LETTER FROM THE DEAD:
---------------------

"I know what you are, Sabella. I didn't know until I came to God, but
when I found God, He told me. His angels told me. I know what you've
done, I know you killed my sister. I hope the cross cripples you, as it
should. If it doesn't, I've made another arrangement. Don't try to guess
what it is. You're just one of the wolves, Sabella, an animal, and
animals can't guess things. Not till it's too late. But you don't have
so long, Sabella, I hope it's soon, and then you'll rot, and your soul,
if you have one, will writhe and shriek in Eternal Fires, Sabella, and
God will let me hear you as I rest on His bosom."

TANITH LEE has also written

THE BIRTHGRAVE

VAZKOR, SON OF VAZKOR

QUEST FOR THE WHITE WITCH

DON'T BITE THE SUN

DRINKING SAPPHIRE WINE

VOLKHAVAAR

NIGHT'S MASTER

DEATH'S MASTER

ELECTRIC FOREST

THE STORM LORD

DAY BY NIGHT *

*Forthcoming

SABELLA
=======

Or
--

The Blood Stone
===============

Tanith Lee
==========

DAW BOOKS, INC.

DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, PUBLISHER

1633 Broadway

New York, N.Y. 10019

COPYRIGHT ©, 1980, BY TANITH LEE.

All Rights Reserved

Cover art by George Smith.

FIRST PRINTING, APRIL 1980

PART ONE The Wolves

1

2

PART TWO The Avenger

1

2

PART THREE De Profundis

1

2

Part ONE
--------

The Wolves
==========

1
-

I was out hunting the night my aunt Cassi died. As she was taking her
last breath of revitalized Arean air, I was high on the Hammerhead
Plateau, under forty thousand stars burning like diamond bonfires. Maybe
I even killed in the same minute she let that last breath go. I hadn't
meant to kill, perhaps it was an omen. And did I feel her reach out to
me in the black eye-star-burning darkness, reach out with her dead
finger, pointing, beckoning, condemning me, me thinking it was only the
chill night wind of Novo Mars?

Just after sunup (Novo Mars sunup like a bomb of light going off in the
sky: sixty-second dawn) the mailman buzzed the porch. He was a real man,
the mailman, I mean human, because mechanization doesn't stretch out too
far into the Styx of Hammerhead. He stood against the fresh pink sky,
his electric mail dolly sitting beside him. When I went to open up, he
saw me just as he always did, in my black wrapper and my dark glasses,
my hair like black coffee poured over me from the crown of my head to my
shoulders. He thinks I'm a slut, a boozy drug addict. Thinks? Thought.
Maybe still thinks, who knows.

"Miss Quey? Registered stellagraxn. Thumbprint right here."

He looked resentful, as he always did. He was wondering if I'd seduce
him someday in my silky wrapper. But I wouldn't. He thought my name
Quey, (pronounced Kay) was phony too. The name on the sender's docket
was Koberman, Cassi's name.

"Thanks," I said, as I thumbprinted.

"Sorry to wake you," said the mailman. His stupid sad malevolent human
eyes said to me: I guess all you whores have to sleep it off in the
morning.

But I didn't argue, not then, with the tepid rosewater sun streaming in
my door and my hands shaking a little and the lightweight stella like a
pack of lead.

"That's O.K.," I said, and buttoned shut the smoked-glass door, and
slunk back into the lovely shadows.

All the blue paper day-blinds were down, and the blinds of violet
cotton. How beautiful it all looked, true virtue of necessity. But that
one slap of light in the face had told. I remembered the striped deer
and some weak tears oozed from my eyes.

Out in the hallway, over the stair, the. stained-glass window cries too,
staining the wooden floor with a big crimson patch.

When I finally opened the stella, I wasn't really interested in it, it
was something else that had to be seen to. At first I thought it was
from Cassi herself, and wondered why she'd suddenly recollected me and
what she wanted that she had to send star-bounced telegrams for, and
what it was going to mean. (Does anyone else ever read their mail like
this? Trepidation always, occasionally fear. How I loved ads and
circulars, things you could send for or forget.) But then I found it
wasn't Cassi, but Cassi's brother-in-law, a lawyer's formal bit of paper
with formal phrases on it. Cassi was dead, but she'd sent me an invite
to the funeral. She'd fixed her heart on it. And to ensure I came, she'd
left me several thousand tax-clear New Mars credits. I hadn't recalled
she was wealthy. I hadn't known she recalled where I was or even if I
was still on-planet. I didn't know either what her post mortem game was,
but it seemed to me she had set out to nail me on a very special
Revivalist Christian Cross. But then, would she, all these years, have
known that too?

Why does everybody have to love money so much? I wasn't rich. They'd
expect me to want to be, and if I didn't, they'd want to find out why
not. And Cassi had remembered where I was and they'd traced me here.
Even if I ran (I contemplated that) they'd follow me.

Sabella Quey, this cash belongs to you, they'd say, as we stood there in
the bright delicate sunlight of rose-hued Novo Mars.

An hour later, I went to the music deck and keyed in the phones. I let
the sinister marvel of a Prokofiev symphony wash up through the house
and over me as the jets of the shower washed down.

But oh, Sabella Quey, the cross stands ready.

The funeral, the day after tomorrow, drawing me, as if by suction, back
into the world.

* * *
-----

Novo Mars is enough like old Mars to have been dubbed with the name, but
a pink planet rather than red, pearl rather than ruby. I was born east
of Ares. This little world is all I've ever known. It's sugar-mouse
color skies with their pale blue clouds of oxygen revitalization that
turn the air over the cities to a lavender soup, the tawny-rose sands,
the knife-ridge plateaus like pasteboard cutouts, the rust-red crags
dissolving in the five-second dusks.

The vegetation is all earth-import, the books tell you, and mostly so is
the fauna that breeds and hunts and basks and leaves its bones on plains
and heights and in the dry canals. But both flora and fauna have mutated
here to fit new climates, zones and geography. The waters were also
initially false, atmospheric stabilizers replenished by viaduct and
sub-surface reservoir, yet they, too, like crystal tinted by indigenous
skies and pointed mountains, have become one with Novo Mars. There are
genuine ruins (beware tourist traps) here and there. Thin pillars
soaring, leveled foundations crumbling, cracked urns whispering of
spilled dusts--all the Martian dreams that old Mars denied to mankind.
Though this prior race, whose wreck men inherited, left small
self-evidence beyond their architecture. Maybe men find it, anyway, more
romantic to guess.

But there are still real Martian wolves in the hills above Hammerhead
Plateau. Fine nights, you can hear them howl in tin-whistle voices, like
antique lost locomotives searching for a station. Periodically, men come
out from the cities and shoot at them, and those nights, from Brade to
Hammerlake, the uplands ring to lead-blast and electric flash-gun
charge. But wolves that have survived so many things, a passing of
peoples, drought of four-fifths of the water, death of half the
air--they can survive guns. Their rough coats are like pink champagne,
their genes programmed long ago to copy the dusts, but catch the glare
of their eyes at night, disembodied blood drops seemingly framed in
stars, and know them for what they are.

When they cry, when they cry, Sabella, the hair lifts on the scalp, and
the eyes fill up with tears and the mouth with water.

* * *
-----

I took the night flight to Aresport. It's a two-hour run by air-bug from
the Brade lift-off point. To reach Brade, there'd been the nineteen
o'clock flyer from Hammerlake Halt. I'd footed the five miles to the
Halt, through the fading afternoon, the scarlet minute of pre-sunset,
through the seconds of sunset, through the tidal wave of night. Five
miles was nothing to me, and the road was good. Once the sun went out, I
took off my black straw hat and the big black glasses and carried them
with my sandals and my single piece of luggage.

The half-hour flyer ride was uneventful, the bus almost empty, though we
picked up a pair of couples on route through Spur and Canyon.

When I'd checked into the cabin of the air-bug at Brade and fastened
myself down in the plasti-plush seat, the first intimation of fate came
over me. I'd been expecting it; not such force. After all, I'd
undertaken a few unavoidable journeys before, and I'd survived,
sometimes with fewer scars than others. Then I remembered my mother's
death, the memory also expected and inevitable, and a dreary pang swept
through me. My mother, Cassi's sister, had understood me. Had understood
me so well that one morning I came home and she was dead, lying there
accusingly under the crimson patch cast by the stained-glass window. I
don't know if she'd planned that, or not. (My paranoia, you perceive,
was that the dead were always in league against me--worse than the
living. The dead, plotting to snare and to implicate, to trip and fell
me and lay a naked sword across my neck.) But my mother died of natural
causes, if heart attack is natural. The medical man, who like the
mailman caught me in my sunglasses, and who looked at me with the same
unliking, interested stare, cleared the death certificate for me
disappointedly. He would, of course, have heard stories of the odd
recluse duo, the mother and her daughter, living in the old colonial
house under the hills. When I was sixteen or seventeen and couldn't keep
out of Hammerlake town, nights, all kinds of tales were spelled out
about me. The boys would whistle after my lean long flanks, nipped-in
swaying waist and heavy young-girl breasts. In those days (nights) I had
no wisdom at all. None. When I think how lucky I was, I tremble, even
now. Caution came long after guilt, but before then it got to my mother.
It made a slim artery in her heart engorge and burst. It killed her.
I--killed her.

Presently the plane began to clear its throat and the fasten-up warning
lights came on. I hadn't glanced about. I'd learned not to where space
is confined, for this is a gregarious civilization; I too, if I could
afford to be, maybe. The bug lifted on its jets and stars crowded the
windows.

I don't often sleep at night, darkness has too much to offer with its
silences and mysteries. But the motion and hum of the air-bug and the
thick half lights gradually sent me under.

Then I started to dream. I dreamed about Easterly, which was a logical
progression from the rest, the death of Cassi and my mother's death.

Easterly was the little township, sixty-two miles east of Ares where my
mother and Cassi were born, and where I grew up. My father was an
ore-blaster, and when I was two years old the drill he was working on
caught fire. (Catalog of death.) My mother, his widow, got the insurance
payments the company awards to survivors. Aunt Cassi, an adventuress,
was way off on Earth, then. My mother and I, alone without a man, became
briefly wealthy.

Consciously, I can perfectly recall the copper-brick house at Easterly,
on a street of copper-brick houses, for Easterly was an ore town on the
boom. Asleep, I could see it in microscopic detail. Every brick shining
in the sun, the neat lawn of aniseed grass running into the avenue of
honeysuckle trees and the brindle oaks across the way where black-haired
boys kick a ball. The mines were neatly hidden underground, but the
distant towers of the three refineries gleamed and gave off tiny puffs
of cotton wool. Beyond the refineries, over the river and the crescent
of the dam, the meadows and the wildflowers faded into the rose-petal
sands. There are ruins at Easterly. At eleven, I didn't know. One of the
dry canals plunges in under the rock of an old quarry. In there.

"Come out!" my mother calls. "Bel, come out of that, it's nothing but a
dirty hole. Bel, do you hear me?"

But momma, I've come to place with a tall pillar like a lily stem. Momma
it's not so dark--

"Child, the sides may cave in--"

Why was I scared? I wasn't scared before. I was eleven. It was the day I
started to bleed for the very first time. It was the day I found--

"Bel!"

Oh God, why am I so scared?

"Bel!"

I realized the tunnel was closing in on me after all, was dragging me
away, and I beheld my mother's terrified face snatched from me,
receding--

And I woke up to discover myself crying softly,

"Momma, Momma!" Like one of those dolls of centuries before.

"It's all right," somebody said. "Really it is. You're awake. It's all
right, now."

I could see the air-bug, quiet, and scattered with persons who slept on
without the raw edges of dreams to slash them alert again. And next to
me, on the twin seat at my side, but not fastened in, a shadow saying,
"Honestly, it's O.K. now," very gently, as if to the child I had been
two instants before. "Is it O.K.?" I asked, to gain time. "Sure it is.
You're back."

"Am I?"

"Truly. I swear."

He laughed, this gentle still. I hadn't looked at him beyond the first
uncalculated awakening gaze that hadn't assimilated anything. But he was
young. My age?

I'll have to be extra careful now. 'That's better," he said. "Look, can
I get you anything?"

"Anything?" No, I must not fool around. "Well, a brandy?"

"No thanks."

"You must have something, to prove to yourself the dream's over. I've
had dreams like that sometimes."

"How do you know what kind of dream it was?"

"A bad one. Come on. Oh, I know," he said. His voice was warm, melodic.
Perhaps Prokofiev had written his voice. "Last year I was on Gall
Vulcan, with my brother. I freaked out on mescadrine." (Some drug.) Now
he was telling me how his big brother saved him, sat and held his hand,
ran him into the ground to sweat the horrors out of him, rocked him like
a baby. It was extraordinary. "I'm not ashamed to tell you," said the
young man in the shadow. "We shouldn't be ashamed."

"I was ashamed. Afraid, ashamed. Excited.

This was the duck-catch syndrome. I'd ducked, but the missile had still
come straight at me. In avoiding it, I'd caught the ball in my ungloved,
unready hands.

"If you don't want a brandy, what about an iced fruit juice?"

I'm going to a funeral. Don't make it two.

"All right. Thank you."

He went to the auto-dispenser, and I looked at him. And when he came
back and we sat drinking cold juice, I looked at him then, too. He was
sunlit, even in the night cabin. He had the light bronze suntan of Novo
Mars I can't even take from a ray-lamp. His eyes and his hair, like
mine, were dark, and his hair was worn rather long, the recurring
fashion among the young poets, the dreamers. His clothes were casual,
but of good quality, and he had one of those gold ropes around his neck
that are jewelers' fantasies of snakes, and have narrow graven heads and
gem eyes.

"I hope you're not angry that I spoke to you," he said.

"I'm not angry."

"I have another confession." He lowered his lashes and I felt sad. Old
and sad, and tired, and alone. "I was watching you when you were asleep.
I was planning something to say when you woke up, but then you had the
nightmare."

How rare and chill the juice tastes on my tongue, the tip of which is
burning now. I always imagine it's like champagne, which I've never
tasted, but how could it be?

"I wanted to talk to you, you see."

Yes. I see. I know.

I mentioned those centuries-old dolls that used to say ('Momma!') Dolls
nowadays are robotic and can do anything your child programs into them.
Eat, sleep, sob, dance, urinate, tell stories. And like dolls, humans,
given a certain programming, will do... anything.

I put down my fruit juice.

"A relation of mine just died," I said flatly.

"I'm sorry."

"We were very close. It's my turn to apologize. I'm not good company
right now. I want to be alone."

That was difficult to say. Laughable, but difficult.

"O.K.," he said. "Of course."

He stood up. The snake about his throat had blue eyes that comprehended
me, and that glittered. But his eyes were innocent.

"My name is Sand--that's really Sand Vincent. If you need anything."

Magic formula, the exchange of names, but I only smiled at him, as
stiffly and coldly as I could, and he went away.

It was so easy to make them come to me, like filings flying to a magnet.
I was a lodestone. The boys on the neon-striped black candy streets of
Hammerlake when I was sixteen, seventeen, seven or eight years ago. Hey,
sister! Hey, baby!

There are still wolves in those damned hills!

The sound of guns, and the lights over the ridges, and the scent of
burnt electric air.

I watched the cabin clock. Less than an hour to Ares. I wouldn't fall
asleep again.

* * *
-----

The Brade air-bug landed at the Cliffton Terminus Strip. Aresport has
twenty-seven landing strips. Ares is a big city, though not as big as
Dawson and Flamingo in the north.

Cliffton was a ghost terminus at this hour, almost deserted. However,
every port had its duty-check, for drugs, for guns, for stolen goods.
Machines clear the luggage, and every now and then a bag was opened.
Mine got opened. The electronic eye scanned inside and hit the metal cap
of the container, and an alarm went off. Aresport is too sophisticated
to let a mechanism handle such matters. Two human securi-guards walked
over and asked me to remove the container. Apart from the cap, it's
transparent, so they looked at the red juice inside.

"Christ, lady, what's that, blood?"

Sand, having got through the check right in front of me, returned.

"Is anything wrong?"

"This lady is carrying a bottle of blood hi her bag."

The guards at the port were bored and power-conscious. But here was a
malign brittle good humor I could match.

"Pomegranate and tomato juice," I said. "Half a liter, concentrated,
with added vitamins. My physician makes it up for me. Like to try some?"

The guards grinned. Sabella the proud beauty was turning them on, and it
had been, was going to be, a long slow night on Cliffton strip.

I uncapped the jar, and they fetched plastic cups and distilled water
and we mixed some and drank together. I hope they enjoyed it.

"It smells of flowers. Or hash," said Sand, perplexed.

"You want to come round the back, son," said one of the guards. "We've
got confiscated Vulcan-grown hash up to the roof, no duty paid."

"And good old frecking alcohol," added the other.

"Are you going to be O.K.?" Sand asked me as we went out of the terminus
building. The wide port highway strode up toward Ares. You never see the
stars above a city. The revitalized atmosphere is thick, but oh the
colors of their lights chalked on the under-swag of the clouds,
greengage and peppermint and opal and strawberry ribs of color, as if
the cities were on fire, and this their smoke.

"Yes, I'll be all right."

"Only, things seem to be happening to you, don't they?"

"Yes, they do. But it will be fine now/'

"I'm not trying," said Sand, outlined against the first hour of black
cloud-blazing morning city, "to be a pain in the ear. But after
this--the funeral--"

"Then, I'm going home."

Say: To my husband and my twelve babies. Say it. Nothing comes.

Sand turned to the city.

"Pillar of fire by .night," he said. He must have had Revivalist
biblical training.

My heart was racing. The sight of the city was hurting me with pleasure.
I have none of civilization's taint A landscape of steel towers against
hills of concrete, sings to me as does a landscape of rock pinnacles and
gullies. All landscapes are one, dissimilar, yet still landscape. All
one to me.

I swallowed.

"I must go now," I said. I can't even be nice to him. Dare not. "Excuse
me."

I brushed by him, and a cab crawled to the walkway.

I got in and gave it directions to drive me to any middle-price hotel.
(Not cheap enough to attract random fellowship, not flashy enough to
attract speculation.)

Sand stood by the window.

"You won't even tell me your name?"

"I'd rather not."

"That pendant," he said.

The cab drove away.

My tongue's tip was a scald of flame.

***

Sunrise was at six o'clock, sunset eighteen-thirty; Aunt Cassi's funeral
was set for sixteen in the afternoon. That was fortunate. The sun would
already be westering behind the tall gray pines and cumulous trees and
the white marble groves of the Koberman cemetery that uncle-in-law
Koberman had sent me a picture of.

Why do you wear so much black, Sabella, baby?

It keeps the sun out, my parasol black. The women in the east of Earth
knew that long ago. They knew other things. Anyway, what else do you
wear for a Christian Revivalist burial? Black frock, black stockings,
black shoes that seem to grow into the legs, as if T were born with
three-inch heels. Big black hat. I am a raven. No, the ravens in the
Ares Zoo are white.

I slipped the pendant inside my dress. It must have wormed out when I
fell asleep on the plane and I didn't properly notice. Only Sand
noticed, and perhaps the securiguards.

The hotel had been sleazier than it should have been.

On the sidewalk, between the great golden towers and the glass shards of
the city, the cab whooshed through the dust. But once I was inside, the
cab disowned the city, throwing it over its shoulder, racing into
suburbs of grass plantings and white colonial houses.

The shadows were long and red when I reached the cemetery. There were no
drivers in these autocabs to argue. I put the necessary credits in the
meter and left it parked among the pines.

Westering glow, yet the sun fell on my face, my hands, like embers. I
walked quickly up the path and into the chapel. The Kobermans had a
Gothic twist. The Christ was white and warped and screwed by pins to his
length of wood and apparently screaming. To be mercilessly nailed
forever in a window; who could blame him?

There were two or three people already there, dark figures kneeling
between the white bench-pews in the white light of the window. The huge
jeweled cross by the lectern took your breath away. If Cassi had paid
for that, Cassi had been in clover. Now she was in a box. My eyes
touched the coffin in its snow drape and the nausea began as it had to.
The last coffin I saw had been my mother's,

"Miss Quey, I'm so glad you were able to come. When we received no
stellagram, I'm afraid I'd almost given up on you--"

The big tusker in the black formal two-piece suit spoke to me in a
hushed monotone.... This was how you spoke in front of the dead, because
they mustn't overhear the huge secret of what had happened to them. He
thought I'd come to listen to the will read, shed a crocodile tear (I've
never seen a crocodile), and collect, like all of them, and so he was
instantly at home with me. But he introduced himself as the sender of
the Stella, uncle-in-law.

"You'll be coming back to the house. For the er, to settle matters."

"Yes."

He was extra pleased. He'd got a word out of me. "And stay over,
naturally. Hammerhead is quite a way."

"That's all right. I have a cab waiting to take me back to town."

"But Miss Quey--Sabella, Come on, now. You must be worn out already."

No, I'm not worn out. The sun left a line of invisible blisters all over
my skin, and through the blisters my nerves were thrusting like eager
wires.

The chapel had filled up, and the priest appeared hi his black cassock,
the lilies of death embroidered on his shawl.

Uncle-in-law wedged me into a pew. Somewhere music started and my heart
stopped.

Oh Christ, let me get through this. I shouldn't be here. I'm on fire.

"Deus," said the priest, authoritatively, as if he had a through line to
God, "cui proprium est misereri semper et parcere--"

The Revivalists revived the Latin with the rest of the Revival. It's
beautiful. It plays me like a harp. Everything's so bright and clear and
full of pain and sorrow. Six years since I heard such words.

"Dicit illi Jesus: Resurget frater tuus."

I was leaning on the pew, and weeping and I didn't really know her, and
it was wrong. And it makes it worse if anyone thinks it's right I should
be weeping.

If it goes on much longer I shall faint. They'll carry me out and the
sun will smite me by day between the pine needles. It will kill me and
they won't know why. They'll say I died of grief for Cassi and now I'm
going to laugh.

I didn't laugh. Something made me turn, maybe the acute instincts of the
hills. And there, at the back of the chapel, his dark head bowed over
his gentle mourning and the snake coiled round his throat, was Sand
Vincent.

* * *
-----

Big hog uncle took me by the arm, and guided me, guided all of us away,
when it was over. At a C.R. mass you often don't see the box go in the
ground. I don't know why not. Dissociation from the mortal to the
spiritual things, perhaps. The way to the house lay across some open
land, acres of the Koberman Ares holdings. It was a distance of half a
mile, but most of them got into their cars to do it. Cars like
black-sharks nosed up the road. Uncle and I walked side by side--between
the tall hedges of stonework, over the lawns, the ugly house like a big
pillared air-raid shelter ahead of us on the rise. Sand Vincent, head
still bowed, walked about twenty yards behind us.

What should I say? I didn't at that time believe in coincidence.

"We've kept it as informal as possible. She wanted it like that.
Cassilda, I mean."

Who could I think he meant? Who else had died?

"I know you saw very little of your aunt since childhood, but toward the
end, you were in her thoughts."

I didn't even know what she'd died of.

"One thing," I said.

"Yes, Sabella. May I call you Sabella?"

"The man behind us."

Hog Uncle Koberman shot a glance behind us.

"Yes?"

"Is he a relation?"

"I don't know who the hell he is, Sabella. He's not with our party."

"He was in the church."

"The hell he was. Some funeral freak. Stay here, Sabella, I'll deal with
it."

I stood where I was while knightly Uncle Hog went back and stopped Sand
on the lawn. They exchanged words I couldn't hear, didn't try to hear.
Uncle's wide back blocked out my view of Sand. I knew he'd followed me,
all the way from the port, I didn't know how. I knew why.

Sand didn't try to look at me and now the exchange of words was over.
Sand stood on the lawn, his thumbs in his belt, cat's paw velvet on the
velvet grass. The Hog Uncle came to me with the blood dinning in his
face. 'That's that."

He didn't tell me what had been said. I didn't ask. Sand got smaller and
smaller as we went up the slope.

Flowers wilt in too much sun. They were wilting in the hall of the
air-raid shelter, petals like paper.

"You need something to eat," Hog Koberman said to me.

They were all at the buffet, like the sin-eaters of old, gobbling up the
crimes of the deceased along with the paté, cakes and exotic fruit
segments in silver dishes.

But I convinced him I'd eaten before I left my hotel, and I sat and
watched the others. When the eaters glanced at me, they felt antagonism.
Uninvolved in their activity, I was outside the pale, I had an
advantage. Besides, I had refused to consume the sins of the dead. Hog
Koberman introduced me to everyone, but their names slipped off the
surface of my mind, and their breath smelled of sugars, proteins and
digestion. They were only extras on the set.

After a while, we went into Cassi's library. One wall was book tapes,
and the rest actual books, bound in leather. Long windows sliced between
the stacks, and there was a globe of Novo Mars in polished rose quartz,
pierced and mounted to demonstrate the axial tilt, and pierced by the
sun rays, too. Even the dust was gilded by the last sun against the
windows. In the middle of the oak table where we were seated was a
jeroboam of wine, slightly cobwebbed from the cellar. Cassi had had
human servants, who now served us with this ancient valuable drink.
Cassi had really schemed things, for this was the one way you reached
back from the grave, with instructions to be obeyed, rituals to be
performed. I pretended to sip from my goblet.

The Hog read the will slowly and carefully. Everybody waited breathless,
as if at a lottery. The prizes were big ones, and everybody got a prize.

I was last of all. Now they could observe me in turn. The sunlight lay
over me in a broad shining spotlight.

"Of course, Cassilda wanted me to intimate to you, Sabella, something of
the form of this bequest," said Uncle, displaying to the others, in
parentheses, the reason for my mercenary attendance at the funeral. "But
what it amounts to, and here I read, 'To my only niece, Sabella Quey,
the entire stock investments of the Kobercor Trust, which come to her,
tax paid, as the sum of eighty thousand credits.'"

The extras smiled archly. My prize was good, but not so good as the
others.

The servants came around to refurbish the drinks and the Hog closed his
portfolio. He drew me aside, against a blazing window.

"It may not seem a great deal, Bella, but with wise reinvestment, it
could amount to a tidy sum in a year or so. How about you sign the
investment procedure over to me? I'd be happy to assist any way I can."

The sun was pouring through me. I felt, maybe I looked, translucent. My
skin often has that quality, but were my bones showing now? Uncle was
blurred as if I stared at him through smoke. I thanked him. I'd had to
keep thanking him. People like you to thank them. They do you kindnesses
so you'll have to say thank you, thank you.

"And there's one other small item," said Uncle playfully.

I stood in the sun's X ray, waiting.

"Cassilda entrusted this to me, this extra small thing, to be dealt with
privately. It's a little casket, and I think, well, I know, Bella, it
has a very fine piece of jewelry in it, which your aunt meant you to
have. Her mind was on you a lot, you know, Bel, the last days. But she
wanted it secret. You know how families are, Bel, squabbling, getting
jealous. Not about the value of the token, but its sentimental worth.
Now, what I want you to do. Our John Trim over there is going to go out,
and I want you to slip out after him. He'll take you upstairs to
Cassilda's bedroom and direct you to the casket. O.K.?"

I nodded. The Hog turned away and John, one of Cassi's servants, walked
between the library doors.

As I stepped out from the sun, the room sizzled and went dark, but I
moved through the darkness, after John, across the flower-garden hall.
John was much older than Cassi. Had John been mentioned in the will?

The stair was mobile with white carpet over the steel. John operated the
button and we rode up in silence to the third floor.

