Splendid Chaos
                      An Interplanetary Fantasy

                          by John Shirley

The First Part—Disortientation Orientation

                                  *1*
He woke into translucent green.

Zero was lying on his back, staring up into—a sky? Yeah. He saw a cloud. It
was in the upper left corner of his field of vision. Creamy yellow cloud
against a translucent jade sky. He saw something more, high and wide and
blue-gray, out of the corners of his eyes. It was a few seconds before he
got up the nerve to look directly at it. He turned his head.

"Christ!" The motion stabbed pain through his head. The throbbing
subsided, and his eyes focused. He saw walls. Broken-down walls, no
ceiling. It was a ruin of some kind.

"Take a deep breath, mite," someone said in some variant of British accent.
"Deep breath make you fit again, eh? Right! Deep breath—clears away the
'eadache, tidies up the 'ead."

Zero took a deep breath. The throbbing in his head went into fourth gear.
But he took another breath, and another. The inhaling pressed his shoulder
blades against the ground, and he felt gravel and something soft, maybe
tufts of grass.

The headache passed, seeped away somewhere. He tried to sit up. His
stomach clenched, and nausea roiled through him. He began to gag.

A firm hand on his shoulder rolled him over. "Go ahead, mite, 'eave it out if
you want to. 'appens to all us when we get 'ere."

But they were dry heaves. After a few moments the spasm passed. He
found he was kneeling, shivering. There was a cold ache in him, deep down
in his bones. An undefined yearning.

"It's adjustment, and maybe a little withdrawal, too. They put you on a
drug during the trip." A woman's voice this time.

He looked around and saw them standing on his left, a man and a woman.
He looked past them at the squared-off ruin. The ruin was about forty yards
across, the walls mostly about twelve feet high, some of them overgrown
with a climbing shrub ... He was in the shadow of one of the walls. The sun
in the green sky was still low, occluded by the wall that had spread its
shadow over him. The sunlight outlined the serrated upper edge of the
broken wall with a line of white neon. It was warm, about eighty-five
degrees.

"Welcome to Fool's Hope, mite," the man said. He was short, almost
dwarfish, barrel-chested; his head seemed just a shade too big for his
body. He grinned, showing crooked teeth. He had a jutting forehead,
deepset eyes, a stub of a nose, and a thatch of rusty-brown hair. He wore a
threadbare brown plaid shirt, torn, grimy denim pants, and rotting tennis
shoes. " 'ow's the boy, eh? Wot's yer nime? I'm Dennis. This 'ere's Jamie."

Jamie was about five seven, a little too heavy in the hips and too narrow in
the shoulders. She wore a short-sleeved blue workshirt, worn Levi pants,
and scuffed black workboots. Her black hair was short, parted like a man's.
Her features were blunt, but her eyes were lively brown and restless with
intelligence. She looked affectedly masculine. Probably a dyke.

Uh-huh. Tattoo on her left biceps. A heart with the name Trish in it.
Classic.

"May as well get you on your feet," Jamie said. "You won't like it, but..."

Dennis stepped nearer and helped Zero stand. "Right, up you go."

Zero's head spun, and he swayed; Dennis held him firmly.

"Come on with us," Jamie said. "Walk slowly, take deep breaths."

"Wait a minute." His voice didn't work very well. "Uh—" He cleared his
throat. "What ... I mean—" It was hard to articulate. "I wanna know, uh..."
He looked around again, trying to find some point of orientation.

The dead, enigmatic walls, overgrown with dull blue ivylike stuff. There was
no wind—it was preternatually still, quiet, every slight noise an obtrusive
echo—but the ivy seemed to rustle, all of it. As if it were adjusting its grip.
There was bluish-gray moss—was it moss?—on the stony ground between
the fallen walls. "Where am I?" he managed at last.

"Scotland, "Dennis said.

"Really?" A wash of relief. The vague memories ... they were just a dream,
then.

"No, don't bullshit him, Dennis," Jamie said. "Friend, you're not in Scotland.
You're in North Dakota."

"North ... what?"

"Come on, Jamie—let's level with 'im, eh? Mite," Dennis went on, deadpan,
"you're in the Arctic circle—that's why the sky's that funny color, eh?"

He looked back and forth between them, blinking. "What?"

"Sydney," Jamie said, as if she were coming clean. "Just outside Sydney,
Australia."

"County Cork," Dennis said, shaking his head sadly at her duplicity.
"Ireland."

They're lunatics, Zero thought. "Go to hell, both of you," he said, pulling
away from Dennis.

Dennis laughed. "All right, all right. Truth is, we don't know where we are.
But the general feelin', like, is: We're on another planet. I mean, this ain't
Earth."

"No joke this time," Jamie said, nodding.
Zero stared at them for a moment. He shook his head. "No. That's bullshit."

"I know how you feel," Jamie said. "I felt that way. Everyone does. But you
get used to it." Zero shook his head insistently.

"Don't it feel all wrong to you here?" Dennis asked. "You know—like the
air's funny, the colors are wrong—gravity's wrong. A little lighter."

It did feel that way. But it might be suggestion. Or: "It's a drug. Somebody
slipped me a drug. Hallucinogenic.''

"Those are the first two stages," Jamie said, shrugging. "First you think
people are putting you on. Then you think you're dreaming or hallucinating
from drugs, schizophrenia, whatever. But after you're here for a while, you
accept it."

"This is bullshit. No one has the technology to—"

"You don't remember the disco?" Jamie asked. "That's what they used for
you, right?"

Zero stared at her. He remembered.


Remembered a disco. Sure it was a disco. Only ... it was in the middle of an
intersection, right smack in the middle of the road.

They were walking along, Zero and Bowler and Angie and Cisco, looking for
a way out of the sticky-hot Manhattan night and into something sufficiently
distracting. Something cheap and something nearby. They'd written their
term papers—"the fucking term papers," Zero had said—and they were
trying not to think about them and how they related to grade point
averages. So it was a natural, it was a prayer's answer, when they found
the disco that was where it couldn't possibly be. It was shaped like a circus
tent. Almost filled the wide intersection. All lit up along its tent-lines with
blinking red and white lights. Or were they blue and yellow? Or what? They
seemed to subtly shift their color if you stared right at them.

They knew it was a disco because it was giving out a bang-bump
bang-bump bang-bump of disco beat, and because there were light-show
flashes coming from inside the open front door, and because there was a
doorman standing out front behind a red velvet rope. And there was a sign
over the front door that said...

Zero squinted. He couldn't quite make it out. Highly stylized lettering. After
a moment it seemed to squirm, resolved into DAYDREAMS AT NIGHT.

They stopped for a moment to stare at the place. Everyone stopped at the
same instant, Zero noticed. "Where's it getting the electricity?" Bowler
wondered, looking around. The rest of the street was dark. The traffic lights
over the disco were dead, dark. There weren't any detour signs around the
disco, or police barriers. But there was no traffic—they'd noticed it tor a few
blocks. It was as if the traffic had been rerouted. So the disco had to be
there with the permission of the cops, right? Didn't it?

They were walking toward it again. Zero couldn't remember deciding to walk
toward it. They'd all done it at once.

The multicolored lights sizzling from the disco fanned over the
time-smoothed black asphalt of the street, coiled in a manhole cover,
snaked up a lamppost.

As they walked closer, the bang-bump bang-bump bang-bump graduated
into bang-bump bang-bump bang-bump. They approached the doorman.
Medium height, black hair, regular features, mirror glasses. Like a lot of
doormen at discos and rock clubs, he didn't even look at them. But he
seemed to evaluate them somehow, without directly looking. He unhooked
the velvet rope, stood to one side, and waved vaguely to tell them they
could go in, continuing to look past them at the street. "No cover tonight,"
he said in a bizarrely sweet, melodi-ous voice. His lips scarcely moved. The
disco light played over his too-glossy skin.

They hesitated just outside the door.

"Open bar, too," he added.

Open bar?

They went inside.

Go into a crowded disco, impressions come in waves. A wall of sound, a
wash of lights: strobes and, higher up, lasers spear and bounce from the
background glitter; color splashes, light-spangled walls, mirror balls. Like
all discos it was a jewelry box of chintzy light, wired softly together with
smoke and dusk.

There was a knot of dancers on the small dance floor—people from this end
of town, every race, all economic strata—but most of them were aged
between twenty and thirty. Odd how few gays there were for a disco.
Smiling people—who looked giddy drunk, starry-eyed—sat at tables too
small to put both your elbows on; a cocktail waitress in tights; a bar across
the room. It was a standard disco, so standard it was almost generic. The
music was the latest standard dance stuff. But sometimes it would be
interrupted, just for a moment, by a radio ad, which would cut off before
the ad had quite got going, and another song would start. As if they had
recorded it off the dance music radio station. Weird. Maybe to save money
on deejays, Zero thought. He saw no deejay booth.

But the music was there, and the drinks swept them like white water into
dancing. Angie was dancing around behind Cisco and kicking him, then
dancing away. Not kicking him hard: Cisco was laughing. It looked pretty
funny. Zero found himself laughing, too. He felt good, weirdly good. Like
drugs. He found himself looking at Cisco and Bowler and Angie as if he'd
never seen them before. Bowler was tall, serious, black-haired, pale—the
would-be ideologue. When he danced, it was usually a way of "relating to
the masses." Only now he danced like he meant it. Not normal for Bowler.
Cisco was short and dark and curly haired, intuitive to Bowler's rationalist.
Bowler was convinced that religion was one of the world's great evils; Cisco
was convinced that we were in a New Age that would see the vindication of
things spiritual. Cisco was endearingly ridiculous, seeing omens and
messages from the Other Side, making predictions based on his
dreams—and he was always wrong. Willowy Angie, hair auburn, her eyes
glittery, scarily intelligent, and icy blue; she was always joking but never
about Certain Things. Angie, who wrote papers on feminist literature, kept
her sexuality carefully contained—and now she was shaking her hips as she
danced ... Zero feeling unlike himself. Like he'd done a hit of nitrous. Only
it didn't wear off as quickly as nitrous because twenty minutes later he was
still laughing, dancing with Angie now (Huh? He never danced with
Angie—she always made fun of his moves), and drinking a pretty decent
Manhattan—dry, not too much vermouth, twist of lemon peel—from a
plastic glass as he danced, sloshing the stuff on other dancers, but no one
seemed to care. (When had he started dancing? He didn't remember
starting to...) It was weird that the waitresses didn't tell him not to take
drinks on the dance floor, but then, everyone out there was drinking, and
how come everything was free here? Must be promotional (bang-bump bang
-bump bang-bump), yeah, must be a promotional gimmick for a mobile
disco, whole thing got wheels, lifts up, skates off down the street (bang
-bump, bang-bump bang bang bang), strange to be enjoying disco so much,
usually he didn't like—

And then he stopped dancing, because of the entrance to the disco. It was
closing. Sliding shut like an elevator door. Only it looked like—it was hard
to tell in the shifting lights, but—it looked like it was closing seamlessly.

Zero yelled at Bowler, signaled him; they ran toward the place where the
door had been.

The wall four feet to their right opened, and—

A man extruded from the wall.

He came out at them on a sort of metal stalk that extended from the wall—
whirrrr—and was suddenly standing between Zero and the place where the
door had been.

The man was naked, but his body was featureless, gray, kind of rubbery
looking. He had an artichoke for a face. No, it wasn't an artichoke, but it
looked like one: a gray artichoke as big as a man's face—instead of a face.
No eyes, no nose, no mouth.

The music stopped. The lights stopped whirling. Now there was just one
blue light. A murmur of voices, confused dancers looking around.

Zero stared at the guy with the artichoke face. He was distantly aware of
Bowler standing at his elbow. "Bowler?"

"I see it, too, man."
There was a little white metal box perched on Artichoke-Face's left
shoulder. From the box came a voice that was exactly the same as the
voice the doorman had. "Not yet. Sleep now."

Artichoke-Face touched something on the metal shaft he'd ridden out of the
wall.

The tables and chairs suddenly pulled out from under the people sitting at
them, and the sitters went sprawling, yelling in astonishment, or giggling,
trying to play along. But it looked to Zero as if the chairs had moved by
themselves.

"Poltergeists!" Cisco hissed as the white chairs and white tables rose to the
ceiling. Seemed to meld with it. Vanished into it.

A man whimpered and then shouted hysterical incoherence.

"Sleep now," Artichoke-Face repeated.

The floor got soft.

It was softer than putty but not as soft as quicksand. They sank into
it—everyone in the club but Artichoke-Face—and everyone stopped trying to
fight the sinking after thirty seconds of babbling and crying out because a
sweet, seductive sleepiness came over them. They quieted, sighed, and the
room was almost silent. Artichoke-Face retracted into the slot in the wall.
The wall closed.

Zero and Cisco and Bowler and Angie and the others sank quickly into sticky
white stuff, sank up to their chins. Stopped sinking. The sticky white stuff
smelled faintly of something almost like peppermint.

They basked in the warm, firm stickiness around them, unable to move
much and no longer trying to, as the room got darker, till there was only
the faintest gray light.

They heard a distant whine and then a muted rumbling. Zero felt giddiness
deep in his gut. Like being in an elevator dropping too fast.

But his sleepiness deepened till he stopped noticing the falling sensation...


That was then, this is now.

"If this were another planet, we'd all die of the local microorganisms," Zero
said. "We'd have no defenses built up."

"You've been immunized against them," Jamie said. "They lure you into the
ship, observe you for a while, restrain you, sedate you, take off with you,
undress you, inoculate you, maintain you, bring you here, dress you again,
dump you here and—except for the Progress Stations—you're on your own."

When she said, "They dress you," Zero looked down at himself, frowning.
His clothes were loose on him. He'd lost weight. He wore the same black
jeans outfit, but coated, in some places crusted, with dried white stuff. It
was on his hands, his face...

He swayed with disorientation. The world, the sky, the whole universe—all
of it was spinning like a roulette wheel. Someone had spun the wheel, and
he was waiting to see what number the spin would end on. The wheel
spinning, the world spinning around him...

Oh, shit. The disco, the sticky white stuff, the rumbling...

"There it is, 'e's gettin' it!" Dennis crowed. "Rememberin' the trip, eh? All
right, tike it easy."

Zero bent over to dry heave again.

" 'ow you feel?" Dennis asked.

"Fucked. Like I've got a bad hangover," Zero said.

"You'll feel better when you get some food and water into you," Jamie said,
"and get cleaned up. But I warn you: There's only one free meal here for
the new arrivals. After that you earn your own."

They'd walked along a faint path that led out of the ruins, and now they
were skidding down the hillside. Zero asked, "Wasn't there anyone with
me? I mean—"

"They dropped your friends off first," Jamie said, "Bowler and the others, all
at once. They've been here almost two weeks. They're well. A little slow to
adjust. The Meta held you back a couple days. Means you were probably
infected with something they had to cure."

"What the hell was that? That they had to—"

"Syphilis, mye-be?" Dennis suggested with a crooked leer.

"No way of telling," Jamie said. Doesn't matter; whatever it was, it's gone.
But don't think there isn't disease here. They leave us some flu viruses,
some other things. They'll probably test some nasty microorganism on us
sometime."

Now they paused to look out over the landscape. "We call the planet Fool's
Hope," Jamie said. "Well, some of the factions don't like that name.
Weisman's Transcendentalist bunch calls it New Chance. Bunch of cornballs.
But most of us call it Fool's Hope."

Zero shaded his eyes against the sun. It looked like Earth's sun but
brassier and a fraction bigger. The plain that stretched out around the
steep, anomalous hill was mostly flat and almost featureless except for
big, randomly scattered craters in the neat expanse of blue vegetation.
They didn't look like impact craters—almost like cookie-cutter-perfect holes,
maybe forty feet across, none closer than fifty yards to another. They made
Zero think of ceiling tiles. The plain was silvery-blue in the morning light,
reaching into a dead-white curtain of mist that shrouded most of the
horizon; through the shroud was a suggestion of something big looming up,
far away. Maybe mountains. Nearer, the mist clung to the ground, and here
and there, between the craters, some of it seemed almost to have clumped
together, entwined to become nearly as cohesive as spun glass'. As he
watched, the spectral clumps—clumps? more like thin sheaves of
mist—began to rotate, all of them counter-clockwise, performing a slow
waltz in the faint breeze—a breeze that smelled something like menthol
and something like rotten roses.

They walked on down the hill, wending between low, lichen-crusted
boulders (was it lichen?) to the flatlands, where a rutted blue-dirt road
stretched in a straight line to what he supposed was the north. An animal
yoked to a crude wooden cart, with wheels carved out of solid wood, was
tethered to a ring carved into a roadside boulder. The wood of the cart
looked like normal Earth wood, except it was turquoise. He was fairly sure
it hadn't been painted that way. They've gone to elaborate lengths to set
up this bullshit, Zero thought.

And then, when he was closer to the animal yoked to the cart, he saw its
tail and flanks—the rear of an ordinary black horse. He nodded to himself
and snorted, "So the aliens are bringing horses here, too?"

"Nope," Jamie said.

"Horses just happened to evolve here?"

"Come on," she said, and led him around to the front of the horse. It
snapped at him with a mottled red beak.

He yelped and stepped back. Jamie and Dennis laughed. The thing with the
beak snapped at him again and took a few steps toward him. The cart
creaked behind it.

"Hold up!" Jamie barked at it. It looked guiltily at at her and stopped, its
head drooping.

"Okay," Zero said. "It's not Earth."

It wasn't a horse either. It's neck was too long, its skull too small, and it
had eight inches of horny red beak, bisected vertically. It had protuberant,
sulky red-brown eyes with wrinkly white lids, A double string of drool hung
from the slit in the beak. Its skin was slick and hairless, he saw now. Its
legs ended in thick gray pads. It raised its head and gave out an
"oh-rooooooh!" mournfully; the call echoed across the rolling plain. From
somewhere far off came a faint answering call. It lifted its head and looked
in that direction. He saw no ears—unless the damp, purplish membranes
behind the eyes were for hearing.

"It's an oruh," Jamie said, pronouncing it or-ooh.

It took a step toward the horizon, in the direction the answering call had
come from. The cart gave a tentative creak.
Jamie took hold of the crude gray leather harness around the oruh's neck
and tugged back on it. "Forget it, pal!" Its head drooped.

"Come on, mite," Dennis said, climbing up onto the cart. Mechanically, Zero
climbed up after him.

Zero sat between Dennis and Jamie. From a long box on the back of the
cart, she took a piece of metal like an oversize carpet tack—three inches
long. She bent over and thumbed it into the oruh's rump. The animal didn't
seem to notice. She gathered up the reins, stretched her legs out on a
wooden support, and pressed the tack with her foot as if it were an
accelerator in a car. The oruh lurched forward, making a sulky horn sound
like "Oruhhhh ... oruhhhh ... oruhhh" deep in its throat. It had a tail that
was superficially like a horse's; but looking closer, Zero saw it was all of a
piece, like a paddle.

The cart shuddered, creaked, and rolled after the oruh, bumping
bone-jarringly along the rutted track. Things clanked in the box behind the
seat. He held on to the bench between his legs and told his stomach to
hold on, too.

He stared at the pockmarks on the swaying rump of the oruh. "Doesn't that
tack thing hurt it?"

"Needs a delicate touch," Jamie admitted. "But it's got a thick hide.
Anyway, don't waste sympathy on an oruh. If an animal can be a shithead
son-of-a-bitch, that's what the oruhs are."

"Oh, I kinda like 'em," Dennis said. "This one 'ere's me chum." He looked
at Zero. "Int 'e goin' to ask about the Meta?"

Zero sighed. "I'm scared to ask. But you better tell me."

Jamie said, "The Meta brought us here—everyone, every intelligent race on
the planet. We were all brought here by the Meta. All abducted. They're
aliens, we assume, and I don't mean wetbacks. We don't know shit about
them. We know they're called the Meta—the High Clan and the others tell
us that. But they don't know much about them, either. They're fairly sure
the Meta aren't native to this planet. We think they just sort of use it as
their game board. We don't know how they brought us here—we assume a
starship, but we have no idea with what method of propulsion. One look at
the stars at night tells you we're not in the same damned solar system. We
don't know where we are, or where the Meta are now. We never see them,
never have. We don't know what they look like. We've seen their servants,
'the Ed McMahons,' we call 'em."

"Faces like artichokes?"

"Yeah. The High Clan rep tells us they're not the Meta, they simply work for
them. Entirely different race, they claim. After a while it becomes clear
that's what's going on. As for why you're here, why the Meta brought us all
here—I mean, I assume you want to know."
Zero glared impatiently at her.

"Okay. Well, the only thing we're sure of is, they're playing a game with us.
It might be a game they're playing for entertainment, a sport."

"I love to 'ear 'er go on about this," Dennis said, looking at Jamie in
genuine admiration.

"It might be a game they're playing for profit. How they profit by it is
anybody's guess. It might be a game they're playing—or making us
play—for scientific rea-sons. To learn about us.

"It might be a game they're putting us through for—well, for spiritual
reasons. The Meta Makers sect believes that. You know the sort of
thing: the Meta are testing our spiritual development, spiritual poten-tial,
or trying to, um, augment it. Personally, I think that's bullshit. I think
they're simply sadistic. Anyway, they're playing a game with us."

"It's not a bad plice," Dennis said, "not really. Quite livable in its own
way. Air's good, water's fine. Not a lot of creepy-crawlies, at least durin'
the day. There's a good deal of food we can eat, if we work at it. And"—he
grinned at Jamie—"and it's dead inner- restin', int it, eh?"

"Oh, yes," Jamie said with heavy irony, "it's interesting."

Zero didn't like the sound of that. He felt a dron-ing anxiety, a swimming
nausea of disorientation. He was going to hyperventilate. Calm down, he
told him-self. If it's a dream, it'll end. Hallucinations end, too, eventually.
Nothing you can do but adjust. More ques-tions. Keep the mind busy,
keep it coping. "How long you been here?" he asked.

"Me," Jamie said. "Two and a half years, about. Seasons aren't the same
here, it's easy to lose track, but the day is about the same length—we
figure twenty-two hours. Dennis's been here maybe eight months. There
are about six hundred Earth people we know of, most of them male, but for
all we know there could be a million more beyond the Stinking Bucket. Oh,
we call the ocean the Stinking Bucket. But I doubt if there are any
other Earthers. We're mostly at a primitive tech-nological level—you can
see that. But we have decent shelter, food. I know what your next question
will probably be, so I'll answer it: there aren't any intelligent natives that
we know of, but there are a good many races on Fool's Hope abducted from
their home worlds. So far we've counted thirty-one intelligent species. And
only one's from Earth."

He stared at her. "Thirty-one? Jesus!"

"Got 'im, too," Dennis said. "The Exodus sect worships 'im, put up a
bleedin' griven image of bloody Jesus and Mary. But no one's got a Bible, so
they're mikin' up their own, mis-rememberin' it and mikin' it any way they
want it, like."

"Thirty-one alien races?" Zero looked around nervously. The blue vegetation
stretched away to either side. Nothing moved but the mist.

"You won't see them out here," Jamie said. "Most 'em are north of our
settlement. But there're some nomads who spook around it. And of course,
the Murderers.''

"The what?"

"Something the Meta gave us to keep us on our toes. Randomly placed,
completely hostile, homicidal aliens. Most of the aliens are more or less
friendly, but the Murderers..." She shrugged. "Thanks to them and some of
the local fauna, like the wheelers—well, there's only a little less than half
as many Earthers here as there were. Some of them didn't get a mile from
the ruin. Some were killed by the Murderers or on expeditions. Or went
crazy and killed themselves."

Up ahead the road climbed gradually to the top of a ridge, maybe a
half-mile off. "The settlement's a little ways on the other side of that rise,"
Jamie said.

"How'd you know I was out there?" Zero asked.

"We could see the ship coming down. The light of it, anyway. We know
what that means. That's they drop Earthers."

Zero was studying the vegetation by the side road. It was one unbroken
mat, about two feet high, looking like a lawn but thicker, or like the surface
of a cauliflower, but flat and dull blue. It was faintly mist-beaded; its
glossiness and regularity made him think of synthetic fabrics. "It looks kept
up, like somebody mowed it."

"It just grows that way. We call it the Rug," Jamie said. "For more than one
reason. But it—" She broke off, staring to the east. After a moment she
said, "Dennis, it's humping up over there!"

"Bloody 'ell! They know we've got to pick up people! Ought to give us a
safer plice to do it so we at least bloody compete. Bugger 'em!"

Jamie pressed hard on the accelerator tack in the oruh's rump; the animal
squealed and lurched ahead, doubling its pace. The cart jounced, and its
axles shrieked in protest.

"What is it?" Zero asked, looking at the thing Jamie had seen.

It was a humped place in the Rug, fifty feet ahead and to their right. As he
watched, it humped more, as if a great balloon were being inflated, lifting
the vegetation without breaking it; as if the vegetation were evenly planted
in something that was all one piece.

The oruh had seen the hump now. It made a long, plaintive
orrrrrr-ooooooooohhhhhhh, stretched out its long neck, hunched its
shoulders, and hurried to get past. Its pads beat a sodden tattoo on the
packed ground. It was hard to stay on the cart now.
The hump began to move toward them. Like a cartoon image of a mole
burrowing just under the surface, the hump sweeping toward them—no, it
was like a wave, a single narrow wave on an otherwise flat sea.

Dennis reached behind them and opened a box. He handed Zero something
like the metal frame of a folded-up umbrella, without the umbrella fabric.
For himself he kept a sort of oversized blunderbuss with a harness instead
of a gun butt. He crammed a cheesecloth bag down the bell-shaped muzzle
with a stick and took a small metal instrument from his pocket. All of this
Zero saw through the distorting jiggling of the cart as Jamie prodded the
wailing oruh into greater efforts, and as the hump began to come parallel
to them.

"What are they?" Zero asked, trying not to shout high-pitched but doing so
anyway.

"Wheelers!" Dennis yelled, dumping powder into a hole in the back of the
blunderbuss. "Bloody friggin' wheelers! We're usually way past 'em by this
time, but the—"

"Shit!" Jamie yelled. "They've got symmetry!" She pointed at a second hump
on the side of the road opposite the first, coming hard at them. They were
about to be caught between the two.

And then what'll happen? Zero thought.

And then the straight edges of the Rug on either side of the road arched
with a nasty ripping sound. The humps formed cave-mouths in the Rug, and
from the caves came a sound that was like pushing a long rough needle
through your eardrums, a yodeling cacophony given off by a mass of
squealing ugliness. Zero's scalp contracted when he saw them: hundreds of
them.

Picture an eight-spoked wheel covered with slick black fur. Take the rim
away from each furred wheel, and at the end of each spoke you put a body,
a body like an oversize ferret, maybe three feet high, each with two little
frantically pumping legs, each without arms, each with jaws far too big for
its head, each with a double row of dagger teeth that look too big for the
jaw, each with a single round adorable-brown eye in the middle of its furry
head, each with long floppy ears horribly like a cocker spaniel's, each with a
wet pink tongue that extends from its mouth like a razzing New
Year's Eve party favor, fibrillating. Each body with a rigid, furry shaft in the
middle of its back that extended behind to a furry globe containing the
unifying brain. The globe was divided into two parts: the lower connected
the spokes, the upper moved independently, spinning like a turntable for its
faceted golden eyes. The legs on the spoke-animals frantically pumped, a
blur, as they poured out of the Rug caves (Zero heard himself screaming)
close beside the cart, coming at it from all sides. There was something
repulsively unnatural in the way they moved, the way the backward-
running parts and the forward-running parts cooperated, the way the things
turned this way and that, pink tongues extended, ear-needling squealings
sent in all directions and suddenly the cart was surrounded by black-furred
wheel-things, jaws snapping, tongues darting in and out between snaps,
the oruh's wail going higher and higher in pitch, its black blood spraying
where the things gnashed its flanks ... the things would bite, spin about so
the other mouths could take a bite while the ones who'd bitten would chew
what they'd bitten off (Zero thinking, Now I know it's not real, couldn't be
real, this is a nightmare), the furry spokes overlapping one another, the
spoke-animals tangling in their haste, the nearer ones climbing onto the
cart, their wheel-shapes crimping so that four spokes could cooperate in the
climb, spiderlike ... Zero dizzy from gulping air; black spots swarming in his
eyes, reflexively whacking at the things with the naked umbrella in his
hands—

Whump. Dennis's blunderbuss thundered, its stock kicking Dennis in the
middle of his chest, knocking him into the back of the cart. He forced
himself up, swearing. Three wheelers were down, blown to twitching,
wet-furred fragments. The oruh was somehow still running, bleeding from a
dozen wounds, shrieking like a human child on fire. Jamie wrenched the
umbrella-thing from Zero, yelling "Like this!" and pressed a trigger so the
weapon's barbed umbrella-spines opened, curving upward like an umbrella,
wind-blown, inside out. There was a spike at the top of the center shaft
that she drove down onto a wheeler's brain-case from above, twisting the
whole mechanism so that the jags on the umbrella-spines caught the furred
spokes, ripping into them, clamping them. The thing fell back crippled. She
twisted the instrument loose and went after another.

The cart stopped moving. The oruh sank to its knees in a voracious morass
of snarling, squealing black fur and madly arachnidian wheel-shapes.
Dennis kicked another wheeler back off the cart as he crammed more shot
and dumped more powder into the blunderbuss. Zero fought an impulse to
run, just run in any direction. (Wake up now, he told himself, wake up),
pulled another barbed umbrella skeleton from the box, fumbled with it,
trying to get it open as a squealing black-fur spoke-thing, horrible
puppy-dog ears flapping, came over the side of the cart at him, thrusting
three snapping faces at his eyes. And then it threw its rear four animals
over its front four, so that suddenly the thing fell on him from above,
making a cage of itself. The spoke-animals twisted on their shafts inward
toward Zero, and the thing's brain-case pressed down on him from above—
he could feel it rotating ... jaw-snapping cyclopean fur-faces everywhere he
turned, their tongues lapping at his ears, rasping on his cheeks, the back of
his neck, tasting him, preparing to take a bite—

He found the trigger on the (Wake up!) umbrella-weapon, thrust it over his
head at the furred brain-case, pressed the trigger. The thing flew open, its
springs driving barbs into the squealing wheeler, which wrenched itself
loose, raining blood on him. He twisted the thing away, off the cart.
Another began to climb toward him.

Whump-ump. Dennis's blunderbuss blew four of the wheelers into
fragments. Jamie tore another away from her; one of its spoke-animals
took a piece of her thigh with it. Zero gagged at the sight.

Whump, whump, whump, and long echoes, and two more detonations, and
more echoes. Zero looked up, panting. Sweat ran into his eyes. He saw
men climbing off a newly arrived four-wheeled cart with smoking
blunderbusses, swinging hooked pikes, driving the wheelers back into the
cave-mouths of the Rug. The cart had come from the settlement to the
north, probably alerted by the sound of Dennis's blunderbuss. The men on it
scrambled to crush, stab, and chivvy the wheelers.

And the wheelers went back into the caves, and the caves closed up. The
humps withdrew and began to sink out of sight in the Rug.

Zero found himself watching a sallow, prematurely bald man who might
have been in his early thirties. He wore tattered corduroys, no shirt and no
shoes, his feet blue with alien soil. He paused a few yards away and bent
to pick up the limp body of a dying wheeler. One of the wheeler's
spoke-animals convulsively snapped its jaws at him. He drove the sharp
end of a pike into the animal's eye and twisted till it sagged. He smashed
the skulls of two other spoke-animals—looking at Zero all the time,
grinning—and then used his pike to pry open the thing's brain-case. The
upper hemisphere popped off and fell away, almost neatly. The man
reached in, scooped out some of its pasty blue brain, and ladled it into his
mouth as a small boy eats a cream pie with his fingers. He shivered and
giggled.

"There's a drug effect from eating their brains," Jamie muttered, looking
over. She winced as she used a strip of leather to make a tourniquet around
her wounded leg. "God, I hope this doesn't get infected." After a moment
she muttered, "He's probably the one who did it."

Wearily, Zero said, "You going to make me say, 'Did what'?"

She looked up to see if the brain-eater was too far away to hear her.
"Started the wheelers after us. We figured they wouldn't be awake yet. He
woke 'em up with a drill or something, if you ask me. No way to prove it.
But I bet the little prick did it."

"Did it just to be an asshole?"

"He probably works for Fiskle."

Dennis was staring at the gutted wreckage of the oruh's body, crying.
Between sobs he murmured, "Bloody 'ell. Bloody 'ell. Bloody 'ell."


"The settlement was here when the first group from Earth arrived a few
years back," Bowler said. He spoke absently, reeling it off as if he weren't
really thinking about it, He stood staring out of the second-story window at
the activity in the settlement street. For some reason the Meta depilated
the facial hair from their abductees; but the rest of Bowler's hair had grown
shaggy. He wore the same blue jeans and workshirt he'd worn that night in
New York. They already looked ragged.

Zero sat across from him in a turquoise wooden chair. He fingered the
leather strips that held the chair together and struggled against sinking
into the depression opening like a bottomless pit inside him.
Bowler went on. "All the buildings were here. Empty. In one of them was
some stored food—local wildlife, vegetation, fruits. And a representative
from the High Clans. The High Clans are just another group of forcibly
transplanted aliens, but kind of humanoid. Anyway, this guy spoke through
one of those shoulder translators and told the Earthers—up to a certain
point—what to expect. Told them the food that the McMahons stored here
was samples of the stuff that would
be safe for our species to eat—but that kind of food, those particular fruits
or whatever, was all he could vouch for. People have been poisoned trying
some of the other stuff, though some of it turned out to be okay. And there
were a few basic tools here: a smelter, a crude machine shop. The Meta
give you that much edge. Just that much." He paused. "Unless you play
their game, and go for the Progress Stations. Which means fighting with
the other races."

"What's at a Progress Station?"

"Progress. Different things. Bits of useful technology. maybe some device
we can use for making other devices or refining chemicals—like those
crappy guns we've got. The plans, the ingredients for those came from a
Progress Station. A little gift that gives us just that much more edge.
Better chance for survival. The carrot in front of the donkey."

Zero nodded. Feeling numb, he looked around to try to get a handle on the
place. The room was high-ceilinged—too high—and the thick walls were
slitted with narrow windows that stretched from close to the floor nearly to
the ceiling. The late afternoon light streamed in dusty shafts through the
glassless windows, which also admitted a faint drone of voices and the
clank and clatter of carts. The room held five beds; each bed was made of
leather stretched on a wooden frame, topped with a mattress of the
cheesecloth-like stuff they'd learned to make from the bark of a local tree.
A symbol of the Pioneer sect was crudely painted on the wall, in a circle: an
ax-blade crossed with a blunderbuss above an hourglass shape. The
hourglass represented the only moon in the planet's sky, a flawless white
double-
triangle configuration a quarter the size of Earth's moon. The settlers
thought it was artificial, a big space station of some kind, operated by the
Meta.

Zero had bathed in cold water, had rinsed off his clothes. He wore shorts of
the raspy cheesecloth stuff while he waited for his own clothes to dry. He'd
eaten some sort of stewed vegetable that tasted like spinach but looked
like cauliflower. He'd met some of the other "settlers" and thought at least
half of them were cracked. Now he felt empty and disoriented, and he was
still waiting for the seams to show themselves, for the dream to show him
its unreality.

Bowler was almost expressionless, but somehow he emanated a deep,
profoundly dignified sadness.

Zero felt like biting through one of his own fingers just to see what would
happen. He made himself think about something else. "We're fighting all
the time with the other races?"

"With some we maintain a ceasefire. Some we tend to fight with—there are
skirmishes here every few months. Most of the fighting is done in the north,
in competition for Progress Stations. But it's obvious that the Meta put us
here because they want us to fight. There was a race of something like
centaurs, but their hind parts were more like lions than horses. Beautiful to
look at. A week ago they were completely exterminated, ambushed,
slaughtered by a temporary alliance of the Earthers, the High Clans, and
the Geck. I suppose it's true that they'd attacked one of our exploration
parties; they'd attacked the High Clan and the Geck. They were probably
like everyone else—half crazy from disorientation. Fierce because they were
lost and scared.

"But lots of the killing is calculated. There isn't room for thirty-one
domineering, intelligent, ambitious races here, and they all know it. The
so-called 'Allies' are waiting for their chance to kill one another when it's
more convenient. It's ugly, Zero. If we hadn't been thrown onto a hostile
planet in low-tech conditions, we could've had friendly relations with most
of the aliens. The Meta set us up so we'd kill one another. And they watch.
That's all. They watch. It's—" He spat at the window.

"But we're here," Zero said, trying to accept it. "What do you think we
should do?"

In a choked voice, his hands balled with anger at his sides, Bowler said,
"Cisco and Angie are out now trying to organize an expedition. They're so
damned stupid. They figured it's that or do drudge work around here. The
Earther Council rewards a successful Progress Station expedition with
leisure and goods. They think they'll have it easy that way. And they think
they'll meet the Meta or something.

"It's bullshit. It's fucking bullshit! I think we should move away from the
settlement, try to ignore the Meta. Maybe if we abandon their game, they'll
leave us alone. Start our own commune somewhere, learn to use the
planet's resources."

"We'd be killed, Bowler. The place is crawling with predators. And the
Murderers..." He stared at the floor between his feet. It was made of the
same bluish, concrete-like stuff as the walls: almost adobe, almost plaster.
"I mean, everything we do here is meaningless, whatever it is. This isn't
where we were intended to be. This is—" He shook his head and added
bitterly, "I wanted to be a filmmaker. Can you believe that? Are the Meta
going to give us film equipment at one of those Progress Stations? I
wonder if they can get me a good cinematograper. Not much variety for
urban locations on this planet. Can't really make a film that's set in Paris,
or East L.A ... It might seem petty, but shit,
Bowler, that was my life. That was my dream. Here it's living death, man."

Bowler's shoulders sagged. He turned back to the window. "Tell me
something, Zero. What did you have in New York, really? Where's your
family, for example? Were you close to them? Close to brothers and sisters,
maybe?"
Zero shook his head. "I was an only child. My parents divorced when I was
ten, and I lived with my mom. She died when I was fourteen, so I moved in
with my dad. He and I—he's not a bad guy, I guess, but there was always
this kind of ... this embarrassment between us. Like he felt, 'Well, you're
my kid, so I got to try to relate to you.' But it was like a couple of people
stuck together on a plane making polite conversation. He was relieved
when I moved out. And ... I had one girfriend I almost married. But that
broke up."

"So you had nothing on Earth, Zero."

"But dammit, the potential for everything was there! I'd have found my
place somewhere. Or had a chance to. Here—shit. Here there's only the
potential for—for combat. It's like being drafted."

"It doesn't have to be. We could find a way to break away from it and
survive. The Meta are the local version of the military-industrial complex.
They're imperialists exploiting us for their own purposes, purposes we don't
understand and probably never will. If we—" He broke off, staring at a thing
that had floated in through the window.

It was a small silver sphere about the size of a tennis ball. It floated
through a shaft of sunlight, glimmering faintly, and then moved
purposefully up toward the ceiling. It seemed to hang in place for a few
moments, slowly rotating. There was a little red dot on one side, and
somehow Zero had the impression that the red dot was like the iris of an
eye, that the sphere was watching him.

Looking at it, Zero felt like a frightened child. A child's uncut anxiety held
him taut inside.

The sphere seemed to watch them for a full minute and then lost interest,
drifted out the open door, and down the hall. The tension in Zero went with
it. He felt drained.

"Jamie says the Meta watch us through those things," Bowler said. "When
there's a fight, a flock of 'em show up. Wouldn't the CIA and the FBI love to
have a few of those?"

"Anybody try communicating with them?"

"Sure. The settlers have tried everything to communicate with the Meta.
They tried talking to the surveillance spheres, the McMahons. No response.
The McMahons—the ones you call Artichoke-Faces—are the Meta's shop
supervisors here. They're in the Progress Stations sometimes, or they come
around to hand out fresh respirators, different kinds of adaptation gear for
the aliens who need it. Sometimes the McMahons say things on their own
initiative, but they don't answer questions, and they don't clue you in on
what's behind the game. They just tell you the basic rules. Trying to
communicate with the McMahons and the Meta is like trying to talk to the
Sphinx. In the end most of the abductees—settlers, if you like—end up
thinking of the Meta as a kind of cryptic but ultimately benevolent
employer. Some of them even worship the Meta. But some of them—"

"Some of them hate the Meta," Zero said, and Bowler nodded.


                                     *2*

Zero and Bowler walked down a long, echoing hallway. The building had the
architectural presence of a monastery. Looking out of place, a striking
young woman was walking down the hall toward them. She was
strawberry-blond, pale, freckled, and dimpled. Big blue eyes. Voluptous in a
torn gingham halter-top and Levi cut-offs. She was barefoot, and she
carried a wooden bowl of steaming water. She glanced at them and walked
expressionlessly past into a room on the left. "She's nursing Jamie," Bowler
said.

"Who is she? That face should be on the label for a jar of preserves or
something. Sunny Jim's sister."

"Who is she?" Bowler repeated dryly as they walked out into the courtyard.
"She's the torment of every man here. That's Trish, Jamie's girlfriend. Her
wife, really."

"Shit."

"Yeah."

They paused outside a wooden door. Bowler whispered, "This is the Council
room. Listen, you're not going to believe this. There's someone here you
know. It's a weird coincidence that they should rake in someone else from
the college. Unless maybe ... I don't know."

"Well, who the hell is it?"

"Fiskle. Harmon Fiskle, Ph.D."

"Are you putting me on?"

"Uh-uh. Dr. Fiskle. He went to that conference at Oxford, right? Went on a
side trip to Wales?"

"And disappeared. Yeah, I heard. God, this is synchronicity with a
vengeance. Jamie mentioned him, but I didn't connect the name ... She
said she thought he tried to kill her, set the wheelers off."

"If he can get away with it, he probably did it. Let's hope it's not
'synchronicity with a vengeance.' He's got power here, the prick."

"Oh, great. Just great. And he brought his social theorem with him. Skinner
and Social Darwinism."

"You know it. And he sees this as the ideal place to—"
The door opened. A bearded man looked out at them and said, "Are you
going to stand out here whispering, or are you coming in?"

There was something ritualistic in the barrenness of the Council room. Zero
thought of a gathering of tribal leaders in an Indian lodge. Bare walls, a slit
in one of them for a window. Shaky light from torches oozing a ghost snake
of yellow smoke. And the settlers, squatting on the floor against the wall,
looking at the floor, the ceiling, staring into space. A few of them talking in
low voices but not looking at one another. They were like a videotape Zero
had seen of a group therapy session for the chronically depressed.

There were twelve of them. With Jamie and Trish missing, only one of them
was female: Anna, a sturdy pop-eyed Puerto Rican woman. Jamie was the
mayor, and normally she'd be in charge of the Council meetings. In her
absence the chief of food rationing presided. That was Fiskle.

Fiskle's was the only cheerful face. Zero remembered him as a preppie and
a snob. And a hide-bound behaviorist. He'd been a prodigy, a professor at
only twenty-six years old. Known for immaculate suits in gray, black, or
quiet blue, and for his spotless patent leather shoes. For his anal
exactitude in everything, from his manicure to his demands for perfection in
student papers.

But after five years he'd trimmed his classroom work to the tenure
minimum, and devoted most of his energies to working at the university
medical facility, correcting sociopathic behavior through a particularly rigid
application of rewards and punishments. Especially punishments.

Now he wore a tunic and rough trousers of leather. His head was shaved—
must be painful, shaving here—and somehow he was the only man in the
room with clean fingernails. He was lean and sunburned with a sharp nose
and hooded gray eyes and lips so red they looked cherry-stained. His
expression was supercilious complacency.

He smiled at Zero and Bowler as they sat directly across from him to the
right of the door. He was also the only man in the room who didn't have
yellowed teeth. Zero imagined him searching frantically through the local
flora till he found some fibrous reed that could be made into a serviceable
toothbrush.

"What a pleasure it is to have two former students here. And how very
curious it is, too! Perhaps someone was listening when I said—more than
once, to be sure—that I wished I had some of my students alone in a
foreign country, where I could make my own rules for their improvement."

"This place don't run to your rules," said a strikingly handsome blond-haired
young man with a surfer's tan. He wore no shirt, perhaps to show off his
perfect muscle tone.

He glanced at the newcomers. Zero's gut contracted when he saw that the
right side of the man's face was missing. It looked as if it had been clawed
away. There was a thin crust of red over the bone, and claw-stripes of
bluish scar tissue, and a crater where his right eye should have been. He
grinned lopsidedly at Zero. "Something wrong, man?"

Zero shook his head. "Um. No!"

"My rules are nature's rules, Warren," Fiskle told the disfigured blond. "And
in time they'll assert themselves without my help. My only hope is to guide
us into step with nature. And then, paradoxically, we'll overcome nature.
Tame it. As we were beginning to do on Earth. It wants us to tame it."

"Let Jesus guide us!" cried a wispy man with long, dirty brown hair. Zero
had assumed the man was wearing a loincloth of some kind, but looking
closer he realized there was no loincloth; the man was nude. "Jesus
appointed us to this new wilderness. His Eden is here. If we find our way
back to innocence, Eden will—"

"Kindly put a sock in it, Smilder, will you?" Fiskle interrupted sweetly. It
was venomous sweetness. He beamed at the rest of them. "Now then, the
chief business of the day is to vote on the acceptance of the newcomer
Martin Wirth, aka 'Zero.' Bowler has sponsored him and given us a bit of
background on him. So, as we have to get on to the rationing budget, let's
get this out of the way. All in favor..." Zero held his breath.

He needn't have worried. He was unanimously voted in. "We need everyone
we can get, you see," Fiskle said. "Everyone human and sane. So far,
you're sane. And so far you're human."

Zero looked at Bowler. The look said, What does he mean by that? Bowler
shrugged. Zero asked, "Fiskle—is there something else here I should know
about?"

Warren laughed bitterly. The others shifted slightly, a rustling noise about
the room, and glanced up at the window.

Fiskle looked at the window, too. "We thought it was the Meta doing it, at
first," Fiskle said meditatively. "But now I don't think so. I think it's this
planet. Something to do with the IAMton fields. I think, though, that the
Meta know about it. I think that's why they picked this planet—to make it
more interesing."

"Shut up, Fiskle," Anna said, "for god's sake."

"They don't like to talk about it." Fiskle was talking absently, as if musing
aloud. "It's as if there's something dirty in being a Twist. I suppose it is
obscene. But I suspect it makes a good deal of sense in the long run."

Bowler said, "If we're going to keep our sanity here, we've got to keep the
mysteries to a minimum. Because there are too damned many already." He
looked sharply at Fiskle and snapped, "So what the hell are you talking
about?"

"There's a sort of ... an indescribable convection that moves through the
landscape, through the atmosphere. A kind of current moving through the
fabric of reality. You can see it in the way it—ah, it makes things look
different. But after its passed, they're the same as before. Except when it
reaches something that thinks. It changes that something, alters it, gives
it a new biology—a new, uh, sense of self. To greater and lesser degrees.
You haven't seen the Current, Bowler, because it comes rarely to this part
of the world. Only twice in Earther memory. And the settlers don't like to
talk about it. Things are, as you say, mysterious enough. But you may
encounter some of those who've been altered. We call them Twists. You'll
know them when you see them. You'll know the Current when you see it.
Steer clear of both."


Zero and Bowler stepped out into the courtyard and paused to look around.
The Fortress of the Pioneers looked like something out of an old Foreign
Legion movie. Baking in the golden afternoon sun, the courtyard could
almost have belonged to some nineteenth-century Cairo trader—until you
looked up at the mocking green sky.

The fortress was separated from the rest of the settlement by high, thick
walls that were seamlessly connected by walkways with the upper floors of
the block-shaped, slit-windowed buildings they protected. The whole
structure looked to be of a piece, as if it had been made by pouring
something into a mold. Pioneer sect guards—eight men and two women,
armed with blunderbusses, crossbows, and pikes—patroled the walkway
atop the wall, two stories up.

The air was rank, partly from the sewage trench in the long shed to the
left, which drained into a ditch back of the fortress. The stink of the
courtyard had layers, fermenting in the heat, and the sharpest layer came
from the oruh pen.

Against the right-hand wall, three oruh shifted and farted in the small
wooden pen. A cloud of some of the local pests, diaphanous flying things
like tiny jellyfish, hung over the pen, valving in jerky movements over the
oruh and their offal. They alighted now and then on an oruh's rump,
clasping like barnacles, sucking, only to zig-zag away when the oruh
irritably snapped at them.

A skinny, stringy-haired, tired-eyed woman carrying a six-month-old baby
hitched on one hip, used her free hand to open a wooden box strapped to
the pen's fence. There was a leather sack in the box. She untied it, lifted it
out, and emptied it into the oruh's feeding trough, dumping segmented,
squirming creatures of shiny ochre. Some variation of roaches, Zero
thought. Which the oruh, grunting happily, began to crunch and grind in
their sideways beaks.

Looking hastily away, Zero followed Bowler across the courtyard to the
weapons rack. Sweat beaded instantly on them when they stepped out onto
the courtyard's hot griddle.

The Pioneers' sergeant at arms stood behind a rough wooden counter in the
shade of the wall, to one side of the wood-post gate. He was an unsmiling
black man of about thirty-five, wearing a tunic of blotchy black rawhide,
probably from an oruh. Bowler showed him a square of leather stamped
with the Pioneers' symbol. The man nodded and asked, "Where you going?"

"Down to the Neutral," Bowler said.

"Pikes is all, then, or daggers. Watch out for the Kiss Me Darlings."

"What the hell are Kiss Me Darlings?"

"Look kinda like overgrown orchids made out of shredded coconut. Five feet
high, real pretty. Smell real nice—like daffodils, kinda. Don't go near 'em.
Don't listen to nothin' they say. If you see any kinda Twist, steer way
clear."

He turned to a rack of weapons made in the shops and forges on the far
side of the settlement. He selected two of the lighter black metal pikes and
passed them over. Each pike was about four feet long with a wicked hook
on one end and a spike on the other.

Bowler nodded and took one; Zero took the other. It felt like iron. It was
heavy. Holding it in both hands, he followed Bowler past the guard, out the
gate.

The road outside was rutted dirt. A few Pioneers squatted outside, wearing
rawhide or the rotting clothing they had been abducted in. They were
talking and smoking some local herb in wooden pipes. Looking again, Zero
saw that one of the men wasn't a Pioneer, wasn't even quite human. His
skin was black but not Negro black; it had the waxy blackness of licorice.
His eye, or perhaps eyes, was a strip of sparkling white-gold above a nose
that looked as if it had been split with a blunt knife and never sewn up. He
was nude except for a metal-mesh loincloth, intricate bodypaints in floral
abstractions, rather like Louis XIV wallpaper, and tennis shoes—Reebok
tennis shoes he'd bartered from someone. Four silvery hoops pierced his
right wrist the way earrings pierce an earlobe. A black plastic box on his left
shoulder translated for him as he spoke to the others. His hands seemed
entirely human, except the fingers were perhaps an inch too long.

"That one of the Twists?" Zero asked, whispering. "Looks like he might've
been human once."

Bowler shook his head and murmured, "An alien. High Clan. Their trading
rep, Zickorian. Supposedly one of our allies, but, like, no one quite trusts
him completely."

There was a broken-down cart leaning against the wall of the building
across the way. A naked teenage boy with feral eyes crouched under the
cart like a dog, sniffing the wind. He was gray with dust and streaked with
blood. Skinny, skin so taut over his lean muscles you could see every cord
and sinew. His nose was running messily. He pissed himself as Zero
watched. Zero didn't need to be told about him: the boy had gone mad.
About twenty-five percent of the Meta's abductees went mad, someone had
said. Zero felt a deep chill, looking at the boy. He forced himself to look
away.
The wall above the cart was dark with graffiti written smearily with
charcoal:

TRISH WANTS COCK
after which someone, probably Jamie, had written:
BULLSHIT JUST TRY AND GIVE IT TO HER YOU CRETIN
SHE'LL USE YOUR BALLS IN A SALAD
(and someone else had scrawled:)
WE DIED AND GOD SENT US HERE. IT AIN'T HEAVEN.

And there was more, written in a cryptic alien script.

They turned left and walked down the road that led to the Neutral, where
the races met to deal and where genuine neutrality was a matter of whim.


The Meta had built the human settlement atop a long, grave-shaped hill.
Between the human settlement and the next one to the west, the Ki-ips
settlement, was a packed dirt road that stretched across a boggy lowland.
About two miles ahead, halfway across the bogs, the ground rose into a
stony maze of boulders, almost a Stonehenge of crooked monoliths a few
acres across, an island of dryness in the sodden valley. Here, Bowler
explained, was the Neutral, where goods were bartered, defense alliances
forged, conspiracies birthed, feuds resolved, curiosity sated, and contracts
for joint expeditions made. Where technologies beyond the Iron Age level—
possessed by those who'd made it to the upper Progress Stations—were
taboo and never the subject of barter. To give another race a technology it
hadn't earned was to undermine your own race's playing position in the
Meta's great game.

Bowler and Zero trudged through a cloud of blue dust raised by a group of
traders trundling wheelbarrows and creaking handcarts along the road to
the Neutral. The road was of packed earth reinforced by logs, stretching
through the swamp from hummock to hummock. It had been there when the
first Earthers arrived.

There were eight traders. All of them carried skeeter switches, like scraggly
brooms, cut from the scratch tree; the switches hung from leather thongs at
their belts. Like most of the settlement, the traders were young, humans of
every color, and mostly male. Only one of the traders was female. The Meta
didn't want their game complicated by a lot of offspring.

Zero looked around, blinking in the dull jade light reflected from the chains
of small bog-ponds around the blue-mossed hummocks. Clusters of
translucent blue plants edged the ponds, seemed to have grown out of the
water and back down into it, perfect arcs like glassy croquet hoops. The sky
was hazed over, looking like tarnished bronze, a fulsome glower in
green-gold. The air was humid here, hothouse warm, cloying with the odd
perfumes of alien blossoms and lewd with swamp rot. Perspiration stuck
Zero's shirt to his back. He unbuttoned it, but then noticed everyone else
was well covered despite the heat. Some were in the rags that remained of
their original outfits; some in a kind of sackcloth; some in tunics of the
local cheesecloth, some in a fine, glossy, silklike cloth with curious red and
yellow lightning-stroke designs woven into it: the weave of the Whorebugs.
The Whorebugs traded for metal goods; few of the settlers were so well
clothed.

"Better not open your shirt," one of the traders told Zero. He was a short,
haggard Japanese, maybe forty, with a slight accent; he wore a
strawberry-lemon Whorebug tunic that he'd rearranged to look like a Shinto
robe. He was carrying a jingling crude-cloth sack of small iron tools,
presumably for trading with the Whorebugs. "The more skin you expose to
the air, the more likely a jumpskeeter will smell you." He pointed at a
nearby hummock, where something squatted, or a mosquito as big as a
crow. Take off the crow-sized mosquito wings, Zero thought, and put
proportional grasshopper's legs on it: jumpskeeter. The skeeter shifted its
faceted rose-colored eyes and preened its proboscis. Zero hastily buttoned
up his shirt.

Bowler nodded. "Yeah, watch out for those fuckers. One of them jump on
you, you'll lose a pint of blood in less than half a second. Jumps on you,
sucks it up zip, just like that, jumps off, all in the blink of an eye.
Sometimes seven or eight of 'em travel together; they get you all at once,
you're a dead man." Seeing the look on Zero's face, he added, "It doesn't
happen very often."

"Not very often," Zero said dully. "Just now and then. Good. Great. Lovely."

"You okay?" Bowler asked him.

"No." He looked out at the glossy patches of the bogs. He imagined the
wheelers, or worse, waiting to meet him out there, something alien
crouched behind a hummock of geological wrongness. "It's all too wrong."
The sky was wrong. The sun was wrong. The horizon was wrong. The color
of the water, the texture of the foliage, the cast of the light, the feel of the
dirt—all of it was wrong. And the smells: tantalizingly ... almost familiar.
And the almost made them even more wrong than if they had been
completely unfamiliar. Go to a foreign country on Earth—the African veldt,
the jungles of Thailand—and things are strange and disquieting. But there's
a foundation of some familiarity, at least, in the colors and feel of sky and
earth and water and sun. The vista seals the foreign place into your
understanding, opens it up to your adaptation. But here...

The Japanese said, "The ground is below and the sky above. Water runs
downhill, plants grow upward. It is not our world, but it is world."

Ashamed of himself for whining but unable to help it, Zero said, "Bowler, I
want to go back to the town. I can't handle it out here. Anything could be
out here."

"It's not that bad. Look, there's some fishermen. They seem okay. In
harmony with the environment and all that."

Six men and a woman, muddy and squinting, stood to their thighs in a
coppery bog-pond not far off the road. Zero thought of Asians working in
rice fields. Four of the fishermen were lined up not far apart in the oblong,
thirty-foot pond, bent to make scooping motions in the water, driving
crustaceans into the grass-fiber net held by the other two. A jumpskeeter
went instantaneously from utter motionlessness to a thirty-foot bound,
soaring down over the woman holding half the net. The man beside her saw
it coming, whipped his switch around, and caught the skeeter in midair,
knocking it to the side. It fell onto the mud of a hummock. The woman
turned and used the butt of her own switch to smash the thing to pulp. Its
storage pouch burst, squirting stolen blood.

"Learn skills like that one," Bowler said, "and it won't be so bad here."

Zero shook his head. He was hot, uncomfortable, and tired, and he hadn't
had enough to eat. Also, he was on the wrong planet. "I just don't think
I'm ready," Zero complained, "to go to this Neutral thing. I've seen enough
aliens, Bowler. And Fiskle will be there. I want to see as little of Fiskle as
possible."

Bowler began, "No one's allowed to fuck with you in the Neutral—"

The Japanese trader looked over his shoulder and laughed. "Not fuck with
you there? That's a good one. They do what they want. They're not
supposed to mess with you, and most people—or not-people—keep it that
way. But sometimes..." He shrugged.

Bowler said, "Yeah, sometimes the Whatevers step out of line. It's hard to
enforce the Neutrality. But it doesn't close down—everyone needs it. I
guess it's safer than—out there." He waved vaguely at the southern
horizon. Off that way the bogs ended as the ground rose to the ridge that
separated the settlement from the Rug. To the north, the bog seemed to
go on forever, lost in mists a half-mile on.

They'd walked more than a mile. Zero was hot and thirsty. Blue dust was
gumming his nose and throat. It was very quiet, just then, for no good
reason at all. No Earthly reason, Zero thought.

