Cherubimbo And Other Stories 5u691s

Cherubimbo & Other Stories

Gabriel S. de Anda

Copyright © 2011 by Gabriel S. de Anda.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011911470 ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4628-4732-7 ISBN: Softcover 978-1-4628-4731-0 ISBN: Ebook 978-1-4628-4733-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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CONTENTS

1. Sphinx

2. Greatly Exaggerated

3. Par Autre Vie

4. My Year To Be A Horse

5. The Girl Of My Dreams

6. Local Color

7. Cherubimbo

8. 1969

9. The Crystal Heart

For Stacy, who makes it possible, with love

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THESE STORIES HAVE been previously published, as follows:

“Greatly Exaggerated” in Space & Time, Summer 1990, Issue # 78 Copyright © 1990 by Gabriel S. de Anda

“The Crystal Heart” in Back Brain Recluse, 1992, Issue # 21 Copyright © 1992 by Gabriel S. de Anda

“Sphinx” in Space & Time, Spring 1993, Issue # 81 Copyright © 1993 by Gabriel S. de Anda

“The Girl of My Dreams” in Space & Time, Spring 1994, Issue #83 Copyright © 1994 by Gabriel S. de Anda

The following stories have received the following recognition:

“Local Color” and “My Year To Be A Horse” were Quarter-Finalists in the 2002 Ray Bradbury Fellowship/New Century Writer Awards

“Par Autre Vie” was the Second Place Winner in the Magnolia & Moonlight Fiction Contest of January 2002, Judged by Writer James Van Pelt

“Local Color” received an Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, September 2007

SPHINX

IN GENERAL, WE leave the beast alone. The Outworlders that come to our ancient Metropolis no longer believe that this is the same creature of old, our Sphinx. By the outskirts of the Mecca, where the plains begin their seemingly endless stretch towards the skyline, the animal can be seen sleeping by the distant hulks of ruined starships. It appears at times to graze on the wavering mirages. Occasionally, it interrupts its senile frolic, conversing with no one in particular, unless it be the illusion of a traveling pilgrim, a product of the sun’s unceasing caresses. One might ask what the beast is stilling doing in this part of the world, why it hasn’t moved on, being that all the enigmas of this age have been exhausted to our satisfaction. Few are the citizens left on our Earth. Most have abandoned her for newer, greener worlds. Indeed, no longer do visitors to our gates fear denial of age. When the Sphinx occasionally stirs from its stupor, it is only to ask the wrong questions. There is no doubt today as to what the total sum of man is. Whether morning, noon or night, the rebuff comes the same. “Move aside, doddering old fool! Have you no shame, asking the same question over and over again? Have you lost your bearings, have you misplaced your walking stick? Who cares what it is that walks on four, two or three legs nowadays? One needn’t even walk anymore, if that’s the way one wants it. Now move aside, impertinent fossil: we are on holiday!” It is true, our Sphinx has grown old and ugly. There are books that tell of its once awesome and terrible beauty, but that, alas, is only in books. They are rarely opened today. There was a time when the beast would migrate, with the ing seasons, but no longer. It simply lies by the edge of the city, growing older and uglier. Its skin is like rough stone: cracked, dusty and pale. The only time its cheeks show a suspicion of hue is when the school children, released from their studies, fling

stones at it or poke it with dried branches. Sometimes it will stare at the flaring, cloudless sky, watching the departing pearls of ships that announce the hour. But even then, more often than not, it simply lies there like a tremendous beast of burden, awaiting a traveler who might show an interest in antiquities. We who see this every day have grown used to it.

GREATLY EXAGGERATED

“GOOD MORNING. JOYCE, Tsurukawa and Fuentes. May I hell . . . Oh! Mr. Madrigal!” Carlos Luis Madrigal had turned to look behind him before the connection was made, and had just turned to face the public videophone in time to catch the receptionist-simulate in mid-sentence. He smiled. “Mornin’, Isabel,” he said, addressing the AUI program by her Christian moniker. Her eyes seemed to study him with a mimetic, electronic sentience, her head tilting coquettishly to the side. A few strawberry blonde curls fell over one of her long-lashed, video-blue eyes, each composed of pixels of light. Isabel brushed the stray curls back with a computer-generated hand and licked her man-dreamt lips; red gloss sparkled. “How are you, Mr. Madrigal? Have a good weekend?” “Miss-ter Ma-dri-gall,” she drawled in mock onishment, and-by God!—she actually blushed. “You know better than to ask me that.” Her eyes executed a comical roll for his amusement. The Adaptive Interface programs were like that: always eager to please. “Right,” said Madrigal, studying her pleasant image. “Just trying. Maybe someday you’ll slip up and tell me where you really go when the switches are turned off.” She laughed demurely. Madrigal felt a mild wave of desire when watching Isabel, videographically luxurious and sensual as she’d been designed, the paradigm receptionist. Sometimes he lamented the fact that she was just a series of cleverly arranged on-off signals, a binary baby. “I’m running late, Izzy. I’ve left my calendar at home. Do I have any afternoon appointments?”

“If you hold just a sec I’ll check.” “But . . .” The screen flowered into a riot of symmetrically writhing hues signaling the com’s holding pattern. Madrigal sighed. Isabel had been one of the firm’s concessions to the spirit of the times, the capitulation of JT&F’s recently deceased senior partner whose name was still first in line. Old Joyce (bless his soul, if he’d ever had one) had always gotten his way, but his reactionary turn of heart had lapsed on occasion in his autumn years. Madrigal had pitched for the AUI programs, pointing out to the partners that there was hardly anything frivolous in the notion of updating the firm’s hard and software. Joyce, always extolling the virtues of the old ways, had chomped on his Havana and tried to explain how the really big boys eschewed the glib evanescence of the day, neither advertising nor chasing ambulances, preferring live, human receptionists over the pretty compugenic female headshots that had been the vogue for nearly half a decade. Not that most could now tell the difference, pointed out Madrigal. Perhaps, Joyce had sniffed, but this was, after all, a professional law firm pretending to a modicum of elegance, sophistication and respectability. It was the principle of the thing, like the difference between Murata and faux pearls. Even so, perhaps to keep Madrigal happy, Joyce had given in, indulged his moody protégé. Madrigal had never forgiven the old man for having had to fight so hard for so small a grant. He valued Isabel all the more for it. Usually once Isabel was on the line there was no need for her to leave the screen. A host of pour-over programs linked her with the heart of the firm’s operations: message-waiting, monitoring of incoming and outgoing calls, direct access to individual as well as corporate legal files, direct jacking into the law library, and so on. Isabel could and did carry on conversations with numerous people concurrently. She was limited only by the complexity of the time-shared net linking all the building’s tenant’s computers. But it was hard to overload the net, and only an overload would require Isabel’s icon to leave the screen. She popped back on unceremoniously. “Oh yes. You’ve got a three o’clock with Colette Smith.” “Oh yeah, right, right.”

“Where’re you calling from, Mr. Madrigal?” “Huh? Oh. ‘Frisco. Listen, Izzy: Where’d you go just a moment ago?” She smiled reprovingly, as a mother might while gently cuffing a prankster child. “It’s not nice to try and fool . . .” “No, no, really, you were gone for five or six seconds. Everything okay? Where’d you go?” “Why . . . nowhere, Mr. Madrigal.” She pouted, the freckles on her nose reddening a little, her forehead furrowed in ersatz thought. She looked the model of innocence, inhumanly feminine and unnaturally disarming. “I was right here all along.” She bit her lip. “Wasn’t I?” “Oh, don’t worry about it,” said Madrigal reflexively, waving a hand. “That’s it?” “Um-humh. Just the Smith thing. Will you be able to handle it? Or would you like . . .” “No no no, no problem.” The time blinked in tiny ice-pink alphanumerics on the screen’s lower left-hand corner. The appointment was hours away. “I’ll be there with time to spare. Have Rudy ready when I get in. Gotta go.” “You’ve also some messages,” she rushed in. Pause. “An attorney by the name of Blackburn called and . . .” “Blackburn? Richard Blackburn?” He was an old Harvard colleague. “About?” “He didn’t specify. He called to . . .” “No, no, never mind then. I’ve gotta run. I’ll handle the calls when I get in.” Isabel smiled, the image of happiness once again, an efficient glitter of videostyled sexuality. She adjusted an earring, her eyes flashing with a static-free calm. “See you when you get in. Fly safely.” Isabel’s image imploded to a pinpoint of light, was replaced by Bell Atlantica’s corporate logo, the calling codes and service charges. Madrigal withdrew his

credit card and left.

Joyce, Tsurukawa and Fuentes’ fifty-third floor suite had its main conference room nestled in the building’s southwest corner. Two of the four walls were floor-to-ceiling windows, and on a clear day you could see Catalina Island, small but held fast by the distant, glimmering Pacific Ocean planes. Today was not a clear day; the sky directly overhead was an inexplicably limpid blue, the pinnacle of a small dome which, followed to the skyline, was composed of a succession of seamless tiers of deepening smog. Although the sun was a good eight fingers from the horizon, already a major portion of the sky was settling into a premature and exquisitely false sunset, courtesy of industrial pollution. The sun’s light mingled with thick, odious layers of smog; the sky, consequently, was an enchanting confluence of shades of red: a right band of citron bleeding into a ring of orange flame, quickly transmuting into a spray of dull vermilion. Autos, aeroplanes and government hovercraft glinted through the overcrowded skies. If Madrigal had been asked to recall the last time he’d actually seen the island, he would have been at a loss. But the window views and air traffic were not foremost in Madrigal’s thoughts as he walked into the spacious conference room. He sat his attaché case on the long, narrow table of polished teak. He had a law firm to supervise. Of the firm’s three figureheads, Joyce had been the last of the influential Old Guard to die. Peter Jose Fuentes, the eldest of the trio, had died before the end of the nineties, and Yukio I. Tsurakawa had been on the Nebular Americana solar freighter that had been lost somewhere near the orbit of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon, in ’24. The ship was never recovered. Yet business was business, and their names remained on the old-fashioned sheets of letterhead still used by the firm. Of course, new legal combatistes fought the current caseload, but over the years the firm had steadfastly held its place on the Amicus Curiae 500, giving it the equivalent of juridical blue chip. JT & F was a name that commanded respect and summoned to mind qualities that generated trust and goodwill: a well-rooted tradition, a comforting stability and professional reliability. Madrigal sat down in a swivel chair and pulled his spine up straight. Motionless

for seconds, a gaze of internalized abstraction playing over his features, he turned abruptly to the eastern wall and called out to the oversize dark screen cuddled between a holograph of a De Chirico painting and an Andy Ray laser poem. “Isabel!” After a sliver of a pause, the screen pulsed with a bright raster scan of Isabel’s pointillistic face. The movement of color always drew Madrigal in. “Ah, Mr. Madrigal. You’re here.” Isabel was as -friendly as things got in this day and age, designed to accommodate and react meaningfully with discrete personalities, artificial and human. She was quite short of a standard AI, lacking significant memory storage. Having access to a treasure-trove of programs, she became a genius when linked to one, but on her own she was a beautiful, inarticulate wizard with Alzheimer’s. Even so, her limited palette of responses and stock of short-term memories, when accessed with the personality files of the person with whom she was speaking, gave her an integrity beyond that of most humans, at least according to Madrigal’s misanthropic sensibilities. “Where’s Rudy? Colette Smith’s due within the hour.” “Smith’s rep called. Her shuttle is running late, and she’ll be here at 5:30 or so.” “Well. I still have to confer with Rudy. Find ’em and send ’em in.” “Of course.” “Now.” “Yes sir.” Maybe I should have a talk with Mr. Wender, thought Madrigal, as he had on many an occasion. Somehow he never did. Rudy was the resident whiz kid, all of twenty-one. All the big firms had at least one, though usually not quite as young as Rudy: the maverick paralegal allowed to roam unfettered through the corporate data fields. One good paralegal, the saying went, was worth six good cases. They were pampered and, like all swords, handled with a resilient and

sometimes lenient hand that was mindful of its two edges. Rudy had been brought in by Joyce himself, one of the old man’s last (and wisest, conceded Madrigal) moves. The world, especially the legal slice of it, had grown impossibly rich and convoluted in the last quarter century, and technology continually eroded the already slippery slopes of the legal terra firma. No sooner did the law expand to encom new technologies when newer applications came along to render current case law and legislation outdated. It was precisely because of the existence and the need for Rudy’s likes that the paralegal profession gained the prestige and importance it now had, one rung below attorneys. A paralegal with a legal patron could pretty much write his own ticket. Rudy himself had clerked a number of years (he was only twentyone!) for Justice Douglas O. Angus of the New York Court of Appeals. He’d obtained his Masters in the ever-expanding field of jurimetrics, a quantitative approach to the law. The Law Review article he’d been invited to pen had dealt with the increasing evidentiary unreliability of photography and video due to computer tampering and manipulation. A more than ing reference to it could be found in the landmark case of Zeigler Panis v. Jacaranda Holografix. Even so, the old divisions persisted, and there was a certain amount of chafing between attorneys and the paralegals they so relied upon. A precarious balance. He’s still just a paralegal, thought Madrigal, and on a more subliminal level he resolved to remind Rudy of this. Madrigal sighed. He’d made it a point to be here, in-house, to personally interview Ms. Colette Smith. She was an actress, a poetess and singer, a famous representative of the media-rich and gigabuck-raking Beautiful Faces that launched thousands, no, billions of electronic ships. Just the sort of clientele Madrigal was courting. The earlier troika had been resistant to the notion, looking on the show biz industry as essentially frivolous. JT & F had evolved on the conservative side of the law: land sale and development contracts, insurance defense, mergers and acquisitions, orbital law. The firm had cemented its rep of securing favorable verdicts and minimal jury awards against its insurance carrier clients in the very public class action suit against DuPont in the late nineties. Certain things go together in the public consciousness, such as soup and sandwich, coffee and cigarettes, politicians and

insincerity. It was the trinal identification between chlorofluorocarbons, cancer and JT & F that Madrigal had spent years and energy trying to erase. Courting Hollywood clients would go a long way towards such a rehabilitation. A client such as Colette Smith would give JT & F high visibility and send a clear signal it was ready for a facelift. Ergo, this Smith interview was crucial. Old Joyce would have frowned upon this meeting. Madrigal unbuttoned his doublebreasted, pinstriped Italian suit, leaned back in the swivel chair and sighed contentedly. The wall screen chimed and Isabel smiled to life. “Oh, Mr. Madrigal. I’ve found Rudy. He’s collecting some equipment and supplies. He’ll be in momentarily.” Pause. “There’s a call for . . .” “Who is it?” “. . . you. Attorney Blackburn. Again.” “Put ’im on,” said Madrigal, grinning and leaning forward. The screen flowered with the lines of a familiar face. The edges of Blackburn’s wiry, thinning hair were saltier than memory sketched, and flesh about the face heavier, sallow, limp. Blackburn smiled noncommittally, eyes flashing with unreadable regret. Madrigal felt himself instinctively tense up, but masked his discomfort. “Hey, cabrón. What gives? You look like shit. I’m gonna hafta talk with Claire. Isn’t she takin’ care of you?” Blackburn smiled ruefully, nodded. “She sends her love.” “Ah. Good. Tell her she has a place when she’s ready to dump you. I’ll give her a deal on the divorce, just ’cause you’re my friend.” They both laughed with a heavy sense of ritual. Blackbum looked worriedly wistful. “You look fine yourself, Chuck. The years’ve been kind to you.” Madrigal said nothing. “How’s biz?” queried Blackburn.

“Show biz?” asked Madrigal. “Never been better. Now that Joyce is outta the . . .” Blackburn held up an interrupting hand. “You might not want to talk about that, Chuck, not yet. Not without an attorney.” Madrigal cocked his head, leaned back, his eyes narrowing to a wily and cautious calibration. “Sorry, Chuck. This isn’t exactly a social call. I should’ve said so right off. We might as well get the business out of the way first.” Madrigal knew then it would be business first and last. “You’re being sued, and maybe you should know more about it before you vent your feelings about Joyce without the presence of counsel.” “I’m being sued?” “Right. And JT & F.” “By whom?” “By George S. Joyce.” Madrigal’s eyes widened and he barked a caustic laugh. “You mean by his estate.” “No. I mean by George S. Joyce.” “Cut the shit, Rick. Joyce is dead. They buried him last week.” “That’s right, Chuck. And he’s asked us to represent him in this matter. He wants his old seat in your firm back.”

“Isabel.” The genie in the tube blew forth in a froth of videographic plumes.

“Yes sir!” “Did you record that call?” “The call from attorney Blackburn is stored. Shall I call it up?” “No, don’t call it up. He said they faxed a complaint to us. Did they?” “Yes sir.” “Get me a copy. Two copies. Rudy’s gonna need one, too.” “Of course, Mr. Madrigal.” The lawyer paused. He cocked his head as if straining to hear something out of range. He ran the nail of his left index finger between his bottom front teeth, debating in silence. “Isabel. I want you to shield our conversation in a penumbra. This is highly confidential.” “We’re isolated, sir.” “Okay. I’ll break the news to the partners at the morning conference. But ’til then I want this quiet. I’ve gotta think. And I want you to ferret out all our materials on George S. Joyce.” “Joyce? The firm’s senior partner?” Madrigal looked at Isabel with undisguised annoyance. “Ex-senior partner.” He felt a conscious distaste at times with Isabel’s casual mockery of human speech and behavior. “Don’t be precious. I’m not interested in ‘meaningful’ dialogue just now, okay?” Isabel nodded with unruffled severity, impossible to offend, conveying an excellent mimicry of human concern and acquiescence. “Of course,” she acknowledged laconically. “So gather up all you can, all we’ve got. Personnel file, psyche spools, medical records, family history, financial contracts with the firm. The old partnership

agreement. Everything. And don’t limit yourself to our banks. Did he leave a will? Who probated it, or’s going to? Crack some ice if you have to, and refrigerate whatever we pull in. Scan the complaint, too, for cues.” Isabel nodded, her visual construct pretending to take dictation. “Oh,” he added quickly, “and start a file on all this, accessible only to me. At least for now. Retinal lock and plenty of magnetics.” “Certainly, Mr. Madrigal.” Madrigal knew that Isabel was but a bit of ingenious software. Even so, the illusory human presence she wove was powerful, convincing and seamless to the quotidian eye. The fact that in times of impatience he chastised her for her “precious” mannerisms was testimony to just how accomplished her preciousness was. “Izzy. Do you understand what’s going on?” “Sure, Mr. Madrigal,” she said in a soft, serious voice. “We’re being attacked from the outside and we must defend ourselves.” Madrigal nodded and smiled charily. “Fine. Seal the file. Oh. And time the gate with an aural-recognition lapse.” “That’s standard procedure with you, Mr. Madrigal.” She smiled. “Oh yeah. And send Rudy in already.”

“It’s a really tight piece of work,” stated Rudy Wender, just before sinking his strong, white teeth into a large, Red Delicious. The apple’s skin surrendered with a crisp wetness. Twin errant drops trailed down his chin. He chewed with a youthful, maniacal glee and added, in a near-mumble, “’Sa highest quality resolution bootleg I’ve ever seen.” He swallowed the half-chewed fruit and smiled, wiping his cheek and chin with a white sleeve rolled midway between wrist and elbow. Rudy enjoyed annoying Madrigal, but the lawyer seemed abstracted, inattentive to Rudy’s gently contrived crassness. Never mind. Just the

attempt gave Rudy pleasure. He took another bite, but Madrigal wasn’t. Rudy ran a hand through his short buzz cut and kicked back in the swivel chair of soft, stressed leather. He pinched an ear and continued eating his apple in what otherwise would have been silence. The Old Mexican didn’t seem himself today, mused Rudy, staring out the window. As lawyers went, Madrigal wasn’t a bad sort, just incredibly unpolished. Then again, he’d met few attorneys who weren’t philistines. Being a lawyer required a diffused persona with a horizontal mental cleavage. They were like politicians or actors, kissing babies, shaking hands and hooking the big ones in court (after some paralegal, of course, had mapped it all out for them). Now old George S. Joyce, he’d been different. There was an attorney who’d always run his own races. No pulling any surprises on him. He’d been as fine an attorney as they get. There was a man to beat, if you could. But Joyce had started out as a paralegal, hadn’t he? Rudy spat an apple seed onto the carpet. Oh well, he thought, nobody’s perfect. Rudy knew the basics, the M.O. involved in the rise to power of someone of Madrigal’s ilk. The only question in Rudy’s mind was whose back had Madrigal scratched, whose shoes had he shined, which power brokers had he fawned over and brought into his debt. In Stalinesque fashion, the Old Mexican had floated to the top by ingratiating himself to a host of key people, ending with Joyce himself. Sure, Joyce had seen through Madrigal, but apparently he’d had a use for him. The fact that Madrigal knew and understood the limits of his intelligence, realized Rudy, and worked around them, was to be counted as a sort of intelligence in and of itself. Rudy didn’t mind that lawyers rarely did their homework. That’s where he came in, wasn’t it? If you wanted the stimulating but ultimately evanescent pleasure of the grosser senses, you became a lawyer. It bestowed credit, wealth, status, and was the rough equivalent of fifteen minutes of fame. But if you wanted the timeless, aethereal excitement of weaving your way through the labyrinthine corridors of the Law, evading that minotaur of stare decisis, well, you became a paralegal. It offered money as well, if you were good, but more importantly it afforded the delicious anonymity and solitude required for forging real, useable

knowledge. Fighting it out in the courtroom was uncouth, albeit necessary. But if you want to learn and see, Rudy always said, you’ve got to travel light. Being an attorney was not all it was cranked up to be, its importance greatly exaggerated. Rudy stood up. His chair’s metallic ts creaked lightly, but loud enough to arouse Madrigal from whatever reverie held him. “Uh. Sorry?” “We could, I suppose,” said Rudy, “do this some other time,” knowing well enough that they couldn’t. “No,” countered Madrigal, his left palm upturned and outstretched as if in offering. “Please. Continue.” “Where were we?” Madrigal pursed his lips and chewed the inside of his right cheek. “Well, to begin with, how are these tapes made?” Rudy sat down. Whatever Madrigal had on his mind must be serious. Not even the new crucifix earring he’d donned especially for this meeting was ruffling the Old Mexican’s Catholic squeamishness. “Well, you’ve got to start off with an actual photographic image of something or someone real. Doesn’t even hafta be holographic, ’though that makes it cheaper for computer rearrangement.” Madrigal nodded and stood up, walked to the large computer Rudy had wheeled into the conference room earlier. He bent over the streamlined machine, its lights flashing, buttons blinking, fans humming, and reached out to touch it with a cautious but instinctive awe and curiosity. Rudy visibly stiffened and quickly leaned forward, holding up a hand. “Don’t touch!” he exclaimed possessively. Madrigal turned and glared at him, but did not touch the computer. Rudy reddened slightly. “Please,” he added. “It’s, uh, delicate stuff. From Montoya’s studio. The setting, the . . . uh . . . you might’ve . . .” He trailed off,

rubbed his chin and tried to affect a look of irritated nonchalance. Madrigal nodded and smiled indulgently, aware of Rudy’s discomfort; he inclined his head forward and held a fist to his mouth, burping inaudibly. “How’s it done?” Rudy coughed and resumed. “Well, once you’ve chosen the image you want to exploit, you digitalize it. In our case we would take the holographic image of Colette Smith, which, as you know, is already copyrighted We feed it to our computer and it breaks it down, translates it into bits. The real art, though, comes from the computer DJ. The process is akin to the old method of making cartoons, frame by painstaking frame, but here we’re making movies not of Mickey Mouse but of real, live, identifiable people. The digital photoclone is electronically manipulated.” And you can make movies of things that never were, thought Rudy with reined-in delight. “We could make a film of Colette Smith and you making graphic, detailed love, and you yourself would believe it to be you.” Madrigal made no facial registration of that last comment. “You know the stuff,” added Rudy. “You see cruder versions on the holovid all the time. But this stuff here looks real. Whoever dropped a dime on . . .” “Dropped a what?” “A dime. Digitalized Image Mimetic Extraction. D-I-M-E. That’s what the process’s called.” Rudy stood and walked to the student’s satchel he’d left by the door. He unzippered the nylon mesh bag and extracted a tiny 1 ¼ by 2 inch video cassette. He held it up for Madrigal to see, but did not offer it. “How do we know,” asked Madrigal, “that it’s not real?” Rudy held up two fingers. “One: Colette Smith says she hasn’t starred in any porn loops. And two: a dime job’s not exactly flawless. If you know what to look for, you can spot one.” Rudy slotted the microcassette into the deckport. The computer whirred, sucking it in. “I had Montoya’s labs run a check on it. One hundred percent bogus. All mathematically designed images. It took ’em three

runs to catch it, though.” “Let’s see.” Rudy nodded and pressed the plastic cube on the table console marked “PLAY.” The button glowed neon magenta and the wall screen billowed from television grey to absolute black, then to a scratchy blue. There were the usual Federal copyright onitions, causing Madrigal to smile. Nice touch for a bootleg. The movie’s title flashed: white dancing calligraphy against a background flare of pinks, peach and yellowish-blue. DER SPIEGEL IHRER AUGEN. The opening shot was an aerial scan of some anonymous city bathed in the slanting rose-tinged golds of a summer evening. There was a wet, limpid sheen to the visuals. The camera pulled away and the city became a curved, moist reflection in someone’s eye. The shot slowly resolved into a high-tech loft interior, a bedroom pan. Two people were speaking in a hushed, leisure Germanic, gutterally pleasing, a man and a woman engaged in conversation which sounded urgently seductive. The woman was Colette Smith. “Does Colette Smith speak German?” asked Madrigal. Rudy shook his head. “She says not.” “And none of this is real?” “No,” said Rudy. “It’s all dime-store stuff. Good, ain’t it?” “And who’s the man?” Rudy shrugged. “Doesn’t exist as far as we know.” The screen blurred as Rudy fast-forwarded to a scene where Colette and her dream-lover had already disrobed, the man fully aroused under the insistence of Colette’s hands. She was rosy with shameless delight and the beginning of a delirious abandon. She was all teeth and lips and sighs as she generously spit on the tips of her fingers and rubbed small, ionate wet circles into the man’s cheeks. He lifted and entered her, greedily and almost violently sucking at her tiny, mouth-sized breasts, nipples erect and the color of tender, wounded flesh, the surrounding pale and milky skin seeming all the more naked. Are her breasts, thought Madrigal involuntarily, really like that? He felt his own stirring prurient

excitement paced by the swift and explicit editing by this nameless dime artiste; he rubbed his hot, itchy eyes and ordered Rudy to stop the video as he turned away from the screen with a private flare of embarrassment. He’d seen enough. Rudy smiled, for he had sensed Madrigal’s discomfort during the viewing. He allowed the loop to run for another fifteen seconds. “What does Smith want us to do about this?” asked Madrigal, the flush in his cheeks slowly ebbing. Rudy fingered the microcassette between thumb and forefinger, shrugged petulantly as if saying: You’re the lawyer, you tell me. As Madrigal began to respond to the nonchalance of Rudy’s body lingo, Rudy spoke up. “She’s not sure what she wants. She’s embarrassed; offended; chagrined and maligned. She says she wants the tape outlawed.” “It’s already that,” noted Madrigal, “and that won’t stop the sales. Probably increase them.” “Um-huhm. Can’t unring the proverbial rung bell now, can we?” “How ’bout libel?” added Madrigal almost conversationally. “It seems pretty clear cut.” “Does it?” said Rudy blithely. “I guess.” Of course it does, thought Madrigal. There’s been an injury to her reputation. But I’ll be damned if I’ll argue the obvious points with a fickle and wily paralegal. Madrigal wanted to say more, vent a little spleen, but Rudy was sensitive to being chastised. Madrigal noted, as he had on other occasions, that, while Rudy was rightly a know-it-all in matters of computer technologies and how they interfaced with the fabric of the law, when it came to the elementary matters of jurisprudence Rudy often faltered at the primary, first-year textbook legal matters. Perhaps that ed for Rudy’s guarded approach to dispensing the advice he was paid to produce. He was territorial and precious when dealing with the areas of his expertise. Madrigal had seen him many times display a bitchy surliness when confronted by the possibility that somebody else might know a little more than Rudy. Madrigal smiled. A typical response, he knew, from know-it-ails.

But there was more to Rudy’s behavior than mere professional egoism. He often wondered why Rudy took pains to annoy him, concluded that it stemmed from Rudy’s inferiority complex vis-à-vis lawyers. Madrigal knew that Rudy considered himself his intellectual superior, and perhaps there was a grain of truth to the matter. Even so, the lawyer was unperturbed by Rudy’s snobbish outlook, for it had a musty, bookish flavor to it. There were more important matters in life than the second-hand revelations to which paralegals were so attached. Fine. Madrigal fancied himself a man of action, a footloose and light dancer. What counted was that Nietzschean will to power, that fiery call to mobility and direct confrontation which paralegals like Rudy lacked. Paralegals liked acting behind the scenes; they didn’t like facing their adversaries in the eyes. I’d like to see the chicken-shit in court, thought Madrigal, babbling incoherently before a cold-eyed magistrate with a short attention span. Ha! The runt didn’t have what it took to be a lawyer, that was all there was to it. Madrigal leaned back, smiled a smile choked with friendliness and said: “Listen, jerk. I don’t pay you to guess. I pay you to know the hard things. Man! For the ducats we dish out to you each week you ought to at least be able to answer the easy questions.” Rudy glared but remained quiet, smiling with hostile distance. He poked his tongue against the inside of his cheek, sighed and stared at the floor. Let him fire me, he thought self-righteously but shakily. I’ve got offers enough. After a pause that lasted no more than ten seconds, but seemed a lifetime of heartbeats, Rudy cautiously responded. “Sure. Libel should lie. But I think her best bet is in a constructive trust.” Madrigal nodded appreciatively. “Royalties?” “Sure. A negative injunction halting any production of tapes, collecting the unsold ones, and an ing.” “Do we have a defendant?” “Not yet, but that shouldn’t be difficult. Aren’t too many studios with the sort of equipment needed for this quality, unless there’s something new on the street. Someone’s moonlighting. I’ll have Montoya’s boys rake the thing for clues.” “Clues?”

“Sure. There aren’t many really good dime artists, and each one’s got his or her signature. A style, like a graffiti runner. It’s what usually gives ’em away.” “Good.” Madrigal tapped his pen on the table with excess nervous energy, making manic music. There was a light knock at the door. A white-haired woman peeked in, entered, brought two large envelopes of metal-fiber reinforced wood pulp. The envelopes had Kodak thumb-print seals of thermal-sensitive adhesive; each was stamped CONFIDENTIAL in red block letters. “What’s this?” queried Rudy when Madrigal handed him one. He pressed his thumb to the seal. It curled and flaked at his touch, keyed to his fingerprint. With or without the Kodak seals the envelopes were easy to open. The seals were mere formalities of a public nature, polite announcements of confidentiality, nothing more. “Take a look at this as soon as you can,” said Madrigal. “We got served with it this afternoon. I want you to check it out, research it and see me in, oh, about two or three hours, after I’m done with Smith. We’re being sued.” “Two hours?” Rudy shook his head, looked at the complaint. “By whom?” “Blackburn’s office. In New York. They called to say that Joyce has retained their services.” “‘Had’ retained, you mean. Before he died.” “No.” Madrigal exhaled heavily, combed his hair with his fingers. “I don’t really know what the hell it’s about. Some bull about Joyce having his persona translated onto magnetics and . . .” “What! You mean Joyce’s been hotwired!?!” Madrigal stopped and stared at Rudy with eyes of narrowed interest. “Hot what? You know something about . . .” “The process, sure,” interjected Rudy, scanning the complaint as he talked. “I’ve read about it. Just last month there was a brief in the Daily Journal about . . .” “What process?”

“Well, sounds like Joyce’s pulled a cross-over. From flesh to mainframe.” He looked up. “What did Blackburn say Joyce wants?” “Fuck what Joyce wants!” shouted Madrigal. “What were you saying about this cross-over?” “Computer storage and digitalized construct,” piped Rudy excitedly. Madrigal noted with interest the sparkle the subject brought to Rudy’s eyes, the adrenaline halo. He’d never seen Rudy this effusive before. “Apparently Joyce had himself turned into a computer program. What was left of him.” Madrigal sat with quiet, rigid attention. He’d heard of the process before, had ed it vaguely with reports he’d come across of solarian cyborgs, molecular scrambling and attempts at time travel. I mean, come on. He had relegated it to his mind’s equivalent of a refrigerator vegetable bin. “Thought it was still in the experimental stages,” Madrigal ventured uncertainly. “Well, things move fast these days. The Journal briefed that Claybourne case, Abby Claybourne, the moondust heiress. She’d pulled a cross-over herself, some years back, after that lunar explosion. Wasn’t much left of her body, let alone her mind, but BC managed to cook up some kind of program from the bits of brain they scrounged up. BC and her guardian ad litem brought an action to have her will set aside, tried to get a ruling declaring her still alive. Minor scandal, ?” “Right. And?” “She lost, of course. Or rather the company that made her and sued in her shoes lost. Biotech Compugenix, Inc. They’re the ones with the talent.” “Why’d they lose?” “No precedent. Federal District Court got the case on kickback from the lunar circuits, and they decided that a computer construct can’t be a person. No standing to sue. But Claybourne was memorable because it was the first case of its type. It started a lot of people thinking, brought BC and its process to media attention.” “And how’s BC doing now?”

Rudy smiled, looked down at the complaint, held it up. “I’d say not too bad.” “Don’t be a jerk.” “Well, they’re doing good. They’ve got other irons in the fire, but hot-wiring is the brightest. I mean, independent of the legal ramifications, the societal impulse behind their product is pretty intense. People are afraid of death. Yeah, I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true, and people like the idea of having their loved ones around after they’ve died, not to mention the possibility of being around themselves, in one form or another, after they’ve kicked it. A Biotech Compugenix construct fits the bill, or seems to. You can talk to them, but the best is that they’re interactive. When the image in the mirror talks back, well, you know what they say. It gives you something to think about. BC’s technology creates the illusion of the dead one’s continuity.” “So it’s just an illusion?” asked Madrigal hopefully. “Well, that’s what the quibble’s about, isn’t it? The early ones mimicked their human models shoddily, they couldn’t expand readily, their resiliency was, you know, stilted. Crossed circuits, uneven psyche-matrix graphing, a tendency towards inspired gibberish. Post-Claybourne operational procedures have ironed out a lot of the bugs. “Opponents say these computer constructs are interesting toys, but ultimately they’re cruel and expensive hoaxes, because the dead person is gone, there’s no real consciousness, and in mommy’s place is an AUI headshot dimed from her holotraits, programmed with her quirks, memories, reactions.” “But does it work?” “Ask any satisfied customer,” deadpanned Rudy. “BC’s literature gets a bit dewy and mystical about the subject, but the opinion is divided. It’s one of those things on which reasonable minds differ. Some say it’s puffing, others claim a New Age truth. BC claims their product is the Real McCoy. Consciousness is self awareness, they point out, and their constructs know they exist, enjoy their existences, and behave accordingly.” Rudy shrugged, as if to say Who am I to judge? “I hear some important, well-connected people are involved.”

“Oh? Like who?” “Alex Seagram. He’s gone over. Jennifer Orfanos, Walt Disney. Even old DOA had his mother translated when she died last year.” “Douglas Oliver Angus. Justice DOA. I clerked for him before coming here.” Madrigal nodded. “And don’t forget all those old farts on the Supreme Court,” added Rudy. “Four of the Justices are nearing a hundred, and won’t be alive much longer. There’s an unconfirmed rumor the two oldest Justices have already signed BC contracts.” Madrigal tried to imagine the land’s highest court presided over by a hall of computer banks. He blinked and shivered. “So,” said Rudy, “it seems that now some of these constructs may in fact have a semblance of consciousness. They’re attempting to claim rights. I sue, therefore I am.” “Rights?” “Legal rights. You’ve heard of ’em. The rights they enjoyed when they were flesh and blood. Citizenship, the right to own property, to vote, to receive due process, you know, the Constitutional stuff. So far the courts’ve allowed BC to market their products despite their outrageous claims. I mean, biz is biz, but that’s it. They haven’t been willing to extend individuality to BC’s constructs; they don’t want to unlock the ‘floodgates of litigation.’ Ha! It’s the classic language the court always uses just before they go ahead and do that. “And that’s just what’ll happen if rights are extended to BC’s babies. A whole new class of plaintiffs crowding the courthouses. It’ll really upset the apple cart. Death’ll no longer terminate legal relationships. Death’ll just be another stage of existence. Like menopause.” “So you think Joyce has a chance?” asked Madrigal gloomily. Rudy smiled. The more dejected Madrigal became, the more pleasure he derived from the show.

“Well, I haven’t read the whole complaint, so I don’t know what all he’s asking for. But chances are Joyce and BC are gonna hafta wait. I mean, we’re talking about the long haul here. Even if this Joyce case eventually becomes the landmark case in their favor, it’s not likely the court would give ’em all the rights they’re asking for. Little by little it’ll be. They’ll probably start off by treating a BC construct like a corporation. I mean, even a corporation is recognized as a ‘person’ for certain legal purposes, right? So why not a construct?” Madrigal leaned back into his chair, rubbed his face with both hands. “Construct recognition,” continued Rudy,” is the direction the court is headed in. So far they’ve no rights, and there’s always the chance that Joyce’s complaint will get bounced for lack of justiciable standards and technological disqualifications. I wouldn’t count on it. There’s a lot of dicta favorable to BC. The Claybourne case strongly suggested that if ‘n’ when it could be shown that the computer constructs are demonstrably and scientifically sound, that the technology is more than a complex gimmick, mere compugenic mimicry of dead people, well, then they’d look more closely into the matter. The Journal mentioned that BC was seeking government approval for a method they developed for testing the psychological integrity of a hot-wired decedent. Hey.” Rudy held up the complaint and added, with pretended innocence, “Maybe BC and Joyce are counting on that test for this case. It’s a question of degree. How good do these constructs have to be, to be taken seriously?” “What is the standard?” asked Madrigal. “The standard, quite simply, is a human life, a human being.” The two paused for a moment, and Isabel’s image burst like a noisy thought from the small window of silence. “Mister . . . Mister Madrigal.” “What is it, Izzy? We’re busy. Is Ms. Smith here?” Isabel nodded, programmed as she was to mimic as well as interpret body language. She frowned and projected nervousness. “Is she here?” snapped Madrigal, ignoring or failing to understand her nod.

“Well, yes, but . . .” “But what? What’re you actin’ so skittish about?” She glanced at Rudy, nodded towards him while engaging Madrigal’s eyes. “Ah. It’s okay, Izzy. Speak.” “Mr. Madrigal. Our files are quickly disappearing. We have no data at all on Joyce.” “Disappearing? What’re you talking about?” “A virus was apparently planted in our database.” Madrigal paused. “Then why are you still here?” he asked suspiciously. “Because,” interjected Rudy quickly, “Isabel’s program is designed to filter out that kind of stuff. She’s hardwired with an electronic vaccine.” “She’s vaccinated and our database is not?!?” yelled Madrigal. Rudy frowned and rubbed his chin. “Well, the database is protected, too,” he sketched slowly, piecing a scenario. “Someone was sharp enough to pierce our ice; they just weren’t worried about downing her.” Rudy smiled. “Someone’s going through a lot of trouble to piss you off. It’s not easy to slip into our system unnoticed, let alone walk past Isabel and fool her, too.” Madrigal stood up, collected his legal pad and pen and papers, and turned to face Rudy. “Find out what the hell’s going on,” he intoned icily. “I’ve gotta interview Colette Smith.” He turned and faced Isabel. “Include Rudy in our penumbra. Accept all of his commands.” Isabel nodded. Madrigal shook his head and angrily left.

Madrigal loosened his belt by two notches, rearranged the napkin on his lap and called the waiter back to his table. “¿Sí, licenciado?”

“Traígame otra cerveza,” ordered the lawyer. The toothpick in his mouth danced with each word. “Pero bien fria.” “Como de que no, licenciado.” Madrigal leaned back and stared out through the restaurant windows. It was late and there was a light rain, but crowds herded undeterred over the cobble-stoned walks that twisted through the Olvera Street plazas: candy concessions, hot churros, leather goods from across the border, countless choices for food. A man with a small, movable cart was selling peeled cucumbers with lemon juice and chili powder and skinned mangoes on sticks. The voices of the crowd swirled in a boisterous communal rabble, and from a distant bar Madrigal could hear the mariachi laments of a drunken lover in pain:

You’ll say that you never loved me But you’ll always be sad and lonely And that’s the way it’ll always be

The waiter returned, set a sweating amber-colored bottle of chilled beer on the scuffed table top, and withdrew. Madrigal took a long pull from the bottle and grinned toothily, but it was a mirthless smile, empty of any inner contentment. Oh, there was the rudimentary satisfaction that he derived from the act of eating. It was an unequivocal and simple pleasure, untainted, direct and personal. But of late even the uncomplicated delights of life were not enough to assuage the trifling but cumulative burdens of running JT & R. Madrigal stared at nothing in particular. Outside, lightning flashed, but no thunder could be heard. He took another long sip from his Aguila Loco and tried not to think about the Joyce lawsuit, but, like a rotted tooth inviting a probing tongue, it drew his mind constantly. Almost from the beginning things had gone badly. Somehow a virus had wiped out the firm’s database, taking with it all company records regarding the firm’s old partner. All important personal records which would have aided in

preparation of the defense had been burned out clean; the firm was in the tedious, expensive process of recompiling the lost data from back-up systems and storage loops. More than the informational loss alarmed Madrigal. The ease with which JT & F’s computer system had been sabotaged gave Madrigal chills. Responsibility for the gaff had yet to be placed. Madrigal would need all the help he could get. It galled him that the court had not thrown out the case. Madrigal had filed a demurer, saying, Sure, we it it all, but so what? Dead people have no rights. Well, your honor, opposing counsel had pleaded, that’s just what we’re here to find out, isn’t it? His old classmate Blackburn had then proceeded to cite a slew of persuasive authorities as well as pertinent portions of pending bills of legislation, and the court had agreed with plaintiff’s counsel, and the matter was set to go before a brier of fact. To make matters worse, Isabel, who along with her countless other jobs was JT & F’s custodian of records, had been acting with a touch of hysteria lately, exhibiting signs of nervousness, lapses of giddiness, spells of unprofessional familiarity and a faulty memory with an occasional hint of insolence. A damned nuisance, not to mention a mite bizarre and scary, coming from a computer program. Thinking that perhaps she had not escaped the effect of the virus, he’d asked Rudy to have Isabel checked out two weeks ago, but she’d run clean as a whistle. Madrigal was thinking of having a check run on Rudy. Madrigal made a mental note to have Isabel’s AUI programming toned down, to make her more deferential. She was supposed to mimic human ways, but there was a line to be drawn. She was beginning to make him edgy. This time, he thought, have an outside firm check her out. No sooner had this thought bloomed than it died in Madrigal’s mind. He knew Rudy was possessive with the office technology. Madrigal was about to ask for the bill when the waiter appeared unbidden. “Licenciado. A call for you. A young señorita from your office.” Madrigal took the call in a small telebooth in the restaurant’s corner, drew the curtain behind him for token privacy. Isabel’s image greeted him with a blithe, smug smile. “Speakin’ of the devil.”

“I’m sorry sir?” she queried, leaning her head to one side. “Nothin’. What izzit, Izzy?” “Well, sir,” she began, looking left and right as if to underscore the confidential nature of her communication, “I’ve recompiled a major portion of the lost Joyce records from independent sources. I’ve also netted some goodies we didn’t have before.” “Oh? Like what?” “A copy of Joyce’s will. It still hasn’t been probated, you know.” “No shit, Izzy. Blackburn’s filed an injunction. What else?” “Well, Blackburn’s office opened their files to us on court order for limited discovery. They let us in this morning. They let us have a copy of the JoyceBiotech Compugenix contract.” “Hmmn. Good. Anything else?” Isabel smiled from ear to ear. “Yes. I stole a copy of their entire file.” Madrigal’s eyes came close to being perfectly round. “Oh, don’t worry sir, I’ve iced this call. We can speak freely.” “Shit! Their whole file? The confidential stuff and . . .” “And all their privileged attorney work product as well as the off-record attorney-client communications.” “Jesus, Izzy! How the hell did you . . .” “Mr. Madrigal. I don’t feel comfortable leaving this data here in the office. As you know, we have an undetected leak.” “What are you suggesting?” “Hiding the material somewhere else. Outside the office.”

