Книга: Peace and War. Omnibus edition

Peace and War

Also by Joe Haldeman

Novels

War Year (1972)

The Forever War (1974)

Mindbridge (1976)

All My Sins Remembered (1977)

Worlds (1981)

Worlds Apart (1983)

Tool of the Trade (1987)

The Long Habit of Living (1989)

The Hemingway Hoax (1990)

Worlds Enough and Time (1992)

1968 (1995)

Forever Peace (1997)

Forever Free (1999)

Short Story Collections

Infinite Dreams (1979)

Dealing in Futures (1985)

None So Blind (1996)

The right of Joe Haldeman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him, in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This edition published in Great Britain in 2006 by

Gollancz

An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group

Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin's Lane,

London WC2H 9EA

An Hachette Livre UK Company

7 9 10 8

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9 780 57507 919 9

Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd,

Lymington, Hants

Printed and bound in Great Britain at Mackays of Chatham plc,

Chatham, Kent

The Orion Publishing Group's policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

www.orionbooks.co.uk

'Man was born into barbarism, when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another's flesh.'

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Forever War

For Ben and, always, for Gay.

Forever Free

For Gay, again, twenty-five years later.

Forever Peace

This novel is for two editors: John W. Campbell,

who rejected a story because he thought it was absurd to write

about American women who fight and die in combat,

and Ben Bova, who didn't.

The

Forever War

Author's Note

This is the definitive version of The Forever War. There are two other versions, and my publisher has been kind enough to allow me to clarify things here.

The one you're holding in your hand is the book as it was originally written. But it has a pretty tortuous history.

It's ironic, since it later won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and has won 'Best Novel' awards in other countries, but The Forever War was not an easy book to sell back in the early seventies. It was rejected by eighteen publishers before St Martin's Press decided to take a chance on it. 'Pretty good book,' was the usual reaction, 'but nobody wants to read a science fiction novel about Vietnam'. Twenty-five years later, most young readers don't even see the parallels between The Forever War and the seemingly endless one we were involved in at the time, and that's OK. It's about Vietnam because that's the war the author was in. But it's mainly about war, about soldiers, and about the reasons we think we need them.

While the book was being looked at by all those publishers, it was also being serialized piecemeal in Analog magazine. The editor, Ben Bova, was a tremendous help, not only in editing, but also for making the thing exist at all! He gave it a prominent place in the magazine, and it was also his endorsement that brought it to the attention of St Martin's Press, who took a chance on the hardcover, though they did not publish adult science fiction at that time.

But Ben rejected the middle section, a novella called 'You Can Never Go Back.' He liked it as a piece of writing, he said, but thought that it was too downbeat for Analog's audience. So I wrote him a more positive story and put 'You Can Never Go Back' into the drawer; eventually Ted White published it in Amazing magazine, as a coda to The Forever War.

At this late date, I'm not sure why I didn't reinstate the original middle when the book was accepted. Perhaps I didn't trust my own taste, or just didn't want to make life more complicated. But that first book version is essentially the Analog version with 'more adult language and situations', as they say in Hollywood.

The paperback of that version stayed in print for about sixteen years. Then in 1991 I had the opportunity to reinstate my original version. The dates in the book are now kind of funny; most people realize we didn't get into an interstellar war in 1996. I originally set it in that year so it was barely possible that the officers and NCOs could be veterans of Vietnam, so we decided to leave it that way, in spite of the obvious anachronisms. Think of it as a parallel universe.

But maybe it's the real one, and we're in a dream.

Joe Haldeman

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Private

Mandella

'Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.' The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn't look five years older than me. So if he'd ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he'd done it as an infant.

I already knew eighty ways to kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy. I sat up straight in my chair and assumed a look of polite attention and fell asleep with my eyes open. So did most everybody else. We'd learned that they never scheduled anything important for these after-chop classes.

The projector woke me up and I sat through a short tape showing the 'eight silent ways.' Some of the actors must have been brainwipes, since they were actually killed.

After the tape a girl in the front row raised her hand. The sergeant nodded at her and she rose to parade rest. Not bad looking, but kind of chunky about the neck and shoulders. Everybody gets that way after carrying a heavy pack around for a couple of months.

'Sir' – we had to call sergeants 'sir' until graduation – 'most of those methods, really, they looked … kind of silly.'

'For instance?'

'Like killing a man with a blow to the kidneys, from an entrenching tool. I mean, when would you actually have only an entrenching tool, and no gun or knife? And why not just bash him over the head with it?'

'He might have a helmet on,' he said reasonably.

'Besides, Taurans probably don't even have kidneys!'

He shrugged. 'Probably they don't.' This was 1997, and nobody had ever seen a Tauran; hadn't even found any pieces of Taurans bigger than a scorched chromosome. 'But their body chemistry is similar to ours, and we have to assume they're similarly complex creatures. They must have weaknesses, vulnerable spots. You have to find out where they are.

'That's the important thing.' He stabbed a finger at the screen. 'Those eight convicts got caulked for your benefit because you've got to find out how to kill Taurans, and be able to do it whether you have a megawatt laser or an emery board.'

She sat back down, not looking too convinced.

'Any more questions?' Nobody raised a hand.

'OK. Tench-hut!' We staggered upright and he looked at us expectantly.

'Fuck you, sir,' came the familiar tired chorus.

'Louder!'

'FUCK YOU, SIR!' One of the army's less-inspired morale devices.

'That's better. Don't forget, pre-dawn maneuvers tomorrow. Chop at 0330, first formation, 0400. Anybody sacked after 0340 owes one stripe. Dismissed.'

I zipped up my coverall and went across the snow to the lounge for a cup of soya and a joint. I'd always been able to get by on five or six hours of sleep, and this was the only time I could be by myself, out of the army for a while. Looked at the newsfax for a few minutes. Another ship got caulked, out by Aldebaran sector. That was four years ago. They were mounting a reprisal fleet, but it'll take four years more for them to get out there. By then, the Taurans would have every portal planet sewed up tight.

Back at the billet, everybody else was sacked and the main lights were out. The whole company'd been dragging ever since we got back from the two-week Lunar training. I dumped my clothes in the locker, checked the roster and found out I was in bunk 31. Goddammit, right under the heater.

I slipped through the curtain as quietly as possible so as not to wake up the person next to me. Couldn't see who it was, but I couldn't have cared less. I slipped under the blanket.

'You're late, Mandella,' a voice yawned. It was Rogers.

'Sorry I woke you up,' I whispered.

"Sallright.' She snuggled over and clasped me spoon-fashion. She was warm and reasonably soft.

I patted her hip in what I hoped was a brotherly fashion. 'Night, Rogers.'

'G'night, Stallion.' She returned the gesture more pointedly.

Why do you always get the tired ones when you're ready and the randy ones when you're tired? I bowed to the inevitable.

'Awright, let's get some goddamn back inta that! Stringer team! Move it up – move your ass up!'

A warm front had come in about midnight and the snow had turned to sleet. The permaplast stringer weighed five hundred pounds and was a bitch to handle, even when it wasn't covered with ice. There were four of us, two at each end, carrying the plastic girder with frozen fingertips. Rogers was my partner.

'Steel!' the guy behind me yelled, meaning that he was losing his hold. It wasn't steel, but it was heavy enough to break your foot. Everybody let go and hopped away. It splashed slush and mud all over us.

'Goddammit, Petrov,' Rogers said, 'why didn't you go out for the Red Cross or something? This fucken thing's not that fucken heavy.' Most of the girls were a little more circumspect in their speech. Rogers was a little butch.

'Awright, get a fucken move on, stringers – epoxy team! Dog'em! Dog'em!'

Our two epoxy people ran up, swinging their buckets. 'Let's go, Mandella. I'm freezin' my balls off.'

'Me, too,' the girl said with more feeling than logic.

'One – two – heave!' We got the thing up again and staggered toward the bridge. It was about three-quarters completed. Looked as if the second platoon was going to beat us. I wouldn't give a damn, but the platoon that got their bridge built first got to fly home. Four miles of muck for the rest of us, and no rest before chop.

We got the stringer in place, dropped it with a clank, and fitted the static clamps that held it to the rise-beams. The female half of the epoxy team started slopping glue on it before we even had it secured. Her partner was waiting for the stringer on the other side. The floor team was waiting at the foot of the bridge, each one holding a piece of the light, stressed permaplast over his head like an umbrella. They were dry and clean. I wondered aloud what they had done to deserve it, and Rogers suggested a couple of colorful, but unlikely, possibilities.

We were going back to stand by the next stringer when the field first (name of Dougelstein, but we called him 'Awright') blew a whistle and bellowed, 'Awright, soldier boys and girls, ten minutes. Smoke'em if you got 'em.' He reached into his pocket and turned on the control that heated our coveralls.

Rogers and I sat down on our end of the stringer and I took out my weed box. I had lots of joints, but we were ordered not to smoke them until after night-chop. The only tobacco I had was a cigarro butt about three inches long. I lit it on the side of the box; it wasn't too bad after the first couple of puffs. Rogers took a puff, just to be sociable, but made a face and gave it back.

'Were you in school when you got drafted?' she asked.

'Yeah. Just got a degree in physics. Was going after a teacher's certificate.'

She nodded soberly. 'I was in biology…'

'Figures.' I ducked a handful of slush. 'How far?'

'Six years, bachelor's and technical.' She slid her boot along the ground, turning up a ridge of mud and slush the consistency of freezing ice milk. 'Why the fuck did this have to happen?'

I shrugged. It didn't call for an answer, least of all the answer that the UNEF kept giving us. Intellectual and physical elite of the planet, going out to guard humanity against the Tauran menace. Soyashit. It was all just a big experiment. See whether we could goad the Taurans into ground action.

Awright blew the whistle two minutes early, as expected, but Rogers and I and the other two stringers got to sit for a minute while the epoxy and floor teams finished covering our stringer. It got cold fast, sitting there with our suits turned off, but we remained inactive on principle.

There really wasn't any sense in having us train in the cold. Typical army half-logic. Sure, it was going to be cold where we were going, but not ice-cold or snow-cold. Almost by definition, a portal planet remained within a degree or two of absolute zero all the time – since collapsars don't shine – and the first chill you felt would mean that you were a dead man.

Twelve years before, when I was ten years old, they had discovered the collapsar jump. Just fling an object at a collapsar with sufficient speed, and out it pops in some other part of the galaxy. It didn't take long to figure out the formula that predicted where it would come out: it travels along the same 'line' (actually an Einsteinian geodesic) it would have followed if the collapsar hadn't been in the way – until it reaches another collapsar field, whereupon it reappears, repelled with the same speed at which it approached the original collapsar. Travel time between the two collapsars … exactly zero.

It made a lot of work for mathematical physicists, who had to redefine simultaneity, then tear down general relativity and build it back up again. And it made the politicians very happy, because now they could send a shipload of colonists to Fomalhaut for less than it had once cost to put a brace of men on the Moon. There were a lot of people the politicians would love to see on Fomalhaut, implementing a glorious adventure rather than stirring up trouble at home.

The ships were always accompanied by an automated probe that followed a couple of million miles behind. We knew about the portal planets, little bits of flotsam that whirled around the collapsars; the purpose of the drone was to come back and tell us in the event that a ship had smacked into a portal planet at .999 of the speed of light.

That particular catastrophe never happened, but one day a drone limped back alone. Its data were analyzed, and it turned out that the colonists' ship had been pursued by another vessel and destroyed. This happened near Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus, but since 'Aldebaraniam' is a little hard to handle, they named the enemy 'Tauran.'

Colonizing vessels thenceforth went out protected by an armed guard. Often the armed guard went out alone, and finally the Colonization Group got shortened to UNEF, United Nations Exploratory Force. Emphasis on the 'force.'

Then some bright lad in the General Assembly decided that we ought to field an army of footsoldiers to guard the portal planets of the nearer collapsars. This led to the Elite Conscription Act of 1996 and the most elitely conscripted army in the history of warfare.

So here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging elitely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium.

About a month later, we left for our final training exercise, maneuvers on the planet Charon. Though nearing perihelion, it was still more than twice as far from the sun as Pluto.

The troopship was a converted 'cattlewagon' made to carry two hundred colonists and assorted bushes and beasts. Don't think it was roomy, though, just because there were half that many of us. Most of the excess space was taken up with extra reaction mass and ordnance.

The whole trip took three weeks, accelerating at two gees halfway, decelerating the other half. Our top speed, as we roared by the orbit of Pluto, was around one-twentieth of the speed of light – not quite enough for relativity to rear its complicated head.

Three weeks of carrying around twice as much weight as normal … it's no picnic. We did some cautious exercises three times a day and remained horizontal as much as possible. Still, we got several broken bones and serious dislocations. The men had to wear special supporters to keep from littering the floor with loose organs. It was almost impossible to sleep; nightmares of choking and being crushed, rolling over periodically to prevent blood pooling and bedsores. One girl got so fatigued that she almost slept through the experience of having a rib push out into the open air.

I'd been in space several times before, so when we finally stopped decelerating and went into free fall, it was nothing but relief. But some people had never been out, except for our training on the Moon, and succumbed to the sudden vertigo and disorientation. The rest of us cleaned up after them, floating through the quarters with sponges and inspirators to suck up the globules of partly-digested 'Concentrate, High-protein, Low-residue, Beef Flavor (Soya).'

We had a good view of Charon, coming down from orbit. There wasn't much to see, though. It was just a dim, off-white sphere with a few smudges on it. We landed about two hundred meters from the base. A pressurized crawler came out and mated with the ferry, so we didn't have to suit up. We clanked and squeaked up to the main building, a featureless box of grayish plastic.

Inside, the walls were the same drab color. The rest of the company was sitting at desks, chattering away. There was a seat next to Freeland.

'Jeff– feeling better?' He still looked a little pale.

'If the gods had meant for man to survive in free fall, they would have given him a cast iron glottis.' He sighed heavily. 'A little better. Dying for a smoke.'

'Yeah.'

'You seemed to take it all right. Went up in school, didn't you?'

'Senior thesis in vacuum welding, yeah. Three weeks in Earth orbit.' I sat back and reached for my weed box for the thousandth time. It still wasn't there. The Life-Support Unit didn't want to handle nicotine and THC.

'Training was bad enough,' Jeff groused, 'but this shit–'

'Tench-hut!' We stood up in a raggedy-ass fashion, by twos and threes. The door opened and a full major came in. I stiffened a little. He was the highest-ranking officer I'd ever seen. He had a row of ribbons stitched into his coveralls, including a purple strip meaning he'd been wounded in combat, fighting in the old American army. Must have been that Indochina thing, but it had fizzled out before I was born. He didn't look that old.

'Sit, sit.' He made a patting motion with his hand. Then he put his hands on his hips and scanned the company, a small smile on his face. 'Welcome to Charon. You picked a lovely day to land, the temperature outside is a summery eight point one five degrees Absolute. We expect little change for the next two centuries or so.' Some of them laughed halfheartedly.

'Best you enjoy the tropical climate here at Miami Base; enjoy it while you came. We're on the center of sunside here, and most of your training will be on darkside. Over there, the temperature stays a chilly two point zero eight.

'You might as well regard all the training you got on Earth and the Moon as just an elementary exercise, designed to give you a fair chance of surviving Charon. You'll have to go through your whole repertory here: tools, weapons, maneuvers. And you'll find that, at these temperatures, tools don't work the way they should; weapons don't want to fire. And people move v-e-r-y cautiously.'

He studied the clipboard in his hand. 'Right now, you have forty-nine women and forty-eight men. Two deaths on Earth, on psychiatric release. Having read an outline of your training program, I'm frankly surprised that so many of you pulled through.

'But you might as well know that I won't be displeased if as few as fifty of you, half, graduate from this final phase. And the only way not to graduate is to die. Here. The only way anybody gets back to Earth – including me – is after a combat tour.

'You will complete your training in one month. From here you will go to Stargate collapsar, half a light year away. You will stay at the settlement on Stargate 1, the largest portal planet, until replacements arrive. Hopefully, that will be no more than a month; another group is due here as soon as you leave.

'When you leave Stargate, you will go to some strategically important collapsar, set up a military base there, and fight the enemy, if attacked. Otherwise, you will maintain the base until further orders.

'The last two weeks of your training will consist of constructing exactly that kind of a base, on darkside. There you will be totally isolated from Miami Base: no communication, no medical evacuation, no resupply. Sometime before the two weeks are up, your defense facilities will be evaluated in an attack by guided drones. They will be armed.'

They had spent all that money on us just to kill us in training?

'All of the permanent personnel here on Charon are combat veterans. Thus, all of us are forty to fifty years of age. But I think we can keep up with you. Two of us will be with you at all times and will accompany you at least as far as Stargate. They are Captain Sherman Stott, your company commander, and Sergeant Octavio Cortez, your first sergeant. Gentlemen?'

Two men in the front row stood easily and turned to face us. Captain Stott was a little smaller than the major, but cut from the same mold: face hard and smooth as porcelain, cynical half-smile, a precise centimeter of beard framing a large chin, looking thirty at the most. He wore a large, gunpowder-type pistol on his hip.

Sergeant Cortez was another story, a horror story. His head was shaved and the wrong shape, flattened out on one side, where a large piece of skull had obviously been taken out. His face was very dark and seamed with wrinkles and scars. Half his left ear was missing, and his eyes were as expressive as buttons on a machine. He had a moustache-and-beard combination that looked like a skinny white caterpillar taking a lap around his mouth. On anybody else, his schoolboy smile might look pleasant, but he was about the ugliest, meanest-looking creature I'd ever seen. Still, if you didn't look at his head and considered the lower six feet or so, he could have posed as the 'after' advertisement for a body-building spa. Neither Stott nor Cortez wore any ribbons. Cortez had a small pocket-laser suspended in a magnetic rig, sideways, under his left armpit. It had wooden grips that were worn smooth.

'Now, before I turn you over to the tender mercies of these two gentlemen, let me caution you again:

'Two months ago there was not a living soul on this planet, just some leftover equipment from the expedition of 1991. A working force of forty-five men struggled for a month to erect this base. Twenty-four of them, more than half, died in the construction of it. This is the most dangerous planet men have ever tried to live on, but the places you'll be going will be this bad and worse. Your cadre will try to keep you alive for the next month. Listen to them … and follow their example; all of them have survived here much longer than you'll have to. Captain?' The captain stood up as the major went out the door.

'Tench-hut!' The last syllable was like an explosion and we all jerked to our feet.

'Now I'm only gonna say this once so you better listen,' he growled. 'We are in a combat situation here, and in a combat situation there is only one penalty for disobedience or insubordination.' He jerked the pistol from his hip and held it by the barrel, like a club. 'This is an Army model 1911 automatic pistol, caliber .45, and it is a primitive but effective weapon. The Sergeant and I are authorized to use our weapons to kill to enforce discipline. Don't make us do it because we will. We will.' He put the pistol back. The holster snap made a loud crack in the dead quiet.

'Sergeant Cortez and I between us have killed more people than are sitting in this room. Both of us fought in Vietnam on the American side and both of us joined the United Nations International Guard more than ten years ago. I took a break in grade from major for the privilege of commanding this company, and First Sergeant Cortez took a break from sub-major, because we are both combat soldiers and this is the first combat situation since 1987.

'Keep in mind what I've said while the First Sergeant instructs you more specifically in what your duties will be under this command. Take over, Sergeant.' He turned on his heel and strode out of the room. The expression on his face hadn't changed one millimeter during the whole harangue.

The First Sergeant moved like a heavy machine with lots of ball bearings. When the door hissed shut, he swiveled ponderously to face us and said, 'At ease, siddown,' in a surprisingly gentle voice. He sat on a table in the front of the room. It creaked, but held.

'Now the captain talks scary and I look scary, but we both mean well. You'll be working pretty closely with me, so you better get used to this thing I've got hanging in front of my brain. You probably won't see the captain much, except on maneuvers.'

He touched the flat part of his head. 'And speaking of brains, I still have just about all of mine, in spite of Chinese efforts to the contrary. All of us old vets who mustered into UNEF had to pass the same criteria that got you drafted by the Elite Conscription Act. So I suspect all of you are smart and tough – but just keep in mind that the captain and I are smart and tough and experienced.'

He flipped through the roster without really looking at it. 'Now, as the captain said, there'll be only one kind of disciplinary action on maneuvers. Capital punishment. But normally we won't have to kill you for disobeying; Charon'll save us the trouble.

'Back in the billeting area, it'll be another story. We don't much care what you do inside. Grab ass all day and fuck all night, makes no difference… But once you suit up and go outside, you've gotta have discipline that would shame a Centurian. There will be situations where one stupid act could kill us all.

'Anyhow, the first thing we've gotta do is get you fitted to your fighting suits. The armorer's waiting at your billet; he'll take you one at a time. Let's go.'

Now I know you got lectured back on Earth on what a fighting suit can do.' The armorer was a small man, partially bald, with no insignia of rank on his coveralls. Sergeant Cortez had told us to call him 'sir,' since he was a lieutenant.

'But I'd like to reinforce a couple of points, maybe add some things your instructors Earthside weren't clear about or couldn't know. Your First Sergeant was kind enough to consent to being my visual aid. Sergeant?'

Cortez slipped out of his coveralls and came up to the little raised platform where a fighting suit was standing, popped open like a man-shaped clam. He backed into it and slipped his arms into the rigid sleeves. There was a click and the thing swung shut with a sigh. It was bright green with CORTEZ stenciled in white letters on the helmet.

'Camouflage, Sergeant.' The green faded to white, then dirty gray. 'This is good camouflage for Charon and most of your portal planets,' said Cortez, as if from a deep well. 'But there are several other combinations available.' The gray dappled and brightened to a combination of greens and browns: 'Jungle.' Then smoothed out to a hard light ochre: 'Desert.' Dark brown, darker, to a deep flat black: 'Night or space.'

'Very good, Sergeant. To my knowledge, this is the only feature of the suit that was perfected after your training. The control is around your left wrist and is admittedly awkward. But once you find the right combination, it's easy to lock in.

'Now, you didn't get much in-suit training Earthside. We didn't want you to get used to using the thing in a friendly environment. The fighting suit is the deadliest personal weapon ever built, and with no weapon is it easier for the user to kill himself through carelessness. Turn around, Sergeant.'

'Case in point.' He tapped a large square protuberance between the shoulders. 'Exhaust fins. As you know, the suit tries to keep you at a comfortable temperature no matter what the weather's like outside. The material of the suit is as near to a perfect insulator as we could get, consistent with mechanical demands. Therefore, these fins get hot – especially hot, compared to darkside temperatures – as they bleed off the body's heat.

'All you have to do is lean up against a boulder of frozen gas; there's lots of it around. The gas will sublime off faster than it can escape from the fins; in escaping, it will push against the surrounding "ice" and fracture it … and in about one-hundredth of a second, you have the equivalent of a hand grenade going off right below your neck. You'll never feel a thing.

'Variations on this theme have killed eleven people in the past two months. And they were just building a bunch of huts.

'I assume you know how easily the waldo capabilities can kill you or your companions. Anybody want to shake hands with the sergeant?' He paused, then stepped over and clasped his glove. 'He's had lots of practice. Until you have, be extremely careful. You might scratch an itch and wind up breaking your back. Remember, semi-logarithmic response: two pounds' pressure exerts five pounds' force; three pounds' gives ten; four pounds', twenty-three; five pounds', forty-seven. Most of you can muster up a grip of well over a hundred pounds. Theoretically, you could rip a steel girder in two with that, amplified. Actually, you'd destroy the material of your gloves and, at least on Charon, die very quickly. It'd be a race between decompression and flash-freezing. You'd die no matter which won.

'The leg waldos are also dangerous, even though the amplification is less extreme. Until you're really skilled, don't try to run, or jump. You're likely to trip, and that means you're likely to die.'

'Charon's gravity is three-fourths of Earth normal, so it's not too bad. But on a really small world, like Luna, you could take a running jump and not come down for twenty minutes, just keep sailing over the horizon. Maybe bash into a mountain at eighty meters per second. On a small asteroid, it'd be no trick at all to run up to escape velocity and be off on an informal tour of intergalactic space. It's a slow way to travel.

'Tomorrow morning, we'll start teaching you how to stay alive inside this infernal machine. The rest of the afternoon and evening, I'll call you one at a time to be fitted. That's all, Sergeant.'

Cortez went to the door and turned the stopcock that let air into the airlock. A bank of infrared lamps went on to keep air from freezing inside it. When the pressures were equalized, he shut the stopcock, unclamped the door and stepped in, clamping it shut behind him. A pump hummed for about a minute, evacuating the airlock, then he stepped out and sealed the outside door.

It was pretty much like the ones on Luna.

'First I want Private Omar Almizar. The rest of you can go find your bunks. I'll call you over the squawker.'

'Alphabetical order, sir?'

'Yep. About ten minutes apiece. If your name begins with Z, you might as well get sacked.'

That was Rogers. She probably was thinking about getting sacked.

The sun was a hard white point directly overhead. It was a lot brighter than I had expected it to be; since we were eighty AUs out, it was only one 6400th as bright as it is on Earth. Still, it was putting out about as much light as a powerful streetlamp.

'This is considerably more light than you'll have on a portal planet.' Captain Stott's voice crackled in our collective ear. 'Be glad that you'll be able to watch your step.'

We were lined up, single-file, on the permaplast sidewalk that connected the billet and the supply hut. We'd practiced walking inside, all morning, and this wasn't any different except for the exotic scenery. Though the light was rather dim, you could see all the way to the horizon quite clearly, with no atmosphere in the way. A black cliff that looked too regular to be natural stretched from one horizon to the other, passing within a kilometer of us. The ground was obsidian-black, mottled with patches of white or bluish ice. Next to the supply hut was a small mountain of snow in a bin marked OXYGEN.

The suit was fairly comfortable, but it gave you the odd feeling of simultaneously being a marionette and a puppeteer. You apply the impulse to move your leg and the suit picks it up and magnifies it and moves your leg for you.

'Today we're only going to walk around the company area, and nobody will leave the company area.' The captain wasn't wearing his .45 – unless he carried it as a good luck charm, under his suit – but he had a laser-finger like the rest of us. And his was probably hooked up.

Keeping an interval of at least two meters between each person, we stepped off the permaplast and followed the captain over smooth rock. We walked carefully for about an hour, spiraling out, and finally stopped at the far edge of the perimeter.

'Now everybody pay close attention. I'm going out to that blue slab of ice' – it was a big one, about twenty meters away – 'and show you something that you'd better know if you want to stay alive.'

He walked out in a dozen confident steps. 'First I have to heat up a rock – filters down.' I squeezed the stud under my armpit and the filter slid into place over my image converter. The captain pointed his finger at a black rock the size of a basketball, and gave it a short burst. The glare rolled a long shadow of the captain over us and beyond. The rock shattered into a pile of hazy splinters.

'It doesn't take long for these to cool down.' He stopped and picked up a piece. 'This one is probably twenty or twenty-five degrees. Watch.' He tossed the 'warm' rock onto the ice slab. It skittered around in a crazy pattern and shot off the side. He tossed another one, and it did the same.

'As you know, you are not quite perfectly insulated. These rocks are about the temperature of the soles of your boots. If you try to stand on a slab of hydrogen, the same thing will happen to you. Except that the rock is already dead.

'The reason for this behavior is that the rock makes a slick interface with the ice – a little puddle of liquid hydrogen – and rides a few molecules above the liquid on a cushion of hydrogen vapor. This makes the rock or you a frictionless bearing as far as the ice is concerned, and you can't stand up without any friction under your boots.

'After you have lived in your suit for a month or so you should be able to survive falling down, but right now you just don't know enough. Watch.'

The captain flexed and hopped up onto the slab. His feet shot out from under him and he twisted around in midair, landing on hands and knees. He slipped off and stood on the ground.

'The idea is to keep your exhaust fins from making contact with the frozen gas. Compared to the ice they are as hot as a blast furnace, and contact with any weight behind it will result in an explosion.'

After that demonstration, we walked around for another hour or so and returned to the billet. Once through the airlock, we had to mill around for a while, letting the suits get up to something like room temperature. Somebody came up and touched helmets with me.

'William?' She had MCCOY stenciled above her face-plate.

'Hi, Sean. Anything special?'

'I just wondered if you had anyone to sleep with tonight.'

That's right; I'd forgotten. There wasn't any sleeping roster here. Everybody chose his own partner. 'Sure, I mean, uh, no … no, I haven't asked anybody. Sure, if you want to…'

'Thanks, William. See you later.' I watched her walk away and thought that if anybody could make a fighting suit look sexy, it'd be Sean. But even she couldn't.

Cortez decided we were warm enough and led us to the suit room, where we backed the things into place and hooked them up to the charging plates. (Each suit had a little chunk of plutonium that would power it for several years, but we were supposed to run on fuel cells as much as possible.) After a lot of shuffling around, everybody finally got plugged in and we were allowed to unsuit – ninety-seven naked chickens squirming out of bright green eggs. It was cold – the air, the floor and especially the suits – and we made a pretty disorderly exit toward the lockers.

I slipped on tunic, trousers and sandals and was still cold. I took my cup and joined the line for soya. Everybody was jumping up and down to keep warm.

'How c-cold, do you think, it is, M-Mandella?' That was McCoy.

'I don't, even want, to think, about it.' I stopped jumping and rubbed myself as briskly as possible, while holding a cup in one hand. 'At least as cold as Missouri was.'

'Ung … wish they'd, get some, fucken, heat in, this place.' It always affects the small women more than anybody else. McCoy was the littlest one in the company, a waspwaist doll barely five feet high.

'They've got the airco going. It can't be long now.'

'I wish I, was a big, slab of, meat like, you.'

I was glad she wasn't.

We had our first casualty on the third day, learning how to dig holes.

With such large amounts of energy stored in a soldier's weapons, it wouldn't be practical for him to hack out a hole in the frozen ground with the conventional pick and shovel. Still, you can launch grenades all day and get nothing but shallow depressions – so the usual method is to bore a hole in the ground with the hand laser, drop a timed charge in after it's cooled down and, ideally, fill the hole with stuff. Of course, there's not much loose rock on Charon, unless you've already blown a hole nearby.

The only difficult thing about the procedure is in getting away. To be safe, we were told, you've got to either be behind something really solid, or be at least a hundred meters away. You've got about three minutes after setting the charge, but you can't just sprint away. Not safely, not on Charon.

The accident happened when we were making a really deep hole, the kind you want for a large underground bunker. For this, we had to blow a hole, then climb down to the bottom of the crater and repeat the procedure again and again until the hole was deep enough. Inside the crater we used charges with a five-minute delay, but it hardly seemed enough time – you really had to go it slow, picking your way up the crater's edge.

Just about everybody had blown a double hole; everybody but me and three others. I guess we were the only ones paying really close attention when Bovanovitch got into trouble. All of us were a good two hundred meters away. With my image converter turned up to about forty power, I watched her disappear over the rim of the crater. After that, I could only listen in on her conversation with Cortez.

'I'm on the bottom, Sergeant.' Normal radio procedure was suspended for maneuvers like this; nobody but the trainee and Cortez was allowed to broadcast.

'OK, move to the center and clear out the rubble. Take your time. No rush until you pull the pin.'

'Sure, Sergeant.' We could hear small echoes of rocks clattering, sound conduction through her boots. She didn't say anything for several minutes.

'Found bottom.' She sounded a little out of breath.

'Ice or rock?'

'Oh, it's rock, Sergeant. The greenish stuff.'

'Use a low setting, then. One point two, dispersion four.'

'God darn it, Sergeant, that'll take forever.'

'Yeah, but that stuff's got hydrated crystals in it – heat it up too fast and you might make it fracture. And we'd just have to leave you there, girl. Dead and bloody.'

'OK, one point two dee four.' The inside edge of the crater flickered red with reflected laser light.

'When you get about half a meter deep, squeeze it up to dee two.'

'Roger.' It took her exactly seventeen minutes, three of them at dispersion two. I could imagine how tired her shooting arm was.

'Now rest for a few minutes. When the bottom of the hole stops glowing, arm the charge and drop it in. Then walk out, understand? You'll have plenty of time.'

'I understand, Sergeant. Walk out.' She sounded nervous. Well, you don't often have to tiptoe away from a twenty-microton tachyon bomb. We listened to her breathing for a few minutes.

'Here goes.' Faint slithering' sounds, the bomb sliding down.

'Slow and easy now. You've got five minutes.'

'Y-yeah. Five.' Her footsteps started out slow and regular. Then, after she started climbing the side, the sounds were less regular, maybe a little frantic. And with four minutes to go–

'Shit!' A loud scraping noise, then clatters and bumps. 'Shit-shit.' 'What's wrong, private?'

'Oh, shit.' Silence. 'Shit!'

'Private, you don't wanna get shot, you tell me what's wrong!'

'I … shit, I'm stuck. Fucken rockslide … shit … DO SOMETHING! I can't move, shit I can't move I, I–'

'Shut up! How deep?'

'Can't move my, shit, my fucken legs. HELP ME–'

'Then goddammit use your arms – push! You can move a ton with each hand.' Three minutes.

She stopped cussing and started to mumble, in Russian, I guess, a low monotone. She was panting, and you could hear rocks tumbling away.

'I'm free.' Two minutes.

'Go as fast as you can.' Cortez's voice was flat, emotionless.

At ninety seconds she appeared, crawling over the rim. 'Run, girl… You better run.' She ran five or six steps and fell, skidded a few meters and got back up, running; fell again, got up again–

It looked as though she was going pretty fast, but she had only covered about thirty meters when Cortez said, 'All right, Bovanovitch, get down on your stomach and lie still.' Ten seconds, but she didn't hear or she wanted to get just a little more distance, and she kept running, careless leaping strides, and at the high point of one leap there was a flash and a rumble, and something big hit her below the neck, and her headless body spun off end over end through space, trailing a red-black spiral of flash-frozen blood that settled gracefully to the ground, a path of crystal powder that nobody disturbed while we gathered rocks to cover the juiceless thing at the end of it.

That night Cortez didn't lecture us, didn't even show up for night-chop. We were all very polite to each other and nobody was afraid to talk about it.

I sacked with Rogers – everybody sacked with a good friend – but all she wanted to do was cry, and she cried so long and so hard that she got me doing it, too.

'Fire team A – move out!' The twelve of us advanced in a ragged line toward the simulated bunker. It was about a kilometer away, across a carefully prepared obstacle course. We could move pretty fast, since all of the ice had been cleared from the field, but even with ten days' experience we weren't ready to do more than an easy jog.

I carried a grenade launcher loaded with tenth-microton practice grenades. Everybody had their laser-fingers set at a point oh eight dee one, not much more than a flashlight. This was a simulated attack – the bunker and its robot defender cost too much to use once and be thrown away.

'Team B, follow. Team leaders, take over.'

We approached a clump of boulders at about the halfway mark, and Potter, my team leader, said, 'Stop and cover.' We clustered behind the rocks and waited for Team B.

Barely visible in their blackened suits, the dozen men and women whispered by us. As soon as they were clear, they jogged left, out of our line of sight.

'Fire!' Red circles of light danced a half-klick down-range, where the bunker was just visible. Five hundred meters was the limit for these practice grenades; but I might luck out, so I lined the launcher up on the image of the bunker, held it at a forty-five degree angle and popped off a salvo of three.

Return fire from the bunker started before my grenades even landed. Its automatic lasers were no more powerful than the ones we were using, but a direct hit would deactivate your image converter, leaving you blind. It was setting down a random field of fire, not even coming close to the boulders we were hiding behind.

Three magnesium-bright flashes blinked simultaneously about thirty meters short of the bunker. 'Mandella! I thought you were supposed to be good with that thing.'

'Damn it, Potter – it only throws half a klick. Once we get closer, I'll lay 'em right on top, every time.'

'Sure you will.' I didn't say anything. She wouldn't be team leader forever. Besides, she hadn't been such a bad girl before the power went to her head.

Since the grenadier is the assistant team leader, I was slaved into Potter's radio and could hear B team talk to her.

'Potter, this is Freeman. Losses?'

'Potter here – no, looks like they were concentrating on you.'

'Yeah, we lost three. Right now we're in a depression about eighty, a hundred meters down from you. We can give cover whenever you're ready.'

'OK, start.' Soft click: 'A team, follow me.' She slid out from behind the rock and turned on the faint pink beacon beneath her powerpack. I turned on mine and moved out to run alongside of her, and the rest of the team fanned out in a trailing wedge. Nobody fired while B team laid down a cover for us.

All I could hear was Potter's breathing and the soft crunch-crunch of my boots. Couldn't see much of anything, so I tongued the image converter up to a log two intensification. That made the image kind of blurry but adequately bright. Looked like the bunker had B team pretty well pinned down; they were getting quite a roasting. All of their return fire was laser. They must have lost their grenadier.

'Potter, this is Mandella. Shouldn't we take some of the heat off B team?'

'Soon as I can find us good enough cover. Is that all right with you? Private?' She'd been promoted to corporal for the duration of the exercise.

We angled to the right and lay down behind a slab of rock. Most of the others found cover nearby, but a few had to hug the ground.

'Freeman, this is Potter.'

'Potter, this is Smithy. Freeman's out; Samuels is out. We only have five men left. Give us some cover so we can get–'

'Roger, Smithy.' Click 'Open up, A team. The Bs are really hurtin'.'

I peeked out over the edge of the rock. My rangefinder said that the bunker was about three hundred fifty meters away, still pretty far. I aimed a smidgeon high and popped three, then down a couple of degrees, three more. The first ones overshot by about twenty meters; then the second salvo flared up directly in front of the bunker. I tried to hold on that angle and popped fifteen, the rest of the magazine, in the same direction.

I should have ducked down behind the rock to reload, but I wanted to see where the fifteen would land, so I kept my eyes on the bunker while I reached back to unclip another magazine–

When the laser hit my image converter, there was a red glare so intense it seemed to go right through my eyes and bounce off the back of my skull. It must have been only a few milliseconds before the converter overloaded and went blind, but the bright green afterimage hurt my eyes for several minutes.

Since I was officially 'dead,' my radio automatically cut off, and I had to remain where I was until the mock battle was over. With no sensory input besides the feel of my own skin (and it ached where the image converter had shone on it) and the ringing in my ears, it seemed like an awfully long time. Finally, a helmet clanked against mine.

'You OK, Mandella?' Potter's voice.

'Sorry, I died of boredom twenty minutes ago.'

'Stand up and take my hand.' I did so and we shuffled back to the billet. It must have taken over an hour. She didn't say anything more, all the way back – it's a pretty awkward way to communicate – but after we'd cycled through the airlock and warmed up, she helped me undo my suit. I got ready for a mild tongue-lashing, but when the suit popped open, before I could even get my eyes adjusted to the light, she grabbed me around the neck and planted a wet kiss on my mouth.

'Nice shooting, Mandella.'

'Huh?'

'Didn't you see? Of course not… The last salvo before you got hit – four direct hits. The bunker decided it was knocked out, and all we had to do was walk the rest of the way.'

'Great.' I scratched my face under the eyes, and some dry skin flaked off. She giggled.

'You should see yourself. You look like–'

'All personnel, report to the assembly area.' That was the captain's voice. Bad news, usually.

She handed me a tunic and sandals. 'Let's go.' The assembly area/ chop hall was just down the corridor. There was a row of roll-call buttons at the door; I pressed the one beside my name. Four of the names were covered with black tape. That was good, only four. We hadn't lost anybody during today's maneuvers.

The captain was sitting on the raised dais, which at least meant we didn't have to go through the tench-hut bullshit. The place filled up in less than a minute; a soft chime indicated the roll was complete.

Captain Stott didn't stand up. 'You did fairly well today. Nobody killed, and I expected some to be. In that respect you exceeded my expectations but in every other respect you did a poor job.

'I am glad you're taking good care of yourselves, because each of you represents an investment of over a million dollars and one-fourth of a human life.

'But in this simulated battle against a very stupid robot enemy, thirty-seven of you managed to walk into laser fire and be killed in a simulated way, and since dead people require no food you will require no food, for the next three days. Each person who was a casualty in this battle will be allowed only two liters of water and a vitamin ration each day.'

We knew enough not to groan or anything, but there were some pretty disgusted looks, especially on the faces that had singed eyebrows and a pink rectangle of sunburn framing their eyes.

'Mandella.'

'Sir?'

'You are far and away the worst-burned casualty. Was your image converter set on normal?'

Oh, shit. 'No, sir. Log two.'

'I see. Who was your team leader for the exercises?'

'Acting Corporal Potter, sir.'

'Private Potter, did you order him to use image intensification?'

'Sir, I … I don't remember.'

'You don't. Well, as a memory exercise you may join the dead people. Is that satisfactory?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Good. Dead people get one last meal tonight and go on no rations starting tomorrow. Are there any questions?' He must have been kidding. 'All right. Dismissed.'

I selected the meal that looked as if it had the most calories and took my tray over to sit by Potter.

'That was a quixotic damn thing to do. But thanks.'

'Nothing. I've been wanting to lose a few pounds anyway.' I couldn't see where she was carrying any extra.

'I know a good exercise,' I said. She smiled without looking up from her tray. 'Have anybody for tonight?'

'Kind of thought I'd ask Jeff…'

'Better hurry, then. He's lusting after Maejima.' Well, that was mostly true. Everybody did.

'I don't know. Maybe we ought to save our strength. That third day…'

'Come on.' I scratched the back of her hand lightly with a fingernail. 'We haven't sacked since Missouri. Maybe I've learned something new.'

'Maybe you have.' She tilted her head up at me in a sly way. 'OK.'

Actually, she was the one with the new trick. The French corkscrew, she called it. She wouldn't tell me who taught it to her though. I'd like to shake his hand. Once I got my strength back.

The two weeks' training around Miami Base eventually cost us eleven lives. Twelve, if you count Dahlquist. I guess having to spend the rest of your life on Charon with a hand and both legs missing is close enough to dying.

Foster was crushed in a landslide and Freeland had a suit malfunction that froze him solid before we could carry him inside. Most of the other deaders were people I didn't know all that well. But they all hurt. And they seemed to make us more scared rather than more cautious.

Now darkside. A flyer brought us over in groups of twenty and set us down beside a pile of building materials thoughtfully immersed in a pool of helium II.

We used grapples to haul the stuff out of the pool. It's not safe to go wading, since the stuff crawls all over you and it's hard to tell what's underneath; you could walk out onto a slab of hydrogen and be out of luck.

I'd suggested that we try to boil away the pool with our lasers, but ten minutes of concentrated fire didn't drop the helium level appreciably. It didn't boil, either; helium II is a 'superfluid,' so what evaporation there was had to take place evenly, all over the surface. No hot spots, so no bubbling.

We weren't supposed to use lights, to 'avoid detection.' There was plenty of starlight with your image converter cranked up to log three or four, but each stage of amplification meant some loss of detail. By log four the landscape looked like a crude monochrome painting, and you couldn't read the names on people's helmets unless they were right in front of you.

The landscape wasn't all that interesting, anyhow. There were half a dozen medium-sized meteor craters (all with exactly the same level of helium II in them) and the suggestion of some puny mountains just over the horizon. The uneven ground was the consistency of frozen spiderwebs; every time you put your foot down, you'd sink half an inch with a squeaking crunch. It could get on your nerves.

It took most of a day to pull all the stuff out of the pool. We took shifts napping, which you could do either standing up, sitting or lying on your stomach. I didn't do well in any of those positions, so I was anxious to get the bunker built and pressurized.

We couldn't build the thing underground – it'd just fill up with helium II – so the first thing to do was to build an insulating platform, a permaplast-vacuum sandwich three layers thick.

I was an acting corporal, with a crew of ten people. We were carrying the permaplast layers to the building site – two people can carry one easily – when one of 'my' men slipped and fell on his back.

'Damn it, Singer, watch your step.' We'd had a couple of deaders that way.

'Sorry, Corporal. I'm bushed. Just got my feet tangled up.'

'Yeah, just watch it.' He got back up all right, and he and his partner placed the sheet and went back to get another.

I kept my eye on Singer. In a few minutes he was practically staggering, not easy to do in that suit of cybernetic armor.

'Singer! After you set the plank, I want to see you.'

'OK.' He labored through the task and mooched over.

'Let me check your readout.' I opened the door on his chest to expose the medical monitor. His temperature was two degrees high; blood pressure and heart rate both elevated. Not up to the red line, though.

'You sick or something?'

'Hell, Mandella, I feel OK, just tired. Since I fell I been a little dizzy.' I chinned the medic's combination. 'Doc, this is Mandella. You wanna come over here for a minute?'

'Sure, where are you?' I waved and he walked over from poolside.

'What's the problem?' I showed him Singer's readout.

He knew what all the other little dials and things meant, so it took him a while. 'As far as I can tell, Mandella … he's just hot.'

'Hell, I coulda told you that,' said Singer.

'Maybe you better have the armorer take a look at his suit.' We had two people who'd taken a crash course in suit maintenance; they were our 'armorers.'

I chinned Sanchez and asked him to come over with his tool kit.

'Be a couple of minutes, Corporal. Carryin' a plank.'

'Well, put it down and get on over here.' I was getting an uneasy feeling. Waiting for him, the medic and I looked over Singer's suit.

'Uh-oh,' Doc Jones said. 'Look at this.' I went around to the back and looked where he was pointing. Two of the fins on the heat exchanger were bent out of shape.

'What's wrong?' Singer asked.

'You fell on your heat exchanger, right?'

'Sure, Corporal – that's it. It must not be working right.'

'I don't think it's working at all,' said Doc.

Sanchez came over with his diagnostic kit and we told him what had happened. He looked at the heat exchanger, then plugged a couple of jacks into it and got a digital readout from a little monitor in his kit. I didn't know what it was measuring, but it came out zero to eight decimal places.

Heard a soft click, Sanchez chinning my private frequency. 'Corporal this guy's a deader.'

'What? Can't you fix the goddamn thing?'

'Maybe … maybe I could, if I could take it apart. But there's no way–'

'Hey! Sanchez?' Singer was talking on the general freak. 'Find out what's wrong?' He was panting.

Click. 'Keep your pants on, man, we're working on it.' Click. 'He won't last long enough for us to get the bunker pressurized. And I can't work on the heat exchanger from outside of the suit.'

'You're got a spare suit, haven't you?'

'Two of 'em, the fit-anybody kind. But there's no place … say…'

'Right. Go get one of the suits warmed up.' I chinned the general freak. 'Listen, Singer, we've gotta get you out of that thing. Sanchez has a spare suit, but to make the switch, we're gonna have to build a house around you. Understand?'

'Huh-uh.'

'Look, we'll make a box with you inside, and hook it up to the life-support unit. That way you can breathe while you make the switch.' 'Soun's pretty compis … compil … cated t'me.'

'Look, just come along–'

'I'll be all right, man, jus' lemme res'…'

I grabbed his arm and led him to the building site. He was really weaving. Doc took his other arm, and between us, we kept him from falling over.

'Corporal Ho, this is Corporal Mandella.' Ho was in charge of the life-support unit.

'Go away, Mandella, I'm busy.'

'You're going to be busier.' I outlined the problem to her. While her group hurried to adapt the LSU – for this purpose, it need only be an air hose and heater – I got my crew to bring around six slabs of permaplast, so we could build a big box around Singer and the extra suit. It would look like a huge coffin, a meter square and six meters long.

We set the suit down on the slab that would be the floor of the coffin. 'OK, Singer, let's go.'

No answer.

'Singer, let's go.'

No answer.

'Singer!' He was just standing there. Doc Jones checked his readout. 'He's out, man, unconscious.'

My mind raced. There might just be room for another person in the box. 'Give me a hand here.' I took Singer's shoulders and Doc took his feet, and we carefully laid him out at the feet of the empty suit.

Then I lay down myself, above the suit. 'OK, close'er up.'

'Look Mandella, if anybody goes in there, it oughta be me.'

'Fuck you, Doc. My job. My man.' That sounded all wrong. William Mandella, boy hero.

They stood a slab up on edge – it had two openings for the LSU input and exhaust – and proceeded to weld it to the bottom plank with a narrow laser beam. On Earth, we'd just use glue, but here the only fluid was helium, which has lots of interesting properties, but is definitely not sticky.

After about ten minutes we were completely walled up. I could feel the LSU humming. I switched on my suit light – the first time since we landed on darkside – and the glare made purple blotches dance in front of my eyes.

'Mandella, this is Ho. Stay in your suit at least two or three minutes. We're putting hot air in, but it's coming back just this side of liquid.' I watched the purple fade for a while.

'OK, it's still cold, but you can make it.' I popped my suit. It wouldn't open all the way, but I didn't have too much trouble getting out. The suit was still cold enough to take some skin off my fingers and butt as I wiggled out.

I had to crawl feet-first down the coffin to get to Singer. It got darker fast, moving away from my light. When I popped his suit a rush of hot stink hit me in the face. In the dim light his skin was dark red and splotchy. His breathing was very shallow and I could see his heart palpitating.

First I unhooked the relief tubes – an unpleasant business – then the biosensors; and then I had the problem of getting his arms out of their sleeves.

It's pretty easy to do for yourself. You twist this way and turn that way and the arm pops out. Doing it from the outside is a different matter: I had to twist his arm and then reach under and move the suit's arm to match – it takes muscle to move a suit around from the outside.

Once I had one arm out it was pretty easy; I just crawled forward, putting my feet on the suit's shoulders, and pulled on his free arm. He slid out of the suit like an oyster slipping out of its shell.

I popped the spare suit and after a lot of pulling and pushing, managed to get his legs in. Hooked up the biosensors and the front relief tube. He'd have to do the other one himself; it's too complicated. For the nth time I was glad not to have been born female; they have to have two of those damned plumber's friends, instead of just one and a simple hose.

I left his arms out of the sleeves. The suit would be useless for any kind of work, anyhow; waldos have to be tailored to the individual.

His eyelids fluttered. 'Man … della. Where … the fuck…'

I explained, slowly, and he seemed to get most of it. Now I'm gonna close you up and go get into my suit. I'll have the crew cut the end off this thing and I'll haul you out. Got it?'

He nodded. Strange to see that – when you nod or shrug inside a suit, it doesn't communicate anything.

I crawled into my suit, hooked up the attachments and chinned the general freak. 'Doc, I think he's gonna be OK. Get us out of here now.'

'Will do.' Ho's voice. The LSU hum was replaced by a chatter, then a throb. Evacuating the box to prevent an explosion.

One corner of the seam grew red, then white, and a bright crimson beam lanced through, not a foot away from my head. I scrunched back as far as I could. The beam slid up the seam and around three corners, back to where it started. The end of the box fell away slowly, trailing filaments of melted 'plast.

'Wait for the stuff to harden, Mandella.'

'Sanchez, I'm not that stupid.'

'Here you go.' Somebody tossed a line to me. That would be smarter than dragging him out by myself. I threaded a long bight under his arms and tied it behind his neck. Then I scrambled out to help them pull, which was silly – they had a dozen people already linked up to haul.

Singer got out all right and was actually sitting up while Doc Jones checked his readout. People were asking me about it and congratulating me, when suddenly Ho said 'Look!' and pointed toward the horizon.

It was a black ship, coming in fast. I just had time to think it wasn't fair, they weren't supposed to attack until the last few days, and then the ship was right on top of us.

We all flopped to the ground instinctively, but the ship didn't attack. It blasted braking rockets and dropped to land on skids. Then it skied around to come to a rest beside the building site.

Everybody had it figured out and was standing around sheepishly when the two suited figures stepped out of the ship.

A familiar voice crackled over the general freak. 'Every one of you saw us coming in and not one of you responded with laser fire. It wouldn't have done any good but it would have indicated a certain amount of fighting spirit. You have a week or less before the real thing and since the sergeant and I will be here I will insist that you show a little more will to live. Acting Sergeant Potter.'

'Here, sir.'

'Get me a detail of twelve people to unload cargo. We brought a hundred small robot drones for target practice so that you might have at least a fighting chance when a live target comes over.

'Move now. We only have thirty minutes before the ship returns to Miami.'

I checked, and it was actually more like forty minutes.

Having the captain and sergeant there didn't really make much difference. We were still on our own; they were just observing.

Once we got the floor down, it only took one day to complete the bunker. It was a gray oblong, featureless except for the airlock blister and four windows. On top was a swivel-mounted gigawatt laser. The operator – you couldn't call him a 'gunner' – sat in a chair holding dead-man switches in both hands. The laser wouldn't fire as long as he was holding one of those switches. If he let go, it would automatically aim for any moving aerial object and fire at will. Primary detection and aiming was by means of a kilometer-high antenna mounted beside the bunker.

It was the only arrangement that could really be expected to work, with the horizon so close and human reflexes so slow. You couldn't have the thing fully automatic, because in theory, friendly ships might also approach.

The aiming computer could choose among up to twelve targets appearing simultaneously (firing at the largest ones first). And it would get all twelve in the space of half a second.

The installation was partly protected from enemy fire by an efficient ablative layer that covered everything except the human operator. But then, they were dead-man switches. One man above guarding eighty inside. The army's good at that kind of arithmetic.

Once the bunker was finished, half of us stayed inside at all times – feeling very much like targets – taking turns operating the laser, while the other half went on maneuvers.

About four klicks from the base was a large 'lake' of frozen hydrogen; one of our most important maneuvers was to learn how to get around on the treacherous stuff.

It wasn't too difficult. You couldn't stand up on it, so you had to belly down and sled.

If you had somebody to push you from the edge, getting started was no problem. Otherwise, you had to scrabble with your hands and feet, pushing down as hard as was practical, until you started moving, in a series of little jumps. Once started, you'd keep going until you ran out of ice. You could steer a little bit by digging in, hand and foot, on the appropriate side, but you couldn't slow to a stop that way. So it was a good idea not to go too fast and wind up positioned in such a way that your helmet didn't absorb the shock of stopping.

We went through all the things we'd done on the Miami side: weapons practice, demolition, attack patterns. We also launched drones at irregular intervals, toward the bunker. Thus, ten or fifteen times a day, the operators got to demonstrate their skill in letting go of the handles as soon as the proximity light went on.

I had four hours of that, like everybody else. I was nervous until the first 'attack,' when I saw how little there was to it. The light went on, I let go, the gun aimed, and when the drone peeped over the horizon – zzt! Nice touch of color, the molten metal spraying through space. Otherwise not too exciting.

So none of us were worried about the upcoming 'graduation exercise,' thinking it would be just more of the same.

Miami Base attacked on the thirteenth day with two simultaneous missiles streaking over opposite sides of the horizon at some forty kilometers per second. The laser vaporized the first one with no trouble, but the second got within eight klicks of the bunker before it was hit.

We were coming back from maneuvers, about a klick away from the bunker. I wouldn't have seen it happen if I hadn't been looking directly at the bunker the moment of the attack.

The second missile sent a shower of molten debris straight toward the bunker. Eleven pieces hit, and, as we later reconstructed it, this is what happened:

The first casualty was Maejima, so well-loved Maejima, inside the bunker, who was hit in the back and the head and died instantly. With the drop in pressure, the LSU went into high gear. Friedman was standing in front of the main airco outlet and was blown into the opposite wall hard enough to knock him unconscious; he died of decompression before the others could get him to his suit.

Everybody else managed to stagger through the gale and get into their suits, but Garcia's suit had been holed and didn't do him any good.

By the time we got there, they had turned off the LSU and were welding up the holes in the wall. One man was trying to scrape up the unrecognizable mess that had been Maejima. I could hear him sobbing and retching. They had already taken Garcia and Friedman outside for burial. The captain took over the repair detail from Potter. Sergeant Cortez led the sobbing man over to a corner and came back to work on cleaning up Maejima's remains, alone. He didn't order anybody to help and nobody volunteered.

As a graduation exercise, we were unceremoniously stuffed into a ship – Earth's Hope, the same one we rode to Charon – and bundled off to Stargate at a little more than one gee.

The trip seemed endless, about six months subjective time, and boring, but not as hard on the carcass as going to Charon had been. Captain Stott made us review our training orally, day by day, and we did exercises every day until we were worn to a collective frazzle.

Stargate 1 was like Charon's darkside, only more so. The base on Stargate 1 was smaller than Miami Base – only a little bigger than the one we constructed on darkside – and we were due to lay over a week to help expand the facilities. The crew there was very glad to see us, especially the two females, who looked a little worn around the edges.

We all crowded into the small dining hall, where Sub-major Williamson, the man in charge of Stargate 1, gave us some disconcerting news:

'Everybody get comfortable. Get off the tables, though, there's plenty of floor.

'I have some idea of what you just went through, training on Charon. I won't say it's all been wasted. But where you're headed, things will be quite different. Warmer.'

He paused to let that soak in.

'Aleph Aurigae, the first collapsar ever detected, revolves around the normal star Epsilon Aurigae in a twenty-seven year orbit. The enemy has a base of operations, not on a regular portal planet of Aleph, but on a planet in orbit around Epsilon. We don't know much about the - planet, just that it goes around Epsilon once every 745 days, is about three-fourths the size of Earth, and has an albedo of 0.8, meaning it's probably covered with clouds. We can't say precisely how hot it will be, but judging from its distance from Epsilon, it's probably rather hotter than Earth. Of course, we don't know whether you'll be working … fighting on lightside or darkside, equator or poles. It's highly unlikely that the atmosphere will be breathable – at any rate, you'll stay inside your suits.

Now you know exactly as much about where you're going as I do. Questions?'

'Sir,' Stein drawled, 'now we know where we're goin' … anybody know what we're goin' to do when we get there?'

Williamson shrugged. 'That's up to your captain – and your sergeant, and the captain of Earth's Hope, and Hope's logistic computer. We just don't have enough data yet to project a course of action for you. It may be a long and bloody battle; it may be just a case of walking in to pick up the pieces. Conceivably, the Taurans might want to make a peace offer,' – Cortez snorted – 'in which case you would simply be part of our muscle, our bargaining power.' He looked at Cortez mildly. 'No one can say for sure.'

The orgy that night was amusing, but it was like trying to sleep in the middle of a raucous beach party. The only area big enough to sleep all of us was the dining hall; they draped a few bedsheets here and there for privacy, then unleashed Stargate's eighteen sex-starved men on our women, compliant and promiscuous by military custom (and law), but desiring nothing so much as sleep on solid ground.

The eighteen men acted as if they were compelled to try as many permutations as possible, and their performance was impressive (in a strictly quantitative sense, that is). Those of us who were keeping count led a cheering section for some of the more gifted members. I think that's the right word.

The next morning – and every other morning we were on Stargate 1 – we staggered out of bed and into our suits, to go outside and work on the 'new wing.' Eventually, Stargate would be tactical and logistic headquarters for the war, with thousands of permanent personnel, guarded by half-a-dozen heavy cruisers in Hope's class. When we started, it was two shacks and twenty people; when we left, it was four shacks and twenty people. The work was hardly work at all, compared to darkside, since we had plenty of light and got sixteen hours inside for every eight hours' work. And no drone attack for a final exam.

When we shuttled back up to the Hope, nobody was too happy about leaving (though some of the more popular females declared it'd be good to get some rest). Stargate was the last easy, safe assignment we'd have before taking up arms against the Taurans. And as Williamson had pointed out the first day, there was no way of predicting what that would be like.

Most of us didn't feel too enthusiastic about making a collapsar jump, either. We'd been assured that we wouldn't even feel it happen, just free fall all the way.

I wasn't convinced. As a physics student, I'd had the usual courses in general relativity and theories of gravitation. We only had a little direct data at that time – Stargate was discovered when I was in grade school – but the mathematical model seemed clear enough.

The collapsar Stargate was a perfect sphere about three kilometers in radius. It was suspended forever in a state of gravitational collapse that should have meant its surface was dropping toward its center at nearly the speed of light. Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there … the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

At any rate, there would be a theoretical point in space-time when one end of our ship was just above the surface of the collapsar, and the other end was a kilometer away (in our frame of reference). In any sane universe, this would set up tidal stresses and tear the ship apart, and we would be just another million kilograms of degenerate matter on the theoretical surface, rushing headlong to nowhere for the rest of eternity or dropping to the center in the next trillionth of a second. You pays your money and you takes your frame of reference.

But they were right. We blasted away from Stargate 1, made a few course corrections and then just dropped, for about an hour.

Then a bell rang and we sank into our cushions under a steady two gravities of deceleration. We were in enemy territory.

We'd been decelerating at two gravities for almost nine days when the battle began. Lying on our couches being miserable, all we felt were two soft bumps, missiles being released. Some eight hours later, the squawk-box crackled: 'Attention, all crew. This is the captain.' Quinsana, the pilot, was only a lieutenant, but was allowed to call himself captain aboard the vessel, where he outranked all of us, even Captain Stott. 'You grunts in the cargo hold can listen, too.

'We just engaged the enemy with two fifty-gigaton tachyon missiles and have destroyed both the enemy vessel and another object which it had launched approximately three microseconds before.

'The enemy has been trying to overtake us for the past 179 hours, ship time. At the time of the engagement, the enemy was moving at a little over half the speed of light, relative to Aleph, and was only about thirty AUs from Earth's Hope. It was moving at .47c relative to us, and thus we would have been coincident in space-time' – rammed! – 'in a little more than nine hours. The missiles were launched at 0719 ship's time, and destroyed the enemy at 1540, both tachyon bombs detonating within a thousand klicks of the enemy objects.'

The two missiles were a type whose propulsion system was itself only a barely-controlled tachyon bomb. They accelerated at a constant rate of 100 gees, and were traveling at a relativistic speed by the time the nearby mass of the enemy ship detonated them.

'We expect no further interference from enemy vessels. Our velocity with respect to Aleph will be zero in another five hours; we will then begin the journey back. The return will take twenty-seven days.' General moans and dejected cussing. Everybody knew all that already, of course; but we didn't care to be reminded of it.

So after another month of logy calisthenics and drill, at a constant two gravities, we got our first look at the planet we were going to attack. Invaders from outer space, yes sir.

It was a blinding white crescent waiting for us two AUs out from Epsilon. The captain had pinned down the location of the enemy base from fifty AUs out, and we had jockeyed in on a wide arc, keeping the bulk of the planet between them and us. That didn't mean we were sneaking up on them – quite the contrary; they launched three abortive attacks – but it put us in a stronger defensive position. Until we had to go to the surface, that is. Then only the ship and its Star Fleet crew would be reasonably safe.

Since the planet rotated rather slowly – once every ten and one-half days – a 'stationary' orbit for the ship had to be 150,000 klicks out. This made the people in the ship feel quite secure, with 6,000 miles of rock and 90,000 miles of space between them and the enemy. But it meant a whole second's time lag in communication between us on the ground and the ship's battle computer. A person could get awful dead while that neutrino pulse crawled up and back.

Our vague orders were to attack the base and gain control, while damaging a minimum of enemy equipment. We were to take at least one enemy alive. We were under no circumstances to allow ourselves to be taken alive, however. And the decision wasn't up to us; one special pulse from the battle computer, and that speck of plutonium in your power plant would fiss with all of .01% efficiency, and you'd be nothing but a rapidly expanding, very hot plasma.

They strapped us into six scoutships – one platoon of twelve people in each – and we blasted away from Earth's Hope at eight gees. Each scoutship was supposed to follow its own carefully random path to our rendezvous point, 108 klicks from the base. Fourteen drone ships were launched at the same time, to confound the enemy's anti-spacecraft system.

The landing went off almost perfectly. One ship suffered minor damage, a near miss,boiling away some of the ablative material on one side of the hull, but it'd still be able to make it and return, keeping its speed down while in the atmosphere.

We zigged and zagged and wound up first ship at the rendezvous point. There was only one trouble. It was under four kilometers of water.

I could almost hear that machine, 90,000 miles away, grinding its mental gears, adding this new bit of data. We proceeded just as if we were landing on solid ground: braking rockets, falling, skids out, hit the water, skip, hit the water, skip, hit the water, sink.

It would have made sense to go ahead and land on the bottom we were streamlined, after all, and water just another fluid – but the hull wasn't strong enough to hold up a four kilometer column of water. Sergeant Cortez was in the scoutship with us.

'Sarge, tell that computer to do something! We're gonna get–'

'Oh, shut up, Mandella. Trust in th' lord.' 'Lord' was definitely lower-case when Cortez said it.

There was a loud bubbly sigh, then another, and a slight increase in pressure on my back that meant the ship was rising. 'Flotation bags?' Cortez didn't deign to answer, or didn't know.

That was it. We rose to within ten or fifteen meters of the surface and stopped, suspended there. Through the port I could see the surface above, shimmering like a mirror of hammered silver. I wondered what it would be like to be a fish.and have a definite roof over your world.

I watched another ship splash in. It made a great cloud of bubbles and turbulence, then fell – slightly tail-first – for a short distance before large bags popped out under each delta wing. Then it bobbed up to about our level and stayed.

'This is Captain Stott. Now listen carefully. There is a beach some twenty-eight klicks from your present position, in the direction of the enemy. You will be proceeding to this beach by scoutship and from there will mount your assault on the Tauran position.' That was some improvement; we'd only have to walk eighty klicks.

We deflated the bags, blasted to the surface and flew in a slow, spread-out formation to the beach. It took several minutes. As the ship scraped to a halt, I could hear pumps humming, making the cabin pressure equal to the air pressure outside. Before it had quite stopped moving, the escape slot beside my couch slid open. I rolled out onto the wing of the craft and jumped to the ground. Ten seconds to find cover – I sprinted across loose gravel to the 'treeline,' a twisty bramble of tall sparse bluish-green shrubs. I dove into the briar patch and turned to watch the ships leave. The drones that were left rose slowly to about a hundred meters, then took off in all directions with a bone-jarring roar. The real scoutships slid slowly back into the water. Maybe that was a good idea.

It wasn't a terribly attractive world but certainly would be easier to get around in than the cryogenic nightmare we were trained for. The sky was a uniform dull silver brightness that merged with the mist over the ocean so completely it was impossible to tell where water ended and air began. Small wavelets licked at the black gravel shore, much too slow and graceful in the three-quarters Earth-normal gravity. Even from fifty meters away, the rattle of billions of pebbles rolling with the tide was loud in my ears.

The air temperature was 79 degrees Centigrade, not quite hot enough for the sea to boil, even though the air pressure was low compared to Earth's. Wisps of steam drifted quickly upward from the line where water met land. I wondered how a lone man would survive exposed here without a suit. Would the heat or the low oxygen (partial pressure one-eighth Earth normal) kill him first? Or was there some deadly microorganism that would beat them both…?

'This is Cortez. Everybody come over and assemble on me.' He was standing on the beach a little to the left of me, waving his hand in a circle over his head. I walked toward him through the shrubs. They were brittle, unsubstantial, seemed paradoxically dried-out in the steamy air. They wouldn't offer much in the way of cover.

'We'll be advancing on a heading .05 radians east of north. I want Platoon One to take point. Two and Three follow about twenty meters behind, to the left and right. Seven, command platoon, is in the middle, twenty meters behind Two and Three. Five and Six, bring up the rear, in a semicircular closed flank. Everybody straight?' Sure, we could do that 'arrowhead' maneuver in our sleep. 'OK, let's move out.'

I was in Platoon Seven, the 'command group.' Captain Stott put me there not because I was expected to give any commands, but because of my training in physics.

The command group was supposedly the safest place, buffered by six platoons: people were assigned to it because there was some tactical reason for them to survive at least a little longer than the rest. Cortez was there to give orders. Chavez was there to correct suit malfunctions. The senior medic, Doc Wilson (the only medic who actually had an M.D.), was there, and so was Theodopolis, the radio engineer, our link with the captain, who had elected to stay in orbit.

The rest of us were assigned to the command group by dint of special training or aptitude that wouldn't' normally be considered of a 'tactical' nature. Facing a totally unknown enemy, there was no way of telling what might prove important. Thus I was there because I was the closest the company had to a physicist. Rogers was biology. Tate was chemistry. Ho could crank out a perfect score on the Rhine extrasensory perception test, every time. Bohrs was a polyglot, able to speak twenty-one languages fluently, idiomatically. Petrov's talent was that he had tested out to have not one molecule of xenophobia in his psyche. Keating was a skilled acrobat. Debby Hollister – 'Lucky' Hollister – showed a remarkable aptitude for making money, and also had a consistently high Rhine potential.

When we first set out, we were using the 'jungle' camouflage combination on our suits. But what passed for jungle in these anemic tropics was too sparse; we looked like a band of conspicuous harlequins trooping through the woods. Cortez had us switch to black, but that was just as bad, as the light of Epsilon came evenly from all parts of the sky, and there were no shadows except ours. We finally settled on the dun-colored desert camouflage.

The nature of the countryside changed slowly as we walked north, away from the sea. The thorned stalks – I guess you could call them trees – came in fewer numbers but were bigger around and less brittle; at the base of each was a tangled mass of vine with the same bluegreen color, which spread out in a flattened cone some ten meters in diameter. There was a delicate green flower the size of a man's head near the top of each tree.

Grass began to grow some five klicks from the sea. It seemed to respect the trees' 'property rights,' leaving a strip of bare earth around each cone of vine. At the edge of such a clearing, it would grow as timid bluegreen stubble, then, moving away from the tree, would get thicker and taller until it reached shoulderhigh in some places, where the separation between two trees was unusually large. The grass was a lighter, greener shade than the trees and vines. We changed the color of our suits to the bright green we had used for maximum visibility on Charon. Keeping to the thickest part of the grass, we were fairly inconspicuous.

We covered over twenty klicks each day, buoyant after months under two gees. Until the second day, the only form of animal life we saw was a kind of black worm, finger-sized, with hundreds of cilium legs like the bristles of a brush. Rogers said that there obviously had to be some larger creature around, or there would be no reason for the trees to have thorns. So we were doubly on guard, expecting trouble both from the Taurans and the unidentified 'large creature.'

Potter's second platoon was on point; the general freak was reserved for her, since her platoon would likely be the first to spot any trouble. 'Sarge, this is Potter,' we all heard. 'Movement ahead.'

'Get down, then!'

'We are. Don't think they see us.'

'First platoon, go up to the right of point. Keep down. Fourth, get up to the left. Tell me when you get in position. Sixth platoon, stay back and guard the rear. Fifth and third, close with the command group.'

Two dozen people whispered out of the grass to join us. Cortez must have heard from the fourth platoon.

'Good. How about you, first?… OK, fine. How many are there?'

'Eight we can see.' Potter's voice.

'Good. When I give the word, open fire. Shoot to kill.'

'Sarge… they're just animals.'

'Potter – if you've known all this time what a Tauran looks like,- you should've told us. Shoot to kill.'

'But we need…'

'We need a prisoner, but we don't need to escort him forty klicks to his home base and keep an eye on him while we fight. Clear?'

'Yes. Sergeant.'

'OK. Seventh, all you brains and weirds, we're going up and watch. Fifth and third, come along to guard.'

We crawled through the meter-high grass to where the second platoon had stretched out in a firing line.

'I don't see anything,' Cortez said.

'Ahead and just to the left. Dark green.'

They were only a shade darker than the grass. But after you saw the first one, you could see them all, moving slowly around some thirty meters ahead.

'Fire!' Cortez fired first; then twelve streaks of crimson leaped out and the grass wilted black, disappeared, and the creatures convulsed and died trying to scatter.

'Hold fire, hold it!' Cortez stood up. 'We want to have something left – second platoon, follow me.' He strode out toward the smoldering corpses, laser-finger pointed out front, obscene divining rod pulling him toward the carnage… I felt my gorge rising and knew that all the lurid training tapes, all the horrible deaths in training accidents, hadn't prepared me for this sudden reality … that I had a magic wand that I could point at a life and make it a smoking piece of half-raw meat; I wasn't a soldier nor ever wanted to be one nor ever would want–

'OK, seventh, come on up.' While we were walking toward them, one of the creatures moved, a tiny shudder, and Cortez flicked the beam of his laser over it with an almost negligent gesture. It made a hand-deep gash across the creature's middle. It died, like the others, without emitting a sound.

They were not quite as tall as humans, but wider in girth. They were covered with dark green, almost black, fur – white curls where the laser had singed. They appeared to have three legs and an arm. The only ornament to their shaggy heads was a mouth, wet black orifice filled with flat black teeth. They were thoroughly repulsive, but their worst feature was not a difference from human beings, but a similarity… Whenever the laser had opened a body cavity, milk-white glistening veined globes and coils of organs spilled out, and their blood was dark clotting red.

'Rogers, take a look. Taurans or not?'

Rogers knelt by one of the disemboweled creatures and opened a flat plastic box, filled with glittering dissecting tools. She selected a scalpel. 'One way we might be able to find out.' Doc Wilson watched over her shoulder as she methodically slit the membrane covering several organs.

'Here.' She held up a blackish fibrous mass between two fingers, a parody of daintiness through all that armor.

'So?'

'It's grass, Sergeant. If the Taurans eat the grass and breathe the air, they certainly found a planet remarkably like their home.' She tossed it away. 'They're animals, Sergeant, just fucken animals.'

'I don't know,' Doc Wilson said. 'Just because they walk around on all fours, threes maybe, and eat grass…'

'Well, let's check out the brain.' She found one that had been hit in the head and scraped the superficial black char from the wound. 'Look at that.'

It was almost solid bone. She tugged and ruffled the hair all over the head of another one. 'What the hell does it use for sensory organs? No eyes, or ears, or…' She stood up.

'Nothing in that fucken head but a mouth and ten centimeters of skull. To protect nothing, not a fucken thing.'

'If I could shrug, I'd shrug,' the doctor said. 'It doesn't prove anything – a brain doesn't have to look like a mushy walnut and it doesn't have to be in the head. Maybe that skull isn't bone, maybe that's the brain, some crystal lattice…'

'Yeah, but the fucken stomach's in the right place, and if those aren't intestines I'll eat–'

'Look,' Cortez said, 'this is real interesting, but all we need to know is whether that thing's dangerous, then we've gotta move on; we don't have all–'

'They aren't dangerous,' Rogers began. 'They don't–'

'Medic! DOC!' Somebody back at the firing line was waving his arms. Doc sprinted back to him, the rest of us following.

'What's wrong?' He had reached back and unclipped his medical kit on the run.

'It's Ho. She's out.'

Doc swung open the door on Ho's biomedical monitor. He didn't have to look far. 'She's dead.'

'Dead?' Cortez said. 'What the hell–'

'Just a minute.' Doc plugged a jack into the monitor and fiddled with some dials on his kit. 'Everybody's biomed readout is stored for twelve hours. I'm running it backwards, should be able to – there!'

'What?'

'Four and a half minutes ago – must have been when you opened fire – Jesus!'

'Well?'

'Massive cerebral hemorrhage. No…' He watched the dials. 'No … warning, no indication of anything out of the ordinary; blood pressure up, pulse up, but normal under the circumstances … nothing to … indicate–' He reached down and popped her suit. Her fine oriental features were distorted in a horrible grimace, both gums showing. Sticky fluid ran from under her collapsed eyelids, and a trickle of blood still dripped from each ear. Doc Wilson closed the suit back up.

'I've never seen anything like it. It's as if a bomb went off in her skull.'

'Oh fuck,' Rogers said, 'she was Rhine-sensitive, wasn't she.'

'That's right,' Cortez sounded thoughtful. 'All right, everybody listen up. Platoon leaders, check your platoons and see if anybody's missing, or hurt. Anybody else in seventh?'

'I … I've got a splitting headache, Sarge,' Lucky said.

Four others had bad headaches. One of them affirmed that he was slightly Rhine-sensitive. The others didn't know.

'Cortez, I think it's obvious,' Doc Wilson said, 'that we should give these … monsters wide berth, especially shouldn't harm any more of them. Not with five people susceptible to whatever apparently killed Ho.'

'Of course, God damn it, I don't need anybody to tell me that. We'd better get moving. I just filled the captain in on what happened; he agrees that we'd better get as far away from here as we can, before we stop for the night.

'Let's get back in formation and continue on the same bearing. Fifth platoon, take over point; second, come back to the rear. Everybody else, same as before.'

'What about Ho?' Lucky asked.

'She'll be taken care of. From the ship.'

After we'd gone half a Hick, there was a flash and rolling thunder. Where Ho had been came a wispy luminous mushroom cloud boiling up to disappear against the gray sky.

We stopped for the 'night' – actually, the sun wouldn't set for another seventy hours – atop a slight rise some ten klicks from where we had killed the aliens. But they weren't aliens, I had to remind myself – we were.

Two platoons deployed in a ring around the rest of us, and we flopped down exhausted. Everybody was allowed four hours' sleep and had two hours' guard duty.

Potter came over and sat next to me. I chinned her frequency.

'Hi, Marygay.'

'Oh, William,' her voice over the radio was hoarse and cracking. 'God, it's so horrible.'

'It's over now–'

'I killed one of them, the first instant, I shot it right in the, in the…'

I put my hand on her knee. The contact had a plastic click and I jerked it back, visions of machines embracing, copulating. 'Don't feel singled out, Marygay; whatever guilt there is, is … belongs evenly to all of us … but a triple portion for Cor–'

'You privates quit jawin' and get some sleep. You both pull guard in two hours.'

'OK, Sarge.' Her voice was so sad and tired I couldn't bear it. I felt if I could only touch her, I could drain off the sadness like ground wire draining current, but we were each trapped in our own plastic world–

'G'night, William.'

'Night.' It's almost impossible to get sexually excited inside a suit, with the relief tube and all the silver chloride sensors poking you, but somehow this was my body's response to the emotional impotence, maybe remembering more pleasant sleeps with Marygay, maybe feeling that in the midst of all this death, personal death could be very soon, cranking up the procreative derrick for one last try … lovely thoughts like this. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through a world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day–

'Mandella – wake up, goddammit, your shift!'

I shuffled over to my place on the perimeter to watch for god knows what … but I was so weary I couldn't keep my eyes open. Finally I tongued a stimtab, knowing I'd pay for it later.

For over an hour I sat there, scanning my sector left, right, near, far, the scene never changing, not even a breath of wind to stir the grass.

Then suddenly the grass parted and one of the three-legged creatures was right in front of me. I raised my finger but didn't squeeze.

'Movement!'

'Jesus Chri – there's one right–'

'HOLD YOUR FIRE! F' shit's sake don't shoot!'

'Movement.'

'Movement.' I looked left and right, and as far as I could see, every perimeter guard had one of the blind, dumb creatures standing right in front of him.

Maybe the drug I'd taken to stay awake made me more sensitive to whatever they did. My scalp crawled and I felt a formless thing in my mind, the feeling you get when somebody has said something and you didn't quite hear it, want to respond, but the opportunity to ask him to repeat it is gone.

The creature sat back on its haunches, leaning forward on the one front leg. Big green bear with a withered arm. Its power threaded through my mind, spiderwebs, echo of night terrors, trying to communicate, trying to destroy me, I couldn't know.

'All right, everybody on the perimeter, fall back, slow. Don't make any quick gestures… Anybody got a headache or anything?'

'Sergeant, this is Hollister.' Lucky.

'They're trying to say something… I can almost … no, just…'

'All I can get is that they think we're, think we're … well, funny. They're not afraid.'

'You mean the one in front of you isn't–'

'No, the feeling comes from all of them, they're all thinking the same thing. Don't ask me how I know, I just do.'

'Maybe they thought it was funny, what they did to Ho.'

'Maybe. I don't feel they're dangerous. Just curious about us.'

'Sergeant, this is Bohrs.'

'Yeah.'

'The Taurans've been here at least a year – maybe they've learned how to communicate with these … overgrown teddy bears. They might be spying on us, might be sending back–'

'I don't think they'd show themselves if that were the case,' Lucky said. 'They can obviously hide from us pretty well when they want to.'

'Anyhow,' Cortez said, 'if they're spies, the damage has been done. Don't think it'd be smart to take any action against them. I know you'd all like to see 'em dead for what they did to Ho, so would I, but we'd better be careful.'

I didn't want to see them dead, but I'd just as soon not have seen them in any condition. I was walking backwards slowly, toward the middle of camp. The creature didn't seem disposed to follow. Maybe he just knew we were surrounded. He was pulling up grass with his arm and munching.

'OK, all of you platoon leaders, wake everybody up, get a roll count. Let me know if anybody's been hurt. Tell your people we're moving out in one minute.'

I don't know what Cortez had expected, but of course the creatures followed right along. They didn't keep us surrounded; just had twenty or thirty following us all the time. Not the same ones, either. Individuals would saunter away, and new ones would join the parade. It was pretty obvious that they weren't going to tire out.

We were each allowed one stimtab. Without it, no one could have marched an hour. A second pill would have been welcome after the edge started to wear off, but the mathematics of the situation forbade it; we were still thirty klicks from the enemy base, fifteen hours' marching at the least. And though you could stay awake and energetic for a hundred hours on the tabs, aberrations of judgment and perception snowballed after the second one, until in extremis the most bizarre hallucinations would be taken at face value, and a person could fidget for hours deciding whether to have breakfast.

Under artificial stimulation, the company traveled with great energy for the first six hours, was slowing by the seventh, and ground to an exhausted halt after nine hours and nineteen kilometers. The teddy bears had never lost sight of us and, according to Lucky, had never stopped 'broadcasting.' Cortez's decision was that we would stop for seven hours, each platoon taking one hour of perimeter guard. I was never so glad to have been in the seventh platoon, as we stood guard the last shift and thus were able to get six hours of uninterrupted sleep.

In the few moments I lay awake after finally lying down, the thought came to me that the next time I closed my eyes could well be the last. And partly because of the drug hangover, mostly because of the past day's horrors, I found that I really didn't give a shit.

Our first contact with the Taurans came during my shift.

The teddy bears were still there when I woke up and replaced Doc Jones on guard. They'd gone back to their original formation, one in front of each guard position. The one who was waiting for me seemed a little larger than normal, but otherwise looked just like all the others. All the grass had been cropped where he was sitting, so he occasionally made forays to the left or right. But he always returned to sit right in front of me, you would say staring if he had had anything to stare with.

We had been facing each other for about fifteen minutes when Cortez's voice rumbled:

'Awright everybody, wake up and get hid!'

I followed instinct and flopped to the ground and rolled into a tall stand of grass.

'Enemy vessel overhead.' His voice was almost laconic.

Strictly speaking, it wasn't really overhead, but rather passing somewhat east of us. It was moving slowly, maybe a hundred klicks per hour, and looked like a broomstick surrounded by a dirty soap bubble. The creature riding it was a little more human-looking than the teddy bears, but still no prize. I cranked my image amplifier up to forty log two for a closer look.

He had two arms and two legs, but his waist was so small you could encompass it with both hands. Under the tiny waist was a large horseshoe-shaped pelvic structure nearly a meter wide, from which dangled two long skinny legs with no apparent knee joint. Above that waist his body swelled out again, to a chest no smaller than the huge pelvis. His arms looked surprisingly human, except that they were too long and undermuscled. There were too many fingers on his hands. Shoulderless, neckless. His head was a nightmarish growth that swelled like a goiter from his massive chest. Two eyes that looked like clusters of fish eggs, a bundle of tassels instead of a nose, and a rigidly open hole that might have been a mouth sitting low down where his adam's apple should have been. Evidently the soap bubble contained an amenable environment, as he was wearing absolutely nothing except his ridged hide, that looked like skin submerged too long in hot water, then dyed a pale orange. 'He' had no external genitalia, but nothing that might hint of mammary glands. So we opted for the male pronoun by default.

Obviously, he either didn't see us or thought we were part of the herd of teddy bears. He never looked back at us, but just continued in the same direction we were headed, .05 rad east of north.

'Might as well go back to sleep now, if you can sleep after looking at that thing. We move out at 0435.' Forty minutes.

Because of the planet's opaque cloud cover, there had been no way to tell, from space, what the enemy base looked like or how big it was. We only knew its position, the same way we knew the position the scoutships were supposed to land on. So it too could easily have been underwater, or underground.

But some of the drones were reconnaissance ships as well as decoys: and in their mock attacks on the base, one managed to get close enough to take a picture. Captain Stott beamed down a diagram of the place to Cortez – the only one with a visor in his suit – when we were five klicks from the base's 'radio' position. We stopped and he called all the platoon leaders in with the seventh platoon to confer. Two teddy bears loped in, too. We tried to ignore them.

'OK, the captain sent down some pictures of our objective. I'm going to draw a map; you platoon leaders copy.' They took pads and styli out of their leg pockets, while Cortez unrolled a large plastic mat. He gave it a shake to randomize any residual charge, and turned on his stylus.

'Now, we're coming from this direction.' He put an arrow at the bottom of the sheet. 'First thing we'll hit is this row of huts, probably billets or bunkers, but who the hell knows… Our initial objective is to destroy these buildings – the whole base is on a flat plain; there's no way we could really sneak by them.'

'Potter here. Why can't we jump over them?'

'Yeah, we could do that, and wind up completely surrounded, cut to ribbons. We take the buildings.'

'After we do that … all I can say is that we'll have to think on our feet. From the aerial reconnaissance, we can figure out the function of only a couple of buildings – and that stinks. We might wind up wasting a lot of time demolishing the equivalent of an enlisted-men's bar, ignoring a huge logistic computer because it looks like … a garbage dump or something.'

'Mandella here,' I said. 'Isn't there a spaceport of some kind – seems to me we ought to…'

'I'll get to that, damn it. There's a ring of these huts all around the camp, so we've got to break through somewhere. This place'll be closest, less chance of giving away our position before we attack.

'There's nothing in the whole place that actually looks like a weapon. That doesn't mean anything, though; you could hide a gigawatt laser in each of those huts.

'Now, about five hundred meters from the huts, in the middle of the base, we'll come to this big flower-shaped structure.' Cortez drew a large symmetrical shape that looked like the outline of a flower with seven petals. 'What the hell this is, your guess is as good as mine. There's only one of them, though, so we don't damage it any more than we have to. Which means … we blast it to splinters if I think it's dangerous.

'Now, as far as your spaceport, Mandella, is concerned – there just isn't one. Nothing.

'That cruiser the Hope caulked had probably been left in orbit, like ours has to be. If they have any equivalent of a scoutship, or drone missiles, they're either not kept here or they're well hidden.'

'Bohrs here. Then what did they attack with, while we were coming down from orbit?'

'I wish we knew, Private.

'Obviously, we don't have any way of estimating their numbers, not directly. Recon pictures failed to show a single Tauran on the grounds of the base. Meaning nothing, because it is an alien environment. Indirectly, though … we count the number of broomsticks, those flying things.

'There are fifty-one huts, and each has at most one broomstick. Four don't have any parked outside, but we located three at various other parts of the base. Maybe this indicates that there are fifty-one Taurans, one of whom was outside the base when the picture was taken.'

'Keating here. Or fifty-one officers.'

'That's right – maybe fifty thousand infantrymen stacked in one of these buildings. No way to tell. Maybe ten Taurans, each with five broomsticks, to use according to his mood.

'We've got one thing in our favor, and that's communications. They evidently use a frequency modulation of megahertz electromagnetic radiation.'

'Radio!'

'That's right, whoever you are. Identify yourself when you speak. So it's quite possible that they can't detect our phased-neutrino communications. Also, just prior to the attack, the Hope is going to deliver a nice dirty fission bomb; detonate it in the upper atmosphere right over the base. That'll restrict them to line-of-sight communications for some time; even those will be full of static.'

'Why don't… Tate here … why don't they just drop the bomb right in their laps. Save us a lot of–'

'That doesn't even deserve an answer, Private. But the answer is, they might. And you better hope they don't. If they caulk the base, it'll be for the safety of the Hope. After we've attacked, and probably before we're far enough away for it to make much difference.

'We keep that from happening by doing a good job. We have to reduce the base to where it can no longer function; at the same time, leave as much intact as possible. And take one prisoner.'

'Potter here. You mean, at least one prisoner.'

'I mean what I say. One only. Potter … you're relieved of your platoon. Send Chavez up.'

'All right, Sergeant.' The relief in her voice was unmistakable.

Cortez continued with his map and instructions. There was one other building whose function was pretty obvious; it had a large steerable dish antenna on top. We were to destroy it as soon as the grenadiers got in range.

The attack plan was very loose. Our signal to begin would be the flash of the fission bomb. At the same time, several drones would converge on the base, so we could see what their antispacecraft defenses were. We would try to reduce the effectiveness of those defenses without destroying them completely.

Immediately after the bomb and the drones, the grenadiers would vaporize a line of seven huts. Everybody would break through the hole into the base … and what would happen after that was anybody's guess.

Ideally, we'd sweep from that end of the base to the other, destroying certain targets, caulking all but one Tauran. But that was unlikely to happen, as it depended on the Taurans' offering very little resistance.

On the other hand, if the Taurans showed obvious superiority from the beginning, Cortez would give the order to scatter. Everybody had a different compass bearing for retreat – we'd blossom out in all directions, the survivors to rendezvous in a valley some forty klicks east of the base. Then we'd see about a return engagement, after the Hope softened the base up a bit.

'One last thing,' Cortez rasped. 'Maybe some of you feel the way Potter evidently does, maybe some of your men feel that way … that we ought to go easy, not make this so much of a bloodbath. Mercy is a luxury, a weakness we can't afford to indulge in at this stage of the war. All we know about the enemy is that they have killed seven hundred and ninety-eight humans. They haven't shown any restraint in attacking our cruisers, and it'd be foolish to expect any this time, this first ground action.

'They are responsible for the lives of all of your comrades who died in training, and for Ho, and for all the others who are surely going to die today. I can't understand anybody who wants to spare them. But that doesn't make any difference. You have your orders and, what the hell, you might as well know, all of you have a post-hypnotic suggestion that I will trigger by a phrase, just before the battle. It will make your job easier.'

'Sergeant…'

'Shut up. We're short on time; get back to your platoons and brief them. We move out in five minutes.'

The platoon leaders returned to their men, leaving Cortez and ten of us – plus three teddy bears, milling around, getting in the way.

We took the last five klicks very carefully, sticking to the highest grass, running across occasional clearings. When we were 500 meters from where the base was supposed to be, Cortez took the third platoon forward to scout, while the rest of us laid low.

Cortez's voice came over the general freak: 'Looks pretty much like we expected. Advance in a file, crawling. When you get to the third platoon, follow your squad leader to the left or right.'

We did that and wound up with a string of eighty-three people in a line roughly perpendicular to the direction of attack. We were pretty well hidden, except for the dozen or so teddy bears that mooched along the line, munching grass.

There was no sign of life inside the base. All of the buildings were windowless and a uniform shiny white. The huts that were our first objective were large featureless half-buried eggs some sixty meters apart. Cortez assigned one to each grenadier.

We were broken into three fire teams: team A consisted of platoons two, four, and six; team B was one, three, and five; the command platoon was team C.

'Less than a minute now – filters down! – when I say "fire," grenadiers, take out your targets. God help you if you miss.'

There was a sound like a giant's belch, and a stream of five or six iridescent bubbles floated up from the flower-shaped building. They rose with increasing speed until they were almost out of sight, then shot off to the south, over our heads. The ground was suddenly bright, and for the first time in a long time, I saw my shadow, a long one pointed north. The bomb had gone off prematurely. I just had time to think that it didn't make too much difference; it'd still make alphabet soup out of their communications–

'Drones!' A ship came screaming in just about tree level, and a bubble was in the air to meet it. When they contacted, the bubble popped and the drone exploded into a million tiny fragments. Another one came from the opposite side and suffered the same fate.

'FIRE!' Seven bright glares of 500-microton grenades and a sustained concussion that surely would have killed an unprotected man.

'Filters up.' Gray haze of smoke and dust. Clods of dirt falling with a sound like heavy raindrops.

'Listen up:

"Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled;

Scots, wham Bruce has often led,

Welcome to your gory bed,

Or to victory!"'

I hardly heard him for trying to keep track of what was going on in my skull. I knew it was just post-hypnotic suggestion, even remembered the session in Missouri when they'd implanted it, but that didn't make it any less compelling. My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories: shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists' vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (the colonists never took babies; they wouldn't stand the acceleration), then raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein) … a hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters…

I knew it was all purest soyashit, and I hated the men who had taken such obscene liberties with my mind, but I could even hear my teeth grinding, feel my cheeks frozen in a spastic grin, blood-lust… A teddy bear walked in front of me, looking dazed. I started to raise my laser-finger, but somebody beat me to it and the creature's head exploded in a cloud of gray splinters and blood.

Lucky groaned, half-whining. 'Dirty … filthy fucken bastards.' Lasers flared and crisscrossed, and all of the teddy bears fell dead.

'Watch it, goddammit,' Cortez screamed. 'Aim those fuckin things – they aren't toys!'

'Team A, move out – into the craters to cover B.'

Somebody was laughing and sobbing. 'What the fuck is wrong with you, Petrov?' Strange to hear Cortez cussing.

I twisted around and saw Petrov, behind and to my left, lying in a shallow hole, digging frantically with both hands, crying and gurgling.

'Fuck,' Cortez said. 'Team B! Ten meters past the craters, get down in a line. Team C – into the craters with A.'

I scrambled up and covered the hundred meters in twelve amplified strides. The craters were practically large enough to hide a scoutship, some ten meters in diameter. I jumped to the opposite side of the hole and landed next to a fellow named Chin. He didn't even look around when I landed, just kept scanning the base for signs of life.

'Team A – ten meters, past team B, down in line.' Just as he finished, the building in front of us burped, and a salvo of the bubbles fanned out toward our lines. Most people saw it coming and got down, but Chin was just getting up to make his rush and stepped right into one.

It grazed the top of his helmet and disappeared with a faint pop. He took one step backwards and toppled over the edge of the crater, trailing an arc of blood and brains. Lifeless, spreadeagled, he slid halfway to the bottom, shoveling dirt into the perfectly symmetrical hole where the bubble had chewed indiscriminately through plastic, hair, skin, bone, and brain.

'Everybody hold it. Platoon leaders, casualty report … check … check, check … check, check, check … check. We have three deaders. Wouldn't be any if you'd have kept low. So everybody grab dirt when you hear that thing go off. Team A, complete the rush.'

They completed the maneuver without incident. 'OK. Team C, rush to where B … hold it! Down!'

Everybody was already hugging the ground. The bubbles slid by in a smooth arc about two meters off the ground. They went serenely over our heads and, except for one that made toothpicks out of a tree, disappeared in the distance.

'B, rush past A ten meters. C, take over B's place. You B grenadiers, see if you can reach the Flower.'

Two grenades tore up the ground thirty or forty meters from the structure. In a good imitation of panic, it started belching out a continuous stream of bubbles – still, none coming lower than two meters off the ground. We kept hunched down and continued to advance.

Suddenly, a seam appeared in the building and widened to the size of a large door. Taurans came swarming out.

'Grenadiers, hold your fire. B team, laser fire to the left and right – keep'm bunched up. A and C, rush down the center.'

One Tauran died trying to run through a laser beam. The others stayed where they were.

In a suit, it's pretty awkward to run and keep your head down at the same time. You have to go from side to side, like a skater getting started; otherwise you'll be airborne. At least one person, somebody in A team, bounced too high and suffered the same fate as Chin.

I was feeling pretty fenced-in and trapped, with a wall of laser fire on each side and a low ceiling that meant death to touch. But in spite of myself, I felt happy, euphoric, finally getting the chance to kill some of those villainous baby-eaters. Knowing it was soyashit.

They weren't fighting back, except for the rather ineffective bubbles (obviously not designed as an anti-personnel weapon), and they didn't retreat back into the building, either. They milled around, about a hundred of them, and watched us get closer. A couple of grenades would caulk them all, but I guess Cortez was thinking about the prisoner.

'OK, when I say "go," we're going to flank 'em. B team will hold fire … second and fourth platoons to the right, sixth and seventh to the left. B team will move forward in line to box them in.

'Go!' We peeled off to the left. As soon as the lasers stopped, the Taurans bolted, running in a group on a collision course with our flank.

'A team, down and fire! Don't shoot until you're sure of your aim – if you miss you might hit a friendly. And fer Chris' sake save me one!'

It was a horrifying sight, that herd of monsters bearing down on us. They were running in great leaps – the bubbles avoiding them – and they all looked like the one we saw earlier, riding the broomstick; naked except for an almost transparent sphere around. the whole bodies, that moved along with them. The right flank started firing, picking off individuals in the rear of the pack.

Suddenly a laser flared through the Taurans from the other side, somebody missing his mark. There was a horrible scream, and I looked down the line to see. someone – I think it was Perry – writhing on the ground, right hand over the smoldering stump of his arm, seared off just below the elbow. Blood sprayed through his fingers, and the suit, its camouflage circuits scrambled, flickered black-white-jungle-desert-green-gray. I don't know how long I stared – long enough for the medic to run over and start giving aid – but when I looked up the Taurans were almost on top of me.

My first shot was wild and high, but it grazed the top of the leading Tauran's protective bubble. The bubble disappeared and the monster stumbled and fell to the ground, jerking spasmodically. Foam gushed out of his mouth-hole, first white, then streaked red. With one last jerk he became rigid and twisted backwards, almost to the shape of a horseshoe. His long scream, a high-pitched whistle, stopped just as his comrades trampled over him. I hated myself for smiling.

It was slaughter, even though our flank was outnumbered five to one. They kept coming without faltering, even when they had to climb over the drift of bodies and parts of bodies that piled up high, parallel to our flank. The ground between us was slick red with Tauran blood – all God's children got hemoglobin – and like the teddy bears, their guts looked pretty much like guts to my untrained eye. My helmet reverberated with hysterical laughter while we slashed them to gory chunks, and I almost didn't hear Cortez:

'Hold your fire – I said HOLD IT, goddammit! Catch a couple of the bastards, they won't hurt you.'

I stopped shooting and eventually so did everybody else. When the next Tauran jumped over the smoking pile of meat in front of me, I dove to try to tackle him around those spindly legs.

It was like hugging a big, slippery balloon. When I tried to drag him down, he popped out of my arms and kept running.

We managed to stop one of them by the simple expedient of piling half-a-dozen people on top of him. By, that time the others had run through our line and were headed for the row of large cylindrical tanks that Cortez had said were probably for storage. A little door had opened in the base of each one.

'We've got our prisoner,' Cortez shouted. 'Kill!'

They were fifty meters away and running hard, difficult targets. Lasers slashed around them, bobbing high and low. One fell, sliced in two, but the others, about ten of them, kept going and were almost to the doors when the grenadiers started firing.

They were still loaded with 500-mike bombs, but a near miss wasn't enough – the concussion would just send them flying, unhurt in their bubbles.

'The buildings! Get the fucken buildings!' The grenadiers raised their aim and let fly, but the bombs only seemed to scorch the white outside of the structures until, by chance, one landed in a door. That split the building just as if it had a seam; the two halves popped away and a cloud of machinery flew into the air, accompanied by a huge pale flame that rolled up and disappeared in an instant. Then the others all concentrated on the doors, except for potshots at some of the Taurans, not so much to get them as to blow them away before they could get inside. They seemed awfully eager.

All this time, we were trying to get the Taurans with laser fire, while they weaved and bounced around trying to get into the structures. We moved in as close to them as we could without putting ourselves in danger from the grenade blasts, yet too far away for good aim.

Still, we were getting them one by one and managed to destroy four of the seven buildings. Then, when there were only two aliens left, a nearby grenade blast flung one of them to within a few meters of a door. He dove in and several grenadiers fired salvos after him, but they all fell short or detonated harmlessly on the side. Bombs were falling all around, making an awful racket, but the sound was suddenly drowned out by a great sigh, like a giant's intake of breath, and where the building had been was a thick cylindrical cloud of smoke, solid-looking, dwindling away into the stratosphere, straight as if laid down by a ruler. The other Tauran had been right at the base of the cylinder; I could see pieces of him flying. A second later, a shock wave hit us and I rolled helplessly, pinwheeling, to smash into the pile of Tauran bodies and roll beyond.

I picked myself up and panicked for a second when I saw there was blood all over my suit – when I realized it was only alien blood, I relaxed but felt unclean.

'Catch the bastard! Catch him!' In the confusion, the Tauran had gotten free and was running for the grass. One platoon was chasing after him, losing ground, but then all of B team ran over and cut him off. I jogged over to join in the fun.

There were four people on top of him, and a ring around them of about fifty people, watching the struggle.

'Spread out, dammit! There might be a thousand more of them waiting to get us in one place.' We dispersed, grumbling. By unspoken agreement we were all sure that there were no more live Taurans on the face of the planet.

Cortez was walking toward the prisoner while I backed away. Suddenly the four men collapsed in a pile on top of the creature… Even from my distance I could see the foam spouting from his mouth-hole. His bubble had popped. Suicide.

'Damn!' Cortez was right there. 'Get off that bastard.' The four men got off and Cortez used his laser to slice the monster into a dozen quivering chunks. Heart-warming sight.

'That's all right, though, we'll find another one – everybody! Back in the arrowhead formation. Combat assault, on the Flower.'

Well, we assaulted the Flower, which had evidently run out of ammunition (it was still belching, but no bubbles), and it was empty. We scurried up ramps and through corridors, fingers at the ready, like kids playing soldier. There was nobody home.

The same lack of response at the antenna installation, the 'Salami,' and twenty other major buildings, as well as the forty-four perimeter huts still intact. So we had 'captured' dozens of buildings, mostly of incomprehensible purpose, but failed in our main mission, capturing a Tauran for the xenologists to experiment with. Oh well, they could have all the bits and pieces they'd ever want. That was something.

After we'd combed every last square centimeter of the base, a scoutship came in with the real exploration crew, the scientists. Cortez said, 'All right, snap out of it,' and the hypnotic compulsion fell away.

At first it was pretty grim. A lot of the people, like Lucky and Marygay, almost went crazy with the memories of bloody murder multiplied a hundred times. Cortez ordered everybody to take a sedtab, two for the ones most upset. I took two without being specifically ordered to do so.

Because it was murder, unadorned butchery – once we had the anti-spacecraft weapon doped out, we hadn't been in any danger. The Taurans hadn't seemed to have any conception of person-to-person fighting. We had just herded them up and slaughtered them, the first encounter between mankind and another intelligent species. Maybe it was the second encounter, counting the teddy bears. What might have happened if we had sat down and tried to communicate? But they got the same treatment.

I spent a long time after that telling myself over and over that it hadn't been me who so gleefully carved up those frightened, stampeding creatures. Back in the twentieth century, they had established to everybody's satisfaction that 'I was just following orders' was an inadequate excuse for inhuman contact … but what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious?

Worst of all was the feeling that perhaps my actions weren't all that inhuman. Ancestors only a few generations back would have done the same thing, even to their fellow men, without any hypnotic conditioning.

I was disgusted with the human race, disgusted with the army and horrified at the prospect of living with myself for another century or so… Well, there was always brainwipe.

A ship with a lone Tauran survivor had escaped and had gotten away clean, the bulk of the planet shielding it from Earth's Hope while it dropped into Aleph's collapsar field. Escaped home, I guessed, wherever that was, to report what twenty men with hand-weapons could do to a hundred fleeing on foot, unarmed.

I suspected that the next time humans met Taurans in ground combat, we would be more evenly matched. And I was right.

Sergeant

Mandella

2007-2024 AD

I was scared enough.

Sub-major Stott was pacing back and forth behind the small podium in the assembly room/chop hall/gymnasium of the Anniversary. We had just made our final collapsar jump, from Tet-38 to Yod-4. We were decelerating at 1½ gravities and our velocity relative to that collapsar was a respectable .90C. We were being chased.

'I wish you people would relax for a while and just trust the ship's computer. The Tauran vessel at any rate will not be within strike range for another two weeks. Mandella!'

He was always very careful to call me 'Sergeant' Mandella in front of the company. But everybody at this particular briefing was either a sergeant or a corporal: squad leaders. 'Yes, sir.'

'You're responsible for the psychological as well as the physical well-being of the men and women in your squad. Assuming that you are aware that there is a morale problem aboard this vessel, what have you done about it?'

'As far as my squad is concerned, sir?'

'Of course.'

'We talk it out, sir.'

'And have you arrived at any cogent conclusion?'

'Meaning no disrespect, sir, I think the major problem is obvious. My people have been cooped up in this ship for fourteen–'

'Ridiculous! Every one of us has been adequately conditioned against the pressures of living in close quarters and the enlisted people have the privilege of confraternity.' That was a delicate way of putting it. 'Officers must remain celibate, and yet we have no morale problem.'

If he thought his officers were celibate, he should sit down and have a long talk with Lieutenant Harmony. Maybe he just meant line officers, though. That would be just him and Cortez. Probably 50 percent right. Cortez was awfully friendly with Corporal Kamehameha.

'Sir, perhaps it was the detoxification back at Stargate; maybe–'

'No. The therapists only worked to erase the hate conditioning – everybody knows how I feel about that – and they may be misguided but they are skilled.

'Corporal Potter.' He always called her by her rank to remind her why she hadn't been promoted as high as the rest of us. Too soft. 'Have you "talked it out" with your people, too?'

'We've discussed it, sir.'

The sub-major could 'glare mildly' at people. He glared mildly at Marygay until she elaborated.

'I don't believe it's the fault of the conditioning. My people are impatient, just tired of doing the same thing day after day.'

'They're anxious for combat, then?' No sarcasm in his voice.

'They want to get off the ship, sir.'

'They will get off the ship,' he said, allowing himself a microscopic smile. 'And then they'll probably be just as impatient to get back on.'

It went back and forth like that for a long while. Nobody wanted to come right out and say that their squad was scared: scared of the Tauran cruiser closing on us, scared of the landing on the portal planet. Sub-major Stott had a bad record of dealing with people who admitted fear.

I fingered the fresh T/O they had given us. It looked like this:

I knew most of the people from the raid on Aleph, the first face-to-face contact between humans and Taurans. The only new people in my platoon were Luthuli and Heyrovsky. In the company as a whole (excuse me, the 'strike force'), we had twenty replacements for the nineteen people we lost from the Aleph raid: one amputation, four deaders, fourteen psychotics.

I couldn't get over the '20 Mar 2007' at the bottom of the T/O. I'd been in the army ten years, though it felt like less than two. Time dilation, of course; even with the collapsar jumps, traveling from star to star eats up the calendar.

After this raid, I would probably be eligible for retirement, with full pay. If I lived through the raid, and if they didn't change the rules on us. Me a twenty-year man, and only twenty-five years old.

Stott was summing up when there was a knock on the door, a single loud rap. 'Enter,' he said.

An ensign I knew vaguely walked in casually and handed Stott a slip of paper, without saying a word. He stood there while Stott read it, slumping with just the right degree of insolence. Technically, Stott was out of his chain of command; everybody in the navy disliked him anyhow.

Stott handed the paper back to the ensign and looked through him.

'You will alert your squads that preliminary evasive maneuvers will commence at 2010, fifty-eight minutes from now.' He hadn't looked at his watch. 'All personnel will be in acceleration shells by 2000. Tench … hut!'

We rose and, without enthusiasm, chorused, 'Fuck you, sir.' Idiotic custom.

Stott strode out of the room and the ensign followed, smirking.

I turned my ring to my assistant squad leader's position and talked into it: 'Tate, this is Mandella.' Everyone else in the room was doing the same.

A tinny voice came out of the ring. 'Tate here. What's up?'

'Get ahold of the men and tell them we have to be in the shells by 2000. Evasive maneuvers.'

'Crap. They told us it would be days.'

'I guess something new came up. Or maybe the Commodore has a bright idea.'

'The Commodore can stuff it. You up in the lounge?'

'Yeah.'

'Bring me back a cup when you come, OK? Little sugar?'

'Roger. Be down in about half an hour.'

'Thanks. I'll get on it.'

There was a general movement toward the coffee machine. I got in line behind Corporal Potter.

'What do you think, Marygay?'

'Maybe the Commodore just wants us to try out the shells once more.'

'Before the real thing.'

'Maybe.' She picked up a cup and blew into it. She looked worried. 'Or maybe the Taurans had a ship way out, waiting for us. I've wondered why they don't do it. We do, at Stargate.'

'Stargate's a different thing. It takes seven cruisers, moving all the time, to cover all the possible exit angles. We can't afford to do it for more than one collapsar, and neither could they.'

She didn't say anything while she filled her cup. 'Maybe we've stumbled on their version of Stargate. Or maybe they have more ships than we do by now.'

I filled and sugared two cups, sealed one. 'No way to tell.' We walked back to a table, careful with the cups in the high gravity.

'Maybe Singhe knows something,' she said.

'Maybe he does. But I'd have to get him through Rogers and Cortez. Cortez would jump down my throat if I tried to bother him now.'

'Oh, I can get him directly. We…' She dimpled a little bit. 'We've been friends.'

I sipped some scalding coffee and tried to sound nonchalant. 'So that's where you've been disappearing to.'

'You disapprove?' she said, looking innocent.

'Well … damn it, no, of course not. But – but he's an officer! A navy officer!'

'He's attached to us and that makes him part army.' She twisted her ring and said, 'Directory.' To me: 'What about you and Little Miss Harmony?'

'That's not the same thing.' She was whispering a directory code into the ring.

'Yes, it is. You just wanted to do it with an officer. Pervert.' The ring bleated twice. Busy. 'How was she?'

'Adequate.' I was recovering.

'Besides, Ensign Singhe is a perfect gentleman. And not the least bit jealous.'

'Neither am I,' I said. 'If he ever hurts you, tell me and I'll break his ass.'

She looked at me across her cup. 'If Lieutenant Harmony ever hurts you, tell me and I'll break her ass.'

'It's a deal.' We shook on it solemnly.

The acceleration shells were something new, installed while we rested and resupplied at Stargate. They enabled us to use the ship at closer to its theoretical efficiency, the tachyon drive boosting it to as much as 25 gravities.

Tate was waiting for me in the shell area. The rest of the squad was milling around, talking. I gave him his coffee.

'Thanks. Find out anything?'

'Afraid not. Except the swabbies don't seem to be scared, and it's their show. Probably just another practice run.'

He slurped some coffee. 'What the hell. It's all the same to us, anyhow. Just sit there and get squeezed half to death. God, I hate those things.'

'Maybe they'll eventually make us obsolete, and we can go home.'

'Sure thing.' The medic came by and gave me my shot.

I waited until 1950 and hollered to the squad. 'Let's go. Strip down and zip up.'

The shell is like a flexible spacesuit; at least the fittings on the inside are pretty similar. But instead of a life-support package, there's a hose going into the top of the helmet and two coming out of the heels, as well as two relief tubes per suit. They're crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder on light acceleration couches; getting to your shell is like picking your way through a giant plate of olive drab spaghetti.

When the lights in my helmet showed that everybody was suited up, I pushed the button that flooded the room. No way to see, of course, but I could imagine the pale blue solution – ethylene glycol and something else – foaming up around and over us. The suit material, cool and dry, collapsed in to touch my skin at every point. I knew that my internal body pressure was increasing rapidly to match the increasing fluid pressure outside. That's what the shot was for; keep your cells from getting squished between the devil and the deep blue sea. You could still feel it, though. By the time my meter said '2' (external pressure equivalent to a column of water two nautical miles deep), I felt that I was at the same time being crushed and bloated. By 2005 it was at 2.7 and holding steady. When the maneuvers began at 2010, you couldn't feel the difference. I thought I saw the needle fluctuate a tiny bit, though.

The major drawback to the system is that, of course, anybody caught outside of his shell when the Anniversary hit 25 G's would be just so much strawberry jam. So the guiding and the fighting have to be done by the ship's tactical computer – which does most of it anyway, but it's nice to have a human overseer.

Another small problem is that if the ship gets damaged and the pressure drops, you'll explode like a dropped melon. If it's the internal pressure, you get crushed to death in a microsecond.

And it takes ten minutes, more or less, to get depressurized and another two or three to get untangled and dressed. So it's not exactly something you can hop out of and come up fighting.

The accelerating was over at 2038. A green light went on and I chinned the button to depressurize.

Marygay and I were getting dressed outside.

'How'd that happen?' I pointed to an angry purple welt that ran from the bottom of her right breast to her hipbone.

'That's the second time,' she said, mad. 'The first one was on my back – I think that shell doesn't fit right, gets creases.'

'Maybe you've lost weight.'

'Wise guy.' Our caloric intake had been rigorously monitored ever since we left Stargate the first time. You can't use a fighting suit unless it fits you like a second skin.

A wall speaker drowned out the rest of her comment. 'Attention all personnel. Attention. All army personnel echelon six and above and all navy personnel echelon four and above will report to the briefing room at 2130.'

It repeated the message twice. I went off to lie down for a few minutes while Marygay showed her bruise to the medic and the armorer. I didn't feel a bit jealous.

The Commodore began the briefing. 'There's not much to tell, and what there is is not good news.

'Six days ago, the Tauran vessel that is pursuing us released a drone missile. Its initial acceleration was on the order of 80 gravities.

'After blasting for approximately a day, its acceleration suddenly jumped to 148 gravities.' Collective gasp.

'Yesterday, it jumped to 203 gravities. I shouldn't need to remind anyone here that this is twice the accelerative capability of the enemy's drones in our last encounter.

'We launched a salvo of drones, four of them, intersecting what the computer predicted to be the four most probably future trajectories of the enemy drone. One of them paid off, while we were doing evasive maneuvers. We contacted and destroyed the Tauran weapon about ten million kilometers from here.'

That was practically next door. 'The only encouraging thing we learned from the encounter was from spectral analysis of the blast. It was no more powerful an explosion than ones we have observed in the past, so at least their progress in propulsion hasn't been matched by progress in explosives.

'This is the first manifestation of a very important effect that has heretofore been of interest only to theorists. Tell me, soldier.' He pointed at Negulesco. 'How long has it been since we first fought the Taurans, at Aleph?'

'That depends on your frame of reference, Commodore,' she answered dutifully. 'To me, it's been about eight months.'

'Exactly. You've lost about nine years, though, to time dilation, while we maneuvered between collapsar jumps. In an engineering sense, as we haven't done any important research and development aboard ship … that enemy vessel comes from our future!' He paused to let that sink in.

'As the war progresses, this can only become more and more pronounced. The Taurans don't have any cure for relativity, of course, so it will be to our benefit as often as to theirs.

'For the present, though, it is we who are operating with a handicap. As the Tauran pursuit vessel draws closer, this handicap will become more severe. They can simply outshoot us.

'We're going to have to do some fancy dodging. When we get within five hundred million kilometers of the enemy ship, everybody gets in his shell and we just have to trust the logistic computer. It will put us through a rapid series of random changes in direction and velocity.

'I'll be blunt. As long as they have one more drone than we, they can finish us off. They haven't launched any more since that first one. Perhaps they are holding their fire … or maybe they only had one. In that case, it's we who have them.

'At any rate, all personnel will be required to be in their shells with no more than ten minutes' notice. When we get within a thousand million kilometers of the enemy, you are to stand by your shells. By the time we are within five hundred million kilometers, you will be in them, and all shell compounds flooded and pressurized. We cannot wait for anyone.

'That's all I have to say. Sub-major?'

'I'll speak to my people later, Commodore. Thank you.'

'Dismissed.' And none of this 'fuck you, sir' nonsense. The navy thought that was just a little beneath their dignity. We stood at attention – all except Stott – until he had left the room. Then some other swabbie said 'dismissed' again, and we left.

My squad had clean-up detail, so I told everybody who was to do what, put Tate in charge, and left. Went up to the NCO room for some company and maybe some information.

There wasn't much happening but idle speculation, so I took Rogers and went off to bed. Marygay had disappeared again, hopefully trying to wheedle something out of Singhe.

We had our promised get-together with the sub-major the next morning, when he more or less repeated what the commodore had said, in infantry terms and in his staccato monotone. He emphasized the fact that all we knew about the Tauran ground forces was that if their naval capability was improved, it was likely they would be able to handle us better than last time.

But that brings up an interesting point. Eight months or nine years before, we'd had a tremendous advantage: they had seemed not quite to understand what was going on. As belligerent as they had been in space, we'd expected them to be real Huns on the ground. Instead, they practically lined themselves up for slaughter. One escaped and presumably described the idea of old-fashioned in-fighting to his fellows.

But that, of course, didn't mean that the word had necessarily gotten to this particular bunch, the Taurans guarding Yod-4. The only way we know of to communicate faster than the speed of light is to physically carry a message through successive collapsar jumps. And there was no way of telling how many jumps there were between Yod-4 and the Tauran home base – so these might be just as passive as the last bunch, or might have been practicing infantry tactics for most of a decade. We would find out when we got there.

The armorer and I were helping my squad pull maintenance on their fighting suits when we passed the thousand million kilometer mark and had to go up to the shells.

We had about five hours to kill before we had to get into our cocoons. I played a game of chess with Rabi and lost. Then Rogers led the platoon in some vigorous calisthenics, probably for no other reason than to get their minds off the prospect of having to lie half-crushed in the shells for at least four hours. The longest we'd gone before was half that.

Ten minutes before the five hundred million kilometer mark, we squad leaders took over and supervised buttoning everybody up. In eight minutes we were zipped and flooded and at the mercy of – or safe in the arms of – the logistic computer.

While I was lying there being squeezed, a silly thought took hold of my brain and went round and round like a charge in a superconductor: according to military formalism, the conduct of war divides neatly into two categories, tactics and logistics. Logistics has to do with moving troops and feeding them and just about everything except the actual fighting, which is tactics. And now we're fighting, but we don't have a tactical computer to guide us through attack and defense, just a huge, super-efficient pacifistic cybernetic grocery clerk of a logistic, mark that word, logistic computer.

The other side of my brain, perhaps not quite as pinched, would argue that it doesn't matter what name you give to a computer, it's a pile of memory crystals, logic banks, nuts and bolts… If you program it to be Genghis Khan, it is a tactical computer, even if its usual function is to monitor the stock market or control sewage conversion.

But the other voice was obdurate and said by that kind of reasoning, a man is only a hank of hair and a piece of bone and some stringy meat; and no matter what kind of a man he is, if you teach him well, you can take a Zen monk and turn him into a slavering bloodthirsty warrior.

Then what the hell are you, we, am I, answered the other side. A peace-loving, vacuum-welding specialist cum physics teacher snatched up by the Elite Conscription Act and reprogrammed to be a killing machine. You, I have killed and liked it.

But that was hypnotism, motivational conditioning, I argued back at myself. They don't do that anymore.

And the only reason, I said, they don't do it is that they think you'll kill better without it. That's logic.

Speaking of logic, the original question was, why do they send a logistic computer to do a man's job? Or something like that … and we were off again.

The light blinked green and I chinned the switch automatically. The pressure was down to 1.3 before I realized that it meant we were alive, we had won the first skirmish.

I was only partly right.

I was belting on my tunic when my ring tingled and I held it up to listen. It was Rogers.

'Mandella, go check squad bay 3. Something went wrong; Dalton had to depressurize it from Control.'

Bay 3 – that was Marygay's squad! I rushed down the corridor in bare feet and got there just as they opened the door from inside the pressure chamber and began straggling out.

The first out was Bergman. I grabbed his arm. 'What the hell is going on, Bergman?'

'Huh?' He peered at me, still dazed, as everyone is when they come out of the chamber. 'Oh, s'you, Mandella. I dunno. Whad'ya mean?'

I squinted in through the door, still holding on to him. 'You were late, man, you depressurized late. What happened?'

He shook his head, trying to clear it. 'Late? Whad' late. Uh, how late?'

I looked at my watch for the first time. 'Not too – ' Jesus Christ. 'Uh, we zipped in at 0520, didn't we?'

'Yeah, I think that's it.'

Still no Marygay among the dim figures picking their way through the ranked couches and jumbled tubing. 'Um, you were only a couple of minutes late … but we were only supposed to be under for four hours, maybe less. It's 1050.'

'Um.' He shook his head again. I let go of him and stood back to let Stiller and Demy through the door.

'Everybody's late, then,' Bergman said. 'So we aren't in any trouble.'

'Uh – ' Non sequiturs. 'Right, right – Hey, Stiller! You seen–'

From inside: 'Medic! MEDIC!'

Somebody who wasn't Marygay was coming out. I pushed her roughly out of my way and dove through the door, landed on somebody else and clambered over to where Struve, Marygay's assistant, was standing over a pod and talking very loud and fast into his ring.

'–and blood God yes we need–'

It was Marygay still lying in her suit she was '

–got the word from Dalton–'

covered every square inch of her with a uniform bright sheen of blood

'–when she didn't come out–'

it started as an angry welt up by her collarbone and was just a welt as it traveled between her breasts until it passed the sternum's support

'–I came over and popped the–'

and opened up into a cut that got deeper as it ran down over her belly and where it stopped

'–yeah, she's still–'

a few centimeters above the pubis a membraned loop of gut was protruding

'–OK, left hip. Mandella–'

She was still alive, her heart palpitating, but her blood-streaked head lolled limply, eyes rolled back to white slits, bubbles of red froth appearing and popping at the corner of her mouth each time she exhaled shallowly.

'–tattooed on her left hip. Mandella! Snap out of it! Reach under her and find out what her blood–'

'TYPE O RH NEGATIVE GOD damn … it. Sorry – Oh negative.' Hadn't I seen that tattoo ten thousand times?

Struve passed this information on and I suddenly remembered the first-aid kit on my belt, snapped it off and fumbled through it.

Stop the bleeding – protect the wound – treat for shock, that's what the book said. Forgot one, forgot one … clear air passages.

She was breathing, if that's what they meant. How do you stop the bleeding or protect the wound with one measly pressure bandage when the wound is nearly a meter long? Treat for shock, that I could do. I fished out the green ampoule, laid it against her arm and pushed the button. Then I laid the sterile side of the bandage gently on top of the exposed intestine and passed the elastic strip under the small of her back, adjusted it for nearly zero tension and fastened it.

'Anything else you can do?' Struve asked.

I stood back and felt helpless. 'I don't know. Can you think of anything?'

'I'm no more of a medic than you are.' Looking up at the door, he kneaded a fist, biceps straining. 'Where the hell are they? You have morph-plex in that kit?'

'Yeah, but somebody told me not to use it for internal–'

'William?'

Her eyes were open and she was trying to lift her head. I rushed over and held her. 'It'll be all right, Marygay. The medic's coming.'

'What … all right? I'm thirsty. Water.'

'No, honey, you can't have any water. Not for a while, anyhow.' Not if she was headed for surgery.

'Why is all the blood?' she said in a small voice. Her head rolled back. 'Been a bad girl.'

'It must have been the suit,' I said rapidly. 'Remember earlier, the creases?'

She shook her head. 'Suit?' She turned suddenly paler and retched weakly. 'Water … William, please.'

Authoritative voice behind me: 'Get a sponge or a cloth soaked in water.' I looked around the saw Doc Wilson with two stretcher bearers.

'First half-liter femoral,' he said to no one in particular as he carefully peeked under the pressure bandage. 'Follow that relief tube down a couple of meters and pinch it off. Find out if she's passed any blood.'

One of the medics ran a ten-centimeter needle into Marygay's thigh and started giving her whole blood from a plastic bag.

'Sorry I'm late,' Doc Wilson said tiredly. 'Business is booming. What'd you say about the suit?'

'She had two minor injuries before. Suit doesn't fit quite right, creases up under pressure.'

He nodded absently, checking her blood pressure. 'You, anybody, give–' Somebody handed him a paper towel dripping water. 'Uh, give her any medication?'

'One ampoule of No-shock.'

He wadded the paper towel up loosely and put it in Marygay's hand. 'What's her name?' I told him.

'Marygay, we can't give you a drink of water but you can suck on this. Now I'm going to shine a bright light in your eye.' While he was looking through her pupil with a metal tube, he said, 'Temperature?' and one of the medics read a number from a digital readout box and withdrew a probe. 'Passed blood?'

'Yes. Some.'

He put his hand lightly on the pressure bandage. 'Marygay, can you roll over a little on your right side?'

'Yes,' she said slowly, and put her elbow down for leverage. 'No,' she said and started crying.

'Now, now,' he said absently and pushed up on her hip just enough to be able to see her back. 'Only the one wound,' he muttered. 'Hell of a lot of blood.'

He pressed the side of his ring twice and shook it by his ear. 'Anybody up in the shop?'

'Harrison, unless he's on a call.'

A woman walked up, and at first I didn't recognize her, pale and disheveled, bloodstained tunic. It was Estelle Harmony.

Doc Wilson looked up. 'Any new customers, Doctor Harmony?'

'No,' she said dully. 'The maintenance man was a double traumatic amputation. Only lived a few minutes. We're keeping him running for transplants.'

'All those others?'

'Explosive decompression.' She sniffed. 'Anything I can do here?'

'Yeah, just a minute.' He tried his ring again. 'God damn it. You don't know where Harrison is?'

'No … well, maybe, he might be in Surgery B if there was trouble with the cadaver maintenance. Think I set it up all right, though.'

'Yeah, well, hell you know how…'

'Mark!' said the medic with the blood bag.

'One more half-liter femoral,' Doc Wilson said. 'Estelle, you mind taking over for one of the medics here, prepare this gal for surgery?'

'No, keep me busy.'

'Good – Hopkins, go up to the shop and bring down a roller and a liter, uh, two liters isotonic fluorocarb with the primary spectrum. If they're Merck they'll say "abdominal spectrum."' He found a part of his sleeve with no blood on it and wiped his forehead. 'If you find Harrison, send him over to surgery A and have him set up the anesthetic sequence for abdominal.'

'And bring her up to A?'

'Right. If you can't find Harrison, get somebody–' he stabbed a finger in my direction, '–this guy, to roll the patient up to A; you run ahead and start the sequence.'

He picked up his bag and looked through it. 'We could start the sequence here,' he muttered. 'But hell, not with paramethadone – Marygay? How do you feel?'

She was still crying. 'I'm … hurt.'

'I know,' he said gently. He thought for a second and said to Estelle, 'No way to tell really how much blood she lost. She may have been passing it under pressure. Also there's some pooling in the abdominal cavity. Since she's still alive I don't think she could've bled under pressure for very long. Hope no brain damage yet.'

He touched the digital readout attached to Marygay's arm. 'Monitor the blood pressure, and if you think it's indicated, give her five cc's vasoconstrictor. I've gotta go scrub down.'

He closed his bag. 'You have any vasoconstrictor besides the pneumatic ampoule?'

Estelle checked her own bag. 'No, just the emergency pneumatic … uh … yes, I've got controlled dosage on the 'dilator, though.'

'OK, if you have to use the 'constrictor and her pressure goes up too fast–'

'I'll give her vasodilator two cc's at a time.'

'Check. Hell of a way to run things, but … well. If you're not too tired, I'd like you to stand by me upstairs.'

'Sure.' Doc Wilson nodded and left.

Estelle began sponging Marygay's belly with isopropyl alcohol. It smelled cold and clean. 'Somebody gave her No-shock?'

'Yes,' I said, 'about ten minutes ago.'

'Ah. That's why the Doc was worried – no, you did the right thing. But No-shock's got some vasoconstrictor. Five cc's more might run up an overdose.' She continued silently scrubbing, her eyes coming up every few seconds to check the blood pressure monitor.

'William?' It was the first time she'd shown any sign of knowing me. 'This wom–, uh, Marygay, she's your lover? Your regular lover?'

'That's right.'

'She's very pretty.' A remarkable observation, her body torn and caked with crusting blood, her face smeared where I had tried to wipe away the tears. I suppose a doctor or a woman or a lover can look beneath that and see beauty.

'Yes, she is.' She had stopped crying and had her eyes squeezed shut, sucking the last bit of moisture from the paper wad.

'Can she have some more water?'

'OK, same as before. Not too much.'

I went out to the locker alcove and into the head for a paper towel. Now that the fumes from the pressurizing fluid had cleared, I could smell the air. It smelled wrong. Light machine oil and burnt metal, like the smell of a metal-working shop. I wondered whether they had overloaded the airco. That had happened once before, after the first time we'd used the acceleration chambers.

Marygay took the water without opening her eyes.

'Do you plan to stay together when you get back to Earth?'

'Probably,' I said. 'If we get back to Earth. Still one more battle.' 'There won't be any more battles,' she said flatly. 'You mean you haven't heard?'

'What?'

'Don't you know the ship was hit?'

'Hit!' Then how could any of us be alive?

'That's right.' She went back to her scrubbing. 'Four squad bays. Also the armor bay. There isn't a fighting suit left on the ship … and we can't fight in our underwear.'

'What – squad bays, what happened to the people?'

'No survivors.'

Thirty people. 'Who was it?'

'All of the third platoon. First squad of the second platoon.' Al-Sadat, Busia, Maxwell, Negulesco. 'My God.'

'Thirty deaders, and they don't have the slightest notion of what caused it. Don't know but that it may happen again any minute.'

'It wasn't a drone?'

'No, we got all of their drones. Got the enemy vessel, too. Nothing showed up on any of the sensors, just blam! and a third of the ship was torn to hell. We were lucky it wasn't the drive or the life-support system.' I was hardly hearing her. Penworth, LaBatt, Smithers. Christine and Frida. All dead. I was numb.

She took a blade-type razor and a tube of gel out of her bag. 'Be a gentleman and look the other way,' she said. 'Oh, here.' She soaked a square of gauze in alcohol and handed it to me. 'Be useful. Do her face.'

I started and, without opening her eyes, Marygay said, 'That feels good. What are you doing?'

'Being a gentleman. And useful, too–'

'All personnel, attention, all personnel.' There wasn't a squawk-box in the pressure chamber, but I could hear it clearly through the door to the locker alcove. 'All personnel echelon 6 and above, unless directly involved in medical or maintenance emergencies, report immediately to the assembly area.'

'I've got to go, Marygay.'

She didn't say anything. I didn't know whether she had heard the announcement.

'Estelle,' I addressed her directly, gentleman be damned. 'Will you–'

'Yes. I'll let you know as soon as we can tell.'

'Well.'

'It's going to be all right.' But her expression was grim and worried. Now get going,' she said, softly.

By the time I picked my way out into the corridor, the 'box was repeating the message for the fourth time. There was a new smell in the air, that I didn't want to identify.

Halfway to the assembly area I realized what a mess I was, and ducked into the head by the NCO lounge. Corporal Kamehameha was hurriedly brushing her hair.

'William! What happened to you?'

'Nothing.' I turned on a tap and looked at myself in the mirror. Dried blood smeared all over my face and tunic. It was Marygay, Corporal Potter, her suit … well, evidently it got a crease, uh…'

'Dead?'

'No, just badly, uh, she's going into surgery–'

'Don't use hot water. You'll just set the stain.'

'Oh. Right.' I used the hot to wash my face and hand, dabbed at the tunic with cold. 'Your squad's just two bays down from Al's, isn't it?'

'Yes.'

'Did you see what happened?'

'No. Yes. Not when it happened.' For the first time I noticed that she was crying, big tears rolling down her cheeks and off her chin. Her voice was even, controlled. She pulled at her hair savagely. 'It's a mess.'

I stepped over and put my hand on her shoulder. 'DON't touch me!' she flared and knocked my hand off with the brush. 'Sorry. Let's go.'

At the door to the head she touched me lightly on the arm. 'William…' She looked at me defiantly. 'I'm just glad it wasn't me. You understand? That's the only way you can look at it.'

I understood, but I didn't know that I believed her.

'I can sum it up very briefly,' the commodore said in a tight voice, 'if only because we know so little.

'Some ten seconds after we destroyed the enemy vessel, two objects, very small objects, struck the Anniversary amidships. By inference, since they were not detected and we know the limits of our detection apparatus, we know that they were moving in excess of nine-tenths of the speed of light. That is to say, more precisely, their velocity vector normal to the axis of the Anniversary was greater than nine-tenths of the speed of light. They slipped in behind the repeller fields.'

When the Anniversary is moving at relativistic speeds, it is designed to generate two powerful electromagnetic fields, one centered about five thousand kilometers from the ship and the other about ten thousand klicks away, both in line with the direction of motion of the ship. These fields are maintained by a 'ramjet' effect, energy picked up from interstellar gas as we mosey along.

Anything big enough to worry about hitting (that is, anything big enough to see with a strong magnifying glass) goes through the first field and comes out with a very strong negative charge all over its surface. As it enters the second field, it's repelled away from the path of the ship. If the object is too big to be pushed around this way, we can sense it at a greater distance and maneuver out of its way.

'I shouldn't have to emphasize how formidable a weapon this is. When the Anniversary was struck, our rate of speed with respect to the enemy was such that we traveled our own length every ten-thousandth of a second. Further, we were jerking around erratically with a constantly changing and purely random lateral acceleration. Thus the objects that struck us must have been guided, not aimed. And the guidance system was self-contained, since there were no Taurans alive at the time they struck us. All of this in a package no larger than a small pebble.

'Most of you are too young to remember the term future shock. Back in the seventies, some people felt that technological progress was so rapid that people, normal people, couldn't cope with it; that they wouldn't have time to get used to the present before the future was upon them. A man named Toffler coined the term future shock to describe this situation.' The commodore could get pretty academic.

'We're caught up in a physical situation that resembles this scholarly concept. The result has been disaster. Tragedy. And, as we discussed in our last meeting, there is no way to counter it. Relativity traps us in the enemy's past; relativity brings them from our future. We can only hope that next time, the situation will be reversed. And all we can do to help bring that about is try to get back to Stargate, and then to Earth, where specialists may be able to deduce something, some sort of counterweapon, from the nature of the damage.

'Now we could attack the Tauran's portal planet from space and perhaps destroy the base without using you infantry. But I think there would be a very great risk involved. We might be … shot down by whatever hit us today, and never return to Stargate with what I consider to be vital information. We could send a drone with a message detailing our assumptions about this new enemy weapon … but that might be inadequate. And the Force would be that much further behind, technologically.

'Accordingly, we have set a course that will take us around Yod-4, keeping the collapsar as much as possible between us and the Tauran base. We will avoid contact with the enemy and return to Stargate as quickly as possible.'

Incredibly, the commodore sat down and kneaded his temples. 'All of you are at least squad or section leaders. Most of you have good combat records. And I hope that some of you will be rejoining the Force after your two years are up. Those of you who do will probably be made lieutenants, and face your first real command.

'It is to these people I would like to speak for a few moments, not as your … as one of your commanders, but just as a senior officer and advisor.

'One cannot make command decisions simply by assessing the tactical situation and going ahead with whatever course of action will do the most harm to the enemy with a minimum of death and damage to your own men and material. Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century. Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy's information, political postures – dozens, literally dozens of factors.'

I was hearing this, but the only thing that was getting through to my brain was that a third of our friends' lives had been snuffed out less than an hour before, and he was sitting up there giving us a lecture on military theory.

'So sometimes you have to throw away a battle in order to help win the war. This is exactly what we are going to do.

'This was not an easy decision. In fact, it was probably the hardest decision of my military career. Because, on the surface at least, it may look like cowardice.

'The logistic computer calculates that we have about a 62 percent chance of success, should we attempt to destroy the enemy base. Unfortunately, we would have only a 30 percent chance of survival – as some of the scenarios leading to success involve ramming the portal planet with the Anniversary at light speed.' Jesus Christ.

'I hope none of you ever has to face such a decision. When we get back to Stargate, I will in all probability be court-martialed for cowardice under fire. But I honestly believe that the information that may be gained from analysis of the damage to the Anniversary is more important than the destruction of this one Tauran base.' He sat up straight. 'More important than one soldier's career.'

I had to stifle an impulse to laugh. Surely 'cowardice' had nothing to do with his decision. Surely he had nothing so primitive and unmilitary as a will to live.

The maintenance crew managed to patch up the huge rip in the side of the Anniversary and to repressurize that section. We spent the rest of the day cleaning up the area; without, of course, disturbing any of the precious evidence for which the commodore was willing to sacrifice his career.

The hardest part was jettisoning the bodies. It wasn't so bad except for the ones whose suits had burst.

I went to Estelle's cabin the next day, as soon as she was off duty.

'It wouldn't serve any good purpose for you to see her now.' Estelle sipped her drink, a mixture of ethyl alcohol, citric acid and water, with a drop of some ester that approximated the aroma of orange rind.

'Is she out of danger?'

'Not for a couple of weeks. Let me explain.' She set down her drink and rested her chin on interlaced fingers. 'This sort of injury would be fairly routine under normal circumstances. Having replaced the lost blood, we'd simply sprinkle some magic powder into her abdominal cavity and paste her back up. Have her hobbling around in a couple of days.

'But there are complications. Nobody's ever been injured in a pressure suit before. So far, nothing really unusual has cropped up. But we want to monitor her innards very closely for the next few days.

'Also, we were very concerned about peritonitis. You know what peritonitis is?'

'Yes.' Well, vaguely.

'Because a part of her intestine had ruptured under pressure. We didn't want to settle for normal prophylaxis because a lot of the, uh, contamination had impacted on the peritoneum under pressure. To play it safe, we completely sterilized the whole shebang, the abdominal cavity and her entire digestive system from the duodenum south. Then of course, we had to replace all of her normal intestinal flora, now dead, with a commercially prepared culture. Still standard procedure, but not normally called for unless the damage is more severe.'

'I see.' And it was making me a little queasy. Doctors don't seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.

'This in itself is enough reason not to see her for a couple of days. The changeover of intestinal flora has a pretty violent effect on the digestive system – not dangerous, since she's under constant observation. But tiring and, well, embarrassing.

'With all of this, she would be completely out of danger if this were a normal clinical situation. But we're decelerating at a constant 1-½ gees, and her internal organs have gone through a lot of jumbling around. You might as well know that if we do any blasting, anything over about two gees, she's going to die.'

'But … but we're bound to go over two on the final approach! What–'

'I know, I know. But that won't be for a couple of weeks. Hopefully, she will have mended by then.

'William, face it. It's a miracle she survived to get into surgery. So there's a big chance she won't make it back to Earth. It's sad; she's a special person, the special person to you, maybe. But we've had so much death … you ought to be getting used to it, come to terms with it.'

I took a long pull at my drink, identical to hers except for the citric acid. 'You're getting pretty hard-boiled.'

'Maybe … no. Just realistic. I have a feeling we're headed for a lot more death and sorrow.'

'Not me. As soon as we get to Stargate, I'm a civilian.'

'Don't be so sure.' The old familiar argument. 'Those clowns who signed us up for two years can just as easily make it four or–'

'Or six or twenty or the duration. But they won't. It would be mutiny.'

'I don't know. If they could condition us to kill on cue, they can condition us to do almost anything. Re-enlist.'

That was a chiller.

Later on we tried to make love, but both of us had too much to think about.

I got to see Marygay for the first time about a week later. She was wan, had lost a lot of weight and seemed very confused. Doc Wilson assured me that it was just the medication; they hadn't seen any evidence of brain damage.

She was still in bed, still being fed through a tube. I began to get very nervous about the calendar. Every day there seemed to be some improvement, but if she was still in bed when we hit that collapsar push, she wouldn't have a chance. I couldn't get any encouragement from Doc Wilson or Estelle; they said it depended on Marygay's resilience.

The day before the push, they transferred her from bed to Estelle's acceleration couch in the infirmary. She was lucid and was taking food orally, but she still couldn't move under her own power, not at 1-½ gees.

I went to see her. 'Heard about the course change? We have to go through Aleph-9 to get back to Tet-38. Four more months on this damn hulk. But another six years' combat pay when we get back to Earth.'

'That's good.'

'Ah, just think of the great things we'll–'

'William.'

I let it trail off. Never could lie.

'Don't try to jolly me. Tell me about vacuum welding, about your childhood, anything. Just don't bullshit me about getting back to Earth.' She turned her face to the wall.

'I heard the doctors talking out in the corridor, one morning when they thought I was asleep. But it just confirmed what I already knew, the way everybody'd been moping around.

'So tell me, you were born in New Mexico in 1975. What then? Did you stay in New Mexico? Were you bright in school? Have any friends, or were you too bright like me? How old were you when you first got sacked?'

We talked in this vein for a while, uncomfortable. An idea came to me while we were rambling, and when I left Marygay I went straight to Dr Wilson.

'We're giving her a fifty-fifty chance, but that's pretty arbitrary. None of the published data on this sort of thing really fits.'

'But it is safe to say that her chances of survival are better, the less acceleration she has to endure.'

'Certainly. For what it's worth. The commodore's going to take it as gently as possible, but that'll still be four or five gees. Three might even be too much; we won't know until it's over.'

I nodded impatiently. 'Yes, but I think there's a way to expose her to less acceleration than the rest of us.'

'If you've developed an acceleration shield,' he said smiling, 'you better hurry and file a patent. You could sell it for a considerable–'

No, Doc, it wouldn't be worth much under normal conditions; our shells work better and they evolved from the same principles.'

'Explain away.'

'We put Marygay into a shell and flood–'

'Wait, wait. Absolutely not. A poorly-fitting shell was what caused this in the first place. And this time, she'd have to use somebody else's.'

'I know, Doc, let me explain. It doesn't have to fit her exactly as long as the life-support hookups can function. The shell won't be pressurized on the inside; it won't have to be because she won't be subjected to those thousands of kilograms-per-square-centimeter pressure from the fluid outside.'

'I'm not sure I follow.'

'It's just an adaptation of – you've studied physics, haven't you?'

'A little bit, in medical school. My worse courses, after Latin.'

'Do you remember the principle of equivalence?'

'I remember there was something by that name. Something to do with relativity, right?'

'Uh-huh. It means that … there's no difference being in a gravitational field and being in an equivalent accelerated frame of – it means that when the Anniversary is blasting five gees, the effect on us is the same as if it were sitting on its tail on a big planet, on one with five gees' surface gravity.'

'Seems obvious.'

'Maybe it is. It means that there's no experiment you could perform on the ship that could tell you whether you were blasting or just sitting on a big planet.'

