======================
To Leuchars
by Rick Wilber
======================

Copyright (c)Copyright COPYRIGHTNOTICEcopy; 2000 by Rick Wilber
A Wildside Original

Wildside
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm

Science Fiction


---------------------------------
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original
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---------------------------------


       _Other books by Rick Wilber:_
       _Where Garagiola Waits and Other Baseball Stories_
       _The Writer's Handbook for Editing and Revision_
       _The Secret Skater _(written as Robin Aran)
       _Rum Point_
--------
         TO LEUCHARS
Rick Wilber

WILDSIDE PRESS
_Berkeley Heights, New Jersey_

This Wildside edition
copyright (C) 2000 by Rick Wilber.
All rights reserved.

First Wildside Press edition: October 2000

       Inset cover painting copyright (C) 2000 by Joe Haldeman.
       Portions of the book have appeared elsewhere in other contexts,
including:
       "To Leuchars" (C) 1997 by Rick Wilber (first published in _Asimov's
Science Fiction,_ September 2000)
       "With Twoclicks Watching" (C) 1992 by Rick Wilber (first published in
_Asimov's Science Fiction,_ January 1993)
       "Suffer the Children" (C) 1987 by Rick Wilber (first published in
_Asimov's Science Fiction,_ April 1988)
       "Swimming with Gort" (C) 1995 by Rick Wilber

       The author wishes to thank a number of editors for their wise counsel
on revisions for various of the S'hudonni stories over the years, including
Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams of _Asimov's Science Fiction_ magazine,
Ellen Datlow, Gordon Van Gelder of _The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction,_ Stanley Schmidt of _Analog,_ and Scott Edelman of _Science Fiction
Age._ And very special thanks to Wildside Press editor Alan Rodgers for his
sharp eyes, timely and accurate advice and his indefatigable assistance.

_To Leuchars_




                                                                                Page 1
A publication of
_Wildside Press_
P.O. Box 45
Gillette, NJ 07933-0045
www.wildsidepress.com

*FIRST EDITION*
--------
         _For Rich, Samantha, and Robin_
--------
         *I*
--------
         *Arribada*
       The regularly scheduled Ominous News Of The Day -- new movement by The
Ships, as we'd all come to call them -- was all over the newswebs once again,
and there were probably a lot of frightened people who thought staying home
and hiding under the covers was the best way to respond to this latest crisis.
       But my brother and I had more important things to worry about. After
all, ten times in the year since they'd arrived those ships had moved, and ten
times it hadn't meant a thing. So on this bright Tuesday morning Tommy and I
sat, unworried, on small canvas folding chairs tucked into a gap between a
pair of sand dunes up past the high-tide line on Egmont Key while we waited
for the first of the Kemp's ridleys sea turtles to arrive. Our only concession
to the events of the day was the newsvue my editor made me wear, one of those
fancy new ones with all the bells and whistles including, of course, a
real-time stream of updates on news, sports and weather. If this was the day
the Earth stood still, we'd know. Meanwhile, a cruise ship, the Sensation,
passed by in the distance, filled with tourists heading out through the mouth
of Tampa Bay toward Grand Cayman and Cozumel: business as usual. Tommy and I
weren't the only ones who'd quit worrying about the intentions of whatever it
was up there in The Ships that circled our little dot of a planet.
       Given enough time, people get used to anything. All the craziness of
those first few months -- the religious nuts on all sides, the politicians
blustering, the scientists changing their minds every day on What It All Was
About -- had calmed down, as the months passed, to a wait-and-see punctuated
by the regular frenzy each time the ships moved around.
       Here, it was nine in the morning and already the temperature was in the
low eighties. Florida in the summer takes its heat seriously, but we were
comfortable enough, with a light breeze coming in off the water, enough
sunblock slathered on us to stop a nova, and a big jug of ice-water to keep
things cool. I had until about noon, and then I'd have to take the boat back
to the Fort DeSoto pier and drive over to the Times to get my column done. I
was hoping for some action before I left, so I'd have something to write about
       Really, it was about as nice a morning as you can get in Florida in the
summer. Later, things would change. The price we pay for our mornings here is
the afternoon clamor, when the breeze dies down to a deathly calm just before
the daily thunderheads crackle with lightning as blinding sheets of rain pour
down.
       But I wasn't going to worry about what might happen later. I'd done
plenty enough of that lately. Instead, right now I was excusing myself from
all the damn guilt I'd earned for myself and just enjoying the perfection of
the morning while my brother and I awaited for the Kemp's ridleys to arrive
and bring Tommy the fame he'd earned.
       This little gathering of turtles would be big news. Until now, all the
Kemp's ridleys in the world had always laid their eggs on a single stretch of
beach in Mexico, Rancho Nuevo. In the old days, thousands of females would
arrive nearly at once: an _arribada_ they called in Spanish. In the 1940s, one
local with an eight-millimeter film camera caught footage of some
forty-thousand of the turtles crawling ashore on the same day, pushing and
shoving and climbing over each other to find a spot where they could dig, lay,




                                                                                 Page 2
bury and scoot.
       But that one little home movie damned the Kemp's ridleys to likely
extinction. There had always been raccoons and bobcats along that beach to
snatch the eggs. Once that film got out there were ambitious locals looking
for a free meal, and then, when they realized the value of the shells and the
eggs, a lot of others, too, looking to make a good living off those turtles.
For awhile, they did, all those earnest egg-laying mamas were awfully easy
pickings. But it couldn't last with all that pressure on one site: best guess
was that by the turn of the millennium there were maybe two-hundred of the
turtles left.
       Over the years, there'd been any number of efforts to get the turtles
to change that nesting behavior and spread things out to other, safer beaches,
but the Kemp's ridleys were having none of it. One group of scientists on the
Texas Gulf Coast had spent millions on a site at Padre Island and managed to
coax a total of eight turtles into nesting there. None of their eggs hatched.
By the time Tommy was in college and got started on his project, the experts
thought the Kemp's ridleys were gone in the wild and everyone had pretty much
given up on the turtles.
       But not my little brother Tommy. He'd succeeded, he hoped, where no one
else had. Almost a decade ago Tommy, a doctoral student then working on his
dissertation, offered fishermen in the Bay of Campeche a reward if they found
any Kemp's ridleys. The fishermen, over the course of six months, found five.
       Two of them were females. Tommy opened them up, took somatic cells from
the ovaries of both turtles and fused them with enucleated eggs -- eggs with
the DNA removed -- from leatherback turtles, then grew those eggs in the lab
where he had all the substrates and environmental parameters required. Tommy's
mitochondrial DNA analysis said it ought to work; but it was out there, very
edgy, doing something like that for turtles. Kemp's ridleys aren't sheep and
the cloning didn't come easy.
       But it worked. The process resulted in nearly one-hundred viable eggs
total from the greens. Tommy and his team had buried them -- no mean feat
there, getting that done just right, he told me -- into nests here on Egmont,
and then watched with joy as ninety-four of those genetically clean Kemp's
ridley hatchlings boiled out of the nests sixty days later and headed for the
water.
       Question was, how many would survive and would those survivors return?
Had they imprinted on this beach or were they lost forever, artificial
creations that would never find their way home?
       Tommy tracked as many as he could, attaching the latest in transponders
just inside the lateral scutes, up near the head. The batteries were meant to
last for five years. Problem was, it takes ten for the turtles to mature, mate
and return. That meant Tommy had a year or so at the midway point to try and
capture as many of them as he could, put in new transponders, and start the
tracking all over again.
       It had kept him busy, catching dozens of them from all around the Gulf
of Mexico and even on up the East Coast as far as Cape Cod. Two turtles, in
fact, drifted with the Gulf Stream all the way to the coast of Ireland.
       Tommy was a bookworm, god knows, and no adventurer. He was the most
cautious guy I knew. But he'd done what he had to do with those turtles, and I
was proud of him for that. He didn't like to travel, hated being on the sea,
was scared to death to snorkel or scuba. But he'd gone to those Kemp ridleys,
brought them home to the Gulf, put in new transponders, and wished them well
as he released them.
       It was a hugely ambitious, and expensive, effort; all the lab work, all
the tracking and re-tagging. It became his life's work. It defined him, made
him who he was. Sitting here in the sand dunes waiting for the payoff, I
figured he'd sure as hell earned the headlines I could already picture in my
mind: Dr. Thomas Holman, Savior of the Kemp's Ridleys; or better still, Dr.
Thomas Holman, the Architect of Change for a Doomed Species.
       If it worked. Now, today, we'd find out how worthwhile all that work




                                                                                 Page 3
had been. He hoped a dozen or more mothers might show and start laying their
eggs.
          ****
       We all pay a price for what success we find. When Tommy had started his
research, ten years before, I'd been sitting on the bench at the University of
Florida, a fifth-string quarterback hoping to get a few minutes of playing
time for the football Gators. Sitting on the bench is hell, and when the
Gators wanted to move me to a blocking back I'd jumped at the chance. The move
cost me a lot, including all the cartilage in my right knee; but I could
always claim I'd played big-time football. Hell, I even played professionally
for a couple of years after that, banged up knee and all, in the NFL's
European League, playing for the Claymores in Scotland. I liked it there,
living in Edinburgh.
       But the docs told me finally that it was time to quit or start thinking
of knee replacements, and _that_ wasn't a price I was willing to pay, so I
hung them up and came back to writing, the only other thing I knew how to do.
I was a Creative Writing major at Florida; there was a time I'd thought of
myself as destined for literary greatness. I won the undergraduate prize in
poetry, and even had a pair of poems published in Kenyon. The poet/running
back made pretty good copy there for awhile for the university's sports
information guys.
       But at about the same time I figured out I wasn't destined for the NFL
I realized, too, that my poetry didn't seem to be getting much interest from
the New Yorker, other than that scribbled "Sorry," at the bottom of the form
rejection. In poetry like in football, I didn't really have the legs for it.
       So I faced reality and quit the poetry and left Scotland to come home
and be a sportswriter, the perfect blend of talents for someone with my level
of ambition. Over the next few years I worked my way up through the ranks of
smaller papers to bigger and better ones -- from the Ocala Star Banner to the
Birmingham News to the Orlando Sentinel and then, a few years later, to the
St. Petersburg Times, where I finally made the move from sports to real news,
and eventually wound up with my own column.
       I loved the work and got paid pretty well for it. I cared about what I
did. Maybe too much.
       It's easy to get caught up in newspapering. When I started out, the
papers were at the end of their print era; back then the newsroom's computers
tied you into the world in a way that was special. I'd feel, as I cruised
through the wire services, like I knew things no one else did. When I was
editing and writing, I knew that whatever anyone read in my paper was because
I thought it was worth their reading. That's a heady sense of power. Even a
few years later, when the Internet came in and anyone sitting at their
computer at home who wanted to know the world's news could, I still loved the
business.
       Early on, as a sportswriter, I learned there's no feeling in the world
like digging into the stench of a corrupt college athletic department, finding
the poison deep in the center of it all, and telling the world. I got two very
popular coaches fired and I was hated for it by some people both times. Now,
on the news side, I did the same sort of legwork on local politicians and
religious leaders. One recent story on the financial scams of a local preacher
had a congregation in a huge uproar. They thought I was the devil himself,
come to torment their leader.
       But I was right about what I found and what I said, and that matters.
       That passion cost me: two marriages, an admittance by age thirty that
alcohol and I got along too well altogether, and the certain knowledge that I
had too many enemies and not enough friends. I figured those things were the
price you paid for finding the truth and saying it out-loud.
       In the last couple of years I'd even gone into broadcasting, showing my
ugly mug via the paper's converged website. There I was, in all my splendor,
talking about the news instead of just writing it.
       I wasn't particularly proud of sliding over into broadcast news like




                                                                                 Page 4
that, even over the web, but there seemed no way to avoid it as print news
fell into its death throes.
       To my mind, broadcast types weren't journalists, they were "talent" --
actors, really -- with perfect hair and teeth and not a news-bone in their
bodies. I told myself that maybe my scraggly, thinning hair and the chipped
front tooth that I refused to have capped would be good a good dose of reality
for the medium. My boss, an older newspaper person herself, seemed to agree,
and my ratings shares were good, so I got plenty of airtime.
       For Tommy, it had been a quieter progression. He'd been waiting and
tracking and publishing a few things while he built a career as a teacher and
waited for those turtles to confirm his research skills. He'd started this all
as a brilliant eighteen-year-old, knowing it would take a decade while he
worked on other research projects, studying cow-nose rays and jellyfish larvae
and doing some shark cartilage debunking. All the while he'd bided his time,
waiting for the Big One, the Kemp's ridleys, to come to fruition. Waiting and
tracking and trapping and tracking some more; and patient all the while,
really patient, while the data came in.
         ****
       And now the payoff. I looked over at him and he was fidgety, squirming
on his folding chair as he used his binoculars to scan the water offshore. I
smiled. You didn't get to see Tommy be fidgety very often. He was always the
calm one, the focused one.
       My newsvue beeped at me: a discreet little tone. I glanced at it. The
anchor, a chipper young blonde named Salli who I'd had been out with a few
times, said with a serious expression that The Ships had disappeared. That
couldn't be a good thing. I looked over to Tommy and caught his eye.
       "They've lost track of The Ships," I said.
       He stared back. "This might be it, then."
       "Or not," I said. "Maybe they've left."
       "Not too damn likely, Pete." He turned away to look out toward the
water. "Well, hell. I hope the turtles make it in soon, then."
         ****
       Tommy was the smart one, growing up, the one who knew the real facts
about things while I was the hazy dreamer who wanted to do nothing but play
sports, read books and daydream. I was into religion and was going to be a
priest. He was into science. We were altar boys together for one year when I
was twelve and he was ten.
       There's a moment in the Catholic Mass when the priest holds the host --
a little wafer of bread not much bigger than a quarter -- up high with both
hands and says "This is my body," and then, a bit later, "This is my blood."
At that moment, Catholic belief says, the host becomes the body and blood of
Christ. Not _like_ the body and blood, but the actual, real thing. It's called
Transubstantiation, and I'd believed it, firmly, from the time I was seven
until that year when Tommy became an altar boy. It didn't have to make sense,
I just believed, the way you're supposed to.
       The first time Tommy served at Mass, he was kneeling on the cold marble
of the altar in St. Thomas Aquinas church as the priest raised that host up
high. Tommy watched, and shook his head. I was there with Mom and Dad, in the
front pew, watching him. They didn't notice that disbelieving shake, but I
did. After Mass, he sneaked a host home and put it under the microscope so we
both could peer at it. Just bread, he concluded. Then he took snippets of it
and ran it through his chemistry set to see what it really was. It was bread,
that was all, and even then I knew better than to argue with him.
       A year or two later I switched my dreams from the priesthood to the
NFL. Later, when that didn't turn out to be real, either, at least I didn't
have to blame Tommy for pointing out reality to me.
       When I was a high-school jock Tommy was jumping grade levels until by
the time I was a junior in high school Tommy, two years younger, was a senior.
By the time I wandered into Gainesville, Florida, as a Gator football player
Tommy was done with his bachelor's there and deciding which grad program to




                                                                                 Page 5
zip through.
       He was an academic star, but I was on the football team and so on
campus he became, no surprise, Pete Holman's little brother. We tried hanging
out as much as we could, though we ran in crowds so different it was hard to
believe we were brothers. Still, the women came easy to me and not so easy for
him, so I helped him out where I could. The girls I hung out with had sorority
sisters or friends, and Tommy's a good-looking guy behind those glasses and
that shy smile, so it usually went okay. They babied him, or course, those
older girls. They treated him as the cute, smart little brother of the
football star. That must have grated on him, but he never admitted it, and he
kept going out with them.
       Then we moved our separate ways for a time and I kept confusing sex and
looks with love while Tommy stayed married, I guess, to his mind, that being
the price of his genius. Eventually, I'd pretty much settled with myself,
though I wasn't particularly happy with what I'd found -- a guy who was good
in the shallows with women but couldn't handle the deep water. Tommy? I
thought he'd been too damn busy to ever bother even wading in.
       Then, a year-and-a-half ago, just before The Ships showed up, came
Heather. Pure dumb luck had Tommy and I in the same town again, sleepy old St.
Petersburg, where he was at the university's school of marine science and I
was writing my column for the Times. We hung out some when we could. Tommy
seemed settled and happy enough. He had a nice house down at the south end of
town, overlooking the bay and with the Skyway Bridge arching across in the
distance. He liked to sit out on his dock at night and look at the water and
the stars and the distant lights of that bridge. My own place was a decent
apartment right downtown, with an impressive view of the city's waterfront
and, way in the distance, the lights of Tampa ten miles away across that part
of the bay. The girls I brought home were always impressed with that.
       He called me at work one day, said he had a surprise to show me and
asked me to bring someone along and come to his place for dinner -- grouper
out on the grill, some sweet corn in the boiler, a few Ybor Gold beers, some
Buffett on the sound system. That sounded pretty good to me, and Danni, my
current friend, would like it just fine. I didn't kid myself that we had a
future, Danni and I, but she was a joy to look at, and perfectly good in the
sack, and I'd learned the hard way that was all I should expect.
       We got there about seven, and Tommy was grinning as he opened the door.
Behind him, her arm comfortable over his shoulder, was Heather.
       She was plain enough. Short, straight black hair framed a round,
pleasant face with dark eyebrows, brown eyes, no lipstick, thin lips, a nice
smile. She looked athletic to me, solid, with the sort of body built for
soccer or softball, solid and firm.
       "Pete, this is Heather," Tommy said, obviously proud of himself.
       I wondered, shaking her hand and saying my hello's, how long Tommy had
known her. They were acting like a couple that had been together for awhile,
at ease with other. As we headed through the house and out to the back porch
and that nice view of the Skyway, in fact, she headed off to the kitchen for
drinks, acting at home, comfortable, like she knew her way around.
       Tommy might as well have read my mind. He came out right behind me as
we walked onto the wooden decking that edged out from the porch. "We've been
seeing each other for a week, Petey. Can you believe it?"
       "No," I answered truthfully.
       He laughed. "It's like I've known her all my life. I didn't know it
could be like that."
       "True love, you mean?"
       "Hell, I guess so." He shrugged his shoulders. "What else would you
call it? It's like we're perfectly made for each other. Fate, I guess."
       "Am I hearing you right, Mr. Scientist? Fate? You were _meant_ for each
other?"
       He laughed. "It's really something, huh?"
       "Yeah," I said, "it's really something."




                                                                                 Page 6
       Later, when Tommy came out on the deck to explain to Danni about how
that Skyway Bridge was the longest concrete suspension bridge in the cosmos, I
wandered into the porch and sat down next to Heather. She looked at me and
smiled.
       "So you're the famous nasty reporter brother," she said. I wasn't
expecting that, and while she said it with a smile, there was a definite bite.
       "Hey," I said, and held my hands out as if to stop her. "I'm only nasty
when I have to be. I say nice things, too, you know, when I get the chance."
       "You just don't get the chance very much, right?"
       I nodded. She laughed. "I read your column. You get really personal.
Girls like Danni must worry about hanging around with you."
       "Girls like Danni are hoping I'll say something about them. Anything."
       "I wonder, are you going to write about me tomorrow? Should I be
careful about what I say?"
       "No. I won't write about you. This is all off-the-record."
       "Off the record?"
       "Not for quotation. Private. Means I won't use any of it in a story." I
grinned at her maliciously, "Unless, of course, you _want_ me to quote you."
       She smiled. "Not right now, thanks." She took a sip of her drink. "What
a strange job you have. I've wondered about that, about what it's like, making
a living off the misery of others."
       I shook my head. "I don't think of it like that. I think of it as
finding out the truth about things, and getting paid for it. I'd like to think
I'd do it for free."
       "You love it that much?"
       "Yes, I do."
       "Telling the truth is that important to you?"
       I didn't have to think about that answer. Journalists who cared about
knowing the truth died all the time in the search for it -- dictators, drug
lords, right-wingers and left, there were a lot of people who didn't like what
we did for a living. Three different times in the past five years I'd been in
situations that could have gone bad on me. Each time I'd come through it okay.
So, "Yes, it's that important, it's what I do." I thought about it for a
second. "Hell, it's who I am."
       She laughed at me. "Mr. Truthfinder? Even when it's unpopular? Even
when people disagree? Even when they hate you for it?"
       I shrugged. "If I write a column where the truth doesn't piss somebody
off I figure I didn't do my job."
       She nodded. "And, of course, some people love you for it. They tell me
that underneath all that attitude you're very talented. They say you could be
a big star if you wanted to."
       "Whoa," I said. "Who the hell tells you that?"
       She shrugged those perfect shoulders. "Friends. They say you're too
good a writer to stay in this town, that not enough happens here. They say you
should be on the top newswebs, that you need just one big story here --
something that will get you some national attention -- and you'll be gone from
here, off to New York."
       "I don't especially like New York."
       "Too big? Too crazy?"
       I grinned. "Yeah, that's it, just too crazy up there for a simple old
Florida boy like me." Then I got more serious. "Really, Heather, I'm just not
looking for that Big Story. I'm happy right here, where there's enough
corruption and stupidity to last me a lifetime. I'm quite content being local,
thanks."
       She laughed. "Content being local? An ambitious guy like you? I bet you
know all the top editors in the business. I bet what you _really_ want is the
biggest audience you can find."
       I just smiled. "Sure, I know a few editors." Truth was, I had friends
at CNN.com and ABCNews.com and MSNBC.com and all the others. And they knew me.
And I got job offers every few months. Truth be told; you can't win awards in




                                                                                 Page 7
this business without having headhunters come after you. But I liked it right
where I was, that's what I told myself.
       She nodded, brushed her hair back from her eyes, stared at me with eyes
that seemed bluer somehow against that black hair. "I thought so. And you want
to know what I think?"
       "I get the feeling you're going to tell me whether I do or not."
       Another laugh. "I sure am. Here's my prediction: You and your brother
are a lot more alike than either of you know, and you both want success.
Tommy's going to find it with his turtles -- he's going to make it work, you
know. He's going to save that whole species. He'll pay any price he has to for
that to happen.
       "And you. Someday soon the right story will come along and you'll
realize the price of telling the whole world the truth is worth all the risk
and you'll go for it, too. Bingo, you'll be a big star."
       I laughed. "I'll get to tell the whole world? Bingo? Just like that?"
       "Just like that. You'll get a chance to go national; hell,
international, and you'll take it. And Tommy, he'll get his chance, too. " She
raised her glass to me. "And you know what else? Both of you will find out
that some things are worth almost any price."
       "I think you're right about Tommy. God knows he's already paid the
price -- all those years of work. But me? Nah," I said. "I like it right here,
thanks."
       She laughed -- and she had a hell of a laugh, throwing her head back
with the energy of it, mouth wide open, enjoying herself. "Well, I guess we'll
see then, won't we? The turtles, Tommy says, are supposed to come back to nest
this summer and that will be his time."
       "And me? When's my time coming?"
       She laughed again. I liked that laugh. She put her fingertips on her
temples, acting the mystic. "I sense it coming soon. Fame. Fortune. Difficult
decisions."
       I chuckled and shook my head. I meant to ask her then what she did for
a living, and why she was in St. Pete. But Tommy and Danni came in to get out
of the humidity and we all wound up talking about the Devil Rays, who were
winning for a change. I kept looking at Heather as the evening wore on. She
was all subtleties with her looks, I decided, in contrast to her conversation,
where she seemed to delight in saying exactly what was on her mind. Tommy
seemed to find that charming.
       Later, at my place, when I made love to Danni I was thinking about
Heather. Some women, the ones like Danni, the more you get to know them the
less attractive they are. There's something about their personality that
begins to affect their looks, or at least how you see those looks. With Danni
and her easy acquiescence, it took me a week or two to start to think her nose
was too small for the broad features of her face, or that her lips needed all
that careful attention she gave them because, really, they were thin and hard.
Things like that started adding up, as they always do.
       With Heather, it was just the opposite. The more I saw of her as the
weeks went by the better she looked to me. I had to work to remember that I'd
found her plain at first. She wore almost no make-up, and didn't seem to care
about her looks in general. But every time I'd be at Tommy's or he would bring
her by my place over the next few weeks, I'd find myself seeing, as if for the
first time, how perfect her body was, or how natural and beautiful that face.
I watched her walk, watched how she moved around, marveled at how her face
came alive when she cared about something -- and she cared about a lot.
Politics, the environment, the hapless Devil Rays: she had ideas on how to fix
them all. She wouldn't tell me directly who she worked for, but I picked up
easily enough that she was a lobbyist, and that I was a target of her efforts.
That should have set off every ethics alarm bell in my feeble little
journalist's head. You don't mess with lobbyists, no matter how much you're
starting to like them. Or how much they seem to like you. I could see it every
time she got started, looking at me when she spoke.




