The sound of our pleasure frightened the blackbirds in the trees.

When they found her, her skin had grown pale, her temples the color of sour milk. We only meant to take a little, but the hunger had long since overtaken us. We wanted to taste the sound of her laughter, to let the womanchild’s joy fill the hollows that hid deep inside. Like the ghosts, we took too much, and just like them, we were not ashamed.

Thirst is thirst.

When the good mistress grew still and joined whatever cold ancestors that claimed her, we dropped the slop bucket in the field, left the dough rising in the wooden bowl, abandoned our chores. We drained the others and fled, taking their laughter with us. Into the wild forest, we ran, cousin to the bush that once betrayed us. We hid in wildness. We hid in plain sight. In hickory and peepaw and loblolly pine, in the light that has always claimed us.

We waited. Sparkling light where shadows should be. The blackbirds visited, kept us company in the silent years when even the first ones marked our hunting ground in the language of their fear. Croatoan, they later said, croatoan carved into the heart of a tree. But no tongue has found the right tones to name us. Twenty years later, finally, the blackbirds crowed good news. When the new beast arrived, it bore one hundred and twenty souls, but none like us were in its belly. We took what sustenance we could from the joyless ones who struggled to make the dry-bone land home. In time, their parched throats would rival our own, for the old gods of this land refused to send rain. And thirst is thirst.

Leaf, ghosts, earth, light. We suffered together. Finally, when we had grown so weak, our light only the spark of fireflies, twenty and odd men joined the colony. A few suns later, a woman appeared. Angelo. Angela. Their ebon skin and eyes stirred memory, the ghost of their laughter refracted light of our own. The sound, infrequent as it was, reminded us of home. And because we are our mother’s daughters, we left the men and the lone woman who could be kin. After the journey across the big water, their bodies held such little joy, we were ashamed to drain them. We knew. Even in strange lands, old seeds release fresh roots. Eyes stinging with memory, we fled again, taking the silver shards of light with us.

We left temptation and the shadows and something close to sorrow. We buried thirst and the seed of ourselves deep within the forests. And the years passed through us. Past the cypress and the oaks. The memory of laughter floating around, dust motes in sunlight. With time, memory became our only home.

The old home was a memory time would not let us forget.

Some night-days we dream. Our thoughts are upside down.

We hang from our feet in the limbs of thick-boned trees.

The blackbirds come and sing to us. They say we have become the language of fear, the hushed gasps and breath around open fires. But the stories they teach are wrong. Darkness is not the only thing to fear. Sometimes the dark is hidden in light. Once girls, we have grown old here. Once girls, our hearts have become hard like the mottled bark of the strange trees that grow here. There are layers to this loneliness. We feel its bite. Its teeth are sharp. Hard things hold beauty, too. The world we live in is a fire. The people we love all burn. Ever hungry, our red gum smiles hide the empty pit within. We know. Legends rise from all the broken places, emerge from the stories and the memories, the half-remembered and the ill-formed, all melded together, united in one. In this land we are like moons who have lost their water. We no longer hear the ocean’s call. If water no longer speaks to us, are we still our mother’s daughters?

The parts that make us monsters are not the teeth or the heart but the mind.

The part that makes us monsters is bone and sinew, spirit and flesh.

We have not been ourselves here. We will not be ourselves here.

We are always ourselves here.

We are always

here.

(First published in Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future, 2020.)

This is a city of many faces. It folds itself into dark corners. It stretches out its fingers of neon signs and asphalt. It unrolls itself like a magic carpet. It changes from day to day. It had a heart that beats in the center, though no one knows where the center is. This is a city of paths and destinations. A hundred thousand people make their way through the maze. Their paths meet and cross; they leave their trails of broken hearts and bread crumbs behind them. They think their ways are secret, their desires unknown. But they are like ants in an ant farm: Anyone watching from above can see exactly where they are going and where they have been.

Mr. and Mrs. Clark stand on a street corner. They are looking for the Theater District. They are visiting their daughter here in the city for the first time. They are to meet her for an evening show. She had offered to make arrangement for them, but Mr. Clark said, “What? Do you think we’re senior citizens already? We can take care of ourselves, thank you.” But now they are lost; they have wandered far from their hotel and the streets are unfamiliar. The boys playing on the sidewalk speak in foreign tongues. Some have no shirts; some have no shoes. Mr. Clark has a thick red neck. He is perspiring a bit. Mrs. Clark clutches his arm, not because she loves but because her new shoes are too tight. Now Mr. Clark looks for a cab, then tries to make sense of the street signs. Mrs. Clark tries to ask directions of the boys. They laugh and call her “fat lady” in their own language, but she understands them anyway. She turns away from them, lips trembling, and says, “We’re going to miss it, aren’t we? We’re going to miss the show.”

You’re lost. Or you’re looking for something. You’re trying to find your way. You turn a corner, then another—no, that’s not it. The streets all look the same, but they change their stripes as soon as you turn your back. You need a guide; you need a map. You walk with your collar turned up and your chin sunk in. The sun’s going down, the streets are empty, and it’s getting later and later. The something that you’re looking for is waiting for you to find it, but it won’t wait forever.

Gordon sits on the examining table in his underwear and a paper rob. His feet are very, very cold. “I’m sorry,” says the doctor. “I have some bad news.” “Yes,” says Gordon. The doctor shows him shadowy pictures of his insides. The doctor points to this dark splotch and that one, and tells him a long, dull story about the microscopic things in his blood. “I see,” says Gordon. “I’m sorry,” says the doctor. Gordan says, “How long do I have?” “According to the statistics, you have about five to ten years. But they could be wrong.” “five years. Five years,” says Gordon. “Five years or fifty thousand miles, is that it? Is that my warranty?” The doctor has no sense of humor. He is a bald man, all business. Gordon looks with envy at the doctor’s bald head. Then he puts on his clothes and leaves. Outside, the receptionist tells him that his fly is undone. She is white-haired and wrinkled. Gordon looks covetously at the wrinkles in her face, the soft folds of her, and her twisted fingers.

The city wakes and stretches itself like a cat. New neighborhoods spring up overnight like tropical jungles. Old neighborhoods die majestically, slowly sinking to their knees in the muck like dying dinosaurs. The old theaters are the last to go, the gilded palaces filled with ghosts of music. They groan and settle and ex[ire with a wheeze, and then there is only dust.

Natalie is a practical girl. Not about money or everyday things. She is practical with her heart. When she loves, she does it efficiently and well. Her heart is reliable. She has two arms and two legs and her hair is red. Just yesterday she lost something. She lost it to a man she thought she loved, and then afterward he put his hand on her thigh in a proprietary way and told her about his wife. Most girls would have slapped and cried, to have lost what she did, to a man like that. But not Natalie. She is a practical girl. She put on her shoes and she put on her coat, and she went out into the street and started walking. And she’s still walking today. She’s searching. She’s a practical girl—she lost something and now she’s going to get it back. “I’ll find it,” she says, “I’ll find what he took from me.”

You’re still looking. You’ll never find it. You know it’s here somewhere, but this city keeps teasing and changing in the corner of your eye. You’re about to give up—but then you look up from the sidewalk and there it is—the map shop, wedged in between the skyscrapers. It’s there waiting for you. Low, sagging, with a mansard roof like a hat pulled low on the brow. MAPS—GUIDEBOOKS—DIRECTIONS reads the sign. What a coincidence, you say to yourself, that it should be right there, right when I need it.

“Five years or fifty thousand miles,” says Gordon as he walks the streets with his hands in his pockets and stubble on his face. He passes the lit windows of shops: stuffed animals, grapefruits, shiny dresses on mannequins that gaze at him longingly. What should I do now, what should I do? he sings in his head. Quit my job? Spend my savings? Do I have time to love a beautiful woman, start a family, star in a movie, study Zen? Is there time to do anything before the time’s up? Maybe, he thinks, if I don’t have much of anything, it will be easier to give it all up. Maybe I should keep walking and walking, use up my miles as fast as possible, get it over with. Then I’ll never have to know what I’m missing.

You’re looking at the sign, peering in the windows. They’re coated with dust, broken, patched with cardboard. What a coincidence, you say. But’s not a coincidence at all. It’s simply practical. People who know where they are don’t need maps; those who are lost do. So naturally, the mapmaker has situated his shop in the place where people are lost, the place where demand is greatest. The mapmaker and his shop are waiting here for you. He saw you coming; he put himself in your path. The map shop is here especially for you, like the gingerbread house in the heart of the deep dark forest.

“Look—maps,” says Mr. Clark. He’s hurrying up the sidewalk, mopping his neck with a handkerchief. Mrs. Clark wobbles after. “Surely they can at least give us directions,” he says. The place looks deserted, some of the windows broken. He reaches for the doorknob. It is shaped like a fish and slithers in his hand. They push their way inside. And inside—maps. Rolls and rolls of them, on shelves, pinned to the walls, lying crumbling in corners. Blurred splotches of color. Thin tangles of line that trail into nothing. “This isn’t what we need,” Mrs. Clark clucks. “Can I help you?” says the man behind the counter. “We’re lost,” says Mr. Clark. “I see,” says the man. “Theater District,” says Mrs. Clark, and stumbles against Mr. Clark in her tight shoes. “Sorry. lost my balance,” she gasps. “One thing at a time,” says the mapmaker.

Two men, in a booth, in a bar. Slouching before two glasses of beer. Victor has black greasy hair like Elvis. Nick has Elvis’ soft, pouty mouth. “Here’s the deal. It’s simple,” says Victor. “Yeah,” says Nick. Victor says, “We got the tools; we know the codes. It’s a cinch once we get in there. We can take it all.” Nick says, “Right.” Victor: “But we’re gonna need a way in. There’s got to be a way.” Nick: “Yeah.” Victor: “Yeah, maybe through the basements? Underneath? You think?” Nick: “Yeah. Sure.” Victor: “Maybe a garbage chute? The subway carries garbage; some buildings have a tunnel going straight down there.” Nick: “Yeah.” Victor: “Can’t you say anything useful?” Nick thinks for a while and says: “Yeah.” Victor grabs him by the hair and knocks his head against the table twice, spills the beer, and laughs.

Natalie walks the streets. She looks for what she lost. She looks in grocery stores and in alleys. She looks on park benches. She wanders through hotel hallways, watching the maids airing out the rooms and killing last night’s sweaty ghosts. She watches the people leaving the movie houses with their eyes glazed and dreamy, full of distant cities and music and imagined touches. She asks prostitutes and drag queens if they have seen it—the thing she lost. “Sorry, honey,” they say, “everybody knows once your lost that, you don’t ever get it back.” She knows that in a way there are right. But in a way they are not.

You go inside the map shop. Inside it is like a church gone to seed. High ceiling, stained-glass windows, a holy hush, the pews replaced by shelves. You almost wish it was a church. You would like that sort of guidance. Here are maps. Hundreds of maps in curling piles. Fantastic faded colors. Delicate lines across the paper like a lover’s hair on the pillowcase. Street maps as intricate as the designs on a computer chip. Continents cramped into strange new shapes: a dog begging, a charm bracelet of island, a centaur, a toilet set. Maps in which sea monsters, mermaids, and watery gods are drawn where the oceans spread into the unknown. The best parts, you think, are these unknown regions.

The wife says I should take a vacation. She says to me, “You should close up shop, take some days off.” I tell her I can’t, but she doesn’t understand. “Your back,” she says, “you’re straining your eyes, and your arthritis. You’re old; you should retire.” “This is my job,” I tell her. “These people need me. What can I do?” “Let’s take a trip,” she begs. Let’s go to another city. You draw maps of a new place if you want.” I tell her a new place wouldn’t make any difference, but she doesn’t understand.

The map shop finds. Gordon. It seems to spring up out of the ground in front of him. He has been walking for days, nonstop, and he bumps his nose on the wall before he sees it. “Maps,” he says. “Hmmm.” He scratches the stubble on his face. He pushes open the door and steps inside. “Can I help you?” says the mapmaker. “Maybe,” says Gordon. “I’m looking,” he says. He looks at the mapmaker, who has wrinkles grooved deep in his face, marking his age like the rings in a tree. Gordon sighs. “I’m looking for something. A place I can go to. A destination. A reason to keep going. Do you have anything like that?”

“A simple street map,” says Mr. Clark, “of the neighborhood. A subway map even. Don’t you have anything like that?” Mrs. Clark says, “The Theater District. Everybody knows where that is!” The map-maker looks at them blankly. “I’ll do my best,” he says, and sharpens his pencil. “We’re going to be late,” mutters Mr. Clark. Mrs. Clark moans, “She’ll think we’re getting senile.”

Natalie goes to the map shop. She makes a beeline for it; she knows it is there. She’s a sensible girl. As she goes inside, the bell on the door tinkles. She goes to the counter and explains what she is looking for. “I see,” says the mapmaker. He looks at the gooseflesh on her bare legs and blisters on her heels. “I have something for you,” he says, and hands her a roll of paper. She studies it. “I don’t see anything,” she says. “You will,” he says. “Well, thank you.” She is as polite as ever, gives him everything in her pocket—a bus token and $3.45. He takes it with a gallant bow.

You ask the mapmaker if he has a map for you. He looks at your face and then takes your hands and studies the whorls and lines of your fingertips. His hair is white; his eyes are deep; his skin is dry and paper-thin. “I might have something,” he says.

“There is a map for you,” says the mapmaker, “but I don’t have it. It’s a map you have to find yourself.” “Then can you give me a map to find that map?” says Gordon. “Sorry,” says the mapmaker. “I see,” says Gordon sadly. He turns and leaves, and the bell on the door rings softly after him.

“I need a map,” says victor, who has found the map shop even though it tried to hide from him. He says, “I need a map of the underground.” “The underground?” says the mapmaker. “Yeah,” says Nick. Victor says, “You know, a map of the subways and basements and things in the city. Infrastructure. Don’t you have anything like that?” The mapmaker says, “The underground? Is that like the underworld?” Nick says, “Yeah.” Victor say, “Yeah, I guess. You got anything like that? Something for the neighborhood around the First National?” The mapmaker smiles and says, “I do.”

Natalie steps outside and studies her map. Now she sees a line on it, starting in the middle and snaking to the right. So she turns to her right and beings walking. At the corner she stops and consults the map. The line has hooked to the left and now she can see it moving, bleeding across the paper in a decisive way. She turns left and follows it.

The mapmaker knows you. Some people say he can follow you everywhere. Your shadow is like the ink spot the mapmaker traces to draw your path. Some say he has your future and fate drawn out in the lines on his map, indelible as the lines on your hand, and as he watches you walk the paths of your like, he is proud of his handiwork. You don’t know what to think, but you look into his piercing hawk eyes and feel his talon grip on your wrist, and you are suddenly not sure you want to see the map he has for you.

“The Theater District,” says Mrs. Clark, as if it will help the mapmaker understand. She leans against her husband. Mr. Clark clears his throat in annoyance. The mapmaker bends over his work.

Gordon wanders the streets, not looking for anything. He tries to remember his mother’s face, the laugh of a friend, the dog that was a childhood companion, his toy soldiers. They are all gone, all lost. The streets are cold underfoot. He will not stop walking.

Victor and Nick wear dark clothes and leather gloves. They have made arrangement. They carry their tools and heavy metal things and ski masks. They follow the map, the map that the mapmaker gave them. They follow it down the streets, down some stairs, down below the subway, through hidden passages, down and down and down. Past pipes and rats and blasts of steam, down into the underbelly of the city. “This map is incredible,” says Victor.

Natalie follows her map. She follows the line as it wanders over the page, bending, turning, twisting back on itself like a restless sleeper. She’s determined; she will reach the end. Her feet hurt terribly.

You take the map he gives you. You fold it in your hands and go out to the street. You decide you’ll look at it later. But you wonder if he has, back in his shop, a master map with every person’s life drawn out neat and indelible, all the paths that cross and join and separate, all the lives that run parallel and never meet at all. You wonder if he is laughing as he draws the thoughts you are thinking right now, to amuse himself.

Gordon stops walking. The world stops flowing past him. It holds still so he can look. He looks up at the buildings, so high that they nearly meet over his head. He looks at the neat lines and squares beneath his feet. The children playing on the corner speak another language. He is lost, and there is no map shop.

“What’s this?” says Mr. Clark as the mapmaker hands him a piece of paper. “That will take you where you want to go,” the mapmaker says. “I can’t read it,” Mr. Clark says. “Let me see,” says Mrs. Clark, and snatches it from him. The shop is dim; she takes it to the door to read it in the twilight from outside. “I can’t—” she says as the door bangs open with a gust of wind, and the paper is swept out of her hand.

Natalie is near the end; she can feel it.

Down stairs and ladders, through passages where the rats look up, surprised at being disturbed. Moisture drips down the walls. “This is terrific,” says Victor. “We should be getting there soon.” Nick says, “It’s really hot down here.”

Natalie’s map has ceased to move. She folds it and puts it in her pocket and looks up. She sees a man sitting on a stoop, watching her. “Hello, she says. He says, “Hello. I’m so tired.” He has a grizzled ace and kind eyes. She says, “I am, too.” She sits beside him. He opens his mouth and so dos he and they talk for hours, gazing at each other and at the little section of starry sky visible between the buildings.

Mr. Clark chases the bit of paper as it blows down the street. “Damn it!” he cries, and runs after it, panting. “Wait!” cries Mrs. Clark. She takes off her shoes and flies after him, her breasts bouncing, her shoes in hand. She runs like a gazelle, in leaps and bounds, chasing her husband as he chases the paper. Mrs. Clark has found her balance.

Victor and Nick reach a metal platform surrounded by a railing. They lean over and stare into a chasm. Nick wipes his forehead. “It’s so hot in here. Very, very hot,” he says. “Shut up,” says Victor. “We have to go on.” “Down there?” says Nick. Victor says, “That’s what the map says. Do you see a ladder?” And then a fiery breath heaves out of the chasm, bringing with it a hot burning smell and shrill screaming echoes. “Did you hear that?” says Nick. “It’s the subway, jerk,” says Victor. And the two of them make their way down.

Gordon stands and asks her to come home with him. She consults her maps and finds that this is the right thing to do. She knows it is, but she is a practical girl and wants to make sure. They walk to Gordon’s apartment. She takes off her coat and she takes off her shoes. And then he sees it—the curves and shapes and colors. He puts his finger on her arm, on a thin blue vein that bends and branches like a river. He explores the texture of her skin, the shape of her coastline, her temperate regions, the mountains and valleys that poets write about. She is warm and wet and dry and large and small all at once. She is a country he can live in. Here is a place he can be.

Natalie is a practical girl. She knows she has not found the thing she lost. But she has found something else, something better.

The paper blows, dancing on the wind, and Mr. Clark follows, cursing and sweating, Mrs. Clark skipping with her newfound lightness, and the paper leads them in a fluttering, flailing dance all the way to the Theater District.

You can’t resist. You look at the map he gave you. You see wondrous colors and dancing shapes; everything you want is spread out on the paper, waiting for you. It is just what you wanted. And so you go on your way, feeling secure that now everything will be all right; the mapmaker says so.

Back in his shop, the mapmaker sits over his master map, watching the paths converge. He smiles at your thoughts, and then he leans on his head on his hand. He sleeps. He sleeps, and dreams of dandelions and tiger lilies that roar in foreign lands. In his sleep he reaches out to stroke them, and he knocks over his pot of ink, and it spills all over the map, and all your lives take a glorious, disastrous, unexpected turn.

(“Directions” from Flying Leap: Stories by Judy Budnitz. Copyright © 1997 by Judy Budnitz. Reprinted by permission of Picador.

Original publisher's copyright statement: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.)

“You work as what, a fisherman?”

I nearly jump clean out my skin at the sound of she voice, tough like sugarcane when you done chew the fibres dry. “Fisherm …?” I stutter.

She sweet like cane, too? Shame make me fling the thought ’way from me. Lord Jesus, is what make me come here any atall? I turn away from the window, from the pure wonder of watching through one big piece of clear glass at the hibiscus bush outside. Only Boysie house in the village have a glass window, and it have a crack running crossways through it. The rest of we have wooden jalousie shutters. I look back at she proud, round face with the plucked brows and the lipstick red on she plump lips. The words fall out from my mouth: “I … I stink of fish, don’t it?”

A smile spread on she beautiful brown face, like when you draw your finger through molasses on a plate. “Sit down nuh, doux-doux, you in your nice clean pressed white shirt? I glad you dress up to come and see me.”

“All right.” I siddown right to the edge of the chair with my hands in my lap, not holding the chair arms. I frighten for leave even a sniff of fish on the expensive tapestry. Everything in this cathouse worth more than me. I frighten for touch anything, least of all the glory of the woman standing in front of me now, bubbies and hips pushing out of she dress, forcing the cloth to shape like the roundness of she. The women where I living all look like what them does do: market woman, shave ice seller, baby mother. But she look like a picture in a magazine. Is silk that she wearing? How I to know, I who only make for wear crocus bag shirt and Daddy old dungarees?

She move little closer, till she nearly touching my knees. From outside in the parlour I hearing two-three of the boys and them laughing over shots of red rum and talking with some of the whores that ain’t working for the moment. I hear Lennie voice, and Two-Tone, though I can’t really make out what them saying. Them done already? I draw back little more on the fancy chair.

The woman frown at me as if to say, Who you is any atall? The look on she face put me in mind of how you does look when you pull up your line out of the water sometimes to find a ugly fish gasping on the end of it, and instead of a fin, it have a small hand with three boneless fingers where no hand supposed to grow. She say, “You have a fainty smell of the sea hanging round you, is all, like this seashell here.”

She lean over and pick up a big conch shell from she windowsill. It clean and pink on the inside with pointy brown parts jooking out on the outside.

She wearing a perfume I can’t even describe, my head too full up with confusion. Something like how Granny did smell that time when I was small and Daddy take me to visit she in town. Granny did smell all baby powder and coconut grater-cake. Something like the Ladies-of-the-Night flowers too, that does bloom in my garden.

I slide back little more again in the chair, but she only move closer. “Here,” she say, putting the shell to my nose. “Smell.”

I sniff. Is the smell I smell every living day Papa God bring, when I baking my behind out on the boat in the sun hot and callousing up my hands pulling in the net next to the rest of the fishermen and them. I ain’t know what to say to she, so I make a noise like, “Mm …?”

“Don’t that nice?” She laugh a little bit, siddown in my lap, all warm, covering both my legs, the solid, sure weight and the perfume of she.

My heart start to fire budupbudup in my chest.

She say, “Don’t that just get all up inside your nose and make you think of the blue waves dancing, and the little red crabs running sideways and waving they big gundy claw at you, and that green green frilly seaweed that look like it would taste fresh like lettuce in your mouth? Don’t that smell make your mind run on the sea?”

“It make my mind run on work,” I tell she.

She smile little bit. She put the shell back. “Work done for tonight,” she tell me. “Now is time to play.” She smoky laugh come in cracked and full up of holes. She voice put me in mind of the big rusty bell down by the beach what we does ring when we pull in the catch to let the women and them know them could come and buy fish. Through them holes in the bell you could hear the sea waves crashing on the beach. Sometimes I does feel to ring the bell just for so, just to hear the tongue of the clapper shout “fish, fish!” in it bright, break-up voice, but I have more sense than to make the village women mad at me.

She chest brush my arm as she lean over. She start to undo my shirt buttons. No, not the shirt. I take she hands and hold them in my own, hold her soft hands in my two hard own that smell like dead fish and fish scale and fish entrails.

The madam smile and run a warm, soft finger over my lips. I woulda push she off me right then and run go home. In fact I make to do it, but she pick up she two feet from off the floor and is then I get to feel the full weight and solidness of she.

“You go throw me off onto the hard ground, then?” she say with a flirty smile in she voice.

One time, five fifty-pound sack of chicken feed tumble from Boysie truck and land on me; two hundred fifty pounds drop me baps to the ground. Boysie had was to come and pull me out. Is heavy same way so she feel in my lap, grounding me. This woman wasn’t going nowhere she ain’t want to go.

“I …” I start to reply, and she lean she face in close to mine, frowning at me the whole while like if I is a grouper with a freak hand. She put she two lips on my own. I frighten I frighten I frighten so till my breath catch like fish bone in my throat. Warm and soft she mouth feel against mine, so soft. My mouth was little bit open. I ain’t know if to close it, if to back back, if to laugh. I ain’t know this thing that people does do, I never do it before. The sea bear Daddy away before he could tell me about it.

She breath come in between my lips. Papa God, why nobody ever tell me you could taste the spice and warmth of somebody breath and never want to draw your face away again? Something warm and wet touch inside my lips and pull away, like a wave on a beach. She tongue! Nasty! I jerk my head, but she have it holding between she two hands, soft hands with the strength of fishing net. I feel the slip slip slip of she tongue again. She must be know what she doing. I let myself taste, and I realise it ain’t so nasty in truth, just hot and wet with the life of she. My own tongue reach out, trembling, and tip to twiny conch tip touch she own. She mouth water and mine mingle. It have a tear in the corner of one of my eyes, I feel it twinkling there. I hear a small sound start from the back of my throat. When she move she face away from me, I nearly beg she not to stop.

She grin at me. My breath only coming in little sips, I feeling feverish, and what happening down between my legs I ain’t even want to think about. I strong. I could move my head away, even though she still holding it. But I don’t want to be rude. I cast my eyes down instead and find myself staring at the two fat bubbies spilling out of she dress, round and full like the hops bread you does eat with shark, but brown, skin-dark brown.

I pull my eyes up into she face again.

“Listen to me now,” she say. “I do that because I feel to. If you want to kiss the other women so you must ask permission first. Else them might box you two lick and scream for Jackobennie. You understand me?”

Jackobennie is the man who let me in the door of this cathouse, smirking at me like he know all my secrets. Jackobennie have a chest a bull would give he life to own and a right arm to make a leg of ham jealous. I don’t want to cross Jackobennie atall atall.

“You understand me?” she ask again.

Daddy always used to say my mouth would get me in trouble. I open it to answer she yes, and what the rascal mouth say but, “No, I ain’t understand. Why I could lick inside your mouth like that but not them own? I could pay.”

She laugh that belly laugh till I think my thighs go break from the shaking. “Oh sweetness, I believe a treasure come in my door this day, a jewel beyond price.”

“Don’t laugh at me.” If is one thing I can’t brook, is nobody laughing at me. The fishermen did never want me to be one of them. I had was to show up at the boat every blessèd morning and listen to the nasty things them was saying about me. Had to work beside people who would spit just to look on me. Till them come to realise I could do the work too. I hear enough mockery, get enough mako make ’pon me to last all my days.

She look right in my eyes, right on through to my soul. She nod. “I would never laugh after you, my brave one, to waltz in here in your fisherman clothes.”

Is only the fisherman she could see? “No, is not my work clothes I wearing. Is my good pair of pants and my nice brown shoes.”

“And you even shine the shoes and all. And press a crease into the pants. I see that. I does notice when people dress up for me. And Jackobennie tell me you bring more than enough money. That nice, sweetness. I realise is your first time here. Is only the rules of my house I telling you; whatever you want to do, you must ask the girls and they first. And them have the right to refuse.”

After I don’t even know what to ask! Pastor would call it the sin of pride, to waltz in the place thinking my money could stand in place of good manners. “I sorry, Missis; I ain’t know.”

Surprise flare on she face. She draw back little bit to look at me good. “And like you really sorry, too. Yes, you is a treasure, all right. No need to be sorry, darling. You ain’t do nothing wrong.”

The Ladies-of-the-Night scent of she going all up inside my nostrils. The other men and they does laugh after me that I have a flower bush growing beside the pigeon peas and the tomatoes, so womanish, but I like to cut the flowers and put inside the house to brighten up the place with their softness and sweet smell. I have a blue glass bottle that I find wash up on the shore one day. The sand had scour it so it wasn’t shining like glass no more. But all the waves smash it, it ain’t break yet. From the licking of the sea and the scraping of the sand, it had a texture under my fingertips like stone. I like that. I does put the flowers in it and put them on my table, the one what Daddy help me make.

“So, why you never come with the other fishermen? When you pull up to the dock all by yourself in that little dinghy, I get suspicious one time. I never see you before.”

All the while she talking, and me mesmerized by she serious brown eyes, and too much to feel and think about at once, I never realise she did sliding she hand down inside my blouse, down until she fingers and thumb slide round one of my bubbies and feel the weight of it. Jesus Lord, she go call Jackobennie now! I make to jump up again, terror making me stronger, but this time she look at me with kindness. It make me weak. “Big strong woman,” she whisper.

She know! All this time, she know? I couldn’t move from that chair, even if Papa God heself was to come down to earth and command me. I just sitting there, weak and trembling, while she undo the shirt slow, one button at a time, drag it out of my pants, and lay my bubbies bare to the open air. The nipples crinkle up one time and I shame I shame. Nothing to do but sit there, exposed and trembling like conch when you drag it out of the shell to die.

I squinch my eyes closed tight, but I feel a hot tear escape from under my eyelid and track down my face. So long nobody ain’t see me cry. I feel to dead. I wait to hear the scorn from she dry-ashes voice.

“Sweetheart?” Gentle hands closing back my shirt, but not drawing away; resting warm on the fat shameful weight of my bubbies. “Mister Fisherman?”

Yes. Is that I is. A fisherman. I draw in the breath I been keeping out, a long, shuddery one. She hands rise and fall with my chest. I open my eyes, but I can’t stand to look in she face. I away gaze out the window, past the clean pink shell to the blue wall of the sea far away. What make me leave my home this day any atall, eh?

“Look at me, nuh? What you name?”

I dash way the tear with the back of my hand, sniff back the snot. “K.C.”

“Casey?”

“Letter K, letter C. For ‘Kelly Carol’: K.C. I sorry I take up your time, Missis. You want me to go?” I chance a quick glance at her. She get that weighing and measuring look again. The warmth of she hands through my shirt feeling nice. Can’t think ’bout that.

“Why you come here in the first place, K.C.?”

I tilt my head away from her, look down at my shoes, my nice shine shoes. Oh God, how to explain? “Is just I … look, I not make for this, I not a … I did only want some company, the way the other men and they does talk about all the time. All blessèd week we pulling on the nets together, all of we. And some of the men does even treat me like one of them, you know? A fisherman, doing my job. Then Saturday nights after we go to market them does leave me and come here, even Lennie, and I hear next day how sweet allyou is, all of allyou in this cathouse. Every week it happen so and every Saturday night I stay home in my wattle and daub hut and watch at the kerosene lamp burning till is time to go to bed. Nobody but me. But I catch plenty fish and sell in the market today, I had enough money, and after them all come here I follow them in one of Lennie small boats. I just figure is time, my turn now … But I will go away. I don’t belong here.” My heart feeling heavy in my chest. I sit and wait for she to banish me.

She laugh like a dolphin leaping. “K.C., you don’t have to go nowhere. Look at me, nuh?”

The short distance I had was to drag my eyes from the window to she face was like I going to dead, like somebody dragging a sharp knife along the belly of a fish that twisting in your hands. My two eyes and she own make four, and I feel my belly bottom drop out same way so that fish guts would tumble like rope from it body.

She start to count off on she fingers: “You come in clean clothes; you bathe too, I could smell the carbolic soap on your skin; you not too drunk to have sense; you come prepared to pay; you have manners. Now tell me: Why I would turn away such a ideal customer?”

“I … because I …”

“You ever fuck before?”

“No!” My face burning up for shame. I hear the word plenty time. I see dogs doing it in the road. I not sure what it have to do with me. But I want to find out.

She give me one mischievous grin. “Well, douxdoux, is your lucky night tonight; you going to learn from the mistress of this house!”

Oh God.

Softly she say, “You go let me touch you, K.C.? Mister fisherman?”

My heart flapping in my chest like a mullet on a jetty. She must be can feel it jumping under she hands. I whisper, “Yes, please.”

And next thing I know, my shirt get drag open all the way. She say, “Take it off, nuh? I want to see the muscles in your arms.”

My arms? I busy feeling shamed, ’fraid for she to watch at my bubbies—nobody see them all these years—but is my arms she want to see? For the first time this night, I crack one little smile. I pull off the shirt, stand there holding it careful by the collar so it wouldn’t get rampfle. She step in closer and squeeze my one arm, and when she look at me, the look make something in my crotch jump again. Is a look of somebody who want something. My smile freeze. I ain’t know what to do with my face. My eyes start to drop to the floor again. But she put she hand under my chin. “Watch at me in my eyes, K.C.; like man does look at woman.”

My blasted tongue run away with me again. “And what it have to look at? You seeing more of me than I seeing of you.”

A grin that could swallow a house. “True. Help me fix that then, nuh?” And she present me with she back, one hand cock-up on she hip. “Undo my dress for me, please?”

She had comb she hair up onto her head with a sweep and a frill like wedding cake icing, only black. The purple silk of the gown come down low on she back so I could see all that brown skin, smelling like sweet flowers. The fancy dress-back fasten with one set of hook and eye and button and bow. I tall, nearly tall like Two-Tone, but this woman little bit taller than me, even. I reach up to the top of she dress-back. I manage to undo three button and a hook before a button just pop off in my hand. “Fuck, man, I can’t manage these fancy things; I ain’t make for them. Missis, I done bust up your dress, I sorry.”

She feel behind she, run one long brown finger over the place where the button tear from. Quicker than my eyes could follow, she undo the dress the rest of the way. I see she big round bamsie naked and smooth under there, but she step away and turn to face me before I could see enough. “Give me the button.”

I hand it to she. She laugh little bit and drop it down between she bubbies. “Oh. Look what I gone and do. Come and find it for me, nuh?”

Is like somebody nail my two foot-them to the floor. I couldn’t move. I feel like my head going to bust apart. I just watch at she. She step so close to me I could smell she breath warm on my lips. I want to taste that breath again. She whisper, “Find my button for me, K.C.”

I don’t know when my hands reach on she shoulders. Is like I watching a picture film of me sliding my hands down that soft skin to the opening of the dress, moving my hands in and taking she two tot-tots in each hand. They big and heavy, would be about three pound each on the scale. If I was to price this lady pound for pound, I could never afford she. I move my hand in to the warm, damp place in between she bubbies. The flower smell rising warm off she. My fingers only trembling, trembling, but I pick out the button. I give it back. She stand there, watching in my eyes. Is when I see she smile that I realise I put the fingers that reach the button in my mouth. She taste salt and smell sweet. She push the dress off one shoulder, then the next one. It land on she hips and catch there. Can’t go no farther past the swelling of she belly and bamsie without help. And me, I only watching at the full and swing and round of she bubbies and is like my tongue swell up and my whole body it hot it hot it hot like fire.

“You like me?” she say.

“I … I think so.”

“Help me take off my dress the rest of the way?” She telling me I could touch she. My mother was the last somebody what make me touch their body, when I was helping Daddy look after she before she dead. Mummy was wasting away them times there. She skin was dry and crackly like the brown paper we does wrap the fish in. But this skin on this lady belly and hips put me in mind of that time Daddy take me to visit my granny in the town, how Granny put me on she knee and give me cocoa-tea to drink that she make by grating the cocoa and nutmeg into the hot milk, how Granny did wearing abrown velvet dress and I never touch velvet, before neither since, and I just sit there so on Granny knee, running my thumb across a little piece of she sleeve over and over again, drinking hot cocoa-tea with plenty condensed milk. This woman skin under my hands put me in mind of that somehow, of velvet and hot cocoa with thick, sweet condensed milk and the delicious fat floating on top. As I pass my hands over she hips to draw down the dress the rest of the way, I feel to just stop there and do that all evening, to just touch she flesh over and over again like a piece of brown velvet.

Then she make a kind of little wiggle and the dress drop right down on the ground and is like I get transfix. My two eye-them get full up of beauty and if God did strike me dead right there I woulda die happy.

She only smiling, smiling. “Like you like what you see, eh, Fisherman?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

She step out the dress and go over to the bed. She lie back on it and I mark how she bubbies roll to either side when she do so. Today I bring back two fat, round pumpkin from the market, rolling around in my basket. The soup from those pumpkins going to be nice. I taste the salt on my lips still from when I touch she bubbies and lick my fingers after.

She say, “Come over here, K.C.”

I go and sit on the edge of the bed, not too close. And now I shame again, for it have a white crochet spread on the bed, and white pillowcases on the pillows and them, with some yellow and pink embroidery edging the pillowcases. I can’t get my fisherman stink all over this lady nice bed!

“Take off your shoes and your pants, K.C.”

So I do that, giving thanks that I could turn my back on she and not see she watching when I get naked.

“The underwears too.”

I drag off my underpants, the one good ones with no stain. I fold them up small small and put them at the foot of the bed. I leave my hand on them. They still warm from my body. I feel to never leave that warmth.

“Come into bed with me.”

So then I had was to turn around to climb on the bed. I feel so big and boobaloops and clumsy. I roll back the bedspread, careful, and sit down on the sheet. I pull my knees up to my chest. I watch at she feet. Pretty feet. No callus though.

She rise up in the bed, sit facing me. She ease the crochet bedspread out from under she body and roll it all the way down to the end of the bed. What she go do now? I nearly perishing for fright. “Lie back, K.C.”

So I do that, stiff like one piece of plank. She lean over me, she chest hanging nearly in my face. If she come down any lower, how I go breathe? She start passing she hands over my two shoulders, side to side. Big, warm hands. Big like mine. All these years, is this my skin been hungry for. I feel my whole body getting warm, melting into the soft bed. I close my eyes.

“Nice?” she ask.

“Mm-hmm.”

She hands pass side to side, side to side, so hot and nice on my skin. And then the hands go under my bubbies, weighing. I jump and my eyes start open, but the look on she face ain’t telling me nothing. I turn a piece of board again, just lying there. She run she thumbs over my nipples and I swear I feel it right down to my crotch. Is so I does do myself nights when the skin hunger get too bad, but Jesus God, how it powerful when somebody else do it for you! My breath coming hard, making little sounds. Can’t make she see, can’t make she hear. I go to push she hands away.

“Is all right, K.C. Nothing for shame. Relax, nuh?”

“I doing it right?”

“When it feeling good, you doing it right.”

I must be doing it plenty right, then. I put my head on the pillow again. She start to squeeze my bubbies, to pull and tug at them. I ain’t know how much time past, I just get lost in what she hands doing. The little noises I making coming louder now. I wonder if Lennie could hear me, and Two-Tone, but I decide I ain’t care.

The woman hands on my belly now, massaging the big swell of it. Between my legs my blood only beating, beating. I want … no, I ain’t want that. How anybody could want that? But when she push my legs apart, when that big, warm hand cover my whole pum-pum and squeeze, I swear it try to leap into she hands. She push apart my legs little more, spread my pum-pum lips open. Oy-oy-oy, I shame, but I couldn’t stand to stop she. She press on that place, the place between my legs I find to rub so long ago. I forget how to breathe. “Look your little parson’s nose there,” she giggle. She take she hand away and I nearly beg she to put it back. She lick she fingers. She must be did watching my face, how it get disgust, for she say, “You never taste yourself?”

“Yes.” My voice come out small.

“Well, then.” She put the fingers back. Oh God, the wetness she bring on she fingers just sliding and sliding on the button. And she rub and she rub and little more I thrashing round on the bed till she had was to lie over me with all she weight to make me keep still, make me stay open under she fingers and something coming from deep inside me it buzzing buzzing buzzing from way inside my body like I don’t know what but it coming and I can’t stop it, don’t want to stop it, and I barely hear myself and the noises I making and then it hit me like lightning and it ride me like a storm and I shout something, I ain’t know what, and inside my pum-pum squeezing so hard and nice. I only sweating and trembling when the something drop me back on the bed. “Fuck.”

“Exactly.” She laugh, move off me. “You have a mouth like a fisherman, too.”

Sweat drenching me, salt drying on my skin. My belly feeling all fluttery inside. I couldn’t look at she. One time long long ago, one nighttime in my bed, I touch myself long time like she just touch me and I get a feeling little bit like she just give me, but it frighten me. I thought I was deading. I thought is because is nastiness I was doing. I pull my hand away, and the feeling stop. And though I figure out afterwards that I wasn’t go dead, though I do that thing between my legs plenty times since and it feel nice, I never manage after that to make the feeling come back so strong again. “What we go do now?” I ask she.

“How you know we ain’t finish, K.C.?”

I peek over my bubbies and belly at she. She sitting in between my legs like if it ain’t have nothing wrong with that. She two massive legs pinning my own big ones down, brown on brown. I see she cocoa pod pumpum, spread open pink and glistening, going to brown at the edges. Lord, what a thing. “I ain’t feel finish yet, I feel like it have more.”

She give me that rapscallion smile. “Oh yes, it could have plenty more.”

She start to stroke my button again, gentle. I glad for that, for it feeling tender. Nice, though. I ain’t really get surprised when she push a finger inside my pum-pum. Then another one. I do that myself, plenty times. I thought is only me do that. Me and my nastiness. I start to relax back on she fine white bedspread again, but all of a sudden I sitting up and pulling she hands away. “No. Stop.”

She stop one time. “You don’t like it?”

“I … I don’t know.” Then I bust out with, “I just feel … I not a glove you does wear for you to go inside me like that.”

She just stroke my thighs, with a look on she face like she thinking. “All right, then. Let we try something else.”

Just like that? “Is all right?”

“Yes, K.C. Everybody different. You must tell me what you like and don’t like. Move over so I could lie down.”

I make room for she. She lie down on she back with one knee bend. “Touch me like I touch you.”

Lord, but this thing hard to do. The way the boys and them talk, I did think it would be easy; just pay the woman and she fix you up.

I do she like she do me. I massage she shoulders, I play with she bubbies. So strange. Like touching my own, almost.

“Pull them.”

I ain’t know what she mean. She put she nipples between my fingers.

“Pull.”

I tug little bit.

“Harder.”

So I ’buse up she breasts for she. It look like she good and like it, though. She breathing coming in heavy. It make me feel good. Powerful. I knead she belly, and she spread open she legs for me. The pum-pum smell rise from she, like I used to smelling it on myself. I know that smell like my life. I start to relax. I rub she little button, but that ain’t seem to sweet she so much. She only screwing up she face and twitching little bit when I touch she. I stop. “I not doing it right.”

“It ain’t have no right nor wrong, my fisherman. Just stroke it from the top to the bottom, very gentle.”

Oho. Treat she tot-tots hard on top, she pum-pum soft down below. I could do that. I make the touch light, so light. In two-twos she start to say, “Mm,” and “Ah,” quiet-quiet like the first soft breeze of morning. I look at she face. She head only rolling from side to side, she eyes shut tight. She nipples crinkle-up and jooking out. I feel if to kiss them. I wonder if I could do that? She belly shuddering. I think she liking it.

Something wetting my hand, down there where I stroking she. I look down. She pum-pum getting wet and warm and sticky. The salt and sweat smell rising up from she stronger. Now what to do? I ain’t know what to do.

Do me like I do you, that is what she tell me. Maybe she don’t mind being a glove. So I slip one finger inside the pum-pum. She kinda give a little squeak. It hot in there, and slippery. It only squeezing and squeezing my finger, tight. “Like this, Missis?”

“Oh God like that. Go in and out for me, nuh? No, no; only partway out. Yes, yes, K.C., like that.”

I get a rhythm going; in, out, in.

“More fingers, K.C.”

I could do that.

“More.”

Four fingers inside she, fulling she up. She squeezing tight like a handshake now, and only getting wetter. And every push I push, my hand going in farther. I get lost in the warm wet and sucking and the little moans she making. She spreading she knees wider, tilting up she hips to get my fingers deeper in.

“Oh God more.”

More? Is only my thumb leave behind. I tuck it in close with the others and push that inside she too. She start to groan. I say, “I hurting you?” I start to pull my hand out.

“If you only take it out,” she pant, “I swear I box you here tonight.” She spread she two feet to either side of the bed, move she pum-pum up to meet me hand. “Push it, K.C. Push.”

And is like a space opening up deep inside the poonani. Like it pulling. Like it hungry. I push a few little minutes more, with she groaning and rolling she head around. And next thing I know, is no lie, my whole hand pass through the tightest place inside she and slide into she poonani right up to the wrist! She groan, “Fuck me, K.C.!”

She hips bucking like anything. A strong woman this. I had was to brace myself, wrap one arm around she thigh, and hold on tight. So close in there, I close my hand up into a fist. I pull back my hand partway, and push it in again. Pull back, push in. Pull back, push in. She start to bawl ’bout don’t stop, fuck she, don’t stop. I could do that. I hold on to she bucking body and I fuck she. Me, K.C. She only throwing sheself around steady on the bed. The way she head tossing, all she hair come loose from that pretty hairstyle. It twisting and knotting all over the two pillows. She belly shaking, she bubbies bouncing up and down, she thighs clamp onto me. And she bawling, bawling. This woman bawling like any baby here in this bed. I ride with she. I feel my own pum-pum getting warm, my button swelling and throbbing between my legs. I fuck she, I fuck she. She moan, she twist herself up. My shoulders burning from all the work I doing, but I just imagine I pulling in the net with the boys and them. Push your hand out, pull it back. Push it out, pull it back. Push, pull. I smelling pum-pum all round me and my sweat and she own.

All of a sudden, something deep inside she start to squeeze my hand fast-fast-fast like a pounding heart, so strong I frighten my hand going to sprain. She arch she back up right off the bed and she scream, “Oh GOD I love a mannish woman!” And more too besides, but them wasn’t exactly words.

Hmm. Mannish woman. I like better to be she fisherman. Now is not the time to tell she that, though.

The pounding inside she stop. She give a little sigh and reach down and grab my wrist to hold it quiet. She flop back down on the bed with that mischevious grin on she face again.

Somebody knock on the door. I jump and freeze. If I come out too fast, I might hurt she.

“Mary Anne? Everything all right?” Is a man voice.

She start to laugh. I could feel it right down in she belly. “Jackobennie, you too fast. I with a customer. Leave we some privacy.”

A deep chuckle roll into the room. “Sorry, girl. I ain’t mean to disturb allyou; I gone.”

I could hear the heavy weight of he footsteps as he walk away. Jackobennie is a giant of a man. My whole body start to feel cold one time. “You is Jackobennie woman?”

She lie back and close she eyes, squeeze my hand that jam up inside she. She smile. “Jackobennie is my right-hand man. He and me know one other since God was a little boy in short pants. Jackobennie does make sure me and the rest of the girls stay safe. Sometimes customers does act stupid. Don’t fret your head about Jackobennie, K.C. You is a well-behaved customer.”

I smile.

“Move the heel of your hand up and down for me, nuh? Ai! Gentle!”

I could do that. A sucking sound come from inside she poonani as she flesh move away little bit from my hand.

“Good. Now come out, slow.”

My shoulder muscles burn as I pull out. My hand come back to me wet and wrinkly. I raise the hand to my mouth. It smell like she, like me. I taste it. I know that taste.

“Here.” Mary Anne hand me a towel from out the bedside table. I wipe my hands.

My bubbies tingling.

Mary Anne sit up, she belly resting on she thighs like a calabash. When she grin at me again, I feel all warm inside.

“So, Fisherman,” she say, “what you think of your first time?”

“Nice. Strange. But nice.”

“Like you. You going to come back and see me sometimes?”

“You want me to come back?”

“It have plenty more I could show you, sweetness.”

My pum-pum feeling like a big, warm smile. I just done fuck somebody. The grin that break out on my face must be did brighter than the sun.

For that grin, she say, she kiss me again.

After she and me done clean weselves up she count the money and tuck it into she bosom. She take my hand. Nobody ain’t do that since I was a small child. We step outside the room and walk down the hall to the parlour.

Bright lights. All the chatting stop one time. Everybody looking at we. Lennie skinning up he face like he smelling something rotten. Two-Tone, with the cards still in he hand, busting a grin from one side of he jaw to the next and shaking he head. “Lord, K.C.,” he laugh. “Is what you was doing inside there with that woman?”

Mary Anne walk with me over to the bar. “Is what you think he was doing, Two-Tone? Bartender, give the man a beer there. House paying.”

I hear the chair scrape and I turn round one time to face the storm. I did know it was coming. Everything I get in this life, I had was to fight for. Lennie throw down his cards and slam his hand on the table. The shot glasses jump. “‘Man’? Don’t make joke, woman! Is nastiness allyou was doing! Is against nature!”

I step between Lennie and Mary Anne, but she come out from behind me. She push out one broad hip and cotch up she hand on it. “Lennie,” she say, loud so everyone in the bar was looking now. “Against nature? And the way you too love to push your totie up inside my behind—ain’t that is against nature too?”

And one set of belly laugh cut loose in the place. Jackobennie, man mountain, thundering, slapping his hand on the bar. The little, light-skin bartender with he long fingers only giggling and snapping he white towel in the air. The rest of my crew holding their sides and shaking with laugh. Ramesh. Errol. Matchstick. Two of the whores jump up from their tables and start to wind each other down, back to belly. “Like this, Lennie? Eh?” the one in back shout, jooking she crotch in she miniskirt, up against the behind of the one in front of she. Lennie face just shut down.

I barely have time to notice how the miniskirt woman voice hard, how she shoulders broader than my own, when Lennie rush Mary Anne, reach for she neck. Jackobennie jump and hold he, but is my hand grab Lennie wrist. Lennie spit at me: “Bullah woman!”

He try to break my hold. I hang on. I could do that.

“Lennie man, calm down!” Jackobennie say, wrestling Lennie by he shoulders. But Lennie not paying him no mind. He only trying to box me, he eyes boring hate into me like them could jook inside my brain and strike me dead. Mary Anne not saying anything. I can’t see she. She all right? I holding Lennie back with the arm I had inside she. It getting weary. But I hang on. Lennie know he could pull net twice as hard as me. But like he forget I could go longer.

“Lennie,” Jackobennie rumble right beside Lennie ear. He put he hand on Lennie shoulder. Lennie try to shrug it away.

“Let me go, I say! Fucking bullah woman and she fucking whore! I going knock she head right off she shoulders!”

I just keep holding on. My hand trembling, but I don’t let go. Mary Anne step in between me and Lennie, and I see Jackobennie fingers tighten on Lennie shoulder. “Lennie,” Mary Anne say, hard and fast, “if you make anymore comess in my house tonight, you never going set foot in here again.”

Lennie look from me to she, he eyes bull-red in he angry face.

“No more of this sweet behind for you, Lennie. Who else you going find to let you do that thing with them?”

Lennie shake my hand off he wrist. It look like he cool down little bit, so I let he. He try to stare down Mary Anne. Jackobennie never move away from he the whole time, that big, heavy hand resting like a threat on Lennie shoulder. From behind the two of them I hear Two-Tone say, “The woman right you know, Lennie. You have to have some manners inside she establishment. And all these years K.C. been doing everything else we men does do, you think she ain’t go do this, too?”

“It not right!” Lennie spit, glaring at Mary Anne.

I barely hear what Jackobennie whisper to Lennie, grinning the whole while: “And what you pay me and Mary Anne to do to you that time? That wrong too?”

Lennie glance over he shoulder like is the devil heself latch on there. He go still. It get quiet in the place again. I see he shoulders sag. “All right,” he mutter. “Let me go. I ain’t go hurt nobody.”

Jackobennie release him. Lennie dust heself off and sit back down to table. He growl to Two-Tone, “Let we finish we game and go home, yes.”

I glance at the whore with the deep voice and the broad shoulders and the tiny, tiny skirt. She? smile and roll she eyes at me.

Mary Anne throw she arms round my waist. I smile at she. “Thanks.”

“Only the best for the best customers.”

I hug she back, this armful of woman. I think the perfume smell and woman smell of she going stay with me whole week.

But I know Lennie and me story ain’t done yet. I have to stand up to he now, in the light, else I go be looking over my shoulder every time it get dark from now on. “Just now,” I excuse myself to Mary Anne.

“All right, darling.”

Lennie and Two-Tone look up when I reach to their table. I pull a chair, I turn it backwards. I throw my leg over it (poonani still feeling warm and nice under my clothes) and I sit down. “Lennie,” I say. He ain’t say nothing.

Mary Anne and Jackobennie come to the table with three beers. “On the house,” Jackobennie tell we. “To thank everybody for being gentlemen.” He look hard at Lennie as he and Mary Anne put down the beers. Two-Tone thank them, but Lennie just pick up his and start guzzling it down. Mary Anne wink at me as they walk away.

I take a sip from my beer. Cold and nice, just so I like it. I swallow two more times, think about what I going to say. “Lennie, you is a man, right?”

“Blasted right!” He slam the empty bottle down onto the table.

“Big, hard-back, long-pants-wearing man?”

“Yes.” He look at me with suspicion.

“Work and sweat for your living? Try to treat everybody fair?”

“I never cheat you, K.C.!”

“Is true. You wish if I never try to work with allyou neither, but once you see I could pull my weight, you treat me like all the rest.”

“So long as you know your place!” He scowl and shake the beer bottle at me. “But coming in here brazen like this!”

“You is a man, yes.”

He look at me, confused. I see Two-Tone frowning too. I nod my head, sip some more beer. “Work hard in the hot sun, don’t do nobody wrong. Have a right to fuck any way you want.”

“But not you! You is a woman!”

To rass. Time to done with this. “Lennie, you is a man. And I? I is a fisherman.”

And I swear all the glasses in the place ring like the fishing bell, the way Two-Tone start to make noise in the place. “Oh God, K.C., in all my born days, I never meet no one like you!” He put down he cards and he hold he belly and he laugh.

“What, you taking the bullah woman side now?” Lennie sulk.

“Man, Lennie, hold some strain,” Two-Tone say. “K.C. not judging you for what you like to do. I not judging you, and you know Mary Anne not judging you, for you bringing you good good dollars and give she. K.C. work hard beside you every day, she never ask no man to look after she. She have a right to play hard too.”

Is not only me does work hard, neither. Mary Anne. All the whores. I realise is not only man have a right to fuck how he want. When a truth come to you simple like that, it does full you up and make you feel warm, make you want to tell everybody. I must ask Mary Anne sometime if she think I right. But for now I just smile and look down at my nice clean shine shoes. I drink some more beer and look Lennie right in he eye, friendly. He scowl at me, but I ain’t look away. Is he glance down finally.

He pick up he cards. “You playing or what?” he say to Two-Tone.

“Deal me in next hand,” I say. God, he go do it?

Lennie glance sideways at me over he cards. Look down at the cards. Then quiet, “You have money after you done spending everything on Mary Anne?”

“Yes, man.” I done being careful. “I have enough to whip both of allyou behind.”

“Oh, yes?” Lennie say. “Well, don’t get too attached to it. I bet you I leave this place tonight with you money and my own.”

He throw down he cards. Two-Tone inspect them, make a face, drop he cards on the table, and pull out two bills and lay them down. Lennie pocket the bills. He pick up the whole deck of cards and hand them to me. “Deal. Fisherman.”

I feel the grin lighting up my face as I take the cards from he. “I could do that.”

(First published in Skin Folk, 2001.)

This story was first published in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination (Nov/Dec 2016) and was shortlisted for the inaugural Nommo Award for best African SF short story.

When she was four he found her in the back yard, holding a brick unsteadily above her head, poised to bring it down on a small heart-shaped clock he had bought her for her bedside table.

It lay face up glass sparkling in the afternoon sun.

“Sorry Baba, I wanted to see what’s inside,” she said.

So he took her to the garage, where he kept his tools, and they dismantled it, carefully removing every minute spring and cog from the casing. Almost a hundred pieces. She studied them for a moment and said “Oh, that’s easy,” and ran back outside to play on the grass.

When she was eight she would watch Sagan’s Cosmos on Sunday afternoons. After “The Lives of the Stars,” she asked him to help tie a sheet to the posts of her bed, so that it hung about a ruler’s length above the mattress. When she was satisfied that the sheet was sufficiently taut, she placed a ball in its centre, thus deforming it.

“I want to show you about gravity,” she said, smiling.

They spent the next hour rolling marbles and watching their paths twist around the apples, oranges, and golf balls she set upon their white, cotton space-time.

When she was eleven, her mother died. It was sudden and unexpected. She looked at her mother’s scans and traced with her fingers the branches and finer tendrils that spread outwards from the tumor’s central mass. She said that it reminded her of an orchid she’d seen in a book.

He’d brought home a model rocket. A project to distract them from their loss, if only for a little while.

When she was seventeen, he let her go for the first time. “It’s Stanford, Baba,” she said, which settled it. They called every second weekend. She would tell him of what she was learning and building. He would close his eyes and simply listen to her voice, chuckling inwardly at the Americanisms creeping into her vocabulary and warming with pride when he had to ask her to explain something that was so far beyond him that he couldn’t hope to understand.

When she was twenty-seven, he let her go for the second time. She called to tell him she was coming home, that she’d be flying into Harare as soon as she could.

He changed the sheets in her bedroom, bought a leg of lamb for roasting, and the next day she was there. As evening settled it was cooler outside, so they sat near the bird bath in wire mesh chairs.

“Baba, I was picked.”

She was leaving. She’d be one of the first.

He insisted on driving her back to the airport and, after watching her plane take off, he sat in the parking lot for a very long time before heading home.

It wasn’t just America this time. It was much farther.

When she was thirty-one he let her go for the last time. The initial phase was a success and they would be going to sleep soon. There was no chance of a phone call, that had been impossible before they’d even passed Mars. And so they sent each other messages, hundreds of them. Not a conversation but a torrent—of memories, of hopes, of anecdotes, and advice, anything that came to them, anything at all. Leave nothing unsaid. Or at least try.

And then, her last message. Her goodbye. She would not get his response until after he was long dead.

The old man had stopped by the maker-space to ask if they would mind helping him digitize some things. Stephen was surprised, and flattered, by the request. Lameck Muchatibaya’s daughter was a big deal.

“They have to be perfect,” Lameck stressed. “I need them to be reproducible, printable, in 3D, you understand?”

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Stephen said.

Then Lameck had shown him what he wanted to model.

“Okay,” said Stephen, “this might take a while.”

They met every Saturday for nearly four months, taking thousands of photographs, capturing millions of data points. Once done, they’d generated almost a hundred models. Minute springs, cogs, and screws. A digitized mess of old, miniature machine parts.

When she was two-hundred and seventeen she woke from stasis to the twin suns of her new home.

And a message.

“My daughter. My beautiful, clever girl.

I always knew that you’d do something important. And I am proud. So proud. But it is hard without you. When a man has a daughter his heart is no longer his own. And so I am sending you a heart, the heart you nearly broke, the heart we took apart together. Though you’re impossibly far away my heart is following, rushing after you at the speed of light, rushing to the only one who understands it, to the only one who can put it back together again.

Ndakusuwa.”

The following translation was first published in Cosmos Latinos, ed. Andrea Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán (2003). We are grateful to the translator and to the author for permission to reprint it here. You can also read the story in Spanish.

The man could feel his eyes filling with tears. Before him stood a spaceship, a giant metallic disk that seemed to be made of two enormous plates joined at the edges. The observation panels and hatchway were on the inverted upper plate, and a ring of vertical tubes circled the entire disk at the edge where the two plates met. Those must be the propulsion devices. He recognized the image that he’d seen so often among his photographs. But he’d never been just an arm’s length away from a spaceship before, the way he was now. And that’s why he felt like crying.

“Bye, Maidana.”

“See you tomorrow, Guille.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

Guillermo Maidana, surprised to see his wife standing on the street corner, said his goodbyes distractedly. Marta hadn’t combed her hair, and some of the grey strands fell across her forehead. She was wearing the old housedress she used when she went to the market. Maidana realized something bad must have happened. She didn’t approach him, though, but remained on the street corner, motionless.

“Marta, what’s wrong? Why’d you come here like that … ?”

She grabbed him by the arm and headed off down the street. This wasn’t the way to their house. What’s more, she was trying to keep him away from his coworkers, who were hanging around in small groups.

“G’bye, Mr. and Mrs. Maidana.”

“Hey, what’s wrong?” he said to her again, “What … ?”

Marta looked around to make sure no one could hear her, and without slowing down said, “Carlitos found the album. I forgot to lock the dresser drawer and he found the album.”

A knot formed in Maidana’s throat. He felt like he might throw up right there but somehow got a hold of himself. Suddenly he was the one dragging Marta along, as she clung to his arm.

“How do you know?”

“He told me himself. I hadn’t noticed it was missing from the drawer.”

“So what did he do?”

“Listen. He took it to school. The pictures impressed him and he wanted to share the treasure he’d dug up with his school friends. He told me the teacher saw it, too. The teacher gave it to the principal, who asked Carlitos whose it was and he said it was his dad’s. I don’t know why they let him come home. I’m sure they’ve already notified the Department of Internal Security. The police must be out looking for you. You’ve got to run. You’ve got to … ”

“But where can I go?” whispered Maidana.

“You have to get away,” she insisted, unable to think of anything else. “Anywhere. Right now. They’ll come looking for you at work.”

It was getting dark. Maidana could see his wife’s eyes were shining with tears. He hugged her to him, hard.

A soft purring sound emanated from the spaceship. At times the noise would grow louder, and the propulsion tubes would shoot out little blue flames. When that happened, the temperature in the ship’s vicinity increased, but the man didn’t seem to notice. His fingers caressed the metallic surface of the fuselage and touched the grooves left by the rains of cosmic dust. The man had the impression that, through the workings of some strange magic, this physical contact allowed him to commune with the far‑off galaxies that had always inhabited his dreams, but were forbidden to him.

Maidana kept going the whole night long. At times he ran, at times he trudged along slowly, but he never stopped. He stuck to the darkest, emptiest streets. He never ran across the police. At last he felt he had to stop, and leaned against a rickety wooden fence trying to catch his breath. It was starting to get light, and the kerosene streetlights were still lit up on their aluminum posts.

A noise brought back to him the sharp stab of fear: it was the splash of a horse’s hooves in the mud of a cross-street, and the squeaking of cartwheels. He looked around for someplace to hide, but found nothing. The wooden fences of the small farms stretched out in an unbroken line, offering not even a chink into which he could squeeze himself. Maidana knew if he tried to climb over one of the fences, the poorly‑nailed boards would come clattering down in a noisy heap. He chose to press up close against the fence, far away from the streetlights, fading into the shadows.

At last the cart appeared at the intersection. It was coming down Maipú Street, and kept going straight. Nothing to do with the police.

Maidana resumed walking along Lavalle Street, towards the Bajo, quickening his step each time he passed beneath one of the streetlights. He had another scare when a dog barked at him from behind a fence, but the animal had already settled down by the time Maidana crossed San Martín. The only sounds were his own footsteps squelching in the rain-soaked ground, frogs croaking in the coastal marshlands, and the song of the crickets.

A rough‑hewn sign leaning up against a lamppost bore a message written in heavy black letters: Our Dignity rejects Materialism’s temptations, which have Enslaved the World. The upper right‑hand edge of the poster had come unglued, and the fugitive man grabbed the dangling corner as he passed by and yanked. As expected, underneath was another slogan: We are the Last Refuge of Western Civilization. We are not afraid to be alone! Maidana made a face and quickly left the circle of yellowish light cast by the kerosene lamp, which swung back and forth overhead.

The man stood facing the ship, with outstretched arms that seemed to be trying to embrace the lower half of the spacecraft. He rubbed his cheek against the rough metal surface, leaving behind a damp track of tears. It was like crying over the stars. He cried out hoarsely, “Please, let me in! Let me in! I’m your friend!”

Instinct drove Maidana toward the river. It wasn’t as if it would be any easier to escape from there. All exit routes—whether by water, land, or air—had been closed off. No vessel had touched the coast in ages. No one left the country, and shipping was strictly prohibited. One of the most enduring principles of the regime was: Let us close our borders to materialist illusion. In order to comply with this slogan, first all tourist traffic was halted, then educational trips were canceled, and finally all commerce and correspondence with the outside world was forbidden. Nostalgia for a civilization with which all ties had been cut became a sort of clandestine birthright for a handful of misfits and reprobates.

But although he couldn’t dream of finding refuge out beyond the quagmires of Leandro Alem, Maidana headed into that sector and made his way to the small mountain near the coast. He plunged in among the brush, trying not to trip over any of the fallen trunks and avoiding the gullies and bogs. The first light of day illuminated his path. The smell that came from the damp, rotten wood and the stagnant ponds was getting steadily stronger. His shoes filled with water, and his wet pant legs clung to his skin. Mosquitoes formed an impenetrable cloud around his head, and he felt the quick tug of leeches on his calves.

The man beat on the armored surface with his fists, ignoring the skin scraping off his knuckles. Every blow left a stain of blood, but he felt no pain. He only wanted them to open the hatchway, to grant him asylum within the depths of the shining capsule. He shouted and pounded, shouted and pounded. The sound that came from inside the ship grew louder and more rhythmic. Once again, little blue flames spat from the propulsion tubes. The atmosphere was heating up.

“Open up! Open up!”

While he made his way through the undergrowth, Maidana told himself it was paradoxical that his own son had revealed the album’s existence to the authorities. That wasn’t the mission in store for him. Carlitos was to have become the guardian of the album as soon as he reached adolescence. That was how possession of the heirloom had always been passed on, that was how Guillermo Maidana had gotten it, he’d been given it by his father who, on that somber occasion, had told him the album’s history.

One of his ancestors had served in the air fleet that had made the last trips to the outside. He was the one who had put together the collection of photographs that had opened a fragile window onto universal civilization. The family held on to the album when, a short time later, the regime ordered the confiscation of everything that glorified “the false progress of materialism,” that was unworthy of “the solemn tradition of our native individualism.” Thus began their defiance, and thus was the album transformed into the secret object of their cult.

On Sundays, when Carlitos went to play in the park with his friends, Guille and Marta had often taken advantage of being alone to take the album from its hiding place and look through it. This ritual, which their ancestors must have performed countless times before, transported them to a world of dreams and imagination. The picture of the huge seawater desalination plants installed in the Sahara was next to the photo of the transparent survival domes that were scattered across the fantastic purple landscape of Mars; beside a picture of the Karachi skyscrapers was one that captured the intricate arabesques of the grey, elastic vegetation of Venus. One photograph’s radiant colors showed the twenty stacked artificial terraces where wheat was grown in Xinjiang, and another featured the proud outline of the Einstein III, the first spaceship to have a crew made up of representatives from every nation in the World Council. The last picture in the album was a misty panorama shot, with colossal green stone towers rising up in the background: Agratr, the first extraterrestrial city the World Council explorers had discovered …

Maidana experienced a feeling of profound disgust when he thought that the album was now in the hands of the regime’s security agents. There were few collections left in the country that contained so many of the forbidden images.

The man clawed at the ship’s fuselage. The violent scratching against the metallic surface had destroyed his fingernails. His hands were two bloody wounds. He himself was numb and didn’t feel the temperature rising as more blue flames shot out from the propulsion tubes above his head. He didn’t hear the growing rumble of the ship’s engines. One idea only was lodged in his brain: he had to break through the armored shell that separated him from the inside of the spaceship.

“Open up! Open up!”

The roar of the engines drowned out his voice.

Maidana abruptly stopped walking, and his hand clenched a tree branch. His feet sunk a little further into the mud of the swamp, but he paid no attention to that. A different sort of picture had caught his attention.

He was at a place where the mountain’s vegetation was starting to thin out again. From there a strip of sand, mud, and limestone stretched out, and roughly two blocks ahead was the river. He heard the splashing of water and waves. But that wasn’t why he was rooted to the spot.

The sun’s rays sparkled with dazzling light on a giant metallic disk. It was a ship. A spaceship. Above the dome that shaped the upper part into a curve was the emblem of the World Council. And there it was on the beach, immobile, separated from Buenos Aires by nothing but the swamps and scrub lands of the Bajo.