A quarter-mile ahead now, Zero could see the stony cluster of vertical black
and gray, patchy in spots with color, that was the Neutral. They might find
anything there. Zero felt panic creeping up on him, coming at him from all
directions. He had strobe-swift images of wheelers snapping at his face; of
the mad-eyed boy crouching under the cart; of the jumpskeeter stropping
its proboscis.

Bowler looked worriedly at him. "You look as if you're going to throw up or
something."

Zero muttered, "I don't know how long I can hold on, Bowler."

"Everybody goes through this when they first come here. Some snap, some
don't. You won't. You can't let yourself. Nothing has prepared us for this.
It's another world, and its foreignness makes Cambodia look like Kansas.
And it shakes you up more than anybody figured it would. Does it to
everyone. Hold on to that, man, that we all went through it. The panic
passes. Yon adapt or you flip out. You got a choice."
"I don't have a choice. If I do, I do. ! can't control—"

"You can," the Japanese said. "It's a choice between strength and no
strength. Between you making a choice and letting the world make the
decision for you."

Zero looked at him. He nodded slowly and said, "What's your name?"

"Yoshio."

"Yoshio. I'm Zero. Thanks, man." And they shook hands. The Earther
custom was reassuring.

Bowler lowered his voice to a whisper. "Zero, you know what happens to
people who flip out here? There're no counselors here. No thorazine, no
antipsychotic drugs, no emergency rooms. If you lose mental control, you
get expelled from the settlement. That kid back there under the cart—
they've been having trouble catching him. But they'll get him. They'll take
him out into the country, chase him off, and leave him out there. And he'll
die. Otherwise he steals food and just ... his presence demoralizes people.
They can't afford you if you can't adjust. So you got to go to the Neutral.
Force yourself to face the alienness. You know? Anyway, you want to see
Angle and Cisco, right? They'll be there somewhere. I promised them I'd
meet 'em this afternoon, once you got on your feet."

"How's Angie handling it?"

"It was rough at first. But she's kind of ... kind of into it now. I almost
think she's starting to enjoy it here."

"She, uh, say anything about me?"

Bowler snorted. "You think this is the place you're going to satisfy your
unrequited love?"

Zero shrugged.

The Neutral was a twisting lane between the high boulders; awnings had
been strung between boulders, some of Whorebug cloth, some of grass
weave, some of leather. Under each awning, or between them, or
wandering about, a dozen races were proof of the galaxy's demented
variety.

A grizzly of a man in the tatters of a LAPD uniform pushed aside the
crude-cloth flap of his lean-to, stepped out, and looked them over. He still
had his badge and a cracked plastic nameplate: LT. DOGGO. Perched
crookedly on his stubby nose were dark glasses with one of the lenses
missing. He had no shoes, and his horny feet were blue from the dirt. On
his right shoulder was a translation box. With him was half-faced Warren,
wearing buckskin.

"You're crazy," Doggo was telling Warren. "There could be anything in
there. Don't do it."

"Don't do what?" Bowler asked. He and Zero stood beside the lean-to, in
the shade of one of the monolithic stones. Bowler seemed to have business
with Doggo.

"Warren wants to go surfing in the Stinking Bucket."

"It shouldn't be called that," Warren said. "It smells funny, sort of
mentholated and sort of like fermented soy sauce. But it's beautiful. The
water's thick and warm—prob'ly hold you up real good."

"And holds you down even better, I'll bet," Doggo said.

"And the waves on it are gigantic and perfectly shaped. Symmetrical as a
mandala. Tubular to perfection. And it's, like, calling to me. I'm gonna
make a board."

"Have you seen my friends, Doggo?" Bowler asked.

"Yeah. I'll take you to them. Who's this?"

"Zero. Friend of mine."

"Zero," Doggo said, "I'm the lawkeeper in the Neutral, okay? I'm the law
here, humanside. Okay?" Not waiting for an answer, he turned and
lumbered off. Bowler and Zero followed him.

They moved down the lane, and almost immediately something four-legged
and bizarre capered up to block their way. It looked like a sawhorse with a
legless, armless dwarf perched on one end where the horse's head would
be. The nearly human torso was naked—or possibly it had been coated with
a kind of paint that was the equivalent of clothing. Where the genitals
would have been was a sort of pouch with something irregular and unlike
human genitals outlined in it—like a silk bag containing random parts from
a gearbox. The sawhorse part was battleship gray; the torso and
head were uniformly gold, even its eyes. Its plastic-glossy legs, of duller
gold, looked like two-by-fours, but they moved like things of rubber,
showing no joints. Zero thought of Gumby's horse, Poky.

The alien's head was like a human's whose face had been blurred, had
somehow been made clay-malleable, as if the Creator's hand had pressed
the features down from top to bottom, smearing eyes into cheekbones,
nose into lips.

It moved with impressive flexibility, its sawhorse-legs were springy as it
bounced back and forth challengingly in front of them.

Doggo turned apologetically to Zero and Bowler. "This is a Pezz. They're
sorta territorial."

The Pezz's mouth moved as if it were chewing something too big for it, and
squeaky, off-key violin sounds emerged. The translator box strapped to its
shoulder said, "You may not pass, though green is green and yellow is
yellow. This is my creche of exquisites, and you have not the three
intimacies."

"Friend Pezz," Doggo said wearily—he'd said it nine times that day already
—"I bear the sigil of passage, and it protects me and those with me.
Anyway this is the Neutral—no one's territory. Stand aside."

"Doggo," the Pezz replied, "you have piqued my curiosity. With you is one
who, if I've sorted and classified your hormonal secretions properly, exudes
the purple odor of impossible ambition. The other reeks with the sour blue
of disorientation and the red smell of irritation. He is
adaptation-incompetent." This last he said looking at Zero.

Zero turned in disgust to Bowler and muttered, "Bowler, not only do I have
to talk to a fucking melted dwarf on a sawhorse, the melted dwarf on a
sawhorse is giving me shit. I can't handle this place, Bowler."

"So take a subway home," Bowler said as they followed Doggo past the
Pezz. "What did he mean, Doggo, uh, about the impossible ambition?"

"You'd know better'n I would," Doggo said. "The Pezz are telepathic, in a
biochemical kind of way. They study a race for a while, match up that race's
hormonal secretions—which they have a sense for—with their emotions and
attitudes, and they know more or less what you're up to by the excess
chemicals you sweat out. You got big plans?"

Bowler said nothing.

Doggo circled well around the Pezz's booth-territory—where it traded
speckled pots that it had made by combining agates and a kind of cement
exuded from its pouch—and they went on, following the writhing lane
through yet another turn.

They emerged into a lane edged by a series of booths—a bazaar where the
fabric of reality became piebald and patchy; the very air seemed uncertain
of itself, crackling with the interaction of bioenergy fields not designed to
mesh. A sense, walking down the lane, of passing open doors into other
worlds.

There were awnings between the crooked, monolithic stones, and under
each one was an alien or two, or one alien that looked like two unless you
looked closely (or perhaps was two and yet one, depending on their mood).
Each alien was hawking wares in its own fashion or attempting some
variation of missionary work, religious or philosophical conversions. Some of
this rhetoric appeared as miniature fireworks from craterlike pores in alien
skin, or the waving of intricately interspersed banners.

The place was Hell for a seeker after consonance; the only constants were
discord and a certain territorial guardedness; and even those consistencies
sometimes broke down.

They passed through an industrial fugue of clamors created by a group of
metallic creatures who flung themselves at one another so as to crash their
brassy hides, evidently in ritual celebration—living cymbals happily
colliding. But they gesticulated in protest when the tendrils of a creature
the Earthers called the Jungle hung down into their niche and got in the
way of their crashing, frustrating them with mufflings. The Jungle
fascinated Zero's eye, a viny, red-bristled thing of iridescent foliage,
stretching from its own booth to overreach several others, pulsing here and
there with bladders like the ballooning underchins of frogs, its interior
pregnant with shadows, its vines reminding him of those Earthly sea
creatures that look like plants but are in fact animals. It was an enormous
tangle—a tangle that was somehow symmetrical, almost a patterned weave
—of slowly reaching, groping ropiness. It signified intelligence by twisting
lengths of itself into geometrical signs, but the translation boxes were
nonplussed by it. Its occasional forays into the other niches were probably
attempts to communicate, Doggo said, since it consumed only air and
minerals.

A scaly cold-blooded snake-eyed thing ripped off one of its own several
arms and offered it cheerfully to Zero as they passed. Zero, out of
politeness—really trying to adjust, honestly trying—began to reach for the
twitching, drippy-stumped limb, but Doggo pushed him away from the niche
and said, "Don't accept, or you'll have to offer it at least a finger. It's a
cheat—his limbs grow back."

Zero whimpered softly to himself but held together and went on.

A thing made of ice-cream-cone-shaped layers of blue-mottled flesh
approached Zero on a biologically generated magnetic field; it smelled of
dirty socks and the smoke from a burned-out electrical socket. It paused
and exuded translucent red pears of gel that hardened and hung from it in a
group of three, waggling enticingly. "You're in luck, Zero," Doggo said. "This
is a Poolsh. These guys don't come around often. Supposed to be an omen
of good fortune in the long run when they come up to someone. Try one of
the jelly pears." Doggo plucked a pear and bit into it and smiled, nodded as
if agreeing with an imaginary speaker.

Zero looked at Bowler, who nodded gravely as he bit into a pear himself.
Zero made himself reach out and pluck a jelly pear. He took a bite. The
consistency was like a "gummy bear," but its taste was of a delicious iodine
—iodine cannot be delicious, but this was. Then he saw a picture, a vivid
image of himself spitting copiously on the Poolsh.

He shook the image from his mind and said, "Whoa. I had a disgusting
hallucination."

Doggo said, "It sent you an image. It knows our brain chemistry now
because it ate one of our dead—with our permission. It trades the fruit for
some enzyme in human saliva it prizes. It deals with us through a chemical
in the fruit that carries the message in image form. You should be around
when they're in the mood to make a speech. You get a pineapple-size jelly
pear, and if you eat it, you get a headache from all the—wait."

He broke off, looking to the side, into a niche between two monoliths,
where an organism roughly resembling a man-sized koala bear was
frantically gesturing, Come here, come here!

"Pay for me, will you, Bowler?" Doggo said, hurrying off to the koala. Bowler
nodded and spat on the Poolsh until his mouth was dry. Zero spat on the
Poolsh a few times, perhaps inadequately, then left to follow Doggo,
hoping he hadn't cheated anyone.

The koala was splitting open when Zero got there, bifurcating wetly
between the legs; the upper head went glassy-eyed and frozen as another
face, a pasty face of gills and suckers, showed itself in the new slit,
lowering on a prehensile neck. The gills began to ooze phlegm. Doggo
turned to Zero, muttered, "This is Hmm, he does some spying for me. But
this ain't a costume. He lives inside this other animal like clothes, but the
animal's alive. They climb inside lower animals and just sort of take them
over and make a few changes and walk around in them. Don't really hurt
them. After a while they let go and get another. Like a living fur coat.
Okay, he's got his gills cleared now."

To Zero's surprise, the thing spoke raspily in English, with aspiration from
its gills, in a voice that was like a sing-song mimicry of Doggo. "Fiskle is
talking about extending human control throughout settlement cluster.
'Humanity uber Alles,' I heard someone say, but I believe they were using
sarcasm. He also wants to restrain the females and force them to breed."

"Jesus!" Doggo shook his head in disbelief. "What an asshole!"

Zero said weakly, trying not to think about the face between the oozing lips
of the suddenly slit koala, "He didn't say anything about this stuff at the
Council meeting."

"He wouldn't. This's something he's pulling on the sly. This came down at
the meeting of his New Humans group," Doggo said distractedly. "Sort of a
lodge he started. I thought they were up to something subversive. Looks
like they are."

He took a coil of copper wire from his pocket and put it in the koala's
insensate hand, closing the koala's fingers around it. "Thank you," Hmm
said, and drew his head back into the koala. The awareness came back into
the koala's eyes, and it lumbered off into the shadows between stones.

"How come it spoke English?" Zero said.

"Oh, I let it tap into my brain once, as a gesture of friendship. That was an
act of trust, let me tell you. Come on. Let's find your friends so I can get
back to work. I got to do something about Fiskle."

They rejoined Bowler and continued down the lane. Doggo's lower lip
pushed into his upper with worry. Only ten yards on they had to slow to
work their way around the edge of a small crowd. About thirty people,
mostly human, stood around a seashell-like booth contrived of intricately
symmetrical many-hued arrangements of fine silky cloths, gauzes, and
filigrees, a kind of enormous peacock's-tail backdrop for the two creatures
who stood upright before it: Whorebugs.

If you were nearsighted and not too close, the Whorebugs looked, at first,
like human women. Blink and move closer, and you saw they were
human-sized insects. (No, not insects, Zero decided. They had only four
limbs, and they didn't have mandibles. But there was an insectlike chiton
on them, and insect exoskeletal joints in their limbs.) Their long, graceful
legs, their skirted hips, and what at least appeared to be breasts made
Zero think of an old Fleischer Brothers cartoon he'd seen in an NYU
animation class. In it a community of peoplelike insects had lived in a town
made of discarded tin cans and old shoes and the like; the "insect girls"
had been sexy mergings of cute bugs and stylized
human females—Betty Boops with six limbs and antennae. That was almost
how the Whorebugs looked, but glossier, made of hard, interlocking parts of
waxy yellow and brown, faceted insect eyes in their shiny bullet-shaped
heads.

They wore bright tangerine Whorebug-cloth skirts folded back to expose
their crotches, where, from something like a horizontal vagina, weblike
strands of silk extruded, streaming out slowly and steadily. The Whorebugs
stood with legs well apart, knees bent, hips thrust forward. Their extra-long
triple-jointed arms reached between their horn-covered thighs to weave the
cloth with hooked fingers in a motion faster than the eye could follow,
almost magically producing the cloth piling in glossy ripples between their
feet. Now and then they opened their mouths and emitted a glutinous,
brightly colored syrup, by turns candy-apple red and ice blue and sun
yellow. It dripped on honeyed strands to the raw material extruding from
between their legs and was somehow incorporated into it, organized into
marvelous patterns—patterns of candy-apple red and ice blue and sun
yellow.

They looked whorish indeed, standing there spraddle-legged. Zero might've
laughed if the sight weren't making him so queasy.

To one side a male (was it male?) Whorebug squatted cross-legged, its
body squarish, its head wrapped in a three-tiered turban. It reached over
and examined the cloth, held it up with a flourish for the crowd to see, then
folded it, cut it neatly into swatches, and chirped something that Doggo's
translator interpreted as, "The divinatory weave indicates a stage of
maudlin forbearance approaching; wail over your condition, seek atonement
with your gods, but forgo postures of aggression. Seek out environmental
harmony ... And friends, how better to seek out environmental harmony
than with a few fine yards of [untranslatable] cloth, which can be yours for
a pittance in metal or high-grade foodstuffs... "

As they watched, Zero whispered to Doggo, "What you going to do about
Fiskle?"

Doggo glanced at him sharply. "Listen—all that was confidential. I told you
because you're with Bowler and he's with the Live and Let Live faction. Like
me. But just—"

"I'm not going to say anything. I don't trust Fiskle, either."
"I don't know what we're going to do. He's got a lot of backers. If we kill
him in his sleep, they'll probably know who did it. I'm still thinking about
it."

Doggo, Bowler, and Zero moved past the crowd, down the lane. But one of
the crowd had turned to watch them, and now he detached himself to tag
along beside Zero. He was a human settler, a shaggy, gaunt, dart-eyed
little guy in cracking black leathers. His hands were black with grime, his
teeth mossy, but he seemed too alert, and he kept an eye nervously on
Doggo, who strode on obliviously up ahead. "Hey, fren'," the newcomer
piped, "you a New Fool, huh? Jus' got here, huh? I seen the ship come
down. You the new one?"

"Yeah. What you want, man?"

"What makes you think I—"

"You're the same kind of guy on Earth. What you want?"

He grinned. "I'm Johnny Kelso. If it can be got on Fool's I can get it for ya.
And there's one thing everybody wants after a while, am I right? There's a
girl shortage here, right? Huh? I can arrange something when you're ready,
my man."

"Christ. You a pimp? You sell some of that sideways Whorebug pussy or
what?"

Kelso tittered. "Better'n that." He lowered his voice and looked around.
They were passing something that looked like a metallic gorilla from the
waist down; from the waist up it became an intricacy of chromium
tentacles, barbed studs, and what appeared to be a headdress of small
glassy radar receivers and green-crystalline hand fans, all of which were
turned toward the sun.

As they passed the alien, Zero turned to Bowler and asked, "What was that
thing?"

Bowler shrugged. "Ask him. Kelso's got it all. He said so."

Kelso gestured expansively. "The man's right—I got it all! Them was what
we call sun-monkeys. Solar-powered animules. Up here you see the High
Clansmen ... now look, you want some of that, uh, relaxation we talked
about?"

"I don't wanta break any of the local laws till I know what they are," Zero
said as they walked past a group of licorice-black High Clansmen. The
Clansmen were squatting around a wooden board gambling, using the skull
of a small animal, painted with tiny symbols, as dice.

Kelso said, "Hey, don't worry about the laws. It ain't against the law—
exactly. It's—well, see..." He lowered his voice. "It's a Twist. Lives off by
himself."
"Himself?"

"Whatever," Kelso said hurriedly. "See, it's not a he exactly, 'cause he was
altered, he—it—always wanted to be ... well, it's got a pussy and a dick, a
real long one so's it can fuck itself, see? It's kinda mean, though. It's got
these big crab-claws. Snip off your head. Uh, so—this is the less-than-legal
part, see, we hadda tie it up. But its female parts work good, and—"

"Forget it."

"I got some really primo dried wheeler-brain. I'm trading for anything you
brought from Earth. Cigarettes, anything useful the Meta mighta left in your
pockets."

"No, man, I don't have anything."

"Hey." Kelso's fingers were like pliers on his arm. "Listen. I'm here, okay?
You're gonna need something. And listen: sooner or later, you're going to
want to have a serious talk with Mr. Fiskle, you know? Things are about to
change, and you're going to find yourself in a bad neighborhood all of a
sudden unless you—"

Bowler broke in. "What'd he say about Fiskle? Hey, Kelso, what did you—"

Doggo had glanced back and stopped, seeing Kelso. He turned, scowling,
pushed past Bowler, and took Kelso by the neck; he began to squeeze his
Adam's apple. "Kelso, get the hell out of here!" He shoved him backward.
Kelso staggered, coughing. "I told you, Kelso, you don't work the Neutral if
you wanta keep your ass on your body, 'cause I will chop it off and feed it
to the Phleg if you—"

Kelso was gone, slipped off into the shifting crowd.

"Sorry about that, friends," Doggo said, turning to Zero and Bowler. "There's
a lotta sleazebags like him here, tryin' to get around workin' to survive."

"That's okay, man," Zero said. "I kinda like it. He made me feel like I was
back in New York ... Damn!"

The Damn! came when Zero saw two creatures blocking the path, beyond
Doggo. Zero pointed. Doggo turned to see what he was pointing at. He
sighed and asked the strangers, "Well? What is it now?"

Two aliens, probably of two different worlds. The one on the left looked
roughly like a pink, fleshy steamer trunk with a head-size lump in one end.
In the lump was a pulsing membrane on which an image fizzed, a
half-coalesced television image somehow organically produced. The
creature moved on an underfringe of cilia. At the "front" end, under the
lump, were four pouches and slits. It respirated through one of the slits,
emitting a flute-toned ki-ips ... ki-ips ... ki-ips sound with each breath.
Which, Zero supposed, meant this was what the settlers called a Ki-ips.
At its side was a bull-size, effluvia-dripping Arthropod with a
gem-festooned snail shell big as a VW bug—and rather resembling one—
and a respirator strapped over its breathing tubes just below its gelatinous
antennae. Its mouth was a quivery, oozing triangle of slivery flesh that
spoke in complex flatulences. The translator box screwed to the immense
Arthropod's shell interpreted, "Doggo! We are in dispute and demand you
arbitrate! The Ki-ips has indicated that its booth is unsuitable, and it
wishes to move."

The Ki-ips's own translator box, screwed into the back of its video hump,
interpreted the Arthropod's remarks in terms of the Ki-ips's own language,
which consisted entirely of organically videotaped (and video-animated)
imagery: a series of images flashing across the membrane screen. After
visually interpreting the Arthropod's remarks, the Ki-ips's screen flickered
through its reply. Zero saw an animation-enhanced video image of a
villainous Arthropod leaping about in an enormous cauldron of slime,
splashing the unfortunate, innocent Ki-ips who was attempting to bask in
the sun
nearby. The gist of the imagery was transmitted from the Ki-ips's box
directly to Doggo's, and they heard, "I said nothing of the sort! The rascal
snail-thing has [untranslatable] and is certainly a boor! The truth is, this
repellent hedonist was splashing me with his stench-happy wallowings—"

"Wallowings?" the Arthropod interrupted, aghast. "The dance celebrating
the succession of elegant slimes can scarcely be described as 'wallowings'!
I insist you move this low creature—"

Zero turned away, his stomach twisting with disorientation. I'm not going
to be able to handle this, he thought. Uh-uh.

He saw a ten-by-five-foot rectangular box standing to one side, twenty feet
away. It looked like something of dull metal. As he watched, its facing side
slid away, revealing a shimmering interior in which the form of a man took
shape—a man Zero knew. Professor Arnold Samuel Garrison, who'd lectured
at New York University on the theoretical intricacies of the fourth
dimension. Zero knew Garrison as a verbose eccentric. And a clothes horse.
Garrison was wearing one of his Victorian suits, replete with French cuffs
and top hat. As his image reified, became solid, he shot his cuffs and
adjusted his string tie; his long, saturnine face flickered, then sharpened to
clarity. He smiled with polite condescension at Zero. "Well, well, well—
young Master Wirth."

Zero winced.

Garrison winked conspiratorially and hissed, "Come over here, my boy. I
want a word with you."

Zero glanced around. Doggo and Bowler were distracted, involved in talking
to the—the things. Zero shrugged and moved closer to the metal box,
stood a yard from Garrison. "The Meta got you too, Professor? What's with
the box? Some kind of prison?"

"The Meta? Prison? Don't be foolish, my boy. You jump to unwarranted
conclusions. You're living in the ivory tower of your own presumptuousness.
'Tis you who are the prisoner, sir. I—the one and only Garrison—am here by
means of teleportation. I'm just looking around. I've built a machine that
has mastered space, which you see before you. If you like, you may step
inside, and I'll take you back with me to Earth. Back to America, back to
comfort and fast living: fast food and fast cars. Back to sex and drugs and
rock and roll. Coming?"

Zero stared. "Seriously? Can you do it? Lemme get my friends—"

"Ah, young Master Wirth, I'm sorry, it cannot be. I can take only one along
with me this trip. And I must go now. You have only to step into the box.
Hurry! Are you coming, sir?"

"Fuck it!" Zero stepped into the box.

A human arm crooked itself around Zero's neck and dragged him backward
out of the box, just as the box's outer edges, their metallic hardness
instantly becoming impossibly flexible, began to move inward, closing like a
sea anemone—clamping on the spot Zero had occupied a moment before.

Zero wrenched loose from the restraining arm, turned and saw Cisco. Angie
was with him. Both of them looked dirty and haggard but intact. "You
almost got ate, Zero," Cisco said "Lucky I had an intuition about you."

"He's full of shit," Angie said. "I just happened to spot you and the
Boxed Liar between the rocks."

Behind them, Doggo, having played diplomat, dis-missed the
quarreling aliens. They moved off, one slid-ing away and one
oozing.

Zero glared at Cisco, demanding, "What the fuck are you doing?
That was Professor Garrison!"

"That," Angie said, "was an alien. It took the pro-fessor from your
mind. Used your own subconscious to cook up a lure."

Doggo, taking the scene in, nodded. "That thing would have eaten
you. Plain and simple. Your friends here saved your life."

Zero pulled irritably away and turned back to the box. It had
collapsed inward on itself and was now humping guiltily away,
moving like a metallic cater-pillar.

That close, he thought. Just that close. I could be digesting in that
thing's guts right now. Zero felt sick and humiliated. Angie had
seen his idiotic blunder. And she was smiling at his
embarrass-ment. He turned away. Cisco and Bowler were talking to
him, but he wasn't listening. The box had almost eaten him. Kelso
was warning him. Fiskle was breathing down his neck. He'd almost
been killed by the wheelers. Get away, he told himself. Hide. He
began to walk. He didn't care where—he just wanted the hell out of
the Neutral.

But first he needed to pee.

Zero ducked into a crowd of traders and turned onto a small path
between two high menhirlike rocks. He found a suitable spot,
opened his trousers, and urinated on the side of a rock. He found a
mild reassurance in the act. He was making a connection with all the
other outdoor places he'd peed in, on Earth.

He'd just finished, when he felt the pressure of someone's gaze. He looked
up and saw an eye in the rock. An eye had opened up in it, of solemn
brown, like the little eye that seems lost in the side of a whale. It was
looking at him reproachfully. He backed hastily away.

From behind came the sound of cheering and applause. Hastily tucking his
privates away, he turned and saw Doggo, Yoshio, Warren, Cisco, Angie, and
a number of other settlers he didn't know, standing in a group and
applauding, cheering, hooting, laughing.

"Nice goin', man!" Warren yelled. "You ain't really here till you've peed on
one of th' Looking Rocks! Now you're a citizen of Fool's Hope!"


"Would you have thought it was such a bad idea if one of the men had
suggested it?" Angie asked. "I know what you think of women. Their place
in the 'genetic scheme.' "

"It has nothing to do with the originator of the idea," Fiskle replied. "A bad
idea is a bad idea."

Zero, Bowler, Doggo, Warren, Yoshio, and Cisco were sitting in the shade in
front of Doggo's lean-to. At least shade was shade here. Yoshio was
absently caressing a new bolt of Whorebug cloth laid across his lap. They
were watching Angie and Fiskle, as if watching a play.

Angie and Fiskle stood facing one another. Fiskle's posture emanated
condescension; Angie's spoke outrage. She looked uncomfortable in the
lavender jumpsuit she'd worn when she was abducted. There was a
bloodstain on the inner left thigh. Tampax were not readily available on
Fool's Hope. Her hair was tangled and matted, and there were streaks of
dirt on her face. Zero thought she'd never looked lovelier.

Angle stood with her arms crossed over her chest as she said, "It makes
sense to try it. I wonder, Fiskle, if you don't think it's in your interest to—"

"I'm responsible for the safety of the Pioneers," Fiskle interrupted, rather
hastily. "If you go out on an expedition with hostile aliens, you're at risk
from both them and the wilderness. And the Murderers. That's an
unacceptable level of risk. The Pezz have consistently attacked us—"

Doggo interrupted, "The Pezz have attacked our people only when we've
wandered into what they consider to be their territory. It's a big planet. Let
them have their territory. They have strict territorial rituals of pass-through
—we can learn them. I really think that if we'd learn their little rituals,
there'd be no trouble. I think it'd be a good idea. A joint expedition with
some of the so-called 'hostile tribes.' Like the Soviet-American joint space
missions back home."

"Back on Earth, you mean," Bowler said rather severely.

Doggo nodded. It was taboo to refer to Earth as home. The Council had
ruled that all effort should be made to encourage pyschological adaptation
to Fool's Hope—to consider it home. Any other course led to madness and
despair.

"You think it's a good idea, Doggo?" Fiskle said with heavy irony. "Fine.
When you're elected to head of Council, you can so rule."

"You preside, you don't rule over us," Angie said. "And anyway the presiding
is only in Jamie's absence. Till she heals up. Let's take it to Jamie. And to a
Council vote."

"Very well," Fiskle said, looking at her stonily. The sun was setting behind
him, a bloodred sunset; its rays bled between the high stones,
blacklighting Fiskle, blotting his face. He stood looking invisibly at them,
his head spiked in red light, his face in shadow. "But we should be looking
for ways to increase our combat efficiency, for methods to undermine our
enemies, not to cozy up to them." He paused and added with melodramatic
finality, "If you succeed, you'll be defeating us all."

He turned and strode away between the boulders. Doggo squinted into the
shattered light. His face was a wash of red, a tint that made Zero think of
a car's taillight glow.

"Sunset. Best get back to the settlement before the Frost rises," Doggo
said, standing. "Let's go."

But the Frost rose in the sky while they were still a quarter-mile from the
settlement The Frost was a constellation, or many constellations
interwoven—a sinister jewelry-chest of them. It was a sickle shape of
blazing diamond-light, as brilliant white as the sky was jet black, and hard
to look at directly. It was not as bright as the sun but far brighter than
Earth's moon. And as if to sound a clarion announcing the rising of the
Frost, the creaks and hooters began singing. Animals or insects? Zero was
not quite sure, but the creaks creaked and the hooters hooted, and now
and then some other creature sounded a comical bass note like a tuba.

"This idea, that danger comes with the Frost's rise—this may be
superstition," Yoshio was saying as they trudged up the road out of the
bogs. He carried the roll of Whorebug cloth tucked under his left arm, on
the side away from Zero. It had taken Yoshio two months to get the ore
with which he'd made the tools and two weeks more to make the tools. But
the cloth he'd traded them for would earn him three months of settlement
food.
The pike Zero carried was a bar of pain rubbing into his shoulder. He shifted
it to the other side as Yoshio went on. "I think we make our own
superstitions now. We're finding this world's nature spirits. Not spirits, but
—" He gestured vaguely, unable to find the words in English.

"But what people think are nature spirits? The patterns in nature?"

"Yes. Patterns. And coincidences. Here people believe that when the Frost
rises in the sky, the Murderers come, or other bad things. Only while the
Frost is touching the horizon. After the Frost rises above the horizon, then
the moon rises. When the moon rises—and the Meta are present in the
moon—then all is safe."

"Superstitions already." Zero said gloomily. "Lord of the Flies. We're gonna
regress here. First we get supersitious and then tribal primitive. Sacrifices.
Despotic chiefs."

"Not if we progress," Bowler said. "Not if we campaign against superstition
and insist on an enlightened political structure." Said with a politico's corny
conviction, but it was welcome. It was a center of orientation.

Twenty yards ahead, a silhouette in the thickening blue, Fiskle walked
alone. "I don't trust Fiskle," Zero said, watching him. "I didn't trust him on
Earth."

Yoshio only nodded.

Zero glanced over his shoulder at Angie, walking beside Cisco, looking for
signs that they might be a couple. But she looked as independent as ever,
walking along with her hands in her pockets, looking moodily up at the sky.
Zero told himself, Go on, do it. Drop back and talk to her.

But he stayed where he was, thinking how strange it was. There should be
less restraining him here, light-years from Earth's social conventions. Here,
where survival was in doubt from minute to minute. But it was as if he were
afraid of committing some xenosocial solecism. Social conventions were
avenues as much as barriers. He didn't know how to approach her on Fool's
Hope. There were rules none of them knew yet.

Shit, he told himself. Don't be such a wirnp, a wuss, a faint-hearted
conformist.

But he stayed where he was.

Doggo and Warren brought up the rear. Both of them looked into the bogs.
Doggo looked wary and hefted his pike. It was hard to judge Warren's
expression with half his face gone. But he seemed almost to be challenging
the bogs with his macabre grin. Like, Go on, send your worst out after us.

"The Murderers—they're out in the bogs?" Zero asked.

"Yes, and other places," Bowler said. "But they're just as likely to come at
you in the daytime."
"Some reassurance. What are they, exactly?"

"Aliens. Only one each, from particularly vicious races. The Meta drop them
among us just to, well, to keep us on our toes, I guess. Unless the Meta
are sadistic.'' His voice dropped to a whisper. "One of the Murderers did for
Warren's face. And killed his brother."

"The Hungry Punkin' is supposed to be the worst," Cisco said, moving up
beside Zero, "the hardest to kill. I think all the Murderers are one race: a
race of demons that take on different ugly shapes. Like, on whims. You
know? Okay, you guys go ahead and sneer—but the thing you haven't got
yet about this place is, it's not another planet. It's a spiritual plane
inhabited by spirits trying to teach us! The Meta are highly evolved spirits,
see, and higher science is always a form of what we call supernatural."

He was cut off by groans and ridicule from Angie and Bowler. Zero spoke
apologetically to Yoshio. "What you have to understand about Cisco,
Yoshio, is that he's from Los Angeles. The guy carried crystal pendants
around to decide his itinerary."

Yoshio smiled. The smile was a mothlike flutter in the near-darkness. "But
he's accidentally right about something: that it is a mistake to bring
anything to Fool's Hope with us. Anything of what we thought on Earth. To
understand this world, we'll have to clear our brains, empty our minds."

"My mind's empty, man. 'Cause I haven't got a clue."

Between the bogs and the settlement, the road curved through a copse of
trees. At least, Zero assumed they were trees. They looked like giant coral.
Their upper branches reached gray against the sky, looking stiff, brittle.

Zero and his friends were almost to the edge of the copse. It gave off a
smell of ginger and sour wine. The creaks and hoots and the tuba groan
grew louder as the little group of humans approached the woods. Zero
supposed that the creatures making the sounds were like crickets and small
birds.

As he passed near the trees—or animal growths—edging the road, Zero
realized that the tips of the twigs were hollow, like tiny horns, and the
sounds, the hoots, creaks, and groans, were coming from the twig-tips
themselves. He reached up and touched one overhanging the road. It was
hard as stone, unyielding. He turned to Yoshio. "There're animals in the
twigs? I mean, they look hollow."

"No. The land-coral itself is singing. We don't know why."

The singing of the land-coral was loud here, almost drowning Yoshio's
voice.

"Oh, God," Doggo said, trotting up ahead of them. He skidded to a stop and
stared at something. Standing rigidly in the road, he was frosted in
starlight. The others sensed his alarm and stopped where they were. He
pointed. "The Current. The altering vector."

The land-coral's singing abruptly stopped, as if someone had switched off a
tape deck. The night was silent. And the gingery, sickening smell was gone,
replace by the burning smell of a dentist's drill at work—the odor of metal
and bone friction, of burning teeth.

At the curve up ahead, Fiskle was passing out of sight behind a screen of
the coral growths. And something was there.

There was no wind, none at all. But Zero felt a shift in the air around him.
Something crackled on his arms. He looked down at himself, and his gut
froze. A fringe of violet fire was playing along his forearms. He felt his hair
stand on end, his scalp contract. There was a palpable electrical charge in
the air. Zero was afraid to move. "The Current. Has it got us?" he asked.
His voice sounded muffled. His lips twitched over the words.

"No," Yoshio said. "We feel the outside of it, maybe displaced charged
particles. But Fiskle—he is in it. Look, now—you can see it." He pointed,
and miniature sunset lightnings played along his arm.

Zero saw it in the stars first; it seemed to swirl them, as in Van Gogh's
Starry Night. And then he saw it in the coral trees. He couldn't help but
think of them as trees. Like heat-wave distortions—but this movement of
the trees was no mirage.

The farther trees were really, truly moving in the windless night. The
nearest growths were motionless but furred in violent cracklings. St. Elmo's
fire foot-lights for the dance going on behind them. There the land-coral
undulated with a flexibility that seemed im-possible for anything so large
and so formerly stiff-looking. Low, slow-motion silver clouds, faintly
lumi-nous, formed in a roiling snake shape over the Current, marking its
passage through the land.

Zero wanted to go to Angie, to protect her—as much as she would
have resented the gesture—but he could not. He couldn't move. He was
nailed to the spot, rigid and shaking, first by terror and then by an
undefinable awe. He had sense that a god-sized power was pass-ing before
him with majestic casualness, taking its titanic ease, sliding effortlessly on
the very fabric of reality, fill-ing Zero's head with a quasar output of
scintillant white noise.

They all knew when it fell over Fiskle. They felt its impact on him in a kind
of psychic backwash, felt Fiskle's ideas, his clearly defined worldview, wash
over them like flotsam on an electric tide. Zero has a brief but lucid mental
image of high structures of polychromatic crystal floating by like unnaturally
symmetrical ice floes. Fiskle's assumptions and almost vindictively
exacting theories of social planning concretized as iridescent clusters
of spines and tetrahedrons; as if, had this been Earth, some great flood
had dislodged the architectural monstrosities built in the 1970s, the
severely geometrical churches and art museums, and swept them by. And
then they moved on, the massive geometries floated off into the darkness.
Zero heard, perhaps with his ears, Fiskle's hysterical screaming:
"Externalization blueprinting metastasis of stinking internal organs!
Stinking internal organs! Elements of—of glue-
ridden hormonal para—para—paralysis synthesized with cataleptic
disorganic elegance! Disorganic elegance!'' He screamed it so loud you
could hear his larynx shredding. The words reeked with his horror. "Fatal
assumptions of arbitrarily imposed ontological skeletons sucked of marrow!
I said ontological skeletons! I said sucked of marrow, damn you!"

And then a guillotine silence.

Creaks and hoots, again, the tuba groan, as if nothing had happened. The
trees were stiff, immobile; the gingery wine smell was nauseatingly strong
now.

The great Current had gone, narrowly missing the settlement and passing
into the night on its arcane tracks, like an invisible train carrying a freight
of inchoate possibilities.

"That was heavy," Cisco said predictably. He hugged himself. His dark eyes
were dilated. His first encounter with nonimaginary psychic phenomena had
left him more shaken than the others.

Twenty yards up ahead, Doggo was bending over the two men lying in the
road. Yes, two. Fiskle—and the other, Doggo told them with a shout, was
Kelso. "What was Kelso doing out in the coral woods?" Bowler wondered
aloud.

"His little whorehouse is out there," Zero said.

"What happened to his head?" Angie asked, her voice carefully controlled.
She was scared.

Zero took a few steps closer to Fiskle and Kelso. And then a few steps
more. The bodies were lying head to head at forty-five-degree angles from
one another, like "casualties of airport terrorism" in a blurred newspaper
photo.

Zero looked closer at Kelso and saw what Angie meant. Kelso's head was
separated from his body. By only a few inches, but clearly separated, and it
oozed a puddle that reflected the starlight. Kelso's hands were gripping his
head, clapped over the ears. He lay utterly motionless.

But Fiskle was moving. He was getting to his knees, and softly, with a
hideous knowingness, he was laughing.


                                      *3*

"He came running at me out of the woods, his face as white as a sheet, his
hair standing on end. Eyes like a lunatic." Fiskle paused in his dreamy recap
and smiled absently to himself, as if savoring the memory. "The muscles of
his face were jumping around as if he had no control over them at all. There
was drool hanging from his mouth. He was giggling. I said, 'Kelso, what the
hell—' And then he fell on his knees before me and said, 'Master, I give you
my essence.' "

There were snorts of disbelief around the Council room. Someone said,
"Come onnnnn!"

Zero was sitting across from Fiskle in the cool, shadowy Council room, his
back against the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest. He said, "Don't
sound like the way he talked."

"That is what he said. He was in the Current. Anyone might have been
speaking through him."

"What the 'ell is 'e talking about?" Dennis demanded, scowling. When he
scowled, his dwarfish face looked like a gnome's, Zero thought.

"What happened after that?" Doggo asked in a cop's flat voice. He sat on
one side of Zero, next to Warren. Bowler and Angie and Cisco sat on the
other side. They were there as witnesses.

Fiskle rubbed his chin and turned to gaze at the window. His smile flickered
as he said, "Then Kelso fell to his knees and began to slash at his own
neck with a knife. Blood everywhere. I was too amazed to interfere. And I
was afraid of him. Once he got the job started, he used the strength of his
arms and legs—his feet tucked up under his chin"—he paused and looked
around the room, as if cueing everyone to disbelieve him—"to tear his own
head from his neck."

There were five full seconds of silence before the jeering, the snickers
began. Not everyone laughed. Warren and Cisco looked like small children
at their first horror movie.

Indifferent to them, Fiskle went on. "He achieved his own decapitation with
a single superhuman wrenching. Horrible but impressive. The spine snapped
away all at once under the exertions of the arms, and of course, the signal
from the brain being cut off, the body went limp." He shrugged.

"It isn't possible," Doggo said. "Halfway through the process he'd collapse
from cutting his jugular vein, or at least from damage to his spinal cord.
And he didn't look that strong. I don't know anybody who is."

"He was insane beyond the insanity we know," Fiskle replied coolly. "He had
not only a madman's strength, he had the Current's strength."

"You talk as if you're an insider," Doggo said, "where the Current's
concerned."

Fiskle said softly, "I have made a quiet study of the phenomenon in my
spare time."

Zero found himself staring at Fiskle. He looked different, in a way Zero
couldn't define. Glossier, and ... Zero wasn't sure.
"Kelso had his hands on his head all right," Warren said. "And there wasn't
no blood on Fiskle."

Doggo nodded. "Even a guy as ... even a clean-freak like Fiskle would've
got some blood on him if he'd cut off Kelso's head. He didn't really have
time, either, to decapitate Kelso. He wasn't out of our sight long." He
pursed his lips. "This is Fool's Hope, this isn't Earth. Maybe what Fiskle said
happened could've happened here. Weird as it sounds, I believe him. So I
motion we accept the story and lay the matter of Kelso's death to rest with
the judgment: accidental."

Zero looked at Doggo with surprise. He'd had the definite impression that
Doggo and Fiskle were on opposite sides of the fence, that Doggo regarded
Fiskle as a clear and present danger to the human settlement.

"The New Humans," Bowler explained, whispering, as the ayes went around
the room. Everyone agreed with Doggo because they wanted to put this
behind them, fast. "Fiskle's new lodge. Too many of them. Doggo doesn't
want a confrontation with them yet—they're too strong. They got Twists
with them."

"Now," Fiskle said, immediately trying to reassert control, "there's this
deplorable matter of the interspecies expedition. I urge that we don't
embarrass ourselves with any more discussion of it than necessary. I
motion that we veto it and go on to—"

"I think it's a bloody good idea!" Dennis interrupted. "Jamie thinks so, too.
She tol' me this mornin'. You can send someone from the Council to get it
from 'er straight on right now, if you want. She's for it."

"The Meta are against it!" Fiskle said sharply between clenched teeth. He
looked around, making eye contact, and then stood up. He raised a hand to
quiet Doggo's predictable question. "How do I know what the Meta want?
Common sense. They set us up here to be in competition with the aliens.
That is obvious. If we defy them—and we know they're always watching
us—things could get ugly. They might do anything—and I mean anything."

There were murmurs of agreement, noises of skepticism. "Sit down, Fiskle,
or I'll have to stand, and then everyone will," Doggo said.

His reluctance naked on his face, Fiskle sat.

Doggo went on. "We have no damned idea what the Meta really want. Just
as many people are sure they put us here to find a way to get along with
aliens."

"Or either one," Zero put in. "To give us a choice and see what we do."

Doggo nodded. "We just don't know. But supposing you're right, Fiskle.
We've got to ask, do we really want to be their sniveling punks?"

The debate went on; Zero followed only the rough outline of it. There was
an element that didn't want to take a chance on angering the Meta. But
there was also a general resentment of the Meta. If Fiskle was right, this
was a chance to defy them, to fling the theft of their own lives into the
Meta's face.

Fear of the Meta was strong. The vote came out half for, half against.
Deadlock.

"I vote aye, in favor of the expedition," someone said. Jamie stood in the
doorway, leaning on Trish. She was bone pale; her face sagged, and she
was breathing through her open mouth. Even with someone to lean on, she
looked as if will power alone kept her upright.

"That breaks the deadlock," Doggo said. "The expedition is on."

Jamie looked at Fiskle and managed a weary smile. "You think I don't know
what happened out there? It's not over, Fiskle."

Zero realized that by out there she meant on the road, when the wheelers
had attacked them. She'd said Fiskle's crowd had somehow prompted the
attack.

Jamie turned and, Trish's arm around her, hobbled away. As if her going
uncorked a jug of bees, the room buzzed with talk.

After the meeting, as they went to morning meal, Zero moved up beside
Doggo and said, "You believe Fiskle's story about Kelso? Bowler says
everyone's just trying to avoid a confrontation with him."

Doggo glanced around to be sure Fiskle wasn't near, then told him, "It
wasn't just being careful about confrontations. It was that I believed him. I
don't know why, but I knew he was telling the truth. I guess what he
described sounded like the sort of pattern that comes down when the
Current happens to people. And it didn't sound like something Fiskle would
make up. But don't you worry, man. We'll take care of Fiskle. I'm on that
one."


Zero had a lot of choices. One was to make crude-cloth out of scumballs.
You picked the scumball pods sort of like picking cotton except the
scumballs stuck to your hands, and if they dried, it hurt to pull them
off—and then you dried them, pulverized them, and wound them into a
loom. You had to learn how to use the loom, of course.

You don't want to do that? You can work with oruhs. Herding, breeding,
shoveling their droppings, gathering ground mites for their meals.
Slaughtering them. Scraping their hides.

Not appealing? Try crustacean harvesting—all day in the sun, bending over,
back aching. Fighting off the jumpskeeters.

Or there's sewage tender, which includes water pump maintenance. Every
morning you got to unclog the sewage ditch.
No? Hard to please. Okay: tater fields. Or you can try to be Army, but
there's a waiting list. Cleaners of all kinds—basically means janitor. Or
woodgathering, though gatherers tend to get killed in the Out There.

Something. You got to show a designated Council monitor what you did
during the day to earn food, and usually that means you work for someone,
and the job boss reports you were okay ... You want to stay in the
settlement, you better pick something.

"Me and Cisco've been working with scumballs, making cloth," Angie said.
"You can do that. You put some oil on your hands first so the stuff doesn't
stick so much, and you just get used to the ... to all this fingerwork. I
wanta go into law like Doggo, eventually, but there's only supposed to be
two settlement cops, and of course Fiskle's the other one. If you don't
count Army. The Army assholes are so fucking lazy."

They were squatting in the shade of a cart (the one the mad boy had
crouched under, Zero thought, wondering if his being there now was an
omen), across from the gates to the human settlement. Angie was wearing
a pair of crude-cloth shorts stitched up the sides with leather strings. He
could see the edge of her Whorebug-silk underwear, where her shorts rode
up on her tanned legs. One of the guardsmen in the Army had given her the
Whorebug cloth the night before. She had "a heap of stuff like that in my
dorm" from other suitors. She insisted she hadn't given out anything but
verbal thank-yous for the gifts yet, but Zero wasn't so sure. The thought
made him cringe inside and grind his teeth.

He could smell Angie's skin, her sweat, and a hint of vaginal secretions. Her
smell combined with the scent of the breeze off the plain and became—for
Zero anyway—an intriguing, exotic perfume. But they were just two working
people resting; polite and friendly but businesslike. She'd shown him the
job centers, the settlements' various social organs, its sheds for drudgery.
She had been assigned to it. It was her job today, was all. If there were
warmth in it, it was because they'd known each other on Earth. "What
happened to that naked kid who was out here yesterday?" Zero asked.

"A bunch of Army caught him, trussed him up, carried him into the country,
and let him go. They said they untied his hands but not his legs, so he'd be
occupied with all the knots and couldn't follow them back. Cute. He's
probably dead. The law here..." She shrugged.

"They don't hassle things out long. They find Fiskle with a decapitated body
and they say, 'Aw, forget it.' "

"There's too much that happens here. They can't investigate much of it. And
Kelso was a greaseball. A thief, a pimp. If they know somebody killed
someone else, though, they come down on them. Well, first they appoint a
defense attorney and a prosecuting attorney, and then the Council tries the
case itself. People convicted of murder are expelled from the settlement,
which usually means they get killed themselves. Unless we decide that the
murder was a one-time-only act of temporary insanity. There's a lot of
temporary insanity here. They understand that. If that happens, the killer is
restricted and watched a lot, assigned extra work. They get another chance.
But if they go completely loco
or even act that way a little too often, they get expulsion.''

"There's already some wicked Social Darwinism here without Fiskle making
it worse."

"That's what Bowler says. He talks about rehab programs." She shook her
head. "It's hard enough for us to take care of people who've got it
reasonably together." She looked at him. "You make up your mind what job
you want?"

"Uh ... I don't like any of them. Don't they have any clerical jobs?"

She grinned. "Council members are also scribes, they keep records with
squirmer juice and dandruff-willow bark. That's it. They all work drudge
jobs, too."

"I'll probably, um, work in crude-cloth. Then at least I can hang out around
you." He said it as matter-of-factly as he could and tried not to look for her
reaction.

"Okay, well, we better get back and tell 'em what you want to do—"

"Actually, uh," he broke in, stalling, "maybe you could tell me about the
Progress Stations. Bowler only told me a little. The Stations are another
possibility, right?"

She shrugged. "It's like this. There are thirty-one races we know about
here, besides the occasional alien Murderer. Each is from a different world.
Each is given its own settlement area. The settlements run across the
continent in—supposedly—an east-west belt. But anything like map-making
and geography is in the infant stage around here. Generally, though, we
know the Progress Stations are to the north. The McMahons move them
around for the Meta, and when someone's found one and gotten into it,
taken whatever was useful in it, the McMahons take it away and put it
down somewhere else—somewhere real dangerous—and you got to find it,
and—what's tougher—you got to get into it. A new one's been reported up
near the wastes, in the Hungry Punkin' swamp."

"What's in 'em?"

"Different things. When you get to one, the McMahons are waiting, and
they hand out things that help your settlement progress, you know,
technologically. So far they've given the human settlements a form of
gunpowder, some medicines, and a method for synthesizing a kind of
rubber compound. Jamie and the others are still learning to use it.

"Only a few of the people who were brought here have any mechanical or
scientific skills. The Meta stacked it that way, I guess. We can build some
stuff on our own, but even something as simple as a generator—how do
you make the components? Copper pure enough, machined metal parts.
There's no Radio Shack on Fool's Hope. You got to make it all from scratch,
from the local stock of ore. But that's taking a long time, a lot of trial and
error. We haven't got a lot of time. Because if you don't progress fast
enough, the other races overtake you, get the advantage—and they wipe
you out. This is what we hear happens, anyway—and we found some empty
settlements with some crude stuff
half built and a lot of bones—well, they were shells in that case—and it
looked as if they'd been ambushed by another low technology."

"But if we could get the races to stop competing—"

"We're working on it. Some are more cooperative than others. Either way,
the Progress Stations are important to us."

"So I take it there's a big reward when you come back from a Progress
Station with the goods."

"You get real light duty for a year. You get some Whorebug cloth, wire,
trading stuff. Hey—I see that light in your eye, Zero. Better think twice.
Most people who go out to look for Progress Stations don't make it back.
They die. Or if they're lucky, they end up like Warren."

"Oh."

"Yeah, oh. But if you do get to a Progress Station, you got a better chance
of being elected to Council. A lot of good comes from it. So I'm still
thinking about the interspecies expedition idea. But look at the
shadows—it's almost noon." She stood up and stretched. He stole a look at
her bare legs. "Come on. Let's report to scumballing."


It was just a shed; the heavy, still air in it was held in place by the sour
Elmer's Glue smell of scumballs. There were two long, irregular wooden
tables, and baskets of scumball pods against the synthetic wall to the
right. Thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk. Like that, over and
over again with the wooden mallet. Zero would spread out the heap of
pasty yellow-white scumball pods, each one marshmallow-size, and remove
the scumball pod-cup, toss it aside, squash a few scumballs together,
compress them, then pound them thunk thunk thunk thunk, four times or so,
hit them hard with the hammer to flatten them out some, then again a
whole lot of times but fast and more lightly, all over, to make them into a
kind of matzo wafer. You put that wafer, after you get it flattened enough,
onto the stack in the corner of the table, then you grab another pile of
pods.

You stop every couple of wafers to pry scumball gunk from your mallet,
which gets too spongy with the stuff.

Zero's hands and arms ached, were beginning to stiffen up. Blisters were
turning from red to white on his fingers. "You get used to it," Angie had
said. She was at the far side of the room from him, pounding. Four other
people he didn't know were between them.

How long had it been? They didn't have any clocks except the dripper—a
couple of jars the Pezz had made. The upper one dripped into the lower one
through a tiny hole, very slowly. When enough had dripped through,
allowing for evaporation, Boris Chubchek, their monitor boss, would tell
them it was quitting time.

There were risks in everything here. He could work his ass off and still get
killed. By aliens—or through settlement politics. There were rumors of some
kind of coup fermenting.

The whole planet was high risk. So why not go for a Progress Station?

Because of sudden death. Because of getting lost and sick and mutilated
and enslaved. A gleam of polished silver.

Zero looked up and saw the small silver sphere of one of the Meta's
watchers floating near the ceiling of the shed, its little red dot turned
toward him. The others glanced at it and ignored it. Zero reached down,
gathered together a clump of scumball paste, and flipped it underhand at
the sphere. It dodged at the last split-second, with no jerkiness, no
indication of agitation. It continued to watch.

Chubchek said, "Zero, don't waste the pod stuff."

Zero sighed and picked up the mallet. Thunk thunk thunk thunk.


Evening, Swanee thought. Evening in the coral gulley. One part of the world
was going to sleep, another was waking up, like on Earth. But there were
different players on this stage.

Swanee was a wide-shouldered man with narrow hips and thick hands that,
when he wasn't using them, hung like dead things on his arms. He had a
quiet body reflecting an inner stillness. Not the stillness of a peaceful
man—the stillness of a trapped man, conserving his energy. He was black,
with nappy hair that was going to Afro now; cocoa-colored skin; brown eyes
so light they were almost yellow. He wore a fading Memphis State
University T-shirt and surprisingly intact jeans. He'd only been on the
planet a month.

Swanee was walking along a hollow in the forest of land-coral. The coral
was just beginning to wake up and sing to the evening murk, humming here
and there, tentatively. He was down in a sort of gulley, his head a few feet
below the edge. The evening had made the ground a soft, faintly strobing
purple. On Earth wild places, unchanged by man, somehow arranged
themselves into their own garden designs; the gardener of struggle and
competition and evolution, he'd always supposed, had given some
wilderness places their look of having been put together like a Japanese
garden. The natural beauty of wilderness could be seen on Fool's Hope if
you were open to it. Only, he wasn't at all sure he wanted to be open to it.

A con trail of light zagged across his path. It was the trace of a local
insect, the streakfly, that outdid the Terran firefly: it left a sulfur-yellow
trail in the air behind it, a luminous stroke that lingered for a few minutes.
There: another streak, zigging, crossing the first like an X. He walked
through them, careful not to breathe, not knowing what the luminous gas
might be made of.

Knots of mossy stuff grew from the walls of the gulley in disturbingly
symmetrical patterns; tufts were arranged in diamond shapes with respect
to one another. Not exact enough, probably, to have been artificial, but
almost.

Another streak of light broke the symmetry. And then luminous red
splashed the air as a Washcloth caught one of the streakflies and
enveloped it in midflight, crushed it, absorbing some of the energy burst.
The Washcloths were a membranous, patch-shaped creature with
terry-clothlike cilia on one side, drifting through the air light as autumn
leaves, then angling like Manta Rays after prey ... Between the
diamond-alignment of moss tufts, dirty-white plants—or perhaps they were
animals—shaped like ten-fingered hands would suddenly open, creating a
suction that pulled
small flying things toward them, with a repeating shhh-fwoop sound that
seemed to deliberately punctuate the
swelling song of the coral trees.

He wasn't at all sure he wanted to know the patterns sewn into this world.

He walked on. Now the coral trees grew closer to the edge of the gulley,
crowding over him. The coral branches cast a crooked mesh of shadows over
the ground; he could feel the shadow net closing over him, tugging him
along.

It was damp down here, smelled of minerals and wet living things; the
usual smells of the alien world were masked by the damp, so that when he
closed his eyes and inhaled, for just a moment it was possible to believe
he was on Earth. He imagined it was the woods behind his Uncle Ted's
place in Tennessee, walking along the path with his brother after Sunday
school, smelling the pines, kicking the ferns to make the dew flash through
the air. As they neared Uncle Ted's, they smelled the barbecue, the deep,
smoky, spicy smell of it, heard his uncle's booming laughter, imagined his
aunt's cakes. Thinking that after dinner, if Dad wanted to stay late enough,
they could watch Have Gun Will Travel on television. Man, that was heaven.
That was—

But then a flying pig asked him his name, and he knew he was on Fool's
Hope.

No, the pig-thing wasn't flying, he saw. It was hanging by something long
and white and sticky that came out of its ass, as if it were a spider on a
web-strand. Hanging from a tree branch. But it was a long way from being a
spider. It was like a human dwarf crossed with a pig. All pink and bristly,
about the size of a seven-year-old kid. Rubbery squashed-looking face,
stubby little fingers. Hanging upside down in front of him like that was real
comfortable for it as it looked at him and asked him his name again ...
while it lowered itself another eight inches, its voice an effeminate grunt.

"My name's Swanee," he told it. "Am I in the right place?" Stupid question.
"Yuh. Yuh inna right place, thweets. C'mon thish way." Its glutinous
hanging strand parted, and it fell to the ground, landing on its back feet in
the soft blue soil, belching with the impact. It did something with a stub of
an arm that might have been a "follow me" gesture and waddled off to a
shadow under an overhang in the dirt walls of the gulley.

What if it isn't a Twist? Swanee thought. What if it's an alien?
But drawn by an invisible strand of his own, he followed the dwarf-pig to
the hole, a sort of cave-mouth blocked up with something.

He squinted into the dimness, looking closer, trying to see what the stuff
blocking the hole was. It was like soft cloth, shiny, sort of furry. Like
velvet. All rumpled but in a pretty way—styled rumpling, like the velvet the
pin-up girls in the old calenders were stretched out on. But it looked as if it
had more substance than cloth. As if it were flesh underneath. He reached
out, touched it, felt it contract a little, reacting to his touch. The dwarf-pig
was looking at him, chuckling. "Velvet. Ith nith, huh?" It stroked the
rumpled blue-black velvet with its truncated fingers, and the stuff
contracted some more, then blossomed out, as if erupting from the hole.
Gushing without wetness.

Swanee stepped back, thinking it was an alien, something he was going to
be fed to.

But it was opening to provide access to a dwelling; it was dilating, flowing
out to slide over some of the dirt around the entrance, exhaling a scent of
gardenias and the ocean. And giving out a glimmer of light.

"C'mon in. Fithskle—he'th inthide," the dwarf-pig said, waddling into the
hole.