                                                                                 Page 8
       And I watched her as she watched me. Little smiles. Little messages in
those blue eyes. Eventually, that all got the better of me.
       We never got a chance to talk our way out of it, talk about how it was
happening between us, before it all got so crazy. As far as Tommy knew, one
day she was there for him and the next day she was gone. All she left behind
was a polite little note saying goodbye. And right about then The Ships
arrived and the whole world got a little crazy there for awhile.
         ****
       I put the spout of the water jug to my lips and took a sip. It was
getting hot. I squirmed around some on the canvas seat trying to get
comfortable. I took another look at my newsvue. Still no sign of The Ships.
Everyone in the world who could search for them was doing it, but they weren't
there.
       I looked out at the Gulf of Mexico, a brisk sea-breeze stirring up a
foot or two of shore break. That looked very promising, Tommy had told me; the
Kemp's ridleys were the only sea turtles to nest during the day and they liked
windy weather for it.
       But the turtles? They weren't in sight either.
       I looked over at Tommy. He looked back and smiled, gave me thumbs up.
He'd forgotten to worry about The Ships. Today was the day, he'd told me a
couple of hours ago before we settled in to be quiet. Everything was just
right for the turtles; the weather, the tides, the timing. I smiled back,
returned the thumbs up, stole another glance at the newsvue. Nothing. I
squirmed some more. Looked toward the water. Sighed. I could have had a
relaxing morning with Tammi -- the current item -- but no, devoted brother, I
was here in the sun with young genius Tommy, watching the waves roll in. I
squirmed again, thinking of excuses to leave, thinking of how much I liked the
nipples on Tammi's breasts, and then, there, maybe, I saw something. A shape
at the edge of the water? Something coming in through the tidal pool? Just a
big ray, probably, this was their time of year to lay eggs, too, and they did
it right up at the edge, in inches of water.
       I put the binoculars to my eyes and there she was, a turtle the size of
a meat platter -- bad image, I thought right away, since the taste of their
meat was one reason there weren't many left. But there she was, coming clean
out of the water, heading inland. I turned to let Tommy know but he'd seen
her, too, and had his digicam going. I turned back and hit the zoom on the
binocs and got a close-up of the turtle. I wanted to follow this girl all the
way up the beach as she came ashore. Then I saw, on both sides of her, more of
them. I zoomed back. More still, a couple of dozen maybe, all of them, all at
once, a tiny _arribada. _I grinned like a son-of-a-bitch. Good for Tommy. He'd
earned this moment's satisfaction, my baby brother. It'd been a long, hard
trail for him getting to this, and it was certainly the damnedest thing I'd
ever seen, a regular D-day of turtles invading this one beach. I kept my eyes
in the eyecups and more and more of them emerged, eighty or ninety of them. I
tried to count but couldn't keep up, so I watched the moms come ashore and
marveled. This was big time, all right. At that moment, I couldn't imagine
anything bigger.
         ****
       It'd been past midnight when I pulled into Tommy's driveway. I'd been
at another of those awards banquets. This time I'd been named Florida's best
at finding out the truth about things in my category, and for newspapers of a
certain circulation, distributed in a certain way. God knows we love to give
ourselves awards, we journalists, and if you break it down into enough
categories we all win something.
       Tommy wasn't there. Heather opened the front door before I got to it.
She was wearing blue-jeans, a short-sleeved blouse, no bra. Her hair, longer,
I realized, than I'd thought it was, was pulled back into a ponytail.
       "We figured you'd come over," she said. "Tommy just got a call that
there's a leatherback nesting over on Longboat. Said he'd be back later."
       She'd been spending most nights at his place for a few weeks by then.




                                                                                 Page 9
There'd been rumblings from Tommy about asking her to marry him. I'd told him
I thought it was a great idea. I'd told him she was smart and nice looking and
seemed in love with him and what more could you possibly ask than that?
       I stood there and took it all in for a moment. She smelled like summer
rain, like the energy in the air right before the downpour. I looked at her
and she looked back, not saying anything. She smiled, leaned up a bit and
kissed me on the neck. My brother's girl, the one he was talking about
marrying.
       We went very slowly. She didn't say a thing at first, stepping back so
I could undo those buttons, one by one, from top down to bottom. Then I
reached up inside the blouse to push it back off her shoulders, off her arms
as she let it slip to the floor.
       I'd never seen her breasts before, though god knows I'd fantasized
about them. They were round and firm and perfect, the areolas a thin dark band
around the deep red of the nipples. I stared at them.
       "They're yours, Peter. I've wanted you to see them for a long time.
Kiss them for me, please."
       I did. Later, after, in bed, I did again. It was three in the morning
by then and Tommy still wasn't home. I kissed those breasts, kissed her on the
lips, and then again. Entered her one more time while she brought me to her,
the electricity crackling as if the first time.
       We fit together. It was perfection. I didn't want it to be, but there
it was. Making love to her, making love _with_ her, was the best thing I'd
ever done, the only true poem I'd ever written, the best truth I'd ever
discovered, a weird and welcome transcendence from what I'd thought, with so
many women, was love.
       But there was Tommy to think of. Jesus, there'd be hell to pay. I
wondered if that's what she'd been getting at that first night we met when she
talked about paying the price. Had she figured then that we'd wind up in bed,
in love?
       Was I in love? I sure thought so. One of the things I'd finally learned
after a hundred girlfriends and three wives is that great sex and True Love
aren't even in the same neighborhood. And this was so different, so not what
I'd known, that I had to think it was something real.
       Finally, burdened and torn between two awful truths, my head whirling
over what we'd done, I left. Went home to my own house. Climbed into bed but
couldn't sleep. Got back up, slipped into shorts and a t-shirt and sat on the
couch, waiting for the phone to ring or for the pounding on the front door
from Tommy's hurt and angry fists. Finally, around seven a.m., the phone
jangled. I picked it up.
       "Hello."
       "Petey." He sounded so terribly hurt.
       "Yeah, Tom."
       "Pete. She's gone. Heather's gone."
       "Gone?"
       "There's a note here. She loves me, but she has to leave. She's gone."
       And that was that. We never saw her again. As the weeks went by, Tommy
seemed to get used to it. The Kemp's ridleys helped him with that. Me? I
couldn't believe, at first, that she'd chosen that path; but eventually you
have to face the facts. And maybe, I thought, she'd done the right thing for
us both. With her gone, I never told Tommy what had happened. If she'd been
there, that all would have gone differently.
          ****
       Tommy had a worried look on his face. As the turtles kept coming ashore
by the dozens, he and I got up from behind the dunes and walked out into them.
       "I didn't think there could be this many, Petey," he said. "It's really
unbelievable."
       "So be happy, Tom," I said. "Enjoy the moment. You're the genius who
saved a whole species." And I patted him on the shoulder as we walked. He just
shook his head, overwhelmed by his own success.




                                                                                 Page 10
       The turtles were blind to us, so focused on nature's dictates that we
didn't exist for them. Invisible, we walked into the warm surge of the
shorebreak, and out to the sandbar, moving through them as we went, shoving
them aside every now and then when we couldn't avoid it. Tommy wanted to get
out there and look back so he could tape them moving into the beach and see
the beach as they saw it during their approach.
       We got past the shallow water over the bar and waded into the deeper,
far side of it. In a few steps it was thigh-deep. I unclipped the newsvue and
held it in my right hand, everything else was going to have to get wet. We
took another couple of steps and it was waist deep, then, still on a downward
slope off the sandbar, it was chest deep. We stopped there.
       Tommy turned around to film. I next to him, and before I made the turn
I saw, out there in the darker blue of the deeper water, something big.
       "Tommy. There's something out there behind us. It's big."
       "Barracuda," he said, not taking his eye away from the eyecup. "They
won't bother you, Petey, don't sweat it." He paused. "Damn, Petey, look at
them. God, there must be a hundred of them."
       I felt a bump against the back of my leg and panicked, jumping away
from it.
       "Damnit, Pete. Keep it cool. I'll be done with this in a minute or
two," said Tommy, turning away from the eyecup long enough to frown at me. He
turned back to film more.
       I looked back where I'd been. There, in the water, rising, was a
turtle, that was all, coming up from the darkness to find the sandbar, get
over it, get into the beach and lay her eggs. Just another turtle.
       And then, beyond it, deeper, a large shape hurtled by. A barracuda?
God, I certainly hoped so, I didn't want it to be a bull shark. I'd been
snorkeling all over the Caribbean, from Grand Cayman to Trinidad; that's how I
used to spend my vacations, with someone attractive at an island with a good
reef and a good bar or two. In those places I'd learned not to worry about
barracuda; they were curious, but for all their sleekly vicious appearance
they never seemed to bother anybody. Not like bull sharks, they'd come and get
you when they could. People survived it when a bull shark hit them if they
could get away after the first attack. Usually it was just a chunk of calf
that was gone, or a long slash on the arm where the shark grabbed and then let
go, a little exploratory nibble before coming around for a second strike, the
serious attack. You didn't want to still be there for that second go-round.
         ****
       Catholic guilt is an interesting thing. You think you've put all that
stuff behind you, all the stuff the nuns and the Jesuits fed you in school.
But then you do something stupid, something you knew was awful even as you
were doing it, and you realize that the Jesuits, especially, never let go. If
they had you for high-school, they have you forever. Bless me, Father, for I
have sinned.
       When I heard from Tommy that Heather had left him that note I expected
her to show up at my door. When she didn't I went through a whole string of
emotions -- anger, mostly: at myself for not having more control over things,
for having done that at all with my brother's girl. At her for leaving. Hadn't
that been something special? Did she think leaving made it all okay?
       I didn't think so. I thought her leaving made it worse. I couldn't get
it done and over with, either with her or not, and it all ate at me, that
guilt knotting up in my stomach while I kept trying to figure out a way to
make it better without telling Tommy what had happened.
       At St. Pete Jesuit we had a priest as assistant principal. We called
him Father Very Vicious. He didn't pull his punches, especially with me. At
the end of the school year he told me I'd never amount to anything if I
couldn't stop daydreaming and get some ambition. "You have to learn to _try,_
Peter," he said to me, "not everything in life is easy, you know. Coach Noll
tells me you don't even try hard in football. You can't get far without
risking the effort, Peter. You think football is going to be your easy




                                                                                 Page 11
meal-ticket, son? You think you're going to be a big star in the NFL without
even trying?"
       Well, yeah, I _did_ think that, back then, what seventeen-year-old
high-school star doesn't? Father Very Vicious sure wasn't going to convince me
otherwise, either, so I just sat there in his office and tried to listen
politely. He shook his head at me. "That brother of yours. He's very smart,
but he works hard for it. Your brother, he's going places, Peter. You," and he
shook his head again sadly, "I just don't know, son. If you don't change your
ways, if you can't change that attitude, I think you'll regret it."
       It took me a long time to figure out how right he was, that priest.
Tommy did go places, and I, mostly, didn't. Which is why, when my football
dreams didn't pan out, I wound up a journalist in a small Southern city, where
all I had to was imagine the worst about people and then prove it true.
Living, like Heather said that first time I met her, off the misery of others.
         ****
       There was another shape out there. Two of them now, moving fast, back
and forth, feeding maybe, in the deeper water. One shot off in a hurry and
disappeared. The other slowed, then just drifted there, a gray shadow in the
water, just deep enough to be hidden from view.
       "Tommy, you about done?" I asked, turning back to look at him. He was
heading back to the beach, filming it all as he went, the shallows filled with
scrambling turtles. He turned back once to wave at me. I could see the grin on
his face, full of triumph; he'd done it, damn it.
       As he reached the shore, a good thirty yards away from me, I saw
something move by to my left. There, in the trench just this side of the
sandbar, surrounded by the arribada of Kemp's ridleys all swimming in to
shore, something was rising up from the water, a blur in the bright splatters,
shimmery then clearing as it stood, looked toward us, raising a hand in
greeting. My god, I thought, The Ships had arrived.
       What was I supposed to do? Run? I turned to look at Tommy. He was
filming a mother scratching out a hole in the sand to bury her eggs in. I
turned back and stood there as the still-arriving sea turtles shoved their way
past me.
       It was, though I didn't quite realize it then, the start of the end of
things as I'd known them to be. I got within ten meters of him. There was
another shape in the water, something as large as him, scuttling as I
approached, a quick flick of a tail and it was gone.
       His skin, dark and slick, smelled vaguely of low tide. His fat,
porpoise-shaped body was five feet tall, maybe a bit more, and he had on what
looked for all the world like comical Bermuda shorts that ended at the knees
of short, thick legs. Halfway up the torso there were thin, tiny arms coming
out from the side.
       "Hello," he said, in perfectly good English, with that mid-Atlantic
flat dialect the newswebs use. "I am very pleassed to introduce myself."
       In a week, the whole world would know him. For now, for this moment, it
was me.
       "You are Peter Holman, yess," he said in that sibilant whistle of a
voice I soon got used to.
       I nodded.
       Good. I am Twoclicks." He waved at that high blue sky, "We are from
Imperial S'hudon."
       I looked up to see what he was pointing at. No clouds, a solitary
frigate bird circled over us, hoping to spot a handout.
       And then I felt, more than heard, a distant rumble. It vibrated through
me, subtle at first and then stronger, a steady background timpani that grew
in intensity until I could hear it, too; a low distant rumble that grew louder
and louder -- a plane doing some low-level thing right over us? Some big boat
rumbling by just out sight?
       I looked back at Tommy and he was looking my way, shaking his head. He
touched his ears, shouted something I couldn't hear.




                                                                                 Page 12
       There was a scream; a metallic tear in the sky above us. I dropped to
my knees in the water and grabbed the side of my head, covering my ears, then
falling from the chair and into the sand in pain as it screeched, fingernails
against the ultimate blackboard.
       And then it was gone. Ten seconds, it couldn't have been longer, and
then gone.
       I stood, looked at my brother in the distance as he, too, stood. I
looked around, and there, out in the gulf, I saw something huge and dark
settling into the shallow water. I am in the business of description but it's
hard to say how it looked that first time. It took me a few moments to find
things I could compare it to, something to use as a tool to understand what I
was seeing.
       It was delicate for all its size, its legs all spidery connecting at
their top to that egg-shaped main body as it settled in, no noise now but that
deep, physical rumble. Then, behind it, more of them began to settle, coming
somehow unseen from the sun-splashed clarity of the sky right into view as
they settled on those spindly legs into the shallows of the Gulf of Mexico. I
watched as a dozen of them settled into the sandy bottom off Egmont Key. It
couldn't have taken more than two minutes, though they looked fragile, those
first S'hudonni freighters, and they fooled us, looking in the distance to
smaller than they turned out to be. The Ships had arrived.
       They were a quarter-mile offshore or maybe a little more. And they were
quiet. The only sounds I could hear were the slight slap of the six-inch
shorebreak against the packed, wet sand and, even at this distance, the
scrinch of sand being dug out by the turtles back on the beach.
       "Hah!" Twoclicks said from behind us and, as we turned to see him he
held those delicate arms of his out wide. "Iss very impressive, right? You can
ssee the strength of Imperial S'hudon."
       I nodded, turned once more to look at Tommy. He was filming this. With
his zoom he could get in tight on us.
       Twoclicks let his arms drop to his sides, then lowered himself into the
water until only the top of his head, and those strange eyes, were visible. He
held it there for a second, rose again.
       "Ahh, your water iss very nice here. Warm. Safe." He seemed to take a
deep breath and went into a little prepared speech. "The great sstrength of
Imperial S'hudon iss not what matterss today. It iss, instead, our
friendship."
       "Right," I said. "Sure. Our friendship." I wondered how in the hell I
seemed to be in charge of intergalactic peace and diplomacy. "But I don't
think we're the ones you should be talking to. In a few minutes, I bet,
there'll be some people arriving here..."
       "We have brought giftss for you," he said. He held out his hands,
nothing in them.
       "I don't understand," I said. "Gifts?"

       "Yess. Gifts. All these turtless," and he waved one stubby warm toward
the beach behind where the mother turtles by the dozens were digging into the
sand, laying eggs, renewing a species that the experts had predicted was
doomed.
       "You had something to do with this? The Kemp's ridleys? The arribada?"
       "Yess. We have," he paused, seemed to think it through for a moment,
"manipulated them, the turtles. They will return here, alwayss." He smiled, a
strange, artificial, lipless grin that he must have taught himself for our
sake. "Their species is saved now, yess?"
       I wondered what Tommy would think of that, his life's work down the
tubes, his level of science suddenly right there with the discovery that two
sticks rubbed just right could start a fire. I supposed I'd be the one to tell
him.
       "And we have work for you," he said to me. "We undersstand you have
certain talents, and accesss to certain avenues of information flow, that you




                                                                                 Page 13
can help us communicate. That iss true, yess?"
       I wanted to disbelieve it all, wanted to blink hard once and wake up
back in Kansas, back in reality. I'd worked hard for years to be a
professional skeptic. But here this thing was. Right in front of me.
       "Yeah," I said, then "I mean yes. Sure." Hell, it was the story of a
lifetime. First contact. Here. Now. Me. So, the Big Story I didn't want had
come my way after all.
       "How do you know this about us. Why have you come here, to us?" I asked
him.
       "Oh," he laughed, a jovial belly-rolling laugh that I came to know well
in the months to come. "Oh, that. You have the highest recommendations. Very
highest." He pointed out toward the ships again. "We have consstructions," he
said. "Biological constructions. Creationss of ourss. Capable of great
changes. They have been here for ssome time. Working. Searching."
       As if to prove how much he knew, he said to me, "You are a
communicator, yess?"
       "A journalist," I said, crazily trying to score some kind of point.
Communicator sounded like public relations to me, and in the middle of all
this insanity I at least wanted that distinction made -- a PR flack I'd never
been, damn it.
       Then, I swear, he winked at me, a thin membrane sliding down over one
eye as he squinched it closed for a second. "And," he said, sliding into that
belly laugh again, "you are excellent at reproduction, at sexual congress,
yess?"
       "What?!" This Twoclicks seemed to think he was some kind of
intergalactic stand-up comic. "What the hell are you talking about?"
       He held out his arms in a practiced move, palms up, faking innocence.
"Iss what I am told." He chuckled a bit more, a deep rumbling from inside that
fat, sleek body. "We ssuppose it is besst if we sshow you, yes?"
       "Sure," I said. "Show me."
       There was something headed our way in the water, something dark and
fast. It swept in fast, just below the surface, neared us, then veered away,
turned, swept back by one more time, then again veered away again.
       Then it slowed, finally, and drifted in toward us until I could see it,
another of these porpoise-shaped things, longer than this Twoclicks character,
maybe leaner. There'd be nothing Tommy could catch with his camera, though,
unless the thing stopped and stood up.
       While I watched, it started to shimmer and blur, vibrating under the
water. I couldn't quite see exactly how it was happening, but the water
trembled with the change, wavelets of energy obscuring what we could see.
       Then it calmed down, things cleared up. It had changed, lost its
porpoise shape, grown thinner, longer, with limbs. Nice limbs, in fact.
       There, rising from the sea, was Heather.
       She started wading toward me, moving through the water with a liquid
perfection that now made sense to me. I shook my head and laughed at myself,
at how stupid I'd been, as she came near us.
       "Hello, Pete."
       I just stared at her, then turned to see what Tommy was doing. Had he
been able to see her change? Did he know she was some kind of damn machine, a
changeable _thing._ I could see he was filming it. I waved at him to come
toward us, join us, bring the camera in and get close to all this. He might as
well know, and the sooner the better. But he stayed where he was.
       Heather smiled, reached up to push the hair from her eyes. "So here it
is, Pete. The Big Story, the Biggest Truth of them all."
       "Yeah," I said, and just kept staring at her. Her skin was rippling,
like she was fighting to keep in under control: like there was something about
being in the water that made it difficult for her.
       "It's yours Pete," she said, the smile fading. "This is your story to
tell. All about us. All about the new future for you, for everyone."
       "It's a hell of a story, that's for sure." I looked at her, standing




                                                                                 Page 14
there, beautiful and perfect, the woman, the thing, I'd made love to. To her
left, Twoclicks was reaching down with those fragile arms to scoop water into
his hands. He splashed it on what passed for a face then smiled at me, wet and
dripping.
       "We need you, Pete, as the project here begins."
       "The project?"
       "Twoclicks is my employer, Pete. He has a great deal of change planned
for here. You'll all be better for it, eventually, but it will take some time
and everyone won't be happy about the changes. Governments, politics, the way
you live here, how you live, where .... All that's going to change."
       "And you want me to help you?"
       She smiled that perfect smile, stable now, under control. "And Tommy,
too. Someone has to explain it to everyone, someone people here can trust. The
two of you, working together, can do that."
       I shook my head. It was all too crazy to even think about.
       "Someone will speak for us, Pete, why not let it be you? You can
explain things for us, can communicate with the whole world. If it goes well,
your work, a lot of people will be better for it."
       "And if it doesn't go well? If we don't sign on?"
       She shrugged. "It _is_ going to happen here, Pete, there's certainly no
stopping that." She waved her hands toward the ships out there, settled and
quiet in the shallow Gulf of Mexico. "We _need_ to be here, or this wouldn't
be happening."
       I turned away from her, looked again at Tommy, tried again to wave him
toward us. He stood there among the Kemp's ridleys and watched us through that
zoom. Around him, the turtles dug their holes, dropped their eggs.
       He took his eye from the lens. Lowered the camera. Shook his head
slowly, staring at me across the water. He was my brother. I thought of the
price he'd pay for all this. I thought about what I owed him, how I could
possibly, ever, make it right.
       Heather's face was rippling a bit as I turned back to look at her,
those perfect cheekbones widening for an instant, then settling down. My god.
Then she smiled again, that face stable for a moment. "Tommy will matter.
He'll be famous."
       She reached out to touch my cheek, let her fingertip trail down to my
lips, pressed there lightly. "And you, Pete. It was very, very good between
us, wasn't it?"
       I nodded.
       "You'll be the most famous journalist on Earth. Every word you write.
Every word you say. The whole world will listen."
       I looked past her, out to where those ships stood. Shook my head at the
thought of it. Good between us? This incredible, beautiful thing and I? Yeah,
it sure had been.
       The whole world listening? Yeah, well, that was surely a lock.
       I wondered, that's all, as I turned back to look toward my brother who
stood there, silent among his sea turtles, their flippers flailing away at the
soft sand of Egmont Key, what the price was going to be. For me. For Tommy.
For all of us.
--------
          *Swimming with Gort*
       Sweating in the heat and glare, Tommy watched from the rocks as Sondra
swam away from him, the sun glinting off the ripples her fins stirred up. A
hundred yards out, over on the other side of the reef she was heading toward,
there was a movement in the water, something almost coming to the surface,
something big. A dolphin maybe, or a leatherback sea turtle.
       This part of Rum Point was tricky to snorkel. The current ran strong
over the reef, then swept by the point and out toward the breakers. The trick
was to swim against the pull for a couple of hundred yards, then let the
current take you effortlessly back over the coral and fish for a few minutes
before you angled out of it and came ashore at the edge of the point. Wait too




                                                                                 Page 15
long and you could wind up way out there by the breakers. Beyond them was
nothing but deep, blue ocean until you got to Cuba.
       Just to please Sondra he'd forced himself to snorkel the reef a couple
of days ago, and managed to enjoy the thrill of it. But he'd been nervous
about the current, worried enough about it that he'd had to force himself to
notice the clouds of little tropical fish, or the startling clarity of the
water, or the parrotfish pecking away at the huge mounds of brain coral that
dotted the bottom.
       It had been a real kick, no question about it, but that one time had
been enough for him, and once was never enough for Sondra. He watched as she
reached the reef, blew a spray of water to clear the snorkel, then let the
current take her, bringing her back his way.
       Snorkeling was such a fragile way to see what was down there, with none
of the comforting hardware of scuba diving or the island's submarine rides.
Himself, he liked technology, the feel of the hardware, the mechanical
certainty of it, and so he was always a little fearful when he strapped on the
mask and snorkel, slipped his feet into those big fins. Anything over about
ten feet deep and he started to feel threatened, began worrying about
drowning, about being attacked by one of those long, barrel-shaped barracuda,
about the currents or a sudden cramp in his legs -- Christ, anything could
kill you out there.
       But not Sondra, she'd rather be out there damn near naked, no
comforting regulator, no weights or tanks. No fear. In the few months he'd
known her, she'd never been afraid to do or say anything. The deeper the water
the more she liked it.
       Living with Gort was the best example of it. The guy was, for Christ's
sake, a S'hudonni; a bulbous and tottering character on thin little legs that
looked like they couldn't support the body above them. He looked like
something Dickens would have invented if he'd been into science fiction.
       It was damn unnerving, really, that lipless smile of his and the watery
chuckle that bubbled out of it when he found something funny, as he often did.
There were maybe two-hundred S'hudonni wandering around Earth, a sort of
accreditation team, they explained when they'd first arrived. Just looking
things over, taking a few local samples of flora and fauna here and there,
making reports to the homeworld. We'll let you know the results as soon as
they're in, they promised.
       One of them, Twoclicks, seemed to be the boss of the whole thing. He
was the one who'd taken Peter with him, out to the stars, to see the homeworld
of S'hudon while Tommy stayed behind as a sort of scientific interpreter for
Gort. It was a job that, at first, Tommy'd thought was important. Now he knew
better.
       Heather was gone, too; beautiful Heather whom he'd misread so badly,
out there now with Peter and that Twoclicks character. There was time when
he'd thought he was in love with her.
       Back then, though, he'd thought he loved his brother, too. Times
change.
       And Sondra, he had to admit, was really something. He hadn't wanted to
work with her, at first. He'd thought, back then, that he hated her. But she
was hard to hate. As his job, what there was of it, became more clearly a
joke, a sort of thin, humiliating waste of time; the way he felt about Sondra
was the thing that took on substance, became increasingly real, dangerously
real.
       The S'hudonni had been the biggest news story ever for a month or two,
back when they first arrived. Tommy and Pete'd had their fifteen minutes of
fame, being in on things right from the start. Now Pete was gone, out There
somewhere, and Tommy, well, the world being what it was, even first contact
with aliens drifts out of the news, replaced by crashing jetliners and sinking
ferries and all that new trouble in the Horn of Africa.
       They all had cutesy names, the S'hudonni. Sci-fi stuff: Hal, and Tweel
and !Tang and Kzin and Twoclicks and the others. Very funny.