Maidana realized that something extraordinary must have happened. His eyes had often followed the World Council ships on their glittering path across the sky. But never in the last twenty years had one landed in the forbidden zone. Once, due to a breakdown in the guidance system, a ship had come down near the city of Tandil. Its crew had gone out in search of help … and was gunned down by a watch patrol. The next day there was an announcement that security forces had discovered and wiped out a gang of foreign infiltrators. The story became the main theme of the regime’s propaganda for a year, and after that the affair was never spoken of again. The abandoned spaceship, which turned out to be indestructible, was surrounded by a fence so as not to awaken any unhealthy curiosity.

This ship must have suffered some kind of breakdown, too, but its crew knew the risks involved with landing there. The hatchways were hermetically sealed and the beach around the vessel was empty. No doubt the mechanics were inside the ship working quickly to repair the problem and leave before morning passed and a watch patrol showed up.

Maidana walked toward the ship, slowly and cautiously at first, then more quickly. He crossed the last stretch of beach at a run. He could feel his eyes filling with tears …

He fell to his knees beneath the curve of the fuselage. He covered his face with his hands, and the blood from his torn fingers mixed with the tears running down his cheeks. The engines roared overhead. The column of blue fire that exploded from the propulsion tubes enveloped the figure kneeling on the beach, and then seemed to become solid, supporting the ship as it rose. The displaced air formed a whirlwind that shook the branches of the nearest trees and churned up a cloud of blackened dust and ashes. Then, slowly, the dust and ashes floated softly back down to the empty beach.

Ann Crothers looked at the clock and frowned and turned the fire lower under the bacon. She had already poured his coffee; he liked it cooled to a certain degree; but if he did not get up soon it would be too cool and the bacon too crisp and he would be angry and sulk the rest of the day. She had better call him.

She walked to the foot of the stairs, a blond woman nearing thirty, big but not fat, and rather plain, with a tired sad face. She called, “Henry! Are you up?” She had calculated to a decibel how loud her voice must be. If it were too soft he did not hear and maintained that she had not called him, and was angry later; if it were too loud he was angry immediately and stayed in bed longer, to punish her, and then he grew angrier because breakfast was spoiled.

“All right! Pipe down, can't you?”

She listened a minute. She thought it was a normal response, but perhaps her voice had been a shade too loud. No, he was getting up. She heard the thump of his feet on the floor. She went back to the kitchen and took out his orange juice and his prunes out of the icebox, and got out his bread but did not begin to toast it yet, and opened a glass of jelly.

She frowned. Grape. He did not like grape, but the co-op had been out of apple, and she had been lucky to get anything. He would not be pleased.

She sat down briefly at the table to wait for him and glanced at the clock. Ten-five. Wearily, she leaned forward and rested her forehead on the back of her hand. She was not feeling well this morning and had eaten no breakfast. She was almost sure she was pregnant again.

She thought of the children. There were only two at home, and they had been bathed and fed long ago and put down in the basement playpen so that the noise they made would not disturb their father. She would have time for a quick look at them before Henry came down. And the house was chilly; she would have to look at the heater.

They were playing quietly with the rag doll she had made, and the battered rubber ball. Lennie, who was two and a half, was far too big for a playpen, but he was a good child, considerate, and allowed himself to be put there for short periods and did not climb out. He seemed to feel a responsibility for his brother. Robbie was fourteen months old and a small terror, but he loved Lennie, and even, Ann thought, tried to mind him.

As Ann poked her head over the bannister, both children turned and gave her radiant smiles. Lennie said, “Hi, Mommy,” and Robbie said experimentally, “Ma?”

She went down quickly and gave each of them a hug and said, “You're good boys. You can come upstairs and play soon.” She felt their hands. The basement was damp, but the small mended sweaters were warm enough.

She looked at the feeble fire and rattled the grate hopefully and put on more coal. There was plenty of coal in the bin, but it was inferior grade, filled with slate, and did not burn well. It was not an efficient heater, either. It was old, secondhand, but they had been lucky to get it. The useless oil heater stood in the corner.

The children chuckled at the fire, and Robbie reached out his hands toward it. Lennie said gravely, “No, no, bad.”

Ann heard Henry coming downstairs, and she raced up the cellar steps and beat him to the kitchen by two seconds. When he came in she was draining the bacon. She put a slice of bread on the long fork and began to toast it over the gas flame. The gas, at least, was fairly dependable, and the water. The electricity was not working again. It seemed such a long time since the electricity had always worked. Well, it was a long time. Years.

Henry sat down at the table and looked peevishly at his orange juice. He was not a tall man, not quite so tall as his wife, and he walked and sat tall, making the most of every inch. He was inclined to be chubby, and he had a roll of fat under his chin and at the back of his neck, and a little bulge at the waist. His face might have been handsome, but the expression spoiled it—discontented, bad-tempered. He said, “You didn't strain the orange juice.”

“Yes, I strained it.” She was intent on the toast.

He drank the orange juice without enjoyment and said, “I have a touch of liver this morning. Can't think what it could be.” His face brightened. “I told you that sauce was too greasy. That was it.”

She did not answer. She brought over his plate with the bacon on it and the toast, nicely browned, and put margarine on the toast for him.

He was eating the prunes. He stopped and looked at the bacon. “No eggs?”

“They were all out.”

His face flushed a little. “Then why'd you cook bacon? You know I can't eat bacon without eggs.” He was working himself up into a passion. “If I weren't such an easygoing man—! And the prunes are hard—you didn't cook them long enough—and the coffee's cold, and the toast's burnt, and where's the apple jelly?”

They didn't have any.

He laughed scornfully. “I bet they didn't. I bet you fooled around the house and didn't even get there till everything was gone.” He flung down his fork. “This garbage!—why should you care, you don't have to eat it!”

She looked at him. “Shall I make you something else?”

He laughed again. “You'd ruin it. Never mind.” He slammed out of the kitchen and went upstairs to sulk in the bathroom for an hour.

Ann sat down at the table. All that bacon, and it was hard to get. Well, the children would like it. She ought to clear the table and wash the dishes, but she sat still and took out a cigarette. She ought to save it, her ration was only three a day, but she lit it.

The children were getting a little noisier. Perhaps she could take them out for a while, till Henry went to work. It was cold but clear; she could bundle them up.

The cigarette was making her lightheaded, and she stubbed it out and put the butt in the box she kept over the sink. She said softly, “I hate him. I wish he would die.”

She dressed the children—their snowsuits were faded and patched from much use, but they were clean and warm—and put them in the battered carriage, looping her old string shopping bag over the handle, and took them out. They were delighted with themselves and with her. They loved the outdoors. Robbie bounced and drooled and made noises, and Lennie sat quiet, his little face smiling and content.

Ann wheeled them slowly down the walk, detouring around the broken places. It was a fine day, crisp, much too cold for September, but the seasons were not entirely reliable any more. There were no other baby carriages out; there were no children at all; the street was very quiet. There were no cars. Only the highest officials had cars, and no high officials lived in this neighborhood.

The children were enchanted by the street. Shabby as it was, with the broken houses as neatly mended as they could be, and the broken paving that the patches never caught up with, it was beautiful to them. Lennie said, “Hi, Mommy,” and Robbie bounced.

The women were beginning to come, as they always came, timidly out of the drab houses, to look at the children, and Ann walked straighter and tried not to smile. It was not kind to smile, but sometimes she could not help it. Suddenly she was not tired any more, and her clothes were not shabby, and her face was not plain.

The first woman said, “Please stop a minute,” and Ann stopped, and the women gathered around the carriage silently and looked. Their faces were hungry and seeking, and a few had tears in their eyes.

The first woman asked, “Do they stay well?”

Ann said, “Pretty well. They both had colds last week,” and murmurs of commiseration went around the circle.

Another woman said, “I noticed you didn't come out, and I wondered. I almost knocked at your door to enquire, but then—” She stopped and blushed violently, and the others considerately looked away from her, ignoring the blunder. One did not call on one's neighbors; one lived to oneself.

The first woman said wistfully, “If I could hold them—either of them—I have dates; my cousin sent them all the way from California.”

Ann blushed, too. She disliked this part of it very much, but things were so hard to get now, and Henry was difficult about what he liked to eat, though he denied that. He would say, “I'd eat anything, if you could only learn to cook it right, but you can't.” Henry liked dates. Ann said, “Well …”

Another woman said eagerly, “I have eggs. I could spare you three.” One for each of the boys and one for Henry.

“Oranges—for the children.”

“And I have butter—imagine, butter!”

“Sugar—all children like sugar. Best grade—no sand in it.”

“And I have tea.” Henry does not like tea. But you shall hold the children anyway.

Somebody said, “Cigarettes,” and somebody else whispered, “I even have sleeping pills!”

The children were passed around and fondled and caressed. Robbie enjoyed it and flirted with everybody, under his long eyelashes, but Lennie regarded the entire transaction with distaste.

When the children began to grow restless, Ann put them back into the carriage and walked on. Her shopping bag was full.

The women went slowly back into their houses, all but one, a stranger. She must have moved into the neighborhood recently, perhaps from one of the spreading waste places. They were coming in, the people, as if they had been called, moving in closer, a little closer every year.

The woman was tall and older than Ann, with a worn plain face. She kept pace with the carriage and looked at the children and said, “Forgive me, I know it is bad form, but are they—do you have more?”

Ann said proudly, “I have had seven.”

The woman looked at her and whispered, “Seven! And were they all—surely they were not all—”

Ann said more proudly still, “All. Every one.”

The woman looked as if she might cry and said, “But seven! And the rest, are they—”

Ann's face clouded. “Yes, at the Center. One of my boys and all my girls. When Lennie goes, Robbie will miss him. Lennie missed Kate so, until he forgot her.”

The woman said in a broken voice, “I had three, and none of them was—none!” She thrust something into Ann's shopping bag and said, “For the children,” and walked quickly away.

Ann looked, and it was a Hershey bar. The co-op had not had chocolate for over two years. Neither of the boys had ever tasted it.

She brought the children home after a while and gave them their lunch—Henry's bacon crumbled into two scrambled eggs, and bread and butter and milk. She had been lucky at the co-op yesterday; they had had milk. She made herself a cup of coffee, feeling extravagant, and ate a piece of toast, and smoked the butt of this morning's cigarette.

For dessert she gave them each an orange; the rest she saved for Henry. She got out the Hershey bar and gave them all of it; Henry should not have their chocolate! The Hershey bar was hard and pale, as stale chocolate gets, and she had to make sawing motions with the knife to divide it evenly. The boys were enchanted. Robbie chewed his half and swallowed it quickly, but Lennie sucked blissfully and made it last, and then took pity on his brother, and let Robbie suck, too. Ann did not interfere. Germs, little hearts, are the least of what I fear for you.

While the children took their naps, she straightened the house a little and tinkered with the heater and cleaned all the kerosene lamps. She had time to take a bath, and enjoyed it, though the laundry soap she had to use was harsh against her skin. She even washed her hair, pretty hair, long and fine, and put on one of the few dresses that was not mended.

The children slept longer than usual. The fresh air had done them good. Just at dusk the electric lights came on for the first time in three days, and she woke them up to see them—they loved the electric lights. She gave them each a piece of bread and butter and took them with her to the basement and put them in the playpen. She was able to run a full load of clothes through the old washing machine before the current went off again. The children loved the washing machine and watched it, fascinated by the whirling clothes in the little window.

Afterward she took them upstairs again and tried to use the vacuum cleaner, but the machine was old and balky and by the time she had coaxed it to work the current was gone.

She gave the children their supper and played with them awhile and put them to bed. Henry was still at the laboratory. He left late in the morning, but sometimes he had to stay late at night. The children were asleep before he came home, and Ann was glad. Sometimes they got on his nerves and he swore at them.

She turned the oven low to keep dinner hot and went into the living room. She sat beside the lamp and mended Robbie's shirt and Lennie's overalls. She turned on the battery radio to the one station that was broadcasting these days, the one at the Center. The news report was the usual thing. The Director was in good health and bearing the burden of his duties with fortitude. Conditions throughout the country were normal. Crops had not been quite so good as hoped, but there was no cause for alarm. Quotas in light and heavy industry were good—Ann smiled wryly—but could be improved if every worker did his duty. Road repairs were picking up—Ann wondered when they would get around to the street again—and electrical service was normal, except for a few scattered areas where there might be small temporary difficulties. The lamp had begun to smoke again, and Ann turned it lower. The stock market had closed irregular, with rails down an average of two points and stocks off three.

And now—the newscaster's voice grew solemn—there was news of grave import. The Director had asked him to talk seriously to all citizens about the dangers of rumormongering. Did they not realize what harm could be done by it? For example, the rumor that the Western Reservoir was contaminated. That was entirely false, of course, and the malicious and irresponsible persons who had started it would be severely dealt with.

The wastelands were not spreading, either. Some other malicious and irresponsible persons had started that rumor, and would be dealt with. The wastelands were under control. They were not spreading, repeat, not. Certain areas were being evacuated, it was true, but the measure was only temporary.

Calling them in, are you, calling them in!

The weather was normal. The seasons were definitely not changing, and here were the statistics to prove it. In 1961 … and in '62 … and that was before, so you see …

The newscaster's voice changed, growing less grave. And now for news of the children. Ann put down her mending and listened, not breathing. They always closed with news of the children, and it was always reassuring. If any child were ever unhappy, or were taken ill, or died, nobody knew it. One was never told anything, and of course one never saw the children again. It would upset them, one quite understood that.

The children, the newscaster said, were all well and happy. They had good beds and warm clothes and the best food and plenty of it. They even had cod-liver oil twice a week whether they needed it or not. They had toys and games, carefully supervised according to their age groups, and they were being educated by the best teachers. The children were all well and happy, repeat, well and happy. Ann hoped it was true.

They played the national anthem and went off the air, and just then Henry came in. He looked pale and tired—he did work hard—and his greeting was, “I suppose dinner's spoiled.”

She looked up. “No, I don't think so.”

She served it and they ate silently except for Henry's complaints about the food and his liver. He looked at the dates and said, “They're small. You let them stick you with anything,” but she thought he enjoyed them because he ate them all.

Afterward he grew almost mellow. He lit a cigarette and told her about his day, while she washed the dishes. Henry's job at the laboratory was a responsible one, and Ann was sure he did it well. Henry was not stupid. But Henry could not get along with anybody. He said that he himself was very easy to get along with, but they were all against him. Today he had had a dispute with one of his superiors and reported that he had told the old ——— where to go.

He said, with gloomy relish, “They'll probably fire me, and we'll all be out in the street. Then you'll find out what it's like to live on Subsistence. You won't be able to throw my money around the way you do now.”

Ann rinsed out the dish towel and hung it over the rack to dry. She said, “They won't fire you. They never do.”

He laughed. “I'm good and they know it. I do twice as much work as anybody else.”

Ann thought that was probably true. She turned away from the sink and said, “Henry, I think I'm pregnant.”

He looked at her and frowned. “Are you sure?”

I said I think. But I'm practically sure.

He said, “Oh, God, now you'll be sick all the time, and there's no living with you when you're sick.”

Ann sat down at the table and lit a cigarette. “Maybe I won't be sick.”

He said darkly, “You always are. Sweet prospect!”

Ann said, “We'll get another bonus, Henry.”

He brightened a little. “Say, we will, at that. I'll buy some more stock.”

Ann said, “Henry, we need so many things—”

He was immediately angry. “I said I'll buy stock! Somebody in this house has to think of the future. We can't all hide our heads in the sand and hope for the best.”

She stood up, trembling. It was not a new argument. “What future? Our children—children like ours are taken away from us when they're three years old and given to the state to rear. When we're old the state will take care of us. Nobody lives any more, except—but nobody starves. And that stock—it all goes down. Don't talk to me about the future, Henry Crothers! I want my future now.”

He laughed unpleasantly. “What do you want? A car?”

“I want a new washing machine and a vacuum cleaner, when the quotas come—the electricity isn't so bad. I want a new chair for the living room. I want to fix up the boy's room, paint, and—”

He said brutally, “They're too little to notice. By the time they get old enough—”

She sat down again, sobbing a little. Her cigarette burned forgotten in the ashtray, and Henry thriftily stubbed it out. She said, “I know, the Center takes them. The Center takes children like ours.”

“And the Center's good to them. They give them more than we could. Don't you go talking against the Center.” Though a malcontent in his personal life, Henry was a staunch government man.

Ann said, “I'm not, Henry, I'm—”

He said disgustedly, “Being a woman again. Tears! Oh, God, why do women always turn them on?”

She made herself stop crying. Anger was beginning to rise in her, and that helped a good deal. “I didn't mean to start an argument. I was just telling you what we need. We do need things, Henry. Clothes—”

He looked at her. “You mean for you? Clothes would do you a lot of good, wouldn't they?”

She was stung. “I don't mean maternity clothes. I won't be needing them for—”

He laughed. “I don't mean maternity clothes either. Have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately? God, you're a big horse! I always liked little women.”

She said tightly, “And I always liked tall men.”

He half rose, and she thought he was going to hit her. She sat still, trembling with a fierce exhilaration, her eyes bright, color in her cheeks, a little smile on her mouth. She said softly, “I'll hit you back, I'm bigger than you are. I'll kill you!”

Suddenly Henry sat down and began to laugh. When he laughed he was quite handsome. He said in a deep chuckling voice, “You're almost pretty when you get mad enough. Your hair's pretty tonight, you must have washed it.” His eyes were beginning to shine, and he reached across the table and put his hand on hers. “Ann … old girl …”

She drew her hand away. “I'm tired. I'm going to bed.”

He said good-humoredly, “Sure. I'll be right up.”

She looked at him. “I said I'm tired.”

“And I said I'd be right up.”

If I had something in my hands I'd kill you. “I don't want to.”

He scowled, and his mouth grew petulant again, and he was no longer handsome. “But I want to.”

She stood up. All at once she felt as tired as she had told Henry she was, as tired as she had been for ten years.

I cannot kill you, Henry, or myself. I cannot even wish us dead. In this desolate, dying, bombed-out world, with its creeping wastelands and its freakish seasons, with its limping economy and its arrogant Center in the country that takes our children—children like ours; the others it destroys—we have to live, and we have to live together.

Because by some twist of providence, or radiation, or genes, we are among the tiny percentage of the people in this world who can have normal children. We hate each other, but we breed true.

She said, “Come up, Henry.” I can take a sleeping pill afterward.

Come up, Henry, we have to live. Till we are all called in, or our children, or our children's children. Till there is nowhere else to go.

El hombre sintió que se le llenaban los ojos de lágrimas. Frente a él estaba posada una nave espacial. Un gigantesco disco metálico que parecía formado por dos inmensos platos unidos por sus bordes. En el plato superior, invertido, se hallaban los paneles de observación y la escotilla. En la juntura de los dos platos había un anillo de tubos verticales que ocupaban toda la circunferencia del disco. Eran los propulsores. Reconoció la imagen que habia visto tantas veces en sus fotos. Pero nunca habia tenido, como ahora, una nave espacial al alcance de la mano. Por eso sintió ganas de llorar.

—Chau, Maidana.

—Hasta mañana, Guille.

—Chau.

—Chau.

Guillermo Maidana contestó distraídamente los saludos, sorprendido por la presencia de su mujer en la esquina. Marta no se había peinado y un mechón de pelo gris le caía sobre la frente. Tenía puesto el vestido viejo que usaba para ir a la feria. Maidana comprendió que algo malo ocurría. Pero ella no se acercaba. Seguía immóvil, en la esquina.

—Marta, ¿qué pasa? ¿Por qué viniste así …?

Ella lo tomó por el brazo y enfiló calle abajo. Por ese lado no iban hacia su casa. Además, estaba tratando de alejarlo de los corrilos que todavía formaban sus compañeros de trabajo.

—Adiós, señora. Chau, Maidana.

¿Qué pasa, che? —insistió él—. ¿Qué …?

Marta giró la cabeza para asegurarse de que nadie podía oírla, y sin detener la marcha dijo:

—Carlitos encontró el álbum. Me olvidé de echar llave al cajón de la cómoda y él encontró el álbum.

Un globo se infló en la garganta de Maidana. Le pareció que iba a vomitar ahí mismo pero de alguna manera se contuvo. De pronto fue él quien arrastró casi a Marta, que iba colgada de su brazo.

—¿Cómo lo sabés?

—El mismo me lo contó. Yo no había notado que faltaba del cajón.

—¿Y qué hizo?

—Escuchame. Se lo llevó al colegio. Lo impresionaron las fotos y quiso mostrarles ese tesoro a sus compañeros. Me explicó que también lo vio el maestro. El maestro se lo pasó al director. Le perguntaron a Carlitos de quién era y él contestó que era de su padre. No sé cómo lo dejaron volver a casa. Estoy segura de que ya notificaron al Departamento de Seguridad Interior. La Policía te debe de estar buscando. Tenés que escaparte. Tenés …

—¿Pero a dónde puedo ir? —murmuró Maidana.

—Tenés que escaparte —insistió ella, incapaz de coordinar otras ideas—. A cualquier lugar. Ya mismo. También vendrán al trabajo.

Estaba oscureciendo. Maidana vio que los ojos de su mujer brillaban. La abrazó con fuerza.

De la nave espacial brotaba un suave ronroneo. A ratos éste se hacía más intenso y los tubos propulsores emitían unas llamitas azuladas. En esos momentos aumentaba la temperatura junto a la nave, pero el hombre no parecía notarlo. Sus dedos acariciaban la superficie metálica del fuselaje, palpaban las estrías que habían dejado allí las lluvias de polvo cósmico. El hombre tuvo la impresión de que por obra de una extraña magia ese contacto lo ponía en comunión con las galaxias remotas que siempre habían poblado sus sueños y que a él le estaban vedadas.

Maidana marchó durante toda la noche. Recorrió unos trechos a la carrera y otros al paso, pero no se detuvo nunca. Eligió las calles más oscuras, más despobladas. No se cruzó con ningún policía. Por fin sintió la necesidad de hacer un alto, y se apoyó contra un claudicante cerco de madera. Trató de normalizar el ritmo de su respiración. Empezaba a clarear, y los faroles de querosén todavía estaban encendidos en los postes de alumbrado.

Un ruido le hizo sentir nuevamente la punzada del miedo. El chapaleo de los cascos de un caballo en el barro de la calle transversal y el chirrido de las ruedas de un carruaje. Buscó un refugio momentáneo pero no lo halló. Las empalizadas de madera de las chacras se prolongaban en una hilera continua, sin dejar resquicios por donde colarse. Maidana comprendió que si intentaba trepar por una de las vallas, las tablas mal clavadas se desmoronarían estrepitosamente. Optó por pegarse contra el cerco, lejos de los faroles, confundiéndose con las sombras.

El tílbury apareció por fin en la bocacalle. Venía por Maipú y siguió derecho. No tenía nada que ver con la policía.

Maidana reanudó la marcha por Lavalle, hacia el Bajo, apresurando el paso cada vez que llegaba a uno de los faroles. Tuvo un nuevo sobresalto cuando un perro le ladró desde atrás de un cerco, pero el animal ya se había calmado cuando él cruzó San Martín. Los únicos ruidos eran los de sus propias pisadas sobre la tierra humedecida por la lluvia de los últimos días, el croar de las ranas en los pantanos de la costa y el canto de los grillos.

Una burda cartelera apoyada contra un poste de alumbrado ostentaba un mensaje escrito con macizas letras negras: Nuestra dignidad rechaza la tentación del materialismo que ha subyugado al mundo. El "affiche" tenía despegado el ángulo superior derecho, y el fugitivo agarró al pasar la punta colgante y le dio un fuerte tirón. Previsiblemente, debajo del cartel apareció otro lema: Somos el último reducto de la civilización occidental. ¡No nos asusta estar solos! Maidana hizo una mueca y se alejó con paso rápido del círculo amarillento proyectado por la oscilante lámpara de querosén.

El hombre estaba colocado de cara a la nave, y sus brazos abiertos en cruz parecían querer abarcar el hemisferio inferior del vehículo espacial. Frotó la mejilla contra la áspera superficie metálica, dejando un húmedo rastro de lágrimas. Era como llorar sobre las estrellas. De su pecho brotó un grito ronco:

¡Por favor, déjenme entrar! ¡Soy amigo de ustedes!

El instinto empujaba a Maidana hacia el río. No se trataba de que por allí fuese más fácil escapar. Todas las vías de salida, por agua, tierra o aire, estaban clausuradas. Hacía siglos que ninguna embarcación tocaba esa costa. Nadie salía del país y la navegación estaba terminantemente prohibida. Uno de los principios más perdurables del régimen era: Cerremos nuestras fronteras al espejismo materialista. Para cumplir esta consigna se suspendió primero la entrada y salida de turistas, después se vedaron los viajes de estudio y por fin se proscribieron el comercio y el intercambio de correspondencia con el exterior. La nostalgia por una civilización con la que estaban cortados todos los vínculos se convirtió en el patrimonio clandestino de unos pocos réprobos e inadaptados.

Pero a pesar de que no podía concebir la esperanza de encontrar refugio más allá del lodazal de Leandro Alem, Maidana se metió en el barro y llegó al monte de la costa. Se interno enre las malezas; procurando no tropezar con los troncos caídos y eludiendo las zanjas y las ciéngas. Las primeras luces del día le mostraron el camino. El olor que emanaba de la madera húmeda, podrida, y de los charcos estancados, se fue haciendo más penetrante. Los zapatos se le llenaron de agua y las perneras empapadas del pantalón se le adhirieron a la piel. Los mosquitos formaron una nube tupida alrededor de su cabeza y sintió sobre las pantorrilas el breve lancetazo de las sanguijuelas.

El hombre golpeaba la superficie blindada con los puños, sin hacer caso de la piel desgarrada de sus nudillos. Cada golpe dejaba una mancha de sangre, pero no experimentaba dolor. Sólo quería que abriesen la escotilla, que le brindasen asilo en las entrañas de la cápsula resplandeciente. Gritaba y golpeaba. Gritaba y golpeaba. El rumor que brotaba del interior de la nave se hizo más parejo e intenso. Las llamitas azuladas volvieron a asomar por los tubos de los propulsores. La atmósfera se estaba recalentando.

—¡Abran! ¡Abran!

Mientras avanzaba entre las malezas, Maidana se dijo que era paradojal que su propio hijo hubiese revelado a las autoridades la existencia del álbum. La misión que le tenía reservada era muy distinta. Carlitos debería haberse convertido en el custodio del álbum apenas entrado en la adolescencia. Así era como siempre se había transmitido las posesión de esa reliquia. Así era como Guillermo Maidana la había recibido de manos de su padre, quien en ese instante solemne le había relatado su historia.

Uno de sus antepasados había prestado servicios en la flota aérea que realizó los últimos viajes al exterior. Fue él quien recopiló esa serie de fotos que abrían una frágil ventana hacia la civilización universal. La familia conservó el álbum cuando poco después el régimen ordenó la requisa de todos los elementos que exaltaran "el falso progreso materialista", desmereciendo "la austera tradición del individualismo autóctono". Así comenzó la desobediancia y el álbum se convirtió en un arcano objecto de culto.

Muchos domingos, cuando Carlitos se iba a jugar al parque con sus amigos, él y Marta aprovechaban le soledad para sacar el álbum de su escondrijo y hojearlo. Este rito, que sus antepasados debían de haber repetido en infinitas oportunidades, los trasladaba a un mundo de ensueño e irrealidad. La foto de los gigantescos centros para la desalinización del agua de mar instalados en el Sahara aparecía junto a la de las cúpulas transparentes de supervivencia que salpicaban el alucinante paisaje púrpura de Marte; al lado de una foto de los rascacielos de Karachi se veía otra que había captado los intrincados arabescos de la elástica y gris vegetación venusina; una placa de colores radiantes mostraba las veinte terrazas artificiales superpuestas donde se cultivaba trigo en Sinkiang, y otra reproducía la orgullosa silueta del Einstein III, la primera nave espacial en cuya dotación estuvieron representadas todas las naciones que integraban el Consejo Mundial. La última foto del álbum mostraba un panorama brumoso, en cuyo fondo se erguían unas torres colosales de piedra verde: era Agratr, la primera ciudad de seres extraterrestres hallada por los exploradores del Consejo Mundial …

Maidana experimentó una honda sensación de repugnancia al pensar que ahora el álbum estaba en poder de los agentes de seguridad del régimen. En el país quedaban pocas colecciones tan completas de imágenes prohibidas.

El hombre arañaba el fuselaje de la nave. Tenía las uñas destrozadas por el violento roce contra la superficie metálica. Sus manos eran dos llagas sanguinolentas. Insensibilizado, no se dio cuenta de que aumentaba el calor a medida que los tubos propulsores vomitaban más llamas azules sobre su cabeza. No oyó el creciente rugido de los motores de la nave. Sólo una idea permanecía incrustada en su cerebro. Debía atravesar la cáscara blindada que lo separaba del interior del vehículo espacial.

—¡Abran! ¡Abran!

El estrépito de los propulsores ahogó su voz.

Maidana se detuvo bruscamente y cerró la mano con fuerza sobre la rama de un árbol. Sus pies se hundieron un poco más en el barro del pantano, pero no hizo caso de ese detalle. Otra imagen absorbía su atención.

Se encontraba en el lugar donde el monte empezaba a ralear nuevamente. A partir de allí se extendía una franja de arena, limo y toscas, y dos cuadras más adelante estaba el río. Oyó el chapoteo del agua y la resaca. Aunque no era eso lo que lo había paralizado.

Los rayos del sol centelleaban con brillo enceguecedor sobre un gigantesco disco metálico. Era una nave. Una nave espacial. Sobre la cúpula que combaba su parte superior ostentaba el emblema del Consejo Mundial. Y se hallaba posada sobre la playa, inmóvil, separada de Buenos Aires sólo por los pantanos y los matorrales del Bajo.

Maidana comprendió que algo anormal tenía que haber ocurrido. Él había seguido muchas veces con las vista las trayectorias rutilantes de las naves del Consejo Mundial que surcaban el cielo. Pero desde hacía veinte años jamás se posaban en el territorio prohibido. En aquella oportunidad, una nave había descendido cerca de Tandil, por una falla en el mecanismo del orientación. Sus tripulantes salieron en busca de auxilio y una patrulla de vigilancia los acribilló a balazos. Al día siguiente se publicó un bando annunciando que las fuerzas de seguridad habían descubierto y aniquilado a un grupo de infiltrados extranjeros. La historia se convirtió en tema central de la propaganda del régimen durante un año, y después no se volvió a hablar del asunto. El vehículo espacial abandonado, que resultó ser indestructible, fue rodeado con una empalizada para que no despertase curiosidades malsanas.

Esta nave también debía de haber sufrido alguna avería, pero su dotación ya conocía los riesgos que implicaba descender allí. Las escotillas estaban herméticamente cerradas y la playa se hallaba vacía alrededor del vehículo espacial. Sin duda los mecánios trabajaban aceleradamente en el interior para reparar el desperfecto y partir antes de que avanzase la mañana y apareciera una patrulla de vigilancia.

Maidana caminó hacia la nave, primero con paso lento y cauteloso, y luego cada vez con más prisa. Atravesó a la carrera el último tramo de playa. Sintió que se le llenaban los ojos de lágrimas…

Habia caido de rodillas bajo la comba del fuselaje. Tenía el rostro cubierto con las manos y la sangre de sus dedos lacerados se mezclaba con las lágrimas que rodaban por sus mejillas. Los motores rugieron sobre su cabeza. La columna de fuego azulado que brotó de los propulsores envolvió a la figura hincada sobre la playa y luego pareció solidificarse para sostener la nave a medida que ésta se elevaba. El aire despladazo formó un torbellino que agitó las ramas de los árboles más próximos y levantó una nube de polvo calcinado y cenizas. Después, poco a poco, el polvo y las cenizas volvieron a posarse blandamente sobre la playa desierta.

I woke up on the staircase.

I spent six months there.

Yestril says he once saw me there, sleeping. He wondered if he should bring me a blanket. He sat on the stair next to me for a while, but I did not wake. I am glad, now, that I did not. He would have regarded me with nothing except sympathy, or interest, or desire, or disgust—the range of human reactions to which I was accustomed. It would have made everything that followed even harder to understand.

The staircase is where we are always found, we waifs. We travelers. Always, I say, but I should say: rarely. Strangers—that is, people from other worlds, like me—arrive there, unannounced and unexplained, very, very occasionally. Once in a century, perhaps. I had lived here a year before I even heard of another one.

Our presence is a mystery. Mystery is not quite the right word: it's more like "something that does not happen among us" or "that does not command attention." People here are occupied with their own, intricate, affairs. At first, believe me, I only cared about simple ones, the ones that might keep me alive.

I still remember the flash of terror on waking up, not in the pillowy darkness of my bed at home but in the sudden light of a huge, unknown stone stairway. The marble was freezing on my back through my thin nightgown.

I sat up, bewildered, to find myself on the edge of a broad stair, about the width of the single bed in which I had gone to sleep in my apartment. I was facing downward, and the staircase uncoiled in a long unbroken spiral below me, giving the impression of endlessness. I turned, and it was the same above me. It was daylight, a dull, even light coming from above, though I saw no windows. Heavy balustrades edged the stairs. Brackets on the walls were filled with unlit torches. The glossy stone was a uniform iron gray color.

I was alone.

There are fifty-five stairs between every floor of this palace, and eighteen floors. I had plenty of time to learn this. I woke up somewhere between the seventh and eighth floors.

One fact kept me in that terrifying, inhuman place for half a year. I had arrived without any crichtén. I had no kin: no-one who was obliged to give it to me. So the hall officers would not let me pass. I could not get off the stairs and into any of the hallways—where there might be beds to lie down on, or food to eat, or people who spoke my language to tell me what to do—until I obtained it. It did not take me long to figure this much out, at most a day or two. There were endless futile conversations, if I can use that word, all the way from the first floor to the eighteenth, with every hall guard on every shift.

By the end of all that climbing, this is what I had learned: the first rule of the staircase is basic and immutable. It will not be broken because you haven't eaten in three days or need to piss. It will not be broken if a woman is in labor, or if a child is injured, or a nobleman angry. It doesn't matter if you are the queen's consort or the lowliest kitchen maid, you will not get off the staircase until you can present the guard with his crichtén, which has been the hereditary right of his family to collect for—I'm still not very good with the temporal words—something like "time out of mind."

Many very polite, very determined encounters taught this to me. It was clear they expected something that I could not give them. And crichtén, as I gradually learned, is not something you can bargain for when you have no status. It is a set, honorific sum, expressed in regular money (a sum that is never used to value anything else, the very idea is unthinkable, so it is an unusable number in commerce) that everyone over the age of seven carries at all times. It must be yielded to the hall guards at every floor for passage, and occasionally handed over in certain ceremonies. As soon as it is gone it must be immediately replenished, either from savings or by working the obligations of kinship and association. There are precise rules about whom you can give crichtén, and from whom you can accept it. Given that different families and guilds occupy each floor, it takes real ingenuity to raise crichtén on a hallway in which you have few allies. As only a fool would depart onto the stairway again without it, people can remain trapped for days. Still, there they are trapped in community. Not so on the staircase.

In those first days, crichténless, knowing nobody, what was I to do? I was hardly going to push my way past one of the guards; they are armed men. Their armor is vestigial, but still. They have knives. They stand dangerously still. They are men.

In a very short time I found myself contemplating things I would never have dreamed of. I was continuously cold. I was starving, and terrified that I would fall sick and become helpless. Along about day five, I took all my clothes off in front of a guard on the thirteenth floor. He was young and seemed the likeliest candidate. It's hard to say which one of us was the more appalled. I nearly succeeded in forcing him back down his hallway because he was so reluctant to touch my bare skin. I was filthy by then, but it wasn't the reaction I expected. A man from home would have tried to make a deal, or taken what he wanted either violently or furtively, or despised me.

His reaction was fear. I was amazed. A young man in a position of power confronted with a naked woman. It was as if I might kill him if I came near. I remember the terrible moment when he came to the perimeter of his watch and could not back any further away, the slight shine of his armor as he came into the shadow of the archway; he stood at bay and his whole body yearned backward. His eyes were wild. I thought he might collapse. I smelled cooking meat in the hallway but I still couldn't push past him. There was no predicting what he might do.

The next day, he brought me food. That young guardsman of the thirteenth, whose name is Galvah—to me, that is, his name is Galvah, his tribe name is something like Galver'oh, though I know that only from overhearing and of course cannot use it, and his lineage name is Háldeccan, which means thirteen—brought me food, water, and clothing the very next night, his next watch. Out of pure compassion, even though I had shamed him. He was careful not to touch me and would scarcely look at me, but he brought a large metal pail of clean water, a stiff silk dress in a soft pink shade, and some spicy vegetable stew in an ornate fired-clay bowl. I am still grateful to him. I send rice to his family three times a year on the Gratitude Days.

Nothing has ever been as wonderful as that water. It was quite a large pail. I drank a lot of it straight off, though I had to wash my hands first. They were filthy with excrement. You have to shit right out in the open on the staircase, something incredibly hard to do at first, and there is nothing to wipe with. By then I had used up almost the last shreds of my nightdress. I was presented with a horrible dilemma therefore: whether to dip my hands in the water first, to wash them, and thus taint it before I drank, or not. I was nearly mad with thirst, and I could not easily reach it by mouth, as it was not full and my head would not fit inside its circumference. I was too weak to lift it. Finally I dipped part of the skirt of the new dress in and used that to scrub my hands, figuring that a stain was better than a disease. I am still proud of myself for this piece of reasoning.

I drank some water, ate the stew, which burned my mouth, drank more water, and then washed. My genitals, my feet, my armpits. I could not stand it any longer. I knew it was a risk to waste the water, but I felt so much at risk already that I hardly cared. After five days of fasting you become foolhardy when you eat. Food is a powerful drug: you feel the nutrients moving through you and the chemicals of your body responding with warmth, satisfaction, and a brief release from fear.

It is not as difficult sleeping on a staircase as you might think. I have never been a good sleeper. I never could sleep more than four hours together in a comfortable bed, with sleeping pills, so it was not appreciably worse on a cold marble stair in a great state of exhaustion. The stairs are broad, almost two paces deep. They are used in many ceremonies, and there must be space on each stair to put down a palanquin. There is little risk of rolling off them. I found that if I installed my head between the mighty marble feet of the railings it provided an added sense of security. The body needs security more than comfort. I slept enough to keep going.

It wasn't long before I met other denizens of the stairway. I couldn't speak to them, and many of them shunned me. Their responses to my overtures were, like the guardsman's, extreme. This was horrifying and puzzling. Most were householders, far better dressed than I, stuck there without crichtén for a prank or by accident. All they had to do was walk up and down bargaining with the guards or passersby to find someone willing to provide crichtén for them, banking on their honor. They were rarely there for more than a day or two. I have heard since that feuding or estranged spouses have been trapped there for much longer. Angry kin can have wide influence on the stairway guards if they are well connected and the case against the offender is deemed to be good. One blood prince of the second family lost his claim to the throne because of it; he was there for three weeks, and the shame was ruled too great. What his transgression was against his wife I have never learned.

I met no estranged spouses or abandoned princes at the time, as far as I am aware. People came and went quite quickly. I tried persistently to speak to them, but the language was complicated, and people were preoccupied with obtaining crichtén and clearly could not get it, or anything, from me. The worst was the violence of that intermittent rejection, that repulsed, fearful drawing back. I felt that I had been transformed into something hideous.

Then I met one of the hardingrhán. These are rare, so I was lucky. The hardingrhá on the stairs in my time was Prevostán, so I was doubly lucky. I owe him much more than tri-annual rice; there aren't enough Gratitude Days in the year to contain what I owe him.

A hardingrhá is vowed to spend a certain part of ­every year out of tribe. This doesn't sound like much, but it is practically like being dead. The words for "person" and "tribe" here share the same root: a person is a member of a tribe. Prevostán taught me that; he is a scholar, as are many of the vowed ones, all of whom are members of the officiating class. Officials are learned men; a certain breadth of vision applies to them. Yet most do not see the need to vow, or to pass out of tribe, and treat the decision with skepticism, even derision, if it is made. Other people, not officials—princes, commoners, servants, the owned and half-owned—treat the vowed ones with great reverence, though they can hardly interact with them, as they are all in tribe. Food, water, wine, clothing, flowers: these are left for the hardingrhán anonymously in certain places on the stairway and elsewhere. Prevostán shared his gifts with me. That was his privilege.

He shared utensils and food and blankets with me though I had no sigil. I was unnatural to him, and touching me made him weak and ill. Yet Prevostán held me when I cried, and gave no sign. That also was his privilege. For when you are out of tribe, you have no sigil. That was the burden he had taken on, though I am sure he never expected it to be so sorely tested. I remember him pale and sweating when he broke bread to share with me, and once he cried out in alarm when I woke him from sleep by touching his shoulder. Everything was so strange to me that I thought little of it then.

We were two outcasts, scarcely even human. His own kin, those he had abandoned, could only look at him with mirrors and were forbidden to offer him crichtén; officials passed him sightlessly, offended by his decision to vow; only those to whom he stood in no kin relation were allowed to aid him. This is the great reversal of being hardingrhán: only those to whom you owe nothing can help you, those with whom you have only money relations, not real, honorific ones. Money relations, dysala, are forbidden on the stairway. So they must help you only because they want to.

When we were on the stairway together I saw many people, great and small, old and young, offer him crichtén. He refused. He stayed with me.

He explained the sigil bond to me. It was incredible to him that I should have to ask about it, even though he knew—knew painfully, as I understood later—I had none. It's like asking about breathing or using language. It took a long time for the ideas to come clear. I had precious few words of the language, and his explanation was long and complicated. I still lack the words to translate it properly: the concepts do not exist in the language I grew up with.

I remember that I had to dance the first, crucial question: why do they shun me? Prevostán and I were sitting side by side on a stair between the ninth and tenth floors, near a place where people customarily left out food for him. Someone passed, making the usual wide berth around us. Spontaneously, I made as if to follow him, reaching out, and then turned round, impersonating him, making shooing gestures, pushing away, my face horrified. I looked back at Prevostán. It was clear he had understood me. After that, we had various conversations that way: it's probably what made him think of protocol dance.

He went on, eventually, to explain how each birth-month makes an inborn, invisible mark—he could not say how it is detected, exactly, not by smell or sight or touch—and how people born in the same birth-month know each other and are compatible. With some other months they are—strictly—incompatible. Some others they can tolerate and can interact with in various contexts. These are not quite the right words. At any rate, in this system I was invisible, unreal. As uncanny as if I had never been born.

Terrible knowledge, but I was grateful to get it. It is not the kind of thing most people will, or even can, discuss. Eventually, I left Prevostán there, on the staircase. After I had earned my passage out, it was many weeks until I saw him again. Yet none of the rest could have happened but for him. I owe him my life, this privileged life in the first hallway: the life of an honor-consort of a prince of the blood.

I have been living here, in the hall of the first kin, with the wide windows and doors opening directly out onto the palace grounds, my feet stepping on that envied grass, for seven years. Some people in the upper halls touch it only once or twice a year. There is nothing like the grass of the palace grounds for dancing. It is remarkable stuff, a smooth, even greenish-yellow, every stalk growing to precisely the same length without cutting. I have never seen anything like it. There was very little grass left at home.

We had three trees left in the city I grew up in, outside of those cultivated for air in the arboretum, and no one ever saw those, except for the foresters. They were too valuable, and the story was that they were prone to disease. I'm not sure if I ever believed that. I always had a suspicion that there were no trees there at all, just oxygenating machines.

Here there are trees everywhere, and the grass grows that perfect, even greenish-yellow for miles around the palace. Then it just stops. The boundary is clear, and nobody does anything to maintain it. It's always been that way—time out of mind. The land beyond is arable. Most of our food grows there. People must cultivate it. Nobody in the palace talks about it at all. To them, the world ends at that boundary.

I am a protocol-dance instructor of the second grade, teaching the children of the first five families. I was promoted to this rank two years ago. For the first time, this winter, I will have the opportunity to teach my own son, Yarren, who is just turning five. That is the age at which the training begins, and it is fortuitous, as I will now be able to teach him from the beginning. I would not have been able to do so before, when I was still third grade and able to teach only the sixth to the eighth families.

It is my mother I have to thank for this. My mother, the person I was gladdest to leave behind in the world I grew up in. It is because of her that I am a dancer. She was a vain woman, a hard exerciser, obsessed with not gaining weight; she got me into dance classes early in life, and I never stopped. I left home early to get away from her, and I never became a professional, partly in spite. She was never impressed with my career in personnel, but then, neither was I. It was a pleasant way to live, and it kept me in the city. I always kept dancing. Three evenings a week.

There are plenty of personnel in this palace, and they don't need me to manage them. I still don't even know what most of them do. But I told Prevostán, all those years ago, that I knew how to dance. I showed him, there on the stairs. He was able to get me a place with a non-rank troupe that performed at festivals. The owner-senior, Arian, whom he brought to see me, became my first crichtén sponsor. The members of the troupe are still my honor-kin; Arian was present at the birth of my son. I made sure she was present. Attending a first family birth festival opened many new avenues for her as a non-rank performer. It was the greatest service I could do her.

I bought my way out of my contract with Arian in less than a year, once it became clear that I was good at teaching children, and once the attention of Yestril had begun to increase my value. Arian asked an honorable price, and I paid it. I'm a good saver. I have realized since that I should have let Yestril pay it. It would have powerfully confirmed my worth. I did not understand this at the time. Indeed, had I done so, it would have moved me into the household of the first kin right away, rather than having to wait for the birth of my son. But it didn't feel right to me. Independence is a great thing where I came from. Here it is worthless. Who would want to act alone, feel alone? Where is the safety, or the pleasure?

There isn't much call for jetés in protocol-dance. Most of it is formal and fairly slow and little of it strenuous. It is about grace and precise steps. Knowing when to advance and when to back up; which salutations to offer to whom; how to turn and bow and do the ritual leaps of ascent. No-one can get married here, or promoted, or be born or buried without it. It is a universal language. Fortunately, in many respects it is easier than the spoken one. I learned it easily and have far more facility with it than with the words. There are things I can dance that I can't actually say.

My relationship with Yestril could never have grown without it, not only because he first met me with the troupe but because in his madness there are whole periods in which he cannot speak, but only dance.

I watch my son Yarren carefully for fear that he should show signs of his father's affliction. I don't know what I would do if I found any, or even what they would be, exactly. Madness is hard to detect in children. Chiefly, I am at a disadvantage because I am sigil-blind. Where I was born, birth-month was not important. People were free to lie about their birthdays if they wanted to; no one could tell. Here, everyone can tell, and a great deal hangs on it: who you can marry, what festivals you can attend, what jobs you can hold, what gods you honor.

Yarren was born in the third month of spring. I know this well, but I cannot smell it in him, or read it in his aura, or sense it however other people do here. So far it seems that either he is not sigil-blind, as his parents are, or perhaps, if he is, he is already good at compensating for it. For he does not offend continually, as I still do, and as Yestril would if his rank were not so great. Yarren plays with the proper playmates at his school; eats with the right ones; waits until the correct servant can take him to the bathroom.

Yes, the prince Yestril is sigil-blind. It is a rare disorder of the brain. It makes his life very difficult. In itself this would not be enough to classify him as insane, but in his case his condition is complicated by other strange reactions. At times, for upwards of a month at a time, he is bereft of the powers of speech: he cannot form words and shows no recognition of spoken language. Such periods typically follow spans of either agitation or depression that recur at intervals, sometimes separated by a year or more. He is at all times very sensitive, to light and heat and sound. For all this, he is the wisest person I know and, it seems to me, at no time more wise than when he is without speech. Then we two speak, perfectly, by dancing.

Sometimes I feel as if my whole life made me just in readiness for those times: my whole world and my whole city and my personnel office and my mother and my dance classes and everything about the millions of people who lived there with me shaped me to be the one person to dance with him, in a perfect communion in which words have no part.

It became clear to me, years ago on the stairs, that dancing was intrinsic to this world. I danced my way off the stairs and into human kinship; I danced my way from non-rank into the highest circles of the court. The first ceremony I ever saw here was a dance of ascent. A marriage dance, on the stairs. This was just before I met Prevostán.

A woman was moving from one level of the palace, one kin, to another, up in rank and down in floor, the way things go here, in balanced contradiction. The bride, in her splendid red dress, glided down the stair, pausing and quarter­-turning in various directions, chiming a pair of silver castanets in her hand at every new step. Her husband led her by the hand, remaining always one step beneath her. When she came to the final stair, where the hallway of her husband's kin began, she knelt in front of the hall guard for a long time. Her husband stood by her. They both waited wordlessly there until a matriarch came along the hall and, reaching past the guard, gave crichtén to the new bride. Then they were admitted and all of the wedding party after them, each handing crichtén to the guard as they filed past.

By imitating the posture of the bride, I learned how to get myself food. I remember kneeling at the feet of the guard with my head bowed and my hands slightly raised, as she had done, for hours after the wedding party had gone in. People are usually prone to charity at weddings. My action caused great perplexity, but finally members of the kin—the eighth, I recall—brought me presents of clothing and some food from the feast, on gold plates. The food lasted for days, and I kept the plates, and a heavy silver goblet also, and spent more hours kneeling before them when they were empty, in front of one hallway or another. They were often eventually filled, though not always.

My first attempts at the spoken language were much less successful. I tried, day after day, to speak to the sweepers. They, of course, speak to no one. Almost all of them, in fact, are dumb, as Prevostán explained afterward. Deaf children, or those speechless, are often given over to that service. Boring as it is, it is a matter of ritual, so it is respected. It is their job to sweep or scrub the stairs free of all filth and refuse and to collect lost objects. They answer to no one but their sweepmaster, and molesting them is one of the few crimes of the stairway. Fallen gloves or books or scarves can be collected from their master, though never money. If that falls on the stairs, in whatever amount, it belongs to the sweepers who found it. That way, no one on the stairway can find or save enough for crichtén.

The sweepers cleaned up the shit I left behind on the stairs, but they spent a lot of their time cleaning up blood. Vendetta is common on the stairway. Most other crime is rare. No one ever touched my gold plates, even while I slept, and I was never harmed. Though I feared rape or attack constantly, knowing nothing of the rules, and though the place seemed insanely and unpredictably violent, no assault ever came. Not to me. I had no honor.

One night I overheard—for I could not bear to watch and fled away at the first sign—a savage beating that ended after an agony of screaming and cries for help that must surely have been heard from top to bottom of the stairway and by many beyond. Nothing ever came of it except that I saw sweepers scrubbing wide brown stains off the steps some hours after. So of course I lived in terror, assuming I was surrounded by barbarians, without law or compassion. I had not yet seen them in tribe.

The stairway is a tribeless space. No master or kin has explicit power there. Only in the extremest of circumstances will the queen's guard act there. A man may attack another man on the stairway, in sight of many, and none of the usual bonds of kin or sigil will prevail; he may insult him, wound him, or even kill him, and no one will abet or defend either party. Honor-debts are therefore often claimed there. It is difficult to attack an individual in a hallway or even in the grounds, because people here are so rarely alone. Formal challenges are fine in the communal spaces of the palace; these are rituals, and kin are needed to act as alternates and to arrange the legal aspects of a challenge. But more casual or quick responses to smaller insults, or other private feuds, often work themselves out on the stairs, where other people will not interfere.

It is a curious and terrible space, the stairway. Malefactors can be driven there, to endure their shame in the public eye: it is a kind of jail. Victims will flee there—runaways, slaves: it offers sanctuary. Unwanted babies are abandoned there, kinless, for any to take or ignore. The wrong people can be seen having sex there, unpunished: men with men, or members of close kin. They are left strictly alone and, indeed, treated as if invisible.

I have talked about it many times to Yestril, my memories and fears of the place. For years after my escape I avoided it, and would only scurry through it blindly, my crichtén clutched in my sweating hand. I had extra pockets sewn in my clothes, each with a crichtén untouched inside it, just in case. The legal maximum you can carry is five. People make jokes about it: da'ot het fle'ot, the friendless carry five. I carried five. Early in our courtship, when I was still with Arian's troupe, I went so far as to challenge Yestril about it, to goad him as the queen's son into policing the stairway.

"I can't," he said simply. "No one can."

"Why not?" I said angrily.

He looked at me soberly for a minute. "It is the between place," he replied. He was silent for a long time. Then he continued abruptly, as if broaching a taboo: "We are free there. We are never free otherwise, constrained as we are by so many laws and traditions and the sigil-bond, too, stronger than all. There a man walks—a woman, too, I believe (and here he made the inclusion gesture from the protocol dance, the hand moving out from heart center, palm inward, in a quick clockwise circle)—in his own person, at his own risk. The stairway is—" He paused again. "—the balancing place. We are people of the bond. There we are free, absolutely free, just as we are bound in every breath and step everywhere else. The two are exactly counterposed."

"But how," I asked, "can the sigil-bond not work there? I have seen people in this hallway pulled from their sleep to help a sigil-mate in the next room … ten women converging at the door of one woman in labor … people who cannot touch their own children without pain. Such things are involuntary."

"I don't know. You know I am the wrong person to ask." Saying so, he made the briefest sketch of the apology-­between-equals gesture, reversed palms out from heart center, turning to come in and meet again. Yestril makes these gestures without even knowing he does them. They are part of his speech. He is always dancing.

"But then how," I continued, "did I end up there?"

He looked at me in puzzlement. "I don't know," I remember him saying, "Perhaps you, also, were too much bound?"

The day I left the staircase ought to have been a great day. But it was not. I had been there too long. My emotions had clamped down, and I could hardly feel anything at all. That took months to undo, maybe years; maybe I am still undoing it. It seems to me now that a flash of joy—from a dance perfectly executed, from the sight of my son's face—is stronger than it was before, almost disabling. All strong emotion shades into fear, or distrust. Feeling becomes too quickly conscious of itself, becomes a problem or an object, something I might lose.

And, of course, when I left the stairway, I was a slave. There was nothing else I could be. I had no kin. I had performed no service, incurred no obligation. Prevostán, tribeless, could not act for me during his vow: only in tribe can bonds be formed. I had nothing of value. Except myself: a beautiful woman is always of value. I had the skill of dancing and a basic vocabulary. You might say I sold all these things to Arian, the owner-senior of the troupe.

Prevostán had been able to approach her because she wasn't kin. He himself was high born, of the third family, and had once paid for her to perform at a festival. Theirs was a cash-based relationship and therefore no relationship at all—dysala, which means "no-over." Plenty of things are for sale here, but if you buy them with money, the exchange is meaningless: no honor accrues from it, and no obligation follows from it. Perversely, if a money-deal goes wrong—if someone is cheated, or a wrong price paid—then a true, honorific relationship ensues, as people negotiate over the difference. You over-tip a merchant, and he returns the extra to you: he has acted honorably, so you owe him. You find you have overpaid for goods, your family challenges the vendor for honor-debt. They owe you.

Prevostán had proceeded circuitously in order to display me to Arian. He did not own me, so he could not sell me. Explicit commerce is forbidden on the stairs, anyway. No one may sell anything there. It almost never happens that people try, but if they do, it is one of the exceptionally rare things that will provoke the queen's guard. Prevostán merely spoke to Arian one day when he met her on the stairs and told her about me, one of those rarities that had shown up on the stairway months ago, who knew how to dance.

Likewise he had done his best to explain to me the intricacies of non-rank performers and their contracts. The relationship entailed in such a contract lies somewhere between ownership and adoption. If Arian took me into her troupe, she would become my honor-kin, and I would have a foothold in the world, owe and be owed. She would provide crichtén for me, and training, and living space, but she would also name a sum that was my worth and that I could not leave her service without paying, or having someone pay for me. Wages would be given me, and I could, over time, buy myself back from her, and continue in her service, or not.

The idea of ownership of the person was hateful to me. Such arrangements were common in my world centuries ago, indentured servitude during its building phases, but it had passed out of use so long ago that it seemed impossible. Now I found myself becoming a dancing girl, property of a master. It was incredible, but I had no strength to protest, and no other way out of the between-place that was the staircase.

So on the day that Arian finally came to see me and offer me my freedom and my servitude, I did my best. In my filthy, stained pink dress, lightheaded from hunger, I did eighteen pirouettes in the highest style I could muster, twirling and leaping down from one step to another (ascending in rank, like the bride) and finished kneeling before her with my hands outstretched, silent. She immediately offered me a contract-price, but the sum was meaningless to me. I accepted.

Looking back on it now, I understand that the sum was considerable. She had to consider her own honor in making it, and she figured from the beginning that I would be worth her investment. I am proud of this and partly ashamed of myself for being proud. The other dancers in the troupe were variously proud or ashamed of their contract­-prices. Mine was one of the highest. Other dancers in the troupe—in fact, those with the highest contract-value—often preferred to remain owned, and made no attempt to purchase their freedom from Arian. These people were her star performers, often contracted out further to other companies or asked to solo at festivals and shows, necessitating intricate negotiations, in which the dancers themselves were involved. Their contract-prices conferred status upon them, a kind of rank among people who rarely had any blood rank to call on. On the other hand, those whose contract-worth was low would earn their way out as fast as possible and then try to negotiate better terms with Arian in dysala, as free workers, though she would not always take them.

After that simple bargain, I left the staircase with Arian. She gave me crichtén—the first time I had held money in my hand in all that time—and I gave it to the guard at the fifteenth hallway, where the troupe was quartered. As we went past the guard I burst into shaky tears, and Arian led me, weeping, away. I did not see Prevostán.

I have wondered ever since if that transaction was legal.

I learned all there was to know about protocol-dance in three months. As I said, it's not hard. It's like a simple language, in which there are maybe three hundred words or short phrases. Yet with that limited vocabulary an amazing number of things can be said. After I had appeared with the troupe a number of times, a group of mothers from the eighth family banded together and offered me a fee to teach their children. This is a common enough arrangement, but, as a complete stranger, I felt it to be a great honor and trust. Yet of course, to those women, anyone not of the eighth family, or of the wrong sigil, is a stranger. There are whole classes of people who do not exist for them, and they think nothing about it. Incompatible sigils are all strangers to each other.
Perhaps this fact explained people's widespread tolerance of me and my uncanny lack of a sigil and corresponding sigil-blindness. I was constantly surprised at how easily people accommodated these things, after the reactions I had experienced on the staircase. People obviously found it odd and were reluctant to touch me, but there was none of the wholesale disgust and drawing back. In the hallways and salles and meeting rooms of the palace, people are in tribe. On the stairs, they are not.

I think, though, that there were other factors. Because I myself had no sigil, I could teach children of all sigils in my group. In itself this was a shocking innovation, absolutely unheard of. If it had happened in a higher family than the eighth, I am sure it would have attracted the attention of the queen. The very principle was enough to bring down the government, if government is even the right word for how people are ruled here. I don't know. Mostly they seem to rule themselves, in endless small ways. But everyone has government, I guess. I don't know much about it.

What I mean is: having no sigil myself meant I could touch all of the children, and correct their posture, and also teach all the sigil-places in the dance. I am, as far as I know, the only person ever to do this. Normally it takes four instructors, as you cannot dance a sigil-part that is not natively your own. Apparently it will make you physically ill, like breaking the sigil-taboo in interacting with other people. The canny mothers of the eighth family must have realized this—that they could hire one person to do the work of four. It explains a lot.

I concluded also that some of their distant complacence came from the fact of dysala—I was not in a true honor-relation to any of them, as they had purchased my services. Sigil-blindness, for example, among one of their own kin would have been treated much more seriously, as a dreadful handicap. But I had seen similar cool, unflappable politeness between Arian and her workers in dysala.

With the children, things were different again. They were much more relaxed about my lack of sigil. It was curious to them but did not cause the kind of anxiety that I felt in adults. I think awareness of the sigil bond grows with age. They were acutely aware of each other's bonds and navigated them effortlessly but worried much less about mine. I learned a lot from observing them.

I had twelve pupils in my first class, three from each sigil-group. Of the twelve birth-months of the year, there are four groups: spring, summer, winter, fall, each representing a collective of three consecutive birth-months. Children of these groups—and adults, in certain contexts—are sigil-compatible, and can interact extensively. So my spring group could dance together, and the fall group, and so on. But they could never dance all together. Nor did they ever show any sign of wanting to. While any two in a group were practicing in pairs, the third would patiently wait, and then they would change about, never even looking over at the other partnerless ones from the other groups. Children of six and seven years old, excitable and hard to restrain, would instinctively avoid bumping into each other if their sigils did not match, even in the wildest game. They were sweet and kind and impulsive, like children anywhere. It's just that they would rush up and hug my knees in groups, never all at once, and even bullying never went cross-sigil.

My sigil-blindness was comical to them. It was like being taught dance by a dog. Children already think adults are stupid, which is to say, incomprehensible. I was just a special case.

"But that would be ondié!" my eight-year-old student Onder reproved me, balking, when I asked him, unthinkingly, to demonstrate a step he had just learned to the whole group. It was, as it happens, a fall step in the sequence acquiescence-junior-to-senior—which differs from the winter, spring, or summer versions only in the slight eastward orientation of the body. Did I mention that all the rooms here are marked with the cardinal directions on all four walls? The only place without these marks is the stairway. In my salle the winter children faced slightly south, the spring children north, the fall children east, the summer west. There is a lot of circling in protocol-dance, as everyone works around to the correct orientation in order to perform.

"Ondié, oh no, would it? Yes, of course!" I said, embarrassed. "Then I will do it." I stood first in front of one group, and then the next, and the next, and demonstrated the step, with its sigil-change, to each group. Everyone relaxed.

Onder, who had turned pale with revulsion at the idea of ondié, performed the step beautifully, in time with me, when I demonstrated it to his group. Strangely, learning it from me was not ondié, as it would have been from anyone of the wrong sigil. It was impossible for me to offend Onder, innocent boy, as he had no sigil-sense from me whatsoever: only blankness, no information. Nothing to induce sweat, tingling, panic, rejection, or to produce a comfortable feeling of order, attraction, security. Just nothingness. When I teach adults, their reaction is stronger, though never anything like I witnessed on the stairs.

Ondié is a word very rarely used, because the experience is so deeply felt. People are not even comfortable saying it, and even after eight years, it still gets used a lot in my presence.

Seven years ago, word came to the fifth son of the first family, the prince Yestril, that there was a sigil-blind dancer in the troupe of Arian, owner-senior of the third non-rank troupe. This was after I had been dancing professionally for about four months, and teaching for two. Yestril came to see us perform at a moon festival and immediately knew me as the woman he had once seen on the stairs. He sat near the front and followed me intently with his eyes, occasionally moving his hands in slight gestures or sketches, as if copying or replying to sections of the dance. This sounds mad—I suppose it is mad—but it was not unattractive. He was not waving wildly or drawing attention to himself; it was as if he were supplying a running commentary, or talking to himself, in whispers of movement. It was childlike. Though I was all the time conscious of his gaze on me, and it was not childlike at all.

As I danced before him on that first occasion, seeing the slight flutter of his hands in my peripheral vision, I was suddenly conscious for the first time that I was dancing a language. I had not been thinking about it that way before, while learning a series of steps and turns, by rote, sequences with names, just like learning dance back at home: volte, legato. Now it became clear to me that I was dancing whole phrases, sentences: Pleased to meet you, person of higher rank. I stay far from you in deference to your rank, and wait for the approach of my sigil-sponsor, who can mediate between us, even though we are of different sigils. Joy! The mediator has arrived. Is it not wonderful how this great gap can be bridged? Leap! I leave you this gift of flowers; the mediator brings it. He is kin to me; co-sigil to you: bond between us. Now I presume on my gift, and I ask this favor: this place in your guild, this assistance, this daughter for my wife … I could almost see my hands inscribing words in the air, feel them in my feet, a walking alphabet. Yestril gave me a great gift from the very beginning.

Feeling the intentness of his eye throughout the performance, I expected him to approach me afterward. But he did not. I found out later that it was because he could not. He was sinking into one of his periods of muteness. His mother knew; all the first kin knew; she always saw to it that during these phases he attended as many protocol-dance events as possible, as they afforded him some relief. Watching the dance, even such mundane matters as civil servants' promotions, the marriages of servants, festivals of the most minor deities, gave him a place in the community of speech.

So in the weeks that followed my first seeing him, the prince turned up at a surprising number of small performances. At the marriage of a vintner's daughter to a furniture-maker's apprentice, I saw him without any retinue at all, just a single servant, guiding him through the crowd after the dance was done, holding tightly to his arm. Yestril's face was expressionless, and he walked with a quick, jerky gait. As the vintner's daughter had done her wedding-leap, as we were circling around her in our interlocking rings, I remember, he gave an involuntary start in his chair, miming her action of ascent, half-rising. People around him carefully looked away. It occurred to me then that there was something wrong with Yestril, and that he had some other reason for attending the dance. Other than me, that is, which I in my vanity had been assuming was his chief interest.

"Why was the prince at such a minor wedding?" I asked Arian. I was half expecting some arch reply.

"The prince—the fifth son? Oh, he is mad, and the dance soothes him. So it is said, at least," replied Arian casually.

That was crushing. My mind had been building up great fantasies of escape and alliance and salvation from the moment I had learned that the man whose attention I had so clearly caught was a prince of the first family. How were any of these things to happen if he was insane?

"Mad, in what way?" I asked cautiously.

"I have no idea," said Arian, "I have never danced for the first family, and don't know anyone who has. They use rank performers. Though I have heard that he can't talk."

"What, not at all?"

"Not at all. He only dances."

"What! Really? Is that why he comes to so many performances?"

"Perhaps it makes him feel less alone. I have heard he is sigil-blind." Arian looked awkward. "Like you."

That was the first I had ever heard of sigil-blindness in other people. I should have realized, from the very fact that there was a word for it, that it must happen occasionally to those born here. But I had never met one, or heard of one. I had assumed I was unique. The idea was staggering. All my flagging hopes in the prince revived. He was like me! There was another person in the palace who lived in the same blind world I did, missing the fundamental part that told everyone what to do, what the boundaries were. A free man, I said in my heart of hearts, one not trapped like a bee in this stupid chemistry.

I felt that it was up to me then, so I did an incredible thing. At the next moon festival, when I saw Yestril there, still silent, still half-dancing to himself, I went straight up to him after the show. I, a half-owned dancer from a non-rank troupe, approached a prince of the first family, in a public place, without even a sigil-mediator. I knew I did not need one. The fact was so liberating that I did what I had never done before—indeed, something that is almost never done—and made up my own steps in the protocol dance. For where were the prescribed steps for this moment, two people meeting without sigil? There were none.

I was eloquent. No one there missed my point.

I came up to the prince and his servant as they left, in approach-of-deference. The servant stepped forward and blocked my way. The prince had already turned and was looking avidly, the blankness leaving his face. Without even thinking, I lifted my hand and touched the servant's bare cheek. The man flinched and staggered back. Ondié. He reeled away several paces, so Yestril could see me fully.

In the sequence reception-of-apology there is an eye-hiding gesture: I am blind to your fault. I came toward the prince in deference, three steps. I made the gesture: blind. I did the slow turn and pointed—note, reveal—at the sigil marks on the four walls. Blind.

I danced myself, a stranger—the steps of non­acquaintance, needing a mediator—with only an honor-kin (I gestured to Arian, standing frozen on the perimeter of the crowd). Coming back from where I had circled near Arian, I struck a changing tangent back toward the prince, no sigils, all sigils—I heard the crowd gasp—and came to rest at his feet in the suppliant's bow: assistance?

Yestril's face was like the sun rising. The servant made as if to approach, recovering, but Yestril silenced him with a curt wave of one hand, never looking away from my face. I stayed in the suppliant's posture. The prince rose to his full height, and his body seemed to resolve before me, no longer loose and shambolical but collected. Touching his palms, his breast, his temple, he made all the signs of his rank in full state—the crowd stood a little straighter, and several dropped into curtseys or made signs of deference—and then he did a quick revolution, marking the sigils on the walls, as I had. And then he made, not the blindness gesture I had made, but the gesture to dismiss. And not to dismiss between equals, or near-equals, but to dismiss someone of the lowest rank: a non-rank servant, unsuccessful suppliant, or offender.

