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+{"meta": {"short_book_title": "Mystery and Confidence Vol. 2 by Elizabeth Pinchard", "publication_date": 1814, "url": "http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34968"}, "text": "\n\n\n\nProduced by Mark C. Orton and the Online Distributed\nProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was\nproduced from images generously made available by The\nInternet Archive)\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n                                MYSTERY\n                                  AND\n                              CONFIDENCE:\n\n\n                               _A TALE._\n\n                               BY A LADY.\n\n                           IN THREE VOLUMES.\n\n\n                                VOL. II.\n\n\n\n                                LONDON:\n                       PRINTED FOR HENRY COLBURN,\n            PUBLIC LIBRARY, CONDUIT-STREET, HANOVER-SQUARE,\n                 AND SOLD BY GEORGE GOLDIE, EDINBURGH,\n                       AND JOHN CUMMING, DUBLIN.\n\n                                 1814.\n\n\n\n                B. CLARKE, Printer, Well-Street, London.\n\n\n\n\n                                MYSTERY\n                                  AND\n                              CONFIDENCE.\n\n\n\n\nCHAP. I.\n\n  ----To mourn because a sparrow dies,\n  To rave in artificial ecstasies,\n  Laments how oft her wounded heart has bled,\n  And boasts of many a tear she never shed.\n\n                                MISS MORE'S POEM ON SENSIBILITY.\n\n\nThe next day being Sunday, Lady St. Aubyn, attired in the most elegant\nundress, and attended by the Earl, made her appearance at the church:\nthe expensive lace veil which shaded her fair face, and hung loosely\nbelow her waist, prevented the gazing of those around her from being\ntoo oppressive. The neighbouring families certainly had heard that Lord\nSt. Aubyn had married a young person of a rank in life much inferior to\nhis own, for secretly as every thing had been conducted, as no one could\ntell the name or family of his bride, such, at least, were the\nconjectures of those who knew him; yet, in spite of the prejudices which\nhad been excited against her, the elegance of her form, and the modest\ncomposure of her demeanour, in a great measure overcame it, and all who\nwere entitled, by their situation in life, to visit at the Castle,\ndetermined to do so; some prompted by mere curiosity, and some by less\nunworthy motives. The three or four following days, therefore, brought\nEllen many visitors, and her own intuitive sense of propriety, added to\nthe few general directions St. Aubyn had given her, and with the\nadvantageous support his respectful attention gave her, prevented her\nappearing at all awkward; and these visits, which she had so greatly\ndreaded, passed over with less pain than she had expected.\n\nAmongst their first visitors were Sir William and Miss Cecil; the former\nof whom was a mere common-place character, whom, if you did not happen\nto see for sometime, you would be apt to forget you had ever seen at\nall; but the fine countenance of Laura, her expressive features, and the\nbright black eyes which animated them, charmed Ellen, who had never seen\nany woman before so pleasing: yet Laura was not strictly beautiful, and\nat this time the lustre of her fine eyes was dimmed by the melancholy\nwhich pervaded her mind, for she said her little invalid was so much\nindisposed, and so weak, she would not have left her to go any where\nelse; but she wished so very much to be introduced to Lady St. Aubyn she\ncould not resist the temptation.\n\nThe very elegant manner in which she spoke, the clearness of her\narticulation, and sweetness of her voice, were strikingly agreeable; and\nSt. Aubyn afterwards said that a few years before she had a gaiety of\nmanner, enlivened by wit of a superior nature, with so much playfulness\nof expression, that by many people she was considered as merely a lively\ngirl, and a little satirical; but time and misfortune had softened what\nat times might have been too severe in her opinions, had improved and\nmellowed her fine judgment, and given a pensive sweetness to her\nmanners, which was occasionally relieved by flashes of her former gaiety\nand ready repartee. St. Aubyn shewed her a particular and most\nrespectful attention, and told Ellen she would be charmed with Miss\nCecil's drawings, which were the very finest he ever saw, except from\nthe hands of a professed artist. He then, with a smile, addressed a few\nwords to Laura in an undertone, to which she replied: \"Oh, pray, my\nLord, do not expose my juvenile follies: I might have done such things\nwhen we were mere children together, but I hope you think me wiser now!\"\n\n\"The world,\" said he, \"has perhaps made us both graver since the days\nyou speak of; and that, in the eyes of many, will doubtless give us\ncredit for an increase of wisdom; but believe me, my fair friend, I have\nlost so little of the romance of youth (if such you choose to term it),\nthat I must hope you do not neglect the pleasing talent to which I\nalluded, and of which you must allow Lady St. Aubyn to judge: I assure\nyou she has a great taste for poetry, and perhaps one day or other may\nfollow your example, and court the Muses in her turn.\"\n\n\"Ah, my Lord!\" said Laura, smiling and colouring: \"I see you are\ndetermined not to keep my secret.\" \"Tell me, Ellen,\" said St. Aubyn,\n\"can you see any reason why Miss Cecil should wish to make a secret of\nher having succeeded very happily in some elegant little poetical\ncompositions?\" \"No, indeed,\" replied Ellen: \"it surely is a gift to be\nrather proud than ashamed of.\" \"Ah, my dear Lady St. Aubyn, if you could\nconceive the illiberal prejudice of some minds, you would not wonder at\nmy dislike to having these trifling attempts spoken of. A lady I knew,\nwho was eminently gifted in that way, and indeed an excellent\nprose-writer also, was, from circumstances, obliged to be less\nscrupulous than I have been; and if you could have heard the things I\nhave witnessed, when she entered or left a room, you would be amazed:\nwhile she, gentle, unassuming, and even timid, judging candidly of every\none, unwilling to see faults, and detesting personal satire, had not the\nmost remote idea of the severe and uncandid remarks she excited.\"\n\nEllen was really astonished at this account, as much as she was pleased\nwith the spirit and grace with which it was delivered; and St. Aubyn\nsaid to her with an expressive smile, \"You see, Ellen, our friend Ross\nhad more reason than we were willing to allow him for _certain\nprohibitions_. However,\" added he, \"I will not relinquish the hope that\nMiss Cecil will soon see how little she has to fear from any\nobservations of such a nature from _you_.\" \"I see it already,\" said Miss\nCecil with quickness: \"one glance at Lady St. Aubyn would convince the\nmost incredulous that nothing but sweetness and candour can lodge in\nsuch a temple.\"\n\nShe then looked at her watch, and saying she had much exceeded her time,\nand Juliet would expect her, departed with her father, who had been\ndeeply engaged in giving Doctor Montague a long account of a\ncounty-meeting, which had been held for some public purpose a few days\nbefore. They had scarcely driven from the door, when Miss Alton was\nannounced; and as she entered, St. Aubyn whispered to Ellen--\"Now you\nwill see a character quite new to you.\" Then rising hastily, he crossed\nthe room to meet the lady, exclaiming, \"Heavens! my dear Miss Alton, how\nenchanted I am to see you look so well! You really improve every day, at\nleast every year: for I believe it is at least that time since I saw you\nlast.\" \"Oh, my Lord,\" answered the lady in an affected tone, but in a\nvoice the natural sharpness of which all her efforts failed to soften;\n\"you flatter--don't try to make me vain. Lord bless me, you men have no\nmercy on us poor young women: but will you not introduce me to your\nLady?\"\n\nEllen, who at the distance from whence she had first seen this visitor\nimagined that she really was young and handsome, was astonished as she\napproached, to find in the white frock, sash, ringlets, and little\nstraw hat of a girl, a woman apparently between fifty and sixty; and who\nvainly attempted to conceal, by a quantity of _rouge_ and a slight veil\nthrown over her face, the ravages which time had made in her\ncountenance. Her spare figure gave her some resemblance to youthful\nslightness; but when near, the sharp bones, and angular projections of\nher face and person, sufficiently proved, that slender appearance was\nthe result of lean old age, instead of girlish delicacy. In spite of the\nadvanced season, she was clad so lightly, that she still shivered from\nthe impression of the keen breeze which had assailed her as she crossed\nthe Park, and gladly accepted a seat by the comfortable fire, though\naffecting to conceal her sufferings under an air of gaiety and ease.\n\nSt. Aubyn (who had known her many years, and had been from a boy\naccustomed to divert himself with her foibles, though he really felt a\ndegree of regard for her, as, in spite of her oddities, she was not\nwithout a mixture of good qualities), after having introduced her to his\nbride, seated himself by her, and began to talk to her in a strain of\nsuch marked flattery, as really alarmed Ellen, who thought Miss Alton\nwould certainly be offended; but her enormous vanity prevented her from\nperceiving that he was merely laughing at her, and she grew every moment\nmore ridiculous. At last, turning to Ellen, she said in a pathetic tone,\n\"Oh, my dear Madam, you cannot conceive how I have felt for you these\ntwo days! I declare I have not been able to sleep for thinking of you,\nand really have shed tears to imagine what a tax you have been paying:\nhow you must have been fatigued by receiving such a succession of\nvisitors! but every one must have some trouble. There is my dear friend,\nMrs. Dawkins, the best of women--sweet woman, indeed--there she is\nlamenting at home such a vexation!\" \"What is the matter?\" said St.\nAubyn, laughing, for he knew what sort of misfortunes Mrs. Dawkins and\nher friend Miss Alton generally lamented with so much pathos: \"has she\nlost her little French dog, or has the careless coachman scratched the\npannels of her new carriage?\" \"Oh, you sad man! how can you make a jest\nof the dear soul's uncommon sensibility? To be sure she has the\ntenderest feelings. She often says to me, 'my dear Alton, what should I\ndo without you: you are the only person who can really feel for the\nmisfortunes of a friend.' Sweet woman!\"\n\n\"Well, but,\" said St. Aubyn, \"you were going to tell us what has\nhappened to this _amiable friend_ of your's.\"\n\n\"Nay, I will tell Lady St. Aubyn, she looks all softness and\nsensibility: but you are so wicked, you make a jest of every thing. Do\nyou know, my dearest Lady St. Aubyn, just as poor Mrs. Dawkins was\ncoming to make you a visit, this morning, nay, she was actually dressed,\nand had one foot on the step of the carriage, _I_ was in it, for she was\nso kind as to say she would bring me; so I thought, as I was to come\nwith her, I need not put on a pelisse, or shawl, for you know they spoil\none's dress. But I can't say but that it was rather cold walking, as I\nwas at last obliged to do, for _just_ as she put her foot upon the\nstep----\" \"What happened?\" interrupted St. Aubyn, laughing still more at\nthe emphatic manner in which poor Alton told her distressing\nstory.--\"Did she fall down and break her leg, or did the horses run away\nand carry off her kid slipper?\"----\"Now only hear him; did you ever see\nsuch a teasing creature: well, I am glad _I_ have not the task of\nkeeping you in order; I don't know what even the sweet Countess will do\nwith you.\"\n\nThis piece of self-congratulation threw St. Aubyn into a violent fit of\nlaughing, in which even the grave Doctor Montague joined, and Ellen\ncould hardly resist, though the fear of quite affronting her guest put a\ncheck upon her risibility.\n\n\"Well,\" said St. Aubyn, at last recovering himself a little, \"but what\nreally did happen to poor Mrs. Dawkins?\"\n\n\"Nay, I protest I won't tell you, you wicked creature; I will tell Lady\nSt. Aubyn some other time, for you do not deserve to hear any thing\nabout it.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, do, my dear Alton, tell, for really I am in great pain for\npoor Mrs. Dawkins, who has been standing so long with one foot upon the\nstep: don't leave her in so dangerous a situation any longer.\"----\"Well,\nthen, if I must tell--at that moment up came a servant on horseback, to\nsay her sister, Mrs. Courtenay, was on the road to her own house, in her\nway from Buxton, and would, with a whole train of children and servants,\ndine at her house to-day; and as they were coming directly, she was\nactually obliged to defer her visit to your Ladyship till to-morrow; and\nshe was so sorry, and I am sure so was I, for I was obliged to walk here\nafter all.\"\n\n\"Well, but,\" said Lord St. Aubyn, \"notwithstanding this terrible shock\nto her feelings, she might have sent the carriage with _you_.\"----\"Aye,\nso she might, to be sure; but poor dear soul, she was put in such a\nbustle she never thought of it; some people don't think----dear me, if I\nhad a carriage of my own, I should be happy to make it useful to my\nfriends, and not let them go broiling on foot two or three miles in warm\nweather or splashing through the mud in the middle of winter.\"----\"I\nbelieve you,\" said St. Aubyn; for with all her foibles, he knew Miss\nAlton was really good-natured, and willing to do a kind action.\n\n\"Well, my dear Miss Alton, if you will favour us with your company, and\ndine with us, Lady St. Aubyn will, I am sure, be happy to send you home\nin her carriage; and I promise you, if the Prince himself was to make us\na visit, that should not prevent your having it.\"\n\nEllen joined in this invitation, to which the happy Miss Alton readily\nassented; and Ellen found her, after a little while, a more tolerable\ncompanion than she expected.\n\nMiss Alton's particular passion was for being with people who lived in\nstyle; if they had a title so much the better; and as she would do any\nthing to make herself useful, and knew how to pay those little\nattentions which every body likes, she generally made herself agreeable,\nor so necessary, that she had admittance at almost all the houses of\nconsequence in the neighbourhood. The entre of St. Aubyn Castle was the\nheight of her ambition. St. Aubyn's mother, who lived much in the\ncountry, had been in the habit of receiving Miss Alton, when she was a\ngirl, on familiar terms: the old Lady was fond of needle-work, and\nAlton assisted in filling up the groundwork of carpets, rugs, &c. with\nthe most patient good humour; or was at any time ready to make up a\nwhist or quadrille table; so that in those days she was very often a\nweek or two together at the Castle, where St. Aubyn, at his vacations,\nhad been accustomed to meet her, and to divert himself with her foibles,\nthough he had always retained a degree of regard for her, a felicity\nwhich the death of the old Countess deprived her of, and she had never\nsince ceased to regret; for though her other connections were\nrespectable, they were not so high in fortune or consequence as the St.\nAubyns, and great was her joy to find herself once more an invited guest\nat the Castle.\n\nAmongst her other friends, as her narrow income by no means permitted\nher to return their civilities in kind, she yet was always well\nreceived, for there was nothing she would not do to oblige: one Lady\nwould send her in her carriage, if not well enough to go herself, to\ninquire the character of a servant; another would express a wish, in her\nhearing, for some game, or fruit, for a dinner party, and Miss Alton\nwould set out the next morning \"to try her luck,\" as she termed it, by\ncalling at some of the higher sort of houses, where she was acquainted,\nand _wishing_ she knew where to get a hare, or a pine-apple (according\nto which was wanted), \"to oblige a friend to whom she owed a great many\nfavours,\" the good natured hearer generally, if possible, was willing to\noblige \"poor Alton;\" or if she did not succeed there, she would tramp a\nmile or two farther, and at worst could fairly boast what pains she had\ntaken, even if they were not successful.\n\nIn London, if a notable friend wanted a cheap trimming, or to match a\nsilk or lace, yet did not like to go about to little shops herself,\nAlton would take a hackney coach, or walk if the weather permitted, and\nnever rest till she had obtained the thing in question.\n\nBy these and similar means she had made a great many high acquaintance,\nand _eked_ out a small income by visits, sometimes a little too long, to\neach in turn.----She had thus acquired some amusing anecdotes, and was\nfar from an unpleasing companion, especially when no male beings came in\nher way; but when with men, vanity and affectation took such full\npossession of her, that she became completely ridiculous. This Lady St.\nAubyn had an opportunity of seeing: when two or three gentlemen happened\nto call before dinner, her whole manner changed, and she became really\nabsurd: her voice was softened----her head leant on one shoulder----a\ntolerably white hand and arm displayed in every possible attitude, and\nshe behaved, in every respect, like a very silly affected girl; but when\nthey were gone, she was again tolerably conversable, and St. Aubyn,\nceasing to play upon her foibles, and turning the conversation to such\ntopics as were most likely to shew her to advantage, the afternoon and\nevening passed pleasantly enough. Nor was St. Aubyn sorry to familiarise\nEllen, by degrees, to company, or to do the honour of his table, before\nthey should be obliged to receive the neighbouring families at dinner,\nmany of whom he knew (especially two or three ladies who had unmarried\ndaughters) would be eagerly looking out for any little omission in her,\nwhile Miss Alton was so delighted with the good things before her\n(certainly being _un peu gourmande_) with the beautiful new service of\nchina, rich plate, &c. &c. that she never thought of her entertainers,\nexcept to express her pleasure in their kindness and attention: and they\nsent her home in the evening perfectly happy, and eager to tell dear\nMrs. Dawkins what a delightful day she had spent, how happy the Earl\nwas to see her, what a _sweet woman_ the Countess was, what fine china!\nwhat a dessert! what an elegant new carriage! &c. &c.\n\n\n\n\nCHAP. II.\n\n  Yet once again farewell, thou minstrel harp,\n    Yet once again forgive my feeble sway,\n  And little reck I of the censure sharp,\n    May idly cavil at an idle lay.\n  Much have I owed thy strains on life's long way,\n    Through secret woes the world has never known,\n  When on the weary night dawn'd wearier day,\n    And bitterer was the grief devour'd alone.\n\n                                                       W. SCOTT.\n\n\nThe next month was past in receiving and returning visits; and the most\npleasing among them was a sociable day passed at Rose-Hill, the seat of\nSir William Cecil. Miss Cecil promised, if Juliet, who now for some time\nhad been tolerably well, should continue so, that Ellen should see her;\nthough she very seldom admitted any company: \"But I have said so much of\nyou,\" said Laura, \"that she is quite anxious to see you; and I am\nparticularly anxious to familiarize her to you, both as it will I am\nsure give her pleasure, and facilitate our being often together.\"\nAccordingly, after dinner, when they left the gentlemen, Miss Cecil led\nLady St. Aubyn to Juliet's apartment.\n\nNever had Ellen seen so interesting a being: this fair creature, now\nabout fifteen, was a perfect model of beauty and symmetry; though so\nslightly formed, she appeared, \"like a fairy vision, or some bright\ncreature of the element:\" her cheeks were faintly tinged with a hectic\nblush; her eyes were of the most dazzling brightness; her lips like\ncoral; and her teeth of pearly whiteness; her fair hair was covered with\na fine lace cap, and her fragile form enveloped in a large shawl.\n\n\"My love,\" said Laura, \"here is Lady St. Aubyn, who is so good as to\ncome and see you.\"\n\nJuliet extended her white hand, and said in a voice of peculiar\nharmony, fixing at the same time her sparkling and penetrating eyes on\nEllen's face, as if she wished to read her heart in her countenance,\n\"Laura says she loves you already, and I am sure _I_ shall.\" The simple\nnaivete of her voice and manner went to the heart of Ellen, who could\nnot help embracing her tenderly, while she felt the tears start to her\neyes at seeing one so young and lovely in a state of health so\nprecarious.\n\nAfter a little more conversation, Ellen put her hand accidentally on a\nsmall book which lay half concealed by one of the pillows of Juliet's\ncouch, and said with that native politeness which ever prevented her\nfrom doing any thing rude or intrusive, \"May I look at the subject of\nyour studies?\" \"Yes,\" said Juliet, with an angelic smile, \"If you\nplease.\" Ellen opened the book. It was in a character totally unknown to\nher. \"Do you read Greek?\" asked the fair Juliet, with a simplicity and\nabsence of design which proved her question was serious; and this\ninterrogation, which would from most people to a young woman be\nabsolutely ridiculous, from Juliet appeared merely a natural wish to\nknow whether her new friend was as able as herself to read the book she\nheld in her hand; for strange as it may appear, it was a copy of the New\nTestament in Greek; and Juliet read it as easily as if it had been\nEnglish.\n\n\"My dear Juliet,\" said Laura, \"few females make that language their\nstudy; I conclude, therefore, Lady St. Aubyn does not know it any more\nthan myself.\" \"Oh, I wish you both did,\" said Juliet: \"if you could but\nknow the delight I feel from reading the Scripture in its original\nlanguage!--If I live till next summer I hope the Hebrew Bible will be as\nfamiliar to me as that book is now.\"\n\nIt is impossible for language to do justice to the perfect innocence and\nartlessness with which she spoke: she seemed to think her own wonderful\nattainments no more extraordinary than other girls do of being able to\nread a newspaper, or work a handkerchief: not a trace of affectation or\npedantry was visible in her manner: she had a childishness of voice and\ntone that singularly contrasted with the subjects on which she spoke;\nfor Laura, willing to let Ellen see what a wonderful creature she was,\nled her to speak of astronomy; and a celestial globe happening to be on\na table before her, led her by degrees to display her extraordinary\nknowledge in that science--of the dimensions and motions of the heavenly\nbodies, their distances from the sun and from each other, &c. all of\nwhich she explained in the clearest and most perspicuous manner, making\nsuch happy allusions to the poets who have touched on the subject, and\nillustrating it by such apt comparisons, as shewed her imagination was\nas brilliant, as the calculations she readily made proved her memory\nwas accurate.\n\nLady St. Aubyn, who had at every leisure hour since her marriage been\nengaged in studying this and other interesting subjects of useful\nknowledge, could in some degree appreciate the value and extent of this\nsweet girl's extraordinary acquirements, and was lost in admiration of\nher abilities, and the industry with which, notwithstanding her ill\nhealth, she had cultivated them.\n\nThis happened to be a day in which Juliet was unusually well, for in\ngeneral she declined all conversation, and spent most of her time in\nstudying the Scriptures, in devotional exercises, and promoting every\nplan which her health would permit her to join in for the relief of the\npoor; for her early piety and extensive charity were as remarkable as\nher other attainments were wonderful: but this day she was so well, that\nat Laura's solicitation, in which Ellen earnestly joined, she placed\nherself at a chamber organ that stood in her apartment, which she\ntouched with great taste and science; and was at last prevailed on to\naccompany it with a voice of the most angelic sweetness.\n\nShe sung only sacred music, and now delighted Ellen with \"Angels ever\nbright and fair;\" and, \"I know that my Redeemer liveth:\" and while her\npure lips poured forth these exquisite specimens of musical inspiration,\nthe soft and pious expression of her heavenly countenance, for ever\nfixed and hallowed them in the remembrance of her hearers.\n\nTo Ellen she seemed hardly a being of this world, and her young and\nenthusiastic heart was melted with the tenderest love for one so very\nfar superior to any thing she could have imagined.\n\nFrom this day the St. Aubyns and Cecils spent a great part of their time\ntogether, and the highly polished manners of Miss Cecil, her excellent\njudgment, and fine taste, were extremely advantageous to Lady St.\nAubyn. Without losing her natural grace and sweet simplicity, she\ngradually acquired more of that style which marks both the woman of\nfashion and the possessor of intellectual knowledge; even her beauty\nimproved with the encreased intelligence of her mind, and the serenity\nof her heart; for now for the first time she felt entirely happy;\nscarcely a cloud overshadowed her.\n\nSt. Aubyn was every day more tender and attentive, and every day\nexpressed himself more pleased and delighted with his choice. Those\nstarts of agitation and gloom which on their first acquaintance had\nappeared in him so frequently, were now very seldom seen. He received\nfrequent letters from Spain, which he told Ellen were from his friend\nthe Marquis of Northington, who was there in a diplomatic situation, and\nwas engaged in seeking a person, by means of his extensive connections\non the Continent, who alone could unravel some mysterious circumstances\nof the most material consequence to _him_. \"But when found,\" said St.\nAubyn, one day when he had by degrees been led to speak on this\nsubject--\"when found, if ever that should happen, I know not that he\nwill be prevailed on to disclose what I have every reason to believe he\nalone can tell. He is a villain!\"----(and St. Aubyn's frame shook with\nthe agitation of smothered rage) \"and may from motives of fear or\nrevenge add to the other injuries he has done me, by withholding that\ninformation which alone can secure _my fame_, perhaps _my life_.\"\n\nHe had never before spoken so much or so calmly on this interesting\nsubject; and seeing that Ellen listened with great anxiety, and that at\nhis last words she trembled and turned pale, he added:\n\n\"Fear not, my love: for your dear sake I will take every necessary\nprecaution; and should I find the enemy, who has long, though most\nunjustly, threatened to revenge on me an act, horrible indeed, but of\nwhich I was not the author----should I find him still determined on\nvindictive measures, I will for a time pass over to the Continent, till\nsome accommodation can be effected. At all events, my Ellen, remember\nyou have promised to _believe me innocent_. In the course of the next\nsummer, this enemy (who, alas! and that is not the least hardship in my\nwayward fate, ought by every tie to look upon me as a friend and father)\nwill be in England, and I shall perhaps be able to clear his mind from\nthose evil impressions with which an unfortunate chain of circumstances\nhave stampt it----impressions received in early youth, and which he has\never since cherished, and brooded over with the most determined\nresentment.\"\n\nAt this juncture, when St. Aubyn seemed for the first time inclined to\nopen his whole heart to his wife, and to disclose to her a story in\nwhich she was so deeply interested, they were interrupted by a servant,\nwho announced Mrs. Dawkins, and her tender friend Miss Alton, who came\narmed with a whole catalogue of sympathetic feelings and notes of\nadmiration of all kinds to entertain Lady St. Aubyn.\n\nMany were the disasters which had happened since they saw her last:\nhorses had been lame, servants impertinent, showers of rain had fallen\nat the most unlucky moments, even a dinner had been spoilt which had\ncost a whole week's preparation, by the cook's inattention in\nover-roasting the venison; in short, all the minor evils of life had set\nthemselves in array against the peace of poor Mrs. Dawkins: and even the\nsympathizing Miss Alton could hardly keep pace with lamentations\nsufficient for such a doleful list of distresses. She fought her way,\nhowever, as well as she could, and where words failed her, shrugs,\nsighs, and the whole artillery of gesticulation, were employed in their\nstead.\n\nWhat then became of poor Ellen, who could at best only sit \"with sad\ncivility and an aching head,\" amid this alternate din of complaint and\ncompassion? But Mrs. Dawkins was pre-determined to like and be pleased\nwith every thing the lovely Countess did or omitted to do, and construed\nthe silence and acquiescence with which she heard every thing into the\nkindest attention and most obliging concern for the troubles of her\nfriends.\n\nThe entrance of a sandwich tray fortunately gave some pause to this\nmelancholy duet; and the excellent hot-house fruits, rich cake, &c.\nseemed to arrive in good time to refresh both ladies after so much\nexertion. At last they took their leave, but the moment for confidence\nwas past; indeed, St. Aubyn, in no humour for trifling, had made his\nescape at one door, as they entered at the other: of course, the\nconversation was not then resumed.\n\nNot to interrupt the course of the narrative, we omitted in the proper\nplace to notice that Lord and Lady St. Aubyn had, immediately on their\narrival at the Castle, written letters of explanation to Powis and\nJoanna, and he permitted Mr. Ross to publish what he alone knew the real\nrank and title of the person Ellen had married.\n\nWe will not pretend to describe the astonishment excited by this\nintelligence amongst the inhabitants of Llanwyllan: the honest and\nunaspiring Powis declared he would much rather Ellen had married a man\nnearer her own rank in life, for he was afraid, poor dear child, she\nwould be bewildered amongst such fine people, and in such a great house:\nfor his part, even if he were able to travel so far, he should not like\nto go to such a grand place as she described the Castle to be; besides,\nhe was afraid they would be ashamed to see such a rough, ignorant fellow\nas he was among their fine company: and if Ellen was above calling him\nfather, he should wish himself in the grave.\n\nThe tears started in his eyes at the painful idea, and the good Ross\ncould hardly dissipate his apprehensions of being forsaken by his only\nchild, by reminding him of her excellent qualities and tender affection\nfor him, and of the kindness with which Lord St. Aubyn had treated him\nthrough the whole of his acquaintance.\n\nMrs. Ross was in ten times a greater bustle than ever; she could not\nrest till she had told the surprizing news to every one she met, and at\nintervals she scolded Mr. Ross heartily for not letting her into the\nsecret, as if she were not as worthy to be trusted as any body else for\nsecrecy and prudence; \"she that had been a mother to Ellen, was no\ngossip, and minded nothing but her own business!\" but when he reminded\nher that even Ellen, deeply as she was interested, was not permitted to\nknow it, she could not but acknowledge she had no great right to expect\nto be better informed.\n\nAs to Joanna, with the natural vanity of youth, she was elated beyond\nmeasure at the idea of her dear Ellen's being a _real lady_, and the\nhope of visiting her one day or other in her fine castle, and seeing all\nher beautiful things, while Mrs. Ross made no doubt Ellen had a dress\nfor every day in the week, and her caps trimmed with fine lace; then she\nlaughed at the recollection of having once \"scolded Ellen for putting on\nher best white gown when she expected Mr. Mordaunt, as we called him,\nand now I should not wonder if she wears as good in a morning!\"--\"Dear\nmother,\" said Joanna, who, from the slight view she had of what she\nfancied the world, when she went with St. Aubyn and Ellen to Carnarvon,\nimagined herself better instructed in fashionable matters--\"dear mother,\nI daresay she does not wear such gowns at all; I should not wonder if\nher maid had as good: I am sure I saw a lady's maid on a travelling\ncarriage at Carnarvon much better dressed than either of us.\" \"Well,\nbless me, what will the world come to,\" said Mrs. Ross, \"when such folks\nas those wear white gowns and flappits!\" Alas, poor Mrs. Ross! could she\nhave seen some ladies' maids!--\n\nAll these things Joanna told Ellen in a letter the longest she had ever\nwritten, and greatly was St. Aubyn diverted with the simplicity of their\nideas. The good Ross wrote to St. Aubyn, and expressed his high\nsatisfaction at the very just and honourable manner in which he had\nperformed all his engagements respecting Ellen, and requested to hear\nfrom time to time whatever might arise concerning those important\ncircumstances which the Earl had done him the honour to confide to him.\n\n\"What can we do for these very good people, my dear Ellen?\" said St.\nAubyn: \"they have no wants nor wishes beyond their present possessions.\nIf I send them any articles of luxury, or the means of encreasing their\npresent expenses, I know not that I should render them happier. I could\neasily procure a valuable living for Mr. Ross, and told him so; but he\nassured me nothing should induce him to leave his present flock, and\nthat he had not a wish to rise to a higher sphere, or for any thing in\nthe world, but a few more books; and for those I have sent an order to\nmy bookseller, requesting they may be immediately forwarded to\nCarnarvon. I shall also enclose to Ross a larger payment for my good old\nlandlady and cook, dame Grey, than I thought it prudent to make while we\nremained at Llanwyllan. Is there any thing else my Ellen can think\nof?\"--\"There are,\" answered Ellen, in a low voice, \"some very poor\npeople at Llanwyllan, that Joanna and I used to be as kind to as we\ncould. I should like, if you approve of it, to send Joanna a little\nmoney for their use.\" \"By all means, send whatever you think proper, and\nas often as you please; never consult me, but do all that your kind and\ngenerous heart prompts you to do on all occasions--think also if there\nis any thing Mrs. Ross and Joanna would be pleased to have. You must be\na better judge of their wishes than I can be.\"--He then took out his\npocketbook, and gave her notes to a large amount, telling her, with a\nsmile, that her expences were so small, he should forget he had a wife\nif she were not a little more profuse. \"Well, but Ellen,\" said St.\nAubyn, \"surely this is not all you have to ask for the friends of your\nyouth! don't make me fancy either that you are forgetful, or _think more\nthan you choose to express for some of them_.\" \"My dear Lord, what do\nyou mean?\" said Ellen, a little startled by the manner in which he\nspoke, \"Nay, don't be alarmed,\" replied St. Aubyn, with a smile, \"_I_\nwas thinking of one certainly not so much in _my_ favour as he ought to\nbe in _your's_, for he deprived me once of your society for a whole day,\nfor which, and some certain pangs and anxieties, I cannot quite forgive\nhim.\" \"I cannot guess who you mean.\" \"Is that really true?\" \"Most\nperfectly so.\" \"Certainly,\" said St. Aubyn, \"I can only mean Charles\nRoss.\" \"Oh poor Charles!\" exclaimed Ellen: \"I really had quite forgotten\nhim.\"\n\n\"Now that was excessively ungrateful,\" said St. Aubyn, laughing, \"for I\ndare engage he has not forgotten you: well, are you still enough his\nfriend to wish to do him service?\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" said Ellen: \"I shall always feel a regard for him, though\njust at that moment I was not thinking of him: but what service can I\ndo him, my Lord?\"\n\n\"If _you_ give him your interest with me, I may, perhaps, try, and most\nlikely shall succeed, in getting him promotion. Should you wish this to\nbe done?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, indeed,\" replied Ellen, animated and sparkling with the\npleasing idea of serving her early friend, and of the joy his promotion\nwould give his parents and sister, \"nothing could give me more\npleasure.\"\n\n\"Not too much of that bright colour and sparkling eye, though, Ellen,\"\nsaid St. Aubyn, half in jest, half gravely: \"I shall be jealous.\"\n\n\"You have so much reason!\"\n\n\"Well, be cautious, I am in that point a Turk, and bear no rival _near_\nthe throne.\"\n\nEllen, half vexed, would have said something, but embracing her\ntenderly, he stopt her by saying, \"Not a word, my love, I am perfectly\nsatisfied,\" and left her a little disconcerted, and half fearing that\nshe had disturbed or displeased him.\n\nIn the familiar intercourse which now took place between Miss Cecil and\nLady St. Aubyn, the former shook off her reserve, and imparted to Ellen,\nnot indeed all the particulars of her early disappointment, but that she\nhad endured the most painful trials that the perfidy and inconsistent\nconduct of one sincerely loved could inflict; yet dignified on this, as\non every other subject, she never expatiated upon it, or said any thing\ndisrespectful of the author of her sufferings: though she never fully\nexplained the cause of her separation from her unworthy lover, it was\nunderstood, that a full conviction of his bad conduct, and that his\naddress to her had chiefly been induced by mercenary motives, had\ninduced her to discard him, and to resist all his subsequent entreaties\nto be forgiven.\n\nOne day, when Lord St. Aubyn and Sir William Cecil were engaged at a\ngreat public dinner in the neighbourhood, Ellen had the pleasure of\ndining tete-a-tete with her agreeable friend: they had spent two hours\nin Juliet's apartment, who every time they met gained more and more on\nEllen's affections, and was become excessively attached to her, when the\nsweet girl, feeling fatigued, said she would lie down for an hour, and\nthen she should be well enough to enjoy their company at tea, which she\nrequested they would take in her apartment; they went therefore to pass\nthis hour in Miss Cecil's dressing-room, who, opening a writing-desk to\nshew Ellen a drawing she had just finished, undesignedly displayed to\nthe quick eye of Lady St. Aubyn a little book, marked \"Manuscript\nPoetry.\"\n\n\"Your own,\" said Ellen, laying her hand on it playfully, \"or extracts?\"\n\"Why,\" returned Laura, \"as Lord St. Aubyn thought proper to betray a\nsecret which he learnt when we were children together, I will not deny\nthat little volume contains some insignificant attempts of my own.\"\n\n\"Oh let me see some of them, pray do,\" said Ellen: \"assure yourself I\nwill make no ill use of your confidence. I really am quite delighted\nwith this opportunity, for I have long wished to see some specimens of\nyour talents in this way.\" Thus urged, Laura allowed her to read two or\nthree of the little poems contained in the volume, and at her earnest\nrequest, permitted her afterwards to have copies of the two following\n\n\n  ELEGIAC STANZAS.\n\n  Athwart the troubled bosom of the night,\n    Low heavy clouds in awful grandeur sweep;\n  And, in the solemn darkness of their flight,\n    Serve but to wrap the world in calmer sleep;\n  Save those sad eyes, which only wake to weep;\n  And give the dreary hour to meditation deep.\n\n  Those eyes perceive, as slow the clouds divide,\n    One star, whose tremulous but brilliant ray\n  Might serve the uncertain wand'rer's steps to guide,\n    And cheer his bosom till the dawn of day;\n  Who trembling else, and lost in black dismay,\n  Wearied and wild, might rove and perish on the way.\n\n  Even such a star, so fair and so benign,\n    When o'er the soul dark clouds of sorrow lour,\n  Is Hope; whose tranquil rays serenely shine,\n    Brightening the horrors of each dreary hour;\n  Smiling when youth prepares the fancied flower,\n  And when in age it feels misfortune's blighting power.\n\n  Oh, thou bright star! still grateful shalt thou find\n    The heart so often cheer'd by thy mild ray:\n  I will not call thee faithless and unkind,\n    Nor with ingratitude thy smiles repay,\n  Because thou hast not, like the glorious day,\n  Power to dispel the dark, and drive the clouds away.\n\n  Gild but those clouds till brighter suns arise;\n    Checkering with thy fair light life's troubled stream;\n  And oft unwearied shall these wakeful eyes,\n    Watching the progress of thy doubtful beam,\n  Shine even in tears; and, closing, still shall seem\n  Sooth'd by thy gentle ray in every peaceful dream.\n\n\n  EPISTLE TO LADY DELAMORE,\n\n  ON RETURNING TO ROSE-HILL.\n\n    From those rain scenes, where fancied pleasure reigns;\n  From crowds that weary, and from mirth which pains;\n  From flattering praises, from the smiles of art,\n  Sweet to the eye but faithless to the heart;\n  From guilt which makes fair innocence its prey,\n  Sighs but to blast, and courts but to betray;\n  From these I fly, impatient to caress\n  All lovely Nature in her fairest dress.\n  Oh, sweet retirement! Oh! secure retreat\n  From all the cares and follies of the great!\n  Here lavish Nature every charm bestows,\n  In softness smiles, in vivid beauty glows!\n  Here May presents each blossom of the spring,\n  And balmy sweetness falls from Zephyr's wing.\n    Yet while I stray, in tranquil quiet blest,\n  Fond mem'ry presses at my anxious breast;\n  And as I rove 'mid scenes so justly dear,\n  Remembrance wakes the tributary fear!\n  The mental eye perceives a sister's form,\n  And even these peaceful shades no longer charm.\n  \"Yes!\" I exclaim, \"'twas here she lov'd to stray,\n  Smiling in beauty, innocently gay!\n  Oft by yon streamlet, in the echoing vale,\n  Her voice would swell upon the evening gale,\n  Charm from the care-fraught bosom half its woes,\n  And hush the wounded spirit to repose!\"\n    While these delightful hours I thus retrace,\n  And dwell on every recollected grace,\n  Thy sister's soul, my Agatha, forgets\n  That _thou_ art blest in that which _she_ regrets;\n  Forgets that pleasure crowns thy happy hours,\n  And fond affection strews thy path with flowers;\n  Anxious thy way with rose-buds to adorn,\n  And from those buds remove each lurking thorn.\n  Ah! selfish heart, lament thy loss no more,\n  Nor thus thy recollected bliss deplore;\n  Content thyself to know thy sister blest,\n  And calm the plaintive anguish of thy breast!\n  Be still serenity thy future state;\n  Far from the pomps and perils of the great;\n  Unnotic'd, quiet, shall thy peace ensure,\n  Peace, when the world forgets thee, most secure.\n  --Yet, yet, my Agatha, affection swells\n  The trembling heart where thy lov'd image dwells;\n  Still bids me look to thee for all that cheers\n  In lengthen'd life, and blesses ling'ring years:\n  My spirit, form'd a _social_ bliss to prove,\n  Dares but to hope it from thy future love.\n  Deceived by him on whom it most relied,\n  Pierced in its fondness, wounded in its pride--\n  Yet, yet, while throbbing through each shatter'd nerve,\n  Disclaims to thee the veil of low reserve;\n  Owns all its weakness, will each thought confide,\n  And what it dares to feel, disdains to hide;\n  Owns, though no more the storms of passion rise,\n  That from the thought of selfish bliss it flies,\n  Still feels whate'er had once the power to charm,\n  Faithful affection, sensitive alarm;\n  But from the pangs which once it felt relieved,\n  No more will trust where once it was deceived;\n  To thee alone will look for future joy,\n  And for thy bliss each anxious wish employ:\n  Absorbed in thee, and in thy opening views,\n  Its pains, its pleasures, nay its being lose:\n  One we will be, and one our future cares,\n  Our thoughts, our hopes, our wishes, and our prayers.\n\n                                                          LAURA.\n\nWith both these little pieces Ellen was perhaps more pleased than their\nintrinsic merit warranted; but we naturally look with a partial eye on\nthe performances of those we love. After looking over several other\npoetical attempts, and some beautiful drawings, they returned to\nJuliet's apartment, where they spent a delightful evening; for Juliet\nseemed materially mending, and Laura's spirits rose in proportion.\n\nThus, and in similar pleasures, passed the time till the beginning of\nMarch, varied indeed by the occasional visits of the neighbouring\nfamilies. One day, after a long solicitation, the St. Aubyns, Cecils,\nand some more of the most fashionable people near them, dined with Mrs.\nDawkins, where they also met her tender friend and shadow, Miss Alton,\nwho this day, for the first time in her life, was destined to offend\nthat _sweet woman_, Mrs. Dawkins; for charmed to find herself seated on\na sofa between \"her _dearest_ Lady St. Aubyn,\" and that _most\ndelightful_ man, General Morton, a veteran officer in the neighbourhood,\nat whom it was supposed Miss Alton had long _set her cap_, as the phrase\nis, she attended not to the hints, shrugs, and winks of her friend, who,\nnot keeping a regular housekeeper, and being extremely anxious for the\nplacing her first course properly, wished Miss Alton just to slip out\nand see it put on table: but vain were her wishes; and the cook, finding\nno aid-de-camp arrive, after waiting till some of the dishes were\nover-dressed, and others half cold, was obliged to act as\ncommander-in-chief, and direct the disposition of the table herself; in\nwhich, not having clearly understood her mistress's directions (for in\nfact her anxiety to have all correct made them vary every half hour),\nshe succeeded so ill, that when, after all her fretting and fuming, poor\nMrs. Dawkins was told dinner was on table, that unfortunate Lady had\nnearly fainted at perceiving, when she entered the dining-room, that\nhalf the articles intended for the second course were crowded into the\nfirst, and roasted, ragoued, boiled, fried, sweet and sour, were jumbled\ntogether, in the finest confusion imaginable!\n\n\"This is all _your_ fault,\" said Mrs. Dawkins, in a low voice, but with\nthe countenance of a fury, to poor Alton: \"you could not _stir_ to see\nit put down;\" and pushing rudely by her, she left her staring with\nsurprize, and wondering what had made the dear soul so very angry: but\nwhen she saw the blunders which were so obvious in the arrangement of\nthe table, and recollected her own negligence (for in fact she had\npromised to see it set down), she was in her turn quite shocked.\n\nInsupportable was the delay and confusion in putting down this second\ncourse; even curtailed as it was, Mrs. Dawkins's servants were not\nperfectly _au fait_ at such things, and at last Lord St. Aubyn gave a\nhint to his own man, who waited behind his chair to assist, which he did\nso effectually, that every thing was soon placed as by magic, and the\nrest of the dinner and dessert passed over tolerably well. After dinner,\nthe ladies retired to the drawing-room, and listened, with their usual\npatience, to fresh lamentations from Mrs. Dawkins, and renewed\nsympathies on the part of Miss Alton, who sought, by even increasing her\nusual portion of _tender sensibility_, to regain her wonted place in\nMrs. Dawkins's good graces; but that lady continued so haughty and\nimpracticable, that poor Alton came at last with _real_ tears, to\ncomplain to the good-natured Ellen and Laura of her hard fate, and the\nimpossibility, do all she could, of pleasing some people; and they\nreally were so sorry for her vexation, that when Lady St. Aubyn's\ncarriage was announced, she rescued her from the visible unkindness of\nMrs. Dawkins, by desiring to have the pleasure of setting her down, and\nmade her quite happy again, by asking her to meet a small party at the\nCastle the next day, which, as it was understood to be rather a select\nthing, and confined to those most intimate there, assured Miss Alton a\nrenewed importance with Mrs. Dawkins and all her friends, as she should\nhave much to tell, which they could by no other possibility know any\nthing about.\n\n\n\n\nCHAP. III.\n\n    Sweet Juliet, that with angels dost remain,\n  Accept this latest favour at my hands,\n  That living honour'd thee, and being dead,\n  With funeral praises do adorn thy tomb.\n\n                                               ROMEO AND JULIET.\n\n\nThe day was now fixed at the distance of a week for the removal of the\nSt. Aubyns to London. Ellen lamented much the impossibility of having\nLaura Cecil with her, who would have been such a support to her in a\nsituation so new; but nothing could be urged on that point, as it was\nimpossible she could leave Juliet, who appeared sometimes better\nsometimes worse, but always patient, gentle, and pious to a degree that\nwas really angelic.\n\nEllen felt sincerely grieved to leave her, and proposed that she should\nbe removed to London for better advice, but found this expedient had\nbeen before resorted to, and Doctor B----'s advice frequently renewed by\nletters since, and that it was thought the air of London did not agree\nwith her. The weather now, for the time of year, the second week in\nMarch, was remarkably mild; and the medical man in attendance on Juliet,\nwho had now been for some days tolerably free from the low fever which\ngenerally hung about her, permitted her to go out once or twice in a\ngarden chair, for the benefit of the air: the returning verdure of\nspring seemed, for a time, to revive her: but whether the exertion was\ntoo much, or some unobserved change in the atmosphere affected her\ndelicate frame, could not be known; but she was suddenly seized with one\nof those attacks of fever which had so frequently brought her to the\nbrink of the grave; and on the day before that fixed for Ellen's leaving\nNorthamptonshire, a note from Laura announced that the life of this\nadmirable young creature was despaired of.\n\n\"She is perfectly sensible,\" added the afflicted sister; \"the dear angel\nretains all her usual pious composure; she wishes to see you. Could you,\ndear Lady St. Aubyn, without being too much affected, come to her?\"\n\nEllen, bursting into tears, put the note into St. Aubyn's hand, saying,\n\"Oh, my dear Lord; let me go--pray let me go directly!\"\n\n\"Be less alarmed, be more composed, my dearest love,\" replied he, after\nglancing over the contents, \"or I cannot consent to your going. I wish\nit had not been asked.\"\n\n\"Oh, indeed, dear St. Aubyn, I am quite composed, quite easy; but I\nshall suffer much more in not seeing the dear, dear creature once again,\nthan even by witnessing this sudden and most unexpected change.\"\n\n\"Well, my love, we will go together; but do not be too much alarmed; she\nmay yet recover: Laura's fears may outrun the occasion: Juliet has often\nbeen very ill before; but we will go: they will both, I know, be pleased\nat your coming.\"\n\nHe then ordered the carriage, which was soon ready; and half an hour\nbrought them to Rose-hill. Ellen was immediately shewn to Juliet's room:\nby the bed-side sat Laura: her cheeks, lips, and whole countenance, were\nthe colour of monumental marble; not a tear fell from her eyes; not a\nsigh heaved her bosom; but the woe, the deep expressive woe which marked\nevery feature, no language could describe: she rose, and advanced a few\nsteps to meet Ellen, grasping her hand with one which the touch of death\ncould alone have rendered colder; her lips moved, but no articulate word\nbroke the mournful silence.\n\nEllen turned pale, shuddered, and looked ready to faint; Miss Cecil\nmade a sign to an attendant, who, bathed in tears, stood near her: she\nplaced a chair for Lady St. Aubyn, and brought her a few drops in some\nwater; she wept, and was relieved.\n\n\"Oh, why did I send for you!\" said Laura, in a low tone, and speaking\nwith difficulty; \"I fear it is too much.\"\n\n\"Don't be frightened, my Lady,\" said the nurse: \"Miss Juliet is a little\neasier; she is dozing.\"\n\nIn a few minutes Juliet moved and spoke, but so faintly, her voice could\nhardly be distinguished. In an instant Laura was on her knees beside\nher, and catching the imperfect sounds, replied in a voice which\nbetrayed not the anguish of her soul, \"Yes, my love, she is here--will\nyou see her?\"\n\nThen turning to Ellen, she motioned her to approach. Ellen rose, and\nwent to the bed-side; she looked on Juliet, and saw that sweet angelic\ncountenance, slightly flushed, and looking as composed as ever; and\nignorant of the appearances of disease, fancied her better, and was, in\nsome measure, comforted. Juliet faintly articulated a few words,\nexpressive of the pleasure she felt in seeing Ellen, and would have said\nmore, but the nurse, for the sake of all, interposed, and requested that\nMiss Juliet might not be allowed to speak much. With difficulty she held\nout her feeble emaciated arms to Ellen, who tenderly embraced her, and\nhalf dissolved in tears, retired to the window, whither she drew Miss\nCecil. Still the wretched Laura shed no tear; and the deep grief,\nimpressed on her fine countenance, was much more painful to the beholder\nthan the loudest expressions of sorrow could have been.\n\n  \"Give sorrow vent: the grief which does not speak\n  Whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break!\"\n\n\"For heaven's sake, my dearest Laura,\" said Ellen, \"endeavour to take\ncomfort; surely she is better--she will recover!\"\n\nLaura only shook her head; and the nurse approaching, said, \"Indeed,\nMadam, Miss Cecil will kill herself; she has not had her clothes off\nthese two nights, nor has the slightest refreshment passed her lips this\nday.\"\n\n\"Oh! talk not to me of rest or food,\" cried Laura, \"I can partake of\nneither.\"\n\nEllen most tenderly urged her to take something; but pressing her hands\nupon her heart, she replied, \"Oh no, oh no--I could not; indeed I could\nnot. Go,\" she added, \"my dear friend--go, this is no place for you;\nnothing but the request of ----; nothing but _her_ request should have\ninduced me to send for you.\"\n\n\"But now I _am_ here,\" said Ellen, \"surely you will allow me to stay; I\nmay be of use to you; of comfort to dear dear Juliet.\"\n\nIn vain she urged. Laura sacrificed all selfish considerations, and\ninsisted on her returning home, promising to send to her should Juliet\nwish to see her again; and St. Aubyn, anxious for her, now sent to\nrequest his wife would come: she therefore embraced her friend, and\nlooking once more on the departing saint, who now again lay heavily\ndozing, she lifted up her hands and eyes to heaven, and, with another\nshower of tears, left the room.\n\nSt. Aubyn was rejoiced to find her disposed to accompany him home,\nthough she complained bitterly that Laura would not let her stay.\n\n\"Laura,\" said he, \"judges as she always does, wisely, and acts kindly:\nyou could be of no real service, and your being here would be highly\nimproper; you must not think of it.\"\n\nTwo days of the greatest anxiety now passed, and at the end of that time\nthe fair and lovely Juliet breathed no more: her last moments were\nattended by consolation so powerful, and hopes so celestial, as might\nwell have taught the worldly \"how a Christian could die!\"\n\nFor many days Laura was confined to her bed, and it was feared she would\nfollow her sister to the grave; but by degrees she shook off the excess\nof her sorrow, and for her father's sake endeavoured to recover from the\ndreadful shock she had received.\n\nSir William Cecil, who had long been convinced that Juliet would not\nlive many months, was more easily consoled. The St. Aubyns of course had\ndelayed their journey to London on this event; and finding that Sir\nWilliam Cecil was disposed to make an excursion to Bath, which his gouty\nhabit indeed rendered almost necessary, they endeavoured to prevail on\nLaura to come to them at St. Aubyn Castle for a short time, and then go\nwith them to London. From this proposal, especially the latter part, she\nfor some time shrunk, and wished to be allowed to remain at Rose-hill\nalone: but that her friends would not permit: and Sir William having\narranged to go to Bath at the same time with a neighbouring family, and\nto be in the same house with them, Laura was at length prevailed on to\nremove to the Castle, and from thence, after a short stay, to accompany\nher friends to London, where they promised her an apartment exclusively\nher own, and that she should see no other till she herself wished it.\n\n\"Yet why,\" said she, \"my dearest Lady St. Aubyn, why should I burden you\nwith one so powerless to add to your comforts, or partake your\npleasures?\"\n\n\"Is not that an unkind question?\" said Ellen; \"or do you really believe\nme insensible to the gratification of soothing your mind, and supporting\nyour spirits? Whenever you will permit me, I will be your visitor in\nyour apartment; whenever my company would be irksome, I will leave you\nto yourself, provided I do not find you the worse for the indulgence.\"\n\nAll was therefore thus arranged, and Miss Cecil, Lord and Lady St. Aubyn\nin one carriage, and Miss Cecil's maid, and Ellen's talkative but\nfaithful Jane, in another, with out riders, &c. in great style left\nNorthamptonshire, and arrived the next evening at the Earl's magnificent\nhouse in Cavendish-square.--Lady St. Aubyn's first care was to select\nsuch an apartment for the mournful Laura as would make her easy, and\nfree from restraint; and having conducted her to it, she told her she\nwas entirely mistress there, and never should be interrupted unless she\nchose it.\n\nEllen, who had made several little attempts in verse since she had seen\nthose of Miss Cecil, now soothed her sorrow for the loss of the sweet\nJuliet by a few stanzas, which, when she thought her able to bear them,\nshe gave to Laura, who was gratified by this little tribute to her\nloved, lamented sister's memory.\n\n\n  ELEGIAC STANZAS.\n\n  How mourns the heart, when early fades away\n    The opening promise of a riper bloom;\n  When youth and beauty, innocently gay,\n    Sink in the silent ruin of the tomb!\n\n  Oh, thou pure spirit! which in life's fair dawn,\n    Arose superior to that childish frame,\n  (Fair tho' it was) from which thou art withdrawn,\n    To that bright Heaven from whence thy beauty came.\n\n  Sweet Juliet! happily releas'd from care,\n    Which future years perhaps had bade the prove;\n  A heart so tender, and a form so fair,\n    Ill with the perils of the world had strove!\n\n  Thy heart expanding at affection's voice,\n    How had it borne in native kindness warm,\n  To check the rapid fire of youthful choice,\n    And dread deceit beneath the loveliest form!\n\n  To thee were graces so benignly given,\n    A soul so tender, and a wit so rare;\n  A love of harmony, as if kind Heaven\n    Had bade thee for an early bliss prepare.\n\n  Long shall the heart which lov'd thy dawning grace,\n    The pensive mem'ry of each charm retain;\n  Thy winning manners studiously retrace,\n    And dwell anew on each harmonious strain.\n\n  Nor shall that heart to present scenes confine\n    Its views and wishes; but with worthier care,\n  Seek to preserve an innocence like thine,\n    And humbly hope thy happiness to share.\n\n\n\n\nCHAP. IV.\n\n  To such how fair appears each grain of sand,\n  Or humblest weed as wrought by nature's hand!\n  A shell, or stone, he can with pleasure view.--\n  ----See with what art each curious shell is made:\n  Here carved in fret-work, there with pearl inlaid!\n  What vivid th' enamel'd stones adorn,\n  Fair as the paintings of the purple morn!\n\n                                                      S. JENYNS.\n\n\nThe arrival of the St. Aubyns in London opened a wide field for\nconjecture and conversation in the fashionable world. It was known, for\nSt. Aubyn's haughty relations had not failed to publish it, that he had\nmarried a young woman far inferior to him in rank, and absolutely\nwithout fortune. It was also known that she was uncommonly beautiful;\nand great anxiety, mixed with no small share of ridicule, was excited by\nher expected _debut_; but the modest Ellen was in no haste to afford the\nstarers and sneerers so rich a treat: she merely went to a few morning\nexhibitions, attended only by her Lord, for the first fortnight of her\nstay in town; and indeed St. Aubyn hoped, notwithstanding her present\ndistance and displeasure, to induce his aunt, Lady Juliana Mordaunt, to\nchaperon Ellen to some of the public places, being fully sensible what\nan advantage it would be to her to be so supported: he therefore\nacquiesced in her wishes, till he could bring about this desirable\narrangement, and allowed his wife to spend most of her evenings at home.\n\nSeveral ladies had however called on Lady St. Aubyn, some of whom had\nleft their cards, and others she had seen. Most of these visits she had\nreturned; but one of those, who had shewn the greatest desire to see\nmore of Lady St. Aubyn--indeed, a distant relation of the Earl's, she\nhad not been yet to see.\n\nOne morning Lord St. Aubyn said he would go with her to see the museum\nof an old friend of his, who lived at Knightsbridge, who was a great\ncollector of every thing rare and curious, particularly shells,\npictures, and gems. \"He is quite a character,\" added he: \"but I will not\nanticipate your surprize: we can go there early. I told him we would go\nto-day, or to-morrow; and after we have been there, you can call on Lady\nMeredith, who gave herself a trouble so extraordinary, as actually to\nalight from her carriage and make you a personal visit.\"\n\n\"You will go with me?\"\n\n\"Pardon me, my love, that is not necessary, and you really must learn to\n_go alone_, and not depend so much on me.\"\n\n\"I hope her Ladyship may not be at home.\"\n\n\"Indeed, my love, I hope she may; for dissimilar as they are in every\nrespect, my aunt, Lady Juliana, spends a great deal of her time there.\nShe is so fond of finding fault, and differing in opinion from others,\nthat I really believe she goes to Lady Meredith's chiefly for the\npleasure of lecturing her, who is so indifferent to the opinion of any\none, that she does not think it worth while to be at the trouble of\nresenting the sharp things Lady Juliana says to her.\"\n\n\"What a strange motive for being intimate with any one.\"\n\n\"Strange enough: but when you see more of the world, you will discern\nthat affection is not the only bond of union between those who call\nthemselves friends.\"\n\n\"I think I have seen that already in Mrs. Dawkins and Miss Alton.\"\n\n\"True: convenience, the wish of finding a patient _hearer_, accident,\nthe want of a more pleasing companion, are amongst the numerous\ninducements which form what we are pleased to call friendship. Nay, I\nonce heard a good lady say she was sure a family she mentioned had\nproved themselves _real friends_ to her, for they had sent her a _large\nplumcake_[A].\"\n\n    [A] A fact.\n\nEllen laughed at this curious definition of friendship.\n\n\"Well,\" said St. Aubyn: \"but to return to Lady Meredith. I hope she may,\nby reporting well of you to Lady Juliana, induce her to become more\nfriendly towards us: you know how anxious I am to have you in her good\ngraces--not, believe me, on account of her immense fortune, but because,\nwith all her pride and stiffness, she has a warm heart and excellent\nqualities, and would be to you a most valuable friend; so pray do your\nbest to please Lady Meredith.\"\n\n\"Very well: but will you tell me the most likely way to succeed?\"\n\n\"I am afraid it will be difficult: she will think you too handsome,\nunless indeed she intends soon to have a large party.\"\n\n\"How is it possible _that_ should have any thing to do with the matter?\"\n\n\"Why, Lady Meredith's great ambition is to outshine all her competitors\nin the number and fashion of those collected at her routes; and as\nsometimes, in spite of her charms, and the lustre of her abundant\njewels, there are some obstinate animals who will be uncivil enough to\nrecollect they '_have seen them before_,' consequently become rather\nweary of them, and desert her for some newer belle. Lady Meredith may\nthink you (so new to the world, and so beautiful) a desirable\nreinforcement, and may therefore honour you with an invitation: pray\naccept it, if she does, and take great pains at your toilette to-day:\nfor my friend, Mr. Dorrington, is a great admirer of beauty, and will\nshew you his fine collection a great deal more readily if he admire\nyour's, particularly if he should fancy you like a bust he has of the\n_bona Dea_ (at least he gives it that name, though it is so mutilated,\nhe confesses he does not exactly know for what or whom it was designed),\nwhich he almost idolizes.\"\n\nEllen hastened to obey, but she wished herself at Castle St. Aubyn, for\nshe had not liked the little she had seen of Lady Meredith, and she\nshrunk from the idea of this formidable morning visit. Conquering her\nfears, however, as well as she could, and looking uncommonly beautiful,\nshe rejoined her Lord. Her milliner had just sent home a most elegant\nand expensive morning dress, bonnet, and cloak, all of the finest\nmaterials, and in that delicate modest style, which she always chose,\nand was to her peculiarly becoming. St. Aubyn thought he had never seen\nher look so well, and gave great credit to Madame de ---- for consulting\nso admirably the natural style of her beauty, as to embellish, without\noverloading it. The barouche was at the door: she had therefore only\ntime to say \"farewell\" to Laura, and stepping hastily in, half an hour\nbrought them to Mr. Dorrington's.\n\nAs the carriage stopt at the house, the figure of a fine old man with\ngrey hair caught the eye of Lady St. Aubyn: he was at the instant\nascending the steps to knock at the door, and was so meanly dressed,\nthat she supposed him a mendicant, or at least extremely poor, and her\nready hand sought her purse, intending to give relief to the infirm\nlooking old man. What then was her surprize, when, just as she stretched\nout her hand for that purpose, the old man, looking into the carriage,\nand seeing Lord St. Aubyn, advanced, and taking off his hat with the\nmost courtly air imaginable, displayed a fine commanding forehead,\nexpressive eyes, and a contour of countenance so admirable, as, once\nseen, could never be forgotten.\n\n\"Ah! my dear St. Aubyn,\" he exclaimed, \"how rejoiced I am to see you! I\nam really happy that I returned in time to receive you: as you did not\nsay positively you would come to-day, it was all a chance; but come, do\nme the favour to alight: I have just succeeded in making the finest\npurchase--a shell, a unique: you shall see it.\"\n\nBy this time St. Aubyn had alighted, and giving his hand to Ellen,\nintroduced her to this extraordinary man. Nothing could be more polished\nthan his address, nothing more elegant than the grace with which he\nreceived her, or more spirited than the little compliment he made St.\nAubyn on his happiness, and the beauty of his lady.\n\nWhoever looked at Mr. Dorrington, when his shabby old hat was removed,\nmust instantly see the man of sense and superior information: whoever\nheard him speak, heard instantly that it was the voice and enunciation\nnot only of a gentleman, but of one who had lived in the very highest\ncircles; and yet his appearance, at first, would have led any one to\nsuppose him, as Ellen did, in absolute poverty. He led the way into his\nfavourite apartment, indeed the only one he ever inhabited, except his\nbed-chamber; and into neither would he ever suffer any one to enter\nunless he was with them. No broom, nor brush of any kind, ever disturbed\nthe sacred dust of this hallowed retirement: in the grate, the\naccumulated ashes of _many months_ remained; the windows were dimmed\nwith the untouched dirt of years: and nothing but the table on which his\nslender meals were spread (for his temperance in eating and drinking\nwere as remarkable as his singular neglect of personal attire), and two\nor three chairs for the reception of occasional visitors, were ever\nwiped. In one of these he seated the astonished Ellen, who gazed around\nher at treasures, the value of which exceeded her utmost guess. A\nhandsome cabinet with glass doors contained a variety of curious gems,\nvases, and specimens of minerals: some invaluable pictures stood leaning\nagainst the walls: heaps of books in rich bindings, which Ellen\nafterwards found were either remarkable for their scarceness, or full of\nfine prints, lay scattered around.\n\n\"Now, my Lord,\" said Mr. Dorrington, \"I will shew you and Lady St. Aubyn\nmy new purchase: I said it was unique, but it is not exactly so: I have\nanother of the same sort; but these are the only two in the world: I\nthink this is a little, a very little finer than that I had before; I\nbought it at ****'s sale, and gave a monstrous price for it; but I was\ndetermined to have it: it was the only thing in his collection I\ncoveted.\"\n\nHe then displayed his new purchase, and descanted for some time on its\nvarious beauties; and seeing Ellen really admired it, pleased also with\nher beauty and sweetness, he proceeded to shew her his collection, and\neven those rare articles which never appeared but to particular\nfavourites, saying she was \"_worthy to admire them_.\" Some beautiful\nminiatures particularly pleased her, and he was delighted that she\nseemed to understand their value. He also produced some fine illuminated\nmissals, and explained every thing with so much grace and perspicuity as\nquite delighted her.\n\nTwo hours fled swiftly in examining these wonders, and even then they\nhad not seen half, but promised to visit him another day. He told Lady\nSt. Aubyn he should be at her command at any time; and then most\npolitely attending her to her carriage, he with a courteous bow took his\nleave.\n\nOn their way home, St. Aubyn told Ellen that the extraordinary man they\nhad just left had for many years led a life of dissipation, by which he\nreduced a large fortune almost to nothing; but that having once, in\nconsequence of his extravagance, been obliged to sell a collection\nstill finer than that he now had, he had determined to gratify his\npassion for _virtu_, without the risk of again ruining himself, and\ntherefore denied himself every thing but the bare necessaries of life;\nand was, consequently, enabled to purchase rare articles at any price,\nand to outbid other collectors, who had different demands on part of\ntheir incomes. He kept no man, and but one female servant; and St. Aubyn\nsaid, that when he had called on him a few days before, he found him in\na storm of rage with this poor servant-girl, for having dared, while he\nwas engaged with some company in his sitting-room, to brush out his\nbed-chamber, in the door of which he had, _par miracle_, left the\nkey.--\"And I am sure, Sir,\" said the girl, crying, \"I never touched\nnothing but that great wooden man\" (meaning a layman which always stands\nin Mr. Dorrington's room), \"that's enough to frighten a body; and he I\nonly just moved, for master never won't have nothing like other people;\nand I thought if he brought the gentlefolks in his bed-room, as he\nsometimes will, it was a shame to see such a place, and such a dirty\ntable cover; so I was only just going to make it a little tidy, and I\nnever broke nothing at all.\"\n\n\"I comforted the poor girl,\" said St. Aubyn, \"by giving her a trifle,\nand advised her by no means to provoke her master, by presuming to touch\na brush in his rooms again without order: and she promised me she would\nin future be contented with cleaning her own kitchen and passages--'And\nnever touch nothing belonging to master's rooms, nor any of them\noutlandish things, that be all full of dust, and enough to breed moths\nand all manner of flies all over the house.'----And I think,\" said he,\nlaughing, \"she appears to have kept her promise very exactly.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAP. V.\n\n  ---- So perfumed, that\n  The winds were love-sick with it.\n  ---- She did lie\n  In her pavilion, cloth of gold.\n\n                                           ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA.\n\n\nLady St. Aubyn set down the Earl in Cavendish Square, and proceeded\nalone to the house of Lady Meredith in Portland Place. A carriage which\nappeared to be in waiting drove from the door to make way for her's, by\nwhich Ellen guessed Lady Meredith had company. To the inquiry whether\nher Ladyship were at home, she was answered in the affirmative, and\nrequested to walk up stairs. Ellen was now tolerably well accustomed to\nmagnificent houses; but there was something in the style of this\ndifferent from any thing she had yet seen: the hall was not only warmed\nby superb stoves, but bronze figures, nearly as large as life, stood in\ndifferent attitudes in every corner, and all bearing censers or urns, in\nwhich costly aromatics perpetually burnt, diffusing around a rich but\nalmost overpowering perfume. As she ascended the staircase she found\nevery possible recess filled with baskets, vases, &c. full of the most\nrare and expensive exotics, which bloomed even amidst the cold winds of\nMarch, with nearly as much luxuriance as they would have done in their\nnative climes; for every part of this mansion was kept in a regular\ndegree of heat by flues passing through the walls and beneath the floors\ncommunicating with fires, which were not visible: when, on the other\nhand, the weather became warm, the cambric sun-blinds at every window\nwere kept perpetually moistened with odoriferous waters, by two black\nservants, whose whole employment it was to attend to this branch of\nluxury; indeed, to luxury alone the whole mansion appeared to be\ndedicated. The floors were not merely covered, but carpetted with\nmaterials, whose softness and elasticity seemed produced by a mixture of\nsilk and down: the sofas, ottomans, &c. were not merely stuffed, but\nevery one had piles of cushions appertaining to it, filled with\neider-down, and covered with the richest silks or velvets. To the\npresiding goddess of this superb temple Lady St. Aubyn was presently\nintroduced. In her boudoir Lady Meredith sat, or rather lay, not on a\nchair or sofa, but on piles of cushions, covered with the finest painted\nvelvet. Her majestic, though somewhat large figure, appeared to great\nadvantage in the studied half-dress in which she now appeared; yet there\nwas something in her attitude, in the disposal of her drapery, from\nwhich the modest eye of Ellen was involuntarily averted. Her dress was\nof the finest and whitest muslin that India ever produced, and clung\naround her so closely as fully to display the perfect symmetry of her\nform: the sleeves were full, and so short, they scarcely descended below\nthe shoulder, which not the slightest veil shaded from the beholder's\ngaze, while the delicate arms thus exposed were decorated with rows of\nwhat she called undress pearls: they were of an extraordinary size and\nbeauty, and were formed into armlets and bracelets of fanciful but\nelegant fashion: two or three strings, and a large Maltese cross of the\nsame, were the only covering of her fair bosom, and a few were twisted\nloosely amongst her dark but glossy and luxuriant hair. At her feet sat\na lovely little girl about four years old, with a low hassock before\nher, on which she was displaying the contents of one of mamma's caskets\nof jewels, as well amused as the great Potemkin himself could have been\nby arranging his diamonds in different figures on black velvet; a\nfavourite entertainment of that extraordinary man.\n\nOn one side of Lady Meredith sat a gay young officer in the uniform of\nthe guards, and on the other a stiff formal looking old lady in a dress\nsomewhat old fashioned, but more remarkable for being excessively neat\nand prim: she had a sour contemptuous look, and her stays and whole\nfigure had the stiff appearance of a portrait of the last century. She\nlevelled her eye-glass at Ellen, as she followed the servant who\nannounced her into the room, and with an emphatic _humph!_ (not unlike\npoor Mrs. Ross's) let it fall again as if perfectly satisfied with one\nlook, and not feeling any wish to repeat it; yet repeat it she did,\nagain and again, and, as if the review displeased or agitated her, her\ncountenance became still more and more sour. In the meantime Lady\nMeredith half rose from her cushions, and holding out her hand,\nlanguidly said:--\n\n\"My dear Lady St. Aubyn, how good you are to come and see me! I am\ndelighted I happened to be at home. Andrew,\" (to the servant, who,\nhaving placed a chair, was retiring) \"don't give Lady St. Aubyn that\nshocking chair: bring a heap of those cushions and arrange them like\nmine: do rest on them, my dear creature; you must be fatigued to death.\"\n\n\"Excuse me,\" said Ellen, smiling with modest grace; \"I am not accustomed\nto such a luxurious seat, and prefer a chair.\"\n\n\"Do you really? Is it possible!\" exclaimed the languishing Lady, sinking\nback again as if the exertion of speaking had been too much for her.\n\"Well, I should absolutely die in twelve hours if I might not be\nindulged in this delicious mode of reposing.\"\n\n\"Nonsense!\" said the stiff old lady, in no very conciliating tone; \"how\ncan you be so ridiculous: pray how do you manage when you sit six or\neight hours at pharo, or go to the Opera--you have none of those silly\nthings there?\"\n\n\"Oh, as to pharo, dear delightful pharo, that keeps me alive, prevents\nmy feeling fatigued even when my unfortunate feet cannot command so much\nas a poor little footstool; and as to the Opera, I wonder your Ladyship\nasks, for you know very well, my box, and the cushions belonging to it,\nare stuffed with eider-down, like these,\" and she sunk still more\nindolently on her yielding supporters. \"Apropos of the Opera,\" added\nshe; \"have you obtained a box there, Lady St. Aubyn?\"\n\n\"No,\" replied Ellen: \"Lord St. Aubyn had one offered to him, but as it\nis so late in the season, and our stay in town will not be long, I\nbegged him to decline it.\"\n\nLady Meredith here exchanged a smile of contempt with the officer, which\nseemed to say \"how rustic that is!\" then half yawning she said:--\n\n\"Oh, but indeed that was very wrong: what can a woman of fashion do\nwithout a box at the Opera? I am sure, from all I have heard of the\nformer Lady St. Aubyn, for I had not the honour of knowing her, she\nwould not have lived a month in London without one.\"\n\n\"Very likely,\" said the old lady, \"but for all that _I_ think _this\nyoung person_ quite in the right, and as to the late Lady St. Aubyn, I\nam sure _she_ was no pattern for any body, and I wonder, Lady Meredith,\nyou will name her in my hearing.\"\n\n\"I beg your Ladyship's pardon,\" replied Lady Meredith; \"I forgot.\"\n\n\"Well, no matter; don't say any more.\"\n\nTo paint Ellen's surprize would be difficult: the odd epithet this\nstrange lady had applied to her, \"_this young person_,\" the allusions to\nthe late countess, of whom she never heard without an indescribable sort\nof emotion, and the suspicion she now entertained that her ungracious\nneighbour was Lady Juliana Mordaunt, all conspired to overpower her;\nand the heat of the apartment, the strong smell of perfumes from immense\nChina jars, with which the room was ornamented, completed it; in short,\nthough wholly unaccustomed to such sensations, she had nearly fainted.\nThe young officer, who had long been watching her interesting and lovely\ncountenance, saw her change colour, and said hastily:--\n\n\"The lady is ill.\"\n\n\"What's the matter, child?\" said the old lady; and rising hastily, she\nuntied her bonnet and the strings of her mantle, which, falling aside,\ndiscovered enough of her figure to render her situation obvious.\n\n\"So!\" exclaimed the old lady; but whether the interjection expressed\nsurprize, pleasure, or what other sensation, was not easy to discover.\n\"Do, Colonel Lenox, exert yourself so much as to open the door and ring\nfor a glass of water: the air of this room is enough to kill any body.\"\n\n\"Pardon me,\" said Ellen, the colour returning to her cheeks and lips,\n\"I am sorry to give so much trouble; I am much better.\"\n\n\"That's well,\" said the old lady. By this time the water was brought;\nEllen drank some, and quite recovered, begged leave to ring for her\ncarriage.\n\n\"Don't go yet, child,\" said the old lady; \"perhaps you may be ill\nagain.\"\n\n\"No: pray don't go yet,\" said Lady Meredith, who all this time had been\nholding a smelling bottle to her own nose, affecting to be too much\novercome to do any thing for the relief of her visitor. \"You have\nfrightened me enormously; stay a little to make me amends; besides, you\nstill tremble and look pale: are you subject to these faintings?\"\n\n\"Not in the least,\" said Ellen. \"I believe the heat of the room overcame\nme.\"\n\n\"No wonder,\" said the old lady; \"it is a perfect stove, and enough to\nunstring the nerves of Hercules, especially when aided by the powerful\nscent of those abominable jars.\"\n\n\"Oh, my dear sweet jars,\" cried Lady Meredith; \"now positively you shall\nnot abuse them; any thing else you may find what fault you please with,\nbut my sweet jars I cannot give up:--have you ever read Anna Seward's\npoetical recipe to make one?\"\n\n\"Not I,\" replied her friend in an angry tone, \"nor ever desire it; all\nthe poetry in the world should never induce me to fill my rooms with\nsuch nonsense.\"\n\nDuring this conversation, the little girl, who had tired herself with\nlooking at the jewels and trinkets, rose from her cushion, and said:--\n\n\"Pretty mamma, dress pretty Miranda in these,\" holding up some fine\nemeralds.\n\n\"No indeed, child: go to Colonel Lenox, and ask him to adorn you; I\ncannot take so much trouble.\"\n\n\"No, Miranda won't; Miranda go to pretty, sweet, beautiful lady;\" and\nshe went to Ellen, who, admiring the lovely little creature, kissed her,\nand indulged her by putting the shining ornaments round her little fair\nneck and arms, and twisting some in the ringlets of her glossy hair.\n\n\"Now I beautiful,\" said the child, looking at herself. \"Is not Miranda\npretty now, mamma?\"\n\n\"Yes, my love, beautiful as an angel: come and kiss me, my darling.\"\n\nThe child, climbing up the load of cushions, laid her sweet little face\nclose to her mother's and kissed her.\n\n\"Is not she a beauty and a love?\" said the injudicious mother to the\nColonel, clasping the little creature to her bosom, with an air more\ntheatrical than tender. He whispered something, in return to which she\nreplied with affected indignation, \"Oh, you flattering wretch, _that_\nshe is, and a thousand times handsomer; but she will never know what[B]\nher mother was, for before she is old enough to distinguish, I shall\neither be dead or hideous, and then she will hate me.\" She heaved a deep\nsigh, and looked distressed at the idea, which the child perceiving,\nfondly twined her little arms round her mother's neck, and answered:--\n\n\"No, dear mamma, Miranda always love you, you so beautiful.\"\n\n    [B] It is said that the once lovely Lady C----, when on her\n        death-bed, lamented to a friend sitting by her, that her\n        little boy, then in the room, _would never know what a\n        beautiful creature his mother was_. \"She feels the\n        ruling passion strong in death!\"\n\n\"See,\" said the old lady, \"the effect of your lessons; you teach her to\nlove nothing but beauty, and if you were to lose your good looks, she\nwould of course cease to care any thing about you.\"\n\n\"Yes, that is exactly what I dread.\"\n\n\"Then why do you not endeavour to prevent it, by giving her more\nreasonable notions? If she is led to suppose beauty and fine dress the\nonly claims to affection, if she is never taught that virtue and an\naffectionate heart can alone ensure unfading esteem, she will grow up a\nmere frivolous automaton, and probably throw herself away on the first\ncoxcomb with a handsome face and red coat she meets with.\"\n\nThe Colonel coloured, laughed, and bowed.\n\n\"Nay,\" said the old lady, \"if you choose to apply the character to\nyourself, with all my heart, settle it as you please; but, I suppose,\nall red coats are not mere coxcombs.\"\n\nLady Meredith and the Colonel laughed, but did not appear entirely\npleased even with this half apology.\n\n\"Well, but,\" said Lady Meredith, \"what, Ma'am, would you have me do with\nMiranda? Can I prevent the child from observing that beauty is\nuniversally admired?\"\n\n\"That,\" said Colonel Lenox, with a bow, \"would indeed be impossible\nwhile with _you_.\"\n\nThe old lady shrugged up her shoulders, with a sour contemptuous frown,\nand said:--\"Then put her into a better school.\"\n\n\"A school!\" replied Lady Meredith, half screaming; \"what, would you have\nme send the dear creature from me? No, my only darling, thou shalt never\nleave me.\"\n\n\"Pshaw!\" exclaimed the old lady, with even encreasing sourness; \"well,\nif fashion absolutely demands this _extraordinary_ degree of tenderness,\nfor very good mothers _have_ sent their children to school before now,\nat least, do get the child a rational and sensible governess, and let\nher employ herself in something better than admiring your jewels, or\neven your beauty, all the morning.--Ah! I wish,\" said she, turning\nabruptly to Ellen, \"I wish she had such an instructress as _your Miss\nCecil_.\"\n\nEllen's surprise at this sudden address from one with whom not even the\nceremony of introduction had passed, yet who seemed to know her and all\nher concerns so well, almost deprived her of the power to reply; she\nrallied her spirits, however, and said, that any mother might think half\nher fortune well bestowed, could it purchase such a preceptress: \"But,\"\nadded she, \"such excellent qualities as Miss Cecil possesses, are rarely\nto be met with in any rank of life: my experience of character has,\nindeed, been very limited, but Lord St. Aubyn says, for elegance of\nmanners, sweetness of temper, and strength of mind, her equal will\nhardly ever be found.\"\n\nThe blended modesty and spirit with which she spoke appeared to please\nthe old lady, who, with an approving nod, again took up her eye-glass,\nand viewed Lady St. Aubyn from head to foot, though she saw that the\nsteadfast gaze embarrassed and covered her with blushes.\n\nLady Meredith said something to the old lady in so low a tone, that the\nword \"introduce\" was alone audible, to which she replied with some\ntartness: \"No, I can introduce myself.\"\n\nEllen now once more rose to depart, and Lady Meredith detained her\nanother minute, to mention a large party she intended having in about\nthree weeks, for which she said she should send Lady St. Aubyn a ticket;\nand requested her to tell St. Aubyn he might come also, \"For I hear,\"\nshe said, \"you always are seen together.\"\n\n\"So much the better,\" muttered the old lady, who seemed, however, to be\nspeaking aside, so no one took any notice of her. She rose when Ellen\nleft the room, and returned her graceful courtesy with a not ungracious\nbend, and bade her good morning with an air more conciliating than she\nhad shewn on her entrance.\n\nOn relating the particulars of this visit to her Lord, Lady St. Aubyn\nfound there was no doubt the old lady she had seen was Lady Juliana\nMordaunt: he made her repeat the conversation that had passed, and when\nshe told him that the old lady had made use of the disrespectful term,\n\"_this young person_,\" in speaking of her, he coloured excessively, and\nexecrating his aunt's pride and impertinence, told his wife she ought to\nhave quitted the room immediately. He smiled when Ellen mentioned Lady\nJuliana's attention and kindness on her fainting, and said, \"That is so\nlike her: her warm heart thaws the ice of her manners when she sees any\none ill or distrest.\"\n\nWhen Ellen repeated the mention which had been made in the course of\nconversation of the late Lady St. Aubyn, he changed colour, and said,\n\"Well, Ellen, were you not surprized? You did not, I believe, know--you\nnever heard I had been married before.\"\n\n\"Pardon me, my Lord, I was previously acquainted with that\ncircumstance.\"\n\n\"You knew it!--from whom? Where did you hear it?\"\n\n\"From Miss Cecil, from Miss Alton, accidentally.\"\n\n\"And were they not astonished you had not heard it before?\"\n\n\"I had heard it before from Mrs. Bayfield, the day after we went to\nCastle St. Aubyn.\"\n\n\"From Mrs. Bayfield--she told you of it?--She told you--What, Ellen, did\nshe tell you more?\"\n\n\"Nothing, my Lord, but that your lady was young and beautiful, and died\nabroad.\"\n\n\"And why did you never mention the subject before? Why this reserve, my\nlove?\"\n\n\"Because I thought as you never told me of it yourself, you would rather\nthe subject were not mentioned.\"\n\n\"Dear creature!\" said St. Aubyn, sighing. \"I have always had reason to\nadmire the excellence of your judgment and the delicacy of your\nsentiments. Believe me, Ellen, I withhold from you only those things\nwhich I think will give you pain to know. Our acquaintance commenced\nunder such singular circumstances, that I had hardly opportunity to tell\nyou this before we were married, and in fact, that name, that\nrecollection is so hateful to me, is connected with so many painful\nideas, that I cannot bear to recall, to dwell upon it! Why that tear, my\nlove--are you dissatisfied with me?\"\n\n\"No, dearest St. Aubyn: whatever you do, appears to me wisest and best\nto be done--but I was pitying--I was thinking----\"\n\n\"Whom were you pitying?--Of what was my Ellen thinking?\"\n\n\"Pitying a woman, who, having once possessed your love, lost it so\nentirely, as to render her very name unpleasant to you. Thinking--ah,\nheaven!--thinking--should such ever be _my_ lot!\"\n\nShe paused, struggling with a sudden gush of tears, and sobs which\nalmost choaked her.\n\n\"Impossible, impossible!\" exclaimed St. Aubyn, clasping her to his\nbosom: \"you will never deserve it, never bring disgrace and dishonour on\nmy name, and blast with misery the most acute, the best years of my\nlife!--Agitate not yourself, my best love, with these frightful ideas.\nAh, had the hapless Rosolia been like thee!--but oh! how different were\nher thoughts and actions!----No more of this, compose yourself, my love,\nand tell me what more passed with this strange proud woman.\"\n\nAfter a few moments, Ellen recovered enough to repeat the remainder of\nthe conversation, with the result of which he appeared very well\npleased, and prophesied from the latter part of it they should soon be\non good terms with Lady Juliana Mordaunt, an event for which he appeared\nso anxious, that Ellen could not fail to wish it also; and, indeed, that\nlady's good sense and just sentiments had made a very favourable\nimpression on her mind, though her manners were so sour and repulsive.