                                                                                 Page 16
       Tom had seen the movie that Gort got his name from, and he thought that
Gort had it wrong, taking that name. Gort had just been the robot in that
movie, not the alien. Just a mechanical man.
       Tom found it comforting that Gort could get it wrong, but it wasn't
something he wanted to mention to him, not the way things were going lately.
The S'hudonni could be vicious when they wanted; Tommy had seen that side,
first-hand.
       He admired Sondra's courage, in fact; the way she hung around Gort,
challenged him sometimes, laughed at him. And Gort took it from her, every
damn time. It was part of what drew Tommy to her, that fearlessness, that
incredible nerve. Maybe he even feared her for it a bit, knowing that it was
the sense of danger that was part of the attraction, drawing him to her,
showing him something he'd never seen before, making him feel like someone
he'd never been.
       He loved her. It was terrifying, but there it was. She was an
incredible lover and the most beautiful woman he'd ever known, all tall and
blonde, those wonderful breasts, that face, the long legs, the full lips, the
way she could pout, that brilliant smile, those eyes he fell right into.
       She didn't come across, he knew, as the brightest person you'd ever
meet. But that was only on the surface, an act she put on. Down deep there was
a bright core, a deep sense of understanding that baffled him sometimes when
she let it out. He wondered, often, if she wasn't a lot smarter than she let
on.
       She was, truly, amazing. Damn. He couldn't believe, sometimes, that it
was him making love to her, making love to one of the best known faces in the
world, making love to the lover of Gort.
       Tom had even begun to think, in his fear and cowardice, that he ought
to try and end it, get away from her, from Gort, before he got consumed by the
whole thing. But Sondra had enough courage for the both of them. She'd made
that clear.
       "Look, Tom," she'd said just this morning, sitting in the wicker chair,
brushing her hair. "Gort's a wonderful person, really. I admire him. You have
no idea what he's gone through to be here, the changes he's made in his body
so he could fit in -- it was all very painful you know.
       "But let's not let our worries about him get in the way of what we
have, you and I. He's an alien, Tom. He's different. I'm not sure he even
cares about what we're doing."
       She stopped brushing. Stared at herself in the mirror.
       "So quit worrying about it, Tommy. Just, like, relax, okay? It's under
control, dear, it's all under control."
       He'd wanted, then, to say something. But, Jesus, he'd never been very
good with words anyway. He was a scientist -- or had been, before all the
science he knew had become worthless with S'hudon's arrival.
       But not good with words, not good with risks. He'd started to tell her
that, when she turned to face him, stood up, laughed, and slowly unsnapped her
bra and held it out in her right hand, let it drop, cupped her breasts in her
hands, watched him as he couldn't help but look at them, flawless, the nipples
seeming to harden while he stared, darkly red against the brown of the
areolas. Jesus, she was perfection, and to have her wanting him like this, to
be able to make love to her as often as he dared, was a kind of heaven.
       "Take me, Tommy," she said. "Now. Here. Before Gort gets back from the
meeting."
       "Sondra," he said, "he could come back anytime. I mean, really."
       "Tom. Tommy," she said. "Now, love. Right here."
       She walked over to him, embraced him, those nipples pressing against
his ribcage. Then she had stood up on her tiptoes to kiss him, quickly, and
then lengthening the kiss until they were, again, making love, she leading the
way.
       There was really nothing he could do about it when she demanded him
like that. He hadn't been able to help himself the first time, when they'd met




                                                                                 Page 17
for lunch at her request; and it had been the same every time since.
       As they made love this morning he'd had an odd sudden moment of
clarity, thinking about the whole affair. It was after he had brought her to
orgasm once with his tongue and while she was on top of him, those perfect
breasts beaded in sweat moving rhythmically up and down over him, her head
angled back in pleasure, that half-smile, those little moans that excited him
so much. He'd wondered, briefly, before the pleasure of it took him spinning
away again, about what she saw in him, about what she saw in Gort, for that
matter. Was he good in bed? An alien, good in bed? Did they even make love,
Sondra and Gort? Tom didn't know, Sondra wouldn't talk about it.
       Maybe, he'd thought in that quick moment of clarity, it was all that
simple. She didn't get any from Gort, so Tom filled in.
       Then she'd started to have her orgasm, the moans turning to cries and
noises and yesses, and he'd lost the thought, quit worrying about it, and just
fell into the enjoyment of it, the wanting of her.
       Now, watching her float his way over the reef, he shook his head. It
was all very stupid in a lot of ways, he was taking an incredible risk. But,
Jesus, she was terrific -- acting the airhead at one moment, and then saying
something brilliant the next. And always, always, gorgeous perfection.
       And it was great sex, no question about that. All of it, too, the other
things as much as the act of making love; the way she ran her finger along his
thigh at the dinner table, the way she stroked him through his pants as he
drove the rental car, getting him hard and then slowly unzipping as he drove,
reaching in to feel him, hold him.
       Today, as they drove here from the Hyatt, she'd gone even further. They
were waiting for that red light in George Town, the locals and a few tourists
-- the sort of people who still had money for a trip to the islands --
crossing the street in front of them, when she leaned over and put her head in
his lap, that perfect blond hair falling down to cover him while she found her
way through the zipper, pulled him loose, and then licked him, running her
tongue lightly across the top.
       Oh, Christ. He'd been embarrassed by it, frozen, his hands on the
wheel, hoping no one would notice, afraid to look around and see who had. But
she knew no embarrassment, knew only the enjoyment of it, and the fun of
seeing his discomfort while bringing him hard.
       When the light changed he'd been slow to react, and the car behind him
had beeped. He'd jumped in the seat, banging her head into the steering wheel.
She'd found the whole thing hilarious.
       He had an erection now just thinking about it as he watched her glide
by, no more than fifteen or twenty yards out, moving quickly in the current
this close to the point.
       He thought for a moment that she'd forgotten where she was, was going
to drift right out toward the breakers if he didn't risk it all and jump in
after her. But then she looked up, waved, and swam easily over to him, angling
against the current to reach the tiny spot of beach that held sand instead of
coral, where she could stand and walk in, her skin and that white bikini swim
suit sparkling in the hard sunshine as she tugged off her mask and snorkel.
       "Tom, it's wonderful. I can't imagine why you didn't want to snorkel it
with me. God, the fish! And the star coral, huge boulders of it, like little
mountain ranges full of tropical fish that you just drift over. It was really
amazing."
       "That's great," he said, scrambling over the rocks to her, handing her
a towel. "I was getting worried about you, actually. The current..." He let
the thought drift.
       "Oh, Tom. The worst thing that would happen is that I go around the
point and then swim in from the other side. I swear, you're such a worrier."
       Then she laughed at him. "There _was_ this huge barracuda out there,
just next to the main reef. Big thing, maybe six or seven feet long. It was
just hanging there, flicking that tail a bit in the current, watching me. And
then something else, too, another one I guess, out past it, where there's that




                                                                                 Page 18
drop-off. Just caught a glimpse of that one.
       "It was terrific," she said, "they're so powerful, so lethal looking.
But everyone says they never attack. They just watch you."
       "Yeah," Tom said. "They just watch."
       "Oh, Tommy, you're such a worrier, I swear."
       "Yeah," he admitted. "Yeah, I am." Then, trying to lighten up, he
added, "But I suppose someone has to worry, right?"
       She was toweling off her hair, rubbing it in long strokes, as she
looked up at him, smiled. "If you say so, Tom."
       "Look, Sondra. Let's walk back to that little beach bar and have a
drink, okay? Get out of the sun for awhile, cool off. And then we'll snorkel
some more if you want, out on the other side of the point."
       "That's really boring over there, Tom, nothing but sand and a few
stingrays. And I don't want a drink, yet. In fact," she flashed him that
smile, "maybe we could do something else."
       "Here?"
       "Why not? It's secluded, it's a perfect little beach on a perfect
little island, with the sun, the sea. I mean, really, Tom, what more could you
ask?"
       Some privacy, he thought, but didn't voice it. Truth was, he didn't
feel all that great. Another headache. There'd been a lot of them lately, not
surprising, given his stress level.
       "Come here, Tom," she said, and reached toward him, grabbed his hand,
pulled him down off the rocks and onto the small strip of sand.
       She kneeled, put the towel down, spread it out on the sand, patted that
spot. "Join me, Thomas?"
       And he did, kneeling to kiss her and then lying with her on the towel
as she slid his trunks down without breaking the kiss.
       She took him in her hand then, still kissing his face, his cheek, his
forehead while gently tugging on him. He hadn't thought, given everything,
that he could get erect that quickly again; but he was quite wrong.
       Then she pushed him onto his back, stood, looked around once, out
toward the reef and then over the rocks to the beach on the other side of the
point, smiled, then slid her own bottoms off and came down to sit astride him,
easing him in as she lowered herself down.
       "There," she said, once she was on him completely and he was lost in
her again. "Now, isn't this better than walking over to that bar?"
       He smiled. He could barely see her against the glare of the hard blue
sky, her hair a wispy halo around that perfect face. "Better," he said. "It's
always better, Sondra."
       And then she started to move, and he rose and fell with her, his eyes
shut, a red haze through the closed lids all he could see, her moans all he
could hear.
       It only took a few minutes and was over. God, they were matched so
well, hitting that moment right together. Why hadn't he found her before Gort
had? He would do anything for her.
       They both waded into the water to rinse and splash a bit after that.
Tom heard a distant splash and looked out toward the reef where there seemed
to be something, another snorkeler maybe? A porpoise? A big patch of roiled
water where it had surfaced, anyway.
       He shrugged. Whatever, whoever, it was, he was safe enough here, now,
on dry land with Sondra.
       They picked up their knit bags with the masks and fins in them, slipped
into their sandals, then picked their way back over the rocks toward the
beach. There, they found the path that wound its way through the pines and
casuarina trees. Sondra held his hand as they went along, bumping up against
him purposefully a few times, chatting away happily about how much she liked
the island, how she would hate to leave tomorrow, about how soon they could
come back.
       Tom didn't say much. Coming in over the rocks he'd seen Gort a few




                                                                                 Page 19
hundred yards out in the water, wading in. Naked as a baby, that bloated
S'hudonni body emerging from the clear water, rising while Tom watched, the
chest, the waist, the crotch, the smooth, doll-like perfection of the crotch.
       It was a long way off, but Tom could see that Gort was missing things.
Tom wondered crazily just how it was that the guy took a piss.
       Well, that explained a lot, anyway.
       Then, while Tom watched, Gort stopped, looked their way, raised his
right hand in greeting, waving hello to his Earthie assistant and to Sondra,
his Earthie girlfriend.
       Tom waved back. Sondra was still acting like she didn't see him out
there, though. She stopped, turned to face him, put her hands behind his neck,
brought his face down to hers, pulling his toward her though he tried to keep
some distance, and kissed him.
       Damnit.
       The kiss ended. "You're, like, a wonderful man, Tom Holman," Sondra
said.
       "Sondra," he said. "Look. Out there," and he pointed toward Gort.
       "It's Gort," she said, smiling.
       "Yes."
       "You know S'hudon is a waterworld, Tom, right? Gort's people are
amphibian, really, they live mostly in the water."
       "Sure, I knew."
       "That was him today, out by the reef. We swam together, he and I, for a
while. He told me some things..." She let the thought trail off.
       Tom looked at her. Looked out at Gort, walking toward them now, maybe
fifty yards away, that perfect body, but smooth in all the wrong places.
       "Hello, Thomas," Gort yelled across the water, waving again.
       Tom just shook his head.
       "So, Sondra, what's going to happen here. Am I fired? Will he have me
killed? Promote me? Or doesn't he care?"
       "Oh, he cares, Tom."
       He looked at her, at Sondra. She was smiling up at him, reached up to
touch his lips. "Such a good kisser you are, Tom. I've enjoyed every minute of
it, every second."
       "What's going on, Sondra?"
       "We're leaving, Tom."
       "Leaving?"
       "Gort and I, and some of the others. We're leaving Earth. We have what
we need, we're ready to go home."
       "You?"
       She smiled. "Yes, Tom. Me."
       "I don't understand. Sondra. You're one of them? You're..."
       She waved him off. "Well, of course, Tom. I've never lied to you, Tom.
I've never told you otherwise."
       "But, I thought..."
       She laughed. "Oh, Tom. You're so sweet, you're such a dear. But,
really, Tom, we all had quite a bit of work to do here, a lot of information
to gather, samples, examples. You know, things to take back. Emotions,
physical sensations, the tension and fear, the semen -- all of you, Thomas.
We'll take that back with us."
       He wasn't sure what to say, what to do. Should he scream? Break down
and cry?
       "Collected?" was all he could manage.
       Sondra smiled.
       "Hello, you two. Wonderful water, isn't it?"
       It was Gort. Friendly Gort. The collector, for some zoo back home,
probably.
       "I was just telling Thomas that we're leaving soon, Gort."
       "In just a few minutes, actually, Sondra. If that's all right with you.
The others are already on board. The ship will be here shortly."




                                                                                 Page 20
       "And me?" asked Tom. "Sondra, what about me?"
       "It's quite clear in the contract, Thomas," said Gort, rubbing his head
with his hands, shaking out the water. "You'll be compensated nicely, of
course, for this premature closure. You'll be quite wealthy, by local
standards." He smiled, added oddly, "And we certainly wish you the very best,
Thomas." He actually seemed a bit wistful as he said that.
       "That's not what I meant."
       "He knows that, Tom," Sondra said. Beautiful, perfect Sondra, smiling
at him. "He knows. And it's all right. You've been wonderful. But now it's
over. That's all there is to it."
       She laughed. "And I have good news for you, anyway. Your brother and
Twoclicks are on their way here. A year from now, maybe even sooner, and
they'll be back."
       "That's great."
       "Heather will be with them, Tom."
       "Heather? What do you know about Heather?"
       But Sondra didn't answer. Instead, she reached out to touch his lips
with her finger, then leaned forward, kissed him, smiled.
       Tom looked out for a moment at the sea. The white spray from the
rumbling breakers rose against the blue of the open sea behind.
       He held, in his left hand, the fins, the mask, snorkel. Flimsy,
plastic; they felt fragile, silly.
       But they worked. Low tech, but they worked. You could see underwater
with the mask on. You could breathe with the snorkel.
       Oh, hell. He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and walked with them
over toward the beach bar, the shade of the Australian pines.
       They had a couple of drinks each, the three of them, while they waited.
And then, two hours later, when Gort and Sondra were gone, Tom walked back to
the rocks, clambered over them to the little beach on the other side, slipped
the fins on, the mask, put the snorkel into his mouth, and jumped into the
water, fighting the current, paddling into it until he could see the reef.
       He thought, as he snorkeled, that he'd have to find something to do
with himself until Peter got home. And Heather. Then he dived down to the
bottom for a bit, surfaced, dived again, then came back to the surface and
breathed through the snorkel while he looked straight down, the current
carrying him along as he just watched the fish swim by ten or fifteen feet
below, unaware of him, not knowing about him, or his life, or his plans. Just
swimming down there. Just eating each other. Just living and dying.
--------
         *With Twoclicks Watching*
       Twoclicks was a sloppy lover. Like all the S'hudonni, he was noisy at
it out of the water. The sharp wet slaps of his bloated bulk against the deck
and his crisp barks of delight cut right through the low rumble of Tempest's
twin diesels.
       Holman was at the helm. He watched with appropriate scientific
detachment from the bridge as Twoclicks rolled his large mass over on his side
to ease the ventral fin out of the way and enter the changer. She, in turn,
angled to accept him, and grunted in feigned pleasure.
       There were unpleasant sucking sounds.
       The moon was nearly full, the Egmont Light a tiny offering off port,
the Gulf nearly glass this close to shore. It was August and the heat, even
out on the water, was oppressive. Holman was sweating just standing at the
wheel. Another mile in and the mosquitoes would find them, too. Twoclicks, of
course, welcomed the heat, and the mosquitoes didn't care for him, they
swarmed him but never seemed to bite.
       Freedom for Holman was just two hours away, when they would reach the
tired old Pass-a-grille marina. Twoclicks had promised to sign the release
papers there, have a bit of a ceremony for his indentured Earthie after all
these good years of service.
       Holman allowed himself a smile, though he knew it might be a dangerous




                                                                                 Page 21
couple of hours, the riskiest of this whole, odd little five-day holiday. They
were running in at midnight to this shore, with its dozens of inlets and small
bays that sheltered the smugglers who fueled the Florida District's violence.
       Coming in at night was Twoclick's idea, of course. The S'hudonni
merchant liked the edge that came with risk. That's what the sex down below
was probably all about, his way of adding to the night's tension, its heat.
Disgusting old Twoclicks was down there with Heather, Holman's changer,
feeding off the night's potential for danger.
       Holman looked away from the sweaty, grappling bodies and stared instead
toward the distant smudge of shoreline. This should be a good time, a pleasant
one. He should be happy. Home the hero, home the great journalist having
enlightened the cosmos about humanity. That was how the newsnets had billed it
for the first few days after he'd returned.
       The nets were wrong. Holman snorted in disgust to think of how it had
really been out there -- the humiliation of it, his slow realization that he
was not what he'd thought, no great mind sharing wisdom with the ethereal
galactic sages. What he had been, instead, was a sideshow, a carnival act. A
whore.
       Now he was back to the little fishing town where he'd grown up. And if
there was no sense of accomplishment, he had hoped for at least some relief
here, a return to his real work, the chance to write a few books, to try and
remember the best of what had happened and discard the greater part, the worst
of it. He had thought his dark comedy finally over.
       But even that wasn't to be. There was no joy at coming home.
       Tommy was dying. His baby brother had a year left, maybe less.
       Tommy, bitter Tommy, had told Holman last night, had spat out the news
angrily. An unhappy mass in the brain ... Glioblastoma Multiforme. High-grade.
Aggressive. Inoperable. There was nothing to be done except get comfortable,
get ready. Not years, a few months.
       Damn.
       Holman shook his head. Poor hard-luck Tommy. Always just missing the
brass ring, always grabbing for it and not quite catching it. Always angry and
suspicious about what life had done to him, about his genius rendered simple
by S'hudon's arrival, about his older brother's successes that magnified his
own failures, about being left behind when his big brother was, unbelievably,
off to the stars.
       And now this final thing, as if to prove those suspicions right.
       Holman saw movement on the water. There was a low shadow to starboard,
hard to see against the thin dark line of distant shore. One of the old marker
buoys? Holman wished he had the S'hudonni nightglasses along so he could see
what it was.
       But no, Twoclicks was determined to go primitive, that was the whole
point of this absurd little vacation. Travel like the natives. Get to know the
real Earth. Make love under the moon and stars the way Holman had always
described it before mounting the changer in a dozen or more cities on each of
the Ten.
       Holman heard heavy feet on the ladder behind him. His brother slowly
clambered up onto the bridge to join him, slipping easily through the narrow
opening and out onto the platform.
       Tommy had lost weight -- a lot of weight -- in the time Holman had been
gone. He'd been in good shape once, a jogger and a tennis player. Now he was a
shadow, sliding silently through this dark world, still groggy from a couple
of hours of sleep and the headaches that plagued him.
       But when Holman turned to look at him Tommy was smiling. Heather, on
Twoclick's orders, had taken Tommy to bed in his captain's quarters and had
clearly worn him out. Holman smiled at that, recalling how Heather had seduced
Tommy with a few coy phrases, a touch or two, that knowing smile. Holman
nodded his head in greeting as Tommy stood next to him. Heather was well
trained.
       Holman, for his own part, had gone from lust to hate to acceptance of




                                                                                 Page 22
the changer. In a weird, unsatisfying way he even liked Heather. While she'd
been acting oddly on this little outing, as if she had something to say but
couldn't get it out, she was basically all right, honest in her own way, more
honest than most people, human or S'hudonni.
       Weird constructs; odd, expensive toys, these shapechangers -- only the
S'hudonni could have thought them up and then spent the money to make them.
But they were what they were, that was all. For Heather, for instance, there
was nothing she could do about it except get on with business. Holman had come
to know how that felt. You do what you have to do, that's all.
       Tommy threw his arms out in a stretch to embrace the sea, turned to
look at his brother, spoke with sarcasm, a cutting edge to the thin, dry
humor. "Pete, like you've been telling me, it must have been real hell out
there. Imagine trying to struggle along with just Heather as your playmate."
       Tommy shook his head, added, "Damn, Pete, that was the best fuck I've
ever had. Maybe the best fuck anybody's ever had. She's incredible."