He was magnificent. All the faces in the crowd grew absolutely taut. Had he not been of the first family, no one would have borne the insult, and he would have been inundated with challenges.

He came directly forward to me, not heeding the orientation marks. He threw the edge of his short cloak over me, the ritual used to adopt a child. Then he raised me up to stand in front of him, and he held up both palms. The crowd grew electric. The touching of palms here is of tremendous import. It only happens among compatible sigils, on particular occasions. A single palm will seal a bargain, witness an oath, receive an apprentice or a new householder. The double-palm salutation is used for rituals of courtship, betrothals, and birth-recognitions. It seals wedded couples and is the last mark made on a coffin.

I raised my palms to his. They did not tremble. I am a trained protocol dancer. We smiled into each other's eyes, we two, sigil-blind. I did not know whether I had just been born, married, or adopted, but I did not care.

Eleven months later our son was born. It may shock you to learn that I slept with the prince before he ever spoke to me. But it did not shock me. He had already spoken to me more clearly than any man before or since without uttering a word. It is nearly impossible to lie in protocol dance. A highly trained dancer may dissimulate, but not one like Yestril, a naïf, who spoke the language out of his very being.

I remember I woke up in his bed on maybe the third or fourth occasion, and he asked me my name. I was so flabbergasted I didn't know how to respond. It sounds unbelievable, but the fact is I had actually forgotten it. Can you imagine forgetting your own name? It was a sign of how very far I felt from my old self, how lost that person was to me. But really, I think it is because there is no way to dance a name. That is one of their chief weaknesses. There's nothing to them, really, no story, nothing to get hold of. They're just empty.

I had to gather myself together when Yestril asked me who I was in regular words, to prevent myself from leaping out of bed stark naked and dancing the answer for him: I am the one, you silly, you man-with-whom-I-am-intimate, the only one who is like you, sigil-blind, careless, the one who loves you, joyous, unafraid, crazy dog, the one you claimed, daughter-wife-child, lover, kin.

That is who I am now.

After a few minutes I answered him, and I learned he could speak, in words, like a normal man. That is the way his madness works: suddenly. One day he cannot talk, and the next day, even if after months, he can. It all comes back, all at once. He offered to pay my contract-price. He was mystified that I refused the money when I so clearly did want to become his concubine. (Yestril, as prince, can only marry from the first rank to the third.) I could not explain it myself, and it took me some time to earn my way out of my contract to Arian. Mid-way through I became pregnant, so in the end it hardly mattered. But I am still glad I freed myself.

I love Yestril and am glad to talk to him. He is my chief guide here in everything and the only one I can be sure of not offending. We have a son, and we need to teach him. Yet we began our relationship without words, and when those times return, I cherish them. I find myself, when we argue, or just grow slowly at odds in ways that words will not repair, looking forward to those periods in which his language runs out.

He does not. They frighten him. I can tell from a growing tightness in his body, from lines around his eyes and mouth as the times come on. He is afraid every time that he will never recover his powers of speech; I see the terror in his eyes, and it is terrible. It fades as he adjusts: after a day or two of fear and darkness, his eyes resume their calm. They become still and watchful and tend to glassiness if he is left long alone. When he is without words, he can act as if absent, moving automatically, responding lethargically, but he can also be moved to fits of sudden brilliance. He can dance then like no-one else in the palace: so clear, so precise, so original.

When Yarren was tiny and before speech himself, his father could be with him for hours and I would never hear a sound from either of them. I would watch them play, and explore small objects, and breathe and laugh and move their hands; they would gaze into each other's faces and it was as if an invisible current passed continuously between them. Yarren was utterly content and would be upset if taken away from him. But the baby would not sleep in his presence; it was as if whatever stream of information he received from him was so riveting that he could not let it go. He often had to be carried off screaming, completely overtired.

Our lovemaking during these times is often spectacular, and wholly different in a way that I cannot define.

Yestril slides into these periods through a passage of fear, yet he finds himself inside them, in the dance. He and I can talk then as we can at no other time, and the clearest language of this world is ours to command. We can speak it as no-one else can, dancing all the parts: the whole palace is contained in us. What could be greater?

Yet I am also reminded, especially at the beginning of each descent—in Yestril's bewilderment, in his painful rediscovery of himself, step by step—of myself waking on the stairway, alone.

I have no need to teach protocol dance now. I am the full concubine of a prince of the first family, mother of a son in the royal lineage. I still teach, though. It is my great pleasure, my best link to people here. In so many respects I am still a stranger and will always be one. I have kin now; I am a rank performer; my bonds to my students and their families are not in dysala. I am not paid to teach them: I do it to incur obligation, to gain fame, to extend my knowledge of the form. I do it because I have to. That is the person I am here, a protocol dancer of the second grade, licensed to teach the first five rank families.

My mother would be proud. I think that, sometimes, grudgingly. I finally became a professional. Though that is the least of it; profession, such a narrow thing, a moneymaking thing, back where I came from. People were typists; they operated jackhammers; they practiced law; they ran the city pools. We did all these things, trained for them or not, fell into them like as not, for money—money to pay the rent, to buy goods, above all to buy time to do other things. Profession bought you time to escape your profession, at least most of the time. Unfair, perhaps, to say so: there was solidarity there, and love of work there, and identity to be gained from it. But not like here. Mine was a whole world of dysala. No-over. And because there was nothing left over—no honor, no shame, no owing and being owed, and none of the places and shapes that those make in the world for us to inhabit—well, we spent all our time, and the money that buys time, trying to be many people at once, to occupy all the imaginary spaces between us. Ondié.

Now, for example, I teach Pol, the seven-year-old son of a princess in the second family, in my fall group once a week. (I teach the seasonal groups separately now, in the high kins.) Pol is a nice boy, rather pale and shy, only a mediocre dancer. But he gets through it; everyone has to here. In return for that hour every week, I am invited to attend a levée in the princess's apartment every second week, and there I have been introduced formally to many members of the high kins and many rank professionals, including the apothecary who healed Yarren when he had the croup at age two. The apothecary gave me herbs for my son and sat up a night breathing in steam with me, and for this I tutored his wife for three days before she received her last promotion, about which she was very nervous. She in turn introduced me to the chief historian, who was a client of hers, and he toured me through the royal library and introduced me to all the books—very rarely read, ancient and beautiful—of dance notation that reside there. Deciphering those old books—it seems the vocabulary of protocol dance was formerly much greater—has become one of my chief pastimes. I have revived some forms in my classes and am becoming an authority on the old dances, even giving a few historical performances. All this because I teach Pol, because his mother wanted him in the class taught by the first prince's concubine. Not a coin changed hands anywhere. Now I know those people; I owe them. They know me; they owe me. Back and forth, endlessly. It's a lot to keep track of. This whole world is an enormous protocol dance.

Today we have heard that the queen is dying: Yestril's mother. I have met her once or twice, a skinny dark-haired woman with a hawk nose who has gone through three husbands and borne nine children. She is ancient now and has been failing since the summer. The whole bottom floor of the palace is swathed in white cloth to muffle the sound of footsteps, which disturb her fitful rest. Doctors come and go, and the nobles of the first families are paying their last visits of state to receive their final blessings. People expect her to die any hour now.

Then there will be a royal funeral, a huge affair during which they will carry the coffin all the way up the staircase to the eighteenth floor—the first time the queen will ever have been there, no doubt—and back again, with farewell ceremonies at every floor.

Yestril says that the coronation of the next ruler will be unlike anything I have ever seen. She has seven children living and many grandchildren, and all of these are eligible for the throne. There is no designated heir. It is in the coronation dance that the new king or queen is chosen. I am not clear how, and Yestril cannot explain it. "It is what we call a strong dance," he says, "People say it moves the world. All sigils participate, and it's said that the palace itself dances, and the grounds, everything."

"But wouldn't that be ondié?" I asked.

"Yes. Everything is ondié on that day. Everything is unmade and then re-made. How, I am not sure. It hasn't happened for almost a hundred years. My mother is the oldest person in the palace, so no one living has ever seen it, except her."

"Has she ever talked about it?"

"Very little. It is sacred. She was very young. All I ever remember her saying is 'there was swirling.'"

"There is swirling in almost every protocol dance."

"True. So we will have to wait and see which one of my siblings or nephews and nieces is chosen."

"But not you?"

"No," said Yestril, humbly, making just a sketch of the exclusion gesture, "It cannot be me."

"I am glad," I said. I do not want to be the king's concubine. How would either of us know what to do?

The queen has indeed died. They have carried the coffin up and down the stairs and buried her in the royal cemetery in the grounds, hiding the hole in the yellow-green grass under a mountain of yellow flowers. Everyone seems purposeless and slow, heavy with grief. It seems hard for people to make decisions. Children and old people have spent most of the last two days sleeping. I expect an announcement about the coronation dance will go out soon.

No announcement has gone out. The majordomo has just left our apartments. He was here to consult me about the coronation dance. Me. He seemed utterly dazed. He came to me as an expert in the old dances, bringing an elaborate gilded book with him, the archival copy of the coronation dance notation. He begged me to read it, comment on it, and then help to organize it.

He promoted me to a first-rank performer, just like that. I tried to explain to him that surely there are more appropriate people—what about the four existing first-rank teachers of the sigil groups? Apparently they are having trouble co-operating, affected by the universal lethargy. The officials are desperate to get on with the ceremony but in their lassitude cannot do it themselves. "Why can't you?" I asked him.

"Things will be better after the ceremony," said the majordomo vaguely, making a faltering gesture that looked to me like a propitiation. "It will all come back together." He was so piteous that I took the book from him and agreed to help. Usually he is a brisk, suspicious, controlling man who doesn't even like me.

The old queen was right. There is swirling. More than any other protocol dance I've ever seen. It looks a bit like a marriage dance, and a bit like a rank-ascension, but more complicated than either. There are many interlocking rings of dancers, moving in different directions; the pathway notation looks like the design of some enormous machine full of cogs. It reminds me of some kind of flow chart that I must have seen once in management school, years ago. There are signs in the margins that I think indicate speed—sometimes the dancers are whirling very fast. And the numbers of people involved are shocking—it comes to over a thousand.

But the most shocking thing about it is that it is full of sigil violations. It's saturated with ondié through and through. I would imagine even reading it would make most people very nervous, or even ill. For the most part the sigil groups cohere; they make their own rings and proceed in the expected cardinal directions. But suddenly, at irregular intervals, the directions will reverse and the spring group will be rotating counterclockwise, the fall group will be facing stark south, and other unthinkable things will happen.

How can I ever get people to do this? When I couldn't get my student Onder to do a single ondié step for his class?

I've just shown the weird notation to Yestril. He is dispassionate. He, like me, is not affected by this depression of energy that has struck everyone, so it is not that. I wonder if he is sliding back into one of his wordless times, though none of the usual signs are there. Maybe he is just protected by his rank: he does not have to picture himself trying to shepherd a thousand terrified, angry, confused people through an extraordinarily complex dance. He says just to let the ceremony proceed: it has worked before. This is not very helpful.

Yarren is asleep, like most of his classmates. I conclude this is a good sign; he is fully connected to the system that expresses itself in the sigils, chemical, metaphysical, or whatever it is. He is not sigil-blind. Yestril and I, the blind ones, though, are apparently the only free agents around at the moment. His highness is going to have to help me a bit more.

I've co-opted all the royal messengers. They have gathered representatives of every floor, every tribe, every clan, every trade, every rank. I've put all these people into their groups. I've had them practice all their parts separately. Just that was harder than I could have imagined. People are willing, even eager, to take orders. Normally bossy people can be led around like children. But they find directions hard to remember. Even the most basic things are ­becoming hard to remember: namely, the sigil-taboos. I have seen it with my own eyes. The wrong people touch each other, or fall into line, and they don't notice. It sends a chill through me every time, a feeling of disorder. If I weren't so horribly busy I would be in a panic.

Yarren, at least, sees none of it. He is still sleeping, through a third day. There are no children in the dance.

There can be no full rehearsal. None at all. The book specifies. The coronation dance can only happen once, and out of it the ruler is chosen. I can find no notation that explains how. I have to assume it's at the end, but there are no instructions.

Now Yarren's cot is empty. He is gone. The halls are completely silent. I have called for servants but none have come. Peering out the door, I see the doorwards are gone. The hall guards at the distant end of the corridor are gone. The floor is strangely shining in the cold light of dawn that falls from the windows.

Yestril and I rush out in panic. My bare feet touch cold coins, strewn everywhere. The floors are littered thickly with them, small triangular pieces with holes in them: gold, silver, bronze. They stick to my feet as I move. Yestril and I walk over the shining carpet of coins toward the central well of the palace, the spiral of the stairs. I rush forward, but behind me Yestril stops, plucks a coin off his sole, and says, in a whisper, as if to himself, "Crichtén."

He arrives beside me to gaze out on the staircase in wonderment. Every single inhabitant of the palace is there, from grandmothers to babes in arms. The sick have risen from their beds and crawled, or been carried. All the formerly sleeping children are there, including Yarren, several stairs down. He is with one of the doorwards, who is not compatible, holding his hand. We walk out to the landing and see ranks of people filling every stair, three deep, packed in like fish in a barrel. Every stair is crammed. There is no room to move. There are thousands of people. They are blank and calm and docile. Most are standing, though a few are sitting or supported.

Pol's mother, our neighbor, is standing squashed next to a housemaid who is an incompatible. The apothecary is sitting on a stair, leaning against the legs of a man who is an incompatible and his business rival. All sigil order is gone.

Yestril and I stare at each other in amazement. "The between place," he whispers.

There is a ripple in the crowd, and a head comes toiling towards us through the ranks. It is Prevostán. He seems weary, but brighter than the rest. "Do you see?" he says, "You see what has happened? They are all hardingrhán now. No tribes. No sigils. This is what the vows are for! Why I went tribeless. I see it now. So we can make it through this day. And now you two, the sigil-blind, are here. Why do you suppose that is?"

"It is time for the strong dance," replies Yestril.

"Yes," says Prevostán, "Now."

So I call them, the thousand dancers, and they come.

The process takes hours, messengers, shuffling, falls. All the groups gradually reassemble, remembering each other at least that much, and move slowly toward the throne room. They sidle out of the stairwell, clinking and ­clattering over the abandoned coins, and leave the majority of the people there, arrested.

The throne room had always seemed unnecessarily big to me before. Now I understand its size. By noon it is full of enormous rings of people, concentric or intercalating all over the huge space. The members of the royal family, the potentials, are all gathered silently in a kind of octagonal form made by the intersection of many rings. As far as I understand from the notation, they never dance. Yestril and I stand up on the balcony that the queen had formerly used for her addresses and look down on the motley, silent crowd.

There is no music. Music is rarely used in protocol dance. The feet and the bodies are speaking and you have to be able to hear them. All the windows are open, even though it is freezing; the book insists. A thousand people stand there vacantly, expectantly.

"What do I do?" I whisper in agony to Yestril. The dancers are so far away. They look like the little dots used in the notation.

"Direct their attention here."

I call out loudly "Mark!" as I would at the beginning of a lesson. Every single person in that room has been trained in protocol dance. They wake up as if from a trance, look around, join hands, and look up toward my voice. Two thousand eyes meet mine.

"Hold up your hands," says Yestril, quietly.

I hold up my two hands, palms out, toward him. The energy of the crowd sharpens and focuses. Yestril holds up his hands with a flourish of rank and presses his palms to mine. We look at each other and breathe twice.

There is an arc. There is a connection. There is swirling. The people move in their rings, in their variegated steps, changing directions. Sometimes I see them as moving dots; sometimes I see faces I know. Somehow these tired, witless people are ­moving incredibly fast. I hear two thousand trampling feet, but I also hear a hum or a thrum or a sob in the air, a huge, directionless voice droning. I feel it in my bones and skin, a deep vibration. I see colors flash on the walls, sigil signs and cardinal directions lighting up as if electrified. Outside the open windows, the yellow-green lawn ripples in the cold wind, changing hue slowly, from hot gold to lemon to aquamarine, in a long rhythm. There is a hot, metallic smell in the air.

I drop hands with Yestril. The connection does not break; whatever enormous, wordless power it is continues to breathe through us all, everyone in that room, in the palace, in the grounds, the world. Most of it is pleasurable, but I am conscious of sudden, frightening, wrenching reversals, occasional sickening waves of revulsion. After a while I can associate these with the moments of reversal I see in the dance below me. The fall sigils face south; the springs cross the room on the wrong tangent; a group of winters cross hands with summers: wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Every one is a blow that makes me cringe. When the chains of linked people go the right way, the right hands touch, I feel great well-being, calm, spaciousness, fullness, affection, like a dog licking someone's hand. I am feeling the sigil bond. Even me.

The painful feelings intensify as the dance goes on. The reversals are harder and harder to last through, an itch on the inside of the skin. I have a feeling, each time it happens, of cranking, or tightening, or winding backwards, tautening. Pressure is building up, running through everything, inside and outside, unbearable. Finally, in the last cycle of the final iteration of the dance—the whole thing repeats three times—the four sigil leaders of the central rings all meet and touch, and it explodes.

There is no bang or flash of light, just a sudden vertiginous feeling of shooting upward, a jangly tingling that runs from the soles of my feet to the top of my head. The dancers below me all seem to flicker or jump. Then the dance goes into its final coda with all persons and sigils in their proper places, everything righted. We look over into the group of potential royals, and only one is standing. The rest are on the ground, unconscious.

Yestril's third brother: Ranil. The king.

People are shaking their heads, rubbing their eyes. Their shoulders sag. It is over. But not for me. There is no more rising effervescence, but a terrible black suction into an upward void, pulling pulling pulling. I scream and hold on to Yestril and to the railing, clutching the stone, every cell protesting movement upward, movement away.

The pull ceases, and I fall down.

A murmur passes through the crowd below, an outcry. Four members of the royal family, in their octagonal enclosure, are gone. There are tears, complaints, railing. But there will not be any serious attempt to explain it. Soon enough this will be one of the things that "do not command attention" or "do not happen among us." Protocol is restored. The majordomo can go back to despising me.

If people dropped their crichtén on the stairs as they did in the hallways, the sweepers will be rich forever. The new king's first problem will be redistributing all those lost coins. People won't be able to get home without them.

I stagger up from the balcony floor. Yestril puts his arm around me and we creep away toward the stairs to find Yarren, who by now has no doubt dropped the hand of the doorward in horror. When we find him, we will take him straight back to our hallway.

I know somebody will give us crichtén.

The men sitting on the couches in the middle of Old Man's Point didn't need the screeching of the cicadas to tell them how hot it was. The sweat on their foreheads and on the beer bottles gave them ample evidence. The sweat was cyclical: the more sweat on their foreheads, the more need for cold beer, which in turn became sweat in the humidity of the summer woods.

Old Man's Point was located near the eastern shore of Otter Lake, named for an old man who used to stand on the bank and point at all the boats going by. A deserted stretch of shoreline running parallel to a rarely used dirt road, it housed a group of cedar trees that grew skyward in a sort of amphitheatre configuration. Over the years, several worn and tattered couches had found their way to the cedars, which circled an ancient fire pit. Weathered by many years of rain, snow, sun, and sweaty Aboriginal behinds, the sofas looked as beaten down, as lived in, and as much a part of the landscape as the men. The constant breeze from the lake kept the more persistent mosquitos and other bugs of July away, and all in all, it was a comfortable and picturesque place to pass the summer months.

Today, like most lazy days, there sat three Ojibway men. Tarzan, Cheemo and Teddy had been there since ten that morning, enjoying a cooler stocked with beer that was chilling in the shallow waters near the shore. They had no place to go and nothing much to do, a happy coincidence for all. Most of their relations agreed the trio were men of few words and fewer ambitions. And the three saw little need to argue. They did what they did, and they were very good at it.

Although they spent long hours in each other's company—they had been best buddies since their early school days—they said remarkably little. Several seasons back, a cousin had joined them for the day and had come away utterly bewildered.

"They didn't say anything. Not one word!" the cousin had exclaimed.

"I tried to talk with them about something, anything, but I got nothing back. They would just sit there, look around occasionally, smile and drink beer. That's all." He never went back.

The men had spent so much time together over the years, they practically knew each other's thoughts; thus, nothing needed to be said. Besides, nothing much happened to them that needed to be discussed anyway.

Until the spaceship landed.

It was a Tuesday. Tarzan, so called because as a kid he loved running around the village and climbing trees in his underwear, was pulling three more beers out of the cooler when he heard it. Years sitting at Old Man's Point with his cousins had made him far more aural than oral. The buzzing of insects, the calls of birds, the lapping of water on the shore, the distant drone of motorboats constituted pretty much the only auditory landscape in the area. So when the insects and birds suddenly went quiet and the relative silence was filled by a growing humming sound—no, humming wasn't quite the right word, but it would have to do—Tarzan's curiosity was piqued. He looked to his right and then left. Not seeing anything out of the ordinary, he finally looked up, over the lake, and almost dropped his beer. Almost.

Cheemo, whose name tragically translates from Ojibway into English roughly as "Big Shit," heard the unfamiliar sound next. At first, Cheemo thought the noise was coming from a passing boat, but then it occurred to him boats don't usually pass overhead.

Puzzled, he looked over to his brother, Teddy, who since childhood had given off the vague aroma of puppy breath. As a result, children loved him. But Teddy's eyes were closed, as the wind had increased and he was enjoying the caresses of the midsummer breeze, for alas, those were the only caresses in his life. It took his baseball cap flying across the fire pit and into the goldenrods near the edge of the clearing to make him open his eyes. What was fast approaching filled his eyes, but the rest of him refused to comprehend the large flashing, multicoloured object making a clear path to their couches. He closed his eyes for a second, thinking maybe it would disappear. No such luck, for he could see the flashing lights through his eyelids. Additionally, it was still there when he reopened them. Teddy shrugged and took a sip of beer.

By now the hum was constant and unmistakable. Cheemo could tell it was close, and judging from Tarzan's pose, head pointed ninety degrees straight up, it was directly overhead. Finally, putting two and two together, Cheemo looked up through the branches of the cedars to see what had caught his brother's and cousin's attention.

Although its shape seemed somewhat amorphous because it was glowing, the object was definitely round, and quite sizable. Perhaps as wide as four or five eighteen-wheelers lined up side by side, thought Cheemo, trying to render an unfamiliar and unexpected occurrence familiar and concrete. The other two expressed their earnest opinion by dropping their jaws, though oddly enough, neither was surprised enough to drop the beer bottle clutched in his hands.

Whatever it was grew closer, eventually descending onto the sandy beach adjacent to the nearby road. It landed not with a thud but with a soft whoosh as the air was pushed aside. A small cloud of road dust briefly surrounded the thing. The men's faces and bodies were bathed in the broad spectrum of colours emitted by the craft, a dozen different hues reflecting the spectrum of visible light, and possibly a few as yet undiscovered by the human race. Birds, insects, frogs, and other animals local to Old Man's Point suddenly remembered they had plans elsewhere and evacuated. In a remarkably short period of time, it was just the strange object, the cedar trees and the three men left in the immediate area. It should be pointed out that in the forty or so seconds since they had spotted the approach of the mysterious craft, the men had not moved a centimetre.

A few more seconds passed as the humming seemed to lessen and the flashing of the lights diminished. Tarzan, somehow realizing this wasn't exactly a normal occurrence, glanced at Teddy, who in turn glanced at Cheemo. Finally, Cheemo managed to force his eyes off the craft and looked to Tarzan for any suggestion of what to do. Unfortunately, expert recommendations for handling such a unique situation were a rare commodity that morning in Otter Lake, and even scarcer in that little nook of the reserve. The only comment on the situation was a loud, nervous gulp by Teddy. The other two quickly followed suit.

Suddenly, the humming shifted, and the whirring lights froze. A new sound emerged from somewhere beneath the pulsating luminosity—a higher-pitched buzzing reminiscent of a thousand mosquitos filtered through a blown guitar amp. Then a rectangular patch of obsidian light erupted along one side of the craft, near the bottom. It flared briefly, then dissipated, revealing what appeared to the three men to be an opaque stairway of sorts. And more distressing, something seemed to be … the only word Tarzan could come up with was … flowing … down the mysterious ramp.

By now it had occurred to the Old Man's Point trio that perhaps this would be a good time to relocate to a less historic location and ponder their next course of action. However, before they could move, they heard a new sound. It was a watery, thick voice, one that seemed to be trying to find the correct boundaries of vocal expression. The sound was fuzzy for a few seconds before it solidified into something understandable.

"Greetings, people of Earth."

It had spoken to them. Cheemo looked to Teddy, unsure whether the voice was referring to them, for he was fairly sure they were people from Earth, but he didn't want to jump to conclusions. White people were always changing the names of things: countries, people, and a bunch of other things. He wouldn't put it past them to change the name of the planet. He had seen on the news some time ago that Pluto was no longer considered a planet. It had been downgraded to the celestial equivalent of a non-status planet.

For obvious reasons, Teddy's attention was not on his brother. He was too busy wondering why it felt as if all his hair was standing on end, like when he forgot to put fabric softener sheets in the dryer.

Tarzan realized his beer was empty, and this was definitely a time for extra beer.

For a brief period, the only sound other than the peculiar humming was the casual lapping of water on the shore. Then more words came from the very strange stranger.

"We are the Kaaw Wiyaa. We come in peace."

That's good, thought Tarzan. Peace is always good.

More cognizant of the history-making implications of the event developing around them, Cheemo tried hard to focus and memorize all that was happening. He knew that, should they survive this encounter, there could be good money and a future of free beer on the horizon. But at the moment, it was difficult to make out who or what was actually talking. Much like the craft, the defining boundaries around the individual seemed to be disobeying the rule that light travels in a straight line. Occasionally, he glimpsed what he thought were tentacles.

Calamari, thought Cheemo, I haven't had calamari in a long time.

There was a constant shimmering, and intermittently what appeared to be dark or smoky blobs emerged in the general vicinity of the strange being.

Must be a bitch taking a family photo, thought Teddy.

Tarzan couldn't help thinking what a cool effect this was. Must freak the girls out.

"You are citizens of this planet?"

All three took a reasonable guess and nodded. Remembering his mother's frequent comments about hospitality and politeness, Cheemo wondered if he should offer … it … a beer … then thought better of the idea. They only had three left. And he wasn't sure that thing had a mouth. Or a liver. Or a bladder.

"Excellent. We wish to open diplomatic negotiations with your planet. That is why we wish to see your leader."

Mentally, Cheemo was kicking himself. He should have watched more Star Trek as a kid. Star Wars doesn't really prepare you for a situation like this. This was definitely a Star Trek moment.

Meanwhile, Tarzan was wondering if they'd let him drive their … spaceship. There was this ex-girlfriend's house he'd like to hover over, maybe dump some interstellar garbage on.

"Will you take us to your leader, then?"

Grabbing the initiative, Cheemo nodded. This was not their problem. This is what people get elected for and why they enjoy those luxurious band office salaries. In those few short seconds, Cheemo had decided a life of fortune and fame just wasn't for him. He preferred the under-the-radar, low-stress approach. And he was fairly confident the other two would agree. Almost as if reading his mind, Teddy was nodding his head, agreeing with Cheemo via a lifelong cultural practice of not contradicting family when you have nothing better to say.

In reality, Teddy was wondering if that thing with calamari arms had farted. He was fairly sure he could smell a fart, but not one he had ever smelled before. And the nature of the breeze indicated it was coming from the direction of the newcomer. Unfortunately, Teddy's Grade 10 chemistry class twenty years ago had neglected to teach him about the prevalence of methane in the universe, and that many planets, including several in his own solar system, contained large quantities of methane. Some scientists have even theorized that alien life would breathe it the same way the ecosystem on Earth uses oxygen. Methane has the same approximate chemical makeup of certain gastrointestinal by-products in Earth animals. Through its unique physiology and the atmosphere it breathed, the Kaaw Wiyaa smelled constantly of a fart.

As for the "take me to your leader" part, Cheemo glanced at Tarzan who glanced at Teddy who glanced back at Cheemo. They all knew where to take him.

It was 3:36 on a hot, gorgeous Tuesday and, luckily, the chief of the Otter Lake First Nation was in his office, not whacking huge divots in the piece of Mother Earth his community had sold to a golf course two decades ago. It took some manoeuvring to get the sizable and abundantly limbed Kaaw Wiyaa through the band office door. It had recently been remodelled to be wheelchair accessible, but not quite alien accessible. And as they'd passed him in the hall, the janitor had looked worriedly at the trail of slime it was leaving on his newly cleaned carpets. For this he got a degree in Indigenous Studies?

Chief Angus Benojee, a man expanding at the belly but thinning on top, sat in his leather chair staring at the creature his nephews had brought into his office. His skinny little moustache quivered in a combination of confusion and irritation. There was barely enough room in the small office for the three men and … it. Tarzan, the smallest of the three, had to climb up on a table and sit cross-legged—Indian-style, some would say—so that the others could comfortably fit. To make things worse, the chief was certain somebody had farted.

"I am honoured to meet the leader of this great planet."

The chief 's brow furrowed. This was his third term in office and this took the cake for most unusual meeting of the year, beating out by far his lunch with the acting regional director for Governmental Interdepartmental Subsidies and Regional Financial Accessibility (ARD-GISRFA). The poor government official had actually thought he had scored a trip to India to meet the Indians. Chief Angus looked at one nephew who looked at his other nephew who looked at the remaining cousin who shrugged. The only comment the chief could make was a weary sigh.

The Kaaw Wiyaa seemed to be doing the Kaaw Wiyaa equivalent of a bow. "We come from 734 light-years away. We have travelled far to bring greetings to your people. You are not alone in the universe."

Chief Angus wasn't sure how to respond to that. This particular situation had not been part of any of his briefings at the Assembly of First Nations. He knew light-years were a good-sized distance to travel because he had watched a lot of Star Trek as a kid. Unlike Cheemo, he had always appreciated it more than Star Wars. He marvelled at the kind of travel allowance and per diem a trip in light-years must pull in. Seeing the gills on the Kaaw Wiyaa quiver as it spoke reminded the chief that he had a fairly large and tasty muskie fish back home in his freezer. He'd have to run home to defrost it in time for dinner.

Teddy, who was standing closest to the creature, could feel the alien's body heat coming off it in waves. Evidently, wherever it came from was a lot hotter than here. Add that to the smell of the Kaaw Wiyaa, the tightness of the room, and the fact they'd forgotten to bring the rest of the beer with them, and Teddy was feeling a bit woozy.

Tarzan had never been in the chief 's office before. Surreptitiously, he pocketed two pens from his desk.

"We would like to open diplomatic relations with the people and government of Earth. That is why I am here."

The chief wondered if this was how the Beothuk and Mi'kmaq chiefs felt five hundred years ago. Wow, life is truly cyclical, he thought. The remnants of his activist youth (he'd gone to a protest once) resurfaced, and he restrained the urge to tell the large glowing, quivering, slimy thing in front of him to go home and leave his people alone. The reserve and the planet were all full up. But the pragmatic and diplomatic politician quickly reasserted itself. You don't get to be the former vice-chief for Central Ontario for the Assembly of First Nations without knowing a few things. Still, the man was at a loss as to how to proceed.

Outside his office door, the chief thought he heard Laurie, head of membership and lands, slip and fall with a loud and painful thud, probably on the trail of slime left by the problem standing in front of him. He'd better do something to get this thing out of the building before it triggered any lawsuits.

"As is protocol, our Grand Council has instructed me to request that you, as leader of this great planet, designate an ambassador to return with us to Kaaw Wiyaa to facilitate a cultural exchange and begin negotiations. As a goodwill gesture, we would be willing to construct sizable stone pyramids, or assist in the erection of enormous rock heads, or create giant stone circular calendars, as per your customs. We humbly await your decision." Chief Angus was in a pickle, and he hated being in a pickle. None of those things would be of any use to Otter Lake. A decent water filtration system would be welcome, but he doubted this traveller from Kaaw Wiyaa would have the patience or the know-how to tackle the necessary forms and applications to navigate all the bureaucratic levels. Just the smell of the creature would probably fail the environmental assessment. Ambassador … hmmm, thought the chief. In the corner, on the table, Tarzan sneezed. In the closed room, the smell was beginning to get to him. He smiled sheepishly. The chief had an idea—three of them, in fact.

Passing the orbit of Earth's moon, the Kaaw Wiyaa craft picked up speed as the quantum drive became fully operational. Soon, the Kaaw Wiyaa equivalent of a computer, buried somewhere deep in the ship, would calculate the best opportunity to open a space-time portal, taking the vessel back to its home. Behind the ship, the planet Earth was already fading into the distance, rapidly becoming just another speck of light in the spectacular backdrop of the universe. Tarzan, Cheemo and Teddy watched their home get smaller and smaller. Needless to say, they had mixed emotions about their recent appointment as ambassadors from Earth to the Kaaw Wiyaa Galactic Confederation. This was not how they had expected their day to end.

From the beginning, all three had doubts about Chief Angus's so-called "brilliant solution." Cheemo had never been out of the county or country, let alone the planet. Teddy got seasick, which is embarrassing enough when you come from a family of fishermen. There was no telling how space travel would affect him. And Tarzan needed the sound of purring from at least one of his three cats in order to fall asleep. They'd been on the ship for a little more than an hour, and there didn't seem to be any cats. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea, he thought. The other two were thinking the same thing, but ever since they were young, Chief Angus had been able to talk them into anything. Case in point.

As Otter Lake and Earth seemed to wink out in the distance, Tarzan had an afterthought. They should have brought some beer. There were now four other members of the ship's crew standing—or whatever the Kaaw Wiyaa equivalent was—in the large pale-green room. There seemed to be more area on the inside of the ship than the three men had thought possible, based on what they saw of the exterior as they entered. Oh well, they decided to add this to the list of mysteries. Tricks like this would sure help with the housing shortage in their community. "We are very honoured that you have accepted our offer to join us as representatives of your people. The citizens of Planet Earth must be very proud of you."

Teddy gave them his best 'ah shucks' shrug. Tarzan was barely conscious of the conversation. He was still looking out the window, wondering if it was too late to … literally … jump ship.

"If I may speak freely, what truly impressed us were your methods of communication. Metacommunication. Your ability to communicate without interacting verbally. Almost a form of telepathy. It was that ability that convinced us of your planet's sophistication."

All three men smiled, looking down at the mauve floor shyly, not really understanding what they were being complimented on.

"Please forgive us, we have misplaced our manners. Perhaps you would like something to drink?"

Tarzan nodded enthusiastically.

"We have something from our planet that you might find mildly intoxicating, based on what we know about human physiology. Would that be acceptable?"

The head Kaaw Wiyaa turned to one of the subordinate crew members and flopped a tentacle.

Once again, Tarzan nodded enthusiastically.

The crew member produced three two-foot tall containers that it delicately handed over to the beings from Earth. Each took one, noting how heavy it was. Tarzan examined his closely for any type of opening while Cheemo sniffed at his. The aroma was not unpleasant, a cross between freshly cut grass and new-car smell.

Suddenly, Teddy's container jerked rather dramatically, as if something inside was trying to escape. Almost immediately, the same happened with the other two—a violent and agitated shift of weight. It reminded Tarzan of one of his cats trying to get out of its carrier. Teddy was just about to drop his when their host quickly cautioned them.

"Do not let it out. If it escapes, that will ruin the taste. Just hold it firmly, like this." Then the Kaaw Wiyaa lifted his up and quickly thudded it against the wall. The container stopped moving. "This stuns the main ingredient and enhances the flavour."

Cheemo, feeling almost adventurous in his new environment, gripped it fiercely and rammed his surprisingly sturdy container against the bulkhead. Not wanting to be outdone, the other two quickly copied. Now, all of them had ceased their frantic tremoring.

"Now drink," their host said, and raised its container to what all three Ojibway earthlings assumed was its mouth. At the top of the container, they noticed, was a small pyramid-shaped aperture. Then it tilted the drink back and seemed to swallow.

Encouraged, Teddy decided it would be rude not to at least sample their host's beverage. Conscious something was alive inside it, he tentatively tipped it back. The other two followed suit.

It was hard to describe the taste—peanut butter mixed with apple pie mixed with moose—but each felt he could definitely get used to it. It certainly wasn't beer, but there was an agreeable … what could only be described as twinkling in their nerve endings that came a few seconds after ingestion. All silently agreed they'd drunk worse.

Once more, whatever was inside Teddy's container gave a violent reaction, but by now, the experienced Teddy just held his drink firmly, thwacked it against the wall and the forceful shaking subsided. Tarzan had already drained his and was holding it up, indicating he wouldn't mind a second. Before he could speak, he was presented with another one, already quivering with flavour. I could get used to this, he thought.

"We hope you will feel at home here."

Suddenly, the familiar couches they had been so comfortably ensconced on that morning were waiting behind them. They were sure they could smell the familiar breeze coming off the lake. The sound of the cicadas was back. And, by golly, there were even a few bushes scattered around the couches, with the old fire pit in the middle. It was like they were back at Old Man's Point. "We have tried to replicate the environment we originally approached you in. We hope it is satisfactory, ambassadors from Earth."

Tarzan, Cheemo and Teddy each took another sip as they sat in their familiar seats. Getting comfortable on their favourite couches, all three nodded their heads in contentment. This ambassador thing might actually turn out okay. After all, they'd had worse jobs.

"We should have done this years ago," said Cheemo.

They say great things are achieved in the dead of night. Montague hoped it was true as he hammered in the next nail with all the life that was left in him. His only illumination was the slice of moonlight shining through the window of the wretched dungeon which had been his home for the last five years.

When the nail was in place, he gripped the piece of metal which was once the corner of a tin food tray, and used it as a wood shaver to smooth out the rough edges of his creation. The sound of the slivers of wood being hewn off seemed to mimic the sickly tones of his wheezing lungs. He paid no attention to that, not now. Now he was fighting his fiercest adversary—time.

"S . . . S'il vous plait . . . " He pleaded quietly to no one. A great cough built up from the bottom of his chest and erupted from him. He crouched helplessly as uncontrollable shakes caused him to drop the makeshift tool; he reached out a shaky hand to hold the edge of the work table. As the cough finally receded he eased open his watery eyes. A mist of blood had speckled the bench.

He cursed himself to his feet, using the most colourful profanities he knew to shock his expiring body into action.

Montague glanced at a charcoal sketch on a yellowing sheet of paper that lay amongst his tools. He never kept it far from reach, and now he drew strength from it again. He forced a deep breath and wheezing, he pushed himself up on one arm. He dragged his leg up for support and growled as he was reminded of the cold heavy iron on his ankle.

The sketch portrayed a young woman, proud, bold, and stunningly beautiful, gazing ahead with Montague's eyes—the only things he had ever given her. Her afro hair was twisted into intricate dreadlocks and pulled up in a magnificent bun, like a crown. In her true homeland, he knew she would have been a queen. Perhaps with his final invention she would, at the very least, be freed.

The worn-out prisoner picked up a table leg-turned-mallet, raised it up slower than before and brought it down with less precision, every motion becoming increasingly more difficult to control. He was puzzled when his vision began to blur, and it was only when he blinked drops onto the smooth wooden surface that he realised they were tears. He smeared them away with the back of his hand. He had to finish!

His frustration threatened to overwhelm him but he didn't stop.

When he put the mallet down he was panting. His whole body pulsed with each breath cut short by the mine dust that had built up in his lungs. The pain meant nothing. He tested his work, gripping the base, the first of three wooden components. It was shaped like a window frame, except there was a gap on the left side, leaving the square incomplete. A wheel was attached to the top right end, which when spun controlled the mechanisms that made his invention work, and a handle was attached to the top so that it could be lifted.

Montague's wheezing slowed to a sigh. His fingertips ran along every inch of it, the fine precise holes and grooves he had drilled to insert the unique mechanism, and the corners he had spent days smoothing down . . . which had in turn rewarded him with splinters so embedded they had become a part of his hands.

Now one more attachment was left, the most fragile component. Even with the risk that it might finish him, he would have to use magic . . . Over the years he had developed his own brand, some Bantu mysticism he had learnt in the Homeland, long before he and his countrymen were taken, mixed with French alchemy which he had imbibed from his second master.

Moving with care, he straddled the bench, first dragging the chain so he could place his feet on either side. He put his right hand on the bench in front of him, palm facing up. The moonlight had shifted, and now it only lit the edge of the bench. Sweating, he firmly pressed his left thumb into the open palm, and felt the largest splinter at the base of his right thumb. He pressed into the skin, and his head felt lighter from the pain. He feared he would sink into unconsciousness—and perhaps never wake up. Closing his eyes he continued to press along the length of the splinter within his flesh.

His fingers slipped, and he bit down on his cracked bottom lip, focusing more than he had ever done in his life. He was vaguely aware of the familiar tapping of footsteps faintly approaching—the guard rotation. Guards would have questions . . . questions about how he had obtained the tools and what he was building. They wouldn't ask him for the answers, they would simply punish him. And he knew he may not survive that.

Montague didn't allow those matters to concern him just now. He began the incantation for transformation, speaking in a grinding mix of French and Chewa. "You who were once a tree became this bench. You who were once my bench became the tool in my hands. Now you will change . . . from mother tree to father silver. Your life of wood is no more."

His thumb kept still over the splinter and he concentrated, barely breathing. He felt coldness spread through his capillaries from the back of his head. He willed it to flow into this left hand, willed it to accumulate on his thumb, then into his palm. He felt a sharpening pain but he struggled to maintain control. He gasped and slumped forward using his elbows to support his weight.

His ears were alert to the progress of the footsteps on the stone floor . . . 15 steps away and counting. They would patrol his floor more frequently than the others, as was necessary for criminals guilty of the most heinous crimes—Les Méchants Hommes. He shifted his hand into the moonlight, examining his palm. There, just the tip of silver protruded from his palm. He pinched it between his thumb and forefinger and drew it out. His own blood trailed along its slender length, but he let out a sigh of relief. It had retained its perfectly straightened form, as he needed it to be. He held it tightly as if his life depended on it. As he slowly moved it towards the machine, he breathed in and out heavily, his whole universe now focused on the end of the needle, his own heartbeat loud in his ears . . . 

Five steps more and invasive eyes would peer through the small grating in the heavy wooden door. Montague cursed under his breath and abandoned his attempt to attach the pin to its mechanism. He picked up the machine while stifling a painful groan, placing it under the workbench, and moving carefully to ensure that the links on his shackles did not clang together. Once he gently placed the machine onto the stone floor, he positioned himself across the tools and debris as if he were slumped asleep on the table. He didn't dare to breathe as the footsteps fell silent at his cell door.

The metal shutter snapped open with a reverberating clang. Heavy breathing interspersed with loud chewing filled the quiet chamber. It was Pierre, the head guard whom he loathed as much for his pungent breath as for his tendency to spit at him for personal entertainment. Pierre mouth-breathed into the gap for a moment, then, after a lazy glance, shut it again. This was what Montague had hoped for.

He waited until Pierre's footsteps were far enough to mask the sounds of his own laborious tasks. He pushed himself up again and the pain in his chest grew tenfold. He groaned aloud, as he clutched his chest, uncertain whether or not he had been heard. He reached under the bench for his precious invention and placed it on top. His watery eyes sought out the pin once more and he pressed it against the table, rolling it to the edge and pinching it close to its sharp end. He ignored his throbbing head, fluttering heart, and wheezing lungs. Now there was only this task.

The magistrate who had sentenced him to this dungeon had said there would be no redemption for what Montague had done. Only death, and hell. That was truly all he deserved after what his terrible machines had done to countless children . . . their blood was his only legacy. Montague's guilt drove him now. Building this last machine meant he might be spared from that fate. He only prayed he might finish it in time . . . 

In a moment where time itself stopped, Montague's prayers were answered. Tilting his head low and close to his newest machine, he twisted the pin clockwise then anti-clockwise in the groove he had prepared for it. It clipped perfectly into place with his first try. Afraid to believe it, he tested it, pulling it one way and then another—it stuck firmly to the mechanism.

He fell back, gazing wearily at the completed machine. Its components, including the pin, were wood from the window sill and a bench leg, and metal from the food trays. It had been hammered together using a second bench leg and shaped using a corner of a tray and his bare hands. The remaining pieces of the bench he had torn apart were discarded in the corner furthest from the door and his tools were behind a stone in the wall. His hands were cut and bruised but it did not matter. The last of his duty now was to conceal his invention . . . then embrace death.

Moving arms that were as weighty as lead, he grasped the handle and placed his other hand on the side of the machine. Just as he had shifted its weight a centimetre off the table, with his joints crunching against each other like dry stone on wood, he heard it. The footsteps of the same guard were now growing louder instead of fading away.

Panic gripped Montague, and he yanked his invention off the table to remove it from sight. Over-shooting, he lost grip of the side, and though his right hand still had purchase of the handle, his weakness made him fail to stop it from crashing to the floor on its side. He screamed as it dragged his arm down in a painful angle . . . 

His worst nightmare. The steps quickened their pace, someone shouted a call of alarm, and hands and keys started scraping at the door. Panting, Montague made sure he was positioned between the machine and the cell door, concealing his secret, then he allowed his body to fall the remaining distance to the floor with a bone-crunching thud. He pulled his right arm out from under his body and stretched his hand over his creation. In a hurried whisper, he began to cast a concealment spell on it.

"You who are manifested from my mind, shall be revealed to no other man but one." Then he spoke the man's name.

In the same moment, the heavy door was shouldered open by two guards, with a third quickly approaching. Pierre's snarling face came first, glancing around the cell before seeing Montague lying on the floor—not on his designated sleep bench. This alone was a punishable offence. Stick in hand, he strode to Montague, jabbing him in the stomach.

Montague gasped and doubled over—but then his hand shot out to grab the stick. Coldness spread from the back of his head.

Pierre's eyes flashed in anger. "Disobedience is still a game to you isn't it, dog?" he said in his crude French, twisting the stick deeper into Montague's stomach. It was Pierre's smirk that Montague hated most of all. It came with the confidence that he had complete control over his prisoner.

Montague tightened his grip on the stick against his abdomen.

"Not a game," he snarled, shoving it forward and making Pierre's hold slip. The handle struck up into the guard's midriff, hard. Pierre doubled over and recoiled; eyes shut tightly, arms over his belly. "It is a way of life!"

Montague pulled the stick with both hands, fully claiming it, and struck Pierre's left kneecap. The guard's eyes opened wide as he shrieked. Montague looked up at him and grinned, reminding his opponent that he too could revel in another's pain.

Pierre held his wounded knee and stumbled away from him, hurriedly whimpering orders to his men. Jacques, the thin one with the potbelly, and François, the short one, immediately dove into action. Against one man, when Montague's eyes could pierce into the soul and convince him he was nothing, but two men with sticks . . . He was not young or healthy anymore; the magic he drew on for strength was now weakening him more than it was helping him.

He dropped Pierre's stick as the blows came raining down, striking his head, chest, and stomach—each one a drumbeat closer to death. In the madness and pain, he rolled onto his side and immediately felt a kick on his back. Unheard by the guards, he said with a broken sigh, "I lived as Montague, I die as Imamu." His birth name would be his token in the land of the gods. Through squinted eyes, he saw the place under the bench where he had put the machine, then tore his shirt and flung the piece over it, just as they dragged him to the open floor.

Jacques raised his stick high, but Pierre grabbed it before it came down and wrenched it from him. He shoved Jacques back and struck Montague square in the head then pulled up for another blow.

"Stop!" shouted François. When Pierre glared at him he pointed at Montague. The prisoner was still. Pierre looked at the limp body in disbelief. He let the stick drop from his hand and wiped his brow, panting.

"Tell the master that the slave," Pierre murmured, "is no more." He limped towards the door in disgust. "And make sure the undertaker collects him immediately. I don't want his stench in here!"

"I am the undertaker," said a voice just outside the door. It was coming from a large robed man in front of them.

Pierre frowned at the mysterious figure for a moment, but he decided he didn't care how the undertaker had arrived before they had sent for him.

"If only the living were served so quickly . . . " Pierre said as he brushed past the man. He was eager to distance himself from the remains, and any inconvenient sense of guilt that may want to bother him. The other two guards followed, with brief sideways glances at the undertaker.

When the guards left the undertaker, whose name was Barthélemy Thimonnier, entered the cell at a brisk pace and began his search. Grim-faced, he stepped around Montague's body, giving it just a brief glance. He moved silently from one end to the other, looking all over the floor, until he finally came to the bench. He lowered himself to one knee and peered under it, and a dirty cloth caught his eye.

He lifted the cloth and tossed it aside. In the poor light, he could not tell what it was, but he knew it was what he came for. As he picked it up he felt a slight tingling vibration. Raising his brow he gazed at the contraption, but it drew no more attention to itself. It was small enough for him to hide it, and carry the slave's body out as well. He placed it within his robes, wrapping and securing it within using a length of cloth.

He began to rise, but then spotted a piece of paper on the floor amongst the makeshift tools. It had been pinned underneath the object. He picked it up and held it up to the moonlight. It was a coal sketch of the woman who was the slave's daughter. The undertaker turned it over.

There were words written with smudges of dirt and a darker smudge which experience told him was blood: "Pour elle." Below that was scrawled: "Je suis deso."

"Je suis desolé . . . " the undertaker read quietly, filling out the missing letters. I am sorry. A fitting final message, he thought. From what he had heard, the slave had much indeed to be sorry for. Rumour had it that on his master's orders, the slave of the house of Montague had kidnapped the children of his master's rivals and brought them to the underground chambers, to his nefarious machines of torture. As deep underground as they were, the screams of the innocent could still be heard across the moorlands on a quiet night. When they were discovered, the châtelain himself was charged a fine and three years' imprisonment whilst his slave was thrown into this dungeon for the remainder of his life.

Barthélemy looked at the paper for a moment, rubbing it between his fingers, before stowing it in his robes together with the machine. He rose from the floor and went to the barred window, feeling along it. Before he dealt with the body, he had one final, most important collection to make. Jammed between two stones he found what he was looking for: two silver coins. Lower than his usual fee for smuggling contraband, but he was impressed that the slave had gotten his hands on these at all.

The undertaker pocketed the money, turned, and shouldered the remains of Montague, closing the cell door behind him.

Weighing down the undertaker's robes was the world's first sewing machine.

2370

Seven-year-old Rodrigo ben-David sat alone in the hovel, spooning the last bit of last Shabbat's chamin into his mouth and using a hard bit of crust to scrape the pot clean. The thin, cold wind rattled the aluplaz walls mercilessly. Winters in the Hellas Region were tough, and in Babulandia, one of the most notorious shantytowns on Mars, the lack of municipal infrastructure made it nearly impossible for the residents to keep themselves warm.

As he moistened the crust in some weak, tepid coffee and slowly chewed that soggy staleness, Rodrigo prayed his father would finally return today. The food was now gone, and the boy had already pushed the limits of his neighbors' meager hospitality well beyond their accustomed limits. Babulandia had accreted into existence during the exodus from religious oppression on Earth earlier in the 24th century, and its inhabitants, a jumbled-together pastiche of cultures and languages, were mistrustful and not particularly giving. Another day of being alone and Rodrigo would have to strike out for Malacandra City, where he believed his aunt lived and worked, though he had never met her.

Isaac ben-David had left a week ago, returning to Nirgal Vallis, where he'd been scavenging a century-old, abandoned research station. Rodrigo's dad scraped out a living this way: hunting through what others considered junk, looking for bits and pieces that could be resold or repurposed. With the station, he claimed, he had finally found his mina de oro, his gold mine.

"Las kozas van amijorarse, fijo. Ya topo algo," his father had muttered in Djidio before leaving. "I'm gonna find something good, promise it, and we're gonna be set, muchacho."

Rodrigo had tried not to cry, but his eyes had gone damp, and his father had grimaced. "Hey, life of the Sefardis, no? First the katolikos run us out of Spain a thousand years ago, and now they run us off the whole planet, got to come to Mars—el guerko ke se lo yeve—and freeze our kulos off. But you and me, we adams are gonna laugh last, yes? So you stay put, light the menorah right before night falls. Shamash, too, so when I come home I'll see them burning through the window, yes? Come on, no tears. Pasiensia Cohá, ke la nochada es larga."

Isaac had smiled broadly then and clicked on the holographic image of Rodrigo's mother, dead these five years. "Your mom would want you to be brave, fijo. And el Dio Barukh, he'll be watching over you."

And Rodrigo had tried, really tried, to be brave. He looked at his mother's face, flickering with the uncertain power source, and tried to remember her voice, singing to him. In snatches it came to him, overlaid with his father's rich baritone—the song of Avraham Avinu, newly born, miraculously singing to his mother, Amtilai:

Yo ya topo ken me alejasse
mandará del syelo ken me akompanyará
porke só kriado de El Dio Barukh

Wish I had someone to get me out of this shack, Rodrigo thought. Wish el Dio Barukh would send me someone to keep me company.

He had faithfully lit the candles, one more each night. The food had dwindled. He had gone out into the cold with his respirator to panhandle at noon, when people often tossed a few scraps to the bakenekos that infested Babulandia. Sometimes he had even kicked a dozen or more of the mutated felines out of the way to get at a couple morsels, his thick clothing and mask keeping him from their nasty claws.

Two days ago, a dark figure had followed the boy back to the hovel, slinking along the meandering way with what might have been bad intentions. Stopping abruptly, Rodrigo had drawn from his jacket an ancient pistol his father had rebuilt. Pointing it at the shadows of the narrow street, the boy had waited. The gun was enormous in his hands, and heavy. But there was only one projectile inside, and Rodrigo bit his lip so as not to shudder with fear. Wish this was the staff of Moses, powerful enough to break open the street and swallow him all up. The boy, of course, had no such forces at his command, but he stood as if he did.

After a few moments in which despair yawned like the grave, the presence had withdrawn. His heart pounding so hard he began to sweat despite the cold, Rodrigo had dashed the last few meters to his home and sealed himself within. Since then he had lived off the nearly nonexistent stores his father had left behind.

And now they were gone.

So Rodrigo lit the shamash and used it to light each of the other eight candles of the hanukkiya. He couldn't remember all the words his father would say, but he repeated what he knew as he dipped the longer candle to share its flame. "Like you protected them backadays, please protect me now. And bring Papa home."

He set the menorah on the ledge of the window, nine flickers refracted by the thick, transparent pane. Sitting at the table, he quietly spun a worn, lopsided sevivon and waited. For his father. For the candles to burn out. For the darkness to overtake him. He was so utterly alone, so close to an amorphous nothingness that threatened to snuff him out like the tenuous flames. Exhaustion and hunger prevailed in the end, and he slumped onto the table, dropping into sleep like a silent stone released from a great height.

Hands were on him, pulling, pushing, grabbing. Someone snatched the pistol from his jacket pocket. He was thrust onto the bed. Rodrigo's eyes were open, but the candles had burnt out, and so it was as if he struggled with darkness itself, with some demonic entity congealed from the night. The guerko, he thought, shuddering to the roots of his being. He cried out, screamed. There was no honor in silence, now, nor cowardice in his weeping. Like an animal he thrashed against the swirling black around him, kicking, scratching, biting. With every blow from his assailant, who seemed desperate to rip off his clothes, Rodrigo's howl grew into a shriek that surely must have reached the ears of God himself.

A bang, and light streamed into the hovel. Rodrigo felt despair begin to rend him, for more of them had arrived, and soon they would truly hurt him in ways his young mind did not want to grasp. But then his father's voice thundered through the cold, darkling air.

"Get away from my son, damn you!"

And there came an unholy, low moan from his father's hands, silhouetted against the faint exterior light. He was holding something, and it was thrumming with the sound of a thousand angels' wings. Suddenly the air itself felt like it was cracking open, and the figure pressing Rodrigo to the thin mattress was hurled against the wall, though nothing appeared to have touched him.

Isaac rushed to Rodrigo and pulled him from the bed with one arm while gripping some strange machine in the other. As they reached the entrance of the hovel, Rodrigo saw through tears of anguish and relief that the device looked like nothing he'd ever seen. Its shape didn't fit his geometrical expectations. Its strange blues and greens seemed drawn from a spectrum alien to human eyes. Thin cables like tendrils twitched and wound themselves around his father's arm.

"What . . . ?" the boy began, hoarse. His father hushed him and led him to their battered transport. Activating its external illumination, he checked his son thoroughly.

"He hurt you? Son? Did he . . . "

Rodrigo shook his head. "No, Papa. No, you came just in time. I was . . . I was so scared."

"It's alright, fijo. Don't think he's gonna be getting up for a while now."

Rodrigo looked at the device. "You found it? At the vallis?"

"Yes. I'd just about given up. Saw a strange cave and felt, I don't know, drawn to it. Went inside, found this. It's our ticket, Rodrigo. I told your mama we'd find something like this someday. Something that changes everything."

"It, uh, it ain't human, is it, Papa?"

Isaac gave a strange smile. "You're a smart boy. No. I've seen just about every machine man ever made, and this ain't ours. So far beyond us that. . . well, it's a miracle, let's just say." Vague intimations of power stirred a desperate hunger in Rodrigo, a yearning for safety and protection that made his chest ache.

"Can I . . . can I hold it?"

Isaac bit his lip, doubting. Rodrigo stared at his dad, watching the indecision.

Clearly ashamed of his near failure to protect his son and recognizing the boy's need to dispel his powerlessness, Isaac pulled the device from his hand and passed it to his son. "Be careful. Don't squeeze the rod. That activates it."

It was heavy, but not like the pistol. It was almost a living weight. The tendrils slipped around Rodrigo's thin forearm, and the rod slid easily into his palm. A great sense of peace came upon him then. This is how Moses felt. Lifting his staff above the water. His enemies didn't scare him no more.

The boy regarded the hovel in which he had huddled in fear, in which he had been attacked, in which he had felt despair. Inside was the darkness. The loneliness. Death. Abandonment.

Raising his arm, he squeezed the rod with all his might. A groan wrenched the night, and a ripple of nearly invisible energy pushed. The hovel crumpled like wet paper, smashed brutally into the ground and against the outcropping of rock that stood just to the west of it.

His father gasped. "Rodrigo! What did you do, boy? Our home! That adam!"

The seven-year-old turned to his father. "Now you ain't got a choice, Papa. You got to take me with you."

Without another word, Rodrigo ben-David walked to the vehicle's door, cycled it open, and climbed inside to wait.

2378

As the battered transport shuddered to a landing, Rodrigo ben-David bookmarked the physics text he was reading and set the pad aside. Climbing out of his sleep-nook, he walked the few steps to the cabin, where his father was already unsealing his safety harness.

"Why did we stop? I thought we were headed to Malacandra City to sell the generator we dug up."

Isaac ben-David winced and rubbed his temples. "Always you're asking the questions, fijo. Go get me a pill from the kit. Me arguele la kavesa."

Grumbling in adolescent frustration, Rodrigo walked back to the head, palmed open the medkit, and scrounged around for analgesics, thrusting aside grafters, gauzes and creams. There was one last packet hidden behind the cauterizer, wedged into a crack in the cheap paneling. He snatched it free and stomped back to where his father was lifting open the trap to the storage compartment.

"Here. Now tell me what we're doing, Father. You know I hate it when you make decisions without consulting with me."

Isaac swallowed the pills quickly and made a scoffing noise. "Ah, fijo. 'Father.' 'Consulting.' You're sounding more like a book every day."

"Quit evading the question. Para ke mos arrestamos?"

"Alright, alright. Vos sos komo la mula de Cohá." He pointed at the opening at his feet. "I found a buyer."

Rodrigo's stomach tightened. "For that?"

"Yes, for that. And don't be starting, fijo. You maybe are 15, but I'm your papa, yes? For near seven years I've went along with your kapricho."

"Whim? You think I was acting like a little spoiled kid when I begged you not to sell it? What would the government do to us if you tried to sell it to them, huh? And who else is gonna pay what it's worth? The Brotherhood? The Qabdat Ar-Rum? Some other crime syndicate? Damn it, they'd kill us quick as spit, Father. I swear, it's like you're the child here."

"And what, you want we should just keep on using it to blast away sand and rock, scraping by on hardly nothing, just what we get for selling scrap?"

His heart hardening despite his love for the old man, Rodrigo shrugged. "That's the life you picked for me, Isaac. You left Earth with Mother, came to this cold, God-forsaken planet . . . "

"El Dio Barukh ain't forsaken nobody, Rodrigo. And what would you want me to do, eh?" Tears stood out in his father's eyes, and suddenly his face twisted in grief as he shouted. "They obliterated Israel! They scattered us! Again!"

Part of Rodrigo wanted to reach out and embrace Isaac, but he continued, implacable. "Then how can you say He hasn't forsaken us, Isaac? So you fled here. A new life for Jews, for Sefardis. But Mother died, didn't she? I spent my childhood alone in that shack in Babulandia while you eked out a miserable existence." Stepping closer to his father, whom he dwarfed by a good 25 centimeters, he dropped his voice to a quiet rasp. "That device is the only thing Mars ever gave us. The only thing God ever placed in my hand. If you just give me time to learn some more, I know I can crack it. The way out of this miserable life isn't selling the thing to some ignorant kaseijin. It's figuring out the technology and reproducing it."

Isaac dropped his gaze for a second, rubbed the dampness from his cheeks. For the past few years, Rodrigo had found it easier and easier to impose his will on the older man. A father's devotion to his son tended toward reverence at times, and Rodrigo had instinctively taken advantage of that weakness. But now Isaac's eyes grew flinty, and he thrust a bony finger at the teenager's chest.

"Ah, so you want to have it out, eh? Adam to adam, like equals. Well, let me make this clear. We just landed in Isana Singu, little fishing village on the coast of the Hellas Sea. In about ten minutes, a buyer is gonna show up. Renhou Jimi."

"Renhou Jimi? Really? Are you out of your mind? RenTek is basically a front for yakuza activity in Hellas, Isaac. You think he isn't going to have a couple of gunsels in tow?"

Isaac half-closed his eyes and spoke over Rodrigo's last words. "He's going to pay us 25,000 New Yen, muchacho. Would take us ten years to make that much paras doing what we do. We're gonna take it, buy a little shop in Malacandra City, fix makinikas nice and calm. I see what it's doing to you, that thing. Every time you use it . . . it's like . . . I told you about your uncle Judah, yes? How the katolikosof the Nuova Pace Romana chipped away at him day by day till he converted? Turned his back on the ways of the Sefardis and el Dio Barukh. That's what I see in you, fijo. That device is changing you."

Rodrigo shook his head in disgust. "What's changing me, Father, is a very strong desire not to end up like you: a victim. And a willing accomplice to your victimhood. I don't think a tinker's shop is going to give you any power over your own life. I think you're going to have to pay protection to the yakuza clowns who're going to buy the device, and we're going to be tied to them and their corrupt, predatory ways for the rest of our lives. You're about to make a very big mistake."

"Well, the device is mine. I found it, boy. I hunted the caves of that vallis and found it, and now I'm gonna do whatever I think is best, you hear me? So that's it for the discussing."

With a dismissive wave, Isaac clambered into the storage hold and emerged with the metal container they kept the strange contraption in. Rodrigo gave an exasperated snort and sat at the dining nook. "Don't expect any help from me. If you want to make a stupid decision like this, you can handle it by yourself."

Isaac closed both hands into fists and looked at his son with barely bridled anger. "You do what you want, adam," he muttered in a tone he'd never used before with his son. Rodrigo felt a spasm of shame, but said nothing. When the older man irised open the lock, the teen stood up and followed him out, the two of them slipping on and sealing up thermal coats as they disembarked.

Outside, Rodrigo saw they had set down near stone piers that jutted into the ice-clogged waters of the Hellas Sea. The pylons had been fashioned from the same red andesite that made up most of the sand on this particular stretch of beach, and the effect was unnerving: a shocking crimson foreground against the pale white-rimed blue that spread across the horizon. A few battered wooden boats stood out in silhouette, black forms drawing nets from the sea. To the south, Rodrigo could barely make out the dilapidated shacks that presumably made up Isana Singu, one of dozens of fishing villages that clung tenaciously to the Martian soil at the edge of the vast southern sea, in fruitless defiance of the brutal, cold winds that shrieked shoreward from the floes.

Isaac reached back through the lock and dragged the metal box out, setting it on the red sand in front of them. As he knelt to thumb open the clasps, an ostentatious transport descended some 40 meters away. Within seconds, four men exited, casting their eyes back and forth as they descended the gangway, three of them with weapons drawn.

Renhou Jimi and a trio of yakuza mademen, Rodrigo concluded. As they approached, Isaac stood to greet Jimi, a pallid, skeletal man with a constant, smug smile.

"Isaac-san," he barked as his companions arrayed themselves in a semicircle around the meeting place. "You have brought the device, yes?"

"Yes. Here." From his thermal coat he pulled a pad. "You can transfer the monies onto this."

Jimi accepted the thin, battered rectangle. "I'm gonna want a demonstration first, as agreed."

"Of course." Isaac went to open the box, but Rodrigo spoke up suddenly, compelled by something he didn't quite understand.

"I'll do it." He flipped the lid up with his left foot. Jimi leaned in to regard the demented, alien angles of the device resting within the box. If anything, it resembled some sort of nightmarish squid, nauseating blues and greens tapering to a shock of black cables that even now seemed to move of their own accord. His heart quickening, Rodrigo plunged his left arm into that squirming morass, wincing as the device gripped him almost eagerly. The trigger bar was warm against his fingers despite the biting cold.

Jimi took a step back. "So this thing, it can blow stuff up, yes?"

"Not really," said Isaac. "Like I told you, it shoves things. Don't know how. Maybe it messes with gravity or something. But, anyways, squeeze hard enough on the mechanism inside it and whatever you're pointing at gets . . . well, Rodrigo is gonna show you. Adelante, muchacho."

Rodrigo turned toward the west, away from the transports and the men, and angled the device so it pointed at the ground a few meters distant. Then, with a grimace, he squeezed.

Gouts of sand and rock shot into the air in a violent, arcing stream. When the wind had shredded the dust, a large hole was left in the beach. Rodrigo and Isaac were not at all surprised; this was how they'd made a living for years now, using the device to uncover salvage that other scavengers couldn't get at. But Jimi and his companions were visibly excited and wary. Two men moved closer to Isaac with deceptive casualness.

"Good, that. What's the range? You could, I don't know, hit one of yonder pier pylons?"

It was farther than they'd ever attempted, but Rodrigo shrugged and moved away from the group, his back to them as he regarded the ice-rimed sea. One of the piers seemed to be in disrepair, and he aimed at it. Closing his fist around the bar with greater violence than he'd ever used, the teen sent its imperceptible force thrumming through the air. The pylons were ripped from their moorings and cast into the water. A nearby pier also collapsed and a wave some five meters in height rose and shattered itself against a distant floe.

Rodrigo stood for a moment, awash in the power he had unleashed. The fishing boats nearly capsized. Faint shouts of terror wafted toward him on the gelid wind.

The muzzle of a gun pressed into his neck.

"Turn slow." One of the yaks.

Rodrigo did as he was told. His father was kneeling on the vermillion sand. On either side of him stood a mobster, lazgats trained on his graying head. Tears were in his eyes. He shook his head slightly in warning.

Behind Isaac, Renhou Jimi was still smiling.

"Thanks for the demo, bozu. I'm gonna need you to hand that thing over now, yes? Otherwise, my friends here are gonna be forced to kill your o-pops. Don't want that, yes?"

Black strands tightened along Rodrigo's arm. He felt he might vomit. The ice, the wind, Jimi's eyes . . . all cold and flat and inhuman.

With a horrifying snap, all warmth left Rodrigo's soul as well.

"You're going to kill him no matter what."

Jimi's smile broadened. "Say again, bozu?"