Swanee had to bend over to enter. And he had to force himself, because
the fear was on him; sweat was beading on his face and neck, running
down his back. Inside, moving hunched over, it was like walking on a soft,
thick carpet, through a living tunnel. The light slithered and blotched along
the folds and rumples of the velvet walls. Looking into the back was like
looking into a hole in thick clouds where you see the light coming through.
The light was strong at the back of the tunnel, where the walls narrowed,
but somehow it wasn't a piercing light, it didn't hurt his eyes. It washed
over things without lighting them up too much. That was good: Swanee
didn't want to get a better look at the
three sitting with Fiskle, or at the thing at Fiskle's feet.

He knew what the thing at Fiskle's feet was, though. It was Kelso's head.
Supposed to have been buried.

Fiskle stood out for his cleanliness—almost everyone else was a little
grimy. And he had a certain intensity, a sense of authoritative
preoccupation about him. Now his expression was simply supercilious, a
good-natured contempt for everything. His eyes seemed glassy. His
fingers—was it Swanee's imagination?—seemed unusually long, their
movement spidery.

I shouldn't have come here. But the one they called Father had made
Swanee promise. Made him promise deep inside himself. You didn't argue
with Father much.

Father wasn't there, Swanee saw. Instead, sitting beside Fiskle, were three
Twists. The dwarf-pig had gone back outside.
The Twists were part of a composition. That was the way it looked to
Swanee. Swanee had painted murals in Nashville and sold some paintings
to collectors, and he knew composition. It was as if the Twists were almost
part of the walls, or worked into them, like the shapes of animals worked
into the patterns of wallpaper; more like a Henri Rousseau.

The big one on the left was made of glassy beetle-wing skin, his
changeless face like a knight's helmet; the body was made out of hard
shell-like sections of random scrapyard things, all tucks and cross-hatchings
and vents and pipes, a tumble of hard stuff arranged like a collage to shape
a man. But when he moved, shifting position, you could see all the parts
working together, pipes over pipes like air compression tubes; everything
went click-click into place. Organic, though, not robotic.

On the right was a white-faced little kid with delicate, semitransparent
fingers, soft pads at the ends, and suckers under them; attenuated face,
round black eyes without any white to them, lids coming from beneath. A
newt, Swanee thought. And then a hunched, skinny, sunburned dude—too
tall for the cave, sway-backed, looking human except for not having legs:
his legs had grown together, gone prehensile. And Fiskle, with the
snake-legs and the newt on his left, the shiny-parts guy on his right,
looked as if he were holding court, sitting on a hump in the velvet, looking
nearly human.

The walls shifted when you didn't look right at them; they ran with faces,
which pinched kaleidoscopically into one another. The light came from some
source behind Fiskle, something hidden. A dirty secret made of luminosity.

Fiskle reached down and tousled the matted hair of the staring, severed
head at his feet and said, "You look scared. Nothing to be afraid of. We're
just plain folks. This"—he indicated the snake-legs—"is Purdy. My little
newt here is Smythe-Wickerson." He tilted his head toward the shiny-part
guy. "This now calls itself Pacific Bell. We're not aliens, Swanee."

He had to swallow hard to get his voice back. "I know you're not." He did.
He sensed they were human, or had started that way; that they were
Earthborn. Even the one made of all those hard pieces of this and that.

"My friends here have simply adjusted a little. The Current made them more
themselves than they were before. Brought out hidden qualities in them.
They're human. Everything they've become is part of the human world."

"Why'd you make me come here?"

"I didn't force you."

"You did. I didn't know it till I was in here, but Father"—his voice rose an
octave—"he did something to make me come here. It's a kind of
kidnapping. It's fucked up."

Purdy coiled himself a little tighter, as if in warning. Smythe-Wickerson
said, "Phhht," softly. Pacific Bell clattered inwardly.
But Fiskle ignored Swanee's outburst of resentment. He said thoughtfully,
"You don't like aliens. When you see one, you scream."

Swanee shifted his position. He was not comfortable, bent over in here. He
grimaced. "Not always. I don't scream when I see just any of them. But I
feel like it. Some I can pretend are just ... are something else. Like this
tunnel thing—it's just some sort of big animal."

"Yes. Tamed."

"But the aliens that think and move around, they scare me because you
can't imagine what they might decide to do. So I don't normally go outside
the settlement much. That's how I know he did something to my mind. To
make me come here."

"You seemed ready, Swanee."

Swanee felt a deep, deep chill radiate out into his soft parts from the
marrow of his bones. "I don't want to be ready."

"We're going to need your support. There are people planning an interracial
expedition. Rapproachement with the aliens would be a disastrous
weakening for us. We must train ourselves to the maximum survivability,
which means optimizing our competitive edge. Don't you agree? You really
must back us up on this."

"Uh..." Swanee was staring at the severed head. A long, utterly dry, rubbery
pink tongue was extruding from its mouth, oozing slowly out to push at the
soft floor. It moved with its tongue, like a clam's single leg, turning itself
with agonizing slowness so it could look at Swanee with its unblinking,
pasty eyes. Its jaws worked restlessly. Much of the face had been peeled
away, exposing bone. Fiskle reached down and absently plucked at the
thing's skin, pulling away another strip—

Swanee gagged and turned away. He started back toward the entrance,
thinking that at any moment the tunnel would contract and begin to
swallow him toward the things in the back.

"You'll need a certain fundamental shift in attitude and aptitude to survive
here," Fiskle called after him. "But in essence we'll always be human,
Swanee!"

His back aching from hunching down, Swanee pushed out of the entrance
and was surprised that he hadn't been held back.

But there was a wind out there now, and a strong smell like teeth burning
under a dentist's drill, and a tension in the air. He felt his hair stand up on
his head and limbs, saw violet fires flickering over his hands and purple
auroras of light outlining the coral trees against the sky. The crooked
branches seemed to flex and bend in the eddying Current, their stiffness
becoming comically rubbery, swaying in a macabre dance of sarcastic
stateliness. He felt the great brooding presence of the Current bearing
down on him, nailing him rigid to the ground so that he was a lightning-rod
medium between atmosphere and the planet's soil, electrocuting him with
the energies of intracellular transformation.

A great and thunderous sound exactly resembling a single high-amped
electric guitar chord boomed keerang! and vibrated through Swanee like a
living whiplash, oscillating from broad to narrow wavelengths, concentrating
into more intense energies, so that sparks leaped blue-white between his
teeth and fulminated from his eyes.

Oh lord, no.


Zero and Angie walked down the slope from the scumball shed, through
warm semidarkness, down narrow streets, and between high walls. On their
left was the outer wall of the settlement. Beyond it was wilderness.

There were irregular triangles of light every so often from the oil lamps in
windows to the right. The yellow light wavered just a little. Zero could
smell the oil burning—it was gathered from a pool of petroleum leakage in
the bogs, a place like the La Brea Tar Pits. The smell was a stroke of
comfort through him, a reminder of Earth.

Zero and Angie walked stiffly, muscles aching, down streets made of the
same stuff as the buildings in the settlement; their footsteps clacked and
rang off the walls.

Something small corkscrewed through the air to Zero's left and then
abruptly changed course and zipped itself onto his forearm, began to screw
itself in.

"Shit!" he shouted, and slapped at it. The corkscrew dug in deeper—and it
hurt.

Angie said, "Hold still." She grabbed his arm just below the elbow and
squeezed it hard, then used the other hand to pump the pressurized blood
hard up the arm to the thing. The sudden pressure popped it out of its
burrow. It unscrewed from him and whipped away into the air, though more
sluggishly now.

"Ow! Shit!" He took a deep breath as the pain ebbed, and he watched the
blood ooze; it looked black in the twilight. The laceration was small. He
said, "Thanks ... I find it hard to believe the Meta inoculated us against
every virus and microorganism on this planet. A parasite might be carrying
anything."

"Maybe. Some people do get infections. So far there isn't much heavy
disease, like Fool's Hope malaria. But the Meta could've blown it, of course.
There could be some microorganisms they haven't got covered. This is just
an experiment, after all. Experiments will go wrong."

They had begun to walk again. They could hear voices from up ahead,
around the curve in the narrow street, but they were too muffled to make
out. Zero said, "You think it's all an experiment?"
"What else?"

He chuckled. "Everybody's got a theory."

"Okay. You think it's stupid."

He looked at her. Insecurity? Most of the time she seemed so confident.
Maybe it marked a change in their relationship. He hoped so. "No. It's not
stupid. Not at all. I meant—"

He broke off as they turned the corner and came to a small courtyard,
where the slope bottomed out and the street widened. A group of people
were standing around a big man who had set a large oil lamp on the bed of
a cart. The darkness had thickened; it pooled indigo around the yellow
circle of light. The big man was backlit; the others, facing him, caught the
light on their faces.

"Jesus," Angie breathed, as they got closer to the group. "Look at the size
of that guy."

Zero saw a man at least ten feet tall. Maybe more. "An alien?"

"I don't think so. The way he's dressed..."

"Yeah." The giant was wearing baggy pressed slacks, wing-tip shoes, white
shirt, dark tie, dark jacket. The tie was loosened. The whole thing looked
about twenty years archaic, for Earth.

"Fred MacMurray," Zero said, thinking aloud. "My Three Sons. It's not Fred
MacMurray but the general look is the same ... except he's so huge. The
clothes are like MacMurray's or Robert Young's in..." His voice trailed off as
they walked up to the group, and he felt a sensation in his chest. A faint
vibration in his sternum ... and spreading out from it was a sense of
relaxing, of warmth. It increased as they neared the giant.

He stopped, awed, as he looked up at the giant's face. There was no
giantism disfigurement, no bulging forehead or prognathous jaw. The
effect, instead, was of ... an adult. They who looked on him were child-size.

His face was middle-aged, lined with care but benevolent. His nose a touch
too small, so it looked Irish; his black eyebrows were thick, bristling
slightly, salted with white hairs. His short hair was combed neatly back and
might have been barbered that day. Streaks of white were at the temples.
His expression was confident, quintessentially paternal.

Zero felt instantly loyal to this man. He knew he could be trusted.

"I guess," the paternal giant was saying, "I was always out of place on
Earth. I feel here I can fulfill myself, find my real function." His low voice,
the way he rolled the syllables, resonated deliciously with the hum of
well-being Zero had felt on entering the courtyard. Zero felt himself
smiling, nodding. He was aware of Angie and the other settlers around him
also sharing in this moment.

"But my work is not here in the settlement," the giant was saying, "not this
settlement. I feel a sort of call to the other one." His smile was pleasantly
mysterious.

"What other one?" someone asked. A familiar voice. Zero looked and
spotted Cisco.

"The New Humans' settlement," the giant rumbled sweetly. "It's just
beginning. But it's more enlightened. It's dedicated to putting the safety of
humanity first. To establishing more than a sort of frantic way station. To
making a home. It has room for individuality." There was just a faint tinge
of irony in his voice then. "Oh, yes. But we know one thing for sure: a close
community is a safe one."

The crowd had moved nearer to him. The giant reached with his big arms to
embrace two of them, pulling them gently close. It was entirely paternal.
One of them was an anemic-looking young man with straggly black hair and
large brown eyes, jeans, a workshirt, a beaded leather belt. He had a sort
of Santa Cruz look about him: wide-eyed, like a yogic devotee. The other
was a smiling Latino with round cheeks. They both smiled like shy children
as he went on. "I can't tell you everything. But I think the Meta will help
us. I have reason to believe they approve of what we're doing."

A sigh, a ripple of ahhs when through the small crowd. The Meta approved.

"Web-maker and false prophet!" came a dissonant shout from the shadows.
Zero looked and saw an old man crouching at the edge of the light. He
seemed agitated, like a frog about to jump. His large black eyes shone. He
sucked a strand from his tangled, teased-out white hair into a corner of his
mouth. He tilted his head to one side. "The stink of your lies hangs in the
air like the flatulence of a corpse!" His voice was as abrasive as the giant's
was assuring. "You are a Twist! And you intend these people nothing but
harm!" The little man stood and came into the light. Zero saw then that he
wasn't old, particularly. His hair seemed prematurely white. His sharp,
birdlike features were a little sunken, but by privation. His lips and hands
trembled with passion as he spoke. "Why is this man dressed as he is?
Where does he get these clean clothes, his perfect hair? They grow on him
that way, friends, or in any way he pleases, for he is a Twist. Open his
shirt if you want to see!"

"Shut up, lunatic! Let the man talk!" Someone yelled. Someone else
muttered, "The old dude is Jack the Baptist." The nickname was spoken
with ripe derision. "Ignore him."

But Zero noticed one of Meta's watchers bobbing overhead, its tiny red dot
turned toward them. The giant glanced at the watcher, then at Jack the
Baptist with the same expression. Raw hatred for both.

For Zero, then, the spell, or whatever it was, was broken. That glimpse into
the giant's emotional core had dispersed Zero's trance, though he still felt
the warmth tugging at him—even more insistently than before—as the
giant recovered his composure and beamed at the Baptist. "We might even
be able to restore this man's sanity if he'll let us help him," the paternal
giant said.

"Open his shirt!" Jack shrieked. Someone aimed a kick at him, and he
danced back. "Ask him to—"

The giant went on, his voice booming like a bass-pitched clarion, drowning
him out. "Our elected organizer is Professor Fiskle. If any of you would like
to go with me to meet him—"

Fiskle, Zero thought. He saw Cisco nodding, as if he were about to
volunteer to go with the giant to Fiskle. Open his shirt!

Zero stepped in, feeling as if he were moving upstream against a strong
pull that came from somewhere he couldn't place. He grabbed the giant's
shirtfront and tore it aside. It wouldn't part far, because it was, as the
Baptist had hinted, growing out of his skin. But between the two halves of
the shirt, under the tie, fully exposed in the light of the lamp, was the
most hideous face Zero had ever looked on. He saw it all in a half-second.

It was an insect's face, but wildly overgrown, with something manlike
merged into its features, growing from the flesh of the giant's chest. It was
about as big as a cat's head. Below it was a chitinous hollow, seamlessly
part of the giant's flesh, in which a purplish membrane vibrated, shivering,
going quiet, shivering again.

The membrane was moving in time with the waves of well-being Zero had
felt.

The people standing nearest to the giant made inarticulate sounds of
disgust and moved away from him. Zero backed away, too, as the giant
stood, his face contorting, his mask of paternal reassurance shorn. The
insect face in his chest, exposed, gnashed its mandibles; a liquid like bile
dripped from its mouth, and its eye glittered iridescent facets at the
Earthers.

"He's a Twist," someone said, incredulous, hurt.

"Looks like," Cisco said, nodding, with awe.

The crowd moved back from the giant. He stood there glowering at them;
the thing on its chest gnashed. The giant was an enormous beast now. The
features that had been arranged for the maximum in paternal reassurance
were now as cold as those of an executioner. The sensation of warmth had
stopped.

"The thing on its chest," Angie said. Her voice was choked with the ugliness
of the realization. "It was humming or something. We couldn't hear it—"

"But it affected us," Cisco said.

"You fucker!" a young man screamed at the Giant—one of the men the giant
had had his arms around.

The giant moved past them, a furious blur. When he stopped, he was
looming over Jack the Baptist—and he had the young man with the straggly
hair and the beaded belt, had him by the neck, holding him like an unruly
barnyard animal.

"Put him down and come and get me, Father!" Jack the Baptist yelled
hoarsely, laughing up in his face. "What you going to do?"

"No fucking way!" the boy was wailing, thrashing in the giant's oversize
hands. "I'll never go with you!"

"In some ways it's easier," Jack said, "isn't it? Easier than the Open Heart?
But in other ways, Twist, it's going to be much harder."

The giant glared at the Baptist—and then turned away from him.
Absentmindedly, the giant reached down and broke
the boy's neck. Crick-ick. The body spasmed once and went limp. He let it
fall.

He turned to them, closing the flaps of his shirtfront. He looked at Zero.
"You're among the ones he wants, or I'd kill you now." He looked up at the
others. "You're going to wish you'd followed me."

He bent, picked up the body of the boy, and slung it over his shoulder.
Carrying the corpse like a sack of meal, he turned, stalked to the outer
wall, and leaped. He grabbed the top, did a pull-up, and then vaulted
ponderously onto the wall and over.

There was a small red puddle on the street where the corpse had been. The
blood seeped into cracks in the pavement. They stared at it, and then
someone yelled a name and began to weep. They began to talk all at once,
a babble of voices. Several of them knew the boy who'd died; they wept for
him. Thinking about the cracking sound when the boy's neck broke, the
casual way the Twist had slung the body over his shoulder, Zero's stomach
contracted sharply.

Angie was looking at Zero, frowning. "What made you do that? Open his
shirt?"

"I don't know. Felt right. I—it feels more all the time like I want to look
past the outsides of things, here."

"I knew it would be you," Jack the Baptist said. He was there at Zero's
elbow, that suddenly. "I could see it in your face, even when he had you.
You, my friend, could smell what Father was from the start."

Smell what the giant was? Zero could smell the sour of Jack the Baptist
when he stood so close. But there was a defiant humor in the man's eyes,
a presence about him. He had the glow of a familiar, drunken friend at a
party. "You said something about the Open Heart to him," Zero said. "What
was that about?"
The Baptist grinned, showing rotting, crooked teeth. "The Open Heart was a
cult he created in Southern California before he was brought here. He was
its father figure, its charismatic leader. He squeezed his followers dry.
Made them paupers."

"You seemed crazy at first," Zero said, thinking aloud. "But you're not."

"Crazy is relative. You're crazy yourself. You're going to go on an expedition
soon."

"You a fortune teller?" Angie said. She was frowning at him. "If you'd kept
your mouth shut, maybe that guy would have gone away, maybe he
wouldn't have gotten pissed off. Maybe that kid would be alive. I can't
believe we're just standing here as if nothing happened, and that kid died
just a minute ago. Must have been like, eighteen..."

"I'm not a fortune teller," the Baptist said, unruffled. "Not even a
mind-reader." He nodded at Zero. "His personality was on store-window
display a few minutes ago. That's what told me he'd go. Once they're out of
their shell, there's no stopping them. He's going on an expedition."

"We don't know if there's going to be one," Angie said, snorting.

But Zero looked at the Baptist and realized he was right.
The Second Part—Fallout from the Exploded Heart

                               *4*
A vista of small mirrors, sunk into the soft blue of the land, reflected the
jade sky. They ran together in the distance like molten silicon. The
bog-ponds mirrored a translucent green sky trimmed with a fine ribwork of
silvery clouds. Zero though it was a sort of cloud formation one saw from
time to time on Earth, weirdly regular in its configuration, each strip of
cloud lined up with the others as neatly as plow-furrowed soil. Each gave
out the moisture-dulled light of refraction.

"How can the clouds be so regular?" Zero asked, looking at Yoshio. They
were in the expedition's leadcart, which rocked and shuddered over the
rutted dry-mud track that led sinuously between the ponds. Zero had to be
careful how he set his jaws, or a sudden jarring would clack his teeth
together. "Winds are turbulent, moving like liquid, just sort of flowing
around ... I used to wonder about this on Earth, too. So how can the clouds
be regular like that?"

Yoshio shrugged. "I saw the same on Earth and wondered. Unliving things
fall into patterns too."

"It's the Meta," Cisco said. He was riding in the back of the cart, sitting on
a leather satchel of supplies, his head nodding with the cart's motion. "We
gotta be careful. It's some kind of sign or—"

"Christ, Cisco," Zero said, "if you imagine you see the Meta everywhere,
you're going to flip out. They're just clouds. It meant nothing on Earth, it
means nothing here," Zero said, unaccountably irritated. "Sometimes I think
you—" He broke off, and they both stared off across the bogs, hearing an
animal voice cry, Ha! Ha! Ha-ha! High-pitched and jeering. They'd heard it
five or six times that morning without ever seeing the cry's originator.

Zero glanced over his shoulder at the other carts. Angie and Dennis were in
the next one. Behind them in the last cart was Zickorian, of the High Clans,
beside his fellow Clansman, Calum. Calum was smaller and had fewer
hoops through his wrists. Zero had the impression that he was some sort of
younger relative out for a rite of passage. Not a son, but perhaps a
nephew.

The Pezz trotted along behind the third cart, as he preferred to do for most
of the day. Now and then he climbed up into the back of a cart and rode,
squeaking listlessly to himself. Or was it itself? Zero could never quite
decide.

The eight travelers were three days into the expedition. They were on their
way, they hoped, to the Progress Station that had been reported beyond
the bogs; it was said to be past the mocking veldt, on the far side of a
great forest, and beyond the IAMton Wastes. The Pezz had absorbed a
"map" of biochemically distilled experiences from a fellow Pezz who had
been on another expedition that had been turned back by the Hungry
Punkin'. Out of nine travelers, that expedition had only two survivors.

All but the first hour of the first day had been spent trundling through the
bogs. The swamp had seemed infinite, stretching ahead and behind and to
either side as far as they could see. "It's as if we've slid into yet another
world," Yoshio had said. "Another plane—a continuum of bog-ponds, one
after another, like one of those Dali perspective planes of checkered
infinity." He said things like that the way other people said, "Boy, this bog
stuff just goes on and on!"

"I wish Bowler had come," Zero said, shifting on the driver's seat. His butt
hurt from the jouncing. He eased his foot on the pedal-tack in the oruh's
rump to slow it a little, give his pelvis a rest. The beast grunted and gave
out a soft, relieved orooooooooh. "Said he wanted to 'organize' the
settlement. I keep telling him his politics are irrelevant here."

Zero's back was hurting from hours of sitting up. The sun had burned a spot
in the back of his neck that chafed him bitterly whenever he turned his
head, and Yoshio was getting on his nerves.

It's the monotony, Zero thought. It made him irritable. And fighting off
jumpskeeters every half-mile or so, having to keep them off the oruh. And
at night, the moss-suckers. They looked harmless, like a short piece of
Spanish Moss, dull violet, floating through the air, dried up and harmless.
But they steered themselves without seeming to and drifted against your
bare skin. The sucker's spongy mesh extruded filaments that drew
blood—much more blood than the corkscrews took. They swelled up like
sponges, just getting bigger and bigger, taking root if you let them.

And the sounds of the bog at night made the Earthers light, paranoid
sleepers. The sounds were like a sinister orchestra tuning up. The ground
was lumpy and moist; a few hours on it, and you woke with aching muscles.
The nights were almost as wearying as the days.

"Parasitism is something you'll see in many forms out there," Jack the
Baptist had told them. He'd stopped them along the road, just outside the
settlement, that first morning, to wish them well. "Be wary of its
multiplicity of form. There is every kind of abundance on this world: you'll
learn to know the abundance that resonates constructively from the kind
that is poisonous to you. The capacity to know it is in you. The outside and
inside are interchangeable."

"Uh-huh," Zero had said, nodding just as if he knew what Jack was talking
about.

They'd driven on, and Jack the Baptist had shouted something obscured by
the creaking of the carts that might have been, "See you around the hill!"

Zero had driven the cart that morning in a glow of interior excitement that
matched the solar energy flashing from bogs. But then the hours and days
had piled up, and tedium had rolled in like an invisible fog—and remained.
And Angie seemed nervous, distant.

"This road looks as if it were made by randomly trekking Pioneers," Yoshio
said, interrupting Zero's train of thought. "But I suspect the Meta may have
laid it down. There's a certain engineering wisdom in its—"

Zero couldn't stand any more of it. Maybe now was the time to try getting
through to Angie. "Yeah, yeah, uh-huh, you're probably right. How about
you take over driving, Yoshio? I'm gonna drop back and talk to Angie for a
while."

But by sunset, she'd only said a few words to him. Maybe she was just
simply scared, and tired from not sleeping much, and trying not to show it.
He'd felt that way himself, the first night in camp. He made the mistake of
trying to tell her that. "All I could think of that first night," he said, "was
that anything could be out there. But then I thought, it's probably no more
dangerous than Africa. Or parts of the Bronx, for that matter. I mean, we
just keep thinking, This is alien, this is alien. And that makes it seem
worse than it is. So I decided just to resign myself to anything that—" He
broke off, seeing her look.

She snapped, "You think I need this lecture? The strong male explains
things to the dizzy female?"

"No, no—that's not what I'm—"

"Just shut up, okay?"

He shut up. The luminous orange oblong floating above the horizon turned
the mirror bog-ponds into plates of hot copper. The sunset light limned one
side of a great hummock up ahead. It was the first break in the monotony,
and it brought with it a mixture of fear and an almost feverish curiosity.

The oruh protested as Yoshio drove the lead cart faster to find out what the
thing was.

It was a small hill, as anomalous as a wart on a baby, rising about forty
feet high from the bogs. It rose in a sudden arc in the midst of a clearing of
bare, compacted dirt. The hill was pocked with caves, they saw as they
came close. The right side of the hill looked molten with sunset light. The
left side was purple with shadow. As they drew nearer still, the motion of
the carts made the shadows in the caves seem to shift and flutter.

Dennis, the expedition's leader, climbed down from his cart and said, "Roit.
No one moves till I have a look-see. Yoshio, stay where you are." Dennis
took an oil lamp, lit it with a spark-maker—something that looked like a
nutcracker with flints—and carried the lamp up to the caves. In his right
hand was a blunderbuss, charged.

He approached the caves and stopped. Stared. Took a few steps closer.
Bent to look into the nearest without getting closer than ten feet to it. He
grunted and circled the hill slowly, looking into the caves, sniffing. He
climbed up onto the hill and looked in each hole—there were about twenty.

He came back to the carts grinning. "It's perfect, it is! Sompin' used ter live
there, but it don't no more. Caves go back two or three meters, and then
it's blank wall. We got a perfect little shelter for the noit."

"It looks sort of like a termite hill," Angie said, looking around at the bogs
as if expecting to see termites coming home. "Big termites."
Yoshio said, "Maybe whatever lived there leaves during the day, comes
back at night."

"Neee-awwww." Which was Dennis's way of saying no contemptuously. "No
tracks. Dust undisturbed. Nothin' been there for years."

"I don't remember this thing from the maps," Zero said.

"Those maps are a bloody mess, they are," Dennis said.

"This place is not on Pezz maps," the Pezz said through its translation box.
It squeaked and capered anxiously. The sack under its melted-dwarf
scrotum inflated with a pweeeee sound, and then it announced, "I smell
nothing but old smells from this place. They who came from these holes
have not been here for a much-long."

Zickorian frowned at the hill. "I am not at ease," the High Clansman said in
his taciturn way. The band of gold that replaced his eyes shimmered red in
the dying sunlight as he turned his head from side to side, as if looking
with his ears.

"I also am uncertain," Calum said.

Zero snorted. They'd learned that Calum echoed whatever Zickorian said.

"The Pezz know when sompin's around," Dennis said. "You can see the
caves for yourself. Come onnn, unpack the gear. Let's mike camp!"

Weariness made the decision for them. They made camp at the base of the
hill. The Pezz foraged through a bog-pond for its dinner; the High Clansmen
brought out their own supply sacks, and each took what looked like a lump
of rock-hard meat into his mouth and chewed it incessantly for an hour
before swallowing. This was their full meal.

Hungry and tired to the core, the Earthers ate their rationed provisions
quickly and silently. Afterward they sat half-slumped, wrapped in
crude-cloth and leather, staring into the flicker of the oil lamp as if it were
a miniature campfire. The sky went violet and then purple-black, crystal
green at the horizons, like thin-sliced volcanic glass. The stars glowed
through, thickened in the sky, jostling each other to get a look at the
expedition. By degrees some of the weary irritability seeped from the
Earthers. Cisco stretched out and fell asleep on the ground. Dennis and
Yoshio looked at their crude map and spoke in low tones on the other side
of the circle of lamplight.

Angie sighed and turned to Zero, whispered, "I'm sorry about what I said.
Telling you to shut up. But you were sort of patronizing."

"Guess so."

"God." She looked up, craning to take in the sky. "Those stars. One good
thing about Fool's Hope—stars to beat the band. Makes Zales look shut
down."

"Sort of like the Texas desert. Last time I was in Texas—visiting this friend
of mine I used to correspond with—we went to a country music club out on
the highway in the desert. Went in a convertible, and we got drunk. And we
were looking at the stars. That was the best part. The club was a
disappointment. No country music. Turned out it was Disco Night. Had all
these country music trappings like a barn but everyone was dancing to
Madonna and wearing—what's the matter? Oh. 'Don't talk about Earth.' "

"Right. Don't talk about Earth."

"Okay. But just one thing—I'm starting to miss it less. The planet itself is
great, but the people have totally fucked it up. Ruined it." Thinking about
the trashed, oil-slicked beaches, the vast dumps, the toxins in everything,
the dying sea, the moronic video culture, he could almost make himself
believe he was better off here. Almost.

"I don't care if you're talking about Earth negative or positive. Just don't."

He was silent till she said, "I guess you think I'm bitchy. I just
feel—cheated all the time. I was going to be a dancer. I studied for two
years."

He looked at her in open surprise. "I knew you were taking dance, but I
didn't know you wanted to be a—you mean a career?"

"Yep. I didn't talk about it because how many people want to be a dancer
or an actress or a successful musician, and talk about it, and everyone
says, 'Oh, that's nice,' but secretly they think, 'Sure, sure, what are the
odds that'll happen?' "

"I didn't have the good sense to keep my mouth shut. Went around making
big talk about the movies I was going to make. You're lucky, compared to a
lot of us here. I'll never be able to make those films, but you can dance
here. In fact, you can dance for every human on this planet."

He fully expected her to tell him that he didn't understand. But she said, "I
never thought of that. That doesn't make up for everything. But I guess it's
okay..." She said it softly, and he felt good.

She yawned. "I'm gonna crash. Listen—how about sharing one of those big
caves near the ground? I'm—I'd rather not stay in one alone. I mean, I
think none of us should be alone, in case something attacks." Her voice
was utterly antisuggestive. Carefully. But he thought, Maybe...

They got up and went to a cave and laid out their bedrolls. Side by side but
not too close.

The caves were bone dry and smooth; this and the thick coating of dust
made them almost comfortable to sleep in, after the bog. As Zero fell
asleep, his mind flickered with fantasies like an old-fashioned peep show.
He imagined both of them waking before dawn, while the others were
asleep. She'd reach for him and snuggle against him, and they'd find
themselves kissing. And then...

Well. She had asked him to sleep next to her, hadn't she?

Outside, the dissonant orchestra began its hopeless tuning up. Inside, the
shallow cave echoed with their snores.


Swanee watched and tried to remember everything he saw.

Night in the Earther settlement. Much activity, which was itself unusual
here after dark, and there was a constellation of lamps, scattered on every
unused horizontal surface. The crowd of human shapes and nonhuman
anomalies made Swanee think of a Chinese New Year's parade, circulating
within the benevolent corral of lights. Above the walls the Frost had risen
and shone balefully on them through a purple sheen.

Swanee stayed in the shadows of the settlement. He didn't want anyone to
see him. He wasn't sure why. It wasn't his fear of the aliens; Fiskle had
forced him to spend time looking at them, getting used to them. "They are
our enemies, but they are not bugbears. If we're afraid of our enemies, our
enemies win. Don't trust them—but learn to observe."

No, it wasn't fear of the aliens that made him stay crouched in the oruh
stalls, peering from shadows out through the door, with the oruhs champing
and defecating only a few feet behind him. It was horror of being seen by
the Earthers. He hadn't completed his Twist, of course. Not yet. Perhaps
there was a little extra glossiness to his skin; a change in its shade, and
texture. A certain humping to his back, his eyes changing color.

But this would go unnoticed by anyone who didn't know him well. It really
wasn't how he looked physically.

It was how he felt. He was sure they could sense the changes taking place
inside him: the birthing of his Real Self, Fiskle called it.

So he crouched in shadow and watched. The Pioneers' courtyard and the
street outside was bannered and frilled for the Interspecies Festival.
Crudely dyed strips of cloth were hung from the walls, the gate, the
weapons rack. A banner reading simply FRIENDS! hung over the front door
of the Pioneers' dorm. Swanee had heard the Ki-ips puzzling to Jamie about
it: in the language of the Ki-ips the closet analogue to friends was
co-conspirator. Which race, they asked, were they planning to conspire
with—and against whom?

Sounding like Abraham Lincoln's speechwriter, Jamie had said, "We're
conspiring with all races on this planet—against conflict itself."

"That almost makes sense," the Ki-ips had replied.

Swanee made a mental note of everything so that he could repeat it to
Fiskle later. "Because after I arrive," Fiskle had said, dispatching him on
this mission, "things will be different, and much will go into hiding." It was
night out, and so the Poolsh had been unable to come: they were rooted
and immobile nocturnally. But the Arthropods were there, and the Ki-ips,
the two known sun-monkeys, a few Whorebugs, a few Gator-Men, two or
three Pezz, a thing that looked like a big koala, and four upper-rank High
Clansmen.

Jamie and Trish and Doggo and Warren and a Latino named Chester
Sanchez had gone in a deputation to the Neutral and had invited each race
to send a few envoys to the Festival. Some understood readily that this
was a sort of embassy party; others were baffled but complied for their own
obscure reasons.

Swanee spotted Jamie and Trish on the other side of the courtyard. He
noticed that Jamie was still moving stiffly and seemed very pale. Swanee
attuned himself to them, performing the focusing trick that had come to
him with the changes, filtering out all other sound, amplifying, hearing
them as if they were standing nearby.

"The food was a mistake," Jamie was saying. "We put crustaceans out for
the Whorebugs, but the High Clans, it turns out, have some kind of
animistic kinship with crustaceans—they're like some holy animal from their
homeworld, and they got mad because we gave them to the bugs to eat
right in front of them. Then the Arthropods wouldn't eat the mashed
spinach-taters we set out for them because they have to be prepared in
some kind of ritual and the way we did it was 'septic.' "

"Chester warned you about all that."

"Yeah, I shoulda listened to Sanchez. He's smart. After you, he'd be the
guy I'd pick to succeed me if this infection kicks my butt."

"That," Swanee muttered to the oruhs, "was a good one. A lucky one to
hear."

On the left, beside the entrance to the dorms, was an improvised stage of
woodblocks, on which four musicians with homemade drums sat in a
semicircle. The small one, in the middle, was Chester Sanchez, who had
irreverent brown eyes outlined by long, thick black eyelashes. The
cheekbones of his wide face hinted at some Indian blood. His expression
was always relaxed, barstool cool, but his whole body nodded to the
drumbeat.

Someone stepped onto the stage with a wooden washboard, and a sixth
man stepped up with a jug. In a moment the salsa/jug band was feeling its
way around a rhythm. A few Earthers gathered around the stage and began
to dance, rather solemnly at first, but smiling. Some of the aliens seemed
to respond. The Gator-Men slapped their corrugated skin and snapped their
alligator jaws shut in time; the Pezz pranced, seeming to enjoy it. (But who
knew with an alien? Perhaps they were in pain.) The Arthropod began to
move in ponderous circles, swaying this way and that, making O's of silvery
slime on the ground. The High Clans seemed puzzled. Swanee heard one of
them ask Warren, "Who is having offspring?"
Warren said, "Nobody I know of. Why?"

"We make drums only for the birthing time. This really is embarrassing.
Perhaps if one of you pretended to have a child...? Just to make things
decent."

Swanee noticed the one they called Bowler at the far side of the courtyard
from the musicians, talking to a group of six human settlers. He seemed so
earnest. Perhaps it would be best to listen in. Feeling his ears shift on his
head, Swanee performed his trick: focusing, amplifying, winnowing sound.
The noise of the Festival crowd and the musicians
fell into the background, and Bowler's voice leaped into aural relief. "It's
not so much the way it is as the way it's going to be if we don't plan
against it. We'll fall into exploitive capitalism. Already some people have
cornered the market on crustaceans; others are dominating oruh skinning."

"Only because no one else wants to do it," Doggo put in.

Bowler went on. "And the people who have the most to trade are the most
influential in the settlement. Eventually some concept of land ownership
will develop here, with people working for other people as employees ... we
bring all those concepts with us from Earth. It was so entrenched on Earth,
in the United States, it was almost impossible to consider giving it up. But
in a place like this where everything is raw and unshaped well, the
capitalism is only inside us, in our assumptions and customs. We can
devalue the whole idea of ownership and capitalism and start a society
unencumbered by the traps of the old."

"Why should we?" Doggo burst in, more assertively this time. "Buying and
selling and owning is the natural human way, and you yourself said it held
civilization together."

"It held it together, but in a viciously competitive way. We can hold it
together in a constructive way. Communal decentralism. There were lots of
communal Earth societies, even before the Bolsheviks. We were trained to
believe capitalism was the natural order of things because it was
convenient for the status quo. Listen, Doggo, this planet is a great
opportunity, a chance for a new society."

"Sure, and whoever organizes it is the big cheese! You'd like that, right,
Bowler?"

"I'd enjoy a leadership role, that's true. But that doesn't devalue my
leadership or my ideas. And I don't fancy a dictatorship, if that's what
you're implying. All I want is to get the thing started."

Doggo snorted out another retort. The argument went on.

Interesting, Swanee thought. This could be a wedge for Fiskle.

But he heard something else, something that made him shiver. A sound
below the other sounds. A deep thrum, announcing the coming of
Father—and Fiskle.

After a few moments, everyone felt it. They turned and looked toward the
front gate. Conversation died from lack of attention. Even the musicians
stopped playing. Puzzled, the aliens, too, turned to look. Fiskle had come,
and he had brought his New Humans Lodge with him.

They were back-lit by something—no, it was someone, Swanee saw. It was
Harry "Hulk" Porter, who had been a football player on Earth, a brutish
linebacker. He had, on Fool's Hope, Twisted into a slender, buxom woman.
She called herself Bella; her Twist was modeled on an early 1960s movie
vampiress, a mesh of Vampira and Elvira, a human pop caricature of
swelling cleavage in a skin-tight black gown, of spike heels and legs in
black mesh stockings and swept-back black hair; the thin, black, arched
eyebrows of a Disney villainess, the clinging black gown that Morticia
Addams might've worn if she'd posed for the first panels of a Playboy
spread. Comic-book lurid makeup: dead-white skin and blood-red lips. The
"clothing" and "makeup," Swanee knew, grew from the skin, like fur or
scales. She was all this, and she was luminous too; emitting a sickly green
glow like those light-absorbing plastic children's toys shaped like stylized
Spooks; toys that glow in the dark. She was quite predatory, of course. She
was a sin and a punishment for sin, in one.

Swanee basked in the sight of her. She glowed like a fluorescent sea
creature; she stood there, seductively relaxed and lethally confident, like a
minor goddess in the back row of the pantheon. Swanee loved her, loved
her deeply, loved her achingly, from afar. She was an artfully crafted
apotheosis of one of Swanee's boyhood fantasies.

The others, standing just outside the light from the oil lamps, illuminated
only by their proximity to Bella, were dim figures, shapes sprung from
whimsy, seen mostly in silhouette.

With Father looming protectively lust behind him, Fiskle stepped into the
light. The crowd aspirated together, almost a whimper, seeing his clothing,
Swanee stared. He hadn't seen Fiskle for a day—but he'd changed. So had
Kelso, Swanee knew; he saw the dark hump of Kelso, like a jacket hood,
hanging from the back of Fiskle's neck. Most of the crowd couldn't see Kelso
at that angle. They were staring at Fiskle. Fiskle was wearing a new suit.

Which was impossible. Where would he get a new suit?

Oh. Where Bella got her skin-tight gown, and Father his raiment.

Fiskle seemed to be wearing goggles. But with a plummeting sensation,
Swanee knew that he wasn't. They weren't goggles. They were small
camera lenses, like the ones on the security cameras you see in banks. And
they were growing from his skull.

Had the Meta altered him? Cyborged him?

No. This thing had grown out of him. Swanee knew it, looking at the lenses.
A shuddery recognition: They had always been part of Fiskle.
Somehow, inexplicably, they went with the immaculately clean,
professionally pressed gray suit and the shiny, spotless black patent
leather shoes. (How many of the staring crowd realized that the shoes were
not shoes but Fiskle's feet?) And yes, the camera-lens eyes went with the
tapering, four-inch mirror-painted fingernails on his prehensile, boneless
fingers.

And his face. Was frozen. Trapped into one expression: Humorously
supercilious, with just a faint undercurrent of cold rage, like a hint of sparks
from short-circuiting wires glimpsed through a crack in the walls...

"I have decided to confront you with the truth of your destiny," Fiskle said,
sounding like a pompous Shakespearean actor, his voice ringing in the
frightened silence. Kelso shifted on Fiskle's back and humped up onto his
shoulder, pulling itself up with tiny little black bird-legs; it took its place
like a parrot, suddenly in full view of everyone, and flapped its wings. The
incongruity brought a sizzle of suddenly sucked-in breaths and mutters from
the crowd. One of the Ki-ips made a startled bra-aak sound, and a Pezz
squeaked in bafflement.

Kelso's face had been stripped away from the skull; only shreds of his hair
remained, a stringy fringe on the remaining strip of scalp around the back
of the yellow cranium. The fleshy wings were stylized, outsize versions of
the wings on Mercury's helmet; grotesque outgrowths of his ears, flapping
uselessly like the flattened arm-stumps of a Thalidomide child. His eyes,
sans lids, bulged from the fleshless sockets, sickly pink, and perpetually
staring. The rest of the face was the face of a skull. Flecks of flesh stuck to
it here and there. The jaws opened, and a long black tongue oozed out,
licked off a bit of rotting flesh clinging to the cheekbone, and sucked it into
its mouth with a smack of enjoyment.

"They've gone alien," someone said. "They're fucking aliens."

Those words sent a sick weakness into Swanee, "No," he whispered to the
oruh. "No way. No."

The thrum from Father picked up, and a shiver of quiescence went through
them all. "We're human," Father rumbled, his voice deeply reassuring.
"We're adaptations. Each of us with some speciality, something useful to
the great pattern the Meta intend. We have in fact come to rescue you from
the aliens."

"This is undeniably another world," Fiskle said, his voice carrying
theatrically. "We must not deny its needs. To be human here, we have to
change, to become—"

"It's a lie!" Jamie said, stepping forward. Doggo, behind her, moved off into
the crowd, signaling to the guards on the wall. They stood ready with
pikes; others moved to charge their blunderbusses. Jamie yelled, "You
aren't adaptations for this world. You're Twists! The Current has changed
you because it does that to people, and only the Meta know why—but I
don't believe it's improvement. We're not going to be intimidated by—by
um..." Her voice faltered.

It was Father's doing. The thrum had deepened, from the hidden thing on
his chest, and ripples of trust and relaxation spread out from him. He said,
"We came like this hoping to shock you into accepting us—and your future."
Jamie looked uncertain, as if about to give in, as Father went on. "We are
your future. Those of you who want to work with the Meta, come with us
now. Accept Professor Fiskle's leadership. Discover your Real Self, the
fulfillment that you've been aching for. We understand that hollowness,
that perpetual doubt you feel."

One of the Pezz stepped up to Doggo, who was staring slack-mouthed at
Father. He squeaked and his box translated, "You are experiencing
[untranslatable] cerebral interference. You are being [approximate
translation] manipulated!"

Doggo stared at the Pezz for a second, then shook himself and yelled,
pointing at Father, "The Pezz is right—he's bullshit!" He signaled to
Sanchez, who began drumming with his hands on the crude conga vised
between his knees.

The drumbeat broke up the thrum. A shudder ran through every human
there as Father's influence dissipated.

Doggo yelled over the beat, "You think I don't know about you?" He pointed
at Father but turned to Fiskle. "This thing murdered one of our people—fella
named Dagstrom, hardly more than a kidl He broke his fucking neck! And
you got the nerve to—" He broke off and turned to shout at the walls. "I
want the son of a bitch arrested!"

There was a jostle of movement on the walls as the guards headed for the
stairways. Fiskle looked around. His camera eyes were whirring; the lenses
extruded an inch further, their chrome collars turning, glinting. Kelso
looking at the other wall, as if he were a second set of eyes for Fiskle;
drool ran down his bony jaw, and his bulging eyes caught the oil-lamp light.

Fiskle barked out something Swanee couldn't make out, and two enormous
Twists stepped from the shadows to flank Father. Two more stood beside
Fiskle. They were what Fiskle called Phylum Twos. Eight feet tall, naked, as
pink as babies with heads nearly as small as babies'—but monstrously
muscled. Utterly under Fiskle's influence. Their great penises, like
elephant's trunks, hung down past their knees, wagging softly with their
movements. Their feet, broad as the blades of shovels, dug toes into the
hard pavement as if it were clay.

The crowd backed away. Fear suffused the air like the stink of blood in a
slaughterhouse. Sanchez stopped his drum patter.

Jamie put her hand on Doggo's arm. "Keep the guards back."

"Even the infinitely stupid have their moments of wisdom," Fiskle said to
her, bowing slightly.
"They're very stuuuu-pid, very stupid, very very stupid," Kelso chattered on
Fiskle's shoulder, using its mutated larynx to make a voice somewhere
between a parrot and a sneering dirty-minded adolescent street kid. "Every
stupid body but baby and me. Baby and me." It nuzzled affectionately
against Fiskle's cheek.

"My friends here," Fiskle said, "are very strong. It would be, as this sweet
little bulldyke has suggested, unwise to attack Father or myself. The
Phylum Two can take walls apart with their hands. Bodies are like soap
bubbles to them. And the rest of us, the Phylum One, we have our
talents—much that you might find disagreeable."

"Fine," Doggo grated. "Then just get the fuck out."

As always, Fiskle's expression remained mannequin frozen. But his camera
eyes turned and clicked to themselves. Kelso whined, "Try to be friends,
and they stink on us. They are not sensitive. They have brain farts. Stink
for stink, stink back at them." It flapped its pathetic wings and spat a fetid
oyster of bloody sputum onto the street.

"Perhaps the time has come," Fiskle began, "to demonstrate—"

Doggo broke in, "We could pike you before your lunks could protect you.
We'd get you, at least. Before they got us."

Fiskle took a deep breath, then nodded curtly. "Another day, then."

He raised his hand in a florid gesture of farewell and turned. His people
parted for him and followed him out the gate.

Swanee's heart ached as he watched Bella go.

Thrumming, perhaps hoping to draw a few of them along in a psychic
slipstream, Father was the last to go. Swanee felt the tug. He fought it. He
wanted to stay here, and perhaps if he remained with the humans, his
store of humanity would remain with him. He had glimpsed what Fiskle
was, and what the others were becoming.

He found himself walking out the door of the oruh stable, pushing through
the crowd. He was drawn by the thrum and the will-o'-the-wisp light of
Bella, a light retreating like the glow of swamp gas, always just out of
reach.

He didn't go alone. For some, Fool's Hope was simply too torturously
unfamiliar a canvas to contemplate, too foreign a banquet to feast on. Half
Twisted already by madness and despair, some twenty settlers followed
Father's Pied-Piper thrum out the gate. Pursuing a light that was darkness.


                                     *5*

Zero awoke suddenly from a dream of earthquakes. In the watercolor-green
light of dawn he saw that Angie was still asleep. She lay with her back to
him. Her crude-cloth blanket had fallen away from her; he was sorry she
slept with her clothes on. He reached for the blanket to cover her.

The tremors came, a deep rumble from below. The sound translated into
motion so that dirt crumbled down on them from the ceiling of the cave.
Still dreaming?

Another tremor. A crack in the wall. A muffled scream from somewhere on
the other side of it.

Zero scrambled out of the cave. Braced on a ledge, he turned, grabbed
Angie's arm, and pulled her into the open like a sack of flour. She cursed
and got onto her feet, blinking, her face swollen with sleep, leaning against
the outer wall of the mound. "For God's sake—"

One more quick tremor, short but sharp, so that they almost lost their
precarious footing, and Angie's eyes widened. She reached into the cave
and scooped up their bedrolls, and they scrambled down the hill.

The others were there, Cisco and Yoshio and the High Clansmen and the
Pezz, standing in a confused group by the oruh carts. The oruh champed
nervously and shifted on their pads like children waiting to go to the
bathroom.

Dennis was missing. "Where's Dennis?" Zero asked, looking up at the
mound. None of the caves seemed to have collapsed.

"I'm round here!" Dennis's voice came from just out of sight around the
curve of the mound. "Come and have a look at this!"

They walked around the curve and saw Dennis about halfway up, his head
and shoulders extended from a cave just big enough for his body. He
pointed to a much larger cave beside him. "This is going to be hard to
believe, but there's an entrance in there to another place, a beautiful
underground world!" He stopped and grinned at them. Foamy spittle at the
corners of his mouth ran through the dust on his face, marking it like a
handlebar moustache. "I found it last night. I'm in an exit from it now. You
must see it—it's beautiful. I think it's where the,"—he paused and stared
into space, his jaw drooping—"trying to remember. The..." Then the
animation came back into his face. "The Meta! That's where the Meta live!
They've been waiting for us to find them, and they'll explain everything! It's
so beautiful! There's a tribe of women there, and they're so friendly!" He
winked at them idiotically. "Come on in! Look! It has to be this hole over
here! You must see it!"

"Wow? Cisco said. "That's rad, man! I mean, it's like it was always with us,
underneath us, and like, I could feel it spiritually, but I didn't know what it
was!" Impelled by his burst of enthusiasm, he started up the slope.

Zickorian looked at Calum and spoke in their language. The translation box
said, "Let's have a look. Perhaps this is a great discovery imparting
[approximate translation] karmic honor!"
Yoshio said, "I think, uh, perhaps you'd better not."

Zero stared at Dennis. The spittle had become drool. Pink drool, mixed with
blood. Dennis twitched.

Zero scrambled up the slope, grabbed Cisco, and pulled him back. Cisco fell
on his ass and slid down the slope. "Shit! Goddammit, Zero!"

Zero slid after him and backed away from the mound. "Dennis—what
happened to your accent?"

The Pezz said, "I smell something that used to live here ... closer now. Also
[untranslatable]."

Angie backed away from the mound, one hand going to her mouth. "Oh,
God. Oh, Dennis..."

Zero said, "We'd better get the hell out of here."

Yoshio looked at Zero. In a halting voice he said, "Zero, we can't leave
him."

Zero took a deep breath and nodded. He trotted back to the carts, reached
in, and brought out a pike and a charged blunderbuss. He returned to
Yoshio and handed him a pike; they started up the hill, moving cautiously
between the caves.

When they reached the ledge just below Dennis's cave, he drew himself
partway into the cave like a startled hermit crab. "Hello, fellows," Dennis
said, his eyes rolling wildly. Sweat made more streaks on his face. A little
blood ran from his nose. "Hello. Ready to ... enter the beautiful paradise ...
beautiful girls?"

Yoshio grabbed Dennis's left arm; Zero grabbed his right, and they pulled,
hard. Dennis came partway out. Zero and Yoshio dug in their heels and
leaned out to enlist the help of gravity. All at once Dennis pulled free of
the cave with a squelching sound.

His lower half was gone. It had been chewed away, replaced by what
appeared to be a maggot as big as a large dog, whipping itself like a worm
on a hot sidewalk. Rubbery bands of pinkish white. Its underside was
swollen with the parts of Dennis it was digesting. Its upper half was
concealed completely inside Dennis's torso like a hand hidden in a Puppet.
Some tap-in filament co-opting Dennis's brain. "Beautiful girls, fellows!" the
Dennis-shell was yammering. "They give their big breasts to you! Beautiful
girls."

There were shouts from the group at the base of the mound and the shrill
orooooooh! of an oruh in fear of its life. But Zero couldn't take his eyes
from the thing that had Dennis. Zero's stomach writhed to match it. The
slugs had been in the mound all the time, behind the backs of the caves,
hibernating. The thing flopped and whipped, slapping the ground, inching
back toward the cave. "Yoshio"—losing control now—"what do we..."
Yoshio made a high-pitched sound mingling horror and fury—and drove the
spike through the middle of the great maggot, piercing it through. Yellow
paste of maggot-gut squirted. Dennis screamed.

The maggot crawled backward into the cave, pulling the spasming shell of
Dennis with it. Zero watched, feeling the blunderbuss as a great leaden
weight in his hands, feeling as if some part of himself were going down a
drain, as Dennis's face drew back into the hole. Maybe there was just a hint
of imploring in Dennis's eyes...

"There might be some part of his brain still alive," Yoshio said huskily,
"experiencing."

Zero made himself step up to the hole. He shoved the blunderbuss up
against Dennis's forehead. He fired. He glimpsed blood and bone exploding,
and then the sky leaped into his eyes as he bent backward, losing the gun,
tumbling down the hill, fragmentary images of clouds and dirt and a hole
with a hideous pinkish-white face—

He retched painfully on the packed dirt at the base of the mound. His face
was warm and wet. Tears. Angie knelt
beside him, touching his cheek, but he couldn't enjoy it.

Yoshio's voice: "The mound is breaking. It's opening up. Where's the oruh
for that cart?"

Zero sat up. Clods of dirt came bouncing down the mound to roll against his
feet. He looked up and saw pinkish-white skin glistening in broad cracks in
the mound.

One of the oruh was missing from its traces. Its black blood smeared the
ground in a path that led up to a big hole in the mound. A plaintive oroooh
echoed to them.

The cracks in the mound widened.

Zero and the others crowded on the remaining carts, driving the oruh away.
The oruh—barely restrained till now by Cisco and the High Clansmen—had
no need to be urged.

"What was that act you performed?" the Pezz asked. "You got out of the
cart and [untranslatable]—"

Zero sighed. "That was vomiting. Regurgitation. Brought on by a shock to
my nervous system." Bitterly he mocked the Pezz's clinical objectivity.
"From seeing my friend half eaten, taken over by the ... whatever it was."

"I understand the shock. Myself, seeing a herd partner in that situation, I
would have run in circles for a while. This is my version of the sickness you
experienced.''

"Uh-huh," Zero said. He didn't want to talk about it. He didn't want to look
at the Pezz, which trotted along beside him. The Pezz was too alien;
something profoundly alien had eaten Dennis's consciousness alive.

Zero was sitting beside Angle, who was driving the oruh. Cisco and Yoshio
were in the back; Zickorian and Calum rode in the second cart. They'd
abandoned the third cart.

The Pezz's squeaking merged indistinguishably with the squeaking of the
wheels. Zero had to strain to hear
the translator box.

The bog was changing. The ponds were fewer and farther apart. The ground
between them seemed dryer. The moss-suckers came rarely. A few twisted
trees, if that's what they were, sprouted between the bogs, competing with
the glassy hoop-plants. There was less smell of waterbound life—which on
Fool's Hope was very much like the smell of ponds on Earth, with a few
dissonant olfactory notes—and more of another smell, brought from ahead
of them on a faint breeze, a sort resinous plangency and dry dustiness: a
smell of austerely dry places.

"When you first vomited," the Pezz said, "I thought you were praying and
applying holy benediction to the road-territory." The Pezz went on,
guilelessly straining Zero's patience. "That is what we do, when we vomit.
But now I understand and agree: The violation of the inner person is the
greatest territorial crime of all. My people will see to it that the mound is
exterminated. I left a scent-swatch there impregnated with a warning ... I
vomited it."

"Good," Zero grated, "glad to hear it."

Translating Zero's remarks, the box strapped to the Pezz squeaked and
trilled. The Pezz said, "The translator box uses the third degree of
semi-refined sarcasm in its tonality. I confirm it in [approximate
translation:] sorting through the hormonal content of your sweat-vapor. I
take this to mean you are annoyed: I understand. I will mention it no
further. Except to request an explanation of your attitude toward
territoriality. Your people pass in and out of one another's territorial scopes
without [untranslatable] or protective acknowledgment. I would have
thought that the territorial instinct is as universal as the survival instinct,
with which it must bear some [untranslatable] relationship."

"We have a sense of personal space and territory," Zero said, glad of the
chance to abstract things away from talk of Dennis. "But I guess it's simply
less extensive than yours. My physical sense of territory—unless you're
talking about my, you know, residence—extends only, urn, maybe twenty
inches from me."

"Mine doesn't extend from me at all," the Pezz said.

Zero looked at it, puzzled. Its rubbery, melted-dwarf face, if that was its
face, was enigmatic. When it spoke, it was like someone with a charred
sheet of rubber over his features; the rubber moved about, but you saw no
no mouth at work. The Pezz's speech sounded like someone trying to talk
to you, high-pitched, through mummy wrappings.

Zero frowned. "It sounds like ... you are your territory. The part of you the
dust from the road is settling on. That's you, to me. Is there more?"

"That's my core or reflective self, my [untranslatable] self. My exteriorized
self extends to [untranslatable] distance. That self-layer is of course
dented when other entities intersect it with their own exteriorized
self-layers."

"Uh, are you talking about some kind of bioelectric field? I read about—"

"No. I speak of a self of environmental interrelationship.''

"This sounds like it's, sort of, um, entirely psychological, to me."

The Pezz was stung. "That's an offensive remark."

"It was? Sorry. It wouldn't be for us. Listen, um—you're like, absorbing
people's vapor exudations and going through them for hormonal traces that
tell about their attitudes, and ... well, doesn't that violate our territories?"

"No. We investigate them only after they have emanated from your
outermost self."

"Oh. That's nice. I guess." He looked at the bogs. Fewer yet. "Where do
they come from?" he wondered aloud. "The bogs. I mean, there's no stream
feeding them like in a swamp. Why don't they just evaporate?"

"They come from below," the Pezz said. "I smell a big water table. I don't
know its source."

"You smell anything else—anything new?"

"Yes. A new ecosystem. A dryer place. For some time now."

"That much I can smell, too."


By late afternoon they'd left the bogs behind. They consuited the map, and
Zickorian's crude compass, and the Pezz—and set off across the veldt,
northeast, following the faint track.

The road, if that was what it was, wasn't rutted, and the ride was much
smoother. Some of the gloom that had come with Dennis's death lifted from
the company. Cisco broke out a water flask and passed it around as they
sat up straighter and looked around at the new landscape.

The plain was dotted with man-high, whip-thin, feathery growths, yellow
but coated on the windward side with blue dust. The desert reached away
to the north; behind them, to the south, were the bogs. To the west,
swallowing the horizon, was what might have been a bank of blue fog or
the edge of a forest. The veldt stretched away unbroken to the east.
"All that water back there, and then suddenly a desert," Yoshio said when
they stopped for lunch. "That is geologically peculiar. The ground rose a
little—but not very much, really."

"This ground is barren and dusty from stripping and wind exposure,"
Zickorian said, "not from lack of water. Water exists under the ground, and
it rains here. No, something has kept all but a few growths stripped away.
This land is very much like my own, and I have looked at it and known: an
animal has done this. Many such."

They went on. And after a while they were lulled to a stupor by the motion
of the cart and the dull pressure of the heat, a stupor broken only by
anxiety. The open spaces made them feel exposed, vulnerable. So by
unspoken agreement the High Clansmen drove their cart up beside the
Earthers'; the two carts trundled on side by side.