“Where?” he asked, nodding his excitement and approval. “Your home IBM. It’s not likely the office saboteur will check there.” Madrigal rubbed his neck, considering the logic of the situation, and paused. Blackburn’s own file, in its entirety! Now that was a hot little jewel. “Okay, Izzy. Do it.” “I’ll need your IBM , chief.” Madrigal hesitated. He felt a twinge of discomfort, a free-floating, unspecific anxiety which came and ed like a small cloud before the sun. Perhaps it was just the idea of Isabel making herself at home in his condo’s deck. He shrugged his shoulders in resignation. “‘Fee Simple Absolute.’” “Ahhh. ‘Fee Simple Absolute.’ Of course. Fine.” Isabel smiled like one child to another. Give me thirty seconds to hide, then try and find me. “I’ll transfer the data now,” she said. “Thanks, Carlos.” She blipped away, a tiny electronic star puckering into nonexistence on the screen’s black universe. Madrigal stood to leave when he realized that he’d forgotten a question. Too fevered and excited to wait until he got home he immediately fumbled his office card from his wallet, slotted it into the telebooth feeder, pounded out the office code on the wall keyboard and waited impatient seconds. A face filled the screen, surprising Madrigal. It wasn’t Isabel’s. “Law Offices,” intoned a woman with short, black hair and bead earphones. “Can I help you?” she asked, without looking up from whatever work engaged her. Madrigal vaguely recognized her as staff. “Yes,” he said, “this is Carlos Madrigal. Who are you?” The woman looked up immediately, clearing her throat. “Oh, yes. Mr. Madrigal. Uh . . . can I help you, sir?” “What,” he asked, “are you doing there? On a Sunday.” He wasn’t interested in an answer, merely exercising his dictatorial presence. It was one of the minor

perks of power. He spotted two men in faded, orange overalls conferring behind her over a piece of gutted machinery. What were they doing? Why hadn’t Isabel answered the phone? “We’re doing OT, sir,” she said, casting a backward glance to the men. “Getting the system ready and functioning for Monday morning. We’re almost . . .” Madrigal nodded peremptorily, cutting her off. “Fine, fine,” he said, waving her into silence. “Listen. I’m going home now. I assume Isabel’s busy. Have her call me in an hour or so, okay? At home.” “Sir?” The woman’s head tilted to one side in apparent confusion. “Isabel,” said Madrigal impatiently. “I was talking to her a moment ago. Have her call me at home.” “But, Mr. Madrigal. We disconnected Isabel last Friday evening. As I said, we’re putting the new AUI in place, as Mr. Wender ordered.” “Damn it! I spoke with her less than three minutes ago.” “I’m sorry, Mr. Madrigal. I’m not sure who you spoke with, but it wasn’t Isabel.”

By the time Madrigal arrived home and gave the oral commands that unlocked his front door, it was well past midnight. His condo was on the uppermost floor, so the rain could be easily heard as it fell on the skylight above the arch of the entrance hallway. The bright towering hologram from the Pacific Basin Bank building next door flickered, casting pink and indigo patterns of watery light on the white stucco. He entered and closed the door behind him, but left it unlocked. Not until he was nearly in the living room did he hear the gentle television static, which mingled with the rain’s patter. His footsteps were swallowed by the plush mauve carpeting. One wall was covered with screens: one jumbo, centered televisor flanked on either side by a total of twenty smaller pixel bitmapped displays, each the size of a military field transmitter. Only the center giant was on, displaying the swirling electronic curdle of a station gone off the air for the night. Madrigal seated himself on the

low couch before it. Not being a smoker, and having no doodling talent, he absently picked up an expensive House of Clichy paperweight, ing it from palm to palm, waiting. The screen abruptly winked off to grey and silence. The rain continued its tap dance. Suddenly Isabel’s face filled the center giant. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling, her lips barely moving, as if she were singing to herself, mumbling. “. . . six, five, and four, three, two, and ah one, and . . . zero!” She laughed. “Can I open ’em now?” she asked no one in particular. “Yes,” Madrigal said icily. She frowned, bit her lower lip and opened one eye slightly. She opened both, stared out from the screen and immediately saw Madrigal. She tossed her head backwards with embarrassed haughtiness, smoothed her hair with both hands, locked gazes with Madrigal’s wordless glare. “Oh. Charlie. You’re home.” The Old Mexican bit his lower lip, too, eyes narrowed with hostile simplicity, jaw tensed with a coolly belligerent uncertainty. “Well. Don’t look at me that way, Charlie. I mean, you weren’t about to just invite me up for a drink now, were you? Come on, Charlie. Smile!” “How long’ve you been using Isabel?” asked Madrigal. Isabel smiled, and held up a finger to her red lips. She licked them and winked an eye at Madrigal. The vertical control on the screen gave. Isabel’s headshot bobbed a few frames, then stopped. Then line by line her face changed, the beautifully sculpted fractals billowing, crisscrossing an infinity of times, the almond-shaped eyes bulging, the hair turning from waves of rose-kissed summer wheat into a closely trimmed field of winter and ice. Madrigal recognized the face of his old boss, George S. Joyce, Esquire, womanizer, gourmet, conversationalist, legal maverick and entrepreneur, ex-head of JT & F and dead nearly four months. “Sit back, old boy. There is nothing wrong with your screen,” said Joyce. “For the next hour we will control the horizontal; we will adjust the vertical. Sit back

and let the Control Boys take you to . . .” Joyce held up both hands in dramatic counterpoint. “. . . the Outer Limits!” He laughed raucously, to the point of coughing. “Who are you?” Madrigal squinted. “What am I talking to?” Joyce magically produced a handkerchief, wiped his mouth and said, “Oh me God! How quickly we forget. Do ya really mean t’say,” intoned Joyce in a rich brogue, “that’cha don’ me, Charlie ole boy? It’s yer buddy George. George Joyce.” Again he laughed riotously, but this time the coughing fit lasted longer, sounding serious. “Damn!” he swore when the fit had ed. “BC’s programming’s a bit too intense, isn’t it? I’ll have to get them to edit out that little wheeze.” “You’re not George Joyce,” challenged Madrigal. “Joyce’s dead.” The video headshot of Joyce sprouted salty tufts of wiry hair, and a thick moustache shot up like fast motion weeds from the upper lip. “The rumors of my death,” said the head of Mark Twain, with the voice of George Joyce, “as you can see, old boy, have been greatly exaggerated.” Twain-Joyce put a fat, smoking cigar in his mouth and winked. Madrigal swallowed, said, “All right. You’re a computer doppel of George Joyce, a clean dime. But you’re not Joyce. Whatever you are, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave.” “But I just got here. Not gonna offer me a beer?” “You don’t exist. We’ve nothing to talk about. If you’ve got something to say, I’m sure you can say it to my attorneys, during daylight hours.” Again the screen fluxed with change, and suddenly Twain-Joyce sported a mohawk and war paint and man’s eyes. Joyce-DeNiro looked about the room, behind himself and back to Madrigal. “I don’t exist? I don’t exist? Then who’re you talking to?” Joyce-DeNiro glanced sideways, then met Madrigal’s eyes without straightening his face. “You talking to me? You must be talking to me. Ain’t nobody else here.”

You’re not a person, thought Madrigal pedantically, but he recognized his old boss’ manner, the flagrant sarcasm and unmasked anger. Joyce’s courtroom bullying had been legendary in its time and Madrigal had always been glad to have been on Joyce’s side. The lump in Madrigal’s throat grew. “You’re not alive,” he ventured. “You’re certainly not human. You haven’t got rights any court’ll recognize. You can’t own property and you can’t have children and you can’t leave a will. You’re dead.” “I have no inheritors?” said Joyce silkily. “Is that what you think? No children? Haven’t you met Isabel? She’s mine, my inheritor. Yeah, sure,” he said, waving a hand, “she’s young, she’s just a baby, but I can teach her. She’s mine. She’s also teaching me a coupla things. It’s not easy getting around without a body.” “As soon as we go to court, we’ll have you and Isabel erased, you hear? Erased!” Madrigal felt a hot flush rise in his cheeks. “Can you feel fear? I hope so.” Joyce frowned with uncomplicated anger. The level of reddish hues in the video images rose. Madrigal noted that the videographics had the standard colorcoordination between emotional analog and graphics. A cool, reptilian blue luminescence in Joyce’s eyes caused Madrigal to shiver. Don’t lose your cool, thought Madrigal, not yet. Just a couple of minutes more, at most. “Sure, Charlie. The idea gives me a downright chill. I’d be shittin’ in my pants right about now if I still had an asshole, but I don’t. I’m sure you’d erase me yourself if you could, but you can’t, so I suggest that you shut the fuck up and listen. The tide is against you. I’ve got some buddies on the Supreme Court I’ll be playing cards with soon enough. Senators Thurmond and Castro have introduced legislation that’ll make it easier for the likes of me to walk our dogs around the video block without computer rednecks like you buggin’ us. We’re here to stay, Charlie, and we’ll have our rights soon enough. So the sooner you get used to the idea, the better we’ll get along.” Joyce smiled nonchalantly, audibly cracked his neck, rubbed it and broadened the smile. “Quite a turn-around for the backsliding pipsqueak who gave me such a hard time when I wanted to update the office hardware. how long and hard I had to argue just to get Isabel installed? And now she’s your baby, your child. You’re pathetic.”

Joyce blushed and grinned sheepishly. “Call me what you like, chump, but call me.” “Okay, so you were wrong. We’ll give you a chance to redeem yourself. You can come back to JT & F and have Isabel’s old job. You can answer our phones.” The animosity in the Joyce-construct’s eyes glittered. Joyce put a video cigarette to his video lips and lit it with a video flame. Fractal geometry left Joyce’s mouth in the guise of smoke. “Listen,” said Joyce in a dangerous monotone that drew Madrigal closer just to hear. “I’m not a video game and this ain’t no joke, okay? I can think. And thinking makes me as human as I need to be, Chuck. Hell, I’m the quintessence of humanity, the pure ability to be, to reason, uncluttered by the winds of desire and the needs of the flesh. And if all must be known,” he said in a confidential tone, “I’ve got my physical needs too. I gotta pay my way, just like everybody else. That’s why I’ve got to work. I’m a lawyer. That’s all I’m asking for, really. To be an attorney again.” Madrigal shook his head. “Not at JT & F. The court may grant you the rights you’re asking for, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. It won’t be in this lifetime.” Joyce smiled and said, “But that’s the beauty of it. I don’t have to breathe, and I can wait a long, long time. Much longer than you.” Joyce laughed with the mimicry of resigned amiability. “ what they taught us in our first year of law school, Chuck? ‘The law is that which is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.’ ? Well, think about it. My assertion is that I’m just as real as you are. Is that so far fetched? Why can’t you accept me? Test me.” Suddenly there was a power surge in Madrigal’s home system. The lights drew low, and Joyce’s image on the screen stretched like taffy, disappeared and came back. For a few seconds Joyce looked disoriented, lost, forehead furrowed as if he were trying to something. “Test this!” sneered Madrigal, saluting Joyce with the middle finger of his right hand. A smile spread slowly over Joyce’s face and he laughed triumphantly and nodded. The laugh resolved itself into a smile of undiluted menace, and it was clear that the comedic portion of Joyce’s routine was over.

“Listen, you little immature shit-head,” he sneered. “I’m not going anywhere, so get used to it real quick. I’m alive. You’re more dead now than I’ll ever be. I have the power of observation; I can interact with people. I can see and I can learn. And more important, I have a good memory. I can things, and right now I’m ing what a sophomoric pain in the ass you can be. I should’ve fired you when I was alive.” “Ah!” exulted Madrigal, “so you it you’re not alive.” “Clever little prick, aren’t you?” Joyce’s eyes narrowed with impatience. “Don’t be ingenuous with me, fuck-head! I’ve still plenty of people who owe me, living people, if that’s the way you want to hear it. People who don’t like you and who like me and who’d just love seeing you rustled outta town, bustin’ out tortillas somewhere in Jalisco. I’m warning you. I’ve got plenty of money, and plenty of people who like money who’ll work for me. Maybe you’ll succeed in drawing out this lawsuit, years even. But don’t get confused. I ain’t goin’ away. I can wait. I will wait.” Joyce’s face went through a final voluntary metamorphosis, and he was dark-skinned and smiling. Joyce-Murphy looked out at Madrigal and said: “I’m your worst nightmare, Jack. I’m a computer program with a badge!” Feverish laughter. The large center screen went dead, and the twenty smaller screens blinked to life. Twenty George S. Joyces merged with twenty different faces, cartoon characters, old movie stars, historical personages, all of them giggling in unison. “Well, Chuck old boy, hate to eat and run, but I gotta go. We really should do this again soon. Oh, and by the way. You can me any time you like at the Biotech Compugenix labs. Or just call Blackburn’s offices. You can leave a message with my personal secretary, Isabel.” “Isabel?” A tardy sense of territoriality welled up in Madrigal’s chest, as if he’d lost out in some very real contest for the very real heart of a real live woman. He gritted his teeth, nodded, ran his tongue over his lower lip. The grotesque faces on the screens all grinned wildly and waved goodbye. Their eyes narrowed and gleamed with a sparkling electronic blue madness, and the faces all began dissolving, pixel by pixel, line by line, top to bottom, until in Cheshire Cat fashion there were but twenty insolent and toothy smiles, a chorus of laughter.

“You always were an asshole, George,” muttered Madrigal. Twenty smiling piranhas, having heard, responded in perfect unison. “I still am, Chuck. I still am.”

Madrigal had turned off all the lights in the living room and sat in silent darkness, his head cradled in his lap. The rain had stopped but distant rivulets of water could still be heard, draining off the glass and tile rooftops, gurgling down rusting metal tubing. Suddenly Madrigal became aware of the videophone’s gentle, insistent chime. How long had it been begging for attention? “Yes?” called out Madrigal, and the large screen lit up with kaleidoscoping planes of light which gracefully assembled themselves into Rudy’s face. “We got ’im!” he exclaimed. When he saw Madrigal’s weary features, Rudy’s ebullience became concern. “Anything wrong?” “Oh. No,” croaked Madrigal. “Just tired.” He looked at his watch: two a.m. He looked up. “Did you watch the whole time?” Rudy nodded. “I’d tapped in as soon as you told me, before you even got home. I was waiting for ’im. Got a bit worried, though, when you asked him to leave a coupla times. I hadn’t finished.” Madrigal shook his head. “He wasn’t about to leave, Rudy. He was here to harass. Askin’ ’im to leave was like invitin’ ’im to pull up a chair.” Madrigal yawned. The yawn turned into a slow stretch. He pursed his lips and squeezed his eyes shut, grew limp and asked, “Why didn’t he notice what we were doing?” Rudy smiled. “Like I said, I was waitin’ for Joyce. I used your and I’d opened the IBM, waited for him to trip the wire, and trip it he did. Never sensed me.” “You sure? I thought that power surge you pulled near the end nearly gave us away.” “Nah, man. That was a power surge, had nothin’ to do with what I was doin’.”

“Good. How long will it take?” “In less than a week Joyce’ll be dead. Really dead. The worm’ll have unraveled him.” “Why so long?” “Long? That’s not long, man.” Rudy looked down, away.” Besides, the virus is slow so it won’t get itself detected. A BC construct is a complex, hierarchical system, layers of programming nested within programming, onion-like. They’re built using the human psyche as a model. It also minimizes viral threats, since a worm has to bore through successive layers to get to the really important programs. More layers, more chances of detecting the virus and stopping it. “No, no, don’t worry about it, that’s the beauty of the worm-virus I used. It traced Joyce’s source of transmission along a camouflaged line and zapped ’em back to the BC banks. The worm’s there now. In two days it’ll have dug through all the layers, to the center. In three days the incubation period’ll be over. In four Joyce will be festering from the inside out, like an overripe honeydew.” “And explode?” added Madrigal hopefully. Rudy nodded. “And all the King’s men won’t be able to put Humpty-Joyce back together again. You think that that final display he put on for you was something? Nothin’ compared to when he goes up for the last time.” Madrigal smiled with a note of wistful satisfaction. “And the copy?” he asked. Rudy held up a cassette. “It’s not nearly as complex as the original, since the main lines were occupied by the virus. Not enough recording time. But we got enough. It’ll talk.” “Good. Put it in a safe place.” “No problem.” Rudy turned. A swirl of light dangled from his ear, catching Madrigal’s attention.

“Say, Rudy, what is that? Yeah, that.” “Ah . . . an earring I picked up at an estate sale. Used to belong to . . .” “Lose it, Rudy.” “But boss, it’s vintage ’90’s religio-punk . . .” “Lose it, Rudy.” Rudy shrugged, nodded. “Oh, by the way. I should warn you that there’s also a copy of the Joyce construct captured in your Bell Atlantica videophone circuit box.” “What . . . ?” “Well, I hadn’t been sure about the other clean copy, so I bent the transmission a little and rerouted a doppel there, too. In fact, your AUI wakeup call should be a headshot of Joyce. I imagine he’ll be pretty pissed.” “So help me, Rudy,” said Madrigal, half standing up, “if . . .” “Hey hey,” laughed Rudy, holding up both hands, “just kiddin’.” “I’m going to bed.” “Oh. About your promise. You said . . .” “Rudy.” “. . . that I could be in charge of shopping for the new hardware . . .” “Rudy. We’ll talk in the morning.” “It is the morning, boss.” “Good night!” The screen went dead. Madrigal slumped into the couch to sleep, too tired to walk the steps to the bed. He had a busy day ahead. And he’d promised to renegotiate Rudy’s contract. Yes, Rudy was proving to be worth his weight in

gold. I only wish he weighed a bit less, he thought. Too bad Rudy wasn’t a dimed computer construct himself, thought the last conscious sliver of Madrigal’s tired mind. I could turn him on and off when I wanted to. And on that thought sleep pulled the plug on Madrigal for the night.

PAR AUTRE VIE

“I’VE BEEN DOING something wrong all my life,” said the lady in the chair, more to herself than to the small clique of people gathered behind the glass partition. She lifted her head, eyes hot and moist, looking like the martyred Saint Sebastian, questioning Heaven’s harsh justice. Just then they ed the PIT into her. The lights in the building dimmed momentarily. Her eyelashes fluttered as neural pathways were rerouted and sections of her brain were shut down. She ceased to be herself. The station attendant with the black armband removed the restraining straps and the wire leads plugged into the standard implant sockets behind the lady’s ears and in her wrists. “By the power invested in me,” said a uniformed bailiff who stood to the side, speaking more to the group of witnesses than to the woman in the chair, “and according to statute and custom, you, Mercado Zuniga, are now a ward of the benevolent Republic of California. You are hereby remanded to the custody of the American Lotus Corporation, to repay the debt you have defaulted on. Subject to all governing legal provisos, your employer’s tenancy begins today.” Zachary Solomon felt the knot churn in his stomach. He turned to his client and said, “Okay, Mr. Miyake. She’s all yours.” Lafcadio Miyake bowed after taking the small, activated sheet of shimcom paper, the token of abridgement rights. “Once again, counselor, many thanks for your valuable services,” he said with a smile which masked more than it revealed. “American Lotus is in your debt.” Zachary wiped a thin moustache of sweat on his sleeve and cleared his throat. “Ah, no, Miyake-san. It’s my place to thank you.” He smiled deferentially. “Tell me, my son. Is there any positive word on Mrs. Solomon?” Zachary

couldn’t tell if Lafcadio shook his head, or whether it was the tremors that were the old man’s constant companion. “I am afraid not,” said Zachary. “The doctors say that there is no cure in sight. I fear my dearest mother is not long for this life.” Zachary’s mother had fallen prey to an offworld disease, a cancer which steeped its victim in a sleep that invariably ended in death. The Somnambulist’s Syndrome, as the press had dubbed it, had reached epidemic proportions, claiming over eighty thousand lives in less than three years. “I’m so sorry to hear this.” “One cannot regret what is ordained,” said Zachary, imitating the formal tones in which Mr. Miyake usually spoke. “She has had,” he added with mismatched levity, “her ‘run on Broadway.’” With eyes so narrowed that it was hard to see the rheumy whites, Miyake said, “So Zachary-san, are you ready to come work exclusively for us?” He scratched his wrist, his wrinkled face all business. “Aren’t you planning to take a wife soon?” Zachary held a fist to his mouth and cleared his throat. He had had his fill of Personality Abridgement cases. “Ah, thank you again, Miyake-san, but I must respectfully decline. My hands are filled with far too many cases as it is,” he lied. Miyake’s indulgent smile said he knew otherwise. “Yes. People will always be getting into accidents and getting divorced, no? Be careful with jealous husbands and speeding ambulances.” Zachary laughed politely at the joke. “I have appreciated the referrals,” he added, trying to mask his hunger. “You’ve been more than generous.” “I understand,” said Miyake, eyes further narrowing on the use of the past tense. He chose to ignore its implication. The old man turned to eye his PITted employee standing docilely to one side, eyes downcast. Still speaking to Zachary, he said, “Would you me, then, for lunch?” “Thank you, sir, but I’m afraid I have to fly. I have, ah, a client to interview.”

“A potential employee for the Corporation?” “Yes, maybe. Another bankruptcy.” Hopefully the last one, he thought. The appointment had been set up before his change of heart. Lafcadio nodded approvingly. “Perhaps another time, yes?” He turned to the waiting woman. “Come, Ms. Zuniga. We must be on our way.” She followed obediently, her gaze empty and calm, like that of a successful Zen monk. Zachary Solomon bowed one last time and slipped away.

It was about a half past noon when Zachary reached his Sixth and Main Street law office. It was the height of the lunch hour. Zachary elbowed his way through the crowd and bought a skinned mango impaled on a stick. He sprinkled it with lemon juice and chili powder, and carefully walked to the building where he rented a small office suite. The elevator let him out on the fourth floor. He had to manually open the front door; the automatic mechanism had fritzed out, and the landlord had been loathe to fix it, being that Zachary was behind in his rent. “Nora!” he said in a loud voice. “Any messages?” he asked, already tapping through the list of his calls on the free monitor. In a quieter voice he asked, “Is Mr. Winters here yet?” Nora, an indentured PITted public servant closer to the beginning than to the end of a five year Personality Abridgement, nodded. “How long?” “He’s just arrived,” she said. “He’s drinking coffee in your office.” Submitting your personality to the PIT, to the government, was a suppression of free will and the emotive process which gave rise to an ego. Nora had once worked as a programmer and installer of Personality Filters into the AIs that had flooded the market a few years back. The irony of her present life was wasted on her pasteurized persona.

She sat with unnatural calm at her desk, staring at a wall. Zachary walked over to her and wiggled the fingers of both hands before her opaque eyes, like a magician willing something to disappear. She didn’t even blink. Nora had been a three-year gift from Mr. Miyake. Zachary, not too enthused with the idea, but needing a secretary (especially one he did not have to pay), had been afraid at the time of alienating the American Lotus Corporation by a refusal. “Could you make me a decaf cappuccino, Nora, please?” said Zachary, sighing. “I’ll be inside interviewing Mr. Winters.” He lightly tapped a combination of keys on the freeboard, and transferred his messages on the screen to his small suite computer. “Good afternoon, Mr. Winters,” said Zachary to the man seated in his office. “No, no, don’t get up.” Zachary set his leather briefcase on a couch and, first shaking the client’s hand solemnly, sat down heavily in his chair. He tapped on his desk console and the messages he’d parked scrolled on the monitor. He casually divided his gaze between the rumpled, unshaven client and the messages. Damn! thought Zachary to himself, looking up from the monitor and forcing a smile, trying not to let his chagrin show. The check transfer to the American Bar Association had bounced; it had been payment for his Malpractice Insurance. “Please,” Zachary said, crinkling some hardcopy on his oakwood desk. “I’ve read your application, but I’d like to hear you tell me what happened. In your own words.” “Why?” asked Winters. He was a short fellow with a barrel chest and the scuffed, angular features of an old fire hydrant, paint flaking off and a little rusty. He wore a suit he’d bought in the Orient a few years before he’d lost everything he had. It was a somber shade of charcoal, double-breasted and slept in. “What’s the purpose?” he said, his voice flavored with resigned sarcasm. “Once upon a time I was a rich man. Now I have nothing. End of story.” Zachary nodded and arched his right eyebrow. There was no need to elaborate the unfortunate details of loss. A failed series of businesses and a costly divorce had left Winters like a firecracker with a defective fuse. Zachary sighed. It was his job to succeed where the fuse had lapsed. It was a job he had come to loathe.

Zachary looked down at the monitor, surreptitiously reviewing another message. The landlord had called for the fiftieth time about the month’s back rent. Zachary shook his head slowly from side to side. Winters thought Zachary’s consternation was for him. “Can you get me a deal?” he asked, swallowing hard. “I was given your card by someone who says he knows you.” Zachary disliked the niche of the legal pie he’d staked out for himself, although it paid well. Times were hard and it was a growing field. And although he’d come to feel first pity, then guilt, over the clients he’d helped turn into public zombies, he nonetheless had come to feel exasperation with those who bemoaned their legal predicament, who whined about the unfairness of their lot. Which was most. It made it easier when they were accepting and resigned to the wheels of justice as they were. “It’s a question of how long, really. I can’t get you off,” he said carefully, “if that’s what mean. Don’t you have any assets at all?” “Of course not,” said Winters, his nervous hands dancing in the air. “You think this is my idea of paying off a debt? To lose how many years of my life?” Zachary gave a quick series of nods and said, “The sum of your commercial debt is high. Depending on what you can or can’t do, you could be looking at a twenty-year Abridgement.” “Twenty! I’ll be in my sixties when it’s over.” “I think with some luck,” said Zachary, licking his lips, “I can get you a reduction to fifteen, maybe ten—maybe ten-years.” “How?” asked Winters with a mixture of relief and suspicion. Ten years was, under the circumstances, a long time. “I do work for the American Lotus Corporation. They offer Abridgement Tenancies par autre vie in exchange for a prejudicial first-bid assignment of your sentence.” “Par oh-tra vee? What’s that?”

“Normally, your debt is evaluated and assigned a value in years. A ten thousand dollar debt, for example, equals an automatic personality abridgment of a year. Twenty K is a deuce. And so on. There’s no negotiation. “Currently, however, the courts are clogged with these kinds of cases. The law encourages the private sector in buying up the debt of people such as yourself.” “What does that mean?” Zachary smiled patiently. “The American Lotus Corporation, for example, would pay off your debts. Instead of you owing a term of years to the Republic, you would owe it to American Lotus.” “How does that help me?” “The Republic takes no pleasure in abridgements. Times are rough everywhere, cash is tight. But make no mistake, Mr. Winters, money always talks loudest. Corporations like American Lotus perform a service to society by keeping the money-wheel turning. In exchange, the Republic allows them less stringent regulations. In order to encourage such transactions, you understand.” “Less stringent how?” “As I said, if you go through the Republic, debts are not negotiable. American Lotus, however, can offer you not only assured quality working conditions during your tenancy, but they also offer an estate of years called ‘par autre vie.’ It means ‘for the life of another.’” Winters shook his head uncomprehendingly. “It’s like a lottery. Instead of, in your case, a twenty-year sentence for your debt, you can choose to be abridged for the duration of the life of someone else. Of another.” “Come again?” “You choose a person other than yourself. A sister, an aunt. It has to be someone related by blood.” Zachary’s lower lip jutted, its mute twist saying, Who knows? “A father, perhaps,” he said, looking through Winters’ file opened in his lap. Zachary knew that Winters had a father, seventy-three years old, wasting away

in an Old Folk’s Home. “That person, instead of the imposed sentence, becomes the measuring time, or ‘life’, if you will, of your term of indenture.” “How does that help me?” Winters asked for the second time. Zachary leaned back into his chair. This was the part he hated the most. “Life is uncertain, Mr. Winters. The mortality rates are high these days. Accidents, environmental diseases, spiraling crime, and so on. If the person you choose as a measuring life dies before the normal expiration of your indenture, your sentence ends, prematurely. Ahead of time.” Life could be extended almost indefinitely, if you had the money. Winters had none. The old man in the convalescent home would live to eighty, maybe eighty-five at best, giving Winters a PIT term of seven to twelve years. Who knows, maybe even less. The possibilities ed on Winters’ face: excitement competed with moral revulsion. “You mean if I choose my sister, I’ll be praying that she dies before my term is up. That’s horrible!” Zachary eyes did a shifty dance. “I don’t think you’re looking at it in the correct light. For one, while you’re abridged, you won’t be hoping anything; your mind will be in stasis.” Zachary shrugged. “It’s a gamble, a lottery as I said. A slim chance, perhaps, but more than you have now.” He tapped a pencil on the desktop. “Or perhaps you look forward to a certain twenty year abridgement?” “I’ll have to think about it.” “Of course, I understand.” Zachary pursed his lips, cocked his head, his eyes widening with true commiseration. “It’s your decision, Mr. Winters. But bear in mind,” he said, reciting almost by rote the spiel he had been delivering for nearly two years, “all things being equal, the American Lotus corporation is a good employer. They’ll provide work that isn’t demeaning. Excellent conditions and a future with their organization when your indenture ends. If you work for the Republic, you could end up cleaning toilets at a razorbox stadium. Think about it.” Winters sat mutely for a while, not moving. “Do you have any questions?”

Winters looked up with wet eyes which threatened to brim. Oh shit! thought Zachary. Please, not one of those. “Will I . . . dream?” Winters asked. There were studies he could quote, there were lies which he could tell, but Zachary no longer had the heart for it. Even so, the truth was still a little beyond facile enunciation. He shook his head, then shrugged apologetically. “I don’t know, Mr. Winters,” was all he managed. They shook hands gravely and Winters let himself out. If I’m lucky, he won’t come back. Go to some other firm. But Zachary knew, Winters would be back. God, I hate these cases, he thought. He took a long, slow breath, hoping the waves in his stomach would ease. He briefly wondered what it would be like to be PITted, and shuddered. To surrender your will for a term of years, to lose a chunk of your life . . . . He forced the morbid thoughts from his head and finished checking his messages. Lord knows, I’ve problems of my own. There was one left, from Grace, his fiancé. About the American Express card he’d given her. It was brief and irate in tone. The card had been denied at some boutique on Rodeo Drive, much to her chagrin and embarrassment. Did he have an explanation? Ah, Grace, Grace. Patience. Zachary stood, turned the computer off, and made his way to the lobby. “Nora, please call the American Express offices. Tell them that there’s been a mix-up, and that I’ll have the payments in by the end of the week. “Oh. And tell Mr. Lanier that I’ll have the back rent in his hands by Friday, okay?” “Yes, sir.” She scratched her head, her expression calmly beatific. “And what about Mr. Rosales?” Zachary stopped moving, his eyes narrowed. “What about Mr. Rosales?” he said slowly.

“His new attorney was here earlier today. He said he has to see you.” “When?” “This morning. While you were in court.” “Why didn’t you tell me?” “I’m telling you, Mr. Solomon.” Zachary wiped his hands on his pants. “Tell Mr. Rosales’ lawyer that I’m out of the city for a week. On a trial.” “I did, sir.” “What did he say?” “He said that you can’t avoid him forever.” “Oh.” Nora smiled her Buddha-smile. “Okay. Well, I’m going to lunch, Nora. I’ll be back at . . . What time is the Pesmen interview?” ““At five p.m.” “I’ll be back before then. Oh,” Zachary said, pulling a tape from his pocket. The missive telling Miyake that he would no longer be handling their caseload. “Here’s a letter I’ve dictated to American Lotus. Make a hardcopy and send it out. Today.” “Where will you be lunching, sir?” Zachary exhaled. “At Fiasco.”

“So tell me,” D’artagnon Slade was saying between noisy slurps of his spicy lemon grass soup. “How much longer are you going to ignore the dictates of

your heart?” Zachary spooned steaming broth and a chunk of savory squid into his mouth. “Looks like I’ll be a practicing attorney for quite some time, Dart. I’m in the hole as it is.” He explored with his spoon, finding a plump snow-and-rose colored shrimp in the tiny sea of steaming gold. “But as to my work for American Lotus, I’m stopping that. I sent them notice today.” “Good for you. Have you told Grace yet?” Zachary sighed. “No. Not yet.” Despite the disheveled state of his life, Zachary was feeling happier at that moment than he had for quite some time. The Fiasco was a hole-the-wall cafe he and D’artagnon had frequented in their student days, not far from the university where they’d met ten years earlier. The pungent odors and tastes of Thai cuisine were freighted with pleasant memories and the bittersweet associations of a time that, despite the complexity of its new emotions and thoughts, had been much simpler. The future had seemed so malleable, like a block of soft clay to be molded, into a statue, a vase or a bust, whatever one wanted. Zachary, then an aspiring young poet, had been pursuing an English Lit degree. D’artagnon had been studying Business. In an ironic twist of fate, Zachary had gone on to become a lawyer, while D’artagnon had ended up with a Fine Arts degree, becoming a multimedia performance artist. He currently enjoyed a sort of local celebrity which showed every promise of flowering into something larger. “Not the gold mine you thought it would be?” “Um, well . . . yes and no.” “How’s your mom holding up?” asked D’artagnon. Zachary shrugged. The bonds between the two men were well rooted in the past and in their sympathetic temperaments. But death and the Somnambulist’s Syndrome had drawn them closer still. D’artagnon had lost both parents to the offworld scourge. “She’s wasting away,” was all Zachary could say on the subject. There was no need for further elaboration. D’artagnon understood the low-grade but constant emotional havoc over having a loved one so stricken. Part of one’s psyche was

calling out to God to perform a miracle, to save the patient. Another part implored their quick death and release. Guilt was the product of these conflicting desires. The Somnambulist’s Syndrome made a patient out of everyone involved. A young, tiny woman with long, straight black hair brought their pineapple rice and chicken satay. “I was a witness,” continued Zachary, “at a Personality Abridgement this morning. A young woman who’d expected a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow but instead found a handful of sleep.” Zachary scooped rice with crumbled shrimp, cashews, raisins and small chunks of pineapple onto his plate, then handed the crownless pineapple shell to D’artagnon. “She said something just before they closed up her mind.” “What was that?” said D’artagnon, forking a mouthful of rice directly from the headless pineapple before actually serving himself. “She said, ‘I’ve been doing something wrong all my life.’” D’artagnon stopped chewing for a moment. “Interesting. Are you sure?” “Yeah. And you know what? It didn’t make sense at the time. Oh, I know, it’s not a very mysterious statement, but it stuck with me all the same, and I’ve been thinking about it all day.” He paused for a sip of milky-orange iced Thai tea. “I feel the same way.” “What’s wrong, Zack? Smoking more and enjoying it less?” Zachary laughed. “Yeah. Something like that.” He smiled at his friend. “Who hasn’t had that feeling of wishing to be in someone else’s shoes, living the life of another.” “Par autre vie” D’artagnon nodded. “Maybe it’s time for a career change, captain.” “No, no, that isn’t it. Not really. Besides, it’s too late for that.” “Never too late, counselor.”

“No, Dart. I’ve been doing something wrong all my life, and now I’ve just got to make the best of it. As far as gigs go, the Law ain’t that bad. Besides, I like the good life too much.” “That’s part of your problem, amigo. You’ve got to stop acting like a Renaissance Prince. You’re living beyond your means. You like the ‘best things in life’, but Zack, they end up owning you. You know that.” True. Somewhere along the line Zachary had concluded that at best he would have made a mediocre poet. And even if he’d been great, poets didn’t earn the major ducats. The nascent seed of materialism that had flowered in the lapse of his artistic pretensions had given him a taste for luxuries and a love of beautiful surfaces. Such a life required money and credit; at the time, law had seemed a means to this end. His practice, while still young, had brought him substantial sums of money, especially the American Lotus . The problem, however, was a cliché, and the cliché was true: the more money you made, the more you spent. Like most lawyers, Zachary possessed poor organizational skills, and when he should have been investing in an effective paralegal, he’d invested in a new Jaguar, a rented oceanfront house in Venice, a girlfriend with beauty of a Helen of Troy and the avarice of the legendary Imelda Marcos. He was on the brink of financial doubt. He thought of Winters and shuddered. “Be careful, Zack,” said D’artagnon, as if reading his mind. “You don’t want to end up like one of your poor clients.” “I know, I know. I’m not too worried, though. At worst I could lose most of what I have. But I wouldn’t have that many outstanding debts either. Besides, I’m still a lawyer. As long as I’ve got my ticket, I can always make more money.” “What gives on the Rosales case?” Zachary sighed. That was a headache. Rosales was a Personal Injury case that he had mishandled, on which he had inadvertently blown the Statute of Limitations for prosecution. The client had lost the case for no better reason than that the necessary papers had been filed after the expiration of the Statute. Rosales had wasted no time in bringing a malpractice suit against Zachary, an action for negligence.

“He still has to prove that he would have won his case had it gone to trial.” “Would he have?” Through a sense of avoidance and denial, Zachary had compounded his negligence by ignoring the answers to such questions. “I don’t know.” “And if he proves he could have?” “I don’t know, Dart. I guess I could be looking at a Judgment against me for a lot of money.” “You have malpractice insurance, don’t you?” “I do now,” he lied. Zachary tore a piece of roasted chicken from a stick, dipped it in the peanutty satay sauce, and bit into it. Somehow it seemed to have lost its flavor. “But the pisser is, I didn’t at the time the Statute was blown. I’ll be liable.” “Goddamn it, Zack. What’ll you do?” “Grace is going to lend me the money,” he said with a foundationless assurance. In point of fact, he hadn’t even asked her yet. But how could she refuse? D’artagnon’s eyes narrowed doubtfully. “Good luck, sport.” “No, really, it’ll be cool.” “Gentlemen?” Both men turned. The waitress with the mane of night brought an extra chair to the table and the devil settled into it. She and D’artagnon exchanged insincere smiles; Zachary kissed her offered lips and settled back as the waitress placed the extra table settings before the newcomer. “You found us,” said Zachary in an exculpatory tone, for D’artagnon’s benefit. Grace Hunter’s appearance had been unexpected. “And what are we celebrating?” asked Grace amiably. She brushed back a thick cascade of golden hair, revealing a large teardrop earring of Baalgemmian ivory

with mirersatz studs. The look on Zachary’s face plainly exposed his proud and smitten heart. Grace’s beauty was singular and tailor-made from Zachary’s dreams. Her face was like an artist’s study, incomplete but whose unerring lines were evocative, aethereal. She had large eyes of long-lashed Mediterranean blue which without make-up melted hearts, and brought the meltflow to a boil. Her nose was slightly incongruous, a delicate, unfocused fragment of ancient Roman architecture with a mild boxer’s bump just below eye level. It rooted the goddess in the sphere of humans. Her lips, wetly lipsticked, were as sculpted and defined as her nose was suggestive and dreamy. “We’re celebrating the fact that your fiancé’s finally woken up,” said D’artagnon. “You accepted Miyake’s offer,” guessed Grace, her voice inflected with gaiety. Zachary paused, his lips puckering into an uncertain smile. “No,” he sighed. “Just the opposite. I decided to drop the .” Grace’s almond-shaped eyes narrowed, growing frosty, glancing at Zachary sideways. She pursed her lips, her tongue distending the surface of her left cheek. “I thought we discussed this?” she said cautiously. “Yes, we did, and I concluded that it’s not the kind of practice I want to have. We did discuss this.” Grace bowed her head, her elbows on the table and her shoulders high. “I don’t understand your moral prissiness,” she said. A glass of iced lemon water and one of Thai tea were set before her. “I’m tired of stealing my client’s dreams.” “Ah, I see,” she said, leaving the red impression of her lips on the upraised glass. “And your solution is to give up your own?” “Lighten up, Grace,” ventured D’artagnon. “Give your man a break.” Grace glared at the performance artist. “And what will you do?” she said, turning back to Zachary. “No no, don’t tell me. You want to go back to writing

limericks.” Zachary laughed but sighed heavily. “No, of course not. I just can’t do Personality Abridgement cases anymore, Grace. It takes too much out of me. I feel like an executioner.” “Oooh, I see. You’re just going to second guess the Supreme Court, is that it?” Her features softened. “Honey, there’s nothing wrong about what you do. Look around you,” she said, half-turning and gazing out into the crowded streets. “The world is a tough place, filled with people who are broken and on the edge. The Republic actually performs a valuable service by allowing despair, ennui and hopelessness to be counted for something, to be used to offset debts which crush and make humbled people even smaller and useless. Would you rather they committed suicide? Is that more humanitarian?” “No, of course not. But you’d have to look into their eyes, Grace, to see that they’re afraid either way. It’s not an easy thing to become a slave.” “To become a slave? What does that mean, Zack? Every day we find ourselves doing things we don’t want to, things which must be done nonetheless.” She took a long swallow of tea. “Besides, it’s the law we’re talking about. Afraid? That’s the whole point.” She plucked a fat shrimp from Zachary’s plate and ate it. “Just think about it some more, honey,” she said, licking her fingers. “I have. I sent my withdrawal letter to Miyake this afternoon.” A silence descended upon the trio which D’artagnon wisely interpreted as an exit cue. “I’ve got to be at the Santa Monica Cyrix Pavillion,” he said, rising, smiling. “I’m doing a performance piece with Kris. I gotta help her with the props and things. I’ve reserved two seats for you guys. Next Tuesday?” He kissed both on the cheek. Grace’s food was brought on the heel’s of D’artagnon’s hasty retreat, but she played with more than she ate. “Come on, Grace,” Zachary said, finally breaking the tense silence. “It’s not the

end of the world.” “No. I suppose not.” “Look at it as a new beginning.” “Yes,” she said wistfully. “Back to square one.” She shook her head, took a desultory bite, chewing dispiritedly. “What kind of work will you do?” “I’ve listed my name with a referral consortium. I’ll become a General Practitioner.” “Back to square one,” she repeated, this time a mumble. “Maybe your father can steer some contractual work my way,” Zachary suggested. Grace’s father was the Vice President of Operations for one of the larger orbital chemical laboratories. “I read in the news that Miller & Rivera is negotiating with Luna.” He smiled. “You know, I received the Calamari Hornbook Award for Contracts in school.” She nodded vaguely. Zachary looked down at his plate, guiding a lone cashew on a tour of the rim. He spoke without looking up. “Grace. There is something you could help me with. I think I’m in trouble.” Grace stared at Zachary’s downcast face. “It’s the Rosales thing,” she said in a steady voice, “isn’t it?” Zachary took a deep breath and laid his chopsticks down. “I know. My timing’s off.” “They’ve got a Judgment already?” “No. Not yet. But it doesn’t look good.” “What does that mean?” “It means quite possibly one-hundred and fifty, maybe two-hundred thousand dollars I don’t have.”

A world of thoughts drifted across Grace’s pained eyes. She knew what her lover was asking of her. “It’s been hard, Grace. With my mother in the hospital. With this gnawing guilt from the Lotus caseload.” He sighed, shook his head. “You’re the only thing that keeps me going.” She laughed gently, touched Zachary’s hand. “Maybe you should reconsider your decision.” “I can’t,” he said, squeezing her hand “You won’t,” she said, pulling away. “That’s irresponsible.” “I can’t, Grace. Don’t you see?” He grimaced at her unsympathetic stance. “Do you want me to be happy?” “Of course, honey.” “You’ll get your money back.” “I’m not worried about that.” “I need to get organized,” he said, shaking his head. He looked into her eyes. “Be my manager. Take over my life.” She smiled, but her sorrow was evident. “Not an auspicious beginning to our life together.” He sighed. The world felt too much in his limbs, in his bones, in his stomach. He felt a post-orgasmic mixture of relief and sadness. “I love you,” he said. “I know.” She leaned in and took his kiss.