'Sure there is. You could turn off the engines, and if–'

'Or you could look outside, sure; I mean isolated, physics-lab type experiments.'

'All right. I'll accept that. So?'

'You know Archimedes' Law?'

'Sure, the fake crown – that's what always got me about physics, they make a big to-do about obvious things, and when it gets to the rough parts–'

'Archimedes' Law says that when you immerse something in a fluid, it's buoyed by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces.'

'That's reasonable.'

'And that holds, no matter what kind of gravitation or acceleration you're in– In a ship blasting at five gees, the water displaced, if it's water, weighs five times as much as regular water, at one gee.'

'Sure.'

'So if you float somebody in the middle of a tank of water, so that she's weightless, she'll still be weightless when the ship is doing five gees.'

'Hold on, son. You had me going there, but it won't work.'

'Why not?' I was tempted to tell him to stick to his pills and stethoscopes and let me handle the physics, but it was a good thing I didn't.

'What happens when you drop a wrench in a submarine?'

'Submarine?'

'That's right. They work by Archimedes'–'

'Ouch! You're right. Jesus. Hadn't thought it through.'

'That wrench falls right to the floor just as if the submarine weren't weightless.' He looked off into space, tapping a pencil on the desk. 'What you describe is similar to the way we treat patients with severe skin damage, like burns, on Earth. But it doesn't give any support to the internal organs, the way the acceleration shells do, so it wouldn't do Marygay any good…'

I stood up to go. 'Sorry I wasted–'

'Hold on there, though, just a minute. We might be able to use your idea part-way.'

'How do you mean?'

'I wasn't thinking it through, either. The way we normally use the shells is out of the question for Marygay, of course.' I didn't like to think about it. Takes a lot of hypno-conditioning to lie there and have oxygenated fluorocarbon forced into every natural body orifice and one artificial one. I fingered the valve fitting imbedded above my hipbone.

'Yeah, that's obvious, it'd tear her – say … you mean, low pressure–'

'That's right. We wouldn't need thousands of atmospheres to protect her against five gees' straight-line acceleration; that's only for all the swerving and dodging – I'm going to call Maintenance. Get down to your squad bay; that's the one we'll use. Dalton'll meet you there.'

Five minutes before injection into the collapsar field, and I started the flooding sequence. Marygay and I were the only ones in shells; my presence wasn't really vital since the flooding and emptying could be done by Control. But it was safer to have redundancy in the system and besides, I wanted to be there.

It wasn't nearly as bad as the normal routine; none of the crushing-bloating sensation. You were just suddenly filled with the plastic-smelling stuff (you never perceived the first moments, when it rushed in to replace the air in your lungs), and then there was a slight acceleration, and then you were breathing air again, waiting for the shell to pop; then unplugging and unzipping and climbing out–

Marygay's shell was empty. I walked over to it and saw blood.

'She hemorrhaged.' Doc Wilson's voice echoed sepulchrally. I turned, eyes stinging, and saw him leaning in the door to the locker alcove. He was unaccountably, horribly, smiling.

'Which was expected. Doctor Harmony's taking care of it. She'll be just fine.'

Marygay was walking in another week. 'Confraternizing' in two, and pronounced completely healed in six.

Ten long months in space and it was army, army, army all the way. Calisthenics, meaningless work details, compulsory lectures – there was even talk that they were going to reinstate the sleeping roster we'd had in basic, but they never did, probably out of fear of mutiny. A random partner every night wouldn't have set too well with those of us who'd established more-or-less permanent pairs.

All this crap, this insistence on military discipline, bothered me mainly because I was afraid it meant they weren't going to let us out. Marygay said I was being paranoid; they only did it because there was no other way to maintain order for ten months.

Most of the talk, besides the usual bitching about the army, was speculation about how much Earth would have changed and what we would do when we got out. We'd be fairly rich: twenty-six years' salary all at once. Compound interest, too; the $500 we'd been paid for our first month in the army had grown to over $1500.

We arrived at Stargate in late 2023, Greenwich date.

The base had grown astonishingly in the nearly seventeen years we had been on the Yod-4 campaign. It was one building the size of Tycho City, housing nearly ten thousand. There were seventy-eight cruisers, the size of Anniversary or larger, involved in raids on Tauran-held portal planets. Another ten guarded Stargate itself, and two were in orbit waiting for their infantry and crew to be outprocessed. One other ship, the Earth's Hope II, had returned from fighting and had been waiting at Stargate for another cruiser to return.

They had lost two-thirds of their crew, and it was just not economical to send a cruiser back to Earth with only thirty-nine people aboard. Thirty-nine confirmed civilians.

We went planetside in two scoutships.

General Botsford (who had only been a full major the first time we met him, when Stargate was two huts and twenty-four graves) received us in an elegantly appointed seminar room. He was pacing back and forth at the end of the room, in front of a huge holographic operations chart.

'You know,' he said, too loud, and then, more conversationally, 'you know that we could disperse you into other strike forces and send you right out again. The Elite Conscription Act has been changed now, five years' subjective in service instead of two.

'And I don't see why some of you don't want to stay in! Another couple of years and compound interest would make you independently wealthy for life. Sure, you took heavy losses – but that was inevitable, you were the first. Things are going to be easier now. The fighting suits have been improved, we know more about the Taurans' tactics, our weapons are more effective … there's no need to be afraid.'

He sat down at the head of the table and looked at nobody in particular.

'My own memories of combat are over a half-century old. To me it was exhilarating, strengthening. I must be a different kind of person than all of you.'

Or have a very selective memory, I thought.

'But that's neither here nor there. I have one alternative to offer you, one that doesn't involve direct combat.

'We're very short of qualified instructors. The Force will offer any one of you a lieutenancy if you will accept a training position. It can be on Earth; on the Moon at double pay; on Charon at triple pay; or here at Stargate for quadruple pay. Furthermore, you don't have to make up your mind now. You're all getting a free trip back to Earth – I envy you, I haven't been back in fifteen years, will probably never go back – and you can get the feel of being a civilian again. If you don't like it, just walk into any UNEF installation and you'll walk out an officer. Your choice of assignment.

'Some of you are smiling. I think you ought to reserve judgment. Earth is not the same place you left.'

He pulled a little card out of his tunic and looked at it, smiling. 'Most of you have something on the order of four hundred thousand dollars coming to you, accumulated pay and interest. But Earth is on a war footing and, of course, it is the citizens of Earth who are supporting the war. Your income puts you in a ninety-two-percent income-tax bracket: thirty-two thousand might last you about three years if you're careful.

'Eventually you're going to have to get a job, and this is one job for which you are uniquely trained. There are not that many jobs available. The population of Earth is nearly nine billion, with five or six billion unemployed.

'Also keep in mind that your friends and sweethearts of two years ago are now going to be twenty-one years older than you. Many of your relatives will have passed away. I think you'll find it a very lonely world.

'But to tell you something about this world, I'm going to turn you over to Captain Siri, who just arrived from Earth. Captain.'

'Thank you, General.' It looked as if there was something wrong with his skin, his face; and then I realized he was wearing powder and lipstick. His nails were smooth white almonds.

'I don't know where to begin.' He sucked in his upper lip and looked at us, frowning. 'Things have changed so very much since I was a boy.

'I'm twenty-three, so I was still in diapers when you people left for Aleph… to begin with, how many of you are homosexual?' Nobody. 'That doesn't really surprise me. I am, of course. I guess about a third of everybody in Europe and America is.

'Most governments encourage homosexuality – the United Nations is neutral, leaves it up to the individual countries – they encourage homolife mainly because it's the one sure method of birth control.'

That seemed specious to me. Our method of birth control in the army is pretty foolproof: all men making a deposit in the sperm bank, and then vasectomy.

'As the General said, the population of the world is nine billion. It's more than doubled since you were drafted. And nearly two-thirds of those people get out of school only to go on relief.

'Speaking of school, how many years of public schooling did the government give you?'

He was looking at me, so I answered. 'Fourteen.'

He nodded. 'It's eighteen now. More, if you don't pass your examinations. And you're required by law to pass your exams before you're eligible for any job or Class One relief. And brother-boy, anything besides Class One is hard to live on. Yes?' Hofstadter had his hand up.

'Sir, is it eighteen years public school in every country? Where do they find enough schools?'

'Oh, most people take the last five or six years at home or in a community center, via holoscreen. The UN has forty or fifty information channels, giving instruction twenty-four hours a day.

'But most of you won't have to concern yourselves with that. If you're in the Force, you're already too smart by half.'

He brushed hair from his eyes in a thoroughly feminine gesture, pouting a little. 'Let me do some history to you. I guess the really important thing that happened after you left was the Ration War.

'That was 2007. A lot of things happened at once. Locust plague in North America, rice blight from Burma to the South China Sea, red tides all along the west coast of South America: suddenly there just wasn't enough food to go around. The UN stepped in and took over food distribution. Every man, woman, and child got a ration booklet, allowing thim to consume so many calories per month. If tha went over ther monthly allotment, tha just went hungry until the first of the next month.'

Some of the new people we'd picked up after Aleph used 'tha, ther, thim' instead of 'he, his, him,' for the collective pronoun. I wondered whether it had become universal.

'Of course, an illegal market developed, and soon there was great inequality in the amount of food people in various strata of society consumed. A vengeance group in Ecuador, the Imparciales, systematically began to assassinate people who appeared to be well-fed. The idea caught on pretty quickly, and in a few months there was a full-scale, undeclared class war going on all over the world. The United Nations managed to get things back under control in a year or so, by which time the population was down to four billion, crops were more or less recovered, and the food crisis was over. They kept the rationing, but it's never been really severe again.

'Incidentally, the General translated the money coming to you into dollars just for your own convenience. The world has only one currency now, calories. Your thirty-two thousand dollars comes to about three thousand million calories. Or three million K's, kilocalories.

'Ever since the Ration War, the UN has encouraged subsistence farming wherever it's practical. Food you grow yourself, of course, isn't rationed… It got people out of the cities, onto UN farming reservations, which helped alleviate some urban problems. But subsistence farming seems to encourage large families, so the population of the world has more than doubled since the Ration War.

'Also, we no longer have the abundance of electrical power I remember from boyhood … probably a good deal less than you remember. There are only a few places in the world where you can have power all day and night. They keep saying it's a temporary situation, but it's been going on for over a decade.'

He went on like that for a long time. Well, hell, it wasn't really surprising, much of it. We'd probably spent more time in the past two years talking about what home was going to be like than about anything else. Unfortunately, most of the bad things we'd prognosticated seemed to have come true, and not many of the good things.

The worst thing for me, I guess, was that they'd taken over most of the good parkland and subdivided it into little farms. If you wanted to find some wilderness, you had to go someplace where they couldn't possibly make a plant grow.

He said that the relations between people who chose homolife and the ones he called 'breeders' were quite smooth, but I wondered. I never had much trouble accepting homosexuals myself, but then I'd never had to cope with such an abundance of them.

He also said, in answer to an impolite question, that his powder and paint had nothing to do with his sexual orientation. It was just stylish. I decided I'd be an anachronism and just wear my face.

I don't guess it should have surprised me that language had changed considerably in twenty years. My parents were always saying things were 'cool,' joints were 'grass,' and so on.

We had to wait several weeks before we could get a ride back to Earth. We'd be going back on the Anniversary, but first she had to be taken apart and put back together again.

Meanwhile, we were put in cozy little two-man billets and released from all military responsibilities. Most of us spent our days down at the library, trying to catch up on twenty-two years of current events. Evenings, we'd get together at the Flowing Bowl, an NCO club. The privates, of course, weren't supposed to be there, but we found that nobody argues with a person who has two of the fluorescent battle ribbons.

I was surprised that they served heroin fixes at the bar. The waiter said that you get a compensating shot to keep you from getting addicted to it. I got really stoned and tried one. Never again.

Sub-major Stott stayed at Stargate, where they were assembling a new Strike Force Alpha. The rest of us boarded the Anniversary and had a fairly pleasant six-month journey. Cortez didn't insist on everything being capital-M military, so it was a lot better than the trip from Yod-4.

I hadn't given it too much thought, but of course we were celebrities on Earth: the first vets home from the war. The Secretary General greeted us at Kennedy and we had a week-long whirl of banquets, receptions, interviews, and all that. It was enjoyable enough, and profitable – I made a million K's from Time-Life/Fax – but we really saw little of Earth until after the novelty wore off and we were more or less allowed to go our own way.

I picked up the Washington monorail at Grand Central Station and headed home. My mother had met me at Kennedy, suddenly and sadly old, and told me my father was dead. Flyer accident. I was going to stay with her until I could get a job.

She was living in Columbia, a satellite of Washington. She had moved back into the city after the Ration War – having moved out in 1980 – and then failing services and rising crime had forced her out again.

She was waiting for me at the monorail station. Beside her stood a blond giant in a heavy black vinyl uniform, with a big gunpowder pistol on his hip and spiked brass knuckles on his right hand.

'William, this is Carl, my bodyguard and very dear friend.' Carl slipped off the knuckles long enough to shake hands with surprising gentleness. 'Pleasameecha Misser Mandella.'

We got into a groundcar that had 'Jefferson' written on it in bright orange letters. I thought that was an odd thing to name a car, but then found out that it was the name of the high-rise Mother and Carl lived in. The groundcar was one of several that belonged to the community, and she paid 100K per kilometer for the use of it.

I had to admit that Columbia was rather pretty: formal gardens and lots of trees and grass. Even the high-rises, roughly conical jumbles of granite with trees growing out at odd places, looked more like mountains than buildings. We drove into the base of one of these mountains, down a well-lit corridor to where a number of other cars were parked. Carl carried my solitary bag to the elevator and set it down.

'Miz Mandella, if is awright witcha, I gots to go pick up Miz Freeman in like five. She over West Branch.'

'Sure, Carl, William can take care of me. He's a soldier, you know.' That's right, I remember learning eight silent ways to kill a man. Maybe if things got really tight, I could get a job like Carl's.

'Righty-oh, yeah, you tol' me. Whassit like, man?'

'Mostly boring,' I said automatically. 'When you aren't bored, you're scared.'

He nodded wisely. 'Thass what I heard. Miz Mandella, I be 'vailable anytime after six. Righty-oh?'

'That's fine, Carl.'

The elevator came and a tall skinny boy stepped out, an unlit joint dangling from his lips. Carl ran his fingers over the spikes on his knuckles, and the boy walked rapidly away.

'Gots to watch out fer them riders. T'care a yerself, Miz Mandella.'

We got on the elevator and Mother punched 47. 'What's a rider?'

'Oh, they're just young toughs who ride up and down the elevators looking for defenseless people without bodyguards. They aren't too much of a problem here.'

The forty-seventh floor was a huge mall filled with shops and offices. We went to a food store.

'Have you gotten your ration book yet, William?' I told her I hadn't, but the Force had given me travel tickets worth a hundred thousand 'calories' and I'd used up only half of them.

It was a little confusing, but they'd explained it to us.

When the world went on a single currency, they'd tried to coordinate it with the food rationing in some way, hoping to eventually eliminate the ration books, so they'd made the new currency K's, kilocalories, because that's the unit for measuring the energy equivalent of food. But a person who eats 2,000 kilocalories of steak a day obviously has to pay more than a person eating the same amount of bread. So they instituted a sliding 'ration factor,' so complicated that nobody could understand it. After a few weeks they were using the books again, but calling food kilocalories 'calories' in an attempt to make things less confusing. Seemed to me they'd save a lot of trouble all around if they'd just call money dollars again, or rubles or sisterces or whatever … anything but kilocalories.

Food prices were astonishing, except for grains and legumes. I insisted on splurging on some good red meat: 1500 calories' worth of ground beef, costing 1730K. The same amount of fakesteak, made from soy beans, would have cost 80K.

I also got a head of lettuce for 140x and a little bottle of olive oil for 175K. Mother said she had some vinegar. Started to buy some mushrooms but she said she had a neighbor who grew them and could trade something from her balcony garden.

At her apartment on the ninety-second floor, she apologized for the smallness of the place. It didn't seem so little to me, but then she'd never lived on a spaceship.

Even this high up, there were bars on the windows. The door had four separate locks, one of which didn't work because somebody had used a crowbar on it.

Mother went off to turn the ground beef into a meatloaf and I settled down with the evening 'fax. She pulled some carrots from her little garden and called the mushroom lady, whose son came over to make the trade. He had a riot gun slung under his arm.

'Mother, where's the rest of the Star?' I called into the kitchen.

'As far as I know, it's all there. What were you looking for?'

'Well … I found the classified section, but no "Help Wanted."'

She laughed. 'Son, there hasn't been a "Help Wanted" ad in ten years. The government takes care of jobs … well, most of them.'

'Everybody works for the government?'

'No, that's not it.' She came in, wiping her hands on a frayed towel. 'The government, they tell us, handles the distribution of all natural resources. And there aren't many resources more valuable than empty jobs.'

'Well, I'll go talk to them tomorrow.'

'Don't bother, son. How much retirement pay you say you're getting from the Force?'

'Twenty thousand K a month. Doesn't look like it'll go far.'

'No, it won't. But your father's pension gave me less than half that, and they wouldn't give me a job. Jobs are assigned on a basis of need. And you've got to be living on rice and water before the Employment Board considers you needy.'

'Well, hell, it's a bureaucracy – there must be somebody I can pay off, slip me into a good–'

'No. Sorry, that's one part of the UN that's absolutely incorruptible. The whole shebang is cybernetic, untouched by human souls. You can't–'

'But you said you had a job!'

'I was getting to that. If you want a job badly enough, you can go to a dealer and sometimes get a hand-me-down.'

'Hand-me-down? Dealer?'

'Take my job as an example, son. A woman named Halley Williams has a job in a hospital, running a machine that analyzes blood, a chromatography machine. She works six nights a week, for 12,000K a week. She gets tired of working, so she contacts a dealer and lets him know that her job is available.

'Some time before this, I'd given the dealer his initial fee of 50,000K to get on his list. He comes by and describes the job to me and I say fine, I'll take it. He knew I would and already has fake identification and a uniform. He distributes small bribes to the various supervisors who might know Miss Williams by sight.

'Miss Williams shows me how to run the machine and quits. She still gets the weekly 12,000K credited to her account, but she pays me half. I pay the dealer ten percent and wind up with 5400K per week. This, added to the nine grand I get monthly from your father's pension, makes me quite comfortable.

'Then it gets complicated. Finding myself with plenty of money and too little time, I contact the dealer again, offering to sublet half my job. The next day a girl shows up who also has "Hailey Williams" identification. I show her how to run the machine, and she takes over Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Half of my real salary is 2700K, so she gets half that, 1350K, and pays the dealer 135.'

She got a pad and a stylus and did some figuring. 'So the real Hailey Williams gets 6000K weekly for doing nothing. I work three days a week for 4050K. My assistant works three days for 1115K. The dealer gets 100,000K in fees and 735K per week. Lopsided, isn't it?'

'Hmm… I'll say. Quite illegal, too, I suppose.'

'For the dealer. Everybody else might lose their job and have to start over, if the Employment Board finds out. But the dealer gets brainwiped.'

'Guess I better find a dealer, while I can still afford the fifty-grand bite.' Actually, I still had over three million, but planned to run through most of it in a short time. Hell, I'd earned it.

I was getting ready to go the next morning when Mother came in with a shoebox. Inside, there was a small pistol in a clip-on holster.

'This belonged to your father,' she explained. 'Better wear it if you're planning to go downtown without a bodyguard.'

It was a gunpowder pistol with ridiculously thin bullets. I hefted it in my hand. 'Did Dad ever use it?'

'Several times … just to scare away riders and hitters, though. He never actually shot anybody.'

'You're probably right that I need a gun,' I said, putting it back. 'But I'd have to have something with more heft to it. Can I buy one legally?'

'Sure, there's a gun store down in the Mall. As long as you don't have a police record, you can buy anything that suits you.' Good; I'd get a little pocket laser. I could hardly hit the wall with a gunpowder pistol.

'But … William, I'd feel a lot better if you'd hire a bodyguard, at least until you know your way around.' We'd gone all around that last night. Being an official Trained Killer, I thought I was tougher than any clown I might hire for the job.

'I'll check into it, Mother. Don't worry – I'm not even going downtown today, just into Hyattsville.'

'That's just as bad.'

When the elevator came, it was already occupied. He looked at me blandly as I got in, a man a little older than me, clean-shaven and well dressed. He stepped back to let me at the row of buttons. I punched 47 and then, realizing his motive might not have been politeness, turned to see him struggling to get at a metal pipe stuck in his waistband. It had been hidden by his cape.

'Come on, fella,' I said, reaching for a nonexistent weapon. 'You wanna get caulked?'

He had the pipe free but let it hang loosely at his side. 'Caulked?'

'Killed. Army term.' I took one step toward him, trying to remember. Kick just under the knee, then either groin or kidney. I decided on the groin.

'No.' He put the pipe back in his waistband. 'I don't want to get "caulked."' The door opened at 47 and I backed out.

The gun shop was all bright white plastic and gleamy black metal. A little bald man bobbed over to wait on me. He had a pistol in a shoulder rig.

'And a fine morning to you, sir,' he said and giggled. 'What will it be today?'

'Lightweight pocket laser,' I said. 'Carbon dioxide.'

He looked at me quizzically and then brightened. 'Coming right up, sir.' Giggle. 'Special today, I throw in a handful of tachyon grenades.'

'Fine.' They'd be handy.

He looked at me expectantly. 'So? What's the popper?'

'Huh?'

'The punch, man; you set me up, now knock me down. Laser.' He giggled.

I was beginning to understand. 'You mean I can't buy a laser.'

'Of course not, sweetie,' he said and sobered. 'You didn't know that?'

'I've been out of the country for a long time.'

'The world, you mean. You've been out of the world a long time.' He put his left hand on a chubby hip in a gesture that incidentally made his gun easier to get. He scratched the center of his chest.

I stood very still. 'That's right. I just got out of the Force.'

His jaw dropped. 'Hey, no bully-bull? You been out shootin' 'em up, out in space?'

'That's right.'

'Hey, all that crap about you not gettin' older, there's nothin' to that, is there?'

'Oh, it's true. I was born in 1975.'

'Well, god … damn. You're almost as old as I am.' He giggled. 'I thought that was just something the government made up.'

'Anyhow … you say I can't buy a laser–'

'Oh, no. No no no. I run a legal shop here.'

'What can I buy?'

'Oh, pistol, rifle, shotgun, knife, body armor … just no lasers or explosives or fully automatic weapons.'

'Let me see a pistol. The biggest you have.'

'Ah, I've got just the thing.' He motioned me over to a display case and opened the back, taking out a huge revolver.

'Four-ten-gauge six-shooter.' He cradled it in both hands. 'Dinosaur-stopper. Authentic Old West styling. Slugs or flechettes.'

'Flechettes?'

'Sure – uh, they're like a bunch of tiny darts. You shoot and they spread out in a pattern. Hard to miss that way.'

Sounded like my speed. 'Anyplace I can try it out?'

"Course, of course, we have a range in back. Let me get my assistant.' He rang a bell and a boy came out to watch the store while we went in back. He picked up a red-and-green box of shotgun shells on the way.

The range was in two sections, a little anteroom with a plastic transparent door and a long corridor on the other side of the door with a table at one end and targets at the other. Behind the targets was a sheet of metal that evidently deflected the bullets down into a pool of water.

He loaded the pistol and set it on the table. 'Please don't pick it up until the door's closed.' He went into the anteroom, closed the door, and picked up a microphone. 'OK. First time, you better hold on to it with both hands.' I did so, raising it up in line with the center target, a square of paper looking about the size of your thumbnail at arm's length. Doubted I'd even come near it. I pulled the trigger and it went back easily enough, but nothing happened.

'No, no,' he said over the microphone with a tinny giggle. 'Authentic Old West styling. You've got to pull the hammer back.'

Sure, just like in the flicks. I hauled the hammer back, lined it up again, and squeezed the trigger.

The noise was so loud it made my face sting. The gun bucked up and almost hit me on the forehead. But the three center targets were gone: just tiny tatters of paper drifting in the air.

'I'll take it.'

He sold me a hip holster, twenty shells, a chest-and-back shield, and a dagger in a boot sheath. I felt more heavily armed than I had in a fighting suit. But no waldos to help me cart it around.

The monorail had two guards for each car. I was beginning to feel that all my heavy artillery was superfluous, until I got off at the Hyattsville station.

Everyone who got off at Hyattsville was either heavily armed or had a bodyguard. The people loitering around the station were all armed. The police carried lasers.

I pushed a 'cab call' button, and the readout told me mine would be No. 3856. I asked a policeman and he told me to wait for it down on the street; it would cruise around the block twice.

During the five minutes I waited, I twice heard staccato arguments of gunfire, both of them rather far away. I was glad I'd bought the shield.

Eventually the cab came. It swerved to the curb when I waved at it, the door sliding open as it stopped. Looked as if it worked the same way as the autocabs I remembered. The door stayed open while it checked the thumbprint to verify that I was the one who had called, then slammed shut. It was thick steel. The view through the windows was dim and distorted; probably thick bulletproof plastic. Not quite the same as I remembered.

I had to leaf through a grimy book to find the code for the address of the bar in Hyattsville where I was supposed to meet the dealer. I punched it out and sat back to watch the city go by.

This part of town was mostly residential: grayed-brick warrens built around the middle of the last century competing for space with more modern modular setups and, occasionally, individual houses behind tall brick or concrete walls with jagged broken glass and barbed wire at the top. A few people seemed to be going somewhere, walking very quickly down the sidewalks, hands on weapons. Most of the people I saw were either sitting in doorways, smoking, or loitering around shopfronts in groups of no fewer than six. Everything was dirty and cluttered. The gutters were clotted with garbage, and shoals of waste paper drifted with the wind of the light traffic.

It was understandable, though; street-sweeping was probably a very high-risk profession.

The cab pulled up in front of Tom & Jerry's Bar and Grill and let me out after I paid 430K. I stepped to the sidewalk with my hand on the shotgun-pistol, but there was nobody around. I hustled into the bar.

It was surprisingly clean on the inside, dimly lit and furnished in fake leather and fake pine. I went to the bar and got some fake bourbon and, presumably, real water for 120K. The water cost 20K. A waitress came over with a tray.

'Pop one, brother-boy?' The tray had a rack of old-fashioned hypodermic needles.

'Not today, thanks.' If I was going to 'pop one,' I'd use an aerosol. The needles looked unsanitary and painful.

She set the dope down on the bar and eased onto the stool next to me. She sat with her chin cupped in her palm and stared at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. 'God. Tuesdays.'

I mumbled something.

'You wanna go in back fer a quickie?'

I looked at her with what I hoped was a neutral expression. She was wearing only a short skirt of some gossamer material, and it plunged in a shallow V in the front, exposing her hipbones and a few bleached pubic hairs. I wondered what could possibly keep it up. She wasn't bad looking, could have been anywhere from her late twenties to her early forties. No telling what they could do with cosmetic surgery and makeup nowadays, though. Maybe she was older than my mother.

'Thanks anyhow.'

'Not today?'

'That's right.'

'I can get you a nice boy, if–'

'No. No thanks.' What a world.

She pouted into the mirror, an expression that was probably older than Homo sapiens. 'You don't like me.'

'I like you fine. That's just not what I came here for.'

'Well … different funs for different ones.' She shrugged. 'Hey, Jerry. Get me a short beer.'

He brought it.

'Oh, damn, my purse is locked up. Mister, can you spare forty calories?' I had enough ration tickets to take care of a whole banquet. Tore off a fifty and gave it to the bartender.

'Jesus.' She stared. 'How'd you get a full book at the end of the month?'

I told her in as few words as possible who I was and how I managed to have so many calories. There had been two months' worth of books waiting in my mail, and I hadn't even used up the ones the Force had given me. She offered to buy a book from me for ten grand, but I didn't want to get involved in more than one illegal enterprise at a time.

Two men came in, one unarmed and the other with both a pistol and a riot gun. The bodyguard sat by the door and the other came over to me.

'Mr Mandella?'

'That's right.'

'Shall we take a booth?' He didn't offer his name.

He had a cup of coffee, and I sipped a mug of beer. 'I don't keep any written records, but I have an excellent memory. Tell me what sort of a job you're interested in, what your qualifications are, what salary you'll accept, and so on.'

I told him I'd prefer to wait for a job where I could use my physics – teaching or research, even engineering. I wouldn't need a job for two or three months, since I planned to travel and spend money for a while. Wanted at least 20,000K monthly, but how much I'd accept would depend on the nature of the job.

He didn't say a word until I'd finished. 'Righty-oh. Now, I'm afraid … you'd have a hard time, getting a job in physics. Teaching is out; I can't supply jobs where the person is constantly exposed to the public. Research, well, your degree is almost a quarter of a century old. You'd have to go back to school, maybe five or six years.'

'Might do that,' I said.

'The one really marketable feature you have is your combat experience. I could probably place you in a supervisory job at a bodyguard agency for even more than twenty grand. You could make almost that much, being a bodyguard yourself.'

'Thanks, but I wouldn't want to take chances for somebody else's hide.'

'Righty-oh. Can't say I blame you.' He finished his coffee in a long slurp. 'Well, I've got to run, got a thousand things to do. I'll keep you in mind and talk to some people.'

'Good. I'll see you in a few months.'

'Righty-oh. Don't need to make an appointment. I come in here every day at eleven for coffee. Just show up.'

I finished my beer and called a cab to take me home. I wanted to walk around the city, but Mother was right. I'd get a bodyguard first.

I came home and the phone was blinking pale blue. Didn't know what to do so I punched 'Operator.'

A pretty young girl's head materialized in the cube. 'Jefferson operator,' she said. 'May I help you?'

'Yes … what does it mean when the cube is blinking blue?'

'Huh?'

'What does it mean when the phone–'

'Are you serious?' I was getting a little tired of this kind of thing.

'It's a long story. Honest, I don't know.'

'When it blinks blue you're supposed to call the operator.'

'OK, here I am.'

No, not me, the real operator. Punch nine. Then punch zero.'

I did that and an old harridan appeared. 'Ob-a-ray-duh.'

'This is William Mandella at 301-52-574-3975. I was supposed to call you.'

'Juzza segun.' She reached outside the field of view and typed something. 'You godda call from 605-19-556-2027.'

I scribbled it down on the pad by the phone. 'Where's that?'

'Juzza segun. South Dakota.'

'Thanks.' I didn't know anybody in South Dakota.

A pleasant-looking old woman answered the phone. 'Yes?'

'I had a call from this number … uh … I'm–'

'Oh. Sergeant Mandella! Just a second.'

I watched the diagonal bar of the holding pattern for a second, then fifty or so more. Then a head came into focus.

Marygay. 'William. I had a heck of a time finding you.'

'Darling, me too. What are you doing in South Dakota?'

'My parents live here, in a little commune. That's why it took me so long to get to the phone.' She held up two grimy hands. 'Digging potatoes.'

'But when I checked … the records said – the records in Tucson said your parents were both dead.'

'No, they're just dropouts – you know about dropouts? – new name, new life. I got the word through a cousin.'

'Well – well, how've you been? Like the country life?'

'That's one reason I've been wanting to get you. Willy, I'm bored. It's all very healthy and nice, but I want to do something dissipated and wicked. Naturally I thought of you.'

'I'm flattered. Pick you up at eight?'

She checked a clock above the phone. 'No, look, let's get a good night's sleep. Besides, I've got to get in the rest of the potatoes. Meet me at … the Ellis Island jetport at ten tomorrow morning. Mmm … Trans-World information desk.'

'OK. Make reservations for where?'

She shrugged. 'Pick a place.'

'London used to be pretty wicked.'

'Sounds good. First class?'

'What else? I'll get us a suite on one of the dirigibles.'

'Good. Decadent. How long shall I pack for?'

'We'll buy clothes along the way. Travel light. Just one stuffed wallet apiece.'

She giggled. 'Wonderful. Tomorrow at ten.'

'Fine – uh … Marygay, do you have a gun?'

'It's that bad?'

'Here around Washington it is.'

'Well, I'll get one. Dad has a couple over the fireplace. Guess they're left over from Tucson.'

'We'll hope we won't need them.'

'Willy, you know it'll just be for decoration. I couldn't even kill a Tauran.'

'Of course.' We just looked at each other for a second. 'Tomorrow at ten, then.'

'Right. Love you.'

'Uh…'

She giggled again and hung up.

That was just too many things to think about all at once.

I got us two round-the-world dirigible tickets; unlimited stops as long as you kept going east. It took me a little over two hours to get to Ellis by autocab and monorail. I was early, but so was Marygay.

She was talking to the girl at the desk and didn't see me coming. Her outfit was really arresting, a tight coverall of plastic in a pattern of interlocking hands; as your angle of sight changed, various strategic hands became transparent. She had a ruddy sun-glow all over her body. I don't know whether the feeling that rushed over me was simple honest lust or something more complicated. I hurried up behind her.

Whispering: 'What are we going to do for three hours?'

She turned and gave me a quick hug and thanked the girl at the desk, then grabbed my hand and pulled me along to a slidewalk.

'Um … where are we headed?'

'Don't ask questions, Sergeant. Just follow me.'

We stepped onto a roundabout and transferred to an eastbound slidewalk.

'Do you want something to eat or drink?' she asked innocently.

I tried to leer. 'Any alternatives?'

She laughed gaily. Several people stared. 'Just a second … here!' We jumped off. It was a corridor marked 'Roomettes.' She handed me a key.

That damned plastic coverall was held on by static electricity. Since the roomette was nothing but a big waterbed, I almost broke my neck the first time it shocked me.

I recovered.

We were lying on our stomachs, looking through the one-way glass wall at the people rushing around down on the concourse. Marygay passed me a joint.

'William, have you used that thing yet?'

'What thing?'

'That hawg-leg. The pistol.'

'Only shot it once, in the store where I bought it.'

'Do you really think you could point it at someone and blow him apart?'

I took a shallow puff and passed it back. 'Hadn't given it much thought, really. Until we talked last night.'

'Well?'

'I … I don't really know. The only time I've killed was on Aleph, under hypnotic compulsion. But I don't think it would … bother me, not that much, not if the person was trying to kill me in the first place. Why should it?'

'Life,' she said plaintively, 'life is…'

'Life is a bunch of cells walking around with a common purpose. If that common purpose is to get my ass–'

'Oh, William. You sound like old Cortez.'

'Cortez kept us alive.'

'Not many of us,' she snapped.

I rolled over and studied the ceiling tiles. She traced little designs on my chest, pushing the sweat around with her fingertip. 'I'm sorry, William. I guess we're both just trying to adjust.'

'That's OK. You're right, anyhow.'

We talked for a long time. The only urban center Marygay had been to since our publicity rounds (which were very sheltered) was Sioux Falls. She had gone with her parents and the commune bodyguard. It sounded like a scaled-down version of Washington: the same problems, but not as acute.

We ticked off the things that bothered us: violence, high cost of living, too many people everywhere. I'd have added homolife, but Marygay said I just didn't appreciate the social dynamic that had led to it; it had been inevitable. The only thing she said she had against it was that it took so many of the prettiest men out of circulation.

And the main thing that was wrong was that everything seemed to have gotten just a little worse, or at best remained the same. You would have predicted that at least a few facets of everyday life would improve markedly in twenty-two years. Her father contended the War was behind it all: any person who showed a shred of talent was sucked up by UNEF; the very best fell to the Elite Conscription Act and wound up being cannon fodder.

It was hard not to agree with him. Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products. Such improvements as had been made on late-twentieth-century technology were – like tachyon bombs and warships two kilometers long – at best, interesting developments of things that only required the synergy of money and existing engineering techniques. Social reform? The world was technically under martial law. As for art, I'm not sure I know good from bad. But artists to some extent have to reflect the temper of the times. Paintings and sculpture were full of torture and dark brooding; movies seemed static and plotless; music was dominated by nostalgic revivals of earlier forms; architecture was mainly concerned with finding someplace to put everybody; literature was damn near incomprehensible. Most people seemed to spend most of their time trying to find ways to outwit the government, trying to scrounge a few extra K's or ration tickets without putting their lives in too much danger.

And in the past, people whose country was at war were constantly in contact with the war. The newspapers would be full of reports, veterans would return from the front; sometimes the front would move right into town, invaders marching down Main Street or bombs whistling through the night air – but always the sense of either working toward victory or at least delaying defeat. The enemy was a tangible thing, a propagandist's monster whom you could understand, whom you could hate.

But this war … the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional – more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth's economy would collapse.

You approached the dirigible by means of a small propeller-driven aircraft that drifted up to match trajectories and docked alongside. A clerk took our baggage and we checked our weapons with the purser, then went outside.

Just about everybody on the flight was standing out on the promenade deck, watching Manhattan creep toward the horizon. It was an eerie sight. The day was very still, so the bottom thirty or forty stories of the buildings were buried in smog. It looked like a city built on a cloud, a thunderhead floating. We watched it for a while and then went inside to eat.

The meal was elegantly served and simple: filet of beef, two vegetables, wine. Cheese and fruit and more wine for dessert. No fiddling with ration tickets; a loophole in the rationing laws implied that they were not required for meals consumed en route, on intercontinental transport.

We spent a lazy, comfortable three days crossing the Atlantic. The dirigibles had been a new thing when we first left Earth, and now they had turned out to be one of the few successful new financial ventures of the late twentieth century … the company that built them had bought up a few obsolete nuclear weapons; one bomb-sized hunk of plutonium would keep the whole fleet in the air for years. And, once launched, they never did come down. Floating hotels, supplied and maintained by regular shuttles, they were one last vestige of luxury in a world where nine billion people had something to eat, and almost nobody had enough.

London was not as dismal from the air as New York City had been; the air was clean even if the Thames was poison. We packed our handbags, claimed our weapons, and landed on a VTO pad atop the London Hilton. We rented a couple of tricycles at the hotel and, maps in hand, set off for Regent Street, planning on dinner at the venerable Cafe Royal.

The tricycles were little armored vehicles, stabilized gyroscopically so they couldn't be tipped over. Seemed overly cautious for the part of London we traveled through, but I suppose there were probably sections as rough as Washington.

I got a dish of marinated venison and Marygay got salmon; both very good but astoundingly expensive. At first I was a bit overawed by the huge room, filled with plush and mirrors and faded gilding, very quiet even with a dozen tables occupied, and we talked in whispers until we realized that was foolish.

Over coffee I asked Marygay what the deal was with her parents.

'Oh, it happens often enough,' she said. 'Dad got mixed up in some ration ticket thing. He'd gotten some black market tickets that turned out to be counterfeit. Cost him his job and he probably would have gone to jail, but while he was waiting for trial a bodysnatcher got him.'

'Bodysnatcher?'

'That's right. All the commune organizations have them. They've got to get reliable farm labor, people who aren't eligible for relief … people who can't just lay down their tools and walk off when it gets rough. Almost everybody can get enough assistance to stay alive, though; everyone who isn't on the government's fecal roster.'

'So he skipped out before his trial came up?'

She nodded. 'It was a case of choosing between commune life, which he knew wasn't easy, and going on the dole after a few years' working on a prison farm; ex-convicts can't get legitimate jobs. They had to forfeit their condominium, which they'd put up for bail, but the government would've gotten that anyhow, once he was in jail.

'So the bodysnatcher offered him and Mother new identities, transportation to the commune, a cottage, and a plot of land. They took it.'

'And what did the bodysnatcher get?'

'He himself probably didn't get anything. The commune got their ration tickets; they were allowed to keep their money, although they didn't have very much–'

'What happens if they get caught?'

Not a chance.' She laughed. 'The communes provide over half the country's produce – they're really just an unofficial arm of the government. I'm sure the CBI knows exactly where they are … Dad grumbles that it's just a fancy way of being in jail anyhow.'

'What a weird setup.'

'Well, it keeps the land farmed.' She pushed her empty dessert plate a symbolic centimeter away from her. 'And they're eating better than most people, better than they ever had in the city. Mom knows a hundred ways to fix chicken and potatoes.'

After dinner we went to a musical show. The hotel had gotten us tickets to a 'cultural translation' of the old rock opera Hair. The program explained that they had taken some liberties with the original choreography because back in those days they didn't allow actual coition on stage. The music was pleasantly old-fashioned, but neither of us was quite old enough to work up any blurry-eyed nostalgia over it. Still, it was much more enjoyable than the movies I'd seen, and some of the physical feats performed were quite inspiring. We slept late the next morning.

We dutifully watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, walked through the British Museum, ate fish and chips, ran up to Stratford-on-Avon and caught the Old Vic doing an incomprehensible play about a mad king, and didn't get into any trouble until the day before we were to leave for Lisbon.

It was about 2 A.M. and we were tooling our tricycles down a nearly deserted thoroughfare. Turned a corner and there was a gang of boys beating the hell out of someone. I screeched to the curb and leaped out of my vehicle, firing the shotgun-pistol over their heads.

It was a girl they were attacking; it was rape. Most of them scattered, but one pulled a pistol out of his coat and I shot him. I remember trying to aim for his arm. The blast hit his shoulder and ripped off his arm and what seemed to be half of his chest; it flung him two meters to the side of a building and he must have been dead before he hit the ground.

The others ran, one of them shooting at me with a little pistol as he went. I watched him trying to kill me for the longest time before it occurred to me to shoot back. I sent one blast way high and he dove into an alley and disappeared.

The girl looked dazedly around, saw the mutilated body of her attacker, and staggered to her feet and ran off screaming, naked from the waist down. I knew I should have tried to stop her, but I couldn't find my voice and my feet seemed nailed to the sidewalk. A tricycle door slammed and Marygay was beside me.

'What hap–' She gasped, seeing the dead man. 'Wh-what was he doing?'

I just stood there stupefied. I'd certainly seen enough death these past two years, but this was a different thing … there was nothing noble in being crushed to death by the failure of some electronic component, or in having your suit fail and freeze you solid; or even dying in a shoot-out with the incomprehensible enemy … but death seemed natural in that setting. Not on a quaint little street in old-fashioned London, not for trying to steal what most people would give freely.

Marygay was pulling my arm. 'We've got to get out of here. They'll brainwipe you!'

She was right. I turned and took one step and fell to the concrete. I looked down at the leg that had betrayed me and bright red blood was pulsing out of a small hole in my calf. Marygay tore a strip of cloth from her blouse and started to bind it. I remember thinking it wasn't a big enough wound to go into shock over, but my ears started to ring and I got lightheaded and everything went red and fuzzy. Before I went under, I heard a siren wailing in the distance.

Fortunately, the police also picked up the girl, who was wandering down the street a few blocks away. They compared her version of the thing with mine, both of us under hypnosis. They let me go with a stern admonition to leave law enforcement up to professional law enforcers.

I wanted to get out of the cities: just put a pack on my back and wander through the woods for a while, get my mind straightened out. So did Marygay. But we tried to make arrangements and found that the country was worse than the cities. Farms were practically armed camps, the areas between ruled by nomad gangs who survived by making lightning raids into villages and farms, murdering and plundering for a few minutes, and then fading back into the forest, before help could arrive.

Still, Britishers called their island 'the most civilized country in Europe.' From what we'd heard about France and Spain and Germany, especially Germany, they were probably right.

I talked it over with Marygay, and we decided to cut short our tour and go back to the States. We could finish the tour after we'd become acclimated to the twenty-first century. It was just too much foreignness to take in one dose.

The dirigible line refunded most of our money and we took a conventional suborbital flight back home. The high altitude made my leg throb, though it was nearly healed. They'd made great strides in the treatment of gunshot wounds, in the past twenty years. Lots of practice.

We split up at Ellis. Her description of commune life appealed to me more than the city; I made arrangements to join her after a week or so, and went back to Washington.

I rang the bell and a strange woman answered the door, opening it a couple of centimeters and peering through.

'Pardon me,' I said, 'isn't this Mrs Mandella's residence?'

'Oh, you must be William!' She closed the door and unfastened the chains and opened it wide. 'Beth, look who's here!'

My mother came into the living room from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. 'Willy … what are you doing back so soon?'

'Well, it's – it's a long story.'

'Sit down, sit down,' the other woman said. 'Let me get you a drink, don't start till I get back.'

'Wait,' my mother said. 'I haven't even introduced you two. William, this is Rhonda Wilder. Rhonda, William.'

'I've been so looking forward to meeting you,' she said. 'Beth has told me all about you – one cold beer, right?'

'Right.' She was likable enough, a trim middle-aged woman. I wondered why I hadn't met her before. I asked my mother whether she was a neighbor.

'Uh … really more than that, William. She's been my roommate for a couple of years. That's why I had an extra room when you came home – a single person isn't allowed two bedrooms.'

'But why–'

'I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to feel that you were putting her out of her room while you stayed here. And you weren't, actually; she has–'

'That's right,' Rhonda came in with the beer. 'I've got relatives in Pennsylvania, out in the country. I can stay with them any time.'

'Thanks.' I took the beer. 'Actually, I won't be here long. I'm kind of en route to South Dakota. I could find another place to flop.'

'Oh, no,' Rhonda said. 'I can take the couch.' I was too old-fashioned male-chauv to allow that; we discussed it for a minute and I wound up with the couch.

I filled Rhonda in on who Marygay was and told them about our. disturbing experiences in England, how we came back to get our bearings. I had expected my mother to be horrified that I had killed a man, but she accepted it without comment. Rhonda clucked a little bit about our being out in a city after midnight, especially without a bodyguard.

We talked on these and other topics until late at night, when Mother called her bodyguard and went off to work.

Something had been nagging at me all night, the way Mother and Rhonda acted toward each other. I decided to bring it out into the open, once Mother was gone.

'Rhonda–' I settled down in the chair across from her.

I didn't know exactly how to put it. 'What, uh, what exactly is your relationship with my mother?'

She took a long drink. 'Good friends.' She stared at me with a mixture of defiance and resignation. 'Very good friends. Sometimes lovers.'

I felt very hollow and lost. My mother?

'Listen,' she continued. 'You had better stop trying to live in the nineties. This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but you're stuck with it.'

She crossed and took my hand, almost kneeling in front of me. Her voice was softer. 'William … look, I'm only two years older than you are – that is, I was born two years before – what I mean is, I can understand how you feel. B – your mother understands too. It, our … relationship, wouldn't be a secret to anybody else. It's perfectly normal. A lot has changed, these twenty years. You've got to change too.'

I didn't say anything.

She stood up and said firmly, 'You think, because your mother is sixty, she's outgrown her need for love? She needs it more than you do. Even now. Especially now.'

Accusation in her eyes. 'Especially now with you coming back from the dead past. Reminding her of how old she is. How – old I am, twenty years younger.' Her voice quavered and cracked, and she ran to her room.

I wrote Mother a note saying that Marygay had called; an emergency had come up and I had to go immediately to South Dakota. I called a bodyguard and left.

A whining, ozone-leaking, battered old bus let me out at the intersection of a bad road and a worse one. It had taken me an hour to go the 2000 kilometers to Sioux Falls, two hours to get a chopper to Geddes, 150 kilometers away, and three hours waiting and jouncing on the dilapidated bus to go the last 12 kilometers to Freehold, an organization of communes where the Potters had their acreage. I wondered if the progression was going to continue and I would be four hours walking down this dirt road to the farm.

It was a half-hour before I even came to a building. My bag was getting intolerably heavy and the bulky pistol was chafing my hip. I walked up a stone path to the door of a simple plastic dome and pulled a string that caused a bell to tinkle inside. A peephole darkened.

'Who is it?' Voice muffled by thick wood.

'Stranger asking directions.'

'Ask.' I couldn't tell whether it was a woman or a child.

'I'm looking for the Potters' farm.'

'Just a second.' Footsteps went away and came back. 'Down the road one point nine klicks. Lots of potatoes and green beans on your right. You'll probably smell the chickens.'

'Thanks.'

'If you want a drink we got a pump out back. Can't let you in without my husband's at home.'

'I understand. Thank you.' The water was metallic-tasting but wonderfully cool.

I wouldn't know a potato or green bean plant if it stood up and took a bite out of my ankle, but I knew how to walk a half-meter step. So I resolved to count to 3800 and take a deep breath. I supposed I could tell the difference between the smell of chicken manure and the absence thereof.

At 3650 there was a rutted path leading to a complex of plastic domes and rectangular buildings apparently made of sod. There was a pen enclosing a small population explosion of chickens. They had a smell but it wasn't strong.

Halfway down the path, a door opened and Marygay came running out, wearing one tiny wisp of cloth. After a slippery but gratifying greeting, she asked what I was doing here so early.

'Oh, my mother had friends staying with her. I didn't want to put them out. Suppose I should have called.'

'Indeed you should have … save you a long dusty walk – but we've got plenty of room, don't worry about that.'

She took me inside to meet her parents, who greeted me warmly and made me feel definitely overdressed. Their faces showed their age but their bodies had no sag and few wrinkles.

Since dinner was an occasion, they let the chickens live and instead opened a can of beef, steaming it along with a cabbage and some potatoes. To my plain tastes it was equal to most of the gourmet fare we'd had on the dirigible and in London.

Over coffee and goat cheese (they apologized for not having wine; the commune would have a new vintage out in a couple of weeks), I asked what kind of work I could do.

'Will,' Mr Potter said, 'I don't mind telling you that your coming here is a godsend. We've got five acres that are just sitting out there, fallow, because we don't have enough hands to work them. You can take the plow tomorrow and start breaking up an acre at a time.'

'More potatoes, Daddy?' Marygay asked.

'No, no … not this season. Soybeans – cash crop and good for the soil. And Will, at night we all take turns standing guard. With four of us, we ought to be able to do a lot more sleeping.' He took a big slurp of coffee. 'Now, what else…'

'Richard,' Mrs Potter said, 'tell him about the greenhouse.'

'That's right, yes, the greenhouse. The commune has a two-acre greenhouse down about a click from here, by the recreation center. Mostly grapes and tomatoes. Everybody spends one morning or one afternoon a week there.

'Why don't you children go down there tonight … show Will the night life in fabulous Freehold? Sometimes you can get a real exciting game of checkers going.'

'Oh, Daddy. It's not that bad.'

'Actually, it isn't. They've got a fair library and a coin-op terminal to the Library of Congress. Marygay tells me you're a reader. That's good.'

'Sounds fascinating.' It did. 'But what about guard?'

'No problem. Mrs Potter – April – and I'll take the first four hours – oh,' he said, standing, 'let me show you the setup.'

We went out back to 'the tower,' a sandbag hut on stilts. Climbed up a rope ladder through a hole in the middle of the hut.

'A little crowded in here, with two,' Richard said. 'Have a seat.' There was an old piano stool beside the hole in the floor. I sat on it. 'It's handy to be able to see all the field without getting a crick in your neck. Just don't keep turning in the same direction all the time.'

He opened a wooden crate and uncovered a sleek rifle, wrapped in oily rags. 'Recognize this?'

'Sure.' I'd had to sleep with one in basic training. 'Army standard issue T-sixteen. Semi-automatic, twelve-caliber tumblers – where the hell did you get it?'

'Commune went to a government auction. It's an antique now, son.' He handed it to me and I snapped it apart. Clean, too clean.

'Has it ever been used?'

'Not in almost a year. Ammo costs too much for target practice. Take a couple of practice shots, though, convince yourself that it works.'

I turned on the scope and just got a washed out bright green. Set for nighttime. Clicked it back to log zero, set the magnification at ten, reassembled it.

'Marygay didn't want to try it out. Said she'd had her fill of that. I didn't press her, but a person's got to have confidence in their tools.'

I clicked off the safety and found a clod of dirt that the range-finder said was between 100 and 120 meters away. Set it at 110, rested the barrel of the rifle on the sandbags, centered the clod in the crosshairs, and squeezed. The round hissed out and kicked up dirt about five centimeters low.

'Fine.' I reset it for night use and safetied it and handed it back. 'What happened a year ago?'

He wrapped it up carefully, keeping the rags away from the eyepiece. 'Had some jumpers come in. Fired a few rounds and scared 'em away.'

'All right, what's a jumper?'

'Yeah, you wouldn't know.' He shook out a tobacco cigarette and passed me the box. 'I don't know why they don't just call 'em thieves, that's what they are. Murderers, too, sometimes.

'They know that a lot of the commune members are pretty well off. If you raise cash crops you get to keep half the cash; besides, a lot of our members were prosperous when they joined.

'Anyhow, the jumpers take advantage of our relative isolation. They come out from the city and try to sneak in, usually hit one place, and run. Most of the time, they don't get this far in, but the farms closer to the road … we hear gunfire every couple of weeks. Usually just scaring off kids. If it keeps up, a siren goes off and the commune goes on alert.'

'Doesn't sound fair to the people living close to the road.'

'There're compensations. They only have to donate half as much of their crop as the rest of us do. And they're issued heavier weapons.'

Marygay and I took the family's two bicycles and peddled down to the recreation center. I only fell off twice, negotiating the bumpy road in the dark.

It was a little livelier than Richard had described it. A young nude girl was dancing sensuously to an assortment of homemade drums near the far side of the dome. Turned out she was still in school; it was a project for a 'cultural relativity' class.

Most of the people there, in fact, were young and therefore still in school. They considered it a joke, though. After you had learned to read and write and could pass the Class I literacy test, you only had to take one course per year, and some of those you could pass just by signing up. So much for the 'eighteen years' compulsory education' they had startled us with at Stargate.

Other people were playing board games, reading, watching the girl gyrate, or just talking. There was a bar that served soya, coffee, or thin homemade beer. Not a ration ticket to be seen; all made by the commune or purchased outside with commune tickets.

We got into a discussion about the war, with a bunch of people who knew Marygay and I were veterans. It's hard to describe their attitude, which was pretty uniform. They were angry in an abstract way that it took so much tax money to support; they were convinced that the Taurans would never be any danger to Earth; but they all knew that nearly half the jobs in the world were associated with the war, and if it stopped, everything would fall apart.

I thought everything was in shambles already, but then I hadn't grown up in this world. And they had never known 'peacetime.'

We went home about midnight and Marygay and I each stood two hours' guard. By the middle of the next morning I was wishing I had gotten a little more sleep.

The plow was a big blade on wheels with two handles for steering, atomic powered. Not very much power, though; enough to move it forward at a slow crawl if the blade was in soft earth. Needless to say, there was little soft earth in the unused five acres. The plow would go a few centimeters, get stuck, freewheel until I put some back into it, then move a few more centimeters. I finished a tenth of an acre the first day and eventually got it up to a fifth of an acre a day.

It was hard, hardening work, but pleasant. I had an earclip that piped music to me, old tapes from Richard's collection, and the sun browned me all over. I was beginning to think I could live that way forever, when suddenly it was finished.

Marygay and I were reading up at the recreation center one evening when we heard faint gunfire down by the road. We decided it'd be smart to get back to the house. We were less than halfway there when firing broke out all along our left, on a line that seemed to extend from the road to far past the recreation center: a coordinated attack. We had to abandon the bikes and crawl on hands and knees in the drainage ditch by the side of the road, bullets hissing over our heads. A heavy vehicle rumbled by, shooting left and right. It took a good twenty minutes to crawl home. We passed two farmhouses that were burning brightly. I was glad ours didn't have any wood.

I noticed there was no return fire coming from our tower, but didn't say anything. There were two dead strangers in front of the house as we rushed inside.

April was lying on the floor, still alive but bleeding from a hundred tiny fragment wounds. The living room was rubble and dust; someone must have thrown a bomb through a door or window. I left Marygay with her mother and ran out back to the tower. The ladder was pulled up, so I had to shinny up one of the stilts.

Richard was sitting slumped over the rifle. In the pale green glow from the scope I could see a perfectly round hole above his left eye. A little blood had trickled down the bridge of his nose and dried.

I laid his body on the floor and covered his head with my shirt. I filled my pockets with clips and took the rifle back to the house.

Marygay had tried to make her mother comfortable. They were talking quietly. She was holding my shotgun-pistol and had another gun on the floor beside her. When I came in she looked up and nodded soberly, not crying.

April whispered something and Marygay asked, 'Mother wants to know whether … Daddy had a hard time of it. She knows he's dead.'

'No. I'm sure he didn't feel anything.'

'That's good.'

'It's something.' I should keep my mouth shut. 'It is good, yes.'

I checked the doors and windows for an effective vantage point. I couldn't find anyplace that wouldn't allow a whole platoon to sneak up behind me.

'I'm going to go outside and get on top of the house.' Couldn't go back to the tower. 'Don't you shoot unless somebody gets inside … maybe they'll think the place is deserted.'

By the time I had clambered up to the sod roof, the heavy truck was coming back down the road. Through the scope I could see that there were five men on it, four in the cab and one who was on the open bed, cradling a machine gun, surrounded by loot. He was crouched between two refrigerators, but I had a clear shot at him. Held my fire, not wanting to draw attention. The truck stopped in front of the house, sat for a minute, and turned in. The window was probably bulletproof, but I sighted on the driver's face and squeezed off a round. He jumped as it ricocheted, whining, leaving an opaque star on the plastic, and the man in back opened up. A steady stream of bullets hummed over my head; I could see them thumping into the sandbags of the tower. He didn't see me.

The truck wasn't ten meters away when the shooting stopped. He was evidently reloading, hidden behind the refrigerator. I took careful aim and when he popped up to fire I shot him in the throat. The bullet being a tumbler, it exited through the top of his skull.

The driver pulled the truck around in a long arc so that, when it stopped, the door to the cab was flush with the door of the house. This protected them from the tower and also from me, though I doubted they yet knew where I was; a T-16 makes no flash and very little noise. I kicked off my shoes and stepped cautiously onto the top of the cab, hoping the driver would get out on his side. Once the door opened I could fill the cab with ricocheting bullets.

No good. The far door, hidden from me by the roof's overhang, opened first. I waited for the driver and hoped that Marygay was well hidden. I shouldn't have worried.

There was a deafening roar, then another and another. The heavy truck rocked with the impact of thousands of tiny flechettes. One short scream that the second shot ended.

I jumped from the truck and ran around to the back door. Marygay had her mother's head on her lap, and someone was crying softly. I went to them and Marygay's cheeks were dry under my palms.

'Good work, dear.'

She didn't say anything. There was a steady heavy dripping sound from the door and the air was acrid with smoke and the smell of fresh meat. We huddled together until dawn.

I had thought April was sleeping, but in the dim light her eyes were wide open and filmed. Her breath came in shallow rasps. Her skin was gray parchment and dried blood. She didn't answer when we talked to her.

A vehicle was coming up the road, so I took the rifle and went outside. It was a dump truck with a white sheet draped over one side and a man standing in the back with a megaphone repeating, 'Wounded … wounded.' I waved and the truck came in. They took April out on a makeshift litter and told us which hospital they were going to. We wanted to go along but there was simply no room; the bed of the truck was covered with people in various stages of disrepair.

Marygay didn't want to go back inside because it was getting light enough to see the men she had killed so completely. I went back in to get some cigarettes and forced myself to look. It was messy enough, but just didn't disturb me that much. That bothered me, to be confronted with a pile of human hamburger and mainly notice the flies and ants and smell. Death is so much neater in space.

We buried her father behind the house, and when the truck came back with April's small body wrapped in a shroud, we buried her beside him. The commune's sanitation truck came by a little later, and gas-masked men took care of the jumpers' bodies.

We sat in the baking sun, and finally Marygay wept, for a long time, silently.

We got off the plane at Dulles and found a monorail to Columbia.

It was a pleasingly diverse jumble of various kinds of buildings, arranged around a lake, surrounded by trees. All of the buildings were connected by slidewalk to the largest place, a fullerdome with stores and schools and offices.

We could have taken the enclosed slidewalk to Mom's place, but instead walked alongside it in the good cold air that smelled of fallen leaves. People slid by on the other side of the plastic, carefully not staring.

Mom didn't answer her door, but she'd given me an entry card. Mom was asleep in the bedroom, so Marygay and I settled in the living room and read for a while.

We were startled suddenly by a loud fit of coughing from the bedroom. I raced over and knocked on the door.

'William? I didn't – 'coughing' – come in, I didn't know you were…'

She was propped up in bed, the light on, surrounded by various nostrums. She looked ghastly, pale and lined.

She lit a joint and it seemed to quell the coughing. 'When did you get in? I didn't know…'

'Just a few minutes ago… How long has this … have you been…'

'Oh, it's just a bug I picked up after Rhonda went to see her kids. I'll be fine in a couple of days.' She started coughing again, drank some thick red liquid from a bottle. All of her medicines seemed to be the commercial, patent variety.

'Have you seen a doctor?'

'Doctor? Heavens no, Willy. They don't have … it's not serious … don't–'

'Not serious?' At eighty-four. 'For Chrissake, mother.' I went to the phone in the kitchen and with some difficulty managed to get the hospital.

A plain girl in her twenties formed in the cube. 'Nurse Donalson, general services.' She had a fixed smile, professional sincerity. But then everybody smiled.

'My mother needs to be looked at by a doctor. She has a–'

'Name and number, please.'

'Beth Mandella.' I spelled it. 'What number?'

'Medical services number, of course,' she smiled.

I called into Mom and asked her what her number was. 'She says she can't remember.'

'That's all right, sir, I'm sure I can find her records.' She turned her smile to a keyboard beside her and punched out a code.

'Beth Mandella?' she said, her smile turning quizzical. 'You're her son? She must be in her eighties.'

'Please. It's a long story. She really has to see a doctor.'

'Is this some kind of joke?'

'What do you mean?' Strangled coughing from the other room, the worst yet. 'Really – this might be very serious, you've got to–'

'But sir, Mrs Mandella got a zero priority rating way back in 2010.'

'What the hell is that supposed to mean?'

'S-i-r…' The smile was hardening in place.

'Look. Pretend that I came from another planet. What is a "zero priority rating" ?'

'Another – oh! I know you!' She looked off to the left. 'Sonya – come over here a second. You'd never guess who…' Another face crowded the cube, a vapid blonde girl whose smile was twin to the other nurse's. 'Remember? On the stat this morning?'

'Oh, yeah,' she said. 'One of the soldiers – hey, that's really max, really max.' The head withdrew.

'Oh, Mr Mandella,' she said, effusive. 'No wonder you're confused. It's really very simple.'

'Well?'

'It's part of the Universal Medical Security System. Everybody gets a rating on their seventieth birthday. It comes in automatically from Geneva.'

'What does it rate? What does it mean?' But the ugly truth was obvious.

'Well, it tells how important a person is and what level of treatment he's allowed. Class three is the same as anybody else's; class two is the same except for certain life-extending–'

'And class zero is no treatment at all.'

'That's correct, Mr Mandella.' And in her smile was not a glimmer of pity or understanding.

'Thank you.' I disconnected. Marygay was standing behind me, crying soundlessly with her mouth wide open.

I found mountaineer's oxygen at a sporting goods store and even managed to get some black-market antibiotics through a character in a bar downtown in Washington. But Mom was beyond being able to respond to amateur treatment. She lived four days. The people from the crematorium had the same fixed smile.

I tried to get through to my brother, Mike, on the Moon, but the phone company wouldn't let me place the call until I had signed a contract and posted a $25,000 bond. I had to get a credit transfer from Geneva. The paperwork took half a day.

I finally got through to him. Without preamble:

'Mother's dead.'

For a fraction of a second, the radio waves wandered up to the Moon, and in another fraction, came back. He started and then nodded his head slowly. 'No surprise. Every time I've come down to Earth the past ten years, I've wondered whether she'd still be there. Neither of us had enough money to keep in very close touch.' He had told us in Geneva that a letter from Luna to Earth coat $100 postage – plus $5,000 tax. It discouraged communication with what the UN considered to be a bunch of regrettably necessary anarchists.

We commiserated for a while and then Mike said, 'Willy, Earth is no place for you and Marygay; you know that by now. Come to Luna. Where you can still be an individual. Where we don't throw people out the airlock on their seventieth birthday.'

'We'd have to rejoin UNEF.'

'True, but you wouldn't have to fight. They say they need you more for training. You could study in your spare time, bring your physics up to date – maybe wind up eventually in research.'

We talked some more, a total of three minutes. I got $1000 back.

Marygay and I talked about it through the night. Maybe our decision would have been different if we hadn't been staying there, surrounded by Mother's life and death, but when the dawn came the proud, ambitious, careful beauty of Columbia had turned sinister and foreboding.

We packed our bags and had our money transferred to the Tycho Credit Union and took a monorail to the Cape.

'In case you're interested, you aren't the first combat veterans to come back.' The recruiting officer was a muscular lieutenant of indeterminate sex. I flipped a coin mentally and it came up tails.

'Last I heard, there had been nine others,' she said in her husky tenor. 'All of them opted for the Moon … maybe you'll find some of your friends there.' She slid two simple forms across the desk. 'Sign these and you're in again. Second lieutenants.'

The form was a simple request to be assigned to active duty; we had never really gotten out of the Force, since they extended the draft law, but had just been on inactive status. I scrutinized the paper.

'There's nothing on this about the guarantees we were given at Stargate.'

'That won't be necessary, Lieutenant.' I handed back the form. So did Marygay.

'Let me check.' She left the desk and disappeared into an office. After a while we heard a printer rattle.

She brought back the same two sheets, with an addition typed under our names: GUARANTEED LOCATION OF CHOICE [LUNA] AND ASSIGNMENT OF CHOICE [COMBAT TRAINING SPECIALIST].

We got a thorough physical checkup and were fitted for new fighting suits, made our financial arrangements, and caught the next morning's shuttle. We laid over at Earth-port, enjoying zero gravity for a few hours, and then caught a ride to Luna, setting down at the Grimaldi base.

On the door to the Transient Officers' Billet, some wag had scraped 'abandon hope all ye who enter.' We found our two-man cubicle and began changing for chow.

Two raps on the door. 'Mail call, sirs.'

I opened the door and the sergeant standing there saluted. I just looked at him for a second and then remembered I was an officer and returned the salute. He handed me two identical faxes. I gave one to Marygay and we both gasped at the same time:

* * O R D E R S * * O R D E R S * * O R D E R S

THE FOLLOWING NAMED PERSONNEL:

Mandella, William 2LT [11 575 278] COCOMM D Co

GRITRABN

AND

Potter, Marygay 2LT [17 386 907] COCOMM B Co

GRITRABN ARE HEREBY REASSIGNED TO:

LT Mandella: PLCOMM 2 PL STFTHETA STARGATE

LT Potter: PLCOMM 3 PL STFTHETA STARGATE.

DESCRIPTION OF DUTIES:

Command infantry platoon in Tet-2 Campaign.

THE ABOVE NAMED PERSONNEL WILL REPORT IMMEDIATELY TO GRIMALDI TRANSPORTATION BATTALION TO BE MANIFESTED TO STARGATE.

ISSUED STARGATE TACBD/1298-8684-1450/20 AUG 2019

SG:

BY AUTHO STFCOM Commander.

* * O R D E R S * * O R D E R S * * O R D E R S

'They didn't waste any time, did they?' Marygay said bitterly.

'Must be a standing order. Strike Force Command's light weeks away; they can't even know we've re-upped yet.'

'What about our…' She let it trail off.

'The guarantee. Well, we were given our assignment of choice. Nobody guaranteed we'd have the assignment for more than an hour.' 'It's so dirty.'

I shrugged. 'It's so army.'

But I couldn't shake the feeling that we were going home.

Lieutenant

Mandella

2024-2389 AD

'Quick and dirty.' I was looking at my platoon sergeant, Santesteban, but talking to myself. And anybody else who was listening.

'Yeah,' he said. 'Gotta do it in the first coupla minutes or we're screwed tight.' He was matter-of-fact, laconic. Drugged.

Private Collins came up with Halliday. They were holding hands unselfconsciously. 'Lieutenant Mandella?' Her voice broke a little. 'Can we have just a minute?'

'One minute,' I said, too abruptly. 'We have to leave in five. I'm sorry.'

Hard to watch those two together now. Neither one had any combat experience. But they knew what everybody did; how slim their chances were of ever being together again. They slumped in a corner and mumbled words and traded mechanical caresses, no passion or even comfort. Collins's eyes shone but she wasn't weeping. Halliday just looked grim, numb. She was normally by far the prettier of the two, but the sparkle had gone out of her and left a well-formed dull shell.

I'd gotten used to open female homosex in the months since we'd left Earth. Even stopped resenting the loss of potential partners. The men together still gave me a chill, though.

I stripped and backed into the clamshelled suit. The new ones were a hell of a lot more complicated, with all the new biometrics and trauma maintenance. But well worth the trouble of hooking up, in case you got blown apart just a little bit. Go home to a comfortable pension with heroic prosthesis. They were even talking about the possibility of regeneration, at least for missing arms and legs. Better get it soon, before Heaven filled up with fractional people. Heaven was the new hospital/rest-and-recreation planet.

I finished the set-up sequence and the suit closed by itself. Gritted my teeth against the pain that never came, when the internal sensors and fluid tubes poked into your body. Conditioned neural bypass, so you felt only a slight puzzling dislocation. Rather than the death of a thousand cuts.

Collins and Halliday were getting into their suits now and the other dozen were almost set, so I stepped over to the third platoon's staging area. Say goodbye again to Marygay.

She was suited and heading my way. We touched helmets instead of using the radio. Privacy.

'Feeling OK, honey?'

'All right,' she said. 'Took my pill.'

'Yeah, happy times.' I'd taken mine too, supposed to make you feel optimistic without interfering with your sense of judgment. I knew most of us would probably die, but I didn't feel too bad about it. 'Sack with me tonight?'

'If we're both here,' she said neutrally. 'Have to take a pill for that, too.' She tried to laugh. 'Sleep, I mean. How're the new people taking it? You have ten?'

'Ten, yeah, they're OK. Doped up, quarter-dose.'

'I did that, too; try to keep them loose.'

In fact, Santesteban was the only other combat veteran in my platoon; the four corporals had been in UNEF for a while but hadn't ever fought.

The speaker in my cheekbone crackled and Commander Cortez said, 'Two minutes. Get your people lined up.'

We had our goodbye and I went back to check my flock. Everybody seemed to have gotten suited up without any problems, so I put them on line. We waited for what seemed like a long time.

'All right, load 'em up.' With the word 'up,' the bay door in front of me opened – the staging area having already been bled of air – and I led my men and women through to the assault ship.

These new ships were ugly as hell. Just an open framework with clamps to hold you in place, swiveled lasers fore and aft, small tachyon powerplants below the lasers. Everything automated; the machine would land us as quickly as possible and then zip off to harass the enemy. It was a one-use, throwaway drone. The vehicle that would come pick us up if we survived was cradled next to it, much prettier.

We clamped in and the assault ship cast off from the Sangre y Victoria with twin spurts from the yaw jets. Then the voice of the machine gave us a short countdown and we sped off at four gees' acceleration, straight down.

The planet, which we hadn't bothered to name, was a chunk of black rock without any normal star close enough to give it heat. At first it was visible only by the absence of stars where its bulk cut off their light, but as we dropped closer we could see subtle variations in the blackness of its surface. We were coming down on the hemisphere opposite the Taurans' outpost.

Our recon had shown that their camp sat in the middle of a flat lava plain several hundred kilometers in diameter. It was pretty primitive compared to other Tauran bases UNEF had encountered, but there wouldn't be any sneaking up on it. We were going to careen over the horizon some fifteen klicks from the place, four ships converging simultaneously from different directions, all of us decelerating like mad, hopefully to drop right in their laps and come up shooting. There would be nothing to hide behind.

I wasn't worried, of course. Abstractedly, I wished I hadn't taken the pill.

We leveled off about a kilometer from the surface and sped along much faster than the rock's escape velocity, constantly correcting to keep from flying away. The surface rolled below us in a dark gray blur; we shed a little light from the pseudo-cerenkov glow made by our tachyon exhaust, scooting away from our reality into its own.

The ungainly contraption skimmed and jumped along for some ten minutes; then suddenly the front jet glowed and we were snapped forward inside our suits, eyeballs trying to escape from their sockets in the rapid deceleration.

'Prepare for ejection,' the machine's female-mechanical voice said. 'Five, four…'

The ship's lasers started firing, millisecond flashes freezing the land below in jerky stroboscopic motion. It was a twisted, pock-marked jumble of fissures and random black rocks, a few meters below our feet. We were dropping, slowing.

'Three – ' It never got any farther. There was a too-bright flash and I saw the horizon drop away as the ship's tail pitched down – then clipped the ground, and we were rolling, horribly, pieces of people and ship scattering. Then we slid pinwheeling to a bumpy halt, and I tried to pull free but my leg was pinned under the ship's bulk: excruciating pain and a dry crunch as the girder crushed my leg; shrill whistle of air escaping my breached suit; then the trauma maintenance turned on snick, more pain, then no pain and I was rolling free, short stump of a leg trailing blood that froze shiny black on the dull black rock. I tasted brass and a red haze closed everything out, then deepened to the brown of river clay, then loam and I passed out, with the pill thinking this is not so bad…

The suit is set up to save as much of your body as possible. If you lose part of an arm or a leg, one of sixteen razor-sharp irises closes around your limb with the force of a hydraulic press, snipping it off neatly and sealing the suit before you can die of explosive decompression. Then 'trauma maintenance' cauterizes the stump, replaces lost blood, and fills you full of happy-juice and No-shock. So you will either die happy or, if your comrades go on to win the battle, eventually be carried back up to the ship's aid station.

We'd won that round, while I slept swaddled in dark cotton. I woke up in the infirmary. It was crowded. I was in the middle of a long row of cots, each one holding someone who had been three-fourths (or less) saved by his suit's trauma maintenance feature. We were being ignored by the ship's two doctors, who stood in bright light at operating tables, absorbed in blood rituals. I watched them for a long time. Squinting into the bright light, the blood on their green tunics could have been grease, the swathed bodies, odd soft machines that they were fixing. But the machines would cry out in their sleep, and the mechanics muttered reassurances while they plied their greasy tools. I watched and slept and woke up in different places.

Finally I woke up in a regular bay. I was strapped down and being fed through a tube, biosensor electrodes attached here and there, but no medics around. The only other person in the little room was Marygay, sleeping on the bunk next to me. Her right arm was amputated just above the elbow.

I didn't wake her up, just looked at her for a long time and tried to sort out my feelings. Tried to filter out the effect of the mood drugs. Looking at her stump, I could feel neither empathy nor revulsion. I tried to force one reaction, and then the other, but nothing real happened. It was as if she had always been that way. Was it drugs, conditioning, love? Have to wait and see.

Her eyes opened suddenly and I knew she had been awake for some time, had been giving me time to think. 'Hello, broken toy,' she said.

'How – how do you feel?' Bright question.

She put a finger to her lips and kissed it, a familiar gesture, reflection. 'Stupid, numb. Glad not to be a soldier anymore.' She smiled. 'Did they tell you? We're going to Heaven.'

'No. I knew it would be either there or Earth.'

'Heaven will be better.' Anything would. 'I wish we were there now.' 'How long?' I asked. 'How long before we get there?'

She rolled over and looked at the ceiling. 'No telling. You haven't talked to anybody?'

'Just woke up.'

'There's a new directive they didn't bother to tell us about before. The Sangre y Victoria got orders for four missions. We have to keep on fighting until we've done all four. Or until we've sustained so many casualties that it wouldn't be practical to go on.'

'How many is that?'

'I wonder. We lost a good third already. But we're headed for Aleph-7. Panty raid.' New slang term for the type of operation whose main object was to gather Tauran artefacts, and prisoners if possible. I tried to find out where the term came from, but the one explanation I got was really idiotic.

One knock on the door and Dr Foster barged in. He fluttered his hands. 'Still in separate beds? Marygay, I thought you were more recovered than that.' Foster was all right. A flaming mariposa, but he had an amused tolerance for heterosexuality.

He examined Marygay's stump and then mine. He stuck thermometers in our mouths so we couldn't talk. When he spoke, he was serious and blunt.

'I'm not going to sugarcoat anything for you. You're both on happyjuice up to your ears, and the loss you've sustained isn't going to bother you until I take you off the stuff. For my own convenience I'm keeping you drugged until you get to Heaven. I have twenty-one amputees to take care of. We can't handle twenty-one psychiatric cases.

'Enjoy your peace of mind while you still have it. You two especially, since you'll probably want to stay together. The prosthetics you get on Heaven will work just fine, but every time you look at his mechanical leg or you look at her arm, you're going to think of how lucky the other one is. You're going to constantly trigger memories of pain and loss for each other… You may be at each other's throats in a week. Or you may share a sullen kind of love for the rest of your lives.

'Or you may be able to transcend it. Give each other strength. Just don't kid yourselves if it doesn't work out.'

He checked the readout on each thermometer and made a notation in his notebook. 'Doctor knows best, even if he is a little weird by your own old-fashioned standards. Keep it in mind.' He took the thermometer out of my mouth and gave me a little pat on the shoulder. Impartially, he did the same to Marygay. At the door, he said, 'We've got collapsar insertion in about six hours. One of the nurses will take you to the tanks.'

We went into the tanks – so much more comfortable and safer than the old individual acceleration shells – and dropped into the Tet-2 collapsar field already starting the crazy fifty-gee evasive maneuvers that would protect us from enemy cruisers when we popped out by Aleph-7, a microsecond later.

Predictably the Aleph-7 campaign was a dismal failure, and we limped away from it with a two-campaign total of fifty-four dead and thirty-nine cripples bound for Heaven. Only twelve soldiers were still able to fight, but they weren't exactly straining at the leash.

It took three collapsar jumps to get to Heaven. No ship ever went there directly from a battle, even though the delay sometimes cost extra lives. It was the one place besides Earth that the Taurans could not be allowed to find.

Heaven was a lovely, unspoiled Earth-like world; what Earth might have been like if men had treated her with compassion instead of lust. Virgin forests, white beaches, pristine deserts. The few dozen cities there either blended perfectly with the environment (one was totally underground) or were brazen statements of human ingenuity; Oceanus, in a coral reef with six fathoms of water over its transparent roof, Boreas, perched on a sheared-off mountaintop in the polar wasteland; and the fabulous Skye, a huge resort city that floated from continent to continent on the trade winds.

We landed, as everyone does, at the jungle city. Threshold. Three-fourths hospital, it's by far the planet's largest city, but you couldn't tell that from the air, flying down from orbit. The only sign of civilization was a short runway that suddenly appeared, a small white patch dwarfed to insignificance by the stately rain forest that crowded in from the east and an immense ocean that dominated the other horizon.

Once under the arboreal cover, the city was very much in evidence. Low buildings of native stone and wood rested among ten-meter-thick tree trunks. They were connected by unobtrusive stone paths, with one wide promenade meandering off to the beach. Sunlight filtered down in patches, and the air held a mixture of forest sweetness and salt tang.

I later learned that the city sprawled out over 200 square kilometers, that you could take a subway to anyplace that was too far to walk. The ecology of Threshold was very carefully balanced and maintained so as to resemble the jungle outside, with all the dangerous and uncomfortable elements eliminated. A powerful pressor field kept out large predators and such insect life as was not necessary for the health of the plants inside.

We walked, limped and rolled into the nearest building, which was the hospital's reception area. The rest of the hospital was underneath, thirty subterranean stories. Each person was examined and assigned his own room; I tried to get a double with Marygay, but they weren't set up for that.

'Earth-year' was 2189. So I was 215 years old, God, look at that old codger. Somebody pass the hat – no, not necessary. The doctor who examined me said that my accumulated pay would be transferred from Earth to Heaven. With compound interest, I was just shy of being a billionaire. He remarked that I'd find lots of ways to spend my billion on Heaven.

They took the most severely wounded first, so it was several days before I went into surgery. Afterwards, I woke up in my room and found that they had grafted a prosthesis onto my stump, an articulated structure of shiny metal that to my untrained eye looked exactly like the skeleton of a leg and foot. It looked creepy as hell, lying there in a transparent bag of fluid, wires running out of it to a machine at the end of the bed.

An aide came in. 'How you feelin', sir?' I almost told him to forget the 'sir' bullshit, I was out of the army and staying out this time. But it might be nice for the guy to keep feeling that I outranked him.

'I don't know. Hurts a little.'

'Gonna hurt like a sonuvabitch. Wait'll the nerves start to grow.' 'Nerves?'

'Sure.' He was fiddling with the machine, reading dials on the other side. 'How you gonna have a leg without nerves? It'd just sit there.'

'Nerves? Like regular nerves? You mean I can just think "move" and the thing moves?'

"Course you can.' He looked at me quizzically, then went back to his adjustments.

What a wonder. 'Prosthetics has sure come a long way.'

'Pross-what-ics?'

'You know, artificial–'

'Oh yeah, like in books. Wooden legs, hooks and stuff.'

How'd he ever get a job? 'Yeah, prosthetics. Like this thing on the end of my stump.'

'Look, sir.' He set down the clipboard he'd been scribbling on. 'You've been away a long time. That's gonna be a leg, just like the other leg except it can't break.'

'They do it with arms, too?'

'Sure, any limb.' He went back to his writing. 'Livers, kidneys, stomachs, all kinds of things. Still working on hearts and lungs, have to use mechanical substitutes.'

'Fantastic.' Marygay would be whole again, too.

He shrugged. 'Guess so. They've been doing it since before I was born. How old are you, sir?'

I told him, and he whistled. 'God damn. You musta been in it from the beginning.' His accent was very strange. All the words were right but all the sounds were wrong.

'Yeah. I was in the Epsilon attack. Aleph-null.' They'd started naming collapsars after letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in order of discovery, then ran out of letters when the damn things started cropping up all over the place. So they added numbers after the letters; last I heard, they were up to Yod-42.

'Wow, ancient history. What was it like back then?'

'I don't know. Less crowded, nicer. Went back to Earth a year ago – hell, a century ago. Depends on how you look at it. It was so bad I re-enlisted, you know? Bunch of zombies. No offense.'

He shrugged. 'Never been there, myself. People who come from there seem to miss it. Maybe it got better.'

'What, you were born on another planet? Heaven?' No wonder I couldn't place his accent.

'Born, raised and drafted.' He put the pen back in his pocket and folded the clipboard up to a wallet-sized package. 'Yes, sir. Third-generation angel. Best damned planet in all UNEF.' He spelled it out, didn't say 'youneff' the way I'd always heard it.

'Look, I've gotta run, Lieutenant. Two other monitors to check, this hour.' He backed out the door. 'You need anything, there's a buzzer on the table there.'

Third-generation angel. His grandparents came from Earth, probably when I was a young punk of a hundred. I wondered how many other worlds they'd colonized while my back was turned. Lose an arm, grow a new one?

It was going to be good to settle down and live a whole year for every year that went by.

The guy wasn't kidding about the pain. And it wasn't just the new leg, though that hurt like boiling oil. For the new tissues to 'take,' they'd had to subvert my body's resistance to alien cells; cancer broke out in a half-dozen places and had to be treated separately, painfully.

I was feeling pretty used up, but it was still kind of fascinating to watch the leg grow. White threads turned into blood vessels and nerves, first hanging a little slack, then moving into place as the musculature grew up around the metal bone.

I got used to seeing it grow, so the sight never repelled me. But when Marygay came to visit, it was a jolt – she was ambulatory before the skin on her new arm had started to grow; looked like a walking anatomy demonstration. I got over the shock, though, and she eventually came in for a few hours every day to play games or trade gossip or just sit and read, her arm slowly growing inside the plastic cast.

I'd had skin for a week before they uncased the new leg and trundled the machine away. It was ugly as hell, hairless and dead white, stiff as a metal rod. But it worked, after a fashion. I could stand up and shuffle along.

They transferred me to orthopedics, for 'range and motion repatterning' – a fancy name for slow torture. They strap you into a machine that bends both the old and new legs simultaneously. The new one resists.

Marygay was in a nearby section, having her arm twisted methodically. It must have been even worse on her; she looked gray and haggard every afternoon, when we met to go upstairs and sunbathe in the broken shade.

As the days went by, the therapy became less like torture and more like strenuous exercise. We both began swimming for an hour or so every clear day, in the calm, pressor-guarded water off the beach. I still limped on land, but in the water I could get around pretty well.

The only real excitement we had on Heaven – excitement to our combat-blunted sensibilities – was in that carefully guarded water.

They have to turn off the pressor field for a split second every time a ship lands; otherwise it would just ricochet off over the ocean. Every now and then an animal slips in, but the dangerous land animals are too slow to get through. Not so in the sea.

The undisputed master of Heaven's oceans is an ugly customer that the angels, in a fit of originality, named the 'shark.' It could eat a stack of Earth sharks for breakfast, though.

The one that got in was an average-sized white shark who had been bumping around the edge of the pressor field for days, tormented by all that protein splashing around inside. Fortunately, there's a warning siren two minutes before the pressor is shut down, so nobody was in the water when he came streaking through. And streak through he did, almost beaching himself in the fury of his fruitless attack.

He was twelve meters of flexible muscle with a razor-sharp tail at one end and a collection of arm-length fangs at the other. His eyes, big yellow globes, were set on stalks more than a meter out from his head. His mouth was so wide that, open, a man could comfortably stand in it. Make an impressive photo for his heirs.

They couldn't just turn off the pressor field and wait for the thing to swim away. So the Recreation Committee organized a hunting party.

I wasn't too enthusiastic about offering myself up as an hors d'oeuvre to a giant fish, but Marygay had spearfished a lot as a kid growing up in Florida and was really excited by the prospect. I went along with the gag when I found out how they were doing it; seemed safe enough.

These 'sharks' supposedly never attack people in boats. Two people who had more faith in fishermen's stories than I had gone out to the edge of the pressor field in a rowboat, armed only with a side of beef. They kicked the meat overboard and the shark was there in a flash.

This was the cue for us to step in and have our fun. There were twenty-three of us fools waiting on the beach with flippers, masks, breathers and one spear each. The spears were pretty formidable, though, jet-propelled and with high-explosive heads.

We splashed in and swam in phalanx, underwater, toward the feeding creature. When it saw us at first, it didn't attack. It tried to hide its meal, presumably so that some of us wouldn't be able to sneak around and munch on it while the shark was dealing with the others. But every time he tried for the deep water, he'd bump into the pressor field. He was obviously getting pissed off.

Finally, he just let go of the beef, whipped around and charged. Great sport. He was the size of your finger one second, way down there at the other end of the field, then suddenly as big as the guy next to you and closing fast.

Maybe ten of the spears hit him – mine didn't – and they tore him to shreds. But even after an expert, or lucky, brain shot that took off the top of his head and one eye, even with half his flesh and entrails scattered in a bloody path behind him, he slammed into our line and clamped his jaws around a woman, grinding off both of her legs before it occurred to him to die.

We carried her, barely alive, back to the beach, where an ambulance was waiting. They poured her full of blood surrogate and No-shock and rushed her to the hospital, where she survived to eventually go through the agony of growing new legs. I decided that I would leave the hunting of fish to other fish.

Most of our stay at Threshold, once the therapy became bearable, was pleasant enough. No military discipline, lots of reading and things to potter around with. But there was a pall over it, since it was obvious that we weren't out of the army; just pieces of broken equipment that they were fixing up to throw back into the fray. Marygay and I each had another three years to serve in our lieutenancies.

But we did have six months of rest and recreation coming once our new limbs were pronounced in good working order. Marygay was released two days before I was but waited around for me.

My back pay came to $892,746,012. Not in the form of bales of currency, fortunately; on Heaven they used an electronic credit exchange, so I carried my fortune around in a little machine with a digital readout. To buy something you punched in the vendor's credit number and the amount of purchase; the sum was automatically shuffled from your account to his. The machine was the size of a slender wallet and coded to your thumbprint.

Heaven's economy was governed by the continual presence of thousands of resting, recreating millionaire soldiers. A modest snack would cost a hundred bucks, a room for a night at least ten times that. Since UNEF built and owned Heaven, this runaway inflation was pretty transparently a simple way of getting our accumulated pay back into the economic mainstream.

We had fun, desperate fun. We rented a flyer and camping gear and went off for weeks, exploring the planet. There were icy rivers to swim and lush jungles to crawl through; meadows and mountains and polar wastes and deserts.

We could be totally protected from the environment by adjusting our individual pressor fields – sleep naked in a blizzard – or we could take nature straight. At Marygay's suggestion, the last thing we did before coming back to civilization was to climb a pinnacle in the desert, fasting for several days to heighten our sensibilities (or warp our perceptions, I'm still not sure), and sit back-to-back in the searing heat, contemplating the languid flux of life.

Then off to the fleshpots. We toured every city on the planet, and each had its own particular charm, but we finally returned to Skye to spend the rest of our leave time.

The rest of the planet was bargain-basement compared to Skye. In the four weeks we were using the airborne pleasure dome as our home base, Marygay and I each went through a good half-billion dollars. We gambled – sometimes losing a million dollars or more in a night – ate and drank the finest the planet had to offer, and sampled every service and product that wasn't too bizarre for our admittedly archaic tastes. We each had a personal servant whose salary was rather more than that of a major general.

Desperate fun, as I said. Unless the war changed radically, our chances of surviving the next three years were microscopic. We were remarkably healthy victims of a terminal disease, trying to cram a lifetime of sensation into a half of a year.

We did have the consolation, not small, that however short the remainder of our lives would be, we would at least be together. For some reason it never occurred to me that even that could be taken from us.

We were enjoying a light lunch in the transparent 'first floor' of Skye, watching the ocean glide by underneath us, when a messenger bustled in and gave us two envelopes: our orders.

Marygay had been bumped to captain, and I to major, on the basis of our military records and tests we had taken at Threshold. I was a company commander and she was a company's executive officer.

But they weren't the same company.

She was going to muster with a new company being formed right here on Heaven. I was going back to Stargate for 'indoctrination and education' before taking command.

For a long time we couldn't say anything. 'I'm going to protest,' I said finally, weakly. 'They can't make me a commander. Into a commander.'

She was still struck dumb. This was not just a separation. Even if the war was over and we left for Earth only a few minutes apart, in different ships, the geometry of the collapsar jump would pile up years between us. When the second one arrived on Earth, his partner would probably be a half-century older; more probably dead.

We sat there for some time, not touching the exquisite food, ignoring the beauty around us and beneath us, only conscious of each other and the two sheets of paper that separated us with a gulf as wide and real as death.

We went back to Threshold. I protested but my arguments were shrugged off. I tried to get Marygay assigned to my company, as my exec. They said my personnel had all been allotted. I pointed out that most of them probably hadn't even been born yet. Nevertheless, allotted, they said. It would be almost a century, I said, before I even get to Stargate. They replied that Strike Force Command plans in terms of centuries.

Not in terms of people.

We had a day and a night together. The less said about that, the better. It wasn't just losing a lover. Marygay and I were each other's only link to real life, the Earth of the 1980s and 90s. Not the perverse grotesquerie we were supposedly fighting to preserve. When her shuttle took off it was like a casket rattling down into a grave.

I commandeered computer time and found out the orbital elements of her ship and its departure time; found out I could watch her leave from 'our' desert.

I landed on the pinnacle where we had starved together and, a few hours before dawn, watched a new star appear over the western horizon, flare to brilliance and fade as it moved away, becoming just another star, then a dim star, and then nothing. I walked to the edge and looked down the sheer rock face to the dim frozen rippling of dunes half a kilometer below. I sat with my feet dangling over the edge, thinking nothing, until the sun's oblique rays illuminated the dunes in a soft, tempting chiaroscuro of low relief. Twice I shifted my weight as if to jump. When I didn't, it was not for fear of pain or loss. The pain would be only a bright spark and the loss would be only the army's. And it would be their ultimate victory over me – having ruled my life for so long, to force an end to it.

That much, I owed to the enemy.

Major

Mandella

2458-3143 AD

What was that old experiment they told us about in high school biology? Take a flatworm and teach it how to swim through a maze. Then mash it up and feed it to a stupid flatworm, and lo! the stupid flatworm would be able to swim the maze, too.

I had a bad taste of major general in my mouth.

Actually, I supposed they had refined the techniques since my high school days. With time dilation, that was about 450 years for research and development.

At Stargate, my orders said, I was to undergo 'indoctrination and education' prior to taking command of my very own Strike Force. Which was what they still called a company.

For my education on Stargate, they didn't mince up major generals and serve them to me with hollandaise. They didn't feed me anything except glucose for three weeks. Glucose and electricity.

They shaved every hair off my body, gave me a shot that turned me into a dishrag, attached dozens of electrodes to my head and body, immersed me in a tank of oxygenated fluorocarbon, and hooked me up to an ALSC. That's an 'accelerated life situation computer.' It kept me busy.

I guess it took the machine about ten minutes to review everything I had learned previously about the martial (excuse the expression) arts. Then it started in on the new stuff.

I learned the best way to use every weapon from a rock to a nova bomb. Not just intellectually; that's what all those electrodes were for. Cybernetically-controlled negative feedback kinesthesia; I felt the weapons in my hands and watched my performance with them. And did it over and over until I did it right. The illusion of reality was total. I used a spear-thrower with a band of Masai warriors on a village raid, and when I looked down at my body it was long and black. I relearned epee from a cruel-looking man in foppish clothes, in an eighteenth-century French courtyard. I sat quietly in a tree with a Sharps rifle and sniped at blue-uniformed men as they crawled across a muddy field toward Vicksburg. In three weeks I killed several regiments of electronic ghosts. It seemed more like a year to me, but the ALSC does strange things to your sense of time.

Learning to use useless exotic weapons was only a small part of the training. In fact, it was the relaxing part. Because when I wasn't in kinesthesia, the machine kept my body totally inert and zapped my brain with four millennia's worth of military facts and theories. And I couldn't forget any of it! Not while I was in the tank.

Want to know who Scipio Aemilianus was? I don't. Bright light of the Third Punic War. War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior, von Clausewitz maintained. And I'll never forget the poetry of 'the advance party minus normally moves in a column formation with the platoon headquarters leading, followed by a laser squad, the heavy weapons squad, and the remaining laser squad; the column relies on observation for its flank security except when the terrain and visibility dictate the need for small security detachments to the flanks, in which case the advance party commander will detail one platoon sergeant…' and so on. That's from Strike Force Command Small Unit Leader's Handbook, as if you could call something a handbook when it takes up two whole microfiche cards, 2,000 pages.

If you want to become a thoroughly eclectic expert in a subject that repels you, join UNEF and sign up for officer training.

One hundred nineteen people, and I was responsible for 118 of them. Counting myself but not counting the Commodore, who could presumably take care of herself.

I hadn't met any of my company during the two weeks of physical rehabilitation that followed the ALSC session. Before our first muster I was supposed to report to the Temporal Orientation Officer. I called for an appointment and his clerk said the Colonel would meet me at the Level Six Officers' Club after dinner.

I went down to Six early, thinking to eat dinner there, but they had nothing but snacks. So I munched on a fungus thing that vaguely resembled escargots and took the rest of my calories in the form of alcohol.

'Major Mandella?' I'd been busily engaged in my seventh beer and hadn't seen the Colonel approach. I started to rise but he motioned for me to stay seated and dropped heavily into the chair opposite me.

'I'm in your debt,' he said. 'You saved me from at least half of a boring evening.' He offered his hand. 'Jack Kynock, at your service.' 'Colonel–'

'Don't Colonel me and I won't Major you. We old fossils have to … keep our perspective. William.'

'All right with me.'

He ordered a kind of drink I'd never heard of. 'Where to start? Last time you were on Earth was 2007, according to the records.'

'That's right.'

'Didn't like it much, did you?'

'No.' Zombies, happy robots.

'Well, it got better. Then it got worse, thank you.' A private brought his drink, a bubbling concoction that was green at the bottom of the glass and lightened to chartreuse at the top. He sipped. 'Then they got better again, then worse, then … I don't know. Cycles.'

'What's it like now?'

'Well … I'm not really sure. Stacks of reports and such, but it's hard to filter out the propaganda. I haven't been back in almost two hundred years; it was pretty bad then. Depending on what you like.'

'What do you mean?'

'Oh, let me see. There was lots of excitement. Ever hear of the Pacifist movement?'

'I don't think so.'

'Hmn, the name's deceptive. Actually, it was a war, a guerrilla war.'

'I thought I could give you name, rank and serial number of every war from Troy on up.' He smiled. 'They must have missed one.'

'For good reason. It was run by veterans – survivors of Yod-38 and Aleph-40, I hear; they got discharged together and decided they could take on all of UNEF, Earthside. They got lots of support from the population.'

'But didn't win.'

'We're still here.' He swirled his drink and the colors shifted. 'Actually, all I know is hearsay. Last time I got to Earth, the war was over, except for some sporadic sabotage. And it wasn't exactly a safe

topic of conversation.'

'It surprises me a little,' I said, 'well, more than a little. That Earth's population would do anything at all … against the government's wishes.'

He made a noncommittal sound.

'Least of all, revolution. When we were there, you couldn't get anybody to say a damned thing against the UNEF – or any of the local governments, for that matter. They were conditioned from ear to ear to accept things as they were.'

'Ah. That's a cyclic thing, too.' He settled back in his chair. 'It's not a matter of technique. If they wanted to, Earth's government could have total control over … every nontrivial thought and action of each citizen, from cradle to grave.

'They don't do it because it would be fatal. Because there's a war on. Take your own case: did you get any motivational conditioning while you were in the can?'

I thought for a moment. 'If I did, I wouldn't necessarily know about it.'

'That's true. Partially true. But take my word for it, they left that part of your brain alone. Any change in your attitude toward UNEF or the war, or war in general, comes only from new knowledge. Nobody's fiddled with your basic motivations. And you should know why.'

Names, dates, figures rattled down through the maze of new knowledge. Tet-17, Sed-21, Aleph-14. The Lazlo… "The Lazlo Emergency Commission Report." June, 2106.'

'Right. And by extension, your own experience on Aleph-1. Robots don't make good soldiers.'

'They would,' I said. 'Up to the twenty-first century. Behavioral conditioning would have been the answer to a general's dream. Make up an army with all the best features of the SS, the Praetorian Guard, the Golden Horde. Mosby's Raiders, the Green Berets.'

He laughed over his glass. 'Then put that army up against a squad of men in modern fighting suits. It'd be over in a couple of minutes.'

'So long as each man in the squad kept his head about him. And just fought like hell to stay alive.' The generation of soldiers that had precipitated the Lazlo Reports had been conditioned from birth to conform to somebody's vision of the ideal fighting man. They worked beautifully as a team, totally bloodthirsty, placing no great importance on personal survival – and the Taurans cut them to ribbons. The Taurans also fought with no regard for self. But they were better at it, and there were always more of them.

Kynock took a drink and watched the colours. 'I've seen your psych profile,' he said. 'Both before you got here and after your session in the can. It's essentially the same, before and after.'

'That's reassuring.' I signaled for another beer.

'Maybe it shouldn't be.'

'What, it says I won't make a good officer? I told them that from the beginning. I'm no leader.'

'Right in a way, wrong in a way. Want to know what that profile says?'

I shrugged. 'Classified, isn't it?'

'Yes,' he said. 'But you're a major now. You can pull the profile of anybody in your command.'

'I don't suppose it has any big surprises.' But I was a little curious. What animal isn't fascinated by a mirror?

'No. It says you're a pacifist. A failed one at that, which gives you a mild neurosis. Which you handle by transferring the burden of guilt to the army.'

The fresh beer was so cold it hurt my teeth. 'No surprises yet.'

'And as far as being a leader, you do have a certain potential. But it would be along the lines of a teacher or a minister; you would have to lead from empathy, compassion. You have the desire to impose your ideas on other people, but not your will. Which means, you're right, you'll make one hell of a bad officer unless you shape up.'

I had to laugh. 'UNEF must have known all of this when they ordered me to officer training.'

'There are other parameters,' he said. 'For instance, you're adaptable, reasonably intelligent, analytical. And you're one of the eleven people who's lived through the whole war.'

'Surviving is a virtue in a private.' Couldn't resist it. 'But an officer should provide gallant example. Go down with the ship. Stride the parapet as if unafraid.'

He harrumphed at that. Not when you're a thousand light years from your replacement.'

'It doesn't add up, though. Why would they haul me all the way from Heaven to take a chance on my "shaping up," when probably a third of the people here on Stargate are better officer material? God, the military mind!'

'I suspect the bureaucratic mind, at least, had something to do with it. You have an embarrassing amount of seniority to be a footsoldier.'

'That's all time dilation. I've only been in three campaigns.'

'Immaterial. Besides, that's two-and-a-half more than the average soldier survives. The propaganda boys will probably make you into some kind of a folk hero.'

'Folk hero.' I sipped at the beer. 'Where is John Wayne now that we really need him?'

'John Wayne?' He shook his head. 'I never went in the can, you know. I'm no expert at military history.'

'Forget it.'

Kynock finished his drink and asked the private to get him – I swear to God – a 'rum Antares.'

'Well, I'm supposed to be your Temporal Orientation Officer. What do you want to know about the present? What passes for the present.'

Still on my mind: 'You've never been in the can?'

'No, combat officers only. The computer facilities and energy you go through in three weeks would keep the Earth running for several days. Too expensive for us desk-warmers.'

'Your decorations say you're combat.'

'Honorary. I was.' The rum Antares was a tall slender glass with a little ice floating at the top, filled with pale amber liquid. At the bottom was a bright red globule about the size of a thumbnail; crimson filaments waved up from it.

'What's that red stuff?'

'Cinnamon. Oh, some ester with cinnamon in it. Quite good … want a taste?'

'No, I'll stick to beer, thanks.'

'Down at level one, the library machine has a temporal orientation file, that my staff updates every day. You can go to it for specific questions. Mainly I want to … prepare you for meeting your Strike Force.'

'What, they're all cyborgs? Clones?'

He laughed. 'No, it's illegal to clone humans. The main problem is with, uh, you're heterosexual.'

'Oh, that's no problem. I'm tolerant.'

'Yes, your profile shows that you … think you're tolerant, but that's not the problem, exactly.'

'Oh.' I knew what he was going to say. Not the details, but the substance.

'Only emotionally stable people are drafted into UNEF. I know this is hard for you to accept, but heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure.'

'If they think they're going to cure me.'

'Relax, you're too old.' He took a delicate sip. 'It won't be as hard to get along with them as you might–'

'Wait. You mean nobody … everybody in my company is homosexual? But me?'

'William, everybody on Earth is homosexual. Except for a thousand or so; veterans and incurables.'

'Ah.' What could I say? 'Seems like a drastic way to solve the population problem.'

'Perhaps. It does work, though; Earth's population is stable at just under a billion. When one person dies or goes offplanet, another is quickened.'

'Not "born."'

'Born, yes, but not the old-fashioned way. Your old term for it was "test-tube babies," but of course they don't use a test-tube.'

'Well, that's something.'

'Part of every creche is an artificial womb that takes care of a person the first eight or ten months after quickening. What you would call birth takes place over a period of days; it isn't the sudden, drastic event that it used to be.'

O brave new world, I thought. 'No birth trauma. A billion perfectly adjusted homosexuals.'

'Perfectly adjusted by present-day Earth standards. You and I might find them a little odd.'

'That's an understatement.' I drank off the rest of my beer. 'Yourself, you, uh … are you homosexual?'

'Oh, no,' he said. I relaxed. 'Actually, though, I'm not hetero anymore, either.' He slapped his hip and it made an odd sound. 'Got wounded and it turned out that I had a rare disorder of the lymphatic system, can't regenerate. Nothing but metal and plastic from the waist down. To use your word, I'm a cyborg.'

Far out, as my mother used to say. 'Oh, Private,' I called to the waiter, 'bring me one of those Antares things.' Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.

'Make it a double, please.'

They looked normal enough, filing into the lecture hall where we held our first muster, the next day. Rather young and a little stiff.

Most of them had only been out of the creche for seven or eight years. The creche was a controlled, isolated environment to which only a few specialists – pediatricians and teachers, mostly – had access. When a person leaves the creche at age twelve or thirteen, he chooses a first name (his last name having been taken from the donor-parent with the higher genetic rating) and is legally a probationary adult, with schooling about equivalent to what I had after my first year of college. Most of them go on to more specialized education, but some are assigned a job and go right to work.

They're observed very closely and anyone who shows any signs of sociopathy, such as heterosexual leanings, is sent away to a correctional facility. He's either cured or kept there for the rest of his life.

Everyone is drafted into UNEF at the age of twenty. Most people work at a desk for five years and are discharged. A few lucky souls, about one in eight thousand, are invited to volunteer for combat training. Refusing is 'sociopathic,' even though it means signing up for an extra five years. And your chance of surviving the ten years is so small as to be negligible; nobody ever had. Your best chance is to have the war end before your ten (subjective) years of service are up. Hope that time dilation puts many years between each of your battles.

Since you can figure on going into battle roughly once every subjective year, and since an average of 34 percent survive each battle, it's easy to compute your chances of being able to fight it out for ten years. It comes to about two one-thousandths of one percent. Or, to put it another way, get an old-fashioned six-shooter and play Russian Roulette with four of the six chambers loaded. If you can do it ten times in a row without decorating the opposite wall, congratulations! You're a civilian.

There being some sixty thousand combat soldiers in UNEF, you could expect about 1.2 of them to survive for ten years. I didn't seriously plan on being the lucky one, even though I was halfway there.

How many of these young soldiers filing into the auditorium knew they were doomed? I tried to match faces up with the dossiers I'd been scanning all morning, but it was hard. They'd all been selected through the same battery of stringent parameters, and they looked remarkably alike: tall but not too tall, muscular but not heavy, intelligent but not in a brooding way … and Earth was much more racially homogenous than it had been in my century. Most of them looked vaguely Polynesian. Only two of them, Kayibanda and Lin, seemed pure representatives of racial types. I wondered whether the others gave them a hard time.

Most of the women were achingly handsome, but I was in no position to be critical. I'd been celibate for over a year, ever since saying goodbye to Marygay, back on Heaven.

I wondered if one of them might have a trace of atavism, or might humor her commander's eccentricity. It is absolutely forbidden for an officer to form sexual liaison with his subordinates. Such a warm way of putting it. Violation of this regulation is punishable by attachment of all funds and reduction to the rank of private or, if the relationship interferes with a unit's combat efficiency, summary execution. If all of UNEF's regulations could be broken so casually and consistently as that one was, it would be a very easygoing army.

But not one of the boys appealed to me. How they'd look after another year, I wasn't sure.

'Tench-hut!' That was Lieutenant Hilleboe. It was a credit to my new reflexes that I didn't jump to my feet. Everybody in the auditorium snapped to.

'My name is. Lieutenant Hilleboe and I am your Second Field Officer.' That used to be 'Field First Sergeant.' A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.

Hilleboe came on like a real hard-ass professional soldier. Probably shouted orders at the mirror every morning, while she was shaving. But I'd seen her profile and knew that she'd only been in action once, and only for a couple of minutes at that. Lost an arm and a leg and was commissioned, same as me, as a result of the tests they give at the regeneration clinic.

Hell, maybe she had been a very pleasant person before going through that trauma; it was bad enough just having one limb regrown.

She was giving them the usual first-sergeant peptalk, stern-but-fair: don't waste my time with little things, use the chain of command, most problems can be solved at the fifth echelon.

It made me wish I'd had more time to talk with her earlier. Strike Force Command had really rushed us into this first muster – we were scheduled to board ship the next day – and I'd only had a few words with my officers.

Not enough, because it was becoming clear that Hilleboe and I had rather disparate philosophies about how to run a company. It was true that running it was her job; I only commanded. But she was setting up a potential 'good guy-bad guy' situation, using the chain of command to so isolate herself from the men and women under her. I had planned not to be quite so aloof, setting aside an hour every other day when any soldier could come to me directly with grievances or suggestions, without permission from his superiors.

We had both been given the same information during our three weeks in the can. It was interesting that we'd arrived at such different conclusions about leadership. This Open Door policy, for instance, had shown good results in 'modern' armies in Australia and America. And it seemed especially appropriate to our situation, in which everybody would be cooped up for months or even years at a time. We'd used the system on the Sangre y Victoria, the last starship to which I'd been attached, and it had seemed to keep tensions down.

She had them at ease while delivering this organizational harangue; pretty soon she'd call them to attention and introduce me. What would I talk about? I'd planned just to say a few predictable words and explain my Open Door policy, then turn them over to Commodore Antopol, who would say something about the Masaryk II. But I'd better put off my explanation until after I'd had a long talk with Hilleboe; in fact, it would be best if she were the one to introduce the policy to the men and women, so it wouldn't look like the two of us were at loggerheads.

My executive officer, Captain Moore, saved me. He came rushing through a side door – he was always rushing, a pudgy meteor – threw a quick salute and handed me an envelope that contained our combat orders. I had a quick whispered conference with the Commodore, and she agreed that it wouldn't do any harm to tell them where we were going, even though the rank and file technically didn't have the 'need to know.'

One thing we didn't have to worry about in this war was enemy agents. With a good coat of paint, a Tauran might be able to disguise himself as an ambulatory mushroom. Bound to raise suspicions.

Hilleboe had called them to attention and was dutifully telling them what a good commander I was going to be; that I'd been in the war from the beginning, and if they intended to survive through their enlistment they had better follow my example. She didn't mention that I was a mediocre soldier with a talent for getting missed. Nor that I'd resigned from the army at the earliest opportunity and only got back in because conditions on Earth were so intolerable.

'Thank you, Lieutenant.' I took her place at the podium. 'At ease.' I unfolded the single sheet that had our orders, and held it up. 'I have some good news and some bad news.' What had been a joke five centuries before was now just a statement of fact.

'These are our combat orders for the Sade-138 campaign. The good news is that we probably won't be fighting, not immediately. The bad news is that we're going to be a target.'

They stirred a little bit at that, but nobody said anything or took his eyes off me. Good discipline. Or maybe just fatalism; I didn't know how realistic a picture they had of their future. Their lack of a future, that is.

'What we are ordered to do … is to find the largest portal planet orbiting the Sade-138 collapsar and build a base there. Then stay at the base until we are relieved. That will be two or three years, probably.

'During that time we will almost certainly be attacked. As most of you probably know, Strike Force Command has uncovered a pattern in the enemy's movements from collapsar to collapsar. They hope eventually to trace this complex pattern back through time and space and find the Tauran's home planet. For the present, they can only send out intercepting forces, to hamper the enemy's expansion.

'In a large perspective, this is what we're ordered to do. We'll be one of several dozen strike forces employed in these blocking maneuvers, on the enemy's frontier. I won't be able to stress often enough or hard enough how important this mission is – if UNEF can keep the enemy from expanding, we may be able to envelop him. And win the war.'

Preferably before we're all dead meat. 'One thing I want to be clear: we may be attacked the day we land, or we may simply occupy the planet for ten years and come on home.' Fat chance. 'Whatever happens, every one of us will stay in the best fighting trim all the time. In transit, we will maintain a regular program of callisthenics as well as a review of our training. Especially construction techniques – we have to set up the base and its defense facilities in the shortest possible time.'

God, I was beginning to sound like an officer. 'Any questions?' There were none. 'Then I'd like to introduce Commodore Antopol. Commodore?'

The commodore didn't try to hide her boredom as she outlined, to this room full of ground-pounders, the characteristics and capabilities of Masaryk 77. I had learned most of what she was saying through the can's force-feeding, but the last thing she said caught my attention.

'Sade-138 will be the most distant collapsar men have gone to. It isn't even in the galaxy proper, but rather is part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, some 150,000 light years distant.

'Our voyage will require four collapsar jumps and will last some four months, subjective. Maneuvering into collapsar insertion will put us about three hundred years behind Stargate's calendar by the time we reach Sade-138.'

And another seven hundred years gone, if I lived to return. Not that it would make that much difference; Marygay was as good as dead and there wasn't another person alive who meant anything to me.

'As the major said, you mustn't let these figures lull you into complacency. The enemy is also headed for Sade-138; we may all get there the same day. The mathematics of the situation is complicated, but take our word for it; it's going to be a close race.

'Major, do you have anything more for them?'

I started to rise. 'Well…'

'Tench- hut!' Hilleboe shouted. Had to learn to expect that.

'Only that I'd like to meet with my senior officers, echelon 4 and above, for a few minutes. Platoon sergeants, you're responsible for getting your troops to Staging Area 67 at 0400 tomorrow morning. Your time's your own until then. Dismissed.'

I invited the five officers up to my billet and brought out a bottle of real French brandy. It had cost two months' pay, but what else could I do with the money? Invest it?

I passed around glasses but Alsever, the doctor, demurred. Instead she broke a little capsule under her nose and inhaled deeply. Then tried without too much success to mask her euphoric expression.

'First let's get down to one basic personnel problem,' I said, pouring. 'Do all of you know that I'm not homosexual?'

Mixed chorus of yes sirs and no sirs.

'Do you think this is going to … complicate my situation as commander? As far as the rank and file?'

'Sir, I don't–' Moore began.

'No need for honorifics,' I said, 'not in this closed circle; I was a private four years ago, in my own time frame. When there aren't any troops around, I'm just Mandella, or William.' I had a feeling that was a mistake even as I was saying it. 'Go on.'

'Well, William,' he continued, 'it might have been a problem a hundred years ago. You know how people felt then.'

'Actually, I don't. All I know about the period from the twenty-first century to the present is military history.'

'Oh. Well, it was, uh, it was, how to say it?' His hands fluttered.

'It was a crime,' Alsever said laconically. 'That was when the Eugenics Council was first getting people used to the idea of universal homosex.'

'Eugenics Council?'

'Part of UNEF. Only has authority on Earth.' She took a deep sniff at the empty capsule. 'The idea was to keep people from making babies the biological way. Because, A, people showed a regrettable lack of sense in choosing their genetic partner. And B, the Council saw that racial differences had an unnecessarily divisive effect on humanity; with total control over births, they could make everybody the same race in a few generations.'

I didn't know they had gone quite that far. But I suppose it was logical. 'You approve? As a doctor.'

'As a doctor? I'm not sure.' She took another capsule from her pocket and rolled it between thumb and forefinger, staring at nothing. Or something the rest of us couldn't see. 'In a way, it makes my job simpler. A lot of diseases simply no longer exist. But I don't think they know as much about genetics as they think they do. It's not an exact science; they could be doing something very wrong, and the results wouldn't show up for centuries.'

She cracked the capsule under her nose and took two deep breaths. 'As a woman, though, I'm all in favor of it.' Hilleboe and Rusk nodded vigorously.

'Not having to go through childbirth?'

'That's part of it.' She crossed her eyes comically, looking at the capsule, gave it a final sniff. 'Mostly, though, it's not … having to … have a man. Inside me. You understand. It's disgusting.'

Moore laughed. 'If you haven't tried it, Diana, don't–'

'Oh, shut up.' She threw the empty capsule at him playfully.

'But it's perfectly natural,' I protested.

'So is swinging through trees. Digging for roots with a blunt stick. Progress, my good major; progress.'

'Anyway,' Moore said, 'it was only a crime for a short period. Then it was considered a, oh, curable…'

'Dysfunction,' Alsever said.

'Thank you. And now, well, it's so rare … I doubt that any of the men and women have any strong feelings about it, one way or the other.'

'Just an eccentricity,' Diana said, magnanimously. 'Not as if you ate babies.'

'That's right, Mandella,' Hilleboe said. 'I don't feel any differently toward you because of it.'

'I – I'm glad.' That was just great. It was dawning on me that I had not the slightest idea of how to conduct myself socially. So much of my 'normal' behavior was based on a complex unspoken code of sexual etiquette. Was I supposed to treat the men like women, and vice versa? Or treat everybody like brothers and sisters? It was all very confusing.

I finished off my glass and set it down. 'Well, thanks for your reassurances. That was mainly what I wanted to ask you about … I'm sure you all have things to do, goodbyes and such. Don't let me hold you prisoner.'

They all wandered off except for Charlie Moore. He and I decided to go on a monumental binge, trying to hit every bar and officers' club in the sector. We managed twelve and probably could have hit them all, but I decided to get a few hours' sleep before the next day's muster.

The one time Charlie made a pass at me, he was very polite about it. I hoped my refusal was also polite – but figured I'd be getting lots of practice.

UNEF's first starships had been possessed of a kind of spidery, delicate beauty. But with various technological improvements, structural strength became more important than conserving mass (one of the old ships would have folded up like an accordion if you'd tried a twenty-five-gee maneuver), and that was reflected in the design: stolid, heavy, functional-looking. The only decoration was the name MASARYK II, stenciled in dull blue letters across the obsidian hull.

Our shuttle drifted over the name on its way to the loading bay, and there was a crew of tiny men and women doing maintenance on the hull. With them as a reference, we could see that the letters were a good hundred meters tall. The ship was over a kilometer long (1036.5 meters, my latent memory said), and about a third that wide (319.4 meters).

That didn't mean there was going to be plenty of elbow-room. In its belly, the ship held six large tachyondrive fighters and fifty robot drones. The infantry was tucked off in a corner. War is the province of friction, Chuck von Clausewitz said; I had a feeling we were going to put him to the test.

We had about six hours before going into the acceleration tank. I dropped my kit in the tiny billet that would be my home for the next twenty months and went off to explore.

Charlie had beaten me to the lounge and to the privilege of being first to evaluate the quality of Masaryk II's coffee.

'Rhinoceros bile,' he said.

'At least it isn't soya,' I said, taking a first cautious sip. Decided I might be longing for soya in a week.

The officers' lounge was a cubicle about three meters by four, metal floor and walls, with a coffee machine and a library readout. Six hard chairs and a table with a typer on it.

'Jolly place, isn't it?' He idly punched up a general index on the library machine. 'Lots of military theory.'

'That's good. Refresh our memories.'

'Sign up for officer training?'

'Me? No. Orders.'

'At least you have an excuse.' He slapped the on-off button and watched the green spot dwindle. 'I signed up. They didn't tell me it'd feel like this.'

'Yeah.' He wasn't talking about any subtle problem: burden of responsibility or anything. 'They say it wears off, a little at a time.' All of that information they force into you; a constant silent whispering.

'Ah, there you are.' Hilleboe came through the door and exchanged greetings with us. She gave the room a quick survey, and it was obvious that the Spartan arrangements met with her approval. 'Will you be wanting to address the company before we go into the acceleration tanks?'

'No, I don't see why that would be … necessary.' I almost said 'desirable.' The art of chastising subordinates is a delicate art. I could see that I'd have to keep reminding Hilleboe that she wasn't in charge.

Or I could just switch insignia with her. Let her experience the joys of command.

'You could, please, round up all platoon leaders and go over the immersion sequence with them. Eventually we'll be doing speed drills. But for now, I think the troops could use a few hours' rest.' If they were as hungover as their commander.

'Yes, sir.' She turned and left. A little miffed, because what I'd asked her to do should properly have been a job for Riland or Rusk.

Charlie eased his pudgy self into one of the hard chairs and sighed. 'Twenty months on this greasy machine. With her. Shit.'

'Well, if you're nice to me, I won't billet the two of you together.'

'All right. I'm your slave forever. Starting, oh, next Friday.' He peered into his cup and decided against drinking the dregs. 'Seriously, she's going to be a problem. What are you going to do with her?'

'I don't know.' Charlie was being insubordinate, too, of course. But he was my XO and out of the chain of command. Besides, I had to have one friend. 'Maybe she'll mellow, once we're under weigh.'

'Sure.' Technically, we were already under weigh, crawling toward the Stargate collapsar at one gee. But that was only for the convenience of the crew; it's hard to batten down the hatches in free fall. The trip wouldn't really start until we were in the tanks.

The lounge was too depressing, so Charlie and I used the remaining hours of mobility to explore the ship.

The bridge looked like any other computer facility; they had dispensed with the luxury of viewscreens. We stood at a respectful distance while Antopol and her officers went through a last series of checks before climbing into the tanks and leaving our destiny to the machines.

Actually, there was a porthole, a thick plastic bubble, in the navigation room forward. Lieutenant Williams wasn't busy, the pre-insertion part of his job being fully automated, so he was glad to show us around.

He tapped the porthole with a fingernail. 'Hope we don't have to use this, this trip.'

'How so?' Charlie said.

'We only use it if we get lost.' If the insertion angle was off by a thousandth of a radian, we were liable to wind up on the other side of the galaxy. 'We can get a rough idea of our position by analyzing the spectra of the brightest stars. Thumbprints. Identify three and we can triangulate.'

'Then find the nearest collapsar and get back on the rack,' I said.

'That's the problem. Sade-138 is the only collapsar we know of in the Magellanic Clouds. We know of it only because of captured enemy data. Even if we could find another collapsar, assuming we got lost in the cloud, we wouldn't know how to insert.'

'That's great.'

'It's not as though we'd be actually lost,' he said with a rather wicked expression. 'We could zip up in the tanks, aim for Earth and blast away at full power. We'd get there in about three months, ship time.'

'Sure,' I said. 'But 150,000 years in the future.' At twenty-five gees, you get to nine-tenths the speed of light in less than a month. From then on, you're in the arms of Saint Albert.

'Well, that is a drawback,' he said. 'But at least we'd find out who'd won the war.'

It made you wonder how many soldiers had gotten out of the war in just that way. There were forty-two strike forces lost somewhere and unaccounted for. It was possible that all of them were crawling through normal space at near-lightspeed and would show up at Earth or Stargate one-by-one over the centuries.

A convenient way to go AWOL, since once you were out of the chain of collapsar jumps you'd be practically impossible to track down. Unfortunately, your jump sequence was pre-programmed by Strike Force Command; the human navigator only came into the picture if a miscalculation slipped you into the wrong 'wormhole,' and you popped out in some random part of space.

Charlie and I went on to inspect the gym, which was big enough for about a dozen people at a time. I asked him to make up a roster so that everyone could work out for an hour each day when we were out of the tanks.

The mess area was only a little larger than the gym – even with four staggered shifts, the meals would be shoulder-to-shoulder affairs – and the enlisted men and women's lounge was even more depressing than the officers'. I was going to have a real morale problem on my hands long before the twenty months were up.

The armorer's bay was as large as the gym, mess hall and both lounges put together. It had to be, because of the great variety of infantry weapons that had evolved over the centuries. The basic weapon was still the fighting suit, though it was much more sophisticated than that first model I had been squeezed into, just before the Aleph-Null campaign.

Lieutenant Riland, the armory officer, was supervising his four subordinates, one from each platoon, who were doing a last-minute check of weapons storage. Probably the most important job on the whole ship, when you contemplate what could happen to all those tons of explosives and radioactives under twenty-five gees.

I returned his perfunctory salute. 'Everything going all right, Lieutenant?'

'Yessir, except for those damned swords.' For use in the stasis field. 'No way we can orient them that they won't be bent. Just hope they don't break.'

I couldn't begin to understand the principles behind the stasis field; the gap between present-day physics and my master's degree in the same subject was as long as the time that separated Galileo and Einstein. But I knew the effects.

Nothing could move at greater than 16.3 meters per second inside the field, which was a hemispherical (in space, spherical) volume about fifty meters in radius. Inside, there was no such thing as electromagnetic radiation; no electricity, no magnetism, no light. From inside your suit, you could see your surroundings in ghostly monochrome – which phenomenon was glibly explained to me as being due to 'phase transference of quasi-energy leaking through from an adjacent tachyon reality,' so much phlogiston to me.

The result of it, though, was to make all conventional weapons of warfare useless. Even a nova bomb was just an inert lump inside the field. And any creature, Terran or Tauran, caught inside the field without the proper insulation would die in a fraction of a second.

At first it looked as though we had come upon the ultimate weapon. There were five engagements where whole Tauran bases were wiped out without any human ground casualties. All you had to do was carry the field to the enemy (four husky soldiers could handle it in Earth-gravity) and watch them die as they slipped in through the field's opaque wall. The people carrying the generator were invulnerable except for the short periods when they might have to turn the thing off to get their bearings.

The sixth time the field was used, though, the Taurans were ready for it. They wore protective suits and were armed with sharp spears, with which they could breach the suits of the generator-carriers. From then on the carriers were armed.

Only three other such battles had been reported, although a dozen strike forces had gone out with the stasis field. The others were still fighting, or still en route, or had been totally defeated. There was no way to tell unless they came back. And they weren't encouraged to come back if Taurans were still in control of 'their' real estate – supposedly that constituted 'desertion under fire,' which meant execution for all officers (although rumor had it that they were simply brainwiped, imprinted and sent back into the fray).

'Will we be using the stasis field, sir?' Riland asked.

'Probably. Not at first, not unless the Taurans are already there. I don't relish the thought of living in a suit, day in and day out.' Neither did I relish the thought of using sword, spear, throwing knife; no matter how many electronic illusions I'd sent to Valhalla with them.

Checked my watch. 'Well, we'd better get on down to the tanks, Captain. Make sure everything's squared away.' We had about two hours before the insertion sequence would start.

The room the tanks were in resembled a huge chemical factory; the floor was a good hundred meters in diameter and jammed with bulky apparatus painted a uniform, dull gray. The eight tanks were arranged almost symmetrically around the central elevator, the symmetry spoiled by the fact that one of the tanks was twice the size of the others. That would be the command tank, for all the senior officers and supporting specialists.

Sergeant Blazynski stepped out from behind one of the tanks and saluted. I didn't return his salute.

'What the hell is that?' In all that universe of gray, there was one spot of color.

'It's a cat, sir.'

'Do tell.' A big one, too, and bright calico. It looked ridiculous, draped over the sergeant's shoulder. 'Let me rephrase the question: what the hell is a cat doing here?'

'It's the maintenance squad's mascot, sir.' The cat raised its head enough to hiss half-heartedly at me, then returned to its flaccid repose.

I looked at Charlie and he shrugged back. 'It seems kind of cruel,' he said. To the sergeant: 'You won't get much use of it. After twenty-five gees, it'll be just so much fur and guts.'

'Oh no, sir! Sirs.' He ruffed back the fur between the creature's shoulders. It had a fluorocarbon fitting imbedded there, just like the one above my hipbone. 'We bought it at a store on Stargate, already modified. Lots of ships have them now, sir. The Commodore signed the forms for us.'

Well, that was her right; maintenance was under both of us equally. And it was her ship. 'You couldn't have gotten a dog?' God, I hated cats. Always sneaking around.

'No, sir, they don't adapt. Can't take free fall.'

'Did you have to make any special adaptations? In the tank?' Charlie asked.

'No sir. We had an extra couch.' Great; that meant I'd be sharing a tank with the animal. 'We only had to shorten the straps.

'It takes a different kind of drug for the cell-wall strengthening, but that was included in the price.'

Charlie scratched it behind an ear. It purred softly but didn't move. 'Seems kind of stupid. The animal, I mean.'

'We drugged him ahead of time.' No wonder it was so inert; the drug slows your metabolism down to a rate barely adequate to sustain life. 'Makes it easier to strap him in.'

'Guess it's all right,' I said. Maybe good for morale. 'But if it starts getting in the way, I'll personally recycle it.'

'Yes, sir!' he said, visibly relieved, thinking that I couldn't really do anything like that to such a cute bundle of fur. Try me, buddy.

So we had seen it all. The only thing left, this side of the engines, was the huge hold where the fighters and drones waited, clamped in their massive cradles against the coming acceleration. Charlie and I went down to take a look, but there were no windows on our side of the airlock. I knew there'd be one on the inside, but the chamber was evacuated, and it wasn't worth going through the fill-and-warm cycle merely to satisfy our curiosity.

I was starting to feel really supernumerary. Called Hilleboe and she said everything was under control. With an hour to kill, we went back to the lounge and had the computer mediate a game of Kriegspieler which was just starting to get interesting when the ten-minute warning sounded.

The acceleration tanks had a 'half-life-to-failure' of five weeks; there was a fifty-fifty chance that you could stay immersed for five weeks before some valve or tube popped and you were squashed like a bug underfoot. In practice, it had to be one hell of an emergency to justify using the tanks for more than two weeks' acceleration. We were only going under for ten days, this first leg of our journey.

Five weeks or five hours, though, it was all the same as far as the tankee was concerned. Once the pressure got up to an operational level, you had no sense of the passage of time. Your body and brain were concrete. None of your senses provided any input, and you could amuse yourself for several hours just trying to spell your own name.

So I wasn't really surprised that no time seemed to have passed when I was suddenly dry, my body tingling with the return of sensation. The place sounded like an asthmatics' convention in the middle of a hay field: thirty-nine people and one cat all coughing and sneezing to get rid of the last residues of fluorocarbon. While I was fumbling with my straps, the side door opened, flooding the tank with painfully bright light. The cat was the first one out, with a general scramble right behind him. For the sake of dignity, I waited until last.

Over a hundred people were milling around outside, stretching and massaging out cramps. Dignity! Surrounded by acres of young female flesh, I stared into their faces and desperately tried to solve a third-order differential equation in my head, to circumvent the gallant reflex. A temporary expedient, but it got me to the elevator.

Hilleboe was shouting orders, getting people lined up, and as the doors closed I noticed that all of one platoon had a uniform light bruise, from head to foot. Twenty pairs of black eyes. I'd have to see both Maintenance and Medical about that.

After I got dressed.

We stayed at one gee for three weeks, with occasional periods of free fall for navigation check, while the Masaryk II made a long, narrow loop away from the collapsar Resh-10, and back again. That period went all right, the people adjusting pretty well to ship routine. I gave them a minimum of busy-work and a maximum of training review and exercise – for their own good, though I wasn't naive enough to think they'd see it that way.

After about a week of one gee, Private Rudkoski (the cook's assistant) had a still, producing some eight liters a day of 95 per cent ethyl alcohol. I didn't want to stop him – life was cheerless enough; I didn't mind as long as people showed up for duty sober – but I was damned curious both how he managed to divert the raw materials out of our sealed-tight ecology, and how the people paid for their booze. So I used the chain of command in reverse, asking Alsever to find out. She asked Jarvil, who asked Carreras, who sat down with Orban, the cook. Turned out that Sergeant Orban had set the whole thing up, letting Rudkoski do the dirty work, and was aching to brag about it to a trustworthy person.

If I had ever taken meals with the enlisted men and women, I might have figured out that something odd was going on. But the scheme didn't extend up to officers' country.

Through Rudkoski, Orban had juryrigged a ship-wide economy based on alcohol. It went like this:

Each meal was prepared with one very sugary dessert – jelly, custard or flan – which you were free to eat if you could stand the cloying taste. But if it was still on your tray when you presented it at the recycling window, Rudkoski would give you a ten-cent chit and scrape the sugary stuff into a fermentation vat. He had two twenty-liter vats, one 'working' while the other was being filled.

The ten-cent chit was at the bottom of a system that allowed you to buy a half-liter of straight ethyl (with your choice of flavoring) for five dollars. A squad of five people who skipped all of their desserts could buy about a liter a week, enough for a party but not enough to constitute a public health problem.

When Diana brought me this information, she also brought a bottle of Rudkoski's Worst – literally; it was a flavour that just hadn't worked. It came up through the chain of command with only a few centimeters missing.

Its taste was a ghastly combination of strawberry and caraway seed. With a perversity not uncommon to people who rarely drink, Diana loved it. I had some ice water brought up, and she got totally blasted within an hour. For myself, I made one drink and didn't finish it.

When she was more than halfway to oblivion, mumbling a reassuring soliloquy to her liver, she suddenly tilted her head up to stare at me with childlike directness.

'You have a real problem, Major William.'

'Not half the problem you'll have in the morning, Lieutenant Doctor Diana.'

'Oh not really.' She waved a drunken hand in front of her face. 'Some vitamins, some glu … cose, an eensy cc of adren … aline if all else fails. You … you … have … a real … problem.'

'Look, Diana, don't you want me to–'

'What you need … is to get an appointment with that nice Corporal Valdez.' Valdez was the male sex counselor. 'He has empathy. Itsiz job. He'd make you–'

'We talked about this before, remember? I want to stay the way I am.'

'Don't we all.' She wiped away a tear that was probably one percent alcohol. 'You know they call you the Old C'reer. No they don't.'

She looked at the floor and then at the wall. 'The Ol' Queer, that's what.'

I had expected names worse than that. But not so soon. 'I don't care. The commander always gets names.'

'I know but.' She stood up suddenly and wobbled a little bit. 'Too much t' drink. Lie down.' She turned her back to me and stretched so hard that a joint popped. Then a seam whispered open and she shrugged off her tunic, stepped out of it and tiptoed to my bed. She sat down and patted the mattress. 'Come on, William. Only chance.'

'For Christ's sake, Diana. It wouldn't be fair.'

'All's fair,' she giggled. 'And 'sides, I'm a doctor. I can be clin'cal; won't bother me a bit. Help me with this.' After five hundred years, they were still putting brassiere clasps in the back.

One kind of gentleman would have helped her get undressed and then made a quiet exit. Another kind of gentleman might have bolted for the door. Being neither kind, I closed in for the kill.

Perhaps fortunately, she passed out before we had made any headway. I admired the sight and touch of her for a long time before, feeling like a cad, I managed to gather everything up and dress her.

I lifted her out of the bed, sweet burden, and then realized that if anyone saw me carrying her down to her billet, she'd be the butt of rumors for the rest of the campaign. I called up Charlie, told him we'd had some booze and Diana was rather the worse for it, and asked him whether he'd come up for a drink and help me haul the good doctor home.

By the time Charlie knocked, she was draped innocently in a chair, snoring softly.

He smiled at her. 'Physician, heal thyself.' I offered him the bottle, with a warning. He sniffed it and made a face.

'What is this, varnish?'

'Just something the cooks whipped up. Vacuum still.'

He set it down carefully, as if it might explode if jarred. 'I predict a coming shortage of customers. Epidemic of death by poisoning – she actually drank that vile stuff?'

'Well, the cooks admitted it was an experiment that didn't pan out; their other flavors are evidently potable. Yeah, she loved it.'

'Well…' He laughed. 'Damn! Wait, you take her legs and I take her arms?'

'No, look, we each take an arm. Maybe we can get her to do part of the walking.'

She moaned a little when we lifted her out of the chair, opened one eye and said, 'Hello, Charlee.' Then she closed the eye and let us drag her down to the billet. No one saw us on the way, but her bunkmate, Laasonen, was sitting up reading.

'She really drank the stuff, eh?' She regarded her friend with wry affection. 'Here, let me help.'

The three of us wrestled her into bed. Laasonen smoothed the hair out of her eyes. 'She said it was in the nature of an experiment.'

'More devotion to science that I have,' Charlie said. 'A stronger stomach, too.'

We all wished he hadn't said that.

Diana sheepishly admitted that she hadn't remembered anything after the first drink, and talking to her, I deduced that she thought Charlie had been there all along. Which was all for the best, of course. But oh! Diana, my lovely latent heterosexual, let me buy you a bottle of good scotch the next time we come into port. Seven hundred years from now.

We got back into the tanks for the hop from Resh-10 to Kaph-35. That was two weeks at twenty-five gees; then we had another four weeks of routine at one gravity.

I had announced my open door policy, but practically no one ever took advantage of it. I saw very little of the troops and those occasions were almost always negative: testing them on their training review, handing out reprimands, and occasionally lecturing classes. And they rarely spoke intelligibly, except in response to a direct question.

Most of them either had English as their native tongue or as a second language, but it had changed so drastically over 450 years that I could barely understand it, not at all if it was spoken rapidly. Fortunately, they had all been taught early twenty-first century English during their basic training; that language, or dialect, served as a temporal lingua franca through which a twenty-fifth century soldier could communicate with someone who had been a contemporary of his nineteen-times-great-grandparents. If there had still been such a thing as grandparents.

I thought of my first combat commander, Captain Stott – whom I had hated just as cordially as the rest of the company did – and tried to imagine how I would have felt if he had been a sexual deviate and I'd been forced to learn a new language for his convenience.

So we had discipline problems, sure. But the wonder was that we had any discipline at all. Hilleboe was responsible for that; as little as I liked her personally, I had to give her credit for keeping the troops in line.

Most of the shipboard graffiti concerned improbable sexual geometries between the Second Field Officer and her commander.

From Kaph-35 we jumped to Samk-78, from there to Ayin-129 and finally to Sade-138. Most of the jumps were no more than a few hundred light years, but the last one was 140,000 – supposedly the longest collapsar jump ever made by a manned craft.

The time spent scooting down the wormhole from one collapsar to the next was always the same, independent of the distance. When I'd studied physics, they thought the duration of a collapsar jump was exactly zero. But a couple of centuries later, they did a complicated wave-guide experiment that proved the jump actually lasted some small fraction of a nanosecond. Doesn't seem like much, but they'd had to rebuild physics from the foundation up when the collapsar jump was first discovered; they had to tear the whole damned thing down again when they found out it took time to get from A to B. Physicists were still arguing about it.

But we had more pressing problems as we flashed out of Sade-138's collapsar field at three-quarters of the speed of light. There was no way to tell immediately whether the Taurans had beat us there. We launched a pre-programmed drone that would decelerate at 300 gees and take a preliminary look around. It would warn us if it detected any other ships in the system, or evidence of Tauran activity on any of the collapsar's planets.

The drone launched, we zipped up in the tanks and the computers put us through a three-week evasive maneuver while the ship slowed down. No problems except that three weeks is a hell of a long time to stay frozen in the tank; for a couple of days afterward everybody crept around like aged cripples.

If the drone had sent back word that the Taurans were already in the system, we would immediately have stepped down to one gee and started deploying fighters and drones armed with nova bombs. Or we might not have lived that long: sometimes the Taurans could get to a ship only hours after it entered the system. Dying in the tank might not be the most pleasant way to go.

It took us a month to get back to within a couple of AUs of Sade-138, where the drone had found a planet that met our requirements.

It was an odd planet, slightly smaller than Earth but more dense. It wasn't quite the cryogenic deepfreeze that most portal planets were, both because of heat from its core and because S Doradus, the brightest star in the cloud, was only a third of a light year away.

The strangest feature of the planet was its lack of geography. From space it looked like a slightly damaged billiard ball. Our resident physicist, Lieutenant Gim, explained its relatively pristine condition by pointing out that its anomalous, almost cometary orbit probably meant that it had spent most of its life as a 'rogue planet,' drifting alone through interstellar space. The chances were good that it had never been struck by a large meteor until it wandered into Sade-138's bailiwick and was captured – forced to share space with all the other flotsam the collapsar dragged around with it.

We left the Masaryk II in orbit (it was capable of landing, but that would restrict its visibility and getaway time) and shuttled building materials down to the surface with the six fighters.

It was good to get out of the ship, even though the planet wasn't exactly hospitable. The atmosphere was a thin cold wind of hydrogen and helium, it being too cold, even at noon for any other substance to exist as a gas.

'Noon' was when S Doradus was overhead, a tiny, painfully bright spark. The temperature slowly dropped at night, going from twenty-five degrees Kelvin down to seventeen degrees – which caused problems, because just before dawn the hydrogen would start to condense out of the air, making everything so slippery that it was useless to do anything other than sit down and wait it out. At dawn a faint pastel rainbow provided the only relief from the black-and-white monotony of the landscape.

The ground was treacherous, covered with little granular chunks of frozen gas that shifted slowly, incessantly in the anemic breeze. You had to walk in a slow waddle to stay on your feet; of the four people who would die during the base's construction, three would be the victims of simple falls.

The troops weren't happy with my decision to construct the anti-spacecraft and perimeter defenses before putting up living quarters. That was by the book, though, and they got two days of shipboard rest for every 'day' planetside – which wasn't overly generous, I admit, since ship days were 24 hours long, and a day on the planet was 38.5 hours from dawn to dawn.

The base was completed in just less than four weeks, and it was a formidable structure indeed. The perimeter, a circle one kilometer in diameter, was guarded by twenty-five gigawatt lasers that would automatically aim and fire within a thousandth of a second. They would react to the motion of any significantly large object between the perimeter and the horizon. Sometimes when the wind was right and the ground damp with hydrogen, the little ice granules would stick together into a loose snowball and begin to roll. They wouldn't roll far.

For early protection, before the enemy came over our horizon, the base was in the center of a huge mine field. The buried mines would detonate upon sufficient distortion of their local gravitational fields: a single Tauran would set one off if he came within twenty meters of it; a small spacecraft a kilometer overhead would also detonate it. There were 2800 of them, mostly 100-microton nuclear bombs. Fifty of them were devastatingly powerful tachyon devices. They were all scattered at random in a ring that extended from the limit of the lasers' effectiveness, out another five kilometers.

Inside the base, we relied on individual lasers, microton grenades, and a tachyon-powered repeating rocket launcher that had never been tried in combat, one per platoon. As a last resort, the stasis field was set up beside the living quarters. Inside its opaque gray dome, as well as enough Paleolithic weaponry to hold off the Golden Horde, we'd stashed a small cruiser, just in case we managed to lose all our spacecraft in the process of winning a battle. Twelve people would be able to get back to Stargate.

It didn't do to dwell on the fact that the other survivors would have to sit on their hands until relieved by reinforcements or death.

The living quarters and administration facilities were all underground, to protect them from line-of-sight weapons. It didn't do too much for morale, though; there were waiting lists for every outside detail, no matter how strenuous or risky. I hadn't wanted the troops to go up to the surface in their free time, both because of the danger involved and the administrative headache of constantly checking equipment in and out and keeping track of who was where.

Finally I had to relent and allow people to go up for a few hours every week. There was nothing to see except the featureless plain and the sky (which was dominated by S Doradus during the day, and the huge dim oval of the galaxy at night), but that was an improvement over staring at the melted-rock walls and ceiling.

A favorite sport was to walk out to the perimeter and throw snowballs in front of the laser; see how small a snowball you could throw and still set the weapon off. It seemed to me that the entertainment value of this pastime was about equal to watching a faucet drip, but there was no real harm in it, since the weapons would only fire outward and we had power to spare.