His hands on the rail, and on the bedroom's enameled handles were like
parched old brown leaves. A life of sun had done that to him. Were my
hands shriveling too?

"In here please, Miss Ouey."

The bedroom was white silk, with bronze blinds down over the windows,
hot, with that smell of too-much hygiene that supplants sickness. On the
vanity table, all was laid out as if in readiness for her return,
platinum-backed brushes, tetra-shell boxes; she should have been buried
in here, like a pharaoh's wife, among her treasures, side by side with
her long-dead spouse in the big white bed.

The casket was on a separate table. It was made of ivory, with gold on
the clasps, and a gold key hanging by a ribbon.

"Excuse me, Miss Quey.w

Servant John shut me in with his brown leaves, closing the doors softly.

I was supposed to open the casket, so I took the key and put in the
lock, and as the lock clicked I thought, Maybe it will explode.

But the box didn't explode. Inside it, lying on satin, was a tiny
replica of the gold jeweled crucifix I'd seen in the chapel, a lectern
cross from Lilliput. It was worth about twice what she'd left me in
credits.

The bedroom in the bronze blind-light was full of menace. Cassi had lain
in here, propped up and guttering, and she'd plotted, and here was the
result. And I didn't grasp what it was. Like death itself, the threat
was invisible.

Then I saw the envelope tucked under the cross, and when I drew out the
envelope my fingers were oddly desensitized, but I wondered if poison
would spurt into my face when I tore the paper across.

Poison spurted. Poison pen.

I know what you are, Sabella. I didn't know until I came to God, but
when I found God, He told me. His angels told me. 1 know what you've
done. I know you killed my sister. I hope the cross cripples you, as it
should. If it doesn't, I've made another arrangement. Don't try to guess
what it is. You're just one of the wolves, Sabella, an animal, and
animals can't guess things. Not till it's too late. But you don't have
so long, Sabella. I hope it's soon, and then you'll rot, and your soul,
if you have one, will writhe and shriek in Eternal Fires, Sabella, and
God will let me hear you as I rest on His bosom.

I sat down on Gassi's bed and put my head between my knees, but it
didn't help, and I'd known it wouldn't. So I lay back, with the letter
balled in my hand, and presently I pushed it inside my frock, between my
breasts where the pendant was. Next to my heart

She'd found God, and she'd found out. Yes, that made sense. She'd had
intimations, but they would seem so crazy, she'd have to go crazy before
she could accept them.

When I felt a little better, I opened my purse and took out the
miniature bottle of what I'd mixed up from the red juice in the
container.

It's blood. We all knew it, didn't we? It's flavored with pomegranate
and tomato and a synthetic grain of hashish, which acts as a
preservative, and to disguise reality in the presence of securiguards.
It's the blood of the deer on Hammerhead Plateau. Brought home and first
stored cold with a concentrator, it thereafter keeps several days, even
in my luggage.

It's going to help you, Sabella. Yes it is. Drink, it'll make you
strong. In spite of the sunlight, in spite of Cassi, in spite of spite.
Drink.

But the fruity odors, this rune, made me gag.

I sat there shivering, feverishly turning my black straw hat between my
hands. On this occasion, Sabella, it isn't going to work.

Get home, Sabella. Quick, Sabella,

Get home.

I put the cross in my purse and left the casket, and as I shut the
bedroom doors, the crumpled letter stirred against my breast.

A black Pig lurked in the hall.

He'd seen me weeping in the chapel, and I must look awful now, I
explained how affected I was by everything, how I wished I'd known her
better. I put in a couple of lies about childhood meetings, when I was
twelve or thirteen. (Cassi had visited Easterly, in the years before we
moved house. I don't think she properly saw me. My mother bored her; it
was duty.) But humanity loves confession and painful reminiscence. We're
all bloodsuckers, one way or another. I sold my uncle on the idea that I
had to go home and pull myself together and we would sign papers another
day, and that was how I got free.

There were about ten minutes left of the sun as I hurried across the
lawns to the pine trees. The gray shade came over me at the same instant
the sun turned boiling red. I walked into the deep shadow, and threw up
violently, wrenching every muscle in my body.

There was a silly little ornamental cistern nearby, for watering the
lawns, recycled tap-water probably unrefined, but I rinsed my mouth and
was thankful. (Do even cisterns require thanks of me?)

Then I went to the cab and leaned on it, sore and aching, too weak to
get inside.

It was coming on dark. The sun had dropped while I was ill. The night
was like a cool bath, even the top of the cab was cool to my hands, my
forehead.

And then I heard him coming up, over the dry needles. I knew who it must
be. You get to know one certain step from all others, the step of the
deer, picking its path to you through the wolf-dappled night.

He put his hands on my shoulders. Gentle, gentle.

"Sabella?"

He knows my name. He must have heard the Hog using it outside the
chapel.

"Sabella, are you all right? Oh, Sabella." Gently he moved me around to
confront him. His handsome face was holy with its concern, eyes limpid,
wanting to aid me any way he could. "You look ghastly. No. I don't mean
that. You look wonderful, but you look sick." He was a saint. He was
meant to be a saint. No, Sabella. He held me in his arms, tenderly, he
smoothed my hair. I was trembling so much it must have been hard for him
to soothe me so delicately. His skin was warm, aromatic of youth,
cleanness, masculinity and desire. I could scent his life through his
skin. I could scent his blood.

He eased me into the cab.

"Now, where to?"

"It has the directions," I said.

"But where? I'll pick up my transport tomorrow. I'm coming with you."

"I don't want you to come with me, Sand."

"You need someone with you."

"Not you."

"Why not me?"

My brain was going out. I was losing consciousness. He had gotten in
beside me and pressed the starter, and the cab moved out between the
trees onto the high road back to town.

Again he put his arm round me. I looked up against his shoulder, through
his warm dark hair, into the knowing eyes of the snake at his throat

We were at the hotel, and I didn't remember much of the journey. Sand
Vincent had got my door-opener, and brought me into the room and pressed
the master switch for the side lighting. Then he picked me up, (I weigh
one hundred and seven, it was comparatively easy for him) and laid me
down on the bed. Like a fool, I still had my sunglasses on. He took off
those, and my shoes.

"You need to sleep," he said. "It's taken it out of you."

"Sand."

"Yes?"

"You've been very kind."

"I'm not leaving you," he said, "if that's what you're leading up to."

"I want--I need to be alone."

"I'll wait in the corridor, then. But that's as far as I go."

"Please, Sand. I'll call you tomorrow."

Tomorrow, I'll be in Hammerhead. Sand doesn't know my route beyond
Brade. It's a big country.

Why did I leave, anyway? Would it have mattered? There are still
investment papers to sign for Hog Koberman. The Hog will pursue me,
grunting. Anxious to see me be a pig too, greedy for cash. No, I came
here because Cassi reached out from the grave and summoned me.

"I'll wait in the corridor."

We'd been silently at work on each other all the way from the cemetery.
Like two acids, smoldering each other away.

"Take the chair."

"I'll carry it into the corridor."

"No. Don't bother."

He sat down in the chair. I shut my eyes so I wouldn't see him studying
me. Inside my lids, the room was empty. It wasn't Cassi that made me
come here. It was I, myself.

Of course, I know now I'm going to do it. And now I know, I'm getting
stronger. My pulse was beating against that scrap of Cassi's vitriol on
my breast, but I could feel the second pulse, too. It was mild,
lethargic at first. It was coming back from limbo, the limbo it goes to,
between.

The excitement. What's it like? It's in every part of me. It's like--I
don't know what it's like at this time, have nothing to compare it to,
drink or drugs, or sex or religion. When I was thirteen, when I
was--changing, my mother took me to Revivalist meetings. Christ had
caught on in a big way in Easterly. It has been remarked, the manner in
which colonies retreat to the old fashions of Earth, the clothes, the
decor, the religions, as if in search of anchorage. But remarking it, it
still comes fresh and sudden, new to the new planets as if they had
invented it. In the new C.R. copper-brick church, momma held my hand
tight, and I saw the faces of men and women burning as if the great
light were about to shatter out of them, dynamite inside glass. You
could almost take hold of the tension, the glorious poise on the brink
of ecstasy, and then the fall.

"Sand," I said, and he started. I can lie so still I seem dead, let
alone sleeping, "I'm going to take a shower."

His eyes were luminous.

"Yes," he said, and rested his head against the back of the chair.

It was altered between us. He'd ceased asking me if he could help. He
sensed he could help me.

I went into the cubicle and ran the shower, and as it ran I took off my
dress and undergarments and when I came to Cassi's letter, I flushed it
away through the chem-flush lavatory.

I looked at myself in the jets of the shower, at my body. Sand was going
to want my body very much. (Whores do it for payment, Sabella.) The
pendant around my neck on the hair-thin white-metal chain was glinting,
pulsing, though usually only I could see it pulse.

The sleazy hotel room was warm. I shut off the shower and went out
rain-wet, and I called his name very quietly, and Sand moved out of the
chair and around and saw me. For a moment his reaction was dual, arousal
and nervousness, quite normal, human: I'm beautiful, I've scared him.

I crossed to him, and slipped off his jacket. I was unsealing his shirt,
quietly, quietly, and he said, "Sabella, are you certain you--" And then
no more, because it was a gesture of some kind the decent human response
was forcing him to make. The animal human response was already making
him tremble, as I trembled when he held me before. He placed his hands
at either side of my face and leaned and kissed me long and slow, and
the unhuman response was beginning to well through him, what the unhuman
part of me was causing to-happen to him. He said my name several times
as he kissed me along my throat, my shoulders, and put his mouth to my
breasts. The stone lay against his cheek. (Sometimes, stretched on the
wolf hills, a boy, misled by the white refracted gleam of the stone,
would say to me, Is this a frecking diamond, baby?) But Sand brushed the
pendant aside.

And then we were on the bed. His skin smooth and marvelous, his loins
blossomed into a single hard fierce flame.

I always feel concern at this moment. Even with the basest of them, I
feel a concern to make them happy. Of course, I know the reason. And I,
I'd had no exquisite delight in it, not before, and not with Sand. The
sensations of touch, of clasp, of physical excitement, are all for the
other, the partner. Yet the prelude is sweet, being a prelude. Inside
me, his rhythm was tidal. Numb to it, yet I could measure its
perfection.

"Sabella--"

'"Darling," I whispered, "there's something we're going to do now,
something you'll like--"

"Whatever you want--whatever--"

I had the trick of this movement, being practiced. We rolled a little,
and he laughed breathlessly, and then I was over him, and though we were
still joined, the wonderful rhythm had broken, to allow the second
rhythm to begin.

The snake shifted under my fingers, upwards two inches along his neck.
His neck was strong and vital, the color of amber. I ran my tongue along
the vein there, the golden vein which throbbed and spoke to me. And then
I put my lips to the golden tube of the vein and kissed with the drawing
kiss which bruises, brings the thing within to the surface. This was how
I found the way, through this kiss, this bruising kiss, tasting the
blood beneath. Sand moaned and clung to me, closing his arms around my
waist, my hips, to hold me to him forever. The eye-teeth don't require
great length, they are nearly long enough in most of you. They only need
to be razor sharp, with points like needles, to pierce without tearing,
without hurt, as the sun pierced through the globe of quartz. I pressed
the flesh, the vein, with my fingers, molding it for my mouth. As I made
the wound, he shuddered, and when I began to draw again with my mouth,
the shudder became convulsive, I was strong, stronger than he supposed,
I could retain my position with total facility, and then I must, for as
the pump began, he came. And continued to come. (How could we guess, in
the beginning? How could we revoke when we understood?) This orgasm,
which follows the rhythm from his vein into my mouth, this climax which
goes on and on, long after the fluids of it are exhausted, while this
other fluid lasts, on and on and will go on until I stop drinking, or
until he faints. This is what the mystery is. This is what kills.

Why does it happen in this way? I don't know. I've thought of the story
that hanged men climax on the rope, the trigger of the throat, the
thrust of blood into the brain and loins. Or of a surge of life whose
symbol is sex, is seed, life rearing against death, for blood flowing
away is the symbol of death. I've thought of the sometimes sensual
pleasure of the beast giving suck. I've thought of the female spider
eating her mate during intercourse. I can think. But I don't know.

And for me?

My excitement had concentrated and changed. I was no longer excited, I
was beyond excitement, beyond the world, A lion crouched over its prey,
you see me like that. No. It was a quite spontaneous need, like needing
air to breathe. And then I was breathing air when ten minutes before I
was breathing mud. I could go on, like him, different but the same, on
and on. But I mustn't. I forced myself, forced myself, as if fighting
against gravity.

I could picture his face. You've seen the faces of those who die in
agony; did you never note that lovers look like this at the peak of joy?

I must, I must.

I raised my head.

Who told you it was messy? Great gouts and slobberings--no. A slender
trickle from the one (why more than one?) minuscule wound, a thread of
scarlet

Sand's head lolled aside. He was unconscious.

I loved him, just for a minute, I loved him and I grieved for him and my
pity was part of the beauty, before the shame began.

* * *
-----

It was four hours to sunrise when Sand came to. He felt slightly dizzy,
yet flooded by well-being, and hungry, as generally they did. He lay on
one elbow, sometimes smiling lazily, and I fed him the steak I'd dialed
for, and told him I'd already eaten my share of. My feeding him seemed
quite suitable, playful and friendly, to him. Subconsciously, I
believed, he understood it was his right, as prey, to be cosseted. In
the light wine I'd already mixed the vitamin concentrate I'd ordered
from the hotel pharmacy, along with the food. By morning, Sand Vincent
would feel no more than tired. In a day or so, not even that.
Unless--but I wasn't going to consider an alternative. There was a five
o'clock Brade lift-off from Aresport. Mine. Even though I'd have to
travel some of the route by day. I could make it now.

"That was one hell of a high," Sand said to me as we lay on the bed.
"But you're one hell of a lady."

He didn't remember it all, not consciously, just that I was a good lay.
In the beginning, even after I learned to control myself, to stop in
time, I'd kill them because I thought they'd remember. But they wouldn't
have. The truth is too absurd, it gets covered over and forgotten.

Then he put his hand to his neck and ran his fingers under the snake,
and winced.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I was enjoying it, too."

He grinned. Sometimes they said, "You're a vampire!" It was a joke. You
both laugh about it. But any pharmacy sells coagulant creams and
healfast jel in handy purse-size packs. There wouldn't be a mark much
more than a pale bruise by sunup.

"You enjoyed it too, did you," he said. He skimmed his hand across my
body. He slid himself toward me, stroking, me, eager again, the way they
are always eager. Then, he saw the stone. "Christ," he said, "it can't
be a ruby, this size, can it?"

The pendant stone is scarlet, pulsing, warm, alive.

"Just stained crystal."

"I thought it was colorless. Why did I think that? Sabella, you're
lovely."

I let him kiss me, then I eased away.

"I'd like to, Sand, but I'm so damn tired. In the morning?"

"No, beautiful. Now." And he started all over me, dreamy and stupid,
with this lust the lodestone brings.

"This is to be rape then, is it?" I said. He blinked, and his face
emptied. He let me go. "In the morning," I said.

"Woman, I won't let you out of this room until we do."

He fell asleep almost immediately, and in his sleep, came back to me,
lying against me trustfully as a child. But the sleep was too deep for
him to wake when I left him, put on my clothes and took up my piece of
luggage and went away.

I paid the hotel bill through until noon next day. Sand would be ready
to leave by then. He'd start at once feverishly trying to find me,
obsessed by me in a way he could barely figure. But the compulsion would
shrivel gradually when he didn't locate me. As long as he never saw me
again, he'd be safe.

It was four years since I'd had a man. I intend the word 'had' in all
its meaning--sex, con-trick, sustenance.

Four years. I'd tried to stop when my mother died. And I'd stopped.
Lapsed. Stopped. Two years of lapsing, regaining ground, four years of
keeping ground. But the craving never goes away. The beasts of the field
appease, but I am a huntress, and my natural prey strides through the
steel prairies, rides the gold mountains of the cities, the neon caves
of the towns.

There are wolves on all the hills, even the hills of glass.

In the plane, as the sun was slitting the sky below and I darkened my
window, I thought for the first time, If Cassi sent me her curse and a
jeweled cross she wanted to scorch me, why did she also leave me eighty
thousand tax-paid credits?

2
-

We moved away from Easterly because one night when I was fourteen, I
went for a drive with a boy I picked up on the highway near the
bearshop. It was insane instinct on my part, callousness on his. He
deserved something but not what he got. The highway auto-patrol found
his body in the bushes. Everybody thought he'd left his car for the
usual reason, and a wildcat had attacked him, which caused a stir since
Easterly isn't hunting country. He'd died of heart failure, as always.
But I'd made a mess of his neck. If you allow your teeth to meet in the
vein there's a hemorrhage at once. My mother waited up for me that
night, and when I came home with strange hot colors on my dress, she
locked us in my bedroom, and she questioned me. Six hours of
questioning, but the same question, which I answered truthfully, which
she would then ask me again, imploring me, mutely, to recant, to say I'd
lied. We were both sobbing and shouting, and she hit me sometimes. She'd
taken me to medics before, but she'd never really told them anything.
The medics would prescribe for anemia. As for psychiatry, nobody
reckoned it anymore, and religion, in my case, had failed. Now she had
this terrible thing to face, to cope with. Her little daughter had done
something momma couldn't admit, couldn't even believe, and momma still
had to hide it from everyone. So she fastened on the believable aspect,
that I'd been laid at fourteen and had lizards in my pants. Then, I got
really sick. I started passing out, getting heat stroke after half an
hour in the sun. There was a doctor who said it was photophobia, and a
doctor who said it was psychosomatic. And then I killed a boy again, and
the same story of wildcats went around and the men got up a shooting
party, and momma and I moved west

She'd had nobody she could confide in. Those years ate her away. The
three years when it was starting in Easterly, and the four years on
Hammerhead Plateau. Did I say she had no one to confide in? That wasn't
strictly accurate. Sister Cassi was permanently on-planet by then,
living with her husband in Ares, and him building up the Koberman
Corporation. Momma must have written Cassi quite a lot. I don't think
she spelled it out, the huge unbelieved terror that lowered over her
days and her nights. But I suppose it was there, if you'd looked through
the written lines at the howling fear behind, Cassi hadn't looked, then.
Cassi had been tuned in to her man and his money, though she wrote so
seldom we didn't really know about that. (She never even wrote us when
he died.) Only at the end had Cassi presumably reread my mother's
letters or re-dreamed them. And the angels had told her what I was, and
she'd accepted their word.

The house at Easterly was isolated, twenty miles from Hammerlake, and
five from the nearest flyer-halt. And it was only semi-mechanized. The
ordinary mail came once a month, unless you went to town for it, but
there wasn't much mail. Only registered parcels (few) and stellas (none)
came to the door. The rest was left lying in the mail basket with the
groceries half a mile off, where the road goes by. Hammerhead was a wild
place, too. Wolves on the uplands, a dam project and dredging complex on
the rim of the lake town, and bars like yellow musical boxes and those
girls that somehow nobody ever properly legalized here, who still copy
vamps of centuries ago, red nails, tinsel hair, winter eyes.

My mother chose the house from a catalog. Did she realize how cunning
she was to choose just this house in this spot, or did she hide away the
cunning, too?

There wasn't much cash left by then, enough to get by and to add a
handful of improvements, button-doors, air-conditioning, dust-eaters,
(There was dust in Cassi's library. By now, dust also is fashionable
again.) I got my tape deck. I'd lie on the parlor floor and listen.
Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Vaeder, Nils. My music frightened my mother. It
was the emanation, to her, or stimulus of my madness. She couldn't see
it as balm, analgesic. She'd move to the other end of the house when I
played music.

She'd try to get me to eat. I must have anorexia nervosa, now. She
thought I made myself sick deliberately. I found ways to pretend, and
she let herself be fooled. I'd take meals in my room, and tip them in a
plastic box I kept for the purpose under the bed, and later I'd empty
the box in the primitive incinerator resident behind the kitchen. School
finishes on the pink planet at about thirteen or fourteen anyway, and
after that you go on to mature studies at your own discretion. That
could be done in the house with mailed library tapes and TV. That was
safe. In the back yard, under the fifteen-foot orange tree, there was an
old swing. Momma used to sit at her bedroom window and stare down at me,
my nighttime insomniac swinging, swinging. When the swing was empty,
she'd search the house. Often, the swing was empty.

I could run for miles on the ridges and over the star-blanched sands,
among the rifts and through the fern-clotted, shade-thick canyons. I was
never afraid. It was country I could comprehend, where no one knew me.
Big cities are the same, you see. I learned how to hunt in the
wilderness, the corridors of night, and on the things I hunted, I
learned how not to kill, though it's harder with the animals, who sense
the hunter from afar off, who, even when they lie down helpless in the
pools of your eyes, are tensed to fly. And besides, there's no sexual
communion to bind them, it has to be an act of sabotage.

One day when I was fifteen, they were repairing the road to Hammerlake
Halt, and working half a mile down the slope from the house. My bedroom
faced that way, and I'd looked through the blue blind, and the blued
dust haze, and made out their shadows, the two men with their robot
equipment. Then came this dulled-over day, sky a deep rose parasol
against the sun, and I went down the road and sat on a stone, and
watched. Perhaps they'd heard about a girl in the house and were keyed
up to it. They turned their copper-skinned male bodies and they looked
at me, and they smiled and offered me a beer.

It happens very naturally. If there are two, one is drawn more readily
than the other, whichever I want the most. His name was Frank. He came
back after it got dark, whistling softly, in a clean shirt. We went up
into the hills, up head-on into the crushed powder of starshine. I liked
him. He was thoughtful and curiously well-mannered. He told me I was
Shakespeare's Juliet and I killed him and I was sorry. It was because he
was the first, after so long. I couldn't stop myself. And--I liked the
power over him, what happened to him, the way he clung to me.

I sat and cried, holding his hand, but his white upturned eyeballs
glared like parodies of the stars.

I'd frequently heard the wolves. You can always hear them from the
house. At certain seasons they fill the hills like blown sand, at others
they drift away toward Brade, or westward to Montiba. But that night
they were suddenly all around me, just red star clusters under the
white.

I wasn't afraid of them. I didn't put it in a sentence in my head, but I
understood nevertheless. They and I. Cassi had it right. One of the
wolves, Sabella.

Delicate as clouds, they began to shiver down to me, and like a cloud
they settled on Frank, and hid him and what they did.

Earth-imported animals don't feed on the dead. But the wolves of Novo
Mars will take a fresh kill, at least from me.

The local TV news had it: Young robot-ganger savaged by wolves.

The wolves will kill, anyway. People have died through the wolves.
Periodically men stray with a weapon which doesn't fire, or in ignorance
without, to meet a girl. Later, other men hunt the wolves, and the night
sky leers with gun flashes.

When I was sixteen, Aunt Cassi sent me a check. I bought some dresses
and a box of face paint. I bleached my hair. I could get to town in
three hours, running. I can run, a slow run, a lope, for hours. And I
could look like a freelance bar-girl. I went with the itinerants where I
could, men who wouldn't be missed. We rode back in solar jeeps, in
runners, in old-fashioned gas-tanked mobiles, into the wide spaces of
Hammerhead. But soon I learned to take a little, only that, and then I
learned the other thing, that they'd come after me for more, they'd beg
me. They thought they were begging to screw me, but they were begging to
die. Only three ever tracked me to the house. One beat me. He slashed me
across my back and stomach, yelling. He pulled me under the orange tree
and raped me and somehow I didn't touch him, and he got up roaring I was
no frecking good any more, and he went away. My mother was in the house,
on her knees. I'd had a toy, one of those loose-limbed things children
cart around. Somehow she'd found it, and there she knelt, hugging it to
her, and crying, and she said to me, "What you're doing to yourself--oh,
Bel, Bel, what you're doing." But she was speaking to the toy. And not
so long after, she died and fell down in the crimson blood pool of the
old window. Momma. Momma.

* * *
-----

I walked home from the Halt through the morning. I felt strong. I could
take the sun because I was appeased. But around three-quarters of an
hour on the road in the shining pink dusts, filed my nerves. There was a
gas storm up over Smokey, the mountain that holds up the sky beyond
Montiba. The gas storms start when the oxygen filler sufficiently
irritates the Martian stratos, generally at the level where high lands
probe the upper air. The sky veiled over a little, and claps sounded,
and a big pale wind blew across my left cheek.

When I approached the house, I was bone-weary. When I'd seen the shape
of it, the tall blind-sealed windows, the orange tree in a marigold of
bloom, it was as if I'd been away a year. The tension went out of my
sinews and I could have dropped.

I tabbed the door, but before I went in, I sat a minute on the porch on
the lacework bench. The storm was building, a storm by Vaeder or
Stravinsky. Dust creamed by the house, the wind made a sound like a sea,
or as a sea sounds to me who has only heard it on a tape: Audio-scapes
of Earth. Vol. 2. There might be rain later, Rain, but nothing else.

The guilt wasn't so bad now, because there was no need for too much
guilt, and presently the gnawing, the need, would go away, as Sand's
need for me would go.

I went in, and closed up, and I was really secure at last

My bed is a copy of an old four-poster. Carved doves and pineapples
decorate these posts, and navy gauzes hang down. There is only space
else in the room for the vanity table blocking the window with its
litter and its mirror. I can see myself in mirrors. The idea that I
might not comes from the same myth that says vampires cast no shadow.
Shadow and mirror image are both primitive ciphers for the soul. The
myth implies a vampire has no soul. Maybe I haven't, but I've met others
who surely haven't too. We all cast shadows, we all show in glass.

On the other plaster wall, where I could see ft through the gauze, was
the picture.

It was the reproduction of a holy picture, painted by a medieval artist
in the days when there was only one world, and they thought it was flat.
It depicts Mara, the mother of Christ. Her name means bitterness. But
God is telling her she is going to conceive immaculately, and the artist
has used the then popular symbol of the pencil-thin ray of light
piercing the crystal goblet in her hands--piercing but not breaking. The
analogy is flawless and beautiful. Her head's tilted back and she's so
happy, so exalted, but it won't last. Mara-bitter. Her child will
suffer. A mother always takes it hard.

* * *
-----

I woke in the initial blush of night. The storm was over. The utter
stillness of the wilderness hung like a velvet canopy on the house, the
land.

I had a vague cramp in my stomach, but that was nothing, and would pass.
But as I lay there in the deep dark, I could see starlight through the
blinds, licking the oddments on the vanity table. And I recalled it was
Cassi's birthday check that bought me my disguise as a bar-girl. Then I
wondered about the credits again, but pushed them mentally aside,
because she'd gone crazy, and that was why she'd threatened with one
hand, gifted with the other.

And then I wondered about the town, the neons, and the boys who called
after me, and the way my tongue burned as if a drop of flame were on the
tip of it. I thought of how I had them. How I drank them. Breathed them.
I thought of Sand.

I got up and shivered, and went downstairs in antique Earth-model jeans
and shirt. Perhaps I'll go out tonight. Perhaps the deer are running,
Montiba way, where the corrals lie like supper tables on the rouge-black
rocky meadows.

I got some real orange juice from the freezer and put it through the
thaw box and drank it. I took a cigarette from the carton. They had each
a couple of grains of the synthetic hash you can buy at any druggist's.
I smoked, and the cramp dulled in my belly.

My coffee-black hair showed natural highlights like pale brass
reflecting in the windows. Remember when it was acid-drop blonde,
Sabella?