Occasionally they saw small patches of hoop-grass and something that
looked like a cheap magician's paper bouquet. And near a patch of the
magician's bouquet was what appeared at first to be great heaps of cow
manure, each as big as a car. "Looks and smells like droppings of
something," Angie said. "But..."

"It'd have to be something fuckin' big," Cisco said for her. "Like a dinosaur
or somethin'."

"It wasn't something big that left those things," Zickorian said. "They are
something big themselves." He reached into the back of the cart, picked up
a scrap of leather, and winged it at the big, crusty yellow-brown lump.

The heap humped itself and began to move away, like a misshapen
inchworm, irritably questing for a more private place in the sun. On the way
it paused and extended an oily brown pseudopod to a clump of the
hoop-grass and magician's bouquet. It uprooted the whole clump in one
easy motion, leaving a naked crater, stuffed the vegetation into some
aperture on its underside, and then went humping on to the west.

The Earthers stared—and then laughed. Laughing felt good, and Cisco, as if
to perpetuate a sort of festive sharing, passed the water flask around.

Zero drank and handed it to Yoshio. "That's good." Zero said. "But God I'd
like a beer."

"Uh-uh," Angie said, closing her eyes and sighing. "Diet Pepsi. Or better
yet, a Tab."

"Okay," Zero said. "We'll stop and get you some. Goddamn 7-11s are
everywhere."

"They don't have 7-11s here," Yoshio said. "They have Plaid Pantry."

"No, it's AM/PM here," Cisco said.
"No, they have In 'n' Out," Angie put in. "I know because I always send the
Ki-ips there to get me my Silvathins."

Zickorian tapped the translator box as if trying to restart it. "The translator
seems to be broken."

As they rolled on, they gradually became aware of a white noise that by
degrees refined itself into what Zero could only think of as "a cloud of
cheeping," the incessant cheeping of hundreds of birds.

Minutes later, as the wind died down and the skirling dust parted, they
caught sight of a big tree. It was almost twenty meters high, the tallest
thing they'd encountered on the plain. And as they neared it, Zero's heart
swelled with a warmth he knew was foolish. It was a tree, a real tree, and
in it, thronging it, were real birds. He had seen many things flapping
through the skies of Fool's Hope. Things soaring, too, and spiraling and
hovering and darting. But none had been birds.

They pulled up about thirty yards from the base of the tree and gazed at it,
the Earthers gaping. It looked like an oak tree without leaves. There was a
bird on every perching spot on every branch. They were brown birds with
rust-colored breasts, varying in size, but all apparently of the same
species.

"I've seen starlings do that on Earth," Zero said. "A huge flock of them just
pick a tree, or two together, settle in, and start yelling, go on for hours. For
no reason anyone can figure out." The sight comforted him.

"They can't have been there long," Yoshio shouted over the wall of sound.
"No guano under the tree."

The Pezz was squeaking something. They couldn't make out the translation
over the noise. Zero heard only, "Wrong smell!" Then the Pezz made a dash
at the tree, as if attacking or trying to startle the birds. He stopped short,
but it
was enough. The birds began to flap their wings—in unison. As one. Every
bird in the tree flapped in time with every other bird. And the shallowly
rooted tree—not a tree at all—lifted off from the ground. Though the birds
remained on the branches. Because, Zero saw as the tree took off, the
birds were part of the branches. They had no legs, nor even eyes. They
were fused to the thing they sat on, and if they could see, it was through
the "tree's" eye, which—golden, big as a dinner plate, and baleful—kept
watch on them from between its roots as the tree flew away.

"I'm sorry I scared it," the Pezz said. "I was testing a theory. I didn't think
it would go so far."

"No birds," Zero said. "Okay." He felt numb. "Fine. No birds."

"Fuck it," Cisco said. "Let's roll."


They camped a little early that night, in the partial shelter of an
outcropping of rock. After they made sure it really was an outcropping of
rock. The sinking sun was just beginning to turn the upper branches of the
feather trees into neon fans.

The outcropping—of basalt, thirty feet high—slanted gray-black from the
plain like three tombstones stacked one against another, each a little
smaller than the next; the great stone made a dimple in the dust where it
thrust through from the bedrock. A few smaller rocks, along the same
design, studded the dust in a rough circle curving out from the outcropping.

Zero and Yoshio sat together, their backs to the stone of the biggest
outcropping, gazing out at the decaying sunlight. The row of rocks stretched
a picket of shadows long and black on the gray-blue plain. The dust had
been swirled into wave-patterns, as if garden-raked that way. Beyond, the
horizon compressed pinwheels of dust clouds between the dirty jade sky
and the ashen ground.

"It's like a Japanese garden, sort of, isn't it?" Zero said tentatively,
glancing at Yoshio. Expecting Yoshio's refined disdain.

But Yoshio said, "Yes. The composition has come together."

"You know Yoshio, you have an accent—but your English, your sentence
structure ... actually, it's better than mine," Zero said, prying dust from his
nose and ears. Angie and Cisco were scraping dust from themselves, too,
Cisco wasting water by rinsing his eyes. The Pezz had found nothing to
forage and ate pressed vegetable matter from its supply bag. It put a
boardlike foot into the bag and drew the wafers out; the matter of its
foreleg flowed into a grasping shape so it could thrust the food into the slit
above its pouch. The High Clansmen had strolled off into the plain to
"exercise mollification of animistic deities," according to the translator box.
They had decided that the spirits investing the local
 animal life were annoyed by the expedition and needed placation.

"I was born in Japan but, after my seventh year, educated in San
Francisco," Yoshio said. "Still, most of my time out of school was spent
with Japanese, speaking Japanese. And every summer we went back to
Japan. I lived there for three years after I graduated from college. American
universities are now held in low regard in Japan—I couldn't find work I could
bear. So I came back to California to work in my father's business in Silicon
Valley. I was not happy there, either. I like to think about the—the
potential of electronics, of computers, but I grew very tired of actually
working with them on little—oh, little job puzzles all day. I wanted to make
something—something artistically meaningful."

"Funny how many people here are artists of some kind," Zero remarked.
"Not everyone. But a high percentage. Anyway, what happened after that?"

"I felt rigid. Trapped. It was as if I'd brought all the strictures of Japan here
with me. I wanted to do something different, to meet a different kind of
people. So one night I went to San Francisco, thinking maybe I could find a
place where artists congregate. Writers, poets—perhaps a coffeehouse of
some kind. I saw a sort of—it looked like a circus tent made of something
shiny and hard. It was in a lot that had been vacant the week before, near
my uncle's house. They said it was for performance art. So I went in." He
shrugged.

"I know the rest."

"I thought it was performance art right up until I lost consciousness. 'A very
clever performance,' I thought."

Angie stood up and said, "Okay, before the light's all gone, I'm gonna use
the ladies' room. Thank God for this rock. I'm going on the other side. You
guys have fair warning." She stood up and walked around the rock, out of
sight.

Cisco came to sit by Zero, grunting as he settled back against the rock. "My
back hurts. My butt hurts. There's dust between my teeth. My throat itches
from it. My eyes hurt. My—"

"We all feel that way, Cisco," Zero broke in.

"Maybe," Cisco said, "it's like Zen or something. The discipline." He looked
at Yoshio. "Right?"

Yoshio snorted. "I don't know anything about Zen."

"You seem so, uh, philosophical," Cisco said.

"There are lots of philosophies. I like to think about things, but I don't
want to be a monk. Not unless the Meta refuse to bring any more women
here."

"I'm with you there, man," Cisco said. "But whatever happens here, we got
to find a way to relate to it, you know? I mean, it's all, like, a message to
us, like stuff in dreams."

"Don't you dare!" It was Angie, shrieking in outrage from the other side of
the rock.

Zero was up with a pike in his hand and running before the other two were
on their feet. He ran around the outcropping—and stopped dead.

Seeing Zero, Angie hastily kicked dust over a hole she'd dug in the plain.
The two High Clansmen were moving in a stiff-legged dance to either side
of her. They looked like children imitating kangaroos as they danced toward
one another, then smacked their fists together and turned toward her,
making humping motions with their hips, dancing closer as she backed
toward the rock. Clamped in Zickorian's mouth was a short blue stick carved
with runes.

"I'm warning you, Zickorian!" she yelled.

Zero walked up and tapped Zickorian on the shoulder. "An emergency has
come up. You have to stop your dance."
After the translator box had done its work, Zickorian stopped dancing and
signaled Calum. Calum stopped dancing. Zickorian turned to Zero,
aggressiveness in the abrupt movement. His vision-strip flashed like a
stoplight. He took the stick from his mouth. "What emergency?''

"A danger of physical conflict between members of the expedition. Angie is
about to deck you." Zero turned to Angie. "What happened?"

She snapped, "They came up to me and started making those obscene
motions, and then Zickorian took a stick out of his satchel and started
rubbing it on my crotch!"

Zickorian replaced the stick in his pouch with one hand; with the other he
thrust a finger into a corner of his mouth, which Zero had learned expressed
puzzlement and surprise. "You mean her protestations were genuine? They
seemed to translate so exactly to the ritual protestations of the matable
female."

"She means it."

"Then why did she signal for a mating ritual? Just as we'd completed our
mollification of the animal-invested deities. That is the proper time for the
female to squat and emit musk."

"But you know perfectly well," Zero said, his voice whetted to a sharp edge,
"that we're a different race with different customs."

"Yes, but some settlement Earthers have studied our customs. I thought
she had studied our customs and was offering herself in our customary way
as an act of interracial camaraderie, such as your people speak of with such
enthusiasm."

Was there a note of sarcasm there? "So she squatted and, uh, made water,
which you thought was musk, and she did this at the wrong time, and you
thought—I see. You really think sex is possible between your race and—?"

"Zero!" Angie broke in. "Let's not explore every angle of this too thoroughly,
shall we?"

"No, I don't think it's possible," Zickorian said, "nor desirable. We were
making the ritual dance of polite disavowal."

"You were"—Zero smiled—"letting her down easy."

Angie made a grating sound deep in her throat and stomped back to the
camp.


It was night on Fool's Hope. Great shafts of blue-white light arose,
quivering faintly, from the perfectly round holes in the Rug. They stood
sharply delineated against the purple-black sky, looking like translucent
columns of quartz holding up the ceiling of lowering rose-edged clouds. The
effect was of some enormous, luminous temple just trembling into
being.

The holes punched in the smooth blue Rug-growth over the rolling plain
were perfectly round but randomly distributed, each between thirty and fifty
feet across. A gathering of Twists was taking place in the sixty-foot gap
between two of the biggest. Swanee wheeled overhead, riding the warm
updrafts. He circled the columns of IAMton light, shivering as IAMton
energies tingled his bioelectric field, exciting his Twist-grown psychic
sensitivity. It was warmer near the columns of shine, but not dangerously
hot. He held back from them because he was afraid of the interaction of the
IAMton radiation and his own mind, though he had no notion what the fruit
of that interaction might be.

Flying seemed normal and natural. He'd awakened with the wings—and the
other changes—only that morning. Almost immediately on waking he'd run
and leaped into the air, spread his wings...

And flown. It was as if he'd been doing it all his life. He had—he was one
of those people who dreamed often of flying. The dream and waking life
had overlapped.

From up here, it was possible to pretend the congregation of Twists was a
gathering of humanity, Swanee thought.

In their oddity they had become interchangeable with the aliens.
Sometimes Swanee wondered: had they become aliens, somehow? Was
there a race of creatures like Swanee somewhere?

Like Swanee: glossy black parodies of a man, with hollow bones and
rattling wings borrowed from a pterodactyl (except that those wings were
not built on the frame of degenerated arms—he had his arms still, in the
same place, but shaped differently now); with a face shaped into a leathery
muzzle, nose flattened onto upper jaw; long prehensile fingers, three to a
hand; his manhood shrunk to something that emerged from the slit at his
groin when he peed and, he supposed, when some unguessable mating
ritual with some unguessable mate triggered a more dramatic response. A
pared-back man without a gram of fat, with lean muscles and leathery black
skin stretched tightly on his light frame; a kite-man.

There were no others like him, because a Twist buried deep in his own mind
had shaped him. He knew that as surely as an angry man knows he wants
to hurt someone. He was alone. He was a Twist.

(And of course there were no aliens who had become Twists here; aliens
who'd been Twisted kept to themselves.)

But three hundred feet above the gathering of Twists, with details blurred
by distance, Swanee could pretend for a comforting moment that they were
ordinary people down there, wearing costumes. One was costumed as a
dwarf crossed with a pig; another as a man whose legs had fused into an
enormous snake's tail, so that he sat S-shaped on it; another was a bar of
flesh that flowed into this shape or that with its moods; many were Phylum
Two: great eraser-pink men grown to eight and nine feet, their muscles
swollen unnaturally, their heads shrunk, absurd caricatures of weightlifters,
naked and brutally sexed. There was a woman who was also a venomous
reptile; beside her a man with a giant snail's underside instead of legs, his
arms shrunken to pathetic flaps; there were the skate couple, a man and
woman shaped like human-flesh Mantas; there was Smarg, who weighed
nearly a ton, a human-skinned eight-legged triceratops; there were the
diaphanous vamps, like silk scarfs in the shape of women, who were lighter
even than Swanee except when they were engorged with stolen blood;
there was the inside-out man, whose intestines were also his legs, whose
heart beat visibly before you; there were the four air-sharks, held
aboveground with their pockets of helium and their constant
back-and-forthing, their wide, toothy shark-mouths open, barely restraining
themselves from tearing at their fellow Twists. There was Father, looming
over most of the others, and there was Sissy, the man who had become an
evil little girl in a white lace dress; Oliver, the former pop star, had split
into two perfected, Adonis-
like versions of himself, each as golden and perfect as the David of
Michaelangelo, each perpetually embracing the
other, obscenely posing and posingly obscene. There, too, were Pacific Bell,
Smythe-Wickerson the Newt, and Solus, who was Fiskle's prisoner: Solus of
the ecstatic wounds.

And Bella. Light in darkness, every curve a wicked invitation. The pop
apotheosis of her Twist came into its own here.

Swanee ached to paint Bella, to do a hundred portraits of her.

And the others; all of them needed to be painted. Some heraldic quality
about the Twists ... As if each was a figure from a card in an otherworldly
Tarot deck. Each a living signifier.

Swanee hung on an updraft, gazing at a watching silver sphere that bobbed
ten yards away, fifty feet over the Twists on the ground, studying the
convocation. "Why?" he asked it. Encrypted in that syllable was more he
couldn't articulate. It was something like, Am I this? Am I a man not yet
thirty, a Tennessee black man raised with a cold fury in him, a painter of
revolution in angry murals? Or am I a hollow-boned thing with wings and a
beak? An aviator, a genius of the uppers air, happiest when diving to snap
up some big-eyed tree nester, just another animal preying on the small
warm furry fauna of this world? I don't feel like Swanee Jackson. I feel like
the flying thing, the aerial elegance. Was the young artist from Tennessee
a dream? Is there a place called Tennessee?

As always, the watching ball gave no response, unless the swivel of its red
dot was a reply.

The Twists were standing in a circle now, facing inward to Fiskle. The
shivering columns of IAMton light looming beside them threw their
shadows, twisted and uneasy, onto Fiskle, like an ecliptic benediction. From
up here Kelso, sitting on Fiskle's shoulder, looked like a second head. But
he was a living skull. Now Kelso saw Swanee looking at him; he looked up
and croaked in his puerile jeer, "Swanee, big black bug, come down and
play for the boss, he's calling you, and if you don't come, you stink like a
seagull, one o' them seagulls in tar, yuh dirty dirty thing!"

"Yes, for the sake of your Consummation, Swanee," Fiskle said in his
rolling, Shakespearean tones, "do come down."

No.

Swanee saw Fiskle's face catch the light as he looked upward. The metal of
his camera-lens eyes gleamed dully; the glass of those lenses glinted
sharply.

There was no change of expression on Fiskle's mannequin face; there never
was. But Fiskle was summoning Swanee. Who felt the tugging. Swanee
held back, back-peddling in mid-air a few meters to diminish the tugging.
Remaining aloof...

Swanee knew that as the kite-man he could stay out of reach, safe from
most of the aliens and everyone else. Safer, he had reasoned on some
cellular level, than a turtle. He could stand back and paint—mentally, if not
physically. Artfully distancing, as he had always done.

"Join us."

Swanee shook his head and thought, No.

Joining Fiskle's congregation meant conscription into war.

"Apart from Swanee, there is only one other," Fiskle said, aloud and
mentally. "And they are arriving now."

They, in this case, meant only one. That would be El Chingadero.

Swanee soared lower, to look. He loathed seeing El Chinga, but, like a
rubbernecker at a car accident, he had to look. There she was. He was.
They were.

The woman, under, was almost dead. It was a shame she'd gone Twist,
with so few women in the settlement. (He chided himself for this disloyal
thought.) She was Guatemalan, a dark, handsomely stocky woman, once
quite pretty, before the draining had begun.

El Chinga looked, just now, like a naked woman with a naked man on her
back. The man, though, was not quite there. He was a thing of transparent
blue filminess, an apparition, naked and lean and the perpetual picture of
lust. His face like a comic parody of Pan. Clinging to her inextricably.
Fucking her from behind. Endlessly. Day and night without ceasing. She
could not shake him—he was as substanceless as a hologram, if you tried
to touch him. But he was not really without substance. He grew more
substantial every day, as she grew weaker. He drained her, as if his ghostly
penis were a vampire's fang, and after a few days of his presence she was
bent, hunchbacked, shriveling, aging. On her face was weary horror and
weary disgust and weary despair. But she had grown this thing herself,
somehow. Some
brutality endured in her past had planted this thing in her, Swanee
supposed. The glimmering white thing on her back kept humping, humping,
gasping happily ... Soon she would be dead. The humping thing would find
someone else, and it would not care if they were male or female.

El Chingadero joined the circle of Twists. Swanee could not see how this
Twist could be of any use to Fiskle. Except perhaps—judging from Kelso's
caper of delight—as entertainment value.

"Swanee," Fiskle said, "you will come ... We'll let it go, for a few minutes."

Swanee circled just fifty feet over Fiskle's group, spiraling up and down,
looking now at Solus.

Solus squirmed at Fiskle's feet. "Solus's childish self-indulgence," Fiskle
announced, sounding theatrically pompous and yet ringingly convinced of
himself, "has acted in a sort of personality alchemy to change him, to
debase him from gold into lead. And here he squirms. Look at what has
become of him ... what the Meta have made him."

"It was you. You have ... done this to me," Solus croaked. "Only because I
spoke up." He was so pale, his skin was almost blue; he was naked and
shivering, but not from cold. He was a pudgy, round-faced man, more
resembling a dog now as he lay on his back, his arms and legs in the air
like a submissive beast, his belly exposed, panting, whimpering
accusations. "You influenced the Current. Your mind." His voice was garishly
pathetic. As if he wanted them to revile him for his weakness. "You did this
to me ... because I fought you. Because I spoke with the aliens." His face
contorted as the anguish of transformation lanced through him.

Fiskle droned, "What has happened to you is the judgment of the Current.
The Meta brought us for the Splendid Conflict. To decimate the Lower
Aliens, to demonstrate our fittingness to survive and blossom in greater
and greater Twist Frees. You defied the Meta; your defiance has taken you
to Phylum Three: the living communion wafer."

"Don't!"

But he didn't fight Fiskle—couldn't, somehow—as Fiskle bent over him and
placed his hands in the wounds on Solus's belly.

The wounds had not been cut there. They appeared in his skin on their own.
Each big as a hand, but releasing no blood or intestines, only a slow ooze
of pink mucus. Before his fall from grace, when one of the other Twists, at
the behest of Solus, had placed his hand in the stigmatic slit, Solus had
writhed with a jolt of pleasure—some of which overflowed into the Twist
touching him.

But he had changed after his rebellion against Fiskle. Now, crueler wounds
had appeared on him, everywhere but his head, and they gave out slow
leaks of blood: they gave a powerful pleasure to the toucher but rewarded
Solus with deep, sickening hurt.
Father's soft thrumming grew louder, like a call to mass, and the crowd
gathered around Solus, kneeling, looking up at Fiskle, who squatted behind
Solus's head, and like Fiskle they thrust their hands into his wounds, so
that he howled and writhed, and they shuddered with pleasure. And more:
they were communing with one another through the medium of Solus's
nervous system, using his neural pathways as their psychic telephone
system.

Swanee fought a down-draft of temptation. Father's call was strong; the
psychic tantalization from Solus was strong. Bella was there, and Swanee
could perhaps commune with her through Solus.

But he held back, almost hovering overhead, clinging to his repugnance.
Watching as Fiskle removed a hand from Solus's neck and reached instead
to touch his victim's scalp in the center of his cranium. The skin parted like
curtains, blood the applause; the skull cracked and shivered apart. (Swanee
alighted on the ground. Was drawing near. Fighting it, but drawing nearer,
slow step by slow step. The soundless music resonated with the contents
of the secret black box he kept locked away in his heart.) Fiskle reached
into the other's brain, between the lobes; Solus began to shake
and foam at the mouth. Kelso scampered down Fiskle's arm, leaped to
Solus's face and perched there, thrusting his tongue into a cleft that
appeared in place of an eye. Kelso giggled.

Fiskle spoke as his hand moved lovingly in the exposed brain, as he rocked
on his hands and knees, murmuring what began as a dry dissertation and
then devolved into a bellowed declaration of messianic destiny:

"The revelation of a global Overmind presence has made a wreckage of my
old assumptions. And then allowed me to fuse them into something new.
The old principles were true: that people are biological machines to be
programmed by reward and punishment; that Social Darwinism is the path
to sociological and biological betterment. That here the struggle with the
lower aliens is the congruence of that path. But a third truth has been
vouchsafed me, children. The third truth is the Overmind, which uses the
principles of behavioral programming and Social Darwinism as the cutting
tools on its lathe."

His voice, booming now, charged with feeling, came faster and faster. "And
the Overmind's raw stuff is intuition, and the emotional self—things I
denied myself all my life. The realm behind the hidden doors. And lo! The
door opens, and I see into the overrealm, the landscape of my own
intuition, and I enter and range there, and I permit the wild horse of my
emotions to gallop where it will over this landscape. And wherever the wild
horse roams, it carries me, and wherever I ride I have, one in each hand,
the tools: the scepter of reward and the scythe of punishment. And those
who do precisely and absolutely and unquestionably as I direct: those are
rewarded. And those who spurn me are
punished!"

And so saying he squeezed Solus's brain in his fingers like a soft fruit. So
that everyone communing felt Solus's death, felt him pass, and glimpsed
the demolishing infinity he was sucked into. And—as Fiskle
intended—perceived Fiskle as Death's doorman.

"Do you feel the Overmind running through us?" Fiskle asked them in
hushed tones that buzzed with his awakened charisma.

Swanee knelt now beside Bella, whimpering as he fumbled for a gash in the
still-spasming body of Solus, probing for what little bioelectricity remained
in it for him.

Fiskle shouted, "Can you feel it?"

"Yes!" came the response, as one.

"I look at the horizon," Fiskle said breathlessly, looking to the east, "and I
see the Frost rising in the sky. And at the opposite horizon the hourglass
moon of the Meta. And overhead? One of the Meta's watchers, hovering. Is
there any mistaking these signs? These are benedictions. They are beyond
argument. They identify me, fully and forever." When Fiskle looked back at
them, he was more than Fiskle as he cried out in a voice that was half
bellow and half whinny, "Do you know who I am? I am the Emperor!"

There was no question about it. Swept away by his lunatic charisma;
stoned on Solus's nervous system; inspired by the cathedral presence of
the great shimmering colunms of light around them, a temple of luminosity
Fiskle had invoked into being himself; struck by the miraculous witnessing
of the Frost and the Meta's silver sphere—they were convinced. "You are
the Emperor!"

"In this great ball of chaos, I am harmony. I am the unifier, the theme, the
needle that sews the patchworks into the safe blanket of society. I am the
Emperor of of Harmony. I AM EMPEROR HARMONY!"

"YOU ARE THE EMPERORI"

"I am," Fiskle said softly. "And I will bring Harmony to Fool's Hope. If I
have to kill everyone to do it."

"You are the Emperor!"

In that moment, Swanee knew that Fiskle, the Emperor Harmony, would
lead them into killing and being killed. That their commitment to devotion
would lead them into catastrophe; that the consecration of their lives to
the Emperor Harmony was a disaster, the signpost of suffering.

But it was a perfect thing in itself; the watching ball above; the columns of
light; the circle of Twists; the constellation they called the Frost; the
bloody communion through Solus; the contrived symmetry of Fiskle's
child-vivid megalomaniacal symbols; the reveling in Fiskle's operatic
excess: all the elements of their improbable situation had come together
into a composition. And the composition was the reason for all of it.

Swanee was sure of it: that the Meta had brought him to this world for this
moment, and this moment alone.


                                 *6*
The dust plain was beginning to change. It had diversified with shrubs and
trees, and they saw no more of the ground-stripping heaps of fetid brown.
But there were long, segmented chitinous things that moved sinuously
away through the blue brush-tipped grasses on what appeared to be tiny
tank treads; there were furry creatures hopping like lame bats and
spreading what looked like batwings. But the wings were not for flying,
they were sticky blue membranes for catching small flying creatures; the
batwings were portable spider webs. Mice with tentacles instead of legs
swung from twig to twig in what Zero called puzzle trees. The puzzle trees
were grown into shapes that made Zero think of the Find Your Way Through
The Maze! puzzles he'd worked in the Sunday papers as a boy.

Still, that sun-baked afternoon, the trees were spaced well apart from one
another, and the meager groundcover was no impediment. The carts
trundled through grass and over beachball-size fungal pods that burst into
dun clouds, breaking with a sound that was a good imitation of a human
voice, the husky voice of a drunk middle-aged man going down a child's
slide: "Wheee-eee-eee. Umph." That was exactly the sound they made
when run over, many times a day. "Wheee-eee-eee. Umph.
Wheee-eee-eee. Umph." A minute or two later, "Wheee-eee-eee. Umph."

Zero rode beside Angie in the lead cart. She slowed the oruh as they came
to a patch of rocky ground. The wheels protested as they crunched and
clacked over the scree. "Those wheels are going to break soon," Angie
muttered.

"We could ride the oruh if we had to, taking turns maybe," Zero said.

"They're already getting weak. We ran out of bugs on the dust plain. Maybe
we'll find a nice patch of bugs to feed 'em."

Zero said, "I need a break from this heat. You think you could steer us
more into the shade?"

"I'll try, but there isn't much of it. I remember when me and my mom and
dad were driving through the Mojave Desert and we ran out of gas out
there. My mom blamed Dad, Dad blamed Mom. My dad insisted that Mom
and I had to crouch in the shade of the car while Dad tried to flag people
down. It was so hot and the shade kept getting smaller. Finally Mom got up
and kind of took over. She always had to take over for him. Or thought she
did. I think that's why they got divorced—she wouldn't let him be in charge
of things—God, I'm really chattering."

"Why shouldn't you?" he said, smiling. "I like to hear you talk. You didn't
say much for the first week out here."

"I guess it's all coming out now. I was—I wasn't adjusted to being on the
expedition till, I guess, after Dennis got killed. Then, like you said, even if
I hate to admit it, you either have to turn back or resign yourself. If it
happens, it happens. It wasn't all that much different on Earth. It wasn't
usually a matter of life and death, but there was always some bullshit
problem springing at you out of, I don't know, the undergrowth of life. That
sounds corny, but—"
"Sounds about right to me."

"And my morn would say, 'If you lose, you lose. Just don't turn your back on
it or you'll end up a scared housewife hiding behind a man.' "

"Your morn was a feminist, sort of, huh?"

"Not sort of. She wrote papers about the sociology of sexism, sexist
conditioning, sexist institutionalism. And my sister had already gone over
to the other camp—'a bovine housewife,' my mother said. So I had to be
the perfect little feminist for my mom." She looked guiltily at Zero and
hastily added, "Not that I wasn't into it. I was. I am. Women have to
struggle. It's hard to break out of that much—that much history. You do
have to kind of be an asshole about it, sometimes, to get free. But my
mom—she was never satisfied. I had to be the shining example for
Womanhood ... And dating, God—she let me wear some makeup and
jewelry and date a little, but she made me feel like I had to watchdog
everything the guy said and did. And I did—and it discouraged them. And
then I had to go see my dad, and he was trying to get me away from my
morn, mostly to spite her. He was always pressuring me to cooperate with
his lawyer, to testify that she was too strict, that she was driving me
crazy."

"Sounds like a lot of pressure all the time. From both sides."

"It was. I was scared when I woke up on Fool's Hope—but there was some
relief, too, to be away from all that pressure. Till the settlers started in on
me."

He glanced at her. She was staring grimly at a tree they were slowly
passing. Something that looked like a dead, eviscerated six-legged monkey
lay on its back on a bough of the tree, wedged in a crotch between two
branches. Its belly had been slashed open, and the edges of the torn flesh
were beginning to curl with decay.

A creature like a small leathery kite was doing a figure eight in the air over
the dead monkey-thing. It had a series of lamprey-mouths on its tubular
torso, under the wing membrane. Zero had seen the lamprey kites feeding
on other carrion; they were the local scavengers. It made up its mind and
settled down over the exposed guts of the monkey-thing—which closed over
it with a snap. The monkey's rib cage snapped shut like a bear trap over
the scavenger, crushing it. The monkey-thing sat up and began grooming
itself as it digested the scavenger in its fake wound.

"Oh," Angie said, "that's it. I wondered why there weren't any of those
spiral bugs on the dead animal." She went on absently. "I was going to go
and get some for the oruhs." She shook her head ruefully. "I can't believe
I'm actually thinking of scraping bugs off dead animals to feed to another
animal. Yuck. Weird, the stuff you get used to."

Zero glanced in the back of the cart at Yoshio. "Hey, Yoshio—you see that
one?"
Yoshio, writing on bark strips with a piece of sharpened, spongy stick
dipped in homemade ink, nodded distractedly. "I'm calling it a trap-monkey.
Not very imaginative, but thinking of names for animals is exhausting after
the first two-thousand."

They were quiet for a while. The trees, it seemed to Zero, were thickening,
and the ground was becoming more uneven, was generally rising.

Not looking at Angie, carefully casual, Zero asked, "What kind of pressure
are the settlers here putting on you? You mentioned, uh—"

She snorted. "What do you think? They want sex. And babies. They say it's
babies. They say, 'Hey, sweetheart, come onnnn—we have to survive here
as a species!' That sort of thing. Just before I left, there was a story going
around that the Meta brought us here because there's going to be a war on
Earth and everyone there'll be killed so this is our chance to preserve our
species. But if they did that, why all these other species? Why the High
Clans and the others? They all having World War III, too?"

"Everybody's"—he began, and then she chimed in and they finished it
together—"got a theory."

He laughed. More soberly, he asked, "Hey, how much pressure they put on
you? Anyone try to force the issue?"

"With Jamie prez? No way. Punishment for rape is expulsion. But I've been
argued with, snubbed, urged, fondled, drooled on, wheedled, lied to, and
once, dry-humped. If I want to have a goddamned baby, I'll decide to do it
myself."

"Yeah. Especially here. No hospitals. No surgeons. One doctor—and he was
only a med student—and one nurse. If there are complications—"

"Even if the delivery comes off okay, there's still the question, do I want to
raise a baby on this godforsaken planet?"

"Why a baby when I can't trust anyone?" The voice was flung at them from
the high grass nearby. A cruel parody of Angie's voice.

Angie's head jerked toward the brush, and she took her foot off the oruh,
which stopped moving and looked questioningly over its shoulder.

The cart behind them stopped. Zickorian shouted. and they dimly heard the
translator say, "What is the problem?"

Yoshio was sitting up, looking around. "I heard it, too."

Another voice from the brush, this time a parody of Yohio's. "It sounded
mocking..." And the rest of the phrase was in Japanese.

"It read my mindl" Yoshio burst out. "That's what I was thinking!"
Angie said tentatively, "I think I was thinking that the real problem with
having a baby is trusting people on Fool's Hope." She added under her
breath as she looked around, frowning, "There isn't much social convention
keeping people responsible."

Another voice from the brush, this time mocking Cisco's. "The spirits of this
planet are finally showing up in person!"

Cisco squeaked, "Jesus!"

At the same moment the voice said, "Jesus!"

Another voice, imitating Zero's, said, "Let's get out of here!" just as Zero
said it himself.

The carts moved off as fast as they could go, which was about twice as fast
as walking.

"Shit, this's just what I need when I'm hungry and my ass hurts and my
head hurts I need some fucking sunglasses in this sun and then this
asshole voice—" A mix of Angie and Zero's voices.

A parody of Cisco's voice: "God, the spirits sound hostile, oh shit, listen
spirits, don't—"

"Fuck, what if it reads my mind about Angie and then says something—oh
God! It's doing it!"

Angie glanced at Zero at that one and then looked quickly away. Zero
flinched.

More voices, from elsewhere in the brush, spoke in Zickorian's languge and
the squeaking of the Pezz. Now and then one of the voices said,
"Oroooooooooh!"

The Pezz trotted up beside Zero and said, "I think I know what they are—"
It broke off as the carts emerged from the area of thicker brush into an
extensive clearing. Something bounded from the brush nearby, pacing them.
It looked like a scorpion, but with a chitin-covered ratlike head, and it was
the size of a smallish kangaroo; it moved like a kangaroo, bounding on hind
legs. Its segmented tail ended in a sort of spiral scoop that took a
right-angle turn halfway down so it was pointed sideways, at the
expedition.

More of them bounded from the brush, eight in all, pacing the carts
effortlessly. Unnervingly, the voices came from the creatures' mouths. Their
faces were permanent expressions of mockery; their mouths curved into
sneers as they spat back bits and pieces of their thoughts at them. "I'd like
to blast one of those little fuckers, but there's no telling what its buddies
might do ... God, I want to stop and crap, but I can't with those things
hanging around ... What the hell are they doing this for?" Snatches of
Japanese. Like turning a dial through radio stations.
The Pezz said, "They are mind-echoers. My people have encountered them
before. They haven't got much mind of their own."

"What the hell are they trying to accomplish?" Zero asked.

"What do they hope to get from this?" came the mocking summary of his
thoughts.

"We don't know," the Pezz said. "Some method for warning others from
their territory, no doubt."

"You would give it that interpretation," Zero said.

"Damn Pezz think everything's related to—"

"Shit!"

"Shit!"

"How do we—"

"get rid of" "the little fuckers?"

"Form mental images of devouring them alive," Yoshio suggested. "Picture
it strongly!"

They did just that. They pictured it very strongly. Zero imagined himself
dismembering the things and eating them like pieces of soft-shell crab.

A squeal like feedback burst from the mind-echoers, and they bounded
away, flinging, "Good riddance, you little fuckers!" back at them.

They saw no more of them.


The carts continued on a track that thinned to a trickle of definition and
finally dried up. Navigating with compass and the Pezz's mind-map, they
bore doggedly north. The ground continued to rise. The oruh were showing
strain; foam flecked their beaks, and progress slowed so much that the
expeditioners found it quicker to climb down from the carts and walk beside
them.

Great, improbably dense clouds moved in from the north, staking out every
corner of the sky with a brooding ceiling of blue-black overcast. The weighty
cloud cover looked as if it were poised to topple. It admitted light sparsely,
so that the shadows multiplied into blue-tinted gloom. The expedition felt
the tension of an impending storm, and the strange, unnaturally dense look
of the clouds seemed to suggest that a strange, unnatural release was
impending.

When afternoon was fraying into dusk, they topped a rise and found
themselves descending into a misty, thickly forested valley. The main body
of the forest was below them, with the details of its purple and indigo
foliage lost behind silvery veils of mist. As they approached it, the
expedition grew quiet. All that was known about this forest was that not
much was known about it.

The clouds rumbled overhead as the expedition zig-zagged down the
hillside, guiding the oruh carefully to keep them from slipping. Warm mist
deepened around them; it dewed the wrinkly, livid blossoms of a vine that
choked the puzzle trees; it bowed the feather trees and pooled in the
cupped leaves of more stunted varieties of growth; it rose into steam on
the flanks of the weary oruh.

The slope bottomed out onto the valley floor, and they emerged into a
small clearing. The ground was cracked and oddly exposed here. On the far
side of the clearing was the apparently impenetrable edge of the forest. In
the center of the clearing was a great fallen tree, rotten now, and in the
broad cracks of its trunk wriggled thumb-sized roach-things of shiny brown
and pasty white. The oruh bellowed happily, and their drivers let them
browse to contentment on the things in the rotting trunk. The crunching of
the roach-things in their beaks was sickening; to escape it, Angie and Zero
took a short walk to the edge of the forest.

"Maybe we should camp here tonight," Angie said, looking at the forest,
hugging herself.

"Probably. God knows we should be fresh before plunging in there. It'll be
dark soon."

"It'll be wet before it's dark," said someone just inside the forest. Zero
could see him—or her—moving in there, but it was hard to make them out
clearly. It was like trying to see someone wearing cammies that fit the
foliage. The voice sounded familiar, though.

"Who is it?" Angie called nervously.

She was no more nervous than Zero. He whispered, "Maybe you should run
and get the blunderbuss."

There—Zero saw it again. A man-shape, just an outline, shadow in shadow.
Coming closer. Zero tensed. And then the man stepped out into the
clearing: Jack the Baptist. Grinning at them. Filthy. His hair matted with
twigs. A worm crawled through his grimy bangs. His face was streaked with
sweaty grime and the purple ooze of plant sap. He wore torn buckskin and,
still smiling, reached into his shirt and plucked what looked like a gray lump
of fungus from it. One end of the thing was sticky with the Baptist's blood.
He tossed the thing playfully from hand to hand, then over his
shoulder—and kicked it away on his heel.

"How the hell did you get—" Zero began.

Angie interrupted, "Are you on foot, or—I mean, how did you—?"

"I've been here all day waiting for you," Jack the Baptist said. "I came
cross-country, and I walk faster than your carts move. I had some things to
look into before I could join you."

"You were waiting for us?" Zero asked. "How'd you know we'd come exactly
this way? There isn't a trail anymore."

"I had word you were coming. I could feel the funneling.'' He seemed bored
with explanations. He looked past them at Yoshio and Cisco, walking up
from the carts. "You've lost Dennis, I understand. A sadness. He was one of
the nicer people here."

"Yeah," Cisco said, ogling Jack. "He was. You follow us here?"

"No, I came ahead. Something else followed you."

They stared at him. The clouds rumbled.

He went on placidly, looking at the clouds. "It's about forty feet behind
me."

They looked and saw nothing but an intricately patterned wall of foliage,
dense with the promise of approaching night.

"Keep looking," he said, reaching behind him. His hand closed over the long
yellow Pinocchio's nose of a plant jutting from the wall of undergrowth. He
pushed it down as if it were a lever. Just exactly as if it were a lever.

In one place, the foliage parted as if it were a curtain. Just exactly as if it
were a curtain. For one startled second, a being was revealed, a human
become marsupial: black-furred, chinless, lank, stretched between two tree
limbs, its long, black, pad-tipped fingers grasped the upper limb, its long
black toes wrapped around the lower; its enormous perfectly round golden
eyes gazed at them in unblinking apprehension. It wore an old U.S. Army
belt and the shreds of an army jacket.

Then it bared its teeth, hissing, and a virulently orange ruff stood out on its
head in warning. It turned and melted into the undergrowth. The curtain of
plants closed.

"That was one of the first Twists," Jack observed. "It works for Fiskle now."

Zero gaped at him. "How did you—I mean, you pulled that almost like a
lever. Is this some kind of sham forest? It's mechanical, or—or what?"

Angie stepped past Jack and pushed the yellow blossom downward. Nothing
happened. She stepped back, brushing yellow pollen off her hands, and
looked expectantly at him. "Well?"

"I have a certain rapport with the natural world," Jack said, shrugging. The
sky rumbled, louder this time. "Maybe that was my stomach," Jack
murmured. "I'm kind of hungry. Got anything to eat?"

"Yes, please come and join us," Yoshio said.
"Wait a minute," Zero said. "I want to know how you—"

Suddenly Jack looked sharply at the sky. "Uh-oh," he said.

The clouds burst. The deluge came down as if it were all of a piece, one
solid thing that fell on them from an enormous aerial trap door, a tidal
wave AWOL from the sea.

They cried out as they were smashed to the ground, flattened facedown by
the thundering downpour. They coughed, sputtered for air, drowning; watery
hands pushed them down into instant mud. Zero saw blood curl away from
his face. The weight of the rain had bloodied his nose against the ground.

The environment had been transformed in a split-second. It was as if they
were instantly underwater. But it wasn't water or, anyway, not only water.
It was ... glutinous. Transparent but thick. It was like mineral oil, Zero
thought, forcing himself to his knees, but a little thicker. Like a liquified
slug. It smelled like a living thing. And almost like chicken soup.

It moved like a living thing, too. It gathered itself into wormlike threads
and slid over his limbs, over the ground, back onto his limbs, searching,
moving up his sides, against gravity, making tiger stripes on him with its
questing.

It wasn't quite like being underwater, he found once he had got to his
knees. He could breathe a little now.

But the baritone white noise of its downpour filled all the world. He gasped,
looking for Angie, almost blinded by the stuff. He saw her, a gray blur a
yard or two away, and he crawled toward her on his hands and knees. The
wet hammering on his back made every movement a bone-creaking effort.
He reached for her, but with one hand lifted he was off balance and the
weight of the deluge flattened him again.

As abruptly as it had begun, the pressure let up. The rain slackened. Some
of the murk cleared away, and he made out Yoshio and Jack and Angie
pushing up from the sucking mud, squinting at the sky. Zero looked up and,
blinking away the last of the rain, saw that the cloud cover was edged with
a rippling aurora of light, the Northern Lights imported from Earth, fringing
the clouds like ornament on an eiderdown blanket. And then the blanket
tore itself into shreds: the cloud cover fragmented and began—not to drift
away, but to disintegrate, dissolving into nothingness, evaporating in
fast-forward. Cracks of luminous emerald sky shone through and expanded.

More rain fell, as if released when the clouds disintegrated. But it fell
fitfully; it was little more than a drizzle, and less glutinous. It washed
away some of the translucent stickiness that coated the Earthers. They
stood and staggered to the carts. No one was badly hurt. Two bloody
noses, some bruises. Jack the Baptist was sniggering, shaking his head,
wagging a finger at the sky. The Pezz had smelled it coming, and had
hidden under a cart. The High Clansmen had followed his cue.

Everything smelled almost of chicken soup. The forest around the clearing
was sagging in spots, looking like cooked spinach in purple food dye, badly
beaten by the sudden weight of the deluge. Mist rose thickly from it now;
the bushes rustled, fussily rearranging themselves. Expanding, unfolding,
shaking dry.

With the clouds' breaking up, the evening's darkness retreated a little,
giving the illusion of time reversed. Zero thought of a film run backward. It
grew lighter for the space of half an hour as they set up their tents, running
them between the carts and the tent poles. Jack squatted nearby, not
lifting a finger to help them.

"It was water and amino acids, I think," Jack was explaining to Yoshio.
"Building blocks of life. A specialized local variety. The local ecology needs,
ah, periodic transfusions of it, like plasma for the wounded." He beamed at
them. "You were baptised in it. It was none of my doing, but I rejoice
anyway."

The ground steamed. The rainbow-coated puddles shifted and squirmed like
amoebas, recombining in a two-dimensional dance, a waltz in Flatland.

Zickorian and Calum set up their own tents. They were silent, seeming
glum and withdrawn. From time to time they stole glances at Jack, and
Zero thought perhaps they mistrusted him. Perhaps they were wondering if
he was someone else to split the booty with when they reached the
Progress Station.

"You know what?" Cisco said, tying a knot. "I feel good."

Zero nodded. "Me, too. Kind of exhilarated."

"The amino rains are good for you," the Baptist said. "Like Flintstone
Vitamins or Post Raisin Bran." He giggled.

"Oh, no, what the hell?" Angie said, pointing at the ground. "Oh, no. Really.
I've had enough for today."

The ground erupted. They were small eruptions, where the glutinous,
transparent puddles had reached out pseudopods of themselves, the rain
puddles nosing into the ground, searching, blindly seeking...

In response, the ground spat mud as something pushed up from beneath,
making room for itself. It was a thing like a square peg with four faces, one
on each of its four sides. They were slimy ochre toadlike faces with a
circular arrangement of transparent-lidded yellow eyes above each twitching
muzzle. The peg emerged a few inches from the ground—and split apart,
into four identical creatures, each of its four sides going a different way,
like a hideous flower opening. More of the things erupted all over the
clearing. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Each one made a noise like winding an
alarm clock as it split apart. Where seconds before the ground was nearly
barren, now life was boiling, spreading itself feverishly; the basin of the
clearing was swarming with slimy things crawling away in four directions
from each hole, crawling on cilia-coated undersides and making the
maddening ratcheting sounds, leaving a complex crisscrossing of slime-lines
on the clearing's floor. They were heading for the brush, on all sides. They
moved steadily as the expedition watched, afraid to move, and in minutes
the clearing was almost empty of them.

"It's the rain, you know," the Baptist yawned, lying down to sleep by the
fire that the High Clansmen had built. "Always happens like this."

As darkness fell, the forest came alive with millions of minute awakenings
and transformations. A festival of metamorphosis was triggered by the
living rain. Sitting by the fire, Zero felt himself open up to the forest's
internal ryhthms. "It's biological party time," Zero said, listening to the
rising uproar of rattles, ratchetings, shrieks, whistles, pops, hoots, and
WHOPs. In the distance something said, "Hey! Hey-hey-hey!"

The sounds came in a sequence and a rhythm, like a song. Rattle shriek
whistle pop whoo!-whop hey-hey-hey! (Begin again.) Rattle shriek whistle
pop whoo!-whop hey-hey-hey! (One more time.) Rattle shriek whistle pop
whoo!-whop hey-hey-hey!

Carried on a wave of exhilaration—maybe from the effects of the unearthly
aminos, maybe from a need to release some of the accumulated tension of
the journey—Zero stood and shuffled into a dance. He moved to the rhythm
of the animal sound sequence, singing along. The Earthers laughed. Zero
pulled Angie to her feet, and they danced around the fire, laughing, singing,
"Rattle shriek (they whistled, popped their cheeks) whoo! (clapped their
hands for whop) hey-hey-hey!" Rattle shriek whistle pop whoo!-whop
hey-hey-hey!

The High Clansmen watched respectfully what they assumed was a ritual of
animistic communing. The Pezz sensed the fun of it and gamboled about
them like a spring lamb, rising to its hind legs so Zero and Angie could take
its front legs in their hands and...

Large, perfectly round golden eyes watched them from the forest.

Rattle shriek whistle POP Who! hey-hey-hey! (one more time.) Rattle shriek
whistle POP.


Swanee heard the beating heart of the small warm furry thing. He heard the
furry thing before he saw it. Then, spiraling lower in the light of the Frost
and the hourglass moon, he spotted the warm furry thing swinging from
branch to branch. It was hamster-size (or ham sandwich-size, he thought,
for he was hungry), and it had one eye and little whipping tentacles instead
of arms and legs. It used them to swing from twig to twig like a tiny spider
monkey. He could hear the quick purr of its heart, could smell its
warm-blooded essence. His mouth watered, and he dove for it, letting his
new instincts take over. His claws moved of their own accord and snatched
the thing from its perch. It squeaked once before he drove a talon through
its faltering heart, and then he popped it into his mouth. It had a
salty-fruity taste, and its life-essence, as it left the body and filtered
between his teeth, luxuriating over his tongue, gave the morsel extra
savor.
Swanee's wings reached for air, and he climbed above the trees. Licking
blood from his talons, he prepared for another pass over the little woods,
looking for another living sweetmeat.

"Swanee, my child. Come along."

It was Fiskle. No—the Emperor Harmony now. Swanee heard the summons
with a mixture of fear and childlike happiness. He banked and angled for
the gulley in the land-coral, two miles away.

He found the Emperor Harmony sitting on a Phylum Two in front of his den,
that living hole in the ground. The exaggeratedly muscled Phylum Two was
on his hands and knees, a human bench, padded with beefcake,
uncomplaining and unwavering. Elbow on his knee and chin on his fist, the
Emperor sat in the pose of the Thinker. The Frost was screwed into the
glass and metal of his camera-lens eyes, and the moonlight filtered
prismatically through the enormous diamond pinky-ring he'd acquired. (From
where?) His suit had changed, too. It had become glossy black silk. Or what
looked like it. There was a broad red silk ribbon across his chest, such as
royalty wore at embassy parties, and an emerald stickpin on his tie (white
silk now), shaped like a crown.

Bella was lolling like a sated panther at the Emperor's feet. Her sickly glow
softly illuminated the Emperor and his charges, tingeing everyone a watery
green. And softly the land-coral sang its alien chorale to the Emperor.
Oliver, the self-cloned pop star, naked and fantasy-beautiful, was
embracing himself just behind his liege, like an ornate back to Harmony's
throne. The diaphanous vamps, weightless human jellyfish of the air, were
dancing six feet off the ground to either side of the Emperor, magic-colored
in the starlight, like living curtains to frame his throne. Father stood behind
and to one side of the throne, like a eunuch guard. The air-sharks cruised in
wide circles around it, moving in
opposite directions, passing one another with the monomaniacal grace of
beings streamlined for predation. They were the first line of protection for
the Emperor. In the Emperor Harmony's pose, in his theatrical regality, was
the message, All of Fool's Hope is my throne room.

Swanee fluttered down to alight before him, going to one knee, his head
bowed, as he knew was expected. "My
Emperor, my essence is yours."

"What do you think?" the Emperor asked mischievously, sitting up straight
and gesturing at the array of Twistflesh around him. "Wait till you see the
palace I'm going to build. Then you'll see some self-indulgence. I intend to
live every fantasy I denied myself as a boy. I lost my boyhood, you know,
raised as I was ... Well, that is neither here nor there."

His eyes whirring, the Emperor reached down to the corpse of a wheeler
lying beside his stoic, breathing throne and dipped two fingers into the
wheeler's exposed brain. Then he ate the blue brainstuff straight from his
fingers, like a Hawaiian with poi. Climbing up Harmony's back, Kelso came
to rest on the Emperor's shoulder, gnashing his skull teeth, sniggering,
eyes glowing pink-red.

"Disturbing news reaches me," Harmony said, looking affectionately at
Kelso but talking to Swanee. "I am in rapport with Goldeneyes, who informs
me that the cross-species expedition, that diplomatic miscegeny, has won
past the brain termites. I awoke the termites myself with a ripple and felt
them take one of the expedition—the little cockney fellow, Dennis—and I
felt sure the others would fall to them, too. But they didn't. They're at the
edge of the forest, and they have a guide now, this Jack the Baptist
creature."

"That's a drag, my Emperor," Swanee conceded. He was looking at Bella,
who gazed tauntingly back at him in full knowledge of his hopeless
devotion. Swanee hoped he didn't have bloody fur on his mouth.

"I need to contact someone out there, Swanee dear," the Emperor was
saying languidly. "A group of aliens going after the very same Progress
Station. I'd like to tip them off about the Earther competition. They might
just do something about that competition. Especially if I tell them that the
Earthers plan to do something about them."

Kelso crooned, "So creative, so, oh soooo creative!"

Pleased, the Emperor paused and turned to Kelso and made kissing noises
at him, like an old lady with a parakeet. Kelso snuggled up closer to his
Emperor's nearly changeless face. The Emperor turned to gaze at Swanee
now, saying, "My agent, unfortunately, is too deep in the forest to contact.
It's a sentient place, that forest, and its interference is impassable. So I
need a sort of communications satellite. You."

The temperature of Swanee's blood dropped twenty degrees. "No. If I
understand you, Emperor, I cannot—"

"You do. You will. You'll take to the air, fly partway to the forest. Nearby
the forest are the aliens. I'll send my ripple to you, and you'll transmit it to
the aliens. We'll tip them off. With any luck—and who is luckier than the
living God?—they will kill the infidels. These aliens are a fierce bunch and
will probably torture them first. I'd like to see them torture this Zero, and
the Baptist ... but even I cannot have everything. Not yet." His voice was
sticky with affected humility.

Twenty degrees colder still. "No, my Emperor," Swanee said haltingly.
"Aliens—to be in mental contact with them—I couldn't handle it."

"You'll merely be a relay. Anyway, it's not as if you have a choice."

Suddenly the air-sharks were there, within reach, circling Swanee with sharp
sweeping motions, making slicing sounds in the air, clashing their teeth. In
their small shark eyes was a compressed infinity of undiluted rapacity.

Swanee shrank within himself.

Bella's laughter tinkled; Kelso snorted derisively and yammered, "Shark
bait, you're shark bait if ya don't!"

Deep inside Swanee there was a reason under the reason for not wanting to
be the Emperor's psychic communications satellite. He didn't want to be the
cause of the expedition's murder. He had known Angie a little, and Yoshio.
Angie was lonely and uncertain of herself, a child really; Yoshio had been
kind to him. He didn't want to murder them. Or anyone at all.

One of the air-sharks ducked its beveled head at him and flashed the
ornament of its jaws in the Frost-light.

"My essence is yours, my Emperor," Swanee said.


                                        *7*

"We'll probably get lost in there," Cisco said, looking at the forest. It was
no less ominous in the light of morning. The trees seemed higher today.

"How will we get the carts in?" Zickorian asked.

"Yes," Calum said, "how can we get the carts in?"

"There is a place," the Baptist said. "I'll show you."

Two hours later they were toiling through a murky corridor of trees along a
narrow, claustrophobic trail between dense banks of underbrush that was
feverish with renewed life. The forest here was a many-layered thing of
purples and shades of violet, of sudden splashes of scarlet and dead-white.
The trees rose in dove-gray shafts, each big enough to dwarf a sequoia,
through tiers of foliage canopy. Their branches contained not leaves on
stems but a feathering of the bark itself into something like leaves, like a
bird with its plumage puffed out. The canopies were made with a profusion
of branches and with interlacing parasitic plants and lesser shrubs. Things
scampered and slithered and fluttered in the canopy but were rarely seen.

The dull blue light was diffuse. The outlines of things were clear; the
details were not. They were blurred not only by shadow but also by the
amino-rich mist that hung between the growths and added choking humidity
to the dull pressure of heat. Occasionally shafts of sunlight struck through
breaks in the canopy, like a spotlight illuminating a circus of dust and
spores and minute flying things ... The place smelled of damp, of dissolved
minerals, of menthol and ergot and fermenting mulch, and faintly of chicken
soup.

The expedition trudged beside the oruhs. Zero and Angie were at the lead
cart, both of them sticky with sweat and trying not to go back to the
water-skins too often. They hiked on either side of their cart's cranky beast,
urging it on when they came to a place where the undergrowth bullied in
too close or where the ground was choked with fallen limbs. The oruh
seemed reluctant to be in direct physical contact with the forest.

"How is it that the ground is exposed here?" the Pezz asked suddenly as it
dropped back from expedition point. It addressed its question to Jack the
Baptist, who was walking beside Angie singing softly to himself.

As if humorously unsure that the Pezz would believe it, Jack said, "From
other expeditions, perhaps? Or forest animals?"

"No, it is very fresh," the Pezz said. "It gives the appearance of being
recently exposed. As if the forest drew back to make it."

Zero looked at the Baptist, wondering. Remembering.

The Baptist said, "Perhaps it recognizes the inevitability of your passage
and seeks to minimize your damage to it. Your expedition is, after all, an
important enzyme action in the unseen organism."

"He's starting that stuff again," Angie muttered. "He says stuff like that
and refuses to explain it."

"I understand it," Cisco said pompously. "See, he means we're all One with
the cosmos, and—"

"We are certainly not all One," The Baptist said. "We are all Many. There is
a One, of course, who rides passively with us and watches through our
eyes."

He's a classic Paranoid, Zero thought.

But Jack went on, with a madman's confidence, "You might say we are that
One, but then again you might point out that we have our own choices to
make which the One does not take part in, and thus we are quite separate.
The forest, similarly, is one organism on a certain level; on another it is
made up of many very combative and competing parts. It happens that,
here, those parts can cooperate when they have to, when it's useful to
them, through the IAMton interconnection. Myself, I tell you that the level
on which we are All One will not help you, Cisco."

Cisco tried to draw him out, but the Baptist would say nothing more. Zero
thought how remarkably little they knew of him. He made jokes to sidestep
their questions about his life on Earth, his background. He made short
forays into the forest at times, melting effortlessly into what appeared
impenetrable to others, and returned with armfuls of fruit. At least, Zero
assumed it was fruit. It might have been colorful egg's or ... he preferred
not to guess. The Baptist had piled the multicolored fruit into the back of
the cart and said, "Take note of the type. I bring you those that won't
poison you. They're nourishing. Even for the Pezz and the Clansmen. Don't
eat any now, though," he had added, as Cisco reached for a mauve ovoid.
"Might not be wise to eat them when you're moving."

The hours dragged. The Earthers' feet ached, and then their legs ached, and
then their feet and legs and backs. Zero's breath rattled in his throat. He
felt chills and wondered if he were coming down with a fever. The angle of
the sun-shafts tilted as the day wore on, and were seen less often; the
smothering closeness of the woods closed around them. The forest spoke
to itself with its ten million denizens, but more quietly now; the chattering
and rattling and hooting sometimes inexplicably dropped into silence. In
those oases of quiet they'd hear only the faint rustling of things moving,
just out of sight.

"This fucking woods is on my nerves," Angie said out of the blue, her voice
shrill with stress. "And the damned trail is getting thinner." She pulled on
the oruh's halter, urging it on against it will so that it cut through a corner
of the underbrush crowding the turn in the trail. The oruh stepped on the
bush. The bush's seeds broke under the oruh's tread. From up ahead came
a rustling. Angie took a pike from the back of the cart and went ahead to
use it like a clumsy machete, smashing at the vines and the smaller
outthrust branches in their way. Jack the Baptist gaped at her, blinking

What's so surprising? Zero wondered.

More rustling up ahead. They completed the turn in the trail...

Then the trail was gone. Just petered out and ended. They faced a wall of
brush.

Jack sighed. "It's rather stupidly stubborn, you know. If you try to penetrate
it like a bulldozer, it closes up and refuses to cooperate. As it has done
here. If you try to minimize your damage, it plays along and lets you
through. You'd think it would be the other way around." He shrugged. "But
perhaps, as you're abusive, it wants you to die here so more of your sort
don't come."