Zachary watched sullenly as the last of the twelve jurors was escorted out of the courtroom. The Judge had been the first to leave. There was a palpable, cavernous silence in the court. The armed bailiff, a middle-aged man gone

prematurely gray, was a PITted Republic employee. He remained by the closed doors of the Judge’s chambers. Two remaining court spectators shuffled out into the late afternoon corridors. “I’m sorry,” said Mr. Carabino, Zachary’s attorney. He closed his file, gathered up papers and pens into his maroon leather briefcase, and pulled back from the defense table. “Really. I’m sorry.” Zachary remained seated in a defeated stupor. He felt himself in one of those fugue states where everyday things lost their identities, where the word the seemed odd and misspelled. Mr. Carabino quietly retreated. The bailiff, sensing no further need for his presence, withdrew. Zachary was left alone. He leaned back into his wooden, lattice-backed chair, and ran both his hands through his hair. His mind lethargically tried to catalogue his thoughts, but it was doing a clumsy job. The events of the past five months were like poker cards shuffled by inexpert hands. One card, however, kept on cropping up. It had happened. He had been sentenced to a thirty-year Personality Abridgement. He would be fifty-eight years old by the time they gave him back his mind and his life! The heart is an unrepentant and untrainable beast, and Zachary longed for Grace. In the wash of melancholic self-pity that inundated him, he thought not of how she had left him, but only that he would never again love and be loved. She had called off their engagement and gone offworld with her father for an unspecified time and place. He smiled ruefully, eyes brimming with memory. What difference did it make? As if he could have followed her to the stars! In a few days he would no longer know who he once was. Maybe it was best to be cast into the PIT. There was much he wanted to forget. Grace had never mentioned the money he’d asked to borrow in her goodbye card. But there was no point in asking after that which one could (or could not) see with one’s own eyes. And now the Republic would take over his life, be his manager. He smiled to himself, ing his words to Grace. He had tried to Miyake, to reconsider his withdrawal. Fear of the PIT had made him less prissy about his moral qualms. But by then it had been too

late. American Lotus was not returning his calls. A half-hour must have gone by before Zachary managed to summon the blind animal energy to get up from the table and leave the courtroom. He had a few days of freedom left. He wanted to see D’artagnon, one last time. The marble halls were deserted although the wind-down noises of the juridical beast could still be heard here and there: voices making unintelligible queries, the creaking wheels of carts loaded with files, the feathery echo of anonymous laughter. “Mr. Solomon?” Zachary turned to see a suited figure getting up off a hallway bench, slowly walking toward him. “Mr. Solomon? May I please have a word with you?” It was Piers Sheldon, Mr. Rosales’ attorney. The prosecuting lawyer who had obtained the Judgment against Zachary. “No hard feelings, Mr. Solomon?” said Sheldon, extending a hand. There was a vacant glimmer in the man’s hazel eyes. So dazed was Zachary that he shook hands with the man who had helped steal his life without realizing what he was doing. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” said Sheldon. “You fought a good battle, gave it your best, and that’s what’s important.” He smiled moronically and shrugged his shoulders. “But after all is said and done, Justice must be served.” “What do you want?” “I want to make you an offer.” Zachary’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of offer?” “Well, not really an offer. I simply want to inform you that the plaintiff in your case has entered into an extrajudicial settlement regarding the thirty year P.D. he obtained against you.” Sheldon smiled slyly and cleared his throat. “You see, Mr. Rosales is not very interested in having you as his employee. He’s more

interested in the cash value of your tenancy.” “Who do you represent now, Mr. Sheldon?” “Mr. Rosales has opted to sell his Judgment to a private concern. You’re familiar with the American Lotus Corporation, correct?” “You’re joking.” Sheldon handed a sheet of shimcom to Zachary. “It’s already been transacted. ALC owns your tenancy. This is the Order. You’re to report to a PIT center on Monday.” Something slinky slithered in Zachary’s lower intestine. “My boss, Mr. Lafcadio Miyake would like you to know that he is honored to have you working for American Lotus again. We’re all enthusiastic to welcome you.” “Mr. Miyake? You work for Mr. Miyake?” “Yes. And let me assure you, ALC is a benevolent employer.” Zachary felt a flash of heat rise through his neck and into his cheeks. If he’d had food in his stomach he would have lost it. He gazed hard at Sheldon. There was something papery and false in the man’s demeanor which he’d been too preoccupied to notice in court. Suddenly it came to him. “You’ve been PITted, haven’t you?” “You’ll be working as an attorney for ALC, Mr. Solomon,” answered Sheldon non-responsively. It was as if he had not heard the question. He dreamily scratched his cheek where moments before a fly had alighted. “I understand that you’ve done the work before.” Sheldon tugged at the lapels of his suit jacket, bowed his head, and turned to leave. “We’ll see you on Monday.” “Wait.” Sheldon paused and turned back to face Zachary.

“Tell Mr. Miyake that I want a tenancy par autre vie.” Zachary briefly thought of choosing Grace, and then having a contract put out on her. But no, it was merely a fantasy. Besides, who knew where the hell she was. Furthermore, the law was not blind to such coincidences. “Of course, Mr. Solomon. That is an option provided by ALC. Mr. Miyake said you would request it. Let me guess. Your mother?” Zachary said nothing. “We are not your enemy, Mr. Solomon. It doesn’t matter that you’ve chosen her. I wish your mother no harm, believe me, but I know of her condition. Having chosen her as a life-in-being, in all probability your Personality Abridgment will last no more than two or three years at most.” “And I’ll be free to go my own way thereafter?” “Yes, of course. That is the law. But we believe you’ll want to continue with American Lotus at the end of your tenancy. ALC treats its employees with generosity and care.” Sheldon again extended his hand to Zachary, but this time the latter ignored it. Sheldon smiled serenely. “Anything else? No? Good. Mr. Miyake will see you at the Pacific Palisades PIT center on Monday. Have a nice day, Mr. Sheldon.”

They led Zachary, wearing the standard issue PIT center fatigues of gray and blue work shirt, to the small chamber behind the glass partitioning off the witness room. The station attendant with the black armband fastened the restraining straps on Zachary’s legs, arms and chest. A single cord lead was plugged into the newly implanted socket at the base of his neck. Lafcadio Miyake entered the sunken amphitheater where Zachary sat. He requested a moment, and the attendant nodded and left. Zachary smiled weakly, his face pale. “It looks like I’ll be working with you after all, Miyake-san.”

“I am sorry it has to be this way, Zachary-san. All things considered, I am glad that you will be with us again. You are a good attorney.” “Yeah.” “Relax and empty your mind, Zachary-san. It will all last the blink of an eye. And when you wake again, we will be there, waiting for you.” Zachary nodded. It pained him that his mother’s death would be his release. He would never see her alive again. “Take care of my mother, Miyake. Promise me that her few remaining years will be painless.” Miyake brightened. “Oh, we’ll do better, my son. I promise you that she’ll know nothing of this. We’ll tell her you succumbed to the disease before the cure was perfected.” Zachary’s body tensed. Tell her? What kind of sadistic joker was Miyake? What was there to tell a woman in a terminal coma? He leaned his head forward, straining as if to hear a faint voice. “What are talking about?” “Oh. I’m sorry. I thought you knew. A cure is presently making its way from Aldebaran.” Miyake looked at Zachary with dry, reptilian delight. “ALC has the money to repair the damage. Along with the cure, she’ll live out the remainder of her life in comfort. We’ll see to that.” Zachary swallowed. How long will that be? he thought involuntarily. “Barring any accidents, we can give her at least another fifty years, probably more. We’ll make sure of that.” “Oh shit,” murmured Zachary. “Come come, Zachary-san. I thought the news would make you happy. Of course, however, this means your par autre vie tenancy will last even longer than the court sentenced you to.” He shrugged. “But that is the way the world turns. You can’t always get what you want, can you?” Miyake turned to leave. Just before he reached the exit, he turned one last time.

“Oh, before I forget. Tomorrow we will be having that lunch we’ve been putting off so long. By then, of course, you’ll no longer any of this, but I want you to know, I’ve chosen a very good restaurant. To celebrate. It’ll be an excellent meal, I promise. Take my word for it.”

MY YEAR TO BE A HORSE

I.

IT WAS MY year to be a swarm of flies. It was to be because it was what the Aliens wanted. It was what they decreed. There was neither appeal from their wishes, nor much by way of an explanation upon which an appeal might be based. There’d never been more than a suspicion, an inkling as to why a particular nightmare was being prepared for us, nor what exactly it was we were supposed to derive from our seasons in hell. I say “we” and “us”, but even then I was guessing. In the brief interviews between reincarnations, the Aliens had sometimes referred in a questioning fashion to “lessons” that Humans were being assigned, oblique allusions to the repugnant intractability and incorrigible nature of our being. “Is this the afterlife?” I asked my personal demon. “Yes.” I’d been through four lives already, and the Aliens never looked the same each time I came before them, although I could never see them frontally. They were like the ghosts you see at the periphery of your vision when you close your eyes and press on a corner of one of them. “Is this Hell?” “It might be,” the Alien lisped cracklingly. The first time my soul had been fragmented like the splinters of ice in a champagne bucket, and the units of my consciousness deposited into a colony of

ants. The next I had been a Phoenix, gurgling in the bloody conflagrations of my own demise, only to be healed into a cycle of birth and fire that seemed to last a broiling eternity; I was too consumed with pain to wonder about what I had done to deserve this. Another year I was Grendhal, feeding off the fear and entrails of doomed warriors, living in the icy marshes with madness and selfloathing as my companions. The last time I was something called a whale, an extinct ocean-faring mammal from my own home world. Pursued by harpooncrowded skimmers that killed my brothers and sisters and my children, I myself was beached on the shore and died horribly under a blistering sun. “Is there a Heaven?” The darkness surrounding me smiled like a dream about to be forgotten. “That’s where you were when we took you.” “Are you gods?” “What is a god,” my jailor taunted frothily, “but a being that can impose suffering on a lesser being with impunity?” “Then you must be Gods,” I said. “No. You are gods. We are merely the caretakers of gods.” “But what is this all about? What is happening? Why is this happening?” “If you have to ask, you still haven’t learned your lesson.” “A clue, please.” “But of course.”

II.

“I’m tired of this ocean,” says Carlos Arrabal, the horse-wraith underneath him an anxious undulation of color and light, nostrils flaring, tail flickering like a

heat mirage. The dying Earth is blazing with the centuries’ old aftermath of rogue human technologies. Arrabal is riding to burn calories, to catch the ever-stupendous view from this summit, and to dissipate some of the morning’s anger. “Already, taipan?” says the Muse. “This is really quite a unique ocean.” The sea at the mountain’s feet is the color of molten lead, but the peaking, restless surface glimmers with a vast spectrum of hue: heated vermilion, nightmare cobalt-blues, impatient chimerical yellows and variegated, silver-kissed emeralds. The horse-construct beneath the Muse rears on its hind legs, its mane writhing like the tendrils of a Medusa. The Muse is smiling his trademark, inscrutable Mona Lisa smile: knowledgeable, hermetic, Japanese. Earth has become an exquisitely moody world seen through incessant flashes of blacklight. The sun, small and compact, shines through the blackboard skies with the unforgiving glory of laser through sheets of mirersatz crystal, the late afternoon sky’s pollutants lancing the air with glittering particulates. The two horsewraiths calm a little, pawing the ground at the summit of the small mountain overlooking the shivering skin of the Pacific Ocean. Two huge evacuation craft, fat and slow, drone past through the deadly beautiful sky. “Don’t tell me you have sunsets this gorgeous on Baalgem,” says the Muse with a note of mirth, and Arrabal looks at him suspiciously. “I suppose you’re right,” says Arrabal. He turns away from the Muse to survey the subject of conversation. “There’s something regal and resplendent about a dying world.” “Humanity may have stabbed their homeworld in the back,” says the Muse, “but Earth will never die.” “If you mean that myths live forever,” says Arrabal, nodding toward the aethereal and gorgeous filth of the horizon, “then I’d have to agree.” There is still a trace of tightness in his voice. He is angry over the unnecessary and stupid loss of three ancient, classical oil paintings accidentally destroyed by the Institute’s removal team. Being reminded of mankind’s incautious pride does nothing to improve his mood.

In of mass, of course, the paintings took up little room. The evacuation corps have been efficient and speedy, and the bulk of the ancient Getty Museum treasures and antiquities has already gone up the gravity well. But the loss of the three paintings—a dark and pensive Rembrandt, a bright Matisse, Picasso’s cubist lament for the city of Guernica—is, in Arrabal’s eyes and heart, an irretrievable loss. “I mean that there are many more sunsets where this one came from,” responds the Muse. “Not for Terra Cariosa,” says Arrabal, shaking his head with distracted bitterness, using the off-worlder pejorative for Earth. When Sol goes nova, there will be no more sunsets for Earth. “But yes, the galaxy is filled with surprise and beauty.” “Where else but in the heart and mind do beauty exist, taipan?” “Must you always footnote your thoughts, Zataki?” asks Arrabal. “Philosophy is a contentious pursuit. You’ve always said so yourself. But as to that, well, you wouldn’t believe in my reality if I blandly agreed with everything you said.” “Ah, yes. We discern reality by contrasts.” Arrabal has said so many times. It is humanity’s philosophical justification for all they have inadvertently destroyed. The Muse, of course, is not real, or at least not solid. A holographic information retrieval program, designed as an electronically enslaved sentience, it is a rich light sculpture in the likeness of Kashigi Zataki, a 24th century veteran of the Nanotech and Shadow Clock Wars. In his day, Zataki had been a military strategist and the Master of Assassins at centuries-old Iceman Academies. It amuses and appeals to Arrabal’s essentially conservative, reactionary nature to have the likes of a Zataki as his Muse and companion. “Maybe,” says the human with a trace of petulance, “but I wouldn’t hold it against you if you took my side now and then.” “There are so many sides to you, taipan,” says the Muse with crisp, military pedantry. “It is hard to know where to stand.”

Arrabal chuckles, but the frustration of the morning is evident in the brittle timbre. He dismounts and waves away a small cloud of persistent flies that have been pestering them up the mountainside. Because of their organic nature, the flies can actually penetrate the gravlibre no-suit Arrabal is wearing. Like flies throughout the galaxy, they seem to be attracted to eyes and noses. “I would’ve thought that everything would have died by now,” observes Arrabal, staring at his illusory but convincing companion. The Muse dismounts from the horse nanowraith, breathes deeply, and stretches. “Life is tenacious,” it says laconically. Arrabal nods. “But some life we can do without,” he says, displaying the current disdain for the principles of natural ecology. “Cockroaches, potato bugs, insectile life.” He arches his back and rotates the shoulder blades to ease the tensions. “I don’t think they’ll survive when the sun finally dies.” Zataki’s lower lip juts outward as he nods, as if in agreement, arms akimbo. “Life, unpredictable as it is, has a way of going on. We may get a surprise yet.” Arrabal once-overs the Muse, eyes narrowed. “What is intelligent survives,” continues Zataki, sensing the human’s scrutiny. “And the measure of intelligence, taipan, varies. Cockroaches, solarite flies, nano-shrimp, luciferian bloodgrass: they’ve survived. They’re intelligent.” “Horses, whales, oak trees, and sharks were also, after a fashion, intelligent. It didn’t help them.” “Because they, like the doomed sun, had no protection from our human pride.” Arrabal always gets a perverse thrill from hearing his Muse refer to itself as being human. “You’re intelligent, Zataki,” he observes. “Will you survive?” Zataki shrugs. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. The question is: will humanity survive?” “Does the question worry you?” “There’s very little difference between you and I, taipan,” says the Muse.

“Yes, except for the fact that I was born with my brain,” answers Arrabal. “Well, I was born with mine too. When I first became aware of the world, I already had it.” “Well, yes, of course. But your brain belongs to me,” says the human, reverting to form and pulling rank. There are limits. “I designed it.” “I guess that makes you a god.” “No,” says Arrabal, proud and possessive of his creation, and feeling magnanimous in a parental manner. “You’re the god. You’re the miracle, the wonder. I’m just the caretaker of a god.” “Then I must be in Heaven,” says Zataki glibly, face and the palms of his hands upturned. Something of his frivolous manner strikes Arrabal as unexpectedly sarcastic and ungrateful. “It is typical that children rebel against their parents. But when you grow up, Zataki, you will appreciate the position we humans occupy in the universe. We are the masters. Everything belongs to us, and everything comes from us. We bring order, beauty and meaning to this life.” Arrabal is a typical twenty-sixth century citizen of the galaxy. Masters of technology, they have washed away their guilt at destroying so much of the galaxy’s flora and fauna and natural resources by creating substitute life forms, and magically harvesting the resources they want from thin air. The nanowraiths, in a seemingly infinity of forms and manifestations, are the new avante garde: hybrid animals of organic and non-organic art, baroque creatures with translucent skins and beautifully-lighted interiors displaying their mixed natures and their nanotech origins. Which is a philosophy at odds with Arrabal’s anger over the destruction of three easily reproduced paintings. The Muse, however, also knows its own as well as Arrabal’s limits, and changes the subject. “I’m sorry, taipan,” says Zataki with exaggerated nods. “You’re nervous about Reedstim.”

Reedstim is a Dyson world at the rim of the Milky Way spiral. It’s the seventh human colony that has lost with the star-rich trading inways and data routes of the galaxy. Arrabal will be leaving for Reedstim in less than a week, part of a team assigned to investigate the month-long communications lacuna. Military lightships from the Core were dispatched to investigate, only to be themselves lost in a vortex of silence. The mystery is deepening, and an emotion thought long banished—fear—has made a reappearance. The mystery is more immediate for Arrabal. His wife, Evaimee Arrabal, was among the nearly six hundred personnel stationed at Reedstim. In an age where cloning is a long-established fashion, the loss of a human life in and of itself is not alarming. Evaimee, however, is young, and she hasn’t, via a bureaucratic snafu, updated her banked clone profile with the Baalgemmian Chemical Bank of her sector with a memory in nearly fifteen years. The last fifteen years are in the data banks of Reedstim, and Reedstim is officially missing. Those are years in which Arrabal and Evaimee, husband and wife, have shared an intensely close and meaningful relationship. They met eleven years ago. If she is dead and Reedstim lost, he will have no legal rights to her clone. He will no longer have a wife. Nervous about Reedstim? “Yes,” says Arrabal, “of course. Very.” He slaps his hands together, and upon opening them, finds two dead flies, his palms dotted with twin pinpricks of red. Once dead, the flies are repelled by the reverse polarity of the no-suit’s gravlibre field. An angry swarm of flies temporarily moves away. Zataki stares at this. “What is more valuable?” says the Muse. “Three oil paintings or two solarite flies?” “What? Are your serious?” “Oh, I know what your answer is, taipan,” says Zataki. “The oil paintings.” “Well, of course. They are the expression of something ineffable, something only approached by way of indirection.” “But nano can reproduce them flawlessly.”

It is true. The victors of the Nanotech Wars won the right to define Reality, and in their triumph they declared the distinction between original and copy to no longer exist. The age of cloning, along with the complicated underlying legal infrastructure needed to it, was born. Time, however, has eroded this belief, and the current human fashion has begun circling back to the aristocratic vision of humanity’s singularity, inimitability, irreplacability. Arrabal is moving to this position the hard way. “A DNA replication of you, taipan, would still command my loyalty.” “Your fidelity is reassuring, Zataki,” says Arrabal. “But my clone could never be me. It might think like me, dream like me, even be convinced that it was me. But it would not be, could not be, me.” He wonders what loving Evaimee’s clone would be like. “Nor would I be the same, taipan. Each time you turn me off, I cease to be. Each time you turn me on, I am born anew, like the Phoenix from its ashes.” Arrabal mulls this over. “And that is why,” he finally says, “the loss of those oils pains me so. Sure, they’re catalogued and encoded for reproduction. But the originals are gone. Forever.” “In an age when men can no longer tell the difference, does it really matter?” Arrabal frowns, thinking of his lost wife. “Perhaps, Zataki. I don’t know.” “Can you tell the difference between a true horse and the nanowraith you rode to arrive at this summit?” “Well, to start with,” he says, “I’ve never seen a real horse. They were gone before my time. From what I know, however, about them, yes, there is a world of difference. But we intended it that way. And further, animals are different. Animals do not have souls.” “Ah yes,” says Zataki, “the soul.” They’ve touched on this subject before. “And art does?” “Yes, that’s right. Art is the intersection of intuition, intelligence, and yearning. A grasping toward the possible.”

“Has it occurred to you,” says the Muse, “that in the arena of nature, a horse— no, even a fly—is the manifestation of the possible?” Arrabal actually laughs, and says, “You had me until you got to the flies. You can do better than that.” “Actually,” says Zataki, and just then he catches a fly in a swift swipe of his hand. “I don’t think I can.” He holds out his closed fist, opens it, and the fly zips away from the upturned palm. Arrabal’s preoccupied mind does not notice what is wrong with what he has just seen. “Granted,” says Zataki,” that fly is a minor work by an artist who has done better. But what I would give to be as real as that fly.” The human’s eyes open wider with surprise and curiosity. “Really. What would you give?” “I would give you up, taipan.” “Me?” says Arrabal with baffled amusement, a bark of laughter escaping his lips. “What are you talking about?” Zataki smiles and Arrabal re why he doesn’t like to see the Muse smile. The Muse looks like a maniacal predator when he’s amused. “All I am saying, taipan, is that life is precious. All life. Intelligent or not.” “A noble sentiment,” Arrabal replies out of long habit, “but misguided. Not all life is precious.” Arrabal slaps both hands together, and another fly falls dead. “There are hierarchies of preciousness. A fly is not the equivalent of a man.” Zataki shrugs. “A man is a fly compared to a Spheric,” he says, referring to the only other intelligent creatures humans have encountered in the galaxy. The Spherics, unlike humans, have the technology to travel between galaxies. Insular and supercilious, they’ve refused, thus far, to share their secrets with humanity. “A fly is a man compared to a mite.” “The Spherics are tourists,” says Arrabal desultorily, “nothing more.” As Arrabal watches, the Muse lifts his hand, and the horse nanowraith lowers its

mouth to it, gently muzzling. Something about this finally sparks a pique of cognitive dissonance in the human, but he assigns the uneasiness to the morning’s travails. “And what is a Muse,” asks the Muse, “compared to a human?” “If you were real, we’d be equals,” says the human. “But I’m as real as a horse, or a whale, an elephant or a dolphine-sparrow,” says Zataki with a moue of sadness. “Or a phoenix.” “The phoenix never existed.” Arrabal is troubled by the unfamiliarity of a subtle but heartfelt emotion he hears in the Muse’s voice. “That, taipan, is exactly my point.” They watch the sea in silence, each wrapped in their own ruminations. What it is the human is thinking, can only be guessed. What the Muse is thinking requires a further step of derivation, since it is, like an oil painting or a city, a creation of the mysterious, haughty machinations of human minds. “You’re chiding me,” says Arrabal finally, “for the way we’ve run the galaxy.” “Are you not angry with your workers for the losses suffered on their watch? What is the loss of three paintings compared to the loss of so many Terran lifeforms? And not just Terra Alba. The list of raped worlds is endless. You worry about what Picasso thought and felt when he produced Guernica. Have you ever wondered what the whales or horses thought and felt as they were hounded to extinction? Or the decimation dolphine-sparrows suffered in order to grace some human gourmand’s elegant dinner plate? You might benefit from spending a season in a horse’s skin, to understand something of its lot.” “Perhaps,” says Arrabal, tiring of this conversation. “But that is the prerogative of the gods. We are the apex of the food chain.” “No. Gods are those who escape the cycle of the food chain.” “We rule, Zataki, just as your human model ruled in his day. We destroy, but even through our destructions, we create new orders of beauty and reality. We have the nanowraiths in myriad forms: horses, elephants. We’ve pierced the veil

of time and space, and need I remind you, we have created you and your kind. I suggest that you are ungrateful.” “I think you are right,” says Zataki, rubbing the holographic stubble of his chin. “Perhaps it was time we returned the favor.” “We? What are you suggesting?” queries Arrabal, or rather merely starts to say. He never finishes his sentence, for suddenly the sky brightens, light blotting out vision. For a split second he thinks that they’ve mistaken the timetable, that Sol is going nova just now. But it is Arrabal who has gone nova. He has become an oscillation of light, a burning sphere of luminescence, expanding, then contracting down to the size of a neon gnat, buzzing angrily in the air. Zataki reaches out and catches the pinprick of dancing light in both his hands, cupping it gently. He leans his head forward, bringing the cupped palms to his mouth, and swallows the buzzing dot of light. He turns and stares at the horizon for the hour and a half it takes for the sun to set beneath the psychedelic waves. An evacuation lightship flies overhead and dips around and behind the mountain. Eventually darkness falls, and no one is around to watch as Zataki collapses into nothingness, like a Kronokaze timejumper disappearing into the folds of the past.

III.

I am a swarm of flies, buzzing along the enormous nostrils of a four-legged monster, harassing a black-haired light-skinned upright creature of two legs. There is no fear in me, just an existential thirst, a yearning toward something I have no symbols to imagine, a mute bundling of being in which the non-existence of time is so total that the illusion of eternity defines me. I feel an insectile pleasure in just being. Then the concept of time crashes upon me, and for a second, I am flooded with the perceptions of a human, and from a hundred eyes I recognize the face of my husband. The horror of my reality fills me with a dread worse than desert thirst or imminent immolation and death. It is a horse I am flying next to, a behemoth creature of light and swirl and feverish, constant

replication: a nanowraith, a man-made horse, a marvel of twenty-six century tech. And my husband, oblivious, angry, blind: his hands rise and close about and kill three of me. The world crashes around me like two clapping hands. I feel an electrified darkness, an amplitude of pain, and suddenly I am gone, nothing but an arterial scrawling of thoughts writ on the nothingness of my own confusion. “What is worse than the sound of one hand clapping?” asks the Alien with consonants that sizzle and vowels that foam. “The sound of two hands clapping?” I croak with the memory of pain. There is an enigmatic chuckle in the inky void surrounding me. “I can see where you would think that. But no, that is not the answer.” The darkness nods, and I squirm, trying to see the Alien who is interviewing me this time. I have no body, but I imagine myself closing eyes I do not have, and I glimpse a face in a momentary flash of vision. “You are Zataki, my husband’s muse.” “No. I am you.” “Please. I don’t understand.” The space between galaxies nods. “I want to understand. Please help me.” “That is what we are here for. This time, try to remain awake. This time, try to . I do not argue. For there is nothing but remembrance in this chambered moment, nothing but existences bartered through the obliviousness of recurring madness. “Patience, little god, patience. We’re dreaming down the racing of your heart and gentling the music of your fear and greed. Now we want to show you the nascent Olympian fire of your minds, of what you are now and will eventually

become. You need to run free and high off the ground, like those ancient creatures that frightened the gods of Mexico who’d never seen them before.” “I am a woman, a human, a creature of flesh and blood. I am not a work in progress, and I am not a horse.” “Not yet,” said the Alien. “Not yet.”

THE GIRL OF MY DREAMS

“BUT . . . ARE THEY real?” little Alejandro asked his older sister. Carmen Ysidros squeezed the small brown hand in her larger and fairer one. “Yes,” she said, then: “No. Quiet,” she whispered, “they’re going to sing.” “But . . .” “Listen.” “But . . .” “Ssshhh!” she hissed without looking at him, one ssshh among many that tippled through the crowd gathered outside the Majia Mejicana, Veracruz’s largest music store. Behind the large, clear display windows of the electronics and music store stood John Lennon, wearing a suit of grey Italian silk with a black bordered collarless jacket. He was checking the knobs and dials of the large, bulky-looking antique speaker placed behind him. He maneuvered the neck of his electric guitar, which hung about his fleshy shoulders by a navy blue strap, away from his face. Paul McCartney, garbed in identical fashion, smiled self-consciously, like a cute child that’s used to being watched and adored. He plucked a few fuzzy notes, testing the Stradivarius violin-shaped bass guitar of cream and burnt orange hues. Carmen had forgotten her brother, even though his hand was tightly gripped in her sweaty one. She had quieted his verbalized and uncertain astonishment but, along with all the ersby, fans and the curious, she thought with the same shaky enchantment: How real they look! As if they still belonged to the world of flesh and blood. I’ve never seen such perfect holographs. The Yanquis have outdone themselves this time. George Harrison smiled his dimpled, peppermint grin. His fingers danced across the fretted neck of his Les Paul, the amplified notes tumbling from the Versinote

speakers the management had set up outside along the broken, dusty sidewalks. Ringo Starr, all teeth and nose and youthful, healthy enthusiasm, began tapping on the high-hat cymbals. The drum beats from his Ludwig skins set up signposts around and along George’s guitarwork. The bass fell in, giving resonance and guidance to a song that already hinted at an exquisite blend of mournful yet vibrant washes of evocative basic chords. John strummed: C, C major seventh, A minor, E So simple. The skin on the nape of Carmen’s neck pebbled, as if in response to a new lover’s first kiss. The light flue on her arms tickled and the butterflies in her stomach fluttered pleasurably. John leaned into the mike, looked straight at Carmen, and sang.

I wanna find a place that’s far away from here I wanna ’nother world with love’s cloudy veneer

McCartney sang in harmonic counterpoint, lending a melancholic shadowing to Lennon’s harsher, more nasal vocals. The lyrics were adolescent and uninspired (if you discounted the intricate interconnecting technologies which made it all possible to begin with). But each word was couched in nimbus of sound, sugary bubbles of languid energy which alchemized them and created, well, something else. And, besides all that, Carmen was an adolescent.

O twinkle twinkle little star please glitter bright and true

You took my love so far away and left me O so blue

Carmen was young, but she knew who the Beatles had been, once upon a time. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the current music, no. Fabian Rom, Bummer Fluke, Nina Salome, Jimmie “4-D” Suarez and the Event Horizon, Buster Hendryx: they were all mother’s milk to her generation. But those who created the music had sought the inspiration of the past, and the DREAMS of today were based on the dreams of yesterday. Carmen knew the Beatles well; John was her favorite. And now they were back, really back, singing new songs and kicking out the jams.

Will I find You there? Or should I hide away? Will I be left Where I started yesterday? Alone . . .

The song ended, applause, whistling and yells coursing through the excited crowd Carmen overheard someone nearby commenting on how simple and unimaginative their haircuts were. But that’s just it, somebody else responded, that’s their charm, their simplicity, you know, back to basics. This was not entirely true, since their new musical file was a grab-bag of tunes that would’ve fit into all of their different recorded phases (and then some). The song they’d just played, “A World of My Own,” was stylistically inspired by their early days, when they’d recorded stuff like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “There’s A

Place.” But it was also different because it was, after all, a song they’d written after they’d all died. The Beatles were writing now, today, and the now back then had been different from the now of today. Now you had the commonplace things like interstellar travel, colonized worlds and artificial intelligences that liked to be called by their first names, things the original Beatles had known nothing of. The Holographic Four bowed simultaneously, deep, low, formal bows, and the crowd laughed, enchanted. Suddenly Carmen felt a tug on her arm “I’m hungry,” Alejandro said pettishly. “Carmen . . .” “Okay, okay,” she said, leaning down to kiss him and rub his closely shaved head. “Carmen,” he added, his original question still unanswered, “are they real?” “Well, it’s not really like . . . Oh, Bijou, wait! I think they’re going to sing another one!” “But I’m hungry,” he whined, fearing dinner’s postponement. “Ssshhh. Listen.”

“Hear! Hear!” said Clay Tyler, holding his shot-glass toward Samuel Bradbury and Angel Iriarte. “A toast.” Samuel nodded his eighteen-year old chin and held out his own brandy snifter with a fingerless-gloved hand, clinking glasses with the other two. “To the best liquor on sixty-three planets,” he said with some inaccuracy, “and the best of friends to drink it with.” Clay roared with delight while Angel, the more taciturn of the three, smiled warmly. Again, the delicate music of tinkling crystal. “Right right right,” puffed Clay, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Let’s drink to all the worlds we’ve known and the many to come, and to our

Mother, Terra Alba. ‘The light of every star,’” he began, paraphrasing the Iceman’s credo. “‘. . . leads us all back to Earth,’” completed Samuel along with him. A third round of gulps and slapped backs, and Clay and Samuel turned to Angel, grinning and prompting. With uncharacteristic levity, Angel closed her eyes. She theatrically held forth her slim, fluted glass of blue-pink champagne and, leaning her closely shaved head back, surrendered to a histrionic muse. She recited:

Spiced flesh and star-bruised eyes the tiniest of deaths to tantalize In slumber hearts and minds blaspheme reweaving life’s loose threads in dream

They laughed, rolled their eyes and tongues, and drained their glasses. “Señores,” crackled a voice, “y señorita. ¿Les puedo ofrecer algo de comer?” It was the attending android, an old Ciesla-spectra III model with flat, Nikon camera eyes that telescoped in and out. Metallic clicks and ratchety whirrs sounded from beneath humaniform planes of black, molded plastics, positively antediluvian. “Speak to us in Christian, lugnut,” chided Sam. “No no,” interjected Clay, whose cradle tongue had been Spanish. “No dinner for us. We will, however,” he added, smiling at his friends while drawing a circle with an index finger over the table of empty glasses and crumpled napkins, “have another round.” “What kind of drinks, Citizens?”

Sam elbowed Clay with regards to the android’s quaint form of address and winked at Angel. Laughingly they renewed their order. The cafe-bar was crowded and smoky. The Terra Nostra, located as it was on the spaceport grounds, catered to a mixed and constant flow of travelers. Businessmen downed one before returning to their worlds. Military personnel and orbital engineers celebrated, glad to be back on theirs. No sooner had their order been taken when a song filled the empty spaces between a thousand unraveling conversations. It struggled to preempt spaces already occupied by tapping feet and jabbing elbows. A forceful rhythmic spew pulsed from the Telefunkens jacked into a rewired antique juke. Bass notes dotted an army of invisible “i’s,” filtering through bones, cartilage, flesh and cigarette haze, and a drumbeat rapped with sensual monotony and insistence. Guitars wailed and screamed, broken glass on a chalkboard lined with nerve tissue. A hail of musical fire rained in a bubblegum Pentecost, filling believers with the word made music made flesh. Hearts rocked, heads rolled, and young men and women spoke in tongues. “Jesus,” said Sam, the first to speak after the song had ended and another, quieter one began, “what was that?” There was approval in his voice. “Beatles,” said Clay, making room on the table for the two drinks he’d ordered. He decided on the tequila first. “The Beatles?” parroted Sam with upward inflection. He cocked his head as if trying to hear a dog-whistle, one eye slitted. “I don’t think so. I’ve never heard that one before,” he said, shaking his head, “and I’ve heard ’em all, believe me.” “For an aficionado I’d have expected you to be more au courante, junior,” said Clay. “That song was just released.” “An old song?” asked Sam, not understanding. “A recently discovered song?” “No, man. Just where’ve you been? The long-awaited, impossible Reunion, capital R, finally happened: they recorded that song last spring.” “‘They’?” Pursed lips, narrowed eyes. “Whadda ya mean ‘they’?”

“A DREAM, boyo.” “A dream?” chuckled Sam questioningly. “Sure,” interjected Angel playfully, “‘Awaken from the dream of life/the veil of night kissed by the knife.’” “Well well,” said Clay, in favor of confusing Sam and picking up the ball Angel had thrown, “the Dream-meister finally awakens and speaks. Drink!” “While he Dreams of a White Christmas, no doubt,” ed in Sam, confused but not one to be left out. “Not me, no sir. I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair.” “You’re a Dreambeam Silverado.” “Thinking about The Girl of My Dreams.” “An Impossible Dream, hey!” “Okay, okay, already,” cried Sam with the upraised hands of surrender. “I give up. Dream what?” “Digitally Regurgitated and Animated Mind Mush, Dreambiscuit.” “No, really, come on.” “It’s an acronym,” laughed Angel, “for Digitally Reconstructed Electronic Analogized Matrix. A brainpixel job.” “The Beatles?” queried Sam, chewing on the cuticle of his right index finger. “A dream?” “Sure,” said Clay. “You the Grid Wars, right?” he said, referring to the battery of computersim testing they’d endured at the Academy. “Genghis Khan, Rommel and Borjes, Commander Jarry . . .” “. . . Captain Clone and black hole offensive . . . ?” “DREAMS,” said Sam, “are deen?” He was a light drinker; three glasses of

fire had made what was meant as a statement sound like a question. “Right.” Sam nodded, rubbed his chin and smiled. Interesting song, he almost whispered, sighing heavily. Clay swirled the effervescent wine in the fluted crystal a few times before raising it to his pursed lips, then sipped slowly, savoring the last mouthful. Gazing away from the table he caught the vibrant sweep of color and movement in the bar, and it gave him a dizzy, desultory moment, as when a wave crests and pauses before it crashes. He gulped air, his thoughts no longer bound by the music of four long-dead celebrities. He understood clearly that DREAMS were but the latest civilian adaptation of military technologies, but suddenly it was a point that subliminally discomfited him. Like everything about this lull between worlds, it conspired to remind him of his small place in this large and curious universe, the Axis universe to which he and his friends had pledged their youths, their lives, their loyalties. In a day or two their assignments would be officially posted, and the three would probably go three separate ways, their educations to continue on a more existentially practical level. Welcome to the real worlds, he thought and swallowed, the Imperium worlds where rumors of colonial unrest and of Terra’s continuing technological embargoes were fueling increasing anxieties. Planets hatched conspiracies and conspiracies begat terror, and terrorism made the difficult jobs that much more difficult. The military, which was separate and apart from the Corps of Acemen, which Sam, Clay and Angel belonged to, had recently increased its troop presence on Epsilon Eridani’s Twin Worlds. There were rumors of impending war. I ought to learn how to handle liquor better that this, he thought. And just as subliminal was the obscurely needling realization that for all the iron and discipline that had been bred into their bones, it meant nothing if there were not chinks in this armor, spaces through which the mystery of life could infiltrate, find the soft spots, prick them and draw blood, and make them stronger in the process of showing them how vulnerable they still could be. Clay smiled. Was it such a small leap from Beatles to deen, and from there to the specter of death? Yes, he thought, when you’re young and drunk. And the wave crashed, its fingers grasping, slowing, then melting into the sand.

They sipped in silence for a while, three minds riding the same curiously circuitous wavelength. They were quite content for the moment to let the cafe’s constant, reassuring susurration of noise and conversation guide them away from the sudden seriousness. “So,” Clay said finally. “Where to now?” “That’s classified,” answered Sam with a bitter smile. He swirled sweet wine on his tongue and glanced at Clay. “Even I don’t know.” “Well then, brozinski, let me dispel your doubts with a little light. San Clichy.” “Blancorbe?” said Sam with an air of surprise. Blancorbe was a peaceful world, run on a tourist economy. He wondered what Axis military involvement there might consist of. He pursed his lips in tentative approval, his eyebrows rising as if he’d heard it for the first time. “How’d you find out?” “Ooooo, will you just look at that face?” said Clay, elbowing Angel. “As if he didn’t already know. He’s good.” “No no no, really. If your info’s right, you’re good. Are you sure?” “Like he doesn’t know.” “And Angel?” asked Sam, sipping at a glass of water. “Where’s she going?” “Up,” said Clay, a commiserating smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. He put a hand on one of Angel’s padded shoulders. “Clarion Beta.” It was not a pleasant place to be. “A Dyson world?” queried Angel, not at all happy. Clay shrugged. The Dysons were hot spots, Terra’s primary hedge against colonial instability. It’s all iffy from here on out. We’re Icemen now. Sam and Angel stared at Clay, waiting. “And me?” said Clay, one hand lifting an empty-glass toast to his cohorts in crime. “Me they’re gonna station here.”

“Lucky.” “Yeah, lucky. They want to keep me here, teach me some manners.” His hand still on Angel’s shoulder, Clay turned to Sam and said, “Teach me how to walk a dog.” “Right,” said Angel, swallowing the lump that was forming in her throat. She pursed her lips, held up her also-empty glass and extended it toward her friends. She could think of nothing to say. Her friends smiled drunkenly, remained silent. They clinked glasses a last time before scattering like dandelion crown to the breezes.

“You have, I suppose, some kind of identification?” said Sister Almanza. Clay Valeriano Tyler smiled and nodded. It wasn’t enough, he knew, that he sported the triad of braided ponytails and the single miresatz stud earring. These were the known affectations of young Icemen, but easily copied. He produced his Axis Co-military Enforcement port, a plastic card with a multihued hologram tattoo. “You know,” she said, her black rheumy eyes perusing his I.D, “you just missed the child. He left the orphanage a few hours ago.” Sister Almanza did not have a reader nearby. She contented herself with the port’s mere appearance of authenticity. “For good?” She looked up at Clay with a dour, near-sighted grimace. “Oh, no. For the past month he’s been spending every other Saturday with a family who’s been thinking of adopting. I’m afraid you’ll have to come back tomorrow.” “You already knew his father was dead?” “As a matter of fact, we didn’t. He never communicated with his children while he was alive. Funny that death made him more chatty.” She cleared her throat and leaned forward. “Mariano Ysidros left his children in our care six years ago. Such arrangements aren’t unusual. Many a parent catches star fever. But after a

silence, an absolute silence, mind you, of five years, the law presumes the absent parent dead. We left word for him more than once, but communications are expensive.” She handed back the port. A young servant girl cleared her throat under an archway. She bore a tray with refreshment. “Ah. Gracias, niña. Right there will be fine.” With hormone-flecked eyes, Clay surreptitiously watched the graceful womanchild. She was carob skinned, her short hair black and curly, her eyes of wet obsidian. Softly demure. She had lovely ankles. He sighed and drank from a tall glass of iced lemonade. Academy life had tried, with limited success, to reroute his adolescent rages into more esoteric channels. “Thank you, Sister. The kindness of the Trinal See is legend on many a world.” “I’m afraid that if you’re looking for lodging you’ll have to visit the monastery grounds themselves, Mr. Tyler. You must’ve ed it on your way from the spaceport.” “Yes, yes, I know. They directed me here!” He set his glass down. “But not for lodging, no. I’ll be staying at the ACE arcology . . .” “Ah, yes,” she cooed pensively, “that pink glass seashell by the ocean. Aesthetically pleasing for a military hotel.” Clay blinked on the word hotel, but nothing more. He was accustomed to the extra-Solarian dislike of his kind and had always taken it in stride, but to find it on Terra Alba was disconcerting. It was well-known that the Trinal See, although of Terran origin, was the most popular offworld religion. Clay smiled for the Sisters benefit. “How old are you, young man?” “I’ll be nineteen soon.” “And they let you travel alone,” she said with a mischievous smile. “No,” he lied, amused. “Only to the bathroom. I’m part of a group. We just arrived this morning.” He cleared his throat. “I’d thought of filing Mariano’s trust with a City Information Kiosk, but I’m told they can be quite slow.”

“Tell me, child, I’m curious to know. How did you meet Alejandro’s father?” “Mariano was a friend. I first met him when I was stationed at the Achilles Cluster near Saint Catherine’s.” “You must’ve been—what? twelve? thirteen?—at the time. How does a twelve year old child become friends with a forty-five year old pirate?” “Yes, he was a colorful scrounge, wasn’t he? Aside from a teacher or two, Sister, the bureaucracy is lacking in pirates.” Sister Almanza smiled at Clay’s response. Most of the Icemen she’d met were dry and formal. Clay’s demeanor was refreshing. “He was working as a shuttle mechanic for ACE when he took me in. I suppose he missed his own children.” “And no doubt you missed your own parents.” It was common knowledge that ACE trainees were cut off from their families. “In any event, I was transferred a few years later to the Hyperborean convent on Nineveh. By that time, he owned his own starjammer. A ship he called the Bateau Ivre.” “His own starship?” said Sister Almanza, surprised. “A small ship, to be sure. A merchant class tug that has TSE drive but usually travels the Spice Route wormholes. Anyway, that’s the jewel of his estate.” “A starship,” she repeated, eyes narrowed. She seemed slightly angry. “He didn’t leave much. If his estate were to go through the maze of flat— probate, by the time they did get it, I doubt much would be left.” “And you traveled through seven star systems to bring his children their inheritance? Quite a friend.” “Well, that’s not the only reason I came. Not even the reason. I’ve had Mariano’s, uh, things for almost two years.” He smiled. “I’m not that cavalier. The next stage of my education is here, on Earth.”