\n\nThis day Miss Cecil dined with her amiable friends, as they had no other\ncompany; indeed, except by a few gentlemen, their dinner hour had\ngenerally passed uninterrupted, Ellen not being yet sufficiently\nacquainted with any ladies to mix with them in dinner parties. The\nreport of St. Aubyn's male friends had, however, been so favourable\ntowards her, as to incline Lady Meredith to wish a more intimate\nacquaintance, and to attract so much youth, beauty, and grace to her\nevening parties, while Lady Juliana was pleased to hear that she\npossessed qualities in her eyes far superior, namely, modesty, talents,\nand a demeanor towards her husband equally delicate and affectionate.\n\nAfter dinner, St. Aubyn having some engagement, left the fair friends\nalone, and they enjoyed a long and confidential conversation.\n\nFrom Laura, Lady St. Aubyn learnt that Lady Juliana was well known to\nher, and that in spite of her austere and forbidden manners, and the\npleasure she undoubtedly took in contradicting almost every thing she\nheard, she was yet a woman of good sense, and would most certainly,\ncould her esteem be once engaged, prove to Ellen a steady and valuable\nfriend: \"Especially,\" added Laura, \"should any thing happen to Lord St.\nAubyn, for she is his only near relation to whom he could confide the\nfuture interests, either of his wife or child; and young and beautiful\nas you are, my dear Ellen, no doubt St. Aubyn thinks such an additional\nsupport would be highly desirable for you.\" Seeing she was deeply\naffected, for Ellen now believed she could discern the cause of St.\nAubyn's anxiety for her being on good terms with his aunt, and connected\nit with the painful circumstances he had told her were hanging over him,\nLaura now added, with a pensive smile, \"Nay, my dear friend, do not be\ndistressed. I have of late thought so much of mortality, I was not\nsensible how much you would be pained by the suggestion; but certainly,\nSt. Aubyn will not leave you a moment the sooner for my hinting the\npossibility of such an event.\"\n\nEllen endeavoured to shake off the painful ideas which forced themselves\nupon her, and asked Miss Cecil if she had known much of the former\nCountess. \"Not very much,\" said Laura: \"she was very handsome, but the\ncharacter of her beauty was so different from yours, that I have often\nwondered how St. Aubyn came to _choose_ two so different; though,\nindeed, I believe I should hardly say choose, for Lady Rosolia de\nMontfort was not so much his choice as that of his relations--at least,\nI believe he would never have thought of her as a wife if they had not.\"\n\n\"Who was she? Do tell me a little about her: I am quite a stranger to\nall particulars.\"\n\n\"I know little more than I have told you, except that she was the only\ndaughter of the late Earl de Montfort, a distant relation of Lord St.\nAubyn's. Lord de Montfort, during the life of his elder brother, went to\nSpain in a diplomatic situation, and there married the daughter of the\nDuke de Castel Nuovo: this marriage with an English protestant, was, for\na long time, opposed by the lady's relations: but, at length, moved by\nfear and compassion for her, whose attachment threw her into a lingering\ndisease, which threatened her existence, they consented on one\ncondition, namely, that the sons of the marriage should be educated\nRoman Catholics, and on the death of their father, be placed with their\nmaternal grandfather, while they permitted the daughters to be brought\nup in the Protestant religion, hoping, perhaps, that the influence of a\nmother over females might ultimately bring them also over to her faith:\nbut the Countess died young: one son and one daughter were her only\nchildren, the boy some years younger than his sister: they both remained\nwith their father (who soon after his marriage became Earl de Montfort),\nsometimes in Spain, sometimes in England, till the marriage of Lady\nRosolia with Lord St. Aubyn, though she was frequently his mother's\nguest, both in London and at St. Aubyn Castle, where the young Edmund\nalso often spent some time: he was a very fine and amiable boy, and\nexcessively attached to his sister.\n\nWhen Lord de Montfort died, the son was claimed by his maternal\ngrandfather, and Lord and Lady St. Aubyn went to Spain with him, where\nshe died: report spoke unfavourably of her conduct during her abode on\nthe Continent; indeed, in England, the gaiety of her manners, especially\nafter the death of Lord St. Aubyn's mother, approached more nearly to\nthe habits of foreign ladies than those of England. It was said, that\nwhile abroad, Lord St. Aubyn was involved in many unpleasant\ncircumstances by her behaviour: certain it is, that on his return, he\nappeared overwhelmed with melancholy, which was the more extraordinary,\nas it was well known they had not lived on very affectionate terms even\nbefore they had quitted this country.\"\n\n\"And what became of her brother: where is the young Lord de Montfort?\"\nasked Ellen. \"He has remained ever since in Spain,\" replied Laura; \"but\nas he will very soon be of age, he must then, I suppose, return to\nEngland to take possession of his estates, of which Lord St. Aubyn is\nthe guardian.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" thought Ellen, \"is it to his return St. Aubyn looks with so much\napprehension and dismay? What! O! what is the strange mystery in which\nthis story seems to be involved?\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAP. VI.\n\n  \"Within 'twas brilliant all, and light,\n  A thronging scene of figures bright:\n  It glowed on Ellen's dazzled sight,\n  As when the setting sun has given\n  Ten thousand hues to summer's even;\n  And from their tissue fancy frames,\n  AErial knights and fairy dames.\"\n\n                                               LADY OF THE LAKE.\n\n\nThe next morning, Ellen, who felt a little fatigued from the various\ncircumstances of the day before, some of which had considerably agitated\nher spirits, declined going out; and after breakfast retired to her own\ndressing-room; Laura, at the same time, going to her's, having letters\nto write to her father and some other friends.\n\nLady St. Aubyn was soon surrounded by her favourite books, some maps, a\ndrawing she was finishing, and all those resources with which she now\nknew so well how to fill up her time. In one corner stood an elegant\nharp, on which Ellen had been taking lessons, and had made a\nconsiderable proficiency; in another sat her faithful Jane busy at her\nneedle, at which she was very expert; and Ellen detesting to see any one\nidle, kept her generally employed either in fine work, or making linen\nfor the poor, to seek out, and relieve whom, was one branch of Jane's\nbusiness. A simple, though graceful taste, regulated the ornaments and\nfurniture of this favourite retirement; no velvet cushions, no\noverwhelming perfumes, were met with here; all was elegant, but all was\nmodest, and generally useful: a small bookcase, a porte-feuille, a\nnetting box, shewed that its inhabitant loved to be employed.\n\nBy a cheerful fire this fair inhabitant was now seated: the modesty of\nher demeanor, the delicacy of her dress, were such as suited one, who,\nthough young, and even girlish, was a wife, and likely to be a mother;\nthe tout-ensemble, in short, was a perfect contrast to the figure,\ndress, and apartment of the luxurious Lady Meredith. A complete silence\nprevailed (for Jane had learned when her lady chose, which as now was\nsometimes the case, to have her in her apartment, to be quiet), and had\nlasted at least half an hour, when a step was heard in the anti-room;\nand a footman knocking at the door, Jane opened it, and the servant\nrequested her to tell her lady that----A voice behind interrupted him,\nby saying, \"You need not trouble yourself, Sir; I know my way, and shall\nannounce myself.\" Ellen rose, and looked surprised, for visitors were\nnever shewn to this room: still more was she amazed when she saw the\nsharp countenance and stiff figure of the old lady she now supposed to\nbe Lady Juliana Mordaunt, who, pushing by the man, gave him one of her\nexpress nods, and said, \"You may go, Sir.\"--She then advanced, and\nseeing Jane, who rose and stared at this extraordinary visitant, she\nsaid, with another nod to Ellen, \"So, you make your maid work at her\nneedle: I am glad of it; but send her away now, for I want to talk to\nyou.\" Ellen seeing that Jane hesitated to leave her with this stranger,\nwhom the poor girl began to believe was deranged, told her to go to her\nown room, and she, gathering up her work, very readily obeyed; though\nshe went to the housekeeper and told her she thought they had better\nboth go and stay in the anti-room, for she really believed a mad-woman\nwas gone into her Lady's dressing-room. \"Nonsense!\" said the\nhousekeeper: \"I saw the lady go up: it is my Lord's aunt, Lady Juliana.\"\nThis intelligence quieted Jane, who really was under some fears for\nEllen, to whom she was become tenderly attached.\n\nIn the meantime, Lady Juliana seeing that Ellen continued standing,\nsaid--\"Sit down, child, and don't be frightened.\" Ellen gladly obeyed,\nfor she could not help feeling a little agitated by Lady Juliana's\nstrange mode of visiting.\n\nThe old lady looked round the room, and after a moment's pause,\nsaid--\"Why, you are an unfashionable young woman, I see; work, books,\nmaps, and the furniture remaining nearly as it was seven years ago!\nWhat, has nobody told you, child, the whole house ought to be new\nfurnished?\"\n\n\"Indeed, Ma'am, if they had, I should have paid no attention to them,\"\nsaid Ellen. \"I must, indeed, be a strange ungrateful creature, if the\nmagnificent furniture of this house was not more than equal to my\nwishes.\"\n\n\"So much the better, I am glad of it,\" returned Lady Juliana.--\"Do you\nknow me?\" she added, turning in her usual abrupt manner to Ellen.\n\n\"I believe--I think I can guess.\"\n\n\"Oh, I suppose you told St. Aubyn you had met with a cross,\ndisagreeable old woman at Lady Meredith's, and he told you it must have\nbeen his aunt, Lady Juliana Mordaunt.\"\n\n\"Indeed, Madam,\" said Ellen, blushing a little at a statement so near\nthe truth.\n\n\"Nay, don't tell lies, child,\" bluntly replied the old lady. \"I hate\nflattery; besides, your countenance won't let you. I know what I am,\nwhich is more than every body can say. And do you generally spend your\nmornings in this manner?\"\n\n\"Generally, unless my Lord wishes me to go any where with him.\"\n\n\"And what do you do in the evening?\"\n\n\"Lord St. Aubyn, Miss Cecil, and myself, sit together: we net or work,\nwhile he reads to us, unless Miss Cecil is sufficiently in spirits to\ngive us some music.\"\n\n\"And have you no idea, child, how ridiculous the fashionable people\nthink all this?\"\n\n\"I am sorry for it.\"\n\n\"But will you persist in the same plan?\" Ellen smiled.\n\n\"And do you mean to go on in this way all the time you are in town?\"\n\n\"Not exactly perhaps. I am to see a little more of the public places;\nbut my Lord wished me to wait till----\"\n\n\"Till what? You may as well tell me, for I see you have an old-fashioned\nway of speaking your thoughts.\"\n\n\"It is true, your Ladyship sees in me one so little accustomed to the\nhabits of the great world, that I have not yet learned to dissemble:\nwill you permit me to say, and not be displeased, that Lord St. Aubyn\nanxiously wished to procure a chaperon, whose sanction should be\nunexceptionable--in short, Lady Juliana Mordaunt.\"\n\n\"I believe you are a little flatterer after all,\" said Lady Juliana,\nrelaxing into a smile. \"With all your talk of sincerity, I hardly\nbelieve St. Aubyn thought of me at all; and how, if he did, he could\nfancy I should ever get the better of the shock he gave my pride, call\nit prejudice if you will, by marrying _you_--for I love plain-dealing,\nchild. I don't know but it is all over now--I like you; and if you will\ncontinue as modest and unaffected as you are now, keep your neck and\narms covered, and bring your Lord an heir, that these de Montforts may\nnot succeed to his title, I will love you, and do all I can to assist\nand support you.\"\n\nSeeing that Ellen blushed at the last hint, she added,--\"Nay, you need\nnot blush, though I like to see you can: for I promise you, it was\nobserving the probability of such an event that did more to reconcile me\nto you than all your beauty and merit could have done; so take care of\nyourself, and don't disappoint me; and now, my dear, kiss me, and call\nme _aunt_ whenever you please.\"\n\nEllen modestly and gracefully bent to receive the old Lady's embrace,\nand at that instant St. Aubyn opened the dressing-room door, and found\nthe two people he loved best in the world in each other's arms, with\ntears of tenderness on the cheeks of both.\n\n\"What do I see!\" he exclaimed.--\"Is it possible!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Lady Juliana, \"it is very possible you see a foolish old\nwoman, who loves you too well not to love one so dear to you, and so\nworthy of being loved.\"\n\nSt. Aubyn respectfully and affectionately kissed the hand she gave him,\nand clasping Ellen in his arms, exclaimed, \"My dearest Ellen, how happy\nhas all this made me!\"\n\n\"Come, don't hurry her spirits with your raptures,\" said Lady Juliana.\n\"She is a good girl, and we shall be very happy together, I dare say.\nBut I find, Sir, you have been waiting for me, of all people, to\nchaperon your Lady about to all the fine places: I have had enough of\nthem, and at my time of life I do not know any business I have at\noperas, balls, and plays: however, to oblige you and _my niece_, I will\ngo wherever you wish me. I do not think she is one who will tire me to\ndeath: I shall dine with you to-day, and if you choose to let one of\nyour people go to Drury-lane, and inquire if there are places, we may\nhear the oratorio to-night.\"\n\nCharmed with this speech, for St. Aubyn knew his aunt well enough to be\nsure if she had not been thoroughly pleased with Ellen, she would\nneither have called her niece, nor have staid to dine with them, he most\nreadily accepted the kind offer.\n\nThey dined rather earlier than usual, that they might be in time for the\nopening of the oratorio, which Ellen was anxious to hear. Laura Cecil,\nin compliment to Lady Juliana, dined with them, and was quite delighted\nto see the affection, and even respect, with which she treated Lady St.\nAubyn: for Lady Juliana was not a person to do things by halves; and\nhaving once conquered her own prejudices, was determined to give her\nniece all the consequence in her power with every other person, and\nwould have been extremely angry with any one, who had dared to treat her\nwith half the contempt she herself had done the day before. Once a\nfriend, she was a friend for life, unless the object of her affections\nproved really undeserving, and then she hated with as much warmth as she\nhad loved.\n\nMiss Cecil could not be persuaded to go with them to the theatre; and\nindeed Ellen was afterwards glad of it, for many of the songs were those\nwhich the sainted Juliet used to sing with so much sweetness and\nexpression: and exquisitely as they were now performed, yet Ellen still\nfelt something wanting. The soul that used to animate the eyes of\nJuliet, while she sung, was not there. The lips that had breathed those\nsacred strains, were so pure, so hallowed, that all the wonders of voice\nand science, now lavished for her entertainment, could not compensate to\nEllen's mind for the pang she felt in recollecting that those eyes,\nthose lips, were closed for ever.\n\n    \"Mute was the music of her tuneful breath,\n  And quenched the radiance of her sparkling eyes.\"\n\nAfter this evening, Ellen's engagements became more frequent; but she\nwas never seen in public, except with Lady Juliana, and seldom without\nher Lord. In vain did fashion dictate, or ridicule assail: the sly\nglance, the pointed sarcasm, alike were vain: she knew herself safe, her\nreputation secure, with protectors so respectable; yet there was nothing\nobtrusive or formal in St. Aubyn's attention to his lovely wife: he was\nneither inseparable from her side, or incapable of attention to any\nother lady, or expecting Ellen never to speak to any other gentleman.\nBut it was obvious, without being intrusive, that each was the first\nobject of the other, and that their mutual honour and happiness were the\nmost interesting care of both.\n\nHence no bold and disgusting flattery assailed the ears of Ellen; no\nforward flirting woman dared dispute with her the heart of St. Aubyn; so\npure, so spotless was her character, that, raised as she had suddenly\nbeen to a rank which might easily excite the envy of those who thought\nthey had a better claim to it, not even the bold license of the age we\nlive in had dared to breathe one syllable against her.\n\nThus passed the time till the latter end of April, which was the period\nfixed for Lady Meredith's famous fete, about which all the great world\nwas going mad. The persons who were invited were expected to wear\nmasquerade dresses, and the house appeared in masquerade, as well as\nthe company. The whole had been new furnished in a fanciful style, and\nat an enormous expence, for this one evening; and her Ladyship's own\ndress was literally covered with jewels: she wore the habits and\nornaments of an eastern beauty, and her attire was exactly copied from\nthat Lady M. W. Montague describes for the fair Fatima, only, if\npossible, still more rich and splendid; and, if possible, still more\ncalculated to display as well as to adorn the figure. No words can do\njustice to the magnificence and splendour of the whole entertainment:\nthe Bow-street officers at the door, and Mr. G---- and his men serving\nices and other refreshments in a room fitted up to represent a casino at\nNaples, with a panorama view of its beautiful bay, &c. gave it all the\ncharacteristics of a modern fete; and the number of gay dresses, shining\ndecorations, lights, and music, made the whole appear to Ellen more like\na palace in a fairy tale than any thing \"which the earth owns.\" She\nwore a black domino, but with a very fine set of diamonds, which Lady\nJuliana had given her the night before: amongst them was a sort of\ncoronet, or chaplet, set to represent sprigs of jessamine and small vine\nleaves, in commemoration of that which St. Aubyn had woven of those\nsimple materials the day he discovered to her his real rank; for Lady\nJuliana had heard the whole story, and was much pleased with that little\nincident.\n\nTheir party consisted of Lord and Lady St. Aubyn, Lady Juliana, and Sir\nEdward Leicester, a particular friend of St. Aubyn's, a very amiable\nyoung man, who appeared much charmed with Laura Cecil, and paid her\ngreat attention, whenever he had an opportunity of being with her. They\nspent a very agreeable evening: it concluded with a splendid supper, at\nwhich all the company appeared unmasked, and the super-eminence of Lady\nSt. Aubyn's beauty was allowed by all.\n\nA few nights after this, Lord and Lady St. Aubyn, Lady Juliana, Lady\nMeredith, and her favourite beau, Colonel Lenox, went to the Opera: the\nentertainment for the evening happened to be the beautiful opera of\nArtaserse. Ellen, lost in delight at the superb stage decorations, the\nexquisite beauty of the music, and the interest of the story, which, by\nthe help of the action, and having read it in English, she understood\nvery well, was scarcely sensible of any thing around her, till the scene\nin which Arbace is accused of the murder of the king. Turning then to\nspeak to St. Aubyn, who sat behind her, she saw him pale, agitated, and\ntrembling: \"What is the matter?\" asked she, in a voice of alarm; but\npressing his hand on her arm, he said, in a low voice, \"Be silent--do\nnot notice me.\"\n\nAt that moment the voice of the singer, who performed Arbace, in the\nmost pathetic tone, breathed out, \"Sono Innocente,\" to which Artaserse\nreplies:\n\n  Ma l'apparenza O Arbace\n  T'accusa ti condanna!\n\nA stifled sigh, almost amounting to a groan, from St. Aubyn, met the ear\nof Ellen. Recovering himself a little, he whispered--\"Remember, Ellen,\n_and I too am innocent_!\"\n\nIn spite of the precaution with which he spoke, Lady Meredith turned,\nand asked him if he were unwell.\n\n\"I have a violent head-ache,\" he replied, forcing himself to appear more\ncomposed.\n\n\"You look pale, indeed, my Lord,\" returned Lady Meredith: \"and Lady St.\nAubyn seems quite overcome with this pathetic scene.\"\n\nShe spoke of the opera, but a crimson flush spread over St. Aubyn's\nface, and complaining of the intolerable heat, he rose, and went out of\nthe box.\n\n\"Bless me!\" said Lady Juliana: \"what is the matter?\"\n\n\"Only Lord St. Aubyn complains of the head-ache,\" said Lady Meredith.\n\n\"Oh, I know what it is,\" answered Lady Juliana: \"my nephew hates to be\ndisturbed when he is attending to music; and I suppose you, Lady\nMeredith, have been talking to him, as you always do at the Opera.\"\n\nLady Meredith only laughed; and St. Aubyn returning soon after, nothing\nmore passed. When the opera was over, and St. Aubyn and Ellen were alone\nin the carriage, he still appeared so restless and agitated, that Ellen\ncould not resist addressing to him a few words, indicative of curiosity,\nif not of alarm. For a time he evaded her tender inquiries; but, at\nlength, grasping her hands with an action expressive of the utmost\nemotion, he again repeated his former words: \"Remember, Ellen, oh,\nremember that I too am innocent!\"\n\n\"I know it, I am sure of it,\" she returned: \"but why thus confide by\nhalves? Why torture yourself and me by these mysterious hints?\"\n\n\"Ah, why indeed!\" said he: \"I ought to have more command of myself: but\nthat scene--that fatal instrument of a horrid deed!--Appearances how\nfalse, yet how convincing!\"\n\n\"To me,\" she replied, \"appearances are not and never shall be any thing,\nwhen opposed to your single assertion, to my confidence in your\nintegrity.\"\n\n\"A thousand thousand thanks,\" he replied, \"for the sweet assurance!\nSoon, too soon, perhaps, you will be tried!\"\n\n\"Demanding so much reliance, so much implicit _confidence_ from his\nwife, under such _mysterious_ conduct, was St. Aubyn willing, if called\nupon, to grant an equal share to her?\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAP. VII.\n\n  Think'st thou I'll make a life of jealousy,\n  To follow still the changes of the moon\n  With fresh surmises?--No; to be once in doubt\n  Is to be resolv'd----\n    I'll see before I doubt; what I doubt prove.\n\n                                                        OTHELLO.\n\n\nAfter the scene at the Opera, which effectually destroyed her pleasure\nthere, Lady St. Aubyn felt for some days not at all disposed to enter\ninto the gay parties which were offered for her amusement: a gloom hung\nover her, and she had a weight on her spirits, which in some degree\naffected her health. Some one says, \"A belief in _presentiment_ is the\nfavourite superstition of feeling minds;\" and Ellen was certainly not\nentirely free from it. Lady Juliana and Miss Cecil perceived the effect\nwithout knowing the cause; and supposing it to be merely a temporary\nindisposition, persuaded her to remain quietly at home for a day or two;\nbut finding the nervous sort of depression under which she laboured was\nencreased by indulgence, they imagined a moderate share of amusement\nmight remove it; and prevailed on her to take places at Covent-Garden,\nto see Mrs. Jordan in a favourite comedy.\n\nLaura did not yet shew herself in public; Ellen therefore went to the\nplay with only St. Aubyn and Lady Juliana. They were joined there by two\nor three gentlemen, and amongst them Sir Edward Leicester, who, between\nthe acts, made so many inquiries for Miss Cecil, and spoke so highly of\nLady St. Aubyn's \"charming friend,\" as convinced her he took a deep\ninterest in all that concerned Laura. This gave real pleasure to Ellen,\nwho thought so well of Sir Edward, as to wish he might succeed in\nrendering the prepossession mutual. They were all extremely well pleased\nwith the play. Who, indeed, that ever saw Mrs. Jordan act was\notherwise? And Lady Juliana was rejoiced to see Ellen quite as cheerful\nas usual. They did not choose to stay the farce, and finding at the end\nof the play the carriage was in waiting, left the box. Lady Juliana\nbeing rather timid, and not very alert in getting into a carriage, St.\nAubyn gave her his arm, and requested Sir Edward would take care of Lady\nSt. Aubyn.\n\nAs they were crossing the lobby, a gentleman accidentally trod on\nEllen's train, and entangled it in his spur, by which she was detained\nhalf a minute before it could be disengaged. He begged her pardon, and\npassed on. St. Aubyn and his aunt not perceiving the circumstance, had\nadvanced some steps before the Countess and Sir Edward. At that moment\ntwo or three young men pushed rather rudely by them; and Sir Edward\nextending his hand, said, \"Take care, gentlemen, you incommode the\nlady.\"\n\nOne of them turned round, and looking in Ellen's face, exclaimed:\n\n\"By heaven 'tis she! 'tis Ellen Powis!\"\n\nLady St. Aubyn starting at the name, cast her eyes upon him, and\ninstantly recognized Charles Ross: but before she could speak to him, as\nshe was preparing to do in a friendly manner, he stamped violently, and\nwith a countenance where the utmost rage was expressed, and a dreadful\noath, exclaimed:\n\n\"Is this the villain that has undone thee?--But where, then, is that\naccursed Mordaunt? Ah, Ellen! abandoned, miserable girl, art thou, then,\nso lost already?\"\n\nPale, gasping for breath at this shocking language, Ellen clung more\nclosely to the arm of Sir Edward, and faintly articulated, \"For God's\nsake let me pass!\"\n\n\"What do you mean, Sir?\" said Sir Edward, fiercely: \"Are you\nintoxicated, or mad? How dare you insult this lady!\"\n\n\"And how dare you, Sir,\" answered Charles, approaching in a menacing\nattitude, \"after seducing her from her friends, and from those who loved\nher, to look me in the face?\"\n\n\"Madman!\" replied Sir Edward, pushing him aside with one hand, while\nwith the other he supported the now almost fainting Ellen. \"Gentlemen, I\nrequest you will secure him till I place this lady in her carriage, and\nthen I am ready to give him any explanation he may wish for.\"\n\nSome of the gentlemen, who by this time surrounded them, knowing\nCharles, said to him: \"Come away, Ross; you are very wrong: at any rate,\nthis quarrel shall go no farther.\"\n\nAt this moment St. Aubyn, having placed his aunt in the carriage,\nwondering at Ellen's delay, returned to seek her; and astonished at\nwhat he beheld, exclaimed:\n\n\"For heaven's sake, what is the matter? My love, what makes you look so\npale? Has any one dared to insult you?\"\n\n\"Oh! you are there, Sir, are you,\" said Charles: \"I know you: I saw you\nonce, and then foretold what has happened: you are the man who must give\nme satisfaction.\"\n\n\"Pshaw! he is mad, quite mad,\" cried Sir Edward; \"pay no attention to\nhim; he knows not what he talks of.\"\n\nThe by-standers began to be of the same opinion; and, indeed, his\nrageful countenance, and the violence of his gesticulations, with the\napparent inconsistency of his words, rendered the idea extremely\nprobable; they therefore forcibly held him, and said: \"Pass on,\ngentlemen, and take care of the lady: we will prevent him from following\nyou;\" while Ross's friends, supposing either that the wine they knew he\nhad drank had affected him, or that some sudden frenzy had seized him,\nwere amongst the foremost to secure him, especially as a gentleman who\nnow came up said the gentleman and lady were the Earl and Countess of\nSt. Aubyn: but Charles was too outrageous to hear that or any thing\nelse, and called after them aloud, stamping with fury, and swearing\nterribly:\n\n\"Mean, detestable cowards, come back. I am not mad. Give up that\nwretched girl: let me take her to her father--to mine, who loved her.\nMordaunt, vile, hateful Mordaunt! to you I call--Come back, I say!\"\n\nSt. Aubyn turned, and but that Ellen hung half-fainting on him, he would\nhave obeyed the summons; for he knew that name was addressed to him, and\neasily guessed who the supposed madman was, and how the mistake which\ncaused his insults might have arisen; but Sir Edward said, \"You shall\nnot go back, St. Aubyn, he is mad; or if not, it belongs to me to\nchastise him.\"\n\n\"Is it not Charles Ross?\" said St. Aubyn to Ellen.\n\n\"Yes,\" she faintly replied; \"but do not go back; he is certainly out of\nhis senses.\"\n\nBy this time they had reached the carriage, and putting her into it, he\nshut the door; and saying, \"Wait a moment, be not alarmed, I must speak\nto him,\" he ran back again, Sir Edward following.\n\nRoss having, as soon as they were out of sight, disengaged himself from\nthe by-standers, was hastening with frantic violence to overtake them:\nwhen he saw the two gentlemen, he advanced and said:\n\n\"You have thought proper, then, to come back; but what have you done\nwith that unfortunate girl?\"\n\n\"For the sake of your father, Mr. Ross,\" said St. Aubyn, \"for now I\nknow you, I will be patient and tell you.\"\n\n\"What can you tell me more than I already know?\" cried Ross,\ninterrupting him with angry vehemence. \"Can you deny that you have\nseduced her whom I loved better than my own soul? Did you not bring her\nwith you to London? I know it all, Sir: the woman where you lodged found\nyou out. She saw how you had deceived my gentle, innocent Ellen.\"\n\n\"What words are these!\" exclaimed St. Aubyn, haughtily. \"Whence arises\nso vile an error?\"\n\n\"Villain!\" exclaimed Charles, with wild impetuosity, \"deny not your\ncrimes, but give me the satisfaction of a gentleman.\"\n\n\"You do not act like one,\" said St. Aubyn: \"but here is my card; I am\nalways to be found, and will give you whatever satisfaction you may\nrequire.\"\n\nHe threw a card with his address to Charles, who hastily gave St. Aubyn\none of his.\n\n\"It shall not be,\" said Sir Edward. \"I was the first insulted: this\naffair is mine.\"\n\n\"Settle it as you please,\" said Charles: \"come one or both, I am ready.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" said St. Aubyn; \"to-morrow we shall be at your service.\nCome, Sir Edward; Ellen will be terrified to death.\" They hastened on;\nand Ross rudely pushing aside those around him, left the theatre.\n\nSt. Aubyn and Sir Edward now went as quickly as possible, where they\nfound the Countess, half-fainting, in the arms of Lady Juliana.\n\n\"For God's sake,\" said the latter, as they opened the door, \"what is the\nmatter? What have you been doing? Could you find no time or place to\nquarrel in but in the presence of this poor girl?\"\n\n\"For heaven's sake, Madam,\" said St. Aubyn, after having ordered the\nservants to drive on, \"do not talk in that manner. Am I so regardless\nof this dear creature's comfort, or so prone to quarrel, that I should\nseek it at such a time as this?\"\n\nHe then made Ellen lean on him, and soothed her with the most\naffectionate and tender expressions.\n\n\"Oh,\" said she, reviving; \"is he gone? Dear St. Aubyn, tell me, are you\nsafe, has he hurt you?\"\n\n\"No--no, my love; be composed, all is over; he is gone away satisfied.\"\n\n\"Satisfied!\" replied she; \"what could he mean? Do you think he is mad,\nor is it the effect of wine, or some mistake?\"\n\n\"I know not,\" said St. Aubyn, hastily; \"but be at rest--he is gone--we\nshall hear no more of him.\"\n\n\"Oh, are you sure--are you quite sure? Dear Lady Juliana, tell me: may I\ndepend upon it? You said something about a duel.\"\n\n\"I talked like a fool, then, if I did,\" replied Lady Juliana; \"but I do\nnot remember any thing of it.\"\n\n\"A duel--ridiculous!\" said St. Aubyn, pretending to laugh. \"I assure\nyou, Ellen, all is over; pray be composed; there is nothing to fear.\"\n\nLady Juliana knew better, but terrified for Ellen, she affected to\nbelieve what St. Aubyn said, and between them, they contrived completely\nto deceive the Countess, who, ignorant of the usages of the world, and\nnot knowing all that had passed, was easily misled. She composed her\nmind, therefore, in the hope that all was well, though she still\ntrembled, and was so much fluttered, that Lady Juliana, after going home\nwith her, waited till she had seen her in bed; and desiring she might be\nkept perfectly quiet, she returned to the drawing-room, and endeavoured\nto learn from St. Aubyn and Leicester what had happened, and what was\nlikely to be the result: but she vainly chid or interrogated either:\nboth persisted in the story that Ross had apologized, and all was over.\n\nRather better satisfied, though not fully convinced, Lady Juliana soon\nafter left them, determined however to keep a little watch upon the\nactions of her nephew, with whose temper she was too well acquainted to\nsuppose such a business would be passed over without farther notice.\n\nSt. Aubyn gave Ellen such assurances that nothing more would arise from\nthis affair, that, tired out with the agitation she had undergone, she\nsoon fell into a profound sleep, and awakened in the morning perfectly\nrefreshed and composed. At St. Aubyn's request, however, she remained\nlater than usual in bed. Laura Cecil sat by her side, and gave her her\nbreakfast, after which she appeared so entirely well, that no objection\nwas made to her rising.\n\nIn the meantime St. Aubyn had received, at his breakfast-table, the\nfollowing note:--\n\n     My Lord,\n\n     I find by the card you gave me last night, that the name of\n     _Mordaunt_ was only assumed to conceal the blackest designs and\n     most detestable perfidy.\n\n     If you do not mean to plead your privilege, I demand a meeting\n     with you on Wimbolton Common to-morrow morning at seven\n     o'clock, when I hope to wash out my wrongs, and those of the\n     injured Ellen, in the blood of a villain.\n\n     I shall bring pistols and a friend.\n\n                                                   CHARLES ROSS.\n\n     _Eight o'Clock, Wednesday morning._\n\nTo this St. Aubyn returned the following answer:--\n\n     Sir,\n\n     I shall be at the place appointed at the time you mention. Sir\n     Edward Leicester will be with me.\n\n                                                      ST. AUBYN.\n\nAfter dispatching this laconic reply, the Earl went to Ellen's\ndressing-room. Laura had just left her; Jane only was with her: at the\nmoment he entered, Ellen was reading a note, which, when she saw him,\nshe hastily folded together, and put within the bosom of her morning\ndress: she seemed a little agitated, and the tears stood in her eyes,\nbut hastening to meet him, she said:--\n\n\"My dear St. Aubyn, they told me you were gone out.\"\n\n\"No, my love,\" said St. Aubyn, a little surprized at the hasty manner in\nwhich she spoke; \"but I am going out soon.\"\n\n\"Shall you take the barouche or the chariot?\"\n\n\"Neither; I shall walk to Sir Edward Leicester's: but why; are _you_\ngoing out?\"\n\n\"Yes--by and bye; I think a little air will do me good.\"\n\n\"Had you not better keep quiet? You know my aunt particularly requested\nyou would do so; she will be here soon: do not go till you have seen\nher, nor then unless she advises it.\"\n\n\"But I assure you, my Lord, I am perfectly well, and I am sure a little\nair will be of service.\"\n\n\"Well, do as you please,\" said St. Aubyn, a little surprized at her\nadhering so determinately to her idea of going out; for, in general,\nhalf a word from him guided her; \"but you will not go alone?\"\n\n\"Oh--no, Laura will go with me.\"\n\n\"Very well, my love; don't fatigue yourself. Where are you going?\"\n\n\"I don't know exactly: I want to do some shopping.\"\n\nSt. Aubyn then wished her good-morning, and repeating his request that\nshe would take care of herself, left her.\n\nThe real fact was this--Jane, who was Ellen's almoner, and brought to\nher knowledge many cases of distress, of which she would otherwise have\nbeen ignorant, had the night before, while her lady was at the play,\nreceived a petition from an officer's widow, who stated herself to be\nliving in a small lodging in ---- Street; that she had several children,\nof whom the youngest was an infant not a month old, born under\ncircumstances of the most acute distress, a few months after its father\nhad fallen in the field of battle; the eldest, a girl of sixteen, in a\ndeep decline: these circumstances, she said, prevented her from waiting\nherself on Lady St. Aubyn, of whose goodness she had heard much from an\nold blind lady, her neighbour, whom, in fact, Ellen had supported for\nsome time past, and whom she had visited two or three times with Jane\nonly.\n\nEllen, warm-hearted and benevolent, was extremely anxious to see this\nunfortunate family: Jane had given her the letter just before St. Aubyn\ncame into her room, and fearing if she declared her purpose he would\noppose it, lest her health should be injured by the emotion she must\nnecessarily feel from the sight of this unhappy mother and her children,\nshe concealed the letter, and did not exactly tell him why she wished so\nmuch to go out, though aware that she must appear unusually\npertinacious; but she had set her heart with all the fervor of youth on\nher object: above all, she desired to see the poor little infant, for\nEllen, always fond of children, had, since she knew herself likely to\nbecome a mother, felt a peculiar interest in young children, and\nardently wished to see and provide for one who had so many claims to\nthe compassion of a tender heart; and having really some purchases to\nmake, she gave without consideration _that_ as her only motive for going\nout. Never before had she departed for an instant from the singular\nsincerity of her character, and the perfect confidence which she reposed\nin her husband; dearly did she soon repent of having done so now.\n\nOn asking Laura to go with her, she unexpectedly declined it, having a\nbad head-ache, and tried to persuade Ellen not to go herself, but to\nsend Jane, and go some other time: but Ellen was so unusually fixed on\nher point, and her imagination was so impressed with the idea of the\n_poor little infant_, that, for a wonder, she was not to be prevailed\non; and fearing, lest Lady Juliana should come and prevent her, she\nordered the carriage directly, and set out.\n\nShe drove first to ---- Street, where she found the distrest family in\nall the poverty and affliction which had been described to her--the\nunfortunate mother, still weak, and scarcely able to support herself,\nobliged to act as nurse, not only to the infant, but to her eldest\ndaughter, who, pale and languishing, seemed ready every moment to\nbreathe her last, while two or three other children were playing in the\nroom, distracting by their unconscious noise the poor invalids.\n\nThe tender and compassionate Ellen felt her heart opprest at this\nmelancholy sight, and hastened as much as possible to relieve it: she\nheld herself the baby in her arms, while she sent Jane to seek a nurse\nfor the poor girl, and to the woman of the house where they lodged, to\nwhom she spoke herself; and requested she would take charge of the other\nchildren, till the mother was more able to do so. She gave the widow an\nample supply of money to procure every thing necessary for her herself\nand family, and after promising to send a physician to attend the poor\ngirl, and kissing the baby, she departed, followed by thanks and\nblessings, \"not loud but deep,\" and went to see the poor old blind lady,\nwho, always delighted to hear her sweet voice and kind expressions,\ndetained her as long as she could.\n\nReturning home, rejoicing in the good she had done, feeling herself\nanimated by the purest pleasure, and quite well in health, Ellen\nsuddenly recollected that she was close by the street where Mrs. Birtley\nlived, with whom she had lodged the first time she was in London; and\nshe thought she would just stop at the door, and ask for the book she\nhad left there, for which Jane had, as she said, always forgotten to\ncall: it was that very volume of Gray which Mordaunt had given her, and\nas his first gift she was really anxious to recover it. Meaning merely\nto stop at the door, and send Jane in for it, she pulled the check, and\nordered the coachman to drive down that street, and stop at No. 6, and\ntold Jane for what purpose she was going.\n\n\"Oh, my Lady,\" said the talkative girl, \"I shall be rejoiced that Mrs.\nBirtley should see you in all your grandeur: she will be surprized after\nall she had the impertinence to say.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" said Ellen, \"I never thought of that: she will wonder to see\nme under such a different appearance, and perhaps say something in the\nhearing of the servants. I will not go.\"\n\n\"Oh, my Lady,\" answered Jane, \"she need not know who you are: only ask\nfor the book, and come away directly: she will not know a bit the more\nwhat your Ladyship's real name is; and I suppose she is not enough\namongst the grand people to know the livery or carriage.\"\n\n\"True,\" said Ellen: \"well, you shall go in and ask for the book, but do\nnot explain any thing to her.\"\n\n\"Oh, no, indeed, my Lady,\" said Jane; \"so far from it, I shall enjoy\nseeing her puzzle----\"\n\nWhile they spoke, the carriage stopped at the door of Mrs. Birtley.\nEllen, who half repented having come, sat back in the carriage, and told\nJane to go in and ask for the book, and not to say she was there, for\nshe would not alight: but notwithstanding Ellen's caution, Mrs. Birtley,\nhaving been drawn to the window by seeing such an elegant equipage stop\nat her door, caught a glimpse of her as the footman opened the door of\nthe chariot for Jane to alight, came to the side of the carriage, and\nwith civility asked her if she would not walk in. Ellen, feeling more\nand more the absurdity of which she had been guilty in coming to the\ndoor of a woman who she knew entertained of her a doubtful opinion, and\nto whom she could not explain herself, coldly declined the offer; but\nthe coachman said he feared the horses would not turn very well, as the\nstreet was rather narrow, and that it would be better if her Ladyship\npleased to alight for a moment, lest she should be alarmed.\n\nMrs. Birtley stared at the \"_Ladyship_\" as much as she had done at the\n_coronetted carriage_ and fine horses; for she was not quite so ignorant\nof _grand people_, as Jane, in the plenitude of her own newly-acquired\nknowledge, had supposed her.\n\nEllen, vexed at her own folly in coming thither, was now obliged to get\nout of the carriage; and several people passing by, staring first at the\ncarriage, and then at Ellen, she thought it would be better to go for an\ninstant into the house. Mrs. Birtley shewed her into the parlour, and\nrequesting she would be seated, added, \"My lodger is gone out, and will\nnot, I suppose, be back till dinner-time: he is generally out all the\nmorning. I believe he knows something of you, Ma'am.\"\n\n\"Of me!\" repeated Ellen, surprized.\n\n\"Yes, Ma'am: for when he came here about a week ago, he saw, by\naccident, that book Mrs. Jane has in her hand; and some writing there\nwas in it seemed to put him into a great passion. He made me tell him\nhow I came by the book, and asked me a thousand questions about you:\nwhat was the name of the gentleman you came with, if you were young and\nhandsome, and I don't know what; and I believe what I told him put him\ninto a great rage, for he stampt and swore like a madman.\"\n\nEllen, vexed and astonished, sorry she had come there, and feeling a\ncertain dread of she hardly knew what stealing over her, now turned\nextremely pale; and Jane exclaimed, \"Oh, my Lady will faint: get some\nwater!\"\n\n\"Your _Lady_! Why she is Mrs. Mordaunt, is not she, _or calls herself\nso_?\" asked Mrs. Birtley with some contempt.\n\n\"Don't stand there asking questions,\" said the impatient Jane: \"but\nfetch some water. Lord, I wish we were at home: if my Lady should be\nill, how Lady Juliana will scold, and my Lord.\"\n\n\"Grant me patience,\" said Mrs. Birtley, as she left the room to fetch\nsome drops and water: \"the girl makes me mad with her Lords and Ladies.\nPoor fool, I suppose they have imposed upon her too finely.\"\n\nNot one minute had she been gone, when Ellen finding herself better, and\nnot meaning to wait Mrs. Birtley's return, and farther questions, had\nrisen, and by Jane's help almost reached the door to go to the carriage,\nwhich through the window she saw drawing up, when that door opened, and\nCharles Ross entered the room: amazed beyond the power of words to\ndescribe, he saw her standing--saw Ellen in his apartment! And\nforgetting every thing but that he had once dearly loved her, he rushed\ntowards, and would have caught her in his arms, but she evaded his\ngrasp; and catching hold of Jane (who, frightened, gave a sudden\nscream), said, \"He here! Oh, how I am terrified!\"\n\n\"Terrified, Ellen!\" he wildly repeated: \"_once_ you were not terrified\nby my appearance.\"\n\n\"No, Sir,\" she replied, with as much spirit as she could assume: \"for\nonce I should have expected friendship and protection, not insult.\"\n\n\"Ah, wretched girl!\" he exclaimed: \"once you deserved and wished for my\nfriendship and protection; but now, that fine gaudy carriage, this\nelegant dress, the jewels, in which I saw you last night, all tell a\ndreadful tale--all speak of your shame, of your ruin.\"\n\n\"Of my shame! of my ruin! what, oh, what do you mean?\"\n\n\"Aye, what indeed!\" said the enraged Jane: \"let my Lady pass,\nimpertinent fellow, and don't stand there talking in that insolent\nmanner. Do, my Lady, let me call the footmen. I wish my Lord was here:\nhe would soon teach you better manners.\"\n\n\"Cease, Jane,\" said Ellen, shaking like a leaf: \"cease this shocking\naltercation. Of your insulting language, Mr. Ross, I know not the\nmeaning: it is well for you Lord St. Aubyn does not hear you thus\naddress his wife.\"\n\n\"His wife! his wife! Is it possible? Have I wronged both him and you?\nStay, Ellen, a moment, for heaven's sake--for St. Aubyn's--for my\nfather's: you know not the mischief one word of explanation may\nprevent.\"\n\nShe stopped, she turned: he seized her hands to detain her. Oh,\nunfortunate Ellen!\n\nAt that moment St. Aubyn himself entered the room. He rushed impetuously\nforward, exclaiming, \"Dissembling woman! Was it for this you left your\nhome--to meet this villain--to come to his very lodging in search of\nhim?\"\n\n\"Oh, no! oh, no!\" sobbed Ellen, as she sunk at his feet in a swoon so\ndeep, so death-like, that it seemed as if her life had left her.\n\n\"Oh, you have killed my Lady!\" cried Jane: \"my dear Lady! Oh, my Lord,\nwe came here for a book, and not----\"\n\n\"Peace, peace!\" sternly interrupted St. Aubyn: \"I will not hear a word.\nIs she dead?\"\n\n\"Oh, Lord, I hope not! How can your Lordship talk so shockingly? Oh,\nMrs. Birtley, for God's sake help my Lady--call assistance!\"\n\nBetween them they raised her: for Charles, confounded, shocked, and half\ndistracted, dared not, and St. Aubyn, gloomy, cold, and stern, would not\nassist her. At length returning life mantled on her cheek, and her first\nincoherent words were, \"St. Aubyn, dear St. Aubyn, save me!\"\n\nSt. Aubyn, somewhat calmer, and fearing he might have been too rash,\nstruggled with the jealous pangs which rent his heart, and approaching\nher, said, \"How is it, Ellen--are you better?\"\n\n\"Yes, better, my love; but sick, oh, sick at heart!\"\n\n\"Compose yourself; all is well.\"\n\nA little revived, she looked up, but was too languid to discern the\nexpression of his countenance, which contradicted the kindness of his\nwords; for St. Aubyn felt there was much, very much to be explained,\nbefore she could be to him again the Ellen she had been--if, indeed, the\nperfect confidence he once felt in her could ever be restored; yet\nfearing quite to destroy her, he constrained himself. Mrs. Birtley, now\nconvinced how unjust had been her suspicions, and Jane, eagerly\nendeavoured to explain how Lady St. Aubyn came to be there; but\nmotioning with an air of proud dignity to them to be silent, he said,\n\"Enough, I am satisfied!\" But his gloomy looks contradicted his words,\nand turning to Ross, he said, in a low voice, \"You and I, Sir, shall\nmeet again.\" Then, with Jane's assistance, he raised Ellen, and lifting\nher into the carriage, and putting Jane in, followed himself.\n\n\"Home!\" fiercely exclaimed St. Aubyn, and home they went; but oh, to a\nhome how different from that of the day before!\n\n\n\n\nCHAP. VIII.\n\n  \"Good friend, go to him; for by this light of Heaven\n  I know not how I lost him. Here I kneel:--\n  If e'er my will did trespass 'gainst his love,\n  Either in discourse or thought, or actual deed;\n  Or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense,\n  Delighted them in any other form--\n  Comfort, forswear me!--unkindness may do much;\n  And his unkindness may defeat my life,\n  But never taint my love.\"\n\n                                                        OTHELLO.\n\n\nSilent and gloomy was the ride homewards. St. Aubyn, bridling with\ndifficulty the jealous rage which consumed him, sat leaning against one\nside of the carriage, veiling his eyes with his hand, that they might\nnot for an instant fall on Ellen, who, hardly supporting herself with\nJane's help, shed no tears, though grief and vexation heaved her bosom\nwith sighs, which almost burst it; for now her recollection was\nrestored, the dreadful words in which St. Aubyn first addressed her rung\nin her ears, and swelled her heart with anguish.\n\nAt length they reached Cavendish-Square, and were met in the hall by\nLady Juliana, whose pride, at first, wounded by Ellen's being from home\nwhen she arrived, had, at length, given way to feelings of alarm at her\nlong absence; but when she saw her lifted from the carriage, pale,\ntrembling, and half-dead, terrified and astonished, she vainly demanded\nan explanation alternately from St. Aubyn and the frightened Jane; her\nnephew passing her hastily, and in silence, went into his study, and\ninstantly shut and fastened the door. There he meant to consider with\nhimself what part it became him to take, and how to elucidate this\nextraordinary event.\n\nEllen, throwing herself into Lady Juliana's arms, exclaimed, \"Oh! my\ndearest madam, let me die at once, for my Lord is angry with me!\"\n\n\"Die!\" cried Lady Juliana, struggling with a thousand terrors;\n\"Nonsense! for what? Do you suppose no man was ever angry with his wife\nbefore? You are so unused to it, it seems strange to you, but you may\nassure yourself few wives would think it so extraordinary.\"\n\nBy this time they had reached Ellen's dressing-room, where, having\nplaced her on a sofa, and given her some restoratives, Lady Juliana\nsaid, \"But what is all this about--what offence have you committed?\"\n\n\"Oh! madam, I know not; but it is too true, St. Aubyn has said such\nwords to me, such words as I never thought to hear from him!\"\n\n\"What is the meaning of all this?\" said Lady Juliana, turning to Jane.\n\"Speak, girl, if you have not quite lost your senses, or do not wish\nthat I should lose mine, and tell me where your lady has been, and what\nhas happened.\"\n\nJane, now, as well as the confusion she was in would let her, repeated\nthe adventures of the morning to Lady Juliana, the visit to the\nofficer's widow, and the old blind lady; and lastly, why they went to\nMrs. Birtley's: \"And it was I,\" she said, \"that persuaded her Ladyship\nto go to that disagreeable Mrs. Birtley's--out of pride, I own it--it\nwas out of pride, that she might see what a grand place I had got, and\nthat _my_ lady was not the sort of person that cross old woman fancied\nshe was; and her Ladyship would not even have alighted or gone into her\ntrumpery parlour, if the horses had not been so frightful, and the\ncoachman said, says he, \"my Lady had better alight, for the horses--\"\n\n\"Grant me patience!\" said Lady Juliana: \"this girl's tongue is enough to\ndistract me! Well, and when you were in her trumpery parlour, as you\ncall it, what happened then? Was Lord St. Aubyn angry that you went\nthere?\"\n\n\"Oh! no, my Lady, not for that; but the instant after we went in, and\nwhile Mrs. Birtley was chattering about the book, and about her lodger\n(and to be sure there never was such another chattering woman in the\nworld, and looking at my lady from head to foot, so saucy-like, I was\nquite in a passion with her), I saw my lady turn pale, and thinking she\nwas going to faint, I made Mrs. Birtley go for some water, for I knew\nwell enough how your Ladyship would scold if _my_ Lady was to be ill,\nand so I told Mrs. Birtley.\"\n\n\"Will this tale ever have an end?\" cried the impatient Lady Juliana.\n\n\"Well, my Lady, and so just as Mrs. Birtley was gone for the water, and\nwe were got up to go away, in came a young man: I believe, for my part,\nhe was quite mad, not indeed that I am any particular judge of mad\npeople, for I remember the first day your Ladyship came here I\nthought--but I believe I had better not tell _that_;--however, this\nyoung man _was_ mad for certain, for the moment he saw my Lady, he ran\nto her, and seemed as if he was going to catch her in his arms. I\nscreamed, and when her Ladyship said she was terrified, he quite raved,\nand called her names, and said something about her shame, and her being\nruined, and her jewels, last night, and I don't know what.\"\n\n\"And who, for Heaven's sake, was this man?\" asked the astonished Lady\nJuliana.\n\n\"Oh, it was Ross! Charles Ross!\" sobbed Ellen; \"and St. Aubyn came in\nwhile he was speaking to me, and said I came there to meet him, to his\nvery lodgings; and then I fainted quite away.\"\n\n\"So, so, so!\" repeated Lady Juliana; \"a pretty piece of work! I see what\nthis mistake will end in! But stay; surely it is not too late: I will go\nto St. Aubyn.\"\n\n\"Yes, go to him, Madam, for Heaven's sake go to him, and explain it to\nhim. Assure him I could not have an idea that Charles Ross lodged at\nMrs. Birtley's. Oh! how cruel to be obliged to make this explanation:\ncan St. Aubyn really think so ill of me? Yet, surely, surely he will be\nundeceived--this is only a momentary start of passion!\"\n\nLady Juliana shook her head, for she knew St. Aubyn's temper; and how\nhardly he would endure to hear even her on such a subject; yet, if he\nwould but condescend to hear what the servants, who attended the\nCountess in this unfortunate excursion, what this Mrs. Birtley would\nsay, their stories would doubtless confirm that of Ellen; for of the\ntruth of that story Lady Juliana had not the smallest doubt; but she\nknew how St. Aubyn's pride would revolt, and his delicacy be hurt, by\nthe necessity of interrogating such people on the conduct of his wife.\n\nShe felt herself indeed angry with Ellen for the childish impatience\nwhich had taken her out in the morning, after the fright of the night\nbefore had rendered repose so desirable, and for going to Mrs.\nBirtley's at all; but she could easily forgive a folly apparently of so\nlittle importance, since it was quite impossible for Ellen to have\nforeseen the chain of circumstances which followed, and involved her in\nso much distress.\n\nHow St. Aubyn happened to go to the same place, no one could guess; it\nappeared, indeed, extremely unlikely that he should have done so; but,\nas singular coincidences no less singular do sometimes occur, though\ntheir rarity makes us call them improbable, unless they arise within our\nown immediate knowledge.\n\nThe real truth was this: St. Aubyn, recollecting that Charles Ross had\nsaid the night before, \"_the woman where you lodged found you out_,\" had\ndetermined to ascertain, from this woman herself, what she had told\nRoss, and how she had dared to speak of him and Ellen in such terms; and\nto explain who her Mr. and Mrs. Mordaunt really were, that no farther\nslander, even in Mrs. Birtley's narrow circle, might attach to the\npurity of Lady St. Aubyn's character, had walked thither from Sir Edward\nLeicester's, with whom he had sat some time, arranging the particulars\nof their intended meeting with Charles Ross the next morning; there, to\nhis utter astonishment, he found Lady St. Aubyn's carriage in waiting;\nand inquiring of the servants where she was, was answered, in that\nhouse, meaning Mrs. Birtley's.\n\n\"And Miss Cecil?\"\n\n\"No, my Lord; Miss Cecil did not come out with my Lady, only Mrs. Jane.\"\n\nSt. Aubyn recollected Ellen's apparent agitation in the morning; the\nletter he had found her reading, and which she so hastily concealed; her\nhaving said Laura would go with her; yet she had come with only her\nmaid, a young ignorant girl, come to the very house where he believed\nRoss was residing; that Ross, of whom, though almost unknown to\nhimself, some secret jealousy had always lurked in his heart.\n\nAll these circumstances rose at once to his memory; and, without waiting\nto knock or ring, the door standing open, he rushed hastily into the\nparlour, where the first object that struck his sight was his wife, his\nbeloved, his adored Ellen, while her hand was held by the man on earth\nhe most detested, the man who but the night before had insulted her and\noutraged him! What could he think? Was it wonderful that the fury which\nswelled his heart broke into words of reproach and anger? Was it not\nrather wonderful he could so far command himself, so far reflect, as to\nreturn with her apparently calm, and that he did not at once cast from\nhim a woman who must have appeared so ungrateful and insincere?\n\nLady Juliana having with the aid of Miss Cecil and Jane put Ellen to\nbed, would have retired to seek her nephew, leaving Laura shocked,\nastonished, and grieved, remaining with her friend; but seeing the flush\nof fever on her cheek, and an unusual brilliancy in her eyes, they sent\nwithout delay to the family physician, who, after asking a few\nquestions, and learning the Countess had been alarmed, and was then\nunder the influence of terror for her lord, who, Laura whispered to him,\nthey feared was meditating a duel with a gentleman who had insulted Lady\nSt. Aubyn, the doctor shook his head, and said if her mind were not\nquieted immediately, he would not be answerable for the consequences:\nshe had, he said, every symptom of an alarming fever, and that if she\nwere not soothed, and kept quiet, the worst event might be expected both\nto herself and the unborn babe.\n\nAlarmed beyond measure, Lady Juliana now ran to seek St. Aubyn. With\nsome difficulty she prevailed on him to grant her admittance, and with\nstill greater, to hear what she had to say. She repeated the whole story\nJane had told her: he shook his head, was silent, but not convinced. She\nsaw his incredulity, and with some hesitation proposed to interrogate\nthe men servants who went out with their lady as to the real cause of\nher alighting at Mrs. Birtley's. He started indignantly from the idea;\nbut Lady Juliana assuring him she could ask in such a way as should give\nthem no suspicion why they were questioned, he at last consented, and\nringing the bell, she ordered the coachman to be sent to her.\n\n\"John,\" said she, \"your lady has been frightened at something or other\nthis morning during her absence from home. Were the horses restive?\"\n\n\"No, my Lady: the horses went as quiet as lambs to ---- Street, where we\nstopped while my Lady went into a house, I believe to see a poor family,\nas her Ladyship does sometimes; and then we went to the poor old blind\nlady's, that Mrs. Jane says her Lady maintains; and after that we went\nto another house, where my Lady said she would not alight, and told Mrs.\nJane to make haste and get the book, for she would not stop an instant;\nbut I was afraid to turn the carriage with her Ladyship in it, the\nstreet being very narrow just there, and a dray standing at the house\nopposite, for fear the horses should prance a little, which my Lady is\nalways afraid of; and so I begged her just to alight a minute while I\nturned, which she seemed not to like to do, but the old lady of the\nhouse coming out and persuading her, she said she would get out for a\nminute, and the people staring at her as she stood on the pavement, she\nwent into the house, and I believe something or somebody frightened her,\nfor as I drew up to the door, which was not directly, for the horses\nwere a little unruly, I saw a young man go into the parlour where my\nLady was waiting, and a minute after, I heard Mrs. Jane scream; and I\nwas going in, and so was James, but just as I was getting off my box,\nand Richard was standing at the head of the horses, my Lord came up, and\nafterwards I found my Lady had fainted away.\"\n\n\"Then your Lady had only been there a short time?\"\n\n\"Not above ten minutes I am sure, Madam, and as Mrs. Jane screamed when\nthe gentleman went into the parlour, I think he must have frightened\nher.\"\n\n\"Very well, John: I was afraid it was the horses, and if so, Lady St.\nAubyn should never have gone with them again.\"\n\n\"Oh, no, my Lady, the horses are quiet enough, poor things, only that\nnarrow street made me think my Lady had better alight.\"\n\nThe man then retired, and Lady Juliana said:--\"Well, St. Aubyn, are you\nnow satisfied?\"\n\n\"Not quite; all this might have been contrivance and art.\"\n\n\"How is it possible you can think so! Did you ever see the slightest\ntrace of either in Ellen?\"\n\n\"Yes, to-day. Why did she tell me Laura was going with her? Why conceal\nwhere she was going?\"\n\n\"Laura lamented just now not having gone out with Ellen, as she\nrequested on account of a bad head-ache: as to Ellen's not telling you\nwhere she was going, that arose from a fear lest you should prevent,\nwhat, with the natural impatience of youth, she had set her heart upon.\nBut if you still doubt, let us inquire of this woman, this\nMrs.----what's her name?--the mistress of the house where you lodged:\nshe can tell what Lady St. Aubyn's errand was there, and why she\nalighted.\"\n\n\"Good God! Madam,\" said St. Aubyn, peevishly, \"would you have me go\nabout collecting evidences whether I ought to believe my wife\nblameless, or the most deceitful of women?\"\n\n\"Yes I would,\" replied Lady Juliana, warmly, \"if you can suspect her; if\nsuch modesty, such guileless sincerity, and purity of words and manners\nas I never before saw in woman, have no power to convince you: if you\ncan set against them all this one unlucky accident, for I am sure it is\nno more, you ought to do every thing, seek every body who can give you\ninformation. Good God! to what purpose is it, as to this world, that a\nwoman should lead the purest and most unspotted life, if one equivocal\nappearance can drive all confidence, all reliance, from the heart which\nought to know her best!\"\n\nTouched by this generous warmth, St. Aubyn began to feel convinced he\nhad gone too far: he knew how penetrating Lady Juliana was, how much she\nhad been prejudiced against Ellen, and how cautiously she would have\nobserved, ere she had given to her an affection and confidence so\ntender: he called to mind many \"a proof of recollected love,\" of native\nmodesty, of the strictest principles in his wife, and began deeply to\nrepent his jealous rashness; but suddenly recollecting the note he had\nseen in her hands, and the haste with which she had concealed it, he\nhastily said:--\"But the letter! What letter was that I found her\nreading?\"\n\n\"What letter?\" asked Lady Juliana.\n\n\"One I found her reading this morning, just before she went out; she\nseemed agitated, and had tears in her eyes, and as I entered, she put it\ninto the fold of her morning dress.\"\n\n\"And there,\" said Lady Juliana, eagerly, \"I found it, when we undressed\nher just now: I have not opened it; here it is.\" She drew it from her\npocket. St. Aubyn recollected it to be the same, and opened it with\ntrembling hands. It was, as has been stated, from the officer's widow\nto Jane, entreating her good offices with her lady, and describing her\nown distress, agreeing exactly with what Ellen and her maid had told\nLady Juliana, and she had repeated to St. Aubyn. Such a corroboration of\nher story he could resist no longer; but shocked, alarmed, and ashamed,\nhe hastily said:\n\n\"I have injured her! Oh! can she ever forgive me!\"\n\n\"It's well,\" said Lady Juliana with some asperity, for his jealous\nobstinacy had vexed her--\"it's well if you have not killed her and your\nchild too. God defend me from such rash, headstrong people, that can\nmake no distinction between a _Rosolia_ and an _Ellen_: poor girl, she\nhas paid dear I am afraid for her dream of happiness, and being \"perched\nup in a glittering greatness, wearing a golden sorrow!\"\n\n\"For God's sake, Madam, no more reproaches,\" said St. Aubyn, angrily:\n\"she has not suffered alone; but let me go to her; let me implore her\nto forgive me. Ah! can I ever forgive myself!\"\n\n\"Indeed, nephew, I shall do no such thing, unless you will promise me\nthere shall be no fighting with that mad Ross, who I wish had been a\nthousand miles off before he had come here to drive us all as mad as\nhimself.\"\n\n\"We will talk of that, hereafter: perhaps he will apologize; at any\nrate, let us go now to Ellen, and try if I can sooth her spirits, and\ncalm her wounded mind.\"\n\nBut Ellen by the time he reached her was in no condition to hear him:\ndelirium had seized her, and the scene at the Opera dwelling on her\nmind, on which it had made a powerful impression, connected, though\nwildly, with the late untoward events, she exclaimed just as he entered\nthe room, \"Remember, St. Aubyn, remember Arbace--_and I too am\ninnocent_?\" then in low tones she imitated the recitative which had\ntaken such hold on her imagination; and sung in a sweet and plaintive\nvoice \"Sono Innocente!\" St. Aubyn, combining these words with all the\ninteresting ideas connected with them, with the generous assurances\nEllen had so often given him, that no appearances should ever shake her\nfaith in _his_ integrity and honour, assurances which he had so ill\nrepaid, was overwhelmed with grief and remorse: he put aside the\ncurtain, and kneeling by the bed-side, said in the tenderest accents:\n\n\"Ellen, my love, my injured Ellen, will you not hear, will you not\nforgive me?\"\n\n\"So you are come at last,\" said she, turning her head quickly towards\nhim: \"go to your son, my good friend, and tell him he has cruelly\ninsulted me; that I am St. Aubyn's _wife_, not the wretch he calls me:\nwhy, you know, Mr. Ross, you married us, and my father and Joanna were\npresent: then what does Charles mean by talking of my _shame_ and\n_ruin_?\"\n\n\"Oh, Heavens! she raves,\" exclaimed St. Aubyn; \"my cruelty has\ndestroyed her!\"\n\n\"Take away the bloody sword,\" screamed Ellen. \"I tell you Arbace did\n_not_ murder him; no, nor yet St. Aubyn: nothing shall ever make me\nbelieve St. Aubyn guilty:--I promised him;--he says he is innocent;\nenough, my love, enough, Ellen will _never doubt you_!\" and again she\nbreathed in plaintive cadences the pathetic \"Sono Innocente.\"\n\n\"She will die! she will die!\" wildly exclaimed St. Aubyn, starting up:\n\"run for more help! fetch all the physicians in London. Oh! have I lived\nto this!\"\n\n\"You will kill her indeed,\" said Laura, \"if you are not quiet: leave her\nto us. Doctor B---- will again be here in a few minutes: he says if she\ncan but be quiet, can but be made to understand, all is well; she will\nrecover; but indeed, my Lord, you must leave her now.\"\n\n\"No, Laura, I will not go; I will sit here without speaking; but should\nshe recover her senses, if only for a minute, it will I know comfort\nher to see me here.\"\n\nThis Laura could readily believe, and therefore made no further\nobjection; but Doctor B---- arriving soon after, comforted them all with\nthe assurance, that though the Countess's fever at present ran high, he\nhad great hopes that perfect quietude, and the medicines he had ordered,\nwould, in all probability, do much for her, especially, aided as they\nwere by youth and an excellent constitution, and that he saw no\nimmediate danger. He strictly enjoined, however, that her chamber might\nbe kept as still as possible, and that at most only two persons should\nremain there: he entreated St. Aubyn and Lady Juliana to retire, and\nhaving prevailed on them to do so, he told Miss Cecil he wished her to\nbe as much as possible one of Lady St. Aubyn's attendants.\n\n\"As to Lady Juliana,\" said he, \"she is so very anxious and restless;\nshe will only disturb our fair patient: you, my dear Miss Cecil, I\nperceive have that happy self-possession, joined with gentleness and\nactivity, which alone can make a good nurse; your voice too is\nparticularly calculated to sooth and persuade a sick person:--you may\nsmile, but believe me, few know how many qualifications are requisite to\nform a good superintendent of a sick bed, and amongst them I have always\nfound a soft but distinct articulation one of the most considerable.\nThink only how a nervous patient is what is emphatically called\n_worried_ by a droning, discontented voice, or alarmed by too loud a\ntone, or sudden question. I assure you I have often seen weak persons\nthrown into a fever by these apparently trifling causes; let me,\ntherefore, beg Miss Cecil will take upon herself the task of replying to\nany questions the Countess may ask, but in as few words as possible: the\nmoment reason returns, sooth her mind by every assurance that the\ndanger she so much feared is over. I shall see Lord St. Aubyn before I\nquit the house, and place before him the evil to be dreaded, should he\npursue this unfortunate business any farther.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAP. IX.\n\n  Doubt shall for ever quit my strengthen'd heart,\n  And anxious jealousy's corroding smart:\n  Nor other inmate shall inhabit there,\n  But soft belief, young joy, and pleasing care.\n\n                                         PRIOR'S HENRY AND EMMA.\n\n\nThe medicines ordered by her skilful physician had so salutary an\neffect, that towards midnight Ellen fell into a quiet sleep, from which\nevery thing favourable might be expected. Lady Juliana was therefore\nprevailed on to retire to bed, Miss Cecil, Jane, and the housekeeper,\nsitting up with Lady St. Aubyn, the two latter in the anti-chamber. But\nLady Juliana was far from being satisfied, notwithstanding the\nassurances of St. Aubyn that all was at an end between him and Ross: she\nknew him too well to believe he would pass over insults so marked; and\nher watchfulness had convinced her no apology from Ross, in writing or\notherwise, had been received. Sir Edward Leicester, too, had called once\nor twice in the course of the day; and though she had tormented him and\nher nephew, by resolutely remaining in the room in defiance of the hints\nSt. Aubyn gave of wishing to be alone with his friend, yet she overheard\na few words, that more and more convinced her a duel was intended. She\nleft orders, therefore, to be called by day-break; and unable to prevail\non St. Aubyn to go to bed, wearied and exhausted by emotions, which, at\nher time of life, she could ill support, she at length left him to\nhimself.\n\nDetermined as he was to meet Ross in the morning, and avoiding\nreflections, which, though he felt how decisive they were against the\npractice of duelling, he yet thought came too late. St. Aubyn's frame\nwas shaken by various sensations. Recollection of the past, and terror\nfor the future, hung heavily upon him; yet not for himself he feared:\nbut should any thing amiss happen to him, what would become of Ellen--of\nEllen, whom he should leave upon a bed of sickness, which, then he felt\nconvinced, would be to her the bed of death!\n\n\"And was it for this,\" he exclaimed, as he paced his study, \"for this I\ndrew her from her native shades, where, happy and contented, but for me\nshe might have blossomed still. Oh! little, my Ellen, hast thou had\ncause to rejoice in that elevation which doubtless many have envied\nthee. Too often have I been to thee the mysterious cause of sorrow and\nanxiety. Perhaps I shall have been also the cause of thine untimely\nend.\"\n\nThe idea so dreadfully shook him, he dared no longer think, lest it\nshould quite unman him; but determined to look upon her once more, he\ntook the taper, which burnt beside him, and, with light steps, passed to\nher apartment. In the anti-room he found the housekeeper and Jane both\nsleeping in their chairs: all was profoundly still, and he began to fear\nEllen was left without a wakeful guard; but at the sound of his\nfootsteps, almost noiseless as they were, and the approaching light, for\nthe bed-room door was open for air, Laura Cecil stole to meet him: she\nmotioned to him to be silent, and advancing a few steps into the\nanti-room, said, in the lowest whisper, \"For heaven's sake, Lord St.\nAubyn, why this--why are you not retired to rest?\"\n\n\"Ah, Laura! dear, kind Laura,\" he exclaimed, grasping her hand, \"how\ncould I rest, while that injured, perhaps that murdered angel lies\nsuffering thus, and through my fault, through my accursed, headlong\njealousy!\"\n\n\"Deeply, indeed,\" said Laura, \"do I lament that appearances should have\nthus misled you, my Lord, and am indeed astonished at it: had you but\nwaited one hour, ere you so harshly condemned, from me you might have\nlearned her perfect innocence: she pressed me to go with her this\nmorning, which my having a bad head-ache prevented: she told me where\nshe was going, shewed me the letter she had received, detailed her kind\nplans for relieving the poor widow, and mentioned not having explained\nher intentions to you, lest you should prevent her going; and she wished\nso much, she said, to see the _poor little infant_; certainly she did\nnot mention any intention of going to that fatal house where you found\nher, and which, I am assured, she never thought of till passing the top\nof the street she recollected the book she so much valued, and which I\none day heard her tell Jane to call for; but all this is now unavailing:\nlet me beg you to retire: should the murmur of our voices disturb her, I\nshall indeed greatly lament it.\"\n\n\"Oh, let me look upon her--once more let me see her! Will she die? Is it\npossible she may recover?\"\n\n\"It is very possible, almost certain, from her sleeping so quietly, if\nyou do not disturb her: but think, if she should awake and see you, at\nthis strange hour, with those distracted looks!\"\n\n\"Yet I must see her _now_--yes, Laura, I must venture all; for how do I\nknow if I shall ever see her more!\"\n\n\"For heaven's sake, what do you mean? Surely, surely you do not think\nof--you are not meditating----\"\n\n\"No matter what,\" said he hastily; \"I must see her _now_.\"\n\nLaura shrunk back astonished and dismayed; but feeling that he would not\nbe contradicted, she again, with light steps, approached the bed; where,\nin a profound sleep, the effect of opiates, lay Ellen, \"fair lily, and\nwhiter than her sheets;\" and but that in the stillness of night her\nquick short breathings were distinctly heard, it could hardly have been\nknown she lived.\n\nLaura then beckoned St. Aubyn to approach, which he did with trembling\nsteps, and shaded by the curtain, gazed wistfully upon her. Overcome by\nthe touching spectacle of youth, beauty, and innocence, in a few hours\nalmost destroyed by his rash jealousy, the tears now ran down his manly\ncheeks; and hardly could he restrain the groans which heaved his bosom,\nwhile Laura's eyes streamed at the affecting sight before her. At that\nmoment Ellen moved a little, and they both retreated, that if she opened\nher eyes she might not see them; but she still slept; and only murmuring\n\"dear St. Aubyn,\" and a few inarticulate words, she was again silent.\n\nAgain St. Aubyn asked Laura if it were possible she could recover, and\nshe assured him that Ellen already looked better than she had done an\nhour before; and at last, after he had knelt and imprinted a soft kiss\non one of her hands, which lay on the counterpane, and lifted up his\nheart to heaven, in silent prayer for her recovery, he was prevailed on\nto quit the room.\n\nThe rest of the night St. Aubyn spent in settling some papers, and\nadding a few lines to his will, all of which he locked into a drawer,\nand sealing up the key, directed it to Lady Juliana.\n\nAt day-break his valet, according to order, came to him. To this\nconfidential servant St. Aubyn explained the cause of his going from\nhome so early, and left the pacquet for Lady Juliana in his care, to be\ndelivered to her, should he not return in safety. He then sent to\ninquire of Jane for her lady, and had the happiness of hearing a\nfavourable account of her. St. Aubyn then set off, attended only by one\nservant, to the house of Sir Edward Leicester, whose carriage was at the\ndoor, and they instantly proceeded to Wimbledon, where, on the spot\nmarked in Charles Ross's letter, they alighted; and telling the coachman\nto draw off, and wait at a place they pointed out to him, the two\nfriends walked up and down some time, expecting Ross.\n\nIn about ten minutes they saw him approaching, but alone: St. Aubyn just\ntouched his hat, and said, \"Mr. Ross, where is your friend?\"\n\n\"My Lord,\" said Ross, in a firm tone, \"I am here, not to fight, not to\ndouble the injuries you have already received from me, but to make every\nconcession you can desire. I have brought no friend with me; I trust my\nhonour and my life implicitly in your hands. Are you prepared to hear my\nexplanation?--if not, I am ready to stand your fire.\"\n\n\"I know not, Sir,\" said St. Aubyn, haughtily, \"what has caused this\nsudden alteration in your sentiments: this meeting was at your own\nrequest; and the insults you bestowed on Lady St. Aubyn yesterday make\nme as desirous of it now as you were when you appointed it.\"\n\n\"Yet, my Lord,\" said Sir Edward, \"hear Mr. Ross: if this affair can be\naccommodated without bloodshed, I think myself called upon to insist it\nshall be so.\"\n\nSt. Aubyn bowed with a lofty air to Ross, and said:--\n\n\"Well, Sir, your explanation if you please.\"\n\nRoss now entered into a long detail of the circumstances which had\nmisled him, stated his fears of St. Aubyn under the name of Mordaunt,\nwhen he first saw him at Llanwyllan; that no letters from thence had\nreached him on the station where he had remained for the last half year,\ntill, about a month before his ship had come home, and he had been\nordered to London to receive a promotion as unexpected as it was\nwelcome; that he happened to lodge at Mrs. Birtley's, and by chance,\nfinding the volume of Gray Lady St. Aubyn had left there, he recognized\nthe initials \"C. F. M. to E. P.\" in the first page, which the words\n\"Dear Llanwyllan,\" written in another, confirmed. The answer Mrs.\nBirtley made to his impatient questions had convinced him who the Mr.\nand Mrs. Mordaunt she spoke of were: this woman had given him also such\naccounts as led him to believe they were not married, and hence his mad\ninsulting conduct at the theatre had arisen. He next repeated so\naccurately every word that had passed between him and Ellen, and\ndescribed their mutual astonishment at meeting so unexpectedly in such a\nnatural manner, that had St. Aubyn doubted before, he could have done so\nno longer.\n\n\"Yet,\" said Ross, \"convinced as I now was how wrong I had been, I could\nnot prevail on myself to apologize to one whom I confess I hated, for he\nhad robbed me of the only woman I ever loved; yet she had never, even in\nthe happy hours of our youth, given me the slightest hope of ever\nobtaining more than the affection of a sister from her, and even that\nseemed at times more the effect of habit than choice; for rough and\nunpolished, my manners repulsed, and choleric and hasty my temper,\nalarmed the gentle Ellen; yet I still flattered myself, time, and the\nretired situation in which she lived preventing her extraordinary beauty\nfrom being known, might have done much for me; but from the moment Mr.\nMordaunt was known to her, I easily perceived that hope was at an end;\nand now I had only to desire that I might fall by the hand of the man\nwho had raised her to that greatness. I could have done no more than\nwish for her; I therefore determined to keep my engagement for this\nmorning. But yesterday it came to my knowledge that the promotion\nintended for me had been granted to the solicitations of Lord St. Aubyn.\nStruck, ashamed at the base ingratitude of my conduct, I resolved at\nlength to make every explanation, every concession. I have done so, and\nnow, my Lord, it rests with you to accept this apology: if you refuse\nit, I am ready to stand your fire, for never will I lift my hand in a\ncause so unjust, and against a man, who, without my knowledge, had so\ngenerously befriended me.\"\n\n\"I told you before, Mr. Ross,\" said St. Aubyn, \"that for your excellent\nfather's sake I would overlook that in you which in another man I would\ninstantly have resented. I am not of a vindictive spirit, and the\npractice of duelling, though I have in some measure been forced to\ncountenance it, is against my principles. You are at liberty, Sir, to\nretire; I am satisfied.\"\n\n\"I dare not, my Lord,\" said Ross, \"attempt to offer any thanks for the\nkindness you intended me in my professional career; still less can I\nconsent to profit by it: I have not deserved it at your hands, and\ndeclining the promotion offered to me, I shall return to my ship, and\nleave England as soon as possible, and I hope for ever.\"\n\nSt. Aubyn's generous spirit was moved by this renunciation.\n\n\"That promotion, Mr. Ross,\" he replied, \"was sought for you at the\nrequest of Lady St. Aubyn, who had not forgotten the friend of her\nchildhood, and in hopes of gratifying your most worthy father, from\nwhom, as well as from your mother and sister, both my wife and myself\nhave experienced much kindness and friendship: I must therefore request\nyou will not renounce it.\n\n\"At this moment Lady St. Aubyn is extremely ill, in consequence of the\nalarming scene to which your mistake and my rashness gave rise: should\nthis illness prove fatal,\" (and his lips quivered with emotion as he\nspoke), \"never more must you and I meet again! Should she recover, as I\nhope and trust she will, I am so perfectly satisfied with the\nexplanations I have received, that I shall not be sorry to see your\nearly acquaintance renewed: for the present we part as friends.\"\n\nThen bowing, he took Sir Edward's arm, and hastened to his carriage,\nleaving Ross overwhelmed with shame and remorse for the treatment he\nhad given to a man so generous.\n\nOn reaching Cavendish Square he found Lady Juliana in the utmost alarm;\nfor missing him when she arose, and hearing at how early an hour he had\nleft the house, she had immediately suspected his errand abroad: she had\nsent to Sir Edward Leicester's, and learned from the servants that their\nmaster and Lord St. Aubyn had gone out together. Still more and more\nalarmed, Lady Juliana paced from room to room in dreadful agitation, not\nknowing whither to send or what to do. Soon after eight o'clock, Laura\nsent a note by Jane to Lady Juliana, saying Lady St. Aubyn was awake,\nthat the delirium had totally subsided, but had left her so extremely\nweak and low she could hardly speak to be heard, but was anxious to see\nher and Lord St. Aubyn, whose affectionate inquiries she had heard of\nwith much delight, and was prepared to see him with composure, and\nwithout recurring to the past. To trust herself near Ellen, agitated as\nshe was, Lady Juliana knew was impossible; she therefore ordered Jane to\nsay, that having sat up almost the whole night, neither the Earl nor\nherself was up, but in an hour or two they would be with her; then\nassuring the girl that the unfortunate misunderstanding of the day\nbefore was perfectly explained, she charged her not to drop a hint of it\namongst the servants, which Jane readily promised, and faithfully\nperformed.\n\nSoon after this, Doctor B. called, and to him Lady Juliana communicated\nher fears on St. Aubyn's account: he entreated she would not go near the\nCountess till her spirits were quieter, and by no means to let any ill\ntidings reach her, should such arrive: then visiting the sick room, he\nrejoiced to find his young and lovely patient out of danger, though\nextremely weak. The excellence of her constitution, assisted by his\nskill, had triumphed over the disease, and if no new alarm occurred, he\ndoubted not her perfect recovery: leaving strict and repeated orders\nthat no one should be admitted at all likely to hurry her spirits, he\nleft her, and as he passed down the staircase, was rejoiced to see St.\nAubyn enter safe and well. The Earl hastened to him with the most eager\ninquiries for his patient, and listened to his favourable accounts with\nthankful joy.\n\n\"As to Lady Juliana, my good Lord,\" said the physician, \"she is scarcely\nin her senses; you have frightened her almost to death: come, let me\nhave the pleasure of leading you to her, and telling her at the same\ntime how much better our fair patient is, after which I would advise you\nboth to take some repose, for your countenance tells me you have not had\nmuch rest last night, and I promise you, you must not go to Lady St.\nAubyn with those pale and haggard looks.\"\n\nThe joy of Lady Juliana at seeing St. Aubyn return safe and unhurt was\nextreme, and was still increased when he owned to her candidly where he\nhad been, and the satisfactory explanation he had received from Ross,\nwhich so completely put an end to this untoward affair for ever.\n\nIn the afternoon, St. Aubyn, promising to be as composed as possible,\nwas permitted to see Ellen for a few minutes. Both forbore to speak of\nwhat had passed, for both felt they could not endure to recur to it; but\nthe warmth and unaffected tenderness of his manner assured her that all\nsuspicion had been effaced from his mind; while the affectionate\nsoftness of her's proved to St. Aubyn that his unkindness was forgiven.\n\nIn a very few days Ellen was pronounced convalescent, though her\nremaining weakness, and Lady Juliana's precautions, confined her to her\ndressing-room: there, by slow degrees, she learned from her\naffectionate Laura all the circumstances which had led to Charles Ross's\nmistake, and that of St. Aubyn, nor could she help acknowledging that\nappearances had been in both instances against her: relieved however by\nhaving all her anxieties removed, and by a full though affecting\nexplanation with St. Aubyn, who gave her the tenderest assurances that\nevery jealous disposition was for ever removed from his mind, she now\nrapidly recovered: but as the weather was now becoming very warm, and\nshe had had no great reason to delight in London, she earnestly\nrequested to be allowed to return to Castle St. Aubyn; and the advice of\nher medical attendants coinciding with her wishes, the request was\neasily granted.\n\nBefore she left London, however, she, with her Lord, paid another visit\nto the officer's widow and her interesting family, and so arranged for\nthem as to ensure them a neat residence a little way out of town, and\nthe certain means of comfortable subsistence for the present; for it was\nher intention, with St. Aubyn's permission, to form a school, and other\nuseful institutions, in the neighbourhood of the Castle, in which she\nhoped to render the widow a service, as well as gratify herself, by\nplacing her at the head of the village seminary. She also visited Mr.\nDorrington again, and spent a delightful hour amongst his treasures;\nthen leaving her P. P. C. for Lady Meredith, and some other slight\nacquaintances, she joyfully left London on her way to Northamptonshire,\naccompanied by the Earl (more tenderly attached than ever), Lady\nJuliana, and Miss Cecil, Sir Edward Leicester promising to pay them a\nvisit very soon.\n\nDelighted indeed was Ellen once more to breathe the pure air of the\ncountry; and as they passed the little inn where they had stopped on\ntheir former journey from town, and caught a distant glimpse of the\nfarm-house where he had told her his real name and rank, she tenderly\npressed St. Aubyn's hand, and with a soft tear on her cheek, reminded\nhim of the circumstance.\n\n\"Ah, my Ellen,\" he said, \"much have we both suffered since that\ninteresting moment, but never more, through fault of mine, shall you\nshed another tear, save such as now glitter in your eyes--tears of\ntenderness and affection.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAP. X.\n\n  She feels it--'tis her son! with rapture wild,\n  Bath'd in warm tears, from soft sensations prest.\n  She clasps him to her cheek, her lip, her breast,\n  And looks with eye unsated on her child.\n  He knows her, sure!--Sure, answering rapture his,\n  Leave her at least the visionary bliss!\n  Lo! his clear eye to her's responsive speaks,\n  And lo! his little mouth, that wistful seeks\n  Warm from her lip to suck the sweet o'erflowing kiss.\n  She hears the silent call--how quickly hears\n  A mother's heart.\n\n                                               SOTHEBY'S OBERON.\n\n\nArrived at the Castle, Ellen once more began to breathe; her colour and\nappetite returned, and she speedily recovered her strength, and thought\nshe had never been so happy: her Lord's renewed, and even encreased\naffection, Lady Juliana's sincere attachment, and the pleasing society\nof Laura Cecil, who remained her guest (Sir William being in Scotland\nwith Lord and Lady Delamore), left her scarcely any thing to wish.\n\nThis little party received a very agreeable addition about a week after,\nby the arrival of Sir Edward Leicester, whose continued attentions to\nMiss Cecil seemed not ill received by her.\n\nSoon after their return to Castle St. Aubyn, letters from Mr. Ross and\nJoanna arrived, filled with thanks and rejoicings for the promotion of\nCharles. They said not a word, nor seemed to know any thing of the late\ntransactions; and Lord and Lady St. Aubyn were glad he had not revealed\nthem. It appeared, that through St. Aubyn's interest, he had been made\nLieutenant, and honoured with the command of a small frigate, and was\ngone to cruize in the Mediterranean. At this latter circumstance Ellen\nwas not sorry; for she could not wish, after what had passed, to see\nCharles Ross again at present. Every thing, therefore, seemed now smooth\nbefore her; and though sometimes her thoughts would wander to the\nformer mysterious expressions of St. Aubyn, and recollecting that the\ntime he appointed for their elucidation was arrived, yet as she heard no\nmore of it, and he seemed to have lost those fits of gloom, which even\nfrom the commencement of their acquaintance had been obvious in him, she\nhoped all was passed over, and determined by no ill-timed curiosity to\nrevive painful ideas in his mind. But she yet fully knew not St. Aubyn,\nexcept when thrown off his guard by any sudden emotion: his command over\nhis spirits and features was wonderful; and no one who saw him composed,\ncheerful, and even gay, could have suspected what at times passed in his\nmind, nor to what unpleasant scenes he now looked forward. Not even Lady\nJuliana knew what reason he had to think of the future with\napprehension, though with much of what had formerly befallen him she\ncertainly was acquainted.