For five months things went pretty smoothly. Such administrative problems as we had were similar to those we'd encountered on the Masaryk II. And we were in less danger as passive troglodytes than we had been scooting from collapsar to collapsar, at least until the enemy showed up.

I looked the other way when Rudkoski reassembled his still. Anything that broke the monotony of garrison duty was welcome, and the chits not only provided booze for the troops but gave them something to gamble with. I only interfered in two ways: nobody could go outside unless they were totally sober, and nobody could sell sexual favors. Maybe that was the Puritan in me, but it was, again, by the book. The opinion of the supporting specialists was split. Lieutenant Wilber, the psychiatric officer, agreed with me; the sex counselors Kajdi and Valdez didn't. But then, they were probably coining money, being the resident 'professionals.'

Five months of comfortably boring routine, and then along came Private Graubard.

For obvious reasons, no weapons were allowed in the living quarters. The way these people were trained, even a fistfight could be a duel to the death, and tempers were short. A hundred merely normal people would probably have been at each other's throats after a week in our caves, but these soldiers had been hand-picked for their ability to get along in close confinement.

Still there were fights. Graubard had almost killed his ex-lover Schon when that worthy made a face at him in the chow line. He had a week of solitary detention (so did Schon, for having precipitated it) and then psychiatric counseling and punitive details. Then I transferred him to the fourth platoon, so he wouldn't be seeing Schon every day.

The first time they passed in the halls, Graubard greeted Schon with a karate kick to the throat. Diana had to build him a new trachea. Graubard got a more intensive round of detention, counseling and details – hell, I couldn't transfer him to another company – and then he was a good boy for two weeks. I fiddled their work and chow schedules so the two would never be in the same room together. But they met in a corridor again, and this time it came out more even: Schon got two broken ribs, but Graubard got a ruptured testicle and lost four teeth.

If it kept up, I was going to have at least one less mouth to feed.

By the Universal Code of Military Justice I could have ordered Graubard executed, since we were technically in a state of combat. Perhaps I should have, then and there. But Charlie suggested a more humanitarian solution, and I accepted it.

We didn't have enough room to keep Graubard in solitary detention forever, which seemed to be the only humane yet practical thing to do, but they had plenty of room aboard the Masaryk II, hovering overhead in a stationary orbit. I called Antopol and she agreed to take care of him. I gave her permission to space the bastard if he gave her any trouble.

We called a general assembly to explain things, so that the lesson of Graubard wouldn't be lost on anybody. I was just starting to talk, standing on the rock dais with the company sitting in front of me, and the officers and Graubard behind me – when the crazy fool decided to kill me.

Like everybody else, Graubard was assigned five hours per week of training inside the stasis field. Under close supervision, the soldiers would practice using their swords and spears and whatnot on dummy Taurans. Somehow Graubard had managed to smuggle out a weapon, an Indian chakra, which is a circle of metal with a razor-keen outer edge. It's a tricky weapon, but once you know how to use it, it can be much more effective than a regular throwing knife. Graubard was an expert.

All in a fraction of a second, Graubard disabled the people on either side of him – hitting Charlie in the temple with an elbow while he broke Hilleboe's kneecap with a kick – and slid the chakra out of his tunic and spun it toward me in one smooth action. It had covered half the distance to my throat before I reacted.

Instinctively I slapped out to deflect it and came within a centimeter of losing four fingers. The razor edge slashed open the top of my palm, but I succeeded in knocking the thing off course. And Graubard was rushing me, teeth bared in an expression I hope I never see again.

Maybe he didn't realize that the old queer was really only five years older than he; that the old queer had combat reflexes and three weeks of negative feedback kinesthesia training. At any rate, it was so easy I almost felt sorry for him.

His right toe was turning in; I knew he would take one more step and go into a savate leap. I adjusted the distance between us with a short ballestra and, just as both his feet left the ground, gave him an ungentle side-kick to the solar plexus. He was unconscious before he hit the ground. But not dead.

If I'd merely killed him in self-defense, my troubles would have been over instead of suddenly being multiplied.

A simple psychotic troublemaker a commander can lock up and forget about. But not a failed assassin. And I didn't have to take a poll to know that executing him was not going to improve my relationship with the troops.

I realized that Diana was on her knees beside me, trying to pry open my fingers. 'Check Hilleboe and Moore,' I mumbled, and to the troops: 'Dismissed.'

'Don't be an ass,' Charlie said. He was holding a damp rag to the bruise on the side of his head.

'You don't think I have to execute him?'

'Stop twitching!' Diana was trying to get the lips of my wound to line up together so she could paint them shut. From the wrist down, the hand felt like a lump of ice.

'Not by your own hand, you don't. You can detail someone. At random.'

'Charlie's right,' Diana said. 'Have everybody draw a slip of paper out of a bowl.'

I was glad Hilleboe was sound asleep on the other cot. I didn't need her opinion. 'And if the person so chosen refuses?'

'Punish him and get another,' Charlie said. 'Didn't you learn anything in the can? You can't abrogate your authority by publicly doing a job … that obviously should be detailed.'

'Any other job, sure. But for this … nobody in the company has ever killed. It would look like I was getting somebody else to do my moral dirty work.'

'If it's so damned complicated,' Diana said, 'why not just get up in front of the troops and tell them how complicated it is. Then have them draw straws. They aren't children.'

There had been an army in which that sort of thing was done, a strong quasi-memory told me. The Marxist POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War, early twentieth. You obeyed an order only after it had been explained in detail; you could refuse if it didn't make sense. Officers and men got drunk together and never saluted or used titles. They lost the war. But the other side didn't have any fun.

'Finished.' Diana set the limp hand in my lap. 'Don't try to use it for a half-hour. When it starts to hurt, you can use it.'

I inspected the wound closely. 'The lines don't match up. Not that I'm complaining.'

'You shouldn't. By all rights, you ought to have just a stump. And no regeneration facilities this side of Stargate.'

'Stump ought to be at the top of your neck,' Charlie said. 'I don't see why you have any qualms. You should have killed the bastard outright.'

'I know that, goddammit!' Both Charlie and Diana jumped at my outburst. 'Sorry, shit. Look, just let me do the worrying.'

'Why don't you both talk about something else for a while.' Diana got up and checked the contents of her medical bag. 'I've got another patient to check. Try to keep from exciting each other.'

'Graubard?' Charlie asked.

'That's right. To make sure he can mount the scaffold without assistance.'

'What if Hilleboe–'

'She'll be out for another half-hour. I'll send Jarvil down, just in case.' She hurried out the door.

'The scaffold…' I hadn't given that any thought. 'How the hell are we going to execute him? We can't do it indoors: morale. Firing squad would be pretty grisly.'

'Chuck him out the airlock. You don't owe him any ceremony.'

'You're probably right. I wasn't thinking about him.' I wondered whether Charlie had ever seen the body of a person who'd died that way. 'Maybe we ought to just stuff him into the recycler. He'd wind up there eventually.'

Charlie laughed. 'That's the spirit.'

'We'd have to trim him up a little bit. Door's not very wide.' Charlie had a few suggestions as to how to get around that. Jarvil came in and more-or-less ignored us.

Suddenly the infirmary door banged open. A patient on a cart; Diana rushing alongside pressing on the man's chest, while a private pushed. Two other privates were following, but hung back at the door. 'Over by the wall,' she ordered.

It was Graubard. 'Tried to kill himself,' Diana said, but that was pretty obvious. 'Heart stopped.' He'd made a noose out of his belt; it was still hanging limply around his neck.

There were two big electrodes with rubber handles hanging on the wall. Diana snatched them with one hand while she ripped his tunic open with the other. 'Get your hands off the cart!' She held the electrodes apart, kicked a switch, and pressed them down onto his chest. They made a low hum while his body trembled and flopped. Smell of burning flesh.

Diana was shaking her head. 'Get ready to crack him,' she said to Jarvil. 'Get Doris down here.' The body was gurgling, but it was a mechanical sound, like plumbing.

She kicked off the power and let the electrodes drop, pulled a ring off her finger and crossed to stick her arms in the sterilizer. Jarvil started to rub an evil-smelling fluid over the man's chest.

There was a small red mark between the two electrode burns. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. Jarvil wiped it away. I stepped closer and checked Graubard's neck.

'Get out of the way, William, you aren't sterile.' Diana felt his collarbone, measured down a little ways and made an incision straight down to the bottom of his breastbone. Blood welled out and Jarvil handed her an instrument that looked like big chrome-plated bolt-cutters. I looked away but couldn't help hearing the thing crunch through his ribs. She asked for retractors and sponges and so on while I wandered back to where I'd been sitting. With the corner of my eye I saw her working away inside his thorax, massaging his heart directly.

Charlie looked the way I felt. He called out weakly, 'Hey, don't knock yourself out, Diana.' She didn't answer. Jarvil had wheeled up the artificial heart and was holding out two tubes. Diana picked up a scalpel and I looked away again.

He was still dead a half-hour later. They turned off the machine and threw a sheet over him. Diana washed the blood off her arms and said, 'Got to change. Back in a minute.'

I got up and walked to her billet, next door. Had to know. I raised my hand to knock but it was suddenly hurting like there was a line of fire drawn across it. I rapped with my left and she opened the door immediately.

'What – oh, you want something for your hand.' She was half-dressed, unself-conscious. 'Ask Jarvil.'

No, that's not it. What happened, Diana?'

'Oh. Well,' she pulled a tunic over her head and her voice was muffled. 'It was my fault, I guess. I left him alone for a minute.'

'And he tried to hang himself.'

'That's right.' She sat on the bed and offered me the chair. 'I went off to the head and he was dead by the time I got back. I'd already sent Jarvil away because I didn't want Hilleboe to be unsupervised for too long.'

'But, Diana … there's no mark on his neck. No bruise, nothing.' She shrugged. 'The hanging didn't kill him. He had a heart attack.' 'Somebody gave him a shot. Right over his heart.'

She looked at me curiously. 'I did that, William. Adrenaline. Standard procedure.'

You get that red dot of expressed blood if you jerk away from the projector while you're getting a shot. Otherwise the medicine goes right through the pores, doesn't leave a mark. 'He was dead when you gave him the shot?'

'That would be my professional opinion.' Deadpan. 'No heartbeat, pulse, respiration. Very few other disorders show these symptoms.'

'Yeah. I see.'

'Is something … what's the matter, William?'

Either I'd been improbably lucky or Diana was a very good actress. 'Nothing. Yeah, I better get something for this hand.' I opened the door. 'Saved me a lot of trouble.'

She looked straight into my eyes. 'That's true.'

Actually, I'd traded one kind of trouble for another. Despite the fact that there were several disinterested witnesses to Graubard's demise, there was a persistent rumor that I'd had Doc Alsever simply exterminate him – since I'd botched the job myself and didn't want to go through a troublesome court-martial.

The fact was that, under the Universal Code of Military 'Justice,' Graubard hadn't deserved any kind of trial at all. All I had to do was say 'You, you and you. Take this man out and kill him, please.' And woe betide the private who refused to carry out the order.

My relationship with the troops did improve, in a sense. At least outwardly, they showed more deference to me. But I suspected it was at least partly the cheap kind of respect you might offer any ruffian who had proved himself to be dangerous and volatile.

So Killer was my new name. Just when I'd gotten used to Old Queer.

The base quickly settled back into its routine of training and waiting. I was almost impatient for the Taurans to show up, just to get it over with one way or the other.

The troops had adjusted to the situation much better than I had, for obvious reasons. They had specific duties to perform and ample free time for the usual soldierly anodynes to boredom. My duties were more varied but offered little satisfaction, since the problems that percolated up to me were of the 'the buck stops here' type; those with pleasing, unambiguous solutions were taken care of in the lower echelons.

I'd never cared much for sports or games, but found myself turning to them more and more as a kind of safety valve. For the first time in my life, in these tense, claustrophobic surroundings, I couldn't escape into reading or study. So I fenced, quarterstaff and saber, with the other officers, worked myself to exhaustion on the exercise machines and even kept a jump-rope in my office. Most of the other officers played chess, but they could usually beat me – whenever I won it gave me the feeling I was being humored. Word games were difficult because my language was an archaic dialect that they had trouble manipulating. And I lacked the time and talent to master 'modern' English.

For a while I let Diana feed me mood-altering drugs, but the cumulative effect of them was frightening – I was getting addicted in a way that was at first too subtle to bother me – so I stopped short. Then I tried some systematic psychoanalysis with Lieutenant Wilber. It was impossible. Although he knew all about my problem in an academic kind of way, we didn't speak the same cultural language; his counseling me about love and sex was like me telling a fourteenth-century serf how best to get along with his priest and landlord.

And that, after all, was the root of my problem. I was sure I could have handled the pressures and frustrations of command; of being cooped up in a cave with these people who at times seemed scarcely less alien than the enemy; even the near-certainty that it could lead only to painful death in a worthless cause – if only I could have had Marygay with me. And the feeling got more intense as the months crept by.

He got very stern with me at this point and accused me of romanticizing my position. He knew what love was, he said; he had been in love himself. And the sexual polarity of the couple made no difference – all right, I could accept that; that idea had been a cliché in my parents' generation (though it had run into some predictable resistance in my own). But love, he said, love was a fragile blossom; love was a delicate crystal; love was an unstable reaction with a half-life of about eight months. Bullshit, I said, and accused him of wearing cultural blinders; thirty centuries of prewar society taught that love was one thing that could last to the grave and even beyond and if he had been born instead of hatched he would know that without being told! Whereupon he would assume a wry, tolerant expression and reiterate that I was merely a victim of self-imposed sexual frustration and romantic delusion.

In retrospect, I guess we had a good time arguing with each other. Cure me, he didn't.

I did have a new friend who sat in my lap all the time. It was the cat, who had the usual talent for hiding from people who like cats and cleaving unto those who have sinus trouble or just don't like sneaky little animals. We did have something in common, though, since to my knowledge he was the only other heterosexual male mammal within any reasonable distance. He'd been castrated, of course, but that didn't make much difference under the circumstances.

It was exactly 400 days since the day we had begun construction. I was sitting at my desk not checking out Hilleboe's new duty roster. The cat was on my lap, purring loudly even though I refused to pet it. Charlie was stretched out in a chair reading something on the viewer. The phone buzzed and it was the Commodore.

'They're here.'

'What?'

'I said they're here. A Tauran ship just exited the collapsar field. Velocity .80c. Deceleration thirty gees. Give or take.'

Charlie was leaning over my desk. 'What?' I dumped the cat.

'How long? Before you can pursue?' I asked.

'Soon as you get off the phone.' I switched off and went over to the logistic computer, which was a twin to the one on Masaryk II and had a direct data link to it. While I tried to get numbers out of the thing, Charlie fiddled with the visual display.

The display was a hologram about a meter square by half a meter thick and was programmed to show the positions of Sade-138, our planet, and a few other chunks of rock in the system. There were green and red dots to show the positions of our vessels and the Taurans'.

The computer said that the minimum time it could take the Taurans to decelerate and get back to this planet would be a little over eleven days. Of course, that would be straight maximum acceleration and deceleration all the way; we could pick them off like flies on a wall. So, like us, they'd mix up their direction of flight and degree of acceleration in a random way. Based on several hundred past records of enemy behavior, the computer was able to give us a probability table:

Days to

Contact Probability 11 .000001 15 .001514 20 .032164 25 .103287 30 .676324 35 .820584 40 .982685 45 .993576 50 .999369 MEDIAN 28.9554 .500000

Unless, of course, Antopol and her gang of merry pirates managed to make a kill. The chances of that, I had learned in the can, were slightly less than fifty-fifty.

But whether it took 28.9554 days or two weeks, those of us on the ground had to just sit on our hands and watch. If Antopol was successful, then we wouldn't have to fight until the regular garrison troops replaced us here and we moved on to the next collapsar.

'Haven't left yet.' Charlie had the display cranked down to minimum scale; the planet was a white ball the size of a large melon and Masaryk II was a green dot off to the right some eight melons away; you couldn't get both on the screen at the same time.

While we were watching, a small green dot popped out of the ship's dot and drifted away from it. A ghostly number 2 drifted beside it, and a key projected on the display's lower left-hand corner identified it as 2 – Pursuit Drone. Other numbers in the key identified the Masaryk II, a planetary defense fighter and fourteen planetary defense drones. Those sixteen ships were not yet far enough away from one another to have separate dots.

The cat was rubbing against my ankle; I picked it up and stroked it. 'Tell Hilleboe to call a general assembly. Might as well break it to everyone at once.'

The men and women didn't take it very well, and I couldn't blame them. We had all expected the Taurans to attack much sooner – and when they persisted in not coming, the feeling grew that Strike Force Command had made a mistake and that they'd never show up at all.

I wanted the company to start weapons training in earnest; they hadn't used any high-powered weapons in almost two years. So I activated their laser-fingers and passed out the grenade and rocket launchers. We couldn't practice inside the base for fear of damaging the external sensors and defensive laser ring. So we turned off half the circle of gigawatt lasers and went out about a klick beyond the perimeter, one platoon at a time, accompanied by either me or Charlie. Rusk kept a close watch on the early-warning screens. If anything approached, she would send up a flare, and the platoon would have to get back inside the ring before the unknown came over the horizon, at which time the defensive lasers would come on automatically. Besides knocking out the unknown, they would fry the platoon in less than .02 second.

We couldn't spare anything from the base to use as a target, but that turned out to be no problem. The first tachyon rocket we fired scooped out a hole twenty meters long by ten wide by five deep; the rubble gave us a multitude of targets from twice-man-sized on down.

The soldiers were good, a lot better than they had been with the primitive weapons in the stasis field. The best laser practice turned out to be rather like skeetshooting: pair up the people and have one stand behind the other, throwing rocks at random intervals. The one who was shooting had to gauge the rock's trajectory and zap it before it hit the ground. Their eye-hand coordination was impressive (maybe the Eugenics Council had done something right). Shooting at rocks down to pebble-size, most of them could do better than nine out of ten. Old non-bioengineered me could hit maybe seven out of ten, and I'd had a good deal more practice than they had.

They were equally facile at estimating trajectories with the grenade launcher, which was a more versatile weapon than it had been in the past. Instead of shooting one-microton bombs with a standard propulsive charge, it had four different charges and a choice of one-, two-, three- or four-microton bombs. And for really close in-fighting, where it was dangerous to use the lasers, the barrel of the launcher would unsnap, and you could load it with a magazine of 'shotgun' rounds. Each shot would send out an expanding cloud of a thousand tiny flechettes that were instant death out to five meters and turned to harmless vapor at six.

The tachyon rocket launcher required no skill whatsoever. All you had to do was to be careful no one was standing behind you when you fired it; the backwash from the rocket was dangerous for several meters behind the launching tube. Otherwise, you just lined your target up in the crosshairs and pushed the button. You didn't have to worry about trajectory; the rocket traveled in a straight line for all practical purposes. It reached escape velocity in less than a second.

It improved the troops' morale to get out and chew up the landscape with their new toys. But the landscape wasn't fighting back. No matter how physically impressive the weapons were, their effectiveness would depend on what the Taurans could throw back. A Greek phalanx must have looked pretty impressive, but it wouldn't do too well against a single man with a flamethrower.

And as with any engagement, because of time dilation, there was no way to tell what sort of weaponry they would have. They might have never heard of the stasis field. Or they might be able to say a magic word and make us disappear.

I was out with the fourth platoon, burning rocks, when Charlie called and asked me to come back in, urgent. I left Heimoff in charge.

'Another one?' The scale of the holograph display was such that our planet was pea-sized, about five centimeters from the X that marked the position of Sade-138. There were forty-one red and green dots scattered around the field; the key identified number 41 as Tauran Cruiser (2).

'You called Antopol?'

'Yeah.' He anticipated the next question. 'It'll take almost a day for the signal to get there and back.'

'It's never happened before,' but of course Charlie knew that. 'Maybe this collapsar is especially important to them.'

'Likely.' So it was almost certain we'd be fighting on the ground. Even if Antopol managed to get the first cruiser, she wouldn't have a fifty-fifty chance on the second one. Low on drones and fighters. 'I wouldn't like to be Antopol now.'

'She'll just get it earlier.'

'I don't know. We're in pretty good shape.'

'Save it for the troops, William.' He turned down the display's scale to where it showed only two objects: Sade-138 and the new red dot, slowing moving.

We spent the next two weeks watching dots blink out. And if you knew when and where to look, you could go outside and see the real thing happening, a hard bright speck of white light that faded in about a second.

In that second, a nova bomb had put out over a million times the power of a gigawatt laser. It made a miniature star half a klick in diameter and as hot as the interior of the sun. Anything it touched it would consume. The radiation from a near miss could botch up a ship's electronics beyond repair – two fighters, one of ours and one of theirs, had evidently suffered that fate, silently drifting out of the system at a constant velocity, without power.

We had used more powerful nova bombs earlier in the war, but the degenerate matter used to fuel them was unstable in large quantities. The bombs had a tendency to explode while they were still inside the ship. Evidently the Taurans had the same problem – or they had copied the process from us in the first place – because they had also scaled down to nova bombs that used less than a hundred kilograms of degenerate matter. And they deployed them much the same way we did, the warhead separating into dozens of pieces as it approached the target, only one of which was the nova bomb.

They would probably have a few bombs left over after they finished off Masaryk II and her retinue of fighters and drones. So it was likely that we were wasting time and energy in weapons practice.

The thought did slip by my conscience that I could gather up eleven people and board the fighter we had hidden safe behind the stasis field. It was pre-programmed to take us back to Stargate.

I even went to the extreme of making a mental list of the eleven, trying to think of eleven people who meant more to me than the rest. Turned out I'd be picking six at random.

I put the thought away, though. We did have a chance, maybe a damned good one, even against a fully-armed cruiser. It wouldn't be easy to get a nova bomb close enough to include us inside its kill-radius.

Besides, they'd space me for desertion. So why bother?

Spirits rose when one of Antopol's drones knocked out the first Tauran cruiser. Not counting the ships left behind for planetary defense, she still had eighteen drones and two fighters. They wheeled around to intercept the second cruiser, by then a few light hours away, still being harassed by fifteen enemy drones.

One of the Tauran drones got her. Her ancillary crafts continued the attack, but it was a rout. One fighter and three drones fled the battle at maximum acceleration, looping up over the plane of the ecliptic, and were not pursued. We watched them with morbid interest while the enemy cruiser inched back to do battle with us. The fighter was headed back for Sade-138, to escape. Nobody blamed them. In fact, we sent them a farewell/good luck message; they didn't respond, naturally, being zipped up in the tanks. But it would be recorded.

It took the enemy five days to get back to the planet and be comfortably ensconced in a stationary orbit on the other side. We settled in for the inevitable first phase of the attack, which would be aerial and totally automated: their drones against our lasers. I put a force of fifty men and women inside the stasis field, in case one of the drones got through. An empty gesture, really; the enemy could just stand by and wait for them to turn off the field, fry them the second it flickered out.

Charlie had a weird idea that I almost went for.

'We could boobytrap the place.'

'What do you mean?' I said. 'This place is boobytrapped, out to twenty-five klicks.'

'No, not the mines and such. I mean the base itself, here, underground.'

'Go on.'

'There are two nova bombs in that fighter.' He pointed at the stasis field through a couple of hundred meters of rock. 'We can roll them down here, boobytrap, them, then hide everybody in the stasis field and wait.'

In a way it was tempting. It would relieve me from any responsibility for decision-making, leave everything up to chance. 'I don't think it would work, Charlie.'

He seemed hurt. 'Sure it would.'

'No, look. For it to work, you have to get every single Tauran inside the kill-radius before it goes off– but they wouldn't all come charging in here once they breached our defenses. Least of all if the place seemed deserted. They'd suspect something, send in an advance party. And after the advance party set off the bombs–'

'We'd be back where we started, yeah. Minus the base. Sorry.'

I shrugged. 'It was an idea. Keep thinking, Charlie.' I turned my attention back to the display, where the lopsided space war was in progress. Logically enough, the enemy wanted to knock out that one fighter overhead before he started to work on us. About all we could do was watch the red dots crawl around the planet and try to score. So far the pilot had managed to knock out all the drones; the enemy hadn't sent any fighters after him yet.

I'd given the pilot control over five of the lasers in our defensive ring. They couldn't do much good, though. A gigawatt laser pumps out a billion kilowatts per second at a range of a hundred meters. A thousand klicks up, though, the beam was attenuated to ten kilowatts. Might do some damage if it hit an optical sensor. At least confuse things.

'We could use another fighter. Or six.'

'Use up the drones,' I said. We did have a fighter, of course, and a swabbie attached to us who could pilot it. It might turn out to be our only hope, if they got us cornered in the stasis field.

'How far away is the other guy?' Charlie asked, meaning the fighter pilot who had turned tail. I cranked down the scale, and the green dot appeared at the right of the display. 'About six light hours.' He had two drones left, too near to him to show as separate dots, having expended one in covering his getaway. 'He's not accelerating any more, but he's doing point nine gee.'

'Couldn't do us any good if he wanted to.' Need almost a month to slow down.

At that low point, the light that stood for our own defensive fighter faded out. 'Shit.'

'Now the fun starts. Should I tell the troops to get ready, stand by to go topside?'

'No … have them suit up, in case we lose air. But I expect it'll be a little while before we have a ground attack.' I turned the scale up again. Four red dots were already creeping around the globe toward us.

I got suited up and came back to Administration to watch the fireworks on the monitors.

The lasers worked perfectly. All four drones converged on us simultaneously; were targeted and destroyed. All but one of the nova bombs went off below our horizon (the visual horizon was about ten kilometers away, but the lasers were mounted high and could target something at twice that distance). The bomb that detonated on our horizon had melted out a semicircular chunk that glowed brilliantly white for several minutes. An hour later, it was still glowing dull orange, and the ground temperature outside had risen to fifty degrees Absolute, melting most of our snow, exposing an irregular dark gray surface.

The next attack was also over in a fraction of a second, but this time there had been eight drones, and four of them got within ten klicks. Radiation from the glowing craters raised the temperature to nearly 300 degrees. That was above the melting point of water, and I was starting to get worried. The fighting suits were good to over a thousand degrees, but the automatic lasers depended on low-temperature superconductors for their speed.

I asked the computer what the lasers' temperature limit was, and it printed out TR 398-734-009-265, 'Some Aspects Concerning the Adaptability of Cryogenic Ordnance to Use in Relatively High-Temperature Environments,' which had lots of handy advice about how we could insulate the weapons if we had access to a fully-equipped armorer's shop. It did note that the response time of automatic-aiming devices increased as the temperature increased, and that above some 'critical temperature,' the weapons would not aim at all. But there was no way to predict any individual weapon's behavior, other than to note that the highest critical temperature recorded was 790 degrees and the lowest was 420 degrees.

Charlie was watching the display. His voice was flat over the suit's radio. 'Sixteen this time.'

'Surprised?' One of the few things we knew about Tauran psychology was a certain compulsiveness about numbers, especially primes and powers of two.

'Let's just hope they don't have 32 left.' I queried the computer on this; all it could say was that the cruiser had thus far launched a total of 44 drones and that some cruisers had been known to carry as many as 128.

We had more than a half-hour before the drones would strike. I could evacuate everybody to the stasis field, and they would be temporarily safe if one of the nova bombs got through. Safe, but trapped. How long would it take the crater to cool down, if three or four let alone sixteen – of the bombs made it through? You couldn't live forever in a fighting suit, even though it recycled everything with remorseless efficiency. One week was enough to make you thoroughly miserable. Two weeks, suicidal. Nobody had ever gone three weeks, under field conditions.

Besides, as a defensive position, the stasis field could be a death-trap. The enemy has all the options since the dome is opaque; the only way you can find out what they're up to is to stick your head out. They didn't have to wade in with primitive weapons unless they were impatient. They could keep the dome saturated with laser fire and wait for you to turn off the generator. Meanwhile harassing you by throwing spears, rocks, arrows into the dome – you could return fire, but it was pretty futile.

Of course, if one man stayed inside the base, the others could wait out the next half-hour in the stasis field. If he didn't come get them, they'd know the outside was hot. I chinned the combination that would give me a frequency available to everybody echelon 5 and above.

'This is Major Mandella.' That still sounded like a bad joke.

I outlined the situation to them and asked them to tell their troops that everyone in the company was free to move into the stasis field. I would stay behind and come retrieve them if things went well – not out of nobility, of course; I preferred taking the chance of being vaporized in a nano-second, rather than almost certain slow death under the gray dome.

I chinned Charlie's frequency. 'You can go, too. I'll take care of things here.'

'No, thanks,' he said slowly. 'I'd just as soon … Hey, look at this.'

The cruiser had launched another red dot, a couple of minutes behind the others. The display's key identified it as being another drone. 'That's curious.'

'Superstitious bastards,' he said without feeling.

It turned out that only eleven people chose to join the fifty who had been ordered into the dome. That shouldn't have surprised me, but it did.

As the drones approached, Charlie and I stared at the monitors, carefully not looking at the holograph display, tacitly agreeing that it would be better not to know when they were one minute away, thirty seconds… And then, like the other times, it was over before we knew it had started. The screens glared white and there was a yowl of static, and we were still alive.

But this time there were fifteen new holes on the horizon – or closer! – and the temperature was rising so fast that the last digit in the readout was an amorphous blur. The number peaked in the high 800s and began to slide back down.

We had never seen any of the drones, not during that tiny fraction of a second it took the lasers to aim and fire. But then the seventeenth one flashed over the horizon, zigzagging crazily, and stopped directly overhead. For an instant it seemed to hover, and then it began to fall. Half the lasers had detected it, and they were firing steadily, but none of them could aim; they were all stuck in their last firing position.

It glittered as it dropped, the mirror polish of its sleek hull reflecting the white glow from the craters and the eerie flickering of the constant, impotent laser fire. I heard Charlie take one deep breath, and the drone fell so close you could see spidery Tauran numerals etched on the hull and a transparent porthole near the tip – then its engine flared and it was suddenly gone.

'What the hell?' Charlie said, quietly.

The porthole. 'Maybe reconnaissance.'

'I guess. So we can't touch them, and they know it.'

'Unless the lasers recover.' Didn't seem likely. 'We better get everybody under the dome. Us, too.'

He said a word whose vowel had changed over the centuries, but whose meaning was clear. 'No hurry. Let's see what they do.'

We waited for several hours. The temperature outside stabilized at 690 degrees – just under the melting point of zinc, I remembered to no purpose – and I tried the manual controls for the lasers, but they were still frozen.

'Here they come,' Charlie said. 'Eight again.'

I started for the display. 'Guess we'll–'

'Wait! They aren't drones.' The key identified all eight with the legend Troop Carrier.

'Guess they want to take the base,' he said. 'Intact.'

That, and maybe try out new weapons and techniques. 'It's not much of a risk for them. They can always retreat and drop a nova bomb in our laps.'

I called Brill and had her go get everybody who was in the stasis field, set them up with the remainder of her platoon as a defensive line circling around the northeast and northwest quadrants. I'd put the rest of the people in the other half-circle.

'I wonder,' Charlie said. 'Maybe we shouldn't put everyone topside at once. Until we know how many Taurans there are.'

That was a point. Keep a reserve, let the enemy under-estimate our strength. 'It's an idea… There might be just 64 of them in eight carriers.' Or 128 or 256. I wished our spy satellites had a finer sense of discrimination. But you can only cram so much into a machine the size of a grape.

I decided to let Brill's seventy people be our first line of defense and ordered them into a ring in the ditches we had made outside the base's perimeter. Everybody else would stay downstairs until needed.

If it turned out that the Taurans, either through numbers or new technology, could field an unstoppable force, I'd order everyone into the stasis field. There was a tunnel from the living quarters to the dome, so the people underground could go straight there in safety. The ones in the ditches would have to fall back under fire. If any of them were still alive when I gave the order.

I called in Hilleboe and had her and Charlie keep watch over the lasers. If they came unstuck, I'd call Brill and her people back. Turn on the automatic aiming system again, then sit back and watch the show. But even stuck, the lasers could be useful. Charlie marked the monitors to show where the rays would go; he and Hilleboe could fire them manually whenever something moved into a weapon's line-of-sight.

We had about twenty minutes. Brill was walking around the perimeter with her men and women, ordering them into the ditches a squad at a time, setting up overlapping fields of fire. I broke in and asked her to set up the heavy weapons so that they could be used to channel the enemy's advance into the path of the lasers.

There wasn't much else to do but wait. I asked Charlie to measure the enemy's progress and try to give us an accurate count-down, then sat at my desk and pulled out a pad, to diagram Brill's arrangement and see whether I could improve on it.

The cat jumped up on my lap, mewling piteously. He'd evidently been unable to tell one person from the other, suited up. But nobody else ever sat at this desk. I reached up to pet him and he jumped away.

The first line that I drew ripped through four sheets of paper. It had been some time since I'd done any delicate work in a suit. I remembered how in training, they'd made us practice controlling the strength-amplification circuits by passing eggs from person to person, messy business. I wondered if they still had eggs on Earth.

The diagram completed, I couldn't see any way to add to it. All those reams of theory crammed in my brain; there was plenty of tactical advice about envelopment and encirclement, but from the wrong point of view. If you were the one who was being encircled, you didn't have many options. Sit tight and fight. Respond quickly to enemy concentrations of force, but stay flexible so the enemy can't employ a diversionary force to divert strength from some predictable section of your perimeter. Make full use of air and space support, always good advice. Keep your head down and your chin up and pray for the cavalry. Hold your position and don't contemplate Dienbienphu, the Alamo, the Battle of Hastings.

'Eight more carriers out,' Charlie said. 'Five minutes. Until the first eight get here.'

So they were going to attack in two waves. At least two. What would I do, in the Tauran commander's position? That wasn't too far-fetched; the Taurans lacked imagination in tactics and tended to copy human patterns.

The first wave could be a throwaway, a kamikaze attack to soften us up and evaluate our defenses. Then the second would come in more methodically, and finish the job. Or vice versa: the first group would have twenty minutes to get entrenched; then the second could skip over their heads and hit us hard at one spot – breach the perimeter and over-run the base.

Or maybe they sent out two forces simply because two was a magic number. Or they could launch only eight troop carriers at a time (that would be bad, implying that the carriers were large; in different situations they had used carriers holding as few as 4 troops or as many as 128).

'Three minutes.' I stared at the cluster of monitors that showed various sectors of the mine field. If we were lucky, they'd land out there, out of caution. Or maybe pass over it low enough to detonate mines.

I was feeling vaguely guilty. I was safe in my hole, doodling, ready to start calling out orders. How did those seventy sacrificial lambs feel about their absentee commander?

Then I remembered how I had felt about Captain Stott that first mission, when he'd elected to stay safely in orbit while we fought on the ground. The rush of remembered hate was so strong I had to bite back nausea.

'Hilleboe, can you handle the lasers by yourself?'

'I don't see why not, sir.'

I tossed down the pen and stood up. 'Charlie, you take over the unit coordination; you can do it as well as I could. I'm going topside.'

'I wouldn't advise that, sir.'

'Hell no, William. Don't be an idiot.'

'I'm not taking orders, I'm giv–'

'You wouldn't last ten seconds up there,' Charlie said.

'I'll take the same chance as everybody else.'

'Don't you hear what I'm saying. They'll kill you!'

'The troops? Nonsense. I know they don't like me especially, but–'

'You haven't listened in on the squad frequencies?' No, they didn't speak my brand of English when they talked among themselves. 'They think you put them out on the line for punishment, for cowardice. After you'd told them anyone was free to go into the dome.'

'Didn't you, sir?' Hilleboe said.

'To punish them? No, of course not.' Not consciously. 'They were just up there when I needed… Hasn't Lieutenant Brill said anything to them?'

'Not that I've heard,' Charlie said. 'Maybe she's been too busy to tune in.

Or she agreed with them. 'I'd better get–'

'There!' Hilleboe shouted. The first empty ship was visible in one of the mine field monitors; the others appeared in the next second. They came in from random directions and weren't evenly distributed around the base. Five in the northeast quadrant and only one in the south-west. I relayed the information to Brill.

But we had predicted their logic pretty well; all of them were coming down in the ring of mines. One came close enough to one of the tachyon devices to set it off. The blast caught the rear end of the oddly streamlined craft, causing it to make a complete flip and crash nose-first. Side ports opened up and Taurans came crawling out. Twelve of them; probably four left inside. If all the others had sixteen as well, there were only slightly more of them than of us.

In the first wave.

The other seven had landed without incident, and yes; there were sixteen each. Brill shuffled a couple of squads to conform to the enemy's troop concentration, and she waited.

They moved fast across the mine field, striding in unison like bowlegged, top-heavy robots, not even breaking stride when one of them was blown to bits by a mine, which happened eleven times.

When they came over the horizon, the reason for their apparently random distribution was obvious: they had analyzed beforehand which approaches would give them the most natural cover, from the rubble that the drones had kicked up. They would be able to get within a couple of kilometers of the base before we got any clear line-of-sight of them. And their suits had augmentation circuits similar to ours, so they could cover a kilometer in less than a minute.

Brill had her troops open fire immediately, probably more for morale than out of any hope of actually hitting the enemy. They probably were getting a few, though it was hard to tell. At least the tachyon rockets did an impressive job of turning boulders into gravel.

The Taurans returned fire with some weapon similar to the tachyon rocket, maybe exactly the same. They rarely found a mark, though; our people were at and below ground level, and if the rocket didn't hit something, it would keep going on forever, amen. They did score a hit on one of the gigawatt lasers, though, and the concussion that filtered down to us was strong enough to make me wish we had burrowed a little deeper than twenty meters.

The gigawatts weren't doing us any good. The Taurans must have figured out the lines of sight ahead of time, and gave them wide berth. That turned out to be fortunate, because it caused Charlie to let his attention wander from the laser monitors for a moment.

'What the hell?'

'What's that, Charlie?' I didn't take my eyes off the monitors. Waiting for something to happen.

'The ship, the cruiser – it's gone.' I looked at the holograph display. He was right; the only red lights were those that stood for the troop carriers.

'Where did it go?' I asked inanely.

'Let's play it back.' He programmed the display to go back a couple of minutes and cranked out the scale to where both planet and collapsar showed on the cube. The cruiser showed up, and with it, three green dots. Our 'coward,' attacking the cruiser with only two drones.

But he had a little help from the laws of physics.

Instead of going into collapsar insertion, he had skimmed around the collapsar field in a slingshot orbit. He had come out going nine-tenths of the speed of light; the drones were going .99 C, headed straight for the enemy cruiser. Our planet was about a thousand light seconds from the collapsar, so the Tauran ship had only ten seconds to detect and stop both drones. And at that speed, it didn't matter whether you'd been hit by a nova-bomb or a spitball.

The first drone disintegrated the cruiser, and the other one, .01 second behind, glided on down to impact on the planet. The fighter missed the planet by a couple of hundred kilometers and hurtled on into space, decelerating with the maximum twenty-five gees. He'd be back in a couple of months.

But the Taurans weren't going to wait. They were getting close enough to our lines for both sides to start using lasers, but they were also within easy grenade range. A good-size rock could shield them from laser fire, but the grenades and rockets were slaughtering them.

At first, Brill's troops had the overwhelming advantage; fighting from ditches, they could only be harmed by an occasional lucky shot or an extremely well-aimed grenade (which the Taurans threw by hand, with a range of several hundred meters). Brill had lost four, but it looked as if the Tauran force was down to less than half its original size.

Eventually, the landscape had been torn up enough so that the bulk of the Tauran force was able to fight from holes in the ground. The fighting slowed down to individual laser duels, punctuated occasionally by heavier weapons. But it wasn't smart to use up a tachyon rocket against a single Tauran, not with another force of unknown size only a few minutes away.

Something had been bothering me about that holographic replay. Now, with the battle's lull, I knew what it was.

When that second drone crashed at near-lightspeed, how much damage had it done to the planet? I stepped over to the computer and punched it up; found out how much energy had been released in the collision, and then compared it with geological information in the computer's memory.

Twenty times as much energy as the most powerful earthquake ever recorded. On a planet three-quarters the size of Earth.

On the general frequency: 'Everybody-topside! Right now!' I palmed the button that would cycle and open the airlock and tunnel that led from Administration to the surface.

'What the hell, Will–'

'Earthquake!' How long? 'Move!'

Hilleboe and Charlie were right behind me. The cat was sitting on my desk, licking himself unconcernedly. I had an irrational impulse to put him inside my suit, which was the way he'd been carried from the ship to the base, but knew he wouldn't tolerate more than a few minutes of it. Then I had the more reasonable impulse to simply vaporize him with my laser-finger, but by then the door was closed and we were swarming up the ladder. All the way up, and for some time afterward, I was haunted by the image of that helpless animal, trapped under tons of rubble, dying slowly as the air hissed away.

'Safer in the ditches?' Charlie said.

'I don't know,' I said. 'Never been in an earthquake.' Maybe the walls of the ditch would close up and crush us.

I was surprised at how dark it was on the surface. S Doradus had almost set; the monitors had compensated for the low light level.

An enemy laser raked across the clearing to our left, making a quick shower of sparks when it flicked by a gigawatt mounting. We hadn't been seen yet. We all decided yes, it would be safer in the ditches, and made it to the nearest one in three strides.

There were four men and women in the ditch, one of them badly wounded or dead. We scrambled down the ledge and I turned up my image amplifier to log two, to inspect our ditchmates. We were lucky; one was a grenadier and they also had a rocket launcher. I could just make out the names on their helmets. We were in Brill's ditch, but she hadn't noticed us yet. She was at the opposite end, cautiously peering over the edge, directing two squads in a flanking movement. When they were safely in position, she ducked back down. 'Is that you, Major?'

'That's right,' I said cautiously. I wondered whether any of the people in the ditch were among the ones after my scalp.

'What's this about an earthquake?'

She had been told about the cruiser being destroyed, but not about the other drone. I explained in as few words as possible.

'Nobody's come out of the airlock,' she said. 'Not yet. I guess they all went into the stasis field.'

'Yeah, they were just as close to one as the other.' Maybe some of them were still down below, hadn't taken my warning seriously. I chinned the general frequency to check, and then all hell broke loose.

The ground dropped away and then flexed back up; slammed us so hard that we were airborne, tumbling out of the ditch. We flew several meters, going high enough to see the pattern of bright orange and yellow ovals, the craters where nova bombs had been stopped. I landed on my feet but the ground was shifting and slithering so much that it was impossible to stay upright.

With a basso grinding I could feel through my suit, the cleared area above our base crumbled and fell in. Part of the stasis field's underside was exposed when the ground subsided; it settled to its new level with aloof grace.

Well, minus one cat. I hoped everybody else had time and sense enough to get under the dome.

A figure came staggering out of the ditch nearest to me and I realized with a start that it wasn't human. At that range, my laser burned a hole straight through his helmet; he took two steps and fell over backward. Another helmet peered over the edge of the ditch. I sheared the top of it off before he could raise his weapon.

I couldn't get my bearings. The only thing that hadn't changed was the stasis dome, and it looked the same from any angle. The gigawatt lasers were all buried, but one of them had switched on, a brilliant flickering searchlight that illuminated a swirling cloud of vaporized rock.

Obviously, though, I was in enemy territory. I started across the trembling ground toward the dome.

I couldn't raise any platoon leaders. All of them but Brill were probably inside the dome. I did get Hilleboe and Charlie; told Hilleboe to go inside the dome and roust everybody out. If the next wave also had 128, we were going to need everybody.

The tremors died down and I found my way into a 'friendly' ditch – the cooks' ditch, in fact, since the only people there were Orban and Rudkoski.

'Looks like you'll have to start from scratch again, Private.'

'That's all right, sir. Liver needed a rest.'

I got a beep from Hilleboe and chinned her on. 'Sir … there were only ten people there. The rest didn't make it.'

'They stayed behind?' Seemed like they'd had plenty of time. 'I don't know, sir.'

'Never mind. Get me a count, how many people we have, all totalled.' I tried the platoon leaders' frequency again and it was still silent.

The three of us watched for enemy laser fire for a couple of minutes, but there was none. Probably waiting for reinforcements.

Hilleboe called back. 'I only get fifty-three, sir. Some may be unconscious.'

'All right. Have them sit tight until – ' Then the second wave showed up, the troop carriers roaring over the horizon with their jets pointed our way, decelerating. 'Get some rockets on those bastards!' Hilleboe yelled to everyone in particular. But nobody had managed to stay attached to a rocket launcher while he was being tossed around. No grenade launchers, either, and the range was too far for the hand lasers to do any damage.

These carriers were four or five times the size of the ones in the first wave. One of them grounded about a kilometer in front of us, barely stopping long enough to disgorge its troops. Of which there were over 50, probably 64 – times 8 made 512. No way we could hold them back.

'Everybody listen, this is Major Mandella.' I tried to keep my voice even and quiet. 'We're going to retreat back into the dome, quickly but in an orderly way. I know we're scattered all over hell. If you belong to the second or fourth platoon, stay put for a minute and give covering fire while the first and third platoons, and support, fall back.

'First and third and support, fall back to about half your present distance from the dome, then take cover and defend the second and fourth as they come back. They'll go to the edge of the dome and cover you while you come back the rest of the way.' I shouldn't have said 'retreat'; that word wasn't in the book. Retrograde action.

There was a lot more retrograde than action. Eight or nine people were firing, and all the rest were in full flight. Rudkoski and Orban had vanished. I took a few carefully aimed shots, to no great effect, then ran down to the other end of the ditch, climbed out and headed for the dome.

The Taurans started firing rockets, but most of them seemed to be going too high. I saw two of us get blown away before I got to my halfway point; found a nice big rock and hid behind it. I peeked out and decided that only two or three of the Taurans were close enough to be even remotely possible laser targets, and the better part of valor would be in not drawing unnecessary attention to myself. I ran the rest of the way to the edge of the field and stopped to return fire. After a couple of shots, I realized that I was just making myself a target; as far as I could see there was only one other person who was still running toward the dome.

A rocket zipped by, so close I could have touched it. I flexed my knees and kicked, and entered the dome in a rather undignified posture.

Inside, I could see the rocket that had missed me drifting lazily through the gloom, rising slightly as it passed through to the other side of the dome. It would vaporize the instant it came out the other side, since all of the kinetic energy it had lost in abruptly slowing down to 16.3 meters per second would come back in the form of heat.

Nine people were lying dead, facedown just inside of the field's edge. It wasn't unexpected, though it wasn't the sort of thing you were supposed to tell the troops.

Their fighting suits were intact – otherwise they wouldn't have made it this far – but sometime during the past few minutes' rough-and-tumble, they had damaged the coating of special insulation that protected them from the stasis field. So as soon as they entered the field, all electrical activity in their bodies ceased, which killed them instantly. Also, since no molecule in their bodies could move faster than 16.3 meters per second, they instantly froze solid, their body temperature stabilized at a cool 0.426 degrees Absolute.

I decided not to turn any of them over to find out their names, not yet. We had to get some sort of defensive position worked out before the Taurans came through the dome. If they decided to slug it out rather than wait.

With elaborate gestures, I managed to get everybody collected in the center of the field, under the fighter's tail, where the weapons were racked.

There were plenty of weapons, since we had been prepared to outfit three times this number of people. After giving each person a shield and short-sword, I traced a question in the snow: GOOD ARCHERS? RAISE HANDS. I got five volunteers, then picked out three more so that all the bows would be in use. Twenty arrows per bow. They were the most effective long-range weapons we had; the arrows were almost invisible in their slow flight, heavily weighted and tipped with a deadly sliver of diamond-hard crystal.

I arranged the archers in a circle around the fighter (its landing fins would give them partial protection from missiles coming in from behind) and between each pair of archers put four other people: two spear-throwers, one quarterstaff, and a person armed with battleax, and a dozen throwing knives. This arrangement would theoretically take care of the enemy at any range, from the edge of the field to hand-to-hand combat.

Actually, at some 600-to-42 odds, they could probably walk in with a rock in each hand, no shields or special weapons, and still beat the shit out of us.

Assuming they knew what the stasis field was. Their technology seemed up to date in all other respects.

For several hours nothing happened. We got about as bored as anyone could, waiting to die. No one to talk to, nothing to see but the unchanging gray dome, gray snow, gray spaceship and a few identically gray soldiers. Nothing to hear, taste or smell but yourself.

Those of us who still had any interest in the battle were keeping watch on the bottom edge of the dome, waiting for the first Taurans to come through. So it took us a second to realize what was going on when the attack did start. It came from above, a cloud of catapulted darts swarming in through the dome some thirty meters above the ground, headed straight for the center of the hemisphere.

The shields were big enough that you could hide most of your body behind them by crouching slightly; the people who saw the darts coming could protect themselves easily. The ones who had their backs to the action, or were just asleep at the switch, had to rely on dumb luck for survival; there was no way to shout a warning, and it took only three seconds for a missile to get from the edge of the dome to its center.

We were lucky, losing only five. One of them was an archer, Shubik. I took over her bow and we waited, expecting a ground attack immediately.

It didn't come. After a half-hour, I went around the circle and explained with gestures that the first thing you were supposed to do, if anything happened, was to touch the person on your right. He'd do the same, and so on down the line.

That might have saved my life. The second dart attack, a couple of hours later, came from behind me. I felt the nudge, slapped the person on my right, turned around and saw the cloud descending. I got the shield over my head, and they hit a split-second later.

I set down my bow to pluck three darts from the shield and the ground attack started.

It was a weird, impressive sight. Some three hundred of them stepped into the field simultaneously, almost shoulder-to-shoulder around the perimeter of the dome. They advanced in step, each one holding a round shield barely large enough to hide his massive chest. They were throwing darts similar to the ones we had been barraged with.

I set up the shield in front of me – it had little extensions on the bottom to keep it upright – and with the first arrow I shot, I knew we had a chance. It struck one of them in the center of his shield, went straight through and penetrated his suit.

It was a one-sided massacre. The darts weren't very effective without the element of surprise – but when one came sailing over my head from behind, it did give me a crawly feeling between the shoulder blades.

With twenty arrows I got twenty Taurans. They closed ranks every time one dropped; you didn't even have to aim. After running out of arrows, I tried throwing their darts back at them. But their light shields were quite adequate against the small missiles.

We'd killed more than half of them with arrows and spears, long before they got into range of the hand-to-hand weapons. I drew my sword and waited. They still outnumbered us by better than three to one.

When they got within ten meters, the people with the chakram throwing knives had their own field day. Although the spinning disc was easy enough to see and took more than a half-second to get from thrower to target, most of the Taurans reacted in the same ineffective way, raising up the shield to ward it off. The razor-sharp tempered heavy blade cut through the light shield like a buzz-saw through cardboard.

The first hand-to-hand contact was with the quarterstaffs, which were metal rods two meters long that tapered at the ends to a double-edged, serrated knife blade. The Taurans had a cold-blooded – or valiant, if your mind works that way – method for dealing with them. They would simply grab the blade and die. While the human was trying to extricate his weapon from the frozen death-grip, a Tauran swordsman, with a scimitar over a meter long, would step in and kill him.

Besides the swords, they had a bolo-like thing that was a length of elastic cord that ended with about ten centimeters of something like barbed wire, and a small weight to propel it. It was a dangerous weapon for all concerned; if they missed their target it would come snapping back unpredictably. But they hit their target pretty often, going under the shields and wrapping the thorny wire around ankles.

I stood back-to-back with Private Erikson, and with our swords we managed to stay alive for the next few minutes. When the Taurans were down to a couple of dozen survivors, they just turned around and started marching out. We threw some darts after them, getting three, but we didn't want to chase after them. They might turn around and start hacking again.

There were only twenty-eight of us left standing. Nearly ten times that number of dead Taurans littered the ground, but there was no satisfaction in it.

They could do the whole thing over, with a fresh 300. And this time it would work.

We moved from body to body, pulling out arrows and spears, then took up places around the fighter again. Nobody bothered to retrieve the quarterstaffs. I counted noses: Charlie and Diana were still alive (Hilleboe had been one of the quarterstaff victims), as well as two supporting officers. Wilber and Szydlowska. Rudkoski was still alive but Orban had taken a dart.

After a day of waiting, it looked as though the enemy had decided on a war of attrition rather than repeating the ground attack. Darts came in constantly, not in swarms anymore, but in twos and threes and tens. And from all different angles. We couldn't stay alert forever; they'd get somebody every three or four hours.

We took turns sleeping, two at a time, on top of the stasis field generator. Sitting directly under the bulk of the fighter, it was the safest place in the dome.

Every now and then, a Tauran would appear at the edge of the field, evidently to see whether any of us were left. Sometimes we'd shoot an arrow at him, for practice.

The darts stopped falling after a couple of days. I supposed it was possible that they'd simply run out of them. Or maybe they'd decided to stop when we were down to twenty survivors.

There was a more likely possibility. I took one of the quarterstaffs down to the edge of the field and poked it through, a centimeter or so. When I drew it back, the point was melted off. When I showed it to Charlie, he rocked back and forth (the only way you can nod in a suit); this sort of thing had happened before, one of the first times the stasis field hadn't worked. They simply saturated it with laser fire and waited for us to go stir-crazy and turn off the generator. They were probably sitting in their ships playing the Tauran equivalent of pinochle.

I tried to think. It was hard to keep your mind on something for any length of time in that hostile environment, sense-deprived, looking over your shoulder every few seconds. Something Charlie had said. Only yesterday. I couldn't track it down. It wouldn't have worked then; that was all I could remember. Then finally it came to me.

I called everyone over and wrote in the snow:

GET NOVA BOMBS FROM SHIP.

CARRY TO EDGE OF FIELD.

MOVE FIELD.

Szydlowska knew where the proper tools would be aboard ship. Luckily, we had left all of the entrances open before turning on the stasis field; they were electronic and would have been frozen shut. We got an assortment of wrenches from the engine room and climbed up to the cockpit. He knew how to remove the access plate that exposed a crawl space into the bomb-bay. I followed him in through the meter-wide tube.

Normally, I supposed, it would have been pitch-black. But the stasis field illuminated the bomb-bay with the same dim, shadowless light that prevailed outside. The bomb-bay was too small for both of us, so I stayed at the end of the crawl space and watched.

The bomb-bay doors had a 'manual override' so they were easy; Szydlowska just turned a hand-crank and we were in business. Freeing the two nova bombs from their cradles was another thing. Finally, he went back down to the engine room and brought back a crowbar. He pried one loose and I got the other, and we rolled them out the bomb-bay.

Sergeant Anghelov was already working on them by the time we climbed back down. All you had to do to arm the bomb was to unscrew the fuse on the nose of it and poke something around in the fuse socket to wreck the delay mechanism and safety restraints.

We carried them quickly to the edge, six people per bomb, and set them down next to each other. Then we waved to the four people who were standing by at the field generator's handles. They picked it up and walked ten paces in the opposite direction. The bombs disappeared as the edge of the field slid over them.

There was no doubt that the bombs went off. For a couple of seconds it was hot as the interior of a star outside, and even the stasis field took notice of the fact: about a third of the dome glowed a dull pink for a moment, then was gray again. There was a slight acceleration, like you would feel in a slow elevator. That meant we were drifting down to the bottom of the crater. Would there be a solid bottom? Or would we sink down through molten rock to be trapped like a fly in amber – didn't pay to even think about that. Perhaps if it happened, we could blast our way out with the fighter's gigawatt laser.

Twelve of us, anyhow.

HOW LONG? Charlie scraped in the snow at my feet.

That was a damned good question. About all I knew was the amount of energy two nova bombs released. I didn't know how big a fireball they would make, which would determine the temperature at detonation and the size of the crater. I didn't know the heat capacity of the surrounding rock, or its boiling point. I wrote: ONE WEEK, SHRUG? HAVE TO THINK.

The ship's computer could have told me in a thousandth of a second, but it wasn't talking. I started writing equations in the snow, trying to get a maximum and minimum figure for the length of time it would take for the outside to cool down to 500 degrees. Anghelov, whose physics was much more up-to-date, did his own calculations on the other side of the ship.

My answer said anywhere from six hours to six days (although for six hours, the surrounding rock would have to conduct heat like pure copper), and Anghelov got five hours to 4½ days. I voted for six and nobody else got a vote.

We slept a lot. Charlie and Diana played chess by scraping symbols in the snow; I was never able to hold the shifting positions of the pieces in my mind. I checked my figures several times and kept coming up with six days. I checked Anghelov's computations, too, and they seemed all right, but I stuck to my guns. It wouldn't hurt us to stay in the suits an extra day and a half. We argued good-naturedly in terse shorthand.

There had been nineteen of us left the day we tossed the bombs outside. There were still nineteen, six days later, when I paused with my hand over the generator's cutoff switch. What was waiting for us out there? Surely we had killed all the Taurans within several klicks of the explosion. But there might have been a reserve force farther away, now waiting patiently on the crater's lip. At least you could push a quarterstaff through the field and have it come back whole.

I dispersed the people evenly around the area, so they might not get us with a single shot. Then, ready to turn it back on immediately if anything went wrong, I pushed.

My radio was still tuned to the general frequency; after more than a week of silence my ears were suddenly assaulted with loud, happy babbling.

We stood in the center of a crater almost a kilometer wide and deep. Its sides were a shiny black crust shot through with red cracks, hot but no longer dangerous. The hemisphere of earth that we rested on had sunk a good forty meters into the floor of the crater, while it had still been molten, so now we stood on a kind of pedestal.

Not a Tauran in sight.

We rushed to the ship, sealed it and filled it with cool air and popped our suits. I didn't press seniority for the one shower; just sat back in an acceleration couch and took deep breaths of air that didn't smell like recycled Mandella.

The ship was designed for a maximum crew of twelve, so we stayed outside in shifts of seven to keep from straining the life-support systems. I sent a repeating message to the other fighter, which was still over six weeks away, that we were in good shape and waiting to be picked up. I was reasonably certain he would have seven free berths, since the normal crew for a combat mission was only three.

It was good to walk around and talk again. I officially suspended all things military for the duration of our stay on the planet. Some of the people were survivors of Brill's mutinous bunch, but they didn't show any hostility toward me.

We played a kind of nostalgia game, comparing the various eras we'd experienced on Earth, 'wondering what it would be like in the 700-years-future we were going back to. Nobody mentioned the fact that we would at best go back to a few months' furlough and then be assigned to another strike force, another turn of the wheel.

Wheels. One day Charlie asked me from what country my name originated; it sounded weird to him. I told him it originated from the lack of a dictionary and that if it were spelled right, it would look even weirder.

I got to kill a good half-hour explaining all the peripheral details to that. Basically, though, my parents were 'hippies' (a kind of subculture in the late-twentieth-century America, that rejected materialism and embraced a broad spectrum of odd ideas) who lived with a group of other hippies in a small agricultural community. When my mother got pregnant, they wouldn't be so conventional as to get married: this entailed the woman taking the man's name, and implied that she was his property. But they got all intoxicated and sentimental and decided they would both change their names to be the same. They rode into the nearest town, arguing all the way as to what name would be the best symbol for the love-bond between them – I narrowly missed having a much shorter name – and they settled on Mandala.

A mandala is a wheel-like design the hippies had borrowed from a foreign religion, that symbolized the cosmos, the cosmic mind, God, or whatever needed a symbol. Neither my mother nor my father knew how to spell the word, and the magistrate in town wrote it down the way it sounded to him.

They named me William in honor of a wealthy uncle, who unfortunately died penniless.

The six weeks passed rather pleasantly: talking, reading, resting. The other ship landed next to ours and did have nine free berths. We shuffled crews so that each ship had someone who could get it out of trouble if the pre-programmed jump sequence malfunctioned. I assigned myself to the other ship, in hopes it would have some new books. It didn't.

We zipped up in the tanks and took off simultaneously.

We wound up spending a lot of time in the tanks, just to keep from looking at the same faces all day long in the crowded ship. The added periods of acceleration got us back to Stargate in ten months, subjective. Of course, it was 340 years (minus seven months) to the hypothetical objective observer.

There were hundreds of cruisers in orbit around Stargate. Bad news: with that kind of backlog we probably wouldn't get any furlough at all.

I supposed I was more likely to get a court-martial than a furlough, anyhow. Losing 88 percent of my company, many of them because they didn't have enough confidence in me to obey the direct earthquake order. And we were back where we'd started on Sade-138; no Taurans there, but no base either.

We got landing instructions and went straight down, no shuttle. There was another surprise waiting at the spaceport. Dozens of cruisers were standing around on the ground (they'd never done that before for fear that Stargate would be hit) – and two captured Tauran cruisers as well. We'd never managed to get one intact.

Seven centuries could have brought us a decisive advantage, of course. Maybe we were winning.

We went through an airlock under a 'returnees' sign. After the air cycled and we'd popped our suits, a beautiful young woman came in with a cartload of tunics and told us, in perfectly-accented English, to get dressed and go to the lecture hall at the end of the corridor to our left.

The tunic felt odd, light yet warm. It was the first thing I'd worn besides a fighting suit or bare skin in almost a year.

The lecture hall was about a hundred times too big for the twenty-two of us. The same woman was there and asked us to move down to the front. That was unsettling; I could have sworn she had gone down the corridor the other way – I knew she had; I'd been captivated by the sight of her clothed behind.

Hell, maybe they had matter transmitters. Or teleportation. Wanted to save herself a few steps.

We sat for a minute and a man, clothed in the same kind of unadorned tunic the woman and we were wearing, walked across the stage with a stack of thick notebooks under each arm.

The woman followed him on, also carrying notebooks.

I looked behind me and she was still standing in the aisle. To make things even more odd, the man was virtually a twin to both of them.

The man riffled through one of the notebooks and cleared his throat. 'These books are for your convenience,' he said, also with perfect accent, 'and you don't have to read them if you don't want to. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do, because … you're free men and women. The war is over.'

Disbelieving silence.

'As you will read in this book, the war ended 221 years ago. Accordingly, this is the year 220. Old style, of course, it is 3138 AD

'You are the last group of soldiers to return. When you leave here, I will leave as well. And destroy Stargate. It exists only as a rendezvous point for returnees and as a monument to human stupidity. And shame. As you will read. Destroying it will be a cleansing.'

He stopped speaking and the woman started without a pause. 'I am sorry for what you've been through and wish I could say that it was for good cause, but as you will read, it was not.

'Even the wealth you have accumulated, back salary and compound interest, is worthless, as I no longer use money or credit. Nor is there such a thing as an economy, in which to use these … things.'

'As you must have guessed by now,' the man took over, 'I am, we are, clones of a single individual. Some two hundred and fifty years ago, my name was Kahn. Now it is Man.

'I had a direct ancestor in your company, a Corporal Larry Kahn. It saddens me that he didn't come back.'

'I am over ten billion individuals but only one consciousness,' she said. 'After you read, I will try to clarify this. I know that it will be difficult to understand.

'No other humans are quickened, since I am the perfect pattern. Individuals who die are replaced.

'There are some planets, however, on which humans are born in the normal, mammalian way. If my society is too alien for you, you may go to one of these planets. If you wish to take part in procreation, I will not discourage it. Many veterans ask me to change their polarity to heterosexual so that they can more easily fit into these other societies. This I can do very easily.'

Don't worry about that, Man, just make out my ticket.

'You will be my guest here at Stargate for ten days, after which you will be taken wherever you want to go,' he said. 'Please read this book in the meantime. Feel free to ask any questions, or request any service.' They both stood and walked off the stage.

Charlie was sitting next to me. 'Incredible,' he said. 'They let … they encourage … men and women to do that again? Together?'

The female aisle-Man was sitting behind us, and she answered before I could frame a reasonably sympathetic, hypocritical reply. 'It isn't a judgment on your society,' she said, probably not seeing that he took it a little more personally than that. 'I only feel that it's necessary as a eugenic safety device. I have no evidence that there is anything wrong with cloning only one ideal individual, but if it turns out to have been a mistake, there will be a large genetic pool with which to start again.'

She patted him on the shoulder. 'Of course, you don't have to go to these breeder planets. You can stay on one of my planets. I make no distinction between heterosexual play and homosexual.'

She went up on the stage to give a long spiel about where we were going to stay and eat and so forth while we were on Stargate, 'Never been seduced by a computer before,' Charlie muttered.

The 1143-year-long war had been begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate.

Once they could talk, the first question was 'Why did you start this thing?' and the answer was 'Me?'

The Taurans hadn't known war for millennia, and toward the beginning of the twenty-first century it looked as though mankind was ready to outgrow the institution as well. But the old soldiers were still around, and many of them were in positions of power. They virtually ran the United Nations Exploratory and Colonization Group, that was taking advantage of the newly-discovered collapsar jump to explore interstellar space.

Many of the early ships met with accidents and disappeared. The ex-military men were suspicious. They armed the colonizing vessels, and the first time they met a Tauran ship, they blasted it.

They dusted off their medals and the rest was going to be history.

You couldn't blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans' having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored.

The fact was, Earth's economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it.

The Taurans relearned war, after a fashion. They never got really good at it, and would eventually have lost.

The Taurans, the book explained, couldn't communicate with humans because they had no concept of the individual; they had been natural clones for millions of years. Eventually, Earth's cruisers were manned by Man, Kahn-clones, and they were for the first time able to get through to each other.

The book stated this as a bald fact. I asked a Man to explain what it meant, what was special about clone-to-clone communication, and he said that I a priori couldn't understand it. There were no words for it, and my brain wouldn't be able to accommodate the concepts even if there were words.

All right. It sounded a little fishy, but I was willing to accept it. I'd accept that up was down if it meant the war was over.

Man was a pretty considerate entity. Just for us twenty-two, he went to the trouble of rejuvenating a little restaurant-tavern and staffing it at all hours (I never saw a Man eat or drink – guess they'd discovered a way around it). I was sitting in there one evening, drinking beer and reading their book, when Charlie came in and sat down next to me.

Without preamble, he said, 'I'm going to give it a try.'

'Give what a try?'

'Women. Hetero.' He shuddered. 'No offense … it's not really very appealing.' He patted my hand, looking distracted. But the alternative … have you tried it?'

'Well … no, I haven't.' Female Man was a visual treat, but only in the same sense as a painting or a piece of sculpture. I just couldn't see them as human beings.

'Don't.' He didn't elaborate. 'Besides, they say – he says, she says, it says – that they can change me back just as easily. If I don't like it.'

'You'll like it, Charlie.'

'Sure that's what they say.' He ordered a stiff drink. 'Just seems unnatural. Anyway, since, uh, I'm going to make the switch, do you mind if … why don't we plan on going to the same planet?'

'Sure, Charlie, that'd be great.' I meant it. 'You know where you're going?'

'Hell, I don't care. Just away from here.'

'I wonder if Heaven's still as nice–'

'No.' Charlie jerked a thumb at the bartender. 'He lives there.'

'I don't know. I guess there's a list.'

A man came into the tavern, pushing a cart piled high with folders. 'Major Mandella? Captain Moore?'

'That's us,' Charlie said.

'These are your military records. I hope you find them of interest. They were transferred to paper when your strike force was the only one outstanding, because it would have been impractical to keep the normal data retrieval networks running to preserve so few data.'

They always anticipated your questions, even when you didn't have any.

My folder was easily five times as thick as Charlie's. Probably thicker than any other, since I seemed to be the only trooper who'd made it through the whole duration. Poor Marygay. 'Wonder what kind of report old Stott filed about me.' I flipped to the front of the folder.

Stapled to the front page was a small square of paper. All the other pages were pristine white, but this one was tan with age and crumbling around the edges.

The handwriting was familiar, too familiar even after so long. The date was over 250 years old.

I winced and was blinded by sudden tears. I'd had no reason to suspect that she might be alive. But I hadn't really known she was dead, not until I saw that date.

'William? What's–'

'Leave me be, Charlie. Just for a minute.' I wiped my eyes and closed the folder. I shouldn't even read the damned note. Going to a new life, I should leave the old ghosts behind.

But even a message from the grave was contact of a sort. I opened the folder again.

11 Oct 2878

William–

All this is in your personnel file. But knowing you, you might just chuck it. So I made sure you'd get this note.

Obviously, I lived. Maybe you will, too. Join me.

I know from the records that you're out at Sade-138 and won't be back for a couple of centuries. No problem.

I'm going to a planet they call Middle Finger, the fifth planet out from Mizar. It's two collapsar jumps, ten months subjective. Middle Finger is a kind of Coventry for heterosexuals. They call it a 'eugenic control baseline.'

No matter. It took all of my money, and all the money of five other old-timers, but we bought a cruiser from UNEF. And we're using it as a time machine.

So I'm on a relativistic shuttle, waiting for you. All it does is go out five light years and come back to Middle Finger, very fast. Every ten years I age about a month. So if you're on schedule and still alive, I'll only be twenty-eight when you get here. Hurry!

I never found anybody else and I don't want anybody else. I don't care whether you're ninety years old or thirty. If I can't be your lover, I'll be your nurse.

–Marygay.

'Say, bartender.'

'Yes, Major?'

'Do you know of a place called Middle Finger? Is it still there?'

'Of course it is. Where else would it be?' Reasonable question. 'A very nice place. Garden planet. Some people don't think it's exciting enough.'

'What's this all about?' Charlie said.

I handed the bartender my empty glass. 'I just found out where we're going.'

Epilogue

From The New Voice, Paxton, Middle Finger 24-6

14/2/3143

OLD-TIMER HAS FIRST BOY

Marygay Potter-Mandella (24 Post Road, Paxton) gave birth Friday last to a fine baby boy, 3.1 kilos.

Marygay lays claim to being the second 'oldest' resident of Middle Finger, having been born in 1977. She fought through most of the Forever War and then waited for her mate on the time shuttle, 261 years.

The baby, not yet named, was delivered at home with the help of a friend of the family, Dr Diana Alsever-Moore.

Forever Free

Men stop war to make gods

sometimes. Peace gods, who would make

Earth a haven. A place for men to

think and love and play. No war

to cloud their minds and hearts. Stop,

somehow, men from being men.

Gods make war to stop men

from becoming gods.

Without the beat of drums to stop

our ears, what heaven we could make

of Earth! The anchor that is war

left behind? Somehow free to

stop war? Gods make men to

be somewhat like them. So men

express their godliness in war.

To take life: this is what gods

do. Not the womanly urge to make

life. Nor the simple sense to stop.

War-men make gods. To stop

those gods from raging, we have to

find the heart and head to make

new gods, who don't take men

in human sacrifice. New gods,

who find disgust in war.

Gods stop, to make men war

for their amusement. We can stop

their fun. We can make new gods

in human guise. No need to

call to heaven. Just take plain men

and show to them the heaven they could make!

To stop God's wars! Men make

their own destiny. We don't need war

to prove to anyone that we are men.

But even that is not enough. To stop

war, we have to become more. To

stop war, we have to become gods.

To stop war, make men gods.

Book One

The Book of Genesis

One

Winter is a long time coming on this god-forsaken planet, and it stays too long, too, I watched a sudden gust blow a line of cold foam across the grey lake and thought about Earth, not for the first time that day. The two warm winters in San Diego when I was a boy. Even the bad winters in Nebraska. They were at least short.

Maybe, we were too quick to say no, when the magnanimous zombies offered to share Earth with us, after the war. We didn't really get rid of them, coming here.

Cold radiated from the windowpane. Marygay cleared her throat behind me. 'What is it?' she said.

'Looks like weather. I ought to check the trotlines.'

'Kids will be home in an hour.'

'Better I do it now, dry, than all of us stand out in the rain,' I said. 'Snow, whatever.'

'Probably snow.' She hesitated, and didn't offer to help. After twenty years she could tell when I didn't want company. I pulled on wool sweater and cap and left the rain slicker on its peg.

I stepped out into the damp hard wind. It didn't smell like snow coming. I asked my watch and it said 90 percent rain, but a cold front in the evening would bring freezing rain and snow. That would make for a fun meeting. We had to walk a couple of klicks, there and back. Otherwise the zombies could look through transportation records and see that all of us paranoids had converged on one house.

We had eight trotlines that stretched out ten meters from the end of the dock to posts I'd sunk in the chest-deep water. Two more had been knocked down in a storm; I'd replace them come spring. Two years from now, in real years.

It was more like harvesting than fishing. The blackfish are so dumb they'll bite anything, and when they're hooked and thrash around, it attracts other blackfish: 'Wonder what's wrong with that guy – oh, look! Somebody's head on a nice shiny hook!'

When I got out on the dock I could see thunderheads building in the east, so I worked pretty fast. Each trotline's a pulley that supports a dozen hooked leaders dangling in the water, held to one-meter depth with plastic floaters. It looked like half the floaters were down, maybe fifty fish. I did a mental calculation and realized I'd probably just finish the last one when Bill got home from school. But the storm was definitely coming.

I took work gloves and apron off a hook by the sink and hauled the end of the first line up to the eye-level pulley wheel. I opened the built-in freezer – the stasis field inside reflected the angry sky like a pool of mercury – and wheeled in the first fish. Worked it off the hook, chopped off the head and tail with a cleaver, threw the fish into the freezer, and then re-baited the hook with its head. Then rolled in the next client.

Three of the fish were the useless mutant strain we've been getting for more than a year. They're streaked with pink and have a noxious hydrogen-sulfide taste. The blackfish won't take them for bait and I can't even use them for fertilizer; you might as well scatter your soil with salt.

Maybe an hour a day – half that, with the kids helping – and we supplied about a third of the fish for the village. I didn't eat much of it myself. We also bartered corn, beans, and asparagus, in their seasons.

Bill got off the bus while I was working on the last line. I waved him inside; no need for both of us to get all covered with fish guts and blood. Then lightning struck on the other side of the lake and I put the line back in anyhow. Hung up the stiff gloves and apron and turned off the stasis field for a second to check the catch level.

Just beat the rain. I stood on the porch for a minute and watched the squall line hiss its way across the lake.

Warm inside; Marygay had started a small fire in the kitchen fireplace. Bill was sitting there with a glass of wine. That was still a novelty to him. 'So how are we doing?' His accent always sounded strange when he first got back from school. He didn't speak English in class or, I suspected, with many of his friends.

'Over the sixty percent mark,' I said, scrubbing my hands and face at the work sink. 'Any better luck and we'll have to eat the damned things ourselves.'

'Think I'll poach a big bunch for dinner,' Marygay said, deadpan. That gave them the flavor and consistency of cotton.

'Come on, Mom,' Bill said. 'Let's just have them raw.' He liked them even less than I did. Chopping off their heads was the high point of his day.

I went to the trio of casks at the other end of the room and tapped a glass of dry red wine, then sat with Bill on the bench by the fire. I poked at it with a stick, a social gesture probably older than this young planet.

'You were going to have the art zombie today?'

'The art history Man,' he said: 'She's from Centrus. Haven't seen her in a year. We didn't draw or anything; just looked at pictures and statues.'

'From Earth?'

'Mostly.'

'Tauran art is weird.' That was a charitable assessment. It was also ugly and incomprehensible.

'She said we have to come to it gradually. We looked at some architecture.'

Their architecture, I knew something about. I'd destroyed acres of it, centuries ago. Felt like yesterday sometimes.

'I remember the first time I came across one of their barracks,' I said. 'All the little individual cells. Like a beehive.'

He made a noncommittal noise that I took as a warning. 'So where's your sister?' She was still in high school but had the same bus. 'I can't keep her schedule straight.'

'She's at the library,' Marygay said. 'She'll call if she's going to be late.'

I checked my watch. 'Can't wait dinner too long.' The meeting was at eight and a half.

'I know.' She stepped over the bench and sat down between us, and handed me a plate of breadsticks. 'From Snell, came by this morning.'

They were salty and hard; broke between the jaws with an interesting concussion. 'I'll thank him tonight.'

'Old folks party?' Bill asked.

'Sixday,' I said. 'We're walking, if you want the floater.'

"'But don't drink too much wine,"' he anticipated, and held up his glass. 'This is it. Volleyball down at the gym.'

'Win one for the Gipper.'

'What?'

'Something my mother used to say. I don't know what a gipper is.'

'Sounds like a position,' he said. 'Server, Spiker, gipper.' As if he cared a lot about the game qua game. They played in the nude, mixed, and it was as much a mating ritual as a sport.

A sudden blast of sleet rattled against the window. 'You don't want to walk through that,' he said. 'You could drop me off at the gym.'

'Well, you could drop us off,' Marygay said. The route of the floater wasn't registered; just the parking location, supposedly for call forwarding. 'Charlie and Diana's place. They won't care if we're early.'

'Thanks. I might score.' He didn't mean volleyball. When he used our ancient slang I never knew whether it was affection or derision. I guess when I was twenty-one I could do both at the same time, with my parents.

A bus stopped outside. I heard Sara running up the boardwalk through the weather. The front door opened and shut fast, and she ran upstairs to change.

'Dinner in ten minutes,' Marygay called up the stairs. She made an impatient noise back.

'Starting to bleed tomorrow,' Bill said.

'Since when do brothers keep track of that,' Marygay said. 'Or husbands?'

He looked at the floor. 'She said something this morning.'

I broke the silence. 'If there are any Men there tonight…'

'They never come. But I won't tell them you're off plotting.'

'It's not plotting,' Marygay said. 'Planning. We'll tell them eventually. But it's a human thing.' We hadn't discussed it with him or Sara, but we hadn't tried to keep them from overhearing.

'I could come someday.'

'Someday,' I said. Probably not. So far it was all first-generation; all vets, plus their spouses. Only a few of them, spouses, were born on this thing Man had called a 'garden planet,' when they gave us a choice of places to relocate after the war.

We usually called 'our' planet MF. Most of the people who lived here were dozens of generations away from appreciating what we'd meant by 'middle finger.' Even if they did know, they probably didn't connect the acronym with the primal Oedipal act.

After living through an entire winter, though, they probably called the planet their cultures' versions of 'motherfucker.'

MF had been presented to us as a haven and a refuge – and a place of reunion. We could carve out an existence here as plain humans, without interference from Man, and if you had friends or lovers lost in the relativistic maze of the Forever War, you could wait for them on the Time Warp, a converted battlewagon that shuttled back and forth between Mizar and Alcor fast enough to almost halt aging.

Of course it turned out that Man did want to keep an eye on us, since we comprised a sort of genetic insurance policy. They could use us as a baseline if, after X generations, something bad cropped up in their carbon-copy genetic pattern. (I once used that term with Bill, and started to explain, but he did know what carbon copies were. Like he knew what cave paintings were.)

But they weren't passive observers. They were zookeepers. And MF did resemble a zoo: an artificial simplified environment. But the zookeepers didn't build it. They just stumbled onto it.

Middle Finger, like all the Vega-class planets we'd found, was an anomaly and a cartoon. It defied normal models of planetary formation and evolution.

A too-young bright blue star with a single planet, Earth-sized with oxygen-water chemistry. The planet orbits at a distance where life can be sustained, if only just.

(Planet people tell us that there's no way to have an Earth-type planet unless you also have a Jupiter-type giant in the system. But then stars like Vega and Mizar shouldn't have Earths anyhow.)

Middle Finger has seasons, but they're provided not by inclination toward the sun, but by the long oval of its orbit. We have six seasons spread over three Earth years: spring, summer, fall, first winter, deep winter, and thaw. Of course the planet moves slower, the farther it is from its sun, so the cold seasons are long, and the warm ones, short.

Most of the planet is arctic waste or dry tundra. Here at the equator, lakes and streams ice over in deep winter. Toward the poles, lakes are solid permanent ice from the surface down, with sterile puddles forming on warm summer days. Two-thirds of the planet's surface is lifeless except for airborne spores and micro-organisms.

The ecology is curiously simple, too – fewer than a hundred native varieties of plants; about the same number of insects and things that resemble arthropods. No native mammals, but a couple of dozen species of large and small things that are roughly reptiles or amphibians. Only seven kinds of fish, and four aquatic mollusks.

Nothing has evolved from anything else. There are no fossils, because there hasn't been enough time – carbon dating says nothing on or near the surface is more than ten thousand years old. But core samples from less than fifty meters down reveal a planet as old as Earth.

It's as if somebody had hauled a planet here and parked it, seeded with simple life. But where did they haul it from, and who are they, and who paid the shipping bill? All of the energy expended by the humans and the Taurans during the Forever War wouldn't have moved this planet far.

It's a mystery to them, too; the Taurans, which I find reassuring.

There are other mysteries that are not reassuring. Chief among them is that this corner of the universe had been inhabited before, up to about five thousand years ago.

The nearest Tauran planet, Tsogot, had been discovered and colonized during the Forever War. They found the ruins of a huge city there, larger than New York or London, buried in drifting dunes. The husks of dozens of alien spaceships drifted in orbit, one of them an interstellar vessel.

Of the creatures who had built this powerful civilization, not a clue. They left behind no statues or pictures, which may be explainable in terms of culture. Neither did they leave any bodies, not even a single bone, which is harder to explain.

The Tauran name for them is Boloor, 'the lost.'

I usually cooked on Sixday, since I didn't teach then, but the Greytons had brought by a couple of rabbits, and that was Marygay's specialty, hassenpfeffer. The kids liked it better than most Earth food. They mostly preferred the bland native stuff, which is all they got at school. Marygay says it's a natural survival trait; even on Earth, children stuck to bland, familiar food. I hadn't, but then my parents were strange, hippies. We ate fiery Indian food. I never tasted meat until I was twelve, when California law made them send me to school.

Dinner was amusing, Bill and Sara trading gossip about their friends' dating and mating. Sara's finally gotten over Taylor, who had been her steady for a year, and Bill had welcome news about a social disaster the boy had caused. It had stung her when he declared himself home, but after a few months' fling he turned het again, and asked her to take him back. She told him to stick to boys. Now it turns out he did have a boyfriend over in Hardy, very secret, who got mad at him and came over to the college to make a loud public scene. It involved sexual details that we didn't used to discuss at the dinner table. But times change, and fun is fun.

Two

The thing we were plotting actually grew out of an innocent bantering argument I'd had with Charlie and Diana some months before. Diana had been my medical officer during the Sade-138 campaign, our last, out in the Greater Magellanic Cloud; Charlie had served as my XO. Diana had delivered both Bill and Sara. They were our best friends.

Most of the community had taken Sixday off to get together at the Larson' for a barn-raising. Teresa was an old vet, two campaigns, but her wife Ami was third-generation Paxton. She was our age, biologically, and they had two fusion-clone teenaged daughters. One was off at university, but the other, Sooz, greeted us warmly and was in charge of the coffee and tea.

The hot drinks were welcome; it was unseasonably cold for late spring. It was also muddy. Middle Finger had weather control that was usually reliable – or used to be – but we'd had too much rain the previous couple of weeks, and moving clouds around didn't seem to help. The rain gods were angry. Or happy, or careless; never could tell about gods.

The first couple to arrive, as usual, were Cat and Aldo Verdeur-Sims. And as usual, Cat and Marygay embraced warmly, but only for an instant, out of consideration for their husbands.

On her last mission Marygay, like me, was a het throwback in a world otherwise 100 percent home. Unlike me, she overcame her background and managed to fall in love with a woman, Cat. They were together for a few months, but during their last battle, Cat was severely wounded and went straight to the hospital planet Heaven.

Marygay assumed that was it; the physics of relativity and collapsar jump would separate them by years or centuries. So she came here to wait for me – not for Cat – on the Time Warp. She told me all about Cat soon after we got together, and I didn't think it was a big deal; a reasonable adjustment under the circumstances. I'd always been easier with female homosex than male, anyhow.

So right after Sara was born, who should appear but Cat. She'd met Aldo on Heaven and heard about Middle Finger, and the two of them switched to het – something Man could easily do for you and, at that time, was required if you were going to Middle Finger. She knew Marygay was here, from Stargate records, and the space-time geometry worked out all right. She showed up about ten Earth years younger than Marygay and I were. And beautiful.

We got along well – Aldo and I played chess and go together – but you'd have to be blind not to see the occasional wistfulness that passed between Cat and Marygay. We sometimes kidded one another about it, but there was an edge to the joking. Aldo was more nervous about it than me, I think.

Sara came along with us, and Bill would come with Charlie and Diana after church let out. We unbelievers got to pay for our intellectual freedom by donning work boots and slogging through the mud, pounding in the reference stakes for the pressor field generator.

We borrowed the generator from the township, and along with it got the only Man involved in the barn-raising. She would have come anyway, as building inspector, after we had the thing up.

The generator was worth its weight in bureaucrats, though. It couldn't lift the metal girders; that took a lot of human muscle working together. But once they were in position, it kept them in place and perfectly aligned. Like a petty little god that was annoyed by things that weren't at right angles.

I had gods on the brain. Charlie and Diana had joined this new church, Spiritual Rationalism, and had dragged Bill into it. Actually, they didn't have gods in the old sense, and it all seemed reasonable enough, people trying to put some poetry and numinism into their everyday lives. I think Marygay would have gone along with it, if it weren't for my automatic resistance to religion.

Lar Po had surveying tools, including an ancient laser collimator that wasn't much different from the one I'd used in graduate school. We still had to slog through the mud and pound stakes, but at least we knew the stakes were going where they belonged.

The township also supplied a heavy truck full of fiber mastic, more reliable than cement in this climate, and easier to handle. It stayed liquid until it was exposed to an ultrasonic tone that was two specific frequencies in a silent chord. Then it froze permanently solid. You wanted to make sure you didn't have any on your hands or clothes when they turned on the chime.

The piles of girders and fasteners were a kit that had come in a big floater from Centrus. Paxton was allotted such things on the basis of a mysterious formula involving population and productivity and the phases of the moons. We actually could have had two barns this spring, but only the Larsons wanted one.

By the time we had it staked out, about thirty people had showed up. Teresa had a clipboard with job assignments and a timeline for putting the thing up. People took their assignments good-naturedly from 'Sergeant Larson, sir.' Actually, she'd been a major, like me.

Charlie and I worked together on the refrigeration unit. We'd learned the hard way the first years on this planet, that any permanent building bigger than a shed had to sit on ice year-round. If you carve down to the permafrost and lay a regular foundation, the long bitter winters crack it. So we just give in to the climate and build on ice, or frozen mud.

It was easy work, but sloppy. Another team nailed together a rectangular frame around what would be the footprint of the building, plus a few centimeters every way. Max Weston, one of the few guys big enough to wrestle with it, used an air hammer to pound alloy rods well below the frost line, every meter or so along the perimeter. These would anchor the barn against the hurricane-force winds that made farming such an interesting gamble here. (The weather-control satellites couldn't muster enough power to deflect them.)

Charlie and I slopped around in the mud, connecting long plastic tubes in a winding snake back and forth in what would be the building's sub-foundation. It was just align-glue-drop; align-glue-drop, until we were both half drunk from the glue fumes. Meanwhile, the crew that had nailed up the frame hosed water into the mud, so it would be nice and deep and soupy when we froze it.

We finished and hooked the loose ends up to a compressor and turned it on. Everybody took a break while we watched the mud turn to slush and harden.

It was warmer inside, but Charlie and I were too bespattered to feel comfortable in anyone's kitchen, so we just sat on a stack of foamsteel girders and let Sooz bring us tea.

I waved at the rectangle of mud. 'Pretty complex behavior for a bunch of lab rats.'

Charlie was still a little dull from the glue. 'We have rats?'

'A breeding herd of lab rats.'

Then he nodded and sipped some tea. 'You're too pessimistic. We'll outlast them. That's one thing I have faith in.'

'Yeah, faith can move mountains. Planets.' Charlie didn't deny the obvious: that we were animals in a zoo, or a lab. We were allowed to breed freely on Middle Finger in case something went wrong with the grand experiment that was Man: billions of genetically identical non-individuals sharing a single consciousness. Or billions of test-tube twins sharing a mutual data base, if you wanted to be accurate.

We could clone like them, no law against it, if we wanted a son or daughter identical to us, or fusion-clone like Teresa and Ami, if some biological technicality made normal childbirth impossible.

But the main idea was to keep churning out offspring with a wild mix of genes. Just in case something went wrong with perfection. We were their insurance policy.

People had started coming to Middle Finger as soon as the Forever War was over. Vet immigration, spread out over centuries because of relativity, finally totaled a couple of thousand people, maybe ten percent of the present population. We tended to stick together, in small towns like Paxton. We were used to dealing with each other.

Charlie lit up a stick and offered me one; I declined. 'I think we could outlast them,' I said, 'if they let us survive.'

'They need us. Us lab rats.'

'No, they just need our gametes. Which they can freeze indefinitely in liquid helium.'

'Yeah, I can see that. They line us up for sperm and egg samples and then kill us off. They aren't cruel, William, or stupid, no matter what you think of them.'

The Man came out to get the manual for her machine, and took it back to the kitchen. They all looked alike, of course, but with considerable variation as they got older. Handsome, tall, swarthy, black-haired, broad of chin and forehead. This one had lost the little finger of her left hand, and for some reason hadn't had it grow back. Probably not worth the time and pain, come to think of it. A lot of us vets remembered the torture of re-growing limbs and members.

When she was out of earshot, I continued. 'They wouldn't kill us off, but they wouldn't have to. Once they had sufficient genetic material, they could round us up and sterilize us. Let the experiment run down, one natural death at a time.'

'You're cheerful today.'

'I'm just blowin' smoke.' Charlie nodded slowly. We didn't have the same set of idioms, born six hundred years apart. 'But it could happen, if they saw us as a political threat. They get along fine with the Taurans now, but we're the wild card. No group mind to commune with.'

'So what would you do, fight them? We're not summer chickens anymore.'

'That's "spring" chickens.'

'I know, William. We're not even summer chickens.'

I clicked my cup against his. 'Your point. But we're still young enough to fight.'

'With what? Your fishing lines and my tomato stakes?'

'They're not heavily armed, either.' But as I said that, I felt a sudden chill. As Charlie enumerated the weapons we did know them to have, it occurred to me that we were in a critical historical period, the last time in human history that there would be a significant number of Forever War veterans still young enough to fight.

The group mind of Man had surely made the same observation.

Sooz brought us more tea and went back to tell the others that our little mud lake had frozen solid. So there was no more time for paranoia. But the seed had been planted.

We unrolled two crossed layers of insulation sheet, and then went about the odd business of actually raising the barn.

The floor was the easy part: slabs of foamsteel rectangles that weighed about eighty kilograms apiece. Two big people or four average ones could move one with ease. They were numbered 1-40; we just picked them up and put them down, aligned with the stakes we agnostics had pounded in.

This part was a little chaotic, since all thirty people wanted to work at once. But we did eventually get them down in proper order.

Then we all sat and watched while the mastic was poured in. The boards that had served as forms for the frozen mud did the same for the mastic. Po and Eloi Casi used long, broom-like things to push the grey mastic around as it oozed out of the truck. It would have settled down into a level surface eventually, but we knew from experience that you could save an hour or so by helping the process along. When it was about a handspan deep, and level, Man flipped a switch and it turned into something like marble.

That's when the hard work started. It would have been easy with a crane and a front-end loader, but Man was proud of having designed these kits so they could be put up by hand, as a community project. So no big machines came along with them, unless it was an emergency.

(In fact, this was the opposite of an emergency: the Larsons wouldn't have much to put into the barn this year, their grapes almost destroyed by too much rain.)

Every fourth slab had square boxes on either end, to accept vertical girders. So you fasten three girders together, ceiling and wall supports, put a lot of glue into the square boxes, and haul them into an upright position. With the pressor field on, when they get within a degree or so of being upright, they snap into place.

After the first one was set, the rest were a little easier, since you could throw three or four ropes over the rigid uprights and pull the next threesome up.

Then came the part of the job that called for agile young people with no fear of heights. Our Bill and Sara, along with Matt Anderson and Carey Talos, clambered up the girders – not hard, with the integrated hand- and toe-holds – and stood on board scaffolds while hauling up the triangular roof trusses. They slapped glue down and jiggled the trusses until the pressor field snapped them into place. When that was done, they had the easier job of gluing and stapling down the roof sheets. Meanwhile, the rest of us glued and stapled the outer walls, and then unrolled thick insulation, and forced it into place with the inner walls. The window modules were a little tricky, but Marygay and Cat figured them out, working in tandem, one inside and one outside.

We 'finished' the interior in no time, since it was all modular, with holes in the walls, floor, and roof girders that would snap-fit with pre-measured parts. Tables, storage bins and racks, shelves – I was actually a little jealous; our utility building was a jerry-built shack.

Eloi Casi, who loves working with wood, brought a wine rack that would hold a hundred bottles, so the Larsons could put some away each good year. Most of us brought something for the party; I had thirty fish thawed and cleaned. They weren't too bad, grilled with a spicy sauce, and the Bertrams had towed over their outdoor grill, with several armloads of split wood. They fired it up when we started working on the inside, and by the time we were done it was good glowing coals. Besides our fish, there was chicken and rabbit and the large native mushrooms.

I was too tired and dirty to feel much like partying, but there was warm water to scrub with, and Ami produced a few liters of skag she'd distilled, which had been sitting for months with berries, to soften the flavor. It was still fiery, and revived me.

The usual people had brought musical instruments, and they actually sounded pretty good in the big empty barn. People with some energy left danced on the new marble floor. I tended the fish and mushrooms and broiled onions, and drank almost enough skag to start dancing myself.

Man declined our food, politely, and made a few stress measurements, and declared the barn safe. Then she went home to do whatever it is they do.

Charlie and Diana joined me at the grill, setting out chicken pieces as I removed fish.

'So you'd fight them?' she said quietly. Charlie'd been talking to her. 'To what end? If you killed every one of them, what would it accomplish?'

'Oh, I don't want to kill even one of them. They're people, whatever else they claim to be. But I'm working on something. I'll bring it up at a meeting when we have the bugs ironed out.'

'We? You and Marygay?'

'Sure.' Actually, I hadn't discussed it with her, since the thought had only occurred to me between the mastic and the girders. 'One for one and all for all.'

'You had some strange sayings in the old days.'

'We were strange people.' I carefully loosened the grilled fish and slipped them onto a warm platter. 'But we got things done.'

Marygay and I talked long into the night and early morning. She was almost as fed up as I was, with Man and our one-sided arrangement, breeding stock staked out on this deadend arctic planet. It was survival, but only that. We should do more, while we were still young enough.

She was wildly enthusiastic about my scheme at first, but then had reservations because of the children. I was pretty sure I could talk them into going along with the plan. At least Sara, I thought privately.

She agreed that we ought to work out some details before we brought the thing to meeting. Not present it to the kids until after we'd talked it over with the other vets.

I didn't sleep until almost dawn, blood singing with revolution. For several weeks we tried to act normal, stealing an hour here and there to take a notebook out of hiding and jot down thoughts, work on the numbers.

In retrospect, I think we should have trusted Bill and Sara to be in on it from the first. Our judgment may have been clouded by the thrill of shared secrecy, and the anticipated pleasure of dropping a bombshell.

Three

By sundown the rain had gone through sleet to soft sifting snow, so we let Bill go straight to his volleyball game, and walked over to Charlie's. Selena, the larger moon, was full, and gave the clouds a pleasant and handy opalescence. We didn't need the flashlight.

Their place was about a klick from the lake, in a copse of evergreens that looked disconcertingly like palm trees on Earth. Palm trees heavy with snow sort of summed up Middle Finger.

We'd called to say we were coming early. I helped Diana set up the samovars and tea stuff while Marygay helped Charlie in the kitchen.

(Diana and I had a secret sexual history that not even she knew about. Conventionally lesbian before she came here, during Sade-138 she had gotten drunk and made a pass at me, just to give it a try the old-fashioned way. But she passed out before either of us could do anything about it, and didn't remember it in the morning.)

I lifted the iron kettle of boiling water and poured it over the leaves in two pots. Tea was one thing that adapted well to this planet. The coffee was no better than army soya. There was no place on the planet warm enough for it to grow naturally.

I put the heavy kettle back down. 'So your arm's better,' Diana observed. She'd given me an elastic thing and some pills, after I pulled a muscle working on the roof.

'Haven't lifted anything heavier than a piece of chalk.'

She punched a timer for the tea. 'You use chalk?'

'When I don't need holo. The kids are kind of fascinated by it.'

'Any geniuses this term?' I taught senior physics at the high school and Introduction to Mathematical Physics at the college.

'One in college, Matthew Anderson. Leona's boy. Of course I didn't have him in high school.' Gifted science students had classes taught by Man. Like my son. 'Most of them, I just try to keep awake.'

Charlie and Marygay brought in trays of cheese and fruit, and Charlie went out to get another couple of logs for the fire.

Their place was better suited than ours, or most others', for this sort of thing. Downstairs was one large round room, the kitchen in a separate alcove. The building was a metal dome that had been half of a Tauran warship's fuel tank, doors and windows cut in, its industrial origin camouflaged inside with wooden paneling and drapes. A circular staircase led to the bedrooms and library upstairs. Diana had a small office and examination room up there, but she did most of her work in town, at the hospital and the university clinic.

The fireplace was a raised circle of brick, halfway between the center and wall, with a conical hood. So the fire was sort of like a primitive campfire, a nice locus for a meeting of a council of elders.

Which is what this was, though the ages of the participants ranged from over a thousand to barely a hundred, depending on when they were drafted into the Forever War. Their physical age went from late thirties to early fifties, in Earth years. The years here were three times as long. I guess people would eventually become used to the idea of starting school at 2, puberty before 4, majority at 6. But not my generation.

I had been physically 32 when I got here, although if you counted from birth date, ignoring time dilation and collapsar jumps, I was 1,168 in Earth years. So I was 54 now – or '32 plus 6,' as some vets said, trying to reconcile the two systems.

The vets began to arrive, by ones, twos, and fours. Usually about fifty showed up, about a third of those within walking distance. One was an observer, with a holo recorder, who came from the capital city, Centrus. Our veterans' group had no name, and no real central organization, but it did keep records of these informal meetings in an archive the size of a marble.

One copy was in a safe place and the other was in the pocket of the woman with the recorder. Either one would scramble itself if touched by Man or Tauran; a film on the outside of the marble sensed DNA.

It wasn't that a lot of secret or subversive discussion went on here; Man knew how most of the vets felt, and didn't care. What could we do?

For the same reason, only a minority of the vets ever came to the meetings, and many of them just came to see friends. What was the use of griping? You couldn't change anything. Not everyone even believed things needed changing.

They didn't mind being part of a 'eugenic baseline.' What I called a human zoo. When one Man died, another was quickened, by cloning. Their genetic makeup never changed – why mess with perfection? Our function was to go ahead and make babies the old-fashioned way, random mutation and evolution. I suppose if we came up with something better than Man, they'd start using our genetic material instead. Or perhaps see us as dangerous rivals and kill us off.

But meanwhile we were 'free.' Man had helped us start up a civilization on this planet, and kept us in touch with the other inhabited ones, including Earth. You could even have gone to Earth, when you mustered out, if you were willing to pay the price – be sterilized and become one of them.

A lot of vets had done it, but Earth didn't sound at all inviting to me. One big city, full of Man and Taurans. I could live with these long winters, for the sake of the company.

Most of the people were reasonably content here. I was hoping to change that tonight. Marygay and I had been hatching a plan, and I was going to throw it out for discussion.

After about a half-hour, forty people had shown up, clustered around the fire, and I supposed weather was keeping the rest away. Diana tapped on a glass for attention, and introduced the woman from Centrus.

Her name was Lori. Her English had the flat Man accent of most Centrans. (All of us vets spoke English, which had been the default language during the Forever War, for people born centuries and continents – or even planets – apart. Some of us only spoke it at get-togethers like this, and the strain showed.)

She was small and slender and had an interesting tattoo that peeked out from under her singlet, a snake with an apple in its mouth. 'There's not much to report that hasn't been in the news,' she said. 'A number of Taurans landed and stayed for one day of meetings, evidently some sort of delegation. But they never appeared in public.'

'Good thing,' Max Weston said. 'I don't care if I never see one of those bastards again.'

'Don't come to Centrus, then. I see one or two a day, in their bubbles.'

'That's gutsy,' he admitted. 'Sooner or later somebody'll take a shot at them.'

'That may be their purpose,' I said. 'Decoys, sacrificial lambs. Find out who has the weapons and the anger.'

'Could well be,' Lori said. 'They don't seem to do much but walk around.'

'Tourists,' Mohammed Morabitu said. 'Even Taurans might be tourists.'

'Three are permanent,' Cat said. 'A friend of mine installed a heat pump in their apartment in the Office for Interplanetary Communications.'

'Anyhow,' Lori said, 'these Taurans came in for a day, were put on a blacked-out floater from the Law Building, spent four hours there, and returned to the shuttle and left. A couple of cargo handlers saw them; otherwise they could have been in and out without being noticed by humans.'

'I wonder why bother with secrecy,' I said. 'There've been delegations before.'

'I don't know. And the shortness of the visit was odd, as well as the number four. Why should a group mind send more than one representative?'

'Redundancy,' Charlie said. 'Max might have run into them and killed three with his bare hands.'

As far as we could tell, the Tauran 'group mind' was no more mysterious than Man's. No telepathy or anything; individuals regularly uploaded and downloaded experiences into a common memory. If an individual dies before tapping into the Memory Tree, new information is lost.

It did seem uncanny, since they were all physically twins. But we could do the same thing, if we were willing to have holes drilled into our skulls and plugs installed. Thanks, no. I have enough on my mind.

'Otherwise,' Lori continued, 'not much is happening in Centrus. The force field bunch got voted down again, so we'll be shoveling snow another year.'

Some of us laughed at that – with only ten thousand people, Centrus wasn't big enough to warrant the energy expenditure to maintain a winter-long force field. But it was the planetary capital, and some citizens wanted the field as a status symbol as much as a convenience. Having the only spaceport, and alien visitors, didn't make them special enough.

To my knowledge, no Taurans had ever been here to Paxton. It might be unsafe; with our large vet population, a lot of people were like Max, unforgiving. I didn't bear them any animus myself. The Forever War had been a colossal misunderstanding, and perhaps we were more at fault than they.

They were still ugly and smelled weird and had killed a lot of my friends. But it wasn't Taurans who had sentenced us to life imprisonment on this iceberg. That was Man's idea. And Man might be a few billion twins, but they were still biologically human.

A lot of what went on in these meetings was just a more splenetic version of complaints that had already been sent through channels. The power grid was unreliable and had to be fixed before deep winter, or people would die, and the only response from Centrus was a schedule of municipal engineering priorities, where we kept getting shoved back in favor of towns that were closer to the capital. (We were the farthest away – a sort of Alaska or Siberia, to use examples that would be meaningless to almost everyone.)

Of course, the main reason for these secret meetings was that Centrus did not really reflect our concerns or serve our needs. The government was human, elected representatives whose numbers were based on population and profession. But in actual administration, Man had oversight that amounted to veto power.

And Man's priorities were not the same as ours. It was more than just a city/country thing, even though it sometimes took that appearance. I called it 'deliberate speciation.' About half the population of Men on the planet lived in Centrus, and most of the ones sent out to places like Paxton usually only stayed one long Year before going back. So whatever benefited Centrus benefited Man. And weakened us, out in the provinces, however indirectly.

I'd worked with Man teachers, of course, and a few times dealt with administrators. I'd long gotten over the uncanniness of them all looking and, superficially, acting the same. Always calm and reasonable, serious and gentle. With just a grain of pity for us.

We talked about the grid problem, the school problems, the phosphate mine that they wanted to build too close to Paxton (which would also bring a freight monorail that we needed), and smaller problems. Then I dropped my bombshell.

'I have a modest proposal.' Marygay looked at me and smiled. 'Marygay and I think we all should help Man and our Tauran brothers out with their noble experiment.'

There was a moment of absolute silence, except for the crackling fire. The phrase 'modest proposal' meant nothing to most of them, I realized, born a millennium after Swift. 'Okay,' Charlie said. 'What's the punch line?'

'They want to isolate a human population as a genetic baseline. Let's give them isolation with a vengeance.

'What I propose is that we take the Time Warp from them. But we don't just go back and forth between Mizar and Alcor. We take it out as far as it can go, and come back safely.'

'Twenty thousand light-years,' Marygay said. 'Forty thousand, here and back. Give them two thousand generations for their experiment.' 'And leave us alone for two thousand generations,' I said.

'How many of us could you take?' Cat asked.

'The Time Warp's designed for two hundred, crowded,' Marygay said. 'I spent a few years on it, waiting for William, and it wasn't too bad. We would probably want a hundred fifty, for long-term living.'

'How long?' Charlie said.

'We'd age ten years,' I said. 'Real years.'

'It's an interesting idea,' Diana said, 'but I doubt you'd have to highjack the damned thing. It's a museum piece, empty for a generation. Just ask for it.'

'We shouldn't even have to ask for it. Man's claim to ownership of it is a legal fiction. I paid for one three-hundred-twelfth of it, myself,' Marygay said. There were 312 vets in on the original 'time shuttle' deal.

'With wealth artificially generated by relativity,' Lori said. 'Your salary piling up interest, while you were out soldiering.'

'That's true. It was still money.' Marygay turned to the others. 'Nobody else here bought a piece of the shuttle?'

There was a general shaking of heads, but Teresa Larson raised her hand. 'They stole it from us, pure and simple,' she said. 'I got billions of Earth dollars, enough to buy a mansion on the Nile. But it won't buy a loaf of bread on Middle Finger.'

'To be devil's advocate here,' I said, 'Man offered to "assume stewardship" of it, if the humans were going to abandon it. And most of the humans had no interest in it after it had served its purpose.'

'Including me,' Marygay said. 'And I don't deny having been a willing collaborator in the swindle. They bought back our shares with money we could only spend on Earth. It was amusing at the time, worthless money in exchange for a worthless antique.'

'It is an antique,' I said. 'Marygay took me up there once to show me around. But did it ever occur to you to wonder why they keep it maintained?'

'Tell me,' Diana said. 'You're going to.'

Not out of sentiment, that's for sure. I suspect they're maintaining it as a kind of lifeboat for themselves, if the situation gets difficult.'

'So let's make it difficult,' Max said. 'Stack 'em in there like cordwood and shoot 'em back to Earth. Or to their Tauran pals.'

I ignored that. 'No matter what their plans are, they won't just let us have it. It may be three Earth centuries old, but it's still by far the largest and most powerful machine in this corner of the universe – even without weapons, a Class III cruiser is a lot of power and materiel. They don't make anything like them anymore. It probably comprises a tenth of the actual material wealth in the system.'

'It's an interesting thought,' Lori said, 'but how do you plan to get there? Both of the orbital shuttles on the planet are at Centrus. You'll have to highjack at least one of those before you highjack the time shuttle.'

'It will take some planning,' I admitted. 'We have to manufacture a situation where the alternative to letting us take the Time Warp is unacceptable. Suppose we had kidnapped those four Taurans and threatened to kill them?'

She laughed. 'They'd probably say, "Go ahead," and send for four more.'

'I'm not convinced of that. I suspect they may be no more actually interchangeable than Man is. We only have their word for it – as you say, if they're all the same, why go to the expense of sending four?'

'You could just ask them for the ship first,' said Ami Larsen. 'I mean, they are reasonable. If they said no, then–'

People were murmuring, and a couple of them laughed out loud. Ami was third-generation Paxton, not a vet. She was here because she was married to Teresa.

'You grew up with them, Ami.' Diana kept a controlled neutral expression. 'Some of us old folks aren't so trusting.'

'So we go out for ten years, or forty thousand, and come back,' said Lar Po. 'Suppose Man's experiment has been successful. We'll be useless Cro-Magnon.'

'Worse than that,' I said cheerfully. 'They'll probably have directed their evolution into some totally new direction. We might be like house pets. Or jellyfish.

'But part of my point is that you and I and most of us here have done this before. Every time we came back from a campaign, we'd have to start over – even if only a few dozen years had passed on Earth, most of our friends and relatives had died or aged into totally different people. Customs and laws were alien. We were largely unemployable, except as soldiers.'

'And you want to do it again, voluntarily?' Charlie said. 'Leave behind the life you've built for yourself?'

'Fisherman-teacher. I could tear myself away.'

'William and I are in a better situation than most,' Marygay said. 'Our children are grown, and we're still young enough to strike out in a new direction.'

Ami shook her head. She was our age, biologically, and she and Teresa had teenage daughters. 'You aren't curious about how your kids will turn out? You don't want to see your grandchildren?'

'We're hoping they'll come along,' she said.

'If they don't?'

'Then they don't,' I said. 'A lot of children leave home and start off on their own.'

Ami pressed on. 'But not many parents do. Look at the choice you're giving them. Throw away their own world to join their parents.'

'As time travelers. As pioneers.'

Charlie butted in. 'Forget about that aspect for a minute. Do you actually think you can recruit a hundred, a hundred fifty people without anybody going to Man and pointing the finger at you?'

'That's why we want to keep it among vets.'

'I just don't want to see my oldest friend in jail.'

'We're in jail, Charlie.' I made a gesture that didn't knock anything over. 'We can't see the bars because they're over the horizon.'

Four

The meeting broke up at midnight, after I called for a show of hands. Sixteen were with us, eighteen against, and six undecided. More support than I'd thought.

We walked home through snow that had a pleasant crunch to it, enjoying the night air, not saying much.

We came in the back door, and there at the dining room table, sipping tea, was Man. Over by the fire, warming its back, a Tauran. My arm came up halfway, in an aiming reflex.

'It's late,' I said to the Man, my eyes on the Tauran's fisheye clusters. One hand fluttered its seven fingers, fourteen-jointed.

'I have to talk to you now.'

'Where are the children?'

'I asked them to go upstairs.'

'Bill! Sara!' I called. 'Whatever you say to us, they can hear.' I turned to the Tauran. '–An evening of good fortune,' I approximated in its language. Marygay repeated it, better.

'Thank you,' it said in English, 'but not for you, I fear.' It was wearing a black cloak, a nice Hallowe'en effect with its wrinkled orange skin. The cloak made it took less alien, hiding the wasp waist and huge pelvis.

'I must be getting old,' I said to Man. 'Lori seemed like one of us.'

'She is. She didn't know we were listening.'

Bill and Sara were at the top of the stairs in nightgowns. 'Come on down. We're not going to say anything you can't hear.'

'But I am,' Man said. 'Go back to bed.' They obeyed.

Disappointing, but not surprising. They'd listen anyhow.

'This is Antres 906,' Man said, 'the cultural attaché to Middle Finger.' I nodded at it. 'Okay.'

'Are you curious as to why he is here?'

Not really. Just go ahead and have your say.'

'He is here because a Tauran representative must be present in any negotiations involving possible travel to Tauran planets.'

'What does that have to do with culture?' Marygay said.

'Pardon me?'

'It's the cultural attaché,' she said. 'What does that have to do with us borrowing the time shuttle?'

'"Culture" includes tourism. And stealing is not borrowing.'

'They're not on our route,' I said. 'We're going straight up, out of the galactic plane, and straight back. An isosceles triangle, actually.'

'You should have gone through proper channels for this.'

'Sure. Starting with you, the sheriff.' He covered the back of his hand, with its identifying scar.

'You could start with anyone. We are a group mind.'

'But you didn't send just anyone. You sent the one Man in this town who has weapons and exercises with weights.'

'You are both soldiers.' He opened his vest to display a large pistol. 'You might resist.'

'Resist what?' Marygay said.

'Coming with me. You're under arrest.'

Paxton doesn't have a large enough criminal element to warrant an actual jail, but I suppose anything that locks on the outside will do. I was in a white room with no windows, furnished with a mattress on the floor and a toilet. There was a fold-down sink next to the toilet, and across from it, a fold-down desk. But no chair. The desk had a keyboard, but it didn't work.

It had a barroom smell, spilled alcohol. That must be what they used as a disinfectant, for some reason.

I knew from a visit last year that the place had only two detention rooms, so Marygay and I constituted a crime wave. (Serious criminals, actually, didn't even spend the night here; they went straight to the real jail in Wimberly.)

I spent a while contemplating the error of my ways, and then managed to get a few hours' sleep in spite of not being able to turn off the lights.

When the sheriff opened the door I could see sunshine behind him; it was ten or eleven. He handed me a white cardboard box that had soap, a toothbrush, and such. 'The shower is across the hall. Please join me for tea when you are ready.' He left with no further explanation.

There were two showers; Marygay was already in one of them. I raised my voice. 'He tell you anything?'

'Just unlocked the door and said to come for tea. Why didn't we ever think of doing this with the children?'

'Too late to start now.' I showered and shaved and we went to the sheriff's office together.

His pistol was hanging on a peg behind him. The papers on his desk had been hastily stacked in a corner, and he'd set out a pot of tea with some crackers and jam and honey.

We sat and he poured us tea. He looked tired. 'I've been with the Tree all night.' Since it had become daytime in Centrus, he might have been with hundreds or a thousand Men. 'I have a tentative consensus.'

'That took all night?' I said. 'For a group mind, you don't synape very fast.' I kidded my Man colleagues at the university about that. (Physics, in fact, was a good demonstration of Man's limitations: an individual Man could tap into my colleagues' brains, but he or she wouldn't understand anything advanced without having previously studied physics.)

'In fact, much of that time was waiting for individuals to be summoned. Besides your … problem, there was another important decision to be made, not unrelated. "The more leaves, the more Tree."'

The jam was greenberry, a spicy sour flavor I'd liked immediately – one of the only things that had impressed me, the first day on Middle Finger. I'd arrived in deep winter.

'So you've decided to hang us in the town square?' I said. 'Or will it be a simple private beheading?'

'If it were necessary to kill you, it would already have been done.' Great sense of humor. 'What would be the point in explaining things?'

He poured himself some tea. 'There will be a wait. I need confirmation from the Whole Tree.' That meant sending word to Earth and back, at least ten months. 'But the tentative consensus is to send you away with my blessings. Give you the time shuttle.'

'And in return,' Marygay said, 'you lose one hundred fifty powerful malcontents.'

'It's not just that. You are already fascinating anachronisms. Think of how valuable you will be forty thousand years from now!'

'Living fossils,' I said. 'What an idea.'

He hesitated for a moment; the word was unfamiliar. There were no actual fossils on his world. 'Yes, in body as well as in modes of thought. In a way, I owe it to my own heritage. I should have thought of it myself.' In their own language, there was a 'collective "I,"' which I assumed he was using.

'You said there were two decisions,' Marygay said. 'A related one.'

'A mirror of yours, in a way.' He smiled. 'You know I love humans very much. It has always saddened me to see you go through life crippled.'

'Crippled … by our individuality?' I said.

'Exactly! Unable to tap the Tree, and share life with billions of others.'

'Well, we were given the choice when we mustered out. I've had over twenty years to regret not joining you, and so far I'm just as glad I didn't.'

'You did have the choice, yes, and some veterans took it.' 'How many?' Marygay asked.

'Actually, less than one percent. But I was new and strange to you then.

'The point is that it's been a hundred Years – nearly three hundred Earth years – since anyone was given the choice. The population of Middle Finger has grown in that time to over twenty thousand, more than large enough to maintain a viable genetic pool. So I want to start giving people the choice again.'

'Anyone who wants can become you?' I had a powerful premonitory urge to gather my children to me.

'No, it would only be one per new birth, and they would have to pass tests for suitability. And they wouldn't really be me, of course; their genetic make-up will be inferior. But they would still be leaves on the Tree.' He smiled in a way that I'm sure he thought was not condescending. 'It sounds horrible to you, doesn't it. You call us "zombies."'

'It does occur to me that there are enough of you already, on this planet. Not to mention ten billion or so back on Earth. Why not leave us alone? That was the original plan.'

'This is consistent with the original plan, only kinder. You don't see it that way because you're too old-fashioned.'

'Well, at least we have ten months to get used to the idea.' To talk some sense into Bill and Sara.

'Oh, this isn't like the starship. I can go ahead, and if the Whole Tree disagrees, only few people will be affected. But I do know myself; I know the Tree. There will be no problem.'

'People who join you will still be human, though,' Marygay said. 'They'll still marry and have families.'

Man looked puzzled. 'Of course not.'

'But they'll be able,' I said.

'Oh, no. They will have to consent to sterilization.' He shook his head. 'You don't understand. You say there are enough of me. In reality, there are more than enough of you.'

Five

I went straight from jail to the university, since I had to teach at 1400, and liked to be in the office for an hour before class, to go over notes and be available to talk to students. They served a hot lunch in the teachers' lounge, too.

It was kind of grandiose to call the place a 'university,' though it did grant a couple of dozen degrees. It was a circle of ten log buildings connected by breezeways. My physics building had two labs, two small classrooms, and a larger lecture hall, which we shared with chemistry and astronomy. The second floor, which was really just a high attic, was a storage area with two offices tacked on the end.

I shared the office with a Man and Jynn Silver. Jynn had not been at the meeting, because she'd gone to Centrus for her son's wedding, but I was pretty sure she would be on our side. She had no love for Man in general, and for the one who shared our office, in particular.

He was there when I came in, after a quick bowl of soup at the lounge. That was odd; he taught mornings and didn't usually hang around.

He was staring out the window. 'You know,' he said without preamble. 'You're one of the first to know that you might join us. Rather than leave us.'

'True.' I sat down and turned on my screen. 'I was tempted for about a microsecond. Then sanity returned.'

'Joking aside. You should take some time to consider the advantages.'

'I'm not joking.' I looked over at him. 'To me it would be a kind of death.'

'The death of your individuality.' He pronounced the last word very slowly, with just a breath of contempt.

'It's not something you could really understand. Human thing.'

'I'm human.' Technically true. 'If you wanted more children, you could adopt.'

Now there was a compelling argument. 'Two's plenty, thanks.' I blinked through the index outline.

'You could save so much research time–'

'I'm not doing research. I'm a modest fisherman who's trying to teach rotational kinematics. If you'll let me get to my notes.'

'Sorry.'

There was a light knock on the doorframe. 'Master Mandella?' Baril Dain, from last term. 'Come on in, Baril.'

He glanced at Man. 'I don't want to take up your time. Just that, well, I heard about your time trip thing. Can anyone go?'

'We'll have to pick from volunteers.' He'd been a below-average student, but I'd made allowance for home conditions. His mother a drunk and his father living over in Filbin. 'Are you six yet?'

'I will be in Archimedes, 13 Archimedes.'

'That'll be plenty of time.' Six months. 'We'll need young people. What are you best at?'

'Music. I don't remember your word, the English word for it … the choséd-reng.'

'Harp,' Man supplied, not looking up. 'Forty-four-string magneto-harmonic neoharp.'

God, I hated the whining sound of those. 'We'll see. We'll need all kinds of talents.' Probably human music would have priority, though.

'Thank you, sir.' He nodded and backed out, as if I were still his teacher.

'The children know already,' Man said. 'I'm surprised.'

'Good news travels fast.' I opened a drawer with a screech and took out a pad and stylus, and pretended to copy something from the screen.

The classroom was stuffy, stale with three classes' exhalations. I opened the window partway and sat on the table in front. All twelve students were there.

A pretty girl in front raised her hand. 'What's it like to be in jail, Master?'

'As many years as you've been in school, Pratha, you know all there is to know about jail.' That got a slight laugh. 'It's just a room with no windows.' I picked up the text and brushed the face with my sleeve.

'Were you scared, Master?' Modea, my best pupil.

'Of course. Man isn't accountable to us. I could have been locked up forever, eating the slop they and you call food.' They smiled indulgently at my old-fashionedness. 'Or they could have executed me.'

'Man wouldn't, sir.'

'I guess you know them better than I do. But the sheriff was careful to point out that that was in their power.' I held up the text. 'Let's go back for a minute and review what we know about the big I, moment of inertia.'

It was a difficult period. Rotational kinematics is not intuitive. I remembered how much trouble I'd had with it, more than halfway back to Newton's day. The kids paid attention and took notes, but most of them had that 'on autopilot' look. Taking it down by rote, hoping they could puzzle it out later. Some of them would not. (Three were hopelessly lost, I suspected, and I'd have to talk to them soon.)

We ground through to the end of the lesson. While they were putting on their coats and capes, Gol Pri voiced an obvious concern. 'Master Mandella, if Man does let you take the starship, who will our teacher be? For mathematical physics?'

I thought for a moment, discarding possibilities. 'Man, probably, if it's someone from Paxton.' Gol's face tightened slightly. He'd had classes from my officemate. 'I would put in a search, though. There are plenty of people in Centrus who could do it, if they felt a sudden hunger for life on the frontier.'

'Would you be teaching on the ship?' Pratha said. 'If we came along?' Her expression was interesting and not ambiguous. Down, boy; she's barely older than your daughter. 'Sure. That's about all I'm good for.'

Actually, they might make me harvest fish, aboard the Time Warp. That would be a major part of the diet, and I certainly knew my way around a cleaver.

When I got home from class, I didn't go straight out to the dock. There was no rush. The day was clear and cold, Mizar making the sky a naked energetic blue, like an electric arc. I'd wait for Bill to get home.

Meanwhile I brewed a pot of tea and blinked through the news. The service came from Centrus, so our story was there, but buried in the exurb section, cross-ref to vets and Earth. Just as well. I didn't want a lot of questions before we had answers.

I asked for random Beethoven and just listened, staring out at the lake and forest. There was a time when I would have thought you'd be nuts to trade this for the austerity and monotony of a starship.

There was also a time when I was, we were, romantic about the frontier. We came out here when Marygay was pregnant with Bill. But it's grown up to where it's just Centrus without conveniences. And there's no place farther out, not to live. No population pressure to speak of. No cultural mandate to keep moving out.

One of the useless things I remember from school is the Turner Thesis. How the American character was shaped by the frontier, always receding, always tempting.

That gave me a little chill. Is that what we were proposing? A temporal version of a dream that was really dead before I was born. Though it drove my father, along with my family – in a VW bus with flowers painted all over the rusted body – to the Pacific and then north to Alaska. Where we found rough-and-ready frontier shops that served latte and cappuccino.

It was possible that out of ten billion souls scattered through this corner of the Galaxy, only Marygay and I had even a tenuous connection to the American frontier. Charlie and Diana and Max were born in a place that still called itself America, but it had not been a place that Frederick Jackson Turner would have recognized, its only 'frontier' light-years and centuries away, men and women fighting an incomprehensible enemy for no reason.

Bill came in and we both put on aprons and gloves and went out to the dock. We worked in relative silence, monosyllables, for the first two trotlines, Bill beheading them with such fervor that twice he got the cleaver stuck in the wood.

'People give you shit about your parents being jailbirds?'

"'Birds"? Oh, being in jail, yeah. They mostly thought it was funny. Stealing the starship and all, like a movie.'

'Looks like they'll just give it to us.'

'Our history Man said she thought they would. They could replace the starship with a newer one, from Earth, through the collapsar. No real loss.' He whacked down on a fish. 'To them.'

That was clear enough. 'But there would be to you. If you don't go with us.'

He held down the writhing headless fish for a moment, then chopped off its tail and threw it in the freezer. 'There are things I can't say in English. Maybe there aren't words.'

'Go on.'

'You say "there would be to you," a loss. Or you could say "there will be a loss to you." But nothing in between.'

I paused, my hand on the line, trying to sort out grammar. 'I don't get it. You say "would" because it's in the future, uncertain.'

He spat out a phrase in Standard: Ta meeya a cha! You say meeya when the outcome is uncertain but the decision has been made. Not ta loo a cha or ta lee a cha, which is like your "would" or "will."'

'I was never good with languages.'

'I guess not. But the point is, the point is…' He was angry, jaw set, reddening. He did another fish and jammed its head back on the hook. 'No matter what the outcome, you've done it. You've said to the world "the hell with Bill and Sara." You're going your own way. Whether Man allows it or not, the intent is there.'

'That's harsh.' I finished the fish I was doing. 'You can come with us. I want you to come with us.'

'And what an offer that is! Throw away everything! Thanks a lot.'

I struggled to keep my voice calm. 'You could see it as an opportunity, too.'

'Maybe to you. I'd be over ten – thirty-some, by little years – and everyone I ever knew, except for you, dead for forty thousand. That's not an opportunity. That's a sentence! Almost a death sentence.'

'To me it's a frontier. The only one left.'

'Cowboys and Hindus,' he said quietly, turning back to the fish. I didn't say 'Pakistanis.'

I could see that he was normal and I was not, even by the standards of my own long-dead culture. Marygay and I, and the other Forever War vets, had repeatedly been flung forward in time, often knowing that when you came to ground, the only people still alive from your past would be the ones you had traveled with.

Twenty years later, that was still central to me: the present is a comforting illusion, and although life persists, any one life is just a breath in the wind. I would be challenged on that the next afternoon, from an unexpected source.

Six

Three times a long Year, I had to report to Diana for some primitive medicine. No human or Man born in the past several centuries had had cancer, but some of us fossils lacked the genes to suppress it. So periodically, Diana had to check, as we politely used to say, where the sun don't shine.

The wall of her office, upstairs in the dome, had been gleaming metal at first, with really strange acoustics due to its roundness. She could stand across the room and whisper, and it would sound as if she were next to your ear. Charlie and Max and I liberated some studs and panels from a stack behind the firehouse, and nailed together a passably square room. The walls were a comfortable clutter of pictures and holos now, which I tried to study intensely as she threaded a sensor probe up into my colon.

'Your little friend's back,' she said. 'Precancerous lesions. I've got a sample to send off.' It was an odd sensation when the probe withdrew, so fast it made me gasp. Relief and a little pain, an erotic shiver.

'You know the drill. When you get the pill, don't eat for twelve hours, take it, then two hours later, stuff yourself. Bread, mashed potatoes.' She crossed over to the steel sinks of the lab module, carefully holding the ophidian probe away from her. 'Get cleaned up and dressed while I set this up.'

She would send the cells off to a place in Centrus, where they'd make up a pill full of mechanical microphages, programmed to dine on my cancer and then switch off. It was only a minor inconvenience, nothing compared to the skin cancer treatment, which was just painted on, but burned and itched for a long time.

Marygay and I had to chase cancer all the time, like everybody we knew who had gone through limb replacement on the hospital planet Heaven, back in the old days. They've licked that now.

I eased myself down by her desk just as she finished wrapping the package. She sat down and addressed it from memory. 'I ordered five of these, which should be plenty for ten years. The examination's just a formality; I'd be surprised if your cancer's changed since the first one.' 'You'll be along, though, to check it out?'

'Yeah. I'm as crazy as you are.'

I laughed. She didn't. She put her elbows on the desk and stared at me. 'I'll never bother you about this again, William, but as your doctor I have to say it.'

'I think I know what it is.'

'You probably do. This whole ambitious scheme is just an elaborate response to post-traumatic stress disorder. I could give you pills for that.'

'As you've offered in the past. Thanks, but no thanks. I don't believe in chemical exorcism.'

'Charlie and I are running away with you for the same reason. Hoping to put our ghosts to rest. But we're not leaving any children behind.'

'Neither are we. Unless they choose to stay.'

'They will. You're going to lose them.'

'We have ten months to turn them around.'

She nodded. 'Sure. If you can get Bill to go, I'll let you stick something up my ass.'

'Best offer I've had all day.'

She smiled and put a hand on my arm. 'Come on downstairs. Let's have a glass of wine.'

Seven

Marygay and I were in the group of twelve, plus one Man and one Tauran, who went up to inspect the starship, to determine what would be necessary for the voyage. We couldn't just turn the key and go, when the ten months were up. We were assuming the Whole Tree would endorse the 'good riddance' policy, and it could take most of the ten months' wait to get the ship in order.

The trip up to orbit was interesting, the first time I'd been in space since the kids were born. We went straight up, with constant gentle acceleration. That was a profligate waste of antimatter, I knew. The Man pilot shrugged and said there was plenty. She wasn't sure where it came from; maybe from the huge supply in the Time Warp.

For a spaceship, the shuttle was tiny, about the size of a schoolbus. There were windows all around, including behind, so we could watch Centrus shrink until it merged with the countryside. Ahead, the starship became the brightest star in the darkening sky. By the time we were in black space, you could tell it wasn't a star; slightly elongated.

The shuttle flipped and began slowing when we were maybe a thousand kilometers from it. Braking at about two gees, it was uncomfortable to crane around to watch the starship grow. But it was worth a stiff neck.

The Time Warp was an antique, but not by my standards! It had been designed and built more than a millennium after I'd left school. The last cruiser I'd fought in had been an ungainly collection of modules stacked around in a jumble of girders and cables. The Time Warp had a simple elegant form: two rounded cylinders, attached at front and rear, with a slab of shielding between them along the rear half, to soak up gamma rays. The metal was like delicate lace around the very end of the top cylinder, where the antimatter engine waited.

We docked with an almost imperceptible bump, and when the airlock door irised open, my ears popped and I was suddenly glad they'd warned us to bring sweaters.

The ship had been maintained with the life-support systems at a bare minimum. The air was stale and cold, just enough above zero to keep the water from freezing and bursting pipes.

The partial pressure was equivalent to three kilometers' altitude, thin enough to make you dizzy. We would get used to it over time.

We used handholds to crawl clumsily through the zero-gee into an elevator decorated with cheerful scenes from Earth and Heaven.

The control room looked more like something that actually belonged in a spaceship. A long console with four swivel chairs. When we entered, the control board glittered into life, indicator lights going through some warming-up sequence, and the ship spoke to us in a friendly baritone.

'I've been expecting you. Welcome.'

'Our agricultural expert wants the place warmed up as soon as possible,' Man said. 'What kind of timetable can she expect?'

'About two days for hydroponics. Five before you ought to start planting in the dirt. For aquaculture, it depends on the species, of course. The water will be at least ten degrees everywhere in eight days.'

'You have a greenhouse you can warm up?'

'For seedlings, yes. It's almost ready now.'

Teresa looked at Man. 'Why don't a couple of us stay up here and get some flats started. Be nice to have stuff growing as soon as possible.'

'I'd like to help,' Rubi said. 'Have to be back by the twenty-first, though.'

'Me, too,' Justin said. 'When's the next flight?'

'We can be flexible,' Man said. 'A week, ten days.' She made the kissing sound that signaled the ship that she was talking to it. 'You have plenty of food for three people?'

'Several years' worth, if they can survive emergency rations. Or I can activate the galley, and they can use up frozen food. It's very old, though.'

Teresa smacked. 'Do that. Let's save the emergency rations for emergencies.'

I wouldn't have minded joining them myself, though I'm not much of a farmer. It was pleasantly exciting. Like putting twigs on the embers of a banked fire, and blowing gently to make the small flame that would start it over again.

But I had classes and fish to take care of. Maybe when classes were over next month, I could come up and help get the aquaculture started.

Marygay pinched my butt. 'Don't even think about it. You've got classes.'

'I know, I know.' How long had we been reading each other's minds?

We took a holo tour of the 'engine room,' which was not a room by anybody's definition. It did have a cylindrical wall of lacy aluminum, for the convenience of workers. Nobody would ever be out there while the engine was running, of course, Gamma-ray leakage would fry them in seconds. A lot of the engine crew would practice working with remote robots, in case repairs had to be made and the engine couldn't be shut off.

There was a huge water tank – a drained lake's worth of water – and a much smaller glowing ball of antimatter, a perfect sphere of sparkling blue pinpricks.

I stared at it for some time, the ship droning on about technical specifications that I could look up later. That glittering ball was our ticket to a new life, one that suddenly seemed real. Freedom, in this small prison.

It had occurred to me that it wasn't just the bland tyranny of Man and Tauran that I wanted to escape. It was also everyday life, the community and family that I had watched growing for the past generation. I was dangerously close to becoming a tribal elder – and despite the fact that I was technically the oldest person on the planet, I wasn't nearly ready for that. Time and spirit for a couple of adventures more. Even a passive adventure like this.

Call it fear of becoming a grandfather. Settling into the role of observer and advisor. I shaved off my beard years ago, when it started to show patches of white. I could just see growing it long, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch…

Marygay wiggled my elbow. 'Hello? Anybody home?' She laughed. 'The ship wants to take us downstairs.'

We wended our serpentine way back to the lift, and in my mind's eye I could almost see fields of grain and fruits and vegetables; the tanks roiling with fish and shrimp.

When we reached the midpoint we got out of the lift and followed Man, floating down the corridor lined with artwork that was showing age. We were out of practice with this kind of locomotion, and kept butting and nudging each other until, with the aid of handholds, we managed to stay in a more or less orderly line.

The 'bottom' cylinder was the same size as the one we'd just left, but it looked larger, for the lack of things on a familiar human scale. Five escape craft dominated the cargo hold, each one a fighter modified to hold thirty people. They could only accelerate up to one-tenth the speed of light (and decelerate at the other end, of course), but the life-support equipment included suspended-animation tanks that would keep people somewhat alive for centuries. Mizar and Alcor are three lightyears apart, so with the ship's original back-and-forth mission, the most time they would spend zipped up in the tanks was thirty years. Which would pass like nothing, supposedly.

I clicked for the ship's attention. 'What's our upper limit, given the flight plan I filed? What's our point of no return?'

'It's not possible to be definite,' it said. 'Each suspended-animation tank will function until a vital component fails. They're superconducting, and require no power input, at least not for tens of thousands of years. I doubt that the systems would last more than a thousand years, though; a hundred light-years' distance. That will be a little more than three years into our voyage.'

It was amusing that a machine would use a romantic word like 'voyage.' It was well programmed to keep company with a bunch of middle-aged runaways.

At the bow of the cylinder was a neat stack of modules left over from the war – a kind of build-a-planet kit, the ultimate lifeboat. We knew that Earthlike worlds were common. If the ship couldn't make collapsar insertion and go home, those modules gave the people a chance of building a new home. We didn't know whether it had ever happened. There had been forty-three cruisers unaccounted for at the end of the war, some of them so far away that we would never hear from them. My own last assignment had been in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 150,000 light-years away.

Most of the rest of the hold was given over to redundancy, materials and tools to rebuild almost anything in the living cylinder, but the area closest to where we were floating was all tools, some as basic as picks and shovels and forklifts, some unrecognizably esoteric. If something went wrong with the drive or the life-support system, there would be no other job for anyone until it was fixed – or we were fried or frozen.

(Those of us with engineering and scientific backgrounds would be speed-training with the ALSC – Accelerated Life Situation Computer – which was not quite as good as learning in real time, hands on, but it did give you a lot of data, fast. It was sobering to realize that if something did go wrong with the drive – which restrained more energy than had been released in any Earth war – then the person in charge of repairing it would be essentially a walking, talking manual, who had really vivid memories of procedures that had actually been done by some actor centuries dead.)

On the way back up the corridor, Man showed off her zero gee expertise by exuberant spinning and cartwheeling. It was good to sometimes see them acting human.

We were free to wander around and poke at things for a couple of hours before going back to Centrus. Marygay and I retraced the patterns of her life here, but it seemed less like revisiting old memories than like exploring a ghost town.

We went into the last apartment she'd occupied, waiting for me, and she said she wouldn't have recognized it. The last occupant had painted the walls in bright jagged graphics. When Marygay had lived there, the walls were light cobalt blue, and covered with her paintings and drawings. She didn't do it much anymore, but in the years while she was waiting here, she'd become an accomplished artist.

She'd looked forward to getting back to it, once the kids were out of the house. They might be light-years out of the house, soon.

'It's sad for you,' I said.

'Yes and no. They weren't unhappy years. This was the stable part of my world. You'd make close friends and then they'd get off the ship, and every time you stopped at Middle Finger, they'd be six or twelve or eighteen years older, and then dead.' She gestured at the dead dry fields and still waters. 'This was permanence. That it's a shambles now does bother me a little.'

'We'll have it rebuilt soon.'

'Sure.' She put her hands on her hips and surveyed the place. 'We'll make it better.'

Eight

Of course, it wasn't going to be just a matter of rolling up our sleeves and slapping paint around. Man allotted us one shuttle every five days, so we had to plan carefully what and whom to take up when.

The 'whom' was something we had to work out now. There were 150 slots to fill, and they couldn't just be random people. Marygay and Charlie and Diana and I all made up independent lists of the kinds of skills we'd need, and then met at our place and merged the lists and added a few more possibilities.

We had nineteen volunteers from Paxton – one had changed his mind after the meeting – and after we fit each of us to a job assignment, we publicized the plan and asked for volunteers planet-wide, to fill the other 131 berths.

In a week, we had 1,600 volunteers, mostly from Centrus. There was no way the four of us could interview all of them, so first we had to winnow through the applications. I took 238 who had technical occupations and Diana took 101 who were medical. We split the rest up evenly.

I wanted, at first, to give priority to veterans, but Marygay talked me out of it. That was more than half the volunteers, but it wasn't necessarily the most qualified half. The proportion of them who were congenital malcontents and troublemakers was probably high. Did we want to be locked up in a box with them for ten years?

But how could we tell which of the applicants might be unstable, on the basis of a few paragraphs? The people who said some version of 'You've got to take me; Man is driving me crazy!' were just echoing my own sentiments, but they might also be revealing an inability to get along with others, which would make them bad company in our mobile prison.

Both Diana and Marygay had studied psychology in school, but neither claimed any expertise in the detection of loonies.

We narrowed the applications down to four hundred, and wrote back a form letter emphasizing the negative aspects of the ten-year joyride. Isolation, danger, privation. The absolute certainty of returning to a completely alien world.

About 90 percent of the people wrote back and said okay; I've already taken these things into consideration. We dropped the ones who didn't respond before the deadline, and scheduled holo interviews with the others.

We wanted to wind up with a list of two hundred, fifty of them being alternates, to be called if we lost people from death or cold feet. Marygay and I interviewed half, Charlie and Diana the other half. We gave a slight edge to married couples or people in some long-term relationship, but tried not to give het preference over home. You could argue that the more homosexuals, the better, since they were unlikely to add to the population. We couldn't handle more than a dozen, maybe twenty, children.

Charlie and Diana would take longer than Marygay and I, since Diana had to keep clinic hours. Marygay and I were in the twenty-day recess between semesters.

That also meant that Bill and Sara were home, underfoot. Sara spent a lot of time on her loom, trying to finish up a large rug before school started. Bill's big project for the twenty days was to talk us out of this insane quest.

'What're you running away from?' was his basic question. 'You and Mom won't let go of that damned war, and we're going to lose you to it, centuries after it's over.'

Marygay and I argued that we weren't running away from anything. We were taking a leap into the future. A lot of our volunteers were his age or a little older, who had also grown up with Man, but had a less sanguine view of them.

About two weeks into the recess, Bill and Sara dropped their separate bombshells. I'd spent a pleasant hour in the kitchen, fixing polenta and eggs with the last greens of the season, listening to Beethoven and enjoying not talking to strangers over the holo. Bill had set the table without being asked, which I should have recognized as a danger sign.

They ate in relative silence while Marygay and I talked about the day's interviews – mostly about the rejects, who made for better conversation than the sane, sober ones who passed the test.

Bill finished his plate and pushed it slightly away from him. 'I passed a test today.'

I knew what he was going to say, and it felt as if the heat had been sucked out of my body; out of the room. 'The sheriff's test?'

'That's right. I'm going to become one of them. A Man.'

'You didn't say anything about–'

'Are you surprised?' He stared at me like a stranger on a bus.

'No,' I finally said. 'I thought you might wait until we were gone.'

And not be so obviously a traitor, I kept myself from saying.

'You still have time to change your mind,' Marygay said. 'They're not starting the program until deep winter.'

'That's true,' Bill said without elaboration. It felt like he was halfway there already.

Sara had put down her knife and fork and was not looking at Bill. 'I've decided, too.'

'You're not old enough to take the test yet,' I said, perhaps a little too firmly.

'Not that. I've decided to go with you. If there's room for me.'

'Of course there is!' No matter who we have to leave behind.

Bill looked startled. 'I thought you were going to–'

'There's plenty of time for that.' She looked at her mother with pretty earnestness. 'You think that Man will be long gone when you return. I think they'll still be here, in improved, evolved form. That's when I'll join them, and bring them all that I've learned and seen on the voyage.' Then she looked at me with her dimpled open smile. 'Will you take me, as a spy for the other side?'

'Of course I will.' I looked at Bill. 'We do have to take a Man or two. The family could stay together.'

'You don't understand. You don't get it at all.' He stood up. 'I'm going to a new world, too. And I'm going tomorrow.'

'You're leaving?' Marygay said.

'Forever,' he said. 'I can't stand this anymore. I'm going to Centrus.' There was a long silence. 'What about the house?' I said. 'The fish?' The plan had been for him to take it all over, when we left.

'You'll just have to find somebody else.' He was almost shouting. 'I can't live here! I have to get out and start over.'

'You couldn't wait until–' I began.

'No!' He glared at me, struggling for words, and then just shook his head and left the table. We watched in silence as he threw on his cold-weather gear and went outside.

'You aren't surprised,' Sara said.

'We talked this over,' I said. 'He was going to keep the place; do the trotlines.'

'The hell with the fish,' Marygay said quietly. 'Don't you see we just lost him? Lost him for good.' She didn't cry until we were upstairs.

I just felt numb. I realized I'd given him up a long time ago. It's easier to stop being a father than a mother.

Book. Two

The Book of Changes

Nine

Bill only stayed in Centrus for two days. He came back, embarrassed at his outburst. There was still no way he was going to get aboard that starship, but he wasn't going to go back on his word; he'd take care of the fish as long as it was necessary.

I couldn't blame him for wanting to go his own way. Like father, like son. Marygay was happy at his return, but wistful and a little shaken. How many times would she have to lose her son?

We were headed for the big city ourselves, which provoked an odd association with my own boyhood.

An unimaginably long time ago, when I was seven or eight, my hippy parents spent the summer in a commune in Alaska. (That's when my brother was conceived, by somebody; my father always insisted he looked like him!)