Zero turned to him. "You mean it's going to—" He broke off, staring at the
apparition hovering over the Baptist.

It was a small pyramid, a half-yard to a side, slowly rotating in midair. It
was the color of the afterimage that comes from staring at a light bulb. Its
artificiality glowed against the riotously organic backdrop like a computer
screen in a dark room, and Zero thought it reminded him of something that
had been computer animated. That look of having been drawn without lines
or conventional shading.

Was it translucent? Zero stared at it, straining to see into its interior—and
it split up into two smaller pyramids, as if under the impact of his gaze; as
if the process of perceiving it disturbed its shape. "Oh," Cisco began.

Angie turned to him, snarling, "Don't you fucking dare say 'Oh, wow!'
Understand?"

The pyramids merged again into one, which moved off, into the forest. The
Baptist murmured something inaudible and followed it, keeping his eyes on
it. For the first time his face showed tension—even fear.

The expedition's sodden amazement broke up into a babble of overlapping
exclamations. "Hey, what the fuck—"

"I apprehend no physical exudations from this entity."
"Where you going—"

"What is this phenomenon?"

"Maybe we oughta follow it. Maybe it wants us along, too." This last from
Cisco, who started to follow Jack into the brush. Acting on instinct,
somehow knowing it was the right thing to do, Zero and Yoshio reached out
and grabbed Cisco by the collar, hauled him back, and held him protesting
till both the pyramid and Jack were gone from sight.

"We camp here, I think," Zickorian said.


Swanee was crucified on the sunset. He had reached the apogee of his
climb, had spread his wings and his arms as if he were asking the sun to
burn away his guilt with photon grace, and he was silhouetted
spread-eagled against the shimmering bands of tangerine, gold, and jade
on the horizon.

And then he plummeted so suddenly, he nearly dove through his own
shadow on the clouds. He pierced the cloud with his dive and opened his
wings, emerging with a horizontal swoop into the open air, clearing his
mind with the breathless exhilaration of the moment, making himself
receptive, an antenna, a transmitter.

A hot flash rolled through him and squeezed perspiration from him like
water from a crushed sponge as he saw the Emperor Harmony sitting on a
small cloud before him. There and not there. The Emperor Harmony:
Caparisoned in an ermine robe and a sapphire-studded diadem, his face
shining with angelic perfection, a halo spiking bluewhite around his head, a
ball of healing golden energy seething in his upturned right hand; a ball of
destructive scarlet energy combusting in the palm of his left; the balance,
reward and punishment...

This was how the Emperor saw himself, Swanee realized.

And then Swanee saw another place entirely. In it were six creatures alike,
aliens, striding along the edge of a forest, circumventing it. They were
noble creatures, living prisms, creatures of transparent skin because the
sun loved their inner selves, knights of breathing glass who rejected
shadowy places like the forest. They remained in the open, so as to remain
in communion with the planet's god, the Star (Swanee realized then that
his rapture in the sunlight had come from the aliens' sun-worship, a
precontact psychic glimpse as the Emperor sent the first mind ripple
between himself, Swanee, and the aliens), the great hydrogen-fusion
warrior in the sky.

Distantly, Swanee was aware—and indifferent to the awareness—that he
had begun to spiral down, recklessly descending.

Images of Zero, Angie, and Yoshio. Of a Pezz and two High Clansmen. All
these springing from the forest, firing blunderbusses and flinging pikes,
ambushing, fouly murdering the noble beings of soft glass.

Gone. The Emperor waved and blinked into nowhere, and Swanee's contact
with the aliens was severed. He found himself diving, falling dangerously
near the ground. Trees rushed up at him; the speed was like a furious
hammer about to smash him onto a treetop. He banked and clawed at the
air, fighting to come out of the dive. But the trees shot toward him like
spears.

Then he found the lift-pressure, and the treetops tickled his stomach as he
pulled up and streaked above them parallel to the ground. That close.

Heart pounding, Swanee found a perch on a natural obelisk of rock thrusting
up from the woods. He settled onto it, panting, fearing a heart attack. But
his heartbeat slowed as the planet heaved its horizon over the sun,
drawing a soothing darkness over the antic world.

Swanee looked north and thought; They're there. A long way north. In
another forest. The memory of the aliens clung to his mind like a bad
aftertaste. There was, in fact, a taste that accompanied it: of vinyl. He
knew them then. They were the aliens whom Earthers called Vinyls,
creatures of what looked like soft transparent plastic and visible internal
organs. Creatures of long, frictionless feet, skating over the ground with
unnatural ease, moving over grass or dirt like an ice skater over a frozen
pond. They were violent things and so utterly alien that he had backed
away, biting off a scream, when he'd first seen them in the Neutral.

With a lead weight sinking through his gut, Swanee knew that he had just
given them a message, a message they would take to be from their sun
god. A counterfeit premonition of ambush. An imperative to do something
about it.


"What did he mean, 'It might not be wise to eat them when you're
moving?' " Zero asked, frowning, looking at the core of the third piece of
fruit he'd eaten since making camp.

"You trust this Jack too much," Zickorian said. He'd refused to eat the fruit.
"What do you know about him? He has been referred to by others of your
kind as insane. Perhaps he has poisoned you."

"Yes," Calum said. "What do you know about him? He might have poisoned
you!"

Angie shook her head. "More likely he meant the stuff gives you diarrhea."

They were sitting around the fire, rather close to it, their backs to the two
carts. No one wanted to leave their backs completely exposed to the
volatile mystery of the forest.

The Pezz had consumed two pieces of the fruit. "The fruit is nourishing and
not poisonous to me. But I cannot truly say that it is harmless. It has
(untranslatable) my synapses and has given me waking dreams."
"I feel ... kind of ... funny myself," Zero said. His teeth ached. His skin
tingled. He moved back from the fire; it seemed to burn aggressively,
threatening to swell to a bonfire.

"Me, too," Cisco and Angie said almost simultaneously. They broke up into
giggles, leaning on one another. Zero himself was smiling idiotically.

"I suspect," the Pezz said, sitting on its hind legs with unusual rigidity,
"that since this forest stands on the edge of the IAMton wastes, its roots
and water systems may carry IAMton-rich minerals to its plants. There may
be an unusually high concentration of IAMtons in the fruit. Which may
account for certain phenomena."

"What the hell are IAMtons?" Yoshio asked.

Zero looked at him in astonishment. He had never heard Yoshio swear.

"They are not in-the-realm-of-metaphysical-punishment," the Pezz said.
"They are—wait." It turned to look at the brush. "I cannot explain today. I
am undergoing an (untranslatable) experience."

"Everything is untranslatable if you try too hard to understand it," Yoshio
said. "Detailed analysis is conceptual shit! We must apprehend with—" The
rest was spoken in angry Japanese. His eyes were wildly dilated.

He's stoned, Zero thought. We're all stoned. What a fucked up place to be
stoned in.

He looked at Zickorian, and saw firelight playing on the golden strip of his
ocular organ. He imagined that Zickorian was using that golden reflection to
communicate with the fire, talking to some spirit innate in fire. And what
was fire? Combustion, rapid oxidation accompanied by heat and light given
off when the—wait. There's someone—

Who is that? In the forest?

A face in the foliage. The golden-eyed thing? No. It was Dennis.

A chill made Zero clutch himself. And then Dennis's face became Bowler's.
And then it was ... his father's. "I should never have left, son. I know that
now." Practically whimpering. All Zero's respect for the man vaporized.

His father wasn't there in the bushes. It was an hallucination.

Zero turned to Angie. She was staring into the dense wall of forest,
muttering, "Shut up, Mom, goddammit. All right, all right, all right already, I
hear you! Now just shut up." Zero looked and saw a middle-aged woman
with short black hair, her mouth moving rapidly, her face contorted.

It's not possible, Zero thought, to see someone else's hallucination.
"Angie—did you see Dennis and Bowler a minute ago?"
She broke off her muttering and turned to him, blinking, her face vibrantly
golden in the firelight. Breathlessly she said, "Yeah, I did." Her eyes looked
so big.

"Jesus. Me, too." He stared at the forest. He heard Cisco and Yoshio talking
to one another; Cisco was frightened, Yoshio was trying to calm him down
but sounded scared himself, while the forest...

It glowed with internal energies, which somehow didn't do much to
illuminate the shadowy places. It was a blacklight forest, pulsing in places
with tongues of ember red and cones of methane combustion; it was a fire
without flame, without glare.

And the forest was moving. The vines, the plumage of the bark, the other
plants woven into every passage in the living maze, were sliding in erotic
lethargy, vine against leaf, branch against bole, small, shiny animals
squeezed in and out—unhurt—like beads of sentient sweat.

But the movements weren't random. They formed shapes, reflecting their
thoughts, one image melting into another, forming a bas-relief in the wall
of living plants, animals, insects, three-dimensional and yet fluid, brutish
but aware.

Zero's father was there again. His features ran like the face of a wax figure
in a burning museum, reshaping, becoming someone else, a face Zero had
pushed from his conscious mind for two years.

Gannywick. Hank Gannywick, in a Long Island jail on suspicion of homicide.
Zero had been arrested in an antinuke demonstration at the Long Island
nuclear power facility. He was doing a student film on the thing as well as
taking part, and when the cops came in to bust the demonstrators for
deliberately blocking the access road, he'd filmed one of them beating a
coal-black Rastafarian with his nightstick after the guy had already been
handcuffed. Then he'd given the film to a friend, who'd driven off with it.
And he'd refused to tell the cops where they could get the film. So they
separated him from the cell containing most of the demonstrators and put
him in with Gannywick. "There you go, Hank," the guard had said. "You
wanted some company, I told you you'd have to wait till we had one we
didn't give a
damn what happened to him. He's one like that."

Gannywick was a big-bellied bearded guy with a shaved head. A dent in
that head, a small crater. An open bubo on his neck. Shit under his
fingernails. "You're gonna be my girlfriend," Gannywick had said. "And I
wancha give yourself to me zif ya like it."

Gannywick had alternately tried to seduce and terrify him for the next seven
hours before the demonstrators' lawyer finally arranged Zero's release.
Gannywick had failed to seduce him but had succeeded in terrifying him,
and only the timeliness of the lawyer preempted a rape.

Here on Fool's Hope, Gannywick was ten feel tall; a shrub had become his
beard, a knob on a branch his head, a legless scorpion had become his
mouth, his eyes were two glittering onyx bugs—but he was there. "I'm
gonna make new holes in you, kid, when I get tired of th' usual ones,"
Gannywick whispered. Rigid with fear, Zero stared—and remembered the
mind-echoers. He concentrated and visualized Gannywick exploding.

The Gannywick-bush burst like fireworks. Bits of twigs and foliage rained; a
piece of legless scorpion was flung by the explosion, fell snapping to and
fro at Zero's feet like a spastic mouth. Zero kicked it away, and covered his
eyes with his hands.

The others, wrapped in their own contemplation of the rippling, shifting
forest, scarcely noticed the small explosion, except that Cisco said "Oh,
wow."

Zero tried to think of some alternative, something to keep Gannywick from
coming back. Angie. The way she moved with, yes, a little
self-consciousness, but never vanity; and always neatly, like a song sung a
cappella by a singer with perfect pitch.

Could she move like that in the awkward displays of lovemaking? When
people, caught up in the toils of instinct, became as mechanically fixated
as frogs mating, or beetles? Would she still be graceful then?

He imagined her shorn of all misgivings about him, free of all inhibitions
about herself, opening her arms and legs to him, opening her mouth and
eyes with no fear whatsoever, trusting him utterly...

Instantly the stoned electric charge in him focused in his groin, making his
cock so engorged it was painful. He fell on his side, hugging his knees to
himself, curling up into the fantasy, letting it carry him.

The fruit in the drug was hallucinogenic, but was not a strong stimulant.
Weariness softened the neon-edged fantasy to muted fleshtones and
pastels, and then to grainy impressions ... and the curtain closed. Zero felt
as if his body were divided up into locked rooms and the various parts could
only communicate dimly, through the walls. His feet and legs were locked
up in the basement; his torso was jailed in the living room; his arms and
shoulders were incarcerated in upstairs bedrooms. Grimly, he admitted to
himself that it was morning. He forced himself to sit up and move around
the campsite, stumbling to the carts, ignoring the others except to walk
around them; he swished water from the waterskins into his gummy mouth
and spat on the blue dirt. He scowled at the moss-sucker welt on his
forearm. He stumbled through everything, giving the Pezz a wide berth as it
staggered, squeaking mournfully to itself, as it bumped into the wheels of
the cart and the legs of the yawning oruh. Zickorian, squatting with Calum
by the dead fire, chewing one of his clods of protein, could not resist
saying, "The Higher Instincts of the High Clan have always saved them from
such pitfalls. We are fortunate, Calum."

"Yes," Calum said. "Fortunate our Higher Instincts save us from these—"

"Oh, fuck off," Angle snarled, holding her head as she looked for a place to
pee. She walked away from the High Clansmen as they puzzled over the
translator box's interpretation of fuck off.

By degrees, Zero's various parts pushed through their bonds, room joined
with room, and his coordination and sense of connectedness began to
return. But they brought a gritty muscular ache and a throbbing headache.

So he wasn't prepared for it when Yoshio touched his arm and pointed at
Dennis in the bushes.

He wasn't in the bushes; he was the bushes. They'd been rearranged like
an unusually detailed topiary into his body, his smiling face. He was made
out of twigs, vines, leafy things, and blossoms; the stuff was stippled into
an improbably lucid mosaic. They found that if they shifted to one side or
the other, they lost the image. It was like a cheap hologram that way. But
it was no accident, no hallucination. It was there.

It wasn't alone. Angie's mother was there, frozen in shouting. Portions of
Gannywick. One of Yoshio's ancestors, who'd died in the blast at Hiroshima.
Aleister Crowley and Bowler, arm-wrestling. What appeared to be
geometrical abstractions arranged around Pezz figures ... The stuff was
etched into the porous wall of the forest. Mental Polaroids caught in an
environmental emulsion.

Zero turned to Angie to show her. He found her staring at something on the
other side of the camp. Her mouth was open in tired outrage. It was a plant
sculpture. He couldn't think of it any other way. It was more abstract than
the other images but embarrassingly clear. It showed a plant-formed
semblance of a nude Zero embracing a semblance of a nude Angie. The
figures, looking as if someone had taken bundles of various plants and
flowers and pressed them into a mold, were rendered impressionistically.
But there was no doubt as to who they were.

Angie's semblance was open in cracks along the thighs and belly, giving an
effect of semitransparency, showing the plumelike inflorescence of a plant
resembling a marsh reed, (the male genitals) thrust into a blossom very
like an orchid (obviously the vagina) ... and from the tip of the reed grew
tiny white flower-filaments like a spurt of semen. The figure of Angie had
its legs locked around the Zero's back, arched in ecstatic surrender...

Angle turned to Zero and her expression said, I've been violated.

He wanted to protest, It could're been you who made it, you know. But
they both knew it hadn't been her.

Angie moved toward the plant sculptures and made as if to kick them apart.
Then, with a hiss of frustration—or perhaps confusion—she turned away and
stalked back to the cart.

Zero saw Cisco wander over for a closer look. To forestall any painful
remark Cisco might make, Zero stepped between the plant erotica and
Cisco and said, "Uh, how we going to go on? Forest's closed off. Trail's
gone."
"I dunno, man." Cisco tried to peer past him.

Yoshio returned from strapping a feedbag of bugs onto the Oruh and said,
"Your friend Jack the Anointer seems to have consistently known what he
was talking about."

"He didn't warn us about the fruit, except to say don't walk when you're
eating it," Angle said bitterly.

"True," Yoshio admitted. "But it was clear he knew about it. I think he felt
it was for the best. Because in the night I thought much about what he
said. About the forest. And the—the drug, or whatever was in the fruit—it
made me ... ah, I am having difficulty expressing myself in English today. It
gave me a feeling of relationship with the forest. I think I know how to
proceed. But I think we will be going much more slowly. And we'll have to
leave the carts."

"We will have to learn to cooperate with the forest and (untranslatable),"
the Pezz said. It was still wobbly but seemed much recovered.

"Exactly," Yoshio said.

They followed Yoshio's lead. They detached the oruh from the carts and
tied some of their baggage onto the animals' backs. Some they carried over
their own shoulders. Then, Angie and Zickorian each leading an oruh, they
followed Yoshio into the underbrush.

The going was hard at first, but by degrees they found that if they avoided
damaging the brush, it loosened up and seemed to move aside for them
just enough. They found a sort of slow, polite rhythm in their pressings on.
In an hour the trail had widened noticeably in front of them.

Once Yoshio said what they were all thinking: "The pyramid thing might've
killed Jack. Or ... it is impossible to know. I wonder if we've abandoned
him."

Zero thought about it. Finally, he shook his head, convinced. "He knew
what he was doing. I'm sure of it. And he knows this forest. He'll be back."


"Mercury is not here by accident," the Emperor Harmony told them. "Like all
of you, he has a purpose special to me. Some of your purposes I see
immediately, some show themselves to me with time and by mysterious
degrees."

The entire colony of Twists was gathered that morning around the Emperor
and the once-human called Mercury. Everyone but Bella—who had fallen
asleep—was looking raptly at Mercury, a faceless, sexless slab of human
flesh in the general outline of a man.

Mercury was lying on its back. If that was its back, it was identical to its
front. It was shaking. A shimmy of pink flesh rose into large goosebumps
down its middle. The goosebumps became a miniature mountain range of
skin, which spread outward, remaking itself into the configurations of a
different creature entirely. To Swanee it looked like a painting taking place
in fast action, with Mercury's original form as the blank canvas. First the
rough shape of the thing, then the topography of its body, then the fur, the
claws, the big golden eyes, the small white teeth.

"What a lovely resemblance," the Emperor said, crooning the words over the
transformed Mercury. "My messenger, you see, takes the form of that which
transmits to it. Its mind-ripple reception is so much clearer than my own. It
is perhaps possessed by that which transmits to it. That's a wonderful
thing, don't you think, children?"

They applauded and murmured approval as he went on. "It's the very
essence of art. It is method acting beyond method acting. It demonstrates
devotion to my needs down to the last cell of Mercury's body. Now, that is
the way to appreciate one's Emperor." He looked down at the furry
golden-eyed thing that had been Mercury.

It lay there twitching, staring at the sky as if swept up by a vision. After a
moment it spoke in a comical voice somewhere between a cartoon dog's
talking growl and a raccoon's chirr: "The cross-species expedition continues.
It has absorbed IAMtons and seen things with them. It has materialized its
mentation with IAMtons in the forest. The expedition is in danger of
becoming holy. The one called the Baptist has communicated with an alien
that is unknown to me." As it spoke, its breast opened, as if it were giving
birth, producing a pyramid the color of the afterimage of staring at a light
bulb; the pyramid rose into the air a few inches and slowly rotated. "The
alien appeared in this form." The pyramid sank back down into Mercury and
melted into him. From the fur of his belly rose six figures of transparent
plastic, the size of toy army men. You could see tiny organs of cherry red
and metallic blue inside them.
They seemed to skate along but never got anyplace. "Here are the Vinyls,
who have nearly circled the forest. They are near the Hillserlive. They await
the expedition; they plan an ambush to counter the ambush they believe
the expedition plans."

Hearing that, Swanee's heart seemed to spin in his chest like a grieving
dervish. His wings closed down over him, enwrapping him protectively.

"The Vinyls will do their bit of business," the Emperor said distantly,
looking up at the dwarf-pig lowering from a coral branch by a sticky white
strand. "But it may perhaps not be enough. This Baptismal with
IAMtons—yes, this is the origin of the Baptist's name, though no one who
uses this nickname knows it—this Baptismal could create interference
patterns. It could siphon Overmind away from your Emperor."

"That ith very thad," lisped the upside-down pig.

Nodding solemnly, the Emperor went on. "And so it is necessary for us to
consolidate our power in the settlement, to eliminate all other interference
patterns." He looked down at Mercury. "Good-bye, Golden-eyes. Well done.
Continue to watch them. Get me Father on the 'line,' Mercury."
Mercury ran within itself, shivering into a new shape. In perhaps ninety
seconds, Father was lying there in place of the anthropomorphic marsupial.
But it wasn't Father. Father was in the settlement. This was a simulation,
his message through Mercury personified. "My essence is yours, Emperor."

"Father," the Emperor said thoughtfully, "have you had some success?"

"With a few of them. I have only just left them. But there was some
interference from this fellow Bowler, who, with an ironic aptness, seems to
regard you as an imperialist."

The Emperor chuckled. "Continue to hide yourself by day. Rest, but watch
them. Mark those who are to be killed."

Swanee could bear no more. He turned and flung himself into the air,
pulling himself up it almost vertically, like a lizard climbing a wall, his
muscles protesting. But the pain was nothing in comparison to the horror of
self-realization he had experienced when he'd heard the Emperor say, "Mark
those who are to be killed."

He flew away but not to warn anyone. Because even when he was gone
from the Emperor, the Emperor was not gone from him.


                                    *8*

It took them almost an hour to realize that they were walking above the
ground.

They were deceived by the density of the forest around them, by the
increasingly murky atmosphere, and by the interwoven solidity of the
surface they trod. The slope had climbed gradually, till it had become
almost steep. The forest had gradually closed in around them, literally
becoming a tunnel, letting only a little light through in thin green-tinted
beams; the ground was covered with woven branches and roots, so that
they were walking on living plant matter, in a funnel of foliage angling up a
hillside, they'd assumed.

But it wasn't a hillside, Zero discovered when one of the oruhs stepped
through a weak spot in the floor of woven wood. The oruh sank up to its
knee and gave out a quavering orooooh of pain. "Shit, I hope it hasn't
broken its leg," Angie said as they gathered around the oruh to help it from
the hole. Zero and Calum the High Clansman bent and grabbed its leg,
pulling up, while the others nudged the beast so it leaned on its other
limbs. Zero could smell the High Clansman's body this close. A smell of
moldy cinnamon.

They pulled the oruh free—and then Zero's breath caught in his throat. The
hole was a window to another level down. It was a hole in a floor, he saw,
and the floor was also a ceiling. He was looking down into a vast chamber
given top and bottom by the terraces of the jungle; at least thirty yards
below him was another level made of interwoven tree limbs, roots, things
he couldn't be sure of. But that distant level too was broken open in one
spot, and he saw void below it.

"We're way above the ground," he said, swallowing. What if the forest
decided to move the way it had that first night? It might move out from
under them.

There was much exclaiming. The Pezz claimed to have known it all along
and had assumed the Earthers knew what they were doing.

"Perhaps we should go back down and try to remain on the ground,"
Zickorian said. He was clutching at a limb in the curving, irregular wall of
tangled wood grown beside him, justifiably afraid that the floor would give
way at any minute.

"Yeah. There's just enough room to turn the oruh around," Angie said.
"Let's just—" She clapped a hand over her mouth and stared back down the
way they'd come. Zero looked, although he was almost afraid to.

The forest had closed tightly behind them. The only way out was ahead.

Somewhere above them it had rained. They had heard the rumble and the
shushing of water, but none of it had reached the expedition directly.

But now it came indirectly. Some of it dripped with sulky reluctance from
overhead; more of it came down the floor of the branch tunnel. The curved
matting of wood became slippery under their feet so that their knees were
soon bruised and bloody. The oruh slipped, too, sometimes, bellowing as
they went down. Zero was afraid that a bad fall might send the oruh
crashing through. In places he could feel the matting give way under his
feet a little. It creaked around them.

But it maintained itself unbroken; stretching ahead into misty brown nullity.
The rains steaming everything, making the Earthers slippery with sweat.

Zickorian and Calum climbed with great caution and—it seemed to the
Earthers—left most of the work of managing the oruh to the others. The
Pezz, with its malleable limbs, had no difficulties. It had volunteered to
carry some of the baggage on its back to ease the weight on the oruh. Zero
decided he definitely liked the Pezz better than the High Clansmen, despite
its being far more physically alien.

"I really have got to get out of this thing," Angie said. "I can't breathe in
here, it's so humid, and ... maybe it's my imagination, but it seems as if
this tunnel is one of those Chinese finger traps. Like, the more you go into
it, the more it tightens up around you, and—" She shook herself. "God,
listen to me."

"I feel the same way," Zero said. "Makes me feel better to hear somebody
say it out lou—shit!" He'd slipped, hit his knee on the slippery wooden
matting. "I think it's getting steeper. Christ, what's with this animal?"

The oruh had begun straining at its halter, stretching its neck out, snapping
at the air. "Roooooooh!" it bellowed. And then it broke free of him and
scrabbled frantically up the slippery grade, disappearing into the mist.

Zero cursed and scrambled after it. The other oruh was straining at its
halter.

Zero plunged into the mist. Up ahead was a shaft of light, projected from
below. And there was a pit. Zero stopped short at the rim of the pit,
swaying, losing his balance, flailing for something to hold onto. Going to
fall in...

He bent his knees, grabbed a ropy piece of the living floor, and leaned
back.

He took a deep breath, knelt, and looked over the edge into the shining
hole the oruh had fallen into. Squinting against the light, instinctively
holding his breath, he made out the oruh about thirty feet down,
spraddle-legged, head down, ass pointing up at him, looking silly. It was
caught in the sticky sides of a funnel of flowers. And these flowers were
fleshy pink, striped with blue, shaped like cactus flowers—or suckers. Each
was connected to the others by a mesh of dull gray vine, visible only in a
few rifts in the floral perspective; each blossom had a glistening dollop of
stickiness at its center. Other animals struggled or lay shrunken and inert
against the walls of the flower-funnel. Their shapes were blurred by the
fringe of petals and the mist. One of those unmoving looked human.

In the distance the funnel narrowed to a diffused green-golden glow, a light
from the lower levels of the forest. The oruh moaned and coughed and
moved with a vague swimming motion, but it didn't seem to be trying to
escape. Its movements looked drugged. Zero had to take a breath and
immediately felt dizzy. He sagged forward, feeling heavy, as if the funnel of
flowers were somehow toying with gravity, drawing him in.

He wrenched himself back, and the motion sent him rolling down the slope
to Yoshio, who was coming to look for him. Yoshio helped him up. "What
was that line from King Kong?" Zero asked. Asked himself, really. "Oh yeah.
'It was Beauty that killed the Beast.' "

There was just enough room to get around the flower funnel. The remaining
oruh struggled the whole way, drugged and enticed by the cloying flowers.
They only just barely kept it from leaping after its fellow.

It was growing too dark to go on, when the ascending tunnel ended. They
emerged, gasping with relief into clearer, cooler air, a place of blurred,
emerald-tinged light. The oruh emerged from the tunnel reluctantly, looking
over its shoulder with grotesque longing...

The level they'd reached was a vast echoing space upheld by the pillars of
ancient growths rising, knobbed and veined, through the tiers of interwoven
foliage and branches. The matted floor stretched on and on, unbroken
except for the gnarled boles and the abstracts. The abstracts—that's how
Zero thought of them—were the iceberg-tips of growths starting on the
forest floor many levels below; they were made of irregular segments of
blue and silvery white and green. The segments were unified into shapes
that might have been solidified ideas, twisting and veering experiments in
organism but right-angled from the style of the organic to penetrate—just
enough to be haunting—the realm of artificial design.

"Who created those things?" Yoshio asked breathlessly, staring up at them.
They were enormous, with the presence of the great rocks studding the
coast at Big Sur. "I mean, they look grown, but they look made, too."

"Maybe we did," Zero said, remembering the plant sculptures at the last
camp.

"No," Yoshio said, gazing breathlessly at the abstracts. "They are very old.
Very, very old."

"Those forms are not artificial," the Pezz said. "They are organism. It is
something I can sense. But they are not without intelligence and have
rearranged themselves in accordance with something like what you call
vanity, or 'self-expression.' "

They were on—Zero supposed—the fifth or sixth canopy of the
many-leveled forest. The matting rustled with life and steamed with
evaporating rain. Tenuous clouds were stretched like spun glass between
the boles, just under the ceiling of the next canopy.

They made camp on a relatively flat place, not far from the tunnel.

Building a fire on the matting was unthinkable. There was no telling how it
might react. So it was a chilly, clammy, uncomfortable night. A night of
rumbling bellies; half their provisions had gone into the hungry
flower-funnel with the oruh. The matting was painfully irregular under their
bedrolls.

In the morning the other oruh was gone. So was the Pezz. But minutes
after they discovered these absences, the Pezz came trotting back from the
mouth of the tunnel. "I awoke from dormancy with a sense that something
was missing. The animal's [approximate translation:] territorial expression
had been removed. It was gone. I ran after it, but I must apologize and
[untranslatable]. I should have aroused you to help me. I was not strong
enough to restrain it. It has gone into the throat of flowers."

"Shit!" Zero said.

"Bacterially infested excretions!" the Pezz agreed politely.

"Well, at least we won't have to figure out how to get the damned animal
down from up here," Cisco said. "Maybe it's, like, an act of providence. Like,
it's our karma straightening itself out within"

"Shut up, Cisco," Angie growled.

They'd removed the rest of their provisions from the oruh the night before,
so they carried these on their backs. Zero and Angie had to insist that the
Clansmen carry their share.
"It it not a work of our rank," Zickorian said.

"Our rank doesn't do that kind of work," Calum chimed in.

But they sensed Angie's seething irritation with them and remembered the
solecism of the mistaken mating ritual. So they accepted equal loads and
trudged across the matting after the Pezz and the Earthers to the north.

The Pezz seemed to know, through some vibration-sensitive organ in its
legs, just how thick the mat was at any given place. It led them safely
through the forest-walled gallery and into a zone of broken rainbow light.
The sheets of polychromatic light were refracted through broad, crystalline
leaves on great, man-thick vines that spiraled up around them and over
them, stretching through the canopy.

"Here is the source of our light," the Pezz said. "There are lens-leaves on
the roof of the forest. They magnify light, focus it, send it to lens-leaves at
sublevels, which send it to others, which refract it to us."

The members of the expedition changed colors as they passed through the
splinters of the prismed light; they were bathed green, scarlet, blue, and
gold, by turns. They traveled between screens of growth abstracts,
thin-walled corridors of the stuff arranged in wave patterns and zig-zags,
like loopy room dividers. Close up, the wall's dense growth made Zero think
of a brick of marijuana. But in other places the growths perspired big drops
of ginger-fragrant pitch which hung like pendant jewels; and inside the
pitch-jewels the living gallery's prismed shine was restored to a glow of
pristine white. Zero found that if he stared at the drops of pitch they began
to tremble and then slide into rows, the leaves between them patterning
like the frowzy conceits of a Victorian facade.

The High Clansmen seemed to tighten into themselves, shivering, turning
their enigmatic bands of gold to the right and left. "The animus thickens,"
Zickorian muttered. "This place is speaking to us in a language I don't
understand. It is crowded with spirits like a gathering of tribes."

Hearing that, Cisco looked around at the living emptiness nervously, licking
his lips. The animals began to come.

They came with the sensation in the air; the feel of something unseeable
lowering itself about them. A fatigue passed out of the expedition; the
ache of carrying their supplies became a distant, benevolent glow in the
limbs.

And the animals began to trot and slither and flap up to them. Small furry
things; bulky things with wet palps for eyes, and bouncing things with
lizard hides; trap-monkeys and flying lampreys; panthers made of sticky
oyster-stuff; a small armored whatsit that rolled itself up, unrolled to look
at them with a tongue that also saw, then rolled itself a little closer; petite
creatures like Dali-designed jewelry with legs, emerald broaches that
scampered, tie-clasps of diamond and blue topaz that scuttled near, trading
colors with one another in the promiscuous light.
The animals approached silently, coming in a crowd, oblivious of their
normal rivalries and instinctive fears, and the expedition froze with
uncertainty. Should they run? But the animals were coming from both sides.
From above and below.

The spontaneous menagerie came within ten meters of the expedition—and
stopped. The animals seemed to be waiting for something. Zero looked at
Zickorian. "What you think we ought to do?"

"Go on as if we are unafraid," Zickorian said. "Move with authority."

He and Calum began walking to the North, Zero and the Pezz following,
Yoshio and Cisco and Angie coming close behind them. The animals began
to move—parallel with them. As if escorting them. Their silence was
terrifying.

"Maybe," Angle whispered, "they think we're Noah."

"They're going to be pissed when they find out we haven't got the boat,"
Cisco muttered.

A cloud of the small valving jellyfish of the air approached with a sort of
purposeful Brownian Motion, and Zero worried that the expedition was
about to be swarmed over, and drained. But the flying cusps stopped over
the parade of animals, and began to parallel the expedition too. Looking at
the cloud of cusps, Zero tried to see some pattern in their motion. Was
that a whirlpool pattern? Yes, they were moving distinctly in a...

They were moving that way now. He frowned, and visualized a roughly oval
pattern, like race cars chasing one another around a track. The flying cusps
moved into that shape. He visualized a diamond shape. The cloud became
diamond shaped.

Dizzy, Zero looked away, feeling a return of the horror of disorientation he'd
felt his first day on Fool's Hope. Maybe this was all hallucination. Things
were arranging themselves according to his imagining. Like when you took
psychedelic mushrooms and looked at a blank wall, you saw patterns there
that shifted according to your thinking.

What was his inside, here, and what was his outside? What if he lost touch
with his borders and melted
into things ... Maybe the Pezz was right, maybe territory was important,
especially in this forest.

The Pezz. Talk to it. It might help you orient yourself. (But don't look at it.)

"Pezz ... uh ... I'm beginning to feel like I did that night when we ate the
fruit..."

"I, too," The Pezz said. "It is the IAMtons. They explain the animals'
attentions, and the geometrical formations of the flying things."
"You saw that too? Good ... You mentioned IAMtons before..."

Yoshio and Angie trooped up close to listen. Cisco came too, because he
was scared to hang back alone.

Near the forest (the Pezz told them) is what appears to be a great
wasteland. It resembles a salt desert, a place of crust-edged craters and
crystal-formed pinnacles that rise and reform with the fluctuation of some
fickle subatomic mood. These are the IAMton wastes, great deposits of a
certain chemical impregnated with the subatomic particle, the IAMton. The
IAMton is most commonly found in the organs of perception and cognition
of any sentient organism. IAMtons are the essence of awareness.

The characteristic electromagnetic field generated by the cognitive organ of
any sentient organism acts as a kind of net to trap and store some of these
IAMtons. The more developed the brain, the stronger the field and the more
IAMtons are caught. The particles work in collaboration with the inherent
electrochemical actions of the brain to produce a psychically holographic
entity, the 'Self.' Real awareness is impossible without IAMtons. They are
the sentient beings' link to the universe's reservoir of collective awareness.

"The forest itself is impregnated with them—some places more than
others—" the Pezz said. "—but not so much as the IAMton wastes. The
electromagnetic churn in the wastes is so pronounced that nothing is stable
long enough to grow there ... We theorize—my people have made a study
of IAMtons for many generations—that in sufficient concentrations external
IAMtons interpret the electromagnetic noise of our brains telekinetically.
Whatever is impregnated with IAMtons—the forest, the animals here—is
psychoreactive..."

"You sure the animals won't attack us?" Cisco asked, looking at the
polymorphous procession accompanying them. Muttering to himself: "If they
are animals."

"No, I am not certain," the Pezz said. "But I think it unlikely. They are
responding to the complexity of our fields ... It seem to put them in some
sort of trance of mindless attraction."

"Moths to lightbulbs," Angie said. "Hope they don't start bouncing off us."

"What's all that stuff?" Cisco wondered aloud, pointing ahead of them. The
fence growths curved back for a wide-open area where the matting was
thickly covered with curvaceous tendrils of pale blue-green. The tendrils
swayed and rippled as if in a dozen conflicting breezes. Symmetrical
patterns asserted themselves in the arrangement of plants and then broke
up into other patterns.

One of the patterns in the field of plants asserted itself repeatedly. It was
a mandala parity of lines, right down the middle of the field, like
shimmer-vibrations spreading out on a struck cymbal. Down the middle of
these lines rode Jack the Baptist, coming toward them with majestic ease,
waving cheerfully at them, smiling as the tendrils stretched out past their
normal length to affectionately clean away the grime from his face, to
groom his hair and clean his teeth. He rode the wave up to them, carried on
nothing but the tendrils themselves; they passed him one to the next like a
man
handed over the tops of spectators at a rock concert. The field passed him
to the expedition. He alighted in the open ground as if he were stepping off
an escalator. "How is everyone?" he asked, smiling beatifically. "Got
anything to eat?"


Father's devotees were waiting for him when he returned to the Earther
settlement. As arranged, his followers gathered outside the main gate with
fronds from feather trees in their arms, waiting to greet him as he rode up
on the oruh. He was dressed in white robes that seemed to share the glow
of the dawn.

The crowd laid the fronds down before him as he rode slowly up to the
gate, his face a study in wise humility.

Doggo and Sanchez and Jamie stood on the walkway atop the wall, looking
down at Father as he rode into the courtyard. His head wagged slightly
from the motion of an overburdened oruh as it clopped up to the wooden
stage remaining from the Interspecies Festival.

Jamie and friends watched Father; someone else watched them all from the
roof of the dorm building, crouched in the shadow of a half-fallen wooden
shack that the Earthers had erected as a Meta Observatory—long
abandoned for lack of observations. Swanee crouched there with his wings
folded. He focused his hearing on the Earthers standing on the wall, and
extended his senses to overhear them.

"Look at them," Jamie muttered. "Like a lot of children waiting in line to
see a department-store Santa."

"I don't hear the noise from his bug," Sanchez commented. "But maybe I
can feel it, just a little."

"He killed someone," Doggo said softly, aside to Jamie. "There were
witnesses. He's big, but if I call up the rest of the constabulary, we could
take him."

"That crowd is with him," Jamie said. "Fiskle's scumbags are with him, too,
outside somewhere. Not too far away."

Sanchez nodded. "Taking him could provoke more killings. But in the long
run it might be smarter."

"Wait and see," Jamie said.

She leaned against Doggo and watched as Father climbed off the beast and
went to stand on the stage. Someone led the beast away for him.
Everything had been rehearsed. Father looked out at them. How many?
Fifty? He sat down on the edge of the stage with one leg drawn up, his arm
on the knee of his cocked leg, smiling faintly but radiantly.
"Sermon on the Mount," Sanchez muttered bitterly. His eyes were hooded,
and he touched the wooden cross on its oruh-leather thong at his throat.
Almost inaudibly he added, "Lower than blasphemy."

Swanee didn't need to focus his hearing for Father. Father's mutated voice
carried up there.

"We call it a spaceship," Father's voice boomed out, forceful but measured.
"Ezekiel called it a wheel of fire. The Emperor Harmony, whose servant I
am, calls it ... a miracle."

("Holy shit," Doggo muttered.)

("Exactly," Jamie said.)

"How can you simply accept what has happened to you?" Father asked.
"How can you take the attitude that it was just a sort of interplanetary
accident, a kidnapping by aliens? Faster-than-light drives are just not
possible. Einsteinian physics makes it impossible. So how did we get here?
We came here on the wings of grace, brought by a power that transcends
the laws of physics—the only power that transcends those laws."

"Bullshit!" Doggo roared, unable to contain himself.

A few people glanced up at him. Loftily, Father ignored him.

"The only explanation is the intervention of God!" Father declared,
managing to sound both humble and inspired at once. "God Himself has
brought us here. And whatever happens here is ordained by God. I recall to
you Job 38:4, 'Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?
... Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath
stretched the line upon us? Whereupon are the foundations thereof
fastened? or who laid the cornerstone thereof, when the morning stars sang
together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?' "

"God forgive him," Sanchez hissed between clenched teeth.

"You and I cannot pretend to know why God brought us here!" Father
declaimed. "Or why He subjects us to our ordeal here. What is our ordeal to
Job's? But there is one who hears God and speaks for Him. The one you call
Fiskle, whom we call the Emperor Harmony."

"Now Fiskle speaks for God?" Jamie murmured. "When God hears this shit,
She's going to be pissed off."

Swanee saw the one called Bowler, then, emerging from the crowd, pushing
to the front. "Did you say something before about the 'Emperor' Harmony?"
Bowler asked loud enough for everyone to hear.

"He is a spiritual Emperor," Father replied evenly, "sent to guide us—"

"Spiritual Emperor?" Bowler interrupted. "You mean like Caligula?" There
was murmuring in the crowd, some supportive of Bowler, much of it hostile
to him.

"Cagligula was human," Father said, unruffled. "The Emperor Harmony is
superhuman. He has undergone the Ascent, the spiritual growing that you
call Twist, and has come out of it a higher being."

"How about that thing on your chest?" Bowler demanded. "Is that a
higher—"

Bowler was shouted down by Father's supporters. Father sat up straight,
crossed his legs yogilike, and spread his hands in benediction. He radiated
paternal tolerance. "I have come here to ask one thing of you: trust. A
single morning's trust, and no more. Come with me to meet the Emperor."

"He'll put you in the Current!" Doggo bellowed. "He's got some kind of
control over it."

"Then why doesn't he just direct it here?" Sanchez wondered aloud.

"The Current has never come into the settlements," Doggo said, aside to
Sanchez and Jamie. "But Fiskle seems to be able to conjure it up, from
what I've been able to find out, in certain spots."

"It is no accident that God brought us to a world where we are in conflict
with aliens!" Father boomed out suddenly, standing. "The Emperor has
spoken with the angels we call the Meta. They have informed him of what
should have been obvious: God has brought us here to hone us, to improve
us in combat with all that is diabolical. Do you really believe that the aliens
are 'beings from other planets'?" He chuckled at their naivete. "Truly I say
unto you: They are beings from our own world—that part of our world we
call Hell; They are demons!"

Thrum. Thrum. Thrum. Thrum thrum. Thrum thrum...

"Then let's kill the bastards!" someone shouted, and a roar went up from
the crowd.

"That's all?" Doggo shouted, coming down the stairs, signaling for the
pikemen. "He's using his Twist—that thing on his chest! Can't you idiots
hear it?" He reached the courtyard, and two burly, tanned guards with pikes
ran up to accompany him to the stage.

Thrum thrum thrum thrum.

Swanee saw the faces of the crowd open up. Secret doors in them were
unlocked by Father's thrum and by their own need for release: release of
pent-up fear, the restlessly corralled terror of life on an alien world. Father
was offering them escape from that fear; Doggo was threatening that
escape. It was as if he were slashing their rubber life rafts in the middle of
the North Sea. The crowd roared and surged toward him.

Boom. Smoke and hellfire, as a blunderbuss roared from the stairs just
above them. Sanchez had fired it in the air; he dropped it and unslung a
second from his back. "Keep back from him! He's our law here!"

The crowd hesitated. There was a momentary stand-off. Doggo glared at a
ring of hostile faces held in check by fear of the blunderbuss and the
pikemen. Father pointed at Doggo and said, "There are aliens among us!"
Thrum thrum thrum thrum. "There are demons among US!"

Doggo turned, snatched a pike from one of his men, and all in one smooth
motion cocked his arm and flung the spear straight, with every iota of his
strength behind the cast. Swanee braced himself as the pike sank deeply
into Father's chest and jutted from his back, darkening his robe with his
inky blood, piercing the thing that lived there.

Father fell back, writhing. Swanee, linked to Father as all Earther Twists
were linked, bent double with emphatic pain.

The crowd watched, stunned, as Doggo stepped close to Father and, with
both hands, ripped the robe away from the shivering metal shaft. He
exposed the insect thing, transfixed by the spear, its mandibles foaming,
its eyes whirling with hatred.

Father threw back his head and gave out a shriek that came not from the
human part of him but from the hideous chitinous thing on his chest. His
eyes glazed. The dying thing at his middle spat venom at the crowd, black
stuff that sizzled where it fell on exposed flesh, raising screams from the
Earthers. Then the light went out of its eyes.

The thrum was gone. Swanee looked at the crowd, expecting them to turn
on Doggo, to declare Father a martyr. But all eyes were fixed on the
diseased thing that had lived in Father's chest.

Moving away to another roof edge where he would not be seen, Swanee
took to the air. Shameful though it was, he was relieved that Father was
dead. But he knew what it meant. Harmony was frustrated. Which meant
that he would be profoundly angry. Was angry already. Swanee could feel
Harmony's anger in the air itself, even from far away, could feel it like a
sudden radical change in barometric pressure.

Now the killing would begin in earnest.


                                     *9*
When Jack the Baptist led them onto the roof of the forest, Zero thought
for a moment that he had brought them to paradise.

They emerged from another long, stifling tunnel through steamy twilight
into sunny, clean, wide-open spaces. The feathery blossoms and
wind-shivered tops of the taller trees, emerging here and there from the
otherwise-flat canopy, only embroidered the soaring vista and seemed
caught up in a subtle genuflection to the blue-green sky.

Yoshio breathed, "It's like a roof garden. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon."

The roof itself was made up of treetops, and leafy vines. The tufted
branches and coiled around broad sections of transparent fronds like
crooked skylights—the lenses that sent sunlight down to the lower levels.
There were a few animals here. They'd left their escorting menagerie of
wildlife behind on a lower level, when Jack had led them into the
up-slanting tunnel to the roof. Jack had spoken a few gentle words to the
animals and dispersed them. But here, at intervals that seemed almost
garden-planned, little translucent creatures flew and fluttered around
outcroppings of topaz blossoms, like spray at a fountain. Yoshio took a
step from the tunnel toward the nearest of these.

And fell through the roof. Jack had already started after him; he lunged and
caught him just under the armpits. Yoshio had fallen through up to his
arms. He clawed for a hand-hold, hissing Japanese. Jack was lying flat, face
down across the roof, stretched out to him from the hardened area around
the tunnel mouth.

"Hold still, Yoshio!" Jack said. "I don't want to drop you."

Zero wriggled out to help Jack—Cisco and the Pezz held him by the ankles.

In a few minutes they'd pulled Yoshio back up. He was scratched and
shaken but unhurt. "How are we going to cross this place?" he asked Jack.

"It must be persuaded to bear our weight," Jack said. He knelt and reached
into the roof, his arm vanishing in the foliage. He felt around invisibly
below. He frowned. He drew a trap-monkey from under the foliage, pulled
his hand from its stomach, and irritably tossed the squawking creature over
his shoulder. It scurried off as he wiped his hand and resumed fishing about
beneath them.                                ,J'

"Ah," he said at length. He pulled something they couldn't see—and just in
front of the tunnel the roof of the forest drew together with an audible
creaking and rustling, knitting itself tightly, becoming a hard road of
interwoven wood stretching ahead of them to the north.

The expedition tramped on through the morning and into the afternoon.
Although the spontaneous road on the forest roof was solid, it was lumpy
and bruised their feet. By late afternoon Jack called a halt.

Zickorian said, "What gives this Earther the authority to tell us when to
stop and go?"
Sitting beside Cisco and Yoshio in the shade of a corkscrew-shaped
upthrust of tubular plant-stuff, Zero said, "If he hadn't done it, I would
have. I've got to take a load off for a while."

"A load of what? Off of what?"

"Never mind. Man, I'm thirsty. It's cooler up here, but that direct sunlight
dries me out."

They'd sat across from an enormous purple bloom, nearly two feet across,
made of four great rumpled, outspread petals, fringed with a translucent
beard of fine silky strands that sketched the breeze. It was beautiful, so
that Yoshio groaned a little when Jack stepped across to it and made it
disintegrate.

Jack had pinched a particular section of the stem between his thumb and
forefinger and then stroked that section a little—and the plant fell apart,
the whole thing, as if Jack had pulled out its molecular underpinnings. It
had collapsed into a heap of fragrant, wet ash that quickly melted down to
a puddle of perfumed water with a purple slick swirling across it. "You
wanted water," Jack said, bending to drink.

Zero crossed to the puddle and knelt—then straightened up. "Smells like
perfume. This stuff isn't going to make me hallucinate, it it?"

"Not at all."

"Good." He thrust his face into it and drank, and an alien fragrance suffused
his brain with soft, purple refreshment.

"At least, not much," Jack amended.

Angie saw the glow first, just after sunset.

The colors of sunset had washed over them and receded, like the glow of
their aching limbs, and evening had come with a long, leisurely twilight.
Then they heard the sound; it was foghorn deep, a concord of voices, like
an all-baritone choir hitting its lowest note as one. The sound rumbled
toward them and faded. And came again, after a while—and faded. Angie
said, "It's coming from the north. And there's a light there."

She pointed, and Zero made it out, a white shimmer at the northern
horizon. What was it? Some marker set over the Progress Station by the
Meta?

It was odd that they had ceased to speculate about the Progress Station,
Zero thought, now that they were so close to it. It was as if they'd almost
forgotten about the Progress Station itself.

"You're seeing the glow of the IAMton fields," Jack said. "It may seem
strange, but when you're on the field itself, there's very little glow. It
seems to be something you can only perceive from a distance."
"And that sound?" Cisco asked, shivering, as the baritone choir began
again.

"The hills, singing," Jack said. "A related phenomenon. They are discharging
their own IAMton excess."

Not only did Zero hear the sound, when the rumble swelled, he seemed to
feel it, or something that accompanied it, rippling through him. And with it
came the tingling, the electrical enormity he'd experienced the night Fiskle
and Kelso had been caught by the Current.

Cisco said it aloud, his voice breaking, "It's the Current, man. I can feel it."

"No," Jack said. "It's something much more diluted. It's not the Current any
more than a little St. Elmo's Fire is a whole lightning storm. But it may
have some effect."

"I do not wish to be [approximate translation:] a Twist," Zickorian said.
"Have you led us into this deliberately?'' He was squatting beside Calum
opposite the Earthers and the Pezz. If he'd had an Earther face, Zero would
have thought he was glowering. His optical strip shone faintly against the
dark backdrop of gathering night.

"I have not led you into danger," Jack said, "except what you knew would
be here. I have led you into a circus of delights. But you have yourselves
knowingly agreed to do without a safety net."

"The translator appears to be confused," Zickorian said.

"You are in no danger of the Current here," Jack said. His face was wrapped
in the deepening shadow.

"I'm in danger of falling asleep sitting up," Angie said, looking around. "I
just wish this stuff were more comfortable to lie on."

"I'll return momentarily," Jack said. He stood and moved off into the
darkness, and somehow the forest knew to hold him up, although he'd
strayed off the road. When he returned a few minutes later, he was
staggering under an armful of fronds gathered from a droopy stand of
treetops they'd seen just before camping. "These will make excellent
bedding." He dumped the thick blue fronds in the midst of the road where
the light was strongest and said, "Now, what about some dinner?"


Zero awoke at the apex of the night. He had an uncanny feeling that the
stars had nudged him awake. They were
crowding the sky; they were all around him, searing and yet pristine.

Feeling noontime-black-coffee awake, he sat up—and found himself staring
into Angie's eyes. "Well?" she said. "What did you want?"

"What?"
She made a small noise of impatience. "I'm sleepy." She didn't look at all
sleepy. "Don't waste my time with games. You said you needed help or
something. So I came over. You called me."

"Not unless I was talking in my sleep ... I think you dreamed it."

She stared at him. She opened her mouth to deny it—and then closed it.
After a moment she said, "Maybe so. I feel strange."

"Me, too, now that you ... now that..." He couldn't get it out. The sensation
that had come over him was occupying his every muscle and cell
completely, petrifying him with input. After a moment it ebbed a little, and
he was able to move. He exhaled raspily and looked toward the white
shimmer at the horizon. It had come from there: the north.

Angie was sitting beside him now, clutching his arm, digging her fingers
into it, staring north. "You felt it, too?" he asked.

She nodded. Her sharp intake of breath was the only sound that escaped
either of them when the sensation rolled over them again—a feeling of
drowning in warmth and sheer sensation, a feeling of profound inner
weight, a resonance.

With Angie. He turned to look at her. "I felt you."

She was shaking. "Help me."

A trembling in the air threatened apocalypse. "I'm scared, too." He slid his
arm around her, utterly without volition, carried on the wave that was
passing through them again; and like two pieces of soft flotsam on a tide,
they were washed together. Something hard in him became soft; something
soft on him became rigid. They clawed and kicked their clothes away and
stretched out on the bed of fronds and groaned when their skin made
contact. Angie sobbed and ground herself against him, so that he felt a wet
suction against his shaft, a purely organic imploring.

They meshed, and the circuit was completed. The energy flowed through
them, and into the world, and back through them again. Zero knew
then—the knowledge flowed through him like an inner river—that the
psychoreactive tide of the IAMtons had brought them together. The radio
emanation of their sexualities had signaled each to each in sleep, and their
inhibitions and mistrusts had been overwhelmed in an arousal that
transcended the biological. They danced horizontally to the soundless tune,
choreographed by a limitlessly arrogant force that was utterly indifferent to
their mawkish little individual preferences.

Zero came. But it didn't have the usual shrinking, depressed aftermath. His
orgasm dulled his blade a little but didn't slow his chopping. He dug deeper
into the sensation-core of her, and she clamped her legs around the small
of his back and urged him on with a seamless flood of whispered
obscenities and romantic endearments—"Fuck me!" and "I love you, love
me, love me!"—overlapping and indistinguishable, for many hours. It
seemed as if the stars were all around them, and beneath them, too.


The same night, a winged man all of black was poised on the edge of a
roof, beside a giggling human skull.

Swanee perched just on the edge of the Pioneers' dorm building, steadying
himself with his hands between his taloned feet, his wings folded back so
as not to catch the breeze. He extended his senses and listened. He could
hear the man inside the room below him breathing in sleep.

"Yes," Swanee whispered. "Now."

Kelso, who was crouched beside Swanee, said "Goo-ooo-oood. I told the
Phylum Twos." Kelso's telepathic rapport with the brutes was sharper than
Swanee's.

"Best keep your voice down."

"Don't tell me what to do, sky-slitherer. I am the Emperor's favorite."

Swanee shrugged and watched the wall across the narrow way from them.
He heard an Earther guard on the front wall; for the moment this building,
near the back wall, was unguarded.

But the back wall was not unoccupied. A hulking silhouette heaved itself up
over the wall from the other side. The enormous Twist found his footing on
the wall, then turned to help a second over. Swanee was a little
disappointed. He'd been hoping the rickety ladder would break under the
weight of the Phylum Twos. But the Twos made it over the wall and onto
the roof adjacent to it. They crossed the roof to the next building, the
dorm, and came to hunker down, stinking, beside Swanee. One of them
uncoiled a rope from his waist and lowered it over the edge. The nearer end
was looped around him. He braced himself against the little wall edging the
roof leaning back, holding the rope as the
other descended it.

In a moment there was the sound of rending wood as the climber tore the
shutters from the window and forced his way inside. There was a muffled
cry of outrage from within.

Swanee saw a shape moving against the stars at the front wall: the guard,
coming back their way. Maybe he'd heard the noise, was coming to
investigate.

"I smell rotten, rotten enemy stinks comin'," Kelso said.

"Yes. I will take care of it," Swanee said as he leaped off the rooftop. His
wings caught the air, and he tilted, climbed, then dove at the guard. He
had a glimpse of a young, very startled face, a blunderbuss angling toward
him. He grabbed the weapon; it came away from the surprised guard with
hardly a tug of resistance. Swanee flung it over the wall and swung about,
flapping at the guard to keep him confused.
The guard saw a man-sized bat-shape against the sky, perhaps glimpsed
starlight on talons. As Swanee had hoped, he turned and ran. Swanee was
relieved he wouldn't be forced to kill the boy. The guard was shouting, but
hoarsely; terror kept the sound small in him.

Swanee turned and flapped back toward the dorm. He saw one of the
Phylum Twos help the other up onto the roof; the second, the climber, was
carrying a man slumped limp over his shoulder.

In three minutes, just as the other guards were arriving with torches and
guns, the Emperor's faithful had carried their charge over the wall and out
into the wilderness. And Swanee, with Kelso tucked like a complaining
football under his arm, was flying above them toward the distant shine of
the IAMton beams glimmering from the holes in the Rug.

Swanee several times had to fight the temptation to drop Kelso from way,
way up.


"Yes," Angie was saying, "I think we'd have done it anyway, eventually."

"Then what does it matter?" Zero asked. It felt good to hear her admit it:
the inevitability of their coming together. He'd known it already, of course;
he'd seen it in the river of knowledge that had flowed between them in the
night.

She turned and looked at the spavined dawn. From up here the light was
half occluded by the forest's bulk. "I just—I wanted it to happen because
we wanted it to. More gradually ... by degrees."

"Romantically?"

"Go ahead and sneer."

"I'm not sneering. I feel the same way. I'd have liked that. But I do feel
romantic about you."

"I just feel cheated, that's all. I don't even know how to say what it was I
wanted. But I know it was ripped off from me." She shrugged and nestled
against him. He put his arm around her.

The others were just beginning to move about the camp. The Earthers were
careful not to look at Zero and Angie. It was respect, and a certain
shyness, for their new intimacy.

Except for Jack, who grinned at them embarrassingly.

After a short, almost silent breakfast, the expedition set out. Everyone
seemed distracted, brooding. The waves of sensation from the IAMton field
had passed with the dawn, but there was a pressure in the air, an
oppressiveness compounded of depression and a meteorological pregnancy.
Zero and Angie walked side by side, not touching but somehow moving in
partnership, Yoshio was just up ahead. Zero said, "Yoshio, did you feel that
thing last night? I mean, did anything wake you up? Uh—I don't mean—"

"I know what you mean," Yoshio said, dropping back beside him. "I slept
through it, but I felt it. It gave me nightmares, more vivid than I've ever
had. I dreamed of the settlement. I saw a man with wings drop a skull on
the settlement, and it exploded like a bomb, and then Fiskle came in." He
scowled. "I don't think about it. I felt strange all night. Cisco did, too. I did
wake up once, actually: The Clansmen were"—he lowered his
voice—"terrified. Hiding in their bedrolls. The Pezz got up and ran in circles
for a while, then started throwing up pottery."

Angie laughed. "Seriously?"

"Oh, yes. Gorgeous stuff. And I buried it this morning. Don't ask me what
that was about."

"What about Jack?"

"I don't know. I didn't see him."

The expedition had been a half-hour on the road when Yoshio pointed at
the onrushing clouds. They felt the damp wind skylarking about them,
tugging at the fringes of their clothing, whipping their hair.

The Pezz danced about excitedly. "Another living rain! We should take
cover; [approximate translation:] Livid phenomena are afoot! And
[untranslatable] commingle!''

Zickorian nodded. "It's coming quickly. In minutes.''