\n\nThe families round the Castle paid every polite attention to Lady St.\nAubyn on her return: many, who had been absent when she was there\nbefore, now visited her; and though for the present she declined\nentering into large parties, every one seemed rejoiced to see her once\nmore amongst them. Not the least delighted was Miss Alton, who with\nunfading charms, and exhaustless professions of regard, came eagerly to\ngreet the charming Countess's return, to rejoice in her perfect\nrecovery, and to assure her how much she had suffered at hearing she was\nill in London.\n\n\"And oh! my dear Lady St. Aubyn,\" said she, \"think how shocked I was to\nhear some rude wretch had annoyed you at the theatre, and that your\nexcellent lord had like to have fought a duel about it. Oh! how thankful\nI am that these frightful scenes did not more materially injure your\nvaluable health, and that you are returned to us, if possible, more\nbeautiful than ever.\"\n\n\"And who, my dear Miss Alton,\" said Laura, who alone retained composure\nenough to answer her (for this familiar recurrence to scenes so painful\nhad greatly disturbed Lady St. Aubyn and Lady Juliana), \"who told you\nall this wonderful story?\"\n\n\"Oh, it was a cousin of mine, who happened to be coming out of the\nplayhouse just as it happened, and wrote me word of it; and that the\ngentlemen had exchanged cards: so you see I had pretty good authority.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" replied Lady Juliana, with her usual asperity, \"and no doubt made\npretty good use of it. Pray, Ma'am, did you think it necessary to send a\nman and horse round the neighbourhood with this amusing piece of\nintelligence; or were you contented with your own personal exertions?\"\n\n\"Dear Lady Juliana, I am sure I thought no harm; I only just mentioned\nit----\"\n\n\"To every one who would hear you, no doubt. If, at least, you had spared\nus the recital, it would have been quite as delicate, and more\nconsistent with your _tender feelings_ for Lady St. Aubyn.\"\n\nPoor Miss Alton, quite shocked to find she had given such offence to the\nold lady, of whom she stood in great awe, vainly attempted to rally her\nspirits, and soon after took her leave, earnestly wishing Lady Juliana\nhad staid in London; for she foresaw the entre of the Castle would not\nbe so easily granted to her now as it had been when only the\nkind-hearted Countess presided; and trembling, lest, if she were not\nmore cautious in future, she should not be admitted to see the little\nstranger when it arrived, and take cake and caudle in Lady St. Aubyn's\napartment.\n\n\"See,\" said Lady Juliana, drawing herself up, \"see, my dear, the\nconsequence of admitting such low, uneducated people to any degree of\nintimacy! This gossipping woman would not have ventured to hint at what\nhad passed, had you kept her at a proper distance: but the easy\nimpudence of such people in these degenerate times astonishes me. In the\ndays of the Countess of St. Aubyn, my mother, _she_ would scarcely have\nspoken to such a sort of person as this Miss--what do you call her?\" For\nwhen Lady Juliana felt proud or indignant, she had a great knack of\nforgetting any name which had not a title tacked to it; though no one\nremembered more accurately those which had.\n\n\"Ah!\" thought Ellen, \"how with pride so overbearing could I ever have\nhoped to be myself exempted from this general censure of such sort of\npersons! How fortunate I may think myself, to have overcome a prejudice\nof such long standing.\"\n\nIn the society of a few agreeable neighbours, and the ever-pleasing\nconversation of Laura, the time passed serenely till the end of August:\nyet there were moments when gloom seemed again to steal over the\nfeatures of St. Aubyn. His foreign letters arrived more frequently, but\nappeared to give him no satisfaction. With Ellen he studiously avoided\nall conversation on the subject of his anxiety: for he dreaded, in her\npresent state, the least alarm, and delayed by every means in his power\nthe apparently fast approaching crisis of his fate, till her safety\nshould have been secured.\n\nAt length, after some hours of uneasy watching, and the most painful\nanxiety, Lady Juliana announced to him the birth of a _son_, who,\nnotwithstanding all the alarms his mother had undergone in London,\nseemed likely as well as herself to do well. Lady Juliana was in\nraptures at this event, to which she had so long looked forward with\nimpatience. Nothing that money could procure was wanting to decorate\neither the infant or the chamber where he lay, which, as well as that of\nthe Countess, had been entirely new furnished in the most superb and\ncommodious manner at her expence, Lady Juliana having insisted on paying\nfor every thing prepared, even to the elegant cradle lined with quilted\nwhite satin; and not even Lady Meredith had softer cushions than those\non which the infant heir reposed.\n\nSt. Aubyn, charmed with the lovely little creature, and to see its\nmother safe, appeared as if he had no wish ungratified, and left no\ntender attention unpaid which might ensure his Ellen's health and\ncomfort. As she approached towards convalescence, Laura Cecil was her\nconstant and most delightful companion, and well knew how to cheer and\nadorn the hours which were necessarily given to the quietude of her own\napartments. The infant was rather delicate though healthy; but safe in\nits mother's fostering cares it strengthened every day, without those\ncares----\n\n  Ah! what avails the cradle's damask roof,\n  The eider bolster, or embroidered woof,\n  Oft hears the gilded couch unpitied plains,\n  And many a tear, the tassel'd cushion stains!\n  No voice so sweet attunes his cares to rest,\n  So soft no pillow as his mother's breast!\n    Thus charm'd to sweet repose, when twilight hours\n    Shed their soft influence on celestial bowers,\n  The cherub, Innocence, with smile divine,\n  Shuts his white wings, and sleeps on beauty's shrine.\n\n                                                         DARWIN.\n\nIncessantly anxious about the babe, Lady St. Aubyn could not soon permit\nit to be removed from her apartments, it lay therefore with its nurse in\na smaller room within that where Lady St. Aubyn slept.\n\nIt was about six weeks after this event, so interesting to all parties,\nhad taken place, and Ellen had for some time been returned to the\nsociety of her own family, that one day, just as they had finished\ndinner, St. Aubyn was told two gentlemen in a chaise and four had just\narrived, and requested to speak to him immediately. He changed colour,\nbut conquering his purturbation, desired they might be shewn into his\nstudy, and he would go to them. \"Who are they?\" said Lady Juliana. \"I\ndid not know, nephew, you expected any company.\" \"Perhaps,\" said St.\nAubyn, evading her questions, \"they may not remain here an hour, perhaps\ntill to-morrow morning.\" He hastily left the room, and Ellen was\nconvinced these strangers were the persons at whom St. Aubyn had often\nhinted as connected with the mystery which hung around him: she\ntrembled, and felt dismayed, but endeavoured to be as composed as\npossible. In a few minutes after St. Aubyn had left the room, Mr.\nMordaunt was sent for; and as he had been some time an invalid, St.\nAubyn desired a carriage might be dispatched to bring him to the Castle.\nEllen passing soon after up stairs to the nursery, crossed him in the\nhall, followed by his assistant with a quantity of papers and\nparchments: they bowed, and went into the study. \"Oh, I know now,\" said\nLady Juliana, who was with her, \"who St. Aubyn has with him: it is I\nsuppose Lord De Montfort, and his guardian and tutor, Mr. O'Brien, a\nCatholic priest, who has the entire management of the young man, and\nwill I suppose now have the entire direction of his estates, which have\ntill now been under the care of my nephew, who was appointed by his\nfather's will the young Earls guardian, as far as related to his English\nproperty, till he should be twenty-four, though his Catholic relations\nhave had the care of his person. Rejoiced shall I be when St. Aubyn has\nfinally concluded all his concerns with that family. Heaven knows they\nhave given him trouble enough already! and this young man I know hates\nhim. I don't suppose he will stay an hour after the accounts are\nsettled, indeed he would not have come at all, only Mordaunt having all\nthe affairs in his hands, and being too unwell to go from home, it was I\nconclude necessary: this I know, if these people stay here to-night, I\nshall remain in my own room.\"\n\nEllen carefully and anxiously attended to all she said, yet this\ndiscourse gave her no clue by which to unravel the mysterious speeches\nof St. Aubyn. After spending an hour in the nursery, both ladies\nreturned to the drawing-room, and sent a servant to know if coffee\nshould be carried into the study, or if Lord St. Aubyn and his guests\nwould join the ladies. Orders were given for tea and coffee in the\nstudy; and Lady Juliana could not restrain her curiosity enough to\nrefrain asking who was with Lord St. Aubyn: from the servant she\nlearned that the party consisted of his Lordship, Mr. Mordaunt, his\nclerk, and two strange gentlemen, one elderly, the other young, and\napparently in ill health. This confirmed her surmises, and soon after\ntea, not wishing to see Lord De Montfort, should he make his appearance,\nshe retired to her own room, leaving Ellen and Laura together, with a\nstrict injunction to the former not to be kept up too late.\n\nEllen's anxiety made her somewhat silent; and Laura, never very\ntalkative, easily fell into her present humour, so that for some time\nvery little conversation passed between them. Laura was netting, and\nEllen attempting a drawing; but her hand was unsteady, and her attention\ndivided, therefore finding she should not succeed, she threw down her\npencil, and listened in silence to a loud equinoxial wind, which howled\naround, and shook with \"murmur not unlike the dash of ocean on his\nsounding shores\" the ancient trees which grew near the mansion. A\nchilling sensation insensibly stole upon her, and at length, to break\nthe melancholy silence of the apartment, rather than that she wished to\nspeak, she said, \"'Tis a rough night, and cold.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Laura; and they both drew nearer the fire.\n\n\"Do you know Lord De Montfort?\" asked Ellen.\n\n\"I have seen him when a boy,\" replied Laura, \"and think I should know\nhim again, though six or seven years make a great alteration at his\nage.\"\n\n\"Was he handsome?\"\n\n\"Yes, but not so much so as his sister.\"\n\n\"Is he like her?\"\n\n\"A little, but of a darker complexion: her's was a clear lively brown;\ndark hazle eyes, full of spirit, and indeed at times of scorn, a Grecian\nnose, full lips, the upper one curled a little, which gave a haughty air\nto her countenance; Edmund was thinner, paler, and his eyes had a\nsofter look.\"\n\n\"Edmund is his name?\"\n\n\"He has a long list of names, according to the Spanish custom; but his\nsister always called him Edmund, which was his father's.\"\n\n\"I wonder whether we shall see him?\"\n\n\"Of course,--I suppose so,\" said Laura, with some surprize: \"it is too\nlate for him to quit the Castle to-night, and he will without doubt pay\nhis compliments to you before he departs.\"\n\n\"I think,\" replied Ellen, \"from what Lady Juliana said just now, that\nSt. Aubyn and Lord De Montfort are not on very good terms, that made me\ndoubt whether he would stay the night.\"\n\n\"It may be so,\" said Laura, \"yet unless they are decidedly at enmity,\nthe young man cannot avoid seeing you.\"\n\nSoon after the supper tray was brought into the room, and on its being\nannounced to the gentlemen, St. Aubyn came to the library, accompanied\nby Mr. Mordaunt and Mr. O'Brien, the latter of whom he introduced to the\nladies. St. Aubyn looked pale, and his manners had lost some of its\nusual composure. O'Brien was a grave, respectable old man, of Irish\nextraction, but bred in a convent abroad, and speaking English but\nimperfectly.\n\n\"I will return to the study,\" said St. Aubyn, \"and see once more if I\ncan persuade Lord De Montfort to take some refreshment. You remember De\nMontfort, Miss Cecil?--He is my other guest, but he pleads fatigue, and\ndisinclination to see any one, and will not be prevailed on to take even\na glass of wine. I will once more endeavour to induce him to join you.\"\n\n\"Indeed, my Lord,\" said Ellen, \"I hope he will: if he be fatigued, he\nmust the more need refreshment.\"\n\n\"My love,\" said St. Aubyn, \"will you have the goodness to order beds to\nbe prepared for Lord De Montfort and Mr. O'Brien. They remain here this\nnight.\"\n\nHe then left the room, and Ellen ringing the bell, desired Mrs. Bayfield\nmight be sent to her dressing-room, whither a few minutes after she went\nherself to give orders respecting the beds. As she passed the study\ndoor, which was not quite close, she distinctly heard St. Aubyn say:--\n\n\"For Heaven's sake, De Montfort, be persuaded; do not wrong me so\ncruelly! Why condemn me on mere appearances?\"\n\nEllen passed hastily on, and heard St. Aubyn close the door with some\nviolence, warned perhaps by the light she carried that some one might\noverhear him.\n\nIn her dressing-room she met Mrs. Bayfield, and was instantly struck\nwith her pale countenance and agitated appearance.\n\n\"My good Bayfield,\" said Ellen, \"I sent for you to request you would see\nchambers prepared for the strange gentlemen; but you look ill, pray go\nto bed: Jane shall go with the housemaids and see that all is right.\"\n\n\"I am not ill, my Lady,\" said Mrs. Bayfield; \"but a glimpse I caught of\nLord De Montfort just now, and the tone of his voice, reminded me of so\nmany painful events--\"\n\nShe paused, sighed, and the tears ran down her cheeks as she added:\n\n\"I wish he had not come here; I wish he was gone back to Spain; I cannot\nbear to see him.\"\n\n\"His likeness to your late lady affects you perhaps, my good friend?\"\nsaid Ellen.\n\n\"Oh, no, Madam; it is not that; he is like her to be sure; but it is not\n_that_. I feel so uneasy when I see him.--He does not love my Lord; and\nyet he used to love him. But forgive me, Madam; I forget myself: will\nyour Ladyship please to give your orders now?\"\n\n\"I will leave all to your care, my good Bayfield. I suppose the\ngentlemen will like to be near each other: the two chambers at the end\nof the gallery where I sleep (those next to that your Lord sleeps in at\npresent, I mean) will suit them best, I think: see that they have good\nfires, for it is cold to-night: the wind is really alarming.\"\n\n\"Your Ladyship had better take another shawl round your shoulders: the\nstaircase is cold.\"\n\nEllen thanked her careful old friend, and returned to the company.\n\n\n                            END OF VOL. II.\n\n                B. CLARKE, Printer, Well Street, London.\n\n\n\n\n\nEnd of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Mystery and Confidence, Vol. 2, by\nElizabeth Pinchard\n\n*** "}
+{"meta": {"title": "Bias in the Booth - Dylan Gwinn"}, "text": "\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2015 by Dylan Gwinn\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.\n\nRegnery\u00ae is a registered trademark of Salem Communications Holding Corporation\n\nCataloging-in-Publication data on file with the Library of Congress\n\nFirst ebook edition \u00a92015\n\neISBN:978-1-62157-388-3\n\nPublished in the United States by\n\nRegnery Publishing\n\nA Salem Communications Company\n\n300 New Jersey Ave NW\n\nWashington, DC 20001\n\nwww.Regnery.com\n\nDistributed to the trade by\n\nPerseus Distribution\n\n250 West 57th Street\n\nNew York, NY 10107\n\n10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1\n\nBooks are available in quantity for promotional or premium use. For information on discounts and terms, please visit our website: www.Regnery.com.\n_For my parents, Bruce and Vinia Gwinn_\nCONTENTS\n\n**Introduction**\n\n**CHAPTER  Landing on Trayvon**\n\n**CHAPTER  The Separation of Church and Sport**\n\n**CHAPTER  Knaves on the Warpath**\n\n**CHAPTER  Making a Hero of Michael Sam**\n\n**CHAPTER  Trashing Tebow**\n\n**CHAPTER  Concussed and Confused**\n\n**CHAPTER  Blacklisting Limbaugh**\n\n**CHAPTER  Bull in Durham**\n\n**CHAPTER  The New Racism**\n\n**Afterword**\n\n**Acknowledgments**\n\n**Notes**\n\n**Index**\nINTRODUCTION\n\nSometimes it's easier to say what a book is not, as opposed to saying what it actually is. So, let's start there. What you're holding in your hand right now is not a book about sports. Nor is it a traditional book about the sports media where I catalogue and detail a career spent covering and writing about the biggest stars in sports and blah, blah, blah, blah.\n\nNo, what you're holding in your hand is something altogether different. This is a book about how virtually the entire sports media have been overrun with liberal activists trying to implement and advance their liberal agenda.\n\nI've been watching sports for most of my life. Being that I've made a career in sports talk radio, I've probably watched a lot more sports than is healthy or advisable. Like many of you, I remember a time when people flocked to sports because they were fun and entertaining, even awe-inspiring at their best, and an escape from the BS and politically correct hysteria of the \"real world.\"\n\nPolitical news and commentary were something you didn't often find in sports, because they were contentious and harsh, a serious business where the burdens of the real world were hung around your neck. Sports were an oasis, a safe zone, that one place where you could shut out all the frustrations and nonsense and seriousness of life and morph into an overgrown, screaming, jumping, foam-finger-waving thirteen-year-old.\n\nNow that former \"safe zone\" has become a political crazy zone, as broadcasters, writers, and TV personalities who are supposed to be talking about Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, Bryce Harper and Justin Verlander, Dwight Howard and Kevin Love, wax silly on everything from religion and politics to homosexuality, rape, race-baiting, and every other form of progressive nuttiness you can imagine. We're fast approaching a point where there's going to be no real difference between Bob Costas and Rachel Maddow. Except one of them is a man. I think.\n\nNot that the sports media's leftward slouch wasn't always there. I always knew the sports media were liberal. But their liberalism was tempered by the fact that their primary job was sports, and that's where they needed to focus their attention. I could deal with the occasional politically correct quip from Bob Costas as long as it was only occasional and the sports-to-politics balance was heavily tilted toward sports.\n\nBut nowadays that scale is about as balanced as a tilt-a-whirl. Politics\u2014and the sports media's desire to advance a political agenda\u2014now determine what stories get covered. Meet, for instance, seventh-round draft pick Michael Sam, an otherwise unremarkable player cut from the final roster of the team that drafted him, not signed onto their practice squad, and yet a headliner in the sports media for months, all because the liberal media have adopted certain sexual practices as worthy of a crusade.\n\nIn the spirit of saying what this book is not, I wish to make clear that I have no desire for the sports media to be conservative either. I'm not writing this book because I want to shift their ideology and worldview from liberal to conservative. I'm writing this book because I want the sports media to talk about sports, not politics. In short, I want the sports media to do their job.\n\nBut the inescapable fact of the matter is that the sports media, along with the mainstream media, have become just another font of liberal activism. A decade and a half ago, former Emmy Award\u2013winning CBS journalist (and a correspondent for HBO's _Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel_ ) Bernard Goldberg wrote a classic number one _New York Times_ bestseller about American journalism called _Bias_. Goldberg at the time was a liberal himself, but he was appalled at the casual yet pervasive bias of his mainstream media colleagues who weren't interested in simply reporting the facts, or even telling the truth, but were focused on advancing a left-wing agenda, often without even thinking about it, so deeply ingrained was their bias. He thought that was unprofessional\u2014and he was right.\n\nIn sports, the stakes might be smaller, but in some ways the offense is even worse. Fans have a right to enjoy a game, or a discussion of sports topics, without feeling like they're being put through a social indoctrination regimen, especially a social indoctrination program that's run by people whose sole accomplishment in life is that they can remember who hit cleanup for the Big Red Machine in the seventies. (Side note: it was Johnny Bench.) And that's part of the problem too. Many sports reporters and commentators recognize that they deal in trivialities, and yet they want to make a bigger impact on society, they want to feel more important, they want to inflate their egos by lecturing you, and as a consequence they often do their real jobs not very well. This book is for all of us who find ourselves wanting to shout, \"Shut up and give me the box score!\"\nCHAPTER ONE\n\nLANDING ON TRAYVON\n\nRadio is an industry dominated by white people. In all honesty, it looks an awful lot like a Mumford & Sons concert in there: shaggy beards and ill-fitting jeans mixed with a healthy dose of malnutrition and metrosexuality. You know the types. Yet one day in early 2012, I sat show-prepping in the newsroom, sitting with a black producer and a black intern. Eventually our discussion turned to a story that had dwarfed all other news: Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.\n\nThe headlines were that the local prosecutors would not charge George Zimmerman with Trayvon Martin's murder. This greatly upset the producer and the intern. But then our conversation turned to the sports community.\n\nPRODUCER: I just wish somebody would stand up and do something. Like maybe a Florida team; if they would just make a statement it would bring the kind of attention this deserves.\n\nINTERN: Oh absolutely. But nobody probably will.\n\nME: Why do you want that? How is it the job of a sports team, or a sports league, to get involved in a murder trial?\n\nPRODUCER: Because this isn't just a murder trial. This is a racial murder trial.\n\nME: So in other words, it's not about Trayvon Martin, it's about George Zimmerman?\n\nPRODUCER: No, it's not all because of that . . .\n\nME: But how many black kids are killed in South Florida every year by other black kids? Probably hundreds. Yet you're not asking a Florida team to make a stand over any of them. You're asking a Florida team to make a stand here because of who the murderer is. Not because of the kid who got murdered.\n\nNow, I'm sure you're asking yourselves: _But, Dylan! What the heck are you doing?!? Why bring up Trayvon Martin? I thought this was a book about sports media._ Relax, this is a book about sports media. And no, Trayvon Martin's story should never have been a sports media story. But it was, because sports media, and athletes, made it into a story that had to do with sports.\n\nTrayvon Martin didn't land on us; we decided to land on Trayvon Martin. And when the liberal sports media land on a topic of which they have virtually no knowledge, and very little understanding, it makes a really bad sound . . . kind of like Nickelback, but racist. Now, I bring up the discussion I had at the radio station for several reasons. First of all, I had a good relationship with this producer; we could be honest with each other, and though our conversation about Trayvon became contentious at times, it didn't end badly. Second, I want to give him credit for basically predicting the Miami Heat \"hoodie photo\" that they would release only a couple of months later.\n\nBut most of all I want to illustrate the fact that _plenty_ of people in the \"social justice\"\u2013driven, liberal sports media _wanted_ to land on the Trayvon Martin story in any way they could and found any excuse they could to do it. Similar discussions occurred at radio and television sports desks all over the country despite the fact that this story had absolutely nothing to do with sports.\n\nHow do I know this? Because in April 2012, thirteen members of the Miami Heat donned hoodies, just as Trayvon had been wearing when he was shot, for a group photo to show solidarity and put forth the idea that any of them could have been the victim. Then immediately after the \"hoodie photo\" went viral, the sports media went apoplectic. Michael Wallace, writing in the _Miami Heat Index_ at ESPN.com, applauded the Heat for \"standing tall\" for Trayvon and explained why the Heat felt they had to do this:\n\nBut this case hits especially close to home for the Heat on several levels. Martin was from Miami Gardens, a community that borders on neighborhoods where Heat players James Jones and Udonis Haslem were raised. . . . In many ways, this was a civic duty for Wade, James and their teammates. . . . Like Wade, LeBron also is the father of two young sons. And also like Wade, LeBron grew up in an impoverished area where young black men were more likely to become fatal statistics than phenoms in the field of sports.\n\nA civic duty, huh? Funny how this civic duty only kicks in when someone of a lighter complexion pulls the trigger. In August 2013, in that very same Miami Gardens neighborhood, twelve-year-old Tequila Forshee was killed by stray bullets as she sat in her family's living room having her hair braided. An innocent little girl, with her whole life ahead of her, snuffed out like she was nothing by stray bullets fired by some shred of human excrement I sincerely hope is somebody's prison wife right now. But you've never heard of Tequila Forshee before. Why?\n\nWhy didn't this sense of \"civic duty\" kick in for her? After all, she was from Udonis Haslem and James Jones's old neighborhood; yet no players \"stood tall\" for Tequila. No members of the Heat braided their hair for her. Maybe it's because her killer wasn't white. In which case, apparently, there's no point \"standing tall.\" Make sense? If it does, you're an idiot.\n\nMichael Wallace is no doubt right when he says that young black men from impoverished areas are far \"more likely to become fatal statistics than phenoms in the field of sports.\" But what he left out is that they're far more likely to become fatal statistics _at the hands of other black men_ than they are by idiot, vigilante neighborhood-watch types. The fact is, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice, about 93 percent of black murder victims are murdered by other blacks; and blacks, who are about 13 percent of the population, commit more than half of all American homicides.\n\nSo is there a crime problem in black America? Yes\u2014and if the Miami Heat or any other players wanted to do something about it, donning hoodies in solidarity with Trayvon was about the least effective thing they could have done.\n\nBut for sports media, grandstanding is just fine. Sports columnist David Hyde, in the _Sun Sentinel_ , lamented how \"over the past few decades,\" before the Heat made their brave stand for Trayvon, \"the model of the sports hero shrank.\" He continued:\n\nIt didn't start with Tiger Woods' refusal to say something\u2014anything\u2014about the lack of black members at certain country clubs or of women at Augusta National. It didn't start with Michael Jordan's avoiding political conversations because, as the namesake of the Air Jordan sneaker famously said, \"Republicans buy shoes too.\" It's a cultural slide we've all participated in\u2014athletes, media and fans\u2014of expecting players only to play great and never to think great like Arthur Ashe, prod great like Muhammad Ali, talk great like Billie Jean King or Martina Navratilova, or challenge in a great way like Jim Brown or Oscar Robertson.\n\nMaybe we only care about players playing great because that's the only reason why we watch them. Tom Brady is a phenomenal quarterback. That's what he does, and that's what he knows. If I wanted to learn how to read a zone-dog blitz, I'd go to Brady. If I wanted insight on political unrest in Ukraine, or crop production in Malaysia, I'd go to somebody else. It's not that I don't expect my athletes to \"think great\"; I would just prefer they keep those \"great\" thoughts to themselves, because I don't watch them for that. Nor is it the shrinking of the \"sports hero\"; if anything, athletes are more famous and wealthy today than they've ever been. What it is (big-word alert) is the compartmentalization of the world. I don't need a political Muhammad Ali in my life; if I want to watch an anti-American Muslim scream about the injustices perpetrated by America, I can watch MSNBC. I don't need Billie Jean King to tell me what it's like to be gay; I have HBO and _Modern Family_ for that. Back when Muhammad Ali and Billie Jean King were around, there were three television stations and five major national newspapers. Now we have cable channels that cover everything from underwater basket-weaving to lesbian biker gangs, and we have podcasts, blogs, satellite radio, terrestrial radio, apps, tweets, and websites with wannabe experts galore. What I want, _and what I think most people want_ , is for their athletes to entertain them with the grace, skill, and power of their sport, and to provide an escape from all the real-world stuff that we have to deal with on a daily basis. Almost every sports fan wants sports to be a politics-free zone, and our job as media isn't to insert realism into people's escapism. And sports media should serve the sports fans, not push the commentators' political agendas, and not push athletes to make political statements (and they're always pushing in one direction, in case you didn't notice).\n\nThat said, Hyde's contention that today's athletes lack political activism is a joke. Michael Jordan, whom Hyde disses for avoiding \"political conversations,\" was one of Barack Obama's most significant private campaign donors. In fact, Jordan, along with then\u2013NBA commissioner David Stern, hosted a massive campaign fund-raising dinner for Obama in New York City right before the 2012 election called the \"Obama Classic.\" The event attracted multiple NBA players, including Kyrie Irving, John Wall, Harrison Barnes, Austin Rivers, and many others. Jordan himself, whose financial support of Obama goes back as far as his Senate run in 2004, has raised and donated millions to Obama. What annoys leftist sports writers like David Hyde is the lack of 1960s\u2013 and 1970s\u2013era photo-ops: no raised fists, no burning bras, no public protests. The hoodie photo brought back, for the leftist sport media, the good old days.\n\nBut for athletes the \"movement\" has grown more sophisticated as it has grown more corporate. For many years \"the Benjamins\" have flown out of athletes' wallets and into the coffers of leftist politicians in copious amounts. The $5,000-a-plate dinner _is_ the new burning bra. But that, of course, doesn't make for good copy or commentary of the sort that Benjamin Hochman of the _Denver Post_ could turn out praising LeBron James and the Heat for the hoodie photo:\n\nEver since [LeBron] made \"take my talents\" a punch line, ever since he floundered in NBA Finals news conferences as if he were Captain Queeg, ever since he forgot about his fans and where he came from, basketball's best player has become a PR nightmare. Your mouth opens when he plays, and your mouth opens when he opens his mouth. But LeBron James did something positive this past week with his public platform.\n\nThe killing has sparked a debate about racial profiling. So James posted a photo on his Twitter account (he has more than 4 million followers). The photo featured the Miami Heat players all wearing sweat shirt hoods over their heads. Using hash tags to provide commentary, James wrote: #WeAreTrayvonMartin #Hoodies #Stereotyped #WeWantJustice.\n\nIn fact, you would have had to look very hard to find any criticism of what the Heat had done. The so-called great fear of the NBA, that its majority fan demographic of suburban whites would be put off by the political stance of its players, mostly urban and black, seemed not to materialize at all. Virtually the entire sports world, fans included, either stood in full-throated support or stayed ambivalent about what the Heat had done in taking the \"hoodie photo.\" Yet the media, in their zest to reward the Heat for the kind of activism they wanted to see more of, continued to heap on the praise. Jason Whitlock, then of Fox Sports, spoke of \"courage\" in what the team had done:\n\nCourage can be every bit as contagious as cowardice. Wade and James spread the courage virus throughout the NBA on Friday. At the formation of Miami's \"Big Three,\" James and his defenders claimed the establishment was threatened by young black athletes seizing their power and using it.\n\nFor the first time, I now believe James understands his power. And it wasn't in forcing NBA executives to come to his hometown, Akron, Ohio, to grovel at his feet, or announcing his relocation to South Beach on national TV or thumbing his nose at Dan Gilbert as he left Cleveland.\n\nLeBron's power is in using his platform, when appropriate, to make the establishment stretch beyond its comfort zone when it comes to dealing with the powerless. LeBron's heart has always been in the right place. Teaming with Wade, a near equal in terms of talent and a big brother in terms of maturity, has moved LeBron's head where his heart is.\n\nHow much \"courage\" is truly involved in tweeting out a pic that garners universal praise? On the contrary, something much more courageous came later from Charles Barkley when he announced his agreement with the eventual acquittal of George Zimmerman. _That_ took incredible balls.\n\nPay close attention to the language Whitlock uses to describe the \"power\" that LeBron James has, and needs to use, \" _when appropriate, to make the establishment stretch beyond its comfort zone when itcomes to dealing with the powerless_ [emphasis added].\" So this is the role of the best player in the NBA? To make the establishment \"stretch\" for the \"powerless\"? Whitlock is, allegedly, a sports writer, but he could just as easily be writing a sports version of Saul Alinsky's _Rules for Radicals_. What Whitlock really means is that he wants LeBron and other high-profile black athletes to become activists for leftist political causes.\n\nTo the sports media, Nike ads, McDonald's commercials, appearances at Boys and Girls Clubs, even campaign contributions, are a waste of the power of someone like LeBron James. Don't believe me? Here's former NBA player Etan Thomas writing in the _Washington Post_ about the \"Obama Classic,\" and more specifically about the \"wasted power\" of Michael Jordan:\n\nIn a recent article on ESPN, LZ Granderson reminds us of Jordan's infamous \"Republicans buy sneakers, too\" comment that has become the prime example of the overall tragedy of _wasted power_ [emphasis added]. Jordan reportedly made the comment when declining to endorse black Democrat Harvey Gantt in a North Carolina 1990 Senate race against Jessie Helms (R).\n\nJordan had the ability to influence an entire generation of young people especially within the black community. But instead he chose to remain publicly neutral in all matters racial and political. He never capitalized on his potential to mobilize the black community on social issues. Simply put, he never wanted to continue the work of the great Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown, both politically outspoken athletes. As his support for President Obama shows, he might have changed his tune.\n\nEtan Thomas and his fellow leftists in sports media think it's not enough for great athletes to inspire kids to work hard and try to excel in sports and in life. No, they should use their wealth and their fame to \"mobilize the black community on social issues.\" Translation: get them to vote Democrat or get them to the picket lines, and make sure they do and say the right things when they're there.\n\nWhen LeBron James left Cleveland for Miami, his former employer Dan Gilbert wrote a childish hit piece attacking him. At the time many black people, including Jesse Jackson and Marc Lamont Hill, a CNN commentator, accused Gilbert of having a \"slave master\" mentality toward his players, acting as if he \"owned\" them.\n\nGilbert and LeBron have since made up, but the idea that multimillion-dollar black athletes are slaves is a theory as absurd as it is prevalent. Etan Thomas wrote in the _Washington Post_ :\n\nThe [early, apolitical] stance that Jordan's behavior illustrated was referenced in William Rhoden's book, \"40 Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of Black Athletes,\" in which the author said: \"Isolated and alienated from their native networks and increasingly cloistered into new networks as they become corporatized entities, they are excised from their communities as they fulfill their professional responsibilities and disconnected from the networks of people, in many cases predominately African-American, who once comprised their 'community.' This leads to a general ignorance of the issues impacting a vast majority of African-Americans across the country.\"\n\nTranslation: As black athletes become more successful, they become less \"black.\" And just as troubling for activists, as black athletes become more successful, the harder they are to control and to manipulate.\n\nTo the activists, black athletes should all think alike. They should all think like _them_. No old plantation slave master could control the thoughts of his slaves, but the new, liberal, \"progressive\" activists in the sports media think we all, but blacks especially, have to think alike. If you think for yourself, you're selling out.\n\nThe activists' message to young black athletes is that if they work hard and succeed, they'll be held in corporate bondage to some billionaire owner who will alienate them from their \"community.\" What an awesome message! What a way to encourage the kids! Being black is somehow antipathetic to success . . . unless you become politically active in left-wing causes. Then, your \"blackness\" will be enshrined forever.\n\nWhat really bothers the likes of William Rhoden and Etan Thomas is not that these athletes are \"slaves,\" but that they're not slaves _to them_. They're upset that they can't just pick up the phone and tell Tiger Woods to start spouting whatever leftist drivel they need spouted, to be the \"voice\" of Jason Whitlock's \"powerless.\" That's why the leftist sports media made their collective O-face after the Miami Heat's hoodie photo. It had nothing to do with Trayvon Martin. None of it did. To them, it was a symbol that the era of the \"forty-million-dollar slave\" might be coming to an end; a sign that ultra-successful, PR-savvy black athletes might, just might, be willing to step into political controversy, giving leftists an awesomely powerful weapon to wield against the \"establishment.\" And it appears that transformation is now well under way, with LeBron James doing commercials promoting Obamacare. Such statements are \"safe\" too in the sense that while Obamacare or the Trayvon Martin case are politically controversial, any liberal statements from athletes will be applauded by the liberal (including sports) media.\n\nOne of the ironies and tragedies of the Trayvon Martin case is that justice and common sense were shot down with him. The \"injustice\" of Zimmerman's acquittal was not the result of racism from the establishment, but the result of the establishment's bending over backward to try and assuage the anger represented by the likes of the Heat. George Zimmerman should never have been charged with murder. He called 911, for God's sake. How many murderers, other than in a Monty Python movie, _The Benny Hill Show_ , or some kind of bad British comedy skit, actually call the cops?\n\nBut if you don't want to hear this from me (a non-lawyer), then hear it from Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law professor with impeccable liberal credentials. Here is some of what he had to say in an interview on CNN's _State of the Union_ about what went wrong in the Zimmerman trial:\n\nThere was political pressure on the governor, and he appointed somebody [special prosecutor Angela Corey] who had the worst reputation in Florida for overcharging. And she did exactly what she was supposed to do; she overcharged. She charged second-degree murder in a case where there was reasonable doubt written all over it.\n\nIn another appearance, on Mike Huckabee's show _Huckabee_ on Fox News, Dershowitz detailed how Corey's behavior even \"bordered on criminal conduct.\"\n\n\"She submitted an affidavit that was, if not perjurious, completely misleading. She violated all kinds of rules of the profession,\" Dershowitz told Huckabee.\n\n\"Halfway through the trial she realized she wasn't going to get a second degree murder verdict, so she asked for a compromised verdict, for manslaughter. And then, she went even further and said that she was going to charge him with child abuse and felony murder. That was such a stretch that it goes beyond anything professionally responsible. She was among the most irresponsible prosecutors I've seen in 50 years of litigating cases, and believe me, I've seen good prosecutors, bad prosecutors, but rarely have I seen one as bad as this prosecutor.\"\n\nThe \"racism\" of the Trayvon Martin case had nothing to do with animosity toward blacks; the \"racism\" was of a legal system going to absurd lengths to prove that it wasn't racist, bringing a case that should never have been brought.\n\nAt the forefront of the mob demanding \"justice\" for Trayvon Martin were the sports media and more than a few players. The frenzy they and others helped stir up distracted millions of people from the actual facts of the case, encouraged the prosecutor to overreach, and then led to an explosion of outrage on social media after the verdict came down. Roddy White of the Atlanta Falcons tweeted: \"All them jurors should go home tonight and kill themselves for letting a grown man get away with killing a kid.\"\n\nJames Harrison, then of the Bengals, weighed in: \"Think I'll go pick a fight and get my ass kicked then pull my gun and kill somebody and see if I can get away . . .\"\n\nAnd Stevie Johnson, then of the Bills, gave us some top-drawer insight as well: \"Living in a world where you fight dogs; you could lose everything (Mike Vick) . . . If you kill a black man you're not guilty! #INjusticeSystem.\"\n\nOf course, we also live in a world where, if you fight dogs, you can get a $100 million contract after serving your time, but point taken, Stevie. Now, none of this was, or should have been, surprising. Twitter has given a voice to unfiltered and instantaneous commentary from anyone and everyone, and sometimes that works out. Sometimes you get awesomeness. Sometimes you get Roddy White. But what was surprising (though maybe it shouldn't have been) was that even before the verdict, ESPN lifted its long-standing ban on employees expressing political opinions on social media and instead allowed expressions of solidarity with Trayvon Martin.\n\nAt first this wasn't the case. On March 23, 2013, the same day that President Obama said, \"If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon,\" ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz affirmed that the network would be enforcing its social-media policy against getting involved in politics: \"We completely understand the strong feelings involved. Our decision is in keeping with our long-standing policy for ESPN content. There are other avenues for our people to represent issues outside of sports beyond ESPN Twitter feeds.\"\n\nBut that didn't last long. Only two days later, Krulewitz executed an abrupt about-face: \"It's a tragic situation that has led to much thoughtful discussion throughout the company. As a result, in this circumstance, we have decided to allow this particular expression of human sympathy.\"\n\nTranslation: Almost everybody at ESPN's headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut, voted for President Obama, and he's talking about it. Therefore, it's cool. This change in policy led to several ESPN employees donning hoodies on their avatars as signs of support. As Benjamin Chance of Breitbart.com reported, not all were pleased by ESPN's reversal:\n\nThe Poynter Institute, the network's former Ombudsman, made clear its disappointment in ESPN's flip-flop: \"ESPN's policy that prohibits its commentators, anchors, reporters and analysts from making personal political statements is a good one because it preserves the individual's ability to do powerful work that others cannot do. Although we applaud the willingness to wrestle with the social media policy\u2014it should be a living, breathing document\u2014we were disheartened to see ESPN make an exception to the strongly rooted journalism value of independence.\"\n\nSo was I, because it confirmed that ESPN has _no_ \"strongly rooted journalism value of independence.\" It flipped its social-media policy two days after Barack Obama spoke. There's nothing independent about that. And as for journalistic integrity, ESPN has dozens of current and former lawyers on its payroll who could have explained the hopelessness of bringing George Zimmerman to trial on a second-degree murder charge. Those voices were either silent or ignored. The worldwide leader of sports media approached a legal story as a political issue from the start, because that is how they see the world.\n\nSo after the Miami Heat's hoodie photo broke the proverbial ice and made it cool for athletes to embrace political issues and social causes, athletes started diving into whatever fashionable current event would get them generous play in the liberal media for \"taking a stand.\" The next flashpoint of silly would be in the NFL.\n\nIn late November 2014, shortly after a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, decided not to indict white police officer Darren Wilson for fatally shooting a black man named Michael Brown, five members of the St. Louis Rams receiving corps\u2014Tavon Austin, Stedman Bailey, Kenny Britt, Chris Givens, and Jared Cook\u2014showed their solidarity with Brown and those protesting the grand jury's decision by walking out for opening game introductions in the \"hands up, don't shoot\" sign of surrender so famously associated with the case.\n\nThe gesture was greeted with a mix of cheers and boos inside the stadium, and outside the confines of the ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut (where the reaction was euphoric), the national reaction was mixed as well. Immediately, questions started circulating about what kind of discipline the NFL and/or the Rams might hand down to the players.\n\nInstead, the NFL decided to issue its own gesture of surrender. In an email response to Yahoo! Sports, NFL vice president of communications Brian McCarthy said, \"We respect and understand the concerns of all individuals who have expressed views on this tragic situation.\"\n\nRams head coach Jeff Fisher doubled down on the proverbial washing of hands by saying that the players \"made the choice to exercise their free speech\" and would not be disciplined.\n\nSo, in other words, the same league that punishes players for choreographing end-zone celebrations decided to play the free-speech card on a day when five of its players used an NFL broadcast to slam law enforcement and choreograph what amounted to a show of solidarity with the rioters who had taken advantage of the alleged \"injustice\" of the Ferguson case to loot and burn private property. In fact, that very day, the Rams hosted dozens of Ferguson business owners, or, excuse me, former business owners who had seen their property destroyed by the very people with whom the Rams players had aligned themselves. To the Rams players it was all about race. Charles Barkley, however, had it exactly right when he said that the rioters \"aren't real black people\"\u2014at least not ones we should admire\u2014but \"scumbags.\" He also laid into the liberal media for misreporting the story in Ferguson because of their racial obsessions and discussed how he had actually read the grand jury testimony that to his mind rightly exonerated the police officer.\n\nThe sports media and the NFL, however, were not nearly as thoughtful as Barkley. Indeed, the NFL seemed less worried about the victims of the rioters than about incurring the wrath of angry white hipsters and black radicals and the journalists who love them. For them the issue, allegedly, was free speech.\n\nBut the NFL has a funny way of dealing with free speech. In fact, it has a downright nasty habit of only respecting and recognizing speech as free when it's politically convenient for it to do so, and not respecting the speech it does not wish to hear. Such was the case with the Miami Dolphins player Don Jones.\n\nSoon after Michael Sam was drafted and images of him kissing his boyfriend were beamed into living rooms all over the country, Jones took to Twitter and decided to weigh in. He did so by tweeting the following: \"OMG\" and \"Horrible.\"\n\nA man of few words, clearly. Still, that one word (oh, and the acronym) were enough for Don Jones not only to get fined and suspended, but to have to undergo sensitivity training. But why? What about Don Jones's right to free speech? The Rams players got in front of more than fifty thousand people in the stadium and God knows how many on televisions nationwide to throw gasoline on the still-smoldering flames of racial dysfunction in America, and we were told that all they had done was exercise their right to free speech.\n\nDon Jones tweeted one negative word to 7,500 Twitter followers and was not only fined but sent to get mentally reprogrammed by liberal activists. Why? Because the rioting activists in Ferguson are a protected species to the liberal sports establishment. While those opposed to homosexuality, or at least the visual of two men kissing, are endangered and marked for figurative extinction.\n\nSame thing with Chris Culliver of the San Francisco 49ers. In an interview right before Super Bowl XLVII, Chris Culliver said that gay players wouldn't be welcome on the team.\n\nAs quoted in Yahoo! Sports:\n\n\"I don't do the gay guys man,\" said Culliver, whose Niners play the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday. \"I don't do that. No, we don't got no gay people on the team, they gotta get up out of here if they do.\n\n\"Can't be with that sweet stuff. Nah... can't be... in the locker room man. Nah.\"\n\nWhen quizzed by Lange whether any homosexual athletes would need to keep their sexuality a secret in football, Culliver responded: \"Yeah, come out 10 years later after that.\"\n\nNow, what you don't get from the article is the context of the interview and the way the shock-jock interviewer completely led Culliver into making these comments. In fact, what was really outrageous was what the shock jock, Artie Lange, said, not what Culliver said:\n\nLANGE: Give me an under/over on white chicks this week?\n\nCULLIVER: White chicks?\n\nLANGE: How many are you going to (expletive)?\n\nCULLIVER: None.\n\nLANGE: None?\n\nCULLIVER: I can't (expletive) no white chicks before the Super Bowl.\n\nLANGE: What about gay guys?\n\nCULLIVER: I don't do the gay guys, man. I don't do that.\n\nSomehow, in the great liberal hierarchy of values, saying that you're not into gay guys is worse than treating women as disposable sex toys (actually, it appears that liberals are in favor of that). I'm not saying Culliver doesn't really believe what he said, but when you ask a player how many white women he's going to sleep with that week and then immediately follow that up by asking him if he's been propositioned by any gay guys or would like to have sex with some, well, it gives you an idea of what kind of interview this was. It wasn't like Culliver offered his opinions unsolicited and just started saying inflammatory things.\n\nOn the contrary, the whole interview was inflammatory. Lange clearly led Culliver onto the topic and asked the questions in such a way as to get a reaction, which Culliver gave to him, and in a stunning turn that only liberals can do, Lange afterward cast himself as a high and mighty moral judge tut-tutting about how attitudes like Culliver's were unfortunately widespread in the NFL.\n\nTo try to stem the ensuing media storm, the 49ers quickly issued a statement: \"The San Francisco 49ers reject the comments that were made, and have addressed the matter with Chris. There is no place for discrimination within our organization at any level. We have and always will proudly support the LGBT community.\"\n\nCulliver issued his own apology. \"The derogatory comments I made yesterday were a reflection of thoughts in my head, but they are not how I feel. It has taken me seeing them in print to realize that they are hurtful and ugly. Those discriminating feelings are truly not in my heart. Further, I apologize to those who I have hurt and offended, and I pledge to learn and grow from this experience.\"\n\nLearning and growing from the experience really meant learning that he wasn't allowed to give an honest answer to a ridiculous question. Where was his right to free speech? Nowhere. Who in the liberal sports media stood up for his right to free speech? Nobody. Because, again, the only speech that is free in the NFL, and that is approved by the liberal sports media, is that which conforms to the marching orders of the activists who have made that once-proud league afraid of its own shadow.\n\nNot that the NFL is alone in that regard, obviously. When LeBron James and Derrick Rose donned \"I Can't Breathe\" T-shirts in pregame warm-ups in December 2014 to show solidarity with the Eric Garner protestors in New York (Garner had died after a police officer put him in an apparent chokehold in an attempt to arrest him; the officer wasn't indicted), they presented the NBA with the opportunity to prevent its games from turning into the equivalent of a Berkeley campus rally. But again, the league would disappoint. This time it would be NBA commissioner Adam Silver's turn to whiff. In an official statement, Silver said: \"I respect Derrick Rose and all of our players for voicing their personal views on important issues, but my preference would be for players to abide by our on-court attire rules.\"\n\nWhat a magical tube of weak sauce that is. Silver would have been better off seal-clapping his applause to the players and getting his own \"I Can't Breathe\" tee as opposed to issuing a statement that made him look completely feckless. Commissioners don't talk about their \"preferences\" when dealing with players who flagrantly flaunt the league's strict rules about pregame attire. They mete out punishment. Or at least they used to.\n\nThis is the same league that fined Jermaine O'Neal $5,000 for wearing his wristband about one inch too high. Yet it does nothing when it comes to players breaking rules to make statements on subjects about eleventy billion times more sensitive than where Mr. O'Neal sports his perspiration protection gear.\n\nI wonder if Adam Silver would have waxed poetic about respecting the players for \"voicing their personal views\" if a bunch of NBA players had shown up to pregames wearing \"I Support Traditional Marriage\" shirts? Or something really provocative, like a shirt that said, \"I Support the Police\"? Based on what happened to Chris Culliver and Don Jones, I don't think that would have ended well.\n\nNor did things end well between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin.\n\nFor what it's worth, I do blame George Zimmerman for Trayvon Martin's death. Had he stayed in his car and just waited for the cops instead of turning into Paul Blart on 'roids, then Trayvon Martin would likely still be alive today. I don't know anyone who really disputes that. Perhaps if the grossly incompetent prosecutor had initially charged Zimmerman with manslaughter instead of second-degree murder, felony murder, child endangerment, the stock market collapse, the breakup of the Osmonds, and the Hindenburg disaster, then maybe Zimmerman would have been convicted\u2014a verdict I would have supported.\n\nBut none of that happened, because Florida's legal and political \"establishment\" was concerned with shielding itself from charges of racism by placating what it took to be popular opinion. The Trayvon Martin case should never have been a sports story, but once it became one, instead of helping to inform an ill-informed public, the sports media saw a racially charged situation\u2014and lit a match.\nCHAPTER TWO\n\nTHE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND SPORT\n\nThe state of Arizona has given us many awesome things: the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, Barry Goldwater, Wyatt Earp cleaning up Tombstone, and the great tradition of getting completely tanked and floating down a river. Beer, rubber dinghies, and rivers punctuated by large underwater boulders\u2014what could possibly go wrong? But in the winter of 2014, the Grand Canyon State gave the sports world a collective hernia when its legislature had the audacity to pass SB 1062.\n\nKnown as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the bill was written primarily in response to an incident in 2006 in which Christian photographers in neighboring New Mexico declined to photograph a gay commitment ceremony (gay weddings were not yet legal), citing conflict with their religious beliefs. The gay couple quickly found another photographer but sued the Christian photographers for allegedly violating their civil rights. The Human Rights Commission of New Mexico and the state courts ruled against the photographers, who appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which in April 2014 declined to hear the case.\n\nArizona lawmakers wanted a law that defined and limited when government could intrude on the First Amendment's guarantees of the \"free exercise\" of religion and freedom of speech to compel people to act against their religious beliefs.\n\nThe sports media, faithfully executing their role as distorters of truth, immediately branded the legislation as an \"anti-gay bill\" and demanded that the NFL pressure Arizona to rescind the law or move the 2015 Super Bowl from Arizona to somewhere else.\n\nOne late February morning, in the midst of the controversy, I was talking on the phone with a friend of mine who is the program director for a sports station in the Midwest. He knew I opposed gay marriage, and I knew he was for it. But I didn't think that was really the point here.\n\nMy friend said, \"Come on, dude. I know what a big deal this is for you. But even you have to see how this is wrong. Answer me this: If Jesus owned a store, would he have said, 'We don't serve your kind' if gay people walked in the door?\"\n\nI tried to point out the obvious: \"If Jesus owned a store, sure he would have sold groceries, because eating and shopping aren't sins. But he wouldn't have taken part in a gay wedding ceremony, because that would have been participating in a sinful relationship. The real question,\" I added, \"is where does a gay person's right to marry end and my right to free exercise of my religion begin.\"\n\nAfter about five seconds, he said, \"Not following.\"\n\nDoing the work that the American public school system clearly isn't doing itself, I explained: \"If a state decides to pass a law\u2014or more likely a court demands\u2014that gay people can get married, fine; but if I have a constitutionally guaranteed right to the free exercise of my religion, I shouldn't be compelled to participate in something I think is sinful, like gay marriage. So if a gay couple gets turned down by a Christian photographer, they should find another freaking photographer!\"\n\nThat's what life is supposed to be like in a free society\u2014free to choose, freedom of association\u2014but my friend, in this case, was just one example of the many in the sports media who took the Arizona law and twisted it into something it was absolutely not. Within hours of the story going national, _USA Today_ ran headlines: \"Arizona _Anti-Gay Bill_ Is Shameful,\" \"Arizona _Anti-Gay Bill_ : Second Look,\" and, last but not least, \"4 Things to Know about Arizona's ' _Anti-Gay_ ' _Bill_ [emphasis added in all headlines].\"\n\nThe sports media toed the same line. Pro Football Talk, which has become increasingly preachy, and less and less about pro football, ran headlines proclaiming, \"MLB Issues Strong Statement regarding Proposed Arizona _Anti-Gay_ Law\" and \"Arizona Governor Vetoes _Anti-Gay Law_ , Clearing Path for Super Bowl XLIX [emphasis added in both headlines].\" _Sporting News_ joined in: \"Super Bowl Could Nix Arizona If It Doesn't Back Off _Anti-Gay_ Law [emphasis added].\"\n\nThe frenzy showcased activist journalism at its worst; they called it an \"anti-gay bill\" even though _nowhere_ did the written legislation make reference to homosexuals, directly or indirectly. And in fact, if the Arizona legislature had wanted to allow businesses to refuse services to gays, it didn't have to do anything. As the _Christian Post_ observed, \"It is not currently illegal for a business to deny service to someone because they are gay. Some cities in Arizona have ordinances against it but there is no state law against it. If business owners in Arizona wanted to deny service to gays, they could do so in most of the state under current law.\" Moreover, though the bill was definitely designed with Christians in mind, it wasn't exclusive to them. Muslims could have claimed RFRA protections from being forced to serve alcohol, and Hindus could have claimed protections from being forced to handle beef. Nor was the bill a return to \"Jim Crow\" segregation laws, as so many liberals claimed (conflating, as they almost always do, homosexuality with race). Paul Mirengoff, a lawyer writing at the popular blog _Power Line_ , called such claims not only \"false\" but \"hysterical.\"\n\nWhich gets us down to the nitty-gritty. The purpose of this law was _not_ to take rights away from gay people. Not a single gay person would have lost a single right as a result of the Arizona law. What the law ventured to do was to protect religious freedom\u2014a freedom central to the founding of this country. If our public schools spent more time teaching American history and less time teaching how to put condoms on cucumbers, maybe more Americans, even in sports media, might have understood this.\n\nSo if the law wasn't anti-gay, which it clearly wasn't, and if it wasn't designed to usher in a new era of Jim Crow for gays, which it also clearly wasn't, then why all the controversy? Why did the NFL threaten to take away the Super Bowl if the law wasn't vetoed? Why did Major League Baseball condemn the law? Why did the sports media\u2014all talk shows, websites, blogs, and TV shows included\u2014spend the better part of a week attacking this bill like a hammerhead shark armed with mace and a stiletto? They attacked it, not because it was anti-gay, but because it was _pro_ -Christian.\n\nSports media, as you might have noticed, have morphed into one of the largest and loudest forums for gay activism. No doubt about it. What's talked about much less, though, is how leftist producers and reporters have made sports media vociferously anti-Christian. The hysterical reaction of the sports world to a law limiting _government coercion_ of religious people to perform what they consider immoral acts tells us all we need to know about where Christians stand with the liberal sports media. As Paul Mirengoff wrote on _Power Line_ :\n\n_First_ , it seems fundamentally wrong to deny someone service at, say, a restaurant or a gas station because of his or her sexual orientation (although doing so is not currently banned by Arizona state law). Likewise, it seems fundamentally wrong for a photographer to refuse to take, say, a passport photo of a person because of his or her sexual orientation. But _second_ , it also seems fundamentally wrong to require a photographer who believes, based on sincere religious conviction, that gay marriage is immoral to participate in a gay marriage celebration by photographing it [emphasis in original].\n\nPrecisely right, and this was a distinction that the photographers themselves made. They were perfectly happy to take portraits of gay people. What they objected to was participating in a ceremony they thought was immoral.\n\nFor most of us, America is about liberty, but no one in the mainstream media sports world seemed to acknowledge or care that there was anything wrong with forcing Christians to violate their religious beliefs. Gay rights trump Christian rights every time. Pro Football Talk took to Twitter to condemn the Arizona law: \"We collectively wagged a finger at Russia for their anti-gay laws. Will we shrug at what Arizona may do? Hopefully the NFL won't.\"\n\nNow, does Arizona remind you of Vladimir Putin's Russia? No? Me neither. But honestly I, too, have felt the need to wag a finger at former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin (I'll let you guess which one) for a number of reasons. But his stance on gay issues has never been one of them. Not that I'm okay with anybody being persecuted for anything, but if Pro Football Talk were to take a break from trying to be a gay _Pravda_ , it might notice that there's more to Putin's Russia than anti-gay prejudice, like, you know, torture, court fixing, suppression of a free press, state-sanctioned murder, and even the invasion of Ukraine. But for sports media no international issues can compete with gay issues.\n\nESPN host Colin Cowherd basically didn't talk sports for an entire day so he could deal with the Arizona law. He even took to Twitter to challenge Christians directly: \"For Christians saying 'a photographer has right to deny lesbian couple'. Do you deny couples who have had premarital sex too? Hmmm.\"\n\nHmmm, indeed. How many couples who have had premarital sex, in Cowherd's hypothetical example, would ask the photographers to join them in fornication or to photograph it? I think most people would agree that the photographers would have a right to say no. The gay couple in New Mexico was _explicitly demanding_ that the photographers participate in an act that the photographers believed to be immoral. The real issue is not whether we're all sinners (the Christian answer to that is yes) but when it is legally acceptable to compel someone to violate his or her conscience. It's pretty amazing, isn't it, how gay-bandwagon sportscasters don't give a flip about freedom of conscience?\n\nAnd if you really wanted to be serious about it, which you can't be in a tweet, a Christian can believe that fornication is a sin, but that a sin can be forgiven before a couple enters into a holy marriage, and that marriage is by nature and by God's design definable as a monogamous, heterosexual union. A homosexual marriage, by contrast, is, in a Christian view, a violation of natural law, contrary to God's design, and wrong\u2014in other words, a sin. Is that so hard to understand? It's a view that, not so very long ago, was held nearly universally in this country and is now almost universally condemned by the progressive commissars who run sports media.\n\nAnd think about it for a second: If you were gay, why would you seek out a Christian photographer to shoot your wedding? I mean, you've seen the kids who go to film and photography school; most of them look like malnourished, hipster baristas. There was certainly no shortage of photographers in New Mexico happy to photograph a gay commitment ceremony. Yet the gay couple in question deliberately chose a small photography business run by a Christian couple and then sued them when the photographers wouldn't violate their religious beliefs. Is that the American way?\n\nI wouldn't want to force a Muslim photographer to come to my wedding and watch me pound J\u00e4ger shots and dance poorly to bad classic rock while manhandling my wife (I film that stuff myself anyway). And who would, exactly, want to hire someone morally opposed to their union to capture their special day? A person trying to make a political point, maybe? Or someone trying to rub someone else's nose in it? To many of us, that might seem ill-mannered, mean, or vindictive, but the sports media were more than willing to jump in and take their shots at the Christian photographers and the lawmakers who tried to defend freedom of religion.\n\n_Pardon the Interruption_ 's Tony Kornheiser, for one, wasted no time in flushing public discourse down the proverbial crapper. He did more than demand the NFL move the Super Bowl if SB 1062 became law. In a flight of ridiculous hyperbole, he alleged that if it did become law, gay football player Michael Sam \"could not buy a ticket possibly to the Super Bowl. Arizona has become in recent years the most recalcitrant, backward-looking state in the country when it comes to social change.\" Kornheiser couldn't resist the reductio ad Hitlerum. Regarding gays in Arizona, he asked: \"How are they supposed to be identified? Should they wear a yellow star? Because my people went through that at one point.\"\n\nThe utter clownery of his statement probably deserves its own chapter, but in the interest of time (and my sanity) I'll confine it to a few lines. First of all, under what circumstances would Michael Sam not be allowed to buy a ticket to the Super Bowl? This is the difference between a journalist and an ideologue. If Kornheiser had approached the subject as a journalist, he would have acknowledged that the bill did not prevent Michael Sam, or any gay person, from going to the Super Bowl or any other public venue. But he wasn't approaching it as a journalist; he was approaching it as a gay-rights activist, which is why he invoked not only the image of Jim Crow\u2013like exclusion but also the Nazis.\n\nThe motivation behind the bill was to defend the First Amendment, hardly a calling card of National Socialism. Breitbart.com sports editor Daniel Flynn noted the law's clear intent was to allow \"citizens to invoke their free exercise of religion as a legal protection against prosecution.\" It said nothing about homosexuals at all, let alone marking them for identification. And if Kornheiser really wanted to play the Nazi game, he might have acknowledged, if he had any knowledge at all, that Catholic priests, readily identifiable by their collars, had their own wing at the Buchenwald death camps, having been sent there by the Nazis for opposing a pagan regime. No one was talking about coercing gays with this Arizona law; the lawmakers were trying to _prevent_ the coercion of Christians. So who is playing Nazi here\u2014the lawmakers who want to defend religious freedom or the sports media bozos who want to expunge Christians' (and Jews' and Muslims' and others') First Amendment rights?\n\nAnd that brings us to another point\u2014and a bigger one. There's something far darker and more sinister going on here than simple media overreaction. Likening Christians to Nazis, which Kornheiser did without using the word _Christian_ , has become a sort of media trope. Right after the NFL draft in April 2010, Boston-based sports radio host Fred Toettcher searched for words to describe the scene of white Christian athlete Tim Tebow's draft party at his parent's home, and boy did Toettcher paint a picture: \"It looked like some kind of Nazi rally. . . . So lily-white is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, Stepford Wives.\"\n\nHmm, interesting use of words there. Question, though: Do you think that Tim Tebow's draft party was the first \"lily-white\" draft party that Fred Toettcher had ever seen? After all, Toettcher has been a media guy for years, and he's probably been watching the draft his whole life. He's undoubtedly seen dozens of other white athletes surrounded by their \"Stepford Wives\" and their families.\n\nYet Toettcher never used the term \"Nazi rally\" to describe any of their draft parties. Why? Because when Toettcher was watching the scene of Tebow's family at his draft party, he wasn't looking at them as people, _he was looking at what they stand for._ And in Toettcher's mind, what they stand for, coupled with their \"lily-white\" surroundings, equals hate. Because that's how he and many other prominent members of the sports media see Christians: Christianity equals intolerance, which equals hate, which equals racism, which equals bigotry. This despite the fact that the Tebows have probably done more for nonwhite people in one weekend of charitable works than Fred Toettcher, Tony Kornheiser, and any other lefty sportscaster you want to throw in there have done in the last ten years.\n\nOf course, many sportscasters are subtler than that, but with a similar agenda: they don't like Christianity, or at the very least they want Christians to be silent. For instance, in October 2013, a group of Seattle Seahawks, four players and two coaches, released a video entitled _The Making of a Champion: Seattle Seahawks._ Led by long snapper Clint Gresham and including quarterback Russell Wilson, they talked about their love of the game; how being a champion means not just winning at football, but at life; and why they play the game for a higher purpose, to honor and glorify God. Inspiring, right? Harmless, right? A perfect antidote to so much NFL news overlapping with the crime pages, right? Wrong. At least according to Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio, who, after watching the video, wrote: \"The not-so-subtle message from _The Making of a Champion: Seattle Seahawks_ is that Christian believers always thrive, and that the Seahawks are a team of Christian believers. While we respect everyone's right to believe whatever they choose to believe (and I'm a lifelong Roman Catholic), there's a line that easily can be crossed when employment and religion become intertwined.\"\n\nThis is such a magical pile of crap. No one ever remotely suggested, either in the fifteen-minute film or outside of it, that Christian belief is _a condition_ of being a Seattle Seahawk. The video was not produced by the Seahawks organization; it was put together by a handful of coaches and players who happen to work and play for the Seahawks and who specifically emphasize that they found faith while looking _beyond_ their football glory. It is never stated or even implied that the Seahawks are \"a team of Christian believers.\" Florio seems to take the position that it's fine to be a Christian in sports as long as you never talk about it. I wonder how many other groups he would apply that to. It seems like we talked about nothing else in the sports world for weeks but about how great it was that football player Michael Sam is gay\u2014and I'm sure a fifteen-minute film about him would be hailed for its \"courage\" and replayed endlessly on ESPN. But a short, innocuous film about how Christian faith has inspired these players and coaches to become better people? Nah, that's too much. Florio gets it wrong too when he says that the \"not-so-subtle message\" of the film \"is that Christian believers always thrive.\" Really? One of the coaches interviewed cites the courage shown by a Christian player after a _career-ending_ knee injury as one of the things that attracted him to the faith. One of the main points of the movie is not that faith will reward you with worldly success but that faith can help you overcome adversity, that it can fill the void you might feel _even after you have worldly success_. Florio, as is so common with sports reporters writing about religion, prefers to deal in negative stereotypes and clich\u00e9s rather than reality. You also might think that as a lawyer he would have a better grasp of the First Amendment and the right of Christian players and coaches to talk about their Christian beliefs without scaremongering about religious tests that don't exist.\n\nSometimes sportscasters take a different tack, simply ignoring expressions of Christianity and replacing them with their own obsessions. In August 2012, Gabby Douglas wrapped up an incredible performance at the London Olympic Games, becoming the first black female to win the gold in the women's gymnastics all-around competition. In an NBC interview, Douglas said, \"It is everything I thought it would be; being the Olympic champion, it definitely is an amazing feeling. And I give all the glory to God. It's kind of a win-win situation. The glory goes up to Him and the blessings fall down on me.\"\n\nHer Twitter account has stated that she loves \"my family, dogs & most importantly God :),\" and as the _Christian Post_ reported, she tweeted after her Olympic triumph: \"Let all that I am praise the LORD; may I never forget the good things he does for me.\"\n\nBut NBC Sports places God in a different place of priority, and that place is nowhere. Completely ignoring what Douglas had said about what her victory meant to her, and the message she wanted people to take from it (which we in the sports media used to call . . . you know . . . the story), Bob Costas determined to make sure this Jesus guy got no play, and let us know what the media thought the real story was: \"There are some young African American girls out there who tonight are saying to themselves, hey, I'd like to try that too.\"\n\nWow, just wow. One of the worst aspects of today's race-obsessed, gay-obsessed media is that we can't even enjoy a moment like Gabby Douglas's thrilling victory in London without having the obligatory PC bull thrown in there by somebody like Costas. Who gave a rip that night that Gabby Douglas was black? Answer? Outside of the NBC Sports studios? Close to zero. For all the talk about how race shouldn't matter, the liberal media sure are quick to bring it up, aren't they?\n\nPoint being, _any_ little girl could have and should have been inspired by Gabby Douglas that night, white or black. While many were angry (justifiably) on Twitter with Costas for needlessly bringing race into the discussion, people missed the bigger story: It wasn't just that Costas had needlessly \"gone there\" as far as race. It was that he went there so he could squelch the message of an athlete who was obviously motivated by a higher power. Bob Costas treated Gabby Douglas the same way the sports media treated Tony Dungy after Super Bowl XLI. Though the Colts head coach repeatedly and strenuously claimed that his victory was all about God, the sports media did everything in their power to make sure that the story had nothing to do with God and everything to do with race, with Dungy being the first black head coach to win a Super Bowl. Costas could have said that girls across America could use Gabby Douglas's kind of faith to overcome obstacles, or he could have just gone to a commercial, but by injecting the sports media's petty, tired political agenda into a story that had absolutely nothing to do with it, Costas robbed Gabby Douglas of her moment and what it meant to _her_ (and her fellow Christians)\u2014something he would not have dared do if she had been gay or Muslim.\n\nTo say that the liberal sports media have a blind spot when it comes to religion is to grotesquely understate the problem. In December 2013, ESPN informed the Cardinal Glennon Children's Foundation that they would refuse to air the foundation's commercial during the Christmas season. The commercial encouraged viewers to send get-well wishes to kids with cancer and messages of support to their moms and dads.\n\nSo why did ESPN refuse to run the ad? Because, according to Dan Buck, the executive director of the Cardinal Glennon Children's Foundation, ESPN thought the words \"Jesus\" and \"God\" in the foundation's Christmas message were \"problematic.\"\n\n\"Jesus\" and \"God\" are \"problematic\" for ESPN? In a _Christmas_ commercial? In a Christmas commercial asking for messages of hope to seriously sick kids? Eventually, the worldwide leader in sports came around and aired the commercial, but only after Bill O'Reilly slammed the network on his Fox News television show, _The O'Reilly Factor_.\n\nWhat's even richer about all this is that ESPN cited their advocacy standards, which prevent them from airing political or religious commercials, as a defense for not airing the Cardinal Glennon commercial. This is the same network, you'll recall, that allowed its employees to tweet their support of Trayvon; the same network with a show hosted by outspoken leftist Keith Olbermann; the same network that made a seventh-round NFL draft pick its lead story on a Sunday morning over the results of an NBA playoff game solely because the draftee was gay, and made sure we got to see him at length snogging his boyfriend; the same network whose talking heads bashed the state of Arizona because its legislature tried to protect freedom of religion.\n\nNot just ESPN but sports media in general have no problem jumping into the fray on political issues, even when they have absolutely nothing to do with sports. In the fall of 2013, Craig James was fired from his job at Fox Sports as a college football analyst only one week into his time there. So you're thinking to yourself: _Wow. Craig James was at ESPN for years and only lasted one week at Fox Sports. What could he have said in only one week to get himself fired?_ The answer to that would be _nothing_. Because Craig James wasn't fired over anything he said at Fox Sports; he was fired over religious views he expressed while running to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison as the next U.S. senator from Texas. As reported by the American Family Association: \"As a candidate during a Texas U.S. Senate campaign in 2010, Craig James said his Christian faith clearly outlined his position on gay marriage and pledged he would not support same-sex unions. He also stated he was 'adamantly opposed to abortion.'\"\n\nNow, again, this wasn't something that happened during a college football broadcast, where, between breaking down the zone read and the trips-right formation, all of a sudden James decided to make a comment on gay marriage or abortion. This happened on the campaign trail, while he was running for a Senate seat. So, essentially, Fox Sports fired Craig James for the thoughts in his head, thoughts that happen to be shared by tens of millions of Christian, pro-life, pro\u2013traditional marriage Americans\u2014but by hardly anyone in sports media. Craig James filmed one episode of a regional college football show for Fox, a show that came off completely without incident, and was then fired.\n\nWhat happened next was high comedy. The _Dallas Morning News_ reported that the decision to fire James came from Fox Sports management's becoming aware that James had expressed opposition to gay marriage, quoting a source as saying, \"We just asked ourselves how Craig's statements would play in our human resources department. He couldn't say those things here.\" A senior vice president from Fox even told media outlets that James had been terminated because of his views on same-sex marriage. James told Breitbart.com: \"I was shocked that my personal religious beliefs were not only the reason for Fox Sports firing me but I was completely floored when I read stories quoting Fox Sports representatives essentially saying that people of faith are banned from working at Fox Sports. That is not right and surely someone made a terrible mistake.\"\n\nThe \"mistake\" might have had legal complications because firing James for his religious beliefs sounds like a civil rights violation, doesn't it? According to court documents that were obtained by Breitbart.com: \"Fox Sports President Eric Shanks admitted in a deposition that a senior VP at Fox Sports told media outlets that sportscaster Craig James was fired from the network because of his support for traditional marriage. Shanks says that statement to the press was untrue.\"\n\nWhich is kind of funny, because if James wasn't fired over his stance on same-sex marriage, then why was he fired? Was he fired over one recording of a regional college football show where, according to all concerned, everything went fine? At the time of this writing, the matter is still being fought out in the courts. But anyone can see what's going on here. Whoever hired Craig James at Fox Sports forgot that the sports media aren't really the sports media anymore. They are simply another branch of the anti-Christian gay-rights movement, and by the time somebody realized this mistake, it was too late. The best part of this, though, is Fox Sports' alleged justification for firing James, worth repeating: \"We just asked ourselves how Craig's statements would play in our human resources department. He couldn't say those things here.\"\n\nReally? James told Breitbart.com: \"I have worked in broadcasting for twenty-four years and have always treated my colleagues with respect and dignity regardless of their background or personal beliefs. I believe it is essential in our business to maintain professional relationships with people from a diverse background and have tolerance for those of different beliefs. I have never discussed my faith while broadcasting and it has never been an issue until now.\"\n\nI seriously doubt that Craig James, who survived for years at ESPN, a network at least as if not more liberal than Fox Sports, would have been walking around HR, or the watercooler, spouting his beliefs on gay marriage. One does not survive long in the sports media by doing such things; James's views on these issues didn't become public until _after_ he left ESPN and _before_ he got to Fox Sports. There's a reason for that.\n\nBut here's the kicker: while Fox apparently had problems with James's privately held religious beliefs on gay marriage, they apparently had no worries at all about the anti-Christian and racist commentary of one of their leading columnists, Jason Whitlock. After Jeremy Lin lit up the Lakers for thirty-eight points, Whitlock tweeted: \"Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple inches of pain tonight.\" That line is as crass as it is racist. But Asian American penis jokes, especially if they're made at the expense of an openly _Christian_ Asian American, must go down just fine at Fox Sports' HR Department. Fox Sports' most recognizable columnist can go on Twitter, _while employed by Fox and while representing them_ , and show the mental maturity of a filthy-minded, racist thirteen-year-old baiting the Asian Christian kid for his beliefs about chastity; meanwhile, Craig James, _while not on the clock_ , can't speak about his religious convictions in a political campaign? Really, Fox Sports, those are your standards?\n\nBut Fox Sports isn't alone in its hypocrisy. Keith Olbermann left ESPN to talk politics at MSNBC, and while doing so racked up one of the longest and most distinguished lists of quotable absurdity you're ever going to hear. In January 2010, Olbermann likened the American healthcare system to terrorism and accused the Bush administration of signing off on the deaths of thousands of Americans:\n\nWhat would you do, sir, if terrorists were killing 45,000 people every year in this country? Well, the current health care system, the insurance companies, and those who support them are doing just that. . . . Because they die individually of disease and not disaster, [radio host] Neal Boortz and those who ape him in office and out, approve their deaths, all 45,000 of them\u2014a year\u2014in America. Remind me again, who are the terrorists?\n\nIn 2010, he blamed Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City bombing:\n\n\"What was the more likely cause of the Oklahoma City bombing: talk radio or Bill Clinton and Janet Reno's hands-on management of Waco, the Branch Davidian compound? . . .\" Obviously, the answer is talk radio. Specifically Rush Limbaugh's hate radio. . . . Frankly, Rush, you have that blood on your hands now and you have had it for 15 years.\n\nAnd in 2006, Olbermann opined that the U.S. government, under President George W. Bush, was a bigger threat to Americans than terrorists:\n\nWe now face what our ancestors faced at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering: A government more dangerous to our liberty than is the enemy it claims to protect us from. . . . We have not before codified the poisoning of habeas corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow. You, sir, have now befouled that spring. You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order. You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom. . . . These things you have done, Mr. Bush\u2014they would be the beginning of the end of America.\n\nAnd yet, despite this plethora of crazed commentary, Keith Olbermann was _re_ -hired by ESPN in August 2013. If Olbermann were the only one at the \"Worldwide Leader\" playing the fool, we might have cause for hope, but unfortunately his number is legion at ESPN.\n\nIn the summer of 2012, Nebraska football assistant coach Ron Brown spoke out against a gay and transgender anti-discrimination law then under consideration in Omaha. Brown, using his constitutional right (and, dare I say, God-given right), spoke out against the law based on his Christian beliefs. According to ESPN.com, \"Brown challenged ordinance sponsor Ben Gray and other [city council] members to remember the Bible does not condone homosexuality. He told council members they would be held to 'great accountability for the decision you are making.'\"\n\nThe University of Nebraska recognized Brown's right to speak out on the issue, but that did not fly for ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski, who, apparently forgetting what country he's in, called for coach Ron Brown's firing \"if he continues to confuse faith with a person's fundamental right not to be discriminated against.\"\n\nPaul Wilson, writing for Fox News, showed that not all the media are insane and asked the pertinent question: \"What exactly is the 'fundamental right not to be discriminated against,' anyway?\" At least for the sports media, \"Politically-correct rights concocted by sports journalists apparently trump arcane rights such as freedom of speech or religion.\" Funny, too, how this \"fundamental right\" of nondiscrimination never seems to apply when idiot sports writers want to attack Christians for exercising their right to free speech.