GIL LAMONT

Gil Lamont's life has always been books—now he is finally taking the time to create them. An editor for many years, Gil was also a highly regarded commentator and collector. Though a love of prose rarely translates into writing ability Gil has ably made the transition. He has had several stories published and is at work on a novel titled No Joke Too Small

He offers here a blackly comic look at the conventions of science fiction, with uncommon insight and a deft solution.

Sinus Fiction

by Gil Lamont

1 .

The itch began as a tiny pinprick on his right cheek where the bone is most prominent, just below the outside comes of the eye. He brushed idly at the itch and reached for his beer, chugging the rest of the bottle white his stare never left the TV screen. Fourth down and twelve. Then the commercial break came and what the hell had just happened on the field? The bottle, now empty, was still at his lips. The pinprick had enlarged to the size of a needle. He moved the bottle away from his mouth and, frowning, turned his head.

Dust motes stirred in the late afternoon sunlight from me picture window, dancing their fruity way across the neat sheaf of Playboys on the coffee table and around the Port-o-Gym he'd blown half a yard on and someday might get around to using. But it gave his apartment such a strong, masculine look, and that impressed the babes he brought home interchangeably every Friday and Saturday night. Sunday afternoons, without exception, were reserved for the ball game and not to be spoiled by anything, least of all an itch.

Thank God it wasn't one of those damned sinus headaches that lately plagued him, when everything inside his face felt like it was rearranging itself. Just an itch.

Idly he scratched at it and was assaulted by incredible pain; pain that tossed the empty bottle to the carpet, lifted him out of his chair, threw his fingers up against his cheek, and lockstepped with him all the way into the bathroom. Lungs panting, heart pounding, he clamped his left hand onto the edge of the sink and peered at his reflected face. His eyes were suddenly bloodshot, his skin pale and waxy beneath its veneer of sunlamp tan. When he pulled his fingers away from his cheek he half expected to see the imprint of loops and whorls; instead, his cheekbone at the epicenter of the itch wore a tiny full moon of puckered skin, like an old scar. But no scar had ever been there. Inside the moon a dark spot lay, surrounded by a uniform iris of white skin. He touched it gingerly with his thumb and felt something hard and unyielding. It did not feel like his cheekbone.

Something weird was going on here.

Didn't he live as clean a life as he could? His only vices were the straightforward: beer, sports, and chicks. His life made no demands on anyone. He was comfortably and thoroghly masculine without being a misogynist, and he never even beat up queers. And now this.

Bracing himself for the pain, he plunged the tip of his right index finger into the dark spot and scratched madly. There was no pain. The skin necked away like a dead sunburn, revealing a lump hard and unyielding . . . and black. He tugged at the skin and it lifted and came away.

Astonishing. The skin came away.

2.

Until she saw his two thugs just before boarding, she believed her getaway would work. Taking the bus was simple. direct, and unexpected. One connection to make in Kansas City, and the next day she would reach her ship, disinter ir. and lift herself off-planet.

She hid in the Ladies' until departure time, secure behind the latched door of the stall, her portfolio case flat over the toilet seat, her feet braced against the door frame. Only once did she have to move so she could throw up.

The nausea convulsed her primary stomach, high under the breastbone, close to her main heart. She bit her lower lip until she tasted blood hot and salty, and her gorge would not be denied; instantly she was off the seat, tossing aside the portfolio case. Her furtive breakfast sandwich threw itself out into the bowl.

A thousand times over she had to remind herself that what mattered was the new life quickening inside her. The new life and the other thing.

The cool of the porcelain rim against her forehead calmed her and slowed her pulse. Drawing herself up, she recalled why she was here and felt the gravity of responsibility press upon her with sobriety and stuffy purpose. She also felt a last good-bye wave of nausea and clamped her teeth together.

She yanked on the flush handle. When the water became still, she dipped a comer of her handkerchief in it and dabbed at her cheeks and upper lip and the insides of her wrists.

Standing at last, she checked her watch. Time to go. She draped her cheap coat over her shoulders, the sleeves dangling empty, and left the stall. No one in the place. Good. At the sink, a last chance to bathe her face in refreshing cold water. A quick look up into the mirror. Ebony features, flattened nose, full lips, hair in tight kinks, a body she'd counted on being anonymous. Too bad she was obviously pregnant. Her eyes were tired and bloodshot, but they stared back at her with adamant resolution. She lifted an ironic right on! fist at her reflection.

Then it was out the door, just her and the portfolio case and a cheap handbag. Her free hand held the ticket with its promise of freedom. And she surrendered her ticket at the gate and was almost at the bus before she saw.

Them.

Two of them. One man stood against the bus, a foot bracing him. The other man elaborately studied his manicure as he leaned against the NO LOITERING signpost where the buses pulled in. Both men appeared nondescript and unmemorable. She recognized both of them as killers.

She had never seen them before, but she knew them for the nonhumans they were. The one at the bus kept forgetting to breathe, the other to move his eyes in tandem.

She reached the bus door and without breaking stride brought the portfolio case up and across her chest, into the first man's face. The steel edge of the portfolio slashed across his eyes and shattered the bridge of his nose. Carelessly, as though she had given it as much thought as unwrapping a stick of gum, she swung the portfolio along its arc and let it fly straight at the other man. Her coat fell off and she didn't care.

Already the first man was on his knees, hands cupped to his face. Whimpers came from him in soft rhythmic waves.