It was a fun summer, a highlight of my childhood. We puffed up the Alcan Highway in our old Deadhead Volkswagen bus, camping or stopping in little Canadian towns along the way.

When we got to Anchorage, it seemed huge, and for years after, whenever he told people about the trip, my father quoted the guidebook: If you fly into Anchorage from an American city of any size, it seems small and quaint. If you drive or ferry up through all the little villages, it seems like a teeming metropolis.

I always remembered that when I came into Centrus, which is smaller than Anchorage had been, a millennium and a half ago. My own life has adapted itself to the scale and pace of a village, so my first impression of Centrus is one of dizzying speed and neck-craning size. But I take a mental deep breath and remember New York and London, Paris and Geneva – not to mention Skye and Atlantis, the fabulous pleasure cities that sucked away our money on Heaven. Centrus is a hick town that happens to be the biggest hick town within twenty light-years.

I held on to that thought when we came in to confer with Centrus administrators – which is to say, the world's – about our timetable for fixing up and crewing the Time Warp.

We'd hoped they could just rubber-stamp it. Fourteen of us had spent most of a week arguing over who was to do what, when. I could just see starting over and repeating the process, with the additional pressure of demands from Man.

We went all the way up to the tenth-floor penthouse office of the General Administration Building, and presented our plan to four Men, two male and two female, and a Tauran, who could have been any of three sexes. He turned out to be Antres 906, of course, the cultural attaché we had entertained at our house the night I earned my first entry on the police blotter.

The five of them read the three-page schedule in silence, while Marygay and I looked out over Centrus. There wasn't really too much to see. Beyond the dozen or so square blocks of downtown, the trees were higher than the buildings; I knew there was a good-sized town out there, but the dwellings and businesses were hidden by evergreens, all the way out to the shuttle pad on the horizon, The shuttles themselves weren't visible; both were inside the launching tubes that rose out of the horizon mist like smokestacks on an old-fashioned factory.

The one wall of this room that wasn't window featured ten paintings, five each of human and Tauran manufacture. The human ones were bland cityscapes in the various seasons. The Tauran things were skeins and splotches of colors that clashed so much they seemed to vibrate. I knew that some of them were pigmented with body fluids. They were evidently prettier if you could see into the ultraviolet.

At some subtle signal, they all set down their copies of the schedule in unison.

'We have no objection to this as far as it goes,' said the leftmost Man. She betrayed her lack of telepathy by glancing down the row; the others nodded slightly, including the Tauran. 'The days when you need both shuttles will be an inconvenience, but we can plan around them.'

'"…as far as it goes"?' Marygay said.

'We should have told you this earlier,' she said, 'but it must be obvious. We will require that you take two more passengers. A Man and a Tauran.'

Of course. We'd known about the Man, and should have foreseen the Tauran. 'The Man is not a big problem,' I said. 'He or she can eat our food. But ten years of rations for a Tauran?' I did a quick mental calculation. 'That's an extra six or eight tonnes of cargo.'

'No, it is not a problem,' Antres 906 rasped. 'My metabolism can be altered to survive on your food, with a few grams of supplement daily.'

'You can see the value of this to us,' the Man said.

'Now that I think of it, of course,' I said. 'Both of your species may change somewhat in forty thousand years. You want a pair of time travelers as baselines.'

Marygay shook her head slowly, biting her lower lip. 'We'll have to change the makeup of the crew. No disrespect, Antres, but there are many veterans who could not tolerate your presence for ten hours, let alone ten years.'

'And in any case, we can't guarantee your safety,' I said. 'Many of us were conditioned to kill your kind on sight.'

'But they have all been de-conditioned,' Man said.

I thought of Max, slated as assistant civil engineer. 'With uneven success, I'm afraid.'

'That is understood and forgiven,' Antres said. 'If that part of the experiment fails, then it fails.' It turned to the last page of the report and tapped on the diagram of the cargo cylinder. 'I can make a small place to live down here. That way your people will not be exposed to me often or involuntarily.'

'That's workable,' I said. 'Send us a list of things you'll need, and we'll integrate them into the loading schedule.'

The rest was formalities, having a small cup of strong coffee and a glass of spirits with the Men. The Tauran disappeared and came back in a few minutes with his list. They had obviously been prepared for us.

We didn't say anything about it until we were out of the building. 'Damn. We should have foreseen that and beaten them to the punch.'

'We should have,' Marygay said. 'Now we have to go back and deal with people like Max.'

'Yeah, but it won't be someone like Max who kills the Tauran. It'll be someone who thinks he's over with the war. And then one day just loses it.'

'Someone like you?'

'I don't think so. Hell, I'm not over the war. Bill says that's why I'm running away.'

'Let's not think about the children.' She put an arm around my waist and bumped me with her hip. 'Let's go back to the hotel and actively not think about them.'

After a pleasant interlude, we spent the afternoon shopping, for friends and neighbors as well as ourselves. Nobody in Paxton had a lot of money; we basically had a barter economy, with every adult getting a small check each month from Centrus. Sort of like the universal dole that was working so well, the last time we'd been on Earth.

It did work pretty well on Middle Finger, since nobody expected luxuries. On Earth, people had been almost uniformly poor, but surrounded by constant reminders of unattainable wealth. Out here everyone had about the same kind of simple life.

We pushed a cart down the brick sidewalk, consulting our list, and made about a half-dozen stops. Herbs, guitar strings and clarinet reeds, sandpaper and varnish, memory crystals, a paint set, a kilo of marijuana (Dorian liked it but was allergic to Sage's homegrown variety). Then we had tea at a sidewalk cafe and watched people go by. It was always a novelty to see all those faces you didn't recognize.

'I wonder what this will be like when we come back.'

'Unimaginable,' I said, 'unless it's ancient rubble. You go back forty millenniums in human history and what do you have? Not even towns, I suppose.'

'I don't know. Let's remember to look it up.' On the street in front of us, a car banged into the rear of another one. The Men who were driving the vehicles got out and silently inspected the damage, which was slight, just a mark on a bumper. They nodded at each other and went back to their places.

'Do you think that was an accident?' Marygay said.

'What? Oh … possibly not. Probably.' A staged lesson on how well they got along together. How well Man got along with himself. The coincidence of it happening in front of us was unlikely; there was little traffic.

We indulged in the services of a masseuse and masseur for the hour before we caught the bus back to Paxton.

When we get back, I punched up the library to find out what we were doing forty thousand years ago. We weren't even 'us' yet; still late Neanderthal. They did have flint and stone tools. No evident language or art, except for simple petroglyphs in Australia.

What if Man, and people, were to develop characteristics as profound and basic as language and art – which they could share with us, perhaps, only to the extent that we can 'talk' to dogs, or be amused by the smears a chimp will make with fingerpaints?

It seemed to me that it would certainly be one or the other: extinction or virtual speciation. Either way, the 150 of us would be totally alone. To rebuild the race or wither away, a useless anachronistic appendage.

I was going to keep that conclusion to myself. As if no one else would arrive at it. It would be Aldo Verdeur-Sims to first bring it up in public, or at least semi-public.

Ten

'We're going to seem as alien to them as the Taurans did to us,' Aldo

said, 'if they do manage to survive forty thousand years, which I doubt.'

It was called a 'discussion group' in the first note we'd sent around, but in fact it was most of the people Marygay and I figured would be most active in setting up the project, if not actually running the ship. Sooner or later there would be some democratic process.

Besides us, it was Cat and Aldo, Charlie and Diana, Ami and Teresa, and a floating population that included Max Weston (his xenophobia notwithstanding), our Sara, Lar Po, and the Tens – Mohammed and one or two of his wives.

Po was a contrarian, in his polite way: express an opinion and watch his brain cells start grinding away. 'You assume constant change,' he said to Aldo, 'but in fact Man claims perfection, and no need to change. They might enforce that among themselves, even for forty thousand years.'

'But the humans?' Aldo said.

Po dismissed our race with a flick of his hand. 'I don't think we'll survive two thousand generations. Most likely, we'll challenge Man and the Taurans and be crushed.'

We were meeting, as usual, in our dining room/kitchen. Ami and Teresa had brought two big jugs of blackberry wine, sweet and fortified with brandy, and the discussion was more animated than usual.

'You're both underestimating humanity,' Cat said. 'What's most likely is that Man and the Taurans will stagnate, while humans evolve beyond them. When we come back, it may be only Man who's familiar. Our own descendants grown into something beyond understanding.'

'All this optimism,' Marygay said. 'Can we get back to the diagram?'

Sara had drawn up a neat timetable, based on my notes and Mary-gay's, roughing out the whole thing from now till launch on one big sheet of paper. At least it had started out neat. For the first hour tonight, people had studied it and penciled in suggestions. Then the Larson came with their jugs, and the meeting became more relaxed and conversational. But we did have to refine the timetable in order to firm up the launch schedule.

You could actually look at it as two linked timetables, and in fact there was a ruled line separating the two: before approval and after approval. For the next nine months, we were limited to two launches a week, and one of them had to be reserved for fuel shipment – a tonne of water and two kilograms of antimatter (which with its containment apparatus took up half the shuttle's payload).

After approval came from Earth, we could have daily shuttles most days, the one on the ground being loaded while the one in orbit unloaded. We could make a good case for getting the ship's ecology up and running before approval, but there was no reason to send up people and their belongings, beyond the skeleton crew that was setting up the farms and fish, and the three engineers stalking from stem to stern, checking 'systems' (like toilets and door latches) and making repairs, while it was still relatively easy to find or make parts.

The rationale for fueling up the ship prior to approval was that, if the Whole Tree were to turn us down, the huge ship would make a few trips to Earth, bringing back luxuries and oddities. (Mars, too; human and Man's presence went back for centuries now; you could bundle up and breathe outdoors there with a slight oxygen supplement. They had their own artistic traditions, and even antiques.) There were plenty of humans on Middle Finger, let alone Men, who would much rather see the Time Warp, used that way. Paintings, pianos, pistachio nuts.

We might be allowed to go along as a sort of consolation prize.

Assuming there would be no approval problem, though, we went ahead with scheduling the second stage. It would only take fifteen days to load all of the people and their personal effects, a hundred kilograms each. Each one could also petition to bring another hundred kilograms, or more, for general use. Mass wasn't too critical, but space was; we didn't want to be crowded with clutter.

It does take a lot of stuff to keep 150 people happy for a decade, but much of it was already built into the ship, like the gym and theater. There were even two music rooms, acoustically isolated, so as not to drive neighbors to acts of vandalism. (We tried to get a real piano, speaking of antiques, but there were only three on Middle Finger, so we had to settle for a couple of electronic ones. I couldn't hear the difference, myself.)

Some requests had to be turned down because of the size of our little mobile town. Eloi Casi wanted to bring a two-tonne block of marble, to work for ten years on an intricate sculptural record of the voyage. I would love to see the result, but would not love living with 'clink … clink … clink.' He compromised with a log, a half-meter by two meters, and no power tools.

Marygay and I were the initial arbiters for these requests, always with the understanding that everything from Eloi's huge sculpture to a brass band could be approved by referendum, after the Whole Tree's acceptance.

I explained to Man that we might need extra launches for 'afterthought' luxuries that the population voted to include, and they were cooperative. They actually were getting into the spirit of the thing, in their own undemonstrative way: it was interesting to be in on the beginning of an experiment forty millenniums long.

(They even went so far as to write up a description of the voyage and its purpose in a physical and linguistic medium that might last all those centuries: eight pages of text and diagrams inscribed on platinum plates, and another twelve pages that comprised an elaborate Rosetta Stone, starting with basic physics and chemistry, from which they derived logic, and then grammar, and finally, with some help from biology, a vocabulary large enough to describe the project in simple terms. They planned to put the plates on a wall in an artificial cave on the top of the highest mountain on the planet, with duplicates on Mount Everest on Earth and Olympus Mons on Mars.)

It's both natural and odd that Marygay and I wound up being leaders of the band. We did come up with the idea, of course, but we both new from our military experience that we weren't natural-born leaders. Twenty years' parenting and helping a small community grow had changed us – and twenty years of being the 'oldest' people in the world. There were plenty of people older than us in actual aging, but nobody else who could remember life before the Forever War. So people came to us for advice because of this mostly symbolic maturity.

Most people seemed to assume that I was going to be the captain, when the time came. I wondered how many would be surprised when I stepped down in favor of Marygay. She was more comfortable with being an officer.

Well, being an officer, had gotten her Cat. All I got was Charlie.

The meeting broke up before dark. The first heavy flakes of a long storm were drifting down. There would be more than half a meter on the ground by morning; people had livestock to manage, fires to kindle, children to worry about – children like Bill, out on the road in this weather.

Marygay had gone to the kitchen to make soup and scones and listen to music, while Sara and I sat at the dining room table and consolidated all of the scribblings on her once-neat chart into a coherent timetable. Bill called from the tavern, where he'd been in a pool tournament, and said he'd like to leave the floater there, if nobody needed it right away, and walk home. The snow was so dense in the air that headlights were useless. I said that was a good idea, not mentioning the slur in his speech that made it a doubly good idea.

He seemed sober when he got home, more than an hour later. He came in through the mudroom, laughing while he beat snow off his clothes. I knew how he felt – this kind of snow was a bitch to drive in, but wonderful for walking. The sound of it feathering down, the light touch on skin – nothing like the killer horizontal spikes of a deep winter blizzard. We'd have neither aboard ship, of course, but the lack of one seemed a more than fair trade for the other.

Bill got a fresh scone and some hot cider, and sat down with us. 'Knocked out in the first round,' he said. 'They got me on a technical scratch.' I nodded in sympathy, though I wouldn't know a technical scratch from a technical itch. The game they played was not exactly eight ball.

He frowned at the chart, trying to read it upside-down. 'They really snaffed your pretty chart, sister.'

'It was meant to be snaffed with,' she said. 'We're making up a new one.'

'Call it out to everyone tonight or in the morning,' I said. 'Give them something to do other than shovel snow.'

'Your mind's made up?' he said to Sara. 'You're going to take the big jump? And when you come back, I won't even be dust anymore.'

'Your choice,' she said, 'as well as mine.'

He nodded amiably. 'I mean, I can see why Mom and Dad–'

'We've had this conversation before.'

I could hear the house creak. Settling under the weight of snow. Marygay was sitting silent in the kitchen, listening.

'Run it by again,' I said. 'Things have changed since I last heard it.'

'What, that you're taking one of Man along? And a Tauran?'

'You'll be Man by then.'

He looked at me for a long moment. 'No.'

'It shouldn't make any difference which individual goes. Group mind and all.'

'Bill doesn't have the right genes,' Sara said. 'They'll want to send a real Man.' That was a pun that saw daily use.

'I wouldn't go anyhow. It stinks of suicide.'

'There's not much danger,' I said. 'More danger staying here, actually.'

'That's true. You're less likely to die in the next ten years than I am in the next forty thousand.'

I smiled. 'Ten versus ten.'

'It's still running away. You're bored with this life and you're deathly afraid of growing old. I'm not either of those things.'

'What you are is twenty-one and all-knowing.'

'Yeah, bullshit.'

'And what you don't know is what life used to be like, without Man or Tauran to complicate things. Or make things easier, by brainwashing you.'

'Brainwashing. You haven't brought that up in weeks.'

'It's as obvious as a wart on your nose. But like a wart, you don't see it because you're used to it.'

Bill exploded. 'What I am used to is this constant nagging!' He stood up. 'Sara, you can supply the answers. Keep talking, Dad. I'm gonna go take a nap.'

'So who's running away now?'

'Just tired. Really tired.'

Marygay was at the kitchen door. 'Don't you want some soup?'

Not hungry, Mom. I'll zap some later.' He took the stairs two at a time.

'I do know the answers by heart,' Sara said, smiling, 'if you want to run through the logic again.'

'You're not the one I'm losing,' I said. 'Even though you plan to go over to the enemy someday.' She looked down at her chart and growled something in Tauran. 'What does that mean?'

'It's part of their catechism. It sort of means "Own nothing, lose nothing."' She looked up and her eyes were bright. 'It also means "Love nothing, lose nothing." They use the words interchangeably.'

She stood up slowly. 'I want to talk to him.' When I went up to bed, an hour and a half later, they were still arguing in whispers.

It was Bill's turn to fix breakfast the next morning, and he was silent as he worked over the corn cakes and eggs. I started to compliment him when he served them, but he cut me short: 'I'm going. I'm going with you.'

'What?'

'I've changed my mind.' He looked at Sara. 'Or had it changed. Sister says there's room for another guy-in aquaculture.'

'And you have a natural love for that,' I said.

'The head-chopping part, anyhow.' He sat down. 'It is the chance of a lifetime, of many lifetimes. And I won't be that old, when we get back.'

'Thank you,' Marygay said, her voice wavering. Bill nodded. Sara smiled.

Eleven

The next few months were tiring but interesting. We spent ten or twelve hours a week in the library's ALSC – Accelerated Life Situation Computer – learning or relearning the arcana of spaceflight. Marygay had gone through it before; everyone who went on the time shuttle had to know the basics of how the ship was run.

Unsurprisingly, things had gotten simpler in the centuries since I was last in training. One person could actually control the whole ship, under normal circumstances.

We trained for specialties, too. For me it was shuttle piloting and the suspended-animation facility, which made me long for summer even more than usual.

We were through first winter and well into deep winter before word came from Earth.

Some people like deep winter for its austere simplicity. It rarely snows. The diminished sun climbs its same steady course. It gets down to thirty or forty below at night; sixty-five below before thaw season begins.

The people who like deep winter are not fishermen. When the lake is solid enough to walk on, I go out to make ninety-six holes in the ice, using hollow heated cylinders.

Each cylinder is a meter of thick aluminum with a heating element wound through inside. The cylinder is flared with insulation at the top so as not to sink. I set out a dozen at a time, upright, spaced evenly for the trotlines, then turn them on and wait. After a couple of hours, they melt through, and I turn off the power. Wait another hour or so, and then the fun begins.

Of course by the time the ice is refrozen on the inside, the outside is stuck fast. I carry a sledgehammer and a crowbar. I whang around the outside of the cylinder until there's a cracking, sucking sound, and then I take hold of the flange and haul this thirty-kilogram ice cube up. I turn the power on that one up high and move down to repeat the process on the next one.

By the time I get to the end of the dozen, the first one has warmed enough so that I can slip it off the bar of ice it's holding. Then I use the crowbar to break up the ice that's re-formed in the hole, slip the aluminum sleeve back in, turn the power down to minimum, cap it, and move to the next one.

The reason for this rigamarole is a combination of thermodynamics and fish psychology. I have to keep the water in the hole at exactly zero or the fish won't bite. But if you don't start out with liquid water – just melt through – you wind up with a cylinder of ice clinking around in it. The fish will bite the hook, but hang up and get away.

Bill and Sara did half the holes one day, and Marygay and I did the other half the next. When we came in from work, late afternoon, the house smelled wonderful. Sara was roasting a chicken over the fire, and had made hot mulled cider with sweet wine.

She wasn't in the kitchen. Marygay and I poured cups and went into the living room.

Our children were sitting silently with a Man. I recognized him by his bulk and the scar. 'Afternoon, Sheriff.'

Without preamble: 'The Whole Tree said no.'

I sat down heavily, sloshing some cider. Marygay sat on the couch armrest. 'Just that?' she said. 'Only "no" and nothing more?'

My spinning mind came up with 'Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."'

'There are details.' He pulled out a four- or five-page document, folded over, and set it on the coffee table.

'Basically, they thank you for your work, and have paid each of the one hundred fifty volunteers one one-hundred-fiftieth of what the ship is worth.'

'In Earth credits, no doubt,' I said.

'Yes … but also a trip to Earth, to spend it. It is a large fortune, and could make life easier and more interesting for all of you.'

'Let all one hundred fifty of us aboard?'

'No.' The sheriff smiled. 'You might go someplace other than Earth.' 'How many, and which of us?'

'Seventeen; you choose. They'll be in suspended animation during the flight, as a security precaution.'

'While Man does the flying and life support. How many of you?'

'I wasn't told. How many would it take?'

'Maybe twenty, if ten were farmers.' We hadn't actually thought in terms of minimums. 'Are any of you farmers?'

'I don't know of any. We learn very fast, though.'

'I suppose you do.' Not the response a farmer would give.

'Have you offered the sheriff some cider?' Marygay said.

'I can't stay,' he said. 'I just wanted you two to hear before the general broadcast.'

'That was kind,' I said. 'Thank you.'

He stood up and began putting on layers of clothes. 'Well, you have a special interest in it.' He shook his head. 'I was surprised. I thought the project was all gain and no real loss, which of course was the consensus here.' He gestured at the table. 'This was not just our Whole Tree's decision, though. It's very curious.'

I ushered him out, as far as the waist-deep channel cut through the snow to the driveway. The sun was getting low and the air sucked my body heat away. Two breaths and my moustache froze into bristles.

Only two years till spring. Real years.

Marygay was almost done reading it when I came back inside. She was on the verge of tears. 'What does it say?'

Without taking her eyes from the last sheet, she handed me the first three. 'The Taurans. It's the god-damn Taurans.'

The first couple of pages were the expected economic argument, which, with scrupulous fairness, they admitted was not reason enough by itself to deny us the time shuttle.

But their group mind hooked up with the Tauran group mind, and the Taurans said absolutely no. It was too dangerous – not to us, but to them.

And they couldn't explain why.

'They used to say, "There are things man was not meant to know."' I looked at the kids. 'That was when "man" meant us.'

'That's what this adds up to,' Marygay said. 'Nothing like an actual explanation.' She felt along the bottom of the last sheet. 'There's some Tauran here.' They did official documents in a Braille-like language. 'Can you read it?'

'Just simple things,' Sara said. She ran a finger along the lines. 'No. I'll take it to the library after school, and scan it.'

'Thanks,' I said. 'I'm sure it'll clear everything up.'

'Oh, Dad. Sometimes they're not strange at all.' She got up. 'Check the chicken. It should be almost done.'

It was a good dinner. She had roasted potatoes and carrots in the coals, wrapped in foil with garlic butter and herbs.

The kids were animated all through dinner. Marygay and I were not good company. After dinner we watched a couple of hours of cube, an ice-skating show that made me reheat the cider.

Upstairs, getting ready for bed, she finally started to cry. Just silently wiping tears.

'I guess I should have been more ready for this. I hadn't thought about the Taurans, though. Man is usually reasonable.'

We peeled back sheet, blanket, and quilt, and bundled in against the cold. 'Twenty more months of this,' she said.

Not for us,' I said.

'What do you mean?'

'The hell with the Taurans and their mysticism. Back to Plan A.'

'Plan A?'

'We highjack the bastard.'

Sara brought home the Tauran writing at noon. 'The librarian said it was a ritual statement, like the end of a prayer: "Inside the foreign, the unknown; inside that, the unknowable." She said that was only close. There aren't exact human translations for the concepts.'

I found a pen and had her repeat it slowly, and printed it in block letters on the back. She went into the kitchen to fix a sandwich. 'Wow. What are you doing with all the stuff?'

'Nothing else scheduled till four. Thought I'd take care of everything at once.' Out of an obscure impulse, I'd brought inside every farming and fishing implement that held an edge or came to a point, and was cleaning and sharpening them. They were stacked in a glittering array along the dining-room table. 'Been putting it off, since it's been too cold to work in the shed.'

I hadn't expected anyone to be home this early. She walked by them with a nod, though. She'd grown up around them, and didn't see them as weapons.

We had lunch together in amiable silence, surrounded by axes and gaffs, reading.

She finished her sandwich and looked straight at me. 'Dad, I want to go with you.'

I was startled. 'What?'

'To Earth. You'll be one of the seventeen, won't you?'

'Your mother and me, yes. That was in the note. It didn't say how the other fifteen would be chosen, though.'

'Maybe they'll let you choose.'

'Maybe so. You'll be at the top of my list.'

'Thanks, Dad.' She gave me a kiss on the cheek, bundled up, and hurried back to school.

I wondered if I understood quite what had just transpired – or whether she knew, at some level. Fathers and daughters don't communicate that well even when alien languages and secret conspiracies aren't involved.

Marygay and I had been chosen, of course, since we were the only two people alive who remembered twentieth-century Earth, before the Forever War. Man would be interested in our impressions. I supposed the other fifteen were to be chosen at random, from people who wanted to make the trip – probably half the planet.

There would be no trip, of course. The ship would be accelerating straight up to nowhere. With Sara aboard, as originally planned.

I unrolled the revised loading schedule she'd prepared, weighing down the four corners with salt and pepper shakers and two wicked-looking knives.

It was discouraging, the hundreds of things that would have to be brought to the spaceport and launched into orbit. They weren't going to bother with all that, just going to Earth and back. So we'd have to highjack the Time Warp and then somehow keep control of the situation long enough to launch the shuttles dozens of times. The people alone would take up ten flights.

We weren't going to do it by attacking them with a bunch of farm implements. We somehow had to present a real threat. But there weren't many actual weapons on Middle Finger, and they were almost all in the hands of authorities like the sheriff.

I gathered up the tools to take outside. A weapon doesn't always look like a weapon. What did we have? Did we have anything that would keep them at bay for ten days, a couple of weeks, while the shuttles plied back and forth?

We could have, I suddenly realized. Maybe it was a little insane.

Twelve

It took planning and coordination – and an unexpected assist from our adversaries: the seventeen going to Earth were all from Paxton, more or less the ringleaders of the original plot. Whether they were planning to let us come back from Earth was open to question. It was also moot.

We had only twelve days before the supposed departure for Earth. I had sent all the others copies of the document from the One Tree, and we'd commiserated and talked about how, among other things, we might still get approval for our long journey, after talking to Man and Tauran on Earth.

While talking on the cube to them, I made a casual gesture, touching middle finger to cheekbone, that used to be phone code: 'Disregard this; someone may be listening.' Most of them returned the gesture.

Not one word of the plot was communicated by voice or electronics. I wrote down brief and precise descriptions of each person's role, the notes to be memorized and destroyed. Even Marygay and I never spoke of it, not even when we were tending the trotlines, alone out on the ice.

The seventeen of us saw a lot of each other, talking about Earth and passing notes about escape. The consensus seemed to be that it probably wouldn't work, but we didn't have time to come up with anything more refined.

I wished I could have told Sara. She was disconsolate at being denied a chance for Earth; a chance to leave Middle Finger just once in her life.

I tried not to smile too much. 'Do something, even if it's wrong,' my mother used to say. We were finally doing something.

Middle Finger didn't have an army; just a lightly armed police force to keep order. There were very few weapons on the planet – nothing to go hunting for with anything more lethal than a hook and line.

But there was one weapon potentially more dangerous than all the small arms at Man's disposal. In the Museum of History in Centrus, there was a fighting suit left over from the Forever War.

Even stripped of its nuclear and conventional explosives, even with the laser finger deactivated, it was still a formidable weapon because of its strength-amplification circuitry and armor. (We knew the circuitry was intact because Man occasionally dusted it off for construction and demolition jobs.) A man or woman inside it became like a demigod of myth – or, for my generation, a superhero of comics. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Kill a person with a single punch.

You could power up a cold suit from almost any source. It could suck the energy out of a floater and have enough juice for a little mayhem – or a couple of hours' searching for a better source.

We couldn't assume the suit was powered up, sitting there waiting to be taken – though Charlie argued that it probably was, for the same reason there was no military force in Centrus to keep us in line. If we fought Man and won, what would we accomplish, from their point of view? They saw themselves as mentors and partners, our conduit to true civilization. There was no need for Man to take precautions against a useless and futile action.

We were to learn otherwise.

Max Weston was the only person I knew who was physically large and strong enough that I had no doubt he could overpower the sheriff. We needed his weapons in order to attack the museum. We had to take them at the last minute, of course, just before we left for Centrus. We could lock him up in his own cell or possibly take him hostage. (I argued against killing him, or anyone, if we could help it. Max agreed too easily, I thought.)

Our timetable was set by Man. An express floater would arrive at noon on 10 Copernicus, and an hour later we would be in Centrus. We were to spend the afternoon in a last-minute briefing, then be prepped for suspended animation and shuttled up to the Time Warp as part of the baggage.

Max raised the possibility, which had occurred to me and probably others, that they had no intention of prepping us for SA. They would give us a shot not to suspend our animation, but to end it. Send the Time Warp off and have it come back without us, with some sad story – we all died of a rare Earth disease, because of lack of immunity – and MF would somehow have to get along without seventeen troublemakers.

It sounded paranoiac; I doubted that Man saw us as a threat worth disposing of, and if indeed they did, there were less elaborate ways to go about doing it. But then Man often did things in elaborate and unlikely ways. Comes from hanging around with Taurans all the time, I guess.

Our timing had to be precise, and a lot of machines had to work. The sheriff's weapons would get us the fighting suit; the fighting suit would get us the shuttle, and the shuttle would take us to the ultimate weapon.

But the plan would stop dead if, for instance, the sheriff's weapons were programmed to work only for him – they had that technology more than a millennium ago – or if the fighting suit wouldn't crank, or if the shuttle or the Time Warp had an override that could be controlled from the ground. In our ALSC training as pilots, me for the shuttle and Marygay for the starship, there was nothing about that; both vehicles were autonomous systems. It was possible they had withheld a few details from our training, though.

We were careful not to arrive at the town hall all at once. It did simplify our operation that the floater was picking us up right at the sheriff's door, and we probably could have all come down as a group. But the plan was for Marygay and me to come early and distract the sheriff, and be there to help Max, if necessary.

Bill and Sara drove us down at eleven o'clock with our small bag – toiletries and a few changes of clothing and two long knives. We hadn't told them anything. Bill was in a good mood, negotiating the icy streets with smooth speed. Sara was subdued, maybe holding back tears. She really had wanted to come, and probably thought we hadn't worked hard enough to get her added to the list.

'We should tell them,' Marygay said as we pulled up to the police station.

'Tell what?' Sara said.

'You're not missing any trip to Earth,' I said. 'We're not going to Earth. We've gone back to the original plan.'

'We'll all be on the Time Warp in a couple of weeks,' Marygay said, 'headed for the future, not the past.'

'I hadn't heard,' Bill said slowly. 'You'd think they would've said something about it.'

'They don't know about it yet. The sheriff's about to find out.'

Bill set the brake and turned around in the driver's seat. 'You're going to take it by force?'

'In a way,' Marygay said. 'If things go according to plan, nobody will be hurt.'

'Can I help? I'm bigger than you.'

'Not now.' Glad he asked, though. 'It has to look like things are going according to their plan, until we get to Centrus.'

'Just act as if nothing were different, darlings. Keep an eye on the news.'

'Don't…' Sara said. 'Don't get … don't do, don't take any chances?'

'We'll be careful,' Marygay said. Sara was probably trying to say Don't do anything foolish, but I'm afraid we'd moved beyond that stage.

I kissed them both and opened the door. Marygay kissed them and held on to Bill for an extra second. 'See you soon.'

'Good luck,' Bill said urgently. Sara nodded, biting her lower lip. I closed the door behind Marygay and they were gone.

'Well,' I said pointlessly, 'here we go.' She nodded and we picked our way up the icy steps and pushed through the double doors.

The sheriff wasn't in his office; he was straightening up the reception hall. He checked his watch. 'You're early.'

'Bill dropped us off,' Marygay said. 'He had to go on to school.' He nodded, 'Tea in the office.'

Marygay went for tea and I went down the corridor to the toilet, mainly to check the cells. Both were open, and could be locked on the outside with a simple mechanical bolt. We'd want to take the keyboard out before we locked him in. It hadn't worked for me, but maybe I hadn't had the right combination.

I joined Marygay for tea. She glanced toward the empty peg behind the sheriff's desk. He was probably wearing the pistol under his vest, as he had the night he came to arrest us.

The door opened and we heard him greet Max. I walked into the room and saw that they were shaking hands. Max knew about the concealed holster.

My move was pretty obvious, and in retrospect I suppose it wouldn't have worked if the sheriff had been on guard. I faked tripping on the rug and dropped the mug of tea. Cried out, 'Oh, shit!'

As the sheriff turned, Max clamped his forearm around his neck and grabbed his right arm. The sheriff tried to kick back, but Max had anticipated the move and blocked it; meanwhile, I reached into the sheriff's vest and yanked out the pistol.

'Don't choke him, Max!' Max dropped his left arm enough to let him breathe, at the same time forcing him to his knees.

The sheriff coughed twice. 'What is this?'

'Figure it out,' Max said. 'Use your group mind.'

Marygay came out of the office holding a big roll of building tape. 'Into the cell! William … point the gun at him!'

I was holding it loosely, aimed at the floor. Might go off. I gestured with it. 'Keep ahold of him, Max.'

He didn't resist. 'You're going to be in real trouble. Whatever you think you're doing.'

'You've got that right,' I said. 'Real trouble now. But by the time we get back, it won't make any difference.'

Max had walked him into the first cell, and pushed him down into the chair. 'What? You think you can … you're going to take the starship?'

'These guys are fast,' Max said. Marygay secured him to the chair with the tape.

'We don't mean you any harm, Sheriff,' I said, 'nor anyone in Centrus. We're just going ahead with what we proposed – with what you approved of.'

He was regaining some composure. 'But that was provisional. Before we heard from the Whole Tree.'

'You do what you want,' Marygay said. 'We don't have to take orders from Earth.'

'From Taurans on Earth,' Max said.

'But it's not practical,' the sheriff said with an edge of exasperation. 'The three of you–'

'Seventeen,' I said.

'Even seventeen, you can't steal the starship and run it.'

'We have a plan. Just sit back and watch us.'

A few people had come in and were standing at the door. 'You don't seem to need any help,' Jynn said.

'Look around and see if you can find any more weapons,' Max said. 'There aren't any,' the sheriff said, nodding at me. 'Just the pistol. Just for emergencies.'

'Like this.' Max stuck his hand out and I gave him the pistol. He aimed it at the viewscreen over the keyboard and fired. The explosion was loud in the small room. I shielded my eyes and didn't see what it looked like, but the result was pretty dramatic. There was more hole than viewscreen.

'What the hell was that?' somebody shouted.

'Testing.' He handed it back. 'Works.'

'You aren't going to steal the starship with an old pistol.'

'We really just have to steal a shuttle,' Marygay said. 'The starship will do what I tell it to.'

'And we'll have more than a pistol,' Max said.

Cat came to the door. She and Marygay exchanged nods. 'We found some crowd-control stuff. Gas grenades and tangle-foot.'

'Probably what they'll use on us, in Centrus,' I said. 'Might as well have our own.'

'The mask would be more useful,' the sheriff said.

'What?'

'The gas mask. It's in the top right-hand drawer of my desk.' He shrugged. 'Might as well cooperate.'

'We couldn't get that one open,' Cat said. 'Thumbprint?'

He nodded. 'That's where the ammunition is, too.' He wiggled his thumb. 'You could bring the desk here, or set me free.'

'It's a trap,' Max said. 'It probably sends a signal.'

'Do as you wish,' the Man said.

'Why would you want to help us?' Marygay said.

'For one thing, I'm on your side; I've known you since I was a boy, and know how much this means.' He looked at Max. 'Also, you have the gun. At least one of you could use it.'

Max pulled out a big pocket knife and the blade snapped out. 'I could cut off your thumb.' He sawed at the tape and freed him. 'Move slowly, now.'

The drawer had the ammo and gas mask, and also handcuffs and ankle restraints. We put them on the sheriff.

'Floater's here,' Po said from the door.

'Driver?' Marygay called back. He said no; it had the autodriver light on. 'You're coming along, then. Hostage.'

'If you leave me locked up in the cell, there's no way I could hamper you. I'd prefer that.'

Max grabbed his arm. 'We'd prefer to have you along.'

'Wait,' I said. 'You think they're going to kill us.'

'As soon as they see you're armed, yes. My being with you wouldn't affect the decision.'

'One reason we love you so much,' Marygay said. 'Your concern for one another.'

'It wouldn't just be Man making that decision,' he said; 'not in Centrus. A Tauran truly wouldn't understand why it made any difference.'

'They let Taurans in on police matters?'

'No, but it won't be a police thing, once the starship's part of it. Matters that involve space are going to involve Taurans.'

'The more reason for a hostage,' Max said.

'Do you hear yourself?' the sheriff said. 'Which of us now is placing a low value on life?'

'Just on yours,' Max said, and gave him a push toward the door.

'Wait,' I said. 'Until they know what we're doing, there won't be any Taurans involved?'

'Only people and Man,' he said. 'But it won't take them long to see what's happening and contact the Taurans.'

'Yeah.' I pointed at the door. 'Take him out and lock him up. We have to confer.'

Max was back in a minute. 'It may be time to gamble,' I said. 'The floater's going to go down Main to get to the spaceport. I could slip out by the museum, and you all go on. With the sheriff, you'll have the expected seventeen people, if anybody's looking. That will gain us some time. Then you can disable the floater before it gets there.'

'But then you don't have the floater's fuel cell.' We had planned on that in case the fighting suit was cold.

'Yes, he will,' Max said, intense. 'We get a klick or so from the spaceport and put the floater on manual and ground it. That's five, maybe seven minutes from dropping him off. Give him a minute or two to get into trouble. Then we turn, the floater around and take it back to him.'

'With the police in hot pursuit,' Marygay said.

'Maybe; maybe not,' I said. 'You keep the gun, in case, but hell. They don't have police like on Earth.' Probably not on Earth now, either. 'Unarmed traffic cops.'

'You don't want the gun?' Max said.

'No – look; that tear gas is a godsend. I go in with the tear gas and the mask and a crowbar, I'll be inside the suit in minutes. Hell, I'll meet you on the road to the spaceport.'

Marygay nodded. 'It could work. And if it doesn't, at least you won't have used a deadly weapon on the guard.' I was able to stuff the gas grenades and mask into the sheriff's briefcase. Hard to disguise a crowbar, but I found I could slide it down my pants leg to the knee, and the belt held it in place, with the top part concealed by my coat.

We all got situated in the floater and it took off, rising to about a hundred meters. The snow had gotten pretty heavy; you couldn't see the ground. We hoped it was like this in Centrus. It would slow things down for them, but not for us, so long as the wind stayed calm. The shuttle was okay in snow but wouldn't launch in a strong crosswind.

It was an uncomfortable hour. The sheriff wasn't the only hostage, in fact; everyone else's fate was dependent on the outcome of a string of unpredictable events. And nobody wanted to talk about it, not with the sheriff listening.

I became curiously calm as the floater dropped to ground level, near the city limits. There was a certain amount of danger ahead, but it was thin soup compared to what I remembered of combat.

I didn't want to think about how many years ago that was. I hoped the museum guards were soft city boys and girls – bookish and unfamiliar with violence. Maybe old folks. I'd give them a story for the grand-kids, regardless. 'I was there when the crazy vets highjacked the starship.' Or maybe 'One day this crazy guy ran in with tear gas. I shot him.' But none of us could remember the museum guards being armed, which would have been memorable. Maybe they just kept the guns out of sight. Maybe I should worry about something else.

Marygay had her thumb on the OVERRIDE button, but it wasn't necessary. The floater stopped for cross-traffic a block before the library. I gave her a kiss and slipped out the door.

The snow was sifting down slowly, straight – still good for the shuttle and perhaps for me, since it would slow down response to a call for help from the museum. I threaded my way through the inching traffic, people perhaps being extra-courteous because of my limp. The crowbar had slid past my knee.

It occurred to me that the museum might be closed, and that might be a good thing. I could break in and, although it would doubtless set off an alarm, I would just be dealing with police, and not a lot of bystanders.

No such luck. As I approached the museum, someone was leaving, backing out the front door with a wide covered tray, probably breakfast.

I went through the heavy wooden door, and sure enough, the guard was nibbling at a piece of cake from a stack of assorted kinds on a plate. She was a female Man, in her early twenties. She said something to me in their language, mumbling through a mouthful. I think she said good morning, and invited me to leave my coat and attaché case there.

She had the broad chin they all have, a good target for a punch. When she looked inside the case, I'd give her an upper-cut that I hoped would knock her out for a minute and leave her disorganized for another.

It wasn't necessary. She asked me what was in the bag, and I said, in slow English, 'I don't know. I'm from Paxton, supposed to deliver this to the Man in charge of the weapons exhibit.'

'Oh, he's not a Man; he's one of you. Jacob Kellman, he came in two or three minutes ago. You could take it right to him, A4.' The small building only had two stories, with four rooms each.

The door to A4 was closed. I opened it and there was no one inside. No lock. I eased it shut and worked fast – pulled out the crowbar and ran past all of the less potent examples of man's inhumanity to all species, straight to the glass case with the fighting suit. Two swings with the crowbar and the front pane of glass cascaded in.

I ran back toward the door and got there just as it opened. Kellman was a greybeard, at least as old as me, unarmed. Drawing on my vast knowledge of hand-to-hand combat, I shoved him hard and he fell down sprawling in the corridor. I slammed the door shut again and wedged the crowbar in between the door and the jamb, as a crude lock, and hurried back to the exhibit.

The fighting suit was a newer model than the 'last one I'd had, but I hoped the basic design hadn't changed. I reached into the concealed niche between the shoulders and felt the emergency lever and pulled. It wouldn't work if there was anyone alive in the suit, but fortunately it was unoccupied. The suit clamshelled open, smashing another pane of glass, and the reassuring hydraulic wheeze meant it had power.

Someone was pounding on the door and yelling. I got one boot off and with a stockinged foot swept away enough broken glass so I could stand barefooted while I undressed. Got my sweater and pants off and tried to rip open the shirt, but the buttons were sewn on too well. While I fumbled with them, the pounding became a rhythmic heavy thump – someone bigger than Kellman was applying a shoulder to the door.

I got both gas grenades out of the briefcase, pulled the pins, and hurled them the length of the room. They popped with a satisfying swirl of opaque cloud and I stepped backward into the suit, slid my arms into the sleeves, and clenched both hands, for the 'activate' signal. I didn't bother with the plumbing; I'd either hold it in or live with the results.

For a long second, nothing happened. I smelled the first acrid hint of the tear gas. Then the suit closed around me with a disconcerting jerkiness.

The monitor and displays came up and I looked to the lower left: power was at 0.05, Weapons systems all dark, as expected.

A twentieth of normal power still made me a Goliath, at least temporarily. The cool machine-oil smell meant I had my own air. I reached down to pick up my clothes and fell on my face with a huge crash.

Well, it had been a long time since I'd been in one of these, and even longer since I'd used a GP unit – General Purpose, one size fits everybody. Normally, I'd had one tailored to my dimensions.

I managed to clamber back up to my feet and stuff the clothes, minus boots, into a front 'pocket,' just before they beat the door open. There was a lot of coughing and sneezing. One figure came staggering out of the cloud, a female Man who was pumped up like our sheriff, in a similar uniform, also with a pistol. She was holding it in both hands, waving it in my general direction, but her eyes were streaming and I assumed she hadn't seen me yet.

These people were not my concern. There was an emergency exit door behind me. I turned, rocking like a zombie from a 1950s movie, and lurched toward it. The Man fired three shots. One of them put a nice hole in a display of nuclear weapons and one broke an overhead lamp. The third must have ricocheted off my back; I heard it sing away but of course felt nothing.

I supposed she knew the suit was unarmed but extremely dangerous. I wondered how brave she would have been if I'd turned around and started lumbering toward her. But there was no time for play.

I pushed on the emergency door and it ripped open, then ducked slightly as I passed through. The suit was almost eight feet tall; not really for indoor wear.

People scattered in all directions, making considerable noise. The Man or someone else was shooting at me – an easy target, a matte-black giant in a snowscape. Twisting the wrist control turned me camo green, then sand yellow, then I finally, found a glossy white surface.

I walked as fast as I could to Main, almost slipping twice in the snow. Come on, I thought, you've operated these things on frozen portal planets a few degrees above absolute zero. But not lately.

At least Main Street had salt and sand, so I could run. Some of the traffic was on manual, and it noisily parted for me as I sprinted down the middle. A lot of them went spinning dangerously out of control. I shifted back to green, so they'd have more warning.

I picked up the pace as I became more sure of the clumsy thing's abilities and limitations. I was loping along at about twenty miles per hour when I met Marygay's bus, just outside the city limits.

She opened the driver's side door and stepped halfway out. 'Do you need power?' she shouted.

Not yet.' The readout said 0.04. 'Back at the spaceport.'

She spun it on its axis and slid to the outbound lane, sending a delivery van that was on auto straight out into a field of snow. The people on manual were all pulling over, evidently from some police command; it was interesting that the ones on auto took longer to comply.

They were no doubt clearing traffic to get to me. I ran after Marygay as fast as I could, but soon lost her in the white distance.

What could they send after a fighting suit? I'd find out soon enough.

Strident blue flashing lights cut through the swirling snow as I approached the spaceport. Marygay's bus was blocked at the entrance by a Security floater.

Two officers, evidently unarmed, were standing by the driver's side, yelling at her. She looked down on them pleasantly, and gave no reaction when I passed behind them.

I picked up one end of the Security floater and easily flipped it over. It went crashing down into a drainage ditch. The two officers, sensibly, ran like hell.

The lack of radio contact was a handicap. I bent down next to her window. 'Park it up by the main building and I'll drain the fuel cell there.'

She said okay and sped off. My power was down to 0.01 and the numerals started flashing red. That would be great, stranded a couple of hundred meters from my destination. Well, I could always open the suit manually. And run naked through the snow.

As soon as I started walking, the suit added a 'beep … beep' in time with the flashing digits, I suppose as a convenience for the blind. The legs started to resist my commands, feeling as if I were walking through water, and then mud.

I did make it to the floater while the people were still unloading. Max stood there with his arms crossed, the pistol prominent.

I popped the rear utility door and clipped my emergency cables to the fuel cell's terminals, and studied the directions on the grimy plate on the side of the cell. Then I pushed the 'fast discharge' button and watched my numbers start to climb.

They'd reached 0.24 when I heard the heavy thrum of a floater braking, and found out what they could send after a fighting suit.

Two fighting suits. One human; one Tauran.

If they were armed, I was nothing but a target. Either suit's weapons could vaporize me or slice me like lunchmeat. But they didn't fire, or couldn't.

The floater lurched as the Man got out, and he repeated my performance, falling on his face. I resisted the impulse to tell him that the longest journey begins with a single step.

In the floater, the Tauran suit flailed, trying to keep its balance, and tipped over backwards. Neither of them had any more recent practice than I had. My hundreds of hours of training and fighting, even though mostly lost in the mists of time, might be worth more than their two-to-one advantage.

The Man had gotten up on hands and knees; I covered the distance with a graceless leap and swiveled a hard side-kick to the head. It probably didn't hurt him physically, but it sent the suit skidding and tumbling.

I grabbed the front bumper of the floater, my strength amplification whining loud, and tried to swing the heavy machine around to bash the Tauran. It managed to dodge, and the effort made me stagger and fall. The floater buzzed away like an angry insect.

The Tauran threw itself on me, but I kicked it away. I was trying to resurrect what I once knew about Tauran fighting suits; what weakness might give me an advantage, but all the musty ALSC stuff was about weapon systems, range, and response speed, which unfortunately seemed not to apply.

And then the Man was on me, falling on my shoulders with a crash like some heavy playground bully. He tried to grab my suit's head, and I batted his hands away – that was a good target; the suit's brain wasn't in the head, but its eyes and ears were.

I flipped him away clumsily. My weapons systems' telltales were still dark, but I tried the laser finger on him anyhow. When it didn't lance out and cut into his suit, I was curiously relieved. My underdeveloped killer instinct hadn't become fiercer with age.

While I was peering through the snow for something I could use as a weapon, the Tauran had found one; it whacked me from behind, across the shoulders, with an uprooted light pole. I went down and plowed into a snowbank. While I staggered up, it kept clanging against my shoulders and upraised arms.

My visual sensors were smeared, but I could see well enough to aim a kick between its legs, an aim more anthropomorphic than practical – but it did unbalance the thing enough for me to grab hold of the light post and jerk it away. I had seen the Man in my peripheral vision, running toward me; I swung the pole around in a flat arc and caught him at knee level. He spun sideways and hit the ground hard.

I turned to face the Tauran again, but couldn't see it, which didn't mean it was far away or hidden – all three of us were white lost in white, invisible from fifty meters in the rolling snow. I tongued over to infrared, which might work if it turned its back to me, with the heat exchangers. That didn't work and neither did radar, which I expected to work only if the suit moved in front of a reflecting surface.

I turned back to see the Man lying there motionless. Maybe a trick, or maybe I actually had knocked him out when I knocked him down. The head's protected with padding, but force is force, and he might have slammed into the ground hard enough to sustain a concussion. I feinted at him, a kick that missed his head by a hair, and he didn't react.

Where the hell was the Tauran? No sign in any direction. I crouched to pick up the Man and heard, from the direction of the spaceport, a woman's scream, muffled by the snow, then two shots.

I ran toward it, but was a moment too late. The floater was rising fast, slanting away from the smashed front entrance; Max was standing with the pistol aimed at the machine, but with no useful target. I jumped with all my amplified might, and went up maybe twenty meters, almost high enough to touch it, and then fell back down with a crash that rattled my teeth and made my ankles sting.

'The thing got Jynn,' Max said. 'It dove through the glass and snatched her and Roberta.' Roberta was sitting in the snow, cradling her elbow.

'You all right?' They both flinched; I realized I'd inadvertently cranked up the sound. I chinned it down.

'Damn near yanked my arm off. But I'm okay.'

'Where is everybody?'

'We split up,' Max said. 'Marygay went on with the bus, out to the shuttle. We stayed here with the gun, try to distract them.'

'Well, you did that.' I hesitated. 'Nothing we can do here now. Let's go catch the bus.' I scooped up Roberta, then Max, and stepped out on the field, carrying them like bundles. The bus wasn't visible, but it had blown a clear path through the snow. We caught up with them in less than a minute, and my passengers seemed happy to switch conveyances.

No sign of the floater with the Tauran and Jynn. I could have heard it if it were within a couple of klicks.

The bus was crowded. There were two humans I didn't recognize, and four Men, evidently our welcoming committee.

'They've got Jynn,' I told Marygay. 'The Taurans took her off on their floater.'

She shook her head. 'Jynn?' They were pretty close.

'There's nothing we can do. She's just gone.'

'They won't hurt her,' Max said. 'Let's move!'

'Right,' Marygay said, but she didn't move.

'I'll meet you at the shuttle,' I said. I was too big and heavy for the bus.

'Meet you there,' she said quietly, and pushed the button that closed the door. The bus lurched forward and I jogged past it toward the shuttle launch tube.

I tapped the tube elevator door button and it opened, looking warm in its yellow light. Then I popped the suit and gingerly stepped out into the snow. The front pocket resisted my efforts, but after one broken thumbnail I got my clothes free and quickly pulled them on in the shelter of the elevator car.

The bus eased down by my empty open suit and I silently urged them to hurry, hurry – how long would it take for someone to just turn off the power and leave us with a useless elevator? The shuttle might be autonomous, but we did have to get inside it to use it.

Marygay spent a few precious seconds telling the four Men and two humans to get out of here and underground, which they probably knew. The launch tube would absorb the gamma rays for the first seconds of launch, but after that it would not be wise to be nearby. Roberta had her thumb on the up button and mashed it as soon as Marygay sprinted inside.

Nobody pulled the plug. The elevator surged up and clicked into place alongside the shuttle airlock, which irised open.

Getting seated was not simple, gravity-against us. We climbed down a ladder net and filled the compartment from the bottom up. The sheriff's hands and feet were freed for the job and he didn't resist being taped into place again, once he was belted in.

I settled into the pilot's seat and started snapping the sequence of switches that would get us out of here. It wasn't complicated, since there were only four standard orbit choices. I chose 'Rendezvous with Time Warp,' and had to more or less trust the ship.

The viewscreen came on and it was Jynn. The focus pulled back to show that she was in a floater, next to a Tauran.

The Tauran pointed to the windows next to Jynn. Vague through the snow, you could just make out the twin shuttle launch towers.

'Please proceed,' the Tauran said. 'Three seconds after you launch, this woman and I will be killed by your radiation.'

'Do it,' Jynn said. 'Just go.'

'I don't think you will,' the Tauran said. 'That would be inhuman. Murder in cold blood.'

Marygay was next to me, in the copilot seat. 'Jynn – ' she started. 'You don't have any choice,' Jynn said evenly. 'For the next part to work, you have to show … what you're willing to do.'

We looked at each other, both frozen.

'Do what she says,' Max whispered.

Suddenly, Jynn's elbow jabbed out and drove into the Tauran's throat. Her wrists were bound with metal handcuffs; she twisted them around its neck and jerked sideways with a loud crack.

She pulled the inert creature down across her lap and reached sideways for the floater controls. It whined and her image bobbed. 'Give me thirty seconds,' she shouted over the straining motor. 'No, twenty – I'll be behind the main building. Get the hell out of here!'

'You come here!' Marygay said. 'We can wait!'

Maybe she didn't hear. But she didn't answer, and her image disappeared.

In her place, the calm image of a male Man in a grey tunic. 'If you attempt to launch, we will shoot you down. Don't waste your lives and our shuttle.'

'Even if you could do it,' I said, 'you probably wouldn't.' I checked my watch; I'd give her the full thirty seconds. 'You don't have any anti-spacecraft or anti-aircraft weapons here.'

'We have them in orbit,' he said. 'You will all die.'

'Bullshit,' I said, and turned half around to face the others. 'He's bluffing. Stalling for time.'

Po's face was ashen. 'Even if he is not. We've come this far. Let's finish it.'

'That's right,' Teresa said. 'Whatever happens.'

Thirty seconds. 'Hold on.' I slammed the FIRE switch down.

There was a tremendous roar and the gee force went from one to three in the short time it took us to clear the launch tube. Snow streamed away from the front viewport and was suddenly gone, replaced with bright sunshine.

The shuttle rolled over for orbital insertion, and the solid-looking clouds of the storm drifted away. The sky darkened from cobalt to indigo.

They might well have weapons in orbit, I knew. Even if they were antiques left over from the Forever War, they could do the job.

But there was absolutely nothing I could do to affect that. No evasive maneuvers or counterattacks or even clever arguments. A kind of tentative and temporary calmness settled over me, that I remembered from combat: you may only be alive for the next few seconds, but whatever happens, it will just happen. I carefully tilted my head against the acceleration and could see the strained half-smile on Marygay's face; she was in the same state.

Then the sky turned black, and we were still alive. The roar abated and then was silent. We floated through space in free fall.

I looked back. 'Everybody okay?' They murmured tentative assent, though some of them looked pretty bad. The anti-nausea medicine worked for most people, but of course space travel wasn't the only stress they were going through.

We watched the Time Warp grow from brightest star to non-stellar sparkle to a hard bright image that grew and then loomed. The automated part of our trip ended with a not-quite-human voice telling me that control would be surrendered to me in ten seconds … nine … and so forth.

Actually, it was responsibility rather than 'control' that had been transferred to me; the shuttle's radar still mediated the rate of approach to the docking area. I kept my right hand gripped on a dead-man's switch; if anything seemed wrong, I would let go, and the previous moment's maneuvers would be quickly reversed.

The airlocks mated with a reassuring metallic snap, and my ears popped as our air pressure dropped to match the thin but oxygen-rich mixture in the Time Warp.

'Phase Two,' I said. 'Let's go see whether it works.'

'I think it will work,' the sheriff said. 'You've done the hard part.'

I looked at him. 'There's no way you could have learned our plans. No way.'

'That's right.'

'But you know us so well – you're so superior – that you knew exactly what we were going to do.'

'I would not put it so harshly. But yes, I was told to expect rebellion and perhaps violence, and advised not to resist.'

'And the rest of it? What we're about to do?'

'That's a mystery to me, or conjecture; I was asked not to tap the Whole Tree, so I wouldn't know too much.'

'But the others know. Or think they know.'

'I've said too much. Just continue with what you're doing. You may learn from it.'

'You may learn something,' Max said.

'Let's move along,' Marygay said. 'Whatever they've got set up for us, whatever they think they know, it doesn't change Phase Two.'

'You're wrong,' Max said. 'We should find out what we can from this bastard. We can't lose anything by squeezing him.'

'Or gain anything,' the sheriff said. 'I've told you all I know.'

'Let's find out,' Roberta said. 'Max is right. Nothing to lose.'

'A lot to lose,' I said. 'You sound like my old drill sergeants. This is a negotiation, not a war.'

'They were threatening to kill us,' Po said. 'If it's not a war, it's something close to it.'

Marygay came to my rescue. 'Leave it as an option. Right now, I think we're ahead for not having hurt or coerced him.'

'Other than beating him up and tying him down,' Roberta said.

'If we ultimately have to force information out of him,' Marygay pushed on, 'then we can do it. Right now we have to act, not talk.' She rubbed her face. 'Besides, they probably have their own hostage by now. Jynn couldn't get far in that floater.'

'Jynn killed one of them,' Max said. 'She's dead meat.'

'You shut up, Max.'

'If she's alive, she's a liability.'

'Shut up.'

'You home cunts,' Max said, 'You always–'

'My wife is not a cunt or a home.' I tried to keep my voice down. 'When we walk through that door she'll be your commander.'

'And I have no problem with that. I had a long career and never saw a het commander. But if you think she's het, you're blind as a worm.'

'Max,' Marygay said quietly, 'my heart has been het and home and irrelevant, as now. William is in charge on this ship, and you're being insubordinate.'

'You're right,' he said flatly. To me: 'I lost my head and I apologize. Too much has happened, too fast. And I haven't been a soldier since before my kids were born.'

'Me neither,' I said, and didn't push it. 'Let's just move.'

On the other side of the airlock, we expected it to be dark and cool, the minimum-energy mode we'd last left it in. But the artificial sun was bright and the air was warm and fragrant with growing things.

And there was a Tauran waiting for us on the shipside landing, unarmed. It made their sign of greeting, hugging itself. 'You know me,' it said. 'Antres 906. Are you the leader, William Mandella?'

I looked beyond it to the well-tended fields. 'What the hell is this?'

'I speak right now only to the leader. Are you he?'

'No.' I put my hand on Marygay's shoulder. She was also staring, stunned. 'My wife.'

'Marygay Potter. Come with me to the control room.'

'They're ready to ride,' Max said behind me. 'Straight to Earth.' They'd told us there would be several weeks of tending to the lifesupport farms, before we went into suspended animation. This looked like we were headed straight to the tanks.

'How many are here, Antres?' Marygay said.

'No one else.'

'This took a lot of people.'

'Come with me.' She followed Antres to the lift, and I came along, both of us struggling with the zero gee nets. Antres was deft with them, but elaborately slow.

We went up to the command level and picked our way into the control room. The center screen was lit, with the image of an older male Man, perhaps one we had talked to in Centrus.

Marygay climbed into the captain's chair and strapped herself in. 'Are there any further casualties?' the Man said without preamble.

'I was going to ask the same thing. Jynn Silver.'

'The one who killed one of us.'

'A Tauran is not "one of us" if you are human. Is she alive?'

'Alive and in custody. I think we have deduced much of your plan. Would you care to reveal it now?'

Marygay looked at me and I shrugged.

She spoke slowly and quietly. 'Our plan is that this ship is not going to Earth. We demand to be allowed to use the Time Warp as we originally requested.'

'You can't do that without our cooperation. Forty shuttle flights. What will you do if we refuse?'

She swallowed. 'We'll send everybody back on the shuttle we have. Then my husband and I will ride the Time Warp to the ground. Crash-land near the southern pole.'

'So you think we will give you the ship rather than let you kill yourselves?'

'Well, it won't be too comfortable for you, either. When the antimatter fuel explodes, the resulting vapor will blanket Middle Finger in clouds. There will be no spring or summer, this year or next.'

'The third year,' I said from behind her, 'will be blizzard and then floods.'

'We can't allow that to happen,' he said. 'So all right. We accede to your demands.'

We looked at each other. 'That's it?'

'You give us no choice.' Two data screens lit up. 'The launch schedule you see here was adapted from your original timetable.'

'So this is all according to plan,' Marygay said. 'Your plan.'

'A contingency,' he said, 'in case you allowed us no alternative.'

She laughed. 'You couldn't just let us go.'

'Of course not. The Whole Tree forbade that.'

'Hold it,' I said. 'You're disobeying the Whole Tree?'

'Not at all. It is you who are defying it. We are only taking a reasonable course of action. Reaction, to your declaration of intent to wholesale murder.'

'And the Whole Tree predicted this would happen?'

'Oh, no.' For the first time, he allowed himself a small smile. 'Men on Earth don't know you as well as we who grew up with you.'

The sheriff tried to explain what he knew or could deduce about the rationale for their plan. It was like a theological argument in somebody else's religion.

'The Whole Tree is not infallible,' he said. 'It represents a huge and well-informed consensus. In this case, though, it was … it was like a thousand people taking a vote, where only two or three were actually well-informed.'

We were all at a big table in the dining hall, drinking bad tea made from concentrate. 'That's what I don't understand,' Charlie said. 'It seems to me that would happen more often than not.' He was directly across from the sheriff, staring intently, his chin in his palm.

'No, this was a special case.' He shifted uncomfortably. 'Men on Earth think they know humans. They live and work with them all their lives. But they're not at all the same kind of people as you are.

'They or their ancestors chose to come to Earth, even though it meant becoming part of a small minority, outside of Man's mainstream culture.'

'Trading independence for comfort,' I said. 'The illusion of independence,'

'It's not that simple. They live more comfortably than you – or we – do, but what's more important is that they deeply wanted to come home. People who chose Middle Finger turned their backs on home.

'So when a Man on Earth thinks about humans, there's a profoundly different composite picture. If you took one hundred fifty Earth humans and shot them forty thousand years into the future … it would be cruel. Like snatching a child from its parents, and abandoning it in a foreign land.'

'That's nice,' Charlie said. 'The Whole Tree's decision was based on concern for our happiness.'

'Concern for your sanity,' the sheriff said.

'The huge expense of the enterprise wasn't a factor.'

Not a large one.' He made a circular gesture, indicating everything around us. 'This ship represents a lot of wealth in terms of our economy. But it's not worth much in Earth terms. There are thousands of them sitting empty, parked in orbit around the Sun. This wouldn't be a big project if people on Earth had proposed it.'

'But they never would,' I said. 'They're stay-at-homes.'

He shrugged. 'How many people on Middle Finger think you're crazy?'

'More than half, I guess.' We only had 1,600 volunteers out of 30,000 people. 'The younger half of my family does.'

He nodded slowly. 'But weren't they going along?'

'Bill, especially, in spite of thinking we're crazy.'

'I understand that,' he said. 'So am I.'

'What?'

'We asked that you take a Man and a Tauran.'

The Tauran spoke up for the first time. 'We are they,' it growled.

Book Three

The Book of Exodus

Thirteen

The timetable had called for fifteen days' loading before launch, but that presupposed everybody being packed and waiting. Instead, they'd had two weeks to rearrange their lives, knowing that the expedition had been scotched.

We lost 12 out of the original 150. Replacing them was not as simple as asking for volunteers, since they'd been chosen with an eye toward a certain demographic mix and assortment of skills.

Forty thousand years from now, we might come back to an unpopulated planet. We wanted our descendants to have a chance at civilization.

We didn't have unlimited leisure for revision, juggling the shuttle schedule while we found replacements. Word had of course gone to Earth about our insurrection, so ten months from now there might be some response. If they had thousands of ships at their disposal, a few of them might be faster than the Time Warp; a lot faster.

A hundred fifty people were sufficient for a town-hall kind of democracy. We'd worked out the structure a couple of months before. There was an elected Council of five, each one of whom would serve a year as mayor, and then retire, a new councilor being elected each year.

So we worked as fast as we could, without cutting corners. Fortunately, none of the elected officials were among the ones who decided to stay home, so our little bureaucracy was intact. We probably had to make more decisions in a couple of weeks than we would in two years aboard the ship.

But it was a ship as well as a town, and the ship's captain had authority over the mayor and council. Both Marygay and I were nominated for captain, along with Anita Szydhowska, who had been with me in the Sade-138 campaign. Anita stepped down in favor of us, and I stepped down in favor of Marygay, and no one objected. Both Anita and I were elected councilors. The other three were Chance Delany, Stephen Funk, and Sage Ten. Diana Alsever-Moore was nominated but declined, arguing that as the ship's only doctor, she wouldn't have time for a hobby.

It only took twenty days to get everyone aboard the ship. I wondered whether anyone else, watching the shuttles leave for the last time, had the image – old-fashioned even in my youth – of the last ropes being thrown back onto the dock, as a great ship left its safe harbor.

The last shuttle was supposed to have our children aboard. It was one short. Sara floated over to us and wordlessly handed me a sheet of paper.

I love you but I never did intend to come with you. Sara talked me into pretending that I would, so that we would stop wasting time fighting. It was dishonest but I think I agree it was the best thing.

I'm somewhere in Centrus. Don't try to find me.

If I was not loyal to you I could have stopped the whole thing the day we left you at the sheriff's. But I guess we all have to be crazy in our own way.

Have a good 40,000 years.

Love,

Bill

The blood had drained from Marygay's face. I handed her the note, but of course she knew what was in it.

I felt loss, but also a strange relief. And I wasn't completely surprised; at some level I guess I'd known something was going on.

Maybe Marygay had, too. She stared at the note and then slipped it under the other sheets on her clipboard, cleared her throat, and spoke to the new arrivals with only a slight quaver in her voice. 'These are your initial housing assignments. We'll be trading around. But put your stuff in there now, and come back to the assembly area. Is anybody feeling space-sick?'

One big man obviously was; his skin had a greenish cast. He raised his hand. 'I'll take you to the doctor,' I said. 'She has something stronger than that pill.' He actually made it to the clinic before he barfed.

There were ten communication channels, and Marygay allowed everyone ten minutes for goodbyes. Not many people took that long. After a little more than an hour, everybody was in the assembly area, watching a large flatscreen display of Marygay in the captain's chair. All 148 of us had maneuvered so as to be 'lying' on the 'floor' in front of the screen.

Marygay peered out of the screen, her thumb poised over a red button on the console. 'Is everybody ready?' The crowd shouted yes and, with less than military precision, our journey began. (I wondered how many people were aware of the fact, or suspected, that the red button wasn't attached to anything. It was just an engineer's joke. The ship launched itself, and knew its time of departure to within a millionth of a second.)

The onset of acceleration was slow. I was floating about a foot off the floor, and I drifted down gently, and then gained weight over the course of ten or twelve seconds. There was a slight hum, which would be the background of all our lives for ten years: the tiny residue of the unimaginable sustained violence that was flinging us out of the galaxy.

I stood up and fell down. So did a lot of people, after days or weeks of zero gee. Sara took my arm and we helped each other up, laughing, forming a wobbly triangle with the floor, that closed up into two roughly parallel people. I cautiously lowered myself into a squat and stood up again, muscles and joints protesting.

About a hundred people were stepping around carefully, looking at their feet. The rest were sitting or lying down, some showing signs of anxiety or even panic.

They'd been told what to expect, that even breathing would seem to be an effort, at first. Those of us who'd been in and out of orbit the past months were used to it. But having it described to you and feeling it were two different things.

Marygay switched us over to a view of the planet. At first it just turned beneath us, a few wispy clouds over the mottled white snowscape. People were chatting and groaning in commiseration.

After a few minutes, things quieted down, as our motion became apparent. People sat and stared at the screen in silent meditation, perhaps a kind of hypnosis.

One curved horizon appeared, and then, on the opposite side of the screen, another. They inched toward one another until, after fifteen or twenty minutes, the planet was a huge ball, visibly shrinking.

Marygay had tottered down the stairs and was sitting next to me. 'Goodbye, goodbye,' she whispered, and I echoed her. But I think she was mostly saying goodbye to our son. I was saying goodbye to the planet and the time.

As it shrank away I felt an odd epiphany, born of science and mathematics. I knew that it would be a month – 34.7 days – before we reached a tenth of the speed of light, and officially I entered the realm of relativity. And it would be months later before the effect of it would be visible, looking out at the stars.

But we were actually there already. The huge force that made the ship's deck feel like a floor was already bending space and time. Our minds and bodies were not subtle enough to directly sense it yet. But that acceleration was slowly pulling us away from the mundane illusion we called reality.

Most of the matter and energy in the universe live in the land of relativity, because of extreme mass or speed. We would be joining them soon.

Fourteen

We kept the image of Middle Finger centered on the screen for a couple of days, as it shrank to a dot, and then a bright star, and then was lost in the hot glow of Mizar. By the end of the first day, we didn't even have to filter Mizar's glare; it was just the brightest star in the sky.

People started going about their business. They knew that much of what they did was make-work; the ship, by necessity, could run itself. Even the agriculture, being integral to the life-support system, was closely monitored by the ship.

Sometimes it bothered me to know that the ship was intelligent and self-aware. It could greatly simplify its existence by turning off life support.

We, in turn, could override the ship. Marygay's captaincy, now largely symbolic, would suddenly become a real and huge burden. The Time Warp could be run without its brain, but it would be a daunting enterprise.

The fifteen children aboard did need parents and teachers, which gave some of us real work. I taught physical science and still had 'father' in my job description, though most of my job there was keeping out of Sara's way.

Everybody who didn't have children had some other ongoing project. A lot of them, of course, were engaged in creating and dissecting scenarios about what we were going to do forty thousand years from now. I couldn't get up much enthusiasm for that, myself. It seemed to me the only model worth planning about was the tabula rasa one, where we came back to find nothing left of humanity. Otherwise, we were Neanderthals speculating about starflight.

(The sheriff was in favor of a scenario where not much would change over forty thousand years, except increasing mastery over the physical universe. Why would Man want to change? I was more in favor of the one where Man, refusing to allow change, declines into gibbering savagery, in obedience to the Law of Increasing Entropy.)

There were several people writing histories of our voyage, whom I could visualize waiting hungrily for something bad to happen. No news is bad news for historians. Others were studying the social dynamics of our little group, which did seem worthwhile. Sociology with a uniquely reduced set of variables.

Others were writing compositions or novels, or otherwise engaged in the arts. Casi was already whittling away at his log, and on the second day out, Alysa Bertram announced she was holding auditions for a play that was in progress; the actors to collaborate on the script. Sara was one of the first to show up, and she was chosen. She wanted me to try out, but the idea of memorizing pages of dialogue always had sounded like mind-numbing torture to me.

Of course I did have my position on the council to keep me out of trouble. But we had a lot less to do, now that the voyage had begun.

With 'gravity,' the ship was a totally different place. In orbit, the floors were just nuisances, obstacles you had to swim around, and you thought of the ship in a sort of horizontal way, bow to stern, like a water ship. But now forward was up and aft was down. Less than an hour into the flight, Diana had to treat her first broken bone, when Ami – who had lived for months in zero-gee – instinctively tried to float down a staircase.

When that happened, I realized we didn't have anyone who was a safety inspector. So I gave myself the job, but wanted an assistant trained in civil engineering. One of the three people qualified was Cat. I guess I chose her so as not to appear to be avoiding her.

I didn't dislike Cat, though I'd never felt completely comfortable around her. Of course, she'd been born, if you can call it that, nine hundred years after me, into a world where heterosexuality was an affliction so rare most people never even encountered it. But the same was true of Charlie and Diana, our best friends.

Some were more hetero than others, though; Charlie'd had at least one fling with a guy. I wondered about Cat, who had left her husband behind. (Though at the time I'd been relieved; he was kind of worthless except for chess and go.)

Cat accepted the offer with enthusiasm. Most of her work was not really going to start for another ten years, when and if we had to roll up our sleeves and start building a new world.

We decided to work from top to bottom. There wasn't much to be concerned about on the top floor, just cargo and control. Nobody would be going there regularly except for Marygay and her assistants, Jerrod Weston and Puül Ten. The five escape ships weren't locked, and I supposed people might sneak into them for privacy, so we checked them with that in mind.

There was not much inside them but acceleration couches and the suspended-animation pods. The couches looked safe enough, all padding, and I didn't think anyone would venture into the pods, unless they wanted to have sex in a dark coffin full of machinery. Cat said I lacked imagination.

The fourth floor was where most of the aquaculture was, so there was theoretical danger of drowning. All the tanks were shallow enough for adults to stand in with their heads above water, but most of the children were small enough for it to be a potential hazard. All the families with children lived on the first floor, but of course the kids would be roaming everywhere. The DON'T FEED THE FISH sign gave me an idea. I found Waldo Everest, who confirmed that the fish were fed a measured amount each day, and he agreed to go along with my plan: make the children responsible for actually scattering the feed. So the aquaculture pools would be their workplace, rather than a forbidden 'attractive nuisance.'

I'd never heard of that phrase until Cat used it. Describes some people well.

There were three shallow rice paddies which also were home to thousands of crayfish, not quite big enough for the menu yet. About half the floor area was given over to fast-growing grains, fish food. This floor smelled best to me, a whiff of the sea along with green growing things.

Not many safety hazards other than the fish ponds and some of the harvesting machinery. This was the stairwell where Ami fell and broke her arm, but it wasn't uniquely dangerous.

The elevator was right across from the stairs, 120 meters away, but you couldn't just walk across. The narrow path between the various hydroponic fields zigged and zagged. So we just walked around the sidewalk in front of the living quarters, which on this floor made up half a circumference of apartments, identical in size but with slightly different layouts.

The apartment where Marygay and I lived was right next to the elevator, a privilege of rank that was also a necessary convenience: the control room was directly overhead. I invited Cat in for tea. One apartment was as good as any other, to look over for safety hazards.

Compared to military quarters, the apartments were large. The ship was originally configured to hold 205 people, each one having one room four meters square. So our 150 were well spread out. Twenty-eight couples planned on having one or two children during the voyage, but even so, it wouldn't be especially crowded.

It did feel claustrophobic after our big house in Paxton, with the windows looking out on forest on one side and the broad lake behind. I put holo windows of the lake on the wall of our bedroom, but was thinking we ought to reset them. It looked real but felt false.

'Fire hazard,' I said, putting the kettle on for tea. 'Burn hazard, anyhow.' The two burners were induction heaters, so you'd have to be really trying, to injure yourself.

'You have knives and things,' Cat said. By choice, she didn't have a cooking area in her own place. Marygay and I had brought along enough kitchenware to cook and serve a meal for six, and a cabinet of precious spices and herbs. Up to a certain hour, by our tentative rules, you could go to the kitchen and get a meal's worth of raw materials, rather than show up for chow and have what everyone else was having.

'They say the bathroom's the most dangerous room in the house,' she said. 'Not much to worry about there.' We had a toilet and small sink. Each floor had a shower room and a schedule, and there was a shower by the pool on the common floor.

The teapot chimed and I poured us each a cup, and sat next to her on the couch. I looked around the room critically. Not much to worry about anywhere. You think about accidents at home – falls, cuts, burns, exposure to dangerous substances – and most of them involve things we don't have here.'

She nodded. 'Balanced by dangers we don't have at home. Like meteorites and life-support failures and the idea of standing on top of tonnes of antimatter.'

'I'll make a note.' We sipped in silence for an awkward minute. 'Did you come along just to … just because of Marygay?'

She stared at me for a moment. 'Partly. Partly because I knew Aldo wouldn't. It was an unembarrassing way to end the marriage.' She set down her cup. 'I also like the idea of running away, finding a new world. We weren't drafted, you know, in my time. I joined up to see new worlds. Middle Finger was getting pretty small.' She made a wry smile. 'Aldo really liked that. He fell in love with the farm.'

'You're farming here, part time.'

'Exercise. And I do know my root vegetables.'

'I'm glad you came.'

'You are.' It was a question. 'Aldo thought I was chasing after Marygay. Did he talk to you about that?'

'Not in so many words.' But a lot of unsubtle innuendo.

'We do … I do love her.' Cat was trying to keep a tremble out of her voice. 'But I've been, we've been, sixteen years this way. Just neighbors, close neighbors. I'm content with that.'

'I understand.'

'I don't think you do. I don't think men can.' She picked up her cup with both hands, as if to warm them. 'Maybe that's not fair. I never met a het man until I was on Heaven, my mid-twenties. But the normal men and boys I grew up with always had to do each other. It wasn't serious if you weren't doing. Girls and women, it was different. You loved someone or you didn't. Whether you did each other was not a big deal.'

'Yeah, I guess we were different. It's not het versus home. Women were more sexually aggressive in my time, too. But you were born, what, nine hundred years after I was?'

She nodded. 'I think it was 2880, your style.'

'I don't want to sound like a jealous husband,' I said. 'I know you and Marygay still love each other. It's obvious to anyone who cares.'

'Then let's not worry about it. The lack of Aldo in my life is not going to drive me into her arms. Somebody's, maybe. But I'm as het as you are, remember?'

'Sure.' I did wonder about that – how effective or permanent Man's technique actually was. I trusted Cat but did wonder. 'More tea?'

'No, we ought to move along.' She smiled. 'People will start talking about us.'

The third floor, the commons, did have safety problems that hadn't been obvious in zero gee. The carpeting in the cafeteria was old and loose, inviting people with their hands full to trip. There was nothing to replace it with, of course. We pried up a corner and decided the metal deck would be preferable; the dried adhesive was easy to peel off. I'd assemble a work crew in a few days.

We tested most of the apparatus in the fitness room, weight machines and stationary rowing, skiing, and pedaling ones. We looked at the rings and ropes and parallel bars and decided someone else could be the first to have an injury on them.

There were a lot of people already in the pool, including nine of the children. I knew the ship was watching that all day and night. The only people who lived on the commons floor were Lucio and Elena Monet, both expert swimmers with an apartment that overlooked the pool. One of them was always there, and could get to the pool in seconds if the ship sounded an alarm.

The first and second floors were drier versions of the fourth: 95 percent farm, ringed by apartments. The only water hazard was an oyster bed, so shallow you could only drown there in a prone position. (I had resisted activating the bed, which took six months to produce a crop, but was overridden by people who can actually look at an oyster without feeling ill.) Unlike the fourth floor, all of the apartments were one-story, so we didn't even have stairs to worry about.

The area under the first floor was the most dangerous part of the ship, but it was beyond the jurisdiction of the safety inspector and his trusty civil engineer. Seven tonnes of antiprotons seethed there in a glowing ball, held in place by a huge pressor field. If anything happened to the pressors, we would all have about one nanosecond to prepare ourselves for a new existence as highly energetic gamma rays.

Cat volunteered to take charge of the carpet demolition project, and I let her lead it, though I'd become accustomed to the role myself. For ten months, I'd been at the center of everything – arguing, coordinating, deciding – and now I was just another passenger. With a title and an amorphous job, but not in charge anymore. I had to get used to watching other people do it.

Fifteen

Marygay was theoretically on duty all the time, but in fact she only spent one eight-hour shift each day actually in the control room. Jerrod and Puiil took the other two shifts.

Their physical presence in the control room was more a psychological, or social, need than an actual one. The ship always knew where all three were – and if there was a need for a quick decision, the ship would make it without consulting the humans. Human thought was too slow for emergencies, anyhow. Most of us passengers knew this, but it was comforting to have humans up there anyhow.

She liked studying the controls, a complex maze of readouts, buttons, dials, and so forth, arrayed along a four-meter panel with two two-meter wings. She knew what everything was and did through her ALSC training, the way I knew how to fly a shuttle, but it was good to reinforce that crammed-in expertise with experience and observation in real time.

(One evening I asked her how many bells and whistles she thought there were on those eight meters of control board. She closed her eyes for about five minutes and then said, 'One thousand two hundred thirty-eight.')

She chose to be on from 0400 to 1200, so we always met for lunch when she got off. We'd usually throw something together at our place, rather than go down to the 'zoo,' the cafeteria. Sometimes we'd have company. Back on MF we always had lunch with Charlie and Diana on Tuesdays, and saw no reason to change that ritual.

The second week out, I made potato and leek soup, for the first but not the last time – we'd be limited, for several months, to the vegetables Teresa and her crew had been able to grow in zero gee. So no tomatoes or lettuce for a few months.

Charlie showed up first, and we sat down to our ongoing chess game. One move apiece, and Marygay and Diana came in together.

Marygay looked at the board. 'You ought to dust that every now and then.'

I gave Diana a kiss. 'How's the doctor business?'

'God, you don't want to know. I spent most of the morning exploring the rectum of one of your favorite people.'

'Eloy?' I knew he had a problem.

She wagged a finger. 'Confidentiality. I noticed a lot of vowels in his name, though.'

Eloy Macabee was a strange abrasive man who called me almost every afternoon with some complaint or suggestion. He was the keeper of the chickens, though, so you had to give him some leeway. (Fish and chickens were the only animals we'd had aboard in zero gee. Fish can't tell the difference and chickens are too dumb to care.)

'Actually, you should know. Both of you,' she said to Marygay as they both sat down at the table. 'We have a small epidemic on our hands.'

I turned up the heat on the soup and stirred it. 'A virus?'

'I wish. A virus would be easy.' Marygay poured coffee. 'Thanks. It's depression. I've treated twenty-some people the last three days.'

'That is an epidemic,' Charlie said.

'Well, people do catch it from each other. And it can be deadly; suicide.'

'But we expected it. Allowed for it,' Marygay said.

'Not so soon, though, nor so many.' She shrugged. 'I'm not worried about it yet. Just puzzled.'

I ladled the soup into bowls. 'Do the victims have anything in common?'

'Unsurprisingly, it's mostly people who don't have real jobs, who aren't involved in the day-to-day running of things.' She took a notebook out of her pocket and tapped a few numbers. 'Just occurred to me … none of them are veterans, either.'

'Not too surprising either,' Charlie said. 'At least we know what it's like, being cooped up together for years at a time.'

'Yeah,' I said, 'but not ten years. You'll be seeing some of us before long.'

'Good soup,' Marygay said. 'I don't know. I'm feeling more and more comfortable, now that I'm used to…'

'Bill,' I said.

'Yes. Shipboard wasn't the worst part of the war. This is like "old home week," as we used to say. But without Taurans to worry about.'

'One,' Diana said. 'But it's really no problem, not yet.'

'Keeps to itself.' I hadn't seen it five times.

'It must be lonely,' Marygay said. 'Separated from its group mind.'

'Who knows what goes through their heads.'

'Throats,' Diana said.

I knew that. 'Just an expression.' I made the kissing sound for the ship. 'Continue Mozart.' Soft strains of a lute being chased by woodwinds.

'He was German?' Diana said.

I nodded. 'Maybe Prussian.'

'He was still being played in our time. It sounds strange to my ear, though.'

I called the ship again. 'How much of your music comes from before the twentieth century?'

'In playing time, about seven percent. In titles, about five percent.' 'Good grief. Only one out of twenty I can listen to.'

'You ought to sample the others,' Charlie said. 'Classicism and romanticism return in cycles.'

I nodded, but kept my opinion to myself. I had sampled a few centuries. 'Maybe we should switch jobs around. Give the depressed people something significant to do.'

'Could help. We wouldn't want to be too obvious about it.'

'Sure,' Marygay said. 'Put dysfunctional people in all the important positions.'

'Or put them in suspended animation,' Charlie said. 'Table the problem for forty thousand years.'

'Don't think I haven't considered asking for that.'

'We couldn't just tell everybody there's a problem?' I said. 'They're intelligent adults.'

'In fact, two of the patients are children. But no; I think that would cause even more depression and anxiety.

'The problem is that depression, and anxiety for that matter, are both behavioral problems and biochemical ones. But you don't want to treat a short-term problem by altering a person's brain chemistry. We'd wind up with a ship full of addicts. Including the four of us.'

'The mad leading the mad,' Charlie said.

'Ship of fools,' Marygay said.

I kissed for the ship and asked, 'If we all went insane, would you be able to carry out the mission?'

'Some of you are already insane, though perhaps my standards are too high. Yes, if the captain so ordered, I could lock the controls and conduct the mission without human mediation.'

'And if the captain were insane?' Marygay asked. 'And the two co-captains?'

'You know the answer to that, Captain.'

'I do,' she said quietly, and took a sip of wine. 'And you know what? I find it depressing.'

Sixteen

The next day, we had something more depressing to worry about than depression.

I was in my office on the common floor, doing the flunky job of tallying people's requests for various movies for afternoon and evening showings. Most of them I'd never heard of. Two people asked for A Night to Remember and Titanic, which would do wonders for morale. Space icebergs. Hadn't worried about them in days.

The Tauran appeared at my door. I croaked a greeting at it, and glanced at my watch. Five minutes later and I would have escaped to lunch.

'I did not know whether to bring this problem to you or the captain or the sheriff.' The sheriff? 'You were closest.'

'What problem?'

It made an agitated little dance. 'A human has tried to kill me.'

'Good God!' I stood up. 'Who is it?'

'He is the one called Charlton.'

Cal, of course. 'Okay. I'll get the sheriff and we'll go find him.'

'He is in my quarters, dead.'

'You killed him?'

'Of course. Wouldn't you?'

I called Marygay and the sheriff and told them to come down immediately. 'Were there any witnesses?'

'No. He was alone. He said he wanted to talk to me.'

'Well, the ship will have seen it.'

It bobbed its head. 'To my knowledge, the ship does not monitor my quarters.'

I kissed for the ship and asked it. 'That's correct. The Tauran's quarters were improvised out of storage. I was not designed to monitor storage.'

'Did you see Cal Charlton headed in that direction recently?'

'Charlton got on the lift at 11:32 and it went down to the storage level.'

'Was he armed?'

'I could not tell.'

'He tried to kill me with an axe,' the Tauran said. 'I heard glass break, and he came running in. He got the axe from the fire station outside my quarters.'

'Ship, can you confirm that?'

'No. If he had pulled the fire alarm, I would have known that.' Well, that was an interesting fact.

'So you took the axe away from him?'

'It was simple. I heard the glass break, and correctly interpreted that. I stepped behind the door. He never saw me.'

'So you killed him with the axe.'

'Not actually. I believe I broke his neck.' It demonstrated with a convincing karate-like stroke.

'Well, that's … it could be worse.'

'Then, to be sure, I took the axe and severed his head.' It made a gesture like a shrug. 'That's where the brain is.'

You don't want to be disrespectful of the dead, but it was a good thing the Tauran hadn't killed someone anybody liked. Cal was kind of a loose cannon when he was younger, and although he seemed to have calmed down in recent years, he did have outbursts. Married three times, never for very long. In retrospect, it's clear we shouldn't have brought him along; if he hadn't been in on it from the beginning, he probably wouldn't have been chosen, in spite of his many useful talents.

He was one of Diana's depression patients, it turned out, but when we looked over his belongings we found that he had taken one pill and then quit. Two days later, he tried to kill Antres 906.

If everyone aboard had liked Cal, we would have had a lynch mob. As it was, the council agreed with the sheriff that it was an unambiguous case of self-defense, and there was no public disagreement with that. So we were spared the knotty problem of a trial between species. No Tauran had ever committed a crime on MF. Antres 906 claimed that the Taurans had no equivalent to the human legal system, and it appeared to me that it didn't really grasp what a trial was. If there are no individuals in your race, what constitutes crime and punishment – or morality or ethics, for that matter?

Anyhow, Antres 906 was in a kind of existential solitary confinement already, by choice. Whatever 'choice' means to a Tauran; I suppose they normally have their equivalent of the Whole Tree, and just follow its orders without question.

In solitary, but not alone. One of the council was always with it for several days after the killing, protecting it, armed with the tranquilizer rifle. It was a lot more time than I'd ever spent with a Tauran, and Antres 906 didn't mind talking.

One time, I brought along the five-page document from Earth, sentencing us to stay out of space. I asked it about that mysterious last line: 'Inside the foreign, the unknown; inside that, the unknowable.'

'I don't understand this,' I said. 'Is it supposed to be a general statement about reality?'

It rubbed its neck in an almost human gesture, which I knew meant I'm thinking, 'No. Not at all.' It lightly ran its long finger over the Braille twice more.

'Our languages are very different, and the written language is subtle.

The translation is incomplete, because…' It rubbed the line again.

'I don't understand human jokes, but I think this is something like a joke. When you say something and mean something different.'

'What words would you use?'

'Words? The words are accurate. They are familiar, a saying in what you would call our religion.

'But when we use them, they are not inflected this way, which is what makes me think of your jokes. The word "unknowable" here, it means, or rhymes with, "un-namable," or "nameless." Which is sort of like fate, or God, in human terms.'

'It's supposed to be funny?'

'Not at all, no, not in this inflection.' It handed the paper back to me. 'Normally, it is meant to be an expression about the complexity of the universe.'

'That's reasonable enough.'

'But this inflection is not a generalization. It's directed at you, I suppose the one hundred forty-eight of you. Or maybe even all humans. And it is … an admonition? A warning.'

I read the English again. 'Warning that we're headed for the unknowable?'

'Either that or the other way around: the unknowable is headed for you. The nameless.'

I thought about that. 'It could just be talking about relativity, then. It gets pretty mysterious.'

It scraped out a syllable of negation. 'Not for us.'

Seventeen

It was little things at first. No pattern.

A whole bed of oysters stopped growing. The other beds were okay. It only interested me academically, since I had an oyster once and decided once would do it for me. But I helped Xuan and Shaunta run environmental tests, having been a fish farmer in another life, myself, and there wasn't one molecule of difference that we could detect between the affected bed and the others. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with the oysters, except that they refused to grow beyond thumbnail size.

We finally decided to sacrifice the bed and harvest them immature, making about ten liters of soup, which I declined to savor. Then we drained and sterilized the pool and reseeded it.

All the movies and cubes that began with the letter C were missing. No Casablanca or Citizen Kane. But an article would preserve them, so we still had The Cat Women from Mars and A Cunt for All Seasons, so some ancient culture was preserved.

Little things.

The temperature regulator on the children's pool refused to work. It would run hot one day and not at all the next. Lucio and Elena took it apart and put it back together, and so did Matthew Anderson, who had an affinity with such things. But it never did work, and Elena took it out of the system altogether after she tested the water one morning and it was scalding. The kids didn't seem to mind the cold water, but it made them a little more noisy.

Something happened to the floor of the handball court. It got tacky; it was like trying to move around on half-dried glue. We stripped it and revarnished it, but of course it was the same varnish, and soon after it dried, it became tacky again.

That wouldn't have seemed important; just an unfortunate choice of materials, but it was the same varnish we used on all of the ship's fiber surfaces, and it only had gotten tacky in that one location. Handball players do sweat. As if weight lifters did not.

Then a small thing happened that had no reasonable explanation at all. It could only have been an elaborate but pointless practical joke: the air was sucked out of a food storage locker.

Rudkowski sent a report to me, annoyed, and I went down to look at the thing. It was a grain storage locker, free-standing, with no possible connection to vacuum.

There's no lock on the door, but when Rudkowski, a strong, fat man, had gone to open it, it wouldn't budge. Another cook helped him pull on it, and it jerked open suddenly, with a sucking inrush of air. Same thing happened the next day, and so he sent up the report.

We emptied out the locker and went over it minutely, and even had Antres 906 come up and use his differently acute senses. The only way for the thing to lose air would be for somebody to pump it out, but none of us could find any opening.

'Fearsome,' was the Tauran's only reaction. We were still annoyed, rather than scared. But then we had the locker watched all afternoon and night. No one came near it, but by the next morning it was full of vacuum again.

Against the obscure possibility of conspiracy, I stood watch over it all night myself, drinking what passed for coffee. The air disappeared again.

Word got out about this strangeness, and reactions were diverse. Some stolid people – or people in ignorant denial – didn't think it was a big deal. The locker was small, and the daily air loss from it was not even 1 percent of what we lost through normal accepted leakage. If we left it closed, we wouldn't even lose that.

Other people were terrified, and I had some sympathy with them. Since we didn't know what mechanism was sucking air out of the small space, how could we know that the same mechanism might not empty out whole rooms, whole floors – the entire ship!

Teresa Larson and her co-religionists were actually smug: here was something going on that the scientists and engineers couldn't explain. Something mystical, that was happening for a purpose, and God would reveal Her purpose in due course. I asked her whether she would like to spend the night in the grain locker, to test God's sympathy with her belief. She patiently explained the fallacy behind my logic. If you 'tested' God, that was the direct opposite of belief, and of course She would punish you.

I kept my silence about that elaboration of foolishness. I like Teresa, and she is probably the best farmer aboard, but her grasp of reality beyond the tilled field or hydroponic tank is seriously impaired.

Most people were in the same middle ground that I inhabited. Something serious was going on that we didn't yet understand. For now, the practical course was to seal the locker and store the grain elsewhere, while people mulled it over.

The most disturbing reaction was from Antres 906. It asked for permission to do a complete systems check on the escape vessels, with the help of a few human engineers. It said we would need them soon.

Antres 906 approached me first. If it had been a human, I would have said no; we're close enough to panic, and don't need to fuel it. But Tauran logic and emotion are odd, so I took him up to Marygay for a captain's decision.

Marygay was reluctant to grant special permission, since of course we did have a regular inspection schedule, and it could look like panic. But there was no actual harm in it, so long as it was done quietly, as if it were routine. And she did have sympathy for Antres 906 in its isolation. A human locked in a ship with a hundred Taurans would be forgiven for odd behavior.

But when she asked it to elaborate on why it thought the inspection was necessary, the response was creepy.

'Not long ago, William asked me about that piece of paper? The one from Earth? "Inside the foreign, the unknown; inside that, the unknowable."'

It did the little Tauran dance of agitation. 'We are inside the foreign. Your airless locker represents the unknown.'

'Wait,' I said. 'Are you saying that that homily is a kind of prophecy?'

'No, never.' The dance again. 'Prophecy is foolish. What it is, is a statement of condition.'

Marygay stared at him. 'You're saying we should be ready for the unknowable.'

It rubbed its neck and rattled assent and danced, and danced.

Book Four

The Book of the Dead

Eighteen

It took two months for the unknowable to catch up with us. Marygay and I were asleep. A chime woke us up.

'Sorry, but I have to disturb you.'

Marygay sat up and touched the light. 'Me?' she said, rubbing her eyes. 'What's wrong?'

'Both of you. We're losing fuel.'

'Losing fuel?'

'It began less than a minute ago. The antimatter is steadily decreasing in mass. As I speak, we have lost about one half of one percent.'

'Good God,' I said. 'What, is it leaking?' And if so, how come we still exist?

'It is not physically leaking. It is in some way disappearing, though.' It made a rare humming sound, that meant it was thinking. It thought so fast it could solve most problems between phonemes.

'I can say with certainty that it is not leaking. If it were, the antiprotons would be receding from us at one gee. I sprayed water back along our path, and there was no reaction.'

I didn't know whether that was good or bad. 'Have you sent a message to Middle Finger?'

'Yes. But if it continues at this rate, the antimatter will be gone long before they receive it.'

Of course; we were more than four light-days away. 'Charge up every fuel cell to the maximum.'

'I did that as we were speaking.'

'How long…' Marygay said, 'how long can we last on auxiliary power?'

'About five days, at the normal rate of consumption. Several weeks, if we close off most life support and confine everybody to one floor.' 'We're still losing it?'

'Yes. The rate of loss appears to be increasing. If this, continues, we will be out of fuel in twenty-eight minutes.'

'Should we sound the general alarm?' I asked Marygay.

'Not yet. We have enough to worry about.'

'Ship, do you have any idea where the fuel could be going; whether we could get it back?'

'No. Nothing consistent with physics as I know it. There is an analogy in the Rhomer model for transient-barrier virtual particle substitution, but it has never been demonstrated.' I'd have to look that up sometime.

'Wait!' Marygay said. 'The escape ships. Is their antimatter evaporating, too?'

'Not yet. But it is not transferable.'

'I'm not thinking about transferring it,' she said to me. 'I'm thinking about getting the hell out of here before something worse happens.'

'Very sensible,' the ship said.

We put on robes and hurried down to the first floor. From the viewing port we could see the antimatter sphere as it shrank. It otherwise didn't look any different, a ball of blue sparkles, but it did grow smaller and smaller. Finally, it blinked out.

Acceleration stopped and the automatic zero gee cables unreeled, with a soft regular chiming, loud enough to wake most of the people. We could hear a few louder bells from some residences.

We'd done zero gee drill five times, twice unannounced, so it was not a big deal, yet. People floated out of their homes in various states of undress and started monkey-climbing to the common floor's assembly area.

Eloi Casi, the sculptor, was fully dressed, with a work apron covered with wood shavings. 'Damned silly time to pull a drill, Mandella. I'm trying to work.'

'Wish it was a drill, Eloi.' We drifted past him.

'What?'

'No power. No antimatter. No choices.'

Those six words were about all we could tell the company assembled, with the ship adding numbers and times.

'We might as well zip up in the escape ships and get the hell out of here,' Marygay said. 'Every second we delay, it's another twenty-four thousand kilometers we have to make up.'

'We're going eight percent of the speed of light,' I said. 'The escape ships have a slow steady thrust of 7.6 centimeters per second, squared. It will take us ten years to slow down to zero, and another fourteen to get back to MF.'

'Why do we have to rush it?' Alysa Bertram said. 'That antimatter might come back as mysteriously as it disappeared.'

'Yeah, suppose it does?' Stephen Funk said, coming to my elbow. 'Do you want to rely on it then? What if it went fine for another couple of months and then disappeared for good? You want to risk ten thousand years in suspended animation?'

Antres 906 had entered, and was floating just inside the door. I looked its way and it bobbed its head: Who knows?

'I agree with Steve,' I said. 'Show of hands? How many want to zip up and leave?'

Slightly more than half the hands went up. 'Wait a minute here,' Teresa Larson said. 'I haven't had my god-damned coffee yet, and you want me to decide whether to give all this up and go flinging into space?'

Nobody had put more work into revitalizing the ship. 'I'm sorry, Teresa. But I watched the stuff disappear, and I don't see any alternative.'

'Maybe it's our faith being tested, William. Though you wouldn't know anything about that.'

'No, I wouldn't. But I don't think the antimatter's going to come back just because we really, sincerely want it to.'

'Those escape ships are death traps,' Eloy Macabee whined. 'How many people die in SA, one out of three? Four?'

'Suspended animation has a survival rate of over eighty percent,' I said. 'The survival rate here aboard ship is going to be zero.'

Diana had come up to float beside me. 'The less time we spend in SA, the more likely we are to survive. Teresa, you have your cup of coffee. But then come down and get in line. I'm going to prep people as quickly as possible.'

'We aren't accelerating anymore,' Ami Larson said. 'We can afford to wait and think things' over.'

'Okay – you hang around and think,' Diana said heatedly. 'I want out of here before something else happens. Like the air disappearing, next – you want to think that one over, Ami? You want to tell me it couldn't happen?'

'If people do want to stay till the last minute,' I said, 'you can't expect Diana to wait along with you.'

'They can prep themselves, without a doctor or nurse,' she said. 'But if anything goes wrong, they just die.'

'In their sleep,' Teresa said.

'I don't know. Maybe you wake up long enough to strangle. Nobody's ever come back to report.'

Marygay stepped into the moment of hostile silence. She had a clipboard. 'I want names of people willing to leave on the first and second ships. That's sixty people. You can take at most three kilograms of personal items. First group, show up at ten o'clock.'

To Diana: 'How long does it take to prepare?'

'The purging part is like lightning. You want to be sitting on a toilet when you take the medicine.' Some people laughed nervously. 'Seriously. Then it takes maybe five minutes to hook up the orthotics. Those of us who did high-gee combat used to do it in under a minute. But we're out of practice.'

'And a little older now. So figure the second group at noon?'

'That's reasonable. Nobody eat anything between now and then, and don't drink anything but water. Don't take any medicine unless you clear it with me.'

The clipboard started around. 'Once I get these sixty names,' Marygay said, 'the ones who've signed up can go. Then we'll start filling ships Three and Four. How many people are dead set against going?' Twenty people raised hands, some tentatively. I think Paul Greyton and Elena Monet did it out of fear of going against their spouses. Or maybe reluctance to leave them. 'Come over here with me and William, to the coffee station.'

No more coffee from this gravity-fed machine, ever again. That was a plus.

Marygay kissed for the ship. 'What chance do these people have for survival?'

'I can't calculate that, Captain. I don't know where the antimatter went, so I don't know what the probability is that it might reappear.'

'How long will they live if it stays missing?'

'If the twenty people stayed in this one room, and kept it insulated, they could live for many years. My water will begin to freeze in a few weeks, though, and one person will have to go out to the pool and mine it.

'But the pool has enough water for ten years, if you only drink it, and don't wash.

'Food is the complicating factor. Before the first year is over, you'll have to resort to cannibalism. Of course, with each person harvested, there is one less person to feed, and the average body should yield about three hundred meals. So the final survivor will have lived one thousand sixty-four days after the first one is killed, assuming he or she stays warm.'

Marygay was silent for a moment, smiling. 'Think it over.' She kicked off from the table and floated toward the door. I followed, less gracefully.

There was a private command line outside the cafeteria door. I picked up the handset, and said, 'Ship, do you have a sense of humor?'

'Only in that I can distinguish between incongruous situations and sensible ones. That was incongruous.'

'What are you going to do when everyone is gone?'

'I have no choice but to wait.'

'For what?'

'For the return of the antimatter.'

'You actually think it will come back?'

'I didn't "actually" think it would disappear. I have no idea where it is. Whatever agency caused it to relocate may be constrained by some physical conservation law.'

'So you wouldn't be surprised if it reappeared.'

'I'm never surprised.'

'And if it does come back?'

'I'll return to Middle Finger, to my parking orbit. With some new data for you physicists.'

Nobody had called me a physicist in a long time. I'm a science teacher and fish harvester and vacuum welder. 'I'll miss you, Ship.'

'I understand,' it said, and made a noise like a throat clearing. 'In your game with Charles, you should move the queen's rook to QR6. Then sacrifice your remaining knight to the pawn, and move the black bishop up to checkmate.'

'Thanks. I'll try to remember that.'

'I'll miss everybody,' it said without prompting. 'I do have plenty of information to move around and recombine; enough to keep busy for a long time. But it's not the same as the constant chaotic input from you.'

'Goodbye, Ship.'

'Goodbye, William.'

There was a line floating for the lift. I clambered down the steps hand-over-hand, feeling athletic.

I realized I had shifted into an emotional mode reminiscent of combat. Something over which I had no control had suddenly put me into a situation where I had a 20 percent chance of dying. Instead of apprehension, I felt a kind of resignation, and even impatience: let's get this over with, one way or the other.

Did I have three kilograms of stuff I wanted to take back to MF? The old book of paintings from the Louvre – I'd picked that up from a pile of Earth artifacts when I left Stargate for Middle Finger, a fairly new thousand-year-old antique. That wasn't even a kilogram. I'd brought along my comfortable boots in case there were no cobblers forty thousand years in the future. But with only twenty-four years passing, Herschel Wyatt would probably still be at his last.

I wondered who would be fishing my trotlines. Not Bill. He would probably be in Centrus by now, totally integrated into Man. Hell, he might even have gone to Earth.

We might never see him again. That felt different now. I shook my head and four tiny globules of tears floated away from my lashes.

Marygay and I, along with the rest of the council and Diana and Charlie, waited till the last. The last shuttle was almost half empty: thirteen people had elected to stay behind.

Teresa Larson was their spokeswoman, still staying though her wife Ami was asleep aboard the second ship. Their daughter Stel was staying with Teresa; their other daughter was on MF.

'For me, there's no decision,' she said. 'God sent us on this pilgrimage, to come back and start anew. She interrupted our progress in order to test our faith.'

'You aren't going to start anew,' Diana said. 'You have ten thousand sperm and ova frozen, but not one of you knows how to thaw them out and combine them.'

'We'll make babies the old way,' she said bravely. 'Besides, we have plenty of time to study. We'll learn your arts.'

'No, you won't. You'll starve or freeze right here. God didn't take that antimatter away, and it's not coming back.'

Teresa smiled. 'You're only saying that on faith. You don't know any more about it than I do. And my faith is as good as yours.'

I wanted to shake some sense into her. Actually, I wanted to hunt them all down with the tranquilizer darts and load them aboard the ship unconscious. Almost everybody disagreed with me, though, and Diana wasn't sure that they could be hooked up properly without being conscious and cooperating.

'I'll pray for you all,' Teresa said. 'I hope you all survive and find a good life back home.'

'Thank you.' Marygay looked at her watch. Now go back to your people and tell them that at 0900 the ship will seal this door and evacuate the chamber. We can take anybody, everybody until 0800. After that, you just stay here and … take your chances.'

'I want to go with you,' Diana said. 'One last chance to talk some sense into them.'

'No,' Teresa said. 'We've heard you, and the ship has repeated your argument twice.' To Marygay; 'I'll tell them what you said. We appreciate your concern.' She turned and floated away.

There was only one zero gee toilet. Stephen Funk came out of it looking pale. 'Your turn, William.'

The stuff tasted like honey with a dash of turpentine. The effect was an internal scalding waterfall.

In school, in anthropology, we read about an African tribe that lived all year on bread and milk and cheese. Once a year, they butchered a cow to gorge themselves on fat, because they thought diarrhea was a gift from the gods, a holy cleansing. They would have loved this stuff. Even I felt holier. In fact, I felt like one big empty hole.

I cleaned up and floated out. 'Have fun, Charlie. It's a moving experience.'

I floated and clambered over to the last escape ship, with its thirty coffins lined up in dim red light. Was this the last thing I would ever see? I could think of more pleasant scenes.

Diana helped me hook up the orthotics, with a lubricant that contained a muscle relaxant. It was easier than the last time, coming back from the last battle. I suppose they had learned something over the centuries.

A slap on my left leg numbed it from the groin down. I knew this was the last one, the shunt that would replace my blood with a slippery polymer.

'Wait,' Marygay said, and she leaned over the coffin and held my face in both hands, and kissed me. 'See you tomorrow, darling.'

I couldn't think of anything to say, and just nodded, already getting dreamy.

Nineteen

I didn't know that five of Teresa's gang had a change of heart, and joined my pod at the last minute. I was already in the strange space I would occupy for the next twenty-four years.

All five ships were ejected from the Time Warp simultaneously,. so they would have a chance of arriving back home within a few days or weeks of one another. A difference in thrust down in the seventh or eighth decimal place could make a big difference in arrival time, multiplied over twenty-four years.

We basically pointed our noses in the direction of Middle Finger and patiently ate away velocity for ten years. At some point, for one instant, we were absolutely still, with respect to the home planet. Then for seven years we accelerated toward it, and flipped, and for another seven years slowed back down.

Of course I felt none of this. Time passed quickly – far too fast to be almost half as long as my life – but I could tell it was passing. I was neither quite awake nor asleep, it seemed to me afterwards, but floating in a kind of sea of remembrance and fantasy.

For many years, or year-long days, I was obsessed with the notion that all of my life since the Aleph-null campaign, or Yod-4 or Tet-2 or Sade-138, was being lived in the instant between a fatal wounding and death: all those billions of neurons basking in their last microsecond of existence, running through a finite, but very large, combination of possibilities. I would not live forever, but I wouldn't really die as long as the neurons kept firing and seeking.

Coming awake was like dying – all that had been real for so long slowly fading into blindness and deafness and the chill numbing that had been my body's actual state for decades.

I vomited dry air, over and over.

When my stomach and lungs were tired of that, a tube inside my mouth misted something sweet and cool. I tried to open my eyes, but damp pads held them gently shut.

Two delicious stings as the orthotics withdrew, and the first motion of my limbs, if you count a twig as a limb, was a fast erection in reaction to warm blood. I couldn't move my arms or legs for some time. Fingers and toes made satisfying crackly sounds, coming to life.

Diana lifted the pads from my eyes and pried the lids apart with dry fingers. 'Hello? Anybody home?'

I swallowed thin syrup, and coughed weakly. 'Is Marygay all right?' I croaked.

'Resting. I just woke her a few minutes ago. You're second.'

'Where are we? Are we here?'

'Yes, we're here. When you're able to sit up, you'll see good old MF down there, looking cold as a bitch.' I strained, but was only able to rock a few inches. 'Don't knock yourself out. Just rest for a while. When you get hungry, you can have some ancient soup.'

'How many ships?'

'I don't know how to hail them. When Marygay gets up, she or you can give them a call. I can see one.'

'How many people? Did we lose any to SA?'

'One. Leona; I've kept her frozen. There might be disabilities among the others, but they're waking up.'

I slept for a couple of hours and then woke to the low murmur of Marygay's voice on the horn. I sat up in my coffin and Diana brought me some broth. It tasted like carrots and salt.

She unlatched the side. My clothes were where I had left them, twenty-four years older but still in style. I had to stop halfway through dressing to swallow hard a few times, coping with zerogee nausea. It wasn't too bad. I remembered the first time, back in graduate school, when I was useless for a couple of days. Now I just swallowed until the soup remembered to stay down, and finished dressing and floated up to join Marygay.

She was half-sitting, in a zerogee crouch, in the pilot's station. I strapped myself in next to her.

'Darling.'

She looked bad, both haggard and bloated, and from her expression I knew I looked the same. She leaned over and kissed me, carrot-flavored.

'It's not good,' she said. 'This ship lost track of Number Four years ago. Number Two is more than a week behind, for some reason.'

'It thinks Number Four's dead?'

'Doesn't have an opinion.' She chewed her lower lip. 'Seems likely. Eloi and the Snells. I haven't checked the roster, who else is on board.'

'Cat's on Two,' I said unnecessarily.

'It's probably okay.' She stabbed at a button. 'We have another little problem. Can't get Centrus.'

'The spaceport?'

'The spaceport, no. Nothing else, either.'

'Could it be the radio?'

'I get the other two ships. But they're close. Maybe it's a power thing.'

'Maybe.' I didn't think so. If the radio worked at all, it would pull in pretty weak signals. 'Tried a visual search?'

She shook her head, one jerk. 'The optical gear's on Number Four. We've got sperm and ova and shovels.' Mass was critical, of course, and the planet-building stuff was distributed among the five ships with only enough duplication so that the loss of one ship wouldn't doom all the others.

'I got some sort of carrier wave when I first turned it on. The ship thinks it's one of the Centrus shuttles, in a medium-low orbit. Should be back in an hour or so.' We were in geosynch, high up.

I looked at the cold white ball of MF, and remembered warm California. If we had gone to Earth twenty-some years ago, forty-some now, it would be warm and safe. No children to worry over or grieve.

Somebody was vomiting loudly. I unsnapped the vacuum cleaner from the back of the copilot's chair and kicked aft to deal with it.

It's not too bad if you work fast. It was Chance Delany, who looked more sheepish than sick.

'Sorry,' he said. 'It didn't want to get past my throat.'

'Drink water for a while,' I said, buzzing up the little globules. As if I were an expert.

I filled him in on the situation. 'Good God. You don't think the Mother Earth people got in power?'

That was Teresa's crowd. 'No. Even if they did, Man wouldn't let them shut everything down.'

In another hour, the rest of the council was up – Sage, Steve, and Anita. Marygay and I were starting to look more normal, as our faces filled in and tightened up.

'Okay,' Marygay said, touching a viewscreen. 'I've got it again. It's a shuttle, all right.'

'Well, I'm the pilot. Let's go get it and see what's happening downstairs.' We couldn't simply land the escape vessels as if they were overgrown shuttles – or, rather, we could, but the exhaust would kill any humans or animals not under cover for a radius of several kilometers.

'Let's wait until everyone's been up for a couple of hours. We ought to use the acceleration couches, in case.'

'Can you see it?' Anita asked.

'Not from here. But it is there; the signal's pretty strong.'

'Only one?' Steve said.

'I think so. If there's another one in orbit, it's not broadcasting.' She came back hand-over-hand to where we were floating. 'We should maneuver all three ships into echelon, for safety, and approach it in formation.'

'Good,' I said. You had to be careful where you pointed the gamma-ray exhaust, even in space. If all three were parallel, we were safe.

'No one aboard the shuttle?' Chance asked.

'I don't get any voice response. They would've seen us arriving.' We'd be brighter than Alcor, coming in. 'There might be something wrong with our radio. But I don't think so. I do pick up the carrier wave, and that's the frequency they'd use.'

She sighed, and shook her head. 'We better hope it's the radio,' she said softly. 'I don't pick up anything at all, in any broadcast frequency. It's as if…'

'But it's only been twenty-four years,' Steve said.

Anita finished the thought. 'Not long enough for everyone to die out.'

'I don't suppose it takes too long,' Chance said. 'Not if you work at it.'

'You know,' I said, 'it's just possible everybody left.'

'In what?' Steve gestured at the square of sky. 'We took the only ship.'

'Man said there were thousands parked back by Earth. It would be a huge undertaking, but if they had to, they could evacuate Middle Finger in less than a year.'

'Some ecological catastrophe,' Marygay said. 'All those mutations, the crazy weather.'

'Or another war,' Chance said. 'Not with the Taurans. There are probably worse ones out there.'

'We'll know soon enough,' I said. 'They probably left a note. Or a lot of bones.'

Twenty

It took ten hours to maneuver the three ships to within reach of the shuttle, skimming three hundred kilometers over the planet's surface. I got into the roomy one-size-fits-everybody space suit and, after a clumsy hug from Marygay, managed to jet myself from airlock to airlock with only one overshoot.

The readout over my eye said the shuttle's air was good, temperature cold but liveable, so I climbed out of the big suit and called the other two over. I had decided to take Charlie down, and, in case there was something Man could understand better than us, the sheriff. I would have taken Antres 906 if it could have been squeezed into the suit. The Taurans may have left a Braille note saying, 'Die, human scum,' or something.

I asked the shuttle what was going on, but got no answer. Not surprising; it didn't need a lot of brainpower to maintain a low parking orbit. But under normal circumstances, it would automatically have tapped into a brain planetside, to answer my questions.

I'd sort of expected grisly skeletons sitting in the acceleration couches. But there was no sign of human habitation, except for some coveralls floating around loose. I assumed the shuttle had been sent into orbit under autopilot.

After Charlie and the sheriff made their way over, and stashed the three suits and got everybody strapped in, I punched in the one-digit command for 'Return to Centrus.' (So much for weeks in the ALSC machine.) The shuttle waited eleven minutes, and then began to angle down into the atmosphere.

We approached the small spaceport from the east, over the exurbs of Vendler and Greenmount. It was early thaw, snow still on the ground. The sun was coming up, but there was no smoke rising from chimneys. No floaters or people in evidence.

There were only two allowable landing paths, dead east and dead west, both fenced off from horizon to horizon. That wasn't out of fear of crashing, although that might have occurred to somebody. Its primary function was to protect people from the shuttle's gamma-ray exhaust, taking off.

The horizontal landing was smooth. Not a peep from the control tower. No floater came out to greet us, surprise. I popped the airlock and a light staircase spidered down.

Gravity was both reassuring and tiring. Our flight suits were not quite thick enough for the damp cold, and we were all shivering – even the genetically perfect sheriff – by the time we'd covered the kilometer back to the main building.

It was almost as cold inside, but at least there was no wind.

The offices were deserted and dusty. As far as we could tell, there was no power in the building. There was little disorder, just a few paper spills and drawers left open. No sign of panic or violence – no unsightly clutter of bodies or bones.

No notes written in the dust either: BEWARE, THE END IS NIGH. It was as if everybody had stepped out for lunch and kept going.

But they had left their clothes behind.

All along the corridors and behind most of the desks were tired bundles of clothing, as if each person had stopped where they were, undressed, and left. Flattened by years of gravity, stiff and dusty, most of the clothing was still identifiable. Business clothes and work coveralls, and a few uniforms. All of the inner and outer clothing piled on top of shoes.

'This is…' For once, Charlie was at a loss for words.

'Scary,' I said. 'I wonder if it's just here, or everywhere.'

'I think everywhere,' the sheriff said, and squatted down. He came up with a gaudy diamond ring, an obvious Earth antique. 'No scavengers came through here.'

Mystery or no, we were all famished, and searched out the cafeteria.

We didn't bother with the refrigerator and freezer, but found a pantry with some boxes of fruit, meat, and fish. After a quick meal, we split up to search the place for some clue as to how long it had been deserted; what had happened.

The sheriff found a yellowed newspaper, dated 14 Galileo 128. 'As we might have guessed,' he said. 'The same day we started back, allowing for relativity.'

'So they disappeared the same time that our antimatter did.' My watch beeped, reminding me that it was almost time for Marygay to pass overhead. The three of us were just able to push open an emergency door.

The sky was slightly hazy, or we might have been able to see the escape ships as three close white spots drifting across the sky.

We were only able to talk for a few minutes, but there wasn't that much to say. 'Two unexplainable things happening at the same time most likely had the same cause.'

She said they'd continue a visual inspection from orbit. They didn't have anything sophisticated, but Number Three had powerful binoculars. They could see our shuttle and the line it had made in the snow, landing, and the other shuttle, conspicuous under a snow-shedding tarpaulin.

The escape ships would have to land on their tails, so there had better be no one living within a few kilometers of where they came down – else there would be no one living. Our shuttle's gamma-ray blast wasn't 1 percent of the larger ships'.

It looked like that wouldn't be a problem.

If there were people living in town, we'd have to go out into the country and find an alternative landing spot big enough and flat enough. I could think of a couple of farms I wouldn't mind seeing put to that use, just for old times' sake.

We found cold-weather gear in a locker room in the basement, bright orange coveralls that were lightweight and oily to the touch. I knew that it wasn't oil, just some odd polymer that trapped a millimeter of vacuum between the suit's layers, but they still felt greasy.

Hoping against hope, we went into the service garage, but the vehicles' fuel cells were all dead. The sheriff remembered about an emergency vehicle, though, that we found parked outside. Designed to work in situations where power wasn't available, it had a small plutonium reactor.

It was an ungainly garish thing, a bright yellow box set up for firefighting, remote rescue, and immediate medical aid. It was wide enough inside for six beds, with room for nurses or surgeons to move around them.

Getting into it was a problem, the doors locked shut with ice. We got a couple of heavy screwdrivers from the garage and chipped our way inside.

The lights came on when the door opened, a good sign. We turned the defroster on high and looked around – a handy mobile base of operations, now and when the rest of the crowd came down, as long as the plutonium held out.

A 'remaining hours of operation' readout said 11,245. I wondered how to interpret that, since it probably used more power charging up a mountainside than sitting here with its lights on.

When the windshield was clear, the sheriff sat down in the driver's seat. Charlie and I strapped ourselves into hard chairs behind him.

'The enabling code for emergency vehicles used to be five-six-seven,' he said. 'If that doesn't work, we'll have to figure out a way to subvert it.' He punched those numbers into a keypad and was rewarded with a chime.

'Destination?' the vehicle asked.

'Manual control,' the sheriff said.

'Proceed. Drive carefully.'

He put the selector on FORWARD and the electric motor whined, increasing in pitch and volume until all six wheels broke free of the ice with a satisfying crunch. We lurched forward and the sheriff steered the thing cautiously around to the front of the spaceport, and took the road toward town.

The spongy metal tires made a sandpapery sound on the icy road. My watch beeped and we stopped long enough for me to step outside and give Marygay a progress report.

There weren't any suburbs on this side of town; no building was allowed in the direction of the spaceport. Once we passed the five-kilometer limit, though, we were in the city.

It was an interesting part of Centrus. The oldest buildings on the planet were here, squat rammed-earth structures with log framing on the doors and windows. They were dwarfed by the brick buildings of the next generation, two and three stories high.

One of the old houses was standing with its front door open, hanging loose on one hinge. We stopped, and walked over to take a look. I heard the sheriff unsnap his holster. Part of me said What the hell does he expect to find? and part of me was reassured.

Dim light came through the dirty windows, revealing a horrible sight: the floor was scattered with bones. The sheriff kicked at a few and then squatted to inspect a pile of them.

He picked up a long one. 'These aren't Man or human bones.' He tossed it away and stirred the pile. 'Dogs and cats.'

'With the open door, this was the only shelter for them when winter came,' I said.

'And the only source of food,' Charlie pointed out. 'Each other.' We'd brought dogs and cats to this place knowing they'd have to be dependent, parasites, for most of the year. They had been a welcome link to the chain of life that began on Earth.

And ended here? I felt a sudden urgency to get on into town. 'Nothing here for us.' The sheriff felt it, too; he stood up abruptly and wiped his hands on the greasy coveralls. 'Let's move on.'

Interesting that we had instinctively assumed that I was in charge from the time the shuttle left orbit, but now the sheriff was in the driver's seat, figuratively as well as literally.

As the sun rose higher, we drove down Main Street, steering around abandoned vehicles. The road and sidewalks were badly in need of repair. We lurched over a choppy sea of frost heaves.

The cars and floaters were not just abandoned; they were piled up in knots, mostly at intersections. People go off automatic inside the city limits, so when their drivers disappeared, the vehicles just kept going until they ran into something heavy.

Most people's homes were open to the sun. That was not reassuring, either. Who leaves for a long journey without drawing the curtains? The same people who leave their floaters in the middle of the street, I guess.

'Why don't we just stop at random and check a place that's not full of dog bones,' Charlie said. He looked like I felt: time to get off this rocking boat.

The sheriff nodded and pulled over to the curb, in case of a sudden onrush of traffic. We got out and went into the closest building, a three-story apartment cluster, armed with our big screwdrivers, to pry open locks.

The first apartment on the right was unlocked. 'Man lived here,' the sheriff said, betraying some emotion. Most of them didn't need to lock their homes.

It was functional and plain past austerity. A few pieces of wooden furniture without cushions. In one room, five plank beds with the wooden blocks they use for pillows.

I wondered, not for the first time, whether they had pillows stashed somewhere for sex. Those planks would be hard on knees and backs. And did the other one and a half couples watch while a couple was coupling? Adults always lived together in groups of five, while children lived in a supervised crèche.

Maybe they all had sex together, every third day. They didn't differentiate between home and het.

The place was completely devoid of ornament, like a Tauran cell. Art belonged in public places, for the edification of all. They didn't keep souvenirs or collect things.

There was a uniform layer of dust on every horizontal surface, and Charlie and I both sneezed. The sheriff evidently lacked that gene.

'We might be able to tell more from a human place,' I said. 'More disorder, more clues.'

'Of course,' the sheriff said. 'Any other one, I'm sure.' The population of Men was spread uniformly through the city, a magnanimous gesture.

The one next door was locked, and so were the other seven on the floor. We didn't have any luck with the screwdrivers.

'You could shoot the lock off,' Charlie said.

'That's not safe. And I only have twenty cartridges.'

'Somehow,' I said, 'I think you'll find boxes and boxes of them at the police station.'

'Let's go outside and break a window,' he said. We went out to the ruined street and he picked up a fist-sized piece of it. He had a pretty good fastball for someone who'd probably never played the game. It starred the glass but bounced back. Charlie and I did the same. After a few repeats, the window was almost opaque with a craze of cracks, but it still held.

'Well…' The sheriff extracted his pistol, pointed it at the center of the window, and fired. The noise was astonishingly loud, and echoed wavering down the street. The bullet left a hand-sized hole in the ruined glass. He aimed a meter to the right and fired again, and most of the window collapsed in a satisfying cascade.

It was time to make contact again, so we rested for a few minutes while I gave Marygay a summary of our disturbing observations. We agreed that they should put off landing until we knew a little more. Besides, the last people to be revived were still a little bit weak for the stress of landing.

We didn't have to clear away the glass fragments that still clung to the bottom of the frame. I could reach through and unlatch the window, and it swung out to make a large, if inconvenient, portal. The sheriff and Charlie sort of heaved me through it, and then we pushed and pulled until we were all inside. Then I realized I could have gone around and unlocked the door.

The place had been a mess even before we started shooting it up. City folks. There were piles of books all around the room, most of them with bindings from the university library, now eight MF years overdue.

I checked a diploma on the wall and was mildly surprised – the woman who lived here, Roberta More, was a mathematical physicist who had come out to Paxton to talk to a couple of my students about doing graduate work in Centrus. The four of us had had lunch together.

'Small world,' Charlie said, but the sheriff pointed out that it wasn't all that unlikely that one of us would know a random resident here, since we both taught and this was a university neighborhood. I could have argued with his logic, but over the years have learned to find more pleasant ways to waste my time.

Dust and cobwebs everywhere. Four large oil paintings on the wall, not very good to my eye. One, improved by an off-center bullet hole, was signed 'To Aunt Rob with love,' which probably explained all four.

The chaos in the room seemed natural. Subtract the dust and cobwebs and it would be the typical lair of an academic who lived alone.

It looked like she had been in the kitchen when whatever happened, happened. There was a small wooden dining table with two chairs, one of them piled high with books and journals. One plate with unidentifiable remains, which was, perhaps, a clue. The kitchen was otherwise neat, in contrast to her working room; all the dishes but that one cleaned and put away. In the center of her table, a porcelain vase with a few brown fragile sticks. Whatever it was, happened in the middle of a meal, and she didn't have time or inclination to finish or clean up. No abandoned clothes, but a person living alone doesn't have to dress for dinner.

Her clothes were laid out on the bed, which was neatly made, its coverlet rich burgundy under the dust. Two paintings by the same artist faced each other from the exact centers of opposite walls. A dresser had three drawers: blouses, pants, and underwear, all precisely folded and stacked. There were two empty suitcases in the closet.

'Well, she didn't pack,' Charlie said.

'Didn't have time to. Let me check something.' I went back into the kitchen and found the fork she'd been eating with, on the floor to the right of the chair.

'Look at this.' I held up the fork, which had a twist of dried something in its tines. 'I don't think she had any warning at all. She just plain disappeared, in mid-bite.'

'Our antimatter didn't,' the sheriff pointed out. 'If we're still thinking about a common cause.'

'You're the physicist,' Charlie said. 'What makes stuff disappear?'

'Collapsars. But they reappear somewhere else.' I shook my head. 'Things don't disappear. They might appear to, but they've only changed state or position. A particle and an antiparticle destroy each other, but they're still "there" in the photons produced. Even things swept up by a naked singularity don't actually disappear.'

'Perhaps it was staged, for our benefit,' the sheriff said.

'What? Why?'

'I don't have any idea why. But it seems to be the only explanation that's physically possible. There would have been ample time to set it up.'

'Let's play a joke on those renegades,' Charlie said with a broad Centrus accent. 'Everybody make it look like you disappeared on 14 Galileo 128; leave your clothing and then tiptoe away naked. Meanwhile, we'll suck the antimatter out of the Time Warp and force them to come back.'

'And then jump out from wherever they're hiding.'

The sheriff was annoyed. 'I'm not saying it's reasonable. I'm just saying that so far nothing else fits the evidence.'

'So let's find some more evidence.' I gestured. 'Shall we leave by the window, or the door?'

Twenty-one

I talked to Marygay a half-dozen times before nightfall. They'd been taking shifts on the binoculars, and hadn't seen any sign of life other than the tracks we made in the snow. They were barely visible to the best observers, though, who knew what they were looking for; the binoculars were only 15 power. So in theory, there could be thousands of people holed up somewhere.

But that hardly seemed possible, in light of what we'd found and hadn't found. Everything pointed to the same impossibility: at 12:28 in the afternoon on 14 Galileo 128, every human, Man, and Tauran disappeared into thin air.

The time was a supposition based on one datum: a broken mechanical clock on the floor of a man's workshop that was full of such curiosities. His clothes were right by the broken clock.

It was starting to get dark as we neared City Center, so we decided to put that off until we had a full day of light. We were all dog-tired, too, and had only managed to keep our eyes open long enough to have a supper of random boxed goods washed down with melted snow. There'd been a cabinet of wine in Roberta's kitchen, but we were reluctant to take any, stealing from the vanished.

Charlie and I collapsed on the gurneys, or operating tables, in the back of the vehicle, even finding some blow-up pillows. The sheriff slept on the floor, the back of his head resting on a wooden block he'd found on the street.

He got up at dawn, evidently cold, and woke the two of us by turning on the heater. We spent a few groggy minutes regretting the lack of tea or coffee to go with our cold smoked fish and goldfruit. We could break into a house or store to find utensils and tea, and then conjure up a fire somehow. It would have been easy in Paxton, where every house had a practical fireplace. In Centrus it was all central heating and air pollution laws.

I had a sudden desire to go back to Paxton, partly curiosity and partly the irrational hope that this sinister disaster hadn't spread that far; that my home would be the same place I'd left two months or twenty-four years ago. That Bill would be there, repentant but otherwise unchanged.

We saw the trio of ships drift overhead from the west, dim gold stars in the twilight. I turned on the radio but didn't broadcast, and they were silent, evidently still asleep.

I hoped. Anything could happen, here, now.

The sheriff wanted to go to the police station first. That was the only building in Centrus that he really knew, and if there had been any premonition of disaster at the official level, we might find evidence there. We had no objection. I wanted most to go to the communications center, where there was a line to Earth, but that could wait.

The station is half the Law Building, a four-story mirror monolith. The east half comprises the courts; the west, the cops. We went around to the west door and walked in.

Inside, it was pretty dark, and we paused for a minute to let our eyes become accustomed to it. The window wall was at minimum polarization, but it still let in only a thin grey fraction of the morning light.

The security gate stayed open in spite of the sheriff's pistol and our potentially lethal screwdrivers. We walked up to the front desk and I turned the log around and flashed it with my penlight.

'Twelve twenty-five, it says. Parking violation.' Civilian clothes and shoes in front of the desk, a sergeant's uniform behind. He was probably arguing about the ticket at 12:28. The sergeant wanting him to disappear so he could go to lunch. Well, he got half his wish.

The sheriff led us across to the other side of the large room, past dozens of office cubicles, some plain grey or green boxes, others decorated with pictures and holos. In one, an exuberant spray of artificial flowers caught the beginning of the day's light.

We went to the briefing room, where all the officers would gather in the morning, to review the day's plans. If the board said '12:28 – DUMP CLOTHES AND GET ON BUS,' at least part of the mystery would be cleared up.

The briefing room was about sixty folding chairs that had started out in orderly lines, facing a wipe-board on which the writing was still clear. It was mostly code, which the sheriff identified as case numbers and squads. The message 'Birthdays today: Lockney and Newsome' probably had no hidden significance.

We went off in search of cartridges for the pistol, but in most of the little carrels there were either no weapons or more modern ones, worthless without power. Finally we found a supply room with a half-open divided door – I asked whether they still called them Dutch doors; and the sheriff said no, range doors, for whatever reason. (I've always had trouble with the language because there are so many words identical to English ones, but unrelated except for sound.)

They had more ammunition there than you could cart away with a wheelbarrow. Charlie and I each took a heavy box, though I wondered what in the world he planned to shoot with it.

He took four boxes, and as we carried them back to the ambulance, provided an oblique answer. 'You know,' he said, 'this looks like the result of some ideal weapon. Kills all the people and leaves all the things untouched.'

'They had one like that back in the twentieth,' I said. 'The neutron bomb.'

'It made their bodies disappear?'

'No, you had to take care of that part yourself. Actually, I guess it would preserve bodies for a while, by irradiating them. It was never used.'

'Really? You'd think every police department would have one.'

Charlie laughed. 'It would simplify things. They were designed to kill whole cities.'

'Whole cities of humans?' He shook his head. 'And you think we're strange.'

We were back outside in time for Marygay's pass. She said they were going to de-orbit and come in on the next pass, so we wanted some real mass between us and the spaceport.

They'd decided not to wait for the others. Too much weird was going on. Antimatter evaporating was no more or less odd than what we'd been seeing, and we did know it could happen, and strand them up there.

Twenty-two

I was sure the landing would have an unearthly beauty; I've seen matter/antimatter drives from a safe distance, or somewhat safe. Brighter than the sun, an eerie brilliant purple.

We weren't sure how little shielding would be safe, so at the appointed time we cautiously made our way down into the Law Building's second basement.

The penlight showed orderly boxes of documents and a wall of old law books, from Earth, mostly in English. There was another wall, behind a locked iron gate, with hundreds of wine bottles, some of them with labels as old as forty MF years.

I gave the lock a tug and it clicked open. I pulled us each out three bottles at random. The sheriff protested that he didn't drink wine. I told him I didn't shoot anymore, but I'd carried his damned ammunition.

There was a triple sonic boom, pretty loud even at our depth, and then a protracted sound like sheets being torn. I ran upstairs as soon as it quit.

Winded by the unaccustomed exercise, I held it down to a dogtrot going through the dead building and out the door.

Standing in the middle of Main Street, I could see the three golden needles of the ships on the horizon.

Marygay was barely understandable through a roar of static from secondary radiation. 'Landing went okay,' she said. 'Some stuff came loose and crashed around.'

'How soon can you disembark?' I shouted.

'You don't have to shout! Maybe an hour. Don't you come too close before that.'

We spent the time loading the ambulance with ninety parkas from the police wardrobe – better too warm than too cold – and I chose a few cases of food from a grocery down the street.

There would be plenty to eat for the next several years – unless everybody else suddenly showed up, naked and hungry. And pissed off. If one kind of magic is possible, or two, counting the antimatter – then what kind of magic might happen tomorrow?

The sheriff seemed to have been thinking along those lines himself. When we finished loading up the clothing and food and a few extra bottles of wine – one for each ten people didn't seem adequate – he said, 'We have to talk to Antres 906.'

'About what?'

'This. I never could understand Tauran humor. But it would be just like them to demonstrate a new scientific principle with a huge practical joke.'

'Sure. Killing off a whole planet.'

'We don't know that they're dead. Until we have a body, it's still a "missing persons" case.' I couldn't tell whether he was being ironic, playing cop. Maybe exposure to the big-city police station had done something to him.

In one of the vehicle's many latched drawers, labeled only by number, we found a radiation counter. It didn't need a power source in daylight. I pointed it toward the ships, and the needle gave a little quiver, well below the red sector labeled LEAVE AREA.

'So? Let's go on in.'

'Inverse-square law,' I said. 'We'd probably get fried if we got within half a klick.' I was guessing, of course; I didn't know anything about secondary radiation.

I thumbed the radio. 'Marygay, have you asked the ship how long it will be until you can disembark?'

'Just a second.' I could hear a vague mumble mixed with the static. 'It says fifty-eight minutes.'

'Okay. We'll meet you there about then.' I nodded to Charlie and the sheriff. 'Might as well get started, and keep an eye on the counter.'

Going back was a lot easier than coming in had been. We wallowed across a ditch and then drove along the level mud that paralleled the broken-up road. We did wait for fifteen minutes at about the two-kilometer mark, watching the needle quiver less and less.

What to do with 90, or 150, people? Food was not a problem, and shelter was just a matter of breaking and entering. Water was a problem, though.

The sheriff suggested the university. It had dormitories, and a river ran through the middle of it. There might even be a way to jury-rig electricity, I thought; I remembered seeing a field full of solar collectors just off campus, and wondering what they were for – teaching, research, or maybe a backup power supply.

Our ambulance had just crawled onto the landing field when the unloading ramp on Marygay's ship rolled down. People wobbled down it carefully, tentatively, in groups of five, which was the capacity of the elevator down from the SA pods and control room.

When she came down in the last group, I let out a held breath and realized how tense I'd been, ever since we'd admitted the possibility that they could have been marooned up there. I went halfway up the ramp and took her in my arms.

The other two ships were emptying out as well, people milling around the ambulance trying on parkas for fit, chattering away with the release of tension and happiness at reunion – it had only been a couple of months, subjective, but that twenty-four years was somehow just as real.

Of course everybody knew what we had found, or not found, on the surface, and they were full of apprehension and questions. I avoided them by taking Marygay off to 'confer.' After everybody was on the ground and in warm clothes, I went halfway up the ramp and waved both arms for attention.

'We've decided to set up temporary quarters at the university. So far, this ambulance is our only working vehicle; it can take ten or twelve in at a time. Meanwhile, let's all move indoors, out of the wind.'

We sent the ten biggest, strongest people first, so they could get to work on breaking into the dormitory rooms, while Charlie and I led the others to the cafeteria where we had found our first planetside meal. They walked silently by the eerie piles of old clothing, which had some of the appearance of bodies felled by a sudden disaster, like Pompeii.

Food, even old boxed fruit, cheered them up. Charlie and I answered questions about what we'd found in the city.

Alysa Bertram asked when we could start planting. I didn't know anything about that, but a lot of the others did, and there were almost as many opinions as people. None of the ones who'd come from Centrus were farmers; the farmers from Paxton were unfamiliar with the local conventions. It was obvious, though, that it wouldn't just be a matter of picking up where the previous tenants had left off. Farming around here was specialized and technology-intensive. We had to devise ways to break up the soil and get water to it without using electricity.

Lar Po, also no farmer, listened to the arguments and seriously suggested that our best chance for survival was to find a way back to Paxton, where we'd have a fighting chance of growing enough to feed ourselves. It would be a long walk, though.

'There's plenty of time to experiment,' I reminded them. 'We could probably survive here for a generation, scavenging and living off the ship rations.' A few weeks on the ship rations, though, would drive anyone to agriculture. That was undoubtedly part of the plan.

The sheriff came back with the welcome news that they'd found a dormitory on the river that didn't even require breaking into. The rooms had electronic locks, and power failure had opened everything up.

I sent Charlie out to start setting up work details. We had to have a water system and temporary latrine as soon as possible, and then organize into search parties to map out the location of resources in the city.

Marygay and I wanted to go downtown, though, to look for two more pieces to the puzzle. The Office for Interplanetary Communications.

Twenty-three

Like the Law Building, the OIC had been unlocked in the middle of the day. The sheriff dropped us off and we walked right in – and were startled to find artificial light inside! The building was independent of the city's power grid, and whatever it used was still working.

Direct broadcasts from Earth wouldn't be useful, since it's 88 lightyears away. But messages via collapsar jump only took ten months, and there should be a log somewhere.

There was also Mizar, only three light-years away. Its Tauran planet Tsogot had a Man colony, and we might hear something from them, or at least call them, and hear back six years later.

It wasn't a matter of just picking up a mike and flipping a switch – if it was, you did have to know which mike and which switch. None of the terse labels were in English, of course, and Marygay and I didn't know much MF other than idiomatic conversation.

We called the sheriff to come back and translate. First he had to pick up a load of food downtown and ferry it to the dorm; then he'd come by on his way to the next pickup.

While we waited, we searched the place pretty thoroughly. There were two consoles in the main large room, with signs that identified them as 'incoming' and 'outgoing' (though the words are so similar, we might have been exactly wrong about both), and each console was divided into thirds – Earth, Tsogot, and something else, probably 'other places.' The ones for Tsogot had Tauran resting frames as well as human chairs.

When the sheriff showed up he brought along Mark Talos, who had worked with the phone system in Centrus, and was pretty fluent in Standard.

'They don't pick up everything from Earth all the time,' he said. 'That would be insane and probably impossible. But there's one frequency they do monitor and record all the time. It's basically an ongoing archive. Important messages come and go by way of the collapsar drone, but this one is basically "Here's what happened on Earth eighty-eight years ago today."'

He stepped up to the console and studied it. 'Ah, Monitor 1.' He flipped a switch and there was a rapid, high-pitched flow of the language they call Standard.

'So the one under it is Monitor 2?'

'Not exactly. More like "1A"'. He turned off the first one and clicked on 1A, Nothing. 'I'd guess that it talks to the collapsar drone, and maybe to people who go back and forth. That might be done at the spaceport, though.'

'Can we send a message to Earth?' Marygay asked.

'Sure. But you'll be … we'll all be pretty old by the time it gets there.' He waved at the chair. 'Just sit down and push the red button in front, the one that says HIN/HAN. Then press it again when you're done.'

'Let me write down the message first.' She took my hand. 'We'll all take a look at it and make sure it has everything.'

'They're probably getting pretty curious,' Mark said.

'Oh, yeah?' I said. 'Where are they, then?' I looked at the sheriff. 'Are humans that unimportant in the scheme of things? That we could suddenly disappear, and they don't even bother to send a ship to check?'

'Well, they'd still be getting radio from–'

'Eighty-eight years ago, but bullshit! Don't they think that twenty-four years without an urgent message, via collapsar jump, might be cause for concern? We send several a year.'

'I can't speak for them–'

'I thought you were a group fucking mind!'

'William…' Marygay said.

The sheriff's mouth was set in a familiar line. 'We don't know that they haven't responded. If they came and found what we have found, they wouldn't necessarily stay. Why would they stay? We weren't due back for another forty thousand years.'

'That's true, sorry.' It still bothered me. 'But they wouldn't come all the way here, take a look around, and go back without leaving a sign.'

'We don't know they haven't left a sign,' Marygay said. 'It would probably be out at the spaceport.'

'Or maybe here.'

'If so, it's not obvious,' Mark said. He stepped to the next station. 'Want to try Tsogot?'

'Yeah, let's do it while the sheriff's here. He knows more Tauran than we do.'

He clicked a few switches and shook his head. Turned a dial up and the room filled with a roar of white noise.

'That's all they're sending,' he said.

'A dead line?' I asked, suspecting the answer.

'Nothing wrong with the circuit,' he said slowly. 'Just an open mike at the other end.'

'So the same thing happened there,' the sheriff said, and corrected himself: 'May have happened.'

'Is it continuously recorded?' I asked.

'Yeah. If it stops 3.1 years after the big day, then it's compelling evidence. I can check that out.' He turned off the white noise and fiddled with some dials. He slid a Tauran keyboard out of the way and a human one took its place.

'Think I can make it go fast-forward here.' A small screen gave him date and time, about eight years ago, and he turned the sound back up. Tauran chatter got faster and faster, more high-pitched, and then suddenly stopped. 'Yep. Same time, about.'

'There and here and where else?' I said. 'Maybe Earth didn't send anybody here because there's nobody there.'