       Tommy, of course, hadn't seen what Heather looked like right at the
moment, rolling around all blubbery and damp underneath Twoclicks. In a
minute, Holman figured, Tommy might notice the coupling below. It would change
his impression of the changer, of just how enjoyable things had been for his
older brother.
       For the moment, Holman just smiled. Tommy wasn't easy to get along
with, but he deserved a little fun. It hadn't been an easy life for him in the
two years since Holman had left. All of Twoclick's and Heather's promises that
there would be useful work for Tommy to do hadn't turned into much of anything
once it was said and done. Tommy, brilliant Tommy, had wound up being, really,
a kind of secretary for another of the S'hudonni, one of Twoclick's
colleagues. It was make-work, something to keep Holman happy while he traveled
around with Twoclicks. It didn't take Tommy long to realize it, and finally, a
year into it, he'd quit. Now Tommy, the genius kid scientist, ran a charter
service out of Pass-a-grille for the new masters, catered to the S'hudonni's
fondness for warm seas and humid nights -- like S'hudon for them, or as close
as they could get here on primitive, backward Earth.
       Holman, to his surprise, had read about Tommy in a guidebook he'd found
on Seventones. He'd finished his presentation in late morning, making love to
Heather before an audience of thirty or so academics who'd left their seats to
gather around close and take notes, whistle and click appreciatively to each
other, touch Holman's erection and collect drops of sweat off his back -- the
usual.
       Then he'd wandered the canals for a few hours between presentations and
there, in what amounted to a travel agency, had been a listing of Tommy and
the charters he offered out of Tampa Bay.
       Holman had laughed out loud, his first laughter in months, imagining
Tommy showing the S'hudonni around, ironies bouncing around everywhere with
that scenario. There was a kind of cosmic justice in it, picturing Tommy, the
man whose career had been destroyed by S'hudon's arrival, making money --
probably good money, at that -- showing around some group of earnest young
S'hudonni diplomats.
       Later, when he thought about it more, Holman saw it as a darker thing;
a sad admittance of ugly new realities. And now this, this cancer -- one they
might have bought Tommy some time with not too long ago, before the Landings,
before the changes. Add it all up and it was no wonder that Tommy's bitterness
ran so deep. You could feel it, the hate, the despair.
       "There's something out there, off starboard," Holman said to Tommy,
steering things away from another confrontation. "See it?"
       Tommy stared, nodded. Of course he'd seen it. Tommy had always
understood the sea better than his brother, had never turned away from the sea
like Peter.
       "Yeah, pretty small," Tommy said, rubbing his temples to ease the
headache that followed him everywhere. "Gun runners, probably. Or the local




                                                                                 Page 23
militia. Nobody good, that's for sure. Not here. Not now. They'll probably
ignore us unless we bother them."
       There was a sibilant whistle and several sharp clicks from below.
Holman clicked back, and ended with a three-note. His S'hudonni was pitch
perfect, another reason to be glad the servitude was over. He'd had enough of
the language of the master, was ashamed that he'd learned it so well.
       "Twoclicks heard us talking. He wants to know how close they are,"
Holman translated for his brother. "I told him we weren't sure, a mile, maybe.
Hard to tell in this moonlight."
       There was a quiet splash from below. Twoclicks was over the side to
check out the other boat. The S'hudonni could swim all day at thirty knots or
more, Holman had seen it done. Once, on Downtone, Twoclicks and a couple of
royal friends on a hunting party had circled a kind of whale thing for more
than an hour, then finally rammed it repeatedly to finish it off. Their heads,
their whole bodies really, were built for that slamming collision of cartilage
and bone into prey. Straight on and head first into trouble, that was the
S'hudonni way. They weren't a subtle people.
       What Holman remembered best about the incident was how much Twoclicks
and his friends had enjoyed it. They were like that, the S'hudonni, cruel at
times just for amusement, the enjoyment of the power they held.
       Holman hadn't told the story to Tommy, who was fragile enough already
when it came to dealing with the S'hudonni. The last thing Tommy needed was
anything that would add to his hate. There was a whole underground movement in
this part of what had been the old States, and the movement still fought its
nagging, annoying little war against S'hudon. It was a stupid fight,
unwinnable, and it cost dearly. Holman had seen what S'hudon could do, had
watched a city melt in retribution on Endtone. He didn't want Tommy to slide
into anything like that.
       It was good that the runners weren't more successful here. Success
would kill them and a lot of others. And just putting up a struggle meant that
S'hudon's technology embargo was still on, would stay on. You can't win the
benefits if you don't play the game S'hudon's way.
       On the deck, below, the changer was shaping back to human, back to the
Heather that Holman knew from a thousand encounters. Tommy didn't see her
shaping, which was fine. Holman didn't know how Tommy would react to seeing
the change take place, the melting and blurring that emerged into startling
beauty.
       In a few minutes Heather, tall, thin and perfect now, rose from the
deck and walked over to the ladder to join them on the platform. "Hello, you
two," she said, with that pleasant lilt she'd developed, almost an Irish ring
to it, Holman thought. He didn't know where she'd learned it.
       "Twoclicks decided to check things out?" he asked her.
       "He said it sounded like fun. And he likes this warm water."
       "Hell," said Holman, "damn risky. It'll just piss them off if they see
him. And he's not screened, of course, right?"
       "You know he's not, Peter. That was the whole point of the trip, to go
native. The only implant he left in was the com unit."
       Holman didn't respond to that, just shook his head. Damn Twoclicks.
Always looking for a little edge of excitement, and this time it might get him
in real trouble.
       Two dull pops echoed across the water and Tommy grunted, spoke.
"Rifles. I saw the muzzle flash. They're shooting at him."
       There were more flashes, and then the brief burp of an automatic
weapon. The changer tilted her head. "I've lost contact with him."
       She turned to look at Holman. "Peter, we all need him alive. Should I
shape and go search for him?"
       "Not yet," Holman said. "Give him a minute."
       "The runners are circling, I don't think they've seen us yet," said
Tommy, staring toward the distant boat. He listened to the growl of its
engines, grunted. "I know that boat, that's Serpent. It's an old scarab,




                                                                                 Page 24
overpowered, quick. Belongs to the Nathan brothers." He shook his head. "Mean
sons of bitches."
       Damn.
       Heather was right, they all needed Twoclicks alive. Holman knew what
would happen to them if Twoclicks were killed. A S'hudonni murdered by
Earthies? This whole coast would be in an uproar. Dozens would die in
retribution, hundreds perhaps. Holman and his brother wouldn't last
twenty-four hours. Heather would be destroyed as soon as her evidence was
taken.
       A long few minutes passed, the mutter of the other boat a constant
worry in the distance, Tempest throttled all the way back. Holman was about to
tell Heather to shape and go search when there was a splash in the glassy
water. "Down there," Tommy said, and pointed over the side.
       The water swirled, phosphorescent in the moonlight. A dorsal fin, a
bulky body, air out a blowhole, a feeble wave of a delicate hand at the end of
a short arm.
       "Help me get him in," Holman said, scrambling down the ladder to the
main deck. Heather was right behind him, Tommy stayed at the helm.
       There were two wounds, neither one serious. Twoclicks would be fine as
soon as they could get him to the medcot on his ship.
       The first was from a slug that had torn its way through the thick
blubber behind the dorsal, smashing the com implant and then passing through.
The wound bled cleanly.
       Another slug was imbedded in the ventral, and had just missed the
sheathed penis. Holman thought the wound was fitting, but didn't whistle that
thought to Twoclicks.
       That wound, too, seemed clean. Twoclicks was in considerable pain, but
not much danger. Holman used Tommy's first aid kit to staunch the bleeding and
left it at that.
       Holman felt Tommy throw the throttles forward. The runners must have
finally seen them and were coming to check them out. Tommy was going to make a
run for it, but Tempest wasn't built for speed, and the runners' scarab was.
       Twoclicks whistled to him. Holman barely heard the tones through the
engine noise, but got the message.
       "He's tired of messing around with these guys," he said to Heather.
"Fun's over. Call the screamship and let's end this thing now."
       There was a pause. The changer tilted her head in concentration, then
nodded. "It's done. Ten minutes."
       Holman patted Twoclick's side. For all the hate he'd like to muster
against the flabby old con artist, Holman had to admit to certain reluctant
admiration for him.
       Twoclicks was of royal blood on S'hudon, but from a failed family, all
lineage and no money. He'd made the classic S'hudonni turn toward trade as a
way out of his aristocratic poverty.
       Holman and his reproductive show-and-tell had been an academic scam
that was one in a long line of minor financial successes. Holman had spent six
months on S'hudon itself, had seen the decayed family manor in a minor
island's steamy tidal swamp, had heard the family story and been treated with
a bit of respect for a time -- and then had been told to show the family how
Earthies reproduce.
       The family had charged admission for the next several months, until the
novelty wore off and Twoclicks headed back on the road.
       There was a pained, thin whistle from Twoclicks. Holman listened,
clicked and whistled back. Twoclicks was actually saying thanks, the old
bastard. Holman told him to shut up, the ship was coming. Twoclicks membranes
slid up over the small eyes, and then they closed.
       The runners' scarab was clearly visible now, a few minutes away, no
more. It was going to be close. Tommy, up on the flying bridge, kept turning
to look at the boat angling toward them. Holman wished he hadn't told Tommy to
get rid of the weapons before they'd started this little jaunt. The hell with




                                                                                 Page 25
Twoclicks' rules, that rifle and old .38 would be useful right now.
       Heather sat down next to Holman and wrapped her arms around her knees.
"He'd be excited about all this if he weren't in such pain," she said, nodding
toward Twoclicks.
       Holman agreed, looking at her face as he did so. She was achingly
beautiful; high cheekbones, light blue eyes, blond hair pulled back now into a
ponytail. A perfect smile. Perfect love making.
       No question, the S'hudonni were great engineers.
       "Peter," she asked, "will we get out of this?"
       He shrugged. "You can always shape into S'hudonni and swim away from
it. No use getting hurt if you don't have to."
       She laughed at that idea. "So S'hudon could just destroy me later? No,
I'll stay."
       Then she smiled that slight smile that he could, sometimes, forget was
artificial. "Twoclicks asked me to talk with you, Peter. I was going to do it
sooner, but the moment never came."
       She paused, reached out to touch his bare shoulder. Her touch was warm,
caring. He always wondered how she did that. "Peter, he wants you to sign on
again, for another tour of the Ten. He'll give you very favorable terms."
       Holman just looked at her for a moment. He laughed, shook his head.
"You've got to be kidding, Heather. Sign on again? God, I've been counting the
days until today, waiting for it to end. I'm tired of being a porn show for
the empire's idle rich and a few interested academics. I've had it with this,
Heather. You know that. Done. Forever."
       He smiled back at her, tight. "I'm home, Heather. I'm staying here.
Besides, my brother needs me."
       "No," she said. "Your brother needs S'hudon. Your brother needs
Twoclicks."
       "What do you mean by that?"
       "We know about your brother. Twoclicks can arrange for him to be
healthy; to live a good, long life."
       Holman stared at her. "That's forbidden. Absolutely. A technology
transfer like that while there's still fighting going on here? If S'hudon
found out Twoclicks had even made the offer he'd be exiled. Or worse."
       "Twoclicks will take the risk, Peter. It can be done. Tommy can live.
He'll think he's gone into a remission, one that never ends. He has a heart
attack on the way, too, did you know that? I scanned him when we made love.
There's an eighty percent blockage. That will be taken care of, as well."
       "And the price?"
       "You sign up for another tour. Favorable terms, complete care. An
account here that will be enormous by the time you return."
       "And fuck you twice a day or more, for an audience."
       "And make love to me, Peter." She smiled. "Has it been that bad?"
       There were times she was so damn human he had to force himself to
remember the artifice of it. Maybe that was what he hated the most about
himself, about the whole thing, the way he forgot when he was with her, forgot
everything -- the indenture contract, her falsehood, the audience and the
humiliation of it.
       There was something very primitive about it, the rutting native from
Earth mounting the mechanical seed collector. He wanted to think better of
himself. He wanted to not want her.
       But, all too often, he lost himself in the delight of her, the wanting
of her. God, he loved it. He loved making love to her.
       This was a terrible admission. There was an enormous self-loathing to
it, an ultimate concession to his own weakness. He wondered, momentarily,
about taking his life right here, now. Just over the side and start swimming,
let the warm water take him, end it. How long could he stand the self-hate if
he went back out there?
       But Tommy, poor damn Tommy. Holman sat back on his rump and stared
toward the approaching boat. In the distance there was a high scream.




                                                                                 Page 26
Twoclick's screamship. It would be here in a minute or two.
       He put his hand back on Twoclick's huge back. Heather spoke. "You can't
tell your brother, Holman. He can't know how it happened, how he went into
remission. Twoclicks won't take that chance. Just tell Tommy that Twoclicks
has made you an offer you can't refuse, that's all. That you've signed another
contract. One more tour."
       "Tommy will think I'm leaving him here to die alone. We're the only
family left for each other, you know."
       "But he won't die, Holman. He'll be here when you get back. Older,
wiser, richer. Both of you. You can tell him then."
       "Sure. Wiser. Richer. I leave for the stars again while he stays here,
alone, to die. That's how he'll see it. God, he's filled with hate already.
This might put him right over the top."
       "He'll be wrong about that. He'll live, Holman. And he'll be
successful. Twoclicks can arrange a few contracts for him."
       "He'll hate me. Despise me. He'll see this as proof of everything he
thinks about me, that I abandoned them, just got my lucky break and left the
whole damn family hanging."
       The scream grew in intensity. There was a shout from Tommy. Holman
looked up at his brother, who pointed toward the horizon line, toward the
deadly white apparition of the screamship.
       It looked for all the worlds like a whale, a giant, huge pale thing
that screamed in over the heads and paused abruptly over the scarab, no more
than a hundred yards away now.
       A bright beam flared down from the screamship. The Nathan boys,
screaming, jumped overboard and splashed away while the beam tightened,
constricted on the scarab.
       There was a dull explosion, a white blossoming.
       Twoclicks whistled in approval. Tommy had come down from the bridge and
stood next to Holman as they watched the bright flaring off starboard.
       "Jesus," Tommy said. "How do they do that?"
       "That's a suppressor field over the boat," Holman told him. "Contains
and amplifies the heat energy."
       Tommy looked out the white flare of heat. "What about the Nathan boys,
Peter? Ask him about them. Is the ship going to kill them? Jesus, Peter, I
grew up with those guys, you know. We went crabbing together as kids."
       Holman could only shake his head. "They shot at him, Tommy. They tried
to kill him. You know how the S'hudonni are."
       Tommy looked at his older brother. He knew. "But you could talk to him,
Peter, ask him for a favor. God, he thinks of you as a friend."
       Holman laughed. Hell with it, maybe it was time for Tommy to find out
the difference between a friend and a slave. "A favor, Tommy? Christ. Let me
explain something to you. Twoclicks is..."
       "Holman," said Heather, pointing, "over there. Both of them. Coming
this way."
       Holman could see them, both swimming strongly toward Tempest.
       "I'll get the grappling hook," said Tommy.
       There was a grunt from behind them and dull series of clicks punctuated
by a high, thin angry whistle.
       "Don't bother," said Holman, and watched impassively as Twoclicks went
back over the side.
       Holman and his brother watched, saying nothing, as the Nathan boys
approached, their strokes weaker now, both of them struggling, too tired to
call for help.
       Fifteen yards out, no more, Twoclicks rammed the first one. There was
only the quick impression of his dorsal in the dark water, than a loud exhale
and a look of surprise from one of the Nathans as he was pushed hard away from
Tempest. A second later he was yanked under.
       "Peter!" said Tommy, turning to look at his brother, eyes wide. "We've
got to stop him. We've got to make him stop."




                                                                                 Page 27
       Heather came up toward Tommy, put her arms around him from behind,
hugged him, said quietly, "We can't, Tommy. Twoclicks is getting even now,
that's all. It's just the way they are, the S'hudonni."
       "But..."
       She came around to face him. She was achingly beautiful. Holman,
despite himself, despite the violence and the inherent lie in her beauty,
wanted her.
       She leaned forward and kissed Tommy lightly on the cheek.
       "We just have to let it be, Tommy. It's all we can do."
       There was a roiling in the water where the first one had gone under.
The other Nathan boy finally yelled for help. "Tommy! Tommy Holman, you
son-of-a-bitch, help me. You got to help me!"
       "Peter," Tommy was forcing himself to say it calmly, rationally.
"Peter, let me help him. If you won't, at least let me."
       Holman just watched the swimmer.
       Heather put her arms around Tommy's neck, then turned his face away
from the scene and kissed him. Tommy stood, arms at his side, for a moment.
       Holman stood impassive. There was a surreal moment of quiet on the
water, a frozen few seconds, and then Twoclicks emerged in a powerful leap,
arcing high and beautiful before diving cleanly back into the sea to disappear
beneath the swimmer.
       The Nathan boy struggled to tread water. "Tommy! Peter! God!" he said,
and then from below Twoclicks struck him and he was lifted nearly out of the
water by the force of the impact. Holman heard breaking bone and tearing
cartilage as the neck snapped back. The body fell back into the water and
Twoclicks struck again, and then a final time before dragging him under.
       Heather reached down to Tommy's hands and pulled them up around her
waist, slowly breaking the kiss. Then, touching his face, smiling that perfect
smile, she led him toward the cabin, toward a kind of satisfaction, a kind of
delight, he'd never known until she had shown it to him. For four steps,
mesmerized, he followed her.
       Then he stopped. "Christ! God Almighty, Peter. Those were the Nathan
boys out there." He turned back, away from Heather and her offerings, to face
his brother. He trembled with anger, boiling with it, containing it. "We
didn't help them," he said slowly, deliberately. "You just let him kill them."
       Holman didn't try to explain. Off starboard, the Nathans' boat settled
hissing and crackling into the Gulf and then, finally, disappeared. The
screamship slowly drifted over the scene for a few more seconds and then arced
high into the night and was gone.
       Holman reached down to help Twoclicks climb back aboard, was just
grabbing the tiny arms, when Tommy crashed into him from behind.
       "You bastard!" Tommy yelled and wrestled Holman to the deck. Twoclicks
splashed back into the water. Heather watched.
       "You son of a bitch," and he rolled over onto the top of Holman and
pushed hard against Peter's shoulders, shoving him into the deck once, twice,
a third time. "Goddamn it, Peter. Look what you are. Look what's happening.
It's all going to hell here, you know that, right? While you're off being some
kind of space cowboy, back here, where it matters, it's all going to hell
because of these, these _things_ you love so much."
       Holman didn't fight back.
       Tommy slapped him, hard, across the face, shook him by the shoulders
once again, crying now, tears bubbling out onto that flabby face. "Peter.
Peter. Peter," he kept saying.
       In their youth they fought often, the sloppy wrestling tussles of
brothers. Peter was four years older and too strong, too tough for Tommy.
Their father, a strong, quiet man, a high school history teacher, would pry
them apart.
       Later, just once when they were older, they'd fought over a girl, the
two of them squared off to punch it out, no playful wrestling here.
       Their mother, a small, gentle woman, had watched from the kitchen




                                                                                 Page 28
window and come out to break it up. She had stepped between them and the anger
evaporated.
       But mother was gone now. And Dad.
       Tommy pulled back a fist, cocked it, and punched Peter across the left
cheek, cutting him. Blood spurted out.
       "Goddamn it, Peter. Just Goddamn it." He pulled back for another.
Holman lay there, waiting for it, saying nothing.
       There was a moment's hesitation. Tommy looked down at his older
brother, the famous friend of S'hudon. "Oh, hell," he said, quietly now,
"you're pitiful, Peter." And he loosened the fist.
       He stood, looked down on Peter, shook his head, and walked away, back
toward the ladder to the bridge. He clambered up, took the wheel.
       "Pull Twoclicks in," he said. "Let's get going."
       Later, at the dock, Tommy tied them up and when his brother told him
he'd signed on again with Twoclicks, just shook his head. It didn't matter.
Nothing mattered, really, except doing what he could in the time he had left.
--------
         *Suffer the Children*
       The grain silos of Troy rose into view above the fields of wheat as he
limped along the crumbling two-lane blacktop toward town.
       He was finally near another good site, then, and that helped ease the
pain in his left leg, the one that hadn't worked right since the blast wave
had caught him and thrown him hard against a pile of stacked railroad ties.
That had been two months ago. A day-care center in Wisconsin.
       School would be in session now, he figured, and that would help
simplify things. There would be a lot of school-age children in a town like
this; the small towns had come through the Collapse a lot better than the big
cities. In a town like this he wouldn't have to go searching for any out-of
the-way day-care centers. All he'd have to do was find the right kind of
school building, one that would come down quick and easy, and then he'd be
able to roll up some numbers in a hurry, something that would really get some
attention.
       He looked up to gauge the time. About noon, maybe a little after. That
was good, they'd all be tired and quiet after lunch and recess.
       He limped on. He was sweating, a hard sun shining down through the
clear September blue of the sky, the kind of sky he remembered from a distant
childhood ... a time long before he'd been forced into all this, long before
the S'hudonni had come with their seduction; their promises and their laws and
their power. He'd lost a brother to them, but saved himself.
       It had all happened so fast. Like everyone else, he'd been bewildered
by the speed with which everything had changed. Those great white ships,
coming in with an offer too good to turn down. The doors to the universe
opening wide. Trade with a hundred other works, a thousand! The wonder of
that, the unimaginable wonder!
       He'd bought into at first, just like everyone else, just like his
brother. Then, slowly, he'd seen what the S'hudonni had really meant when
they'd explained that it would take a few small changes here and there for
Earth to earn its way to the stars.
       A few small changes. The district governors, the new currency, the new
language -- the S'hudonni way to peace and prosperity and that rainbow's end,
that unlimited future
       He was dying. He felt good, had felt good for months now. But he knew
that wasn't real, wouldn't last. The doctors had made it clear there was
nothing they could do. If S'hudon had wanted to help, well, that would be
different. But that kind of technology transfer was forbidden. So he would
die, the way America had died. The old way of life gone in a heartbeat. Three
years, was it now? Four? And everything was gone. The might, the importance,
the freedom, the strength -- all of it gone.
       He managed a small bitter smile, thinking about it. Pax S'hudonni, a
world at peace, a prosperous, orderly world. Most people these days went for




                                                                                 Page 29
that, thinking that what they'd lost had been a small price to pay. But not
everyone bought it. Not everyone.
       He was, he knew, alive for a reason. Two years ago he was supposed to
be dead. Instead he was here, the sun beating down hard on the black pavement,
the heat uncut by Midwest haze for a change. Must be nearly a hundred. Heat
came late to southern Illinois.
       He rubbed his arms. The blast that had nearly gotten him had singed the
hair on his arms. It had grown back now, but that had been much too close a
call. He rubbed his arms in memory of that. Much too close. He'd learned his
lesson from that one. He'd be more careful this time. He couldn't afford to
die, not yet. There was still too much work to do. Painful work. Awful,
necessary work.
       He rounded a wide curve in the road and saw the outskirts of the town,
no more than a mile or so ahead. Brick buildings, mostly one or two stories.
Fine. There was an old brick billboard up ahead, ten or twelve feet tall and
hung with the faded emblems of the Kiwanis and the Moose and the Knights of
Columbus.
       He didn't see anyone until he was right in town, on a residential
street that was cooled and canopied by tall, old oaks.      An old man was
moving slowly along the cracked concrete sidewalk. They said hello to one
another cordially enough, he and the old man, but he thought that the old guy
eyed him suspiciously. Small-town people were like that these days, insulated,
protective. He decided that he'd have to do it soon, then, in the next hour or
two, before any more people had a chance to wonder who he was. He didn't like
that, he didn't like to feel hurried.
       He stopped at the end of the street and sat down for a moment on a bus
stop bench. He looked back the way he'd come and saw how the oaks made a cool
dark tunnel right in the middle of the blazing sunlight.
       Those oaks were old enough to have seen the glory of World War II, and
they'd greeted the returning heroes then. And the heroes returning from Korea,
and 'Nam and Nicaragua. All the returning heroes. All those brave young men.
       And then had come the S'hudonni, promising riches. But no more heroes,
no more wars. No more glory. Just profit. S'hudonni profit.
       He squirmed a bit to get comfortable on the splintered wood. He could
feel, against the small of his back, down where the bottom of the backpack
pushed against him, the thin, rectangular hardness that was the two S'hudonni
devices.
       A little present for the city of Troy, brought to town by a guy who
looked pretty harmless. He smiled again at the thought of that. Nice little
piece of irony.
       Ironic, too, that the devices were of S'hudonni make. These today, then
another two in a few weeks, somewhere up the Mississippi somewhere, maybe
Hannibal.
       So powerful an explosion from so small a thing. He felt the devices
against his back. About the size of a deck of cards. A magic deck of cards.
       He didn't know how the group had gotten them. He didn't want to know.
He had two left, that was all that mattered. That, and how well they worked.
       The rubble, the smoke, the heat. The death. That was how well they
worked. In Rhinelander. In Saginaw before that. In Akron before that.
       Now this one, then one more, and then back home. He'd hide for a while
there, get the leg taken care of, and then head out again. So much to do
before they found him. Eventually, he figured, they would, and that would end
it.
       He rose to walk on, and the street sign caught his eye. He was standing
at the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Hale Street. Very patriotic little town,
Troy. Below the street names were two, newer signs. They also gave the names
of the streets, but in S'hudonni script.
       It would be best, the S'hudonni said, if all concerned would learn the
language of interstellar commerce, of universal profit. Indigenous languages
were nice, and could be retained, they said, but only those who could deal in




                                                                                 Page 30
S'hudonni could really expect to prosper.
       That was why all the schools taught S'hudonni to all the children, so
they could grow up to prosper under the enlightened rule of the S'hudonni
Empire. He was angry with himself for being able to read the script. It was
unavoidable, the S'hudonni influence.
       But that didn't mean he couldn't do something about it. He started
walking again, watching for a school. It wasn't that big a town that he
couldn't find what he wanted in a half-hour or so, he figured, and he was
right, a perfect two-story red brick one.
       "George P. Tillman Elementary" it said in Indiana limestone across the
twin-doored entrance.
       Air conditioners hummed in the windows of the school. Things were
getting back to normal in small-town America. People had bought the new
system; had forgotten some of the old hates, had forgiven the S'hudonni for
all the chaos that had followed those first landings. Now there were air
conditioners once again in the windows of the schools in towns like Troy.
       He shook his head slightly at seeing it. He knew what he'd find inside
that building. It would be just as bad as the street signs. Worse. Much worse.
The acceptance. The children.
       In there they were being taught the new way, the S'hudonni way, with
those S'hudonni teaching machines for the language and for the science and the
math -- and with nothing being taught by real teachers about how things had
been, nothing being taught of everything that America had been, of everything
that America had lost.
       And the S'hudonni themselves; white, pasty-skinned, those
porpoise-shaped bodies, those permanent damn smiles. There would be one of
them in there, too, running things. That was always how it worked. American
kids, American teachers, but all of it run by some S'hudonni administrator.
       They would live in the school building, the S'hudonni, that's how they
always did it, in a few rooms converted for their use -- damp, misty, clammy
places, so that their precious skins wouldn't dry and crack.
       They would have their own food in there, would lead their own strange
lives -- a little bit of S'hudon right here in Troy, Illinois, right here,
where they could teach the children ... always the children.
       He slowly circled the building, looking it over closely. The S'hudonni
would be in some rooms on the third floor, up on top of everyone else. The
second floor would have just a few classrooms, the first floor maybe a small
gym. The building would come down easy if he found the right spot in the
basement.
       He stopped behind a maintenance building, slipped off the pack, reached
in to arm the two devices, a little pressure along the upraised ridge, a
pattern of four pushes, a pause, then three more. They both started vibrating.
       He reached the front gate, found it open, and walked through it toward
the building itself. Almost too easy. Security was lax when the S'hudonni ran
things; everyone counted on them for protection.
       Ten wide steps led up to the main doors. He climbed them, limping a
bit, favoring his left leg.
       He walked down the central hallway on the first floor. The building was
wide open. He tried to look purposeful and parental, but no one stopped him,
no one bothered.
       He heard a teacher speaking. She was telling the children to put on the
caps for a science lesson. "Relax," he heard her say. He looked in briefly as
he walked by. Little blond-haired innocents, all in a row, putting on their
wired metal caps for a lesson.
       The teacher saw him. She was very pretty; blonde, too, like the kids.
She smiled at him, and was about to speak when he smiled back, put up his hand
to let her know he was just looking in for a second, and then walked on.
       She didn't come after him; probably assumed he was a parent who'd just
stopped by on the way to the office. He was lucky she'd been stupid; she could
have been suspicious and ruined everything.