Everyone looked expectantly at Jack. "Oh, very well," he said, shrugging.
"Though personally I think you should enjoy it."

"I don't enjoy being flattened," Angie said.

Jack stepped off the road, knelt, and reached down to the vines. He pulled
two out of the uneven surface and tied them together, then commenced to
tug at them, first one way, then another, with an air of distraction.

In minutes a sort of igloo of forest life had bulked, rustling, up from the
roof, and they'd crawled into its shadowy mouth—Cisco with some
reluctance, muttering about being eaten by plant spirits—and huddled
together away from the gathering force of the wind. Zero found himself
pressed up against the Pezz; its skin felt like balloon plastic and was cool
to the touch.

It surprised him by saying, "I forgot to tell you—congratulations on your
marriage."

"Oh. Well, it's—" The sudden downpour interrupted him, smacking down on
their inadequate roof with a thunderous clap. The igloo shivered and
became a little more oblate, but held.
"Did you see him, too?" Angie asked, nudging Zero, shouting over the roar
of the amino rain. Its salty smell and glutinous presence had transformed
the world; already it was oozing through onto their necks in big sticky
drops.

"See who?"

"The golden-eyed thing! That—that marsupial thing we saw in the clearing
that day! I saw it just now. Just before the rain! It stuck its head up from
below the roof!"

"You mean that thing Jack said was spying on us?"

"I can't hear you! Never mind, the rain's too damned loud, I'm going
hoarse!"

Zero nodded and looked out the entrance of their igloo.

Things were happening out there. Towers raised themselves up.
Inseminated by the bulky rains, shapes reared and shrugged into intricate
convolutions. When the rain stopped, the world outside was changed, and
Jack said, "It would appear that Fiskle has erected an obstacle. And it's one
I don't think I can do anything about."


I looked everywhere," Sanchez said, coming into the Council chamber. "He's
just not in the settlement. His room is a shambles." He shrugged
resignedly. "They got him."

Trish choked off a sob. "I always liked that guy. He was so sweet to me
when I first came. He kept everybody off me and—God, he was just like
this neighborhood cop where I grew up."

Jamie squeezed her hand and said, "We'll find him."

"You won't have to," Bowler said, appearing at the door. "He's outside."

Bowler led the Council outside to the front gate. They stood in the morning
sunshine—it was a beautiful day—and stared at the gate.

Doggo's head, and most of his skin, stripped from his body, was nailed to
the front gate. His hide was flayed, with his intact head still attached. His
head drooped down over the skin, (the inner side of his skin, scraped
clean), which was nailed up like an animal hide in a log cabin. Or like a
parchment containing a papal bull. Because on the skin, Harmony had
written—with the black poison that dripped from his fingernails—a sort of
declaration of intent, in baroquely calligraphed script:

                                BE IT KNOWN

      IN PARADOX IS DIVINITY. THE PREVAILING ORDER OF THIS
      WORLD IS A RULE OF CHAOS: A PARADOX. I, THE
      UNDERSIGNED, EMBODY THAT PARADOX, THEREFORE AM I
      DIVINE: THE AVATAR. AND THEREFORE BY DIVINE RIGHT AM I
      RULER OF THIS WORLD WHERE CHAOS IS THE META'S ORDER.
      IF CHAOS IS THIS WORLD'S ORDER, THEN THE RULER OF THE
      WORLD IS THE EXECUTOR OF CHAOS. THEN CHAOS IS MY LAW.
      AND MY LAW IS GOOD, AS ALL THAT PROCEEDS FROM DIVINITY
      IS GOOD. AND THE CHAOS OF THE LAND IS MY RAIMENT. FOR
      CHAOS SPARKLES, AND SO CHAOS IS MY GLORY. MY WORLD
      WILL BECOME A SPLENDID CHAOS THAT GLORIFIES MY RULE.

      AND BE IT KNOWN THAT THE LANDS TO THE NORTH AND ALL
      TREASURES AND GOODS TO BE FOUND IN THEM ARE THE
      PROPERTY OF THE EMPEROR, WHOM CLEARLY THE META
      INTENDED AS THEIR SPECIAL ENVOY; BE IT KNOWN THAT ALL
      TRESPASSERS IN THE NORTH WILL BE EXECUTED, THE
      DESIGNATION TRESPASSER WILL SIGNIFY ANYONE I HAVE NOT
      OFFICIALLY RECOGNIZED AS MY SUBJECT. ALL EXECUTIONS
      WILL BE SWIFTLY UNDERTAKEN BUT SLOW TO CONCLUDE.

      THUS IS ESTABLISHED THE FIRST LAW OF THE LAND, BY ORDER
      OF HIS SUPERHUMAN MAJESTY, EMPEROR HARMONY, THIS
      SECOND DAY OF THE YEAR ONE, ANNO HARMONY.

He is going to come and kill us," someone said.

Jamie turned to a guard. "Take that thing down. We'll cremate it. We'll hold
a service for Doggo."

The guard stared at Doggo's head. One of Doggo's eyes looked up at the
sky; the other looked at the ground. Worms crawled across the blackened,
shriveled tongue in his open mouth, a mouth rimmed with dried blood. The
hands had been cut away. The guard had to be asked twice, but at last he
raised his pike and began to pry.

A tired old man named Carmody—he was only fifty but in the months here
had come to look seventy—said, "They're going to come and kill us unless
we surrender. They can take people anytime they want. They have magic or
something. They can fly. They are too strong."

Jamie turned to the Council. "No," she said. "This is grandstanding. And
lunacy. We outnumber them. We have the fortress. No."

Sanchez nodded. "Jamie's right. If we give in, he'll Twist us or kill us. We'd
live in a Hieronymus Bosch place, shoving knives up our asses. No. We
have to fight."


                                    *10*

The rain stopped, and after a while the puddles stopped crawling.

Zero and the others could feel the IAMton charge in the air as they stepped
out of the wooden igloo. They could see it—no, they could almost see it,
when they looked at the odd structures that had sprung up at the behest of
the deluge. A sort of iridescent glamour clung to the new growths, a shine
that was invisible except when the head was tilted just so and the eyes
were squinted...

The growths reminded Zero of the fifteen-foot termite castles he'd seen in
documentaries about the tropics, although these were of something like
plant matter and were more intricately studded and vented. There were
eight of them in a semicircle around the igloo, neatly spaced twenty feet
apart.

The great gray clouds were still breaking up overhead, moving with
unnatural speed to race away like a panicked herd of elephants. The
sunlight struck through in wildly dancing shafts, chased by shadows that
crawled frantically over the semicircle of organic monuments and seemed to
make them move and shift.

One of them had moved. Hadn't it?

Feeling giddy as he inhaled the mists rising in the aftermath of the
downpour, Zero looked at Jack the Baptist. He felt a certain warmth as he
saw Jack's mood of uncertainty. Jack had supposed these sudden growths in
their path to be a sending from Fiskle, but he wasn't sure.

It was good to see him unsure. Easier to think of him as a friend when he
was fallible. Zero looked at Jack more closely, trying to perceive him as an
individual, as one does with real friends. Trying to see past the
assumptions and misguesses, past the veneer others themselves generate
defensively, trying to see the real Jack.

He saw that Jack was not there. It was as if, for a moment, he had become
invisible, or opaque, or both. He was the silhouette of a man cut into the
air, an outline with no interior detail.

Zero blinked and shuddered, and the effect passed. Jack looked normal. A
puzzled, filthy, half-mad, long-haired, scruffy hermit, come out of his
hermitage for a while like a precocious rat snuffling the daylight.

Jack saw Zero staring at him and smiled faintly. "Let's leave here quickly,"
he said. "These things are a function of the Overmind in an uncontrolled
mode, and I mistrust them."

But Cisco was standing at the base of the nearest growth, staring at
something emerging from its grainy, dirty-blue surface. "Look at this!" he
shouted.

"Best that you not," Jack said.

But Zero and Angie had already gone to watch the thing bulging from the
growth. It was an enormous gem. So they thought at first. A great cats-eye
gem, as big as a beachball, emerging like a blister in fast-action, pushing
through ... a blue-green gem, polished but smokily obscure within.
They all felt it. The tug. The overwhelming desire to reach out and touch
the thing.

They were dimly aware that the Pezz and the High Clansmen were standing
at other growths, looking at similar glassy swellings. And that Jack was
speaking stridently against further contact with them.

And then Cisco touched the gem, and it burst. It split open down the
middle and oozed out a blue-green gel that, on meeting the air, sizzled and
then evaporated. In moments it had steamed away, revealing an object
that had been hidden in the smoky interior of the gem-thing.

Something blurry ... till Cisco touched it, and then it instantly reshaped,
became almost recognizable. It was artificial but effortlessly so, as if it had
grown itself, using a manufacturer's blueprint for its DNA. It was chrome
and oblong, with artfully placed metal about it and glass panes that
showed mysterious inner works defying articulation. Cisco caressed it and
sucked in his breath appreciatively. He drew it out and cradled it and hefted
it and felt it murmur against him. "It's a—a ... it's a—" he muttered.

Zero and Angie looked at him enviously. But they knew it was his.

As if in response to their inchoate yearning, another great gem blistered
from the grainy blue stuff, and then another. Zero and Angie each chose
one and touched it. Zero's burst and revealed a sort of camshaft-shape that
played the tunes that drifted through the back of his mind all day. He could
hear the songs whisper softly from between the interlocking, turning parts
of the thing, as if it were cranking them out, an alien organgrinder playing
bits and pieces of old songs and jingles that haunted every Earther brain,
harmonizing all of them together with a marvelous connective drone. When
he held the torquing white metal thing against him, its touch produced a
quasi-sexual stimulation, a
delicious electric shock, its movements triggering responses in the secret
chambers of his epidermis.

He saw that another of the growths was hollowing itself out invitingly, and
there was niche where the squirming camshaft songmaker would fit. He was
quite unable to keep himself from carrying it to the niche and installing it.
He returned to the first structure and found another gem blistering, swelling
out, a precious bubo that split at his touch and produced something that
shifted, under his attention, to become sharp-edged, compressed to
glossiness in some places, fluffed to furriness in others, the essence of
Tantalus in a material thing. It was a designer compact disc player; no, it
was a gorgeous Mardi Gras headdress; no, it was a device with which,
surely, they could communicate with Earth; no, it was a weapon, if worn
just so on the arm, the essence of martial confidence and macho chic; no,
it was a marital aid, an aphrodisiac if you merely gazed at it; no, it was...

Each object was heart-rendingly beautiful. Don't take your eyes off it—it
might vanish.

The objects (some part of Zero's mind noted, behind the feverish wanting
that occupied most of his consciousness then) were reminiscent of
enticements seen in glass cases and expensive, artfully arranged window
displays on Earth—but they weren't those objects. They were abstractions
of the glamour of those objects, extracted from the unconscious. They were
the secret paradigms of material perfection, clockworked into the engine of
desire itself. Zero knew this; the knowledge like a draught from the inner
river that flowed through him from the IAMton ambience. He knew this in
the objective filmmaker part of him. But it did him no good to know. He
was as feverish as an amateur Vegas gambler on a winning streak,
scooping up his shiny loot—object after object, another and another, till he
was
breathless from exertion (more and more!), each radically different from the
last but of the same continuity—and carrying it to the niches in the growths
to one side.

Till he had a wall of them, whirring, cranking, humming, glowing, singing
things, interlinked into a gestalt of sheer but unidentified appeal that made
him buzz with possessive delight.

He was distantly aware that Angie was doing more or less the same thing,
at another of the growths; that Zickorian and Calum were taking tribal
fetishes of some sort from their own gem-eggs, were twining them on
themselves and hearing them sing out the cries of beasts from their home
world, messages from the plane of animistic spiritism.

And Yoshio was at work on objects that seemed melded together of various
cybernetic modalities, objects that were programmable, responsive,
material things that spoke to you with digested concepts the way a guitar
responds with attuned sounds. Yoshio chattered to himself in exhilaration.
He, too, was caught.

It was as if they each had a hollow place inside, and now, holding the
object, they felt it filling the emptiness, the hollow-place, snugly and
exactly.

Jack stood back, saying something that wasn't quite intelligible; the Pezz
danced a warning and uttered cryptic squeaks that confounded the
translator.

Zero was aware of all this through a sort of lAMton-fed psychic peripheral
vision, but he was mostly indif-ferent to it. The thing he had been
constructing in his niche came together as he'd known it would, forming a
cinematic continuity, so that images flashed in mem-branes that stretched
like soap bubbles between the exquisite materializations. He saw the
movie from its beginning: his arrival on Fool's Hope; his struggle to accept
his lot; the confrontation with the alien at the Neutral; his vision of an
exile to drudgery in the settle-ment; his decision to seek the technological
Ark of the Covenant, the Progress Station; his journey through sweet
dreams and nightmares; Dennis's death and the teeming foreignness of the
plains and forest; his sense of being both the manipulated and the
manipulator; and their arrival here. All were neatly edited into a seamless
cinematic flow, a thing with Kubrick's lucidity and scope, Roeg's luscious
intricacy, Zefferelli's lyrical faith, and Wertmuller's moral force but this was
Zero's film! His own! His own creation; His raison d'etre, com-pleted, here
and now; The consummation of his life; The bits and pieces he'd taken from
the gems were like jigsaw-puzzle parts connected into this perfect
cine-matic composition, so that he was sure that he had come here, to this
world, for this moment, and—

"It's false," Jack said, gripping his shoulder so it hurt him. "It's a fake
movie. It's not something you created. "It's an idealized hallucination."

Irritably, Zero shook himself free. "You're disturb-ing the images."

"If you let this thing capture you, it won't let you go—"

"Why shouldn't it capture me? I filmed it, I created it to hold me."

"No, listen to me. You didn't do this. It wants you to believe that you did
so you'll fall into it."

Zero snorted. Jack was raining on his parade; he was an obstruction to
ecstasy. Zero turned his back to him and went back to his rapt,
masturbatory self-congratulation.

He was distantly aware—and irritated by the knowledge now—that Jack was
talking to Angie. "Angle, listen to me—listen! You're seeing objects that
seem to embody your desire for a home and your ambition for a sort of
matriarchal influence on your community. You want to be a woman with a
family and a leadership role, too. So the objects seem to embody that.
When people buy things on Earth, they're buying psyche-symbols framed to
represent reassurance and resolution of uncertainties. The Overmind—at
Fiskle's prompting—is doing the same thing to you now. You are being
manipulated. Don't you resent it?"

Why doesn't he leave her alone? Zero thought. Why doesn't he—

''Zero?'' It was Angie at his side now, tears streaking her face. He had
never before noticed that her face was grimy, that her eyes were kind of
funny-looking, that one of her front teeth was inexplicably more yellow than
the other. Her breath was not as fresh as it might have been. Why didn't
she go away?

She stepped between him and the construct, the perfect film. He raised his
hand to strike her. She reached out and touched his lips with the tips of her
fingers, sending something into him there, a pulse of knowledge she'd
stored up from the night before.

Zero hesitated.

"Zero," she said, "he's right. We're being pushed around."

Yoshio was there, too. "She is right. When I heard her say it, I knew."

Zero shivered and felt dizzy, as if he'd awakened standing on the edge of a
precipice. He stepped back and made himself look away from the growths.
Sirens called to him from the far side of mythology. But Angie had tied him
to the mast now, and he sailed past them.

"Come on," he said hoarsely, turning toward the High Clansmen, moving
slowly, slowly, feeling he was moving through syrup. "Let's get Zickorian
and Calum. We're going to have to take them by force. And then let's get
out of here."


"We have asked too much. We have taken a great deal from the spirits,"
Zickorian said, "but we have given back nothing. They came to ask us a
price, and you defied them. You carried me by force away from them. Now
they will punish us. There is a beast we call [uncertain translation] the
Unmasculator, who has a serrated mouth where his face should be; his
teeth are his eyes; his teeth are his nose, too; his tongue is his heart; and
his heart wishes to take your reproductive facility and grind it into paste,
which he will spread on his Nightmare Eggs. This Unmasculator is the one
who will come to punish us, Zero. Or his [uncertain translation] incarnation
on this world.

"We have the tale of Erythmanna, who desired the soft pelts of the infant
cave-diggers, the [untranslatable] lambs, and who roamed the countryside
stealing the lambs from their cave-digger mothers and murdering them for
their soft flesh and pelts. He could not pay his great debt to the growing
places, and they sent, first, a warning, in the person of [untranslatable]
feathers, which grew about his loins; and this feathered beast had no male
sex about it. And when he did not heed this warning, and refused to make
the Seventeen Submissions, and did not cease his lamb raiding, his four
children were turned into belly-slugs with the heads of children, and they
crawled into holes and cried out to him from within the dirt-places in horror;
but still he did nothing. And a cloud came from the sky onto his wife and
wrinkled her into a dried (untranslatable), taking her juices with it so that it
was a great red cloud when it floated away, and all the female juices were
gone from her; and still he did not see. And then the (untranslatable) beast
itself came, and took his sex in its jaws, and chewed it slowly, carrying him
about with it, so that he lived with his crotch in its wet jaws for one
hundred fifty years precisely, whereupon—"

"That's quite enough, Zickorian," Angie said.

Calum reproached her. "But he has attempted to tell you the classic story
of Erythmanna, who stole the (untranlatable) lambs and was visited with—"

"You too, Calum, or I'm going to start with Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs and go right through the story of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer
and the Grinch who Stole Christmas," Angie snapped. "And when I get to
the autobiography of Shirley MacLaine, you're going to be really sorry."

"Besides, Zickorian," Jack said, "all this prophecy is false prophecy."

"What if it's not?" Cisco said. "What if he knows the damned spirits better
than we do? I mean—" He broke off, his lips trembling, his face pinched
with fear he couldn't articulate. Zero watched him, wondering how much
longer he'd last.
The High Clansmen fell silent and went on trudging. They were near the
edge of the forest, Zero reckoned. He kept himself busy looking around at
the details of things to distract himself from the sense of loss he felt at
having left ... the objects.

They were all depressed, their movements sodden. They were hungry, and
irritable from being hungry. Their packs seemed nothing but irksome
crosses to bear, and the pikes were painful weights in their hands. They
had seen too much.

So they were relieved to be shed of this paradise when they reached the
chute at the end of the forest, where Jack said, "Escalator to the first floor,
ladies' shoes and imported cosmetics, no wheelchairs or baby strollers."
And they descended the chute, left the forest behind, and stepped into the
uncertainty of the Hillserlive Hills.


Swanee tasted pity in his mouth like bile as he watched the Groyn child
playing by the creek-worm.

The Groyn kidling looked rather like a teddy bear. It was three feet tall and
plump and brown and pleasantly furry and mild-muzzled. Almost
disgustingly adorable. Nearby, at the far edge of the clearing from the
kidling, was its shaggy brown mother, using a crude iron tool to root
through the soil for the bulbous hibernating things—little round yellow
creatures like puffer fish in the dirt—that she stowed in a leather bag slung
over her broad back. Mother was less preciously cute: she was big as an
Indian elephant. She had no legs, for in the second growth phase Groyn
legs fused into a single supportive base that moved on thousands of tough
cilia, surprisingly quickly. The adult Groyn, in fact, looked as if it were cut
off at the hips. It moved over the ground like a snail, though faster, much
faster.

It wouldn't be fast enough, Swanee knew.

It was another perfect day. If not for the burning weight of his duty,
Swanee would have enjoyed it. The wind soughing through the coral trees,
the cool ssssss-sssss of the creek-worm, the light playing in its dull,
quartz-colored depths. Swanee shifted on his perch in the thicket of coral
trees at the edge of the clearing; he was not far above the kidling but was
out of its line of sight. Swanee looked at the creek-worm with a friendly
appreciation, thinking what a benign marvel it was, what a challenge it
would be to paint accurately. Unlike the Groyn, it was a native of Fool's
Hope, a
single being twenty or thirty miles long and five yards across (a little
narrower here at this curve, a little wider there at that straightaway),
curving through its own trench in the land, a mass of protoplasm that
simply dissolved minerals from the dirt and dead proteins from munch. A
gelatinous, transparent thing made of the stuff you found inside
earthworms back in Tennessee but without a skin and with no visible spine.
(What did it use for nervous tissue or organs? No one knew.) Curving
through the land, it looked exactly like a creek from a distance, with ripples
on its surface. Only, when you got closer, the ripples were slow-motion
wallows and freeze-frame waves, and the thing was moving only as fast as
snake on Valium.

The Groyn kidling tottered on the edge of the creek-worm—and fell in,
disappeared beneath its surface as if under hungry quicksand. The Groyn
mother ran up to the edge, snarfling mightily. And then the surface of the
gelatinous river erupted, and the kidling was lifted clear on an arm of
protoplasm and set on the banks directly in front of its mother. The kidling
was sticky and confused, but unhurt. The Groyn mother snarled gratefully at
the creek-worm in her own language and caressed its slow ripples once with
her ropelike upper limbs (the creek-worm shimmied politely in response),
and after soothing the child, she turned away, letting the kidling wander
once more, knowing it was being
baby-sat.

If only it really were safe, Swanee thought.

He looked up and saw the Meta's watching sphere, striped with shadow and
sunlight, as it floated between the boughs of coral trees. It stopped over
the clearing, fifty feet up, to hover expectantly.

There: an Earther, big and pink and mightily sexed, a Phylum Two, was
huffing through the undergrowth. It paused and looked up at Swanee. He
shifted on his perch to see the mother Groyn better. Yes, she was far
enough away. He turned and, sadly, nodded to the Phylum Two.

The Two sprinted from cover, ran across the little clearing, grabbed the
infant, and carried it away, flailing and whimpering, into the woods. Mother
gave chase, but the Two ran into a thicket of coral trees that were too
close together to allow her entry. She wasted time trying to push the outer
fringe of coral trees down—and succeeded after a moment but only
encountered more of the same. Realizing her error, she tried to circle 'round
the thicket.

Swanee dove from his perch, angled down, and whipped close past the
mother's head, shrieking at her. She swiped at him, so that he felt hot wind
against his ribs. She pursued him, and he led her away from the thicket.

The kidling was lost.

Swanee eluded the Groyn, after enough time had passed, and returned to
the Twist camp in the woods on the far side of the thicket, hoping to see to
it that the kidling had a merciful end. But he was too late. His duty was a
sulfurous smell high in his nose as he watched what was done.

The Groyn mounted a search party, eight enormous warriors, both male and
female, caparisoned in leather harnesses that contained their throwing
weapons. They traced the child quickly by smell, but they were far, far too
late. They found the remains of the kidling spitted and roasted, its charred
carcass already cool.
The Emperor sat back in his throne of flesh, and Swanee squatted before
him, head inclined.

"A Groyn war party makes plans to march on the human settlement,"
Swanee said. "I saw them sketching a map of the settlement in the dirt.
Like you figured it, they don't know about human Twists. They saw the
Phylum Two and thought: Earther."

The Emperor Harmony's posture of easy recline informed everyone there—in
lieu of a novel facial expression—that he was pleased. The living cave
contracted the folds of its walls just a little to show its empathic pleasure
in its master's happiness. Bella smiled and stroked the long penis of a
Phylum Two like a spinster stroking a cat. The Two gave out an inarticulate
sound of frustration as his erection sprouted. Bella made big eyes at the
erection and pretended surprise.

Swanee watched in a torment of jealousy, although he knew she was only
taunting the thing.

"Don't tease him, Bella," the Emperor said. "I've told you before. It makes
them bella-cose." Everyone dutifully chuckled at his little joke. He waved
peremptorily at her. "Take him outside and make him mount one of his
brothers. It's too crowded in here anyway."

"Certainly, my lord," she said. "Come on, Hunky."

Swanee flattened into the too-friendly folds of the living wall as she
squeezed past. She smiled mockingly at him.

"Swanee, come here," the Emperor said in honeyed tones. He knelt before
the Emperor. "You've done well."

"For once, for once, the sky-slitherer didn't shit it up!" Kelso snickered,
scampering up and down the Emperor's leg.

"Really, Kelso, he has almost always done very well for me," the Emperor
said. "Now I have something else for you to supervise, Swanee. You have
seen, I trust, the pavilion of the Whorebugs in the Neutral. You are to—"

"Uh, begging your pardon, my lord"—Swanee had heard this phrase used in
a movie about Elizabethans—"but I would be a bit obvious in the Neutral.
Doggo's successor, Sanchez, is in charge there, and he knows about my
part in Doggo's kidnap."

A great weight slid off Swanee when the Emperor said, "Hm ... very well. I'll
send Bella to do it. She's a clever thing. It's true: she can be disguised
more easily than you. If we do it right, the Whorebugs will ally with the
Groyn against the human settlement." He clapped his hands together.
"What splendid colors I am bringing to the canvas!"


Jamie and Trish and Sanchez stood together on the settlement's front wall,
looking over the small army of Groyn massing in the field outside. "How's
the gate going?" Jamie asked Sanchez.

"It's shored up as much as we have time for."

"We wouldn't have any time at all," she mused, "if they hadn't decided to
wait for something or other."

"They're aliens," Trish said. "They might have any kind of motive at all. A
ritual or some certain time of day they prefer for attacking or ... anything."
She raised a hand to shade her eyes against the sunlight as she looked out
over the field. The Groyn milled restlessly about, more like cattle than
soldiers. But they were strapped with weapons, and armor of wood and
iron. From here, blurred by the low clouds of dust rising about them, they
were a little reminiscent of Hannibal's martially decked-out war elephants,
sans riders.

"Maybe," said Trish, "we should try another emissary. He might've made a
mistake."

Sanchez shook his head. "No. As lawkeeper I have to veto that. He didn't
do anything wrong. They're just too pissed off to negotiate. One of their
kids roasted alive—can't blame them. Even for that." He gestured vaguely
in the direction of the red splash, halfway across the dusty field to the
Groyn, that was all that was left of the last emissary. He'd come running
back when he'd seen them charge him, and he hadn't run fast enough. "I—I
don't want to waste anyone else that way."

"We could send another emissary to explain that it wasn't us. A woman this
time," Jamie said.

"What?" Sanchez looked at her, startled.

"Their leaders are women. They're matriarchal. Perhaps they'll sense
another female, agree to talk to an equal. As opposed to talking to an
inferior. Sending a male might have been an insult."

"An equal. I see. Jamie, we can't risk any of our women. We have too few."

Jamie turned on him, nostrils flaring. "You want to protect the female
commodity for breeding, is that it?"

"I—frankly, yes. And we can't risk you, you're too valuable a leader."

She shrugged her anger away. This wasn't the time. Then she smirked.
"You're discounting me as a breeder? I have news for you. I'm pregnant."
Sanchez's mouth dropped open.

Trish and Jamie laughed. With destruction shuffling restlessly outside the
gate, it was sad, bitter laughter.

"Doggo helped us out on that," Trish said. "He was a nice guy about it, too.
Very understanding."
Jamie winced. "Do we need to go into all that? It was brutish enough once,
without having to relive it. Ugh. But I got pregnant and I always wanted to
raise a family. And Trish had a hysterectomy on Earth. But I wish Doggo
were alive to see the baby. He could've been godfather or something. And
babysitter."

"He would've been something more than that to the child," Sanchez said,
quietly simmering with disapproval.

Jamie shrugged diplomatically. She glanced back toward the back gate. All
this talk was just to cover the anxiety of waiting for their other plan to
come to fruition. They'd sent a runner to their allies among the other races,
asking for help. If he'd got past the Groyn...

"This is all Fiskle, you know," Sanchez said.

Jamie tilted her head to one side and pursed her lips. "Probably."

"Not probably. Definitely. What happened to the Groyn child ... we
shouldn't be just sitting back letting him hammer at us. First he set up
Father's little lecture series; then he murdered Doggo. Now this."

"What do you want her to do?" Trish snapped.

"Really," Jamie said, nodding. "I can never find the bastards. We sent a
party to try to arrest those big guys he uses, the ones who carried Doggo
off. Took them three days to find one, and when they did, he killed two of
our people and their oruh. He broke the oruh's back with his arms. We don't
know how many of those things Fiskle has. Anyway, Fiskle has some sort of
... some telepathic thing. He knows when we're coming. The one we caught
was a fluke, and I wish he hadn't caught him. So what do you suggest?"

"We'll have to trick the son of a bitch. How, I don't know yet. But ... Here
comes our messenger boy." He'd spotted Warren trotting up the courtyard.
The undamaged side of his face, contorted with the pain of exertion, almost
matched the other side. He trotted up the steps to the walkway just
beneath the defensive wall.

Puffing, he leaned on the wall and said, "Twists ... broke into the Neutral,
killed five Whorebugs, set 'em on fire ... The Whorebugs are joining the
Groyn. That's what the Groyn are waiting for—the Whorebug war party."

Trish said softly, "It'll be soon. Things must be coming to a head. Look."
She pointed upward. The Meta's watching spheres were there, a hundred
feet overhead, a cluster of little silver spheres turning this way and that,
like a group of toy balloons.

Jamie glared up at them. "Five of them. Plenty of camera angles," she
muttered. "Bastards."


Standing on the strip of barren rock between the forest and the Hillserlive
Hills, Zero watched the literal rolling of the rolling hills with queasy
fascination. A great ripple went through the ground, and then another from
the opposite direction; the two nearest hills seemed to roll toward one
another. "This, Cisco," Zero said, "is what the word awesome really means."

The ground shook; small cracks in the strip of rock widened and extended
just enough to be noticeable.

The hills were covered with a flat, dusty-blue growth identical to the Rug
near the settlement. Zero looked at it nervously. He moved up close to
Jack, who stood beside Cisco and the Pezz, watching the grumbling roll of
the hills. "Jack, we going to see wheelers here? Under those hill-things,
maybe?"

"No. None. What is under the Rug here are the hills themselves. Living
things, relatives of the creek-worm."

The hills moved under the covering like a bull's muscles rolling under its
hide. But they were big, so damned big. Zero felt dwarfed and lonely,
looking at them. The vastness of them, like the great, storm-driven oceanic
swells he'd seen off Oahu, gave him an agoraphobic sense of vulnerability.

As the nearer hills approached one another, dozens of slits opened in them
like lipless mouths, giving out the baritone-choir sound that the expedition
had heard earlier. The hills seemed about to collide—but instead they
ground loudly against one another, as if they were grindstones working
away under their Rug-like covering. And from the point of contact, yard-long
spines of what appeared to be polished steel emerged, squeezed out as if
manufactured by the junctioning of the hills. The hills stopped moving, and
the spines toppled and clanged down into an untidy heap, flashing in the
sun. The slits on the hills closed; the hills fell silent.

Jack pointed across the Hillserlive region toward the horizon. They could
see, beyond a few miles of the hills, a shining band of white. "The IAMton
wastes," he said. "We'll have to cross the hills, and then the wastes. Then
we reach the Progress Station."

"And if we acquire the goods in the Progress Station,'' Zickorian said, "a
very doubtful proposition—but if we do, we are expected to split their value
with you, Jack?"

"He's earned the right to it," Angie said. "He's helped us."

"I agree!" the Pezz chimed in, rearing on his hind legs for emphasis. "I
quite agree. He has demonstrated his value!"

"He was not part of the original agreement," Zickorian said. "His motives
are suspect."

"I'm here because I'm concerned," Jack said, "because I love intelligent life
and don't like to see it wasted. I have no desire for a share. Now, let us
go. I am very hungry. There is food to be had at the swamp on the other
side of the wastes. Let's hurry to it."
Zero looked at him. "Your style has changed. You talk more rationally,
cooler. You were playing some kind of role before, right? How come?"

Jack smiled. "We really don't have time to chat. Are you all willing to make
the crossing?" He looked around at them.

"It can't be safe to cross those hills, man," Cisco said, chewing a knuckle.
"Maybe Zickorian's right. I mean, anything could sprout up out of those
humps. Maybe that Unmasculator thing he was talking about. Some kinda
spirits of the ground."

"It's perfectly safe, if you don't wake the hills," Jack said casually. He set
off across the Rug.

Angie and Zero looked at one another. If you don't wake the...? "Looks like
we gotta," she said. "That way's north, all right."

"Yes, yes, this is the way, north, north!" the Pezz said excitedly. "The ones
who live beneath the ground here—their territorial emanations are turned
downward, toward the inner planet. They commune. Their exudations are
foreign to me, but I sense deep planetary rapture and (untranslatable). Let
us go quickly before their territorial fields are expressed upward!"

"It seems inevitable," Yoshio said resignedly. He hurried after Jack.

"It's all hopeless anyway," Zickorian said. "We die soon, it doesn't matter
where."

Calum, crestfallen, muttered, "Die soon. Doesn't matter. And
(subarticulate)." They followed Yoshio.

Shouldering their packs and pikes, Zero and Angie and Cisco hurried after
the clansmen. Hurrying but treading lightly...

They crossed between the two nearest hills, entered a valley between a
row of others, feeling the body heat from the great, anonymous humps
beneath them. There was no shade out here, and the sun blazed down on
them, sapping their strength, making them bow their heads. Jack led them
to the middle of the valley and up to the shining heap of spines. They were
long, barbed quills, Zero saw. Jack bent and picked one up.

"Uh, maybe we shouldn't disturb them," Zero said. "Maybe the hills wouldn't
like it."

"It's quite all right," Jack said. "I advise you to get one each. They'll be
useful."

"Just what we need," Cisco grumbled. "More to carry."

"They're very light."

Skeptical of this, Zero bent and picked one up. It was light indeed, like
something made out of balsa, and surprisingly cool to the touch, but very
hard. They'd each picked one up when Angie said, "Uh-oh."

She was looking up at two Meta spheres that arrived overhead, forty feet
up. Dolefully she said, "Must be we're in for a hassle."

"Very astute," Jack said. "Here it comes." He was watching something
approach from the far side of a hill, circling its base to angle sharply toward
the expedition.

Zero saw six clusters of internal organs, it looked like, winding through the
air toward them. And then Zero saw the rest of the creatures, the
transparent plastic bodies the sun had washed out at first, casting
rainbows on the ground as they came, skating over the ground as
effortlessly as expert skiers down a slope, coming right at them with a
terrible, drawn-out squeaking sound that set Zero's teeth on edge.

And now he saw things whirring in their hands, bolas of some kind, spinning
so fast they were just a blur unless you watched closely. Spiked bolas.

"Start backing up the hill!" Jack shouted. "Get up the slope!"

Backing away, pulling Angie with him, Zero remembered. He'd heard these
creatures described. Vinyls, they were called.

"We should surrender to show our good will!" Yoshio said. "Then we can
convince them we're not hostile."

"This race cannot be negotiated with once it decides you are the enemy!"
the Pezz said, rearing up. "They regard all other creatures as sub-beings!"

"They have been set against us by Fiskle!" Jack shouted. "Talk is no use!
Climb the hilll. Up!"

And then the Vinyls were upon them, streaking around them in a snappy
ellipse, roughly human-shaped things, their features just dimples in their
transparent heads. One of them zipped in close to Zero and whipped a bola
at his face; Zero blocked with his pike and staggered back.

Another was upon him, but Angie was there, her pike braced against the
hillside, catching the Vinyl in its gut. It squealed, and a comet of light
flashed from its wound to spiral away into the sky. It collapsed, spurting an
interior goo that smelled of industrial waste, but as she jerked the pike
free of it, another came. Zero jabbed at it, but Angie had hit the first one
just right. Zero's jab only just deflected the second Vinyl for a moment. It
zipped back around as if on a rail, its frictionless feet never leaving the
ground, and came at them again. Yoshio stepped in and karate-kicked it off
balance so that it went glimmering down the hill, but the others were
closing in, slashing at him with the bolas.

Zero saw Yoshio fall—then he had to swing the pike at another; it ducked
and skated around behind him. He caught the edge of a bola on the back of
his neck, and fell, tasting the hot iron of terror in his mouth, picturing them
closing in on him, their squeaking bodies and horribly faceless faces
blocking away the world. "Angie!" he shouted over the furiously squeaking
passage of the Vinyls, as he skidded facedown. "Angie, get up the hill with
Jack!"

He looked up in time to see the Pezz, with one rubber-band ssswwwap of
its front legs, hit a Vinyl so hard that it flipped over backward, head over
heels, and landed in a tangle of broken plastic and steaming liquid.

The ground was moving beneath him.

He heard Cisco shout, "They're coming awake—the hill spirits are waking
up!" Panic pealed in his voice.
And then another Vinyl was looming over Zero, and the bola blurred down
at him. Someone—Angie!—was blocking the bola with a pike, deflecting it
only partly—

A hot flash of pain in the right side of his head.

It was only a minute later when he came to. Someone was dragging him up
the slope by his wrists. Through a haze of pain he saw Cisco running wildly,
trying to escape the hill, running down slope, and falling off the edge ...
the edge?

The hill had broken away from the others, was booming to itself in pain as
Jack stabbed one of the pikes into it, bleeding pink glue-stuff from the
wound as he drove it away from the Vinyls ... leaving, at its edge, a
ten-foot cliff that the Vinyls couldn't climb.

And the hill had torn the Rug, was carrying a piece away with it, away from
Cisco and the Vinyls. Cisco looked up, screaming, as they closed around
him. Squeaking. Squeaking.

Zero closed his eyes.


Zero was lying atop the hill, which was moving away to the north, shoving
rudely between its fellows. An earthquake out for a walk.

"The Vinyls tried to control one of the other hills the way I did this one,"
Jack was telling Yoshio. "It trampled them. It has to be done just so. And I
wasn't even sure I could do it. It was a great risk. Are you quite all right?"

Yoshio's voice: "Yes. The bleeding has stopped, I think."

Zero sat up and sucked in his breath sharply. Angie, sitting beside him,
said, "You better lie down. You might have a concussion."

"It hurts, but I don't think there's any damage."

"Better lie down anyway," Yoshio said.

"Please recline, recline!" the Pezz said.

Zero lay back. He saw Zickorian off to one side with Calum, the two of
them muttering out of translation-box range.

He saw the shining wastes to the north growing closer.

He saw the emerald ceiling of the sky losing its polish. Dusk.

He saw Angie smiling down at him, the dust on her face striped with tears.
"I knew that guy a long time," Zero said. "Cisco was kind of a jerk, but—"

"I know," she said. "Rest. Just accept whatever happens here. Just accept
it. Because otherwise..."
"Yeah. Otherwise."

He closed his eyes and let the growing susurration of IAMton energies
whisper to him from the north.


                                    *11*

The Groyn only had to charge the gate twice. The second time, it splintered
with a despairing groan. The men behind it screamed and were crushed
under broken planks as the Groyn plowed through, rearing up on their back
sections to slam down on the Earthers caught beneath, jellying them.
Meanwhile the Whorebugs climbed the outer walls, scrabbling up them
without handholds, ascending furiously on sticky clawpads. Some were
struck from the top edge of the wall with pikes and blunderbusses; but
others whipped lassos of Whorebug exudation over the battlement and
noosed the Earthers and used them to pull themselves up and then finished
the choking, clamping them with all their
limbs at once in the lethal embrace of a preying insect. Glamorous in the
light of sunset, jewelry-perfect and nightmare-disgorged, the Whorebugs
showed a strength that seemed impossible for their slender limbs,
dismembering their victims with methodical intentness.

The Groyn, though bigger and stronger, crushing men against the walls like
ripe fruit, were nevertheless almost Earthly, were like angry, sentient bears
or mammoths; they were furious and showed it, as animals from Earth did.
But the Whorebugs were monsters of inscrutability, with bodies designed
by some speed-freak paranoid; they were expressionless and mechanically
efficient in everything, making not a sound as they killed, like bored
workers in the slaughterhouse dispatching steer after steer.

Men were later found dangling from the walls, wrapped in the most bright
and gorgeous Whorebug silk, intricately patterned and tightly bound,
smothered inside it, buried alive in textile excellence. Sarcophagi for the
fashion-conscious, Harmony would call them.

Now there was flame, as fallen torches ignited debris, and leviathans came
bellowing, looming tip in the smoke. Leviathan silhouettes resolved into
Groyn flailing with their tentacular limbs to tear heads from shoulders and
to smash leg bones into flinders, shrieking to their gods as they were
impaled on three pikes at once. A child was glimpsed screaming and
clawing the air as she was carried away over a wall by a Whorebug ...
Flame wagging out of windows like an angry neighbor ... On the ground, red
blood puddled with black blood, and both mixed with yellow effluvium.

Overhead, the Meta's watching spheres placidly took everything in.

Jamie and Sanchez and Warren and Trish remained on the wall fighting,
shouting encouragement, struggling with panic. They crossed to the roof of
the dorms, calling for the other Earthers to fall back.

At last the Earthers retreated to the main dorm, their numbers halved,
knowing the barricade at the door of the dorms would not hold for long;
choking on the smoke and the taste of impending probability.

That was when the Emperor Harmony made his entrance: Swanee carried
the shapechanger to the roof of the dorm, where Jamie and the Council
were arguing about surrender and the consequence of it. And then Swanee
was there, lowering the pink bar of flesh that was already writhing into
another shape. Harmony's face showed on it, grinning, and then the rest of
him slowly filled in.

The pikemen came at Swanee and Harmony—but paused at Jamie's order
after Swanee shouted, "This is not the Emperor Harmony, but his
representative!"

The "representative," in psychic rapport with the Emperor, took on the
Emperor's shape and spoke what the Emperor spoke, safe in a far place.
"They are too furious to stop now, even if you do surrender," Harmony said.
"We picked them for that quality: that banzai rage against the enemy. But
I know something about the Groyn that I can use—together with the
strength of my Phylum Two Pragmatics, who wait outside the settlement—
to make them give up the fight and accept a truce. If the Groyn back off,
the Whorebugs will, too. All I require for this service is your simple loyalty.
Your recognition of me as your Emperor.

"At this point I could take the place anyway, of course. But I want the ritual
of coronation, I want your cooperation: it will be best in the long run.
Choose. Death or a redefinition of honor."

"Fuck off," Jamie said.

"Go to hell," Sanchez said.

But Jamie and Sanchez were almost alone in their defiance.

The others stepped forward and voted to accept the new ruler. It was a
matter of survival. Among them was Bowler, who perhaps saw an
opportunity for revolution in the installation of a proper dictator.

"Here then, are the first commands of your new Emperor." The
shapechanger boomed. "First—you are all to remain here, while my people
dispose of the aliens. Once that is done, We will begin reconstruction—"

At the back of the crowd, Jamie squeezed Trish's hand. She looked at
Sanchez. He bent near them, whispered, "We have a few minutes..." He
tilted his head toward the stairway that led onto the roof from the second
floor terrace. Jamie nodded. She and Trish followed Sanchez to the stairway
and hurried down it, quietly as possible. When they reached the terrace,
Sanchez said, "I don't think Harmony knows about the back tunnels under
the walls. You were smart to keep that under wraps, Jamie. You and Trish'll
hide there, I'll head for the Neutral, try and drum up some alien support—"

"Look, if we run," Trish said, "it'll look like we're his Enemies for sure. He'll
hunt us down. Maybe we can play along, then organize an underground..."
Jamie shook her head. "We are his Enemies, right now, and he knows it—"
She broke off, startled by the crunching sound from below. The Groyn were
breaking through the barricade. Jamie looked at Trish. "If we stay here, he'll
kill us. That's what he's like. He'll weed out anyone he thinks would cause
him trouble. We have to hide in the building—when the coast is clear we'll
run."

Another crunch from downstairs. And then a scream.

The Pragmatics—Phylum Twos—charged from three directions into the herd
of Groyn at the front door of the dorms. Fifteen of them, at Harmony's
command, using crude iron axes, leaped astride the Groyn and hacked their
tentacles away, sunk pitted iron blades into their broad skulls, axed
Whorebugs into twitching segments. The aliens fell back before this
onslaught as yet another Twist kited in over the wall: this was Sizzle, a
new member of Harmony's troop. His head was human, and his hands and
feet, but between them he was a membraneous thing that glided through
the air like a flying squirrel. The thin pink-and-blue membranes were
stretched between his flattened pitted torso and limbs; his expression was
imbecilic. He was shaped, overall, like a slightly concave disk—the convex
side upward—and clapped down over his prey from above. Now, protected
by the phalanx of Phylum Twos, Sizzle dropped down over a Groyn and
enclosed its head and upper parts in his cuplike membrane, closing over
them like an octopus over a fish—and exuding powerful acids from his
underside. The Groyn shrieked as the acids melted into it, breaking it down
into living mush, crumbling bone and melting muscle, pressure-cooking it in
seconds so that a bubbling organic soup cooked from the Groyn's flesh
bubbled out from around Sizzle's edges and spattered the ground. The
Groyn collapsed to a shapeless white lump of anonymous stuff. And then
Sizzle sprang into the air like a mongoose and came down on two
Whorebugs, closed around them, tittering like a lunatic squirrel as they
melted beneath him, held helpless by the paralytics in the acids.

Three Phlyum Twos surrounded a great, shaggy female Groyn who'd stayed
in the background bellowing commands, who had not entered the
settlement till the Earthers retreated to the dorm. The Pragmatics dragged
her away from her consorts. On seeing this the other Groyn froze where
they were and waited.

Swanee, carrying a translation box, appeared in an upper window and said,
"People of the Groyn! We have your Chief Mother, and we advise you to
accept a cessation of hostilities. You have many times over avenged the
death of one of your own. Let it rest here, and your Chief Mother will go
free, unhurt. We require your Soul Boulder agreement on this."

The Groyn gave out a moan of defeat, hearing the invocation of the
eternally binding Soul Boulder. But they consented, and the Chief Mother
was set free. They filed out of the settlement; the Whorebugs accepted the
peace as equably as they had accepted the war.

And the Emperor Harmony arrived and toured the settlement so as to
choose a proper site for his throne room.
"We should have gone with Sanchez," Trish said. "There's food at the
Neutral."

Jamie sighed. "Yeah. We got 20-20 hindsight. But we can't make it now
with Fiskle's guards on the walls, watching everything outside ... I'll be
back in ten minutes.'' Jamie kissed Trish, deeply and languidly. They
hugged, and then Jamie turned and crawled out through the tunnel, into the
torchlight.

She had come out near the scum-pod worksheds at the back of the
settlement, and there was no one around. She froze, hearing the roar of
some great beast of the night, a beast with a hundred throats—No. It was
a crowd, chanting something: the "Emperor" was holding a rally; the noise
was coming to her from the distance, distorted by the crooked streets. Or
maybe, she thought as she ran up the road, going for the food stored in her
dorm room, Maybe it wasn't distortion. Maybe it was the truth behind it.
The roar of an animal.

She saw one of the animals, then. She turned the corner and there it was,
looming over her, pink and contentedly bestial. It was ten feet away but
she could smell it: the rotting essence of male. Its muscles rippled as it
moved toward her; its ropy penis stirred.

She tried to circle it, to walk past, hoping the Phylum Two would ignore her.
Maybe it didn't know who she was...

But it knew. She tried to run when its fingers went around her neck—easily
encircling her neck with its one hand—and it jerked her from her feet,
snarled at her. It lifted her by the neck so that she hung struggling and
kicking over the ground. It carried her like a spitting, ill-tempered cat,
almost choking her. Dangling her feet over the ground, it struck off down
the street. She was to be a gift, given to the Emperor of all the world.


They stood on the edge of the IAMton wastes, their backs to its teeming
expanse of emptiness, and watched the hill roll away like a disenfranchised
wave rumbling back to rejoin the sea. "Now the spirits abandon us,"
Zickorian said.

"He's leaving because he's fed up with us," Jack replied. "Wouldn't bear us
an inch farther. Well." He turned and looked at the IAMton wastes.

Angie said, "Looks like Death Valley. Sort of."

"Death Valley would be a misnomer here," Jack said. "Let's camp, so that
Yoshio and Zero can rest. They're not badly hurt, but let's not take chances
when we haven't got a doctor. And"—he brightened and rubbed his hands
together—"I suggest we eat the last of our provisions all up completely,
like pigs. There's food a few hours' march from here, across the wastes."

"Look like the salt flats to me," Yoshio said as they laid out their packs.
Yoshio grimaced from the pain of his wounds, bandaged in crude-cloth.
"Except for those clinker-type things. Those crooked little towers and that
violet stuff." He meant the small violet lightnings that crackled
intermittently over the ground. Just overgrown sparks. "Will we get a shock
from those discharges?"

"No," Jack said, opening the provisions pack and frowning as he inspected
the interior. "We'll be appropriately grounded. It's not actually electricity,
as you mean it. What have we here? A little dried crustacean left. Some
dried fruit of a disappointingly nonhallucinogenic variety."

Zero sat down on his bedroll with a sigh. His own bruises ached, fussed at
him when he moved. His ears still rang, and his head throbbed from the
blow to his skull.

They ate what remained of their stores ("Nothing matters now," Zickorian
said. "Therefore, why not?") and prepared for a night's rest.

Zero expected more of the psychic intrusion from the IAMton field that he'd
felt on other nights. "It won't come as powerfully as that here," Jack said.
"You are on the edge of the field now. It's like being in the eye of the
hurricane. But there may be some effects. It knows we're here."

The expedition settled in, and full darkness closed in on them. Its way
prepared, the hourglass moon rose in the sky. The violet glow of the
IAMton field was faint, ghostly, haunting. The stars crowded around to
outshine it, the Frost rose like a white-hot interstellar battle flag, and the
expedition, each in his or her own way, retreated from the fearsome
surveillance of these energies, from the sense of being spied on by the
perpetually burning gods.

Zero and Angie lay on their sides together, fitting like spoons, Zero with his
arm around her. But within their own heads they detached from one another
for a while and went away into the private places of the mind.


One astronomical pulse away from dawn.

A strange taste in Zero's mouth awoke him. It was a sharp metallic taste. A
smell accompanied it, of electrical burning. And a sensation on the skin, as
if he had a sunburn under his clothing.

He sat up, looked around, and saw that, restless in sleep, Angie had rolled
away from him in the night. She was ten feet away, making abortive
inchworm motions in her sleep. He saw another movement from the corner
of his eye, turned his head to look—and froze. A chandelier was hanging in
midair. No, it was more like a man-of-war jellyfish, as big as a condor,
translucent violet and fluorescent, training long, scintillating streamers
from its underside. It tinkled softly to itself, chiming like wind chimes as it
drifted above the sleeping camp and came to rest over Yoshio. A second
one drifted in from the IAMton wastes ... and Zero saw a third emerging
from the violet shimmer of the ground itself, like a bubble appearing on the
surface of a pond, growing out of it. The chiming thing—clearly something
alive and aware—mounted buoyantly into the sky, where it was almost lost
against the stars. But he could make out its outline, smearing the stars
with violet; it drifted twenty feet up, coming closer, angling now, floating
toward—

"Angie!" But it was too late. The limp violet streamers of the thing had
already insinuated around her head, crackling out blue fulminations, and he
knew without needing proof that it was changing her. He was up, shouting,
waving at the thing, and it backed off.

He turned to Angie and found her sitting up, reaching for the empty
provisions sack lying beside her. Hands trembling with urgency, she tore it
along a seam and drew it over her head like a hood so it locked her face
into shadow.

In the faint light from the eastern horizon he saw Yoshio sit up and look
around at the expedition as if he'd awakened to find himself among
strangers.

The third jellyfish floated toward Zero. He made a dash at it, throwing one
of the light metal spikes produced by the living hills. Halfway to the thing,
the metal spike started turning end over end, and fell through it from above
—and the diaphonous creature vanished in a fireworks of glitter.

"Don't do that," Jack said, coming up behind him.

"They did something to Angie!" Zero knelt beside her, reached toward her.
"Angie ... hey, you okay?"

She drew back from his hand and spoke in a deadened voice, a monotone:
"Don't touch me." And then something more in nonsense syllables. Zero
stared at her in shock.

Jack laid a hand on his shoulder. "Leave her alone for now."

"But she's—shit! What happened? I mean she—"

"Leave her alone. It's what's safest for her, for the moment."

Reluctantly, his mouth dry, Zero stood and took a step back from her,
staring. She just sat there, face concealed, hands clasped in her lap, a little
hunched over.

Zero heard a clacking sound, looked up, and saw that it was Yoshio piling
large flat rocks from the edge of the wastes onto one another. He moved
stiffly, but the Vinyls hadn't hurt him badly.

The formation he'd constructed, a low, precarious wall of rocks, described a
crude spiral about eight feet across. Yoshio knelt beside it, laid his hands
on it, and said, "I am descending to the Higher; I am de-escalating to the
Upper. I am debasing to the Tower. I begin again in each minute that
arrives." And then more in Japanese—and in another language Zero had
never heard before.
"Oh, dear," Jack said, staring at Yoshio, "I fear he is going to be violent."

The Pezz bounced up to pose springily beside Jack and said, "Yes,
completely and with verification: yes. I have heard that chant in translation
before, just prior to the skirmishes of [untranslatable term for the speaker's
own people] and the Mack Nary."

"I agree, a Mack Nary declaration-of-evil construct. The descending spiral."

Zero turned fiercely toward them. "Are you going to explain, or—?"

"It's not the same thing that has Angie," Jack said. "I believe she's a Solips
now. Yoshio, judging from the way he's now rubbing sand in his face and
generally debasing himself, is working his way up to a ritualistic Mack Nary
killing frenzy. There was a Mack Nary on the planet for a while, a Murderer
as Earthers call them. It was killed by the Whorebugs. Its consciousness
was, I suppose, drawn into the IAMton fields and now has been transferred
into our Yoshio." His voice was distracted. But he went on. "The Mack Nary
are the monks of a race of beings who are by nature utterly benevolent,
almost unnaturally sweet of disposition. In contrast to most beings, which
are instinctively aggressive around competing races. This nearly caused the
decimation of their race, and they came to believe it was a serious
imbalance in their relationship to the universe. They believe that the great
object is to merge with the base
clay of the universe, the most primitive forms of life. They believe that
these forms are closer to God than the complex organisms because most of
the universe is made up of raw material, of primitive stuff. They attempt to
redress this imbalance and to achieve oneness with the lower forms by
forcing baseness on themselves—especially by doing pointless evil. They
overcompensate, you see. They see that the lower animals are predatory
and that unevolved races are sadistic and cruel—they aspire toward this,
and constantly struggle against their own natural predilection for
saintliness."

Zickorian and Calum had joined them. "The spirits have taken two more, I
see," Zickorian said.

"Two more are gone, we see!" Calum intoned.

"Shut up," Zero snapped, bending to try to see Angie's face. "She hasn't
gone anywhere." He looked up at Jack. "You say she's possessed?"

"In a sense. I suspect her to have become—psychically—an alien we call
the Solips. When they're around others, they don hoods and behave with
the maximum characterlessness. Try to become ciphers. They are strong
individualists and live in fear of being 'eaten' by society, of being pressured
into conformity. So they live in solitude, except in childbearing. They simply
don't want their personalities subsumed in others, so they communicate in
this safe, distancing mode, which refuses all commitment."

"Great. Fine. Now, how do we get her out of it?"

"Don't shout, Zero, you'll provoke the Mack—uh-oh."
Suddenly Jack lunged for Zero, tackling him about the middle, knocking him
flat. A pike flashed through the air where Zero had stood a moment before.
Jack had saved his life.

Zero and Jack were up in time to see Yoshio—with the Mack Nary
controlling him—reach for another pike, his face contorted in self-hatred,
eyes filling with tears. "I am sorry about this," the Mack Nary said. "It is so
distasteful. But I really must impale the lot of you and let you die slowly on
the spear. Twist it in your guts, that sort of thing. I do hope you
understand." The voice—it was not Yoshio's voice—was unctuous with
sincere apology.

The Pezz danced toward Yoshio and danced back, snagging his attention.
Yoshio jabbed awkwardly at the Pezz with the spear, missing by a good
margin and muttering, "Drat. I feel so odd. Hard to control this body."
Something in Japanese, and then the alien language. And then in English,
as he made another fruitless stab at the Pezz, "I really wish this wasn't
necessary, but I'm sure you understand—must get back to basics, you
know."

Jack stepped into the wastes and circled stealthily around behind Yoshio.

Zero couldn't hold himself back any longer. He squatted beside Angie and
put his hands on her shoulders, shook her. "Angie, fight the damn thing!"

"This physical contact is embarrassing, disgusting, imperialistic, and
tasteless," she said in a monotone. "Please withdraw." Not waiting for him
to obey, she drew away from him and turned her back.

Zero heard a shout, turned, and saw Jack straddling Yoshio, who was
making feeble struggling motions facedown in the dirt. Jack drew a piece of
line from inside his tangle of clothing and tied Yoshio's wrists together with
it. The Pezz took a turn sitting on Yoshio as Jack returned to Zero.

"More of the spirits have arrived," Zickorian said, pointing. Zero looked and
saw three more of the fluorescent aerial jellyfish drifting toward them. One
of them was on a trajectory that would take it to Angie.

"Just what she needs," Zero muttered.

Zero snatched up another of the metal spikes and took aim at the delicate
being daintily approaching Angie.

"This wrestling is getting very tiresome," Jack said. "But..." He clamped his
arm around Zero from behind. "Mustn't interfere, Zero," he said.

Zero struggled and found that Jack was impossibly strong. He felt like an
infant gripped by an adult in Jack's arms.

The jellyfish approached Angie from behind. She sensed it, turned, tried to
back away—and tripped. She fell heavily, and the thing was upon her. She
froze into paralysis as the tendrils shot sparks into her skull. "Zickorian!"
Zero cried, anguished. "Stop the fucking thing!"

"I don't believe it is having sex with her," Zickorian said. "And it would be
wrong to interfere with the spirits."

"Now!" Jack said, suddenly releasing him. "Chase it away now—but don't
hurt it!"

Zero ran toward the thing, yelling, waving the spike. It drew hastily back
and returned to the IAMton wastes.

Angie sobbed and clutched her head. Zero knelt and put his arms around
her. Relief cascaded through him as she returned his hug. "God, my head
hurts," she said.

"The second visitation drove out the first," Jack said. "And we drove the
second off before it could possess her. They are not spirits; they are
plasma vessels generated by the IAMton field, carrying records of psychic
imprints that—" He broke off, staring at the Pezz. Another of the things
was drifting toward the Pezz and Yoshio. "Friend Pezz! Back off, my friend—
let it get at Yoshio for a moment! Let his second visitor drive out his first.
And then we shall see."

An hour later they were standing on the edge of the IAMton desert,
squinting against the reflection of early morning sunlight off the white
expanse. "Still looks like the salt flats," Yoshio said dully. He winced.
Saying even that much had hurt his head.

"It feels exactly like a real, real bad hangover," Angie whispered to him.
"Doesn't it?"

"Yes," he said as softly as he could and still be heard.