The second man was her immediate concern. Before the portfolio reached him he lifted his arm without looking up and casually brushed the case aside. But she had caught his attention. He shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet, hips loose and ready to move in any direction. He pulled his gaze at last from his fingernails and turned it toward her.

His eyes were dead and colorless. He had managed to make everything else look human, everything but the eyes. And still they would not move together.

Her heavy armament had been foolishly concentrated inside the portfolio, which now lay fifteen feet from the second man's side. It might as well have been fifteen miles. All she had left was her handbag. Inside it were lip gloss, wallet, comb, perfume, pens, mascara, a nail file.

While she watched him attempt to keep his eyes parallel, she thrust a hand into the bag and closed her fingers on the nail file. She grazed its point with her thumb. It was sharp enough.

As if somnolent the second man yawned, lifting one hand to the inside of his raincoat. In seconds that hand wouid emerge with a pistol or a phaser or a colloidal gun or worse. She had no time to lose.

Nail file raised high she lunged at the second man, set on taking him with her if she had to go down at all. As she leaped the incongruity struck her: millennia of wisdom and philosophy could not outreason the fist. What, she wondered in flight, do we learn from this?

Before he could draw his weapon she slammed into him. the nail file flashing in her hand. Kill the inhuman in him first, she thought, and aimed for his wandering eyes.

He batted her away as though she were nothing. The nail file slid from her fingers and skittered feet distant.

She tried to swallow past a gigantic lump in her throat. Amazing, how fear stayed with you always. The fear said she was as good as dead. This she would not accept.

She made herself go limp, letting him toss her to one side.

In seconds he would throw himself on top of her, splayed fingers ready to choke the life out of her. She had only seconds to live. She still had a chance.

Fumbling in her purse, her fingers discovered the perfume atomizer. New hope filled her. Her coat was ruined and her back felt as though she'd tried wrestling the bus, but by the Great Mother the game was not over yet. As soon as the second man was close enough she sprayed perfume into his eyes.

He screamed.

She scrambled clear and retrieved her portfolio, took stock of the thugs. The first still lay by the bus, holding his face. The second lay on the sidewalk, pawing at his eyes and moaning. She allowed herself one quick gloat of victory and then she was gone, scurrying from the bus terminal as fast as she dared, disdainful of the waiting passengers and what they thought.

Outside, in the early afternoon, perfectly ordinary people somehow conducted themselves as though it was a perfectly ordinary day.

In her haste to blend with them she did not notice the cadaverous gentleman in the dingy white suit leave his battered 1974 Pinto and sidle after her in an awkward gait. He hid his eyes behind cheap plastic mirror shades. He was loose-limbed and gangly-legged, and easily kept up with her unhurried but desperate flight.

Her mistake was looking over her shoulder after she ducked into the alley.

Well, of course, he was the boss of the two at the bus station. Power flowed from him in almost visible waves. She laughed to herself in the sudden understanding that escaping him without her full armament was impossible. Atomizer or nail file would be useless here.

Anyway, the alley had a dead end.

Dead end. Ha. She grimaced at the gallows humor.

Nothing left to her could compete with the cadaverous man in the dingy white suit. Indifference cloaked his spirit like the callus on a heel. He lacked compassion, and therefore his powers far outranked hers.

(Except.)

She let the portfolio case fall to the ground, for there was no saving the portfolio case now. She eased her pregnant self down to sit on the portfolio, resting her wrists on her knees, palms up, for there was no saving herself. Death was her only option, and she would embrace it with her head raised.

(Quitter, accused the undying part of her.)

Mr. Cadaver returned her stare, unblinking. He pointed his beam weapon at her and fired it and she died.

Neither of them knew that somehow she survived.

3.

This was utterly fantastic. The skin was peeling off in long strips, each about half an inch wide. Sunburned skin is tissue thin when it peels, but this stuff was thick as the wedge the rocks on the beach had taken out of his big toe the summer he turned thirteen. As thick as that, and yet the skin came off easily, no pain, no blood. Was this how a snake felt?

No pain, no blood. With every piece of his skin torn awav the itch dwindled. By the time it had vanished he was too captivated to notice.

What the peeling skin revealed was hard and black, like onyx yet flexible. A carapace. (Chitin? he wondered.) It followed the contours of his old pink face like an impressionistic painting, a suggestion, a remembrance. First the skin came off the cheekbone, stopping at his right ear with a soft tearing noise. He leaned into the mirror to examine the demarcation line, but was distracted by the skin on the left side of the original puckered scar curling up in invitation. He slid his attention to this new tab of skin with the languor of someone drugged. His thumb and forefinger grabbed the curl and pulled slowly, and the skin lifted up in its strip, traveling smoothly across the territory under the eye and across the fleshy part of the nose, moving down at an angle over the other cheek until it came to a stop at the base left of his jaw.

He still held the first piece in one hand, the new piece in the other. He dropped both pieces into the sink, looked up. The next piece of skin seemed to lead up into the eye itself.

Scared? Hell, this was fascinating.

He braced his forehead in his left hand and tugged slowly at the tab of skin with his right. It eased off his skull with the static resistance of a sock that clings to a shirt in the laundry. Once it reached the eye, the skin formed itself into a spiral around the socket. Circumnavigating the eye, right across the eyebrow ridge, avoiding the eyelid altogether, down and around, it intersected uncovered onyx and tore free.