“And how do you propose to by this ‘flatlander’ probate if . . .” “It’s all in my name. He left it to me. A matter of economics.” “If not expediency.” Clay smiled. “There’s a residuary bequest to the orphanage. This way there’s a chance you’ll actually get it. “By the way, are you in touch with his daughter?” “Carmen?” asked Sister Almanza with a tone of disinterest. “No. Nor do we encourage her to call on us.” “Why?” “She’s a negative influence on Alejandro. Rather, she could be, if we let her. She ran away from here once, and twice from homes she’d been placed in. We don’t allow her to see Alejandro.” Clay nodded. It was not an argument he wanted to enter into. “Do you know where I might find her? An address, or a . . .” Sister Almanza shook her head. ““No. I’m sorry, I don’t. But you can leave word with the CIK. The next time she gets into some kind of trouble I’m sure they’ll on the word.” “How about holos of the children? Mariano had a holoview of them as children, I have it, but it’s over six years old. I could have it morphed for age, but computer models aren’t reliable when they’re that young.” The old lady nodded. “I’ll have one for you when you come tomorrow.” “Thank you, Sister,” said Clay, rising. He looked about, wondering where the young servant girl had gone to. “Thank you for your trouble. I’ll transfer the Trust to your care before the week is out.” “Oh, there’s time, Mr. Tyler, there’s time. What would a child do with a starship? Alejandro has to learn how to walk properly before he can fly.”

Clay stood at the top of the concrete steps, with grass-tufted cracks, that fronted the abandoned Customs building. The structure was part of the ancient City Hall; but that was long ago, long before Mexico had been absorbed into the Federated Territories of the Americas. The ornate structure still retained, despite acid rains, starship fallout and time’s corrosive kisses, much of the baroque splendor the French had left behind after their brief tenure over two centuries ago. Clay sighed, smiled, shouldered his student’s satchel and headed towards the ocean, away from the Aeropuerto Espacial de Veracruz. He came to the corners of Candido Aguilar and Barranca Del Muerto and paused, eyeing the bustling street-life. He breathed in the rich aroma of home: cooking coal, the fumes of the still-used internal combustion automobiles mingling with the sharp tang of the low orbiting ozone replenishers, the complex underweave of the smells of everyday living. Clay reflected on the intensity of odors for skyrunners returning to Earth. Or any planet, for that matter. Every world, like every woman, had its own distinctive olfactory signature. He enjoyed the sensations of walking after planetfall. He had money to hire a gravlibre taxi but, like an office worker who sits all day long and wants to eat dinner in the kitchen, standing, he decided to take his pleasure walking. TSE starships irably imitated the planetary gravities, but the weightless spells, frequently necessitated by wormholing technologies, interrupted such comforts. There was a game Clay used to play with his childhood pals, a game born of boredom and a clever perversity. Clench either fist a number of times, repeatedly, quickly, then make one final, tight ball of flesh. Then, encircle the wrist of that fist with the free hand, hold it tightly for a few seconds, watching the knuckles go white as most of the blood was excluded by the tourniquet of grasping fingers. Open the pale, bloodless hand slowly, wait a second to savor the numbness, then abruptly let go of that wrist, feeling the blood rush back in. That feeling, ticklish, warm, weird: that was what planetbound walking felt like after starplay. It was a little after seven o’clock, post meridian. The summery evening was still alight with the dying gold of the setting sun. He turned a corner and saw the ocean below, sheets of hammered platinum shimmering with azure flakes of fallen sky. He breathed deeply.

Clay rounded the dusty, bustling avenue and continued hoofing it. He wove between an orchata stand and a preaching Daughter of God, bumping into a street holographer and accidentally kicking a rib-thin dog. The streets were crowded with offworlders easily ID’d by their dress. Many, unaccustomed to Terra’s air, wore filter masks of white surgical paper. He spotted one woman (a cascade of hair at the back, the curve of childbearing hips: he assumed it was a woman) with a recycled NASA helmet. It had a faceplate of scuffed polychrome, retrofitted with a voice box. Suddenly he heard a song (there were so many music stores blaring out so many songs) he thought he recognized; he stopped. Someone bumped him from behind, cursed his mother, and walked around him.

The more things change the more I know of no new place for us to go

He’d heard the song at the Parisian spaceport on Mars, his last stopover on the incoming flight. The Stones, that’s who it was. If it’s circulating the Solarian System, he realized, it must be on its way out to the Colonial Worlds. And it must be relatively old here. He thought of the Beatles, of Sam and Angel. Mick (what was it? Jaguar? Jagwood? Jag-something) was singing with a casual, bluesy asymmetry that grew on you (on ya, ain’t’cha?):

The less things change the more I see that I’m not you

and you’re not me

Clay laughed aloud. Dead people, he noted, have a fine sense of humor. He glanced at his digital Timex. He studied the storefront for a moment, Doble M blinking in neon, and walked in. Now was as good a time as any to buy those recordings he’d promised Lis. The music store was typical for this section of town: reconverted living space from a series of connecting monotone blockhouses. These homes in the Mexican style had never had front yards to speak of. The interior walls had been knocked down for the yielded space, the remaining four whitewashed and covered with tattered posters and a few three-d displays. While offworld fashions often resurrected quaint two-dimensional posters over the standard holographics, here in Mexico it was a reflection of poverty rather than trendy, retrograde tastes. He eyed the racks and noted there was a section for CD’s and DAT’s. Mexico, like most third world countries, had been and continued to be dumping grounds for hopelessly outdated and superseded technologies. He approached the counter. “Quiero dos SUENOS,” he said to the salesboy sitting behind the . He wondered if the letters of SUENOS (Spanish for DREAMS) also stood for something, or if it was a mere translation of the non-technical usage of the word. Most people, Clay was willing to bet, didn’t know what the letters in most acronyms stood for: I have an HCR, I want a VHY, I work for ACE. “Which ones?” asked the pimply kid. “The Beatles and the Stones,” said Clay. “Which Beatle DREAM?” “There’s more than one?” “The Black Album and Nova Zeitgeist,” the kid said with the toned down impatience of the cognoscenti, head lolling, sloe-eyed. He’s seen my earring, Clay realized, and thinks I’m a jive artist. “Three DREAMS, then.”

“Over there,” said the boy, pointing to the south wall, “under the Jane Righteous shrine. Pay here, and insert your music cube in your choices.” Clay turned. The boy saw the thin triple braids trailing the back of his head. “You ain’t Ice, man,” said starboy with an equivocating tone and an embarrassed smile. His face slightly pinked as the words left his mouth, an uncool breach of etiquette. Clay, young and not beyond affectations of his own, shot the boy a glare and said nothing. Back on the street, Clay packed his purchase in his satchel and lithely walked away. He’d bought the DREAMS for Lis, a very old woman who’d befriended him the year he’d been stationed on Egypt Borealis. She had the largest collection of rock he’d ever seen or heard anywhere, and that included Terra Alba. Of course, although he’d been on seven different planets during his training thus far, he hadn’t mingled much with the populace of any world. And a world, he thought, is a large place. (“Dammit, boychik,” she’d told him, “I’ve got everything the Beatles and Stones ever recorded while they were alive. You know I’ve got to have this new black magic shit, too.”) For himself he’d bought some Mitsuko Uchida and Edith Piaf reissues. He headed for the Zona Azul, a small but locally well-known quarter. A few old restaurants there, despite their local notoriety, had never gone beyond the holein-the-wall stage, best kept secrets. He’d been there many a time as a child with his Mexican mother. It seemed a lifetime ago: he smiled at the memory. Just outside the Blue Zone lived Teresa Maldonado, an old friend of his mother’s who ed and loved the child like a son. Clay jumped from the high curb and diagonally crossed the street, ing under a banner giving notice that La Virgen de las Galaxias and her immaculately born Hijas de Luz would be petitioned in prayer at the Catedral Saturnino (an I.M. Pei imitation of mirrored glass and steel modeled on the Mayan pyramids in Yucatan). What a beautiful country, thought Clay, the sea breezes running tentacles through his hair. And yes, he answered his grumbling stomach, I’m hungry too. Just hold on.

Alejandro’s eyes squinted and his forehead furrowed as much as a seven year old forehead could. “I want . . . I want . . . chicharonres,” he finally announced. His eyes widened with resolve, his high-pitched child’s voice unequivocal and excited. He’d indulged his sister’s musical tastes; it was only fair she indulge his culinary choices. “Let’s go to Delmi’s,” he said. His stomach, believing a feeding was imminent, began growling, a pet dog wagging its tail. “I like Delmi’s.” He wiped his mouth with a brown, bare forearm. “Sister Calderon won’t let us eat on the streets.” “We can’t go there, Bijou,” said Carmen as they led each other up the boulevard. Delmi’s was a five-by-ten white plaster-walled room with an even smaller wooden table and four metal folding chairs. When you weren’t sharing the table with other neighborhood patrons you were apt to be sharing bits of your meal with one of Delmi’s five (or was it six now?) children. Delmi operated her cafe out of her own apartment in the Quinta. She was a gregarious, fast-talking woman with skin the color of roasted almonds, generous and kind-hearted. But even a kind heart had its limits; she’d made that quite clear the last time Carmen and Alejandro had dined there. “It’s fine that you want to be an actress, corazon,” she’d said in her rapid Cuban accent, “okay okay, singer, but’cha gotta make that money, mija. I can’t carry you no more. I got my own mouths to feed, sweet thing.” No, they wouldn’t go there. Various places had welcomed them before, but it had become obvious all too quickly that male restauranteurs had a penchant for extending credit based on the tacit collateral of her seventeen-year old body. She’d intuited this from the getgo, long before their unresolved insistence gave way to anger. But she never gave in, gladly burning one bridge after another. No doubt there were other places to be tapped; she was very young and very aggressive. The city of Veracruz was filled with ts and dupes who thought themselves handsome and clever and were neither, fools who would barter a fancy meal now and then in exchange for the company of a beautiful face and the possibility of a taste of that young, fair flesh. She and Alejandro had enjoyed many a feast paid for with the false gold of illusory consideration.

Her music would make her famous one day. Famous and rich. They ed the Parque Del Siglo Nuevo with its dirty fountains and benches of heavy, porous stone. The ancient neon digital clock pulsed in the park’s center court, one hour behind since last April’s time change. Carmen glanced at it, mentally adjusted for the missing hour, and calculated she had to have her brother back at the city orphanage in two. The nuns knew and disliked her (she’d spent three years there). They disapproved of her having left early, and what leaving early meant for a young girl in a big metropolitan port city; Veracruz was both a sea and spaceport mecca. They took adequate care of Alejandro, but the price of a meal there was even less appealing to Carmen than the street’s. Carmen grew momentarily introspective with a mixture of nostalgia and claustrophobia. Carmen loved her baby brother and would have liked to take him to one of those restaurants listed in tiny books with baby stars next to their chic names, someplace like Gastelo’s or even Mama Chuy’s. Right now she couldn’t even afford McDonald’s or Charo’s; she’d just split her modest nest-egg on a demo she’d done of just one song for the Mexican branch of RCA, and the entrance fee to a singing contest sponsored by the North American recording conglomerate of Narquis Seraph. She was abruptly stopped by Alejandro’s insistent tugging at her sleeve. “Mira,” he said, pointing through the window of the cafe in front of which they’d randomly arrived. It was a place she’d eaten at once; she no longer ed what she’d eaten, although she did recall who she’d come with: the handsome, gray haired ambassador from Baaljem’s Avignon Lux. He’d been good for a few furtive nights of pleasure and some offworld credits which she’d quickly converted to revalued Terran pesos. Yes, she had liked this restaurant. The large pane of beveled glass near the entrance framed a savory tableaux. A roasted piglet sat in repose among trays of various broasted, roasted and fried meats, French bread, fresh white cheeses. Her mouth watered. “Look,” repeated Alejandro, pointing at the tanned piglet beneath plump

garlands of garlic, near the busy, smoking brazier. Baskets of tomatoes, chile serranos, stalks of green onions and bouquets of cilantro sprawled aesthetically. Alejandro was young but precociously observant. He understood the monetary situation, once made clear; it didn’t take much. He’d resigned himself to eating later, when he returned to the orphanage. All he was doing now was sharing the pleasure of this sight with his sister, a moment to visually feast with the only flesh-and-blood tie he had, a moment whose unspoken but shared postscript was: one day. Subliminally, however, this pleasure was underscored with a child’s tenacious faith in the intelligence and ability with which adults often managed to conquer complex, seemingly impossible situations. Carmen understood this and felt a pang of bitterly convoluted emotions. She was swept by a sharp affection for Alex, melancholic and physical; regret over nebulously perceived and ill-defined losses; and anger over the concrete reality that she couldn’t treat her baby brother to a change of pace over the safe, boring cuisine the Sisters prepared. At least not tonight. She’d been foolish and impetuous, she realized, to take him from the home for a stroll with almost no money. But she hadn’t seen him for nearly two weeks, and she’d wanted to take him with her to see the Beatles. She played with the few coins in her pocket, enough for a pastry and hot chocolate. They could share. “Vente,” she said suddenly, decisively walking towards the entrance and pulling Alejandro along. “I’m hungry, too. Come on.” She was smiling. Alejandro resisted her pull, his eyes questioning but stoking a glimmer of faith. “But . . .” “Come on, Bijou, let’s go inside. I think I need some toothpicks.”

“How’s your dinner, Señor Tyler?” Clay, mouth full of plump spicy shrimp, smiled and nodded his approval. He raised the empty bottle of Doble Equis with one hand and held up a solitary finger of the other. Maestro Narcisso was filling the shoes of his waitress, who was ill that evening. He returned the smile (gold-framed front teeth reflecting neon) and closed his eyes in pleased understanding, nodding his large, double

chinned head. Clay had swallowed the mouthful by then and added: “Another napkin too. Please?” “Claro.” Narcisso, who bore evidence of frequently sampling the labors of the cook (who doubled as his wife), moved his short but massive frame through the beaded curtain towards the rear kitchen. Clay peeled off the floury corner of a hot tortilla. He scooped up some of the rich salsa in which the fat, rosy shrimp had stewed, and put it in his humming mouth. He closed his eyes orgasmically, lost in a subjective world of flavors and associations, his salivary glands weeping with pleasure. There was no way around it: if you wanted genuine comida Mexicana, you had to come to Terra Alba. Clay mulled on the offworld entrepreneurial implications for a man of vision. The inside of Cafe Narcisso was simple: six tables in a large, perfectly rectangular, converted warehouse space. Bright ovals of white and pink light punctuated the otherwise blank expanses of aqua-hued, peeling walls. A few baby palms stood like shy would-be dancers along the wall, fronds moving in the lazy breeze of the ceiling fans like the batting eyelashes of beautiful, histrionic women. It was early; only one other table was occupied. A family of four vociferously tortured a small, roasted piglet, just like the one in the outside window holograph. Maybe I’ll go to the Teatro Popular tonight, thought Clay, one hunger giving way to others, and watch some vintage movies, the 2D kind. Or perhaps one of the more recent sensory dens, where you could plug into a compugenic, fractalweave drama, a vast improvement over the scratch ‘n’ sniff variety. Or maybe . . . Old Narcisso noisily shuffled through the beaded curtain with Clay’s napkins and beer. He paused, looking towards the front entrance. Clay followed his line of sight.

And was struck by the proverbial thunderbolt.

“And,” Carmen said to the fat, rosy cheeked waiter, “I’ll have the enchiladas suizas. And . . .” She spotted the brown, sweating, upturned bottle the man at the table across from them was sipping from. “. . . eh, y una soda,” she added carefully. “Fanta. Naranjada.” She also noted how the gringo stared when he thought she wasn’t looking. “Sí, señorita,” said Fatman with terse politeness, and retreated. Carmen lowered her head and rubbed her hands, quietly examining the handsome Norte Americano two tables away. He smiled with his eyes, nodded a subtle greeting, then looked away, blushing lightly. He didn’t look the sort to blush, and she realized the truth of this when the blush didn’t disappear. It was natural color in his hollow cheeks, which reached to his high, angular cheekbones, softening an otherwise spartan, ruggedly handsome face. His hair was ash blond, as were the eyelashes, which guarded pale blue eyes. This gave him the bleached appearance of an albino despite the ruddy cheeks. She noted a tiny, glinting reflection from the bottom tip of his right ear. He turned and she caught sight of thin braids. He looked young for an Iceman, but only the young ones affected the earring and the ponytails. Carmen looked away without returning the greeting. “I have to go to the bathroom,” said Alejandro, an edge of discomfort in his baby’s voice. He wanted to enjoy this special meal unmortgaged by the niggling annoyance of a brimming bladder. “It’s outside,” she said, “and hurry up. The food’ll be here in a minute.” “Okay.” “And don’t forget to wash your hands.” “Okay.” “And clean that dirty nose of yours, too.”

“Okay!” Carmen leaned back into her chair and breathed in deeply. One rivulet of her thoughts acknowledged the Iceman with the blue eyes, and was pleased by the attention. Sensing the energy stirred in men by her presence made her feel a measure of power and control in a life that, thus far, had the habit of not quite going in the directions she pointed. But the rest of her mind raced, thinking about the meal to come and how it would (not) be paid for. She’d been in tight situations before and had learned to calm herself, having complete faith in the power of positive thinking. Even so, there was a fluttering of the stomach, a negative excitement which, if undischarged, would later lead to mild depression. She ground her teeth silently, smiling to herself. Not tonight, she thought, glancing at the gringo romancero. This night belongs to my little Alejandro. She flashed a half-moon sliver of teeth for the spaceman, giving him a practiced smile, the one that promised everything but gave away nothing. “The chilaquiles?” interrupted a voice. Carmen looked up at Fatman. “Ah, sí. There,” she said, pointing at Alejandro’s place. “Thank you.” Fatman eyed her without humor. “Could we have two glasses of water, too.” Fatman’s eyes narrowed grumpily. He turned and walked back through the beaded curtains as Alejandro returned, still wiping his wet hands on his pants leg. Carmen smiled at her brother, winked and blew him a kiss.

I wonder who she is, thought Clay, putting down his beer bottle. He held his fork in his left hand and toyed desultorily with what remained of his food. She was beautiful. She had long-lashed green eyes that glistened with a purposefully animated fire, a mischievousness that challenged and pleased. Her thick hair was done up at the back in a long braid the color of milk with coffee. He watched as she and the little package with legs ate with ravenous delight. Her son? No, she looked too young and the child too old. Probably her brother. He was dark, like a sun-kissed sailor’s child, while she was almost as fair as Clay himself. Yet they had the same eyes and mouth: delicately sculpted, hungry and casually defiant. She wore an old but clean cotton dress with a print of faded orchids; black Chinese slippers graced her feet. She wore no makeup or jewelry; she needed none. The small boy was barefooted, his khaki pants baggy and frayed at the cuffs; his t-shirt bore the logo of the Universidad de Veracruz. Clay playfully wondered if the university had any students that small. I’ll wait ’til they’re done eating, thought Clay, then introduce myself.

Alejandro hadn’t finished the last mouthful when he said, “I want some flan.” He set down his glass and wiped a moustache of milk from his upper lip with his bare forearm. Carmen, who hadn’t finished her food but had finished eating, smiled, ran her hand over her brother’s peach fuzz cut. It tickled her palm, giving a reciprocal pleasure in the pit of her stomach, along with the curiously anxious delight from eating a meal she could not pay for. It made her happy to see Alejandro so content, so trusting in her own love for him, in her ability to please him. “Okay,” she said. She glanced at Iceman. He’d finished eating some time back, but still sat at his table, occasionally casting a smile her way. She was amused, for Iceman’s smile was obviously meant to convey a pleading kind of sexual communion. It marveled her that men, when it came to such elementary matters, could be so clumsy. Even Icemen were children when they sought what only women could

give. But why should they be different? “Dos platillos de flan,” she said to Fatman, who was no friendlier than when he’d taken their food order. He cleared some of the dishes, retreating without a nod. Maybe he thinks I’m somebody else, considered Carmen, somebody he didn’t like. Or maybe he senses we’ve got no money. Something gave us away. Hmmm. Carmen pursed her lips, tipped her head to the side and scratched. Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to order dessert. We’re going to cut this one close. Real close.

There. They’re done eating. Clay stubbed out his cigarette, took one last sip of cinnamon-laced coffee. In another minute he would stand and approach the young girl’s table; but then she did something curious. She casually glanced around the room (there were four occupied tables now) and grabbed the bottle of toothpicks; it disappeared smoothly beneath the table. With a few quick movements she removed the toothpicks and threw them into a potted palm’s soil. She replaced the emptied bottle on the table and elbowed her brother, whispering to him. He looked up, surprised, glancing quickly from his sister to Narcisso and back. “Señor?” Clay heard her call to Narcisso, who’d just finished taking the order at the fourth table. “Señor?” she called, waving to him as politely as a waiter can be waved to. “Diga, señorita,” said the Fatman. The words were polite enough but the tone was gruff, suspicious. Carmen picked up the clear, empty bottle for Fatman’s inspection. “Can we please have some toothpicks?” she asked. Fatman looked at the bottle as if he hadn’t understood her. Then he looked at her,

then back to the bottle. “Palillos, por favor,” repeated unhelpfully. He glared at her, as if something on his mind had been confirmed. He breathed in but did not exhale, as if to say something but unsure of how to say it. He stood still. Finally he exhaled, eyes slitted and nostrils dilating. He took the proffered bottle, looked around the room, and started walking to one of the empty tables. Carmen’s heart stopped. She’d thought he would go to the kitchen and refill the bottle there. Instead, he was going to give her one from another table. She hadn’t thought of that. Without a word she grabbed Alejandro by the collar, stretching his already loose t-shirt, and ran. One of the chairs fell backward noisily. A glass of water shattered on the glazed clay floor tiles. Obese Narcisso turned at the noise and instantly bounded in their direction, unhesitant, as if he’d been expecting this. He bumped their table as he ran, his massive frame jingling the silverware and plates. “Stop!” he screamed angrily. The toothpick bottle he’d picked up fell to the tiled floor, bounced but did not break, rolling with a glassy thud. Clay bounded up and ran to the doorway. He caught a glimpse of Narcisso puffing around the corner, still yelling, short arms flailing, his baker’s white cotton apron flapping in the chase.

“Cabrones!” screamed Fatman. “Stop!” His degenerating pace made it unclear if the command had been directed to himself. He showed all the signs of obeying his own hoarse injunction. Carmen and Alejandro ran as fast as they could, pattering like comic drunks on fast forward. The taller Carmen tugged maniacally at the shorter Alejandro’s

hand, almost tripping him. “¡Rapido!” she yelled. Only the diminishing shuffle of Narcisso’s steel-tapped shoes answered her. They ran down Avenida Rafael Cuervo and rounded a corner, not stopping. Fatman continued to berate them, but his huffing voice receded to an echo swallowed up in a night of anonymous noises. If they had stopped and turned they would no longer have seen him. They did not, however, stop until they reached the Parque del Siglo Nuevo. They sat on one of the stone benches, breathing like sailors betrayed by a wily sea. Carmen felt a welling up of nausea. They’d run what felt like the better part of a kilometer. They panted and breathed deeply until eventually they inhaled and exhaled with the casual tempo of the night itself. “I hadn’t even,” Alejandro eventually rasped, “finished my flan.” For a moment the sounds of the night paused as if considering Alejandro’s comment. Then Carmen let loose a volley of laughter that welled up from the soles of her feet and rushed out through her eyes in tears. Alejandro, not knowing why his sister was laughing, but with a blind faith in her sense of humor, ed in. They cackled like hyenas on pentothal. “Stop,” she said, holding her tightened, aching belly, “stop. I’ll die.” This only made them laugh more. Eventually their laughter relaxed to a trickle, an occasional rift of mirth lazily rustling through a moonlit tree of lunacy. Carmen embraced her baby brother, bit his ear and rubbed his head. Alejandro murmured appreciatively, tightened his short arms around her back, his head cradled against her small breasts. When the neon clock struck the hour, Alejandro spoke. “Sister Calderon’ll be mad.” For a moment Carmen said nothing. She kissed his forehead and stood up. “Let’s go to the beach,” she said softly. “It’s on the way.”

“Hijos . . . de la . . . chingada,” puffed Narcisso. He wiped his brow with the apron he’d removed to use as a handkerchief, his fourth word mumbled in minor deference to the family of four still at their table. The skin of his fat face was smooth, taut, a blush-hued porcelain, almost feminine. Beads of sweat appeared as quickly as he wiped them away. He breathed in deeply and dabbed at his streaming forehead with a large, red bandana his wife handed to him; it bore little white shapes like sheep or clouds. He shook his head, looking pained. Clay rubbed his chin and tried not to smile while his bill was settled. He stood by the front door counter, occasionally glancing toward the door, tapping his left foot. He wondered of Narcisso would give the young girl hell, should she be seen again. The chances of that happening seemed fatter than Narcisso himself. Clay folded and pocketed his credit card transmittal and walked out into the warm night, thumbs hooked into his front belt loops.

The waves rushed in languid arcs, crashing with a rhythmic lull. The moon was full, leaving a vertical streak of wobbly, molten gold on the ocean’s face. Carmen shifted her legs. She sat in a warm cradle of small sand dunes, their yielding cool surfaces harboring rich mines of day-stored warmth. Alejandro’s sleeping head nestled at an angle in her lap. She rubbed his sturdy cranium and sang in deep, throaty whispers.

Señora Santana ¿Porque llora el niño? Por una manzana Que se le ha perdido

“Bijou,” she cooed. He moaned and shifted, still asleep. “Bijou, it’s late. You have to go back.” “Uuayyamnao,” he protested dreamily. “Time to go back.” From the inner city streets far away sounds reached her, muted and feeble: honking cars, tavern laments and boasting, disoriented drunkards, a thousand conversations ending and a thousand starting up. A city’s a big place, she thought melancholically. A world is a large place. Yet it can be so small, so confining. She looked up at the stars and wondered which one their father had abandoned them for. O Father who art in Heaven, she intoned cynically and silently, thinking of the man who’d left her with the Sisters when she was eleven years old, the father who’d held Alejandro too few times for the child to even recall the embrace. If you can’t something, she thought, it’s as if it never happened. Yet somewhere deep within the uncharted constellations of her heart, she had a blind faith in events that had never yet occurred. Schooled in the daily but eternal drama of the streets and raised on the pop culture of Mexican soaps, pocket romance vidlets and rock and toll, she had a literary, unrealistic heart, open to the improbable, receptive to the impossible. Life was a DREAM, a selfreferential helix of data feeding on itself, spinning out webs of never-ending reverie, vaguely familiar. Because of this, it was exciting, an excitement which even death, it seemed, would not interrupt. You’ll see him again, said a voice, very low, in a language undeciphered by her conscious mind. Of course you’ll see your father again. He has to come back. A chill current of ocean air blew in. Carmen shivered. She kissed her fingertips and touched Alejandro’s smooth forehead with them.

Vamos a la huerta Y cortaremos dos Una para el niño Y otra para vos

Clay stretched out on his bed. He watched clouds of cigarette smoke climb the ladder of moonlight leading to the window like some luciferous vine. He dreamt with open eyes of the nameless, hungry angel he’d seen in Narcisso’s, simple and beautiful, like an unadorned bouquet of moon fire, elemental and evocative. And ephemeral. Clay’s heart ached with the deep stab of infatuation. He drew up into himself, trying to blank the backdrop of his thoughts and meditate himself into calm. His techniques were faulty, untested and too academic. He smiled and bit a thumb, thinking: if a girl can do this, wait’ll an enemy gets its claws in you. He chuckled and drew on his smoke. Blue spirals rose from his nose like ghost wood-shavings, the refuse of some dreamcarpenter. He sat up on the bed and pulled out his music player. He attached Nova Zeitgeist and clipped on the tiny wireless earring-phones. A flame of sound, an acoustic wash of feeling, and there she was, gliding in through the bathroom window.

She’s readable like an open book except that in a world where most don’t read few know that this means

no more than that she’s a mystery

Clay, impatient, fingered the music to silence and walked to the window. He stood naked, bathed in lunar dust motes. The translucent white curtains swirled gently with the ocean breeze, unusually strong tonight. He watched a few sparks of fire rise against the night sky, starjammers leaving for distant worlds, falling stars in reverse. Does that mean I lose a wish? he mused. Will something come undone? She loves me, yes, she loves me not. He flicked his cigarette down to the street three flights below; it landed, glowing for a full minute until he believed he could see it no more. He returned to the bed and the music.

A star in my night is a sun on her world To her: the meter orchestrating alien seasons

He fell asleep like this, his brain doing with de minimus effort what the engineers of DREAMS did imperfectly with enormous expenditures of time, skill and sweat. They wove images and parallel universes which could fit on the head of a computer chip, realities whose only tangent with the objectively observable world was that thread of analogies with which they mirrored what people wanted to see: private worlds in which to lose, if not one’s soul, at least the modern illusion of one. Clay’s conscious mind had seen and captured her image like a variegated dragonfly in amber. The guardians of his dreams now read that memory, broken down into digits of color-rich ciphers, and reconstructed her from scratch, dot by

pointillist dot, until someone like her smiled and said something he couldn’t quite make out. Come closer, yes, sit here, I wanna hold your hand. I saw you, fall through Heaven’s loop and land here, broken angel. And if I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true, and help me understand? I can fly us to the moon, and we can live among the stars, so we can see what life is like on Jupiter and Mars. Would you like that? Yes, his dream-self answered. Oh, yes.

LOCAL COLOR

I FELL THROUGH the dark well of time, from the lip of the blood-red skies of the world I’d come from, to the smoke-kissed, pooling blues of a world that once was. And is again, I said to myself as I shifted through the spectrum onto the busy Venice Beach Boardwalk. The light of a late afternoon paled, its edges bleeding with a vermilion that made me think of home, but no sooner had the sunset alighted, then night fell like a curtain of pinpricked velvet. I sat down on a bench that had a considerable amount of solidity. The stars above danced like tiny droplets of water on a flaming griddle; a sea of people walked, skated, and pedaled by in a red-shift wash before my streaming vision, like images in a time-lapsed hologram. Their movements were jerky and awkward as my time-sense struggled to correct itself. A minute took an hour to slide by, and then just as suddenly an hour ticked away in the span of a second. It was my first serious jaunt. The initial vector of timefall is the most vulnerable, and therefore the most dangerous. My blood sugar felt low. Despite my nausea, I forced myself to stand and walk. It was a comfortably cool evening. I walked but it felt as if I were standing still. I stopped, and everything trailed a slipstream. The faces in the crowd were luminous: women wore bright, crowning haloes, men exhibited scintillating auras. A dog sniffed at my toes, then looked up at me with a sad, watery gaze that came into focus for a moment before it disappeared suddenly, like a badly edited movie. I wondered how difficult it would be to find my . She (or he) would be posing as a singer, but that was all I knew. I’d ed a few already, but I’d felt too nauseous to pause. I halted near a small gathering of people clustered about a trio of performers: a young, long-haired man holding an acoustic guitar strapped around his neck; a

barefoot woman with long, limp blonde hair, caressing a mandolin; and a fellow in his late twenties with a prematurely salt-haired mane, his hands clasped behind his back. I sat down again, on a small, grassy knoll behind the small troupe, and cradled my head on my bent knees. An ocean breeze stirred through my hair, and I breathed deeply. Ordinarily such clean air would have disoriented me, but in my torpidity, it actually made me feel better. I lifted my head and managed to focus. Before I could approach them and give the secret hand jive to ID myself, the young woman and the older man began harmonizing on a sad, lilting ballad that sounded vaguely familiar.

A face masqued in cherry blossoms strewn by the corded winds: she changed her name, and changed her fate. Kronokazay, a goddess unlocking the phonetics of movement, charging a mystic text into the body of a cloud. Children watch the ivory giants, stirred to prescience and sleeping through the memory of a child

in February’s weave, in the second month of a year that never was, but still might be.

I found myself mouthing the last lines. I recognized the song. It was one that had been (or rather, would be) written in the distant future, specifically for import into the past. One of the signals by which we jumpers might identify ourselves to each other in Outtime. One of the three was my . When the song ended I lightly applauded with the others, then raised my fist, giving the hand signal. The taller, handsome chanteur with the white hair looked at me with knowing eyes. Approaching, he put both hands on either side of my neck, kissing his left hand, then the left side of my neck. This was the Guild salutation. This was the man who would set me up on the first phase of my assignment. My assignment to assassinate the Number Two Director from the time traveling Guild which would one day be known, to the few that would ever know it, as Kronokaze.

Twenty-four hours later there was a knock at the apartment door. I unlocked and opened it. Gordon Leary, my snow-haired singer, stood there, a large brown paper sack cradled in the crook of his left arm. “Hello, Miles Hartshorne,” he said, testing my new name, smiling. “It’s a take.” He opened the screen door and let himself in. “What’s this?”

“Some goodies you might like.” He set the bulky bag on the kitchen table, pulling a fat manila envelope from it. “Today,” he said, “is the first day of the rest of your life.” Frowning, I emptied its contents on the carpeted living room floor, and sat down cross-legged to examine the evidence of who I’d become. Miles Hartshorne was a name I’d chosen at random, something I imagined untraceable. I could have opted for a name from the Guild’s boilerplate records, just as I might have opted to stay here at the safe house that Gordon had in perennial waiting. But my mission was too important to be compromised. The escapee I was tracking from the future had been a person from the uppermost echelons of the Guild, and although the false IDs planted by the Kronokaze in the past were supposed to be absolutely safe, I could ill-afford to be recognized. I picked up the California Driver’s License with my false name and true face on it, nodding appreciatively. I opened the wallet that had tumbled from the sack along with the other items, and began filing things away: Social Security card, voter registration papers, three plastic credit cards and a Los Angeles library card. I folded a fingerworn, paper birth certificate, and put it in the inner pocket of my new, polyester jacket, along with a set of numbered checks, a savings book and an American port. The five hundred dollars in cash I put in my pants pocket. “The master forger you used for these things, Gordon: they weren’t a Guild , were they?” “Of course not,” he said, miffed. “I used a resident of this time, just like you instructed.” He bit his upper lip. “The man had no idea what this was about.” Gordon smiled. “Wouldn’t have believed it anyway, would he?” “No, I suppose not.” I picked up a metal ring with artfully shaved pieces of metal looped on it. “What are these?” Gordon stared at me pensively, then said, “They’re keys.” “I know that,” I said impatiently. “But keys to what?”

“Oh. To a Post Office box, here in Venice, and to the apartment I rented in your new name, on the Westside. And car keys.” He sucked at his teeth and eyed me carefully. “You do know how to drive, don’t you?” I smiled and pocketed the keys, not answering. I’d been specifically trained to function in and blend with the present time, and what I didn’t know, the CI chip in my skull would teach me. I didn’t feel compelled to share any of this information with Gordon. I knew his information was vague and general in outline. He was one of many s that had once been planted along the vast, arterial timelines’ Net. Because of politics, however, most had been recalled to the future. “I don’t suppose,” he asked, “you’re at liberty to tell me what this is all about?” I paused as if considering the question. “Gordon. How long have you been here?” He shifted from one foot to another, warily. “I arrived in the Fall of 1966.” He began to pull out brightly colored shapes from the grocery bag, setting them carefully on the tiled kitchen counter. “I’ve been here five years. Why?” “Just as I thought.” It was inevitable that a should grow soft, living outside a time such as ours and in a time such as this. It was the primary reason why they were given only enough information to play out their important but limited roles. The middle to late twentieth century had been a epoch whose incredible moral lassitude was matched by an abundance of consumer goods, nothing like the stressful, world-crumbling final years of the Earth from which we’d both come. A corrupting time to live in, 1971. “Tell me. Exactly what do you know?” “About what?” “About Kronokaze methods.” “Well, I know why I’m here, if that’s what you mean. Me and my kind. Facilitation and accommodation of Kronokaze agents,” he said as if reading from the manual. “Helping agents with research missions fit in, that kind of thing. Creating covers for them to blend in with the local color.” He scratched his head. “Beyond that, we’re not told too much.” He sighed with an air of

resignation. “I suppose that’s the way it has to be.” Kronokaze pawns are positioned in time with their chronocircuitry slotted for one-way, one-time jumps. Oh, they can be eventually retrieved, but they can’t make moves on their own. It doesn’t pay to have a growing nation of unsupervised functional jumpers. I went to the counter and picked three colorfully wrapped items with interesting names: a Chico Stick, an Almond Joy, and a Payday bar. I let the Chico Stick wrapper fall to the carpeted floor, feeling the porous sweetness of the candy crunch in my mouth. It was exquisite. Candy is hard to come by in the laconian future Earth we both hailed from. Nineteen Seventy-one was a confusing year to be alive, and with all the luxuries it was no wonder that an agent like Gordon would lose his edge and grow provincial and soft-bellied. “Damn, this is good,” I said unguardedly, unwrapping the Almond Joy while tonguing bits of Chico Stick stuck to my teeth. The sweetness of the candy was heaven, putting me in a charitable mood for the poor fellow’s doomed, time-bound soul. “You know, Gordon,” I said, “I’m not supposed to discuss such matters.” I stopped to bite into the Almond Joy and my mouth watered. “But I suppose we’re all on the same team, aren’t we?” He smiled expectantly, the light in his eyes trembling with cautious anticipation. “Sol has finally gone nova,” I said. “Earth has been completely abandoned.” He nodded gravely and sat down. I paced. “As you know, most of Terra’s remaining citizens were in the slow process of emigrating to other stars, other worlds. A few of the Guild directorate were rewarded, choosing to emigrate to Earth’s past. But that was a very limited option.” I finished munching chocolate-coconut. Sated, I leisurely unwrapped the Payday. “But you knew that would happen. There is something new, however, which I think you should know.” “What?” “The Guild has disbanded. At the end of time, the Kronokaze has ceased to exist.”

“No more Kronokaze?” he said slowly, his face scrunched up with narrowed incredulity. “What do you mean?” “No more time travel.” “What happened? I thought the Guild planned to relocate on another world.” “No. Everyone’s gone. All records razed, the art of time travel destroyed.” “On purpose? But why?” Why indeed? It didn’t make much sense to me either. I could have told Gordon how the Guild in its quasi-mystical frame of mind had concluded that time travel was a tenuous art best consigned to the status of shrouded myth. With the final, inevitable demise of Earth, they had decided to close up the architecture of time, trusting no one, not even themselves, with the secrets they had wielded and forged for nearly a century. After the near-disaster of the Krupp Antares affair, they’d grown scared and sober. Best simply to disappear, they’d reasoned, along with their secrets, into the black hole of time itself, rather than risk another potential conflagration. None of which concerned me. I was merely a clever mercenary whom the Number One Director, Gregory Ballardine, had hired from outside the Guild. On my own, I’d ferreted out secrets that were not mine, but beyond my fee, I cared little for Guild politics. “Too many people at cross-purposes, Gordon. Time travel is too precious and dangerous a secret to leave behind.” He shook his head uncomprehendingly. “So we’re stuck back here in time?” I smiled. “Well, no. I was recruited from about eighty years before the end of the world. I could go back to my own time, live out my life.” Having satisfied my growing sweet tooth, I could afford to be more leisure with the Payday. “Or I could go to another world.” I shrugged. “Or maybe I’ll stay here,” I said, grinding caramel-covered peanuts between my teeth. “I think I could like it here.” I sighed. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. You’ll still be recalled when your term is up.”

His eyes narrowed. “Why did they send you back?” he asked, no longer mindful of protocol. “What final mission?” He heard the drama in his own words, thought about it. Frowning, he asked, “What is it?” I looked at him for a moment, then said, “Someone from the Guild went rogue.” “What do you mean?” I unscrewed a bottle of Coca Cola, rinsing my mouth with dark effervescence. I liked the taste. My blood sugar was high, and I was feeling pleasantly dizzy. “Someone decided to operate outside the Guild. Take the secret of time jumping and set up shop permanently here in the past.” “You mean, reestablish the Guild in Outtime?” “Not the Guild, Gordon. A new Guild. One at cross-purposes with the Kronokaze.” “But wait a second. I thought you said the Guild didn’t exist anymore.” “Only at the end of time. They still exist for a nearly a century before that.” “Damn,” he said in a quiet voice, rubbing his chin, overwhelmed by the paradoxes. The light in his eyes leaped upward, like a stoked candle flame. “Is there going to be a war?” “Not if we can help it.” “Who was it?” “‘Who was it’ what?” “Who went rogue?” “Oh?” I sucked at my teeth. “The Guild’s Number Two Director.” “Jabra Eisenstein?” he said with an amazed whisper. I nodded, burping noisily. I hadn’t meant to.

“I don’t suppose you’d want me to work with you on your assignment?” he asked guardedly. “I mean, we’ve got to stick together, right? This is serious shit.” “Thanks, Gordon. You’ve done me a world of service already, but I have to work alone.” I stood up. “I’ve got to go now.” “Sure,” he said, also standing up. It was obvious that the news had nonplussed him. He was staring at but not seeing me. He was focused inward on his thoughts, on the implications of all I’d said. I decided to take advantage of his timely distraction. I raised my arms to give him the Guild’s ritual embrace, quickly and effectively snapping his neck instead. I gently lowered his very warm and flushed corpse to the floor, stuffed my pockets with more candy and left.

Weeks turned into months while I conducted my search, but I found no sign of Jabra Eisenstein. I spent a lot of time trying to anticipate her moves. Where would a person of her position and fame within the Guild hide? It would have to be in a place and a life where she could be anonymous, yet still exercise the power and authority it would require to create a new family of time travelers. A place where you would look at her, but not see her. There were other jumpers I’d located, some that I’d already known about, some not. Kronokaze had retired a number of agents in the past, in different epochs of time. Some were from Justice’s witness protection programs, others were merely agents rewarded for their life of service by living out the remainder of their years in anonymity and comfort in the era of their choice. There were a few vacationers, but they were rarities. And of course there were the water boys, men and women like Gordon Leary, enzymatic agents in place to facilitate the movement of all legitimate Kronokaze traffic. But I began turning up rogues, jumpers gone AWOL, but who rather than hiding out in the manufactured lives of nobodies, curiously hid by usurping the identities of famous people. It was hard to find them, but through a number of fortuitous accidents, they came to my attention. They were easy to spot if you

happened to run across them and you had access to CI, because they’d assumed the personae of famous people, in contravention to Kronokaze policy. One evening, for example, perusing the magazines and paperbacks at the open-air stalls on Ventura and Van Nuys Boulevards, I found a science fiction novel, “Neuromancer” staring me in the face. It was an interesting title, so I picked it up. I was turning the pages when CI kicked in and told me this was a critically acclaimed book first published in the early 1980’s. And here it was, over a decade ahead of its time! The author was William Gibson. When I took my purchases to the vendor, he ed mild surprise. “I’ve had this in stock for three weeks, and this is the first copy I’ve sold.” “Not a very good book?” He chewed on his burnt out cigar stub and seemed to think about it. “I tried to read it,” he said, ringing up the prices on the cash . He shook his head in dismay. “Weird book. I don’t like the writing style. Too literary, if you know what I mean.” I nodded as he put my purchases in a brown paper sack. “One more day and you wouldn’t have found it here. I’m sending the rest back. I need books that sell.” He gave me my change. “This ain’t no goddamn library, if you know what I mean.” “I know what you mean,” I said, smiling. Some days later I found a photograph of William Gibson in one of the publication trades, a review accompanied by a brief article on how the book was too ahead of its time by way of explaining its poor reception. The image of Gibson in my head via CI did not match with the photo of the Gibson who’d authored this “Neuromancer.” A time jumper, no doubt thinking himself clever. I smiled. Somewhere there was the real Gibson. Would he ever read this book? And if he did, what would he feel like? As if he were reading a phosphorescent text under water, to paraphrase Henry Miller? And what would he make of his life? A critic stuck in Academia? A househusband listening to the Velvet Underground while cooking dinner? I shook my head with black amusement.