The stone glittered between my breasts. It was only rosewater then,
pallid, dying, the rich scarlet sunk away. Faithful barometer. Once it
was always red, sometimes so red it was a coal, a wolfs eye.

I put a tone poem by Nils on the music deck.

I shut my eyes, and saw myself alone in this house for sixty years.

I waited till the Nils was done, then switched off the deck. I crossed
the hall and buttoned open the door and stepped out on the porch.

And as I stood there, facing down the slope toward the road, I saw a
pinprick of light ghosting along the road's surface, coming from the
east, from Hammerlake.

Traffic goes by on that road at night, not often, now and then. But this
car came level with the dirt track that swivels up from the road, and
the car swiveled with it. The car was coming for me.

The headlight threw a blank page of light across the house and went out.
The car parked about forty yards away where the road flickers back into
scrub grass.

It was my uncle, the Hog. He wanted me to sign his goddamn papers.

The car door lifted. Someone got out, the door closed.

Somewhere, there was a whisper of cicadas.

He was poised hi the darkness with only starlight to see by.

It was Sand.

"Here I am," he said. He said it not boldly but with shyness. A bag hung
from his hand. "I had to see you again, Bella. I didn't believe it when
I woke up and you'd gone. Why did you? Sabella?"

"How did you find me?" I said, having to say something.

The cicadas, who rarely speak around the Plateau, intimidated by our
larger voices, had crushed themselves again to silence.

"It's so simple to find anyone you really want to."

The Hog knew where I was, maybe others of Cassi's circle. Sand had
followed me to Cassi's house before. Maybe Sand had paid the servants a
visit and just been plausible enough to elicit information.

I want you, baby, said the night with a hundred voices (So many? Less?
More?) the men who had returned for me. Not twenty yards away, a man had
torn into me under the orange tree. Why hadn't I killed him? He had
earned it.

"Sand," I said. My voice was husky.

Sand, I don't want you. You make me sick, I hate your body and the way
you lay me and Sand--and Sand--

"Bella," he said. His voice was one caress. He made my name magic.

"I don't want you here."

"Yes you do. You do want me. Maybe we both should be honest, for once.
But then, it goes beyond honesty, Sabella."

He dropped his bag and came to me and grasped me against him, and he was
breathing as if he'd swum for shore from some treacherous river, and I
was the shore, and now he was home, he was safe.

"Don't cry, Sabella. Why are you crying?"

"I don't want you."

But I was pulling at his arm. We were actually scrambling over the
porch, into the house.

The door was still open. The night leans on the door, staring.

Sand pinned me against the wall.

Flesh was grass.

He couldn't wait for me. He didn't know he would react quite like that.
He apologized even as he ripped my shirt.

Centuries ago, men dying of tuberculosis, were discovered to have a high
sexual drive.

Incubus and succubus imparted such exquisite pleasure to their victims
during intercourse that the victims could not resist them, shunning
their human partners for the embrace of death.

Be patient. Don't kill him. You will, but not yet.

He won't come back, of course. Another myth, vampiric resurrection. He
won't rise from the grave. He'll lie in it. And all his amber and bronze
and sable will combine to form decay.

He cried out, and then the whirlpool choked him and swept him under. He
only thought he'd escaped the river.

And I breathe again.

* * *
-----

We had three nights, two days between, some hours more. All the while I
wanted to baby him, care for him. Don't turn away. Quid est veritas?
This is mine. All the time I was killing him I wanted him to live. I
wanted to help him. Perhaps others do this. Kill each other, but always
wanting to restore. But he was a drug to me, I to him. Of the two, he
was the more importunate. He didn't know for a long while, almost to the
last, what I was doing to him. Sometimes they never knew.

We didn't go out of the house. We--he--made love. And I used his
lovemaking. I fixed him meals, after I'd dialed groceries from town. My
mother taught me to cook, I cook well. I gave him steaks and wholewheat
bread, green vegetables, red fruits, clear wines like morning. I pumped
vitamins into him. He wasn't truly weak until the ultimate night.

You're thinking of the farmer who fattens his pig for the kill.

Did you ever eat the pig?

It's love that made me preserve. Guilt, despair.

He talked a lot about his brother. That was the subconscious again. It
became apparent from his dialogues concerning this man, his brother,
that Sand had been rescued by him many times. Not only from the
mescadrine trip on Gall Vulcan, but from petty crimes years before, a
dangerous liaison or two, debts. Sand was born a victim. I say this not
to excuse myself, for it does not excuse me. But he'd traveled twisting
ways, and snares had molded to him. Sand was a prophetic name. Sand that
blows and forms many configurations, that can never settle, that is a
mere residue of rock. Then I began to wonder if his mind was clouding,
if he were hallucinating, for Sand's brother became a massive figure on
the skyline of everything Sand said, an angel with blazing wings. Was it
that the subconscious, anxious to provide another rescue for Sand in
this extreme cul-de-sac, kept supplying the illusion of a brother?
Possibly, the brother was not real and had never been.

The second morning, the mailman came. I'd forgotten about mail. He
brought the registered packet which contained my certificate of holdings
and my uncle's drawn-up documents whereby I could sign the investment
paraphernalia over to him. The Hog was taking a fee, naturally. His
letter assured me he had to, to see things legal. But I looked at all
this days later.

The mailman, who again required my thumbprint, stared at my wrapper, and
in the lenses of my black glasses.

"Sorry to wake you, Miss Quey."

He pivoted against the fragile sky, gazing long and hard, at Sand's car
parked on the scrub grass by the track.

"Long time since I seen one of them. Ares I.D. digit panel."

He went on gazing. I held the packet in my hand.

There's menace here. He means me to feel menaced. But what can he do,
what is he insinuating he can do?

"Visitor?" he said to me.

I could keep quiet, which might goad him further, though to what?

"Yes."

"You don't get so many of those."

"Thank you," I said.

"Thank you," he repeated automatically. "That's a nice car. Old model.
Self-drive or auto. Nice."

"Thank you."

"Some morning," he said, "I'm going to buzz this door and you're going
to come out with your clothes on."

I buttoned the door shut, but he went on grinning at me through the
smoked glass. I walked away before he did, and his grin was focused on
my spine as I passed through the blood splash of the big window.

Sand was lying on one elbow, reading, among the cushions on the bed. The
house was cool and sweet with the air-conditioning. The blinded room was
blue, and Sand's body and hair filtered blue. Even his eyes, the pages
of the paper book.

He glanced up and he smiled at me. "She walks in beauty like the night,"
he said, "and all that's best of dark and bright, meet in her aspect and
her eyes."

I sat beside him, and he let go the book, and laid his head in my lap
and looked up at me.

"I've never felt like this before. And I've known some trips."

"How do you feel, Sand?"

"Floating. And as if," he smiled once more, pondering, "as if I'm a pane
of window glass. What are we on, Sabella?" I didn't answer and he didn't
seem to need the answer, and next he said, "Last time we made it, did I
black out? I think I did for a moment. But it was wonderful, Sabella. As
good for you?"

"Yes."

"I keep thinking," he said, "I haven't been honest with you, Jace--did I
tell you about him?" Jace was the big invented brother. "Yes, I did. Did
I tell you about my father? My father was incredible. Daniel. He was
like being alive. He was so full of life, he was like--some kind of sun.
And he was crazy. I loved that man. And Jace, he's like that man all
over..." He fell asleep, and the fiery jewel, swinging above him,
reflected on his cheek, which now was hollow.

A little after sunset, he wanted me. I tried not to take anything from
him, but he dragged my mouth to his neck. Dragged me. It isn't the same
without, you understand, not after it's begun. Finally, I am as
incapable of resisting as he.

After midnight, he started to die.

He wasn't scared. He was floating, as he'd put it. The heart gets
lethargic, its sluggishness compounded by the loss of blood. I'd seen it
happen quickly, in a single night, or less. But with Sand, I'd had the
chance to preserve him, keep him alive. I'd never had that chance
before. To watch it happen, slow, then steady and sure, like light going
from the sky.

He had opened his eyes as far as they would open, which was only now a
third of the way, the pried lids like heavy shutters. But at his neck
the snake was still alert Those watching, knowing, unsensual eyes would
never close.

I could kill him now, simple as turning out a lamp. We didn't need to
couple. His body had learned the connected responses. If I took from him
now, he'd spasm anyway, and die in bliss, not guessing.

He seemed to love to say my name, a thing I'd noticed with the others.

"Sabella," he murmured, holding my hand, "Sabella--Bella--Bella."

After Frank, I'd tried to cut my wrists. I say tried. I couldn't do it.
When your whole process is geared to survival, as in the hunter it has
to be, calculated suicide is as hard to accomplish as to kill in cold
blood would be for someone else.

Sand was young, and he had been strong. It was so stupid to realize that
transfusions, cardiac assist, rest and sedation, could save this life
which was trickling steadily out of him. Seventeen miles away, this side
of Hammerlake, there was a hospital. It sat on a rise among palm trees,
a hideous white cube that saved lives. It would be straightforward.
Sand's car with its auto-drive on the night-clear road, could cover the
ground in less than ten minutes. Next, I'd leave the car and Sand in it,
hit the emergency button on the hospital gate, and run. Who could run
better than Sabella?

Oblivion might cure him of his obsession. If he came after me again. I
could go up into the hills. The longer he was away from me, the easier
it would be for him. For him.

But there wasn't much time.

I broke the plasti-cover on two of the vitamin shot dermics and pumped
the goodness through his pores. At the same instant I was smoothing the
heal-fast jel over his throat At the touch, he roused.

"Sabella," he said drowsily, "have you been drinking my blood?"

O.K. To a medic bending over him: "I met a lady who sucked my blood."
The medic wouldn't believe him.

"Darling," I said, "we're going for a drive."

"Sure," he said, smiling. I helped him to sit up, and I dressed him as
best I could. He had no more stamina now than the floppy doll my mother
had held to her, kneeling on the floor. "I don't mind," he said.
"Eternal life. Beautiful Sabella."

I carried him down the stairs. I'm unusually strong, but it was awkward.

"Why, Sabella," he marveled dreamily, "You're carrying me. Jace used to
carry me," he said, "but Jace is built like a gladiator."

I got him through the door, over the porch. I opened the car, and
managed to angle him onto the rear seat. Not every car has a rear seat.
It was lucky Sand's car was a throwback model.

"Sabella," he said, "there's something I have to tell you."

"Later, Sand. There'll be lots of time later."

I got in and shut the car. I switched on the auto and keyed in the
directions. The car revved itself, exploding the framework of the night.

"I'm cold," he said.

Miserere met, Doming... canturbata sunt omnia ossa mea....

Forgive me, God. Let him live. Let me be quick enough.

Sabella, you're insane.

The car spun itself around, and flared down the track toward the road,
going so swiftly you scarcely felt the bumps.

"Where are you, Sabella?"

"I'm here, honey."

"If I ten you something about myself, don't start hating me."

"There's nothing to hate."

"Please don't hate me. Your aunt Cassilda Koberman--right? She had a guy
who worked for her, an old guy, a servant, John Trim."

"Sand, don't talk."

"You don't know what I'm going to say."

"That he told you how to find me, because Cassi knew."

"Not--not quite. Christ, I'm cold, Sabella. I feel terrible, Sabella."

Horror fills me. If I'd let him die in the house he'd have died without
pain.

"It'll be better soon," I said. It will. It will.

I could hear him shivering then, his teeth chattering as he pushed the
phrases out. We were on the concrete road, racing east to Hammerlake.
The speedometer showed one hundred and forty.

"I kept wanting to tell you, Bella. Once I understood how wrong they
were, and how I--felt about you."

"Hush."

"No, listen--Cassilda Koberman was your enemy. She left you a handful of
credits in her will, like bait, to draw you out of hiding. Then she
primed old Trim with stories about you. She never told him what it was
you were supposed to have done, but she implied plenty. The death of
your mother was suspicious, you were a whore--old John Trim got the
notion he was meant to hunt you down, bring you to justice. They both
had this godawful Revivalist thing. She left him a stack of cash,
privately, the way she left it to her bloody church. I told that fat man
at the cemetery that I was a relation of Trim, but Trim had hired me to
get friendly with you, to suss you out. Can you hear me, Bella? I've run
a little private investigation agency in Dawson for about a year.
Business was poor till this stunt came up. You see, Bella, that's how I
was on the plane to Ares. I was watching for you, and the checkout
tipped me when your name came through the machine. That's how I always
knew where you'd be: the funeral. Cassilda's house. I even found you
here on Hammerhead. But that wasn't--I knew straight off on the plane it
wasn't my job any more, that they had it wrong." He stopped, gasping for
breath. Then he said, "Am I dying? What have you done to me?"

The car streamed over the concrete, speedometer at one hundred and
fifty-one, maximum.

I remembered the Hog marching to Sand across the lawns, returning to me
with a congested face, boasting no triumph. I remembered John Trim's
frail brown leaf hands shutting me in with Cassi's casket of bane.

I had to make a decision. This is the nearest to the abyss I've ever
been. I ought to let him die.

But I can't.

And then the road bent into a tunnel of rock, and as the dark of the
tunnel clambered over the car, I saw something beyond the tunnel about a
hundred yards along the road. I slammed the brake button, and the car
threw itself to a halt three feet from the tanners end. And in the dark
I sat and stared out through the windscreen at a bar of light dividing
the road, and the bright gems of neon that spelled the words RANDOM
ROADBLOCK.

* * *
-----

Sand asked me if I was angry, and if that was why I'd stopped the car.
Then he asked where we were going. He seemed to have forgotten what he'd
said previously, he seemed to assume he had a virus, influenza,
something like that. Then he told me his father, Daniel, had never had
influenza and then he asked me when Jace would arrive.

All during this, I was looking at the roadblock sign, and the barrier
across the road. Such checks on traffic across the deserts are irregular
but thorough, carried out on suspicion, or just precaution to see what's
going where, and when, and why, and with what cargo. They'd search the
car and ask questions about Sand, the state he was in. And who was I and
what was my involvement I'd taken chances in my adolescence, chances
that made me shake when I recalled them, and I'd been fortunate. (Oh I
don't mean the law would react to what I was. But pervert, murderess, to
all of that.) And now trouble was on every side of me, on every side one
slip and the precipice yawned.

I said, I'm geared toward survival. I was like someone with half vision,
and what I could see was my own life, and just a blur by it that was the
life of Sand.

I grasped quite suddenly what I had to do.

I opened the car door.

"Sand, it's just a little way. Will you help me? It won't be for long."

I carried him back down the rock tunnel out into the night on the other
side, the way we'd come a minute ago. I laid him in the still-warm dust
just out of sight of the road. The night-morning was black, cool, not
cold. The stars were friendly above. He was out, all the time I carried
him. But he was breathing, shallowly. I took off my jacket and spread it
over him,

"I won't be long, baby."

I ran back to the car. I jammed the auto button with the self-drive, the
thing they say idiots often do. It was dim in the tunnel, but I scooped
up the dust and smeared the digit panel. Maybe they wouldn't bother to
check it, anyway, if they checked the car and it wasn't packed with
anything illegal.

I walked out of the tunnel and straight toward the roadblock and into
the light.

There were three automatic electric flash-guns set half charge on the
barrier. Two men in the uniform of the Hammerhead road patrol sprawled
on the roadside bank with a bottle and a box playing out softly live
news, weather, and slow-beat music from the Montiba Smokey Impulse
Tower. Both men got to their feet.

"You know," I said as I came up, "God and his angels must have sent you
to me."

The men grinned.

"What's the problem?"

"I've jammed my damn car button again. And there isn't a fixit place for
thirty miles."

"Oh, we can fix it, lady," said one of the men. "But I'll have to check
your car, too."

I saw the roadblock for the first time.

"You after me again? What did I do this time?"

"Not you, lady. At least, I hope not you."

They offered me a drink from their bottle and even a plasti-cup to go
with it, but I explained I was desperate to get to Canyon where my man
would experience apoplexy when I told him about the car buttons.

Still grinning, but with one of the auto guns unlinked from the barrier
and trundling after to cover me, the bigger man strolled with me into
the tunnel. He didn't check the digit panel, just the seats, the seat
storage and the rear compartment. He did it all humorously, showing his
powers of search but not supposing they were necessary. He untangled the
jam on the dash with a device from his pocket. He told me where I could
buy such a device in Hammerlake. Then he extracted a pack of cigarettes.
He demonstrated no wish to leave me. I thought of Sand beyond the
tunnel, his strained heart struggling through each pulse.

"You know," said the patrol man, "you're kind of nice looking."

"Am I?"

"I'd say you were. I'd say you might be nice all over."

"Hey," I said, "do you have something to write with?"

Once we got over the double entendre of this, I gave him an invented
call number.

"Any time after ten. If a man answers, say you're the Hammerhead police.
That'll knock the oxygen out of him."

He might never take me up on this anyway, the boredom of the roadblock
being over. If he did, either he'd get the unlisted tone, or a surprise.

He said I could drive on now, they'd open the block up for me to go
through, and he walked away out of the tunnel. As soon as he was twenty
yards down the concrete, I turned and ran in the other direction. My
plan was to bring Sand back to the car just as I'd unloaded him, in the
tunnel's cover, lay him on the floor and drive straight through the
block. They wouldn't flag me down again, and if they did, they wouldn't
check the car.

I reached the tunnel and crossed to the dust-floor, and Sand wasn't
there any longer.

My jacket was, but nothing else. Only the scuffed dust, and a slur that
might have been a footprint, before the patchy shrubs took over.

I'd been with the patrolmen about ten minutes. Sand had been comatose.
But presumably the air had brought him to. Either he'd panicked, or he
had just started moving automatically, to find me, or someone. Maybe he
was looking for Daniel or for Jace. Maybe he hurt too much to lie quiet.
But he hadn't the strength to go far.

I called him, softly. I didn't want the men by the block to hear me. In
any case, I only had a few minutes at most before one of them came back
into the tunnel to see why I hadn't driven on out.

The wind blew like a lake's ripples across and across the wilderness. I
picked up the jacket and put it on.

I went out over the plain, one way, now another. Even in the dark the
stars were bright and there the land was almost flat, apart from the
ridge that ran down to form the tunnel. Sand couldn't have climbed that
ridge, but he could have wandered among the shrubs, the slender, dryly
flowering clumps of trees. A parched watercourse, long abandoned, was
cut like a scar in the soil. I stared into and along it, because he
could have fallen there. But it wasn't there that he fell.

The road was two hundred, two hundred and thirty yards away. I could see
the flush of the roadblock's light beyond the arched shapes of the ridge
and the tunnel. They must have been going into the tunnel by then. It
was too late. I couldn't get back to the car, even when I found Sand.

Then I found him. Of course, then.

He'd come quite a way, as if there were really something out there on
that flat easel of earth and night that he had to get to. The wind
stroked his hair as he lay there on his face. He was dead. I could have
saved him, even with the roadblock, I could have, if he'd waited.

"Why didn't you wait for me," I said to him and I crouched by him, as if
for an answer. One of his cheeks was pressed in the dust, the other half
turned upward, and luminous, or so it seemed, and the lid of the eye was
luminous as if the eye shone through, looking at me. Somehow the snake
rope had twisted so that its eyes could look at me too. The dead are
always in league against me.

Naturally, the men would have reentered the tunnel then, found the empty
car. They'd search for me, then or the next day. They'd stumble on Sand.
They'd think that strange, a magic trick, a girl into boy. The digit
panel of the car is an Ares registration. A call to Ares could tell them
who bought or hired the car. Then they would trace Sand to John Trim and
discover who Trim wanted investigated and it was me. Then they'd
remember the girl on the road was like Trim's description of Sabella
Quey.

It didn't matter what they could tie on to me, or can't. One connection
with one of these deaths, these men who die in the darkness, one
connection could trigger others. Easterly. The wolves. A spark spinning
along a fuse. But not without evidence.

I gathered Sand up in my arms. It was harder, much harder since I had to
run with him.

Back there in the tunnel, I heard Sand's car cough as someone manually
revved the engine.

Run, Sabella. And Sabella ran.

* * *
-----

The incinerator came with the house. It was fashionably antiquated but
functional, a five-foot square black drum with a chemical filter chimney
that odorlessly smoldered day and night in my mother's time, that didn't
often smoke in mine. But it had been at work the past day or so, because
Sand had been with me. Leftovers, cartons, wrapping, the incinerator had
been busy. The press-button chute was large enough to take an item a
whole four feet around. Back before my mother and me, the chute had
obviously had to serve larger objects than are common to domestica. And
now. Now it had to serve a man.

It had been four hours, going home, carrying Sand. I'd had to lower him
to the ground many times. Gradually he ceased to be handsome, pitiful
and important. He became a sack of beans I had to haul, my penance,
unhuman. I moved a mile or so off the road, because one of the patrolmen
was sure to come looking for me or radio for others. As I staggered the
last steps toward the house, the brink of the sky was rinsing itself
colorless ready for sunrise.

I bore him to the chute. I pushed the igniter to feed the flame inside,
and sat down while the furnace heated. I held him in my lap, and we were
the Pietŕ.

Then, when the furnace was ready, I fed him in, let the outer door
close, and heard the inner door open and the flames rush up as he dove
through into them.

So callously she burned his body, the evidence which might condemn her.

There is no way I can prove it wasn't like that. If you held a knife,
would you stick it in your heart, or would you throw it away? Sand had
become a knife. But, no. The knife is also your child.

The smoke from the chimney was blue, and the sun came up in it.

The heat from the proofed incinerator was slight, but greater than I had
ever known it, even in my adolescence, when my mother burned her old
dresses from Easterly, and those albums she and my father had kept
together, stills of their wedding and their two anniversaries and my
birth. We all go up in flames.

I'm cold, Sabella.

Not anymore, my love.

The ash and melted residue was shunted away beneath into an underground
pit. Here it slowly amalgamated with the soil, and if you dug down at
the farther opening of the pit, ten feet from the kitchen door, there
was an ashy compost. But we had never needed it

I'm not leaving you, Sabella.

The jewel between my breasts, catching the sun, was the color of a dying
rose.

* * *
-----

Five days later, I walked down to the delivery box at the edge of the
road.

I'd heard nothing. No one had come to the house. I'd been listening to
all the news bulletins as I hadn't done for years. But even the local
news from Smokey Tower hadn't carried word of a ghost-girl and a car, or
a young man who'd been out this way and vanished. It had occurred to me
that perhaps Sand had informed no one that he was following me to my
very doorstep; that possibly the car dealer in Ares had mislaid Sand's
name. Snatches of Sand's reveries came back to me. Possibly not
everything was true, or legal. Possibly they'd never trace him through
to me anyway. I'd remembered the mailman by then, who'd seen Sand's car
parked at the end of the track. But if he'd been sure of a search or of
his facts presumably by now he would have spoken out. His manner had
registered as sly, a personal antagonism. When he came again, I'd know.
As for the Hog, Sand had told him he was related to Trim. And in fact,
the only definite potentially damning link between Sand and myself, was
Cassi's servant, John. And again, his personal and suppressed form of
malice might hold him silent and stultified.

There was a letter in the box, an unregistered letter.

When I opened it, I saw it was from the Hog. There was some grist about
having sent me the papers I should sign if I wanted him to deal with my
credits. There was a pompously sentimental footnote. He knew I'd be very
sorry to hear that John Trim, Cassilda's manservant, had suffered a
fatal stroke on the second night after the funeral.

I sat on the ground and read these sentences over. I think I laughed a
little. Because, for once, the dead had aided me.

Perhaps it was the shock of seeing the whore-murderess in person that
killed John. He had seemed remote, disinterested, in my vicinity, it
must have cost him dear, boiling underneath for vengeance, justice. He
was older than Cassi, he had looked ephemeral. Revenge had been too big
a legacy to leave him.

Cassi, you failed. The prime agent is removed from the stage. And Sand--

My pendant is clear white, Sand. And all night the pain in my belly
comes at me like the wolves. I'm living on diluted concentrates and the
blood of fruits.

Your metal and your silk are cinders, trash.

And if you lay here dead, right now, I'd burn you again.

* * *
-----

The tenth night I hunted, on the hills. The wolves were singing like
broken silver saws,

The next night, I went to Angel Meadow, north of Hammerlake, the
cemetery where my mother is buried.

Cassi didn't come to my mother's funeral. Nobody came but me, though
curiously enough someone else was being buried at precisely the same
hour in a neighboring plot, with a somber crowd, and an incredible
importation of horses and carriages, emanations of that earlier world
the colony planets cling to. It wasn't, in either case, a Revivalist
burial. In theirs show took the place of religion. Soil rained on the
coffin, and white flowers rained on it, and women desperately rained
tears. Twenty paces off, the polished horses stamped. I'd never seen a
horse before, certainly not with plumes. There were torches, too, though
why these people also needed the night for their burying, I didn't know.

I hadn't cried over my mother's grave, though I cried in Cassi's chapel.
Maybe my tears are the sweat of my calumny, and I had not yet learned I
was utterly to blame for everything. I was eighteen. I was still blonde.

Obviously the gates were long shut that midnight when I revisited, but
the wall was accessible. The cross leaned a fraction over her gray bed.
I had never brought her flowers. I didn't pray or stupidly, humanly,
attempt to speak to her; I just sat there on the turf, and I could smell
aniseed grass, somewhere, like the lawn at Easterly.

When I came back over the wall, and started home, I had the urge to look
behind me several times. There was never anyone there, and I think I
imagined it. The pursuit had not yet begun.

Part TWO
--------

The Avenger
===========

1
-

Two months after the smoke from the incinerator faded, a new mailman
called at the house.

It was noon, the light hitting the walls like a frozen explosion, the
tinted reflections of the blinds stamped in a patchwork on the floor,
I'd been on the hills that night, and though I wasn't sleeping, I was
lying on the parlor sofa with the music deck playing, when the buzzer
from the porch drilled through. The Hammerhead mail might be delivered
any time of day, for traditionally service to the Plateau wilderness is
constant but erratic. But the buzz was like voltage going through me,
for a moment, before my nerves dimmed down. For I was about to find out
if this other enemy of mine remembered Sand's car parked on the track.

Yet, when I went to the door, even through the smoked glass, I could see
it wasn't who I anticipated.

I opened the door, and he turned around slowly, like some big animal
turning at a noise it doesn't fear.

"Mail," he said in a flat friendly drawl. He held a square package in
one hand.

Behind him, pink noon heat shimmered, land and sky flowed over into each
other. He stood out on the glare as if drawn on it and then blocked in
with rich heavy color. He was six feet two. His skin was tanned like a
brown-gold wood, and with the same sheened finish to it. His hair was
black, and his pants and his shirt were black, and he wore black lenses
over his eyes just as I did. It was as if we had both dressed in the
same uniform in order to contend in some duel, in which, perhaps,
sunglasses would actually become weapons. Certainly, he wasn't wearing
the uniform of the mail service.

"A very fancy order, lady," he said. "All the way from Flamingo." And he
grinned. His teeth were beautiful, as if he had filled his mouth with
winter snow.

"I didn't order anything from Flamingo."

He lifted the box. Black hair on hands and forearms and chest: each hair
neatly done as if each were painted on with a fine brush and coal-black
ink.

"Miss Ritter," he said.

"No. I'm afraid you have a wrong address," I said.

"It says here, Miss Ritter. You're Miss Ritter?"

"No."

"You have to be Miss Ritter."

The heavy colors of him, the heat that seemed to focus through nun from
the sun beyond, were becoming oppressive, almost frightening.

"Print here, please, Miss Ritter."