He opened his eyes wide in delight. Where next? Where next? And his right eyelid fell off. Fluttered into the sink. And he was laughing now, hugely entertained, because the skin of his forehead was bulging and beginning to flap as if air blew behind it. And he tore it straight across as though it were a paper towel perforated at the hairline, and then he threw that handful into the sink, and then it was down the other cheek and under the mouth, swinging back up around to the tip of the nose—and there was no nose nothing! beneath it—and his hands had traveled loose skin up to his left eye and bared that and then stripped away his chin and were scrabbling at his neck.

When he stopped for a second and saw what he was becoming.

He stared without moving, except for a tic in his left eye that jettisoned the eyelid and then went away. He studied his face for a long moment.

And he liked what he saw.

And he thought he was beginning to recognize himself.

And the panic he had not known was there began to recede, quashed under growing acceptance. Hell, this was like exploring. No Columbus or Cortes had confronted territory as unfamiliar as this. He slid his fingers under his scalp and the whole damn thing lifted, not a hair out of place. He felt it unsticking at the back of his neck. Into the sink with it! And look at those dreadful ears! Sail with the wind much? He reached up and plucked one off his head. It lay in his hand. a disgusting wrinkled thing, and with a shudder he dropped it. His left hand batted away his other ear and he admired his sleek black shining faceted earless noseless head, turning is with his hand this way to admire the reflection of the bathroom light fixtures bouncing off the mound of cheekbone, tumine it with his hand that way to revel in how he could almost see the other eye without the bother of a nose to block his view, turning it with his hand, his hand—

The pinkness of it, the wrinkles, the softness. Bile scurried up his throat. For a few heartbeats he had to look away.

Then it was thank God hard fingernails scraping the inside of one wrist, finding purchase, peeling away skin like peeling away a glove, revealing beautiful armored segments of black, the tips a deeper black. Fascinated, he drew his new fingers negligently across the back of his old hand.

And saw blood well out in sudden redness. In haste he stripped away the other glove of skin, saw the bleeding stop, carried away with the skin.

Skin. He shuddered at the concept.

The only skin left on him was covered by his clothes.

And the sink was getting full.

4.

Being dead held certain advantages denied her former condition. For one, her nausea had vanished completely. For two, pain was a memory. For three—as she was soon to find out—mobility was no problem.

But first she willed her eyes to open. They would not. She willed her eyes to open. They would not.

Ah. No longer was she in control of her body.

She pushed out a sensor from her mind, a tendril of thought that bloomed beyond the confines of her body with a sudden flare of paraconsciousness. So the mind still reigned. She quickly added vision, felt herself above her body and looking down upon it. Damn. She was in a Dumpster. And naked. Angry beam scars covered her chest and abdomen.

The bastards. Mr. Cadaver and his thugs had done an instant autopsy on her after all. She wondered if they'd killed the new life inside her. Or even interfered with the other thing.

Great Mother, she looked terrible. She looked dead. She was dead. And probably her inner secret had been lost, along with what was in the portfolio.

So where was Mr. Cadaver and his dingy white suit? Where was anybody? Was this world of the dead empty and deserted?

She expanded her consciousness in accordion folds, shifting her perceptions outward.

Beyond the Dumpster lay a parking lot on one side, an apartment complex on the other. She moved to the apartment complex, sensing herself passing through walls, simultaneously at room level and above it, as if one eye stayed at eye level and the other looked down through the ceiling. And learned that Mr. Cadaver was not very bright: his own apartment abutted her Dumpster grave. Here was the living room:

couch, chairs, table, lamps, no TV, no stereo, one picture on the wall opposite the couch: a landscape of some place that was not Terra. She knew the place well. She recognized it with an inner heartache that transcended the mortal senses.

It was Home.

Time became meaningless. Perhaps in her present condition Time was no longer a constant. So she could not judge how long she stared at that picture. She only knew that had she still worn her human body she would have felt the tears running down her cheeks.

She spread her perceptions further, beyond the wails of Mr. Cadaver's apartment. She found herself in a long corridor, then above it. The night was young and full of new stars, stars she saw as swollen globes of energy, and she a puny thing lost in the vast dark. They sucked at her, the stars did, seducing her spirit off-planet (where she had wanted to be— before), and she rose up and up, halfway to the thin clouds before she shook herself free and looked down and down, and gaped in awe at the grid of the city spread below her. Not just streetlights; anyone in an airplane could see those. She saw more. She saw the power lines that lit the streetlights and electrified the homes. The telephone wires that laced across the city and held the buildings down. As she dropped to treetop level she could see the delicate tracing of a car's electrical system, the faint glimmer of a pedestrian's Walkman radio.

She reached out with a casual tendril of thought and nudged the radio's frequency higher, saw the pedestrian frown, smiled to herself, shifted the tendril, and gave a waiting car's turn signals palpitations. The traffic light turned green and the car moved off and the pedestrian stepped off the curb, and she could see not only the nicker of the relays that told the traffic light when to change but the gas mains beneath the street holding their breath and the water lines muttering to themselves and somewhere off to her right the crimson huffiness of a factory late shift and above her the airplanes along their well-worn highways and beneath it all the unceasing background hum of the planet itself and she knew she was starting to shred and she concentrated all of her will and shut down her perceptions until she could deal with it.

Then she scanned across the city's muted lights, her mind translating the auras or energy fields or whatever into primary colors that she could understand. Over there, in the east. Something tugged at a childhood memory.

She followed it and found herself above a giant apartment complex in the suburbs. She looked down upon it as if the roof had lifted on a vast, many-roomed dollhouse. Inside were the dolls. She sampled their lives, her perception dipping down and rising up and moving on and dipping down again.