"There's no way you're going to let either of us live. You've decided there's too many potential problems, us being alive. Complications for whatever plans you're making right now. So if I give the device to you, my father's dead. I'm dead."

The man behind him pushed his gat deeper into the flesh of his neck, twisting it so the sight bit at his skin. "You're dead if you don't, kusobaka, so might as well cooperate with Jimi-san."

The weight of his entire existence pressed down on Rodrigo's chest for the briefest of moments, a black, bloated hand that squeezed the trigger of his mind. And the young man understood that he was a weapon in the blind grip of history.

"Te kyero bien, Padre," he whispered, and dropped to one knee as he lifted his arm to fire. The four men were torn to pieces in a bloody, groaning gale that caught the edge of Isaac's transport and sent it tumbling down the beach. Rodrigo jerked his head away from the devastation in time to see the fifth man bring his gun to bear. The teen swung around to fire, but the lazgat sizzled to life first, its purple beam cutting deep into Rodrigo's bicep and nearly severing his arm. Brain-numbing pain trammeled his entire body, pushing him toward the darkness, but black tendrils whipped from the device and anchored his limb to his shoulder.

Then the device swung itself up without his help and shoved at the last mobster with pulverizing finality.

Rodrigo could stand no more. He fell into the black, unmoored from life and love.

Three weeks later, he stood beside the rough men and rude women who had nursed him back to health, cauterizing his wounds, carefully removing his severed arm from its snare and packing the alien device away in the metal case. They had buried the bodies, hidden the transports, said nothing to the regional authorities. The fisherfolk of Isana Singu had no love for government or yakuza, and they stoically aided this teen whose powerful arm had lain to waste some of their oppressors at the cost of his own father.

They called him Urakaze, the cold sea wind. He claimed no other name.

When they had stood beside the unmarked grave of the young man's father long enough, he motioned them away, back toward their village. Then he thumbed open the case and slipped the device over his remaining arm. Walking unsteadily to the broken hills that shaded into mournful dunes, he found a scarred monolith from which he carved a massive plinth, a cube of red and gray granite, shot through with black webbing. Carefully he used the alien tool on his awkward right arm to nudge the stone across the sand until the monument rested atop Isaac ben-David's shattered bones.

"God," he muttered bitterly, at last able to speak, "since you never gave a sign that you cared, I'm leaving this sepulcher on your behalf. My father lived his miserable, pointless existence, weakened by his faith in you. I'm not saying you don't exist. It's just clear now that you're not going to help the way people want you to. Maybe you already did, but Isaac just didn't understand what your help looked like. But, you know, that's fine. Because I'm ready to help myself.

"No one is ever going to hurt me like this again, do you hear? I swear it on your name. You've put this staff in my hands. I've bought the right to use it with blood. So here's what I'm going to do. Are you listening? I'm not Job. I'm going to use this tool. I'm going to figure out how it works. Not so I can just avenge my father, but so I can bring the justice everyone keeps waiting for you to dispense. Either you want me to do it, or you simply don't care. Whatever. Just keep out of my way."

It was enough. Nothing remained to be said. He turned toward the village and saw his people watching him, like grains of sand awaiting the wind.

This story was first published in Kaleidoscope, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios (Twelfth Planet Press, 2014). You can read a short interview with the editors here, and Amal El-Mohtar's introduction to the story here.

For Tessa Kum

Owls have eyes that match the skies they hunt through. Amber-eyed owls hunt at dawn or dusk; golden-eyed owls hunt during the day; black-eyed owls hunt at night.

No one knows why this is.

Anisa's eyes are black, and she no longer hates them. She used to wish for eyes the color of her father's, the beautiful pale green-blue that people were always startled to see in a brown face. But she likes, now, having eyes and hair of a color those same people find frightening.

Even her teachers are disconcerted, she's found—they don't try to herd her as they do the other students. She sees them casting uncertain glances towards her before ushering their group from one owl exhibit to another, following the guide. She turns to go in the opposite direction.

"Annie-sa! Annie, this way!"

She turns, teeth clenching. Mrs. Roberts, whose pale powdered face, upswept yellow hair, and bright red lips make Anisa think of Victoria sponge, is smiling encouragingly.

"My name is A-NEE-sa, actually," she replies, and feels the power twitching out from her chest and into her arms, which she crosses quickly, and her hands, which she makes into fists, digging nails into her palms. The power recedes, but she can still feel it pouring out from her eyes like a swarm of bees while Mrs. Roberts looks at her in perplexed confusion. Mrs. Roberts' eyes are a delicate, ceramic sort of blue.

Anisa watches another teacher, Ms. Grewar, lean over to murmur something into Mrs. Roberts' ear. Mrs. Roberts only looks more confused, but renews her smile uncertainly, nods, and turns back to her group. Anisa closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and counts to ten before walking away.

Owls are predators. There are owls that would tear you apart if you gave them half a chance.

The Scottish Owl Centre is a popular destination for school trips: a short bus ride from Glasgow, an educational component, lots of opportunities for photographs to show the parents, and who doesn't like owls nowadays? Anisa has found herself staring, more than once, at owl-print bags and shirts, owl-shaped earrings and belt buckles, plush owl toys and wire statues in bright, friendly colors. She finds it all desperately strange.

Anisa remembers the first time she saw an owl. She was seven years old. She lived in Riyaq with her father and her grandparents, and that morning she had thrown a tantrum about having to feed the chickens, which she hated, because of their smell and the way they pecked at her when she went to gather their eggs, and also because of the rooster, who was fierce and sharp-spurred. She hated the chickens, she shouted, why didn't they just make them into soup.

She was given more chores to do, which she did, fumingly, stomping her feet and banging cupboard doors and sometimes crying about how unfair it was. "Are you brooding over the chickens," her father would joke, trying to get her to laugh, which only made her more furious, because she did want to laugh but she didn't want him to think she wasn't still mad, because she was.

She had calmed down by lunch, and forgotten about it by supper. But while helping her grandmother with the washing up she heard a scream from the yard. Her grandmother darted out, and Anisa followed, her hands dripping soap.

An owl—enormous, tall as a lamb, taller than any bird she had ever seen—perched in the orange tree, the rooster a tangle of blood and feathers in its talons. As Anisa stared, the owl bent its head to the rooster's throat and tore out a long strip of flesh.

When Anisa thinks about this—and she does, often, whenever her hands are wet and soapy in just the right way, fingertips on the brink of wrinkling—she remembers the guilt. She remembers listening to her grandmother cross herself and speak her words of protection against harm, warding them against death in the family, against troubled times. She remembers the fear, staring at the red and pink and green of the rooster, its broken, dangling head.

But she can't remember—though she often tries—whether she felt, for the first time, the awful electric prickle of the power in her chest, flooding out to her palms.

There are owls that sail through the air like great ships. There are owls that flit like finches from branch to branch. There are owls that look at you with disdain and owls that sway on the perch of your arm like a reed in the wind.

Anisa is not afraid of owls. She thinks they're interesting enough, when people aren't cooing over them or embroidering them onto cushions. From walking around the sanctuary she thinks the owl she saw as a child was probably a Eurasian Eagle Owl.

She wanders from cage to cage, environment to environment, looking at owls that bear no resemblance to the pretty patterns lining the hems of skirts and dresses—owls that lack a facial disk, owls with bulging eyes and fuzzy heads, owls the size of her palm.

Some of the owls have names distinct from their species: Hosking, Broo, Sarabi. Anisa pauses in front of a barn owl and frowns at the name. Blodeuwedd?

"Blow-due-wed," she sounds out beneath her breath, while the owl watches her.

"It's Bloh-DA-weth, actually," says a friendly voice behind her. Anisa turns to see one of the owl handlers from the flying display, a black woman named Izzy, hair wrapped up in a brightly colored scarf, moving into one of the aviaries, gloved hands clutching a feed bucket. "It means 'flower-face' in Welsh."

Anisa flushes. She looks at the owl again. She has never seen a barn owl up close, and does not think it looks like flowers; she thinks, all at the same time, that the heart-shaped face is alien and eerie and beautiful and like when you can see the moon while the sun is setting, and that there should be a single word for the color of the wings that's like the sheen of a pearl but not the pearl itself.

She asks, "Is it a boy or a girl?"

"Do you not know the story of Blodeuwedd?" Izzy smiles. "She was a beautiful woman, made of flowers, who was turned into an owl."

Anisa frowns. "That doesn't make sense."

"It's from a book of fairytales called The Mabinogion—not big on sense-making." Izzy chuckles. "I don't think she likes it either, to be honest. She's one of our most difficult birds. But she came to us from Wales, so we gave her a Welsh name."

Anisa looks into Blodeuwedd's eyes. They are blacker than her own.

"I like her," she declares.

A group of owls is called a Parliament.

Owls are bad luck.

The summer Anisa saw the owl kill the rooster was the summer Israel bombed the country. She always thinks of it that way, not as a war—she doesn't remember a war. She never saw anyone fighting. She remembers a sound she felt more than heard, a thud that shook the earth and rattled up through her bones—then another—then a smell like chalk—before being swept into her father's arms and taken down into shelter.

She remembers feeling cold; she remembers, afterwards, anger, weeping, conversations half-heard from her bed, her mother's voice reaching them in sobs from London, robotic and strangled over a poor internet connection, a mixing of English and Arabic, accents swapping places. Her father's voice always calm, measured, but with a tension running through it like when her cousin put a wire through a dead frog's leg to make it twitch.

She remembers asking her grandmother if Israel attacked because of the owl. Her grandmother laughed in a way that made Anisa feel hollow and lost.

"Shh, shh, don't tell Israel! An owl killed a rooster—that's more reason to attack! An owl killed a rooster in Lebanon and the government let it happen! Quick, get off the bridges!"

The whole family laughed. Anisa was terrified, and told no one.

Why did the owl not go courting in the rain? Because it was too wet to woo.

"What makes her 'difficult'?" asks Anisa, watching Blodeuwedd sway on her perch. Izzy looks fondly at the owl.

"Well, we acquired her as a potential display bird, but she just doesn't take well to training—she hisses at most of the handlers when they pass by, tries to bite. She's also very territorial, and won't tolerate the presence of male birds, so we can't use her for breeding." Izzy offers Blodeuwedd a strip of raw chicken, which she gulps down serenely.

"But she likes you," Anisa observes. Izzy smiles ruefully.

"I'm not one of her trainers. It's easy to like people who ask nothing of you." Izzy pauses, eyes Blodeuwedd with exaggerated care. "Or at least, it's easy to not hate them."

Before Anisa leaves with the rest of her class, Izzy writes down Mabinogion for her on a piece of paper, a rather deft doodle of an owl's face inside a five-petaled flower, and an invitation to come again.

Most owls are sexually dimorphic: the female is usually larger, stronger, and more brightly colored than the male.

Anisa's mother is tall, and fair, and Anisa looks nothing like her. Her mother's brown hair is light and thin and straight; her mother's skin is pale. Anisa is used to people making assumptions—are you adopted? Is that your stepmother?—when they see them together, but her mother's new job at the university has made outings together rare. In fact, since moving to Glasgow, Anisa hardly sees her at home anymore, since she has evening classes and departmental responsibilities.

"What are you reading?" asks her mother, shrugging on her coat after a hurried dinner together.

Anisa, legs folded up underneath her on the couch, holds up a library copy of The Mabinogion. Her mother looks confused, but nods, wishes her a good night, and leaves.

Anisa reads about how Math, son of Mathonwy, gathered the blossoms of oak, of broom, of meadowsweet, and shaped them into a woman. She wonders, idly, what kind of flowers could be combined to make her.

There are owls on every continent in the world except Antarctica.

The so-called war lasted just over a month; Anisa learned the word "ceasefire" in August. Her father put her on a plane to London the moment the airports were repaired.

Before she started going to school, Anisa's mother took her aside. "When people ask you where you're from," she told her, "you say 'England,' all right? You were born here. You have every bit as much right to be here as anyone else."

"Baba wasn't born here." She felt a stinging in her throat and eyes, a pain of unfair. "Is that why he's not here? Is he not allowed to come?"

Anisa doesn't remember what her mother said. She must have said something. Whatever it was, it was certainly not that she wouldn't see her father in person for three years.

The Welsh word for owl once meant "flower-face".

When Izzy said Blodeuwedd was made of flowers, Anisa had imagined roses and lilies, flowers she was forced to read about over and over in books of English literature. But as she reads, she finds that even Blodeuwedd's flower names are strange to her—what kind of a flower is "broom"?—and she likes that, likes that no part of Blodeuwedd is familiar or expected.

Anisa has started teaching herself Welsh, mostly because she wants to know how all the names in the Mabinogion are pronounced. She likes that there is a language that looks like English but sounds like Arabic; she likes that there is no one teaching it to her, or commenting on her accent, or asking her how to speak it for their amusement. She likes that a single "f" is pronounced "v", that "w" is a vowel—likes that it's an alphabet of secrets hidden in plain sight.

She starts visiting the owl centre every weekend, feeling like she's done her homework if she can share a new bit of Mabinogion trivia with Izzy and Blodeuwedd in exchange for a fact about owls.

Owls are birds of the order Strigiformes, a word derived from the Latin for witch.

During Anisa's first year of school in England a girl with freckles and yellow hair leaned over to her while the teacher's back was turned, and asked if her father was dead.

"No!" Anisa stared at her.

"My mum said your dad could be dead. Because of the war. Because there's always war where you're from."

"That's not true."

The freckled girl narrowed her eyes. "My mum said so."

Anisa felt her pulse quicken, her hands tremble. She felt she had never hated anyone in her whole life so much as this idiot pastry of a girl. She watched as the girl shrugged and turned away.

"Maybe you just don't understand English."

She felt something uncoil inside her. Anisa stood up from her chair and shoved the girl out of hers, and felt, in the moment of skin touching skin, a startling shock of static electricity; the girl's freckles vanished into the pink of her cheeks, and instead of protesting the push, she shouted "Ugh, she shocked me!"

In her memory, the teacher's reprimand, the consequences, the rest of that year all melt away to one viciously satisfying image: the freckled girl's blue eyes looking at her, terrified, out of a pretty pink face.

She learned to cultivate an appearance of danger, of threat; she learned that with an economy of look, of gesture, of insinuation, she could be feared and left alone. She was the Girl Who Came From War, the Girl Whose Father Was Dead, the Girl With Powers. One day a boy tried to kiss her; she pushed him away, looked him in the eye, and flung a fistful of nothing at him, a spray of air. He was absent from school for two days; when the boy came back claiming to have had a cold, everyone acknowledged Anisa as the cause. When some students asked her to make them sick on purpose, to miss an exam or assignment, she smirked, said nothing, and walked away.

Owls have a narrow field of binocular vision; they compensate for this by rotating their heads up to two hundred and seventy degrees.

Carefully, Izzy lowers her arm to Anisa's gloved wrist, hooks her tether to the ring dangling from it, and watches as Blodeuwedd hops casually down on to her forearm. Anisa exhales, then grins. Izzy grins back.

"I can't believe how much she's mellowed out. She's really surprisingly comfortable with you."

"Maybe," Anisa says, mischievous, "it's because I'm really good at not asking anything of her."

"Sure," says Izzy, "or maybe it's because you keep talking about how much you hate Math, son of Mathonwy."

"Augh, that prick!"

Izzy laughs, and Anisa loves to hear her, to see how she tosses her head back when she does. She loves how thick and wiry Izzy's hair is, and the different things she does with it—today it's half-wrapped in a white and purple scarf, fluffed out at the back like a bouquet.

"He's the worst," she continues. "He takes flowers and tells them to be a woman; as soon as she acts in a way he doesn't like, he turns her into an owl. It's like—he needs to keep being in charge of her story, and the way to do that is to change her shape."

"Well. To be fair. She did try to kill his adopted son."

"He forced her into marriage with him! And he was a jerk too!"

"You're well into this, you are."

"It's just—" Anisa bites her lip, looking at Blodeuwedd, raising her slightly to shift the weight on her forearm, watching her spread her magnificent wings, then settle, "—sometimes—I feel like I'm just a collection of bits of things that someone brought together at random and called girl, and then Anisa, and then—" she shrugs. "Whatever."

Izzy is quiet for a moment. Then she says, thoughtfully, "You know, there's another word for that."

"For what?"

"What you just described—an aggregation of disparate things. An anthology. That's what The Mabinogion is, after all."

Anisa is unconvinced. "Blodeuwedd's just one part of someone else's story, she's not an anthology herself."

Izzy smiles, gently, in a way that always makes Anisa feel she's thinking of someone or something else, but allowing Anisa a window's worth of view into her world. "You can look at it that way. But there's another word for anthology, one we don't really use any more: florilegium. Do you know what it means?"

Anisa shakes her head, and blinks, startled, as Blodeuwedd does a side-wise walk up her arm to lean, gently, against her shoulder. Izzy smiles, a little more brightly, more for her, and says: "A gathering of flowers."

Owls fly more silently than any other bird.

When her father joined them in London three years later, he found Anisa grown several inches taller and several sentences shorter. Her mother's insistence on speaking Arabic together at all times—pushing her abilities as a heritage speaker to their limits—meant that Anisa often chose not to speak at all. This was to her advantage in the school yard, where her eyes, her looks, and rumors of her dark powers held her fellow students in awe; it did her no good with her father, who hugged her and held her until words and tears gushed out of her in gasps.

The next few years were better; they moved to a different part of the city, and Anisa was able to make friends in a new school, to open up, to speak. She sometimes told stories about how afraid of her people used to be, how she'd convinced them of her powers like it was a joke on them, and not something she had ever believed herself.

Owls purge from themselves the matter they cannot absorb: bones, fur, claws, teeth, feathers.

"Is that for school?"

Anisa looks up from her notebook to her mother, and shakes her head. "No. It's Welsh stuff."

"Oh." Her mother pauses, and Anisa can see her mentally donning the gloves with which to handle her. "Why Welsh?"

She shrugs. "I like it." Then, seeing her mother unsatisfied, adds, "I like the stories. I'd like to read them in the original language eventually."

Her mother hesitates. "You know, there's a rich tradition of Arabic storytelling—"

The power flexes inside her like a whip snapping, takes her by surprise, and she bites the inside of her lip until it bleeds to stop it, stop it.

"—and I know I can't share much myself but I'm sure your grandmother or your aunts would love to talk to you about it—"

Anisa grabs her books and runs to her room as if she could outrun the power, locks the door, and buries her fingernails in the skin of her arms, dragging long, painful scratches down them, because the only way to let the power out is through pain, because if she doesn't hurt herself she knows with absolute certainty that she will hurt someone else.

Illness in owls is difficult to detect and diagnose until it is dangerously advanced.

Anisa knows something is wrong before she sees the empty cage, from the way Izzy is pacing in front of it, as if waiting for her.

"Blodeuwedd's sick," she says , and Anisa feels a rush of gravity inside her stomach. "She hasn't eaten in a few days. I'm sorry, but you won't be able to see her today—"

"What's wrong with her?" Anisa begins counting back the days to the last flare, to what she thought, and it wasn't this, it was never anything like this, but she'd held The Mabinogion in her hands—

"We don't know yet. I'm so sorry you came out all this way—" Izzy hesitates while Anisa stands, frozen, feeling herself vanishing into misery, into a day one year and four hundred miles away.

Owls do not mate for life, though death sometimes parts them.

The memory is like a trap, a steel cage that falls over her head and severs her from reality. When the memory descends she can do nothing but see her father's face, over and over, aghast, more hurt than she has ever seen him, and her own words like a bludgeon to beat in her own head: "Fine, go back and die, I don't care, just stop coming back."

She feels, again, the power lashing out, confused, attempting both to tether and to push away; she remembers the shape of the door knob in her hand as she bolts out of the flat, down the stairs, out the building, into the night. She feels incandescent, too burnt up to cry, thinking of her father going back to a country every day in the news, every day a patchwork of explosions and body counts, every day a matter of someone else's opinions.

She thinks of how he wouldn't take her with him.

And she feels, irrevocably, as if she is breathing a stone when she sees him later that evening in hospital, eyes closed, ashen, and the words reaching her from a faraway dimness saying he has suffered a stroke, and died.

"Anisa—Anisa!" Izzy has taken her hands, is holding them, and when Anisa focuses again she feels as if they're submerged in water, and she wants to snatch them away because what if she hurts Izzy but she is disoriented and before she knows what she is doing she is crying while Izzy holds her hands and sinks down to the rain-wet floor with her. She feels gravel beneath her knees and grinds them further into it, to punish herself for this, this thing, the power, and she is trying to make Izzy understand and she is trying to say she is sorry but all that comes out is this violent, wrecking weeping.

"It's me," she manages, "I made her sick, it's my fault, I don't mean to do it but I make bad things happen just by wanting them even a little, wanting them the wrong way, and I don't want it anymore, I never wanted this but it keeps happening and now she'll die—"

Izzy looks at her, squeezes her hands, and says, calm and even, "Bullshit."

"It's true—"

"Anisa—if it's true it should work both ways. Can you make good things happen by wanting them?"

She looks into Izzy's warm dark eyes, at a loss, and can't frame a reply to such a ridiculous question.

"Think, pet—what good things do you want to happen?"

"I want—" she closes her eyes, and bites her lip, looking for pain to quash the power but feels it differently—feels, with Izzy holding her hands, Izzy facing her, grounded, as if draining something out into the gravel and the earth beneath it and leaving something else in its wake, something shining and slick as sunlight on wet streets. "I want Blodeuwedd to get better. I want her to have a good life, to . . . be whatever she wants to be and do whatever she wants to do. I want to learn Welsh. I want to—" Izzy's face shimmers through her tears. "I want to be friends with you. I want—"

She swallows them down, all of her good wants, how much she misses her father and how much she misses just talking, in any language, with her mother, and how she misses the light in Riyaq and the dry dusty air, the sheep and the goats and the warmth, always, of her grandmother and uncles and aunts and cousins all around, and she makes an anthology of them. She gathers the flowers of her wants all together in her throat, her heart, her belly, and trusts that they are good.

The truth about owls—

Anisa and her mother stand at the owl centre's entrance, both casually studying a nearby freezer full of ice lollies while waiting for their tickets. Their eyes meet, and they grin at each other. Her mother is rummaging about for caramel cornettos when the sales attendant, Rachel, waves Anisa over.

"Is that your mother, Anisa?" whispers Rachel. Anisa goes very still for a moment as she nods, and Rachel beams. "I thought so. You have precisely the same smile."

Anisa blushes, and looks down, suddenly shy. Her mother pays for their tickets and ice cream, and together they move towards the exit and the picnic area.

Anisa pauses on her way through the gift-shop; she waves her mother on, says she'll catch her up. Alone, she buys a twee notebook covered in shiny metallic owls and starts writing in it with an owl-topped pen.

She writes "The truth about owls—" but pauses. She looks at the words, their shape, the taken-for-granted ease of their spilling from her. She frowns, bites her lip, and after a moment's careful thought writes "Y gwir am tylluanod—"

But she has run out of vocabulary, and this is not something she wants to look up. There is a warmth blossoming in her, a rightness, pushing up out of her chest where the power used to crouch, where something lives now that is different, better, and she wants to pour that out on the page. She rolls the pen between her thumb and forefinger, then shifts the journal's weight against her palm.

She writes

and smiles.

This story was first published in Monstrous Affections (Candlewick, 2014). We are grateful to the author for permission to reprint it in this week's special issue.

“Allyou have this in a size nine?” Jenna puts the shiny red patent shoe down on the counter. Well, it used to be shiny. She’s been wearing it everywhere, and now it’s dulled by dust. It’s the left side of a high-heeled pump, pointy-toed, with large shiny fake rhinestones decorating the toe box. Each stone is a different size and colour, in a different cheap plastic setting. The red veneer has stripped off the heel of the shoe. It curls up off the white plastic heel base in strips. Jenna’s heart clenches. It’s exactly the kind of tacky, blinged-out accessory that Zuleika loves—loved—to wear.

The girl behind the counter is wearing a straw baseball cap, its peak pulled down low over her face. The girl asks, in a puzzled voice, “But don’t you bought exactly the same shoes last week?”

And the week before that, thinks Jenna. And the one before that. “I lost them,” she replies. “At least, I lost the right side”—she nearly chokes on the half truth—“so I want to replace them.” All around her, other salespeople help other customers. The people in the store zip past Jenna, half-seen, half-heard. This year’s soca road march roars through the store’s sound system. Last month, Jenna loved it. Now, any happy music makes her vexed.

“Jeez, what’s the matter with you now?” the girl says. Jenna startles, guiltily. She risks a look at the shoe store girl’s face. She hadn’t really done so before. She has been avoiding eye contact with people lately, afraid that if anyone’s two eyes make four with hers, the fury in hers will burn the heart out of the core of them.

But the girl isn’t looking at Jenna. With one hand, she is curling the peak of her cap to protect her eyes against the sun’s glare through the store windows. Only her small, round mouth shows. She seems to be peering into the display on the cash register. She slaps the side of the cash register. “Damned thing. It’s like every time I touch it, the network goes down.”

“Oh,” says Jenna. “Is not me you were talking to, then?”

The girl laughs, a childlike sound, like small dinner bells tinkling. “No. Unless it have something the matter with you too. Is there?”

Jenna turns away, pretends to be checking out the rows of men’s running shoes, each one more aerodynamically fantastical than the last, like race cars. “No, not me. About the shoes?”

“Sure.” The girl takes the pump from Jenna. Her fingertips are cool when they brush Jenna’s hand. “What a shame you can’t replace just one side. Though you really wore this one down in just a week. You need both sides, left and right.” The girl inspects the inside of the shoe, in that mysterious way that people who sell shoes do. “You say you want a size nine? But you take more like an eight, right?”

“How you know that?”

“I remember from last time you were in the store. Feet are so important, you don’t find?”

Jenna doesn’t remember seeing the girl in the store before. But the details of her life have been a little hazy the past few weeks. Everything seems dusted with unreality. Her standing in a shoe shop, doing something as ordinary as buying a pair of shoes. Her standing at all, instead of floundering.

The shoe shop girl’s body sinks lower and lower. Jenna is confused until the girl comes out from behind the counter. She’s really short. She has been standing on something in order to reach the cash register. Her arms and legs are plump, foreshortened. The hems of her jeans are rolled up. Her body is pleasantly rotund.

The girl glances at Jenna’s feet. At least, that’s where Jenna thinks she’s looking. Jenna’s seeing the girl from above, so it’s hard to tell. In addition to the straw cap, the girl’s twisty black hair is in thousands of tiny plaits that keep falling over her face. She must have been looking at Jenna’s feet, because she says, “Yup. Size eight. Don’t it?”

Jenna stares down at the top of the girl’s head. She says, “Yes, but the pumps run small.” The girl is wearing cute yellow moccasins that look hand-sewn. She didn’t get those at this discount shoe outlet. Her feet are tiny; the toe boxes of her moccasins sag a little. Her toes don’t quite fill them up. Jenna curls her own toes under. Her feet feel unfamiliar in her plain white washekongs, the tennis shoes she used to wear so often, before her world fell in. Now she only wears two sides of shoes when she needs to fake normal. Or when she needs to take the red pump off to show the people in the shoe store. The blisters on the sole of her right foot are uncomfortable cushions against the canvas-lined foam inside the shoe. Although she’d scrubbed the right foot bottom before putting the washekong on, she hadn’t been able to get all of the weeks of ground-in dirt out. The heel of her left foot, imprisoned most of the time in the red high heel, has become a stranger to the ground. Going completely flat-footed like this makes the shortened tendons in her left ankle stretch and twang.

The girl hands the shoe back to her and says, “I going in the back to see if we have any more of these.” She disappears amongst the high rows of shoe shelves. She walks jerkily, with a strange rise and fall motion.

Jenna sits on one of the benches in the middle of the store. She slips off her left-side tennis shoe and slides her left foot back into the destroyed pump. The height of it makes her instep ache, and her foot slides around a little in the too-big shoe. When she’d borrowed Zuleika’s pumps without asking, she’d only planned to wear them out to the club that one night. The discomfort of the red shoe feels needful and good. It will be even more so when she can remove the right side washekong, feel dirt and hot asphalt and rocks with her bare right foot. She waits for the girl to bring the replacement pumps. The girl returns, hop-drop, hop-drop, carrying a shoe box.

Jenna doesn’t want to be in the shop, fully shod, a second longer. She takes the box from the girl, almost grabbing it. “These are fine,” she says, and stumps—hop-drop, hop-drop—to the cash register. She starts taking money out of her purse.

Behind her, the girl calls, “You don’t want to try them on first?”

“Don’t need to,” Jenna replies. “I know how they fit.”

The girl gets back behind the counter and clambers up onto whatever she’d been standing on. She sighs. “This job,” she says to Jenna, “so much standing on your feet all the time. I not used to it.”

Jenna isn’t paying the girl a lot of attention. Instead, she’s texting her father to come and get her. She doesn’t drive at the moment. May never drive again.

The girl rings up the purchase. Her plaits have fallen into her eyes once more. When she leans forward to give Jenna her change, her breath smells like pepper shrimp. Jenna’s tummy rumbles. But she knows she won’t eat. Maybe some ginger tea. The smell of almost any food makes her stomach knot these past few weeks.

The girl pats Jenna’s hand and says something to her. Jenna can’t hear it clearly over the sound of her grumbling stomach. Embarrassed, she mumbles an impatient “thank you” at the girl, grabs the shopping bag with the shoes in it, and quickly leaves the store. After the air-conditioned chill of the store, the tropical blast of the outdoors heat is like surfacing from the river depths to sweet, scorching air. She kicks off the single tennis shoe. She stuffs it into the shopping bag with the new pair of pumps.

What the girl said, it had sounded like, “Is Eowyn Sinead.”

Jenna doesn’t know anybody with those names.

Daddy texts back that he’ll meet her at the Savannah, by the ice cream man. He means the ice cream truck that has been at the same side of the Savannah since Jenna and Zuleika were young. Jenna likes soursop ice cream. Zuleika liked rum and raisin. One Sunday when they were both still little, their parents had brought Jenna and Zuleika to the Savannah. Jenna had nagged Zuleika for a taste of her ice cream until Mummy ordered Zuleika to let her try it. A sulking Zuleika gave Jenna her cone. Jenna tasted it, spat it out, and dropped the cone. So Daddy made Jenna give Zuleika her ice cream, which made Jenna bawl. But Zuleika wanted her rum and raisin. She pouted and threw Jenna’s ice cream as far as she could. It landed in the hair of a lady who was walking in front of them. Jenna was unhappy, Mummy and Daddy were unhappy, the lady was unhappy, and Zuleika was unhappy.

Jenna remembers the odd satisfaction she had felt through her misery. Except that then Zuleika wouldn’t talk to her or play with her for the rest of the day. Jenna smiles. It probably hadn’t helped that she had followed Zuleika around the whole rest of that day, nagging her for her attention.

Jenna turns off her phone so no one else can call her. Her boyfriend, Clarence, tried for a while, came to visit her a couple of times after the accident, but Jenna wouldn’t talk to him. She didn’t dare open her mouth, for fear of drowning him in screams that would start and never, ever stop. Clarence eventually gave up. The doctors say that Jenna is well enough to return to school. She doesn’t know what she will say to Clarence when she sees him there.

As Jenna is crossing the street, she walks with her bare right foot on tiptoe. That almost matches the height of the high heel on her left foot, so it isn’t so obvious that one foot is bare. But she can’t keep that up for long, not any more. After more than a fortnight of walking with her right foot on tiptoe, the foot has rebelled. Her toes cramp painfully, so she lowers her bare heel to the ground. She steps in a patch of sun-melted tar, but she barely feels the burn. Her foot bottom has developed too much callous for it to bother her much. People in the street make wide berths around her in her tattered one-side shoe. They figure she is homeless, or mad, or both. She doesn’t care. She makes her way to the three hundred-acre Savannah. Not too many people walking or jogging the footpath yet, not in the daytime heat. But the food trucks are in full swing, vending oyster cocktail, roast corn, pholourie, doubles. Jenna ducks past the ice cream man, hoping he won’t see her and ask how she’s doing. He knows—knew—Jenna and Zuleika well. He had watched them grow up.

The poui trees are in full bloom. They carpet the grass with yellow and pink blossoms. Jenna steps over a cricket wicket discarded on the ground and goes around a bunch of navy-uniformed school girls liming on the grass under the trees. A couple of them are eating roti. They all stop their chatting long enough to stare at her. Once she passes them, they whoop with laughter.

Jenna doesn’t know how she will manage school next week.

She finds a bench not too far from the ice cream man, where she can see Daddy when he comes. She sits and puts the shoe bag on her lap. She clutches the folded top of it tightly. She doesn’t put the new shoes on. She never has. They aren’t for her. She was wearing the left side of Zuleika’s shoes when she surfaced. She has to give Zuleika a good pair of the shoes in return for the ones she took without permission.

For a few minutes, Jenna rests her aching feet. Then she realizes that the air is beginning to cool. The sun will be going down soon. Jenna texts her father again, tells him never mind, that she will come home on her own later. He tries to insist. She refuses. Then she turns the phone off. Is better like this, anyway. Her parents are doing their best. Looking after Jenna, asking after her. Doing their grieving in private. Some days Jenna can’t bear the burden of their forgiveness.

She can’t take neither bus nor taxi half shod the way she is. She gets up off the bench, wincing at the separate pains in her feet. She starts walking. Clop, thump. Clop, thump. One shoe off, and one shoe on.

It’s dark when she gets to the right place on the highway. The sight of the torn-apart metal guardrail sets her blood boiling hot so till she nearly feels warm enough for the first time in almost a month. Anger is the only thing hotting her up nowadays. When are they going to fix it?

She lets herself through the space between the twisted pieces of metal and starts clambering down the embankment. Below her, the river whispers and chuckles. A few times, she loses her footing in the pebbles and sparse scrub grass of the dry red earth of the embankment, and slides a little way down. She could hold on to clumps of grass to try to stop her skid, but why? Instead, she digs in the heel of Zuleika’s remaining pump. Above her, cars whoosh by along the highway. But the closer she gets to the tiny patch of wild between the highway and the river, the more the traffic sounds feel muffled, less important. The moonlight helps her to see her way, but she doesn’t need it. She knows the route, every rock, every hillock of grass. She has been here every night for a few weeks now, as soon as the bleeding stopped and the hospital discharged her.

Tiny glowing dots of fireflies prick the darkness open here and there all around her. Jenna’s skin pimples in the cool evening breeze. The sobbing river flows past, just ahead of her.

At the shore line, Jenna gets to her knees. “Zuleika!” she yells. She sits back on her heels in the chilly riverbank mud, clutching the shoe bag in her lap, and waits. The heel of the red shoe pokes into her backside, but the mud feels good on the blistered sole of the other, bare foot.

“Zuleika!”

Nothing.

“I sorry about your fucking shoes, all right?”

Nothing.

She gets the new shoes out of their box. She tosses them into the water. They sink. She waits. She is waiting for the frogs in the reeds to stop chirping. For the sucking pit of grief in her chest to fill in.

For Zuleika to forgive her.

When none of that happens—just like it hasn’t happened every other time she’s come down here—she sighs and stands up. The heel of the left shoe sinks down into the mud. She pulls it out with a sucking sound.

The river isn’t the only thing weeping. Someone is crying, over there in the dark, where the mangroves cluster thicker together. Jenna heads, hop-drop, towards the sound. There are tiny footprints in the muddy soil. They lead away from the crying, towards the direction of the embankment. In the dark, Jenna can’t make out how far they go. But she can tell where they came from, so she follows the footprints backwards.

There’s a child sitting on a big rock by the waterside. The child is the one crying. It is wearing a huge panama hat. To keep from burning in the moonshine? Jenna doesn’t laugh at her own joke. The child is wearing jeans rolled up at the ankles, a too-big T-shirt. It has its legs tucked up and its chin on its knees, propping sorrow. In the moonlight, Jenna can see the yellow moccasins on its tiny feet. It’s the girl from the shoe store.

When she gets near enough, Jenna says, “What you doing out here? Something wrong?”

“I was trying to catch crabs,” the girl replies. “I like them too bad.”

Jenna remembers the seafood smell on the girl’s breath. “Trying to catch them how?”

“With my hands, nuh?”

“You went wading in this water at night, with nobody around? This water not good,” says Jenna. It takes people, she doesn’t say. Sure enough, now that she’s closer, she can see that the girl is sopping wet. Water is running off her clothes and streaming down the sides of the rock.

“Mummy don’t have time for me,” the girl replies. “I been trying to catch my dinner myself, but…” the girl starts sobbing again. “My feet hurt so much! All that standing in the shoe store, all day. Every time I put my feet down, is like I walking on nails. I keep flinching when I step and frightening off the crabs-them.”

Poor thing. Something small releases inside Jenna, like the easing of a stitch. She squishes through the mud and sits on the rock beside the girl. She puts the bag with the empty shoe box in it down on the rock. “I know how it feel when your feet paining you,” she says.

Whimpering, the girl leans closer to Jenna. The smell of seafood makes Jenna’s tummy grumble again. Jenna thinks she could comfort the girl with a hug. She doesn’t do it, though. Since last month, she doesn’t have any business with comfort. But the girl won’t stop crying, her shoulders jerking with the force of her sorrow. Unwillingly, Jenna asks, “You want me help you catch the crabs?”

The girl doesn’t lift her panama-hatted head, but her crying noise stops. “You would do that for me?” she asks, sounding so young. She’s only a child!

“You would have to show me how,” Jenna replies. “And how old you are, anyway?”

The girl says, “You have to put your feet in the water, slow-slow and quiet, so the crabs don’t know you’re there. You have to stay crouched over, ready to grab them when they come up.”

Jenna doesn’t want to put her feet back into the river that had swallowed her and Zuleika not too long ago. She still has nightmares of escaping through the open driver’s-side window, of her head feeling light from holding her breath in. Only in her dreams, Zuleika doesn’t let go when she grabs Jenna’s right foot.

Jenna whispers so the child won’t hear her talking to Zuleika. “I told you to undo your seat belt, don’t it? When we started sinking, I told you. You should have come with me. But all you did was scream.”

In Jenna’s dreams, she isn’t able to kick her leg free of Zuleika’s panicked hold. In Jenna’s dreams, river weed comes pouring out of Zuleika’s hand and wraps itself around Jenna’s right ankle, and doesn’t let go. In Jenna’s dreams, she drowns with her sister. Every night, she drowns.

But she’s promised the shoe-shop child. “Okay,” says Jenna. “Just until your mummy comes.” She briefly wonders why a little girl is working in a shoe store, why she’s hunting for crabs alone down by the river at night, but she doesn’t wonder for too long. The world has become strange, and she is no longer part of it.

Jenna takes off the mashed-up left-side shoe and puts it on the rock. She wiggles her toes. Night air slips through the spaces between them. It feels odd. She had put that shoe back on after Zuleika’s funeral.

She eases herself down off the rock. Now she’s standing, both feet bare, on the riverbank. Her feet are squishing up mud. The left foot sinks a little farther into the mud than the right one. In front of her, black as oil, the roiling river giggles.

She can’t do this. Jenna turns to walk back to solid land, to leave the child to wait there alone for its mother.

“Don’t be frightened,” says the child.

“I not frightened,” Jenna replies. She is, but not of the water. Truth to tell, she wants nothing more than to sink down into the river, to join Zuleika. She wants it so badly, but she knows she can’t. Can’t make her parents lose two daughters to the river in less than a month. And she loves the sweet air. Heaven help her, but she loves it more than she loves her sister.

The child says, “You have to walk slow, keep your eyes peeled on the river bottom. When you see a crab, you reach down and grab it with your two hands.”

“And what if it pinch me?”

“They small. They can’t pinch hard.”

Jenna tries it. She slides her feet along in the shallows. The moonlight lends its glow to the water there. After a minute or two of squinting, she can make out the river bottom. At first, Jenna’s feet hurt every time she takes a step, but pretty soon the chilly river water numbs them. A crab scuttles sideways in front of her. Jenna pounces. Splashes. Misses. She falls into the shallow water. She’s wet to the waist. The child laughs, and Jenna finds herself smiling, just a little. Jenna picks herself up. “Lemme try again.”

She misses the second time, too. At the third fall, she laughs at herself. And at the fourth. By the fifth missed crab, she and the child are shrieking with merriment.

The child points. “There! Look another one!”

Jenna leaps for the splayed, scuttling crab. She catches it. She’s holding it by its hard-shelled body. Its claws wave around and scrabble at her hand, but the crab is too small to do any damage. Jenna rises with it, triumphant, from the riverbed. She whoops in glee, and the child applauds. Jenna realises that she’s stopped thinking of the child as a girl. Really, she doesn’t know whether it’s a girl or a boy. She wades closer to the bank with her catch. “What I do with it now?” she asks.

The child hesitates. Then slowly, it removes the large panama hat that’s been obscuring its face. It turns the hat over, bowl-like, and holds it out. “I put them in here,” it says.

It has no face. Just a small bump where a nose should be, and that perfectly bowed mouth. Jenna is startled for a second, but she recovers. Not polite to stare. Anyway, in a world gone strange, why make a fuss about a missing pair of eyes and a nose with no holes? Jenna drops the crab into the hat the child holds out. Immediately, the child grabs the live crab up and rips into it with tiny, sharp teeth. It spits out a mouthful of broken shell. “You could catch more, please? I so hungry.”

Jenna splashes about some more. She catches crabs, and she laughs giddily. Before this, the river has been making fun of her. Now, it is chortling with her. Jenna catches crabs and drops them into the child’s hat. Jenna is shivering, belly deep. Maybe from being cold and wet, maybe from giggling so hard. The child smiles and eats and pats its full belly. Jenna pats her empty one. She goes closer to the shore. “Let me have one,” she says to the child. She holds her hand out.

The child turns its blank face towards the sound of her voice. “You eat salt, or you eat fresh?” it asks.

“You have salt?” Jenna asks. “I would prefer that over eating it fresh.”

“I don’t have any.”

Why does the child sound so happy about that? Jenna doesn’t have patience with gladness nowadays. She has stopped hanging out with her friends and them from since. They would probably just want to go to the club, to dress up nice, to lime. Jenna doesn’t want to do any of that any more. Dressing up leads to borrowing your sister’s shoes without permission. It leads to quarreling over the shoes in the car on the way to the club. It leads to your sister losing control of the steering wheel and driving the car off the road into the river.

Jenna’s eyes overflow. She has become used to the quick spurt of tears, as though someone has squeezed lime juice into her eyes.

Gently, the child says, “And look the salt right there so.” It nods approvingly and hands over a particularly big crab. Jenna snatches it. She pulls off a gundy claw. With her teeth, she cracks it open. Crab juice and moist meat fall into her mouth. She sucks the rest of the meat out of the claw. She’s so hungry that she barely chews before swallowing. As she eats, she cries salt tears onto the food, seasoning it. She fills her belly.

Jenna stops eating when she notices that the child is trying to reach for its own moccasined feet. Its arms are too short. The child says, softly, “I wish I could take these shoes off.” It turns its smooth face in Jenna’s direction and smiles. “She had them with her in the car that night. She was going to give them to you, Mummy. As a present for me.”

Jenna’s mind goes still, like the space between one breath and the next. Somehow, she is out of the water and sitting on the rock beside the child. Gently, she touches one of the child’s infant-fat legs. The child doesn’t protest. Just leans back on its hands, its face upturned towards hers. Jenna lifts the child’s small, lumpy foot. She loosens the lace on the moccasin and eases it off. The tiny yellow shoe sits in her palm, an empty shell. The child’s foot is cold. Jenna cups the foot to warm it, and removes the other shoe. She looks at the two baby feet that fit easily in her hand. The child’s strange gait makes sense now. Its feet are turned backwards.

Jenna gasps and pulls the child onto her lap. She curls her arms around it and holds its cold body close to hers. The other life she’d lost that night. The one only she and her older sister had known about.

The child snuggles against her. It puts one hand to its mouth and contentedly sucks its thumb. Jenna rocks it. She says, “I didn’t even self tell Clarence yet, you know.” The child grunts and keeps sucking its thumb. Jenna continues, “I sixteen. He fifteen. I was trying to think whether I was ready to grow up so fast.”

The child sucks its thumb.

Jenna takes a breath that fills her lungs so deeply that it hurts. “Part of me was relieved to lose you.” Her breath catches. “Zuleika drowned. And part of me was glad!” Jenna rocks the child and bawls. “I sorry,” she says. “I so sorry.” After a while she is quiet. Time passes, a peaceful space of forever.

The child takes its thumb out of its mouth. It says, “Is her own she need.”

Jenna is puzzled. “What?”

“Is that I was trying to tell you in the store. She don’t want new shoes. She have the right-side shoe already. You have to give her back the left-side one. The one you been wearing.”

Jenna surprises herself with a low yip of laughter. All this laughing tonight, like a language she’d forgotten. “I didn’t even self think of that.”

The child replies, “I have to go now.”

Jenna sighs. “Yes, I know.” She takes the child’s blank, unwritten face in her hands and kisses it.

The child stands and pulls off its T-shirt and jeans. Its body is as featureless as its face. Jenna puts its hat back on. The child says, “You could keep my shoes instead, if you want.” It eases itself down off the rock and toddles towards the water, away from life. But in the mud, the imprints of its feet are turned towards Jenna. The child enters the river. Knee deep, it stops and looks back at her. It calls out, “Auntie say she will look after me!”

Jenna waves. “Tell her thanks!”

Her child nods and waves back. It dives into the water, panama hat and all.

Jenna is still holding the tiny, wet moccasins. Gently, she squeezes the water from them. She slips them into the front pocket of her jeans. She goes and picks up the destroyed left pump from the rock. She kisses it. She yells, “Zuleika! Look your shoe here!” She raises her arm, meaning to fling the shoe into the river.

But there. In the very middle of the water—a rising, rolling semicircle, like a half-submerged truck tyre. Blacker than the blackness around. Swallowing light. The back of Jenna’s neck prickles. Muscles in her calves jump; her running muscles. She makes herself remain still, though.

The fat, rolling pipe of blackness extends into a snakelike tail that wriggles over to the shore. The tail is unbifurcated, its tip as big around as her wrist. The tip is coiled around a red patent pump, the matching right side to the shoe that Jenna is holding. In a whisper, Jenna asks, “Zuleika?” The tail tip slaps up onto the bank, splashing Jenna with mud.

Zuleika rises godlike from the river. Jenna whimpers and runs behind the rock.

Zuleika’s upper half is still wearing the red-sequined minidress, now in shreds, that she’d worn to go dancing the night of the accident. Moonlight makes the sequins twinkle, where they aren’t hidden by river weed that has become tangled in them. The weed dangles and drips. Zuleika’s lower half has become that snakelike tail. At her middle, the tail is as thick around as her waist. She floats upright. Her tail waves on the surface of the water. It extends as far upriver as Jenna can see in the moonlight.

Jenna’s douen child clambers from where she’d been hidden behind Zuleika’s back. The child climbs to sit on Zuleika’s shoulders. It knots its fingers into the snares of Zuleika’s hair. The water hasn’t damaged its hat. Is the child smiling, or baring its teeth? Jenna can’t tell.

Zuleika raises the whole length of her tail, and Jenna quails at the sheer mass of it, blacker than black against the night sky. Zuleika smashes her tail against the water’s surface. The vast wave of sound, echoing up the river, hurts Jenna’s ears. Jenna hears cars screeching to a halt on the highway, horns bleating. Jenna puts her hands against her ears and cowers. Not another crash. Please.

But there is no sound of collision. A couple of car doors slam. A couple of voices ask each other what the rass that sound was. Mama d’lo Zuleika hovers calmly in the water. The few trees must be hiding her from view, because soon, car doors slam again. Cars start up and drive off. Zuleika, Jenna, and the douen child are alone again.

Jenna finds that she’s still holding the left-side shoe. She gathers her courage. She comes out from behind the rock. She says to her sister, “This is yours.” She holds the shoe out to Zuleika.

Zuleika’s tail-tip comes flying out of the darkness and grabs the shoe from Jenna. She hugs both once-shiny red shoes—the dusty one and the waterlogged one—to her breast.

The wetness in Jenna’s own eyes makes the moon break up and shimmer like its own reflection on the water. “I miss you,” she says.

Zuleika smiles gently. Carrying her niece or nephew, Zuleika sinks back beneath the water.

Jenna’s hands are cold. She slides them into the front pockets of her jeans. One hand touches the child’s shoes. The other touches her cell phone. She brings it out. It’s wet, but for a wonder, it’s still working. She texts her mother, says she will be home soon. She calls another number. “Clarence, you busy? You could come and give me a lift home? I by the river. You know where. No, I’m all right. I love you, too. Have something I need to tell you. Don’t worry, I said!”

She still has her washekongs. She rinses her feet in the river and puts them on. She collects the empty shoe box and the plastic shopping bag. She climbs up the embankment to the roadside to wait for her boyfriend.

The story and translation are presented for the 2017 fund drive by Samovar, the sister magazine of Strange Horizons, specialising in speculative fiction in translation, which we publish bilingually. Samovar was made a reality by last year's fund drive and, just like Strange Horizons, is wholly supported by voluntary donations.

___________

深圳湾之夏长达十个月，红树林淤血般浅浅环绕着湾区，年复一年地萎缩、发臭，并非浪漫如其名，锈色的夜晚罪案频发。

红树林以东，皇岗口岸以北，便是我栖身的沙嘴村。

我在这里躲了半年，亚热带日光毒辣，我却愈发苍白。沙嘴村与沙头、沙尾、上沙、下沙等五个城中村形成巨大的混凝土密植森林，占据着福田区的核心地带。村落名字经常令人产生幻觉，仿佛生活于一种名为“沙”的巨型生物体嘴部，虽已与头部割裂分离，但仍保持活性。

沈姐告诉我，这里曾经是小渔村，后来改革开放了，城市化大建设，村民们为了被政府拆迁时能多拿赔偿，每家每户都在自己的地界上拼命盖楼，以制造出更大的居住面积。但在他们达成心愿之前，房价已经飙升到连政府都赔付不起的地步，这些见证历史的建筑就像遗址般被保留了下来。

三天就能盖一层，她说。真正的特区速度。

我想象着癌细胞般快速增殖的房屋如何形成今天的格局，在房间内永远暗无天日，因为楼与楼之间只有“握手”的距离，道路如毛细血管般狭窄，走向毫无章法，一股腐败的臭味弥漫其中，渗透进每个人的毛孔。由于租金便宜，吸引了三教九流的外来人员栖身于此，艰难追求着他们的深圳梦，那个高科技、高薪水、高解析度、高级生活的高-深圳。

我却宁愿选择这个低端版本，它让我感觉安全。

沈姐是个好人。她来自东北，多年前从一户移民海外的本地土著手里盘下这栋楼，过上了包租婆的日子，现在租金日涨，而她在深圳的身家早已过千万，可她还是住在这里。她收留了没有身份的我，给了我一个小摊位，甚至搞定了给警方的备案文件。她从来不问我的过去。我感激她，为她做一些事情作为回报。

我的摊位在中药店门口，卖人体贴膜及一些破解版的增强现实软件，奇怪的搭配。人体贴膜能感应肌肉电泳信号显示文字图案，在美国这种技术一般用来监测病患的各种生理指标，到了这里却变成一种炫耀性的街头亚文化。打工仔、黑社会或者小姐，都喜欢在身体的显眼或隐秘部位贴上贴膜，随着肌肉紧张或体表温度变化呈现不同图案，以显示个性、气魄或者性感。

我还清楚记得第一次和雪莲说话时的情形。

雪莲是湖南人，却用一种寒带高山花卉来命名，即使在黑夜里，她的皮肤也像白瓷般流淌着光芒。人们说她是沙嘴村最有名的“楼凤”，也就是在家里接客的小姐。我常见她与不同的男子携手走过，但表情淡定自若，看不出半分风尘气息，相反，有种令人无法侧目的魔力。

沙嘴村里圈养着上千名不同档次的小姐，她们为深港两地的中低阶层男性提供了价廉物美、种类丰富的性服务，她们的身体仿佛一片乐土，收容着那些疲惫、肮脏而脆弱的雄性灵魂，又像是一针安慰剂，片刻欢愉之后，让男人们精神抖擞地重返现实的疆场。

雪莲是与众不同的一位。她是沈姐的密友，也常来帮衬中药店，每当她经过我的摊档步入店内时，那阵香风总让我心跳失速，我努力控制自己不回头看她，但无一成功。

“能帮我修一下贴膜吗，它不亮了。”那一天，她突然从背后拍了拍我的肩膀，说。

“给我看看。”我掩饰不住慌张的神情。

“跟我来。”她压低了声线。

昏暗的楼梯如肠道般狭窄，她的房子与我想象中截然不同，鹅黄色调，细节处充满了居家的温馨，尤其是有一面朝向开阔天空的阳台，这在沙嘴村可算是奢侈品。她领我进入卧室，背对着我，牛仔裤褪到了膝盖上方，露出黑色丝质内裤和白得晃眼的大腿。

我手脚冰凉，艰难地完成了一次吞咽动作，试图湿润干燥的喉管。

雪莲纤长的手指伸向内裤，我还没准备好，满心恐惧。

“它不亮了。”她并没有脱下内裤，只是露出尾椎上方那枚八卦形的贴膜。

我努力掩饰自己的失望与不安，小心翼翼地用工具检测着贴膜，尽量不去注意背景那片细腻的肌肤。“应该好了，试试。”我纠正了电容芯片的热感应插值，长长地呼出一口气。

雪莲突然发出清脆的笑声，她腰间的汗毛齐刷刷立了起来，像是一片微缩的芦苇丛。

“怎么试？”她扭过脸，挑逗地望着我。

我相信世间没有任何正常的男人能够抵抗这样的眼神，可在那一瞬间，我却仿佛受到了侮辱。她只是把我当成另一个顾客，另一个用金钱交换她身体使用权的消费者，或许她企图以此偿付修理费？我不知道自己幼稚的怒气从何而来，只是一语不发地取出加热垫，贴在她的腰间，大概过了三十秒，八卦中间的太极图案亮起一个楷体的“东”字，闪烁着幽幽蓝光。

“东？”我脱口而出。

“我男人的名字。”雪莲突然恢复了淡然的神态，她拉起裤子，转过身来，看见我欲言又止的模样，说出了我的疑惑。“以为小姐就是人尽可夫？

“他喜欢从后面，贴在这里，就是想告诉所有的男人，你们可以花钱上我，可总有些东西，是钱买不到的。”她点起一支烟，突然想起了什么。“对了，我该给你多少钱？”

不知为何，我突然感到一阵解脱。

东是雪莲的老公，也是她老板，长年在深港两地走私一些数码产品，赚取差价。听别人说，东嗜赌如命，雪莲接客赚来的钱多半被他输在赌桌上，甚至还逼雪莲接待一些有特殊癖好的香港老男人。可就算如此，雪莲的腰间仍闪烁着他的名字，宣示着主权所有不容侵犯。

这种俗套的剧情让我回想起许多旧日的香港黑帮片，可在沙嘴，这就是日常生活。

显而易见，她不开心，这也是她为何成为沈姐常客的原因。

如同沙嘴的其他人，沈姐也身兼多职，她的另一重身份是神婆。沈姐自称是满族人，祖上曾经有过女萨满大神，因此基因中也遗传了一些灵力，可通鬼神，卜吉凶。曾有一次，她喝得兴起，讲述起呼气成冰的北方苍莽大漠，远古族人们头戴狰狞面具，在暴风雪中旋转起舞，击鼓扬鞭，高唱神曲，祈求各路神灵附体的仪式。尽管那天室外热气腾腾，气温逼近摄氏四十度，屋内众人却在她的故事里瑟瑟发抖。

沈姐从不让我进她作法的房间，她说我没有诉求，心不诚，会破坏神灵的气场。找她的人络绎不绝，据说十分灵验，只要看人一眼就能把背景情况说个八九不离十。我见过那些作法结束后离开房间的人，脸上毫无例外地漂浮着一种虚幻的满足感。

这种表情我见过许多回，地铁里拎着LV Monogram Speedy的花样少女，威尼斯酒店V Bar里猎艳得手的都市精英，每晚六点半深圳新闻里出席各种活动的政客，他们脸上都洋溢着同样的深圳表情。

就像沙嘴村里每日往来的嫖客，在中药店里购买服用强力春药后，脸上浮现出的自信微笑。只有我知道，那些春药的有效成分只是纤维素，除了大便通畅外别无功效。

这座城市里，人人都需要一点安慰剂。

雪莲来了又走，每次离开似乎都大彻大悟，然后又愁容满面地再次光临。我可以想象她所需倾诉的苦恼，却无法遏制地想要知道更多。我有无数的技术手段满足好奇心，但欠缺的必要条件便是踏进那个房间。我知道，唯一的办法就是把自己也变成一名信徒。

“我有求于神灵。”我对沈姐说。我并没有撒谎。

“进来。”沈姐阅人无数，她明辨真假。

房间不大，灯光昏暗，墙上挂着色彩斑斓的萨满神像画，笔触疯狂得像是嗑了药，沈姐端坐在一张铺着暗红色绒布的方台前，上面摆放着面具、牛皮鼓、鼓鞭、铜镜、铜铃等神器。电子诵经机开始吟唱起经文，她戴上面具，透过那狰狞的孔洞，双眼射出古老而陌生的光芒。

“大神在听。”她的嗓音变得低沉而嘶哑，带着不容辩驳的威严。

我无法抗拒。那个故事被我封禁在记忆的暗角，可折磨未曾有片刻停歇。罪疚像酒，愈是避开天日，发酵得愈加醇厚猛烈。我猛然觉醒，潜意识玩弄了我，并非是对雪莲的好奇驱使我踏入房间，而是释放压抑寻求解脱的内心需求。

“我来自关外，我是个工程师。”我试着调节气息，稳定声线。

我来自关外，我是个工程师。在我还没有出生的1983年，一道长达84.6公里、高2.8米的铁丝网把深圳一分为二，从此，二线关内便是327.5平方公里的经济特区，关外成了1600平方公里的蛮荒之地。据说设立这道关卡的目的在于缓解一线关的压力，也就是深圳与香港之间27.5公里的交界线，在1997年前港英当局统治香港时期，曾发生多次逃港偷渡潮。

柏林墙从未真正倒下。

被二线关铁丝网和九大检查站隔开的，不仅仅是人流和车流，还有法律、福利、税收优惠、基础建设和身份认同。关外成了深圳的“二奶”，尽管依靠临近特区和土地充沛的优势，吸引了大批劳动密集型低附加值企业入驻，但说起关外，深圳人的第一反应便如同好莱坞西部片里的荒漠，贫穷、落后、道路永远在施工、闯红灯不用罚款、罪案频发且警力不足。

但历史总是惊人的相似，深圳也有西部大开发的一天。

2014年拆除二线关铁丝网时遭受前所未有的阻力和抗议。关内居民认为这会带来外来流动人员和犯罪，而关外人反应更加激烈，他们觉得以前你们为了发展特区抛弃了关外，现在经济发展后劲不足了，遇到土地瓶颈了，就要开始榨取我们的资源，哄抬我们的房价和物价，变相地把低收入人群驱逐出去。年轻人们甚至打扮成印第安土著的模样，把自己绑在铁丝网上阻止拆除。

我所在的工厂，便是其中一家遭受冲击的电子加工贸易企业。每年我们靠欧美日本的增强现实装备配件订单赚取外汇，同时承受美元缩水和人民币升值的巨大压力，如果租金和人工成本再上涨，基本上就没什么赚头。老板在厂里开了大会，让大家做好散伙的准备。

我是模具工程师，我想在临走前干一票大的，赚一笔快钱，像所有人想的那样。

订单客户会发给我们未上市的新机型供开模具使用，由于严格的NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement)协议，机器里的有源RFID标签会发射433MHz射频信号，通过专用空中接口协议与接收器通讯，若离开有效范围则会自动预警，300秒预警期内如不归位，则会开启自毁装置，同时，这家企业在国际市场上的信用宣告破产，列入黑名单，永不续用。

珠江三角洲地区到处都是高价收购原型机的买家，他们经验丰富，手段刁钻，当然，破解原型机能给这些山寨电子企业带来数以千万计的巨额利润。这年头，本分做生意不如黑心发横财。

一切准备就绪。买家、订金、交货方式、逃跑路线，但我还需要一个帮手，一个吸引保安及众人注意力好让我趁机下手的诱饵。除了老乡陈敢，我实在想不出更合适的人选。

我了解陈敢，那个腼腆爱笑的年轻人，他老婆刚生了第二个闺女，正在发愁大女儿上小学交赞助费的问题，没有深圳户口，只能上教学质量低劣的外来工子弟学校。他经常看着女儿的照片，说不希望她重复自己的老路。我往他银行帐户里打了一笔钱，不多不少正好够付赞助费。

对于中国人来说，没有比“为了孩子”更好的借口。

在约定的时间，大楼外传来扩音器的噪音，我知道陈敢已经进入了角色，他将自己全身浇上汽油，手拿打火机，威胁如果老板不给他足够的裁员赔偿，他就把自己点着。保安们紧张地抱着灭火器冲下楼，没人注意到我拿着原型机爬上通往天台的应急楼梯。

我是工厂里允许接触原型机的五个人之一，借助工作之便，我把RFID标签的触发机制测试了几次，预警日志里似乎只对经纬度进行标记，高度并不是触发锚点，这个漏洞帮助我设计了靠谱的交货方式。

天台上阴风阵阵，似乎山雨欲来。几乎全厂工人都聚集在楼前空地，看这场自焚的闹剧如何收场，如果老板妥协的话，明天便会有一个加强连的自焚队伍等着他。我认识老板三年了，以他的性格，只会拼命怂恿陈敢擦亮打火机，然后在未熄的骨灰堆里点一根烟。

一架状似蜻蜓的遥控飞机嗡嗡作响地从远处飞近，垂降在天台上，我按照指示把原型机接驳在线路上，飞机摇晃着垂直升起。我紧张地看着这关系到两个人，甚至更多人性命的脆弱机械，接收器与RFID标签的通讯距离最长为60英尺，天台已经接近极限。它悬停在半空中，似乎在等待一个指令，我不知道他们如何处理自毁装置，或者破解通信协议后，用假的射频源代替，那已经超出我所能控制的范围。

有那么一瞬间，我甚至以为它永远不会飞走，可它终于消失在天台边缘，消失在那片灰色的天空深处。

我镇定地乘坐电梯下到底层，加入围观人群，故意让陈敢看到我。他微微点头，露出那标签式的腼腆笑容，手中的打火机掉落在地，保安们群拥而上，将他死死按在沙土里。我想是时候离开了。

我坐上通往东莞的长途车，车还没起动，手机便疯狂地震动起来。以我对老板的了解，留给我的时间不会太长，可却没有想到会这么快。是监控录像还是陈敢出卖了我，我已不关心，只希望他也能全身而退，能活着看到女儿入学的那一天。

我丢掉手机，下车，坐上反方向通往关内的大巴。直觉告诉我，这是更安全的路线。

这便是我来到沙嘴村的经过。

半年来，我一直通过各种途径打听陈敢的下落，却一无所获。我以为自己已经足够冷漠，冷漠到可以丢弃无用的良心，却时常会在梦里惊醒。梦里的陈敢，带着一脸腼腆的笑，燃烧着，化为灰烬。我甚至梦到他的两个女儿，哭喊着一起燃为灰烬。我知道我无法再逃避下去。

“告诉我他还好吗？”不知不觉间我已泪流满面。

吊目圆睛的木质萨满面具上折射着橘色的光，那是愤怒女神的面容，孔洞中的目光闪烁得有些异常，许多细碎的蓝色光点飞快地溢出，高速频闪。我豁然开朗，这是一副他妈伪装得极好的增强现实眼镜。

一直以来，我以为沈姐只是装神弄鬼骗人钱财的心理顺势治疗师，原来她是真的通灵。保守估计，她的信息权限至少在IIA级以上，才能通过面孔识别获取目标的个人档案，但没有专业的分析过滤软件，她如何在短时间内从可视化界面摘取有用信息呢，其难度不亚于大海捞针。我只能相信她的萨满基因，就像《雨人》里的达斯丁霍夫曼，一眼就能看出一盒火柴有几根。

她的目光停止闪烁。我的心跳加速。

“他很好。”

一股希望重新从我心头燃起。

“至少在那里，他不再需要为钱担忧了。”沈姐指了指天上，轻轻地说。“节哀顺变。”

我深深地吸入一口空气，尽管早有预期，可当尘埃落定时，仍会感到一种深深的无助，仿佛整个世界都模糊了焦点，无依无靠。我知道，在这个世界上，只有一件事我可以作为弥补，哪怕只是对自己良知虚伪的安慰。

“我要陈敢家里的活跃银行帐号。”

金钱曾经是我的安慰剂，现在我不需要了。

离开沈姐房间时，天色已暗。我望着华灯初上的沙嘴村，人流熙攘，漂浮着欲望的气息，可我却心如死水。我张开掌心，空空如也。下意识再次欺骗了我，它还是把窃听器安在了神台下沿。我以为自己只是为了陈敢，结果还是忘不了雪莲。

我露出一个深圳式的微笑。

那一天，雪莲看起来很不好。她面色苍白，戴着巨大的墨镜，试图掩饰什么。她没有跟任何人打招呼，径直上了沈姐的房间。我戴上耳机，打开接收器，一股静噪涌动之后，是诵经机的声音。

“他又打我。”雪莲的声音带着哭腔。“他说我最近接客少了，钱不够花。”

“你自己选的。”沈姐很平静，似乎早已习惯。

“我就应该和那个香港老板走。”

“可你又舍不得。”

“我跟了他十年！十年！从黄花闺女，到现在的贱货一个！”

“你还想要第二个十年？”

“姐……我怀孕了。”

沈姐沉默了片刻。“是他的？”

“是他的。”

“那就告诉他，你有了他的骨肉，你不能再接客了。”

“他会让我打掉的，这不是第一次了。姐，我年纪大了，我想要这个孩子。”

“那就生下来。”

“他会杀了我的，他会的。”

“他不会的。”从耳机和空气里同时听见自己的声音是件挺诡异的事情，我站在房门口，看着雪莲转过身来诧异地看着我，那脸像白瓷一样光洁，除了右眉骨处显眼的瘀青。我的拳头攥得紧紧的，指甲嵌进了肉里。

这是计划，尽管有违我的初衷，但不得不承认，它是最有可能成功的。

东嗜赌成性，且跟天下所有的赌徒一样，迷信。我们要让他在孩子和运气之间建立某种联系，为了孩子，我心头泛起一丝苦涩。

雪莲会在清晨的睡梦中反复呢喃一些毫无意义的数字，作为赌徒，东习惯性地从所有的事物中寻找下注灵感，无论是《天线宝宝》里出现的颜色，还是广告传单上的电话。他会发现，这些数字是前一天福利彩票的头奖号码。

雪莲会告诉他自己的怪梦，梦见七彩祥云从东方飘来，飘进了她的肚子里。

如此连续七天后，终于来到戏肉部分。

我的专业技能终于派上用场，无线耳机，增强现实隐形眼镜，把雪莲武装到牙齿。最精彩的部分是一件黑色连体衣，外表看上去只是普通的贴身内衣，但特殊的纤维材料在导电时能发生拓扑形变，产生巨大的精确定向拉力，甚至防弹，配合内置电极和通讯芯片，我把它变成了一件遥控傀儡服。

“你为什么要帮我？”雪莲问我，似乎依旧认为男人只会对她的肉体感兴趣。

“积福报，消业障。”我笑了笑，沈姐经常这样教育她的顾客。穿着傀儡服的雪莲在我的操控下摆出各种性感的姿势。

“不穿衣服，我能做得更好。”

我低下头，假装没听见，继续摆弄操控平板。突然，像是一团温热的云朵从天而降，两只柔软白皙的手臂绕过脖子，环在我胸前，雪莲的声音贴着后背穿透我的胸腔、心脏、肺叶，顺着脊柱传递到耳鼓。像是来自我心底，又遥远得无边无际。

“谢谢你。”她说。

我很想说点什么，可终究什么也没说出来。

我和沈姐共享了雪莲的视域。

穿过幽暗的楼梯后是熟悉的鹅黄色房间，那个名叫“东”的男人正坐在电视前，看着香港赛马节目，不时发出咒骂声。雪莲走进厨房，开始准备晚饭。画面突然僵住，然后是两条男人的手臂，就像她抱住我时一样，环在她的胸前。

“别……”她说。

男人没有回答，画面突然一抖，她的脸趴到了清洗水槽前，水龙头哗哗开着，水漫过蔬菜和水果，带着细微的泡沫流入下水道。画面开始有节奏地前后晃动起来，然后是粗重的喘息声和偶尔遏制不住的呻吟。

我可以关闭声音和画面，可我没有，只是近乎冷酷地欣赏着这一切，体验那种愤怒、嫉妒和恶心的混合物在胃里慢慢搅动，最后融为一体。我努力想象着雪莲此时的感受，尤其是当这一切发生在两个外人的眼皮底下时。她没有发出一点声音，一点都没有。

终于，她找到了解脱的办法，她闭上了眼睛。

半透明的黑暗中，那些穿透眼睑皮肤的模糊光斑微微颤动，一只手搭在了我的肩膀上，是沈姐。她洞察一切。

我们等到了半夜。雪莲侧旁传来均匀而规律的呼吸声，我抬了抬她的左手，表示准备就绪，她清了清嗓子作为回复。

这是一场伪降神仪式。

我操纵傀儡服，高高抬起雪莲的双腿，将她的上半身凝固住，双腿如杠杆般落下，撬动上半身离开床垫，然后上半身落下，将双腿弹得更高，势能与动能的转换间，雪莲僵硬的躯体仿佛一枚落地的硬币，在床上快速地弹跳起来，发出越来越骇人的撞击声。

“……操你妈大半夜不睡觉搞什么……”男人被惊醒，摸索着打开床头灯，然后只听得一声巨响，那个叫东的男人滚到了地板上。

“操！操！操……”东极度惊恐地咒骂着。

在快速运动中，雪莲的身体仿佛挣脱了重力的束缚，像是被无形绳索提拉的木偶，在床垫上不断地弹起、落下，有那么一瞬间，她似乎完全漂浮了起来。暗黄色的天花板逼近，又远离，像是某种皮质呼吸膜，视野边缘在舒张过程中出现轻微的桶状变形。

“够了。”沈姐阻止我忘乎所以的疯狂，吓跑这个男人不是我们的目的。不得不承认，操纵雪莲的身体让我上瘾，像是某种潜意识层面的补偿。

振幅慢慢减小，雪莲的身体又重新回到床上，我解除了傀儡服的拘束状态，她像一摊死肉般散开来。

如我们计划的，她开始哭起来，语无伦次地诉说噩梦和怪异的信息。

“它说……如果好好照顾它，它会报答我们，就像那些彩票号码……”

“它是谁？”

“你的孩子。”

那个男人从地板上爬起，似乎被过于密集的信息轰炸得一脸木然。他手里还抓着不知从哪来的水果刀，靠近雪莲，抚摸着她的肚子，抬头看着她。温暖的灯光下，这一幕仿佛肥皂剧里的惊喜场景，接着会是迎接新生命的应许，以及爱的深吻。

东那漂亮的瞳膜闪烁着光，光陡然变冷、变浊，如同一潭黑水。

“医生说过，我的精子不行。”他把刀在雪莲的肚子上缓缓擦拭。“告诉我，这回是谁的野种，然后，打掉它。”

“你的……”雪莲的呼吸变得急促，带着颤抖的哭腔。

“你是圣母玛利亚吗，你这个贱货！”他甩给了她一个耳光，画面一偏，穿衣镜中出现两个人的剪影，在昏黄光线中构图完美。

“你的。”雪莲无力地重复着。

刀子逼到她的鼻尖，薄薄的刃口闪着冷光，我无法再坐视不理。我举起雪莲双手，控住东的手腕和刀柄，将刀刃扭转，朝向他自己的胸口。他显然被雪莲的速度和力量惊呆了，没有做出任何反应。

雪莲整个身体向前倾倒，将刀尖向东的胸前推进。

“停！”沈姐大叫。可我什么也没干。是雪莲，我甚至来不及拘束她。

刀身带着雪莲全身的重量没入东的皮肤，穿透肌肉和肋骨，刺破心脏，暗红色的液体从伤口爬出，缓缓扩大，像野蛮生长的花朵。东向上看着，目光掠过雪莲，似乎看见了某种更为黑暗而遥远的存在，直到最后一点光亮从他瞳孔里消失。

这个画面定格了许久，我们被这突如其来的扭转所震惊，手足无措。雪莲突然奔跑起来，眼前的一切剧烈晃动着，她跑向阳台，跑向那片打开的夜空。

这次我没有失手。在她跃入虚无之前，我拘束了她，雪莲像一束霜冻的花，重重砸在地板上，她愤怒地嘶叫着，试图挣脱，最后化为绝望的呜咽。

死亡是最好的安慰剂。

在这个案例上，我同意此观点。

警笛长啸击碎沙嘴村的清晨。我和沈姐被警察陪同着，穿过围观的人群，钻进警车。雪莲被关在另一辆车里，戴着手铐，她的侧脸如同白瓷一样，颧骨处闪烁着红蓝两色，她没有抬头，眼帘低垂，引擎轰响，侧影抖动、模糊、远去。

我回忆起第一次和雪莲说话时的情形，开始漫长的后悔。

Translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu. Read the original in Chinese here.