\n\nIn fact, ESPN actively discriminates against Christians, even when they are engaged in nonpartisan civic activities. ESPN had no problem airing Rock the Vote ads to encourage young people to vote, even plugging on its X Games site the participation of skateboard \"legend\" Tony Hawk. But it nixed an ad featuring NASCAR driver Blake Koch for a nonpartisan voting group called Rise Up and Register because the Rise Up and Register website linked to Koch's website, which linked to . . . wait for it . . . Christian ministries, and specifically to the \"Be My Vote\" campaign geared toward pro-lifers. Therefore, ESPN decided they could not air the ad. You get all that? A nonpartisan voter registration ad that linked, not directly, but to a second- and even third-party Christian ministry and pro-life group was enough to get the ad nixed because it compromised the network's political and religious advocacy standards. But Rock the Vote, whose celebrity endorsers lean heavily left while the organization itself is professedly nonpartisan, was not problematic at all. I think we all know why.\n\nAs if there weren't already enough to loathe and despise about the self-righteous, anti-Christian bigots who masquerade as our sports media today, their smugness over their assumed sense of wit and intelligence on matters they know nothing about is the icing on the cake. In December 2012, Tigers outfielder Torii Hunter was asked how he would feel about having a gay player on his team, and was quoted as saying: \"For me, as a Christian . . . I will be uncomfortable because in all my teachings and all my learning, biblically, it's not right. It will be difficult and uncomfortable.\"\n\nHunter came out later and said those quotations were taken out of context and misrepresented what he actually said. Unfortunately, that's beside the point. After hearing those quotations from Hunter, CBS Sports' Dayn Perry decided to surf the Google in an attempt to sound far smarter than he actually is: \"Hunter is of course entitled to his personal beliefs\" (which is always what liberals say, just before they take a giant dump on your personal beliefs), \"although one wonders whether he is similarly affronted by, say, shellfish and neatly maintained beards, which are also forbidden by the holiness code of Leviticus.\"\n\nThis did not escape the attention of the Media Research Center's Matt Philbin, who executed a clean takedown of Perry: \"Great argument. Here's the problem: The New Testament lifts dietary restrictions, just as it no longer requires the sacrifices demanded in Leviticus. But the New Testament explicitly reaffirms Leviticus' injunction on homosexuality (I Corinthians 6:9\u201310 and Romans 1:26).\"\n\nStay in your lane, Perry.\n\nBut Dayn Perry isn't the only one who has tried to have some fun with ol' Leviticus. Boxer Manny Pacquiao, who is a Catholic and a politician in his home country of the Philippines, came out against gay marriage, as you might expect from a Catholic in an overwhelmingly Catholic country. The media, however, decided that what really happened here was that Pacquiao had come out in favor of gay executions. In an article, Granville Ampong of the Examiner.com chronicled and contrasted Pacquiao's views on same-sex marriage with those of President Obama's. Pacquiao had drawn strong distinctions between himself and President Obama: \"God's words first . . . obey God's law first before considering the laws of man. . . .\"\n\nSigh. President Pacquiao has such a nice ring to it. Vladimir Putin would definitely think twice before crossing that guy. But anyhow, Pacquiao's quotation wasn't what provoked the wrath of the liberal sports media. About two paragraphs down from Pacquiao's actual words, the writer, Ampong, threw in this passage from Leviticus: \"If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.\"\n\nNow, the article clearly doesn't quote Pacquiao as having actually said this; it merely includes the quotation to give some frame of reference (though outdated) for biblical teachings on homosexuality. But that little factoid did nothing to stop the anti-Christian media from unleashing the Kraken of Crazy. Almost immediately, the left-wing group _ThinkProgress_ tweeted out a message demanding that Nike cut off Pacquiao from their client list: \"Dear @Nike: Are you going to continue to sponsor boxer Manny Pacquiao, who is engaging in hate speech against gays?\"\n\nThe liberal Courage Campaign jumped into the fray as well: \"Homophobia+Violence= @Nike? Join us in telling Nike to drop #homophobic boxer #MannyPacquiao <http://bit.ly/IWUinB> #DropManny.\"\n\nBut again, Pacquiao never said the quotation. After the dustup, Pacquiao explained: \"I didn't say that, that's a lie. . . . I didn't know that quote from Leviticus because I haven't read the Book of Leviticus yet.\" And before anyone jumps on Pacquiao (as if they'd dare) for not knowing what he's talking about, it's important to remember that Christianity isn't about memorizing the Bible. It's a statement of historical facts and moral teaching. Pacquiao knows the Catholic Church teaches the sinfulness of homosexual behavior. He's right about that, even if he couldn't quote you Leviticus or the passages from Corinthians or Romans\u2014and as you probably know, the Catholic Church doesn't endorse a death penalty for homosexuals; the Church's current pope has even washed the feet of AIDS victims, exemplifying Christ's teachings on charity and service. I wonder how many sports journalists could say the same.\n\nThe author of the article that sparked the brouhaha, Granville Ampong, weighed in to clarify what he had written:\n\nNowhere in my supposition and integration of my interview with Pacquiao did I mention that Pacquiao recited this Leviticus 20:13 nor did I imply that Pacquiao had quoted such. I have simply reminded in my column how God made it clear in the Old Testament time that such practice of same-sex marriage is detestable and strictly forbidden, in as much as God wants to encourage [in] his people practices that lead to health and happiness and fullness of life.\n\nNow follow me on a journey to an imaginary place where the media aren't on an anti-Christian crusade to make the world safe for gay marriage. In that wonderful, but completely pretend, paradise, having the author of the article explicitly confirm that Pacquiao never quoted Leviticus would put an end to the story and might even lead to a few media apologies. Instead, in reality, all it did was enrage the media further. Days after Pacquiao denied quoting Leviticus and Ampong confirmed his denial, _ThinkProgress_ took to Twitter and showed that they neither think nor have they progressed: \"UPDATE: Did Pacquiao cite the Leviticus 'put to death' verse or not? A new statement suggests he did: <http://bit.ly/Kt5gGB>.\"\n\nThe Courage Campaign tweeted: \"Stand with millions of LGBT and fair minded-people the world over. Drop Manny Pacquiao now. Hatred surely does not = Nike.\"\n\nESPN's _Grantland_ website went even further, offering use of their site to Laurel Fantauzzo, a well-known lesbian activist, so she could display her contempt for Pacquiao and the Catholic Church\u2014and mind you, this was a day _after_ Pacquiao denied having quoted Leviticus. Here are just a few pearls from Fantauzzo's screed:\n\nI know, though, that you [Pacquiao] also don't want me to be married. I know you think this is a perfectly reasonable, justified stand to take against me. You're like a lot of Filipinos: Catholic. Powerfully, post-colonially Catholic. . . .\n\nI've stood in front of the Black Nazarene in Quiapo Church that you pray to after each fight. . . . I've felt the power and the grace of it. I get it. . . . When you grow up Filipina\u2014or Italiapina, as I did\u2014your parents give you Catholicism as a kind of heavy gift. A centuries-old guide for every life transition a human can go through. Birth, death, the burden of any wrongdoing, and, yes, marriage. But as I grew older and realized the dreaded word applied to me\u2014lesbian\u2014I realized the Church was what I'd have to feint and duck; the Church's cruel, untrue dictates about me were what I'd have to dance with and defeat. . . .\n\nWhen I faced Proposition 22, Proposition 8, DOMA, Amendment 1, and too many dictates from the Church, and relatives, and leaders like you, who called me disordered, dangerous, diseased, doomed, how did I survive? . . .\n\nAs you can probably tell, this isn't just some random, concerned lesbian woman whom _Grantland_ selected for this article; this is a renowned leftist, anti-Catholic activist. As Matthew Balan wrote at NewsBusters.org:\n\nThe website's [ _Grantland_ ] editor noted in their short bio of Fantauzzo that she was a \"2011 Fulbright Scholar to the Philippines. She's currently an Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction program.\" Shamelessly, the unnamed editor added, \"Ladies, she's also currently single.\" But, Grantland completely left out the radical activism in her background.\n\nAstraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice gave a $10,000 grant to the writer in 2009\u20132010, and disclosed that she \"has contributed to AfterEllen and Go Magazine, among other publications. She also founded the popular We Are Not the Enemy photo blog in response to California's Proposition 8.\" In September 2011, she wrote an article for the online magazine The FilAm (\"a magazine for Filipino Americans in New York\"), where she promoted the so-called RH (\"reproductive health\") bill in the Philippines, which would legalize abortifacients and contraceptives, and is staunchly opposed by the Catholic bishops in the country.\n\nIn other words, the truth of the story didn't matter. The fact that Manny Pacquiao never said what he was accused of saying didn't matter. His opposition to President Obama, and references to God and God's laws, were enough for the media to trample all over journalistic principle. The only truth that ESPN's _Grantland_ and others aired was Laurel Fantauzzo's \"truth,\" because they feel exactly the same way she does. They believe in blanket gay marriage, they see the Catholic Church as bigoted and oppressive, and they agree with her so much that they don't care if they have to lie, cover up, or fabricate quotations in order to go against the Church.\n\nThe anti-Christian bias of the American sports establishment is reflected in international sports bodies as well. In 2009, FIFA, the organizing body that administrates international professional soccer, disciplined a couple of Brazilian superstar players for overt displays of Christianity during a match.\n\nAccording to the _Daily Mail_ :\n\nStars including \u00a356 million Real Madrid forward Kaka and captain Lucio revealed T-shirts with devout slogans such as \"I Belong to Jesus\" and \"I Love God\" during the Confederations Cup final last month.\n\nNow FIFA has risked accusations of being \"anti-religious\" by reminding Brazil of its guidelines banning players from making displays of a personal, religious or political nature on the football pitch.\n\nFIFA seemed to express no concern at all, though, when labeled anti-religious. In fact, international soccer regulators felt so unconcerned that they immediately took FIFA's ball and ran with it. The head of soccer in Denmark went even further than FIFA, calling for an immediate ban on any and all religious statements. He said, \"Just as we reject political manifestations, we should also say no to religious ones. There are too many risks involved in clubs, for example, with people of different religious faiths.\"\n\nAccording to the _Daily Mail_ , the specific rule in question that the pesky Brazilian Christians violated, called Law 4, reads: \"Players must not reveal undergarments showing slogans or advertising. The basic compulsory equipment must not have any political, religious or personal statements.\"\n\nFIFA, however, turned a 180 when the religious concerns of Muslims came into question. In 2011, the Iranian women's national team withdrew from a game against Jordan because they weren't allowed to wear their traditional Muslim headscarves. Now mind you, this was not a religious \"undergarment\" of the kind that got the Christian Brazilian players punished. This was a loud, proud, in-your-face outer garment, worn on the head, which would be seen by all.\n\nSo what did FIFA do? Did they tell the Iranian women's national team that since FIFA had already banned undergarments with Christian statements, it would be completely and totally hypocritical for them to turn around and allow Muslims to wear outer garments that serve as religious symbols? I'll save you the suspense: they did not.\n\nInstead, FIFA, which had previously regarded headgear as unsafe, reversed course. The BBC described what happened next:\n\nFollowing a request from the Asian Football Confederation, the IFAB (International Football Association Board) allowed for their safety to be tested during the trial.\n\nAt the annual general meeting at FIFA's headquarters, IFAB members also voted to introduce a new law that will punish players who display messages on T-shirts underneath their club's kit.\n\nThe rule change, which will come into effect from 1 June, amends Law 4 of the game, which relates to players' equipment.\n\nSo not only did the governing body _not_ vote to reaffirm the ban on religious headgear, but they voted to make _another law_ to prevent players from wearing religiously themed undergarments\u2014just in case Christian players tried to bring back their Jesus shirts.\n\nThe obvious message: religious symbolism really isn't all that bad, just so long as it's not Christian religious symbolism. If it's Muslim symbolism, they'll \"safety\" test it and then change the rules in your favor. FIFA clearly isn't worried about being called anti-religious or anti-Christian. They just don't want to be called anti-Muslim.\n\nSimilarly, the sports media aren't at all worried about mocking the sexual ethics of Christians, because they regard these ethics as ridiculous and repressive.\n\nStill, you might have thought that someone like Lolo Jones, a Christian and quite possibly the only person in the entire London Olympic Village not utilizing her share of the more than 150,000 prophylactics provided to the athletes, would at least get some begrudging media praise for her willpower alone.\n\nAnd you would be wrong. During the run up to her 2012 appearance in the London Games, Jones gained a lot of attention for her stated desire to abstain from sex until marriage. The _New York Times_ , which abstains from nothing except objective, fact-based reporting, published a piece lashing out at Jones, saying she \"received far greater publicity than any other American track and field athlete competing in the London Games. This was based not on achievement but on her exotic beauty and on a sad and cynical marketing campaign.\"\n\nUh-huh. Yet the _New York Times_ had no problem adding to the publicity of Michael Sam, who gained enormous media attention not because of his achievements on the football field but because of his homosexuality. Michael Sam wasn't even the best player on his own defense at Missouri, but the _Times_ confidently asserted in February 2014 that, \"Mr. Sam, 24, is projected to be chosen in the early rounds of the N.F.L. draft in May, ordinarily a path to a prosperous pro career.\"\n\nThe statement was laughable to anyone who actually watches college football. Sam was, at best, a mid-round pick, and more likely not draft worthy at all, but he was a symbol of a cause the _Times_ is at pains to hype\u2014and that cause is not chastity, or heterosexuality.\n\nRookie Michael Sam was released before the start of the 2014 NFL season by the St. Louis Rams, the team that drafted him. But that wasn't the end of the story. ESPN's Stephen A. Smith spilled the beans on the league's behind-the-scenes efforts to make sure Sam landed on an NFL roster:\n\nAccording to sources I have in the NFL, the league did call a few teams. They did want teams to take Michael Sam _because obviously we see what kind of movement they're gearing for_ [emphasis added], and what their support of Michael Sam, who we all know, came out, acknowledged that he was gay before the draft and ultimately this is something that Roger Goodell and the NFL support and they want their teams to support. But other teams weren't too receptive to taking him on once the St. Louis Rams cut him.\n\nSo in steps Jerry Jones [owner of the Dallas Cowboys], coming to the aid of the NFL and making a splash with his willingness to bring this guy on board to the practice squad.\n\nThe \"movement\" the league was gearing for was a liberal, sports media freak-out of epic proportions had Sam not made an NFL roster. Which is what prompted the NFL's cowardly eleventh-hour scramble to ensure (with who knows what kind of promises and assurances attached) that somebody signed Sam to a team. As _Sports Illustrated_ 's Peter King said, \"Now Sam and the NFL avoided a nightmare situation when he signed with the practice squad of the Dallas Cowboys.\" Though the Cowboys spared the NFL a public-relations nightmare, they eventually, and quietly, released Michael Sam as well.\n\nSo let's take stock of where the sports media's values really lie. Lolo Jones refuses to have sex before marriage, because she's a Christian. But because she refuses to allow herself to become the carnal conquest of the Swedish curling team, her credibility as a star (despite her multiple indoor track championships and ability to qualify for the Olympics in two different sports) is disparaged; her personal story is nothing but a \"sad and cynical marketing campaign.\"\n\nYet Michael Sam's personal story became so incredibly vital to the liberal sports media that not only did they vastly overinflate his pre-draft status, but they succeeded in threatening the NFL with a PR disaster unless he made, even temporarily and on a practice squad, some team's regular season roster.\n\nYeah, there's nothing sad or cynical about that.\n\nThe depth of contempt and outright hatred the sports media hold for Christianity probably deserves its own book, not just its own chapter. The American sports media are a loud and proud focal point in the gay-activist movement, and they've branded Christianity as the premier roadblock between where they are and where they're trying to go. Most of us see Christianity as a saving, nurturing grace in our lives, whereas the sports media see it as an obstacle, something to be overcome and ultimately left behind in the dust. You can agree with where they stand or disagree with it, but the fact is that it's not the sports media's job to disparage Christianity. They can leave that to others. How about just reporting on sports\u2014they have a tough enough time doing that.\nCHAPTER THREE\n\nKNAVES ON THE WARPATH\n\nThere's a unique feeling-out process that happens when you get to a new radio station. Of course, there's one at any new job, but in radio, where the business is driven by opinions and passionate takes instead of sales or closing the big account, the process tends to be more about one's worldview. So, not surprisingly, I did not have to wait very long for the first ideological probe to be administered when I started at my second sports station. It happened innocently enough, hanging out in the studio's break room with a bunch of producers and fellow hosts. Joking, laughing, and messing around on the internet, all of a sudden the topic turned to the Redskins' name change. Since I was the new guy, and since I was from Washington, D.C., I knew that in only a matter of seconds the inevitable question would be thrown my way:\n\nPRODUCER: So, man, what do you think about the Redskins' name? Do you think they should change it?\n\nME: What do you mean? Why should they change it?\n\nPRODUCER: You know, because it's so offensive to Native Americans!\n\nME: No. I think when the state of Oklahoma changes its name, that's when the Redskins should change their name.\n\nThis response earned me some quizzical looks. So I elaborated.\n\nME: Oklahoma literally translates to \"Red People\" in the Choctaw language. How is that any better than, or any different from, Redskin? Indiana translates into \"land of the Indians,\" and Indianapolis translates into \"City in the land of the Indians.\" Are you going to force every city and state that alludes to \"red people\" or \"Indians\" to change its name after you're done forcing the Redskins to change theirs? Where does it end?\n\nIt didn't take long to realize I had given the wrong answer; the lively conversation faded to dead silence, and everyone became suddenly laser-focused on their computer screens, no longer interested in discussing the Redskins and their \"offensive\" name, or anything else for that matter. And so it goes. You see, contrary to the idea that a sports newsroom or other media outlet should be a bastion of free-thinking and communication that would welcome dissenting points of view, in reality they are a bastion of liberal group-think. \"Questions\" like the one my producers asked me are intended not just to find out what you think but also to expose those beyond the pale of liberal conventional wisdom.\n\nThat conventional wisdom includes the belief that changing the name of the Washington Redskins is now one of the leading civil rights issues of our time. In early 2012, during a _Sunday Night Football_ halftime, Bob Costas referred to the team name as \"a slur,\" which is laughable on several levels, including the fact that Costas and his fellow journalists have used the word countless times over decades of broadcasting and only recently discovered its alleged offensiveness. And answer me this: How many teams name themselves after a slur?\n\nYou might think that the liberal offensive to demand a name change, reaching all the way from the sports media to President Barack Obama, must be linked to some major public uproar. And you would be wrong.\n\nIn fact, according to an AP-Gfk poll conducted in April 2013, 79 percent of Americans _did not_ think the Redskins should change their name; only 11 percent thought they should. _But, Dylan_ , you might say, _who cares what \"ordinary\" Americans think about the Redskins' name? The important thing is what \"Native Americans\" think about it. If you ask them, I'll bet you get a different answer!_\n\nAnd you'd be right. Indians gave a _much_ different answer: According to a poll of 768 Native Americans taken by the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey, when asked what they thought of the team name \"Redskins,\" _90 percent_ of Native American respondents said that they found the term \"Redskin\" _not offensive_. Only 9 percent thought it was offensive. It is not American Indians who are leading the charge to change team names; it is American liberals, _even against the wishes of American Indians_. In 2012, the state of North Dakota capitulated to pressure from the NCAA and dropped the \"Fighting Sioux\" as the nickname for the University of North Dakota's sports teams, _even though the Sioux ofNorth Dakota's Spirit Lake Indian Reservation had voted in favor of keeping the nickname in 2010_. As even ESPN.com felt obliged to acknowledge, reproducing an Associated Press report:\n\nMany American Indians lobbied for the name and logo to be kept, arguing that they reflected a positive image for their tribes. Eunice Davidson, an enrolled member of the Spirit Lake tribe and member of the committee to save the nickname, was too devastated to talk about the result, her husband Dave Davidson said.\n\n\"I will be honest with you. I'm heartbroken and I'm ashamed of this state,\" Dave Davidson said. \"On the other hand, there are a lot of wonderful people we have met in the course of this.\"\n\nLater, Eunice Davidson remarked that if she could speak to Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins, she would tell him, \"I stand with him. I don't want our history to be forgotten.\"\n\nFunny, but you don't often hear voices like Eunice Davidson's on sports media, not because they don't exist\u2014they're actually the majority\u2014but because they don't fit the liberal sports media's narrative. If the sports networks went beyond the professional grievance-mongers, they might get somebody like Tommy Yazzie, superintendent of the Red Mesa School District for the Navajo Nation, who thinks tribes have more-important things to worry about than the name of the Washington Redskins:\n\nWe just don't think that it [the Redskins' name] is an issue. There are more important things like busing our kids to school, the water settlement, the land quality, the air that surrounds us. Those are issues we can take sides on. Society, they think it's more derogatory because of the recent discussions. In its pure form, a lot of Native American men, you go into the sweat lodge with what you've got\u2014your skin. I don't see it as derogatory.\n\nCoincidentally, the nickname for the sports teams in the Red Mesa School District? The Redskins.\n\nWhy don't the sports networks give airtime to mainstream American Indian opinion on this issue? Maybe because they fear they would come across somebody like Robert Green, the longtime and recently retired chief of the Fredericksburg, Virginia, Patawomeck tribe, who said, among other things:\n\nFrankly, the members of my tribe\u2014the vast majority\u2014don't find it offensive. I've been a Redskins fan for years. And to be honest with you, I would be offended if they did change it [the name, Redskins. . . . This is] an attempt by somebody . . . to completely remove the Indian identity from anything and pretty soon . . . you have a wipeout in society of any reference to Indian people. . . . You can't rewrite history\u2014yes there were some awful, bad things done to our people over time, but naming the Washington football team the Redskins, we don't consider to be one of those bad things.\n\nThink about this for a minute: How many Indians do you see in government? How many do you see in politics? In entertainment? In sports? Not even enough to have a pow-wow. Team nicknames like \"Indians,\" \"Fighting Sioux,\" and \"Redskins\" are forceful, popular reminders of Indian culture in America\u2014and of Americans' respect for it. When Florida State football fans cheer on the Seminoles or Atlanta Braves fans do their tomahawk chop, the image in their minds is of courageous, fierce warriors\u2014of something admirable, not an ethnic slur.\n\nBut not surprisingly, liberal sportscasters ignore the reality in front of them in preference to their holier-than-thou groupthink. Sports radio personality Dan Patrick had Bob Costas on his show the day after Costas derided the term Redskin as a \"slur\" and an \"insult.\" Patrick said this:\n\nI think Daniel Snyder eventually changes the name. I don't know when, I just feel like there's an end game here. . . . I feel like he became his own worst enemy here by making it about him instead of being understanding about what it means, and who it affects. I don't want somebody to tell me how I'm supposed to think, and Daniel Snyder did that with Native Americans, and I think that's where people started to go wait a minute here. Nobody wants to be told what to think or what to do.\n\nDan Snyder, of course, never told anyone what they had to think or do, nor did he make himself the story. He only made his own thinking perfectly clear when asked about the controversy, after the media tirade about \"Redskins\" being a racial slur. He told _USA Today_ : \"We will never change the name of the team. As a lifelong Redskins fan, and I think that the Redskins fans understand the great tradition and what it's all about and what it means. . . .\" He added, \"We'll never change the name. It's that simple. NEVER\u2014you can use caps.\"\n\nDan Patrick is absolutely right on one thing: nobody wants to be told what to think or what to do, but that is _precisely_ what he, Costas, and the rest of the liberal sports media have done and continue to do\u2014you either agree with them or you're a racist. They're the ones who are pushing this non-issue as a story; they're the ones who insist on acting as thought police.\n\nWhy? Because you've got a bunch of sports guys who want to attach their names to something meaningful. After spending their entire careers covering seven-foot-six guys from China and twenty-one-year-olds who run sub-4.3 forties, inevitably they want to feel like their careers mean something, that they're socially relevant in some way, and the Redskins have become just that for the leftist sports media. Bob Costas and Peter King were not around when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball. So the Redskins, to some extent, become their \"Jackie Robinson\" moment, and they will have that moment whether you want it or not.\n\nNow, to be clear, I'm not trying to make an argument for keeping the Redskins' name. Yes, I grew up a fan of the team, and there's definitely some sentimentality there that makes me not want to see it changed. But if the Redskins changed their name to the Washington Silly Nannies, and started winning, and won a Super Bowl, I would be the Silliest Nanny of them all. My point is not that the Redskins' name is good or bad, but that this over-the-top, emotional push to drive the name Redskins from our sports lexicon did not materialize because \"the people\" are upset over it. The \"people\" don't really give a rip about what the Redskins call themselves, and if pressed, as they have been by the sports media, they would overwhelmingly prefer that the name stay the same and the sports media drop the subject.\n\nBut of course, the sports media aren't content to merely report and analyze sports news. They are not interested in informing and entertaining you; they want to reform and indoctrinate you. And that's a problem.\n\nWhat's even more hilarious about the lefty sports crowd on the issue of Indian-themed sports nicknames is their inability to see the irony in their own irony. In 2002 a group of Indian college students at the University of Northern Colorado decided to name their intramural basketball team the Fightin' Whities in response to a local high school's team called the Fightin' Reds.\n\nApparently the students decided to print T-shirts as a way of sticking it to the paleface and making him taste the bitterness of his own racial medicine. The self-loathing palefaces in the sports media grabbed onto the Fightin' Whities story and, as usual, got it just about all wrong.\n\nKeith Olbermann joined Paula Zahn and Anderson Cooper on CNN to praise the students' racial jiu-jitsu as \"genius.\" Olbermann continued: \"I think the point is being made here, how offensive this can be. . . . How the names that . . . we have grown up with\u2014Indians, Braves, Redskins, Chiefs\u2014how offensive they can be.\"\n\nExcept that when Paula Zahn asked Olbermann to give examples of white people in Colorado offended by the Fightin' Whities, Olbermann couldn't come up with a single person. Instead, he waxed silly about the \"attention\" the issue had received nationally, and how it had put \"people\" (read: evil, treaty-breaking white people) in the position of the \"offended party,\" which is the \"best way to effect social change.\"\n\nBut the real story was that no one was taking offense. White Coloradans did not consider themselves an offended party\u2014they thought the name was funny or clever or anything but offensive. As syndicated columnist Clarence Page wrote, readers of the _Greeley Tribune_ (the hometown paper of Eaton High School, where the Fightin' Reds nickname originated) wrote in to say they saw the nickname as \"an honor to white Americans.\" One reader wrote in to say: \"Help me out here, why am I supposed to be offended?\"\n\nIn fact, so epically did this little racial stunt fail to offend that Fightin' Whities T-shirts actually became a hot-selling item to the unoffended\u2014so much so that the Native American Student Services office opened up the Fighting Whites Scholarship Fund with proceeds from the sales.\n\nIronic, isn't it? The would-be revolutionaries intent on showing whitey how cruel and demeaning it felt to be a mascot failed to offend anyone, and instead ended up selling T-shirts for the palefaces' wampum.\n\nAnd Northern Colorado intramural players weren't the only ones to go down this path. Shelf Life Clothing came up with a T-shirt that mocked the Chief Wahoo logo of the Cleveland Indians. Instead of Chief Wahoo with the word \"Indians\" emblazoned above him, Shelf Life's creation had a blond-haired white guy in his place, a dollar sign where Wahoo's feather would normally sit, and \"Caucasians\" emblazoned above him.\n\nThe shirts have existed in relative obscurity for years, only recently coming into the spotlight when Ian Campeau, a DJ for a group called A Tribe Called Red, which includes three Ojibwa Indians, found himself called racist and hypocrite for wearing the shirt in publicity photos. You see, Campeau had previously filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission to get a Canadian high school to change its team name from \"Redskins\" to \"Eagles.\"\n\nCampeau's publicity stunt paid off huge for Shelf Life. As the _Toronto Star_ reported:\n\nA hot fashion item this summer on Ontario First Nations' reserves is a T-shirt with the lettering \"Caucasians\" and the grinning logo of Chief Wahoo, the much-derided mascot of the Cleveland Indians major league baseball team. . . . T-shirt maker Brian Kirby of Shelf Life Clothing in Cleveland said the \"Caucasians\" shirt has been his most popular seller since he began making them in 2007, but interest \"skyrocketed\" after the Deejay NDN (Ian Campeau) controversy, especially after the story hit Reddit and Facebook.\n\nNBC Sports' HardballTalk.com's Craig Calcaterra greeted news of the T-shirt's success with sarcastic glee: \"I've been told by so many people that, in reality, no one cares about Chief Wahoo, most Indians feel 'honored' by their images and iconography being appropriated by sports teams and that the politics of race and sports mascots is purely a function of liberal white guilt and pinkos like me wishing to push our agenda. Hmm. Guess not.\"\n\nUh, Craig, guess again. If the intent of the shirt was to offend white Americans or white Cleveland Indians fans, it failed utterly. Again, people weren't offended: they thought the T-shirts were funny, which is why demand exploded. Most Americans still have a life, a sense of humor, and better things to do than obsess over team nicknames. Most Americans, in this case, would not include sports reporters. In fact, if the Caucasians and Fightin' Whities T-shirts proved anything, it is that many Americans will buy a shirt that they see as _making fun of people offended by team nicknames, or as making fun of the sports media's racial obsessions_.\n\nThe hypocrisy and stupidity of media coverage of the Redskins is not limited to T-shirt sales and _Sunday Night Football_ monologues. In October 2014, a Fox broadcast of the Redskins versus Cardinals game in Phoenix showed Redskins owner Daniel Snyder sitting alongside Navajo Nation president Ben Shelly. It gets better. Shelly and his wife each wore Redskins hats.\n\nThe excrement storm that followed on social media was completely predictable. Here are some of the more memorable Twitter contributions to the highbrow discourse:\n\nJess @JessOfRVA: Dan Snyder is parading around the President of the Navajo nation in Redskins Gear. Good Lord.\n\nMaya @pho_re: @5150ellis #dansnyder is parading these people like property with little hats #disgusting.\n\nAnd last but certainly not least . . .\n\nAlex Hale @DaSportsGenius7: Wait the President of the Navajo Nation is in Dan Snyder's suite? Now if only Cartman was there to say, \"Washington Redskins go F yourself.\"\n\n(Side note: Do you see how these liberals refer to the Navajo president as being \"paraded\" around by Snyder, as if he's a non-thinking person without any free will whatsoever? If you ever want to see what liberals truly think of minorities, wait until a minority goes against them on a political or cultural issue. You'll see libs go from hippy-dippy lover of all the earth's creatures to racists of a sort that would make Bull Connor cringe. But they get away with it because, you know, they're uber-tolerant . . . or something.)\n\nThe backlash to Shelly's solidarity with Snyder, though, wasn't confined to mouth-breathers in their pajamas. The mouth-breathers in the sports media got in on the act real quick. Right after the television image of Snyder and Shelly appeared, ESPN's Bomani Jones tweeted this gem: \"dude in the box with snyder was also once accused of stealing from the nation. he was cleared, but check the details.\"\n\nFirst of all, funny how quickly the president of the Navajo Nation gets demoted to \"dude\" when sitting next to the owner of the Redskins, isn't it? That \"dude\" has a lot more credibility on the issue of the Redskins' name change than Bomani Jones or any other member of the leftist sports media by virtue of his being not only an Indian, but also an actual leader of Indians. But here he ran afoul of the stated sports media agenda, thus rendering himself merely a dude.\n\nThe link in Jones's tweet described a sordid affair in which the Navajo president settled out of court after accusations that he stole more than $8,850 from the tribal government. Ben Shelly, the Navajo president, adamantly maintained his innocence of theft. He returned all of the money, except for $600, which Shelly had used to bury his mother. The judge in the case dismissed the charges.\n\n_Deadspin_ also fired off a tweet about Shelly soon after he appeared next to Snyder, linking to an article charitably titled \"Disgraced, Soon-to-Be-Former Navajo Nation President Attends Skins Game.\" As Daniel Flynn described it at Breitbart.com, \"The sports site, suddenly expert on tribal politics, maintains that the Navajo Nation president 'entered office under a dark cloud' and 'was accused of going behind the back of tribal leaders.' The only good Indian is a _Deadspin_ Indian.\"\n\nAnd that's not all they said. _Deadspin_ went on to provide in-depth detail of Shelly's recent election loss and past conflicts with the tribal councils, which is fine. I'm not here to defend Ben Shelly. But I do think his willingness to openly support the Redskins as an Indian man of some stature\u2014whether on his way in or out of power\u2014is important and should be taken seriously. I do know that neither _Deadspin_ nor any other branch of the left-wing media machine went to such lengths to do \"opposition research\" on any of the Indians who _support_ the Redskins' name change.\n\nWhen Ray Halbritter, leader of the Oneida tribe, emerged as the most vocal Indian leader of the Change the Mascot movement, _Deadspin_ had only very vague references to his background. _Deadspin_ writer Dave McKenna, for instance, described Halbritter as an \"Oneida Indian frontman.\" Sean Newell, also writing for _Deadspin_ , referred to Halbritter as an \"Oneida Indian Nation Representative.\"\n\nIf _Deadspin_ had done the same sort of oppo research on Halbritter as they had done on Ben Shelly, they would have found some significant stories. For example, according to a report by the Christian Peacemaker Teams, Ray Halbritter cemented himself as head of the Oneida tribe by building a casino.\n\nIn 1993, Mr. Halbritter negotiated a gaming compact for the Oneidas with New York governor Mario Cuomo. . . . This casino became the cornerstone of an expansive Oneida business enterprise that now includes a chain of gas stations, a textile factory, and a luxury hotel. The business is incorporated as the Oneida Indian Nation of New York, Inc. with Ray Halbritter as its CEO.\n\nAs Daniel Greenfield of FrontPageMag.com pithily summed it up: \"So yes, Ray Halbritter is a representative of the Oneida Indian Nation. But it's the Oneida Indian Nation Inc. It's a company with gas stations, a hotel, and a casino.\"\n\nIt gets better:\n\nIn 1993, the Grand Council of Chiefs removed Mr. Halbritter as the Oneida wolf clan representative and notified the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) that he no longer represented the Oneida people. The decision was accepted by the BIA, only to be reversed 24 hours later, reportedly under pressure from Sherwood Boehlert, the U.S. congressional representative for the area and a casino supporter.\n\nToday the U.S. government but not the Grand Council of Chiefs gives official recognition to the Oneida Indian Nation with Ray Halbritter as its representative.\n\nSo Ray Halbritter is not even considered a legitimate representative by his own people! Who is it that considers him legitimate? The white man! The palefaces in Washington!\n\nAnd it gets better still:\n\nOn February 13, 1996, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and local counsel filed suit on behalf of the Oneida Nation of New York against the U.S. Department of the Interior, charging that the government violated the Oneidas' national sovereignty.\n\nThe suit alleged that the Department refused to recognize a legitimate decision by the Nation and the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee, Six Nations Confederacy, to remove Arthur Raymond Halbritter from his claimed position as sole leader of the Nation and representative to the U.S. government.\n\nHere you have the Indian people actually suing the federal government to have this clown removed, and why? Because, as the Oneidas protested:\n\nAgainst the wishes of the Confederacy, and without knowledge of the Oneida people, a Casino deal was struck between ex-Governor Cuomo and so-called Oneida Nation \"CEO\" Arthur Raymond Halbritter in 1993. The compact was never ratified by the Oneidas. Using money borrowed by Halbritter from the Key Bank of Central NY (the CEO mortgaged Oneida land without our knowledge) \"The Turning Stone Casino\" was built in Oneida, NY. The Casino was built on wetlands in violation of both US and Haudenosaunee laws. Because Halbritter violated Haudenosaunee rules he was removed from his position as an Oneida spokesperson in May, 1993. . . .\n\nThe Oneida people were completely unaware that any transactions for land, a casino, or lawsuits against 20,000 land owners would ensue. To date, the Oneida people who have opposed these decisions continue to be threatened with on-going human, civil and religious rights violations and are in present danger of losing their homes on the Oneida Indian Territory. Under the guise of a \"beautification program\", the leadership has authorized a mock tribal court system to prosecute all those who stand up for their rights as Haudenosaunee. A 54 man, completely non-Native \"Oneida Nation Police\" force acting on the direct orders of Halbritter has harassed, intimidated and physically assaulted Oneida people on their own territory.\n\nIn short, Ray Halbritter built himself a casino empire against the wishes of his own people and then hired a goon squad to make sure they stayed in line. But why do we have to find all this information out from FrontPageMag.com and OneidasforDemocracy.org? Where was _Deadspin_ on this? The answer to that, of course, is that the liberal media do opposition research against people whose beliefs they don't like, but they will give a pretty much free ride to those who toe the liberal party line.\n\nBen Shelly _might_ have wrongfully taken less than $9,000 from his tribe, and more than 90 percent of that money he returned. Yet _Deadspin_ saw fit to call him a \"disgraced,\" \"soon-to-be-former President\" and a \"lame duck\" who had entered office under a \"dark cloud.\"\n\nForget a lame duck, Ray Halbritter is a dead duck with the Oneida. He was voted out twenty years ago, yet, thanks to the U.S. government, he still spends Oneida money and uses that money to hire goons who have assaulted tribal people. Because he chooses to let the Left use him as a true \"mascot\" in their quest to remove all Indian mascots, _Deadspin_ sees fit to refer to him only as a \"frontman\" and a \"representative.\"\n\nThe Redskins' trip to Arizona in 2014 wasn't just about what we saw on TV, with Navajo president Ben Shelly sitting next to Daniel Snyder. It was also about what we didn't see. The great website RedskinsFacts.com\u2014which dedicates itself to getting out the truth about the Redskins' name\u2014continuously tweeted pictures of dozens of Indians wearing Redskins jerseys, proudly waving signs in support of the name, and posing for pictures with famous former Redskins like Mark Moseley and Gary Clark.\n\nI give Fox full credit for showing Ben Shelly with Daniel Snyder. But if it were not for RedskinsFacts.com, few of us would know just how deep and widespread is the Redskins' support among American Indians. That's not something the liberal sports media want you to know.\n\nThink of it this way: If these Indians had wanted the Redskins to change their name, would they have received more attention and airtime? You bet they would have.\n\nWhen it comes to the liberal sports media, sports reporter Daniel Flynn of Breitbart.com nailed it: \"The only good Indian is a _Deadspin_ Indian.\"\nCHAPTER FOUR\n\nMAKING A HERO OF MICHAEL SAM\n\nI normally don't watch local news. The mullet-to-secondary-education ratio is far too imbalanced for me; for some reason, local television news is completely obsessed with covering the decay of Western society. Occasionally I see a quality story and solid journalistic work, but normally within three minutes of watching, I feel like I'm witnessing the news equivalent of the primordial ooze river from _Ghostbusters II_. So with great fear, trepidation, and yet some semblance of hope, I turned on my local Fox affiliate here in Houston to get an update on the Rockets. I, like a true NBA fan when his team goes out of time zone, had fallen asleep during their game against Phoenix the night before, and I wanted to see the highlights.\n\nAfter wading through a seemingly endless myriad of \"Woman Shoots Baby-Daddy for Farting Too Loud\" and \"Dog Finds Car Keys in Baby's Diaper\" stories (not literally, but you know what I'm talking about), the NBA coverage began. However, instead of coverage of the team that . . . you know . . . plays for the city in which the television station's audience lives, I found myself treated to a highlight montage of Jason Collins, who had recently announced that he had sex with men\u2014in other words, was gay\u2014which was treated as an act of national importance and tremendous heroism. Here he was, playing in the first game since his coming out. The montage was set to the tune of John Lennon's \"Imagine.\"\n\n\"'Imagine' what?\" a viewer might have asked. Certainly not what Jason Collins got up to in his alleged private life, now made public. Moreover, why would a local television station that airs in Houston, Texas, a place where Jason Collins never played in his career, instead of airing coverage of the team they \"cover\" (and a team that won that night in Phoenix, by the way), choose to go with a heavily produced tribute piece about a thirty-five-year-old journeyman basketball player, playing in Los Angeles for a team from Brooklyn?\n\nWell, we all know the answer. Because when it comes to sports media, if it's gay, it leads.\n\nNow, this chapter is going to deal primarily with the Michael Sam story as opposed to Jason Collins for a few reasons. First, Michael Sam is more recent, and he also plays in the biggest sports league in America, the NFL. And on a personal level, I have to say, even though I have about as much interest in hearing about the sex life of another man as I have in chewing glass, I respect Michael Sam and the way he came out much more than I respect the way Jason Collins did.\n\nMichael Sam came out at the _beginning_ of his career, before the draft even. Jason Collins came out after the last game of what absolutely should have been his last season. It's one thing to shout, \"I'm gay!\" as you're leaving a party. It's quite another to shout it out as you're entering one. Trust me on this.\n\nAfter Jason Collins announced he was homosexual, at the end of the 2013 NBA season, he was not signed to another NBA contract. Some people (ESPN) believe this was done for anti-gay reasons, and that it looked awful for the league to have a player publicly come out, only to have nobody sign him.\n\nOther people (non-gay-rights advocates, using their brains) know that no team came within ten yards of Jason Collins at the end of the 2013 season, because he wasn't the same player anymore. In the 2012\u20132013 season, Collins had played in only 38 games, logged only 384 minutes, and been held to 41 points and 60 rebounds over that time. If you put up those stats at twenty-four while bouncing between an NBA team and the Development League, _maybe_ a team sticks with you and tries to bring you around. But when you do that at thirty-four, the party's over. So Jason Collins remained unemployed\u2014that is, until University of Missouri defensive end Michael Sam announced to the world in February 2014 that he was gay too, thus sparking the strangest race in the history of history: \"The Great Gay Race\" of 2014.\n\nNot to be outdone by the NFL, the NBA moved quickly. Exactly two weeks after Michael Sam made his announcement, Jason Collins signed a ten-day contract with the Brooklyn Nets and played the very next night. If you needed any proof that Jason Collins was signed only because he was gay, take a look at his stat line: in his first game back, against the Lakers, Collins played eleven minutes and logged two rebounds (rebounding had previously been his strength). He missed his only field-goal attempt and committed _five fouls_. That is the stat line of someone who has no business being on an NBA basketball court. More important, any prospect from the NBA's Development League could have done as well, or better, and so could a lot of other free-agent veterans. Jason Collins was signed purely because he was gay and it helped the NBA and the Nets make a political statement to the adoring liberal sports media. Having a gay player proves that you're a tolerant, nuanced, open-minded, and loving human being. Not having one means that you're hateful, \"behind the times,\" and cruel to small woodland creatures. Professional sports leagues are keenly aware that gay activism has become the new liberal cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre, and they want to be at its forefront.\n\nIt was absurd to ask, as the liberal sports media did repeatedly, whether the NBA or the NFL was ready for a gay athlete, because everyone knew there had been gay athletes before (though they had kept it private) and everyone knew there would be no quicker way to fawning media coverage than to have an openly gay player. That's why the NBA snatched Jason Collins off Oprah's couch in February 2014 and threw an NBA uniform on him\u2014because he was gay and it made the NBA and the Nets look good, at least in the eyes of the sports media.\n\nThe NBA may have won the battle of \"The Great Gay Race,\" but the NFL will win the war, because the NFL is the NFL. Michael Sam is the big one: an NFL player playing the country's most popular game. The sports media greeted the Michael Sam announcement with jubilation unparalleled. _Sports Illustrated_ 's Stewart Mandel wrote about how Sam had broken \"a longstanding barrier.\" NFL Network analyst Mark Kriegel tweeted: \"Mizzou's Michael Sam just showed people what it's like to be a real man.\" _Grantland_ staff writer Holly Anderson tweeted: \"The support from Michael Sam's teammates puts gladness in my heart. Bless them all.\" Rob Moseley of GoDucks.com tweeted: \"The Michael Sam news is massive, groundbreaking\u2014and long overdue\u2014stuff. Awesome for him, and for those who will follow in his footsteps.\" Will Brinson, senior writer for CBS Sports, said, \"So much for Johnny Manziel having the biggest crowd at the combine. Incredibly brave decision by Michael Sam.\"\n\nNow, sportswriters are supposed to know something about the meaning of words, and all of the words above are a prime, grade-A bullfeathers. Contrary to Stewart Mandel, Sam had not broken a longstanding barrier, because there was no covert or overt rule against gay athletes in the NFL. If for Mark Kriegel the definition of a real man is someone who talks about his sex life, well, that seems a pretty impoverished view, and I wonder if he would take the same view if an athlete said he intended to remain a virgin until he got married. New York Giants cornerback Prince Amukamara did that and was roundly ridiculed for it. I wonder how often Holly Anderson \"blesses\" football players\u2014isn't it funny or ironic how sportswriters use words of religion or morality to approve behavior that used to be considered neither religious nor moral? Rob Moseley thought the Sam news was \"massive, groundbreaking,\" while most sports fans probably thought the news was something more akin to \"thanks for sharing.\" And as for what Will Brinson calls the \"incredibly brave decision\" by Michael Sam, how incredibly brave is it to make an announcement that any PR person could tell you would suddenly make you a hero in the eyes of the sports media, and even merit\u2014as did the Jason Collins announcement\u2014a congratulatory phone call or statement of support from the president of the United States? Just as an aside, can you imagine previous presidents considering a man's announcement that he has sex with other men worthy of presidential commendation\u2014George Washington congratulating the first openly gay Indian lacrosse player, or Abraham Lincoln congratulating the first openly gay jockey, or FDR congratulating the first openly gay race car driver?\n\nIt's instructive to compare the sports media's treatment of Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow when he was drafted in the first round with their treatment of seventh-round draft pick Michael Sam. You can guess who got the easier ride. Pete Prisco of CBS Sports referred to Tebow's pro day at Florida as \"St. Timmy's Day.\" He trashed Tebow's NFL potential and even wondered whether Tebow was charging for pictures (he wasn't). Prisco made a cottage industry of anti-Tebow columns, concluding that Tebow \"stinks,\" might have \"learning problems,\" and was \"not a great teammate.\" Others were even less forgiving, and blunter. Jeff Pearlman of _Sports Illustrated_ left little doubt where he stood on \"Saint Timmy\" when he wrote a blog post titled \"I Want Tim Tebow to Fail.\" Imagine the reaction if a sports writer had written an article titled \"I Want Michael Sam to Fail.\" That writer would have been fired\u2014and then probably loaded into a cannon and fired into the polar vortex. There would have been universal outrage.\n\nBut there was no such outrage at Jeff Pearlman, who in that blog post said everything that the liberal sports media thought needed to be said:\n\nI want him to fail in the NFL nonetheless, because a famous Tim Tebow is a dangerous Tim Tebow. Tim Tebow scares me and judging from his father's website, his upcoming Super Bowl ad and mounting knowledge of his way of life he should scare you, too. Tim Tebow doesn't play football merely for the joy of the game. He plays football because he wants to spread the word of Jesus Christ.\n\nYeah, all that \"turn the other cheek,\" \"love thy neighbor,\" and saving unwanted children in Philippines stuff? Horrifying.\n\nAnd while Pearlman wanted Tebow to fail because Tebow is a devout evangelical Christian, Pearlman (who is Jewish) _gushed_ over Brooklyn-based Orthodox Jewish fighter Dmitriy Salita who also goes by the nickname \"The Star of David.\" In another blog post, Pearlman describes Salita as being \"genuinely pious.\" But, despite the fact that Salita is essentially the Jewish Tim Tebow, Pearlman never said he wants Salita to fail. On the contrary, Pearlman even went on to call Salita his favorite \"Jewish jock\" of all time. So it's okay for a Jewish fighter to be openly devout, but it's not okay for a Christian athlete? And of course when Michael Sam announced that he was going to be the first openly gay NFL player, Pearlman gushed again:\n\nMichael Sam is my new favorite football player.\n\nI don't have a close second. . . .\n\n. . . Some teammates will avoid him in the showers. There'll be whispers and chuckles. Religious teammates will damn him a sinner. Maybe to his face, maybe not. But the words, they will speak.\n\nAnd yet . . . I get the feeling this man can take it. He's clearly intelligent and insightful. He braved coming out to his college teammates, and was encouraged by the aftermath. He seems to know he's a trailblazer; seems comfortable carrying that torch.\n\nI've never seen him play, but I expect my son to be wearing his jersey next season.\n\nWith pride.\n\nOkay, so Michael Sam is Pearlman's \"new favorite football player,\" and he doesn't have \"a close second,\" even though he's \"never seen him play.\" In other words, Sam is Pearlman's favorite player _solely because_ Sam is openly gay, and Pearlman is rooting for Sam to succeed just as he rooted for Tebow to fail, because Tebow \"wants to spread the word of Christ\" while Sam is \"a trailblazer\" carrying the \"torch\" of gay activism, and the sports media love the latter and loathe the former.\n\nBut as giddy and jubilant as the sports media were after Michael Sam's announcement that he was gay, there was still a problem. No one else seemed to care. All the supposedly racist, homophobic religious zealots were remarkably quiet. Dave Zirin, sports editor for the very liberal magazine the _Nation_ , was even moved to write an article that posed the question: \"Why the Curious Right-Wing Silence on Michael Sam?\"\n\nI don't know, maybe it's because the rest of the country isn't as obsessed with homosexuality as sports columnists are, and maybe most people have better things to do than talk about the sex lives of others. The sports media were perplexed that the \"right wing\" appeared far less \"homophobic\" than advertised. So how did the sports media handle this? Extensions of friendships? Apologies? Back rubs? Long walks on the beach? No, they decided to pick a fight.\n\nDale Hansen, a sports anchor for WFAA television in Dallas, couldn't resist, as almost all liberal sportscasters can't resist, the idea that gay is the new black:\n\nIt wasn't that long ago when we were being told that black players couldn't play in \"our\" games because it would be \"uncomfortable.\" And even when they finally could, it took several more years before a black man played quarterback.\n\nBecause we weren't \"comfortable\" with that, either.\n\nSo many of the same people who used to make that argument (and the many who still do) are the same people who say government should stay out of our lives.\n\nBut then want government in our bedrooms.\n\nI've never understood how they feel \"comfortable\" laying claim to both sides of that argument.\n\nHansen's thinking is so confused here I have almost no idea what he's really trying to say. But, I'll give it a try. It seems like Hansen is blaming small-government types, in other words, Republicans, and Christian Republicans in particular\u2014you know, the ones who support small government _and_ traditional morality\u2014for the color bar that used to keep professional sports segregated. And I guess he's saying that these same people opposed black quarterbacks and now oppose Michael Sam. Make sense? Maybe if you're Bob Costas or Keith Olbermann; otherwise, Hansen's whole rant is beyond silly, as is his final slap at Republicans' \"wanting government in our bedrooms.\" Really? Like when? I thought it was liberals who were responsible for putting, on the taxpayers' dime, the \"bedroom\" stuff in our public schools, including all sorts of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) propaganda; Obamacare, which has made us pay for everyone else's contraception (more bedroom stuff); the liberal welfare state that has made us pay for everyone else's abortions, STDs, and illegitimate children (yet more bedroom stuff); and the Obama administration's inclusion of gay liberation as part of our foreign policy, flying the LGBT rainbow flag from some of our embassies, or in other words having the government take the sheets out of certain bedrooms and fly them on a flagpole representing our nation.\n\nBut back to sports. Let's begin with some facts. Branch Rickey, the Dodgers executive who decided to snatch Jackie Robinson out of relative obscurity and shatter baseball's color barrier by bringing him up to the big leagues with the Brooklyn Dodgers, was, wait for it, a Republican. In fact, so was Jackie Robinson until the late 1960s, when he supported Hubert Humphrey for president. And guess what? Both men were devout Christians.\n\nAs for the first black quarterback to win a Super Bowl, that was Doug Williams, and his head coach was a Christian conservative Republican named Joe Gibbs. The same Joe Gibbs who spoke at the 2008 Republican National Convention, and the same Joe Gibbs who benched a white quarterback named Jay Schroeder in order to give Williams the starting job that he had rightfully earned. Not to mention that Jack Kent Cooke, who was the Redskins owner at the time and the boss of both Williams and Gibbs, was also a staunch Republican.\n\nHansen wants to imply that Republicans\u2014those small-government, moralistic types\u2014are racists. But the inconvenient truth for Hansen is that it was Republicans who broke the color barrier in baseball, it was Republicans who gave us the first black quarterback to win a Super Bowl, and it was Republicans who were saying next to nothing about Michael Sam at the time that Hansen decided to go on his rant.\n\nHansen loosed his tirade after some anonymous NFL executives and personnel types told _Sports Illustrated_ that Sam's announcement could hurt his draft stock. So naturally Hansen took the assessment of NFL executives and scouts as a means to attack conservatives for being, guess what, racist and for wanting to get into your bedroom. Makes sense, doesn't it? Well, it does if you're in sports media. Or any mainstream media for that matter. After Sam was drafted and was filmed kissing his boyfriend, an anchor named Courtney Kerr on a Dallas morning TV show called _The Broadcast_ said that critical comments about Sam's messy display of affection were \"racist toward homosexuals.\" Her coanchor Lisa Pineiro, a fellow liberal, actually attacked conservatives for _not_ wanting to hear or see more stories about Michael Sam. People were, she said, and she implied that she was one of them, \"very sick of people who are being sick of hearing about [Michael Sam stories].\" There we have a point-blank confession that conservatives might not want to talk obsessively about gays, but the liberal media sure do.\n\nSince they couldn't get much of a rise with the Michael Sam coming-out story, they tried, and partly succeeded, by airing or posting, around the clock, video or pictures of Michael Sam kissing his boyfriend. Has an NFL draft pick's public display of affection ever been more widely aired? For the sports and mainstream media, it was as iconic as that end-of-World-War-II picture of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square. Even better, the liberal sports media knew it was offending the instincts and sentiments of a lot of people who are willing to tolerate homosexuality but don't want it broadcast into their living room or to their children who, you know, watch sports media for sports, not the national gay lip-locking championship. It's not conservatives who want government in the bedroom\u2014handing out \"free\" contraception \u00e0 la Obamacare\u2014but rather the liberal sports media, broadcasting gay kissing into every electronic device you might have in your bedroom.\n\nAnd if you're a professional football player who happens to tweet \"horrible\" and \"OMG\" at the spectacle, as Miami Dolphins safety Don Jones did, don't expect any sympathy from the sports media after the team fines you, suspends you, and sends you to \"educational training,\" because these journalists are perfectly fine with what the Communists used to call \"reeducation camps.\"\n\nThe liberal sports media think gay rights are a civil rights crusade and those who think otherwise need to have their thinking changed, which is why it is \"racist\" not to want round-the-clock coverage of Michael Sam kissing his boyfriend, why the liberal sports media think they are so bravely progressive when they broadcast it, and why the liberal sports media will fall right behind NFL management in stifling any dissent on this issue.\n\nFor the sports media, the enemy is always the same: conservatives and Christians. The \"ground\" the liberal sports media want to break is the ground of traditional Christian morality. Shortly after Jason Collins came out, the _Washington Post_ 's Mike Wise waxed stupid about those he felt were opposed to Collins. He, cowardly, did not name, though he paraphrased, ESPN NBA analyst Chris Broussard, who was pretty much the only member of the sports media to be openly critical of Collins, citing homosexuality as an \"open rebellion against God.\" Wise quickly went to full froth as he attacked the \"heterosexual religious zealots\" who \"used [Collins's] historic announcement to call homosexuality a sin and an open rebellion toward God and otherwise trumpeted their bigotry under the guise of 'religious beliefs.'\"\n\nIn other words, if Christians consider homosexuality a sin, then they are bigots. Not much liberal tolerance for Christians, is there? Wise continued: \"Let's at least be consistent: If the outrage at Collins is all about religion, where was the contempt for Shawn Kemp's and Antonio Cromartie's serial fathering? Really, why is an openly gay athlete evoking such fervor while a womanizing athlete is just one of the fellas?\"\n\nThere are a couple of points to be made here. First, there wasn't a lot of outrage\u2014in fact, there was hardly any\u2014at Jason Collins's announcement. There was no anti-Collins \"fervor.\" The fervor was all on the side of the liberal sports media, who trumpeted a story that very few people cared about and lashed out against \"bigots\" who were almost entirely silent, perhaps even nearly nonexistent. If you looked at any sports media blog, you'd quickly find that most any \"outrage\" was directed not at Collins but at the sports media's endless clamor about Collins, which is why sports media liberals were \"very sick of people who are being sick of hearing about it,\" as Lisa Pineiro said about Michael Sam.\n\nAnd as for the lack of \"contempt for Shawn Kemp's and Antonio Cromartie's serial fathering,\" is it really the role of Christians to show contempt for anyone? Christians are called to charity, and it's telling that Wise doesn't know that\u2014contempt seems to be more his line when he talks about Christians.\n\nSpeaking as a sports commentator, I can tell you that the real reason sports writers steer away from talking about athletes and their \"baby mamas\" is because they don't want to be called _racist_. Mike Wise knows this. Whenever someone criticizes a Kemp or a Cromartie for his \"serial fathering,\" he gets shouted down and vilified. Case in point was when, in 2013, one of NFL running back Adrian Peterson's _many_ illegitimate children was tragically beaten to death by a monster whom the child's mother was living with. Phil Mushnick, a sports writer for the _New York Post_ , then took Peterson to task. Mushnick was angry with Peterson for not providing a better home for his son and for living a lifestyle that made his kids vulnerable because he wasn't there to be a father for them, saying:\n\nMaybe Peterson's son is just one more stands-to-reason murder victim, just another child born to just another \"baby mama,\" one more kid who never had a shot, anyway. Maybe, by now, even if we can't accept it, we can expect it. . . . The suspect in the beating murder of Peterson's 2-year-old is the boyfriend of Peterson's \"baby mama\"\u2014now the casual, flippant, detestable and common buzz-phrase for absentee, wham-bam fatherhood.\n\nAnd for those comments, Mushnick was ripped by the sports media. _Deadspin_ described Mushnick as a \"professional shithead\" and \"race-baiting troll.\" The site Awful Announcing called Mushnick's piece \"the most offensive sports column in the history of Earth.\" It is Wise's fellow travelers in the liberal sports media, who are quick to yell racism and quick to reject Christian morality, who make it nearly impossible to criticize athletes for impregnating their serial baby mamas.\n\nWise saved the kicker for the end: \"Collins being gay is about him, not anyone else. By sharing his sexual identity publicly, he's stating who _he_ is, not what anyone else should be.\"\n\nYeah, and that's why you're writing about it in one of the country's largest newspapers, and that's why the Collins and the Sam stories dominated ESPN for days, because all this is a private moment for Jason Collins and Michael Sam. Please. I could have said the exact same thing about Tim Tebow. Tebow's Christianity was about him, and not necessarily anyone else. He opened the door to others who might want to follow, but he in no way compelled them to or damned them if they didn't. So what's the difference? The sports media like what Sam stands for and loathe what Tebow stands for.\n\nThis moment ceased having anything to do with Jason Collins the second he said, \"I'm gay.\" Collins was just the means to an end for the liberal sports media. As Matt Philbin of the Media Research Center said, Collins is their \"gay Jackie Robinson.\" Collins and Sam might say they just want to play ball and don't want to be activists, and that's fine. But it doesn't matter. The sports media will turn them into activists. That same sports media, however, could also be their undoing. In a moment of breathtaking honesty, Gregg Doyel of CBS Sports tweeted out an article that he wrote, with the catch line in the tweet reading: \"Michael Sam and the liberal media: Match made in heaven, or . . . not?\"\n\nHats off to Gregg Doyel for acknowledging that the liberal media are . . . the liberal media. He goes further:\n\nThe media wants Michael Sam to succeed. I could ignore that and write something else about him, something that would sound very much like I want him to succeed\u2014and I do, unabashedly and unapologetically\u2014but ignoring the obvious is no way to go through life. So let's not ignore that Michael Sam has fans in newsrooms and press boxes around the country.\n\nSee, Michael Sam is a story, one we've been waiting on for years. We in the national media have long anticipated a publicly gay male professional athlete in one of our biggest sports leagues\u2014the NFL, MLB, the NBA\u2014and we almost had one last year when Jason Collins came out. The media fawned over Collins' announcement, and I could pretend that didn't happen but it's like I've already said: Ignoring the facts is no way to go through life. Hell, I was fawning myself. Unabashedly and unapologetically.\n\nSo the mostly liberal media has a story that we find not just fascinating, but inspiring. And we're going to write about Michael Sam as much as we can, as I'm doing right here, because it's so fun and new and progressive.\n\nNFL teams will be watching, reading. And at some point you have to wonder if the overexposure that killed the career of Tim Tebow will do the same to Michael Sam.\n\nNow, first off, the obvious difference between Sam and Tebow is that the media actually _wanted_ Tim Tebow to fail. They viewed him, his family, and what he stood for as a clear and present danger to what they believe, and they wanted him gone. If Michael Sam's NFL career face-plants after a year or two because of the \"media circus,\" it will be sad, and no doubt some of those liberals in those press boxes and newsrooms will lament the tragic downfall they helped to make happen. But, in the end, Michael Sam's career demise would just be collateral damage. The sports media don't care about Michael Sam. They care about what Michael Sam represents. As Doyel says, this is the story \"we've been waiting on for years.\"\n\nAnd that's sad. What's also sad is that so many reporters were waiting on this for so long. Why? What's such a big deal about a kid being gay and playing football? What would it prove? What kind of warped mind-set do you have to be in to lose sleep at night wondering when and whence the first gay football player is coming? More important, why weren't they waiting for someone like Tebow? With all the domestic violence, rapes, murders, broken homes, bankruptcy, and other crap that the sports world produces nowadays, if you were going to lose sleep over waiting for a great story and a breath of fresh air, wouldn't you have been hoping for a Tim Tebow? Instead, your answer to all of that was to anxiously anticipate the first gay player? What does that say about the people who are bringing you your sports news?\n\nUnfortunately, what it offers is more evidence that gay activism has become the new religion of the sports media. Sports have always taken relatively obscure players like Michael Sam and Jason Collins and helped turn them into heroes. But, in the past, that kind of hero-or icon-making was reserved for people who had either done incredible things on the field of play or done incredibly brave and heroic things away from the field of play. Michael Sam and Jason Collins can lay claim to no such exploits on the playing field. Their icon stature is due solely to their homosexuality and the \"bravery\" they showed in coming out.\n\nBut what's brave or heroic about saying you're gay in America in 2014? Not much. The fact is, coming out has become, as Matt Philbin of the Media Research Center describes it, more about joining \"society's most trendy and celebrated grievance group.\" All it means is that _Sports Center_ is going to be showing your highlights all day, Oprah's booking agent will be calling soon, and you're probably going to pick up about thirty thousand Twitter followers. I'm not saying coming out doesn't require a certain degree of self-confidence. But bravery? What's brave in America in 2014 is going to Radio Row at the Super Bowl and telling someone you voted for Romney.\n\nI don't have anything against Michael Sam personally. I've got enough trouble keeping up with my own sex life, let alone his or anyone else's. But I have to say I really do wish they would keep it to themselves. Few of us feel the need to talk about our sex lives. Most of us think there is a lot more to us than what we do behind closed doors. But the only reason we're asked to know or care about Jason Collins or Michael Sam is because they're gay, and that's a problem.\n\nI should know about you because of _what_ you've done, not because of _whom_ you've done. Are we really getting to a point in society where people are known and identified by whom they go horizontal with?\n\nIt seems like we are, and whether you're gay or straight, that's not a good thing.\n\nEspecially, and bizarrely, when having a Christian point of view on these issues can cost you your job.\n\nThat's how liberals play the \"tolerance\" game. It's a matter of definition: they're tolerant, and you're not; and because you're not, you might get sued or lose your job or be otherwise publicly vilified.\n\nDavid Tyree found this out firsthand. In 2014, the New York Giants decided to hire their former wide receiver and Super Bowl XLII hero as director of player development.\n\nTyree had previously spoken publicly about his views on gay marriage. According to Breitbart.com:\n\nIn 2011 Tyree got involved in the campaign in New York on the question of same-sex marriage and said same-sex marriage would lead to \"anarchy.\" He maintained, \"The nuclear family is the backbone of society,\" \"marriage existed prior to our country,\" and \"redefining marriage changes everything including the way we educate our children.\"\n\n\"This is not personal,\" the sure-handed receiver explained. \"I could still be in a locker room with a gay man and still love him as a teammate. I can be tolerant, but the problem is people aren't tolerant of the views people like me have. If you don't agree with that lifestyle, you're a bigot. I'm not a bigot. I have different viewpoints.\"\n\nAs if on cue, to ensure that Tyree's statement on intolerance completely fulfilled the prophecy, the benignly named but liberally inspired Human Rights Campaign attacked Tyree. The HRC called his beliefs \"misinformed and dangerous.\" What seemed to annoy the HRC at first was Tyree's statement that he would trade his Super Bowl win for a society that maintains the institution of traditional marriage: \"As a player, David Tyree made clear that his misguided personal views trump his responsibility to his teammates and his employer.\"\n\nGood. I'm glad David Tyree's personal views and strongly held convictions trump his responsibility to his employer. They should. How strongly or dearly held is a personal view or conviction if it can be overruled by the guy signing your paycheck?\n\nDavid Tyree had a good NFL career. The only reason he is a household name to millions of sports fans is because of his amazing circus catch that helped make the Giants' win in Super Bowl XLII possible. That Super Bowl and that moment will likely become the only thing that people remember from his playing career; and yet, he would trade away that signature moment of his career for traditional marriage. Good for him.\n\nYou would think that in a sane world, the HRC and others of their ilk could have at least felt a begrudging respect for the depth of his commitment, his sense of principle, even if they disagreed with him. Instead, the only depths the HRC managed to go to were name-calling and fearmongering.\n\nTyree really got under their skin with his strong belief in gay conversion. As Tyree said in a 2011 Twitter exchange on the civil rights and gay rights movements: \"I'll never be a former black. I have met former homosexuals.\"\n\nIt was this that led to the hissiest of all hissy-fit responses from the HRC:\n\n\"When did Tyree decide to be straight?\" Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin asked in a statement criticizing the Giants for hiring the former receiver. \"The idea that someone can change their sexual orientation or gender identity is ludicrous and the New York Giants are risking their credibility by hiring someone who publicly advocates junk science. His opposition to basic legal equality aside, David Tyree's proselytizing of such dangerous practices goes against the positive work the Giants organization has done in recent years.\"\n\nGay conversion equals kryptonite to PC police and activists like the HRC. It's the one thing they can't allow over and above all else. It's not \"science\" that these activists are pushing; it's an agenda defended by intimidation, intolerance, and even, in some states, the force of law. The readily observable fact that gays walk away from, and heteros walk into, homosexuality every year brings _their_ junk-science, \"it's not a choice\" house of cards crashing down. The fact that David Tyree publicly expressed that fact with his simple yet forceful take about meeting former homosexuals yet never having met former blacks became good enough to get him marked for figurative death.\n\nBut reports of Tyree's career death were greatly exaggerated. The Giants went ahead and made the hire. David Tyree also tried to appease the homosexual lobby that wanted to kill his career by meeting with Wade Davis, the executive director of the You Can Play foundation, which aims to eliminate \"homophobia.\"\n\nThe _New York Daily News_ reported that You Can Play cofounder Patrick Burke released a tweet suggesting that Tyree was \"evolving\" in his views. Not only that, Burke even went so far as to criticize the HRC for attacking Tyree. Wade Davis echoed that in a piece he wrote for the Monday Morning Quarterback in which he described Tyree as being \"on a journey when it comes to understanding the LGBT community. He is evolving.\" But Davis also cautioned that the former Giant wide receiver's \"journey\" is not complete. He vowed to \"help him along his journey\" and hopes that the outcome will be a \"positive one.\"\n\nWell, here's hoping it's not a \"positive one\"\u2014not because I think a man isn't entitled to change his opinion, but because a man shouldn't be compelled to change his opinion because of politically correct tyranny that denies alternative points of view. David Tyree was a brave and forceful voice for traditional marriage in the NFL, and it's not like there were many such voices willing to speak publicly. I have seen no evidence of Tyree recanting his beliefs. But let's not kid ourselves: activists like Burke and Davis aren't going to rush to Tyree's defense against fellow travelers like the HRC and wax eloquent about his philosophical evolution unless Tyree has said or done something to convince them that they should. It might appear that Tyree had to pay a ransom for his opinions, because once it was reported that he was on a \"journey\" and \"evolving,\" the activists' criticism of him died down. Is that how it's going to be from now on? Will every traditional-marriage advocate, or every conservative, have to sit down with the politically correct tyrants and kiss the proverbial ring in order to get the crazies to shut up and leave him alone? It certainly seems that's the direction we're headed. I don't know if the Giants told Tyree to meet with Wade Davis or if he did it on his own initiative, but it sets the terrible precedent of giving activists who represent about 3 percent of the population near veto power over an NFL franchise's hiring a former player who happens to have exercised his First Amendment right to speak in favor of traditional marriage. Even when these activists lose, they win.\n\nAlas, the practice of gay extortion is not confined to the HRC. Perhaps the most famous example of this comes from an NFL player. Chris Kluwe, a former punter for the Minnesota Vikings, supports gay marriage and has a history of loudly making his views known. He also happened to be an older and increasingly expensive player as the 2013 season approached. Just prior to the start of the season, the Vikings cut Kluwe, and no other NFL team signed him that year.\n\nIn 2014, with his career apparently over, Kluwe decided to give life to his bitterness toward the Vikings by writing a provocative tell-all for _Deadspin_. Kluwe could have chosen one of two roads when he penned his tale. One was the high road. The other was the one that he took. Here is the gist of his piece, \"I Was an NFL Player Until I Was Fired by Two Cowards and a Bigot,\" as related by the _New York Daily News_ :\n\n\"It's my belief, based on everything that happened over the course of 2012, that I was fired by [special teams coach] Mike Priefer, a bigot who didn't agree with the cause I was working for, and two cowards, Leslie Frazier and [general manager] Rick Spielman, both of whom knew I was a good punter and would remain a good punter for the foreseeable future, as my numbers over my eight-year career had shown, but who lacked the fortitude to disagree with Mike Priefer on a touchy subject matter,\" Kluwe wrote in the 3,700-word piece, adding that he doesn't know for sure if his activism led to his dismissal from the team, \"However I'm pretty confident it was.\"\n\nPriefer vehemently denied Kluwe's allegations in a statement given to Minnesota's KFAN sports radio. And in a separate statement released Thursday afternoon, the Vikings said they are taking Kluwe's claims seriously and \"will thoroughly review this matter.\"\n\nKluwe didn't leave the matter there, threatening to sue the Vikings for wrongful termination, claiming that his stance on gay marriage, not his performance, led to his being cut. This is interesting, since Kluwe, by his own admission, could not prove that his personal politics caused his release.\n\nIn fact, at the end of the _Deadspin_ piece, Kluwe himself even went so far as to outline a couple of really, really good reasons for firing him, citing his \"age\" and his expensive \"veteran minimum salary.\" He might have added that the Vikings ranked twentieth in the NFL in punting average during Kluwe's last season with the team. That's certainly not good, and not something worth paying a ton of money for. But, of course, he left that part out.\n\nThe Vikings opened their own investigation into Kluwe's case, asking former chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court Eric Magnuson and former U.S. Department of Justice trial attorney Chris Madel \"to complete an independent review of Kluwe's allegations\" and \"to thoroughly and comprehensively investigate three particular allegations by Kluwe and Kluwe's counsel,\" namely:\n\n1. Special Teams Coordinator Mike Priefer made offensive and insensitive remarks in Kluwe's presence.\n\n2. Representatives of the Vikings discouraged Kluwe from publicly supporting marriage equality and had knowledge of the Priefer comments prior to the _Deadspin_ article publication on January 2, 2014.\n\n3. Kluwe's activism for marriage equality was the reason for his release from the Vikings on May 6, 2013.\n\nThe investigative team concluded that, basically, Chris Kluwe was full of garbage. They found evidence that Priefer had made _one_ homophobic remark, but only after the coach became exasperated that Kluwe and his long snapper Cullen Loeffler weren't focusing on football. There was, on the other hand, _no_ evidence that Vikings management knew about this remark. Moreover, according to the report, \"The record supports the conclusion that players and management were concerned about the distraction that Kluwe's activism was creating, as opposed to the nature and content of his activism. The record does not support the contention that members of management and the coaching staff were focused on discouraging Kluwe based on the nature of his activism.\"\n\nAccording to the investigation:\n\nKluwe himself stated that he never reported any of Priefer's alleged statements to management, Human Resources, or anyone else other than in discussions with [long snapper Cullen] Loeffler and [kicker Blair] Walsh [who issued a statement supporting Priefer's integrity and professionalism]. . . . During his interview, investigators asked Kluwe why he did not bring Priefer's comments to the attention of others within the Vikings organization sooner. Kluwe explained that at the time, he did not know he was going to be released from the Vikings so he thought Priefer's remarks were \"a momentary unpleasant thing\" that would pass as they moved on to the next year.\n\nTranslation: Chris Kluwe was so horrified by Priefer's alleged homophobic quip that he waited for the team to release him and then came up with this garbage story to look like a martyr.\n\nOther findings from the commission make Kluwe look like an ass, almost literally. After news broke of the Jerry Sandusky child-abuse scandal at Penn State, Kluwe, according to a memorandum released by the Vikings and quoted in Pro Football Talk:\n\n. . . made fun of the Vikings' then Head Strength and Conditioning Coach Tom Kanavy, an alumnus of and former coach at Penn State University. . . . In his interview, Kanavy explained that Kluwe cut the seat out of his pants and then put them on to imitate a victim of the Penn State child-abuse scandal. According to Kanavy, Kluwe said that he was a \"Penn State victim\" and to \"stay away\" from him while his buttocks were exposed.\n\nKluwe told investigators that he did not recall that behavior, but that \"it's very possible\" that he did it.\n\n\"It didn't stick in my mind, but, you know, I\u2014it is definitely\u2014if people said they saw it, then yeah, I probably did it,\" Kluwe said.\n\nSo, they want us to believe that the same guy who makes light of the rape of several young boys at the hands of a monster was mortally offended by a single homophobic remark made in frustration by a coach who though Kluwe wasn't focused on his job? Not buying it. Kluwe trashed what little credibility he had left when he took to Twitter after the release of the Vikings' investigative report and memorandum: \"Oooh, shall we talk about the time two very well-known Vikings players were caught in a compromising situation with an underage girl?\" In a follow-up tweet, Kluwe said: \"Bet you didn't hear about that one in the news. We can do this all day, Vikings. Special teams hears *everything*.\"\n\nHmm, so to get this straight: Chris Kluwe, moral champion and defender of the LGBT realm, not only made fun of the rape of young boys, but apparently turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the rape of a young girl?\n\nYet, despite the fact that Kluwe's charges were proved baloney and that he had exposed himself as a scumbag of the highest order, what did the Vikings do? They caved. To start, the Vikings suspended special teams coach Mike Priefer for three games. Then the team agreed to provide an undisclosed sum of money to five different LGBT charities, and to host a national conference on LGBT issues in the field of professional athletics, _and_ to mandate sensitivity training four times a year for all Vikings employees. To top it all off, the Vikings donated an additional $100,000 to LGBT charities, over and above the undisclosed amount already given to the other five charities.\n\nAl Sharpton has nothing on this corporate shakedown. Facts no longer matter. Only image and fear matter. The Vikings, and really all sports organizations, now simply manage image, tempered solely by the fear of appearing insensitive, as defined by pressure groups and the liberal media.\n\nThe liberal sports media that tried to make heroes of Michael Sam, Jason Collins, and Chris Kluwe only showed how ridiculously partisan, lacking in any rational perspective, and off-topic they can be. Sports fans deserve better.\nCHAPTER FIVE\n\nTRASHING TEBOW\n\nWatercooler talk at the office is awesome, because everyone gets together to talk about things that have nothing to do with work. But in radio it's different. Your watercooler talk is our meat and potatoes. And so it was that, as cut-down day loomed in the NFL and Tim Tebow prepared to learn his fate, I was standing in front of the studio's break-room microwave waiting for the beep and instead I heard a loud scream: \"Yes!\"\n\nTurning around, I saw a coworker with a beaming grin on his face: \"Tebow is out! Somebody _finally_ got rid of that Jesus freak!\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah?\" I said. \"I feel bad for him. I don't think the religious stuff really hurt anybody. He should be on a roster somewhere.\" He had, after all, led the Broncos to the playoffs in 2011\u201312 after a series of thrilling come-from-behind wins.\n\n\"Well, you know, man, he can be who he is; I'm not saying all that. I just don't like it when people wear that stuff on their sleeve.\"\n\n\"Well, where should he have worn it? Why should he keep it to himself if it's something he believes in?\"\n\nMy work buddy, stunned to find someone not part of the liberal groupthink, backed out of the room, saying, \"I feel you, dawg. I feel you . . .