She saw a young woman sitting mesmerized by a book.

She saw a married couple arguing and the wife carried murder in her heart, the aura of death a black cape about her.

She saw a young man stretched out on a bed, corpse for half a day already.

She saw a corpulent man feed himself and his small corpulent dog rich delicacies.

She saw rooms submerged in cigarette smoke, their occupants slowly drowning.

She saw an old woman polishing her furniture over and over in an endless pavane.

She saw a sad-faced man in a leather armchair divide his attention between a clock on the wall and a bottle of pills at his elbow. While she watched, the clock hands did not move. So, Time really was no longer a constant. She could, it seemed, slow it down to an infinite moment. (But the sad-faced man moved to the clock, frowned, consulted the watch on his wrist, frowned, rapped the side of the clock. The hands began to move.)

She saw one person crying, she saw many people laughing.

She saw an odd faceted black creature shedding human clothes in a bathroom. The childhood memory was almost invoked. She settled back on mental haunches to watch this one for a while.

5.

His laughter echoed against walls of tile.

Because his skin was coming off easier than his clothes had. No buttons to fumble with, no zippers to catch the folds of hated epidermis. Just a smooth ecdysiasm that gave him instant rewards: broad shoulders pared themselves away to faceted plates of armor; overpadded chest and hard pecs and useless nipples sloughed off at sternum depth; pucker of navel gave it up with a moist sucking sound; soft washboard of toned bellyfat peeled down to a rock-hard plane flat from throat to belly.

Kicked off his pants, past his shins and ankles and feet. Ripped the skin down from the knees, feeling it cling like socks on a sweaty day. Gone the leg hair, the scars of a thousand summer ball games, the ingrown toenails, the odor.

He lifted up his shoulders in a gigantic shrug and felt all of his back loosen. His inner self writhed and the solid sheet of skin shifted, caught, hung by a shoulder blade, responded to the twisted swipe of his arm up behind him and fell away. It hit the bathtub porcelain with a soft sigh, slid down to join the rest of his skin and clothes.

Thighs quickly diminished to half their girth. The tendons that ran up the insides of his thighs were like piano wire.

His buttocks dropped off like a shed bustle. Now it was a straight line from his nape to the backs of his thighs. His waist and hips were gone.

His crotch refused to come away.

This enraged him. In his life he had desired many things: tight prom queen, sleek sports car, fifty-yard-line tickets, boss's big-breasted secretary. But none of these with the fervor for this final metamorphosis. A keen frustration filled him. Give it up! Tear it off! Have done with it!

He snatched up the scruff of his scrotum and yanked it hard. It barely budged.

He used his best golfing grip on his penis (one hand clutching mostly air) and jerked it just as powerfully as he could, and he felt it resist and he realized then why it resisted and he stopped himself suddenly. Was he crazy? His dick was smarter than he was! His dick was crying No.' Let me stay a man! Because giving this up was giving up the last of himself, the essence of masculinity.

What kind of man would he be without it? (What kind of man was he now? whispered the errant thought.) Would losing this make him androgynous, or the sort to patronize fern bars?

The thought made him sick to his stomach. For the first time the enormity of what was happening reached him, made him stagger.

And then he found the answer. No. A real man would see this through. Columbus. Cortes. He too was an explorer. One of them. A real man down to the marrow. Hey.

And so he slid his hand down his abdomen, slid it under the hypotenuse of pubic hair, felt the whole thing slip away. His genitals shriveled all the way down to the bathtub, became insignificant wrinkles of skin, what the hell had all the fuss been about, it was all about being a man inside, dammit, inside.

He looked down at himself and there was nothing there. No extrusion of cartilage or flesh or skin. No orifice of any kind. Just the smooth juncture of thigh meeting groin, groin meeting thigh.

So what happened when you had to piss? Or maybe you never had to piss. He rather liked that concept.

He lifted his feet out of the mess of useless skin and useless clothes in the bathtub, steadied himself on the shower curtain rod, found he was light enough to chin himself one-handed, found he was strong enough to tear the rod down. He thrust both hands into the sink and picked up the remnants of his face and threw it at the window over the tub, dislodging the shampoo and conditioner on the sill, and he laughed again, caught a sidelong view of himself in the mirror over the sink, laughed even more.

Watched his teeth fall in a linear sequence from his mouth, leaving behind hard-edged black gums and an elongated tongue.

Winked at his image and saw the facade of his eye—pupil, iris, white—unstick and flutter down, this sleight of hand revealing a yellow eye with the vertical pupil of a cat. And the same with the other eye.

This had to be one of the great cosmic jokes.

So. Was he done changing, then? (Funny, he still thought human.) Was he complete? In the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door he saw his final transformation:

An odd tingling suffused his toes. He stared down without amazement at his feet. (He had abandoned amazement long ago.) The second and third toes on his right foot merged to become one toe. The fourth and fifth toes merged to become one toe. He was left with three little piggies.

His left foot did the same.

No, he had some amazement left after all. He held his hands up in front of his face and watched the index and middle fingers of his right hand merge and become one finger, watched the ring and little fingers merge and become one finger, watched it happen again with his left hand. Three fingers on each hand.

Looked about his bedroom and saw threes everywhere. Three points define a plane. Three rooms defined his apartment. Bedroom (& attached bathroom), living room, kitchen. Kitchen. He wondered if he was hungry.

The Formica of his kitchen counter did not quite meet the wall behind it. A cockroach emerged from this misaligned juncture and without a thought his tongue slithered out and licked up the insect and his jaws ground it to paste.