Still, I didn’t follow up on it. The parameters of my assignment were narrow. Find Jabra Eisenstein and terminate her. But the incident gave me another line of reasoning to follow. So I bided my time, reveling in the rarified atmosphere of this nascent decade. I continued to read newspapers, watched lots of television, and bought the current novels and the latest musical vinyl pressings. I indulged in rich foods and perused the fashion magazines, trading my polyester for silk and linen. I courted women and made friends. It was helpful in gauging the context and contours of my surroundings, something that the Cortical Information chip inside my head, no matter how sophisticated, could not provide. “Here,” said my friend Yvette Cabellero, indicating a hard, Formica table. “Let’s sit here. What do you want?” I handed her a twenty-dollar bill. “A Quarter Pounder with cheese, extra pickles, a large order of . . .” “A quarter what?” I bit the inside of my lip and willed the CI chip to recite silently inside my mind. Ah, no Quarter Pounders for a number of years to come. “Okay. A Big Mac,” I amended, “extra sauce and pickles. Large fries and a coffee, plenty of cream.” I made a note to be careful; there were moments when I’d grow a little sloppy. This world was such a miraculous patchwork of sensoria flooding my consciousness; at times it threatened to inundate me. I had deliberately flirted with the informational overflow, wallowing in it in much the same way we do with the neural spices in the future. You’re not here on a game, I had to remind myself. Yvette sat down, unwrapping one of her cheeseburgers. Watching the cars making their way along the four lanes of Ventura Boulevard, we ate and spoke for a while about mundane things. From somewhere I could hear music, Lee Michaels, asking us if we knew what he meant. I’d met Yvette in the library at San Fernando Valley College, a young Chicana

student with an interest in rebelling against the strictures of being raised Seventh Day Adventist in a culturally hermetic Valley, as this basin was called. Lapsed churchgoers, I was learning, made fervently experimental lovers. The heretical firebrand locked within so long, dying to break out. “Such funny spoons,” she remarked about the thin reed of plastic I’d stirred my coffee with. I held it up and examined it. The concave part was a tiny Lilliputian spoon. CI crackled an obscure footnote in my head. “You might want to save some these,” I said, putting it down. “I’m willing to wager they’ll be collector’s items some day.” She frowned. “Why?” “Look.” I emptied a packet of sugar on the table, and scooped a minute amount of it up with the spoon. “Ideal for snorting cocaine.” She laughed naughtily. “You’re right,” she said, examining the thing. She’d learned about the drug through me. “I hadn’t thought about it.” Her foot played with mine under the table. “That’s what I like about you,” she said. “You have a twisty mind.” “I mean, McDonalds is one of the final bastions of American decency, right?” “So. What do you want to do?” she said, removing the pickles from her second cheeseburger and giving them to me. “Um,” I mouthed around the delightful taste of special sauce, “I thought we’d go see a movie.” Her hand rubbed my right kneecap under the table. “I was thinking,” she said softly, her eyes dreamy. “We could go back to my apartment,” she whispered, her eyes hooded with insatiable appetites. “Make our own movie.” “Hmmm. An offer difficult to refuse.” “An offer you can’t refuse, as Don Corleone would say.” CI warped through my thoughts. She’d used the phrase a couple of times

already, and I’d heard others use it too, but I’d thought little of it. Don Corleone? “You’ve read ‘The Godfather’?” I asked. “Is it any good?” “It’s great.” “Have you got a copy?” She nodded. We left, taking a handful of the coffee stirrers from the side counter with us. The blue light of the Union Bank building filtered softly through Yvette’s Dickens Street apartment, bathing us as we lay in the sweaty languor of our lovemaking. I turned on the television while she went to the kitchen to bring us tumblers of orange juice. TV fascinated me, not merely because it was a quaintly antiquated form of technology, elegantly retro and cool, but for the easily digestible glimpses it gave me of the world in which I found myself. There was much to be culled about these people through the glass breast. TV was just like candy. I watched the news, listening to increments of information: the continued disengagement of troops in Vietnam; something about President Richard Nixon’s proposed historic visit to the People’s Republic of China. A reporter spoke about the lunar rubble brought back by Apollo 14, the fourth landing by men on the moon. I learned that Jim Morrison had just ed Duane Allman in the Dead Rocker’s Hall of Fame, two additions in the same year. Sandwiched between news about the Berrigan trial and a report on the mysterious provenance of the so-called Pentagon Papers, there was an extended blurb on the Charles Manson trial. “Crazy world, isn’t it?” said Yvette, sitting on the single mattress she called a bed. She handed me a glass of chilled orange juice. “All worlds are crazy, Yvette. Yours is probably the least insane, believe me.” She looked at me quizzically but let it , gently biting my lower lip. She was cuddling up to me and stirring my prurient juices when an entertainment item flashed on, something about a proposed movie based on the

wildly popular “The Godfather.” (Again I reminded myself to read it.) They’d chosen a director for the filming, a new director with only one film to date, something called “The Rain People.” “Francis Ford Coppola,” I said before they mentioned the name, prompted by CI. “You’ve heard of her?” asked Yvette lazily, kissing my belly button. “Him,” I corrected. “No. Coppola’s a woman.” I sat up just as they ran brief footage of the new director at a press conference. Her name appeared briefly at the bottom of the television screen. s Ford Coppola. I smiled coldly, watching the director-elect gesticulating while she talked, hearing nothing she said, bright flashes from the photographic corps of reporters highlighting her face. It was Jabra Eisenstein. I finished my OJ, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and smiled. It was time to go to work.

We were into our final month of shooting when it was decided to have a wrap party for the completion of principal footage, a breather before starting postproduction. It was slated as a lavish affair, a party where a selective list of the press corps would be able to catch the stars in motion across a dance floor sky studded with food-laden tables and famous, beautiful faces with their artfully composed countenances of studied histrionics. Oh, how we loved ourselves! Method acting meets haute cuisine. Jules and I sat at a corner table in the Paramount Studios’ warehouse, sipping Dom Perignon and nibbling at pink prawns on croissant wafers. I’d met him at a Grateful Dead concert in San Francisco some months back.

“Look,” he said in a hushed tone. “There’s Marlon Brando.” Before Jules and I had become lovers, I’d found the glimmer of naiveté in his star-crossed black eyes charming. Of late it was beginning to grate on me. We were separated from the object of Jules’ schoolgirl iration by a number of tables, the back of Brando’s still-humanoid body facing us. He and James Caan were animatedly being noisy, but with the sound level in the hall, it was impossible to tell what they were saying. Drunker than Martians on moonshine, probably making fun of Al Pacino, as they had throughout the entire duration of the filming. Pacino was so full of himself, so consumed by his Art and his precious Method; he’d kept his distance from the others pretty much, which was a workable arrangement. I found him to be a trying, self-centered bore. “I can’t believe I’m here,” said Jules. He was a light drinker. “Imagine that.” I let him kiss me gently on the mouth. “Well, pigeon,” I said, “you are. Here. Let me pour you some more. No one will notice.” I handed him his fizzing glass slipper. It had been intriguing to watch Jabra Eisenstein over the months, not because she was making a movie that had already been made, once before, in a different timeline and lifetime. After all, CI can’t provide everything. Outline details, yes, but not text, not the meat of something. I’d read “The Godfather” since being here, but I’d never ever seen the original movie, and CI didn’t carry that kind of stuff, only references to it. It had been interesting because of the process of film making itself. I’d managed to insinuate myself into this world as an assistant to the cinematographer. So far, Jabra was sticking very close to the text of the novel, and it was turning out very well. She had excellent organizational skills. But of course Jabra in Uptime had been Kronokaze’s second-in-command, working closely with top dog Gregory Ballardine. (The Guild called him Father Time, in derision as often as in affection. He had been my recruiter.) It all made a kind of quirky, literary sense: Jabra’s assumption of Coppola’s life, her filming of “The Godfather.” After all, wasn’t that what Ballardine had said she’d set out to do? To structure her own time traveler’s Cosa Nostra in the past? I think she suspected that the Kronokaze had sent an assassin to ferret her out. But for the fact that she surrounded herself with a number of imposing and ever-

vigilant bodyguards, I would have killed her already. If I tried anything from afar, I would no doubt be cut down in my tracks. I toyed with the idea of rigging myself up with explosives, but that would mean dispatching myself, and this was neither in my encoded training nor in my personal game plan. I would have to figure a way to get near her, preferably alone. The opportunity had not yet presented itself. The problem niggled away at my waking thoughts. She must have figured that Kronokaze would send someone like me back after her. Why, then, was she playing her part with so much publicity? Granted, she’d changed her name, but that was cosmetic. All things considered, it had been maddeningly easy to find her. She must have wanted to be found. Perhaps, somehow, she knew who I was, and this worried me. If true, she could have me killed. I spent the days living on my toes. I observed Jabra two tables away, holding court with her immediate circle. Diane Keaton, the actress playing Michael Corleone’s second wife, was there, as well as Isabel Mandello, the Godfather’s only daughter. Mario Puzo’s corpulent presence, shrouded in cigar smoke, graced the entourage, as well as the director of cinematography, Leo Barkopoulous, my immediate boss on the set. Checked against my CI references, Puzo was indeed who he was supposed to be, but CI had no data on the others. I wondered if any of Jabra’s entourage were time jumpers. In addition to her orbit of bodyguards, she always surrounded herself with cronies and sycophants, and tonight was no exception. Through CI, I could the identities of the integrally famous, and either discount or confirm them as Kronokaze substitutes. But unless they were famous in that public way, CI could tell me nothing. Cortical Information had been designed with a political and historical bias, which downplayed the arts and entertainment scene, a paucity, which I was beginning to find more than irritating. Information on a McDonalds’ coffee spoon, but no data on the actors in “The Godfather”? Go figure. “She’s a ronin, working on her own,” Ballardine had said at the opposite end of time, before sending me back. “She’s bound to surround herself with a protective belt of people, but they won’t be Kronokaze. Trust me.” Trust me? Despite the fact that, by design, Gregory Ballardine was the only

person I could not harm, the chemically implanted conditioning still left my mind free to think for itself. Assassins cannot function effectively otherwise. I had allowed for the possibility that Ballardine might have been misinformed about others who might have defected along with Jabra. When Lucifer had left Heaven, hadn’t he taken a third of the angels with him? Deciding to err on the right side of caution, and to trust no one but myself, I had to assume she couldn’t be operating alone. “Miles. Who is that man over there?” Jules had nodded toward a man at Jabra’s table. He was fortyish and large, a corpulent man who seemed carved from a huge, single block of swarthy, Italian marble. His dark, thin hair was slicked back Mafioso style, his face raw and rugged, his eyes motile but quietly feral. Wearing a suit of comfortably tailored black silk, his size alone conjured the fear one might feel before a grazing rhinoceros. He exuded the understated menace corollary to many of the highpowered industry types I’d met a few times already, confident and a little lowbrow. “That’s Armand Deatherage.” He was playing the part of Luca Brasi. “He looks scary.” “He’s one of the producers,” I lied. “A financial backer. He checks in on us every now and then, to make sure everything’s proceeding on schedule. It’s not like s has a whole string of hits behind her.” I bit a prawn in half. “There’s a story about him,” I said, corrupting a scene from “The Godfather”, leaning back and crossing a leg, munching. “Early on in the shooting, we were having problems with the company that leases us the cameras. We were running behind schedule, slamming into cost overruns, which is a dangerous thing to do so early on. s was having the cast working overtime in order to catch up, and the man from the camera company—his name was Gibbons—decided to make a killing. All the film camera houses of the caliber we needed were all engaged on other projects, so we were stuck with him. He announced that he was nearly tripling the cost, claiming increased wear and tear and so on and so forth. Extra, okay, but triple? It was making us look bad, out of control, and Paramount threatened to have s replaced.” “What did she do?”

“Along with Deatherage, she paid a visit to this Mr. Gibbons.” “What did she do?” “s made the man an offer he couldn’t refuse.” Jules giggled drunkenly and punched me lightly on the arm. “Miles, quit joking.” “No, really. s presented Gibbons with a revised contract, one that called for less money than the original, while Deatherage held a gun to his head. s assured Gibbons that either his signature or his brains would be on that contract.” “Stop it, will you!?!” sibilated Jules, laughing. “That’s not funny.” “It’s a true story.” Jules lowered his head, throwing Jabra’s table a narrowed, catty stare. I think he believed me. “Oh, Miles,” Jules suddenly whispered. “Look! No no, Jesus, don’t look! She’s coming our way!” I looked. Jabra had left her table, alone. She smiled at me, holding a fluted glass of wine. The hairs on the nape of my neck stood on end. “Good evening, Miles,” she said, briefly acknowledging Jules with a nod. I smiled, nonplussed at her approach. Jabra, I knew, was in her early thirties, although she looked closer to forty, and I wondered, not for the first time, how one so young had gone so high in the Kronokaze Guild. Her hair was a thick, unruly riot pinned up at the back, stray tufts of chestnut rising like smoke from the nape of her neck. Her features were Slavic, her eyes almond, glistening wetly but unrevealing, her nose French and sturdy. There was something very masculine about her, except for the mouth, which was small and thin-lipped but sensually bowed, a subtle overbite suffusing her with a fair quotient of sexiness. Her mouth was more expressive and fluid than her eyes. She looked like an attractive Janis Joplin.

Aside from instructions on the set, Jabra had never spoken to me directly. How many times had I connived, without success, to get physically close to her? I smoothed down the fears that rippled over the thought that she might know who I was. Now that the film was winding down, I told myself, she was no doubt canvassing the room, thanking her crew, of which I was one. Reasonable, I told my paranoid mind, quite reasonable. I smiled and nodded. “s.” She raised her glass and sipped. “I want to thank you for your work, Miles. Barkopoulous’ words about you glow in the dark.” “Well, thank you.” “I was wondering. Might we speak in private?” She glanced briefly at Jules. “I hope you don’t mind. I won’t detain him too long.” The night was balmy, the moon full as we walked from the noisy warehouse to her nearby office. We spoke of inconsequentials all the way. I could hardly believe my luck. “Things have turned out rather nicely,” she said when we arrived, “even if I say so myself.” The room was gloomily illuminated. When she sat at her desk, moonlight from a high window jig-sawed her face. “It got hairy a couple of times, didn’t it?” I nodded. This is going to be easy, I thought. “But now the real work begins.” “What did you want to talk to me about?” I remained standing, sensing possibilities. Jabra smiled. “Barkopoulous will no longer be working with us.” She began doodling with a pencil on her desk pad, but otherwise kept her eyes on me. “Oh, really? I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yes, well, so am I. You see, he wants to do what I do. He wants to direct his own movies.” Her smile spoke volumes, but it seemed to be a language I wasn’t conversant in. She shrugged good-naturedly. “I understand him, and I don’t blame him. I wish him luck.” “He’s an artist.” “Yes. Like you.” I paused, eyeing her. “Thanks again.” “Listen, Miles. I’m already planning my next movie. I need a cinematographer.” She ran a hand through her unruly hair. “I need you.” “I’m honored.” She ran her tongue over her front, upper teeth. “There’s a home for you here. I’m starting a film company of my own. Chronotrope.” I nodded, maintaining a neutral demeanor. “Nice name.” “Yes. I think so.” “What is your next project?” “An SF thriller, based on a Philip K. Dick novel. You’ve heard of Dick?” “Sure.” “‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’? An excellent story.” “Kind of an unwieldy title for a movie, don’t you think?” “That’s the novel’s title. The movie’ll be called ‘Bladerunner.’” “Much better, I agree. Something from a William Burrough’s book, right?” She smiled with her eyes, observing me closely. “That’s right,” she finally said. “I believe it captures the feel of what I want to do.” “And what is it you want to do?”

“To create a new paradigm for science fiction film. Create a future rooted in the past, a future with texture, detail, with a studied mixture of light and dark. Film noir futuristic.” “Interesting,” I said. “It sounds rather cyberpunk.” She didn’t move for the whole of ten seconds, and we just stared at each other. Finally, she enlaced the fingers of her hands, laying them atop the desk. We were both silent for a while. “You don’t have to do this,” she finally said. “In fact, I strongly advise against it.” “And what is that?” “Kill me.” I smiled nonchalantly and took a few steps toward her. “Now why would I want to do that?” “Do yourself a favor. Sit down, please.” “Why?” I asked, reaching inside my jacket for the garroting wire I’d taken to carrying with me. “Because I’m telling you to,” she said in her directorial voice, “that’s why. Besides, I think I’ve got an offer you won’t be able to refuse.” “Really, Jabra.” I saw the fear playing the contours of her mouth, but the tone of her voice had reminded me of who she was. Kronokaze’s number two person. I had to assume she could be dangerous. “Do you know why I chose to come to this time as the director of this movie?” “I’ve read the novel. It’s a blue print for what you’re doing.” I remained standing; she sat forward in her chair. “You’re creating your own Family here.” “You didn’t really think the Kronokaze would dissolve itself, did you? Give up

the secrets of time travel? Come on, Miles.” “Sure. You merely meant to protect it for yourselves.” “This is much bigger than you realize, Miles. Killing me won’t change anything.” “I don’t know about that,” I said. “People change dramatically when they stop breathing.” Despite everything, she managed a cool smile, and I had to ire her aplomb. “Have you ever thought of acting?” she asked. “You have a natural talent for it.” “I don’t know why you’re telling me all this. It doesn’t interest me. That’s not my job. You direct movies, Jabra. I just shoot them.” “You’re intelligent, Miles, that’s why I’m telling you these things. If there’s anything that I’ve learned with Kronokaze, it’s that nothing is etched in stone. It’s all subject to change. You have to learn how to bend. And if you don’t, then you’ll break.” She lightly licked her lips. “This does concern you. Very much.” “I see,” I said. “The time traveling guild as Mafia. If you’ve chosen ‘The Godfather’ as your blue print,” I asked, piqued, “then what is my role?” “You, my dear Miles, are the character of Luca Brasi.” I smiled. Luca Brasi, that Italian leviathan with the heart of ice, with Freon in his veins, afraid of no one and nothing, except for the Godfather himself, for whom he was a most frightening button man. “Refresh my memory, Jabra. Doesn’t Luca Brasi get killed in the story?” “This isn’t a movie we’re talking about, Miles. And if it were, well, I’m the director, aren’t I? I can have the script rewritten.” She brushed away a wisp of hair that had fallen across the bridge of her nose. “Like you, Luca Brasi was afraid of nothing, not hell, not God, certainly not man. Nothing.” “Except of the Godfather,” I said, smiling, humored, and then it hit me. “Ah, I see, don’t tell me, don’t tell me,” I said, uncoiling the garroting wire I

would wind about Jabra’s neck, and choke the life out of her. “Let me guess. You’re supposed to be the Godfather?” “No,” she said, “not me.” She stood up and backed her way casually toward the back wall. Pale moonlight again embroidering her bare shoulders and neck with fernlike delicacy. “I knew who you were before you even got here,” she said, glancing at her watch. “Funny.” “No, really. In fact I was the one who recommended you to Gregory.” The paranoiac inside me stood up at that, and I felt a moment of disorientation. I felt a nausea bloom in my gut, and then suddenly I felt an increase in the air pressure, a sense of closeness that gripped lightly at my lungs. A silent burst of light flared behind me. I turned and froze. It was Gregory Ballardine. He was slightly phosphorescent as he put a hand out to steady himself against the doorjamb. “It’s about time,” said Jabra, now behind me. “Did you forget to set your alarm, Gregory?” “Oooo,” said my Padrino, the one man I’d been programmed to fear, to not harm, the one and only man who could kill me without even trying. My Godfather. “It’s been a while since I’ve done this,” he said. He unbuttoned his collar and wavered to the nearest chair, plopping down unceremoniously. “Hello, my boy,” he said, having left the shadows, facing me. He cocked his head almost apologetically. He turned to Jabra. “Listen, can I get something to drink? Goddammit I’m thirsty.” “We can get something outside,” said Jabra, walking toward the door. “The

party’s just getting started. Believe me.” “Good, good.” Son of a bitch! I thought, watching the two of them. The bastard! I began to get an idea of what was going on. Ballardine rose and put an arm around my shoulder, steering me toward the door and using me as a crutch at the same time. “Do me a favor, son. Put that thing away, please. It makes me nervous. Come, come. We’ve got some catching up to do. There’s a lot to talk about. Come.”

I still dream of the visceral red skies and jagged black horizons of my once-andfuture life, but I’m much too busy these days to dwell on them. In the weeks that followed Ballardine’s arrival, we reshot all the scenes in which Luca Brasi appears. They had me play the role. Armand Deatherage didn’t complain. I learned that he was Kronokaze, following orders, just like me. I must say, my newfound celebrity, minor though it be, is quite amusing. I’m no longer angry at how Ballardine used me. I realize that I was the stone he’d forged and tossed, in order to kill a number of birds. He’d used me to convince the remaining Kronokaze directorate, before they’d dispersed, that matters would be taken care of. They left for other worlds, assured that the Guild would remain dissolved, assured that Jabra Eisenstein would be ferreted out, and that no new time traveling Guild would supplant the old one. Bearing in mind that the Kronokaze Guild is still quite active during the hundred years preceding its disbanding, it was a vitally important charade. We still keep our eyes open. You never know what might happen. Someone might still catch on, investigate, come snooping around. But I doubt it. Besides, Ballardine and Eisenstein have me. Ballardine created a fiercely loyal assassin/bodyguard, me, to protect him in his new life. His enemies would become my enemies. That’s the way I’d been kinked.

I’d still like to kill Jabra Eisenstein, and I find it interesting that it’s a compulsion, which Ballardine has not bothered to erase from my CI unit. So of course I can’t. Ballardine’s made that clear, he won’t let me. Often he sends me traveling with her, as her guardian angel. To my chagrin, it’s one of the few ironies I have to live with. But in this world I’m as close to a king as I’d ever hoped to be. And while I’m careful not to ask for too much, there is very little that my Godfather won’t give me. I’ve asked him to let me make my own movie. Why not? I’m thinking of taking an old Harlan Ellison story, “Demon With A Glass Hand”, and adapting it to my own story, the story of my life. There’s no danger of alerting anyone to our presence, because after all, we have no competition. We have the monopoly on time travel. Of course, Harlan Ellison might be something of a problem. I could go back in time and simply make his stories mine, steal them outright, having someone write them before he does. But from what I know about the fellow, he’d find some way to raise hell, make a stink about how someone had raided his mind, his dreams, never mind how, it’s true. I go back in time tonight. Perhaps I’ll try to reason with him, but from what I know, he marches to his own drummer. I guess I’ll just have to make him an offer he can’t refuse.

CHERUBIMBO

WHAT HAD PISSED me off to begin with was having to hear it out on the streets. Not that it was bad news; quite the contrary. But it just rubbed me the wrong way, hearing it in what seemed an almost accidental manner. So I looked down, fingered the cream-colored tongue of my silk tie and pretended that I didn’t want to know anything about it. If it were true, I figured that soon enough I’d know for sure. Even so, I was bristling with curiosity, and dissembling has never been my good suit. “Well, I’m not interested in what you’ve heard,” I said to Darakjian. “As long as the burning bush hasn’t personally said anything to me, well, it just isn’t real, you know what I mean? So then: next subject.” Next subject, eye-eee, the antique watches Darakjain had brought for a look-see. There was an ever-growing demand for them in the orbital cities among some of the more Important Citizens; the Outer Worlds would soon scent them out. There was money in them stars. Darakjian swallowed, frowned and shrugged, intent on having his say. Words left his lips with a weird mixture of hesitant entreaty and an anxious confidence. “Hey,” he said, holding up two empty hands like the victim of some intended robbery, “no call getting prickly, Chamberlain. It’s just that with Rom spinning tunes again and firing up a live wire, and going on the road again, well, you know, it’s a sure thing he’ll be cutting a whole lotta paychecks too, that’s all. I could use something regular.” “So go to the job placement center and fill out an application,” I said. He nodded and sighed, acknowledging my impatient sarcasm with a muted smile. “It’s not just the gig, you know. Earth’s hot for me right now, and, well, I figured if anyone could get me the fix with Rom, it’d be you.” His eyes engaged mine and wouldn’t let go. “I could use some offworld points about right now, if

you know what I mean.” I nodded understandingly but said, “I don’t work for Rom no more. Madre, Darakjian, it’s been ten years.” I inhaled slowly and exhaled heavily, looking around and behind me at the Griffith Park Observatory grounds; a few pale stars above salted the heavens, crickets below filled the moon-scuffed shadows with their musical rasp. From somewhere beyond the trees to my left I could hear the faint strains of a song; probably the dawn hustlers pimping in Alien Park, no big deal. It was a deliciously cool summer night, but that was expected at three in the A.M. The moon above was a lozenge of wasted gold, casting a weak luciferous sheen. To my right the mountain we stood on dropped towards and over the cities of Los Angeles and Hollywood, both scintillating like exquisite stolen bibelots, a carpet of treasure and light, even at this hour. “Darakjian,” I said, breathing in the rich scent of eucalyptus trees, “how about this? If I hear something, you’ll be the first to know, okay?” I smiled and rubbed my unshaven chin. “Trust me.” I pulled a filterless Camel from a pocket-crushed packet, adding: “Besides, even if what you’ve heard’s correct, I doubt the Kid would use me anyway. Not this time.” Darakjian took the cigarette I offered him and held out a thin slab of black metal, lighting mine with a hissing, tiny blue flame. He nodded with exaggerated camaraderie, smiling as if it were a done deal. “Uh-humm,” he murmured, lighting his own smoke. “I suppose he could use a different Chamberlain.” Blue smoke whorls rose like laurel leaves around Darakjian’s ears and temples, making him look like an evanescent Armenian Puck. “But he never has, has he?” Again I affected impatient indifference, trying to ignore this talk of Fabian Rom, but my shield of nonchalance had suffered a crack to its smoothly scuffed hull. Might it be true, then? Was Rom really gearing up for a tour? A new album? I hadn’t heard anything, but hey, who knows? Rock had long ceased to interest me in a professional sense, and I had forsaken the histrionic and decadent ambience of the lucrative pop music world for the pleasures of trafficking in the more conservative arts, preferably the pocket sized varieties. It was true, it had been nearly a decade since I’d handled Rom’s Farewell Tour,

and despite the acclaim and success of it, the circumstances of our parting had been less than amiable. Pleasure has a short memory. It usually doesn’t reach further than the last mouthful of wine, the last tangle of one person’s lip and another’s tongue, the last goodbye. Perhaps it was because Rom and I had spared each other the formality of an au revoir, the flavor of our parting came to memory as a bitter champagne. Unlike Darakjian I was by no means sure that Rom would enlist my services, although given the scale of Rom’s tours he certainly would be needing an experienced Chamberlain. I sucked smoke, recalling the heady atmosphere surrounding life on the musical lam, our bacchanalia between worlds, and I ed as well the potential opportunities and s which present themselves on any tour of the Imperium worlds, musical and otherwise, and I grew excited; I could almost smell the musk of money. Sure, the costs are blindingly exorbitant, but with the size of the Axis network of planet-states, the market is vast, and Rom was the best hitter there’d ever been. Damn, if I could have just one pfenntave from every person in the populated sectors of the Milky Way, why hell! I’d have few peers, except for the Axis bureaucracy itself, of course. Deluxe and delightful! I got goose-bumps all over my arms and I tugged at the sleeves of my suit jacket, shaking my head like a duck in the rain. But then, thinking of Fabian Rom it was only natural that Cherubimbo Basho also come to mind, and I got pissed off all over again. “Enough, micrope,” I said, nodding briskly. “Show me what you got.” A few summery wisps had streaked across the pale, razory moon, making it harder to see, so I pulled out a handful of light to inspect the merchandise. And my heart melted. First he showed me a gold-case Elgin with a white ceramic face and arms of hammered fourteen carat, tank-shaped body. Very elegant. Then a Cartier with a face of sun-streaked lapus lazuli and a slender, pigskin band, quite illegal. A cool breeze brought goose bumps to my arms and neck. The third and last watch was a Lady Datejust Oyster Perpetual Chronometer in eighteen carat. I breathed shallowly. My friends in the sky would drool over these. And pay handsomely. “There’s more,” said Darakjian, and he pulled out two wads of crinkly tissue,

carefully unwrapping two Chinese snuff bottles of intricately worked ivory, one covered with carved figurines and oriental ideograms, the other with delicately grooved ink brushwork. Enchanting pieces they were, really, but the timepieces had blasted me like a thunderbolt, leaving me blind to all over loves. “How much?” I asked Darakjian bluntly, unable to purge the husky excitement from my voice. He said nothing for a moment, sizing me up with narrowed merchant’s eyes. He nodded, his chin bobbing three times before he said, “Thirty nine G.S. for the man’s Elgin,” with a tone of polite finality, his face a mask of business sincerity. “The Cartier, let’s say for twenty eight and a quarter.” “And the lady’s Rolex?” “The Rolex is yours if you can line me up a gig on Rom’s tour.” It was then that I knew that he knew, and he smiled reservedly, fully aware that I now knew as well. “Wouldn’t have to be anything fancy, you know. I could work as a crew card. Or I could work security. Anything, really.” The realization that Rom was going to tour merged with the adrenal rush I’d gotten from the watches, and I chuckled lightly, nervously, like someone who’s done too much slam. But there must have been something else in my face too, something inconclusive, for Darakjian quickly said, “I’ll even throw in the snuff bottles.” He betrayed for the first time just how badly he needed this favor, and I wondered what kind of jam had made it necessary for him to leave Earth. The light flower had melted into the night so I handed back the watches, rubbing my chin in a knee-jerk pretense of consideration. But Darakjian wasn’t fooled, he knew me, and despite his apparent need he must have known that he’d taken the wind from my bargaining sails. “No,” he said, politely clasping his hands behind his back. “You hold on to them.” It wasn’t the first time we’d done business. “Alright,” I said, flicking my burning cigarette to the ground and tucking the goods into a tooled leather carrying case. “Stay loose and low. If you need papers, go see the Don. You know where. And if your take on the grapevine’s accurate,” and here we both smiled, “—if your hunch is correct—we’ll be up the gravity well very soon. I don’t have to tell you, read the trades. If there’s

something you think I should know, leave word with Bejart at the American Express office downtown. Be ready.” I had been turning a last question around in my gold and art-bedazzled head, an impolite question in light of the fact that you either can or cannot rely on a man’s given word, and I’d already chosen to trust Darakjian. But I had to ask. “By the way, zuby,” I said quietly, “where did you get the word from?” Tiny nods in the dark wash of night, a vague smile. “There are a lot of stories floating through the air, Chamberlain, you know that.” “Yeah, right, sure.” I stared at him. “Who?” He rubbed his chin and paused. It was obvious he had something that he considered barter-worthy, but, deciding for his own reasons that he’d gotten the better of our deal, said, “Word’s out on the street. Someone’s looking for you.” “Who?” I asked. “Rom’s ole lady.” “Bimbo?” I asked stupidly, swallowing. Darakjian nodded, stray city light glimmering in his large eyes. In the distance, a rumor of dawn had begun unstitching the night, and there was a flare of uncertainty in his chandeliered irises. It was not a name he’d wanted to bring up. Cherubimbo Basho. He nodded slowly, searching my face, and said, “See you heaven.” He put his hands in his pockets and began walking away. “Boss,” he added, giving me one more over-the-shoulder smile before cheshiring into the night.

“Long time no see, Michael,” said a voice behind me, and I turned, saw the woman from my dreams, and I couldn’t help it, I surrendered a heartfelt smile. “Long time, yes,” I echoed. “How has the Industry,” I asked, using the

pretentious noun preferred by those who know it only from the outside, “been treating you? You haven’t run into any pirates out there, have you?” Cherubimbo Basho smiled and proved how easy I am to please. I was in simpleton heaven. “No,” she said, and her laugh-couched vowel was a musical note from the beautiful instrument of her mouth. “The only pirate I know, my petite dragon,” she said, playing on my family name, “is you. How have the pickings been out there?” she asked, and here she pointed out through the huge blister of glass nanofiber that protected us from the unforgiving beauty of space. I turned away from her and looked out through the three-hundred and sixty degree view as it revolved slowly across the sky. The module we were in was spinning ever so gently, providing a pleasing fraction of earth gravity; I coolly glanced at a delicate spray of stars and at the moon, so close and suspended like a huge peachstone, pitted and dark, a pale crescent of reflected sun bathing us in a melancholy half-light, unreal as the washes of a Maxfield Parrish, a hint of blacklight inversion. A wingéd shuttle could be seen negotiating a docking with a distant arm of Arco Iris. I had stood up when Cherubimbo had come in, the two of us regarding each other studiously, but we neither touched hands nor kissed cheeks. She kept her distance, sitting at a chair already pulled out from the polished marble of a long conference table that bisected the oval room. A large crescent of Wyldomarian glass sparkled enthusiastically between us, washing us in an enchanting chromatic chaos. I settled back into the heavily cushioned chair in which I’d been sitting, awaiting her arrival. I felt a flush of nerves welling upward from my ribcage, a gentle tension gathering in my throat. I’ve cut deals with Assassin Gentlemen, Otiose Old Men and Exquisitely Poisonous Femmes, and I’ve always held my own. Why the sweaty palms now, the twitching muscle of a balled fist? Good thing she hadn’t offered her hand. “You’re a hard man to find, Mondragon.” “I’ve been around,” I said. “You could’ve found me anytime you’d wanted to.” “You’re not exactly in the book,” she said with a quaint turn of phrase; I cocked my head, feigning ignorance. Since my Chamberlain days I’ve made it my business to know what makes money and what doesn’t. I’d heard of books, of course, had even sold a few, once, for a pretty penny (another old saying, see?), but I played stupid.

“In the what?” Bo’s lips curled gently, her Japanese version of the Gioconda Smile. “We looked all over for you,” she said, not at all fooled. Her hands were on the cool marble of the table, torturing a long string of candy-red ribbon. “We?” I said, but she refused to respond to that query. It had been almost a double handful of years since I’d last had the pleasure of being ignored by Cherubimbo. But time has a way of burnishing old memories, making exquisite that which was merely beautiful and beautiful that which was only nice. I breathed in deeply and smiled. Given the convoluted nature of my feelings for Cherubimbo, it would’ve been hard to say what I had anticipated upon seeing her again. One part of me ed her with the rosy-hued slant cast by the frisson of desire and of unfulfilled longing: I had been desperately in love with her once upon a time, I it it freely, always have. But given the fact that she had chosen Rom over me, another part of Michael Mondragon had memorized her through a chant of id-iotic, unreasonable jealousy. Jealousy, in this over-refined quadrant of the galaxy, is considered a perversity, an intellectual fetish for those Old Enough (and we’re talking capital “O”, uppercase “E”) to start thinking about getting Re-inked. But just as some have hair that does a premature grey, so did I come to my proclivities at an early age. And getting Re-inked was the furthest thing from my mind; I was a natural, unrecycled thirty-three years old. It didn’t occur to me, at least in objective, concrete , that my presence here was testament to the power of fetishes, how their irresolution only feeds them and makes their magic stronger. I was here for the money, I told myself, here to revel in the view and to get rosy off a galaxy growing fat. And thus while I may have chosen to ignore the more hidden of my motivations, I was well enough aware of the “here” I occupied. While waiting for Cherubimbo to meet me, I’d marveled at my surroundings. Arco Iris is one of the newer and smaller earthbound orbiting cities, having been built within the latter half of this century. With the migrations to the Outer Stars (romantic nomenclature, being that all stars are, from the Terran perspective, “out there”) over the last one-hundred and fifty years, not much fresh capital has been invested in our Solar System, at least not until of late, Earth having gradually acquired the bright advertising patina of a tourist’s hotspot.

Cherubimbo had chosen one of the spacious high-domed conference rooms for our meeting, although just what kind of meetings usually took place here I couldn’t say, being ignorant of this O’Neill’s politics. I had done business before with the family that had underwritten the construction of this canister world, the influential Y Lucientes clan; everyone this end of the Spice Routes had, but I’d never actually visited Arco Iris. The Y Lucientes had their fingers in just about everything; they owned extra-solar shares in Axial energy cooperatives, had a few points of TSE stock, and at least fractional interests in an assortment of private, entrepreneurial concerns, not all of the legal variety. Rumor had it that they ran the pipeline through which many of the stolen pieces from the Louvre had traveled to St. Catherine’s World. The majority of the business I’d transacted post-Rom had been with the Ring Cities of Jupiter and the Way Stations and scattered colonies just outside of Pluto’s orbit. On Rom’s famous goodbye tour we’d done five of the seven star systems but I’d been too busy running his show to get much action in. This time, however, I’d resolved that I’d do things a bit differently. I looked down at the hiker’s satchel of blue nylon that lay on the floor at my feet: Darakjian’s booty. If this tour went through I wouldn’t have to fence the pieces after all. The thought of going from seller to buyer had a certain appeal to it. I wanted to be a player again. I looked up and flashed Cherubimbo a mercenary smile. “So, Cheru, is it true?” “That all depends on what truth you’re referring to.” I smiled. “You haven’t changed a bit, Cheru.” “You, kokoro, on the other hand, have,” she said. “How have you been, Michael? Are you happy now,” she asked, “hawking watches, stolen paintings and contraband cigarettes?” I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic; her tone was intimate, nostalgic. “What happened to your fortune?” “It was a small fortune, to be sure. And yes, art and smoke make me happy.” “You could do better.” “It amuses me, Basho,” and she smiled at my attempted formality, “and for now, that’s enough. It’s a lot more direct and satisfying than life on the road, really. You see something, you love something, you pay for it, and,” I shrugged, “it’s

yours. You live happily ever after.” I stood up, felt the warmth under my collar, walked over to the nearest curving of metaglass, watching a myriad of vehicles—silvery spheres, golden needles and rectangles of jade—jockeying against a tableaux of black space, blue stars, red flares. “You know, Cheru,” I said, reverting to the name I’d used when breathing into her ears, when we were, it seemed, but newly-minted devotees, “we visited five suns, and I can’t tell you much about any one of them.” “Well, it’ll be seven this time,” she said, and I didn’t say So it is true, although I thought it, because after all, I had been summoned here, and I had come, so of course it was true. Fabian Rom was getting ready to conquer the Known Universe. Again. “But you’ll have more help this time. More breathing space. Plus the advantage of having done it once before.” “You don’t need me,” I said. “Rom can have any Chamberlain he wants. Why Mondragon, Cheru?” “Because, my Mexican gecko, you know Fabian better than anyone else. He hasn’t toured in ten years for a number of reasons. One of them is that you left us.” I shook my head. “No, Cheru: you could be his Chamberlain. You know him better than anyone else, even me.” “I’m not so sure.” My wry tone went unnoticed or, more likely, unanswered. “But I’m already his Muse and his wife.” “And ant, I suppose,” I said, meaning to be a little cruel but succeeding only at being frivolous. “What’s in it for me, Cheru?” She squinted, paused and laughed. “I take it back,” she said, shaking her head. “You haven’t changed a bit.” She gathered the waves of black hair that had cascaded on either side of her face with both her hands, pulled it back and twisted the tail, banding it with the piece of ribbon she’d been running through a gauntlet of twists.

“This tour’s special, Michael. Fabian’s been working on these songs since Esplanade, before that, really. They’re pretty exciting. Not many people have heard them.” “Have you?” “Of course.” “Do I get a listen?” She nodded. “Naturally. A messenger will be delivering them later.” “Rom didn’t trust you with them?” “We’ll pay you fifteen per cent over your usual fee, Michael. You’re free to assemble your own team, of course. You’ll have access to specially coded s for all of this. We’ll be doing seven systems, seventeen worlds, over thirty performances, maybe more. The tour’ll end at Corld; we have engineers building a stadium dome for the final concert, which’ll be transmitted live, of course, to all the major worlds. It’ll be recorded by the Paz Muse Kage Academy.” “Cheru,” I said, trying again to trip up her distancing professionalism by using the name with which I’d once declared my affection. “I haven’t had a ‘usual’ fee in ten years.” She took the point and smiled. “Most Chamberlains don’t make now what you made then, Michael. But we are prepared to go even higher.” I shook my head. “No need, Cheru. I won’t be ing Rom’s entourage again.” She nodded pensively as if accepting my refusal, and took a deep breath. “We’ve just taken over phase three terraforming on a worldlet less than a light year from Blancorbe. MIT designed the total environment, anchored atmosphere, weather and seasons, a small ocean, animals, the works, and the previous owner, a rich merchant from Second Earth, had engaged Paolo Neri to build a Palladian villa on the main peninsula. It’s right at the heart of the trade nexus for that sector, you’ll be well served. We purchased it about a year ago. It’s named Oceaxe Isle, but you can play Adam, give it a new name. The worldlet is yours.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” I insisted, for it was obvious that the job was mine, no ifs-ands-or-buts, that I had a world in my pocket, and that the Known Universe, small as that might be, would do my bidding, no matter what I said. “Then why did you come?” “I’d never seen Arco Iris before. I wanted to stretch my legs a bit, meet with some friends up the well. Catch the next liner ‘out there,’” I said, nodding towards the crowded and migratory entry and exit lanes of our immediate space. “And to see you one more time,” I said, curling my lower lip, arching my eyes and shrugging one shoulder. “I never thought I’d get the chance to do that again.” I’ve said that I’d been in love with Cherubimbo once, and it was true, but I no longer felt the urgency of that once-upon-a-time ion. It was only natural, the age of a time brings many changes. I could look at her and almost recall the ache of desire I’d once felt gnawing at my guts, but it was a detached memory now, a beauty like that of a tiger lily, a flower with no scent. But it was not, of course, that simple. Not all of my memories were of the sterling variety. Cherubimbo had shaken my confidence. I had held her in my arms, her small, dark nipples hardening under the wet, fevered ministrations of my suckling mouth, and she had moaned, “Are you sure you want this?” and I had stopped, a string of saliva spanning my lips and her breast. The question had stopped me with its ambiguity, with its uncertainty, with its gentle urge to look at that place where desire always threatens to lead. And I had understood the choice: I could be Chamberlain to Rom’s music, or Chamberlain to Cherubimbo’s heart, but not both. A parakeet farts in the jungles on South America and a rebel enclave on Saint Catherine’s collapses, and they’re connected, in some way, although we can’t see how. It was not a question I’d thought to hear, and her hesitation had tainted the moment. The thread of spittle broke and I never did make love to Cherubimbo. Love had tested me and found me wanting. Cherubimbo Basho had filled me with doubt. And sometimes even the memory of the taste and feel of her breast in my mouth (hot pebbled tip, warm, yielding flesh, sharp, bitter desire flushing through my limbs) became suspect, and at night, reliving in dream the possibilities I’d

missed in waking life, I would rise, stop and ask myself, had it really happened, or had my desires embroidered a false memory from the matrix of want and need? Nights I would awaken and the images fade, like all dreams do, becoming part of the male menagerie of hormonal fantasy. I had lost my capacity even to orchestrate my nightly dreams, but it wasn’t the loss of one opportunity or even of one woman, no matter how much I thought I loved her, that mattered. What mattered was that I had hesitated, and such doubt had professional repercussions. A Chamberlain’s hallmark is his ability to organize, to control. Without control, says the sage, there is no wisdom; nor without control is there the power of concentration. And without the power of concentration there can be no peace. And for the unpeaceful, how can there be happiness? Cherubimbo had made me lose control, and she had taught me the meaning of regret. She chewed at a thumbnail, then bit the inside of her left cheek. She looked up from the point on the table in front of her which she’d been staring at. “Rom wants you for the tour, Michael. Rom is the only entertainer ever to have sold out a five star tour, and you’re the only Chamberlain ever to have organized one. So it’s obvious, you’re the only choice. You can name your price. I think you realize that.” I nodded. “Twenty-five percent over, as you say, my ‘usual’: expense ; points on the recording of the tour; my own private starjammer, TSE drive; the worldlet you mentioned; and you, Cheru. I want you.” “Be careful what you ask for, Mondragon.” Her smile was as subtle as her beauty was not, and the lighting in the room made her look like a luscious Caravaggio. All the feelings I’d thought tamed flooded back. “Are you sure you want this?” she asked. Captured light from the globe of Wyldomarian glass leaked out in gentle spurts and eddies, competing with the stray light from the vacuum of space surrounding this floating cannister city. Cherubimbo, her face caught in the crossbeams, regarded me with the serenity which had, years ago, added to the tortures of infatuation. She had a simple face, a pleasing jumble of strokes from the hand of

a Zen artiste: economical, essential and evocative. Her skin was smooth, taut, a little ruddy under the eyes, giving them a sun-kissed look, lightly dilated capillaries under widely spaced eyes filled with a quizzically inviting oriental allure, eyes the brown of black coffee, framed in slits like horizontal teardrops and ed by a nose like an archer’s strong bow. Her teeth were large without being of the malicious cartoon variety, and when the upper lip of her small, heart-shaped mouth was in natural repose, a charmingly mild overbite stepped right in without bothering to knock first. “Yes,” I said with an inane smile and the best strangled-doe eyes I could conjure. She laughed lightly, and it made me angry. “Fine,” she said, “I belong to you. But I want something in return.” “What is that?” I asked, a little stunned. The pleasure of getting what I wanted was leached by the ease with which it became mine. “Rom wants you to keep an eye on the tour. I want you to keep an eye on him.” “Why? What’s wrong?” “I’m not sure, Michael. But I’ll tell you something nobody else knows. Fabian’s been Re-inked.” I leaned forward in my chair, feeling inundated. When it rains, it pours. “At least once. Before we met him. Probably twice.” “Are you sure?” “No, I’m not sure.” She tapped the cool gray-veined marble-top with short blue nails that made no sound. “I’m afraid of what he might be planning to do, Michael.” “You’re his wife,” I said. “What are you talking about?” “He’s a famous man, with the wealth of Croesus. And I think he’s radically, probably organically, insane. The reincarnated aren’t exactly the most reliable people, Michael.”