This translation was first published in Interzone 243, Nov/Dec 2012, and reprinted in Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, ed. Ken Liu, Tor Books, 2016. We are grateful to the author and translator, and to Tor Books,  for allowing us to reprint it here.

The translation and story in Chinese are presented for the 2017 fund drive by Samovar, the sister magazine of Strange Horizons, specialising in speculative fiction in translation, which we publish bilingually. Samovar was made a reality by last year's fund drive and, just like Strange Horizons, is wholly supported by voluntary donations.

____________

Summers in Shenzhen Bay last ten months. Mangrove swamps surround the bay like congealed blood. Year after year, they shrink and rot, like the rust-colored night that hides many crimes.

To the east of the mangroves, north of Huanggang Port between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, is Shazui Village, where I’m staying for now.

I’ve hidden here for half a year. The subtropical sun is brutal, but I’ve grown even paler. The five urban villages, Shazui, Shatou, Shawei, Shangsha, and Xiasha—or literally, “Sand Mouth,” “Sand Head,” “Sand Tail,” “Upper Sand,” “Lower Sand”—form a large, dense concrete jungle at the heart of Futian District. The names of the villages often give one the illusion of living in the mouth of some giant, mythical monster named “Sand” which, while separated from the head, remains alive.

Big Sister Shen tells me that this used to be a sleepy fishing village. But with the economic reforms and the opening up of China, urbanization brought construction everywhere. To get more compensation when the government exercised its eminent domain powers, villagers raced to build tall towers on their land so as to maximize the square footage of the residential space. But before they could cash in, real estate prices had risen to the point where even the government could no longer afford to pay compensation. These hastily erected buildings remained like historical ruins, witnesses to history.

The villagers built a story every three days, she says. Now that’s what you call the Speed of the Special Economic Zone.

I imagine these buildings, growing as fast as cancer cells, finally settling into the form they have today. Inside the apartments it’s always dark because there’s so little space between the buildings that tenants in buildings next to each other can shake hands through the windows. The alleyways are narrow like capillaries and follow no discernible pattern. The stench of rot and decay permeates everything, sinks into everyone’s pores. Because the rent is cheap, every kind of migrant can be found here, struggling to fulfill their Shenzhen dream: the high-tech, high-salaried, high-resolution, high-life, high-Shenzhen.

But I prefer this lower-end version. It makes me feel safer.

Big Sister Shen is a good person. She’s originally from the Northeast. Years ago, she bought this building from a native family that was moving overseas. Now she lives the life of a happy landlady. With the rent rising daily, her net worth must be in the tens of millions, but she still lives here. She took me in despite the fact that I had no identity papers, and gave me a small booth to practice my trade. She even prepared a fake file for me in case the police ever show up. She never asks me about my past. I’m grateful, and I try to do a few favors to repay her.

From my booth at the door of the Chinese medicine shop, I sell a combination of body films and cracked versions of augmented-reality software. Body films are applied to the skin, where they display words or pictures in response to the body’s electrical signals. In America, they use the technology as a diagnostic tool, monitoring patients’ physiological signs. But here, it has become part of the street culture of status display. Laborers, gangsters, and prostitutes all like to apply the films to prominent or hidden parts of the body so that, in response to changing muscle tension or skin temperature, the films can show various pictures to signal the wearer’s personality, daring, and sex appeal.

I still remember the first time I spoke with Snow Lotus.

Snow Lotus is from humid, subtropical Hunan, but she decided to name herself after an alpine flower. Even at night, her pale skin glows like porcelain. Some say that she’s Shazui Village’s most famous “house phoenix”—a prostitute who works out of her home. I often see her walking and holding hands with different men, but her expression is always composed, with no hint that anything sordid is going on. Indeed, she exudes an allure that makes it impossible to look away.

Shazui Village is home to thousands of prostitutes at all price levels. They provide the middle- and lower-class men of both Shenzhen and Hong Kong with all varieties of plentiful, cheap sexual services. Their bodies are like a paradise where the tired, dirty, and fragile male souls can take temporary refuge. Or maybe they are like a shot of placebo so that the men, after a moment of joy, their spirit restored, can return to the battlefield that is real life.

Snow Lotus is not like any of the others. She’s Big Sister Shen’s good friend, and comes often to shop at the Chinese medicine store. Every time she passes my booth, her perfume makes my heart skip a few beats. I always try to restrain myself from following her with my eyes, but I never succeed.

That day, she tapped my shoulder lightly from behind. “Can you help me fix my body film? It won’t light up,” she said.

“I can take a look.” I had trouble hiding my rising panic.

“Follow me,” she whispered.

The dim stairs were as narrow as intestines. Her apartment was nothing like what I had imagined. The color scheme was light yellow, decorated with many homey, warm details. There was even a balcony that allowed one to see the open sky. In Shazui, this was a real luxury.

She led me into her bedroom, and keeping her back to me, she slid her jeans down to her knees, revealing a pair of blindingly white thighs and black, lacey panties.

My hands and feet felt cold. I swallowed with difficulty, trying to moisten my dry throat.

Snow Lotus’s elegant finger pointed to her panties. I was still not ready. My heart was full of fear.

“It won’t light up,” she said. She hadn’t taken off her panties. She was just pointing to the octagon-shaped film depicting a bagua that was applied right above her tailbone.

I tried to disguise my disappointment. Carefully, I examined the film with my diagnostic tools, doing my best not to pay attention to her smooth, silky skin. I tweaked the thermal response curve of the capacitance detector. “It should be okay now. Try it.” I let out a long-held breath.

Suddenly, Snow Lotus began to laugh. The almost-invisible hairs around the curve below her waist stood up, like a miniature patch of reeds.

“How am I supposed to try it out?” She turned around to look at me, her tone teasing.

I believe that no straight man in the world can resist that look. But in that moment, I felt insulted. She was treating me as just another customer, a consumer who exchanged money for the right to make use of her body. Or perhaps she thought that this was how she’d pay for my services? I didn’t know from where my childish anger came, but without saying another word, I took out a heating pad and held it against her waist. After thirty seconds, the yin-yang symbol in the middle of the bagua lit up with the character for “East,” glowing with a blue light.

“East?” I asked, not understanding.

“That’s my man’s name.” Snow Lotus’s expression was back to being calm and composed. She pulled up her jeans, turned around, and saw the question on my face. “You think a prostitute should have no man to call hers?

“He likes to take me from behind. I put the film here to let all my customers know that they can mount me if they’re willing to spend the money, but there are some things that they cannot buy.” She lit a cigarette. “Oh, how much do I owe you?”

I felt a sudden, inexplicable sense of relief.

The man named East is Snow Lotus’s husband, and also her pimp. His business involves traveling between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, smuggling digital goods. Others tell me that he’s addicted to gambling. Most of Snow Lotus’s earnings are lost by him at the gaming table. Sometimes he even forces her to service some older Hong Kong customers with … special desires. But even so, she still wears his name on her waist, declaring that she belongs to him.

This is such a cliché that it reminds me of many old Hong Kong gangster movies. But that’s just daily life in Shazui.

Snow Lotus is unhappy. That’s why she often comes to Big Sister Shen for help.

Like many in Shazui, Big Sister Shen also has multiple jobs. One of them is shaman.

Big Sister Shen claims to be a Manchu. Some of her ancestors were also shamans, she says, and so she has inherited some of their magical powers, enabling her to speak to spirits and to predict the future.

One time, when she was a little drunk and in a talkative mood, she described the great empty deserts of the far north, where one’s breath turned to ice, and where her ancestors had once performed magical ceremonies dressed in ferocious masks, dancing, twirling in the blizzard, drumming and singing, praying for spirits to take over their bodies. Even though that was a hot day, with the temperature hovering near forty degrees Celsius, everyone in the room had shivered as she told her story.

Big Sister Shen never allows me to enter the room where she performs her magic. She says that because I don’t want anything, my heart isn’t pure, and so I will harm the atmosphere for the spirits.

An endless stream of customers comes to seek her services. They all say that she has real Power—one look, and she can tell everything about you. I’ve seen the people who leave her room after the magic sessions: their faces are filled with a dreamy look of satisfaction.

I’ve seen that expression many times: young women carrying their LV Speedy bags, wealthy urbanites on the hunt for beautiful women at the V Bar of the Venetian, politicians who appear on TV every night for the six-thirty Shenzhen News—all of them wear that same expression on their faces, a very Shenzhen expression.

They are like the johns who come to Shazui every day. They go to the Chinese medicine store for some extra-strength aphrodisiac and then reappear with a confident smile. But I know that the aphrodisiac contains nothing but fiber, and it has no effect except causing them to shit regular.

In this city, everyone needs some placebo.

Snow Lotus comes to Big Sister Shen again and again. Each time she leaves as if enlightened, but soon after she returns, her face full of unhappiness. I can imagine the kind of troubles that someone like her must endure, but I can’t help wanting to know more. I have many technical ways to satisfy my curiosity, but they all require that I set foot first in Big Sister Shen’s room. I know that the only way is to become a disciple.

“I need the aid of spirits,” I tell Big Sister Shen. I’m not lying.

“Come in.” Big Sister Shen has seen countless men. She can spot a liar from a mile away.

The room isn’t big and it’s dimly lit. On the wall I can see paintings of shamanistic spirits, the chaotic brushstrokes probably the result of a drug-addled brain. Big Sister Shen sits in front of a square altar covered by a red flannel cloth. On top of the altar are a mask, a cowhide drum, a drum whip, a bronze mirror, a bronze bell, and other ritual implements. An electronic prayer machine begins to recite sutras. She puts on the mask, and through the hideous eyeholes, I can see an ancient and alien light in her eyes.

“The Great Spirit is listening,” she says. Her voice is low and rasping, full of an indisputable sense of dignity.

I can’t resist her power. There’s a story locked away in the darkest corner of my memory, but it has never ceased to torment me. Sin is like wine. The more it is hidden from sunlight, the more it ferments, growing more potent. Suddenly, I startle awake. My subconscious has been playing a trick on me. It’s not curiosity about Snow Lotus that caused me to step into this room, but the inner desire to be free of repression, to seek relief.

“I’m from outside the Fence. I was an engineer.” I try to control my breathing, to steady my voice.

I’m from outside the Fence. I was an engineer.

Back in 1983, before I was born, a barbed-wire fence 84.6 kilometers long and 2.8 meters high was built to divide Shenzhen into two parts. Inside the Fence is the 327.5 square kilometers of the Special Economic Zone, outside is a wilderness of 1600 square kilometers. They say that the purpose of the Fence was to provide some relief for the border checkpoint between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Before 1997, when Hong Kong was ruled by Great Britain, there used to be many waves of illegal border crossings.

The Berlin Wall never truly fell.

The Fence and its nine checkpoints separated not only people and traffic, but also different systems of law, welfare, tax benefits, infrastructure, and identity. The area outside the Fence became Shenzhen’s “mistress.” Because of its proximity to the Special Economic Zone and its vast tracts of undeveloped land, it attracted many labor-intensive though low-value-added industries. But every time “outside the Fence” was mentioned, a Shenzhener’s first thought was of the deserts in Hollywood westerns: a poor, backwards place, where the roads were always under construction, where running red lights had no consequences, where crime was rampant and the police powerless.

But history always surprises us with similarities. Shenzhen also had its own version of the taming of the West.

In 2014, the government’s decision to finally tear down the Fence received unprecedented opposition. Shenzheners living inside the Fence believed that they would be overwhelmed by migrants from the other side and suffer increased crime. But those living outside the Fence opposed it even more. They felt that they had been abandoned by those inside the Fence back when the Special Economic Zone grew, and now that development had run into a wall due to the scarcity of developable space, they were now being exploited for their only resource: land. If unopposed, increased rent and prices would drive the low-income population out of their homes. Young people even dressed up in Native American garb and tied themselves to the Fence to prevent it from being torn down.

The factory where I worked was one of the electronics manufacturers affected by the change. Every year, we relied on orders from Europe, America, and Japan for augmented reality gear components to earn foreign currency. At the same time, our margins were being squeezed by the declining value of the dollar against the yuan. If commercial rent and wages also rose, then there would be nothing left for profit. The owner announced at an all-hands meeting that everyone should be prepared for layoffs.

I was a mold engineer. I wanted to do something to make as much money as I could before I was let go. Everyone thought that way.

Our clients gave us prototypes for unreleased products so that we could design the molds ahead of actual production. Following strict NDAs and security procedures, RFID chips embedded in the prototypes sent out signals at 433 MHz, and communicated with dedicated receivers through a proprietary over-the-air protocol. If at any time a prototype left a designated area, an automatic alarm would sound. If the prototype weren’t returned to the designated area within 300 seconds, the machine would activate a self-destructive mechanism. Of course, if that were to occur, the factory would lose all international credibility and be blacklisted by clients and get no more business.

Throughout the Pearl River Delta, experienced and crafty buyers solicited secret prototypes at high prices. Getting their hands on such prototypes and reverse engineering them would bring these shanzhai electronics manufacturers tens of millions in profits. These days, getting rich unethically was easier than running an honest business.

I had lined up everything: a willing buyer, a price, a way to deliver the goods, and an escape route. But I still needed one more thing, a helper, someone to divert the attention of the crowd and lure away the security guards. I couldn’t think of anyone better for the job than Chen Gan, who was also from my hometown.

I understood Chen Gan. He was a shy young man. His wife had just given birth to their second daughter, and he was worried about how he would be able to afford his first daughter’s elementary school tuition. As a migrant, he could not have his household registration in Shenzhen and had to pay an extra fee for his daughter to go to the regular school. Without that money, he would have to send his daughter to a different school, a low-quality place set up for the children of migrant workers. He would often look at a picture of his little girl and say that he didn’t want her to repeat the path he had walked.

I made a deposit into his bank account: not too much, just enough to cover the extra fee for the school.

For the Chinese, what reason could be more compelling than “for my child”?

At the agreed-upon time, I heard the sound of loudspeakers outside my building. I knew that Chen Gan was already playing his role. In the middle of the yard, he had covered himself in gasoline and held a lighter in his hand. He declared that if the owner didn’t pay him enough severance, then he would light himself on fire. As security guards rushed anxiously into the yard with fire extinguishers, no one paid attention as I took the emergency stairs up to the roof, clutching the stolen prototype.

I was one of only five individuals in the factory authorized to touch the prototype. Taking advantage of opportunities afforded by my duties, I had tested the RFID trigger mechanism several times. The logs appeared to only record the latitude and longitude of the device, but not the altitude. This hole allowed me to devise an effective method of delivery to the buyer.

On the roof, the wind blew strong and cold, like the moment before the first drops of rain. Almost all the workers in the factory had congregated in the yard to watch how the self-immolation drama would end. If the owner gave in to Chen Gan’s demands, tomorrow, hundreds more would be waiting for him, doused in gasoline.

But I’d known the owner for three years. He was the sort who would encourage Chen Gan to go ahead and use the lighter, and then he would light a cigarette from the smoldering pile of ash.

A dragonfly-like remote-controlled helicopter approached from afar, humming, and landed on the roof. Following directions, I tied the prototype to the bottom of the helicopter. Unsteadily, it began to rise. I anxiously watched this fragile machine, on which the lives of two men, and perhaps of even more, depended.

The maximum communication distance between the RFID chip and the receiver was about sixty feet. The roof was already close to that limit.

The helicopter hung in the air as if waiting for more direction. I didn’t know how the buyers intended to deal with the self-destructive mechanism or if they were going to crack the communication protocol and substitute in a false signal to fool the device. That was all beyond what I could control.

For a moment, I thought the helicopter might never leave. But it did eventually leave the roof, and then disappeared into the grey sky.

Calmly, I rode the elevator down and squeezed myself into the gaping crowd. I made sure that Chen Gan saw me. He nodded almost imperceptibly, gave me his trademark shy smile, and dropped the lighter.

The security guards were on him immediately and wrestled him to the ground.

It was time to leave, I thought.

I got on the intercity bus to Dongguan. But before the bus had even started its engine, my phone began to vibrate insistently. Given what I knew about the owner, I never would have had much time. But I hadn’t expected to be caught so quickly.

Maybe it was the closed-circuit cameras, or maybe Chen Gan sold me out. But I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted him to be all right, to live long enough to see his daughter go to school.

I threw away my phone, got off the bus, and got on the bus going the opposite direction, inside the Fence, into Shenzhen. Instinctively, I knew that was the safer direction.

This was how I came to be in Shazui Village.

For the last half year, I’ve tried every which way to find out news about Chen Gan, but have heard nothing. I thought I was sufficiently indifferent, indifferent to the point that I could abandon my useless conscience. But often I would awaken in the middle of the night, breathless. In my dreams, Chen Gan, smiling his shy smile, would burn and turn into a pile of ashes. Sometimes I would even dream of his two daughters, crying, burning with him, also turning into ash. I knew that I could no longer hide from myself.

“Please, tell me if he’s all right.” My face is full of tears even though I don’t remember crying.

The wooden shaman mask glowers at me with its round eyeholes, orange light reflecting off the surface. The face is that of an angry goddess. Through the eyeholes I can see a strange glint in her eyes: blue sparkling flashes, very high in frequency.

Suddenly I understand. The mask is nothing more than a fucking well-made disguise for a pair of augmented reality glasses.

All this time, I’ve thought that Big Sister Shen is just a fraud pretending to be a medium and making her money by telling her clients what they want to hear. But she actually has real power. Guessing conservatively, her information privilege level must be set to at least level IIA or above, giving her the power to access an individual’s private file based on facial recognition.

But even so, without professional grade analysis filter software, how can she glean any useful information out of that torrent within such a short time? It would be like finding a needle lost in the sea. I can only credit her shaman genes, like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man being able to tell how many matches are in a box with a single glance.

The lights behind the eyeholes flash faster. My heart accelerates.

“He’s doing well.”

Hope rekindles in my heart.

“At least there, he no longer needs to worry about money.” Big Sister Shen points towards the sky. Then she adds, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

I suck in a deep breath. Even though I was expecting it, now that the fear has settled into reality, I still feel a deep helplessness. The whole world seems to have lost focus, and nothing can be relied on.

I know that in this world, there’s only one thing I can do to try to atone, even if it will provide only illusory comfort for my conscience.

“I want a working bank account number for Chen Gan’s family.”

Money was once my placebo. Now I no longer need it.

It’s dark by the time I leave Big Sister Shen’s room. I look around at Shazui, where lights are just being turned on behind windows. People are bustling every which way, filling the air with hope. But my heart is like a dead pool of water. I open my hand. Emptiness.

My subconscious has played another trick on me. I did indeed install the bug below the rim of the altar. I thought I was there for Chen Gan, but in the end I couldn’t forget about Snow Lotus.

I smile, a Shenzhen-style smile.

Snow Lotus doesn’t look well.

Her face is pale. She’s wearing large shades that cover her eyes and half of her face. Without speaking to anyone, she goes straight to Big Sister Shen’s room.

I put on my headset and turn on the receiver. After a static-filled moment, I hear the sound of the electronic prayer machine.

“He hit me again.” Snow Lotus’s voice is tearful. “He said that I haven’t been turning enough tricks. He needs more money.”

“This is your own choice.” Big Sister Shen’s voice is calm, as if she’s used to hearing this.

“I should go with that Hong Kong businessman.”

“But you don’t want to leave him.”

“I’ve been with him for ten years! Ten years! I was once a girl who didn’t know anything, and now … I’m nothing but a cheap whore!”

“You want another ten years just like these?”

“Big Sister … I’m pregnant.”

Big Sister Shen is quiet for a moment. “Is it his?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell him. You’re bearing his child. You cannot be a whore anymore.”

“He’ll tell me to abort it. This is not the first time. Big Sister, I’m getting old. I want to keep this child.”

“Then keep it.”

“He’ll kill me. He will.”

“He won’t.” Hearing your own voice from the air as well as the headset is a very odd sensation. I’m standing at the door to the room, watching a surprised Snow Lotus turning to look at me. Her face is as smooth as porcelain, except for her swollen, bruised right eye. My fists are squeezed so tight that the nails puncture my skin.

Here’s my plan. Even though it’s against my original aim, I have to admit that it’s the most likely to succeed.

Her husband is addicted to gambling. He’s also like every other gambler under the sun: superstitious. We need to allow him to make a connection between his child and good luck. For my child. My heart feels a tinge of bitterness.

Every morning, Snow Lotus will mumble a string of meaningless numbers as if talking in her sleep.

Her obsessive husband habitually seeks inspiration for his bets from anything: whether it’s the colors of the Teletubbies, or the phone number on advertising brochures. Then he’ll discover that she’s mumbling the winning lottery numbers from the day before.

Snow Lotus will tell him that she had a strange dream: she dreamt that a beautiful rainbow-colored cloud floated out of the east and drifted into her belly.

After seven days of this, we’ll come to the best part of the show.

My professional skills will finally come into use. I’ll arm Snow Lotus with wireless earbuds and augmented reality contact lenses. But the key will be a special black unitard. At first glance, it looks like regular long underwear, but specially designed fibers will deform and harden when electrically charged, resulting in precisely defined areas of tension and force, strong enough to stop a bullet.

With the addition of an array of electrodes and a communication chip, I can turn the unitard into a remote-controlled puppet suit, allowing me to pose the wearer into any position.

“Why do you want to help me?” Snow Lotus asks. She still thinks that men are only interested in her body.

“For karma.” I laugh. Big Sister Shen often says this to her customers. With the remote control, I direct the unitard-wearing Snow Lotus into various sexy poses.

“Without any clothes, I can pose even better.”

I lower my head, pretending not to hear. I continue to fiddle with the controls. Suddenly, like a warm cloud descending from the sky, two soft, pale arms are wrapped around my chest. Her voice is against my back, fills my chest, my heart, my lungs, flows up my spine into my eardrums. The voice seems to come from the bottom of my heart, and also seems to come from very far away.

“Thank you,” she says.

I want to say something, but in the end I say nothing.

Big Sister Shen and I are seeing what Snow Lotus is seeing.

After the dim stairs, we come to the familiar, pale yellow apartment. The man named East is sitting in front of the TV, watching horse races in Hong Kong, cursing all the while. Snow Lotus walks into the kitchen, preparing to make dinner.

The picture suddenly becomes still. Then a man’s two arms are wrapped around her breasts, like the way she had held me.

“Don’t,” she says.

The man does not answer. The picture suddenly shakes, and now her face is close to the faucet, her head lowered into the sink. The faucet is on, and the water rises, covering the vegetables and the fruits before draining into the overflow hole with tiny bubbles. Now the picture begins to shake rhythmically. Then comes the heavy breathing, sighing, and the occasional moaning.

I can turn off the video and audio feed, but I don’t. I observe all this almost grimly, experiencing a mixture of anger, jealousy, and disgust churning slowly in the pit of my stomach until they merge into a single feeling. I struggle to imagine what Snow Lotus is feeling, especially since she is making not a sound, not a single sound, while all this is happening under the gaze of two outsiders.

Finally, she finds some relief. She closes her eyes.

In the semidarkness, blurry patches of light penetrate her eyelids and tremble lightly. A hand is on my shoulder. It’s Big Sister Shen. She sees and knows all.

We wait until midnight. I can hear even, rhythmic snores coming from next to Snow Lotus. I lift her left hand, indicating that I’m ready. She clears her throat in response.

Now begins the fake séance.

I manipulate the puppet suit and lift her legs high up; then, I make her torso rigid and drop her legs, using them as a lever to lift her upper body off the bed. Then I let her body drop, bouncing her legs even higher. Switching thus between potential and kinetic energy, the rigid body of Snow Lotus soon behaves like a coin striking hard ground, quickly bouncing and making a frightening ruckus against the bed.

“What the fuck is the matter with you? It’s the middle of the night!” The man, rudely roused from slumber, feels for the bedside lamp and turns it on. Then, with another great noise, the man named East is bounced off the bed onto the floor.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” His curses are full of fear and shock.

As she continues to bounce, Snow Lotus’s body seems to no longer be restrained by gravity. She is like a puppet pulled up by invisible strings. Up, down, up again, she springs from the mattress. For a moment, she seems to be floating in air. The yellow ceiling comes closer, and then recedes, like some kind of breathing membrane. The edges of our vision show signs of barrel distortion as the membrane relaxes.

“That’s enough.” Big Sister Shen puts a stop to my madness. Our goal isn’t to scare this man away. I have to admit that controlling Snow Lotus’s body is addictive, as though it compensates for something subconsciously.

The amplitude of the bounces lessens. Snow Lotus’s body is once again quietly lying in bed. I relax the fibers in the puppet suit. Now she is spread out like a floppy corpse.

Just like we planned, she begins to cry. Babbling incoherently, she describes her nightmare and the strange news.

“It … it says that if we take care of it, it will repay us, like with those lottery numbers …”

“Who is it?”

“Your child.”

The man gets up from the floor. His face is wooden, as though he has been overwhelmed with too much information. He holds in his hands a fruit knife that he grabbed from somewhere. Approaching Snow Lotus, he caresses her belly, and then lifts his head to gaze into her face. Under the warm glow of the lamp, this seems like a happy scene from a soap opera. Next will come the promise to welcome new life, followed by the deep kiss of love.

The glimmer in his beautiful pupils suddenly turns cold, dark, like a pool of black water.

“The doctor told me that my sperm is no good.” Slowly, he rubs the flat of the knife across her belly. “Now tell me, whose bastard is this. Then, get rid of it.”

“It’s yours.” Snow Lotus’s breathing is now very rapid. Her voice trembles on the verge of tears.

“You think you’re the Blessed Virgin Mary? You fucking whore!” He slaps her, hard. The picture tilts. The dressing mirror shows two silhouettes. The composition is perfect in the dim light.

“It’s yours,” she repeats, her voice weak.

The knife is now right in front of her face, the thin, sharp edge glowing with a cold light. I can longer sit and watch. I lift Snow Lotus’s hands, grab his wrist and the knife handle, and turn the knife around, pointing it towards his own chest. He’s unprepared for her speed and strength, and doesn’t know how to react.

Snow Lotus’s entire body leans forward, pushing the tip of the knife towards her husband’s chest.

“Stop!” Big Sister Shen yells. But I’m not doing anything. It’s Snow Lotus. I don’t even have a chance to restrain her.

The knife, with all of Snow Lotus’s weight behind it, sinks into the man’s skin, through muscle and ribs, through his heart. Crimson liquid oozes out of the wound and spreads, like wild flowers. He looks up, gazing past Snow Lotus, as though he sees an existence even darker, further away, until the last light of life disappears from his pupils.

The picture stays still for a while. Stunned by the sudden turn of events, we don’t know what to do. Snow Lotus suddenly begins to run. Everything in front of us is shaking violently. She runs towards the balcony, towards that patch of open night sky.

This time I don’t miss. Before she leaps into nothingness, I restrain her. Snow Lotus stops like a frozen flower and falls heavily against the floor. Angrily, she screams, struggles, and finally howls in desperation.

Death is the best placebo.

In this instance, I agree with this view.

Sirens shatter the dawn in Shazui Village. Accompanied by the police, Big Sister Shen and I walk through the crowd and duck into the police car. Snow Lotus is sitting in the back of another car, handcuffed. From the side, her porcelain cheeks are lit alternately by flashes of blue and red. She does not lift her head.

Eyes lowered, the roar of the engine in her ears, her silhouette trembles, blurs, and then disappears in the distance.

I recall the first time I spoke with Snow Lotus, and I begin down the long road of regret.

The first time Suhela Mullick takes any notice of Amrita Karim she has just mixed up Varahamihira and Mahavira and Amrita has raised her hand and put her right. Suhela is cleverest in the class and almost certainly knows which is which but she maintains her superiority as though she will be shot if bested, which means that she answers in haste, which is a practise that inevitably leads to mistakes. Amrita has been observing this, for the two months they have been at school, but has not been observed. When the exam results are put up her name is usually second to Suhela's, but she suspects correctly that Suhela checks to see that her name is at the top and doesn't read further. Now from across the room Suhela's gaze is like the point of a dagger beneath her chin: look up. She fiercens her face and looks. Suhela's stare is the stare of a tiger which has had its kill interfered with. Amrita has never actually seen a living tiger but this is no impediment to her imagination.

The year is 1291 A.H. and Amrita, Suhela, and twenty-seven others are the top class in the new Girls' Intensive Preparatory #32, their local outpost of the national experiment. They are the same age as the new Queen and devoted to her with a love which they joke self-consciously amongst themselves is just this side of idolatry. They are conscious of their luck not to be a year older. At thirteen, the cutoff for new enrollment, the heaviest lot is theirs; within two years of what is the first formal education most of them have ever had they will be expected to have caught up to boys the same age who have been tutored all their lives. "But it is not difficult," remarked the Queen, when she visited their school in turn, "for anyone who really wishes to do a thing to do it better than one who does it simply because it is expected and convenient. So for you, who each have requested and work hard for your place, I am sure it will be easy." She speaks to them outdoors, on a clear morning, with a quiet wind alternately shirring and stilling the water of the rice flats. The building of the school hasn't yet lost its clean vegetal smell of sawn bamboo. The girls could not stand straighter.

Four months. When they are given written tests Suhela continues to finish first as though in a footrace, often bearing down so hard on the tin nib of her pen that it breaks. When she comes back to her seat she has a rather wicked and aggressively private smile. Amrita takes a long time over her equations, her essays, rarely handing them in until the time is called. The piece of slate on the wall at the front of the room that bears the name of the pupil with best marks alternates week to week, KARIM, MULLICK, MULLICK, KARIM. KARIM.

Behind the school, one evening, peering at the plot of land where they are studying genetics in plants, Amrita cannot tell at once whether the girl who is on weeding duty that day is the one she wants. All the girls in the Intensives wear the same clothes, which is meant to give them a feeling of solidarity, like men in armies, Amrita has heard: an intensely plain shalwar khameez set in a dusty dun-rose colour, intentionally drab, which they are disallowed from embroidering. The girls call these uniforms "our sacks," with varying degrees of affection. The plainness is meant to level them, like the proscription on jewelry, but what it largely does is to separate them into the categories of those who look beautiful, or expensive, no matter what they wear, and those who no matter what they wear do not. She comes round to the other side of the plot. Suhela has a streak of some sort of sauce down her front and she has neglected to put down a mat to kneel on before starting her weeding and her hair has slipped out of its braid, and she looks, muddy-kneed, like minor royalty. Amrita, whose clothes are spotless, feels like a squat servant, as, born ten or a hundred years back, she would have been. Well, they are all equal in the Girls' Intensive, and before Allah, she thinks to herself, not for the first or last time.

"I think we can be useful to each other," she says, her first words to Suhela.

Suhela tears a snippet of hypericum out of the earth.

"You don't know everything," says Amrita, "and I don't know everything."

"You certainly haven't told me anything yet that I don't know," says Suhela.

Amrita, standing, is briefly aware of how easy it would be to put her knee on Suhela's back and push her face into the mud. "You haven't given me the opportunity. Listen. I want one of the Khayyáms. So do you. There's no reason we can't both have one."

"Except probability," says Suhela, looking up at her, not discourteously now. Amrita sees what she means; there are to be one hundred of the Khayyám Scholarships, for the entire kingdom, when the first wave of Intensive Preparatory girls is seventeen, and graduates.

"We aren't going to throw dice for them," says Amrita, watching for, then watching, a fine flicker of interest, like light, cross Suhela's face. "Probability doesn't come into it. If we were to do a joint proposal—"

"Is that allowed?"

"It's not prohibited," says Amrita, pulling out one of the mats and shaking the insects off, and sitting down. "If we both worked on the same thing—and it was clever enough—I know you don't like me, that's useful, it means you'll be hard on me. But if we started now, before nearly everybody else, we would have a kind of body of evidence, that we had been interested, that we were good at cooperating, as scientists must. And it gives us each someone to check the other's work." The new electric lights have come on overhead, extravagantly early. She had only meant to sit but her hands were restless; to her own irritation she finds she is helping Suhela weed the plot.

"There must be many girls thinking that two brains are twice as clever."

"All the more reason. I don't know that they're wrong."

"I don't think," says Suhela, "that this would be useful, I don't think you have the same sort of plans as I do, I don't think it would work."

They realise, at the same moment, that they are reaching for the same last tall stalk, and Amrita in a flash seizes it from under the slower hand, snaps it, rises and tosses it into Suhela's lap.

"How would you know?" she says, and walks away.

1313, early autumn. The flood barriers along the Padma River are holding up well. Amrita takes a few days out to visit the main gate, anonymously, without notice. It has been an odd irony that neither she nor Suhela was involved in their construction, when their experiments and models for storm-surge gates earned them one of the six double Khayyáms ever awarded: but they have both been very busy, in the years that followed.

It is a satisfaction to look back to the days when there were only two women's universities in all the country, and those two disorganised and small, though certainly determined. Amrita, travelling light, leans with closed eyes on the bulwark of the monotram as it slows and the press of the air against her face changes from the steady rush to a fickle, sari-catching wind. When she came to Nusaybah University she had had little more than she could carry over her shoulder, hardly more than she carries now. The tower had not even been built then: for the first two years they had had to use the laboratories of a men's university, at night. The monotram has finally drawn level with the platform, eighteen guz above the ground. This train would not exist or function without Nusaybah or the neighboring Razia University, though the Ministry of Transportation will not acknowledge the debt.

She stands on the bank at Khumarkali in the fitful rain, admires the tremendous span and strength of the thing, realises it is beyond her immediate comprehension, feels briefly ridiculous, and goes home. It was not her project at all, though her closest friend, a hydraulics engineer named Chaitali who can intermittently be coaxed to teach at Nusaybah, was one of its main designers, and it has nothing in it that she could not understand if she put her mind to it. But she has been working at something else, for nearly ten years, and has had no attention to spare outside of it.

When she returns to the capital she finds that in her absence the coolant systems in the engines of the balloon have been repaired, and that they are finally to the stage of testing the optimal length for the flexible portion of the pipes, and that in the course of two nights away her mailbasket has accumulated seventeen envelopes, thirteen stamped VERY URGENT. President of the University is meant to be a ceremonial position. It is not. She understands now why Suhela was appointed; no one would dare send her frivolous letters, out of fear of being made to eat them.

"Can you imagine Suhela as an administrator?" she asks Chaitali, who has come by her rooms that evening to find her still sorting through the intra-university mail.

"Straight out of the Arthashastra," says Chaitali, who knew her in undergrad at Razia.

"What do you bet that she has spies?"

"Maybe I am one of them," says Chaitali, raising her eyebrows.

"The fraudulent disciple! With a knife at your ankle. No, it doesn't bear thinking of. But—no, really," says Amrita, scanning a paper in disbelief, "this is marked VERY URGENT, and it is to tell me that there's a leak in the roof of Choudhury's office. I wish people would use the system properly."

"That used to be my office," says Chaitali. "It's leaked for six years. I can assure you it would only become urgent if she were tied up in a vat under it, for another six or seven years."

Amrita is still laughing about this when she opens the last of the notes—which bears no stamp—glances at it, and puts it in a drawer, without comment. She has by now gotten several covert letters, an earlier one of which claimed to be from the Prime Minister himself, about building gun-ports into the balloon, and turning it over to the army. She had sent a brief, oblique inquiry to the Queen's council, at that one, and received a curt and careful reply instructing her to continue the work and let the military mind its own affairs. There is constant rumor about the invasion of Andhra Pradesh by its former trading partner, constant murmur and worry, constant unexplained relocations of troops. She had had to wait through the departure of three trains to return, as the first two had been full of soldiers. Amrita minds her own affairs, but she is less and less at ease.

Robert Jennings is relieved, coming over the hill, to see that his intuition was correct, and that the other four hundred of his men are indeed better put to use back towards Balasore. He had thought that most of the native resistance must have been put down by now, there were boys with sticks and stones in the last battle, it almost gave one pause: but you can never tell with these devils, you think you've got them all and then thousands more pour out of some crack in the earth. This, though, is clearly mop-up, it doesn't even look like there will be combat: there's only this fan-shape of women—almost all of them young, solemn; offerings, perhaps—and some queer tall machines, not, he agrees with his men in low voices, machines of war. Tribute, he guesses; they know the game's up. After some conferring he begins to move in to accept it, very ceremoniously, the way they like. There is a beautiful, dusky woman at the front of the fan-shape, smiling at him, beckoning. Her lips move, her eyes half-close. He canters closer, smiling back, very near, to survey what he has won, and from the nearest machine a bolt of blue-white light leaps for his eyes and devours them in a hiss, blazes through his oily brain and breaks his skull, and rises, lingering, elegant, into the sky, in a pillar of fire.

All of the university students have been warned not to look while this thing happens; but most of them had gone on looking as the man approached, unable to glance away. The majority of the people on the plain are arc-blind for nearly two minutes. There is total confusion on the invading side, exponentially more so for the terror of their horses; the commander's horse, its back badly burned, has thrown off his body and galloped away, and the rest are trying to follow. Several of the foreigners' guns go off. There are shouts in their pinched guttural language, but also a woman's scream. Amrita, who had early put the heels of her hands against her eyes and pressed—victory or death but let it be one of those and let it be quick—opens her eyes at the scream, which seemed very near her, and which she finds to have come from one of her own students, Nilufer, with a bullet in her arm, which has broken the bone and torn an artery. "If you can see," she shouts, "come to me!," and at her familiar voice, several other students struggle towards her, and help her maneuver Nilufer onto one of the electric carts that carried the machines to the field. Around them stray invaders are blundering blindly into their line, trying to flee, and for these they are ready. Even flash-struck or squinting it's not difficult to feel for a moustache and get the cord round the throat. This is not battle as it is in poems, as some of these girls in mourning imagined it would be, not vengeful, not noble, only efficient, which will have to suffice. In the official record of this event there will be no mention of it. It is like catching a rat in the storeroom, you do not need to say what happens next.

Amrita, occupied during this time with stabilising Nilufer, realises abruptly that it is quiet, and that someone is tugging at her shoulder and indicating: down the field Suhela is still standing beside her generator, which she ought to have the sense not to be anywhere near. Her students are ringed round her at a distance, hesitating. Amrita has no idea what she is supposed to do about this, but she crosses the field to find out, stepping hard on the face of a dead foreigner in honour of her father, almost as an afterthought.

There is blood on Suhela's teeth and for an instant Amrita thinks she has been shot. Almost at once she sees that it is only that her bitten lips have cracked—many of their faces are a little scorched in the backlash heat—but in that instant her heart is struck, like a hanging bell. If you were dead I would be: If you were dead I would: she is unable to complete this, as the ringing fades. Suhela is a constant, like the acceleration of gravity or the speed of light. It is not possible to take her out.

At close range she can be seen to be shaking, a hard tight focused trembling, not confined to the hands. She looks close to resonant frequency. Amrita wants to, somehow, by touching her with one finger perhaps, strike her unconscious, into some kind of healing sleep. If the engine is approaching critical speed you shut it off. She is staring at the burnt exposed bone of the dead invader, still steaming or smoking, into the eyesocket of his charred face.

"Don't look at that," says Amrita, reflexively, then, "Can you see? Do you know what you're looking at?"

"I should have killed them," says Suhela. If it were not so quiet now Amrita would not be able to hear her. She can hear all about them the kingfishers calling in the early evening, like falling stars. Nilufer's blood is drying on her hands. "I should have killed all of them. I should have been making guns, artillery, all this time, I should have taken the offer from the army. I should have been ready. What a damned waste to damage the generator like that and only kill a few of them. Oh, what an idiot I am, they are going to go back to their general, and they are going to come back, millions of them, I should have—"

"If they come back," says Amrita, "you can kill them then. Don't look at that. If you are looking. Are you? Can you? Tell me you can see. How many—"

"Seven," says Suhela, "do you think I'm an idiot, I covered my eyes."

"Good," says Amrita, reassured that she has restored Suhela to asperity. "Good, come on, come with me. We need to speak to the Queen."

A few years after the institution of mardana, there begins to show up in editorials, in pamphlets, in common conversation, the idea that for women to go to bed with each other is the most exquisite expression of friendship, is finer and cleaner than intercourse with men, does not constitute adultery as it cannot result in impregnation, and so on. Amrita imagines cynically and correctly that in some places where men are dominant the same must be said of the union of males, but when Chaitali asks her she doesn't say no, although Chaitali has to proposition her twice, Amrita having missed it initially. Amrita feels, at times, like a ceramic marble rolling about among a tableful of magnets.

She did not expect to like it, but she likes the scent of spikenard in Chaitali's hair, and she likes the nails of Chaitali's warm hands scratching in a gentle intent way along her back, and she likes the quiet after, when she feels as though she has dissolved or diffused, and does not know where her body lies. In the morning she has condensed back into her own self again, and doesn't like the feeling of another person in the bed, whom one is obliged to keep still beside so as not to wake up: but on the balance, she won't say no, when Chaitali asks. It does not occur to her to be jealous of the other partners she knows her friend to have, as she wishes her joy without wishing necessarily to be obliged to provide it, and jealousy is anyway a vice for men.

She cannot approve, however, of the intrigues which form in her own university, between faculty and students especially. It destroys objectivity, it is like wine, which nothing will convince her is useful or necessary, despite the interpretation of the surah currently in vogue which forbids it only to the hot-headed sex. Accordingly she is irritated with herself when she finds that she must put in a conscious effort to treat one of her students the same as the others, a chemist by the name of Barnali. It is so easy to confuse form with function, and it is a disservice to Barnali, whose interest in the composition of the sky would already merit close attention. But she has the kind of beauty that demands analogy, beauty that must, Amrita thinks, be terribly inconvenient. Beauty that distracts. Amrita herself should not like to be compared to a flower or a fruit, an animal or a bird, and she turns this problem over sometimes in her mind, what Barnali's beauty is like: if she solves it, she can forget it, and go on to something else. This is how her mind works: turn the thing over, turn it over, pry, catch at its seam, pry, crack it apart, work the kernel out and pick up the next. After she decides that Barnali's beauty is like an electric light in glass—the slenderness of the brightening and dimming filament, the clarity and fineness of its casing, the perfected minimalism—she ceases to be distracted, or attracted. Once categorised, the thing is safe.

She has quite forgotten the well-concealed nervousness she used to have around Barnali when three years later she invites her to supper, part congratulations on completion of her graduate degree, part advisory meeting. She would like Barnali to continue her work at Nusaybah, though she has been careful not to say so, to see what Barnali herself will propose. She and the board are considering the construction of machines that can go much further up into the atmosphere than human beings, to gather data while aloft. The expense of this—even for Nusaybah, which runs on the national treasury, but which also runs entirely on scholarships—is prohibitive enough that Amrita hasn't made up her mind as to whether or not to begin this program, and the number of researchers she will have who will actually use it is a deciding factor. She knows that Razia University has approached Barnali as well, but not what they have offered her.

It is winter, and the air in the evenings is cool. Amrita puts on her table one of the new electric braziers, with its caged and glowing coils, which keeps gathering strength for a sententious hum and then settling down again, ticking. Barnali arrives a few moments early, and even Amrita notices that she has composed herself as an aesthetic object, which she does not usually bother to do: there is a touch of surma traced round her eyes, and her glossy black hair loose on her shoulders. Standing in the slant of the sunset with a nervous colour in her cheeks she is like warmth given human shape: copper, garnet, coal and ember, palash-flower, rosy gold. Amrita notices, as it is not possible not to, but does not assume that this is directed at herself personally. It is not for hours, after the meal, when they are sitting drinking tea in the room that faces out from the tower and she has begun to ask increasingly precise questions about research objectives that, as though to silence her, Barnali leans in and kisses her, the heat of the tea held on her lips.

Amrita, her mouth unmoving below this kiss, draws back, disappointed to be used in this fashion, to be thought susceptible, which she now remembers she almost was. But she is a good teacher, and tries to temper this, as she speaks, though this is like the dreams she has where she is supposed to give a speech to a crowd and has forgotten about what.

"Please don't. That's not—how one does things. Not how—anything gets done. At least with me. And you don't need to, I suppose it must be a temptation, when one has—that coin to spend, but you—it's a kind of counterfeit—you simply don't need to, it's a waste, it's—limited, it doesn't last. While your mind, which is quite enough, will."

End with praise, when one reprimands, thinks Amrita, very conscious of her mouth.

Barnali has looked down, through this, and looks up now in cold taut distress (Amrita's mind touches on the trapped vacuum in the glass bulb) to say, "You think that's what it was, you think this is about the sub-orbitals, you think I would try to—buy you—like that, you think that is what I want. Horrible. I don't—that wasn't it, but I don't expect you to believe it." The tendons in the backs of her hands stand out pale as bone.

"What was it, then?" says Amrita, genuinely puzzled, not meaning to be cruel, though she can see at once that this was.

"You," says Barnali, quiet in the quiet room. "You. That's all. For years. Your face, in that light. All the things you know. Which I have—ruined my relation to. But that was all."

Amrita does not think of herself as beautiful, and she is not, when looking, without interest, at a mirror: a short stocky woman, beak-nosed, thin-lipped, pockmarked along the jaw. She has looked more or less like this since she was seven, thirty-five years ago, and for almost as long has not minded, as she has always known with a private impatience, mostly haughty, a little wistful, that beauty is not what she is for. But she is unaware, never having seen it from the outside, of her face when she is talking about anticipating and redirecting cyclones, about tides and rivers in the sky, about the recent discovery that stars form in the same way that raindrops do. When she paces about before her small class thinking aloud she is lit up with love for knowledge, Barnali has thought, like a lamp. Like the palm-oil lamps on pillars which used to warn ships of shore, she thinks now, conscious that this is a bit overdone, but unable not to think it. The light I ought to have steered by, never tried to come near.

"Oh," says Amrita, startled, and, "Oh, my dear, I am sorry." And then, "You haven't ruined anything, it's all right, sit down."

"I would rather not," says Barnali, in the doorway, very flushed and bright-eyed, very fixedly steady, very beautiful, "I will write up my complete proposal, you'll have it within the week," and, very steady, very quickly, goes out.

Amrita approves the proposal, restraining herself from adding another apology in her note. Out of sheer embarrassment, Barnali accepts the fellowship at Razia, which is probably not coincidentally beginning a sub-orbitals program, and Amrita does not see her again. For one reason and another it will be close to six years before Nusaybah formally begins its own research in astrodynamics, and although they both will eventually share the same launch facility with two other universities up in the Chattagram Hills, Razia will always be considered the more advanced on the subject; Amrita, who is generally immune to politics, is always a little annoyed by this.

She sends congratulations many times over the years, as Barnali's discoveries are published, but never receives any reply.

As a woman of importance in Naaridesh reaches her mid-thirties she begins to receive more, and more serious, offers of husbands than ever before, with endless sly allusions to the classical perfection of the union of a woman of forty with a man of twenty-five. This marriage market begins in earnest in 1316, when the boys who were just barely too young for the Battle of Kaliganj are just barely old enough to be married; their relatives, of course, say that they are all beautiful, docile, virginal, and virile, ready to begin raising long lines of daughters in well-swept homes. Portraits are printed up and chaperoned meetings are arranged with the country's most eminent women, including Amrita, who is surprised, then amused, then frankly alarmed, to find that she is considered an excellent match. She is not looking to be matched, with a young man or an old one. She likes her insulated, isolated life, her luxurious set of rooms at the top of Nusaybah. She doesn't need a husband to order her household, as she is tidy by nature and prefers taking meals in restaurants or from street vendors, and considering the scarcity of males it is moreover considered bad form to take a husband when one has no intention of children, which she does not. Sometimes her students, when they have known her for years, venture the informality of calling her Ammu, and sometimes, archly but affectionately, when she nags or chastises them, they call her Amma. It is a joke, and not a joke. She does think of the best ones as her heirs, though she would not admit it.

After turning down seven or eight offers and nearly losing her temper with one ruthless old matchmaker who keeps trying to show her indecent collodions, she publicly declares herself out of the running. She is surprised to hear, a year or so later, that Suhela has married, and later, although it is only logical, still more surprised to hear that she is pregnant. The currents of gossip that vibrate between the two universities, faster than radar, courier, acoustic telegraph, or light, let her know when Suhela has gone into labour, a thought that makes Amrita uneasy; the Queen's own midwife and surgeon have been sent to attend her, and it is very rare for women to die in childbirth these days; but it is a process which is a permanent mystery to her, which no amount of reading can change.

She hears, the next morning, that it was a quick birth, and both mother and infant are safe and well and resting, and she is very glad: but she hears, with a pang of sympathetic disappointment, that the baby was only a boy.

She doesn't see the mother or the child for half a year, until they attend the same infrastructure-planning meeting, on where to put the next electrical station. Suhela has the baby in a sling, sleeping against her chest, which is not unusual, except that sons are usually left to be raised by the men of the house. Most women bring their daughters to work until they are too large to be carried about, and many continue to do so until the daughters are old enough to go to school; every building has a section set apart for these daughters, where they can be left with a minder if they are driving a mother mad with their crying or if she needs to do something like operate on a patient.

During the midday break in the conference Amrita walks over to where Suhela is sitting bent over some papers, eating fried fish with one hand and making notes with the other. The baby is now in a basket on the table, covered loosely with fine shawls, murmuring to itself and turning its plump hands back and forth in the air as though to admire the change in colour from back to front. Amrita stares at it, wishing she could surreptitiously lift the shawls and napkin. The baby looks back, black-eyed, alert, glimmering here and there with points of crystal-pure baby saliva, probably beautiful. Amrita is not confident in her ability to tell one baby from the next. She is certain she heard that Suhela had a son. "Yes, I did," says Suhela, not looking up.

Amrita, who hasn't said a word, bites her tongue.

"Have a son. He's a son. Quite true."

Amrita opens her mouth, closes it, and says, not insincerely, "Congratulations." She wonders whether Suhela will have more children, as women with nothing but sons usually do.

"No," says Suhela.

"No?" says Amrita, wondering whether congratulations had been a mistake.

"I'm not going to try again," says Suhela, sharply. "I wanted a child and I have got one. He may be a son, but he is Suhela Mullick's son. I expect he will be good for something," and, noticing or assuming that Amrita is staring, says "It's been six months. I've learnt this conversation."

"Not from me," says Amrita. "Congratulations, on your child." She turns away, blinking. Eventually, she thinks, one of them will stop having the last word, when they are dead.

There are in the year 1330 a quarter of a million girls of seventeen in Naaridesh, and twenty-one universities. The two in the capital—referred to by grandiose national chroniclers as the Twin Lights, which gets on both their nerves—are the oldest and best, for everything, especially for science. Each receives nearly fifty thousand undergraduate admissions applications every year, and each accepts, of these, exactly one thousand. This is an acceptance rate of two to three percent. "It should not surprise you," goes a line in Razia's pamphlet that Amrita suspects Suhela of having written herself, "if you are not admitted."

In the year 1330, a very clever mathematics student from a riverside town, with good chances, is surprised, or was. She has exempted herself permanently from having to be anything in the present tense. She has hanged herself, from a tree, in the middle of the night, the night she received the two rejections. She put her dupatta over her entire head, inside the noose, so that no one should see her strangled face: and she left a note, of awful seventeen-year-old clarity.

Amrita herself looks all night through the administrative office but cannot find the girl's application, learning in the morning that like all of the rejections it has already been destroyed.

This is, almost certainly, not the first time this has happened, but it is the first time anyone has left a note about it, or the first time such a note has got into the news. There is a call for the presidents of the universities to have a conference with the press, give speeches, do something. On the appointed date Amrita, who feels very old, sits backstage for nearly three hours before it is time to go out into the small audience hall. She thinks she ought to speak to Suhela—compare notes—but Suhela isn't there and can't be reached. She still hasn't arrived when Amrita, who as a result spends most of her speech wondering whether she will turn up, goes onstage. Amrita speaks passably, even movingly, she thinks, about the Battle of Kaliganj, about never despairing, about how persevering with calm courage must be the national characteristic of Naaridesh. After she answers the few short, absurd questions—certainly one can reapply but the odds remain the same; yes, more than half of her graduate students come from other schools—she goes to sit in the front with the principals of the other universities, none of whom will meet her eye, and observes with relief that the presenter is beginning to announce Suhela Mullick, President of Razia University.

Suhela's speech is shorter and given rather fast, difficult to transcribe, thinks Amrita, who had thoughtfully put in pauses. It is not general, but painfully specific. She does, at least, stop short of outright disrespect towards the dead girl, to whom she is clearly speaking as though she were alive, and could be bullied out of dying. Towards the end she appears to broaden her audience, but she is not kinder for addressing the living.

"If there's anything you ought to learn from this it is that that is not how a scientist behaves. You must be prepared for your work not to turn out, and you can't mix up your work with your own self, you must keep them separate. You must know that most of what you do will be a failure on its first try. You must understand that you're not going to get what you want, you're not going to be able to help, you won't accomplish anything that can be put at once into practical use, most of the time. If you don't understand this you are no good to us."

It is not the speech that anyone was expecting. It is not, actually, a speech that the media can use. The reporters stare at each other and begin clamoring for interview questions, for an explanation, for anything. One shouts the question of what Suhela Begum, national hero, can know about failure. A fair question, thinks Amrita, trying to find her; she had stopped and left the stage before anyone realised she had finished speaking. She leaves the reporters to assemble something heartening out of their transcripts and slips backstage, where Suhela has already gathered her things and is striding towards one of the small unofficial exits.

"You are heartless," says Amrita, not harshly, almost experimentally, as she passes.

"I am right," snaps Suhela, hollow-eyed, not slowing.

1335. Three male students are accepted to Naaridesh universities, two privately tutored sons of high-ranking officials at small colleges along the coast, and Salim Mullick, pre-med, at Nusaybah. There are protests on the streets of the capital; Amrita hears that there is a faculty strike at one of the other universities, but it doesn't last. It is the young women, the ones who have lived under Queen Rokheya's reign all their lives, whose support for the decision carries it.

The politicians' children, unsurprisingly, got in through deceit and spectacle: they had submitted their applications under female names, and one of them had gone to an interview in a sari. Salim had sent in his application plainly, as though it were quite natural. They would have recognised him, anyway, as over the years most of the professors in the capital have watched him grow up, flitting soft-footed behind his mother through the halls of Razia, or beside her at conferences, never speaking until spoken to. Amrita knows him by sight: slight and sharp-elbowed, immaculately serious, his kurta and shalwar nothing a woman might not wear. There is a family resemblance which, with the application of a dose of arrogance to his face, would become immediately apparent.

There is, not unreasonably, some murmuring that this is nepotism, which it is, and is not. If he were a girl his qualifications would not be in question; he has apparently been doing microbiological research from the age of nine. The prevailing theory at Nusaybah is that one of these days he is going to forget himself and yawn, and they will glimpse in his gullet a blinking light from his circuit board. It cannot be easy to be Suhela's child.

Suhela herself came to consult with Amrita before he sent in his application, to ask her permission, which Amrita had not expected. She had to think it over for a long time, but at last thought: what is one for, when one has a mind, but to use it? What good would it do anyone, not to let him.

"He knows that if he were to say the least thing to a girl, anything that could be construed as improper, that would be the end of it? Or if he began some sort of fight. As men do. And I think he would have to take care to keep his face clean-shaven, so as not to present a distraction. And someone must escort him to classes, and see him back every day, he couldn't possibly live here."

"Of course," says Suhela, audibly refraining from snapping, leaning back in the creaking chair in Amrita's office. "Yes, of course he knows." The shadow of a twelve-pointed star from the window screen sharpens and blurs on her cheek, clouds passing over the sun. There is a sudden bright scattering of voices from the north garden, floors below, and laughter. She is silent a long while.

"Do you think this is—a thing that can be done?" she says, surprising Amrita again. "Do you think it can hold?"

"I think we can try," says Amrita, not certain.

Amrita spends most of the year 1343 far from home, in the newly independent Republic of Masqat. Seven university teams of faculty and students have come to learn by doing, in assisting this fledgling country in becoming fully self-sufficient, and innumerable civil servants. The Queen herself visited through Muharram, to the extreme discomfiture of her guards—the Republic is under constant threat from the Trucial States and the Ingrej—but has now safely returned. All has gone as well as it can, under the embargo, through the submarine scare, through the explosion in the copper mine; there is not a single life lost, conditions are seen to improve, it is all real and useful work, as one prays to be given: but by Shawwal, Amrita is exhausted. She is used to heat, but not heat of this intensity, and it is pitilessly dry. She has been reading and writing Arabic since she could read and write, but the sound of the language is different here, and she cannot seem to pick up the correct accent, so that she must repeat everything three or four times and sometimes, at a loss, write it down. She wants her own familiar apartments in the Nusaybah tower, she wants to lie on a blanket under the lichu tree in Chaitali's garden, she wants to go back to her research on thermal wind, she is too old for this, she thinks crossly, knowing full well that she is not.

Eventually it is the day before departure, three months later than nearly everyone else. The two teams from Razia and Nusaybah have been overseeing the construction of the vacuum towers that use sun-heat and salt to pull water from the air, a curious problem to consider for women from a land with more water than they often want. The collection of water from the air is, of course, Amrita's specialty, or her most famous one, and the application of sun-heat is Suhela's, and so they have been here in an official, almost ostentatious capacity, a public relations venture as much as anything: but it was Suhela who figured out what had been causing the trouble with the vacuum chamber, and Amrita who had found that the concentration of brine could be adjusted to a more efficient level, so they are spared from feeling ornamental, a thing they both dread. After several hitches, the first tower is operational, and they have been remaining merely in case of any problems, for a precautionary week.

The week is up, and in any case the Masqati engineers know what they are doing, and there is a general cheerful, worn out sort of celebratory mood among the university delegations. Amrita, never having left her own country, had not known before this how travellers become informal, far from home. In the tall conference room at the top of the National Parliament they have been doing more or less nothing all day, like some pack of men: ten cups of dried-lemon tea drunk for every line they write down. Finally, in the late afternoon, the meeting, which has ostensibly been about the number of meteorites that the Republic will allow to be taken back to Naaridesh for study, is dismissed, and the women go out to look around the city one last time, and to pack up for the aerostat journey on the morrow.

Amrita, who spent most of the meeting lost in thought, has remained in a reverie as the room empties, and when she looks up she thinks at first she is alone. By this hour, the room is lit wholly by reflected light, including the bright shimmer flung up from the flat sheet of water in the grand fountain before the Parliament—a display of wealth that tiles of gold could not equal, in this parched land—which shifts and glitters, and gives the chamber the diffused, unsteady light of some vision or dream. So when she glances up at last, and sees Suhela still seated at the far end of the table, near the southern row of high open windows, it is like seeing her in a vision, or for some first, fated time. Amrita knows the face, but has to study it, to be sure.

She is sitting with her arm along the back of her chair, looking out over the city, with her face turned to the breeze which draws near and turns away, draws near and turns away. The colour of her eyes has leached, or bleached, with age, turning tawny, like the eyes of a kal pencha. There are white hairs in her black brows, as in Amrita's own. She has a look on her face that Amrita can't initially read, as she has not seen this before, either: an absence of impatience, is the best she knows how to define it. It is not a smile, but it is near to. It is the sort of look one has when content and alone, and Amrita for a moment thinks she is intruding, but she realises she has been in Suhela's line of sight, all the while. And so when she has gotten up, mildly stiffly, and is walking out, in no hurry, she pauses; and like some action in a vision or dream, for the first time, reaches out and strokes her hand along Suhela's face.

Suhela catches her hand, quick as electricity, and grips, and then gentles, and holds: and the speckled skin over her cheekbone, hot and thin, presses against Amrita's fingers, and her eyes close. Amrita stands with the casing of the finest mind of Naaridesh resting in her hand, like a reactor in an eggshell. She has wanted to do this for perhaps fifty-one years. She could not have, before now, done this, at any time in the last fifty-one years.

When, at the end of a long moment, she draws her hand out of Suhela's, she steps forward and bends to where her fingertips had rested, and presses her lips lightly, lightly to that same place, near the calm closed eye. She goes out of the room without a sound, but she lets the soft leather sole of her shoe tap on the top stair, and the steps after that, as a sort of courtesy. There are wide warm bars of amber light on the stairs, cool bars of blue. When she walks out into the blazing sun with her face turned up she hardly minds it, she could stay another month, a year, if there were a need. She was not this lighthearted as a girl, with all her life's work before her. It is not the last word.

My father wanted to write his memoirs but he didn’t have enough confidence in his English to pull it off on his own. He had come to this country in 1974; after thirty-five years he still had trouble with his pronouns and verb tenses. Nevertheless, he did not want to produce such a document in Polish. America is where I grew up, where my father met his second wife (finally, a soul mate), where my half-brother and sister were born. Feeling the need to record his life on paper quickly, he decided that I would become his amanuensis. The choice was obvious, as my father had agreed to subsidize my college education, even though I insisted on studying Comparative Literature over the more practical Engineering. He is the sort of man who likes to see a return on his investment.

We met over three consecutive weekends in July at a modest resort in the Catskills, my father dictating in Polish while I translated into English.

Before I tell you the story he told me about his encounter with Count Stanislas August Poniatowski, the last King of Poland, I need to explain a thing or two about my father. For the past three decades he had been working for the same engineering firm in Manhattan until it was sold to a large multinational corporation. Not long after the merger, my father was deemed redundant. He found himself suddenly at home, alone (his wife worked, the kids were already out of the nest), with nothing to fill the next seven years before he reached retirement age, at which time he could allow himself to behave like a retiree.

My father repainted the apartment a calming shade of blue: the color of the sky the day he met his met his second wife while taking a stroll after Mass one September afternoon. A complete stranger to popular culture, he decided to educate himself by going to the movies every weekday afternoon, when the tickets were half price. He read three newspapers each day, cover-to-cover. For a man who had been earning his living since he was sixteen, none of these activities could make him feel like a productive human being. He felt spellbound, worthless, miserable. Unbeknownst to his family, or even to himself, he began to search for a Great Deed.

One thing my father did enjoy was taking his lunch al fresco, a pleasure he hadn’t had time for since childhood, when he and his brothers would take chunks of bread and cheese into the forest behind their grandfather’s country house and pretend that they were woodland creatures. So it was that on a crisp, russet-hued fall day my father crossed Cabrini Boulevard heading toward Ft. Tryon Park, brown bag in hand, his head full of childhood memories, and was run down by a gunmetal gray Hummer H3.