Twenty-four

The next week was too busy with practical matters to allow much time or energy for mystery. We were keeping the same leadership until things settled down, so I was pretty occupied with the business of turning this corner of a ghost town into a functional town.

People wanted to roll up their sleeves and get the farms started, but our immediate needs were power, water, and sanitation. Another vehicle or two wouldn't hurt, either, but nothing turned up in the first search.

The solar power plant the university maintained outside of the city limits was evidently for teaching, thank goodness, rather than research. It wasn't working, but that was because it hadn't been completely reassembled for the nth generation of engineering students. I took a mechanic and an engineer out there, and after we found the plans, it only took us a day to reconstruct it and two days to carefully take it apart.

Then we moved the pieces to the dormitory and reassembled it on the roof, and started charging fuel cells. People weren't too happy about all of the electricity going into batteries when it could be giving them light and heat, but first things first. (My mother and father were always talking about 'power to the people.' A good thing they weren't here to agitate.)

We got two delivery vans running – I guess we should have called them 'scavenger' vans – and raided a plumbing supply depot and a hardware store for the things we needed to get running water in the dorm. We basically pumped water from the river, presumably clean, up to a collapsible swimming pool on the roof, which served as a holding tank. That gave us gravity-fed plumbing for the kitchen and the dormitory's first floor, complete with hot water, since it was only a matter of finding the right adapters to run the water through a heater. Still no toilets, since the dorm used conventional 'flash and ash' disposal, completely sanitary but requiring truly huge amounts of power.

There wasn't enough water to convert to the ancient kind of plumbing I grew up with, and I don't know what you could safely do with the effluent anyhow. I remember big sewage plants, but I'm not sure how they did what they did. So we kept using slit latrines, a simple design from an army manual, and Sage was researching for more permanent solutions.

The fourth ship, Number Two, came into orbit after twelve days and landed without incident. Its passengers all got second-floor rooms, except for Cat. Ami Larson really needed someone sympathetic; she was grieving over Teresa and feeling guilty for having abandoned her and their daughter. Cat had been het since she came to Middle Finger, but she'd been lesbian all her life before that. Which was probably less important than having twenty years' more experience than Ami, in love and loss, and a patient ear.

So she was next door, which shouldn't have bothered me – would it have, if Cat had been an old boyfriend? Maybe it was the long period of their lives (only about a year in real time) that was theirs alone, which I could never share – when I had been out of the picture, presumed dead.

Of course all of us first-generation veterans who'd been home had been switched to het, as a condition for coming to Middle Finger and jumping in the gene pool. Teresa showed how effective that was. And I knew Charlie had had at least one fling with a guy, maybe for old times' sake. Boys will be girls and girls will be boys, we used to say, in my unenlightened youth.

Mark kept searching for more information at the OIC, but had found nothing new. He also spent days prowling around the spaceport, but in neither place was there any record of collapsar-jump messages from Earth, either before or after the disaster. They were evidently kept secret from hoi polloi; the sheriff had no idea where they might be. Of course, even if we did find messages and there were none from Earth after the Day plus ten months, it wouldn't prove anything. There wasn't anyone here to receive.

(In fact, we could be getting messages from Earth every hour, via collapsar, and never know it. The transmitter comes tearing out at a velocity much higher than Mizar's escape velocity, since the small collapsar's in a tight orbit around Mizar. It whips by MF at fifty or a hundred times the planet's escape velocity, and sends its message down in a burst, and goes off for parts unknown. It's only about the size of a fist, so it's almost undetectable if you don't know the frequency it's using.)

People were excited about an expedition to Earth. The escape ships still had plenty of fuel for a collapsar jump, there and back. If there were still people and Man and Tauran on Earth, they might be able to help us figure out what had happened. If there were none, we'd be no worse off; one more bit of data.

Or so the reasoning went. I agreed, but some were not so sure that we had so completely cut our bonds to Earth. If everyone was gone, if they'd disappeared on the Day, we wouldn't stop hearing from them for another sixty-four Earth years. By that time, we'd be re-established on MF – it would be a shock, but life would go on.

If we were to find out now, still reeling from the original disaster, that we were alone in the universe – and still vulnerable to whatever force had snuffed out everyone else – it might be more than we could handle, as individuals and as a culture. So the theory went.

We were not too stable 'as a culture' even now. If the last ship was indeed lost, we totaled 90 people, only 4 of them children. (Two of the 9 who died in SA were under twelve years of age.) We had to start making babies, wholesale as well as retail, hatching some of the thousands of ova frozen aboard the ships.

The prospect was not greeted with enthusiasm. A lot of the people were like me and Marygay: we've already done that! Among the various options we'd seen opening up in middle age – like the wild scheme to highjack the Time Warp – starting a second family was pretty low on the list.

Sara comprised one-fourth of the females old and young enough for natural motherhood, and she wouldn't have felt ready for it even if any of the available men appealed to her. None of them did.

The sheriff suggested we raise a large batch Man-style, in a group creche, with no parents as such, just supervisors. I could see some merit to it, since a large majority of them actually wouldn't have living parents, and if it wasn't for the association with Man, I think most would have gone along with it. But there was a general counter sentiment; this was the kind of thing we wanted to escape from, and now you want to re-invent it?

They might reconsider when they have four or five infants crawling around. The council decided on a compromise, only possible because we had people like Rubi and Roberta, who were mad about children but unable to have their own. They volunteered to supervise a creche. Every year – three times a Year – they would hatch eight or ten from the ship's stores; they'd also take on the stewardship of unwanted children born the old-fashioned way.

Antres 906 was probably worse off than any of us, though of course it's hard to say anything about a Tauran's emotional state. For all it knew, Antres 906 was the last survivor of its race. They didn't have gender, but they couldn't reproduce without an exchange of genetic material – a holdover from their ancient past, since for millenniums all Taurans had been genetically identical.

People were getting used to the sight of it wandering around, trying to be helpful, but it was like the situation aboard the Time Warp, it essentially had no useful skill, being a linguist who was the sole speaker of its language, and a diplomat representing only itself.

Like the sheriff, the Tauran could tap into the Tree, but they both had the same experience. There was no sense of any danger or even problem approaching, but after the Day, no information had been added. The last collapsar-jump message from Earth, three weeks before the Day, also had no premonitions of disaster, from either Man or Tauran.

Antres 906 was in favor of going to Earth or Kysos, nominally the Tauran home planet, and volunteered to make the collapsar jump alone, and come back with a report. Marygay and I believed it was sincere, and I think we knew Antres 906 better than anyone but the sheriff. But most people thought that would be the last we saw of ship or Tauran (but some of them thought it would be worth losing a ship to get rid of the last surviving enemy).

A lot of people did want to go check out Earth, with or without Antres 906. We left a sheet on the dining room bulletin board, and got thirty-two volunteers.

Including Marygay and Sara and me.

Logic would dictate that the ones least essential to the fledgling colony ought to go. But it was hard to say who was more valuable than who, beyond a few who couldn't be replaced, like Rubi and Roberta (who weren't on the list anyhow), and Diana and two young people she was training to be doctors (who were).

The council decided that twelve would be selected from a pool we winnowed to twenty-five non-essentials. (I got disappointingly little argument when I insisted I was not essential.) The sheriff and Antres 906 would go, as observers with unique points of view.

But the fourteen wouldn't leave before deep winter, when not much work would be done, anyhow. The expedition could go to Earth, look around, and be back before spring.

When to make the choice? Stephen and Sage, both on the list, wanted to go ahead and get it over with. I argued for waiting until the last minute, ostensibly to make it more of an occasion; give people a little bit of drama that didn't have to do with day-to-day survival. Actually, my motivation was purely statistical – given a year and a half, some of the twenty-five were bound to change their minds, or die, or otherwise become ineligible, thus increasing our chances.

Marygay and I had decided we would only go if both of us were chosen. If Sara were chosen, she would go, period. She was apologetic about that, but adamant, and I was secretly proud of her for her independence, if apprehensive about the separation.

The council agreed to wait, and we went back to the job of making Centrus livable. The problem of power generation was frustrating and basic. We had always taken free and abundant power for granted: three microwave relay satellites had been in place for more than a century, turning solar power into microwaves and beaming it down. But there's no such thing as a simple stable orbit around MF, not with two large moons and the sun a close double star. Without supervision, the three satellites had wandered off on their own. Eventually, we'd be able to go out and retrieve them, or build and orbit new ones, but for now, our industrial planet was closer to the nineteenth century than the twenty-first. Likewise, any of the three spaceships out on the pad had enough energy to keep us going for decades, but we had no way to release it slowly and safely.

In fact, a vocal minority, led by Paul Greyton, wanted those three ships parked in orbit, right now – before something happened to their magnetic containment apparatus, and we were all instantly vaporized. I understood his concern and didn't entirely disagree, even though the containment fields couldn't possibly fail so long as particle physics worked. Of course, particle physics didn't predict antimatter dwindling away of its own accord, either.

Parking them would require the shuttle, too, and I wouldn't mind the practice. But the rest of the council was unanimous in rejecting Greyton. To most people, the sight of the ships on the horizon was comforting, a symbol of options, possibilities.

Twenty-five

We got two multi-purpose farming vehicles fired up, and I cheerfully delegated authority for that little set of problems to Anita Szydhowski, who used to keep the Paxton coop organized.

There were too many choices. If we had landed on a random Earth-like planet, it would be no problem; there were super-hardy varieties of eight basic vegetables in the ships' survival stores. But to get that hardiness, the breeders had to trade off things like taste and yield.

None of the Earth plants on Middle Finger had survived eight hard winters, but there were plenty of seeds in stock, a good fraction of which would be viable – plus hundreds of varieties in cryonic storage at the university. Anita wound up being Solomon-like, making sure enough of the super-hardy were planted to get us through the next year before allotting acreage for the traditional crops, riskier because of the age of the seeds. Then a few acres on the campus itself, for the three ex-farmers who had been itching for years to get their hands on the exotics the university doled out on rare occasion.

I restarted the teaching schedule I'd been following on Time Warp – much, of course, to the students' delight. I could drop general science, sadly, since my two youngest students had died in SA, but had to add calculus because the higher-math teacher, Grace Lani, had also died. That was a challenge. Doing calculus is a lot easier than teaching it, and the students I used to have had all been beyond the basics, so I didn't have any experience with the chore.

After a month had passed, we were able to make an expedition to Paxton. This took both vans out of service for two days – their range was about a thousand kilometers, so the van that made the trip had to carry along the other van's fuel cells.

The council magnanimously decided that one of the council should do it, and I drew the short straw. For my assistant and co-driver, I chose Sara. Like almost everyone, she was intensely curious. Also young and strong, to help with driving – all manual, of course – and changing over the heavy fuel cells. Marygay approved, though she would've liked to go herself. Sara was growing away from us, fast, but this was one area where our interests converged.

The van could carry three tonnes, so we could bring back a certain amount of stuff. I had Sara canvass people, and then we sat down with the list and made decisions. It was like the Time Warp winnowing process, in miniature. There weren't very many purely sentimental requests, since those things had been taken aboard the time ship and either brought back or abandoned. But there was a limit to the time and effort we could spare – it would be worth going to Diana's office and getting the medical records of the thirty-one of us she'd had as patients, for instance, but I wasn't going to ransack Elena Monet's place to find her crocheting kit.

We did have some hard decisions, juggling time and weight and needs, individual and communal. We were going to load Stan Shank's ceramic kiln, even though it weighed half a tonne and you'd think such things would not be rare. But he'd searched Centrus, and all nine of the kilns he'd found were ruined; left on until they'd burned out.

Sara and I didn't have anything on the list. But there was a little slack.

We left at first light, and a good thing. The trip, normally eight hours, took twenty, most of it crawling along the shoulder of the road rather than trying to negotiate the pavement's rubble.

When we got there, we went straight through town to our old place. Bill had moved in as temporary caretaker, until someone else came along, able and willing to fish in exchange for a nice old house.

We went straight to the kitchen and built a fire. I left Sara to do that while I went out to the lake for a couple of buckets of water, for which I had to break a skin of ice.

In the barrel on the end of the dock, the stasis field was still on; it requires no power to maintain. It was about one-quarter full of fish. I went back to the kitchen for tongs and brought in a few. Absolute zero, of course, but they'd thaw in time for breakfast.

We warmed the water over the fire and drank old wine – I'd bartered it from Harras not five months ago – and when the water was hot enough, I carried a candle into the cold living room to read, while Sara bathed. Having grown up in a nudist commune, and going from there to the army's communal showers, I didn't have any modesty about bathing, and neither did Marygay. So of course our children turned out to be prudes.

It looked like Bill had still been here on the Day, and not alone. I recognized the pile of his clothes where he'd been sitting on the couch in the living room, next to a pile of woman's clothing. Seeing his clothes was a sudden shock; my head swam and I had to grope for a chair.

When I could stand again, feeling curious and obscurely guilty, I checked upstairs, and yes, two people had slept in his unmade bed. I wondered who she was and whether they'd had time, or inclination, to fall in love.

After she'd washed up, Sara looked at her brother's clothes and fell silent. She found us reasonably fresh linen and went upstairs to change her bed and sleep, but for a long time, I could hear, she tossed and turned. I just made a pallet on the floor by the fire, no desire to sleep in our old bedroom alone.

In the morning I broiled the fish in the fireplace, and made a pot of rice that barely seemed a decade old. Then we went out on various errands, a pair of holo cameras mounted in front of the van. Stephen Funk had insisted on that; someday it would be a valuable historic record. And people would be curious about what their homes looked like, abandoned for eight years.

Most of them would be unhappy, since very few had had landscaping of native plants alone. There was status in planting and maintaining Earth stock, but very little of it had survived even one hard winter unattended. The native forms had taken over, especially the large and small green mushrooms, neither plant nor fungus, pretty ugly even out in the woods, where they belonged. All of the lawns were full of it, knee high to head high. The town looked like a nightmarish fairy tale.

We gathered records and artifacts and a few specialized tools – Stan's kiln, as he'd said, disassembled into ten pieces, but it was still a monster to load. By the end of the day, we were tired and depressed and ready to leave. But we had to wait till dawn.

I made a stew of boxed fruit with rice, and we sat by the fire, eating and drinking too much.

'Earth is going to be like this to you, isn't it?' Sara said. 'Only worse.' 'I don't know,' I said; 'it's been so long. I think I've adjusted to the fact that there won't be much I recognize.'

I added some wood to the fire and went back to refill the wine pitcher. 'I guess I told you about the guy from the 22nd.'

'A long time ago. I forget.'

'He came to Stargate while I was waiting for Charlie and Diana and Anita to get hetero-ed. He was alone, supposedly the only survivor of some battle. Too vague about it, though.'

'You assumed he'd deserted.'

'Right. But that wasn't what interested me.' The wine was cool and tangy. 'He'd been back to Earth in the twenty-fourth. Born in 2102, he'd mustered out into the 2300s. Like your mother and me, he couldn't tolerate what passed for Earth society, and re-upped to get away from it.

'But what he described sounded so much better than the world he'd been born into. That was a half-century after Marygay and I had left, and it was even worse. The leading cause of death in the United States was murder, and most of the murders were legal duels. People settled arguments and even made business deals and gambled with weapons – I put up everything I own, and you put up everything you own, and we fight to the death for the whole pile.'

'And he liked that.'

'He loved it! And after all his commando training and combat experience, he was looking forward to becoming a wealthy man.

'But the Earth wasn't like that anymore. There was a warrior class, and you were born into it, biologically engineered. They went into the army as children, and never left it; never mixed with polite society – and I mean polite. The Earth had become a planet of docile lambs who lived communally; no one owned – or desired – more than anyone else had; no one even spoke ill of anyone else.

'They even knew that their harmony was artificial, imposed by biological and social engineering, and were glad for it. The fact that a horrific war was being waged on a hundred planets, in their name, just made it the more logical that their own daily lives be serene and civilized.'

'So he ran back to the army?'

Not immediately. He knew how lucky he'd been to survive, and wasn't eager to press his luck. He couldn't live with the sheep, so he took off on his own – wandering through the countryside, trying to live off the land.

'But they wouldn't let him! They wouldn't leave him alone. They could always find him, and every day they sent someone new to try to bring him into the fold. He'd fight the messengers – or at least assault them; they didn't fight back – and even killed some. A new one would show up the next day, full of pity and concern.

'After a month or two, the one who showed up was an army re-enlistment officer. He was gone the next day.'

We watched the fire for a while. 'You think you could've adjusted?'

Not adjusted. I could never be like them. But I could have lived in their world.'

'So could I,' she said. 'It sounds like Man's world.'

'Yeah, I suppose it does.' The one I rejected for Middle Finger. 'It was probably a first step. Even though we didn't make peace with the Taurans for another thousand years.'

She took our bowls and spoons to the sink, walking with careful unsteadiness. 'I sort of hope it's different, if I get, if we get chosen.'

'It will be. Everything changes.' I wasn't sure, though, once Man got ahold of it. Why mess with perfection?

She agreed, and made her way upstairs to bed. I washed the bowls and spoons, pointlessly. This house probably wouldn't have inhabitants again in my lifetime.

I made up my pallet by the fire, after wrestling a big overnight log into place. I lay down and stared at the flames, but couldn't fall asleep. Maybe I'd had too much wine; that sometimes happens.

For some reason I was haunted by images of war – not only actual memories of the campaigns and the gore we twice had to deal with in transit. But I also went way back to training; to the ALSC-induced fantasies of combat, killing phantoms with everything from a rock to a nova bomb. I thought about having some more wine, enough to chase them away. But I'd be driving, steering, at least half of a long day.

Sara clumped down sniffling with her pillow and blankets and said, 'Cold.' She snugged up to me the way she used to when she was little, and in a minute was softly snoring. The familiar warm smell of her drove the demons away, and I slept, too.

Twenty-six

Eventually, other people went on expeditions to Thornhill, Lakeland, and Black Beach/White Beach, scavenging from the lost past. No new clues as to what had happened showed up, but the dorm did become more homey, and crowded, with the junk they brought back.

Toward the end of spring, we began to expand, although it was more like an amoeba slowly splitting. There were no central utilities, and wouldn't be for some time, so they had to reproduce in miniature our mechanisms for power and plumbing and so forth.

Nine people moved into a building downtown that had been called 'The Muses,' a place where artists, musicians, and writers lived together. All the materials for those pursuits were still in place, though the cold had ruined some of them.

Eloi Casi's lover, Brenda Desoi, brought along the unfinished small sculpture that Eloi had given her before we left the Time Warp; she wanted to make an installation around it, and she knew that Eloi had spent a deep winter studying and working at The Muses when he was young. She found eight others who wanted to move there and start making art and music again.

There was no objection – in fact, most of us would have borne Brenda out on our shoulders, just to get rid of her. We'd found a storage room full of solar panels and equipment out at the spaceport, and so that was not a problem; Etta Berenger set it up in a few afternoons. She also designed a year-round latrine for them, in an elegant atrium, but allowed them to do the artistic pick-and-shovel work themselves.

That freed up six rooms at the dorm. We shuffled people around so that the west end of the building was given over to Rubi and Roberta's creche and the families who were raising children on their own. It was good for the kids to have other kids around, and marvelous to have a door – the firedoor that isolated the west wing – beyond which children could not go unescorted.

Etta and Charlie and I, along with specialists we'd call in now and then, spent a few hours every afternoon working on plans to reclaim Centrus. We could start out with small colonies like The Muses, but eventually we wanted to have an actual city to grow into.

It would have been easier on Earth, or some other well-behaved planet. Dealing with month after month of bitter cold complicated everything. Just keeping buildings livable was a challenge. In Paxton, we'd supplemented electrical heat with fireplaces and stoves, but out there we had heat-farms; fast-growing trees whose limbs were trimmed every year for fuel. Centrus was surrounded by hills with native trees, but their spongy 'wood' didn't burn well, and if we cut them down in quantity, we'd cause erosion and probably flooding, during the spring thaw.

The ultimate solution was going to be finding one of those powersats and bringing it back. But that wouldn't be this winter. And this winter had to be dealt with soon – not only did it cool off quickly as the summer faded, but the output of the solar power plant plunged at the same time – we weren't just dealing with the inverse-square law (when the sun became twice as far away, we'd have one-fourth the power), but also more and more cloudy days, lacking weather-control satellites.

So we would go for wood stoves. There was enough wood at Lakeland to keep us warm through dozens of winters. Normally, the heat-farm trees were kept 'topped,' so they never grew above eye level. Eight uncontrolled seasons had turned those acres into a tall dense jungle of fuel.

In a shed next to a chemical factory outside of Centrus, we found hundreds of steel drums, 100- and 250-liter, which made ideal stoves for heating. I used to be a welder, and in an hour I taught a couple of guys how to cut the proper holes in the drums. Alysa Bertram also knew how to weld; she and I attached the metal ducts to the stoves. Back at the dorm, and at Muses, people were improvising exhaust ducts through windows or walls.

We diverted one farm machine and one van to a wood-gathering detail; it was going to require 850 cords of wood, to be on the safe side. They needed it to make water out of ice, as well as for keeping warm and cooking.

Everybody breathed a little easier when the first crops started coming in. The flock of chickens had grown to laying size. The artists took two pair, which was going to make living in The Muses interesting, come winter. At the dorm, we were able to turn the downstairs cube room into a chicken coop. People who had to have a large cube or screen for their movies could share them with the chickens. There weren't going to be regular cube broadcasts for a while, I thought. (That would prove wrong; faced with a long winter's boredom, people would watch anything, even if it was their own neighbors being themselves in front of a camera downstairs.)

The sunny upstairs exercise room became a greenhouse, for growing seedlings to be transplanted. We could also grow greens there during the winter, for which Anita installed three wood-stoves and supplemental lighting.

As for the truly big winter problem – finding an alternative to running through the snow to bare your butt over a slit trench at fifty below – Sage came up with a solution more direct than elegant. Even at this latitude there was a permafrost layer. Anything below seven meters (and not so deep that the earth began to warm) would freeze and stay frozen forever. We didn't have earthmoving tools, or power, for that matter, to actually dig a pit deep enough and large enough for a population that was ninety and growing. But there was a copper mine only ten klicks out of town, and from it she appropriated shaped charges and a mining laser that did the job.

The folks in town would have to make do with their slit trench, but art always requires sacrifices. Going out to the frozen atrium would put them in touch with nature, and their inner selves.

Twenty-seven

I worked as hard on the reclamation project as I ever had on anything, outside of combat, and so did Marygay. There was a lot of desperation in the air. We didn't talk about the Earth expedition, not until the day of the drawing.

Everybody gathered at the dorm cafeteria at noon, where there was a glass bowl with thirty-two slips of paper in it. The youngest child who was not too young to be able, Mori Dartmouth, sat up on the table and picked out twelve names for me to announce. Sara was second, and she rewarded me with a squeal of delight. Cat was third, and hugged Sara. Marygay was eighth and she just nodded.

After twelve, my name was still in the bowl. I didn't want to look at Marygay. A lot of other people did. She cleared her throat, but it was Peek Maran who spoke: 'Marygay,' he said, 'you're not going without William, and I'm not going without Norm. It looks like we have a game situation.'

'What do you propose?' she said. 'We don't have coins.'

'No,' he said, momentarily puzzled at the word – he was third-generation and had never seen money in any non-electronic form. 'Let's empty out the bowl and put our names – no, William's and Norm's – into it. Then have Mori draw.' Mori smiled and clapped.

So I won, or we did, and there was a quiet pressure of jealousy in the room. A lot of people who hadn't volunteered their names for the bowl back in the spring would be only too glad to take their chances, and a little trip, now that deep winter loomed.

The physical preparations had been finished months before. We were taking ship Number Two, christened Mercury. All of the terraforming and recolonization tools and materials had been taken out; if Earth was deserted, we would just come back with that news, and let later generations decide about repopulating it.

We were prepared for other contingencies, though. Each ship had a fighting suit, and we took all four. We also carried a stasis dome, but elected not to bother with a nova bomb, or any such dramatic weapon. If anything that serious happened, we'd be meat anyhow.

They weren't great fighting suits, since they had to accommodate a range of sizes and skills, and we discussed leaving them behind, as a matter of principle. I argued that we could decide not to use them, when the time came, as a matter of principle. But meanwhile, as the poet said, do not go gentle into that bad night. Or something.

Book Five

The Book of Apocrypha

Twenty-eight

Some Indian tribe or tribes had no ritual for good-byes; the person leaving just turned his back and left. Sensible people. We spent a day making the rounds, saying good-bye to everyone because you didn't dare leave anyone out.

I saw half the people in the colony, anyhow, as mayor, since everybody seemed to be in charge of this or that, and had to come by and give me a report and sketch out what they'd be doing while I was gone. Sage, who would be interim mayor, sat beside me for all of the discussions.

It was also her job, the next day, to make sure everyone was safely underground, away from the launch's radiation, when Marygay pressed the button. Precisely at noon she radioed that everyone but her was downstairs. The button gave her a minute; the ship counted down the last twenty seconds of it.

It was a crushing four gees at first; then two. Then we floated in free fall for half an orbit, and the ship drove toward Mizar's collapsar at a steady one gee.

A day and a half of constant acceleration. We made simple meals and small talk while Mizar drew closer – finally, closer than you'd like to be, to a young blue star.

The collapsar was a black pinprick against the filtered image of the huge star, and then a dot, and then a rapidly swelling ball, and then there was the odd twisting feeling and we were suddenly in dark deep space.

Now five months to Earth. We got into our coffins – Sara clumsily quick in her modesty about nakedness – and hooked up the orthotics and waited for sleep. I could hear the ship whispering, telling a couple of people to redo this or that attachment, and then the universe squeezed to a pinpoint and disappeared, and I was back in the cool dream of suspended animation.

I'd talked with Diana about the emotional, or existential, discomfort I'd gone through last time, and she said that as far as she knew, there was no medical solution for it. How could there be, when you're metabolizing slower than a sequoia? Just try to think comfortable thoughts before you go under.

It sort of worked. Most of us could see the overhead view-screen, and I'd set up a program for it to show a sequence of soothing pictures while we waited to cool down. Expressionist paintings, quiet nature photographs. I wondered whether Earth had any nature left. Neither Man nor Tauran was sentimental about such things; they found beauty in abstractions.

Well, we didn't have such a great track record, either. Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.

So I spent the dreaming five months, which sometimes felt like five minutes, in a series of quiet pastoral environments, most of which were extrapolations of places I'd only read about or seen in pictures; even the commune where I grew up was in a suburb. I had played in neatly manicured parks and dreamed they were jungles. I came back to those dreams now.

It was curious. My dreams didn't take me back to Middle Finger, where Mother Nature and I had always been on intimate, battling terms. No rest in that, I guess.

Coming out of SA was more difficult, and uncomfortable, than when I'd had Diana to help. I was confused and numb. My fingers didn't want to work, and they couldn't tell clockwise from counterclockwise, unscrewing the bypass orthotics. When I lifted myself out I was streaked with blood from the abdomen down, though there was no injury.

I went to help Marygay, and she was only one step behind me, trying to sort out and loosen straps. She had managed not to splash blood all over herself. We both got dressed, and she went back to check on Sara, while I looked at the others.

Then I checked on Rii Highcloud, who was our volunteer medico. She was actually a librarian, way back in real life, but Diana had given her an intense week of training in how to use the standard medical kit aboard the ship.

Antres 906 was alert, and nodded at me when I peered over the edge of the box. Good thing. If something went wrong, the creature would have been at the mercy of a first-aid manual that had an appendix about Taurans.

Jacob Pierson was frozen solid, with no life signs. He had probably been dead for five months. It made me feel vaguely guilty that I didn't like him and hadn't looked forward to working with him.

Everyone else was at least moving. We wouldn't know if they were well until they were up and talking. Unwellness could take odd forms, too; Charlie had come out of SA on Middle Finger unable to smell flowers, though he could smell other things. (Marygay and I used it as an excuse, a private joke, for not remembering names or numbers: 'Must've lost it in SA.')

She said that Sara was coming along fine; she'd needed some mopping up, but didn't want her mother to help, of all people.

We got the screen working, and Earth looked all right, or at least as we expected. About a third of what we could see, between clouds, seemed to be city, a featureless grey, all over northern Africa and southern Europe.

I drank some water and it stayed down, though I could imagine it floating, a cold spherical lump, in my stomach. I was concentrating on that when I realized Marygay was crying, silently, blotting floating tears with her knuckles and forearm.

I thought it was about Pierson and started to say something comforting.

'The same,' she said tightly. 'Nothing. Just like Middle Finger.'

'Maybe they're…' I couldn't think of anything. They were dead or gone. All ten billion.

Antres 906 had climbed out of the box and was floating behind me. 'This is not unexpected,' it said, 'since there was no sign of Centrus having been visited by them.' It made a strange sound, like a hoarse dove. 'I must go to the Whole Tree.'

Marygay looked at it for a long moment. 'Where is your Tree?'

It cocked its head. 'Everywhere, of course. Like a telephone.'

'Of course.' She unbelted and floated out of the chair. 'Well, let's help people get up and around. See what's down there.'

We 'buried' Jacob Pierson in space. He was sort of a Muslim, so Mohammed Ten said a few words before Marygay pressed the button that opened the outer lock and spun him gently into the void. It was deferred cremation, actually, since we were in a low enough orbit for him to eventually fall into friction fire.

We landed at Cape Kennedy, far out on a spit, on a special pad reserved for those of us who had to come down in a shower of gamma rays. A personnel carrier, heavily armored, rolled up to wait for us.

After thirty minutes, the radiometer let us exit. The air was sultry warm and heavy with salt fragrance. Wind rushed across mangrove swamps and ruffled our clothing as we walked unsteadily down the gangway. At the bottom, the smell was of burnt metal, and the landing pad patiently ticked as it contracted.

'So quiet,' Alysa said.

'This part has always been quiet,' Po said, 'between launches and landings. I'm afraid the rest of the spaceport is going to be quiet, too. Like ours.'

The metal ground still radiated heat. And maybe a few alpha particles. The air was wonderful, though; I was a little giddy from breathing deep.

'Who are you?' the personnel carrier boomed, in Standard. 'Where are you from?'

Marygay answered in English. 'Speak English. We're just a group of citizens from Middle Finger, a planet of Mizar.'

'Here to trade?'

'Just here. Take us to some people.'

A double door in the thing's side swung open. 'I can take you to the spaceport. I'm not allowed on roads, without wheels.'

We entered the thing and four large windows became transparent. Once we were seated, the door closed and the thing backed up, turned around, and lurched toward the other end of the long strip, moving fast. It walked on twelve articulated legs.

'Why don't you have wheels?' I asked, my voice wavering from the carrier's jerky progress.

'I do have wheels. I haven't put them on in a long time.'

'Are there any people in the spaceport?' Mohammed asked.

'I don't know. I've never been inside.'

'Are there any people in the world?' I asked.

'That is not a question that I am able to answer.' It stopped so abruptly that Matt and I, facing forward but not belted in, were almost thrown from our seats. The doors sprung open. 'Check to make sure you have all your belongings. Be careful upon exiting. Have a pleasant day.'

The spaceport main building was a huge structure with no straight lines; all sweeping parabolas and catenaries, with facets like beaten bright metal. The rising sun gleamed orange from a hundred shiny surfaces.

We walked hesitantly toward the DIIJHA/ARRIVALS door, which for some reason slid open upwards. Walking through it gave me a guillotine kind of anxiety. The others hurried, too.

It wasn't quiet. There was a soothing sound like modulated white noise, pulsing in a rhythm slower than a heartbeat. There were chimes at the edge of perception.

The floor was littered with clothes.

'Well,' Po said, 'I guess we can turn around and go home.'

Antres 906 made a hissing sound I'd never heard, and its left hand turned in a continual slow circle. 'I appreciate your need for humor. But there is much to do, and there may be danger.' It turned to Marygay. 'Captain, I suggest at least one of you return to the ship for a fighting suit.'

'Good idea,' she said. 'William? Go see if you can catch that thing.'

I went back to the arrivals door, which wouldn't open, of course. There was a MOSCH/TRANSPORTATION door a hundred meters away. When I went through it, the carrier minced up, clattering. 'I forgot something,' I said. 'Take me back to the ship.'

Putting on fighting suits used to be dramatic and communal. The ready room would have mounting harnesses for as many as forty people; you'd strip and back into the suit, hook up the plumbing and let it clamshell shut around you, and move out. You could have the whole company in suits and, theoretically, outside fighting in a couple of minutes.

When there's no harness and no hardware, and the suit isn't customized for your body, it's neither quick nor dramatic. You squirm this way and that and finally get everything in place, and then try to close it on your own. When it doesn't close, you go back a few steps and start over.

It took almost fifteen minutes. I walked down the gangway, clumsy at first. The carrier doors opened.

'Thanks anyhow,' I said. 'I think I'll walk.'

'That is not allowed,' it said. 'It is dangerous.'

'I'm dangerous,' I said, and resisted the impulse to tear off a couple of its legs, to see what would happen. Instead, I started running, invoking the suit's strength amplification to give me a broad-jump lope. It wasn't as smooth and automatic as I remembered, but it was fast. I was at the spaceport door in less than a minute.

The door wouldn't open for me, sensing that I was a machine. I walked through it. The shatterproof glass turned opaque, stretched, and ripped apart like cloth.

Marygay laughed. 'You could have knocked.'

'This is the way I knock,' I said, amplified voice echoing in the huge hall. I turned it down to conversational volume. 'Our odd men out went to find their Trees?' The sheriff and Tauran were missing.

She nodded. 'Asked us to wait here. How's the suit?'

'I don't know yet. Leg amplifiers work. Okay on doors.'

'Why don't you take it outside and try out the ordnance? It's pretty old.'

'Good idea.' I went back through the hole I'd made and looked around for targets. What would we not need? I set my sights on a fast-food stand and gave it an order of fries, with the laser finger. It burst into flame in a satisfying way. I flipped a grenade at it and the explosion sort of put out the fire by scattering the pieces.

The personnel carrier came mincing up, accompanied by a small robot with flashing blue lights. It had PARKING POLICE stenciled on front and back.

'You are under arrest,' it said, in a huge stentorian voice. 'Surrender control to me.' That was followed by some almost ultrasonic warbling. 'Surrender control to me.'

'Sure.' I chambered a rocket, which the heads-up thing called MHE. That's not an acronym we used to have. I assumed 'medium high explosive' and squeezed it off. It did vaporize the parking robot and leave a crater two meters in diameter, in the process knocking the personnel carrier on its back.

It righted itself by rocking back and forth until it tipped onto its spidery feet. 'You didn't have to do that,' it said. 'You could have explained your situation. You must have a reason for this arbitrary destruction of property.'

'Target practice,' I said. 'This fighting suit is very old, and I had to know how well it works.'

'Very well. Are you finished?'

Not really.' I hadn't tried the nukes. 'But I'll hold off with the other systems until I have more real estate to work with.'

'Real estate outside of Spaceport?'

'Absolutely. There's nothing in here small enough to destroy.'

It actually seemed to pause, integrating that statement into its world view. 'Very well, I will not call the police again. Unless you destroy something here.'

'Scout's honor.'

'Please rephrase that.'

'I won't hurt anything here without telling you ahead of time.'

It sort of threw a mechanical tantrum, stamping its many feet. I supposed it was generating conflicting orders. I left it there to sort things out.

The sheriff came back to the group the same time I did.

'The Whole Tree gives no warning,' he said. 'There's no sense that anything was going wrong.'

'Just like home?' Marygay said.

He nodded. 'More complex things are going on,' he said, 'and the Tree is still trying to make sense of what has happened.'

'But it hasn't,' Po said.

'Well, now it has new information. What happened to us, out in space, and to Middle Finger. And Tsoget. It may be able to piece something together.'

'It thinks by itself?' I said. 'Without people connected to it?'

'It's not like thinking, exactly. It just sifts things; makes things more simple for itself. Sometimes the result is like thought.'

Antres 906 had returned. 'I have nothing to add,' it said.

Maybe we should have turned around and gone home. Begin to rebuild from what we had. Both the sheriff and the Tauran would have been in favor of that, I think, but we didn't ask them.

'Guess we ought to try a city,' Marygay said.

'We're right next door to what used to be the biggest one in the country,' Cat said, 'at least in terms of acreage.'

Marygay cocked her head. 'Spaceport?'

'No, I mean big. Disney!'

Twenty-nine

Marygay and I had been to Disneyworld, as it was still called, in the early twenty-first, and it had been large then. The one we'd gone to was now just one element in a patchwork of 'lands' – Waltland, where you visited in groups, and a simulacrum of the place's founder took you around and explained the wonders.

The carrier had amiably agreed to produce wheels, and it got us to the outskirts of Disney in about twenty minutes.

The perimeter of Disney was a huge ring, where parking lots for the patrons alternated with clustered living areas for the people who worked there.

You were supposed to park, evidently, and wait for a Disney bus to take you inside. When we tried to drive through an entrance, a big jolly cartoon robot blocked it off, explaining in a loud kiddy voice that we had to be nice and park like everyone else. It alternated Standard and English. I told it to fuck off, and after that all the machines spoke to us in English.

Goofy was the robot on the third one we tried. I got out in my fighting suit. It said, 'Ah-hyuh – what have we here?' and I kicked it over and pulled off its arms and legs and tossed them in four directions. It started repeating 'Hyuh … that's a good 'un … Hyuh … that's a good 'un,' and I pulled off the meter-wide head and threw it as high and far as I could.

The living areas for the staff were blocked off by holograms that were only partly successful now. On one side we had a jungle where cute baby monkeys played; on the other, a sea of Dalmatian puppies running through a giant's house. But you could see dimly through them, and sometimes they would disappear for a fraction of a second, revealing identical rows of warren housing.

We came out in Westernland, a big dusty old town from a pre-mechanized West that once existed in movies and novels. It wasn't like the spaceport, with clothing scattered all around. It was very neat, and had a sort of dreamlike ordinariness, with people walking about in period costume. They were robots, of course, and their costumes showed unusual fading and wear, plastic knees and elbows showing through frayed holes.

'Maybe the park was closed when it happened,' I said, though it would be hard to reconcile that with the thousands of vehicles in ranks and files outside.

'The local time was 13:10 on April 1,' the sheriff said. 'It was a Wednesday. Is that significant?'

'April Fool's Day,' I said. 'What a trick.'

'Maybe everybody came naked,' Marygay suggested.

'I know what happened to the clothes,' Cat said. 'Watch this.' She opened the door and threw out a crumpled piece of paper.

A knee-high Mickey Mouse came rolling out of a trap door in the side of a saloon. It speared the paper with a stick and addressed us, finger wagging, in a scolding squeaky voice: 'Less mess! Don't be a pest!'

'We used to throw stuff all around it and get it confused,' she said.

The carrier was up on its toes again, to maneuver more easily through the narrow streets, and it tiptoed through this strange land of saloons, dance halls, general stores, and quaint Victorian houses, each with its retinue of shabby busy robots. Where there were wooden boardwalks, the robots had worn a light-colored trail a couple of centimeters deep.

There were broken robots frozen in mid-gesture, and twice we came upon piles of several helpless robots, their legs sawing air, where evidently one had stopped and the others tripped over it. So they weren't true robots, but just mechanical models. Marygay remembered the term 'audio-animatronics,' and Cat confirmed that two hundred years after we'd been there, the old-fashioned technology had been re-introduced for nostalgia and humor.

One universal anachronism was on the buildings' roofs, with solar cells covering the south side. (A more prosaic anachronism was that every building, even the churches, had something for sale.)

At least it made the business of food and shelter simple. There was enough frozen and irradiated food to last us several lifetimes, most of it more interesting than our survival rations, if less nutritious.

We decided to spend the night at Molly Malone's Wayside Inn. Marygay and I were surprised to see, behind the registration desk, a price list for sexual services. Cat said all you got was robots. Clean robots.

But then our own robot, the carrier, delivered its own larger surprise. We went back out of Molly Malone's to get our bags, and there they were, lined up neatly on the boardwalk.

And behind them, instead of a machine, stood a ruggedly handsome cowboy. He didn't look like the worn-out robots, but he didn't look quite human, either. He was too big, over seven feet tall. He left deep footprints in the dust, and when he stepped onto the boardwalk, it creaked alarmingly.

'I'm not really a carrier,' he said. 'Not any kind of machine. It was just handy to look and act like one, down at the spaceport.'

He talked in a slow drawl that I recognized vaguely from childhood, and then it clicked: he looked like the actor John Wayne. My father had loved his movies and my mother despised him.

While he talked, he rolled a fat joint of tobacco. 'I can be the carrier again, or whatever thing or organism we need about that size.'

The Tauran spoke up. 'Please demonstrate?'

He shrugged and produced a large wooden match, and scratched it alight on the sole of his boot. Sulfur dioxide and, when he puffed the joint into life, the acrid tang of tobacco. I hadn't smelled it in thirty years, or thirteen hundred. Cigarettes, they used to be called.

He stepped back three giant strides and blurred and flowed into the shape of the carrier. But he kept the colors of blue jeans and leather and held the smoldering cigarette in a human hand that grew out of the top.

Then he changed again, into an oversized Tauran, still holding the cigarette. He said something to Antres 906 in rapid Tauran, and then changed back into John Wayne. He took a last puff and pinched the cigarette out between thumb and forefinger.

None of us could come up with anything intelligent to say, so I opted for the obvious: 'You're some kind of alien.'

'Actually, no; nothing of the kind. I was born on Earth, about nine thousand years ago. It's you guys who are creatures from another planet.'

'A shape-changer,' Marygay whispered.

'Like you're a clothes-changer. To me, I'm always the same shape.' He twisted his leg around to a break-bone angle and looked at the boot sole. 'You don't have a name for us, but you could call us Omnis. The Omni.'

'How many are you?' Po asked.

'How many you need? A hundred, a thousand? I could turn into a troop of Campfire Girls, as long as they didn't mass more than twosome tonnes. Maybe a horde of locusts. But it's hell to get them all back together in one bunch.'

'You people have been on Earth for nine thousand years…' Max began.

'Try a hundred fifty thousand, and we aren't people. We don't even look like people, most of the time. I was a Rodin sculpture in a museum for more than a century. They never could figure out how the thieves got me through the door.' He laughed, and John Wayne split down the middle, and re-formed as two museum guards in uniform, a petite young woman and a fat old man.

They spoke in absolute unison: 'When I do something like this, I'm an actual "group mind," like Taurans and Man aspire to being. It can be useful, but confusing, too.' The two figures collapsed into a pile of hundreds of scuttling cockroaches. Two Mickey Mouse robots rolled toward them, and they quickly re-formed into John Wayne, who kicked one of the robots onto the roof of Molly Malone's.

'How do you do that?' I asked.

'It's a matter of practice. Eye-foot coordination.'

'No, I mean how do you change back and forth? You can't take molecules of metal and turn them into organic material.'

'I suppose you can,' he said. 'I do it all the time.'

'What I mean is, it's inconsistent with physical law.'

'No, it's not. Your version of physics is inconsistent with reality.'

I was starting to get an Alice-in-Wonderland dizziness. Maybe Lewis Carroll had been one of them.

'Let me turn it around,' he continued. 'How do you turn food into flesh? Eating.'

I thought for a second. 'Your body breaks down the food into simpler compounds. Amino acids, fats, carbohydrates. Components that aren't burned for energy may turn into flesh.'

'That's your opinion,' he said. 'I had a friend a few thousand years ago, not far from here, who said that you took part of the spirit of the animal or plant that you ate, and it became part of your own spirit. Explains all kinds of sickness.'

'Very poetic,' I said, 'but wrong.'

'You likewise. You just have different ideas about what poetry is, and what "right" is.'

'Okay. So tell me how you do it.'

'I don't have the faintest idea. I was born being able to do it, just as you were born able to metabolize. My Timucuan friend was able to metabolize as well as you, even if he described it differently.'

'In nine thousand years, you haven't tried to find out how your body works?'

Not everybody's a scientist.' He changed from John Wayne to a man I vaguely recognized from the kids' schoolwork, an artist whose medium was body sculpture. He had four and six fingers, and a heat-sensing eye installed in his forehead. 'I'm a kind of historian.'

'You've lived alongside humans since prehistory,' Cat said, 'and no one ever suspected?'

'We don't keep real good records,' he said, 'but I think that at first, we were open about what we were, and co-existed. Somewhere along the line, I think when you got language and society, we started to hide out.'

'So you became myths,' Diane said.

'Yeah; I can do a great werewolf,' he said. 'And I think we were taken for angels and gods sometimes. Every now and then I'd be a plain human for a lifetime, appearing to age. But that's kind of boring and sad.'

'You've been Man as well?' the sheriff asked. 'You've tapped into the Tree?'

'Not as tricky as you might think. I have a lot of control over my neural organization. The Tree can't tell me from a human – and you guys are just humans, with a hole in your skull and some odd ideas.' He turned into Wayne again, and said with the actor's drawl, 'Buncha god-damn Commies, if ya ask me.'

'Did you do it?' The sheriff and the Omni made an odd tableau in the middle of us: the two biggest men standing there, both with guns holstered on their hips. 'Did you make them disappear?'

John Wayne didn't invite him to slap leather, a challenge I don't think he would have understood. He just shook his head sadly. 'I don't know what happened. I was in an elevator with two people, two Men, and they just plain disappeared. There was a little "pop" and their clothes fell to the floor. The elevator doors opened and I rolled out – I was in the shape of a food-dispensing robot – and the whole office building was empty, except for clothes.

'There was a huge racket outside, thousands of traffic accidents. A floater crashed through a picture window; I took human shape and ran down the stairs to the basement until things calmed down.'

'Where were you at the time?' I asked.

'Titusville sector. It's part of Spaceport Administration. We went near it on our way here.' He took the shape of an oversized statue of Albert Einstein, and sat in the dust, cross-legged, his eyes at our level. 'It was a convenient coincidence, since I would have headed for a spaceport no matter where I'd been at the time. Waiting for someone to come explain what has happened.'

'I don't think we know any more than you,' Marygay said.

'You know your own circumstances. Maybe together we can come up with something.' He looked off to the east. 'Your ship is an old-fashioned fighter, Sumi class, and its communication system has safeguards that prevented it from telling me much. I know you came from Middle Finger via the Aleph-10 collapsar. The ship also knows you, and it, were somewhere else before, but it can't say where.'

'We were in the middle of nowhere,' I said, 'a tenth of a light-year from Middle Finger. We'd taken a converted cruiser and were headed out twenty thousand light-years–'

'I remember that from the Tree. I thought the request was denied.' 'We sort of highjacked it,' Marygay said.

Einstein nodded. 'Some people suggested you might. That they should have let you go ahead with it, to prevent violence.'

'One of me was killed,' said the Tauran.

There was an uncomfortable silence. The Omni said something in Tauran, and Antres replied, 'True.'

'We'd gone about a tenth of a light-year, when the antimatter fueling the cruiser suddenly evaporated.'

'Evaporated? Do you have a scientific explanation for that?' Einstein grew a third eye and blinked it.

'No. The ship suggested "transient-barrier virtual particle substitution," but as far as I could find out; it doesn't apply. Anyhow, we limped back to Middle Finger in these converted Sumi fighters, and found everybody gone. It turns out that if you make corrections for relativistic simultaneity, they disappeared the same time our antimatter did.

'We assumed that our being off Middle Finger had saved us. But it happened here, too.'

He stroked his huge moustache. 'Perhaps you caused it.'

'What?'

'You just posited the argument yourself. If two improbable things happen simultaneously, they must be related. Maybe one caused the other.'

'No. If putting a bunch of people in a starship and accelerating caused impossible things to happen, we would have noticed long ago.'

'But you weren't going anywhere. Except the future.'

'I don't think the universe cares about our intent.'

Einstein laughed. 'That's your belief system again. You just used the word "impossible" to describe events you know did happen.'

Cat was amused. 'You have to admit he has a point.'

'Okay. But the other anomaly is that you guys are still here, when all the humans and Taurans disappeared. So maybe you caused it.'

He changed into a huge Indian brave, I suppose a Timucuan, scarred with elaborate tattoos, impressively naked, smelling like a wet goat. 'That's more like it. Though I'll ask the others about virtual particle transient barrier, whatever. Some of them know science.'

'Can you talk to them now, like telepathy?' Cat asked.

'No, not unless they're in my line of sight. The way I talked to your ship. We used to just call each other up, but most of the systems are failing. We leave messages on the Tree now.'

'We ought to check the Tree again ourselves,' the sheriff said, 'Antres and I.'

'Especially the Tauran Tree,' the brave said. 'We can tap it, but a lot of it is confusing.'

'I'm afraid much of it is confusing to me as well,' Antres said. 'I'm from Tsogot. We're in contact with Earth, or were in contact, but our cultures have been diverging for centuries.'

'That might be useful.' The brave changed into a kindly-looking old man. 'A doubly alien perspective.' He produced a blue package of cigarettes and lit one, wrapped in yellow paper, which smelled even more noxious than the one before. I sorted through grandfatherly images and came up with Walt Disney.

'Why are so many of your images from the twentieth century?' I asked. 'Are you reading our minds, Marygay and me?'

'No, I can't do that. I just like the period – end of innocence, before the Forever War. Everything got kind of complicated after that.' He took a deep drag on the cigarette and closed his eyes, evidently savoring it. 'Then it got too simple, if you ask me. We were all sort of waiting for this Man thing to run its course.'

'It survived so long because it worked,' the sheriff said mildly.

'Termite colonies work,' Disney said. 'They don't produce interesting conversation.' To Antres: 'You Taurans got a lot more done, or at least more interesting things, before you had a group mind. I went to Tsogot once, as a xenosociologist, and studied your history.'

It's academic now,' I said; 'both Man and Tauran. No group, no group mind.'

The sheriff shook his head. 'We'll grow back, same as you. Most of the frozen ova and sperm are Man.'

'You assume the others are all dead;' Disney said, 'but all we really know is that they've disappeared.'

'They're all in some big nudist colony in the sky,' I said.

'We have no evidence one way or the other. Your group is here and so is ours. Omni on the Moon and Mars and in local spaceships all report the disappearance of humans and Taurans, but none of us is gone, as far as we can tell.'

'Other starships?' Stephen said.

'That's why I was waiting at the Cape. There are twenty-four within one collapsar jump of Stargate. Two should have returned by now. But only unmanned drones have come in, with routine messages.'

'Why do you think the Omni were spared?' Marygay said. 'Because you're immortal?'

'Oh, we're not immortal, except the way an amoeba is.' He smiled at me. 'If you had targeted me this morning, rather than the hot dog stand, you would probably have done enough damage to kill me.'

'I'm sorry–'

He waved it away. 'You thought I was a machine. But no, except for you, the thing seems species-selective. Humans and Taurans disappear; birds and bees and Omni don't.'

'And the thing that sets us apart is that we were trying to escape,' Cat said.

Disney shrugged. 'Suppose for a moment that the universe does care about intent. What you were doing would get its notice.'

That was a bit much. 'And that would piss off the universe so much that it would destroy ten billion people and Taurans.'

Anita moaned softly. 'Something … something's wrong.' She stood erect, her back arching, and her eyes grew round and bulged. Her face swelled. Her coveralls became taut and the seams started to split.

Then she exploded: one horrible wet smack, and we were all spattered with blood and tissue; a piece of bone glanced off my cheekbone with stinging force.

I looked at the Omni. He was Disney, covered with blood and gore, and then he flickered, between Disney and an apparition that was mostly fangs and claws – and then he was Uncle Walt again, clean.

Most of us, including me, sat down. Chance and Steve sort of fell down. Where Anita had been standing, there were a pair of boots with two blood-streaked stalks of bone.

'I didn't do this,' Disney said.

The sheriff drew his pistol. 'I don't believe you.' He shot him point-blank in the heart.

Thirty

The next few minutes were grotesque. The little robots rolled out to clean up – Mickey and Donald and Minnie chanting admonitory rhymes while they speared and vacuumed up the fragmentary remains of a woman I'd known for half my life. When they went to police up her boots, all that was left that had any individuality, I followed the Omni's example and kicked them away. The sheriff saw what I was doing and helped.

We each picked up a gory boot. 'There has to be some way to bury her,' he said.

Disney sat up, clutching his chest. 'If you'll stop shooting me, I can help.' He closed his eyes, his skin chalk grey, and for a moment it looked like he was just going to fall back dead. But he transformed himself, slowly, limb by limb, into a large black working man in overalls, clutching a shovel. He got to his feet with exaggerated stiffness.

'You been around these normal people too long,' he said in a gravelly Louis Armstrong bass. 'You suppose' to control that temper.' He whacked a robot away with the shovel, and pointed with it, toward a stand of palm trees. 'Let's take her over there, put her to rest.' He addressed the others. 'You all get inside and clean up. We take care of this part.'

He hefted the shovel and walked toward the palms. As he passed the sheriff, he said, 'Don't do that. It hurts.'

The sheriff and I followed him, each with our grisly token. It took him about a minute to dig a deep square hole.

We put the boots in the hole and he refilled it and patted the dirt smooth. 'Did she have a religion?'

'Orthodox New Catholic,' I said.

'I can do that.' He absorbed the shovel and became a tall priest in a black cowled robe, with tonsure and heavy cross on a chain swinging from his neck. He said a few words in Latin and made a cross gesture over the grave.

Still the priest, he walked with us back to Molly Malone's, where several people were sitting on porch chairs and a rocker. Stephen was weeping uncontrollably, Marygay and Max holding on to him. He and Anita had had a son together, who died in an accident at nine or ten. They drifted apart after that, but were still friends. Rii brought him a glass of water and a pill.

'Rii,' I said, 'if that's some sort of trank, I could use one myself.' I felt as if I was about to explode, out of grief and confusion.

She looked at the vial. 'It's mild enough. Anybody want to take a nap?' I think everybody took one, except Antres 906 and the priest. Marygay and I went up to the inn's second floor and found a bed, and collapsed in each other's arms.

It was almost sundown when I woke up. I got out of bed as quietly as possible and found that Molly Malone's plumbing still worked, even to hot water. Marygay got up while I was washing, and we went downstairs together.

Stephen and Matt were making noise in the dining area. They'd pulled several tables together and set out some plastic dishes and forks, and a pile of food boxes. 'Our fearless leader,' she said. 'You get to open the first box.'

I didn't really feel like eating, though I should have been famished. I picked up one that said CHILI in bright red letters, with a picture of Donald Duck holding his throat, fire issuing from his beak. I pulled the top back and it worked, the chili sizzling and filling the room with an agreeable odor.

Not spoiled,' I said, and blew on a forkful. It was bland, meatless. 'Seems okay.'

The others popped boxes, and soon the place smelled like a cafeteria. Cat and Po came down, followed by Max. We ate the small meals in stunned silence, except for mumbled greetings. Po said grace before he opened his box.

I left mine unfinished. 'See what the sunset looks like,' I said, and got up from the table. Marygay and Cat came along.

Outside, Antres 906 and the Omni, still looking like a priest, were conversing in croaks and squeaks, standing where Anita had died.

'Discussing who the next will be?' Cat said, glaring at the priest.

He looked up, startled. 'What?'

'What caused that,' she said, 'if it wasn't you?'

'Not me. I could do that to myself, if I wanted to die, but I couldn't do it to someone else.'

'Couldn't, or wouldn't?' I said.

'Couldn't. "Physically impossible," to put it in words of four syllables. To use your belief system.'

'So what happened? People don't just explode!'

He sat down on the edge of the porch and crossed his long legs, lacing his fingers over his knee, looking toward the sunset. 'There you go again. People do explode, obviously. One just did.'

'And it could have been any of us.' Marygay's voice shook. 'We could all go like that, one by one.'

'We could,' the priest said, 'including me. But I hope it was just an experiment. A test.'

'Someone's testing us?' I was feeling dizzy and trying to control nausea. I sat down carefully on the porch floor.

'Always,' the priest said quietly. 'You've never felt that?'

'Metaphor,' I said.

He made a slow sweeping gesture. 'The way all this is metaphor. Taurans understand that better than you do.'

'Not this,' Antres 906 said. 'This is something I cannot contain.'

'The nameless.' The priest said a Tauran word I didn't know.

Antres touched his throat. 'Of course. But the … you say "nameless"? They are not literally real. They are a convenience, a symbol, talking about … I do not know how to say it. Truth underneath appearance, fate?'

The priest touched his cross and it became a circle with two legs, a Tauran religious icon. 'Symbol, metaphor. The nameless, I think, are more real than we are.'

'But you've never seen or touched one,' I said. 'Just guessing.'

'No one ever has. You've never seen a neutrino, but you don't doubt their existence. In spite of "impossible" characteristics.'

'All right. But you can prove neutrinos are there, or something is there, because otherwise particle physics wouldn't work out. The universe couldn't exist.'

'I could just say, "I rest my case." You don't like the idea of the nameless because it smacks of the supernatural.'

Fair enough. 'Okay. But for the first fifty – or fifteen hundred – years of my life, and for thousands of years preceding me, the universe could be explained without resorting to your mysterious nameless.' I turned to Antres. 'That's also true of Taurans, isn't it?'

'Very much so, yes. The nameless are real, but only as intellectual constructs.'

'Let me ask you an old question,' the priest said. 'How likely is it that humans and Taurans, evolving independently on planets forty lightyears apart, would meet at the same level of technology, and be similar enough psychologically to fight a war?'

'A lot of people have asked that question,' I nodded toward Antres, 'and a lot of Taurans, I suppose. Some of the people from my future, under my command, belonged to a religious sect that had it all explained. Something like your nameless.'

'But you have a better explanation?'

'Sorting. If they had been pre-technological, we wouldn't have interacted. If they'd been thousands of years ahead of us, there would have been no war. Extermination, maybe.' Antres made a sound of agreement. 'So it's partly coincidence, but not completely.'

'It was not at all coincidence. We Omni have been on both planets since before humans and Taurans had language, which we gave you. Or technology, which we controlled.

'We were Archimedes, Galileo, and Newton. In your parents' time, we took control of NASA, to retard human development in space.'

'And you masterminded the Forever War.'

'I don't think so. I think we just set up the initial conditions. You could have cooperated with one another, if it had been in your natures.'

'But first you made sure our natures were warlike,' Marygay said.

'That I don't know. That would be far before my time.' He shook his head. 'Let me explain. We're not born the way you are; nor you, Antres 906. I think there are a fixed number of us, around a hundred, and when one of us dies, a new one comes to be.

'You've seen how I can split into two or several pieces. When it's time for a new Omni – when one of us dies somewhere – I or someone else will split, and half will stay separate, and go off to become a new individual.'

'With all the parent's memories and skills?' Rii said.

'I wish. You start out a duplicate of your parent, but as the months and years go by, that fades away, replaced by your own experience. I would love to have a hundred fifty thousand years of ancestral memory. But all I have is hearsay, passed on by others of my kind.'

'Including this "nameless" stuff,' I said.

'That's true. And at various times in my life, I've wondered whether it might not be a delusion – some sort of fiction that we share. Like a religion: there's no way you or I could prove that the nameless don't exist. And if they do, their existence can explain the otherwise inexplicable. Like the coincidence of parallel evolution, Taurans and humans coming together at just the right time. Like random people exploding.'

'Which happens all the time,' Cat said.

'All sorts of inexplicable things happen. Most of them do get explained. I think sometimes the explainers are wrong. If, in the normal course of things, you came upon the remains of someone who had died the way your friend did, you would have assumed foul play; some kind of bomb or something. Not a whim of the nameless.'

The sheriff gave words to my thoughts: 'I still haven't ruled out foul play. We've watched you do all sorts of things we would call impossible. It is much easier for me to assume you did this, somehow, than to posit the existence of invisible malevolent gods.'

'Then why did I do it to her, rather than you? Why didn't I do it to Mandella when he came within an inch of killing me?'

'Maybe you crave excitement,' I said. 'I've met people like that. You want the two of us to live, to make your world more interesting.'

'It's interesting enough, thank you.' He cocked his head. 'And about to become more so.'

Book Six

The Book of Revelation

Thirty-one

I heard it then, the faint warbling sound of two floaters converging from different directions. In a few seconds they were visible; in a few more, they floated over us and settled down in the park.

They were sport floaters, bright orange and cherry, streamlined like the combat helicopters of my youth – 'Cobras,' and they did look like cobras.

The cockpit canopies slid back and a man and a woman climbed out. They were both a little too large, like our pal, and the floaters rocked in gratitude, relieved of their weight.

Both the man and the woman shrank when they saw us. But they left deep footprints in the grass. I wondered why they hadn't just come as floaters. Maybe that took too much material.

The woman was black and stocky, and the man was white and so plain it would be hard to describe his face. Protective coloration, I supposed; a kind of default configuration. They were both wearing togas of natural unbleached cloth.

There was no greeting. The three Omni looked at each other, conversing silently, for less than a minute.

The woman spoke. 'There will be more of us here soon. We are dying too, in violence, the way your friend died.'

'The nameless?' I asked.

'What can you say about the nameless?' the man said. 'I think it is them, because things are happening contrary to physical law.'

'They're in control of physics?'

'Apparently,' our priest said. 'People exploding, antimatter evaporating. Ten billion creatures going off to, as you say, some cosmic nudist colony. Or mass grave.'

'I'm afraid it is a grave,' the woman said. 'And we're about to join them.'

All three of them looked at me. The faceless man spoke. 'You did it. You tried to leave the Galaxy. Escape the preserve the nameless established for us.'

'That's ridiculous,' I said. 'I've left the Galaxy before. The Sade-138 campaign was in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Other campaigns were in the Lesser Cloud and the Sagittarius Dwarf.'

'Collapsar travel is not the same,' the woman said. 'Wormholes. It's like exchanging one quantum state for another, and then going back.'

'Like a bungee jump,' our fan of the twentieth century added.

'With your starship,' she continued, 'you were actually leaving. You were going into the territory of the nameless.'

'They told you this?' Marygay asked. 'You talk to the nameless?'

'No,' the man said. 'It's just inference.'

'You would call it Occam's Razor,' the woman said. 'It's the least complicated explanation.'

'So we've provoked the wrath of God,' I said.

'If you want to put it that way,' the plain one said. 'What we're trying to figure out is how to get God's attention.'

I wanted to scream, but Sara expressed it more calmly. 'If they're omnipotent and everywhere … we have their attention. Too much of it.'

The priest shook his head. 'No. It's sporadic. The nameless leave us alone for weeks, for years. Then they introduce a variable, like a scientist or a curious child would, and watch how we react.'

'Getting rid of everybody?' Marygay said. 'That's a variable?'

'No,' the black woman said. 'I think it means the experiment is over. The nameless are cleaning up.'

'And what we have to do,' the plain man said, and paused. 'Now me.' He exploded, but not into blood and guts and fragments of bone. It was a shower of white particles, a small blizzard. The particles settled to the ground and disappeared.

'Hell,' the priest said. 'I liked him.'

'What we have to do,' the woman continued for him, 'is get the attention of the nameless and convince them to leave us alone.'

'And you two,' the priest said to me and Marygay, 'are the obvious key. You provoked them.'

Max had disappeared. He came back inside the fighting suit. 'Max,' I said, 'be real. We can't fight them that way.'

'We don't know,' he said softly. 'We don't know anything.'

'We still don't know if you're telling the truth,' Sara said. 'The nameless stuff might be so much sand. You did it – you killed everybody off and now you're playing with us. You can't prove otherwise, can you?'

'One of us just died,' the priest said.

'No, he changed state and disappeared,' I said.

The priest smiled. 'Exactly. Isn't that what you do when you die?'

'Drop it,' Marygay said. 'If it is the Omni, and an elaborate ghastly joke, we're doomed no matter what we do. So we might as well take them at face value.' Sara opened her mouth to say something and closed it.

'Oh, shit,' Max said, and the fighting suit rocked and stood rigid.

'Again,' the priest said.

'Max!' I shouted. 'Are you there?' Nothing.

Marygay moved behind the suit, where the emergency release was. 'Should I do this?'

'Have to, sooner or later,' I said. 'Sara…'

'I can take it. I saw Anita,' she said, her pale face going to chalk.

Marygay popped the suit, and it was about as bad as I had imagined. There was nothing you could identify as Max. Gallons of blood and other fluids sloshed out on the ground. Chunks of muscle and organs and bone filled the lower part of the suit.

Sara crouched and vomited. I almost did the same, but an old combat reflex made me clench my teeth and swallow, hard, three times.

Max was the kind of guy you liked in spite of what he did; in spite of who he was. And they just took him out like removing a piece from a game.

'Can we be part of this?' I yelled. 'Is there any way we can make a case for ourselves?'

Cat exploded like a bomb. Not even organs and bones, this time; just a fine mist blowing away from where she had been standing. Marygay moaned and fainted. Sara, I think, didn't even notice. She was on her knees, sobbing, her arms wrapped around herself while her body spasmed, trying to empty an empty stomach.

There were two explosions inside Molly Malone's, and hysterical screaming.

Antres 906 looked at me. 'I am ready,' he said in slow English. 'I do not want to be here anymore. Let the nameless take me.'

I nodded numbly and went to Marygay. Kneeled and lifted her head and tried with a tissue to wipe her face clean, clean of what remained of the woman she loved. She half woke, her eyes still closed, and put an arm around my waist. She rocked silently, breathing hard.

It was a closeness not many people could have, the way we'd felt sometimes in battle, or just before: We're going to die now, but we're going to die together.

'Forget the nameless,' I said. 'We've been on borrowed time since the day we were drafted … and we've–'

'Stolen time,' she said, her eyes still closed. 'And we made a good life out of it.'

'I love you,' we said at the same time.

There was a loud thump; the fighting suit had fallen over. The breeze reversed itself and became a wind, blowing toward the suit. Something stung the back of my neck – a bone or a piece of one, again – and it tumbled on into the suit.

With a sound like dry sticks rattling, an incomplete skeleton heaved itself upright from the open casket of the suit. A forearm, ulna and radius, attached itself to the right elbow; metacarpals grew out of the wrist, and finger bones grew out of the metacarpals.

Then a long coil of blue intestines settled onto the pelvic girdle, and a stomach on top, a bladder, faster and faster; liver, lungs, heart, nerves, and muscles. The skull fell forward with the weight of a brain, and it rose slowly to look at me with Max's blue eyes. For a moment, the face was red and white, like a flayed specimen. But then skin appeared, and hair; and then skin and hair all over the body.

He stepped out of the suit, gingerly, and clothing grew on him, a loose white robe. He walked toward us with a fixed, intense expression. He, or it.

Marygay was sitting up now. 'What's happening?' she said, in a voice so tight it cracked.

It sat down cross-legged in front of us. 'You're a scientist.'

'Max?'

'I don't have a name. You're a scientist.'

'You're the nameless?'

He waved that away. 'William Mandella. You are a scientist.'

'Trained as one. Science teacher, now.'

'But you understand the nature of research. You understand what an experiment is.'

'Of course.'

The Omni had come over to join us. He nodded toward the black woman. 'Then she was pretty close to the truth.'

'The experiment's over?' she said. 'And you're cleaning up?'

He shook his head slowly. 'How can I put it? First the mice you're examining escape the cage. Then they understand what's happening to them. Then they demand to talk to the experimenter.'

'If it were me,' I said, 'I'd talk to the mice.'

'Yes, that's what a human would do.' He looked around, with a vaguely annoyed expression.

'So talk,' Marygay said.

He looked at her for a long moment. 'When you were a little girl, you wet the bed. Your parents wouldn't let you go to camp until you stopped.'

'I'd forgotten that.'

'I don't forget.' He turned to me. 'Why don't you like lima beans?'

I drew a blank. 'We don't have lima beans on Middle Finger. I don't even remember what they taste like.'

'When you were three Earth years old, you stuck a dry lima bean up your nose. Trying to get it out, you pushed it farther up. Your mother finally figured out what you were crying about, and her ministrations made it worse. It began to swell, with the moisture. She took you to the commune's holistic healer, and he made it worse still. By the time they got you to a hospital, they had to put you to sleep to extract it, and you had sinus problems for some time.'

'You did that?'

'I watched it. I set up the initial conditions, a long time before you were born, so, in a way, yes, I did. Every sparrow that falls, I hear the thump, and the thump never surprises me.'

'Sparrows?'

'Never mind.' He made a small dismissive shrug. 'The experiment's over. I'm leaving.'

'Leaving?'

He stood up. 'This galaxy.' There was an explosion of soil, and the feet we'd buried flew back to where Anita had been standing when she died. Bits of flesh and bone and a mist of red sucked through the air toward the ghastly remnants, and began to reconstruct her. Ten feet away, Cat's body was reassembling itself from the air.

'I don't guess I need to straighten up,' he said; it said. 'I'll just leave you on your own. Check back in a million years or so.'

'Just us?' Marygay said. 'You killed ten billion people and Taurans, and now you're handing five empty planets over to us?'

'Six,' it said, 'and they're not empty. The people and Taurans aren't dead. Just put away.'

'Put away?' I said. 'Where did you put them?'

It smiled at me like someone holding back a punch line. 'How much space, how much volume, do you think it takes to store ten billion people?'

'God, I don't know. A big island?'

'One and a third cubic miles. They're all stacked in Carlsbad Caverns. And now they're awake, and cold and naked and hungry.' It looked at its watch. 'Guess I could leave them some food.'

'Middle Finger?' I said. 'They're alive, too?'

'In a grain elevator in Vendler,' it said. 'They're really cold. I'll do something for them. Have done.'

'You do things faster than the speed of light?'

'Sure. That's just one of the constraints I put on the experiment.' It scratched its chin. 'Think I'll leave it. Otherwise you'd be all over the place.'

'The Moon and Mars? Heaven and Kysos?'

It nodded. 'Mostly cold and hungry. Hot and hungry on Heaven. But they'll all probably find some food before they're reduced to eating one another.'

It looked at Marygay and me. 'You two are special, since nobody else remembers as far back as you do. It amused me to construct your situation.

'But to me, time is like a table, or a floor. I can walk back to the Big Bang, or forward to the heat death of the universe. Life and death are reversible conditions. Trivial ones, to me. As you have seen here.'

I shouldn't have said it, but I did. 'So now it amuses you to let us live?'

'That's one way to put it. Or you could say I'm leaving the experiment to cook on its own. I'll walk forward a million years and see what happens.'

'But you already know the future,' Marygay said.

The thing inside Max rolled his eyes. 'It isn't a line. It's a table. There are all kinds of futures. Else why bother to experiment?'

Sara spoke up. 'Don't leave!' He looked at her with an impatient expression. 'We see things like a line, a line of cause and effect. But you see millions of lines on your table.'

'An infinity of lines.'

'Okay. Is there anything else in the universe besides your table?' He smiled. 'Are there other tables? Is there a room?'

'There are other tables. If they're in a room, I've never seen the walls.'

Then it spoke in exact unison with Sara: 'So is there someone else in charge?' By herself: 'In charge of all of you and your tables?'

'Sara,' it said, 'in some of those many lines, you choose to be alive a million years from now, when I return. You may ask me then. Or you may not need to.'

'But if there isn't anyone else; if you're God–'

'What?' Max said. He rubbed the white cloth between his fingers. 'What the hell is going on here?' He looked over at the fighting suit. 'I felt this horrible pain, all over.'

'Me, too,' Cat said. She was sitting cross-legged on the spot where she had died, one hand in her lap and the other over her breasts. 'And then I was suddenly here, back again. But you got clothes.' She looked at us with raised eyebrows. 'What the hell is going on?'

'God knows,' I said.

Thirty-two

I worried for a few seconds about what to do with ten billion people and Taurans stranded naked in the middle of the desert. But the nameless had waved its wand one last time.

The air around us shimmered, and we were suddenly surrounded by a thick crowd of men, women, and children, all naked, many screaming.

A small cluster of people with clothes on does stand out in that situation. People began to approach us tentatively, and Marygay and I both braced for leadership.

Of course it didn't happen. An older Man walked straight up to me and started asking loud, pointed questions.

But I couldn't understand a word of it. I spoke a dead language that, on this planet, I shared with only a handful of scholars and immigration people.

The three Omni stepped up, tall enough to draw attention, arms up and shouting something in unison. The priest touched my shoulder. 'We'll see what we can do here. You help your own people.'

Marygay was standing with a protective arm around Cat. I took off my shirt and gave it to her; it was just big enough to cover the essentials.

In fact, it looked kind of sexy. A popular woman once told me that the way to attract attention at a party was to wear a long dress when you knew the others would be in jeans or shorts, and vice versa. So if you're at a party where everyone is naked, any old thing will do.

We finally herded everyone together in Molly Malone's. The cafeteria was jammed with hungry people, so we gathered in the 'Social History of Prostitution' room, or however it translates. The exhibits were unambiguous.

Seven of us had been killed and reconstructed. We tried to explain to them what had happened. As if we could actually understand.

God killed a bunch of you, to get our attention. Then He announced He was leaving, and revived you and ten billion others on His way out.

I kept waiting to wake up. Like the old guy in A Christmas Carol, I was thinking this had to be something I ate.

As it went on and on, of course, that possibility faded. Maybe everything before had been a dream.

The sheriff and Antres 906 got in touch with their Trees and let everybody know what apparently had happened. The Omni amiably revealed their existence and helped pull things together. There was a little more involved than just finding clothes for everybody.

Finding a 'place' for everybody was going to take a while: one thing human, Man, and Tauran cultures had in common was the assumption of the immutability of physical law. We may not understand everything, but everything does follow rules, which are eventually knowable.

That was gone now. We had no idea what parts of physics had been a whim of the nameless. It had laid claim to the constancy and limitation of the speed of light, which meant that most of post-Newtonian physics was part of the joke.

It had said it was going to leave that unaffected, to keep us in our cage. Were there other laws, assumptions, constants that did not please it? All of science was in question now, and had to be checked.

Religion was less in question, interestingly enough. Just change a few terms, and ignore uncertainty as to the existence of God. God's intent had never been that clear, anyhow. The nameless had left the faithful incontrovertible proof of its existence, and enough new data for millenniums of fruitful theological debate.

My own religion, if you can call it that, had changed in its fundamental premise, but not its basic assertion: I'd always told religious friends that there may or may not be a God, but if there is one, I wouldn't want to have him over for dinner. I'll stand by that last part.

Thirty-three

After a couple of weeks, there was little we could do or learn on Earth, and we were anxious to get back. The Omni who had met us at our arrival wanted to go along, and I was glad to include it. A few magic tricks would make our fantastic story more acceptable.

Nobody died on the jump, so five months later we came out of the SA coffins and stared down at Middle Finger, blinding white with snow and cloud. We should have found a few years of stuff to do on Earth; come back in thaw or spring.

There was no one on duty at the spaceport, but we were able to get through to the Office for Interplanetary Communications, and they had a flight controller sent out. It took us a couple of hours to transfer to the shuttle, anyhow.

The landing was a big improvement over our last one: reassuring lines of smoke from chimneys in outlying towns; a snarl of winter traffic in Centrus.

A woman who identified herself as mayor came out in the transfer vehicle, along with her Man liaison – and Bill, who got the most attention from Marygay and Sara and me. He was growing a beard, but otherwise hadn't changed much.

Except perhaps in his attitude toward me. He wept when we embraced, as I did, and for a minute couldn't do anything but shake his head. Then in heavily accented English he said, 'I thought I'd lost you forever, you stubborn old bastard.'

'Sure, me stubborn,' I said. 'Good to have you back. Even though you're city folk now.'

'Actually, we're back in Paxton' – he blushed – 'my wife Auralyn and I. We went back to set the place up. Plenty of fish. Figured you'd come back soon, if you were coming back, so I came into Centrus last week to wait.

'Charlie's with me in town. Diana's stuck in Paxton, doctoring. What the hell happened?'

I groped for words. 'It's kind of complicated.' Marygay was trying not to laugh. 'You'll be glad to know I found God.'

'What? On Earth?'

'But he just said hello-goodbye and left. It's a long story.' I looked out at the snow, plowed higher than the vehicle's windows. 'Plenty of time to talk, before things get busy in the thaw.'

'Eight cords of wood,' he said. 'Ten more on the way.'

'Good.' I tried to summon up the warm memory of sitting around the fireplace, but reality intruded. Slipping around on the ice, pulling in fish that froze in the air. Plumbing jammed by frozen pipes. And shovel, shovel, shovel snow.

Thirty-four

We resumed 'everyday' life in the sense of fishing and fighting the winter, though we were suddenly a household of five adults. Sara still had a term of school left before she could start university, but she got permission to wait a few months rather than start at midterm and play catch-up.

Life in Paxton had resumed pretty much unchanged, once people found their way back from Centrus. We lived with constant power outages during the winter in the best of times, so it wasn't hard to cope with a semi-permanent one.

The town had been almost completely repopulated in a few weeks. Centrus had put a high priority on getting rid of anybody who could leave, since the city's resources were strained to the limit, providing essentials for the people who normally lived there.

The capital was settling down after five months of chaos. Eight winters' exposure had left the city a shambles, but it was obvious that most repairs would have to wait till thaw and spring. Our group of involuntary pioneers had helped the city organize itself on a temporary bare-survival footing. The lack of a central power system would have been the death of all of the city dwellers, if anybody had been simple-minded enough just to go home. Instead, people packed together in large public shelters, to conserve heat and simplify the distribution of food and water.

I'm sure it was all very chummy, but I was just as happy to be out in the provinces, with our cords of wood and boxes of candles. The university was open in the daytime, though most normal instruction was postponed, waiting for the power grid to give us back our computers and viewscreens, and most of all our library. We did have a couple of thousand printed books, but they were a disorganized collection of this and that.

One of them, fortunately, was a thick text about theoretical mechanics, so I could start on what was going to be my life's work. I'd discussed it with some Man physicists on Earth: all of us had to go back to Square One and find out how much of physics was still intact. If the whole thing was just a set of constraints that the nameless had set up, and changed at whim, then it behooved us to find out what the current state of whims was! And it seemed like a good idea to do the experiments on other planets, as well as Earth, to see whether the laws were uniform.

Bill joined me in the laboratories that winter, acting as my assistant while we reproduced the basic experiments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century physics. Weights and springs. We did have the advantage of accurate atomic clocks, or so we thought. Within a year we'd find out, from Earth, that the nameless had left us a truly Sisyphean job: the speed of light was still finite, but it had changed by about 5 percent. That screwed up everything, down around the fourth decimal place. Little things like the charge on the electron, Planck's constant. While he was at it, he should have made pi equal to three.

But things were all right with us, waiting out the cold in our warm lab, rolling balls down inclines, measuring pendulums, stretching springs, then going home to the women. Bill had met Auralyn when they'd both volunteered to become Man, and they fell in love before any damage had been done, and came back here. She was going to have a baby in the spring.

Meanwhile, we chip ice, shovel snow, thaw pipes, scrape windows. Winter lasts forever on this god-forsaken world.

Forever Peace

Caveat lector: This book is not a continuation of my 1975 novel The Forever War. From the author's point of view it is a kind of sequel, though, examining some of that novel's problems from an angle that didn't exist twenty years ago.

It was not quite completely dark, thin blue moonlight threading down through the canopy of leaves. And it was never completely quiet.

A thick twig popped, the noise muffled under a heavy mass. A male howler monkey came out of his drowse and looked down. Something moved down there, black on black. He filled his lungs to challenge it.

There was a sound like a piece of newspaper being torn. The monkey's midsection disappeared in a dark spray of blood and shredded organs. The body fell heavily through the branches in two halves.

Would you lay off the goddamn monkeys? Shut up! This place is an ecological preserve. My watch, shut up. Target practice.

Black on black it paused, then slipped through the jungle like a heavy silent reptile. A man could be standing two yards away and not see it. In infrared it wasn't there. Radar would slither off its skin.

It smelled human flesh and stopped. The prey maybe thirty meters upwind, a male, rank with old sweat, garlic on his breath. Smell of gun oil and smokeless powder residue. It tested the direction of the wind and backtracked, circled around. The man would be watching the path. So come in from the woods.

It grabbed the man's neck from behind and pulled his head off like an old blossom. The body shuddered and gurgled and crapped. It eased the body down to the ground and set the head between its legs.

Nice touch. Thanks.

It picked up the man's rifle and bent the barrel into a right angle. It lay the weapon down quietly and stood silent for several minutes.

Then three other shadows came from the woods, and they all converged on a small wooden hut. The walls were beaten-down aluminum cans nailed to planks; the roof was cheap glued plastic.

It pulled the door off and an irrelevant alarm sounded as it switched on a headlight brighter than the sun. Six people on cots, recoiling.

'–Do not resist,' it boomed in Spanish. '–You are prisoners of war and will be treated according to the terms of the Geneva Convention.'

'Mierda.' A man scooped up a shaped charge and threw it at the light. The tearing-paper sound was softer than the sound of the man's body bursting. A split second later, it swatted the bomb like an insect and the explosion blew down the front wall of the building and flattened all the occupants with concussion.

The black figure considered its left hand. Only the thumb and first finger worked, and the wrist made a noise when it rotated.

Good reflexes. Oh, shut up.

The other three shapes turned on sunlights and pulled off the building's roof and knocked down the remaining walls.

The people inside looked dead, bloody and still. The machines began to check them, though, and a young woman suddenly rolled over and raised the laser rifle she'd been concealing. She aimed it at the one with the broken hand and did manage to raise a puff of smoke from its chest before she was shredded.

The one checking the bodies hadn't even looked up. 'No good,' it said. 'All dead. No tunnels. No exotic weapons I can find.'

'Well, we got some stuff for Unit Eight.' They turned off their lights and sped off simultaneously, in four different directions.

The one with the bad hand moved about a quarter-mile and stopped to inspect the damage with a dim infrared light. It beat the hand against its side a few times. Still, only the two digits worked.

Wonderful. We'll have to bring it in.

So what would you have done?

Who's complaining? I'll spend part of my ten in base camp.

The four of them took four different routes to the top of a treeless hill. They stood in a row for a few seconds, arms upraised, and a cargo helicopter came in at treetop level and snatched them away.

Who got the second kill there? thought the one with the broken hand.

A voice appeared in all four heads. 'Berryman initiated the response. But Hogarth commenced firing before the victim was unambiguously dead. So by the rules, they share the kill.'

The helicopter with the four soldierboys dangling slipped down the hill and screamed through the night at treetop level, in total darkness, east toward friendly Panama.

I didn't like Scoville having the soldierboy before me. You have to monitor the previous mechanic for twenty-four hours before you take it over, to warm up and become sensitive to how the soldierboy might have changed since your last shift. Like losing the use of three fingers.

When you're in the warm-up seat you're just watching; you're not jacked into the rest of the platoon, which would be hopelessly confusing. We go in strict rotation, so the other nine soldierboys in the platoon also have replacements breathing over their mechanics' shoulders.

You hear about emergencies, where the replacement has to suddenly take over from the mechanic. It's easy to believe. The last day would be the worst even without the added stress of being watched. If you're going to crack or have a heart attack or stroke, it's usually on the tenth day.

Mechanics aren't in any physical danger, deep inside the Operations bunker in Portobello. But our death and disability rate is higher than the regular infantry. It's not bullets that get us, though; it's our own brains and veins.

It would be rough for me or any of my mechanics to replace people in Scoville's platoon, though. They're a hunter/killer group, and we're 'harassment and interdiction,' H & I; sometimes loaned to Psychops. We don't often kill. We aren't selected for that aptitude.

All ten of our soldierboys came into the garage within a couple of minutes. The mechanics jacked out and the exoskeleton shells eased open. Scoville's people climbed out like little old men and women, even though their bodies had been exercised constantly and adjusted for fatigue poisons. You still couldn't help feeling as if you'd been sitting in the same place for nine days.

I jacked out. My connection with Scoville was a light one, not at all like the near-telepathy that links the ten mechanics in the platoon. Still, it was disorienting to have my own brain to myself.

We were in a large white room with ten of the mechanic shells and ten warm-up seats, like fancy barber chairs. Behind them, the wall was a huge backlit map of Costa Rica, showing with lights of various colors where soldierboy and flyboy units were working. The other walls were covered with monitors and digital readouts with jargon labels. People in white fatigues walked around checking the numbers.

Scoville stretched and yawned and walked over to me.

'Sorry you thought that last bit of violence was unnecessary. I felt the situation called for direct action.' God, Scoville and his academic airs. Doctorate in Leisure Arts.

'You usually do. If you'd warned them from outside, they would've had time to assess the situation. Surrender.'

'Yes indeed. As they did in Ascension.'

'That was one time.' We'd lost ten soldierboys and a flyboy to a nuclear booby trap.

'Well, the second time won't be on my watch. Six fewer pedros in the world.' He shrugged. 'I'll go light a candle.'

'Ten minutes to calibration,' a loudspeaker said. Hardly enough time for the shell to cool down. I followed Scoville into the locker room. He went to one end to get into his civvies; I went to the other end to join my platoon.

Sara was already mostly undressed. 'Julian, You want to do me?'

Yes, like most of our males and one female, I did, as she well knew, but that's not what she meant. She took off her wig and handed me the razor. She had three weeks' worth of fine blond stubble. I gently shaved off the area surrounding the input at the base of her skull.

'That last one was pretty brutal,' she said. 'Scoville needed the body count, I guess.'

'It occurred to him. He's eleven short of making E-8. Good thing they didn't come across an orphanage.'

'He'd be bucking for captain,' she said.

I finished her and she checked mine, rubbing her thumb around the jack. 'Smooth,' she said. I keep my head shaved off duty, though it's unfashionable for black men on campus. I don't mind long bushy hair, but I don't like it well enough to run around all day wearing a hot wig.

Louis came over. 'Hi, Julian. Give me a buzz, Sara.' She reached up – he was six feet four and Sara was small – and he winced when she turned on the razor.

'Let me see that,' I said. His skin was slightly inflamed on one side of the implant. 'Lou, that's going to be trouble. You should've shaved before the warm-up.'

'Maybe. You gotta choose.' Once you were in the cage you were there for nine days. Mechanics with fast-growing hair and sensitive skin, like Sara and Lou, usually shaved once, between warm-up and the shift. 'It's not the first time,' he said. 'I'll get some cream from the medics.'

Bravo platoon got along pretty well. That was partly a matter of chance, since we were selected out of the pool of appropriate draftees by body size and shape, to fit the platoon's cages and the aptitude profile for H & I. Five of us were survivors of the original draft pick: Candi and Mel as well as Lou, Sara, and me. We've been doing this for four years, working ten days on and twenty off. It seems like a lot longer.

Candi is a grief counselor in real life; the rest of us are academics of some stripe. Lou and I are science, Sara is American politics, and Mel is a cook. 'Food science,' so called, but a hell of a cook. We get together a few times a year for a banquet at his place in St Louis.

We went together back to the cage area. 'Okay, listen up,' the loudspeaker said. 'We have damage on Units One and Seven, so we won't calibrate the left hand and right leg at this time.'

'So we need the cocksuckers?' Lou asked.

'No, the drains will not be installed. If you can hold it for forty-five minutes.'

'I'll certainly try, sir.'

'We'll do the partial calibration and then you're free for ninety minutes, maybe two hours, while we set up the new hand and leg modules for Julian and Candi's machines. Then we'll finish the calibration and hook up the orthotics, and you're off to the staging area.'

'Be still my heart,' Sara murmured.

We lay down in the cages, working arms and legs into stiff sleeves, and the techs jacked us in. For the calibration we were tuned down to about ten percent of a combat jack, so I didn't hear actual words from anybody but Lou – a 'hello there' that was like a faint shout from a mile away. I focused my mind and shouted back.

The calibration was almost automatic for those of us who'd been doing it for years, but we did have to stop and back up twice for Ralph, a neo who'd joined us two cycles ago when Richard stroked out. It was just a matter of all ten of us squeezing one muscle group at a time, until the red thermometer matched the blue thermometer on the heads-up. But until you're used to it, you tend to squeeze too hard and overshoot.

After an hour they opened the cage and unjacked us. We could kill ninety minutes in the lounge. It was hardly worth wasting time getting dressed, but we did. It was a gesture. We were about to live in each other's bodies for nine days, and enough was enough.

Familiarity breeds, as they say. Some mechanics become lovers, and sometimes it works. I tried it with Carolyn, who died three years ago, but we could never bridge the gap between being combat-jacked and being civilians. We tried to work it out with a relator, but the relator had never been jacked, so we might as well have been talking Sanskrit.

I don't know that it would be 'love' with Sara, but it's academic. She's not really attracted to me, and of course can't hide her feelings, or lack of same. In a physical way we're closer than any civilian pair could be, since in full combat jack we are this one creature with twenty arms and legs, with ten brains, with five vaginas and five penises.

Some people call the feeling godlike, and I think there have been gods who were constructed along similar lines. The one I grew up with was an old white-bearded Caucasian gent without even one vagina.

We'd already studied the order of battle, of course, and our specific orders for the nine days. We were going to continue in Scoville's area, but doing H & I, making things difficult in the cloud forest of Costa Rica. It was not a particularly dangerous assignment, but it was distasteful, like bullying, since the rebels didn't have anything remotely like soldierboys.

Ralph expressed his discomfort. We had sat down at the dining table with tea and coffee.

'This overkill gets to me,' he said. 'That pair in the tree last time.'

'Ugly,' Sara said.

'Ah, the bastards killed themselves,' Mel said. He sipped the coffee and scowled at it. 'We probably wouldn't have noticed them if they hadn't opened up on us.'

'It bothers you that they were children?' I asked Ralph.

'Well, yeah. Doesn't it you?' He rubbed the stubble on his chin. 'Little girls.'

'Little girls with machine guns,' Karen said, and Claude nodded emphatically. They'd come in together about a year ago, and were lovers.

'I've been thinking about that, too,' I said. 'What if we'd known they were little girls?' They'd been about ten years old, hiding in a tree house.

'Before or after they started shooting?' Mel asked.

'Even after,' Candi said. 'How much damage can they do with a machine gun?'

'They damaged me pretty effectively!' Mel said. He'd lost one eye and the olfactory receptors. 'They knew exactly what to aim for.'

'It wasn't a big deal,' Candi said. 'You got field replacements.'

'Felt like a big deal to me.'

'I know. I was there.' You don't exactly feel pain when a sensor goes out. It's something as strong as pain, but there's no word for it.

'I don't think we would've had to kill them if they were out in the open,' Claude said. 'If we could see they were just kids and lightly armed. But hell, for all we knew they were FOs who could call in a tac nuke.'

'In Costa Rica?' Candi said.

'It happens,' Karen said. It had happened once in three years. Nobody knew where the rebels had gotten the nuke. It had cost them two towns, the one the soldierboys were in when they were vaporized, and the one we took apart in retaliation.

'Yeah, yeah,' Candi said, and I could hear in those two words all she wasn't saying: that a nuke on our position would just destroy ten machines. When Mel flamed the tree house he roasted two little girls, probably too young to know what they were doing.

There was always an undercurrent in Candi's mind, when we were jacked. She was a good mechanic, but you had to wonder why she hadn't been given some other assignment. She was too empathetic, sure to crack before her term was up.

But maybe she was in the platoon to act as our collective conscience. Nobody at our level knew why anybody was chosen to be a mechanic, and we only had a vague idea why we were assigned to the platoon we got. We seemed to cover a wide range of aggressiveness, from Candi to Mel. We didn't have anybody like Scoville, though. Nobody who got that dark pleasure out of killing. Scoville's platoon always saw more action than mine, too; no coincidence. Hunter/killers – they're definitely more congenial with mayhem. So when the Great Computer in the Sky decides who gets what mission, Scoville's platoon gets the kills and ours gets reconnaissance.

Mel and Claude, especially, grumbled about that. A confirmed kill was an automatic point toward promotion, in pay grade if not in rank, whereas you couldn't count on the PPR – Periodic Performance Review – for a dime. Scoville's people got the kills, so they averaged about twenty-five percent higher pay than my people. But what could you spend it on? Save it up and buy our way out of the army?

'So we're gonna do trucks,' Mel said. 'Cars and trucks.'

'That's the word,' I said. 'Maybe a tank if you hold your mouth right.' Satellites had picked up some IR traces that probably meant the rebels were being resupplied by small stealthed trucks, probably robotic or remote. One of those outbursts of technology that kept the war from being a totally one-sided massacre.

I suppose if the war went on long enough, the enemy might have soldierboys, too. Then we could have the ultimate in something: ten-million-dollar machines reducing each other to junk while their operators sat hundreds of miles away, concentrating in air-conditioned caves.

People had written about that, warfare based on attrition of wealth rather than loss of life. But it's always been easier to make new lives than new wealth. And economic battles have long-established venues, some political and some not, as often among allies as not.

Well, what does a physicist know about it? My science has rules and laws that seem to correspond to reality. Economics describes reality after the fact, but isn't too good at predicting. Nobody predicted the nanoforges.

The loudspeaker told us to saddle up. Nine days of truck-stalking.

All ten people in Julian Class's platoon had the same basic weapon – the soldierboy, or Remote Infantry Combat Unit: a huge suit of armor with a ghost in it. For all the weight of its armor, more than half of the RICU's mass was ammunition. It could fire accurate sniper rounds to the horizon, two ounces of depleted uranium, or at close range it could hose a stream of supersonic flechettes. It had high explosive and incendiary rockets with eyes, a fully automatic grenade launcher, and a high-powered laser. Special units could be fitted with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, but those were only used for reprisal in kind.

(Fewer than a dozen nuclear weapons, small ones, had been used in twelve years of war. A large one had destroyed Atlanta, and although the Ngumi denied responsibility, the Alliance responded by giving twenty-four hours' notice, and then leveling Mandelaville and Sao Paulo. Ngumi contended that the Alliance had cynically sacrificed one nonstrategic city so it could have an excuse to destroy two important ones. Julian suspected they might be right.)

There were air and naval units, too, inevitably called flyboys and sailorboys, even though most flyboys were piloted by females.

All of Julian's platoon had the same armor and weapons, but some had specialized functions. Julian, being platoon leader, communicated directly and (in theory) constantly with the company coordinator, and through her to the brigade command. In the field, he received constant input in the form of encrypted signals from flyover satellites as well as the command station in geosynchronous orbit. Every order came from two sources simultaneously, with different encryption and a different transmission lag, so it would be almost impossible for the enemy to slip in a bogus command.

Ralph had a 'horizontal' link similar to Julian's 'vertical' one. As platoon liaison, he was in touch with his opposite number in each of the other nine platoons that made up Bravo. They were 'lightly jacked' – the communication wasn't as intimate as he had with other members of the platoon, but it was more than just a radio link. He could advise Julian as to the other platoons' actions and even feelings, morale, in a quick and direct way. It was rare for all the platoons to be engaged in a single action, but when they were, the situation was chaotic and confusing. The platoon liaisons then were as important as the vertical command links.

One soldierboy platoon could do as much damage as a brigade of regular infantry. They did it quicker and more dramatically, like huge invincible robots moving in silent concert.

They didn't use actual armed robots, for several reasons. One was that they could be captured and used against you; if the enemy could capture a soldierboy they would just have an expensive piece of junk. None had ever been captured intact, though; they self-destruct impressively.

Another problem with robots was autonomy: the machine has to be able to function on its own if communications are cut off. The image, as well as the reality, of a heavily armed machine making spot combat decisions was not something any army wanted to deal with. (Soldier-boys had limited autonomy, in case their mechanics died or passed out. They stopped firing and went for shelter while a new mechanic was warmed up and jacked.)

The soldierboys were arguably more effective psychological weapons than robots would be. They were like all-powerful knights, heroes. And they represented a technology that was out of the enemy's grasp.

The enemy did use armed robots, like, as it turned out, the two tanks that were guarding the convoy of trucks that Julian's platoon was sent to destroy. Neither of the tanks caused any trouble. In both cases they were destroyed as soon as they revealed their position by firing. Twenty-four robot trucks were destroyed, too, after their cargos had been examined: ammunition and medical supplies.

After the last truck had been reduced to shiny slag, the platoon still had four days left on its shift, so they were flown back to the Portobello base camp, to do picket duty. That could be pretty dangerous, since the base camp was hit by rockets a couple of times a year, but most of the time it was no challenge. Not boring, though – the mechanics were protecting their own lives, for a change.

Sometimes it took me a couple of days to wind down and be ready to be a civilian again. There were plenty of joints in Portobello willing to help ease the transition. I usually did my unwinding back in Houston, though. It was easy for rebels to slip across the border and pass as Panamanians, and if you got tagged as a mechanic you were a prime target. Of course there were plenty of other Americans and Europeans in Portobello, but it's possible that mechanics stood out: pale and twitchy, collars pulled up to hide the skull jacks, or wigs.

We lost one that way last month. Arly went into town for a meal and a movie. Some thugs pulled off her wig, and she was hauled into an alley and beaten to a pulp and raped. She didn't die but she didn't recover, either. They had pounded the back of her head against a wall until the skull fractured and the jack came out. They shoved the jack into her vagina and left her for dead.

So the platoon was one short this month. (The neo Personnel delivered couldn't fit Arly's cage, which was not surprising.) We may be short two next month: Samantha, who is Arly's best friend, and a little bit more, was hardly there this week. Brooding, distracted, slow. If we'd been in actual combat she might have snapped out of it; both of them were pretty good soldiers – better than me, in terms of actually liking the work – but picket duty gave her too much time to meditate, and the truck assignment before that was a silly exercise a flyboy could have done on her way back from something else.

We all tried to give Samantha support while we were jacked, but it was awkward. Of course she and Arly couldn't hide their physical attraction for one another, but they were both conventional enough to be embarrassed about it (they had boyfriends on the outside), and had encouraged kidding as a way of keeping the complex relationship manageable. There was no banter now, of course.

Samantha had spent the past three weeks visiting Arly every day at the convalescent center, where the bones of her face were growing back, but that was a constant frustration, since the nature of her injuries meant they couldn't be jacked, couldn't be close. Never. And it was Samantha's nature to want revenge, but that was impossible now. The five rebels involved had been apprehended immediately, slid through the legal system, and were hanged a week later in the public square.

I'd seen it on the cube. They weren't hanged so much as slowly strangled. This in a country that hadn't used capital punishment in generations, before the war.

Maybe after the war we'll be civilized again. That's the way it has always happened in the past.

Julian usually went straight home to Houston, but not when his ten days were up on a Friday. That was the day of the week when he had to be the most social, and he needed at least a day of preparation for that. Every day you spent jacked, you felt closer to the other nine mechanics. There was a terrible sense of separation when you unjacked, and hanging around with the others didn't help. What you needed was a day or so of isolation, in the woods or in a crowd.

Julian was not the outdoor type, and he usually just buried himself in the university library for a day. But not if it was Friday.

He could fly anywhere for free, so on impulse he went up to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he'd done his undergraduate work. It was a bad choice, dirty slush everywhere and thin sleet falling in a constant sting, but he grimly persisted in his quest to visit every bar he could remember. They were full of inexplicably young and callow people.

Harvard was still Harvard; the dome still leaked. People made a point of not staring at a black man in uniform.

He walked a mile through the sleet to his favorite pub, the ancient Plough and Stars, but it was padlocked, with a card saying BAHAMA! taped inside the window. So he squished back to the Square on frozen feet, promising simultaneously to get drunk and not lose his temper.

There was a bar named after John Harvard, where they brewed nine kinds of beer on the premises. He had a pint of each one, methodically checking them off on the blotter, and flowed into a cab that decanted him at the airport. After six hours of off-and-on slumber, he flew his hangover back to Houston Sunday morning, following the sunrise across the country.

Back at his apartment he made a pot of coffee and attacked the accumulated mail and memos. Most of it was throwaway junk. Interesting letter from his father, vacationing in Montana with his new wife, not Julian's favorite person. His mother had called twice about a money problem, but then called again to say never mind. Both brothers called about the hanging; they followed Julian's 'career' closely enough to realize that the woman who'd been attacked was in his platoon.

His actual career had generated the usual soft sifting pink snowfall of irrelevant interdepartmental memos, which he did have to at least scan. He studied the minutes of the monthly faculty meeting, just in case something real had been discussed. He always missed it, since he was on duty from the tenth to the nineteenth of every month. The only way that might have hurt his career would be jealousy from other faculty members.

And then there was a hand-delivered envelope, a small square under the memos, addressed 'J.' He saw a corner of it and pulled it out, pink slips fluttering, and ripped open the flap, over which a red flame had been rubber-stamped: it was from Blaze, who Julian was allowed to call by her real name, Amelia. She was his coworker, ex-adviser, confidante, and sexual companion. He didn't say 'lover' in his mind, yet, because that was awkward, Amelia being fifteen years older than him. Younger than his father's new wife.

The note had some chat about the Jupiter Project, the particle-physics experiment they were engaged in, including a bit of scandalous gossip about their boss, which did not alone explain the sealed envelope. 'Whatever time you get back,' she wrote; 'come straight over. Wake me up or pull me out of the lab. I need my little boy in the worst way. You want to come over and find out what the worst way is?'

Actually, what he'd had in mind was sleeping for a few hours. But he could do that afterward. He stacked the mail into three piles and dropped one pile into the recycler. He started to call her but then put the phone down unpunched. He dressed for the morning cool and went downstairs for his bicycle.

The campus was deserted and beautiful, redbuds and azaleas in bloom under the hard blue Texas sky. He pedaled slowly, relaxing back into real life, or comfortable illusion. The more time he spent jacked, the harder it was to accept this peaceful, monocular view of life as the real one. Rather than the beast with twenty arms; the god with ten hearts.

At least he wasn't menstruating anymore.

He let himself into her place with his thumbprint. Amelia was actually up at nine this Sunday morning, in the shower. He decided against surprising her there. Showers were dangerous places – he had slipped in one once, experimenting with a fellow clumsy teenager, and had wound up with a cut chin and bruises and a decidedly unerotic attitude toward the location (and the girl, for that matter).

So he just sat up in her bed, quietly reading the newspaper, and waited for the water to stop. She sang bits of tunes, happy, and switched the shower from fine spray to coarse pulse and back. Julian could visualize her there and almost changed his mind. But he stayed on the bed, fully clothed, pretending to read.

She came out toweling and started slightly when she saw Julian; then recovered: 'Help! There's a strange man in my bed!'

'I thought you liked strange men.'

'Only one.' She laughed and eased alongside him, hot and damp.

All of us mechanics talk about sex. Being jacked automatically accomplishes two things that normal people pursue through sex, and sometimes love: emotional union with another and the penetration, so to speak, of the physical mysteries of the opposite sex. These things are automatic and instantaneous, jacked, as soon as they turn on the power. When you unjack, it's a mystery you all have in common, and you talk about that as much as anything.

Amelia's the only civilian I've talked about it with at any length. She's intensely curious about it, and would take the chance if it were possible. But she would lose her position, and maybe a lot more.

Eight or nine percent of the people who go through the installation either die on the operating table or, worse, come out of it with their brains not working at all. Even those of us who come out successfully jacked face an increase in the frequency of cerebrovascular incidents, including fatal stroke. For mechanics in soldierboys, the increase is tenfold.

So Amelia could get jacked – she has the money and could just slip down to Mexico City or Guadalajara and have it done at one of the clinics there – but she would automatically lose her position: tenure, retirement, everything. Most job contracts had a 'jack' clause; all academic ones did. People like me were exempt because we didn't do it voluntarily, and it was against the law to discriminate against people in National Service. Amelia's too old to be drafted.

When we make love I sometimes have felt her stroking the cold metal disk at the base of my skull, as if she were trying to get in. I don't think she's aware of doing it.

Amelia and I had been close for many years; even when she was my PhD adviser, we had a social life together. But it didn't become physical until after Carolyn died.

Carolyn and I were first jacked at the same time; joined the platoon on the same day. It was an instant emotional connection, even though we had almost nothing in common. We were both black Southerners (Amelia's pale Boston Irish) and in graduate school. But she was no intellectual; her MFA was going to be in Creative Viewing. I never watched the cube and she wouldn't know a differential equation if it had reared up and bit her on the butt. So we had no rapport at that level, but that wasn't important.

We'd been physically attracted to each other during training, the shoe stuff you go through before they put you in a soldierboy, and had managed to sneak a few minutes of privacy, three times, for hasty sex, desperately passionate. Even for normal people, that would have been an intense beginning. But then when we were jacked it was something way beyond anything either of us had ever experienced. It was as if life were a big simple puzzle, and we suddenly had a piece dropped in that nobody else could see.

But we couldn't put it together when we weren't jacked. We had a lot of sex, a lot of talks, went to relators and counselors – but it was like we were one thing in the cage and quite another, or two others, outside.

I talked to Amelia about it at the time, not only because we were friends, but because we were on the same project and she could see my work was starting to suffer. I couldn't get Carolyn off my mind, in a very literal way.

It was never resolved. Carolyn died in a sudden brain blowout when we weren't doing anything particularly stressful, just waiting for a pickup after an uneventful mission.

I had to be hospitalized for a week; in a way, it was even worse than just losing someone you loved. It was like that plus losing a limb, losing part of your brain.

Amelia held my hand that week, and we were holding each other soon enough.

I don't usually fall asleep right after making love, but this time I did, after the weekend of dissipation and the sleepless hours on the plane – you'd think a person who spent a third of his life as part of a machine would be comfortable traveling inside another one, but no. I have to stay awake to keep the damned thing in the air.

The smell of onions woke me up. Brunch, lunch, whatever. Amelia has a thing about potatoes; her Irish blood, I suppose. She was frying up a pan with onions and garlic. Not my favorite wake-up call, but for her it was lunch. She told me she'd gotten up at three to log on and work out a decay sequence that turned out to be nothing. So her reward for working on Sunday was a shower, a somewhat awake lover, and fried potatoes.

I located my shirt but couldn't find my pants, and settled on one of her nightgowns, not too pretty. We were the same size.

I found my blue toothbrush in her bathroom and used her weird clove-flavored toothpaste. Decided against a shower because my stomach was growling. It wasn't grits and gravy, but it wasn't poison.

'Good morning, bright eyes.' No wonder I couldn't find my pants. She was wearing them.

'Have you gone completely strange?' I said.

'Just an experiment.' She stepped over and held me by both shoulders. 'You look stunning. Absolutely gorgeous.'

'What experiment? See what I would wear?'

'See whether.' She stepped out of my jeans and handed them over, and walked back to her potatoes wearing only a T-shirt. 'I mean, really. Your generation is so prudish.'

'Oh, are we?' I slipped off the gown and came up behind her. 'Come on. I'll show you prudish.'

'That doesn't count.' She half-turned and kissed me. 'The experiment was about clothes, not sex. Sit down before one of us gets burned.'

I sat down at the dinette and looked at her back. She stirred the food slowly. 'I'm not sure why I did that, really. Impulse. Couldn't sleep but didn't want to wake you up, going through the closet. I stepped on your jeans getting out of bed and I just put them on.'

'Don't explain. I want it to be a big perverse mystery.'

'If you want coffee you know where it is.' She had a pot of tea brewed. I almost asked for a cup. But to keep the morning from being too full of mystery, I stuck with coffee.

'So Macro's getting a divorce?' Dr 'Mac' Roman was dean of research and titular head of our project, though he wasn't involved in the day-to-day work.

'Deep dark secret. He hasn't told anybody. My friend Nel passed it on.' Nel Nye was a schoolmate who worked for the city.

'And they were such a lovely couple together.' She laughed one 'ha,' stabbing at the potatoes with the spatula. 'Was it another woman, man, robot?'

'They don't put that on the form. They're splitting this week, though, and I have to meet with him tomorrow before we go to Budget. He'll be even more distracted than usual.' She divided the potatoes between two plates and brought them over. 'So you were out blowing up trucks?'

'Actually, I was lying in a cage, twitching.' She dismissed that with a wave. 'There wasn't much to it. No drivers or passengers. Two saps.'

'Sapients?'

'"Sapient defense units," yeah, but that puts a pretty low threshold on sapience. They're just guns on tracks with AI routines that give them a certain degree of autonomy. Pretty effective against ground troops and conventional artillery and air support. Don't know what they were doing in our AO.'

'Is that a blood type?' she said over her teacup.

'Sorry. "Area of operations." I mean, one flyboy could have taken them out in a single treetop pass.'

'So why didn't they use a flyboy? Rather than risk damaging your expensive armored carcass.'

'Oh, they said they wanted the cargo analyzed, which was bullshit. The only stuff besides food and ammo were some solar cells and replacement boards for field mainframes. So we know they use Mitsubishi. But if they buy anything from a Rimcorp firm, we automatically get copies of the invoices. So I'm sure that was no big surprise.'

'So why'd they send you?'

'Nobody said officially, but I got a thread on my vertical jack that they were feeling out Sam, Samantha.'

'She's the one who, her friend?'

'Got beaten up and raped, yeah. She didn't do too well.'

'Who would?'

'I don't know. Sam's pretty tough. But she wasn't even half there.'

'That would go rough on her? If she got a psychiatric discharge.'

'They don't like to give them, unless there's actual brain damage. They'd either "find" that or put her through an Article 12.' I got up to find some catsup for my potatoes. 'That might not be as bad as rumor has it. Nobody in our company has gone through it.'

'I thought there was a congressional investigation of that. Somebody with important parents died.'

'Yeah, there was talk. I don't know that it got any further than talk. Article 12 has to be a wall you can't climb. Otherwise half the mechanics in the army would try for a psych discharge.'

'They don't want to make it that easy.'

'So I used to think. Now I think part of it is keeping a balanced force. If you made an Article 12 easy, you'd lose everyone bothered by killing. The soldierboys would wind up a berserker corps.'

'That's a pretty picture.'

'You should see what it looks like from inside. I told you about Scoville.'

'A few times.'

'Imagine him times twenty thousand.' People like Scoville are completely disassociated from killing, especially with the soldierboys. You find them in regular armies, too, though – people for whom enemy soldiers aren't human, just counters in a game. They're ideal for some missions and disastrous for others.

I had to admit the potatoes were pretty good. I'd been living on bar food for a couple of days, cheese and fried meats, with corn chips for a vegetable.

'Oh … you didn't get on the cube this time.' She had her cube monitor the war channels and keep any sequences where my unit appeared. 'So I was pretty sure you were having a safe, boring time.'

'So shall we find something exciting to do?'

'You go find something.' She picked up the plates and carried them to the sink. 'I have to go back to the lab for half a day.'

'Something I could help you with?'

'Wouldn't speed it up. It's just some data formatting for a Jupiter Project update.' She sorted the plates into the dishwasher. 'Why don't you catch up on your sleep and we'll do something tonight.'

That sounded good to me. I switched the phone over, in case somebody wanted to bother me on Sunday morning, and returned to her rumpled bed.

The Jupiter project was the largest particle accelerator ever built, by several orders of magnitude.

Particle accelerators cost money – the faster the particle, the more it costs – and the history of particle physics is at least partly a history of how important really fast particles have been to various sponsoring governments.

Of course, the whole idea of money had changed with the nanoforges. And that changed the pursuit of 'Big Science.'

The Jupiter Project was the result of several years' arguing and wheedling, which resulted in the Alliance sponsoring a flight to Jupiter. The Jupiter probe dropped a programmed nanoforge into its dense atmosphere, and deposited another one on the surface of Io. The two machines worked in concert, the Jupiter one sucking up deuterium for warm fusion and beaming the power to the one on Io, which manufactured elements for a particle accelerator that would ring the planet in Io's orbit and concentrate power from Jupiter's gargantuan magnetic field.

Prior to the Jupiter Project, the biggest 'supercollider' had been the Johnson Ring that circled several hundred miles beneath Texas wasteland. This one would be ten thousand times as long and a hundred thousand times as powerful.

The nanoforge actually built other nanoforges, but ones that could only be used for the purpose of making the elements of the orbiting particle accelerator. So the thing did grow at an exponential rate, the busy machines chewing up the blasted surface of Io and spitting it out into space, forming a ring of uniform elements.

What used to cost money now cost time. The researchers on Earth waited while ten, a hundred, a thousand elements were chucked into orbit. After six years there were five thousand of them, enough to start firing up the huge machine.

Time was involved in another way, a theoretical measure. It had to do with the beginning of the universe – the beginning of time. One instant after the Diaspora (once called the Big Bang), the universe was a small cloud of highly energetic particles swarming outward at close to the speed of light. An instant later, they were a different swarm, and so on out to a whole second, ten seconds, and so on. The more energy you pumped into a particle accelerator, the closer you could come to duplicating the conditions that obtained soon after the Diaspora, the beginning of time.

For more than a century there had been a back-and-forth dialogue between the particle physicists and the cosmologists. The cosmologists would scribble their equations, trying to figure out which particles were flitting around at what time in the universe's development, and their results would suggest an experiment. So the physicists would fire up their accelerators and either verify the cosmologists' equations or send them back to the blackboard.

The reverse process also happens. One thing most of us agree on is that the universe exists (people who deny that usually follow some trade other than science), so if some theoretical particle interaction would lead ultimately to the nonexistence of the universe, then you can save a lot of electricity by not trying to demonstrate it.

Thus it went, back and forth, up to the time of the Jupiter Project. The Johnson Ring had been able to take us back to conditions that were obtained when the universe was one tenth of a second old. By that time, it was about four times the size the Earth is now, having expanded from a dimensionless point at a great rate of speed.

The Jupiter Project, if it worked, would take us back to a time when the universe was smaller than a pea, and filled with exotic particles that no longer exist. But it would be the biggest machine ever built, by several orders of magnitude, and it was being built by automatic robots with no direct supervision. When the Jupiter group sent an order out to Io, it would get there fifteen to twenty-four minutes later, and of course the response would be delayed by an equal length of time. A lot can happen in forty-eight minutes; twice, the Project had to be halted and reprogrammed – but you couldn't really 'halt' it, not all at once, because the submachines that were making the parts that would go into orbit just kept on going for forty-eight minutes plus however long it took to figure out how to reprogram them.

Over the Jupiter Program director's desk, there was a picture from a movie over a century old: Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice, staring dumbfounded at the endless line of brainless brooms marching through the door.

I slept a couple of hours and woke up suddenly, in a panic sweat. I couldn't remember what I'd been dreaming about, but it left me with a fading sense of vertigo, falling. It had happened a few times before, the first day or two off duty.

Some people wound up never getting any deep sleep unless they were jacked. Sleeping that way gave you total blackness, total lack of sensation or thought. Practicing up for death. But relaxing.

I lay there staring into the watery light for another half hour and decided to stop trying. Went into the kitchen and buzzed up some coffee. Really ought to work, but I wouldn't have any papers until Tuesday, and Research could wait until tomorrow morning's meeting.

Catch up on the world. I'd resolutely stayed away from it in Cambridge. I turned on Amelia's desk and decrypted a thread to my news module.

It humors me and puts the light stuff first. I read through twenty pages of comics and the three columns I knew to be safely immune from politics. One of them did a broad satire about Central America anyhow.

Central and South America took up most of the world news section, unsurprisingly. The African front was quiet, still stunned a year after our nuking of Mandelaville. Perhaps regrouping and calculating which of our cities would be next.

Our little sortie wasn't even mentioned. Two platoons of soldierboys took the towns of Piedra Sola and Igatimi, in Uruguay and Paraguay; supposedly rebel strongholds. We did it with their governments' foreknowledge and permission, of course – and there were no civilian casualties, equally of course. Once they're dead they're rebels. 'La muerte es el gran convertidor,' they say – 'Death is the great converter.' That must be literally true as well as a sarcasm about our body counts. We've killed a quarter-million in the Americas and God knows how many in Africa. If I lived in either place I'd be a 'rebel.'

There was a business-as-usual running report about the Geneva talks. The enemy is so fragmented they will never come together on terms, and I'm sure at least some of the rebel leaders are plants, puppets ordered to keep the thing good and confused.

They did actually come to agreement over nuclear weapons: neither side would use them except in retaliation, starting now, though Ngumi still won't take responsibility for Atlanta. What we really need is an agreement on agreements: 'If we promise something, we won't break the promise for at least thirty days.' Neither side would agree to that.

I turned off the machine and checked Amelia's refrigerator. No beer. Well, that was my responsibility. Some fresh air wouldn't hurt, anyhow, so I locked up and pedaled toward the campus gate.

The shoe sergeant in charge of security looked at my ID and made me wait while he phoned for verification. The two privates with him leaned on their weapons and smirked. Some shoes have a thing about mechanics, since we don't 'actually' fight. Forget that we have to stay in longer and have a higher death rate. Forget that we keep them from having to do the really dangerous jobs.

Of course, that's exactly it for some of them: we also stand in the way of their being heroes. 'It takes all kinds of people to make a world,' my mother always says. Fewer kinds to make an army.

He finally admitted I was who I was. 'You carrying?' he asked as he filled out the pass.

'No,' I said. 'Not in the daytime.'

'Your funeral.' He folded the pass precisely in two and handed it over. Actually, I was armed, with a puttyknife and a little Beretta belt-buckle laser. It might be his own funeral someday, if he couldn't tell whether or not a man was armed. I saluted the privates with one erect finger between the eyes, traditional draftee greeting, and went out into the zoo.

There were about a dozen whores lounging around the gate, one of them a jill, her head shaved. She was old enough to be an ex-mechanic. You always wondered.

Of course, she noticed me. 'Hey, Jack!' She stepped onto the path and I stopped the bike. 'I got something you can ride.'

'Maybe later,' I said. 'You're lookin' good.' Actually, she wasn't. Her face and posture showed a lot of stress; the telltale pink in her eyes tagged her as a cherrybomb user.

'Half price for you, honey.' I shook my head. She grabbed on to my handlebars. 'Quarter price. Been so long since I done it jacked.'

'I couldn't do it jacked.' Something made me honest, or partly so. 'Not with a stranger.'

'So how long would I be a stranger?' She couldn't hide the note of pleading.

'Sorry.' I pushed off onto the grass. If I didn't get away fast, she'd be offering to pay me.

The other hookers had watched the exchange with various attitudes: curiosity, pity, contempt. As if they weren't all addicts of one kind or another, themselves. Nobody had to fuck for a living in the Universal Welfare State. Nobody had to do anything but stay out of trouble. It works so well.

They had legalized prostitution in Florida for a few years, when I was growing up. But it went the way of the big casinos before I was old enough to be interested.

Hooking's a crime in Texas, but I think you have to be a real nuisance before they lock you up. The two cops who watched the jill proposition me didn't put the cuffs on her. Maybe later, if they had the money.

Jills usually get plenty of work. They know what it feels like to be male.

I pedaled past the college-town stores, with their academic prices, into town. South Houston was not exactly savory, but I was armed. Besides, I figured that bad guys kept late hours, and would still be in bed. One wasn't.

I leaned the bike up against the rack outside of the liquor store and was fiddling with the cranky lock, which was supposed to take my card.

'Hey boy,' a deep bass voice said behind me. 'You got ten dollars for me? Maybe twenny?'

I turned around slowly. He was a head taller than me, maybe forty, lean, muscle suit. Shiny boots up to his knees and the tightly braided ponytail of an Ender: God would use that to haul him up to heaven. Soon, he hoped.

'I thought you guys didn't need money.'

'I need some. I need it now.'

'So what's your habit?' I put my right hand on my hip. Not natural or comfortable, but close to the puttyknife, 'Maybe I got some.'

'You don't got what I need. Got to buy what I need.' He drew a long knife with a slender wavy blade from his boot.

'Put it away. I got ten.' The silly dagger was no match for a puttyknife, but I didn't want to perform a dissection out here on the sidewalk.

'Oh, you got ten. Maybe you got fifty.' He took a step toward me.

I pulled out the puttyknife and turned it on. It hummed and glowed.

'You just lost ten. How much more you want to lose?'

He stared at the vibrating blade. The shimmering mist on the top third was as hot as the surface of the sun. 'You in the army. You a mechanic.'

'I'm either a mechanic or I killed one and took his knife. Either way, you want to fuck with me?'

'Mechanics ain't so tough. I was in the army.'

'You know all about it, then.' He took a half-step to the right, I think a feint. I didn't move. 'You don't want to wait for your Rapture? You want to die right now?'

He looked at me for a long second. There was nothing in his eyes. 'Oh, fuck you anyhow.' He put the knife back in his boot, turned, and walked away without looking back.

I turned off the puttyknife and blew on it. When it was cool enough, I put it back and went into the liquor store.

The clerk had a chrome Remington airspray. 'Fuckin' Endie. I would've got him.'

'Thanks,' I said. He would've gotten me too, with an airspray. 'You got six Dixies?'

'Sure.' He opened the case behind him. 'Ration card?'

'Army,' I said. I didn't bother with the ID.

'Figured.' He rummaged. 'You know they got a law I got to let the fuckin' Endies in the store? They never buy anything.'

'Why should they?' I said. 'World's going up in smoke tomorrow, maybe the next day.'

'Right. Meanwhile they steal y' blind. All I got's cans.'

'Whatever.' I was starting to shake a little. Between the Ender and this trigger-happy clerk I'd probably come closer to dying than I ever would in Portobello.

He put the six-pack in front of me. 'You don't want to sell that knife?'

'No, I need it all the time. Open fan mail with it.'

That was the wrong thing to say. 'Got to say I don't recognize you. I follow the Fourth and Sixteenth, mainly.'

'I'm Ninth. Not nearly as exciting.'

'Interdiction,' he said, nodding. The Fourth and Sixteenth are hunter/killer platoons, so they have a considerable following. Warboys, we call their fans.

He was a little excited, even though I was just Interdiction. And Psychops. 'You didn't catch the Fourth last Wednesday, did you?'

'Hey, I don't even follow my own outfit. I was in the cage then, anyhow.'

He stopped for a moment with my card in his hand, struck dumb by the concept that a person could live nine days in a row inside a soldierboy and then not jump straight to the cube and follow the war.

Some do, of course. I met Scoville when he was out of the cage once, here in Houston for a warboy 'assembly.' There's one every week somewhere in Texas – they haul in enough booze and bum and squeak to keep them cross-eyed for a long weekend, and pay a couple of mechanics to come in and tell them what it's really really like. To be locked inside a cage and watch yourself murder people by remote control. They replay tapes of great battles and argue over fine points of strategy.

The only one I've ever gone to had a 'warrior day,' where all of the attendees – all except us outsiders – dressed up as warriors from the past. That was kind of scary. I assumed the tommy guns and flintlocks didn't function; even criminals were reluctant to risk that. But the swords and spears and bows looked real enough, and they were in the hands of people who had amply demonstrated, to me at least, that they shouldn't be trusted with a sharp stick.

'You were going to kill that guy?' the clerk said conversationally.

No reason to. They always back off.' As if I knew.

'But suppose he didn't.'

'It wouldn't be a problem,' I heard myself saying. 'Take his knife hand off at the wrist. Call 9-1-1. Maybe they'd glue it back on upside down.' Actually, they'd probably take their time responding. Give him a chance to beat the Rapture by bleeding to death.

He nodded. 'We had two guys last month outside the store, they did the handkerchief thing, some girl.' That was where two men bite down on opposite corners of a handkerchief, and have at each other with knives or razors. The one who lets go of the handkerchief loses. 'One guy was dead before they got here. The other lost an ear; they didn't bother to look for it.' He gestured. 'I kept it in the freezer for awhile.'

'You're the one who called the cops?'

'Oh yeah,' he said. 'Soon as it was over.' Good citizen.

I strapped the beer onto the rear carrier and pedaled back toward the gate.

Things are getting worse. I hate to sound like my old man. But things really were better when I was a boy. There weren't Enders on every corner. People didn't duel. People didn't stand around and watch other people duel. And then police picked up the ears afterward.

Not all enders had ponytails and obvious attitudes. There were two in Julian's physics department, a secretary and Mac Roman himself.

People wondered how such a mediocre scientist had come out of nowhere and brown-nosed his way into a position of academic power. What they didn't appreciate was the intellectual effort it took to successfully pretend to believe in the ordered, agnostic view of the universe that physics mandated. It was all part of God's plan, though. Like the carefully falsified documents that had put him in the position of being minimally qualified for the chairmanship. Two other Enders were on the Board of Regents, able to push his case.

Macro (like one of those Regents) was a member of a militant and supersecret sect within a sect: the Hammer of God. Like all Enders, they believed God was about to bring about the destruction of humankind. Unlike most of them, the Hammer of God felt called upon to help.

On the way back to campus I took a wrong turn and, circling back, passed a downscale jack joint I'd never seen. They had feelies of group sex, downhill skiing, a car crash. Done there; been that. Not to mention all the combat ones.

Actually, I'd never done the car crash. I wonder if the actor died. Sometimes Enders did that, even though jacking's supposed to be a sin. Sometimes people do it to be famous for a few minutes. I've never jacked into one of those, but Ralph has his favorites, so when I'm jacked with Ralph I get it secondhand. Guess I'll never understand fame.

There was a new sergeant at the gate to the university, so we went through the delaying song and dance again.

I pedaled aimlessly through the campus for an hour. It was pretty deserted, Sunday afternoon of a long weekend. I went into the physics building to see whether any students had slipped papers under my door, and one had – an early problem set, wonder of wonders. And a note saying he'd have to miss class because his sister had a coming-out party in Monaco. Poor kid.

Amelia's office was one floor above mine, but I didn't bother her. I really ought to work out the answers to the problem set, get ahead of the game. No, I ought to go back to Amelia's and waste the rest of the day.

I did go back to Amelia's, but in a spirit of scientific inquiry. She had a new appliance they called the 'anti-microwave;' you put something in it and set the temperature you want, and it cools it down. Of course the appliance has nothing to do with microwaves.

It worked well on a can of beer. When I opened the door, wisps of vapor came out. The beer was forty degrees, but the ambient temperature inside the machine must have been a lot lower. Just to see what would happen, I put a slice of cheese in it and set it to the lowest temperature, minus forty. When it came out I dropped it on the floor, and it shattered. I think I found all the pieces.

Amelia had a little alcove behind the fireplace that she called 'the library.' There was just room for an antique futon and a small table. The three walls that defined the space were glassed-in shelves, full of hundreds of old books. I'd been in there with her, but not to read.

I set the beer down and looked at the titles. Mostly novels and poetry.

Unlike a lot of jacks and jills, I still read for pleasure, but I like to read things that are supposed to be true.

My first couple of years of college, I majored in history with a minor in physics, but then switched around. I used to think it was the degrees in physics that got me drafted. But most mechanics have the usual compulsoryed degrees – gym, current events, communication skills. You don't have to be that smart to lie in the cage and twitch.

Anyhow, I like to read history, and Amelia's library was lean in that subject. A few popular illustrated texts. Mostly twenty-first century, which I planned to read about when it was over.

I remembered she wanted me to read the Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, so I took it down and settled in. Two hours and two beers.

The differences between their fighting and ours were as profound as the difference between a bad accident and a bad dream.

Their armies were equally matched in weaponry; they both had a diffuse, confused command structure that essentially resulted in one huge mob being thrown against another, to flail away with primitive guns and knives and clubs until one mob ran away.

The confused protagonist, Henry, was too deeply involved to see this simple truth, but he reported it accurately.

I wonder what poor Henry would think about our kind of war. I wonder whether his era even knew the most accurate metaphor: exterminator. And I wondered what simple truth my involvement kept me from seeing.

Julian didn't know that the author of The Red Badge of Courage had had the advantage of not having been a part of the war he wrote about. It's harder to see a pattern when you're part of it.

That war had been relatively straightforward in terms of economic and ideological issues; Julian's was not. The enemy Ngumi comprised a loose alliance of dozens of 'rebel' forces, fifty-four this year. In all enemy countries there was a legitimate government that cooperated with the Alliance, but it was no secret that few of those governments were supported by a majority of their constituents.

It was partly an economic war, the 'haves' with their automation-driven economies versus the 'have-nots,' who were not born into automatic prosperity. It was partly a race war, the blacks and browns and some yellows versus the whites and some other yellows. Julian was uncomfortable on some level about that, but he didn't feel much of a bond with Africa. Too long ago, too far away, and they were too crazy.

And of course it was an ideological war for some – the defenders of democracy versus the rebel strong-arm charismatic leaders. Or the capitalist land-grabbers versus the protectors of the people, take your pick.

But it was not a war that was going to have a conclusive endgame, like Appomattox or Hiroshima. Either the slow erosion of the Alliance would make it collapse into chaos, or the Ngumi would be swatted down hard enough in all locations that they would become a collection of local crime problems rather than a somewhat unified military one.

The roots of it went back to the twentieth century and even beyond; many of the Ngumi traced their political parentage back to when white men first brought sailing ships and gunpowder to their lands. The Alliance dismissed that as so much jingoistic rhetoric, but there was logic to it.

The situation was complicated by the fact that in some countries the rebels were strongly linked to organized crime, as had happened in the Drug Wars that simmered early in the century. In some, there was nothing left but crime, organized or disorganized, but universal, from border to border. In some of those places, Alliance forces were the only vestige of law – often underappreciated, when there was no legal commerce and the population's choice was between a well-stocked black market and essentials-only charity from the Alliance.

Julian's Costa Rica was anomalous. The country had managed to stay out of the war early on, maintaining the neutrality that had kept it out of the twentieth century's cataclysms. But its geographic location between Panama, the only Alliance stronghold in Central America, and Nicaragua, the hemisphere's most powerful Ngumi nation, finally dragged it into the war. At first, most of the patriotic rebels spoke with a suspicious Nicaraguan accent. But then there was a charismatic leader and an assassination – both engineered by Ngumi, the Alliance claimed – and before long the forests and fields were filled with young men, and some women, ready to risk their lives to protect their land against the cynical capitalists and their puppets. Against the huge bulletproof giants who stalked the jungle quiet as cats; who could level a town in minutes.

Julian considered himself a political realist. He didn't swallow the facile propaganda of his own side, but the other side was just plain doomed; their leaders should be making deals with the Alliance rather than annoying it. When they nuked Atlanta they hammered the last nail into their coffin.

If indeed Ngumi had done it. No rebel group claimed responsibility, and Nairobi said it was close to being able to prove that the bomb had come from the Alliance nuclear archives: they had sacrificed five million American lives to pave the way for total war, total annihilation.

But Julian wondered about the nature of the proof, that they could be 'close' to it and not be able to say anything specific. He didn't rule out the possibility that there were people on his own side insane enough to blow up one of their own cities. But he did wonder how such a thing could be kept secret for long. A lot of people would have to be involved.

Of course that could be dealt with. People who would murder five million strangers could sacrifice a few dozen friends, a few hundred coconspirators.

And so it went around and around, as it had in everybody's thoughts in the months since Atlanta, Sao Paulo, and Mandelaville. Would some actual proof emerge? Would another city be snuffed out tomorrow; and then another one, in retaliation?

It was a good time for those who owned rural real estate. People who could move were finding country life appealing.

The first few days I'm back are usually nice and intense. The homecoming mood energizes our love life, and all the time I'm not with her I'm deeply immersed in the Jupiter Project, catching up. But a lot depends on the day of the week I come back, because Friday is always a singularity. Friday is the night of the Saturday Night Special.

That's the name of a restaurant up in the Hidalgo part of town, more expensive than I would normally patronize, and more pretentious: the theme of the place is the romanticized California Gang Era – grease, graffiti, and grime, safely distant from the table linen. As far as I'm concerned, those people were no different from today's whackers and slicers – if anything, worse, since they didn't have to worry about the federal death penalty for using guns. The waiters come around in leather jackets and meticulously grease-stained T-shirts, black jeans, and high boots. They say the wine list is the best in Houston.

I'm the youngest of the Saturday Night Special crowd by at least ten years; the only one who's not a full-time intellectual. I'm 'Blaze's boy'; I don't know which of them knew or suspected I literally was her boy. I came as her friend and coworker, and everybody seemed to accept that.

My primary value to the group was the novelty of being a mechanic. That was doubly interesting to them, because a senior member of the group, Marty Larrin, was one of the designers of the cyberlink that made jacking, and thus soldierboys, possible.

Marty had been responsible for designing the system's security. Once a jack was installed, it was failsafed at a molecular level, literally impossible to modify, even for the original manufacturers; even for researchers like Marty. The nanocircuitry inside would scramble itself within a fraction of a second if any part of the complex device was tampered with. Then it would take another round of invasive surgery, with a one-in-ten chance of death or uselessness, to take the scrambled jack out and install a new one.

Marty was about sixty, the front half of his head shaved bald in a generation-old style, the rest of his white hair long except for the shaved circle around his jack. He was conventionally handsome, still; regular leading-man features, and it was obvious from the way he treated Amelia that they had a past. I once asked her how long ago that had been, the only such question I've ever asked her. She thought for a moment and said, 'I guess you were out of grade school.'

The population of the Saturday Night Special crowd varies from week to week. Marty is almost always there, along with his traditional antagonist, Franklin Asher, a mathematician with a chair in the philosophy department. Their jocular sniping goes back to when they were graduate students together; Amelia's known him nearly as long as Marty.

Belda Magyar is usually there, an odd duck but obviously one of the inner circle. She sits and listens with a stern, disapproving look, nursing a single glass of wine. Once or twice a night she makes a hilarious remark, without changing expression. She's the oldest, over ninety, a professor emeritus in the art department. She claims to remember having met Richard Nixon, when she was very small. He was big and scary, and gave her a book of matches, no doubt a White House souvenir, which her mother took away.

I liked Reza Pak, a shy chemist in his early forties, the only one besides Amelia with whom I socialized outside the club. We met occasionally to shoot pool or play tennis. He never mentioned Amelia and I never mentioned the boyfriend who always drove up to fetch him, exactly on time.

Reza, who also lived on campus, usually gave me and Amelia a ride to the club, but this Friday he was already uptown, so we called a cab. (Like most people, Amelia doesn't own a car and I've never even driven, except in Basic Training, and then only jacked with someone who knew how.) We could bike to Hidalgo in daylight, but coming back after dark would be suicide.

It started raining at sundown anyhow, and by the time we got to the club it was a full-fledged thunderstorm, with tornado watch. The club had an awning, but the rain was almost horizontal; we got drenched between the cab and the door.

Reza and Belda were already there, at our usual table in the grease section. We talked them into moving to the Club Room, where a phony-but-warm fireplace crackled.

Another semi-regular, Ray Booker, came in while we were relocating, also drenched. Ray was an engineer who worked with Marty Larrin on soldierboy technology, and a serious 'grass musician who played banjo all over the state, summers.

'Julian, you should of seen the Tenth today.' Ray had a little warboy streak in him. 'Delayed replay of an amphibious assault on Punta Patuca. We came, we saw, we kicked butt.' He handed his wet overcoat and hat to the wheelie that had followed him in. 'Almost no casualties.'

'What's "almost"?' Amelia said.

'Well, they ran into a shatterfield.' He sat down heavily. 'Three units lost both legs. But we got them evac'ed before the scavengers could get to them. One psych, a girl on her second or third mission.'

'Wait,' I said. 'They used a shatterfield inside a city?'

'They sure as hell did. Brought down a whole block of slums, urban renewal. Of course they said we did it.'

'How many dead?'

'Must be hundreds.' Ray shook his head. 'That's what got the girl, maybe. She was in the middle of it, immobilized with both her legs off. Fought the rescue crew; wanted them to evac the civilians. They had to turn her off to get her out of there.'

He asked the table for a scotch and soda and the rest of us put our orders in. No greasy waiters in this section. 'Maybe she'll be okay. One of those things you have to learn to live with.'

'We didn't do it,' Reza said.

'Why would we? No military advantage, bad press. Shatterfield's a terror weapon, in a city.'

'I'm surprised anyone survived,' I said.

'Nobody on the ground; they were all instant chorizo. But those were four and five-story buildings. People in the upper stories just had to survive the collapse.

'The Tenth set up a knockout perimeter with UN markers and called it a no-fire zone, collateral casualty, once we had all our soldierboys out. Dropped in a Red Cross med crawler and moved on.

'The shatterfield was their only real 'tech touch. The rest of it was old-fashioned, cut-off-and-concentrate tactics, which doesn't work on a group as well integrated as the Tenth. Good platoon coordination. Julian, you would have appreciated it. From the air it was like choreography.'

'Maybe I'll check it out.' I wouldn't; never did, unless I knew somebody in the fight.

'Any time,' Ray said. 'I've got two crystals of it, one jacked through Emily Vail, the company coordinator. The other's the commercial feed.' They didn't show battles while they were happening, of course, since the enemy could jack in. The commercial feed was edited both for maximum drama and minimum disclosure. Normal people couldn't get individual mechanics' unedited feeds; lots of warboys would cheerfully kill for one. Ray had top-secret clearance and an unfiltered jack. If a civilian or a spy got ahold of Emily Vail's crystal, they would see and feel a lot that wasn't on the commercial version, but selected perceptions and thoughts would be filtered out unless you had a jack like Ray's.

A live waiter in a clean tuxedo brought our drinks. I was splitting a jug of house red with Reza.

Ray raised a glass. 'To peace,' he said, actually without irony. 'Welcome back, Julian.' Amelia touched my knee with hers under the table.

The wine was pretty good, just astringent enough to make you consider a slightly more expensive one. 'Easy week this time,' I said, and Ray nodded. He always checked on me.

A couple of others showed up, and we broke down into the usual interlocking small conversational groups. Amelia moved over to sit with Belda and another man from fine arts, to talk about books. We usually did separate when it seemed natural.

I stayed with Reza and Ray; when Marty came in he gave Amelia a peck and joined the three of us. There was no love lost between him and Belda.

Marty was really soaked, his long white hair in lanky strings. 'Had to park down the block,' he said, dropping his sodden coat on the wheelie. 'Thought you were working late,' Ray said.

'This isn't late?' He ordered coffee and a sandwich. 'I'm going back later, and so are you. Have a couple more scotches.'

'What is it?' He pushed his scotch away a symbolic inch.

'Let's not talk shop. We have all night. But it's that girl you said you saw on the Vail crystal.'

'The one who cracked?' I asked.

'Mm-hm. Why don't you crack, Julian? Get a discharge. We enjoy your company.'

'Your platoon, too,' Ray joked. 'Nice bunch.'

'How could she fit into your cross-linking studies?' I asked. 'She must hardly have been linking at all.'

'New deal we started while you were gone,' Ray said. 'We got a contract to study empathy failures. People who crack out of sympathy for the enemy.'

'You may get Julian,' Reza said. 'He just loves them pedros.'

'It doesn't correlate much with politics,' Marty said. 'And it's usually people in their first year or two. More often female than male. He's not a good candidate.' The coffee came and he picked up the cup and blew on it. 'So how about this weather? Clear and cool, they said.'

'Love them Knicks,' I said.

Reza nodded. 'The square root of minus one.' There was going to be no more talk of empathy failures that night.

Julian didn't know how selective the draft really was, finding people for specific mechanics' slots. There were a few hunter/killer platoons, but they tended to be hard to control, on a couple of levels. As platoons, they followed orders poorly, and they didn't integrate well 'horizontally,' with other platoons in the company. The individual mechanics in a hunter/killer platoon tended not to link strongly with one another.

None of this was surprising. They were made up of the same kind of people earlier armies chose for 'wet work.' You expected them to be independent and somewhat wild.

As Julian had observed, most platoons had at least one person who seemed like a really unlikely choice. In his outfit it was Candi, horrified by the war and unwilling to harm the enemy. They were called stabilizers.

Julian suspected she acted as a kind of conscience for the platoon, but it would be more accurate to call her a governor, like the governor on an engine. Platoons that didn't have one member like Candi had a tendency to run out of control, go 'berserker.' It happened sometimes with the hunter/killer ones, whose stabilizers couldn't be too pacifistic, and it was tactically a disaster. War is, according to von Clausewitz, the controlled use of force to bring about political ends. Uncontrolled force is as likely to harm as to help.

(There was a mythos, a commonsense observation, that the berserker episodes had a good effect in the long run, because they made the Ngumi more afraid of the soldierboys. Actually, the opposite was true, according to the people who studied the enemy's psychology. The soldierboys were most fearsome when they acted like actual machines, controlled from a distance. When they got angry or went crazy – acting like men in robot suits – they seemed beatable.)

More than half of the stabilizers did crack before their term was up. In most cases it was not a sudden process, but was preceded by a period of inattention and indecision. Marty and Ray would be reviewing the performance of stabilizers prior to their failure, to see whether there was some invariable indicator that would warn commanders that it was time for a replacement or modification.

The unbreakable jack fail-safe supposedly was to keep people from harming themselves or others, though everybody knew it was just to maintain the government monopoly. Like a lot of things that everybody knows, it wasn't true. It wasn't quite true that you couldn't modify a jack in place, either, but the changes were limited to memory – usually when a soldier saw something the army wanted him or her to forget. Only two of the Saturday Night Special group knew about that.

Sometimes they erased a soldier's memory of an event for security reasons; less often, for humane ones.

Almost all of Marty's work now was with the military, which made him uncomfortable. When he had started in the field, thirty years before, jacks were crude, expensive, and rare, used for medical and scientific research.

Most people still worked for a living then. A decade later, at least in the 'first world,' most jobs having to do with production and distribution of goods were obsolete or quaint. Nanotechnology had given us the nanoforge: ask it for a house, and then put it near a supply of sand and water. Come back tomorrow with your moving van. Ask it for a car, a book, a nail file. Before long, of course, you didn't have to ask it; it knew what people wanted, and how many people there were.

Of course, it could also make other nanoforges. But not for just anybody. Only for the government. You couldn't just roll up your sleeves and build yourself one, either, since the government also owned the secret of warm fusion, and without the abundant free power that came from that process, the nanoforge couldn't exist.