It tasted like the tiniest morsel of chocolate chalk.

He loved it.

6.

What she watched was fascinating. One part of her mind witnessed this metamorphosis, another part cast and recast her chances of making something of her situation, another part threw guilt up at her for wasting her time watching and doing nothing. Perhaps she was becoming fragmented. Perhaps it was just as well. She felt so hopeless. Soon she would dissolve into the Cosmic All like coffee crystals in water, becoming a thin ersatz spirit before her flavor faded completely.

The other thing: a microdot in the lining of the portfolio case had held theory and schematics for the ultimate weapon: total manipulation of time and matter. Inside her body, lodged uncomfortably between her hearts, had been the plan for the weapon's only defense. Or maybe, she thought wildly, the microdot in the portfolio had contained the greatest epic poem ever written, the finest moment in a billion years of cultural and philosophical evolution, all truths and wisdom encompassed in it, and inside her body had been the thematic key that would unlock the poem's mysteries for everyone. Given her situation, what was the difference now?

Likely the weapon and its defense (the poem and its interpretation) were gone from her forever. She had seen her mutilated carcass, that beautiful brown skin torn open and ineptly sealed shut. All her plans had been undone.

And she wept for the daughter she had conceived more than a century ago and waited until now to grow, the daughter she had meant to succeed her in the great tradition of her line, the daughter she had planned to teach for decades, just as her own mother had done some thousands of years before, the daughter now lost forever.

Damn Cadaver! Damn him for eternity!

If only she could squash him like the bug he was . . .

She saw below her the human finish his metamorphosis and she gave mental utterance to an oath. Her childhood memory restored at last.

In the ancient days, when her race had equated power with violence, they had bred their own warrior caste. This was before even her great-great-grandmother had been young. These warriors were bold and fearless, quite strong and quite invincible (albeit extremely short-lived, even by human standards), thoroughly obedient and devoted, and once they had roamed the galaxy in the millions. The last one had died in a zoo on Home thousands of years ago, before she was even born. As a little girl she had been taken by her mother to see his stuffed remains; all she could remember was what the exhibit card had told her.

Yet before her now was a modern-day example. A warrior! She was not beaten yet. She could no longer complete her mission but she could show Mr. Cadaver justice.

If. If Mr. Cadaver had not yet left Terra with his booty, it she could communicate with her newfound Champion.

Better to find Mr. Cadaver first, she thought. Her Champion would keep; lost in self-admiration he wasn't going anywhere.

She lifted up her spirit and felt herself pulled back to the other side of town, to the Dumpster where her body lay still. As she sped over the city she expected to perceive the souls of humanity as an assortment of colored auras. Golden shafts-would extend up from church spires to pierce the low-hanging clouds. A crowd in the streets would be mostly soft blue. except for the occasional red gleam like a coal before it sinks to ash. Once in a while a brighter color would show itself: yellow or orange or even copper. Rarely there would be a pure white. That is how it would be.

instead there were just a thousand thousand dim red firings of synapses packaged neatly in skulls. No colors. No auras.

Instead there were just humans. Humans.

Perhaps humans had no souls.

A pitiful concept, but she had to appreciate its practical advantages: without the human static it should be that much easier to find Mr. Cadaver.

Blanking the nonsentient energies of electricity and gas and water and gravity, she released thought beams to wander over the city. Over there. A cold, cold blue, muffled as if through gauze.

She sped toward it, plummeting her consciousness through clouds, frightening sensitive winging geese, skimming over the tops of trees. As she neared, she discovered that Mr. Cadaver's cold blue aura concealed another aura deep down inside, like a core of rot at the heart of an onion.

She stopped and watched. In this other part of the city, Mr. Cadaver, her portfolio case beside him, sat enjoying the finest in fast-food cuisine and berating in turn each of the men from the bus station. The second man hid his regenerating eyes behind opaque sunglasses. The first man wore across his nose a bandage already stained black crimson and mild pink.

The second man's aura did not vibrate in any frequency. He did not respond to Mr. Cadaver's harangue in any way because he had turned himself off. She sensed that when the need arose he would turn himself on again.

The first man was not listening because all his attention was on his boss devouring french fries. Inside him was a spirit like a small and faithful dog. When kicked he would whine but would always return, eager to please and enormously satisfied with a few words of praise; or just as ready to be kicked again, for that was attention too.

And Mr. Cadaver loved to kick his dog around. No, not true. He just gave his people what they really wanted. His thoughts were indifferent. Unreadable.

Just for fun she moved herself inside his body.

And emerged, shaken, as quickly as was possible.

In the dim and happy days of her childhood, she once wandered into a palace corridor so thick with dust the settling clouds obscured her footprints. Quickly lost, she thought she would never see her mother again. Her immature hearts thudded in anguish; she was ready to drop and die. Then a shadow fell across her. Looking up, and up, she beheld a crone, hooded, caped, one withered claw lowering a mirror to her. The mirror was clouded by dirt. She scrubbed it with the hem of her skirt and peered deep into it:

Her face. Her face grew up, grew older, grew lines. She was going to be very beautiful, even in old age, for the progression did not stop. Her cheeks sank in on themselves. Her hair turned gray, then white, then brittle, then disappeared in uneven patches. Her skin flensed itself away as if invisibly scoured. Her skull grinned back at her.

In terror she shifted her gaze back up to the old crone, who threw back her hood and revealed the face of a very beautiful young woman. Herself. But with a twisted aspect.