\"\n\nIf I were more na\u00efve, I'd be shocked that the sports media so hated such a well-meaning, harmless, good-works-doing kid as Tim Tebow.\n\nBut while sports journalists can tolerate an index finger raised to heaven after a touchdown or even a prayer circle after a game, they don't like players to talk about it and walk the Christian walk in public. Tebow is not just a Christian who \"tebows\" after touchdowns. He lives his faith in ways that, to lefty sports journalists, make him a threat to the totally secular sports world they are determined to create. (Sports journalists, in case you haven't noticed, are terrific at moral reversals.) So the fact that Tebow spends his summers helping at a family-run orphanage, building a children's hospital, and preaching the gospel is something sports commentators actually hold against him, particularly that last part.\n\nIn college, Tebow spent more time in prison than most college athletes\u2014and that's saying something. But he wasn't making license plates, he was conducting a prison ministry. Tebow's parents are Baptist missionaries, and Tebow has taken up that role too. It is very hard for liberal, amoral sports reporters not to want to rebuke someone like that, especially when the player and the missionary are inseparable.\n\nThe whole Tebow package\u2014tebowing after a touchdown, the \"pro-life\" Tebow Super Bowl commercial (where his mother talks about how Tebow \"almost didn't make it into this world\" and how she still worries about him\u2014before he tackles her . . . about the most inoffensive pro-life message imaginable), and the mass popularity of Tebow as a Christian sports hero\u2014scared the sports media. It wasn't merely that Tebow had religion, it was that he used his celebrity to evangelize. The liberal sports media viewed him as a monster, even though he was a monster they had helped create because he made good copy and was good for ratings.\n\nWith more than eighty colleges recruiting him out of high school, Tebow was the subject of a documentary in ESPN's _Faces of Sports_ series. It showcased his incredible on-the-field exploits but also covered the family's strong Christian faith. The documentary showed Tebow's father, Bob, reading scripture and talking about how he had prayed for a son named Timothy whom he could raise to be a preacher. The piece went into, albeit briefly, how doctors told Pam, Tebow's mother, that she would die if she did not abort the future Tim, and how she defied their advice, literally risking her life for the benefit of her unborn child. It was an extremely well-done, powerful, and uplifting piece of journalism.\n\nThe sports media profiles continued through his college years, depicting Tebow's religion in a light that, if not flattering, was at least not overtly critical. As his fame grew at Florida and he established himself as one of the best college football players of his class, Tebow became more comfortable in front of the cameras, talking God and football to millions. By the time he arrived in the NFL, he was seen by many as what was once called a \"muscular Christian,\" an evangelist who could take on a Mike linebacker in the open field.\n\nHowever, once Tebow got into the pros, the lefty NFL media were quick to put \"Saint Timmy\" on notice that the mostly positive media coverage he had received in high school and college was over. In fact, Tim Tebow couldn't even get out of the NFL combine before the proverbial lions were released. As Gregg Rosenthal wrote on Pro Football Talk, \"Quarterback Tim Tebow's habit of openly expressing his religious beliefs could potentially rub folks the wrong way, especially in a locker room of grown men who choose to keep their beliefs to themselves, who don't share his beliefs at all, and/or who only want to hear 'God bless' after they have sneezed.\"\n\nGregg's strange line that \"Tebow's habit of openly expressing his religious beliefs could potentially rub folks the wrong way, _especially in a locker room full of grown men_ [emphasis added]\" implied a deep disdain for Christianity, treating it as a fairy tale that Saint Timmy might still believe but that grown men don't. But put the typical liberal media contempt for Christianity aside for a minute and think about the double standard here. The same media that would later cheer the prospect of an openly gay player in an NFL locker room and didn't care if it rubbed anyone \"the wrong way\"\u2014that in fact called such people \"bigots\"\u2014thought it disruptive to have an openly Christian player like Tebow in a locker room. That's not just a double standard: that's crazy.\n\nBut that was just the opening salvo of Rosenthal's piece. The larger context came via a report from the NFL combine that before taking the Wonderlic test (the NFL IQ test administered to all players) Tim Tebow summoned the athletes together for a group prayer. \"Per a league source,\" Rosenthal reported, one of the players said in response:\n\n\"Shut the f\u2013k up.\" Other players in the room then laughed.\n\nWe're not passing judgment on this one; we're just passing along what we've heard. And it illustrates the type of challenges that could be faced by the team that drafts Tebow.\n\nAfter Rosenthal's story came out, Tebow contacted Pro Football Talk, denied that anything like this happened, and even named the players in the room and invited Rosenthal to call them.\n\nRosenthal's dire warning of how Tebow's religion could be a problem was based on a single highly suspect account of an occurrence at the combine, one very convenient for Rosenthal's piece. There was, however, no record of Tebow's religion being a problem with the Florida Gators, where he had been a team captain, or with his high school teammates. Like so much of leftist sports journalism, Rosenthal's story was centered on opinion, his own and that of those who agreed with him, rather than facts.\n\nIt also illustrates the complete disconnect between the sports media and the athletes they cover. News flash: NFL players are overwhelmingly Christian, as is the country at large. Rosenthal's assertion that it would be problematic to add an evangelical Christian player to a locker room full of Christian players, nominal or not, is beyond absurd.\n\nOne could say that Rosenthal failed to do his due diligence as a reporter. But equally important is the _way_ this story was reported. If we lived in a sane world, the villain of the piece would be the alleged hurler of the F-bomb, not the fellow praying for his success. What if, at the NFL combine, a player yelled out at Michael Sam as he was being interviewed, \"Shut the f\u2013k up\"? Do you think the sports media would have passed this along as one of the dangers of drafting Michael Sam? Or do you think they would have named and shamed the F-bomb shouter?\n\nRosenthal claimed not to be \"passing judgment on this one\"\u2014as if there's some kind of gray area between Christianity and \"shut the f\u2013k up\"\u2014but as a reporter, shouldn't he have tried to find out who allegedly said it, you know, to confirm the story? Rosenthal claimed he would \"keep digging\" on the story after Tebow said it didn't happen. Yet despite all the \"digging,\" no one identified the alleged culprit. Seems odd, right? After all, when the sports media want to expose someone, they do it. We all remember ESPN's Darren Rovell and shady hotel-room footage of Johnny Manziel signing football helmets, telling camera operators, \"You never did a signing with me.\" We remember the near-Orwellian lip-reading tactics used on Kobe Bryant when he called NBA referee Bennie Adams a \"f\u2014ing faggot,\" which of course sparked a massive gay-outreach program by the NBA. But the sports media seemed content to the let the combine story drop.\n\nThere's another explanation as to why the sports media never produced Tim Tebow's F-bomb hurler, and that's because he never existed in the first place. Pro Football Talk's promises to \"keep digging,\" coupled with Tebow's stringent denial, smack of a story whose basis in fact was flimsy at best. That in itself could have been a story, but if you think the liberal sports media are interested in journalistic standards, you obviously haven't been paying attention.\n\nPro Football Talk's \"reporting\" was just the tip of the iceberg for the USS Tebow. When he landed on the Denver Broncos, serving as Kyle Orton's backup, he was consistently peppered with questions about what he thought his prospects were of one day landing the starting job. Sometimes the questions were less flattering, sounding more like statements of how he didn't have what it took to be a consistent starter in the NFL, to which he once replied, \"Others who say I won't make it are wrong. They don't know what I'm capable of and what's inside me. My family and my friends have been bothered by what's gone on, and I tell them to pay no attention to it. I'm relying as always on my faith.\"\n\nPretty innocuous statement there, right? I mean, pro athletes frequently speak of how they have faith in themselves and faith in God. But CBS Sports' Gregg Doyel heard Tebow's words and hastily penned a column making some of the most ludicrous claims ever made from a harmless quote. \"Unbelievable,\" Doyel cried in the headline. \"Tebow Believes Faith Equates to Starting in NFL.\" Doyel inserted all the semi-mandatory \"I'm not against religion\" disclaimers and the obligatory \"I go to church myself\" qualifier at the beginning of the piece, then without skipping a beat went about demonstrating no understanding of religious faith whatsoever as he summed up Tebow's quote thus: \"He'll make it in this league\u2014for the Bible tells him so.\"\n\n\"Tebow is rightfully confident,\" Doyel went on. \"But his confidence isn't only in himself. It's in his God. Tebow has basically said, and I'm paraphrasing here, 'I'll be a starter in this league because God loves me that much.'\" Doyel wrote, also in his own words, that Tebow's faith seems to be that he \"will be rewarded with a starting job in the NFL.\"\n\nHoly overanalysis, Batman! First of all, it really would have been swell if Doyel had actually . . . you know . . . _asked Tebow_ what he meant by saying he was \"relying on faith.\" Apparently that didn't happen. Perhaps if he had asked, Tebow would have said that \"relying on faith\" doesn't mean everything works out the way you want it to; it's a belief that _no matter what comes_ , you'll be okay, because it's all part of God's plan. I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere.\n\nAll of Doyel's ignorance and spin and lack of due diligence I could forgive, but there's no forgiving what Doyel said in his last paragraph:\n\nTebow has been a great billboard for Christianity\u2014just as Muhammad Ali has been a great billboard for Islam, and Sandy Koufax a great billboard for Judaism\u2014but that doesn't mean he will be rewarded with a starting job in the NFL. Maybe deep inside his heart Tebow knows that, but from the outside it doesn't look that way. From the outside it looks like Tebow equates his love for God in heaven with tangible rewards here on earth. And that's more than wrong. It's blasphemy.\n\nReally? So now we have sports commentators defining _blasphemy_ for us, and typically they define it in a self-serving, double-standard way. Somehow it passes liberal sports reporters by that part of faith is _gratitude_ for the gifts God has given you. When a player scores a touchdown and raises his finger skyward, he's not saying, \"God thinks I'm great,\" but rather, \"Thanks, God, for giving me the talent to do this.\" But even supposing for a second that Doyel is right, that Tim Tebow \"equates his love for God in heaven with tangible rewards here on earth,\" how many athletes, and Christians at large for that matter, thank God for \"His blessings\" and think those blessings come, at least in part, from their love of God? When Florida State's Jameis Winston praised God after winning the BCS National Championship game, was he saying that his faith in God had helped deliver him the title? Maybe\u2014again, at least in part. Did Kurt Warner equate religion with success when on the podium with Terry Bradshaw after winning the 2009 NFC Championship game he said, \"There's one reason that I'm standing up on this stage today, and that's because of my Lord up above. . . . I've got to say thanks to Jesus!\"? Yet I don't recall anyone writing a column calling Winston or Warner blasphemous because they credited their success on the football field to God. But that's precisely what Gregg Doyel did to Tim Tebow because Tebow is more overtly a missionary for his faith and therefore, if you're part of the liberal sports media, a greater threat.\n\nEspecially disappointing about the Tebow saga is that when fellow Christian athletes had the chance to get Tebow's back and help defend their shared faith, they instead let him be fed to the lions. No one was more disappointing in this regard than Kurt Warner. Something funny happened to Kurt after he stopped playing and took a commentary spot for the NFL Network. When asked about Tebow and his brand of expressive faith, Warner told the _Washington Post_ that Tebow should \"put down the boldness in regards to the words, and keep living the way you're living.\" I love Kurt Warner, but that's a complete cop-out. Did Kurt Warner \"put down the boldness\" when he shouted, \"I've got to say thanks to Jesus!\" to Terry Bradshaw? In fact, you could make the argument that Kurt Warner was Tebow before Tebow, frequently making his faith a public part of his life.\n\nBut that was when Warner was a player in the league. Look at the transformation in Warner from player to broadcaster, from Mr. Thank-You-Jesus to Mr. Tone-It-Down Guy. Why? Because he knew, or was flat out told, that kind of talk would not be tolerated in the sports media. If Kurt Warner were gay, and Tim Tebow had been the first active, openly gay athlete in a major American sport, there's no way Kurt Warner would have felt compelled to tell Tebow to tone anything down. On the contrary, he would have demanded a one-hour exclusive interview, complete with footage of Tebow snogging his boyfriend, because homosexuality is embraced by the leftist American sports media. Christianity is not.\n\nI remember one day hearing an outbreak of laughter and choruses of \"Oh yeah!\" coming from the newsroom. Running at my age and girth from the copier to the newsroom takes a while, but the mood was still jubilant when I arrived. It didn't take me long to see why. Stephen Tulloch of the Detroit Lions had sacked Tebow and then mocked the famous on-the-field prayer gesture of the quarterback. One of our board-ops was beside himself with joy: \"Take that, motherfucker!\"\n\nIt was quite a scene. And this was a newsroom in Houston, Texas, where _nobody_ gave a rip about the Broncos _or the Lions_ , and yet they were thrilled, because the quarterback who committed the \"crime\" of prayer had gotten his. Nor did any condemnation or anger come from any of the media for what Tulloch had done. I'm not saying Tulloch is anti-Christian; I don't know what's in his heart. For all I know, he was only trying to mock the young celebrity player he had just sacked (I feel pretty strongly that he has that in his heart). But regardless of his intent, here was an NFL player mocking the deeply held religious faith of a fellow player on the field of play. Yet it was met with deafening silence by the overwhelming majority of the sports media\u2014well, except when they were shouting, \"Take that, motherfucker!\"\n\nBut as Todd Starnes of Fox News wrote shortly after this happened, \"Imagine for just a moment if Tebow had been a Muslim. Imagine Tulloch sacking the quarterback and then pulling out a prayer rug and offering a mocking prayer toward Mecca. Imagine that.\" Imagine indeed. Stephen Tulloch probably would have been suspended, and I don't just mean from football. I mean suspended in mid-air with a pack of press hyenas nipping at his dangling feet. _Sports Illustrated_ might even have run a cover with Stephen Tulloch's face on it asking if Tulloch was too hateful for the NFL, the same way the magazine once asked if Chuck Cecil was too violent for the NFL.\n\nPresident Obama might have weighed in. Actually, I guarantee President Obama would have weighed in. Because if a faith _other thanChristianity_ had been mocked, then the media would have seen fit to respond. But Christianity? Meh. No biggie. In fact, this point was made by none other than KISS front man Gene Simmons, who absolutely nailed the media for their hypocrisy on Tebow:\n\nHe's got a religious passion, as well he should, we're in America. He's proud to be a Christian, what's wrong with that? And yet, with sports media and pop culture media, they make fun of his religion. Really? In America? If he was wearing a burqa, they wouldn't dare say anything.\n\nBut if you're a Christian, you get to be picked on? What the hell?\n\nIt's a scary day when a guy best known for leather body suits and an impressive tongue length makes more sense than the American sports media. But that's precisely what's happened here. And yes, it's true that only Muslim _women_ wear burqas. But change that to a keffiyeh or a taj, both traditional headgear worn by Muslim men, and his point is still well made. The sports media are just as terrified of provoking Muslim outrage as the mainstream media are, and they would in no way be telling Tebow to \"tone it down\" if he prayed on a carpet instead of bended knee.\n\nThere's also\u2014and many people disagree with me about this (which must mean that I'm right), but I'm going to say it anyway\u2014a very strong racial component to the Tebow coverage. Many proud and openly Christian athletes have come through the NFL over the years, but up until recently the most high profile of these have been black. Reggie White, for one, was an _ordained minister_ (hence his nickname, the Minister of Defense). Yet Reggie White did not receive the same level of hatred as Tim Tebow, though he was outspoken about his faith, was vocal in the community, and preached at his church every single weekend.\n\nSure, people got upset in 1998 when he told the Wisconsin state legislature he thought marriage should be between a man and a woman. But that was late into his career, and he had said things before that didn't garner the same media backlash. Reggie White used to spend hours and hours every day reading and memorizing the Bible. He's also the same player who once told an opposing offensive lineman that \"Jesus was coming\" right before he fired out of his stance and planted the aforementioned tackle on his backside.\n\nCould you imagine if Tebow had shouted, \"Jesus is coming!\" before running a zone read or a quarterback sneak? Bob Costas would have had a stroke. White is also the one famous for singing a stirring rendition of \"Amazing Grace\" that every football fan over the age of thirty has no doubt seen at least eleventy times. Point being, Reggie White's faith was every bit as deeply held as Tebow's. White was also a bona fide first-ballot Hall of Famer and one of _the_ most dominant defensive players in NFL history. You would think his faith would be as scrutinized as Tebow's by an unfriendly media, but it wasn't.\n\nFormer NFL coach Tony Dungy, the first black head coach to win the Super Bowl, was appointed to serve on former president George W. Bush's Council on Service and Civic Participation, and then invited to join President Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (which he declined). Clearly he was known for his faith. In fact, at Super Bowl XLI, when Dungy's Colts faced Lovie Smith's Bears, Dungy had the nerve to ruin CBS's pre\u2013and post\u2013Super Bowl meme of talking up the first Super Bowl between two black head coaches by focusing instead on what he thought was the more significant trait he and Lovie Smith shared.\n\n\"This is a great time for both of us,\" Dungy said. \"I'm so happy Lovie got to the Super Bowl because he does things the right way. He's gotten there with a lot of class . . . no intimidation, just helping his guys play the best they can. That's the way I try to do it and I think it's great we've been able to show the world that not only can African-American coaches do it, _but Christian coaches_ [emphasis added] can do it in a way that, you know, we can still win.\"\n\nAfter the game, the _New York Times_ quickly moved in to course-correct Dungy and make sure you didn't get the wrong idea that God was the real story here:\n\nIn the midst of the rain and confetti falling on Dolphin Stadium on Sunday night, two men embraced near midfield and held on tight.\n\nThey were linked by football and friendship, faith and success. _But Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith also shared a broader distinction: being the first African-Americans to coach a team to the Super Bowl_ [emphasis added].\n\nSo being black is the \"broader distinction,\" huh? That's funny, because Tony Dungy seemed to go out of his way to make it clear that he thought it was the other way around. In Dungy's own words: \"I tell you what, I'm proud to be representing African-American coaches, to be the first African-American coach to win this. It means an awful lot to our country. But again, _more than anything_ , I said it before, Lovie Smith and I, not only the first two African-Americans, _but Christian coaches showing you can win doing it the Lord's way. We're more proud of that_ [emphasis added].\"\n\nNever let the facts get in the way of a good story.\n\nBut what's interesting too is how Reggie White's and Tony Dungy's Christian faith and controversial opinions never caused a media storm the way Tebow's faith did. Yes, Dungy took some media flack for saying that he wouldn't have drafted Michael Sam, but it was mild-mannered stuff compared with what Tebow has endured. No sports radio host has ever likened Dungy's family to Nazis.\n\nOf course, nothing stirred the ire of the liberal sports media more than the perfectly harmless Focus on the Family Super Bowl ad that Tebow and his mother Pam appeared in during the 2010 Super Bowl. For all the hype that commercial received, you would have thought the Tebows planned to slaughter the fatted calf right there on national television. Instead, it turned out to be a nice, even slightly goofy, commercial about the love a mother can have for her child (even if unborn) and what can become of her child if given a chance at life (like winning the Heisman Trophy). But even this innocuous thirty-second ode to life was too much to escape the scorn of CBS's Gregg Doyel: \"If you're a sports fan, and I am, that's the holiest day of the year. It's not a day to discuss abortion. For it, against it, I don't care what you are. On Super Sunday, I don't care what I am. Feb. 7 is simply not the day to have that discussion.\"\n\nOf course, abortion was not even mentioned in the ad. In fact, if you were like most Super Bowl viewers\u2014munching chips, drinking a beer, talking with friends\u2014the only thing you probably noticed was Tebow tackling his mom. This wasn't an ad you had to shield the kids from. It wasn't an ad that was loud and brash and trying to be more important than the game. It was an innocent thirty-second football-themed spot about a mother's love for her son. How flipping controversial is that?\n\nThe CBS/AP story, which quoted Doyel, didn't bother to get any quotations from sportswriters who _were not_ offended by the Tebow ad, but maybe that's because the other sportswriters they called were cowering under their desks in the fetal position, as they usually do when abortion comes up, and were \"unavailable for comment.\" It is interesting, however, that Doyel uses the word \"holiest\" to describe a sporting event. He's being deliberately provocative in calling a football game \"holy\"\u2014and life, family, and faith something less than that (the ad's tagline was \"Celebrate family, celebrate life\"). For abortion and against abortion, he says, \"I don't care what you are . . . I don't care what I am. Feb. 7 is simply not the day to have that discussion.\" So life and death, right and wrong cease to matter when the NFL decides to have a championship game?\n\nBut, in all honesty, Tebow had been marked for destruction long before his Super Bowl ad came out. The ad merely gave the sports media another opportunity to vent against Tebow and everything he stands for, and there are few issues that provide a starker dividing line than \"life.\" The liberal sports media are opposed to anything that restricts \"freedom\" below the waist. So Tebow's \"celebrating family, celebrating life\" in a thirty-second spot was far more offensive to them than one of those titillating GoDaddy ads that provide awkward moments for family viewing. Go figure.\n\nOver the years, though, there have been a few brave voices in the sports media who have \"called out their own\" on the Tim Tebow saga. On Showtime's _Inside the NFL_ , host James Brown and former Bengals wide receiver Cris Collinsworth discussed the treatment of Tebow, and Collinsworth didn't hold back: \"It's unbelievable, though, J. B., that one of the best kids\u2014just pure kids that's ever come into the NFL\u2014is hated because of his faith, because of his mission work, because of the fact that he wears it on his sleeve, because of the fact that he lives his life that he talks about.\"\n\nFormer 49ers offensive lineman, three-time Super Bowl champ, and current CBS sports analyst Randy Cross was equally direct on the subject: \"People, especially the media, root against him because of what he stands for. . . . My personal belief is there are people in the media, people in the stands, who are predisposed to see a guy like that fail. . . . Just because he's so public about the way he feels.\"\n\nJames Brown, in his conversation with Collinsworth on _Inside the NFL_ , opined, \"There's a number of guys who come into the league with a big marquee, fat paychecks, a lot of attention, and folks don't seem to hate them with the same intensity that they hate Tim Tebow.\" Collinsworth commented: \"I couldn't agree with you more. And it's kind of a sad commentary, that, you know, if someone is out carousing every night, the Joe Namath thing, or whatever, they're American heroes, and Tim Tebow, who's working in missions in Asia somewhere, is a guy that we're going to vilify.\" And that really sums it up, doesn't it?\n\nGiven all the criminal news on the sports pages, the NFL should be starving for some wholesome inspiration, and Tim Tebow should have been held up as a role model rather than vilified for\u2014well, for his goodness, for crying out loud.\n\nA kid growing up in the 1960s had to wait until he was in his thirties before he found out that Mickey Mantle was a drunk. A kid growing up in the 1920s had to wait until he was in his fifties before he learned Babe Ruth was a violent drinker, and a womanizer to boot. Thanks to twenty-four-hour cable sports television, radio, and print, our kids find out the dirty laundry on their heroes in real time. In such a polluted landscape, a good guy like Tim Tebow was an uncontaminated wellspring of hope for a lot of people\u2014a reminder that faith, hard work, and determination, values that coaches used to instill in their players, sometimes met their reward. Remember when we used to think that sports taught character? Tebow was a throwback to that. But the sports media are more comfortable with players who \"make it rain\" at the strip bars downtown.\n\nAnd if you didn't like Tebow's stance on abortion, fine; ignore it the same way I ignore the seven children, as of this writing, that Adrian Peterson has fathered out of wedlock when I cheer his brilliance on the football field. Ignore Tebow's tebowing the same way Eagles fans ignored Michael Vick's dog-torturing and mutilation when they cheered for him. People in Denver appeared to have no problem ignoring whatever they didn't like about \"Saint Timmy\" when he became the come-from-behind sensation who led his team to the playoffs. It was the members of the sports media who had the problem.\n\nA lot of people have become quite comfortable over the years cheering for their favorite athletes, even if they sometimes have to hold their noses when they do it. The point is that whatever the source of Tebow's goodness, what is indisputable is that he was good for the sports world, and he had a whole lot more in common with the average everyday fan than the multimillion-dollar players who live like gangsters. But that wasn't good enough for the sports media. No, they chewed him up and spat him out, because their values and your values are not the same.\nCHAPTER SIX\n\nCONCUSSED AND CONFUSED\n\nTwitter is truly an awesome thing. Right next to ketchup, the internet, the wheel, fire, and the Red Zone Channel, it is a solid member in good standing among the top ten greatest inventions of all time. Twitter is great for many reasons, but chiefly because it's nothing but raw, unfiltered opinion. People's honesty comes through in a way that it doesn't in more traditional formats. And it was while I was consuming this veritable cornucopia of unfiltered human thought one morning that I came across _USA Today_ college football writer Dan Wolken tweeting from the American Football Coaches Association convention in January 2014. The tweets seemed harmless enough at first: quotations from speakers discussing concussions in football and some of the misconceptions that have been formed. Then Wolken tweeted: \"This is a total pep rally for football.\"\n\nOkay, so what did Wolken expect at a coaches association meeting? A condemnation of football? Wolken's _pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance_ wasn't long in coming: \"Is football safety going to be like the climate change debate? Don't like the research? Find a new researcher.\"\n\n_Ta da!_ There you have it. Not only are all the coaches at the AFCA \"pep rallying\" for football, they've now assumed the role of global-warming/climate-change deniers! You see, in the minds of the leftist American sports media, football is \"the new smoking\" and is certain to bring about the next global apocalypse, largely because they're convinced that the link between playing football and long-term debilitating brain damage is \"settled science.\" Apparently you'd be better off taking a pull on a Marlboro Red than putting on pads and cleats, and \"science\" has already settled the issue.\n\nNow, this book is about the sports media, not about scientists, so I'm not going to get all _Myth Busters_ on you here. But there are plenty of areas in life where science is far from \"settled\"\u2014everything from diet advice, which changes daily, to the origin of the world (Big Bang or something else?), up to and including, as it turns out, global warming, where, for instance, scientists like Patrick Moore (an ecologist and early leader of Greenpeace), Patrick Michaels (a climatologist), and MIT professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen all have views starkly at odds with those of non-scientist and global-warming alarmist Al Gore. Didn't know that? Most sports reporters don't either.\n\nAnd yes, not all scientists agree that football is wiping out the male population of the United States. Yet in a twist of journalistic masochism on a scale heretofore unseen, the leftist American sports media have decided to swallow the football-is-the-new-smoking meme hook, line, and sinker. They've essentially joined the crusade against the pigskin, despite the fact that the American sports media need football for their survival.\n\nIn 2013, according to SportsMediaWatch.com, the top twenty-six most-watched television sporting events were NFL games. Sixteen of those twenty-six were in the regular season, not playoff or championship games. The NBA would have had to showcase LeBron wrestling a live cougar to get those kinds of ratings for a regular season game. In fact, none of the association's post-season games did well enough to crack the top twenty-six. Ditto for baseball, whose World Series ratings are slugging it out with the lowly NHL. Taking it a step further, forty-six of the top fifty most-watched television sporting events in 2013 were NFL games. ESPN is paying the NFL $15.2 billion through 2021. That's $1.9 billion a year, and that's just for _Monday Night Football_. That's just for the rights to broadcast seventeen regular season games a year.\n\nAnd then there's the money that Fox, CBS, and NBC pay the league to broadcast regular season games, playoff games, and the Super Bowl. My point here is not to further massage the already well-massaged ego of the National Football League. My point is that in the American sports world, the NFL is king and no one else is even close. In fact, you could argue that American sports media wouldn't even exist in their current position of power if it weren't for the NFL.\n\nYet, more than anything else, more than journalistic ethics (which entails getting both sides of a story), more than economic self-interest, more than serving the interests of its audience, the sports media are driven, lemming like, by political correctness, and political correctness dictates that football is bad for us. Even President Obama has weighed in, saying he wouldn't let his son, if he had one, play football. So the sports media are actually trying to kill their golden goose.\n\nThe only thing that could bring the NFL down, the thing that represents a clear and present danger to the future of the sport, is lawsuits. Specifically, concussion-related class-action lawsuits that could cost the league billions and result in Commissioner Roger Goodell's and other NFL leaders' being grilled on Capitol Hill and threatened with government oversight.\n\nAnd yet, though they eventually pulled out of the production, who do you think assisted PBS in putting together its _Frontline_ documentary _League of Denial_ , which charged that the NFL willfully and knowingly covered up the fact that players' brains were being turned to mush while Roger Goodell and his fat-cat owner buddies raked in the billions? Yes, that would be ESPN.\n\nNow, I'm not saying that football is a completely safe sport. Of course it's not. Anyone who believes that probably already suffers from some kind of brain damage. What I am saying is that to liberals in the sports media, the link between the NFL and concussions is \"settled\" by their ideology rather than science. Their real concern is social justice and making those fat-cat owners pay reparations to the downtrodden\u2014overwhelmingly minority\u2014players who serve them. Don't believe me? In January 2014, on a Sunday right before the NFL's divisional round playoff games, ESPN ran a promo for a segment featuring Malcolm Gladwell. For those of you who don't know, Malcolm Gladwell is the guy who penned _Outliers_ , which chronicled the lives and habits of successful people, and _Tipping Point_ , which sought to explain mysterious sociological changes that mark everyday life. He's also the guy who said that football is no different from dogfighting:\n\nIn what way is dog fighting any different from football on a certain level, right? I mean you take a young, vulnerable dog who was made vulnerable because of his allegiance to the owner and you ask him to engage in serious sustained physical combat with another dog under the control of another owner, right?\n\nWell, what's football? We take young boys, essentially, and we have them repeatedly, over the course of the season, smash each other in the head, with known neurological consequences.\n\nAnd why do they do that? Out of an allegiance to their owners and their coaches and a feeling they're participating in some grand American spectacle.\n\nStill think I went too far when I said football and concussions fit in the liberal worldview? Does it sound like Gladwell is making a scientific argument here, or a political one? This argument is dripping with political and racial innuendo. If the science is so self-explanatory, then why resort to crass dogfighting analogies? Answer: Because this is the racial and class-warfare lens through which Gladwell and the sports media see the world. Now, to be clear, \"young boys\" are not forced to play football the way dogs are forced to fight each other. Dogs are not given a choice to fight; they have to and are almost certainly killed if they don't. Nobody is \"forced\" to play football. If the players decide they don't want to play anymore, they are not killed for it. In fact, on occasion they leave while costing their \"owners\" huge sums, as running back Ricky Williams did to then\u2013Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga when he decided he'd rather study massage therapy in India than continue to play football. Even college players are permitted to transfer from school to school.\n\nAlso, unlike dogs in dogfights, football players do not play until the other guy dies. As bad as the Jaguars are, nobody's going to let the Broncos kill them (though I understand that may disappoint many Jaguars fans). Nor do players play the game out of an \"allegiance\" to the owner. Many NFL players don't even know who the owner is. They play out of an allegiance to a game they love and for the grand American paycheck they receive for playing it. That paycheck is as close as many of them ever get to the owner. Even in college, the kids play for the scholarships and a chance to showcase their talents to the NFL scouts who will be evaluating them, not out of some ridiculous notion of \"allegiance\" to schools that wouldn't have given these players a second look were it not for their sub-4.5 forties.\n\nBut all that aside, don't you think it odd that on its NFL divisional playoff morning show, ESPN chose to showcase a guy who likens football to the lowest form of animal cruelty? If you were producing a show on how to prepare Thanksgiving turkey, would you invite a PETA activist to host the pre-show? Such a thing flies in the face of any kind of reason or common sense. But apparently in the corridors of power at Bristol, Connecticut (ESPN headquarters), nothing is thought to be amiss at having a football \"denier\" on the pregame show. Why? Because he thinks like they do.\n\nNor was Gladwell's dogfighting tirade the only negative thing he has said about our nation's favorite game. According to _Forbes_ magazine:\n\nGladwell mentioned the case of University of Pennsylvania lineman Owen Thomas, who committed suicide in 2010. An autopsy showed early stages of CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) in Thomas' brain\u2014just as it was found in the brains of Dave Duerson and Junior Seau, professional players who also ended their lives in suicide. CTE is linked to depression and impulse control disorder, so it is probable\u2014though not certain\u2014that it contributed to Thomas' death, since he had no documented history of depression.\n\nNow, I'm not a scientist, but then again, neither is Malcolm Gladwell. However, a researcher at _Harvard Medical School_ named Grant Iverson is, and he studied the claim that NFL players are at increased risk of suicide and published his findings in the _British Journal of Sports Medicine_. As summarized by Daniel Flynn, author of the great book _The War on Football_ (a must read if you want the truth on concussions and football):\n\n\"Former NFL players were less likely to die by suicide than men in the general population,\" the doctor working in Harvard Medical School's Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation notes of a comprehensive 2012 study of NFL veterans by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). \"There were only nine reported case[s] of suicide between 1960 and 2007. Therefore, according to the only published epidemiological data until now, NFL players are at decreased risk, not increased risk, for completed suicide relative to the general population.\"\n\nMoreover, not only are former NFL players less likely to commit suicide than people in the general population, it's not even clear to Dr. Iverson that concussions and/or CTE are even the causes of the few suicides that occur. Again, Flynn explains it:\n\nFor instance, Iverson notes that suicide caused the deaths of just three of the thirty-three NFL players examined in a recent journal article authored by researchers affiliated with Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. Among the non-NFL brains examined, the BU group reported ten suicides among the 53 decedents, with the majority of those suicide cases not demonstrating any signs of CTE. Of the minority of brains in which researchers did discover CTE among that group of ten non-NFL suicide cases, three exhibited just stage 1 or 2 CTE. In other words, most of the CTE cases didn't kill themselves, most of the suicide cases didn't have the disease, and most of the few who did exhibited a less advanced form of it.\n\nOr, put differently, the few former NFL players who choose to take their own lives likely do it for the same reasons that non-NFL players do it : They're miserable. They've made mistakes. They've lost their families, their money, whatever the case may be. As Flynn notes in an article on Breitbart.com, most of these high-profile NFL suicides had non-football-related mitigating factors:\n\nBears defensive back Dave Duerson experienced home foreclosure, bankruptcy, and the failure of a marriage. Broncos offensive lineman Mike Current faced thirty years in prison for allegedly molesting three children. Chargers linebacker Junior Seau drank five or six nights a week, gambled excessively, relied on various prescription drugs to sleep, and faced the imminent loss of his San Diego steakhouse.\n\nDr. Iverson even attempted to give alternative explanations for why NFL players might be committing suicide. As noted by Flynn: \"Iverson cites a study of Swedish athletes that showed a link between past steroid use and suicide among power lifters, wrestlers, and other competitors. Might these same factors induce some NFL players to experience depression and commit suicide?\"\n\nNow, in a world with an unbiased, non-leftist-agenda-driven media, this information would be cause for serious pause. Even doubt. After all, any journalist honestly concerned with truth would look at the findings of a Harvard researcher like Dr. Iverson, coupled with the mitigating factors in all of these suicides, and think, \"Hmmm. Maybe we should sit this play out and wait for the scientists to make up their minds before we jump to any conclusions.\" But not in the world we live in. No, in our world, any facts that differ from the sports media's talking points only convince the sports media that they need to talk more loudly to make sure nobody ever hears the \"deniers.\" For example, Sally Jenkins, sports columnist for the _Washington Post_ , wasted no time lashing out at the NFL with unsubstantiated data. While making her case that, during labor negotiations, NFL players will get hurt no matter the outcome, Jenkins said, \"The suicide rate among ex-NFL players is six times the national average, according to GamesOver.org, a Web site dedicated to helping former players adjust to retirement.\" Now, we can give Sally a break here, because the NIOSH findings were a few months away from being published\u2014even though she could have proved that number wrong by doing her own, you know, job of investigating the claim before she printed it.\n\nBut what's Frank Bruni's excuse? In a _New York Times_ article released months after the NIOSH findings were published, he made the same exact claim that Jenkins did, saying, \"The suicide rate for men who have played in the N.F.L. is nearly six times the national average.\" The NIOSH report also did not sway the hysterical bleating of Don Banks over at _Sports Illustrated_ 's Monday Morning Quarterback. In an article titled \"What Price Football?,\" he chastised those who complain about NFL rule changes put in place for \"safety,\" saying such critics should \"worry less about new rules 'ruining' the game and more about the lives that have been ruined by the game, thanks to the effects of dementia, depression and suicides related to brain trauma. What we know about those issues today might wind up being just the tip of that scary iceberg.\"\n\nWhat's important to note here is that this article was written in October 2013, more than a full calendar year after the release of the NIOSH report, when it was apparent to anyone actually paying attention (so not necessarily sports reporters) that the suicide rate for NFL players was well below, not well above, the national average. What we knew was that there was no definitive link between football-incurred brain damage and suicide. And CTE was, at most, one of many factors causing suicides. But what we knew at the time and what Don Banks wrote are two entirely different things, because Banks didn't write that article as a journalist, he wrote it as a propagandist, desperate to keep an anti-football media agenda alive long after the facts started to take it apart. Ditto Frank Bruni. Which begs an interesting question: If covering football is your job, but you view football as a life-destroying, soul-sucking contagion, then why would you continue doing it? Why would you continue to sit there, day in and day out, producing articles for something called the Monday Morning Quarterback if all you thought the NFL was doing was producing future invalids, vegetables, and suicide cases?\n\nI think most people would walk away from that. I think most people would find some other area to ply their trade, as opposed to covering a beat of death and disability from the NFL. But they don't. In fact, I'm unaware of any journalist who has laid down his pen, or dropped his microphone, and walked away in disgust over the \"blood sport\" spectacle he's being forced to comment on, and there are reasons for that. Yes, many of these commentators have made themselves a lot of money covering sports, which of course adds another level of hypocrisy to their whining about the league most directly responsible for their job security and affluence. But it goes deeper than that, much deeper. The real reason they're not walking away is because they have resolved to change the game from within, not because they're interested in \"saving\" NFL players. They're doing it to save you from yourself.\n\nBob Ryan of the _Boston Globe_ let that proverbial cat out of the bag in his article titled \"Football a Game of Inherent Conflict.\" Who is Bob Ryan? Bob Ryan is the elder statesman of the sports media, not just in Boston, but nationally as well. That's not to say he's old and washed up\u2014I've interviewed Bob many times, and he's as smart as anybody, if not smarter. He's also as respected as anybody, which means when he talks people listen, and normally he's not just speaking for himself. Bob Ryan is the Walter Cronkite of the sports media in a lot of ways: he is their voice and their soul. In his article, Ryan laid out the Left's \"guilt pangs\" at covering a sport that he refers to as \"almost barbaric,\" and also how the sport may be stopped and done away with altogether. Referring to players and coaches, he writes: \"Football has an enormous appeal to many people who are borderline psychopaths in a manner that no other sport\u2014and this includes the very virile sport of hockey\u2014does not.\"\n\nWhat's funny about this is that Bob Ryan works at ESPN in Bristol, Connecticut, which employs dozens of former NFL players and coaches, none of whom he'd probably want to call a borderline psychopath, at least not face-to-face. His point is that because football is so violent, it draws in those of \"questionable moral character and mental make-up.\" It's not a game that is suitable for \"normal\" people. He goes on:\n\nThe simple truth is that football can never be made safe. Even if the essential \"kill\" mentality were changed, football can never be made safe. And it has never been more dangerous than it is now, thanks to a combination of there being larger, quicker, more lethal people delivering the blows and the lingering mentality brought to the game by coaches and players who cannot or will not change.\n\nSo, even with all of our scientists and all of our technology, our efforts to protect the \"psychopaths\" from damaging their precious brains will come to naught, because it's impossible for the game to be made safe. Which, of course, leaves us with the question: Whatever are we to do about this \"almost barbaric\" scourge that is ruining so many lives? Bob Ryan provides the answer:\n\nThe mothers of America could shut down football today.\n\nI'm not saying they're going to, but they could. The mothers of America could band together and say, \"Uh-uh, no way. My boy's not playing football. And that's all there is to it.\". . . .\n\nI come to you as an enabler, and I suspect there are many more out there like me. We are essentially troubled by the casual acceptance our society has of a sport that really and truly maims people. That football is America's current sport of choice reflects poorly on us as a people. But we enablers also have lived with this sport as long as we can remember and we understand it and appreciate its history. We enjoy a good game. And we know nothing we say or do will have an effect on the product. I'm going to guess that Super Bowl XLVIII will take place on Feb. 2, 2014. But Super Bowl LXXIV? Mothers of America, it's up to you.\n\nAnd there you have it. Here is the dean of the American sports media not only empowering the \"mothers of America\" by reminding them of the power they hold in not allowing their sons to play football, but essentially pleading with them to shut down football once and for all. He's saying, basically, \"Hey, I can't stop this thing. I can't derail this crazy train. But you can! So unless you want your kids to spend the rest of their lives as vegetables, you better pull them from Pop Warner and get them going on something else. Or you'll have no one to blame except yourself.\" And you know what? It's working. According to statistics provided by Pop Warner football to ESPN's _Outside the Lines_ :\n\nPop Warner lost 23,612 players, thought to be the largest two-year decline since the organization began keeping statistics decades ago. Consistent annual growth led to a record 248,899 players participating in Pop Warner in 2010; that figure fell to 225,287 by the 2012 season. Pop Warner officials said they believe several factors played a role in the decline, including the trend of youngsters focusing on one sport. But the organization's chief medical officer, Dr. Julian Bailes, cited concerns about head injuries as \"the No. 1 cause.\"\n\nClearly the \"mothers of America\" are listening and have heard Bob Ryan's clarion call, which undercuts his very point that he and the liberal sports media are powerless to derail the NFL Express. Where, after all, did the 23,612 \"mothers of America\" who pulled their boys out of Pop Warner between 2010 and 2012 get their information? Where did they hear that concussions and CTE were prime factors in brain damage, suicide, twerking, global warming, and the shooting of J. R.? They heard it from Bob Ryan and his ilk, though they conveniently never heard the mounting evidence that completely contradicted these claims, showing that NFL suicides were lower than the national average and that CTE alone did not conclusively cause any of said suicides. That bit of deafening silence was also brought to you by Bob Ryan and his fellow travelers.\n\nAnd why? Because Bob Ryan and the liberal sports media believe football \"reflects poorly on us as a people.\" Their real charge against football is less about the people who play it and more about the people who watch it. If it takes a bunch of \"borderline psychopaths\" to play football, well then it must take _a nation_ full of borderline, if not actual, psychopaths to turn it into the wealthiest sport in the country. Bob Ryan is saying it's not about him, or his fellow sports writers, it's about you. The fact that football is this country's \"sport of choice\" represents an inherent defect in you, me, and the country as a whole. The liberal sports media, like liberals in general, think America is fundamentally flawed, which is why traditional, conservative, Christian America is always in need of being reformed by progressives. Football, to them, can seem the ultimate expression of the unreformed American spirit\u2014chauvinistic, competitive, and even too Christian, as football is so big in religious states like Texas and is more given to midfield prayers than any other sport.\n\nThis, in the minds of Bob Ryan and the leftist American sports media, is why football must go. And make no mistake about it: Bob Ryan knows that he's speaking on behalf of the sports media when he says these things. Pay careful attention to his words, \"I suspect there are many more out there like me.\" Someone like Bob Ryan doesn't write that unless he knows _for a fact_ that there are many more sports reporters and commentators out there who think the way he does. And then the less subtle, \" _We_ [emphasis added] are essentially troubled by the casual acceptance our society has of a sport that really and truly maims people.\" That's the voice of the liberal sports media.\n\nHow did we get to this point? I mean, for all of our lives, most of us \"normal\" people have been taught that football was America's game because it embodied everything that was great about America: the toughness, the grit, the will to succeed and win, the determination to see something through despite hardships and setbacks, the ability to work together as a team with people who don't look like you and strive toward a common goal. Isn't that, among other things, what makes America great? Isn't that what foreign people mean when they talk about that great, quintessentially American character trait, the \"can-do spirit\" that refuses to be denied? Football is the anvil upon which that steely American resolve has been forged. It's in our blood because it's part and parcel of who we are. Yet to the sports media, who should be, you might think, the most knowledgeable and passionate supporters of the game, it's a pox. It's a scourge that represents what's wrong with America, and therein lies the problem.\n\nIt's not just that the sports media get it wrong sometimes. That wouldn't be anywhere near as big of a problem, and it could be easily forgiven. No, it's that _their values and worldview_ are completely different from those of most other people in the country. Most people see football as a sport that gives opportunities to poor kids who would otherwise not have them; the media see it as a tool for rich white owners to exploit the bodies and livelihoods of poor black kids to earn a buck. Most people understand that youth football is potentially dangerous, but they also understand, as Daniel Flynn points out in _The War on Football_ , that football is actually less dangerous than skateboarding, bicycling, or skiing. Most of the media see it as a concussion factory, where kids are berated by coaches into trying to maim each other, just as in Malcolm Gladwell's dogfighting analogy. That's the worldview of the intelligentsia in the American sports media, and they've decided, in all their infinite wisdom, acting as the elitists that they are, to use their microphones, cameras, and keyboards to correct what they believe to be a mental defect in _our_ minds. Lucky us, right? How thoughtful of them. The reality, of course, is something altogether different. The reality, as the NIOSH study proved, is that NFL players do not die faster than \"normal\" people. From _USA Today_ : \"A records-based study of retired [NFL] players conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) concludes that they have a much lower death rate than men in the general population, contrasting the notion that football players don't live as long.\"\n\nNor do they suffer disproportionately from heart disease: \"Yet the results also revealed that nearly 38% of deaths from the pool of retirees\u2014who played at least five seasons between 1959 and 1988\u2014were linked to heart disease. Even so, NIOSH concluded in the study that the risk of dying of heart disease for the retirees as an overall group is lower than that for the general population.\"\n\nAs discussed earlier, through evidence provided by NIOSH and others, there is no evidence that NFL players commit suicide at elevated levels and no evidence that CTE is a direct cause of suicide. In fact, a study that went almost completely _unreported_ by our \"truth-seekers\" in the press showed that there's no definitive link between contact sports and CTE at all. Dr. Stella Karantzoulis and Dr. Christopher Randolph of the Loyola University Medical Center\u2014in other words, people who have forgotten more about the human brain than Malcolm Gladwell will ever know\u2014concluded that there was no link between football and increased risk of CTE: \"Karantzoulis and Randolph examined symptoms of retired NFL players who had mild cognitive impairment and said that symptoms seen in the retired players were virtually the same as those observed in non-athletes. They write that these findings cast doubt on the notion that CTE is a novel condition unique to athletes who have experienced concussions.\"\n\nIn their conclusion they said: \"One cannot deny that boxing and other contact sports can potentially result in some type of injury to the brain. There currently are no carefully controlled data, however, to indicate a definitive association between sport-related concussion and increased risk for late-life cognitive and neuropsychiatric impairment of any form.\"\n\nI should have become aware of this study from Bob Ryan. I should have found out about it from Don Banks on the Monday Morning Quarterback. I should have heard about it from Malcolm Gladwell during one of his inexplicable appearances on ESPN.\n\nBut I didn't. Instead, I only found it while researching for this book. If the Loyola University study had shown that former NFL players were ten times more likely to die, commit suicide, grow a third nipple, or vote Republican, it's all I or any of us would have heard about for months. The sports media for the most part ignored the study because it contradicted their narrative. It flew in the face of their agenda to prove that football is a symptom of the disease that is American culture. Dan Wolken was right about one thing: the football-safety debate is indeed becoming like the climate-change debate, and the reports that show football _isn't_ killing people are an inconvenient truth.\nCHAPTER SEVEN\n\nBLACKLISTING LIMBAUGH\n\nAnyone's first time on air is nerve-racking, especially in radio. It's not like television, where you can blame the hair guy for making you look bad, or the graphics guy for having the wrong backdrop behind you. With all due respect to my brethren and sistren on the television side, I think radio is better. Simply put, it's all on you. If you fail, it's all you. If you succeed . . . it's all you as well. But no matter your venue, the first time on air is hard, especially when you know you're going to be diving into something controversial. It is one thing to say cutting, provocative, and insightful things to your steering wheel and quite another to say them into a working microphone with real people listening, people who might be genuinely angered by what you say.\n\nAnd so it was, in October 2009, in the eye of the sharknado of controversy swirling around Rush Limbaugh's effort to purchase a share of the St. Louis Rams, that I was given my first shot at sports talk radio. The cohost I auditioned with that day, for reasons that are known only to him, had no interest in talking about Rush and told me not to bring it up. But there was a two- to three-minute gap in the show where he had to leave to do an update on one of our sister stations, and I knew that was going to be my chance. I was angry, and I wanted people to know why. And as soon as my cohost left, I let fly. I let fly about how hypocritical the players, specifically the black players, were for their condemnation of Limbaugh. Several black players had recently said they would not play for Limbaugh, citing quotations attributed to Limbaugh, some out of context, others completely fabricated, that they found to be \"insensitive\" and \"disrespectful.\"\n\nThough, interestingly, none of these players had ever said they wouldn't play alongside Michael Vick, who brutally maimed, tortured, and killed hundreds of dogs. None of these players had spoken harshly of Ray Lewis, who, although never proved guilty of murder, had certainly been hip-deep in a situation that resulted in the stabbing deaths of two young black males. Nor had anybody been this vocal about a player like Leonard Little, who through his own drunken negligence had killed an innocent mother of three with his car.\n\nI then spoke of how different (read: better) a world we might live in if the black players angry at Rush Limbaugh saved their anger for the players who create the \"thug\" stereotype of black athletes in America. Maybe if the players made a point of disavowing the thugs, \"thug life\" wouldn't seem as cool as it does to too many kids.\n\nWithin seconds of that rant, all five phone lines lit up with callers, most of whom questioned my ancestry, and one guy announced that he would never listen to our station ever again. Soon after, I found out that I got the job. That only accelerated the flow of hate on message boards and chat rooms from other media people in Houston who often tried to hide their real identities and went off at length about how I should never be allowed near another microphone again, and how there was no place in sports radio for someone as \"backward\" as me. But the backlash wasn't really about me, it was about boogeymen: that something or someone that gets under your skin and terrorizes you and seems to exist only to freak you out. To me, that thing is an ocelot . . . and Russell Brand. But to the liberal sports media, it's Rush Limbaugh. He is their boogeyman: the guy who really sticks in their craw; a weird foreign substance that when introduced into their perfectly manicured liberal ecosystem causes a collapse of apocalyptic proportions. Which is why if you really want to understand the maelstrom of liberal media hissy-fitting that sprung up in the fall of 2009 when Limbaugh bid to become a part-owner of an NFL franchise, you really have to go back to the fall of 2003.\n\nThere actually was a time, however short-lived, when Limbaugh was allowed to circulate in the sports media gene pool. In 2003, Limbaugh was given a role on ESPN's pregame show, _Sunday NFL Countdown_. During the week-three edition of the show, Rush, along with panelists Chris Berman, Steve Young, Michael Irvin, and Tom Jackson, delved into the recent woes of Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb. Not only had McNabb stunk it up in the NFC championship game the year before, but he had been a dumpster fire during the first two weeks of the regular season, and the panel was discussing the possible reasons why. It was then that Limbaugh did what anybody who had ever listened to Limbaugh could have told you he was going to do. And it was glorious: \"Sorry to say this, I don't think he's been that good from the get-go,\" Limbaugh said. \"I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team.\"\n\nNow, these comments were entirely true and accurate on all counts, which presented the sports media with a tremendous problem; namely, _Limbaugh's comments were entirely true and accurate on all counts_. You see, in a normal world, with an unbiased media interested in truth, only lies and inaccuracies would pose a threat. But, in our world, with a leftist, agenda-driven, race-mongering flash mob running the show, it is truth and accuracy that pose the threat, specifically, when the charges are levied at them.\n\nA little background here. Despite being featured in dozens of one-on-one interviews, being tapped for NFL promotional pieces and commercials, landing major endorsement deals, and getting more face time on ESPN than most other athletes, Donovan McNabb was never among the five best quarterbacks in the league at any point in his career. In the 2003 season, the year that Limbaugh made these comments, McNabb was fourteenth in passing yards, seventeenth in touchdowns, and nineteenth in completion percentage out of thirty-two NFL quarterbacks. Despite his playing in perhaps the most offense-friendly, pass-happy era in league history, McNabb never had a four-thousand-yard season, something that has come to be expected from elite NFL quarterbacks.\n\nIn other words, if you look up \"Average NFL Quarterback\" in the dictionary, there would be a huge, smiling picture of Donovan McNabb staring right back at you. If Donovan McNabb had been a white quarterback with those numbers, he never would have been featured on ESPN so regularly. That is, unless he had used the N-word or had come out as gay, in which case he would have been the _only_ person on ESPN for about four months. But you line up Donovan McNabb's production behind that of any quarterback in the league, white or black, and he would not have stood out.\n\nIn fact, it's debatable that McNabb was even the best _black_ quarterback in the NFL in 2003. Daunte Culpepper, the late Steve McNair, and even Aaron Brooks all had better numbers than he did. So why did the sports media latch onto McNabb? Probably because the bulk of the American sports media are based in and around New York, and Donovan McNabb played just down the road, in Philly. After all, going to Tennessee to talk to Steve McNair or going to Louisiana to talk to Aaron Brooks would require our highly sophisticated and nuanced media elite to leave their Northeastern comfort zone and mingle with the commoners.\n\nLimbaugh nailed two incredibly key points: (A) Donovan McNabb was never that good to begin with, and the fact that his team had advanced to the playoffs only reinforced Limbaugh's point that the defense carried the team; and (B) it was the sports media who had turned McNabb into something he was not. So how did the sports media deal with the issue of being publicly and accurately called out this way? Their position was completely indefensible; anyone can look up McNabb's numbers, compare them with the Eagles' success, and see that Limbaugh was right.\n\nThe sports media, instead of conceding that they had made way too much of McNabb, turned Limbaugh's comments into an attack on a _black quarterback_. Within forty-eight hours, the virtual entirety of the sports world, plus the political race machine, had converged on Limbaugh. Democratic presidential candidates Wesley Clark and Howard Dean were both reported as saying Limbaugh should be fired. Clark, a retired army general, called the remarks \"hateful and ignorant speech.\" The NAACP condemned Limbaugh's remarks, calling them \"bigoted and ignorant,\" and called for the network to fire Limbaugh or at least provide an opposing point of view on the show. \"It is appalling that ESPN has to go to this extent to try to increase viewership,\" then\u2013NAACP president Kweisi Mfume said in a statement. The National Association of Black Journalists also called for ESPN to \"separate itself\" from Limbaugh. \"ESPN's credibility as a journalism entity is at stake,\" NABJ president Herbert Lowe said in a news release. \"It needs to send a clear signal that the subjects of race and equal opportunity are taken seriously at its news outlets.\"\n\nThe NFL disclaimed any responsibility for Limbaugh's remarks. \"ESPN knew what it was getting when they hired Rush Limbaugh,\" league vice president Joe Browne said. \"ESPN selects its on-air talent, not the NFL.\" Which brings up a good point: Why did ESPN hire Rush Limbaugh? Clearly they knew who he was. They knew his feelings on the media and the fact that he would not hold back. Sure, they wanted the ratings bump Limbaugh would give them ( _Sunday NFL Countdown_ ratings went up 10 percent with Limbaugh on the show), but they had to know they couldn't just get the milk without buying the cow. In any event, it didn't end there. In an article titled \"In No Rush to Forget,\" _New York Daily News_ sports writer Ralph Vacchiano interviewed McNabb's father about what impact Limbaugh's comments had on him. Vacchiano's lead sentence was high comedy: \"When Sam McNabb heard the words coming from Rush Limbaugh's mouth\u2014the hateful, hurtful words about his son Donovan\u2014he flashed back to another devastating night in the early 1980s.\"\n\nHateful? Hurtful? Limbaugh's comments weren't about \"his son Donovan\"\u2014they were about agenda-driven reporters like Ralph Vacchiano who hyped an average black quarterback into something that he wasn't. If anything is hateful or hurtful, it's that. But this is a perfect example of how the sports media convinced the public that Limbaugh had been criticizing black QBs instead of criticizing the sports media for overhyping black QBs.\n\nIn his next bit, Vacchiano told how McNabb's father likened Limbaugh's comments to an evening in the 1980s when his family's new home, purchased in a white neighborhood, was broken into and damaged by racist vandals. Really? Saying a black quarterback isn't very good is akin to vandals breaking into your home?\n\nIn a shocking twist, sports writer Allen Barra, writing in the liberal online magazine Slate, had the gumption to announce \"Rush Limbaugh Was Right.\" His story appeared a week after Rush resigned from ESPN. Barra wrote:\n\nLimbaugh is being excoriated for making race an issue in the NFL. This is hypocrisy. I don't know of a football writer who didn't regard the dearth of black NFL quarterbacks as one of the most important issues in the late '80s and early '90s.\n\nSo far, no black quarterback has been able to dominate a league in which the majority of the players are black. To pretend that many of us didn't want McNabb to be the best quarterback in the NFL because he's black is absurd. To say that we shouldn't root for a quarterback to win because he's black is every bit as nonsensical as to say that we shouldn't have rooted for Jackie Robinson to succeed because he was black. . . .\n\nConsequently, it is equally absurd to say that the sports media haven't overrated Donovan McNabb because he's black. I'm sorry to have to say it; he is the quarterback for a team I root for. Instead of calling him overrated, I wish I could be admiring his Super Bowl rings. But the truth is that I and a great many other sportswriters have chosen for the past few years to see McNabb as a better player than he has been because we _want_ him to be.\n\nRush Limbaugh didn't say Donovan McNabb was a bad quarterback because he is black. He said that the media have overrated McNabb because he is black, and Limbaugh is right.\n\nBut as noble as the effort was, Allen Barra was trying to plug the Hoover Dam with a toothpick. As asinine as the backlash against Limbaugh was, it had already worked. In fact, it worked well before the Vacchiano or Barra articles came out. Limbaugh stepped down from his role on _Sunday NFL Countdown_ three days after making his comments about McNabb. Sports media, the mainstream media, Democrat political leaders, and the NAACP had worked in perfect synchronicity to force Limbaugh out.\n\nI can already hear it: \"But, Dylan! Are you saying that the sports media coordinated with Democrat politicians and the NAACP to bring down Limbaugh?!\" No, what I'm saying is that no coordination was necessary, because they're all the same people and they all look at the world in the same way. They're all liberals, and together they succeeded in driving Limbaugh from their jealously guarded (and toxic) ecosystem . . . at least for the moment. Limbaugh's next attempt at \"the fulfillment of a dream,\" to be involved in the sports world, came six years after McNabb-gate, when he tried to become part-owner of the St. Louis Rams.\n\nIn early October 2009, Limbaugh announced on his radio show that he and St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts had put together a bid to buy the St. Louis Rams. Mortified that the cunning (and rich) Limbaugh might circumvent their ecosystem's well-protected firewalls and buy his way into the NFL, the racial flash mob kicked into high gear. ESPN's Mike Wilbon even went on CNN's _Reliable Sources_ with Howard Kurtz to rail against the conservative would-be owner. With the flash mob fully behind him, \"Magic Mike\" took center stage: \"I don't know whether Rush Limbaugh is a straight-up bigot or he simply plays one on TV and radio, but he is universally reviled by black people in this country.\"\n\nNot only was Wilbon deluded in naming himself the spokesman for all black people, but he was majorly exaggerating. It's debatable whether Limbaugh was even \"universally reviled\" among black sportscasters. Stephen A. Smith (who is black) said in an interview on CNN that black players who said they wouldn't play for Limbaugh were \"walking hypocrites.\" He even said Rush's comments about McNabb in 2003 should have no bearing on his becoming an owner. As Smith said, \"If he has the money, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.\"\n\nThe fact that Kurtz didn't challenge Wilbon's ludicrous exaggeration\u2014given that Smith had made his comments on CNN less than a full week before Wilbon's claim that Limbaugh was \"universally reviled\"\u2014was unfortunate. However, Kurtz did counter Wilbon on one important point; he just didn't go far enough. During a previous rant on _Pardon the Interruption_ , Wilbon claimed that Rush had said incredibly hurtful and racist things on his show. Among them, that the NFL \"too often looks like a game between the Crips and the Bloods without any weapons\" and that \"slavery . . . had its merits.\"\n\nKurtz called out Wilbon for attributing the slavery quotation to Limbaugh despite having no proof of when he supposedly said it. In fact, the source for this alleged quotation was a radical sociology professor from Georgetown University named Michael Eric Dyson, whom Limbaugh himself had called out on his radio show in September 2009: \"There's even a guy that was on MSNBC, I'm not going to play the sound bite for you. I am not going to dignify this by playing it, but it was this morning on MSNBC. This guy, _Michael Eric Dyson, claims that I have written that slavery was a good thing_ [emphasis added]. Even Scarborough said, 'What are you talking about?' 'Oh, yeah, you can read it, you can read it.' I have never said slavery was a good thing!\"\n\nJust how radical is Dyson? Here's what he had to say about Mumia Abu-Jamal, who murdered a Philadelphia police officer in 1981:\n\nSo for me, then, the Mumia Abu-Jamal case is about the person who is able to articulate the interests of minority people not only in terms of color, but in terms of ideology. Because we know what the real deal here is also about. It is about the repression of left-wing, progressive, insightful cultural criticism and political and moral critique aimed at the dominant hegemonic processes of American capitalism and the American state as evidenced in its racist, imperialist and now we might add homophobic and certainly its patriarchal practices.\n\nSo Abu-Jamal articulated the \"interests of minority people\" by killing a white cop? Is this the kind of critical insight it takes to be a professor at Georgetown nowadays? Dyson also waxed silly when asked what he thought Tupac would have to say about 9/11:\n\nI think that Tupac would say, \"What business do we have being in Arab nations when the tentacles of colonialism and capitalism suck the lifeblood of native or indigenous people?\" . . . He would have had questions about who really was the thug. He would have said that America has ignored the vicious consequences of its imperialistic practices across the world. America ignores how millions of people suffer on a daily basis throughout the world, except in isolated spots that involve so-called national interests. Thirdly, that America has forfeited its duty as global policeman, by virtue of its own mistreatment of black people.\n\nGreat! So Michael Wilbon's go-to source for cutting racial and sociological commentary and non-researched pull quotes is a Marxist, racist, anti-American hack at Georgetown University. Wilbon wasn't the only one who cited Dyson's made-up Rush quotation either; _Detroit Free Press_ sportswriter Drew Sharp took the Dyson-generated lie and used it in an article in which he tried to stop Limbaugh's bid to become an NFL owner: \"Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Farrior agreed Sunday that nobody with Limbaugh's litany of incendiary racial comments\u2014Limbaugh once said on his nationally syndicated radio show that slavery 'had its merits'\u2014deserves the privilege of owning an NFL franchise.\"\n\nThe bogus quotation, by this point, had also made it onto Rush's _Wikipedia_ page. So Sharp either heard this directly from Dyson, from Wilbon, or from related misguided commentary, or he latched onto a news source that, as Debbie Schlussel once put it, is \"less reliable than the Onion.\" What does it say when Drew Sharp and Michael Wilbon use as their source material a quack professor who is to the left of Che Guevara and then never bother to check the quotation\u2014you know, fact-checking? Well, really it tells you just about everything. Yes, the liberal mainstream media are biased in sometimes crazy ways, but so are sports media.\n\nThe players, who were as much tools of the media as anyone, were beyond ridiculous in the Limbaugh saga as well. As Mathias Kiwanuka of the New York Giants put it:\n\nI don't want anything to do with a team that he has any part of. He can do whatever he wants, it is a free country. But if it goes through, I can tell you where I am not going to play. I am not going to draw a conclusion from a person off of one comment, but when it is time after time after time and there's a consistent pattern of disrespect and just a complete misunderstanding of an entire culture that I am a part of, I can't respect him as a man. . . . It is just an opinion show that should be only be taken for shock value. I liken it to _South Park_ when I am listening to him.\n\nIf I had a dollar for every minute that Mathias Kiwanuka listened to Rush Limbaugh, I bet I'd be no richer. Kiwanuka and other players were spun by the media and they stayed spun, convinced that Rush was a hater, when the real hater was the liberal sports media that hate Rush.\n\nJets linebacker Bart Scott said, \"It's an oxymoron that he criticized Donovan McNabb. A lot of us took it as more of a racial-type thing. I can only imagine how his players would feel. I know I wouldn't want to play for him. He's a jerk. He's an \u2014. What he said [about McNabb] was inappropriate and insensitive, totally off-base. He could offer me whatever he wanted, I wouldn't play for him. . . . I wouldn't play for Rush Limbaugh. My principles are greater and I can't be bought.\"\n\nAfter looking up the definition of oxymoron so he can actually use it correctly next time, Scott should have done a little research into what Rush actually said instead of what the media had told him he said. Beyond that, whatever Scott thinks, Stephen A. Smith absolutely nailed it when he noted that players go where the money is, and almost all allegedly anti-Rush players would probably be happy hypocrites if Rush owned a team and offered them a bigger paycheck to play on it.\n\nBut it's not misguided players who are the issue: it's the sports media and a little something called objective consistency. I'm too cynical and scarred by my experiences in journalism to expect fairness or honesty. I mean, you're getting that in this book. But this book is about _what's wrong_ with the sports media, not about what's right. So maybe one day we can strive for and reach consistency. Here would have been a great place to start. In June 2012 it was announced that Bill Maher, the radical, left-wing, religion-baiting host of _Real Time with Bill Maher_ on HBO, had bought a minority stake in the New York Mets. Except I was the one who included \"radical, left-wing, religion-baiting host,\" because nowhere in any of the very few articles that reported this transaction did the sports media accurately portray who Maher is. In the Huffington Post Sports article about the purchase, Maher is referred to as a \"stand-up comic, and a political satirist,\" which makes him sound about as threatening as a harmless circus clown.\n\nThe ESPN.com article announcing the ownership venture referred to Maher as a \"political commentator.\" The ESPN.com article announcing Limbaugh's attempt to buy the Rams referred to him as a \"conservative,\" and the \"voice of the Republican Party.\" One of these things is not like the other. Now, for those of you not in the know, Bill Maher is every bit as liberal as Rush Limbaugh is conservative, except he's about eleventy times more vulgar, crass, and offensive than Limbaugh could ever be on his worst day. When Rush Limbaugh announced his intent to become a minority owner of the St. Louis Rams, _New York Times_ sports columnist George Vecsey did everything short of calling Limbaugh an outright racist, referring to him as \"a virulent exhibitionist\" who uses racist \"code words\" to communicate with his \"constituency\" and has a \"visceral\" hatred of President Obama.\n\nBut when the _Times_ reported on Maher's acquisition of a minority share of the Mets, Maher was described as \"the most celebrated person\u2014at least the only one with a TV show\u2014known to have become a new partner in the team with the Wilpon family. . . .\" Hmmm. That's quite a change from visceral, racist-code-word guy. But they went even further than that. Attempting to insulate Maher from any criticism over the tons of crazy and insulting things he has said over the years, the _Times_ went on to describe Maher as a person whose \"libertarianism and atheistic views are elements of his comedy.\" You see? He doesn't really mean it! Because if you say horrible and offensive things on TV or on stage at a comedy joint, it doesn't really count! Somewhere Michael Richards is shedding a tear. What are some of the awful things said by Maher over the years? In October 2007, while on his previous show _Politically Incorrect_ , Maher likened retarded children to dogs: \"But I've often said that if I had\u2014I have two dogs\u2014if I had two retarded children, I'd be a hero. And yet the dogs, which are pretty much the same thing. What? They're sweet. They're loving. They're kind, but they don't mentally advance at all. . . .Dogs are like retarded children.\"\n\nAs if that weren't bad enough, one of his guests said that she had a nine-year-old nephew who was retarded and that she never thought of him as a dog. Maher, instead of taking this golden opportunity to remove his head from his ass, turned to the woman who had never looked at her nephew as being a canine before and said, \"Maybe you should.\"\n\nThe Catholic League has even compiled an annotated list, ranging from 1998 to the middle of 2014, of anti-Catholic venom from Maher, not that anyone in sports media cares about that. Race, though, is something they do care about, and even here Maher gets a free pass, as all liberals do.\n\nIn May 2010, while talking about the BP oil spill, Maher gave us insight into what he thinks a real black man is, and what a real black president should be like: \"I thought when we elected a black president, we were going to get a black president. You know, this [BP oil spill] is where I want a real black president. I want him in a meeting with the BP CEOs, you know, where he lifts up his shirt so you can see the gun in his pants. That's . . . [in black man voice] 'We've got a motherfucking problem here?'\u2014and shoot somebody in the foot.\"\n\nYeah, that's way better than saying you don't think Donovan McNabb is a very good quarterback. Rush Limbaugh merely said a black guy wasn't a very good quarterback, not because he was black, but based on his playing record. He blamed _the media_ for having a racial angle, which was patently obvious to everybody, and suddenly he is full of \"visceral\" hatred and is a \"virulent exhibitionist.\" Bill Maher stereotypes black men as gangster thugs and that's okay, because after all Maher is just a \"satirist\" who blends atheism and libertarianism in with his comedy and is the \"most celebrated person\" to have become a partner with the Wilpon family. How quaint.\n\nThere are dozens of other examples of Maher's racial insensitivity, but I think you get the picture. I have no issue with Bill Maher's buying a share of a baseball team. I find the words he chooses to say completely vile and contemptible in almost every way, but he still has a right to buy a professional sports team. And so did Rush Limbaugh. Both Limbaugh and Maher represent opposite ends of the political spectrum, but the \"objective\" sports media had an obligation to treat them the same way, and they didn't. Because the sports media are not objective, not even close.\nCHAPTER EIGHT\n\nBULL IN DURHAM\n\nAh, lacrosse. They very thought of it conjures up images of regal exploits on the lush green fields of our country's finest institutions, as young men, primarily affluent young men, play the game handed down to them by our Indian forebears. But if you're a member of the mainstream media, especially the mainstream sports media, it might conjure up a very different image\u2014a very drunk, very violent, and very rapey image, where those same young lads of wealth and privilege abuse their position and exploit the helpless and vulnerable minorities who serve them.\n\nHow do I know the sports media have this image? Because that's precisely the image they tried to sell us in 2006, when a stripper named Crystal Mangum accused three Duke University lacrosse team members of forcing her into a bathroom, beating her, raping her, and sodomizing her. The evidence against the players was so flimsy that it folded like a pre-fab in a cat-five hurricane, but that didn't stop the media. Within five days of the arrests of two Duke players (a third would be charged later), there were 673 news stories, including 160 from major television news outlets, talking about the alleged rape that had occurred at an off-campus house party. Right now you're thinking to yourself: _Geez, almost seven hundred news stories about a couple of lacrosse players who_ might _have raped a stripper? That seems like a lot._\n\nOh, I'm sorry. Did I happen to mention that the stripper was black and the lacrosse players were white? My bad. I guess race isn't always the first thing I look at; after all, this isn't ESPN's _Pardon the Interruption_. But it didn't take long for the racial flash mob to belly up to this bar. All over the country, the story went out: privileged white lacrosse players at a prestigious college rape underprivileged young black woman. It was the stuff of legend for the media, sports and mainstream alike. Over and over again the media told us that lacrosse players were a pampered, privileged, and, as a consequence, abusive elite. After the case against the Duke players fell apart, reporter Terry Moran took to ABC's website to remind us not to feel sorry for these wealthy and spoiled white boys who had just had their names dragged through the mud by a frenzied media:\n\nAs students of Duke University or other elite institutions, these young men will get on with their privileged lives. There is a very large cushion under them\u2014the one that softens the blows of life for most of those who go to Duke or similar places, and have connections through family, friends and school to all kinds of prospects for success. They are very differently situated in life from, say, the young women of the Rutgers University women's basketball team.\n\nWay to go, Ter. God forbid any culpability be admitted on the part of the media for doing virtually no investigative work despite having armies of reporters camped out in Durham, North Carolina, for the better part of a year. No, instead the message was, \"Hey, don't you dare feel sorry for the kids we slandered, even though we had no evidence whatsoever of their supposed guilt. They're rich, they're white, they're evil, they're elitists, they deserve it!\" (By the way, ABC's Terry Moran went to college at an exclusive and extremely expensive music conservatory in Wisconsin. So, any time you want to fire him, go ahead: there is a very large cushion under him.)\n\nLook again at what Moran said: he's acting as if these guys are still guilty. That blog posting was written _after_ we found out that his reporting, and the rest of the mainstream media's reporting on the case, was completely bogus. Yet you read what he wrote there and you get the impression that he feels like the Duke players got away with something. As if, despite being cleared and exonerated of any and all wrongdoing, the Duke players aren't any less guilty now than they were before. That's because to the media, the wealth and privilege of the Duke lacrosse players _were_ their real crime. The accusation of rape was bad (even though it turned out to be false), but the alleged rape was just the pretext for allowing the media to swoop in and expose just how spoiled, violent, abusive, and racist these children of privilege really are. And the media weren't in the least bit interested in the mounting number of facts that proved the case against the players was made up, because the case already confirmed the way the sports media see the world: rich, evil, and spoiled white people abusing defenseless, helpless, and vulnerable black people. The end.\n\nWhat's that they say? _Never let the facts get in the way of a good story?_ You better believe it. Two points need to be made here before we go any further: I will not rehash the entire saga of how the media screwed up the Duke lacrosse story, because (A) that would take entirely too long, considering it was quite possibly the worst-managed affair in the history of the American media; and (B) one neglected aspect of the story, which I want to explore here, is how the media believed they did nothing wrong in reporting the events _as they saw them_ (instead of as they were) in Durham, North Carolina, and actually promoted some of the worst offenders to positions of greater power _after_ their stories were thoroughly debunked by the facts. This is true both for the sports reporters who got it wrong and mainstream media idiots like Terry Moran, which underlines one of the most important points of this book: _there is no difference between the sports media and the mainstream media._ Both are rabidly liberal, and both see the world and the stories they cover through a prism of \"social justice\" that colors everything they report. The subject matter they cover differs, but the way they cover it doesn't.\n\nLet me to introduce you to John Feinstein, sports columnist for the _Washington Post_ , who in May 2007, while on the nationally syndicated _Jim Rome Show_ , said that he felt the Duke lacrosse players were \"guilty of everything but rape\" and \"I really don't want to hear that they're victims and martyrs, and that their lives have been ruined.