The driver, a young German with a blond crew cut, could not have been more apologetic. He simply hadn’t seen my father in his brown wool suit, camouflaged so perfectly among the dying autumn leaves of the tree-lined street. The unfortunate driver was articulate in his mortification over the accident, promising to pay for all medical expenses; all my father could hear was the German accent. And all he could think about, as he was strapped into a gurney and hoisted into the ambulance, was the day the Panzers rolled into Warsaw.

In the hospital where he stayed for two weeks while his bones knit, my father’s already somber mood descended into melancholy retrospection. Why had he survived the accident? Was it a coincidence that the driver was German? Was it some sort of sign? Although he had worked hard his entire life, was his real work about to begin?He made a mental inventory of his accomplishments: immigrating to a new country: check. Successfully raising not one, but two, families: check (though if he were entirely honest with himself, one more successfully than the other). Building a career in his profession (as opposed to driving a cab, or running a candy store, like many other immigrants must do to survive): check. Was this enough to constitute a successful life? Surely there were other things he could have done, could still do, now that he had been spared, once again. Every night before he fell asleep he tried to work on a list of future accomplishments, but he could never get beyond item # 1.

The youngest of five brothers, my father was just three years old when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, but he remembered the day his family hid in the basement of their apartment building with great clarity. Polish fighters had managed to keep the Germans out of Warsaw for eleven days of a siege before they ran out of supplies. Panzers broke through fortifications and rolled down the streets while German soldiers swarmed the city, going door-to-door, looking for Polish soldiers hiding among the civilian population.

My father’s oldest brother was at the age when little boys fall in love with war. In the family’s rush to get downstairs, no one noticed that he had brought his favorite hat into the basement, the one that superficially resembled the square czapka with the scarlet band of the Zandarmeria, the Polish Military Police. When the gun shots, the screams, and the smoke had cleared the Germans discovered that their fugitive Polish soldier was just a ten-year-old boy.

Out of the hospital and recuperating in his tranquil blue apartment, my father took his pain pills and reviewed what he knew about the sequence of events from the German invasion of September 1, 1939, to the partition of Poland, just one month later, by Germany and the Soviet Union. He confirmed that nothing could have been done in those thirty-odd days to prevent his brother’s death. Really and truly the only way to undo that past event was to prevent World War II, the first and only item on his To-Do list. And if the turning point of the war did not exist in Warsaw in 1939, he would have to look for it elsewhere.

My father is an engineer, not a historian. He spent six months at the Tennessee Valley Authority Reactor Facility, reworking the electrical grid to harvest the nuclear energy more efficiently. He can track the path of an electrical current through conductors and resistors. He understands the laws of cause and effect. He was convinced that there was a specific moment, a prima mobile in the timeline of Polish history that was responsible for the sequence of events that occurred in the basement of his childhood apartment building. He started reading history books. It was not long before he found what he was looking for.

Between 1764 and 1795, Stanislas August Poniatowski was King of the Most Serene Republic of the Two Peoples, also known as the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. The official motto of his kingdom: Si Deus Nobiscum quis contra nos? (If God is with us, then who is against us?). Sadly, God could not protect Poland from its aggressive neighbors, Prussia, Austria, and Russia. As it turns out, King Poniatowski was little more than a puppet, having been forced onto the throne, against the wishes of the Polish nobility, by his former lover, Catherine the Great of Russia, who then virtually controlled the country. The one and only independent (one might say, rebellious) act of his reign was the brilliant speech he made upon the adoption of the new Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791, a constitution written and ratified without the approval of King Poniatowski’s puppeteers. What happened next was the prima mobile: my father was sincerely convinced that if he could make Poniatowski retrace his steps of the night of May 3, 1791, he could change the course of Polish history, and thereby change the history of Europe, and thereby bring his brother back from the dead. How to make a King take council from a humble engineer?

I had no idea what was going on inside my father’s head when finally I convinced him to spend a few days with me and my husband in sunny Los Angeles. I remembered from growing up in New York how bad it got by February, when the charming snowdrifts left over from the Christmas holidays turned into sooty hills and valleys dotted with frozen dog shit, extremely treacherous terrain for a fifty-nine-year-old man on crutches.

As soon as I saw my father at the airport I could tell that something was troubling him besides the weather and his leg. It was the lack of purpose that got him down, I rationalized, a temporary depression brought on by the early retirement. Had I known that he was revising mental blueprints for a fantastical contraption he once made me, I would have marveled at the coincidence of taking him to see the Überorgan at the Getty.

My father once made me a beautiful little windmill. In the 5^th grade I had put together a self-sustaining environment I found in the World Book Encyclopedia by filling a glass Ball jar with water, snails and aquatic plants. The plants were supposed to feed the snails, and the poop from the snails was supposed to feed the plants. It was simple and elegant, but it only got me an Honorable Mention. I vowed to do better the following year, so I came to my father and asked for his professional advice. In just a couple of hours, after dinner and before the evening news, he transformed the contents of our junk drawer into a windmill. I marveled at its miniature perfection, two feet high on our kitchen table, cute little blades spinning when I connected the red wire to the green wire. No amount of patient explanation could make me understand how the thing actually worked.

Needless to say, my submission to the Science Fair was disqualified for cheating (those were the days when it was forbidden for kids to turn in work that was actually done by their parents). I was humiliated. My father felt even worse for setting me up to fail, albeit with the best intentions. It never occurred to him that I wasn’t able to comprehend the mechanism of the windmill, even though I sat at his elbow during its construction. My father could never understand why everyone didn’t see the physical world as clearly as he did, why simple things like mathematics and science provoked confusion, distrust, and sometimes even hostility.

For instance, how would I have reacted if I figured out that what my father had made me was not just a clever toy, but a time machine? Had I known that my father had given me the means to fast-forward to a time beyond the havoc of my parents’ divorce, would I have used it? Had I known that I could skip past the 80s and 90s and settle gently into the place where I am now, at peace with myself, would I have done it? Would I look ahead, given the opportunity to use the windmill today? Probably not. Nature shows us only the tail of the lion.

The Überorgan could have been the intestinal tract of an enormous creature made from cardboard tubing, tinfoil, dry cleaner bags and electrical tape, except it played music. My jet-lagged father stood inside the light-filled atrium of the Getty Center listening to the hooting strains of Bach coming out of toilet paper rolls and promptly reminded me that he worked on the Tennessee Valley Authority Nuclear Power Plant. He wasn’t interested in children’s toys cobbled together from bits of junk.

I was deeply disappointed that my father failed to make the connection between the Überorgan and the windmill he made me. Perhaps he didn’t remember the windmill. Why should he? How could he be expected to remember an insignificant event in childhood of his first child, the one he only lived with for ten years, the one that came before the two new children, whose elementary school years were fresher in his mind?

But I was wrong to underestimate the power of the Überorgan. It jogged his memory the same way it did mine (though it was only several months later, when I sat down to transcribe his words, once again at my father’s elbow, that I finally, fully, understood the mechanism of the windmill). That night, after a light dinner, my father emptied the contents of my junk drawer into a shopping bag and locked himself into the spare bedroom.

Having already mapped out his prima mobile around the afternoon and evening of May 3, 1791, my father was still left with the “wet” problem (“wet” referring to the humid, mycelial world of human interactions, as opposed to “dry,” hygienic world of science) of manipulating a monarch. By employing the principles of electrodynamics in combination with a reverse cause/effect vector and the information he had gleaned from his history books regarding the life cycle of the average Head of State, my father concluded that favorable results would follow if he approached King Poniatowski not at the height of his reign, the previously mentioned May 3, 1791, but at its absolute nadir.

By 1798, Catherine the Great was dead and Count Poniatowski was no longer King of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. If fact, there was no commonwealth: it had been torn to pieces by Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Despised by his countrymen and practically a prisoner in his own house, Count Poniatowski was forced to swallow his pride and accept an invitation from the new Emperor of Russia, Paul I, the crazy son of Catherine the Great and her only official husband, Peter III. The new tsar had invited his mother’s former lover to live out the rest of his days in St. Petersburg, with a modest pension provided by the Russian crown. Being a connoisseur of irony, Paul I even offered Poniatowski the Marble Palace in which to live, the exact same mansion his mother had built for her other lover, Gregory Orlov, who had replaced Poniatowski in her heart and bedchamber (and whose brother had killed the father of Emperor Paul I).

With all this history carefully plotted in the form of a circuit diagram, my father taped this “map” to the wall of my spare bedroom and dumped the contents of my junk drawer onto the quilt I had purchased earlier in the week in anticipation of his visit. He sorted through greasy gaskets, bent paperclips, lint-covered gum balls, rusted nails, used twist-ties, packets of soy sauce, keys to forgotten doors, a mouse trap, Hershey’s Kisses, match books without matches, a tape measure, a box of regular strength Ex-Lax, and a water pistol, keeping an inventory of everything. By midnight he had finished reconstructing the windmill time machine.

Time is an arrow. Time is a sphere without exits. Time is the reef upon which all our frail mystic ships are wrecked. Time is the fire in which we burn. Time is the longest distance between two points. Tempus fugit. Many fancy things have been said about time, but one thing everyone can agree on is that time, like space, is three dimensional. It follows that just as one is able to move freely through a three-dimensional space, one should be able to move freely through three-dimensional time. The easiest way to move freely through time is via the fourth dimension. But what is the fourth dimension?

You know when a wheel spins so fast that at a certain point it looks as if the center of the wheel is spinning in the opposite direction from the rim of the rim? Well, it does. The centrifugal forces created by a spinning wheel begin to generate, following Ampère's Law, a weak electrical current. This is not unlike what happens in the solenoid in your car, in which a three-dimensional coil wrapped around a metallic core produces a magnetic field when a current is passed through it. Thus the center of the windmill produces a weak magnetic field which begins to drag on the fabric of space-time until there’s a snag and a pucker and an accumulation of extra fabric. This extra fabric is the fourth dimension.

And if you reach in with nimble fingers into the center of a reverse-spinning wheel and pluck at a bit of that fourth dimension, you’ll find that it yields to your touch, and that it is extremely fine, and practically invisible. And if you pull and pull on the fourth dimension, you’ll pull out enough for a handful, and when you examine it you will find that it’s quite flexible. And if you keep pulling you’ll eventually pull out enough cover your entire body, like a pair of footsie pajamas, plus hood. And if you step into this garment made from the fourth dimension, you can go anywhere, because an additional property of the fabric of the fourth dimension is it pelastricity (penetration and elasticity). You can go anywhere; all you need is a map. Time is on the side of the outcast.

In 1798, St. Petersburg experienced an exceedingly mild February. The Neva was slushy, not frozen. On Millionnaya Street, just one block in from the Gulf of Finland, where the Marble Palace stood out from the candy-colored townhouses like a displaced family crypt, the arctic wind did not peel the skin from my father’s forehead, as it should have done this time of year. Though the Marble Palace was far superior to the Getty Center with regard to its form and the quality of its building materials, there was no doorman to greet my father as he climbed its wide front steps. The gardener had neglected to wrap the boxwoods in burlap and they had died in the first frost of the season. A brass lion’s head doorknocker, completely black with tarnish, produced a sound like rocks falling down a mineshaft. My father could barely contain his nervous excitement at these signs of neglect. The door swung open on creaking hinges and my father beheld Count Poniatowski. He was older, of course, than the robust image preserved by the court painters, but he was still as tall and handsome as in his prime. Wisps of fine silver hair framed his high forehead. He was dressed in carpet slippers and a blue velvet sable-trimmed robe. A beautiful white chicken was perched on his left shoulder; she too had fine silver plumage on her aristocratic head. My father bowed deeply and introduced himself. Poniatowski offered his thin old man’s hand to be kissed.

That a countryman from another century had come to visit him in his exile did not disturb the former King of Poland. He had met many exotic people during his active years, both during his youth, while attached to the diplomatic corps in St. Petersburg, and in his own court. Now, left with no retinue except the old nursemaid who had taken care of the infant he had fathered with Catherine the Great (alas, mother and daughter were both dead now), Poniatowski was glad to have someone new to talk to.

The Count closed the heavy wooden door and invited my father to follow him into a pale gray marble sitting room. It was bare except for a small Bukhara rug, a shabby divan, silver candelabra, and two Karelian birch armchairs. An imposing black marble fireplace, tall enough for Poniatowski to stand in, consumed smoldering remains of the furniture that must once have decorated this room. Smoke backed out of the fireplace and crept up the marble walls; it had been years since the chimney was swept. Despite the embers, a subterranean chill hung in the air.

Poniatowski offered my father one of the armchairs and took the divan for himself. They sat in silence for a few minutes, my father stealing glances at the chicken, Poniatowski examining his neatly manicured fingernails. The chicken eyed my father in between bouts of grooming its topknot of decorative feathers. It really was the prettiest chicken my father had ever seen.

Before too long, a very old woman shuffled into the room carrying a silver tray with two cut crystal glasses. She offered one glass to my father and the other to the Count. Then she settled down into the other armchair, placed the silver tray under the chair, pulled an embroidery frame out of the pocket of her apron, and began to work.

Count Poniatowski raised his glass. “Sto lata.” (“One hundred years.”)

“Sto lata,” my father clinked glasses and downed his vodka.

Having grown up in communist Poland, my father never felt comfortable among aristocrats. For instance, a completely trivial problem gnawed away at the resolve with which had arrived at the Marble Palace: what to do with the vodka glass in hand? Eventually he gathered his wits, placed the glass on the rug under his armchair and came right to the point:

“Count Poniatowski, I have studied your reign and the long and sad history of our country in great detail. I realize that I am a man of no consequence, nevertheless I believe that God has chosen me to come to you with a plan that will help you reclaim Poland.” Satisfied with the way his speech came out, my father wasted no time in producing from his briefcase a thick document, complete with diagrams and bibliography.

Poniatowski accepted the document with a sigh and let its bulk settle onto his lap. The beautiful chicken shifted her perch and clucked. The nurse made no sound at all.

“It’s really quite simple,” my father continued. “All you have to do is go back seven years, to May 3, 1791, to the day you made your triumphant speech in front of the Assembly of Noblemen.”

“That seems like a lifetime ago,” Poniatowksi replied sadly. “I can’t even remember what I said last week, let alone the supposedly triumphant speech I made seven years ago.”

My father gets very impatient with people who refuse to understand the thing he’s trying to explain to them. But he mastered his irritation and continued.

“You made a speech to the assembly upon signing into law the new constitution. And for six glorious months, before the new government was overturned by a royal decree sent from Russia, you were able to unite the fiercely independent Polish nobility for the first time in the nation’s history.”

“Yes, I do remember those bickering idiots, the ‘Polish nobility.’ What a nuisance it was to be their king,” Poniatowski sniffed, stroking the elegant feathers of his hen.

“If I may be so bold, Your Majesty,” said my father, the vodka loosening his tongue, “it was the first time in your twenty-seven year reign that you had power independent of the Russian Crown. Now, all you have to do is go back with me to the precise hour of your speech (he had made an additional pelastric suit for Poniatowski), right after you received the standing ovation from the members of the Assembly, and, instead of going home to tend to your art collection, you will come with me to see your nephew, Prince Adam Czartoryski. You will lay your crown at the feet of Prince Adam—a born leader and warrior, if you’ll forgive my boldness once again—who will then lead the Polish army to victory in 1792, and, like Garibaldi in Italy (but how could you know of Garibaldi, forgive me once again), would have united the Polish states. A unified Poland would have been able to rebuff imperialistic designs of Empress Catherine and her devious ally, Frederick the Great of Prussia. A united, independent Poland would have grown and prospered at the same rate as every other country in Europe, so that by the time the German Panzers came rolling across the border in 1939 (for the Germans will come back, they always come back), instead of the sad spectacle of the Polish cavalry (horses fighting against tanks!), Hitler would have encountered a modern, fully-equipped Polish army bound in steel! And while Poland held the Germans in check on the eastern front, the French would have had time to mount their offensive (900 division, 1500 tanks, 1400 planes) and attack Germany’s western flank, thereby stopping their military machine in its tracks, and ending World War II before it even began.”

My father concluded his speech with a short bow and wiped his brow on his sleeve, panting softly. He retrieved the glass from under his chair and tipped the last drop of vodka into his parched throat.

Poniatowski smiled and nodded. He was a good listener, but of course, most of what my father said to him made no sense at all. Except for one thing. “I only accepted the throne of Poland because I thought that Catherine would marry me if I, too, were a monarch. All of Europe thought the same.”

“You were her puppet!” My father could not control himself any longer. “All of Europe knew that. But everything changed after your speech. That was the moment you showed your true self, your brilliance, Your Majesty. You could have done great things for your country had you simply done as I have just described.”

“Kings are the slaves of history,” Poniatowski murmured sadly and reached up to stroke his chicken. She dipped her white plumed head under his caresses and shook out her tail. A single milk white feather flew up, caught a draft, and landed on my father’s knee. He picked it up and tucked it into the breast pocket of his sport coat.

Poniatowski wiped a tear that had escaped from his rheumy old man’s eyes and rearranged the folds of his velvet robe. “You are wrong about me. I never had power other than the power Catherine gave me. I was not born to do great things. An excellent education enabled me to conceal my mental and physical defects. I have sufficient wit to take part in any conversation, but not enough to converse long and in detail on any subject. I have a natural penchant for the arts. My indolence, however, prevents me from going as far as I should like to go, either in the arts or in the sciences. I work overmuch, or not at all. I can see the faults of any plan, but am very much in need of good counsel in order to carry out any plans of my own. In short, I would have made Catherine a good husband. Why do you think she stopped loving me?”

The vodka buzz had worn off and suddenly my father felt incredibly sober, cold and tired. Though not an intuitive person, he now saw Poniatowski more clearly and realized that there had been a flaw in his approach. The former King of Poland was not ruled by his mind, but by his broken heart.

“I understand,” my father said evenly, as if trying to calm a child who has broken a favorite toy. “I too was once married to a Russian woman. Though she wasn’t a Tsarina, she carried herself as one. I remember the day I came home from work to find the apartment completely empty. She had taken everything, my furniture, my daughter, even the cooking pots.”

My father looked up to find Poniatowski nodding sympathetically. “Catherine also took our daughter away from me. A child for a throne. I never saw her again.” A second tear slid down Poniatowski’s withered cheek. “She did not live past her second birthday. Is your daughter alive?”

“She’s alive, Thank God (Dziekuje Bogu),”my father put his hands together and glanced Heavenward. “I should have gone after them, but something stopped me. I should have at least tried to take my daughter, but times where different then. Divorce courts almost always granted custody to the mother. I also believe that the child, especially a daughter, should stay with the mother, but I still regret not doing more. It wasn’t until she became an adult that my daughter and I renewed our relationship. In short, I understand how difficult Russian women can be.”

“But Catherine was German,” Poniatowski protested.

“Only until she came to Russia, and then she was more Russian than the Russians,” said my father.

“What does that mean?” Poniatowksi leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, finally interested in what my father was saying.

“Nobody knows. The Russians can’t even decide what it means to be Russian. In any case, I’m sure Catherine loved you. Women only torture the men they love.”

Poniatowski clapped his hands. “Bravo!” The beautiful chicken flapped her wings and settled back down on his shoulder. “You understand everything. I promise to read your proposal, but not until tomorrow morning, after we’ve both had a good night’s sleep. In the meantime, you shall have supper with me.”

Not having any relatives in 18^th-century St. Petersburg to stay with, my father gladly accepted the Count’s hospitality. For dinner they would have a simple omelet. Poniatowski told my father how he learned to cook in Paris, during his first trip abroad. Now that he was older and had a sensitive stomach, it gave him great pleasure to eat at home rather than in one of those expensive Petersburg restaurants, which he could no longer afford anyway. My father, who hated to waste money, was glad that he and Poniatowski were able to agree on something beside the curious nature of Russian women.

In the basement kitchen of the Marble Palace, my father sat on a high wooden stool and watched Poniatowski cook. The beautiful chicken walked around the rough wooden table pecking at breadcrumbs.

“Why do you examine each egg over a candle flame before breaking it?” My father was hoping that the question about the eggs would lead to an explanation about the chicken. In lieu of an explanation, my father got a story.

“I used to sneak into the aviary of the Summer Garden in the morning. It was Catherine’s favorite place to have her intimate dinner parties,” Poniatowski began. “I spent many a pleasant evening there in my youth, back when I used to be invited to her parties. The aviary has fallen into disrepair since Paul became Tsar. Now I visit the place for an hour or two each day, to keep the birds company. I pick up an egg every now and then, not wanting them to go to waste.”

What harm was there in stealing eggs from a dead lover, especially when one is poor and hungry, my father wanted to ask. But he kept silent.

“The Summer Garden reminds me of when Catherine was young and I was the love she had not found in her marriage,” Poniatowski continued. “She was beautiful back then, and absolutely fearless. She would sneak into my rooms dressed as a cadet in breeches and boots with shiny silver spurs, wrapped in a fur-lined cloak. In her later years, she grew fat, and pitifully prone to flattery. Her last lover before she died was an insipid boy of twenty-six, can you imagine? I was once such a boy.”

My father nodded. He too was once such a boy.

“I still laugh when I recall the antics—I never really liked sex. Did you know that she was my first lover? I found it degrading the way she used to ride me around the bed like a pony, though I will never forget the feeling of her powerful, slender thighs clenched around my back. I tried to talk to Catherine about my love for her, that it was so pure as to be almost platonic, but she just laughed in my face. She liked to sing during our lovemaking, compose little operettas; dress me up like a doll. All idiocy. I can just imagine what it would have been like for her last Favorite, what the New One thought when a graying mountain of a woman climbed on top and grasped him with her old, womanish hams…but that’s all in the past now.”

My father, who hated to interrupt people in the middle of a story (more than he hated to listen to people talk about intimate matters), cleared his throat and asked, “You were going to tell me about the eggs.”

“I understand,” Poniatowski smiled. “You want to know about my chicken.”

My father began to protest, because he felt it was important to continue in the charade that the chicken simply wasn’t there, or that it wasn’t odd to meet a former monarch living with a pet chicken, but the Count waved him off with another laugh.

“One morning I returned from the Imperial Aviary with a pocket full of fresh eggs. When I tried to crack the first one, it cheeped back at me! It was fertile, and moreover, the chick inside had been just minutes from hatching when I so rudely invaded its shell. So I took the egg, which was largely intact, though cracked, and placed it inside a fur-lined glove. Eventually, pieces of the shell flew out of the glove, and I was able to sustain the newborn chick on mashed flies and droppers full of water. One day a perfect little yellow chick emerged, and now look at her,” Poniatowski grabbed the chicken and kissed her fine feathered neck. “Isn’t she beautiful? She’s a gift, after all my suffering.”

Let me repeat: my father is a scientist. He deals with the physical world, governed by the predictable laws of cause and effect. He has no mental construct for the metaphorical (or metaphysical) significance of a chicken born from a lover’s garden. Or so I thought. Nevertheless, he made no comment about the chicken-and-egg story, simply agreeing with his host that she was indeed a handsome bird.

Poniatowksi and my father finished their meal in companionable silence and wished each other pleasant dreams (“Spokojny sen.”) It really was an unusually warm night in February. There should have been piles of snow along the embankment, but the sleepless citizens of St. Petersburg were strolling about amidst daffodils tricked into premature bloom.

Later that night, there was a terrible storm, one of the hundreds of storms that regularly flooded the city until Brezhnev built a dam in the 1970s. Sometime after midnight the air changed from a caress to a claw. The waiting winter cold rolled in making the Neva thrash in her canals like a sick man upon a pillow. The howling wind and rain and wicked waves stalked thief-like through the empty streets, creeping under doors, through partially-opened windows, breaking up the bridges and sweeping out the foundations like coffins from sodden graveyards.

My father, exhausted from his journey through the centuries, slept through it all, until the wraith-like figure of Count Poniatowski in a nightshirt bent over his bed and inadvertently dripped candle wax on his forehead. “You must help me!” He cried. “It was so warm, I left the window open, and now she is gone. I’ve searched the entire house. She is out there in this storm. Please help me.”

Outside the wind tore at their hair and clothing. Frigid water gushed out of the canals and numbed their feet. People driven from their ground-floor beds ran through the streets, scrambling over each other to get to higher ground. But Poniatowski did not seem to feel the sting of the sleet on his face. His eyes were fixed on a single spot on the embankment, where a beautiful willow swayed in the midst of a broken pile of pleasure boats. There, perched on a bobbing limb, was a luminous white speck, a ghostly flutter of wing. And then a wave came down upon the tree, and the speck was gone.

“Catherine!” Poniatowski wrenched himself from my father’s grip and ran for the tree. My father ran after him, clutching at the hem of his cloak.

In the morning the world had turned to glass. Crystallized leaves fell from the trees onto the newly frozen ground with the plinking sound of a celestial harpsichord. Bodies trapped under the ice and snow would remain there until spring, immobilized like pike in a frozen pond. Survivors of the night stayed indoors with the curtains drawn.

Poniatowski lay inside his Marble Palace like a corpse in a mausoleum. My father had carried him home the night before. He and the nameless, wordless nurse had put him back into his bed. Having weathered several winters in wartime Poland, my father knew that you could survive this kind of cold only if you kept your head. He broke up the Karelian birch armchairs for firewood and gathered together the Count’s fur-lined cloaks, the red one, the black one, and the silver one with the chinchilla lining, wrapped himself and the nurse and the Count, spooning together to conserve body heat. Towards dawn of the following day, death came softly on kitten paws and left behind an elegant corpse.

The weather had grown mild once again. My father handed the cloaks to the nurse and bid her good bye with a short bow. In no time at all he was back in my spare bedroom. When he came down to breakfast the day after he arrived, he looked a little more like his old self. Six months later he asked me to help him with his memoirs.

It was nine o’clock on a perfect July evening of our last session in the Catskills and the sun was just beginning to set behind Slide Mountain. Dragonflies were dancing the mazurka with a flock of swallows as my father and I sipped vodka-spiked lemonade, gently rocking in our aluminum lawn chairs. We hadn’t eaten since lunch and I was starving, but there was still one question I wanted to ask. The fading light obscured my father’s features, so now seemed like a good time.

“Why didn’t you go back?”

My father put his drink down under his chair and shifted in his seat to stretch his bad leg.

“You could have gone back,” I continued, “to an earlier time, when Poniatowski was a bit more lucid. Before he found his chicken, for instance. Maybe he would have listened to you then.”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” said my father.

I shrugged. Nothing in this story was obvious.

“Cause and effect,” my father continued. “What have I always taught you? Follow the sequence of events to their logical conclusion.”

I shrugged again, not sure if he could see the gesture now that it was full dark.

“If there was no war, the part of Poland in which I was born would not have become a Russian satellite state. I would not have gone to university in Russia, would not have met your crazy mother, and you would not have been born.”

“Oh,” I said, though this is what I had expected my father to say, exactly what a man of science would say in lieu of an apology. It was enough for me. To forestall the sentimental tears that threatened to mess up our beautiful moment, I tried to grasp the concept of my non-being. What I imagined was a vast marble room without furniture, weak northern light, a chill in the air.

My father pulled something out of the pocket of his short-sleeved shirt. It was a feather, extremely white in the dark, moonless night. He leaned forward and handed it to me. “You are my beautiful chicken,” he said, “a gift after all my suffering.”

I ran the feather across my cheek and smiled in the dark. Time heals all wounds.

The blood woke Yalnis. It ran between her thighs, warm and slick, cooling, sticky. She pushed back from the stain on the silk, bleary with sleep and love, rousing to shock and stabbing pain.

She flung off the covers and scrambled out of bed. She cried out as the web of nerves tore apart. Her companions shrieked a chaotic chorus.

Zorargul’s small form convulsed just below her navel. The raw edges of a throat wound bled in diminishing gushes. Her body expelled the dying companion, closing off veins and vesicles.

Zorargul was beyond help. She caught the small broken body as it slid free. She sank to the floor. Blood dripped onto the cushioned surface. The other companions retreated into her, exposing nothing but sharp white teeth that parted and snapped in defense and warning.

Still in bed, blinking, yawning, Seyyan propped herself on her elbow. She gazed at the puddle of blood. It soaked in, vanishing gradually from edge to center, drawn away to be separated into its molecules and stored.

A smear of blood marked Seyyan’s skin. Her first companion blinked its small bright golden eyes. It snapped its sharp teeth, spattering scarlet droplets. It shrieked, licked its bloody lips, cleaned its teeth with its tongue. The sheet absorbed the blood spray.

Seyyan lay back in the soft tangled nest, elegantly lounging, her luxuriant brown hair spilling its curls around her bare shoulders and over her delicate perfect breasts. She shone like molten gold in the starlight. Her other companions pushed their little faces from her belly, rousing themselves and clacking their teeth, excited and jealous.

“Zorargul,” Yalnis whispered. She had never lost a companion. She chose them carefully, and cherished them, and Zorargul had been her first, the gift of her first lover. She looked up at Seyyan, confused and horrified, shocked by loss and pain.

“Come back.” Seyyan spoke with soft urgency. She stretched out her graceful hand. “Come back to bed.” Her voice intensified. “Come back to me.”

Yalnis shrank from her touch. Seyyan followed her, sliding over the fading bloodstain in the comfortable nest of ship silk. Her first companion extruded itself, just below her navel, staring intently at Zorargul’s body.

Seyyan stroked Yalnis’ shoulder. Yalnis pushed her away with her free hand, leaving bloody fingerprints on Seyyan’s golden skin.

Seyyan grabbed her wrist and held her, moved to face her squarely, touched her beneath her chin and raised her head to look her in the eyes. Yalnis tried to blink away her tears, baffled and dizzy, flooded with the molecular messages of anger and distress her remaining companions pumped into her blood.

“Come back to me,” Seyyan said again. “We’re ready for you.”

Her first companion, drawing back into her, pulsed and muttered. Seyyan caught her breath.

“I never asked for this!” Yalnis cried.

Seyyan sat back on her heels, as lithe as a girl, but a million years old.

“I thought you wanted me,” she said. “You welcomed me—invited me—took me to your bed—”

Yalnis shook her head, though it was true. “Not for this,” she whispered.

“It didn’t even fight,” Seyyan said, dismissing Zorargul’s remains with a quick gesture. “It wasn’t worthy of its place with you.”

“Who are you to decide that?”

“I didn’t,” Seyyan said. “It’s the way of companions.” She touched the reddening bulge of a son-spot just below the face of her first companion. “This one will be worthy of you.”

Yalnis stared at her, horrified and furious. Seyyan, the legend, had come to her, exotic, alluring, and exciting. All the amazement and attraction Yalnis felt washed away in Zorargul’s blood.

“I don’t want it,” she said. “I won’t accept it.”

Seyyan’s companion reacted to the refusal, blinking, snarling. For a moment Yalnis feared Seyyan too would snarl at her, assault her and force a new companion upon her.

Seyyan sat back, frowning in confusion. “But I thought—did you invite me, just to refuse me? Why—?”

“For pleasure,” Yalnis said. “For friendship. And maybe for love—maybe you would offer, and I would accept—”

“How is this different?” Seyyan asked.

Yalnis leaped to her feet in a flare of fury so intense that her vision blurred. Cradling Zorargul’s shriveling body against her with one hand, she pressed the other against the aching bloody wound beneath her navel.

“Get out of my ship,” she said.

The ship, responding to Yalnis’ wishes, began to resorb the nest into the floor.

Seyyan rose. “What did you think would happen,” she said, anger replacing the confusion in her tone, “when you announced the launch of a daughter? What do you think everyone is coming for? I was just lucky enough to be first. Or unfortunate enough.” Again, she brushed her long fingertips against the son-spot. It pulsed, a red glow as hot and sore as infection. It must find a place, soon, or be stillborn. “And what am I to do with this?”

Yalnis’ flush of anger drained away, leaving her pale and shocked.

“I don’t care.” All the furnishings and softness of the room vanished, absorbed into the pores of Yalnis’ ship, leaving bare walls and floor, and the cold stars above. “You didn’t even ask me,” Yalnis said softly.

“You led me to believe we understood each other. But you’re so young—” Seyyan reached toward her. Yalnis drew back, and Seyyan let her hand fall with a sigh. “So young. So naïve.” She caught up her purple cloak from the floor and strode past Yalnis. Though the circular chamber left plenty of room, she brushed past close to Yalnis, touching her at shoulder and hip, bare skin to bare skin. A lock of her hair swept across Yalnis’ belly, stroking low like a living hand, painting a bloody streak.

Seyyan entered the pilus that connected Yalnis’ ship with her own craft. As soon as Seyyan crossed the border, Yalnis’ ship disconnected and closed and healed the connection.

Yalnis’ ship emitted a few handsful of plasma in an intemperate blast, moving itself to a safer distance. Seyyan’s craft gleamed and glittered against the starfield, growing smaller as Yalnis’ ship moved away, coruscating with a pattern of prismatic color.

Yalnis sank to the floor again, humiliated and grief-stricken. Without her request or thought, her ship cushioned her from its cold living bones, growing a soft surface beneath her, dimming the light to dusk. Dusk, not the dawn she had planned.

She opened her clutched, blood-sticky hand and gazed at the small body. She drew her other hand from the seeping wound where Zorargul had lived and cradled the shriveling tendril of the companion’s penis. A deep ache, throbbing regularly into pain, replaced the potential for pleasure as her body knit the wound of Zorargul’s passing. Behind the wound, a sore, soft mass remained.

“Zorargul,” she whispered, “you gave me such pleasure.”

Of her companions, Zorargul had most closely patterned the lovemaking of its originator. Her pleasure always mingled with a glow of pride, that Zorar thought enough of her to offer her a companion.

Yalnis wondered where Zorar was, and if she would come to Yalnis’ daughter’s launching. They had not communicated since they parted so long ago, for Zorar anticipated other adventures. She might be anywhere, one star system away, or a dozen, or setting out to another cluster, voyaging through vacuum so intense and a region so dark she must conserve every molecule of mass and every photon of energy, using none to power a message of acceptance, or regret, or goodwill.

Yalnis remained within parallax view of her own birthplace. She had grown up in a dense population of stars and people. She had taken a dozen lovers in her life, and accepted five companions: Zorargul, Vasigul, Asilgul, Hayaligul, and Bahadirgul. With five companions, she felt mature enough, wealthy enough, to launch a daughter with a decent, even lavish, settlement. After that, she could grant her ship’s need—and her own desire—to set out on adventures and explorations.

Zorar, she thought—

She reached for Zorar’s memories and reeled into loss and emptiness. The memories ended with Zorargul’s murder. Zorar, much older than Yalnis, had given her the gift of her own long life of journeys and observations. They brought her the birth of stars and worlds, the energy storm of a boomerang loop around a black hole, skirting the engulfing doom of its event horizon. They brought her the most dangerous adventure of all, a descent through the thick atmosphere of a planet to its living surface.

All Yalnis had left were her memories of the memories, dissolving shadows of the gift. All the memories left in Zorargul had been wiped out by death.

By murder.

The walls and floor of her living space changed again as her ship re-created her living room. She liked it plain but luxurious, all softness and comfort. The large circular space lay beneath a transparent dome. It was a place for one person alone. She patted the floor with her bloodstained hand.

“Thank you,” she said.

“True,” her ship whispered into her mind.

Its decisions often pleased her and anticipated her wishes. Strange, for ships and people seldom conversed. When they tried, the interaction too easily deteriorated into misunderstanding. Their consciousnesses were of different types, different evolutionary lineages.

She rose, lacking her usual ease of motion. Anger and pain and grief drained her, and exhaustion trembled in her bones.

She carried Zorargul’s body down through the ship, down into its heart, down to the misty power plant. Blood, her own and her companion’s, spattered and smeared her hands, her stomach, her legs, the defending teeth or withdrawn crowns of her remaining companions, and Zorargul’s pale and flaccid corpse. Its nerve ends dried to silver threads. Expulsion had reduced the testicles to wrinkled empty sacs.

Water ran in streams and pools through the power plant’s housing, cold as it came in, steaming too hot to touch as it led away. Where steam from the hot pool met cold air, mist formed. Yalnis knelt and washed Zorargul’s remains in the cold pool. When she was done, a square of scarlet ship silk lay on the velvety floor, flat and new where it had formed. She wrapped Zorargul in its shining folds.

“Goodbye,” she said, and gave the small bundle tenderly to the elemental heat.

A long time later, Yalnis made her way to the living space and climbed into the bath, into water hot but not scalding. The bath swirled around her, sweeping away flecks of dried blood. She massaged the wound gently, making sure the nerve roots were cleanly ejected. She let the expulsion lump alone, though it was already hardening.

The remaining companions opened their little faces, protruding from the shelter of her body. They peered around, craning themselves above her skin, glaring at each other and gnashing their teeth in a great show, then closing their lips, humming to attract her attention.

She attended each companion in turn, stroking the little faces, flicking warm drops of water between their lips, quieting and calming them, murmuring, “Shh, shh.” They felt no sympathy for her loss, no grief for Zorargul, only the consciousness of opportunity. She felt a moment of contempt for the quartet, each member jostling for primacy.

They are what they are, she thought, and submerged herself and them in the bath, drawing their little faces beneath the surface. They fell silent, holding their breaths and closing their eyes and mouths, reaching to draw their oxygen as well as their sustenance from her blood. A wash of dizziness took her; she breathed deep till it passed.

Each of the companions tried to please her—no, Bahadirgul held back. Her most recent companion had always been restrained in its approaches, fierce in its affections when it achieved release. Now, instead of squirming toward her center, it relaxed and blew streams of delicate bubbles from the air in its residual lungs.

Yalnis smiled, and when she closed herself off from the companions, she shut Bahadirgul away more gently than the others. She did not want to consider any of the companions now. Zorargul had been the best, the most deeply connected, as lively and considerate as her first lover.

Tears leaked from beneath her lashes, hot against her cheeks, washing away when she submerged. She looked up at the stars through the shimmering surface, through the steam.

She lifted her head to breathe. Water rippled and splashed; air cooled her face. The companions remained underwater, silent. Yalnis’ tears flowed again and she sobbed, keening, grieving, wishing to take back the whole last time of waking. She wanted to change all her plans from the beginning.

If she did, Seyyan might take it as a triumph. She might make demands. Yalnis sneaked a look at the messages her ship kept ready for her attention. She declined to reply or even to acknowledge them. She felt it a weakness to read them. After she had, she wished she had resisted opening the message port.

Why did you tantalize and tease me? Seyyan asked. You know this was what you wanted. I’m what you wanted.

Yalnis eliminated everything else Seyyan had sent her.

“Please refuse Seyyan’s messages,” she said to her ship.

“True,” it replied.

“Disappear them, destroy them. No response.”

“True.”

“Seyyan, you took my admiration and my awe, and you perverted it,” she said, as if Seyyan stood before her. “I might have accepted you. I might have, if you’d given me a chance. If you’d given me time. What do we have, but time? I’ll never forgive you.”

The bath flowed away, resorbing into the ship’s substance. Warm air dried her and drew off the steam. She wrapped herself in a new swath of ship silk without bothering to give it a design. Some people went naked at home, but Yalnis liked clothes. For now, though, a cloak sufficed.

She wandered through her ship, visiting each chamber in the current configuration, looking with amazement and apprehension at the daughter ship growing in the ship’s lower flank. What would the person be like, this new being who would accompany this new ship into the universe? She thought she had known, but everything had changed.

She returned, finally, to her living chamber.

“Please defend yourself,” she said.

“True.”

Yalnis snuggled into the ship’s substance, comforted by its caress. She laid her hand over her belly, pressing her palm against the hot, healing wound, then petting each of the little faces. They bumped against her palm, yearning, stretching from their shafts so she could tickle behind Asilgul’s vestigial ears, beneath Vasigul’s powerful lower jaw. Even Bahadirgul advanced from its reserve, blinking its long-lashed eyelids to caress her fingers, touching her palm with its sharp hot tongue.

Each one wished to pleasure her, but she felt no wish for pleasure. Even the idea of joy vanished, in grief and guilt.

The nest drew around her, covering her legs, her sex, her stomach. It flowed over the faces and extruded a nipple for each sharp set of teeth. The ship took over feeding the companions so they would not drain Yalnis as she slept.

“Please, a thousand orbits,” she said.

“True,” said the ship, content to have the time to complete and polish the daughter ship, to prepare for the launch. But, afterwards, it wanted to stretch and to explore. She understood its need, and she would comply.

For now she would sleep for a thousand orbits. If anyone besides Seyyan accepted the invitation to her daughter’s launch, they would arrive in good time, and then they could wait for her, as she waited for them. Perhaps a thousand orbits—a thousand years in the old way of speaking—would give her time to dream of a proper revenge. Perhaps a thousand years of sleep would let her dream away the edges of her grief. The ship’s support extensions grew against her, into her. She accepted the excretion extensions and swallowed the feeding extension. The monitor gloved one hand and wrist.

The view through the dome swept the orbit’s plane, facing outward toward the thick carpet of multicolored stars, the glowing gas clouds.

Yalnis slept, for a thousand years.

The kiss of her ship woke her. Sharp water exuded from the feeding extension, moistening her lips and tongue. The tangy fragrance touched her consciousness. She drifted into the last, hypnopompic layer of sleep, finding and losing dreams.

She thought: It would be good if... I would like...

Loss hit her unaware. A chill of regret and grief swept through her and to her four remaining companions; they woke from their doze and released the nipples and squeaked and shrilled. The ship, after a thousand orbits of the irritation of their little sharp teeth, drew away its fabric.

The ship made Yalnis aware of everything around them: the ship’s own safety, the star and its planets, the astronomical landscape glowing through the transparent dome.

And it displayed to her the swarm of other ships, sending to her in their individual voices that ships and people had come to celebrate the launch of her daughter and her ship’s daughter. She recognized friends and acquaintances, she noted strangers. She looked for former lovers, and found, to her joy and apprehension, that Zorar’s ship sailed nearby.

And, of course, Seyyan remained.

During Yalnis’ long rest, Seyyan had never approached, never tried to attach or attack. Yalnis felt glad of this. Her ship would have surrounded itself with an impermeable shell, one that induced a severe allergic reaction in other ships. A defensive shell drew heavily on a ship’s resources. Her ship was sleek and well-provisioned, but growing defenses while developing a daughter ship would strain any resources.

Instead of approaching, Seyyan’s craft’s course had closely paralleled her own for all this time, as if it were herding and protecting Yalnis.

Annoyed that she had not anticipated such a move—she had expected aggression, not a show of protection—Yalnis nudged her ship to a different course, to a mathematical center along the long curved line of other craft. Her ship agreed and complied, even to skirting the bounds of safety and good manners, in moving itself into a position where Seyyan would have difficulty acting as their shadow.

Yalnis stretched. The ship, understanding that she wished to rise, withdrew its extensions from her body. She gagged a little, as she always did, when the nutrient extension slid up her throat, across her tongue, between her lips, leaving a trace of sweetness. The extension collapsed; the ship’s skin absorbed it. Excretion extensions and the monitor followed, and disappeared.

She raised her head slowly. The weight of her hair, grown long, held her down. She turned the dome reflective and gazed up.

Her hair spread in a wide shining fan across the floor, covering the whole diameter of the living room, drawn out by the living carpet as it lengthened. Its color ranged in concentric circles. The outer circle, spread out so wide that each hair was a single ray, glowed an attenuated platinum blond, the color she had worn her hair when she first met Seyyan. It changed dramatically to black, then progressed from honey to auburn to dark brown, and the sequence started over. She removed the palest color from the growth sequence for the future. It would only remind her.

Instead of cutting her hair to the short and easy length she usually favored, she asked the ship to sever it at a length that would touch the ground when she stood.

Despite the ship’s constant care when she slept, she always had difficulty rising after a long hibernation. The ship eased the gravity to help her. She rose on shaky legs, and stumbled when she left the nest. The companions squealed with alarm.

“Oh, be quiet,” she said. “What cause have I ever given you, to fear I’d fall on you?” Besides, their instincts would pull them inside her if she ever did fall, and the only bruises would form on her own body.

But even if I’ve never fallen on them, she thought, I have left them reason to fear. To doubt my protection.

Her hair draped around her shoulders, over her breasts, along her hips and legs to the ground. The companions peered through the thick curtain, chittering with annoyance. Bahadirgul sneezed. In sudden sympathy, she pushed her hair back to leave them free.

The wound beneath her navel had healed, leaving a pale white scar. Beneath her skin, the sperm packet Zorargul emitted as its last living action made a jagged lump, invisible, but perceptible to her fingers and vaguely painful to her nerves. She had to decide whether to use it, or to finish encapsulating it and expel it in turn.

Without being asked, the ship absorbed the shorn ends of her hair. She and the ship had been born together; despite the mysteries each species kept from the other, each knew the other’s habits. It produced a length of ship silk formed into comfortable and neutral garments: loose pants with a filmy lace panel to obscure the companions, a sleeveless shirt with a similar lace panel. She wore clothes that allowed the companions some view of the world, for they could be troublesome when bored. She left the silk its natural soft beige, for the horizontal stripes of her hair gave plenty of drama. She twisted her hair into a thick rope to keep it from tangling as she dressed, then let it loose again. It lay heavy on her neck and shoulders.

I may reconsider this haircut, she thought. But not till after the launch. I can be formal for that long, at least.

Messages flowed in from the other ships. It pleased her that so many had accepted her invitation. Still she did not reply, even to welcome them. Her ship looked out a long distance, but no other craft approached. The party was complete.

Yalnis closed her eyes to inspect her ship’s status and records. The ship ran a slight fever, reflecting its increasing metabolism. Its flank, smooth before her sleep, now bulged. The daughter ship lay in its birth pouch, shiny-skinned and adorned with a pattern of small knots. The knots would sink into the new ship’s skin, giving it the potential of openings, connections, ports, antennae, undifferentiated tissue for experiment and play.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered to the ship.

“True.”

The companions squeaked with hunger, though they had spent the last thousand years dozing and feeding without any exertion. They were fat and sleek. They were always hungry, or always greedy, rising for a treat or a snack, though they connected directly to her bloodstream as well as to her nerves, and could draw their sustenance from her without ever opening their little mouths or exposing their sharp little teeth.

But Yalnis had been attached to the ship’s nutrients for just as long, and she too was ravenous.

She left the living room and descended to the garden. The light was different, brighter and warmer. The filter her ship used to convey light to the garden mimicked a blanket of atmosphere.

She arrived at garden’s dawn. Birds chirped and sang in the surrounding trees, and a covey of quail foraged along borders and edges. Several rabbits, nibbling grass in the pasture, raised their heads when she walked in, then, unafraid, went back to grazing. They had not seen a person for thousands of their generations.

The garden smelled different from the rest of the ship, the way she believed the surface of a planet might smell. She liked it, but it frightened her, too, for it held living organisms she would never see. The health of the garden demanded flotillas of bacteria, armies of worms, swarms of bugs. She thought it might be safer to grow everything in hydroponic tanks, as had been the fashion last time she paid attention, but she liked the spice of apprehension. Besides, the ship preferred this method. If it thought change necessary, it would change.

She walked barefoot into the garden, trying not to step on any adventurous worm or careless bug. The bacteria would have to look out for themselves.

She captured a meal of fruit, corn, and a handful of squash blossoms. She liked the blossoms. When she was awake, and hunted regularly, she picked them before they turned to vegetables. The neglected plants emitted huge squashes of all kinds, some perfect, some attacked and nibbled by vegetarian predators.

The companions, reacting to the smell of food, fidgeted and writhed, craning their thick necks to snap at each other. She calmed and soothed them, and fed them bits of apple and pomegranate seeds.

They had already begun to jostle for primacy, each slowly moving toward her center, migrating across skin and muscle toward the spot where Zorargul had lived, as if she would not notice. Her skin felt stretched and sore. No companion had the confidence or nerve to risk detaching from its position to reinsert itself in the primary spot.

A good thing, too, she thought. I wouldn’t answer for my temper if one of them did that without my leave.

Leaving her garden, she faced the task of welcoming her guests.

I don’t want to, she thought, like a whiny girl: I want to keep my privacy, I want to enjoy my companions. I want to be left alone. To grieve alone.

In the living room, beneath the transparent dome, the ship created a raised seat. She slipped in among the cushions, sat on her hair, cursed at the sharp pull, swept the long locks out from under her and coiled them—bits of dirt and leaves tangled in the ends; she shook them off with a shudder and left the detritus for the carpet to take away. She settled herself again.

“I would like to visit Zorar,” she said to her ship.

“True.”

She dozed until the two ships matched, extruded, connected. A small shiver ran through Yalnis’ ship, barely perceptible.

Yalnis hesitated at the boundary, took a deep breath, and entered the pilus where the fabric of her ship and the fabric of Zorar’s met, mingled, and communicated, exchanging unique bits of genetic information to savor and explore.

At the border of Zorar’s ship, she waited until her friend appeared.

“Zorar,” she said.

Zorar blinked at her, in her kindly, languorous way. She extended her hand to Yalnis and drew her over the border, a gesture of trust that broke Yalnis’ heart. She wanted to throw herself into Zorar’s arms.

Do I still have the right? she thought.

She burst into tears.

Zorar enfolded Yalnis, murmuring, “Oh, my dear, oh, what is it?”

Between sobs and sniffles, and an embarrassing bout of hiccups, Yalnis told her. Zorar held her hand, patting it gently, and fell still and silent.

“I’m so sorry,” Yalnis whispered. “I was so fond of Zorargul. I could always remember you, when... I feel so empty.”

Zorar glanced down. The lace of Yalnis’ clothes modestly concealed the companions.

“Let me see,” she said. Her voice remained calm. Yalnis had always admired her serenity. Now, though, tears brightened her brown eyes.

Yalnis parted the lace panels. The four remaining companions blinked and squirmed in the increased light, the unfamiliar gaze. Bahadirgul retreated, the most modest of them all, but the others stretched and extended and stared and bared their teeth.

“You haven’t chosen a replacement.”

“How could I replace Zorargul?”

Zorar shook her head. “You can’t duplicate. But you can replace.”

Yalnis gripped Zorar’s hands. “Do you mean...” She stopped, confused and embarrassed, as inarticulate as the girl she had been when she first met Zorar. That time, everything that happened was her choice. This time, by rights, it should be Zorar’s.

“A daughter between us,” Zorar said. “She would be worth knowing.”

“Yes,” Yalnis said. Zorar laid her palm against Yalnis’ cheek.

Instead of leaning into her touch, Yalnis shivered.

Zorar immediately drew back her hand and gazed at Yalnis.

“What do you want, my dear?” she asked.

“I want...” She sniffled, embarrassed. “I want everything to be the way it was before I ever met Seyyan!” She took Zorar’s hand and held it, clutched it. “I wanted a daughter with Zorargul, but Zorargul is gone, and I...” She stopped. She did not want to inflict her pain on Zorar.

“You aren’t ready for another lover,” Zorar said. “I understand entirely.”

Zorar glanced at Yalnis’ bare stomach, at the one shy and three bold little faces, at the scar left from Zorargul’s murder.

“It wasn’t meant to be,” Zorar said

Yalnis touched the scar, where Zorargul’s jagged remains pricked her skin from underneath.

“Maybe I should—”

“No.” Zorar spoke sharply.

Discouraged, Yalnis let the lacy panels slip back into place.

“It’s our memories Seyyan killed,” Zorar said. “Would you send out a daughter with only one parent’s experience?”

Zorar was kind; she refrained from saying that the one parent would be Yalnis, young and relatively inexperienced. Yalnis’ tears welled up again. She struggled to control them, but she failed. She fought the knowledge that Zorar was right. Zorar was mature and established, with several long and distant adventures to her credit. Her memories were an irreplaceable gift, to be conveyed to a daughter through Zorargul. The sperm packet alone could not convey those memories. “Let time pass,” Zorar said. “We might see each other again, in some other millennium.”

Yalnis scrubbed at her eyes with her sleeve. “I’m so angry!” she cried. “How could Seyyan betray me like this?”

“How did you find her?” Zorar asked, as if to change the subject. “She’s not been heard of for...” She paused to think, to shrug. “Sixty or eighty millennia, at least. I thought she was lost.”

“Did you hope it?”

Zorar gave her a quizzical glance. “Don’t you remember?”

Yalnis looked away, ashamed. “I don’t have all Zorargul’s memories,” she said. “I savored them—anticipated them. I didn’t want to gobble them all up at once. It would be too greedy.”

“How old are you now?” Zorar asked gently, as if to change the subject.

“My ship is eleven millennia,” she replied. “In waking time, I’m twenty-five.”

“You young ones always have to find out everything for yourselves,” Zorar said with a sigh. “Didn’t you ask Zorargul, when you took up with Seyyan?”

Yalnis stared at her, deeply shocked. “Ask Zorargul about Seyyan?” Zorar might as well have suggested she make love in a cluster of ships with the dome transparent, everyone looking in. It had never occurred to Yalnis to tell the companions each others’ names, or even to wonder if they would understand her if she did. She had a right to some privacy, as did her other lovers.

“You young ones!” Zorar said with impatience. “What do you think memories are for? Are they just a toy for your entertainment?”

“I was trying to treat them respectfully!” Yalnis exclaimed.

Zorar snorted.

Yalnis wondered if she would ever be so confident, so well-established, that she could dispense with caring what others thought about her. She yearned for such audacity, such bravery.

“I asked about her, of course!” she exclaimed, trying to redeem herself. “Not the companions, but Shai and Kinli and Tasmin were all near enough to talk to. They all said, Oh, is she found? Or, She’s a legend, how lucky you are to meet her! Or, Give her my loving regard.”

“Tasmin has a daughter with her. She’d never hear anything against her. I suppose Seyyan never asked anything of Tasmin that she wasn’t willing to give. Kinli wasn’t even born last time anyone heard anything from Seyyan, and Shai...” She glanced down at her hands and slowly, gradually, unclenched her fists. “Shai fears her.”

“She could have warned me.”

“Seyyan terrifies her. Is she here?” She closed her eyes, a habitual movement that Yalnis did, too, when she wanted information from her ship’s senses.

“No,” Yalnis said, as Zorar said, “No, I see she’s not.”

“She said she would, but she changed her mind. It hurt my feelings when she disappeared without a word, and she never replied when I asked her what was wrong.”

“She changed her mind after you mentioned Seyyan.”

Yalnis thought back. “Yes.”

“Would you have believed her, if she’d warned you?”

Yalnis remembered Seyyan’s word and touch and beauty, the flush Yalnis felt just to see her, the excitement when she knew Seyyan looked at her. She shivered, for now all that had changed.

“I doubt it,” she said. “Oh, you’re right, I wouldn’t have believed her. I would have suspected jealousy.”

Zorar brushed away Yalnis’ tears.

“What did she do to you?” Yalnis whispered.

Zorar took a deep breath, and drew up the gauzy hem of her shirt.

She carried the same companions as when she and Yalnis first met: five, the same number Yalnis had accepted. Yalnis would have expected someone of Zorar’s age and status to take a few more. Five was the right number for a person of Yalnis’ age and minor prosperity.

“You noticed this scar,” Zorar said, tracing an erratic line of pale silver that skipped from her breastbone to her navel, nearly invisible against her translucently delicate skin. “And I shrugged away your question.”

“You said it happened when you walked on the surface of a planet,” Yalnis said. “You said a flesh-eating plant attacked you.”

“Yes, well, one did,” Zorar said, unabashed. “But it didn’t leave that scar.” She stroked the chin of her central little face. Just below her navel, the companion roused itself, blinking and gnashing its teeth. It neither stretched up aggressively nor retreated defensively. Yalnis had never seen its face; like the others, it had remained nearly concealed, only the top of its head showing, while Yalnis and Zorar made love. Yalnis had thought the companions admirably modest, but now she wondered if their reaction had been fear.

Zorar pressed her fingers beneath the companion’s chin, scratching it gently, revealing its neck.

The scar did not stop at Zorar’s navel. It continued, crossing the back of the companion’s neck and the side of its throat. “Seyyan claimed she behaved as she’d been taught. As she thought was proper, and right. She was horrified at my distress.”

She stroked the companion’s downy scalp. It closed its eyes.

Her voice hardened.

“I had to comfort her, she acted so distraught. I had to comfort her.”

“She accused me of teasing and deceiving her,” Yalnis said. “And she killed Zorargul.”

Under Zorar’s gentle hand, the scarred companion relaxed and slept, its teeth no longer bared.

“Perhaps she’s learned efficiency,” Zorar whispered, as if the companion might hear and understand her. “Or... mercy.”

“Mercy!” Yalnis exclaimed. “Cruelty and sarcasm, more likely.”

“She killed Zorargul,” Zorar said. “This one, mine, she left paralyzed. Impotent.”

Yalnis imagined: Zorargul, cut off from her, unable to communicate with either pleasure or memory, parasitic, its pride destroyed. She gazed at Zorar with astonishment and pity, and she flushed with embarrassment. She had felt piqued when Zorar created Zorargul with a secondary little face, instead of with her first companion. Now Yalnis knew why.

Yalnis laid her hand on Zorar’s. Her own fingers touched the downy fur of the damaged companion. Involuntarily, she shuddered. Zorar glanced away.

Could I have kept Zorargul? Yalnis wondered. No matter how much I loved Zorar...

She thought Zorar was the bravest person she had ever met.

Would it be right to say so? She wondered. Any more right than to ask the questions I know not to ask: How could you—? Why didn’t you—?

“What do you think, now?” Zorar said.

“I’m outraged!” Yalnis said.

“Outraged enough to tell?”

“I told you.”

“You confessed to me. You confessed the death of Zorargul, as if it were your fault. Do you believe Seyyan, that you deceived her? Are you outraged enough to accuse her, instead of yourself?”

Yalnis sat quite still, considering. After a long while, she patted Zorar’s hand again, collected herself, and brushed her fingertips across Zorar’s companion’s hair with sympathy. She kissed Zorar quickly and returned to her own ship.

Preparations, messages of welcome to old acquaintances, greetings to new ones, occupied her. Zorar’s question always hovered in the back of her mind, and sometimes pushed itself forward to claim her attention:

What do you think, now?

While she prepared, the ships moved closer, extruded connections, grew together. Yalnis’ ship became the center, till the colony obscured her wide vistas of space and clouds of stars and glowing dust. She felt her ship’s discomfort at being so constricted; she shared it. She felt her ship’s exhilaration at intense genetic exchange: those sensations, she avoided.

She continued to ignore Seyyan, but never rescinded her invitation. Yalnis’ ship allowed no direct connection to Seyyan’s glittering craft. Seyyan remained on the outskirts of the colony, forming her own connections with others. The ships floated in an intricately delicate dance of balance and reciprocity. As the people exchanged greetings, reminiscences, gifts, the ships exchanged information and new genetic code.

Most of their communications were cryptic. Oftentimes even the ships had no idea what the new information would do, but they collected and exchanged it promiscuously, played with it, rearranged it, tested it. The shimmery pattern of rainbow reflections spread from Seyyan’s craft’s skin to another, and another, and the pattern mutated from solid to stripes to spots.

Yalnis’ ship remained its customary reflective silver.

“The ships have chosen a new fashion,” Yalnis said.

“True,” her ship said. Then, “False.”

Yalnis frowned, confused, as her ship displayed a genetic sequence and its genealogy tag. Yalnis left all those matters to the ship, so she took a moment to understand that her ship rejected the pattern because it descended from Seyyan’s craft. Her ship led her farther into its concerns, showing how many new sequences it had considered, but rejected and stopped taking in when it encountered Seyyan’s tag.

“Thank you,” Yalnis said.

“True.”

That was a long conversation, between ship and human. She was glad it had ended without misunderstanding.

The ship did understand “Thank you,” Yalnis believed, and Yalnis did understand its response of appreciation.

Maybe Seyyan was right, Yalnis said to herself. Maybe I am naive. I feared direct assault, but never thought of a sneak attack on my ship.

She wondered if her encounter with Seyyan had changed the balance between the two ships, or if their estrangement had its own source. She wondered if she should try to exclude Seyyan’s craft from the colony. But that would be an extreme insult, and Seyyan had more friends than Yalnis, and many admirers. She was older, wealthier, more experienced and accomplished, more limber of voice and of body.

“I trust your judgment,” she said, remaining within the relative safety of simple declarative statements. She would leave decisions about Seyyan’s craft to her own ship.

“True.”

The shimmering new fashion continued to extend from Seyyan’s to other craft, each vying with the next to elaborate upon her pattern.

Seyyan’s popularity created a second center for the colony, decreasing the stability of the delicate rotation, but there was nothing to be done about it. It was ships’ business, not people’s.

Yalnis was ready. She made her last decisions, dressed in intricate lace, took a deep, shaky breath, and welcomed her guests.

Zorar arrived first, too well-established to concern herself with being fashionably late. Yalnis embraced her, grateful for her presence. Zorar kissed her gently and handed her a sealed glass ampoule.

“For your daughter’s vineyard,” she said. “I think the culture’s improved even over what I gave your mother, when she launched you and your ship.”

“Thank you,” Yalnis said, honored by the gift. She put it on the central table, in a place of distinction.

More guests arrived; an hour passed in a blur of greetings, reunions, introductions, gifts. People brought works of art, stories, and songs. They brought ship silk as refined as fog, seeds of newly-adapted plants, embryos of newly-discovered creatures, unique cultures of yeast and bacteria. Yalnis accepted them all with thanks and gratitude. Her daughter would be well and truly launched; her ship would be rich, and unique.

Her guests ate and drank, wished each other long life and adventures, congratulated voyagers on their safe return. They exchanged compliments and gossip, they flirted, they told tales, they even bragged: Kinli had, of course, been on another great adventure that made all others pale by comparison. Guests complimented Yalnis’ ship’s cooking, especially the savory rabbit, and the complexity and quality of her wine. Everyone wore their best ship silk, and most, like Yalnis, wore lace so their companions could remain decently modest while watching the party. A few guests wore opaque garments to enforce a complete modesty; Yalnis thought the choice a little cruel. The very youngest people, recently debuted from solitary girl to adult, revealed their virgin midriffs.

Yalnis found herself always aware of the new connections leading from other ships to her living space. The openings, glowing in the cool pastels of biological light, changed her living area from one of comfortable intimacy to one of open vulnerability.

Zorar handed her a glass of wine. Yalnis had based the vintage on the yeast Zorar gave her ship when it, and Yalnis, were born and launched.

Yalnis sipped it, glanced around, swallowed a whole mouthful. The effects spread through her. The companions squeaked with pleasure, leaning into her, absorbing the alcohol, yearning. She brushed her hand across the lace of her shirt. She had been neglecting the companions, since Zorargul’s murder. She drank more wine, and Zorar refilled their glasses.

Yalnis blocked out the rising level of conversation. She was unused to noise, and it tired her.

“What do you think?” she said.

Zorar raised one eyebrow. “That’s the question I want you to answer.”

“Oh,” said Yalnis. “Yes, Of course.” She blushed at her misstep. “But I meant, about the wine.”

“It’s excellent,” Zorar said, “as you well know. Your ship is of a line that seldom makes a recombinant error, and I can only approve of the changes. What about Seyyan? Did you ban her?”

“No. I want her here. So she knows she failed. Maybe she banned herself.”

“Maybe she’s trying to unnerve you. Or to wait till you drink too much.”

Yalnis drained her glass again.

“Maybe if I do, I’ll be ready for her.”

She was ignoring the noise, but she noticed the sudden silence.

“And then I—” Kinli said, and stopped.

Seyyan stood in the largest new entryway, silhouetted by golden bioluminescence, her face shadowed, dramatized, by the softer party light. Yalnis’ heart pounded; her face flushed.

“I thought she was so beautiful,” Yalnis whispered to Zorar, amazed, appalled. She thought she whispered: a few people nearby glanced toward her, most amused, but one at least pale with jealousy for her relationship with the renowned adventurer.

If you only knew, Yalnis thought. I wonder what you’d think then?

Yalnis mourned the loss of the joy she had felt when Seyyan chose her, but she mourned the loss of Zorargul much more.

Seyyan strode into the party, greeting allies, her gaze moving unchecked past the few who had rejected her craft’s fashionable offerings. Misty ship silk flowed around her legs and hips, shimmering with the pattern that newly decorated the flanks of so many craft. No one else had thought to apply it to clothing. She wore a shawl of the same fabric around her shoulders, over her breasts, across her companions.

But her hands were empty of gifts. Yalnis declined to notice, but others did, and whispered, shocked.

Then she flung back the end of the shawl, revealing herself from breastbone to pubis.

She had accepted more companions since she was with Yalnis. She bore so many Yalnis could not count them without staring, and she would not stare. Her gaze hesitated only long enough to see that the son-spot had erupted and healed over.

The other guests did stare.

How could any person support so many companions? And yet Seyyan displayed health and strength, an overwhelming physical wealth.

She turned to draw another guest from the shadows behind her. Ekarete stepped shyly into the attention of the party. Ekarete, one of the newly debuted adults, already wore new lace. Seyyan bent to kiss her, to slip her hand beneath the filmy panel of her shirt, so everyone would know that if she had neglected a launching gift for Yalnis’ daughter, she had given a more intimate one to Ekarete.

Seyyan wanted Yalnis to know what had happened to the new companion, that she had easily found someone to accept it.

Seyyan whispered to Ekarete, drew her hand down her cheek, and continued toward Yalnis and Zorar. Ekarete followed, several steps behind, shy and attentive, excited and intimidated by her first adult gathering.

Seyyan’s first companion, the assassin, protruded all the way to the base of his neck, eyes wide, teeth exposed and snapping sharply. Her other companions, responding to him, gnashed their teeth and blinked their eyes.

“What a pleasant little party,” Seyyan said. “I so admire people who aren’t caught up in the latest fashion.”

“Do have some wine,” Yalnis said. She meant to speak in a pleasant tone, but her voice came out flat, and hard.

Seyyan accepted a glass, and sipped, and nodded. “As good as I remember.”

Yalnis wished for the ancient days Seyyan came from, when poison could still wreak havoc with a person’s biochemistry, undetected till too late. She wished for a poisoned apple, a single bite, and no one ever to kiss Seyyan again.

Maybe I can have that last wish, she thought, and took action on her decision.

She let Zorargul’s wound break open. The stab of pain struck through her. Her companions shrieked, crying like terrified birds, reacting to her distress. Blood blossomed through the lace panel of her shirt. All around her, people gasped.

Yalnis reached beneath the scarlet stain. Her hand slid across the blood on her skin. The wound gaped beneath her fingers.

 Her body had treated the capsule like an intrusion, an irritation, like the seed of a pearl. At the same time, the capsule struggled for its own survival, extending spines to remain in contact with her flesh. As it worked its way out, scraping her raw, she caught her breath against a whimper.

Finally the capsule dropped into her hand. She held it up. Her body had covered its extrusions with shining white enamel. All that remained of Zorargul was a sphere of bloody fangs. “This is your work, Seyyan,” she said. Blood flowed over her stomach, through her pubic hair, down her legs, dripping onto the rug, which absorbed it and carried it away. Yalnis went cold, light-headed, pale. She took courage from Zorar, standing at her elbow.

“You took me as your lover,” Seyyan said. “I thought you wanted me. I thought you wanted a companion from me. My lineage always fought for place and position.”

“I wasn’t at war with you,” Yalnis said. “I loved you. If you’d asked, instead of...” She glanced down at the gory remains.

“Asked?” Seyyan whispered. “But you asked me.”

Whispers, exclamations, agreement, objections all quivered around them.

Tasmin moved to stand near Seyyan, taking her side.

“You must have been neglectful,” she said to Yalnis. “I think you’re too young to support so many companions.”

Seyyan glanced at Tasmin, silencing her. Anyone could see that Yalnis was healthy, and well supplied with resources. She was her own evidence, and her ship the final proof.