Like a scent, I could smell that strange odor which an intelligence
gives off, a biting, honed intelligence, playing dumb.

"My name isn't Ritter."

Again he smiled. He invited me.

"What is your name then, lady?"

"My name is Quey."

"K-A-Y."

"Q-U-E-Y."

"Qwee?"

"Quey."

"O.K. Hannah Qway."

"Quey. Sabella Quey."

"That's sure a pretty name," he said. "Sabella. Still think this package
is for you. Maybe you go in for made-up names."

I put my hand toward the door button. I can move quickly. He moved
quicker. He was in the doorway, and the door wouldn't close on him. He
didn't come into the hall, he stayed in the doorway. He looked
immovable, in or out. He held out the package.

"Why don't you open it, Miss Qway?"

"It isn't for me."

"Look at the label and make sure."

"I don't need to look at the label."

"Ah, please."

So I glanced at the package. It had no label on at all.

"There's no label."

"Maybe there is, and you just can't see it."

I was afraid of him. Why? I'd met the pushy kind. I'd handled them.
Handled some into the earth. My voice didn't show my fear.

"I can see there's no label."

"If you took off your sunglasses," he said, trying to help me, "maybe
you'd see better."

"Get out," I said.

My heart hit my throat twice every second.

Then he took off his own dark glasses, and raised his head, smiling, and
the glow of the stained-glass window revealed to me his eyes. They were
like mahogany, but they shone. The black lashes were thick, almost
coarse in their thickness. And because he was laughing at me, the outer
corners of the eyes were scarred with hair-thin silver cracks in the
gold.

"Ever play the imitation game, Miss Qwee?" he asked me. "I do it, and
now you do it."

"You're not with the mail service."

"Then you'd better call the police."

The long silence filled the hall. The glare streaming around the edges
of him was a crucifixion.

"What do I have to do," I said, "to make you get out. You want money?"

"It's true what the man said."

A pause. He continued to smile at me.

"He said you never answer the door with your clothes on."

I was not in my wrapper, but in a floor-length black smock, with an
ornamental button-up, the top four buttons of which were undone.

"How about jewelry," he said, and I know he'd seen the glint of the
pendant.

"What you're looking at is glass. You'd get twenty credits for it.
There's nothing else."

"There's you."

When he said that, a constriction of terror came up through me. We know
I'm not innocent. We know for me it's as if they comb my hair, rough or
tender, no more than that. So why terror?

He'd been fraternizing with the mailman. He had a box he wanted me to
open. I took it abruptly from his hands, ripped off the plasti-cover and
the card reinforcer. One side of the interior gives, and something drops
out onto the wooden floor with a clack.

It was the ivory casket, closed by its gold lock as when I had first
seen it, and the key on the ribbon, the casket Cassi's heirloom had been
in, and her poison-pen letter. I'd left it behind in the house at Ares.
Now this man, who was eight inches taller than me and weighed around
seventy pounds more, had brought the casket to my door. (Sabella, his
height and weight don't matter. You aren't scared of those. What looms
so great is the look on his face, in his eyes, that sense of a coiled
spring. A thousand yards of coil ready to unwind like a whiplash.)

"You say this came from Flamingo." I sounded calm. I sounded
indifferent. He knew I wasn't, but the control might throw him a little,
not that he'd show that anymore than I was showing my own emotions.

"Flamingo? Did I say that? Ares."

"Who gave it to you to give to me?"

"Who gave it to me to give to you? The mail service, ma'am."

Now he was abruptly the simple dumbbell again; the dope, worried about
his job, worried that I might misunderstand. I stood ossified, and he
said, "My buddy is sick., ma'am. Something he ate. So I offered to bring
this package out to your house. He couldn't make it, ma'am. He was
puking. Real bad puking. Puking to left of him, ma'am. Puking to right
of him. Volley and thunder... ma'am."

The mailman had gabbled about me. This one, this new enemy, intrigued,
had persuaded or coerced the other into letting him bring me my package
instead. Could it be that straightforward? Did they really gamble that I
was so deep into shady dealings that I wouldn't complain? And why no
label on the package, which seemed to have been opened and reseated. And
why the ploy with a false name and an erroneous city, as if I must
declare myself and my connections. There was no letter in with the
casket

"Just need your thumbprint now," he softly reminded me. Soft, his voice
was almost a mumble, lazy, a beast purring.

But he didn't have the nail block for prints. Instead he extended his
hand to me, well-formed, hirsute, with its sinews of fire under the
skin. The gesture was another invitation. Then suddenly he grabbed my
fingers into his. His hand was hot and dry like the desert in the sun.

He wrung my fist into a knot, as if he meant to break the bones, and all
the while he went on smiling. But his eyes, were cold. I couldn't tell
if he was merely a sadist, if he was enjoying this. No, it wasn't that.
There was more. Only I couldn't read it.

Then he let me go. He saluted me and sauntered out onto the porch. I
walked slowly to the door button. I'd learned, for he'd already taught
me, that he could be swift enough to negate that action if he wanted. At
the top step, he paused.

"While I'm on the premises," he said, "maybe you can help me. I'm making
inquires, you see, Miss Ker-way. About my brother/'

I didn't even blink. But then I hung by a thread.

"Could there possibly be two of you?

He laughed. He made a meal of laughing. He rocked around and clapped his
hard palm against the porch rail. He knew I wouldn't close the door.

"Nice, Miss Ker-woo. Nice, Well, Miss Ker-wuk, I'm looking for my kid
brother, Sand, Sand Vincent. I guess you never heard of him."

Falling.

"I guess I never did."

"Your loss, Miss Ker-wak. Your loss." He swung down the steps. There was
no car visible, not even on the road below, where the genuine mailman
parks. When he turned once more, he had his sunglasses on again. "See
you," he said, "Jezebella."

* * *
-----

Why can't I take the sun, even the rays of a health-lamp? No, it's no
part of a myth. The sun harms me, I think it's my blood. My blood is
built of blood, purer, less opaque than human plasma, and more
vulnerable. The sun affects all blood. In the daylight, the cells of
mine begin to break down, shatter. The radiation of the sun, which would
kill you if you were close enough to it, can kill me from a distance.

I moved around behind the blue and violet blinds all afternoon, all
around the house, downstairs, upper floor, the attics, looking out
through the blue and violet glare, checking to see that he had gone,
that he hadn't come back.

He went toward Hammerlake, walking. Even through the blinds, he was
definite, indissoluble. He must have known I'd be watching. He didn't
glance over his shoulder.

Jace Vincent couldn't have known what was in the packet, not till he
opened it. Someone had come on the casket in Cassi's bedroom, closed and
locked it and mailed it to me, perhaps an unfriendly, painfully honest,
self-effacing servant, hence the lack of a covering letter. Or Jace had
taken the letter out and destroyed it, or lost it... How had Jace found
me? It's so simple to find anyone you really want to. I pictured Jace at
Cassi's house, or with the Hog; with the patrolmen from the roadblock.
Perhaps it was less complex than that. Perhaps Sand had kept in touch
with his big brother (real brother) and there was a communication which
mentioned me and Hammerhead. And what does everyone get? Mail. Jace and
the mailman, a league of gentlemen against that dreaded witch, a woman
alone. A woman who opened the door in her wrapper, who had visitors in
cars with Ares digit panels.

And did any of that matter? What mattered was that Jace Vincent had
followed Sand to me. Probably from off-planet, for he had a glaze on him
of recent other places, other globes. (Gall Vulcan, where he had nursed
and sweated Sand out of the mescadrine D.T.'s?) Again, extraneous. He
was here.

What now?

He couldn't be sure. He couldn't know Sand was in trouble, let alone
dead. But Sand had often been in trouble. How did Jace know that
anything at all was seriously wrong? Force of habit?

An itch in his brother-bone?

See you, he said.

And I couldn't call for help, I'd have to help myself. But there was
only one way I knew of, and I couldn't return to that. I was being
punished for that now. The angel-gladiator, the winged avenger. The
house spontaneously self-locked, doors, windows. My mother's
installation. No one could get in, at least not without a fight.

Perhaps he'd just wanted to rattle me. I thought I'd convinced him I was
impervious; perhaps, therefore, guiltless. He'd just been testing me. He
might not come back.

See you.

What had he said to the police, if he'd spoken to them? What had he said
to the Hog, or Cassi's servants, or the mailman?

Was there some signal he and Sand had had between them, something
missing, by which he knew Sand was dead?

The day crawled by. The sun flared and went out and the night closed its
blind over the sky. I closed Cassi's casket in an empty drawer of my
vanity table. Out of sight, out of mind? I sat in the parlor, so tense
the muscles ached at the base of my skull, between my shoulder blades. I
sat there and listened and waited. I couldn't go out. He was out there,
somewhere.

I could move away from Hammerhead, There were other wildernesses.

It's so simple to find anyone you really want to. (Wherever they may
be.)

See you.

* * *
-----

When the morning sun came back, Jace Vincent hadn't. He was making me
wait, a master musician, for the crash of chords, the brazen blare of
trumpets.

I showered and changed into a frock. I put on stockings and shoes, which
I hardly wore around the house or on the Plateau.

The door had a lectro-alarm, one of those force bars you can trigger to
keep anyone from crossing through the open door, save the occupants. It
hadn't been activated since my mother's time, but now I jammed a battery
in the slot and switched it on.

As I was standing by the door, I heard the growl of a vehicle taking the
spin-off track from the road and gunning for the house.

The center of my body, everything that held me straight, seemed to gush
away, but I was still standing.

I'd have to open the door. To leave the door shut would be an admission
of fear, and if you were afraid, you went to the police. I couldn't, and
therefore I couldn't reveal that I had any reason to. I had to play it
that he was just a crazy event in my life that I'd cope with.

The vehicle pulled up, and then there was a pause, then feet, over the
ground, up the steps. Feet heavy on the porch. A shadow blossomed on the
door glass.

It wasn't his shadow. I could tell immediately. In a way, I'd known they
weren't his footfalls.

The buzzer went. I walked stiffly to the door and opened it. A boy about
fifteen, in white overalls, was on the porch. He carried a crystal box,
a transparent coffin full of green Savior roses.

"Miss Kerwow?"

That's not my name."

"It isn't?" Concerned, the boy gazed at the docket on the box. His eyes
had a puffy, almost tearful look of disorientation. He was at the age of
confusion, when you can only get by through a series of perviously
planned moves dependent on predicted responses. A reaction out of
sequence could derail. I'd been meant to cry out Why, yes, and make a
balcony of my arms and breast for the flowers. Then he could have smiled
(what a charming boy!) and we would both have been satisfied. But now he
fumbled at the docket, two wheels off the track. "It says, it says
Kerwow here."

"Is there a sender's name?" He didn't guess his panic was one-ninetieth
of mine.

"Sure is. J. Vincent."

"Take them away."

"But Miss Kerwow--"

"My name is not Kerwow."

"Lady, they're special delivery. They cost twenty-three credits, plus
delivery charge--n

His eyes were bulging. He would never go. He would stand there forever,
until the green blooms wilted into brown, and the natural-cloth overalls
turned to skeletal rags on his body.

I made a balcony.

"All right. Give them to me--"

Something snapped. He didn't need preplanning for a second, indignation
was enough.

"Well don't do me any favors, lady."

I didn't tip him. I shut the door. He was fifteen and working on Mature
Studies and he needed cash. But Jace had sent the flowers.

I put the transparent coffin on the floor. I had the same feeling I had
with Cassi's casket

But nothing exploded, there wasn't a message. Somehow, I didn't need a
message. You lay flowers on a grave.

They were beautiful, the roses. That was my problem, I wanted to destroy
them because they came from him, they're poison. But they were not
poison, they were loveliness. So I siphoned out water and set them in
one of my mother's pottery bowls. I'd thank him graciously when he came.

I waited in the kitchen then. Through the blind of the kitchen window I
could see the broken swing, the orange tree where the man beat and raped
me and escaped alive. What was his name?

The flower vehicle had driven away, and now it seemed to come back and
the buzzer went. My hands were shaking, heart booming. But still it was
not his shadow on the door. "Miss Kervac, I have a crate of wine for
you." J. Vincent had sent me a crate of wine. It cost him two hundred
credits. I wouldn't let them in. I made them leave it on the porch.
Before they drove off, I brought out the green roses in the pottery bowl
and placed them by the crate. I didn't deny that I was called Kervak.
There was no message.

I sat on the wooden floor in the hall, to one side, out of the window
splotch. I wasn't thinking. My heart thudded slow and heavy. You drink
wine at funerals. The door buzzed. ''Miss Kweet?"

I broke. I laughed. It's funny, it's hilarious. And he'd sent me a
three-foot white-velvet bear. You unpop the bear's guts and a white
flagon of scent emerges on a satin ledge. The bear's eyes are cold; cold
blue eyes. Like a snake's.

I closed the door and doubled over and retched. But I was dried up
inside, a burned-out ditch.

Presumably he wasn't sure of me. I might be on the level, an honest
nobody. I might yet call the police in Hammerlake. So he threatened me
with gifts I can't complain of. Fragrance to perfume the dead.
Frankincense and myrrh.

Then I waited again. I waited all afternoon. Sometimes the house creaks
and my pulses stumble. I could call the Hog: You're the lawyer, uncle.
Well, there's a man pestering me. The Hog wouldn't want to know, or he'd
want to know too much.

When he comes back, you'll have to, Sabella. Have to kill him. Which
means you act friendly, you watch the lodestone have its effect on him,
as on all the others. All you have to do is briefly want him. Is it so
hard? His skin is flawless golden wood and his hair is jet. His blood's
blood-color. Air to breathe, Sabella, air.

But there's something--something. He frightens me too much. I don't want
to touch him, go near him. He frightens me.

Think of the man under the orange tree. You could have taken him any
time. You held off, not because you were afraid, though you were
terrified, but because you didn't want the guilt of his life. Remember?

You can kill this one. It's guiltless. It's self-defense.

When he comes back.

Out on the porch in the westering light, the wine bottles glinted, the
roses withered, the white bear stared.

There was a wind blowing up, like the day I returned from Ares, the day
before the night Sand found me.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, Sand to--sand.

But Jace wasn't dust, isn't sand, isn't jet and wood and metal. He was
skin and muscle, bone, fiber, juices, enzymes, atoms. Nobody made him
up. He wasn't like all the rest. He was real.

I won't answer the door again.

I left the bar switched on and I went up the stairs and lay down under
the gauze curtains of my bed.

Paternoster...

* * *
-----

Sleeping--suddenly the room was black. It was night, inside and out.
There was a noise. Someone was knocking on the glass door below.

Glass doesn't break any more, unless it's custom-built to do so. He'd
know that. Why knock when the buzzer was there?

I lay quiet and waited for the knocking to cease. It didn't, it went on
and on. O.K., I can take the sound. Rap your bloody knuckles raw, you
bastard.

Then, a girl's voice was shrieking.

I sat up, swung my legs off the bed. Certain reactions have to be
learned, like those of the fifteen-year-old boy. A girl shrieking on my
porch may mean different trouble, worse trouble. Once, in Hammerlake, a
police patrol questioned me on the street because two girls had been
fighting in the bar I had walked out of. This one shrieks again, and now
I can make out the single word: "Hey! Hey! Heyl"

My night vision was developed long ago, and starlight comes in to help
me through the stained window above the stairs, showing me the door, and
a white shadow this time, thrown close on the glass. She cant see me,
the shrieking girl. She knocks again, rat-tat.

He had sent her, this girl. She was out there with the wine and the
flowers and the perfume-belly bear.

The fear was mounting up in me, the great orchestra.

The knocking, on and on and on, point counterpoint.

"Hey! Hey!"

I ran down the stairs; I didn't mean to. As I ran, I hit my fist against
the old-fashioned light switch, a nipple in a lily bud, on the wall.
Light burst through the hall, against the glass door, and my pupils
squeezed to dots, but I still saw her. It was me. Sabella, when she was
sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, low-cut dress, white powdered flesh,
bleached hair, red nails. A vamp, (I perceived the ironic pun) a harlot
from Hammerlake. How would he know what I looked like at seventeen?

I buttoned the door, and it swung wide, and I was face to face, eye to
eye with Me. I don't mean she was my double. She was my past, is all. My
past, that never ended.

"Hey," she said again, between perplexity and outrage, "Is this a
party?"

Then she took in my face. Do I look like that? She backed a step and
demanded loudly of the darkness; "Jay-yaice."

They must have walked from the road, for there was no car on the track,
shutting out the stairs. But as he moved from the lacework bench, he
shut them out. He had on black again, but different clothes, no
sunglasses, just the black glass eyes themselves.

"Why," he said, "if it isn't my friend Jezebel."

I'm standing in the doorway. The lectro-chain's switched on and he can
see the faint glow of it, and that this is as far as he gets.

"Is she welcoming?" Jace Vincent inquired.

"I should say not," said the bleached girl.

"What about my advance payment?" said Jace. "Why, I anticipated finding
you, Jezebella, sipping my wine, carrying my roses, smelling like sixty
credits a bottle. And look," he showed me a wad of credits in his hand,
the bills you rarely see in a world of check and auto-cards. "Down
payment. More to come. For services to be rendered. Or have the charges
gone up since my brother was here?"

I didn't say anything.

The girl sensed abruptly that this candy had a bitter kernel.

"Jay-yaice? You said there'd be a pa-arty."

"Shut up," he told her companionably. "Unless you want to remind this
lady of the going rate of whores."

"Jay-yaice--"

"You scared she'll call someone? A patrol, maybe. She won't. Not my old
friend Jezebella. My kid brother told me about this one. She's hot
stuff. She does it like nobody else."

With strange profundity, his harlot told him, "Nobody does it like
nobody else."

Jace directed his hand, mildly, as if to reach in at me, and the
lectro-chain sizzled up, prepared to block him. He smiled at me, as
before, politely. Then he leaned and hefted the wine crate, agile, as if
it weighed a quarter of what it did. He nodded to the girl. "The rest of
it's yours."

"Oh," said the girl, and her face was a child's face. "Can I have the
bear, too?"

"Sure," he said.

She struggled and succeeded and had the bear and the roses, and she
looked happy and very young. She'd forgotten me.

They walked away into the night as if nothing had happened, and he
whistled a hymn tune, giving a lick to it it never had in church.

The car--Jace's?--revved about two-thirds down the track.

Green petals rushed along the porch.

* * *
-----

The sun came up in a great mulberry ball and golden razors lanced the
blinds. I lay on my bed and listened to the sun raining on the house,
the tindery crackle it made, hitting the joists, the paint, the
emanations. I felt enormously calm because there was no point in
anything else. I had something in the freezer that would keep me going
two or three days more. I had hash grains and tobacco and fruit juice
and air-conditioning and music. I didn't need to go out. I didn't need
to open the door. I could lie there, taking my time, making up my mind.
And when I was ready, I could invite him in. I'd be glad to, then.

When something cracked on my window, I thought of Easterly. Boys used to
do that in easterly, to wake you, little crumble stones flung at the
glass.

"Oh, Miss Kwhore."

His voice was more familiar than my mother's, which had faded in my
memory.

"Oh, Miss Kwhore, you have a very stylish residence."

Something smashed. Breakable glass--a bottle left over from the wine
crate? If he'd been close all night, I never heard him.

"Yes, Miss Kweer, I'd say you had a fine appreciating property."

I half sat, then dropped back. I was going to look out at him. Silly.

The second time he spoke, he'd moved slightly, and then again, but I
couldn't hear his steps. He walked soft, the way I can walk, a hunter's
way.

And then he struck something with a stone, sounding it. It was away
around the other side of the house, the tree side. I couldn't think what
he struck, but suddenly he was at my side again, under my window.

"You have some charming antiquated features here."

And I knew what he'd struck, and slowly I sat up again, and I held my
breath.

"Shit, Miss Kwack, you even have an incinerator."

And now I understood what it's like to be changed to stone. The limbs
too heavy to move, the rib cage jammed so no oxygen will come, the eyes
starting, the tongue grown into the roof of the mouth.

The silence outside told nothing. A stone can't ask, can't go to a
window and see.

And then I heard his footsteps, he'd turned up the volume for my
benefit. A deft crunching over the ground, and with it a low thin
electronic humming, some machine that was trundling beside him up from
the track. He walked with the machine, around to the back.

Suddenly the hum broke into a great chugging noise, a whoosh, and a
vibration that ran through the frame of the house. And he too broke
suddenly into a huge hoarse singing shout:

* * *
-----

"Oh when we get there,

When we get there to that gloryus town, o'gold

Jezus'll be waiting,

Oh yes Jezus'll be waiting--"

* * *
-----

I picked up my stone body and moved.

Momma's bedroom looks out toward the orange tree. I can remember her
pale face watching me as I swung the swing. I hadn't gone in her room
for five years. I buttoned the door, and it was like cutting into a loaf
of time, through a crust, through bread. And even though the dust-eaters
and the air-conditioning did their work here as in the rest of the
house, the atmosphere was thick as bread. I didn't look at anything.
Only out the window, the one window that had no blind, merely the yellow
gauze in front of it. The sunlight was like a knife, and the noise of
the machine was roaring through the floor.

"Oh yeah, Jezus'll be waitin' as the Holy Boot foretold."

A black rubber pipe went in the earth ten feet from the kitchen door. It
quivered. It was attached to a cube of machinery with a blow-out chimney
on the top, and an open rear end. I couldn't see Jace. I could see a
haze of gray and black cinders showering out fine as pollen from the
rear end of the machine. The machine was pumping out the belly of the
pit under the incinerator.

... conturbata sunt ornnia ossa mea...

I was running out of the room. No, not this way.

Brush your hair, Sabella. Straighten your dress. Put on your shoes. You
look sick, Sabella, but for thirteen years I never saw you look less
than beautiful. Pick up the half cigarette in the tray, light it. That's
it. Now, run.

I switched off the lectro-chain and went out into the molten clamor of
the morning and around the house. As if I had all the hours there are.

This side of the machine, Jace was. He stripped to black jeans, his body
like a living carving, the round brazen muscles gliding in his arms as
he manually shoveled through the piles of settled cinders. He'd left off
singing. His face was concentrated, but though I'd made no sound, be
knew I'd come out, and he turned and straightened up, and then he
grinned.

"Hallo, Miss Kerwale."

"Hallo, Jace."

His face didn't alter, but he said, politely correcting me, "My name is
Jason, Miss Kerwule. Only my friends call me Jace."

"And my name is Sabella, Jason."

Pleasantly he said, "Your name's just shit to me."

"Jason," I said. I looked in his eyes. They were hard, like the sun.
"What are you doing?"

"Just sorting your dry compost, Miss Kerville. You see, a lady on her
own can eat only so much, particularly a skinny jane like you. But a
lady and a man. Some things don't burn. Metal tops, the check stamp on
cartons, meat bones. I'd say you'd had a guest, Miss Kweele. Like my
buddy the mailman told me."

I seemed to be looking at him down a funnel. He appeared small and made
by an able craftsman. My nausea was a kind of feathering through my
whole body. But he couldn't see it.

"I sometimes have guests, Jason."

"I thought you did, Miss Kwole."

The machine gave a sort of hiccup. Something a little too big for the
pipe was being lugged up, sucked in. The dust would whirl off the top of
the pit first, then the lighter noncumbustibles, the metal bits he spoke
of. Down below, where the soil-returning mulch had begun, the machine
wouldn't take hold. Between the two lay the heavier unburnt leftovers of
the furnace. The pipe bucked a fraction, coughed, renewed its grip. Like
a dog worrying a bone--

"Jason, leave that. Come in the house."

"Suddenly the lady is gregarious."

"Last night... just wasn't the right time, Jason."

Go to him, Sabella. Go closer.

I could scent him, and he was like Sand, a clean masculine odor,
unmistakable, potent. In fact, he was very like Sand, but Sand
crystallized, fused into essentials and into strength. Sand's weakness
drew me to him. All their weaknesses. But this one wasn't weak.

The pipe gurgled.

He glanced at it. I was close enough to reach out and run my finger
across his skin. Chest and belly were like sculptured rock. He turned
back to me and I lifted my finger away from him,

"What did Sand tell you about me?" I said.

"A couple of things."

"Tell me."

I couldn't see any whites to his eyes, they were so dark and so still.

"Sand has a knack for permanent trouble. We keep in touch because that
way I'm ready to bail him out. One stellagram a month, and if anything
comes up, an extra stellagram. And he always tells me about the women he
runs with. Women are mostly bad luck for Sand. So I know all about you,
about Cassilda and Trim and how you turn Sand on and how he's following
you to this old colonial house on the Plateau. And how there's two
months' nothing from him after that. Which is what you're waiting to
find out, Miss Kwek, Why I'm here."

"Do you know all about me, Jason? Why don't you come and see for
yourself."

"First, you tell me where Sand is."

He's in that pipe, in that damn pipe, choking it, but it's going to spit
him out, any moment, right where you're standing--

"He had something else to do. I don't know what, he didn't tell me. I
guess he'll be back. You could wait around."

"He left his car in a tunnel on the Hammerlake Road. There was a girl.
You have a sister, Miss Kwade?"

The pipe gave a big choke and dislodged the obstacle.

Black and brown, the sticks of bones hailed down into the dust and
cinders.

We were both looking at the bones.

"What the hell is that?" His voice had changed. For a second there was
no strength, no assurance in it after all.

"Oh God, how horrible," I said. "My dog. He got sick and he died. I had
to burn his body."

The blazing day had turned to paper. Rose aluminum sky, reddish floor of
congealed parchment The man, a paper cutout, with drawn-in shaded
musculature, hair and features.

"A dog," he said.

Then the machine vomited out something else. It ripped over the paper
sky and landed, and skidded. It skidded to our feet. It was
unrecognizable, blackened, jagged. But there was a dull glowing smear on
it, like melted debased metal. Jace Vincent bent forward a little. Now
he could make out the curious wedge-shaped formation in the middle of
the smear, and the two calcified burned drops that glared up out of it.

It was Sand's snake, the gold jewelry around his neck, what was left of
it. And the two blue gem eyes of the snake, no longer blue, were still
unclosed.

There wasn't any time anymore. There was leisure to let my gaze drift up
to Jace's profile. His face had gone yellow. He couldn't have known it
all, then. Of course, it was terrible to learn this way, I felt an
instinctive, momentary idiotic pity, and then I remembered that I was
part of this.

I sprang and I spun and I ran. I'd run after the wolves. I was quick.
The open door was only around the side of the house.

I could see the door, I was twenty feet away, when he brought me down,
his weight like thunder, like a lion.

The ground hit me, the ground crammed into my mouth and thrust into my
breasts, and the man lay on me like stone, and then he pulled off and I
was flung around, onto my back.

He knelt over me. His face wasn't vulnerable anymore; how could I ever
have reckoned it was? It was the face of God turned toward Gomorrah.

I brought up my hands and scratched at his face and jackknifed my knees
into his stomach and his groin--but somehow his flesh eluded me, it
wasn't there. He caught my hands and impaled them on the earth and he
lay over my legs. I arched and strained my throat, but even my mouth
couldn't come near him now. He said into my face, without expression,
"So you killed him. How and why?"

When my voice came, I was surprised, it was hoarse and caked with
terror. I screamed at him.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

'"Listen," he said, "I know that murder has become a sickness, and the
Planetary Federation puts murderers in doll houses on a hill with pretty
flowers and trees to make them happy, I know that. So this is our
business, Jezebel. Yours and mine. Nobody is going to rescue you and
institutionalize you and keep you safe. You have to deal with me."