                                                                                 Page 31
       He found the stairs to the basement at the far end of the hallway and
descended them, grimacing with the pain in his leg at every step.
       His luck held. The building was heated by an old, coal-fired,
gravity-fed furnace that had been converted to natural gas. The huge ducts
still arced away to the floors above, providing the airflow, carrying the
heat.
       He took the first device out and looked it over in the dim light that
came from a high-set basement window. A push here, a pull, four taps, a slide
to the right, and the time was set for twenty minutes. He planted the thing in
the side water evaporator for the unlit furnace. Twenty minutes.
       He looked around. It was perfect, just one would do. He could save the
other. He slipped it back into the pack, tugged it on, headed upstairs.
       The same teacher was quiet as he walked by the same classroom on his
way out. Probably had her own cap on, he thought. Learning her lessons. He
smiled at the thought.
       He walked right out, still unchallenged. He looked back once, from the
main gate, glancing at his watch. Only five minutes had passed. Good, he
wouldn't get caught by this blast. No nasty surprises.
       He walked down the street for a couple of blocks, taking his time. He
wanted to be near enough to make sure all went as it should, but not so near
as to be suspicious. There was a certain delicacy to this kind of work that
went unappreciated by most. He looked at his watch again as he walked. Five
more minutes had passed. Another ten to go.
       He came to a small park, fronting a pond. He walked in and then moved
over to the idle merry-go-round to find a seat. Pushing with his good right
leg, he sent the merry-go-round spinning, enjoying the sensation. There were
five other people in the park. A mother and her two small children played in
the sandbox. An elderly couple sat on a bench at the edge of the pond, feeding
ducks. No one looked his way. He looked again at his watch.
       Seven minutes left, maybe less. He was never really certain, not to the
exact second. S'hudonni time didn't always seem to work out the same as
American time.
       The children in the sandbox were building a castle while Mom watched.
It wasn't too bad an effort, he thought, especially for children so young.
Lucky for them they weren't a few years older.
       Their mother looked up from their handiwork and saw him. She smiled.
       "Hot day, isn't it?" she said, brushing back her hair. "I didn't want
to bring them out in this heat, but they were just screaming at me to get
outside for a bit. They love to play at building things, both of them."
       He said nothing. The little girl looked a year or two older than the
boy. Five and three, he guessed.
       The boy's part of the castle collapsed suddenly, taking part of the
girl's section with it.
       "Tommy!" the girl said. _"Now_ look what you've done!" She started back
to work on the reconstruction.
       Still speaking English, he noticed. Still innocent, at ages five and
three. Still American.
       It was difficult, it was painful, but he was doing the right thing.
This showed it. It was hard, so hard, to see them die, to ask them to pay such
a price, to suffer so for what others had done.
       So hard. But there was a certain clarity that such violence brought, a
certain clarity of vision, a certainty that what he was doing was right, very
right. And the first such act, once committed, led inevitably to the second,
and then -- more easily -- to the third...
       Suffer the children.
       He stood up from the merry-go-round and walked away from the sand
castle, over toward the older couple. He wanted to be near them when it went
off; they would better understand.
       And he wanted people to understand. That was the whole reason for
everything he did. So that people would understand.




                                                                                 Page 32
       He stood off to the side of the bench and watched the ducks stab at the
thrown pieces of bread. Dumb creatures, those ducks, paddling around waiting
for handouts. They'd be better off trying to make it on their won, better off
without the largess of the older couple. What if the ducks got too used to the
gifts and then the old couple didn't show? What if the bread fooled the ducks
into trying to stick around through the winter, and then the pond froze over
and the old couple stayed inside? That would be that, then, wouldn't it?
       He heard a distant _whoomph!_ and turned to face that way, to feel the
explosion against his face. The dull rumble swelled into a roar, washing over
him, and he felt again the sadness of it all, the necessity of it all.
       The old couple rose from their bench, looking scared but saying
nothing. The ducks scattered, a few of them taking to the air and flying hard.
       He looked toward the sandbox, and saw the children shouting in fear as
their mother gathered them to her, hugging them, crushing their castle to do
it, kneeling on the towers and walls to reach them and hold them and keep them
safe.
       He nearly cried to see them, the children safe with their mother. He
wanted to go over and tell them that it would be all right, that everything
would be fine, that he was doing it all for them.
       Instead, he looked away from them, over toward the school, where a
column of dark smoke was rising. He could hear the flames crackling, even from
here. Time to go. Time to head for Hannibal next, or maybe Quincy.
       He slipped off the pack, ready to disarm the second device and start
walking, when he felt a deep background rumble. He knew what that was. He
looked up.
       A solitary, shimmering form walked toward him in the waves of heat
rising from the road. Old home week. So they'd found him. All right, then. He
fingered the device: a push here, a pull, one good tap, a slide to the right.
Five minutes.
       "Peter," he said a minute later, when his brother got close. "Didn't
know you were back."
       His brother shook his head. "This has to stop, Tommy. You know it
does."
       Tommy smiled. "This?" He waved back toward the rising smoke. "Your
friends don't like it?"
       Another head shake, slower, eyes sad. "The people in there were
shielded, Tommy. No one was hurt."
       "How'd you know I was here, Peter?"
       "Jesus, Tommy, you have to ask that? They know everything about you.
You've been tagged since, hell, day one, back at that beach in Florida.
Everything."
       Tommy laughed. It was true, of course. He should have seen it long ago.
"It's because of you, Pete, right? They let me blow things up because I'm your
brother and they want to keep you happy, that about it?"
       "You know how they are, Tommy. You served a purpose for them, one way
or another."
       "And now?"
       "And now that's done. That's why I'm here, to tell you it's over. To
tell you that you have to stop."
       "Do I?"
       Peter nodded. "You need to come with me, Tommy. Now. Away from here.
Back home to the Florida District. Twoclicks says he needs you there. He says
he needs us both."
       "Jesus, Peter. You hear what you're saying? He needs us? Your S'hudonni
master fucking _needs_ us?"
       He watched Peter reach out with his hand. "Come on, Tom. Come with me.
We'll bubble up to the ship and be back home in twenty minutes." Behind him,
the air shimmered, the bubble taking form in the heat.
       All right, then. This is what it had all come to, this is what he was
meant for. This moment. Now.




                                                                                 Page 33
       He reached out to take his brother's hand, seeking closure. The small
weight of the thing in his backpack was comforting. About two more minutes, he
figured. That would do it. Two more minutes.
--------
         *II*
--------
         *To Leuchars*
_When the stars threw down their spears_
_And water'd heaven with their tears_
          _ -- William Blake_
         ****
       All I wanted was a safe landing. Our frightening, turbulent descent
dropped us through towering anvils of lightning-racked storm clouds that shook
and shoved our huge landing shuttle with violent bursts of wind as we dropped
below sixty-thousand feet and headed into our approach to Caledonia's sole
landing strip.
       The stomach-wrenching yaws and drops reminded me that we would be
forced now to deal again with the vagaries of atmosphere after our months of
calm confinement. Too tumbled about to read, I turned away from my book to
watch out the window, almost longing for the boring days of interminable
nothingness that had marked the past half-year of travel aboard the S'hudonni
freighter.
       Week followed blank week there in the Earth Environment Bulb. I'd
intended to use the time to finish one collection of poetry and start another,
but the hours weighed so heavily that I accomplished precious little work
beyond writing in my journal.
       Instead, I drifted into a kind of permanent daze that helped the time
go by. My daily routine included leisurely meals and long rambling walks in
the simulator, working my way through a variety of realities; from miles of
seacoast dunes to winding mountain paths to damp forest floors.
       The one thing to break the monotony was a S'hudonni merchant prince who
stopped by to visit once he learned I was aboard.
       In a previous life -- one I'd put away decades ago -- I'd known
Twoclicks. I'd worked for him, in fact, and suffered for it even while I
gained the stars.
       He hadn't changed, still the fat, Falstaffian character he'd been forty
years before -- all bonhomie and good will, but with a dark undercurrent that
kept me cautious. He was, he said, interested in what I'd become since those
days old long since. He had read much of my poetry. He said, that first time,
that he hoped I would find the time to converse about my work with him.
       Find the time? Those rambling conversations with the effusive Twoclicks
helped me keep my sanity during that monotonous voyage. Eventually we returned
to the odd friendship we'd had nearly half-a-century before, talking about
everything from the intricacies of American baseball in its golden era -- How
could he have known about Bobby Thompson? And why? -- to the current glories
of greater Mercantile S'hudon.
       His friendship, and the motives behind it, were impenetrable to me. Why
did this wealthy member of the Earth's ruling class hold such interest in me
again? The S'hudonni, god knows, were always looking for gain. What profit
could I possibly bring? And I hadn't paid enough in the past?
       They are such strange creatures, these S'hudonni. There was a time, in
my youth, when I thought I knew them, understood them, even got along with
them. I was, in my own way, famous for that understanding, wrong though I
turned out to be.
       Eventually I found they are truly unknowable, our mercantile masters; I
learned that in the most difficult of ways, and so finally walked away from
any knowledge, any relationships I'd built. Until my long passage on that
freighter, I hadn't held a conversation with a S'hudonni in more than forty
years.
       And now this particular one sought me out. There have been times when I




                                                                                 Page 34
would have gone screaming away from his presence and all that it reminded me
of. But, decades pass, old horrors recede, and you get on with life, you
accept things. That's part of growing old. Learning once again to get along
with one of our colonial lords in all his intricacies was just another part of
my slide into old age.
       And Twoclicks was better than most, to tell the truth. It was, perhaps,
no more than our situation, hurtling along in close quarters through the
darkness in the tiny, fragile environment; but he seemed genuinely interested
in my thoughts on matters from the political to the poetic. He thought the
Scots' acceptance of limited independence at the turn of the last century had
turned out to be a mistake, for instance. And, to my delight, he professed to
love sestinas. Imagine a classic in that form, say "Saul's Death," coming
forth from that lispy, wide mouth and you can appreciate my amazement.
       Short and squat like all the S'hudonni; pasty-white and porpoise-shaped
with those stubby arms and legs and fragile fingers, the wide mouth, the small
eyes buried in that rubbery flesh -- he was no better looking than any of our
masters. And he was full of their typically weird affectations, from his
purposefully strange accent (the S'hudonni can speak any of our languages
perfectly when they choose -- I've seen them do it) to his love of Earthie
soft drinks.
       But his good humor and the way he treated me as an equal, as a friend,
won me over. I was sorry to see him go on our last afternoon together. I was
leaving the freighter for Caledonia along with the rest of the travelers from
Earth, while Twoclicks was traveling on to mighty S'hudon itself. We parted
warmly.
       I had kept to myself, otherwise, making no friends and acquiring no
enemies. The people aboard knew nothing of me, nothing of who I'd been and
what I'd become, and that was all to the good. My only break in the routine
was the time I spent chatting with Twoclicks and the week I spent in sickbay,
mid-voyage, fighting a persistent cough and cold. The S'hudonni medcot seemed
puzzled at first by whatever had worked its way into my old, tired lungs, but
eventually the cot puzzled it out and I recovered, slowly, patiently regaining
my strength, knowing that I had time in abundance.
       Now, by contrast, we hurtled toward solid ground so quickly I was
stunned by our passage, could only watch out the window as the angry weather
greeted us with amazing fury. We'd been warned about the storms back at the
orbital outpost, where we'd left the freighter and met the landing shuttle.
The warnings, of course, just made the actuality worse, with the expectation
of danger heightening the nervousness. For most of its year, Caledonia's
weather along its populated coastal plain was cool, wet and calm. Only during
these few summer months did the occasional storm rage, and this one was, we
were told, a classic.
       There was another worry we were told of, too. Once we landed we'd have
to contend with domestic troubles in Leuchars, the colony's only city. Exactly
what "domestic troubles" meant hadn't been made clear, but it didn't sound
like a promising start for the colony's new batch of arrivals. Welcome to
Earth's first colony, please take cover immediately.
       At least we were comforted through the stormy ride toward all these
troubles below by the knowledge that our shuttle, like all S'hudonni
technology, was nearly magical in its abilities. The wings of the craft grew
or contracted, thinned and thickened, to meet the pilot's needs as she
contended with the thick well of atmosphere. Even S'hudonni technology, for
all its advanced perfection, had to deal with nature now and again and
Caledonia seemed determined to prove that point as we fought our way down.
There was, at least, a certain wry satisfaction in the way the struggle showed
there were limits for even mighty S'hudon. I hadn't encountered such limits
often in my life.
       Our pilot flew the massive thing as though she were in a dogfight,
dodging the worst of the storm cells and twice clicking into our comm system
to apologize for her rough handling. She was one of us, oddly, an Earth




                                                                                 Page 35
emigrant now handling shuttle duties for the colony. Most days that meant
moving freight back and forth between the oddly enormous orbital outpost and
the colony. Once every three months, it meant passengers. The very fact that
she wasn't S'hudonni showed how different things were here on the fringes of
the Empire.
       Her second apology was worrisomely sincere, and followed a dazzling
maneuver that stood us on our left wing as we swerved around a thick, black
thunderhead that boiled with activity, gray-black cloud forming and swirling
upward as I watched. My restraining device clamped my waist automatically as
we banked, and I looked straight down the wing to the dark depths below with
considerable awe and no small amount of fear, feeling the pressure of the belt
against my hips as gravity tried to pop me loose from Seat 22A, Row Three,
Lamb/Clifford, Earth/Caledonia, Return.
       I am not a brave man, god knows I'd proven that in my past, so I was
more than glad when the riotous ride finally eased a few minutes later as we
dropped below the cloud deck. Then, as we flew beneath the storms, I watched
as bright lightning streamers etched outward from explosive central flares.
I'd never seen lightning quite like that, and it reminded me forcefully of the
alienness of what I was doing and where I was. These were not the long, jagged
bolts of Earth's electrical activity, these were Caledonia's expressions of
power. Caledonia, Earth's first step toward the stars -- the great,
humiliating, wonderful, terrifying, humbling, inspiring, tantalizing gift from
our S'hudonni benefactors. Caledonia, our grand experiment, given to use by
our mercantile friends who rule the stars for profit.
       We banked to skirt a final storm cell and there, briefly, I could see
in the distance the landing lights seeking us through the rain and the
scattered moments of brilliance. We straightened out and dead-arrowed for
their glimmer, our target in sight.
       I was excited to see that runway. I'd traveled here, as far from my
past as any human could get, and in that traveling I'd moved from the pain of
that awful past through a sleepy academic interregnum and now into something
new, something fresh. That felt very good, indeed.
       We bounced three times, the first time quite hard, as if we sought the
solid ground too strongly. And then we were rolling toward the distant
terminal building, our shuttle's landing lights mixing with the strip's to
splash and bounce off the puddled surface of the tarmac. Lightning flashed
over us but now didn't seem so threatening.
       We exited from the shuttle in a light drizzle. There were a good three
hundred meters between our exit ramp and the open door of the pre-fab,
one-story terminal building. I put my head down against the cool, light rain
and began walking, stepping gingerly around the deeper puddles.
       The water reflected brightly with each blast of lightning, and one
closer flare caused me to look up. We were in the eye of the storm system. In
three directions the thunderheads reached high, mountainous and menacing
against a deep blue-black late evening sky. Toward the east, Arran,
Caledonia's famous red-hued moon, was full in a broadening patch of clear sky,
and from its light the storm clouds took their shape. The clouds sailed west.
In an hour, I guessed, the rain might be done.
       Another crack of energy brought me back to the task at hand. I hustled
with the other two hundred toward the terminal building. I didn't mind getting
wet, enjoyed it even, after the long months of weatherless, featureless
boredom aboard the bulb of that S'hudonni freighter; but being struck by
lightning was surely an encounter with nature more intimate than necessary. I
smiled at that thought, and scrambled with the others toward the single large
arrival building.
       There, a tall, florid man wearing a rumpled gray suit stood behind a
podium and apologized to us for "The unfortunate delay you're facing."
       He never did introduce himself, a jittery functionary whose plans for
the day had been sent spinning by the "troubles" in Leuchars. But, "Landing
Day is our major national holiday," he explained. "It commemorates our first




                                                                                 Page 36
landing here twenty-seven years ago. In the past it has been a time of
festivities and celebrations and pride, pride in what we've done here."
       He paused, nervous, "In recent years, however, particularly last year
and now this year, certain," he paused again, wiped his brow with an
embarrassingly pink handkerchief, "certain elements of our society have begun
using Landing Day to express, a bit violently at times, their discontent."
       He stopped and looked over the crowd as if we were somehow to blame for
all this. "No one has been seriously hurt, yet. But we felt you ought to know
about the troubles in the city before you take your shuttle buses into the
colonial arrival center. Buses _will_ run. However, for those of you who want
to spend the night here in the calm, if crowded," and he had the nerve to
smile benignly at us, "conditions of the terminal building, cots will be
provided. There are showers, toilet facilities, and food enough for the
night."
       He rambled on, but I hardly heard him. The important news was Trouble
in Paradise.
       Well, I hadn't planned on being a war correspondent again. I paid those
dues, and quite dearly, forty years before. Now I thought of myself quite
contentedly as a teacher in semi-retirement and a poet of some small
reputation, not, by god, a gung-ho journalist out to save the world,
especially _this_ world.
       On the other hand, I told myself, when I accepted this two-year
teaching appointment, I had figured that understanding and accepting the
people and the places of the island continent of Caledonia would be an
important part, the most revitalizing part, of my teaching and writing. And
part of me, too, was still that journalist who'd seen the Conflict rage and
flare and die nearly a half-century before.
       I sighed, and began edging toward the door where the luggage was
stacked, meaning to grab my two bags and find the first bus into the city. It
would be a confusing first night, that seemed certain, but one does what one
must, sometimes. God knows that was a lesson I'd learned over the many years.
       A hand on my shoulder stopped me. "Mr. Lamb?" a tall, thin young man,
wearing glasses, maybe twenty-five years old, stood there. "Mr. Lamb? Clifford
Lamb?"
       I nodded.
       "My name is Paul Seals, sir. I'm with _The Observer._ I've been sent to
do a story on your arrival. I'll be happy to take you into city centre in my
runabout and maybe we can talk on the way."
       Well, Seals was a god-send, free transportation and a font of knowledge
all rolled into one lanky form. I quickly discovered as we found my bags and
headed toward the small car park in front of the main building, that he was a
nice enough fellow, earnest to a fault, thought clearly not happy at all about
the position he was in.
       I was sure that he would have preferred covering the uproar in the city
over meeting a visiting retired politician and minor poet from Earth. I smiled
at that humbling thought. In our small literary circle on the home world I had
something of a name from my past and a bit of a reputation for my writing.
Here, of course, I would be completely unknown.
       "I'm sure you'd rather be covering the action in the city," I admitted
conversationally as we loaded the bags into the boot of his car and then
climbed into the front seats.
       He laughed, nodded. "But at least you really showed up. Six months ago
we received the message that you'd be coming, but we didn't know exactly when.
If you hadn't been on this shuttle, the evening would have been a complete
waste."
       Though he meant the conversation to be an interview of me, Seals was
the talkative sort. As he steered us through the shallow glens that angled in
toward the city and its bay, I did most of the listening.
       The current troubles headed his list of topics. "Riot, I guess, is too
strong a word for them," Seals said, "but there is a lot of pushing and




                                                                                 Page 37
shoving and yelling back and forth between the older colonists and the
first-borns."
       "First-borns?"
       "They're the ones -- I'm one of them -- who were born on Caledonia.
They want changes in the way things are done; secret ballot elections, no
restrictions on _The Observer,_ fairer treatment of the Anpics, things like
that."
       The Anpics are the indigenous tribes. Like everyone else on Earth I'd
read about them. "I thought the Anpics were left unchanged. Wasn't that part
of the original agreement with the S'hudonni when the colony was started?"
       "Well, yes, but it hasn't worked out quite that way. Most of the
first-borns think the Anpic population has been decimated by the changes we've
made here. There never were very many of them, you know, and as we've spread
out those relative few have been forced to change tribal patterns that go
back, well, thousands of years at least, I suppose."
       "And the older colonists aren't worried about that?"
       "Oh, they're worried, or claim to be. But all they ever want to do is
study the problem. And then they seem to be figuring out ways for the Anpics
to accommodate us rather than having us back away."
       He'd been getting angry, just talking about it, but then he eased back
in his seat and calmed. "At least that's how the first-borns look at it."
       "I can see which side you're on."
       "I'm a journalist," he said, running his hand through his full mop of
red hair. He intended that to be his full answer, as if it proclaimed a
convincing neutrality.
       I said nothing in response.
       "Look," he said, after a long minute of silence. "I have my sympathies,
sure, but I cover it straight, like we all do at _The Observer._ There's only
a dozen of us working at the paper, and we're evenly divided between
first-borns and older colonists. We all get along just fine by staying outside
of the arguments. We cover it straight up, that's all."
       I nodded. I'd played it that way myself, a long time ago. It hadn't
done me much good. I could only hope, for Seals' sake, that his efforts had
happier results and less deadly consequences than mine. I almost said
something, tried to use my past to warn him of his possible future. But I
hadn't talked about those years in a very long time and I found I couldn't
here, either.
       It was a half-hour drive into the outskirts of Leuchars. By the time we
got there my worries about the troubles had eased. The streets were quiet, and
Seals clearly expected no serious trouble. His electric runabout even had a
sign on each side that read _The Observer._ He laughingly called that
"Protective. Maybe. Not everybody likes the paper, you know. The sign might
just make us a target."
       Then he added, rather wistfully, "There might be a little action, but
it's doubtful. We're not used to violence here; we've never had any, really,
and I think everyone is shying away from even the possibility."
       It certainly looked that way. Leuchars was not a pretty city at first
glance. Here on the outskirts the prefab and hastily-built stone and wood
homes and shops looked as though they hadn't been there long and might not be
there tomorrow; like coastal Florida had always looked to me before my life
changed, before we tore the whole place down and let the S'hudonni rebuild it
for us. Before I'd admitted my shame and then left it behind for a safer life
in Scotland.
       The wide streets appeared calm, though, nearly empty; and then things
began to look more prosperous and permanent as we drove closer to the city
centre. The people walking the streets didn't look especially furtive or
dangerous. It was late, nearly midnight local time, and there was no curfew in
effect.
       Seals even convinced me to go with him to a favorite local pub to
continue our conversation and get started on the real interviewing. He was




                                                                                 Page 38
talking about the local ales, in fact, when we felt, as much as heard, a deep
dull, thumping boom as he turned right to take a short cut.
       "I wonder..." Seals said, and then fell silent as a long, low rumble
followed the boom. He took two more quick turns, trying to get in the
direction of the sounds. There was a stalled car ahead, angled across the road
so that we had to edge up and onto the sidewalk to get past it. From the rear,
in the streetlights, the car looked fine, but as we pulled slowly by I could
see the front fender scorched where paint had bubbled. The windshield was
cracked into thousands of tiny fragments, held together only by their polymer
bond. The headlights were blown out.
       "Paul," I said stupidly, as if he couldn't see this for himself, "this
car's been bombed..."
       ...and then an explosion from the corner behind us lit up the night,
flashing momentary light and stark shadows as it shattered storefront glass
and rattled our little car violently.
       I looked back. Dozens of people were rounding the corner and running
toward us, bloody, panicked by the explosion. They were marching when the bomb
went off along their route, and now they fled for their very lives, afraid
there would be more terror at any moment.
       The scene reminded me a lot of what I'd left behind all those years
before in the States, before I'd left for Britain and my years of quiet
hibernation. Back then, back home in the States, was when it had all fallen
apart on me. I had watched, safe, as friends died, a nation died. That was
when my memories were made. Everything I'd been since, the teaching, the
plays, the poetry -- they all began there, a reaction to that terrible time.
       Seals pulled the runabout thirty meters or so farther on and parked it.
He killed the engine, opened his door, grabbed his camera from the back seat
and tried explaining things to me all at once.
       I got the idea. My news value was in rapid decline and he was getting
his wish for some action.
       I could see the excitement in his face, and decided to watch him work,
getting out to follow him back up the road. I stayed behind him as he walked
along, talking to people and rapidly taking pictures. The crowd had slowed in
its flight as no more bombs exploded. They were young, first-borns no doubt,
and their fear was turning quickly to anger. I heard them talking about how
the bombs proved what kind of people they had to deal with.
       I talked briefly with one of them, a chubby, anxious young man in a
light blue jacket with the letters UL stenciled across the front. "That car
there," he said, pointing to the scorched vehicle we'd driven carefully by,
"was just driving along when someone threw a bomb. There was this big splash
of flame, and then the driver managed to pull it over. She got out, I saw her
running. And then your car came out of that street and turned to go by it, and
we thought you'd get bombed, too, but then you didn't and we started walking
that way and then that big bomb blew out that chemist's shop right back there
and..."
       The fellow was near panic, rambling, but the general information seemed
clear. A peaceful march had gone terribly wrong here, and might get worse at
any moment. Seals was inside a pub that sat across the street, The Canny Man,
talking to people in there who'd seen the action. He'd waved at me to join him
a few minutes before and then gone into the place. I headed that way to tell
him what little I'd learned.
       And I saw something, someone, a fleeting glimpse of a man, running down
the side alley next to the pub, through it and into the street beyond.
       "Hey," I yelled, and raised my hand to point at him. He'd been standing
over a rubbish bin, dropping something into it. "Hey, stop!"
       As if that would stop him. As if I, a tired old man, could stop
anything.
          ****
       Once, a long time ago, I was given the chance to stop someone. I
didn't, I couldn't, and too many suffered far too much because of me.