Its development had cost thousands of lives and put a huge crater in North Dakota, but by the time Julian was in school, the government was in a position where it could give everybody any material thing. Of course, it wouldn't give you everything you wanted; alcohol and other drugs were strictly controlled, as were dangerous things like guns and cars. But if you were a good citizen, you could live a life of comfort and security without lifting a finger to work, unless you wanted to. Except for the three years you were drafted.

Most people spent those three years working in uniform a few hours a day in Resource Management, which was dedicated to making sure the nanoforges had access to all the elements they needed. About five percent of the draftees put on blue uniforms and became caregivers, people whose tests said they would be good working with the sick and elderly. Another five percent put on green uniforms and became soldiers. A small fraction of those tested out fast and smart, and became mechanics.

People in National Service were allowed to reenlist, and a large number did. Some of them didn't want to face a lifetime of total freedom, perhaps uselessness. Some liked the perquisites that went along with the uniform: money for hobbies or habits, a kind of prestige, the comfort of having other people tell you what to do, the ration card that gave you unlimited alcohol, off duty.

Some people even liked being allowed to carry a gun.

The soldiers who weren't involved in soldierboys, waterboys, or flyboys – the people mechanics called 'shoes' – got all of those perquisites, but always faced a certain probability of being ordered to go out and sit on a piece of disputed real estate. They usually didn't have to fight, since the soldierboys were better at it and couldn't be killed, but there was no doubt that the shoes fulfilled a valuable military function: they were hostages. Maybe even lures, staked goats for the Ngumi long-range weapons. It didn't make them love the mechanics, as often as they owed their lives to them. If a soldierboy got blown to bits, the mechanic just put on a fresh one. Or so they thought. They didn't know how it felt.

I liked sleeping in the soldierboy. Some people thought it was creepy, so complete a knockout it was like death. Half the platoon stands guard while the other half is shut down for two hours. You fall asleep like a light being turned out and wake up just as suddenly, disoriented but as rested as you would have been after eight hours of normal sleep. If you get the full two hours, that is.

We had taken refuge in a burned-out schoolhouse in an abandoned village. I was on the second sleep shift, so I first spent two hours sitting at a broken window, smelling jungle and old ashes, patient in the unchanging darkness. From my point of view, of course, it was neither dark nor unchanging. Starlight flooded the scene like monochromatic daylight, and once each ten seconds I switched to infrared for a moment. The infrared helped me track a large black cat that stalked up on us, gliding through the twisted remains of the playground equipment. It was an ocelot or something, aware of motion in the schoolhouse and looking for a meal. When it got within ten meters it froze for a long period, scenting nothing, or maybe machine lubricant, and then was away in a sudden flash.

Nothing else happened. After two hours, the first shift woke up. We gave them a couple of minutes to get their bearings and then passed on the 'sit-rep,' situation report: negative.

I fell asleep and instantly awoke to a blaze of pain. My sensors brought in nothing but blinding light, a roar of white noise, searing heat – and complete isolation! All of my platoon was disconnected or destroyed.

I knew it wasn't real; knew I was safe in a cage in Portobello. But it still hurt like a third-degree burn over every square centimeter of naked flesh, eyeballs fried in their sockets, one dying inhalation of molten lead, enema of same: complete feedback overload.

It seemed to last for a long time – long enough for me to think this was actually it; the enemy had cracked Portobello or nuked it, and it was actually me dying, not my machine. Actually, we were switched off after 3.03 seconds. It would have been quicker, but the mechanic in Delta platoon who was our horizontal liaison – our link to the company commander if I died – was disoriented by the sudden intensity of it, even secondhand.

Later satellite analysis showed two aircraft catapulted from five kilometers away. They were stealthed and, with no propellant, left no heat signature. One pilot ejected just before the plane hit the schoolhouse. The other plane was either automatically guided or its pilot came in with it – kamikaze or ejection failure.

Both planes were full of incendiaries. About one hundredth of a second after Candi sensed something was wrong, all our soldierboys were trying to cope with a flood of molten metal.

They know we have to sleep, and know how we do it. So they contrive things like this setup: a camouflaged catapult, zeroed on a building we would sooner or later use, its two-pilot crew waiting for months or years.

They couldn't have just boobytrapped the building, because we would have sensed that amount of incendiary or other explosive.

In Portobello, three of us went into cardiac arrest; Ralph died. They used air-cushion stretchers to move us to the hospital wing, but it still hurt to move; just to breathe.

Physical treatment wouldn't touch where that pain was, the phantom pain that was the nervous system's memory of violent death. Imaginary pain had to be fought through the imagination.

They jacked me into a Caribbean island fantasy, swimming warm waters with lovely black women. Lots of virtual fruit-and-rum drinks, and then virtual sex, virtual sleep.

When I woke up still in pain, they tried the opposite scenario – a ski resort, thin dry cool air. Fast slopes, fast women, the same sequence of virtual voluptuousness. Then canoeing in a calm mountain lake. Then a hospital bed in Portobello.

The doctor was a short guy, darker than me. 'Are you awake, sergeant?'

I felt the back of my head. 'Evidently.' I sat up and clutched at the mattress until the dizziness subsided. 'How are Candi and Karen?'

'They'll be all right. Do you recall…'

'Ralph died. Yes.' I dimly remembered when they had stopped working on him, and brought the other two out of the cardiac unit. 'What day is it?'

'Wednesday.' The shift had started Monday. 'How do you feel? You're free to go as soon as you feel up to it.'

'Medical leave?' He nodded. 'The skin pain is gone. I still feel strange. But I've never spent two days jacked into fantasies before.' I put my feet on the cold tile floor and stood up. I walked shakily across the room to a closet and found a dress uniform there, and a bag with my civvies.

'Guess I'll hang around awhile, check on my platoon. Then go home or wherever.'

'All right. I'm Dr Tull, in RICU Recovery, if you have any problems.' He shook hands and left. Do you salute doctors?

I decided to wear the uniform and dressed slowly and sat there for awhile, sipping ice water. I'd lost soldierboys twice before, but both times it was just a twist of disorientation and then switch-off. I'd heard about these total feedback situations, and knew of one instance when a whole platoon had died before they could be turned off. Supposedly, that couldn't happen anymore.

How would it affect our performance? Scoville's platoon went through it last year. We all had to spend a cycle training with the replacement soldierboys, but they seemed unaffected, other than being impatient with not fighting. Theirs was only a fraction of a second, though, not three seconds of burning alive.

I went down to see Candi and Karen. They'd been out of jack therapy for half a day, and were pale and weak but otherwise all right. They showed me the pair of red marks between their breasts where they'd been jolted back to life.

Everyone but them and Mel had checked out and gone home. While I waited for Mel I went down to Ops and replayed the attack.

I didn't replay the three seconds, of course; only the minute leading up to them. All the people on guard heard a faint 'pop' that was the enemy pilot ejecting. Then Candi, out of the corner of her eye, saw one plane for a hundredth of a second, as it cleared the trees that bordered the parking lot and dove in. She started to swing, to target it with her laser, and then the record ended.

When Mel came out, we had a couple of beers and a plate of tamales at the airport. He went off to California, and I went back to the hospital for a few hours. I bribed a tech to jack me with Candi and Karen for five minutes – not strictly against regulations; in a way, we were still on duty – which was long enough for us to reassure each other that we would be all right, and to share grief about Ralph. It was especially hard on Candi. I took on some of the fear and pain they had about their hearts. Nobody likes to face the possibility of a replacement, having a machine at the center of your life. They were likely candidates now.

When we unjacked, Candi held my hand very hard, actually just the forefinger, staring at me. 'You hide your secrets better than anyone else,' she whispered.

'I don't want to talk about it.'

'I know you don't.'

'Talk about what?' Karen said.

Candi shook her head. 'Thanks,' I said, and she released my finger.

I backed out of the small room. 'Be…' Candi said, and didn't complete the sentence. Maybe that was the sentence.

She had seen how profoundly I hadn't wanted to wake up.

I called Amelia from the airport and said I'd be home in a few hours, and would explain later. It would be after midnight, but she said to come straight over to her place. That was a relief. Our relationship didn't have any restrictions, but I always hoped she slept alone, waiting, the ten days I was away.

Of course she knew something was seriously wrong. When I got off the plane, she was there, and had a cab waiting outside.

The machine's programming was stuck in a rush-hour pattern, so it took us twenty minutes to get home, via surface roads I never see except on bicycle. I was able to tell Amelia the basic story while we drove through the maze that avoided nonexistent traffic. When we got to the campus the guard looked at my uniform and waved us through, wonder of wonders.

I let her talk me into some reheated stir-fry. I wasn't really hungry, but knew she liked to feed me.

'It's hard for me to visualize,' she said, rummaging for bowls and chopsticks while the stuff warmed. 'Of course it is. I'm just talking.' She stood behind me and massaged my neck. 'Tell me you're going to be all right.'

'I am all right.'

'Oh, bullshit.' She dug in. 'You're stiff as a board. You're not halfway back from … wherever that was.'

She had nuked some sake. I poured a second cup. 'Maybe. I … they let me go back and jack with Candi and Karen in the cardiac recovery unit. Candi's in a pretty bad way.'

'Afraid of getting her heart pulled?'

'That's more Karen's problem. Candi's going round and round about Ralph. She can't handle losing him.'

She reached over me and poured herself a cup. 'Isn't she a grief counselor? Out of uniform.'

'Yeah, well, why does somebody take that up? She lost her father when she was twelve, an accident while she was in the car. That's never buried very deep. He's there in the background with every man she, she's close to.'

'Loves? Like you?'

'Not love. It's automatic. We've been through this.'

She crossed the kitchen to stir the pot, her back to me. 'Maybe we should go through it again. Maybe every six months or so.'

I almost blew up at her, but held back. We were both tired and rattled. 'It's not at all like Carolyn. You just have to trust me. Candi's more like a sister–'

'Oh sure.'

'Not like my sister, okay.' I hadn't heard from her in more than a year. 'I'm close to her, intimate, and I guess you could call it a kind of love. But it's not like you and me.'

She nodded and measured the stuff into bowls. 'I'm sorry. You go through hell there and get more hell here.'

'Hell and stir-fry.' I took the bowl. 'Time of the month?'

She put her own bowl down a little hard. 'That's another goddamned thing. Sharing their periods. That's more than "intimate." It's just plain strange.'

'Well, count your blessings. You've got a couple of years' peace.' The women in a platoon synchronize periods pretty quickly, and the men are of course affected. It's a problem with the thirty-day rotation cycle: the first half of last year I came home every month crabby with PMS, proof that the brain is mightier than the gland.

'What was he like, Ralph? You never said much about him.'

'It was only his third cycle,' I said. 'Still a neo. Never saw any real combat.'

'Just enough to kill him.'

'Yeah. He was a nervous guy, maybe oversensitive. Two months ago, when we were parallel-jacked, Scoville's platoon was worse than usual, and he was bouncing around for days. We all had to hang on to him, keep him putting one foot in front of the other. Candi was best at that, of course.'

She played with her food. 'So you didn't know all that intimate stuff about him.'

'Intimate, yeah, but not as deep as the others. He wet the bed until puberty, had terrible childhood guilt over killing a turtle. Spent all his money on jacksex with the jills that hang around Portobello. Never had real sex until he was married, and didn't stay married long. Before he got jacked he used to masturbate compulsively to tapes of oral sex. Is that intimate?'

'What was his favorite food?'

'Crab cakes. The way his mother made them.'

'Favorite book?'

'He didn't read much, not at all for pleasure. He liked Treasure Island in school. Wrote a report about Jim in eleventh grade and then recycled it in college.'

'He was likeable?'

'Nice enough guy. We never did anything social – I mean nobody did, with him. He'd get out of the cage and run to the bars, with a hard-on for the jills.'

'Candi didn't, none of the women wanted to … help him out that way?'

'God, no. Why would you?'

'That's what I don't understand. Why wouldn't you? I mean, all the women knew he went off with these jills.'

'That's what he wanted to do. I don't think he was unhappy on that score.' I pushed the bowl away and poured some sake. 'Besides, it's an invasion of privacy on a cosmic scale: when Carolyn and I were together, every time we went back to the platoon we had eight people who knew everything we had done, from both sides, as soon as we jacked. They knew how Carolyn felt about what I did, and vice versa, and all the feedback states that that kind of knowledge generates. You don't start that sort of thing casually.'

She persisted. 'I still don't see why not. You're all used to everybody knowing everything. You know each other's insides, for Christ's sake! A little friendly sex wouldn't be that earthshaking.'

I knew my anger was unreasonable, that it didn't really come from her questions. 'Well, how would you like to have the whole Friday night gang in the bedroom with us? Feeling everything you felt?'

She smiled. 'I wouldn't mind. Is that a difference between men and women or between you and me?'

'I think it's a difference between you and merely sane people.' My smile might not have been totally convincing. 'It's actually not the physical sensations. The details vary, but men pretty much feel like men and women feel like women. Sharing that isn't a big deal after the initial novelty. It's how the rest of you feels that's personal. And embarrassing.'

She took our bowls to the sink. 'You wouldn't be able to tell that from the ads.' Her voice dropped. '"Feel how it feels to her"'

'Well, you know. People who pay to have a jack installed often do it out of sexual curiosity. Or something deeper; they feel trapped in the wrong kind of body but don't want to do the swap-op.' I shuddered. 'Understandably.'

'People do it all the time,' she said, teasing, knowing how I felt. 'It's less dangerous than jacking, and reversible.'

'Oh, reversible. You get somebody else's dick.'

'Men and their dicks. It's mostly your own tissue.'

'Used to be inseparable.' Karen had been male until she turned eighteen, and was able to file with National Health for a swap. She took a few tests and they agreed she'd be better off outside-in.

The first one's free. If she wanted to go back to being a male, she'd have to pay. Two of the jills that Ralph liked were ex-males trying to earn enough to buy their dicks back. What a wonderful world.

People outside of National Service did have legitimate ways to earn money, though not many of them were paid as much as prostitutes. Academics made small stipends, larger ones for people who did 'hands-on' teaching, only a token for people who just did research. Marty was the head of his department and was a world-renowned authority on brain/machine and brain/brain interfacing – but he made less money than a teaching assistant like Julian. He made less money than the greaseball kids who served drinks at the Saturday Night Special. And like most people in his position, Marty took a perverse pride in being broke all the time – he was too busy to make money. And he rarely needed the things you could buy with it, anyhow.

You could buy objects with money, like handcrafts and original art, or services; masseur, butler, prostitute. But most people spent money on rationed things – things the government allowed you to have, but didn't allow you enough of.

Everyone had three entertainment credits a day, for instance. One credit would get you a movie, a roller-coaster ride, one hour of hands-on driving on a sports car track, or entry into a place like the Saturday Night Special.

Once inside, you could sit all night for free, unless you wanted something to eat or drink. Restaurant meals ranged from one to thirty credits, mostly depending on how much labor went into them, but the menu also had dollar amounts, in case you had used up all your entertainment and had money.

Plain money wouldn't buy alcohol, though, unless you were in uniform. You were rationed one ounce of alcohol per day, and it made no difference to the government whether you parceled it out to yourself as two small glasses of wine each night or as a once-a-month binge with two bottles of vodka.

It made abstainers and people in uniform sought-after companions in some wobbly circles – and, perhaps predictably, did nothing to reduce the number of alcoholics. People who had to have it would either find it or make it.

Illegal services were available for money, and in fact were the most active part of the dollar economy. Penny-ante activities like home-brewing or freelance prostitution were either ignored or taken care of with small regular bribes. But there were big operators who moved a lot of cash for hard drugs and services like murder.

Some medical services, like jack installation, cosmetic surgery, and sex-change operations, were theoretically available through National Health, but not many people qualified. Before the war, Nicaragua and Costa Rica had been the places to go to buy 'black medicine.' Now it was Mexico, though a lot of the doctors had Nicaraguan or Costa Rican accents.

Black medicine came up at the next Friday night gathering. Ray was on a little vacation in Mexico. It was no secret he'd gone there to have a few dozen pounds of fat removed.

'I suppose the medical advantages outweigh the risk,' Marty said. 'You had to approve the leave?' Julian asked.

'Pro forma,' Marty said. 'Pity he couldn't put it against sick leave. I don't think he's ever used a day of it.'

'Well, it's vanity,' Belda said in a quavering voice. 'Male vanity. I liked him fine, fat.'

'He didn't want to get in bed with you, darling,' Marty said.

'His loss.' The old woman patted her hair.

The waiter was a surly handsome young man who looked as if he'd stepped out of a movie poster. 'Last call.'

'It's only eleven,' Marty said.

'So maybe you get one more.'

'Same all around?' Julian said. Everyone said yes except Belda, who checked her watch and bustled out.

It was getting toward the end of the month, so they put all the drinks on Julian's tab, to conserve ration points, and paid him under the table. He offered to let them do it all the time, but it was technically against the law, so most of the people usually demurred. Except Reza, who had never spent a dime in the club except in payoffs to Julian.

'I wonder how fat you have to be to go to National Health,' Reza said. 'You have to need a forklift to get around,' Julian said. 'Your mass has to alter the orbits of nearby planets.'

'He did apply,' Marty said. 'He didn't have high enough blood pressure or cholesterol.'

'You're worried about him,' Amelia said.

'Of course I am, Blaze. Personal feelings aside, if something happened to him I'd be stopped dead on three different projects. The new one especially, the empathy failures. He's pretty much taken that over.'

'How's that coming along?' Julian asked. Marty raised a palm and shook his head. 'Sorry. Didn't mean to–'

'Oh, well, you might as well know one thing – we've been studying one of your people. You'll know all about it next time you jack with her.'

Reza got up to go to the bathroom, so it was just the three of them: Julian, Amelia, and Marty.

'I'm very happy for you both,' Marty said, in a distant tone, as if he were talking about the weather.

Amelia just stared. 'You … you have access to my string,' Julian said.

'Not directly, and not for the purpose of invading your privacy. We've been studying one of your people. So naturally I know a lot about you, secondhand, and so does Ray. Of course we will keep your secret for as long as you wish it to remain a secret.'

'Nice of you to tell us,' Amelia said.

'I don't mean to embarrass you. But of course Julian would know the next time he jacks with her. I was glad to finally get you alone.'

'Who was it?'

'Private Defollette.'

'Candi. Well, that makes sense.'

'She's the one who was so hurt about the death last month?' Amelia said.

Julian nodded. 'You expect her to crack?'

'We don't expect anything. We're simply interviewing one person per platoon.'

'Chosen at random,' Julian said.

Marty laughed and raised an eyebrow. 'We were talking about liposuction?'

I didn't expect a lot of action the next week, since we'd have to break in a new set of soldierboys and start with a new mechanic as well. Almost two new ones, since Rose, Arly's replacement, had no experience other than last month's disaster.

The new mechanic was not a neo. For some reason they broke up India platoon to use as replacements. So we all sort of knew the new man, Park, because of the diffuse platoon-level link through Ralph, and Richard before him.

I didn't much like Park. India had been a hunter/killer platoon. He'd killed more people than all the rest of us put together, and unabashedly enjoyed it. He collected crystals of his kills and replayed them off duty.

We trained in the new soldierboys three hours on, one off, destroying the fake town 'Pedropolis,' built for that purpose on the Portobello base.

When I had time, I linked up to Carolyn, the company coordinator, and asked what was going on – why did I wind up with a man like Park? He'd never really fit in.

Carolyn's reply was sour and hot with confusion and anger. The order to 'decompose' India platoon had come from somewhere above the brigade level, and it was causing organizational problems everywhere. The India mechanics were a bunch of mavericks. They hadn't gotten along all that well even with each other.

She assumed it was a deliberate experiment. As far as she knew, nothing like it had been done before; the only time she'd heard of a platoon being broken up, it was because four of them had died at once, and the other six couldn't work together anymore, with the shared grief. India, on the other hand, was one of the most successful platoons they had, in terms of kills. It didn't really make sense to split them up.

I was the lucky one, to have Park, she said. He had been the horizontal liaison, and so had been directly linked to mechanics outside his platoon for the past three years. His cohorts, except for the platoon leader, had only had each other, and they were a fun bunch. They made Scoville look like a pedro lover.

Park liked to kill nonhuman things, too. During the training exercise he occasionally popped a songbird out of the air with his laser, not an easy task. Samantha and Rose both objected when he zapped a stray dog. He sardonically defended his action by pointing out that it didn't belong in the AO, and could have been rigged up as a spy or boobytrap. But we all were linked, and had felt how he felt when he targeted the enemy mutt: it was simple obscene glee. He'd cranked up to maximum magnification to watch the dog explode.

The last three days combined perimeter guard with training, and I had visions of Park using kids as target practice. Children often watch the soldierboys from a safe distance, and no doubt some of them report to Dad, who reports to Costa Rica. But most of them are just kids fascinated by machines, fascinated by war. I probably went through a stage like that. My memories before eleven or twelve are vague almost to nonexistence, a byproduct of the jack installation that affects about a third of us. Who needs a childhood when the present is so much fun?

We had more than enough excitement for anybody the last night. Three rockets came in simultaneously, two of them from the sea and one, a decoy, coming in at treetop level, launched from the balcony of a high-rise on the edge of town.

The two that came in from the sea were in our sector. There were automatic defenses against this kind of attack, but we backed them up.

As soon as we heard the explosion – Alpha knocking out the rocket on the other side of the camp – we stifled the natural impulse to look and turned to watch in the opposite direction, facing directly out from the camp. The two rockets immediately appeared, stealthed but bright in IR. A flak wall sprayed up in front of them, and we targeted them with our heavy bullets about the time they hit that. Two crimson fireballs. They were still glowing impressively in the night sky when a pair of flyboys screamed out to sea in search of the launching platform.

Our reaction time had been fast enough, but we didn't set any records. Park, of course, got in the first shot, .02 of a second ahead of Claude, which made him smug. We all had people in the warm-up seats, it being the last day of our cycle and the first of theirs; I got a confused query from Park's second, through my second: Is there something wrong with this guy?

Just a real good soldier, I said, and knew my meaning was clear. My second, Wu, didn't have any more killer instinct than I did.

I left five soldierboys on perimeter and took the other five down to the beach to police up debris from the missiles. No surprises. They were Taiwanese RPB-4s. A note of protest would be sent, and the reply would lament the obvious theft.

But the rockets were just a diversion.

The actual attack was timed pretty well. It was less than one hour before the shift ended.

As far as we could reconstruct it, the plan was a combination of patience and sudden desperate force. The two rebels who did it had been working for the food service in Portobello for years. They rolled into the lounge adjacent to the locker room to set up the buffet most of us tore into after our shift. But they had scatterguns, two streetsweepers, taped under the food carts. There was a third person, never caught, who cut the fiber line that gave Command its physical picture of the lounge and locker room.

That gave them about thirty seconds of 'somebody tripped over the cable,' while the two pulled out their weapons and walked through the unlocked doors that connect the lounge to the locker room and the locker room to Operations. They stepped into Ops and started shooting.

The tapes show that they lived for 2.02 seconds after the door opened, during which time they got off seventy-eight 20-gauge buckshot blasts. They didn't hurt any of us in the cages, since that would take armor-piercing shells and more, but they killed all ten of the warm-up mechanics and two of the techs, who were behind supposedly bulletproof glass. The shoe guard, who dozes over us in his armored suit, woke up at the noise and toasted them. It was actually a close thing, as it turned out, because he took four direct hits. They didn't harm him, but if they'd hit the laser, he would have had to lumber down and attack them hand to hand. That might have given them time to crack the shells. They each had five shaped charges taped under their shirts.

All the weapons were Alliance issue; the fully automatic shotguns fired depleted uranium ammunition.

The propaganda machine would play up the suicide aspect of it – lunatic pedros who place no value on human life. As if they had just run amok and wiped out twelve young men and women. The reality was frightening, not only because of their success in infiltrating and attacking, but also in the bold and desperate dedication that it bespoke.

We hadn't just hired those two people off the street. Everyone who worked on the compound had to pass an exhaustive background check, and psychological testing that proved they were safe. How many other time bombs were walking around Portobello?

Candi and I were lucky, in a grim way, because both our seconds died instantly. Wu didn't even have time to turn around. He heard the door click open and then a shotgun blast took off the top of his head. Candi's second, Marla, died the same way. Some of them were pretty bad. Rose's second had time to stand up and turn half around, and was shot in the chest and abdomen. She lived long enough to drown in blood. Claude's was shot in the crotch as a reward for facing the enemy; he lived for a long couple of seconds jackknifed in pain before a second blast tore out his lower spine and kidneys.

It was a light jack, but still profoundly disturbing, especially for those of us whose seconds died in pain. We were all tranked automatically before they popped our cages and rolled us to Trauma. I got a glimpse of the carnage all around, the big white machines that were trying to hammer life back into the ones whose brains were intact. The next day we found out that none of those had been successful. Their bodies were too completely shredded.

So there was no next shift. Our soldierboys stood in frozen postures in their guard positions while shoe infantry, suddenly pressed into guard detail, swarmed around them. The natural assumption was that the attack on our seconds would be followed immediately by a ground attack on the base itself, before another platoon of soldierboys could be brought in. Maybe it would have happened if one or two of the rockets had found their mark. But all was quiet, this time, and Fox platoon, from the Zone, was in place in less than an hour.

They let us out of Trauma after a couple of hours, and at first said we weren't to tell anyone what happened. But of course the Ngumi weren't going to keep it quiet.

Automatic cameras had recorded the carnage and a copy of the scene fell into Ngumi hands. It was powerful propaganda, in a world that couldn't be shocked by death or violence. To the camera, Julian's ten comrades were not young men and women, naked under an unrelenting spray of lead. They were symbols of weakness, triumphant evidence of the Alliance's vulnerability in the face of Ngumi dedication.

The Alliance called it a freakish kamikaze attack by two murderous fanatics. It was a situation that could never be duplicated. They didn't publicize the fact that all of the native staff in Portobello were fired the next week, replaced by American draftees.

This was hard on the economy of Portobello proper, as the base was its largest single source of income. Panama was a 'most favored nation,' but not a full Alliance Member, which in practical terms meant it had limited use of American nanoforges, but there weren't any of the machines within its boundaries.

There were about two dozen small countries in a similar unstable situation. Two nanoforges in Houston were reserved for Panama. The Panama Import/Export Board decided what they were to be used for. Houston supplied them with a 'wish book,' a list of how long it took to make something, and what raw materials had to be supplied by the Canal Zone. Houston could supply air and water and dirt. If something required an ounce of platinum or a speck of dysprosium, Panama would have to dig it up somewhere or somehow.

The machine had limits. You could give it a bucket of coal and it could return a perfect copy of the Hope Diamond, which would make a dandy paperweight. Of course, if you wanted a fancy gold crown, you'd have to supply the gold. If you wanted an atomic bomb, you'd have to give it a couple of kilograms of plutonium. But fission bombs were not in the wish book; nor were soldierboys or any other products of advanced military technology. Planes and tanks were okay, and among the most popular items.

This is the way things worked: the day after the Portobello base was emptied of native workers, the Panama Import/Export Board presented the Alliance with a detailed analysis of the impact of the loss of income. (It was obvious that someone had foreseen the eventuality.) After a couple of days' haggling, the Alliance agreed to increase their nanoforge allotment from forty-eight hours per day to fifty-four, along with a onetime settlement of a half-billion dollars' credit in rare materials. So if the prime minister wanted a Rolls-Royce with a solid gold chassis, he could have it. But it wouldn't be bulletproof.

The Alliance did not officially care how client nations came up with their requests for the machines' largesse. In Panama there was at least a pretense of democracy, the Import/Export Board being advised by elected representatives, compradores, one from each province and territory. So there were occasional well-publicized imports that benefited only the poor.

Like the United States, technically, they had a semi-socialist electrocash economy. The government supposedly took care of basic needs, and citizens worked for money for luxuries, which were paid for either by electronic credit transfer or cash.

But in the United States, luxuries were just that: entertainments or refinements. In the Canal Zone they were things like medicine and meat, more often bought with cash than with plastic.

There was a lot of resentment, of their own government and Tio Rico to the north, which gave rise to an ironic pattern common to most client states: incidents like the Portobello massacre ensured that Panama would not have its own nanoforges for a long time, but the unrest that led to the massacre was directly traceable to its lack of the magic box.

We got no peace the first week after the massacre. The huge publicity machine that fueled the warboy mania, and was usually concerned with more interesting platoons, turned its energies on us; the general media wouldn't leave us alone, either. In a culture that lived on news, it was the story of the year: bases like Portobello were attacked all the time, but this was the first time the mechanics' inner sanctum had been violated. That the mechanics who were killed had not been in charge of the machines was a detail repeatedly stressed by the government and downplayed by the press.

They even interviewed some of my UT students to see how I was 'taking it,' and of course they were quick to defend me by saying it was business as usual in the classroom. Which of course demonstrated how unfeeling I was, or how strong and resilient, or how traumatized, depending on the reporter.

Actually, it may have demonstrated all of the above, or maybe just that a particle-physics practicum is not a place where you discuss personal feelings.

When they tried to bring a camera into my classroom, I called a shoe and had them evicted. It was the first time in my academic career that being a sergeant meant more than being an instructor, however junior.

Likewise, I was able to commandeer two shoes to keep the reporters at a distance when I went out. But for almost a week they did have at least one camera watching me, which kept me away from Amelia. Of course, she could just walk into my apartment building as if she were visiting someone else, but the possibility that someone would make a connection – or happen to see her walking into my own apartment – was too great to risk. There were still some people in Texas who would be unhappy about a white woman who had a black man, fifteen years younger, for a lover. There might even be some people in the university who would be unhappy about it.

The newsies seemed to have lost interest by Friday, but Amelia and I went to the club separately, and I brought along my shoes to stand guard outside.

We overlapped trips to the bathroom, and managed a quick embrace unobserved. Otherwise, most of my apparent attention went to Marty and Franklin.

Marty confirmed what I had suspected. 'The autopsy showed that your second's jack was disconnected by the same blast that killed him. So there's no reason for it to have felt any different to you than just being unplugged.'

'At first, I didn't even realize he was gone,' I said, not for the first time. 'The input from the rest of my platoon was so strong and chaotic. The ones whose seconds were hurt but still alive.'

'But it wouldn't be as bad for them as being fully jacked to someone who died,' Franklin said. 'Most of you have gone through that.'

'I don't know. When somebody dies in the cage, it's a heart attack or stroke. Not being ripped open by buckshot. A light jack may only feedback, say, ten percent of that sensation, but it's a lot of pain. When Carolyn died…' I had to clear my throat. 'With Carolyn it was just a sudden headache, and she was gone. Just like coming unjacked.'

'I'm sorry,' Franklin said, and filled both our glasses. The wine was a duped Lafite Rothschild '28, the wine of the century, so far.

'Thanks. It's years now.' I sipped the wine, good but presumably beyond my powers of discrimination. 'The bad part, a bad part, was that it didn't occur to me that she'd died. Nor to anybody else in the platoon. We were just standing on a hill, waiting for a snatch. Thought it was a comm failure.'

'They knew at the company level,' Marty said.

'Of course they did. And of course they wouldn't tell us, risk our screwing up the snatch. But when we popped, her cage was empty. I found a medic and she said they'd done a brain scan and there wasn't enough to save; they'd taken her down to autopsy already. Marty, I've told you this more than once before. Sorry.'

Marty shook his head in commiseration. 'No closure. No leave-taking.'

'They should've popped you all, once you were in place,' Franklin said. 'They can snatch cold 'boys as easily as warm ones. Then you would've at least known, before they took her away.'

'I don't know.' My memory of the whole thing is cloudy. They knew we were lovers, of course, and had me tranked before I was popped. A lot of the counseling was just drug therapy with conversation, and after a while I wasn't taking the drugs anymore and I had Amelia there in place of Carolyn. In some ways.

I felt a sudden pang of frustration and longing, partly for Amelia after this stupid week of isolation, partly for the unattainable past. There would never be another Carolyn, and not just because she was dead. That part of me was dead, too.

The talk moved on to safer areas, a movie everybody but Franklin had hated. I pretended to follow it. Meanwhile, my mind went round and round the suicide track.

It never seems to surface while I'm jacked. Maybe the army knows all about it, and has a way of suppressing it; I know I'm suppressing it myself. Even Candi only had a hint.

But I can't keep this up for five more years, all the killing and dying. And the war's not going to end.

When I feel this way I don't feel sad. It's not loss, but escape – it's not whether, but when and how.

I guess after I lose Amelia is the 'when.' The only 'how' that appeals to me is to do it while jacked. Maybe take a couple of generals with me. I can save the actual planning for the moment. But I do know where the generals live in Portobello, Building 31, and with all my years jacked it's nothing to slide a comm thread to the soldierboys who guard the building. There are ways I can divert them for a fraction of a second. Try not to kill any shoes on my way in.

'Yoo-hoo. Julian? Anybody home?' It was Reza, from the other table.

'Sorry. Thinking.'

'Well, come over here and think. We have a physics question that Blaze can't answer.'

I picked up my drink and moved over. 'Not particle, then.'

'No, it's simpler than that. Why does water emptying out of a tub go one direction in the Northern Hemisphere and the other in the Southern?'

I looked at Amelia and she nodded seriously. She knew the answer, and Reza probably did, too. They were rescuing me from the war talk.

'That's easy. Water molecules are magnetized. They always point north or south.'

'Nonsense,' Belda said, 'Even I would know it if water were magnetized.'

'The truth is that it's an old wives' tale. You'll excuse the expression.' 'I'm an old widow,' Belda said.

'Water goes one way or the other depending on the size and shape of the tub, and peculiarities of the surface near the outlet. People go through life believing the hemisphere thing without noticing that some of the basins in their own house go the wrong way.'

'I must go home and check,' Belda said. She drained her glass and unfolded slowly out of the chair. 'You children be good.' She went to say good-bye to the others.

Reza smiled at her back. 'She thought you looked lonely there.'

'Sad,' Amelia said. 'I did, too. Such a horrible experience, and here we are bringing it up all over.'

'It's not something they covered in training. I mean, in a way they do. You get jacked to strings recorded while people died, first in a light jack and then deeper.'

'Some jackfreaks do it for fun,' Reza said.

'Yeah, well, they can have my job.'

'I've seen that billboard.' Amelia hugged herself.

'Strings of people dying in racing accidents. Executions.'

'The under-the-counter ones are worse.' Ralph had tried a couple, so I'd felt them secondhand. 'Our backups who died, their strings are probably on the market by now.'

'The government can't–'

'Oh, the government loves it,' Reza broke in. 'They probably have some recruitment division that makes sure the stores are full of snuff strings.'

'I don't know,' I said. 'Army's not wild about people who are already jacked.'

'Ralph was,' Amelia said.

'He had other virtues. They'd rather have you associate the specialness of being jacked with being in the army.'

'Sounds really special,' Reza said. 'Somebody dies and you feel his pain? I'd rather–'

'You don't understand, Rez. You get larger in a way, when somebody dies. You share it and' – the memory of Carolyn suddenly hit me hard – 'well, it makes your own death less earthshaking. Someday you'll buy it. Big deal.'

'You live on? I mean, they live on, in you?'

'Some do, some don't. You've met people you'd never want to carry around in your head. Those guys die the day they die.'

'But you'll have Carolyn forever,' Amelia said.

I paused a little too long. 'Of course. And after I die, the people who've been jacked to me will remember her too, and pass her down.'

'I wish you wouldn't talk like that,' Amelia said. Rez, who had known for years that we were together, nodded. 'It's like a boil you keep picking at, like you were getting ready to die all the time.'

I almost lost it. I literally counted to ten. Rez opened his mouth but I interrupted. 'Would you rather I just watched people die, felt them die, and came home asking "What's for dinner?"' I dropped to a whisper. 'How would you feel about me if that didn't hurt me?'

'I'm sorry.'

'Don't. I'm sorry you lost a baby. But that's not what you are. We go through these things, and then we more or less absorb them, and we become whatever we are becoming.'

'Julian,' Reza said in a warning tone, 'perhaps you ought to save this for later?'

'That's a good idea,' Amelia said, rising. 'I have to go on home anyhow.' She signaled the wheelie and it went for her coat and bag. 'Share a cab?' I asked.

'It's not necessary,' she said in a neutral tone. 'End of the month.' She could use leftover entertainment points for a cab ride.

Other people didn't have points left over, so I bought a lot of wine and beer and whiskey, and drank more than my share. Reza did, too; his car wouldn't let him drive. He came along with me and my two bodyguard shoes.

I had them drop me at the campus gate, and walked the two kilometers to Amelia's through a cool mist of rain. No sign of any newsies.

All the lights were out; it was almost two. I let myself in through the back and belatedly thought I should have buzzed. What if she wasn't alone?

I turned on the kitchen light and harvested cheese and grape juice from the refrigerator. She heard me moving around and shuffled in, rubbing her eyes, 'No reporters?' I asked.

'They're all under the bed.'

She stood behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. 'Give them something to write about?' I turned around in the chair and buried my face between her breasts. Her skin had a warm, sleepy smell.

'I'm sorry about earlier.'

'You've been through too much. Come on.' I let her lead me into the bedroom and she undressed me like a child. I was still a little drunk, but she had ways of getting around that, mostly patience, but other things, too.

I slept like a creature stunned and woke to an empty house. She'd left a note on the microwave that she had a sequence scheduled at 8:45 and would see me at the lunch group meeting. It was after ten.

A Saturday meeting; science never sleeps. I found some clean clothes in 'my' drawer and took a quick shower.

The day before I went back to Portobello, I had an appointment with the Luxury Allocation Board in Dallas, the people who handle special requests for the nanoforge. I took the Triangle monorail, and so got a glimpse of Fort Worth streaming by. I'd never gotten off there.

It was a half hour to Dallas, but then another hour crawling through traffic out to the LAB, which took up a huge piece of land outside the city limits. They had sixteen nanoforges, and hundreds of tanks and vats and bins that held the raw materials and the various nanos that put them together in millions of ways. I didn't have time to walk around, but had taken a guided tour of the place with Reza and his friend, the year before. That's when I got the idea to get something special for Amelia. We didn't do birthdays or religious holidays, but next week was the second anniversary of the first time we were intimate. (I don't keep a diary, but could trace the date down through lab reports; we both missed the next day's sequence.)

The evaluator assigned to my request was a sour-faced man, about fifty. He read the form with a fixed glum expression. 'You don't want this piece of jewelry for yourself. This is for some woman, some lover?'

'Yes, of course.'

'I'll have to have her name, then.'

I hesitated. 'She's not exactly my–'

'I don't care about your relationship. I just have to know who will eventually own this object. If I should approve it.'

I wasn't enthusiastic about having our relationship officially documented. Of course anyone who tapped me with a deep jack would know about it, so it was only as secret as anything in my life was secret.

It's for Amelia Blaze Harding,' I said. 'A coworker.'

He wrote that down. 'She also lives at the university?'

'That's right.'

'Same address?'

'No. I'm not sure what her address is.'

'We'll find it.' He smiled like a man who had sucked on a lemon and tried to smile. 'I see no reason to disapprove your request.' A printer in his desk hissed and a piece of paper flipped up in front of me.

'That will be fifty-three utility credits,' he said. 'If you sign here, the finished piece should be available at Unit Six within half an hour.'

I signed. More than a month's worth of credits for a handful of sand transformed was one way to think of it. Or fifty-three worthless government counters for a thing of beauty that would have been literally beyond price a generation ago.

I went out into the corridor and followed a purple line that led to Units 1 through 8. That split, and I followed a red line to Units 5 through 8. Door after door concealing people who sat at desks slowly doing work that machines could have done better and faster. But machines had no use for extra utility and entertainment credits.

I went through a revolving door into a pleasant rotunda built around a rock garden. A thin silvery stream fell and washed through it, splashing among exotic tropical plants that grew out of a gravel of rubies, diamonds, emeralds, and dozens of glittering stones with no common names.

I checked at the Unit 6 counter and it said I still had a half-hour wait. There was a cafe, though, with tables ringed around half the rock garden. I produced my military ID and got a cold beer. At the table where I sat, somebody had left a folded-up copy of the Mexican magazine Sexo!, so I spent the half hour improving my language skills.

A card on the table explained that the gems were specimens rejected for esthetic or structural flaws. They were nevertheless well out of reach.

The desk announced my name and I went over and picked up a small white package. I unwrapped it carefully.

It was exactly what I had ordered, but seemed more dramatic than its picture. A gold chain necklace supporting a dark green nightstone inside a halo of small rubies. Nightstones had only been around for a few months. This one looked like a small egg of onyx that somehow had a green light imbedded. As you turned it, the green changed shape, square to diamond to cross.

It would look good on her delicate skin, the red and green echoing her hair and eyes. I hoped it wouldn't be too exotic for her to wear.

On the train ride back, I showed it to a woman who sat next to me. She said it was pretty, but in her opinion was too dark for a black woman's skin. I told her I'd have to think about that.

I left it on Amelia's dresser, along with a note reminding her it was two years, and went on to Portobello.

Julian was born in a university town, and grew up surrounded by white people who weren't overtly racist. There were race riots in places like Detroit and Miami, but people treated them as urban problems, far removed from their comfortable reality. That was close to the truth.

But the Ngumi War was changing white America's feelings about race – or, cynics maintained, allowing them to express their true feelings. Only about half the enemy were black, but most of the leaders who appeared on the news were from that half. And they were shown crying out for white blood.

The irony wasn't lost on Julian, that he was an active part of a process that was turning American whites against blacks. But that kind of white person was alien to his personal world, his daily life; the woman on the train literally came from a foreign land. The people in his university life were mostly white but color-blind, and the people he jacked with might have started out otherwise, but didn't stay racist: you couldn't think black people were inferior if you lived inside black skin, ten days every month.

Our first assignment had a lot of potential to turn ugly. We had to 'remand for questioning' – kidnap – a woman who was suspected of being a rebel leader. She was also the mayor of San Ignacio, a small town high in the cloud forest.

The town was so small that any two of us could have destroyed it in minutes. We circled it in a silent flyboy, studying the infrared signature and comparing that to maps and low-orbit pictures. The town was lightly defended, apparently; ambushes set on the main road where it entered and left the town. Of course there could be automated defenses that didn't betray themselves with body heat. But it wasn't that rich a town.

'Let's try to do this quietly,' I said. 'Drop into the coffee plantation about here.' I pointed mentally to a spot almost two kilometers downhill from the town. 'Candi and I'll work up through the plantation to the rear of Senora Madero's house. See whether we can make the snatch without raising any fuss.'

'Julian, you ought to take at least two more,' Claude said. 'The place is gonna be wired and 'trapped.'

I gave him a nonverbal rebuttal: You know I considered that. 'Just you be ready to charge up if something happens. We start making noise, I want all ten of you to run up the hill in a tight formation and circle Candi and me. We'll keep Madero protected. Lay down smoke and we head straight down the valley here and then up this little rise for a cargo snatch.' I felt the flyboy relay that information laterally and, in a second, confirm that we could have a warm-body snatch in place.

Now,' I said, and all twelve of us were falling fast through the cold night air. We spaced ourselves fifty meters apart and after a minute the black chutes whispered out and we drifted invisibly down into the acres of low coffee trees – bushes, actually; a person of even normal height would have a hard time hiding out there. It was a calculated risk. If we'd landed closer to town, in the actual forest, we would have made a lot of noise.

It was easy to aim between the neat rows. I sank up to my knees in the soft wet soil. The chutes detached and folded and rolled themselves into tight cylinders that quietly fused into solid bricks. They'd probably wind up as part of a wall or fence.

Everybody moved silently to the tree line and took cover, while Candi and I worked uphill, weaving quietly between trees, avoiding brush.

'Dog,' she said, and we froze. From where I was, slightly behind her, I couldn't see it, but through her sensors smelled the fur and breath and then saw the IR blob. It woke up and I heard the beginning of a growl that ended with the 'thap' of a tranquilizer dart. It was a human dose; I hoped it wouldn't kill the dog.

Just past the dog was the neatly trimmed lawn behind Madero's house. There was a light on in the kitchen – worse luck. The house had been dark when we jumped.

Candi and I could just hear two voices through the closed window. The conversation was too fast and too heavily accented for either of us to follow, but the tone was clear – Senora Madero and some man were anxious, whispering urgently.

Expecting company, Candi thought.

Now, I thought. In four steps, Candi was at the window and I was at the back door. She smashed the window with one hand and fired two darts with the other. I pulled the door off its hinges and stepped into a storm of gunfire.

Two people with assault rifles. I Cranked them both and stepped toward the kitchen. An alarm whooped three times before I could track down the relay clicking and rip it out of the wall.

Two people, three people running down the stairs. Smoke and VA, I thought to myself and Candi, and dropped two grenades in the hall. Using vomiting agent was a little tricky, since our snatch was unconscious; we couldn't let her inhale it and possibly choke on her own puke. But we had to work fast anyhow.

Two people were slumped over the kitchen table. There was a circuit-breaker box on the wall; I smashed it and everything went dark, though for Candi and me it was bright red figures in a dark red kitchen.

I picked up Madero and her companion and started back for the hall. But along with the sounds of gagging and retching I heard the greased-metal 'snick-chk' of a weapon being armed, and the snap of a safety switch. I flashed an image to Candi and she stuck one arm through the window and swept half the wall down. The roof sagged with a creak and then a splintering crash, but by then I was in the backyard with my two guests. I dropped the man and cradled Madero like a baby.

'Wait for the others,' I vocalized unnecessarily. We could hear townsfolk running down the gravel road toward the house, but our people were moving faster.

Ten black giants exploded out of the forest behind us. Smoke there there there, I thought. Lights on. White smoke welled up in a semicircle around us and became an opaque blinding wall with our sunlights. I turned my back on it, shielding Madero from the random chatter of gunfire and laser stab and sweep. Everyone VA and split! Eleven canisters of vomiting agent popped; I was already in the woods and running.

Bullets hummed and rustled harmlessly overhead. As I ran I checked her pulse and respiration, normal under the circumstances, and checked the dart site on the back of her neck. The dart had fallen out and she'd already stopped bleeding.

Leave the note?

Candi thought, Yes: on the table somewhere under the roof now. We had a supposedly legal warrant for Señora Madero's detainment. That and a hundred pesos would get you a cup of coffee, if there was any left after export.

Out of the forest, I could run faster. It was exhilarating, bounding over the rows of low coffee bushes, even though in some corner of my mind I always knew I was lying inert a hundred miles away, inside an armored plastic shell. I could hear the others running just behind me and, as I moved up the hill toward the pickup, the faint hiss and snap of the approaching chopper and flyboys.

When it's just us soldierboys they snatch us at speed; we hold up our arms and grab the bail as it sails by. For a warm-body snatch, though, they have to actually land the helicopter, which is why she had two flyboys as escorts.

I got to the top of the hill and broadcasted a bleep, which the helicopter returned. The rest of the platoon came loping up in twos and threes. It occurred to me that I should have called for two choppers; do a regular snatch on the other eleven. It was dangerous for all of us to stand out in the open for any length of time, with the helicopter noise attracting attention.

As if in answer to my concern, a mortar round hit fifty meters to my left, orange flash and muted thump. I linked with the flyboy in the chopper and sensed a short argument she had with Command. Someone wanted us to drop the body and do a regular snatch. As the flyboy came over the horizon, another mortar round hit, maybe ten meters behind me, and we got the modified order: line up for a regular snatch and she would come in as slowly as practical.

We got together in file with our left arms up, and I had one second to wonder whether I should hold Madero tightly or loosely. I opted for tight, and most of the others agreed, which might have been wrong.

The bail snatched us with an impulse shock of fifteen or twenty gees. Nothing to a soldierboy but, we found out later, it cracked four of the woman's ribs. She woke up with a shriek as two mortar rounds hit close enough to hole the chopper and damage Claude and Karen. Madero wasn't hit by the shrapnel, but she found herself dozens of meters off the ground and rising fast, and she struggled hard, beating at me and screaming, writhing around. All I could do was hold her more tightly, but my arm had her pinned just below the breasts, and I was afraid to press her too hard.

Suddenly she went slack, fainting or dead. I couldn't check her pulse or respiration, hands full, but there was not much I could have done in any case, other than not drop her.

After a few minutes we landed on a bald hill, and I confirmed that she was still breathing. I carried her inside the helicopter and strapped her into a stretcher that was clamped to the wall. Command asked whether there were any handcuffs, which I thought was kind of amusing; but then she elaborated: this woman was a true believer. If she woke up and found herself in an enemy helicopter, she would jump out or otherwise do away with herself.

The rebels told each other horror stories about what we did to prisoners to make them talk. It was all nonsense. Why bother to torture someone when all you have to do is put her under, drill a hole in her skull, and jack her? That way she can't lie.

Of course, international law is not clear on the practice. The Ngumi call it a violation of basic human rights; we call it humane questioning. The fact that one of ten winds up dead or brain-dead makes the morality of it pretty clear to me. But then we only do it to prisoners who refuse to cooperate.

I found a roll of duct tape and bound her wrists together and then taped loops around her chest and knees, fixing her to the stretcher.

She woke up while I was doing her knees. 'You are monsters,' she said in clear English.

'We come by it naturally, Señora. Born of man and woman.'

'A monster and a philosopher.'

The helicopter roared into life and we sprang off the hill. I had a fraction of a second's warning, and so was able to brace myself. It was unexpected but logical: what difference did it make whether I was inside the vehicle or hanging on outside?

After a minute we settled into a quieter, steady progress. 'Can I get you some water?'

'Please. And a painkiller.'

There was a toilet aft, with a drinking water tap and tiny paper cups. I brought her two and held them to her lips.

'No painkillers until we land, I'm afraid.' I could knock her out with another trank, but that would complicate her medical situation. 'Where do you hurt?'

'Chest. Chest and neck. Could you take this damned tape off? I'm not going anywhere.'

I cleared it with Command and a foot-long razor-keen bayonet snicked into my hand. She shrank away, as much as her bonds would allow. 'Just a knife.' I cut the tape around her chest and knees and helped her to a sitting position. I queried the flyboy and she confirmed that the woman was apparently unarmed, so I freed her hands and feet.

'May I use that toilet?'

'Sure.' When she stood up she doubled over in pain, clutching her side.

'Here.' I couldn't stand upright in the seven-foot-high cargo area, either, so we shuffled aft, a bent-over giant helping a bent-over dwarf. I helped her with her belt and trousers.

'Please,' she said. 'Be a gentleman.'

I turned my back on her but of course could still see her. 'I can't be a gentleman,' I said. 'I'm five women and five men, working together.'

'So that's true? You make women fight?'

'You don't fight, Señora?'

'I protect my land and my people.' If I hadn't been looking at her I would have misinterpreted the strong emotion in her voice. I saw her hand flick into a breast pocket and caught her wrist just before her hand made it to her mouth.

I forced her fingers open and took a small white pill. It had an odor of bitter almonds, low-tech.

'That wouldn't do any good,' I said. 'We'd just revive you and you'd be sick.'

'You kill people and, when it pleases you, you bring them back from the dead. But you are not monsters.'

I put the pill in a pocket on my leg and watched her carefully. 'If we were monsters we would bring them back to life, extract our information, and kill them again.'

'You don't do that.'

'We have more than eight thousand of your people in prison, awaiting repatriation after the war. It would be easier to kill them, wouldn't it?'

'Concentration camps.' She stood and pulled up her trousers, and sat back down.

'A loaded term. There are camps where the Costa Rican prisoners of war are concentrated. With UN and Red Cross observers, making sure they're not mistreated. As you'll see with your own eyes.' I don't often defend Alliance policies. But it was interesting to watch a fanatic at work.

'I should live that long.'

'If you want to, you will. I don't know how many more pills you have.' I linked through the flyboy to Command and brought a speech analyzer on line.

'That was the only one,' she said, as I'd expected, and the analyzer said she was telling the truth. I relaxed slightly. 'So I'll be one of your prisoners of war.'

'Presumably. Unless this has all been a case of mistaken identity.'

'I've never fired a weapon. I've never killed anybody.'

'Neither has my commander. She has degrees in military theory and cybernetic communication, but she's never been a soldier.'

'But she has actually killed people. Lots of us.'

'And you helped plan the assault on Portobello. By that logic, you killed friends of mine.'

'No I didn't,' she said. Quick, intense, lying.

'You killed them while I was intimately connected to their minds. Some of them died very horribly.'

'No. No.'

'Don't bother to lie to me. I can bring people back from the dead, remember? I could have destroyed your village with one thought. And I can tell when you're lying.'

She was silent for a moment, considering that. She must have known about voice analyzers. 'I am the mayor of San Ignacio. There will be repercussions.'

'Not legal ones. We have a warrant for your detention, signed by the governor of your province.'

She made a spitting sound. 'Pepe Ano.' His name was Pellipianocio, Italian, but her Spanish converted it to 'Joe Asshole.'

'I take it he's not popular with the rebels. But he was one of you.'

'He inherited a coffee plantation from his uncle and was such a bad farmer he couldn't make a radish grow. You bought his land, you bought him.'

She thought that was the truth, and it probably was. 'We didn't coerce him,' I said, guessing. I didn't know much about the town's or province's history. 'Didn't he come to us? Declare himself–'

'Oh, really. Like a hungry dog would come to anybody who put out food. You can't pretend to think that he represents us.'

'As a matter of fact, Señora, we were not consulted. Are your soldiers consulted before being given orders?'

'We … I don't know anything about such matters.' That one set the bells off. As she knew, their soldiers were in on the decision-making process. That cut down on their efficiency but did give some logic to calling themselves the Democratic Army of the People.

The helicopter suddenly lurched left and right, accelerating up. I put out a hand and kept her from falling.

'Missile,' I said, in touch with the flyboy.

'A pity it missed.'

'You're the only living creature aboard this craft, Senora. The rest of us are safe in Portobello.'

At that she smiled. 'Not so safe, I think. Wasn't that the point of this little kidnapping?'

The woman was one of the lucky ninety percent who survived jacking intact, and she did give Alliance questioners the names of three other tenientes who had been in on the Portobello massacre. For her own part in it she was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She was sent to the large POW camp in the Canal Zone, the jack in the back of her skull guaranteeing that she wouldn't be part of any conspiracy there.

Unsurprisingly, during the four hours it had taken to get her to Portobello and install the jack, the three other tenientes and their families had dissolved into the bush, driven underground – perhaps to return. Their fingerprints and retinal patterns tagged them as rebels, but there was no real guarantee that the ones on file were authentic. They had had years to effect substitution. Any one of them might show up at the entrance to the camp at Portobello with a job application.

Of course, the Alliance had fired every Hispanic employee at the Portobello camp, and could do the same everywhere else in the city, even the country. But that might be counterproductive in the long run. The Alliance provided one out of three jobs in Panama. Putting those people out of work would probably add one more country to the Ngumi ranks.

Marx and others thought and taught that war was fundamentally economic in nature. No one in the nineteenth century, though, could have foreseen the world of the twenty-first, where half the world had to work for its rice or bread and the other half just lined up in front of generous machines.

The platoon returned to the town just before dawn, with warrants for the three rebel leaders. They entered the houses in groups of three, simultaneously crashing inside in clouds of smoke and vile gas, lowering real estate values but finding no one. There was no effective resistance, and they sped away in ten separate directions.

They rendezvoused at a place about twenty kilometers downhill, a feed store and cantina. The cantina had been closed for hours, but one customer remained, collapsed under one of the outside tables, snoring. They didn't wake him up.

The rest of the mission was an exercise in malice dreamed up by some half-awake genius who was annoyed at not taking any more prisoners that night. They were to go back up the hill and systematically destroy the crops that belonged to the three escaped rebels.

Two of them were coffee planters, so Julian ordered his people to uproot the bushes and leave them in place; presumably they could be replanted the next day.

The third man's 'crop' was the town's only hardware store. If Julian had asked, they probably would have been ordered to torch it. So he didn't ask; he and three others just broke down the doors and threw all of the merchandise out on the street. Let the town decide whether they would respect the man's belongings.

Most of the town was tired of dealing with the soldierboys by now, and had gotten the message that the machines weren't going to kill anyone unless provoked. Still, two ambitious snipers came in with lasers and had to be shot, but the soldierboys were able to use tranquilizing darts.

Park, the platoon's new homicidal addition, gave Julian some trouble there. He argued against using the darts – which technically was insubordination under fire, a court-martial offense – and then when he did take aim with the dart, he aimed for the sniper's eye, which would have been fatal. Julian monitored that just in time to send a mental shout, 'Cease fire!' and reassign the sniper to Claude, who tranked him in the shoulder.

So as a show of force, the mission was reasonably successful, though Julian wondered what the sense of it was. The townspeople would probably see it as bullying vandalism. Maybe he should have torched the store and sterilized the two farmers' lands. But he hoped the restrained approach would work better: with his laser he wrote a scorched message on the whitewashed wall of the hardware store, translated by Psychops into formal Spanish: ' – By rights, twelve of you should perish for the twelve of us you killed. Let there not be a next time.'

When I came home Tuesday night there was a note under my door:

Darling,

The gift is beautiful. I went to a concert last night just so I could dress up and show it off. Two people asked who it was from, and I was enigmatic: a friend.

Well, friend, I've made a big decision, I suppose in part a present to you. I've gone down to Guadalajara to have a jack installed.

I didn't want to wait and discuss it with you because I don't want you to share the responsibility, if something should go wrong. My mind was actually made up by a news item, which I've put on your queue as 'law jack.'

Basically, a man in Austin got jacked and fired from his administrative job, then challenged the antijack clause under Texas job discrimination laws. The court ruled in his favor, so at least for the time being, it's professionally safe for me to go ahead and do it.

I know all about the physical danger, and I also know how unseemly it is for a woman of my years and position to take that risk because of what amounts to jealousy: I can't compete with your memory of Carolyn and I can't share your life the way Candi and the others do – the women you swear you don't love.

No arguments this way. I'll be back on Monday or Tuesday. Do we have a date?

Love,

Amelia

I read it over twice and then ran for the phone. There was no answer at her place. So I played back the other messages, and got the one I most feared:

'Señor Class, your name and number were given to us by Amelia Harding as a person to be reached in case of emergency. We are also contacting a Professor Hayes.

'Profesora Harding came here to the Clínica de cirugía restorativa y aumentativa de Guadalajara to have a puente mental, what you call a jack, installed. The operation did not go well, and she is completely paralyzed. She can breathe without help, and responds to visual and auditory stimuli, but cannot speak.

'We want to discuss various options with you. Señora Harding listed your name in lieu of next of kin. My name is Rodrigo Spencer, chief of la división quiriúrgica para instalación y extracción de implantas craniales – Surgical Unit for Installation and Removal of Cranial Implants.' He gave his number and the address.

That message was Sunday night. The next was from Hayes, Monday, saying he'd checked my schedule and wouldn't do anything until I got home. I took time for a quick shave and called him at home.

It was only ten, but he answered no-face. When he heard it was me, he turned on the screen, rubbing his face. I'd obviously gotten him out of bed.

'Julian. Sorry … I've been on an odd schedule because we're testing for the big jump. The engineers had me up till three last night.

'Okay, look, about Blaze. It's no secret that you two are keeping company. I understand why she wants to be discreet, and appreciate it, but that's not a factor between you and me.' His smile had real pain in it. 'Okay?'

'Sure. I figured…'

'So what about Guadalajara?'

'I, I'm still a little in shock. I'll go downtown and get the first train; two hours, four, depending on connections … no, I'll call the base first and see if I can get a flight.'

'Once you get down there?'

'I'll have to talk to people. I have a jack but don't know much about the installation – I mean, I was drafted; nobody gave me a choice. See whether I can talk to her.'

'Son, they said she can't talk. She's paralyzed.'

'I know, I know. But that's just motor function. If we can jack, we can talk. Find out what she wants.'

'Okay.' He shook his head. 'Okay. But tell her what I want. I want her back in the shop today. Yesterday. Macro is going to have her head on a platter.' He was trying to sound angry. 'Damn fool stunt, just like Blaze. You call me from Mexico.'

'Will do.' He nodded and cut off.

I called the base and there weren't any direct flights scheduled. I could go back to Portobello and hitch up to Mexico City in the morning. Gracias, Pero no gracias. I punched up the train schedule and called a cab.

It was only three hours to Guadalajara, but a bad three hours. I got to the hospital about one-thirty but of course couldn't get past the front desk. Not until seven; even then, I wouldn't be able to see Amelia until Dr Spencer came in, maybe eight, maybe nine.

I got a mediocuarto – half-room" – at a motel across the street, just a futon and a lamp. Couldn't sleep, so I found an all-night place and got a bottle of tequila almendrada and a news magazine. I sipped about half the bottle, laboriously picking my way through the magazine article by article. My everyday Spanish is all right but it's hard for me to follow a complicated written argument, since I never studied the language in school. There was a long article about the pros and cons of a euthanasia lottery for the elderly, which was scary enough even when you only got half the words.

In the war news there was a paragraph about our kidnapping venture, which was described as a peacekeeping police action ambushed by rebels. I don't guess they sell too many copies in Costa Rica. Or they probably just print a different version.

It was an amusing magazine, with ads that would have been illegal pornography in some of the United States. Six-image manifolds that move with stroboscopic jerkiness if you shake the page. Like most male readers, I suppose, I came up with an interesting way to shake the page, which finally helped me get to sleep.

I went over to the waiting room at seven and read less interesting magazines for an hour and a half, when Dr Spencer finally showed up. He was tall and blond and spoke English with a Mexican accent thick as guacamole.

'Into my office, first, come.' He took me by the arm and steered me down the hall. His office was a plain windowless room with a desk and two chairs; one of the chairs was occupied.

'Marty!'

He nodded. 'Hayes called me, after he talked to you. Blaze had said something about me.'

'An honor to have you here, Dr Larrin.' Spencer sat down behind the desk.

I sat on the other hard chair. 'So what are our options?'

'Directed nanosurgery,' Spencer said. 'There are no other options.' 'But there is,' Marty said, 'technically.'

'Not legally.'

'We could get around that.'

'Would somebody tell me what you're talking about?'

'Mexican law is less liberal than American,' Marty said, 'in matters of self-determination.'

'In your country,' Spencer said, 'she would have the option of remaining a vegetable.'

'Well put, Dr Spencer. Another way of putting it is that she would have the option of not risking her life and sanity.'

'I'm missing something,' I said.

'You shouldn't be. She's jacked, Julian! She can live a very full life without moving a muscle.'

'Which is obscene.'

'It's an option. The nanosurgery is risky.'

'Not so. Not so risky. Más o menos the same as the jack. We have ninety-two percent recovery.'

'You mean ninety-two percent survival,' Marty said. 'What percent total recovery?'

He shrugged, twice. 'These numbers. They don't mean anything. She's healthy and relatively young. The operation will not kill her.'

'She's a brilliant physicist. If she comes out with brain damage, that's the same as no recovery.'

'Which is explained to her before the installation of the jack.' He held up a document five or six pages long. 'Before she signs the release.'

'Why don't you jack her and ask her?' I said.

'It is not simple,' Spencer said. 'The first moment she is jacked, is new, new neural pathways are formed. The network grows…' He gestured with one hand. 'It grows more than fast.'

'It grows at an exponential rate,' Marty said. 'The longer she's jacked, the more experiences she has, the harder it is to undo.'

'And so this is why we do not ask her.'

'In America you'd have to,' Marty said. 'Right of full disclosure.'

'America is a very strange country. You don't mind my saying?'

'If I jacked with her,' I said, 'I could be in and out muy pronto. Dr Larrin's had a jack longer, but it's not an everyday tool, the way it is with a mechanic.' Spencer frowned at that. 'A soldier.'

'Yes … I suppose that's true.' He leaned back and paused. 'Still, it is against the law.'

Marty gave him a look. 'This law is never broken.'

'I think you would say "bent." The law is bent, for foreigners.' Marty made an unambiguous gesture with thumb and two fingers. 'Well … not a bribe, as such. Some bureaucracy, and a tax. Do either of you have a…' He opened a desk drawer and said, 'Poder.'

The drawer answered, 'Power of attorney.'

'Do you have one of those with her?'

We looked at each other and shook our heads. 'This was a surprise to both of us.'

'She was not well advised. This is something she should have done. Is either of you her fiancé?'

'You could say that,' I said.

'Bueno, okay.' He picked a card out of a drawer and passed it over. 'Go to this office after, nine o'clock and this woman will issue you a temporary designatión de responsabilidad.' He repeated it into the drawer. 'State of Jalisco Temporary Assignment of Legal Responsibility,' it translated.

'Wait,' I said. 'This allows a person's fiancé to authorize a life-threatening surgical procedure?'

He shrugged. 'Brother, sister, too. Uncle, aunt, nephew. Only when the person cannot decide for himself, herself. People wind up in Profesora Harding's situation every day. Several people every day, counting Mexico City and Acapulco.'

It made sense; elective surgery must be one of the biggest sources of foreign income for Guadalajara, maybe for all of Mexico. I turned the card over; the English side said, 'Accommodations to the Mexican Legal System.'

'How much is this going to cost?'

'Maybe ten thousand pesos.' Five hundred dollars.

'I can pay for it,' Marty said.

'No, let me do it. I'm the fiancé.' I also make three times his salary.

'Whoever,' Spencer said. 'You come back with the piece of paper and me, I set up the jack. But have your mind ready. Find the answer and then unplug. That will be safer and easier all around.'

But what would I do if she asked me to stay?

It took almost as long to find the lawyer as it had to get to Guadalajara from Texas. They had moved.

Their new digs were not impressive, a table and a moth-eaten couch, but they did have all the paperwork. I wound up with a limited power of attorney that gave me authority for medical decisions. It was a little scary, how easy the process was.

When I came back, I was directed to Surgery B, a small white room. Dr Spencer had Amelia prepped for both jacking and surgery, lying on a gurney with a drip in each arm. A thin cable led from the back of her head to a gray box on a table. Another jack was coiled on top of it; Marty was dozing in a chair by the door. He woke up when I came in.

'Where's the doctor?' I said.

'Aquí.' He was right behind me. 'You have the paper?' I handed it to him; he glanced at it, folded it, and put it in his pocket.

He touched Amelia on the shoulder, and then put the back of his hand on her cheek, then her forehead, an oddly maternal gesture.

'For you, you know … this is not going to be easy.'

'Easy? I spend a third of my life–'

'Jacked, sí. But not with someone who's never done it before. Not with someone you love.' He pointed. 'Bring that chair here and sit.'

While I was doing that, he rummaged through a couple of drawers. 'Roll up your sleeve.'

I did that and he buzzed off a little patch of hair with a razor, then unwrapped a 'derm and slapped it on.

'What's that, a trank?'

'Not exactly. It does trank, tranquilize, in a way. It softens the blow, the shock of first contact.'

'But I've done first contact a dozen times.'

'Yes, but only while your army had control over your … what? System of circulation. You were drugged then, and now you will be drugged as well.'

It hit me like a soft slap. He heard my sudden intake of breath.

'¿Listo?'

'Go ahead.' He uncoiled the cable and slipped the jack into my socket with a metallic click. Nothing happened. Then he turned on a switch.

Amelia suddenly turned to look at me and I had the familiar double-vision sensation, seeing myself while I looked at her. Of course it wasn't familiar to her, and I was seized with secondhand confusion and panic. It gets easy dear hold on! I tried to show her how to separate the two pictures, a mental twist really no harder than defocusing your eyes. After a moment she got it, calmed, and tried to make words.

You don't have to verbalize, I felt at her. Just think what you want to say.

She asked me to touch my face and run my hand slowly down my chest to my lap, my genitals.

'Ninety seconds,' the doctor said. Tenga prisa.'

I basked in the wonder of discovery. It wasn't like the difference between blindness and sight, exactly, but it was as if all your life you'd been wearing thick tinted glasses, one lens opaque, and suddenly they were gone. A world full of brilliance, depth and color.

I'm afraid you get used to it, I felt. It becomes just another way of seeing. Of being, she answered.

In one burst of gestalt I told her what her options were, and of the danger of staying jacked too long. After a silence, she answered in individual words. I transferred her questions to Dr Spencer, speaking with robotic slowness.

'If I have the jack removed, and the brain damage is such that I can't work, can I have the jack reinstalled?'

'If somebody pays for it, yes. Though your perceptions would be diminished.'

'I'll pay for it.'

'Which one are you?'

'Julian.'

The pause seemed very long. She spoke through me: 'I'll do it, then. But on one condition. First we make love this way. Have sex. Jacked.'

'Absolutely not. Every second you talk is increasing the risk. If you do that you might never return to normal.'

I saw him reaching for the switch and grabbed his wrist. 'One second.' I stood and kissed Amelia, one hand on her breast. There was a momentary storm of shared joy and then she disappeared as I heard the switch click, and I was kissing an inert simulacrum, tears mingling. I sat back down like a sack falling. He unplugged us and didn't say anything, but gave me a stern look and shook his head.

Part of that surge of emotion had been 'Whatever the risk, this is worth it,' but whether that came from her or me or both of us together, I couldn't say.

A man and a woman dressed in green pushed a cart of equipment into the room. 'You two have to go now. Come back in ten, twelve hours.'

'I'd like to scrub and watch,' Marty said.

'Very well.' In Spanish, he asked the woman to find Marty a gown and show him to the limpiador.

I went down to the lobby and out. The sky was reddish-orange with pollution; I used the last of my Mexican money to buy a mask from a vending machine.

I figured I would walk until I found a moneychanger and a city map. I'd never been to Guadalajara before and didn't even know which direction downtown was. In a city twice the size of New York, it probably didn't make much difference. I walked away from the sun.

This hospital area was thick with beggars who claimed they needed money for medicine or treatment; who thrust their sick children at you or showed sores or stumps. Some of the men were aggressive. I snarled back in bad Spanish and was glad I'd bribed the border guard ten dollars to let me bring the puttyknife through.

The children looked wan, hopeless. I didn't know as much about Mexico as I should, living just north of it, but I was certain they had some form of socialized medicine. Not for everyone, obviously. Like the bounty from the nanoforges we graciously allocated to them, I supposed: the people in the front of the line didn't get there by lot.

Some of the beggars pointedly ignored me or even whispered racial epithets in a language they thought I didn't understand. Things had changed so much. We'd visited Mexico when I was in grade school, and my father, who had grown up in the South, gloried in the color blindness here. Being treated like any other gringo. We blame the Ngumi for Mexico's prejuicio, but it's partly America's fault. And example.

I came to an eight-lane divided avenue, clogged with slow traffic, and turned right. Not even one beggar per block here. After a mile or so of dusty and loud low-income housing, I came to a good-sized parking island over an underground mall. I went through a security check, which cost another five dollars for the knife, and took the slidewalk down to the main level.

There were three change booths, offering slightly different rates of exchange, all with different commission arrangements. I did the arithmetic in my head and was not surprised to find that, for everyday amounts, the one with the least favorable exchange rate actually gave the best deal.

Starving, I found a ceviche shop and had a bowl of octopus, little ones with inch-long legs, along with a couple of tortillas and a pot of tea. Then I went off in search of diversion.

There were a half-dozen jack shops in a row, offering slightly different adventures from their American counterparts. Be gored by a bull – no gracias. Perform or receive a sex-change operation, either way. Die in childbirth. Relive the agony of Christ. There was a line for that one; must have been a holy day. Maybe every day's a holy day here.

There were also the usual girly-boy attractions, and with them one that offered an accelerated-time tour of 'your own' digestive tract! Restrain me.

A confusing variety of shops and market stalls, like Portobello multiplied a hundred times. The everyday things that an American had delivered automatically had to be bought here – and not for a fixed price, either.

That part was familiar from walking around Portobello. Housewives, a few men, came to the mercado every morning to haggle over the day's supplies. Still plenty here at two in the afternoon. To an outsider, it looks as if half the stalls are scenes of pretty violent argument, voices raised, arms waving. But it's really just part of the social routine, for vendor and customer alike. 'What do you mean, ten pesos for these worthless beans? Last week they were five pesos and excellent quality!' 'Your memory is fading, old woman. Last week they were eight pesos and so shriveled I couldn't give them away! These are beans among beans!' 'I could give you six pesos. I need beans for supper, and my mother knows how to soften them with soda.' 'Your mother? Send your mother down here and she'll pay me nine pesos,' and so on. It was a way to pass the time; the real battle would be between seven and eight pesos.

The fish market was diverting. There was a much greater variety than you found in Texas stores – large cod and salmon that originally came from the cold north Atlantic and Pacific, exotic brightly colored reef fish, wriggling live eels, and tanks of huge Japanese shrimp – all of them produced in town, cloned and force-grown in vats. The few native fresh fish – whitebait from Lake Chapala, mostly – cost ten times as much as the most exotic.

I bought a small plate of those – minnows, sun-dried and marinated, served with lime and hot chile – which would have marked me as a tourist even if I weren't black and dressed like an American.

Counted my pesos and started looking for a gift for Amelia. I'd already done jewelry, to help get us into this mess, and she wouldn't wear ethnic clothing.

A horrible practical whisper told me to wait until after the operation. But I decided that buying the gift was more for me than for her, anyhow. A commercial kind of substitute for prayer.

There was a huge stall of old books, the paper kind and also the earlier versions of view-books – most of them, with formats and power supplies decades out of date, were for collectors of electronic curiosities, not readers.

They did have two shelves of books in English, most of them novels. She'd probably like one, but it posed a dilemma: if a book was well-known enough for me to recognize the title, then she probably already had it, or at least had read it.

I killed about an hour deciding, reading the first few pages of every book there I hadn't heard of. I finally returned to The Long Good-bye, by Raymond Chandler, which was good reading and also had a leather binding, embossed 'Midnite Mystery Club.'

I sat by a fountain and read for awhile. An engrossing book, a time trip not only for what it was about and the way it was written, but also the physicality of it – the heavy yellowed paper, the feel and musty smell of the leather. The skin of an animal dead more than a century, if it was real leather.

The marble steps weren't all that comfortable, though – my legs fell asleep from butt to knees – so I wandered awhile more. There were more expensive shops on the second floor down, but they included a set of jack booths that cost almost nothing, sponsored by travel agencies and various countries. For twenty pesos, I spent thirty minutes in France.

That was a strange experience. The spoken cues were all in rapid Mexican Spanish, hard for me to follow, but of course the unspoken ones were the same as ever. I walked around Montmartre for awhile, then lounged on a slow barge drifting through the Bordeaux region, and finally sat at an inn in Burgundy, feasting on rich cheeses and complex wines. When it was over, I was starving again.

Of course there was a French restaurant right across from the booth, but I didn't even have to look at the menu to know it was beyond me. I retreated back upstairs and found a place with lots of small tables and music that wasn't too loud, and wolfed down a plate of taquitos varios. Then I washed up and finished reading the book there, nursing a beer and a cup of coffee.

When I finished the book it was only eight, still two hours before I could check on Amelia. I didn't want to go hang around the clinic, but the mall was getting oppressively loud as it moved from evening into night-time mode. A half-dozen mariachi bands competing for attention along with the blare and rumble of modern music from the night clubs. Some very alluring women sitting in the windows of an escort service, three of them wearing PM buttons, which meant they were jacked. That would be a great way to spend the next two hours – jacksex and guilt.

I wound up wandering through the residential neighborhood, reasonably confident because of the puttyknife, even though the area was rundown and a bit menacing.

I picked up a bouquet of flowers at the hospital store, half price because they were closing, and went up to the waiting room to wait. Marty was there, jacked into a portable work terminal. He glanced up when I came in, subvocalized something into a throat pickup, and un-jacked.

'It looks pretty good,' he said, 'better than I would have expected. Of course we won't know for sure until she's awake, but her multiphase EEGs look good, look normal for her.'

His tone was anxious. I set the flowers and book down on a low plastic table scattered with paper magazines. 'How long till she comes out of it?'

He looked at his watch. 'Half an hour. Twelve.'

'Doctor around?'

'Spencer? No, he went home right after the procedure. I've got his number if … just in case.'

I sat down too close to him. 'Marty. What aren't you telling me?'

'What do you want to know?' His gaze was steady but there was still something in his voice. 'You want to see a tape of the disconnection? I can promise you'll puke.'

'I just want to know what you're not telling me.'

He shrugged and looked away. 'I'm not sure how much you know. From the most basic, up … she won't die. She will walk and talk. Will she be the woman you loved? I don't know. The EEGs don't tell us whether she can do arithmetic, let alone algebra, calculus, whatever it is you people do.'

'Jesus.'

'But look. Yesterday at this time she was on the edge of dying. If she'd been in a little worse shape, the phone call you got would've been whether or not to turn off the respirator.'

I nodded; a nurse at Reception had used the same words. 'She might not even know who I am.'

'And she might be exactly the same woman.'

'With a hole in her head because of me.'

'Well, a useless jack, not a hole. We put it back in after the disconnection, to minimize mechanical stress on the surrounding brain tissue.'

'But it's not hooked up. We couldn't–'

'Sorry.'

An unshaven nurse came in, slumped with fatigue. 'Señor Class?' I put up a hand. 'The patient in 201, she asks for you.'

I started down the corridor. 'Don't stay. She needs sleep.'

'Okay.' Her door was open. There were two other beds in the room, but they were empty. She was wearing a cap of gauze, eyes closed, sheet pulled up to her shoulders. No tubes or wires, which surprised me. A monitor over her bed displayed the jagged stalactites of her heartbeat.

She opened her eyes. 'Julian.' She twisted a hand out from under the sheet and grabbed mine. We kissed gently.

'I'm sorry it didn't work,' she said. 'But I'll never be sorry for trying. Never.'

I couldn't say anything. I just rubbed her hand between both of mine.

'I think I'm … unimpaired. Ask me a question, a science question.'

'Uh … what's Avagadro's Number?'

'Oh, ask a chemist. It's the number of molecules in a mole. You want the number of molecules in an armadillo, that's Armadillo's Number.'

Well, if she could make bad jokes, she was partway back to normal. 'What's the duration of a delta resonance spike? Pions exciting protons.'

'About ten to the minus twenty-third. Give me a hard one?'

'You say that to all the guys?' She smiled weakly. 'Look, you get some sleep. I'll be outside.'

'I'll be all right. You go on back to Houston.'

'No.'

'One day, then. What is it, Tuesday?'

'Wednesday.'

'You have to be back tomorrow night to cover the seminar for me. Senior seminar.'

'We'll talk in the morning.' There were plenty of people better qualified.

'Promise me?'

'I promise I'll take care of it.' At least with a phone call. 'You get some sleep now.'

Marty and I went down to the machine cantina in the basement. He had a cup of strong Bustelo – stay awake for the 1:30 train – and I had a beer. It turned out to be nonalcoholic, specially brewed for hospitals and schools. I told him about 'Armadillo's Number' and all.

'She seems to be all there.' He tasted his coffee and put another double sugar in it. 'Sometimes people lose bits of memory, that they don't miss for awhile. Of course it's not all loss.'

'No.' One kiss, one touch. 'She has the memory of being jacked for what, three minutes?'

'And there might be something more,' he said cautiously. He took two data strings out of his shirt pocket and set them on the table. 'These are complete copies of her records here. I'm not supposed to have them; they cost more than the operation itself.'

'I could help pay–'

'No, it's grant money. The point is, her operation failed for a reason. Not a lack of skill or care on Spencer's part, necessarily, but a reason.'

'Something that could be reversed?'

He shook his head and then shrugged. 'It's happened.'

'You mean it could be reinstalled? I've never heard of that.'

'Because it's so rarely done. Usually not worth the risk. They'll try it if, after the extraction, the patient is still in a vegetative state. It's a chance to re-establish contact with the world.

'In Blaze's case it would be too dangerous, at the present state of the art. And it is as much art as science. But it keeps evolving, and maybe someday, if we find out what went wrong…' He sipped at his coffee. 'Probably won't happen, not in the next twenty years. Almost all of the research funding is military, and it's not an area they're deeply interested in. If a mechanic's installation fails, they just draft somebody else.'

I tasted the beer again and decided it wasn't going to improve. 'She's totally disconnected now? If we jacked, she wouldn't feel anything?'

'You could try it. There's still a connection with a few minor ganglia. A few neurons here and there – when we replace the metal core of the jack, some of them reestablish contact.'

'Be worth a try.'

'Don't expect anything. People in her condition can go to a jack shop and rent a really extreme one, like a death trip, but all they get is a mild hallucinating buzz; nothing concrete. If they just jack with a person, no go-between, there's no real effect. Maybe a placebo effect, if they expect something to happen.'

'Do us a favor,' I said. 'Don't tell her that.'

Compromising, Julian took the train up to Houston, staying just long enough to cover Amelia's particle seminar – the students weren't wild about having a young postdoc unexpectedly substitute for Dr Blaze – and then caught a midnight train back to Guadalajara.

As it turned out, Amelia was released the next day, traveling by ambulance to a care facility on campus. The clinic didn't want a patient who was just resting under observation to take up a valuable bed on Friday; most of their high-ticket customers checked in that day.

Julian was allowed to ride with her, which was mostly a matter of watching her sleep. When the sedative wore off, about an hour from Houston, they talked primarily about work; Julian managed to avoid lying to her about what might happen if they jacked in her almost-connected state. He knew she would read all about it soon enough and then they'd have to deal with their hopes and disappointments. He didn't want her to build up some transcendental scenario based on that one beautiful instant. The best that could happen would be a lot less than that, and there would probably be no effect at all.

The care center was shiny on the outside and shabby on the inside. Amelia got the only bed left in a four-bed 'suite,' inhabited by women twice her age, long-term or permanent residents. Julian helped her settle in, and when it became obvious that he wasn't just working for her, two of the old ladies were ostentatiously horrified at the difference in color and age. The third was blind.

Well, they were out in the open now. That was one good thing that had come from the mess, for their personal lives if not their professional ones.

Amelia hadn't read the Chandler book, and was delighted. It seemed unlikely that she would spend much time in conversation.

Julian was headed for conversation that night, of course, Friday. He decided to show up at the club at least an hour late, so Marty could tell the others about the operations and reveal the sordid truth about him and Amelia. If indeed it was actually secret to anybody there. Straitlaced Hayes knew and had never given a hint.

There was plenty to occupy him before the Saturday Night Special, since he hadn't even checked his mail after reading the note under his door, when he returned from Portobello. An assistant to Hayes had written up a summary of the runs he and Amelia had missed; that would take a few hours' study. Then there were notes of concern, mostly from people he would see that night. It was the sort of news that traveled fast.

Just to make life interesting, there was a note from his father saying he'd like to drop by on his way home from Hawaii, so Julian could get to know 'Suze,' his new wife, better. Unsurprisingly, there was also a phone message from Julian's mother, wondering where he was, and would he mind if she came down to escape the last of the bad weather? Sure, Mom, you and Suze will get along just fine; think of how much you have in common.

In this case, the easiest course was the truth. He punched up his mother and said she could come down if she wanted, but that his father and Suze were going to be here at the same time. After she calmed down from that, he gave her a quick summary of the past four days' excitement.

Her image on the phone took on an odd appearance as he talked. She'd grown up with sound-only, and had never mastered the neutral expression that most people automatically assumed.

'So you're pretty serious about this old woman.'

'Old white woman, Momma.' Julian laughed at her indignation. 'And I've been telling you for a year and a half how serious we were.'

'White, purple, green; doesn't make any difference to me. Son, she's only ten years younger than I am.'

'Twelve.'

'Oh, thank God, twelve! Don't you see how foolish you look now to the people around you?'

'I'm just glad it's not a secret anymore. And if we look foolish to some people, well, that's their problem, not ours.'

She looked away from the screen. 'It's me that's the fool, and a hypocrite, too. Mother's got to worry.'

'If you'd come down once and meet her, you'd stop worrying.'

'I should. Okay. You call me when your father and his playmate have gone on up to Akron–'

'Columbus, Mom.'

'Wherever. You call me and we'll work out a time.'

He watched her image fade and shook his head. She'd been saying that for more than a year; something always came up. She had a busy life, admittedly, still teaching full-time at a junior college in Pittsburgh. But that obviously wasn't it. She really didn't want to lose her little boy at all, and to lose him to a woman old enough to be her sister was grotesque.

He'd talked to Amelia about their going up to Pittsburgh, but she said she didn't want to force the issue. There was something less simple at work with her, as well.

The two women had opposite attitudes toward his being a mechanic, too. Amelia was plainly worried sick all the time he was in Portobello – much worse now, since the massacre – but his mother treated it as a kind of brainless second job that he had to do, even though it got in the way of his actual work. She never seemed to have any curiosity about what went on down there. Amelia followed his unit's actions with the single-minded intensity of a warboy. (She'd never admitted this, which Julian supposed was to spare him anxiety, but she often slipped and asked questions about things that nobody could have found out if they simply followed the news.)

It suddenly, belatedly, occurred to Julian that Hayes, and probably everybody else in the department, knew or suspected there was something going on because of way Amelia acted when he was away. They worked hard at (but also had fun) playing the role of 'just friends' when they came together at work. Maybe their audience knew the script.

All part of the past now. He was impatient to get to the club and see how people had reacted to the news. But he still had a couple of hours if he was going to give Marty ample time to set them up. He didn't really feel like working, even answering mail, so he flopped down on the couch and asked the cube to search.

The cube had a built-in learning routine that analyzed every selection he made, and from the content of what he liked, constructed a preference profile that it used to search through the eighteen hundred available channels. One problem with that was that you couldn't communicate with the routine; its only input was your choices. The first year or so after he was drafted, Julian had obsessively watched century-old movies, perhaps to escape into a world where people and events were simply good or bad. So now when the thing searched, it dutifully came up with lots of Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, and Julian had found through objective observation that it did no good to yell at it.

Humphrey Bogart at Rick's. Reset. Jimmy Stewart headed for Washington. Reset. A tour of the lunar south pole, through the eyes of the robot landers. He'd seen most of it a couple of years before, but it was interesting enough to see again. It also helped deprogram the machine.

Everyone looked up when I walked into the room, but I suppose they would do that under any circumstances. Perhaps they kept looking a little longer than usual.

There was an empty chair at a table with Marty, Reza, and Franklin.

'You get her safely ensconced?' Marty asked.

I nodded. 'She'll be out of that place as soon as they let her walk. The three women she's sharing the room with are straight out of Hamlet.'

'Macbeth,' Reza corrected me, 'if you mean crones. Or are they sweet young lunatics about to commit suicide?'

'Crones. She seems okay. The ride up from Guadalajara wasn't bad, just long.' The sullen waiter in the artfully stained T-shirt slouched over. 'Coffee,' I said, then caught Reza's look of mock horror. 'And a pitcher of Rioja.' It was getting on toward the end of the month again. The guy started to ask for my ration card, then recognized me and slumped away.

'Hope you re-enlist,' Reza said. He took my number and punched in the price of the whole pitcher.

'When Portobello freezes over.'

'Did they say when she'd be released?' Marty asked.

'No. Neurologist sees her in the morning. She'll call me.'

'Better have her call Hayes, too. I told him everything was going to be all right, but he's nervous.'

'He's nervous.'

'He's known her longer than you have,' Franklin said quietly. So had he and Marty.

'So did you see any Guadalajara?' Reza asked. 'Fleshpots?'

'No. Just wandered around a little. Didn't get into the old city or out to T-town, what do they call it?'

'Tlaquepaque,' Reza said. 'I spent an eventful week there one day.' 'How long have you and Blaze been together?' Franklin asked. 'If you don't mind my asking.'

'Together' probably wasn't the word he was searching for. 'We've been close for three years. Friends a couple of years before that.'

'Blaze was his adviser,' Marty said.

'Doctoral?'

'Post-doc,' I said.

'That's right,' Franklin said with a small smile. 'You came from Harvard.' Only an Eli could say that with a trace of pity, Julian mused.

'Now you're supposed to ask me whether my intentions are honorable. The answer is we have no intentions. Not until I get out of service.'

'And how long is that?'

'Unless the war ends, about five years.'

'Blaze will be fifty.'

'Fifty-two, actually. I'll be thirty-seven. Maybe that bothers you more than it does us.'

'No,' he said. 'It might bother Marty.'

Marty gave him a hard look. 'What have you been drinking?'

'The usual.' Franklin displayed the bottom of his empty teacup. 'How long has it been?'

'I only want the best for both of you,' Marty said to me. 'You know that.'

'Eight years, nine?'

'Good God, Franklin. Were you a terrier in a former life?' Marty shook his head as if to clear it. 'That was over long before Julian joined the department.'

The waiter sidled over with the wine and three glasses. Sensing tension, he poured as slowly as was practical. We all watched him in silence.

'So,' Reza said, 'how 'bout them Oilers?'

The 'neurologist' who came to see Amelia the next morning was too young to have an advanced degree in anything. He had a goatee and bad skin. For half an hour, he asked her the same simple questions over and over.

'When and where were you born?'

'August 12, 1996. Sturbridge, Massachusetts.'

'What was your mother's name?'

'Jane O'Banian Harding.'

'Where did you go to grade school?'

'Nathan Hale Elementary, Roxbury.'

He paused. 'Last time you said Breezewood. In Sturbridge.'

She took a deep breath and let it out. 'We moved to Roxbury in '04. Maybe '05.'

'Ah. And high school?'

'Still O'Bryant. John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science.'

'That's in Sturbridge?'

'No, Roxbury! I went to middle school in Roxbury, too. You haven't–'

'What was your mother's maiden name?'

'O'Banian.'

He made a long note in his notebook. 'All right. Stand up.'

'What?'

'Get out of bed, please. Stand up.'

Amelia sat up and cautiously put her feet on the floor. She took a couple of shaky steps and reached back to hold the gown closed.

'Are you dizzy?'

'A little. Of course.'

'Raise your arms, please.' She did, and the back of the gown fell open.

'Nice bottom, sweetheart,' croaked the old lady in the bed next to her.

'Now I want you to close your eyes and slowly bring your fingertips together.' She tried and missed; she opened her eyes and saw that she had missed by more than an inch.

'Try it again,' he said. This time the two fingers grazed.

He wrote a couple of words in the notebook. 'All right. You're free to go now.'

'What?'

'You're released. Take your ration card to the checkout desk on your way out.'

'But … don't I get to see a doctor?'

He reddened. 'You don't think I'm a doctor?'

'No. Are you?'

'I'm qualified to release you. You're released.' He turned and walked away.

'What about my clothes? Where are my clothes?' He shrugged and disappeared out the door.

'Try the cabinet there, sweetheart.' Amelia checked all the cabinets, moving with creaky slowness. There were neat stacks of linen and gowns, but no trace of the leather suitcase she'd taken to Guadalajara.

'Likely somebody took 'em,' another old lady said. 'Likely that black boy.'

Of course, she suddenly remembered: she'd asked Julian to take it home. It was valuable, handmade, and there was no place here where it would have been secure.

What other little things had she forgotten? The John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science was on New Dudley. Her office at the lab was 12-344. What was Julian's phone number? Eight.

She retrieved her toiletry kit from the bathroom and got the mini-phone out of it. It had a toothpaste smear on the punch-plate. She cleaned it with a corner of her sheet and sat on the bed and punched #-08.

'Mr. Class is in class,' the phone said. 'Is this an emergency?'

'No. Message.' She paused. 'Darling, bring me something to wear. I've been released.' She set the phone down and reached back and felt the cool metal disk at the base of her skull. She wiped away sudden tears and muttered 'Shit.'

A big square female nurse rolled in a gurney with a shriveled little Chinese woman on it. 'What's the story here?' she said. 'This bed is supposed to be vacant.'

Amelia started laughing. She put her kit and the Chandler book under her arm and held her gown closed with the other hand and walked out into the corridor.

It took me a while to track Amelia down. Her room was full of querulous old women who either clammed up or gave me false information. Of course she was at Accounts Receivable. She didn't have to pay anything for the medical attention or room, but her two inedible meals had been catered, since she hadn't requested otherwise.

That may have been the last straw. When I brought in her clothes she just shrugged off the pale blue hospital gown. She didn't have anything on underneath. There were eight or ten people in the waiting room.

I was thunderstruck. My dignified Amelia?

The receptionist was a young man with ringlets. He stood up. 'Wait! You … you can't do that!'

'Watch me.' She put on the blouse first, and took her time buttoning it. 'I was kicked out of my room. I don't have anyplace to–'

'Amelia–' She ignored me.

'Go to the ladies' room! Right now!'

'Thank you, no.' She tried to stand on one foot and put a sock on, but teetered and almost fell over. I gave her an arm. The audience was respectfully quiet.

'I'm going to call a guard.'

'No you're not.' She strode over to him, in socks but still bare from ankles to waist. She was an inch or two taller and stared down at him. He stared down, too, looking as if he'd never had a triangle of pubic hair touch his desktop before. 'I'll make a scene,' she said quietly. 'Believe me.'

He sat down, his mouth working but no words coming out. She stepped into her pants and slippers, picked up the gown and threw it into the 'cycler.

'Julian, I don't like this place.' She offered her arm. 'Let's go bother someone else.' The room was quiet until we were well out into the corridor, and then there was a sudden explosion of chatter. Amelia stared straight ahead and smiled.

'Bad day?'

'Bad place.' She frowned. 'Did I just do what I think I did?'

I looked around and whispered, 'This is Texas. Don't you know it's against the law to show your ass to a black man?'

'I'm always forgetting that.' She smiled nervously and hugged my arm. 'I'll write you every day from prison.'

There was a cab waiting. We got in fast and Amelia gave it my address. 'That's where my bag is, right?'

'Yeah … but I could bring it over.' My place was a mess. 'I'm not exactly ready for polite company.'

'I'm not exactly company.' She rubbed her eyes. 'Certainly not polite.'

In fact, the place had been a mess when I went to Portobello two weeks earlier, and I hadn't had time to do anything but add to it. We entered a one-room disaster area, ten meters by five of chaos: stacks of papers and readers on every horizontal surface, including the bed; a pile of clothes in one corner aesthetically balanced by a pile of dishes in the sink. I'd forgotten to turn off the coffeepot when I'd gone to school, so a bitter smell of burnt coffee added to the general mustiness.

She laughed. 'You know, this is even worse than I expected?' She'd only been here twice and both times I'd been forewarned.

'I know. I need a woman around the place.'

'No. You need about a gallon of gasoline and a match.' She looked around and shook her head. 'Look, we're out in the open. Let's just move in together.'

I was still trying to cope with the striptease. 'Uh … there's really not enough room…'

'Not here.' She laughed. 'My place. And we can file for a two-bedroom.'

I cleared off a chair and steered her to it. She sat down warily.

'Look. You know how much I'd like to move in with you. It's not as if we hadn't talked about it.'

'So? Let's do it.'

'No … let's not make any decisions now. Not for a couple of days.'

She looked past me, out the window over the sink. 'I, you think I'm crazy.'

'Impulsive.' I sat down on the floor and stroked her arm.

'It is strange for me, isn't it?' She closed her eyes and kneaded her forehead. 'Maybe I'm still medicated.'

I hoped that was it. 'I'm sure that's all it is. You need a couple of days' more rest.'

'What if they botched the operation?'

'They didn't. You wouldn't be walking and talking.'

She patted my hand, still looking abstracted. 'Yeah, sure. You have some juice or something?'

I found some white grape juice in the refrigerator and poured us each a small glass. I heard a zipper and turned around, but it was only her leather suitcase.

I brought her drink over. She was staring intently, slowly picking through the contents of the suitcase. 'Think something might be missing?'

She took the drink and set it down. 'Oh, no. Or maybe. Mainly I'm just checking my memory. I do remember packing. The trip down. Talking to Dr, um, Spencer.' She backed up two steps, felt behind her, and sat down slowly on the bed.

'Then the blur – you know, I was sort of awake when they operated. I could see lots of lights. My chin and face were in a padded frame.'

I sat down with her. 'I remember that from my own installation. And the drill sound.'

'And the smell. You know you're smelling your own skull being sawed open. But you don't care.'

'Drugs,' I said.

'That's part of it. Also looking forward to it.' Well, not in my case. 'I could hear them talking, the doctor and some woman.'

'What about?'

'It was Spanish. They were talking about her boyfriend and … shoes or something. Then everything went black. I guess it went white, then black.'

'I wonder if that was before or after they put the jack in.'

'It was after, definitely after. They call it a bridge, right?'

'From French, yeah: pont mental.'

'I heard him say that – ahora, el puente – and then they pressed really hard. I could feel it on my chin, on the cushion.'

'You remember a lot more than I did.'

'That was about it, though. The boyfriend and the shoes and then click. The next thing I knew, I was lying in bed, unable to move or speak.'

'That must have been terrifying.'

She frowned, remembering. Not really. It was like an enormous … lassitude, numbness. As if I could move my arms and legs, or speak, if I really had to. But the effort would have been tremendous. That was probably mood drugs, too, to keep me from panicking.

'They kept moving my arms and legs around and shouting nonsense at me. It was probably English, and I just couldn't decipher their accents, in my condition.'

She gestured and I handed her the grape juice. She sipped. 'If I remember this right … I was really, really annoyed that they wouldn't just go away and let me lie in peace. But I didn't say anything, because I wouldn't give them the satisfaction of hearing me complain. It's an odd thing to remember. I was really being infantile.'

'They didn't try the jack?'

She got a faraway look. 'No … Dr Spencer told me about that later. In my condition it was better to wait and have the first time be with someone I knew. Seconds count, he explained that to you?'

I nodded. 'Exponential increase in the number of neural connections.'

'So I lay in a darkened room then, for a long time; lost track of time, I suppose. Then all the things that happened before we … we jacked, I thought it was a dream. Everything was suddenly flooded with light and a couple of people lifted me and bit me on the wrists – the IVs – and then we were floating from room to room.'

'Riding a gurney.'

She nodded. 'It really felt like levitation, though – I remember thinking, "I'm dreaming," and resolving to enjoy it. An image of Marty floated by, asleep in a chair, and I accepted that as part of the dream. Then you and Dr Spencer appeared – okay, you were in the dream, too.

'Then it was all suddenly real.' She rocked back and forth, remembering the instant we jacked. 'No, not real. Intense. Confusing.'

'I remember,' I said. 'The double vision, seeing yourself. You didn't recognize yourself at first.'

'And you told me most people don't. I mean you told me in one word, somehow, or no words. Then it all snapped into focus, and we were…' She nodded rhythmically, biting her lower lip. 'We were all the same. We were one … thing.'

She took my right hand in both of hers. 'And then we had to talk to the doctor. And he said we couldn't, he wouldn't let us…' She lifted my hand to her breast, the way it had been that last moment, and leaned forward. But she didn't kiss me. She put her chin on my shoulder and whispered, voice cracking: 'We'll never have that again?'

I automatically tried to feed her a gestalt, the way you do jacked, about how she might be able to try again in a few years, about Marty having her data, about the partial re-establishment of neuron connection so we might try, we might try; and a fraction of a second later I realized no, we weren't connected; she can only hear something if I say it.

'Most people never even have it once.'

'Maybe they're better off,' she said, muffled, and sobbed quietly. Her hand moved up to squeeze my neck and caress the jack.

I had to say something. 'Look … it's possible you haven't lost it all. There might be a small fraction of the ability still there.'

'What do you mean?' I explained about some of the neurons homing back into the jack's receptor areas. 'How much might be there?'

'I don't have the faintest idea. I'd never even heard of it until a couple of days ago.' Though I knew with sudden certainty that some of the jills must be that way, unable to make a really deep connection. Ralph had brought back memories of some who had hardly seemed jacked at all.

'We have to try. Where could we … could you bring the equipment back from Portobello?'

'No, I'd never get it off the base.' And be court-martialed, if I tried.

'Hmm … Maybe we could find a way to sneak into the hospital–'

I laughed. 'You don't have to sneak anywhere. Just buy time at one of the jack joints.'

'But I don't want that. I want to do it with you.'

'That's what I mean! They have double unis – two-person universes. Two people jack in and go someplace together.' That's where the jills took their customers. You can screw on the streets of Paris, floating in outer space, riding a canoe down rapids. Ralph had brought us back the weirdest memories.

'Let's go do it.'

'Look, you're still beat from the hospital. Why not get a day or two rest and then–'

'No!' She stood up. 'For all we know, the connections might be fading while we sit here and talk about it.' She picked up the phone off the table and punched two numbers; she knew my cab code. 'Outside?'

I got up and followed her to the door, afraid I'd made a big mistake. 'Look, don't expect the world.'

'Oh, I don't expect anything. Just have to try it, find out.' For someone who didn't expect anything, she was awfully eager.

It was infectious. While we waited for the cab, I went from thinking Well, at least we'll find out one way or the other to being sure that there would be at least something there. Marty had said there would be a placebo effect, if nothing more.

I couldn't give the cab a specific address, since I'd only been there once. But I asked whether it knew where the block of jack joints was, just outside the university, and it said yes.

We could have biked there, but it was the neighborhood where that guy had pulled a knife on me – it had started pretty low and gone downhill – and I figured it might be dark by the time we finished our experiment.

It was a good thing the cab turned off the meter while we went through security. The shoe in charge saw our destination and jerked us around for ten minutes, I supposed to watch Amelia's discomfort.

Or try to get some sort of rise out of me. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

We had the cab let us off on the near end of the block, so we could walk the length of it and check the menus in each joint. The price was important; payday was two days away for both of us. I made three times as much as she did, but the Mexican excursion had brought me down to less than a hundred bucks. And Amelia was flat.

There were more jills than pedestrians. Some of them offered to join us in a three-way. I hadn't known that was possible. It sounded more confusing than alluring, even under good conditions. And being more intimately linked to the jill than to Amelia would be a disaster.

The place with the best double uni deal was also one of the nicest, or the least sleazy. It was called Your World, and instead of car crashes and executions, it offered a menu of explorations – like the French tour I'd taken in Mexico, but more exotic.

I suggested the underwater tour of the Great Barrier Reef.

'I'm not a good swimmer,' Amelia said. 'Would that make a difference?'

'Me neither; don't worry. It's like being a fish.' I'd done this one. 'You don't even think about swimming.'

It was a dollar a minute, cash, or two minutes for three dollars, plastic. Ten minutes up front … I paid cash; keep the plastic for emergencies.

A stern-looking fat lady, black with a springy forest of white hair, led us to the booth. It was a small cubicle just over a meter high, with a padded blue mat on the floor, two jack cables hanging from the low ceiling.

'Time start' when the first one plug in. You-all want to take your clothes off first, I s'pose. Place been sterilized. You-all have a good time, now.'

She turned abruptly and bustled away. 'She thinks you're a jill,' I said.

'I could use a second income.' We entered the place on our hands and knees and when I shut the door the air conditioner started to whir. Then a white-noise generator added a steady hiss.

'Does the light make a difference?'

'It goes off automatically.' We helped each other undress and she lay down the right way, on her stomach facing the door.

She was rigid and trembling slightly. 'Relax,' I said, kneading her shoulders.

'I'm afraid nothing will happen.'

'If nothing happens, we'll try it again.' I remembered what Marty had said – she really should start off with something like jumping off a cliff. Well, I could tell her that later.

'Here.' I slid over a diamond-shaped pillow that supports your face on the chin, cheekbones, and forehead. 'This'll help your neck relax.' I stroked her back for a minute, and when she seemed looser, I moved the jack interface into place over the metal socket in her head. There was a faint click and the light went out.

Of course after thousands of hours, I didn't need the pillow; I could jack standing up or hanging upside down. I groped for the cable and stretched out so we were touching, arm and hip. Then I jacked in.

The water was warm as blood and it tasted good, salt and seaweed, on my lips, as I breathed it in. I was in less than two meters of water, bright coral formations all around, tiny fish with brilliant colors ignoring me until I came close enough to be a danger. A small green moray eel, face like a cartoon villain, stared at me from a hole in the coral.

Volition is strange when you're jacked like this. I 'decided' to go off to the left, although there was nothing obvious there, just a plain of white sand. Actually, the person who had recorded the trip had a good reason to check it out, but the customer wasn't in contact with him or her at that level; nothing but the sensorium, amplified.

Sunlight refracting through the ripples on the surface made a pleasant shimmering pattern on the sand, but that wasn't why we had come here. I hovered over two eye-stalks that poked out of the sand, twitching, agitated. Suddenly the sand exploded underneath me, and to the left and right, and a tiger-striped manta ray flew out from where it had been hiding, under a few centimeters of sand. It was huge, easily three meters wide. I shot forward and grabbed a wing, before it had time to gather speed.

One powerful flap of the wings and we surged forward; another, and we were going faster than any merely human swimmer, the water churning smoothly down my body…

And hers. Amelia was there, definitely but faintly, like a shadow inside me. The turbulence from the fast water made my genitals flutter, but part of me didn't have that; for that part of me the water flowed smoothly tickling between her legs.

Intellectually, I knew that they'd had to merge two strings to create this, and wondered how hard it had been to find a large manta for both the man and the woman or how they'd gotten around it. But mainly I focused on that particular dual sensation and tried to make contact with Amelia through it.

I couldn't, quite. No words, no specificity; just a vague 'isn't this thrilling' gestalt that I felt reflected with a different twist, Amelia's personality. There was also a faint different excitement that must have been her realization that we were in contact.

The sand surface fell away in an underwater cliff and the manta dived, the water suddenly cool and the pressure increasing. We lost our grip and went tumbling alone in the dark water.

As we slid slowly upward I felt little butterfly flutterings that I knew were Amelia's hands on me, back in the cubical, and as I became erect it was wetness that wasn't the imaginary ocean around me, and then the ghostly clasp of her legs and a faint pulsing up and down.

It wasn't like Carolyn, where I was her and she was me. It was more like a compelling sexual dream that possessed you while you were half awake.

The water above was like beaten silver, and three sharks scudded there as we floated up. There was a little shiver of fear, though I knew they were harmless, since the string wasn't rated D or I; death or injury. I tried to project to Amelia not to be scared, but I didn't feel any fear from her. She was preoccupied. Her physical presence grew stronger in me, and she wasn't exactly swimming.

Her orgasm was faint but long, radiating and pulsating in that strange-but-familiar way that I hadn't felt in the three years since I lost Carolyn. The ghosts of her arms and legs rocked me left and right as we rose up toward the sharks.

It was one large nurse shark and two dogfish, no danger. But as we passed them I felt myself go soft and slip out of her. It wasn't going to work, not this time, not for both of us.

Her hands on me were like feathers, coaxing, pleasant but not enough. There was a sudden faint loss of something, dimensionality, that meant she had come un-jacked, and then she was using her mouth, cool and then warm, but it still wouldn't work. Most of me was still in the reef.

I felt for the cable and unjacked myself. The lights went on and I immediately started to respond to Amelia's ministrations. I slipped my arms around her slipperiness and rested my head on her hip and didn't think about Carolyn, and worked a couple of fingers between her legs from behind, and in a minute we both came at once.

We were allowed about five seconds' rest, and then the lady was pounding on the cubicle door, saying we had to get out or pay rent; she had to clean it up for the next customers.

'The meter stops running when we both unjack, I guess,' Amelia said. She nuzzled me. 'I could pay a dollar a minute for this, though. You want to tell her that?'

Nah.' I reached for our clothes. 'Let's go home and do it for free.'

'Your place or mine?'

'Home,' I said. 'Your place.'

Julian and Amelia spent the next day moving and cleaning house. Since it was Sunday, they couldn't get any paperwork done, but they didn't expect any problems. There was a waiting list for singles who qualified for Julian's efficiency, and Amelia's place was rated for two, or even two adults and a child.

(A child was something that was never going to happen. Twenty-four years before, after a miscarriage, Amelia had opted for voluntary sterilization, which gave her a monthly cash-and-coupon bonus until age fifty. And Julian's view of the world was so sufficiently dark that he wasn't eager to bring a new person into it.)

When they had everything boxed, and Julian's apartment clean enough to satisfy the landlord, they called Reza for his car. He scolded Julian for not calling him earlier so he could have helped, and Julian said, honestly, that it hadn't occurred to him.

Amelia listened to the conversation with interest, and a week later would point out that there had been a good reason for them to do it alone, a kind of sacramental labor – or something even more elemental, nest-building. But what she said when Julian hung up was, 'It'll take him ten minutes to get here,' and hurried him to the couch, one last quick time in this place.

It only took two trips to move all the boxes. On the second trip Reza and Julian were alone, and when Reza offered to help unpack, Julian said well, you know, maybe Blaze wants to go to bed.

In fact, she did. They collapsed exhausted and slept until dawn.

Once or twice a year, they don't bring the soldierboys in between shifts; they just immobilize us one by one and have the mechanic's second move straight from barber chair to cage, a 'hot transfer.' It usually meant something interesting was going on, since we don't normally work the same AO as Scoville's hunter/killer platoon.

But Scoville had been grouchy because nothing had happened. They'd gone to three different ambush sites in nine days with nothing but bugs and birds showing up. It was obviously a make-work assignment, marking time.

He crawled out of the cage and it sealed shut for its ninety-second cleaning cycle. 'Have fun,' Scoville said. 'Bring something to read.'

'Oh, I think they'll come up with some little chore for us to do.' He nodded morosely and hobbled away. They wouldn't do a hot transfer if there was a choice. So it was something important that the hunter/ killers weren't supposed to know about.

The cage popped and I wiggled into it, quickly setting the muscle sensors and plugging in the orthotics and blood shunt. Then I closed the shell and jacked.

It was always disorienting for a moment, but a lot more so with a hot transfer, since being platoon leader, I went first, and was suddenly jacked with a bunch of relative strangers. I did know Scoville's platoon vaguely, since I spent one day a month lightly jacked with him. But I didn't know all the intimate details of their lives, and really didn't care to know. I was plopped in the middle of this convoluted soap opera, an interloper who suddenly knew all the family secrets.

Two by two, they were replaced by my own men and women. I tried to concentrate on the problem at hand, which was to keep guard on the pairs of soldierboys as they spent their couple of minutes of immobile vulnerability, which was easy. I also tried to open a vertical link to the company commander and find out what was really going on. What were we going to do that was so secret Scoville was kept in the dark?

There was no answer until all of my people were in place. Then it came in a gestalt trickle while I automatically scanned the morning jungle for signs of trouble: there was a spy in Scoville's platoon. Not a willing spy, but somebody whose jack was tapped, real time.

It might even have been Scoville himself, so he couldn't be told. Brigade had set up an elaborate manipulation, where each member of the platoon was misinformed as to the location of their ambush. When an enemy force showed up in the middle of nowhere, they'd know which one was the leak.

I had a lot more questions than the company commander had answers. How could they control all the feedback states? If nine of the people thought they were at point A and one thought they were at point B, wouldn't there be conspicuous confusion? How could the enemy tap a jack in the first place? What was going to happen to the mechanic who was affected?

That last one, she could answer. They would examine him and take out his jack, and he would serve out the rest of his term as a tech or a shoe, depending. Depending on whether he could count to twenty without taking off his shoes and socks, I supposed. Army neurosurgeons made a lot less than Dr Spencer.

I cut off the thread to the commander, which didn't mean she couldn't eavesdrop on me if she wanted to. There were some large implications here, and you didn't need a degree in cybercomm to see them. All of Scoville's platoon had spent the last nine days in an elaborate and tightly maintained virtual-reality fiction. Everything each one saw and felt was monitored by Command, and fed back instantly in an altered state. That state included nine other tailor-made fictions for the rest of the platoon. A total of a hundred discrete fictions, constantly created and maintained nonstop.

The jungle around me was no more or less real than the coral reef I'd visited with Amelia. What if it bore no relation to where my soldierboy actually was?

Every mechanic has entertained the fantasy that there is no war at all; that the whole thing is a cybernetic construction that the governments maintain for reasons of their own. You can turn on the cube when you get home, and watch yourself in action, replaying the news – but that could be faked even more easily than the input/feedback state that connects soldierboy to mechanic. Had anybody actually been to Costa Rica, any mechanic? No one in the military could legally visit Ngumi territory.

Of course, that was nothing but a fantasy. The piles of shattered bodies in the control room had been real. They couldn't have faked the nuclear flattening of three cities.

It was just a place to retreat from your own responsibility for the carnage. I suddenly felt pretty good, and realized my blood chemistry was being adjusted. I tried to hold on to the thought: how could you, how could you justify … well, they actually did ask for it. It was sad that so many Ngumi had to die for their leaders' lunacy. But that's not the thought; that's not the thought…

'Julian,' the company commander thought down, 'move your platoon northwest three kilometers for a pickup. As you approach the PZ, you want to home in on a twenty-four megahertz beeper.'

I rogered. 'Where we headed?'

'Town. We're going to join up with Fox and Charlie for a daytime thing. Details on the way.'

We had ninety minutes to get to the pickup zone, and the jungle wasn't thick, so we just spread out in echelon, maintaining about twenty meters between each soldierboy, and picked our way northwest.

My uneasiness faded in the mundane business of keeping everybody in line and moving. I realized that my train of thought had been interrupted, but wasn't sure whether it was anything important. No way to write a note to myself, I realized for about the hundredth time. And things sort of fade when you get out of the cage.

Karen saw something and I froze everybody. After a moment she said false alarm; just a howler monkey and its baby. 'Out of the branches?' I asked, and got a nod back. I projected uneasiness to everybody, as if that were necessary, and had us split into two groups and move in file, two hundred meters apart. Very quietly.

'Animal behavior' is an interesting term. When an animal misbehaves, it's for a reason. Howler monkeys are more vulnerable on the ground.

Park sighted a sniper. 'Got a pedro at ten o'clock, range a hundred ten meters, in a tree blind about ten meters up. Permission to fire.'

'Not granted. Everyone stop and look around.' Claude and Sara got the same one, but there weren't any others obvious.

I put all three images together. 'She's asleep.' I got the gender from Park's olfactory receptors. The IR pattern gave me almost nothing, but her breathing was regular and sonorous.

'Let's drop back about a hundred meters and circle around her.' I got a confirm from the company commander and an angry '?' from Park.

I expected others – people don't just wander out into the woods and climb a tree; she was protecting something.

'Possible she knew we were coming?' Karen asked.

I paused … Why else would she be here? 'If so, she's pretty calm about it, to be able to sleep. No, it's a coincidence. She's guarding something. We don't have time to look for it, though.'

'We have your coordinates,' the commander said. 'Flyboy coming in, in about two minutes. You want to be elsewhere.'

I gave the platoon the order to move out fast. We didn't make too much noise, but enough: the sniper woke up and fired a burst at Lou, who was bringing up the rear on the left flank.

It was a pretty sophisticated antisoldierboy weapon, explosive rounds with depleted-uranium punchers, probably. Two or three rounds hit Lou about waist-level and blew out his leg control. As he fell over backward, another one blew off his right arm.

He hit the ground with a jarring crash, and for a moment everything was still, the high leaves over him rustling in the morning breeze. Another round exploded into the ground next to his head, showering his eyes with dirt. He shook his head to clear them.

'Lou, we can't do a pickup. Get out of there except for eyes and ears.'

'Thanks, Julian.' Lou jacked out, and the warning-signal pains from his back and arm stopped. He was just a camera pointed at the sky.

We were most of a kilometer away when the flyboy screamed overhead. I linked to her through Command and got a strange double view: from above the forest canopy, a spreading blossom of napalm shot through with glittering streaking sparkles, hundreds of thousands of flechettes. On the ground, a sudden sheet of fire overhead that dripped down through the branches, loud splintering crackle as the flechettes tore through the forest. Sonic boom and then silence.

Then a man screaming and another one talking to him in low tones, and one shot that ended the screaming. A man ran by, close but out of sight, and threw a grenade at the soldierboy. It bounced off the chest and exploded harmlessly.

The napalm dripped and flames from the underbrush licked up toward it. Monkeys screamed at the fire. Lou's eyes flickered twice and went out. As we moved away from the inferno, two more flyboys came in low and dropped fire retardant. It was an ecological preserve, after all, and the napalm had done all we wanted it to.

As we approached the PZ, Command said they'd calculated a body count of four – our sniper and both of the men plus one for whoever else might have been there – and gave three of them to the flyboy and split one among us. Park didn't like that at all, since there wouldn't have been a sortie if he hadn't spotted the sniper, and she would've been an easy kill if I hadn't ordered otherwise. I advised him to hold that in; he was on the verge of a public tantrum that would leak up to command and force an Article 15 – pro forma company-level punishment for petty insubordination.

As I shot that warning to him, I had to think how much easier it must be to be a shoe. You can hate your sergeant and smile at him at the same time.

The PZ was obvious without the radio beacon, the denuded dome of a hill that had been cleaned up recently with a controlled burn-andblast.

As we picked our way up the muddy ashes of the hillside, two flyboys came in and hovered protectively. Not a normal fast snatch.

The cargo helicopter came in and landed, or at least hovered a foot off the ground while the rear door slammed down to form an unsteady ramp. We scrambled aboard to join twenty other soldierboys.

My opposite number in Fox platoon was Barboo Seaves; we'd worked together before. I had a double-weak link to her, through Command and through Rose, who had replaced Ralph as horizontal liaison. By way of greeting, Barboo projected a multisensory image of carne asada, a meal we'd shared at the airport a few months ago.

'Anybody tell you anything?' I asked.

'I am but a mushroom.' That military joke was old when my father heard it: They keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit.

The chopper was rising and tilting as soon as the last soldierboy dove in off the ramp. We all sort of crashed around, getting acquainted.

I didn't really know Charlie platoon's leader, David Grant. Half of his platoon had been replaced, in the past year – two stroked out and the others 'Temporarily reassigned for psychological adjustment.' David had only been in command for two cycles. I hello'ed him, but at first he was busy with his platoon, trying to calm down a couple of neos who were afraid we were going into a kill situation.

With luck, we wouldn't be. When the door slammed shut I got an outline of the general order, which was basically a parade, or show of force, in an urban area that was due for a reminder that we See All, Know All. It was the el Norte section of Liberia, which, oddly enough, had both guerrilla activity and a high concentration of Anglos. They were a mixture of older Americans who had retired to Costa Rica and the children and grandchildren of earlier retirees. The pedros thought that the presence of a lot of gringos would protect them. We were supposed to demonstrate otherwise.

But if the enemy stayed out of sight, there wouldn't be any problems. Our orders were to use force 'only reactively.'

So we were to be both bait and hook. It didn't look like a good situation. The rebels in Guanacaste province had been faring badly and needed their own demonstration. I supposed Command had taken that into account.

We picked up some riot control accessories – extra gas grenades and a couple of tanglefoot projectors. They spray out a skein of sticky string that makes it impossible to walk; after ten minutes, it suddenly evaporates. We were also issued extra concussion grenades, though I'm not sure they're a good idea with civilians. Blow out somebody's eardrums and expect him to be grateful you didn't do worse? None of the riot control weapons are pleasant, but that's the only one that does permanent damage. Unless you're staggering around blinded by tear gas and get run over by a truck. Or breathe VA and choke on vomit.

We came in over the city at treetop level, lower than many of the buildings, helicopter and two flyboys in tight slow formation, loud as three banshees. I suppose that was good psychology, show we're not afraid and at the same time rattle their windows. But again I wondered whether we weren't set out as tempting bait. If somebody fired at us, I had no doubt the sky could be full of flyboys in a few seconds. The enemy must have figured that out, too.

Once on the ground and out of the chopper, the twenty-nine soldier-boys could easily destroy the city themselves, without air support. Part of our show was going to be a 'public service' demonstration: a block of tenements to be razed. We could save the city a lot of construction, or deconstruction, expense. Just walk in and pull things down.

We set down gently on the town square, flyboys hovering, and disembarked into a parade formation, ten by three, minus one. Only a scattering of people were there to watch us, which surprised no one. A few curious children and defiant teenagers and old people who live in the park. Only a few police; most of the force, it turned out, was waiting down by our demonstration area.

The buildings surrounding the square were late colonial architecture, graceful in the shadow of the glass-and-metal geometries that hovered over them. The blind reflective windows of those modern buildings could conceal a city full of watchers, maybe snipers. As we marched off in robotic lockstep I was more than ever aware of the fact that I was a safe puppeteer a couple of hundred miles away – if rifles did appear in each window and started firing, no actual people would be killed. Until we retaliated.

We broke step into a carefully random rolling gait as we crossed an old bridge, so as not to be embarrassed by shaking it apart and falling into the noisome trickle below, and then went back to the slamslam-slam that was supposed to be so intimidating. I did see a dog run away. If any humans were being terrorized along our route, they were doing it indoors.

Past the postmodern anonymity of downtown, we went through a few blocks of a residential neighborhood, presumably upper-class dwellings, all hidden behind tall whitewashed walls. Watchdogs howled at our echoing steps, and in several places we were tracked by surveillance cameras.

Then we got into the barrios. I always felt a kind of referred sympathy for the people who lived in these circumstances, here and in Texas, so similar to the American black ghettos that I had avoided by accident of birth. I also knew that there were sometimes compensations, family and neighborhood bonds that I never experienced. But I could never be sentimental enough to consider that a reasonable trade-off for my longer life expectancy; higher life expectations.

I turned down my olfactory receptors a notch. Smell of standing sewage and urine starting to steam in the morning sun. There was also the good smell of corn baking, and good strong peppers, and somewhere a chicken roasting slowly, maybe a celebration. A chicken was not an everyday menu item here.

You could hear the crowd several blocks before we got to the demonstration site. We were met by two dozen mounted police – mounted on horses – who formed a protective V, or U, around us.

It made you wonder who was demonstrating what. Nobody pretended that the party in power represented the actual will of the people. It was a police state, and there was no question whose side we were on. I suppose it didn't hurt to reinforce that every now and then.

There must have been two thousand people milling around the demolition site. It was obvious we were moving into a pretty complicated political situation. There were signs and banners proclaiming ACTUAL PEOPLE LIVE HERE and ROBOT PUPPETS OF RICH LANDOWNERS, and so forth – more signs in English than in Spanish, for the cameras. But there were a lot of Anglos in the crowd, too, retirees showing support for the locals. Anglos who were locals.

I asked Barboo and David to halt their platoons in place for a minute, and sent a query up to Command. 'We're being used here, and it looks like a potentially bad situation.'

'That's why you were issued all the extra riot gear,' she said. 'This crowd's been gathering since yesterday.'

'But this isn't our job,' I said. 'It's like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly.'

'There are reasons,' she said, 'and you have orders. Just be careful.'

I relayed that to the others. 'Be careful?' David said. 'Of us hurting them or of them hurting us?'

'Just try not to step on anybody,' Barboo said.

'I'd go further,' I said. 'Don't injure or kill anybody to save the machines.'

Barboo agreed. 'That's a corner the rebels may try to back us into. Stay in control of the situation.'

Command was listening. 'Don't be too conservative. This is a show of force.'

It started out well. A young Ender who'd been standing on a box, haranguing, suddenly jumped off and ran over to stand in the way of our progress. One of the mounted police touched him on the bare back with a cattle prod, which knocked him down and threw him into a trembling seizure at David's feet. David stopped dead and the soldier-boy behind him, distracted by something, ran into him with a crash. It would have been perfect if David had fallen over and crushed the helpless fanatic, but at least we were spared that. Some of the crowd laughed and jeered, not a bad response under the circumstances, and they spirited the unconscious man away.

That might protect him for a day, but I'm sure the police knew his name, address, and blood type.

'Straighten up the ranks and files,' Barboo said. 'Let's keep moving and get this over with.'

The block we were supposed to demolish was identified with a girdle of orange spray paint. Hard to miss, anyhow, since a solid square of police and sawhorses kept the crowd a neat hundred meters away on all four sides.

We didn't want to use explosives more powerful than the two-inch grenades; with the rockets, for instance, individual fragments of brick could go a lot farther than a hundred meters, with the force of a bullet. But I queried for a calculation and got permission to use the grenades to weaken the buildings' foundations.

They were six-story concrete slab constructions with crumbling brick facades. Less than fifty years old, but the work had been done with inferior concrete – too much sand in the mixture – and one building had already collapsed, killing dozens.

So it didn't sound like a big deal to bring them down. Grenades to jar things loose at the foundation, then put a soldierboy at each corner to push and pull, putting torsion on the framework structure, and jump back as it falls – or don't jump back; demonstrate our invulnerability by standing there unaffected by the rain of concrete and steel.

The first one went perfectly – a textbook demonstration, if there were a textbook on bizarre demolition techniques. The crowd was very quiet.

The second building was recalcitrant; the front facade fell away, but the steel frame wouldn't twist enough to snap. So we used lasers to cut through a few exposed I-beams, and then it came down with a satisfying crash.

The next building was a disaster. It came down as easily as the first, but it rained children.

More than two hundred children had been squeezed into one room on the sixth floor, bound and gagged and drugged. It turned out that they were from a suburban private school. A guerrilla team had come in at eight in the morning, killed all the teachers, kidnapped all the children, and moved them into the condemned building in crates covered with UN markings, just an hour before we had gotten there.

None of the children survived falling sixty feet and being buried by rubble, of course. It was not the sort of political demonstration a rational mind might have conceived, since it demonstrated their brutality rather than ours – but it did speak directly to the mob, which collectively was no more rational.

When we saw all the children, of course we stopped everything and called for a massive medevac. We started clearing away rubble, numbly looking for survivors, and a local brigada de urgencia crew came in to help us.

Barboo and I organized our platoons into search parties, covering two thirds of the building's 'footprint,' and David's platoon should have done the other third, but the shock had them badly disorganized. Most of them had never seen anyone killed. The sight of all those children mangled, pulverized – concrete dust turning blood into mud and transforming the small bodies into anonymous white lumps – it unhinged them. Two of the soldierboys stood frozen, paralyzed because their mechanics had fainted. Most of the others were wandering aimlessly, ignoring David's orders, which were barely coherent, anyhow.

I was moving slowly, myself, stunned by the enormity of it. Dead soldiers on a battlefield are bad enough – one dead soldier is bad enough – but this was almost beyond belief. And the carnage had just started.

A big helicopter sounds aggressive no matter what its actual function is. When the medevac chopper came beating in, someone in the crowd started shooting at it. Just lead bullets that bounced off, we ascertained later, but the chopper's defenses automatically acquired the target, a man shooting from behind a billboard, and fried him.

It was a little too impressive, a large spalling laser that made him explode like a dropped ripe fruit. The cry 'Murderers! Murderers!' began, and in less than a minute the crowd broke through the police lines and attacked us.

Barboo and I had our people move quickly around the perimeter, spraying tanglefoot, curling threads of neon that quickly expanded to finger thickness, then to ropes. It was effective at first, sticky as Super-glue. It immobilized the front couple of ranks of people, bringing them to their knees or flattening them. But that didn't stop the ones behind them, who eagerly crowded over their comrades' backs to get to us.

In seconds the mistake was apparent, as hundreds of them, immobilized, were crushed under the weight of the screaming mob that charged us. We popped VA and CS gas everywhere, but it barely slowed them down. More fell and were trampled.

A Molotov cocktail exploded on one of Barboo's platoon, turning him into a flaming symbol of staggering helplessness – in reality, he was just blinded for a moment and then weapons came out all over, machine guns chattering, two lasers lancing through the dust and smoke. I watched a row of men and women fall in unison, swept down by a misaimed spray of their own machine gun fire, and relayed the order from Command, 'Shoot anyone with a weapon!'

The lasers were easy to spot, and went down first, but people would pick them up again and keep firing. The first man I ever killed, a boy actually, had scooped up the laser and was firing offhand, standing up. I aimed for his knees, but then somebody knocked him down from behind. The bullet struck the center of his chest and blew his heart out his back. On top of everything else, that pushed me over the edge, into paralysis.

Park went over the edge, too; the other edge, berserk. A man got to him with a knife, and tried to climb up and poke out his eyes, as if that were possible. Park grabbed an ankle and swung the man like a doll, spattering his brains on a concrete slab, and tossed his twitching body into the mob. Then he waded into the crowd like an insane mechanical monster, kicking and punching people to death. That snapped me out of my shock. When he wouldn't respond to shouted orders, I asked Command to deactivate him. He killed more than a dozen before they complied, and his suddenly inert soldierboy went down under a pile of enraged people, pounding it with rocks.

It was a truly Dantean scene, bloody crushed bodies everywhere, thousands of people staggering or crouching, blinded, gagging and spewing as the gas swirled around them. Part of me, vertiginous with horror, wanted to leave the place by fainting, let the crowd have this machine. But my crew was in bad shape, too; I couldn't desert them.

The tanglefoot suddenly dissipated in a cloud of colored smoke, but it didn't make any difference. Everyone who had been immobilized by it was lying dead or crippled.

Command told us to clear out; go back to the square as quickly as possible. We could have done an extraction right there, while the crowd was subdued, but didn't want to take the chance of more helicopters and flyboys setting them off again. So we picked up four immobilized soldierboys and rushed off in victory.

On the way, I told Command that I was going to file a recommendation that Park be given a psychological discharge, at the very least. Of course, she could read my actual feelings: 'You really want him tried for murder, for war crimes. That isn't possible.'

Well, I knew that, but said that I wouldn't have him as part of my platoon anymore, even if my refusal meant administrative punishment. The rest of the platoon had had enough of him, too. Whatever the idea had been that prompted them to insert him into our family, today's action proved it wrong.

Command said that every factor would be taken into consideration, including my own confused emotional state. I was ordered to go directly to Counseling when we jacked out. Confused? How are you supposed to feel, when you precipitate mass murder?

But the mass death, I could rationalize away the blame for that. We had tried everything our training had given us to minimize loss. But the single death, the one I shot myself – I couldn't stop reliving that moment. The boy's determined look as he pointed and fired, pointed and fired; my own aiming circle dropping from his head to his knees, and then just as I pulled the trigger, his annoyed frown at being jostled. His knees hit the pavement just as my bullet ripped his heart out, and for an instant he still had that annoyed expression. Then he pitched forward, dead before his face hit the ground.

Something in me died then, too. Even through the belated stabilizing soup of mood drugs. I knew there was only one way to get rid of the memory.

Julian was wrong on that score. One of the first things the counselor told him was 'You know, it is possible to erase specific memories. We can make you forget killing that boy.' Dr Jefferson was a black man maybe twenty years older than Julian. He rubbed a fringe of gray beard. 'But it's not simple or complete. There would be emotional associations we can't erase, because it's impossible to track down every neuron that was affected by the experience.'

'I don't think I want to forget,' Julian said. 'It's part of what I am now, for better or worse.'

'Not better, and you know it. If you were the type of person who could kill and walk away from it, the army would've put you in a hunter/killer platoon.'

They were in a wood-paneled office in Portobello, bright native paintings and woven rugs on the walls. Julian obeyed an obscure impulse and reached over to feel the rough wool of a rug. 'Even if I forget, he stays dead. It doesn't seem right.'

'What do you mean by that?'

'I owe him my grief, my guilt. He was just a kid, caught up in the–'

'Julian, he had a gun and was firing all over the place. You probably saved lives by killing him.'

'Not our lives. We were all safe, here.'

'Civilians' lives. You don't do yourself any good by thinking of him as a helpless boy. He was heavily armed and out of control.'

'I was heavily armed and in control. I aimed to disable him.'

'The more reason for you not to blame yourself.'

'Have you ever killed anybody?' Jefferson shook his head, one short jerk. 'Then you don't know. It's like not being a virgin anymore. You can erase the memory of the event, okay, but that wouldn't make me a virgin again. Like you say, "emotional associations." Wouldn't I be even more fucked up? Not being able to trace those feelings back to their trigger?'

'All that I can say is that it's worked with other people.'

'Ah ha. But not with everybody.'

No. It's not an exact science.'

'Then I respectfully decline.'

Jefferson leafed through the file on his desk. 'You may not be allowed to decline.'

'I can disobey an order. This isn't combat. A few months in the stockade wouldn't kill me.'

'It's not that simple.' He counted off on his fingers. 'One, a trip to the stockade might kill you. The shoe guards are selected for aggressiveness and they don't like mechanics.

'Two, a prison term would be disastrous to your professional life. Do you think the University of Texas has ever granted tenure to a black ex-con?

'Three, you may not have any choice, literally. You have clear-cut suicidal tendencies. So I can–'

'When did I ever say anything about suicide?'

'Probably never.' The doctor took the top sheet from the file and handed it to Julian. 'This is your overall personality profile. The dotted line is average for men at your age when you were drafted. Look at the line above "Su."'

'This is based on some written test I took five years ago?'

'No, it integrates a number of factors. Army tests, but also various clinical observations and evaluations made since you were a child.'

'And on the basis of that, you can force me into a medical procedure, against my will?'

'No. On the basis of "I'm a colonel and you're a sergeant."'

Julian leaned forward. 'You're a colonel who took the Hippocratic oath and I'm a sergeant with a doctorate in physics. Can we talk for just a minute like two men who've spent most of their lives in school?'

'Sorry. Go ahead.'

'You're asking me to accede to a medical treatment that will drastically affect my memory. Am I supposed to believe that there's no chance that it will hurt my ability to do physics?'

Jefferson was silent for a moment. 'The chance is there, but it's very small. And you sure won't be doing any physics if you kill yourself.'

'Oh, for Christ's sake. I'm not going to kill myself.'

'Right. Now what do you think a potential suicide would say?'

Julian tried not to raise his voice. 'Do you hear yourself? You mean that if I said, "Sure, I think I'll do it," you'd pronounce me safe and let me go home?'

The psychiatrist smiled. 'Okay, that's not a bad response. But you have to see that it could be a calculated one, from a potential suicide.'

'Sure. Anything I say can be evidence of mental illness. If you're convinced that I'm ill.'

He studied his own palm. 'Look, Julian. You know I've jacked into the cube that recorded how you felt when you killed that boy. In a way, I've been there. I've been you.'

'I know that.'

He put Julian's file away and brought out a small white jar of pills. 'This is a mild antidepressant. Let's try it for two weeks, a pill after breakfast and one after dinner. It won't affect your intellectual abilities.'

'All right'

'And I want to see you' – he checked a desk calendar – 'at ten o'clock on July ninth. I want to jack with you and check your responses to this and that. It'll be a two-way jack; I won't hold anything back from you.'

'And if you think I'm nuts, you'll send me to the memory eraser.'

'We'll see. That's all I can say.'

Julian nodded and took the white jar and left.

I would lie to Amelia; say it was just a routine checkup. I took one of the pills and it did help me fall asleep, and sleep without dreams. So maybe I would keep taking them if they didn't affect my mental acuity.

In the morning I felt less sad and conducted an internal debate regarding suicide, perhaps in preparation for Dr Jefferson's invasion. I couldn't lie to him, jacked. But maybe I could bring about a temporary 'cure.' It was easy to argue against the act – not only the effect on Amelia and my parents and friends, but also the ultimate triviality of the gesture, as far as the army was concerned. They would just find somebody else my size and send the soldierboy out with a fresh brain. If I did succeed in killing a few generals with my exit, they would likewise just promote some colonels. There's never any shortage of meat.

But I wondered whether all the logical arguments against suicide would do anything to conceal the depth of my own resolution. Even before the boy's death I knew I was only going to live as long as I had Amelia. We've stayed together longer than most people do.

And when I came home, she was gone. Gone to see a friend in Washington, the note said. I called the base and found I could fly out to Edwards as a supernumerary if I could get my butt down there in ninety minutes. I was in the air over the Mississippi before I realized I hadn't called the lab to arrange for someone else to monitor the scheduled runs. Was that the pills? Probably not. But there was no way to call from a military plane, so it was ten o'clock Texas time before I was able to phone the lab. Jean Gordie had covered for me, but that was pure luck; she'd come in to grade some papers, seen I wasn't in, and checked the run schedule. She was more than slightly pissed off, since I couldn't offer a really convincing excuse. Look, I had to take the first flight to Washington to decide whether or not to kill myself.

From Edwards I took the monorail into old Union Station. There was a map machine on the car that showed me I'd be only a couple of miles from her friend's address. I was tempted to walk over and knock on the door, but decided to be civilized and call. A man answered.

'I have to talk to Blaze.'

He looked at the screen for a moment. 'Oh, you're Julian. Just a moment.'

Amelia came on, looking quizzical. 'Julian? I said I'd be home tomorrow.'

'We have to talk. I'm here in Washington.'

'Come on over then. I was just about to fix lunch.'

How domestic. 'I'd rather … we have to talk alone.'

She looked offscreen and then back, worried. 'Where are you?' 'Union Station.'

The man said something I couldn't quite overhear. 'Pete says there's a bar on the second floor called the Roundhouse. I can meet you there in thirty or forty minutes.'

'Go ahead and finish lunch,' I said. 'I can–'

'No. I'll be down as fast as I can.'

'Thanks, darling.' I thumbed off and looked into the mirror of the screen. Despite the night's sleep, I still looked pretty haggard. I should've shaved and changed out of my uniform.

I ducked into a men's room for a quick shave and comb and then walked down to the second floor. Union Station was a transportation hub, but also a museum of rail technology. I walked by some subways of the previous century, with their makeshift bulletproofing all pitted and dented. Then a steam-powered locomotive from the nineteenth that actually looked to be in better shape.

Amelia was waiting at the door to the bar. 'I took a cab,' she explained as we embraced.

She steered me into the gloom and odd music of the bar. 'So who's this Pete? A friend, you said?'

'He's Peter Blankenship.' I shook my head. The name was vaguely familiar. 'The cosmologist.' A serving robot took our iced tea orders and said we had to spend ten dollars to take the booth. I got a glass of whiskey.

'So you're old friends.'

'No, we just met. I wanted to keep our meeting secret.'

We took our drinks to an empty booth and sat down. She looked intense. 'Let me try to–'

'I killed somebody.'

'What?'

'I killed a boy, a civilian. Shot him with my soldierboy.'

'But how could you? I thought you weren't even supposed to kill soldiers.'

'It was an accident.'

'What, you stepped on him or something?'

'No, it was the laser–'

'You "accidentally" shot him with a laser?'

'A bullet. I was aiming for his knees.'

'An unarmed civilian?'

'He was armed – it was him with the laser! It was a madhouse, a mob out of control. We were ordered to shoot anyone with a weapon.'

'But he couldn't have hurt you. Just your machine.'

'He was shooting wildly,' I lied; half-lied. 'He could have killed dozens himself.'

'You couldn't have shot for the weapon he was using?'

'No, it was a heavy duty Nipponex. They have Ablar, a bulletproof and antispalling coating. Look, I aimed for his knees, then somebody jostled him from behind. He pitched forward and the bullet hit him in the chest.'

'So it was sort of an industrial accident. He shouldn't have been playing with the big boys' toys.'

'If you want to put it that way.'

'How would you put it? You pulled the trigger.'

'This is crazy. You don't know about Liberia yesterday?'

'Africa? We've been too busy–'

'There's a Liberia in Costa Rica.'

'I see. That's where the boy was.'

'And a thousand others. Also past tense.' I took a long drink of whiskey and coughed. 'Some extremists killed a couple of hundred children, and made it look like we'd been responsible. That was horrible enough. Then a mob attacked us, and … and … the riot control measures backfired. They're' supposed to be benign, but they caused the death of hundreds more, trampled. Then they started shooting, shooting their own people. So we, we…'

'Oh, my God. I'm sorry,' she said, her voice trembling. 'You need real support, and here I come all edgy with fatigue and preoccupied. You poor … have you been to a counselor?'

'Yeah. He was a big help.' I plucked an ice cube from the tea and dropped it in the whiskey. 'He said I'd get over it.'

'Will you?'

'Sure. He gave me some pills.'

'Well, be careful with the pills and the booze.'

'Yes, doctor.' I took a cool sip.

'Seriously. I'm worried.'

'Yeah, me too.' Worried, wearied. 'So what are you and this Pete doing?'

'But you–'

'Let's just change the subject. What did he want you for?'

'Jupiter. He's challenging some basic cosmological assumptions.'

'Then why you? Probably everyone from Macro on down knows more about cosmology – hell, I probably do.'

'I'm sure you do. But that's why he chose me – everyone senior to me was in on the planning stages of the Project, and they have this consensus about … certain aspects of it.'

'What aspects?'

'I can't tell you.'

'Oh, come on.'

She touched her tea but didn't drink it; looked into it. 'Because you can't really keep a secret. All your platoon would know as soon as you jacked.'

'They wouldn't know shit. Nobody else in that platoon can tell a Hamiltonian from a hamburger. Anything technical, they might pick up on my emotional reaction, but that's it. No technical details; they might as well be in Greek.'

'Your emotional reaction is what I'm talking about. I can't say any more. Don't ask me.'

'Okay. Okay.' I took another drink of whiskey and pushed the order button. 'Let's get something to eat.' She asked it for a salmon sandwich and I got a hamburger and another whiskey, a double.

'So you're total strangers. Never met before.'

'What is that supposed to mean?'

'Only what I asked.'

'I met him maybe fifteen years ago, at a colloquium in Denver. If you must know, that's when I was living with Marty. He went to Denver and I tagged along.'

'Ah.' I finished the first whiskey.

'Julian. Don't be upset about that. There's nothing going on. He's old and fat and more neurotic than you.'

'Thanks. So you'll be home, when?'

'I have to teach tomorrow. So I'll be home by morning. Then come back here Wednesday if we still have work to do.'

'I see.'

'Look, don't tell anyone, especially Macro, that I'm here.'

'He'd be jealous?'

'What is this with jealousy? I told you there's nothing…' She slumped back. 'It's just that Peter's been in fights with him, in Physics Review Letters. I may be in a position where I have to defend Peter against my own boss.'

'Great career move.'

'This is bigger than career. It's … well, I can't tell you.'

'Because I'm so neurotic.'

'No. That's not it. That's not it at all. I just–' Our order rolled up to the booth and she wrapped the sandwich in a napkin and stood. 'Look, I'm under more pressure than you know. Will you be all right? I have to get back.'

'Sure. I understand about work.'