She fled. Lacking footprints to guide her, she fled in any direction, and somehow emerged into known territory. The old woman who wore her face seemed so unimaginably evil that not until centuries later did she understand the reason for her fright: that face was of one who would respond to the least of stimuli: that face was of one who was corrupt.

So too the inside of Mr. Cadaver. He was a house that had been shuttered for years. The drapes were musty and rotten and stank of mildew. Crawling things ran over the books and paintings. Furniture fell apart at the caress of a hand. The visible part of Mr. Cadaver was all artifice, and all hollow.

There was nothing there. No morals, no ethics, no sense of humanity. Not even a lust for power that could redeem this her murderer.

(Not even the love of a little dog.)

But in her brief visit to that crumbling manor, she had found the place where Mr. Cadaver was most vulnerable and most dangerous. She had looked into the pantry and found the heart of the onion, the rotten core: the parasite.

(She did not stay in Mr. Cadaver to meet the parasite because of the wholly irrational fear it would have her face, with a twisted aspect. Unlike Mr. Cadaver, who could sense power yet had no need of it, the parasite lived for power, accepted nothing else. And now, thank the Great Mother for her warrior, the parasite would not be impossible to kill.)

Mr. Cadaver was merely the willing puppet of an organism so palpably evil that she suddenly understood that all the conflict through the ages between Good and Evil came down to people like herself against this one terrible, foul thing.

And she—she\—controlled the one instrument that could destroy that parasite, destroy it so utterly it could never seat itself in another corrupt host. She controlled her warrior.

Well, soon enough, anyway. It was her heritage. And his.

Now that she had firmly fixed Mr. Cadaver's aura, knowing she could easily track him, she sped back to her Champion.

7.

He had eaten half the refrigerator—shelves, eggkeeper, icemaker, door handles—when he thought he heard a voice calling him to the bathroom. He put back the mayonnaise jar he'd been about to munch and cocked his head in an attitude of listening. Nothing.

In the bathroom he saw nothing but the person he used to be, collapsed in the bathtub. His disarrayed face, what was left of it, was there. But if his face was trying to speak it was hopeless, since it lacked lips, tongue, or palate, or even any arrangement that could resemble them.

But he knew someone wanted to communicate with him. He knew. He could not articulate how he knew (perhaps something tugged at a racial memory), but he knew.

He tore off me towel bar and nibbled it idly while pondering the next step. Soon enough a sliver of soap heaved itself up from the dish and began to drift across the mirror. "Help me" appeared in shaky, delicate letters.

He nodded eagerly at the soap, started to say yes, yes. I understand, what is it you want? when he realized he had lost the power of speech. Damn. Then inspiration seized him and he plucked the soap out of the air and rubbed the letters away and watched his three-fingered hand write in hasty block letters, "Who are you? What do you want?"

After a beat he rubbed the mirror again and opened his hand. The soap floated up. Time passed. Letters slowly wrote themselves: WAIT, and the soap dropped back into the sink.

Nothing happened for a while. He grew bored. He ate some more towel bar. An idea occurred to him, almost as if he had thought of it himself. He went into the living room. The sky outside the picture window was dark with brooding clouds covering the moon. He snapped on the TV set and turned it to an empty channel. He put a sofa cushion between two 10-kilo weights and munched this sandwich thoughtfully while he sat and stared at colored TV snow. After a while his head drooped, and simultaneously a blurry picture formed on the screen. Haltingly and without speech the blurry picture told him to turn on his radio. This he did.

The needle raced by itself across the dial, back and forth. station to station, pulling in phonemes from a hundred sources, building sentences from fragments in a thousand voices and timbres, some with a snatch of tune, some yanked from the middle of the news or out of a commercial, most from the meaningless chatter of the gospel stations: "HELL tooth ee 0 my ch UMMM peon!"

At last the spirit had a voice, and it told him everything.

8.

Who'd have thought it would be so difficult? If she hadn't remembered the pedestrian and his Walkman she'd be playing with that silly soap sliver even now, helpless as Time made her Champion's skin scaly and brittle with old age, sapped him of his special strength, and robbed her of her revenge. Then she would have had no reason to cling to her consciousness this little while longer.

But no. She had remembered, the radio had supplied her with all the sound combinations she'd needed, all was right with the world, she'd told him exactly what he needed to know:

That she was several thousand years old in the way he measured Time. That she had been nearly immortal. Nearly.

That she was the enchanted princess of a far-off land (a fair rendering of the truth), brought to Earth in chains as a slave (an utter falsehood; as courier she had come to Terra to obtain the ultimate weapon/poetry from one of its authors, who had retired here millennia ago).

That her killer, Mr. Cadaver, was of an alien, inimical race whose sole reason for existence was to wrest power from her own people, the Good Guys. (If somewhat true, this was misleading: his race was not so alien nor so inimical, and if his people wanted to wrest power, so did hers.)

That he was her Champion, as had been destined from the first. That he had been bred for this moment; that his transformation was the inevitable result of her appearance in the city; that she owned him body and soul, because she had brought him this wonderful metamorphosis, because he was her Champion.

That at the completion of the mission the finest and sweetest of rewards awaited him. The most sensual of concubines to fulfill every fantasy. The most precious metals and crystals on which to dine. The frothiest acid baths in which to lounge. Glory everlasting.

His eyes had practically glowed with the hunger of his belief, it was almost pitiable. She felt no remorse regarding the manner of his reward, which she had made up entire because her knowledge of the warrior caste was too scanty to go beyond its prime purpose.