I didn't fight anymore. The sun was washing me away like mud from a lake
shore. I was blind, I was quiet, and blindly, quietly I said, "Sand was
sick. I tried to take him to the hospital outside Hammerlake, but there
was a roadblock and they checked the car and Sand wandered away and he
died. I didn't want to get involved."

"Don't pass out," he says. "I'll only bring you around and well start
again."

I was whispering, with my eyes shut tight.

"De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine..."

"Stop that," he said. He slapped my face lightly, wanting to keep me
with him.

"Domine, exaudi vocem meant."

He held my hair, not really painfully, and repeated to me in English,
"Out of the depths I have cried to you, O Lord: hear my voice. The only
one who's going to hear you is me, Jezebel."

"Please take me in the house."

I didn't really think he would, but he did. He picked me up and carried
me. He put me on the floor exactly where my mother lay when she was
dead, under the crimson spillage of the window, and I wondered how he
knew to do that, or if he knew.

I was listless. Was I afraid? Probably.

He didn't need a special weapon or ritual to kill me, Anything would do.
A gun, a cord, a blow.

"What you're doing to yourself, Bel," my mother said, standing over me
with her sad and fallen face.

"I know, momma."

I'm crying, momma.

"I know, momma."

I'm crying.

2
-

When I found the pendant, it was a few days after my eleventh birthday,
and it was the day I started to bleed. My father had been dead for nine
years, and our house was a woman's world. Women tend, as do men, to turn
into clans when thrown in with too many of their own gender, and then
those clans practice mysteries. From my tenth birthday on there'd have
been these mystery hintings: Once you start. Once you get to be a big
girl, Bel. I knew about menstruation, school took care of that. But
somehow the science had never fully related to my body. A picture on a
screen was just a picture on a screen. Then one day the picture happened
inside me. Even when you know, it shocks. Even when you understand it's
nothing bad, somehow it's still bad. Now you're different, not yourself
anymore. In that moment, I turned for reassurance, applause perhaps, I
turned to find myself in the eyes of another, because this is where
generally human beings find themselves. But my mother gave me a tape
book to play which told me what I had to do now, although I'd already
heard it through at school. So I went out of town and along the road
over the hidden mines and by the refineries and over the river into the
meadows. Where a couple of the old dry canals opened under the rosy
sands of Easterly's neck of the deserts, that still make up four-fifths
of Novo Mars, I found a hole in the ground.

Anice (or is it Alicia?) fell into a hare's warren. Do bats eat cats she
wondered, as she plunged into the dark. I suppose Sabella had climbed
trees, dug into holes; I don't recall. I think I'd even seen this hole
before, assumed it was but another pit in the quarry that overhung the
canal bed. Why did I go in? I foresee an analogy, the womb of the earth,
Sabella's womb. But I think it was just somewhere to hide, and maybe
Alicia's was also a hiding place from her womanhood. Certainly, the
tunnel had no exclusive feminine aura. In fact, an old catapult, the
sometime gadget of most Easterly boys, lay near the entrance, but when I
knelt on it it broke, brittle with age.

When I dreamed about the tunnel on the plane to Ares, my mother was
there, but when it happened she hadn't been, I was alone. Nor were there
tall thin pillars, as at Dawson, or up in the Calicoes. The tunnel roof
was actually low, and I didn't go far before I came on a slab of rock
set endways across the tunnel. All this I discerned by feel, because my
body had shut out most of the light that came in at the entrance. Even
then, I thought the slab was a grave.

The rock of the slab was worn or planed as smooth as satin, and, as with
the other ruins of New Mars, there was no sand blown in, no dust, except
their own, as if they had had dust-eaters at work. I was stroking the
texture of the smooth rock when my fingers found a crevice. In the
crevice was a pebble, also silken smooth.

When I took it out and held it toward the light, trying to see, it was
opaque and dull, the shape and size of a small plum. But at the narrow
end was a ring fixed through the stone. I was only eleven but I
recognized the metal of that ring, the amalgam they christened areum,
stuff of meteors that die here, unreproducible.

So I bore my prize out into the sunlight, holding it in my closed fist.

By planetary law, an item discovered on the site of a previous
civilization is Federation property, which means property of Earth. I
knew that, but I wasn't about to renounce what the day had given me when
it had already taken away so much. I sat in the rough meadows beyond the
dam, and picked the stone up, and held it, and put it down. It was ugly,
but pleasing to touch and caress.

I watched the sun dive off the slope of the world, and then I got up to
hurry home. I had my first cramps, and the tape book had recommended
which analgesics were the best. When I was into town, I stopped at the
drug store. I had been sentenced but I knew my rights.

On the street, as I started to smell the aniseed grass of our lawn, I
looked at the stone, and it wasn't dull any more. It was clear and
bright as crystal, as diamond, its facets all inside and winking,
blinking back at the stars.

I made a deduction. The heat of my hands and my palm's pressure had
burnished the stone free of sediment

My mother hadn't told me I was wonderful to become a woman, so I didn't
tell her about the stone.

I saved my expense money, and I bought a chain of white metal at a store
on the far side of town. I never wore the stone then, except in my
bedroom. Then I let it rest against my skin, between my breasts, which
were growing fast now. I felt secretive when I wore the stone, and
sensual and afraid and--as if I hungered, but I didn't know for what
until that night when I was fourteen.

Six months before I was fourteen, I'd started to wear the stone all the
time. Other girls wore crosses or medallions or good-luck pieces. The
stone was mine. Nobody saw it. When I had to go into the school shower
or the changing room, I'd have an adhesive tape wrapped round the stone.
The girls laughed at that. They didn't like me. I was different, I
didn't have a father, and their mothers didn't like mine because she was
a widow with a bit of ephemeral money and maybe she'd seduce their men,
so the daughters, catching the virus unconsciously, didn't care for me
either. And now that I was beautiful they liked me less and less. And
strangely, the boys didn't like me any more than the girls did. I didn't
look soft or alluring or yielding or admiring at them. I was too
beautiful to be pretty.

I didn't really know why I was on the highway near the beer shop that
night. Restlessness, hunger. When the boy picked me up, I was flattered
and amazed. He had very blue eyes and fair hair and he self-drove a car.
He said we'd go to a cinemat, and to a roadhouse and dance. But he
parked by the road under great dripping fern trees.

I knew about sex, too. We all did. We were taught about it and then told
to leave it alone. The boy explained with his hands and his mouth that
it wasn't to be left alone. I was excited, and then I felt the stone,
pulsing against my breast. I became so fascinated by the pulsing of the
stone, I lost track of what the boy did to me, all the burning
sensations passing into each other, the stone their focus. And then he
laid me on my back and he tried me, and when he couldn't ride easy, he
forced me instead. It wasn't that I attempted to prevent him, but I felt
roughly torn like a garment and the scald of blood. He'd taught me to
kiss, the kiss that draws the blood against the skin. His neck was
against my mouth. It was natural. I took his flesh into my mouth, and my
teeth met through the vein. When he screamed out I thought it was in
pain. He was holding my arm, and he bruised it black; the other hand was
clutched on the seat beneath us, and his nails went in the fabric. He
was crying oh God, oh God, oh God, and then he didn't cry any more, and
only the movements of his body went on, and then even they stopped.

I was satiated and drowsy and I lay there half an hour under him before
I comprehended he was dead. I had continued too long, you see. I hadn't
known.

I stopped menstruating when I was fourteen, about the time my body
recognized I was no longer human.

* * *
-----

"Is there some reason why you haven't killed me?" I said to Jace
Vincent.

"There's a good reason why I might."

I couldn't see him. My eyes were still dazzled from the sun, though the
dark glasses helped. He had let me put them on; at least he didn't stop
me. There were no tears in my stockings, because nylon doesn't run any
more, but there were runs in the long pale calves of my legs, and across
my hands. I needed to replace what the sun had done to me out there. But
it hardly mattered, if he was going to kill me. The fact was, he didn't
want to kill me, not yet. He wanted to get the truth, or he thought he
did. He wanted his vengeance drawn out, to break my back and watch me
squirm, because he imagined I was a whore-lady who killed his brother
for cash or kicks, and in a way he was right.

Presently I said, "Can I have some water?"

He didn't speak.

I didn't add anything, and then he got up and got my wrist and pulled me
with him into the kitchen. I fell against the siphon unit. My ringers
were cotton wool and I couldn't make the button work, so then he did it
for me.

"What's the matter with you?"

"What does it look like?"

"It looks like let's pretend."

I drank the water, which nearly came back, but didn't. "Maybe I'm just
afraid of you."

"It's more than that."

"I have photophobia. I can't take much sun."

"I know about photophobia. You don't have the right symptoms."

That's funny. I laugh, and he shakes me and lifts and holds me against
the wall.

"Now, you tell me what you did to Sand, Photopho-bella."

My eyes are getting clear. I can focus on his golden throat. It would be
easy. Do it.

I can't.

Why can't I?

"I told you, Sand was sick. I tried--"

"To take him to a hospital. Yeah. What did he have? Something he caught
off you?"

I could see the orange tree through the blind.

"Let me down, in tell you everything."

I didn't know what I was doing, half-blind, dizzy. My instinct was, of
course, still to run, but by day my escape route had to be limited. When
he swung me down and let go of me, my instinct nevertheless mastered me
stupidly.

I wasn't unexpected or fast anymore, I simply pushed by him and
floundered out of the kitchen, toward the stairs, and up through the
daggers of stained glass sun. He let me do this, although I had told him
nothing, and I was aware that he let me. When I fell and pulled myself
on hands and knees, he let me do that too. I had only one direction to
go. I went into the bedroom, and thrust the door shut, and buttoned the
lock. All that he allowed, but only in order to prove it was futile.

As I lay on the bed, stunned and mindless and panting with the effort, I
heard that soft step of his that he permitted me to hear when he wanted
me to. Then he put his shoulder to my door, a dazzling brazen machine,
and the lock sizzled and shorted and the door crashed inward.

"Just so you know," he said.

I'm so tired. Suppose I told him the real truth. I killed your brother
for his blood. He was beautiful. I couldn't get enough of him, I drank
him nearly dry and his heart stopped because he loved what I did to him
too much.

"I don't think we can go any further with this," I said.

"You don't."

"Because I told you the truth and you won't accept what I've told you."

"I can accept that Sand was working for the old guy, Trim, and that
maybe Sand dug up some news you didn't want printed. Cyanide between
bread and butter might be something you're good at."

"Would I tell you if I were?"

"You might," he said. "You see, Jezebel, you're curling at the edges. I
don't know what you're on, but there's some kind of stuff you have to
have, and until you get it, you're shaking. When you start to shake
enough, you'll tell me anything I want."

I could feel my mouth idiotically form into a grin.

Yes, I believe I am exhibiting the symptoms of drug addiction and
deprivation, sufficient anyway to convince him, whose brother screamed
and rolled on the floor from a lack of mescadrine.

"So I'll finally tell you I murdered Sand, and then you'll kill me."

"Don't worry," he said. "You have religion. I'll let you pray first."

"That's very kind." But he had already turned. "Suppose," I said,
"suppose I have a secret stash of whatever drug it is you think I'm
using, up here in this room?"

He turned back, and in his helpful voice he said, "If you do, then
you'll use it, and that way I'll know. Then I'll rip the room apart and
I'll find it. And then we'll wait till you start to need again." He went
out, and from the place beyond the broken swinging door he said, "On the
other hand, I reckon you have it ready-mixed in your freezer, like any
store-minded junkie."

Don't flinch, don't move. Don't say a word.

Five minutes later, I hear cans explosing in the kitchen below, and the
glub-glub of the waste-pipe, drinking the fruit juice he's pouring away.
When the glass container falls, I hear that too. Unlike the glass of
doors or windows or goblets, the container is disposable and smashes,
and the red eau de vie will be gliding on the kitchen floor, amid the
fragments of the glass. Presently the sun will dry the substance into a
rich raw stain, just like blood.

"Say good-bye," he called up to me.

I said good-bye.

* * *
-----

I need, I need. Every part of me is a hurt, my joints, my stomach, my
tongue, my glands, my eyes. The sun took and I can't replace the sun's
taking. I'm dying. No, not yet.

I lay on the bed. The sun was out. (Where did the day go to?) Sometime
earlier he went down by the road where his car was parked, and brought
back a pack of ready-food, which he heated in momma's old
microwave-heater. Then he brought me a dish of this amalgam and urged me
cheerfully to eat it. He only removed the plate when I informed him what
would happen if he didn't. He offered me wine, too. Wine, he pointed out
solicitously, would blunt the edge of the knife in my guts, for a while.
His sadism was affectionate and intense, and under it he was a blank,
not enjoying it at all, just using it, like the rack, the jump-chair, to
get my confession.

Two hours after sunset, the first wolf let out his whistling howl, high
on the razor-back hills in the star storm of night.

When I heard the howl my whole body began to jerk and tremble. I started
to groan aloud and couldn't hold the sounds inside myself as agony and
craving flung me about the bed. Then all the wolves in the world were
howling out there, as if they called to me: Come, come, come to us, why
do you wait?

Soon he reappeared in my door, dark on darkness, one glowing star caught
between his lips.

"Charming cigarettes you have," he said. White smoke curled from his
mouth as he spoke, and I smelled the incense smell of the loaded
tobacco. He crossed to the window, passed by the mirror, raised the
blind, and buttoned up the glass. The tide of wolf voices sang into the
room, making it tingle, sparkle, like winter frost forming on
everything.

Jace watched me.

"You like that sound?"

"Yes."

He moved around the bed and offered me the cigarette.

"No." I turned my head aside.

"You're hurting, honey," he said, "Very bad. Aren't you?"

"You know I am."

"Say a little prayer," he said, and he went away again.

Why can't I get over this unseen barrier and take him and have him?

The voices of the wolves were fading, blowing away. Out there, the hills
are promises, there are four thousand neons in heaven.

Maybe he'd sleep. Sometime he had to. He was confident, he thought he'd
beaten me.

The house was softly dislocating its tensions in the chill of the young
night. Momma's ghost was sitting in her room, watching at the window.
The broken swing and the broken door slowly swung to and fro in the
wind.

The knife moved like a child in my belly, but then I began to drift,
drift up out of the hurt. I began gently to hallucinate, or to dream...

About how, over westward, Montiba way, the little deer may be feeding on
the night-black plants, and how sometimes the heavy cattle, white as
plaster in the dark, break their way from the corrals...

Where do the wolves run to who hunt these hills, where do they run when
they're invisible--back into time, before the civilization of this
planet ended? Back to when the pillars upheld roofs like fluted
water-ice and the urns were empty?

Dreaming, I struck west and ran ten miles. It was nearly midnight by the
rings and spirals of the stars which seem immovable yet move. (No. The
planet moves, not the stars. We must ignore the evidence of our eyes.)

There was a ravine, a memory ravine I remembered at once, its contours,
its tiers ripe with leaves. A fragmentary wind rustled the papers of the
leaves, and below, a rivulet of black water waded. I eased down through
the shadows, and I could feel the dream deer as I always felt them, like
a warmth in the night.

Near the bottom of the ravine side, where the eucalyptus trees grew
sideways toward the water, I beheld the deer by the river, like young
girls in a story, like Pharaoh's daughter at the river with her
handmaids. No male in attendance, for the season is far off. Now a
slender head, ears like curled leaves, lifts and listens. How lovely,
the striped body, the fragile legs. Every one of them's a porcelain
figurine.

I walked forward, and other heads lifted. The stone was burning softly
on my breast, and I loved the deer as I moved among them. When I was
fourteen, fifteen, and learned my hunting, I was surprised that I could
go right into the herd like this, selecting from them the one I would
drink from, like a precious wine stored in a vase of flesh. When I took
from the deer, there was no human sexual act to encounter, to use as
bait and placation. There was simply their instinct to fly from me,
which only the chosen animal would exhibit. If they died, it was from
shock, blood loss. I killed accidentally, through greed and
carelessness, at first. And then I lessoned myself in how I need not
kill. On the night of Cassi's death, I had chosen mistakenly a creature
which had a weakness in it, and when it died between my hands, it was as
though Cassi's cold breath, hissing from her corpse, had condemned us
all. The deer, Sand, myself.

Here is the one I will nave.

She comes after me instantly, her delicate steps pattering on the stones
among the moss by the water. She came trustingly at first, irresistibly.
In reality, I would feel now the excitement of hunger, and tenderness,
compassion. In the dream, my limbs are leaden. I creep to the edge of
the clearing, and in the cradle of the eucalyptus I drop down, and the
deer follows me.

A yard away her struggle begins. She suddenly knows. She's come to the
wolf. She tosses her head and stamps her miniature feet, as if she were
tethered to a post, scenting death, unable to escape.

I go on gazing at her, at her soft antimony eyes, and finally she comes
on again and kneels down. Her head lowers itself. Her eyes are glazed
with terror, but her body is quiescent. Don't be afraid. I stroke her
neck, whose nap is prickly velvet, (I can feel it, even dreaming.) Her
smell is strong but healthy, ( I can smell her, dreaming). My eyeteeth
are slanted a fraction, outward, not enough to notice, enough to save my
own mouth from their razors, (dreaming, I can analyze.) I make the
single bite with enormous care. I must be very careful of her life. When
I begin to draw out the wine, she quivers, tenses. Now she's ready for
flight the moment I negate the hypnosis I've set on her. She feels, I
think, nothing. She suffers it because she must. While I feel gratitude,
comfort and boundless love.

Measure, Sabella. Don't drain her. Don't harm her. Love her and thank
her. Let her go. ( I don't remember any more that it's a dream).

No more, Sabella.

Let her go.

I wrench my head away, and at once the deer leaps to her feet. Memory of
a hundred other deer.

They flash like bolts from a gun, through the nets of the shadows and
the leaves, over the stream. The strong deer, who, when they had put
distance between us, would rest and browse again, their cells
refashioning what I had robbed them of. All the deer vaulted over the
water and poured through unseen holes in the black.

The moss made a pillow for my body, and the pains were going out in me
as if cancelled by a powerful analgesic, that yet left my brain quite
lucid. I have evaded the avenger. How had I done that?

Perhaps, I had not.

I lay there in the dream and I thought, he couldn't keep up with me, a
wolf-bitch's running.

But he was an athlete, his body gave evidence of that. He could keep up.
Silently. But a night is full of sounds, of winds and grass and sands
and waters. What you take for silence in the hills is only another kind
of clamor. Yes. Jace could have tracked me, could have witnessed me. If
I sat up and I saw him in the nightscape anywhere around me, then I'd
know I'd told him every detail, after all.

There were none of the breaks, the edited sequences that come in dreams.
All went forward logically, in progression. So I sat. And just across
the trickle of the stream, the way the deer had fled, a black silhouette
was inked on the night. It was not a freak form constructed of boulder,
tree or shadow. It was a man. It was Jace.

I sat and looked at him, and eventually I could even see his eyes, their
brightness, and then I could see the sheen of something slung behind his
shoulder, a burnished tube that also was no part of any tree or branch;
the long muzzle of an electric gun with which a man goes hunting wolves.

Dream Jace spoke to me.

"And that," he said, "the thing with the deer, is what you did to Sand."

"That and more." I wasn't afraid, not here, not in the dream-canyon,
pain-freed, among the stars and the leaves.

I got to my feet. I was warm, and still, and easy with him.

"When I take blood from a man," I said softly, "it isn't the same as
when I take it from an animal. When I find a man I want, when we make
love; I take it then."

I was walking to him, I was stepping over the narrow stream. My tongue
gently burning. My body burning. All the night was strung, like the
strings of violins, resin-taut. As I walked to Jace, stepping over the
water, I was like a bow, ten bows or twenty, drawn across those strings.
And the note sounded deep in the womb of the darkness.

"Let me show you," I said to him. I knelt down before the man with the
gun as the deer knelt to me. I was arching my back and the hoarse music
of the night was soaring through me. He could kill me then. I didn't
care. I wanted him to.

I turned my head, and offered him my neck.

"It's all right," Sand said. "You're awake. It's all right now."

But it wasn't Sand. There was nobody there. No one by me.

The wind was blowing the curtains around my bed, the wind which smelled
of the hills and which had brought me my dream. But not all of my dream.
About me, the house was quiet as though empty. His skin is sunburned,
Sabella. He drinks alcohol and eats real food, Sabella, you saw him. No,
that isn't the horrible joke. He isn't one of your own kind You're still
unique, and alone.

Why then----

I was the victim. Willing victim.

It's sex, Sabetla. What you missed. What you give but never receive.
That's why you're afraid to touch him, Sabella.

I rested my head against my knees, doubled up to ease the clawing in my
stomach. And I smiled coldly, remembering the Freudian dream symbol of
the gun, and the Pascian symbols of the stream, the violins.

The house was so noiseless. Was he sleeping? Was he? The avenger, doubly
my enemy, doubly to be dreaded.

I should like to see him asleep, just once. That face smoothed out,
helpless and blind in sleep.

No, Sabella, let me explain this to you. All sadists are also
masochists, one indulgence feeds the other. Sand kneeled to you. Now you
kneel to the sword. But it's the night you need. Yes, I can, I must.

I crept out, and down those stairs which I've descended a thousand,
thousand times. In the starlight from the window, pausing, reaching out
to sense and avoid him. The darkness was deaf and dumb with waiting for
me, the whole night a pool that I must cleave.

The glass door would open silently at my finger on its button. The night
would open silently, and close over my head, hiding me.

The splotch of the starlight window was colorless yet glowing on the
wooden floor. I half turned, intuitively, feeling for the parlor, the
sofa where I had slept, and where the man, secure in his assumptions,
was sleeping now.

I ran forward soundlessly, and a huge blackness materialized from
nothing, apparently from the bottom of the door, and reached out and
seized me with iron hands.

I screamed in an ecstasy of terror, my whole body and my spirit
dissolved in fear and loathing and despair. Pressed into the shadow, he
had waited for me, like a great dog guarding a prison gate. Screaming, I
couldn't stop. The whole night was screaming. The wolves, who waited on
the hills for me, cheated as I am cheated, reciprocal of my terror,
howled.

They were closer than I'd ever heard them, a ring of voices spiking the
air, the stars.

"Shut up," he said to me.

I could only scream.

"All right," he said. He was forcing me, upright and wrapped against
him, into the kitchen. Lights fired up. He was forcing me to look at
something. I couldn't see. Then I opened my eyes.

My mother used to make homemade lemonade in that cut-glass jug. On the
lawn at Easterly, lemons and sugar, and I was eleven years old, and I
was almost happy and I don't remember--

There was blood in it now, blood flavored with hashish and pomegranates
and tomatoes.

"Is that it?" he said to me. "Is that what you want?"

I was breathing and that was enough. He dropped me in a chair and poured
a glass of the red juice for me with the detached accuracy of a
bartender. It was deduction, he couldn't know. There was more of it than
anything else and it had concentrator granules on the container rim.
Maybe he understood, too, its scent is a cover for something else. He'd
poured it in the jug, then smashed the container so I'd hear.

I drank carefully, almost primly.

My stomach griped, dulled, subsided.

It was over.

The avenger had saved me.

I could feel the imprint of his body against mine, even though he was no
longer touching me.

The wolves had fallen quiet. I wondered if I'd imagined their cries
rising with mine.

"Now, do I tell you about your brother again?" I said to him, not
looking at him.

"Forget it," he said. "You're frecking crazy, Jezebel. Whatever you told
me would be a pile of crap."

I felt drowsy, but it was a thin skin over my unease, my dread. Was this
another snare? What's he playing for? Tell me the truth. No, any truth
you tell will be a lie.

"If," I said, "you're not going to execute me, or hand me over to a
madhouse somewhere, or even listen to what I say, or even credit what I
say, why don't you get out and go to hell?"

"Maybe I will," he said. It's the mumble, lazy, indifferent

I sat daintily drinking blood that tasted of fruit, and he sat, but I
didn't look at him, didn't know what he did, his presence like red-hot
metal a few feet away over my shoulder. I thought I'd become his
experiment. In the morning, perhaps, he'd dissect me.

For sure, he wouldn't sleep. Watch and prey.

* * *
-----

Like a picture of an invalid, I lay on my bed, propped up high, the
glass of nourishment to hand, covered by a paper cloth. He didn't try to
prevent me from coming back here, just watched me. I shut the window and
pulled the blind and now the sixty-second dawn was beginning and the
blind was a shining sapphire.

The juice wasn't enough, not really enough, to restore me after my dose
of golden radiation. And besides, it wouldn't last long.

I'd tried to think of a way out of this. I'd tried to imagine some way I
could appease him. But I didn't think he really knew anymore what he
wanted from me. Maybe in the end he'd come up the stairs and beat me and
rape me, and then he'd go away. Or maybe he'd just go.

Or maybe he wouldn't.

* * *
-----

The day was overcast, the sky a gray-pink almond fondant. It was the
kind of day I could go out on, the kind of day I used to wait for and
use, for here, in the revitalized atmosphere of Novo Mars, that kind of
Overcast, once formed, remained till sundown.

Had the wind changed? I mean, the wind of ill-fortune.

I decided to display normalcy, what normalcy I could, I rose and
showered. The shower was temperamental, being accustomed to my touch,
because another had used it, and now it hesitated to respond to me, the
hot too hot, and the cold too cold. I put on some of my black clothes, I
brushed my hair, and fixed my face before the mirror. Then, on impulse,
I brought my single traveling bag from under the bed, and packed it as
if I were planning another trip, and when I'd stored the bag again,
under the bed, I hung my black straw hat ready on the mirror. It was a
premonition. Like the premonition I felt on the air-bug, going to Ares
for Cassi's funeral, like the premonition I had the night I visited my
mother's grave: foretastes of Death the hunter.

I walked downstairs, and I heard a sound thwack on the dry ground. The
glass door stood open on the sugar almond day, and Jace was framed in
the door and the day, twenty feet away along the slope. He was digging a
grave for all the bits of his brother's bones. I glanced at the door,
automatic and forewarned, since he wouldn't have gone outside without
arranging the door. The lectro-chain was shorted, the self-lock quietly
broken from inside, and bent.

A day like this, I didn't even need sunglasses. I could take in
horizons, even the road, and a filmy high-speed dot of car. I stood on
the porch, and looked at Jace working with the shovel. I felt a little
twist of reassurance standing there in the safe morning. His face was
all shut up and with its blinds down, unreadable, the way my face
becomes when something is tearing at me. I wondered if he were torn. Of
course he was. Why else his advent here and the cruel tricks of
vengeance, undecided and malevolent as any of Hamlet's.

Around the other side of the house, by the pump which had excavated
Sand, and which provided my mother's ghost with something fresh to stare
at, Sand's bones had lain all yesterday and all yesterday night Now they
were in a neat indecipherable pile by the hole Jace was digging. It
didn't have to be a large hole. It was already large enough.

Then Jace Vincent shocked me. Into the carefully dug, only ethically
necessary grave he kicked, systematically and sparsely, the bones of his
dead.

I went down the steps and crossed over to him and watched him cover them
with dusts and soil.

"A ministering angel shall thy brother be," I said to Jace, "when I lie
howling."

He tamped the soil flat, and let the spade go. He looked at me, and I
beheld I had not reached him at any time, nor in any way. I had not even
scratched the surface of what he was.

That second, the real fear caught up to me, the worse-than-fear. I had
been trying to assess him by what I'd learned of men, and suddenly I saw
none of these clues applied. He wasn't any kind, but neither was he of
any kind I knew, and an overcast, a bag under a bed, a glass of red
juice, were not sufficient talismans.