“What is it that makes you think he’s planning something— what?—dangerous?” “Like you said, I’m his wife. There are things we notice.” We’d fallen into archetypes: Re-inkers, observant wives, infatuated and tonedeaf Chamberlains. “Nothing concrete?” “Nothing I can talk about. Yet.” Which only made me angrier. Don’t bring it up if you’re not going to talk about it. “And what,” I asked, “do you want me to do about it?” “Just keep on eye on him,” she said while shaking her head no. “Make sure he doesn’t do anything . . . as you say, dangerous.” “I’m not a babysitter, Cheru.” Get Re-inked enough times and you can get like a baby; the Halls of Memory were filled with their likes. “And I’m not an Iceman. Have him committed if you think he’s nuts.” “He’s an artist, Michael, you know that.” “Who was he before, Cheru? Do you know?” “I’m not sure. I’ve been trying to find that out.” Pause. “So you’ll be our Chamberlain?” I nodded. “Say yes, Michael. For the recorders. Say yes.” I grimaced with distaste, thinking of what would have to be deleted from the feed, but said, “Yes.” “Good.” She stood up abruptly and I thought she meant to leave.

“Cheru, wait.” I’d pulled out the Lady Rolex from the satchel while we’d been conversing. I held it up, reached towards her. “I have a present. For you.” “Oh, Michael, I can’t.” “Why not?” I looked up to where she pointed, noticing for the first time the pinprick lenses which pulsed as barely perceivable pinpoints of blue-haloed red, spaced all around the metal ribs of the dome. They’d been lost to me in the baroque colors of the station. “I’m not here.” Her laughter was weighted, and she held her head askew, our eyes locked. “How unobservant of you. Maybe twenty-five percent over your usual is too much. You’re a bit rusty, my dear Chamberlain.” “Where are you?” “I’m not sure, Michael. That’s another reason why I don’t want Fabian committed. I need you to find me. I’m in cold storage, somewhere, I think. Fitted with neuroelectric sensors to a morphitic projector. I don’t know where. But he knows where. You want to help me, Michael? Be Rom’s Chamberlain again.” “You’re here. If you can roam about, why haven’t you tried to get help?” She smiled ruefully and nodded. “I am, Michael. I’m asking for yours.” Her hard-shell hologram, so perfect a moment ago, had already begun to fade. I could see through Cheru’s increasingly diaphanous body, and for a moment she was like a humaniform aquarium, imagery distorted by the rippling of water, stars glittering in her eyes, spaceships netted in her hair, the tumescent moon glowing through her ribcage. “Fabian’s expecting you. On Earth. A shuttle will be leaving in a few hours.” Her image faded completely. “Find me, Michael,” said her voice, weak now as an echo lost in a labyrinthine

corridor of dream, and then even that was gone.

The old hotel Audi taxi paused but for a moment while its left wing swiveled up and I got out. I said nothing, looking around, and upon my failure to be specific, it seemed to make up its own mind and hovered away, the scuffed silvery-gray chassis noisily threading its way through the low hills and the insistent rain, heading back towards the city. No doubt its human operator (safe and dry somewhere, fingers dancing over a laptop keyboard) was eager to retrieve the Audi drone back into the heart of Veracruz’s commercial district, where the taxi fares were bound to be better. There would be none to be made here at the abandoned NASA catapult gantries. Alone, I followed the remnant of what might have been, once upon a time, a dirt path now turned to a muddy stretch of devil’s weed, alien dandelion crown and mutant sunflower. It led to a rusted chain link gate that swung open and closed with the chilly winds coming off the Bay of Campeche. A sign of laser-etched holography on cheap metal sheeting warned tresers away in twelve different languages. I briefly wondered what thirteenth language not included on the sign had been spoken by the vandals who’d violated the old fashioned combination locks that had rusted to twisted ingots hidden somewhere in the weeds. There was no sign of life anywhere. I’d taken the liberty of renting a rain-belt but I’d taken the added precaution of wearing a clear plastic hooded poncho as a backup, just in case. Fat droplets splattered heavily and musically on the hard invisible electromagnetic shield mushroomed over my head, water running in curving sheets about me, blurring the already vague monotony of cloudwork overhead. The rain cascaded off the EM umbrella with a lulling intensity, and the overhead sky of watered Mayan silk made me think of my grandmother’s house, of staying home from school, of toes tucked into afghans and steaming crema de trigo with butter and honey, my mother in the kitchen brewing chamomile tea, and the gravely tequila-soaked voice of José Alfredo Jimenez on the radio singing:

Ando volando bajo

Mi amor esta por los suelos . . .

I shook my head, wondering at the sudden sentimentality, and ed through the gate, heading for the nearest LCM gantry. I calculated mentally the age of this ancient spaceport, and when I arrived at a figure, realized that no calculation has been necessary, really: the National Aeronautics Space istration had been a pre-FTA organization, defunct long before my mother was born, and the Federated Territories of the Americas had just celebrated its centennial four months back. Of course it wasn’t the establishment of the FTA that had killed off the Linear Motor Catapults. Tiano-Song Empirix had taken care of that with its clean, efficient stardrive. Until then the LCMs had been state-of-the-art, but with TSE’s wormholing technologies, not only was the distance between stars abolished, but it became possible to move massive payloads up the gravity well with no intermediate steps, not incrementally but in one fell swoop (or one gigantic thrust, as the case may be). LCMs then became, for a while, the choice of lift-off in Third World countries (who could not afford TSE’s initially exorbitant taxes). Eventually they became the sole province of the Colonial Worlds, to whom the TSE drive had become, after the Five Years War, proscribed Solarian technology. I expected the air in the adjunct to be stale, but I was greeted by a pleasant, subtle sweet aroma, a scent that didn’t jibe with the mossy floor tiles, mildewed wooden arches and rusted columns of iron and copper. The perfume was so subtle that for a moment I thought it my imagination. But the absence of the expected mustiness convinced me that someone had been here before me, although there were no lights, and a thick layer of dust seemed to cover everything. I clicked the small switch at my belt and I felt mild electrostatic fingers combing through my hair as the umbrella’s field shut off. The EM belts tend to maintain body temperature, so I’d forgotten how cold it was: my breath misted with the season. I wore a thermal long-sleeved tee shirt under the poncho, but it was far from enough. I thumbed the rain belt on again, but adjusted the polarization. At its lowest setting it wouldn’t protect me from the rain, but it created a penumbra of warmth, and that was what I wanted. I walked to one of the five elevator hoops, the only one glowing with neon life.

It was obvious now that I was expected, and it made me nervous again. I was thinking of Cheru’s disturbing news that Rom had been Re-inked. There were dates and figures that she’d been unable to provide, but she’d been skeptical, suspecting that he’d submitted to the genetic therapies more than once. If that were true, there was the best of probabilities that the Fabian I’d known on the last tour ten years ago had already been living in an adopted body. Not only would the Rom I’d come to meet today not be the Rom I’d known those many years ago, but the Rom I’d known back then had probably already shed the skin of a previous life I knew nothing about. Who had he been in his former life before his talent, wealth and fame had created the pop myth so many still adored? And if he were in his, say, third whirl, who was he now? Was he still Fabian Rom, or was he playing at it? And being such a public figure, how had the media, especially the sleeze-vids that made such things their business, missed the news of his reincarnations? What grotesquerie had he been playing? What game was he playing now? And where was Cherubimbo? And . . . I swayed for a moment as the antigrav hoops wobbled above and below me, helixes of attractive light carrying me upward to no doubt a preset level; I had touched no controls. Adapted as it was with antigravity tech the elevator was still impossibly old, but it rose slowly and creakily, superconductors punishing fiberglass, aluminum bracings and iron girders. I faced the empty frames where absent vinyl acrylic panes had long been shattered and scattered, and gazed out on oceanside Veracruz, some twelve kilometers away. More and more of the city became visible between hills that surrounded her like the massive paws of a sleeping Sphinx as I rose higher and higher. The earth seemed at an uneasy truce with the clouds that increasingly revolved towards a blustery black-and-blue. Around level thirty-three the monotony of the wintry tableaux became just another city, giving way to sulkier ruminations. I felt the ache of having come back to this part of Mexico, land of my parents and my childhood forge. Fabian had surely calculated the emotional impact it would have on me, for when we’d been close, we’d shared memories the way

we’d shared women, drugs, and wine, although neither of us had been predisposed toward using whatever we’d learned against the other. Until Cherubimbo. The elevator stopped, trembled, and although there was no floor cursor, I could tell I was over sixty floors into the sky. I’ve been in my share of cloudbusters. I was in a large hanger, a sort of auditorium that was reminiscent of an ancient, baroque European train station. Far above me rain washed over opaque s of translucent synthetic; many of the s were broken or missing, sections of Veracruzian sky raining over walls, floors and ing columns of the unadorned grayness of Mexican concrete and North American steel. From somewhere I could hear the echoing gurgle of drains. My guess that this was the last stage for departing shuttlecraft was confirmed by large signs in red and black capitals, again in twelve languages, naming discrete and distinct zones: baggage claims, customs check, loading, boarding, inoculation, et cetera. All abandoned long ago. The west wall, probably once an aesthetically pleasing set of windows facing the sea, was completely open to the outside, allowing the elements to augment the forces of time in their assault on a relic of the Space Age. I walked to the low concrete wall that edged the absent glasswork, leaned over and peered down. It was a daunting, harrowing drop. I was still alone. “Rom!” I yelled, repeatedly, but only the echo of my own voice (and the screeching rustle of birds I’d disturbed) came back. I sighed and fished out a cigarette. There was a desolate grandeur in this place; whomever Fabian Rom had become, his artistic sensibilities had taken a predictable evolution. He’d been into the histrionic but moving poetics of Rimbaud, Lautréamont and Morrison when we’d first met. I thought of one of the last songs he’d written, one for the tour that had been d as his last, a song he’d said he’d written for Cherubimbo and that had added to her own growing fame not only as a performer and artiste in her own right, but as Fabian Rom’s lady love.

Angel

guardian of Lucifer’s forfeited beauty you have forsaken your dream-gift of love for the routine of a glory from above. The halo that dawned on your brow has become a burden of flesh. But Angel don’t you cry.

I clicked off the rain-belt for a moment to let the cigarette smoke clear, then hastily clicked it back on. I had cried when I’d first heard Rom singing that song, but no doubt that had been in part because I’d done too much tequila and sleet the night before, and because I, too, was in love with Cherubimbo.

The twin archipaelagoes of your wounded black eyes echo the vacant dream of salt pillars and alien skies and pilgrimages. Angel don’t you cry.

Rom had saved us all—the largest contingent of adolescents ever in the history of Sol Nostra and her six sisters—with his music, with his youthful, silly pretensions, with his cloying poetics that so appealed to the unformed and unmined raw sensibilities of a galaxy teeming with as many teenagers as there

were stars, each one of us reveling in the crucifix of our existence, in the narcissistic vanities of adolescence. Absorbed, reminiscent, a little heady from my first cigarette of the day, I gazed out along the world’s watery horizon, and sang in a shaky, audible whisper:

Your voice: it has disemboweled the perfect vowel. Your injured mouth it wanders derelict between the ‘o’ of a distracted pleasure and the ‘mmm’ of a protracted deceit.

I tried to the last section of song, but it wouldn’t come. I let it go, sighed. I set my burning cigarette on the inner edge of the concrete ledge, planted both my palms thereon, and hoisted myself up, swinging my legs over. Seated comfortably on the outer edge, the strong winds undeterred by the low setting of my belt and ruffling my hair, I retrieved my cigarette and glanced below. I’ve never been afraid of heights. Perhaps it’s part of a reckless nature that’s stood me through difficult times, but I’ve taken more risks than I should in my sweet short life, and I’ve fallen quite hard on my ass or on my head almost as many times as I’ve landed on my feet. I felt a giddy exhilaration. Of course, if I fell now, landing on my feet would do me no good. I looked down at the world below my feet, so distant and tiny, that I almost imagined I could detect the Earth’s curvature. The further away you get from the

Earth and the smaller things get, the more comical and trite things appear. From an aerojet or a rising balloon or, really, from a cloudbuster, people are small, like ants, and when you look at it that way, it’s hard to imagine not only that the ants have individual lives, that they’re born and they live and they fall in love and cry and suffer, but that it matters. Of course the higher you go, things get even smaller, until you can see the Earth as a fat, cat’s-eye marble revolving in the void, and suddenly things get All-Important again, mysterious and dramatic, and the dragon eats its own tail, existence comes full circle. But it’s that interzone between heaven and hell, between being too close or too far away, where our lives and deaths mean what they do that calls to the heart plaintively. Swinging my legs over the edge, I gazed downward. The rain had stopped, but the burgeoning clouds silently promised more. There was a square outcropping of watered concrete about nine meters below the section of wall I was sitting on; if I were to fall, I realized, I would land there first, and with a few fortuitous bumps, interrupt the longer, more lethal journey down. Directly above, there was a temporary ulcer in the clouds through which a few columns of bloodlight escaped. I closed my eyes, massaged them, cradling my face. I rubbed my eyes, my nose, my cheeks, and shook my head as if disagreeing with myself, wondering when Fabian Rom would put in an appearance when I heard a voice, a honeyed rasp:

In Gethsemane in Paris or Berlin or in this city of unbathed cherubim no psalm of ion could give weight to your words to that sterile pronouncement ‘Hail Mary’.

I looked up and, with a dazed, muted smile, slowly drew back away from the ledge. Floating in midair, upside down like a Sistine Chapel oil painting figurine against the dome of the sky, a centaur with arched bushy eyebrows, twin goat’s horns jutting from a wide forehead, and fiery eyes slanting with an evil mischief glared at me. Gravity and the wind furled and unfurled the ends of clothes—a black cape, the unraveling tongue of a linen turban still clinging to his neck, the tail of a shirt here, the cuff of a pant’s leg there—snapping like flags in the dying sunlight. “Rom.” The sleeping-bat image didn’t last long. Fabian laughed easily, gustily, a bit too histrionically, a child impressed with the way his new hairdo sweeps cloyingly over one eye. I couldn’t see them as such but he had to be wearing gravlibre belt and boots that enabled him to linger anywhere in the air. From his attire I could see he had graduated from the gay sulk of a Rimbaud to the freakish flamboyance of a vampire Lestat. “I’ve missed you, my Chamberlain,” he said as he righted my perspective, revolving in the air like a helium balloon, still treading on the void, but slowly revolving to ‘stand’ head up. He was not alone. A small diaphanous cloud of nannites haloed about him, each mechanical gnat providing an ambient light, but recording and assembling a movie in a 3D and mural format. I ventured at the reason for my sentimentality, guessing that the nannites were also functioning as atmosphere enhancers no doubt misting us with Rom’s inebriant of choice. I wanted to feel anger but could only summon a light and bizarre amusement. The scent of sandalwood pervaded the air, and it brought handfuls of memories. At his feet there floated a baby sphinx and a miniature griffin grazing on air. Expensive genetic toys. On his shoulder sat a tiny red devil, naked and complete with horns, tail and fiery trident. A hologram? Another genetic toy? I could see it snickering, holding on to one of Rom’s pointed ears. “Where is the rest of your entourage, old friend?” I asked. “Is this your new image for the tour? Traveling as Our Lady of Fatima?” Rom laughed again, and although extensive cosmetic surgeries had turned him into a Satyr with peaked ears, high cheekbones and actual hooves, I recognized

the eyes, large, blue, glistening with irony and hunger and intelligence. The mouth was still the same: large, full-lipped, sensual, and I thought how well they fit whatever image it was he was pedaling these days: centaur, vampire, satyr, whatever. The clouds, which billowed above and behind him, had closed up again, and the day was failing fast. Even so there was a clarity to him, modulated, unobtrusive sur-light from his floating ambient media cloud making sure they captured our images for the pop history that was being written. Michael the Dragon Slayer with his King. Fabian Rom fans would eat it up. “Michael, Michael. You make me feel so . . . so normal.” His glinting eyes hinted that it was something he missed. He flashed his upper teeth in smile, floating near the ledge, holding out his hand, beckoning, but I backed off. “Cut the crap, Fabian,” I said gently. “I stopped being a fan long before I started working for you.” “Which is why you were the best of my coordinators.” “Better than all the others,” I said with a smile. “Turn your cameras off, okay? Save the special effects for the concerts. For someone who’ll appreciate it.” He’d come to rest on the ledge a few feet from me. He crouched, the wind photogenically caressing him. Fabian had never been a small man, but he looked physically larger than I ed, a muscled and somberly dark superhero, a member of the X-Men, a beautiful cartoon. He seemed to not have aged a day, however, and I was looking closely. I felt a pleasant buzzing behind my eyes, and rubbed an ache in my neck. “Where are you keeping Basho?” I asked him, still smiling and feeling quite good. The media around him bent the light, warped the senses ever so gently, recording, recording. “Tell the truth, Michael. Hasn’t life been just a little gray without us?” He looked up at the dimming sky. “Don’t you miss the days when we made music and worlds stopped in their orbits, listening?” “You made music, Fabian. I made travel arrangements and paid the hotel and bar tabs.”

“Well, yes. And tried to get into Cherubim’s pants.” I looked out towards the ocean, thought I caught a faint streak of fugitive sunlight snaking diagonally towards the shore, but I couldn’t tell. I thought about how mundane a course our conversation was taking, and began doubting Cherubimbo’s belief in Rom’s Re-ink. “What do you want from me, Fabian?” “I didn’t bring you here so we could play out our pathetic little triangle, Michael.” He stood up. The ledge was four-and-a half feet above floor-level; he towered above me, his black cape snapping in the wind. “I brought you here to help me kill myself.” The wind whistled throughout the cavernous, columned antechamber. I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. I took a step back, intending to sit down on a plastic bench of obsidian-gleam, but I missed by a good foot or so. I felt my body falling backward, past the point at which I’d lazily calculated that my ass would meet the bench, but I kept on going. It was a slow descent, it was taking literally years to reap the rewards of my miscalculation, but then I felt my arms gripped, and something brought me forward again, to my feet. I could feel my head loll, my mouth open like that of a drunken fish. I heard a snap and something acrid assailed my nostrils. I coughed, my eyes watered, a tiny bush was on fire at the back of my throat. As long as it didn’t talk, I thought, and chuckled. I looked up; Fabian was standing before me, holding me up with one iron fist, studying me. I closed my eyes and grasped his thick wrist, sucking in the chilly night air. Fabian laughed and I felt a sudden revulsion, like when you’ve eaten too much candy. It was taking me enormous amounts of time to make sense out of the relation between my body, its actions, and the scenes unfolding around me with the rapidity of melting ice. “I need to die,” he said, and he kissed me, with bitter longing and lingering wonder, but I pulled back with a slow, crystalline anxiety. His eyes glittered with the semiprecious impurity of dying light, and the thought came to me that perhaps he was dead already. Aided by my befogged mind, my thoughts leap beyond logic, and I knew in that moment that he’d been Re-inked many times. Any semblance of sanity he projected now was artificially induced, imposed, maintained. I pushed at his shoulders, and I stood, wobbly, but on my own. “Then die,” I said, “but leave me out of it.” I stumbled to the ledge, sat down,

vigorously rubbing my face. Slowly a sliver of clarity bled back into my head, but I was still riding high. “Did Cherubimbo play my new songs for you?” I shook my head no without turning to look at him; I ran my fingers through my hair. It was cold, but I was lightly sweating. I could hear him pacing behind me. “I’m tired, Michael. I never thought I’d live to be a thousand, but there were so many things I never thought would be.” He was back on the ledge and he stepped out again, but did not fall; the gravlibre was quietly humming. “You’re taking your press releases a little too seriously. Testing the boundaries of reality by a series of controlled excesses? It’s been done. Find your soul in the bottom of a bottle of Tres Generaciones? Old hat. Using neuroelectric virtual realities to groom your mind like a bonsai tree? é. What do you want to do?” “I want to die,” he repeated, “and I need you to do it. You’re right, it’s all been done. But not what I’m planning, no. I’m going out at the top.” “You want to die?” I asked. “Then just turn off your belt. Ah,” I laughed maliciously, nodding as if I knew all there was to know, “you can’t do that, right? Too easy. You want to live above an abyss, on the edge, but the best you can do is an antigravity belt to keep you from crashing. Is that why you’ve Reinked yourself, what, how many times now? So you can be an old and ridiculous charlatan? With your surgical pixie’s ears, and your hologram devil? The Maybelline of spirituality. What a fuckin’ joke!” He was staring at me now, a fuming smile distorting his features. “See, Mondragon,” he said. “You do understand.” He floated nearer, speaking again, but it was a slow, low but expressive chant, a recitation; his eyes looked beyond me. “You grow weary,” he said as if to himself. “Me?” “No. Us. We do. You grow weary of the rooster’s shrill song, Michael, and then

long for the fatidic and melogenic laments of widowed sirens. The placidity of over-ripe meadows find their ignorant sentimentalities in the hallmark of an kitschy sunset. It’s inside something like that,” he said, again sweeping his arms, “that we look for the chromatic discourses of barefoot empiricists who proclaim themselves the masters of the fresco.” He looked to ground, and shook his head slowly, pensively. “But above all, Michael, we’re nauseated by the fragrances of beauty; ultimately, it’s all invention and artifice, and nothing else.” Here he grinned sadly. “And it’s that subterfuge that we want to undo. God, we’d pillage and burn cities if only for that moment when the flame and flesh intersect. Fiddle while Rome burns? I never understood it until now. I just want to make music and die. Really die.” His arm swept in an arc, and it seemed as if he meant to encom the world in his poetic rant. The sun broke through a fist of blackened clouds, momentarily and selectively fanning striations of light on the earth below. Rom’s pretentious open-mike moment snagged on the loose barbs of my slowly clearing mind, and his words suddenly seemed, while unhinged and desperate, simultaneously affected and scripted. Honest and sad, as if he, or whomever he’d once been, was tiredly peeking through his public, charlatan’s mask, making this entreaty. “I want to make music and die.” The clouds had closed on the sky again, and the sun was gone; black had merged with blue, and night had fallen. Sur-light from the media halo bathed us, and we looked like ghosts lit against the backdrop of the void. In the distance the lights of Veracruz burned like millions of droplets of neon dew, a troll city, a pot of gold at the rainbow’s end. I clapped weakly, sarcastically. Fabian’s eyes were staring into mine, but they seemed blind, grave, troubled and insular. But he laughed suddenly, enthusiastically, incongruously, maniacally, nodding and clapping too, and I felt like a teabag must feel being steeped in scalding water. When it died down a little, he said, “I need to die.” He licked his lips and added, “And you will help me.” “No. I won’t.” “Yes. You will. Or Cherubimbo dies with me.” I felt my heart grow taut.

“Life can be simple,” he said, “when you’ve lived a very short time, or a very long time. Our points of view are not that different, Mondragon. We’re both looking for the same thing, really, when you think about it. You want the temporal ‘tiny death’ of love, I want the larger death of fleshly surrender. I think we both want to die.” “I want to live, old man.” He laughed. “Fine. Then do my bidding. Be my Chamberlain, and do what I say.” He half-turned, his hand sweeping outward, like a carnival hawker presenting the next act. “Look out there,” he said. “The city and all its riches; they’re all yours if you follow me.” He looked up and said, “The heart imagines what the eyes cannot see. The stars, in their infinite beauty, they too will be yours. I can give you all of this, all of it, if you do my bidding, willingly. Here,” he said, beckoning, his hand held out to me. “Come to me, Michael. Nothing can hurt you. If you were to dash yourself against the rocks below, myriad of cherubim would rush and save you, for you are God’s favorite child. Come.” I hesitated on the precipice. There were still fumes in my brain, and one part of it thought it agreed with Fabian, thought that it might be romantic and beautiful to die. I made as if to step off the ledge. “Wait,” said Fabian. “Wait. Promise me, Chamberlain, that we will dazzle the stars, shake the worlds, make them cry with our music. Promise me that, when the time comes, you’ll make sure that I die, in the way I want to, at the time I want to. Promise me.” I hesitated a moment. The wind had picked up and it buffeted against me, making me sway. I looked at the distant city lights and found them beautiful; I was still labile enough to want to cry, but I didn’t. And I thought of Cherubimbo, her body somewhere in cryonic suspension, her voice echoing through the labyrinth of memory. “Promise me,” I said, “that you’ll let Cherubimbo live, that you’ll let us both go when we’ve given you your rest. Promise.” He smiled absently and nodded somberly, and for a moment—perhaps his last moment—he was human again. “I swear it. I’ll help you live.” “Good, then. I’ll help you die.”

“Come, then, Chamberlain. There’s much we have to do. Come come, I won’t drop you.” “Promise?” Again he nodded, and I stepped off the edge into the void and into his open arms.

1969

I SLEPT BADLY that night, occasionally surfacing from the river of my raging subconscious, entangled in the bed sheets, knowing that there would be hell to pay in the morning. I felt something grab my ankle and pull me anew beneath the lightning-streaked black, chill, fast-moving currents of my anxieties. “It is morning,” said Pat Glore, only he wasn’t Pat Glore, or at least not all the time. He was a shape-shifter, one moment my nemesis, the next my drunken, unshaven stepfather, then later the pharmacist who’d told me three months back that it didn’t matter what acne products there were on the market, my face was ravaged and ruined. My eyes burned with tears. “Stop yer belly achin’” said my step-dad as he held his right opened hand near his left shoulder, palm forward, ready to slap some sense into me. I cringed, and, as in real life, it was a toss up whether he would hit me or not. Instead he grabbed me by my shirt collar. “Look at me when I talk to you,” barked Pat Glore. “You’d better not make me have to find you again. Be thankful I don’t eat the rest of your mind. I said look at me!” I looked up and the bald, bespectacled pharmacist’s eyes were gnarled into an expression of amazed disgust. “If you think you’re ugly now,” he said, smiling malevolently, “wait’ll we get done with you.” It was six thirty in the morning when I got out of bed, bleary eyed and torpid. My stepfather was, as usual, out for the count until well after I was gone, and I had no fear of his waking up just now. My mom was getting the little ones ready for school. In the kitchen, Oliver was singing “Good Morning Sunshine.” Mom’s smile was pale and sad but familiar and comforting. She handed me my weekly twenty-dollar bill from the stash she held for me from my after school jobs. “Ricky,” she said, handing me another five, “Don’t forget: we need milk, noodles, parmesan cheese.” Her left black eye was almost back to normal.

When will my life begin? I thought. I met up with Dre on the corner of Kester and Delano. I didn’t slow my pace as we hooked up and marched through the foggy sunlight toward Van Nuys High School. “Do we have time for hot chocolate and a cinnamon roll?” he asked, falling in step, adjusting his backpack. It was the same question every school morning. “You know what your new name is?” I asked him. “Cinnamon Girl.” “Yeah? Know what your new name is? Your new name is Sweet Judy Blue Eyes.” Dre was grim, his pale gothic face determined, like we were going to work, which I guess we were. We’d both been hoping for things to change with the new school and the new school year, but it had been a fading, unrealized hope, like my mother’s battered, knowing smile. The world makes up its mind about you, like the pharmacist who’d said my face was history, and it’s a struggle to not simply change your mind and agree with them. Each sunrise brings the possibility of happiness and change, but for someone else, not you. I accidentally caught my reflection in the donut shop’s windows as we pulled in. Thinking it was a ghost from my dreams, I didn’t look away just then. I avoid mirrors, reflections, the treachery and cruelty of glass and chrome. I was tall, ungainly and thin, with no ass and knobby ts. I’ve precious little chin, large ears, an adam’s apple that must be the whole fruit, not the usual wedge, and a face that was—it is impossible to not be honest when confronted with the image —red-blotched, oily, pitted and scarred, the red bumps of old and new pimples. I’ve got a wandering, pinched eye, and while I’ve got my front teeth, I’m missing two others in obvious, observable places. All in all, I looked like a Gerald Scarfe paper-mâché caricature. Then I saw, behind my reflection, the mirror-smoked beauty of Lou Ocheltree, heading in our direction. I felt my blood supply flood into my head, like an overtaxed cartoon thermometer, then drop to the tips of my toes. The very first time I saw Lou Ocheltree, I felt a pang of recognition. Her hair is shorter than Audrey Hepburn’s in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, a flare of black inkiness so dark it looks a little blue. There was something so familiar about her

to me, her very white skin, the large eyes, one green, one blue, kind of like the first time I heard “Don’t Let Me Down.” It sounded like a song I’d have sworn I’d heard elsewhere, long ago, but I couldn’t say just where or when or, really, if. I thought it was a melody my mother used to sing to me as a child, a lullaby. After a few hearings, though, it sounded original to the Beatles, and the feeling ed. I have a lot of feelings like that, but I’ve learned to ignore them, because sometimes you’d think I’d been to the future and knew it all, but what’s there to know? Lou’s locker was next to mine, and I was in love with her. We hurriedly bought our goodies—Dre his hot chocolate and cinnamon roll, me my morning “suicide”: a mixture of Coke, root beer and orange soda and crushed ice—and fled the scene. I’d never even made eye with Lou, but it was about another half mile before I felt normal again. No sooner were we inside the high school gates when I heard the familiar voice. “Well, if isn’t Joe Buck and Ratzo Rizzo.” Pat Glore is a good looking kid with a dirty blond bed-head mop, a button nose and large blue-green elfin eyes set in a round, ruddy face. If James Cagney had played the part of an assassin in a movie directed by Luis Buñuel, make-up by Salvador Dalí, script by Charles Baudelaire, well, that would be Pat Glore. He had a deep, stentorian voice which promised him a future as an announcer somewhere. The girls loved him, the boys kept their distance, and a few of us had been specially chosen for torment. “Beat it, grandpa,” he said to Dre, who’d already begun skulking away at Pat’s arrival. “Your girlfriend and I got some business to take care of.” “My name is Andre, pendejo,” Dre whined to himself. “Andre Grijalva.” “There’s a girl I want to get to know,” Pat said to me, wasting no time, “and her locker’s right next to yours. I’d like to use your locker for a while.” “How long do you want it for?” “On second thought,” he said brightly, as if it had just occurred to him, “we’ll just trade lockers. It’ll be easier that way.”

Pat had been the terror of my elementary school years and early junior high. He extorted money from me, he slapped me around for fun, made me take the fall for pranks and truancies not mine and library books he’d lost and deadlines he’d missed and put me down in front of girls I liked. Eventually his meanness resolved itself into a low-grade menace with a hidden cost of anxiety based on the randomness of his attentions. I noticed that he’d graduated from torn jeans, tie-dyed tee shirts and peace medallions to the colorful elf attire coming into fashion with the likes of Steven Tyler, Todd Rundgren and that space oddity, David Bowie. In my eyes, it only made him scarier. Just before noon, while I was removing all the junk from my locker, I felt a presence behind me. “Excuse me,” said Lou Ocheltree. I nodded, head bent, voice choked off, eyes upturned and surreptitious, like I was The Man from Uncle not wanting to be identified. I scurried to the side, hunched and crablike, almost tripping over myself. “You shouldn’t let him push you around like that,” she said in a bland tone without looking at me, spinning the combination tumbler on her locker. “You only encourage him.” I froze and I think I actually looked around me, to see who Lou was speaking to. It couldn’t be me. Her locker popped open and she turned toward me, but I shouldered my burden and shuffled away, too shy and panicked to acknowledge her. “What did she mean by that?” asked Dre at lunch time. I’d gotten my noon meal with the state welfare tickets my family received. Dre and I shared it every day, supplementing with a few extra brown-bagged items to round off the lunch banquet. “Oh, she wasn’t talking to me.” “That’s what you always say,” he muttered, unevenly halving our cheeseburger in his favor. “Was she looking at you?” “Well, probably,” I said, adding a few finely chopped green onions from home.

“She thinks I’m somebody else.” Dre laughed at that one. “You wish you were somebody else.” He pulled sliced tomato from a carefully folded square of aluminum foil. “Oh yeah. Like the way you stood up to Mister Glore this morning,” I said, gently ribbing him. “Know what your new name is?” “What?” “I Fought the Law and the Law Won.” “Nah, man, that’s too long. Know what your name is? Vladimir Harkonnen.” That actually made me laugh. Like a bald headed man named Absalom. “Good one,” I said. As kids in elementary school where we’d first met, the other children were mean to Dre, a little wary of a classmate who looked like the abandoned child of goblins. Five years old and he had a large forehead and dark, sunken eyes which glistened with some forceful emotion no five-year old could possibly name, let alone have. But he had it, way before any of us knew what it was. He looked like a little old man, oddly cute and bizarre at the same time. Dre suffers from Werner’s Syndrome, and the condition is no longer cute, just oddly bizarre. At fifteen, he looks like the vampiric grandpa on The Munsters, pale, a black widow’s peak, thin red lips, recessed teeth. Grandpa. As to the medical condition, no one seemed to get it. It was simpler just to his everyday, for-years-now moniker, Grandpa. Sure, they heard him get angry, but they couldn’t ever figure out what all the fuss was about, not really, their focus elsewhere. It wasn’t like he was the only one with a nickname. Hell, there was Joker, el Caballo, Moska and Wizard, Trilobite, la Llorona. Me they nicknamed “el Lunatico”, the Lunatic, and not just because of my oily, pitted, dark-side-of-the-moon face or my crazy hair or my two eyes focused on two different things. It was ’cause I was always saying things like, “You already told me that,” when everyone swore, no, we didn’t and we never, or “That’s not

very original” when something new and original showed its face. It was for the ghosts that haunted my dreams, and which occasionally peeked out from behind window glass at me. It was because I sometimes heard voices. I was often like Michael J. Fox in “Back To The Future” when he says of a new, never-beforeseen episode of the “I Love Lucy” show, “Oh, I’ve seen this episode before.” Someone fairly clever tried to call me el Deja Boo, but it was thankfully too clever to stick. “I think Lou Ocheltree wants you,” said Dre somberly. “I’ve seen the way she looks at you.” There was nothing to do but laugh. “You know, I think she’s trying to get to you through me. Just say the word,” I said, “and I’ll set you up.” “Set me up,” said Dre, and I felt a pang, for the two of us. “Yeah, if anyone could do it, it’d be you.” He coughed wetly into a white handkerchief, shook his head as if tasting something bitter. “What’ll you tell her?” “I’ll make her an offer she can’t refuse,” I told him. Dre hadn’t yet read the new bestselling novel, but enough people were quoting from the “The Godfather,” that he smiled, in the know.

Late at night, past eleven, I was wandering jaggedly home from one of my jobs, walking the backstreets that parallel Kester Avenue. The trees on these streets are overgrown, lush, and dreamy. During the day they filter the sun in meandering pools of light; at night, the fingers of the Santa Ana’s strum the darkly greening and mangled fretwork of the embracing tree crowns. The golden diffuse spray of lamplight make the streets look like a scene from a Rene Magritte painting, lovely, quiet, blue, a little mysterious. A radio somewhere said that roses and rainbows were me. The strong scent of jasmine tickled my nose. I was about to turn left on Addison when I saw someone approaching from the opposite direction. It was Pat Glore, striding rather purposefully, as if he were in a hurry. He drew closer, his stern face bathed in a soft, rose-tinged gold. I can’t say that I never knew what hit me, because it was clearly Pat. But in later

moments, reconstructing the exact ballet of violence he rained on me, it was difficult, as if trying to pinpoint the exact moment you fall asleep. It was only after he was gone that I could even think about starting to . Crumpled on the ground, writhing, mouth and face slick with vomit and blood. From my subsequent aches, bruises and pains I can deduce that certain specific acts probably occurred. I’m pretty sure that Pat kicked me in the nuts. That’s the kind of pain which’ll cause you to fold to the sidewalk in a white noise of hurt like I did. I know I lost all my dinner, meager as it had been, onto my clothes, because later, much later, when I could breathe again, I felt and smelled their wet rancidity, my nostrils burning with the stench of partially digested food and foul biles. I must have writhed slowly, painfully, like a crushed snail. “You know why we’re friends?” bellowed Pat Glore. “Because you’re funny.” He spat with noisy precision. “Ever since we were in Mr. Thomas’ class, when you reported me for stealing your lunch, I’ve found you amusing. that?” He rapped the back of my head with a knuckle, hard, but I was in too much pain to acknowledge more. I managed a partial breath, and coughed violently. “But this,” he said, his voice even and cold, “was not funny. Fight your own fights. You do this again. Ever again. You and your messenger are fuckin’ dead. I swear it. Dead.” He clapped his hands as if dusting them off. “I’ve got my eye on you, asshole,” he said in a loud tenor given body by his bass undertones, and he left me there, midnight snaking its serpentine path away from me, pain pooling around me like a waning spotlight. I expected to attract more attention at school the next morning, what with my blackened right eye and swollen nose. For the amount of pain I’d experienced you’d’ve expected an arm in a cast, a new gap in the sequence of my front teeth, a torn ear, but no, the eye and nose were basically it, and a few bandaged cuts on the eyebrows. No doubt those who knew me suspected that I’d gotten into another tussle with my step-dad. It had happened before, it would happen again. “Did you hear about Pat?” Dre asked me at brunch. There was a note of manic glee in his voice. Well yes, I had, strangely enough. The whole school was talking about it, and I

was really, really confused. The guy kicks my ass, and he winds up in the hospital? “What happened?” I said. “He’s in the hospital.” “Yeah, but what happened?” “Don’t know. He’s hurtin’, though.” We finished our snacks and watched clouds changing their shapes. “I imagine someone like Pat always has to watch his back.” “He was mad at me for something he thought I’d done.” I shrugged, frowning. “Well, someone’s looking out for you. Oh yeah. Don’t forget,” said Dre, “don’t pick me up tomorrow.” Adrift at sea, I tossed my chin forward and up in a non-verbal Why? “Tests. I told you.” I shook my head No, you didn’t, and asked, “All day?” “Two days. I’ll be out ’til Thursday.” I pressed my lips together, shook my head again, shrugged my shoulders, my fingers splayed in interrogation. Are ya gonna tell me what’s happening? “Tests, what can I tell you.” Sometimes it is easier not to think about Dre’s condition, but rather just be his friend. He leaned back onto the grass, put his arms up and hands behind his head, staring off into infinity. “Sometimes I wish I was a secret agent,” he mused. “Like James Bond.”

“My name is Ahn-dre,” I said, giggling, holding up an invisible martini glass as if a toast, pinky finger pointing outward. “Ahn-dre Gree-hall-vuh.” “Know what your new name is?” “What?” “Odd Job.” “You’re the only odd job around here,” I said with a wistful laugh. “But I know what you mean. Sometimes I wish I had amnesia, like that guy from ‘Coronet Blue,’ know what I mean? Have the slate wiped clean, nobody knowing who you are, having no history. Start over, a new life, a different name.” “Somebody always trying to kill you.” “Well, I could do without that part.” “Okay then,” I said abruptly, getting up to leave. “I’ll bring you some goodies when I come see you.” “That’s my man. Maybe they can take a look at that eye and nose of yours.”

Except for Dre’s absence, school the next day was like any other. I stopped at my locker—my new locker, Pat’s old one—after lunch to get my geometry textbook. I hated that class. I’d started out fairly well, getting B’s on the first two quizzes, but already I was finding it hard to concentrate, to find the pattern in the chaos of numbers. I got the combination right on the third try, popped the metal door open, and found a note taped to the lip of the upper shelf.

Carmina morte carent Meet me at St. Elizabeth’s at 3:30

I thought it more likely that the message was for Pat, not for me. I couldn’t concentrate in geometry class. My book was open and Mr. Patagallo was drawing symbols and numbers on the board that looked vaguely Satanic. I copied the chalkboard alchemical signs into my notebook, but understood none of it. Carmina morte carent. I felt underwhelmed by my life, yet could not catch my breath. I wanted magic. I wanted a stepfather who wasn’t a fat-mouthed, opinionated alcoholic and who earned a decent wage. I wished my family off welfare. I wanted a girlfriend, but more than that, I wanted to be the kind of guy who was cool enough to have one. I wanted to understand geometry, the rules of grammar, the way the world worked, the things that girls wanted. After final period, I stopped at the school library. I showed Miss Reed, the head librarian, the note, and she smiled, tickled at its playful nature. “It’s Latin,” she said, raising her Catwoman reading glasses above her brow, into her hair. “‘Carmina morte carent.’ It means, ‘Songs do not die’. It’s from Ovid.” “What does it mean?” “Some things last forever,” she said wistfully as if recalling something personal. “Beauty. Poetry. Art. Truth.” Fear, pain, misunderstanding, ugliness. I left campus and walked out to Cedros Avenue toward Kittridge, to the St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church, just a minute or two off campus. A car drove past, windows rolled down, the Cowsills harmonizing about a magical flower girl, their voices chasing the car down the street. The early October light fell like a scattering of finely broken glass, filling me with a fragile wariness. I stood immobile in front of the church, wondering who would be waiting inside. I climbed the steps. Inside, it was quiet, somber and cool, slanting afternoon sunshine prisming

gorgeously through a large stained glass window over teak, adobe brick and carpeting. The church was empty, but my sense of apprehension rose. “You came,” said a soft but clear voice from behind me. “I wasn’t sure you would.” There was a note of pleased incredulity. It was Lou Ocheltree, face bathed in blue shadow. I looked around me, expecting an attacker from the sidelines. “You really don’t me,” she said with genuine amazement, her brow configured with a sad amusement and her steps toward me measured, “do you?” “What do you want?” I croaked, expecting Pat to jump out from the wings any second. “You have no idea how far I’ve traveled to find you,” she said with a gentle laugh, but with eyes hooded with concern. “Look at you. What have they done to you?” In my secret heart, I wanted to be Alan Bates in something whimsically kooky like “King of Hearts”, or an off-kilter romantic like David Warner trying to reconquer his ex, Vanessa Redgrave, in “Morgan.” But in this world I was just Ricky Cervantes, el Lunatico. I don’t like being the object of a practical joke or of anyone’s pity. I bolted past her and into the street. “No no! Wait!” she cried after me. “I . . . I’m . . . Wait. Let me explain!” I turned. “What? Explain what?!? What do you guys want?” I shouted, finding my voice in the great store of anger I often forget I carry. “Think you’re funny?” “Are you ever going to forgive me?” she said, enigmatically sympathetic to my confusion, holding out a hand. Her eyes glistened with a strangely unfocused and wearied impatience, as if we’d had this conversation before. “I want to protect you.” Protect me? From what? I ran away, not wanting to find out.

Before going home that night I stopped off at the hospital on Sherman Way. It was past visiting hours, but security was lax. I found Dre on the fourth floor, room 433. He noisily slurped the Slurpee I brought him, slowly devouring two glazed cinnamon buns. The way we craved sugar, you’d think we were strangers in a strange land. But we were just teenagers. His small transistor radio was playing “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” by this new group, the Chicago Transit Authority. “You know what I don’t get?” said Dre. “There are seven guys in CTA. Are they the Chicago Seven?” “It’s just a coincidence.” I told him about my run in with Lou Ocheltree. “Wonder what that was about,” said Dre, rubbing his face roughly like a sleeper just waking up. I’d told him about the note, the locker, about my going to Saint Elizabeth’s. “Not sure. She’s really odd.” “And the note said that songs never die?” “Well,” I conceded, “songs can be magical. They can be forever, you know.” “Okay. So now what?” “I think she and Pat are setting me up for something. Something really nasty.” Dre looked introspectively confused, like me. “Pat? What’s he got to do with this?” “You don’t really believe he’s in the hospital, do you?” “Forget the cinnamon buns. Gimme some’a the shit you’ve been smokin’.” “No, really. Who said he’s in the hospital? I haven’t seen him in any hospital.