                                                                                 Page 39
       I'd been lucky in my life. No, Lucky -- capitalized. An athlete, then a
journalist, I'd had my successes, won my awards, righting the wrongs as I'd
seen them, doing my best to find the truth of things. I hadn't always been
perfect; a trail of failed marriages and a pained relationship with my younger
brother attested to that. But I'd done my best, achieved a certain
satisfaction in doing it. I was settled, happy with my place in the general
scheme.
       Then came Landing Day, the cushiony soft bottom of the shallow Gulf of
Mexico perfect for the S'hudonni's big freighters, and soon after, so much
like home for the S'hudonni themselves, creatures of that warm, shallow
waterworld we now hear so much of, mighty S'hudon itself.
       There were turtles on the beach that day, laying eggs in newly dug
nests. My brother and I were there, taping away as the mothers struggled up
the beach, flailed away with her back flippers and then began dropping soft,
wet gray eggs by ones and twos -- dozens of them, plopping into the sand and
then stickily onto each other. I was mesmerized by this process, watching it
closely, when a distant roar began and then dopplered higher and louder and
louder still as it came toward me before suddenly going silent -- total
mind-numbing volume to eerily quiet in an instant.
       I looked out to sea and there sat a screamship, a great white whale of
thing floating there calmly. And then came another, roaring into silence, and
another and then more, freighters on spindly legs dropping into the shallow
seas.
       So when that first S'hudonni emerged I was there. Peter Holman was my
name then, and I was the one who the first S'hudonni spoke to in that
strangely sibilant English. My career was made. I had access thereafter, and
played my role well, quickly making pasty-white porpoise-shaped friends in the
highest of places.
       A month later I was in New York, six months later I was on my way to
stars. A few years later, when I returned from my second visit to S'hudon and
the Seven, I had unspendable wealth and power beyond imagining.
       And then, during the Reorganization, reality set in. Grain farms for
S'hudon's alcohol, some necessary changes in the way we led our lives, some
new rules and regulations, a new way of seeing ourselves.
       Some rebelled, my brother among them. He had a stolen device of
S'hudon's. He thought he could do something useful with it. That was Tommy,
always trying to be useful, to make an impact.
       He tried to detonate that thing as we boarded a ship to take us home to
Florida. It didn't work, of course, but they knew he'd tried. I'd thought that
my presence, the presence of Peter Holman, the Earthie they trusted, the
Earthie they shared soft drinks with, the one who knew their private lives,
their secrets, their little jokes, would protect him.
       I was so terribly wrong. Oh, god. I heard that awful scream from above
as we stood there, Tommy and I.
       I heard that scream and looked up and there, above us, hovered one of
those awful ships. I fell to my knees in terror. I cried. I begged of that
thing to let us live. A light shone down on us; I felt consumed by it, thrown
into the gravel of the road we stood on, waiting for the pain, for the end.
       But for me, alone, my prayer was answered. Tommy died in the bright
light of S'hudon's power, his arms outstretched to embrace the end. I think he
was smiling.
       I had scrapes on my arm -- imbedded grit from an Illinois road. That
was all, that the knowledge of what I'd done. So I fled. I had money, god
knew, and time. I thought, given those two, that I'd somehow emerge from my
horror, find a new life, a new name. Change myself, renew myself, somehow earn
back the debt I'd incurred. I felt dead. That me _was_ dead. I quit the show,
quit the country, traveled, learned my new name and who it was I'd become.
Clifford Lamb, an academic. A quiet man. A poet, by god -- one with a
shattered arm, pieces of that burnt sand imbedded so deeply into me that forty
years later it was still there, occasional grains of it emerging from time to




                                                                                 Page 40
time to remind me of what I was and what I did and did not do.
       Once, years ago, I thought that eventually all of the grime in my arm
would works its way out, my arm and shoulder would be clean, renewed. It never
quite happened.
         ****
       And now this, all of it back again for me as if my cowardice had
happened recently, a month or two ago, not forty years. Hesitantly, fearfully,
I cried out to that figure.
       And he, it, stopped. I was halfway across the street when I saw him
hesitate at the end of the short alley, no more than thirty meters from me. He
turned to look back. He waved at me, as if to push me back, before turning and
running quickly around the far corner and out of sight.
       I had only started to turn back when the bomb he must have planted in
the rubbish bin blew with a loud whoomph of concussion that sent me tumbling
back and down onto the street at the curb. I saw the explosion in weird
slow-motion time, saw the rubbish bin expand and disappear into an orange-red
flame that grew toward me. Somehow I had the sense to drop down low and duck
behind a stone bench before the shock wave could catch me fully, and even
then, with some of its force broken by the bench, the shock flung me hard back
against the stone wall behind me.
       There was a dizzying moment, as I lay there, when I thought surely I
must be dying. But life and death are not so simple as that. Instead, as my
senses returned, I realized I wasn't badly hurt. So I stood, was dusting
myself off as others, Paul Seals among the first, reached me to offer help.
       "My god, Lamb. I thought for sure that you'd been killed. I can't
believe it. Bombs. Here. And you. My god, what if..."
       I waved his concern off. Truth was, I didn't feel that bad; felt
exhilarated, really. Something about the past few minutes had gotten my tired
old adrenal glands working again, waking me up.
       "I'm all right, Paul, really. The concussion just knocked me down,
that's all. I don't think any of the debris got to me at all. I got behind
that bench there, and then was just awfully lucky, I suppose."
       "Well," he said, smiling, "not all _that_ lucky." And he pointed toward
my left leg, where a jagged piece of metal was jammed into the thigh. Blood
soaked my pants, but there was no spurting, so this wouldn't likely kill me
where I stood. Funny that I hadn't noticed it and felt no pain until Seals
showed me the wound. Then, "damn," I said, and immediately felt faint. I sat
down on the curb of the street. Sirens were wailing now in the distance. Help
would be here soon.
       "I think we should just leave it in there for now," Seals was saying,
and then there was something else he said, something about violence and bombs
and Leuchars and the first-borns. He was rambling on but I barely heard him
for the roaring in my ears and the way the night-time view of the streets was
curiously narrowing in my vision and then, slow fade, there was darkness.
--------
_You looked out to winter_
_and I seemed to look out, too._
_I seemed, as I so often do,_
_to be doing the one thing_
_while actually lost in the other._
          _ -- from _To Leuchars, _Clifford Lamb (Expat Press)_
         ****
       My stay in the infirmary was mercifully short. The surgeon who cleaned
out the wound and stitched me up said I'd been lucky, the shrapnel missed the
femoral artery by a centimeter or I might have bled to death before the
emergency crews could get to me.
       There was no S'hudonni medcot here, of course, they don't easily part
with that level of technology. Instead, the surgeon's work was his own. But
his stitching inside and out went well; he thought I'd spend no more than a
week in bed recovering, given my age.




                                                                                 Page 41
       In two days, I felt healed. In three days the stitches were out and so
was I, free to go amidst the smiles of the surgeon, proud of his work, and to
my own amazement. Physically, I felt surprisingly good, given what I'd been
through. The other bumps and bruises of that night had healed quickly, and the
few days in the infirmary had gone by in a blur, with visits from Seals and
his sister Pauline and her friend Janice, a recent emigre from Earth.
       To my surprise, I was a celebrity in Leuchars. Not only was I the first
writer of any reputation to visit the colony in more than a decade; I was, to
them, a famous Earth poet. One of my thin collections, as it happens, was
taught in the school system, along with the likes of MacCaig and Eliot and
Yeats and Tennyson.
       Everyone, it seemed, had great plans for me during my visit. Everyone
wanted to help me get over my wounds and get on with my work here, my teaching
and the writing of the expected new volume of poetry based on the delights of
Caledonia.
       Things had been calm since that explosive night. The explosions of
Landing Day, the injured people and shattered buildings, had frightened both
sides into a kind of shocked ceasefire. They weren't used to this kind of
violence, and everyone seemed to think it was over, as a result. I hoped they
were right.
       But I had my doubts. In my too-long life I had seen any number of these
moments of calm, some of them years long. None of them had lasted.
       I had thought, in fact, that this last long stretch in my life was
reality; calm, academic and serene, with a slow accumulation of reputation as
a poet. I'd earned my peace, I thought. And now this.
       As I left the infirmary with Paul Seals, I rubbed my left arm, thinking
of what the surgeon said. "This has always been a quiet place," he murmured as
he checked on me, marveled at my recovery. "I don't understand, it's always
been nice and calm."
       Calm. I smiled at that. I thought I'd earned a certain calm, but the
pressures here were moving toward a violence. I had no idea why these
pressures had come, any more than the people here, these good people,
understood the horror of what they'd come to face. They thought it was over, a
spasm of horror that was past them now. I hoped it was so, I truly did.
       The Governor General of Leuchars, apologetic to a fault about what she
said her city had done to me, paid a visit the morning before I left the
infirmary. When she heard I was being released early, she invited me to dinner
that evening at Government House. "It will be a quiet little gathering, Mr.
Lamb, just five or six of us, nothing too taxing, I promise."
       Feeling energetic, I agreed, though as soon as I left the infirmary
with Seals and we drove to his house, where I was staying in a small guest
room, I began to have second thoughts. Still, this strange energy wouldn't
last forever, I guessed, and I might as well take advantage of it. By
mid-afternoon I was out for a long walk that should, if my planning held up,
end with my arriving at Government House in time for the Governor General's
"little gathering."
       The walk was wonderful. Sometimes what you touch tells you more than
what you see. Walking the streets of Leuchars was like that for me. Feeling
the pavement beneath my feet and reaching out to touch the grass of that alien
place showed me more of it in a two-hour stroll than days of viewing out of a
hospital window or looking at it through Seals' car window might have.
       I rambled from residential areas through the business district and from
there into a small series of parks that ringed the city. It was possible,
using those parks, to walk completely around the city centre in woods and
parkland the entire time, always within a half-kilometer or so radius from
Government House, the political heart of Caledonia, built atop the hill that
centered the park.
       The park's foliage was a mixture of local plants and genetically
tweaked Earth imports, courtesy of the S'hudonni. Broad-leafed low bushes
adorned with cottony balls of bright red flowers that launched themselves at




                                                                                 Page 42
me as I passed, vied with beds of forsythia and roses for my attention.
       The afternoon darkened as I walked. At first I thought the thickening
weather was a local fog rolling in from the docks where the New Tay River
emptied into the mouth of Leuchars Bay. But the weather proved it was more
than a mist by spitting gusty rain at me and forcing me from the park. I
sought shelter in a small cafe on a side street near the city's central
square.
       The rain reminded me of home. The runoff rushing through the gutters
and spilling out onto the street looked and sounded the same. The rain even
tasted the same as it ran off my soaked cap and into my eyes and mouth while I
sought out the cafe. There, drying out, I sat and sipped on hothouse grown
coffee of which the owner of the cafe was justifiably proud.
       "Best coffee in the entire city," he boasted as he poured me a refill.
"It's all in the details, you see. The right beans, tended just so. Then the
drier for them, then the right grind, the right filters, good water. You have
to do these things right every time for a good cup. Every time."
       He was right, it _was_ in the details, and the coffee was delicious, a
perfect counterpoint to the blowing rain I could see rippling across the
street outside. For that dizzying moment it looked just like home.
       Twenty-seven years I spent in Edinburgh, twenty-seven good years
recovering and reviving and learning how to live a quieter life. Sheltered in
the Dean Village, a quiet little group of homes hidden away in a small gorge
in the middle of urban Edinburgh, I lived and worked. I had friends there,
good ones. They held the typical Scots' cold sympathy for what S'hudon had
done to my own country, the enormous grain farms everywhere busy in the first
stage of producing S'hudon's alcohol. The crowded, gleaming perfection of the
four S'hudonni port cities with their rings of shantytowns. The shock and pain
of economic collapse that led to S'hudon's Reconstruction of once-America.
       The Scots and the rest of the British had benefited enormously from the
S'hudonni arrival, forging their New Empire, working at the behest of the new
lords of the country manor that Earth seemed to be to the S'hudonni, their
private garden where we labored busily, incongruously raising grains for them.
So my friends' sympathy was muted; they were sorry for the poor cousin across
the sea, certainly, but not _too_ sorry. We'd earned it, in their minds, by
trying to alter the inevitable back in those early days. Such hubris, to think
ourselves capable of warring with the gods.
       I had warred with the gods, and lost. But there was no way to revive
the dead. There was no honor to be earned that can remove those stains. I had
thought to change the world. Instead, instead.
       But life and times go on, and eventually I drifted to Edinburgh and the
calm, studied life that slowly emerged. I could never repay what I'd done,
true enough; but I could teach, and care, and help my students one by one. I
didn't know how to survive any other way.
         ****
       That was all long ago. There I sat in a perfect faux cafe in a perfect
faux Scots city on a world hidden in distant technology from Earth. No
astronomer peering into the heavens, no cosmologist philosophizing about
distant and missing dark matter: none of them had the vaguest idea where
Caledonia was located. The S'hudonni found the planet and for their own
reasons prepared it in ways beyond our knowing, and brought us here, the
planet ready for our occupation. And there I sat, sipping coffee, marveling
that life could take me from that broken past to this strange present.
       I shook my head, remembering. I sipped the coffee while the rain
mnemonically slapped against the window. Finally, as I watched, it eased off
and I finished my second cup, thanked and paid the man, and walked back onto
the street.
       Leuchars seemed older and larger than it had a right to be. There
couldn't be more than thirty thousand people here, and yet it seemed as big a
city as one ten times that size.
       And its age was a fooler, as well. The stains of past rains that




                                                                                 Page 43
discolored the sides of the buildings, the worn stone steps of the houses and
shops, the general feel of age that permeated this place -- all of that gave
Leuchars the feel of a city hundreds of years old, instead of one nearly new.
       But as I walked along it slowly began to make sense to me. Twenty-five
years was time enough for soft stone to wear from heavy use and for frequent
rain to make a permanent memory of its effect upon the side of a building.
There had been time enough, in those twenty-five years, for these people, like
their buildings, to look as if they belonged here, to have their own sense of
destiny, their own history.
       The very name of the place held clues. The Leuchars in Scotland after
which this place was named was a small, transitional town, a train station
near an abandoned air base. From Leuchars you can take the bus or a taxi to
St. Andrews, or change trains to make your way to Dundee or Perth. Otherwise,
the place is of no consequence.
       Just outside of that original Leuchars, a few miles away on the coast,
half buried in the turf, lies the bottom row of stones from what was, more
than two thousand years ago, a Roman fort. Visited by the Emperor, Septimius
Severus himself at the height of his power, the fort marked the very edge of
the Empire, looking out over St. Andrews Bay toward the distant Grampian
mountains and the naked blue Picts who lived there.
       I thought of that as I walked a sodden gravel path through a murky
afternoon. The edge of empire. A place for transitions. Wasn't that why I had
come here to the edge of this empire, for my own transition, some final change
in a life that had seen too much, done too little, caused too much harm?
       I'd thought to find a calm peace here for my final acts, a place where
I could teach and write into my decline.
       Instead, I'd stumbled into this explosive ferment. How could they do
this to one another? How could feelings that deep, hate so strong that lives
were threatened, have emerged here in such a tight-knit, isolated community? I
was no sociologist, no psychologist. I was, instead, just a tired, old poet;
and I didn't have the answer.
         ****
       The birds of Earth migrate by ultrasound, marking their paths by the
resonations of a distant sea, harmonizing with it as they move toward food and
safety.
       Just such a resonance connected this city to the ships of S'hudon. I
heard and felt nothing at first. But heads tilted and the people around me in
the park clearly heard. They felt.
       Then I, too, finally, felt a distant rumble, a low vibration, something
calling. God, I knew that sound. It had been nearly half a century since I'd
felt it in my bones like that, but I knew, I knew.
       I followed the crowd. What had been a few dozen became hundreds and
then a thousand or more as we gathered around a small hill in the center of
the park. No one moved onto the hill itself, we all simply gathered and
waited.
       There were young and old there, looking up, scanning the sky, smiling,
saying nothing for a change, just watching and waiting.
       I didn't break into the moment to ask anyone, it seemed too spiritual
for that. Instead, I, like them, looked up, shading my eyes against a thin sun
that broke through the clouds. And then there came a great roar from the
crowd, and I saw in the fading gray of the clouds a high white enormity,
slowly descending. A screamship. The gathered crowd burst into cheers.
       And I understood. For these people, everything they had was the result
of such ships. For the humans here; their careers, their culture, their very
lives depended on the arrival of ships such as this, the great protectors, the
benefactors, the screamships of S'hudon.
       The ship flew over our heads once, just above the thin, scattered
clouds so that I could see its shadow through the clouds, pale and gray as it
passed.
       Then it came down beneath the cloud layer and began to settle, glinting




                                                                                 Page 44
of that white perfection I'd seen years before. It somehow looked warm, even
from a distance. And it looked powerful, too, as I'd known it would.
       It hovered for a moment, pausing a few hundred feet above us, its wings
extended for atmosphere. There was no high, angry scream, no great roar of
engines balancing thrust against gravity; none of that famous intimidation.
Just that deep rumbling and that huge shape as the ship settled just above the
hill.
       A few long minutes passed, and then a door irised open from a spot on
the side of the hull. A figure emerged onto a walkway that slid forth -- a
S'hudonni, porpoise shaped, whitely pale, standing on those stubby legs. They
are not a pretty people, our lords and benefactors.
       He looked over the crowd, raised one frail arm in a barely perceptible
wave, and there was an audible sigh of appreciation from the crowd. On Earth,
the S'hudonni wear personal shields, their thin glow a reminder of who's in
control and who isn't. Here, on a world they created for their Earthie
friends, there was no shimmering protection despite the recent violence.
First-borns and colonials might try to kill each other, but neither group
would ever threaten the S'hudonni, their lifeline.
       Several dignitaries mounted the ramp of the screamship, shook hands
with the agent. They, too, then waved to the crowd before the entire troupe
came down through handshakes and smiles to a pair of limousines -- I wondered
what it had cost to ship _those_ from Earth -- which they disappeared into as
the ship, safely impenetrable in its perfection, sat behind to wait.
       I looked around. An older colonist smiled at me, said "Usually just
once a year they come, and now this is the third time in the past six months.
Something, isn't it, the power of those things? And what they've done for us.
lt's just something."
       I shook my head and began walking away, thinking of what mighty S'hudon
has done to us all in its search for harmony and profit. Out here, on the
fringe of the empire, their power impressed all the more. As I walked along,
the rain returned; a brief, cold shower that spit at me as I struggled in the
sudden wind to snap my jacket shut.
         ****
       I heard a car behind me, turned to see one of the limousines. It
stopped, a door opened. There was a giggle. It was Twoclicks.
       "Mr. Lamb, that wass good, wassn't it? Just like your film about Earth
standing still. 'Klaatu barada nikto,' yess?"
       "Twoclicks! I'm amazed, and pleased, to see you. I had no idea that it
was you getting out of that screamship. Weren't you continuing on to S'hudon?"
       "Planss changed," he said in that sibilant whisper of theirs. "Here,
watch." And he pointed toward his ship. "Gort," he said, "Marana kooa."
       The ship's ramp withdrew inside, and a vertical hatch closed smoothly
after it. "I made that up," he said, barely containing his merriment. "Iss
good, yess?"
       "Yes, Twoclicks, it's very funny. I don't suspect most of the people
here have seen that old movie, though."
       "Really? You ssaid on the ship that it wass a classic. You lied?"
       "No, it's a classic, surely, of a kind. It's just rather obscure, I'm
afraid."
       "Ah," he said. "Obscure. Well, no matter, much of life is obscure,
yess? Pleasss come ssit down in comfort, Mr. Lamb. We have much to talk about
once again, the two of uss."
       "I was walking to a dinner at Government House. I suppose that's
canceled now, with your surprise arrival."
       "Oh, no, Mr. Lamb, iss very important that you be there. Iss important
matterss to discuss."
       "Important matters?"
       "Yess, but that iss for later. Now, jusst relax. Let uss talk, Mr.
Lamb, as we did on the ship. Tell me again of your favorite poetss. Let's say,
American, nineteenth century. Whitman, no doubt, yess?"




                                                                                 Page 45
       "Well, yes, him certainly. But Dickinson, too, and perhaps Crane. Have
you read Crane's poetry, Twoclicks? Very, very interesting work. Listen," and
I recited a favorite from Crane, "A man feared that he might find an
assassin;/Another that he might find a victim./ One was more wise than the
other."
       "Ah, yess, iss very, very good," said Twoclicks. "Iss from _Black
Riders,_ yess?"
       "Yes," I said, and shook my head. His knowledge was amazing.
       And so we contented ourselves with conversation as the limousine drove
toward Government House. It was like old times, discussing poets and politics
for those thirty minutes or more as the car slowly worked its way through the
crowds that surrounded us. Then we arrived, were escorted from the limousine
into a large dining room, and the calm times began to end.
--------
_In what distant deeps or skies,_
_Burnt the fire of thine eyes?_
_On what wings dare he aspire,_
_What the hand, dare seize the fire?_
          _ -- William Blake, _The Tyger
         ****
       The governor general was chatting with her assistant, the slick
too-smiley character I'd met at the hospital when the two of them paid me the
visit that led to this invitation. Bailey, the assistant, was speaking
heatedly as we approached, his face contorted in anger -- something had him
terribly upset.
       But that all changed, night into day, as he saw our approach. His face
immediately brightened into a wide smile and he jovially stretched out his
hand to meet mine. "Mr. Lamb, we're so glad you could make it. And Consul
General Twoclicks," he added with a slight bow, "we are honored, as always, by
your presence."
       Twoclicks ignored him, and spoke instead to the Governor General.
"Madam, these troubless are sso unfortunate."
       "We are doing what we can, Twoclicks," she said with a tired smile. "I,
for one, think it's a matter of communication, or lack of it. The two sides
just won't talk to each other."
       "Except through _The Observer,"_ said Bailey. "And since we have no
control whatsoever over what's printed in that paper there's no telling how
heated things may get. It's really a very threatening situation."
       "But at least in _The Observer_ the two sides are talking about the
issues," said the Governor General, turning to look at her chief aide.
       "More like they're shouting," said Bailey, then, seeing his boss'
expression as she eyed him, "but, yes, they are," he hesitated, "as you say,
communicating."
       Twoclicks raised his hand and the two fell silent. "Freedom of press
wass _your_ idea, you humans, when we first began this colonization. We found
it a curious concept even then, to allow such criticism. Hass it failed? Do
you wish it to end?"
       The question struck me as an explosive one. Standing there as an
uncomfortable observer, watching the obvious conflict between the Governor
General and her Lieutenant Governor and mixing it in with my personal liking
for Paul Seals and his hard-working _Observer_ colleagues, I could sense that
great things suddenly hung in the balance here. Twoclicks had posed a question
that came to the heart of Caledonia's existence. If the colony's leadership
admitted that its free-press ideals weren't working, it would also be making a
tacit request for S'hudonni help in stopping the current troubles before they
got worse. So much for independence.
       But if the leadership held ground and turned down Twoclick's implied
offer for help, then the current situation might tumble into serious, deadly
violence. If that happened, surely the S'hudonni would have to step in anyway?
It seemed so to me. I was happy I wasn't the one being asked the question.