'This is more than just work. You'll forgive me later.' She slid out of the booth and gave me a long kiss. Her eyes were wet with tears. 'We have to talk more about that boy. And the rest of it. Meanwhile, take the pills; take it easy.' I watched her hurry out.

The hamburger smelled good but it tasted like dead meat. I took a bite but couldn't swallow it. I transferred the mouthful to a napkin, discreetly, and drank up the double in three quick swallows. Then I buzzed for another, but the table said it couldn't serve me alcohol for another hour.

I took the tube to the airport and had drinks in two places, waiting for the flight back home. A drink on the plane and a sour nap in the cab.

When I got home I found a half-bottle of vodka and poured it over a large mug of ice cubes. I stirred it until the mug was good and frosty. Then I emptied out the bottle of pills and pushed them into seven piles of five each.

I was able to swallow six of the piles, one mouthful of icy vodka apiece. Before I swallowed the seventh, I realized I should write a note. I owed Amelia that much. But I tried to stand up to find some paper and my legs wouldn't obey; they were just lumps. I considered that for awhile and decided to just take the rest of the pills, but I could only make my arm swing like a pendulum. I couldn't focus on the pills, anyhow. I leaned back and it was peaceful, loose, like floating in space. It occurred to me that this was the last thing I would ever feel, and that was all right. It was a lot better than going after all those generals.

Amelia smelled urine when she unlocked the door eight hours later. She ran from room to room and finally found him in the reading alcove, slumped sideways in her favorite chair, the last neat pile of five pills in front of him, along with the empty prescription vial and half a large glass of warm watered vodka.

Sobbing, she felt his neck for a pulse and thought maybe there was a slight thread. She slapped him twice, hysterically hard, and he didn't respond.

She called 9-1-1 and they said all units were out; it might be an hour. So she switched to the campus emergency room and described the situation and said she was bringing him in. Then she called a cab.

She heaved him out of the chair and tried to pick him up under the arms, staggering back out of the alcove. She wasn't strong enough to carry him that way, though, and she wound up dragging him ignominiously by the feet through the apartment. Backing out through the door, she almost ran into a large male student, who helped her carry him to the cab and went along with her to the hospital, asking questions that she answered in monosyllables.

He wasn't necessary at that end, it turned out; there were two orderlies and a doctor waiting at the ER entrance. They swung him up onto a gurney and a doctor gave him two shots, one in the arm and one in the chest. When he got the chest one, Julian groaned and trembled, and his eyes opened but showed only whites. The doctor said that was a good response. It might be a day before they knew whether he would recover; she could wait here or go home.

She did both. She took a cab with the helpful student back to the apartment building, picked up the notes and papers for her next class, and returned to the hospital.

There was nobody else in the waiting room. She got a cup of coffee from the machine and sat at the end of a couch.

The papers were all graded. She looked at her lecture notes but couldn't concentrate on them. It would have been hard to go through the teaching routine even if she had come home to a normal Julian. If Peter was right, and she was sure he was, the Jupiter Project was over. It had to be shut down. Eleven years, most of her career as a particle physicist, down the drain.

And now this, this strangely reciprocal crisis. A few months ago he had sat this deathwatch for her, brain-deathwatch. But she had caused both of them. If she had been able to put the work with Peter aside – put her career aside – and give him the kind of loving support that he needed to work through his guilt and anguish, he wouldn't have wound up here.

Or maybe he would. But it wouldn't have been her fault.

A black man in a colonel's uniform sat down next to her. His lime cologne cut through the hospital smell. After a moment he said, 'You're Amelia.'

'People call me Blaze. Or Professor Harding.'

He nodded and didn't offer his hand. 'I'm Julian's counselor, Zamat Jefferson.'

'I have news for you. The counseling didn't take.'

He nodded the same way. 'Well, I knew he was suicidal. I jacked with him. That's why I gave him those pills.'

'What?' Amelia stared at him. 'I don't understand.'

'He could take the whole bottle at once and survive. Comatose, but breathing.'

'So he's not in danger?'

The colonel put a pink laboratory form on the table between them, and smoothed it out with both hands. 'Look where it says "ALC." The alcohol content of his blood was 0.35 percent. That's more than halfway to suicide by itself.'

'You knew he drank. You were jacked with him.'

'That's just it. He's not normally a heavy drinker. And the scenario he had for suicide … well, it didn't involve either alcohol or pills.'

'Really? What was it?'

'I can't say. It involved breaking the law.' He picked up the form and refolded it neatly. 'One thing … one thing you might be able to help with.'

'Help him or help the army?'

'Both. If he comes out of this, and I'm almost certain he will, he'll never be a mechanic again. You could help him get through that.'

Amelia's face narrowed. 'What do you mean? He hates being a soldier.'

'Maybe so, but he doesn't hate being jacked with his platoon. Quite the contrary; like most people, he's become more or less addicted to it, to the intimacy. Perhaps you can distract him from that loss.'

'With intimacy. Sex.'

'That.' He folded the paper twice again, creasing it with his thumbnail. 'Amelia, Blaze, I'm not sure you know how much he loves you, depends on you.'

'Of course I do. The feeling's mutual.'

'Well, I've never been inside your head. From Julian's point of view, there's some imbalance, asymmetry.'

Amelia sat back in the couch. 'So what does he want of me?' she said stiffly. 'He knows I only have so much time. Only have one life.'

'He knows you're married to your work. That what you do is more important than what you are.'

'That's harsh enough.' They both flinched when someone in another room dropped a tray of instruments. 'But it's true of most of the people we know. The world's full of proles and slacks. If Julian were one of them, I would never have even met him.'

'That's not quite it. I'm in your class, too, obviously. Sitting around consuming would drive us crazy.' He looked at the wall, reaching for words. 'I guess I'm asking that you take a part-time job, as therapist, in addition to being a full-time physicist. Until he's better.'

She stared at him in a way she sometimes stared at a student. 'Thank you for not pointing out that he's done the same thing for me.' She stood up suddenly and crossed over to the coffee machine. 'Want a cup?'

'No, thank you.'

When she came back she hooked a chair around so that the table was between them. 'A week ago I would have dropped everything to be his therapist. I love him more than you, or he, seem to think, and of course I owe him, too.'

She paused and leaned forward. 'But the world has gotten a lot more complicated in the last few days. Did you know he went to Washington?'

'No. Government business?'

'Not exactly. But that's where I was, working. He came to me with what I see now was obviously a cry for help.'

'About killing the boy?'

'And all the other death, the tramplings. I was properly horrified, even before I saw the news. But I … I…' She started to take a drink of coffee but put it down and sobbed, a startling, racking sound. She knuckled away sudden tears.

'It's all right.'

'It's not all right. But it's bigger than him or me. Bigger than whether we even live or die.'

'What, wait. Slow down. Your work?'

'I've said too much. But yes.'

'What is it, some sort of defense application?'

'You could say that. Yes.'

He sat back and pressed on his beard, as if it were pasted on. 'Defense. Blaze, Dr Harding … I spend all day watching people lie to me. I'm not an expert in much, but I'm an expert in that.'

'So?'

'So nothing. Your business is your business, and my interest in it begins and ends with how it affects my patient. I don't care if your job is saving the country, saving the world. All I ask is that when you're not working with that, you're working with him.'

'I'll do that, of course.'

'You do owe him.'

'Dr Jefferson. I have one Jewish mother already. I don't need one with a beard and a suit.'

'Point well taken. I didn't mean to be insulting.' He stood up. 'I'm misdirecting my own sense of responsibility onto you. I should not have let him go after we jacked. If I'd admitted him, put him under observation, this wouldn't have happened.'

Amelia took his offered hand. 'Okay. You beat yourself up over this, and I'll beat myself up over it, and our patient will have to improve, by osmosis.'

He smiled. 'Take care. Take care of yourself. This kind of thing is a terrible strain.'

This kind of thing! She watched him leave and heard the outer door close. She felt her face redden and fought the pressure of tears behind her eyes, then let it win.

When I'd started to die it felt like I was drifting through a corridor of white light. Then I wound up in a big room with Amelia and my parents and a dozen or so friends and relations. My father was the way I remember him from grade school, slim and beardless. Nan Li, the first girl I was ever serious about, was standing next to me with her hand in my pocket, stroking. Amelia had an absurd grin, watching us.

Nobody said anything. We just looked at each other. Then everything faded out and I woke up in the hospital with an oxygen mask over my face and the smell of vomit deep inside my nose. My jaw hurt, as if someone had punched me.

My arm felt like it belonged to someone else, but I managed to drag my hand up and pull the mask down. There was someone in the room, out of focus, and I asked for a Kleenex and she handed it to me. I tried to blow my nose but it triggered retching, and she held me up and put a metal bowl under my chin while I coughed and drooled most attractively. Then she handed me a glass of water and said to rinse, and I realized it was Amelia, not a nurse. I said something romantic like 'oh, shit,' and started to black out again, and she eased me back to the pillow and worked the mask over my face. I heard her calling for a nurse and then I passed out.

It's strange how much detail you recall from some parts of an experience like this, and how little of others. They told me later that I slept a solid fifteen hours after the little puking ceremony. It felt more like fifteen seconds. I woke up as if from a slap, with Dr Jefferson drawing a hypo gun away from my arm.

I wasn't wearing the oxygen mask anymore. 'Don't try to sit up,' Jefferson said. 'Get your bearings.'

'Okay.' I was just able to focus on him. 'First bearing, I'm not dead, right? I didn't take enough pills.'

'Amelia found you and saved you.'

'I'll have to thank her.'

'By that, you mean you're going to try again?'

'How many people don't?'

'Plenty.' He held out a glass of water with a plastic straw. 'People attempt suicide for various reasons.'

I drank a cold sip. 'You don't think I was actually serious about it.'

'I do. You're pretty competent at everything you do. You'd be dead if Amelia hadn't come home.'

'I'll thank her,' I repeated.

'She's sleeping now. She stayed with you for as long as she could keep her eyes open.'

'Then you came.'

'She called me. She didn't want you to wake up alone.' He weighed the hypodermic gun in his hand. 'I decided to help you along with a mild stimulant.'

I nodded and sat up a little. 'It feels pretty good, actually. Did it counteract the drug? The poison.'

'No, you've already been treated for that. Do you want to talk about it?'

'No.' I reached for the water and he helped me. Not with you.'

'With Amelia?'.

Not now.' I drank and was able to replace the glass by myself. 'I guess first I want to jack with my platoon. They'd understand.'

There was a long silence. 'You're not going to be able to do that.'

I didn't understand. 'Of course I can. It's automatic.'

'You're out, Julian. You can't be a mechanic anymore.'

'Hold it. Do you think any of my platoon would be surprised by this? Do you think they're that dumb?'

'That's not the point. It's just that they can't be made to live through it! I'm trained for it, and I can't say I look forward to jacking with you. Do you want to kill your friends?'

'Kill them.'

'Yes! Exactly. Don't you think it's possible you might push one of them into doing the same? Candi, for instance. She's close to clinical depression most of the time, anyhow.'

I could see the sense in that, actually. 'But after I'm cured?'

No. You'll never be a mechanic again. You'll be reassigned to some–'

'A shoe? I'll be a shoe?'

'They wouldn't want you in the infantry. They'll take advantage of your education, and put you in a technical post somewhere.'

'Portobello?'

'Probably not. You'd jack socially with members of your platoon, your ex-platoon.' He shook his head slowly. 'Can't you see? That wouldn't be good for you or for them.'

'Oh, I see; I see. From your point of view, anyhow.'

'I am the expert,' he said carefully. 'I don't want you to be hurt and I don't want to be court-martialed for negligence – which is what would happen if I let you go back to your platoon and some of them couldn't handle sharing your memories.'

'We've shared the feelings of people while they died, sometimes in great pain.'

'But they didn't come back from the dead. Come back and discuss how desirable it might be.'

'I may be cured of that.' Even as I said it, I knew how false it sounded.

'One day, I'm sure you will be.' That didn't sound too convincing, either.

Julian endured one more day of bed rest and then was transferred to an 'observation unit,' which was like a hotel room, except that it only locked from the outside, and was always locked. Dr Jefferson came in

every other day for a week, and a kindly young civilian therapist, Mona Pierce, talked to him daily. After a week (by then, Julian was convinced he was going to go insane) Jefferson jacked with him, and the next day, he was released.

The apartment was too neat. Julian went from room to room trying to figure out what was wrong, and then it hit him – Amelia must have hired someone to come in and clean. Neither of them had any instinct or talent in that direction. She must have found out when he was going to be released and squandered a few bucks on it. The bed was made with military precision – a dead giveaway – and on it was a note with today's date inside a heart.

He made a pot of coffee (spilling both water and grounds but scrupulously cleaning them up) and sat down to the console. There was a lot of mail stacked up for him, most of it awkward. A letter from the army giving him one month's leave at reduced pay, followed by a posting right on campus, not a mile from where he lived. The title was 'senior research assistant'; it was TDY, so he could live at home, 'hours to be arranged.' If he was reading between the lines correctly, the army was pretty well through with him, but on principle wouldn't just discharge him. It would be a bad example, being able to get out of the army just by killing yourself.

Mona Pierce had been a good listener who asked the right questions. She didn't condemn Julian for what he did – was angry at the military for not seeing it and discharging him before the inevitable happened – and didn't really disapprove of suicide in an absolute way, giving Julian tacit permission to do it again. But not over the boy. A lot of factors caused the boy's death, but Julian had been present against his will, and his part in it had been reflexive and appropriate.

If the personal mail had been awkward to write, it was doubly awkward to answer. He wound up with two basic replies: One was a simple 'Thanks for your concern; I'm okay now' brush-off, and the other was a more detailed explanation, for those who deserved it and wouldn't be too bothered by it. He was still working on that when Amelia came in, carrying a suitcase.

She hadn't been able to see him during the week he was incarcerated in the observation unit. He'd called as soon as he was released, but she wasn't at home. The office said she was out of town.

They embraced and said the obvious things. He poured her a cup of coffee without asking. 'I've never seen you look so tired. Still going back and forth to Washington?'

She nodded and took the cup. 'And Geneva and Tokyo. I had to talk with some people at CERN and Kyoto.' She looked at her watch. 'Midnight flight to Washington.'

'Jesus. What is it that's worth killing yourself over?' She looked at him for a moment and they both laughed, an embarrassed giggle.

She pushed the coffee away. 'Let's go set the alarm for ten-thirty and get some rest. You feel up to going to Washington?'

'Meet the mysterious Peter?'

'And do some math. I'm going to need all the help I can get, convincing Macro.'

'Of what? What's so damned…'

She slipped out of her dress and stood up. 'First bed. Then sleep. Then explanations.'

While Amelia and I sleepily dressed and threw together some clothes for the trip, she gave me a rough outline of what to expect in Washington. I didn't stay sleepy long.

If Amelia's conclusions about Peter Blankenship's theory proved correct, the Jupiter Project had to be shut down. It could literally destroy everything: the Earth, the solar system; the universe itself, eventually. It would recreate the Diaspora, the 'big bang' that started everything.

Jupiter and its satellites would be consumed in a fraction of a second; Earth and the Sun would have a few dozen minutes. Then the expanding bubble of particles and energy would muscle its way out to consume every star in the Galaxy, and then go on to the main course: the rest of everything.

One aspect of cosmology that the Jupiter Project had been designed to test was the 'accelerated universe' theory. It was almost a century old, and had survived in spite of inelegance and a prevailing skepticism over its 'ad hoc'-ness, because in model after model, the theory seemed to be necessary in order to account for what happened the tiniest fraction of a second after creation – 10^-35 of a second.

Simply stated, during that tiny period, you either had to temporarily increase the speed of light or make time elastic. For various reasons, the elasticity of time had always been the more likely explanation.

All of this took place when the universe was very tiny, growing from the size of a BB to the size of a small pea.

In the cab to the airport and during the flight, Amelia slept while I skimmed the field equations and tried to attack her method, using pseudo-operator theory. Pseudo-operator theory was so new I'd never applied it to a practical problem; Amelia had only heard of it. I needed to talk to some people about applying it, and to do it right required a lot more computing power than my notebook could muster.

(But suppose I did demonstrate they were wrong, and the Jupiter Project went ahead, but it turned out to be me and my new technique that were in error. A guy who couldn't live with killing one person would wind up destroying all life, everywhere.)

The danger was that the Jupiter Project would focus furious energies into a volume much smaller than a BB. Peter and Amelia thought that this would re-create, in reverse, the environment that characterized the universe when it was that small, and, an infinitesimal fraction of a second later, precipitate a tiny accelerated universe, and then a new Diaspora. It was bizarre to realize that something that happened in an area the size of a paramecium could trigger the end of the world. Of the universe.

Of course the only way of really checking it would be to do the experiment. Sort of like loading a gun and testing it by putting the muzzle in your mouth and pulling the trigger.

I thought of that metaphor while I was setting up operator conditions, typing on the plane, but didn't pass it on to Amelia. It occurred to me that a man who had recently tried to kill himself might not be the ideal companion for this particular venture.

Because of course the universe does end when you die. From whatever cause.

Amelia was still asleep, her head against the window, when we landed in Washington, and the change in vibration didn't wake her. I touched her awake and took down both our bags. She let me carry hers without protest, evidence of how tired she was.

I bought a pack of speedies at the airport newsstand while she called to make sure Peter was up. As she suspected, he was up and speeding, so we put the patches behind our ears and were wide awake by the time we got to the tube. Great stuff if you don't overdo it. I asked, and she confirmed that Peter was living on it.

Well, if your mission is saving the universe, what's a little sleep deprivation? Amelia was taking a lot of it, too, but coming down (with sleepies) to sleep three or four hours a day. If you don't do that, sooner or later you'll crash like a meteorite. Peter needed a complete and ironclad argument ready before he could allow himself to sleep, and knew he would pay for it.

Amelia had told him I was 'sick,' but hadn't elaborated. I suggested we call it food poisoning. Alcohol is a sort of a food.

He never asked. His interest in people began and ended with their usefulness to 'the Problem.' My credentials were that I could be trusted to keep my mouth shut and had been studying this new corner of analysis.

He met us at the door and gave me a cold damp handshake while he stared at me with pinpoint speedie pupils. As he led us to the office he gestured at an untouched tray of cold cuts and cheese that looked old enough to give you actual food poisoning.

The office was a familiar-looking mess of papers and readers and books. He had a console with a large double screen. One screen was a fairly straightforward Hamiltonian analysis and the other was a matrix (actually one visible face of a hypermatrix) full of numbers. Anybody familiar with cosmology could decode it; it was basically a chart of various aspects of the proto-universe as it aged from zero to ten thousand seconds old.

He gestured at that screen. 'Identify … can you identify the first three rows?'

'Yes,' I said, and paused long enough to gauge his sense of humor: none. 'The first row is the age of the universe in powers of ten. The second row is the temperature. The third row is the radius. You've left out the zero-th column.'

'Which is trivial.'

'As long as you know it's there. Peter … should I call you–'

'Peter. Julian.' He rubbed two or three days' worth of stubble. 'Blaze, let me freshen up before you tell me about Kyoto. Julian, familiarize yourself with the matrix. Touch to the left of the row if you have any questions about the variable.'

'Have you slept at all?' Amelia asked.

He looked at his watch. 'When did you leave? Three days ago? I slept a little then. Don't need it.' He strode out of the room.

'If he got one hour of sleep,' I said, 'he'd still be down.'

She shook her head. 'It's understandable. Are you ready for this? He's a real slave driver.'

I showed her a pinch of dark skin. 'It's in my heritage.'

My approach to the Problem was about as old as physics, post-Aristotle. First, I would take his initial conditions and, ignoring his Hamiltonians, see whether pseudo-operator theory came to the same conclusion. If it did, then the next thing, probably the only thing, we had to worry about was the initial conditions themselves. There were no experimental data about conditions close to the 'accelerated universe' regime. We could check some aspects of the Problem by instructing the Jupiter accelerator to crank up energies closer and closer to the critical point. But how close to the edge of a cliff do you want to push a robot when it might be forty-eight minutes between command and response? Not too close.

The next two days were a sleepless marathon of mathematics. We took a half hour off when we heard explosions outside and went up to the roof to watch the Fourth of July fireworks over the Washington Monument.

Watching the crash-bang of it, smelling the powder, I realized it was kind of a dilute preview of coming attractions. We had a little more than nine weeks. The Jupiter Project, if it went on schedule, would produce the critical energy level on September 14.

I think we all made the connection. We watched the finale silently and went back to work.

Peter knew a little about pseudo-operator analysis, and I knew a little about microcosmology; we spent a lot of time making sure I was understanding the questions and he was understanding the answers. But at the end of two days, I was as convinced as he and Blaze were. The Jupiter Project had to die.

Or we all had to die. A terrible thought occurred to me while I was twanging on speedies and black coffee: I could kill both of them with two blows. Then I could destroy all the records and kill myself.

I would become Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, to paraphrase a nuclear pioneer. With a simple act of violence, I could destroy the universe.

A good thing I was sane.

It wouldn't be difficult for the Project engineers to prevent the disaster; any random change of the position of a few elements of the ring would do it. The system had to line up just so in order to work: a circular collimation over a million kilometers in circumference that would last for less than a minute before gravity from Jupiter's moons pulled it apart forever. Of course that minute would be eons long compared to the tiny interval that was being simulated. And plenty of time for the accelerating surge to make one orbit and produce the supercharged speck that would end it all.

I was growing to like Peter, in spite of himself. He was a slave driver, but he drove himself harder than he did me or Amelia. He was temperamental and sarcastic and blew up about as regularly as Old Faithful. But I've never met anyone so absolutely dedicated to science. He was like a mad monk lost in his love of the divine.

Or so I thought.

Speedies or no, I'm still blessed and cursed with a soldier's body. In the soldierboy I was exercised constantly, to keep from cramping up; at the university I worked out every day, alternating an hour of running with an hour on the gym machines. So I could get along without sleep, but not without exercise. Every morning at dawn I'd excuse myself from the proceedings and go off to run.

I was systematically exploring downtown Washington during my morning jogs, taking the Metro down and going in a different direction each day. I'd seen most of the monuments (which might be more moving to someone who'd actually chosen to be a soldier) and ranged as far afield as the Washington Zoo and Alexandria, when I felt like doing a few extra miles.

Peter accepted the fact that I had to have the exercise to keep from cramping up. I also contended that it cleared my head, but he pointed out that his head was clear enough, and the only exercise he got was wrestling with cosmology.

That was not entirely true. On the fifth day I got almost all the way to the Metro station and realized I'd left my card behind. I jogged on back to the apartment and let myself in.

My street clothes were in the living room, by the foldout bed that Amelia and I shared. I took the card out of my wallet and started back to the front door, but then heard a noise from the study. The door was partly open; I looked in.

Amelia was sitting on the edge of the table, naked from the waist down, her legs scissored around Peter's bald head. She was gripping the edge of the table so hard her knuckles were bone-white, her face to the ceiling in a rictus of orgasm.

I closed the door with a quiet click and ran out.

I ran as hard as I could for several hours, stopping a few times to buy water and choke it down. When I got to the border gate between D.C. and Maryland, I couldn't get through because I didn't have my interstate pass. So I stopped running and slid into a dive called the Border Bar, icy air sharp with tobacco smoke, legal in D.C. I drank down a liter of beer and then sipped another liter with a shot of whiskey.

The combination of speedies and alcohol is not entirely pleasant. Your mind goes off in all directions.

When we first started going together, we talked about fidelity and jealousy. There's a kind of generation problem: When I was in my teens and early twenties, there was a lot of sexual experimentation and swapping around, with the defendable basis that sex is biology and love is something else, and a couple could negotiate the two issues independently. Fifteen years earlier, when Amelia had been that age, attitudes were more conservative – no sex without love, and then monogamy afterward.

She agreed at the time to go along with my principles – or lack of same, her contemporaries might say – even though we both thought it was unlikely we would exercise our freedom.

So now she had, and for some reason it was devastating. Less than a year ago, I would have jumped at the opportunity of having sex with Sara, jacked or not. So what right did I have to feel injured because she had done exactly the same thing? She'd been living with Peter more closely than most married couples live, for quite a while, and she respected him enormously, and if he asked for sex, why not say yes?

I had a feeling it was she who had asked, though. She certainly had been enjoying it.

I finished the drinks and switched to iced coffee, which tasted like cold battery acid, even with three sugars.

Did she know that I'd seen? I had closed the door automatically, but they might not remember having left it slightly open. Sometimes the current from the airco cycling on and off would ease a door shut.

'You look lonely, soldier.' I did my running in fatigue uniform, in case I wanted an unrationed beer. 'You look sad.' She was pretty, blond, maybe twenty.

'Thanks,' I said, 'but I'm all right.'

She sat down on the stool next to me and showed me her ID, professional name Zoë, medical inspection only one day old. Only one customer had signed the book. 'I'm not just a whore. I'm also a professional expert on men, and you're not "all right." You look like you're about to jump off a bridge.'

'So let me.'

'Huh-uh. Not enough men around to waste one.' She lifted up the back of her wig. 'Not enough jacked men, anyhow.'

Her off-white shift was raw silk, hanging loosely on her graceful athletic body, revealing nothing and everything: This merchandise is so good I don't have to advertise.

'I've used up most of my entertainment points,' I said. 'Can't afford you.'

'Hey, I'm not doing any business. Give you one for free. Got a dime for the jack?'

I did have ten dollars. 'Yeah, but look. I've had too much to drink.'

'No such thing, with me.' She smiled, perfect hungry teeth. 'Money-back guarantee, I'll refund your dime.'

'You just want to do it jacked.'

'And I like soldiers. Was one.'

'Come on. You're not old enough.'

'I'm older than I look. And I wasn't in for long.'

'What happened?'

She tilted toward me so that I could see her breasts. 'One way to find out,' she whispered.

There was a jack joint two doors down. In a few minutes I was in the dark humid cube with this intimate stranger, memories and feelings crashing together and mingling. I felt our finger slide easily into our vagina, tasted the salt sweat and musk of our penis, sucking it rigid. Breasts radiating. We shifted around so we were two mouths working together. There was a slight distracting ache from two of her molars that needed work. She was terrified of dentists and all of her beautiful front teeth were plastic.

She had thought about suicide but never attempted it, and our sexual rhythm faltered while she relived my memory – but she understood! She had spent one day as a mechanic, assigned to a hunter/killer platoon by a clerical error. She watched two people die and had a nervous breakdown, her soldierboy paralyzed.

She knew nothing of science or mathematics, physical education major, and although she felt my end-of-the-world anxiety, she just linked it with the suicide attempt. For several minutes, we stopped the sex and just held on to each other, sharing sorrows at a level that's hard to describe, independent of actual memory, I suppose body chemistry talking to body chemistry.

There was a two-minute warning chime and we re-coupled, hardly moving, slight internal contractions bringing us to a slow-flowing orgasm.

And then we were standing in the lemon heat of the afternoon sun, trying to figure out what to say.

She squeezed my hand. 'You aren't going to do it again – kill yourself?'

'I don't think so.'

'I know what you think. But you're still 'way too upset about him and her.'

'You helped with that. Having you, being you.'

'Oh.' She handed me her card and I signed on the back.

'Even when you don't charge?' I said.

'Except for husbands,' she said. 'Your own, that is.' Her brow furrowed. 'I got a little ghost of something.'

I felt a sudden new sweat break out. 'Of what?'

'You jacked with her. Only once? Once and a … another time that, that wasn't really the real thing?'

'Yeah. She had a jack put in, but it didn't take.'

'Oh. I'm sorry.' She came close and plucked at my shirt. She looked up at me and whispered, 'The stuff I was thinking about you being black, you know I'm not a racist or anything.'

'I know.' She was, in a way, but not malicious and not in a way she could control.

'The other two…'

'Don't worry about it.' She'd had only two other black customers, jacked, full of anger and passion. 'We come in all flavors.'

'You're so cool, so thoughtful. Not cold. She ought to hang on to you.'

'Can I give her your phone number? For a reference?'

She giggled. 'Let her bring it up. Let her talk first.'

'I'm not sure she knows I saw them.'

'If she doesn't know, she will know. You got to give her time to work out what she's gonna say.'

'Okay. I'll wait.'

'Promise?'

'I promise.'

She stood up on tiptoe and kissed me on the cheek. 'You need me, you know how to get me.'

'Yeah.' I repeated her number. 'Hope you have a good day.'

'Ah, men. Never get any real action before sundown.' She waved with two fingers and walked away, the silk artfully revealing and concealing with every step, a flesh metronome. I had a sudden backflash and for a moment I was in her body again, warm with afterglow and hunting for more. A woman who enjoyed her work.

It was three o'clock; I'd been gone for six hours. Peter would throw a fit. I took the Metro back and got an armload of groceries at the station store.

Peter didn't say anything, and neither did Amelia. Either they knew that I'd seen them, and were embarrassed, or they'd been too busy to worry about my absence. Whichever, this week's bundle of data had come in from Jupiter, and that meant a few hours of painstaking sorting and redundancy checks.

I put away the groceries and told them chicken stew tonight. We alternated cooking – rather, Amelia and I alternated cooking; Pete always called out for pizza or Thai. He had some private source of money, and got around the rationing because he'd wangled a reserve commission in the Coast Guard. He even had a captain's uniform hanging in plastic in the front hall closet, but he didn't know whether it fit.

The new data gave me plenty to do, too; pseudo-operator analysis requires some careful planning before you actually start to grind numbers through it. I tried to put the disturbing events of the day behind me, and concentrate on physics. I was only partly successful, Whenever I glanced over at Amelia I had a flash of her face lost in ecstasy, and a pang of reactive defiance and guilt over Zoë.

At seven I put the chicken into a pot of water and dumped the frozen vegetables on top; sliced up an onion and added it with some garlic. Zapped it to a quick boil and then left it to simmer for forty-five minutes, while I put on headphones and listened to some of this new Ethiopian stuff. The enemy, but their music is more interesting than ours.

Our custom was to eat at eight and watch at least the first part of the Harold Burley Hour, a Washington news distillation for people who could read without moving their lips.

Costa Rica was quiet today; fighting in Lagos, Ecuador, Rangoon, Magreb. The Geneva peace talks continued their elaborate charade.

It had rained frogs in Texas. They actually had amateur footage of that. Then a zoologist explained how it was all just an illusion caused by sudden local flooding. Nah. Secret Ngumi weapon; they'll go hopping all over the country and then suddenly explode, releasing poison frog gas. I'm a scientist; I know these things.

There was a consumer 'demonstration' in Mexico City, which would have been called a riot if it had happened in enemy territory. Someone had gotten hold of the three-hundred-page manifest that detailed what was actually created last month with their 'most favored nation' nanoforges. To everyone's surprise, most of it had been used to make luxuries for the rich. That was not what the public record had said.

Closer to home, Amnesty International was trying to subpoena the strings recording the activities of a 12th Division hunter/killer platoon that had been accused of torture, in an operation in rural Bolivia. Of course it was all pro forma; the request was going to be held up by technicalities until the heat death of the universe. Or until the crystals could be destroyed and convincing fakes synthesized. Everybody, including Amnesty International, knew that there were 'black' operations whose existence was not even recorded at the division level.

A potential terrorist had been stopped at the Brooklyn Bridge customs point and summarily executed. As usual, no details were available.

Disney revealed plans for a Disneyworld in low Earth orbit, first launch scheduled to go up in twelve months. Peter pointed out that that was significant because of the inside information it implied. The area around the half-completed Chimborazo spaceport had been 'pacified' for more than a year. Disney wouldn't start building if they hadn't had a guarantee that there would be a way of getting customers up there. So we were going to have routine civilian spaceflight again.

Amelia and I had shared a bottle of wine with dinner. I declared that I wanted to get a few hours' sleep before I pasted a new patch, and Amelia said she'd join me.

I was lying under the covers, wide awake, when she finished in the bathroom and slid in next to me. She held herself still for a moment, not touching.

'I'm sorry you saw us,' she said.

'Well, it's always been part of our arrangement. The freedom.'

'I didn't say I was sorry I did it.' She turned on her side, facing me in the darkness. 'Though maybe I am. I said I was sorry you saw us.'

That was reasonable. 'Has it always been like this, then? Other men?'

'Do you really want me to answer that? You'll have to answer the same question.'

'That's easy. One woman, one time, today.'

She put her palm on my chest. 'I'm sorry. Now I feel like a real shit.' She stroked me with her thumb, over my heart. 'It's only been Peter, and only since you … you took the pills. I just, I don't know. I just couldn't stand it.'

'You didn't tell him why.'

'No, as I said. He just thought you were sick. He's not the kind of man to press for details.'

'But he is the kind of man to press … for other things.'

'Come on.' She scrunched over so her body was long against my side. 'Most unattached men constantly radiate their availability. He didn't have to ask, I think all I did was put a hand on his shoulder.'

'And then surrender to the inevitable.'

'I suppose. If you want me to ask for your forgiveness, I'm asking.'

'No. Do you love him?'

'What? Peter? No.'

'Case closed, then.' I rolled over on my side to embrace her and then tipped her onto her back, pressing against her lightly. 'Let's make some noise.'

I was able to start, but not finish; I wilted inside of her. When I tried to continue with my hand, she said no, let's just sleep. I couldn't.

The case was not closed, of course. The encounter with Zoë kept coming back to him, resonating with all the complicated emotions he still felt for Carolyn, dead more than three years. Sex with Amelia was as different as a snack is from a feast. If he wanted a feast every day, there were thousands of jills in Portobello and Texas who would be more than willing. He wasn't that hungry.

And although he appreciated Amelia's directness, he wasn't sure he quite believed her. If she did feel some love for Peter, under the circumstances she could justify lying about it, to spare Julian's feelings. She certainly hadn't looked casual, his face buried in her womanhood.

But there was time for all that later. Julian finally fell asleep some seconds before the alarm went off. He groped around for the box of speedie patches and they both took a paste. By the time they were dressed, the cobwebs were melting away and Julian was one cup of coffee away from math.

After they ground the fresh data through the mill, Julian's modern method and Peter's tried-and-true, all three were convinced. Amelia had been writing up the results; they spent half a day cutting and fine-tuning it, and zapped it to the Astrophysical Journal for peer review.

'A lot of people will want our heads,' Peter said. 'I'm going to go away for about ten days, and not take a phone. Sleep for a week.'

'Where to?' Amelia asked.

'Place down in the Virgin Islands. Want to come?'

'No, I'd feel out of place.' They all laughed nervously. 'We have to teach, anyhow.'

There was a little discussion over that, optimistic on Peter's part and exasperated on Amelia's. She already had been missing one or two classes a week, so why not a few more? Because she had already missed so many, she insisted.

Julian and Amelia flew back to Texas thoroughly exhausted, still running on speedies since they didn't dare come down until the weekend. They went through the motions of teaching and grading, waiting for their world to fall apart. None of their colleagues was on the Aph. J. review board currently, and apparently no one was consulted.

Friday morning, Amelia got a terse note from Peter: 'Peer review report due this afternoon. Optimistic.'

Julian was downstairs. She buzzed him up and showed him the message. 'I think we might want to make ourselves scarce,' he said. 'If Macro finds out about it before he leaves the office, he'll call us up. Just as soon wait till Monday.'

'Coward,' she said. 'Me, too. Why don't we go out to the Saturday Night Special early? We could kill some time at the gene zoo.'

The gene zoo was the Museum of Genetic Experimentation, a place that was regularly closed by animal rights groups and reopened by lawyers. Ostensibly, the privately owned museum was a showcase for groundbreaking technology in genetic manipulation. Actually, it was a freak show, one of the most popular entertainments in Texas.

It was only a ten-minute walk from the Saturday Night Special, but they hadn't been there since the last time it was reopened. There were lots of new exhibits.

Some of the preserved specimens were fascinating, but the real attraction was the live ones, the actual zoo. They had somehow managed to contrive a snake with twelve legs. But they couldn't teach it how to walk. It would step forward with all six pairs at once, and lurch in one rippling flop after another – not a conspicuous advance over slithering. Amelia pointed out that the legs' connection to the animal's nervous system must be the same as goes to a normal snake's ribs, which undulate together to make it move.

The value of a more mobile snake might be questionable, and the poor creature obviously was made just as a curiosity, but another new one did have a practical application, besides scaring children: a spider the size of a pillow that spun a thick strong web back and forth on a frame, like a living loom. The resulting cloth, or mat, had surgical applications.

There was a pygmy cow, less than a meter tall, that wasn't touted as having any practical purpose. Julian suggested that it could answer the dairy needs of people like them, who liked cream in their coffee, if you could figure out how to milk it. It didn't move like a cow, though; it waddled around with earnest curiosity, probably gene-jumped with a beagle.

To save credits and money, we went to the zoo snack machines for some bread and cheese. There was a covered area behind the place with picnic tables, new since the last time we'd been there. We got a table to ourselves in the afternoon heat.

'So how much do we say to the gang?' I said, slicing cheddar in crumbling chunks with a plastic knife. I had my puttyknife but it would make a raclette out of the stuff, or a bomb.

'About you? Or the Project?'

'You haven't been there since I was in the hospital?' She shook her head. 'Let's not bring it up. I meant should we talk about Peter's findings; our findings.'

'No reason not to. It'll be common knowledge tomorrow.'

I stacked an uneven pile of cheese on a slab of dark bread and passed it to her on a napkin. 'Rather talk about that than me.'

'People will know. Marty, for sure.'

'I'll talk to Marty. If I have a chance.'

'I think maybe the end of the universe might upstage you, anyhow.'

'It does put things into perspective.'

The half-mile walk to the Saturday Night Special was hot and dusty, even with the sun setting; a chalky kind of dust. We were glad to step into the air-conditioning. Marty and Belda were there, sharing a plate of appetizers. 'Julian. How are you?' Marty said with careful neutrality.

'All right now. Talk about it later?' He nodded. Belda said nothing, concentrating on dissecting a shrimp. 'Anything new on the project with Ray? The empathy thing.'

'Quite a bit of new data, actually, though Ray's more up to date on it. That terrible thing with the children, Iberia?'

'Liberia,' I said.

'Three of the people we were studying witnessed that. It was hard on them.'

'Hard on everybody. The children, especially.'

'Monsters,' Belda said, looking up. 'You know I'm not political, and I'm not maternal, either. But what could have been in their minds, to think that something so terrible could help their cause?'

'It's not just a warrior mentality,' Amelia said. 'Doing that to your own people.'

'Most of the Ngumi thinks we did it,' Marty said, 'and just manipulated things to make it look like they did … as you say, no one would do that to their own people. That's proof enough right there.'

'You think it was all a cynical plan?' Amelia said. 'I can't imagine.'

'No, the word we have – this is confidential and unsupported – is that it was one lunatic officer and a few followers. They're all disposed of now, and Ngumi Psychops, such as they are, are doing a lot of smoke and mirrors, proving that for some reason we would want to destroy a school full of innocent children, to make a point. To show how ruthless the Ngumi are, when of course everyone knows they're the army of and for the people.'

'And they're buying it?' I asked.

'A lot of Central and South America is. You haven't been watching the news?"

'Off and on. What was the thing with Amnesty International?'

'Oh, the army let one of their lawyers jack into any string he wanted, on condition of confidentiality. He could testify that everyone was genuinely surprised by the atrocity, most people horrified. That's pretty much gotten us off the hook in Europe, and even Africa and Asia. Didn't make the news down south.'

Asher and Reza came in together. 'Hey, welcome back, you two. Run off and get married?'

'Ran off,' Amelia said quickly, 'but to work. We've been up in Washington.'

'Government business?' Asher said.

'No. But it will be, after the weekend.'

'Can we wheedle it out of you? Or is it too technical?'

'Not technical, not the most important part.' She turned to Marty. 'Is Ray coming?'

'No; he had a family thing.'

'Okay. Let's get our drinks. Julian and I have a story to tell.'

Once the waiter had delivered the wine and coffee and whiskey and disappeared, Amelia started the tale, the threat of absolute intergalactic doom. I added a few details here and there. Nobody interrupted.

Then there was a long pause. There had probably not been that many consecutive seconds of silence in all the years this group had been getting together.

Asher cleared his throat. 'Of course the jury's not in yet. Literally.'

'That's true,' Amelia said. 'But the fact that Julian and Peter got the same results – down to eight significant figures! – using two different starting points and two independent methods … well, I'm not worried about the jury. I'm just worried about the politics of shutting down such a huge project. And a little worried about where I'll be working next year. Next week.'

'Ah,' Belda said. 'You've done a good job with the trees. Surely you've thought about the forest as well.'

'That it's a weapon?' I said, and Belda nodded slowly. 'Yes. It's the ultimate doomsday weapon. It has to be dismantled.'

'But the forest is bigger than that,' Belda said, and sipped her coffee. 'Suppose you don't just dismantle it – you destroy it without a trace. You go through the literature and erase every line that relates to the Jupiter Project. And then you have government goons go out and kill everyone who's ever heard of it. What happens then?'

'You tell me,' I said. 'You're going to.'

'The obvious. In ten years, or a hundred, or a million, somebody else will come up with the idea. And they'll be squashed, too. But then in another ten or a million years, somebody else will come up with it. Sooner or later, somebody will threaten to use it. Or not even threaten. Just do it. Because they hate the world enough they want everything to die.'

There was another long silence. 'Well,' I said, 'that solves one mystery. People wonder where physical law comes from. I mean, supposedly, all the laws governing matter and energy had to be created with the pinprick that began the Diaspora. It seems impossible, or unnecessary.'

'So if Belda's right,' Amelia said, 'physical law was all in place. Twenty billion years ago, someone pushed the "reset" button.'

'And some billions of years before that,' Belda said, 'someone had done it before. The universe only lasts long enough to evolve creatures like us.' She pointed a V of bony fingers at Amelia and me. 'People like you two.'

Well, it didn't really solve the first-cause mystery; sooner or later there had to be an actual first time.

'I wonder,' Reza said. 'Surely in all the millions of galaxies there are other races who've made this discovery. Thousands or millions of times. They evidently have all been psychologically incapable of doing it, destroying us all.'

'Evolved beyond it,' Asher said. 'A pity we haven't.' He swirled the ice in his whiskey. 'If Hitler had had the button in his bunker … or Caligula, Genghis Khan…'

'Hitler only missed the boat by a century,' Reza said. 'I guess we haven't evolved past the possibility of producing another one.'

'And won't,' Belda said. 'Aggression's a survival characteristic. It put us at the top of the food chain.'

'Cooperation did,' Amelia corrected. 'Aggression doesn't work against a saber-toothed tiger.'

'A combination, I'll grant you,' Belda said.

'Cooperation and aggression,' Marty said. 'So a soldierboy platoon is the ultimate expression of human superiority over the beasts.'

'You couldn't tell that by some of them,' I said. 'Some of them seem to have devolved.'

'But allow me to keep this on track.' Marty steepled his fingers. 'Think of it this way. The race against time has begun. Sometime within the next ten or a million years, we have to direct human evolution away from aggressive behavior. In theory, it's not impossible. We've directed the evolution of many other species.'

'Some in one generation,' Amelia said. 'There's a zoo full of them down the road.'

'Delightful place,' Belda said.

'We could do it in one generation,' Marty said quietly. 'Less.' The others all looked at him.

'Julian,' he said, 'why don't mechanics stay in soldierboys for more than nine days?'

I shrugged. 'Fatigue. Stay in too long and you get sloppy.'

'That's what they tell you. That's what they tell everybody. They think it's the truth.' He looked around uneasily. They were the only people in the room, but he lowered his voice. 'This is secret. Very secret. If Julian were going back to his platoon, I couldn't say it, because then too many people would know. But I can trust everyone here.'

'With a military secret?' Reza said.

'Not even the military knows. Ray and I have kept this from them, and it hasn't been easy.

'Up in North Dakota there's a convalescent home with sixteen inmates. There's nothing really wrong with them. They stay there because they know they have to.'

'People you and Ray worked on?' I asked.

'Exactly. More than twenty years ago. They're middle-aged now, and know they'll probably have to spend the rest of their lives in seclusion.'

'What the hell did you do to them?' Reza said.

'Eight of them stayed jacked into soldierboys for three weeks. The other eight for sixteen days.'

'That's all?' I said.

'That's all.'

'It drove them crazy?' Amelia asked.

Belda laughed, a rare sound, not happy. 'I'll bet not. I'll bet it drove them sane.'

'Belda's close,' Marty said. 'She has this annoying way of being able to read your mind without benefit of electricity.

'What happens is that after a couple of weeks in the soldierboy, you paradoxically can't be a soldier anymore.'

'You can't kill?' I said.

'You can't even hurt anybody on purpose, except to save your own life. Or other lives. It permanently changes your way of thinking, of feeling; even after you unjack. You've been inside other people too long, shared their identity. Hurting another person would be as painful as hurting yourself.'

'Not pure pacifists, though,' Reza said. 'Not if they can kill in self-defense.'

'It varies from individual to individual. Some would rather die than kill, even in self-defense.'

'Is that what happens to people like Candi?' I asked.

Not really. People like her are chosen for empathy, for gentleness. You would expect being jacked to enhance those qualities in them.'

'You just used random people in the experiment?' Reza asked.

He nodded. 'The first one was random paid volunteers, off-duty soldiers. But not the second group.' He leaned forward. 'Half the second group were Special Forces assassins. The other half were civilians who had been convicted of murder.'

'And they all became … civilized?' Amelia said.

'The verb we use is "humanized,"' Marty said.

'If a hunter/killer platoon stayed jacked for two weeks,' I said, 'they'd turn into pussycats?'

'So we assume. This was done before hunter/killers, of course; before soldierboys were used in combat.'

Asher had been following this quietly. 'It seems to me absurd to assume that the military hasn't duplicated your experiment. Then figured out a way around this inconvenient aberration, pacifism. Humanization.'

Not impossible, Asher, but unlikely. I'm jacked, one-way, with hundreds of military people, from private to general. If anyone was involved in an experiment, or had even heard a rumor of one, I would know.'

Not if everyone in authority was also jacked one-way. And the experimental subjects isolated, like yours, or disposed of.'

That was worth a moment of silence. Would military scientists have inconvenient subjects killed?

'I'll admit the possibility,' Marty said, 'but it's remote. Ray and I coordinate all the military research on soldierboys. For someone to get a project approved, funded, and implemented without our being aware … possible. But it's possible to flip a coin and come up heads a hundred times in a row.'

'Interesting that you bring up numbers, Marty,' Reza said. He'd been scribbling on a napkin. 'Take a best-case scenario, where you have everyone agreeing to become humanized, and lining up to get jacked.

'First of all, one out of ten or twelve dies or goes crazy. I'm already trying to figure ways to get out of it.'

'Well, we don't know–'

'Let me go on just a second. If it's one out of twelve, you're killing six hundred million people to ensure that the rest of them won't kill anybody. You're already making Hitler look like an amateur, by two orders of magnitude.'

'There's more, I'm sure,' Marty said.

'There is. What do we have, six thousand soldierboys? Say we build a hundred thousand. Everybody has to spend two weeks jacked – and that's after they spend five days getting their brains drilled out and recovering. Call it twenty days per person. Assuming seven billion survive the surgery, that's seven thousand people per machine. It sounds like a hundred forty thousand days to me. That's almost four hundred years. Then we all live happily ever after – the ones who live at all.'

'Let me see that.' Reza handed the napkin to Marty. He traced the column of figures with-his finger. 'One thing that's not in here is the fact that you don't need a whole soldierboy. Just the basic brain-to-brain wiring, and IV drips for nourishment. We could set up a million stations, not a hundred thousand. Ten million. That reduces the time scale to four years.'

'But not the half-billion deaths,' Belda said. 'It's academic to me, since I only plan on living a few more years. But it does seem a high price to ask.'

Asher pushed the button for the waiter. 'This didn't come off the top of your head, Marty. How long have you been thinking about it, twenty years?'

'Something like that,' he admitted, and shrugged. 'You don't really need the death of the universe. We've been on a slippery slope since Hiroshima. Since World War One, actually.'

'A secret pacifist working for the military?' Belda said.

Not secret. The army tolerates theoretical pacifism – look at Julian – so long as it doesn't interfere with work. Most of the generals I know would call themselves pacifists.'

The waiter shambled in and took the order. When he left, I said, 'Marty's got a point. It's not just the Jupiter Project. There are plenty of lines of research that could ultimately lead to the planet being sterilized, or destroyed. Even if the rest of the universe is unaffected.'

'You're already jacked,' Reza said, and finished his wine. 'You don't get a vote.'

'What about people like me?' Amelia said. 'Who try to be jacked and fail? Maybe you can put us in a nice concentration camp, where we can't hurt anybody.'

Asher laughed. 'Come on, Blaze. This is just a thought experiment, Marty's not seriously proposing–'

Marty slapped the table with his palm. 'Damn it, Asher! I've never been more serious in my life.'

'Then you're crazy. It's never going to happen.'

Marty turned to Amelia. 'In the past, it's never been imperative that any one person be jacked. If it became an effort on the order of your Jupiter Project – the Manhattan Project – all the work that's been begging to be done would be done!' To Reza: 'The same with your half-billion dead. This isn't something that would have to be implemented overnight. A lot of cautious, controlled research, refinement of techniques, and the casualty rate would dwindle, maybe to zero.'

'Then to put it in the least kind terms,' Asher said, 'you're accusing the army of murder. Granted, that's what they're supposed to do, but it's supposed to be people on the other side.' Marty looked quizzical. 'I mean, if you have thought all along that jacking installation could be made safe, why hasn't the army held off on making new mechanics until it is safe?'

'It's not the army who's a murderer, you're saying. It's me. Researchers like me and Ray.'

'Oh, don't get dramatic. I'm sure you've done your best. But I've always felt the human cost of the program was way too high.'

'I agree,' Marty said, 'and it's not just the one-in-twelve installation casualties. Mechanics have an unacceptably high death rate from stroke and heart attack.' He looked away from me. 'And suicide, during their enlistment or after.'

'The death rate for soldiers is high,' I said. 'That's not news. But it's part of the argument: get rid of soldiering as an occupation.

'Suppose we could develop a way that jacking was a hundred percent successful, with absolutely no casualties. There's still no way you could get everyone to do it. I can just see the Ngumi lining up to have their heads drilled by a bunch of Alliance demon-scientists! Hell, you couldn't even convert our own military. Once the generals found out what you were doing, you'd be history. You'd be compost!'

'Maybe so. Maybe so.' The waiter was bringing our drinks. Marty looked at me and stroked his chin. 'You feel up to jacking?'

'I suppose.'

'Free at ten tomorrow?'

'Yeah, until two.'

'Come by my place. I need your input.'

'You guys are going to hook up together and change the world?' Amelia said. 'Save the universe?'

Marty laughed. 'That's not exactly what I had in mind.' But it was, exactly.

Julian had to bicycle a mile through much-needed rain to get to Marty's lab, so he didn't arrive in too festive a mood.

Marty found him a towel, and a lab coat against the airco chill. They sat on a couple of straight-back chairs by the test bed, which was literally two beds, equipped with full-face helmets. There was a nice view of the sodden campus, ten stories down.

'I gave my assistants the Saturday off,' Marty said, 'and routed all my incoming calls to my home office. We won't be disturbed.'

'At doing what?' Julian said. 'What do you have in mind?'

'I won't know for sure until we're linked. But I'd just as soon keep it between ourselves, for the time being.' He pointed to the data console on the other side of the room. 'If one of my assistants was here, she could patch in one-way and eavesdrop.'

Julian got up and inspected the test bed. 'Where's the interrupt button?'

'You don't need one. You want out, just think "quit" and the link is broken.' Julian looked doubtful. 'It's new. I'm not surprised you haven't seen it before.'

'Otherwise, you're in control'

'Nominally. I control the sensorium, but that's trivial for conversation. I'll change it to whatever you want.'

'One-way?'

'We can start out one-way and go limited two-way, "stream of conversation," on mutual consent.' As Julian knew, Marty couldn't jack deeply with anyone; he'd had the ability removed for security reasons. 'Nothing like you and your platoon. We can't really read each other's minds. Just communicate more quickly and clearly.'

'Okay.' Julian hiked himself up on the bed and let out a long breath. 'Let's get on with it.' They both lay down and worked their necks into the soft collars, slipped the plastic sleeves off the water tubes and moved their heads around until the jacks clicked. Then the front half hinged shut over their faces.

An hour later the masks sighed open. Julian's face was slick with sweat.

Marty sat up, looking refreshed. 'Am I wrong?'

'I don't think so. But I'd better go to North Dakota anyhow.'

'It's nice this time of year. Dry.'

It wasn't raining when I left Marty's lab, but that turned out to be temporary. I saw a squall line coming at me down the street but was providentially right by the Student Center. I locked up the bike and got through the doors just as the storm hit.

There's a bright and noisy coffee place under the dome on the top of the building. That felt right. I'd spent too long cooped up in two skulls, contemplating skullduggery.

It was crowded for a Saturday, I guess because of the weather. It took me ten minutes to get through the line and negotiate a cup of coffee and a roll, and then there was no place to sit. But the inside of the dome had a ledge at the proper height for parking against.

I reviewed what I'd taken from Marty's brain:

The 10 percent casualty figure for jacking didn't tell the whole story. The raw figures were that 7.5 percent die, 2.3 percent are mentally disabled, 2.5 percent are slightly impaired, and 2 percent wind up like Amelia, unharmed but not jacked.

But the classified part is that more than half of the deaths are draftees who were slated to be mechanics, killed by the complexity of the soldierboy interface. Many of the others are due to undertrained surgeons and bad operating conditions in Mexico and Central America. On the large scale Marty was talking about, you wouldn't use human surgeons at all, except for oversight. Automated brain surgery, Jesus. But Marty claimed it was a couple of orders of magnitude simpler when you didn't have to wire into a soldierboy.

And even if it were ten percent death, the alternative is one hundred percent, chasing life all the way out to Hubble's Wall.

Still, how do you get normal people to do it? Civilians who do it fit pretty narrow profiles: empaths, thrill-seekers; the chronically lonely and the sexually ambiguous. A lot of people who are in Amelia's position: someone they love is jacked, and they want to be there.

The basic strategy is, first, you don't give it away. One thing we've learned from the Universal Welfare State is that people devalue things they don't pay for. It would cost a month of entertainment credits – but as a matter of fact, you'd be spending most of that month unconscious, anyhow.

And the empowerment factor will become compelling after a very few years: people who aren't humanized will be less successful in the world. Maybe less happy, too, though that's harder to demonstrate.

Another little problem was what to do with people like Amelia? They couldn't be jacked, and so they couldn't be humanized. They would be handicapped and angry – and able to do violence. Two percent of six billion is 120 million people. One wolf for every forty-nine sheep is another way of looking at it. Marty suggested that initially we relocate all of them onto islands, asking all the humanized islanders to emigrate.

Anybody could live comfortably anywhere, once we use the nano-forges to make other nanoforges and give them out freely to everyone, Ngumi or Alliance.

But the first order of business was to humanize the soldierboys and their leaders. That meant infiltrating Building 31 and isolating the high command for a couple of weeks. Marty had a plan for that, the War College in Washington ordering a simulation exercise that required isolation.

I was to be a 'mole.' Marty had had my records modified, so that I'd just had an understandable episode of nervous exhaustion. 'Sergeant Class is fit for duty, but it is recommended that Portobello take advantage of his education and experience, and transfer him to the command cadre.' Prior to that, he would do some selective memory transfer and storage: I would temporarily forget the suicide attempt, the takeover plot, and the apocalyptic results of the Jupiter Project. I would just go in and be myself.

My old platoon, as part of another 'experiment,' would stay jacked long enough to become humanized, and I could be inside Building 31 to open the door for them when they came in to replace the security platoon.

The generals would be treated well. Marty would have temporary attachment orders cut for a neurosurgeon and her anesthesiologist from a base in Panama; together they have a phenomenal success rate of ninety-eight percent in jack installation.

Today, Building 31; tomorrow, the world. We could work outward from Portobello, and downward from Marty's Pentagon contact, and quickly have all of the armed forces humanized. The war would end, incidentally. But the larger battle would just be beginning.

I stared out at the campus through the blurring sheets of water while I ate the sweet crab-apple roll. Then I leaned back against the glass and surveyed the coffee shop, coming back down to earth.

Most of these people were only ten or twelve years younger than me. It seemed impossible, an unbridgeable chasm. But maybe I was never quite in that world – chatter, giggle, flirt – even when I was their age. I had my head in a book or a console all the time. The girls I had sex with back then were in the same voluntarily cloistered minority, glad to share quick relief and get back to the books. I'd had terrible earthshaking loves before college, like everybody, but after I was eighteen or nineteen I settled for sex, and in that era there was plenty of it. Now the pendulum was swinging back to the conservatism of Amelia's generation.

Would that all change, if Marty had his way – if we had our way? There's no intimacy like being jacked, and a lot of the intensity of teenaged sex was fueled by a curiosity that jacking would satisfy in the first minute. It remains interesting to share experiences and thoughts with the opposite sex, but the overall gestalt of being male or female is just there, and is familiar a few minutes after you make contact. I have physical memories of childbirth and miscarriage, menstruation and breasts getting in the way. It bothers Amelia that I share cramps and PMS with my platoon; that all the women have been embarrassed by involuntary erections, have ejaculated, know how the scrotum limits the ways you sit and walk and cross your legs.

Amelia got a taste of that, a whisper, in the two minutes or less we had in Mexico. Maybe part of our problem now was rooted in her frustration at having had just a glimpse. We'd only had sex a couple of times since the abortive attempt the night after I saw her with Peter. The night after I jackfucked with Zoë, to be fair. And there was so much happening, the end of the universe and all, that we hadn't had time or inclination to work on our own problems.

The place smelled kind of like a gym crossed with a wet dog, with an overlay of coffee, but the boys and girls didn't seem to notice. Searching, preening, displaying – a lot more outright primate behavior than they revealed in a physics class.

Watching all that casual mating ritual simmering, I felt a little sad and old, and wondered whether Amelia and I would ever completely reconcile. It was partly that I couldn't get the picture of her and Peter out of my mind. But I had to admit that part of it was Zoë, and all her tribe. We'd all felt kind of sorry for Ralph, his endless harrying after jills. But we'd also felt his ecstasy, which had never diminished.

I shocked myself by wondering whether I could live like that, and in the same instant shocked myself again by admitting I could. Relationships emotionally limited, temporarily passionate. And then back to real life for awhile, until the next one.

The undeniable lure of that extra dimension – feeling her feeling you, thoughts and sensations twining together – in my heart I'd built a wall around that, labeled it 'Carolyn,' and shut the door. But now I had to admit that it had been pretty impressive just with a stranger; however skilled and sympathetic, still a stranger, with no pretending about love.

No pretending: that was true in more than one way. Marty was right. Something like love was there automatically. Sex aside, for several minutes she and I had been closer, in terms of knowing, than some normal couple who'd been together fifty years. It does start to fade as soon as you unjack, and a few days later, it's the memory of a memory. Until you jack again, and it slams back. So if you kept it going for two weeks, it would change you forever? I could believe that.

I left Marty without discussing a timetable, which was literally an unspoken agreement. We wanted time to sort through each other's thoughts.

I also didn't discuss how he was able to have military medical records altered and have pretty high-ranking officers shuffled around at will. We hadn't been jacked deeply enough for that information to come through. There was an image of one man, a longtime friend. I wished I didn't even know that much.

I wanted to postpone any action, anyhow, until I had jacked with the humanized people in North Dakota. I didn't really doubt Marty's veracity, but I wondered about his judgment. When you're jacked with someone, 'wishful thinking' has a whole new meaning. Wish hard enough and you can drag other people along with you.

Julian watched the rain for about twenty minutes and decided it was not going to let up, so he splashed on home through it. Of course, it stopped when he was half a block from the apartment.

He locked the bike up in the basement and sprayed the chain and gears with oil. Amelia's bike was there, but that didn't mean she was home.

She was sound asleep. Julian made enough noise getting his suitcase to wake her.

'Julian?' She sat up and rubbed her eyes. 'How did it go with–' She saw the suitcase. 'Going somewhere?'

'North Dakota, for a couple of days.'

She shook her head. 'Why on earth … oh, Marty's freaks.'

'I want to jack with them and check for myself. They may be freaks, but we may all be joining them.'

'Not all,' she said quietly.

He opened his mouth and shut it, and picked out three pairs of socks in the dim light. 'I'll be back in plenty of time for the Tuesday class.'

'Be getting a lot of calls Monday. The Journal doesn't come out till Wednesday, but they'll be calling everybody.'

'Just stack 'em up. I'll tap in from North Dakota.'

Getting to that state was going to be harder then he thought. He found three military flights that would zigzag him to the water-filled crater Seaside, but when he tried to reserve space he was informed by the computer that he no longer had a 'combat' flag, and so would have to fly standby. It predicted that he had about a fifteen percent chance of making all three flights. Getting back on Tuesday would be even more difficult.

He called Marty, who told him he'd see what could be done, and called back one minute later. 'Give it another try.'

This time he got all six flights booked with no comment. The 'C' for combat had been restored to his serial number.

Julian carried his armload and the suitcase into the living room to pack. Amelia followed him, shrugging into a nightgown.

'I might be going to Washington,' she said. 'Peter's coming back from the Caribbean so that he can do a press conference tomorrow.'

'That's a change of heart. I thought he'd gone down there to avoid publicity.' He looked up at her. 'Or is he coming back mainly to see you?'

'He didn't exactly say.'

'But he is paying for the ticket, right? You don't have enough credit left this month.'

'Of course he is.' She folded her arms on her chest. 'I'm his coresearcher. You'd be welcome there, too.'

'I'm sure. Better that I investigate this aspect of the problem, though.' He finished packing the small suitcase and looked around the room. He stepped over to an end table and picked up two magazines. 'If I asked you not to go, would you stay here?'

'You would never ask me that.'

'That's not much of an answer.'

She sat down on the sofa. 'All right. If you asked me not to go, we would fight. And I would win.'

'So is that why I don't ask you?'

'I don't know, Julian.' She raised her voice a little. 'Unlike some people, I can't read minds!'

He set the magazines inside the suitcase and carefully sealed it shut, thumbprinting the lock. 'I really don't mind if you go,' he said quietly. 'This is something we have to get through, one way or another.' He sat down next to her, not touching.

'One way or another,' she repeated.

'Just promise me that you won't stay permanently.'

'What?'

'Those of us who can read minds can also tell the future,' he said. 'By next week, half the people involved in the Jupiter Project will be sending out resumé's. I'm only asking that if he offers you a position, don't just say yes.'

'All right. I'll tell him I have to discuss it with you. Fair enough?'

'That's all I ask.' He took her hand and brushed his lips across her fingers. 'Don't rush into anything.'

'How about … I don't rush and you don't rush.'

'What?'

'Pick up the phone. Get a later flight to North Dakota.' She rubbed the top of his thigh. 'You're not going out that door until I convince you that you're the only one I love.'

He hesitated and then picked up the phone. She knelt on the floor and started unbuckling his belt. 'Talk fast.'

The last leg of my flight was from Chicago, but it overshot Seaside by a few miles so we could get a glimpse of the Inland Sea. 'Sea' is a little grandiose; it's only half again as big as the Great Salt Lake. But it's impressive, a perfect blue circle sketched inside with white lines of wakes from pleasure craft.

The place I was headed was only six miles from the airport. Taxis cost entertainment credits but bikes were free, so I checked one out and pedaled there. It was hot and dusty, but the exercise was welcome after being stuck in airplanes and airports all morning.

It was a fifty-year-old building style, all mirror glass and steel frame. A sign on the frizzled lawn said ST BARTHOLOMEW'S HOME.

A man in his sixties, wearing a priest's collar with everyday clothes, answered the door and let me in.

The foyer was a white box devoid of ornament, except for a crucifix on one wall facing a holo of Jesus on the other. Uninviting institutional couch and chairs with inspirational literature on the table between them. We went through double doors into an equally plain hall.

Father Mendez was Hispanic, his hair still black, his lined dark face scored with two long old scars. He looked frightful, but his calm voice and easy smile dispelled that.

'Forgive us for not coming out to greet you. We don't have a car and we don't go out much. It helps maintain our image of being harmless old loonies.'

'Dr Larrin said your cover story contained a grain of truth.'

'Yes, we're poor addled survivors of the first experiments with the soldierboy. People tend to shy away from us when we do go out.'

'You're not an actual priest, then.'

'In fact I am, or rather, was. I was defrocked after being convicted of murder.' He stopped at a plain door that had a card with my name on it, and pushed it open. 'Rape and murder. This is your room. Come on down to the atrium at the end of the hall when you've freshened up.'

The room itself wasn't too monkish, an oriental carpet on the floor, modern suspension bed contrasting with an antique rolltop desk and chair. There was a small refrigerator with soft drinks and beer, and bottles of wine and water on a sideboard with glasses. I had a glass of water and then one of wine while I took off my uniform and carefully smoothed and folded it for the return trip. Then a quick shower and more comfortable clothes, and I went off in search of the atrium.

The corridor was featureless wall along the left; on the right were doors like mine, with more permanent nameplates. A frosted-glass door at the end opened automatically as I reached for it.

I stopped dead. The atrium was a cool pine forest. Cedar smell and the bright sound of a creek tumbling somewhere. I looked up and, yes, there was a skylight; I hadn't somehow been jacked and transferred to somebody's memory.

I walked down a pebbled path and stood for a moment on the plank bridge over a swift shallow stream. I heard laughter up ahead and followed the faint smell of coffee around a curve into a small clearing.

A dozen or so people in their fifties and sixties stood and sat around. There was rustic wooden furniture, various designs arranged in no particular order. Mendez separated himself from a small conversational group and strode over to me.

'We usually gather here for an hour or so before dinner,' he said. 'Can I get you a drink?'

'Coffee smells good.' He led me to a table with samovars of coffee and tea and various bottles. There was beer and wine in a tub of ice. Nothing homemade and nothing cheap; a lot of it imported.

I gestured at the cluster of Armagnacs, single-malts, anejos. 'What, you have a printing press grinding out ration cards?'

He smiled and shook his head, filling two cups. 'Nothing so legal.' He set my cup down by the milk and sugar. 'Marty said we could trust you enough to jack, so you'll know eventually.' He studied my face. 'We have our own nanoforge.'

'Sure, you do.'

'The Lord's mansion has many rooms,' he said, 'including a huge basement, in this case. We can go down and look at it later on.'

'You're not kidding?'

He shook his head and sipped coffee. 'No. It's an old machine, small, slow, and inefficient. An early prototype that was supposedly dismantled for parts.'

'You're not afraid of making another big crater?'

'Not at all. Come sit over here.' There was a picnic table with two pairs of black-box jacks. 'Save a little time here.' He handed me a green jack and took a red one. 'One-way transfer.'

I plugged in and then he did, and clicked a switch on and off.

I unjacked and looked at him, speechless. In one second, my entire world view was changed.

The Dakota explosion had been rigged. The nanoforge had been tested extensively in secret, and was safe. The Alliance coalition that developed it wanted to close off potentially successful lines of research. So after a few carefully composed papers – top-secret, but compromised – they cleared out North Dakota and Montana and supposedly tried to make a huge diamond out of a few kilos of carbon.

But the nanoforge wasn't even there. Just a huge quantity of deuterium and tritium, and an igniter. The giant H-bomb was buried, and shaped in such a way as to minimize pollution, while melting out a nice round glassy lake bed, large enough to be a good argument against trying to make your own nanoforge out of this and that.

'How do you know? Can you be sure it's true?'

His brow furrowed. 'Maybe … maybe it is just a story. Impossible to check by asking. The man who brought it into the chain, Julio Negroni, died a couple of weeks into the experiment, and the man he got it from, a cellmate in Raiford, was executed long ago.'

'The cellmate was a scientist?'

'So he said. Murdered his wife and children in cold blood. Should be easy enough to check the news records, I guess around '22 or '23.'

'Yeah. I can do that tonight.' I went back to the serving table and poured a splash of rum into the coffee. It was too good a rum to waste that way, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I remember thinking that phrase. I didn't yet know quite how desperate the times were.

'Cheers.' Mendez raised his cup as I sat back down. I tipped mine toward him.

A short woman with long flowing gray hair came over with a handset. 'Dr Class?' I nodded and took it. 'It's a Dr Harding.'

'My mate,' I explained to Mendez. 'Just checking to make sure I got here.'

Her face on the handset was the size of my thumbnail, but I could see she was clearly upset. 'Julian – there's something going on.'

'Something new?' I tried to make that sound like a joke, but could hear the shakiness in my voice.

'The Journal jury rejected the paper.'

'Jesus. On what grounds?'

'The editor says they "decline to discuss it" with anyone but Peter.' 'So what does Peter–'

'He's not home!' A tiny hand fluttered up to knead her forehead. 'He wasn't on the flight. The cottage in St Thomas says he checked out last night. But somewhere between the cottage and the airport he … I don't know…'

'Have you checked with the police on the island?'

'No … no; that's the next step, of course. I'm panicking. I just wanted to, you know, hoped he had talked to you?'

'Do you want me to call them? You could–'

'No, I'll do it. And the airlines, too; double-check. I'll get back to you.'

'Okay. Love you.'

'Love you.' She switched off.

Mendez had gone off to refresh his coffee. 'What about this jury? Is she in trouble?'

'We both are. But it's an academic jury, the kind that decides whether a paper gets published.'

'Sounds like you have a lot tied up in this paper. Both of you.'

'Both of us and everybody else in the world.' I picked up the red plug. 'This is automatically one-way?'

'Right.' He jacked in and then I did.

I wasn't as good at transmitting as he was, even though I was jacked ten days a month. It had been the same with Marty the day before: if you're used to two-way, you wait for feedback cues that never come. So with a lot of blind alleys and backtracking, it took about ten minutes to get everything across.

For some time he just looked at me, or maybe he was looking inward. 'There is no question in your own mind. It's doom.'

'That's right.'

'Of course I have no way to evaluate your logic, this pseudo-operator theory. I take it that the technique itself is not universally accepted.'

'True. But Peter got the same result independently.'

He nodded slowly. 'That's why Marty sounded so strange when he told me you were coming. He used some stilted language like "vitally important." He didn't want to say too much, but he wanted to warn me.' He leaned forward. 'So we're walking along Occam's razor now. The simplest explanation of these events is that you and Peter and Amelia were wrong. The world, the universe, is not going to end because of the Jupiter Project.'

'True, but–'

'Let me carry this along for a moment. From your point of view, the simplest explanation is that somebody in a position of power wants your warning to be suppressed.'

'That's right.'

'Allow me the assumption that nobody on this jury would profit from the destruction of the universe. Then why, in God's name, would anyone who thought your argument had merit want to suppress it?'

'You were a Jesuit?'

'Franciscan. We run a close second in being pains in the ass.'

'Well … I don't know any of the people on the review board, so I can only speculate about their motivations. Of course they don't want the universe to go belly-up. But they might well want to put a lid on it long enough to adjust their own careers – assuming all of them are involved in the Jupiter Project. If our conclusions are accepted, there are going to be a lot of scientists and engineers looking for work.'

'Scientists would be that venal? I'm shocked.'

'Sure. Or it could be a personal thing against Peter. He probably has more enemies than friends.'

'Can you find out who was on the jury?'

'I couldn't; it was anonymous. Maybe Peter could wheedle it out of someone.'

'And what do you make of his disappearance? Isn't it possible he saw some fatal flaw in the argument and decided to drop out of sight?'

'Not impossible.'

'You hope something bad happened to him.'

'Wow. It's almost as if you could read my mind.' I sipped some coffee, now unpleasantly cool. 'How much did I let slip there?'

He shrugged. 'Not a lot.'

'You'll know everything minutes after we jack two-way. I'm curious.'

'You don't mask very well. But then you haven't had much practice.'

'So what did you get?'

'Green-eyed monster. Sexual jealousy. One specific image, an embarrassing one.'

'Embarrassing for you?'

He tilted his head to about ten degrees of irony. 'Of course not. I was speaking conventionally.' He laughed. 'Sorry. I didn't mean to be patronizing. I don't suppose anything just physical would embarrass you, either.'

'No. The other part is still hanging there, though. Unresolved.'

'She's not jacked.'

'No. She tried and it didn't take.'

'Wasn't long ago?'

'Couple of months. May twentieth.'

'And this, urn, episode was after that?'

'Yeah. It's complicated.'

He took the cue. 'Let's go back to ground zero. What I got from you – assuming that you're right about the Jupiter Project – is that you and Marty, but Marty more than you, believe that we have to rid the world of war and aggression right now. Or the game is up.'

'That's what Marty would say.' I stood up. 'Get some fresh coffee. You want something?'

'Splash of that rum. You're not as certain?'

'No … yes and no.' I concentrated on the drinks. 'Let me read your mind, for a change. You think that there's no need for haste, once the Jupiter Project's deactivated.'

'You think otherwise?'

'I don't know.' I set the drinks down and Mendez touched his and nodded. 'When I jacked with Marty I got a sense of urgency that was completely personal. He wants to see the thing well in process before he dies.'

'He's not that old.'

'No, sixty-some. But he's been obsessed with this since you guys were made; maybe before. And he knows it will take a while to get going.' I searched for words; logician's words. 'Marty's feelings aside, there's an objective rationale for urgency; the black-and-white one of scale: anything else we do or don't do is trivial if there's the slightest chance that this could come to pass.'

He sniffed the rum. 'The destruction of everything.'

'That's right.'

'Maybe you're too close to it, though,' he said. 'I mean, you're talking about a huge project here. It's not something that a Hitler or a Borgia could cook up in his backyard.'

'In their own times, no. Now they could,' I said. 'You of all people should see how.'

'Me of all people?'

'You've got a nanoforge in your basement. When you want it to make something, what do you do?'

'Ask it. We tell it what we want and it goes into its catalogue and tells us what raw materials we have to come up with.'

'You can't ask it to make a duplicate of itself, though.'

'They say no, it would melt down if you did. I'm not inclined to try.' 'But that's just part of the programming, right? In theory, you could short-circuit it.'

'Ah.' He nodded slowly. 'I see where you're heading.'

'That's right. If you could get around that injunction, you could say, in effect, "Re-create the Jupiter Project for me," and if it had access to the raw materials, and the information, it could do it.'

'As an extension of one person's will.'

'That's right.'

'My God.' He drank the rum and set the glass down hard. 'My God.'

'Everything,' I said. 'A trillion galaxies disappear if one maniac says the right sequence of words.'

'Marty has a lot of faith in the monsters he created,' Mendez said, 'to let us share this knowledge.'

'Faith or desperation. Guess I got a mixture of both from him.'

'You hungry?'

'What?'

'You want dinner now, or should we all jack first?'

'That's what I'm hungry for. Let's do it.'

He stood up and brought his hands together in two explosive claps. 'Big room,' he shouted. 'Marc, you stay out and keep watch.' We followed everyone to a double door on the other side of the atrium. I wondered what I was getting myself into.

Julian was used to being ten people at once, but it was stressful and confusing at times, even with people you had grown close to. He didn't really know what to expect, linking with fifteen men and women he'd never met, who had been jacked together for twenty years. That would be alien territory even without Marty's pacifistic transformation. Julian had used his horizontal liaison to weakly link with other platoons, and it was always like breaking in on a family discussion.

Eight of these had been mechanics, at least, or protomechanics. He was more nervous about the others, the assassins and murderers. More curious about them, too.

Maybe they could teach him something about living with memories.

The 'big room' held a ring-shaped table surrounding a holo pit. 'Most of us get together here for the news,' Mendez said. 'Movies, concerts, plays. Fun to have all the different points of view.'

Julian wasn't sure about that. He'd mediated too many firestorms in his platoon, where one person came up with a strong opinion that divided the ten into two bickering camps. It took about a second to start, and sometimes an hour to sort out.

The walls were dark mahogany and the table and its chairs were fine-grained spruce. A slight whisper of linseed oil and furniture polish. In the pit, an image of a forest clearing, dappled sunlight on wildflowers.

There were twenty seats. Mendez offered Julian a chair and sat down next to him. 'You might want to plug in first,' he said, let people come in one at a time and introduce themselves.'

'Sure.' Julian realized this had all been rehearsed. He stared at the wildflowers and plugged himself in.

Mendez was the first one, waving a silent hello. The link was strange, powerful in a way he'd never come close to experiencing. It was startling, like seeing the sea for the first time – and it was like a sea in a literal way; Mendez's consciousness floated in a seemingly endless expanse of shared memory and thought. And he was comfortable with it the way a fish is comfortable with the sea, moving through its invisibility.

Julian tried to communicate his reaction to Mendez, along with a sense of rising panic; he wasn't sure whether he could manage two such universes, let alone fifteen. Mendez said it actually gets easier with more, and then Cameron plugged in to prove it.

Cameron was an older man, who had been a professional soldier for eleven years when he volunteered for the project. He had gone to a sniper school in Georgia, and trained for long-distance murder with a variety of weapons. Mostly he had used the Mauser Fernschiesser, which could target people around a corner or even over the horizon. He had fifty-two kills, and separate grief for each of them, and a single large pang for the humanity he had lost with the first shot. He also remembered the exhilaration the kills had given him, at the time. He had fought in Colombia and Guatemala, and automatically made a connection with Julian's jungle days, absorbing and integrating them almost instantly.

Mendez was still there, too, and Julian was aware of his immediate connection with Cameron, casually sorting through what the soldier had taken from his new contact. That part was not so alien, except for the speed and completeness of it. And Julian could understand why the totality could become more clear as more people joined: all the information was already there, but parts of it were better focused now that Cameron's point of view had combined with Mendez's.

Now Tyler. She was one of the murderers, too, having remorselessly killed three people in one year for money, to support a drug habit. That was just before cash became obsolete in the States; she had been captured in a routine check when she tried to emigrate to a country that had both paper pesos and designer drugs. Her crimes were older than Julian was, and although she didn't deny legal or moral responsibility for them, they literally had been done by a different person. The DD doper who lured three pushers into bed and killed them there, as a favor for their boss, was just a vivid melodramatic memory, like a movie you saw a few hours ago. For the peaceful part of her day, Tyler was part of the Twenty, as they still called themselves in their minds, even though four had died; other times she worked as an arbitrageur, bartering and buying commodities in dozens of different countries, Alliance and Ngumi. With their own nanoforge, the Twenty could survive without wealth – but then if the machine asked for a cup of praseodymium, it was nice to have a few million rupees close to hand, so Tyler could buy it without having to go through a lot of tiresome paperwork.

The others came in more rapidly, or seemed to, once Julian got over the initial strangeness.

As each of the fifteen presented himself or herself, another part of the vast, but now not endless, structure became clear. When they all had logged in, the ocean was more like an inland sea, huge and complex, but thoroughly mapped and navigable.

And they sailed together for what seemed like hours, in a voyage of mutual exploration. The only one they had ever jacked with outside the Twenty was Marty, who was a sort of godfather figure, remote because he only jacked one-way with them now.

Julian was a vast treasure of quotidian detail. They were hungry for his impressions of New York, Washington, Dallas – every place in the country had been drastically changed by the social and technological revolution, the Universal Welfare State, that the nanoforge had wrought. Not to mention the endless Ngumi War.

The nine who had been soldiers were fascinated with what the soldierboy had become. In the pilot program they had been taken from, the primitive machines were little more than stick men with one laser finger. They could walk around and sit or lie down, and open a door if the latch was simple. They all knew from the news what the current machines were capable of doing, and in fact three of them were warboys, after a fashion. They couldn't go to the conventions, but they followed units and jacked into soldierboy crystals and strings. It was nothing like being jacked two-way with an actual mechanic, though.

Julian was embarrassed by their enthusiasm but could share their amused feedback at his embarrassment. He was familiar enough with that from his platoon.

A lot of it became more and more familiar-feeling as he grew used to the scale of it. It wasn't only that the Twenty had been together so long; they had also been around a long time. At thirty-two, Julian was the oldest in his platoon by several years; all together, they had less than three hundred years of experience. The aggregate age of the Twenty was well over a thousand, a lot of that time spent in mutual contemplation.

They weren't exactly a 'group mind,' but they were a lot closer to that state than Julian's platoon. They never argued, except for amusement. They were gentle and content. They were humane … but were they quite human?

This was the question that had been in the back of Julian's mind from the time Marty first described the Twenty: maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.

The others picked up on this worry and said no, we're still human in all the ways that count. Human nature does change, and the fact that we've developed tools to direct that change is quintessentially human. And it must be a nearly universal concomitant to technological growth everywhere in the universe; otherwise, there would be no universe. Unless we're the only technological intelligence in the universe, Julian pointed out; so far there's no evidence to the contrary. Maybe our own existence is evidence that we're the first creatures to evolve far enough to hit the reset button. Someone does have to be first.

But maybe the first is always the last.

They caught the hopefulness that Julian was protecting with pessimism. You're much more idealistic than us, Tyler pointed out. Most of us have killed, but none of us was driven to attempt suicide by remorse over the act.

Of course there were a lot of other factors, which Julian didn't have to explain. He was cushioned by wisdom and forgiveness – and suddenly had to get out!

He pulled the plug and was surrounded but alone, fifteen people staring down at the wildflowers. Staring into their collective soul.

He checked his watch and was shocked. Only twelve minutes had actually passed during all those seeming hours.

One by one they unjacked. Mendez kneaded his face and grimaced. 'You felt outnumbered.'

'That's part of it … out-gunned. All of you are so good at this, it's automatic. I felt, I don't know, out of control.'

'We weren't manipulating you.'

Julian shook his head. 'I know. You were being very careful that way. But I felt like I was being absorbed anyhow. By … by my own willingness. I don't know how long I could stay jacked with you before becoming one of you.'

'And that would be such a bad thing?' Ellie Frazer said. She was the youngest, almost Amelia's age, beautiful hair prematurely white.

'Not for me, I think. Not for me personally.' Julian studied her quiet beauty and knew, along with everyone else, exactly how desperately she desired him. 'But I can't do it yet. The next stage of this project involves going back to Portobello with a set of false memories, infiltrating the command cadre. I can't be as … obviously different as you are.'

'We know that,' she said. 'But you could still spend a lot more time with us–'

'Ellie,' Mendez said gently, 'turn off the goddamned pheromones. Julian knows what's best for him.'

'I don't, actually. Who would? Nobody's ever done anything like this before.'

'You have to be cautious,' Ellie said in a way that was reassuring and infuriating: we know exactly what you think, and though you're wrong, we'll go along with it.

Marc Lobell, the chess master and wife murderer who had stayed out of the circle to answer the phone, ran pounding over the little bridges and skidded to a stop in front of them.

'A guy in uniform,' he said, panting. 'Here to see Sergeant Class.' 'Who is it?' Julian said.

'A doctor,' he said. 'Colonel Zamat Jefferson.'

Mendez, in all the authority of his own black uniform, came along with me to meet Jefferson. He stood up slowly when we walked into the shabby foyer, setting down a Reader's Digest half his age. 'Father Mendez; Colonel Jefferson,' I said. 'You went to some trouble to find me.'

'No,' he said, 'it was some trouble to get here, but the computer tracked you down in a few seconds.'

'To Fargo.'

'I knew you'd take a bicycle. There was only one place to do that at the airport, and you left them an address.'

'You pulled rank.'

'Not on civilians. I showed them my ID and said I was your doctor. Which is not false.'

'I'm okay now. You can go.'

He laughed. 'Wrong on both counts. Can we sit?'

'We have a place,' Mendez said. 'Follow me.'

'What is "a place"?' Jefferson said.

'A place where we can sit.' They looked at each other for a moment and Jefferson nodded.

Two doors down the corridor, we turned into an unmarked room. It had a mahogany conference table with overstuffed chairs and an autobar. 'Something to drink?'

Jefferson and I wanted water and wine; Mendez asked for apple juice. The bar wheelie brought our orders while we were sitting down.

'Is there some way we can help each other?' Mendez said, folding his hands on his small paunch.

'There are some things Sergeant Class might shed some light on.' He stared at me for one second. 'I suddenly made full colonel and had orders cut for Fort Powell. Nobody in Brigade knew anything about it; the orders came from Washington, some "Medical Personnel Redistribution Group."'

'This was a bad thing?' Mendez said.

'No. I was gratified. I've never been happy with the Texas and Portobello posting, and this move took me back to the area where I grew up.

'I'm still in the middle of moving, settling in. But I was going through my appointment calendar yesterday, and your name came up. I was scheduled to jack with you and see how well the antidepressants are working.'

'They're working fine. Are you traveling thousands of miles to check up on all your old patients?'

'Of course not. But I punched up your file out of curiosity, almost automatically – and what do you know? There's no record of your having contemplated suicide. And it seems you have new orders cut, too. Authorized by the same major general in Washington who cut my orders. But you're not part of the "Medical Personnel Redistribution Group"; you're in a training program for assimilation into command structure. A soldier who wanted to commit suicide because he killed someone. That's interesting.

'And so I trace you down to here. A rest home for old soldiers who aren't so old, and some of whom aren't soldiers.'

'So you want to lose your colonelcy,' Mendez said, 'and go back to Texas? To Portobello?'

'Not at all. I'll risk telling you this: I didn't go through channels. I don't want to rock the boat.' He pointed at me. 'But I have a patient here, and a mystery I'd like to solve.'

'The patient's fine,' I said. The mystery is something that you don't want to be involved in.'

There was a long, thick silence. 'People know where I am.'

'We don't mean to threaten you, or frighten you,' Mendez said. 'But there's no way you have the clearance to be told about this. Julian can't let you jack with him, for that reason.'

'I have top-secret clearance.'

'I know.' Mendez leaned forward and said quietly: 'Your ex-wife's name is Eudora and you have two children – Pash, who's in medical school in Ohio, and Roger, who's in a New Orleans dance company. You were born on 5 March 1990 and your blood type is 0-Negative. Do you want to know your dog's name?'

'You're not threatening me with this.'

'I'm trying to communicate with you.'

'But you're not even in the military. Nobody here is, except Sergeant Class.'

'That should tell you something. You have top-secret clearance and yet my identity is concealed from you.'

The colonel shook his head. He leaned back and drank some wine. 'There's been time enough for somebody to find out these things about me. I can't decide whether you're some kind of super-spook or just one of the best bullshit artists I've ever come across.'

'If I were bluffing, I'd threaten you now. But you know that, and that's why you said what you just said.'

'And so you threaten me by making no threat.'

Mendez laughed. 'Takes one to know one. I will admit to being a psychiatrist.'

'But you're not in the AMA database.'

'Not anymore.'

'Priest and psychiatrist is an odd combination. I don't suppose the Catholic Church has any record of you, either.'

'That's harder to control. It would be cooperative of you not to check.'

'I don't have any reason to cooperate with you. If you're not going to shoot me or throw me in a dungeon.'

'Dungeon's too much paperwork,' Mendez said. 'Julian, you've jacked with him. What do you think?'

I remembered a thread from the common mind session. 'He's completely sincere about doctor-patient confidentiality.'

'Thank you.'

'So if you left the room, he and I could talk patient-to-doctor. But there's a catch.'

'There is indeed,' Mendez said. He remembered the thread as well. 'A trade you might not want to make.'

'What's that?'

'Brain surgery,' Mendez said.

'You could be told what we're doing here,' I said, 'but we'd have to make it so that no one could learn it from you.'

'Memory erasure,' Jefferson said.

'That wouldn't be enough,' Mendez said. 'We'd have to erase the memory of not only this trip and everything associated with it, but also your memories of treating Julian and people who knew him. That's too extensive.'

'What we'd have to do,' I said, 'is take out your jack and fry all the neural connections. Would you be willing to give that up forever, to be let in on a secret?'

'The jack is essential to my profession,' he said. 'And I'm used to it, would feel incomplete without it. For the secret of the universe, maybe. Not for the secret of St Bartholomew's Home.'

Someone knocked on the door and Mendez said to come in. It was Marc Lobell, holding a clipboard over his chest.

'May I have a word with you, Father Mendez?'

When Mendez left, Jefferson leaned over toward me. 'You're here of your own free will?' he said. 'No one's coerced you?'

'No one.'

'Thoughts of suicide?'

'Nothing could be farther from my mind.' The possibility was still back there, but I wanted to see how this turned out. If the universe ceased to exist, it would take me with it anyhow.

I suspected that that would be the attitude of someone resigned to suicide, and that realization may have shown on my face.

'But something's bothering you,' Jefferson said.

'When did you last meet someone with nothing bothering him?' Mendez came through the door alone, carrying the clipboard. A lock on the door clicked behind him.

'Interesting.' He asked the bar for a cup of coffee and sat down. 'You've taken a month's leave, Doctor.'

'Sure, moving.'

'People expect you back in what, a day or two?'

'Soon.'

'What people? You're not married or living with anyone.'

'Friends. Colleagues.'

'Sure.' He handed the clipboard to Jefferson.

He glanced at the top sheet and the one under it. 'You can't do this. How could you do this?' I couldn't read what was on either sheet, but they were some sort of signed orders.

'Obviously, I can. As to how,' he shrugged. 'Faith can move mountains.'

'What is it?'

'I'm TDY'ed here for three weeks. Vacation canceled. What the hell is going on?'

'We had to make a decision while you were still in the building. You've been invited to join our little project here.'

'I decline the invitation.' He tossed the clipboard down and stood up. 'Let me out of here.'

'Once we've had a chance to talk, you'll be free to stay or go.' He opened a box inlaid in the table's surface and unreeled a red jack and a green one. 'One-way.'

'No way! You can't force me to jack with you.'

'Actually, that's true.' He gave me a significant look. 'I couldn't do anything of the sort.'

'I could,' I said, and pulled the knife out of my pocket. I pushed the button and the blade flicked out and then began to hum and glow.

'Are you threatening me with a weapon? Sergeant?'

'No, I'm not. Colonel.' I raised the blade to my neck and looked at my watch. 'If you aren't jacked in thirty seconds, you'll have to watch me cut my own throat.'

He swallowed hard. 'You're bluffing.'

'No. I'm not.' My hand started to tremble. 'But I suppose you've lost patients before.'

'What is so goddamned important about this thing?'

'Jack and find out.' I didn't look at him. 'Fifteen seconds.'

'He will, you know,' Mendez said, 'I've jacked with him. His death will be your fault.'

He shook his head and walked back to the table. 'I'm not sure of that. But you seem to have me trapped.' He sat down and slid the jack in.

I turned off the knife. I think I was bluffing.

Watching people who are jacked is about as interesting as watching people sleep. There was nothing to read in the room, but there was a notepad and stylus, so I wrote a letter to Amelia, outlining what had been going on. After about ten minutes, they started to nod regularly, so I finished the letter quickly, encrypted it and sent it.

Jefferson unjacked and buried his face in his hands. Mendez unjacked and stared at him.

'It's a lot to assimilate all at once,' he said. 'But I really didn't know where to stop.'

'You did right,' Jefferson said, muffled. 'I had to have it all.' He sat back and exhaled. 'Have to link with the Twenty now, of course.'

'You're on our side?' I said.

'Sides. I don't think you have a snowball's chance. But yes, I want to be part of it.'

'He's more committed than you are,' Mendez said.

'Committed but not convinced?'

'Julian,' Jefferson said, 'with all due respect for your years as a mechanic, and all the suffering you've gone through for what you've seen … for having killed that boy … it may be that I know more about war and its evil than you do. Secondhand knowledge, admittedly.' He scraped sweat off his forehead with the blade of his hand. 'But the fourteen years I've spent trying to put soldiers' lives back together make me a pretty good recruit for this army.'

I wasn't really surprised at that. A patient doesn't get too much unguarded feedback from his therapist – it's like a one-way jack with a few controlled thoughts and feelings seeping back – but I knew how much he hated the killing, and what the killing did to the killers.

Amelia shut down her machine for the day and was stacking papers, ready to go home, long bath and a nap, when a short bald man tapped on her office door. 'Professor Harding?'

'What can I do for you?'

'Cooperate.' He handed her an unsealed plain envelope. 'My name is Harold Ingram, Major Harold Ingram. I'm an attorney for the army's Office of Technology Assessment.'

She unfolded three pages of fine print, 'So would you care to tell me in plain English what this is all about?'

'Oh, it's very simple. A paper that you co-authored for the Astrophysical Journal was found to contain material germane to weapons research.'

'Wait. That paper never got past peer review. It was rejected. How could your office hear of it?'

'I honestly don't know. I'm not on the technical end.'

She scanned the pages. '"Cease and desist"? A subpoena?'

'Yes. In a nutshell, we need all of your records pertaining to this research, and a statement that you have destroyed all duplicates, and a promise that you will discontinue the project until you hear from us.'

She looked at him and then back at the document. 'This is a joke, right?'

'I assure you it is not.'

'Major … this is not some sort of gun we're designing. It's an abstraction.'

'I don't know anything about that.'

'How on God's green Earth do you think you can stop me from thinking about something?'

'That's not my business. I just need the records and the statement.'

'Did you get them from my co-author? I'm really just a hired hand, called in to verify some particle physics.'

'I understand that he's been taken care of.'

She sat down and put the three pages on the desk in front of her. 'You can go. I have to study these and consult with my department head.'

'Your department head is in full cooperation with us.'

'I don't believe that. Professor Hayes?'

No. It was J. MacDonald Roman who signed–'

'Macro? He's not even in the loop.'

'He hires and fires people like you. He's about to fire you, if you aren't cooperative.' He was completely still, and didn't blink. It was his big line.

'I have to talk to Hayes. I have to see what my boss–'

'It would be better if you just signed both documents,' he said mildly, theatrically, 'and then I could come by tomorrow for the records.'

'My records,' she said, 'cover the spectrum from meaningless to redundant. What does my collaborator have to say about all this?'

'I wouldn't know. I believe that was the Caribbean branch.'

'He disappeared in the Caribbean. You don't suppose your department killed him.'

'What?'

'Sorry. The army doesn't kill people.' She got up. 'You can stay here or come along. I'm going to copy these pages.'

'It would be better if you didn't copy them.'

'It would be lunacy if I didn't.'

He stayed in her office, probably to snoop around. She walked past the copy room and took the elevator down to the first floor. She stuffed the papers into her purse and jumped into the lead cab at the stand across the street. 'Airport,' she said, and considered her diminishing options.

All of her travel to and from D.C. had been on Peter's open account, so she had plenty of credits to get to North Dakota. But did she want to leave a trail pointing directly to Julian? She would call him from the airport public phone.

But wait; think. She couldn't just get on a plane and sneak off to North Dakota. Her name would be on the passenger list, and somebody would be waiting for her when she got off the plane. 'Change destination,' she said. 'Amtrak station.' The cab's voice verified the change and it made a U-turn.

Not many people traveled long distances by train, mostly people phobic about heights or just determined to do things the hard way. Or people who wanted to go someplace without leaving a document trail. You bought train tickets by machine, with the same kind of anonymous entertainment chits you used for cabs. (Bureaucrats and moralists would love to have had the clumsy system replaced with plastic, like the old cash cards, but voters would just as soon not have the government know what they were doing when, and with whom. The individual coupons made barter and hoarding simple, too.)

Amelia's timing was perfect; she ran for the 6:00 Dallas shuttle and it pulled out just as she sat down.

She turned on the screen on the back of the seat in front of her and asked for a map. If she touched two cities, the screen would show departure and arrival times. She jotted down a list; she could go from Dallas to Oklahoma City to Kansas City to Omaha to Seaside in about eight hours.

'Who you runnin' from, honey?' An old woman with white hair in short spikes was sitting next to her. 'Some man?'

'Sure am,' she said. 'A real bastard.'

The old woman nodded and pursed her lips. 'Best you get some good food to carry while you in Dallas. You don' wanna be livin' on the crap they serve in that lounge car.'

'Thank you. I'll do that.' The woman went back to her soap opera and Amelia punched through the Amtrak magazine, See America! Not much she wanted to see.

She pretended to nap the half hour to Dallas. Then she said good-bye to the spike-coiffed lady and dove into the crowd. She had more than an hour before the train to Kansas City, so she bought a change of clothing – a Cowboys sweatshirt and loose black exercise pants – and some wrapped sandwiches and wine. Then she called the North Dakota number Julian had left her.

'Jury change its mind?' he asked.

'More interesting than that.' She told him about Harold Ingram and the threatening paperwork.

'And no word from Peter?'

'No. But Ingram knew that he was in the Caribbean. That's when I decided I had to run.'

'Well, the army's tracked me down, too. Just a second.' He left the screen and came back. 'No, it's just Dr Jefferson, and nobody knows he's here. He's pretty much joined us.' The phone camera tracked him as he sat down. 'This Ingram didn't mention me?'

'No, your name's not on the paper.'

'But it's only a matter of time. Even not connecting me with the paper, they know that we live together and will find out I'm a mechanic. They'll be here in a few hours. Do you have to change trains anywhere?'

'Yes.' She checked her sheet. 'The last one is Omaha. I'm supposed to get there just before midnight … eleven forty-six Central Time.'

'Okay. I can get there by then.'

'But then what?'

'I don't know. I'll talk it over with the Twenty.'

'The twenty whats?'

'Marty's bunch. Explain later.'

She went to the machine and, after a moment's hesitation, just bought a ticket as far as Omaha. No need to guide them any farther, if she was being followed.

Another calculated risk: two of the phones had data jacks. She waited until a couple of minutes before the train was going to leave, and called her own database. She downloaded a copy of the Astrophysical Journal article into her purse notebook. Then she instructed the database to send copies to everyone in her address book with *PHYS or *ASTR in their ID lines. That would be about fifty people, more than half of them involved with the Jupiter Project in some way. Would any of them read a twenty-page draft that was mostly pseudo-operator math, with no introduction, no context?

She herself, she realized, would look at the first line and dump it.

Amelia's reading on the train was less technical, but severely limited, since she couldn't identify herself to access any copyrighted material. The train had its own magazine on-screen, and courtesy images of USA Today and some travel magazines that were just ads and puffery. She spent a lot of time looking out the window at some of America's least appealing urban areas. The farmland that flowed by in the dusk between cities was peaceful, and she dozed. The seat woke her up as they pulled into Omaha. But it wasn't Julian waiting for her.

Harold Ingram stood on the platform, looking smug. 'It's wartime, Professor Harding. The government is everywhere.'

'If you tapped a public phone without a warrant–'

'Not necessary. There are hidden cameras in all train and bus stations. If you are wanted by the federal government, the cameras look for you.'

'I haven't committed any crime.'

'I don't mean "wanted' in the sense of a wanted criminal. Just desired. Your government desires you. So it found you. Come with me, now.'

Amelia looked around. Running was out of the question, with robot guards and at least one human policeman watching the area.

But then she saw Julian, in uniform, half hidden behind a column. He touched a finger to his lips.

'I'll go with you,' she said. 'But this is against my will, and we're going to wind up in court.'

'I certainly hope so,' the major said, leading her toward the terminal. 'My natural habitat.' They passed Julian and she could hear him fall into step behind them.

They passed through the terminal and walked toward the lead cab in line outside.

'Where are we going?'

'First flight back to Houston.' He opened the cab door and helped her in, not too gently.

'Major Ingram,' Julian said.

One foot in the cab, he half-turned. 'Sergeant?'

'Your flight's been canceled.' He had a small black pistol in his hand. It fired almost inaudibly, and as Ingram slumped, Julian caught him and appeared to be helping him into the cab. '1236 Grand Street,' he said, feeding it a chit from Ingram's book. He pocketed the book and closed the door. 'Surface roads, please.'

'It's good to see you,' she said, trying to sound neutral. 'We know someone in Omaha?'

'We know someone parked on Grand Street.'

The cab worked its zigzag way across town, Julian watching behind for a tail. It would have been obvious in the sparse traffic.

When they turned onto Grand Street he looked ahead. 'The black Lincoln in the next block. Double-park next to it and we'll get out there.'

'If I am ticketed for double-parking, you will be liable, Major Ingram.'

'Understood.' They pulled up next to a big black limousine with North Dakota 'clergy' plates and opaque windows. Julian got out of the cab and hauled Ingram into the back seat of the Lincoln. It looked like a soldier assisting a drunken comrade.

Amelia followed them. In the front seat was the driver, who was a rough-looking gray-haired man with a priest's collar, and Marty Larrin. 'Marty!'

'To the rescue. Is that the guy who served you the papers?' Amelia nodded. As the car started, Marty held out his hand to Julian. 'Let me see his ID.'

He handed over a long wallet. 'Blaze, meet Father Mendez, late of the Franciscan order and Raiford Maximum Security Prison.' He flipped through the wallet as he talked, holding it up to a small dashboard light.

'Dr Harding, I presume.' Mendez held a hand, up in greeting while he steered with the other one, the automobile under manual control. In the next block a chime sounded and Mendez let go of the wheel and said, 'Home.'

'This is annoying,' Marty said, and switched on the overhead light. 'Check his pockets and see if he has a copy of his orders.' He held up the wallet and scrutinized a photo of the man with a German shepherd. 'Nice dog. No family pictures.'

'No wedding ring,' Amelia said. 'Is that important?'

'Simplify things. Is he jacked?'

Amelia felt the back of his head while Julian rifled his pockets. 'Wig.' She lifted the back of it with a painful ripping sound. 'Yes, he is.'

'Good. No orders?'

'No. Flight manifest, though, for him and up to three others, "two prisoners plus security."'

'When and where?'

'Open ticket to Washington. Priority 00.'

'Real high or real low?' Amelia asked.

'The highest. I think you might not be our only mole, Julian. We need one in Washington.'

'This guy?' Julian said.

'After he's been jacked with the Twenty for a couple of weeks. It'll be an interesting test of the process's effectiveness.' They didn't know how extreme a test it would be.

We hadn't brought handcuffs or anything, so when he started to stir halfway to St Bart's, I gave him another pop with the trank gun. Searching for his papers, I'd found an AK 101, a small Russian flechette pistol that's a favorite of assassins everywhere – no inconvenient metal. So I didn't want to sit in the back seat and chat with him, even with his gun safe in the glove compartment. He probably knew some way to kill me with his pinky.

It turns out I was close. When we got him to St Bart – tying him to a chair before administering the antitrank – and jacked him one-way with Marty, we found out he was a 'special operator' for Military Intelligence, assigned to the Office of Technology Assessment. But there was little else there, other than memories of his childhood and youth, and an encyclopedic knowledge of mayhem. He hadn't been treated to the selective memory transfer, or destruction, that Marty had said I would need for my own mole burrowing. It was just a strong hypnotic injunction, which wouldn't hold up for long, after he was jacked two-way with the Twenty.

Until then, all he and we knew was what room in the Pentagon he was to report to. He was to find Amelia and bring her back – or kill her and himself if it came to a desperate situation. All he knew about her was that she and another scientist had discovered a weapon so powerful that it could win the war for the Ngumi if it fell into the wrong hands.

That was an odd way of characterizing it. We used the metaphor 'pressing the button,' but of course for the Jupiter Project to proceed to its final cataclysmic stage, you needed a team of scientists, doing a sequence of complicated actions in the proper order.

The process could be automated, in theory, after the first careful walk-through. But then once you'd done it, there would be no one left to automate it.

So someone on the Astrophysical Journal jury was linked to the military establishment – no surprise. But then was the jury's rejection because of pressure from above, or had they actually found an error in our work?

One part of me wanted to think, well, if they actually had disproved our theory, there would be no reason to go after Amelia, and presumably Peter. But maybe Intelligence thought it would be prudent to get rid of them anyhow. There's a war on, they keep saying.

There were four of us in the plain conference room, besides the jacked couple: Amelia and me, Mendez, and Megan Orr, the doctor who checked out Ingram and administered the antitrank. It was three in the morning, but we were pretty wide awake.

Marty unjacked himself and then pulled the plug out of Ingram's head. 'Well?' he said.

'It's a lot to assimilate,' Ingram said, and looked down at his bound arms. 'I could think better if you untied me.'

'Is he safe?' I asked Marty.

'You're still armed?'

I held up the trank pistol. 'More or less.'

'We could untie him. Under some circumstances he might make trouble, but not in a locked room, observed, under armed guard.'

'I don't know,' Amelia said. 'Maybe you ought to wait until he's had the sweetness-and-light treatment. He seems like a dangerous character.'

'We can deal with him,' Mendez said.

'It's important to talk with him while he's just had interrogational contact,' Marty said. 'He knows the facts of the matter, but he hasn't been engaged at a deep emotional level.'

'I suppose,' Amelia said. Marty untied him and sat back.

'Thank you,' Ingram said, rubbing his forearms.

'What I'd like to know first is–'

What happened next was so quick that I couldn't have described it until after I saw the record from the overhead camera.

Ingram shifted his chair slightly, as if half-turning toward Marty as he spoke. Actually, he was just getting leverage and clearance.

In a sudden move worthy of an Olympic gymnast, he twisted out of the chair and up, clipping Marty on the chin with his toe, and then making a complete spin halfway down the table to where I was sitting, the pistol in my hand but not aimed. I got off one wild shot and then he slammed into my chest with both feet, breaking two ribs. He snatched the gun out of midair and shoulder-rolled off the table, landing feet-first with a balletic spin that ended with his foot catching me in the throat as I fell. It was probably intended to kick my brains out, but nobody's perfect.

I couldn't see much from my vantage point on the floor, but I heard Marty say 'Won't work,' and then I passed out.

I woke up back in my chair, with Megan Orr withdrawing a hypodermic gun from my bare forearm. A man I recognized but couldn't name was doing the same to Amelia – Lobell, Marc Lobell, the only one of the Twenty I hadn't jacked with.

It was as if we'd gone back a few minutes in time and had been given a chance to start over. Everybody was back in their original positions; Ingram safely tied up again. But my chest hurt with every breath and I wasn't sure I could talk.

'Meg,' I croaked. 'Dr Orr?' She turned around. 'Can I see you when this is over? I think he broke a rib or two.'

'You want to come with me now?'

I shook my head, which hurt my throat. 'Want to hear what the bastard has to say.'

Marc was standing at the open door. 'Give me half a minute to get situated.'

'Okay.' Megan went over to Ingram, the only one not awake now, and waited.

'Observation room next door,' Mendez said. 'Marc watches what's going on and can flood the room with knockout gas in seconds. It's a necessary precaution, dealing with outsiders.'

'You really can't do violence, then,' Amelia said.

'I can,' I said. 'Mind if I kick him a few times before you revive him?'

'We can defend ourselves, actually. I can't imagine initiating violence.' Mendez gestured at me. 'But Julian presents a familiar paradox – if he were to attack this man, there's not much I could do.'

'What if he attacked one of the Twenty?' Marty asked.

'You know the answer to that. It would be self-defense, then. He'd be attacking me.'

'Should I go ahead?' Megan asked. Mendez nodded and she gave Ingram his shot.

He came to, instinctively pulling at his bonds, jerking twice, and then he settled back. 'Quick anesthetic, whatever it was.' He looked at me. 'I could have killed you, you know.'

'Bullshit. You did your best.'

'You better hope you never find out what my best is.'

'Gentlemen,' Mendez said, 'we'll agree that you two are the most dangerous people in this room–'

Not by a long shot,' Ingram said. 'The rest of you are the most dangerous people under one roof in the whole world. Maybe in all of history.'

'We've considered that viewpoint,' Marty said.

'Well, consider it some more. You're going to make the human race extinct in a couple of generations. You're monsters. Like creatures from another planet, bent on our destruction.'

Marty smiled broadly. 'That's a metaphor I hadn't thought of. But all we're really bent on destroying is the race's capability for self-destruction.'

'Even if that could work, and I'm not convinced it could, what good is it if we wind up being something other than men?'

'Half of us aren't men to begin with,' Megan said quietly.

'You know what I mean.'

'I think you meant just what you said.'

'How much does he know,' I asked, 'about why this is urgent?'

'No details,' Marty said.

"'The ultimate weapon," whatever that is. We've been surviving ultimate weapons since 1945.'

'Earlier,' Mendez said. 'The airplane, the tank, nerve gas. But this one's a little more dangerous. A little more ultimate.'

'And you're behind it,' he said, looking at Amelia with an odd, avid expression. 'But all these other people, this "Twenty," know about it.'

'I don't know how much they know,' she said. 'I haven't jacked with them.'

'But you will, soon enough,' Mendez said to him. 'Then it will all become clear.'

'It's a federal offense to jack someone against his will.'

'Really. I don't suppose they'd be amused about our drugging someone and kidnapping him, either. Then tying him up for interrogation.'

'You can untie me. I see that physical resistance is futile.'

'I think not,' Marty said. 'You're just a little too fast, too good.'

'I won't answer any questions, tied up.'

'Oh, I think you will, one way or another. Megan?'

She held up the hypo gun and turned a dial on the side two clicks. 'Just give the word, Marty.'

'Tazlet F-3,' Megan said, smiling.

'Now that's really illegal.'

'Oh my. They'll just have to cut our bodies down and hang us again.'

'That's not funny.' Obvious strain in the man's voice.

'I think he knows about the side effects,' Megan said. 'They last a long time. Great for weight loss.' She stepped toward him and he shrank back.

'All right. I'll talk.'

'He'll lie,' I said.

'Maybe,' Marty said. 'But we'll find out the next time we jack. You said we were the most dangerous people in the world. Going to make the human race extinct. Would you care to amplify that statement?'

'That's if you succeed, which I don't think is likely. You'll convert a large fraction of us, from the top down, and then the Ngumi, or whoever, will step in and take over. End of experiment.'

'We'll be converting the Ngumi, too.'

'Not many and not fast enough. Their leadership is too fragmented. If you converted all the South American goomies, the African ones would step in and eat them up.'

Kind of a racist image, I thought, but kept it to my cannibal self.

'But if we do succeed,' Mendez said, 'you think that would be even worse?'

'Of course! Lose a war, you can rise up and fight again. Lose the ability to fight…'

'But there would be no one to fight,' Megan said.

'Nonsense. This thing can't work on everybody. You have one tenth of one percent unaffected, they'll arm themselves and take over. And you'll just give them the key to the city and do whatever they say.'

'It's not that simplistic,' Mendez said. 'We can defend ourselves without killing.'

'What, the way you've defended yourself against me? Gas everybody and tie them up?'

'I'm sure we'll work out strategies well ahead of time. After all, we'll have plenty of minds like yours at our disposal.'

'You're actually a soldier,' he said to me, 'and you go along with this foolishness?'

'I didn't ask to be a soldier. And I can't imagine a peace as foolish as this war we're in.'

He shook his head. 'Well, they've gotten to you. Your opinion doesn't count.'

'In fact,' Marty said, 'he's on our side naturally. He hasn't gone through the process. Neither have I.'

'Then the more fools you both are. Get rid of competition and you're just not human anymore.'

'There's competition here,' Mendez said. 'Even physical. Ellie and Megan play vicious handball. Most of us are slowed down by age, but we compete mentally in ways you couldn't even comprehend.'

'I'm jacked. I've done that – lightning chess and three-dimensional go. Even you must know it's not the same.'

'No, it's not the same. You've been jacked, but not long enough to even understand the rules we play by.'

'I'm talking about stakes, not rules! War is terrible and cruel, but so is life. Other games are just games. War is for real.'

'You're a throwback, Ingram,' I said. 'You want to smear yourself with woad and go bash people's brains out.'

'What I am is a man. I don't know what the hell you are, other than a coward and a traitor.'

I can't pretend he didn't get to me. One part of me sincerely wanted to get him alone and beat him to a pulp. Which is exactly what he wanted; I'm sure he could have stuffed my foot up my ass and pulled it out through my throat.

'Excuse me,' Marty said, and tapped his right earring to pick up a message. After a few moments, he shook his head. 'His orders come from too high. I can't find out when they expect him back.'

'If I'm not back in two–'

'Oh, shut up.' He gestured to Megan. 'Knock him out. The sooner we get him jacked, the better.'

'You don't have to knock me out.'

'We have to go to the other side of the building. I'd rather carry you than trust you.'

Megan clicked the gun to another setting and popped him. He stared defiantly for a few seconds and then slumped. Marty reached to untie him. 'Wait a half minute,' Megan said. 'He might be bluffing.'

'That's not the same stuff as this?' I said, holding up the pistol.

'No, he's had plenty of that in one day. This doesn't work as fast, but it doesn't take as much out of you.' She reached over and pinched his earlobe, hard. He didn't react. 'Okay.'

Marty untied the left arm and it jerked halfway to his throat and fell back limp. The lips twitched, eyes still shut. 'Tough guy.' He hesitated, then untied the other bonds.

I got up to help him carry, but winced with the pain in my chest. 'You sit down,' Megan said. 'Don't lift a pencil until I get a look at you.'

Everybody else hustled out with Ingram, leaving Amelia and me alone.

'Let me look at that,' she said, and unbuttoned my shirt. There was a red area at the bottom of my rib cage that was already starting to turn bruise-tan, on its way to purple. She didn't touch it. 'He could have killed you.'

'Both of us. How does it feel to be wanted, dead or alive?'

'Sickening. He can't be the only one.'

'I should have foreseen it,' I said. 'I should know how the military mind works – being part of one, after all.'

She stroked my arm gently. 'We were just worried about the other scientists' reactions. Funny, in a way. If I thought about outside reaction at all, I assumed people would just accept our authority and be glad we had caught the problem in time.'

'I think most people would, even military. But the wrong department heard about it first.'

'Spooks.' She grimaced. 'Domestic spies reading journals?'

'Now that we know they exist, their existence seems almost inevitable. All they have to do is have a machine routinely search for key words in the synopses of papers submitted for peer review in the physical sciences and some engineering. If something looks like it has a military application, they investigate and pull strings.'

'And have the authors killed?'

'Drafted, probably. Let them do their work with a uniform on. In our case, your case, it called for drastic measures, since the weapon was so powerful it couldn't be used.'

'So they just picked up a phone and had orders cut for someone to come kill me, and another one to kill Peter?' She whistled at the autobar and asked it for wine.

'Well, Marty got from him that his primary order was to bring you back. Peter's probably in a room like this somewhere in Washington, shot full of Tazlet F-3, verifying what they already know.'

'If that's the case, though, they'll know about you. Make it sort of hard for you to sneak into Portobello as a mole.'

The wine came and we tasted it and looked at each other, thinking the same thing: I was only going to be safe if Peter had died before he could tell them about me.

Marty and Mendez came in and sat down next to us, Marty kneading his forehead. 'We're going to have to move fast now; move everything up. What part of the cycle is your platoon in?'

'They've been jacked for two days. In the soldier-boys for one.' I thought. 'They're probably still in Portobello, training. Breaking in the new platoon leader with exercises in Pedroville.'

'Okay. The first thing I have to do is see whether my pet general can have their training period extended – five or six days ought to be plenty. You're sure that phone line's secure?'

'Absolutely,' Mendez said. 'Otherwise we'd all be in uniform or in institutions, including you.'

'That gives us about two weeks. Plenty of time. I can do the memory modification on Julian in two or three days. Have orders cut for him to be waiting for the platoon in Building 31.'

'But we're not sure whether he should go there,' Amelia said. 'If the people who sent Ingram after me got ahold of Peter and made him talk, then they know Julian collaborated on the math. The next time he reports for duty they'll grab him.'

I squeezed her hand. 'I suppose it's a risk I'll have to take. You can fix it so that they won't be able to learn about this place from me.'

Marty nodded, thoughtful. 'That part's pretty routine, tailoring your memory. But it does put us in a bind … we have to erase the memory of your having worked on the Problem, in order for you to get back into Portobello. But if they grab you because of Peter and find a hole there, instead of a memory, they'll know you've been tampered with.'

'Could you link it with the suicide attempt?' I asked. 'Jefferson was proposing to erase those memories anyhow. Couldn't you make it look like that's what had been done?'

'Maybe. Just maybe … may I?' Marty poured some wine into a plastic cup. He offered it to Mendez, and he shook his head. 'It's not an additive process, unfortunately – I can take away memories, but I can't substitute false ones.' He sipped. 'It's a possibility, though. With Jefferson on our side. It wouldn't be hard to have him supposedly erase too much, so that it covered the week you were working up in Washington'

'This is looking more and more fragile,' Amelia said. 'I mean, I know almost nothing about being jacked – but if these powers that be tapped into you or Mendez or Jefferson, wouldn't the whole thing come tumbling down?'

'What we need is a suicide pill,' I said. 'Speaking of suicide.'

'I couldn't ask people to do that. I'm not sure that I would do it.'

Not even to save the universe?' I meant that to be sarcastic, but it came out a simple statement.

Marty turned a little pale. 'You're right, of course. I have to at least provide it as an option. For all of us.'

Mendez spoke up. 'This is not so dramatic. But we're overlooking an obvious way of buying time: we could move. Two hundred miles north and we're in a neutral country. They'd think twice before sending an assassin into Canada.'

We all considered that. 'I don't know,' Marty said. 'The Canadian government wouldn't have any reason to protect us. Some agency would come up with an extradition request and we'd be in Washington the next day, in chains.'

'Mexico,' I said. 'The problem with Canada is it's not corrupt enough. Take the nanoforge down to Mexico and you can buy absolute secrecy.'

'That's right!' Marty said. 'And in Mexico there are plenty of clinics where we can set up jacks and do memory modification.'

'But how do you propose getting the nanoforge there?' Mendez said. 'It weighs more than a tonne, not even counting all those vats and buckets and jars of raw materials it feeds on.'

'Use the machine to make a truck?' I said.

'I don't think so. It can't make anything bigger than seventy-nine centimeters across. In theory, we could make a truck, but it would be in hundreds of pieces, sections. You'd need a couple of master mechanics and a big metalworking shop, to put it together.'

'Why couldn't we steal one?' Amelia said in a small voice. 'The army has lots of trucks. Your pet general can change official records and have people promoted and transferred. Surely he can have a truck sent around.'

'I suspect it's harder to move physical objects than information,' Marty said. 'Worth a try, though. Anybody know how to drive?'

We all looked at each other. 'Four of the Twenty do,' Mendez said. 'I've never driven a truck, but it can't be that much different.'

'Maggie Cameron used to be a chauffeur,' I recalled from jacking with them. 'She's driven in Mexico. Ricci learned to drive in the army; drove army trucks.'

Marty stood up, moving a little slowly. 'Take me to that secure line, Emilio. We'll see what the general can do.'

There was a quick light rap on the door and Unity Han opened it, breathless. 'You should know. As soon as we jacked with him two-way, we found out … the man Peter, he's dead. Killed out of hand, for what he knew.'

Amelia bit a knuckle and looked at me. One tear.

'Dr Harding…' She hesitated. 'You were going to die, too. As soon as Ingram was sure your records had been destroyed.'

Marty shook his head. 'This isn't the Office of Technology Assessment.'

'It's not Army Intelligence, either,' Unity said. 'Ingram is one of a cell of Enders. There are thousands of them, scattered all through the government.'

'Jesus,' I said. 'And now they know that we can make their prophecy come true.'

What Ingram revealed was that he personally knew only three other members of the Hammer of God. Two of them were fellow employees of the Office of Technology Assessment – a civilian secretary who worked in Ingram's office in Chicago, and his fellow officer, who had gone to St Thomas to kill Peter Blankenship. The third was a man he knew only as Ezekiel, who showed up once or twice a year with orders. Ezekiel claimed that the Hammer of God had thousands of people scattered throughout government and commerce, mostly in the military and police forces.

Ingram had assassinated four men and two women, all but one of them military people (one had been the husband of the scientist he was sent to kill). They were always far from Chicago, and most of the crimes had passed muster as death from natural causes. In one, he raped the victim and mutilated her body in a specific way, following orders, so the death would appear to have been one of a chain of serial killings.

He felt good about all of them. Dangerous sinners he had sent to Hell. But he had especially liked the mutilation, the intensity of it, and he kept hoping Ezekiel would bring him another order for one.

He'd had the jack installed three years before. His fellow Enders wouldn't have approved of it and neither did he approve of the hedonistic ways they were normally used. He only used his at the jack chapels and sometimes the snuff shows, which also qualified as a kind of religious experience for him.

One of the people he'd killed was an off-duty mechanic, a stabilizer like Candi. It made Julian wonder about the men, maybe Enders, who had raped Arly and left her for dead. And the Ender with the knife, outside the convenience store. Were they just crazy, or part of an organized effort? Or were they both?

The next morning I jacked with the bastard for an hour, which was more than fifty-nine minutes too long. He made Scoville look like a choirboy.

I had to get away. Amelia and I found bathing suits and pedaled to the beach. In the men's changing room two men watched me in a strangely hostile way. I supposed black people are rare up here. Or maybe bicyclists.

We didn't do much swimming; the water was too salty, with a greasy metallic taste, and surprisingly cold. For some reason, it smelled like cured ham. We waded out and dried off, shivering, and walked for a while on the odd beach.

The white sand wasn't native, obviously. We'd come in pedaling over the actual crater surface, which was a kind of dark umber glass. The sand felt too powdery underfoot, and made a squeaking sound.

It seemed really strange compared to the Texas beaches where we'd vacationed, Padre Island and Matagorda. No seabirds, shells, crabs. Just a big round artifact full of alkaline water. A lake created by a simpleminded god, Amelia said.

'I know where he could find a couple of thousand followers,' I said.

'I dreamed about him,' she said. 'I dreamed he had gotten me, like the one you talked about.'

I hesitated. 'Do you want to talk about it?' He had opened the victim from navel to womb, and then made a cross-slash through the middle of the abdomen, as a kind of decoration after cutting her throat.

She made a brushing-away gesture. 'The reality's more frightening than the dream. If it's at all like his picture of it.'

'Yeah.' We'd discussed the possibility that there were only a few of them; maybe only four deluded conspirators. But he seemed to be able to draw on an awful lot of resources – information, money, and ration credits, as well as gadgets like the AK 101. Marty was going to talk to his general this morning.

'It's scary that their situation is the opposite of ours. We could locate and interrogate a thousand of them and never find anyone involved in the actual planning. But if they jack with any one of you, they know everything.'

I nodded. 'So we have to move fast.'

'Move, period. Once they track him or Jefferson up here, we're dead.' She stopped walking. 'Let's sit here. Just sit quietly for a few minutes. It might be our last chance.'

She crossed ankles and drifted into a kind of lotus position. I sat down less gracefully. We held hands and watched morning mist burn off the dead gray water.

Marty passed on what Ingram had revealed about the Hammer of God to the general. He said it sounded fantastic, but he would make cautious inquiries.

He also found for them two decommissioned vehicles, delivered that afternoon: a heavy-duty panel truck and a school bus. They turned the conspicuous army green into a churchly powder blue, and lettered 'St Bartholomew's Home' on both vehicles.

Moving the nanoforge was no picnic. The crew that had delivered it long ago had used two heavy dollies, a ramp, and a winch to get it into the basement. They used the machine to improvise duplicates, jacked it up onto the dollies and, after widening three doors, managed to get it into the garage in one backbreaking day. Then at night they snuck it out and winched it into the panel truck.

Meanwhile, they were modifying the school bus so that Ingram and Jefferson could stay jacked continuously, which meant taking out seats and putting in beds, along with equipment to keep them fed and watered and emptied. They would stay continually jacked to two of the Twenty, or Julian, working in staggered four-hour shifts.

Julian and Amelia were working as unskilled labor, tearing out the last four rows of seats in the bus and improvising a solid frame for the beds, sweating and swatting mosquitoes under the harsh light, when Mendez clomped into the bus, rolling up his sleeves: 'Julian, I'll take over here. The Twenty need you to jack with them.'

'Gladly.' Julian got up and stretched, both shoulders crackling. 'What's up? Ingram have a heart attack, I hope?'

'No, they need some practical input about Portobello. One-way jack, for safety's sake.'

Amelia watched Julian go. 'I'm afraid for him.'

'I'm afraid for us all.' He took a small bottle from his pants pocket, opened it, and shook out a capsule. He handed it to her, his hand quivering a little.

She looked at the silver oval. 'The poison.'

'Marty says it's almost instantaneous, and irreversible. An enzyme that goes straight to the brain.'

'It feels like glass.'

'Some kind of plastic. We're supposed to bite down on it.'

'What if you swallow it?'

'It takes longer. The idea is–'

'I know what the idea is.' She put it in her blouse pocket and buttoned it. 'So what did the Twenty want to know about Portobello?'

'Panama City, actually. The POW camp and the Portobello connection to it, if any.'

'What are they going to do with thousands of hostile prisoners?'

'Turn them into allies. Jack them all together for two weeks and humanize them.'

'And let them go?'

'Oh, no.' Mendez smiled and looked back toward the house. 'Even behind bars, they won't be prisoners anymore.'

I unjacked and stared down into the wildflowers for a minute, sort of wishing it had been two-way; sort of not. Then I stood up, stumbled, and went back to where Marty was sitting at one of the picnic tables. Incongruously, he was slicing lemons. He had a large plastic bag of them and three pitchers, and a manual juicer.

'So what do you think?'

'You're making lemonade.'

'My specialty.' Each of the pitchers had a measured amount of sugar in the bottom. When he sliced a lemon, he would take a thin slice out of the middle and throw it on the sugar. Then squeeze the juice out of both halves. It looked like six lemons per pitcher.

'I don't know,' I said. 'It's an audacious plan. I have a couple of misgivings.'

'Okay.'

'You want to jack?' I nodded toward the table with the one-way box.

'No. Give me the surface first. In your own words, so to speak.'

I sat down across from him and rolled a lemon between my palms. 'Thousands of people. All from a foreign culture. The process works, but you've only tried it on twenty Americans – twenty white Americans.'

'There's no reason to think it might be culture-bound.'

'That's what they say themselves. But there's no evidence to the contrary, either. Suppose you wind up with three thousand raving lunatics?'

'Not likely. That's good conservative science – we ought to do a small-scale test first – but we can't afford to. We're not doing science now – we're doing politics.'

'Beyond politics,' I said. 'There's no word for what we're doing.'

'Social engineering?'

I had to laugh. 'I wouldn't say that around an engineer. It's like mechanical engineering with a crowbar and sledgehammer.'

He concentrated on a lemon, 'You do still agree that it has to be done.'

'Something has to be done. A couple of days ago, we were still considering options. Now we're on some kind of slippery ramp; can't slow down, can't go back.'

'True, but we didn't do it voluntarily, remember. Jefferson put us on the edge of the ramp, and Ingram pushed us over.'

'Yeah. My mother likes to say, "Do something, even if it's wrong." I guess we're in that mode.'

He set down the knife and looked at me. 'Actually not. Not quite. We do have the option of just plain going public.'

'About the Jupiter Project?'

'About the whole thing. In all likelihood, the government's going to discover what we're doing and squash us. We could take that opportunity away from them by going public.'

Odd that I hadn't even considered that. 'But we wouldn't get anything close to a hundred percent compliance. Less than half, you figured. And then we're in Ingram's nightmare, a minority of lambs surrounded by wolves.'

'Worse than that,' he said cheerfully. 'Who controls the media? Before the first volunteer could sign up, the government would have us painted as ogres bent on world domination. Mind controllers. We'd be hunted down and lynched.'

He finished with the lemons and poured equal amounts of juice into each pitcher. 'Understand that I've been thinking about this for twenty years. There's no way around the central conundrum: to humanize someone, we have to install a jack; but once you're jacked two-way, you can't keep a secret.

'If we had all the time in the world, we could do it like the Enders' cell system. Elaborate memory modification for everybody who's not at the very top, so that nobody could reveal my identity or yours. But memory modification takes training, equipment, time.

'This idea of humanizing the POWs is partly a way of undermining the government's case against us, ahead of time. It's presented initially as a way of keeping the prisoners in line – but then we let the news media "discover" that something more profound has happened to them. Heartless killers transformed into saints.'

'Meanwhile, we're doing the same thing to all the mechanics. One cycle at a time.'

'That's right,' he said. 'Forty-five days. If it works.'

The arithmetic was clear enough. There were six thousand soldier-boys, each serviced by three cycles. Fifteen days each, and after forty-five days you had eighteen thousand people on our side, plus the thousand or two who run the flyboys and waterboys, who would be going through the process.

What Marty's pet general was going to do, or try, was to declare a worldwide Psychops effort that required certain platoons to stay on duty for a week or a few weeks extra.

It only took five extra days to 'turn' a mechanic, but then you couldn't just send him home. The change in behavior would be obvious, and the first time one was jacked, the secret would be out. Fortunately, once the mechanics were jacked, they'd understand the necessity for isolation, so keeping them on base wouldn't be a problem. (Except for feeding and housing all those extra people, which Marty's general would incorporate into the exercise. Never hurt a soldier to bivouac for a week or two.)

Meanwhile, the publicity over the miraculous 'conversion' of the POWs would be priming the public to accept the next step.

The ultimate bloodless coup: pacifists taking over the army, and the army taking over the government. And then the people – radical idea! – taking over the government themselves.

'But the whole thing hinges on this mystery man, or woman,' I said. 'Someone who can shuffle medical records around, have a few people reassigned, okay. Appropriate a truck and a bus. That's nothing like setting up a global Psychops exercise. One that's actually a takeover of the military.'

He nodded quietly.

'Aren't you going to put water in the lemonade?'

'Not until morning. That's the secret.' He folded his arms. 'As to the big secret, his identity, you're perilously close to solving it.'

'The president?' He laughed. 'Secretary of defense? Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?'

'You could figure it out with what you know, given a table of organization. Which is a problem. We're extremely vulnerable between now and the time your memory has been tailored.'

I shrugged. 'The Twenty told me about the suicide pills.'

He carefully uncapped a brown vial and shook three hard pills into my hand. 'Bite down on one and you'll be brain-dead in a few seconds. For you and me it ought to be in a glass tooth.'

'In a tooth?'

'Old spy myth. But if they take you or me alive, and get a jack into us, the general's dead meat, and the whole thing is over.'

'But you're one-way.'

He nodded. 'With me, it would take a little torture. With you … well, you might as well just know his name.'

'Senator Dietz? The pope?'

He took my arm and started to lead me back to the bus. 'It's Major General Stanton Roser, the Assistant Secretary for Force Management and Personnel. He was one of the Twenty who supposedly died, but with a different name and face. Now he has a disconnected jack, but otherwise he's well-connected indeed.'

'None of the Twenty knows?'

He shook his head. 'And they won't find out from me. Nor from you, now. You don't jack with anybody until we get to Mexico and tailor your memory.'

Their drive down to Mexico was too interesting. The fuel cells in the truck lost power so fast they had to be recharged every two hours. Before they got out of South Dakota they decided to pull over for half a day and rewire the vehicle so it was powered directly by the nanoforge's warm fusion generator.

Then the bus broke down, the transmission turning to mush. It was essentially an airtight cylinder of powdered iron stiffened by a magnetic field. Two of the Twenty, Hanover and Lamb, had worked on cars, and together they figured out that the problem was in the shifting program – when the torque demand reached a certain threshold, the field switched off for a moment to shift to a lower gear; when it went below another threshold, it would shift up. But the program had gone haywire, and was trying to shift a hundred times a second, so the iron powder cylinder wasn't rigid long enough to transmit much power. After they figured out the nature of the problem, it was easy to fix, since the shifting parameters could be set manually. They had to reset them every ten or fifteen minutes, because the bus wasn't really designed for so heavy a load, and kept overcompensating. But they did lurch south a thousand miles a day, making plans.

Before they got into Texas, Marty had made arrangements of a shady nature with Dr Spencer, who owned the Guadalajara clinic where Amelia had been operated on. He didn't reveal that he had a nano-forge, but he did say he had limited, but unsupervised, access to one, and he could make the doctor anything, within reason, that the thing could make in six hours. As proof, 2200 carats' worth, he sent along a one-pound diamond paperweight with Spencer's name lasered into the top facet.

In exchange for the six machine hours, Dr Spencer shuffled his appointments and personnel so that Marty's people could have a wing to themselves, and the use of several technicians, for a week. Extensions to be discussed.

A week was all that Marty would need, to tailor Julian's memories and complete the humanization of his two captives.

Getting through the border into Mexico was easy, a simple financial transaction. Getting back the same way would be almost impossible; the guards on the American side were slow and efficient and difficult to bribe, being robots. But they wouldn't be driving back, unless things absolutely fell apart. They planned to be flying to Washington aboard a military aircraft – preferably not as prisoners.

It took another day to drive to Guadalajara; two hours crawling through the sprawl of Guadalajara itself. All the streets that were not under repair seemed not to have been repaired since the twentieth century. They finally found the clinic, though, and left the bus and truck in its underground lot, guarded by an old man with a submachine gun. Mendez stayed with the truck and kept an eye on the guard.

Spencer had everything prepared, including the rental of a nearby guest house, la Florida, for the busload. No questions, except to verify their needs. Marty had Jefferson and Ingram installed in the clinic, along with a couple of the Twenty.

They began setting up the Portobello phase from la Florida. Assuming the local phones weren't secure, they had a scrambled military line bounced off a satellite and routed through General Roser.

It was easy enough to get Julian assigned to Building 31 as a kind of middle-management trainee, since he was no longer a factor in the company's strategic plans. But the other part of it – a request to extend his platoon's time in the soldierboys an additional week – was turned down at the battalion level, with the terse explanation that the 'boys' had already gone through too much stress the past couple of cycles That was true enough. They had had three weeks, unjacked, to dwell on the Liberia disaster, and some had not been in good soldierly shape when they came back. Then there was the new stress of retraining with Eileen Zakim, Julian's replacement. For nine days they would be confined to Portobello – 'Pedroville' – doing the same maneuvers over and over, until their performance with Eileen was close enough to what it had been with Julian.

(It would turn out that Eileen did have one pleasant surprise. She had expected resentment, that the new platoon leader had come from outside, rather than being promoted from the ranks. It was quite the opposite: they all had known Julian's job intimately, and none of them wanted it.)

It was fortunate, but not exactly unusual, that the colonel who brusquely turned down the extension request had himself a request for change of assignment in the works. Many of the officers in Building 31 would rather be assigned someplace with more action, or with less; this colonel suddenly had orders delivered that sent him to a relief compound in Botswana, a totally pacified place where the Alliance presence was considered a godsend.

The colonel who replaced him came from Washington, from General Stanton Roser's Office of Force Management and Personnel. After he'd settled in for a few days, reviewing his predecessor's policies and actions, he quietly reversed the one affecting Julian's old platoon. They would stay jacked until 25 July, as part of a long-standing OFMP study. On the 25th, they'd be brought in for testing and evaluation.

Brought in to Building 31.

Roser's OFMP couldn't directly affect what went on in the huge Canal Zone POW camp; that was managed by a short company from Army Intelligence, which had a platoon of soldierboys attached to it.

The challenge was somehow to have all the POWs jacked together for two weeks without any of the soldierboys or Intelligence officers, one of whom was also jacked, eavesdropping.

To this end they conjured up a colonelcy for Harold McLaughlin, the only one of the Twenty who had both army experience and fluency in Spanish. He had orders cut to go to the Zone to monitor an experiment in extended 'pacification' of the POWs. His uniforms and papers were waiting for him in Guadalajara.

One night in Texas, Marty had called all the Saturday Night Special people and asked, in an enigmatic and guarded way, whether they would like to come down to Guadalajara, to share some vacation time with him and Julian and Blaze: 'Everyone has been under so much stress.' It was partly to benefit from their varied and objective viewpoints, but also to get them across the border before the wrong people showed up asking questions. All of them but Belda said they were able to come; even Ray, who had just spent a couple of weeks in Guadalajara, having a few decades' worth of fat vacuumed out of his body.

So who should be first to show up at la Florida but Belda, after all, hobbling in with a cane and an overloaded human porter. Marty was in the entrance hall, and for a moment just stared.

'I thought it over and decided to take the train down. Convince me it wasn't a big mistake.' She nodded at the porter. 'Tell this nice boy where to put my things.'

'Uh … habitatión dieciocho. Room 18. Up the stairs. You speak English?'

'Enough,' he said, and staggered up the stairs with the four bags.

'I know Asher's coming in this afternoon,' she said. It was not quite twelve. 'What about the others? I thought I might rest until the festivities begin.'

'Good. Good idea. Everyone should be in by six or seven. We have a buffet set up for eight.'

'I'll be there. Get some sleep yourself. You look terrible.' She pulled herself up the stairs with cane and banister.

Marty looked as bad as she said, having just spent hours jacked with McLaughlin going over all the ins and outs, every possible thing that could go wrong with the POW aspect of 'the caper,' as McLaughlin called it. He'd be on his own most of the time.

There would be no problem as long as orders were followed, since the orders called for all the POWs to be isolated for two weeks. Most of the Americans didn't like jacking with them anyhow.

After two weeks, starting right after Julian's platoon moved in on Building 31, McLaughlin would take a walk and disappear, leaving the POWs' humanization an irreversible fact of life. Then they would be connected with Portobello and prepare for the next stage.

Marty flopped down on the unmade bed in his small room and stared at the ceiling. It was stucco, and the crusted swirls of it made fantastic patterns in the shifting light that threaded across the room from the top of the shutters that cut off the view of the street; light reflected from the windshields and glittering canopies of the cars that crawled by in the street below, noisily unaware that their old world was about to die. If everything went right. Marty stared at the shifting shadows and catalogued all the things that could go wrong. And then their old world would die, literally.

How could they keep the plan secret, against all odds? If only the humanization didn't take so long. But there was no way around it.

Or so he thought.

I'd been looking forward to seeing the Saturday Night Special crowd again, and there couldn't have been a more welcome setting for the reunion, as tired as we were of road food. The dining table at la Florida was a crowded landscape of delights: a platter of jumbled sausages and another of roasted chickens, split and steaming; a huge salmon lying open on a plank; three colors of rice and bright bowls of potatoes and corn and beans; stacks of bread and tortillas. Bowls of salsa, chopped peppers, and guacamole. Reza was loading a plate when I came in; we exchanged greetings in silly gringo Spanish and I followed his example.

We'd just collapsed in overstuffed chairs, plates balanced on laps, when the others came downstairs in a group, led by Marty. It was a mob, a dozen of the Twenty as well as five from our crowd. I gave up my chair to Belda and filled a small plate to her specifications, saying hello to everyone, and eventually found a piece of floor in a corner with Amelia and Reza, who had also given up his early advantage to a white-haired woman, Ellie.

Reza poured us each a cup of red wine from an unlabeled jug. 'Let me see your ID, soldier.' He shook his head, drank half the cup and refilled it. 'I'm emigrating,' he said.

'Better bring lots of money,' Amelia said. There were no jobs for Nortes in Mexico.

'You guys really have your own personal nanoforge?'

'Boy, security is tight around here,' I said.

He shrugged. 'I sort of heard Marty tell Ray about it. Stolen?'

'No, an antique.' I told him as much of the story as I could. It was frustrating; everything I knew about its history came from being jacked with the Twenty, and there was no way to communicate all the nuance and complexity of its shadowy story. Like reading just the face level of a hypertext.

'So technically, it's not stolen. It does belong to you.'

'Well, it's not legal for private citizens to own warm fusion plants, let alone the nanogenesis modules – but St Bartholomew's was chartered by the army in a grant that hid all kinds of spooky classified things. I guess the records got scrambled, and we're sort of caretaking the old machine until someone like the Smithsonian shows up for it.'

'Good of you.' He attacked a quarter-chicken. 'Would I be wrong in assuming that Marty didn't summon us down here for our sage advice?'

'He'll ask your advice,' Amelia said. 'He asks for mine all the time.' She rolled her eyes.

Reza dipped a chicken leg in jalapeños. 'But basically, he's covering his rear. His rear flank.'

'And protecting you,' I said. 'As far as we know, nobody's after Marty yet. But they're certainly after Blaze, for this ultimate weapon she knows all about.'

'They killed Peter,' she murmured.

Reza looked blank and then shook his head sharply. 'Your coworker. Who did?'

'The one who came after me said he was from the army's "Office of Technology Assessment."' She shook her head. 'He was and he wasn't.'

'Spooks?'

'Worse than that,' I said. I explained about the Hammer of God.

'So why not just go public?' he said. 'You didn't plan for it to stay secret.'

'We will,' I said, 'but the later, the better. Ideally, not until we have all the mechanics converted. Not just Portobello, but everywhere.'

'Which will take a month and a half,' Amelia said, 'if everything goes according to plan. I can imagine how likely that is going to be.'

'You won't even get to that stage,' Reza said. 'All those people able to read minds? I'd bet you a month's alcohol ration it'll blow up in your face before you get the first platoon converted.'

'No bet,' I said. 'As little as I need your ration. The only chance we have is to stay a little ahead of the game. Try to be ready for disaster when it strikes.'

A stranger sat down with us and I realized it was Ray, the three quarters of him that was left after cosmetic surgery. 'I jacked with Marty.' He laughed. 'God, what a screwball plan. Go away for a couple of weeks and everybody goes crazy.'

'Some are born crazy,' Amelia said. 'Some achieve craziness. We had craziness thrust upon us.'

'Bet that's a quote,' Ray said, and crunched down on a carrot. He had a plate full of raw vegetables. 'True enough, though. One person dead and how many of us to follow? To take on the unlikely task of improving human nature.'

'If you want out,' I said, 'it better be now.'

Ray set his plate down and helped himself to some wine. 'No way. I've worked with jacks as long as Marty. We've been playing with this idea longer than you've been playing with girls.' He glanced at Amelia and smiled and looked down at his plate.

Marty rescued him by dinging a spoon on a water glass. 'We have a vast range of experience and expertise here, and won't often all be together in one room. I think it would be smart this first time, though, to limit ourselves to getting our timetable and other information straight – things the jacked people all know in detail, but the rest of us only in bits and pieces.'