Now she directed him to his closet, where he donned raincoat and slouch hat, pulling the latter low over his face. She told him to keep his hands in his pocket, no one would even notice them or his strange feet.

And she led him into the night, to be her Champion truly, to destroy in his special way the thing that pushed and pulled Mr. Cadaver, the thing that lived inside Mr. Cadaver's testicles.

And then she could finish dying.

9.

Concubines, crystals, and baths. Oh, my!

Almost too wonderful to be believed, but believe it he did. After his metamorphosis he was ready to accept almost anything. The trick with the radio had clinched it. What human agency could have that kind of finesse?

Out in the street, clad in only raincoat and hat, he moved through the night wherever she guided him, following a series of beckoning traffic signals and streetlights, store window neon and the running lights of an occasional passing car.

Leading him onward, west, farther into the city. Thunder rattled and it began to rain.

The water on his three-toed feet as he splashed through gutters was warm, amniotic, gelatinous, erotic. Strings of rain hung from street signs and telephone wires. Sound flattened. He tipped his head back and let the rain sluice his tongue and throat, feeling the rain inside and the rain outside, feeling light-headed, wanting to tear off the raincoat and hat and dance through the jelly of the sodden air, wanting to spin down into the sewers and race beneath the city, what was happening, what was happening, he felt giddy, he had to stop, he lowered his head and shut his mouth. Equilibrium returned. Across the street a traffic light blinked yellow at him angrily and he waved back at it, hunched his shoulders, and moved on.

He was beginning to realize that this change was more profound than he'd thought. Sure, rainwater seemed to make him drunk, but that didn't explain why he felt more camal now than ever before in his life. Everything around him turned him on. The sheen of water on the pavement, silkier than the softest thigh. The squeals and thuds of thunder. People hurrying through the rain, quivering blobs of animation. The spermatic flow of car lights on the elevated highway to his left. The musty tang of a NO PARKING sign as he munched it. The rough caress of the sidewalk under his feet.

And her. Had she been beautiful? he wondered. When she was still alive? He imagined her in harem garb, all diaphanous and frail and he her great protector. (But not a eunuch, never that. No.) She would have responded to him eagerly, bending her lush body beneath him willingly, because he was ail male, all powerful, she would have yielded to that, it was what all women wanted, how could she have resisted him . . . ?

So swirled his thoughts as he moved through the streets. Pacing steadily along the wet sidewalk to the fast-food restaurant, his feet titillated by the concrete slabs, he kept looking about him in quick glances, recording everything, missing nothing, tripping briefly over a discarded plastic hamburger box only because it would not stop fellating his toes. And then he stopped outside the golden arches, staring at the back where a tiny red light above something cooking in hot oil winked and blinked and semaphored to him: your target is here.

But he already knew that.

Just as, once inside, he knew immediately who Mr. Cadaver was. Not only because his quarry was the thinnest of the only three customers in the place. There was something else, almost tangible.

The stench of corruption. Of embracing a steadily cheapening sense of values, until what became important was the flashy, the tawdry, the shoddy, the seedy.

(Not that The Warrior could articulate all this, not when a hundred primary smells seduced him and the heavy odor of french fries was all musk and mating. He sat, and the seat cupped him.)

He took off his hat and dropped it on the table, and felt the victim of a thousand cheap theatrics. This was the enemy? This pathetic eater of vultures' leavings?

The man with the bandaged nose glanced his way and said something to Mr. Cadaver. Mr. Cadaver blinked slowly in the direction of the uncovered earless noseless black faceted head, and betraying nothing in his face pulled a projectile weapon from his dingy coat and fired it.

The Warrior's new yellow cat's eyes watched the bullet tumble out of the barret and lazily fall forward. When at last it reached him he plucked it from the air and ate it. It didn't taste bad at all.

"What's going on?!" cried the man in the opaque sun-glasses. "Will somebody please tell me what is going on!"

Mr. Cadaver blinked once, twice, and revealed another weapon. A beam fanned out from the muzzle of this weapon, and caught the warrior full in its triangle.

Tingling! Ecstasy! Sexual delights surpassing anything his former human state had fantasized. Mindless orgasm rooted him to the spot.

Holding a large flat case, Mr. Cadaver stood up. His retinue stood up. Mr. Cadaver & Crew made to leave the restaurant.

Back over at the grill a radio blared into life. "Stop him, you fool! Break free and stop him!"

And he wanted to reply to her, to the radio, to her spirit, Hey, babe, it's okay, we got some time here. Feels so good, just five minutes more! But the radio would not stop its demands, now it called him names, shamed him, denigrated him past and present, and only his overpowering devotion to her kept him from getting really mad. Still he did not move, not until the frightened gum-chewing teenager from behind the counter ran in slow motion into his line of sight and his eyes tracked the bounce of her breasts and the sway of her hips and oh baby oh baby his innate maleness asserted itself and he shook himself free of his trance—

—and he was up and out the door, Mr. Cadaver & Crew just a few steps ahead, and had he a voice he would have shouted. Instead he settled for lunging forward at the skeletal figure, hoping by his forward rush to break some legs.

Mr. Cadaver sidestepped him neatly.