                                                                                 Page 46
       The Governor General shook her head. "No, Twoclicks. We will solve this
according to our constitution, and with our freedoms intact."
       Bailey's face was a mask as the Governor General said that; a slight,
tight smile his only expression. He clearly had other ideas.
       "As you wissh, Madam," said Twoclicks, smiling that wide smile the
S'hudonni can flash when they choose. "I wass only wondering."
       The evening went on like that for two hours or more, polite
conversation with a deadly undercurrent to it. Bailey, the Lieutenant
Governor, was the one who seemed the most dangerous to me. He was, on the
surface, a smiling and pleasant man, one concerned about Leuchars and the
Troubles and anxious to find a way to, as he kept saying, "Just solve the
problem."
       But under that veneer was a calculated viciousness. Bailey had
ambition, and power. It was a dangerous combination.
       I said as much to Twoclicks as he drove me home to Seals' house later,
in that expansive, ridiculous limousine.
       "Yes, iss true, I think, Mr. Lamb. Bailey is the ssort who wishes for
action. The Governor General, as you can ssee, is the ssort who wishes for
things _not_ to happen. Iss funny, really, yess?" And he chuckled.
       "Funny, Twoclicks? I'm afraid I don't see the humor in it."
       "Oh, Lamb, _iss_ funny."
       "If you say so."
       He held up his small hands as if to slow me down. "I have a nice
surprise. You would like to hear it?"
       "All right."
       "Good. I undersstand you were involved in these troubless. There wass
an explosion?"
       "Yes. I wasn't badly hurt."
       "It could have been sso much worse for you."
       "Yes, I suppose so, it could have been. But I was lucky, I got out of
the way of the worst of it, ducked behind a bench."
       He smiled at me. "You moved well for a man of your age, Lamb. Did it
all sseem to be in sslow motion as it happened? Did you sseem to have time
enough to do what you needed to do?"
       "Yes, yes it did." What was he getting at?
       "And you sseem very healthy now, very fit."
       "Yes. I feel good, actually. I think the excitement, the changes, the
travel: they've been good for me."
       "Yess. Good for you."
       We wheeled smoothly around a corner and headed toward Seals' house. The
driver, without being told, clearly knew where we were going and how to get
there.
       Twoclicks turned to face me directly. "These difficultiess on Caledonia
jusst now," he hesitated. "We are watching them. From among uss, different
factionss are watching."
       Oh, god, now he wanted to tell me of S'hudonni politics? Internal
squabblings? Power struggles? No thank you.
       "Twoclicks, I don't need to know about this."
       "But you will lissten?"
       I nodded. Just listening might be dangerous, of course, but no more so
than _not_ listening.
       Twoclicks paused, thinking something through, it seemed. Then, "Lamb, I
will go the heart of it. I have need of your help."
       I laughed. _"My_ help? You must be joking. What could I possibly do to
help you? I am a tired, old poet, Twoclicks. Remember how we talked about
that, back on the ship?"
       He'd actually been able to recite a poem of mine, a little thing about
old empires. That and Shelley's _Ozymandias_ were, he claimed, his favorite
poems from Earth. I'd been flattered, and not believed him for a second.
       "You are not so tired now, I think."




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       "Yes," I admitted again, "not so tired just now. I'll probably collapse
in a few hours and sleep for a week. Look, Twoclicks, I don't know what you
have in mind, but I don't really see how I could possibly be capable of
helping you in any significant way."
       Then I realized what he must mean. "Oh, you'd like something written,
right? A speech perhaps, or an essay for the local paper? Yes, certainly, I
can help you with that."
       "No, nothing like that, Lamb. We have alwayss enjoyed what you write,
but no, nothing like that, at all."
       "What, then?"
       "During your trip, during your illness on the freighter." He paused,
waited. I could feel a certain dark enjoyment he was getting from this
conversation.
       "Yes?"
       "Certain enhancements were made for you. Changes. Devices as part of
your treatment."
       "You did something to me? Oh, Christ, Twoclicks, what..."
       _"For_ you, Lamb. These things, these devices, will help you,
physsically. They," he paused again, found the word, "repair what damage they
find. They enhance where they can, within their limitss and yours."
       "Enhance?"
       He reached over with that short, frail arm and touched me with his
fragile fingers. "I will sshow you, on this sspot on your arm. Ssee?"
       He pushed up my sleeve, uncovering part of my left arm that showed the
dirt from decades ago. He concentrated for a moment, smiled at me, said
"Insstructions. I have contacted my ship, and it informs your devices, and
thiss," he pointed to my arm, "iss the result."
       I looked at my arm, and a patch the size of my thumb seemed to be
clearing, _was_ clearing, and then, in a few more seconds, was a pale white,
my skin without its ground-in blemish.
       "They do nothing but help you, Mr. Lamb. Your life will improve as long
as they function."
       He paused, seemed to be listening to something for a few seconds. "They
have already cleaned certain placques away, near your heart. There were polyps
in the lower intestine, they are gone. Your muscle tone, it iss better. You
are fasster, quicker. You are younger, Lamb, and can sstay that way."
       "Oh, Christ," was all I could say. What had they done to me? Why?
       He smiled broadly. "You are sshocked. We understand thiss. But you have
lost nothing and gained all. And thiss is temporary. Another week or two and
the devices corrupt. They collapse, are flushed away. You will again be as you
were; aging, an old poet."
       "Well, thank god for that."
       He laughed, a sharp bark of delight. "Yess, thank god for old poetss.
You are a delight, Lamb."
       Then he grew more serious. "Lamb. Understand this, we can enhance
again, more permanently, more broadly. Your mental skillss. Your very bones
and cartilage. Everything, anything. Your left arm, it could function once
again."
       "Perfect health?" I laughed. It was all some scam, of course, some
elaborate joke from Twoclicks. The S'hudonni wield enormous power, no
question, but they always have a reason, there is always a profit. Nothing is
for free. "And what else, Twoclicks? Immortality?"
       "Perhapss, in a way. A long, healthy life, at leasst."
       "And what am I to do in return?"
       "Soon," he said, "a crucial moment. A particular act."
       "I didn't ask for this, Twoclicks. I don't want it. Take them away from
me. Leave me be as I am, as I was. Please."
       "It iss a very large empire, Lamb, with many who serve."
       "It's not _my_ empire, Twoclicks."
       "Yes, it iss. You are here. Earth iss here. You are part of uss now."




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       We pulled up in front of Paul Seals' house.
       "I will probably just disappoint you, Twoclicks, when this big moment
comes. You know my past."
       "Your past. Yess, we remember." He motioned to the driver, who got out,
walked around to my door, opened it for me.
       I stepped out, looked back in to say, "I make no promises, Twoclicks.
I'll be happy when your devices are done with me."
       He just smiled, and the driver closed the door.
--------
_My Water of Leith runs through a double city;_
_A matter of regret._
_ -- Norman MacCaig, "Double Life"_
          ****
       Two weeks later I'd begun to think of it all as a false alarm. I felt
better, yes, but I was no Superman. My knees still ached some in the mornings,
my lower back twinged after my long, daily walks. Whatever it was that
Twoclicks had given me, whatever those "devices" were, they hadn't affected me
all that much.
       Leuchars, too, suffered pain. The tension between the older colonials
and the first-borns seemed to be rising each day, though there had been no
more violence.
       In my long walks, I could see it, feel it, the way the emotions were
bottled up but threatening to burst. The way the two groups looked at each
other on the street, the way they interacted in the shops; from my outsider's
perspective, the dam was surely going to burst.
       Paul Seals and the other _Observer_ staffers were increasingly blamed
for much of the tension, especially by Bailey, the Lieutenant Governor. He
even arranged for the Governor General's office to issue its own daily
news-sheet, "In the interests of fairness," as he explained in the first
issue's main story.
       The new paper, along with _The Observer's_ columns and heated letters
to the editor, served as daily reminders to all of us that while the violence
had receded, its source remained.
       Driving back from a quick visit to _The Observer, _where I had agreed
to meet with the editor-in-chief and discuss the issues, I tried to talk it
over with Paul Seals, but he was unusually quiet. He'd received a death threat
by e-mail, and while it wasn't the first, the cumulative effect was starting
to take its toll on him.
       Droplets of rain slid down my side window as Seals drove the last mile
or so to his house. I'd come to really like the young journalist, as well as
his sister and her friend, during the days I'd spent with them. Despite our
differences in age, we got along well. They felt they could trust me to be
fair, and so had begun asking my opinion on their current troubles. Were they
right in assuming my fairness? I thought so. I hoped so. I hadn't told them of
my conversation with Twoclicks.
       I watched the rain drops angle down my window, merging occasionally
with one another. The wind, the rain and the motion of the car all conspired
to move the drops along, pushing them off the glass, toward some sad little
oblivion.
       I didn't care for that image, frankly; it fell much too close to home.
I sighed, shook my head to clear it of the bad omen I'd just invented for
myself by watching silly drops of water on a glass, and looked past the
remnants of the drop's trail to the neighborhood beyond as Seals pulled his
car into short gravel driveway.
       His house was a small, one-story stone structure. A simple cottage,
really, but it boasted a large front yard, covered spottily in that moss-like
greenery they called grass here. There was one wonderfully large oak-like tree
with huge, bright yellow leaves and a multitude of branches rising just at the
edge of the yard. Its shade reached all the way to the house.
       I planned on writing through the evening. The lull had given me time to




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consider my own poetry again, and the writing felt productive, focusing on the
sights and sounds of this place first, since I understood its emotional values
so little.
       I brought out my portable screen and started scribbling. The screen had
become almost a friend of mine in the year since I'd bought it. As it
converted my handwriting into print on the screen I was able to see, at once,
both my hand-written version of the poem and, at the same time, a good
approximation of how it would look in print at the same time. The dual
imagery, at first an annoyance to me, had become a necessary part of my
writing, allowing me to sense the poem, to feel it, in more depth somehow, as
if I still held it tightly and yet had sent it out into print at the same
time.
       Then, as I wrestled with a bad rhyme, trying for some useful enjambment
that might save the thought, I heard the television broadcast from the
adjoining room. It was the local station offering a special on what were now
officially labeled the Troubles.
       I set the poem aside -- probably a wise thing to do in any event -- and
walked into the room. Seals, his sister and her friend were there, watching,
and I joined them.
       It was disconcerting, seeing that televised version of what Paul and I
had been through more than two weeks before. The images battled with my own
recollections to secure some anchor in the truth. Had there been that many
people on the streets? Had the burned car given off such dark, oily smoke? Had
the explosion which threw me down on the street done so much damage to the
buildings but so little to me?
       Like the poetry I'd just been writing, it was two realities at once. I
would have said no to all of those images, but there were the tapes in front
of my eyes to prove me wrong. I was angry, watching the show, to think that
technology was restructuring my remembered reality of events.
       At one point the news commentator, an older man with white hair,
referred to suspicions by the authorities that the bombings were the work of
the "First-borns and the chief instigator for their claims, local journalist
Paul Seals."
       "Oh, god," Paul moaned, "now that's the sort of reality you get when
your government runs the television station. How in god's name did they come
up with that? 'Chief instigator'? Good lord."
       Pauline laughed nervously. "You always said you wanted to be a famous
writer, Paul."
       "Well, I _did_ have a different sort of fame in mind, of course," he
said with a smile.
       Pauline brushed back her red hair. "Jokes aside, Paul, this could be
dangerous. They're obviously setting you up for something."
       "Yes," I added. "Be careful, this had made you a target. It's made all
of you targets, in fact."
       "Oh, I don't think there will be any more violence, Mr. Lamb," said
Janice, Pauline's friend.
       She was tall, only a few centimeters shorter than me, and athletic in
build. Her brown hair was cut short. Her face was very pretty, high
cheekbones, almost Asian eyes, and a delightful smile that reminded me of
someone I'd once been in love with. Thirty years ago I fell in love with a
woman like her.
       She was a curious creature in several ways. The same general age as
Pauline, she hadn't been born on Caledonia at all, but had come from Earth
some five years before. I didn't know why, yet, but assumed it was the sense
of adventuresome travel that often appeals to the young, multiplied here by
time and distance.
       But Caledonia was no backpacking trip through Europe. Getting here was
difficult and expensive, indeed, for someone not sponsored by the S'hudonni or
some Earth government or corporation, and she seemed independent of those
sorts of constraints, never mentioning any such aid. She had family money, I




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supposed, finally, and a great deal of it, though if that was the answer she
hid her wealth well..
       "It's really hard to understand this violence," she was saying. "I'm
sure it's not first-borns starting it, and it's hard to imagine the older
colonials doing it either. From my perspective, it just doesn't make any
sense, all of this chaos over some disagreements on how to treat the Anpics."
       "Well, that's how it began," said Paul. "But it's getting a lot bigger
than that now, Janice. I mean, we're into issues of free speech here, and a
free press. We've had a representative democracy from the start, and now I
think maybe we're heading toward a dictatorship. Those sort of things? They
matter."
       "Sad thing is, everyone's too damn confrontational right now for any
common ground to be found."
       "There _is_ no common ground between freedom and a dictatorship, and
that's what Bailey, in particular, wants. He figures he can be his own little
king here, run his world while the S'hudonni sit and watch."
       "You think that's all S'hudon will do? Just watch?"
       "Why not? Things will run along here smoothly enough if Bailey gets
control. Hell, probably a lot smoother, to tell the truth. From the S'hudonni
perspective, it probably makes great sense."
       "Or as much sense as anything they do," added Janice with a wry smile.
"I mean, we still don't know why Caledonia exists as a colony; they've never
explained that adequately, right?"
       I nodded, and smiled. God knows S'hudonni logic didn't always make
sense. "Right. We know what they get from Earth, which serves as a kind of
private garden and an alcohol producer. We don't know where those products go,
though, or why. And we have no idea at all what Caledonia is all about."
       "We know what we've learned in school, that Caledonia expands the
empire, and it's a way station for shipping anyway, so it made sense to
colonize, and since it's like Earth, we got to do the colonizing."
       I shrugged. "All of that may well be true."
       "Or not," said Paul. "But the S'hudonni aren't our immediate problem.
Bailey and his friends are. And my point is that the S'hudonni aren't going to
help us stop them."
       "So you think there's nothing we can do and it's all going to explode
again?" Pauline asked.
       He shook his head. "I don't know. I'm not optimistic."
       "Maybe you could help, Clifford," said Janice, looking at me. "The
older colonials seem to like you, your respected by the first-borns, and it's
obvious the S'hudonni think highly of you."
       I laughed. "Everyone seems to think a lot more highly of me than I
deserve," I said. "No. I'm not your answer. I'm a teacher, and a middlin' good
writer trying to write a few more decent poems before I die."
       Janice looked at me almost crossly. "Why say something like that,
Clifford? You're young enough, as writers go. There's no reason you won't be
writing for years and years. My god, you're in terrific shape, you're
obviously fit. If I didn't know better I'd say you were forty-five, not
sixty-five."
       Her flattery was enjoyable, and frightening. Did I really look younger?
Could I be honest with myself about how I felt, physically? I could trust none
of it, knowing it all might be the work of the engineers of S'hudon. Was I a
falsehood? For the second time in my life I could not trust myself. For the
second time, I had no idea of my own reality.
       Still, "Easy to say when you're young, Janice. No, I'll do this, and
finish a final volume of new poems, spend my time here teaching in Leuchars
and then find some small island back on the home planet somewhere where I can
while away my declining years in peace."
       "I think maybe you're serious," she said.
       "I am, truly. I've earned the rest." Then I laughed. "Look, maybe I'm
just tired and worn down right now, Janice. I came here expecting a quiet




                                                                                 Page 51
couple of years of teaching and writing. Instead, I come roaring down through
a terrible storm, find myself wounded in a riot and spend days in the
infirmary, then find I'm being wooed as a diplomat of some sort. This isn't at
all what I thought Caledonia would offer me."
       She laughed. "I can promise you that things on Caledonia aren't
normally so exciting."
       Pauline agreed. "It's usually so quiet it will drive you crazy. If
quiet contemplation is what you need, you'll find plenty of time for that
here, I'm sure."
       She leaned forward on the couch. "I'm sure the Troubles are over. They
_have_ to be over, and we can go back to _talking_ about what to do rather
than blowing each other up."
       I liked Pauline. She was honest and open. She and her brother were
clearly quite close, yet she wasn't afraid to differ with him. I hoped she was
right, I hoped their troubles were over.
       Eventually we talked ourselves out, getting nowhere, really. The day
had been a long one, and tomorrow promised more of the same, so we finally all
headed for bed.
       I tossed and turned for awhile, restless, but then finally fell into
sleep. Then, in the pre-dawn darkness, I awoke in a fever, my shirt soaked in
sweat, my hair damp, pulse racing. There was a dream. Explosions, pain,
screaming -- that awful time from my past, that time when I watched my brother
die for what he believed in Someone stared at me in the dream, a wide, patient
smile. Twoclicks.
       I couldn't recall more details, had spent far too many years learning
to forget the minutiae of the horrible. A minute passed and I calmed. As my
heart slowed, a breeze from the open window in the next room worked to cool
the sweat. In a few minutes I went from feverishly hot to chilled. I rose from
my bed and walked into the living room to shut the window.
       It was just before dawn. Arran had long since set, and I saw, through
the glass, a neighborhood cloaked in shades of gray. A ground mist covered
everything from waist height down, giving the stone homes and strange,
wonderful, oakish trees a curiously ungrounded look, as if they were adrift on
some gray sea.
       It appealed to me, that sense of being adrift. Above the ground mist
the gray thinned, roofs and higher branches stood out in sharp, stark relief;
all hard, dark ominous edges. Above them, the sky held the color of granite
tinged with a faint, thin, precursing red.
       I stared at the scene for a few minutes, taking it in, thinking that
the ground fog might clear, for myself as well as for the day. I turned back
to the couch, ready to try for more sleep.
       I have always slept better in the mornings. The nights too often are
troubled, images drift through unbidden and then slowly filter away. It has
been that way for me for forty years now -- half-acknowledged things poke and
prod their way through my unconscious, turning themselves into parts of my
dreams, leaving wispy remnants behind when I struggle up to consciousness.
       I loved my dreams as a small child, dreaming of flying through blue
skies like Peter Pan, soaring into Neverlands of warm islands in azure seas.
Later, after my times of trouble, the dreams darkened, my very pillow seemed
to harden to rock beneath my head, the night recalling my heavy burden.
       In the morning, things were better, the surrounding huge dark sack full
of unwanted dreams had emptied and I could sleep, my thoughts again my own.
       Here, I sat on the living room couch. These were things I hadn't
thought much about in years. Edinburgh, and work in a calm, confident society,
had painted a veneer of order over all that had gone before. In Edinburgh I
had managed to put my past away, had convinced myself this was a better me,
the truer me. A poet, not a journalist; an artist and teacher, not a hack
journalist milking the misery of others for personal profit.
       But now things were changing, moving like that ground mist out there,
streaming in and around me again. I would have to try and keep my tired, old




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head above it all.
       A voice from behind me asked, in a surprised tone, "You're up this
early?"
       It was Janice, dressed in running shorts and shoes and an oversized
sweatshirt with the letters UL across the front. Her dark, brown hair was
pulled plainly back behind her head into a pony tail. She wore no makeup on
those high cheekbones. She looked altogether American there for a moment -- a
vision from a past that was long gone.
       "Bad dream," I admitted. "But I was just about to try for some more
sleep after closing this window. Surely you're not going outside in that fog,
and at this time of the morning?"
       "I run every morning. I like the peace of it. And the ground mist isn't
a problem. It's really not that thick, and the pavement is smooth."
       "Well, have a good run. I'll probably take a good, long walk this
afternoon. You can give me some advice on where to go."
       "You like walking?"
       I laughed. "You make it sound like exercise. Poets don't exercise, my
dear, it's bad for the reputation. No, I just like to go for long rambles,
five or six miles, enough to keep my weight under control. On the S'hudonni
freighter I went into a wonderful VR treadmill every day." I chuckled, "I knew
it was the only chance I'd ever get to walk along the Great Wall or in the
Outback."
       She put her hands on her slim, runner's hips and stood in front of me
in mock defiance. "Look, Clifford, why don't you just come with me now and do
the real thing? You're already awake, it's a beautiful morning out, we can
talk as we go, and there's nothing virtual about it."
       I groaned. "First thing in the morning? Heavens, Janice. I don't know
if I'm capable of it. And I'd just slow you down terribly, to boot. No, some
other time, perhaps."
       "Clifford, we'll just go for a nice, slow ramble as you called it, then
come back for some juice and coffee and a hot shower. It'll be wonderful. Come
on along, all right?"
       She reached down to grab my hands and tugged me up from the couch. "All
right," I said, "all right, then. Let me put some shoes on, and off we go. But
you'll have to be easy on me, agreed? Take your time for this tired old body?"
       "Doesn't look that old and tired to me," she said with a grin. "Come
on, it will be nice and easy."
       And, for a time, it was.
       The mist, thicker than Janice had predicted, was a waist-high cloud
that we plowed through, our feet all but hidden. Sunrise was still a few
minutes away, and the false, gray pre-dawn light gave us just enough shadowy
visibility to see our way.
       I was a little stiff at first. I hadn't taken any time to loosen up
before we started out and the pace was faster than I liked. But then, as we
moved briskly along, I warmed up to it and began to enjoy myself, feeling the
rhythm of the walk.
       It was eerily silent, our shoes on the pavement the only sound to mar
the mist-dampened morning. Street lights, still on, threw a yellowish glare
through the mist so that our shadows moved from behind us to in front before
elongating and fading out every few meters. I could have been home in
Edinburgh: the stone homes, the cool mist, the yellow vapor lights, the wet
earthy smell of it as the pre-dawn darkness lightened to gray.
       I noticed a small animal scamper off under some low bushes as we neared
one yard, and in glancing at that little creature I was brought back
immediately to just how far I'd come. Its single front-leg never touched the
ground as it loped with quick strides into the bush. Moments later, a
four-winged bird flew toward us, no more than three or four meters off the
ground, and hovered to stare at us.
       Janice laughed and waved her hand at it to shoo the bird off. "That's a
kurra," she said. "They're very curious, a lot of people have them as pets."