'Let's take it backward,' Ray said. 'We conquer the world. What's the step just before that?'

Marty stroked his chin. 'September first.'

'Labor Day?'

'It's also Armed Forces Day. The one day in the year when we can have a thousand soldierboys marching down the streets of Washington. Peacefully.'

'One of the few days,' I added, 'when most of the politicians are also in Washington. And more or less in one place, at the parade.'

'A lot of what happens before, just before that, is control of the news. "Spin," they used to call it.

'Two weeks before, we will have finished humanizing the entire POW compound down in Panama City. It's going to be a miracle – all those unruly, hostile captives transformed into a forgiving, cooperative nation, eager to use their newfound harmony to end the war.'

'I see where this is going,' Reza said. 'We'll never get away with it.'

'Okay,' Marty said. 'Where are we going?'

'You get everybody excited about turning these nasty goomie soldiers into angels, and then you whip aside the magic curtain and say, "Ta-da! We've done the same thing to all our soldiers. By the way, we're taking over Washington."'

Not quite that subtle.' Marty rolled up a tortilla with a strange mixture of beans, shredded cheese, and olives. 'By the time the public learns about it, it will be "Oh, by the way, we've taken over Congress and the Pentagon. Stay out of our way while we work this out."' He bit into the tortilla and shrugged at Reza.

'Six weeks from now,' Reza said.

'Six eventful weeks,' Amelia said. 'Just before I left Texas, I sent the rationale for the doomsday scenario to about fifty scientists – everyone in my address book tagged as a physicist or astronomer.'

'That's funny,' Asher said. 'I wouldn't have gotten it, since I'd be in your book as "math" or "old fart." But you'd think some colleague would have mentioned it by now. How long it's been?'

'Monday,' Amelia said.

'Four days.' Asher filled a mug with coffee and steaming milk. 'Have you contacted any of them?'

'Of course not. I haven't dared to pick up a phone or log on.'

'Nothing in the news,' Reza said. 'Aren't any of your fifty publicity-hungry?'

'Maybe it was intercepted,' I said.

Amelia shook her head. 'It was from a public phone, a data jack in the Dallas train station; maybe a micro-second download.'

'So why hasn't anybody reacted?' Reza said.

She kept shaking her head. 'We've been so … so busy. I should have…' She set down her plate and fished through her purse for a phone.

'You're not–' Marty said.

'I'm not calling anybody.' She punched a sequence of numbers from memory. 'But I never checked the echo of that call! I just assumed everybody got … oh, shit.' She turned the handset around. It showed a random jumble of numbers and letters. 'The bastard got to my database and scrambled it. In the forty-five minutes it took for me to get to Dallas and make the call.'

'It's worse than that, I'm afraid,' Mendez said. 'I've jacked with him for hour after hour. He didn't do it; didn't think of it.'

'Jesus,' I said into the silence. 'Could it have been someone in our department? Someone who could decrypt your files and cream them?' She'd been keying through the text. 'Look at this.' There was nothing but gibberish until the last word:

'G¡O¡D¡S¡W¡I¡L¡L.'

It takes time for information to percolate up through a cell system. By the time Amelia found evidence that the Hammer of God had scrambled her files, there was still one day left before the very highest echelon knew that God had given them a way to bring on the Last Day: all they had to do was keep anybody from interfering with the Jupiter Project.

They were not dumb, and they knew a thing or two about spin themselves. They leaked the 'news' that there were lunatic-fringe conservatives who wanted to convince you that the Jupiter Project was a tool of Satan; that continuing it could precipitate the end of the world. The End of the Universe! Could anything be more ridiculous? A harmless project that, now that it was set in motion, cost nobody anything, and might give us real information as to how the universe began. No wonder those religious kooks wanted it suppressed! It might prove that God didn't exist!

What it proved, of course, was that God did exist, and was calling us home.

The Ender who had decrypted and destroyed Amelia's files was none other than Macro, her titular boss, and he was glad beyond words to see that his part in the plan was crystallizing.

Macro's involvement did help the other Plan – Marty's rather than God's in that he deflected attention from the disappearance of Amelia and Julian. He had set up Ingram to get rid of Amelia, and assumed he had taken care of the black boyfriend at the same time, good riddance to both of them. He had forged letters of resignation from both, in case anyone came looking. He'd assigned their teaching duties to people who were too grateful to be curious, and there was already so much rumor brewing about them that he didn't bother to manufacture a cover story. Young black man and older white woman. They probably pulled up stakes and went to Mexico.

Fortunately, I still had the rough draft of the paper on my own notebook. Amelia and I could clean it up and send a delayed broadcast after we left Guadalajara. Ellie Morgan, who had been a journalist before committing murder, volunteered to write a simplified version for general release, and one with everything but equations for a popular science magazine. That would be a pretty short article.

The staff removed all the plates, empty or piled with bones, and brought back plates of cookies and fruit. I couldn't look at another calorie, but Reza attacked both.

'Since Reza has his mouth full,' Asher said, let me be devil's advocate for a change.

'Suppose all it took to become humanized was a simple pill. The government demonstrates how it's going to make life better for everyone – or even that life will end if everyone doesn't take it – and they supply the pills to everybody. Pass a law saying it's life imprisonment if you don't take the pill. How many would manage not to take it anyhow?'

'Millions,' Marty said. 'Nobody trusts the government.'

'And instead of a pill, you're talking about a complex surgical procedure that only works ninety-some percent of the time and when it doesn't work, it usually kills or stupefies the victim. You'll have people running for the hills.'

'We've been through this,' Marty said.

'I know. I got the argument when we were jacked. You don't provide it for free – you charge for it and make it a symbol of status and individual empowerment. How many Enders do you think you're going to get that way? And what about the people who already have status and power? They're going to say, "Oh, good, now everybody else can be like me"?'

'The fact is,' Mendez said, 'it does give you power. When I'm linked with the Twenty, I understand five languages; I have twelve degrees; I've lived over a thousand years.'

'The status part will be propaganda at first,' Marty said. 'But when people look around and see that virtually everything of interest is being done by the humanized, we won't have to sell the idea.'

'I'm worried about the Hammer of God,' Amelia said. 'We're not likely to convert many of them, and some of them like to serve God by murdering the godless.'

I agreed. 'Even if we convert a few like Ingram, the nature of the cell system would keep it from spreading.'

'They're notoriously antijack anyhow,' Asher said. 'Enders in general, I mean. And arguments about status and power aren't going to move them.'

'Spiritual arguments might,' Ellie Morgan said. She looked kind of saintly herself, all in white with long flowing white hair. 'Those of us who are believers find our belief strengthened, and broadened.'

I wondered about that. I'd felt her belief, jacked, and was attracted by the comfort and peace she derived from it. But she'd instantly accepted my atheism as 'another path,' which didn't sound much like any Ender I'd met. The hour I'd spent linked with Ingram and two others, Ingram had used the power of the jack to visualize imaginative hells for the three of us, all involving anal rape and slow mutilation.

It would be interesting to jack with him after he'd been humanized, and play those hells back for his entertainment. I suppose he'd forgive himself.

'That's an angle we ought to map out,' Marty said. 'Using religion – not your kind, Ellie, but organized religion. We'll automatically have people like the Cyber-Baptists and Omnia on our side. But if we could be endorsed by some mainstream religion, we could have a big bloc that not only preached our gospel, but demonstrated its effectiveness.' He picked up a cookie and inspected it. 'I've been concentrating so much on the military aspects that I've neglected other concentrations of power. Religion, education.'

Belda tapped her cane on the floor. 'I don't think deans and professors are going to see the appeal of gaining knowledge without working through their institutions. Mr Mendez, you plug into your friends and speak five languages. I only speak four, none of them that well, and it took a large piece of my youth, sitting and memorizing, to learn three of those four. Pedagogues are jealous of the time and energy they invest in gaining knowledge. You offer it to people like a sugar pill.'

'But no, it's not like that at all,' Mendez said earnestly. 'I only understand things in Japanese or Catalan when one of the others is thinking with that language. I don't keep it.'

'It's like when Julian joined us,' Ellie said. 'The Twenty never had a physical scientist before. When he was linked with us, we understood his love for physics, and any of us could use his knowledge directly – but only if we knew enough, anyhow, to ask the right questions. We couldn't suddenly do calculus. No more than we understand Japanese grammar when we're linked with Wu.'

Megan nodded. 'It's sharing information, not transferring it. I'm a doctor, which may not be a huge intellectual accomplishment, but it does take years of study and practice. When we're all jacked together and someone complains of a physical problem, all the others can follow my logic in diagnosis and prescribing, while it's happening, but they couldn't have come up with it on their own, even though we've been jacked together off and on for twenty years.'

'The experience might even motivate someone to study medicine, or physics,' Marty said, 'and it certainly would help a student, to have instant intimate contact with a doctor or a physicist. But you still have to unplug and hit the books, if you want to actually have the knowledge.'

'Or never unplug at all,' Belda said. 'Just unplug to eat or sleep or go to the toilet. That's really attractive. Billions of zombies who are temporarily expert in medicine and physics and Japanese. For all of their so-called waking hours.'

'It'll have to be regulated,' I said, 'the way it is now. People will spend a couple of weeks jacked, to humanize them. But after that…'

The front door opened so hard it banged against the wall, and three large policemen strode in with submachine guns. An unarmed policeman, smaller, followed them.

'–I have a warrant for Dr Marty Larrin,' he said in Spanish.

'–What is the warrant for?' I asked. '–What is the charge?'

'–I am not paid to answer to negros. Which of you is Dr Larrin?'

'I am,' I said in English. 'You can answer to me.'

He gave me a look I hadn't seen in years, not even in Texas. '–Be silent, negro. One of you white men is Dr Larrin.'

'What is the warrant about?' Marty asked, in English.

'Are you Professor Larrin?'

'I am and I have certain rights. Of which you are aware.'

'You do not have the right to kidnap people.'

'Is this person I supposedly kidnapped a Mexican citizen?'

'You know he is not. He's a representative of the government of the United States.'

Marty laughed. 'Then I suggest you send around some other representative of the government of the United States.' He turned his back on the guns. 'Where were we?'

'To kidnap is against Mexican law.' He was turning red in the face, like a cartoon cop. 'No matter who kidnaps who.'

Marty picked up a phone handset and turned around. 'This is an internal matter between two branches of the United States government.' He walked up to the man, holding the phone like a weapon, and switched to Spanish. '–You are a bug between two heavy rocks. Do you want me to make the phone call that crushes you?'

The cop rocked back but then held his ground. 'I don't know anything about that,' he said in English. 'A warrant is a simple matter. You must come with me.'

'Bullshit.' Marty touched one number and unreeled a jack connector from the side of the handset. He clicked it onto the back of his head.

'I demand to know who you are contacting!' Marty just stared at him, slightly wall-eyed. '¡Cabo!' He gestured, and one of the men put the muzzle of his submachine gun under Marty's chin.

Marty reached back slowly and unjacked. He ignored the gun and looked down into the little man's face. His voice was shaky but firm. 'In two minutes you may call your commander, Julio Casteñada. He will explain in detail the terrible mistake you almost made, in all innocence. Or you might decide to just go back to the barracks. And not further disturb Comandante Casteñada.'

They locked eyes for a long second. The cop jerked his chin sideways and the private withdrew his gun. Without another word, the four of them filed out.

Marty eased the door shut behind them. 'That was expensive,' he said. 'I jacked with Dr Spencer and he jacked with someone in the police. We paid this Casteñada three thousand dollars to lose the warrant.

'In the long run, money isn't important, because we can make anything and sell it. But here and now, we don't have a "long run." Just one emergency after another.'

'Unless somebody finds out you have a nanoforge,' Reza said. 'Then it won't be a few cops with guns.'

'These people didn't look us up in the phone book,' Asher said. 'It had to be someone in your Dr Spencer's office.'

'You're right, of course,' Marty said. 'So at the very least, they do know we have access to a nanoforge. But Spencer thinks it's a government connection I'm not able to talk about. That's what these police will be told.'

'It stinks, Marty,' I said. 'It stinks on ice. Sooner or later, they'll have a tank at the door, making demands. How long are we here?'

He flipped open his notebook and pushed a button. 'Depends on Ingram, actually. He should be humanized in six to eight days. You and I are going to be in Portobello on the twenty-second, regardless.'

Seven days. 'But we don't have a contingency plan. If the government or the Mafia puts two and two together.'

'Our "contingency plan" is to think on our feet. So far, so good.'

'At the very least, we ought to split up,' Asher said. 'Our being in one place makes it too easy for them.'

Amelia put a hand on my arm. 'Pair up and scatter. Each pair with one person who knows Spanish.'

'And do it now,' Belda said. 'Whoever sent those boys with guns has his own contingency plan.'

Marty nodded slowly. 'I'll stay here. Everybody else call as soon as you find a place. Who speaks enough Spanish to take care of rooms and meals?' More than half of us; it took less than a minute to sort up into pairs. Marty opened a thick wallet and put a stack of currency on the table. 'Make sure each of you has at least five hundred pesos.'

'Those of us who are up to it ought to take the subway,' I said. 'An army of cabs would be pretty conspicuous, and traceable.'

Amelia and I got our bags, not yet unpacked, and were the first ones out of the door. The subway was a kilometer away. I offered to take her suitcase, but she said that would be too conspicuously un-Mexican. She should take mine, and walk two paces behind me.

'At least we'll get a little breathing space to work on the paper. None of this will mean anything if the Jupiter Project is still going September fourteenth.'

'I spent a little time on it this morning.' She sighed. 'Wish we had Peter.'

'Never thought I'd say it … but me, too.'

They would soon find out, along with the rest of the world, that Peter was still alive. But he was in no shape to help with the paper.

Police in St Thomas arrested a middle-aged man wandering through the market at dawn. Dirty and unshaven, dressed only in underwear, at first they thought he was drunk. When the desk sergeant questioned him, though, she found that he was sober but confused. Monumentally confused: he thought the year was 2004 and he was twenty years old.

On the back of his skull, a jack connection so fresh it was crusted with blood. Someone had invaded his mind and stolen the last forty years.

What was taken from his mind corroborated the text of the article, of course. Within a few days, the glorious truth had spread to all of the upper echelons of the Hammer of God: God's plan was going to be fulfilled, appropriately enough, by the godless actions of scientists. Only a few people knew about the glorious End and Beginning that God would give them on September 14.

One of the paper's authors was safe, most of his brain in a black box somewhere. The academics who had juried the paper had all been taken care of, by accident or 'disease.' One author was still missing, along with the agent who had been sent to kill her.

The assumption was that they were both dead, since she hadn't surfaced to warn the world. Evidently the authors had been uncertain how much time they had before the process became irreversible.

The most powerful member of the Hammer of God was General Mark Blaisdell, the undersecretary of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Not too surprisingly, he knew his arch-rival, Marty's General Roser, in a casual social way; they took meals at the same Pentagon dining room – 'officers' mess,' technically, if you can apply the term to a place with mahogany paneling and a white-clad server for each two 'messers.'

Blaisdell and Roser did not like each other, though both hid it well enough to occasionally play tennis or billiards together. When Roser once invited him to a poker game, Blaisdell coldly said, 'I have never once played cards.'

What he did like to play was God.

Through a series of three or four intermediaries, he supervised most of the murder and torture that was regrettably necessary to hasten God's plans. He used an illegal jack facility in Cuba, where Peter had been taken to have his memory stripped. It was Blaisdell who reluctantly decided to let the scientist live, while the five jurors were succumbing to their accidents and diseases. Those five scientists lived all over the world, and there wasn't much to immediately link their deaths and disabilities – two of them were in comas, and would sleep through the end of the world – but if Peter showed up dead as well, it could make trouble. He was moderately famous, and there were probably dozens of people who knew the identities of the five jurors and the fact that they had turned down his paper. An investigation might lead to a re-evaluation of the paper, and the fact that Blaisdell's agency had mandated its refusal might attract unwanted scrutiny to other activities.

He tried to keep his religious beliefs to himself, but he knew there were people – like Roser – who knew he was very conservative, and might suspect, given a whisper of fact or rumor, that he was an Ender. The army wouldn't demote him for that, but they could make him the highest-ranking supply clerk in the world.

And if they found out about the Hammer of God, he'd be executed for treason. He would personally prefer that, of course, to demotion. But the secret had been sealed for years, and he would be the last one to give it away. Marty's group was not the only one with pills.

Blaisdell came home from the Pentagon and put on sport coveralls and went to an evening soccer game in Alexandria. At the hot dog stand he talked to the next woman in line, and as they walked back toward the bleachers, he said their agent Ingram had gone to the Omaha train station the evening of July 11th, to pick up and eliminate a scientist, Blaze Harding. Agent and scientist left the station together – security cameras confirmed that – but then both had disappeared. Find them and kill Harding. Kill Ingram if he does anything that makes you think he's on the wrong side.

Blaisdell returned to his seat. The woman went to the ladies' room and disposed of her hot dog, and then went home to her weapons.

Her first weapon was an illegal FBI infoworm, threading undetected through municipal transportation records. She found out that a third party shared the cab with the agent and his supposed victim; they had stopped the cab on Grand Street, no particular address. The original order had been for 1236 Grand, but they'd stopped early, a verbal cancel.

She went back to the security tapes and saw that the two had been followed by a large black man in uniform. She didn't yet know that there was a connection between the scientist and the black mechanic. She assumed he was a backup for Ingram; Blaisdell hadn't mentioned it, but maybe it was an arrangement Ingram had made on his own.

So Ingram probably had a car waiting, to drive his victim out into the country to dispose of her.

The next stage depended on luck. The Iridium system that provided global communication by way of a fleet of low-flying satellites had been quietly co-opted by the government after the start of the Ngumi War; all of the satellites had been replaced by dual-function ones: they still took care of phone service, but each one also spied continuously on the strip of land it passed over. Had one of them passed over Omaha, over Grand Street, just before midnight on the 11th?

She wasn't military, but she had access to Iridium pictures through Blaisdell's office. After a few minutes of sorting, she had an image of the cab leaving and the black mechanic getting into the back seat of a long black limousine. The next shot was a low angle that showed the limousine's license plate: 'North Dakota 101 Clergy.' In less than a minute, she had it traced to St Bartholomew's.

That was strange enough, but her course was clear. She already had a bag packed with a business suit and a frilly dress, two changes of underwear, and a knife and a gun made completely of plastic. There was also a jar of vitamins with enough poison to murder a small town. In less than an hour she was in the air, headed for the crater city Seaside and its mysterious monastery. St Bartholomew's had some military connection, but General Blaisdell didn't have high enough clearance to find out what it was. It occurred to her that she might be getting in over her head. She prayed for guidance, and God told her in his stern fatherly voice that she was doing the right thing. Stay your course and don't fear dying. Dying is just coming home.

She knew Ingram; he was a third of her cell – and she knew how much better he was at mayhem. She had killed more than twenty sinners in service to the Lord, but always at a distance or protected by extremely close contact. God had gifted her with great sexual attractiveness, and she used it as a weapon, allowing sinners in between her legs while she reached under the pillow for the crystal knife. Men who don't close their eyes when they ejaculate will close their eyes a moment later. If she was on her back with the man above her, she would embrace him with her left arm and then drive the dagger into his kidney. He would straighten up in tetanic shock, his penis trying to ejaculate again, and she would sweep the razor-keen blade across his throat. When he sagged, she would make sure both carotid arteries were severed.

Sitting in the plane, she put her knees together and squeezed, remembering how the last dying thrust felt. It probably didn't hurt the man too much, it was over so fast, and he faced an eternity of torment anyhow. She had never done it to anyone who had taken Jesus as his Savior. Instead of being washed in the Blood of the Lamb, they drowned in their own. Atheists and adulterers, they deserved even worse.

Once a man had almost escaped, a pervert she had allowed to engage her from behind. She'd had to half-turn and stab him in the heart, but she didn't have full force or good aim, and the point of the knife broke off in his breastbone. She dropped the knife and he ran for the door, and might have run naked and bleeding into the hotel corridor, but she had double-locked it, and while he was struggling with the combination of latches, she retrieved the knife and reached around him and slashed open his abdomen. He was a gross fat man, and an incredible mess spilled out. He made a lot of noise dying, while she knelt helplessly sick in the bathroom, but the hotel was evidently well soundproofed. She left by way of window and fire escape, and the morning news said that the man, a well-connected city commissioner, had died at home, peacefully, in his sleep. His wife and children had been full of praise for him. A godless swine too fat to engage a woman normally. He had even pretended to pray before they had sex, currying favor because of her crucifix, and then expected her to use her mouth to make him ready. It was while she was doing that, that she had savored the image of splitting him open. But her hate hadn't prepared her for the multicolored jumble of gore.

Well, this one would be clean. She had killed women twice before, each one a merciful pistol shot to the head. She would do that and then escape or not. She hoped she wouldn't have to kill Ingram, a stern but nice man who had never looked at her with lust. He was still a man, though, and it was possible that this redheaded professor had led him astray.

It was after midnight by the time she got to Seaside. She got a room at the hotel closest to St Bartholomew's, slightly more than a kilometer away, and walked over to take a look.

The place was completely dark and silent. Not surprising for a monastery, she supposed, so she went back to the hotel and slept for a few hours.

One minute after 8:00, she phoned the place, and got an answering machine. The same at 8:30.

She put on her weapons and walked over and rang the doorbell at 9:00. No response. She walked completely around the building and saw no sign of life. The lawn needed mowing.

She noted several places she could break in, come nightfall, and went back to the hotel to do some electronic snooping.

She found no reference to St Bartholomew's in any database of religious activity, other than acknowledgment of its existence and location. It was founded the year after the nanoforge cataclysm that formed the Inland Sea.

It was doubtless a cover organization for something, and that something was somehow connected with the military – in Washington, when she'd typed in the name, working under Blaisdell's aegis, she'd gotten a message that 'need-to-know' documents would have to be processed through Force Management and Personnel. That was pretty spooky, since Blaisdell had unquestioned access to top-secret material in any part of the military establishment.

So the people in that monastery were either very powerful or very subtle. Maybe both. And Ingram was evidently part of them.

The obvious conclusion would be that they were part of the Hammer of God. But then Blaisdell would know about their activities.

Or would he? It was a large organization, with linkages so complex and well-protected that it was possible even the man in charge could have lost track of an important part. So she should be ready to go in shooting, but also ready to tiptoe away quietly. God would guide her.

She spent a couple of hours assembling an Iridium mosaic of snapshots of the place since the 11th. There were no pictures of the black limousine, which was not too surprising, since the monastery had a large garage and there were never any vehicles parked outside.

Then she saw the army truck and bus appear, and watched them reappear as blue church vehicles, and leave.

It would take a long time, and a lot of luck, to trace them through the Interstate system. Fortunately, the powder blue was an unusual color. But before she settled into that mind-numbing chore, she decided to go check the monastery for clues.

She put on her business suit over the weapons and assembled the ID package and pocket litter that identified her as an FBI agent from Washington. She wouldn't get past a retinal scan at a police station, but she didn't foresee going into any police station alive.

Again, no response from the doorbell. It took her only a couple of seconds to pick the lock, but it was dead-bolted. She took out the pistol and blew the deadbolt off, and the door swung open.

She hurried in with the gun drawn and shouted 'FBI!' at the dusty waiting room. She went into the main corridor and started a hasty search, hoping to get through and out before the police arrived. She figured, accurately, that it was possible the folks at St Bart's didn't have a burglar alarm because they didn't want any police showing up suddenly, but she didn't want to count on that.

The rooms off the corridor were disappointing – two meeting rooms and individual dormitory rooms or cells.

The atrium stopped her, though, with the towering trees and active brook. A trash container had six empty Dom Perignon bottles. Off the atrium, a large circular conference room built around a huge hologram plate. She found the controls and turned it on to the peaceful woodland scene.

At first she didn't recognize the electronic modules at each seat – and then it dawned on her that this was a place where two dozen sinners could jack together!

She'd never heard of anything like that outside of the military. Maybe that was the military connection, though: a top-secret soldierboy experiment. The office of Force Management and Personnel might indeed be behind it.

That made her hesitant about proceeding. Blaisdell was her spiritual superior as well as her cell leader, and she would normally follow his orders without question. But it seemed increasingly obvious that there could be aspects to this he was unaware of. She would go back to the hotel and try to set up a secure line to him.

She turned off the hologram and tried to return to the atrium. The door was locked.

The room spoke up: 'Your presence here is illegal. Is there any way you would care to explain it?' The voice was Mendez's; he was viewing her from Guadalajara.

'I'm Agent Audrey Simone from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We have reason to believe–'

'Do you have a warrant to search this establishment?'

'It's on file with the local authorities.'

'You forgot to bring a copy when you broke in, though.'

'I don't have to explain myself to you. Show yourself. Open this door.'

'No, I think you'd better tell me the name of your supervisor and the location of your branch. Once I verify that you are who you say you are, we can discuss your lack of a warrant.'

With her left hand she pulled out her wallet and turned in a circle, displaying the badge. 'Things will go a lot easier for you if–' She was interrupted by the invisible man's laugh.

'Put the fake badge away and shoot your way out. The police should have arrived by now; you can explain about your warrant to them.'

She had to shoot off both hinges as well as the three bolts on this door. She ran across the brook and found that the door out of the atrium was now similarly secured. She reloaded, automatically counting the number of remaining air cartridges, and tried to open this one with three shots. It took her four more.

I was watching her on the screen from behind Mendez. She was finally able to push the door down with her shoulder. He pushed two buttons and switched to the corridor camera. She went pounding down the corridor in a dead run, the pistol held out in front of her with both hands.

'Does that look like an FBI agent going out to reason with the local cops?'

'Maybe you should have actually called them.'

He shook his head. 'Unnecessary bloodshed. You didn't recognize her?'

'Afraid not.' Mendez had called me when she shot down the front door, on the off chance that I might recognize her from Portobello.

Before she went out the front door, she slipped the pistol into a belly holster, and buttoned just the top button of her suit, so it was like a cape, concealing without restraining. Then she walked casually out the door.

'Pretty smooth,' I said. 'She might not be official. She could have been hired by anyone.'

'Or she could be a Hammer of God nutcase. They had Blaze tracked as far as the train station in Omaha.' He switched to an outside camera.

'Ingram had a lot of government authority, as well as being a nut. I guess she might, too.'

'I was sure the government lost her in Omaha. If anyone had followed the limo, St Bart's would have had company long before now.'

She stepped out and looked around, her face revealing nothing, and started up the sidewalk toward town like a tourist on a morning constitutional, neither slow nor hurried. The camera had a wide-angle lens; she dwindled away pretty fast.

'So should we check the hotels and try to find out who she is?' I asked.

'Maybe not. Even if we got a name, it might not do us any good. And we don't want anyone to make a connection between St Bart's and Guadalajara.'

I gestured at the screen. 'No one can track that signal to here?'

'Not the pictures. It's an Iridium service. I decrypt them passively from anywhere in the world.' He turned off the screen. 'You going to the unveiling?' Today was the day Jefferson and Ingram were to have finished the humanization process.

'Blaze wondered whether I ought to. My feelings about Ingram are still pretty Neanderthal.'

'I can't imagine. He only tried to murder your woman and then you as well.'

'Not to mention insulting my manhood and attempting to destroy the universe. But I'm due in the Clinic this afternoon anyhow, to get my memory fucked with. Might as well see Wonder Boy in action.'

'Give me a report. I'm going to stay by the screen for the next day or two, in case "Agent Simone" tries another visit.'

Of course I wouldn't be able to give him a report, because the encounter with Ingram was related to all the stuff I was having erased, or at least so I assumed – I wouldn't be able to remember his assault on Amelia without recalling what she had done to attract his attention. 'Good luck. You might check with Marty – his general might have some way to access FBI personnel records.'

'Good idea.' He stood up. 'Cup of coffee?'

'No, thanks. Spend the rest of the morning with Blaze. We don't know who I'm going to be tomorrow.'

'Frightening prospect. But Marty swears it's totally reversible.'

'That's true.' But Marty was going ahead with the plan even though it meant the risk of a billion or more dying or losing their sanity. Maybe my losing or keeping my memories didn't rank too high on his list of priorities.

The woman who called herself Audrey Simone, whose cell name was Gavrila, would never go back to the monastery. She had learned enough there.

It took her more than a day to put together a mosaic of Iridium pictures of the two blue vehicles making their way from North Dakota to Guadalajara. By God's grace the last picture was perfect timing: the truck had disappeared and the bus was signaling for a left turn into an underground parking garage. She used a grid to find the address and was not surprised when it turned out to be a clinic for installing jacks. That Godless practice was at the heart of everything, obviously.

General Blaisdell arranged transportation to Guadalajara for her, but had to wait six hours for an express package to arrive. There was no sporting goods store in North Dakota where she could replace the ammunition she'd used up opening doors – Magnum-load dumdum bullets that wouldn't set off airport detectors. She didn't want to run out of them, if she had to fight her way to the redheaded scientist. And perhaps Ingram.

Ingram and Jefferson sat together in hospital blues. They were in straight-backed chairs of expensive teak or mahogany. I didn't notice the unusual wood first, though. I noticed that Jefferson sat with a serene, relaxed expression that reminded me of the Twenty. Ingram's expression was literally unreadable, and both of his wrists were handcuffed to the chair arms.

There was a semicircle of twenty chairs facing them in the featureless white round room. It was an operating theatre, with glowing walls for the display of X-ray or positron transparencies.

Amelia and I took the last empty chairs. 'What's with Ingram?' I said. 'It didn't take?'

'He just shut down,' Jefferson said. 'When he realized he couldn't resist the process, he went into a kind of catatonia. He didn't come out of it when we unjacked him.'

'Maybe he's bluffing,' Amelia said, probably remembering the conference room at St Bart's. 'Waiting for an opportunity to strike.'

'That's why he's handcuffed,' Marty said. 'He's a wild card now.'

'He's just not there,' Jefferson said. 'I've jacked with more people than everybody in this room put together, and nothing like this has ever happened. You can't unjack yourself mentally, but that's what it felt like. Like he decided to pull the plug.'

'Not exactly a selling point for humanization,' I said to Marty. 'It works on everyone but psychopaths?'

'That's the word they used to describe me,' Ellie said, saintly and serene. 'And it was accurate.' She had murdered her husband and children, with gasoline. 'But the process worked with me, and still works after all these years. Without it, I know I would have gone crazy; stayed crazy.'

'The term "psychopath" covers a lot of territory,' Jefferson said. 'Ingram is intensely moral, even though he's repeatedly done things that all of us would call immoral; outrageously so.'

'When I was jacked with him,' I said, 'he reacted to my outrage with a kind of imperturbable condescension. I was a hopeless case who couldn't understand the rightness of the things he had done. That was the first day.'

'We wore him down a little over the next couple of days,' Jefferson said. 'By not disapproving; by trying to understand.'

'How can you "understand" someone who can follow an order to rape a woman and then mutilate her in a specific way? He left her tied up and gagged, to bleed to death. He's not even human.'

'But he is human,' Jefferson said, 'and however bizarre his behavior is, it's still human behavior. I think that's what shut him down – we refused to see him as some sort of avenging angel. Just a profoundly sick man we were trying to help. He could take your condemnation and laugh at it. He couldn't take Ellie's Christian charity and loving kindness. Or, for that matter, my own professional detachment.'

'He should be dead by now,' Dr Orr said. 'He hasn't taken any food or water since the third day. We've kept him on IVs.'

'A waste of glucose,' I said.

'You know better.' Marty waved fingers in front of Ingram's face and he didn't blink. 'We have to find out why this happened, and how common it's going to be.'

'Not common,' Mendez said. 'I was with him before, during, and after his retreat into wherever he is now. From the first, it was like jacking with some kind of alien, or animal.'

'I'll go along with that,' I said.

'But nevertheless very analytical,' Jefferson said. 'Studying us intently from the very first.'

'Studying what we knew about jacking,' Ellie said. 'He wasn't that interested in anybody as a person. But he had only jacked before in a limited, commercial way, and he was hungry to absorb our experience.'

Jefferson nodded. 'He had this vivid fantasy that he extrapolated from the jack joints. He wanted to be jacked with someone and kill him.'

'Or her,' Amelia said, 'like me, or that poor woman he raped and cut up.'

'The fantasy was always a male,' Ellie said. 'He doesn't see women as worthy opponents. And he doesn't have much of a sex drive – when he raped that woman, his penis was just another weapon.'

'An extension of his self, like all of his weapons,' Jefferson said.

'He's more obsessive about weapons than any soldier I ever jacked with.'

'He missed his calling. I know some guys he'd get along with fine.'

'I don't doubt it,' Marty said. 'Which makes him that much more important to study. Some people in hunter/killer platoons have similar personality traits. We have to find a way to keep this from happening.'

Good riddance, I didn't say. 'So you won't be coming with me tomorrow? Stay here?'

'No, I'm still going to Portobello. Dr Jefferson's going to work on Ingram. See whether he can walk him back with a combination of drugs and therapy.'

'I don't know whether to wish you luck. I really prefer him this way.' Maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought the bastard showed a glimmer of expression at that. Maybe we should send Marty down to Portobello alone, and leave me up here to taunt him out of catatonia.

Julian and Marty missed by only a few minutes sharing the Guadalajara airport with the woman who had come down to kill Amelia. They got on a military flight to Portobello while she took a taxi from the airport to the hotel across the street from the Clinic. Jefferson was staying there, no coincidence, and so were two of the Twenty – Ellie and the old soldier Cameron.

Jefferson and Cameron were dawdling over breakfast in the hotel cantina when she walked in to get a cup of coffee to take back to her room.

They both looked at her automatically, as men will when a beautiful woman makes an entrance, but Cameron kept staring.

Jefferson laughed and put on the accent of a popular comedian. 'Jim … you don't stop puttin' eye tracks on her, she's gonna come over and smack you one.' The two men had become friends, having worked their way up from the same beginning, the lower-class black suburbs of Los Angeles.

He turned around with a careful expression and said quietly, 'Zam, she might more'n smack me. Kill me just for practice.'

'What?'

'Bet she's killed more people than I have. She has that sniper look: everyone's a potential target.'

'She does hold herself like a soldier.' He slid a glance over to her and back. 'Or a certain kind of patient. Obsessive-compulsive.'

'How 'bout let's not ask her over to join us?'

'Good idea.'

But when they left the cantina a few minutes later, they ran into her again. She was trying to deal with the night clerk, a frightened teenaged girl whose English was not good. Gavrila's Spanish was worse.

Jefferson walked over to the rescue. '–Can I be of some assistance?' he asked in Spanish.

'You're American,' Gavrila said. 'Will you ask her if she's seen this woman?' It was a picture of Blaze Harding.

'–You know what she's asking,' he said to the clerk.

'Sí, claro.' The woman opened both her hands. '–I have seen the woman; she has been in here for meals a few times. But she doesn't stay here.'

'She says she's not sure,' Jefferson translated. 'Most Americans look pretty much the same to her.'

'Have you seen her?' Gavrila asked.

Jefferson studied the photograph. 'Can't say as I have. Jim?' Cameron stepped over. 'You seen this woman?'

'I don't think so. A lot of Americans coming and going.'

'You're here at the Clinic?'

'Consulting.' Jefferson realized he'd hesitated a moment too long. 'Is she a patient?'

'I don't know. I just know she's here.'

'What do you want her for?' Cameron asked.

'Just a few questions. Government business.'

'Well, we'll keep an eye out. You're…?'

'Francine Gaines. Room 126. I'd surely appreciate any help you could give me.'

'Sure.' They watched her walk away. 'Is this deep shit,' Cameron whispered, 'or just meters of excrement?'

'We have to get a picture of her,' Jefferson said, 'and send it on to Marty's general. If the army's after Blaze, he can probably get rid of her.'

'But you don't think she's army.'

'Do you?'

He hesitated. 'I don't know. When she looked at you, and when she looked at me, she looked first at the middle of the chest and then between the eyes. Targeting. I wouldn't make any sudden movements around her.'

'If she's army, she's a hunter/killer.'

'We didn't have that term when I was in the service. But it takes one to know one, and I know she's killed a lot of people.'

'A female Ingram.'

'She might be even more dangerous than Ingram. Ingram rather looks like what he is. She looks like…'

'Yeah.' Jefferson looked at the elevator door that had just been graced by her presence. 'She sure does.' He shook his head. 'Let's get a picture and get it over to the Clinic for when Mendez checks in.' He was down in Mexico City, scrounging raw materials for the nanoforge. 'He had some crazy woman break into St Bart's.'

'No resemblance,' Cameron said. 'She was ugly and had frizzy red hair.'

Actually, she'd had a wig and a pressure mask.

We walked right into Building 31, no trouble. To their computer, Marty was a brigadier general who had spent most of his career in academic posts. I was sort of my old self.

Or not. The memory modification was seamless, but I think if I had jacked with anyone in my old platoon (which should have been done as a security measure; we were just lucky) they would have known immediately that there was something wrong. I was too healthy. They had all sensed my problem and, in a way you can't put into words, had always 'been there'; had always helped me get from one day to the next. It would be as obvious as an old friend showing up without the limp he'd had all his life.

Lieutenant Newton Thurman, who was given the task of finding me a place to be useful, was an oddity: he had started out as a mechanic but developed a kind of allergy to being jacked – it gave him intense headaches that were no fun for him or for anybody jacked with him. I wondered at the time why they would put him in Building 31 rather than just retiring him, and it was clear that he wondered the same thing. He'd only been there a couple of weeks. In retrospect, it's obvious that he was planted as part of the overall plan. And what a mistake!

The staff in Building 31 was top-heavy in terms of rank: eight generals and twelve colonels, twenty majors and captains, and twenty-four lieutenants. That's sixty-four officers, giving orders to fifty NCOs and privates. Ten of those were just guards, too, and not really in the chain of command, unless something happened.

My memory of those four days, before I had my actual personality restored, is vague and confused. I was slotted into a time-consuming but unchallenging make-work position, essentially verifying the computer's decisions about resource allocation – how many eggs or bullets to go where. Surprise, I never found a mistake.

Among my other unchallenging duties was the one, as it turned out, that everything else was a smoke screen for: the 'guard sitrep-log,' or situation report log. Every hour I jacked in with the guard mechanics and asked for a 'sitrep.' I had a form with boxes to check, according to what they reported each hour. All I had ever done was check the box that said 'sitrep negative': nothing's happening.

It was typical bureaucratic make-work. If anything of interest did happen, a red light would go on on my console, telling me to jack in with the guards. I could fill out a form then.

But I hadn't given any thought to the obvious: they needed someone inside the building who could check on the actual identities of the mechanics running the guard soldierboys.

I was sitting there on the fourth day, about one minute before sitrep time, and the red light suddenly started blinking. My heart gave a little stutter and I jacked in.

It wasn't the usual Sergeant Sykes. It was Karen, and four other people from my old platoon.

What the hell? She gave me a quick gestalt: Trust us, you had to undergo memory modification so we could Trojan-horse our way in here and then a broad outline of the plan and the incredible Jupiter Project development.

I acknowledged a numb kind of affirmative, unjacked, and checked the 'sitrep negative' box.

No wonder I had been so damned confused. The phone buzzed and I thumbed it.

It was Marty, in hospital greens with a neutral expression. 'I have you down for a little brain surgery at 1400. You want to come down and prep when your shift's over?'

'Best offer I've had all day.'

It was more than just a bloodless coup – it was a silent, invisible coup. The connection between a mechanic and his or her soldierboy is only an electronic signal, and there are emergency mechanisms in place to switch connections. It would only take a few minutes after something like the Portobello massacre, where every mechanic was disabled, to patch in a new platoon from a few hundred or a thousand miles away (The actual limit was about thirty-five hundred miles, far enough for the speed of light to be a slight delaying factor.)

What Marty had done was set things up so that at the push of a button all five guard mechanics in the basement of Building 31 would be switched off from their soldierboys, and simultaneously, control of the machines would be switched over to five members of Julian's platoon, with Julian being the only person in Building 31 in a position to notice.

The most aggressive thing they did, immediately after taking over, was to pass on an 'order' from Captain Perry, the guard commander, to the five shoe guards, that they had to report immediately to room 2H for an emergency inoculation. They went in and sat down and a pretty nurse gave them each a shot. Then she stood quietly behind them and they all fell asleep.

The rooms 1H through 6H were the hospital wing, and it was going to be busy.

At first, Marty and Megan Orr could be doing all the jack installations. The only bedridden patient in H wing, a lieutenant with bronchitis, was transferred to the base hospital when the order came down from the Pentagon to isolate Building 31. The doctor who normally came around every morning couldn't have access.

Two new doctors came in, though, the afternoon after the morning coup. They were Tanya Sidgwick and Charles Dyer, the jack team from Panama who had a ninety-eight percent success rate. They were mystified over their orders to come to Portobello, but sort of looked forward to the vacation – they'd been installing jacks in POWs at the rate of ten or twelve a day, too fast for comfort or safety.

The first thing they did after settling into their quarters was to go down to the H wing and see what was happening. Marty got them comfortable on a pair of beds and said they had to jack with a patient. Then he plugged them into the Twenty, and they instantly realized just what kind of a vacation they were in for.

But after a few minutes of deep communication with the Twenty, they were converts – in fact, they were a lot more sanguine about the plan than most of the original planners were. That simplified the timing, because it wasn't necessary to humanize Sidgwick and Dyer before putting them on the team.

They had sixty-four officers to deal with, and only twenty-eight of them were already jacked; only two of the eight generals. Twenty of the fifty NCOs and privates were jacked.

The first order of business was to get the ones who were already jacked into bed and plugged in with the Twenty. They lugged fifteen beds into the H wing from the Bachelor Officer Quarters. That gave forty spaces in H; for the other nine, they could install jack interfaces in their rooms.

But the first order of business for Marty and Megan Orr was to restore Julian's lost memories. Or try.

There was nothing complicated about it. Once Julian was under, the procedure was totally automated and only took forty-five minutes. It was also totally safe, in terms of the patient's physical and mental health. Julian knew that.

What he didn't know was that it only worked about three quarters of the time. About one in four patients lost something.

Julian lost a world.

I felt refreshed and elated when I woke up. I could remember the mind-numbed state I'd been in for the past four days, and could also remember all the detail that had been taken away from me – odd to feel happiness at being able to remember a suicide attempt and the imminent danger of the world coming to an end – but in my case it was a matter of providing actual reasons for the sense of unease that had pervaded my world.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at a silly Norman Rockwell print of soldiers reporting for duty, remembering furiously, when Marty walked in looking grim.

'Something's wrong,' I said.

He nodded. From a black box on the bed table he unreeled two jack cables and handed one to me, wordlessly.

We plugged in and I opened up, and there was nothing. I checked the jack connection and it was secure. 'Are you getting anything?'

'No. I didn't in post-op either.' He fed his cable back in, and then mine.

'What is it?'

'Sometimes people permanently lose the memories we removed–'

'But I've got it all back! I'm certain!'

'–and sometimes they lose the ability to jack.'

I felt cold sweat prickling on my palms and forehead and under my arms. 'It's temporary?'

'No. No more than it is with Blaze. It's what happened to General Roser.'

'You knew.' The sick feeling of loss was turning into rage. I stood up and towered over him.

'I told you you might lose … something.'

'But you meant memory. I was willing to give up memory!'

'That's an advantage to jacking one-way, Julian. Two-way, you can't lie by omission. If you had asked me, "Could I lose the power to jack?" I would have told you. Fortunately, you didn't ask.'

'You're an MD, Marty. How does the first part of that oath go?'

'"Do no harm." But I was a lot of things before I got that piece of paper. A lot of things afterward.'

'Maybe you better get out of here before you start explaining.'

He stood his ground. 'You're a soldier in a war. Now you're a casualty. But the part of you that died – only a part – died to shield your unit, to get it safely into position.'

Rather than hit him, I sat back down on the bed, out of range. 'You sound like a goddamned warboy. A warboy for peace.'

'Maybe so. You must know how badly I feel about this. I knew I was betraying your trust.'

'Yeah, well, I feel pretty bad about it, too. Why don't you just leave?'

'I'd rather stay and talk to you.'

'I think I have it figured out. Go on. You have dozens of people to operate on. Before the world has the slightest chance of being saved.'

'You do still believe that.'

'I haven't had time to think about it, but yes, if the stuff you put back in my mind about the Jupiter Project is true, and if the Hammer of God is real, then something has to be done. You're doing something.'

'You're all right about it?'

'That's like being "all right" about losing an arm. I'm fine. I'll learn to shave with the other hand.'

'I don't want to leave you like this.'

'Like what? Just get out of my sight. I can think about it without your help.'

He looked at his watch. 'They are waiting for me. I have Colonel Owens on the table.'

I waved him away. 'So go do it. I'll be all right.'

He looked at me for a moment and then got up and left without a word.

I fished around in my breast pocket. The pill was still there.

Back in Guadalajara that morning, Jefferson had warned Blaze to stay out of sight. That was no problem; she was holed up with Ellie Morgan several blocks away, working on the various versions of the paper that would warn the world about the Jupiter Project.

Then Jefferson and Cameron sat for a few hours in the cantina, a small camera on the table between them, watching the elevator doors.

They almost missed her. When she came back down, her silky blond hair was tucked under a wig of black ringlets. She was dressed conservatively and had toned her visible skin to a typical Mexican olive hue. But she hadn't disguised her perfect figure or the way she walked.

Jefferson froze in mid-conversation and surreptitiously slid the camera around with his forefinger.

They had both idly watched her exit the elevator. 'What?' Cameron whispered.

'That's her. Made up like a Mexican.'

Cameron craned around in time to see her glide through the revolving door. 'Good God, you're right.'

Jefferson took the camera upstairs and called Ray, who, along with Mendez, was coordinating things in Marty's absence.

Ray was at the Clinic. He downloaded the pictures of her and studied them. No problem. We'll keep an eye out for her.'

Less than a minute later, she walked into the Clinic. The metal detectors didn't catch either of her weapons.

But she didn't pull out a picture of Amelia and ask whether anyone had seen her; Gavrila knew that Amelia had been in this building, and assumed it was enemy territory.

She told the receptionist she wanted to talk about a jack installation, but she refused to talk to anyone but the top man.

'Dr Spencer's in surgery,' she said. 'It will be at least two hours, maybe three. There are plenty of other people–'

'I'll wait.' Gavrila sat down on a couch with a clear view of the entrance.

In another room, Dr Spencer joined Ray looking at a monitor watching the woman watching the entrance.

'They say she's dangerous,' Ray said: 'some sort of spy or assassin. She's looking for Blaze.'

'I don't want any trouble with your government.'

'Did I say she was government? If she was official, wouldn't she produce credentials?'

'Not if she was an assassin.'

'The government doesn't have assassins!'

'Oh, really. Do you also believe in your Santa Claus?'

'I mean, no, not for us. There's a crackpot religious group that's after Marty and his people. She's either one of them or she was hired by them.' He explained about her suspicious activity at the hotel.

Spencer stared at her image. 'I believe you are correct. I have studied thousands of faces. Hers is Scandinavian, not Mexican. She probably has dyed her blond hair – or no, she's wearing a wig. But what do you expect me to do about her?'

'I don't suppose you could just lock her up and throw away the key.'

'Please. This is not the United States.'

'Well … I want to talk to her. But she may be really dangerous.'

'She has no knife or gun. That would have registered as she walked through the door.'

Don't suppose I could borrow a guy with a gun to watch over her while we talked?'

'As I said–'

"'This is not the United States." What about that old hombre downstairs with the machine gun?'

'He does not work for me. He works for the garage. How dangerous could this woman be, if she has no weapon?'

'More dangerous than me. My education was sadly neglected in the mayhem category. Do you at least have a room where I could talk to her and have somebody watching, in case she decides to tear off my head and beat me to death with it?'

'That's not difficult. Take her to room 1.' He aimed a remote and clicked. The screen showed an interview room. 'It's a special room for seguridad. Take her in there and I will watch. For ten or fifteen minutes; then I will ask someone else to watch.

'These ultimodiadores – you call them Enders – is that what this is all about?'

'There's a relation.'

'But they are harmless. Silly people, and what, blaspheming? But harmless, except to their own souls.'

'Not these, Dr Spencer. If we could jack, you'd understand how scared I am of her.' For Spencer's protection, no one who knew the whole plan could jack with him two-way. He accepted the condition as typical American paranoia.

'I have a male nurse who is very fat … no, very large – and who knows, who grasps, a black belt in karate. He will be watching along with me.'

'No. By the time he got down the stairs, she could kill me.'

Spencer nodded and thought. 'I'll put him in the room next door, with a beeper.' He held up the remote and pushed a button. 'Like now. This will call him.'

Ray excused himself and went to the bathroom, where he was unable to do anything but catalogue his weapons: a key ring and a Swiss Army knife. Back in the observation room he met Lalo, who had arms the size of Ray's thighs. He spoke no English and moved with the nervous delicacy of a man who knows how easily things break. They walked downstairs together. Lalo slipped into room 2, and Ray went into the lobby.

'Madame?' She looked up at him, targeting. 'I'm Dr Spencer. And you?'

'Jane Smith. Can we go someplace and talk?'

He led her to room 1, which was larger than it had seemed in the camera. He motioned her to the couch and pulled over a chair. He straddled it, the chair back a protective shield between them.

'How may I help you?'

'You have a patient named Blaze Harding. Professor Blaze Harding. It is absolutely imperative that I speak to her.'

'In the first place, we don't give out the names of our clients. In the second place, our clients don't always give us their real names. Ms Smith.'

'Who are you, really?'

'What?'

'My sources said Dr Spencer was Mexican. I never met a Mexican with a Boston accent.'

'I assure you that I am–'

'No.' She reached into her waistband and pulled out a pistol apparently made of glass. 'I don't have time for this.' Her face became grim, set; totally mad. 'You are going to quietly take me from room to room until we find Professor Harding.'

Ray paused. 'And if she's not here?'

'Then we'll go to a quiet place where I will cut your fingers off, one by one, until you tell me where she is.'

Lalo eased the door open and swung in with a large black pistol coming up to aim. She gave him an annoyed look and shot him once in the eye. The glass pistol was almost completely silent.

He dropped the gun and fell to one knee, both hands over his face. He began a girlish keening but her second shot sheared off the top of his head. He toppled forward silently in a flood of blood and brain and cerebrospinal fluid.

Her tone of voice was unchanged: earnest and flat. 'You see, the only way you're going to live to see the night is to cooperate with me.'

Ray was struck dumb, staring at the corpse.

'Get up. Let's go.'

'I … I don't think she's here.'

'Then where–' She was interrupted by the rattling sound of metal shutters rolling down over the door and window.

Ray heard a faint hissing sound, and remembered Marty's story about the interrogation room at St Bart's. maybe they had the same architect.

She evidently didn't hear it – too many hours on the firing range – but she looked around and did see the television camera, like a stub of pencil pointed at them from an upper corner of the room. She jerked him around to face the camera and put the pistol to his head. 'You have three seconds to open that door, or I kill him. Two.'

'Señora Smith!' A voice came from everywhere. 'To open that door, it requires a, el gato … a jack. It will take two minutes, or three.'

'You have two minutes.' She looked at her watch. 'Starting now.'

Ray slumped and suddenly collapsed, rolling out on his back. His head hit the floor with a solid whack.

She made a disgusted noise. 'Coward.' Then a few seconds later, she herself staggered, and then sat down hard on the floor. Wavering, she held the pistol with both hands and shot Ray in the chest four times.

My place in the BOQ had two rooms – a bedroom and an 'office,' a gray cubicle with just enough room for a cooler, two hard chairs, and a small table in front of a simple comm console.

On the table, a glass of wine and my last meal: a gray pill. I had a yellow legal tablet and a pen, but couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't obvious.

The phone rang. I let it go three times, and said hello.

It was Jefferson – my psychiatric nemesis, come to save me in the eleventh hour. The instant he hangs up, I resolved, I'm taking the pill.

But like the room and the pill, Jefferson was gray, more gray than black. I hadn't seen anybody that color since my mother had called to tell me Aunt Franci had died. 'What's wrong?' I said.

'Ray's dead. He was killed by an assassin they sent after Blaze.'

"'They"? The Hammer of God?' The wavering silver bar at the top of the screen meant the encryption was working; we could say anything. 'We assume she's one of them. Spencer's drilling her out now for a jack.'

'How do you know she was after Amelia?'

'She had her picture; was nosing around the hotel here – Julian, she killed Ray just for the hell of it, after she'd killed another man. She walked right through the security screen at the clinic, with a gun and a knife of some plastic. We're scared shitless that she's not here alone.' 'God. They tracked us to Mexico?'

'Can you get up here? Blaze needs your protection – we all need you!'

I actually felt my jaw drop. 'You need me to come up and be a soldier?' All those professional snipers and convicted murderers.

Spencer unplugged his jack and walked to the window. He raised the blinds and squinted at the rising sun, yawning. He turned to the woman who was bound to a wheelchair with locked restraints.

'Señora,' he said, 'you are crazy nuts.'

Jefferson had unjacked a minute before. 'That would be my professional opinion, too.'

'What you've done is completely illegal and immoral,' she said. 'Violating a person's soul.'

'Gavrila,' Jefferson said, 'if you have a soul, I couldn't find it in there.' She jerked at her bonds and the wheelchair rocked toward him.

'She does have a point, though,' he said to Spencer. 'We can't very well turn her over to the police.'

'I will, as you Americans say, keep her under observation indefinitely. Once she's well, she's free to go.' He scratched the stubble on his chin. 'At least until the middle of September. You believe that, too?'

'I can't do the math. But Julian and Blaze can, and they don't have any doubts.'

'It's the Hammer of God coming down,' Gavrila said. 'Nothing you can do will stop it.'

'Oh, shut up. Can we put her someplace?'

'I have what you would call a "rubber room." No lunatic has ever escaped from it.' He went to the intercom and arranged for a man named Luis to take her there.

He sat down and looked at her. 'Poor Lalo; poor Ray. They didn't suspect what a monster you were.'

'Of course not. Men just see me as a receptacle for their lust. Why should they fear a cunt?'

'You're going to find out a lot about that,' Jefferson said.

'Go ahead and threaten me. I'm not afraid of rape.'

'This is more intimate than rape. We're going to introduce you to some friends. If you do have a soul, they'll find it.'

She didn't say anything. She knew what he meant; she knew about the Twenty from being jacked with him. For the first time, she looked a little frightened.

There was a knock on the door, but it wasn't Luis. 'Julian,' Jefferson said, and gestured. 'Here she is.'

Julian studied her. 'She's the same woman we saw in the monitor at St Bart's? Hard to believe.' She was staring at him with an odd expression. 'What?'

'She recognizes you,' Jefferson said. 'When Ingram tried to kidnap Blaze off the train, you followed them. She thought you were with Ingram.'

Julian walked over to her. 'Take a good look. I want you to dream about me.'

'I'm so frightened,' she said.

'You came here to kill my lover, and instead killed an old friend. And another man. They say you didn't blink.' He reached slowly toward her. She tried to dodge, but he grabbed her throat.

'Julian…'

'Oh, don't worry.' The wheels on the chair were locked. He pushed slowly on her throat and she tipped back. He held her at the balance point. 'You're going to find everyone here so nice. They just want to help you.' He let go, and the wheelchair fell over with a jarring crash. She grunted.

'I'm not one of them, though.' He got down on his hands and knees, his face directly over hers. 'I'm not nice, and I don't want to help you.'

'That's not going to work with her, Julian.'

'It's not for her. It's for me.' She tried to spit at him, but missed. He stood up and casually flipped the wheelchair into an upright position.

'This isn't like you.'

'I'm not like me. Marty didn't say anything about my losing the ability to jack!'

'You didn't know that could happen with the memory manipulation?'

'No. Because I didn't ask.'

Jefferson nodded. 'That's why you and I haven't been scheduled together lately. You might have asked me about it.'

Luis came into the room and they didn't say anything while Spencer instructed him and he rolled Gavrila out.

'I think it's more sinister than that, more manipulative,' Julian said. 'I think Marty needed somebody who'd been a mechanic, knows soldiering, but is immune to being humanized.' He gestured with a thumb at Spencer. 'He knows everything now?'

'The essentials.'

'I think Marty wants me this way in case there's a need for violence. Just like you – when you called me to come protect Blaze, you implied the same.'

'Well, it's just that–'

'And you're right, too! I'm so fucking mad that I could kill someone. Isn't that crazy?'

'Julian…?'

'Oh, you don't use the word "crazy."' He lowered his voice. 'But it's odd, isn't it? I've sort of come full circle.'

'That could be temporary, too. You have every right to be angry.'

Julian sat down and clasped his hands together, as if to restrain them. 'What did you learn from her? Are there other assassins in town, headed here?'

'The only other one she actually knew was Ingram. We do know the name of the man above her, though, and he must be close to the top. It's a General Blaisdell. He's also the one who ordered the suppression of your paper and had Blaze's partner killed.'

'He's in Washington?'

'The Pentagon. He's the undersecretary of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – DARPA.'

Julian almost laughed. 'DARPA kills research all the time. I've never heard of them killing a researcher before.'

'He knows she came to Guadalajara, and that she was coming to a jack clinic, but that's all.'

'How many clinics are there?'

'One hundred thirty-eight,' Spencer said. 'And when Professor Harding had her work done here, the only connections to her real name are my own office records and the … what did you call the thing you signed?'

'Power of attorney.'

'Yes, that's buried in a law office's files, and even so, there shouldn't be anything connecting it with this clinic.'

'I wouldn't get too complacent,' Julian said. 'If Blaisdell wants to, he can find us the same way she did. We left some kind of trail. The Mexican police could probably place us in Guadalajara – maybe even right here – and they could be bribed pretty easily. Begging your pardon, Dr Spencer.'

He shrugged. 'Es verdad.'

'So we suspect anyone who comes through that door. But what about Amelia, Blaze – is she nearby?'

'Maybe a quarter of a mile,' Jefferson said. 'I'll take you there.'

'No. They might be following either of us. Let's not double their odds. Just write down the name of the place. I'll take two cabs.'

'Do you want to surprise her?'

'What does that mean? She's staying with someone?'

'No, no. Yeah, but it's Ellie Morgan. Nothing to get all bothered about.'

'Who's bothered? It was just a question.'

'All I meant was, should I call and say you're coming?'

'Sorry. I'm in a state. Go ahead and give her a … wait, no. The phone might be tapped.'

'Not possible,' Spencer said.

'Humor me?' He looked at the address Jefferson had written down. 'Good, I'll take a cab to the mercado. Lose myself in the crowd and then dive into the subway.'

'Your caution verges on paranoia,' Spencer said.

'Verges? I'm well over the edge, actually. Wouldn't you be paranoid if one of your best friends just ripped out half your life – and some Pentagon general is sending assassins down after your lover'.

'It's like they say,' Jefferson said. 'Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't someone after you.'

Having said I was going to the market, instead I took a cab out to T-town and then the subway back into the city. No such thing as being too careful.

I slipped from a side street into the courtyard of Amelia's motel. Ellie Morgan answered the door.

'She's asleep,' she said in a half-whisper, 'but I know she'd want to be woken up.' They had adjoining rooms. I went through and she eased the door closed behind me.

Amelia was warm and soft from sleep and smelled of lavender from the bath salts she liked.

'Marty told me what happened,' she said. 'It must be horrible, like losing one of your senses.'

I couldn't answer that. I just held her close for a moment longer. 'You know about the woman and … and Ray,' she stammered. 'I've been there. I spoke to her.'

'The doctor was going to jack her.'

'They did that, a high-risk speed installation. She's Hammer of God, same cell as Ingram.' I told her about the general in the Pentagon. 'I don't think you're safe here. Nowhere in Guadalajara. She traced us from St Bart's right to the clinic door, through low-orbit spy satellites.'

'Our country uses satellites to spy on its own people?'

'Well, the satellites go all around the world. They just don't bother to turn them off over the US.' There was a coffee machine set into the wall. I kept talking while I set it up. 'I don't think this Blaisdell knows exactly where we are. Otherwise we probably would have had a SWAT team instead of a lone assassin, or at least a team backing her up.'

'Did the satellites actually see us as individuals, or just the bus?'

'The bus and the truck.'

'So I could walk out of here and go to the train station, and just slip away to some random part of Mexico.'

'I don't know. She had a picture of you, so we have to assume that Blaisdell can give a copy to the next hit man. They might be able to bribe someone, and you'd have every policeman in Mexico looking for you.'

'Nice to feel wanted.'

'Maybe you should come back to Portobello with me. Hole up in Building 31 until it's safe. Marty can have orders cut for you, probably with a couple of hours' notice.'

'That's good.' She stretched and yawned. 'I just have a few hours to go on this proof. I'd like to have you go over it; then we can send it out through an airport phone just before we leave.'

'Good. It'll be a relief to do some physics for a change.'

Amelia had written a good concise argument. I added a long footnote about the appropriateness of pseudo-operator theory in this regime.

I also read Ellie's version for the popular press. To me it seemed unconvincing – no math – but I supposed it would be best to bow to her expertise and keep my mouth shut. Ellie had intuited my unease, though, and had remarked that not using mathematics was like writing about religion without mentioning God, but editors believed that ninety percent of their readers would quit at the first equation.

I had called Marty. He was in surgery, but an assistant called back and said that orders would be waiting for Amelia at the gate. He also passed along the unsurprising news that Lieutenant Thurman was not going to be among the humanized. We'd hoped that the peaceful mental environment, being jacked with people from my converted platoon, would eliminate the stress that was causing his migraines. But no, they just came on later and stronger. So like me, he'd have to sit this one out. Unlike me, he was virtually under house arrest, since the few minutes he did spent jacked were enough for him to learn far too much.

I looked forward to talking to him, since we were no longer bureaucrat-and-flunky. We suddenly had a lot in common, involuntary ex-mechanics.

I also suddenly had a lot more in common with Amelia. If there was any advantage in my losing the ability to be jacked, that was it: it erased the main barrier between us. Cripples together, from my point of view, but together nonetheless.

It felt so good working with her, just being in the same room with her, it was hard for me to believe that the day before, I'd been ready to take the pill.

Well, I wasn't 'me' anymore. I supposed I could put off finding out who I was until after September 14. By then, it might be immaterial – I might be immaterial! A plasma, anyhow.

While Amelia was packing her small bag, I called the airport for the flight number, and verified that they had pay phones with long-distance data links. But then I realized that if Amelia had orders waiting down in Portobello, we could probably deadhead down in a military flight. I called D'Orso Field and, sure enough, Amelia was 'Captain Blaze Harding.' There was a flight leaving in ninety minutes, a cargo flyboy with plenty of room if we didn't mind sitting on benches.

'I don't know,' Amelia said. 'Since I outrank you, I should get to sit on your lap.'

The cab made good time. Amelia uploaded twelve copies of the proof, along with personal messages, to trusted friends, and then posted copies on the public domain physics and math nets. She put Ellie's version on both popular science and general news, and then we ran for the flyboy.

Rushing off to the air base, rather than waiting in the motel for the next commercial flight, probably saved their lives.

A half hour after they left, Ellie answered a knock on the door to Amelia's adjoining room. Through the peep-hole, she saw a Mexican maid, apron and broom, pretty with long black hair in ringlets.

She opened the door. 'I don't speak Spanish–' The end of the broom handle plunged into her solar plexus and she staggered backwards, crashing to the floor in a ball.

'Neither do I, Satan.' The woman lifted her easily and threw her into a chair. 'Don't make a sound or I'll kill you.' She pulled a roll of duct tape out of the apron pocket and wound it around the woman's wrists, and then wound a tight loop twice around her chest and the chair back. She tore off a small piece and smoothed it over Ellie's mouth.

She shrugged off the apron. Ellie gasped through her nose when she saw the hospital blues underneath, streaked with blood.

'Clothes.' She ripped off the blood-stained pyjamas. She pivoted, tense muscular voluptuousness, and saw Ellie's suitcase through the open double door. 'Ah.'

She walked through the door and came back with jeans and a cotton shirt. 'They're a little baggy, but they'll do.' She folded them neatly on the end of the bed and peeled away enough of the tape so that Ellie could speak.

'You're not getting dressed,' Ellie said, 'because you don't want to get blood on your clothes. My blood on my clothes.'

'Maybe I want to excite you. I think you're a lesbian, living here alone with Blaze Harding.'

'Sure.'

'Where is she?'

'I don't know.'

'Of course you do. Do I have to hurt you?'

'I'm not telling you anything.' Her voice shook and she swallowed. 'You're going to kill me no matter what.'

'Why do you think that?'

'Because I can identify you.'

She smiled indulgently. 'I just killed two guards and escaped from the high-security area of your clinic. A thousand police know what I look like. I can let you live.' She bent to the floor in a gymnast's sweep and took a glittering scalpel from the apron pocket.

'You know what this is?'

Ellie nodded and swallowed.

'Now, I solemnly swear that I will not kill you if you answer my questions truthfully.'

'Do you swear to God?'

'No, that's blasphemy.' She hefted the scalpel and stared at it. 'In fact, though, I won't even kill you if you tell me lies. I'll just hurt you so badly that you'll beg for death. But, instead, just before I leave, I'll cut out your tongue so you can't tell them anything about me. And then cut off your hands so you can't write. I'll tourniquet them with this tape, of course. I want you to have a long life of regret.'

Urine dripped on the floor and Ellie started sobbing. Gavrila smoothed the tape back over her mouth.

'Did your mother ever say "I'll give you something to cry about"?' She stabbed down hard and pinned Ellie's left hand to the chair.

Ellie stopped sobbing and stared dully at the handle of the scalpel and the rivulet of blood.

Gavrila rocked the blade slightly and eased it out. The flow of blood increased, but she gently folded a Kleenex over it and taped it in place. 'Now if I let you talk, will you just answer questions? Not cry out?' She nodded her head listlessly and Gavrila peeled back half the tape.

'They went to the airport.'

'They? Her and her black friend?'

'Yes. They're going back to Texas. To Houston.'

'Oh. That's a lie.' She positioned the scalpel over the back of Ellie's other hand, and raised her fist like a hammer.

'Panama!' she said in a hoarse shout. 'Portobello. Don't … please don't–'

'Flight number?'

'I don't know. I heard him write it down' – she pointed with her head – 'over by the phone there.'

She walked over and picked up a piece of paper. '"Aeromexico 249." I guess they were in such a hurry they left it.'

'They were in a hurry.'

Gavrila nodded. 'I suppose I should be, too.' She came back and looked at her victim thoughtfully. 'I won't do all those terrible things to you, even though you lied.' She smoothed the tape over Ellie's mouth and took another small piece and pinched her nose shut with it. Effie began kicking wildly and jerking her head back and forth, but Gavrila managed to make a couple of tight turns of tape around her head, fixing the two small pieces in place and cutting off any possibility of air. In her struggles, Ellie tipped the chair over. Gavrila brought her back upright with an effortless lift, as Julian had done with her a couple of hours earlier. Then she dressed slowly, watching the pagan's eyes as she died.

There was a message waiting for us in my BOQ office, flashing on the console screen, that Gavrila had overcome her guard and escaped.

Well, there was no way she could get to us inside the base, locked inside a building isolated by Pentagon decree. Amelia was worried that the woman might find out where she had been living, so she called Ellie. There was no answer. She left a message, warning about Gavrila and advising her to move to some random place across town.

Marty's schedule said he was in surgery and wouldn't be free until 1900 – five hours. There was some cheese and beer in the cooler. We had a slow snack and then collapsed into bed. It was narrow for two people, but we were so exhausted that anything horizontal would do. She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder, for the first time in a long time.

I woke up groggily to the console pinging. It didn't wake Amelia, but I did, in my clumsy efforts to extricate myself. My left arm was asleep, a cold tingling log, and I had romantically left a spot of drool on her cheek.

She rubbed at that and opened her eyes to slits. 'Phone?'

'Go back to sleep. I'll tell you if it's anything.' I walked into the office, beating my left arm against my side. I snagged a ginger ale from the cooler – the favorite drink of whoever had lived there previously, and sat down to the console:

Marty will meet you and Blaze at 1915 in the mess hall.

Bring this.

Name Rank Implant Humanization:

Begin/

Complete Name Rank Implant Humanization:

Begin/

Complete Tames PFC – 26J/9A Sutton 1LT 28J/1 29J/12 Reynolds PFC – " Whipple 1LT 29J/2 30J/13 Benyo PFC – " Daniel 1LT 29J/2 30J/13 Jewel TCH – " Suggs 1LT 29J/2 30J/13 Monez 5SGT – " Johnson B. 1LT 29J/2 30J/13 Hazeltine 1 LT 29J/2 30J/13 Foster 2GEN – " Maxberry 1LT 29J/2 30J/13 Pagel 1 GEN – " Lanardson 1LT 29J/2 30J/13 Fox CNL – " Dare 2LT 29J/2 30J/13 Lyman CNL – " Butwell 2LT 29J/1 30J/13 McConnell CNL – " Lavallec 2LT 29J/1 30J/13 Lorenz LCNL – " Kelly 2LT 29J/1 30J/13 Mealy LCNL – " Gilpatrick 9SGT 27J/2 28J/11 Swim LCNL – " Miller 7SGT 27J/2 28J/11 Barbea MAJ – " Holloway 7SGT 27J/1 28J/11 Barnes MAJ – " Garrison 7SGT 29J/1 30J/13 Costello MAJ – " McLaughlin 6SGT 29J/1 30J/13 Dick MAJ – " Rowe 6SGT 3J/1 31J/13 Donahue MAJ – " Hughes 6SGT 30J/1 31J/13 Evans MAJ – " Smith R. 5SGT 30J/1 31J/13 Ho MAJ – " Duffy 5SGT 30J/1 31J/13 Washington MAJ – " Ching 5SGT 30J/1 31J/13 Griffen 1LT – " Schauer TCH 30J/2 31J/13 Hyde 1LT – " Williams TCH 30J/2 31J/13 Lake 1LT – " Perkins TCH 30J/2 31J/13 Neumann 1LT – " Hunt TCH 30J/2 31J/13 Phan 1LT – " Tara! TCH 30J/2 31J/13 Steinberg 1LT – " Kanzer PFC 30J/2 31J/13 Check 2LT – " Pincay PFC 30J/2 31J/13 Thurman 2LT (X) (X) Hyde PFC 30J/2 31J/13 Friedman 2LT – " Blinken PFC 31J/1 01A/14 Steinman 2LT – " Merrill PFC 31J/1 01A/14 Thomson 2LT – " Ramsden PFC 31J/1 01A/14 Troxler 2LT – " Yalowitz PVT 31J/1 01A/14 Santos PVT 31J/1 01A/14 Spoa 3GEN 27J/2 28J/11A Merci PVT 31J/2 01A/14 Pew 2GEN 27J/2 28J/11A Kantor PVT 31J/2 01A/14 Bowden 1GEN 28J/2 29J/12A Walleri PVT 31J/2 01A/14 Nguyen 1GEN 28J/2 29J/12A Scanlan PVT 31J/2 01A/14 Hoffher 1GEN 29J/2 30J/13A Pomoroy PVT 31J/2 01A/14 Kummer CNL 27J/1 28J/11A De Berry PVT 31J/2 01A/14 Loftus CNL 2J/1 28J/11A Pesk PVT 31J/2 01A/14 Owens CNL 27J/1 28J/11A Gilbertson 9SGT – 26J/09 Snyder LCNL 27J/1 28J/11A Tasille 7SGT – " Stallings LCNL 27J/1 28J/11A Flynn 7SGT – " Tomy LCNL 27J/2 28J/11A Mintner 6SGT – " Allan MAJ 27J/2 28J/11A Raymond 6SGT – " Blackney MAJ 27J/2 28J/11A Goldsmith 5SGT – " Bobo MAJ 27J/2 28J/11A Sweeney 5SGT – " DeHenning MAJ 28J/2 29J/12A Lyons 5SGT – " Edwards MAJ 28J/2 29J/11A Cavan 5SGT – " Ford MAJ 28J/2 29J/12A West TCH – " Lynch MAJ 28J/2 29J/12A Lubhausel TCH – " Majors MAJ 28J/2 29J/12A Chin TCH – " Nestor MAJ 28J/1 29J/12A Yarrow TCH – " Perry MAJ 28J/1 29J/12A Spender PVT – " Roxy MAJ 28J/1 29J/12A Warren PVT – " Van Horn MAJ 28J/1 29J/12A

The size of the roster was familiar, a listing of the entire complement of Building 31, minus me. I'd probably seen it a hundred times a day in my old job.

The order of the listing was odd, since it had nothing to do with people's functions (I'd normally seen it as a duty roster), but it only took a minute to figure it out. The first five names were the mechanic guards whose soldierboys my platoon had taken over. Then a list of all the jacked officers, who had been jacked together since 26 July, presumably not all in one big group.

Likewise, the end of the roster was all of the jacked non-coms and privates, beside the guards. They also had been jacked together since day before yesterday. They would all theoretically come out of on the 9th of August, cured of war.

In between those two groups, a list of the sixty-some who had spent all their lives up to now under the handicap of normality. The four doctors had been drilling since yesterday. It looked like team 1 was doing about five a day, and team 2 – presumably the hotshots from the Canal Zone – were doing eight.

I heard Amelia moving in the bedroom, changing out of the clothes she'd slept in. She came out combing her hair and wearing a dress, a red-and-black Mexican thing I'd never seen.

'I didn't know you brought a dress.'

'Dr Spencer gave it to me; said he bought it for his wife, but it didn't fit her.'

'Likely story.'

She looked over my shoulder. 'Lot of people.'

'They're doing about a dozen a day, with two teams. I wonder whether they're sleeping at all.'

'Well, they're eating.' She checked her watch. 'How far away is that mess hall?'

'Couple minutes.'

'Why don't you change your shirt and shave?'

'For Marty?'

'For me.' She plucked at my shoulder. 'Shoo. I want to call Ellie again.'

I scraped a quick shave and found a shirt that had one day's wear.

'Still no answer,' Amelia said from the other room. 'There's no one at the motel desk, either.'

'You want to check with the Clinic? Or Jefferson's motel room?'

She shook her head and pushed the PR button. 'After dinner. She's probably out.' A copy of the roster drifted out of the slot; Amelia caught it, folded it, and put it in her purse. 'Let's go find Marty.'

The mess hall was small but, to Amelia's surprise, not totally automated. There were machines for some standard simple food, but also an actual food station with an actual cook, who Julian recognized. 'Lieutenant Thurman?'

'Julian. Still can't tolerate jacking, so I volunteered to step in for Sergeant Duffy. Don't get your hopes up, though; I can only cook four or five things.' He looked at Amelia. 'You would be … Amelia?'

'Blaze,' Julian said, and introduced them. 'Were you jacked with them for any length of time?'

'If you mean "Are you in on it," yes, I got the general idea. You did the math?' he asked Amelia.

'No, I did the particles; just tagged along behind Julian and Peter on the math.'

He started tossing two salads.

'Peter, the cosmology guy,' he said. 'I saw about him on the news yesterday.'

'Yesterday?' Julian said.

'You didn't hear? They found him wandering around dazed on some island.' Thurman told them all he remembered about the news item.

'But he doesn't recall anything about the paper?' Amelia said.

'I guess not. Not if he thinks it's the year 2000. You think he can get it back?'

'Only if the people who took out the memory saved it,' Julian said, 'and that doesn't sound likely. Sounds like a pretty crude job.'

'At least he's still alive,' Amelia said.

'Not much good to us,' Julian said, and caught a look from Amelia. 'Sorry. True, though.'

Thurman gave them their salads and started a couple of hamburgers. Marty came in and asked for the same.

They went to the end of a long empty table. Marty slumped into the chair and unpeeled a speedie from behind his ear. 'Better sleep a few hours.'

'How long you been on your feet?'

He looked at his watch without focusing on it. 'I don't want to know. We're just about through with the colonels. Two Team's just up from a nap; they'll do Tomy and the topkick, what's his name?'

'Gilpatrick,' Julian said. 'He could use a little humanizing.'

Thurman brought over Marty's salad. 'That was a mess up in Guadalajara,' he said. 'The news came in from Jefferson just before I left the Twenty.' Most of the communication between Guadalajara and Portobello was via jack circuit rather than conventional phone – you got through more information in less time, and everyone who was jacked would know sooner or later, anyhow.

'It was sloppy,' Julian said. 'They should have been more careful with that woman.'

'That's for sure.' Thurman went back to his hamburgers. Neither of them knew they were talking about two different incidents; they'd tried Thurman on the jack twice; he'd been in contact when the news came in about the killing rampage that ended in Ellie's murder.

'What woman?' Marty said between bites.

Julian and Amelia looked at each other. 'You don't know about Gavrila. About Ray.'

'Nothing. Is Ray in trouble?'

Julian took a breath and let it out. 'He's dead, Marty.'

Marty dropped his fork. 'Ray.'

'Gavrila's a Hammer of God assassin who was sent down to kill Blaze. She smuggled a gun into an interrogation room and shot him.'

'Ray?' he repeated. They'd been friends since graduate school. He was still and pale. 'What will I tell his wife?' He shook his head. 'I was best man.'

'I don't know,' Julian said. 'You can't just say "He gave his life for peace," though it's true, in a way.'

'It's also true that I dragged him away from his safe, comfortable office and put him in the way of a lunatic murderer.'

Amelia took his hand in both of hers. 'Don't worry about it now. Nothing you can do will change anything.'

He stared at her blankly. 'She's not expecting him back until the fourteenth. So maybe the universe will make it all irrelevant by exploding.'

'More likely,' Julian said, 'he'll wind up just one in a long list of casualties. You might as well wait and announce them all after the shitstorm. After the bloodless revolution.'

Thurman came over quietly and served them their hamburgers. He'd overheard enough to realize that they didn't yet know about Ellie's murder, and perhaps the fact that Gavrila was loose.

He decided not to tell them. They would know soon enough. There might be something in the delay that he could turn to his advantage.

Because he wasn't going to just stand around and let these lunatics wreck the military. He had to stop them and he knew exactly where to go.

Through the migraine haze that kept him from communing with these misdirected idealists, some real information did bleed through. Like the identity of General Blaisdell, and his powerful position.

Blaisdell had the power to neutralize Building 31 with a phone call. Thurman had to get to him, and soon. 'Gavrila' might do as a code word.

When we got back to our billet, there was a message on the console for Amelia, not me, to call Jefferson immediately on the secure line. He was in his own motel room in Guadalajara, eating dinner. He was wearing a handgun in a shoulder holster, a dart-thrower.

He stared out of the screen. 'Sit down, Blaze.' She eased herself slowly into the chair in front of the console. 'I don't know how secure Building 31 is supposed to be. I don't think it's secure enough.

'Gavrila escaped. She's left a trail of bodies leading to you. She killed two people at the Clinic, and one of them she apparently had tortured into giving up your address.'

'No … oh, no!'

Jefferson nodded. 'She got there right after you left. We don't know what Ellie might have told her before she died.'

That may have hit me harder than it did her. Amelia had lived with Ellie, but I had lived inside her.

She turned pale and spoke almost without moving her lips. 'Tortured her.'

'Yes. And went straight to the airport and took the next flight to Portobello. She's somewhere in the city now. You have to assume she knows exactly where you are.'

'She couldn't get in here,' I said.

'Tell me about it, Julian. She couldn't get out of here, either.'

'Yeah, all right. Are you set up to jack?'

He gave me a cautious doctor look. 'With you?'

'Of course not. With my platoon. They're standing guard here, and could use a description of the bitch.'

'Of course. Sorry.'

'You tell them everything you know, and then we'll go to Candi for a debriefing.'

'All right … just remember Gavrila's been jacked with me two-way–'

'What? That was smart.'

'We thought she'd be in a straitjacket for the duration. It was the only way to get anything from her, and we got a lot. But you have to assume she'll retain a lot of what she got from Spencer and me.'

'She didn't retain my address,' Amelia said.

Jefferson shook his head. 'I didn't know it, and neither did Spencer, in case. But she knows the broad outline of the Plan.'

'Damn. She'll have passed it on.'

'Not yet. She has a superior in Washington, but she won't have talked to him yet. She idolizes him, and combining that with her rigid fanaticism … I don't think she'll call until she can say "Mission accomplished."'

'So we don't just stay away from her. We catch her and make sure she doesn't talk.'

'Nail her into a room.'

'Or a box,' I said.

He nodded and broke the circuit.

'Kill her?' Amelia said.

'Won't be necessary. Just turn her over to the medicos and she'll sleep past D day.' Probably true, I thought, but pretty soon Amelia and I were going to be the only people in this building physically able to kill.

What Candi told them was frightening. Not only was Gavrila vicious well trained and motivated by love and fear of God and His avatar, General Blaisdell – but it would be easier for her to get into Building 31 than Julian would have supposed. Its main defenses were against military attack and mob assault. It didn't even have a burglar alarm.

Of course she first would have to get onto the base. They sent descriptions of her in the two modes they knew of, and copies of her fingerprints and retina scans, to the gate, with strict detention orders – 'armed and dangerous.'

There were no security cameras in the Guadalajara airport, but there were plenty at Portobello. No one who looked like her had gotten off any of the six flights arriving from Mexico that afternoon and evening, but that could just mean a third disguise. There were a few women her size and shape. Their descriptions also went to the gate.

In fact, as Jefferson might have predicted, in her paranoia Gavrila bought a ticket to Portobello, but didn't use it. Instead, she flew to the Canal Zone disguised as a man. She went down to the waterfront and found a drunken soldier who resembled her, and killed him for his papers and uniform. She left most of the body in a hotel room, first cutting off the hands and head, wrapping them well, and mailing them at the cheapest rate to a fictitious address in Bolivia. She took the monorail to Portobello and was inside the base an hour before they started looking for her.

She didn't have her plastic gun and knife, of course; she'd even left behind the scalpel she'd used on Ellie. There were thousands of weapons inside the base, but all were locked up and accounted for, except for a few guards and MPs with pistols. Killing an MP sounded like a bad way to get a weapon. She went down to the armory and loitered for a while, inspecting it while appearing to read the notices on the bulletin board, then waiting in line for a few minutes and rushing off as if she'd forgotten something.

She went outside the building and then re-entered through a back door. From the floor plan she'd memorized, she went straight to ROUTINE MAINTENANCE. There was a duty roster posted; she went to an adjacent room and called the specialist on maintenance duty, and told him a Major Feldman wanted to see him at the desk. He left the room unlocked, and Gavrila slipped in.

She had perhaps ninety seconds. Find something lethal that looked like it worked and wouldn't be missed immediately.

There was a jumbled pile of M-31s, mud-spattered but otherwise in good shape. Probably used in an exercise – by officers, who wouldn't be expected to clean them afterward. She picked one and wrapped it in a green towel, along with a cassette of exploding darts and a bayonet. Poison darts would have been better, quieter, but there weren't any in the open stock.

She slipped outside undetected. This didn't appear to be the kind of base where a soldier could casually carry a light assault weapon around, so she kept the M-31 wrapped up. She put the sheathed bayonet inside her belt, under her shirt.

The binding that compressed her breasts was uncomfortable, but she left it on in case it would buy her an extra second or two of surprise. The uniform was loose, and she looked like a slightly chubby man, short with a barrel chest. She walked carefully.

Building 31 looked no different from the ones that surrounded it, except for a low electrified fence and a sentry box. She walked by the box in the dusk, fighting the temptation to rush the shoe guard and shoot her way in. She could do some real damage with the forty rounds in the cassette, but she knew from Jefferson that there would be soldierboy guards on duty. The black man Julian's platoon. Julian Class.

Dr Jefferson hadn't known anything about the building's floor plan, though, which was what she needed now. If she knew where Harding was, she could create a diversion for the soldierboys as far as possible from her quarry, and then go after her. But the building was too large to just go in cold and hope to find her while the soldierboys were occupied for a few minutes.

They would be expecting her, too, of course. She didn't look at Building 31 as she walked by. They certainly knew about the torture-murders. Was there any way she could use that knowledge against them? Make them careless through fear?

Whatever action she took, it would have to be within the building. Otherwise, outside forces would deal with it, while Harding was protected by the soldierboys.

She stopped dead and then forced herself to move on. That was it! Create a diversion outside, but be inside when they find out about it. Follow the soldierboys to her prey.

Then she would need God's help. The soldierboys would be swift, though probably pacified, if the humanizing scheme had worked. She had to kill Harding before they restrained her.

But she was all confidence. The Lord had gotten her this far; He would not fail her now. Even the woman's name, Blaze, was demonic, as well as her mission. Everything was right.

She turned the corner and said a quiet prayer. A child was alone playing on the sidewalk. A gift from the Lord.

We were lying in bed talking when the console chimed its phone signal. It was Marty.

He was weary but smiling. 'They called me out of surgery,' he said. 'Good news, for a change, from Washington. They did a segment on your theory on the Harold Burley Hour tonight.'

'Supporting it?' Amelia said.

'Evidently. I just saw a minute of it; back to work. It should be linked to your data queue by now. Take a look.' He punched off and we found the program immediately.

It started out with an optical of a galaxy exploding dramatically, sound effects and all. Then the profile of Burley, serious as usual, faded in, looking down on the cataclysm.

'Could this be us, only a month from now? Controversy rages in the highest scientific circles. And not only scientists have questions. The police do, too.'

A still picture of Peter, bedraggled and forlorn, naked from the waist up, holding up a number for the police camera. 'This is Peter Blankenship, who for two decades has been one of the most highly regarded cosmologists in the world.

'Today he doesn't even know the right number of planets in the Solar System. He thinks he's living in the year 2004 – and is confused to be a twenty-year-old man in a sixty-four-year-old body.

'Someone jacked him and extracted all his past, back to that year. Why? What did he know? Here is Simone Mallot, head of the FBI's Forensic Neuropathology Unit.' A woman in a white coat, with a jumble of gleaming equipment behind her. 'Dr Mallot, what can you tell us about the level of surgical technique used on this man?'

'The person who did this belongs in jail,' she said. 'Subtle equipment was used, or misused; microscopic AI-directed investigation shows that they initially tried to erase specific, fairly recent, memories. But they failed repeatedly, and finally erased one huge block with a surge of power. It was the murder of a personality and, we know now, the destruction of a great mind.'

Beside me, Amelia sighed, almost a sob, but leaned forward, studying the console intently.

Burley peered directly out of the screen. 'Peter Blankenship did know something – or at least believed something, that profoundly affects you and me. He believed that unless we take action to stop it, the world will come to an end on September fourteenth.'

There was a picture of the Multiple Mirror Array on the far side of the Moon, irrelevant to anything, tracking ponderously. Then a time-lapse shot of Jupiter rotating. 'The Jupiter Project, the largest, most complex scientific experiment ever conducted. Peter Blankenship had calculations that showed it had to be stopped. But then he disappeared, and came back in no shape to testify about anything scientific.

'But his assistant, Professor Blaze Harding' – an inset of Amelia lecturing – 'suspected foul play and herself disappeared. From a hiding place in Mexico she sent dozens of copies of Blankenship's theory, and the high hard mathematics behind it, to scientists all over the world. Opinions are divided.'

Back in his studio, Burley faced two men, one of them familiar. 'God, not Macro!' Amelia said.

'I have with me tonight Professors Lloyd Doherty and Mac Roman. Dr Doherty's a longtime associate of Peter Blankenship. Dr Roman is the dean of sciences at the University of Texas, where Professor Harding works and teaches.'

'Teaching isn't work?' I said, and she shushed me.

Macro settled back with a familiar self-satisfied expression. 'Professor Harding has been under a great deal of strain recently, including a love affair with one of her students as well as one with Peter Blankenship.'

'Stick to the science, Macro,' Doherty said. 'You've read the paper. What do you think of it?'

'Why, it's … it's utterly fantastic. Ridiculous.'

'Tell me why.'

'Lloyd, the audience could never understand the mathematics involved. But the idea is absurd on the face of it. That the physical conditions that obtain inside something smaller than a BB could bring about the end of the universe.'

'People once said it was absurd to think that a tiny germ could bring about the death of a human being.'

'That's a false analogy.' His ruddy face got darker.

'No, it's precise. But I agree with you about it not destroying the universe.'

Macro gestured at Burley and the camera. 'Well, then.'

Doherty continued. 'It would only destroy the Solar System, perhaps the Galaxy. A relatively small corner of the universe.'

'But it would destroy the Earth,' Burley said.

'In less than an hour, yes.' The camera came in close on him. 'There's no doubt about that.'

'But there is!' Macro said, off camera.

Doherty gave him a weary look. 'Even if the doubt were reasonable, and it is not, what sort of odds would be acceptable? A fifty-fifty chance? Ten percent? One chance in a hundred that everyone would die?'

'Science doesn't work like that. Things aren't ten percent true.'

'And people aren't ten percent dead, either.' Doherty turned to Burley. 'The problem I found isn't with the first few minutes or even millenniums of the prediction. I just think they've made an error extrapolating into intergalactic space.'

'Do tell,' Burley said.

'Ultimately, the result would just be twice as much matter; twice as many galaxies. There's room for them.'

'If one part of the theory is wrong–' Macro began.

'Furthermore,' Doherty continued, 'it looks as if this has happened before, in other galaxies. It actually clears up some anomalies here and there.'

'Getting back to Earth,' Burley said, 'or at least to this solar system. How big a job would it be to stop the Jupiter Project? The largest experiment. ever set up?'

'Nothing to it, in terms of science. Just one radio signal from JPL. Getting people to send a signal that will end their careers in science, that would normally be hard. But everybody's career ends September fourteenth, if they don't.'

'It's still irresponsible nonsense,' Macro said. 'Bad science, sensationalism.'

'You have about ten days to prove that, Mac. A long line is forming behind that button.'

Close-up on Burley, shaking his head. 'They can't turn it off too soon for me.' The console went dead.

We laughed and hugged and split a ginger ale in celebration. But then the screen chimed and turned itself on without my hitting the answer button.

It was the face of Eileen Zakim, my new platoon leader. 'Julian, we have a real situation. Are you armed?'

'No – well, yes. There's a pistol here.' But it had been left behind, like the ginger ale; I hadn't checked to see if it was loaded. 'What's up?'

'That crazy bitch Gavrila is here. Maybe inside. She killed a little girl out front in order to distract the shoe guard at the gate.'

'Good grief? We don't have a soldierboy out front?'

'We do, but she patrols. Gavrila waited until the soldierboy was on the opposite side of the compound. The way we've reconstructed it, she slashed up the child and threw her, dying, up against the sentry box door. When the shoe opened the door, she cut his throat and then dragged him across the box and used his handprint to open the inner door.'

I had the pistol out and threw the dead bolt on the door. 'Reconstructed? You don't know for sure?'

'No way to tell; the inner door isn't monitored. But she did drag him back into the box, and if she's military, she knows how the handprint locks work.'

I checked the pistol's magazine. Eight packs of tumblers. Each pack held 144 razor-sharp tumblers – each actually a folded, scored piece of metal that shatters into 144 pieces when you pull the trigger. They come out in a hail of fury that can chew off an arm or a leg.

'Now that she's in the compound–'

'We don't know that for sure.'

'If she is, though, are there any more handprint locks? Any monitored entrances?'

'The main entrance is monitored. No handprints; just mechanical locks. My people are checking every door.'

I winced a little at 'my' people. 'Okay. We're secure here. Keep us posted.'

'Will do.' The console went dark.

We both looked at the door. 'Maybe she doesn't have anything that can get through that,' Amelia said. 'She used a knife on the child and guard.'

I shook my head. 'I think she did that for her own amusement.'

Gavrila huddled in a cabinet under a laundry sink, waiting, the M-31 cradled, ready to fire, and the guard's assault rifle digging into her ribs. She had come in through a service door that was open to the night air, and locked it behind her.

While she watched through a crack, her patience and foresight were rewarded. A soldier boy slipped silently up to the door, checked the lock, and moved on.

After one minute, she got out and stretched. She had to either find out where the woman was staying or find some way to destroy the whole building. But fast. She was ridiculously outnumbered, and in gaining the advantage of terror she had sacrificed the possibility of surprise.

There was a beat-up keyboard and console, gray plastic turning white with some kind of soap film, built into the wall. She went over to it and pushed a random letter, and it turned itself on. She typed in 'directory' and was rewarded with a list of personnel. Blaze Harding wasn't there, but Julian Class was, at 8-1841. That looked like a phone number, rather than a room number.

Guessing, she rolled a pointer over to his name and clicked on it. That gave her 241, more useful. It was a two-story building.

A sudden loud rattling startled her. She spun around, pointing both weapons, but it was just an unattended washing machine that had been dormant while she was hidden.

She ignored the freight elevator and shouldered through a heavy FIRE EXIT door that opened on a dusty staircase. There didn't seem to be any security cameras. She climbed quickly and quietly up to the second floor.

She thought for a moment and left one of the weapons by the door on the landing. She only needed one for the kill. Besides, she'd be retreating fast, and might want an element of surprise. They would know she had the guard's assault rifle, but probably didn't know about the M-31 yet.

Opening the door a crack, she could see that the odd-numbered rooms were across from her, numbers increasing to the right. She closed her eyes for a deep breath and a silent prayer, and then burst through the door in a dead run, assuming there were cameras and soldierboys in her near future.

There were neither. She stopped at 241, took a fraction of a second to note the CLASS nameplate, leveled the assault rifle, and fired a silenced burst at the lock.

The door didn't open. She aimed six inches higher and this time blew out the dead bolt. The door opened a couple of inches and she kicked it the rest of the way.

Julian was standing there, in the shadow, holding the pistol straight out with both hands. She spun away instinctively as he fired, and the burst of razors that would have beheaded her instead just tore out a piece of her left shoulder. She fired two random blasts into the darkness – trusting God to guide them not to him, but to the white scientist she was there to punish – and leaped back out of the way of his second shot. Then she sprinted back to the stairwell and just got through the door as his third shot redecorated the hall.

There was a soldierboy waiting there, hulking huge at the top of the stairs. She knew from picking Jefferson's mind that the mechanic controlling it probably had been brainwashed so it couldn't kill her. She emptied the rest of the magazine into the thing's eyes.

The black man was shouting for her to throw out her weapon and come out with her hands up. All right. He was probably the only thing between her and the scientist.

She toed the door open, ignoring the soldierboy groping blindly behind her, and threw out the useless assault rifle. 'Now come out slowly,' the man said.

She took one moment to visualize her move while she eased back the arming lever of the M-31. Shoulder-roll across the corridor and then a continuous sweeping burst in his direction. She leaped.

It was all wrong. He got her before she hit the ground, an ungodly pain in her belly. She saw her own death happening, a thick spray of blood and entrails as her shoulder hit the floor and she tried to complete the roll but just slid. She managed to get up on her knees and elbows, and something slimy fell out of her body. She fell over facing him, and through a darkening haze raised the weapon toward him. He said something and the world ended.

I shouted 'drop it!' but she ignored me, and the second shot disintegrated her head and shoulders. I fired again, reflexively, blowing apart the M-31 and the hand that was aiming it, and turning her chest into a bright red cavity. Behind me, Amelia made a choking sound and ran to the bathroom to vomit.

I had to stare. She didn't even look human, from the waist up; just a messy montage of butchered meat and rags. The rest of her was unaffected. For some reason I held up my hand to block out the gore and was a little horrified to see that her lower body was in a relaxed, casually seductive pose.

A soldierboy slowly pushed the door open. The sensory apparatuses were a chewed-up mess. 'Julian?' it said in Candi's voice. 'I can't see. Are you all right?'

'I'm okay, Candi. I think it's over. Backup coming?'

'Claude. He's downstairs.'

'I'll be in the room.' I walked back through the door on automatic pilot. I'd almost meant it when I said I was okay. I just turned a human being into a pile of steaming meat, hey, all in a day's work.

Amelia had left the water running after washing her face. She hadn't quite made it to the toilet, and was trying to clean up the mess with a towel. I set down the pistol and helped her to her feet. 'You lie down, honey. I'll take care of this.'

She was weeping. She nodded into my shoulder and let me guide her to the bed.

After I cleaned it up and threw the towels into the recycler, I sat on the end of the bed and tried to think. But I couldn't get past the horrible sight of the woman bursting open three times, each time I pulled the trigger.

When she silently threw the rifle out, for some reason I knew she would come through the door shooting. I had a sight picture and the trigger halfway pulled when she leaped out into the corridor.

I'd heard a pattering sound, which must have been her silenced weapon blinding Candi. And then when she threw it out without hesitation, I guess I assumed it was empty and she had another weapon.

But the way I felt as I eased down on the trigger and waited for her to show herself … I had never felt that way in the soldierboy. Ready.

I really wanted her to come out and die. I really wanted to kill her.

Had I changed that much in a few weeks? Or was it actually change? The boy was a different case, an 'industrial accident' that I didn't completely cause, and if I could bring him back, I would.

I wouldn't bring Gavrila back except to kill her again.

For some reason I remembered my mother, and her rage when President Brenner was assassinated. I was four. She hadn't liked Brenner at all, I learned later, and that made it worse, as if she had some complicity in the crime. As if the murder were some kind of wish fulfilment.

But that wasn't close to the personal hate I felt for Gavrila – besides, she was almost not human. It was like disposing of a vampire. A vampire who was single-mindedly stalking the woman you loved.

Amelia was quiet now. 'I'm sorry you saw that. It was pretty awful.'

She nodded, face still buried in the pillow. 'At least it's over. That part's over.'

I rubbed her back and murmured agreement. We didn't know how Gavrila – like the vampire – was going to return from her grave to kill again.

In the Guadalajara airport, Gavrila had written a short note to General Blaisdell and put it in an envelope with his home address. She put that in another envelope, addressed to her brother, with instructions to send it on unread if Gavrila didn't call by tomorrow morning.

This is what it said: If you haven't heard from me by now, I'm dead. The man in charge of the group that killed me is MG Stanton Roser, the most dangerous man in America. An eye for an eye?

Gavrila.

After she had sent that one, she realized it wasn't enough, and on the plane she scribbled another two pages, trying to set down everything she could remember from the minutes when she'd been able to see into Jefferson's mind. Luck was on the other side for that one, though. She dropped it in a mailbox in the Canal Zone and it was automatically routed through Army Intelligence, where a bored tech sergeant read part of it and recycled it as crank mail.

But she hadn't been the only one on the wrong side who had been exposed to the Plan. Lieutenant Thurman heard of Gavrila's death a few minutes after it happened, and put two and two together, and changed into his dress uniform and slipped out into the night. He got by the sentry box with no problem. The shoe who had been pressed into service to replace the one Gavrila had murdered was just this side of catatonic. He passed Thurman through with a rigid salute.

He didn't have any money for a commercial flight, so he had to gamble on using the military. If the wrong person asked for his travel orders, or if he had to go through a retinal scan for security, that would be it – not just AWOL, but fleeing from administrative detention.

A combination of luck and bluff and planning worked, though. He got off the base just by getting aboard a supply chopper that was returning to the Canal Zone. He knew that the CZ had been in bureaucratic chaos for months, ever since it had seceded from Panama and become a US Territory. The Air Force base there was not exactly overseas and not exactly stateside, either. He wait-listed himself on a flight to Washington, misspelling his name, and a half hour later flashed his picture ID and rushed aboard.

He arrived at Andrews Air Force Base at dawn, had a big free breakfast at the Transient Officers' Mess, and then loitered around until nine-thirty. Then he called General Blaisdell.

Lieutenant's bars don't move you through the Pentagon's switchboards very fast. He told two civilians, two sergeants, and a fellow lieutenant that he had a personal message for General Blaisdell. Finally, he wound up with a bird colonel who was his administrative assistant.

She was an attractive woman a few years older than Thurman. She eyed him suspiciously. 'You're calling from Andrews,' she said, 'but my board says you're stationed in Portobello.'

'That's right. I'm on compassionate leave.'

'Hold your orders up to the lens.'

'They aren't here.' He shrugged. 'My luggage went missing.'

'You packed your orders?'

'By mistake.'

'That could be an expensive mistake, lieutenant. What is this message for the general?'

'With all due respect, colonel, it's very personal.'

'If it's that personal, you'd better put it in a letter and mail it to his home. I pass on everything that goes through this office.'

'Please. Just tell him it's from his sister–'

'The general doesn't have a sister.'

'His sister Gavrila,' he pressed on. 'She's in trouble.'

Her head jerked up suddenly and she spoke beyond the screen. 'Yes, sir. Immediately.' She pushed a button and her face was replaced by the green DARPA sigil. A shimmering encryptation bar appeared over it, and then it dissolved to the general's face. He looked kind, grandfatherly.

'Do you have security on your end?'

'No, sir. It's a public phone. But there's no one around.'

He nodded. 'You spoke with Gavrila?'

'Indirectly, sir.' He looked around. 'She was captured and had a jack installed. I jacked briefly with her captors. She's dead, sir.'

He didn't change expression. 'Did she complete her assignment?'

'If that was to get rid of the scientist, no, sir. She was killed in the attempt.'

While they were talking, the general made two unobtrusive hand gestures, recognition signals for Enders and for Hammer of God. Of course Thurman didn't respond to either one.' Sir, there's a huge conspiracy–'

'I know, son. Let's continue this conversation face-to-face. I'll send my car down for you. You'll be paged when it arrives.'

'Yes, sir,' he said to a blank screen.

Thurman drank coffee for most of an hour, looking at the paper without actually reading it. Then he was paged and told that the general's limousine was waiting for him in the arrivals area.

He went there and was surprised to see that the limo had a human driver, a small young female tech sergeant in dress greens. She opened the back door for him. The windows were opaque mirrors.

The seats were deep and soft but covered with uncomfortable plastic. The driver didn't say a word to him, but did turn on some music, soft-drift jazz. She didn't drive, either, other than pushing a button. She read from an old-fashioned paper Bible and ignored the numbing monotony of the huge gray Grossman modules that housed a tenth of a million people each. Thurman was kind of fascinated by them. Who would live that way voluntarily? Of course most of them were probably government draftees, just marking time until their term of service was up.

They traveled alongside a river, in a greenbelt, for several miles, and then went spiraling up an entrance ramp to a broad highway that led to the Pentagon, which was actually two pentagons – the smaller historical building nested inside the one where most of the work was actually done. He could only see the whole structure for a few seconds, and then the car banked down a long arc of concrete toward its home.

The limousine came to a stop outside a loading bay, identified only by the flaking yellow letters BLKRDE21. The driver put her Bible down and got out and opened Thurman's door. 'Please follow me, sir.'

They went through an automatic door straight into an elevator, whose walls were an infinite regression of mirrors. The driver put her hand on a touchplate and said 'General Blaisdell.'

The elevator crawled for about a minute, while Thurman studied a million Thurmans going off in four directions, and tried not to stare at the various attractive angles of his escort. A Bible-thumper, not his type. Nice butt, though.

The doors opened to a silent and spare reception room. The sergeant went behind the desk and turned on a console. 'Tell the general that Lieutenant Thurman is here.' There was a whisper and she nodded. 'Come with me, sir.'

The next room was more like a major general's office. Wood paneling, actual paintings on the walls, a pic window that displayed Mount Kilimanjaro. One wall of awards and citations and holos of the general with four presidents.

The old gentleman rose gracefully from behind his acre of uncluttered desk. He was obviously athletic and had a twinkle in his eye.

'Lieutenant, please sit over here.' He indicated one of a pair of leather-upholstered easy chairs. He looked at the sergeant. 'And bring in Mr Carew.'

Thurman sat uneasily, 'Sir, I'm not sure how many people ought to–'

'Oh, Mr Carew's a civilian, but we can trust him. He's an information specialist. He'll jack with you and save us all kinds of time.'

Thurman had a premonitory migraine glow. 'Sir, is that absolutely necessary? Jacking–'

'Oh yes, yes.' The man's a jack witness in the federal court system. He's a marvel, a real marvel.'

The marvel came in without speaking. He looked like a wax replica of himself. Formal tunic and string tie.

'Him,' he said, and the general nodded. He sat down in the other chair and pulled two jack cables from a box on the table between him and Thurman.

Thurman opened his mouth to explain, but then just plugged in. Carew followed suit.

Thurman stiffened and his eyes rolled back. Carew stared at him with interest and started breathing hard, sweat dotting his forehead.

After a few minutes he unplugged, and Thurman sagged into relieved unconsciousness. 'That was hard on him,' Carew said, 'but I have a great deal of interesting information.'

'Have it all?' the general said.

'All we need and more.'

Thurman started to cough and slowly levered himself into a normal sitting position. He clamped his forehead with one hand and massaged a temple with the other. 'Sir … could I ask for a Pain-go?'

'Certainly … sergeant?' She went out and returned with a glass of water and a pill.

He gulped it down gratefully. 'Now … sir. What do we do next?' 'The next thing you do, son, is get some rest. The sergeant will take you to a hotel.'

'Sir, I don't have a ration book, or any money. It's all back in Portobello; I was under detention.'

'Don't worry. We'll take care of everything.'

'Thank you, sir.' The headache was retreating, but he had to close his eyes at the mirrored elevator car, or face the prospect of watching himself puke a thousand times at once.

The limousine hadn't moved. He slid gratefully onto the soft slick plastic.

The driver closed his door and got in the front. 'This hotel,' he asked her, 'are we going all the way down-town?'

'No,' she said, and started the engine. 'Arlington.' She turned and raised a silenced .22 automatic and shot him once in the left eye. He clawed for the door handle and she leaned over and shot him again, point-blank in the temple. She made a face at the mess and pushed the button that directed the car to the cemetery.

Marty dropped his bombshell by bringing a friend to breakfast. We eating out of the machines, as usual for the morning meal, when Marty walked in with someone whom I didn't at first recognize. He smiled, though, and I remembered the diamond set into his front tooth.

'Private Benyo?' He was one of the mechanic guards replaced by my old platoon.

'In the flesh, sarge.' He shook hands with Amelia and introduced himself, then sat down and poured a cup of coffee.

'So what's the story?' I asked. 'It didn't take?'

'Nope.' He grinned again. 'What it didn't take was two weeks.' 'What?'

'It doesn't take two weeks,' Marty said. 'Benyo is humanized, and so are all the others.'

'I don't get it.'

'Your stabilizer, Candi, was in the loop. That's what did it! It only takes about two days, if you're jacked with somebody who's already humanized.'

'But … then why did it take the whole two weeks with Jefferson?' Marty laughed. 'It didn't! He was one of them after a couple of days, but people didn't recognize it, since he was the first – and he was ninety percent there from the beginning. Everybody, Jefferson included, was concentrating on Ingram, not him.

'But then you take a guy like me,' Benyo said, 'who hates the idea from the very start – and wasn't exactly a sweetheart to begin with – hell, everybody could tell when I converted.'

'And you are converted?' Amelia said. He got a serious look and nodded in jerks. 'You don't feel resentful about … losing the man you used to be?'

'It's hard to explain. What I am now is the man I used to be. But more me than I used to be, get it?' He made a helpless gesture with both hands. 'What I mean is I never in a million years could've found out who I really was, even though it was there all the time. I needed the others to show me.'

She smiled and shook her head. 'It sounds like a religious conversion.'

'It is, sort of,' I said. 'It literally was, with Ellie.' I shouldn't have said that; she started to cloud up. I put my hand on hers.

For a moment everyone was silent. 'So,' Amelia said. 'What does this do to the timetable?'

'If we'd known before the thing started, it would've sped it up considerably – and of course it will do that in the long run, when we're out to change the world.

'Right now the limiting factor is the surgery schedule. We plan to finish the last set of implants on the thirty-first. So by the third of August, we should have a building-full of converts, general to private.'

'What about the POWs?' I asked. 'McLaughlin didn't convert them in two days, did he?'

'Again, if we'd only known. He was never jacked with them for more than a few hours at a time. It would be good to know whether it does work with thousands of people at once.'

'How do you know it's one or the other?' Amelia said. 'Two weeks if they're all just "normal" people; two days if one of the elect is with them all the time. You don't know anything about intermediate states.'

'That's right.' He rubbed his eyes and grimaced. 'And no time to experiment. There's some fascinating science to be done, but as we said up at St Bart's, we're not doing science quite yet.' His phone pinged. 'Just a second.'

He touched his earring and listened, staring. 'Okay … I'll get back to you. Yes.' He shook his head.

'Trouble?' I asked.

'Could be nothing; could be disaster. We've lost our cook.'

That took me a moment. 'Thurman's gone AWOL?'

'Yep. He cruised right past the guard last night, right after you … after Gavrila died.'

'No idea where he went?'

'He could be anywhere in the world. Could be downtown living it up. You jacked with him, Benyo?'

'Huh-uh. But Monez did, and I'm with Monez all the time. So I got a little. Not much, you know, his headaches.'

'Do you have any secondhand impression of him?'

'Just a guy.' He rubbed his chin. 'I guess he was a little more army than most. I mean he kind of liked the idea.'

'He didn't much like our idea, then.'

'I don't know. I'd guess not.'

Marty looked at his watch. 'I'm due in surgery in twenty minutes. Be doing jacks until one. Julian, you want to track him down?'

'Do what I can.'

'Benyo, you jack with Monez and whoever else was with Thurman. We have to know how much he knows.'

'Sure.' He stood up. 'I think he's down by the game room.'

We watched him go. 'At least he couldn't have known who the general was.'

'Not Roser,' Marty said. 'But he might have gotten the name of Gavrila's boss, Blaisdell, through one of the people in Guadalajara. That's what I want to find out.' He checked his watch again. 'Call Benyo about it in an hour or so. And check all the flights to Washington.'

'Do what I can, Marty. Once he's out of Porto, hell, there must be ten thousand ways to get to Washington.'

'Yeah, right. Maybe we should just wait and see whether we hear from Blaisdell.'

We were about to.

Blaisdell spent a few minutes talking to Carew – the actual 'download' of information from the jack session would take several hours' patient interrogation under hypnosis, by machine, but he did learn that there were a couple of days unaccounted for, between the time Gavrila was jacked in Guadalajara and her death more than a thousand miles away. What did she learn that sent her to Portobello?

He stayed in the office until he got the coded message from his driver that matters had been disposed of, and then he drove himself home – an eccentricity that sometimes was useful.

He lived alone, with robot servants and soldierboy guards, in a mansion on the Potomac less than a half hour's drive from the Pentagon. An eighteenth-century home with original exposed timbers and a wooden floor buckled with age, it was consistent with his image of himself – a man destined from birth, privileged birth, to change the history of the world.

And now his destiny was to end it.

He poured his daily ounce of whiskey into a crystal snifter and sat down to the mail. When he turned on the console, before the index came up, a blinker told him he had paper mail waiting.

Odd. He asked the wheelie to fetch it, and it brought back a single letter, no return address, postmarked from Kansas City that morning. It was interesting, considering the intimacy of some aspects of their relationship, that he didn't recognize Gavrila's handwriting on the envelope.

He read the short message twice and then burned it. Stanton Roser the most dangerous man in America? How unlikely, and how convenient: they had a golf date Saturday morning at the Bethesda Country Club. Golf could be a dangerous game.

He bypassed his mail and opened up the line to his computer at work. 'Good evening, general,' it said in a carefully modulated sexless voice.

'List for me every project rated "secret" or above that has been initiated in the past month – no, eight weeks – by the Office of Force Management and Personnel. Delete any that have no connection to General Stanton Roser.'

There were only three projects on the list; he was surprised at how little of Roser's work was classified. But one of those 'projects' was essentially a file of miscellaneous classified actions, with 248 entries. He tabled that one and looked at the other two, separated because they were Top Top Secret.

They were apparently unrelated, except that both projects had been initiated the same day, and – aha! – both were in Panama. One was a pacification experiment on the detainees in a POW camp; the other, a management evaluation scheme at Fort Howell in Portobello.

Why hadn't Gavrila given more details? Damn the woman's flair for the dramatic.

When had she gone to Panama? That was easy enough to check. 'Show me all the DARPA travel voucher requests for the past two days.'

Interesting. She had bought a ticket to Portobello under a female code name and one to the Canal Zone under a male code name. Which flight did she actually take? The note had been on Aeromexico stationery, but that was no help; both flights used that carrier.

Well, which identity had she used in Guadalajara? The computer said that neither code name had flown into the city in the past two weeks, but it was a good assumption that she wouldn't have gone through the inconvenience of masquerading as a male while she was tracking down that woman. Therefore it was likely that she did cross-dress to elude detection on the flight down.

Why Panama, why the Canal Zone, why the connection with mousy old Stanton? Why didn't she just come back to the States, after the damned woman's theory about the Jupiter Project was splashed all over the news?

Well, he knew the answer to the last one. Gavrila watched the news so seldom she probably didn't even know who was president. As if the country had an actual president nowadays.

Of course, the Canal Zone could have been a feint. She could get to Portobello from there in minutes. But why would she want to go to either place?

Roser was the key. Roser was protecting the scientist by hiding her in one of those two bases. 'Give me a list of noncombat deaths of Americans in Panama over the past twenty-four hours.'

All right: there were two at Fort Howell, a male private who was 'KILODNC' – killed in the line of duty, noncombat – and an unidentified female, homicide. Details available, no surprise, on a need-to-know basis from the Office of Force Management and Personnel.

He touched the KILODNC, which was not restricted, and found that the man had been murdered while standing guard at the central administration building. That must have been Gavrila's work.

A soft chime and a picture of the interrogator, Carew, appeared in the corner of the screen. He touched it and a hundred-thousand-word hypertext report appeared. He sighed and decided to have a second ounce of whiskey, in coffee.

We were going to be a little crowded in Building 31. The people in Guadalajara were too vulnerable; there was no telling how many nutcases like Gavrila might be available to Blaisdell. So our administrative experiment suddenly needed a couple of dozen civilian consultants, the Saturday Night Special crowd and the Twenty. Alvarez stayed behind with the nanoforge, but everybody else got away within twenty-four hours.

I wasn't sure it was a good idea – after all, Gavrila had killed almost as many people here as she had in Guadalajara. But the guards were really on guard now; three soldierboys patrolling instead of one.

It did simplify the humanization schedule. We had been set up to use the Twenty one at a time, by way of the secure phone line at the Guadalajara clinic. Once they were physically inside Building 31, we could use them four at a time, in rotation.

I wasn't looking forward to the Twenty arriving so much as I was the others – my old friends who now shared with me an inability to read minds. Everybody who was jacked was completely caught up in this huge project, in which Amelia and I were reduced to the status of retarded helpers. It was good to be around people with a few ordinary, noncosmic problems. People who had time for my own ordinary problems. Like becoming a murderer for a second time. No matter how much she deserved it, and had brought it on herself, it was still my finger on the trigger, my head full of the indelible image of her last horrifying moments.

I didn't want to bring it up with Amelia, not now, maybe not for a long time.

Reza and I were sitting out on the lawn at night, trying to pick out a few stars hidden in the glare and haze from the city.

'It couldn't possibly have bothered you as much as the boy,' he said. 'If anybody ever had it coming to them, she did.'

'Oh, hell,' I said, and opened a second beer. 'At a visceral level, it doesn't make any difference who they were or what they did. The kid just got a red spot on his chest and fell over dead. Gavrila, I sprayed her guts and brains and fucking arms all over the corridor.'

'And you keep thinking about it.'

'Can't help it.' The beer was still cool. 'Every time my stomach growls or I get a little pain down there, I can see her bursting open. Knowing I have the same stuff inside.'

'But it's not as if you've never seen it before.'

'Never caused seeing it before. Big difference.'

There was an awkward silence. Reza ran a fingertip around the rim of his wineglass, but it just hissed. 'So are you going to try it again?'

I almost said Try what again? but Reza knew me better than that. 'I don't think so. Who ever knows? Until you die or something else, you can always kill yourself.'

'Hey, I never thought of it quite that way. Thanks.'

'Thought you needed cheering up.'

'Yeah, right.' He licked his finger and tried the glass again, with no result. 'Hey, is this an army-issue wineglass? How you guys expect to win a war without decent glassware?'

'We learn to rough it.'

'So are you taking medicine?'

'Antidepressants, yeah. I don't think I'm going to do it.'

I was startled to realize I hadn't thought about suicide all day, until Reza brought it up. 'Things have to get better.'

I spilled my beer hitting the dirt. Then the sound registered with Reza – machine-gun fire – and he joined me on the ground.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency does not have any combat troops. But Blaisdell was a major general, and among his secret coreligionists was Philip Cramer, the vice president of the United States.

Cramer's primacy on the National Security Council, especially in light of the absence of oversight from the most feckless president since Andrew Johnson, allowed him to grant Blaisdell authority for two outrageous actions. One was the temporary military occupation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, essentially preventing anybody from pushing the button that would end the Jupiter Project. The other was an 'expeditionary force' under his control in Panama, a country with which the United States was not at war. While the senators and justices blustered and postured over these two blatantly illegal actions, the soldiers involved locked and loaded and went forth to follow orders.

The JPL action was trivially easy. A convoy pulled up at three A.M. and chased out all the night workers, and then locked the place up tight. Lawyers rejoiced, as did America's persistent antimilitary minority. Some scientists felt the celebration was premature. If the soldiers stayed in place for a couple of weeks, constitutional issues would become irrelevant.

Attacking an actual army base was not so simple. A brigadier general filed a battle order and died seconds later, personally disposed of by General Blaisdell. It sent a hunter/killer platoon, along with a support company, on a short hop from Colon to Portobello, supposedly to put down an insurrection by traitorous American troops. For security reasons, they of course were forbidden to contact the Portobello base, and they knew very little other than the fact that the insurrection was limited to the central command building. They were to take control of it and await orders.

The major in charge sent back a query as to why, if the insurrection was so limited, they hadn't given the assignment to a company that was already on the base. There was no answer, the general being dead, so the major had to assume that all of the base was potentially hostile. The map showed that Building 31 was conveniently close to the water, so he improvised an amphibious attack: the soldierboys waded into the water at a deserted beach north of the base, and walked underwater for a few miles.

Moving through water so close to the shore, they eluded submarine defenses, a deficiency the major recorded for his eventual report.

I could hardly believe what I was seeing: soldierboy versus soldierboy. Two of the machines had come up out of the water and were crouching on the beach, blasting away at two of the guard soldierboys. The other guard machine was hanging back around the corner of the building, ready to join in but keeping an eye on the front.

Nobody had noticed us, evidently. I shook Reza's shoulder to get his attention – he was transfixed by the pyrotechnics of the duel – and whispered, 'Stay down! Follow me!'

We low-crawled to a line of shrubs and then ran crouched over to the building's front door. The shoe guard down by the gate saw us and fired a warning shot – or a badly aimed one – over our heads. I yelled 'Arrowhead!' at him, the day's password, and it evidently worked. He shouldn't have been looking in our direction anyway, but I could lecture him on that some other time.

We piled through the narrow door together like a pair of slapstick comics and confronted a blind soldierboy, the one Gavrila had damaged. We hadn't sent it out for repair because we didn't want to answer questions, and four soldierboys seemed like plenty. Before we found ourselves in the middle of a war.

'Password,' somebody yelled. I said 'Arrowhead' and Reza helpfully, said 'Arrowsmith,' a movie I missed. Close enough, though. The woman who was kneeling behind the reception desk, acting as eyes for the soldierboy, waved us on.

We crouched down next to her. I was out of uniform. 'I'm Sergeant Class. Who's in charge?'

'God, I don't know. Sutton, maybe. She's the one who told me to come down here and spot for the thing.' There were two loud explosions out back. 'Do you know what the hell's going on?'

'We're being attacked by friendlies, is all I know. That, or the enemy has finally gotten soldierboys.'

Whatever was happening, I realized that the attackers had to move fast. Even if there weren't any other soldierboys in the base, we should have flyboys any minute.

She was thinking along the same lines. 'Where are the flyboys? They should be scrambled by now.'

That's right; they were always on duty, always plugged in. Was it possible they had been taken over? Or had orders not to interfere?

There wasn't anything like an 'operations room' in Building 31, since they never actually directed battles from there. The sergeant said that Lieutenant Sutton was in the mess hall, so we headed there. A windowless basement room, it was probably as safe as anywhere, if the soldierboys started to take the building apart.

Sutton was sitting at a table with Colonel Lyman and Lieutenant Phan, who were both jacked. Marty and General Pagel, both jacked, were at another table, with Top, Chief Master Sergeant Gilpatrick, anxiously fidgeting. There were a couple of dozen shoes and unjacked mechanics crouched around with weapons, waiting. I spotted Amelia with a crowd of civilians underneath a heavy metal serving table and waved.

Pagel unjacked and handed the cable to Top, who plugged in. 'What's going on, sir?' I asked.

Surprisingly, he recognized me. 'I can't tell much, Sergeant Class. They're Alliance troops, but we can't make contact. It's like they came from Mars. And we can't raise Battalion or Brigade.

'Mr. Larrin – Marty – is trying to subvert their command structure, the way he did here, through Washington. We have ten mechanics waiting on-line, though not in cages.'

'So they could take control, but not do anything fancy.'

'Walk around, use simple weapons. Maybe all they have to do is make the soldierboys just stand there, or lie down. Anything but attack.'

'Our flyboy and waterboy communications have been cut off, apparently right at this building.' He pointed at the other table. 'Lieutenant Phan's trying to patch through.'

There was another explosion, powerful enough to rattle dishes. 'You'd think someone would notice.'

'Well, everybody knows the command's isolated for a top-secret simulation exercise. All this commotion could be special training effects.'

'Until they actually vaporize us,' I said.

'If they'd intended to destroy the building, they could have done that in the first second of the engagement.'

Top unplugged. 'Shit. Pardon me, sir.' There was a huge crash upstairs. 'We're dead meat. Four soldierboys against ten, we never had a chance.'

'Had?' I said.

Marty unjacked. 'They got all four. They're inside.'

A glossy black soldierboy clomped up to the mess hall door, bristling with weapons. It could kill us all in an instant. I didn't move a muscle, except for an eyelid twitching uncontrollably.

Its contralto voice was loud enough to hurt the ears. 'If you follow orders there is no reason for anyone to be hurt. Everyone with weapons, place them on the floor. Everyone move to the wall opposite me, leaving your hands visible.' I backed up with my hands in the air.

The general stood up a little too fast, and both laser and machine-gun barrels swiveled to target him. 'I'm Brigadier General Pagel, the ranking officer here–'

'Yes. Your identity is verified.'

'You know you are going to be court-martialed for this? That you'll spend the rest of your life–'

'Sir, begging your pardon, but I am under orders to disregard the rank of anyone in this building. My orders come from a major general, who I understand will be here eventually. I respectfully suggest you wait to discuss it with him.'

'So you are going to shoot me if I don't go to that wall with my hands up?'

'No, sir. I'll fill the room with vomiting agent and not kill anyone unless they touch a weapon.'

Top turned pale. 'Sir…'

'All right, Top. I've had a sniff of it myself.' The general sulked back to the wall with his hands in his pockets.

Two more soldierboys rolled up behind her, along with a couple of dozen people from other floors, and I heard the faint sound of a cargo helicopter approaching; then a small flyboy. They both landed on the roof and went silent.

'Is that your general?' Pagel said.

'I wouldn't know, sir.' After a minute a bunch of shoes came in, ten and then another dozen. They were wearing camouflage coveralls with head nets, no insignia or unit markings. That could make you nervous. They stacked their own weapons in the hall outside, and gathered armloads from the floor.

One of them stepped out of his coveralls and tossed away the head covering. He was bald except for a few strands of white hair. He looked kindly in spite of his major general's uniform.

He stepped up to General Pagel and they exchanged salutes. 'I want to speak to Dr Marty Larrin.'

'General Blaisdell, I presume,' Marty said.

He walked over to him and smiled. 'We have to speak, of course.'

'Of course. Maybe we can convert one another.'

He looked around and stared at me. 'You're the black physicist. The murderer.' I nodded. Then he pointed at Amelia. 'And Dr Harding. I want all of you to come with me.'

On his way out, he tapped the first soldierboy. 'Come along for my protection,' he said, smiling. 'Let's go talk in Dr Harding's office.'

'I don't really have an office,' she said, 'just a room.' She seemed to be straining not to look at me. 'Room 241.'

We did have a weapon there. Did she think I could outdraw a soldierboy? Excuse me, general; let me open this drawer and see what I find. Oops, fried Julian.

But it might be the only chance we'd have at him.

The soldierboy was too big for all of us to fit in the freight elevator, so we walked up the stairs. Blaisdell led at a quick pace. Marty got a little winded.

The general was obviously disappointed that room 241 wasn't full of test tubes and blackboards. He consoled himself with a ginger ale from the cooler.

'I suppose you're curious about my plan,' he said.

'Not really,' Marty said. 'It's a fantasy. No way you can prevent the inevitable.'

He laughed, quiet amusement rather than a madman's cackle. 'I have JPL.'

'Oh, come on.'

'It's true. Presidential order. There are no scientists there tonight. Just my loyal troops.'

'All of them Hammer of God?' I asked.

'All the leaders,' he said. 'The others are just a cordon, to keep the world of unbelievers away.'

'You seem like a normal person,' Amelia said, lying through her teeth. 'Why would you want all this beautiful world to end?'

'You don't really think I'm normal, Dr Harding, but you're wrong. You atheists in your ivory towers, you don't have any idea how real people feel. How perfect this is.'

'Killing everything,' I said.

'You're worse than she is. This is not death; it's re-birth. God has used your scientists as tools, so He can cleanse everything and start over.'

It did make a crazy kind of sense. 'You're nuts,' I said.

The soldierboy swiveled to face me. 'Julian,' it said in a deep voice, 'I'm Claude.' There was an uncertain tremor to his movements that said he wasn't in a cage, warmed up, but was operating the soldierboy from a remote jack.

'What's going on here?' Blaisdell said.

'The transfer algorithm worked,' Marty said. 'Your people aren't in control of the soldierboys. Ours are.'

'I know that's not possible,' he said. 'The safeguards–'

Marty laughed. 'That's right. The safeguards against transfer of control are profoundly complex and powerful. I should know. I put them there.'

Blaisdell looked at the soldierboy. 'Soldier. Leave this room.'

'Don't, Claude,' Marty said. 'We may need you.'

It stayed put, rocking slightly. 'That was a direct order from a major general,' Blaisdell said.

'I know who you are, sir.'

Blaisdell made a leap for the door, surprisingly fast. The soldierboy reached to grab his arm but punched him down instead. He shoved him back into the room.

He stood up slowly and brushed himself off. 'So you're one of these humanized ones.'

'That's right, sir.'

'You think that gives you the right to disregard orders from your superiors.'

'No, sir. But my orders include assessing your actions, and orders, as those of a man who is mentally ill, and not responsible.'

'I can still have you shot!'

'I suppose you could, sir, if you could find me.'

'Oh, I know where you people are. The mechanics' cages for this building's guards are in the basement, in the northeast corner.' He pinched his earring. 'Major Lejeune. Come in.' He pinched it again. 'Come in.'

'Nothing gets out of this room but static, sir, except on my frequency.'

'Claude,' I said, 'why don't you just go ahead and kill him?'

'You know I can't do that, Julian.'

'You could kill him to save your own life.'

'Yes, but his threat to find my cage is not realistic. In fact, my body is not there.'

'But look. He's proposing to kill not only you, but everybody else in the world. In the universe.'

'Shut up, sergeant,' Blaisdell snarled.

'You couldn't have a more clear-cut case of self-defense if he was standing with a gun at your head.'

The soldierboy was silent for a long moment, weapons at its side. The laser came up partway and fell back. 'I can't, Julian. Even though I don't disagree with you. I can't kill him in cold blood.'

'Suppose I ask you to leave the room,' I said. 'Go stand in the corridor. Could you do that?'

'Of course.' It staggered outside, taking off a piece of the doorjamb with its shoulder.

'Amelia … Marty … please go out there, too.' I pulled open the top drawer of the bureau. The tumbler pistol had two rounds left. I took it out.

Amelia saw the gun and started to stammer something.

'Just go outside for minute.' Marty put his arm around her and they stepped awkwardly, crabwise, through the door.

Blaisdell stood up straight. 'So. I take it you're not one of them. The humanized.'

'Actually, I'm partway there. At least I understand them.'

'Yet you'd kill a man for his religious beliefs.'

'I'd kill my own dog if it had rabies.' I clicked the safety off.

'What kind of devil are you?'

The aiming laser spot danced on the center of his chest. 'I'm finding out.' I squeezed the trigger.

The soldierboy didn't interfere when Julian fired and almost literally blew Blaisdell into two pieces. Part of the body knocked over a lamp and the room was in darkness except for the light from the corridor. Julian stood rigid, listening to the wet sounds of the corpse settling.

The soldierboy glided in behind him. 'Let me have the gun, Julian.'

'No. It's of no use to you.'

'I'm afraid for you, old friend. Give me the weapon.'

Julian turned in the half-light. 'Oh. I see.' He stuck the pistol in his belt. 'Don't worry, Claude. I'm okay with that.'

'Sure?'

'Sure enough. Pills, maybe. Guns, no.' He walked around the soldier-boy and into the hall. 'Marty. How many people do we have who aren't humanized?'

It took Marty a minute to find the composure to answer. 'Well, a lot of them are partway. Everyone who's recovered from surgery is either humanized or hooked up.

'So how many haven't been operated on? How many people in this building can fight?'

'Maybe twenty-five, thirty. Most over in E Wing. The ones who aren't under guard downstairs.'

'Let's go there. Find as many weapons as we can.'

Claude came up behind him. 'We had lots of NLIs in the old soldierboys' – the somewhat pacifistic weapons of nonlethal intent – 'and some of them must still be intact.'

'Get them, then. Meet us over at E Wing.'

'Let's take the fire escape,' Amelia said.' We can sneak around to E without going through the lobby.'

'Good. Do we have all the soldierboys?' They started toward the fire escape.

'Four,' Claude said. 'But the other six are harmless, immobilized.'

'Do the enemy shoes know yet?'

'Not yet.'

'Well, we can capitalize on that. Where's Eileen?'

'Down in the mess hall. She's trying to figure out a way to disarm the shoes without anybody getting hurt.'

'Yeah, good luck.' Julian opened the window and looked out cautiously. Nobody in sight. But then, down the hall, the elevator pinged.

'Everybody look away and cover your ears,'. Claude said. When the elevator door opened, he launched a concussion grenade down the hall.

The flash and bang blinded and deafened the shoes who had been sent to check on Blaisdell. They started shooting at random. Claude stepped between the firing and the window. 'Better move,' he said unnecessarily. Julian was pushing Amelia through the window in an ungentlemanly way, and Marty was about to crawl over both of them.

They pounded down the metal steps and sprinted toward the ell of E Wing. Claude fired scary bursts that just missed them, alternating machine gun and laser, that chewed up and scorched the ground to their left and right in the darkness.

The people in E Wing had already armed themselves as much as possible there was a storage room with a rack of six M-31s and a box of grenades – and had improvised a defensive position by piling up mattresses in a shoulder-high semicircle at the end of the main corridor. Their lookout, fortunately, recognized Julian, so when they burst through the front door they weren't mowed down by the distinctly unhumanized, and completely terrified, group behind the mattresses.

Julian outlined the situation for them. Claude said that two of the soldierboys had gone outside to check on the remains of our original soldierboys, the ones with weapons of nonlethal intent. The current drop of soldierboys were peaceful types, but it's hard to express your pacifism with grenades and lasers. Tear gas and vomiting agent didn't kill, but it was less dangerous just to put people to sleep and collect their weapons.

As long as the enemy shoes stayed inside, that was a possibility. Unfortunately, Building 31 wasn't set up the way the Guadalajara clinic and St Bart's were, where you could maneuver people into the right room and push a button and knock them out. But two of the original soldierboys had been carrying crowd-control canisters of Sweet Dreams, which was a combination knockout gas and euphoriant – you put them to sleep and they wake up laughing.

Both of those machines, though, were wreckage strewn along about a hundred meters of beach. The two searchers sorted through the scattered junk pile and did come up with three intact gas canisters. But they were all identical modules; there was no way to tell whether they would make you sleep or cry or puke. With a normal cage hookup, the mechanics could have let out a little gas and smelled it, but they couldn't smell anything with the remote.

They didn't have a lot of time to work on the problem, either. Blaisdell had covered his tracks well, so they weren't getting any long-distance calls from the Pentagon, but there was plenty of curiosity in Portobello itself. For a training exercise, aspects of it were profoundly real; two civilians had been injured by stray rounds. Most of the city was huddled in cellars. Four squad cars of police ringed the entrance to the base, with eight nervous officers hiding behind their cars shouting, in English and Spanish, at a soldierboy guard that didn't respond. They couldn't know it was empty.

'Be back in a minute.' The soldierboy controlled by Claude went rigid as its operator rotated to check out the six immobilized ones. When he got to the one at the front gate, he fired a few laser bursts at the tires of the squad cars, which made nice explosions.

He inhabited one in the mess hall for a few minutes while Eileen expedited a solution to the lady-and-the-tiger canister problem. She took three 'prisoners' (choosing among officers she didn't care for) and marched them down to the beach.

It turned out that they did have one each of each variety: one colonel fell asleep blissfully and another was blinded by tears. A general got to practice his projectile vomiting technique.

Claude rotated back to E Wing when Eileen's soldierboy walked into the mess hall with a gas canister under its arm. 'I think we're almost out of danger,' he said. 'Anybody know where we can find a few hundred yards of rope?'

I did know where some rope was stashed, clothes-line in the laundry room, I guess in case all the dryers broke down at the same time. (Thanks to my exalted former position in Building 31, I may have been the only person who knew about the rope, or where you could find three dusty cans of twelve-year-old peanut butter.)

We waited a half hour for fans to blow out the residual Sweet Dreams, and then went into the mess hall to sort through friends and foe, disarming and tying up Blaisdell's troops. All men, it turned out, all built like fullbacks.

There was enough of the Sweet Dreams hanging around to give you a little buzz, relaxing and uninhibiting. We stacked Blaisdell's commandos in pairs, face to face, assuming and hoping they would wake up in a homophobic panic. (A side effect of Sweet Dreams for males is profound tumescence.)

One of the shoes had a bandolier of tumbler ammunition. I took it outside and sat on the steps, my head clearing as I shoved the rounds into the weapon's side port. There was a faint glow to the east. The sun was about to rise on a most interesting day. Maybe my last.

Amelia came out and sat down next to me silently. She stroked my arm.

'How are you doing?' I asked.

'I'm not a morning person.' She took my hand and kissed it. 'It must be hell on you.'

'I took my pills.' I jammed the last round in and hefted it. 'I killed a major general in cold blood. The army's going to hang me.'

'It was as you told Claude,' she said. 'Self-defense. Defending the whole world. The man was the worst kind of traitor imaginable.'

'Save it for the court martial.' She leaned against me, crying softly. I put the gun down and held her. 'I don't know what the hell's going to happen now. I don't think Marty does, either.'

A stranger came running toward us, his hands in the air. I picked up the weapon and pointed it in his direction. 'This facility is closed to unauthorized personnel.'

He stopped about twenty feet away, his hands still in the air. 'Sergeant Billy Reitz, sir, motor pool. What on earth is going on?'

'How did you get in here?'

'I just ran by the soldierboy; nothing happened. What is all this craziness?'

'As I said–'

'I don't mean in there!' He gestured wildly. 'I mean out here!' Amelia and I looked out past the compound's fence. In the dim dawn light stood thousands of silent people, stark naked.

The fewer than twenty individuals who comprised the Twenty were able to solve interesting and subtle problems with their combined experience and intelligence. They'd had this enhanced ability from the first instant they were humanized.

The thousands of POWs in the Canal Zone were a much larger entity, which only had two problems to work on: How do we get out of here? and What then?

Getting out was so easy as to be almost trivial. Most of the labor in the camp was done by POWs; together, they knew more about how it actually ran than did the soldiers and computers that ran it. Taking over the computers was simple, a matter of properly timing a simulated medical emergency in order to get the right woman (whom they knew to be kindhearted) to leave her desk for a crucial minute.

This was at two in the morning. By two-thirty, all the soldiers had been awakened at gunpoint and marched to a maximum-security compound. They gave up without a shot being fired, which was not surprising, given that they faced thousands of apparently angry armed enemy prisoners. They couldn't know that the enemy were not really angry, and constitutionally unable to pull the trigger.

None of the POWs knew how to operate a soldierboy, but they could turn them off from Command and Control, and leave them immobile while they pried the mechanics out of their cages, and took them down to join the shoes in prison. They left them plenty of prison food and water, and then went on to the next step.

They could have simply escaped and dispersed. But then the war would go on, the war that had turned their peaceful, prosperous country into a strangled battlefield.

They had to go to the enemy. They had to offer themselves.

There were regular freight shipments between Portobello and CZ via monorail. They left their weapons behind, along with a few people who could speak perfect American English (to maintain for a few hours the illusion of a functioning POW camp), and crowded into a few freight cars manifested as fresh fruit and vegetables.

As the cars pulled in to the commissary station, they all undressed, so as to present themselves as totally unarmed and vulnerable – and also to confuse the Americans, who were strange about nudity.

Several of their number had been sent to the camp from Portobello, so when the doors opened and they stepped in unison into the shocked floodlights, they knew exactly where to go.

Building 31.

I watched the soldierboy at the guard box teeter for a second and then swivel, taking in the magnitude of the phenomenon. 'What the hell is going on?' Claude's voice boomed out. '¿Qué pasa?'

A wrinkled old man shuffled forward, holding a portable jack transfer box. A shoe rushed up behind him, raising an M-31 butt-first.

'Stop!' Claude said, but it was too late. The buttplate smacked into the old man's skull with a cracking sound, and he skidded forward to lie at the soldierboy's feet, unconscious or dead.

It was a scene the whole world would see the next day, and nothing Marty could have orchestrated would have had such an effect.

The POWs turned to look at the shoe with expressions of quiet pity, forgiveness. The huge soldierboy knelt down and carefully scooped up the frail body, cradling him, and looked down at the shoe. 'He was just an old man, for Christ's sake,' he said quietly.

And then a girl of about twelve picked the box up off the ground and pulled out one cable and offered it wordlessly to the soldierboy. It went down on one knee and accepted it, awkwardly plugging it in while not letting go of the old man. The girl plugged the other jack into her own skull.

The sun comes up fast in Portobello, and for the couple of minutes that tableau lasted, thousands of still people and one machine in thoughtful communion, the street began to glow, gold and rose.

Two shoes in hospital whites came up with a stretcher.

Claude unjacked and gently lowered the body into their care. '–This is Juan Jose de Cordoba,' he said in Spanish. '–Remember his name. The first casualty of the last war.'

He took the little girl's hand and they walked toward the entrance.

They did call it The Last War, perhaps too optimistically, and there were tens of thousands more casualties. But Marty had predicted the course of it and the outcome pretty accurately.

The POWs, who collectively called themselves Los Liberados, 'the Freed,' actually absorbed Marty and his group, and led the way to peace.

They started out with an impressive display of intellectual force. They deduced from first principles the nature of the signal that would turn off the Jupiter Project, and used a small radio telescope in Costa Rica to bleep the signal out there – saving the world, as an opening move in an enterprise that resembled a game as much as a war. A game whose goal was to discover its own rules.

A lot that happened over the next two years was difficult for we merely normal people to understand. In a way, the conflict ultimately would be almost Darwinian, one ecological niche contested by two different species. Actually, we were subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens pacificans, because we could interbreed. And there never was any doubt that pacificans was going to win in the long run.

When they began to isolate us 'normals,' who would be the sub-normals in less than a generation, Marty asked me to be the chief liaison for the ones in the Americas, who would be populating Cuba, Puerto Rico, and British Columbia. I said no, but eventually gave in to wheedling. There were only twenty-three normals in the world who had once had the experience of jacking with the humanized. So we would be a valuable resource to the other normals who were filling up Tasmania, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Zanzibar, and so on. I supposed eventually we would be called 'islanders.' And the humanized would take over our former name.

Two years of chaos stubbornly resisting the new order. It all sort of crystallized that first day, though, after Claude had taken the little girl in to jack completely two-way with her brothers and sisters in Building 31.

It was about noon. Amelia and I were dog-tired, but unwilling, almost unable, to sleep. I certainly was never going to sleep in that room again, though an orderly had come by and discreetly told me that it had been 'tidied up.' With buckets and scrub brushes and a body bag or two.

A woman had come by with baskets of bread and hard-boiled eggs. We spread a sheet of newspaper on the steps and assembled lunch, slicing the eggs onto the bread.

A middle-aged woman came up smiling. I didn't recognize her at first. 'Sergeant Class? Julian?'

'Buenos días,' I said.

'I owe you everything,' she said, her voice shaking with emotion. Then it clicked, her voice and face. 'Mayor Madero.'

She nodded. 'A few months ago, you saved me from killing myself, aboard that helicopter. I went to la Zona and was conectada, and now I live; more than live. Because of your compassion and swiftness.

'All the time I was changing, these past two weeks, I was hoping you would still be alive so that we could, as you say, jack together.' She smiled. 'Your funny language.'

'And then I come here and find out that you live but have been blinded. But I have been with those who knew you and loved you when you could see into each other's hearts.'

She took my hand and looked at Amelia and offered her other hand. 'Amelia … we also have touched for one instant.'

So the three of us held hands in a triangle, a silent circle. Three people who almost threw away their lives, for love, for anger, for grief.

'You … you,' she said. 'No hay palabras. There are no words for. this.' She let go of our hands and walked toward the beach, wiping her eyes in the brightness.

We sat and watched Madero for some time, our bread and eggs drying in the sun, her hand clenched tight in mine.

Alone, together. The way it always used to be.