\" Hmmm, guilty of everything but rape? That's funny; rape and sodomy, along with battery, were the only things the players were charged with, and in May 2007, Feinstein and everyone else in the world knew those charges were bogus. So what else could they possibly have been guilty of? Answer: The same thing that Terry Moran found them guilty of\u2014being rich while white. In fact, so unhinged was Feinstein that in March 2006 when the Duke lacrosse story first broke and details of what actually happened were sketchy at best, Feinstein told ESPN's Tony Kornheiser that the whole lacrosse team should be done away with: \"You know, I don't want to hear any ifs, ands, or buts. These kids have acted disgracefully, just by the fact that not one of them\u2014I don't want to hear about the code among buddies and among teams. A crime was committed. There were witnesses to the crime. They need to come forward and say what they saw. . . . They won't, and that's why I'm saying the hell with them\u2014strip their scholarships.\"\n\nFeinstein actually wanted forty-seven athletes, one of whom was black (and could not have met Mangum's description of the rapists, because she said all three were white), stripped of their scholarships. And why? Because none of them would confess to witnessing a crime that had never happened! This despite the fact that only days before Feinstein uttered his tripe on national television it had been reported that three Duke lacrosse team captains had come forward, told police exactly what had happened, and even _volunteered to be polygraphed_ in order to prove the stripper was a liar. But none of this mattered to Feinstein or Moran, because to them the players were guilty of living lives of privilege and partying while white. The media condemned the players _just for who they were_ \u2014or not even that, just for the media's image of them.\n\nTerry Moran and John Feinstein are different types of reporters. One of them works for a large mainstream news conglomerate covering major news stories around the world. The other works for a newspaper covering sports. And yet when their worlds converged in the Duke lacrosse case, they saw the story in exactly the same (and factually wrong) way. Like Moran, Feinstein was contemptuous of the idea that these young men's futures might be harmed by irresponsible media commentary and outright slander. He did not care, because they were children of wealth and privilege. Guilt or innocence was irrelevant; what mattered was that those rich white kids had more wealth and power than other kids do, and that was wrong. Nothing infuriates the liberal media more. Especially because most media people come from privileged backgrounds as well, and lashing out at others of their class (especially those they might imagine are conservative in a preppy sort of way) is how they assuage the massive insecurities, pangs of guilt, and self-loathing they have about their own upbringing.\n\nAdd the racial element on top of that: lacrosse players lustily ogling poor black strippers while wearing their Dockers and J. Crew shirts and drinking their beer and living the good life at the \"Harvard of the South,\" and you had liberal sports writers practically soiling themselves as they raced to their laptops to get on record trashing these kids. Damn the facts and evidence; someone had to pay for this post\u2013Jim Crow outrage, and the accused players would be lambs in the liberal-media slaughter.\n\nThe unquestioned leader of the liberal media lynch mob against the players was then\u2013 _New York Times_ sports columnist Selena Roberts. When Durham district attorney Mike Nifong, now disgraced and disbarred, was tossing as much red meat as possible to the media to gin up support for his completely fraudulent case against the players, no member of the fourth estate gobbled it up and asked for seconds more than Selena Roberts.\n\nLike the rest of the media fraternity, Roberts assumed the players were guilty. On March 31, 2006, writing in the _New York Times_ , Roberts claimed: \"Players have been forced to give up their DNA, but to the dismay of investigators, none have come forward to reveal an eyewitness account.\" This was three days _after_ the lacrosse team captains released their statement, dated March 28, 2006, where they made clear that not only were they fully cooperating with the police but that no rape or sexual assault had occurred. In other words, Roberts was condemning the players for not stepping forward and providing an eyewitness account _of something that never happened._ And that something that never happened was later _proved_ , in a court of law, not to have happened. Right now, I am making my shocked face.\n\nIn an interview with the sports website The Big Lead about her article, Roberts let her liberal freak flag fly and reminded us what her real issue was: \"Basically, I wrote that a crime didn't have to occur for us to inspect the irrefutable evidence of misogyny and race baiting that went on that night. . . . Obviously, some segments of the Duke lacrosse crowd did not enjoy the scrutiny of their world.\"\n\nQuestion: What sort of \"scrutiny\" do you get when you're \"investigated\" by a reporter who has decided that you're guilty even if you're not?\n\nAnswer: Maybe the sort of scrutiny of a \"reporter\" who has decided that you are part of \"a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their status as human beings. . . . [Mixed metaphor alert:] Whatever the root, there is a common thread: a desire for teammates to exploit the vulnerable without heeding a conscience.\"\n\nUh-huh. So the Duke lacrosse players might be subhuman beings without conscience. Who, one might ask, is exploiting whom here? The players who were innocent of all charges or a \"reporter\" who levels crazy-ass accusations likes this, which come not from the facts of the case but straight out of Progressive Ideology 101? The _facts_ of the case did not move Roberts to make any sort of retraction or apology, because she believed that the \"culture\" of the Duke lacrosse players was inherently guilty of, um, er, not being progressive. \"People want to conflate the crime and the culture,\" said the woman who did exactly that, accusing the culture of Duke lacrosse of giving birth to a nonexistent crime. \"They want to say a crime did not happen, so therefore the culture that existed around that party did not happen.\" Actually, what \"they\" are saying is that you got your story wrong, Selena Roberts, and you refuse to admit it, because you are an ideologue rather than a reporter.\n\nWhat the Duke lacrosse case proved more than anything was that the media believe privileged, heterosexual white males are the true perpetrators of injustice, not the female minority stripper who happened to be lying (and who later, in a separate case, was convicted of murdering her boyfriend). Selena Roberts actually doubled down on her smearing of the innocent Duke lacrosse players and their university when she wrote: \"Don't mess with Duke, though. To shine a light on its integrity has been treated by the irrational mighty as a threat to white privilege. Feel free to excoriate the African-American basketball stars and football behemoths for the misdeeds of all athletes, but lay off the lacrosse pipeline to Wall Street, excuse the khaki-pants crowd of SAT wonder kids.\" Outside of Selena Roberts's progressive fantasy world, no one was defending \"white privilege\"; they were defending innocent players falsely accused of a heinous crime by a liar who had the media acting as her willing accomplices.\n\nIn late January 2007, as ethics charges piled up against the corrupt Durham district attorney Mike Nifong, feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte launched into a screed that would have made Al Sharpton blush:\n\nIn the meantime, I've been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For a while, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will\u2014not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can't a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.\n\nThe point here is not that Amanda Marcotte is a feminist, extremist whacko. The point is that if you clean up the language so that it's suitable for a newspaper, her view of the case was the same as that of Selena Roberts, who went from completely messing up this story for the _New York Times_ to a multiple-six-figure job writing for _Sports Illustrated_. Just like Moran and Feinstein earlier, Marcotte and Roberts are in different fields. Yet both are feminist activists without a shred of difference between their respective views on men and race. Both Marcotte and Roberts mocked those who felt sorry for the players whose reputations had been trashed; both cited white privilege as the reason why players were \"getting away with it.\"\n\nEven worse for those of us who have any hope for journalistic integrity is that the _New York Times_ allowed Roberts's reports to proceed in this way, sometimes with wild factual errors that were only belatedly corrected\u2014if at all. The _Times_ had no issue with some of Roberts's other errors of fact (including incorrect reporting of the medical evidence). Nor did the _Times_ have any problem with her race-baiting, her charges of misogyny, or her unfounded condemnation of the players, because as liberal media members themselves, they thought the same things about the players that Roberts did. Don't believe me? Let's look at what happened to Selena Roberts after the Duke lacrosse story.\n\nHere you have a writer who couldn't have been more wrong about what happened at Duke, and who never even came close to apologizing, much less printing a retraction. In Normalsville, that would be the end of a reporter's career. You were maliciously and outspokenly wrong about a case of national prominence while working for the most famous newspaper in the land? Fired.\n\nBut instead of her career going up in a ball of flames as it should have after her \"reporting\" on the Duke lacrosse case, Selena, like Darth Vader, came back more powerful than we could possibly imagine. After leaving the _New York Times_ , Roberts joined a group of writers at _Sports Illustrated_ who replaced Rick Reilly on the magazine's then-popular back page.\n\nAs reported in _Deadspin_ in 2009, Roberts and a colleague broke the story that Alex Rodriguez had tested positive for steroids in 2003. Terry McDonnell, _Sports Illustrated_ 's managing editor at the time, called it the \"biggest news break\" in his tenure at the magazine. Only days after the release of Roberts's book detailing A-Rod's positive steroid test, other media accolades started pouring in (per the Huffington Post):\n\nSelena Roberts is a \"top-flight reporter,\" says _SI_ 's Jeff Pearlman. (Feb. 10[, 2009])\n\nRoberts is \"universally respected,\" agrees ESPN's Jayson Stark. (Feb. 17[, 2009])\n\nShe is a \"reporter who has conducted herself with nothing but class her entire career,\" says the _NY Daily News_ ' Mark Feinsand. (Feb. 17[, 2009])\n\n\"I am friendly with Selena and consider her an excellent reporter,\" writes Joel Sherman of the _NY Post_. \"I have no doubt she was tireless and diligent in this reporting, and\u2014therefore\u2014I suspect that what is in this book is accurate.\" (April 30[, 2009])\n\nThis is beyond insane. A \"reporter who has conducted herself with nothing but class her entire career\"? Whatever Mark Feinsand was smoking when giving that comment is probably legal only in Colorado and Washington State. This woman had been an absolute joke when it came to her reporting on the only issue she ever covered that mattered: a veritable font of race-mucking, feminist angst, unfounded accusations, and innuendo. But she was A-OK with the \"good ol' boy\" network in the liberal sports media; she had been the good soldier, she had been the spokeswoman for everything they believed and wanted to say, and after that she could do no wrong.\n\nRoberts was breathtakingly insightful and truthful about one thing, though. When being interviewed on the _Jim Rome Show_ about her reporting on the Duke case, Roberts offered this defense: \"I wrote about the culture at Duke, and there's no doubt about that. I stand by that today. I separated the criminal investigation from the culture.\"\n\nIn fact, she didn't. Roberts's condemning articles could not have been written by anyone who believed the Duke players to be innocent. But there is this shred of truth to what she says about \"culture.\" If the Duke allegations had occurred at Northern Illinois University, they wouldn't have attracted half the national attention that they did. The media, sports and mainstream, loved the Duke lacrosse story because it gave them a chance to attack a culture that they loathe and despise: the culture of affluent, _Southern_ (read: conservative) white males. The mainstream and sports media did not converge on Duke to report on a rape. Guilt and innocence had already been determined by the media; they went there to attack a culture, to expose and destroy a culture they believe is racist, sexist, and inherently geared toward the wealthy and privileged\u2014a culture that is antithetical to their liberal vision. The black stripper was just a stage prop.\n\nThe media's racial double standard would be plainly evident in future cases as well. In 2013, sexual assault allegations would arise about then\u2013Heisman Trophy hopeful Jameis Winston (who is black) after a Florida State student claimed that Winston had raped her. The differences in the way the two cases were handled couldn't be more striking. The case against Winston was first filed in December 2012. It didn't reach the DA's office until December 2013, _a full year later_. By contrast, _only one month and three days after_ Crystal Mangum said she was raped, the Duke lacrosse players (who were white) were being indicted by a grand jury. More important, the media coverage was totally different. There was a healthy debate but no rush to judge what had happened in the Winston case. On my show, and others, the debate was \"if he's guilty,\" this should happen, or, \"if they prove him guilty,\" he shouldn't win the Heisman.\n\nIn the Duke case, though, there had been no \"what ifs\" or \"until there's proof.\" The debate was over how hard the Duke players should be punished, not whether they were guilty. In fact, the calls for punishment of the Duke players continued even after we knew they were innocent. This double standard prompted former Major League pitcher John Rocker to ask the most important question, in an article titled \"What If Jameis Winston Were a White Lacrosse Player\" on WND.com:\n\nLet's imagine that Jameis Winston isn't black, or the star football player for the Seminoles. Let's imagine that he is instead a white lacrosse player, who happens to play for Duke. Let's say an allegation emerges that he might have raped somebody. Do you think the student body and the school's fans would rally to his support? Do you think that the Durham Police Department would've sat on his case for nearly a year before sending it to the district attorney? Do you think police would've made veiled threats against the accuser for deciding to press charges? Would the district attorney carefully deliberate the case?\n\nThe likely answer to all of these questions would be no. And if the accuser were black, this story would be another racially charged national news case, and Winston would be portrayed as a modern-day Klansman by the national media, or the reincarnation of the Duke lacrosse players.\n\nSo why were the two cases portrayed so differently by the media and pursued so differently by the authorities? I can't say for sure, but I'm sure if Winston looked a lot more like the average Duke lacrosse player, we'd hear a different story than the one that is currently being pushed by the media.\n\nYou could bet the farm on it. In fact, so different was the coverage of the Winston case from the Duke lacrosse case that ESPN went out of its way to assuage the liberal-feminist component in the sports media, and within their own network, by hosting a special impact segment after the Florida DA had announced that he wasn't pressing charges against Winston. The subject of said impact segment? The difficulties women face in coming forward after rapes and sexual assaults, and the ways such cases are handled by investigators and other law enforcement officials. In the first minute of the segment, host David Lloyd cited a number from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center which stated that only 2 to 10 percent of rape claims turn out to be false. Mind you, this special aired shortly after Jameis Winston was cleared of any rape charges because the Florida DA couldn't find enough evidence to bring a case forward.\n\nSo why would ESPN air this discussion right after Winston had been exonerated, citing statistics that remind you that the overwhelming number of rape cases brought forward are true, and talking about how hard law enforcement makes it for women to come forward and talk about rape? It's because they wanted to cover their liberal behinds with their feminist fellow travelers.\n\nESPN radio hosts Colin Cowherd and Paul Finebaum appeared on the show. Cowherd strongly criticized the Florida state attorney for not understanding the seriousness of the case and the charge, as shown by the fact that he laughed through his press conference. Finebaum criticized the prosecutor for \"grandstanding\" and really went after Jameis Winston's attorney Tim Jansen for making \"a mockery of the whole system, particularly with women.\" Finebaum also condemned the Tallahassee Police Department for their mishandling of the case.\n\nI agree with Finebaum on all of that: the Tallahassee Police Department did appear to bungle the investigation into the allegations against Winston, _and_ the Florida district attorney did appear to be grandstanding. But similar criticisms could be made in the Duke lacrosse case where the prosecutor was grandstanding so much that he ended up getting disbarred. Yet ESPN didn't follow up the Duke lacrosse case with a special for the unjustly maligned players, lamenting how hard it was for them, and how hard it would be for them going forward. They didn't lay into the Durham Police Department for their mishandling of the case, and they certainly didn't criticize anyone in the media, which acted as a lynch mob, plain and simple, condemning the players merely because their accuser was black and because they decided Duke lacrosse players represented evil, wealthy, Southern, white males.\n\nYou can fault, if you want, the Duke lacrosse team for getting involved at all with a stripper. But it's not a criminal act, and it's not unknown for young men to do stupid things. But what is ironic is that the liberal media, so keen to promote any and all forms non-Christian sexuality\u2014premarital sex, homosexual sex, \"sex week\" at major colleges, coed dorms and bathrooms that promote the hook-up culture, you mention it, they're for it\u2014suddenly get all puritanical when it comes to something like this. That's because the sports media\u2014like the mainstream liberal media\u2014view every issue with an obsession on race, sex, and class. And if there's ever any opportunity to dump on rich white males and run to the support of poor black females, even if they're liars, they'll do it every time.\n\nThe most mind-blowing part of the liberal sports media's complete fail at covering the Duke lacrosse case was not that normal everyday analysts and writers ignored facts and made baseless claims\u2014they do that all the time\u2014but that even the so-called legal \"experts\" in the sports media made these mistakes.\n\nLester Munson currently writes and reports for ESPN.com and specializes in legal affairs. During the Duke lacrosse scandal, though, he worked for CNNSI.com, where he offered his not-so-learned advice. Munson went about wasting no opportunity to besmirch any credible evidence that might exonerate the lacrosse players, even searching for new and increasingly absurd ways for them to appear guiltier.\n\nAs chronicled on Brooklyn College historian KC Johnson's blog _Durham-in-Wonderland_ , arguably the most authoritative historical account of the lacrosse scandal (outside this one, of course), Johnson describes Munson's appearance on the scene thusly:\n\nMunson's first case-related comments came on April 18. Despite the court filing from Mike Nifong's office that DNA would exonerate the innocent, Munson immediately downplayed DNA's role. \"There are hundreds of convicted rapists in prison,\" he contended, \"even though there was no sign of their DNA in the examinations of their victims . . . Lawyers for the accused players can talk endlessly about DNA, but the absence of DNA is not conclusive by itself.\" He implied that the team had a history of \"previous predatory conduct,\" and expressed little doubt that a crime occurred: \"There is always an element of brutality in what occurs. In the Duke situation, it may be the number of athletes joining in the attack. In the Tyson case, the attack was brutal.\"\n\nSo here you have Munson going even a level beyond the already beyond-awful Mike Nifong. Munson is so unhinged that he immediately refutes the notion put forth by Nifong that the DNA evidence could clear the innocent by telling us of \"hundreds of convicted rapists\" in jail today absent any DNA evidence against them.\n\nAnd you know what? Technically, he's right. There are rapists who have been convicted without DNA evidence. Wouldn't, though, the absence of any DNA evidence in this case at least cause the objective, non-agenda-driven person to take some level of pause and question the air-tightness of the case against the players? Apparently not for Munson, who seems to have the case, and the guilt of the players, all sewn up.\n\nDoubling down on the presumed guilt of the innocent, Lester Munson next removed any reasonable doubt about lacrosse player Reade Seligmann's innocence by construing his alibi as tantamount to an admission of guilt. The interviewer with CNNSI.com asked Munson: \"A report has surfaced that one of the players charged, Reade Seligmann, has an alibi\u2014including ATM receipts, a statement from a cab driver and evidence he was at his dormitory\u2014indicating he had left the party before the alleged incident happened. Is this credible evidence?\"\n\nAfter conceding the _potential_ that Seligmann's alibi could prove his innocence, Munson went on to state that Seligmann might even be _guiltier_ : \"The police and the prosecutor will scrutinize this evidence in exquisite detail, and if they find something is askew, that something doesn't fit in the alibi evidence, they will not hesitate to charge Seligmann with yet another crime. That would be obstruction of justice.\"\n\nIn any normal world, this response would have led to Munson's disbarring, or to dis-whatever happens to people who only \"practice\" law on TV. Note how the possibility that the alibi evidence could prove Seligmann's innocence only takes up about 4 percent of Munson's response here. He uses the remainder to cast the shadow of doubt.\n\nAgain, Seligmann's alibi evidence included an ATM receipt and a taxi driver's statement. ATMs have time-stamped receipts and also have security cameras. In fact, the ATM Seligmann used happened to capture him on camera at the exact time the alleged rape occurred. Not to mention the word of the cab driver to corroborate Seligmann's story.\n\nFor Munson to sit there and treat this evidence that Seligmann was innocent as somehow irrelevant, or worse\u2014somehow putting him at risk of conviction for an additional crime\u2014betrays a strong bias against the accused to say the least. Munson wasn't shy about revealing his bias: \"You don't see many alibis in criminal cases\u2014it's a very rare thing. Ordinarily, 99 times out of 100, the police have the right guy, and you'll find that most people arrested were involved in something. Getting the wrong guy is very unusual.\"\n\nEvidence for this claim was not forthcoming; of course neither was evidence for Mike Nifong's claims. None of that seemed to bother Munson. In his appearance on _Nancy Grace_ , Munson was asked by Grace:\n\nGRACE: A lot has been said that the state doesn't have much of a case. Agree or disagree?\n\nMUNSON: I disagree. I think the state has probably a better case than most observers are describing. I have studied this at some length for the piece that we had in Sports Illustrated this week.\n\nMr. Nifong is a seasoned, experienced prosecutor. He is not stupid. He's been doing this kind of thing for 30 years. I believe he has enough to make a prima facie case. A jury will determine the guilt or the innocence of these student athletes from Duke University. And I think that Nifong is probably managing the discovery in such a way that there may be some surprises for these defense lawyers further down the road.\n\nCarefully note how Munson essentially says nothing here. How does Nifong's thirty years on the job bolster his case? Dan Rather had reported the news for more than thirty years and still ran with a completely fabricated story to try to prevent the reelection of President George W. Bush. So instead of actually answering the question about the strength of Nifong's case, Munson instead gave us Nifong's r\u00e9sum\u00e9 and a little Civics 101 about how a jury will decide the case\u2014and unknowingly betrayed that he had no idea what he was talking about. Though Nifong's case appeared weak, Munson assured Nancy Grace that Nifong was probably \"managing discovery in such a way that there may be some surprises for these defense lawyers further down the road.\"\n\nThere was only one problem with this: North Carolina is an open-discovery state, meaning that Mike Nifong was not allowed to \"manage discovery\" with the goal of springing \"surprises\" against defense attorneys later in trial. He was compelled by law to share any and all information and evidence he had, at the defense's request. I wouldn't expect Selena Roberts or Bomani Jones or John Feinstein or some other strictly sports talking head to know that information. But it does tell you something about sports reporters with \"legal expert\" in their title\u2014namely that they really aren't.\n\nMunson also proved unconvincing when Nancy Grace challenged him on the \"victim's\" credibility:\n\nGRACE: Back to Lester Munson with _Sports Illustrated_. What supports the victim account? And I know there's problems with the state's case. I'm not denying that, all right? You've got the second dancer who's given three or four different stories. But what supports the actual alleged victim's account, Lester?\n\nMUNSON: There is some veracity to the victim's account. She and the other woman, obviously, felt the sense of danger, a sense of menace in that house. They left a lot of stuff behind. They were able to describe what they left behind to the police, and the police, when they went to search the house, found everything there that the woman had described as left behind when she left in a big hurry in fear.\n\nReally? Three kids should spend the next twenty to thirty years behind bars because a couple of strippers left behind \"a lot of stuff\" at a house party? You'd think a lawyer might recognize that leaving stuff behind proves that you were at a location and that you left. It doesn't prove _why_ you left, or how you _felt_ when you were leaving, and if your case is based solely on that, you don't have a case.\n\nMunson could never quite grasp Nifong's lack of a case. After Nifong dropped the charges against the players, _Sports Illustrated_ for some reason went back to their reporter who had gotten just about everything wrong and asked him what was next for the players.\n\nMUNSON: They still face some serious charges. There is little doubt that something unsavory happened at the party on March 13. After the dismissal of the rape charges, it will be easier for the accused players to attempt to settle everything with a guilty plea on lesser charges. The likelihood of a trial on any of these charges is now greatly reduced.\n\nSomething \"unsavory\"? Something unsavory accurately describes my nightlife from the age of about nineteen to twenty-two, and I can assure you that a rather large gulf exists between unsavory and rape. Note how Munson still, even in light of the dropping of the charges, still believes the players should plead guilty. Why?\n\nBecause the guilt of these players existed in the minds of Munson and the rest of the liberal media regardless of proof to the contrary. Unlike the usual sports reporters who spout opinions in legal cases without knowing anything about the law, Lester Munson _is_ a lawyer and presumably should have known at some point that Nifong's case would fold like paper under any kind of serious scrutiny. Yet he stuck by the players' guilt\u2014of something\u2014long after the truth became obvious.\n\nSomehow, though, this case did not discredit Munson as a \"legal expert.\" In fact, like Selena Roberts, this episode of failure only resulted in newer and better things for Munson. His willingness to serve as the Baghdad Bob of Durham in no way kept him from getting a gig with ESPN, where he retains his \"expert\" status on legal matters despite his decidedly un-expert takes.\n\nMunson did not stand alone in his inability to see well-established innocence. Among the other hindsight-challenged members of the sports media was ESPN's Bomani Jones, who in February 2007 reported from the first Duke lacrosse game since their previous season had been canceled because of the rape charges.\n\nIn his discussions with students on campus, Jones spoke with several students who wanted to express their support for the wrongly accused lacrosse players. One kid, Chris Antonacci, sounded (gasp!) just happy the lacrosse team could play a game again: \"Around here, we believe the guys [former players Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and Dave Evans] are innocent,\" Antonacci said, \"and that [last] season should not have been canceled.\"\n\nJones pounced on this mere statement of the obvious like a leopard on a gazelle:\n\nPerhaps that's true, but that's no reason to celebrate the team. After all, none of the three players charged with crimes surrounding a March 9, 2006, house party are still on the team.\n\nWhile the cancellation of the season may have been premature, plenty came to light when they left the field. Too much to be ignored.\n\nWhat's this? Too much to be ignored? What kind of twisted, deep-seated evil \"came to light\" about this lacrosse team?\n\nThe ad hoc committee commissioned by Duke president Richard Brodhead and Academic Council Chair Paul Haagen found that lacrosse players were involved in thirty-six separate disciplinary incidents in the last three academic years, including destruction of property on campus, public urination and numerous alcohol-related incidents.\n\nI must confess, I laughed out loud when I read this paragraph. Seriously? You tried and failed to convict them as rapists, so for your next act you charge them for acting like college students? How pathetic. My research assistant (Answers.com) tells me that anywhere between thirty and thirty-five students play on a college lacrosse team. For nearly one hundred different individuals between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two to amass only thirty-six minor incidents of law-breaking on a college campus over three years is hardly surprising.\n\nIn fact, it's disappointing. When I was nineteen, my technical term for amassing thirty-six disciplinary violations was \"Tuesday.\" What Jones was really doing was continuing a smear campaign against college kids for behaving like college kids. The technical term in journalism for this is \"grasping at straws.\"\n\nBut Jones wasn't done yet:\n\nHave people forgotten about the claim by Kim Roberts, one of the dancers hired that evening, that the players hurled racial slurs at her? Or the report in the _Raleigh News and Observer_ that one partygoer told one of the dancers to \"thank your grandpa for my cotton shirt,\" an obvious slavery reference?\n\nEvidence in the record gives proof of a racial slur used by the lacrosse players. What Jones conveniently leaves out of his account, however, is that Kim Roberts, one of the two black dancers, \"hurled\" the first racial slur.\n\nIn an interview with _60 Minutes_ , Roberts reveals what exactly happened:\n\n\"I called him a little dick white boy,\" she recalls laughing. \"And how he couldn't get it on his own and had to pay for it. So, he was mad. And it ended with him callin' me the n-word. And it echoed, so you heard n. . . . once, and then you heard, n. . . ., n. . . ., n. . . .\"\n\nRoberts acknowledges _her taunting_ [emphasis added] provoked that remark but tells Bradley, \"But when I think about it again, I say he could've said black girl. You know what I mean? He could've said black girl. He didn't have to go that route.\"\n\nA neighbor also told police he overheard a player yelling in Roberts' direction \"Thank your grandfather for my cotton shirt.\"\n\nRoberts is right: the lacrosse player didn't have to go that route, but an honest reporter would have provided the context.\n\nThe student that Jones cites in his article makes the point that a few bad apples don't spoil the bunch, saying in reference to the alleged racist slurs, \"The whole team shouldn't suffer for the actions of a few.\"\n\nBut predictably, that line of thought does not go very far with Bomani Jones:\n\nEven if that's true\u2014and it's definitely debatable\u2014the overall body of misbehavior of this team wasn't the reflection of a few people. That track record was built by several players over a span of years\u2014too many sins over too much time to be written off as anything isolated.\n\nReally?! If the legal equivalent of Winston Churchill visited Durham, he would certainly have said, \"Never have so many suffered so much for so little.\" The completely over-the-top effort to paint an entire group of young men as guilty of _something_ \u2014racism and sexism, if not rape\u2014highlights nothing less than the obsessions of the liberal media.\n\nAs KC Johnson says in _Durham-in-Wonderland_ :\n\nGiven Jones' branding the entire lacrosse team as racists because one player uttered a racial slur as part of a racially charged argument, Joan Foster wonders why the espn.com author elected to ignore the findings of the Coleman Committee report on the question of the team's racial attitudes. (After a comprehensive inquiry, the committee discovered no evidence of racist or sexist on-campus behavior.)\n\nIn other words, the same ad hoc committee that produced the instances of petty misbehavior that Bomani Jones used to cast an aura of guilt over the Duke lacrosse team reported that the lacrosse team had _no_ history of racism or sexism. Committee chairman James Coleman wrote, \"We looked closely but found no compelling evidence to support claims that these players are racist or have a record of sexual violence.\" Wouldn't an honest reporter have made note of that?\n\nColeman also described team members' drinking habits as \"deplorable but pretty typical of what you see with other Duke students who abuse alcohol.\"\n\nIn other words, they were kids\u2014but the sort of kids the liberal media don't like, and so they were dragged through the mud without a second thought to their innocence or to journalistic integrity. That's what you get from the liberal sports media.\nCHAPTER NINE\n\nTHE NEW RACISM\n\nEveryone loves the NFL playoffs, as teams get winnowed down to play in the ultimate American spectacle, the Super Bowl. And the inherent drama of the games means the sports media are often at their best during the playoffs too\u2014except when they take a relatively inconsequential event and blow it way out of proportion.\n\nOn January 19, 2014, only moments after deflecting the NFC championship game\u2013sealing interception into the waiting hands of a friendly linebacker, Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman decided to unleash his inner Ric Flair in a postgame interview. Fox Sports' Erin Andrews asked Sherman about the play, and what followed was pure television gold. In a full-throated roar, the likes of which would make the \"Nature Boy\" himself proud, Sherman\u2014huge, dreadlocked, tattooed, enraged, and black\u2014let loose with a tirade for the ages: \"I'm the best corner in the game! When you try me with a sorry receiver like Crabtree, that's the result you gonna get! Don't you ever talk about me. [ . . . ] Don't you open your mouth about the best, or I'm gonna shut it for you real quick!\"\n\nIt was one of the most hilarious things ever to happen on a football field. Well, in my mind it was funny. Apparently I was in the minority, because in a matter of minutes, Twitter exploded with people reacting not only to Sherman's postgame interview, but also to his taunting of 49ers receiver Michael Crabtree and quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Strong words were used\u2014most of them condemning Sherman as a loudmouth and a bad sport.\n\nBut the next day, when the media took over the debate, a different word started getting used. That word was \"thug.\" In fact, as reported by _Deadspin_ , a group called iQMedia, a company that does media platform research, said that the word \"thug\" was used 625 times in closed-captioning across all television markets on the day after the Sherman interview aired. The TV broadcast of the Boston-based _Dennis & Callahan Show_, on WEEI, apparently logged twelve \"thug\" mentions in two minutes alone. Not too shabby.\n\nWhy does this matter?\n\nIt matters for two reasons.\n\nFirst, while the word \"thug\" can be applied to anyone, from the likes of former Patriot tight end Aaron Hernandez to actor Alec Baldwin, according to taste, the media view it as a word that almost always references someone who is black.\n\nThe other reason this matters is that when the debate over Richard Sherman happened on Twitter\u2014in other words, among the people at large\u2014\"thug\" did not get a lot of play. The few racist trolls out there went straight to the N-word. But the racist stuff came from the fringe. Most people upset at Sherman were upset at his behavior, not his skin tone; they disliked his alleged lack of sportsmanship (he received a penalty for taunting on the play); and some didn't like a football player talking like a professional wrestler. But for the American sports media, this was another teaching moment in which they could tell us all just how deeply ignorant and racist they believe the average American to be.\n\nStill, they faced a problem. While the few racist reactions used the N-word with various epithets preceding it, _Sports Center_ couldn't air a debate with the caption \"Is Richard Sherman a 'No-Class N*****?\" They needed some other word to bring the racial debate to the fore, something racially charged but not an overt slur. Sometime between the end of the game on Sunday and the start of the news cycle on Monday, the metaphorical memo went out to all concerned: just as \"fiery\" can be code for Latinos and \"scrappy\" can be code for white guys, \"thug\" can be racist code-speak for black people\u2014at least to the media.\n\nThe Monday after the game was the most thuggish day in American media in years, as the American sports media trolled the country trying to spark a debate about why white people feel threatened by black men and are unhappy at seeing them succeed, which was an odd accusation if you consider that the American people had recently elected a black man president of the United States\u2014twice. It was also an odd accusation given that black athletes and coaches are among the most popular in the country.\n\nBut the sports media wanted this story because they are obsessed with race and will run with any \"racist\" story they can get. And they absolutely love racist witch-hunts.\n\nConsider, for instance, the case of Steve Lyons. Lyons, former broadcaster for Fox, was fired immediately after a game during which he made some less-than-great references to Lou Piniella's Hispanic heritage. From the original AP story:\n\nPiniella had made an analogy involving the luck of finding a wallet, then briefly used a couple of Spanish phrases during Friday's broadcast. Lyons said that Piniella was \"hablaing Espanol\"\u2014butchering the conjugation for the word \"to speak\"\u2014and added, \"I still can't find my wallet.\"\n\n\"I don't understand him, and I don't want to sit too close to him now,\" Lyons continued. Lyons claimed he was kidding.\n\nLyons could have saved his breath about \"kidding.\" There was a time, in the 1960s and 1970s when stewardesses had anatomically luminescent uniforms and newborn infants were handed a Marlboro eight seconds after birth, when Lyons's comments would have been called kidding. Those times are gone. Nowadays, even a hint of a racially insensitive remark, even if the speaker is kidding, even if the allegedly racially insensitive remark is about a minority group not usually categorized as a minority group (Piniella's parents were from Spain, not from south of the border), can be enough to wreck a career.\n\nIn a more egregious error of judgment, San Francisco talk show host Larry Krueger once referred to the San Francisco Giants lineup as a bunch of \"brain-dead Caribbean hitters.\" As a result, Krueger was canned. Now he can take a long vacation (I hear Antigua is lovely this time of year). Long-time Vikings radioman Lee Hamilton resigned after being quoted by the _San Diego Union-Tribune_ as having said: \"I think it's real hard to find an African American who can come in and do sports talk across the board and be able to talk about a lot of different things.\" Now, you can agree or disagree with this\u2014I happen to disagree\u2014but this hardly amounts to \"Segregation now! Segregation forever!\" In fact, the funniest thing about it is that Hamilton managed to conjoin the politically correct term \"African American\" and a dumbo generalization about black sports commentators. That quotation, in addition to Hamilton's calling Hideki Irabu a \"fat jap,\" was enough to end a pretty nice run as a radio broadcaster.\n\nLook outside the sports world: Michael Richards is no longer the universally loved goofball named Kramer on _Seinfeld_. He is now a universally unemployable pariah after launching into an inexplicably awful tirade at a heckler in an LA comedy club. Meanwhile, black sportscasters like Michael Irvin can make absurd charges of pre\u2013Civil War\u2013era crossbreeding, and there's no backlash whatsoever. On the _Dan Patrick Show_ , Irvin attempted to explain how the Cowboys' white quarterback Tony Romo was so athletic. You'll get a good laugh from his hypothesis if you're an idiot, or Michael Wilbon, or both: \"[Romo's] great, great, great, great Grandma pulled one of them studs up outta the barn.\"\n\nDo me a favor, just for one moment, and imagine if a white broadcaster on a radio show, discussing a very intelligent black athlete like, say, Richard Sherman, had explained away Sherman's considerable intelligence as the result of his great-great-great-great-grandma having had sex with a plantation owner. He would have been fired\u2014and not just from his job: the network would have loaded him into a cannon and fired him into a lake of fire. There would be national outrage. Yet Michael Irvin continues to be employed by a radio station and the NFL Network.\n\nThe point is that racism is punished in our society today. Well, unless the racist in question is black, in which case you get a free pass and perhaps a multiyear, six- or even seven-figure contract from a major sports network. But there is no institutional racism in this country against \"people of color.\" That is long gone. In fact, many institutions\u2014including the NFL with its \"Rooney Rule\" requiring teams to interview minority candidates for coaching and management positions\u2014go out of their way to increase their \"diversity.\" And \"racism\" is one of the worst charges that can be made against anyone in the court of public opinion. No one\u2014by which I mean maybe 1 percent of the American people\u2014is \"for\" racism. Everyone\u2014by which I mean about 99 percent of the American people\u2014is against it. That doesn't mean that racism has completely disappeared in our society or that the racist acts aren't still committed\u2014but they shock us now because they are so rare and universally regarded as wrong. Comedian Tom Shillue sums up the current state of race relations in America perfectly: \"The only people hurt by racism these days are the racists.\"\n\nReal victims of racism these days are few, so, by necessity, the liberal media, wanting to relive their glory days of the civil rights era, must invent them, and that is the function of the New Racism\u2014namely, finding racism where there isn't any.\n\nWhich speaks to the point: racism is no longer a social institution, like Jim Crow, that needs to be abolished. It's a business worth millions of dollars to shysters like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who shake down corporations for payoffs; and it is worth a ton in ratings and notoriety for sports media racial hucksters like ESPN's Michael Wilbon who inject their vile hate-venom into every topic that they conceivably can. And even some that they conceivably can't. On _Pardon the Interruption_ , Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon discussed comments made by well-known University of Texas booster Red McCombs about the hiring process that led to UT picking Charlie Strong (who is black) to succeed Mack Brown (who is white) as UT's next head football coach. Red McCombs was highly displeased with the hire and let fly while on the air with an ESPN affiliate in San Antonio: \"I think the whole thing is a bit sideways. . . . I don't have any doubt that Charlie is a fine coach. I think he would make a great position coach, maybe a coordinator. But I don't believe [he belongs at] what should be one of the three most powerful university programs in the world right now at UT-Austin. I don't think it adds up.\"\n\nMcCombs went on:\n\nI think it is a kick in the face. Beyond the fact of what actually happened. We have boosters that have a lot of knowledge about the game. When we decided to go get Mack\u2014from the time we decided to go get Mack to about 30 hours later to have a press conference here and it was done\u2014we had a lot of input before we went after him.\n\nSo I don't know what the big rush was. I was kind of pleased that [Texas athletic director Steve] Patterson already said that he'd like to get it done in the middle of January. That seemed logical to me. I'm a team player, but I think they went about it wrong and made the selection wrong.\n\nNow, to be clear, McCombs's comment that Strong might only be good enough for a position coach at UT is beyond insane. Strong was 23 and 3 as the head coach at Louisville. The coaching position he was most suited for was head coach. But plenty of people (myself included) thought Charlie Strong might be in over his head at Texas. Strong was notorious at Louisville for hating the \"political\" side of the job: doing media, selling the program, hanging out with rich donors. The head-coaching job at Texas, at least under Mack Brown, was as much political as it was about football: schmoozing with millionaire donors and kissing the ring (and if necessary, the behind) of the guy who's buying you the new wing of the \"student-athlete\" center.\n\nNone of those people, and certainly not Red McCombs, ever stood against hiring Strong because he was black. In fact, Red McCombs is the cofounder of the San Antonio Spurs, which, if you haven't noticed, employs a higher percentage of black men than most businesses and more than have ever been employed by Michael Wilbon. But of course that's exactly the well-worn path that Michael Wilbon wanted to take us down on _Pardon the Interruption._ Wilbon called UT's new (as of November 2013) athletic director Steve Patterson more \"progressive\" (read: less racist) than most, having come from a college basketball background as opposed to a football background.\n\nWilbon's not-so-subtle message was that football, especially Southern college football, remains\u2014against all evidence to the contrary, including black coaches, like Charlie Strong at Louisville\u2014a bastion of, in leftist speak, white male privilege. But Wilbon didn't stop there; he then warned of the great obstacles and hurdles that Charlie Strong would have to overcome at Texas. Specifically, the \"good old boy network\" (read: angry, racist, white Republicans) that rule the roost there. So here you have the University of Texas, the largest school in the state and the wealthiest athletic department in the country, hiring the first black head coach in school history, and Wilbon wants us to fear the \"good old boy network\"?\n\nQuick question: How entrenched and all-powerful could this alleged network of racist good old boys be if they couldn't succeed in stopping the appointment of a \"progressive\" athletic director or the hiring of a black head football coach? In fact, let's go a step further, because the University of Texas is not the only school in the Lone Star State to hire a black head coach. Texas A&M, UT's archrival, and the second-biggest program in the state, actually beat the \"progressives\" in Austin to the punch when they hired Kevin Sumlin (who is black) in December 2011. So here you have the Great State of Texas, the western anchor of the Deep South; here in this supposed cauldron of fiery racial hate, the two largest schools in the state have hired black head coaches, and to Michael Wilbon the real story is the power of the \"good old boy network.\" _Really?_\n\nIt wasn't so long ago that Wilbon and others were lamenting . . . check that . . . screaming at the top of their lungs about how there weren't more than four black head coaches in all of the top 120 schools in college football. Here you have two black head coaches at the two biggest institutions in arguably the biggest football state in the country, and the story is that Texas is racist? This is the \"New Racism\" at work. Wilbon can't let us sit back and take stock of what should be an awesome moment in race and sports and applaud how these hires show just how far we've come, because then people might . . . you know . . . realize how far we've come.\n\nNor has Wilbon confined his hysterical bleating to _Pardon the Interruption_ or coaching moves. In 2010, when the Redskins were in the midst of year seventeen of their rebuilding program, head coach Mike Shanahan (who is white) pulled quarterback Donovan McNabb (who is black) from a football game in the final two minutes and put in white quarterback Rex Grossman. Shanahan explained his decision this way: \"I felt with the time, with no timeouts, Rex gave us the best chance to win in that scenario. Everything is sped up when you don't have timeouts. It's got to be automatic. People forget how quick things are in that two minutes. It's like learning a new language. Are you asking me if we played poorly? Yes, we did.\"\n\nJason Reid of the _Washington Post_ offered further explanation for the coach's decision: \"Redskins Coach Mike Shanahan said Monday that Donovan McNabb's lingering injuries played a role in the coach's decision to bench his starting quarterback Sunday. . . . McNabb wasn't able to fully practice and Shanahan said that from a 'cardiovascular standpoint,' McNabb couldn't handle the fast-paced two-minute offense.\"\n\nThat knowing-the-offense, being-in-shape, giving-your-team-the-best-chance-to-win mumbo-jumbo wouldn't fly for Michael Wilbon, who wrote this in the _Washington Post_ :\n\nLook, I've long ago declared my bias toward McNabb and I'm not going to spin away from it now. McNabb, though, hasn't played all that well and has said so. He wasn't particularly effective Sunday in Detroit, either. And indications are now that the Shanahans, father and son, don't much like the way McNabb prepares for games. Mike's assertion makes it sound like McNabb is some dummy, an ominous characterization he'd better be careful about, lest he run into some cultural trouble in greater Washington, D.C.\n\nPretty funny that Wilbon feels comfortable enough threatening the cultural wrath of \"greater Washington, D.C.,\" after taking one of his highly publicized large-scale bowel movements on the city, calling it a \"terrible\" sports town. He wrote that despite living in D.C. for thirty-two years, he \"barely call[s] it home.\" Apparently Wilbon isn't worried about incurring any \"cultural trouble in greater Washington, D.C.,\" himself. What Wilbon did here was take a meaningless quarterback change by a lousy team (I say that as a native Washingtonian and lifelong fan) in a lousy game, and elevate it to Rodney King\u2013like proportions. Conveniently forgotten in all this was that Shanahan, as head coach, was involved in the Redskins' decision to trade for Donovan McNabb in Shanahan's first season with the team. He, apparently, saw a serviceable starting quarterback in the aging veteran. I, on the other hand, when I looked at Donovan McNabb, thought of soup: not the stringy chicken stuff they send in aid packages to kids in Eastern Europe, but the thick, industrial-strength stuff that you have to wear elastic-waist sweatpants to eat and that McNabb advertised for Campbell's Chunky brand. Clearly, though, Wilbon saw Rosa Parks in pads and cleats.\n\nAgain, the New Racism's \"heroes\" aren't actual heroes; they're millionaires who get pulled from the two-minute drill. But look at the precedent set here: because McNabb was out of shape, past his prime, and unable to understand the offense (after his stint with the Redskins, he failed in Minnesota, \"despite,\" as race-crazed liberal sports reporters might add, having a black head coach there), Wilbon turned Shanahan's concerns over McNabb's football IQ into a referendum on black people as a whole, or at least those who live in D.C.\n\nJohn Feinstein was not to be outdone by Wilbon. After ESPN's Chris Mortensen reported that Mike Shanahan had to drastically cut down the size of his playbook in order for McNabb to learn it (and even then, with the CliffsNotes version of the playbook, McNabb still had trouble calling the right plays in the huddle), Feinstein went off:\n\nThen I saw Mortensen's \"report.\" That's when I went on Washington Post Live and accused Shanahan of racial coding because I believe if he was Mortensen's source that is absolutely what he was doing. And if it was, Shanahan is a despicable human being and, yes, I think he's using racial coding and yes I think he should be fired. If anyone wants to disagree with me about that, fine. . . .\n\nBasically Wilbon and Feinstein are claiming that this info about McNabb's not knowing the playbook and being out of shape never would have been leaked to the media if McNabb were white. As if information questioning a quarterback's IQ is somehow kept secret if the quarterback is white (somewhere Tim Tebow is calling BS on this). I have a different theory though. Maybe, just maybe, after getting accused of racism at every turn by an unhinged and race-obsessed liberal sports media, Shanahan released that information believing (na\u00efvely) it would show he made the move for football reasons. Maybe he released it thinking that everyone would see that he didn't really harbor racial animus toward the quarterback he traded a second-round pick for, and that in reality McNabb was an overweight, over-the-hill, in-over-his-head player who was past his prime. It's too cute that Mike Shanahan might have thought that the releasing of facts would dissuade the D.C. sports media from labeling him a racist. It's so cute I just want to poke him in the nose. Boop!\n\nBut whatever his motivations for releasing the information, the sports media's handling of said information was beyond ridiculous, though that's not totally unexpected from a group of race-peddlers, especially in Washington, D.C. Other aspects of the sports media's desire to preserve racism and racist lingo, no matter the cost, have proved far more troubling.\n\nTo my knowledge, there is only one word in the English language that dramatically switches meaning based on who speaks it. A car is always a car, a potato is always a potato, and a marsupial is always a marsupial. But the New Racism has furnished us with a word that forms and shape-shifts like Mystique on meth. And that word is the N-word. Ironically, the word that true heroes and civil rights leaders of yore probably wanted done away with more than any other word in the English language, regardless of who said it, has now been safely ensconced in the American lexicon for the foreseeable future\u2014 _but only when it's said by black people_. For it is a sad but true fact that one of the negative legacies of the civil rights movement in this country was that it stole the N-word away from white people (a good thing) and made it the exclusive province of black people (a not-so-good thing). The end result is that when the N-word is used by white people, it means cotton fields, whip-lashings, fire hoses, German shepherds, and Jim Crow. But when it's used by black people, it means rainbows, butterflies, unicorns, and fuzzy bunny slippers.\n\nNothing brought this galactically hypocritical garbage to light more than when an overly intoxicated Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver named Riley Cooper got caught dropping N-bombs by a camera phone at a Kenny Chesney concert: \"I will jump that fence and fight every n***** here, bro.\"\n\nYes, I am appalled too. How a man who sings about strawberry wine and going to restaurants barefoot could cause such an explosion of racial hatred is beyond me. But as for what Riley Cooper actually said, let's go through some facts. Cooper is an idiot and wrong for doing what he did. But he never acted on his threat. He never jumped the fence and fought anybody. For all intents and purposes, it was an ignorant lapse of judgment while drunk (as opposed to Bob Costas's ignorant lapses in judgment, which occur while he's stone-cold sober), and it appeared to be an isolated incident, since nobody on the Eagles roster recalled Cooper using that word before or showing any sign of racial hostility.\n\nThe Eagles fined Cooper, made him publicly apologize for his comments, and then sent him out for sensitivity training. But that wasn't good enough for the sports media's racial flash mob. In fact, it wasn't just the sports media. Michael A. Nutter, the mayor of Philadelphia, took precious time away from running Philly's public school system into the ground to get on his soapbox and push for stronger action against Cooper: \"In a year when we celebrated the great achievements of Jackie Robinson in the movie _42_ , it is truly saddening that racial epithets are still being hurled like baseballs, or by a football player, at the human dignity of African-Americans and others. This incident is a disgrace, and cannot be excused by just paying a fine, as if it were a parking ticket.\"\n\nDon't worry, Mr. Mayor: as someone who has spent years in the locker rooms of professional sports teams, I can assure you that racial epithets are \"hurled like baseballs\" by black players far more than they are by white players. Nutter even went on to lay out exactly how the Eagles could fire Riley Cooper for what he said:\n\nAs the Mayor of this City and an African-American man, I find the remarks made by Riley Cooper repugnant, insensitive and ignorant, and all of us, regardless of race or nationality, should be offended by these comments. I recognize that the private sector is very different than the public sector in terms of rules and procedures, but I would note that in our government, if an executive branch \"at-will\" employee, somewhat similar to Mr. Cooper's status with the Eagles, made such comments, I would insist on a suspension at a minimum and would seriously have to evaluate terminating such an individual from employment with the City.\n\nMichael Wilbon and Dan Patrick, though sports reporters who are supposed to know something about the sports they report, rebuked NFL commissioner Roger Goodell for not doing something he has no power to do: impose an NFL punishment on Cooper. These sorts of disciplinary decisions are left, by the NFL's collecting bargaining agreement, to the teams themselves to decide. But of course that's no reason for reporters like Wilbon and Patrick not to grandstand, especially when the issue is race.\n\nSometimes you have to wonder about the real-world experience of these sports reporters. It's not exactly a secret that the N-word gets tossed around NFL locker rooms like a dirty jock strap, albeit by black players. Yet nothing is ever said by the media\u2014not by Dan Patrick, not by Michael Wilbon, and not by big-city mayors. Yet it was in this case. Why? Not because of the N-word itself, but because of who said it. Riley Cooper's crime wasn't using the N-word; it was that he was white. Is that progress?\n\nWhat was even more convoluted than the sports media's reaction to Riley Cooper was the reaction of some of his teammates. Running back LeSean McCoy wasn't quite so ready to welcome Cooper back with open arms. According to CSNPhilly's Geoff Mosher: \"'Ain't nothing to prove. He said how he felt,' McCoy said. 'He's still a teammate. I'm still going to block for him. I'm still gonna show great effort. Just on a friendship level, and as a person, I can't really respect somebody like that. I think as a team, we need to move past it. There are some things that are going to be hard to work with, to be honest.'\"\n\nReally? That's odd, because McCoy showed no such moral hang-ups about showing \"respect\" for fellow teammate Michael Vick, who had brutally tortured and slaughtered hundreds of defenseless dogs for sport.\n\nNow, to their credit, most of the Eagles don't live in McCoyville. DeSean Jackson, Jason Avant, DeMeco Ryans, and even Michael Vick himself were all able to publicly embrace Cooper and welcome him back to the team without any apparent issues. But McCoy wasn't alone in his moral back-assward-ness. Back in 2009, when Michael Vick was trying to reenter the league, Michael Wilbon wrote the journalistic equivalent of a love letter to Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie in the _Washington Post_. Wilbon called Lurie's signing of Vick after his stint in the federal pen for dog-killing \"the most difficult decision in his professional life,\" and wrote that Lurie had always \"seemed to me to be one of the most thoughtful owners in sports.\"\n\nLurie was clearly, in Wilbon's words, \"conflicted if not outright tortured by the decision, which was playing much better nationally than in Philly.\" There were other owners who might have wanted to sign Vick but, according to Wilbon, those other owners \"didn't have the fortitude to make the call that Lurie did.\" To say that Wilbon is laying it on thick here is an understatement. What he's doing is turning Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie into a hero. Jeffrey Lurie, conflicted from within and persecuted from without by petty, small-minded simpletons who . . . you know . . . don't want to see dog-electrocuters get multimillion-dollar contracts, is an army of one against a nation of seething intolerance. Lurie rose to the occasion and made a decision that no one else had the guts to make.\n\n_Please_. Yes, there were some PETA protesters at Vick's court hearings and there may have been the odd bearded \"Fur Is Evil\" hipster sipping a macchiato outside of Eagles practice, but it took no great courage to sign Michael Vick. Though there was no hotter topic on sports talk radio at the time, there were just as many hosts and callers in favor of Michael Vick's getting a second chance (I was one of them) as there were demanding he be fed to the dogs. So the idea that Lurie was some kind of \"hero\" in all of this is absurd. But the point here is not Jeffrey Lurie, it's what gets people in the New Racism ginned up, and whom they come after and why. Here's Wilbon heaping praise on an owner for taking a chance on a dog killer while at the same time ferociously attacking NFL commissioner Roger Goodell for not coming down harder on Riley Cooper. Priorities? In what kind of whacked-out, crazy world is Michael Vick less repulsive and less in need of forgiveness and mercy than Riley Cooper? In the world of the New Racism, that's where.\n\nAnd does anyone really believe that LeSean McCoy loses respect for every _black_ player on his team who uses the N-word? On the flip side, is there anyone who thinks Michael Wilbon would have written an article praising the courage and fortitude of Jeffrey Lurie if Michael Vick had been white? Of course not. Again, in the New Racism, the crime is not the slur being used but the skin color of the person who uses it. Michael Wilbon doesn't care any more about those dogs than he cares about the N-word (which, as we will see shortly, he says proudly on an almost daily basis). He cares about the identity of who said it and whether that person fits in his New Racism good-old-boy club.\n\nNo story illustrated this more than the Jonathan Martin/Richie Incognito fiasco of 2013. This is a really weird one, folks, so bear with me. In late October 2013, Dolphins tackle Jonathan Martin suddenly left the team, saying he needed to address \"emotional issues.\" For anyone doubting the success of the political correctness/wussification-of-America movement in this country, read that line again: a 6-foot, 5-inch, 320-pound offensive tackle left an NFL football team to deal with \"emotional issues.\" I rest my case.\n\nA week later, the Dolphins suspended fellow offensive lineman Richie Incognito after it allegedly became apparent that the \"emotional issues\" stemmed from Incognito's bullying of Martin. Martin's camp made public a voice message in which Incognito had referred to Martin (who is half-white and half-black) as a \"half-n***** piece of shit.\" Incognito then went on to say that he was going to go after Martin's family, saying, \"I'm going to slap your real mother across the face.\" Then, as if this Taster's Choice moment between bros couldn't get any more heartfelt, Incognito capped it off with this great term of friendly endearment, \"I want to shit in your fucking mouth.\" (Side note: It was awful nice of Incognito to offer to do that for free. I hear there's a guy in lower Manhattan who charges $500 for that.)\n\nAt this point, however much a digression it might seem, I'd like to make my case for bringing back the military draft. Or at least bringing it back for members of the media. Because here's where having a sports media with more guys who have spent some time in the military, or a police department, or a fire department would have been helpful. As someone who has spent time in two of the three above services (U.S. Army and FDNY), I've had several of these kinds of relationships. I had a black friend in the army who told me he was going to beat the \"oppressor\" out of me and do odd things to my skull after I was dead. I then told him I was going to displace him and his whole family like an unwanted band of Brazilian rainforest dwellers. I had a Puerto Rican friend in the fire department who told me to make sure I didn't come to work sick, because then I would be poisoning him the same way my ancestors had poisoned his people by bringing diseases over from Europe. I then made a joke that I can't share with you because the racial rules are different for me than they are for him. But the point is he laughed. The bigger point is that I would have put my life on the line for him, and he would have done the same for me; same thing with my friend in the army.\n\nBack and forth it would go, and, especially in the army, all of it occurred over a lot of beers and more than a few laughs. The reality is that in jobs and professions where you get your hands dirty, there's a different code of etiquette. It's an untaught, unwritten, yet mutually understood language rooted in filth, violence, sexual perversion, and racial angst that borders on the insane to anyone on the outside looking or listening in, yet one that preserves some sense of sanity and balance in a world that has very little sanity and balance. It's that way in the military, the police department, and the fire department, and evidently it's that way in the NFL as well. It's the secret language of men. But it might as well be Swahili to our sports media, the vast majority of whom have never held a job like that. Not that I'm blaming them for it; if you went straight to college and straight from college to a career, good for you. God bless. But part of the job of being in the media is to at least attempt to understand the world and the people that you're reporting on, not to try and judge it based solely on what makes sense to you in your own worldview. But this is precisely what the leftist sports media do.\n\nIt took me all of three minutes after listening to the voice messages that Incognito had left for Martin to realize that, although it had obviously gone very wrong for some reason at some point, there was a relationship between Incognito and Martin. They were friends. It took the racial flash mob in the sports media all of three minutes to try and turn this into a referendum on bullying and racial politics. They began asking how we can change the culture of NFL locker rooms and calling for the ousting or suspending of virtually every coach and executive in Miami. The flash mob had a problem though. Jonathan Martin was a terrible \"victim.\" At first he didn't speak at all. Then when he did, his few public statements were confusing and not specific. The pre-draft reports about Martin's being \"sensitive\" started coming out as well, which was a major reason why a lot of teams passed on him.\n\nThen Richie Incognito started releasing his own text messages from his correspondence with Martin, over a thousand of them, including one where Martin said he was going to send someone over to Incognito's house to rape him with \"sandpaper condoms\" and ejaculate on his face (in the language of men, this is how we say \"Hello\"). The messages Incognito released proved even more that if there was \"abuse\" or \"bullying\" going on here, it was a two-way street. Then another funny thing happened: the \"barbarians\" fought back. The NFL players who shared the same locker room, and the same unwritten language of men that Martin and Incognito had shared, started fighting back against the sports media's attempts to intrude upon and radically alter a world they had no business trying to change.\n\nFormer Dolphin Lydon Murtha, who played with both Incognito and Martin, wrote a piece on the Monday Morning Quarterback page of SI.com that fully explained why Incognito had invested so much time in Martin and why their relationship was as complex as it was. According to Murtha, Martin was very \"standoffish\" when he first joined the team, and as a team leader, Incognito was tasked with bringing Martin \"out of his shell.\" But, according to Murtha, bringing Martin out of his shell was no easy task:\n\nThat's where Incognito ran into a problem. Personally, I know when a guy can't handle razzing. You can tell that some guys just aren't built for it. Incognito doesn't have that filter. He was the jokester on the team, and he joked with everybody from players to coaches. That voicemail he sent came from a place of humor, but where he really screwed up was using the N-word. That, I cannot condone, and it's probably the biggest reason he's not with the team right now. _Odd thing is, I've heard Incognito call Martin the same thing to his face in meetings and all Martin did was laugh_ [emphasis added]. Many more worse things were said about others in the room from all different parties. It's an Animal House. Now Incognito's being slandered as a racist and a bigot, and unfortunately that's never going to be wiped clean because of all the wrong he's done people in his past. But if you really know who Richie is, he's a really good, kind man and far from a racist.\n\nThis article should have been written by a member of the sports media. But no member of the sports media was interested in digging deeper to find out the truth of the relationship between Incognito and Martin, because as soon as the N-bomb was dropped, the liberal sports media had the story they wanted. Black players, incidentally, seemed just as offended by Jonathan Martin for not sticking up for himself as they were by anything Incognito said. On WFAN in New York, the Giants' Antrel Rolle let fly at Martin: \"Was Richie Incognito wrong? Absolutely. But I think the other guy is just as much to blame as Richie, because he allowed it to happen. At this level, you're a man. You're not a little boy. You're not a freshman in college. You're a man.\"\n\nIt's an unwritten rule that in order for the media to truly make someone a victim, that person has to be a sympathetic figure\u2014someone you not only identify with, but feel sorry for. Thanks to Richie Incognito's lawyers and players like Lydon Murtha (who were the only people who did any real reporting on this story), the sports media had a very hard time turning Jonathan Martin into a \"victim\" and instead left him looking like a weak, confused wimp who might have been partly culpable for the over-the-top razzing by Incognito. So instead the media shifted to talking about the toxic culture of the Dolphins locker room in particular and NFL locker rooms in general, which was just as well for their storyline about the need for progressive reform of an overly manly sport.\n\nIn November 2013, the N-word came up again, this time in basketball after a scuffle on the court involving the Clippers and the Thunder. Clippers forward Matt Barnes, who was ejected during the fight, shared a few thoughts on Twitter: \"I love my teammates like family, but I'm DONE standing up for these n[******]! All this shit does is cost me money,\" Barnes wrote before deleting the tweet.\n\nInstead of sparking universal outrage and condemnation from the sports media (as it would if a white player had tweeted this), the tweet made the flash mob decide that this would be an awesome time to debate who can use the N-word. On _Inside the NBA_ on TNT, Charles Barkley laid out the case:\n\nI'm a black man. I use the N-word. I'm going to continue to use the N-word with my black friends, with my white friends. They are my friends. What I do with my black friends is not up to white America to dictate to me what's appropriate and inappropriate. What we say in the locker room, the language we use sometime it's homophobic, sometime it's sexist, and a lot of times it's racist. White America don't get to dictate how me and Shaq talk to each other. And they have been trying to infiltrate themselves saying, \"Well, you guys use it. It's in rap music.\" No, no, no, no, no. That's not the same.\n\nUm, actually it is. Barkley can tell himself whatever he wants. But the word means the same thing no matter who says it. And Barnes didn't confine his use of the N-word to the locker room. He tweeted it out in public. Had he used it in the locker room only, as he and his teammates probably do ninety-seven times a day, nobody would have reported it. But there's a bigger point to be made here: Who exactly are these white people who are trying to \"infiltrate themselves\"? Riley Cooper was denounced by white people every bit as much, if not more, than he was by black people. Even Richie Incognito's friend Lydon Murtha (who is white) said he shouldn't have used that word. Who are all these white people out there who are just _dying_ to use the N-word? It just seems like there are, because the media only report it when white people use the N-word. The other eleventy billion times the word gets used, it's used by minorities, and normally to great financial benefit by said minorities.\n\nLil Wayne, who had the gall to criticize Riley Cooper on Twitter, can hardly utter three words in any of his songs without dropping an N-bomb, and he's made himself a millionaire while doing it. If the media were to report every time a black person said the N-word, we would need an N-word channel.\n\nBarkley wasn't alone in his take on who had exclusive rights on the N-word. Also on _Inside the NBA_ , Shaquille O'Neal weighed in: \"Chuck makes a good point. In the Ebonic culture we have programmed ourselves to use the word positive. We have G14 classification to say it to each other. But when we say it to each other, believe it or not, it's in the positive sense.\"\n\nI call BS on this as well. There are plenty of derogatory uses of the N-word among black people, especially when someone uses the word \"house\" before it. I watched two guys in the army get in a knockdown, drag-out fight after one guy called the other that particular name. They would definitely have disagreed with Shaq on that one. But again, Shaq's point is consistent with the New Racist mantra: When one black guy calls another black guy the N-word, it means gin blossoms and show ponies. When a white guy does it, it means a barracuda armed with a machete and herpes. The worst part about all this is that this debate took place on an NBA show that was carrying a live game. Can you imagine tuning in trying to watch a game and having to sit through this?\n\nAt least Michael Wilbon had the decency to handle his indecency on an actual opinion show. After _Pardon the Interruption_ cohost Tony Kornheiser asked Wilbon about Barnes's public use of the N-word, the leader of the racial flash mob went full monty: \"People can be upset with me if they want; I, like a whole lot of people, use the N-word all day, every day, my whole life.\"\n\nHit the brakes for a second. Follow me on a short trip back to Normalsville, a nice place where things make sense, Russell Brand does not exist, and we don't tolerate bullshit political correctness. Can you imagine if a white broadcaster for ESPN, or any other major sports network, had gotten up there and freely admitted to using the N-word \"all day, every day\" of his \"whole life\"? This is a word that is deemed so offensive by Wilbon's employer, among others, that they won't even print it anymore. It gets the same letter followed by dash, dash, dash, treatment that the F-word and countless other expletives have gotten for decades. And here's Wilbon, freely, check that, _proudly_ boasting to have used the word every day for his whole life, with no fear of retribution whatsoever\u2014practically daring ESPN to do something about it. That is breathtaking. Even Kornheiser seemed taken aback by Wilbon's brashness, asking Wilbon if NBA commissioner David Stern (who is white) needed to step in and ban players from publicly using the N-word. Wilbon bristled: \"I have a problem with\u2014and excuse me, here\u2014white people framing the discussion for the use of the N-word. They better not sit there like plantation owners and tell black people how to use the language that was forced on us!\"\n\nAnd boom goes the dynamite. This is what passes for \"sports\" coverage in the sports media during the age of the New Racism: a highly paid \"analyst\" making an analogy between a liberal, Jewish commissioner and a Southern plantation owner, and a league of millionaire black players and slaves. But look at the shift in direction from when Riley Cooper used the N-word to when Matt Barnes did. When Riley Cooper said it, Wilbon was enraged at NFL commissioner Roger Goodell for not dropping the hammer on Cooper:\n\nI think what is becoming to me a bigger story and more important story and a sadder story is Roger Goodell and his lightweight reaction to this. This is a chance for the Commissioner who likes to use the bully pulpit to just sorta smack people around the head . . . [and] threaten to suspend people. \"I'm a tough guy. I'm a law and order Commissioner.\" He's a lightweight. I am beyond disappointed in Roger Goodell. I am angry at Roger Goodell because Roger Goodell is a smart man. I covered the NFL for a while. I got to know Roger on his way up. And for Roger Goodell to hide behind procedure is so lame, it's unspeakably lame. . . .\n\nThe league has to take action. You're the CEO of the NFL. And you like to remind everybody of that. You're bad bad Leroy Brown. You like to wear it on people's noses publicly. And when the time comes, when something happens like this and your league is 70 percent black and you don't understand that people are _angry_. . . . I'm much angrier at Roger Goodell than I am at Riley Cooper. . . . [Cooper] is in the process of getting it, and he's going to have to live with the consequences. Roger Goodell is a grown man and just sort of hides behind \"well the team handles this.\" _Please_! That is just so borderline just gutless. It is unspeakable to me what he has done.\n\nBut when Matt Barnes (a black guy) says the very same word, Wilbon gets on a different high horse and proclaims: \"They better not sit there like plantation owners and tell black people how to use the language that was forced on us!\"\n\nUnreal. While in the thick of the Riley Cooper episode, I was debating with a black caller who couldn't understand why I was so passionate about making the point that it wasn't okay for either white _or black_ people to use the N-word. Why did I care so much? he asked. I don't know. Maybe as a talk show host I believe in the power of words. Maybe I believe that if somebody gets called a demeaning word \"all day, every day\" then sooner or later they start to believe it. Maybe I grew up in a city that was majority black and crime-ridden and I think that word has something to do with the cultural rot and moral decay that you find in so many inner-city neighborhoods.\n\nHere's what I know: the history of slavery is a sad and ugly one, but it's not a uniquely American history, and the history of slavery is not a uniquely black one either. Before Christianity, slavery was pretty much universal, east and west, north and south. In the ancient world, Egyptians kept Jews as slaves, the Greeks kept slaves, the Romans kept slaves, the Persians and Gauls kept slaves. Everyone did until slavery was essentially abolished in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages. The slave trade to the New World colonies came later, but even then, Africans practiced slavery, the Indians of the New World practiced slavery, and more than a million white, Christian Europeans were enslaved by Muslims.\n\nGiven all that history, think about this: How many Jews call themselves whatever Pharaoh's thugs used to call them? How many people even remember if their Greek or French ancestors were slaves? How many white, Christian Europeans call themselves kaffirs or infidels or any of the other names that their Islamic slave masters used? The answer is none. Point being, if those cultures could rise above and cast aside the hate language they were subjected to, why can't black people? Why is it so important to keep the N-word? So Lil Wayne can sell records? So Michael Wilbon doesn't have to expand his vocabulary? Sorry, I realize it's a crime under the rule of the New Racism to care more about the self-worth and future of black kids than about Russell Simmons's bank account, but I do. Guilty as charged.\n\nWhite people aren't angry with black people for using the N-word because they want to use it or because they want to be like \"plantation owners\" telling black people how \"to use language that was forced\" on them. It's the polar opposite of that. White people are angry because they na\u00efvely believed we were all fighting for the same thing, which was banishing slurs like that entirely, no matter who said it, only to rather rudely be made aware that they were wrong. Instead, it turns out that what we were fighting for was the New Racism, the permanent preservation of a race-mongering industry, dedicated to making whites feel perpetual guilt and self-loathing while blacks are made to feel like perpetual victims. As sportswriter Mike Wise, a lone voice of reason in this debate, wrote in the _Washington Post_ after Wilbon's hideous _Pardon the Interruption_ performance: \"When you think you're fighting for a less hostile, less confusing and more mutually respectful country for our children to live in and then you find out your idea of a shared purpose wasn't shared by people you like and respect, a real hopelessness sets in.\"\n\nIt's the New Racism that is the factory of that hopelessness. Whether it's in the music industry that benefits tremendously from the use of slurs or the sports entertainment industry that craves race controversies for ratings, \"racism\" has become a business that peddles denigration as its stock and trade, and the sports media are among its largest franchises. Responding to Wilbon's statement that he had a problem with \"white people framing the discussion for the use of the N-word,\" Wise wrote, \"And I have a problem with anyone of any ethnicity telling me that my values and beliefs about eradicating slurs from public and private conversation are less important than having agency over them for personal use\u2014no matter who it hurts, including millions of African Americans who want the word abolished and should have just as much say.\"\n\nAmen. I am a free man, and you are a free man or woman, made so by the blood, sweat, and tears of men black and white who fought to end slavery in the Civil War and by men and women who fought to end segregation, and whose sacrifice absolved us of the guilt that accompanied both. I won't dishonor them and what they fought and died for by living my life in perpetual guilt over crimes that had nothing to do with me. Nor should any black person live as though he or she is an eternal victim of slavery, which was abolished a hundred and fifty years ago, or of segregation, which was torn down fifty years ago.\n\nWe should all be students of history, but not prisoners of it. Time has a funny way of moving on, and so should we. We should learn the lessons of history, one of which is _not_ to refight the wars, hatreds, and blood feuds of yore. Yet that's the biggest crime of the New Racism: not just the dishonoring of the memories of those brave souls who fought for freedom in the past, but the depriving of generations of current kids from the true sense of freedom so dearly bought that is their birthright.\nAFTERWORD\n\nCan anything be done about the liberal bias and politicization of sports media?\n\nThe short answer is yes.\n\nBut we need to be realistic. We're never going to get rid of ESPN, no matter how biased or obnoxious it gets. Just as the new media never did away with the mainstream media, we're never going to get rid of the dominant liberal sports media; they're simply too well entrenched.\n\nBut what we can do, as with this book, is highlight the failures and bias of the liberal sports media, erode their position of authority, and provide millions of underserved sports fans with real, honest sports reporting.\n\nAccording to a Gallup poll from the summer of 2014, only 18 percent of the American public has \"confidence\" in the news they get from television. That's down from 46 percent in 1993. Truth-tellers like former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg, author of the influential bestseller _Bias_ , helped expose the truth about the liberal media. Entrepreneurs, many of them on the political Right, have set up alternatives to the mainstream liberal media. These alternatives, like Fox News, try to provide better, \"fair and balanced\" reporting, including coverage of stories that the liberal media try to ignore.\n\nThat same thing can happen, on a smaller scale, with the sports media. Conservative and nonpolitical sports fans want to be able to talk about the teams they love without having their worldview besmirched and denigrated by a bunch of wannabe Chis Matthewses and Rachel Maddows. Breitbart.com has already launched a great sports website that is not only doing great reporting and analysis on sports but confronting left-wing mainstream sports media bias every day. Conservatives are natural sports fans, because they love competition, revel in American traditions and history (including sports), and appreciate individual hard work and striving for greatness. The demand from conservative sports fans for real sports coverage, liberated from leftist agendas and politically correct spin, is palpable and growing.\n\nThe sports world has become politicized, and there's probably nothing that can undo that. Now that the sanctity of our once pristine and unviolated sports sanctum has been breached, our responsibility is to do something about it. It's not something that you or I, in our innocence, signed up to do. But if we want real sports reporting and commentary that's accurate and fair, if we want to thwart an arrogant liberal media that want to remake sports, our country, and ourselves, then we need to shut off the bad guys and tune into the good guys. With the decisions that you and I make, a better sports media can start today.\nACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nYears ago I asked God to give me at least one guide, at least one great friend, at least one confidant, at least one rock that I could lean on, and at least one great love. What I didn't know is that He would combine them all in the same person, my wife, Lara.\n\nAs for our son Mitchell, you're the greatest thing I've ever seen. You've single-handedly restored my hope for the world by representing everything that is good about it. Your presence here is living proof that this place is still worth fighting for, and fight I will.\n\nThe list of those deserving acknowledgment is far too long, but here's a condensed version: Daniel Flynn for going out of his way to help and advise on this project and others; the awesome editing duo of Harry Crocker and Katharine Spence for making my ranting sound eloquent; Norma and Don Abrams for substitute parenting and support; and Michael Mayhew for being a great patriot and a great friend.\n\nAlso, special thanks to the program directors I've had the pleasure of working with and for, especially Bryan Erickson and Craig Larson; the great Michael Berry for giving me my first talk show; Mark Passwaters, Gerald Sanchez, and Brian McDonald for being great and loyal friends; Kenneth Fletcher for being the \"Mighty Listener\"; and to God, Whom I owe for everything.\n\nAnd for any left off this list, I'll make sure to remember you for the sequel: _Bias in the Booth 2: Even More Biased!_\nNOTES\n\nCHAPTER ONE: LANDING ON TRAYVON\n\n. Michael Wallace, \"The Heat Stand Tall for Trayvon Martin,\" _Miami Heat Index_ (blog), ESPN.com, March 23, 2012, <http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/miamiheat/post/_/id/13046/the-heat-stand-tall-for-trayvon-martin>.\n\n. D. Kevin McNeir, \"Crime Rate Drops but Murder Rate Now Five-Times the U.S. Average,\" _Miami Times_ , October 31, 2013, <http://miamitimesonline.com/news/2013/oct/31/crime-rate-drops-murder-rate-now-five-times-us-ave/>.