                                                                                 Page 53
       "In cages?"
       "Cages? No, a kurra wouldn't stand for that. They just stay in the
homes of people who feed them and pet them. They love to be stroked along
their throats."
       "And that animal that ran into the bush, what was that?"
       "A dewlong? I didn't see it, but it must have been. They look a bit
like a cross between one your rabbits and a cat, I suppose. Yes, they
domesticate, too, and they're everywhere. They're very clean little animals,
and they've accommodated well to our presence here. The experts say there are
even more dewlongs now than when we first landed. They're cute little things,
very cuddly."
       She turned to look me in the eyes as she walked. "It's beautiful out
here in the morning, isn't it? And you're keeping up fine, Clifford. I knew
you would. You were an athlete in your younger days, as I recall."
       "How did you know that?"
       "You're better known here than you think," she said, and then added
"'We warm nicely in the rain/ stride by stride as/ we run that bouldered
shore/ where the legions faltered/ and ceased at last/ the outward surge of
empire.' That's from 'Running in the Rain.' From your _Clearances_ collection,
right?"
       This place, and this young girl, were full of surprises. I had
published six collections of poetry in the years I had taught in Edinburgh.
They had sold well enough, for poetry, and earned me a small reputation as a
minor expatriate American poet. But for someone to have memorized a poem from
one of them?
       "Where in heaven's name did you find a copy of that?"
       "At the university. You're taught there. That's one of the lit
teacher's favorite poems. I took an open course from her, and she went on and
on about what a wonderful poet you are. I'm sure she's excited about having a
chance to meet you while you're here. I had to memorize that poem and
half-a-dozen others for my final examination." She laughed. "You don't act it,
Clifford Lamb, but you're really quite famous."
       "Famous? Hardly. I'd like to meet that teacher and thank her, though. I
must have more readers here than back home."
       "Think so? No, you're just being humble. I read your work back home,
too, in the poetry magazines. And here, I bet we could find several of your
collections in the city centre bookstore right now."
       "I wonder how they got here? I didn't know any of my little books had
been sent all the way to Caledonia."
       "Well, they certainly got here by S'hudonni freighter," she laughed.
"Most books come digitized, of course, and then they print them here. I'm not
sure how Professor Lindsay came to find that one poem, or pick it out, but
it's quite famous. The poem seems to speak to people here, you know, talking
about empires and outward edges and all."
       "Yes, I guess it would, though I don't recall having thought of any of
that as I wrote it."
       "For god's sake," she laughed, "don't let Professor Lindsay know that.
She's convinced us all that you meant every word of it to be understood by
us."
       "I won't tell a soul."
       "Neither will I," Janice said, and then smiled at me warmly before
turning away and stepping up the pace. "Let's build up a little momentum,
Clifford, there's a bit of a climb up around this corner."
       She was a marvel, this young Janice. For the first time in many years I
regretted my age. If I were decades younger...
       But, of course, I wasn't. I was an old poet, despite all of S'hudon's
wonders. What interest could she possibly have in me? None, and I knew it. She
was a beautiful, athletic young girl who delighted in teasing me. That was it,
and nothing more, despite an old man's fantasies.
       We rounded the corner and headed up a gentle incline. Janice glided up




                                                                                 Page 54
it easily. I took it with more work, but was pleased to realize I could handle
it well enough. We were a good four or five kilometers into the walk and I
felt fine, quite good even, loose and warm and good.
       The incline steepened, and we left the ground mist below us as we
climbed through a small park. The scenery reminded me of my long walks through
Edinburgh's Holyrood Park, striding along the paved road that runs right
around Arthur's Seat, the small mountain that rises near the heart of the
city.
       It was always a difficult climb there, one I struggled with a few times
a week, climbing easily at first and then finding it tougher and tougher as I
neared the crest of the road. As the years went by that incline had seemed to
grow steeper. But now, pleasantly, my calves and my breathing felt fine.
       In twenty minutes more we rounded a final corner and the road flattened
out. We had reached the top of the climb. Janice stopped, turned to look at
me. "I wanted you to see this," she said, and pointed over my shoulder.
       I turned to stare at the distant sunrise. We were no more than two
hundred meters above the ground fog, but it was enough. The pewter sky was
easing into a faint, pale blue as I watched the sun rise behind a distant
volcanic mountain. The fog still hugged the ground, but the air above was
startling in its clarity. I could see Leuchars spread out below, not unlike
the view from Calton Hill back in Edinburgh. To the west, a morning
thunderhead rose from the bay, its top half reflecting the dawn's light in
startling shades of pink and red. I hadn't seen such a sky since Florida, all
those years ago. While I looked that way a bolt of lightning flashed deep
within the cloud. A few moments later came a rumble of thunder.
       Janice came over to me, took my left arm and held it. "Beautiful, isn't
it?" she said. "That sunrise over the city is the main reason I run so early
every day."
       "It's magnificent."
       I was much too conscious of her holding my arm as we stood there,
cooling in the breeze. "It's not a bad little city, really. It's not Earth, of
course, that it doesn't have anything like the wonders of the home world. But
they manage here, you know? They publish their books, they have two different
live theater groups, some writers groups and..." she stopped, laughed. "That
must all sound very silly to you, very defensive, my talking about Leuchars
like this."
       "On the contrary," I said. I was, in fact, watching her as she spoke of
it. Her cheeks were lightly flushed from the exercise and the cool wind, her
eyes clear and blue. Her jaw, strong and angular, gave her face a strength
that matched her physical fitness. "It's a remarkable place, your Leuchars.
I'm very happy to be here, to have a chance to stay for awhile, to teach and
write. I find this all very rejuvenating. Though I'd prefer it a little
calmer, to be honest."
       She gave my arm a squeeze, then looked up at me, reached out slowly to
touch my cheek. I was dizzy, light-headed as I looked at her looking at me,
that slight smile, her eyes so clear.
       And then, as if on cue, we heard a low, distant whoomph. An odd sound
for thunder, I thought.
       We turned to look and there, near the far edge of the city, a column of
smoke was rising.
       "Oh, no," she said. "What could that..."
       There was a flash of bright light, perhaps a half-mile away to the
south. A few seconds later came the sharp thud of another deep blast.
       "Oh, my god, Clifford."
       And it happened again, to the east. In moments, columns of smoke were
rising from all three sites.
       We headed back to Seals' house, at first walking quickly, and then as
we heard another distant explosion and then yet another, this one closer, we
started moving more and more quickly, until we were trotting, and then
running.




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       As we picked up the pace that thunderhead we'd seen at the city's edge
came toward us, first kicking up a breeze and then, as we neared Seals' house,
dropping fat, scattered raindrops around us on the pavement.
       I shouldn't have been physically able to run as I did, full stride for
at least two miles, a frantic pace. At that, Janice was well ahead of me,
hurrying home, hurrying to her friends.
       The fat drops became more numerous and then a hard squall line came up
on me from behind. I lost track of Janice in the gray wall of rain as it
passed over me.
       I was no more than three blocks away when I heard a final, terrible
explosion ahead. Legs pumping, arms in motion as if pulling me along, I ran
harder still, a right turn, and then down a block and a left and there, damn
it, I saw it, a small, black cloud rising through the downpour. Too late. I
felt that oppressive lead in my gut that I remembered from times past. Too
damn late.
       I came closer and there, next to that bright and brilliant tree at the
edge of Seals yard, glorious in its bright yellow plumage, stood Janice,
screaming in the rain, hands at her hair as she fell to her knees in anguish.
In his yard, near his car, stood Paul Seals, his face contorted, his hands
blackened at his side. In the car, silhouetted by flame, was what had been
Pauline, her arms upraised in supplication, the fire roaring past the dark
figure, licking out through the windows, hungry for more. I could hear the hot
hiss of the rain splashing against the hot metal.
--------
_He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven,
and excessively romantic._
         _ -- Joseph Conrad,_
Lord Jim
         ****
       There were sirens everywhere, I realized as I stood there, my senses
sharpened by the horror and the fear. Sirens, the crackle of the flames in the
downpour, the terrible stink of burning rubber and paint and scorched metal
and acrid steam; and there, in that awful mix, the terrible smell of meat, of
burning death.
       "Paul," I said, walking toward him. The moment, surreal in its details,
agonized slowly toward a painful reality. "Paul," I said again, and he turned
to look at me, his face contorted with grief. He started to speak, saw
something behind me, eyes widened, and turned and ran for his door.
       I turned to face what Paul had seen, a little rag-tag army coming up
the street. There were perhaps one-hundred older men and a few women with
Bailey at their lead. They carried weapons they'd fashion from their daily
lives -- plowshares into swords here on a world where they were no weapons.
       And they marched our way.
       "Lamb! Mr. Lamb!" Bailey yelled at me. I stood there and waited for him
as he walked briskly over to me, drenched from the rain but his face alight
with a kind of fever. He was enjoying this immensely.
       "Lamb, I'm so glad you're all right! It's been a terrible day, a
terrible day. I've invoked martial law and we're doing our best now to restore
order. My god, there's explosions all over the city."
       "Where's the governor general?"
       He sighed, his expression one that mixed contained glee with faux
sympathy. "I'm afraid she's collapsed under the strain. Completely incoherent.
She's in Government House now, resting."
       "Under house arrest?"
       He looked at me oddly, realizing for the first time, I think, that I
wasn't firmly in his camp. "Absolutely not. She's under sedation and I've had
to step in temporarily, as the Constitution requires."
       "And why are you here?"
       "To arrest Seals, of course. He's the cause of all this, Lamb, as we
discussed. You agreed with me, remember? You could see he's the reason for all




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this violence, these explosions. Lamb, my god, people have been hurt, perhaps
some of them killed."
       "And he caused this? Paul Seals set off these explosions?"
       "Yes, or had his followers set them off. I'm convinced of it." Bailey
waved toward several of his supporters, armed with cricket bats and shovels.
They walked our way, stood next to him, glowering happily in their moment of
power.
       God, I'd seen that look before in men's eyes, the look of the immortal,
supreme in supposed power -- ready here to take on the first-borns and anyone
else who got in their way. I'd had that look in my own eyes, once.
       I shook my head. "Bailey, you should just walk away from here. Seals
had nothing to do with this." In fact, I wondered if Bailey himself hadn't
arranged for the explosions, that made more sense than anything else. This
whole conflagration, the chaos, the fear, might well be his construction.
       "Nothing to do with this! My god, you're a sympathizer with them,
Lamb." He motioned to the two and they walked over to me, stood at my side,
ready to take me under arrest.
       "Do you think the S'hudonni will stand for this coup d'etat, Bailey?"
       "I've spoken to your friend Twoclicks, Lamb. He understands the
necessity of what I'm doing here. He'll back me fully."
       But my question had reminded him of my friendship with Twoclicks, and a
slight shake of the head to the two was enough to get them to back away from
me.
       I wondered if Bailey's version of what Twoclicks had said was as much a
lie as his version of what _I'd_ said. Probably, which meant Twoclicks might
not have agreed with all this at all, and a screamship might come roaring in
at any time. Then what would happen? Death, again, as it had happened for me
in the past? Perhaps.
       "Go with these men, Lamb," Bailey said, polite and careful with his
language and his tone. "No harm will come to you. We'll just keep you quiet
until we can get you off-planet and up to the station. From there you'll get
the first freighter back to Earth. Easy, right?"
       It _was_ easy. I could just walk away and be done with this. It was
not, after all my fight. It never had been. Both sides had assumed I supported
them, both knew of my friendship with Twoclicks and thought that somehow I
wielded influence.
       They couldn't have been more wrong. And while this was the right time
to make my exit, I realized, standing there staring at Bailey, that I
couldn't. I'd made my choices here.
       There was a distant rumble, a roar like the one I'd heard forty years
before. It grew louder and the crowed milling around our tragic scene stopped
in mid stride, stood there, then looked up, scanning the sky through the gray
smoke and the rain, easing off now with the passing of the squall line.
       The roar rose into a scream and then suddenly stopped and there, above
us, was a screamship. The same one I'd seen two weeks before? No way to know,
and it probably didn't matter. A screamship, that's all that we needed to
know, hanging there, intensely quiet, all power and glory hallelujah.
       I knew then what I had to do, what this was all about, how it had been
designed for me, planned for me. Nothing happens that isn't planned, when it
comes to the S'hudonni. I was an actor. This was my role to play.
       I turned my back on Bailey and walked toward the front door of Paul
Seals' house. Bailey cursed me, under his breath at first as I turned away
from him, and then more openly as I walked away.
       "Lamb, damnit, you're _wrong,_ this has to be done my way, for the sake
of all of us, for the sake of Leuchars. Goddamnit, for the sake of humanity."
       Ah, there was his mistake. Humanity. I walked on.
       I reached the door, hesitated. Was I to walk in? Stand there and shout?
I shrugged, knocked politely.
       "Come on in, Lamb," said Paul from inside.
       I entered. He stood there. "It's all gone to hell, hasn't it?" he said,




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not phrasing it as a question, saying it with certainty.
       "Maybe. There's a screamship out there, just watching. If it's on your
side, then you'll win, that simple."
       "And if it's on their side, the side of order and control?"
       "Then, yes, it's over. But there's no reason to die for this Paul, no
reason for anyone else to suffer."
       "She was," he said, "the most wonderful person, my sister. She was
everything I tried to be but couldn't. She had so much patience."
       I smiled, nodded. "I liked her, Paul. Everyone liked her. She was a
wonderful person."
       "And look what happened to her."
       "Yes, and we'll have to find out who did it and punish them. But no
more death now, Paul, not here."
       He started crying, reached out to me, held me by my shoulders, sobbing.
"I just thought if we said it all loud enough, and long enough, that we could
make it happen, you know? And then I thought that just a scare, just enough of
something to make them pay attention, and we could change things. Jesus, I had
no idea this would happen."
       "The first bombs?"
       "Oh, hell, yes. I was tired of words."
       "And today's?"
       "No, none of this. For Christ's sake, she was my sister, _my sister!_
No, none of this."
       "Okay, then. You didn't hurt anybody, Paul. Some property damage, and
you bruised me up some." I chuckled. "But I'm over it now, and I won't press
charges."
       I held out my hand. If I could get him out of there while the
screamship was nearby, maybe with Twoclicks inside, I could probably keep him
alive. The mob wouldn't try to beat him to death with a screamship hovering
right over their heads.
       Paul suddenly looked very tired to me. The manic energy from the horror
he'd just seen, the energy that drove him toward madness, had drained away,
leaving nothing but an enormous sadness, maybe, for what his life had been
like before this awful day. God, I knew that feeling.
       He staggered toward me, defeated. I put my right arm around him, turned
us both around, opened the door with my left hand, and we headed out.
       The rain had stopped. The mob of older colonials had grown in the few
minutes I'd been inside. There were hundreds now, angry, buzzing with an
animated hostility toward Paul, toward all the first-borns, maybe even toward
me, depending on what trouble Bailey had been stirring up among them.
       Above them, over us all, that screamship floated silently blotting out
the morning sky, watching over us, god-like.
       We walked down the short front walk toward the gate. Paul's car still
smoldered, a few firefighters standing over it now, playing hoses on it. I
could no longer see Pauline's body inside.
       An electric whine came from our right, where an alley ran. I looked
that way and saw that Janice had found a car, god knows where or how, and was
waiting there, in the driver's seat, a tight, grim smile on her face. She
waved us to her, started to open the door to get out so we could slide in
behind her. If we could get there, get in, and get away before all this
exploded into chaos then, I figured, there would be time enough for things to
calm down, for reason to return.
       We reached the gate. Then, as I put my hand on it to swing it open, I
heard a new noise, another angry buzz.
       Paul said "Look," and tilted his head in the direction I'd come running
in from just a few minutes before.
       It was the first-borns, dozens of them, walking toward us, linked arm
in arm.
       The mob in front of us couldn't hear the first-borns' approach over
their own babble, but then a few at the fringe saw the new group, poked those




                                                                                 Page 58
next to them to show them, and the word spread in moments. The crowd turned to
look at the new arrivals.
       The older colonials outnumbered the first-borns two or three to one.
Unless some had put together home-made bombs of some sort (and god knew that
was entirely possible) this was going to be a hand-to-hand battle, shovels and
cudgels and crickets bats against each other. There would be a lot of cracked
skulls out there, I knew. That, and the final tearing apart of this little
society's peaceful existence.
       Could the screamship stop all this somehow? Would it? Was Twoclicks up
there watching? Was he laughing?
       Oh, hell. I hadn't asked for this, but here I was. And if the memories
of my past failures still haunted me, well the thought of failing again loomed
even larger as a spectre.
       I shouted out. "Wait!"
       A few heard me, and turned back to look. Again, "Wait! Listen to me!"
       A few more turned, then more and it spread. I had their attention.
       "This won't help," I yelled out to them. "Fighting them won't help.
Killing each other won't help."
       Bailey emerged from the front of the crowd, his face contorted in
anger. "Look at you, standing there with Seals. He's killed a lot of our
friends. The bombs today? People have died, Lamb. You hear me, our friends
have been killed!"
       I raised my hands. "So let it stop there, Bailey. No more death. Not
this way, not here."
       He held a long, stout club in his hands. He raised it. "We'll stop it,
Lamb. We'll stop it for good, starting with Seals. Don't get in our way. Don't
do it!" And he charged toward us, that club held high.
       I pushed Seals out of the way and ran toward Bailey, thinking to tackle
him, wrestle him to the ground before this all detonated into pain and death.
       As we approached each other he began to swing the club. I could see it
in aching detail as it arced toward me -- a meter long or so, as big around as
a coffee can, polished wood, some piece of furniture I guessed with a
strangely calm part of my brain. I was about to be clobbered with the leg of a
table.
       But I surprised even myself, moving more quickly than I would have
thought possible, getting inside the arc of that swing before he could strike
me.
       I grabbed Bailey in a bear hug, started squeezing, stronger than I'd
ever felt in my life -- glorious in that strength suddenly, feeling an
enormous sense of well-being, of calm serenity in the midst of all this
frenzied motion.
       The crowd froze to watch our struggle. I squeezed harder and Bailey
dropped the club. I heard his ribs crack beneath my crushing grip. He cried
out in pain. I let him go, and he fell to his knees on the ground.
       I'd won.
       His head hung down. He seemed haggard, beaten. I thought surely the
hate had been squeezed out of him.
       "C'mon, Bailey." I offered him my hand. "Get up. Let's talk to these
people. Let's tell them what we have to tell them. Let's get them headed home
before things get any worse."
       To my surprise, he shook his head no and then slowly looked up, a
strange grin on his face, a look of dark triumph. For a moment, I couldn't
figure out why.
       And then, to my right and at the back of the crowd, there was an
explosion. I looked that way and saw the last moment of blue flame covered by
a rising cloud of gray. Then another, to my left, this one also inside the
back edge of crowd.
       There were a few long seconds of stunned silence, and then the crowd
exploded in anger and fear, surging away from the bombs, surging toward where
we stood.




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       Over our heads there was a high-pitched warning shriek and then the
screamship opened fire, onto the front yard just behind where Bailey and I
stood. It was a warning shot, one meant to quell the rush of the crowd.
       It didn't work. The front of the crowd tried to stop, threatened by
that bright vortex, but those behind, pushed by those even farther behind,
continued to move forward.
       Bailey, screaming in fear, ran from me, scrambling on his hands and
knees to get away from the thin, blue tunnel of death that marched toward us.
       As he ran, the light followed him, seeking him out, searching for him.
That was the S'hudonni plan, then, to exorcise this devil now, take this
opportunity to end his reign before it truly began. In a few seconds he'd be
covered by it, the panic would escalate, hundreds might die, would die. I knew
this. With a terrible, deadly certainty, I knew it.
       And I knew what I could do about it. I'd failed again. I'd been named a
leader by both sides and I'd failed them both. But there _was_ an answer.
       It was the calmest, most serene moment of my life. The decision made,
the understanding of it all so very clear.
       Twenty meters away, in front of me, a ruined distribution truck from
_The Observer_ lay on its side, its windscreen shattered. "To Tell the Truth,"
was written in script across the side panels. To get to Bailey the light would
have to cross that wreck, etch a burned path across those words.
       I ran to the truck, scrambled atop it and turned to watch the light
approach. Janice had left her car, was coming toward, pushing her way through
the crowd. Standing there, above the fray, knowing the crowd could see me, I
raised my arms in acceptance, embraced the column of searing light that turned
and moved my way, ten feet from me, then five. It seemed to hesitate, to slow
its march as it reached the edge of the truck. I looked out over the crowd.
       I could not feel the heat. Isn't that strange? No more than two meters
away the pavement bubbled beneath it, macadam melting and scorching in its
heat, but I couldn't feel it.
       It moved, angling away from me. I heard, as if from a distance, Janice
shouting my name. What was it she had said to me, that they trusted me here,
that they wanted me to lead them, to show them the way? Well, all right, then,
that's what I could do, I could show them.
       It moved again. It would miss me. No. Not that. Not away. Quickly,
firmly, I looked up toward the screamship that brought all this to us, to me,
and then took two strong steps and, arms outstretched in that wonderful
embrace, leaped into the light.
--------
_In all the broad expanse of tranquil light, I saw no shadow of another
parting._
           _ -- Charles Dickens, _Great Expectations
          ****
       A huge face swam over me; a bulbous smile, a deep chuckle. "Wass
_wonderful_ Lamb. What you did was simply _wonderful!"_
       It was Twoclicks, bubbling with merriment. "A moment sstraight from
your Conrad -- the ssacrifice for honor, yes? To die to ssave others and earn
back one's honor, yess? Expiation. Penance. _Very_ Catholic, Lamb. Ah, it wass
brilliant!"
       "I'm alive?"
       "Oh, yess. Very much sso. Alive, and a hero. You are ssurprised by
thiss? I have told the Governor General that you live. Later today, when we
land in the park and we emerge from the ship, there will be thoussandss to
ssee you there."
       "A hero?"
       A voice from behind him spoke. "You died to save them, Clifford. They
know this on both sides. They know that you offered yourself to stop the riots
before more people died."
       It was Janice. She came out from behind Twoclicks and moved to stand
next to me. She leaned over, reached out to touch my cheek as she'd done on




                                                                                 Page 60
that hilltop, then came closer, her eyes staring into mine. She leaned down
and kissed me gently. "It was the most courageous thing I've ever seen."
       Twoclicks laughed out loud, that fat, bloated body shaking with
merriment. "It wass absolutely _perfect._ We gave you a ssecond or two, jusst
for impact, and then sstopped the weapon. You were outlined in it, blazing in
it, Lamb, and then I ussed the stasis field and brought you on board, set the
devices to work on repairs, and now," he waved those stubby arms dramatically,
"here you are. The Hero of the day."
       "You did this, Twoclicks? You did this to me?" I was very tired.
       His whole body moved forward with that nodding head. It was almost a
bow, he bent so low to say yes to me. I watched him, wondering at his
intentions.
       "Why am I alive?"
       "Why? To ssave thiss colony, to make thiss place work."
       "No, no. I mean 'how' am I alive. Why didn't I die in that flame, that
heat?"
       "Ah," he smiled again. "Weapon doess not affect uss, of course, Lamb.
Iss simple thing, really. Excites molecules. Friction. Heat. Ssomething like
that. But we are," he paused, thought it through, said vaguely, "protected."
       "And me?"
       "As I ssaid, Lamb, protected."
       _"I'm_ protected?"
       He looked at me, sighed, spoke as if to a slow child, said what I did
not want to hear. "Yes, Lamb. You are one of uss now. Remember? Those devices
insside you? They rebuild, create, assemble, repair. And protect."
       "I didn't ask for this."
       "That could be argued, Lamb."
       "I'm not sure I can do this, do what you say you need, Twoclicks."
       "Oh, Clifford, you can," said Janice, smiling down at me. I looked at
her and couldn't help but weakly smile back. I realized now, in this setting
and with Twoclicks here in the room, who she reminded me of; someone I'd known
long ago, someone whose love I'd walked away from once to save myself from
further destruction. "Heather?" I asked.
       Janice only kept smiling as Twoclicks put one thin arm over her
shoulder. "Never look back, Lamb. Iss Janice, and she can help you. Iss
brilliant, you know."
       Yes, I thought, looking at her, seeing that smile I knew so well, I
supposed she _was_ brilliant.
       Twoclicks smiled that huge, wide smile at me one more time. "I will
help. We will have the besst time!" And he reached out with those thin, frail
arms to give me a hug. I am, I suppose, the only Earthie to have been hugged
by a S'hudonni.
       We talked more after that, the three of us. Twoclicks made it clear
that S'hudon needs a leader here, someone who can bring these people together,
keep them together here on the fringes of empire, here where the outermost
fortress looked out toward the emptiness, toward the wild lands where savages
hide in wait.
       As he explained it to me, this outpost is important to S'hudon's trade
routes, and the small human population is crucial is to the support of that
outpost. He hinted darkly at something more, at some new enemies of S'hudon,
some competitors; but I wondered, as he talked, how true that was. For
Twoclicks, ultimately, it's all about profit, not patriotism.
       I felt better physically even as we talked, S'hudonni technology
working its medical miracles on me. But my arm, the one shattered by the dirt
and pain of a memory decades old? The ground-in dirt, the reminder of who I
was and what I did -- that was still there. I had only to ask and the
S'hudonni devices would clean that out in minutes. But that seemed wrong. I
needed the memories that arm brought me. Sometime, somewhere, perhaps I'd get
the chance to act on those memories.
       Later, that evening, as Arran rose in the east, we came in over




                                                                                 Page 61
Leuchar's main city park, hovered there for awhile, screaming and rumbling,
impressive as hell. Twoclicks and Janice were right, of course; both the older
colonials and the first-borns were there, cheering me wildly. I was the answer
they sought. They need a leader here, someone they could admire and follow.
       With the crowd gathered, with the roar of their approval, we lowered
that wide ramp. Together, Twoclicks, Janice and I, we walked down it. Klaatu
barada nikto.

-----------------------
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