And then we both heard the high-speed car's rolling roar as it skimmed
off the road onto the track.

"Who are you expecting?" Jace asked me.

I didn't say anything.

In a dust ball, the vehicle whirled toward us, already slowing on big
silent brakes. As the fumes soaked down on the air, the size of the car
became obvious. It was a four-seater auto-drive, the color of old
copper, which rejected the dust that tried to settle on it as it
overshot the track, and came to rest ten feet away. The polarized
one-way windows were blanks. Then the side door lifted. Out climbed
Cassi's executor, my uncle-in-law, Hog Koberman.

The Hog stared at once at Jace. Clearly, I'd guessed wrong before;
they'd never met. The Hog didn't recognize Jace, but the Hog's features,
his whole stance, implied disapproval, and uneasiness. This was to have
been the Hog's party.

Then his eyes slid away from Jace, who presumably was impenetrably and
intractably undiminished. The Hog's eyes lit instead on the spot of
new-turned soil, and the fallen spade.

I can shriek: Uncle, save me from this madman who insists I killed his
brother, the bones of said brother having just been buried where your
eye is riveted. Jace can say: A woman who feeds dead men in her
incinerator needs treatment. Neither of us is likely to say such things.
I don't want trouble and incrimination, I don't want a planet-state
institution any more than I want to die. And Jace, for whatever reason,
doesn't want to surrender me to anyone else.

"Another burial, Bella?" the Hog asked me, with obscene accuracy and
surprising lack of social taste.

Jace is silent, letting me make the first move, waiting for the cat to
jump.

In a second or so, the Hog will also note the demolished lock fitments
on the porch door.

"A thief broke in the house," I said, "while I was in town. He didn't
take much, my dog scared him off." It's mostly the same story I
attempted before. "But he killed the dog."

"Good God, Bel," said uncle, "this should be reported to the police." He
risked a man-to-man antagonistic glare at Jace. "And who are you?"

Jace said, "Ask the lady, she'll tell you."

Confused, frustrated, the Hog swung to me.

"A neighbor. He helped me, with the doe."

"Jason," Jace said. "Name's Jason." He smiled at the Hog suddenly, a
snow-white smile of parochial gregariousness that threw the Hog
off-balance instantly.

"Well then," the Hog said. He came to me and took my arm, angling us
away from Jace. "Shall we go into the house?"

"All right."

We walked. Jace, naturally, came after us, sticking to us with a modest,
eager-to-please doggedness. Uncle tried to ignore this dark and golden
beast upon our trail.

At the door, uncle examined the two loose tongues of the lock.

"The police, Bella. You contacted them?"

"Yes, of course."

"What are they doing?"

"Looking..."

The Hog was satisfied but omnipotent.

"If you have any trouble--"

"Thank you."

"Strange I should drop by right now," he said. (Stranger than you
think.) "I had some business out Brade way, and took a notion to drive
over into this Styx of yours. I have the bimonthly figures of your
investment program. There's also another matter--"

But really, it's just curiosity, uncle. You just wanted to see where I
am, what I'm doing, the strange weeping girl in sunglasses, the social
outcast of the tribe. Maybe you fancy me, too, your arm constantly
around my shoulders, your hand on my arm, your breathing in my face.
Whatever it is, you're here.

In the hall we paused.

"That's a fine window above the stairs, Bel."

Last night, this hall was an arena of the most basic savagery, of my
screaming desperation, of Jace's blackness rising from the dark. My
mother died out here. Now this stupid man stands and admires the damn
window.

We went into the parlor. Uncle sat.

"I wonder if you have any iced tea?" wondered uncle.

Glibly, against my earlier statement, I said, "The thief took everything
from my cupboards and my freezer."

"All she can offer you is water," added Jace obligingly from the
doorway. He leaned there, shutting us in.

Unless you care for a drop of blood?

I laughed noiselessly and snapped the laugh off my face. Jason Vincent
watched me. Uncle didn't see. Uncle was alone with two of the most
dangerous creatures he was ever likely to mix with. Stop it, Sabella,
Whatever you do, you mustn't feel part of a conspiracy with Jace;
condemned and executioner aren't coupled in a primitive rite.

"Oh," said Hog Koberman, "Mr. Jason--pardon me, but there are some
private matters I should like to discuss with Bella here."

Jace smiled accommodatingly. He would do uncle a favor and not mind. But
he wouldn't move.

"Bel--" uncle said to me. I didn't offer a solution. The Hog made a
wrong judgment he should wrongly have made some while before. His face
engaged with his distaste, his disappointment. "Very well. If that's the
way you want it, Bella."

"Sabella," I said. I don't really know why.

Uncle's head jerked. "Excuse me?"

"Sabella," I said. "That's my name." I looked at Jace. "Sabella."

Uncle became very formal. Very proper.

"If you prefer. Sabella. Before we come to the investment figures,
Sabella--"

"How about," Jace said, "Miss Quey."

Uncle jumped. He looked at Jace, and at me.

"Sabella--"

"Miss Quey," said Jace, "Spelled Q-U-E-Y. Pronounced Kay, Try it."

Hog Koberman was speechless. He looked at me, waiting for rescue, and
then he stood up.

"I'd hoped to deal with this personally, Sabella." Nervously,
involuntarily, he hesitated for Jace's interpolation, but none came.
"Now I see a letter would be more in the order of things."

Jace stood aside from the door graciously, making way for Hog Koberman
to pass through. Jace wanted to drive the visitor off, and he'd
succeeded, the visitor was leaving.

Suddenly, a chasm split in front of us. The decision was so swift there
was no space for doubt or conjecture.

I strolled quietly past Jace, and after the Hog, and I caught the Hog at
the porch.

"I'll walk you to your car," I said.

"There's no need."

"I'd like to."

"Very well, Sabella."

We went out again. I took uncle's pudgy arm. Jace followed, slow, a
guard hound pacing us, fifteen feet behind.

"Now," I said, "tell me what you wanted to say."

"What I wanted to say hardly comes into it, Bel--Sabella. I have a
mystery on my hands, and I was in hopes you might throw some light on
it."

I was barely listening.

"Yes, whatever you think."

"It's this business of old John Trim's death."

We were marching toward the big car, Uncle dragging me by my hand on his
arm which he wouldn't acknowledge and I wouldn't release. When he said,
"Old John Trim," it was like a record tape, snagged and repeating. I'd
heard it before, yet it was meaningless.

"You understand, Bella--Sabella, I have responsibilities to the Koberman
estate. After John's death I was sent certain documents of his. I
learned from these that Cassilda had made Trim a private antemortem
payment, which had at no time been declared for tax. A foolish
illegality for Cassilda to have committed. On top of it, John was being
harassed for money by some person who seems to have made a lucky guess
about the payment. A term of detention at Trim's age would have finished
him. In fact, the threat was enough. His stroke was doubtless due to
worry at the harassment he was receiving. Among his effects was an
unmailed letter, intended for the vulture who was threatening him,
containing an enclosure of credit bonds. There was also evidence of the
previous relationship of the two concerned. The reason I trouble you
with the affair, Bella, is that apparently Trim had hired the man in the
first instance at your aunt's instigation, in the capacity of a private
investigator, the subject of the investigation being yourself."

We're all mad. The Hog's mad too.

Sand, a blackmailer, my gentle-voiced, sweet and sunlit lover?

Uncle was waiting for my reply, so I replied, but not verbally. I
punched him in the stomach, a blow of such force he never could have
reckoned my little white-knuckled fist would inflict it. And as he bent,
choking, I threw myself past him into the car. Anyone can operate
auto-drive.

The door sizzled down, and through the one-way window I had a final
glimpse of uncle kneeling on the ground, his head in the dust. Behind
him, Jace, running, but a fat hog in the way.

Then the car spun itself about, as Sand's car did just over two months
ago. It raced for the road below. These big custom-built chariots, they
do a maximum of two hundred, faster than most traffic there is. Jace's
car, small enough to be parked out of sight, wouldn't have a speed like
this.

The packed bag was only a symbol, and the hat for traveling.

I've left it all behind. And I've left another enemy, another witness
for my prosecution.

"Say good-bye," Jace said, when he smashed the glass container. Now I've
said good-bye to everything.

* * *
-----

When I got near the Grade Highway, Route 09, I took the bills I found in
Hog Koberman's wallet compartment. The credit cards I didn't dare to
touch, not from honesty, but because card-users could be traced in
minutes by the central computer of the banking system. That the Hog
carried bills at all surprised me, as Jace's possession of bills had. I
suppose they were a rich man's small-change, and for Jace, a good-faith
token to the blonde whore he had brought that night to the house. I
didn't feel compunction at robbery. In a world of enemies, compunction
is a flaw no survivor could indulge. I'd stolen lives, after all. Cash
was nothing.

After I'd pocketed the bills, I stopped the car. There was nothing on
the road, either way. I got out, jammed on the accelerator, manually
slammed down the door, and watched the vehicle plow on up the highway. A
top-speeder has a built-in avoidance pattern to miss other traffic, halt
at obstacles or roadblocks, or pedestrians. Meeting none of those, it
will run until its solar cells dry out. With luck, the police uncle
would undoubtedly alert wouldn't realize that the blank windows hid an
empty space.

I walked into Brade Corner in ten minutes. The Corner is one of fifty
outposts of Brade itself. People come and go constantly, and no one
remembers faces. In a dim little underground parlor I let someone
quick-set my hair with a haphazard bleaching that would fade in
streaks--I could refine it later. Somewhere else again, I bought a red
dress and a large red bag, and somewhere suntan makeup for girls who
come in from the cold planets. Then I took a cab to Brade lift-off
point.

It was thirteen o'clock, unlucky thirteen, when I boarded the air-bug to
Ares.

Who'd reckon I'd head for Ares, Koberman country? But Ares is like all
big cities, like the Plateau, a wide tract of land where names don't
matter, but the hunting is good by night.

I suppose I could have run to the hills, but years of human comforts had
softened me. I couldn't live in a cave, not now. Besides I'd dreamed of
those hills, and Jace Vincent had found me in that dream. Maybe I was
just insane as well as full of hate and fear and anger, and tired of
making allowances, cheating myself. Saying no, Sabella, no.

I sat in my bright bloody dress, and I looked around the plane, and the
dull sky shone in the windows. I didn't care any more, you see. I'd
tried, and my reward was punishment. I wouldn't try anymore.

The name on my ticket was Sarah Holland. Sarah was my mother's name, and
Holland was the promotion name on a long billboard advertising bottled
water as the Hog's car burned through Canyon.

Sarah Holland doesn't care about cold fanatical Cassi, or shifty
shifting Sand that Sabella had taken, scorched in her own horror and
guilt, while he had been trying all along to take her too, and Trim, and
how many others, perhaps, back in his insecure, faltering
father-brother-haunted-past.

Even Jace has no part in Sarah's world.

When Sarah was fourteen, she went with a boy in a car. And when she was
sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, she went with all the boys. Her mother
never said to her, "Sarah, what are doing to yourself?" Sarah's mother
hadn't cared.

Sarah has no pursuers, and no guilt. Sarah won't let herself tremble
with reaction.

Sarah can live with all she is.

Sarah will have to.

Part THREE
----------

De Profundis
============

1
-

The nights I don't go out I sit and watch the skies above the city. I
mentioned the clouds, and the lights of the city on the clouds, long
ago. I explained about the hills of concrete and glass, and the valleys
of neon and the trees of blue steel. The subways rumble wild as rivers.
Great mountains of apartment blocks stand black on rays of white and
indigo and violet. Sometimes jeweled birds fly over, planes coming into
the landing strips of the port, or the golden tail of a phoenix, a space
ship taking a fix on our glow, heading in to some point a thousand miles
away.

In the end, maybe, I'll go off-planet. Maybe I should go to Earth. But
the hills are green and the skies are blue, how strange, how oppressive.
I think I could only go to Earth to die.

I move about a lot, anyway, a month here, a month there. Five days in
Cliffton, ten in Ties, three in Dale.

My hair's pure blonde tinsel, but I have a wig which is black, woven of
darkness. I wear white frocks and red, and stockings with silver seams.
Guess what I do, nights?

I haven't killed yet. The whole Christawful city is riddled with men who
are searching for me, the whore who gave them the lay of their life, but
they can't recall why. I charge them cash, too, since I have to pay the
rent somehow. Sometimes I even meet one of my customers again. I never
say no. But then I move on again, and they're safe, till next time.

Did I say I never say "no"? Once I did. In a bar behind the spin-drive
stadium. He was a racer and he came up to me. Jet black hair and golden
skin. He reminded me of Jace.

"Come on, honey," he said. "Why not?"

Those fine black ink-and-brush-painted hairs were on his hands, lean and
articulate with handling the blazing wheel of the spin-track. Had Jace
done that, too? What had Jace done in any event, that I know of? Except
hunt for me. Was he still hunting? Was the pig-man helping him now?"

"I don't do it with spin-racers."

"Yes you do."

"When I do it with a spin-racer, he crashes."

They have superstition on the track. As he got up and left me, I caught
the glimmer of a gold cross on his gold skin.

I left Cassi's cross in the house, and the casket, and everything else.

I missed the house. The colored window, the deck of music, the wolves'
music in the loudly silent nights.

An overcast day--the cities are richer in these, pale-blue oxygen
overcast on lavender--I went out. I saw a tinstone C.R. mission, the
House of the Shepherd. New and shiny, with a great white banner. The
banner said: WHAT ARE YOU LIVING FOR? LIVE FOR JESUS.

It's been three months since I ran. Five months since Sand was burned to
bones.

Sometimes it seems odd that they haven't traced me after all. Other
times, I know they never will.

So what am I living for? For what happens when I take? I'll tell you
something, when I take, now, nothing happens to me. It's a hunger and I
feed it. Like sex to some of them, an itch to scratch. Not like
breathing anymore. Each time I hunt on the slopes of concrete, through
the ravines of metal brick, my excitement says to me, this time it will
be special, like it was. Why isn't it? And if it isn't, why do I go on?
Perhaps it is a drug, a habit, and I could break it. Perhaps I'm
deranged, need help. Put me in a doll's house, lock me away. I'm preying
on your city, sinking teeth in it, sucking its veins.

The pendant blazes. It's a ruby and never less than a ruby, and some
nights it's a dragon's eye.

Before I became Sarah my life was just a series of roles. My mother's
daughter, a hundred men's dream-lay, Sand's oyster, Jace's
Hamlet-vengeance, Cassi's scapegoat. When was I ever my own?

Now I'm Sarah, I drink the air (which has become the mud). Now I'm truly
me. But no, Sabella. Now I belong entirely to the blood-red stone around
my neck.

Maybe, indirectly, Cassi's plan to destroy me is working after all.

Meantime, I watched the skies above the city.

* * *
-----

There are about ten churches in Ares. Ten churches to around ten
thousand bars, around ten thousand girl-houses, twenty-seven landing
strips, fifteen spin-drive stadiums, twenty-five cinemats, ninety public
swim pools, nine hundred hyper-markets, eight hundred automats, six
hundred lavatories.

But once there were no churches at all. Till the Revivalists built them.
Silver tinstone and white plasti-plaster, blue concrete, stained glass.
Spires like metal pylons with crosses that light up by night.

I hadn't been in church for around eleven years, apart from Cassi's
chapel, and the chapel at Angel Meadow when momma died. Sarah Holland
had never been in church at all, nor did I suppose she'd have any
hankering to be.

Of the ten or so, about half stay open at night, and the utensils on the
altar have faintly glowing lectro devices around them.

I'd been hunting and I'd taken, and I was going home to where home was
just then, which was an apartment block on Eighteenth Dale. The cross of
the church, like an emerald badge pinned on the night, appeared between
the tall stacks and crags of the buildings, and then the pale wall, and
then the wide-open doorway. I hadn't seen this place previously, though
others like it many times. The warm-tinted soft light inside, the musty
incense smell. Above the door was a treated painted panel. This Christ
looked like Sand Vincent, the longish dark hair, dark eyes, amber flesh.

Before I knew it, Sarah Holland walked up the steps in at the door.

I sat on one of the polished benches, and looked at the altar. The cloth
was dark red, embroidered with green and gold, the Cloth of the Blood of
the Redeemer, A mutedly lit sign gave the times of the services, which
were all done for tonight. No one was there but me; so I sat, my spine
pressed against the hard supporting plank of the bench, I wondered why I
was there, but the church was quiet. The peace was heavy on the air as
any scent.

Then a priest came out of the back and began to walk along the aisle.

I meant to get up and go out at once, but my feet were heavy, had grown
into the floor, I was weighted down on the bench. I stared straight
ahead, but, of course, the priest would come to me. Presently he spoke.

"Can I help you in any way?"

His voice was young, younger than he'd looked coming toward me.

"No, thank you very much."

"Are you sure?"

I should never have come in here.

"Yes, I'm sure. I just wanted to sit for a while."

I know he's taking in my garb and my hair.

"Christ can help you," the priest said, "even if you won't let me."

I turned and stared hard at him, and I said, "If He knows the things
I've called Him, He won't help."

The priest startled me by smiling. "Oh, I think He'd understand about
that."

He was trying to draw me out, gently and kindly. And I felt the danger
of a response. For three months I'd only really spoken to those I meant
to have. And what was this? Childhood's theology hanging on my shoulder.

"Look," I said, "I won't discuss Jesus Christ with you."

"No," he said, "you don't have to discuss Him with anyone."

"You don't mind if I sit here."

"I'm glad for you to, if it helps."

Does it?

I wish I could tell him the truth and he'd pray with me and Christ would
come down like a dove on the altar and make it all right.

The priest moved on and left me alone, but my own emotional prodigality
had driven off the mood of peace from me, leaving me in the midst of the
peace, in a little vacuum of dread and confusion.

You thought I was happy, did you, the wolf-bitch stalking the city?

I walked home to my unhome on Eighteenth Dale. I had a dream that night.
I dreamed I was wandering through the house at Hammerhead. But the house
was very old, ruinous and piled with pink rusting dusts of the desert.
The blinds were torn and the doors broken. and even the indestructible
glass of the windows was cracked. In my bedroom, the bed was just a
frame, and dust webs hung from the carved posts instead of gauze
curtains. Then I came to the mirror and I saw myself. I wore the black
night-hair wig I wore in the church, but it was thick with blood, and
ends spiked stiff with it. There was blood over my mouth and down my
dress (the way there'd been blood on my dress the first time, when I was
fourteen, my own blood and the boy's). My nails were long and pointed
and sheathed in blood. My eyeballs were scarlet. My lips were parted and
I saw my teeth were very long, like white needles; and my tongue was a
thin black whip. The terror that filled me was unspeakable, unutterable.
And when I plunged awake, the terror was still with me, clamped inside
me, a tumor on my invisible, shadow-casting, mirror-image-making,
nonexistent soul.

The next sunset, I went back to the church. I went back without the
black wig, in another dress, hoping the priest wouldn't recognize me. It
was between services, and the church had emptied, all but for one woman
kneeling, and the priest at the altar, who didn't seem to see me at all.
Then there was another woman kneeling, and it was me.

You look like Sand, and I don't believe in you, or if I do, I resist the
belief. I've cursed you and profaned you, and I'll do it again. I've
never served you and I never will. Every minute that I'm not afraid I'll
forget you. I can't make a bargain. But help me, help me. Help me, if
you can, or you're there, or if anyone's there, or no one. Help me. Help
me.

Then I went home to Eighteenth Dale. I brought a bottle of pills from
the pharmacy across the way. But I only took five, and then I got sick,
and it wasn't any use.

Next morning, the Ares sky was overcast, and my rent was up at
Eighteenth Dale. I packed my red bag that I bought at Brade Corner with
the things I bought at Cliffton when I arrived in the big city. It was
time to move on.

* * *
-----

I moved into a room at Iles, and I went with a blond spacer. His blood
had been purified by the stars of space, but it was still mud, and I
still had to have it. I also had to get out in the dark. He couldn't
leave me alone, nor I resist his entreaties, and I was coming perilously
close to killing him. At one in the morning I panicked, and when he was
unconscious I smeared the jel on his neck and I ran.

I ran straight for the church in Dale.

The altar cloth was white and blue and I couldn't remember why. I
huddled into the pew-bench and laid my head on the rail of the bench in
front. I didn't know what I was doing there. If the priest had come out
I would have bolted, but there was only a man near the door in the
shadow, head on hands, praying.

And then I turned and looked, and he wasn't praying, and it was Jace.

I got up slowly, and slowly returned to the door, and he didn't react.
Then I got outside, and he was there, and he caught my arm.

The touch of his hand on my arm, my skin, stopped me.

"How?" was the only word I could get out.

His voice was so familiar, I must have been hearing it in my sleep.

"You have religion," he said. "It was just a matter of when and where."

"Let me go," I said.

He said, ignoring that, "I've been to every god-damned church in Ares. I
left a call code. I told them I was looking for my sister."

"Sister?"

The priest, the kind priest, wanting to be kind. Any woman can bleach
her hair, wear a white dress. When I was praying to Jesus for help, the
priest was looking at me, recognizing me despite blonde hair, black
hair, from Jace's description. When I was vomiting up the pills, the
priest was calling Jace.

I'm immobile in his grasp, except I'm shivering in the hot city night.

"Still want to kill me for Sand? Sand, the black-mailer, the cheat."

"I know what Sand was," Jace said.

"He looked like Christ over the door."

"Sure he did. That was his big number. Extortion, blackmail, those
weren't new games for Sand. He raped a girl on Gall Vulcan. You find
that hard to believe? So did she, till he did it to her. And I was the
insurance, the demon brother who had to clean up whenever the stuff hit
the fan, which it always did."

"So why come after me?"

"To see how far he'd implicated me this time, and in what. Whatever you
and he had been into. He did write me. That was part of the fun, to show
me what a great deal he was making for himself. Only the deals stank,
and they never came off. Then I'd get the Stella from the belly of the
whale: Get me out, Jace. No Stella at all was special. After what he'd
said about you, it sounded as if the pot had boiled over. I'd say he
meant to take you for everything you had, but then you did your magic
act on him, and he shot for Trim instead. Someone was bound to get Sand
one day. It just happened to be you."

I recalled Sand's confession, and his trying to run away from me across
the desert, when he was dying, afraid I must be paying him out for
discovered tricks. I recalled Jace's profile, yellowing, when Sand's
bones landed in the dust.

"This is another trap," I said.

"Whatever it is, you're stuck with it."

"Does Koberman know?"

"The fat man? No. This is a private war, Sabella."

"Cozy-cozy," I said. My teeth chattered, as Sand's teeth chattered when
I tried to drive him to the hospital. "But Koberman will still be
looking for me."

"I doubt it."

His tone was unequivocal. He'd obviously warned the Hog away, perhaps
merely by threats of violence. Jace is violence, or at least, violent
power. I should know. I was held in the vise of it.

"Stop shaking," he said, "I'm not going to hurt you."

"Because you hated your kiddy brother after all."

I'd tried to kill myself. If Jace killed me, it would settle everything.
Apparently, I was not a survivor anymore. Even Sarah wasn't.

"I didn't hate him. You don't hate the garbage."

"The great Daniel would be proud of you."

"Daniel," he said, so soft I nearly missed it.

"Your father. You forgot? Your golden marvel god of a father that Sand
worshiped, second only to you. Your family has a truly biblical
ambience, the Patriarch and his two sons. One with the mark of Cain on
his forehead."

"You're the lady with the incinerator," he said, "and the sick dog."

"And you still don't know how he died, or why." I paused. I watched the
neons making flaming smoke of the clouds. "I'll show you."

"O.K.," he said.

He turned me unexpectedly toward him, and our eyes met, and I thought of
the dream of the deer and the hills and the man with the gun, and I
leered at him, and in my imagination my teeth were long as daggers.

"You've made a mess of yourself," he said to me. "Your hair, the way
you've dyed your skin. You look as though you've slept hanging on a
peg."

"Now I really want you to see," I said to him. "I want you to see what I
did to Sand."

I knew I was insane, but I couldn't pull myself up. I'd raced to the
brink, and leapt, and I was dropping through the air and I couldn't save
myself if I tried. J was even exhilarated, horribly excited. I did want
him to see. I did want him to know, An ultimate witness, to condemn me.
As my mother was the first.

"Come on," I said. "We walk."

He shifted his grip to my elbow, and we did walk, down the steps of the
church, under the reflected glory of the emerald cross.

There was a bar three blocks away; I'd been there before. Someone would
be loitering, looking for a girl. There always was someone.

We walked without speaking, but at the street, where you could see the
bar's bright sheen and three men leaning on the wall outside, smoking, I
said to Jace, "Now for the demonstration. Let go my arm and watch."

His grip came off me immediately and for a moment I felt disoriented,
adrift. How could he trust me? Could he read me so well he knew on this
occasion I was on the level? Then I was walking on. I went toward the
three men, and they looked, and I smiled.

"Hey, girlie," they said.

They reached for me. The one I wanted was in the middle, the youngest,
the most tender shoot. "Last dance tonight," I said. And I put out my
hand, and the young one took my hand.

The other two laughed and congratulated us, and the boy and I came back
up the street, past Jace, and Jace fell in behind us.

"Who's he?" said the boy.

"My protector," I said. "Don't worry."

"Who's worried," said the boy, "but most of you girls are free lance. In
case you have any ideas--" he revealed a switchblade, the old kind with
the razor welded to the outer edge. This boy was younger than Sand. But
then, Sand wasn't innocent either. I've taken so many and thought of
them as victims, but maybe I'm the victim.

"You don't get it," I said to the boy with the razor switch. "If you let
him watch, you needn't pay."

"Oh really?" The boy grinned. He grinned back at Jace. "Be my guest,
mister," He's stupid. He's perfect.

A loading alley for robot carts ran between high steel walls. I led the
boy, and we stepped over the rails, and Jace came behind. "Here?" I
asked.

"Freck it," said the boy. "I thought you had a bed."

"Come on," I said. "Who needs beds?" He acquiesced and slid his hands up
under my skirt and I released the sealer on his pants.

I didn't have any need, not really, and I was in complete control. Jace
was standing a few yards off, black on black shadow, as in the dream.

I didn't feel pity anymore. Or a desire to give pleasure in return. I
hated this boy working away in me, squeezing me, grinding me back
against the metal wall. I called softly to Jace, "Now watch me, honey."
The boy grunted his breathless contempt. I kissed his neck. He tasted of
smoke and alcohol and darkness and sex. In the dimness, I wondered if
Jace would see. Somehow, I knew he would. I was touching the vein, and
the boy groaned. I was in control, but I bit hard and deep, almost
carelessly. The boy yelped and then he reared against me, trying to
thrust himself through me into the wall.

I took very little, then I let him go, and he fell away from me and on
his face beside the rails.

I pulled my clothes straight automatically, practiced.

"Come and see, Jason," I said.

He came toward me, and I was going to tell him what to look for when he
leaned over the boy, grasped his loose head by the hair, and examined
the throat. There was more blood than usual, and the wound was glaring
black in the dimness.

"That's what I did to Sand," I said. "And he loved it. He begged for it.
I tried to save his life when it was too late. But there are plenty I
didn't. I'm a lady with a past all littered with dead young gentleman
callers."

Then I went by Jace and rubbed the heal-fast coagulant jel into the
wound. When I'd finished, I straightened and Jace took my elbow and we
walked away.

I looked up at his face. Unreadable.

"You do understand," I said. I looked unreadable too.

He didn't answer.