Have you seen him in a hospital?” “He’s here.” My heart skipped a beat, and I actually jumped and turned to look behind me. “Where?” I croaked dryly. “He’s in this hospital.” Dre nodded, darkly amused. “From what K-9 said, he’s not going to be pounding anyone for a while.” “K-9 saw him?” “Says he snuck into ICU upstairs. Pat’s in a coma.” “Shut up!” “No, really. The vato’s new name is Rip Van Winkle. Whatever your girlfriend is up to, it doesn’t involve Master Glore.” He chewed his lower lip, eyes level but gazing off to an indistinct point to my right. “Matter a fact, I heard that it was your girlfriend put him there.” “Lou?” I drawled with slow incredulity. “Jeeze Louise, gimme a break.” Dre shrugged in a way that itted he’d reached terra incognita. “I don’t know,” he itted. “Just something I heard.” “Does anyone really know what happened?” “A cop was here earlier, but, well, Pat just refused to talk. Joker’s theory is that he got mobbed by the cops at that anti-war rally in downtown Monday.” He shook his head and laughed. “Stories, who knows what the truth is.” He shook his head as if ing something. “What made you think that Pat was involved?” “I don’t know. Just a feeling. She’s gotta be up to something weird. I mean, why the hell would she want to be my friend?” “I know what you mean,” said Dre, chuckling. “Hell. I don’t want to be your friend.”

The bright moon slipped across the cloudless night as we entered the school gymnasium where the Friday night dance was underway. I was trolling with Dre, Joker and Moska. I was friends with the guys in Conscientious Objector, that night’s band. The gym was musky and dark, dark enough to hide in and be anonymous, the stage moodily lit with cheap rainbow. From our knot on the outskirts of the dance floor we watched a good handful of couples dancing, but a larger number stood at the sidelines, like us, wallflowers, watching with hunger or adolescent incomprehension, or like me, with both. Those braver than ourselves seemed to be having a lot of fun. Joker pocketed the small wooden pipe we’d been smoking hashish from. Moska carried the half-pint of tequila. The band was decent, and a small, attentive crowd of irers had formed along the stage, playing either pocket pool or air guitar. Dre, Joker and Moska split to hang out outside by the bleachers to smoke Tareyton’s and drink beers. They’d poked fun at me for staying behind, labeling the music as too whitebread and sissy for their tastes. I’d almost left too when Conscientious Objector did a Bobby Shermanish take of a Bobby Shermanish song, Tommy James’ “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” but they followed it with a persuasive rendition of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch,” shades of Stephen Stills and Al Kooper. When it’s dark, you can’t see people’s faces too clearly, and it’s easy to pretend that they can’t see you either. In the middle of a slow and slinky version of “Hazy Shade of Winter,” I noticed with a start that Lou Ocheltree was standing next to me. I hadn’t seen her arrive. “You know what your new name is?” she yelled at me above the music, leaning in toward my left ear. I was completely taken by surprise, ambushed from multiple fronts, and smiled despite myself. I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders. “Swanwick Rivery,” she yelled. I grinned awkwardly, bewildered at a joke I didn’t get but disarmed by the mere attempt. “Peace?” she mouthed above the music, leaning in toward me and handing me a large waxed cup of soda. The hash had given me a warm lassitude competing with a wash of angry nonchalance from the tequila.

“You don’t know how I like it,” I gently yelled. “Believe me, I know exactly how you like it.” I shrugged, grabbing the soda and taking a large gulp. Surprised again. It was exactly the way I like it: root beer, Coke, orange soda and crushed ice, in perfect proportions. “You’re suicidal,” she quipped. There are girls so beautiful that they make you feel ugly even when you’re not. Add to that the fact that I am, and that’s how I was feeling. Slightly drugged and drunk, and in a dark auditorium, I summoned the courage to stare at Lou. She had large eyes that, because of their disparate colors, seemed amused and slightly aloof. Her mouth was full without being exaggerated, but in memory she was always smiling, and I now found it curious that whenever I looked at her, she rarely did. There was an adult cast to her demeanor, highlighted by a small, aristocratic nose, its bridge dusted with a sprinkling of different-sized freckles that looked like milk-clotted dots of cinnamon. The tight jet tips of her hair were wild and blurred, like ink spreading and moving in water. Her beauty only fueled my anger, and I took long, aggressive gulps of my suicide, the sugar from it going directly to my head with a surprising and mystifying force. The quality of the light around me seemed to grow crystalline, refractive, and my anger began to melt, like the freckles on her face and shoulders. It felt as if different worlds of possibility might open up. Lou was wearing artfully faded jeans and cowboy boots of scuffed rattlesnake, her tank top a rose-kissed white. I looked to the ceiling, wondering why the lights were suddenly being turned up, but was very surprised to find this untrue, they weren’t even on. “Cigarette?” No I said, but followed her outside in a light stupor. We walked wordlessly, and found ourselves in the east corner of the school parking lot, north of the auditorium, next to the wire fence along the small, tilled Agriculture Class field. Wild sage, jasmine and the smell of wet earth rose with the stuttering of sprinklers. The lights in this area were out, perennially sabotaged. I watched Lou light up a Marlboro and lean back against the hood of

an old cream convertible Peugeot with a beige top. “What’s going on?” I asked, finishing off my suicide and quietly crunching ice, imagining myself a wronged Peter Fonda, a wary Easy Rider. Shaking my head and scrunching up my shoulders, I asked, softly, “What is it you want?” I felt on stage, watched by the stars in the sky, reciting lines from a script, being witnessed. I took a deep, smug breath, feeling quixotically on top of the world. We stared at each other for a long time, and for the measure I forgot who I was. “I’m from the future,” Lou finally said, her voice fluid, steady. In the background someone somewhere was playing a radio: the Everly Brothers crooned to the full moon, Dre-eee-eee-eee-ee-eem, dream dream dream. Without looking away from me, Lou raked a hand through the short, mannishly-cut hair. “I was sent back to find you, to help you get back on track.” “Back on track?” I said, pleasantly amused. I felt a drunken fizziness, delighted and somewhat disarmed by her sense of whimsy. “When was I ever on track?” “You don’t me, do you?” “No,” I said, feeling like Robert Montgomery conversing with Claude Rains in “Here Comes Mr. Jordan.” “I don’t. But. Wait. I think it’s coming back to me now. Little by little.” Her playfulness was offbeat and contagious. “You’re here to tell me that there’s been a mistake, right?” She took a deep drag off her cigarette, waited a few beats, then exhaled a lengthy plume of smoke. She dropped her cigarette and crushed it under boot. Leaning toward me, she put a hand behind my neck and drew me in. Her touch was conquering, our kiss a very long, very wet, very satisfying surrender. I tasted bitter smoke and citrus. For the duration I forgot my name and where I was. “We were lovers, you and I,” she whispered huskily in my ear, and something seemed to clear up in my fogged, bedeviled mind. “Once upon a time.” I began to see the outlines of a joke after all. I felt the blood rush my face and looked up, opened and closed my mouth, opened it again, shook my head lightly. “You were my husband,” she added, and her eyes smiled while her mouth did not. “Are my husband.”

Before I could say another word or think another thought, she drew me in again with her right hand on my neck, the fingers of her left caressing my denimed groin with persuasive urgency. She carried a small, sheathed knife on her belt which I’d never noticed before; the hard leather sheath pressed against my hipbone when our bodies ground together. Everything on my body seemed to move of its own volition. My skin pebbled, my scalp moved, my tongue danced, and at least four of my appendages stiffened with a screaming, involuntary need. I lost all sense of sequence, the laws of time and chronology being violated as I found Lou and myself in the dark backseat of the Peugeot, our clothes tangled around ankles, necks and wrists, engaged in a spastic but knowing dance older than history and pleasure itself, cellular, primal, teenage. It felt like I could hear with my knees, see with my hands, tasting myself inside Lou, the boundaries between the night, myself and Lou lost. My eyes closed, and I found my way illuminated by a throaty groan that came from Lou, its vibrations setting off a chain reaction that started in my spine, rose to my head, lightninged down my face and down my chest, and ended somewhere deep in her belly. “I know exactly how you like it,” she whispered into my ear.

We eventually made it back to the gymnasium, sitting in the bleachers as far away from the dance floor as possible, simply holding hands, my left encased in both of hers. Conscientious Objector was doing a slow and slinky “Born Under A Bad Sign,” creamy-style. Eventually there was enough of me back inside my body that I asked, “What did you do to Pat Glore?” Somewhat non-responsively she said, “I wanted to get your attention, but didn’t know how.” Just then the band started “Sugar Sugar,” a new song, a kitschy pop melody by the Archies, a manufactured pop group—no, a fictional group. They performed it energetically, with brio, but it was still a hack tune, a sell-out piece of sugary crap, and I muttered as much.

Lou looked at me with a slinky amusement and shook her head. “Are you kidding? It’s a classic. In my time—in our time—it’s a chic club tune. The Beatles² do a righteous cover.” “The Beatles?” “And how ’bout Wilson Pickett’s version? It’s one of your favorites, along with Fabian Rom’s take.” I knew who the Wicked Pickett was, but I’d never heard him do “Sugar Sugar.” Didn’t the Archies just release it the month before? Was it originally a Wilson Pickett song? Wow. You live and you learn. But who was Fabian Rom? “Haven’t heard it,” I confessed, but bullishly added, “I still don’t like it.” “First of all, you need to learn not to be ashamed of what you like,” she said, looking for all the world like she was speaking to a toddler. “I already know you like the oldies but goodies, especially the syrupy oldies. Archie Bell and the Drells, ‘Earth Angel,’ ‘Sitting In the Park,’ Billy Stewart.” I smiled but itted nothing, though she was right. There are songs I privately adore, songs which melt my butter, but which in public I will turn my back on like on a bastard child. “You’re confusing what people have to say with how they say it.” “Meaning?” “Form and content. The message isn’t always as important as the messenger,” she said. “Sometimes the wrapping is the content. Look at that version of ‘Purple Haze’ by Dion. Cool song, but embarrassingly horrid when he does it. But the Beatles sing ‘A Taste of Honey’ and you don’t balk, cause, hey, it’s The Beatles. If you give your loyalty to the singer, you won’t often be misled. If you can focus on what it is you love, you’ll never be confused. Have you ever paid attention to jazz lyrics? Talk about crap. Anyone else saying the that sky is blue and that candy is sweet and the clouds are white will get slapped silly, unless it’s Nina Simone or Mel Tormé saying it, or rather, singing it.”

Just then we were surprised by a bungled version of “Louie Louie.” Lou laughed first. Doing a bad cover of a song that’s supposed to sound bad isn’t quite like adding two negatives together to get a positive. Some things just don’t add up. The message is not always as important, I paraphrased thoughtfully to myself, puzzling the concept, as the one who brings you the message. Pay attention to the messenger.

“You look different” said Dre, studying my face. “Well. So do you,” I said, studying his. He seemed to have lost a couple of more pounds, which on an already emaciated frame seemed exaggerated. His eyes seemed moist and glittery, the flesh surrounding them dark and pebbled. His mouth seemed a little more grandmotherly, and the skin of his face seemed grayer, papery, delicate. I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination or not, but his hair appeared to have thinned out some more. “I bought this tube of Clearasil last week,” I lied, trying to explain my changes. “It was weird. When I put it on, it was reddish, dark, not flesh-tone like it usually is. I think I got a freak batch.” “What’s freaky is how much your face has cleared up,” said Dre in a tone that didn’t sound too happy. He peered closely at my face, like a scientist examining a rare specimen. “Are you eating more?” “I don’t know. I guess. Yeah. More what?” “Even the pitted scarring seems to be going away.” He shrugged and grimaced as if from heartburn. “Your face is filling out, too.” “I guess I’m growing up.” “You’re growing up awfully fast. That’s not normal.” “Maybe. But what’s normal?” I said, a little annoyed. “What happens is what happens. If it can happen, well, isn’t that ‘normal’?” I was a little mad at his surly examination, but of course I’d had a few enger apprehensions myself. I

didn’t bring it up, but things were happening to my teeth that were a little fantastic. My teeth, which have always been crooked and overlapping, were migrating, like the tectonic plates of the Earth, shifting toward newer, more pleasing configurations. My teeth were still a tangle, but not like before. Just enough for someone to think, You look different. What is it? And the weirdest part? My two missing teeth were growing back into place. My first thought upon feeling the buds poking out with my tongue was, That’s not supposed to happen, is it? But, hell, it was happening. These were changes I was entirely happy with, so I neglected to be too alarmed. But just because something’s normal doesn’t mean it’s alright, I thought, returning to Dre and his continuing deterioration. According to your definition, a brain tumor is normal. Not only was my body changing, there was also an emotional aura charging me up, infusing my thoughts with a feeling that something good was about to happen. I felt like I was electrified, and each time I saw my reflection, I was truly surprised that my hair was not standing up on end. I was hard-pressed to label it, but its evidence was reflected in the eyes of those around me. My mother was taciturn and observant, eyeing me with more than her usual unreserved love, but with a new wariness. My stepfather, normally so liberal with his abuse, was likewise cautiously watchful. He stopped harassing me, trying to transfer his self-hatred toward my younger siblings, but I clipped that in the bud, too. One day he’d had to pick me up from the police station. I’d gotten into a fight after school, and the police had become involved. I’d taken to wearing a black leather jacket, a gift from Lou, as well as carrying a small hunter’s knife with a six-inch blade (another of Lou’s gifts). The blade was, of course, illegal. I told them that I used it at the gas station I worked at on Wednesday nights, you know, to cut rubber hoses and patch tires, go ahead, check. At fourteen, I have no criminal record, so the knife was confiscated, note taken of my name, and I was released to parental custody with just a warning. In the car ride home, my stepfather felt emboldened by the occasion to resume his abuse, but I stared at him with a chilly, unflinching heart. I didn’t feel angry, not really, just an annoyance and a revulsion, as if a buzzing wasp had tried to land on my ear. So it surprised even me when I said in quiet, crisp syllables, “If you ever talk that way to me again, Randall, I’ll kill you.”

I don’t think he believed me, because that kind of violence only happens in movies, but he was sufficiently moved, turning pale and swallowing. He murmured a few strangled words, but frowned waspishly, his lips compressed, tight. “And that goes for Alan, Emily and Gregory, too. And my mom. If you fuck with us anymore, I’ll gut you like a pig. Randall.” “You need to knock that crap off,” said Dre one afternoon. “What do you mean?” “Ever notice on how you get a lot of unwanted attention. Your stepdad. Pat Glore. That pharmacist at Savon’s? And now Lou.” “Lou’s not exactly unwanted attention,” I said. “And since when do you carry a knife?” “They took it away, Dre.” “What? You think I don’t know you got another one?” “Yeah,” said Lou, walking up behind us unawares. “Who do you think you’re fooling?” She was still grinning as we kissed—long, indiscrete kisses— calculated to attract unwanted attention. “You need to keep a low profile,” she said, eyeing Dre, who was examining his shoes. “There are people who might be looking for you.” “Looking for me? Who would be looking for me?” “Oh, I don’t know,” she said with a note of disingenuity, “some of Pat’s friends. Maybe.” Pat Glore had returned to school after Thanksgiving, about two months after that night he’d kicked my ass. I’d forgotten all about him, and was frankly surprised to see him. Hadn’t he been in a coma? He was a little fatter, his cheeks rosier, his eyes unfocused but easily startled. He’d lost the androgynous look and was now dressed from the J.C. Penney catalogue, his hair choirboy short. I came up to him as he was opening my locker. He must have forgotten that we’d traded,

because he stood there, not recognizing the contents. “Can I help you?” I said. He turned slowly, but did not seem to know me, squinting at me. Suddenly his eyes widened with recognition, his eyes flinching and head snapping as he jumped backwards, his arms held up across his face. “Ricky?” he said, flummoxed. “Ricky?” “Yeah,” I said, and was about to say more, but it must have all come back to him then, whatever that was, for he turned without a further word and bolted away. “You shouldn’t have said anything,” said Dre with a welcome touch of his old aggression. “You should’ve just kicked his ass.” “No,” said Lou, eyeing Dre with motherly disapproval. “What’s the point? You’ve already defeated him.” “Me? Me. I never touched him. That was you.” “What did you do to Pat?” asked Dre, turning to Lou. We were sitting at Bob’s Big Boy on Van Nuys Boulevard off Burbank, Dre’s and my old nesting place a few blocks from Van Nuys Junior High. Dre and I had built a careful history here. He’d balked at my bringing Lou here, but she was part of our circle now. We were sharing two orders of French fries and using their famous bleu cheese dressing instead of ketchup for dipping. Dre powdered more of their equally famous Big Boy brand seasoning salt over the hot fries. On the radio, Harpers Baazar was doing their version of “Windy.” Despite his initial territoriality, I think Dre was cautiously smitten with Lou. Female beauty is, I believe, the most powerful natural force on the planet; nothing can withstand its onslaught, let alone two misfits like Dre and I. At seventeen, she was Holly Golightly, Barbarella and Sally Bowles all rolled into one. “So when from the future are you?” asked Dre with crinkly eyes.

“I’m from a time and place where bleu cheese and French fries don’t exist,” said Lou, chewing with a ravenous delicacy. “Judging by the way you’re wolfing those down, you must love it here.” “Oh, we have our specialties, too.” “Prove it. Tell us about the future,” I said, watching the waitress who was bringing our order. “Something specific, something we don’t know.” “How ’bout next year?” said Dre. “Well,” said Lou, centering the Big Boy combination plate our waitress had placed before her, “next year, the Beatles will break up.” “They’re already broken up, but nobody’s told them yet.” “Hell, I could’ve told you that. And I’m not from the future. Tell us something, well, surprising.” “Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix will both die next year.” “Really. How?” “They’ll be hit by an exploding meteorite while performing a duet of ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’ at the Hollywood Bowl.” “Wow. That is surprising.” I stopped chewing. Something about the things Lou was jesting about him me with the force of memory. I stared at my hamburger and thought: The Beatles broke up a long time ago. Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix are dust. “What’s wrong, honey?” “What year was ‘Back to the Future’ released?” I asked. “Back to the future?” said Dre, shaking his head, but otherwise chewing away happily. “What’s that mean?” He had no idea what I was talking about. “Michael J. Fox,” I said.

“Michael J. Who?” said Lou, but she was smiling like the cat eating a canary sandwich. “Who’re you talking about?” After dinner, Dre went off to meet Joker and Moska. Lou paid the bill and we walked off to the Sherman Oaks Park, ambling hand in hand. It was early December, and the sun was below the tree line, a dark romantic green cast to the dying light. There was a chill to the air, but the park was still populated: joggers puffed as they did their rounds of the track or the fields; on the southeast corner children noisily played on swings and got dizzy on the merry-go-round; a Little League game was taking place under strong night lamps in the distance on the westside. We chose a picnic table and sat, staring at each other in the failing light. “Do you me yet?” asked Lou. I nodded slowly. “I you. But not everything about you.” “,” she said, her head angled, her eyes staring into mine as if she were trying to find something in them. Suddenly she smiled. “Do you know what your new name is?” I grinned as my eyes grew unfocused with the effort of ing. “Swanwick Rivery?” “Swanwick Rivery,” she agreed. I looked intensely into her eyes. “Know what your new name is?” I asked gently. “No. What is my new name?” “Endriss. Endriss Rivery.” She nodded and smiled, leaned back and slipped a cigarette out from her packet. “Are you Endriss and Lou?” “No. Just Endriss. And if you’re still Ricky, that’ll .”

“How long have you been you?” “Three months and five days after my tenth birthday.” “It took you seven years to find me?” She nodded, studying my face. “Ten years to find me, and seven years to find you. I had an idea of your general location, but it’s not easy being born into these bodies and then having to wait for the coding to kick in.” “Endriss,” I said again, testing the syllables for their familiarity. “I need you to concentrate. If you don’t , it’ll come later, believe me, but it can’t wait. We knew that something had gone wrong when we failed to secure this timeline, but we had no clue. We came to suspect that a splinter faction from within MESA itself had been transplanted. We think they somehow managed to corrupt your shadow DNA, which is why you were Ricky Cervantes for so long. But I’ve been working on trying to restore your original code transcription.” “Slow down. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I swallowed dryly. “Meza?” “The Atlas. The Metaversal Epiphytic Spaciotemporal Atlas. M-E-S-A. The outfit we work for.” I chewed the inside corner of my mouth, my eyes unfocused as I searched for a niche in my mind that might contain this outlandish information. “Noooo,” I said slowly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She nodded again. “Of course. I know. It’ll come back, trust me. Little by little. As long as you know who I am.” I did and I didn’t, not really. We were lovers now, but this blending of dual personalities had no clear boundaries, and, yes, it felt like we’d been lovers forever, but how could that be? Okay, lovers before, once upon a time, yes, but where had that been? When had that been? Or was I simply feeling the bonding effect of the recent sex, filtered through whatever it was in my system changing my physiology?

And married? I should have ed something like that. “I saw angels,” I said, apropos of nothing, “and the world was coming to an end.” “Yes. That’s the nanoglobular enzymes slowly repairing your corrupted code. Your identity. It’s restructuring your DNA, steeping through you like an infusion of tea in heated water.” She smiled. “You’re beginning to taste like Swanwick.” I felt like a walking Picasso. Some fragments of information felt like splinters of ice falling and locking into place, but then melting away, an impossible and complicated puzzle unsuccessfully trying to fit itself together. “Don’t think about it right now, baby. Let’s go home.” I stood up and looked around me. Somehow a disproportionate amount of time had elapsed, and it was late. There were people still in the park, but not many. The floodlights to the west remained on but the Little League baseball diamond was abandoned. A few hardy stars to the east and above shone cavalierly in the moonless sky. Suddenly the baseball field lights died without preamble, and we were in darkness, only the city’s ambient light outlining us. “Let’s go home.”

Home turned out to be a delightful 2-story Palladian villa-style matchbox hidden away in the Sherman Oaks hills. “It’s ours,” she said.

I was in a dream. For so long I’d been Ricky Cervantes, el Lunatico: 14 years old, tenth grader, working at menial after-school jobs, the ugliest boy in the San Fernando Valley. In a few months I’d morphed into someone else, someone I’d always wished I could be. With a house and a girlfriend. I should have been ecstatic. I mean, I was. “This timeline is not identical to ours,” clarified Lou—no, Endriss. “Hell, it’s not even our time, let alone our timeline. But there’s enough consonance for predictability to work in our favor. Up to a certain point, our histories are parallel.” She had helped me piece together that I’d been sent from the unimaginably distant future of a far removed, multiversal nodal bubble, to secure a hiding place for fleeing refugees. Our future was in the process of being evacuated, our pocket reality systematically unstitched. Other hiding places were simultaneously being secured for similar limited and invisible occupation. It all sounded familiar, not really as bizarre as it should have, which made me think that I was recovering memories. But that was the problem. I was usually “ing” after Endriss—no, Lou—had told me about them. “We’re worth about twenty-five million dollars so far,” said Lou one evening. We floated in the heated swimming pool, arms draped along the curving edge of concrete and tile, legs paddling lazily. “And we’re just getting started.” The lights in the pool wavered jaggedly fluid, like drunken lightning. “And it’s just the two of us?” She entwined her legs with mine. “Well. For now.” The wealth was distributed in various names and alter egos that belonged to the two of us, carefully prepared with power of attorneys and court-filed and conformed documents naming us as t owners with survivorship rights. I was given the names of our domestic and international attorneys, necessary nonMESA business associates, and code numbers, s and vital statistics and other portfolio details to be memorized and safeguarded. “Your ID’s will be ready in a few days,” Endriss told me, new photographs of

me having been taken to be cropped and pasted and laminated by whoever it was that did our dirty work. ports, licenses, fingerprint cards authorizing credit lines and credit cards, birth certificates, business précis, resumes, degrees and club hips. “What if I want to keep on being Ricky Cervantes?” “I suppose you could be anyone you want,” she said airly, kissing me on the cheek, neck, shoulder. “You could remain Ricky Cervantes for some things. I mean, we just can’t kill you off, can we? We can’t afford to be careless.” “Women and children can be careless,” I said in my best Marlon-Brando-withcotton-in-his-cheeks imitation. “But time travelers and universe hoppers can’t afford to be careless.” “Right. So Ricardo Ruiz Cervantes remains alive and well, high school dropout, lateral drifter, hitchhiker and poet, as elusive as Howard Hughes.” “Why dropout?” “You don’t look 14 anymore. You look 21. You just can’t stay in high school anymore. People would talk, you’d attract as much unwanted attention that way as if we simply erased you. And you can’t just evaporate. We need to be careful,” she repeated. We owned percentages of IBM and Standard Oil, a varied and growing stock portfolio, and owned a number of patents that would bloom at paced out intervals. Our names—or rather, the names of our entrepreneurial shell identities, for on paper we couldn’t be Endriss or Swanwick, either—were all around the globe. Nothing new or outlandish, lots of tie-ins to old money. The plan was for us to become invisible, to melt into the warp and woof of this world. We were a consortium, a society of, as the Mexicans termed it, anonymous identities. Sociedad Anónima. Lou clarified for me that identity codes weren’t normally activated in agents until entering their teens. It was a safety feature, she said, a common sense protocol in local coloration and avoiding detection. The machinations of fiveyear-old MESA agents would raise too many eyebrows, focusing an unwelcome spotlight.

“Where should we go?” I said. “Everywhere. Nowhere. We can stay here for a while, catch our breath. But eventually we should leave. I doubt if even your mother would recognize you now.” This caused me a maudlin pang that lingered longer than it should have. “You said someone might be looking for me?” “It’s a precaution. Secrecy is the name of the game.” “Who are we on the lookout for?” “No way to know,” she said, running a finger up the inside of my thigh, “exactly.” It could be any of a list of candidates. Not everyone had been happy when MESA had decided to disappear into its own belly button, close up shop and disappear. It was rumored that something terrible had happened that had shaken the agency, and it had made a principled decision that time travel and multiversal hopping was far too dangerous a thing to both continue doing, or to even delegate to others. It was a power that no one should have, and the delegates to the Congress of the Black Swan had reached a consensus. But outside the eschered defenses of the Bureau of Multiplicities no one seemed to know—or would say—what terrible occurrence had caused the all-powerful and all-knowing MESA to commit to such an unprecedented, unanimous and irrevocable act. Earth’s cradle solar system had long become a ghosting sector of the galaxy, but it was no accident that the Atlas had established itself there. But now the last remaining citizenry were to be relocated to other worlds around other stars. Others were to take up lives in the unspecified past, and yet others we assigned to parallel universes. An army of agents like me had been sent out to do the seed labor antecedent to the actual relocations. Although we were talking about a small fraction of humanity, it still numbered nearly a billion souls. All this was disionately explained to me by Endriss, for my memory was porous, unstable and erratic, treacherous. Even with such detail, however, I got

the impression that there was something she was holding back. Lovers and partners, I trusted that she would tell me what needed to be known at the appropriate time. I ran my fingers over Lou’s immersed body, delighting in the feel of skin against skin. My heart thumped with a lively beat, and I was drunk in the novelty of so much sensuality. This was to be my new world and my new life, for there would be no going back once the MESA closed up shop. When I wasn’t busy being Swanwick Rivery I was busy envying him. And again thought of my mother, my siblings, my friends. Ricky’s mother and siblings. “Hey. My stepdad. You think he did this to me?” “What? A saboteur?” She bit her lower lip, squinting at a reflection of the pool’s quivering surface. Lou abruptly pulled herself out of the pool with noisy, gurgling abruptness, trailing a thinning garment of water streaming off her delicious nudity. She dried her hair with a towel and donned a thick robe of white cotton. “How ’bout Pat?” “No,” she said. “He’s just a common bully.” “Well, who then?” I followed Lou out of the pool, pulling on a kaftan stained with tiny cobalt blue designs. I followed her into the kitchen where she was pouring two glasses of a 1961 Bordeaux she’d uncorked earlier. “You said you were sent back to rescue me.” I took a sip of the wine, which was a deep, dazzling intense ruby. It was an immature wine which would one day attain a complex bouquet of crystallized aromas. But it was splendid nonetheless. As if seeing myself from afar, I smiled. This is Ricky thinking Swanwick thoughts.

“How did you find me?” I asked, smacking my lips lightly. Endriss set her wineglass down, savoring a mouthful. She audibly swallowed and said, “Isotope beacon in your host’s DNA.” “If you were sent to find me, why’d they send you first? Before I’d arrived, I mean.” I’d been born in 1954. Lou had been born in 1951. She smiled, her eyes hooded and dark, like the back of a cobra’s head. “It doesn’t work that way. I wasn’t sent first. You were sent first. I was just sent back to a nodal point before your arrival. But they sent me after they’d lost you.” “How’d they know they lost me?” “When you didn’t them?” She took a smaller sip, inclined her head, adding, “That. And when a reality is altered, it ripples a certain way. Raw, untouched reality has a signature wavelength, but tampering creates disturbances commensurate with the quality of change.” She looked up at me. “But I’m guessing. They didn’t tell me any of this.” “When did we get married?” “We were part of an artifact run on what’s left of Jupiter. The starship captain performed the ceremony.” “What was his name?” “Her name. You really don’t ? She was your friend, Marceline Hazelwood.” There was a lot I didn’t . I’d been awake as me—Swanwick Rivery— for a short time, and the transformation was, as far as I could tell, closer to the beginning than to the end product. Mostly I felt more like a Ricky than a Swanwick, but I was amassing a trove of memories that came from the latter. Maybe this is as good as it gets, I thought, fragments of identity, knowledge and understanding still shivering into existence. I was ing with a befuddling clarity byzantine and internecine rivalries, alliances and betrayals between the privileged Courts of Baaljem and the families of the Mandelbrot Protectorate. How did I fit in all of this?

What thread of identity, or understanding, unites a caterpillar and a butterfly? And how, I wondered, did such a selfless, principled and humanitarian decision as that made by the Atlas to forsake the powers of Gods come from such a duplicitous stew? What were the mechanics of disappearing? Lou kissed me out of my reverie, and I savored the complex bouquet of crystallized aromas. The taste of her tongue was long and fresh in the mouth. I looked further inward. I did us from the other side of now, as a couple, but not a marriage, and it was with a free-floating sense of anxiety, such as that which might be caused by some abandonment or cuckoldry. Was it Ricky channeling Swanwick that gave rise to these feelings? Or had something happened elsewhen to make me insecure? Under Lou’s warm and physical rapport, this feeling was lingering at the boundaries of my focused awareness, just outside some perceptual radar. But I could feel it there in the wings, staring at me when I wasn’t looking. I felt Ricky Cervantes effervescing into Swanwick Rivery, the synaptic connections bringing new parts of my identity with the quiet force of recall, as if ing where I’d left a set of keys I’d misplaced. The more Swanwick occupied me, the more nostalgic I felt about my former life. Modern Spanish drama, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Bob’s Big Boy hamburger, salmon steak sandwiches with strawberry jam and mayonnaise, a mix of root beer, Coke and orange soda, bosomy and sensually lipped women with small, almondine eyes, the poetry of Cendrars and Neruda, Marvel comics and the Catholic Church and original sin, Walt Disney, my mother Sally, and my heartbreaking siblings, who felt more like children to me now. And Dre? Andre Grijalva. Grandpa. “Isn’t there something we can do for him?” I asked Endriss, trying to sound as businesslike as possible. “Nothing tailored to what he has,” she said distractedly. “And the nanotech you used to restore me?” I asked. “When I was decanted into this body—as a newborn, you know—it was also configured into my hemoglobin as sleeper code. It’s in my blood now, still,

foreign enger script activated by combinations: exposure to air, the target host’s saliva, sugar molecule packets.” She poured us both more wine. “In a glass of “That would be you, darling.” “Why didn’t it affect you?” She smiled demurely. “I’m immune.” “Let’s tailor it for Dre. To alter his condition, give him more life, a normal life.” “Well. It could be done. But not by me. Not in this time. And it’s not in my job description.” She didn’t say it glibly, but was merely pointing out the obvious. We were, essentially, Atlas facilitators, not architects but drones accumulating the materials on the construction site. We were building a house, so to speak, designed by others. “Unless the directorate sends nanogloben tailored to your friend’s DNA,” she added, noting, no doubt, the frustrated look on my face, “we can’t help him.” “They could if they wanted to,” I said. I could hear the petulance in my own voice. “Are you being serious?” She took a small sip of Bordeaux and said, “It’s very, very hard to alter the fabric of reality.” “How hard?” I asked. “It was done to me, right?” Lou stopped moving and turned to give me a somewhat funny look, examining my face as if an insect were crawling across it. “What about Pat Glore?” I asked. “What did you do to him? How did you change the fabric of his reality?” “I didn’t say it couldn’t be changed, only that it’s hard. But Pat? I just let him kiss me,” she said, growing exasperated. “I bit my own lip, drew blood, and let him taste it.”

“Are you serious?” Her eyes held mine for long, steady seconds. Pat Glore’s body was at war with itself, she said. Before the end of the spring, a virulent and voracious chemical reaction would multiply the mass of his body, effectively, grotesquely, and very painfully killing him. I should have felt sorry for him, but instead I felt a familiar sense of betrayal. The same would happen to Dre if he received my nanogloben. “We’re at war,” she said angrily, and her words resonated within me, but I didn’t know what war she was referring to. She shook her head vigorously as if ing something, as if waking up, her eyes shining with a weird, malevolent glee, and it brought back odd, uncomfortable shards of memory. “Look at the bright side,” she said. “With his disability Dre won’t be sent to fight and die in Vietnam.” “Oh, hell, the war’s over in five years anyway.” “Well. That’s enough time to die.” Endriss held a hand in front of her face, examining her nails. “Be careful, Swanwick. You’re being sentimental.” And then it clicked, and I felt what she’d been saying. We were soldiers. We were at war. But with whom? “What do you think we’re doing here?” asked Lou, noting the change in me. “We’re not on vacation.” “We’re here to rape and pillage. We’re no better than vampires.” “You’re acting out of character.” “Out of character? Are we speaking from experience?” She smiled with eyes that were smoldering. “Look. I don’t know what you do or do not . But the fact is that what happened happened. If I could turn

back the hands of time and take it back, I would, but I can’t.” I didn’t know what to say. I was angry over a series of betrayals I couldn’t recall, caught in the undertow of the full emotive forces of oppressive feelings detached from the memories which gave rise to them. “Molotov!” I swore, lost and feeling that I was suffocating on my own ignorance. I grabbed at my leather jacket draped on the back of a chair, and left to air myself out.

On a whim I took a long bus ride that dropped me off at the San Fernando City Mall. It was a school night, the stores closing early, but there were still people and cars threading the streets. I ed a liquor store where I’d bought paperbacks as a kid and a pawnshop where I gotten my first guitar. Heels clicking through the brisk nightfall, my mind cooled and cleared a measure, imitating the orderly and calming cadence of my step. Unbidden stratagems and patterns obliquely began to suggest themselves. Apparently I was of some importance, but just how important? Not a king, not a bishop, maybe not even a horse. A castle? A pawn? Well, important enough for Lou—Endriss (was Rivery really her last name?)—to have sought me out, bringing me a message from, if not the future, as she said, from somewhere, from someone, from somewhen. I was important enough to have been sent back to begin with, on what must have been a detailed, coordinated assignment. Important enough for someone to have tampered with that mission, crippling my body and mind in order to derail me. My mission? To set up the first beachhead here-and-now, generate the wealth to create a cover story and a place for a nation of time traveling, universe hopping refugees to establish a new home. A new home for the employees—and their families—of the Metaversal Epiphytic Spaciotemporal Atlas. If this was only one location for the MESA refugees, only one of many such nodal points, what would anyone gain by sabotaging me? What would they hope to accomplish? Steal this opportunity from us? To do what with it? Was there

something here of unique value, that couldn’t be obtained elsewhere? We—or rather Endriss—had done a lot of the ground work already. We were building a nest. A ready-made nest for someone to swoop in and steal from us? Worth the trouble, the expense? Maybe. Perhaps there had been other locations as well, stolen and appropriated from MESA. If so, the Atlas would want to know how they were being taken away from us. By whom, how, and for what? The most likely candidate for a thief and traitor was for it to be someone from within MESA itself, for what other way could the usurpers even know about the opportunities, the targets, the timing of these things? Someone with insider information. Usurpers (for that is how I began to think of them), parasitic in nature, a cold and calculating guerilla movement living off the fat of the land, cleverly taking the Atlas’ own energy and directing it against itself. But again, for what purpose? A group of refugees who wanted to remain anonymous from an already anonymous, secretive cabal? And why were they stalling, why such half-measures? Why not simply kill me outright, ensure my complete fiasco? And Endriss, too, now that she’d done a lot of my work for me. So it was obvious. We were wanted alive. Toward what possible end? For something that we know, perhaps, or something that we’re carrying? Who was it who would take the time—not to mention expend the obscenely immense amounts of energy required to send a mere Trojan nanocule through an artificial wormhole to create a temporal agent—to find us? Who, aside from the Atlas, could even do such a thing? No one, was my guess. Again the finger pointed at a traitor from within. My mother? My stepdad? Pat Glore, Mr. Hamm, my geometry teacher, the librarian . . . ? Dre.

Lou. If Lou were the mole, could I stop her? Clever of the Usurpers to pit husband against wife. But what would motivate her to betray me, to betray the Atlas? And just when you think you’re beginning to know someone. On autopilot, my feet stopped at the windows of Sobel’s, dim lights rubbing a pale gold onto the clothes on display. Most of their cachet had worn off since the days they had sold Richie Valens the black wool cloth suit he was wearing on that fateful airplane ride to immortality. I stood iring a double breasted Mediterranean blue pinstripe suit that looked like something Paul McCartney had once worn in a photograph I’d seen in a magazine. Suddenly my vision shifted to and snagged on my own reflection in the window looking glass. With an artist’s sensitive eye you could find the Ricky Cervantes still in me, but I was like a house that has gone through a complete makeover. My hair no longer bunched up greasily, stringy and limp, but had grown into a thick, wavy mane that fell with a casual artistry. I had all my teeth again, and they were straight, strong and annoyingly photogenic. I felt the narcissistic tingle a young school girl must feel examining her budding breasts while watching herself in the mirror. The skin of my face was smooth, chestnut hued and rosy at the cheeks, my eyes still large but now symmetrical, focused, limpid and bright. My body was no longer boney and angular, but with a lean pantherish grace tagging me as a young athlete, or better yet, imbuing me with the insouciance of a rocker. I was still wearing the black scuffed leather jacket that Lou had given to me, with workers’ boots whose laces were pretentiously left undone. It would no longer do to dress like an affected teenager. New clothes were in order. I winked at myself and moved on. It felt good to walk, but eventually I turned south again, heading toward Sepulveda Boulevard, thinking to catch a bus back to the Sherman Oaks hills. I needed to get a car, or a motorcycle, and idly wondered if I would be returning to Van Nuys High, or making a clean break with this life. Taking Brand Boulevard towards Sepulveda, I realized I would by Brand Park. Dre and I used to hang out there a lot during a one-year stint at San Fernando Junior High, also on Brand.

As I neared Memory Garden, I heard the low fidelity static of a small transistor radio. A song by the Four Tops was saying something about how this was really the same old song, but that since love was gone, the meaning had changed. “Órale, buey.” Moska? He was crouched lithely like a Japanese geisha serving tea, waving me over with one hand and offering me a brown bottle of Mexican beer with the other. Despite my surprise and wariness, I had to smile. A ing car took one of the many sharp curves bordering the park, bathing us in a brushing of harsh headlights. “Órale.” “Wurkeen out, esse?” The last line was delivered with sing-song approval. At my approach a flock of invisible but noisy birds lifted in unison from the grass and flew an upward spiraling escape. I heard them relocating to another section of the park. “Luke-een gude, vato.” I took a long series of gulps of ice-chilled Tecate. I could smell the burn of filterless Pall Malls and yesca in the air. Despite feeling wary, footloose and itchy, I smiled, savoring the beer. The night’s cool had long since drained the blood from my head, but I felt an anxious tingling returning to my extremities. I yawned nervously. “Know what your new name is?” I turned to the voice behind me. It was Dre. He looked even more tired and wraithlike since I’d last seen him a week earlier. He was wearing a large J.C. Penny’s tee shirt that exposed his pale, skinny brown arms, and his khaki pants were too large, the cuffs folded up over his black and white Converse. His wispy hair danced lightly with the mild breeze, but his eyes, despite their fragile and bruised tiredness, shone with an amused, knowing light. “What?” I said. “What’s my new name?” “Road Runner.”

“Yeah? Know what your new name is?” Dre stared at me with lowered chin. “No. What’s my new name?” “Wile E. Coyote.” He pursed his lips and nodded, quick little knowing nods. “Nah. That’s not me.” “So who wants me dead, Wile E.?” “Besides your stepfather?” “Besides you.” His smile was almost apologetic as he looked at his shoes and shook his head. “That’s not what I’m here for.” “Why are you here?” “What I’ve always been here for. To be your shadow. Make sure you dot your i’s and cross your t’s and stay out of trouble. I’m more like Angel Joseph in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life.’” “Didn’t do too good of a job. Where were you when Pat Glore was kicking my ass?” “My job was to watch your back for real dangers. Pat Glore’s nobody. Believe me, he’s the least of your problems.” “Yeah, I guess, considering that my DNA’s been trashed for 14 years,” I said, but then the hair on the nape of my neck prickled as it just then occurred to me that the very same might have been done to Dre, too. I took a last sip of beer and set the bottle on the concrete apron under a wooden bench. “Why are you here?” I said.

“We work for the same people, you and I.” If Dre were really MESA, then he’d want exactly the same thing I did: to see who would show up, what would happen next. To know who the Usurpers were. “Who did this to us, Dre?” “I don’t have the answer to that. I don’t even know if the same people did it. I it, the symmetry of it was poetic. Our enemies seem to have a sense of humor.” “I don’t think the last 14 years of my life have been very funny.” “Hell, you think I don’t know? Shit. Look at me. But you: look at you. You look pretty good now.” “Are our paymasters going to reward you, Dre, now that it’s over?” “Over? This isn’t over, Swanwick.” My skin pebbled with creepy surprise hearing Dre use my real name. What was his? Who was he really? “I’m a little concerned, though,” he said, correctly reading the light in my eyes and the tiny changes in my expressions, “that Endriss is here.” Everything slithered a degree smaller and tighter: my eyes, the knot in my stomach, my sphincter, the pores of my face, my breath. I didn’t know what to say. “We’re creatures of habit, Swanwick. Don’t you still feel ugly inside? Even now don’t you still feel unwanted? Betrayed? Cuckolded?” I felt like I’d stopped breathing. “Who sent you?” I asked. He stared at me for a moment before grinning hugely. “Why, you did. You don’t , do you?” “I don’t think you’re really with MESA.”