"We shouldn't make them march when they're feeling like this," Zero said.

"We are out of food," Jack said.

"Food is a big priority with you apparently," Zero said brusquely.

"Yes. It has to be."

"We could go without for a day."

"I urge that we don't wait here any longer," Jack said.

"The hell with it," Angie said, wincing. "Let's go. He's been right about
everything else. We're just scared to go into this thing. Making excuses.
The hell with it. Come on."

She started off across the wastes, and reluctantly, carrying their packs and
the metal spikes, the others followed.
The boy screamed and writhed, and foam flecked his lips.

"You're fortunate I'm here to deal with this matter," the Emperor said. "The
wounded are fortunate, too. They need someone who's not squeamish to
rescue them from their suffering. Do this one now, Bella."

Making a kissy-face and batting her eyes at the teenage boy, Bella knelt
and lovingly cut his throat with a ragged-edged machete cadged from a
dead Groyn. The boy's screaming became a gurgle, then silence.

Sadly, Swanee realized that this was the boy guard from the night they'd
taken Doggo. The boy he'd frightened off, trying to save his life. Well, his
lower half was crushed; he'd have died anyway. And now the screaming was
stopped. But did Bella have to enjoy herself so much?

Bella, Swanee, two Phylum Twos, Jamie, Kelso, and two air-sharks
accompanied the Emperor Harmony on his continuing inspection of his new
residence. The air-sharks circled the group restlessly in opposite directions,
one a little higher than the other; they were waiting for another chance to
feed, eyeing the cadaver of the boy, champing their beveled jaws.

Jamie stood grimly rigid in the enormous hands of a Phylum Two, who
imprisoned her effortlessly, clamping her arms to her sides. Now and then
he nudged his semitumescent penis against her rump, and she ground her
teeth in bottled-up fury. Swanee could see it in her eyes: she was
imagining just how she would kill this creature once she had the
opportunity.

The room had once been a large workroom in the back of one of the
open-air shops and was now a repository of broken crockery, shattered
pots, overturned furniture, and a heap of gravel where one wall had
collapsed.

"There's another over there, there is!" Kelso cawed out, hopping from foot
to foot on Harmony's shoulder. His stunted wings flapped his excitement;
drool leaped from his skull's mouth; and his lidless eyes dilated and
pinpointed and dilated and pinpointed.

Swanee had to suppress an imprecation. He had hoped that the Emperor
wouldn't see the scarred fellow, just a boy himself. Warren. He was lying
on his back, half covered with debris, mostly hidden by a wooden table
lying on its side.

Harmony turned to look. The camera lenses occupying his eye sockets
whirred, focusing; the mechanical iris inside them opening as he looked into
the dark corner of the room.

Bella threw the table aside. Jamie sucked in her breath audibly. "Warren!"

Warren grinned lopsidedly at her. It was a weak grin. His side was stoved
in; blood glued gravel to the floor.

Then Jamie glanced guiltily at the Emperor, who had turned his changeless
features toward her. "He's a friend of yours."

"I know everyone here," she said, shrugging. "I even used to know you
when you were human."

"Is that supposed to be an insult? If it is, you're an ignorant girl. A silly
airhead, like all females." He snorted with pleasure. "I see you don't like
that remark. That's nice. Listen: I'm going to let the air-sharks play with
your friend here. Unless perhaps you'd like to tell me where Sanchez and
your little lesbian whorefriend are hiding?"

She was fighting tears. "I really, honestly don't know."

"I could Twist you, and then I could read your mind. But I don't think I want
to see what you'd become, and anyway the process takes too long. Well.
The sharks."

"Look, leave Warren alone. He could be useful to you," she said
desperately, a catch in her voice. "He might live. He's a good fighter."

"That's what worries me. But he'd die anyway. The wounded are all
impossible to care for on Fool's Hope. Stupid to try to save them unless
their wounds are minor. No, he'll die. But if I give him to the sharks, it'll be
... well, they like to play with their food."

"Look, I'll help you any way I can. You're in power, so putting this moron on
me is unnecessary. But I don't know where Sanchez and Trish are."

He snorted. "As if the whore would so much as go for a tinkle without
telling you where she was doing it and how much came out."

"Hey, Jamie." Warren's voice was a rasp. "Forget it. I'm goin' anyway. I like
the idea ... the sharks. Always knew sharks'd get me. A surfer way to go.
One of the risks of living freestyle."

"You think you'd like the idea, but you won't," Harmony said nonchalantly.

"You won't like it you won't like it you won't!" Kelso sniggered.

Harmony gestured, and the two air-sharks dove. One of them clamped
Warren's head in its jaws—not hard enough to kill him—and pulled him from
the debris. He choked off a scream. It carried him about the room, dangling
him awkwardly from its jaws, as the other worried at his thighs.

Swanee shouted, "Shit!" He stepped in and slashed out Warren's throat
with his talons as the shark swept by. He turned instantly to Harmony, fell
to his knees, and bowed his head. "Forgive me. I couldn't bear it: I am
weak. But I am loyal. Kill me now. My essence is yours."

Harmony said nothing for a moment. The only sound was the crunching,
sucking noises as the two air-sharks fought over Warren's remains. Jamie
was alternately sobbing and cursing.
Swanee couldn't bring himself to look up at the Emperor.

Finally, Harmony said, "You could have been my favorite. But I have always
perceived this—this simpering indecision in you."

"He has misgivings," Bella said. As always, her voice was a velvety tease.
"But he does what is required. He can fly: he is useful, my Emperor. One
who serves even in the face of his doubts is finally more devoted than one
who serves unthinking. The unthinking servant might one day think and
turn. This one has shown that he is yours no matter what occurs to him."

Swanee was staring at her in surprise. She looked at him languidly, with
cool objectivity. There was no hint of affection or regard in her gaze. But
she had spoken up for him. Which meant that she was willing to take a risk
for him.

"Still, he has defied me just now," Harmony said. "He knew I meant for the
little asshole to suffer. Oh, very well. But go from my sight, Swanee.
Quickly. Make yourself useful restoring my throne room. Go!"

Bowing his head to conceal his relief at being allowed to leave, Swanee
backed away, out the door, and then leaped into the air. He climbed the
sky and, feeling strangely giddy, circled the settlement, looking down at
the restoration activity, wondering about Bella. Wondering how he could
care about so cruel a creature, and how so cruel a creature could care about
him.

Below, workmen under the watchful eye of various Twists were loading
wreckage onto oruh carts and shoring up the gates against hypothetical
attacks. Others had begun work converting the warehouse into Harmony's
throne room. "Save the skulls," Harmony had told them. "Keep the skulls of
all the dead. The old era has expired; the skulls will symbolize the death of
the past. The new age is here: the new age of Harmony."

Oh yes, Swanee thought. The new age.


The sunlight glanced off the clinker tower of crystal up ahead and speared
into Zero's eyes. He squinted against the reflection and the glare of the
pitted white plain. Abruptly, the forty-foot tower collapsed into itself,
crackling and thudding. Section by rough-faceted section shunted jerkily
into the desert surface as if it were being pulled into a tube from
underground. And as if in response, another rose off to the left, rising
shakily from the plain with a chuck-chuck-chuck sound, an irregular
construct like a precarious pile of badly worn children's blocks just waiting
for someone to push it over. In the distance, against the horizon, yet
another tower built itself out of nothing, while a third tower
deconstructed.

"That a reaction to us?" Zero asked Jack. The Earthers were together;
Angie, Jack and Yoshio were walking abreast. The Pezz trotted up ahead,
very nervously indeed, muttering to itself. Zickorian and Calum followed
disconsolately behind.
"The towers? A reaction to us?" Jack seemed distant and less animated
than usual. "No. It happens all the time out here. Some electrochemical
activity I don't pretend to understand."

"It's funny, the things you do understand, Jack," Zero said, watching him,
"and the thing you profess not to. You seem to know what you need to
know when the time comes for it."

"Very good," Jack said wearily. "I have traveled many times farther on
Fool's Hope than anyone else who was kidnapped to this world. I entered
its wilderness alone in order to make its acquaintance. Its Gaea, its
Overmind, its ecological network—it is there to talk to you if you learn its
language. It tells me what I need to know."

Zero kept watching him. It seemed to him that Jack was a bit more frayed
around the edges than usual. Not his clothing or the dirt on him, not the
depredations of travel; no, instead, Zero thought, it was the total picture,
the gestalt of him. There was something ... something...

"God, I'm hungry," Angie said suddenly, bitterly, "and thirsty. No more
water. I hope to God you're right about that swamp. It seems so dry here."

"We encountered that phenomenon before. From dry to wet, just like that,"
Yoshio said.

"And my head is killing me," she went on, scowling. "I'd kill for an aspirin.
Okay. I wouldn't kill for one. But I'd maim for one. Or maybe a couple of
Tylenol. No, make it Advil. Three Advil washed down with a glass of
fresh-squeezed orange juice. Chilled."

Orange juice, Zero thought. Grapefruit juice, apple juice,
strawberry-banana milkshakes: never again. Change the subject, quick. He
said, "The thing that happened to you this morning—the alien, um,
borrowing your body, sort of." He didn't want to say possessed. "You really
don't remember any of it?"

Angie shrugged glumly. "Not anything that happened. Just a feeling. Like
an aftertaste. Fear. Like, a fear I was going to be eaten. Wanting to
escape, find isolation. Just a general sort of feeling."

"Same here," Yoshio said. "All I can remember about the alien is a mood. A
sense of regret and being angry at the regret."

Zero understood. He felt a sharp, empathic sense of what they were
describing. Too sharp. The IAMton field was enhancing his intuition, leaking
bits of telepathic signals to him. And it was growing more intense.

For a while the only sound was their footsteps crunching across the acrid
crust of the IAMton wastes. The dust they raised stung their eyes and
made their mouths dry and puffy; it burned in Zero's split lip and worked its
way under the bandages to Yoshio's wounds.
All at once the Pezz froze in its tracks. Then it began to back toward them
and turned, very slowly, as if struggling with a mysterious inertia. Zero had
been around it long enough to know this was an indication of real fear.

"I cannot continue," it said.

"It isn't much farther," Jack said. "I can smell the water, the grass. We
could carry you if—"

"No, no, I am not weary. I am ... there are too many others here. Invisible
ones. The territorial impingement is great. I violate them; they violate me.
We are [untranslatable]."

"I sense them, too," Zickorian said, moving up from behind. "The
beast-ancestors of this place give us our final warnings."

Zero felt a prickle of sourceless anxiety himself, had been feeling it for a
while. The sunlight seemed intrusively bright. He closed his eyes for a
moment to rest them.

And then it washed over him: a vision, styled cinematically. Pan over a
cavern of verdigris, artificially lit from within artfully arranged wall-niches.
The big cavern's gold and green-streaked walls are honeycombed with
elegantly carved-out holes, cave-mouths tastefully bearded with something
like sparkling macrame made of cotton candy. Truck in on one
filigree-trimmed cave in particular. Someone looks out of one of the holes.
It exudes a tangerine mist that clings to it, obscuring its inner form. But he
knows what this person is like under the clothing-smoke: like a leathery
vacuum cleaner hose articulated with animate hairs and pincers. Zzzz, but
it is good to see her! A warmth rolls through him at the sight of his sweet
mother.

"Zero!" Jack's voice, from somewhere. "Clasp it! Close your hands over it!"

Zero felt something cold in his hands. The cold was like the cold pang of
separation from a loved one: he'd lost his mother. Reeling from the loss, he
opened his eyes and saw himself surrounded by strangers. Aliens. "Zzzz?"

"Oh, God," Angie said. "Zero!"

He looked at her, and a filter was withdrawn from his mental camera. Her
features shifted from alien to familiar. "Angie..." He felt spaced out and his
head ached, but the vision and the strangeness had gone. He opened his
arms to embrace her. She melted against him. He closed his eyes to savor
her—and then snapped them open. He'd seen pictures against the darkness
behind his eyelids. A city of interlocked glass toroids; a red sky thronged
with flying creatures moving in strict ritualistic formations.

"Don't close your eyes except to blink," he told the others over Angie's
shoulder. "You'll see things."

"You see how it is?" the Pezz said, turning to Jack. "They are everywhere,
here."
"It's not them, actually," Jack said. "It's a sort of record of them,
impregnated into the ambient IAMton field. But I see your problem. You
feel you are transgressing?''

"Yes," the Pezz said. "I am unclean and in danger of becoming absurd."

"Talk about closing the barn door after the horse is gone," Angie muttered.

Zero turned to the Pezz. "Don't you have some kind of—some sort of official
diplomatic apology you can make for, uh, transgressing? Maybe something
traditional among your people?"

"Yes, the Traveler's Obsequy. It would not be enough."

"It might be," Jack said, "combined with this." He bent and unwrapped the
metal hill-spikes he'd been carrying wrapped in cloth. "These can be
dangerous. I didn't want to break them out till they were really needed." He
gave one to each of the travelers. "Now, be careful how you hold them.
They will act as lightning rods of a sort for the psychoreactive energies.
They are to be used with a firm grip, held just so." He held his own shining
metal spike out to the side like a canoe paddle, its lower end touching the
dirt. "It must drag in the dust. It will be uncomfortable, hunched over like
this, but we haven't got far to go, and you can take frequent rests."

"Why do you say 'Keep a good grip on them'?" Yoshio asked, sounding
worried.

"Because when they pick up an IAMton surge, they might react by turning in
your hands and attracting to your center of psychic polarity. That is, if you
don't hold them firmly, they'll whip about and sink themselves into your
skull. They're attracted to your brain like a pin to a magnet, you see."

Zero's knuckles immediately whitened on the spike.

"I refuse," Zickorian said, casting his spike down. It clanged onto the salt
crust and trembled as violet sparks shivered up and down its length. "It is
wrong to defy the spirits. If they desire to enter us, it is for good reason.
We should commune with them."

For a moment Zero found himself wondering if Zickorian were right. He
shook his head. He didn't want to go back to that verdigris cavern.

"Do as you prefer, Zickorian," Jack said. "And I wish you farewell."

Zickorian turned a rather human expression of accusation at Calum, who
reluctantly dropped his own hill-spike beside Zickorian's.

The expedition set off once more to the north, toward the Hungry Punkin'
swamp and the Progress Station. The Earthers and the Pezz were moving
clumsily, having to drag the "lightning rods." Zickorian stepped out well
ahead of the others; as if setting himself apart from them and challenging
"the spirits" to take him. Calum hung back. Zero noticed that he walked
between Angie and Yoshio, close between their hill-spikes, as if hoping
their close proximity would protect him. Apparently it did.

For he was untouched when, minutes later, Zickorian gave a shout and
went rigid, his arms stretched overhead, reaching for the jade sky. And then
he bent double, clawing at himself. Zero and Jack ran up to help him, but it
was too late. Zickorian had drawn a knife from his boot and was using it to
slash himself. The alien within the alien, the alien mind that had taken
over Zickorian, had seen hideous things sunken into his underside—what
the Earthers called legs—disgusting growths trying, perhaps, to eat him
alive.

Zero gathered something of the sort from the few fragments of Zickorian's
babbling that the translator-box could manage. And then it translated
Zickorian's death-scream as "[Untranslatable]."

Before Jack and Zero could wrest the knife away, Zickorian's random
slashing found a vital organ.

Silently, Calum buried Zickorian and inscribed the appropriate runes in the
dust over the shallow grave.

The Earthers stood gloomily by while this was done. There had been much
friction with Zickorian. But he had traveled with them a long way, had
undergone the same privations and confusion. They had come to identify
with him, to think of him, like every member of the expedition, as an
extension of themselves. He had been part of their island of familiarity in a
sea of the alien. Piece by piece their island had been swamped by the sea:
Dennis, Cisco, now Zickorian. Losing Zickorian made them feel small and
lost and sorry they hadn't tried harder to understand him.

Zero's own sense of loss was complicated by the aftertaste of the alien
consciousness he'd shared for a few moments: the alien's sense of loss for
its mother.

The horror of that intrusion, the longing for the embrace of that thing,
nagged at the back of his mind. Don't think about that, Zero told himself.
Bury it. But he wondered how much longer he could keep burying his shocks
and stay sane.

Zero slipped an arm around Angie's waist, and for a few minutes they
leaned on one another. Then Jack said, "We'd best go." Calum nodded and
hunkered beside Jack, sharing his hill-spike. Walking like Groucho, they
continued on their way.

When the back pain could no longer be borne and the irritation of the dust
in their eyes threatened to blind them, Jack announced, "There, up ahead,
see it? The stand of ghost trees?"

With watering eyes they peered through the haze of dust and saw a thatch
of wavery plumes at the horizon. Like filmic superimpositions of trees, Zero
thought, but without color. Misty gray.
"That is the edge of the swamp," Jack said. "The turf of the Hungry Punkin'.
And the place where the Progress Station is supposed to be."


                                    *12*

"I knew we'd find her," the Emperor said, turning his camera-lens eyes
toward Trish. "Something as sweet and delicate and valuable as this silly
creature couldn't be hidden in the settlement long. I'm deeply annoyed to
learn that there were escape tunnels dug under the settlement for her to
hide in. I really had no idea they were there. I'm going to have a bit of
advice sewn into a sampler: Never have too much faith in your own
intelligence service."

Swanee was lying on a wooden scaffold on his back, gluing snail shells to
the ceiling. They weren't really snail shells—the creature who'd lived in
them was more like a spider—but they looked a lot like them, with their
spiral formation and their delicate patterning, and they were perfect for a
ceiling mosaic. He was using them to delineate patterns of power radiating
from the central figure of the ceiling, the Emperor's face, which was forty
feet across from ear to ear.

The throne room—which, because it was so fussily tended by the dwarf-pig,
Harmony called the Porcine Chapel—was to be decorated wall to wall,
ceiling to floor, with murals and mosaics depicting the Ascent of the
Emperor, in Harmony's own fanciful version of the story.

Swanee shifted a little on the scaffold and grunted with pain. This was very
hard on his wings. They were flexible wings, almost rubbery, but they were
not unbreakable. Also the smoke from the torches had collected near the
ceiling, making him cough. He had run out of shells up there. A good excuse
to quit the scaffold for a while and work on the walls.

Swanee wriggled free of the scaffold and slid down a rope to the floor,
giving his wings a few tentative twitches to restore circulation.

"Watch out with thothe wingth!" the dwarf-pig lisped indignantly. "You
almotht knocked over the royal chamberpot!"

"Thorry—I mean, sorry," Swanee said, looking over his shoulder. The
dwarf-pig was carrying the chamberpot proudly out the front gate, where
two Pragmatics stood guard.

Swanee looked around. It would be a very busy room, in the design sense,
when he was finished. But it was not for him to dictate the Emperor's taste.

It was high ceilinged, the biggest room in the settlement. It was empty
except for the ceiling decorations, the scaffold, the throne at one end, and
a red rug of of Groyn hide running from the throne to the door opposite.
There was a door behind the throne leading to new jail cells and to the
Emperor's quarters.

The Emperor was humming as he supervised the hanging of various ceiling
decorations and of various people, and these two decorating tasks were
indistinguishable. He hung two of the textile sarcophagi of the Whorebugs
above and to either side of his throne; the windings were cut away in one
spot so that the genitals of the men who'd died in them were exposed,
dangling like shriveled blue tassels. Others, two men and two women who
had resisted his takeover—in fact only one of them had; the others were
executed for not completely contradicting the dissenter at once—had been
hung by the neck, and then, after Swanee had dutifully painted pretty
Art-Decoesque designs on them, were dipped in a lacquer made from oruh
hooves to preserve them. Mummified, eyes bulging and tongues protruding
under their yellow coating, they were hauled by pulley into place, dangling
from the ceiling by their nooses like morbid chandeliers.

"When we get the electric lighting worked out," the Emperor said
thoughtfully, "I really must have some bulbs put in their mouths, or
perhaps in their rumps."

Trish was tied hand and foot, lying at the foot of the Emperor's throne. Her
groin was bloodied; the Emperor had let the Phylum Twos use her. He'd
watched, absently caressing himself the while.

"Look at yourself, you animall" Trish had screamed at Harmony as the
Phylum Twos dragged her onto the mattress. "Look in a mirror! You call that
exalted? Divine? You're being punished, you dumb backward intellectual
slob!"

Harmony had laughed at her. "Punished? If this is punishment, give me
more—because I'm very happy! How could punishment make a man so
happy? And do you think I don't look in the mirror, dear child? I do so,
lovingly, every day! Do you imagine that this is some Dorian Gray
retribution for me, my transformation? Should I want to look human? But
humans are base things. Lower animals. That's like a human wanting to
resemble a chimp! What divine being ever looked really human? No one
interesting. Have you seen paintings of Krishna, of Kali, of Shiva? I never
liked my former face. This"—he indicated his own face—"now this is an idea
made flesh. It is purity, my dear. To me it's very beautiful.''

But she hadn't heard him; she'd been penetrated by the Phylum Two just
then and was occupied with screaming.

The Emperor's shape-changer had assumed the shape of a throne. A throne
of living human flesh, of soft pink skin, veins and sinews and muscles
articulating an imitation of an Earthly throne's marbling and baroque inlays.
It was outlined in blinking, rolling human eyes, and its cushions were
pulsing and warm. The Emperor strode to it and sat down with a sigh of
pleasure. Kelso was asleep, eyes staring, glazed over, on the back of the
throne. He woke with a snort when the Emperor sat down, flapped his
truncated wings; his long tongue unwound as he yawned hugely.

Swanee watched the throne with sidelong glances, looking up now and then
from his palette and his brushwork.

The Emperor looked down at Trish, and a reflection of a wall torch
glimmered in perfect miniature in his camera lens. He spoke aside to the
dwarf-pig. "Have the guards bring in the little bird's new cage."

"My ethenth is yourth, Your—"

"Yes, yes, just do it."

The dwarf-pig scrambled to do the Emperor's bidding. Swanee could feel the
Emperor's gaze shift to him, to his work at the wall mural. It was like
hearing a wasp buzz at the back of your head; you were afraid to move,
afraid to provoke it into stinging you.

Swanee was using a crude brush and a palette of crude but vivid paints to
fill in the details of a mural depicting the transformation of the Emperor.
The figure of the Emperor was the center of a pastoral design, and the
trees, the undergrowth, the gathering of animals and awed worshippers all
seemed to emanate from him in the stroke-emphasis of Swanee's
stylization.

"Very pretty," Harmony commented. "But it's rather ... there's a sort of
angry undertone, don't you think? Rather like Van Gogh in his last phase.
Emotional strokes, so vivid as to be hostile. Could this express some inner
turmoil on your part, Swanee, hm?"

"No, my Emperor," Swanee said as evenly as he could, blanking his mind to
discourage letting go a telepathic contradiction. "To be honest, what it
expresses is the crudeness of my tools and paint. It just comes out that
way with these brushes and this unsubtle goo I'm stuck with." He tried not
to hope that the lie would work. The Emperor might pick up on that hope.

"I'm dubious. It's vibrancy is—ah, here's your new home, Patricia."

"Fuck you, scumbag," Trish said, articulating clearly.

"The sun-monkeys made this cage for us," Harmony said conversationally as
his entourage entered the throne room. The wrought iron cage was carried
in by the newt and snakelegs and the beetlewingface and El Chingaderty—
who had a new victim, a teenage boy. "They're quite good at ironwork, the
monkeys," Harmony went on. "...Ironic all this dealing we're doing with
aliens. Considering what we've got planned for them. I think it wise we find
out which ones are most useful to us. That way, before the extermination,
we can select a few for slaves..."

The cage, with its floral pattern of black metal, was about four and a half
feet high, three in diameter. It was shaped like an outscale parakeet's cage
except that inside there were hundreds of tiny barbs.

They opened the cage door and pushed Trish in. She bit off a scream. They
locked the door and reached through the bars to cut her bonds. Running a
chain through the iron ring at the top of the cage, they hoisted her twenty
feet into the air, just in front and to one side of the throne.

Trish writhed, and her blood, released by the hundreds of barbs on every
interior surface of the cage, began to leak almost immediately through the
holes in its floor. Trish hunched herself, trying to avoid the barbs, but could
find no place where her weight didn't bear her down on them.

"Actually, I borrowed this notion from Elizabeth of Bathory," Harmony said.
"We really should have gagged the pretty little lezzie—the noise is ... oh,
good." This last as the guards—two scared-looking humans—brought Jamie
in and tied her to a ring in the floor, directly beneath the cage.

"You needed a shower, you dirty little dyke," the Emperor said.

Kelso howled with laughter at this. "Yes, stinky dyke needs fuckin' show
-wer!"

In trickles and drops, Trish's blood rained down on Jamie. Jamie sobbed and
tried to strangle herself on her ropes. The guards prevented her. She
convulsed and bent double, clutching her belly. On her thighs, her own
blood mixed with Trish's.

She's having a miscarriage, Swanee thought dully. The paintbrush seemed
heavy in his hands. He felt numb except for a distant, roiling nausea.

"I'm hungry I'm hung-reeeee," Kelso said "I want to eat little furry things
like Swanee, Emperor lovey-sir! You said he could take me to get some, you
said he could!" Kelso capered on Harmony's shoulder, nuzzling and begging.

"Oh, very well. Swanee, take him out and feed him, but don't dawdle. Bring
him back soon and return to work."

"My essence is yours," Swanee said. Despite his disgust at the thought of
physical contact with Kelso, he came alive inside knowing he was to be
released from this scene. The girl writhing in the cage, the blood raining on
her lover. Get away, he told himself, before the Emperor reads you.

Fortunately, the Emperor was fully involved in enjoying his new toys.

With Kelso tucked under his arm, Swanee hurried into the sunlight. Even
out there he could still hear the screaming.

Get away. Get gone. Go!

He leaped into the air and mounted into the sky with laborious heaves of
his wings. As he did so he was aware that he'd made a decision. The leap
into the air and the decision had come simultaneously.

He climbed and climbed till the soft green sky cooled him with an
amber-tinged cloud and the winds drowned the scream of the young woman
in the barbed cage. (All those little holes—how long would it take her to
bleed to death?)

"Where yuh go-in'?!" Kelso yammered. "Whatcha doin'? The woods is the
other way, that's where thuh little ani-mules is!"
Swanee ignored him. He soared, gliding toward the Neutral. Presently,
through a gold-limned break in the clouds, he saw it below, looking as if
Stonehenge had multiplied. He dove through the break and spiraled down
toward the Neutral, wondering where to begin.

"You're gonna get in trouble," Kelso complained. "I'm gonna call the
Emperor!"

"Oh no, I don't think so," Swanee said. "I've been waiting for this moment
for a while, Kelso."

He was still a quarter-mile up when he lifted the living skull over his head
and flung it downward. Babbling obscenities, making futile flaps with its
Thalidomide wings, the skull turned end over end as it fell—and in a few
moments it was a white-flecked red splash on the empty blue road, a few
hundred yards from the edge of the Neutral.

Swanee had felt the ripple of empathic pain go through him—and it
bothered him not a whit. He laughed and spiraled lower yet and saw that
the road wasn't quite empty. Bella was there, staring at the splash on the
road. Swanee grinned, pleased to see an expression on her face that had
nothing to do with her Queen of the Night role.

Emboldened by her amazement, he fluttered down across from her, the
spin-painting that had been Kelso between them.

She closed her mouth and regained her aplomb. "Your prettiest artwork,"
she said, nodding toward the splash. "Very modern. I like it. I could never
stand the little snitch."

"I feel like I've just pulled a tick off my back," Swanee said.

"I have to turn you in, you know. And the Emperor will kill you."

"No. I'm leaving. And I'm going to see him brought low. He did something
today ... I just couldn't stand it anymore."

"You don't really think you can just fly off, do you? He'll reel you back in,
Swanee." She came around the circle of blood, making motions with her
hands as if pulling on an invisible line that brought her closer to him till she
was standing body-warmth close, the tips of her breasts just touching his
leathery black chest. She tapped Swanee's forehead. "He'll reel you in up
here."

"He'll try. He succeeded before. But I'll fight him. This time I'll win.
Something busted open in me back there." He looked into her eyes,
searching for warmth, compassion. He saw only a vibrating void. He shook
his head. "You wouldn't understand." For a moment he thought he saw it.
Just a flicker.

It occurred to him that she might be planning to kill him. To curry favor with
Harmony.
He took a step back and tried to see past the styling of her Twist. Even
here in the sunlight she was Queen of the Night. In the darkness she
carried light with her, an unhealthy swamp-gas glow. In the daylight she
carried a corona of darkness, her own capsule of night, a backdrop that
went with her wherever she went.

He remembered going to the state fair as a boy. There had been a Haunted
House—just a big trailer, really, with a facade that unfolded, that showed
cartoony ghosts and ghouls wreathed in mist and climbing from mossy
graves beneath crooked gravestones. And he'd paid his fifty cents and
entered this thing from the bright daylight, and inside it was pitch dark,
narrow, zig-zagging corridors lit every so often by a little alcove with a
black light and a Day-glo monster mask in it; maybe, here and there, wispy
stuff hanging from the ceiling tickled the back of his neck; cold air blew
from a hole somewhere in the floor. But for a nine-year-old, they'd
successfully created the right atmosphere. The
tacky atmosphere of the American Halloween, of Disney movies about
witches, of Abbott and Costello movies about ghosts.

And this superbly tacky rendition of supernatural darkness was something
Bella carried with her like a negative aura.

Combined with Bella's maddening voluptuousness and her skin-tight black
and scarlet costume that was a kind of lingerie to wear in public ... it gave
Swanee a hard-on.

He turned away from her and glanced down at himself. The hard-on bulged
beneath the skin of his belly. So it was in there. A mental image came to
him, a motion of his hips that would unleash the organ, snap it into the
open.

"Take a walk with me, and we'll talk about it," she said, coming up behind
him, taking his arm.

Mouth dry, he looked at her. "Talk about, uh, it?"

She smiled wickedly. "About Harmony, silly."

"Oh."

They strolled down the road between the bogs, distantly aware of
jumpskeeters splashing, the life of wet places carried to them on the smell
of the alien breeze. It was hot and humid, and walking along the road
beside the swamp was a little like walking through the Deep South
countryside, like an afternoon of that summer he'd spent in Georgia.
Almost.

"He'll know Kelso is dead by now," Swanee said. "He'll have sensed it. I
should go. He'll send someone after me." He looked at her. "Perhaps he
already did."

"Nope. Not me. I was coming back from the Neutral to report to him about
Sanchez. He was right: Sanchez is hiding in the Neutral. The Pezz are
hiding him."

"Is he?" He watched her sidelong. "Still, you said you have to turn me in—
and he'd know if you let me go."

"I changed my mind. He can't read me like he can the others. I let him hear
what he wants to hear. I'm ... telepathically selective." She stopped and
turned him to her. Her hands burned across his pectorals, down his ribs,
coming to rest on his hips, where there was just a suggestion of a pull in
them. "I know how you feel about me," she said. "I am not ... invulnerable
to emotion.'' Her voice had gone husky.

Could he believe her? He wanted to back away. He couldn't.

"Swanee..." Her eyes were windows into underground rivers; her voice was
thick now with invitation. Her cleavage sang to him. "What you did to Kelso
—I mean, defying Harmony—that turns me on. Got me all ... you know."

He pulled her close and felt her, firm but yielding, a communicative heat
against him. (He managed not to think about the fact that she used to be a
man, a pro football player.) And they kissed, which was a storm on a
midnight sea, and then she raked her lips from his, across his cheek to his
ear, and, with her hips grinding softly against his hard-on, one hand
caressing his wings (an erogenous zone, he discovered), she whispered,
"It's so hot here on the road—take me up into the sky. Fly with me. Make
love to me up there in the clouds, where it's cool and private."

He blinked in surprise. "I don't think I could. I'm—uh, not strong enough ...
I mean, it's not that you're overweight, but—"

"My weight is my whim. I can cancel my mass, dear, with a field I don't
really understand. It works for a time, darling, my darkling darling. Take me
up, take me up."

"I'll try."

He gathered her in his arms, carrying her like a groom toting a new bride
across the threshold, and found that she was strangely light. So he ran and
leaped, and his wings climbed the air-pressure ladder till they were
mounting the sky and she was laughing and kickher feet with happiness. He
grinned at her and took her up, took her up.

And then they were in the clouds, in damp silence and muted, pearly light,
and it was cooler there. She touched something at her crotch, and her
clothing melted away, and he did that thing with his hips, glanced down
and saw with relief that his organ was not particularly Twist, it was simply
very big, very black, and very hard. She ground her sticky-wet parts against
him, and he thought, She smells like a spring in the Okefenokee swamp,
the smell of swamp rot mixed with blooms.

His wings kept them climbing, but slowly now, a few inches at a time. He
explored her breasts and found them impossibly firm and resilient and
magnetically charged, his hands positively charged, so that click—they
locked together. The light diffused around them, leaving them in a sweet
gray limbo with nothing to distract them from one another. God, the smell
of her hair, its gloss, the cloud moisture beading like diamond chips on the
exquisite line of her throat, the swell of her hips inviting him in ... He tried
to enter her, and she said, "No."

"No?"

"Not till we're farther up—and then stop flying. Fold your wings. Dive. Do it
to me then. When we're diving."

"But we'll—"

"I trust you to pull us up before we hit. Please. Please. I'd come then. I'd
come hard for you."

Too feverish to think twice, he climbed, kept climbing till they'd broken from
the cloud. And for a moment they hung in the air at the roof of the cloud
with the emerald sky arching above and the soft, light-infused infinite fluff
of the cloud's roof stretching out to either side like their Elysian marriage
bed, and she said, "Now!"

He drove himself into her. He moaned and couldn't have flown then if he'd
wanted to. He was too wired with sensation, savoring it, then pumping for
more of it, digging deeper. A miner in a delirium of lust when he's found a
millionaire-making vein of gold; dig into the gold, follow it back into the
darkness of the world's secret interior places...

Swanee was not aware that they were falling till they'd broken from the
bottom of the cloud and were plunging through a plane of sunlight and she
was howling with happiness, urging him on, bucking wildly against him, her
eyes lit up with suicidal glee, with kamikaze devotion to some sexual
absolute. The wind ripped the breath from his lungs, the sky screamed past
him, sucking the moisture from his eyes as they fucked in freefall turning
over and over, clouds and sun above, strobing, alternating with the
glimmering topography of the bogs down below as they spun, adrenaline
shouting through him and mixing with hot Twist semen as she screamed,
"I'm coming!"

The ground rushed up at them. From the corner of his eye he saw a spike of
glass in her hand and caught her wrist in his taloned fingers.

He shrieked like a man whose wife has metamorphosed into a black widow.
He wrenched free of her, wings flapping desperately for purchase on the air,
backing away from her. He saw the long thin glass needle in her hand, like
a hatpin but exactly as long as his penis, glimmering in the light as she
slashed at him again with it. She missed but screamed with delight, still
bucking in orgasm.

Swanee was still falling, but he twisted away from her slash and angled
down, then arched his back to ascend, to glide, fighting his momentum,
terrified by the rush of the bogs toward him. He fought and found a grip on
the air. The approach of the ground slowed, stopping as he raked upward.
He thought, My God, I've let her fall.

But she was floating in the air, her arms and legs moving like a frustrated
spider dangling on a web-strand. She drifted downward very slowly; she
would make the ground safely, he saw. Despite his bitterness, he was
pleased.

He heard her think a parting message to him as he flew away from her: "I
meant everything and would never have wanted anyone else. But I had to
try to kill you anyway. I really tried. And I'm almost glad you got away,
darling ... Keep fighting ... I love you ... I'll kill you if I get the chance ... I
love you."

Swanee closed his mind to her and flew faster to put more distance
between them. He angled for the Neutral and his cock—dripping, feeling
cold now in the open air—drew itself into its sheath, like a frightened turtle
into a shell.

Feeling drained, he fluttered down to the Neutral, dropping into the midst
of the Pezz's pavilion.

"Where's Sanchez?" he asked them wearily. "I want to save his life."


Zero felt relief here on every level. Relief from heat, from hunger and thirst
and the burning in his eyes, relief from exertion and especially from the
pressure of alien minds. The prickling anxiety had drained away the
moment they'd stepped out of the IAMton wastes.

And it was soothing here among the ghost trees. The ghost trees were
living organisms, Jack had assured him, but they were so diffuse—as limpid
as steam, etiolated and fine—that they looked like mist, mist carved into
the shape of elms seen in the foggy distance on an autumn day. The
dramatic upward lift of the trunk, the expressive articulation of branches
and leaves, all blurred into fog. But they were in their reproductive phase
now: every few minutes they spawned seedlings with meteoric bursts of
colored rain, colors of rainbow purity showering miraculously from
colorlessness, silting brightness to the ground.

Cooled by a fine spray from the ghost trees, Angie and Zero and Yoshio and
Calum sat together against a hummock that rimmed a swamp-pool. They
had washed in a clear, cold pool of spring water. They'd eaten crustaceans
and something Jack called swamp bulbs; the bulbs looked like onions,
growing underwater along the edges of the pools. They tasted like papayas
dabbed with catsup.

Stomach full, the Earthers and Calum sat waiting for Jack and the Pezz to
return from reconnaissance. They sat contentedly, watching the ghost trees
become more solid with the thickening of dusk.

"I suppose we ought to be worried about the jumpskeeters," Yoshio said.
They could hear those and other creatures buzzing and whirring and
splashing behind them.
"The hell with the jumpskeeters," Angie said listlessly.

"The Hungry Punkin' is the real problem child around here," Zero said.

"The hell with the Hungry Punkin'," Angie murmured, her eyes drooping.

"Perhaps we should seek out the creature," Calum said, "and kill it. Take
the offensive. Lay a trap for it."

Zero looked at him. "Huh! That sounded like initiative. Like an idea all your
own. Not something I would expect from you, the way you parroted
Zickorian."

"Truly," Calum said, "you don't know our customs. I repeated what he said
because I am underage, and he is my [approximate translation:] Boy Scout
troopmaster. And that is our way. Without him, I am a free agent,
permitted to express myself independently."

The Earthers gaped at him. "Christ," Angie muttered, "I wonder what else
we misunderstood about the High Clans. About everyone."

Calum craned his neck, looking around. "Jack and Yoshio have been gone a
long time," he said.

Zero nodded. He'd been worrying about it. "They could be lost. Maybe we
should look for them."

"Then we'd all be lost," Yoshio said. "Anyway, you really think Jack is ever
lost?"

"No," Zero admitted. "I guess what really worries me is that we can't be the
only people doing recon for the Progress Station. The Vinyls must be around
somewhere. Maybe ... I dunno. Others. Or the Punkin'."

"You mean they could've been ambushed."

"We weren't," Jack said, stepping into the little white-sand area that had
sprouted the ghost trees. "But we were followed."


                                      *13*

"We saw the [untranslatable]," the Pezz said. "From a safe distance."

"He means the Hungry Punkin'," Jack said. "The Punkin' spotted us from a
ways off. It followed us, clearly intending to kill us. But I think we lost it."

"We have found the Progress Station!" the Pezz said, prancing excitedly.

"It's a sort of bunker," Jack said, "made of the same stuff the settlement is
made of, on a little island in a lake. I've never seen a Progress Station—it
wasn't here before. But I'm pretty sure that's it. But in the lake..." He
hesitated.

"The bodies of the dead," the Pezz said. "They are floating in the lake.
Among them is the creature who spied on us in the woods. It is dead. Also
some Vinyls, and some creatures I've never seen. They're badly
deteriorated.''

"The creature who spied on us?" Angie said. "That thing with the big golden
eyes?"

Jack nodded. "One of Fiskle's pets. Its head is half torn off, and those big
eyes are quite gone."

"What was the Punkin' doing when you saw it?" Yoshio asked.

"It was sloshing through the lake—the water's very shallow—and we saw it
kill a marsh weasel, and a flying dog, and a rope worm. It simply likes to
kill things. I wonder what it used to look like."

"Used to?" Zero asked.

"I don't believe the story about their representing psychotic alien races. I
think they're Twists from the races we know here. I think it's what happens
to most Twists eventually if they haven't got the right sort of psychological
underpinnings. Well, what do we do?"

"Perhaps we should go now," Yoshio said. "Maybe the darkness would work
to our advantage. We could pass the creature with stealth."

"I suggest we rest the night," Calum said, "but leave shortly before dawn,
before first light. Then perhaps the creature will be dormant. If not, we will
see if darkness works to our advantage—and if it doesn't, it will shortly be
day."

Jack and the Pezz looked at Calum in surprise. Zero and Angie laughed.


The Pezz had taken the first watch. The watch's job was not only to watch
for the Hungry Punkin', and other hostiles but also to slap away
jumpskeeters and spongesuckers with a stick. The Pezz was very good at
this, and when Zero awoke to take his watch a few hours before dawn, he
found a ring of smashed jumpskeeters around the camp.

As the Pezz went rigid with dormancy, Zero moved around the camp,
stretching, taking deep breaths, trying to clear the cobwebs away. He'd
been deeply asleep, and coming back from it was an ugly affair.

Starlight limned the ghost trees and made the white sand seem
fluorescent. Beyond the rim of the swamp pool, clumps of bulbous bushes
alternated with stunted coral trees that hooted and clicked and rattled
softly to themselves. The jumpskeeters had done for the night, but other
creatures slapped the water of the pool and clattered in the crystalline
hoop-grass.
Zero turned to look at Angie; her sleeping face was angelic in the starlight.

Zero's head snapped up; he froze, listening.

Something large was shouldering through a thatch of blue spindle-shaped
growths about forty feet away, just on the other side of the swamp pool.
Zero heard a crackle of electricity and saw a strobe of sparks jump through
cracks in the brush.

"I think we lost it," Jack had said.

"I think it found us again," Zero muttered.

And then it bounded from cover and splashed into the pool, waking a
group of jumpskeeters; it stood there trembling with fury, glaring with
every inch of itself.

"Shit!" Zero yelled, bending to fumble for a pike without taking his eyes off
the thing. "Yo! We got a visitor!"

The Hungry Punkin' was fifteen feet tall, with long, lean, corded arms and
taloned hands dangling near its double-jointed knees. Its hands looked
almost detached; its loose claws were like the mechanical grabber in the
arcade game where you operate a crane to pick up the prize. It had a big
orange head like a pumpkin—no fea-tures, not even eyes on it—and a
two-foot-wide mouth that opened in its belly where its navel should have
been. The Punkin', Zero had heard, would stuff anything that had body heat
into its belly-mouth. As if to confirm this for him, it grabbed one of the
crow-size jumpskeeters and crammed it buzzing, whole, into its maw. The
Punkin' had four organic cables dangling from its neck, spitting out sparks
like Fourth of July sparklers—but bigger sparks, deadly ones.

As the Meta's watching spheres gathered overhead, the others, awakened
by Zero, snatched up their crude weapons and stood on either side of him.
The Punkin' came sloshing toward them, sparking and roaring. Unprepared
and disoriented, they babbled suggestions at one another, everyone talking
at once, while the Punkin' climbed over the rim.

"Surround it!" Zero yelled as it came on.

They formed a rough circle around the Punkin', trying to confuse it, keep it
off balance, jabbing at it with their pikes.

Its arm lashed out and grabbed Yoshio's pike; he wouldn't let go. The
Punkin' lifted him into the air, so that he dangled from the pike, then
whipped him hard across the face with a sparking cable. Yoshio screamed
and fell away, rolling—then lay still.

Another swipe with its free talon, and Punkin' sent Calum flying through the
air, falling heavily on his back, coughing and shaking. Then it snapped
Yoshio's metal pike in two and threw the halves contemptuously aside as
Jack lunged at it with a pike from one side, Zero and Angie from another.
The Pezz tried to use a pike but could handle the weapon only clumsily.
Zero's jab glanced from the Murderer's head, leaving a waxy streak across
it; it weaved like a boxer, and Angie missed it entirely. Jack stepped in
close and tried to jam the pike down its throat. It closed its jaws on the
spear and wrenched it away, at the same time slashing at Jack with its
claws—

—and ripping his face away.

The claws had caught Jack's face at the side of the jaw and neatly sloughed
it off his head. And what was underneath made the Murderer stagger back,
disoriented. It was a light.

Jack stood there shaking as the skin began to peel away from the rest of
his head, as his neck began to crumble into paste that fell in clots at his
feet. There was no blood.

What remained was a smooth, glowing bulb shape, a shining head-size
light bulb floating over the shoulders, without a neck at all. Upheld by an
electric field of some kind, Zero supposed. The rest of Jack's veneer peeled
away in seconds, as if he were coming unraveled. The torso was
human-shaped but made of the same shining white stuff. The glowing legs
and arms floated near it but weren't directly attached.

For a moment everyone stared at what had been Jack the Baptist—and in
that moment Zero and Angie and the Pezz and the Punkin' were all
members of the same group, sharing their amazement. Zero felt like
turning to the Murderer and saying, "Can you beat that? Man, you never
know, do you? I mean, Christ, did you know that he was—?"

But what he said was, "Fuck!" as the Punkin' recovered itself and lashed out
at him with a cable. It wound around his pike, and Zero was knocked off his
feet with the electrical jolt that came through it. He found himself lying on
his back, his hands aching, wondering where the pike was. He sat up and
saw that once again Jack had startled the Punkin'.

The glossy surface of the shiny creature who'd been Jack the Baptist was
emitting a tan foam that was quickly reshaping itself, hardening, changing
color, becoming...

Another Hungry Punkin'. A smaller one (a female? Zero wondered), that was
backing away from the creature. The real Punkin' took a tentative step
toward it. The Jack-Punkin' picked up one of the hill-spikes they'd taken
from the Hillserlive. The real Punkin' followed, fascinated.

Angie knelt beside Zero and caressed his head, took his hands in hers. "Are
you okay? Maybe you better lie down."

"No, I'm okay. Little spaced out but okay." He watched the real Punkin'
follow the simulacrum. "Not too bright, is it."

"Uh uh."
Jack and the Punkin' reached the edge of the wastes and stepped into
them. He—or it—proffered the hill-spike to the Punkin', as if offering a gift.
Hesitantly, cables waving in confusion, it took the spike in its claws. The
spike began to waver in its uncertain grip—and then, as if propelled by
poltergeists, it spun and aligned itself with the Murderer's pumpkin-head
and flew the intervening few inches to spit its brain, skewering it through.
The Punkin' fell, twitching, and its sparking ceased, except along the
hill-spike. A violet crackling traveled the spike as the Murderer's essence
drained into the IAMton field of the white desert crust.

Zero heard a groan and looked over at Calum. Calum turned over, gasping,
muttering. He was alive. Yoshio was breathing, too, but was still
unconscious.

"Zero," Angie said, "he's coming back. The ... the Jack-thing."

He hugged her as they watched the Jack-Punkin' begin to change. Bits and
pieces of its false exterior curled off from it, as if molting, falling away as it
came back to the camp. When it came within twenty feet of them, it
paused as if uncertain of itself and was just the glowing light-bulb man
again, shining against the darkness.

Zero wanted to do something to help Yoshio and Calum, but he was afraid
to take his eyes off the alien they'd called Jack the Baptist. Now that the
thing's secret was exposed, it might do anything.

A voice came from a slit of dimness that appeared in its chest. It was
Jack's voice, but it sounded oddly reverbed now. "I would like to talk to
you. I have much to explain."

"Are you ... the Meta?" Angie asked.

"No. But—" It hesitated for a moment. The hesitation hung in the air,
vibrating. It was a long, long moment.


Swanee swam through darkness.

That was the way it felt, with his wings so leaden, his chest burning with
the effort. The weight of the man hanging from him seemed to increase
exponentially with each minute, as if he were a seagull in an oil slick;
Kelso's epithet was a prophecy.

He was carrying Sanchez in a leather harness that the Gatermen had made;
Sanchez dangled in his crude seat a couple of feet below him. A small guy,
Sanchez, but he was almost too much for Swanee.

Now the sea of darkness had become a sea of pain. His joints creaked, his
muscles screamed, his breath threatened to stop coming. He could hear his
own heartbeat in his ears. And there was still a long way to go.

He almost laughed when Sanchez said, "Listen, Swanee, I really need a
rest. This harness is cutting off my circulation. It's killing me."
Grateful for the excuse to set down his burden, Swanee grunted assent and
spiraled down toward an enormous treetop nest. Flapping his wings to stay
in place, he lowered Sanchez into the nest and then squatted onto the bed
of interwoven twigs and grasses, wheezing and coughing, letting the ache
flow out of his wing muscles.

"Madre de Dios," Sanchez said, "I had no idea you were suffering like that.
Stupid of me—it must be hard for you, carrying me. Let me help you off
with that harness. Hold still, I don't want to hurt your wings. There."

Sanchez sat back carefully, taking the harness off; he folded it up, and
used it for a pillow.

Swanee furled his wings and leaned back against a branch padded with
nest. He could see better than Sanchez in the darkness. Sanchez could see
him as a silhouette, maybe a few details from starlight, but he could see
Sanchez quite clearly. The little man was squinting at the tangle of bones
and hide and hair on the bottom of the nest. They could smell the beast's
battery-acid sharpness, counterpoint to the dull reek of carrion.

"Whatever lives here," Sanchez said, "eats people. And it might be coming
home to roost soon. Maybe we ought to climb down."

"We'll need the elevation to take off after we rest. Anyway," Swanee said
hoarsely, "it won't come back. It's dead: I killed it. I was flying by here
once, and it attacked me in the air. If I hadn't been the smarter one, it
would have added my bones to those." He yawned. "We'll rest a few
minutes and then we'll take off again."

"We've been flying for hours. I don't think we should go on until we both
sleep," Sanchez said.

"The expedition has already reached the Progress Station. If we don't hurry,
we could miss them. Or the Punkin' will kill them."

"If you kill yourself first, we won't get there at all," Sanchez said. "Don't
squander your resources."

"Funny. That's what Harmony—"

"You mean Fiskle. He doesn't deserve any fucking titles."

"Yeah. Fiskle. That's what Fiskle said once. He was going to send me to fly
to the Progress Station. But he decided that the Punkin' would probably kill
me, and he'd be squandering his resources, killing his only aerial scout. The
air-sharks are too stupid to be of much use as scouts or for anything
besides killing. He's been trying to develop new Twists who can fly, to work
up an expedition that could beat the others there. But all he came up with
was Sizzle, who's too crazy to control very well."

"He should have sent his ground forces. Big mistake. The turtle wins the
race because the hare is overconfident. So Fiskle controls the way people
are Twisted?"

"Um-hm." Swanee was drifting off. "Sorta. Influences it with mind ripple ...
Don't let me sleep long. We got to go. Get whatever is in the Station. Use
it against Fiskle, if it's the right kind of ... thing..." He couldn't keep his
eyes open any longer. Sanchez became a voice out of darkness.

"Maybe it was a mistake to bring me. Maybe you should've gone by
yourself, brought it back."

"Told you. Can't. Can't come back. Fiskle would regain control of ... me ...
you—" Swanee yawned hugely.

It felt good to let go, to slide into sleep. But then the dream swallowed
him up, and in its belly he found Fiskle waiting for him.

"I simply felt that you would not have trusted me enough if you had known
I wasn't of your race. People in the settlement would not have spoken so
freely around me. My appearance seems to startle humans more than, say,
the High Clansmen or even the Pezz. I wanted you to accept me as one of
you. It was for the best."

The Jack-thing had foamed over again and regrown the form of Jack the
Baptist, complete with clothing. Now he sat across from Zero and Angie, his
back to a mossy hummock, his knees drawn up, arms locked around his
knees, seeming very casual and very human. The completeness of its
disguise was unnerving.

"I saw you eat like a human being," Angie said. "You swallowed everything
you ate. Of course, I never saw you, um, eliminate wastes."

"I did eat. It went down a tube to the speech-slit where it was
disintegrated and converted to energy. Nothing is wasted. I had to eat
rather often—as you may have noticed—to maintain my disguise. It had to
be constantly shored up."

"You holding anything else back from us?" Zero asked sharply. "Maybe
about the Meta?"

"Not exactly. I understand what the Meta are doing, but I think when you
get to the Progress Station, you'll see for yourself. If I try to tell you, it
would be confusing."

"Try."

"Wait till the morning. If you don't understand after you use the thing in
the Progress Station, I will try to explain. But I will be honest with you and
tell you everything about myself. For example: I am not only alien to you, I
am what you call a Twist."

Hearing this, Zero and Angie tensed and looked at one another. Zero
looked around for a pike.
Jack shook his head. "You misunderstand. I am not dangerous to you. Not
all Twists become ... Twisted. I am simply more of what I was before. Mine
is an intuitive race. I am, just as I told you, in deep communion with this
world, with its Overmind. The Overmind is not a thinking being, like you
and I; it cannot articulate words or even ideas. But still it is a mind, and
still it communicates. I read in the Overmind that you, Zero, bear the
fullest potential to conceivably take the Meta's game—if you choose to
think of it as a game—into the next phase. I wanted to accelerate the
coming of that phase. It will improve things. It will leave Fiskle broken. Or
it will end our suffering with death."

"But—was there a human Jack once?" Angie asked.

"Yes. He stumbled into my Hollow of Meditation in the wilderness. He was
dying. He laid his head in my lap, thinking me an angel, he said, and I had
no heart to contradict him. As he died, his mind unraveled and I watched it
decay, and I remembered all that was released in its decay. Hence I speak
your language, know your ways. Hence I wrapped myself in some part of
Jack's personality."

"Do you have a name?" Zero asked.

"A description, used as a name. It translates to something like 'A Zany,
Self-Indulgent Overflight.' But the translation is too inexact. I think you
should call me Jack."

Calum, who had been lying unconscious nearby, awoke just then, the light
flicked on in the dark strip of his ocular organ. He made a miserable chirring
sound in his throat as he sat up. "I am ... not feeling [approximate
translation:] at the top of my form. But I seem ... intact."

"You are all right," Jack said. "But Yoshio is comatose. His outcome is
unforseeable."

"Where is the beast?" Calum asked.

"It is gone, dead," Jack said. "You call it a beast. You don't regard it as a
spirit incarnate, as Zickorian would?"

"I suppose it had spirit in it. But Zickorian was very old-fashioned. Don't
tell anyone, but I am a neomaterialist."

"The young always react in excess," Jack said. "Well, we had better go to
the Progress Station. It will be dawn soon. There is nothing to keep us from
claiming the prize now—unless someone beats us to it."

"We'd better explain about you to Calum," Zero said, looking squarely at
Jack. "There should be no more deception."

"Of course. When we return. I urge that we hurry. The new phase and the
object in the Progress Station are one and the same, Zero. And the new
phase is overdue."
"Am I here?" Swanee asked.

"Yes," the Emperor said, "you are. Don't you feel like you're here? Touch
yourself."

"I feel ... strange but ... it feels real. I was dreaming, though. This must be
part of the dream."

"Does it feel like a dream?"

"I couldn't be here! I was in the nestl"

Harmony shrugged imperiously. "I brought you with a snap of my fingers. I
can do anything."

"You'd like me to believe that. But I don't think I do."

They were strolling in a small courtyard behind the palace. The time,
Swanee supposed, was somewhere deep in the night, a time too deep to
see clearly.

A Phylum Two lumbered along behind them, carrying a torch. An air-shark
circled them sleepily.

Harmony had had the paving ripped up here, and the dirt churned into the
beginnings of a garden. Rows of exotic plants had been transplanted from
the gulley. Haggard human artisans were working by torchlight to glue
bones and teeth and hanks of hair and bits of shell to the garden walls,
making baroque mosaics in accordance with the Emperor's sketches.

"Here are two people you might remember, Swanee," Harmony said. They'd
come to a line of five humps, like graves without tombstones. From each
sprouted a cluster of translucent tendrils, as fine as fishing line. Some of
the tendrils groped through the air blindly, seeking here and there with the
tiny filament tufts at their ends. One of the tendrils had found a home in
the back of Jamie's neck. She was wearing rags, was squatting on the
hump, patting dirt over something Swanee couldn't quite make out. Her
face was empty of expression except for a certain intentness.

"These are the Phix," Harmony said proudly. "They'll be the centerpiece of
my garden. They're really a prize. The bulk of their bodies are underground.
They're related to the charming creatures that eliminated the little cockney
fellow—ah, Dennis, I think his name was. The Phix send out these seeking
spines, which, before you know it, latch onto you and sink their filaments
into your brain from the little hole at the base of the skull and take control.
Make an obedient little robot of you. To prevent any struggle before they
take complete control, they inject their hosts with an enzyme
that finds its way into the victim's pleasure center and stimulates it. Seems
to work for most animals. People writhe in ecstasy when the Phix first
makes contact. In fact, if you try to release the victim, the victim will fight
you tooth and nail.
"Once the filaments are deeply into the brain, the pleasure stops and the
work begins. They send the victims out to gather food, so the Phix can be
nourished through them; the victim—or host, if you prefer—maintains the
ground around the buried body of the Phix, chases away anything that
threatens it. It's marvelous! A classic reward-conditioning system that
evolves into a control system. A blueprint for the ideal monarchy, Swanee.
I've made quite a study of it, as you can tell."

"You said that there were two people here. I see only one."

"Jamie is burying the pieces of the other one for later use as food. That one
will nourish the Phix. I'm sure she'll be quite a delicacy."

Swanee glimpsed a swatch of blond hair in the dirt under Jamie's knee.
Stomach lurching, he turned away.

"I wouldn't advise you to turn your back on these creatures. We really
shouldn't be standing so close, in fact," Harmony said. They moved away.
Swanee thought he'd like to snatch up a chisel that one of the craftsmen
was using and drive it through Harmony's skull.

"I didn't quite get the details of that," Harmony said, "but I grasped that
you were thinking of killing me. Don't try. You can't, since—well, it's quite
hopeless. Trust me."

"Trust you? I assume you've brought me here to give me to your Phix. I
notice there are several without hosts."

"You? No. There are others who'll grace my garden. Our friend Sanchez, for
example. I am prepared to forgive all, Swanee, to welcome you home with
open arms, if you'll tell me where he is. Precisely, I mean. We have only
the vaguest idea as to where this nest is that he's sleeping in."

"Only the vaguest idea? Then how did you bring me here? You must know
where it is if you brought me here from there."

"Actually, we don't. We, ah, had the coordinates and lost them after we
brought you over." The Emperor's voice was colored by irritation. He was
too pompous to be a good liar.