As they confronted each other, the guests sorted themselves, most in a neutral circle, some behind Yalnis, more flanking Seyyan. Yalnis wished Shai had remained for the gathering. She might have sided with Seyyan, but the others might have seen her fear.

Ekarete, in her new lace shirt, moved shyly between the opponents.

“Seyyan was very gentle with me,” she whispered. “She acceded to my choice.” She twitched the hem of her shirt aside, just far enough, just long enough, to reveal the fading inflammation of a new attachment, and the golden skin and deep brown eyes of Seyyan’s offspring, Ekarete’s first little face.

“Very gentle,” Ekarete said again. “Very kind. I love her.”

“For giving you a cast-off?” Yalnis said. “For inducing you to take the companion I refused?”

Ekarete stared at her. Yalnis felt sorry for her, sorry to have humiliated her.

Tasmin stood forward with Ekarete. “Yalnis, you’re speaking out of grief,” she said. “You lost a companion—I grieve with you. But don’t blame Seyyan, or embarrass Ekarete. We all know Seyyan for her generosity. My daughter by her launched gloriously.”

“You’re hardly disinterested,” said Yalnis.

“But I am,” said Kinli, “and I know nothing against her.”

Yalnis started to say, When did you ever listen to anyone but yourself?

Zorar yanked up the hem of her shirt, revealing the scar and her emasculated companion with its drooping mouth and dull eyes. It roused far enough to bare its teeth. It drooled.

The older people understood; the younger ones started in horror at the mangled thing, heard quick whispers of explanation, and stared at Seyyan.

“I loved you, too,” Zorar said. “I told myself, it must have been my fault. I should have understood. I consoled you. After you did this.”

“I came for a celebration,” Seyyan said, holding herself tall and aloof. “I expect to be taken as I am—not ambushed with lies and insults.”

She spun, the hem of her dress flaring dramatically, and strode away.

Ekarete ran after her. Seyyan halted, angry in the set of her shoulders; she paused, softened, bent to speak, kissed Ekarete, and continued away, alone. The main entrance silhouetted her formidable figure as she left Yalnis’ ship.

Ekarete stood shivering, gazing after her, pulling the hem of her shirt down all the way around. Finally she scurried after her. Tasmin glared at Yalnis, heaved a heavy sigh, and followed.

The others, even Kinli, clustered around Yalnis and Zorar.

“You’ve spoiled your own party,” Kinli said, petulant. “What now? A permanent break? A feud?”

“I shun her,” Yalnis said.

“That’s extreme!”

Yalnis hesitated, hoping for support if not acclaim. She shrugged into the silence. “If the community doesn’t agree, why should she care if only I shun her?”

“And I,” Zorar said, which made more difference to more people.

The light of the connecting corridors faded as she spoke. The openings slowly ensmalled. No one had to be told the party had ended. The guests hurried to slip through the connections before they vanished. Their finery went dim.

All around, the tables resorbed into the floor, leaving crumbs and scraps and disintegrating utensils. The rug’s cilia carried them away in a slow-motion whirlpool of dissolving bits, into pores, to be metabolized. The gifts all sank away, to be circulated to the new ship.

Only Zorar remained. Yalnis’ knees gave out. She crouched, breathing hard, dizzy. Zorar knelt beside her.

“I’m—I have to—”

“Hush. Lie back.”

“But—”

“It’s waited this long. It can wait longer.”

Yalnis let Zorar ease her down. The ship received her, nestling her, creeping around and over her with its warm skin. The pain eased and the flow of blood ceased. The blood she had shed moved from her skin, from her clothes, red-brown drying specks flowing in tiny lines across the comforter, and disappeared.

She dozed, for a moment or an hour. When she woke, Zorar remained beside her.

“Thank you,” Yalnis whispered. She closed her eyes again. She desperately wanted to be alone.

Zorar kissed Yalnis and slipped through the last exit. It sealed itself, and disappeared.

Yalnis wanted only to go back to sleep. A thousand years might not be enough this time. She had never been among so many people for so long, and she had never been in such a confrontation. Exhaustion crept over her, but she must stay awake a little longer.

“I shun Seyyan,” she said. Her companions quivered at her distress.

“True,” the ship said, and let all its connections to all the other ships shrivel and drop away. The primary colony broke apart, resolving into individual ships. They moved to safer distances, and the stars reappeared above Yalnis’ living space.

Seyyan’s glittering secondary colony remained, with her craft protected in its center. None broke away to shun her. Yalnis turned her back on the sight. She no longer had anything to do with Seyyan.

“It’s time,” she said aloud.

“True,” her ship replied. It created a nest for her, a luxurious bed of ship silk. It dimmed the light, and mirrored the outer surface of the transparent dome. The stars took on a ghostly appearance. Yalnis could see out, but no one could see inside.

Yalnis pulled off her shirt. Her long hair tangled in it. Annoyed, she shook her hair free. She stepped out of her loose trousers. Naked, she reclined in the nest.

“Please, cut my hair.”

“True,” the ship said. The nest cropped her hair, leaving a cap of dark brown. The weight fell away; the strands moved across the carpet, fading to a dust of molecules.

Yalnis relaxed, gazed at her companions, and let her hand slide down her body. The little faces knew her intent. Each stretched itself to its greatest extent, into her and out of her, whispering and offering.

She made her choice.

Bahadirgul stretched up to seek her hand, moaning softly through its clenched sharp teeth. The other companions contracted, hiding their little faces in modesty or disappointment till they nearly disappeared. Yalnis stroked Bahadirgul’s head, its nape, and caressed its neck and shaft. She opened herself to her companion.

The pleasure started slowly, spreading from Bahadirgul’s attachment point deeper into her body. It reached the level of their ordinary couplings, which always gave Yalnis joy, and gave the companion days of pride and satiation. It continued, and intensified. Yalnis cried out, panting, arching her back. Bahadirgul shivered and extended. Yalnis and her companion released, and combined.

Their daughter formed. Yalnis curled up, quivering occasionally with a flush of pleasure, listening to their daughter grow. The pleasure faded to a background throb.

Inside her, her daughter grew.

Content, she nestled deeper into the ship silk and prepared to sleep.

Instead, the dome went transparent. Seyyan’s colony of connected ships gleamed in the distance. The connecting pili stretched thin, preparing to detach and resorb.

Yalnis sighed. Seyyan was none of her concern anymore. She had sworn to take no more notice of her.

What happened next, Yalnis would never forget, no matter how many millennia she lived or how many adventures filled her memory.

The connections deformed, shifted, arched in waves. They contracted, forcing the craft closer even as they tried to separate and depart.

Seyyan commanded her supporters, and they discovered the limits of their choices. They tried to free their ships, tried to dissolve the connections, but Seyyan drew them ever nearer.

Seyyan’s craft had infected their ships not only with beauty, but with obedience.

Tasmin’s craft, old and powerful, broke free. Its pilus tore, shredding and bleeding. Yalnis’ ship quivered in response to the sight or to a cry of distress imperceptible to people. The destruction and distraction allowed a few other people to overcome the wills of their craft and wrench away, breaking more connections. After the painful and distressing process, the freed craft fled into a wider orbit, or set a course to escape entirely from the star system, and from Seyyan.

Person and ship alike suffered when fighting the illness of a malignant genetic interchange. Yalnis hoped they would all survive.

“What’s she doing?” Yalnis whispered. Her ship interpreted her words, correctly, as a question for people, not for ships. It opened all her silenced message ports and let in exclamations, cries of outrage, excuses, argument, wild speculation.

Seyyan’s craft gleamed and shimmered and proclaimed its ascension and gathered the remaining captives into a shield colony. With its imprisoned allies, it moved toward Yalnis and her ship.

Yalnis went cold with fear, shock, and the responsibility for all that had happened: She had brought all the others here, she had succumbed to Seyyan and then challenged her, she had forced people to take sides.

“Seyyan infected their defenses,” Yalnis said. That’s what the fashionable pattern was for, she thought. A temptation, and a betrayal.

“True,” her ship replied.

Yalnis’ ship moved toward Seyyan’s craft. It quivered around her, like the companions within her. It had made its decision, a decision that risked damage. This was ship’s business. Yalnis could fight it, or she could add her will to her ship’s, and join the struggle. She chose her ship.

Zorar followed, and, reluctantly, so did Tasmin’s craft, its torn pili leaking fluid that broke into clouds of mist and dissipated in sunlit sparkles. The skin of the craft dulled to its former blue sheen, but patches of shimmering infection broke out, spread, contracted.

After all too brief a time, the stars vanished again, obscured by the coruscating flanks of Seyyan’s shield. Yalnis’ ship pushed dangerously into the muddle. Yalnis crouched beneath the transparent dome, overcome with claustrophobia. No escape remained, except perhaps for Seyyan.

Seyyan forced her captive allies to grow extensions, but when they touched Yalnis’ ship, they withdrew abruptly, stung by its immune response. In appreciation, Yalnis stroked the fabric of her ship.

“True,” her ship whispered.

Please, Yalnis thought, Seyyan, please, just flee. Let everyone go. Announce a new adventure. Declare that you’ve shamed me enough already, that you won our altercation.

She had no wish to speak to Seyyan, but she had an obligation. She created a message port. Seyyan answered, and smiled.

“Your shunning didn’t last long,” she said. “Shall I tell my friends to withdraw?”

Yalnis flushed, embarrassed and angry, but refused to let Seyyan divert her.

“What do you want?” Yalnis cried. “Why do you care anymore what I think? Leave us all alone. Go on more of your marvelous and legendary adventures—”

“Flee?” Seyyan said. “From you?”

Ekarete’s craft, willingly loyal to Seyyan, interposed itself between Seyyan and Yalnis. A pore opened in its skin. A spray of scintillating liquid exploded outward, pushed violently into vacuum by the pressure behind it. The fluid spattered over the dome of Yalnis’ ship. It spread, trying to penetrate, trying to infect. Yalnis flinched, as if the stuff could reach her.

Her ship shuddered. Yalnis gasped. The temperature in her living space rose: her ship’s skin reacted to the assault, marshalling a powerful immune response, fighting off the infection. The foreign matter sublimated, rose in a foggy sparkle, and dispersed.

Seyyan lost patience. The flank of her craft bulged outward, touching Ekarete’s. It burst, like an abscess, exploding ship’s fluids onto the flank of Ekarete’s craft. The lines of fluid solidified in the vacuum and radiation of space, then contracted, pulling the captive craft closer, drawing it in to feed upon. Ekarete’s craft, its responses compromised, had no defense.

“Seyyan!” Ekarete cried. “I never agreed—How—” And then, “Help us!”

Seyyan’s craft engulfed Ekarete’s, overwhelming the smaller ship’s pattern variations with the stronger design. The captive ship matched the captor, and waves of color and light swept smoothly from one across the other.

“You must be put away,” Yalnis said to Seyyan, and ended their communication forever.

Tasmin’s craft, its blue skin blotched with shimmer, its torn connections hovering and leaking, approached Seyyan’s craft.

“Don’t touch it again!” Yalnis cried. “You’ll be caught too!”

“She must stop,” Tasmin said, with remarkable calm.

Yalnis took a deep breath.

“True,” she said. Her ship responded to her assent, pressing forward.

To Tasmin, she said, “Yes. But you can’t stop her. You can only destroy yourself.”

Tasmin’s ship decelerated and hovered, for Seyyan had already damaged it badly.

A desperate pilus stretched from the outer flank of Ekarete’s ship. Yalnis allowed it to touch, her heart bounding with apprehension. Her ship reached for it, and the connecting outgrowths met. Her ship declined to fuse, but engulfed the tip to create a temporary connection. It opened its outgrowth, briefly, into Yalnis’ living room.

The outlines of the younger craft blurred as Seyyan’s ship incorporated it, dissolved it, and took over its strength. Its pilus pulled away and sank into the substance of Seyyan’s craft. Air rushed out of Yalnis’ ship, and then went still as the ship clenched the opening closed.

Ekarete squeezed inside, naked, crying, her hair flying in all directions. She held her hand over her stomach, modestly covering the little face of her companion, muffling its squeals and the clash of its sharp teeth.

Maybe it will bite her, Yalnis thought, distracted, and chided herself for the uncharitable thought.

“How could she, how could she?” Ekarete said.

“Yalnis,” Zorar said from the depths of her own ship, “What are you doing? What should I do?”

“Come and get me if we dissolve,” Yalnis said. And then she wondered, Could I leave my ship, if Seyyan bests us? Should I?

If Seyyan had been patient, Yalnis thought, she might have persuaded her friends to defend her willingly. If she’d asked them, they might have agreed I’d outraged her unjustly. If she’d trusted them, they might have joined her out of love.

No shield colony had existed in Yalnis’ lifetime, or in the memories of the lovers whose companions she had accepted: no great danger had threatened any group of people. A shield was a desperate act, a last effort, an assault. Extricating and healing the ships afterward was a long and expensive task. But Seyyan’s friends might have done it willingly, for Seyyan’s love. Instead they tore themselves away from her, one by one, desperately damaging themselves to avoid Ekarete’s fate, but weakening Seyyan as well.

They dispersed, fleeing. Seyyan’s craft loomed, huge and old, sucking in the antennae desperately growing outward from the vestiges of Ekarete’s craft.

Ekarete cried softly as her ship vanished.

“Do be quiet,” Yalnis said.

Until the last moment of possibility, Yalnis hoped Seyyan would relent. Yalnis and Zorar and Tasmin, and a few others, hovered around her, but she had room to escape. Seyyan’s former allies gathered beyond the first rank of defense, fearful of being trapped again, but resolving to defend themselves.

Yalnis’ ship emitted the first wave of ship silk, a silver plume of sticky fibers that caught against the other ship and wrapped around its skin. Yalnis’ ship balanced itself: action and reaction.

The other ships followed her lead, spraying Seyyan’s craft with plume after plume: silver, scarlet, midnight blue, ultraviolet, every color but the holographic pattern their defenses covered. Seyyan’s craft reacted, but the concerted effort overwhelmed it. It drew inward, shrinking from the touch of the silk to avoid allergic reaction. Gradually it disappeared beneath the layers of solidifying color.

Yalnis listened for a plea, a cry for mercy, even a shout of defiance. But Seyyan maintained a public silence.

Is she secretly giving orders to her allies? Yalnis wondered. Does she have allies anymore? She glanced over her shoulder at Ekarete.

Ekarete, creeping up behind her, launched herself at Yalnis, her teeth bared in an eerie mirror of her angry companion’s. She reached for Yalnis’ face, her hand pouring blood, and they fell in a tangle. Yalnis struggled, fending off Ekarete’s fists and fingernails, desperate to protect her tiny growing daughter, desperate to defend her companions against Ekarete’s, which was after all the spawn of Seyyan and her murderous first companion.

All the companions squealed and gnashed their teeth, ready to defend themselves, as aware of danger as they were of opportunity.

“Why are you doing this?” Yalnis cried. “I’m not your enemy!”

“I want my ship! I want Seyyan!”

“It’s gone! She’s gone!” Yalnis wrestled Ekarete and grabbed her, holding tight and ducking her head as Ekarete slapped and struck her. The companions writhed and lunged at their opponent. Their movements gave Yalnis weird sensations of sexual arousal and pleasure in the midst of anger and fear.

The floor slipped beneath her, startling her as it built loose lobes of ship silk. She grabbed one and flung herself forward, pulling the gossamer fabric over Ekarete, letting go, rolling free, leaving Ekarete trapped. The silk closed in. Yalnis struggled to her feet, brushing her hand across her stomach to reassure herself that her companions and her daughter remained uninjured. She wiped sweat from her face and realized it was not sweat, but blood, not Ekarete’s but her own, flowing from a stinging scratch down her cheek.

Both she and her ship had been distracted. Seyyan’s craft struggled against a thin spot that should have been covered by more silver silk from Yalnis’ ship. The tangled shape rippled and roiled and the craft bulged to tear at the restraint. Glowing plasma from the propulsion system spurted in tiny jets beneath the surface of the silk. The craft convulsed. Yalnis flinched, to think of the searing plasma trapped between the craft’s skin and the imprisoning cover.

“Finish it,” Yalnis said to her ship. “Please, finish it.” Tears ran hot down her face. Ekarete’s muffled cries and curses filled the living space, and Yalnis’ knees shook.

“True,” her ship said. A cloak of silver spread to cover the weak spot, to seal in the plasma.

The roiling abruptly stopped.

Yalnis’ friends flung coat after coat of imprisoning silk over Seyyan’s craft until they were all exhausted.

When it was over, Yalnis’ ship accelerated away with the last of its strength. Her friends began a slow dispersal, anxious to end the gathering. Seyyan’s craft drifted alone and silent, turning in a slow rotation, its glimmer extinguished by a patchwork of hardening colors.

Yalnis wondered how much damage the plasma had done, how badly Seyyan’s craft had been hurt, and whether it and Seyyan had survived.

“Tasmin,” she said, quietly, privately, “will you come for Ekarete? She can’t be content here.”

Ekarete was a refugee, stripped of all her possessions, indigent and pitiable, squeaking angrily beneath ship silk like a completely hidden companion.

After a hesitation Yalnis could hardly believe, or forgive, Tasmin replied.

“Very well.”

Yalnis saw to her ship. Severely depleted, it arced through space in a stable enough orbit. It had expended its energy and drawn on its structural mass. Between defending itself and the demands of its unborn daughter ship, it would need a long period of recovery.

She sent one more message, a broadcast to everyone, but intended for Seyyan’s former friends.

“I haven’t the resources to correct her orbit.” She felt too tired even to check its stability, and reluctant to ask her ship to exert itself. “Someone who still cares for her must take that responsibility.”

“Let me up!” Ekarete shouted. Yalnis gave her a moment of attention.

“Tasmin will be here soon,” Yalnis said. “She’ll help you.”

“We’re bleeding.”

Yalnis said, “I don’t care.”

She pulled her shirt aside to see to her own companions. Three of the four had retracted, showing only their teeth. She stroked around them till they relaxed, dozed, and exposed the tops of their downy little heads, gold and copper and softly freckled. Only Bahadirgul, ebony against Yalnis’ pale skin, remained bravely awake and alert.

Drying blood slashed its mouth, but the companion itself had sustained only a shallow scratch. Yalnis petted the soft black fur of Bahadirgul’s hair.

“You’re gallant,” Yalnis said. “Yes, gallant. I made the right choice, didn’t I?” Bahadirgul trembled with pleasure against her fingers, within her body.

When Bahadirgul slept, exhausted and content, Yalnis saw to her daughter, who grew unmolested and unconcerned; she saw to herself and to her companions, icing the bruises of Ekarete’s attack, washing her scratches and the companion’s. She looked in the mirror and wondered if she would have a scar down her cheek, across her perfect skin.

And, if I do, will I keep it? she wondered. As a reminder?

As she bathed and put on new clothes, Tasmin’s ship approached, sent greetings, asked for permission to attach. Yalnis let her ship make that decision, and felt relieved when the ship approved. A pilus extended from Tasmin’s ship; Yalnis’ ship accepted it. Perhaps it carried some risk, but they were sufficiently exhausted that growing a capsule for Ekarete’s transport felt beyond their resources.

As the pilus widened into a passage, Zorar whispered to her through a message port, “Shall I come and help? I think I should.”

“No, my friend,” Yalnis whispered in reply. “Thank you, but no.”

Tasmin entered, as elegant and perfect as ever. Yalnis surprised herself by taking contrary pride in her own casual appearance. Zorar’s concern and worry reached her. Yalnis should be afraid, but she was not.

“Please release Ekarete,” she said to her ship.

“True,” it said, its voice soft. The net of silk withdrew, resorbed. As soon as one hand came free, Ekarete clutched and scratched and dragged herself loose. She sprang to her feet, blood-smeared and tangle-haired.

She took one step toward Yalnis, then stopped, staring over Yalnis’ shoulder.

Yalnis glanced quickly back.

As if deliberately framed, Seyyan’s craft loomed beyond the transparent dome of the living space, bound in multi-colored layers of the heaviest ship silk, each layer permeated with allergens particular to the ship that had created it. Seyyan’s craft lay cramped within the sphere, shrinking from its painful touch, immobilized and put away until time wore the restraints to dust.

Ekarete keened with grief. The wail filled Yalnis’ hearing and thickened the air.

Tasmin hurried to her, putting one arm around her shaking shoulders, covering her with a wing of her dress.

“Take her,” Yalnis said to Tasmin. “Please, take her.”

Tasmin turned Ekarete and guided her to the pilus. The connection’s rim had already begun to swell inward, as Yalnis’ ship reacted to the touch of Tasmin’s with inflammation. Tasmin and Ekarete hurried through, and disappeared.

Seyyan’s former friends would have to decide how to treat Ekarete. They might abandon her, adopt her, or spawn a new craft for her. Yalnis had no idea what they would choose to do, whether they would decide she was pure fool for her loyalty, or pure hero for the same reason.

When the connector had healed over, leaving the wall a little swollen and irritated, when Tasmin’s ship moved safely away, Yalnis took a long deep breath and let it out slowly. Silence and solitude calmed her.

“It’s time, I think,” she said aloud.

“True,” replied her ship.

Yalnis descended to the growing chamber, where the daughter ship lay fat and sleek, bulging toward the outer skin. It had formed as a pocket of Yalnis’ ship, growing inward. A thick neck connected the two craft, but now the neck was thinning, with only an occasional pulse of nutrients and information. The neck would part, healing over on the daughter’s side, opening wide on the outer skin of Yalnis’ ship.

Yalnis stepped inside for the first, and perhaps the only, time.

The living space was very plain, very beautiful in its elegant simplicity, its walls and floor a black as deep and vibrant as space without stars. Its storage bulged with the unique gifts Yalnis’ guests had brought: new foods, new information, new bacteria, stories, songs, and maps of places unimaginably distant.

The soft silver skin of Yalnis’ ship hugged it close, covering its transparent dome.

The new ship awoke to her presence. It created a nest for her. She cuddled into its alien warmth, and slept.

She woke to birth pangs, her own and her ship’s. Extensions and monitors retracted from her body.

“Time for launch,” she said to her ship.

“True,” it said, without hesitation or alternation. It shuddered with a powerful labor pang. It had recovered its strength, during the long rest.

“Bahadirgul,” Yalnis said, “it’s time.”

Bahadirgul yawned hugely, blinked, and came wide awake.

Yalnis and Bahadirgul combined again. The pleasure of their mental combining matched that of their physical combining, rose in intensity, and exceeded it. At the climax, they presented their daughter with a copy of Yalnis’ memories and the memories of her lover Bahadir.

A moment of pressure, a stab of pain—

Yalnis picked up the blinking gynuncula. Her daughter had Bahadir’s ebony skin, and hair of deepest brown, and Yalnis’ own dark blue eyes. Delighted, she showed her to Bahadirgul, wondering, as she always did, how much the companion understood beyond pleasure, satiation, and occasional fear or fury. It sighed and retreated to its usual position, face exposed, calm. The other companions hissed and blinked and looked away. Yalnis let the mesh of her shirt slip over their faces.

Yalnis carried her daughter through the new ship, from farm space to power plant, pausing to wash away the stickiness of birth in the pretty little bathing stream. The delicate fuzz on her head dried as soft as fur.

The daughter blinked at Yalnis. Everyone said a daughter always knew her mother from the beginning. Yalnis believed it, looking into the new being’s eyes, though neither she nor anyone she knew could recall that first moment of life and consciousness.

By the time she returned to the living space at the top of the new ship, the connecting neck had separated, one end healing against the daughter ship in a faint navel pucker, the other slowly opening to the outside. Yalnis’ ship shuddered again, pushing at the daughter ship. The transparent dome pressed out, to reveal space and the great surrounding web of stars.

Yalnis’ breasts ached. She sank cross-legged on the warm midnight floor and let her daughter suck, giving her a physical record of dangers and attractions as she and Bahadirgul had given her a mental record of the past.

“Karime,” Yalnis whispered, as her daughter fell asleep. Above them the opening widened and the older ship groaned and the new ship quaked, as it pressed out into the world.

“Karime, daughter, live well,” Yalnis said.

She gave her daughter to her ship’s daughter, placing the chubby sleeping creature in the soft nest. She petted the ship-silk surface.

“Take good care of her,” she said.

“True,” the new ship whispered.

Yalnis smiled, stood up, watched the new ship cuddle the new person for a moment, then hurried through the interior connection before it closed.

She slipped out, glanced back to be sure all was well, and returned to her living space to watch.

Yalnis’ ship gave one last heavy shudder. The new ship slipped free.

It floated nearby, getting its bearings, observing its surroundings. Soon—staying near another ship always carried an element of danger, as well as opportunity—it whispered into motion, accelerating itself carefully toward a higher, more distant orbit.

Yalnis smiled at its audacity. Farther from the star, moving through the star’s dust belt, it could collect mass and grow quickly. In a thousand, perhaps only half a thousand, orbits, Karime would emerge to take her place as a girl of her people.

“We could follow,” Yalnis said. “Rest, recoup...”

“False,” her ship whispered, displaying its strength, and its desire, and its need. “False, false.”

“We could go on our adventure.”

“True,” her ship replied, and turned outward toward the web of space, to travel forever, to feast on stardust.

It's one of those days, rainy and dull, when you remember all the times you said or did the wrong thing, or somebody else said the wrong thing to you, or insulted you, or you insulted them, or they forgot you altogether, or you forgot them when you should have remembered. One of those days when everything you say is misunderstood. Everything you pick up you drop. You knock things over. You slip and fall. And your nose is running, your throat is sore. And it's your birthday. You're a whole 'nother year older. At your age, one more year makes a big difference.

At least I'm alone. No need to bother anyone else with myself, and my temper, my moods, my dithering and doubts, my yackety-yacking when others want to keep quiet. And my voice is too loud. I laugh when nothing's funny.

Having had a night of nightmares about what might have happened if this or if that bad thing had come about. (Good no one's here, because I would be telling them the whole dream detail by detail.) Stop me if I go nattering on. I talk and talk even when I mean to keep quiet. Especially when I mean to be quiet.

There ought to be something else to talk about that wouldn't be my long, long dream or the weather, where the sunshine, gruesome and garish, causes spots before my eyes. It's time to go somewhere. Anyplace else is better than here. It will be a makeshift journey. No purpose except to get away. I didn't pack. I didn't plan. I won't bring a map. I can't depend on strangers because of my beady eyes. I have a mean smile.

You see, this evening I was sitting in the window of my cottage looking out at my piece of desert with squawking quail in it. (Tobacco! Tobacco!) I was thinking to write a story about somebody who needs to change (the best sort of character to write about), and all of a sudden I knew it was me who had to change. Always had been, and I didn't realize it until that very minute. So I have to be the one to go on a journey, either of discovery or in order to avoid myself.

I won't pack a lunch. I won't bring a bottle of water. I know I don't look my best but I don't even want to. My hair. . . . I don't want to think about it.

If you crawl out the hole in the back fence, right away you're on the road to town. "A pointless coming and going," they'll say, and I'll say, "That's exactly what I'm after." I've lived all this time a different kind of pointless coming and going: Concerts and plays and then reading all the books one should read—that everybody else was reading, so how could you not read them? But this will be a different kind of pointless. I don't care what they think.

They!

Why can't they just take me for granted like most children do? Being chased by your own children. How could that happen? Being followed and watched.

I suppose to catch me out, non compos mentis. Mentos? If that's what it's called. Mentis sanos? If I can remember the words for it, how can it be true? Except I don't remember.

They'll see me if I leave in the daytime.

It's one of those nights with a fingernail moon. It's one of those nights with a cold wind. Who'd expect Grandma to be out in this weather and at this hour? Who'd expect Grandma to be walking down the road to town, leaning against the wind. (It's been a long time since I was allowed to drive.)

That's my son behind the arborvitae. My middle daughter by the carport. (Carport without a car.) I see her shadow. My oldest? I don't know where she is.

"Mama, you're not as young as you think you are." (I am. I am. Exactly as young as I think I am. I'm maybe even a little more so.)

I'll be set upon by this and that. Snarling dogs let free to roam at night. Maybe there's other snarling people like myself out here. Hard rain or hail. Smells that sting the nose. Sky, a preposterous overdose of stars. If I fall asleep behind a creosote bush, what will come get me?

I suppose I ought to trust in some sort of god or other. There's one under every bush. At least I hope so. Feats of faith. I can do that.

Here I am, gone. Forever. So far, forever. I regret my books. The children will keep all the wrong ones. The good ones will get thrown in the garbage. My best scarf—they'll think it's just any old scarf. They don't know I got it from my own grandma. I told them, but they forget.

What I've done for them! It was endless! Of course that was a long time ago.

But after that, what I've done for my art! If that is art. I don't know what to call it. I could call it leisure time. My hard-working leisure time. Most of it spent looking out the window.

But art is . . . was my life. I mean looking out the window so as to think about it was.

I always had plenty of ideas. I didn't exactly have them. They grew—little by little, a half an idea at a time. First, part of a phrase and then a person to go with it. After a person, then a little corner of a place for the person to be in.

Can I make it through town before morning? It's six miles to the other end of it. If I do, I might be able to get my usual nap. I could rest in the ditch by the side of the road.

I've disguised myself. Big floppy hat, sand-colored bathrobe. . . . (I forgot not to wear my slippers.) I had a hard time deciding how I could be unobtrusive and yet not be like myself, because I've always tried to look unobtrusive. There's those earth colors which I always wear anyway.

I already stay in the corners and the shadows. I already never look people in the eye. I already hunch over. Now I'm shuffling because my slippers keep falling off.

I hear footsteps. When I stop to listen, they stop, too. I knew one of them would follow. I wonder which it is? You can't get rid of your children.

"I'm laughing at you . . . whoever you are. Ha, ha, ha. Hear that?"

Well, I can't keep stopping and listening and laughing all the time. I'd never get anywhere. I have to keep going if I want to get somewhere or other in time for anything at all. It's bad enough when your slippers won't stay on.

If I had a diary, I'd write: Next Day, or, Day Two. (I'd have to write the days that way because I don't know the date, I hardly even know if spring or summer, but that's not a sign of non compose . . . whatever . . . because I never did pay attention to things like that.)

I'd write: Had a nice nap by the side of the road, and that I don't know if long or short, but a nice one. (With my sand-colored bathrobe I'll bet I looked like a pinkish/tan rock.) I'd write how I must begin working on myself. They say writing things down is a good way to begin, so I'll do that. Or will when I get the diary.

If I'd brought money I could have bought one in town. Except I went through town at about dawn and the stores were closed. (If I'd brought a watch I'd know when.)

Whoever is following me has not made themselves known except in rustlings and snappings and scuffling sounds. I have to admit I'm a little bit scared. Living in a clearing in a forest might be nice. A mountain pass would be nice, too. I'd like a view. A view can make you happy. And with a view you'd be able to see who's creeping up on you.

I've decided. I turn, sharp left, leave the road, and start straight up. It's hard going in these slippers but I have a purpose. I'm taking charge of my own life. I know exactly what I'm doing, and when, and how much and why, and the time, which is right now.

It's a cute . . . you could call it a cute pass, up there where I'm heading. The cliff walls on each side hug a marshy spot. There's an overhang to sleep under. Old icy snow to chew on. Though it's high, it's sheltered enough for there to be fairly large trees. The ground glitters all over as if with tiny chunks of gold. (If it was gold, it would be gone.) There's things to eat. I'll nibble lambs quarters and purslane. Do they grow up there? I'm probably thinking of the olden days back East. Anyway, there's wild rose hips, so small I wonder that I've ever bothered eating them but I always do.

Even from here, well below that pass, you can see fairly far. I study the landscape. The orange lichen that dots the boulders looks like something left in the refrigerator too long. The sky looks as if it's got the measles.

I see movement on the hillside below me. For sure there's something down there. I catch glimpses from the corner of my eye.

It's inevitable, your children will track you down. There they are. I didn't actually see them, but something is out there, I'm sure of it, creeping up on me. What do they want? What do they have in store for me? If they can catch me. Of course it is my birthday—or was, a couple of days ago. Perhaps they want to have a surprise party. Perhaps their arms are full of presents, paper hats, tape recorders for the music for dancing. . . . What if they're bringing champagne? What a lot to carry! No wonder they haven't been able to catch me.

If they bring me sweets, they'll have forgotten I can't eat chocolate. If blouses, they'll be too big. (A mother is supposed to be bigger than the children, but they forget I'm the smallest now.) If paper hats, I suppose I'll have to put one on. If horns, I suppose I'll have to blow one.

Maybe, if I can get far enough ahead, they'll give up. I try to hurry but it's getting steeper. At least, if they're carrying all those things, they're having a hard time, too. The champagne will be the heaviest. I suppose they'll have those plastic champagne glasses you have to put together, and I suppose they think that'll be a good job for Grandma. I won't do it. They can't make me.

If I did have a diary, and if I did write anything in it, it would be misunderstood anyway, just like everything I say is, so the first thing I'd write (page one, January first) should be: That isn't what I mean at all.

But I'd rather write about how my feet hurt and how it looks like rain.

Once I get up there, I may have to stay forever. I might not be able to climb down. A long time ago when I was still spry, I came up to that very spot to die, but I didn't die after all. I waited and waited but nothing happened except I had my usual dizzy spell. I had to climb back down, though I had to wait until the spell passed. Good I hadn't told anybody.

This time I haven't thought (even at my age!) about what would be the best way to die. I know I should, but, after I didn't die back then at the top of my favorite pass, thinking about it began to seem a waste of valuable time. I was contemplating art. That seemed the important thing to do.

But, from now on, what to hope for out of life (and art)? Or is it the art part that's done with? I'm still full of longing . . . so much longing . . . for. . . . I don't know what, but I'm breathless with it.

I lie down with a rock for a pillow. I rest a long time. When I wake up, I think: Day two or day three or day four? Even if I had a diary I'd be all mixed up already.

But now I'm thinking perhaps my own attic is the best place to disappear into. I could go down to the kitchen any time I wanted. I could get clean underwear. They say, "East or West, home is best."

I start back. It'll be easier going down because I won't keep stepping out of my slippers all the time.

Something streaks by. Lights up the whole sky. Dizzying, dazzling even in the daytime. (Talk about spots in front of your eyes!) Well now, there's something beautiful. One nice thing is happening on my birthday. (If it still is my birthday.)

The ground shakes. Boulders come bounding down—whole sides of mountains. . . . Who would have thought it, the end of the world as if just for me. Right on time, too, before my slippers give out entirely. We're all going together, the whole world and me. Isn't that nice! Best of all, I'm in at the end. I won't have to miss all the funny things that might have happened later had the world lasted beyond me. So, not such a bad birthday after all.

The Duke was an old man, and his young wife had never known him when his hair grew dark and heavy, and lay across the breasts of his many lovers like a mantle.

She was a foreigner, and so she did not understand, when he'd come home to his city to die, and the nursing of him through his final illness began to tax her strength, why his relations were so concerned to help her in the choosing of a manservant to attend him.

"Let him be pretty," said gentle Anne with a blush.

"But not too pretty." Sharp Katherine flashed her a look.

"By all means," the young wife said, "why not let him be as pretty as may be, if it will please my husband, so long as he is strong and careful?"

And since neither one would answer her, nor even look at her nor at each other, she chose a lovely young man whose name was Anselm. She did not know how badly he had wanted the job.

Anselm had a steady hand and clear eyes. He could fold linen and pour medicine, slip a shirt on and off with a minimum of fuss, and wield a razor quickly and efficiently. The Duke insisted on being presentable at all times, although he was no longer able to go anywhere. In his youth, the Duke's cuffs had foamed with lace, breaking like waves over the backs of his hands. His hands had been thin then, but they were thinner now.

Now the old Duke lay in the bed he had not lain in for twenty years, in the house he had built, furnished and decorated and then abandoned. In a time when today's young lovers were not yet born, the Duke had left his city and his rights and his duties to follow his lover, the first and oldest and best, to a far island where they might live at last for love, although the word was never spoken.

Sitting by him on the bed, his young wife said to the Duke, "There was an old woman outside, waiting for me in the doorway of your house. She took me by the wrist; quite strong, her fingers. 'Is he in there?' she asked me. 'Is he? They say he's come back home. They say that he is in there dying.'"

The Duke's smile had always been thin as a whip. "I hope you told her they were right."

His wife pressed his hand. She loved him helplessly and entirely. She was to be the last of his loves. Knowing it comforted her only a little; sometimes, not at all.

"Go and dress," he told her. "It will take you longer than you think to dress for the sort of party you are going to tonight."

She hated to leave him. "My maid can lace me up in no time."

"There's still your hair, and the jewels and the shoes. . . . You'll be surprised."

"I want to stay with you." She snuggled into the bony hollow of his shoulder. "Suppose you're hungry, or the pain starts up again?"

"Anselm will bring me what I need." The Duke twined his fingers in her hair, stroking her scalp. "Besides, I want to see if they fitted it properly."

"I don't care. I'm sure it's a beautiful gown; you chose it."

The stroking stilled. "You must care. They must learn to know you, and to respect you."

She said, "At home, no one could respect a wife who left her husband to go to a party when he was—when he was ill."

"Well, things are different here. I told you they would be."

It was true. But she would come with him. Five years ago, she had married a stranger, a man wandering her island half-crazed with the loss of his lover, the oldest and the best. In her village, she was past the age of being wed. But it was only that she had been waiting for him: a man who saw her when he looked at her. He surprised her with her own desires, and how they could be satisfied.

That he had once been a duke in a foreign country was a surprise he'd saved for the end. The rings on his hands, which he'd never removed, not even in his grief, he wanted to return to his family himself. She had begged to come with him on this final journey, although they both knew that it would end with him leaving her there alone. She wanted to see his people, to visit the places he had known; to hear him remember them there. She wanted his child to be born in the house of his fathers.

The last jewel was set in place on his wife's gown, the last curl pinned, the last flower arranged to suit the Duke's discerning eye. Exotic and stylish, livid and bright, the Duke's foreign wife went off in the carriage in a clatter of hooves and outriders, a blazon of flambeaux.

Candles were lit by the Duke's bed. Anselm sat quietly in a shadowed corner of the room.

"My wife," the Duke said, his eyes shut, white face against white pillow, "was the daughter of a great physician. He taught her all he knew, passed on to her his philtres and potions. She was justly proud, and healed a king with them. She loved a boy, a nobleman, but he was haughty, and did not return her love, nor could she make him. There are no philtres for that, whatever anyone may tell you." His own laugh made him catch his breath in pain. "Nor for this. It vexes her. And me."

Anselm said, "I wish it could be otherwise."

The Duke said dryly, "You're very kind. So do I. I suppose, being old, I should be graceful about it, and pretend not to mind much. But I have never lived to gratify others."

"No," said the lovely servant, whose loveliness went unnoticed. The Duke's eyelids were thin, almost blue, stretched over his eyes. His mouth was stiff with pain. "You caused some trouble in your time. "

The taut face softened for a moment. "I did."

Anselm approached him with a drink poured into a silver cup. The cup was engraved with the Duke's family crest, a swan. There was no telling how old it was.

The Duke was tall, long-boned. There was not much flesh left on him and his skin was dry and parchment-thin. Anselm held him while he took the drink. It was like holding the mirror of a shadow: light instead of dark, edged instead of flat.

"Thank you," said the Duke. "That ought to help, for awhile. I will sleep, I think. When she comes home, I want to hear what happened at the party. Something is bound to have, her first time out."

"You want to cause some trouble now, do you?" his servant gently teased.

The thin lips smiled. "Maybe." Then, "No. Not now. What would be the use?"

"What was the use then?"

"I wanted . . . to be amused."

Closer now, the planes of his own face gilded by candlelight, Anselm said, "Men died for you."

"Not for me. For him."

"He killed them for you."

"Yesss . . ." a long breath of satisfaction.

Anselm leaned closer. "And you remember. I know you do. You were there. You saw it all. How they were good, but he was the best." His strong hand was dark against the linen sheet. "There is no swordsman like him now."

"But there never was." The Duke's voice was stretched so thin that Anselm, bending close, must hold his breath to hear. "There never was anyone like him."

"And will not be again, I think." Anselm said as softly, and as much to himself.

"Never."

The Duke lay back, his color gone, and the pillow engulfed him, welcoming him back to his new world, the world of brief strengths and long weaknesses.

Still glittering with finery, and the kiss of wine and rich company, the Duke's wife returned to him, to find out whether he slept, or whether he waited for her in the darkness.

From the huge bed his thin, dry voice said, "You smell of revelry."

She struck a light, revealing herself in splendor. The flowers were only a little withered at her breast. Despite the scratch of lace and the weight of gold, she settled herself beside him on the bed. "Ah! That's good, now I no longer need to be held up." She sighed as he slowly unlaced her stays. "I pretended—" She stopped, then went on, shyly, determined not to be afraid of him, "I told myself they are your hands, keeping my back straight before them all."

He chuckled. "And were people so hard on you?"

"They stare so! It is not polite. And they say things I do not understand. About each other, about you . . ."

"What about me?"

"I don't know. I don't understand it. Empty, pointless things that are supposed to mean more than they say. How you must find the city changed, and old friends gone."

"All true. I hope you were not too bored."

She pinched his shoulder. "Now you sound like them! No, I was not bored. I even got a compliment. An old man with diamonds and bad teeth said I was a great improvement on your first wife. He had very poor color—liver, I should think," she added hurriedly, having spoken of something she had intended not to.

"Yes," her husband said, impervious. "They can forgive me a foreigner better than they can an actress. Or maybe I finally merit pity, not censure, because I am sicker than any of them would like to be. Maybe that's all it is." His ruminations gave way to a story, more disjointed than he intended, a tale of past insult, of revenge. A lover spurned, the Duke's first wife publicly hissed; a young man's anger and the answer of money and steel. Blood and no healing, only scars closing over a dirty wound.

These were not stories that she had heard before, on the sunny island where they had been wed among the bees' hum and the thyme. They did not even describe a man she knew.

Lying undressed in the dark, next to his thin and burning body, she wondered for the first time if they had been right to come here to this place of his past.

His hand moved, half-aware, to her shoulder blade, cupping it like a breast. Her whole body flushed with memory. She desired him suddenly, wanted her strong lover back. But she knew the disease, she knew its course, and clenched her heart around the knowledge that that would not happen. All that had passed between their bodies was done, now, and was growing in her belly. In the future it would comfort her, but not now.

"People do not forget," he said. She'd thought he was asleep, his breathing was so quiet.

"You," she said tenderly. "They do not forget you."

"Not me. Themselves. I was important only for what I made them feel. Remember that." His fingers tightened on her, urgent and unalluring. "And do not trust anyone from my past. They have no cause to love me."

"I love you."

A little later, he sighed in his sleep, and spoke the name of his first wife, while he held her. She felt her heart twist and turn over, close to the child she carried, so that there was room for little inside her but pain and love.

Physicians hoping to make their fame and fortunes came to bleed him.

"There isn't enough left of me as is," said the Duke. He sent his wife down to chase them all away, knowing it would give her satisfaction to have someone else to be angry with.

Anselm was shaving him, gently and carefully. "In the old days," Anselm said, "you would have had them skewered."

The Duke did not even smile. "No. He did not kill unarmed men. There was no challenge in it."

"How did you find challenges for him? Did you have a good eye?"

Now the old lips quirked. "You know—I must have. I never thought of it. But there was a certain kind of bully I delighted in provoking: the swaggering cocksure idiot who pushed everyone out of the way, and beat up on the girl who worked to keep him in funds. That sort generally carried a sword."

"And would you know now?" Anselm busied himself with cleaning the brushes. "Would you know a decent swordsman if you saw one—by the swagger, say, or by the stance?"

"Only," said the Duke, "if he were being particularly annoying. May I see that?"

When Anselm offered the brush for inspection, close, so the weak eyes could focus on it, the Duke closed his fingers around the young man's wrist. His touch was paper-dry. Anselm kept his arm steady, although his eyelids trembled, a fringe of dark lashes surrounding blue eyes so dark as to be almost violet.

"You have a good wrist," the Duke observed. "When do you practice?"

"In my room." Anselm swallowed. His skin was burning where the bony fingers barely touched it.

"Have you killed anyone?"

"No—not yet."

"They don't kill much, nowadays, I hear. Demonstration bouts, a little blood on the sleeve."

The Duke's wife came in at the door without knocking, full of her achievement. But the Duke held his servant's wrist for one moment more, and looked at his face, and saw that he was beautiful.

Visitors sometimes were allowed, although not the ones who promised a miracle cure. The pain came and went; the Duke took to asking his wife two and three times a day whether there were enough poppy juice in the house laid by. The medicine made his mind wander, so that he talked with ghosts, and she learned more of his past than sometimes she wanted to hear. When visitors came, people who were still alive, she often sat quietly in a corner of the room, willing herself invisible, to learn more. Other old men, more robust than her husband, she still found not half as beautiful. She wondered how he ever could have touched them, and tried to imagine them young and blooming.

Lord Sansome came to gloat, her husband said, or maybe to apologize; either way, it would be amusing to see what time had done with him. She thought admitting such a man unwise, but he made a nice change from the ghosts.

Sansome had bad teeth and a poor color, but he took the glass of wine that Anselm offered. The nobleman approved the young servant up and down. He settled by the bed with his gold-headed stick upright between his knees.

The Duke watched his visitor through half-lidded eyes; he was tired, but wanted no drugs until he'd gone.

Sansome uttered no commonplaces, nor was he offered any. And so there was silence until the Duke said, "Whatever you are thinking is probably true. Thank you for coming. It is prodigious kind."

His foreign wife didn't know what prodigious meant. It sounded like an insult; she readied herself for action. But Lord Sansome continued to sit.

The Duke closed his eyes but kept on talking: "I do not think that I am going to die while you sit there. Though I know it would please you greatly."

Across the room, Anselm made a noise that in a less well-bred servant would have been a snort. He busied himself with the brushes, so that all they could hear was their hush-hush-hush as he cleaned.

At last, Sansome spoke. "I thought you gone years ago. No one knew where you were. I thought you'd died of a broken heart."

"It mended."

"You told me you didn't have one."

"Wishful thinking. I see that yours beats on."

"Oh, yes." Sansome's thick-veined hands opened and closed on the gold ball of his stick. "Mine does. Though we never know what's around the corner, do we?"

"I believe I do."

"Perhaps something may yet surprise you." Unexpectedly, Lord Sansome smiled warmly at the Duke's manservant. Anselm looked annoyed.

"He's good with a blade," Sansome observed.

"You've had the pleasure?"

"Once or twice. A nice, close shave."

"Oh." The old Duke laughed, and kept on laughing at a joke no one else could see, until his breath drew in pain, and wife and servant shut him off from view while they held and gave him drink to ease him.

When Lord Sansome was gone, "People do not forget," the Duke said dreamily. "I think this pleases me. Or why would I have come back?"

"My references came from somewhere." Anselm was curt with the Duke, who had been goading him with revelations. They were alone together. "I never would have gotten in to you without them. Your family checked; and I do know how to valet. Now tell me again. Tell me about how he held his hands."

"They were never empty. He was always doing something: gripping bars to strengthen his wrists, squeezing balls, tossing a knife . . . and other things." The Duke smiled most annoyingly to himself. Anselm was coming to know that smile, and knew that there was no coaxing out of the Duke whatever memories it hid.

The old man's face clouded, and he began to swear, inelegantly, with pain. Anselm wiped his sweating face with a cold cloth, and kept on this way until the Duke could speak again: "As an adventure, this is beginning to pall. Life grows dull when all I have to wonder about is how long my shirt will stay dry, and whether I am going to swallow soup or vomit it up. I would say, let's have it over and done with, but my wife will not like that. Of course," he bared his teeth in a painful grin, "she doesn't like me in this condition, either. There really is no pleasing some people."

"You must take comfort in the child that is to come."

"Not really. That was only to please my wife. I do not want posterity. I was a great disappointment to my parents."

Anselm shrugged. "Aren't we all?"

"But when I am dead, it will keep her from doing something stupid. That is important."

Anselm was good at catching hints. "Shall I fetch your lady?"

"No." The Duke's hand was cold on his. "Let us talk."

"I'm not like you," Anselm said hopelessly. "Words are not my tools. All I can do is ask questions. You are the one who knows things, sir, not I. What I want to know, even you cannot show me."

"Annoying for you," the sick man said; "since sometimes I do see him, yet—in the corners of the room. But it's only the drugs, since he never answers when I speak."

"He was the greatest swordsman who ever lived. If taking drugs would let me see him, I'd do it." Anselm paced the room, his measured valet's demeanor given way to an athlete's ardent stride. "I wonder, sometimes, if there is any point even in trying. He took his secrets with him. If only I could have watched how he did what he did!" The sick man made no reply. "You were there. You saw. What did you see? Can't you tell me? What did you see?"

The Duke slowly smiled, his vision turned inward. "It was beautiful; not like this. He killed them quickly, with one blow, straight to the heart."

"How?" Anselm demanded, fists clenched. "No one offers his heart to the sword."

With every one of his fighter's senses, he felt the Duke's regard full upon him, unclouded by dream or pain. It drew him back to the bed, as though to close with an opponent, or a partner.

"No one?" the Duke whispered. Anselm knelt to hear him. "Not no one, boy."

The Duke's hand drifted down into his dark and springy hair.

Anselm said, "You are a terrible man." He seized the fingers, tangled in his hair with his own, and pulled them through his curls down to his mouth.

Lying by him in the dark, the Duke's wife said, "I have seen so many women through childbirth, I should be more afraid. But I am not. I know this will be a good child. I hope that you will see him."

His hand was on her gently rounded belly. "I hope he will not be too unhappy."

"As you were?" she answered sadly. "No, my darling. This one will know that he is loved, I promise you!" She gripped his fragile hand; fading, like the rest of him, even in the dark. "And he will know all about his father, that I promise, too."

"No," the man said; "not if it makes him unhappy. "

"He will be happy."

"You promise that, do you?" She heard his smile. "Will you take him back to the island, then, to run with the goats?"

"Certainly not!" Sometimes the things he assumed amazed her. "He will stay here, with his family. He must be raised in your city, among people who know you."

"I think he would be more happy on the island." The Duke sighed. "I wish I could go back there, after, and rest on a hill above the sea. But I suppose it is impossible."

In a small voice she said, "I suppose it is. Where will you go, then?"

"I shall lie in the Stone City: ranks and ranks of tombs like houses, with all my ancestors, my family—that should please your sense of decorum. They are not the company I would have chosen, but I suppose I will not care then."

"I will bring him there. To visit you."

He pulled his hand away. "By no means. I forbid it."

"But I want him to know you."

"If you insist on telling the child stories about me, do it somewhere nice, with a fire, and bread and milk. . . ." She had given him poppy syrup; soon he would sleep. "I hope he will be beautiful. Not like me. Beautiful as you are. As he was."

Some of the time, he spoke of people she did not know. But she knew this one well, this loved ghost from his past, the beautiful, the rare, first love and best. She willed her breath to evenness, her arms to softness. A memory, nothing, against a living child.

"I wanted him to kill me. Years ago. But he never got round to it."

"Hush, love, hush."

"No, but he promised! And so I hold him to it. In the end he failed me, he left me. But he will come for me. Long ago he promised to come for me. He is my death."

She held him tightly to her, hoping he was too far gone to notice her sobbing breath, and the tears that fell on both their skins.

Lord Sansome did not come again, though he sent the Duke's bodyservant, Anselm, a gift of money.

"What will you spend it on?" the Duke inquired; "swords or sweethearts?"

His servant frowned. "I feel I should return it. It isn't right for me to take what I do not intend to earn."

"Oh, re-eally?" Weariness drew out the old man's drawl. "But surely my old friend can be nothing but pleased that you care for me so thoroughly? It is his right to tip you if he wishes."

Anselm drew back. "Do you want to be shaved or don't you?"

"Is anyone expected?"

"No one but Her Ladyship, and that not until noon."

"She will not mind. The way I look, I mean. Put that thing down, Anselm. It is the wrong blade for you. Lord Sansome doesn't know it, but I do. I do."

The hours when he knew her grew farther apart. At last, she was uncovering every thing that he had kept from her—promises to his first wife, quarrels with his lovers, games with his sister—she heard a young man's voice, disputing with a tutor, and murmuring provocation so sweet it could only be to his old lover, the first and best. Did she give him more poppy than she should, to keep the voices coming, and to shield him from the pain? She tried, but in the end she had to fail, as even love could not appease the author of the play that he was in. He did not eat, he barely spoke. The old tart who had known him young came back to the door. His lady would not let her in to see him now, but, seeking her own comfort, went down to sit a moment with this relic of his past.

In the shadowed room, the Duke's patient servant waited.

The old Duke opened his eyes wide and looked at him.

"Oh," he said. "I didn't think it would be now."

"When else?" said the swordsman. "I promised, didn't I?"

"You did. I thought you had forgotten."

"No. Not this."

"I always wanted you to."

"Of course you did. But that wasn't the time."

"How bright it is! Do it quickly. I'm afraid of pain."

The other end of the bright blade laughed. "You can't breathe properly. You can't even feel your feet. This will be quick. Open your arms, now."

"Oh," said the old Duke again; "I knew you'd come."

For Delia Sherman, with thanks for her part of the dialogue

IN MEMORIAM: Dallas B. Sherman
Feb. 22, 1908–Dec. 24, 1995

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Originally published in Starlight 2, 1998.

Ellen Kushner's career is distinguished by its eclecticism. The author of several novels and editor of some anthologies (most recently Welcome to Bordertown with Holly Black), she has also had a long career in public radio, first locally on WGBH in Boston, and then nationally with her weekly series Sound & Spirit. As a performer, she appeared off-off-Broadway in her adaptation of her children's book, The Golden Dreydl. In the last year, she has also begun recording audiobooks of her "Riverside" novels for the Neil Gaiman Presents line on Audible.com. The latest, The Privilege of the Sword launched last week, on July 24th! She lives in New York City, with her partner, author and editor Delia Sherman.

Image Copyright © Daisy Rockwell 2010

Şad mauj rā ze raftan-e khud muztrib kunad
Maujē keh bar-kinār ravad az miyān-e mā

Each wave that strikes out to embrace the shore
Leaves a hundred more perturbed by its departure

—Nazīrī Nīshāpūrī

And with such luck and loss
I shall content myself
Till tides of turning time may toss
Such fishers on the shelf

—George Gascoigne

1.

After keeping me with him with the greatest of love for eight years, my foster father was finally forced to find another place for me. It was not his fault, nor was it mine. He had believed, as had I, that my stuttering would stop after a few days of relaxation with him, but neither he nor I expected that the people here would turn me into a sideshow, the way they do a madman. In the bazaars, people listened to my words with a greater curiosity than they exhibited toward others, and whether what I said was funny or not, they always laughed. Within a few days my situation worsened so drastically that when I tried to say anything at all, not only in the bazaar but even at home, the words collided with my teeth and lips and palate and bounced back the way waves retreat on touching shore. In the end, I would get so tongue-tied that the veins in my neck would swell and a terrible pressure would invade my throat and chest, leaving me breathless and threatening to suffocate me. I would pant, forced to leave my sentence incomplete, then start all over again after I had recovered my breath. At this my foster father would scold me, "You've said that. I heard you. Now go on."

If he ever scolded me, it was over this. But my problem was that I couldn't begin my account from the middle. Sometimes he would listen to me patiently and at others he would lift his hand and say, "All right, you may stop."

But if I couldn't begin my account from the middle, I couldn't leave it unfinished, either. I would grow agitated. Finally he would walk away, leaving me still stuttering, talking to myself. If anyone had seen me, I'd have been thought insane.

I was also fond of wandering through the bazaars, and enjoyed sitting there among the groups of people. Though I could not utter what I had to say comprehensibly, I made up for this by listening closely to what others said and repeating it in my mind. Sometimes I felt uncomfortable, yet I was happy enough, because the people there didn't dislike me, and above all my foster father held me dear and looked after my every need.

For the last few days, though, he had seemed worried. He had begun talking to me for long stretches of time, a new development. He would come up with questions to ask me that required a long answer, and then listen attentively without interrupting me. When I'd tire and begin to pant, he would wait for me to finish what I was saying , and when I resumed my account he would listen with the same concentration. I'd think he was about to scold me, and my tongue would start to tie itself in knots, but he would just gaze at me, saying nothing.

After only three days my tongue began to feel as if it were unknotting a bit. It was as if a weight were being lifted from my chest, and I began to dream of the day when I would be able to speak as others did, with ease and clarity. I began collecting in my heart all the things I had wanted to share with others. But on the fourth day, father called me over and had me sit very close to him. For a long time his talk rambled aimlessly, then he fell silent. I waited for him to pose one of his questions, but he suddenly said, "Your new mother is arriving the day after tomorrow."

Seeing the joy begin to dawn on my face, he grew troubled, then said slowly, "She'll go crazy if she hears you speak. She'll die." The next day my luggage was all packed. Before I could ask any questions, my father took my hand and said, "Let's go."

He didn't say a word to me during the journey. But on our way, he told a man who chanced to inquire, "Jahaz has asked for him."

Then they both started talking about Jahaz. I remembered Jahaz, too. When I had first come to live with father, Jahaz earned his bread by performing clownish imitations at fairs and bazaars. He would wear a small pink sail tied to his back—perhaps that's why his name became Jahaz, "ship," or perhaps he wore the sail because his name was Jahaz. The pink sail would billow when the wind blew hard and Jahaz would seem to be moving forward under its power. He could mimic to perfection a ship caught in a storm. We would be convinced that angry winds, raging waves, and fast-spinning whirlpools were bent on sinking the ship. The sounds of the wind howling, the waves slapping, the whirlpool's ringing emptiness, even the sails fluttering, would emerge distinctly from the mimic's mouth; finally, the "ship" would sink. This routine was very popular with the children and the older boys, but was performed only when the wind was high. If the wind halted, however, the young spectators were even more delighted, and called out:

"Tobacco, tobacco!"

I had never seen anyone smoke tobacco the way Jahaz did. He used every kind of tobacco, in every way it was possible to smoke it, and when the air was still he would perform such astounding tricks with clouds of smoke that the spectators couldn't believe their eyes. After producing several smoke rings, he would take a step back, then twist his hands and wrists in the air as though sculpting a figure in soft clay. And sure enough, the rings would take on a shape, just like a sculpture, and stand suspended in the air for some time. Some of his mimic- routines the boys weren't allowed to see or hear . When performing these he would hide inside a rapidly closing circle two or three spectators deep, and the only way those standing at a distance knew that Jahaz was performing his mimicry was by a glimpse of the fluttering sail and the sound of the spectators' laughter.

A year after I had come to my foster father's, Jahaz's voice had gone bad and he had been afflicted with a severe cough. In the course of his mimicry he had used many different voices, but now if he opened his mouth a coughing fit would seize him, and at times it took him nearly as long to finish his sentence as it would have taken me. Not only did he cease to perform his mimic-routines, he stopped coming to our village at all, and after the first year I did not see him again.

We passed many settlements and ghats by the Big Lake on our route. Everywhere we went, there were people who knew my father, and he would tell them that Jahaz had asked for me. I didn't understand what this meant, but asked no questions. In my heart I was angry with him, because I wasn't the least bit happy about the idea of living apart from him. But my father didn't look happy either; at least he didn't seem like someone who was about to bring home a new wife.

Finally we arrived at a grimy settlement. The people here worked glass. There were few houses, but each one had a glass-furnace; ugly chimneys belching smoke protruded from the straw thatch of the roofs. Layers of soot had settled on the walls, the lanes, the trees. The people's clothes and the coats of stray dogs and cats were black from the smoke. Here, too, a few people were acquainted with my father. One of them bade us sit down to eat and drink. An oppressive feeling stole over me. My father looked at my face observantly, then he spoke to me for the first time on the journey.

"People don't get old here."

I didn't understand him. I looked at the people strolling by and, indeed, none among them was elderly. Father said, "The smoke eats them away."

"Then why do they live here?" I wanted to ask, but the question seemed futile, so I simply stared in father's direction.

"Jahaz knows glass-working, too," he said after a while. "This is his home."

I stood up with a jolt. My tongue was in many knots all at once, but I couldn't stay silent now. Would I have to live with a smoke-belching bazaari clown like Jahaz in this settlement where a dark barbarity seemed to pour over everything? This question had to be asked, no matter how long it took to get it out. But with a reassuring gesture father beckoned me over to sit by him, and said, "But he moved away long ago."

I was relieved. As long as Jahaz doesn't live here, in this settlement, I said to myself, I can live with him anywhere. Then father said:

"He lives on the ghat now." He pointed off in its direction. "On Sheesha Ghat."

When I heard this name the oppressive feeling returned. Father must not have known that I had already heard mention of Sheesha Ghat from visitors in his house. I knew that it was the most widely known and least inhabited ghat on the Big Lake, and that a scary woman by the name of Bibi was its sole owner. She had been the lover of a notorious dacoit—or maybe he was a rebel—and later become his wife. He had in fact been betrayed when he came to see her one time, and had died on the same ghat at the hands of the government people. But then things went strangely topsy-turvy and the entire ghat was given over to Bibi's custody. Her huge boat lay anchored in the lake and Bibi had made it her abode . She ran some sort of business, in connection with which people were allowed to come to the ghat now and then. Otherwise it was forbidden to go near. Nor had anyone the courage. All were too frightened of Bibi.

How had Jahaz come to live on Sheesha Ghat? Would I have to meet Bibi as well? Would she speak to me? Would I have to answer her questions ? Would she go mad with anger on hearing me? I had grown so absorbed in these questions and their imagined answers that I didn't even realize we had left the settlement of the glass-workers. I was startled when I heard father's voice in my ear: "We're here."

2.

This was perhaps the most deserted area around the Big Lake. An expanse of muddy water began at the end of the barren plain, its far shore invisible in the distance. On our left, set back from the water, a big boat obscured the view of the lake. Perhaps at one time it had been used to transport logs. Now the same logs had been used to build many large and small rooms on the deck. The planks on the boat were all loose, and a light creaking sound issued from them, as of some giant object slowly breaking apart. On the shore of the lake a low, long retaining wall was lying face down on the ground. Near it stood four or five rickety platforms with huge cracks in them. Close to them lay a moldy length of bamboo, nearly claimed by the soil. Though there wasn't much left here, I sensed that it must have been a bustling locale before it had fallen into this tumbledown state. It was called a ghat, but all that was left was a roofed shelter extending from a building toward the shore, the front of it overhanging a little pool of lake-water that had sloughed over into a depression in the ground. At the rear of the shelter, on a little rise, sat the shapeless building of logs and clay, which looked as though its builder had been unable to decide whether to construct it of wood or earth, and in these contemplations, the building had reached its completion. The roof, however, was all of wood. A small pink sail, perched on a projection in the center of the roof, was fluttering in the wind.

My foster father must have been here before. Grabbing my hand, he quickly walked down the slope and over to the five earthen steps beneath the shelter that led up to the doorway of the building.

There was Jahaz, sitting on the floor smoking his tobacco. We, too, sat down when we went in.

"So you're here, are you?" he asked father, and began coughing.

He seemed to have aged quite a lot in eight years. The extreme paleness of his eyes and darkness of his lips made it look as though they had been dyed in different vats. From time to time his head would move as if he were admitting something. During one of these motions he glimpsed me with his pale eyes and said, "He's grown up!"

"It's been eight years," my father told him.

We sat silently for a long time. I'd have suspected that the two were talking in signals, but they weren't looking at each other. Suddenly my father stood up. I rose with him. Jahaz raised his head, looked up at him, and asked, "Won't you stay a little?"

"I've got a lot to do," my father said. "Nothing's ready yet."

Jahaz nodded his head as though agreeing, and my father stepped out the door. He descended the earthen steps, then turned back, came over and took me in his arms. We stood there silently for a long time, then he said, "If you don't like it here, tell Jahaz. I'll come and get you."

Jahaz's head moved in the familiar fashion, and father went down the steps. I heard Jahaz cough and turned toward him. He took a few quick drags of his tobacco, made an effort to even out his breathing, then got up, took my hand and walked out under the shelter. He just stood there quietly, running his eyes over the lake. Then he returned to the earthen steps, but stopped himself before putting his foot on the first step.

"No," he said. "First, Bibi."

We walked along the shore of the lake until we came to the big boat. A gangplank had been built between shore and boat by joining two boards. Carefully balancing on the planks, we reached the ladder at the other end, then climbed up onto the boat. Over the door of the small front room was a curtain of coarse cloth. In front of the curtain a two-colored cat was dozing. It peered at us with half-open eyes. Jahaz halted as he neared the curtain. I halted many steps behind him. At Jahaz's first cough the curtain slid aside and Bibi appeared.

The sight of her filled me with fear, but even more with amazement at the thought that this shapeless woman had once been someone's lover. She looked at Jahaz, then at me.

"Your son's here?" she asked Jahaz.

"Just got here,"Jahaz told her.

Bibi looked me up and down a few times, then said: "He looks sad."

Jahaz didn't say anything. Nor did I. The silence lingered for some time. I looked at Bibi and she asked me, "Do you know how to swim?"

I shook my head "no."

"Afraid of the water?"

I just nodded, admitting it.

"A lot?"

"Yes, a lot,"I indicated.

"You should be,"she replied, as if I had said what was in her heart.

I viewed the expanse of the lake. In the still air, the muddy water seemed entirely at rest; the lake could have been mistaken for a deserted plain. I looked up at Bibi. She was still looking at me. Then she turned toward Jahaz, who was handing her the tobacco-smoking paraphernalia. For some time they smoked and talked. The conversation had something to do with finances. Meanwhile, a brown dog appeared from somewhere, sniffed at me and went away. The cat, which had been dozing all this time, raised its tail on seeing the dog, arched its back, then retreated behind the curtain. I would peek at Bibi from time to time. She was a strongly built woman and seemed bigger than her boat, but it also seemed as if she, like her boat, were very slowly disintegrating. At least, that was my impression from looking at her, and from her talk, which I couldn't hear very well. Suddenly she stopped in the middle of what she was saying, raised her head and called loudly, "Parya!"

The sound of a girl's laughter came toward us as though floating on water. Jahaz took my hand and led me back to the gangplank. After we had stepped onto it, I heard Bibi's voice behind my back, "Take good care of him, Jahaz."

And she repeated, "He looks so sad."

She said this in such a way that I myself began to think I was sad.

3.

Yet there was no reason for me to be sad. When we returned from Bibi's and Jahaz showed me my quarters, I couldn't believe this was part of the shapeless house on the deserted ghat, between the muddy lake-water in front and the barren plain in back. The best preparations had been made for my comfort. The rooms were lavishly decorated, mostly with glass objects. Glass was also inlaid in the doors and the vents in the walls. I was surprised that Jahaz could create a place like this. I thought he must have had help from someone, or else had been trained in the art of decoration. A lot of the items seemed to have been brought there that very day; I suspected that other things had been removed, and that before me, perhaps long ago, someone else had lived here.

After I had seen the place where I was to live, I thought I must have seen the whole of Sheesha Ghat on the first day. But on the second day I saw Parya.

To this day I am amazed that during the many times people at my father's house spoke about Sheesha Ghat, no one ever mentioned the name of Bibi's daughter. I first heard her name the day I arrived at Sheesha Ghat, when Bibi called her from the boat. I was overwhelmed by the day's confusion, it didn't even occur to me to wonder who Parya was. But the next morning, I heard the sound of someone laughing. Then a voice said, "Jahaz, let's see your son."

Jahaz jumped up and grabbed my hand.

"Bibi's daughter," he told me as he led me out to the shelter.

About twenty-five yards away in the lake I saw Parya, standing perfectly erect at the far end of a narrow, slowly swaying boat. With a light shimmy of her body she advanced the boat toward the shelter. Her body gave another little twist. The boat came nearer. Advancing and stopping in this fashion, she pulled right up to the shelter.

"Him?" she asked, with a questioning glance at Jahaz.