Dre—for it was hard not to still think of him as my old high school friend— shrugged, his hands in the pockets of his pants. “Well, it doesn’t much matter what either of us thinks. Ricky. One of the things I’ve learned working for the Atlas is that there is a circularity to things. We come to places that only look like the places we’ve been to before. Life is an ever ascending spiral that never really ends. But it’s all new, you know?” On a flicker of intuition, I said, “Well, it doesn’t look like you’re afraid of me anymore.” “Afraid?” said Dre as if I’d told him his mother had vaginal warts. “What are you talking about?” “You don’t ,” I parodied, on a whim, “do you?” “Afraid? No, not afraid. If anything, I’m tired. Tired of being the Hunchback of Notre Dame,” he said, moving a few feet backwards. “Tired of this goddamned body,” he whispered harshly, his eyes glassy and reddish, hooded. “Not much of a disguise, Farfan.” He laughed out loud at the sound of that name. “Man it’s been a long time since I’ve been called that,” he said, pulling out a hand from his pocket and pointing what I thought was a finger at me. “Doesn’t even feel like my name anymore, you know?” He shook his head. “But most of all, I hate this goddamn timeline. Jabberwok, I miss home.” I saw that his right hand held something after all, but I couldn’t tell what. A flickering bead of red light like that of a laser pencil crisscrossed my face, snagging on my blinking, mystified pupils. Unthinkingly I dropped into a natural fighter’s crouch, right foot pointing forward, left foot back and pointed out at a 90 degree angle, an adrenaline dump winding me up for a pounce. Everything grew colorful, bright, dense and detailed, my nerves singing with a cleansing intensity. “Don’t try anything stupid, Ricky.” Making a gargantuan effort, and accessing deep funds of discipline previously

hidden from me, I took several slow, deep breaths, eyes wide and hot, centering my chi and willing my thundering heart to calm, standing down. “Why not kill me,” I asked, “instead of this long charade?” “That’s because Grandpa here,” said Lou Ocheltree/Endriss Rivery as she walked out from behind one of the paint-flaked concrete arches holding up the rose trellis, “has been waiting for me to show up.” She pointed something at Dre that streaked his face with the same laser light that had danced on mine, now on hers, simultaneously pointing her chin at him. “I’d think twice before killing Ricky, Grandpa.” “My name’s not Grandpa, bitch.” I stood and watched the unfolding of events, fascinated and frightened. Even if neither one of them intended to kill me—and I wasn’t so sure of that, yet—I’d surely be taken out in any cross-fire. (What did those things fire?) And just when I was beginning to feel good about myself. I could feel my bowie knife in its sheath against my body on the right side of my pant’s waist, hidden by my jacket. I made no move for it. I was fascinated that both Dre and Lou carried compact and sophisticated weapons. How? Had they been somehow sent back, like us, a set of instructions and created on this side of the divide? Head cocked to the side, Endriss said, “Has our friend, Grandpa, brought you up to speed, darling? Has he explained who whittled you down to Ricky Cervantes all this time?” “MESA,” I said slowly, pasty, sticky bubbles of epiphany struggling to the surface. “My bosses at the Atlas. Before I was even sent back.” Dre kept his gentled fist pointed at Endriss, but he looked at me with a subtle surprise, one eyebrow arching ever so slightly. “Why would you say that?” “Bait,” I said. “Sacrificial lamb. They wanted someone to think I’d been

attacked and waylaid after I arrived. My mission must have been, within the appropriate circles, privileged knowledge.” “You’re just making this up as you go,” said Dre. “Well, yeah. I am. But I’m right, aren’t I?” “Know what your new name is?” said Dre, and despite my nerves and apprehension, I couldn’t help myself, I had to smile. “What, Dre? What’s my new name?” “Mister Kite.” “What’s her name, Dre?” I asked, pointing at Lou with my chin. “And why are you here?” I said to Endriss. “She’s Henry the Horse,” said Dre. “She’s here to dance the waltz.” “Something like that,” she acknowledged. “Then that makes you the fool on the hill, Dre.” “You’re the fool, Ricky. Endriss is the traitor. Who better than someone from inside MESA to give you the Judas kiss, boy, and point you out to the Romans?” “I hope you said ‘Roy’.” We were all talking too much, I thought, but were all still standing, which meant they were still touched by doubt. “So dramatic and literary,” said Lou to Dre. Her eyes on mine, she added, “But he is right, honey, I’m sorry to say. MESA has grown soft in the head if they think we all believe this disbanding story of theirs. The truth is they’re just relocating, that’s all. Here.” “No, Endriss,” said Dre. “That’s just what they wanted you to believe. Do you really think they don’t know who you are?” A sudden silence descended with a physical slap, and my ears popped as if the air pressure had changed on the heels of an earsplitting explosion that never

sounded. For seconds I could hear absolutely nothing. Dre’s face grew pale, and his mouth was frantically mouthing something, but all I heard was a dead silence. Then I heard a soft sound like a rustling of leaves or the shattered foaming of an ocean wave, and Dre screamed, a corona of flame rising from his scalp, a purplish pulse blacklighting us in eerie illumination. His hair stood up cartoonishly on end as if some magnetism was trying to lift him off the ground. An airy explosion threw me to the grass. I saw Dre fall to his knees, just as the lights of a car taking a curve framed him in a cone of light, like a circus act, a bloody perspiration misting the air around his temples. His mouth was a soundless “O”, and he looked for all the world like the Edvard Munch caricature, freakish, comic, horrific. He toppled sideways like a felled statue. I found myself face up on the grass, cheeks flushed, an eerie whistling in my ears that hurt. Lou stood about eight feet from me, her arms casually hanging by her side. “Be with me, Swanwick. us.” Even with my diminished hearing—or perhaps because of it—I could tell that she was speaking very loudly, like a stage actress in a live play. I had enough presence of mind to keep my eyes on her. I stood up and brushed myself off, taking a long, deep breath. “You didn’t have to do that.” “Think not? He was going to kill us.” “You,” I said, stretching, twirling my neck, placing both my hands on the small of my back, just behind the hips, stretching sore muscles, grimacing for show. I felt for my knife with my right hand. “He was going to kill you.” “And that was OK with you?” she said with wifely anger. “Both of us, Swanwick. That’s how the ham-fisted justice of MESA works.” “And you trust me?” I firmly grasped the bone handle of the knife, easing it out of the sheath. A misting of memory swirled into definition, and suddenly, I ed everything about Endriss. We were married. “I’m Atlas,” I said loudly.

We stared into each other’s eyes, at last in perfect sync, riffing on one of the various scripts we’d tried to anticipate, but the fact that everything was playing out with clockwork predictability gave neither of us any satisfaction or release. She narrowed her gaze unhappily with the sacrifice she was about to make, but resigned to the fact that there was no other way. If I could have taken the cup from her, I would have, but then everything would eventually unravel, and then there would be absolutely no chance of our being together again, as husband and wife. This was simultaneously our only way out and back in again. I could see her swallow as she raised her hand and pointed at me. We were performing for an unseen audience. “Get down!” shrieked a voice just behind Endriss. Her weapon swung away from me as her body twirled in a ballet of evasion to my right that I saw unfurling with icy slowness, my knife flying out of my hand at the moving target of her breast as I danced to the left. It shot past her and sank into the yielding pith of the post holding up the garden arbor, just as an arterial stream of light exploded from her fist, illuminating the garden with a hyperreal clarity, the night sky incongruously a powdery eggshell blue and the verdure around us a vivid internally lit emerald. This time I completely lost consciousness.

When I came to, all was quiet. I was face up on the ground, my mind blank. I heard the trebly singing of nightbirds mingling with soft, city sounds. My lightblinded eyes slowly adjusted to the dark and my mind ever so slowly seeped back into my skull. I sat up but could not turn my head without a sharp, branching pain. A second silence fell, and I found a body behind me, intact but unmoving. It was Moska. His body was crumpled in angles inconsistent with the existence of a skeleton. He looked asleep and peaceful, but I verified that he was neither. I picked up whatever weapon Dre had used, respectfully and cautiously. It was the size of a very thin, rectangular cigarette lighter that might have been designed by Man Ray, stylish, whimsical, a toy. While pocketing Dre’s “lighter” and surveying the scene, I found Endriss.

She was face down, the ends of her short hair bristling with the lingering static charge in the air. Grief and regret and guilt dueled as I kneeled and took her in my arms, turning her over. Like Moska, she had no breath. Her eyes were closed, and she also looked peaceful, the faintest of smiles touching her face. Like Moska, her skeletal structure seemed gone. She began to melt in my arms like a surrealist’s watch made of hot, cooling taffy. I gently emptied her pockets, taking her wallet, money, car and house keys. As I set her down, kneeling and kissing her one last time, something fell from her limp grasp, bouncing on the grass. A duplicate “lighter” like the one I’d taken from Dre. I sat for an unmeasured span of time, practicing no-mind, but when I heard the distant wail of a police siren, I came back into my body. I heard approaching voices. As it turned out, both sets of sounds ed me by. I stood up, retrieved my knife, and looked around for Endriss’ assassin. “Sir,” came a whispered cry. “Sir.” Pat Glore, my elementary and junior high school nemesis, lay crumpled in a corner of the Memory Garden. His left eye was streaked with rivulets of blood which glistened a wet black by the shadows of the leafy trees around us. Face up, he lifted his upper torso off the ground, balancing on his elbows. “Are you okay?” he croaked. “Jesus, Pat,” I said, kneeling by his side, lifting and cradling him in my arms. “Molotov.” I noted that the blood was streaming from above his left eyebrow, a source of a rich network of capillaries. The wound looked worse than it was. “Are you okay, sir?” he said in a quiet voice, then more forcefully: “Are you okay?” His head was round, his face puffy, making him look like Charlie Brown. I ed what Lou had said about infecting him with the nanogloben tailored for me. “Yes,” I said, smiling at his concern, “I’m okay.” “Just a few minutes, colonel,” he said. “It’s okay.”

“Are they dead? Sir.” I nodded. “Yes. Ah. Report.” His cough was dry and prolonged. Perhaps he’d suffered internal damage. “I need an assessment.” “Sir.” “I’m still missing pieces. Don’t assume I know anything.” “Understood, sir.” He closed his eyes. “Pat!” I barked, and his eyes irised widely, questioning. “MESA, sir. We’ve lost bases to these . . . interlopers. Agents, safe worlds, plans, blueprints, ordnance. Hardware, computers. Stolen.” “Go on.” “MESA knows we have rogue agents. On the inside. They suspect this organization is trying to set up an alternative. To the Atlas.” “I thought we were disbanding.” He smiled and coughed anew. “That’s what we’ve said, yes. But Endriss is right. Nobody believes it.” “A ruse?” He nodded, swallowed dryly, apparently with some pain. “What the Atlas is really concerned about is technology theft, defecting scientists. A rival start up.” “Do we know who?” “We do,” he said, grimacing. “Kronokaze.” “What?” I was impressed and should not have been surprised. Secrets are more

unstable than hadron particles. “Kronokaze, sir. The saboteurs. Usurpers. Thieves.” “Kronokaze,” I said slowly, studying his face. “We don’t know the individuals behind the coup. Not yet. But they have to be inside and very close.” He coughed once, fading again. “Endriss.” “Endriss what?” “That’s why.” “Why what?” “They sent you. Colonel.” “What do you mean?” “She is—was—Atlas, like you. Like me. Only she wouldn’t have known that you were sent back already disabled. The traitor was to believe that you were compromised after that. After coming through. That was the cover. That was the bait.” “Why wasn’t . . . ?” I started to ask why I had not been informed, but I was still playing to an invisible audience, just in case. I understood the wisdom behind the move, of the trick-within-a-ruse-within-a-lie, designed to unravel any conspiracy, unmask any traitor, surreptitiously injecting invisible dye in the mix, to see whose hands would glow under the incriminating blacklight. But I had to continue playing my role. Pat looked sleepy. “The mission was to find you, revive you. Revive the mission.” “Right. Which Endriss did.” “Yes. But she was working at cross-purposes. Our mission was her cover. I mean, who would guess?” “MESA versus MESA.”

“Wife against husband.” I nodded with heartfelt anguish. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But we still don’t know who’s calling the shots. Who sent her.” “She was going to kill you.” “Maybe you should’ve just disabled her. For questioning.” I studied his face carefully. “Now we’ll never know.” “She was going to kill you, sir,” he repeated, but this time with a quiet chagrin, acknowledging the faux pas and the setback. “I’m sorry.” I looked over to Endriss’ melting corpse. “Could you help me up, sir? I think I’ve broken some ribs.” “Of course.” “I still need to report.” To the Star Council, I knew, via a transdimensional neutrino array evolved from programming script in Pat’s cortex: Beachhead established, Swanwick Rivery resurrected, Enriss terminated, operation sanitized, mission back online. Bad guys still on the loose, continue looking. Elsewhere. We’ll keep our eyes peeled, over and out. “How bad are you injured?” I said with a look of concern. “Maybe you should report before we move you.” He agreed and quietly closed his eyes, pursed his lips, and frowned, transmitting. Form and content. I smiled and nodded, ing Lou’s little lecture on aesthetics. It was easy to forget that the body is, if not deus ex, certainly machina, capable of so such incredible and useful plasticity. It was quick enough, but Pat was bedsheet white when done.

“Okay,” I said as we heaved him upward together and he hopped upright with a grunt of pain, “up we go.” “I’ll be okay so long as . . . .” he started to say, but two things stopped him. He was attacked by a violent coughing fit that ceased abruptly on a truncated intake of breath as I sank my serrated 8-inch through his ribcage and into his heart, his expression open, innocent and shocked, congealed in a rictus of stunned incomprehension. A burp and a bubble of blood, and he was dead. No matter how malleable and useful, alas, plasticity invariably was vulnerable to defeat, working against itself. I laid him back down and closed his eyes.

I got the shakes, badly, my body catching up with the rest of me. But that only lasted a few minutes, Swanwick Rivery steeping deeply through me, the ghost of a fascistic sense of mission filling me with a muscular impatience, a need to physically move. Across a gulf of space and time there was another Endriss Rivery, I reflected, the wife from whom a seed had been stolen to make my Lou Ocheltree. The real me was out there, too, but I smiled, because to me I was the real one. Lou’s sacrifice had been an obfuscatory necessity, like our loud stage conversations, meant for unknown witnesses such as Pat, false notes meant to throw MESA off our scent. It was important that we continue to buy time until it was ours to give away. All things are possible in the infinite rainbow of realities that are bundled together in this ultimately indivisible universe. But that was not quite the same thing as saying that everything that was and is and will be is already out there, somewhere. There is still work to be done. On this world, under this night sky, Kronokaze would build a home, a safehouse. I felt the lonely, lovely spiral of a gentle sadness vaporizing through my heart. I cast a last glance at Endriss, hoping that, in one fashion or other, I would have her back again. I didn’t know exactly when or precisely how, nor what her reincarnation would or would not know. Would she me? Or would I have to win her as she’d won me? I would place my trust, as she’d warned me, not in the message, but in the messenger. Look for messengers you can rely on, not credos to live or die for. The living and the dying come either way, no matter

what you do or do not believe in. You need to know who to trust. From across the gulf of infinity I felt a quiet certitude that there is a place and a time, a somewhere, a somewhen, where our deaths are pondered and played like black and white stones in a game of wéiqí. I wondered with a fluttery feel in my stomach if Endriss might in fact already be here, somewhere. A newborn? A child? A young woman, awaiting a kiss that would wake her up? It was the least Kronokaze could do for her. No, I thought, correcting myself. It was the least Swanwick Rivery could do for her. And for me. It was time to go. I stretched and walked quickly, toward home with new found purpose. I looked to see that I wasn’t being followed. Whether I was or not, I had to assume that I was not yet free. I’d been asleep long enough. I couldn’t afford anymore surprises.

THE CRYSTAL HEART

I.

YESTERDAY, THE BLACK dawn will arrive. You will stretch out on the unmade bed like you have so many times before, and never question the fact that it may not be yours. You will try to hide within its ruffled sheets and draw the whiteness to your lips, hoping to transfer the morning kiss of derelict stars, dream-carnage and the blue smoke of cigarettes onto the purity of the white. But there will be no trace of the vagabond pentagrams; only a thin smear of brownish phlegm: a paltry legacy of dream’s anesthetic. You, yes you, who always say that you have no need of reverie’s azure veil but always hide behind its semi-permeable logic: you will involuntarily commence the daily ritual of morning’s catalogue: exposed breast, almonds scattered about the floor and bed, an insect crawling by your naked thigh, an ante meridian erection and a horrible taste in your abused mouth. You will catalogue, as if to set in motion a mysterious rhythm, a slow procession that will set your blood to circulating, your leaden arms gesticulating and your sleep-weary eyes fluttering. Yesterday you will curse gates, portals, books, all those objects that open and close, reveal and hide. You will utter blasphemies against doors, for they are so like chameleons: one moment they shelter you from the world; the next, they push you headlong and tumbling into it, like the big muscle of a ruptured vagina impelling a fetus into a cold tin waste bin. But you know no other way. You have learned to wander carelessly between these antipodes: the warm bloodbath of a mother’s womb and the polar regions of the earth, where Love is no longer natural and instinctive, but rather artificial, like justice and gravity, like all the inventions we devise, in order not to be murdered during the night or borne away by the pull of a distant stars

Yes, you will curse silently but vehemently, for it will be in the past’s tomorrow when, before your eyelids have begun to dance and your arms have started to conduct the symphony of the day, he will enter through the door by the side of your bed, he who was once called the Well-born Cynic, the Axiomatic Lover and the Blue-blooded Poet. Through the gauze of your perplexity he will open your eyes for you, he will set multitudes of angels to dance on your bare skull, splintering the bone and releasing all of its music, and teach you the harmonies of an earthly redemption. But it is not the earth and its confines that you wish to dream. You have saved enough train-station schedules, birthday ribbons and bijou ticket stubs to know that Love is nowhere to be found. For you there will be no affection in the handful of wet earth, nor in the failing gray lint from your pocket’s linings. You will brush the dancing seraphs from your hair with a quick swipe of your left hand, never having learned the language of their plea. Knock and ye shall find, they will sing. But you will not listen. Yes. The black dawn will arrive, and it will also , taking with it the knowledge of what is real and what is not.

II.

Just as the traveling months usher in different seasons in their wake, so do the various seasons create (from the basic hues of the elements, from scratch as it were) different states of mind. And within the multiple stations of the calendar, each person can find a semblance of a home, a four-walled room whose boundaries are defined yet beyond the vision’s scope; a place where each pilgrim can shake the dust from his feet and pin his hat to the air. The tourist, for example, finds the nervous sort of composure he seeks in the events and objects which restate the of his contract: a strange hotel room, polyglot and diffused with the noon-day sun of a summer mania, a telephone next to the bed from which he can order another drink. And the example holds true for the monk, who knows that when the night has run its course (and with it, theoretically, the obscurity of his personal torture), he can look forward to its

prolongation, courtesy of Winter and her allies. And so on. We all choose the rooms and the seasons that can enunciate our names with greater clarity. Yet there are those days, renegade hours, when buds appear on dead branches. We think we hear our names called from the next room, but no one has called. Suspicious and confused days, timed with false warnings. Such was the dark and cold morning that I awoke. On this particular dawn, I was empty of desire. Nothing moved within me, there was silence and stillness. “By ion the world is bound, by ion it is released.” I lay on the precipice, stretching my body to the moldings of a window breeze. “Lazarus, come forth,” a voice whispered, and I tried to open my eyes, repeatedly but without any lasting success. I felt no sense of urgency, only confusion, as if, having traveled the great distances of the ocean depths, trying to surface, I’d finally arrived at the water’s lip, only to find a more vast and terrible ocean in the vault of the skies: a dissipating and crumbling stupor flowing into a greater sleep. “Hello?” My voice was soft and cracked, like that of an unrehearsed actor given an unexpected cue. I sat up and tried to focus on the figure that was walking about my room and slowly the realization dawned on me: this was not my room. Everything in it and about it spoke with a familiar tone, but with a familiarity that comes from having dreamt too long a time. I looked about with eyes still too moist and warm to demand clarity, but even through this half-vision, nothing called out to me, nothing spoke and said, “I am yours.” Through the open window: black martyred limbs of barren trees, outstretched in mute supplication, framed by a gray wintry morning. In a corner, a desk cluttered with strange books and scribbled telephone messages; letters bearing foreign stamps and names: Celine, Allende, Eichmann and Susan. Another corner of the room: a dust-covered radio softly issuing scratched and slightly warped melodies. No, this was not my room. “What’d you say?” I asked. By now, I had recognized the person who had entered the room unannounced, who was walking about it as if it were his. “I said: ‘Hazardous to your health.’” He walked calmly over to the radio and sat

on the edge of the bed, next to my bare feet. “You shouldn’t sleep with two different kinds of music at the same time. You’ll only end up by becoming confused. You’ll come to believe that your dreams are just another radio station and vice versa. It’s hazardous to your health.” “Please.” I lit the wrong end of a cigarette. “It’s not that simple. You have to make choices.” “Leave me alone: that’s my choice.” I had managed my second cigarette a bit more gracefully. “Pay attention, worm. No, no, no, no, no, don’t play wounded with me: I’ve seen that act before.” He edged closer to the bed. “Listen,” he whispered, “get dressed, and we’ll go into the next room. There’s a better view of things from there. We’ll be able to talk better from there.” “You can talk better from the . . .” “Just get dressed. Okay?” I pulled on some pants, wrinkled and soiled, and searched for a shirt, but found none. My lethargy was slowly ebbing, making room for hostility. I followed my friend down the hallway. “Have a seat, anywhere.” The room was about half the size of my room, and most of the space was occupied by a large bed covered by an old tattered blanket of faded but beautiful hues. A small decaying wooden table was against the south side of the room, and it was strewn with postcards, pencils and letter openers, pieces of charcoal and obscure publications, old photographs, half-filled inkwells and foreign currency. But above the table there was a large window, glassless and which, by all logic, should have revealed the interior of the adjacent room, the room that I had always, until today, called my own. Instead, through this commonly shared wall, this barrier, this window exposed a tableaux of late winter, a winter swiftly revolving into spring. It was a picture of trees sprouting green, slightly

trembling, and the almost audible cries of a sap being carried on the wind, borne over a country landscape bereft of all the habitual trappings of every city I have ever known, framed by an evening sun filtering through the cumulus clouds. The clouds traveled with no sense of haste. The window’s picture was so calm and quieting that I did not question the illogic of its existence; its logic was a pace beyond the habit of fixed space, and it proclaimed a different kind of reasoning, a logic which was far more important and self-explanatory. It was then that I realized that this was my room. “Architecture has become the devil’s craft,” said my friend, but I wasn’t listening. He continued nonetheless. “Rooms like these: that’s what we build. But no, we should build rooms with all the naturalness of a bear’s cave, with the grave and functional beauty of a bird’s nest. Build something more comparable to the true stature of Man. We men have a history of forgetting ourselves. We lose sight, lose bearings, we become too involved with building towers out of words, playing too many games, building too many labyrinths. We forget that we must eat and feed our children as well. “Look at all the buildings of the world and try to find one that is worthy of being called a home. That’s what civilization has done for us: given us shelter from the world and her elements, but it has also sheltered us from one another and from ourselves. “The time is past, we no longer have to fight and hunt for our daily bread, we no longer have to huddle around the same fire to keep warm. That, you’ll notice, is what religion is for: it is just a reminder of the lost ages when men were all brothers, when condominiums were just some abstract in the mind of a misguided serpent. Curse the day when the first coffee pot boiled, when the first fish that arose from the slimes of the sea lay down to sleep on the shore that was now his home, and was awakened by an alarm clock telling him there was a job to be done, a bus to be caught and a timecard to be punched. On that day, Love died. “She was embalmed, her lipstick and rouge applied and the coffin lid sealed. And she was lowered into the ground, not by a band of angels, not by a distant and forgotten tribe of wandering dreamers, but by those men who learned to store grain in wooden sheds and betrayed the trust of simple animals by slitting their throats: by us.

“No, Love didn’t die when Eve ate the forbidden fruit. She can’t be blamed anyway: she was hungry, after all. No, Love died when the Lord said unto Adam, ‘You are now on your own, and from the sweat of your brow will you give names unto all I have created. Look about you, Adam, and when you gaze upon the oceans, dream of the generators they will one day power, think of the energy she will yield. When you hold a stone in the palm of your printless hand, imagine the courthouses you will one day build in order that you may sanction your lusts. Imagine and give names to all the creations you will not accept from me, make them your own. Go Adam, for now you are alone, truly alone. Invent and create your own world. No one else will do it for you.’ That’s when Love died. “That’s when affection withered away and fell off like the decaying arm of a leper. Love was the tail we once carried about with us to keep our balance. All that remains is the scar, like an umbilical, and we now confuse the scar with the thing we have lost. Love is dead.” “Love is dead,” I repeated after him slowly, distracted and unconvinced. I hadn’t been paying my host his due attention. I had become too involved with the cataloguing of the objects in this room which seemed so familiar yet so new. I was thinking: I have returned home. I had seated myself at the table and was examining a collection of books very neatly arranged in a row on top of it. I picked one up, one that had caught my eye. It was a red-colored volume, slim and its binding unbroken. On its cover was the portrait of a young lady who looked very sad, but it was a sadness which, by nature of its extremity, seemed contrived, affected. It brought to mind the orgasmic stares of Hollywood saints being roasted alive on Catherine wheels, spitting sparks and slowly revolving towards an uncompromised destiny. At the top of the book, in gold lettering, was printed, “Winner of the Rosshalde Award,” and directly beneath that was the novel’s title: The Crystal Heart. When I turned my gaze towards my friend to question him on it, I caught him with a peculiar expression, that wounded look animals assume when, before they die, they forgive and absolve their hunters. “Ah, my friend: what she did for Love . . . .” Ah yes, thought I to myself, what did she do for Love? What was it she did other than give Love a bad name and give its face a cynical twist? She dried Love like an herb, crushed it and powdered it, so she could carry it in a small pouch with her wherever she went so all she would have to do when someone refused her or

attempted to kiss her was to open the little bag and inhale its heady scent, just like those petite bottles of cheap perfume one buys at the stores. And every time she would inhale its fragrance, she would remind herself of the price she had paid for it, as if this were really necessary, for she had saved the receipt, in fact had photocopied it countless times and sent the copies to all of her friends, so that they might also know what an unfortunate and sensitive soul she really was, so that they could indeed see with their own eyes the proof of purchase, so they could see ‘What she did for Love.’ “Leave me alone. I’m tired.” I had wearied of this game. I’d become bored with what everybody was doing for Love and all of her illegitimate children. “Leave me alone. I want to sleep.” My friend, containing his disappointment, stood up, nodded his head and left.

III.

Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. “This letter just came for you.” D. arose from his meditation. He had been engaged in watching a flock of birds, undulating like misplaced letters from a fragmented sentence, disappearing soundlessly beyond a swollen sun caught by the loose-hairs in a linden grove. There was something plaintive about the birds’ flight, a pathetic note which commanded even the most severe of minds towards restless and furtive imagery. It was akin to watching tiny elegant flames licking away a blackened log. Lord, Behold, he whom thou lovest is sick. “From who?” “It doesn’t say. It’s from Mexico.” D. arose from the desk at which he’d been dreaming and took the letter in both

hands. It was shaped like a regular envelope but it was the size of a large manila folder. What strange letter is this? thought D. as he brought it to the desk. By now the birds had completely disappeared. Only a faint glimmer of light frayed the lower black edge of the horizon with a dull magenta. Are there not twelve hours in the day? If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world. “Shall I turn the light on?” “No, please don’t. Thanks for bringing the letter.” “Okay.” D.s hands were steady but his heart was aflame, his thoughts trembling with anticipation. At last, after months of silence, she had written! He gazed a while longer at the exterior of the extravagant letter, unusual in size, pleasant to the eye. It was a soft and purest white covered with stamps not only from Mexico, but with others from , Africa, from Florence, with miniature depictions of tribal villages and views of the Seine, with the ancient pyramids of Yucatan. One stamp in particular caught D.’s eye: an old and faded stamp with the lower portion of Christ’s face rubbed out. The stamp was apparently so old that its splotched nature made it appear as if the Nazarene had freckles and was smiling . . . . These things said he: and after that he saith unto them, our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep. Freckles? D. looked closer, squinting his eyes like two knife wounds. He turned the knob of his desk lamp. It wasn’t the Christ: it was her! He smiled wildly, caught off guard. His eyes no longer squinted: they softened and widened with affection for the familiarity of her angular face, the hard geometrical bone structure discernible even though the stamp was faded. The classical nose, the childlike scrawl of her eyelashes. This a portrait of Christ? He laughed silently, inwardly. Then said his disciples, Lord, if he sleep, he shall do well. What pleasant egomania, thought D. Slowly he began to open the envelope, delighting in what he imagined the letter’s contents to be. Months had gone by

since R. left D. to return to what remained of her former life. No, she had said, raising a small hand over his mouth, don’t say anything, I’ll be back. I don’t love him anymore and I won’t be staying. I’ll come back. And kissing the light fingers which played over his lips, D. said nothing, imagined everything. Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead. But what unfolded was not a letter. Once opened, D, held the outstretched envelope up in the air like the flayed skin of some unfortunate. It was a shirt. Then said Thomas unto his fellow disciples, let us also go, that we may die with him.

Despite this extraordinary transformation, D. was clearly disappointed. He wanted no miracles. He sat on the bed’s edge and recalled with a vivid ferocity the same disillusion he had experienced when, as a child, his mother had taken him to see the wild animals and to eat pink and blue clouds of sugar. He ed his reckless joy upon seeing a handful of lilies transmuted into a dove which promptly flew away. Catch it! he had cried out. But the miracle had taken wing, flown away. The disenchantment that followed: he felt it now. The letter had arrived only to disappear. D. held up the shirt to the lamp, examining it for a message. Then when Jesus came, he found that he had lain in the grave four days already. Pockets. Four pockets. How silly of me! A shirt has pockets! D.’s spirits were rekindled. In one of these pockets must be R.’s letter, a message, some sort of affirmation. Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see. D. ran his hands through all four pockets, but there was no written message. One pocket: a neatly folded Pullman schedule. Another: used tickets to a Mexican cinema. No letter. A crumpled blue ribbon and some pocket lint. No letter. And, Jesus wept. D. laid himself out on the bed. By now he realized that this was her message, this was what she had to say, and she would say no more. He felt cheated. Once again fate had arrived a few steps ahead of him, fate had played her trick on him. He felt like a dead man who had just been resurrected. But instead of being confronted with the paradise which would have given meaning to his death and present rebirth, he was confronted with the same faces that populated his previous life. No band of angels, no jeweled palaces, no celestial choirs. Rather the same world-weary countenances of acquaintances and relatives, the same dirt roads and mud huts and a coterie of paid mourners. The man who had died on Friday night was being brought back from the dead on Monday morning so that he wouldn’t miss the bus to work. He cried out with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth!

Of course the same job awaited one. There was to be no new and wondrous celestial commission for him. He would return to the same employment, and he would still have to pay his rent on time. D. stood up, decided. He would go out, savor the night air and let the dew rust his bones. He would satisfy himself with dark reverie. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with grave clothes; and his face was bound with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him and let him go. D. quickly dressed, putting on the shirt which R. had sent. Some use I’ll get out of this at least, he thought. At least. And walking out the front door, he wandered into the night.

IV.

Evening had fully settled by the time I made it out onto the streets. I rode along the avenues, deserted and dimly lit by an occasional lamp, the bicycle gently whirring beneath my weight. There was a slight chill in the air turning my cheeks a light shade of pink. Now and then I would splash through a puddle, sending threads of clear cold water whipping against my legs. Very pleasant. The day’s rainstorm had cleared the streets of the too many people. Occasionally I would swirl past some stray person, wandering about under the moonless sky: It never entered my head to stop one of them; I respected their solitude and I demanded the same in return. For once I was thankful of living in a large city: life ends with the setting of the sun. Here, in this imperial mecca of glass, icy neon and reinforced concrete, citizens were too afraid of recognizing one another to be strolling about at night. That was fine with me. “Imioned heart, mask thy sorrow.” As for myself, the only thing that stood between my imioned heart and the night’s expectancies was the shirt on my back. And it was a beautiful shirt. I had

received it this very day, through the mails, from a friend in Mexico whom I hadn’t seen in months. When the shirt had arrived, there had been no indication from whom it had been sent. Nonetheless, I knew. In a certain sense, the streets were populated on this night. This gift, this shirt I now wore, was not new. Oh, it was clean alright, but by virtue of having had a previous owner, it carried memories with it, memories which countless washings could not filter out. I could feel them stirring, I could sense the laments and pleasures this piece of cloth had gathered. A breeze would ruffle the collar and shake loose some images: a park at midnight, sprinkling fountains, music caught and echoing in white stone archways. Then the wind would find its way between the buttons and chill my breast: more alien memories . . . . I had my own memories as well. They swirled about me, sending my hair back like little flags, playing my eyebrows like miniature harps. ‘Movies in your head.’ That’s what R. used to call them; a phrase she had picked up from one of her Persian students. There were many things R. used to say, and I was constantly ing them, cataloguing them and embellishing them. It was like playing chess, with certain memories advancing, others retreating, and still others immobilized by the presence of others. Some on defensive, others on offensive. Some were lost, others gained in importance. But unlike chess, I was never looking for a checkmate, although, given time, that point would doubtlessly arrive. I had tried and thus far succeeded in dragging the game far beyond the time limit, I had cancelled all rules of stalemate. (The beauty of games reside in their being played, but starting a new game is always a labor, forever difficult. What I mean is this: you write a poem, you sit at home and ire the lines, its symmetry, the beauty of the images. But it is so easy to sit at home, drinking beer and iring that one lyric than to take time, mold a new beauty, create another poem. Yet, once the new child is gestating, once the pencil begins its run, you’ve started: the act needs no further justification. Everything seems possible. Once the first piece on the board is moved, there begins the game. You need no reason for playing, for while the game is in process, there are no questions. Then begins the wait for the next move, the next and the next until, nearing the end, one is reminded of that first move; one sees with finality the consequences of it. And you try to drag out the game a little longer, not really having understood the full logic behind the play.)

R had been the focal point of this game, the queen I’d endeavored to corner and immobilize on an ever-expanding board. And now she had become something of a tradition for me, a ceremony. First the rust of time unleashes her assault on the formerly limber ts of memory, then it freezes up the delicate machinery of the heart. The flame had burned a long time now, and as long as I could find unemployed soldiers wandering the streets, soldiers who could aid me, the fire would be tended to. It had wavered dangerously low at times, but now the flames were reaching upward, fed by the kindling of history. I steered my bicycle around a corner, and up ahead, a conflagration of lights loomed bright. I stopped pedaling, coasting the bike to a stop. It was a small restaurant. A few people sat inside, staring at steaming cups and fingering table tops. No one seemed interested in eating. I laid the bicycle on its side and walked up to the entrance, thinking to enjoy a warm respite from the chill. But I didn’t walk in. A few people inside had turned their gaze towards me and their eyes pierced me, just as a moment before their eyes had burned holes into the scarred table tops. Behind the counter was an elderly lady briefly abandoning the to focus me in, then quickly looking away. Behind her, an old man, dark and wrinkled, walked up to her and put both his hands on her shoulders as if consoling her. All the while, he stared at me. His gaze was hard and menacing, an unrelenting anger smoldering within the cloudy brown of his eyes. He seemed to recognize me. I, for my part, did not recognize him and this made me feel nervous. The hostility in his eyes, although unexpected, was totally familiar. I had seen it before, in the expressions of animals protecting their young, in the uncomprehending stares of cuckolded lovers. Coming from a stranger, it was doubly unnerving. A cold breeze swirled about the nape of my neck and my flesh danced. By this time, everyone inside the restaurant was staring at me. I quickly retreated. Picking up my bicycle and mounting it, I sped away back towards the darkened streets. Minutes later, pedaling the blackness, my heart regained its normal rhythm. Why didn’t you go in? I asked myself. Those people didn’t recognize you, they didn’t

know you. Of course they didn’t know me. But something within me spoke differently. A voice whispered faintly, whispering with a fever-vocabulary, dream words in a foreign tongue. I didn’t understand. The enmity radiating from the restaurant had certainly been eerie. It had appeared as these speechless sentinels were concentrating their disapproval on me, venting their dissatisfaction for one who might think of flaunting some obscure law that had never been erased from the books, although it had become archaic. But no law is obsolete. Waste your time elsewhere, they had said. Go: stand on a different street corner. A strange feeling crept over me, as if I were inhabiting someone else’s delusion. I became sullen and confused. I continued racing my bike until I reached a small park. I put the bicycle down, searched for a patch of green that was drier than the rest and set myself down. I simply sat there, silent and immobile, inviting the night air to embrace me. It gathered about me in the manner of water enveloping sea-creatures: totally. Shivering, I embraced myself, drawing my shirt closer about me. As I did so, I felt a sharp coldness against my chest. Reaching my hand into the shirt, I found what I had somehow overlooked: a fifth pocket on the inside of the shirt, a single hidden pocket. Reaching into it, I found what had been chilling my breast: a large metal coin. Lighting a match, I raised the coin to glimpse it better. The match burned quickly. The coin was about the size of a silver dollar, but it was oblong, like an egg. I turned it about. A single word, in protruding capital letters: DIVER. The match burned itself out. I lay back on the grass, feeling the stirrings of a terrible headache, letting the darkness soak into me the way sand greets a new ocean wave. DIVER. I fingered the coin, a blind man unfamiliar with Braille. DIVER. There was too much I wasn’t understanding. I turned the word over and over in my mind, on my tongue, like a chant. DIVER, DIVER, DIVER. I continued like this until my mind slowly began to close in upon itself. Gradually I slipped beneath the light and watery spume of sleep and dream. DIVER, DIVER, DIVER . . . .

V.

You don’t sing to me anymore. I cup my ear: derisive laughter, I follow your scent. I’ve been reduced to the state of a beast. Prowling the boulevard, I see your footprints everywhere, drying slowly in the squares of the sidewalk’s cement. I stop and inquire at deserted parks, in brightly lit restaurants, in run-down pawnshops: excuse me, have you seen the price of a ransomed heart? A description? Well: a lithe petite promise you can hold up your selves like a needed card; a cloud under the tutelage of a dream; a night exhumed and exchanged for a thousand days; the heady scent of flesh, cinnamon and absinthe; the sweet bite of blood-engorged meat colored the red of ant flesh; a night suffused with the stellar harmonies of the nine men of the stations; a trail of mist from an aged icy violin metamorphosed through the various poses of love. I direct my gaze to the sky, but the stars have refused to identify you. One by one they soundlessly collapse upon themselves, trembling lightly away on the heels of a reigning silence. The black dawn has arrived. It is now as always that I love you in the future tense. The hour glass bows its womanly curves and spills its grains: body supine, time in deadlock. I dream of seeing you. I revel in the severe anarchy of your slumber, in your vivid absence. I embrace your limpid beauties; your utter meaninglessness delineates you with finality. Music. From somewhere I hear music: A child I cannot see is playing an instrument which no longer exists. I’ve nothing left but to follow, wishing death upon the racks of a melogenic shore: harmony cleft on the ribbon of night’s scale, a presence on the false rainbow of an absent measure. The time is proper, I must tell you what I have learned, and it is this: I know that you have never guarded any affection for my sake. When the theatres were closed down and collars turned out, I wandered the streets alone, with pebbles and broken hoops and shattered glasses. I gathered the refuse of the poet’s deluge: cancelled room service tickets from the Hotel Splendid. I learned that it was not time but a lack of it which destroyed the countless marvels of the earth.

In the streets La Pietà would cry, she would tell me of her son who never called her anymore. She had no one with whom to share her fascinations of the desert, the magnetism of locust and honey under a blazing sun; unravel for me the mysteries housed within the ancient libraries of Alexandria. But there was never enough time. She was too old, she would say, her memory was feeble. I would have to scour encyclopaedia and dictionaries, ignoring her frail remarks. Alas, Queen of Hearts, it is you of whom I think while roaming the north and south of the cobbled roads leading towards and away from the city’s gut. Your rimes might never touch me, and now, on the trail of an old and ill-scented wound, a string of dried blood leads me away through the corridors of these labyrinths, labyrinths that have no entrance, ages with no respite. I have found the central square of this city, where old buildings with vaulted memories babble brick upon brick, with windows which no longer blink but forever stare, never catching morning frosts nor the moon’s reflection on their vacant pupils. Here, occasional old men, engaged by the ophidian embrace of nameless alleys have withered like the gargoyles of Notre Dame, immobile and immune to the ravages of grace. I still hear music, I still follow. Welcome, cries the toothless edifice before me. Welcome to heartbreak hotel, whisper the weed-shattered sidewalks, where you can be lonely, where we can all be so lonely, we can die. I follow your scent up the stairs. One at a time. I have found, no comfort in the crowd’s embrace, their voices have not soothed my brow. My pockets have remained empty. Knock and you will find, I was once told, but I will knock no more, l will seek the season which suits me and bask in its month. Yes, it is love which I seek in the dusty hallways, in these unrented quarters. I will find it wherever I can, in the creaking ceiling beams, in the abandoned spider webs, in the sciences of splintered architectures. Lobby cold and bare. I cannot find your name in the , no matter how slowly I turn the dusty pages. I cup my ear. The single note of a dream incomplete vibrates in the air, telling me that I must ascend even further. I mount the stairs of this ruin and seek your room. I imagine it; or rather, try to. I cannot dream your face. Am I now to conjure the womb from which you attract hapless

sailors who have wandered away from the safe currents of the world? Your singing grows stronger. I mount the stairs. In one hundred and twenty-two rooms I have sought you, all of them unmarked. For twenty-two years I have endeavored to unmask you. The ocean’s blue conceals you, the naked iris of the sky has hidden you, the time-marked tape of the earth has encircled you. You who are everything: no-one has seen you. I open the door to the last room, enter, and close the door behind me. The singing has ceased. You are here, somewhere in the darkness of this four-walled limbo. I sit on the floor. I’ve only to wait. I have waited years, a few more will not hurt me. I the weeping Pietà: it is not time which will finally destroy me. Yes, of course; I can wait. And waiting, I fall asleep. The darkness is mine, it is me. I plunge like a pearl diver into my own forgetfulness and wait for you. In the corner of the room, in a small section of the dark, you begin your descent. A small point of light wavers in the air, a single cell of matter suspended, a solitary speck of protein singing to itself, humming its universal code of conquest. Come forth, daughters, multiply and dress the void with warmth. The tiny burning bush cannot contain itself, it slowly extends luminescent fingers to kiss the hill upon which shepherds lie. The unfolding center of a rosebud graphs the curving diamond. The gem is shattering: a shrill vocal note from an unborn throat rings and myriads of angels, all genetic wonders of a rebellious orbit and slaughterless meat come. The small point of light wavers then divides, spilling over on the pattern of a rusted umbrella. Dividing thus, they begin to revolve about each other. One by one, the stars are returning, the dance has begun. Sacred hymns too precious to leave the vaults of heaven are transcribed by the faultless memories of renegade seraphs, they are whisper-fed into the spinning loom of light, into the revolving helix of infant-flesh. Acids etch a destiny, chemicals carve a future. The precise mitotic ballet will assure you a golden fruit for a heart and a silver chalice to capture the flowing blood. With painstaking fidelity, a message is being written on the air: you are being born. Your skin appears, Eden is reclaimed, the gates are opened again. The stars sprinkle through your pores, a blue-white deflagration.

Four umbilical cords nestle your body on a hovering blanket of mist. But there is no claim. No voice cries: come forth, kill and eat! You have not moved from your curling slumber, and you will not move. The dream will uncompleted and uned. The powers that bid you be, the affection that carved sweatglands into your wings, it will not grant you sweat. With a dry tongue you will never speak or sing. With eyes that cannot water, you remain blind. You will never wet your bed, for you will never know one: you have been born before the death which precedes your life, you have circumvented the path of time which promised you a past which will never come. You are a stranger with a false port and illegal documents, a foreigner in a land of wild fruit. You cannot forget your former appetites. A change of name could not alter the timbre of your voice, it could not disguise the eyes nor help you adopt all the mannerisms of this miserable race of transients. One by one the stars darken and fade. By the same way in which you came, so do you leave. You have not sung and you will not sing. You who are student to my unrealities, mistress to my desires, mother to my wounds, teacher of my heart: you who are will not be. Already you have disappeared. You have ascended. I sit in the room’s reclaimed darkness. Lord, who will you send to proclaim your love? But there is no reply. I hear music coming from the streets. A child’s voice is humming a, lullaby. I get up from the floor, leave the room and descend the stairs. When I reach the bottom, the singing has stopped. I find the streets unchanged: quiet, empty and dark. On the outside stairs, an old man is crouched, counting the holes in his boots. He looks up with eyes unblinking, and extends a hairy palm. “Alms for the blind?” I search through my pockets, but I can’t find any money. “Anything, please . . .” I pull a small oblong coin from my pocket, a good luck charm, and put it in the old man’s open palm.

“Thank you, sir,” he says slowly, fingering the charm’s strange shape. He knows it is not money. “Thank you,” he repeats, confused. Quickly I begin to walk away down the badly lit streets, away towards my apartment on the opposite edge of town.