Swanee turned to look at him. "I thought I felt strange. Kind of heavy,
uncoordinated. I'm asleep, back at the nest. This isn't my body at all, is it?
This must be the shape-changer, shifted to resemble me, acting as a sort
of container for me. Yes." Swanee could sense the shape-changer now. It
was a presence squirming like a tormented amoeba, away off in the
darkness somewhere. "Yes, there he is. I wonder if I and the Phix and the
changer can coexist."

"Don't!"

But Swanee turned and threw himself onto the grave beside Jamie, trying
to yank the tendrils out of her, to give himself to it. Then he felt a sting at
the back of his neck, heard a hum of high-tension wires in high winds,
tasted dirt. He knew another one of them had got him ... felt his limbs go
numb.

A cold, vindictive, hungry presence was all around him. The Phix.

And then he was standing over himself. Over the shape-changer, which was
wriggling out of the Swanee shape and into a series of halfway shapes,
expressing uncertainty and desperation—and then ecstasy.

Swanee looked down at himself and saw nothing. He heard Harmony
whining at the top of his lungs in infantile fury.

And then a black wind picked him up and flung him into the stars ... The
stars spat him out onto the nest.

He sat bolt upright and stared at Sanchez, who was still snoring a few feet
away.

Swanee looked down—and saw himself. He shuddered, and lay back,
determined not to sleep again that night. The tree creaked and swayed a
little in the breeze.

He needed something to keep sleep at bay. So he thought about Bella, and
the pain of it kept him awake.


The faint green light of predawn slowly drew away the veils of shadow, as
Zero, Jack, and the Pezz toiled across the hummocks of mud between the
ponds. Angie had remained behind with Yoshio and Calum. The Progress
Station was a short journey from their camp and, now that the Punkin' was
dead, an uneventful one. But on another level, things happened around
them; the miniature world of the local ecology was rearranging itself,
shifting from its nocturnal web of relationships to its diurnal configuration.
From a nearby mudbank some thing slipped heavily into the water and
cruised with dark grace just under the surface, leaving elliptical ripples.
Other things were waking; a thing of rhinestone scales said Skrank! Skrank!
as it flapped from bush to bush; ten-fingered hands sucked themselves into
their stems; something else unfurled from a tube hanging over the pond,
like the tongue of a yawning dog. Insects
rattled and hummed. A concealed animal slurped loudly.

The place smelled wet; of cheerful decay, and morbid life.

The dawn took a deep breath, and another degree of blindness seeped out
of the sky. Up ahead a chain of ponds fed streams that pooled into a broad
lake. It was shallow, and its surface, between the black outlines of corpses,
quivered with reflected silver and green. On the little, almost barren island
in the center of the lake, about fifty yards from the bank, was the white
hump of something artificial.

"That's it," Jack said, when they'd reached the bank. "The Progress Station."

Between them and the mud island, bodies littered the lake as if the
morning had overlooked them. They bobbed slightly in slow, vague vortices.
A few might have been human. One appeared to be a Phylum Two. There
was the deflated, torn shape of a Vinyl, and a much-decayed Pezz. Seeing
this, the expedition's own Pezz muttered to itself. "We are all food-scraps
for the microscopic."

"The lake is shallow," Jack said. "We can simply walk across."

"You're certain nothing else guards the station, Jack?" Zero asked.

"We have a saying on my world," Jack said. " 'Nothing is certain in life.' "

"We have the same saying," Zero said.

"So do we," The Pezz said. "It is one truth everyone agrees on."

Zero sighed. "Let's do it."

He stepped into the water, and sloshed toward the island. Jack picked the
Pezz up in his arms and followed.

The water was warm; it soaked through Zero's pants, and lapped at his
thighs. Mud sucked at his shoes. The smells of lake life and carrion curled
around him.

The body of a chitonous alien with a head like an overlarge hermit crab
spun slowly past, trailing a stink that nearly turned his stomach inside out.
A creature of tawny fur and limp tentacles drifted by; a huge wound in its
side was a home for a squirming puddle of alien shrimp. A human skull, still
attached to a purple, bloated corpse, looked like a yellow fishing float in
the water. The water around the corpse swirled with the sick iridescence of
a petroleum slick as the body's fats exuded decay.

Gagging, Zero sloshed faster, harder, till at last he reached the island's
shore. He fell to his knees in the yielding mud, drinking in the fresher air.
The Progress Station was but a hundred feet away. Its entrance gaped
wide, waiting for him.

There were no McMahons in the Progress Station. There was only the glossy
black-plastic box, sitting in the center of the blue concrete floor. Zero
walked around it and saw that on the far side a miniature translation unit
was affixed to the center of that face of the box. On impulse, he knelt
beside the translator, and said, "What do I do now?"

A falsely sweet, artificial voice spoke from the translator; the voice the
McMahons had used. "Pick up the box and press it to your forehead."

Zero glanced up at Jack. "Now that," Zero said, "sounds risky."

"After all you've come through, it's too risky?" Jack asked him in a tone of
disbelief.

"You have a point." But Zero only stared at the box. He chewed the inside
of his lip. He looked up at Jack. The dawn light framed him in the doorway,
and for a moment he looked like a Russian saint. "What's in it for you,
Jack? I mean, why not take the thing for yourself? You expect me to believe
you did all this for us just because you want to bring on the millennium or
something?"

"You're stalling," Jack said. "But all right. I'm doing it for a selfish reason.
Partly. The selfish reason being my own comfort. As long as Fiskle
influences the Overmind, the IAMton fields, the intelligent life on this world
—as long as there is false conflict, I'm in pain. It's a pain that's induced
psychically. It's my empathic nature. I'll be healed in the next phase. Or, as
I said, I'll be dead."

"You're suffering all the time?"

"Not always. But often. Yes. Are you finished stalling?''

Zero smiled crookedly. "Yeah." He lifted the box in his hands. It weighed
about ten pounds. He pressed the nearest side to his forehead. He closed
his eyes. The box moved against him. He jumped back, startled. It fell to
the floor and didn't break. It had altered its shape, become a sort of double
mask. The comedy-tragedy mask. He saw nothing inside it. It didn't look
like a device. It looked like a mask and only a mask.

"Proceed to a center of IAMton activity," the sweet voice said. "Take me
with you."

"Oh, man," Zero said, picking up the mask, "I got this bad feeling..."

But walking beside Jack and the Pezz, and carrying the mask, Zero waded
through the lake and followed a trail between bog-ponds back toward the
IAMton wastes.

The light of day was still in its infancy, little more than dawn. it silvered
the blue mists rising from the ponds, and when something many-legged
and glossy black rippled the surface, it painted the widening circles of
ripples with white-gold.

As they walked, Jack talked softly, coaching him. "The IAMton wastes are
like a battery or, again, like a computer memory for the planetary
Overmind. The Overmind stores things: energies and idea-structures. The
Overmind automatically—but not maliciously—tries to coopt everyone into
itself. As it did with Zickorian. As it does in a different way with the Twists.

"With Fiskle's Twists and the Murderers, the Overmind has released the
dark aspects of their personalities, making them over according to their
perverse obsessions, because that way they lose their free will. They think
it's the opposite, of course, but once you're doing something compulsively,
you've lost control of yourself. And then the Overmind has absorbed you,
though you may continue to walk about the world as if you were free. What
you have become is a living principle, a walking urge, a plaything of the
Overmind, and nothing more. Except, perhaps, very dangerous, like a
tornado. A tornado is simply a part of the weather system, but it moves
about as if it's independent and is very dangerous indeed.

"The Overmind tries to keep us all in stasis and controlled and absorbable—
but not out of any conscious purpose. Not because it chooses to. It does it
because it's in its nature, just as it's in the nature of air to rush in and fill a
vacuum.

"All intelligent beings face the same dilemma, Zero. How to communicate
with the world, how to have a relationship with it without losing
themselves to it—without losing their free will. Both things are important.
To resonate with the universe; to maintain a personal perspective, an
identity, a will. That is how you should approach this thing. You will have
to do several things at once. You will have to commune with the Overmind
through the IAMton-ambient field, and at the same time you wild have to
retain your free will, your individuality, without letting it exaggerate your
obsessive side, without letting it trick you in that way or any other way.
And the way you'll do that is with self-expression. With art. It's no accident
that so many of those brought here are artists, Zero."

"Look," Zero broke in as they reached the verge of the violet-flickering
white expanse of the IAMton wastes, "what does this thing do?" He tapped
the box in his hands with a thumb. "I mean, how is this thing going to help
the settlement?"

"It has a lot of potential, Zero. One thing it does, if I understood the Meta
properly—"

"When did you talk to the Meta?" Zero demanded.

"The pyramid-thing that floated to me in the forest. It was a sort of signal
beacon for them. They sensed I was ... unusual. They enlisted my help."

"You are working for them!"

"Yes and no. Zero, if you want to understand, use the Progress gift. Use it.
With it, you can communicate with the Meta. You'll understand how when
you put it on. It'll come naturally."

Zero swallowed. His throat was charred with fear. He looked over his
shoulder at the camp, a few hundred yards behind and to the left. He saw
Angie and the Pezz watching.

With Angie watching, what else could he do?

He put on the mask. The comedy side was on the left half of his face; the
tragedy on the right. He stepped out into bright shimmer of the IAMton
wastes. Almost immediately he felt the psychedelic charge of the place.
The electricity of it lighting up his bones, crackling between his teeth. His
senses expanding...

The world. The world! It came to him on a tsunami of input, and he fell to
his knees with the impact, a twig swept away in the Biblical flood. The vast
matrix of it towered over him and threatened him with his own
insignificance. He was nothing. He had to be something to survive this.
What?

He looked for something strong and coherent in himself.

He glimpsed it: a star, a larger-than-life media figure of perfect features,
ready wit, bristling awards, overarching charisma; a magnet for women, and
an influence; a power, a power, a ... a Twist.

"Not falling for it," Zero said aloud. "Got to be another way." But it had to
be quickly. He could feel himself dissolving. He was a speck becoming a
microdot becoming a microorganism blown away on the wind. You're born,
you blink, you're gone, pal. Gone. What's the point? It's a pinpoint. Now
you see it, now you don't. Because it's nothing. You're nothing.

Desperately, he reached out for something, past the Twist version of
himself. There must be something else.

His expanded senses told him that they were there watching, somewhere
overhead. The Meta.

Anger boiled up in him. He remembered Dennis. Cisco. Zickorian. Now
Yoshio. Yoshio the wistful, the dutifully centered, the intellectually elegant.
Dying.

Himself and Angie ripped from their own lives and pasted like collage
figures onto Fool's Hope.

Tell it, man. Get on your knees and tell it.

He stood up. Sing it.

The first time Zero saw a movie was like the first time a sculptor saw clay,
the first time a painter saw a color wheel. He recognized his medium as
innately as a newborn turtle knows to crawl into the sea.

Now he recognized it again in another kind of theater, with another
dimension added. But it was the same medium. He could feel it crackling at
his fingertips. He raised those fingertips and reassigned the energies there,
to the sands.

The Meta were watching. They were an audience. And he had something to
tell them. Tell them about the anger, man. Tell it.

Obediently, the crust of the IAMton wastes rose up; their sands surged and
rearranged and conformed to his vision. The IAMton desert was his canvas,
and on it he created a moving painting, a three-dimensional film. It rose up
from the colorless sands in colors given to it by his will; it rose up,
holographically but touchable and on a gigantic scale, so it could be seen
from a long way away, from above. In his mind's eye, he saw it from above.
From the sky. As the Meta would see it.

Men on Earth. Huddled in the rain, under overhanging branches, stinking
and crusted with sores, and shivering.

Men huddled in a hut, suffering from sickness. Women protecting their
children as other men entered and began raping and butchering. Protecting
the children was no use.

Men enslaved by other men, building monuments. Pyramids rising; their
stones cemented together with blood. With pain.

A city choked with the dead; the faces of the dead mottled with blisters,
and bloated purple-black. The Black Plague, eating Western civilization
alive.

Another civilization murdered by a plague of men from the East. The
Aztecs, the Maya, their temples thrown down and their children
slaughtered. The American Indian, massacred and massacring.

Four hundred thousand men murdering one another on a European
battlefield in World War One, all in a few days—and not twenty feet of
ground was gained by either side. Four hundred thousand men wasted.

Children herded into a gas chamber in Auschwitz, into a trench in Poland.
Gas, machine guns.

A thousand faces dying of a thousand diseases. Their prolonged suffering.

A child playing in Hiroshima. The child looks up...

Once Zero saw a videotape made in El Salvador. The face of a dying
woman. Now he reproduced her face gigantically, a mile across, in the
IAMton wastes, suffering with disbelief, the betrayal of it. While around her
the events that had brought her to this were replayed. She was eight
months pregnant, walking through a plantain field, when the soldiers came.
American advisers had informed the soldiers that there were
anti-government guerrillas hiding in the woman's village. The woman had
never met one of the guerrillas—not knowingly—and no one in the village
had joined the
uprising. But the soldiers had their information from the CIA, so it was not
to be doubted. Everyone in the village, they were told, was a collaborator.

This was good news to the soldiers. This meant they could do anything
they wanted to the people of the village and no one would arrest them for
it. The first person they came upon was the woman, carrying her basket of
plantains. They knocked her down with a gun butt, and then two of them
held her while three others—had her. Their CO told them to stop wasting
time. Leave her as a message to the ones who escape, he said. So they
stuck the bayonet in her swollen belly and opened it like a ripe fruit,
exposing the baby, which shrieked when they skewered it and took a while
dying itself, lying across her lap, still attached to her by the umbilicus.

The soldiers went on their way, closing in on the village. Half an hour later
a group of Italian journalists arrived on the scene and found the woman
and filmed her, going in for a close up of her disbelieving face, the camera's
cool objectivity nonchalantly framing the unspeakable magnitude of her
suffering.

Zero coalesced the segments of the image so that the image of the
woman's living, real-time, dying face grew and filled his canvas. Close up.

"Look at that!" he told the Meta. He knew, intuited, that they could hear
him through the Progress Station device. "Look! You put us here on this
world, Meta! You pitted us against one another, indifferent to the suffering
you caused except, I guess, for its scientific interest. Or whatever you're
getting out of it. But look again."

And then he made the image a part of a vast single-frame cinematographic
composition, one constructed of ten million million grains of sand, sands in
which every pigment existed, if you looked at them individually—and the
image depicted the tapestry of suffering on Fool's Hope. Suffering both
human and alien. In its individual parts, the image showed the suffering on
Fool's Hope. But as a whole, it coalesced to recreate the face of the dying
Salvadoran woman.

"You're alien to us. But you've studied us. You know what suffering is. You
know."

He sustained the image as long as he could. It was too big to hold. The
strain exacted its price. Zero collapsed.

Just before he fell, as consciousness fluttered away like a startled bird, he
saw the silver spheres, the Meta's watchers, forming patterns on the sky.


                                    *14*

"Zero, you okay?"

"Mm. Yeah."

"Good," Angie said, "because there's something coming down. In both
senses of that phrase. You better see this."

Zero opened his eyes. He saw Angie's face upside down. He was lying with
his head on her lap. He sat up, expecting some sort of hangover pain—and
felt only normal. Beside him was the tragedy-comedy mask.

They were at the camp. To one side were smoke trees. Above them was a
spaceship.

"Anyway," he murmured, "I assume it's a spaceship."

It was about five hundred feet up, hovering over the IAMton wastes beyond
the trees. It was enormous—two football fields of it—and hemispherical. It
looked olive green one moment, rosy tinged the next. It was smooth,
featureless all over.
Except for a little nubbin on the bottom, which grew and became a pyramid.
Relative to the ship it was a small pyramid, growing out of it and
separating like a drop of water from ice, dropping from the underside to
hover in the air, apex upward. It was mercuric and yet perfectly pyramidal,
slowly rotating as it drew near, floating down toward the expedition.

The pyramid paused just in front and about thirty feet above them. It was
ten feet high, seven to a side at the base. It rotated very slowly. At the
apex of the pyramid, was an eye. It was more or less of the human sort,
but its color was that of the spaceship: mercurial, uncertain. The eye
seemed to float in front of the pyramid, in some way connected to it but
not part of it physically. Like Jack's head with his shoulders, Zero thought.

From somewhere inside the pyramid came the sound of a translator box. It
said, "Why didn't you say so before?"


Swanee had to concentrate on each sweep of his wings, one at a time.
Mentally, he maintained a drumbeat to pace each stroke. Otherwise the
pain made him falter.

The harness, with Sanchez dangling in it, creaked and swayed. By minute
degrees, but steadily, the pain grew.

They were flying through the sunlight, not far over the cloud of dust that
choked the plain.

"I'm glad we're skipping that," Sanchez said, looking down.

You may be walking through it on the way back, Swanee thought. But said
nothing aloud.

Beneath him, Sanchez swore. Swanee glanced down and saw that a little
blood had dripped onto Sanchez's cheek. It had dripped from the shallow
groove the harness straps had cut into Swanee's shoulders, sawed by the
constant motion of his wings.

Sanchez said, "For God's sake, Swanee, put me down! Let's treat that
wound. We could pad it or something."

"No ... time..." Swanee croaked. "I can feel it. No time. Harmony wants to
... start a war. With aliens. Every minute brings it closer."

"There's no guarantee the thing in the Progress Station will help."

"I sensed ... something ... from Fiskle. He's going to try to get it for
himself. Before us. Thing in the Station is something important. Unusual."

"Look, man, you're killing yourself!"

To change the subject and to ease a certain emotional pressure, Swanee
said, "Sanchez, what if you thought that you were evil ... You ... hated
yourself for it ... but ... you fell in love with someone, and that made you
feel like you ... like you weren't so bad ... but when you made love with
her, she tried to ... tried to kill you ... How ... would you feel?"

"Lord," Sanchez said. His voice was almost drowned by the wind. "I don't
know."

Up ahead, the plain ended in hills that became a ridge. Beyond the ridge,
just visible at the horizon, was the edge of a great forest.


"Yes, we knew you were suffering," the Meta said. "But suffering is the
natural state of living creatures. We merely transplanted your suffering
from one planet to another and gave it a different character. You have
spoken to us in a higher language, in the poetry of vision, and we are
compelled to respond. But we have no regrets."

"But why did you do it at all?" Zero asked. He was standing up now, gazing
up at the thing, arms rigid at his side, fists balled. Angie and the others
were huddled in a group nearby. "Why did you bring us here from Earth?"

"Why? Because we are like all evolved creatures, in search of spiritual
exaltation. This we achieve through artistic creation.

"Every creature that lives is a part of the universe. Subatomically, all things
merge into one in the great sea of energy, of which matter is only a
particular series of wavelengths. And yet units of this greater body
perceive. A creature perceives; therefore the universe, of which it is a part,
perceives through it. God manifests Its perception in individual creatures in
order to experience Its various parts from a subjective viewpoint. God, the
Great Narcissist, is always looking out through our eyes or whatever
perceptual organs we use; God is detached from our consciousness but
sees through it like a cinematographer looking through a camera. This you
should be well suited to understand, Zero.

"If a creature has perceived, then no matter how base the creature, God
has perceived through it. God does not control the universe, as you would
understand the concept of control, but It stages events in the universe in
Its own way. Scientists of your own world have begun to see—in studying
turbulence, in what they call Chaos Theory, and 'self-propagating reactions'
—that structure spontaneously develops in any excitable matter/energy
medium, as a response to the intrinsic nature of things. Things don't evolve
purely by accident—although accident is part of the formula. They are
programmed to evolve, atomically. In this way, and with other subtle
influences, God stages dramas on the great stage of Its body, the universe,
so as to investigate Itself. This is simply Its nature.

"To be in harmony with God, we aspire to Godlike artistry. We offer up this
artistry to God. It is our form of prayer. It is the medium through which we
speak to God and aspire to merge with God's divinity. We exist only to take
part in God's art—and to create art of our own. All that remains aside from
this is the process of reproduction and survival. Which is to say, tedium.
The small rewards, the pleasures of mundane life, without art, are
ultimately not enough to justify the difficulties of living. Not for a highly
evolved being.

"Living only makes sense when it is framed by art, Zero, or composed into
art. Interpreted by art. Art elevates perception above the perpetual struggle
against entropy—because in the instant the viewer has perceived the art,
God has perceived it, and recorded it in Itself, and added it to Its store of
order-paradigms. Do you understand?"

"I think so," Zero said, amazed at the gall of it. "You're telling me that you
kidnapped us because you're pious. To me, that's absurd. But I know what
you mean about art redefining life. I've thought about that sort of thing
looking at Picasso's Guernica, some stuff by Goya, Munch. They painted
war, suffering, depression, but, uh, in the context of the composition the
suffering becomes a thing of beauty."

"Yes. The beauty is achieved through a perfect balance between empathy
and objectivity; between insight and unaffected appraisal. If we allowed
ourselves to become empathic to your suffering—beyond what is needed to
appreciate the fullness of our imagery—we would lose that balance and
lose the insight."

"And all of us on Fool's Hope are part of your staged drama? You're staging
a drama using real-life players who don't know they're playing in a drama?
Are you manipulating things in some way? Controlling the outcomes?"

"No. Except in our arrangement of the borderlines, the various limitations
we impose, and in our choices of the various personality chemistries,
cultural chemistries, and other elements to be included. And in the
selective introduction of IAMton currents. We know that putting A together
with B will elicit certain probable reactions; we can predict to some extent
the direction of the drama. Not the details but the overall pattern. And
when we are surprised, it is all to the
good."

"You simply drop the players onto the stage and let them go at it?"

"Largely, yes. Setting elements are controlled. The environment, access to
tools and shelter, Progress Station motivational factors. But randomness is
the choicest element, introducing just the right degree of chaos: a splendid
chaos, to quote one of your people, that elevates the drama to the cosmic
because it adds in a collaboration with the universe's own principles of
mathematical completeness."

"And the interspecies conflict, I suppose, gives you good, sharp,
well-defined imagery."

"Your instincts are sound."

"And the watching balls—they record the art, then you guys edit it?"

"Yes. And transmit the results to our people. So that God can watch it
through them."
"God watches anyway. Why make drama for God if God is already enjoying
our dramas from, um, inside us?"

"It is like building a temple to celebrate God. It is a way of communicating
with God. It is prayer without petition. Finally, we do it because it is the
task we were created for, and to do otherwise would be to refute our
creator."

"Yeah. Right. Do your people live, uh, somewhere on this planet? Or in the
moon?"

"This is not our world. The moon of this world is our outpost. Our directorial
vantage. This world is our canvas or, if you like, our set."

"So why talk to me now?"

"You have demonstrated a high order of artistic composition in your
manipulation of IAMton energies to create images. It is an unusually high
order for so low a creature, for IAMton mastery is difficult, it is a
demanding medium. You were the best qualified to achieve this mastery,
and we encouraged you, as it is time for the composition to come to its
denouement."

"You say I'm a low creature. I am not low enough, Meta, to steal you from
your world, even if I had a way to do it, nor low enough to throw you in the
midst of hostile aliens."

"You are not high enough to do that."

Exasperated, Zero blurted, "Look, why does the 'drama' have to be so
melodramatic, full of killing and—big splashy events? How about a nice
little nonviolent drawing-room comedy, say? You know, something with
some subtlety?"

"Our audience prefers a big canvas. Small, subtle events are not easily
perceived on it. Furthermore, we are of the Historical Galvanization school
of four-dimensional drama creation."

"Your audience prefers! Are you telling me it's a matter of ratings?"

"No. But rapport with the audience is an important element of the process
of worshipping God through drama creation."

"Maybe orginally. I'm beginning to wonder if you haven't lost sight of your
original motivations."

"Permit us to maintain our own aesthetic imperatives.''

Inwardly, Zero fumed. But he sensed the futility of further argument. He
and the Meta would have to agree to disagree on some points.

"Bring the composition to its fruition," the Meta said, "and your people will
be allowed to triumph over this world and all competitors. World is world,
Zero. You represent the empathic principle of your species' consciousness.
That's why you're a filmmaker; the non-empathic, self-oriented principle is
represented by the one called Fiskle, the Emperor Harmony. Resolve this
conflict by bringing it to consummation. And then we'll talk."

The Meta began to move, angling down and to Zero's left. It lowered itself
over Yoshio. The expedition stood, paralyzed by indecision, as the Meta
seemed to bathe Yoshio in the essence of itself, for a few moments
saturating him in its interior. Then, leaving Yoshio behind, it lifted away
and in seconds was merging once more with the starship, which itself
merged with the heavens.

Yoshio yawned and sat up, looking spritely and refreshed. "Is the Punkin'
gone?"


"Why did they help Yoshio?" Angie wondered aloud.

Zero shrugged. "Can't say. Seems out of character, since they let so many
others die. I guess the Meta were right there, and their 'empathic principle'
got out of hand. They acted on impulse. Nice to know they have those
kinds of impulses."

"Mostly they seem to be careful not to have them."

"Yeah." It was sunset, a bloodred sunset that seemed to give energy to the
violet glimmers in the white expanse of IAMton desert. They were strolling
along the edge of the desert, the swamp on their left an oasis; the wastes
to their right. A few towers rose and fell out on the white crust in a
desultory way.

"I wonder if just anybody could put on that mask thing," she said, "and
make something like what you made out there."

"Probably." But he didn't believe it. He was hoping she wouldn't try. It was
dangerous. He'd almost blown it himself.

She stopped and looked at him. "You really did it, though. You contacted
the Meta. I don't care what my mom thinks: I'm proud of you."

He smiled. "I haven't said anything about it, but I haven't forgotten: you
saved my life, Angie, on those hills. You stepped in and stopped the Vinyls
from killing me. Thanks. A lot of people—even people in love—would have
panicked and run. You were brave, you were fast, and you were smart."

She seemed to bloom, hearing that. "I was, wasn't I?"

"You know what I want to see? I want to see you dance."

"What, you mean like a belly dancer in a skimpy costume? Sexist." But she
was joking. Her insecurity was gone.

"I love you," he said, and kissed her. The IAMton field tingled around them,
between them, made the kiss into an electric event. Things began to come
together in his mind, organizing as order spontaneously arises from chaos,
like self-propogating reactions. A surge of good feelings rose up in him.
Triumph, love for Angie—and something more. A sense of being home.

Suddenly he was brimming with things to tell her. " 'World is world,' they
said. Yoshio said something like that once. Angie, when I was out there, I
felt the whole world moving around me. It made me feel small, threatened.
But at the same time I got a hint from it, a sense of its identity. As if the
Overmind told me its name."

"What is the Overmind?"

"The planetary matrix, Jack told me. The gestalt awareness of a biosphere.
The Gaea of a world. Here it's more defined than on Earth because of the
IAMton concentration. I saw it in my mind's eye. I saw ten million million
little animals procreating and,"—he struggled for words—"and growing and
feeding on each other and just being part of the process. Plants and
animals, struggling, competing, in conflict but at the same time part of this
big system. And it was alien, but, Angie, I recognized it. From Earth. We
can relate to this world. We can be part of it. Because two symphonies
might be in different keys, with different, um, different styles, at different
times but they're both played by the same orchestra."

She looked at him, and he looked back, and together they were a matrix, a
gestalt, a Gaea, a world, and they fell to the ground together and began
procreating, ecstatic in the release of recognition, making love on the
breast of their home. The IAMton field reacted by creating spontaneous
structures in the desert beside them, miniature temples growing out of the
white crust, thrown up instantaneously by the completeness of their sexual
union, rising and falling with the surge of their mutual pleasure.

Later, Zero and Angie sat by the ghost trees, feeling pleasantly drained and
thinking vaguely about what to do next. The Pezz and Calum returned.
Calum was carrying the IAMton device Zero had found in the Progress
Station. It was shaped like a winged helmet now. Calum set it at Zero's
feet, and it became, once more, a glossy black box. "I tried," Calum said,
"but the thing nearly took my mind away. I cannot use it. The Pezz does
not wish to try. We give it into your keeping, with the understanding that
our people will share equally in any benefits that derive from this find."

"Okay. I hope your people trust me as much as you do."

"They will have no choice," the Pezz said. "It is clear that the thing is
intended for you And you have spoken with the Meta—you are their
chosen."

"Not sure I want to be," Zero said. But he picked up the box and pressed it
to his forehead, and once more it was the tragedy-comedy mask, all of
glossy black.


At dawn, as the expedition prepared to set off for the south, they spotted
Swanee and Sanchez approaching over the desert. Amazed, they stared at
the incongruous figures, thinking that Fiskle had sent Swanee to stop them,
to steal the Station's gift. Zero hefted a pike.

"That's no longer your weapon," Jack said.

Zero dropped the pike and picked up the glossy black tragedy-comedy
mask.

But then Jack said, "That's Sanchez, I think. He's not one of Fiskle's
cronies."

"But the batwing guy," Angie protested.

"I sense no hostility in the Twist," Jack said. "Pain, disappointment,
self-disgust. But no hostility. No Fiskle influence. His name is Swanee."
After a moment he added, "But there's a Murderer coming." He pointed to
the sky above and behind Swanee. "There."

Zero saw it then. A second flying thing. It looked as if it were gliding more
than flying. Every so often it pumped itself like an octopus, jetting up for a
little more elevation. Then a long glide ... "Never saw it before," Angie
said.

"It is a stranger to me, too," Calum said.

"Its name is Vanderman," Jack said, staring at the distant silhouette,
frowning. "No—that was its old name, before the Twist. I pick up ... Sizzle.
The Emperor calls it Sizzle."

"The other one looks weak," the Pezz said.

Swanee's wing-strokes were uneven, shaky. "He's exhausted. Dangerously,"
Jack said.

They were close enough now that their faces could just be made out. The
exaggerated expression of idiotic glee on Sizzle's face made Zero's stomach
turn.

Suddenly Sizzle angled down toward Swanee, diving to intercept him. "He's
going to kill him!" Jack said suddenly. "He'll burn him with acids!"

Swanee braked with his wings, backpedaling, and Sizzle overshot him.

Sizzle came about and pumped up his elevation, prepared for another dive.
They were lower now, only a hundred feet over the desert. "He'll get him
this time," Yoshio said. "Swanee's too weak, he's barely maintaining up
there."

Zero ran, fitting the mask over his head as he went. He skidded out onto
the IAMton wastes and told it what to do.

The sands of the IAMton desert boiled up and solidified into a structure
that rose, rose, branched out, and enclosed Sizzle in midair. He was
trapped, fluttering angrily, caught in a cage of solidified sand, visible
through the bars Zero had constructed. Sizzle latched on to one of the bars,
wrapping himself around it. The bars began to smoke as he commenced
burning his way through.

Zero said, "Forget it." He visualized, and the sand structure responded. It
closed around Sizzle, clenching, shutting like a mousetrap, crushing and
dragging him down, burying him alive in the desert sands. A hump of sand
shook for a few moments and then lay still.

Swanee came toward them like a plane with its engine out, losing altitude
rapidly, his wings sagging, dipping. He angled for the nearest bog-pond.
Sanchez had to yank his feet up to keep from losing them in the little coral
trees. They hit the pond with a double splash.

The expedition waded out to get them, but Sanchez was already free of the
harness when they got there, carrying Swanee in his arms. Swanee was
limp. His wings trailed in the water.

"He's dead," Sanchez said, his voice thick with grief. "He wouldn't put me
down. I tried to talk him into letting me walk, but he wouldn't. His heart
just gave out. I guess it's what he wanted."


Bowler shook his head and growled. "No! No! He doesn't know everything.
He isn't all-powerful. If he were, he would have busted us by now. We've
had four meetings. Harmony won't tolerate dissent. He doesn't know about
us."

There were six of them in the cell, crowded into a corner of the tanner's
workshed. The hides of oruh and slug-lizards hung from pegs at Bowler's
back. The place reeked, but you got used to it after a few minutes. They
used it because the smell discouraged the guard from coming in.

Bowler lit a third candle to give them a little more light. The gloom was
disheartening.

"It's not just the risk of it," Brindle said. He was young, thin, with a wispy
red beard. Had been a sculptor on Earth. "It's the—the futility. Everyone is
scared, really scared, of Harmony. He's got them all jumping when he snaps
his fingers. They saw what happened to Doggo. Trish. They've seen Jamie.
They've seen that big thing wandering around that looks like it's made of
scrap iron. God, Harmony told it to kill someone who was looking at him
funny, and it sucked the guy into itself like a human garbage disposal,
grinding him up. And that Sizzle thing and those vamps and—"

"Don't forget the Pricks," Carmody said, meaning the Phylum Twos. "That's
his real power."

Brindle added, "And anyway, the guy is telepathic."

"Not with just anybody," Bowler said. "Just with—"
"The point is, people think he's a supernatural power. Some are starting to
worship him!" Brindle said.

"I'll bet he sucks that up," Bowler said.

"You bet your ass," Brindle said.

"I have bet my ass," Bowler said suddenly, seriously. "I've put my life on
the line. I've decided it's better to die fighting this thing than to live with
the whims of our own private Caligula. I thought you people had made the
same decision."

Brindle looked at the bloodstained floor. His voice broke. "I don't know. I
don't know. I think you're right, that this world is our chance for a social
system that really works. I think you're right that it's no good living this
way. But it's useless. And I'm scared."

Bowler took a deep breath. He decided he had to take the chance that one
of them might get caught: he had to tell them. "I got the explosive,"
Bowler said. Everyone stared at him. Bowler smiled. "Stole a nice quantity
of it. It's just a matter of timing."


The return trip was faster. The Expedition crossed the wastes in minutes,
carried in a great cupped hand created by Zero's control over the IAMton
deposits. "The atom," Jack explained, "is only a superposition of
possibilities, on the quantum mechanics level. And it is on that level that
the IAMton works, when it is directed by Mind to reorganize the material
world. It applies itself to the collapsing waveform at the root of atomic
structure, and asserts the mind's probability of form over the infinite range
of possibilities vibrating in the heart of wave-function."

"Whatever," Zero said.

Responding to Zero's new IAMton awareness, the forest carried them all as
it had carried Jack, and they passed through it with equal ease. After the
forest, they had to walk for awhile—till they reached another IAMton
deposit, which Zero accumulated beneath them into a sort of abstract
engine. The violet, powdery engine carried them in a chariot of maybes
across the plain, till it lost its charge at the edge of the swamplands that
lay between them and the Neutral...

Two weeks after Swanee brought Sanchez to the Expedition, Zero was one
again staring at the gates of the settlement. He was almost unnerved. He
lay on his stomach beside Angie, Yoshio, and Calum, atop the ridge that
separated the settlement from the Rug, staring down at it. It was an
overcast morning; in the dull light the settlement's new embellishments
seemed to clutch the shadows to them.

Every visible surface of the fortress and the settlement walls had been
covered with an intricate mosaic of bones, teeth, preserved fingers, and
other body parts, together with red and black agates. The designs were
lush with flourish and self-congratulatory excess. The skeletons of the
Groyn killed in the battle had been hoisted to the outer walls, where they
were arranged symmetrically, to lean outward like gargoyles. Minarets of
wood, eccentrically notched and intaglioed, and fantastic structures with no
clear purpose had been erected, making a mad tangle of the skyline.
Phylum Two guards stood scratching themselves and leaning on their pikes
at the gaudy parapets.

Another Phylum Two, in the early stages of its Twist—only slightly bigger
than average human size—came lumbering out the front gate. The
expeditioners watched it cross the several hundred yards of open ground
between the fortress and the ridge, where they were hidden among the
outcroppings. They watched him, unmoving, as he strode directly toward
them. His eyes locked on Zero's as he caught sight of him. He came closer,
and still none of the expedition moved.

The Phylum Two climbed over the rimrock and slid into the crater behind it,
close beside Zero. Jack's voice came out of him. "It hasn't taken him long
to put his stamp on it, on every level."

Gradually the Phylum Two exterior began to slough off, and in the gaps
thus created a tan foam bubbled up. The alien recreated Jack the Baptist.
He went on. "I heard no one bitching about him, but resentment was on a
lot of faces. Others seem resigned to him. The ones in the court—the
humans he's dressed up like courtiers—seem to be enjoying themselves. He
has a certain charisma. And he encourages their sadistic side. Some people
like that. A human and a High Clansman were tortured and murdered while
I was there."

Calum made an inarticulate sound of suppressed fury.

Jack went on. "There are more human skins—with the heads attached—
nailed up here and there around the settlement, with more 'proclamations'
from Harmony written on them. A spaceship dropped off another forty
people from Earth a few weeks ago, and apparently some of them were
rebellious. A couple of them were added to his garden. Given to the Phix,
like Jamie." He told them about the Phix.

Angie's eyes filled. "I can't believe it ... doing that to Jamie ... making
her..."

"We'll get her out," Zero said, squeezing Angie's arm.

"How many Twists are there?" Calum asked.

"I'm not sure. Perhaps only a hundred, or fewer. Fiskle converts humans
into Twists at the rate of only one or two a week, I gather. Perhaps it's a
great effort for him, or perhaps not everyone is a suitable candidate.''

"Today's a Feast Day," Jack went on. He had finished his transformation. He
paused to rest a moment. During the interval the Pezz arrived, with
Sanchez; Sanchez climbed laboriously up from behind, and the Pezz climbed
the slope easily, like a mountain goat. It came to stand beside Angie; she
patted its back. It wriggled happily, then settled in beside her to listen as
Jack went on. "He declares Feast Days every so often. Mostly only the
Twists and the Emperor's sycophants are invited to the feast. In fact, the
others are on half-rations. The Earthers outnumber the Twists, but no one
rebels because they're scared of the Phylum Twos—and the aliens."

"Why are they frightened of aliens?" the Pezz asked. "They have a truce."

"It's just barely holding. Harmony has made his intentions clear. The alien
races are preparing for war with him. Some of the alien races have been
raiding humans who step outside the settlement. It could blow up into war
any day now. This is all Harmony's fault, but the Earthers are afraid of the
aliens now. They see him as protection from them."

"What happens on a Feast Day?" Sanchez asked.

"They feast. They get stoned on wheeler-brain. The Twists have begun
eating human flesh: anyone Harmony has designated criminal is publicly
tortured or given to one of the creatures in his menagerie—wheelers,
slug-lizards, Yellow Vampires, and a couple of alien Twists—Murderers he's
caught. One of them is remarkable: the Widow Window, Harmony calls it. It
teleports people into things."

"Skip the details about that one," Angie said.

"Did you find Bowler?" Zero asked.

Jack smiled. "I did. I have established psychic rapport with him. I believe I
can locate him when I need him. He has a plan you should know about."
Zero turned to the Pezz. "Any luck?"

"If I understand you correctly, yes. Events transpired usefully. I have
spoken to the Groyn and my own people. They are amenable. Perhaps
others will come, too."

Zero nodded. It occurred to him that he had become the leader of their
little group, seamlessly and without misgivings. And that their expedition
had become something else: a cell of revolutionaries. In a way it was
annoying—it was so clearly part of the Meta's drama. But there was no
other way to play it. He shrugged and thought, So be it.

"What was Bowler's plan, Jack?" he asked.


Bowler was on the verge of telling the others in the cell everything when
the Phylum Twos burst into the tanner's workshed and dragged the rebels
out into the street. The morning clouds had burned away, it was a sunny
noon, and everything was so starkly, bright lit up, it looked unreal. The
crowd looked confused. A frightening number of faces in the crowd looked
at the rebels with angry satisfaction, glad they were taken; others looked
afraid, uncertain.

The crowd was made up of males except for a couple of women past
childbearing age; that morning, the Emperor had sent his thugs to arrest all
Earther women. They were taken to detention, where they were to be
methodically impregnated—by anyone Harmony designated—in order to
produce children as efficiently as possible. What is an Emperor without a
population to rule over? One of the women had escaped and run to Bowler,
and Bowler had called the meeting to decide how best to help her.

They were brought to the Emperor's garden. Jamie—her hair gone white, her
face aged ten years—crawled in aimless circles on a Phix hummock. Two
others Bowler didn't know were attached to the Phix behind her; dull-eyed
puppets. Feverishly overgrown exotic plants curled and towered, the color of
bruises and sores. In one palpating, oversize bloom, the shoulders and
head of a man were just visible in the folds of blossoms. He was the same
mottled purple as the petals, now; it was hard to see him. In the center of
the garden a High Clansman, recognizable by his hands, was being turned
on a spit over hot coals. His head was gone. On a table was a bowl of
wheeler-brain mixed with a fermentation of swamp pods.

Smoke from the barbecue oozed greasily over the various Twists and
courtiers in the garden; it assaulted Bowler's gut with the smell of cooked
flesh. The courtiers were tarted up with Whorebug tunics of bright cloth
that Harmony had awarded his favorites, and with gaudy makeup—paint,
really—that made them look like inexpert drag queens. That turned Bowler's
stomach, too.

Bella, and the two identical Adonis types, and El Chingadero, and the
diaphanous vamps, and the junkyard beetle-wing man, and the newt, and
the dwarf-pig, and the pretty little girl all in white—a gleeful murderess,
Bowler had heard—all of them and others, guarded by air-sharks and the
overmuscled, naked guards, were gathered around the Emperor, who was
sitting on his living throne in the open air.

Bowler and the other members of the cell were hustled up to the Emperor
and forced to kneel.

Harmony took a deep breath and sighed, as if enjoying the air. "A backyard
barbecue. There's nothing like it to bring a family together," he remarked,
sounding perfectly serious. He looked at Bowler. "We knew you were there,
but we didn't know quite where. It was your friend the tanner who turned
you in. It appears he had an attack of paranoia. He was sure I was reading
his mind. Thought he'd wheedle a pardon from me for ratting on you. That's
him over there, feeding my blood-orchids. Fed to them, anyway. Want you
to meet someone else. Window!"

From behind the Twists, escorted by two Pragmatics who kept it between
them bound in thick crude-iron chains, stepped something that looked to
Bowler like a giant tortoise, almost eight feet high, six wide. It stood on
three legs at the bottom, like a tripod. Its hooded black eyes were
motionless and ancient; its beak-mouth opened, and it chattered
something in an alien language. Its flat stomach was composed of black
plates folded one over another to make a spiral pattern. "He's a Twist of
some alien tribe," Harmony said. "Just wait till you see what he can do,
Bowler, it's wonderful. It's just lucky he can only do it with organic things,
living things that have biofield—otherwise he'd teleport his chains, I
suppose," He turned to the Phylum Twos holding the alien. "Let him at
them."

The Phylum Twos paid out some slack on the chain, and the Widow Window
stepped forward purposefully. It snatched a Hispanic girl, Carmen, in its
stubby, scaly hands and thrust her against its middle—which dilated,
opening to reveal a crackling black vastness. A window on noplace. Carmen
screamed as it shoved her through. She vanished inside.

"Now, let's see where he teleported her to!" the Emperor said. He looked
around eagerly. "I do hope it's handy. Ah!" He pointed up at a spot in the
sky. The spot grew and became a falling woman, turning end over end. The
crowd moved back for her—and she hit the ground just in front of the
throne, splashing nicely. Harmony clapped his hands. "Oh, I am sorry that
Kelso isn't here to enjoy this!" The evil little girl went to the shattered
corpse and began to toy with it, singing a childish song without words.

Bowler shouted at the courtiers, "We have brought Hitler from Earth!
Caligula, de Sade, General Westmoreland, Lieutenant Calley, the Ayatollah
Khomeini! It's as if we carried syphilis here with us! You don't have to be
part of this disease!"

Harmony laughed, and everyone obediently laughed along with him. Sixty
feet overhead, a trio of the Meta's watching spheres bobbed in the sky.
Bowler gave them the finger.

Carmody was next: the Widow Window sent him halfway into the garden
wall. He shrieked and convulsed, melded with stone from the waist down;
still, it took him a noisy while to die.

"He'll make a nice decoration," Bella said. "We could lacquer him."

"Let's do Bowler next," Harmony told the creature through a translator. "And
send him to the sky."

As a small boy, Bowler had seen a Bela Lugosi movie in which a man was
crushed as the walls closed in on him. The man had been reduced to paste
between the slabs of rock. The young Bowler had tried to imagine what that
would feel like.

The transit through the Widow Window felt like that. Only the crushing
happened faster, in just under two seconds. Abruptly, the unspeakable pain
was gone, and he was in an infinite vault of green, and he was weightless.
Drifting free, the wind singing in his ears. And then he saw clouds, and the
settlement far below, its structures like lines on a blueprint from up there,
and he knew he was falling from the sky. He had no air in his lungs to
scream with. No audience to shriek defiance to. Nowhere to go but inside
himself and down.

And then he felt a jarring, a sharp jerk that clacked his teeth together. The
wind stopped whistling. He had stopped falling. Something was holding him
up. He could feel it invisibly gripping him around the middle. He was
moving again, but parallel to the ground, still far above it. Something was
carrying him somewhere—probably somewhere that Harmony didn't intend.

His first thought was, The Meta.

He was heading out over the Rug ... and he found himself descending now,
into one of the "holes in the Rug" that sometimes gave off light.

As he descended the shaft, neatly down the middle, he saw faces looking
up at him, illuminated by a faint glow from beneath. There was a man
wearing a shiny black tragedy-comedy mask. With him was Angie. Yoshio.
Sanchez. Also a Pezz, a Whorebug, a Groyn, an Arthropod with its jeweled
shell, a High Clansman, and what appeared to be Jack the Baptist.

The invisible hands lowered him gently to a floor of white crust that
shimmered with faint violet overtones. The man with the mask removed it.

"Zero! What the fuck! How'd I get here? What—"

"I brought you here."

"You? How?"

"IAMton enhancement of telekinetic potential. This thing was in the
Progress Station. Helps me control the field. Apparently I've got the right
visualization talent for it."

"What field? What's an IAMton?"

"Later," Jack said. "What about the explosives?"

"Uh ... God, it's hard to think after all this ... Well, by now Harmony must
have scared it out of Brindle or one of the others. He'll have told them
where they are. I put a big hunk of blunderbuss powder, some other stuff
the sun-monkeys told me about, set it up in the throne room so that if they
try to detach it, it blows. I figured Harmony would be in the throne room
today."

He sighed. "But it was 'such a nice day' that he took the court out to his
'garden.' So much for my plan to get most of them in one swoop." He
looked around. "What the fuck is this place?"

"It is potential," Zero said. He put the mask back on. "I'll show you."


When the throne room blew up, Harmony just stood there, camera lenses
dilating, closing, dilating, closing, hands opening and closing, mouth
opening and closing. Silently. Staring at the wreck of the old warehouse
building and the smoke churning up from the caved-in masonry. Seven
Phylum Twos, sent to find the explosives and carry them to a safer place,
had gone up with it.

At last Harmony strode to what had once been the dorms and was now his
quarters. He climbed the stairs inside and flung open the shutters of a
window on the second floor. He glared out at his followers and the human
crowd. He pointed into the mass of humans. "Punish them!" he shrieked,
his voice falsetto. "Just throw them through the Widow Window till I tell
you otherwise! They all must have known!"

The crowd cried out and turned to run, stampeding. Phylum Twos and other
Twists grabbed the laggards and began feeding them into the Widow
Window. In seconds the air was lacerated with the screams of its victims as
it rained bodies over the settlement. "Rains of frogs!" Harmony bellowed.
"Rains of fish! Rains of giant hailstones and UFO crankshafts! Rains of
blood! Rains of blood!"

The air-sharks went mad with the smell of blood and began swooping,
biting, darting into the crowd, carrying pieces of people away, blood
dripping from their jaws.

And then the cry from the guard reached Harmony, barely audible over the
pandemonium of the terrified crowd. It was a human guard on the walls,
pointing at the countryside. "The Current! The Current is coming!''

"In the daytime?" Harmony muttered. "Never in the daytime! And never in
the settlement! Not possible!"

But when he went to the roof he could see it wending eerily across the
landscape, making everything it touched look Halloween, discharging violet
sparks at its borders.

A hush fell. Or did it? Perhaps it was the silence in Fiskle's head. Silence as
he watched the Current come. He seemed to hear a rising and falling of
static sounds, of white noise, and nothing else.

In seconds the Current had borne down on the settlement, had washed over
it. And Harmony felt the Other One. He felt Zero, was aware of him
immediately, as the Current oozed around him like the ghost of some vast
dragon.

Harmony was distantly aware that the Meta's watching spheres were
gathering overhead in unusually great numbers.

Harmony could feel ideas approaching. They were carried on the Current,
and they were crystallizing around him.

The Overstructure was appearing. Ornate structures were solidifying out of
nothing and forming over the settlement like the Platonic ideal
superimposing over the mundane world. They were crystalline and
translucent, composed of segments that were bright with primary colors;
they were architecturally vast, but formed arches at the base to
accommodate people, so no one was trapped in them. No one yet.

They were concepts growing up level on level, each level representing a
paradigm, and growing out of each paradigm was a theory. They were like
computer models of ideas, but three dimensional and solid. Some of them
were clearly of Earth culture derivation, looking like variations of Greek
temples, Venetian architecture, Japanese architecture, the Lincoln
Memorial, sculptures by Rodin and Michelangelo and Brancusi, and Arp and
Calder, all of these incorporated, intertwined, and neatly juxtaposed into
one never-completed composition.

Other facets of the structure were alien; the Numinous Nets of the Groyn—
mandala-like nets woven to catch Groyn who, in religious ecstasy, throw
themselves off the roofs of their temples. The Groyn worship Gravity, the
Mother of All Homes, which is the one invisible force that demonstrates its
power without cease and not only holds things together but instantly
punishes those who don't abide by its rules. In gravitational meditation the
Groyn throw themselves off high places so that, on the way down, they can
experience gravity fully, till they're caught in the net woven with symbols of
apology to the Gravitational Mother.

And incorporated into the Overstructure were abstractions of microscopic
cellular structure created by the Arthropods, who are believers in
maximizing harmony with nature. It materialized bas-reliefs of the
scaled-up interior of an Arthropod brain cell; and around this, giant models
of DNA molecules twined and writhed up the length of the great tower.

The Whorebugs contributed their philosophical orientation of enlightened
materialism, their belief that highly ordered property is the only hedge
against mortality, a record of their activities that survived them; their
segment of the Overstructure used Whorebug weaving patterns depicting
their mansions and acquisitions on their home world.

Jack contributed a section that constantly mutated from one symmetrical
geometrical form to the next, representing the primacy of sheer
organization in the evolving universe, the antientropic forces that organize
things into organic structures, expressed in the great Overstructure by a
series of sections that constantly mutated from one symmetrical geometric
form to another, each a variation of the last.

The High Clans' shamanism made its imprint of animal-worship imagery on
the Overstructure; the Pezz's fascination with boundaries, with interfaces
and interchanges between borders, insinuated itself in marblesque veins
and woodgrain patterns.

Yoshio's native Japanese cultural perspective arranged these alien and
human concepts with respect to one another like the deft strokes and
eloquent spaces in Japanese painting and gardening. Zero and Angie and
Bowler and Sanchez infused the shape with humanistic ideas. Sanchez's
contribution included a monument to Swanee: his image a hundred feet
high, and despite his leather wings, he was styled more like an angel than
a demon.

The Overstructure rose story on story into the sky, transfiguring the
consciousness of all who looked at it—all but Fiskle, the Emperor Harmony,
who resisted it with his own assertions.

Harmony plugged into the Current and began to create his own
counterstructure, trying to overwhelm Zero and friends with a dark tower
that rose up from his roof in counterpoint, spiraling, torquing, attempting to
entwine and encompass, to smother the Overstructure. Harmony's dark
growth wriggled with moving friezes, images of animals eating other
animals; of people performing the basest acts of self-degradation and
self-destruction; of women debased to slaves; the Emperor himself
triumphing over Zero and a thousand other enemies; battle scenes dripping
with blood and drooling entrails and spilled brains. Out of this Wagnerian
display a Fiskle superman arose from a baptism in flames, rising like a
Titan above the maggotlike swarming of his enemies, the aliens and the
traitor humans: the triumph of the will. Social Darwinism and jingoistic
fanaticism coalesced into a kitschy design that might have been the work of
Frazetta or Boris Vallejo.

The two structures, Zero's and Fiskle's, interlinked and grew like competing
vines, climbing one another, lofting into the sky. The underpinnings were
stationary, but the upper segments showed scenarios restlessly acting
themselves out. From the Neutral it looked like an Olympus that was
creating itself moment by moment. A Jungian principle, materialized.

Zero's part of the structure didn't buckle under Harmony's fierce imagistic
fecundity but continued to grow. The alien concepts mitigated the human
concepts, and vice versa; they fused and synthesized, and as they did so
the humans and aliens involved saw one another, began to really
understand one another, for the first time. In their mind's eyes the alien
symbols were translated into their own visual-symbolic terms. Their
assumptions reeled, and their attitudes staggered for new footing.

Some more than others. Zero could sense them out there—the men and
aliens who were particularly in congruence with his basic sensibility; those
who were responsive to an effort at finding points of agreement and areas
of commonality and compromise with aliens. Using the comedy-tragedy
device, he involved their psychic energies in his creation.

And found the additional energy he needed. He triumphed over Fiskle.
Fiskle-Harmony was surrounded like a piece on a Go board by Zero's final
gambit and locked in place. Checkmated. No more room to move. Caught.

Seeing the Overstructure rising a mile into the sky, the other races came
from their various settlements to investigate. They were impressed by its
incorporation of diverse themes; its responsiveness, in certain segments, to
their own ideas, which they could see played out and recorded in the great
fractal intricacy of the thing.

And they were pleased to see that their enemy, the one who'd called
himself Harmony, was trapped in a crystalline cage, permanently entombed
there, preserved alive, forever raving mad: a living cautionary sign, a
warning about intolerance.

Onlookers could see into the cage atop what had been the dorm roof; Fiskle
could not see out. Inside the cage he was surrounded by mirrors,
alternating with panels showing the twisted imagery he contributed to the
dark side of the Overstructure. The imagery was infinitely reflected in the
mirrors, and Harmony quite lost his mind in it.

The aliens were further reassured seeing the other human Twists in their
own cells. Those, anyway, who were beyond saving. Some few, like Bella,
reverted to human in the IAMton adjustment sections of the Overstructure
and were freed from Fiskle's influence.

The Meta's watching spheres recorded it all. Then, after a time, they
drained away into the sky.
Zero, Yoshio, Jack, the Pezz, and a few others from the human settlement
were gathered in Harmony's garden. Zero bent and cut Jamie loose from the
Phix. She collapsed, twitching. "I've killed her!" Zero cried.

"No," Jack said. He'd shed his human camouflage and reverted to what Zero
thought of as "the light-bulb man." "She'll be okay in a few days. Well—she
will never be okay, not after what happened to her lover and her child. She
will never be a leader again. But she will survive for a while."

As the settlement's amateur doctor laid Jamie onto a stretcher, the Pezz
asked Zero, "Who will be the leader of the human colony now?"

"It'll be Zero," Yoshio said.

Zero shook his head. "I'm going to work on creating some kind of working
relationship with the other races. Maybe be a minister of culture of some
kind. But Sanchez is going to be the new Prez. He's suited for it. Anyway,
he'll be Prez of the human settlement, but we're going to have to form
some kind of interspecies nation so the conflict ends for good. Elect a
council of Earther reps and reps from the other races." He said all this
distantly, sadly, as he watched the doctor and his assistant carry Jamie out
of the garden. "But first," he added, with more animation, "I think we ought
to uproot this fucking garden. Turn it into a handball court or something.


"The drama has reached its denoument," the Meta said. "The planet is
yours."

It was an hour after dusk, the day after the fall of Fiskle. Zero stood on the
highest point of the Overstructure, having ascended with IAMton energy. He
stood on the parapet with a wisp of cloud trailing past him, gazing up into
the eye of the pyramid. He had come here in answer to the Meta's call.

"The planet belongs to all the races who live on it," Zero said.

"That is your decision," the Meta said. "So it will be."

"Actually," Zero said, "they can have it. Look, I'm not going to ask for
residuals on this film of yours. No points, nothing. Just cab fare, okay? Can
you take us home? Me and the Earthers, at least?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"What you have created is a self-perpetuating pattern. To disturb it would
be vandalizing a work of art. Never. Besides, the planet you call Fool's
Hope is your home."

"We dropped the 'Fool's' part," Zero said absently. He gazed out over the
misty reaches of landscape, out into the green sky. "Yeah, it's my home.
World is world."
"Still, we are balancing out the picture a little. We are bringing more
females from your world. This will be the last shipment from your planet, or
from any other, to this one."

"Bringing females. Mars Needs Women, huh?"

"The reference escapes me."

"Never mind." He patted the translucent railing of the parapet. "What's this
thing made of?"

"We don't know. Haven't analyzed it. The Overmind built it in response to
your wishes out of the local agglomeration of molecules. We know that it
channels IAMton energies harmlessly—it will prevent any more malicious
Currents. It will be a focal point of a harmonious interspecies society that
you will be instrumental in organizing, involving all races now living on this
world. In time, we project, your race and the others will develop a society
that will find its own sociological and even ecological symbiosis. The
structure will also provide you with a means to manipulate matter through
IAMtons. We predict, therefore, a renaissance in your relationship with the
environment."

"Oh. But you don't know what it's made of?" Zero asked dryly.

"No. It incorporates much IAMton energy; IAMtons are locked into its
molecular structure. It was we who impregnated this world with the
compacted IAMton deposits, but we don't pretend to fully understand the
working of that particle. We are still struggling with the question. IAMtons
don't like to be looked at too closely."

"You going to just abandon us here, then?"

"We may look in from time to time. We project that your associate, Bowler,
will form a splinter society based on a much more communal,
anticompetitive system than your own. It will be interesting to see whether
the two Earther systems coexist peacefully."

"Great." Zero laughed. "Just great. We'd better start the diplomacy now."
He looked up at the ship, hovering like a thundercloud beyond the pyramid.
"I should hate you because so many people have died here because of you.
But it's true: There's suffering everywhere. And Bowler's right about one
thing: This place is a chance to escape the suffering people have locked
themselves into on Earth. Where you going to go from here, Meta?"

"We are moving into a new school of our art. We are going to be
impregnating already occupied worlds with IAMtons and then adding some
energetic new races. It should be interesting as it involves only worlds that
are already quite crowded. Farewell, Zero. We wish you artistic
satisfaction."

The pyramid merged with the hemisphere, and both were drawn into the
green bowl of the sky.
Zero looked out at the circle of the horizon. He could see infinity and he
could see limits. "World is world," he said.


                                  Epilogue

On Earth, in New York City, on a sultry September day, everyone was
talking about the announcement that had come that morning on network
television. Astronomers and other scientists, using satellite telescopes and
a variety of other devices, had confirmed what lay observers had been able
to see for some time.

There was a second moon in the sky. It was shaped like an hourglass.

                                  The End

                                  -=*@*=-