I was as wonder-struck that this girl was Bibi's daughter as I had been that Bibi was once someone's lover. I tried to look at her closely, but now she was inspecting me from head to toe.

"He doesn't look so sad,"she said to Jahaz; then to me, "You don't look sad."

"When did I say I looked sad?" I tried to say, feeling a little irritated, but could only stutter. Parya laughed and said, "Jahaz, he's so …"

Then she began laughing louder and louder, until Bibi's voice boomed from the boat, "Parya, don't bother him."

"Why," Parya asked loudly, "because he's sad?"

"Parya," Jahaz said encouragingly, "you'll have a good time with him."

"Who needs a good time?" she said and began to laugh again.

I began to feel uneasy, as though trapped, but then she asked, "Have you seen your new mother?"

"No, I haven't," I told her with a shake of my head.

"Don't you want to?"

I didn't answer and looked the other way.

"You don't want to?" she asked again.

This time my head moved in a way that could mean yes or no. It occurred to me that my new mother was to arrive at my former house today, or perhaps had already arrived.

Father had said that she would go crazy if she heard me speaking. I tried to envision myself talking and her slowly going crazy. I tried to imagine how it could be possible to live with a woman who would go crazy because of me. I also reflected that at this time yesterday I was at my old house, and the memory seemed to come from the distant past. I relived my eight years there in eight seconds. Then I recalled my foster father's embrace before leaving me in Jahaz's custody I believed now, even more than before, that he loved me deeply.

"Jahaz will love you deeply, too." Parya's voice startled me.

I had forgotten about her, but she had been watching me all this time. Then, balancing herself as she walked, she moved to the other end of the boat. With a little spin of her body, her back was toward the shelter. A light swing of her torso nudged the boat and slowly she slid away from us. I felt as if a wonder had taken place before my eyes.

"If Bibi had not called to her," I said to myself, "I would have thought she was the spirit of the lake."

If not the spirit of the lake, she was indeed a wonder, because she had been born underwater, and her feet had never touched the earth.

Bibi had received her boat from her forefathers and no one could say how long it had been in the Big Lake, Jahaz told me after Parya had left. But Bibi herself used to live far away from the lake where her husband, the same dacoit, or whatever he was, came to meet her clandestinely. When Parya was about to be born, the husband had Bibi sent to the boat along with a midwife. During the birth, Jahaz could hear Bibi's cries of pain. Suddenly, the voices changed. The government people had arrived and were interrogating Bibi as to the whereabouts of her husband. Seeing that Bibi wouldn't tell them anything, they started holding her underwater over and over, and in the midst of one of the longer episodes, Parya was born.

"I could clearly see bubbles coming from Bibi under the water," Jahaz said, "then amid the bubbles Parya's little head came out and you could hear her cry."

At this the government people realized that Bibi wasn't faking. They left, but continued their surveillance. And one day, Parya's father came to the ghat, just as they had thought he would. They surrounded him on the boat. He tried to escape, but was injured, fell into the lake and drowned.

Since that day Bibi had made the boat her and Parya's abode. Bibi sometimes ventured out to other localities herself, but had never let Parya set foot on land. She would roam around the lake in her small craft, or would return to her mother on the big boat. Why was this so? Had Bibi made a vow of some kind? Was it the condition of some pact? No one knew how long Parya would be circling the lake, and whether her feet would ever touch the earth.

4.

I spent a year at Sheesha Ghat, and during that year I witnessed the passing of every season, and in each season I watched Parya's boat roam the waters. She was my only means of diversion. The outer door of my abode opened onto the barren field, which led only to the fishing settlements at its nearest outskirts, past the smoky dwellings of the glass-wallahs. I stayed away from these habitats because of the drying fish. The fishermen were always immersed in their work and were of no use to me, just as I was of no use to them. There were many ghats at the far ends of the field, including some at good-sized fishing settlements. A few ghats were lively with activity, but once or twice when I went to them I realized that the news of Jahaz's foster son had preceded me, and the people were going to realize who I was; that is why, except for roaming the abandoned field and amusing myself with a few stray objects, I mostly sat underneath the shelter. Jahaz, too, after running here and there to complete his errands, would come and sit here with his tobacco supplies and recount to me all sorts of tales which were worth remembering, but I forgot them anyhow. However, I do remember that when a story of his failed to hold my attention, he would become agitated, even frenzied, and narrate it the way he used to perform his imitations; in the telling he would suffer a fit of coughing and ruin what little interest there had been in the story.

In the beginning, I thought that Sheesha Ghat was a place totally cut off from the world, and that this part of the lake had always been a wasteland. That was not the case, but it was true that no one could set foot there without Bibi's consent. This is what I had heard from people at father's house, and I had assumed that Bibi never let anyone come here.

But once at Jahaz's I noticed that on certain special days the fishermen gathered here, bringing their nets and boats. Sometimes their numbers were so great that the scene looked like a little fair set up on the water. Sitting at my post under the shelter, I would hear the fishermen calling to each other and shouting directions. Filtering through their voices here and there came the sound of Parya' s laughter. At times they seemed to be forbidding Parya from doing something. Occasionally, the voice of one of the older fishermen would be heard scolding Parya, yet laughing heartily at the same time. Then Bibi's voice would come from the boat: "Parya, let them work!"

Parya would laugh in reply, and the fisherman would tell Bibi not to say anything to Parya.

On those days, and other days too, Parya would come to the ghat early in the morning. Standing in her boat in front of the shelter, she'd converse with Jahaz for some time, then call me out to the shelter as well, and if Jahaz left she would talk to me. Her conversation was a bit childish. She would tell me stories about her dogs and cats, or why Bibi had scolded her the day before. Sometimes she would ask me a question so suddenly that I'd start to answer with my tongue instead of the bobbings of my head. She would laugh wildly at these attempts and get a scolding from Bibi, then she would push out to the far reaches of the lake. In the afternoon, Bibi would call her loudly and her tiny craft would be seen advancing toward the boat. Then the sounds of Parya laughing and Bibi getting mad would emanate from the boat. Late in the afternoon, she would set out again and stop in front of the ghat. If Jahaz were not there, she would talk to me about him. She found something to laugh at in everything about Jahaz, whether his tobacco-smoking, his disorderly dress or the sail on top of his house.

As she was talking to me one day, I began to suspect, and was soon convinced, that she had never seen the clown routines Jahaz performed in the bazaars years before, and at last realized that she knew nothing about them. That day I tried to speak somewhat calmly for the first time, to tell her about Jahaz's mimic-routines. I tried for quite some time. She listened to me very attentively, without laughing, the way my father had begun to listen to me in the end. At that moment Jahaz walked out underneath the shelter, smoking his tobacco. He relieved me of my efforts by telling Parya all that I had been trying to recount. He even performed two or three of his minor routines. To me they seemed pathetic imitations of his old ones, but Parya laughed so hard her boat began to rock. She wanted more, but Jahaz in the meantime had been overcome with a coughing fit.

Parya waited for the coughing to stop, but he gestured for her to go away. Laughing, Parya turned her boat around and said as she left, "Jahaz, Jahaz, you would make even Bibi laugh."

The next morning she arrived at the shelter earlier than ever, but Jahaz had slipped off somewhere. She began talking to me about Jahaz and describing the mimicking as though I hadn't seen Jahaz performing his routines the day before, indeed, as though I'd never known about them. I listened to her for a while, then tried to tell her that Jahaz used to walk through the bazaars with the sail tied on his back, and mimic sinking ships before the crowds. I could not tell her, by tongue or by gesture. Finally, I fell silent.

"Tomorrow," I said in my heart, "somehow, I will tell you."

I watched her as she retreated from sight.

"Tomorrow," I said again in my heart, "somehow."

My foster father arrived at the ghat the same evening.

In one year he seemed to have aged more than Jahaz had in the eight-year period before my arrival. His step was halting and Jahaz was supporting him, almost carrying him. As soon as he saw me he drew me into his arms. Finally, Jahaz separated him from me, made him sit properly, then turned to me.

"Your new mother has died," he told me, and the coughing overtook him again.

5.

There was no conversation between my foster father and me. Shortly after he arrived, Jahaz took him off somewhere and returned late at night alone. I had just stretched out to sleep. I believe Jahaz too fell asleep after smoking his nightly tobacco. I kept pondering how my foster father could have grown so old so quickly. Then I thought of my new mother who had died without seeing me, and perhaps without going crazy. Then I started recollecting my year at Sheesha Ghat. At first I had been bored by the extended, nearly unbreakable silence there, but I now realized that the place was always full of noises. Faint calls would come from the glass-wallahs, fishermen and other ghats, and water birds would call over the lake. But I had never paid attention. Now, when I tuned my ears a little, I heard the halting sound of waves coming in and turning back after touching shore, and the faint creaking of the planks of Bibi's boat.

I decided that Sheesha Ghat was the only place for me to live, and that I had been born to live at Sheesha Ghat.

"Tomorrow morning, I'll tell Jahaz,"I told myself, and fell asleep.

In the morning my eyes opened, as usual, to the sound of Jahaz's coughing. Then I heard Parya's voice, too. They were talking much as on any other day. Jahaz was inside and couldn't see Parya's boat from where he sat, so he had to speak loudly, and was coughing again and again.

I got up and went out to the shelter. There was Parya, standing in the middle of her boat. She chatted with Jahaz a little more. Part of it had to do with Bibi. Then Parya retraced her steps to the other end of the boat. The boat made a half-circle from the light movement of her feet. Now Parya's back was toward the shelter. For the first time I took a good look at Bibi's daughter, and found myself more amazed than ever that a woman like Bibi could be her mother. At that instant Parya's body twirled and the boat moved away from the shelter. Then it swayed a moment and stopped. Parya scanned the expanse of lake before her. Again the boat rocked lightly, but Parya, straightening her body, adjusted its balance. She made another barely perceptible motion with her feet. The boat made a very slow half-circle, and I gazed at Parya from head to foot as she stood in the bow. I was afraid she might not like the way I was staring at her, but she wasn't looking in my direction. She was gazing intently at the ghat's still water, as if seeing it for the first time. Then, measuring her steps, she walked to the end of the boat nearer the shelter. Leaning over the water, she gazed at it once again, stood up, shook her whole body into alignment, and very calmly placed a foot on the water's surface as one steps on dry earth. Then her other foot left the boat. She took one step forward, then another.

"She's walking on the water!" I exclaimed to myself, my surprise tinged with fear; I turned my head toward Jahaz, who was smoking tobacco a little distance away, then looked back to the lake. Between Parya's empty boat and the shelter there was only water, concentric circles of waves spreading on its surface. A few moments later Parya's head emerged from the circles. She slapped the water with her palms over and over as though trying to grab onto the surface of the lake. The water splashed and I heard Jahaz's voice: "Parya, don't fool around with water."

Then a noose of smoke tightened at his throat and he doubled up, coughing wildly. My eyes turned to him for an instant. He was having a fit and needed someone's help. I looked back at the lake. New circles were spreading on the bare water.

She rose again, then began to sink. My eyes met hers and I stood up with a jolt.

"Jahaz!" I shouted, as my tongue began to knot.

I leapt toward the old man. His coughing had stopped, but his breath was gurgling. He was rubbing his chest with one hand and his eyes with the other. Dashing up the steps, I grabbed both his hands and shook him with force.

"… Parya …," my mouth said. He looked into my eyes with his pale irises, then lightning flashed in his eyes and I felt as though a bird of prey had escaped from my grip. Dust was dancing on the steps to the shelter and Jahaz was standing at the shore.

Parya's boat completed a full circle. Jahaz looked at the boat, then the water. Then with full force he let out a call in a strange language. I heard Bibi match his cry from her boat. Then from far, far away the same voice returned. Bibi's voice came again: "The sad one?"

"Parya!" Jahaz said with such force that the water before him trembled.

Other voices, far and near, repeated Jahaz's cries over and over and fishermen, some with nets, some empty-handed, began running toward the ghat from all directions. Even before they got to the shelter, some of them had plunged into the water. Jahaz was signaling to them with hand gestures when a splashing sound came from the left. I saw a barking dog running helter-skelter on the big boat and the two-colored cat, its back raised, looking at the dog from a corner of the roof. Then I saw Bibi, almost naked, like some prickly man-eating fish, cutting through the water. Her body collided with Parya's boat, sending it spinning like a top. Bibi dived and came up on the other side of the boat. She signaled to some of the fishermen and dived again.

Fishermen from other ghats were seen rowing toward Sheesha Ghat. Some had jumped overboard and were swimming in front of their boats.

Now heads were bobbing everywhere in the water between the shelter and Parya's boat. The crowd grew, collecting along the shore as well. There was din and commotion everywhere. Everyone was talking, but it was hard to tell what was being said by whom. The loudest noise was the splashing water, obscuring all sense of the passage of time. Finally, a loud voice rang out. The clatter peaked and suddenly died to nothing. The bodies in the water, swimming soundlessly, slowly gathered at one spot. All were silent now; the only sound was the dog barking from the boat.

At that moment I felt my hand clamped as though in a vise. Jahaz was standing next to me.

"Go," he said, giving my hand a shake.

I didn't understand where he wanted me to go. But now he was leading me inside the house. Turning back, I tried to look toward the lake, but Jahaz tugged my hand and I turned to look at him. His eyes were glued to my face. "Go," he said again.

We had come to the back door of the house. Jahaz opened it. In front was the barren plain. "They've found her," he told me, then pointed off across the plain and said hurriedly, "You'll reach the glass-workers' settlement in a short time. There you'll find transportation out of here. If not, just mention my name to anyone."

He deposited some money, tied in a handkerchief, in my pocket. I wanted to ask him many things and didn't want to leave, but he said: "Only you saw her drown. Everyone will ask you questions. Bibi more than anyone. Will you be able to answer?"

The scene rose before my eyes: the people—fishermen with rings in their ears, rowers with bangles on their wrists, visitors from different ghats—all forming a ring around me two or three deep, questions flying from every direction, Bibi fixing me with her intent stare. They all fall silent as Bibi approaches me…

Jahaz noticed me trembling and said, "Tell me what happened… Anything … Did she fall into the water?"

"…No…"I managed somehow.

"How did it happen, then?" Jahaz asked. "Did she jump?"

"No," I said, and repeated it with a shake of my head.

Jahaz shook me: "Say something, hurry!"

I knew I wouldn't be able to say anything with my tongue, so I tried to communicate through hand gestures that she had been trying to walk on the water. Yet my hands halted again and again. I felt that even my signals were beginning to stutter, and that they too were uninterpretable. But Jahaz asked in a constricted voice, "Was she walking on the water?"

"Yes," I said again with some difficulty.

"And she went under?" Yes.

"She was heading toward Bibi?"

"No."

"Where then? "he asked. "Was she coming toward us?"

"Yes," I gestured with my head.

Jahaz lowered his head and grew a bit older before my eyes.

"I've seen her every day," he said at last, "from the day her tiny head popped out of the water"—he was nearly coughing the words—"but I hadn't noticed how grown-up she'd come to look."

I stood silently watching him grow even older.

"All right, go!" he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. "I'll find something to tell them. Don't you tell anybody anything."

What could I tell anybody? I thought. And my attention, which had meanwhile strayed from the ghat, returned to it. But Jahaz gently turned me around and nudged me in the direction of the open field.

When I reached the edge of the field, I turned toward him and he said, "Your father came to take you back yesterday. I told him to wait a few days."

Again he coughed a little. He grabbed both panels of the door and slowly began to back away.

Before the door had closed, I'd already started on my journey, but I'd only gone some fifteen steps when he called out to me. I turned around and saw him walk toward me haltingly. He looked as though he were mimicking a ship whose sails had been torn off by the winds. He came up to me and embraced me. He held me to him for a long time. Then he released me and stepped back.

"Jahaz!" Bibi's wail was heard from the ghat.

The pale eyes of the old clown looked at me for the last time. He nodded, as though in affirmation, and I turned and walked on.

I

When she realized that this time she couldn't leave, the Voyager decided to keep a diary.

Only one sentence, and already a half-lie, she thinks with some irony. In fact, when she realized she couldn't leave she was stupefied, furious, terrified. It was when she'd accepted the idea of never leaving that she began keeping a diary.

Or else the idea crossed her mind when she went back to the village feeling troubled, discouraged and listless, when her Total Recall accessed her first awakening on the beach. The thought came hesitantly, tinged with amusement. A diary. What is a diary if not an imperfect, distorted memory — as proven by the first sentence she wrote in it? The idea of a diary for a Voyager with free access to Total Recall and trained to assemble and integrate countless data—yes, it was rather funny. Humour is the politeness of despair, as someone once said (she doesn't want to know who or in what universe). The idea was doubtless a final twitch of despair in the face of certainty, the final admission that she would never leave this particular Earth, this particular universe where the ever unpredictable laws of her Voyages had cast her ashore.

The shifting, finely granulated texture of the sand, the intensity and slant of the sun's rays, the rhythmic murmur of waves lapping, the slightly saline humidity.­.­.­ Dozens of other facts recorded by her sensor implants (atmospheric pressure, exact composition of the air), enlarging her perceptions before she even opens her eyes, tell her she is beside the sea in the northern hemisphere, and that it is late afternoon on Earth. On one Earth.

In the eternal present of Total Recall, there is almost no causal delay between data recorded by the Voyager's body and the conclusions drawn from them by her consciousness. Recall, whether Total or not, isn't linear. The Centres on some planets have perfected complex machines capable of directly recording the electric impulses corresponding to memory engrams. Voyagers can skip the interminable recital of their travels. Yet other machines translate and catalogue the data for the Archives. She, however, has always liked to recount her Voyages aloud. Some atavistic impulse, no doubt. Tell the story of her Voyages to someone. As they have been lived, not as they've been recorded in her brain and body. Also, to avoid accessing Total Recall except when necessary. It has always seemed to her that the telling gives these Voyages an extra edge of reality. Isn't writing a diary the equivalent, after all? She would be telling the story of this last Voyage (no longer a Voyage now that she could never leave), this passage that should have been a stopover and is to become her life.

She kept her eyes closed for a moment, letting all her other senses describe the scene: a long, sandy beach curving gently around a calm bay; behind her, the fringe of a fairly dense forest, with trees interspersed with hard blocks, too regular in their irregularity not to be buildings. And, fading away along the length of sand and water, bouncing off the forest and plotting the contours of the blocks, human voices, the voices of children playing.

One of those Earths.

Not Earths like the one she'd left on her first Voyage twenty years ago — Earths where in recent years she sometimes awoke directly in a Centre, in the Voyagers' capsule, in the core of the Bridge's sphere. Where often, on opening her eyes, she found an Egon bending over her, an old Egon, moved to see her, but at peace. (Just as she had delivered herself from him in the course of manifold encounters in manifold universes, so he, in his way, had delivered himself from her. Now he could hold out a hand to help her out of the capsule and smile as he said her name: "Talitha.") Sometimes — and it happened more and more often — there was no Egon in these Centres. Egon was no more; Egon was dead.

She felt no sadness: he was alive somewhere else in other universes. It must surely be a sign. The Voyage takes Voyagers into universes that secretly correspond to their desires, and therefore the progressive fading and disappearance of Egons must mark the end of a phase for her. (After more than twenty years! Were one's inner tides so slow?) A sign that perhaps she was approaching the moment where Voyagers control the Voyage, go where they decide to go, not where their obscure inner voices propel them. They can only move among universes at will when these voices can be recognized and interpreted. A sign, the sign that soon she might be able to direct her Voyages, venture onto the most distant branches of the human universe-tree, and at long last leap onto another tree, go truly Elsewhere.

She had consulted the Archives in all the Centres she'd passed through, combed the libraries and the most advanced data on local science or the most ancient memories of tradition. No one, not ever, had made contact with a non-human universe. Oh, there were varying external details (diverse morphologies covered with fur, scales, or even a carapace), but the basic form remained upright and biped. Given these variants, their natural habitats, and the resulting mentalities and societies, the possible combinations were immense but not infinite. The universe that contained all possible variants of human history was certainly just one among many others. And it was the Others that she longed for.

Had some Voyager in some universe made the leap, having mastered the Voyage? Impossible to know, of course. She herself had only Voyaged in a few hundred universes out of billions or trillions.­.­.­ Well, it didn't matter: what she sought was a different universe-tree, another universe, the Other Universe, truly and absolutely different. She didn't really know what motivated her — she supposed this was why she hadn't yet found it. Was it fame? Curiosity? But she'd set aside these false motives long ago. No, it was something deeper, more obscure. This idea of her goal had only come to her bit by bit. In the beginning she had wanted to become a Voyager the way some people want to die. But — with Egon — she had learned to want to live, even if she was still fleeing when she left the first time. Egon. For years she hadn't stopped fleeing, or seeking, or finding him. At last, though, she'd understood, had accepted the inevitable and freed herself. All those years, all those universes behind her.­.­. she could feel them drifting away. The end of one phase and the start of another? But so nebulous, so uncertain.­.­.­

Personal, subjective time takes on another dimension during the Voyage, in the leap from one universe to another, from one historic time to another, sometimes vastly different. But she'd kept count: in the last five years there'd been a dozen Voyages with the same pattern. About one time in three, she would find herself in a Centre on an Earth identical to her own. She would leave immediately, not bothering to explore the variants, for they were often so minimal that it would take years and years to discover them. Another time in three, she would find herself on a planet not Earth, but always terrestrial enough despite variants to make it clear this was not the desired Other Universe.

That small planet on the outer edge of its galaxy, for example, perched on the verge of an intergalactic void — a vast black space where no star shone, where the most powerful telescopes could only discern the distant light of other galaxies as patches where the dark was slightly less profound. She stayed on this planet for six months, motivated by a vague hope. But no one ever crossed the void to bring news of other lives. She stayed to watch the night skies gradually losing their stars as the planet drifted toward the part of its orbit bordering on the void. That season of deep and total nights corresponded to springtime in the southern hemisphere, where the equivalent of the Bridge was located. Spring, the renewal of life: the inhabitants of Shingèn associated it with blackness, whereas she perceived the blackness as a heavy, terrifying lid. The Shingèn fantasies — their myths, religions, and legends — stubbornly survived and were preserved as a precious heritage, peopling the shadows with beings of black light, guardians of a domain where, once a year, all the colours of the world came to renew themselves. And the Shingèns had a very wide vocabulary for describing colours, especially black, which for them was the most mysterious and rich of shades. "Was." Is. Why speak of them in the past tense? Their universe still exists, and so does their planet, perched on the edge of its stellar abyss.

There has also been that planet where life was only possible within a thin zone suspended between the boiling pressure of the surface and the suffocating void of gigantic mountain tops. Hanging between two mortal hells, life still evolved, tenacious and rich in dreams. The Bridge was not called by that name, and had been developed to explore the torrid depths of the surface. As often happened, its inventors had no idea it could be used to Voyage through universes, and their attempts after she'd come had failed. Perhaps they'd had no need to Voyage. They'd only begun to explore their planet, and, in itself, it was three universes.

There has been. Yes, this is how the memory of this diary differ from Total Recall — in this past that insists on coming back. She has briefly visited these planets, these universes, and will never go back. Her passage emphasizes their temporality. There has been, therefore, this planet where two human races cohabited, one very ancient, and the other on the edge of humanity, over which the first watched with discreet tenderness, not keeping itself hidden but with no attempt to dominate, with no fear or bitterness. The name of the first race, K'tu'tinié'go, literally meant "those who come before the beginning," which signified "the apprentices," or "the unfinished." Only the second race, which had barely begun to explore the fringes of language, was called "human." A system of complex myths recorded these names, to which the K'tu'tinié'go scholars, and particularly the biologists, gave another meaning. But they would smile at her as they explained the scientific basis for relations between the two races, as though these explanations were merely another story, mainly pleasing for its novelty and ingenuity. For them, all truths were always multiple. She had been astonished that, with such a world vision, this first people had been able to develop science to a state advanced enough to include the equivalent of a Bridge.­.­.­. They used it to treat congenital cellular degeneration, which could only be slowed down in the suspended animation of deep cold, around absolute zero.

And one Voyage in three leads her to another Earth, this Earth, with continents gradually submerged, dikes anxiously watched over by their guardians, cliffs nibbled away by the waves, and the soft, moist air of a warming planet on which the polar icecaps are inexorably melting. She had recognized it even before opening her eyes. This was the fourth time her sensors had recorded this gestalt perception in her Total Recall. When she did open her eyes to find the beach with its still muted colours, she asked herself yet again whether, through some new and bizarre trick of her Voyages, this mightn't be the same planet at different moments in its evolution.

Total Recall, so clear, so immediate; the past becomes the present again, just for the asking. The children aren't far from the spot where she has materialized. She knows, having read about it in many Archives and witnessed it once herself, that a Voyager appears almost instantaneously, almost in the blink of an eye. Perhaps the children haven't seen her appear. The awakening takes longer, and plenty of Voyagers have found themselves in sticky situations, although never fatal — not according to the Archives consulted by her, at any rate. Could suicidal Voyagers propel themselves into a universe that would immediately kill them? But you can't train to become a Voyager and remain suicidal, as she well knows.

Haven't the children noticed the woman sleeping naked on their beach? She walks in their direction, watching them and scanning the landscape. The beach is well kept, with heaps of driftwood and kelp neatly arranged at the far end beside the pilings of a wharf. The forest seems well tended, too. Great umbrella pines mingle with more tropical species, growing thickly enough to create a wall of foliage and branches above the regularly spaced trunks and the cleared forest floor. The half-hidden buildings are ruins, but their contours and materials are still recognizable — such architecture was ultramodern on the last Earth of this type that she'd visited. The children's village lies beyond the wharf, in a notch cut out of the forest.

The children continue playing at the edge of the waves. Their slender bodies are of curiously different shades, the palest seeming to shimmer in the sunlight. It is hard to tell girls from boys at first glance. The sinuous silhouettes flow smoothly from head to shoulders to hips to legs, ending in feet that are subtly disproportionate and, like their overly large, flat hands, slightly .­.­. webbed. A semi-aquatic humanity — she's never encountered it on an Earth like this one. The children don't turn their eyes away when she looks at them. They smile rather shyly and go on with their game. She can tell what it is from their movements. They are tossing a flat, round marker and hopping to retrieve it. Rows of shells mark segments in the smooth, wet sand. But it isn't the hopscotch grid of her childhood (so near, so far, dozens of universes away), or those she's occasionally come upon since then. Those were either rectangular or arranged in a double cross. This one is a spiral with ten sections that diminish toward the centre, ending in a space just big enough for a child's foot. Beneath it, somewhat scuffed by the feet of the players, is the whorl of an inverse spiral that grows bigger toward the centre.

She sits on the sand again near a pile of empty shells. A great sense of peace fills her, as is so often the case when she awakes. The sun sinks behind the sea, leaving a sky dotted with small clouds slowly sculpted by a distant wind, meticulous yet shifting hieroglyphs, their silvery outlines bright at first, then fading to nothing. The ebbing surf breaks softly but steadily on the sand to a continuo of rustling trees and the gentle, rhythmic sing-song of the children at their game. A new coolness touches her skin, and night seems to well up from the water as it fades from pink to gray, blotting out the line where sea meets sky. All this, simultaneously perceived by her senses (and not linearly as it is now being recorded by these words), resembles the vibrato of an ultimate chord before... before what, if ultimate? Still, that is what she feels at the time, a Voyager in transit, present yet altogether detached: a suspension, a waiting.

She is waiting for someone to speak. But the someone sits down beside her in silence, watches the children as they continue their game, takes a shell from the pile — the smooth greeny-white palette of an oyster — and strokes it with a finger. A long finger, joined to the others by a translucent membrane. The light skin, vaguely pink in the afterglow of the sun, is covered in fine, iridescent scales; the arm, like the whole body, is wet and smells of the sea. The head, with its cap of fair, water-smoothed hair, pivots slowly to reveal a heart-shaped face, vaguely Asiatic, with large, gray-green eyes, heavy lids slanting toward the temples, a flat nose, and a small mouth with full, curved lips. The someone is a naked woman, age impossible to tell, who has just come out of the water and is looking at her, unsmiling but not unfriendly. They stare at one another for a long moment. Then the woman gets up, takes her by the hand, and leads her to the village, followed by the children.

Talitha accepts the simple garments proffered by the villagers. After a somewhat uncertain silence, the familiar ritual begins. The large, dusky woman who appears to speak for the villagers places a hand on her heart and says, "Ao palli kedia” — syllables that may be her name. Talitha's trained mind immediately begins to establish correlations between the stressed syllables and pronunciation of this language with those encountered on the three other, similar planets. Perhaps the syllables mean "I am Palli Kedia" or "I am a kedia" or "a palli" or "the village chief." Faithful to the ritual, however, Talitha in turn places a hand on her heart and says her own name clearly. The villagers murmur softly. Is it surprise? Appreciation? The woman from the sea touches Talitha's arm and smiles — perhaps because she is moved or amused or both. Putting her other hand on her naked breast (a flower-like hand, the membranes stretched between the spreading fingers) she speaks what must be her name, accentuating the difference: "Ao Tilitha."

Talitha has already met herself in other universes. Not very often — that isn't what she was hoping to find when she became a Voyager. (And, quite soon, she even stopped wanting to meet the Talitha who lived happily with an Egon. Of course they exist somewhere, all the facets of this story exist somewhere, but she has finally passed beyond the stage where she thinks of it as "our story." It is the story of every Talitha and every Egon in their respective universes, as those she's met have made her fully realize. Her own story is something else, something she hasn't yet shaped.) And so she merely smiles, noting the similarity between her name and the name of the woman from the sea. She has no desire to find out more about this contingent variant of herself, however exotic. She turns toward "Palli Kedia," resolved to do what every Voyager does upon arrival: learn the local language.

Palli Kedia seems reluctant to talk, once they have exchanged names. Talitha shows her wish to communicate, pointing to the objects around them and saying all the names given them on other Submerged Earths. Palli Kedia may be reluctant to talk, but she is quite ready to communicate. The language is based on a complex sign system assisted occasionally by a few words, sometimes by a mere sound.

There are Voyagers who never tire of the infinite forms of humanity encountered. They are the ones who feed the Archives in the Centres, to which they travel only to leave again. Talitha isn't one of these explorers. What struck her very soon in her Voyages were the recurrent patterns, the resemblances, the repetitions. She seeks something else, something totally other, unimaginable, amazing.

She leaves the village next morning. If this Earth resembles the other three fairly closely, the political and scientific centres will be in the southeast. Once again she'll probably have to travel to the extreme south of the continent, where the capital stands on a cliff (in one case entirely artificial), a city built as a challenge to the sea and its inevitable encroachment. On the first Submerged Earth this was a true calamity — a natural disaster. On the others, humans had played a considerable part in the general warming of their planet. Changes came with great speed, made worse by the accompanying recurrence of violent seismic activity. On an overpopulated Earth, and in societies that were all the more fragile because of their complex technologies, these upheavals were catastrophic. The long-term consequences had decimated the population on the third Earth, and the human race was slowly becoming extinct. She had taken nearly three years to find a group of scientists either dynamic or stoic enough to continue doing research, and to convince them to develop the machine that one of them was tinkering with for the sake of amusement — a machine that, unknown to him, was an embryo Bridge. Three years! Never had she stayed so long in one place, even in the universe where she had at last made her peace with Egon. It was also the first time she'd actually had to help build a Bridge. She left that planet, that universe, with a brief question in her mind: now that a Bridge existed, Voyagers would surely come, and others would leave by it. But it was probably already too late to change the fate of that dying human race. In any case, she was no missionary and she knew perfectly well she hadn't given that Earth a Bridge in order to fulfil the secret plan of some hidden divinity: her goal was to leave.

Now, as she travels over almost vanished roads, through ruined towns and landscapes still bearing the scars of ancient devastation, she soon feels a growing anxiety. Does she detect an increasingly recurrent pattern here? She'd found it more and more problematic to leave the preceding Submerged Earths. This one seems to have regressed even further in the same direction as the last. Not much is known about how the Voyage works, apart from the physical functioning of the Bridge itself up to the moment when the anaesthetized body is cooled to almost absolute zero and disappears from the capsule. But the law, the only sure law, is that the Bridge always provides access to universes that you can leave, one where a Bridge exists (even if not called that), or where it is technologically possible for the Voyager to have one built. There is nothing surprising in this, because it is not the Bridge that propels Voyagers into the various universes but the Voyagers themselves, their psyche, or as believers say, their Matrix. Voyagers may have sent themselves into universes without any means of escape, because they desired it either consciously or unconsciously. It is a statistical certainty, but materially unverifiable, since such Voyagers have never returned to the Centres to confide their experiences to the Archives. She knows she doesn't yearn for that kind of universe; that means there must be a Bridge on this planet or the possibility of one — or its equivalent.

After two weeks of solitary walking, her fears are allayed. She comes to a small city where the remaining inhabitants speak a language closely resembling the Euskade she'd learned on the second Submerged Earth. Without too much difficulty, they agree to provide her with a small automotive vehicle in fairly good shape. The roads improve toward the southeast, they tell her, and she'll have no trouble getting to the big city she's looking for. In the other universes it was called Périndéra, Neva de Rel, Torremolines. In the village by the sea they called it Aomanukéra. Here it is called Baïblanca.

II

The city is like its predecessors, a constant from one of these universes to another, revealing the stubborn resolve of the city's creators to fashion a place at once functional, comfortable, and aesthetically pleasing. A rather too carefully orchestrated casualness seems to have governed its development. This Baïblanca possesses the same general characteristics and layout as its doubles, with one notable exception: it is almost totally deserted. The parks and gardens have run wild and are invading the streets and squares, a green tide attacking monuments and buildings. She walks the length of the Promenade, the name here for the long, tree-lined esplanade that follows the curve of the clifftop — or what had once been a clifftop. At high tide the water washes over the flagstones, swirling around the benches and trees in small, patient eddies (there is no violence in the sea, it knows it has won). The weather is mild and the sunlight has a pearly quality from the permanent haze masking the sky. A few people in light boots stroll along the Promenade, and a few children too, barefoot and too young to be either blasé — or afraid, laughing with sacrilegious delight at seeing water where it should not be. She contemplates the Promenade's sweep, subtly distorted by the thin layer of water, and already she knows, senses, what the still-functional data banks will tell her: there is no Bridge, nor the equivalent, nor the possibility of a Bridge in Baïblanca.

She doesn't give up at once; she will not, cannot believe this. She consults the data banks, criss-crosses the city interrogating the inhabitants — a nucleus of several thousand diehards clustered in the quarter between the Arts Palace, the Government Complex, and the fortress-hill of the Institute. Whatever its names elsewhere — names meaning "academy" or "university"— the Institute is the real seat of power. Here she finds interested listeners, minds still curious, and a wistful willingness: yes, they understand very well the principle of the machine she describes, and they even dig through the Institute's memory banks to show her another version, equally workable. But to build such a machine.­.­.­

The problem isn't so much to build it as to reconstitute the technology necessary for making the required materials. Baïblanca has passed the critical point beyond which this is impossible.

She won't, can't believe it. Surely Baïblanca isn't the only large metropolis still in existence! People sigh and pull long faces, but they give her names and maps, and at last supply her with a precious, small airborne vehicle. They wish her good luck, but they are right to be skeptical. After six months, she has to accept the evidence: no one, nowhere, is capable of helping her build a Bridge. If one exists on this Earth, it has been forgotten and all trace of it lost. In a flash, she sees herself as an old Voyager, transformed into an obdurate explorer, a detective, interminably ruffling through tattered documents, following dubious trails in the heart of jungles and ruins, tirelessly interrogating human survivors who have reverted to a primitive state. No. Not her. Another Talitha in another universe, maybe, but not her. She won't chase a phantom for the rest of her life, the mirage of a nonexistent Bridge; she won't pay such a crazy price to avoid despair.

She does despair, although she won't admit it, returning to Baïblanca through what is left of the continent called Numeïde, Eslam, or Basilisso in other worlds, but Africa in this world. She journeys part of the way on the back of a dromedary, an animal no more and no less strange than others in other universe — hump-backed, a long-legged quadruped, its long, arched neck resembling a ship's prow, rolling like a dinghy as it walks. "Ship of the desert," its human owners call it. The name has stuck, despite the fact that the desert is finally disappearing beneath the Sahara Sea, which linked up long ago with the other sea — a sea with no special name anymore, because it is the same everywhere, the same inexorable invader, "the sea." She goes back to Baïblanca, leaving the small airborne vehicle to rust away in the shallow water where she made a forced landing. The Institute scholars are certainly not pleased, but they pity her. They offer her their hospitality, but she feels restless, preferring to explore the city, camping wherever she can, striding tirelessly through the familiar yet strange places (in a city where she had spent three years of her life, not so very long ago, in another universe). She catalogues resemblances and differences, but as usual she notices the resemblances most. Does she actually see them? She records, she moves, tries to tire herself out on rambles so that she will fall into a dreamless sleep at night. She ignores the city's dangers, the wild animals, the solitary and sometimes aggressive humans; these don't compare with the real terror, the instant of inattention when the noise of all this motion fades, and the inner voice is heard again.

I cannot leave, there is no Bridge, I am stuck here! Condemned to live and die here, on this drowning Earth. Is it possible? Is all she knows or thinks she knows about the Bridge and the Voyage false? The Bridge takes you where, consciously or unconsciously, you wish to go, until you have mastered the Voyage, until you know yourself. Then you can go where you please, or return. What she knows or thinks she knows of herself — is that also false? After twenty years of Voyaging, is she unable to understand why she has propelled herself onto this dead-end planet? She is stupefied, furious — and scared to death. So she goes off to yet another quarter of the city, she probes the occasional data banks that still function, learning in bits and pieces the story of this world, this society, this city, not really caring what her Total Recall is recording. The crucial thing is to fill the threatening silence with voices and images, to prevent the horrifying litany from welling up: I cannot leave, there is no Bridge, I am stuck here!

When at last she gives up, she returns to the Institute and settles into one of the residential wings of the fortress-campus. Naturally, some of the Institute members ask her to record her experiences in other universes for the central Infolibrary. There are no machines for abridging the process, but it doesn't matter — telling it helps pass the time. She accesses her Total Recall and listens to it speak. Weeks pass: in the morning she talks, in the afternoon she answers questions raised by her accounts. After that, she aimlessly digs for facts in the Infolibrary or wanders through the inhabited triangle of Baïblanca, taking a detour to the Boardwalk or the Colibri Park. The park is named after tiny, colourful birds, living jewels that gather nectar from the flowers beneath a huge, transparent cupola in the middle of the main lawn. But it isn't the birds that fascinate her: it's the statues.

There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, everywhere — the bodies of men and women, sometimes in graceful poses, sometimes in stances so natural as to seem strange. It was dusk when she first entered the park, and she thought that the whole city had congregated there. Figures stood, sat, lay on the ground, rested against trees, even in trees. And then she realized that all these people were completely naked and motionless. As she came closer, she saw that they were made of stone, or something mineral-like. All of them statues, all of them highly individualized. They had worn clothing once, but it had gradually rotted away. (The Infolibrary provided her with curious pictures of this gradual divestment, showing multitudes of statues with garments in varying stages of disintegration.) But the statues themselves were made of a material impervious to salt air, and yet so delicate in texture, porous, like a honeycomb .­.­. like pumice stone. As she touched it, she had a momentary vision of the park finally submerged beneath the sea, and the statues gradually floating off their benches, or trees, or lawns, drifting with the tides. In reality, however, the stone was very solid, very heavy. The statues would remain anchored to the sea-bottom in the park, and moonfish would replace the tiny birds.

"Oh, the hendemados," says Caëtanes, referring to the statues.

The old biologist's tone sparks her interest. It is an intricate mixture of amused disdain and an undercurrent of resentment (of disgust, of fear?). He says no more, and the Infolibrary is also curiously laconic on the subject. Six hundred years earlier, during the brief period when all was still in a state of equilibrium, when the Earth's civilization had not yet begun to topple toward extinction, scientists and technicians had perfected an artificial organic material with complex properties, capable of imitating life. The artifacts created by biosculptors out of this material had a certain amount of independence that diminished with age — and they aged rapidly. Generally, after about a dozen years, their gradually slowing metabolism produced complete mineralization. For some unfathomable reason, it became fashionable at one point for biosculptors to give their creations a motor tropism that directed them to Colibri Park as life was ending. And there they stopped forever.

The history of biosculpture covers barely a hundred and fifty years. The sources of this science — this art — are obscure. Its origins seem to have been in more or less secret government research immediately after the so-called "Catastrophe" period, the fifty or so years after the first Great Tides. The Infolibrary is very discreet on this point. Nevertheless, various signs clearly indicate to her trained mind that the data bank has been fixed and that the Institute itself has probably lent a hand in this. Old stories of a bygone day that seem to have left fairly conscious traces in the minds of the last survivors.­.­.­ She doesn't realize it at this moment, but after nearly a year the period of mourning has ended. Her old vitality has rekindled itself and she feels the need to act instead of letting the days slip by. This small mystery comes at just the right moment to distract her. It doesn't take long to solve: after six hundred years, the taboos have lost their potency, even among the heirs of the Institute.

Some biosculptors clearly improved on their basic material, to the point where their creations couldn't be distinguished from real human beings. And some biosculptors actually decided that their creatures, their artifacts, were indeed human beings. And why not? They had actually created beings that lived longer than normal humans, and above all, could procreate — something normal humans were doing less often and less well. The Institute had outlawed biosculpture, but it had neither the political power nor, in reality, the necessary conviction to enforce this. The artifacts proliferated. Now, only a few small communities of the original human race remain, and these have become rigid in their isolation. Over the centuries, however, often without knowing it, humans had mated with artifacts. Their halfbreed descendants, the hendemados, and the descendants of mating between artifacts themselves, are slowly, very slowly, repopulating the world.­.­.­ This Earth isn't a dying planet, after all is said and done. It's recovering slowly, very slowly, from a near-fatal illness.

When she's finished putting together the pieces of the puzzle, she is astonished. How could she have thought this planet was dying? She has let herself be hypnotized by ruined cities and the traces of a once-powerful civilization that can still be seen everywhere. Above all, she hasn't really cared whether it was dying or not, since this planet was supposed to be merely a stage in her Voyages. And when she realized she wasn't going to leave again.­.­. Now she understands both the cause of her illusion and that this cause no longer exists. She suddenly thinks of the fishing village, of Tilitha who may be her double in this universe. Why not, why not? Going back to her starting point would be a gesture replete with satisfying irony: would it not respect the recurring structure of her latest Voyages? To go back to her starting point: a dead end, the circular motion of starting over. She sees things clearly, now (so easy in retrospect). All those Earths, identical to hers, were telling her the same thing as those other, falsely different planets: the end, immobility, death. The stellar desert in the springtime night of the Shingèns, the certain extinction of some of the K'tu'tinié'go and of those ever more submerged Earths.­.­.­ Of course, there was also Manischë, the planet of fire and ice, its tenacious life balancing on a thread. The heirs of the K'tu'tiniè'go would take up the torch once more, the starless Shingèn night would be succeeded by the constellations of the summer sky. And here, the hendemados.­.­.­

And just because she, Talitha, will live out her life on this particular Earth does not mean life itself is becoming extinct. Through the huge picture window of the reading room she has a view over the city to the sea, a dull gleam beneath the veiled sun. She can certainly make this sacrifice to her new but useless clairvoyance: since life goes on, at least live where it is going on, and not in condemned Baïblanca. Make one last little voyage, and for once (the first and last time) know where she is going.

III

February 20: Year One, after all. I've decided to. I. Really, decided? I'm certainly assuming a lot.

When she realized that this time she couldn't leave, the Voyager decided to keep a diary.

Only one sentence, and already a half-lie.­.­.­

February 23: Welcomed without fanfare by the village. They recognized me and greeted me by name, helped me settle into a small, quickly built hut on the edge of the village. They didn't say much — and always in sign language. I'll soon learn it. Easier to use the first person: I. Because they are observing me — an external perspective that in effect makes me draw into myself, concentrate on myself, unlike my own perspective, which undoes me.

February 26: It seems they've decided to make an exception for me and talk a little, at least for long enough to teach me the sign language. Spoken language is too precious to be wasted in verbalizing the trivia of daily life. (A curious detail: in this language the verb "to talk" seems to have the same derivation as the verb "to voyage.") I'm learning very fast, of course, both the spoken and sign language. It's easy to establish correlations from the crumbs they let fall — after all, I was trained to do it. They seem surprised. Palli Kedia came in person to see how I was getting along. A supposedly fortuitous meeting. I was coming back from my morning walk on the shore. (How quickly one settles into a routine!) She greeted me, we talked for a moment, and I continued on my way, conscious of having passed a test. And now?

March 6: Now it's Tilitha who's keeping an eye on me. Or so I suppose. Our meetings, always on the shore morning or evening, also seem purely accidental. Tilitha is always naked, often wet. Dolphins play in the waves while we talk. They come with her, go with her; she calls them "cousins." She and those like her, the arevags, visit the village regularly, but they don't live there. Their habitat is under water, in the forest of giant kelp covering the drowned cities. Tilitha is the sister of Palli Kedia. The two races can crossbreed. Among the arevags, one child in four — almost always a boy — turns out to be a hendemado and is given by the mother to the village. The same proportion of arevags is born in the village; they are always girls, and they return to the sea, as in Tilitha's case. Both are almost completely amphibious, with the hendemados able to remain under water for long periods, and the arevags able to stay in the open air for over a day without discomfort. Their respective capacities depend on the degree of crossbreeding — scientific details to be recorded in my Total Recall, not in this diary. What I see of this double race, what I experience, is the constant mixing, the opening of one to the other, and the impression that the water's edge isn't a frontier for these people but a door to be opened at will. The reverse of Baïblanca, in a way — Baïblanca on its inundated clifftop, Baïblanca where the tide is looked upon as an almost unholy encroachment of one element on another, because each is conceived of as an opposite. Here, water and earth are clearly distinct, and the two races (despite their ability to crossbreed) are different, if only because the arevags are exclusively female; yet they are open to one another, for better or for worse. (There are quarrels, jealousies, and longings that cause a certain amount of strife, and life, particularly in mixed families, seems fairly agitated. Sign language may not be noisy, but it can be pretty vehement for all that. The other day I witnessed a public outburst that ended in blows and tears.)

By the by, as far as language goes, each race seems to have adopted the habits of the other. The arevags tend to speak aloud when they come to the village, and the villagers communicate with them by signs, as though they were under water. Both, however, have begun to observe a cautious silence toward me, the stranger. Probably they don't quite know what category of human to put me in: suddenly I appeared from nowhere on their beach, and I didn't stay with the original humans (referred to by them simply as "the last ones"). My talks with Tilitha have been fairly brief these last few days. I'm not even sure our meetings are part of a predetermined plan on the part of the two communities. Perhaps it's a purely personal initiative on her part, because of the similarity of our names. This seems to fascinate her. To start with, she didn't ask me where I came from; instead, she explained who she was and where she came from (thereby confirming my theories about the arevags). I tried to do the same, but without much confidence. How was I to make her understand the concept of the Bridge? I drew the universe-tree in the wet sand, showing the ramifications of its branching universes. She listened, nodding, her eyes shining. I wondered what she made of it. Then she asked, "How?" I tried to explain the Bridge, but my description of the machine only aroused a perplexed interest. She came alive, though, when I began to explain how the Voyage worked. The descent to absolute zero, the cold sleep, all motion stopped, and at the heart of this absolute immobility, absolute motion: the spirit, the Matrix, shooting forth, tearing the Voyager's body from its universe to propel it into the merry-go-round of similar universes. "Similar universes?" she echoed, visibly disconcerted. I described the universes where I had met Egons — and Talithas. She meditated this for a while but said nothing. Then, with a sharp fingertip, she drew a closed circle around the tree in the sand. (The arevags don't go defenceless into the depths: they have sheathed claws.) In a few minutes she has grasped what has taken me five years to comprehend: the Voyage comes to an end one day; there is no truly other universe.

"I am Tilitha. You are Talitha," she added aloud, as if to conclude her statement.

That's how I translate it. What she said in her language was, "Ao Tilitha. Ao Talitha." Ao, the human pronoun of both arevags and hendemados, can't be translated otherwise. It's used to introduce oneself to strangers, or talk of oneself or others in important discussions — when it is felt the speaker is not the individual woman or man, but the person, a concept transcending gender. I asked her about the origin of this so-called human pronoun. It was a long story, Tilitha said with a smile, getting up. Hadn't we time, I asked? She shook her head. "Tomorrow." She slid into the water without leaving a ripple, and went to join her dolphins.

March 11: Of course, it's a lot more complicated than I thought. Ao, the human pronoun, implies active virtuality. There is another, O, related to passive virtuality. Tilitha explained this to me (or thought she was explaining it, while plunging me into even greater darkness) by recounting a legend. It was the story of creatures who attained the state of wholeness in the real world. (Androgynes? Or beings capable of changing their sex at will? It wasn't clear.) These creatures went away from the Earth but left their seeds behind to divide and redivide, spreading until their effectiveness has been completely lost. The only surviving traces are in language, among others this active-virtual pronoun. But what about the passive-virtual pronoun O? No, no, that pronoun came from before, said Tilitha by way of correction, as though it were obvious. Not obvious to me, though, as she realized; she decided to go back to the Flood for my edification, that is, to Creation.

The first woman is called Manu, and she has two mothers. The Uncreated Mother, Taïke, whom she meets during her wanderings and who gives her Earth and Time — in other words, Death, without which no life is possible. And another, the Created Mother, who gives Manu the Sea and Life, and who is named Tilith (after whom girls are often called Tilitha). Tilith entrusts Manu with a mission: find the land-beneath-the-sea and the first arevags who have been lost there in the limbo of eternity (are they immortal?). Manu finds them, and in some obscure way — since the original arevags are all females, too — gives birth to the first hendemados.

Manu must be the third woman then, not the first, I said to Tilitha. Yes and no, she answered (with confidence, not with the hesitation such a reply would express if I had made it). Manu was the first real woman; Tilith was the first virtual woman. And Taïke? Taïke came from the world in an earlier state, not chaos, but "the mirror-world."

I pleaded for clarification, and Tilitha tried to supply it. In the mirror-world, the passive-virtual beings (o ikeï  she said) reproduced by union with their reflection. But one day, three of these beings had union among themselves, abandoning their reflections and creating Tilith, the first being who wasn't a copy. In this same momentum the three reflections, left to themselves, fused to produce Taïke, called "the Uncreated" because in a sense she gave birth to herself. But Taïke was too heavy for the insubstantial material of the virtual world; she tore a great hole and fell through. Her fall created the Earth. Tilith also was too real for the virtual world. The reflections turned to water wherever she went, and all this water flowed with Tilith toward the tear and spilled onto the Earth. And Tilith's fall created the Sea. The meeting of Tilith and Taïke gave birth to Manu in the real world created by both.

I asked Tilitha what happened to the beings of the virtual world once their reflections had spilled away, and her reply at last made it clear how she had been able to grasp my explanations about universes so readily. They still exist, she said. Without Tilith, the reflections grew again, and at this very moment Creation is reenacting itself in innumerable places and innumerable ways. The world in which we now live is merely a sort of local precipitation around the original seed created by Tilith and Taïke. There are many others, elsewhere.

March 15: As usual, a morning walk along the shore. And as usual, on the smooth sand left by the tide, the children are drawing the spiral of their morning hopscotch, the one narrowing toward the centre. This spiral retraces the adventures of Manu, and each segment must be approached in a certain way, accompanied by the little song I heard when I first awoke on this planet. It's a kind of dance, with the stances and the song complementing each other in recounting the adventures of the Third Mother, from her birth (first segment) to the birth of the first hendemados. The evening hopscotch tells of the creation of the world, the birth of Tilith and Taïke in the mirror-world, their fall, and (in the last and largest segment) the birth of Manu.

The whole game is highly ritualistic and the song resembles the chanting of a psalm. The players sing the whole thing in unison, adding a verse at each segment. The one standing on a segment must stay perfectly still all this time, holding the required posture for that segment and the story, only picking up the marker on the last syllable of the verse. Once one has hopped onto the same segment as the marker, one closes one’s eyes. This gives the other players a chance to exchange a sign fixing the speed at which they will chant. It may catch the player unawares, especially if one hasn't a clear idea of where the marker was lying. One has to pick it up without opening one’e eyes. If fumbling the first try or stumbling, then one must wait until the next turn to try for the same segment. I'm a little surprised at the age of the players, though, considering the kind of game it is. They range from five to fifteen years, of both sexes, arevags and hendemados — but fifteen is the cutoff mark. This is also the age when the young hendemados stop using speech as their main form of communication, and adopt the adult mode, three-quarters of which involves gestures.

I've been living in Terueli (the name of the village) for nearly a month now, and I'm still under observation. When I ask questions, people often reply with the head movement that means "tomorrow." Even Tilitha, whose open curiosity about me is an exception, often makes it clear that a particular question is premature. With the help of my Total Recall I can make all the correlations and hypotheses I like, but they're worthless if I can't verify them. (I'm forever noticing that the information in Total Recall isn't knowledge; like wisdom, knowledge isn't merely a matter of storing data.)

In any case, these people are not at all primitive, although they live simply. In a world where previous civilizations have plundered most of the primary materials, they make very clever use of what can be salvaged from the waste still surrounding them. Not so much at Terueli, which is mainly a fishing village — but the hendemados of the interior trade regularly with the coastal communities and even with some cities where the original humans are on the point of extinction. They have very sensibly adapted their way of life to the possibilities in their changed environment. But how do they really see themselves? Do they know that arevags and hendemados were artificially created by the original humans only six hundred years ago? It's tempting to link Tilitha's myth with my findings in Baïblanca.­.­.­. But then I remember the K'tu'tinié'go and their indulgent smile. Such a reductionist interpretation would still tell me nothing about how the myth nurtures their individual and collective lives. Tilitha had no hesitation about telling it: for her, it is a familiar story with no sense of secrecy or taboo. She even seemed to regard it with a sort of amused detachment. But how representative is she of her culture, I wonder? Physically, she's more of a hendemado than an arevag, and yet she's chosen to live under the water. And although she has a male companion in the village (and a female one beneath the sea, as is often the case), she has never had children, which is very unusual. It accentuates our resemblance. Some women Voyagers are compulsive about bearing a child in each of the universes where their desire takes them — something I could never understand. Or accept. And the ones to whom I sometimes talked never understood my quest for a totally different universe. But there was no acrimony in our disagreement: the Voyage is too personal, too solitary an adventure for us to judge each other. But they no doubt found what they were looking for, whereas I.­.­.­

March 22: Was it a dream? If so, I certainly can't shake it off. It has some secret meaning that I want to — that I must — make clear to myself.

Yesterday was the spring equinox. The villagers had a festival. They cleaned and redecorated their boats and houses. Delicious smells wafted through the village all that day and the day before, heralding the dishes for the coming feast. The young adults went out with the ebbing tide, and the boats came back with the rising tide, bearing the little hendemados born beneath the sea. These children will live in the village from now on. The little arevags born in the village will leave at the autumn equinox. There was dancing, music and singing competitions, and the two communities competed in trials of strength and skill on land and in the water. At nightfall we had the feast. I hadn't been officially invited, but then I've been welcomed with good will and friendliness at all festivities. I assumed an invitation was considered superfluous, since I was now sufficiently part of the village. As the night wore on, however, I became uncomfortable amid the increasingly erotic intimacy. All at once I felt terribly alone, and the black thoughts that had been temporarily pushed aside came flooding back. I'm here forever, I'll never leave.­.­.­ I set about serious drinking, both amused and disgusted at my childish behaviour. Disgust got the upper hand in the end, and I walked away from the merrymakers, not wishing to inflict my maudlin drunkenness on my hosts. I collapsed in the shadows of the beach, drifting in the slow whirlpool of second-stage inebriation as I lay between the heaving beach and the reeling, starstudded sky. I closed my eyes and fell asleep. And dreamed. I think.

I am on the beach where the feast was held. All trace of the festivities has disappeared, leaving only villagers and arevags seated side by side, forming a continuous line in the shape of a spiral. At the heart of the spiral, motionless and with eyes closed, lies Pilki, a fairly old hendemado. I've been tempted to think of him as the village priest, because people often consult him on a variety of problems. ("Oh, no," Tilitha said, "he's merely the father of a lot of children.") He doesn't move, nor do the arevags and hendemados, and yet something is moving. It's the song. It spirals slowly, swelling as each voice picks it up and adds a syllable. The song is a single word that lengthens as it passes from mouth to mouth... and suddenly begins to diminish, one syllable at a time, as it coils around the old man. I see it, I see it as though each syllable were a round box larger than the one before, growing until a threshold is reached, a limit beyond which the movement turns back on itself and each syllable folds into the preceding one until the word returns to its original state. Only to unfurl once more, from beginning to end, and from end to beginning—and no, they aren't boxes but rings springing successively out of their predecessors and being successively swallowed up by them, and the rings are a word, the word of the universe: it governs the ebb and flow of the tides, the elliptic path of the planet around the sun, and the sun's trajectory in the embrace of the galaxy; while the galaxy, dancing in the universe, whispers the same word passed back from sun to planet to tide, carried on the swirling winds and the curling buds, and from there into human bodies and jostling molecules of matter, minuscule galaxies of infinite coils.­.­.­. The spiral of sound furls and unfurls, and at the end of this eternity of motionless movement no one is left at the centre of the coil. Pilki has disappeared.

I awoke in my hut — someone had carried me back. It was past noon. I had a dreadful hangover and didn't get up. The villagers have better heads for their sparkling wine than I, and went about their daily business. In the evening one of Palli Kedia's sons brought me something to eat (leftovers from the feast will probably feed the village for several days). He is a tall, handsome boy named Lekin: the only sign of the arevag strain is his very light, vaguely iridescent skin. I made a joke of asking him if he'd brought me home last night. There was just the slightest hesitation, then he said "Til," sketching the sign for arevag. Tilitha had brought me back.

March 23: Pilki is no longer in the village. When I awoke this morning, I had such a vivid memory of the night on the beach (although I don't think I'd been dreaming again) that I went to Pilki's house. I had some idea of asking him about the meaning of my dream. He's no longer there. He has left, someone informed me in sign language. No one in his household seemed particularly upset except for Lollia, one of his granddaughters. Her eyes were red, as through from crying, but perhaps there's no connection. I went down to the beach. The children were playing hopscotch. I viewed the game differently now, and I asked them why they are always playing it, and why only at sunrise and sunset. To begin and end the day properly, they replied. Is it a game? A prayer? A training for the ritual I witnessed (maybe) the night of the festival? Or why not all of these together?

Tilitha was in her usual place, not far from the children. I expected some banter about the other night to reassure me it was all a drunken dream. But she said nothing. She was playing with one of those large shells sometimes washed in by the waves — a nautilus. After the brief moment of shared silence that is our greeting, I asked her where Pilki was. She turned the shell over and over, not answering, the delicate membranes between her fingers stretching and shrinking like a pulse-beat.

"When I was little," she said dreamily, as though not hearing my question, "I used to wonder what happened to the animal in this shell when it died. I thought it must get smaller and smaller as it went further and further into the shell, until one day it disappeared."

She handed me the shell. Its surface had been broken by the scouring sea or by the creature's predator. I could see the inner passages of the nautilus, the delicate, opalescent helix coiling around the transversal cone. I dropped the shell, annoyed by her apparent evasiveness. Was Pilki dead? Tilitha picked up the shell and blew off the sand.

"No, Pilki has left. He is elsewhere. As you are elsewhere here — more than you are elsewhere here. But he can never come back."

More than I was elsewhere here? Tilitha's forefinger, the tip of its claw just showing, traced the shell's spiral from the wide end to its apex. I tried to talk about my dream, but she held out the shell again.

"There is a tale. After Taïke fell from the mirror-world she was very lonely. She hadn't yet met Tilith. One day she found this shell on the beach and picked it up. It reminded her of her longed-for mirror-world. She lifted it to her ear and heard the word of the universe."

What had that to do with my dream?

Tilitha placed the shell in my hand with gentle authority. "Your dream," she said.

In exasperation I threw the shell far out into the waves where Tilitha's cousins were dancing. She shook her head and slid into the sea.

My dream. The nautilus. The spiral-song, the helix. Pilki's disappearance. I waited for the spark that would set all these data alight, but nothing came. Back in the village I tried to question the villagers — not openly, of course: if there's one thing I've learned, it is that this subject is really taboo, since even Tilitha couldn't answer me directly. My deviousness got me nowhere. People pretended not to understand, remarking with veiled amusement that things had got pretty hot at the festival. So here I am with my diary, alone beneath the great wheel of the stars. Tilitha hasn't come out of the sea to watch the sunset, or the daylight sky closing like a mother-of-pearl fan as night draws in. The sand beneath my feet is dotted with little rolling shells. Shells. Rolling. The wheel of the stars. The word of the universe. Taïke's mirror-world. My dream. The thread of words that coil and uncoil. A slow turning, more and more resonant, more and more...

motionless movement, resonant and deep, like

that sensation of motionless movement by which,

when the interior and exterior change places just before

the moment when the cold when

the imperceptible irresistible coiling when the cold

eyes closed the cold when breathing slows when

the breathing slows when

the vibrating thread of consciousness when all must stop

then the motionless and profound movement of the Voyage through

the Bridge, the Bridge!

But how do they do it — how would they do it? Suspended animation? Induced trance? I've never encountered anything like it before. The Voyage without the Bridge. Never, anywhere.­.­. How is it possible? I'd have to know more about the metabolism of hendemados and arevags. (Return to Baïblanca?) Heaven knows what those biosculptors invented six hundred years ago. Maybe they didn't even know themselves, or perhaps evolution has continued to shape their creatures in forms they never even imagined.­.­.­

No, it's not possible. A Voyage without a Bridge, a one-way, uncontrollable Voyage — it's death, Tilitha must have been talking about death. And yet she did say, "He is elsewhere, as you are elsewhere here — more than you are elsewhere here." But if this is a Voyage, how do they know it? Have those kinds of Voyagers arrived here? And yet she was so quick to understand my explanations, the universes, my Voyage.­.­­.

No, it's a dream, it must be a dream, because I've hunted through my Total Recall and there's nothing... but Total Recall records dreams too, so why would this one be so nebulous?

March 23, later: Tilitha again answered (but is it an answer?) that Pilki is elsewhere and that he won't come back. (She's so serene. I wonder why?) So I really did see something that night and it wasn't just a dream?  Pilki has gone on a Voyage? Have visitors come here the same way Pilki has arrived elsewhere? No. Well, how does she know he's elsewhere, in that case?

"Before you came among us," she said finally, "we didn't know, we weren't sure. Now we know why no one ever came back. Pilki is elsewhere. And he's not Pilki any more."

"If he's no longer Pilki, then he's dead!"

"Yes and no," she answered, always with that disconcerting assurance. "If he were still Pilki, he couldn't really be elsewhere. That's the price you have to pay."

Suddenly she seemed so strange in the pearly dawn light, such a stranger with her incomprehensible certainties, so totally, terribly, alien.­.­.­ I felt we could talk all day long, all our lives long, and I wouldn't even begin to understand. She's there, so close to me that I can touch her, but she seems to be... in another universe. And yet I'm the one who is the Voyager. Who was the Voyager.

Who could become a Voyager once more. Total Recall doesn't tell me anything about what happens between the moment I lose consciousness in the Bridge's capsule and the moment I wake on another planet. Suppose I were in the middle of the circle, in the middle of the universe-word like Pilki, perhaps I wouldn't remember anything when I awoke elsewhere. Really elsewhere?

"If it really is elsewhere, you can't tell. Look," Tilitha said, pointing to her dolphins leaping out of the sea at some distance from the shore. Their blue-black bodies glistened as they described perfect arcs in the air. "We are able to come on land and remain the same, just as our land sisters and brothers can go under water, but the dolphins... the dolphins can't fly. They're not made to fly. If they stayed in the air they'd no longer be dolphins. That would be the price they'd pay for becoming birds, for being truly elsewhere, don't you see?"

March 29: Pilki isn't dead, but he's no longer Pilki. In order to go elsewhere, truly elsewhere, he has become totally other. I understand. A transformation over which no control is possible, an irreversible metamorphosis, a Voyage from which you can't come back. A Voyage with no control, ever. I can grasp the concept intellectually, but my whole past life, all my conditioning as a Voyager, refuses to accept it. Yet what if this is the price of breaking out of the circle, of going truly elsewhere?

It's odd. All these years I spent leaping from one universe to another in search of something I wouldn't recognize, and I never once asked myself how I'd know it, how I'd identify the other universe-tree. How can anyone recognize absolute otherness? Can it even be perceived? When I thought about it, I naively told myself it would be a kind of illumination, that I'd know. It never occurred to me that it must be a one-way illumination, changing you irremediably, tearing you from yourself. How can you know the absolute-other if you carry your own reflection around with you everywhere? You can't simply recognize. You have to be other, no longer yourself... Impossible not to think "cease to be." (Tilith—between the world and its reflections, unable to stay in the universe where she was born, flowing out of it and, as she fell, creating another universe.) The price to pay. I never thought there'd be a price to pay: giving up control, giving up certainty — giving up oneself. A gamble. To get to the edge of the spiral, to the last syllable of the universe-word, and leap.

The law of the Voyage is still valid, though. I have indeed sent myself into a universe where a Bridge exists. A kind of Bridge. A Bridge you burn as you cross it. And of course none of those Voyagers has come back to describe other universe-trees. Even if they could, their truth would be incommunicable. Is that really what I was looking for, an incommunicable truth? No, I wanted to come back and tell the story, and that's still what I want. But I can't have it both ways. If I go, I become other. If I come back, if I become myself once more, I'll be unable to describe the otherness. Either way there's a price to pay.

But I did send myself here, where choice is possible. Go. Stay. Just as it was twenty years ago when I became a Voyager. But that wasn't really a question of choice: I'd already decided by coming to the Centre and undergoing the operations and training. I didn't leave right away became of Egon, because I wasn't sure he didn't love me.­.­. And in the end I left without being sure, on an impulse. That wasn't a real choice.

Go. Stay. If I leave, will it be out of defiance? If I stay, will it be out of fear? I don't know — I just don't know.

Tilitha felt the call of the dolphins' dance. She got up, and I automatically did the same, following her to the water's edge. The tide had washed the nautilus ashore again. A different nautilus, though, with a perfect shell. Tilitha nudged it with her foot, smiling, and I picked it up. I shook out the sand and water. They came in spurts, first passing from one chamber to another, sliding along the intricate coils of the inner surfaces. The chambered nautilus is an amazing shell: the volume enclosed by its internal surfaces is greater than the volume enclosed by its outer surface. There is more space inside the nautilus than its outer shell occupies.

"For us," Tilitha suddenly said, "the world, our world, is a nautilus. It takes a long, long time to explore its entire space, and rarely, very rarely, do we ever reach the end. Pilki thought he had reached it. Do you think you've reached it, Ao Talitha?”

Not knowing how to answer, I put the same question to her. She smiled. Long ago, when she was younger, she thought so. She retreated beneath the waves to meditate for a protracted period, after which she took a long journey through the sea, far from the kelp forest where the arevags live, and far from the coast as well. She visited the lands-beneath-the-sea, the drowned countries, their monuments, their cities, their mountains. On the way back she went to Aomanukera (the-city-of-Manu, as they call Baïblanca). And she decided she wasn't ready to go elsewhere.

"For me, elsewhere is here, with my companions in the village, my sisters and cousins beneath the sea. So many things to learn, always. And you, Ao Talitha, do you think you've learned everything?" she asked, gently insistent. "Do you believe you've come to the end of this world?"

To the end. The end of this world?  Know everything about this world? No, of course not. Never. You are right, alien from the sea who bears a name so close to mine, you are right, Ao Tilitha. I don't know, I won't know, not for a long time. Not before I die, perhaps.

Is there more space within than without?