"OH, MY CHAMPION!" blared the radio behind him. "DO NOT FALTER NOW! DO NOT DISAPPOINT ME! THE ENEMY HAS A SECRET! A SECRET WEAKNESS! HE PRETENDS TO BE FEARLESS BUT HE IS TERRIBLY AFRAID OF ONE THING, AND ONE THING ONLY! ALL HIS POWER IS BETWEEN HIS LEGS! CASTRATE HIM! BITE HIS BALLS OFF! THEN YOU'LL STOP HIM FOREVER! BITE HIS BALLS OFF! AND THEN GRAB THAT PORTFOLIO CASE, MY CHAMPION!"

He dug in his heels and suddenly stopped. Now hold it right there! He liked to think of himself as an any thing-goes kind of guy, but even "anything goes" had its limits. And biting off Mr. Cadaver's genitalia went way beyond those limits, no matter how important she thought it, no matter how erotic his current exalted unhuman condition. He was still all man, dammit. (Wasn't it enough that he never even beat up queers? Did he have to become one?) And real men didn't—

He tried to visualize what she asked, but the thought made him sick to his stomach. He grabbed at a lamppost and swung around it, vomiting up bits of a NO PARKING sign and Port-o-Gym weights and sofa cushion and towel bar.

"NO! NO! NO!" screamed the radio from the restaurant. "YOU'RE LETTING HIM GET AWAY! IF YOU DON'T STOP HIM NOW, THE WAY I SAID, THAT THING INSIDE HIM—"

He stopped listening. His mouth tasted vile, his head buzzed, he felt betrayed.

But she owned him, body and soul. He had been bred for this moment. He was her Champion.

He pulled his fingers free of the lamppost and saw the triple track they had left behind. He cranked his head around and saw the three points that defined Mr. Cadaver and Company hardly more than a block away, slithering and sliding along the wet street. He ran after them casually and was not surprised to catch up to them in no more than three heartbeats.

The one in the sunglasses, still blind, ran into a parking meter and bounced off with a scream, fell face forward, and the man's spine snapped beneath The Warrior's three-toed feet.

The one with the bandaged nose looked back, screamed, was still screaming as The Warrior's three-fingered hand closed around the man's neck and broke something inside.

Two down, one to go, and Mr. Cadaver had not looked back, not even for an instant, but he was just a few strides away . . .

And he was her Champion. She owned him. She was his reason for being. So as her Champion he reached out and tapped Mr. Cadaver gently across the back of the head, and The Adversary tumbled down onto the glistening sidewalk and lay stili.

But he had to be sure, because he was her Champion and she owned him. So, stooping, he placed his black faceted hands one on either side of Mr. Cadaver's head and then brought his hands together. And Mr. Cadaver would never again enslave enchanted princesses from far-off lands.

He grabbed the portfolio case and hurried back to hear her radioed congratulations.

10.

Everything had gone wrong.

Her radio link steadily weakening, she watched helplessly as her Champion failed her. Watched in disbelief as he reverted, at the last minute, to that same alien, inimical thinking that characterized Mr. Cadaver's race: maleness.

She had forgotten the unyielding rigidity of male thinking and male behavior, and it had cost her dearly. No wonder her own people had eliminated the male element millennia before.

She had badly misjudged, and although Mr. Cadaver and his toadies were dead, that thing inside him would find another host and this ultimate war between Good (she or her sisters) and Evil (thing thing thing) would go on until another Champion was found. She only hoped the next one found would be female.

And now she would never know if her daughter could have been saved. She would never fire the ultimate poem or delight in all the verses of the ultimate weapon. She couldn't even direct that miserable male warrior to take care of the portfolio case in the unlikely event of a new courier, for already she was fading, and could manage through the radio no more than a weak "I'm sorry. Good-bye . . ."

And then she was moving up and away from the surface of the planet, all the bodies beneath her dwindling and shrinking, and this time, yes, she could sense an infinitude of other souls in all the colors both known and unknown, vibrating across all spectra to become one vibration. And as she blurred to join them she left behind her a last thought that faded like a smile:

All adversity derives from the cell that first divided.

11.

How could he have been such a fool?

He let himself in the door and stared around his apartment in dismay. The refrigerator was half-eaten, the couch was a mess, he'd never use the Port-o-Gym again, thank God he hadn't touched the TV, and his landlord would fix him good for the damage to the bathroom.

The bathroom. There was nothing in the sink or bathtub but a lot of fine ash. No clothes, no skin. Just holes in the wall where the towel bar had been fastened.

Just holes in his heart where she'd fooled him. He had been bred as her Champion, what a laugh that was, as if she knew what motivated him. No woman knew. Fools. All of them fools.

And he the biggest fool of them all. Believing her. Believing she owned him, body and soul. Believing all her lies and promises. Concubines and acid baths indeed! Enchanted princess from a far-off land! She'd enchanted him all right. He'd waited and waited, portfolio case in hand, waited while the counter help returned and, ignoring him, called the police, waited for her to shower rewards upon him—or at least direct him to where they could be found—and all she'd said, finally, was "I'm sorry. Good-bye . . ." Fool!

He'd thrown away the portfolio case and in dejection come home before the police arrived.

Now he looked into the bathroom mirror, past the pathetic soapy letters that read WAIT, and he had to admit that whatever else had happened, he had to admire his black faceted head, had to approve of the changes to his body. Only . . . where did he go from here?

Damn, he looked good. That powerful head, that virile body. Maybe he should go into politics. Become dictator. He could outrun the wind, he could eat anything (well, whatever he chose to eat), and bullets couldn't touch him. He nodded his head at himself. Yes. Rule the world.

Rule the world! (Just stay out of the rain.)

An itch began just below the outside comer of his right eye, where the facet of his cheek was most prominent.