\n\n. Alexia Cooper and Erica L. Smith, _Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980\u20132008_ , Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, November 2011, pp. 3, 13. Available online at <http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf>.\n\n. Dave Hyde, \"Heat's Photo a Powerful Statement,\" _Sun Sentinel_ , March 24, 2012, <http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2012-03-24/sports/fl-hyde-miami-heat-hoodies-0325-20120324_1_wade-and-james-lebron-james-tweeted-voices>.\n\n. Benjamin Hochman, \"LeBron's Message to the Masses Refreshing,\" _Denver Post_ , March 25, 2012, <http://www.denverpost.com/hochman/ci_20250341/lebrons-message-masses-refreshing>.\n\n. Jason Whitlock, \"LeBron, Wade Show a Courageous Side,\" FoxSports.com, updated July 24, 2014, <http://msn.foxsports.com/nba/story/LeBron-James-Dwyane-Wade-Miami-Heat-honor-Trayvon-Martin-shot-to-death-032412>.\n\n. Etan Thomas, \"Athletes Take a Stand for President Obama,\" _The Root DC Live_ (blog), _Washington Post_ , August 28, 2012, <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/therootdc/post/president-obama-feels-the-love-from-a-new-generation-of-black-athletes/2012/08/28/4a392436-f143-11e1-a612-3cfc842a6d89_blog.html>.\n\n. \"Jesse Jackson: Dan Gilbert Sees LeBron James as 'Runaway Slave,'\" Huffington Post, July 11, 2010, updated May 25, 2011, <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/11/jesse-jackson-dan-gilbert_n_642363.html>; and \"Did Dan Gilbert Treat LeBron James like a 'Slave Master'? Is Mel Gibson Racist?,\" YouTube video, excerpt from July 12, 2010, episode of _The Joy Behar Show_ , uploaded by Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, July 13, 2010, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKbxYBPzrR0>.\n\n. Thomas, \"Athletes Take a Stand for President Obama.\"\n\n. _State of the Union with Candy Crowley_ , July 14, 2013, CNN.com, transcript, <http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1307/14/sotu.02.html>.\n\n. Susan Jones, \"Liberal Law Prof: Zimmerman Case 'Should Never Have Been Brought in the First Place,'\" CNSNews.com, July 15, 2013, <http://cnsnews.com/news/article/liberal-law-prof-zimmerman-case-should-never-have-been-brought-first-place>.\n\n. Dave Zirin, \"'America's Justice System Is a Joke': Athletes Respond to Trayvon Martin Verdict,\" _Nation_ , July 14, 2013, <http://www.thenation.com/blog/175264/america-justice-system-joke-athletes-respond-trayvon-martin-verdict#>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Benjamin Chance, \"Flashback: ESPN Abandoned Social Media Policy for Trayvon Martin Case,\" Breitbart Sports, Breitbart.com, July 16, 2013, <http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Sports/2013/07/16/FLASHBACK-ESPN-Abandoned-Social-Media-Policy-for-Trayvon-Martin-Case>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Lisa Suhay, \"Should NFL Punish St. Louis Rams for 'Hands Up, Don't Shoot' Protest?,\" _Christian Science Monitor_ , Yahoo! News UK and Ireland, December 1, 2014, <https://uk.news.yahoo.com/nfl-punish-st-louis-rams-hands-dont-shoot-185555974.html#i3Zg9VM>.\n\n. \"Fisher: Rams Players Exercised Free Speech, Won't Be Disciplined,\" FoxSports.com, December 11, 2014, <http://www.foxsports.com/nfl/story/st-louis-rams-ferguson-jeff-fisher-tavon-austin-brian-quick-jared-cook-stedman-bailey-120114>.\n\n. Kevin Demoff, the executive vice president of the St. Louis Rams, announced this on Twitter. See the November 30, 2014, tweet here: <https://twitter.com/kdemoff/status/539219554769960960>.\n\n. \"Sir Charles Barkley: The Last American Who Can Speak His Mind on Obama and Ferguson without Blowback,\" transcript from the December 1, 2014, episode of _The Rush Limbaugh Show_ , <http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/12/01/sir_charles_barkley_the_last_american_who_can_speak_his_mind_on_obama_and_ferguson_without_blowback>.\n\n. Tom Pelissero, \"Dolphins' Don Jones Fined for Tweets about Michael Sam,\" _USA Today_ , May 12, 2014, <http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/dolphins/2014/05/11/don-jones-fined-for-michael-sam-tweets/8985297/>.\n\n. Martin Rogers, \"Niners CB Says Openly Gay Players Would Not Be Welcomed on the Team,\" Yahoo! Sports, January 30, 2013, <http://sports.yahoo.com/news/nfl--report--niners-cb-says-openly-gay-players-would-not-be-welcomed-on-the-team-190346715.html>.\n\n. Cam Inman \"Culliver Says He Nor His Teammates Want Gay Teammate,\" _49ers Hot Read_ (blog), MercuryNews.com, January 30, 2013, <http://blogs.mercurynews.com/49ers/2013/01/30/report-culliver-says-gay-teammates-would-not-be-welcome/>.\n\n. \"Adam Silver Comments on 'I Can't Breathe' Pre-Game Warm-up Trend,\" TheSource.com, December 8, 2014, <http://thesource.com/2014/12/08/adam-silver-comments-on-i-cant-breathe-pre-game-warm-up-trend/>.\n\n. Mike Wells, \"O'Neal's Elbow Wrap Costs 5k,\" IndyStar.com, November 12, 2006, <http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061112/SPORTS04/611120445/1062/NLETTER01>.\n\nCHAPTER TWO: THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND SPORT\n\n. Owen Ullmann, \"Voices: Arizona's Anti-Gay Bill Is Shameful,\" _USA Today_ , February 24, 2014, <http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/24/voices-column-on-arizona-anti-gay-bill/5775081/>.\n\n. \"Arizona Anti-Gay Bill: Second Look,\" letters to the editor, _USA Today_ , February 27, 2014, <http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/02/27/arizona-anti-gay-bill-second-look-your-say/5880025/>.\n\n. \"4 Things to Know about Arizona's 'Anti-Gay' Bill,\" _USA Today_ , video, February 26, 2014, <http://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/nation/2014/02/26/5830831/>.\n\n. Mike Florio, \"MLB Issues Strong Statement regarding Proposed Arizona Anti-Gay Law,\" ProFootballTalk.com, February 26, 2014, <http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/02/26/mlb-issues-strong-statement-regarding-arizona-anti-gay-law/>.\n\n. Florio, \"Arizona Governor Vetoes Anti-Gay Law, Clearing Path for Super Bowl XLIX,\" ProFootballTalk.com, February 26, 2014, <http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/02/26/arizona-governor-vetoes-anti-gay-law/>.\n\n. David Steele, \"Super Bowl Could Nix Arizona If It Doesn't Back Off Anti-Gay Law,\" _Sporting News_ , updated February 25, 2014, <http://www.sportingnews.com/nfl/story/2014-02-25/super-bowl-arizona-anti-gay-law-discrimination-deny-service-nfl-change-site-game-location>.\n\n. Napp Nazworth, \"Issue Analysis: Arizona Bill Does Not Give Businesses License to Discriminate against Gays,\" _Christian Post_ , February 24, 2014, <http://www.christianpost.com/news/issue-analysis-arizona-bill-does-not-give-businesses-license-to-discriminate-against-gays-115093/>.\n\n. Paul Mirengoff, \"No, This Is Not Jim Crow for Gays\u2014Understanding Arizona SB 1062,\" _Powerline_ (blog), February 25, 2014, <http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/02/no-this-is-not-jim-crow-for-gays-understanding-arizona-s-b-1062.php>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Daniel J. Flynn, \"ESPN Overboard: Kornheiser Likens AZ Bill to Nazism,\" Breitbart Sports, Breitbart.com, February 27, 2014, <http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Sports/2014/02/27/Kornheiser-Likens-AZ-Bill-to-Nazism>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Noel Sheppard, \"Sports Radio Host Calls Tim Tebow's 'Lily White' NFL Draft Party a 'Nazi Rally,'\" NewsBusters.org, April 24, 2010, <http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/04/24/sports-radio-host-calls-tim-tebows-lily-white-nfl-draft-party-nazi-ra>.\n\n. Florio, \"Russell Wilson Says He Was a 'Kind of a Bad Kid' Until He Found Religion,\" ProFootballTalk.com, October 17, 2013, <http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/10/17/russell-wilson-says-he-was-a-kind-of-a-bad-kid-until-he-found-religion/>.\n\n. Daniel Blake, \"Gabby Douglas Praises God; Christian Gymnast Thankful After Winning All-Around Gold at Olympics 2012,\" _Christian Post_ , August 2, 2012, <http://www.christianpost.com/news/gabby-douglas-praises-god-christian-gymnast-thankful-after-winning-all-around-gold-at-olympics-2012-79386/>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Matthew Dicker, \"U.S. Women's Gymnastics Olympic Team 2012: Showcasing Effect Fab 5 Has on U.S.,\" BleacherReport.com, August 4, 2012, <http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1284431-us-womens-gymnastics-olympic-team-2012-showcasing-effect-fab-5-has-on-us>.\n\n. Matt Yoder, \"ESPN Dives Headfirst into the War on Christmas,\" AwfulAnnouncing.com, December 13, 2013, <http://awfulannouncing.com/2013/espn-dives-headfirst-into-the-war-on-christmas.html>.\n\n. The American Family Association sent out an \"action alert\" regarding the Craig James story, part of which is still available online at \"Fox Sports Fires Sportscaster for His Christian Faith,\" FamilyandRelations.com, September 26, 2013, <http://www.familyandrelations.com/family-and-affairs/fox-sports-fires-sportscaster-for-his-christian-faith.html>.\n\n. Barry Horn, \"Craig James' Anti-Gay Stance during Political Campaign Reason for His Quick Exit from Fox Sports SW,\" SportsDayDFW, September 6, 2013, <http://collegesportsblog.dallasnews.com/2013/09/craig-james-anti-gay-stance-during-political-campaign-reason-for-his-quick-exit-from-fssw-college-football-duties.html/>.\n\n. Ben Shapiro, \"Exclusive: Broadcaster Fired for Opposing Same-Sex Marriage Blasts Fox Sports for Religious Discrimination,\" Breitbart Sports, Breitbart.com, September 23, 2013, <http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Sports/2013/09/23/Craig-Jones-Fox-Sports-gay-marriage>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Horn, \"Craig James' Anti-Gay Stance.\"\n\n. Shapiro, \"Exclusive: Broadcaster Fired for Opposing Same-Sex Marriage.\"\n\n. Richard Langford, \"Jason Whitlock Shows True Colors on Twitter with Lame Jeremy Lin Tweet,\" BleacherReport.com, February 14, 2014, <http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1066390-jason-whitlock-shows-true-colors-on-twitter-with-lame-jeremy-lin-tweet>.\n\n. Scott Whitlock, \"The Worst of the Worst: A Look Back at Keith Olbermann's Most Outrageous Quotes,\" NewsBusters.org, January 24, 2011, <http://newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitlock/2011/01/24/worst-worst-look-back-keith-olbermanns-most-outrageous-quotes>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. ESPN.com News Services, \"Ron Brown: 'Views Stand the Same,'\" ESPN.com, May 8, 2012, <http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/7896560/nebraska-cornhuskers-assistant-coach-ron-brown-says-job-safe-curb-anti-gay-stance>.\n\n. Gene Wojciechowski, \"Ron Brown Confusing Faith with Rights,\" ESPN.com, April 27, 2012, <http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/7863307/nebraska-cornhuskers-assistant-ron-brown-confusing-faith-rights>.\n\n. Paul Wilson, \"Why Are Christian Athletes Still Being Crucified by Sports Media?,\" FoxNews.com, September 5, 2012, <http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/09/05/why-are-christian-athletes-still-being-crucified-by-sports-media/>.\n\n. Anthony Witrado, \"Torii Hunter Would Be 'Uncomfortable' with Having a Gay Teammate,\" _Sporting News_ , updated December 30, 2012, <http://www.sportingnews.com/mlb/story/2012-12-30/torii-hunter-comments-gay-teammate-detroit-tigers-mlb-locker-room>.\n\n. Dayn Perry, \"Torii Hunter: Having Gay Teammate Would Be 'Difficult,'\" CBSSports.com, December 30, 2012, <http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/eye-on-baseball/21474369/torii-hunter-having-gay-teammate-would-be->.\n\n. Matthew Philbin, \"'Glee' on the Gridiron?,\" NewsBusters.com, March 20, 2013, <http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-philbin/2013/03/20/glee-gridiron>.\n\n. Gayle Falkenthal, \"Manny Pacquiao Takes a Punch over Gay Marriage Remarks,\" Communities, _Washington Times_ , May 16, 2012, <http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/ringside-seat/2012/may/16/manny-pacquiao-takes-punch-over-gay-marriage-remar/>.\n\n. \"Manny Pacquiao against Same-Sex Marriage but Never Said Gay People 'Must Be Put to Death,'\" Huffington Post, May 16, 2012, <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/16/manny-pacquiao-gay-marriage-leviticus-examiner_n_1521747.html>.\n\n. Twitchy staff, \"Lefties Call for Nike to Drop Manny Pacquiaofor 'Homophobic' Remarks He _Never Made_ ; Update: Pacquiao Banned from LA Mall for Life,\" Twitchy.com, May 16, 2012, <http://twitchy.com/2012/05/16/lefties-call-for-nike-to-drop-manny-pacquiao-for-homophobic-remarks-he-never-made/>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Manny Pacquiao against Same-Sex Marriage but Never Said Gay People 'Must Be Put to Death,'\" Huffington Post.\n\n. Falkenthal, \"Manny Pacquiao Takes a Punch over Gay Marriage Remarks.\"\n\n. Twitchy staff, \"Lefties Call for Nike to Drop Manny Pacquiao.\"\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Laurel Fantauzzo, \"An Open Letter to Manny Pacquiao from a Gay Filipina American,\" _Grantland_ (blog), May 17, 2012, <http://grantland.com/features/an-open-letter-manny-pacquiao-gay-filipina-american-concerning-champion-boxer-recent-comments-gay-marriage/>.\n\n. Matthew Balan, \"ESPN to Manny Pacquiao: Stop Defending 'Cruel, Untrue' Catholic Church,\" NewsBusters.com, May 19, 2012, <http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-balan/2012/05/19/espn-manny-pacquiao-stop-defending-cruel-untrue-catholic-church>.\n\n. Daniel King, \"'Keep God Out of Football'\u2014Fifa Tells Brazil's Soccer Superstars,\" _Daily Mail_ , July 12, 2009, <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1199121/Brazils-football-superstars-told-Keep-faith-football.html>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Fifa Allows Wearing of Head Covers for Religious Reasons,\" BBC.com, March 1, 2014, <http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/football/26398297>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Jer\u00e9 Longman, \"For Lolo Jones, Everything Is Image,\" _New York Times_ , August 4, 2012, <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/sports/olympics/olympian-lolo-jones-draws-attention-to-beauty-not-achievement.html?_r=0>.\n\n. John Branch, \"NFL Prospect Michael Sam Proudly Says What Teammates Knew: He's Gay,\" _New York Times_ , February 10, 2014, <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/10/sports/michael-sam-college-football-star-says-he-is-gay-ahead-of-nfl-draft.html>.\n\n. \"Michael Sam Meets with Dallas Cowboys,\" YouTube video, 2:51, excerpt from September 3, 2014, episode of ESPN's _First Take_ , uploaded by \"ESPN1stTake,\" September 3, 2014, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_Xx6aqRhmo#t=21>.\n\n. Al Weaver, \"Report: NFL Officials Asked Teams to Consider Signing Michael Sam to Practice Squad,\" Daily Caller, September 4, 2014, <http://dailycaller.com/2014/09/04/report-nfl-officials-asked-teams-to-consider-signing-michael-sam-to-practice-squad/>.\n\nCHAPTER THREE: KNAVES ON THE WARPATH\n\n. Sarah Kogod, \"Bob Costas on Redskins Name: 'It's an Insult, a Slur,'\" _Washington Post_ , October 13, 2013, <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/dc-sports-bog/wp/2013/10/13/bob-costas-on-redskins-name-its-an-insult-a-slur/>.\n\n. Associated Press, \"UND OK to Drop Fighting Sioux Name,\" ESPN.com, June 14, 2012, <http://espn.go.com/college-sports/story/_/id/8045554/north-dakota-residents-vote-let-school-scrap-fighting-sioux-nickname>.\n\n. Associated Press, \"How Many Native Americans Think 'Redskins' Is a Slur?,\" Washington.CBSLocal.com, October 8, 2013, <http://washington.cbslocal.com/2013/10/08/how-many-native-americans-think-redskins-is-a-slur/>.\n\n. \"Letter from Washington Redskins Owner Dan Snyder to Fans,\" _Washington Post_ , October 9, 2013, <http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/letter-from-washington-redskins-owner-dan-snyder-to-fans/2013/10/09/e7670ba0-30fe-11e3-8627-c5d7de0a046b_story.html>.\n\n. \"Dan Patrick: Owner Snyder Will Change Redskins Name,\" Breitbart Sports, Breitbart.com, October 14, 2013, <http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Sports/2013/10/14/Dan-Patrick-Snyder-Will-Change-Name>.\n\n. Erik Brady, \"Daniel Snyder Says Redskins Will Never Change Name,\" _USA Today_ , May 10, 2013, <http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/redskins/2013/05/09/washington-redskins-daniel-snyder/2148127/>.\n\n. \"The Fighting Whities\u2014American Morning with Paula Zahn, March 13, 2002,\" YouTube video, excerpt from March 13, 2002, episode of CNN's _American Morning_ , uploaded by \"Countdown Fan,\" December 22, 2011, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_mzZRX-JVQ>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Clarence Page, \"Fightin' Whities Mascot Raises a Little Awareness, a Little Cash,\" SeattlePi, March 18, 2002, <http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Fightin-Whities-mascot-raises-a-little-awarness-1083127.php>.\n\n. Dylan Gwinn, \"Why Chief Wahoo's Caucasian Brother Doesn't Bother White People,\" Breitbart Sports, Breitbart.com, August 18, 2014, <http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Sports/2014/08/18/Hail-to-the-Chief>.\n\n. Peter Edward, \"'Caucasians' T-Shirt Mocking Cleveland Indians Becomes Hot Seller on Reserves,\" _Toronto Star_ , July 29, 2014, <http://www.thestar.com/sports/2014/07/29/caucasians_tshirt_mocking_cleveland_indians_becomes_hot_seller_on_reserves.html>.\n\n. Craig Calcaterra, \"'Caucasians' T-Shirts Are Hot Sellers on Canadian Indian Reservations,\" _Hardball Talk_ (blog), NBCSports.com, July 29, 2014, <http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/07/29/caucasians-t-shirts-are-hot-sellers-on-canadian-indian-reservations/>.\n\n. Felicia Fonseca, \"Judge Dismisses Charges against Navajo President,\" _News from Indian Country_ , February 2011, <http://www.indiancountrynews.com/news/9-news-from-through-out-indian-country/11042-judge-dismisses-charges-against-navajo-president>.\n\n. Barry Petchesky, \"Disgraced, Soon-to-Be-Former-Navajo Nation President Attends 'Skins Game,\" _Deadspin_ (blog), October 12, 2014, <http://deadspin.com/disgraced-soon-to-be-former-navajo-nation-president-at-1645509844>.\n\n. Daniel J. Flynn, \"Navajo Nation President Watches Redskins Game with Dan Snyder,\" Breitbart Sports, Breitbart.com, October 13, 2014, <http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Sports/2014/10/13/Navajo-Nation-President-in-Redskins-Box>.\n\n. Dave McKenna, \"No Name Is Really Sacred to Dan Snyder,\" _Deadspin_ (blog), June 25, 2014, <http://deadspin.com/no-name-is-really-sacred-to-dan-snyder-1595841512>.\n\n. Sean Newell, \"President Obama: I'd 'Think about Changing' Redskins Nickname,\" _Deadspin_ (blog), October 6, 2013, <http://deadspin.com/president-obama-id-think-about-changing-redskins-ni-1441711555>.\n\n. \"Oneida: Central New York,\" Christian Peacemaker Teams, no date, <http://www.cpt.org/work/aboriginal_justice/Oneida>.\n\n. Daniel Greenfield, \"Casino Kingpin and Fake Indian Chief Targets Redskins,\" FrontPageMag.com, October 8, 2013, <http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/casino-kingpin-and-fake-indian-chief-targets-redskins/>.\n\n. \"Oneida: Central New York,\" Christian Peacemaker Teams.\n\n. _Shenandoah et al. v. Halbritter_ , synopsis and description available at <http://ccrjustice.org/ourcases/past-cases/shenandoah,-et-al.-v.-halbritter>.\n\n. \"The Oneidas For Democracy: Who We Are,\" Oneidas for Democracy, no date, <http://www.oneidasfordemocracy.org/main/the-oneidas-for-democracy-who-we-are/>.\n\nCHAPTER FOUR: MAKING A HERO OF MICHAEL SAM\n\n. Stewart Mandel, \"Michael Sam Breaks Longstanding Barrier by Announcing He Is Gay,\" _Sports Illustrated_ , updated June 11, 2014, <http://www.si.com/nfl/2014/02/10/michael-sam-missouri-tigers-nfl-draft>.\n\n. Glenn McGraw, \"Michael Sam Comes Out as Gay: Fans and Media React on Twitter,\" GameDayR.com, February 9, 2014, <http://gamedayr.com/sports/michael-sam-gay-twitter-reactions-97478/>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Pete Prisco, \"Tebow Throws Out Some, but Not All Doubts,\" Real Clear Sports, March 18, 2010, <http://www.realclearsports.com/2010/03/18/tebow_throws_out_some_but_not_all_doubts_71824.html>.\n\n. Jerry Spar, \"Pete Prisco on D&C: Tim Tebow 'Stinks,' Will Be Cut by Patriots in Mid-August,\" _It Is What It Is_ (blog), June 11, 2013, <http://itiswhatitis.weei.com/sports/newengland/football/patriots/2013/06/11/pete-prisco-on-dc-tim-tebow-stinks-will-be-cut-by-patriots-in-mid-august/>.\n\n. Jeff Pearlman, \"I Want Tim Tebow to Fail,\" _Jeff Pearlman_ (blog), February 2, 2010, <http://www.jeffpearlman.com/i-want-tim-tebow-to-fail/>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Pearlman, \"Dmitriy Salita,\" _Jeff Pearlman_ (blog), October 18, 2012, <http://www.jeffpearlman.com/the-quaz-qa-dmitriy-salita/>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Pearlman, \"Michael Sam,\" _Jeff Pearlman_ (blog), February 10, 2014, <http://www.jeffpearlman.com/michael-sam/>.\n\n. Dave Zirin, \"Why the Curious Right-Wing Silence on Michael Sam?,\" _Nation_ , February 13, 2014, <http://www.thenation.com/blog/178377/why-curious-right-wing-silence-michael-sam>.\n\n. \"Sports Anchor Blasts Michael Sam Critics, Calls Out Conservative Hypocrisy,\" Mediaite, February 12, 2014, <http://www.mediaite.com/tv/sports-anchor-blasts-michael-sam-critics-calls-out-conservative-hypocrisy/>.\n\n. \"How Will News That Michael Sam Is Gay Affect His NFL Draft Stock?,\" _Sports Illustrated_ , February 9, 2014, <http://www.si.com/football/2014/02/09/michael-sam-draft-stock>.\n\n. \"Texas Anchor Amy Kushnir Throws Hilarious On-Air Temper Tantrum over Michael Sam Kiss,\" Queerty, May 14, 2014, <http://www.queerty.com/texas-anchor-amy-kushnir-throws-hilarious-on-air-temper-tantrum-over-michael-sam-kiss-20140514>; Sean Pendergast, \"Zapruder Analysis of Four Dallas TV Women Verbally Brawling over Michael Sam,\" HoustonPress.com, May 15, 2014, <http://blogs.houstonpress.com/news/2014/05/zapruder_analysis_of_four_dall.php>; and Cindy Boren, \"Watch Dallas TV Host Walk off Set during Debate on Michael Sam Kiss,\" _Washington Post_ , May 15, 2014, <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/early-lead/wp/2014/05/15/watch-dallas-tv-host-walk-off-set-during-debate-on-michael-sam-kiss/>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. John Breech, \"Dolphins Fine and Suspend DB Don Jones for Anti-Michael Sam Tweet,\" CBSSports.com, May 11, 2014, <http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/eye-on-football/24559187/dolphins-db-don-jones-fined-suspended-for-anti-michael-sam-tweet>.\n\n. Mike Wise, \"Jason Collins's Religious Critics Need to Practice What They Preach,\" _Washington Post_ , April 30, 2013, <http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/wizards/jason-collins-religious-critics-need-to-practice-what-they-preach/2013/04/30/3129e752-b1df-11e2-9a98-4be1688d7d84_story.html>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Phil Mushnick, \"Being a Great Player Doesn't Make Peterson a Great Guy,\" _New York Post_ , October 13, 2013, http://nypost.com/2013/10/13/sons-death-doesnt-make-adrian-peterson-a-great-person/?utm_source=SFnewyorkpost&utm_medium=SFnewyorkpost.\n\n. Barry Petchesky, \"Your Regular Reminder That Phil Mushnick Is a Race-Baiting Troll,\" _Deadspin_ (blog), October 14, 2013, <http://deadspin.com/your-regular-reminder-that-phil-mushnick-is-a-race-bait-1445099979>.\n\n. Reva Friedel, \"Phil Mushnick Wrote the Most Offensive Sports Column in the History of the Earth,\" AwfulAnnouncing.com, October 14, 2013, <http://awfulannouncing.com/2013/phil-mushnick-wrote-the-most-offensive-sports-column-in-the-history-of-earth.html>.\n\n. Wise, \"Jason Collins's Religious Critics.\"\n\n. Matthew Philbin, \"Into Left Field: 5 of the Most Obnoxious Political Intrusions on Sports,\" NewsBusters.org, April 3, 2014, <http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-philbin/2014/04/03/left-field-5-most-obnoxious-political-intrusions-sports>.\n\n. \"Gregg Doyel,\" Muckrack.com, <http://muckrack.com/gregg-doyel/statuses/436533856800636928>.\n\n. Gregg Doyel, \"Constant Media Attention Could Derail Sam's Career Just Like Tebow's,\" CBSSports.com, February 20, 2014, <http://www.cbssports.com/general/writer/gregg-doyel/24449523/constant-media-attention-could-derail-sams-career-just-like-tebows>.\n\n. Philbin, \"Into Left Field.\"\n\n. Austin Ruse, \"Gay Speech Police Targets Giants for Hiring Super Bowl Hero,\" Breitbart Sports, Breitbart.com, July 23, 2014, <http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Sports/2014/07/23/Super-Bowl-Hero-Targeted>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Michael O'Keeffe, \"David Tyree, Who Said He'd Trade Super Bowl If It Meant Stopping Gay Marriage, Joins NY Giants as Director of Player Development,\" _New York Daily News_ , updated July 22, 2014, <http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/football/giants/david-tyree-returns-ny-giants-director-player-development-article-1.1876104>; and A. J. Perez, \"David Tyree, Giants New Staffer, Says He Knows 'Former Homosexuals,'\" NJ.com, updated July 24, 2014, <http://www.nj.com/giants/index.ssf/2014/07/david_tyree_giants_new_staffer_says_he_knows_former_homosexuals.html>.\n\n. Charlie Joughin, \"When Did David Tyree Decide to Be Straight?,\" _HRC Blog_ , Human Rights Campaign, July 22, 2014, <http://www.hrc.org/blog/entry/when-did-david-tyree-decide-to-be-straight>.\n\n. O'Keeffe, \"David Tyree, Who Said He'd Trade Super Bowl If It Meant Stopping Gay Marriage, Joins NY Giants as Director of Player Development.\"\n\n. Wade Davis, \"Only Love Drives Out Hate,\" Monday Morning Quarterback, Sports Illustrated, July 24, 2014, <http://mmqb.si.com/2014/07/24/new-york-giants-david-tyree-gay-comments-wade-davis/>.\n\n. Bernie Augustine, \"Chris Kluwe Says He Was Cut by Vikings over Stance on Gay Marriage, Calls Special Teams Coach a Bigot,\" _New York Daily News_ , updated January 3, 2014, <http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/football/kluwe-vikes-cut-gay-marriage-advocacy-article-1.1564805>.\n\n. Chris Kluwe, \"I Was an NFL Player Until I Was Fired by Two Cowards and a Bigot,\" _Deadspin_ (blog), January 2, 2014, <http://deadspin.com/i-was-an-nfl-player-until-i-was-fired-by-two-cowards-an-1493208214>.\n\n. Vikings PR, \"Vikings Respond to Independent Investigative Report of Chris Kluwe's Allegations,\" Vikings.com, July 18, 2014, <http://www.vikings.com/news/article-1/Vikings-Respond-To-Independent-Investigative-Report-of-Chris-Kluwes-Allegations/207d9d67-eda5-45e7-bed2-8adcd8df113a>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Mike Florio, \"Vikings Begin to Push Back against Kluwe,\" ProFootballTalk.com, July 18, 2014, <http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/07/18/vikings-begin-to-push-back-against-kluwe/>.\n\n. Bobby Bonett, \"Chris Kluwe Addresses 'Compromising Situation' Tweet on NFL Radio,\" _Sirius XM Blog_ : _Sports_ , July 22, 2014, <http://blog.siriusxm.com/2014/07/22/chris-kluwe-addresses-compromising-situation-tweet/>.\n\n. Doyel, \"Chris Kluwe Can't Be a Moral Crusader after His Cruel Twitter Rant,\" CBSSports.com, July 19, 2014, <http://www.cbssports.com/general/writer/gregg-doyel/24628550/chris-kluwe-cant-be-moral-crusader-after-his-cruel-twitter-rant>.\n\n. Robert Wilde, \"Chris Kluwe Drops Suit; Vikings Donate to LGBT Groups,\" Breitbart Sports, Breitbart.com, August 20, 2014, <http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Sports/2014/08/19/Chris-Kluwe-Drops-Lawsuit-With-Vikings-over-Homophobic-Claims>.\n\nCHAPTER FIVE: TRASHING TEBOW\n\n. Gregg Rosenthal, \"Tebow's Pre-Wonderlic Prayer Request Falls Flat,\" ProFootballTalk.com, March 23, 2010, <http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2010/03/23/tebows-pre-wonderlic-prayer-request-falls-flat/>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Rosenthal, \"Tebow Denies Wonderlic Incident,\" ProFootballTalk.com, March 24, 2010, <http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2010/03/24/tebow-denies-wonderlic-incident/>.\n\n. \"Sresnick,\" \"Broker: Manziel Got $7,500 for Autographs,\" ESPN1005.com, updated August 6, 2013, <http://espn1005.com/archives/37586>.\n\n. Simone Wilson, \"Video: Kobe Bryant Throws Towel, Mouths 'Faggot' to Ref at Lakers-Spurs Game,\" LAWeekly.com, April 13, 2011, <http://www.laweekly.com/informer/2011/04/13/video-kobe-bryant-throws-towel-mouths-faggot-to-ref-at-lakers-spurs-game>.\n\n. Woody Paige, \"Paige: Broncos' Tim Tebow Dealing with Tension, Frustration,\" _Denver Post_ , August 5, 2011, <http://www.denverpost.com/ci_18621060?source=infinite>.\n\n. Gregg Doyel, \"Unbelievable\u2014Tebow Believes Faith Equates to Starting in the NFL,\" CBSSports.com, August 6, 2011, <http://www.cbssports.com/columns/story/15406131/unbelievable-tebow-believes-faith-equates-to-starting-in-nfl>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"2009 Kurt Warner and Jesus,\" YouTube video, uploaded by \"wwensek,\" January 19, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdTLqmY5x3M&feature=related.\n\n. Dan Bickley, \"Kurt Warner to Tim Tebow: Let Your Actions Be Your Words,\" AZCentral.com, November 26, 2011, <http://www.azcentral.com/sports/cardinals/articles/2011/11/26/20111126nfl-kurt-warner-tim-tebow-advice.html>.\n\n. Todd Starnes, \"Why Are Anti-Christian Bigots So Eager to Prey on Tim Tebow?,\" FoxNews.com, December 12, 2011, <http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/12/12/why-are-anti-christian-bigots-so-eager-to-prey-on-tim-tebow/>.\n\n. Brian Ives, \"Interview: Gene Simmons Defends Tim Tebow, Wants Football to Be More like KISS,\" Radio.com, September 13, 2013, <http://radio.com/2013/09/13/gene-simmons-tim-tebow-religion-football-interview/>.\n\n. Mark Cannizzaro, \"Smith, Dungy, Edwards at Head of Classy Table,\" _New York Post_ , January 23, 2007, <http://nypost.com/2007/01/23/smith-dungy-edwards-at-head-of-classy-table/>.\n\n. John Branch, \"Two Coaches, Two Friends, but Only One Prize,\" _New York Times_ , February 5, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/sports/football/05branch.html?ref=tonydungy&_r=1&.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Associated Press, \"CBS Urged to Scrap Tebow Ad,\" ESPN.com, updated January 25, 2012, <http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs/2009/news/story?id=4857753>.\n\n. Paul Wilson, \"NFL Analysts: Tim Tebow Hated Because of His Faith,\" NewsBusters.org, October 21, 2011, <http://newsbusters.org/blogs/paul-wilson/2011/10/21/nfl-analysts-tim-tebow-hated-because-his-faith>.\n\n. \"Tell Us: Is Tebow Victim of Anti-Religious Bias?,\" GameOn!, _USA Today_ , August 24, 2011, <http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gameon/post/2011/08/tell-us-is-tebow-backlash-religious-based/1#uslPageReturn>.\n\n. Wilson, \"NFL Analysts: Tim Tebow Hated Because of His Faith.\"\n\nCHAPTER SIX: CONCUSSED AND CONFUSED\n\n. See Dan Wolken's January 13, 2014, tweet here: <https://twitter.com/DanWolken/status/422726109726142465>.\n\n. See Wolken's January 13, 2014, tweet here: <https://twitter.com/DanWolken/status/422730082893836288>.\n\n. \"2013 Rating Wrap: NFL Dominates List of Most Watched Sporting Events,\" December 2013, SportsMediaWatch.com, <http://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2013/12/2013-ratings-wrap-nfl-dominates-list-of-most-watched-sporting-events/>.\n\n. Richard Sandomir, \"ESPN Extends Deal with N.F.L. for $15 Billion,\" _New York Times_ , September 8, 2011, <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/sports/football/espn-extends-deal-with-nfl-for-15-billion.html>.\n\n. James Andrew Miller and Ken Belson, \"N.F.L. Pressure Said to Lead ESPN to Quit Film Project,\" _New York Times_ , August 23, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/sports/football/nfl-pressure-said-to-prompt-espn-to-quit-film-project.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1.\n\n. \"Gladwell: Why College Football Is like Dog Fighting,\" excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell interview on _Global Public Square_ , CNN.com, July 20, 2013, <http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/20/gladwell-why-college-football-is-like-dog-fighting/>.\n\n. David DiSalvo, \"Is Malcolm Gladwell Right, Should College Football Be Banned to Save Brains?,\" _Forbes_ , July 21, 2013, <http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2013/07/21/is-malcolm-gladwell-right-should-college-football-be-banned/>.\n\n. Daniel J. Flynn, \"The NFL Suicide Epidemic Myth,\" Breitbart Sports, Breitbart.com, January 13, 2014, <http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Sports/2014/01/12/The-NFL-Suicide-Epidemic-Myth>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Sally Jenkins, \"No Matter What Happens in NFL Labor Negotiations, the Players Pay the Price,\" _Washington Post_ , February 23, 2011, <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/23/AR2011022305999.html>.\n\n. Frank Bruni, \"Pro Football's Violent Toll,\" _New York Times_ , December 4, 2012, <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/opinion/bruni-pro-footballs-violent-toll.html?_r=0>.\n\n. Don Banks, \"What Price Football?,\" Monday Morning Quarterback, _Sports Illustrated_ , October 23, 2013, <http://mmqb.si.com/2013/10/23/price-of-concussions-don-banks/>.\n\n. Bob Ryan, \"Football a Game of Inherent Conflict,\" _Boston Globe_ , November 17, 2013, <http://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2013/11/17/football-game-inherent-conflict/GkAXWtEoJWdjEoqH0dHIAJ/story.html>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, \"Youth Football Participation Drops,\" ESPN.com, updated November 4, 2013, <http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/page/popwarner/pop-warner-youth-football-participation-drops-nfl-concussion-crisis-seen-causal-factor>.\n\n. Jarrett Bell, \"Study Shows NFL Players Live Longer,\" _USA Today_ , updated May 9, 2012, <http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/football/nfl/story/2012-05-08/Study-shows-NFL-players-live-longer/54847564/1>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Do Sports Concussions Really Cause Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy?,\" Newswire, Loyola Medicine, December 2, 2013, <http://www.loyolamedicine.org/newswire/news/do-sports-concussions-really-cause-chronic-traumatic-encephalopathy>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\nCHAPTER SEVEN: BLACKLISTING LIMBAUGH\n\n. ESPN.com News Services, \"Limbaugh's Comments Touch Off Controversy,\" ESPN.com, October 1, 2013, <http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=1627887>.\n\n. \"NFL Player Passing Statistics\u20142003,\" ESPN.com, <http://espn.go.com/nfl/statistics/player/_/stat/passing/sort/passingYards/year/2003>.\n\n. ESPN.com News Services, \"McNabb: Too Late for an Apology from Limbaugh,\" ESPN.com, updated October 1, 2003, <http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/wire?id=1627977>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. ESPN.com News Services, \"Limbaugh Resigns from NFL Show,\" ESPN.com, October 2, 2003, <http://espn.go.com/gen/news/2003/1001/1628537.html>.\n\n. ESPN.com News Services, \"McNabb: Too Late for an Apology from Limbaugh,\" ESPN.com, updated October 1, 2003, <http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/wire?id=1627977>.\n\n. ESPN.com News Services, \"Limbaugh Resigns from ESPN's NFL Pregame Show,\" ESPN.com, October 2, 2003, <http://espn.go.com/gen/news/2003/1002/1628778.html>.\n\n. Ralph Vacchiano, \"In No Rush to Forget: McNabb's Dad Still Irate over Limbaugh's Attack,\" _New York Daily News_ , January 18, 2004, <http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/sports/rush-forget-mcnabb-dad-irate-limbaugh-attack-article-1.605662>.\n\n. Allen Barra, \"Rush Limbaugh Was Right,\" Slate, October 2, 2003, <http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2003/10/rush_limbaugh_was_right.html>.\n\n. Noel Sheppard, \"Wilbon: Rush Limbaugh 'Universally Reviled by African-Americans,'\" NewsBusters.org, October 18, 2009, <http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/10/18/wilbon-rush-limbaugh-universally-reviled-african-americans>.\n\n. Sheppard, \"Sportswriter: Black NFLers Claiming They Won't Play for Rush 'Are Lying through Their Teeth,'\" NewsBusters.org, October 12, 2009, <http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/10/12/sportswriter-black-nflers-claiming-they-wont-play-rush-are-lying-thro>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"ESPN Bigots Obsessed with Rush,\" RushLimbaugh.com, transcript from January 24, 2007, episode of _The Rush Limbaugh Show_ , <http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2007/01/24/espn_bigots_obsessed_with_rush>.\n\n. Sheppard, \"Wilbon: Rush Limbaugh 'Universally Reviled by African-Americans.'\"\n\n. \"The National Hemorrhoid Pops Up, Claims Criticism of Obama Is Racist,\" transcript from the September 16, 2009, episode of _The Rush Limbaugh Show_ , <http://img.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_091609/content/01125106.guest.html>.\n\n. Tim Graham, \"Ed Schultz Decries 'Age of Overzealous Law Enforcement,' Guest Calls Gates 'Rosa Parks' of Profiling,\" NewsBusters.org, July 24, 2009, <http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2009/07/24/ed-schultz-decries-age-overzealous-law-enforcement-guest-calls-gates-ros>.\n\n. \"Michael Eric Dyson,\" entry on DiscovertheNetworks.org, accessed September 2014, <http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2192>.\n\n. Debbie Schlussel, \"Not Sharp, Drew: _USA Today_ /Freep Sportswriter Used Fake _Wikipedia_ Quotes to Savage Limbaugh,\" DebbieSchlussel.com, October 13, 2009, <http://www.debbieschlussel.com/10335/not-sharp-drew-usa-todayfreep-sportswriter-used-fake-wikipedia-quotes-to-savage-limbaugh/>.\n\n. Ohm Youngmisuk, \"Black NFL Players Crush Prospect of Playing for a Rush Limbaugh\u2013Owned St. Louis Rams,\" _New York Daily News_ , October 9, 2009, <http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/football/black-nfl-players-crush-prospect-playing-rush-limbaugh-owned-st-louis-rams-article-1.383689>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Mike Fitzpatrick, \"Bill Maher Buys Minority Share in New York Mets,\" Associated Press, Huffington Post Sports, updated August 3, 2012, <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/03/bill-maher-new-york-mets-owner-minority-share-video_n_1566669.html>.\n\n. Adam Rubin, \"Bill Maher Owns Stake in Mets,\" ESPN.com, June 4, 2012, <http://espn.go.com/new-york/mlb/story/_/id/8004806/bill-maher-reveals-owns-minority-share-new-york-mets>.\n\n. Associated Press, \"Checketts, Limbaugh in Bid to Buy Rams,\" ESPN.com, updated October 6, 2009, <http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4535583>.\n\n. George Vecsey, \"32 Voices Louder Than Limbaugh's,\" _New York Times_ , October 13, 2009, <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/sports/football/13vecsey.html?_r=0>.\n\n. Zach Berman and Richard Sandomir, \"Bill Maher Now Owns Share of the Mets,\" _New York Times_ , June 4, 2012, <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/sports/baseball/bill-maher-now-owns-share-of-the-mets.html>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Bill Maher Compares Retarded Children to Dogs,\" YouTube video, excerpt from January 11, 2001, episode of _Politically Correct_ , uploaded by \"jvideos8,\" October 4, 2007, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe57F77ZKIs>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Maher: Obama Not Acting like a Real Black President,\" Real Clear Politics, May 29, 2010, <http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/05/29/maher_obama_not_acting_like_a_real_black_president.html>.\n\nCHAPTER EIGHT: BULL IN DURHAM\n\n. Scott Whitlock, \"ABC Looks at Media Bias in Duke Rape Case; Ignores Example from Own Network,\" NewsBusters.org, September 4, 2007, <http://newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitlock/2007/09/04/abc-looks-media-bias-duke-rape-case-ignores-example-own-network>.\n\n. KC Johnson, \"Feinstein: 'They're Probably Guilty of Everything but Rape,'\" _Durham-in-Wonderland_ (blog), May 7, 2007, <http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/05/feinstein-theyre-probably-guilty-of.html>.\n\n. Johnson, \"John Feinstein, and the Unbearable Lightness of America's Sportswriters,\" _Durham-in-Wonderland_ (blog), June 5, 2007, <http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/06/john-feinstein-and-unbearable-lightness.html>.\n\n. Selena Roberts, \"Sports of the Times; When Peer Pressure, Not a Conscience, Is Your Guide,\" _New York Times_ , March 31, 2006, <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D04E0DC1230F932A05750C0A9609C8B63>; and Johnson, \"Selena Roberts: Still Misleading,\" _Durham-in-Wonderland_ (blog), March 17, 2008, <http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2008/03/selena-roberts-still-misleading.html>.\n\n. John Leo, \"A 'Wildly Misleading' Self-Defense,\" Minding the Campus, March 18, 2008, <http://www.mindingthecampus.com/2008/03/a_wildly_misleading_selfdefens/>.\n\n. Johnson, \"Her 'Great Job Covering Rape Culture,'\" Minding the Campus, March 10, 2014, <http://www.mindingthecampus.com/2014/03/her_great_job_covering_rape_cu/>.\n\n. Johnson, \"Selena Roberts & Journalistic Credibility,\" _Durham-in-Wonderland_ (blog), May 4, 2009, <http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2009/05/selena-roberts-journalistic-credibility.html>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Roberts, \"Closing a Case Will Not Mean Closure at Duke,\" _New York Times_ , March 25, 2007, <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/sports/othersports/25roberts.html?_r=0>.\n\n. xy109e3, \"The Edwards-Marcotte Fiasco,\" _Daily Kos_ (blog), February 2, 2007, <http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/02/02/297671/-The-Edwards-Marcotte-Fiasco>.\n\n. Stuart Taylor Jr., \"Witness for the Prosecution? The _New York Times_ Is Still Victimizing Innocent Dukies,\" Slate, August 29, 2006, <http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_minute/2006/08/witness_for_the_prosecution.single.html>.\n\n. John Koblin, \"Who's 'This Lady'? Meet Selena Roberts, A-Rod's Worst Nightmare,\" _New York Observer_ , February 11, 2009, <http://observer.com/2009/02/whos-this-lady-meet-selena-roberts-arods-worst-nightmare/>.\n\n. Chris Kyle, \"The Decline and Fall of Selena Roberts,\" Huffington Post, updated May 25, 2011, <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kyle/the-decline-and-fall-of-s_b_196747.html>.\n\n. Jason Whitlock, \"Selena Roberts Reminds Me of Al Sharpton,\" Real Clear Sports, May 5, 2009, <http://www.realclearsports.com/2009/05/06/selena_roberts_reminds_me_of_al_sharpton_59654.html>.\n\n. John Rocker, \"What If Jameis Winston Were a White Lacrosse Player?,\" WND.com, December 2, 2013, <http://www.wnd.com/2013/12/what-if-jameis-winston-were-a-white-lacrosse-player/>.\n\n. Travis Waldron, \"ESPN Delivers Powerful Segment on Sexual Assault during Jameis Winston Coverage,\" _ThinkProgress_ , December 6, 2013, <http://thinkprogress.org/sports/2013/12/06/3029761/did-espn-cover-end-jameis-winston-case/>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Johnson, \"The Sports Reporters,\" _Durham-in-Wonderland_ (blog), March 5, 2007, <http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/03/sports-reporters.html>.\n\n. \"Duke Lax Players Staring Down Tough Trial\u2014SI.com,\" excerpt from _Sports Illustrated_ story on Newsgroups.Derkeiler.com, posted April 22, 2006, <http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Alt/alt.true-crime/2006-04/msg04637.html>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Breaking News in Search for Darren Mack,\" transcript of June 22, 2006, episode of _Nancy Grace_ , CNN.com, <http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/22/ng.01.html>.\n\n. Associated Press, \"North Carolina Governor Signs Open Discovery Bill into Law,\" Death Penalty Information Center, August 4, 2004, <http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/node/1213>.\n\n. \"Breaking News in Search for Darren Mack,\" transcript of June 22, 2006.\n\n. \"Duke Lax Players Are Staring Down a Tough Trial.\"\n\n. Bomani Jones, \"Duke Lacrosse Celebrated for Wrong Reasons,\" ESPN.com, February 26, 2007, <http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=jones/070226>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Daniel Schorn, \"Duke Rape Suspects Speak Out,\" CBSNews.com, October 11, 2006, <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/duke-rape-suspects-speak-out/3/>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Jones, \"Duke Lacross Celebrated for Wrong Reasons.\"\n\n. Johnson, \"The Sports Reporters.\"\n\n. \"Committees Report on Lacrosse Team Behavior, Student Judicial Processes,\" news release, DukeToday, May 1, 2006, <http://today.duke.edu/2006/05/twocommittees.html>.\n\nCHAPTER NINE: THE NEW RACISM\n\n. Chris Chase, \"Seahawks Star Richard Sherman's Instant-Classic Postgame Interview with Erin Andrews,\" _USA Today_ , January 19, 2014, <http://ftw.usatoday.com/2014/01/richard-sherman-erin-andrews-interview>.\n\n. Samer Kalaf, \"Dumb People Stupid, Racist Shit about Richard Sherman,\" _Deadspin_ (blog), January 19, 2014, <http://deadspin.com/dumb-people-say-stupid-racist-shit-about-richard-sherm-1504843629>.\n\n. Kyle Wagner, \"The Word 'Thug' Was Uttered 625 Times on TV on Monday. That's A Lot,\" _Deadspin_ (blog), January 21, 2014, <http://regressing.deadspin.com/the-word-thug-was-uttered-625-times-on-tv-yesterday-1506098319>.\n\n. Associated Press, \"Fox Fires Lyons for Racially Insensitive Comment,\" ESPN.com, October 15, 2006, <http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs2006/news/story?id=2625500>.\n\n. Robert Weintraub, \"Color Commentators,\" Slate, November 30, 2006, <http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2006/11/color_commentators.html>.\n\n. Mike Penner, \"Voice of His Past Haunts Hamilton,\" _Los Angeles Times_ , August 16, 2001, <http://articles.latimes.com/2001/aug/16/sports/sp-34851>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Weintraub, \"Color Commentators.\"\n\n. John Hawkins, \"The Best Quotations from Greg Gutfeld's 'The Joy of Hate,'\" RightWingNews.com, May 19, 2014, <http://www.rightwingnews.com/quotes/the-best-quotations-from-greg-gutfelds-the-joy-of-hate/>.\n\n. Max Olson, \"Red McCombs Bashes Texas Hire,\" ESPN.com, January 8, 2014, <http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/10257706/booster-red-mccombs-bashes-texas-longhorns-charlie-strong-hire>.\n\n. Olson, \"Red McCombs Bashes Texas Hire.\"\n\n. Buck Harvey, \"McCombs and His Giant Mess,\" _My SA_ (blog), January 7, 2014, <http://blog.mysanantonio.com/buckharvey/2014/01/mccombs-and-his-giant-mess/>.\n\n. Brooks, \"Deion Disputes Wilbon Claim of Shanahan Racism,\" SportsbyBrooks.com, November 12, 2010, <http://www.sportsbybrooks.com/deion-debunks-wilbon-claim-of-shanahan-racism-29234>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Nick Schwartz, \"Eagles Receiver Riley Cooper Uses Racial Slur at a Kenny Chesney Concert,\" _USA Today_ , July 31, 2013, <http://ftw.usatoday.com/2013/07/eagles-receiver-riley-cooper-uses-racial-slur-at-a-kenny-chesney-concert>.\n\n. Mike Florio, \"Philly Mayor Says Fining Riley Cooper Isn't Good Enough,\" ProFootballTalk.com, August 2, 2013, <http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/08/02/philly-mayor-says-fining-riley-cooper-isnt-good-enough/>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Frank Schwab, \"LeSean McCoy Says He Lost a Friend in Riley Cooper: 'Can't Really Respect Somebody Like That,'\" Yahoo! Sports, August 1, 2013, <http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/lesean-mccoy-says-lost-friend-riley-cooper-t-200733255.html>.\n\n. Michael Wilbon, \"Vick Owes His Second Chance to Those Willing to Give Him One,\" _Washington Post_ , August 15, 2009, <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/14/AR2009081402130.html>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Popsspotted, \"Roger Goodell Reaction to Riley Cooper Blasted as 'Gutless' and 'Unspeakably Lame' by ESPN's Michael Wilbon,\" _POPSspot_ (blog), August 21, 2013, <http://www.popsspot.com/2013/08/roger-goodell-reaction-to-riley-cooper-blasted-as-gutless-and-unspeakably-lame-by-espns-michael-wilbon/>.\n\n. Associated Press, \"Emotional Issues to Keep Dolphins T. Jonathan Martin Out for Week 9,\" _USA Today_ , October 31, 2013, <http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/dolphins/2013/10/31/jonathan-martin-emotional-issues-out-week-9-bengals/3327929/>.\n\n. \"Richie Incognito Threatened Jonathan Martin, Used Racial Slur to Refer to Dolphins Teammate: Reports,\" Huffington Post, updated November 5, 2013, <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/04/richie-incognito-jonathan-martin-racial-slur-threats_n_4213340.html>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Breitbart Sports, \"Report: Martin Threatened to Send Someone to Sodomize Incognito with 'Sandpaper Condoms,'\" Breitbart Sports, Breitbart.com, January 30, 2014, <http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Sports/2014/01/30/Report-Martin-Threatened-to-Send-Someone-to-Sodomize-Incognito-with-Sandpaper-Condoms>.\n\n. Lydon Murtha, \"Incognito and Martin: An Insider's Story,\" Monday Morning Quarterback, _Sports Illustrated_ , November 7, 2013, <http://mmqb.si.com/2013/11/07/richie-incognito-jonathan-martin-dolphins-lydon-murtha/>.\n\n. Dan Graziano, \"Antrel Rolle Blames Martin, Too,\" ESPN.com, November 7, 2013, <http://espn.go.com/new-york/nfl/story/_/id/9931466/antrel-rolle-new-york-giants-says-jonathan-martin-stood-in-miami-dolphins-harassment-case>.\n\n. Arash Markazi, \"Matt Barnes: Epithet OK in Context,\" ESPN. com, November 15, 2013, <http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/nba/story/_/id/9981526/matt-barnes-los-angeles-clippers-racial-slur-get-used-it>.\n\n. \"N-Word Controversy Is Another Example of the Liberal Takeover of American Sports,\" transcript from the November 18, 2013, episode of _The Rush Limbaugh Show_ , <http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/11/18/n_word_controversy_is_another_example_of_the_liberal_takeover_of_american_sports>.\n\n. Staff, \"Lil Wayne Gets Slammed for Dissing Riley Cooper for Using the N-Word,\" _Urban Belle_ , August 4, 2013, <http://urbanbellemag.com/2013/08/lil-wayne-disses-riley-cooper-blasted-for-hypocrisy.html>.\n\n. \"N-Word Controversy Is Another Example of the Liberal Takeover of American Sports.\"\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Popsspotted, \"Roger Goodell Reaction to Riley Cooper Blasted as 'Gutless' and 'Unspeakably Lame.'\"\n\n. Mike Wise, \"A Word You Shouldn't Use in Any Sentence,\" _Washington Post_ , November 21, 2013, <http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/a-word-you-shouldnt-use-in-any-sentence/2013/11/21/f0e9fb38-521e-11e3-a7f0-b790929232e1_story.html>.\n\n. Ibid.\nINDEX\n\n**A**\n\nabortion, , , 110\u201311,\n\nAbu-Jamal, Mumia,\n\nAdams, Bennie,\n\nAfrican Americans. _See also_ blacks, black community\n\ndefined solely by race in media, 34\u201335,\n\nthe N-word and, 185\u201386, ,\n\nin professional sports, , , , , 176\u201377\n\nAIDS,\n\nAkron, OH,\n\nAlinsky, Saul,\n\nAmerica, Americans\n\nacceptance of homosexuality in, ,\n\ncrime statistics in,\n\nfootball's popularity in, , 119\u201320, 126\u201327, 129\u201331,\n\nhistory of, , ,\n\nideals of, 27\u201329, , ,\n\nmedia in, xi, , , 201\u20132\n\npolitics in, 39\u201340\n\npolling data on Redskins name,\n\nrace relations in, , 61\u201362, , ,\n\nsports media in, , , 51\u201352, , , , 116\u201317, 126\u201330, , ,\n\nwussification of,\n\nAmerican Family Association,\n\nAmerican Football Coaches Association, 115\u201316\n\nAmpong, Granville, 43\u201345\n\nAmukamara, Prince,\n\nAnderson, Holly, 74\u201375\n\nAndrews, Erin,\n\nanti-Americans, anti-Americanism, , 142\u201343\n\n\"anti-gay bill,\" 24\u201325. _See also_ Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA); SB 1062\n\nAntonacci, Chris,\n\nAP-Gfk polling,\n\nArizona\n\nRedskins' 2014 game in, 62\u201363,\n\nSB 1062, 23\u201330, 35\u201336\n\nArizona Cardinals,\n\nAshe, Arthur,\n\nAsian Americans,\n\nAssociated Press (AP), 55\u201356, , 175\u201376\n\nAtlanta Braves, ,\n\nAtlanta Falcons,\n\nAustin, Tavon, 15\u201316\n\nAvant, Jason,\n\nAwful Announcing,\n\n**B**\n\nBailes, Julian,\n\nBailey, Stedman, 15\u201316\n\nBalan, Matthew,\n\nBaltimore Ravens,\n\nBanks, Don, 123\u201324,\n\nBarkley, Charles, , 16\u201317, 194\u201395\n\nBarnes, Harrison,\n\nBarnes, Matt, 194\u201398\n\nBarra, Allen, 139\u201340\n\nBBC, the, 48\u201349\n\n\"Be My Vote\" campaign,\n\nBerman, Chris,\n\n_Bias_ (Goldberg), xi, ,\n\nBible, the, 40\u201341, , ,\n\nblacks, black community, , 15\u201316, 89\u201390. _See also_ African Americans\n\nBill Maher's caricature of,\n\nblack athletes as \"disconnected\" from black community, 10\u201311\n\nand Christianity, 107\u20139\n\ncrime statistics and, 1\u20134\n\nDuke lacrosse case and, 150\u201351, 153\u201354, , , 162\u201363, 170\u201371\n\nas exploited in sports, 10\u201311, 129\u201330\n\nJameis Winston double standard and, 159\u201361\n\nmedia's focus on coaches and athletes as, 33\u201335, , 108\u20139, ,\n\nmedia's use of \"thug\" in reference to, 174\u201375\n\nNew Racism and, 177\u2013200\n\nin professional sports, 5\u201313, 78\u201380, 137\u201340\n\nradicals and,\n\nRush Limbaugh and, 134\u2013143,\n\nBoehlert, Sherwood,\n\nBoortz, Neal,\n\n_Boston Globe_ ,\n\nBradshaw, Terry, 104\u20135\n\nBrady, Tom, x,\n\nBrand, Russell, ,\n\nBrazil, 47\u201348,\n\nBreitbart.com, 14\u201315, , 37\u201338, , , , ,\n\nBrinson, Will, 74\u201375\n\nBristol, CT, , , ,\n\nBritt, Kenny, 15\u201316\n\n_Broadcast_ , _The_ , 80\u201381\n\nBrooklyn Dodgers,\n\nBrooklyn Nets, 73\u201374\n\nBrooks, Aaron,\n\nBroussard, Chris,\n\nBrowne, Joe,\n\nBrown, James ( _Inside the NFL_ host), 111\u201312\n\nBrown, Jim (former Cleveland Browns player), ,\n\nBrown, Mack, 178\u201379\n\nBrown, Michael, 15\u201316\n\nBrown, Ron, 40\u201341\n\nBruni, Frank, 123\u201324\n\nBryant, Kobe,\n\nBuchenwald camps,\n\nBuck, Dan,\n\nBureau of Indian Affairs,\n\nBureau of Justice Statistics,\n\nBurke, Patrick, 90\u201391\n\nburqas, 107\u20138\n\nBush, George W., 39\u201340, ,\n\n**C**\n\nCalcaterra, Craig,\n\nCampbell's Chunky soups,\n\nCampeau, Ian, 61\u201362\n\nCardinal Glennon Children's Foundation,\n\nCatholic Church, Catholicism, , , 42\u201347\n\nCatholic League, the,\n\nCBS, xi, , 110\u201311, ,\n\nCBS Sports, 74\u201376, , , , 110\u201312\n\nCecil, Chuck,\n\nChange the Mascot movement,\n\nChecketts, Dave,\n\nChesney, Kenny,\n\nChicago Bears, ,\n\nChief Wahoo (logo), 61\u201362\n\nChristianity, Christians, , ,\n\nFIFA rules affecting, 47\u201348\n\nSB 1062 as protecting rights of, 23\u201331\n\nSeattle Seahawks and, 32\u201333\n\nsports media treatment of, 26\u201352, , , 82\u201384, 88\u2013110,\n\nChristian Peacemaker Teams,\n\n_Christian Post_ , the, ,\n\nchronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), 120\u201324, ,\n\nCincinnati Bengals, ,\n\nClark, Gary,\n\nClark, Wesley,\n\nCleveland Cavaliers, ,\n\nCleveland Indians, 60\u201362\n\nCleveland, OH,\n\nclimate change, ,\n\nCNN, , , , ,\n\nCNNSI.com, 163\u201364\n\nCollins, Jason, 72\u201375, 82\u201387,\n\nCollinsworth, Cris, 111\u201312\n\nconcussions, , 118\u201319, , , 130\u201331\n\nCooke, Jack Kent,\n\nCook, Jared, 15\u201316\n\nCooper, Anderson,\n\nCooper, Riley, 185\u201389, 194\u201398\n\nCorey, Angela,\n\nCostas, Bob, x, 34\u201335, , 58\u201359, , ,\n\nCourage Campaign, ,\n\nCowherd, Colin, ,\n\nCrabtree, Michael, 173\u201374\n\nCromartie, Antonio, 82\u201383\n\nCronkite, Walter,\n\nCross, Randy, 111\u201312\n\nCulliver, Chris, 18\u201321\n\nCulpepper, Daunte,\n\nCuomo, Mario, ,\n\nCurrent, Mike,\n\n**D**\n\n_Daily Mail_ , 47\u201348\n\nDallas Cowboys, 50\u201351\n\n_Dallas Morning News_ , the,\n\nDallas, TX, 50\u201351, ,\n\n_Dan Patrick Show_ , the,\n\nDavidson, Dave,\n\nDavidson, Eunice,\n\nDavis, Wade, 90\u201391\n\n_Deadspin_ , , ,\n\nChris Kluwe and, 92\u201393\n\nRedskins name and, 64\u201365, 68\u201369\n\nDean, Howard,\n\nDeejay NDN. _See_ Campeau, Ian\n\nDemocrats, Democrat Party, 9\u201310, ,\n\n_Dennis & Callahan Show_,\n\nDenver Broncos, , , , 119\u201320,\n\n_Denver Post_ , the,\n\nDershowitz, Alan,\n\n_Detroit Free Press_ ,\n\nDetroit Lions, ,\n\nDetroit Tigers,\n\ndogfighting, , 118\u201320, ,\n\nDouglas, Gabby, 33\u201335\n\nDoyel, Gregg, 85\u201386, 103\u20135, 110\u201311\n\nDuerson, Dave, 120\u201322\n\nDuke University, , , , , . _See also_ Duke University lacrosse\n\nDuke University lacrosse, 149\u201372\n\nDungy, Tony, , 108\u201310\n\nDurham, NC, , , , , ,\n\nDurham Police Department, ,\n\n_Durham-in-Wonderland_ , ,\n\nDyson, Michael Eric, 141\u201343\n\n**E**\n\nESPN, , , 36\u201340, , , , , , , , , , , , , 168\u201369, , , ,\n\nadvocacy standards of, 35\u201336,\n\ncontract with the NFL,\n\n_Grantland_ as part of, ,\n\nRush Limbaugh's time with, , 138\u201339\n\nsegments on concussions, 117\u201318, , , ,\n\nsocial media policy of, 14\u201315\n\nESPN.com, , 40\u201341, , , ,\n\n_Miami Heat Index_ (blog) on, 3\u20134\n\nEvans, Dave,\n\nExaminer.com,\n\n**F**\n\n_Faces of Sports_ ,\n\nFantauzzo, Laurel, 45\u201347\n\nFarrior, James,\n\nFeinsand, Mark, 158\u201359\n\nFeinstein, John, 152\u201355, , ,\n\nFerguson, MO, 15\u201317\n\nFIFA, 47\u201348\n\nFighting Whites Scholarship Fund,\n\nFightin' Reds, 60\u201361\n\nFightin' Whities, 60\u201362\n\nFinebaum, Paul,\n\nFinnerty, Collin,\n\nFire Department of New York City (FDNY),\n\nFirst Amendment, the, , , ,\n\nFisher, Jeff,\n\nFlorida, , , , 161\u201362\n\nFlorida State Seminoles, , , 159\u201360\n\nFlorio, Mike, 32\u201333\n\nFlynn, Daniel \"Dan,\" , , , 121\u201323, 129\u201330\n\n_Forbes_ ,\n\nForshee, Tequila,\n\n_Forty Million Dollar Slaves_ (Rhoden),\n\nFoster, Joan,\n\nFox, , , ,\n\nFox News, , , , ,\n\nFox Sports, , 36\u201339, ,\n\nFrazier, Leslie,\n\nfreedom of conscience, ,\n\nfreedom of religion, , 35\u201336\n\nfree speech, 16\u201317, ,\n\n_Frontline_ ,\n\nFrontPageMag.com, ,\n\n**G**\n\nGallup polling,\n\ngays, 5\u20136, , , , . _See also_ homosexuality\n\nChris Culliver's comments on, 18\u201319\n\nlegislation affecting, 25\u201334, 40\u201341\n\nmarriage and, 23\u201325, 27\u201329, 36\u201338, 42\u201344, , ,\n\nin professional sports, 50\u201351, 72\u201380, , 84\u201387,\n\nGeorgetown University, 141\u201343\n\nGibbs, Joe,\n\nGilbert, Dan, ,\n\nGivens, Chris, 15\u201316\n\nGladwell, Malcolm, 118\u201321, 130\u201331\n\nGod, 28\u201329, 32\u201335, 43\u201344, , , , 103\u20134,\n\nGoDaddy,\n\nGoldberg, Bernard, xi,\n\nGoodell, Roger, , , , ,\n\nGore, Al,\n\nGrace, Nancy, 165\u201367\n\nGranderson, LZ,\n\n_Grantland_ , 45\u201347,\n\nGray, Ben,\n\n_Greeley Tribune_ , 60\u201361\n\nGreenpeace,\n\nGreen, Robert,\n\nGresham, Clint,\n\nGriffin, Chad,\n\nGrossman, Rex,\n\n**H**\n\nHalbritter, Arthur Raymond \"Ray,\" 63\u201368\n\n\"hands up, don't shoot,\" 15\u201316\n\nHansen, Dale, 78\u201380\n\nHardballTalk.com,\n\nHarper, Bryce, x\n\nHarrison, James,\n\nHarvard Law School,\n\nHarvard Medical School, ,\n\nHaslem, Udonis, 3\u20134\n\nHawk, Tony,\n\nHBO, xi, 5\u20136,\n\nHeisman Trophy, , , 159\u201360\n\nHochman, Benjamin,\n\nhomosexuality, x, 17\u201318, 25\u201330, , 42\u201344, , , , 81\u201382, , 89\u201390, , . _See also_ gays\n\nhoodie photo, the, 3\u20134, 6\u20137, ,\n\nHouston, TX, 71\u201372, , 134\u201335\n\nHoward, Dwight, x\n\n_Huckabee_ ,\n\nHuffington Post, the,\n\nHuffington Post Sports,\n\nHuizenga, Wayne,\n\nHuman Rights Campaign (HRC), 88\u201391\n\nHuman Rights Commission of New\n\nMexico,\n\nHumphrey, Hubert,\n\nHunter, Torii,\n\nHutchison, Kay Bailey,\n\nHyde, David, 4\u20136\n\n**I**\n\n\"I Can't Breathe\" T-shirts,\n\nIncognito, Richie, 189\u201393,\n\nIndiana,\n\nIndianapolis,\n\nIndianapolis Colts, ,\n\n_Inside the NFL_ , 111\u201312\n\nInternational Football Association Board (IFAB),\n\niQMedia,\n\nIran,\n\nIrving, Kyrie,\n\nIrvin, Michael, ,\n\nIverson, Grant, 121\u201323\n\n**J**\n\nJackson, DeSean,\n\nJackson, Jesse, ,\n\nJackson, Tom,\n\nJacksonville Jaguars,\n\nJames, Craig, 36\u201339\n\nJames, LeBron, , 7\u201311, ,\n\nJansen, Tim,\n\nJenkins, Sally,\n\nJesus Christ,\n\nJews, , , ,\n\nJim Crow, , , , ,\n\n_Jim Rome Show_ , ,\n\nJohnson, KC, ,\n\nJones, Bomani, , , 169\u201372\n\nJones, Don, , ,\n\nJones, James, 3\u20134\n\nJones, Jerry,\n\nJones, Lolo, ,\n\nJordan (country),\n\nJordan, Michael, 5\u20136, 9\u201310\n\njournalism, journalists, xi, , , , , , , , , , , 98\u201399, 101\u20132, 116\u201317, 123\u201324, , , , 170\u201372,\n\n**K**\n\nKaepernick, Colin,\n\nKanavy, Tom,\n\nKarantzoulis, Stella, 130\u201331\n\nkeffiyeh,\n\nKemp, Shawn, 82\u201383\n\nKerr, Courtney,\n\nKGB, the,\n\nKing, Billie Jean, 5\u20136\n\nKing, Peter, ,\n\nKirby, Brian,\n\nKISS,\n\nKiwanuka, Mathias,\n\nKluwe, Chris, 91\u201396\n\nKoch, Blake,\n\nKornheiser, Tony, 29\u201331, , ,\n\nKoufax, Sandy,\n\nKriegel, Mark, 74\u201375\n\nKrueger, Larry,\n\nKrulewitz, Josh,\n\nKurtz, Howard,\n\n**L**\n\nLange, Artie, 18\u201319\n\nLaw 4 (FIFA), , 48\u201349\n\n_League of Denial_ ,\n\nLeft, the, ,\n\nlesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender\n\n(LGBT) causes, , , , , 95\u201396\n\nlesbians, lesbianism, , , 45\u201346\n\nLeviticus (book in Bible), 42\u201345\n\nLewis, Ray,\n\nliberals, liberalism, , , , , , , ,\n\nathletes,\n\nideology of, , 54\u201355, , , , , , ,\n\nin the media. _See_ mainstream media: liberal political agenda of the; sports media: liberal political agenda of the\n\nLimbaugh, Rush, , 133\u201348\n\nKeith Olbermann and, 39\u201340\n\nLincoln, Abraham,\n\nLindzen, Richard,\n\nLin, Jeremy,\n\nLittle, Leonard,\n\nLloyd, David,\n\nLoeffler, Cullen,\n\nLos Angeles Clippers, 193\u201394\n\nLos Angeles Lakers, ,\n\nLove, Kevin, x\n\nLoyola University, 130\u201331\n\nLurie, Jeffrey, 187\u201389\n\nLyons, Steve, 175\u201376\n\n**M**\n\nMaddow, Rachel, x,\n\nMadel, Chris,\n\nMagnuson, Eric,\n\nMaher, Bill, 145\u201348\n\nmainstream media,\n\nDuke lacrosse case and, 149\u201353, ,\n\nliberal political agenda of the, xi, 80\u201381, , , , ,\n\nnew media as a challenge to the, 201\u20132\n\nvilification of Manny Pacquiao, 43\u201347\n\nvilification of Tim Tebow, 106\u20137\n\nMajor League Baseball (MLB), ,\n\nSB 1062 and,\n\n_Making of a Champion_ , _The_ ,\n\nMalaysia,\n\nMandel, Stewart, 74\u201375\n\nMangum, Crystal, , ,\n\nManning, Peyton, x\n\nMantle, Mickey,\n\nManziel, Johnny, ,\n\nMarcotte, Amanda, 156\u201357\n\nmarriage\n\nChris Kluwe's opinions on, 91\u201393\n\nCraig James's opinions on, 36\u201338\n\nDavid Tyree's opinions on, 88\u201391\n\nManny Pacquiao's opinions on, 42\u201347\n\nas political issue, , , 107\u20138\n\nReggie White's opinions on, 107\u20138\n\nsame-sex couples and, 24\u201325, 27\u201329,\n\n\"traditional,\" , , 36\u201337, , , 88\u201389,\n\nMartin, Jonathan, , ,\n\nMartin, Trayvon\n\ndeath of, 1\u20132,\n\nMiami Heat's solidarity with, 3\u20134, ,\n\nsports media and, 2\u201315, ,\n\nMatthews, Chris,\n\nMcCarthy, Brian,\n\nMcCombs, Red, 178\u201380\n\nMcCoy, LeSean, ,\n\nMcDonnell, Terry,\n\nMcKenna, Dave,\n\nMcNabb, Donovan, 135\u201341, , , 181\u201384\n\nMcNabb, Sam, 138\u201339\n\nMcNair, Steve,\n\nMecca,\n\nMedia Research Center, , ,\n\nMfume, Kweisi,\n\nMiami Dolphins, , , , , , 192\u201393\n\nMiami, FL, ,\n\nMiami Gardens, 3\u20134\n\nMiami Heat, 3\u20134, , ,\n\n_Miami Heat Index_ (blog),\n\nMichaels, Patrick,\n\nMinnesota Vikings, 91\u201396,\n\nMirengoff, Paul, 26\u201327\n\n_Modern Family_ ,\n\n_Monday Night Football_ ,\n\nMoore, Patrick,\n\nMoran, Terry, 150\u201353,\n\nMortensen, Chris,\n\nMoseley, Mark, ,\n\nMoseley, Rob, 74\u201375\n\nMosher, Geoff,\n\nMSNBC, , ,\n\nMuhammad Ali, 5\u20136, ,\n\nMunson, Lester, 163\u201369\n\nMurtha, Lydon, 192\u201393,\n\n\"muscular Christian,\"\n\nMushnick, Phil, 83\u201384\n\nMuslims, , , 29\u201330, ,\n\ndouble standard with Christianity, 48\u201349, 106\u20137\n\n**N**\n\nNAACP, 137\u201338,\n\nNamath, Joe,\n\nNancy Grace,\n\nNASCAR,\n\n_Nation_ , the,\n\nNational Basketball Association\n\n(NBA), 6\u20139, 20\u201321, , 71\u201374, , , , , 194\u201396\n\nattire rules,\n\nNational Football League (NFL), 91\u201393, ,\n\nattempts to keep Michael Sam on a team by the, 50\u201351\n\nblack quarterbacks as an issue in the, 135\u201340\n\nChristian players in the, , 107\u20138,\n\nconcussions and the, , 120\u201331\n\ncrime and players in the, , 83\u201384,\n\nas dominant professional sports league, , , 117\u201318\n\nFerguson protests and the, 15\u201317\n\nfree-speech issues in the, 15\u201320,\n\n\"Great Gay Race\" and the, 73\u201377, 80\u201381, 85\u201386\n\nlocker-room culture of the, 186\u201388, ,\n\npunishment of Don Jones by the,\n\nrevenue earned by the,\n\n\"Rooney Rule\" of the,\n\nRush Limbaugh's attempts to own a team in the, , 140\u201348\n\nSB 1062 and the, 24\u201329\n\nTim Tebow's career in the, , 99\u2013104, ,\n\nNational Hockey League (NHL),\n\nNational Institute for Occupational\n\nSafety and Health (NIOSH), ,\n\nNavajo Nation, , 63\u201364\n\nNavratilova, Martina,\n\nNazis, Nazism, 30\u201331\n\nArizona and comparisons to,\n\nTim Tebow and comparisons to, ,\n\nNBA Development League, the,\n\nNBC, 33\u201334, ,\n\nNBC Sports, 33\u201334,\n\nNCAA, the,\n\nNew Mexico,\n\nNew Racism, the, 173\u2013200\n\ndefinition of,\n\ndouble standards of, 184\u201385, 188\u201389\n\nNewsBusters.org,\n\nNew Testament, the,\n\nNew York, ,\n\nNew York City, , 65\u201366,\n\n_New York Daily News_ , 90\u201392,\n\nNew York Giants, , 88\u201392, ,\n\nNew York Jets,\n\nNew York Mets, 145\u201346\n\n_New York Post_ , the, ,\n\n_New York Times_ , the, xi, 49\u201350, , , , , 157\u201358\n\nNFL Network, , ,\n\nNifong, Mike, , , 163\u201368\n\nNike, , ,\n\nNorth Carolina, , 151\u201352,\n\nNorth Dakota, 55\u201356\n\nNorthern Illinois University,\n\nNutter, Michael A., 185\u201386\n\nN-word, the,\n\nDuke lacrosse players' use of,\n\nracists and, 174\u201375\n\nRichie Incognito and, 189\u201393\n\nRiley Cooper and, 185\u201388\n\nuse by African Americans, 185\u201389, 193\u2013200\n\n**O**\n\nObama, Barack, , , 14\u201315, , , , , , , , ,\n\nObamacare, , ,\n\nObama Classic, the, ,\n\nOklahoma,\n\nOklahoma City bombing, the,\n\nOlbermann, Keith, , 39\u201340, ,\n\nOlympics (2012),\n\nO'Neal, Jermaine, 20\u201321\n\nOneida Indian Nation, 65\u201368\n\nbusiness incorporated by,\n\nOneidasforDemocracy.org,\n\nO'Reilly, Bill,\n\n_O'Reilly Factor_ , _The_ ,\n\n_Outliers_ (Gladwell),\n\n_Outside the Lines_ ,\n\n**P**\n\nPacquiao, Manny, 42\u201345,\n\nPage, Clarence,\n\n_Pardon the Interruption_ , , , , , 180\u201381, ,\n\nPatawomeck tribe,\n\nPatrick, Dan, 58\u201359, , 186\u201387\n\nPatterson, Steve, 179\u201380\n\nPBS,\n\nPearlman, Jeff, 76\u201378,\n\nPenn State University,\n\nPeople for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), ,\n\nPerry, Dayn,\n\nPeterson, Adrian, 83\u201384,\n\nPhiladelphia Eagles, , , , 185\u201388\n\nPhilbin, Matt, , ,\n\nPhilippines, the, , ,\n\nPineiro, Lisa, ,\n\nPiniella, Lou, 175\u201376\n\nPittsburgh Steelers,\n\npolitical correctness, ix\u2013x, , , , , 176\u201377, , ,\n\n_Politically Incorrect_ ,\n\npolitics, x\u2013xi, , , , , 62\u201364, , , , , , , ,\n\nathletes' involvement in, 5\u20137, , , 73\u201374\n\nESPN policies regarding, 14\u201315, 35\u201336,\n\nFIFA policies regarding, 47\u201348\n\nMichael Jordan's avoidance of, , 9\u201310\n\nPop Warner, 127\u201328\n\n_Power Line_ (blog), 26\u201327\n\nPoynter Institute,\n\nPravda,\n\nPriefer, Mike, 92\u201394,\n\nPrisco, Pete,\n\nPro Football Talk, , 27\u201328, , , 100\u20132\n\nprogressives, progressive politics, x, , , , , , , 155\u201356, ,\n\nPutin, Vladimir, 27\u201328,\n\n**R**\n\nrace. _See also_ New Racism\n\nconflations with homosexuality,\n\ndouble standards and, 38\u201339, 83\u201384, 107\u201313, 159\u201362, 175\u2013200\n\nMichael Jordan's neutrality on issues of,\n\nrace-baiting, x, ,\n\nrole in Ferguson protests, 16\u201317\n\nrole in Trayvon Martin case, , , 12\u201313\n\nsports media's focus on, , 60\u201362, 108\u201313, , 136\u201347, 150\u201372, 175\u201378, 180\u201382, 199\u2013200\n\nracism, racists. _See also_ New Racism\n\nallegations of racism in Trayvon Martin case, 12\u201313,\n\nChristianity equated with, ,\n\nMike Shanahan accused of, 181\u201384\n\nNative American sports names as issue of, 58\u201363\n\nRepublicans as,\n\nRichard Sherman and, 174\u201375\n\nRichie Incognito and, 189\u201393\n\nRiley Cooper and, 185\u201389\n\nrole of alleged racism in the Duke lacrosse case, , 154\u201359, 170\u201372\n\nRush Limbaugh as, 137\u201346\n\nRadio Row,\n\n_Raleigh News and Observer_ ,\n\nRandolph, Christopher, 130\u201331\n\nrape. _See also_ sexual assault\n\naccusations against Jameis Winston, 160\u201361\n\nDuke lacrosse case and, 149\u201360, , 168\u201369,\n\nPenn State and, 95\u201396\n\nprofessional athletes and, 95\u201396,\n\nsports media coverage of (in general), x,\n\n_Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel_ , xi\n\n_Real Time with Bill Maher_ ,\n\nRedskins. _See_ Washington Redskins\n\nRedskinsFacts.com,\n\nRed Zone Channel,\n\nReid, Jason,\n\nReilly, Rick,\n\n_Reliable Sources_ ,\n\nReligious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), , . _See also_ \"anti-gay bill\"; SB 1062\n\nRepublican Party, the,\n\nRepublicans, , , 79\u201380, , ,\n\nRhoden, William, 10\u201311\n\nRichards, Michael, ,\n\nRickey, Branch,\n\nRise Up and Register,\n\nRivers, Austin,\n\nRoberts, Kim, 170\u201371\n\nRobertson, Oscar,\n\nRoberts, Selena, 154\u201359, 167\u201368\n\nRobinson, Jackie, , , , ,\n\nRocker, John,\n\nRock the Vote,\n\nRolle, Antrel,\n\nRomney, Mitt,\n\nRomo, Tony,\n\nRooney Rule, the,\n\nRoosevelt, Franklin Delano,\n\nRose, Derrick,\n\nRosenthal, Gregg, 100\u20132\n\nRovell, Darren,\n\n_Rules for Radicals_ (Alinsky),\n\n_Rush Limbaugh Show_ , _The_ , 140\u201343\n\nRussia, 27\u201328\n\nRuth, Babe,\n\nRyan, Bob, 125\u201329,\n\nRyans, DeMeco,\n\n**S**\n\nSalita, Dmitriy,\n\nSam, Michael, 29\u201330,\n\ncoming out, 72\u201375\n\nexcessive sports media coverage of, x\u2013xi, , 50\u201351, 77\u201387,\n\nNFL draft and, , 76\u201377, 80\u201381,\n\nshown kissing his boyfriend, , 80\u201383\n\ntime spent on NFL rosters, 50\u201351\n\nSan Antonio Spurs,\n\n_San Diego Union-Tribune_ ,\n\nSan Francisco ers, 18\u201319, ,\n\nresponse to Chris Culliver comments,\n\nSan Francisco Giants,\n\nSB 1062 (Arizona), , . _See also_ \"anti-gay bill\"\n\nSchlussel, Debbie,\n\nSchroeder, Jay,\n\nScott, Bart, 144\u201345\n\nSeattle Seahawks, ,\n\nSeau, Junior, ,\n\nSeligmann, Reade, 164\u201365,\n\nSeptember 11, 2001, attacks (9/11),\n\nsexual assault, , 159\u201361, . _See also_ rape\n\nShanahan, Michael \"Mike,\" 181\u201384\n\nShanks, Eric,\n\nSharp, Drew,\n\nSharpton, Al, , ,\n\nShelf Life Clothing, 61\u201362\n\nShelly, Ben, 63\u201365,\n\nSherman, Joel,\n\nSherman, Richard, 173\u201375,\n\nShillue, Tom,\n\nShowtime,\n\nSilver, Adam, 20\u201321\n\nSimmons, Gene,\n\nSioux, the, 55\u201356,\n\n_60 Minutes_ ,\n\nSlate,\n\nslave masters,\n\nslavery, 141\u201343, , 197\u2013200\n\nslaves, 10\u201311, , , 198\u2013200\n\nSmith, Lovie, 108\u20139\n\nSmith, Stephen A., , ,\n\nSnyder, Daniel \"Dan\"\n\nBen Shelly and, 63\u201364,\n\nrefusal to change Redskins name, ,\n\nsoccer,\n\nSouth, the, ,\n\nSpielman, Rick,\n\nSpirit Lake tribe,\n\n_Sports Center_ , ,\n\n_Sports Illustrated_ , , , , 157\u201358, 166\u201368\n\nsports media,\n\nanti-Christian biases of the, , , 37\u201338, 42\u201347, , 51\u201352, , , , 98\u2013104, 106\u201311,\n\n\"anti-gay\" bill (SB 1062) and, 24\u201331\n\nBill Maher and 145\u201348\n\nconcussions in football and, 116\u201319, , 125\u201331\n\ncoverage of Donovan McNabb, 135\u201337, 139\u201340\n\ncoverage of Ferguson protests, 16\u201317\n\ncoverage of Jason Collins, 71\u201372, 82\u201387\n\ncoverage of Michael Sam, 50\u201351, , 78\u201382, 84\u201387\n\ndefense of Rush Limbaugh, 139\u201340\n\ndefense of Tim Tebow, 111\u201312\n\nhow to fix politicization of the, 201\u20133\n\nignoring Native Americans who support Redskins name, 56\u201359, 64\u201369\n\nliberal political agenda of the, ix\u2013xi, , 9\u201311, 13\u201317, , , 34\u201338, , , 60\u201363, 74\u201387, , 106\u20137, , , , , , , 174\u201375\n\nnarrative created in Duke lacrosse case, 149\u201372\n\nNew Racism and the, 178\u2013200\n\nRush Limbaugh and, 135\u201348\n\nTrayvon Martin and the, 2\u20136, , , ,\n\nas unfamiliar with real world of sports and teammates, 190\u201393\n\nuse of \"thug\" by the, 174\u201375\n\nvilification of Tim Tebow, 76\u201378, 85\u201386, 98\u2013108,\n\nSportsMediaWatch.com,\n\nStark, Jayson,\n\nStarnes, Todd,\n\n_State of the Union_ ,\n\nStepford Wives,\n\nStern, David, ,\n\nSt. Louis Blues,\n\nSt. Louis Rams, 15\u201317, , , , 145\u201346\n\nStrong, Charlie, 178\u201380\n\n\"St. Timmy.\" _See_ Tebow, Tim\n\nSumlin, Kevin,\n\n_Sunday NFL Countdown_ , , ,\n\n_Sunday Night Football_ , , ,\n\n_Sun Sentinel_ ,\n\nSuper Bowl game, , , , , , ,\n\nfirst black quarterback to win a,\n\nSuper Bowl XLI (2007), , 108\u20139\n\nSuper Bowl XLII (2008), 88\u201389\n\nSuper Bowl XLIV (2010), , , 110\u201311\n\nSuper Bowl XLVII (2013),\n\nSuper Bowl XLIX (2015), 24\u201326, 29\u201330, 126\u201327\n\nSuper Bowl LXXIV (2040),\n\n**T**\n\ntaj,\n\nTallahassee Police Department,\n\nTebow, Bob,\n\ntebowing,\n\nTebow, Pam, ,\n\nTebow, Tim\n\nChristianity of, , 75\u201376, , , , 98\u2013113\n\ncompared with other Christian athletes, 107\u201310\n\ndraft party of,\n\nGene Simmons's defense of,\n\nGregg Doyel's writings on, 102\u20135,\n\nJeff Pearlman's writings on, 76\u201378\n\nKurt Warner's advice for,\n\nPete Prisco's columns on,\n\nPro Football Talk's Wonderlic test story and, 100\u20133\n\nsports media's effect on career of, 85\u201386, 97\u2013113,\n\nStephen Tulloch's mocking of, 105\u20136\n\nas \"St. Timmy,\"\n\nSuper Bowl commercial of, 98\u201399,\n\nterrorists, terrorism, 39\u201340\n\nTexas, , , , , 178\u201381\n\n_ThinkProgress_ (blog), ,\n\nThomas, Etan, 9\u201311,\n\nThomas, Owen, 120\u201321\n\n\"thug,\" , , 174\u201375\n\n_Tipping Point_ , _The_ (Gladwell),\n\nToettcher, Fred,\n\nTribe Called Red, A,\n\nTulloch, Stephen,\n\nTupac,\n\nTurning Stone Casino,\n\nTwitter, , , , ,\n\naccount of Gabby Douglas,\n\nArizona's SB 1062 and, 27\u201328\n\nbacklash against Manny Pacquiao on,\n\nChris Kluwe's comments on,\n\nDavid Tyree and gay conversion comment,\n\nESPN accounts and,\n\nJason Whitlock joke on,\n\nMatt Barnes N-word tweet and,\n\nMiami Heat and,\n\nresponse to Ben Shelly and, 63\u201364\n\nresponse to Richard Sherman and,\n\nTyree, David, 88\u201391\n\n**U**\n\nUkraine, ,\n\nUnited States\n\ngovernment of the, , ,\n\npresident of the, , ,\n\nUniversity of Florida Gators, 99\u2013101\n\nUniversity of Louisville, 179\u201380\n\nUniversity of Missouri, ,\n\nUniversity of Nebraska, 40\u201341\n\nUniversity of Pennsylvania National Annenberg Election Survey,\n\nUniversity of Texas (UT), 178\u201380\n\nU.S. Army, the,\n\n_USA Today_ , , , ,\n\nU.S. Department of Justice, ,\n\nU.S. government, the, , , 66\u201368, , , ,\n\nU.S. Senate, the, , ,\n\nU.S. Supreme Court,\n\n**V**\n\nVacchiano, Ralph, 138\u201340\n\nVecsey, George,\n\nVerlander, Justin, x\n\nVick, Michael, , , , 187\u201389\n\n**W**\n\nWallace, Michael, 3\u20134\n\nWall, John,\n\nWall Street,\n\nWalsh, Blair,\n\n_War on Football_ , _The_ (Flynn), ,\n\nWarner, Kurt, 104\u20135\n\nWashington, D.C., , , , ,\n\nWashington, George,\n\n_Washington Post_ , 9\u201310, , , , , 181\u201383, ,\n\nWashington Redskins, ,\n\nDonovan McNabb and the, 181\u201383\n\nNative Americans and the, 55\u201358, 62\u201365, 68\u201369\n\npossible name change of the, 53\u201359, 62\u201369\n\nWFAA Dallas,\n\nWhite, Reggie, 107\u20138,\n\nWhite, Roddy, 13\u201314\n\nWhitlock, Jason, 8\u20139, ,\n\nWikipedia,\n\nWilbon, Mike, , , 177\u201378, 180\u201383, 186\u201389, 196\u2013200\n\nWilliams, Doug,\n\nWilliams, Ricky,\n\nWilson, Darren,\n\nWilson, Paul,\n\nWilson, Russell,\n\nWinfrey, Oprah, ,\n\nWinston Churchill,\n\nWise, Mike, 82\u201384, 199\u2013200\n\nWojciechowski, Gene,\n\nWolken, Dan, 115\u201316,\n\nWonderlic test,\n\nWoods, Tiger, ,\n\nWorld Series, the,\n\n**Y**\n\nYahoo! Sports, ,\n\nYazzie, Tommy,\n\nYou Can Play foundation,\n\n**Z**\n\nZahn, Paula,\n\nZimmerman, George, 1\u20132, , , ,\n\nZirin, Dave, \n"}
+{"meta": {"title": "Caesar's Footprints - Bijan Omrani"}, "text": " \nCAESAR'S\n\nFOOTPRINTS\n\nA CULTURAL EXCURSION TO ANCIENT FRANCE:  \nJOURNEYS THROUGH ROMAN GAUL\n\nBIJAN OMRANI\n\n_To Sam, Cassian and Beatrix_\n\n_The Amphitheatre at N\u00eemes. Like that of Arles, it was built around ad 70, and was converted into a fortification by the time of the Visigoths. It functioned as a town in its own right, until being restored to its more recognizably Roman form (and function), for bullfights and other public spectacles, in the mid-nineteenth century._\nContents\n\n_List of Maps_\n\n_A Note on Terminology_\n\n_Introduction_\n\nI \u2022 Gaul Before Caesar\n\nII \u2022 Caesar's Command\n\nIII \u2022 The Taming of Gaul\n\nIV \u2022 Tales of the Imagination\n\nV \u2022 When in France\n\nVI \u2022 High Life and City Chic\n\nVII \u2022 Country Life\n\nVIII \u2022 The Dignity of Labour\n\nIX \u2022 In Their Own Words\n\nX \u2022 Blood of the Martyrs\n\nEpilogue: From an Empire to a Dream\n\n_Bibliographical Notes_\n\n_Bibliography_\n\n_Picture Credits_\n\n_Acknowledgements_\n\n_Index_\nList of Maps\n\nPage numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device's search function to locate particular terms in the text.\n\n1 \u2022 The tribes of Gaul at the time of Caesar \u2022\n\n2 \u2022 The course of the Rh\u00f4ne from Geneva to the Pas de L'\u00c9cluse \u2022 -\n\n3 \u2022 The Battle of Bibracte \u2022\n\n4 \u2022 The Battle of Gergovia \u2022 -\n\n5 \u2022 The Battle of Al\u00e9sia \u2022 -\n\n6 \u2022 Julius Caesar's invasions of Britannia \u2022 -\n\nMaps 2\u20135, together with the map that appears in the endpapers, were prepared by Colonel Stoffel in the 1860s during the archaeological investigations ordered by Napoleon III into the Gallic conquests of Caesar. They were first included in Napoleon III's _Histoire de Jules C\u00e9sar,_ published in 1866.\nA Note on Terminology\n\nThe use of the words 'Celtic', 'Gaul' and 'Gallic' caused considerable difficulty to classical authors, who could not agree on their exact meanings. There was a debate as to whether all Gauls were Celts, or whether they were mutually exclusive, and whether the term Gallic should be used to denote just those peoples living in the southern and western areas of modern-day France (as opposed to those who lived in the Belgic or Aquitanian regions). This difficulty exists as much for contemporary authors. For simplicity, I use the word 'Gauls' to describe those people who lived in the area designated by Julius Caesar as Gaul.\n\nAnother challenge is the use of ancient and modern place names. Here, I make no great claims to consistency. In general, I have tended to use ancient place names when talking about the places in the Roman context. However, this is not always the case. For example, I have stuck with Autun rather than persistently using the lengthy ancient name of Augustodunum. Both ancient and modern names of places are given in the index for clarity.\nCAESAR'S\n\nFOOTPRINTS\n\nIntroduction\n\nTHE IDEA FOR WRITING THIS book came to me a few years ago, while I was teaching a Latin lesson. It was a Wednesday morning deep in the winter term, period two. I was conducting a Latin language session with a bright but not especially motivated lower sixth. The unfortunate fodder for this exercise was the fifth book of Julius Caesar's _Commentaries on the Gallic War,_ describing his conquest of Gaul between 58 and 50 BC.\n\nThere was something almost ritualized about the pupils' misery during these sessions. The use of Caesar as fodder for teenage children to take their first steps in translating 'real' Latin, after leaving behind the safety of language textbooks, is an ancient tradition. Say 'Caesar' to anyone who has been subjected to an education containing a classical component, and there are two likely reactions. One the one hand, a cheerful reminiscence of how good Caesar was for them: how wonderfully hard his writing worked their brain, as if his dialogues were specifically designed \u2013 like some formidable fibre-laced breakfast cereal \u2013 to improve their cerebral motions. On the other, a cross-eyed stab of agony, like thinking back to a mental version of the Somme, where all was muddy quagmire and barbed-wire entanglements formed of indirect statements enmeshed with ablative absolutes and gerundives of obligation. My lower sixth form class was very much in the latter camp.\n\nI hated it that, for generations of schoolchildren, this was the miserable end to which Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars was put. During that lesson, as someone, floundering in a particularly long and vicious stretch of _oratio obliqua_ ,* paused and expressed his total disgust for Caesar, _The Gallic Wars_ and the whole exercise, I felt compelled to pause and make a defence, if not of using Caesar for grammar bashing, then at least of Caesar's writing. It was, I pleaded, rather more than a random tale of legions being marched and legates being dispatched. The text stood as an extraordinary account of the very foundation of modern Europe: for it was by taking the heartlands of Gaul under their control that the Romans introduced the culture of the Latin Mediterranean to the European north. Without this conquest \u2013 which was not a historical inevitability, and which was undertaken on the spur of the moment because of Caesar's own political circumstances and all-consuming ambition \u2013 the Roman empire would likely never have had the reach or staying power that it attained. The modern languages of Europe would probably have been more Celtic than Latinate in nature. The literary classics of Virgil, Cicero and Ovid, and the masterpieces of ancient Greek literature that influenced them, might not have had such a profound impact on the Western tradition. The same is the case for classical ideas of philosophy, law, rhetoric, music and architecture. Christianity likewise would perhaps never have penetrated Europe as deeply as would prove to be the case. Without Caesar's conquest of Gaul, the map of modern Europe would look entirely different. There would have been no European neurosis springing from the memory of the barbarian invasions across the Rhine in the fifth century AD; no Charlemagne; no modern state of France; no Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries \u2013 and very little likelihood that we would have been sitting in that classroom reading a classic work of Latin literature on a cold Wednesday morning.\n\nI expressed myself largely and eloquently. My class essentially told me to sod off. Not one to give up on a fight with my students, I determined then that I would do something to save Caesar from the slough of grammar and syntactical misery to which he \u2013 perhaps as fitting punishment from the Furies for the Olympian scale of his ambition \u2013 had been condemned.\n\nModern interest in Caesar tends to concentrate on what he did in Rome rather than on what he did in Gaul. It is the political intrigue that marked his rise to prominence and his victory in the civil war, and the period that led up to his assassination, that captures the twenty-first-century imagination. His time in Gaul, and his bloody activities there, are by contrast relegated to the classroom, and the wretchedness of grammatical exercises for reluctant schoolchildren. My aim in writing this book is to redress the balance: to place centre stage what Caesar \u2013 and the Romans who followed him \u2013 achieved in Gaul, and to explore their lasting and highly visible cultural legacy.\n\nThe purpose of this book is not to give a military account of Caesar's time in Gaul; nor, indeed, is it exclusively devoted to Caesar. There are many excellent works that already fill this niche. It is intended rather to examine the circumstances that led to the Roman conquest of Gaul, and to consider the reasons why, after the initial bloodletting of the Gallic Wars, it would prove to be such a long-term success: how the Roman transformation of Gaul laid the foundations of modern Europe. It therefore looks at the history of the engagement of Rome and Gaul and the cultural and economic impact of that connection. Physical evidence of this can still be seen on the ground, and parts of the book are devoted to the surviving vestiges of Roman Gaul \u2013 amphitheatres, aqueducts, triumphal arches, temples and mausoleums. I will also trace the impact of Roman Gaul on cultural ideas, literary remains and religious traditions.\n\nThe question as to how Rome managed to knit Gaul to itself so effectively that it remained a part of the empire for half a millennium has an enduring relevance. In an age in which the aspiration for European unity looks increasingly chimerical despite the blessings of technology and the modern era, it is instructive to look back to when this ideal, under Rome, was first born, how it was brought about and what \u2013 in the example of Gaul \u2013 was its cost. It is tied up in questions not just of material change, but also culture, and in particular how Rome dealt with outsiders and migration. The Roman movement into Gaul was arguably born as a response to the first European migration crisis for which we possess an eye-witness account (however slanted it may be). To describe Caesar and the conquest of Gaul is also to describe how Rome treated the 'barbarian other'. And this demands that we look at Caesar not just as a grammatical exercise, but as the brooding presence \u2013 the 'vast ghost' in the words of Lawrence Durrell \u2013 that still hangs over a Europe which struggles to be at one.\n\n*Indirect speech. For example, _'Magister est stupidus'_ (The teacher is stupid) is direct speech. _'Putat magistrum stupidum esse'_ (He thinks that the teacher is stupid) is indirect speech.\n\n_Detail of the Vix Krater, c. sixth century BC._\nCHAPTER I\n\nGaul Before Caesar\n\n_Factum eius hostis periculum patrum nostrorum memoria_  \n'We have made trial of this foe in the time of our fathers'\n\nJULIUS CAESAR, _De Bello Gallico,_ 1.40\n\nMARSEILLES\n\n\u2022\n\nGREEK MIGRANTS\n\n\u2022\n\nSAINT-R\u00c9MY-DE-PROVENCE\n\n\u2022\n\nGALLIC MIGRANTS\n\n\u2022\n\nGALLIA CISALPINA\n\n\u2022\n\nENTREMONT\n\n\u2022\n\nTEUTONIC MIGRANTS\n\n\u2022\n\nORANGE\n\n\u2022\n\nTHE CRAU\n\n\u2022\n\nMONTAGNE SAINTE-VICTOIRE\n\n\u2022\n\nPOURRI\u00c8RES\n\n\u2022\n\nAIX-EN-PROVENCE\n\nOUR STORY BEGINS IN THE OLD port of Marseilles, where the masts of a vast fleet of sailing boats are reflected, ribbon-like, in the opalescent water. These are the same waters that lap at the harbour walls of cities across the length and breadth of the Middle Sea: Ajaccio, Genoa, Algiers, Athens, Alexandria. Water, boats and masts seem to vaporize in the heat, suspended in a haze of ochre and peach dust above the grand frontages measuring the length of the quay. At the traffic lights, a figure in a brown chador washes windscreens for a handful of cents. In a shuttered doorway, sitting on a sleeping bag, an Arab man skins plastic from copper cables with a crooked knife, his young son curled up beside him on a bed of cardboard and dirty cushions.\n\nTheir origins may lie elsewhere, but Marseilles is _their_ city. Just as, east of the city, the limestone cliffs of the Massif des Calanques shelter a diverse array of herbs and flowers, so Marseilles has always provided a refuge for new arrivals from foreign shores. A curtain of low mountains \u2013 the Garlaban and Massif de l'\u00c9toile \u2013 is draped beyond the city's suburban shoulder like a protective cowl, shielding it from the suspicions of the north. Marseilles was founded not by Romans but by Greeks: it is, therefore, older than Caesar, though not older than Rome. But it was a place of wealth and taste long before Rome made its mark on the wider world. It had no great aspirations to empire or dominion like Rome, no serious martial tradition, but was happy, like Venice after it, to cling to a redoubt in a hostile hinterland \u2013 so long as it could make money as a middleman from trading upon the sea.\n\nBut, in truth, this city is a cousin to Rome. They are alike in the stories of their birth. They were early friends. They shared their fears, neuroses and hypocrisies. It was through Marseilles that the culture of the Mediterranean made its original entry into Gaul and so into northern Europe. Marseilles prepared the way for the coming of Caesar and the Romans, and presaged the mindset that drew Caesar into conquest. To understand the lure and the myth of the ground that Caesar would tread in Gaul, we must first understand Marseilles.\n\nThey came in search of a better life. Their original home, the Ionian Greek city of Phocaea, lay far to the east, clinging to the rocky scourings off the coast of Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey, north of Izmir. The land was crowded, stony and infertile. The Phocaeans thus became accustomed \u2013 according to the Gallo-Roman historian Pompeius Trogus, writing in the first century BC \u2013 to wandering and making a living from the sea. They were the first of all the Greeks, so Herodotus says, to make long journeys on the Mediterranean for the sake of trade. They conducted business past the Hellespont in the north, Egypt in the south, and Spain in the west. But the demographic pressures on their native city led many of them not just to travel, but to abandon Phocaea altogether and settle elsewhere. Some of their colonies, such as Lampascus in the Dardanelles, were close to home; others \u2013 Al\u00e9ria in Corsica or Emp\u00faries in Catalonia \u2013 were far away. The first wave of Phocaean migration, at the end of the seventh century BC and early in the sixth, was voluntary; the second, in the middle of the sixth, came about as a result of war. Cyrus, king of Persia, determined to seize the Greek hinterland in Asia Minor and captured Phocaea in 546 BC; its entire population fled.\n\nMarseilles was born of the first wave of Greek migration, and augmented by the second. Gaul would not have been completely unfamiliar to the Phocaeans, but it was certainly replete with mystery and danger. The tenth labour of Heracles* \u2013 to kill Geryon, the three-bodied giant, and steal his cattle \u2013 led him to traverse the coast of the Mediterranean through Spain and southern Gaul. The land even bore the scars of his journey: chased by the Ligurian tribes, Heracles was aided by his father Zeus, who flung rocks from the sky at his pursuers to cover his escape. According to local legend, the rocks that Zeus threw can still be seen in the dry, stony landscape around the town of Saint-Martin-de-Crau near the mouth of the Rh\u00f4ne. Closer to the Phocaeans' own experience, the Phoenicians of the Levant, the Etruscans from northern Italy and other Ionian Greeks had \u2013 over a number of centuries \u2013 carried on a fitful trade with the coast-dwellers of southern Gaul, but there was no sign that they had put down a permanent presence.