"I drink blood. I need to. The Juice in the container was blood. Does it
surprise you a vampire has religion?" I couldn't stop talking, and he
apparently couldn't start. "It shouldn't surprise you. Jesus Christ,
after all, was a vampire. Oh, yes, Jason, Jesus was a vampire. They
drank blood at the last supper, and then the priests impaled him on a
stake of wood. To be sure, they drove a wooden stake in his side. God
made the sky go black by day out of pity for Jesus's agony in the
sunlight. When he was dead, they buried him, but he resurrected, the way
a vampire is supposed to. You can't keep a good man down."

See, Jesus? You wouldn't help me, so now I'm blaspheming you for all I'm
worth. When I'm in hell, you can come and stoke the fires.

We'd crossed suddenly out onto one of the broad lit-up bridges of the
Dale-Iles thoroughfare. A hundred feet below, an empty walkway, and
traffic gushing on thirty-two lanes, like streaks of fire, a river of
multi-colored lavas. And all around, the distant volcanoes and the
mountains rose in impersonal waterfalls of neon.

"All you have to do," I said to Jace, "is lift me up over the rail and
let me fall on the walkway. They threw Jezebel out of a window."

Jace had let go of me again. He rested his forearms on the rail of the
bridge. The streaks of car-fire burned across his eyes. He was, alone. I
wasn't with him anymore.

"All right," I said. "I suppose you'll tell someone, sometime. Here's my
address: four on twenty-sixth, DBS. The name on the tag is Sarah
Holland. I'll wait for you, or who you send. Remember, every night you
delay, I'll be out here, busy."

My head was up to look at him, and the wind, full of sparks and spirits
of electricity and oxygen, blew back my cold-color hair. Then he turned
his, head and his eyes glared down at me, hard black surfaces, showing
me what he saw. I'm dirt. I'm cheap and demented and filthy. He saw
that. You don't hate the garbage.

I turned my back and walked on.

When they put me into the hospital they may cure me. Or if they don't
111 die.

But if my courage fails me, I'll just move out of four on twenty-sixth,
Iles, and the circus will continue, I can keep away from churches now.

He found me. What was the point if it goes nowhere?

I hadn't wanted him to kill me. I'd wanted him to say to me it would be
all right. Not a dove on an altar, but Jace. Not prayer, but Jace. Not
Jesus.

Jace.

* * *
-----

A mail chute slanted up into my room at four on twenty-sixth. A couple
of random circulars came along the chute in the morning when I was
drearily, restlessly sleeping. The package came later, and woke me from
a nightmare like a grave. Awake, the grave persisted, since I knew what
the package was. It was my haunting, Cassi's casket.

I opened the package, and I lifted out the casket. It was rather funny,
had an element of burlesque, the way three times I'd been given this
thing. There was the sinister quality, too. This version of the casting
of runes. I knew who'd sent it now, delivered it by hand through the
chute marked four, twenty-six Holland, ten stories down. But there was a
miniature self-play tape in with the casket.

For half an hour, I couldn't make myself press the button to activate
the tape. Maybe I never would have, but part of me, a very shamed
foolish part, wanted to hear his voice, whatever it said to me. And this
small part finally pressed in the button.

"Your friend, the Hammerhead mailman, hung onto the parcel with Cassi
Koberman's box in it. Your recent life seems full of those of us trying
to test which side of the law you walk. The mailman thought he could
play games and you wouldn't report him. Then he sobered up some, and got
scared you might. I know, because I had a couple of drinks with the
bastard, the day before I took the box off him. I've talked with a few
people about you Sabella. Don't backtrack on that. None of them can get
near you, or has the guts to try. As for Cassi's box, I guess you
couldn't have opened it the second time. When the fat man left, I went
through your house on the Plateau, and I found the box, and opened it.
Trim John sent it to you, just before he died. He put his own letter in
the box. You haven't read the letter. Read it."

The voice ended there, and I paced about waiting for more, but the blank
tail of the tape coiled on, with nothing, and then stopped.

I thought of Jace's eyes, on the bridge. The voice was. unchanged, .the
lazy slurred drawl, even an edge of bevelled humor on the "Trim John." I
thought of other things after that, but finally I set the key in the
casket and lifted the lid, and took out the sheet of fine quality
paper--finer than the paper Cassi's curse had been written on.

I expected to be cursed again. I spent a while looking at the thin,
spidery, stilted writing, so I wouldn't have to read the words. "Miss
Sabella Quey," it began. "Miss Sabella Quey, When Mrs. Koberman went to
Easterly and came home with the warmth of God Almighty in her heart, I
was glad for her. But then she had this notion that God's angels had
warned her against you. And all her last days, she was planning how she
would get to you through the law, because she said that they don't burn
witches, and the law was the only recourse she had. To begin with, she
provided you a sum in her will. She believed the chance of the money
would ensure your presence at her funeral, while, if you had vacated the
house at Hammerhead, a newscast announcement was to be made of your
mention in the will, similarly intended to draw you from seclusion.
Next, she selected a young man, a private investigator in Dawson, and
instructed me to hire him. She had seen from the advertisement that the
young man's name was Sand Vincent, and insisted that, because of his
name, she understood God had selected him to carry on His work against
you. Well then, Miss Quey, Mrs. Koberman died, and I did what she'd told
me because you get accustomed to obeying a woman you've obeyed for
ten-odd years. But Mr. Vincent isn't God's agent, Mr. Vincent is an evil
man. The day after we put Mrs. Koberman to rest Mr. Vincent came back to
the house for his rented car, which he had parked beside the cemetery.
He told me he was driving out west to Hammerhead Plateau, to see you,
Miss Quey. He said he had things arranged between you and everything was
going as he wished. But then he threatened me over a certain payment
that Mrs. Koberman had made to me. This evil boy is from the devil, and
has not done with me, or with any of us. You see, Miss Quey, not being
well, I can write these things, but I should be quick. I think that your
aunt was led falsely in her supposings. I think that, rather than to
chastise you, she was meant to bring you to salvation. It's a wonderful
thing to approach God, and His Only True Son, Jesus Christ, whose love
emcompasses all worlds and states and times. If you could know the
comfort it brings me, even in my agitation, I believe you, too, would
turn to Him. And for this reason, I advise you to go to Easterly, Miss
Quey, It was there that Cassilda Koberman found her faith and there she
learned what she upheld to be this bad thing which you had done, though
she never confided in me as to what this thing might be. In Easterly
there's a church, and here is where she said she was directed to
discover this terrible thing. Or maybe we have all been mistaken. But I
felt obliged to reveal all these matters to you, in hopes you also will
seek redemption. And I ask you to forgive me if I have wronged you. I
remain, most faithfully yours, John Michael Trim."

The extraordinary form of this letter. It's religious fever coupled to
its curious formality; its blindness, its doubts, its pedantry, its
childishness, linked to the stoicism with which John Trim recognized
oncoming sudden death.

I visualized again his frail hands on the stair rail, his impartial,
self-effacing solemnity. (Can I recall his face?)

But none of that took me nearer to any point of reference. So I reread
the letter. John Trim advised me to go back to Easterly for the
salvation of my soul. An old man's naive fanatical deed of expiation.
But why had Jace augmented it?

I pulled the blind of polarized glass over the window, for the day was
burning bright. Easterly. Already I could smell the aniseed grass, see
the cotton wool over the refinery chimneys. Already I could feel momma
as she slapped my fourteen-year-old face in my locked bedroom, and hear
the sound of men marshaling for a wildcat hunt, and the noise the wind
makes, blowing over the river, the meadows, and the dry canals. And by
the hole in the rock where I found my pendant.

Easterly's where it started. Maybe it had to end there.

I read Trim's letter yet again. Why did the name Sand Vincent make Cassi
judge him suitable to her scheme? Then I played the tape again, but all
I heard was Jace's voice, not what he said.

He stood in the dark, and watched me with the boy from the bar. Jace
watched me, and then he examined the boy, and then he walked with me,
and he never spoke. "I drink blood," I said to him. Only the second time
I ever vocalized it. The first time, momma hit me and yelled at me. He
didn't answer. He didn't hit me, or yell, or laugh, or try to reason
with or kill me. As if--

As if he'd been expecting it all. As if he knew.

I know what you are, Sabella. I didn't know until 1 came to God, but
when I found God, He told me. I hope the cross cripples you, as it
should. You're just one of the wolves.

His angels told me. I know what you've done.

Cassi had found God at Easterly, and her heart should have exploded with
love, but instead she went crusading, and I was the Infidel and she knew
it--

And Jace knew it.

How?

It was more than Cassi digesting my mother's old letters, those hints
and evasions. It was more than Jace talking to a few people who mistrust
me, and guessing. The kind of thing he'd never guess would be a thing
like a girl who lives by drinking blood. I doubt if he actually believes
it, even now. But he knew it

It was at Easterly, whatever the truth was.

And then I realized that Jace has had the time, between when he opened
the casket and when he waited for me on the off-chance in the church at
Dale. He'd had three months since I ran from Hammerhead Plateau.
Whatever was at Easterly, he'd been there, and that was how he knew.

But the dead are always in league against me. Momma, Cassi, Sand, John
Michael Trim. And those others, Frank and Angelo and Benny and Lek
and....

Maybe all the dead were sending me to Easterly to die and Jace was the
human spokesman for all those ghosts, so real and human and alive that
I'd never figure it out until too late.

I sat in the room in Iles, and waited, but no one came to take me into
any kind of custody.

So I packed my bag and I went out on the briefly sunset street, and
dipped in the minute of fire, an auto-cab came to the walkway. And
before the fire had died, I was riding east.

Besides, there was nowhere else to go but Hell.

2
-

At a car fixit place two miles outside Easterly, having had a moment's
forethought, I went into the washroom and slipped on a black dress, took
off my silver stockings, combed and pinned my bleached hair into a big
knot on my head, and wiped most of the cosmetics off my face. When I was
a child there, Easterly had a Puritanical flavor, and being sixty-two
miles from Sodom (Ares) had only made it worse. I assume Cassi had gone
to visit Easterly again out of nostalgia, and perhaps out of fear. It
seems to me she understood death was creeping up on her, and she needed
every anchor she could find. So she aimed for her roots, the town she
was born in, and with true Koberman luck she caught God and holy war
into the bargain. But what do I feel, with only the synthetic tan dye
left on my skin, and my sober black dress, do I register anything beyond
scents and alarms and old dusts?

It's true, I felt a kind of hankering for Easterly, the way you can look
back at childhood, even when it's bitter, longing for all those firsts
of life, and those endless wide horizons of unknowledge.

And remembered Easterly, of course, was bigger than I'll ever see it
now, and younger, and more important. The brindle oaks, the honeysuckle
trees, the children in the streets, the unmechanized bakery that baked
real bread; the beer shops and dancing palaces and wicked 3-V cinemats
outlawed out of town.

The first thing I saw as the auto-cab decelerated to eighty an hour and
cruised in was the great chain of supermarkets built along the highway.
And then I saw the surrealistic candy-parlor ballooning over the town, a
large striped tent of magenta and white sugar fluorescents.

Everywhere new apartment blocks had been built up like toy bricks, and
then spilled over and left lying in the meadows. Automated plants and
factories overhung the dam. Where were the refineries? Their chimneys
were hidden, like the mines, and only long plumes of smoke, pure bronze
on the neonized darkness, flowed up into the night.

There were bars in Easterly, blazing on main street. The novel copper
bricks of the ore boom town looked oxidized and pale. The houses
crouched between the piles and pylons, a colony invaded by monsters. The
old town was being squeezed out like paste from a tube.

Some of the streets were entirely gone to make way for improvements. My
street was one of them.

I stopped the cab at the edge, where the half-remembered, half-familiar
avenue ended, and where my street, momma's and mine, had begun, and now
had ceased to be. It's very odd, the way it just isn't there. As if a
chunk of my past had been rubbed out, as if it's only hearsay. Did we
really live here? Did any of the events I associate with this spot
actually occur? It suddenly seems memory itself could be a fake, come to
that. What happened an hour ago, only the fabrication of a mind anxious
to possess its background.

Even the trees had vanished.

The times I'd smelled aniseed grass, and thought of this place. And now
the one place in my world that I wouldn't smell that grass was here.

I paid off the cab, and it sailed away into the lights and shadows. Then
I moved slowly along the concrete sidewalk, through the arches and over
the tiled plaza with its fountain of liquid glass. The house would have
stood about here. Maybe I would find it. Maybe somewhere it was still
here, meshed in the new brickworks and tiles, like those crazy drawings
where you win a prize if you can discover the shape of a flower in a
girl's eye, or a girl's eye in a flower.

But I didn't win the prize.

Only one thing was sure. The C.R. church had remained. Cassi came to it,
and Jace had come to it. John's letter told me that this was where the
secret of my sin was blazoned forth for all to see who could read it.

Abruptly my legs were water. I wondered what I was doing here at the
whims of my enemies.

Over there, where the apartment blocks stride away beyond the river, a
tunnel ran into a quarry. Was that the way I ought to go?

I walked through town, and over the river by a new steel bridge. Then I
walked on a new white fluorescent road by the rims of which wild flowers
still clustered. My heart roused in my side as I got closer and closer,
closer and closer to that afternoon.

About a quarter of a mile from the border of the two dry canals, a wall
climbed up into the air. Through an eyelet in the wall, I beheld
scaffolding and other walls and a pallid dome which ambiguously might be
intended as the future roof of a processing plant or of a theatre. These
buildings extended for two or three miles into the night, beyond the
point where the quarry had gaped and the hole had gaped in the quarry.

Like vast dunes, they had swarmed over, and smothered it.

I went back to town, and then couldn't remember where the C.R. church
was anyway. Subconsciously, no doubt, I had reasons. Consciously, I was
simply confused and exhausted. There was a shabby hotel on the corner of
one of the older streets. The desk was mechanized, and the lift played
tinny music. I went into a room that was like the lift except it had
furniture squashed into it. I lay down on the bed and I listened to the
noise that Easterly made now, a noise like Ares, but thinner and less
sure.

I took ten showers in the closet of that room that night. The room was
hot and the windows wouldn't open and the air-conditioning was faulty, I
came to imagine there was nobody in the hotel but me, not one human. And
I felt alone as I'd never felt alone, alone without even myself for
company.

* * *
-----

When the sun came and set Easterly on fire, I lay on the bed in the
hotel, because it was too bright to go out, too bright and hot to go
searching for any answers. But possibly the church would be shut after
sundown. I considered waiting for an overcast, but to wait alone in this
room and to walk the streets and the dry meadows by night filled me with
an obscure fear. I didn't want to take, not in Easterly, where it
started. The spacer had been generous, loading me with gifts, and then
the boy from the bar had added the last dance of the night. I could hold
out two or three nights on that, if I avoided the sun, but one day and
night of the allowance were gone, and here was another day.

When the big sun began to wester, I put on my shade hat and my
sunglasses, and walked down through the seemingly deserted hotel and out
into the town. Long shadows I didn't recall were plastered on the ground
from the new buildings, I asked someone on the street the way to the
church. It was like seeing a movie I hadn't seen for years, recollecting
the actions only as they happened--here the turn of concourse, there the
angle of a store, now crushed between giants. The blackish shade trees
were the same and the fence, discolored now like teeth. The church had
been fitted with a door that opened as you approached.

I didn't really remember the church after all. Or else it was entirely
changed. It had an austere whitewashed frame, through which had been
stabbed great wounds of windows, like sliced pomegranates, green
angelica and blue ink. The altar cloth was the blue and white I'd seen
in Ares, and roses bled over their bowls in the hands of white marble
angels with huge open-fan wings of tarnished gilt. A pool of incense
hung in the air above the altar, like a mirage. The watch flame
flickered in its little crystal canister, showing that God was present.
But nobody else was home.

I stood on the tiled floor, staring around, my pulse a drum, searching
for the vast scrawled words written in fire on the white wall; SABELLA
QUEY IS DAMNED. But there weren't any words, and only the angels with
their roses had any connection with Cassi's letter. Surely, there hadn't
been marble angels here when momma and I sat among the congregation,
tensed for the visitation of light put of or into our souls. Maybe
marble angels would come alive, were granted the power of speech.

Their carved faces were frigid over the red flowers like blood. The
blank eggs of the eyes stared back at me. Their lips must have parted
slowly, and before Cassi's gaze they had stated the truth to her, as she
kneeled astonished between the pews. Behold, the mouthpiece of the Lord.

And then one of the angels slowly opened its mouth.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I froze, with that feeling of the
heart actually turning over which accompanies unpredicted horror. Wider
and wider the lips of the angel stretched, as if snarling, as if
preparing to bite at me. From out the lips came a huge high-pitched gale
of sound, which seemed to split my head apart. Not till the shriek cut
off did I scream, irresistibly, but helplessly delayed. The scream
sounded far away, and so did the crack of my purse landing on the tiles.

There was a thud, and footsteps. I looked to see the angel running
toward me, its mouth pulled wide to bite, but instead there was a man
with a distraught face and two gray dog's ears of hair flopping at
either side of it.

"Please," said the man, taking my arm, treading on my purse and jumping
off it. "Please, don't be alarmed."

"The angel--" I think I said.

"It's just the calliope," said the man.

I looked past him. The angel's mouth remained wide.

"The calliope," said the man. "The organ pipes run up through our
angels, there, and when I play they part their lips so they seem to be
singing with the congregation. It's rather cute, I suppose. I always run
over the hymns at this time. Usually the church is empty. But, oh my,
I've really given you a shock, haven't I?"

I felt rather sick and very foolish. I sat down on the edge of a pew and
the dog's ears man picked up my purse and put it by me.

He offered me a brandy from the medicine cabinet, but when I refused, he
brought me a small tumbler of water instead, from the back room behind
the angels.

"And you're a stranger, too," he said. "A newcomer, and now I've
frightened you away."

"I'm just passing through," I said. "Some relatives of mine used to come
here, years ago."

"That'd be before my time, then. Only been here a year and a half,
part-time organist, and museum attendant on the side. If it's that
you've come to see, I'm afraid it's not on show today." He seemed to
expect a comment.

"Excuse me, what isn't?"

"The museum."

"I didn't know about a museum."

"The museum is generally what visitors to Easterly come in here to see.
Or did. One time there was quite some traffic, but once the initial
interest died down--Mother Earth gets the original and we get the bits,
and everyone forgets. I say museum. I think I overstate."

The water, laying a cold gravitational center through my body, had
steadied me.

"I'm sorry, I still don't understand."

"You mean to say, Miss--"

"Holland."

"Miss Holland, you mean to say you didn't know about the archaeological
find at Easterly, two years back?"

There it was. It was like a gong booming through the pit of the world,
unheard, detected only by its massive vibration. I still didn't
comprehend, yet I recognized the moment.

"What find?"

"Ah, Miss Holland. Are you interested in previous cultures? Are you
concerned about the prior civilization of Novo Mars? Don't answer. Let's
pretend you are. When they started to process the ground over the river
for the New Easterly Complex, they blasted out an old quarry, and
straight through it was this blessed confounded hole with a slab in it
that dates back a thousand years before the first ships landed here.
Just think of it. One thousand years before men started squeaking and
picking about over the surface. That's older than the foundations at
Dawson, older than the stuff up in the Callicoes. Not only older, but
different. That's the real point. Different. The news had it, TV
newsouts carried it for months. You never heard?"

"I suppose... I must have."

Recollect, I never listened to the news of my world, not since my mother
died, except those days after I burned Sand Vincent.

"Well, it's a tomb. We've had them before, right? But they're urn
burials. And this. This is a sarcophagus. Like the Egyptians on Earth,
or the Plutonids--you get me, Miss Holland?"

"Yes."

"Oh, damn it," said the dog's ears man, then he glanced at the altar and
said, "Pardon me, Sir. Miss Holland, we've put away the museum for
today, but I've nearly scared you half to death. So if you'd like to see
what we have down there--"

I wanted to say no.

"Yes," I said, "I really would."

He beamed at me.

"Better take off those glasses. The generator runs the lights below, and
it's switched to half power now."

I took the sunglasses off, and the wounded window light shattered over
me.

"Why, that's strange," said my guide, as he walked me towards the angels
and the room behind, "the very last visitor that came to see the
museum--you wouldn't have a brother would you, Miss Holland?"

"No."

"That's strange," he repeated. We went by the angel with the open mouth,
and I could see the hairline hinges in its jaw. "A tall man, what I'd
call the piratical type. Of course much bigger built than you and
black-haired, but you know--a distinct resemblance."

Is he talking about Jace? Do Jace and I look alike? I don't want to
think about Jace, now now, nor Cassi, nor anything. They were leveling
the ground out there, to create their complex with its ambiguous domes,
when they found the hole I had crawled into, and disemboweled it.
Whatever they'd found in there, one thing they hadn't found. That thing
which seemed to be beating now, like a second crimson heart against my
breast

We were in the organ room, with a door to the robe room, and a static
moving stair that led down through a trap in the floor. A notice in the
wall said: REPLICATE REMAINS.

"Isn't that too nasty for words?" he asked me, indicating the notice.
Then he invited me onto the stair, and pressed the down button. "This
used to be the old robe room," he told me. "When they dug up the
sarcophagi (or do you prefer 'guses?) it was reckoned the safest storage
place in Easterly. Or rather, the safest place that would accept
responsibility. Then, after they'd shipped the real relics off to the
Federation archives on Earth, the replicas came in here, and here they
stayed. Ares wants them, naturally, but we've held out. You know, I do
think it would have been kind of nice to have held out all the way. We
keep the real articles and have the Federation make the confounded
replicas."

Cassi must have come this way, a year ago. Did she see the reality or
the replicate? The replicates will be so perfect, I doubt it would have
made much difference. Then again, suppose this stone around my neck were
in a vault on Earth and a replicate were throbbing on my skin. What
difference would that make?

As he warned me, the old robe room, now the museum, was dim, and after
the rain of sun from the windows I was glad. Along the far wall were a
series of blocks, the kind all genuine museums have, to contain and
protect the objects inside yet leave them accessible to all around view.

"It's very dark," said my guide. "Of course, the blocks light up. Here
we are." He led me, and we stood by the first block in the line, and it
came alight like dawn.

The slab across my way in the tunnel, satin-smooth and almost
featureless, save that there, there, Sabella, was the crevice you never
saw before, only felt, in which your destiny lay like a pebble.

"See that little dinge, just there?" helpfully he pointed. "No one
guesses as to what made that pock. You need laser power to cut into such
a slab. And look, this next one shows the cut sections."

The second block lit. Inside, the tomb, split wide like a walnut.

My heart rattled. It couldn't beat so fast and let me live.

"And here we are, the insides--"

The third block lights. There it was. Whatever if was. It looked like
handfuls of yellow string, and gray wire, and then I perceived a skull
that looked to me human, ordinary and simply dead.

"That," he said, "is a Martian. A New Martian. Not dust, but bones. Now,
just look at these wrappings from the body--" And he dashed to the
fourth block and it lit.

Where the bones had staled, the covering hadn't. It was a sheet of a
weave that looked like the best kind of synthetic silk, only a touch
faded. The drawing, or maybe embroidery, on the cloth was
photographically accurate. A man bent to drink from a cup a woman was
handing him. Both were naked, hairless, beautiful. Beside them, stood
another man and woman (or rather the first pair, repeated in the fashion
of a cartoon), and the woman was kissing the neck of the man. The
pictures were very calm, and quite innocent, except for the drop that
hung from the woman's throat. These drops are two pieces of crystal,
fixed into the design, and the first one colorless as white diamond, the
second red.

'The theory is a little grisly, I'm afraid," said my guide, "Do you want
to hear it? Originally, there was some outcry over such items being
stored under the church if the theory was true, but of course, the
safest place for every form of evil is directly under the eye of God. If
it is evil."

"I'd like to know the theory."

''Well, first of all, the pictures were taken to mean nothing in
particular--domestic duty, affection, between man and woman. Then the
visual semantics people got on to it. The idea is that, since only two
activities are shown, and quite specifically, they must interrelate. In
the first picture, the woman gives the man a cup and he drinks. In the
second, the man is giving the woman drink." There was a silence. He
glanced at me rather apprehensively. After my outburst at the roaring
angel, he wondered if I could take this. "I mean, she is drinking from
his neck vein. Which leaves us, if the theorists are correct, with
vampirism. Of course, there's nothing supernatural in it. It's probably
a rite. We know so little about this people--" He starts to theorize
himself, postulating many other acts which the cloth may really be
depicting.

I stood, and I called to mind Cassi visiting in momma's house. Cassi not
seeming to notice me. Not noticing me till she reread momma's letters,
which must have mentioned several things, half hiding, half revealing.
Momma, you must have seen the stone, and told her. You must have seen
the stone, I know you did, when it was white and when it was red--and
yet, even so, for Cassi to make the connection between this replicate
under the church, the replicate she thought God led her to see, and
myself--

"But superstition is a dreadfully clinging vine," my guide was saying.
"The worst moment came for our collection here when the robot digger on
the complex unearthed the bones."

I realized something about my guide. Despite his worry over me, which
was quite genuine, he'd brought me down here because he felt assured,
after my response to the angel, of a sensitive, perhaps hysterical
further reaction from me. For months he'd had no custom for this pride
of his, this find, and when I screamed in the church, he visualized,
somewhere on the dark side of his brain, I might scream a little over
these blocks. And so far, I hadn't. So now he was waiting. It was time
to speak again.

"You mean there's another burial besides this one?"

"Well, in a way. What I actually meant was that human bones were found
in the tunnel, outside the tomb itself."

It didn't register properly. It didn't fit.

"Human bones?"

"Well yes. Something of a mystery, and hence a lot of foolish nonsense,
and opposition to us keeping the artifacts of the burial just here. I
recall a lady who came all the way from Ares to shout at us. A big name.
What was it now--Cooperman--"

"Koberman," I say, before I can hold myself.

"Ah, yes, I believe it was. How did you know?"

"The Kobermans are a big name in Ares."

"I can credit that. This lady now, she spoke a lot about God, and what
she owed to Him. She scared me, I don't mind telling you. And as it
turned out, her objections were virtually groundless, she didn't even
know about the human bones. Then Pennington--he was guide down here
then--he blurted it. She went as white as ash, this lady did. That was
the first time we had a lady faint in our church, (you were nearly the
second). And when she came to, you'd think she'd had some sort of
vision. I love my God, Miss Holland, but that sudden turning on, like an
electric current, it bothers me...."

I didn't feel anything. No, not quite correct. I felt a sword poised
across my neck, delicate as the wing of a butterfly. I couldn't prompt
him, but I didn't have to.

"The thing was," he said, "this set of bones the digger unearthed
belonged to a perfectly healthy little girl, about eleven years of age,
just on the edge of puberty. There was no apparent cause of death,
though I'd say she'd crawled in there and maybe the air was bad and she
fell asleep and asphyxiated. But that's not good enough for the
superstitions of our community. Something had to have lured her in the
hole, and killed her. Now who in their senses would agree to that about
a tomb full of dead remains?"

I was cold. Christ, I was so cold. Even the roots of my hair, my
fingernails, even the moisture in my eyes, cold, cold...

"But who was she?"

"The little girl bones? Well, it's a funny business, I'll admit that.
The date of the decay was around eleven or so years before we got them
out--they'd sunk back in the earth some, but we can date fairly
accurately, even after Martian soil has done its work. But the trouble
was, nobody had reported a child missing at that or any subsequent time,
here in Easterly. The teeth are the usual way of identifying, and they
were a dear little set, all flawless, but for a spot of work on one back
molar. So they chased up the dental records in the town, and the only
child whose record matched the teeth in the skeleton was a child
called--"

Don't. Don't. Don't.

"--Sabella Quey."

He pronounced it Kee. Perhaps that made it all right. Perhaps that means
it isn't--can't be--

"But this Sabella Kee (Sabella--that's pretty, don't you think?) Well,
she certainly didn't go missing at any point. In fact she and her mother
moved out of the area about three years later than the bone-decay date,
and went to live over near Brade somewhere, I think the gossip had it,
though we never traced them."

No. No.

This man is mad. And he told Cassi all this. And Cassi thought--no
wonder Cassi thought--

I went in the tunnel. I went in, and I came out. I, me, Sabella.
Sabella. Oh momma, why aren't you here with me to tell this man he's
crazy, and that I'm your daughter, that you slapped and loved and died
for.

He was saying something else about the bones, and missing children, and
he was moving on and there was one more block, but I didn't want to stay
there. I knew now what Cassi heard, what made her hate and fear me, and
it was a lie.

But I must, as always, cover my tracks where I can. The tracks of the
wolf. "It's been very good of you--w

"But you must see the last one."

"I'm so sorry, I didn't realize how late--"

And the last block lit up, but I was on the moving stair.

* * *
-----

"Come out!" my mother called. "Bel, come out of that, it's nothing but a
dirty hole. Bel, do you hear me?"

But that was my dream on the plane to Ares, the dream when Sand woke me,
and told me everything was all right. My mother wasn't with me.

But I remember. I do.

I was eleven, and nine years before, my father was killed, And I lived
in Easterly, and I started to menstruate. And I was unhappy and I walked
out of town and I found the tunnel in the quarry, which may have been a
metaphor for the vagina, and--

And when I came back to Easterly last night, the house was gone that I'd
lived in, and I thought it was as if a chunk of my past had been rubbed
out, as if my past were only hearsay, and it suddenly seemed memory
itself could be a fake, a fabrication of the mind.

And yet I can remember--

Everything since I came out of the tunnel, clear and absolute and washed
with color and pain and shadings. And everything before I went into the
tunnel--yes, I can remember, but--

It's like a diluted painting, or a kind of tableau, where events and
people are made of paper and pasted on....

Yes, I know my father died. I know where I lived and where I went to
school, and the shape of that room and this tree, and the color of a
doll's dress and mother's hair and that it went gray after my father was
killed and then she tinted it another color; and I know what my grades
were, and when my second teeth came, or maybe a dentist fixing one, and
perhaps I climbed trees and perhaps I loved lemon-acid ice cream, but
then--

It was just as if I learned those things, the way I learned history
dates in school. I could remember, but maybe only--

Second hand.

Outside the church, there was half an hour left of sun. A pink-copper
light slicks off the walls beyond the churchyard fence.

Everything seemed to be whirling, the air full of specks, the trees
coming undone, everything in shreds, returning to chaos. There was
nowhere firm for me to stand, and even my flesh was whirling off,
Sabella's flesh that wasn't Sabella's.

And then there was one dark solid, a static beacon in the flood.

The avenger, the dark angel. There was a bar across the street, and he
was standing there. He'd been right behind me all the while, right
behind this thing he knew wasn't human, not even the part-human thing it
thought it was. In the whirling world, only he remained whole, but that
was because he was death, just as I always thought.

He'd seen me, but he was waiting for me to cross the street and lie down
for the stroke of the sword.

I turned and I ran. By the church and under the shade trees. The path
was tiled, and there I could see a back gate and a street beyond.

He'd be running to catch me. He always caught me before. But now I knew
what I was, now I was running not only from human vengeance but from my
own self, that thing I dreamed in the mirror, its claws sticky with
blood, its tongue a black whip, now surely I could run fast enough to
get away.

I dropped my purse somewhere. The heel of my shoe twisted and I tore off
my shoes and ran on.

I couldn't hear his steps behind me.

My hat was caught in the tree, a black raven. That was funny.

On the street, people got out of my way. Their surprised eager faces
flashed past. Perhaps I wasn't running, but the world was dashing away
from me, carrying Jace with it.

I ran over a road and a car dived by me, a hot breath of hell on my
back. I never turned. I might see death behind me.

Here was a crowd. I ran, I pushed, I was trapped, I was free, I was
through.

The sun was going. Try to catch the sun.

Sabella was running. No. Not Sabella. Something,

A pain in my side began to slow me, like a piece of lead shot in my
vitals. And the red sky was being tipped out over the horizon and
overhead the sky was already black.

What place was this? Did I need my fabricated memory, or the real one?

Real one. I was on the highway out of town. Beyond the hypermarkets and
the giant stores, where the old beer shop used to be, and where the bars
were now like yellow rips in the dark. This was where I was when I was
fourteen and the boy with fair hair came by. That's right, that's fine.
Full circle. And there was an open-top solar jeep slowing by the
walkway.

"Hey, lady!"

Good. That's good. How it has to be.

I turned, and held out my hand, and three grinning human males lifted me
into the jeep.

Even death can't outrun this jeep.

Then I looted back.

I couldn't see Jace. The pain was like tears now, like the tears I never
did cry, the important ones I held inside me, keeping them, for they
were all I had.

The boys in the jeep were laughing, touching my hair, my arms,
insidiously my breasts, boldly my knees. They offered me a bottle of
wine as the night burst on the front of the windscreen.

* * *
-----

Where the plantations of trees ran out from Easterly, they spun the
open-top off the road and down a track into darkness. Somewhere in the
black they cut the engine and jumped out of the jeep, taking me with
them. I didn't have to do a thing, they did it all for me, transported
me, put me down, began to strip me.

They were all over me. If I'd have struggled it would have been
pointless, but they missed the struggle or some sort of wriggling,
panicky response, and so they began to slap me about.

I'd known it, I'm the masochist you suppose me to be. Because I want you
to hurt me for what I do to you, I want to expiate my sins with your
blows ringing on my flesh. None of this is happening to me. I died,
thirteen years back, sitting by a tomb in a hole in a rock.

One of them was sprawled on me, fumbling for the door. His body was hot
and wet through his thin clothes, and the other two were rolling on the
ground, tugging my arms, yelling. Beyond their heads, I could see stars,
as if it mattered. And then the stars went out.

The boy screamed, dragged up and backwards and flung, like a johitless
bundle. I could just see his face, the big howling mouth like the mouth
of the angel. And then branches crashing, and he was gone. The other two
had started up like dogs. I was alone on the ground, but I couldn't
really see what was happening. The stars kept going out then
reappearing, as shapes went over them. And then one of the boys dropped
down beside me, his face turned to mine, snoring wild-eyed through a
beard of blood. His fists came scrabbling and were kicked aside, and I
heard someone running away through the trees. My night vision had
cleared, but I didn't need it any more. I knew the hands of death as
they lifted me.

As soon as death touched me, I stopped being afraid. I relaxed totally,
and let him carry me, with my clothes hanging off me in portions, and my
hair white in my eyes.

There was a hire car parked up on the road. I didn't ask him how he'd
got to it in time to come after the jeep. Perhaps he stole the car,
perhaps he lost the jeep in any case and found it again merely by luck.
It seemed to me that it was inevitable, that he couldn't lose me, he had
never lost me.

The car started and he took the wheel. There was a crackle in the cab
that must have been his anger, but I didn't look at him.

Then he gunned the engine so the car screamed up the road back to town,
and he shouted at me in one long sustained shout. I couldn't hear half
the words, and some I heard were off-planet obscenities. It was all
distant from me, this shout. Then it stopped and there was silence. Then
he said in the flat version of his voice, "Where are you staying?"

"You know everything, but not that?"

"Right."

I told him the location of the hotel, and for a moment I was almost
amused. But then I remembered Sabella had died thirteen years ago.
Whatever I was, I couldn't be amused.

We drove in silence again.

When we got to the hotel, he drove into the garage, told me to pull my
dress together, and then ladled me out of the car and into the foyer and
into the lift.

Sabella's head was hurting.

My--Sabella's--arms were bruised.

We went into my room and he shut the door.

He switched on the side lights. He said, "Go in the goddammed shower."

So I went into the shower, and took off the remains of my clothes, and
let the water wash the blood, their blood and mine, off me. And then I
put my fingers to the chain around my neck. And I took off the pendant.

I held it in my hand, with the water splashing over my body and through
my hair. The stone was paling again, a pale, pale rose.

I stood there, with the water falling on me, staring at the stone, and
gradually the water beat me to my knees. I kneeled, and I could only see
the stone in my hand, getting paler and paler, as if the life were
rinsing out of it

When Jace opened the cubicle door, I couldn't raise my head from looking
at the stone.

"See," I said. "Just like the ghoul lady in the tomb." And then the
proper words came, and I said to him, "I'm afraid, I'm afraid," and I
couldn't stop saying it, it was the only thing I wanted to say.

He switched off the shower, and came and lifted me. He held me very
quietly, and I thought of Sand holding me, rain wet from a shower, but
the thought couldn't stay in my brain.

"I'm afraid, Jace."

"I know you are."

The stone was clamped tight in my hand, and my other hand held on to him
more tightly. He took me through and put me on the bed, and rocked me.
I'd supposed he was going to kill me. But of course he wouldn't. He was
like the rest, the lodestone had magnetized him like an the others, and
now he was mine. Yet, Jace wasn't like the others. Jace was like, was
like--me. No, like Sabella, not like--me.

"Why did you want me to see the replicates?" I said.

"You don't know why?"

"Unless--to make me afraid, to--"

"No, Sabella."

"I'm not Sabella."

"You're as much Sabella as you need to be."

"I'm something that killed Sabella, took her form, her skin, her
memories--"

"And that's all the memory you have. The human memory. No throwback
Martian vignettes?"

I stared at him, at his real face, the only reality. He said, "You
didn't see all those Martian blocks, did you?"

"One block I didn't see--"

"There's something I'm going to tell you, Sabella," he said to me. "But
not just yet."

He'd stopped looking at my eyes. He looked now at all of me, and as he
looked at me, I too began to become real again, alive. When he touched
me now it was like fire sponging into me.

"No," I said. But he didn't take any notice of what I said, only of the
answer my body was giving back to his hands. "Jace--don't."

"Such a beautiful mouth," he said. "Pity it's a liar."

"You saw me--with the boy in Ares."

"I've seen plenty."

"Jace, I can kill you."

"No."

"Yes I can. Like with the boy. Like Sand. I can, and I don't--I don't
want--"

"Forget the others. When did you ever feel this before?"

Damn him, it's true, when did I? But I must fight him, for his own
sake--or is it just--

As he raised me, I seemed to be lifted out of myself quite literally, as
if my body slipped away and the new body inside rushed free. Then he
brought his mouth down over mine very gently and undeniably, and began
to kiss me. A wonderful feeling washed through me. It wasn't only sex,
which I'd never truly felt before, it was a sensation of peace, of
comfort almost. I couldn't fight him. Neither could I fool him. Suddenly
I understood I couldn't do a single thing he couldn't handle; I couldn't
take from him because he would leave me no space to take, no room for
any response but one. Nor need I be ashamed, for I could commit no crime
against him, only surrender, give in, let go.

That was what I'd confused with death. That was why I'd been afraid of
him.

I was afraid now, but it was a different fear. It wasn't fear at all.

He was beautiful. He had the most beautiful male body I'd ever seen. He
was terrible, too, that reality burning like the sun. But I couldn't
resist and the sun flamed over me and inside me and I couldn't do a
thing. I couldn't even be wise, or try to give him pleasure. I could
only take. Take in a new, another way. So this is what they felt, this
was what, prolonged, had killed them. Yes--it has the taste of death in
it. The great blaze carried me up with it in long gasping leaps of solar
energy. And then the world exploded, the sixty-second dawn.

He was lying over me, big golden animal, looking at me with his black,
black-lashed eyes half-closed, lazy, amused, tolerant, in control. My
fingers ached from grasping him so hard. I dropped the stone, sometime.

I said rather stupidly, with a very human attempt at wit, "Nobody ever
gave me a present like that before."

"Relax," he said, "it's Christmas."

* * *
-----

He made love to me twice more, before he told me what was in the last
museum block. Partly because he wanted me, partly to have that symbol of
sexual command clear and definite between us.

In the last block was the other string of bones from the tomb. It had
been a double burial, a woman and a man.

* * *
-----

The Easterly news archive, like the bars, stayed open all night. It was
fully automated, and, because Easterly hadn't yet gained the city
sophistry of Ares, there were no human attendants. Jace put me in a
booth and dialed the year he wanted. The sheet came up on the screen and
it read. TRAGEDY IN COPPER: One man dead, twenty injured as ore-drill
sparks on fire. It's the year I was--Sabella was--two, the year and the
day my father--Sabella's father--died a hundred feet underground in the
New Mine, here, at Easterly.

Dressed in our black clothes, as if in mourning, Jace and I were framed
by the large white screen. I shifted, disturbed, my body soothed, my
mind staring, at odds with each other. "What--"

"Just read down the column."

I read. I read about Sabella's father's death, which left a widow and a
two-year old daughter. I read about other injured men and company
insurance. Then, at the column's end I read, Luckier than some, Daniel
Vincent, who should also have been at work on the ill-fated drill, had
quit work that morning following an altercation with the drill ganger.
Vincent, an off-planeter, who has lived in Easterly for five years, also
found his luck holding good elsewhere. His twelve-year old son, missing
for two days, came home yesterday, alive and well. The Vincents have
another son, just one year old today.

Jace touched the button and the screen went blank. My mind seemed to go
blank with it, so when he began to talk to me, I saw what he said in
pictures on the that blank brain-screen.

Daniel Vincent brought his family to Novo Mars in the hope of striking
rich with the ore boom. But the ore boom, which benefited many, failed
Daniel, and in the end, he had to work for the company in Easterly, in
order to make up losses. Five years was a long time to Daniel, who was
at heart a drifter. A rough, tough hell-raiser of a man, his first son,
Jason, bore much of the brunt of Daniel's frustration. The head slaps,
the off-hand beatings, were well outside the legal limits of assault,
yet, they were brutal enough. They served to convey, more than physical
hurt, the unlove that Daniel had for his first son. Then, the second son
arrived, and on this second son, belatedly and bizarrely, Daniel
fastened a savage possessive affection. If Jason's life was bad before,
it got worse in the year which followed. The second son, named Sand for
some romantic maybe drunken whim, was the blessing, Jason retained his
position as the curse on the Vincent home. Jason ran with a pack of
boys, caught in those bouts of hooliganism that plague all colonies once
they become townships. Finally, trouble behind and the usual beating
ahead, Jason, one sundown, didn't go home. Instead he went climbing in
the dry canals outside of town. In an abandoned quarry, his foot kicked
through a pile of loosened rocks, eroded by exposure, by time and the
moistening of a revitalized atmosphere, and a black pit gaped at him. To
Jason, it was a cave to spend the night, a place of shelter. He crawled
inside, and when the rock slab blocked his way, he climbed over it to
the far side. It was black in the hole, but it seemed like sanctuary.

He stayed in the tunnel, the far side of the tomb slab, one whole night,
and the next day he tried to go to Ares, but someone spotted him
eventually and brought him home, and Daniel Vincent beat the hell out of
him.

A month after the drill fire, Vincent moved off planet. He took his
family to Gall Vulcan, and here he periodically deserted his woman and
his boys, returning at uneven intervals, like a chronic illness, to pet
Sand, and to curse and to beat Jason. He went on spasmodically beating
Jason until Jason was fifteen, and then Jason broke Daniel's nose and
two of his own fingers. After that, Jace got free, becoming a drifter
between the planets, enough of his father in him for that. Sand remained
and let the father's petting warp and smear him out of shape in a way
Jason had never been warped or smeared by those blunt crusted hands and
the belt between them. It had been the father who had rescued Sand, in
the beginning, from the blunders he made in his own world of twilight
morality and confusion. Later, when Daniel vanished into death, Sand
turned incredibly to Jason, and perhaps more incredibly, Jason answered.

Jace had stopped talking and the mind pictures flowed away.

"Sand--" I said.

"No," he said. "Ask me about the tunnel."

I paused, because even in my bewilderment I saw he was asking to be
spared any more of Daniel and of Sand. At last I said, "You made the
tunnel."

"I kicked it open again. It was already made."

"And you never noticed the stone? But all this was ten years before I--"

"We haven't finished with this, yet," he said, and he spun the dial
again.

The blank screen lights, and it's last year's newsout, styled quite
unlike the earlier crisper bulletin, with capitals that curl, the modern
penchant for harking further and further back to the modish past of
Earth.

Another skeleton retrieved from the relic tomb cavity. Last night, robot
diggers clearing the farther debris from the quarry tunnel where last
year the unique New Martian tomb slab was discovered, unearthed another
mystery find of human bones. These latest ossa, believed to be those of
a male around thirteen years of age, are registering as having lain in
the tunnel behind the area of the tomb for twenty-odd years or more.
Readers will recall the rather uncanny previous disinterment of a
prepubescent female skeleton some months ago, identified by dental
records as a former Easterly child, still supposed living. There is a
possibility no identification, accurate or false, can be made with the
latest find, since all teeth are present and perfect and conceivably no
dental record exists.

The screen goes out. I can't move. My brain, the blank screen, empty,
frozen.

"The Calliope man could have told you about that other parcel of bones,"
Jace said, "if you'd given him a chance. He likes the buildup gradual."
I didn't move. "Come on, Sabella," he said. His voice was slurred,
playful, unafraid. "We're in this shit together."

"You're telling me that you're--That you and I--No. You eat and drink
and walk in the sun--"

"Sabella, you're missing the sign."

He walked me out of the archive, and across the street into a bar. And
then we sat at a table, he with a long glass of golden beer, the very
color his soul must be, I thought, I with a glass of strawberry juke,
the sort I used to drink in Easterly long ago, pale satin pink, the
color the bloodstone goes just before all color fades from it.

If you looked at us, we looked quite normal, and very splendid, very
beautiful. You couldn't see my hands shake from where you're sitting, or
my heart shake, or my mind.

I didn't believe him, or the newsout, because he was so calm, so
uninterested: So, I'm dead. So.

"If you believe this," I said, "I just wish to God I could be like you."

"You don't have to be like me," he said. "I'll be like me for both of
us." He took my hand lightly and looked at it, as if my mask of a face
with the two distraught eyes in it, might distract him from his purpose.
"You're scared," he said, "because you think you're dead. You're not
dead any more than I am. We came out of the tunnel, but we didn't go in.
Nor did we, you or I, kill those kids that we thought we were all of
these years."

"What then? Something killed them."

"Maybe not. Maybe just bits of them got discarded. Or if not, just the
shock of being copied. They walked up to a mirror and the mirror came
alive. I'd say it was an impulse, a psychic trigger of some kind."

Somehow, words like "psychic" didn't fit in Jace's mouth. He had no
gothic approach to any of this, no spiritual anguish. That was what was
keeping him on the rails, and me too.

"You mean like a fly-trap plant," I said, "waiting for the first two
flies."

He grinned at me. "We're alive. Even you're alive now, Sabella, You
can't shoulder the guilt for a crime you don't even remember
committing."

"We're Martians, then. Why don't we remember back when the place was all
bloody lily pillars and damned urns--"

"I don't think it works that way. I think we got made on a blueprint,
like two tin cans."

But I imagined the pink indigenous wolves on the hills, their voices,
their running to me, and to my kill. They remember, if I don't, what
fashioned me, and what I am.

A Martian. An old new reborn Martian. Do I laugh, now?

"Come on," he said, "you've got to live with it. Vampires resurrect,
don't they?"

I clenched my hand hi his, "But you're not--"

"Come on, baby. You know what I'm supposed to be."

Before I considered it, I'd snatched my hand away, and half got out of
my chair. But he took my hand back and I sat down again.

I said feverishly, "There are too many coincidences. It's absurd. Even
to Cassi spotting Sand's name in an ad, and recalling it from Easterly
small-town gossip, which I guess is what happened. Or am I to assume the
coincidences are deliberate. This planet dragging its survivors together
again."

Jace said, "If my goddam bastard of a father had stayed on in Easterly,
you might not have had to make such a ballsup of your life till now."

"Stop patronizing me," I said. "All right, you know how to lay me. It
doesn't give you the right to treat me like a child."

"That's the way I have to treat you," he said. "At least for now. And
you sure as hell know why."

"No," I said.

But he stood up, drained the gold beer with swift gold undulations of
the throat muscle that fascinated me, because I was reducing everything
to detail, minutiae. Then he led me out of the bar.

On the street, he said to me, "For Christ's sake, Bella, I'm not afraid
of you."

"I am. I am. You don't know--"

"I can turn you out like a light," he said. "Any time at all. And that's
all you need tell yourself."

In the lift I started to shiver convulsively while the tinny music
played. By the time we got to my room, I could hardly walk.

He sat on the bed and took me on his lap, and for all I'd cried I wasn't
a child, I was glad enough to rest there in his arms. And I thought of
Sand's descriptions--Jace the defender, the rock, Jace the comforter.
And I wondered if these stories of Sand's were true, and still I didn't
know just what love there had been between them, or hate, or if love
could cancel all hatred, hatred all love.

Presently, Jace showed me the stone, which I'd left lying, and which
he'd picked up.

"See," he said gently. "Meant for you, not for me. The infallible meter.
You're almost out of gas."

"I can't."

But be moved my head until my mouth was against his throat, and easily
he lay back and pulled me with him.

"Do it," he said.

So I did.

Instinct. And then, more than instinct. It isn't the same. Not the old
thing, the sense of breathing, it's more than that, it's--but I can't
say, I don't have the words to say. It isn't performed during love,
that's a snare for enemies, the robber's way, the fool's way. But it's
an act of love, nevertheless. And for the first time, I could kill a man
only by excess of this, the drawing from the vein, the milking of life,
and I would kill him out of love, not need. I could kill him then, but
he said to me quietly, "That's it, Sabella," and I heard, and I wanted
to leave him, but oh, I couldn't leave him, couldn't--and then he put
his hands on my shoulders, and with his strength which was always
greater than mine, just as he was generally a fraction swifter, he
lifted me from him and held me away, and when the film of the great
silence of the well I had been drinking at seeped off me, and my eyes
unglazed, he put me down beside him, and for a while, we were quiet, as
if after the other act of love.

"What," I said to him at last, "did you feel?"

"You kissing me," he said. "Very nice."

"But you can control it. You can stop me."

"Anytime."

"Even if I took when we were making love?"

"You won't."

"But if I did?"

"Try it," he said. "You won't sit on your ass for a month."

The stone was a drop of ruby in his hand, and he gave it back to me.

I was not afraid any more.

* * *
-----

I believe in God. I think I believe in Jesus Christ. That night in Ares,
I knelt, and I begged someone who was above bargaining to help me. And
see, I was helped.

* * *
-----

I've thought about it, and I have a conclusion to offer, though Jace
doesn't care about it. It's a fact for him, insane but
self-demonstrating. I am a woman he wants, and I want him, and he'll
haul me with him to other worlds, or stay awhile here on this world
which I perceive is ours, and which he takes as a stop-over point or a
returning point, but which emotionally he views as just another hotel in
space. Which makes me wonder if we are, in a way, still those two
children who wandered into the grave-tunnel, not just exact copies of
their bodies and their memories and their names. Certainly, we have no
recollection of a past to set archaeologists and spiritualists squalling
and turn the Revivalist Church on its ear. The last impulse of two
lovers in a last lost tomb, that's what formed us, and what pins us
together, beyond sex and trauma and loneliness and need. We're utterly
unlike, opposed, embattled. We can fight all we want, and we do fight.
But this nail passes through both of us, a bolt of light as in a picture
of Mars, piercing, but not breaking, the vessels of glass we are. Which
to Jace is an idea to laugh at, the same as to liken him to earth, and
fire.

And for the conclusion? It's all unround.

Before the Earth ships landed, started up their colonies, pumped oxygen
into the air and water over the ground and planted things, acting like
God in Eden, this planet was four-fifths dead. But before death came,
what changes had occurred among a people who raised lily pillars and
sealed death in an urn, a people whose technology was either so
incredible or so obsolete that men can find no trace of it? I think when
all but half the stores of the world were gone, they happened on, or
evolved deliberately, a method of sharing. Of the little water and the
little food there was, one would eat and drink, and when he was strong,
the other would take from him the vital element which food and drink had
made--his blood. So there were those who lived by feeding on the things
of the earth, and those who lived by feeding upon them. It's a situation
that admits no intolerance. A system that requires a careful pairing, a
creation of partners, who could permit in love what could never be
permitted in hate or greed. Except that some were greedy or reluctant,
forcing, taking, pillage and robbery, and so the process of seduction
followed, the murderous snare I had practiced, not knowing, (or could it
be remembering?) another way. That destroyed them, or else, ultimately
the planet had nothing left to give, even in half-shares. So the lovers
had their tomb, and after them dust again filled all the urns.

It doesn't frighten me anymore about the tomb, the possession Cassi set
out to destroy, the possession which is me. And Jace, if she had known.
As for guilt, I still feel it, I'm still culpable, but it's become a
familiar thing, a piece of me, no more. Because guilt is purposeless. I
can undo nothing. Yet in the future, I can live without destruction. And
more than that, simply, I can live.

We went to Hammerhead and tidied the house, heard the occasional cicadas
and walked on the hills. Once three wolves came out in the dusk and
briefly followed us, gilded by stars and blazoned with eyes. Jace
whistled them and they came to him. To him they're dogs. He would have
thrown them a stick, I think, but they loped away before it occurred to
him.

And yet, by that hole of a grave he dug for Sand, I've seen him stand in
the sunlight, while I linger in the shade. I've seen his face, closed;
I've seen him recall his life as a human man, knowing he is no longer
that.

We won't stay here forever, or even very long. I've never seen another
planet. This is all I know. I tell him we're the last New Martians, and
he says sure, baby, forgetting graves, his light to my dark, his wide
outward gaze to my introspection.

But we're not human. No humans are as we are.

The last Martians.

He has to dominate me, that's essential; for I take his life's blood.
The victim must be stronger than the oppressor--or he dies. He has to
tell me when and how, and where to walk, and if I may, and I obey him,
but that's not for always. I've been anchorless for years. I've wanted a
discipline beyond myself, and needed it to show me how to master myself,
and I'm learning this too, he's teaching me. In the end, maybe I shall
be the one to say that this planet is where we return to and where we
remain.

And maybe the planet is a vampire too, taking from the life that moves
over it, waiting for its resurrection from the deadness of a desert
before it whispered to its inner dead in their obscure burial places.
Come, rise up, taste of the oxygen in the skies, and the poured out
waters, and the spilled dreams of men.

Men don't own this world. And though the Federation of Earth leaves only
replicates behind it, the bloodstone between my breasts is real. I'm not
a woman in the human sense. A taker of blood, I don't squander that gift
at quarter season. But still it seems to me that I may not be infertile.
This traveling man who has saved me, might not be of one mind with me as
he blows between the stars, but I can hear destiny now in the whistling
cry of the enduring wolves, the cry of survival. There may come a time
that whatever brought us together will shout for its purpose to be
fulfilled through us, the last of our kind.

You will have noted I must still walk in shadows, I'm still closer to
the dark, the secret, the mystery. Don't think me Jace's slave, for if
you do, you miss all truth in what I've told you, and you miss the
promise that one day I may choose to make this man the father to our
planet's children.

And on that day, or night, the last shall be first.