\n\nThe Phocaeans were to change this. At the beginning of the sixth century BC, according to Trogus, Phocaean ships sailed into the mouth of the Rh\u00f4ne and found it to be an inviting place. Quite apart from its favourable location, at the hub of a trading route that could stretch from the furthest reaches of the Mediterranean, via the river Rh\u00f4ne, into the unexplored interior of Gaul, there were safe natural harbours and fine stretches of pleasant land protected by an encircling wall of hills.\n\nAttracted by promising reports from these early visitors to southern Gaul, a fleet of migrants assembled in Phocaea. Its captains were Protis and Simos. They crossed the sea safely and arrived at the mouth of the Rh\u00f4ne, but they still had to win the right to settle the territory. The inhabitants of the area were the Segobrigii, whose king was Nannus. The legend of the coming of the Phocaeans is recounted not only by Trogus but also by Aristotle. They arrived on the very day that Nannus had appointed for his daughter, Gyptis, to be betrothed. When they approached Nannus to ask him for land on which to settle, the Greek captains found themselves invited to the nuptial festivities.\n\nIt was the custom at these events for the bride herself to choose whom she would marry. The suitors would gather, and the bride would parade around them clutching a goblet of water, or wine, says Aristotle, before finally giving it to the man she wished to be her husband. That night, after the local chiefs had assembled with the newcomers in their midst, they were astonished when Gyptis handed the goblet to Protis. Nannus, believing that a god had guided her choice, did not stand in her way, and granted the Greek migrants the site of Marseilles, then called Massalia.\n\nTrogus's account of the legend is broadly similar to that of his Greek predecessor, but Aristotle gives the protagonists different names. In Aristotle's version, Protis was the son born of the marriage of the Greek newcomer and the daughter of the native king; the Greek captain's original name was Euxenus, meaning 'good stranger'; while the king's daughter was Petta (although she changed her name to Aristoxena \u2013 'best stranger' \u2013 on marrying Euxenus). The descendants of Protis still constituted a noble family in Massalia when Aristotle was writing in the fourth century BC. Whatever the truth of the legend of the marriage, the kernel of the story suggests that a union between the migrants and the native inhabitants took place at the moment of Massalia's foundation.\n\n_Remains of the ancient Greek and Roman port of Massalia, now silted up a few streets inland from Marseilles' old port._\n\nThe city was a great success. Standing in the ancient harbour of Massalia, now silted up a few streets inland from the old port, it is difficult to envisage the prosperity of the early days of the Greek colony. One cannot see the theatre or the temples the Phocaeans built nearby for their migrant gods, Artemis and Apollo. The harbour walls, water tanks and tower bases built of well-squared Roman blocks overtop the Greek originals of the earliest generations; it is only beneath the elegantly grooved Cassis\u2020 stone slabs on the Roman roadway leading from the quayside that traces of the sixth-century Greek road, which lies below the Grand-Rue of the modern city, can be discerned.\n\nTo see the early success of the colony, one must look beyond the city to wider Gaul and to the impact that the Greek presence had on the tribes deep in the Gallic heartland. In the sixth century BC, the interior of Gaul was under the sway of a proto-Celtic society \u2013 the Hallstatt culture, as it is conventionally termed by archaeologists. It was a society of the warrior chieftain. It possessed a special skill in metalwork, particularly iron, and the manufacture of weapons. The highest members of its aristocracy, perhaps ultimately migrants from the eastern steppes, were buried in timber chambers beneath tumuli, laid out on four-wheeled chariots decked in bronze. They displayed their power through ownership of an abundance of rare and exotic goods, which they could freely distribute to enhance their prestige and also attract new followers. It was the presence of the Greeks that gave them access to these desirable items, and even prompted them to develop this hierarchical society. Greek traders, with their links to the ateliers in the east, brought luxuries to Massalia and from there they were transported along the Rh\u00f4ne and Sa\u00f4ne to the deep heartlands of Gaul. Perhaps in return for tin, or iron, or slaves, the noble classes were able to secure fine examples of Greek workmanship as tokens of their own authority.\n\nBy examining some of the archaeological finds of this age, it is possible to imagine how Gallic tribesmen might have reacted when they first set eyes on the luxury imports of the Greeks. For a vignette, let us set the date at 520 BC, at a Gallic settlement on the flat-topped hill of Mont Lassois by the upper reaches of the Seine in northeastern Burgundy. A number of boxes have been brought up the hill into the camp of wooden huts and palisades. The boxes contain together just one item, but being a heavy import, it is flat-packed for self-assembly. Fortunately, there are instructions \u2013 scratched-on Greek letters, indicating which part should be joined to which. As the tribesmen labour to join the pieces together \u2013 handles, stand, cover \u2013 the item takes shape. It is not easy work. The item is metal, refulgent hammered bronze, weighing over 200 kilograms, with individual components of as much as 60 kilograms. When finished, it stands at least as high as the tribesmen, at 1.6 metres (5 foot 4 inches). This is no simple bookshelf or bedstead, but a colossal 1,200-litre wine cauldron, or _krater._ It is the largest such item known from the ancient world, and is intricately and skilfully worked. Gorgons, menacing, with snakes in their hair and tongues sticking out through grimacing smiles, glare from the handles, as do rampant lions, their muscles taut and claws digging into the metalwork, while their tails echo in their curve the elegant whorls and scrolls chased into the rim and the volutes of the handles. In a band below the rim that runs the whole circumference of the _krater_ , Greek soldiers, hoplites, march in an endless parade. They are naked save for great fan-crested helmets (whose plumage reaches down to their waist), greaves and round, dish-like shields strapped to their left arms. Some ride on chariots whose horses, ambling and stately, peer inquisitively at the new owners of the _krater._\n\nThe tribesmen, who then had no native tradition of sculpture, would have felt similarly curious. They would have recognized and appreciated the chariots, but the panoply of Greek art and decorations \u2013 and the complex religious and social ideas that they expressed \u2013 would have been quite incomprehensible to them at this point in time. In a classical Greek context, such a _krater_ would have been used for mixing wine and water at a symposium, or drinking party, where the atmosphere would have been that of easy aristocratic conviviality. In the Gallic context, however \u2013 to judge from investigations of other such _kraters_ dating from sixth-century BC Gaul \u2013 it seems more likely they were used for mead, not wine. Their role in Gallic feasting was not simply as a drinking vessel, but to impress on the guests the power of the owner: they expressed hierarchy, not conviviality. They might even have had a religious function. In the very earliest stratum of Greek culture, the cauldron was associated with death and rebirth, a symbol of the abundant power of nature for regeneration. Such profundities were less likely to occupy the mind of a Greek party-goer of the sixth century BC, but these ideas were also indigenous to Celtic culture, and visible in surviving Celtic mythology.\u2021 Perhaps it was for the power of its religious symbolism that the cauldron was put to its final use, to accompany a lady of high status to the grave.\n\nWhen the _krater,_ now named the Vix Krater after the village nearest to the grave, was discovered in 1953, it provided compelling evidence of the impact of the Greek newcomers on the interior of Gaul in those early times. They had not at that stage brought about a fundamental change in culture, but they had introduced a material presence that would gradually affect Gaul in myriad ways. Following the import of _kraters_ and ceramic items, Greek methods were introduced into construction, agriculture and the arts. Solid buildings were built, with mud bricks on top of stone bases. Even on Mont Lassois, huge structures of wood but in imitation of Greek halls, or _megara,_ were erected. In the areas near Massalia, the olive and vine began to be cultivated. Local productions of ceramics in imitation of the Greek imports began. Silver coins, like those of the Greeks, were struck. The Greek alphabet was tentatively used for inscriptions in the local languages. Motifs from Greek art were taken up by indigenous artists: the figures and patterns from the imported wares formed the basis for the familiar style of what became known as Celtic art.\n\nAt the end of the sixth century BC there was an apparent breakdown in trade along the Rh\u00f4ne, as Etruscan rivals began to compete for business in the interior of Gaul using overland routes from northern Italy. Sites like Mont Lassois were abandoned, and Massalia turned its attention more to the southern coast of Gaul. The colony spawned a cluster of daughter colonies during the fifth century BC \u2013 Nice, Antibes, Agde, Monaco \u2013 increasing the Greek cultural presence in the south and marking a divergence from the northern interior. 'Such a radiance was shed over both men and things', writes Pompeius Trogus, 'that it was not Greece which seemed to have immigrated into Gaul, but Gaul that seemed to have been transplanted into Greece'.\n\n_The Vix Krater, an ancient Greek import into Gaul, discovered in 1953._\n\nThe Gauls had given the Phocaeans refuge and permitted them to found Massalia, but they were nonetheless uneasy. Trogus relates that a subject complained to the king of the Segobrigii by telling him the following fable: 'A bitch once asked a shepherd, when she was pregnant, for a place to give birth to her puppies. When he agreed, she asked again to be allowed to bring them up in the same place. Later, when her puppies were grown up, and she could depend upon their support, she seized the place as her own.' In such a way, the subject continued, 'the people of Marseilles, who are now regarded as your tenants, will one day become masters of your territory'.\n\nThe king began to fear. The immigrants were now too powerful to expel by open warfare, so he decided on a plot to remove them. Some of his strongest warriors would enter Massalia openly, as friends to the newcomers, to join in a festival. Others would lie concealed in carts, covered with baskets and branches. The king himself would hide with an army in the hills outside the city, waiting for the moment when \u2013 as the Massalians slept off the day's carousing \u2013 his agents within the city would throw open the gates. But, after the plot was set, one of the king's relatives told her Massalian lover what was afoot, and he rushed to alert the city authorities. The alarm was sounded. The Massalians, putting their celebrations on hold, scoured the city, rooting out and killing the intruders, before marching out of the city and destroying the army that was ready to trap them; even the king of the Segobrigii was killed. Thus did a reprise of the Trojan horse fail to overcome the Greeks.\n\nThis was not the only battle the Massalians had to fight. There were skirmishes in the sixth century BC with the north African city-state of Carthage, then the dominant naval power in the western Mediterranean, and their north Italian allies the Etruscans. Massalia and Carthage clashed over the capture of fishing vessels and perhaps the liberty of trade within Gaul itself. But it was on the landward side that the danger to the Greek colony was perhaps the greatest. Sometime before the end of the fifth century, Massalia was besieged by a large army of Gauls under a prince named Catumandus. It appears that, in response to Massalia's ever-growing prosperity, the neighbouring tribes had come together under Catumandus's banner/leadership. The legend of how Massalia came to be saved on this occasion, again recorded by Trogus, is telling. One night during the siege, when Catumandus was asleep outside the city walls, he saw a vision of a fearsome-looking woman. She told him she was a goddess, and ordered him to make peace with Massalia. Terrified, he begged the Massalians to allow him to enter the city by himself to worship their gods. As he came into one of the unfamiliar temples he saw, in a portico, a statue of Athena. Recognizing her as the goddess who had appeared in his sleep, he told the Massalians of his dream, and said that, since they were under the protection of the gods, he would leave them in peace. Before departing, he left what must have seemed to the onlookers a barbarous offering on her shrine: a Gallic neck torque, laid in submission to the most Greek of goddesses.\n\nIt is difficult to believe that the Gauls were easy neighbours for the Greek incomers. Some scholars, it is true, do not hold to this opinion. They observe that the stories portraying the Gauls as barbarous warriors who terrified their opponents are seen only in texts after the third century BC, particularly following wide-ranging Gallic attacks on Delphi and Asia Minor (Trogus was writing in the first century AD). They also point out that the Gauls bought goods from the Greeks, and began over time to imitate Greek ways. However, the Gauls used many of those Greek ways and ideas in a fashion that the latter must have found unnervingly beyond their cultural comprehension. The Gauls scarcely ever received good press among Greek authors based in mainland Greece. Authors such as Aristotle asserted that the Gauls were warlike, obsessed with drinking, cruel to their children for the sake of toughening them for battle, and bold to the point of irrationality. It might be easy to dismiss such writings as the projection of cultural clich\u00e9s on a distant other. But setting eyes on some of the remains, one wonders if these Greek writings had more than a modicum of truth in them.\n\nIn the centre of St-R\u00e9my-de-Provence, a dozen miles south of Avignon, stands a complex of Roman baths. Its walls are mostly intact, though the ancient buildings have been integrated into a warren of tall and handsome Renaissance townhouses. The little square outside is filled with tubs of white flowers. It was near here, in the Asylum of St Paul about a mile outside the town, in the midst of wide olive groves, that Vincent van Gogh spent the last months of his life. But in the inner recesses of the baths, which now house a selection of the archaeological finds from the nearby Gallic settlement of Glanum \u2013 a town based around a healing spring that fell strongly under the Greek influence of Massalia \u2013 is an item that speaks of more than a severed ear. Next to a storeroom, laid out on packing crates, is a stone door lintel from Glanum. From a cursory glance, one might think it an unremarkable Greek or Roman relic. The surface is well-squared, although battered by time, and topped with finely carved egg and dart mouldings. More arresting, however, are the six visible head-shaped niches gouged into the polite Greek stonework. These niches were, indeed, for heads. A Greek scholar, Posidonius, who travelled in Gaul at the end of the second century BC, records his difficulty in getting used to the sight of severed human heads on public display. On occasion they were strung like beads on a bracelet to adorn the neck of a horse, or preserved in linseed oil and kept in store chests to be proudly brought out on special occasions. Sometimes they even served practical uses. Livy writes that in 215 BC, the general Lucius Postumus, who was campaigning in Gallia Cisalpina, was captured and killed by members of the Gallic Boii tribe who then proceeded to clean out his skull, cover the scalp with beaten gold, and use it as a drinking vessel. No Gaul would want to part with the heads that they had won or inherited. They were marks of success in war, and a sign of the endemic competitiveness between Gallic warriors for the greatest glory in battle. Examples of lintels and pillars for displaying heads have been found at Roquepertuse and Entremont, sometimes with the skulls of the victims themselves pierced with iron spikes to secure them to the display space. The custom of exhibiting the severed heads of enemies would have been deep rooted when the Greeks arrived, and remained the norm even in the area close to 'civilized' Massalia throughout the Greek period. For all the willingness of the Gauls to adopt Greek artistic and architectural styles, Greek consciousness of the Gallic proclivity for head-hunting must have induced a fear of their underlying bellicosity, a primal terror of the brutalities they were capable of inflicting.\n\nThe 'Terror Gallicus' was the abiding impression that the Gauls left behind after their first encounter with the Romans. And it was an encounter that very nearly led to Rome's early extinction.\n\nThe Celtic Gauls, according to some accounts, were first present in the north of Italy as early as the sixth century BC. A grave stele found at Bologna, dating to the fifth century BC and depicting an Etruscan on horseback in combat with a characteristically naked Celt, suggests that Gallic warrior bands had taken up residence south of the Alps by this time. However, the first major incursion of Gauls into Italy appears to have taken place in the fourth century BC.\n\nThe ancient historians offer various explanations for their arrival. One reason given is the desire of deprived northerners for the luxuries of the south. According to Pliny the Elder, a Gallic craftsman from Switzerland who lived in Rome for a time sent back to his homeland dried figs and grapes, as well as samples of olive oil and wine. 'We may offer some excuse, then, for them, when we know that they came in quest of these various productions, though even at the price of war,' remarks Pliny indulgently. Livy reports a legend that one citizen of an Italian town sent presents of wine to Gallic warriors to lure them south of the Alps; once they arrived, he hoped to employ them to rid himself of an otherwise untouchable local dignitary who had been sleeping with his wife.\n\nPerhaps the vintages of the south were indeed one of the leading attractions for the Gauls. However, the ancient historians acknowledge that there was more to their movements than this alone. Both Polybius and Livy (writing respectively in the second and first centuries BC) state that, as was the case with the Greek migration from Phocaea, Gallic migrations into northern Italy were triggered primarily by overpopulation in the Gallic heartlands. Livy explicitly recognizes the analogy between the southward movement of the Gauls and the northward movement of the Phocaeans. Placing the movements at the same time in the sixth century BC, he says that the wandering Gauls took the migration of the Phocaeans to Massalia as a good omen, and that each helped the other in their journey. To explain the circumstances of the Gallic migration, Livy tells the tale of one of the most powerful kings in Gaul, who had been so successful and had obtained so many followers that his kingdom had become overpopulated and difficult to manage. As he himself was growing old, he ordered his two nephews to set out in search of new kingdoms. He told them to take as many followers as they needed to overcome any opposition they might encounter on their journey. The nephews looked to heaven for signs indicating which way they should take: the less fortunate of the two found himself heading for the uplands of southern Germany; the other was assigned 'the much pleasanter road' to Italy.\n\n_Stone heads from the Gallic oppidum _of Entremont, second century_ BC._\n\nThis legend may reflect part of a wider truth. Archaeological evidence suggests that there was a rapid depopulation in Champagne and around the upper stretches of the Marne at the beginning of the fourth century BC. This was the starting point for an established route that led south, via the Rhine, to the Great St Bernard Pass and across the Alps. However, Livy's legend may also reflect an economic impetus behind the Gauls' southward migration. As has been said, Gallic chiefs relied on abundant wealth for their prestige. Aside from sporadic trade, the other source of such wealth was raiding. A successful chief who had gained a large entourage of warriors after a spell of local raiding would be compelled to raid further afield to support them. As the quantity of plunder increased and the warrior entourage swelled in number, the chief was caught in a vicious cycle of success. He had to lead his ever-increasing band of followers further and further afield to win sufficient plunder to maintain his authority and prestige. Eventually, the raids necessary to sustain him covered such a distance that they took on the character of a sudden long-distance exodus. Whether or not it was such an imperative that led the Gauls into Italy, the Gallic culture of raiding goes some way to explain the character of the first encounter between the Gallic migrants and Rome.\n\nClassical authors spoke admiringly of the movement of the Phocaeans and the foundation of Massalia. It represented, among other things, an extension of the Hellenic world, and hence civilization. Aristotle himself wrote a work in praise of the constitution of Massalia. But the movement of the Gauls south into Italy was not so well regarded. By about 400 BC, the Gallic migrants had established a number of settlements in the valley of the River Po. The Greek historian Polybius, writing about 250 years after this time, reflects an impression of the new arrivals that would have been commonly held by his Roman readership, even if he errs in the detail or repeats _id\u00e9es re\u00e7ues._ They lived, he says, in unwalled villages, and had no knowledge of the refinements of civilization. They were unacquainted with art or science. They slept on straw and leaves, ate meat, and had no occupations other than war and agriculture. Polybius's account hints at a raiding culture. Their only possessions were cattle and gold, since these were easily portable. It was of the greatest importance to have a following, and whoever had the largest following was the most powerful and the most feared.\n\nThe Romans, at this time, knew little of the Gauls. Rome was then a rising power on the Italian peninsula \u2013 significant, but not without its rivals. Just after the turn of the fourth century BC, it had captured the important Etruscan city of Veii, ten miles to the north of the city, and also subdued the tribes on the surrounding plain of Latium. Other enemies, nevertheless, remained further afield. The Samnites, to the south, were a potential threat, as was the Greek city-state of Syracuse in Sicily. To the north, the Etruscans likewise represented a danger to Rome. It was therefore hardly surprising that the Gauls, even though they had begun to enter Etruscan areas, were little noticed by the Roman authorities. Thus, reports Livy, when a lowly Roman plebeian one night heard a voice more than human near the shrine of Vesta calling 'Tell the magistrates that the Gauls are coming!' \u2013 the first, he says, that was known of the Gauls' approach in Rome \u2013 the warning was disregarded.\n\nThe Gauls' first port of call was Clusium, about ninety miles north of Rome. The sight of the new arrivals, according to Livy, threw the city into alarm. They came in their thousands, arrayed before the gates, men the like of whom Clusians had never seen before \u2013 outlandish warriors with strange weapons. Clusium sent for help to Rome. The citizens hoped to be able to deal with the Gauls peaceably, but that the Romans would support them with arms if they could not.\n\nRome decided against sending any military assistance. Instead, they sent three envoys to warn the Gauls against harming Clusium. Livy muses that things might have ended very differently if the Roman envoys 'had not behaved more like Gauls than Romans'. When all the parties came together to negotiate, the Gauls demanded land from Clusium. They needed land, said a Gallic emissary, and besides, Clusium had more land than it could manage. At this point the Romans intervened, asking what right the Gauls had to demand land, and what they were doing there at all. The Gauls replied that they carried their right on the point of their swords. At that, a fight broke out. One of the Roman diplomats stabbed a Gallic chief with a spear, and began to strip him of his armour. When the Gauls realized what had happened, they turned their anger against Rome. They did not, according to Livy's account, immediately march against the city, but instead sent their own mission to demand the surrender of Rome's envoys, who had breached time-honoured convention by killing their chief while he was engaged on a diplomatic embassy. The Romans, however, not only flatly refused to comply with the Gallic demands, but appointed the men responsible to positions of military command for the following year, thus making them immune to prosecution. The Gauls now gave way to their 'characteristic uncontrollable anger'. Ignoring every other town and city on the way, they marched directly on Rome.\n\nThe Roman military preparations to meet the Gallic invasion were lackadaisical. An emergency force was assembled to block the Gauls' advance at the River Allia, about ten miles from Rome. However, it was disorganized and poorly led, and the Gauls swept it away without effort. Rome was thrown into a panic. With its army scattered, the decision was taken that able-bodied citizens and the Senate should retreat into the fortified Capitol and make a stand. The rest of the city was to be abandoned to the barbarian onslaught.\n\nSuch was the abiding trauma of the Gallic attack on Rome that it attracted all manner of myth-making to mitigate the reality of what was in truth a catastrophic defeat. Elderly grandees, says Livy, who were too frail to merit a place in the citadel, dressed up in the finery of their past offices and sat, dignified and statue-like, on thrones in the courtyards of their great houses \u2013 a sight that filled the Gauls with reverential dread. When the rest of the city had been burnt and the Capitol was under siege, one of the Roman priests, determined that the blockade should not prevent him from celebrating an annual sacrifice that was meant to take place on a particular spot, put on his vestments and walked calmly through the enemy lines to perform the ritual, unharmed. A flock of geese, sacred to the goddess Juno, were also famously hailed as heroes of the siege. The geese, resident on the Capitol, are said to have cackled and hissed as the Gauls attempted a night-time assault. This woke the Roman guards, who were able to repulse the attack.\n\nYet none of this mythologizing could efface the fact that this was Rome's most grievous defeat: traditionally dated to 390 BC, it was the only time that Rome would be sacked by an enemy before Alaric and the Goths 700 years later, in AD 410. A story Livy tells about the conclusion of the siege illustrates how Rome's shame persisted. After several months, the Romans, starving and hopeless, offered 1,000 pounds of gold to the Gauls to lift the siege. It was a proposal that the Gauls readily accepted. The desire for wealth was likely to have been one of the principal motivations for their attack: they were not experienced in siege warfare, the conditions in the disease-ridden, burnt-out city were not easy for them either, and they were eager to return and secure their northern base in Italy which was under threat from other tribes. A delegation from both sides met to weigh out the gold. As this was happening, the Romans realized that the Gauls were using doctored weights, heavier than marked. When they angrily objected, the Gallic leader Brennus, chief of the Senones tribe, threw his sword into the scales as well and said _'vae victis'_ ('woe to the conquered'): 'words intolerable to Roman ears', laments Livy.\n\nThe scars of the attack were still present and vivid even in Caesar's time in the first century BC, nearly 400 years later. The destruction of the city, writes Plutarch, led to the loss of the early records of Rome's history. When the Gauls departed, the Romans came close to abandoning the ruins of the city and decamping en masse to another. When they decided not to do so, the work of rebuilding was rushed and ill planned. Old boundaries were ignored. Buildings went up wherever there was space, and no one took measures to ensure that the streets were straight. Old sewers that originally ran under straight streets ended up beneath private property. It was because of the Gallic attack, writes Livy, that the general layout of Rome in his time was more like a squatters' settlement than a properly planned city.\n\nBut the scars were more than physical. It took around thirty years after 390 BC for Rome to regain its authority in the immediate vicinity. This time was marked by social unrest in the city, as citizens from the lower plebeian order attempted to seize power from the patricians. All the while, the continuing threat from the newly arrived Gauls of northern Italy weighed heavily on Rome. The following centuries of Roman history are a litany of conflict with the Gallic incomers. On occasion, the latter would offer themselves as mercenaries to the opponents of Rome, including the Syracusians in the fourth century BC, King Pyrrhus in the early part of the third century, or Hannibal \u2013 another invader who attacked Rome from the north \u2013 in the later years of the second century. Sometimes they would ally with local tribes, such as the Samnites. On other occasions, the Gauls who had settled in the north would be impelled by further waves of Gallic migration to make incursions into Rome's expanding territory in the centre of the Italian peninsula, or join with the latest newcomers in making such attacks. It is a measure of the fear that the Gauls inspired in the Romans that the latter negotiated an early truce with the Carthaginian commander Hasdrubal, Hannibal's brother, in order to deal with what they saw as the more fundamental Gallic menace.\n\nThroughout this period, Roman prejudices vis-\u00e0-vis the Gauls seem to have hardened. Polybius, among others, describes the martial customs of the Gauls: they charged into battle with extraordinary shouts, sounding horns and war trumpets throughout their ranks. Some of their number fought naked in the front rank of battle. This made for a terrifying spectacle, the warriors being men of splendid physique and in the prime of life, their bodies adorned with gold necklaces and torques. It was a sight, says Polybius, that did indeed strike fear into the Romans, but when it came to the practicalities of battle, intimidating appearance was to be overcome with strict Roman discipline.\n\nIt is a contrast that is pursued ad infinitum by Roman authors. The Gauls were temperamental, volatile, boastful, given to rash displays of boldness at the start of a fight, but were incapable of channelling these qualities into an orderly plan of battle. If their initial \u2013 admittedly dangerous \u2013 impetus did not produce swift results, they lost heart and enthusiasm; they lacked the discipline necessary to fight a prolonged battle. Frequently, Gallic warriors are seen in the works of classical historians challenging Roman soldiers to resolve battles by single combat. A huge Gaul marches before the battle lines, boasting of his prowess, wielding a long slashing sword. A small and taciturn Roman, with an unglamorous short stabbing sword and a larger shield, comes to meet him. The slashing sword whistles past the Roman, or is rendered useless by its first contact with Roman blade or shield \u2013 an analogy between the sword and its Gallic wielder not lost on the Roman authors. The Roman, hiding safely behind his shield, then dispatches the Gaul with a brief and undramatic stab to the face or torso.\n\nThat the Gauls, in the words of Polybius, were swayed by 'impulse rather than calculation' was not just a point of military strategy. It was also a moral judgement. The clash with the Gauls was not only a fight for survival, but also for civilization. The Romans were the representatives of order: a bulwark protecting not only themselves, but also the rest of the Italian peninsular against the perpetual danger of a Gallic irruption with all the chaos that it would bring. The centuries of friction with the Gauls, Polybius suggests, were to some extent responsible for the ever more military character that Rome took on as it developed. They were also at the root of an abiding neurosis that was to play out to the end of the Roman empire: a fundamental terror of what lay beyond the northern frontier.\n\nFear of the Gauls impelled the Romans to move the frontier northwards, and to take under their control those areas south of the Alps that had been colonized by Gallic migrants. It was a slow, difficult, long-term undertaking, interrupted by the First and Second Punic Wars (264\u2013241 and 218\u2013201 BC). Rome established an early colony in Gallic territory on the Adriatic coast at Sena Gallica (modern-day Senigallia, close to Ancona) in 283 BC after defeating the Senones who had previously settled there. Following the First Punic War, they made further progress in the 220s BC, setting up outposts at Cremona and Piacenza, and settling colonists on the land. These colonists suffered further Gallic attacks; many were captured and sold into slavery by the Gauls in 200 BC. Nevertheless, further colonists were sent and the area was secured by the construction of a road, the Via Aemilia, connecting Piacenza (Placentia) via Rimini (Arminium) to Rome. After the Second Punic War, in which the Gauls had assisted Hannibal's invasion of Italy, Rome moved to take over the rest of the Po Valley. Their forces reached Lake Como in 196 BC, and further colonies were founded to secure the area, including Bologna (Bononia) in 189, and Parma and Modena (Mutina) in 183.\n\nWaves of migration marked the Roman seizure of control. Many of the Boii, a Gallic tribe that had settled around Bologna, returned northwards across the Alps. Yet, at the same time, a different Gallic grouping of migrants including 12,000 armed men, intent on raiding and settlement, attempted to enter the new area of Roman dominance south of the Alps. In 183 BC, they were set upon by the Roman legions, and those who were not killed were turned back north. Henceforth Rome would try to ensure that further such Gallic irruptions \u2013 all too reminiscent of the destruction of Rome 200 years previously \u2013 were prevented, if at all possible, from penetrating the Italian peninsula. The Alps were by no means a fully defensible border, but, by 180, they seemed a sensible place for the Romans to pause in their northern expansion; they proceeded to consolidate the regions captured by introducing Roman settlers and propagating a Roman way of life. This area, named Gallia Cisalpina ('Gaul-on-this-side-of-the-Alps'), was recognized as a province of Rome a century later, around 80 BC. In the first century BC, this province and its admixture of Gallic tribes and Roman colonists gave rise to three of the most Roman of writers: the historian Livy, and the poets Catullus and Virgil. Some scholars even claim to hear traces of Celtic in their voices.\n\nThe Romans themselves were originally migrants. If legend is to be believed \u2013 and it is a legend that the Romans certainly _did_ believe \u2013 they emerged as refugees from the east. In the beginning, they were Trojans. When Agamemnon and the Greeks destroyed the city of Troy, a remnant of its population fled the smoking ruins of the city and the prospect of enslavement, and, huddled in boats, sought a new life in 'Hesperia' \u2013 the Promised Land in the west. Led by a surviving prince of the Trojan royal house, Aeneas, they were driven from Asia Minor to the Adriatic, then to the north coast of Africa, and finally to the shores of the plain of Latium and the River Tiber in Italy. Their journey lasted for several years and was accompanied by deep suffering and privation. Even when they arrived in Italy, the promised Hesperia, there was no respite from their distress. The local population took exception to these newcomers from the east, and fought a bitter war against them. The new arrivals, marked by their piety and self-discipline, were ultimately successful, but as a price of their success they would ultimately have to discard their eastern language and their Asiatic dress in favour of those of Italy. According to Livy, it was the descendants of these Trojan emigrants who were to establish the city of Rome. The traditional date for this, according to the Roman antiquarian Varro, was 753 BC.\n\nIt is perhaps the fact that the Romans and Massalians had in common a shared memory of migrant origins that made for such affinity between the two peoples. Pompeius Trogus records a legend that the Phocaeans stopped at Rome on their way from Anatolia to southern Gaul and contracted an alliance with them even before the foundation of Massalia. Yet, if a birth in migration forged their affinity, it was not a feeling either side could extend to the migrant Gauls. Both Massalia and Rome saw themselves as bringers of civilization from the south. Trogus, who was of Gallic descent but wrote in Latin from a Roman perspective, described how the Gauls ultimately learnt a more civilized way of life from their Massalian neighbours: they learnt to lay aside or soften 'their former barbarity'. The Massalians taught them to cultivate their lands and enclose their settlements with walls, and to live according to laws rather than violence. Massalia's government, writes Strabo, was an aristocracy, and of all known aristocracies theirs was the best ordered. The Romans, pious and self-restrained, saw themselves as similarly blessed; they did not believe that good government and civilization \u2013 those qualities of the warm south that they themselves exemplified \u2013 would be found among the Gauls. 'Nothing is more inclement' than the region north and west of the Alps, writes the Roman historian Florus: 'The climate is harsh, and the disposition of the inhabitants resembles it.' Romans and Massalians shared a fear of the Gauls, compounded by their experiences of severed heads and near destruction.\n\nSome authors trace the idea of a Roman and Massalian alliance based on fear back to earlier times. Trogus claims that when news of the Gallic destruction of Rome reached Massalia in 390 BC, the Massalians went into a period of public mourning, and even offered the Romans their personal hoards of gold and silver to help pay for the ransom demanded by the Gauls. Whatever the case, by 150 BC Massalia was certainly appealing to Rome for assistance against their common enemy. The Romans, however, having advanced their northern frontier to the Alps by 180 BC, were reluctant to engage so soon in the complexities of Transalpine Gaul, having only so recently taken Cisalpine Gaul under their control. Yet the calls of their ally in adversity could not be ignored for ever. Thus Rome was led by Massalia into its first engagement with Gaul beyond the Alps.\n\nIn 125 BC, the Massalians were coming under increasing pressure from their Gallic neighbours, in particular the tribe of the Saluvii. They repeated their appeal to Rome for help. This time, the Romans agreed to assist them, and their legions were able to score a quick victory. However, once they had crossed the Alps, there was no going back, and they soon found themselves embroiled in further conflict. The king of the Saluvii fled to a neighbouring tribe, the Allobroges, who refused to surrender him. The fight thus widened to include the Allobroges and another tribe, the Arverni, who lived in what is now the Auvergne. The Romans not only demanded that the king be handed over, but also sought retribution on behalf of another Gallic tribe, the Aedui, with whom they had at some point made an alliance. The Aedui, like the Massalians, had complained to the Romans of aggression by the Allobroges and Arverni, and the Romans agreed to take their part.\n\nAlthough they were the invaders, the Romans had the advantage of military technology. According to Florus, they employed elephants against the Gauls; their ferocity, observed Florus, matched that of the barbarians. The Romans also brought siege weaponry, including stone-hurling ballistas, to break resistance at the Gallic _oppida,_ or fortified settlements. Yet, the fact that the Romans had to resort to such weaponry suggests that the Gauls near Massalia were not so sunk in backward barbarity as some Roman propagandists were pleased to portray them. One place where the Roman missiles were found was in the ruins of the _oppidum_ of Entremont. Close to Aix-en-Provence, on a rocky promontory overlooking a grand sweep of the Proven\u00e7al ranges receding into the lilac distance, Entremont is likely to have been the principal centre of the Saluvii. It was not a primitive settlement. Built in about 180 BC, its northern walls on the hillside are about 400 metres long, built of formidable squared-off blocks of stone, relieved every 50 metres by protruding bastions with rounded corners. Only part of the settlement has been excavated, but among the dry shivers of limestone knapped from the living rock of the hill, the lower courses of the walls of the buildings can be still be seen. It must have caused confusion for the Roman invaders when they captured it in 123 BC. Entremont was a settlement of long streets with substantial dwellings, workshops with ovens for melting metals, bakeries, stores of amphorae and stone presses for making olive oil. But at its centre there stood an imposing tower on the site of an earlier shrine: its entrance was adorned with carvings of human heads, and around it were scattered as many as twenty human skulls.\n\nThe picture of the Gauls as ferocious and hasty to arms is not fully borne out by the fragments of written accounts that we have of this period. Appian, a historian writing in the second century AD, states that the king of the Allobroges sent an ambassador during the conflict to one of the Roman commanders, Gnaeus Domitius, to sue for peace. The Roman commander was taken aback that the Gauls for the most part used dogs to guard the embassy party, but even more surprised that the greater part of the diplomacy was handled by a magnificently dressed musician. The musician began to improvise a lay on the excellence of the king of the Allobroges, and then the Allobroges themselves, and then even the Roman commander, praising his descent, his bravery and his wealth. But this early example of the bardic tradition in action availed them nothing. Not only were the musician and diplomatic song chalked up as a manifestation of the empty boasting of the Gauls, but their call for peace was turned down. Between 125 and 121 BC, battles raged along the lower Rh\u00f4ne. Thousands of Gauls were killed, others captured and enslaved, and the hostile tribes were pushed back a distance from the coast.\n\nMassalia and its own possessions were left intact, but before long Rome had taken control of a strip of territory that extended along the Mediterranean coast all the way to the Pyrenees. Since the Romans had acquired colonies in Spain over the previous century, this was a considerable boon, creating a land route that united their newly won international domains. The route from Italy to Hispania, traversing what is now Provence and Languedoc, was traced by Gaul's first Roman road, the Via Domitia. New Roman settlements sprang up across southern Gaul. Entremont was abandoned, but next to it Aix-en-Provence (Aquae Sextius) was established in 123 BC as a replacement, named after the Roman Consul Sextius Calvinus who was responsible for Entremont's destruction. Roman entrepreneurs rushed in to capitalize on the trade opportunities. Further conflict with tribes along the Rh\u00f4ne as well as the Carcassonne Gap and Garonne in the west led to the capture and re-establishment of further settlements \u2013 Vienne, Geneva and Toulouse (Tolosa) \u2013 as mercantile depots. Toulouse was connected to the Via Domitia by another new road, the Via Aquitania. Their intersection on the Mediterranean coast by the mouth of the River Aude was guarded by a new colony, Narbo Martius (Narbonne), which gave its name to the new Roman province in Gaul when it finally came to be formally constituted sometime in the early first century BC: Gallia Narbonensis.\n\n_The walls of Entremont, second century BC._\n\nThe conquest of a large strip of southern Gaul, however militarily and economically advantageous, was no guarantee of safety from the old threats that haunted the Roman imagination. Just a few years after the Romans had entered Gaul, a huge horde of migrants began to move across central Europe. They first made contact with the Romans in 112 BC, when they attempted to enter the land of a Roman confederate tribe through the region of Noricum in the south of present-day Austria. In the process, they came close to annihilating a Roman force tasked with keeping them away from their allies' territory. Only a storm that arose during the battle saved the Romans from complete destruction. The commander of the Roman force, Papirius Carbo, committed suicide out of shame at the defeat.\n\nAlthough they could have proceeded into Italy, the migrants turned instead west into Gaul. Their presence upset the order that Rome had recently established in and around the newly conquered territory. Tribes such as the Helvetii rose up, and settlements, including Toulouse, rebelled. The legions were ordered in to regain control. It was during this mission that the Romans again came face to face with the migrants at Arausio, the site of modern-day Orange, on the Rh\u00f4ne. This time, the encounter was an unmitigated disaster for the Romans. Divided forces, an ill-thought-out disposition of troops and class-based jealousy between the commanders led to calamity. Livy records that as many as 80,000 Roman soldiers perished in the rout, a figure endorsed even by some modern scholars. Scores of them drowned in the Rh\u00f4ne as, trapped between the river and their opponents, they tried to swim for safety and sank in their armour.\n\nRome was seized by panic. No one knew for sure who the migrants were. It was rumoured that some of them were called Teutones, and some of them Cimbri. Nor did anyone know where they came from. Some conjectured from the name 'Cimbri' that they were Cimmerians, from the sunless region at the edge of the earth where Odysseus had been to summon the dead from Hades. Others said that 'Cimbri' was simply a Germanic word for 'robber'. There were those who believed they were a branch of the Gauls, or Scythians, or Galloscythians, or a Germanic tribe. Another mystery was the nature of the language they spoke: whether it were a Celtic or Germanic tongue. What _was_ known was that the migrants were physically imposing specimens: tall, blueeyed, and savage in their manner. In the end, the classical geographers including Posidonius and Strabo concluded that they came from the region of Jutland, and had been forced to move because of some convulsion of the sea. It was reported that at least 300,000 people were on the move across Europe \u2013 armed men, women and children, their belongings piled in leather-covered wagons. Whoever they were, Rome was agreed on one thing: these were the new Gauls \u2013 the latest incarnation of the old threat from the north. It was feared that a repeat of the visitation of 390 BC, with the potential to sweep away Roman cities and Roman civilization, was imminent. On this matter, there was no dissent: the migrants could not be allowed into Italy. There was no room. Land, the Romans pleaded, was now in short supply. Indeed, land distribution had become a matter of contention on the Italian peninsula, with the Romans themselves divided into factions on the issue. They certainly did not want further competition from a group of barbarian incomers.\n\nThe Roman people entrusted the mission against the Teutones to the most successful commander of the age: Gaius Marius. The son of a peasant family from a provincial town in central Italy, he rose through the ranks on account of his military genius and Spartan temperament, gaining political offices in Rome as well as military preferment. He made a good marriage into an aristocratic family. Nevertheless, Marius belonged to the populist faction in Roman politics and many in the Senate were uncomfortable with his growing reputation. However, faced by the prospect of a mass incursion by a barbarian horde, they had no alternative but to turn to him in their hour of need. Marius, who had just returned in triumph from Africa leading a rebel king, Jurgurtha, in chains to the Capitol, was immediately despatched to Gaul.\n\nThe erratic movements of the migrant column gave Marius some breathing space. When he arrived in Gaul in 104 BC, shortly after the Battle of Arausio, the column veered westwards again and appeared to be heading for northern Spain. Despite this, Marius did not relax his guard. He began preparations to defend the route through southern Gaul into Italy, and readied his men for the conflict. Marius found the Roman legions demoralized, ill-disciplined and unfit. They were, unsurprisingly, terrified of encountering the migrants. Marius set about remedying this state of affairs. He would brook no idleness, leading the legionaries on runs and route-marches, and meting out harsh punishments for the slightest breaches of discipline. Aware of the problems of getting provisions inland quickly from the Rh\u00f4ne, he ordered his men to dig a canal from the port of Fos near Arles to run eastwards across the then marshy land of the Crau\u00a7 towards St R\u00e9my. As they waited for the migrants to turn back towards Italy, the morale and strength of the legions improved.\n\nBy 102 BC, it had become clear that the column of migrants had The flat area of land at the confluence of the Rh\u00f4ne and Durance rivers. wheeled round. It had also split into two discrete groups. The group calling itself the Cimbri was to return by a circuitous northern route to Noricum and from there to descend over the Alps into northeast Italy, near Vercellae in the Po Valley. The Teutones, by contrast, were to take the more direct route eastwards across southern Gaul, past Massalia and Aix, and then over the mountains. Marius, meanwhile, had made sure that his troops were generously provisioned, and had established them in a large fortified camp by the Via Domitia, perhaps near the town of Glanum and modern-day St R\u00e9my. The Teutones soon came into view: they had probably crossed the Rh\u00f4ne by the modern-day towns of Beaucaire and Tarascon. Their numbers, says Marius's biographer Plutarch, were limitless; they covered the open plain, and once they had pitched camp for the night, they challenged Marius to battle.\n\nMarius's soldiers, confined in the camp, were desperate to fight. They found the newcomers hideous to look at, their speech and cries outlandish. But Marius restrained his men and ordered them merely to observe the migrants from the ramparts of their camp. When the migrants attacked, they were repulsed. They then decided to strike camp and continue marching eastwards, bypassing the Romans. Such was their number, according to Plutarch, that it took six days for them to file past Marius's camp. As they went by, they shouted 'We're on our way to Rome \u2013 got any messages for your wives?' Once they had finally passed, Marius himself broke up his camp and followed them closely, but still kept his men from engaging. His intention was to accustom them to the sight of the newcomers, and by familiarity to remove the aura of invincibility that the migrants had won in their earlier battles with the Romans.\n\nThis pursuit continued until near Aix. Marius kept to the high ground, and to positions that were easy to defend but less favourable when it came to finding water. One evening, when his men looked down from the ridge on which they were stationed, they were infuriated to see some of the migrants, after eating their dinner, happily bathing and whooping in a stream fed by warm springs. These were men of the tribe of the Ambrones, who had played a leading role in the defeat of the Romans at Arausio. With some reluctance, Marius allowed his troops to attack, commenting that if they were prepared to pay for it with their own blood, they could get some water for themselves. A detachment of his men \u2013 indigenous to the area, but now serving Rome \u2013 charged down the hill. The Ambrones did their best to form rank and fight, but Marius's troops broke through. They pressed on to the wagons, where the women and children were huddled. The women, reports Plutarch, took up swords and axes to defend their possessions and their children, but many of them were cut down in the skirmish. The Ambrones then rejoined the main column of the Teutones. According to Plutarch, the place resounded all night long with their keening for their dead: '...not like the wailings and groanings of men, but howlings and bellowings with a strain of the wild beast in them, mingled with threats and cries of grief...'\n\nIt is likely that Marius was now stationed on the eastern slopes of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, just east of Aix, with his lines arrayed near the modern village of Puyloubier. The narrow valley of the River Arc opens out here into the wide green valley of Pourri\u00e8res. Apart from the traffic noise from the A8 _autoroute_ that now traverses the valley, this is a quiet place. Wild fennel grows luxuriantly from the dry ground; its stems, more often than not, are covered in pearl-like white snails. The air is thick with the aroma of marjoram and thyme. Aleppo pines and oaks with dusty brown leaves cover the slopes, along with vines rich with grapes, deep purple and frosted with bloom. Above, the towering ridge of Montagne Sainte-Victoire rises like an extended fin, sloping at first but then a sheer cliff of chequered rock in its highest register. Beneath the ridge is a band of pinkish-red earth.\n\nEager to go in for the kill after his successful assault on the Ambrones, Marius turned the valley into a trap. As the migrants debouched through a narrow gorge onto its open floor, he sent a detachment of 3,000 cavalry to gallop all the way round Montagne Sainte-Victoire and hide behind their rear guard. Marius himself likely drew up his main forces to block their way forward, spanning the entire valley from the modern town of Trets to Puyloubier on the slopes of Montagne Sainte-Victoire.\n\nThe Teutones advanced to the Roman lines to do battle. The Romans had the advantage of height, and as the migrants began to tire, the trap was sprung. The cavalry detachment appeared from its hiding place and charged. Confusion overtook the Teutones as Marius responded to the cavalry charge at the rear with his own charge from the heights. Pressed in both directions, the Teutones had nowhere to go. Those who attempted flight were cut down, and defence was impossible in the crush. The Romans showed no mercy. Women and children as well as armed men were killed indiscriminately. A few were spared, to be kept as slaves, but the rest were massacred. It is not known how many died in this battle, named after the nearby town of Aquae Sextiae; some writers suggest as many as 100,000. Rome was saved.\n\nMarius had no time to bask in the glory of his victory. His presence was required elsewhere, to halt the westward progress of the second column of migrants, the Cimbri, which had entered Italy via Noricum. They had overcome a Roman force at the Brenner Pass and reached a place called Vercellae, in what is now Piedmont. These migrants would suffer a similar fate at Marius's hands to that of the vanquished at Aquae Sextiae.\n\n_The dramatic ridge of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, which stands above the valley of Pourri\u00e8res._\n\nFrom the moment Marius departed Aquae Sextiae \u2013 his last gestures were a grand pyre of the Teutones's wagons and personal possessions offered as a thanksgiving, not to mention the sacrifice of a hundred prisoners thrown down Mont Sainte-Victoire at the prompting of a Syrian prophetess whom he kept in his retinue \u2013 he left an enduring reputation as a saviour of Rome. In the aftermath of the battle, the dead bodies of the migrants came to be seen as a blessing. The decaying corpses, too numerous to bury, helped fertilize the fields, and the bones were used by the locals to mark the boundaries of their vineyards. Even the modern French name of the valley, Pourri\u00e8res, is said to come from the Latin _campi putridi,_ the 'fields of putrescence'. The Roman triumph is reflected in the name Mont Sainte-Victoire, where a temple dedicated to Venus Victrix was later cloaked in a Christian guise. In an annual ritual celebrated up until the French Revolution, garland-wearing local villagers danced the _farandole_ and ran in procession, brandishing branches cut from box trees, crying 'Victoire!' Marius was a common name in the region until recent times. The Revolutionary leader Mirabeau, who represented Aix at the Estates-General in 1789, cited Marius as his inspiration. He was a friend of the people: the destroyer of the Teutones and the eventual scourge of the Roman aristocracy.\n\nMarius was married to an aristocratic woman named Julia, the sister of a senator. In 100 BC, shortly after Marius's destruction of the Teutones, the senator's wife gave birth to their third child, a boy called Gaius Julius Caesar. The boy's uncle \u2013 populist and military hero that he was \u2013 had set a fine example for his nephew to follow. And when Caesar, in time, found himself where Marius had put the migrants to the sword, he would follow that example with a vengeance.\n\n* Heracles is the Greek name for the hero Hercules\n\n\u2020 Limestone has been quarried at Cassis, a town east of Marseilles, since early antiquity.\n\n\u2021The Irish father-god Dagda possessed a cauldron with powers of rejuvenation. Similarly, the cauldron of the mythical character Da Derga could not only provide an unending supply of food, but also had the power to bring back life to the dead.\n\n\u00a7 The flat area of land at the confluence of the Rh\u00f4ne and Durance rivers.\n\n_An early bust of Julius Caesar, discovered in the Rh\u00f4ne in 2007._\nCHAPTER II\n\nCaesar's Command\n\n_Homines bellicosos populi Romani inimicos_  \n'A warlike tribe, unfriendly to the Roman people'\n\nJULIUS CAESAR, _De Bello Gallico,_ 1.2\n\nTHE RISE OF CAESAR\n\n\u2022\n\nBEAUCAIRE\n\n\u2022\n\nVIA DOMITIA\n\n\u2022\n\nGENEVA\n\n\u2022\n\nTHE RH\u00d4NE\n\n\u2022\n\nCOLLONGES\n\n\u2022\n\nPAS DE L'\u00c9CLUSE\n\n\u2022\n\nTHE SA\u00d4NE\n\n\u2022\n\nMONTMORT\n\n\u2022\n\nBESAN\u00c7ON\n\n\u2022\n\nMULHOUSE\n\nGAUL WAS NOT ALWAYS PART OF Caesar's life plan. There is no sign, either from his own writings, or those of his ancient biographers, that he held the conquest of Gaul as a long-cherished ambition. In his early thirties, Caesar contemplated a statue of Alexander the Great and wept that Alexander, by the same age, had overcome the world while he himself could point to no achievement of note; but his lament, as described by Plutarch, did not extend to wishing he could overcome the old northern enemy of Rome.\n\nEven when he was entrusted with the military command of the Gallic regions for an initial five-year period from 58 BC, Caesar himself confessed that his attention was elsewhere. His command included not just Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul, but also the province of Illyricum, an area on the eastern coast of the Adriatic corresponding to parts of modern Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and northern Albania. Illyricum was wealthy and unstable, a place that offered superb prospects for Roman generals in pursuit of military glory. Moreover, it was one of the strategic keys for the defence of northern Italy. The security of the region towards the Danube is a constant refrain in the military history of Rome, and Caesar well understood its importance and the opportunities it offered. Yet he was to reject Illyricum in favour of the distant wilderness of Gaul. His conquest of that territory was not undertaken by design, nor necessity; nor was it carried out, as was said of the expansion of the British empire, in a fit of 'absence of mind'. What led him to the conquest of Gaul \u2013 and thereby irrevocably to change the history and culture of Europe \u2013 was his own immediate political requirements: the need for spectacular military success to keep his political enemies at bay, and the need for cash to pay off his debts.\n\nThere is much that a citizen of a modern democracy would recognize in the politics of ancient Rome: the opportunity for ordinary people (women, slaves and foreigners excepted) to elect officials and vote on laws; a rigorous system of checks and balances regulated by law and custom to ensure that no part of government became over-mighty; debates in the Senate; the excitement, intrigue and gossip surrounding elections; political factions based on class, money and business interests; a political establishment whose wealthy members assume office from a sense of entitlement, either to use their terms for self-aggrandizement, or else to support their commercial backers; the struggles of brilliant outsiders to break into the cabal of power; long periods of stagnation in which vested interests refuse to deal with endemic problems; and the corruption of a well-meaning but outdated system of government by money and violence.\n\nWhen Caesar was born in 100 BC, the republican political system of Rome was gasping its last breath. Designed in the sixth century BC, when Rome was a mid-sized market town, it was incapable of dealing with the massive challenges it faced following the acquisition of a world empire. The greatest of these was the inequality of wealth in the Italian heartlands. The conquest of overseas territories from the third century BC onwards \u2013 Sicily, Carthage, Greece \u2013 led to the concentration of captured colonial wealth and opportunities for trade in a few aristocratic hands. Roman soldiers, however, began to suffer. Drawn from the rural peasantry, they were dependent on farming for their long-term livelihood. Originally, they would return to their smallholdings after short, seasonal campaigns. Now, they could be absent for years. Their farms fell into decay, and were increasingly bought up by the ever more affluent aristocracy who farmed them with cheap slave labour from the provinces. The demobilized soldiery, lacking pensions or any means of financial support, began to look to their individual commanders for their livelihood. The indigent landless began to fill Rome, with nothing to sell but their votes. At the end of the second century BC, aristocratic landowners holding the reins of power blocked moves to break up their great estates, formed from the old peasant freeholdings, and redistribute them to the Roman poor. The city became polarized. Loyalties shifted from the Republic to its successful generals, and party cliques formed behind the aristocrats ( _optimates_ ) on one hand, and the populists ( _populares_ ) on the other. At the head of a mass of poverty-stricken veterans and the unemployed urban mob, a successful commander, liberal with his gifts, could outdo in power any of the grand elected magistrates of Rome. The stage was set for a prolonged civil conflict.\n\nCaesar's uncle, Marius, lionized after his victory over the Teutones, was able to dominate politics in Rome at the beginning of the first century BC. He himself was of peasant origin, and made himself the leader of the _populares._ To the outrage of the _optimates,_ he forced through land laws to favour demobilized soldiers and the landless poor, while reforming the constitution to break the stranglehold of the old aristocracy on the levers of power. After his death in 86 BC, the aristocrats fought back. One of their number, Sulla, seized effective control of the state, reversed the reforms of Marius and enforced his dominance through terror. He circulated hit lists of his political enemies, declaring them to be outlaws. Hundreds were killed and their property seized by informers and speculators. Chief among these speculators was a financier, Crassus, who made himself one of the richest men in Rome by buying up the property of the dead at knock-down prices.\n\nCaesar himself and his immediate family were, however, spared. Although they were on the side opposed to Sulla thanks to their link by marriage to Marius, they were not prominent or well off and therefore not perceived as an immediate threat. Caesar's father, who had a government post, died in 85 BC of natural causes. Caesar himself, then aged about fifteen, had only just put on the _toga virilis,_ signifying his transition from childhood to adulthood, and had not yet entered public life. Moreover, as Caesar was of an ancient patrician family, albeit fallen on hard times, it may have been a sense of class sympathy that led Sulla not to proceed against him.\n\nThus it was in an environment of threat, bloodletting and political decline that Caesar spent his formative years. Little else is known of his childhood. The early death of his father resulted in him assuming a position of absolute responsibility over his family while still a teenager, even having nominal legal control over whether his own mother was allowed to remarry. The indications at the start of his adult life suggest that those around him did not consider he had a career of greatness before him. He married a young woman named Cornelia, daughter of Cinna, another patrician. Cinna arranged for Caesar to assume an ancient and singular priesthood of the god Jupiter, the role of _flamen dialis._ The priesthood was hedged about by a swathe of obscure and ancient regulations. These included rules against the priest having knots in the fabric of his clothing, a requirement for the secret disposal of his nail clippings, and an absolute prohibition against him ever looking on a dead body. The _flamen dialis_ was required to remain within Rome at all times, which effectively ruled out a military career or advancement in politics. The priesthood, thus, was often held by those who were bodily weak or suffered chronic illness. Some sources claim that Caesar was afflicted in this way. Even though his taking on the position would have conveniently snuffed out his political ambitions at the outset, Sulla chose to prevent him from doing so, because Cinna, the man who had nominated him, was a supporter of the popular faction. Thus, Sulla inadvertently opened the way for Caesar to pursue a political career.\n\nCaesar's attempt to gain the priesthood appears to have rattled Sulla. Although it was regarded as a dead-end in career terms, the _flamen dialis_ was still a prestigious and influential position. When Sulla embarked on a vicious persecution of the _populares,_ Caesar \u2013 having become son-in-law of one of the most prominent members of the popular party \u2013 became a prime target. Sulla issued orders for his arrest, and for a time Caesar had to go into hiding. However, when Caesar's relatives interceded on his behalf, Sulla relented and Caesar was able to make his first steps in public service. From this point on, the stories that historians tell about Caesar, as well as those he chose to tell about himself, evoke his early promise, energy and ambition. He was posted while still in his teens to the staff of the _propraetor_ of Bithynia. There, in a skirmish with the forces of Mithridates, king of Pontus, he saved the life of another Roman citizen, thereby winning the _corona civica:_ the wreath of oak leaves that stood as Rome's highest award for gallantry. According to the historian Suetonius, he may have entered into a homosexual relationship with Nicomedes, king of Bithynia. This was, perhaps, for purposes of diplomacy.\n\nAfter Sulla's death in 78 BC, Caesar, then in his early twenties and back in Rome, began to practise at the Bar. For young men aspiring to high office, this was a quick way to raise their profile among the Roman electorate and political establishment. Caesar took on the private prosecution of two high-profile provincial officials and allies of Sulla \u2013 Dolabella and Gnaeus Antonius \u2013 charging them both with embezzlement and corruption in the administration of their territories. In neither case was he successful, but he had begun to make his mark on the public scene.\n\nAround this time Caesar travelled to the island of Rhodes to develop his talent for oratory under Greek specialists. On his way there \u2013 according to Caesar himself \u2013 he was captured by Cilician pirates who held him for ransom on the island of Pharmacussa off Asia Minor. When they informed him that the sum demanded for his release was 48,000 sesterces, he was outraged. He was worth at least 1.2 million sesterces, he told them, and they shouldn't accept anything less. The pirates gave in to his insistence and increased the price on his head. Caesar passed the time by playing games with the pirates, mocking them for their general lack of education and reciting poetry to remedy the defect. He told them that if he were ever released, he would come back and have them all crucified. And when he was finally freed, so Caesar himself relates, this is exactly what he did. After his release he went straight to the coastal city of Miletus, raised a squadron of warships, captured the pirates and eventually had them crucified at Pergamum.\n\nRoman society in the first century BC was not given to reticence or restraint. Those involved in politics knew that prominent public display was a prerequisite for career advancement. But awareness of the importance of their public image did not prevent ambitious politicians from indulging in the pleasures of the flesh. Caesar's early career offers an extreme example of the pursuit of relentless self-promotion in tandem with sensual gratification. According to Suetonius, despite the fact that Caesar was not physically strong \u2013 he was tall but slight in build, and given to fits of epilepsy \u2013 he possessed almost superhuman energy and firmness of purpose. He could endure hunger as well as any Roman legionary; he could simultaneously dictate several different letters to several different scribes, and compose long poems during the course of extended journeys on horseback. His sexual appetite was prodigious. It was normal for young married men like Caesar to satisfy their sexual desires in the bordello. But Caesar's sex life was not merely about carnal gratification, it was a matter of conquest: he was interested not in prostitutes but in senators' wives. Suetonius lists at least five wives of senior politicians with whom he was connected. The list included Servilia, the half-sister of Cato the Younger, his bitterest rival in the aristocratic party, and mother of Brutus, his assassin.\n\nCaesar was also prodigal in his exploitation of his patrician ancestry. In 69 BC, Caesar's aunt Julia and his wife Cornelia died in quick succession. It was not unknown for aged Roman matrons to receive grand public funerals, but Caesar's decision to accord them both this honour was highly unusual. He may have been motivated by a sense of grief, but the funerals were also an opportunity to display the glory of his ancestry. Despite Sulla's ban on public commemoration of Marius, Caesar included his effigy in the funeral procession of Julia \u2013 to widespread popular approval. This was not all. Old legends recorded that the Julian _gens,_ or clan, of which Caesar was a part, was descended not only from Ancus Marcius, the second king of Rome seven centuries previously, but also Venus, the goddess of love herself. Caesar may or may not have believed in these old tales, but he was happy to use them to his advantage, and he had no scruples about proclaiming in the funeral orations before the crowds in the forum the especial distinction of his ancestry.\n\nYet it was his excess in display, and hence in the excess of his spending, that Caesar particularly stood out. Here, he realized, was the way to political glory. Although in the early part of his career he lived in a down-at-heel part of Rome \u2013 the Subura, a working-class district full of tottering apartment blocks and seedy brothels \u2013 he was fastidious in his own person. He was groomed and coiffed beyond the common run; some accounts say that he kept his body entirely hairless. He cultivated a distinctive sartorial style, wearing his senatorial tunic with long sleeves and an unconventional loose belt. He collected works of art, as well as precious gemstones and _intaglios_.* He began to borrow money to fund his conspicuous lifestyle, as well as his political campaigning. Before he achieved his first elected office, that of military tribune in around 71 BC, his debts, according to Plutarch, amounted to more than 31 million sesterces.\u2020\n\nAs he worked his way up through the _cursus honorum_ (the sequence of public offices held by politicians under the Roman Republic) in the 60s BC, Caesar's appetite for spending borrowed money to enhance his popularity continued to increase. He served as quaestor,\u2021 a junior official, and was posted to Spain in 69 BC. It was here he is said to have wept at the statue of Alexander the Great. Shortly afterwards, he was elected curator of the Appian Way, the great highway that led from Rome to the southeastern tip of Italy. Caesar lavished money on its repair and restoration, knowing that his name would be associated with its renovation by travellers throughout Italy. This no doubt assisted Caesar in his election to the next rung on the ladder of governmental offices, that of _curule aedile_ in 65 BC. The _curule aediles,_ of whom there were two elected annually from the patrician classes, were responsible for the upkeep of the Roman infrastructure \u2013 the maintenance of temples, roads, bridges, aqueducts and sewers. They were also responsible for organizing the traditional games in March and September for the entertainment of the Roman crowds \u2013 which presented another opportunity for self-advertisement and display. Caesar spent on these games as never before. He erected temporary colonnades in the Forum to exhibit his private art collection. To further boost his reputation, he also manipulated the ancient Roman tradition of staging gladiatorial contests. Formerly, gladiators were only meant to fight to mark the funeral of a famous man; the blood shed in their fighting was supposed to appease the spirit of the departed. Stretching the tradition to breaking point, Caesar announced that gladiatorial games would be held to mark the death of his own father, who had died twenty years previously. These games were on an unprecedented scale: 320 pairs of gladiators were drafted in, each kitted out with tailor-made sets of ornate silver armour.\n\nAccording to Plutarch, Caesar also used his time as _curule aedile_ to put up images of his uncle Marius paired with the goddess of victory on the Capitol. This overt celebration of an individual who had taken power in Rome through military might caused many to fear Caesar's intentions. A number of historians take the view that it was in this year, 65 BC, that Caesar began to emerge as a real contender for a position of power in Rome.\n\nIn the following year, 64 BC, a gamble by Caesar allowed him to add to his growing authority. The position of _pontifex maximus,_ or chief priest, fell vacant. It was not encumbered by the same taboos as the _flamen dialis,_ and was politically a valuable office to hold. Not only did it come with a magnificent official residence for life in the heart of Rome and duties such as administration of the calendar, but the holder was entitled to be one of the first to speak in senatorial debates. There was fierce competition for the post. Senators of much greater seniority than Caesar were determined to win the position, and Caesar was offered a huge bribe by a rival candidate, Quintus Lutatius Catulus, not to stand. But he was set on making the post his own: he borrowed recklessly and paid even larger bribes to the electorate in the hope of securing the necessary votes. As he left his house on the morning of the election, he is said to have told his mother, 'Today, you will see your son as high priest or else an exile.'\n\nCaesar's victory is with us still in the lasting reforms he made to the calendar, yet the immediate consequence was that the traditional governing classes began to grow suspicious of him. The extent of this growing paranoia was revealed the following year, in 63 BC, when Rome was shaken by a conspiracy. A debt-ridden senator, Catiline, had run for the consulship \u2013 the supreme office in republican Rome \u2013 on a policy of the cancellation of all debts. When his candidacy failed, he organized an armed insurrection to overthrow the state, which ended in his capture and that of his co-conspirators. Cicero, who was then consul, proposed to the Senate that they be summarily executed. Caesar, however, argued against haste. He instead called for the conspirators to be imprisoned until the uprising could be contained, after which their ultimate fate would be decided.\n\nSuch was the power of Caesar's appeal that opinion in the Senate seemed to be going his way, until his rival Cato began to accuse the spendthrift Caesar of involvement in the conspiracy. His harangue was for a moment undermined when a messenger brought in a letter for Caesar that Cato ordered him to read, saying it was a clear sign that he was in communication with the remaining conspirators. Caesar cheerfully proceeded to read out a love letter from Cato's half-sister, Servilia. When the laughter had died down, Cato whipped the Senate into such a frenzy of anger against Caesar \u2013 who was perceived by many to be manipulating the situation to his own political advantage \u2013 that he had to be bundled out of the session under a colleague's toga to avoid being murdered on the spot.\n\nDespite such alarms, Caesar continue his rise up the ladder of Roman offices. In 62 BC, he was elected one of the eight praetors, the most senior rank of official below consul. The next year, 61 BC, he was appointed propraetor of the province of Further Spain. It was in this capacity that he gained his first real experience of a prolonged military command. Over the course of the year, he successfully conducted a campaign in Lusitania, a renegade province that included modern-day Portugal. Caesar's performance entitled him to a triumph: a grand military parade through the streets of Rome where he would be hailed as a victorious commander. The triumph was one of Rome's highest honours, and would leave Caesar perfectly positioned to make a run for the consulship of 59 BC. However, he faced a difficulty. To run for office in that year, he had to forego his military command; but to claim the triumph, he had to retain it. He asked the Senate to relax the rule for him. Thanks to Cato, they refused. Caesar's growing ambition for power overcame his desire to enjoy Rome's most prized honour. He lay down his command and returned to Rome as a private citizen to run for office.\n\nCaesar was not the only magnate to have been thwarted by the Senate and the aristocratic party. The military commander Pompey had for the previous few years been leading a campaign in the east. Over the course of the 60s BC he had conquered a number of territories in the Levant and Asia Minor, covering a large swathe of what is now Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Palestine. Pompey needed approval from the Senate for the provisional forms of government he had arranged for the territories. He also needed them to grant land for his veterans to support themselves once they had been demobilized from the campaign. Over all of this, the Senate was dragging its feet.\n\nCrassus, who had been bankrolling Caesar's political career, was likewise in difficulties. One of his principal investments at this time was in tax-farming syndicates. Since Rome did not have the administrative apparatus to collect taxes, particularly in its outlying provinces, the right to collect taxes was auctioned by the state to commercial syndicates, which would then be permitted to keep the difference between the taxes they were able to collect and the sum they paid for the right to collect them. At this time, the investments were turning bad. The tax-take was much lower than the syndicates had expected, and they needed to cut the amount that they owed the state in order to avoid serious losses. Crassus had been trying to negotiate this with the Senate, but had been rebuffed.\n\nIt was here that Caesar saw his greatest opportunity. Up until this point, Pompey and Crassus had disliked each other. To achieve their aims, Caesar proposed to them a secret alliance. They would use their support, financial and otherwise, to secure Caesar's election as one of the two consuls for 59 BC. They would also help him to secure a fitting post for the following year \u2013 a proconsular command of a rich province, where he could gather up sufficient money to pay off the now vast sums he owed Crassus. In return, he would use his proven political skills to force through the laws that both Pompey and Crassus required.\n\nOnce Caesar's candidacy had been announced, the aristocratic party did everything in its power to disrupt his plans. They passed a law that the proconsular responsibility for the consuls of 59 BC, following their year of office, would be no rich province but management of the forests and cattle-paths of Italy. In the end, their machinations were fruitless. Caesar was elected as one of the two consuls at the beginning of January, 59 BC.\n\nCaesar's consular colleague, Cato's son-in-law Bibulus, belonged to the aristocratic party. Such was the nature of the Roman governmental machine that when one consul was in opposition to another, it became impossible to get anything done by legitimate means: each consul was equal in power, and each had a veto over the actions of the other. This had made sense when the constitution had been designed, centuries earlier, with the prime intention of preventing a back-door return to the old monarchy. However, with Rome trying to administer a growing empire, it simply made for paralysis. When Caesar embarked on his legislative programme, Bibulus refused to co-operate. At first, Caesar was diplomatic with Bibulus and his fellow aristocrats in the Senate, but in short order he resorted to procedural trickery and violent intimidation. Bypassing the Senate, he appealed directly to the people, using stage-managed referenda to approve bills for land redistribution and the approval of Pompey's eastern settlement. When Bibulus attempted to veto one of these proceedings, Caesar's supporters smashed his insignia of office and emptied a bucket of dung over his head. In high dudgeon, Bibulus locked himself in his house and refused to leave for the whole year, relying on his vetoes and archaic constitutional mechanisms to render Caesar's acts formally void. Despite this nominal illegality Caesar pressed on, and by the end of the year had passed the laws he had agreed with Pompey and Crassus.\n\nWhen his year of consular office ended, there was still the matter of Caesar's next job. The Senate was now somewhat more biddable: Caesar had taken to publishing daily accounts of their proceedings to hold them to closer public scrutiny. Pliantly, they put aside the cattle-tracks of Italy and offered him an extraordinary five-year command over the provinces of Illyricum and Cisalpine Gaul. Such a command meant that Transalpine Gaul, the region beyond which the Gallic conquest would take place, would not come under Caesar's sway. Yet at that moment, the incumbent governor of Transalpine Gaul died suddenly. As an afterthought, the Senate added this province as a bonus to Caesar's portfolio. Caesar's _imperium_ now stood face to face with the unknown hinterlands of unconquered Gaul.\n\nThe early Roman colonies of Transalpine Gaul have left little visible evidence of life there in the half century before Caesar's arrival. But some traces can be found, and to see them, one needs to search not in the cities of southern Gaul, but outside them.\n\nBeaucaire stands on the Rh\u00f4ne, close to the point where the Teutones crossed to face slaughter at the hands of Marius. A canal that eventually runs into the \u00c9tang de Thau, close to S\u00e8te on the Mediterranean coast, begins its course in the centre of this small Occitanian town. From Beaucaire you can take a road west. If you leave the town centre on foot, the path of escape winds through the blank accretions of the modern age, twisting beneath a nicotine-hued railway bridge and past factory silos \u2013 ferrous pink as the dust on the earth beneath \u2013 before leaving the suburbs behind to reach the fields. Beside the path, in the hedgerows, is a tangle of brambles, their tiny fruit tart and dust-peppered; above them grow blue-black sloes and the bright red berries of autumn. There are Aleppo pines and olives; the coppery seed pods of silk trees jangle in the breeze. After a turn, the track straightens out, departing from its course only to avoid a low farm building. Its surface is neglected gravel, its sole traffic a red tractor. Vines radiate from its margins. Suddenly, the road comes to a bulbous end: a quarry has eaten up the way ahead. On one side sits a mound of rubble and plaster, fly-tipped; on the other, three angular standing stones and the stump of a fourth. They are worn, dust-blasted, lichen-blotted. Looking closely, one can see the ghosts of Roman numerals bevelled into their gunmetal surface. But even when these ancient marks were young, the road was already old.\n\nThe Via Domitia is one of the oldest visible Roman constructions in Gaul. It was built in 118 BC by Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, one of the generals who oversaw the early campaigns in support of Massalia against the Gauls. The four Roman milestones by the road near Beaucaire \u2013 the largest group of Roman milestones surviving in France \u2013 are not witness to the age of the road; the earliest of them was erected in the reign of Augustus in 3 BC. Yet they do bear witness to its importance. The Via Domitia runs from the Pyrenees to the Alps, providing a land route from Italy and Cisalpine Gaul to the Spanish provinces. It original purpose was military. Rome now possessed a new route \u2013 other than the maritime one \u2013 for troops to reach the perpetually troubled districts of Spain which, since the time of Hannibal over a century earlier, it had fought to subdue. In the 70s BC, Pompey marched along the Via Domitia to fight his Spanish campaign, and to collect Gallic auxiliaries to assist the Roman cause. Near its western extremity, by the modern-day Pyrenean hill village of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, Pompey established the colony of Lugdunum Conuenarum to mark his Spanish triumph.\n\nAs part of its military function, the Via Domitia was probably used for frontier defence. The road, in essence, marked the early character of Transalpine Gaul. This was frontier territory. For the first decades of Roman rule beyond the 120s BC, we are ignorant of the form of its government, but it is likely that it was not highly advanced. In the early years, there may indeed have been no governor, and the administration of the region may have been in the hands of neighbouring provinces. Roman functionaries in the area had to deal not only with the influx of Teutonic migrants culminating in the slaughter by Marius in 103 BC, but also with tribal uprisings and tribal politics. Gallic tribes had to be propitiated, and alliances made with other groupings beyond the formal sphere of Roman influence \u2013 the Aedui, for example, in the region south of modern-day Dijon, or the Allobroges near the southern Rhine. Rome had to consider the balance of power between them to ensure stability for the areas within their direct control.\n\n_Roman milestones on the Via Domitia in the countryside beyond Beaucaire._\n\nThe frontier was also a place to make money. The first person actually known to have been a governor of Transalpine Gaul was Marcus Fonteius. It seems he served in the province from 75 to 73 BC. Sometime after 70 BC, when he was back in Rome, he faced a charge of corruption in his administration. His accusers were Gauls, but his defence counsel was Cicero. Cicero's speech in his defence for the most part survives. Regardless of what we may discern of Fonteius's guilt, the speech allows us a glimpse of life in the early Roman province. 'Gaul', says Cicero, 'is packed with traders, brim-full with Roman citizens.' It was a place where one could go for business and fast profit. Romans of all trades had set up there: 'merchants, colonists, tax-farmers, agri-businessmen, cattle-ranchers'. Veterans from Pompey's Spanish campaigns had also been allotted land confiscated from the indigenous people. Together, they had taken control of the province's economy: 'None of the Gauls ever does any business without a Roman citizen being involved; not a penny changes hands without being marked in the account books of Roman citizens.' The wine-trade was booming, money was being made in the construction and maintenance of roads, including the Via Domitia. But the Gauls were complaining to the court that they were being forced deep into debt while Fonteius milked the province to line his own pockets.\n\nBut what weight could one attach to their testimony, asks Cicero? They were Gauls. Not so long ago, Rome had been at war with them. Now here they were, in their cloaks and uncivilized trousers, strutting around the Forum muttering uncouth and unintelligible oaths. Did they understand what it meant to take an oath? What it meant to give evidence in a Roman court of law? These were the same people who, three centuries ago, had burnt down Rome, laid siege to the Capitol and desecrated the shrines of the gods. What was the word of a whole tribe of them worth when weighed against that of a single citizen of Rome? No matter that they were furnishing cavalry to fight for the Romans in Spain and grain to support their troops. One would hardly believe that, a few years later, Gallic ambassadors who had come to Rome to complain about debt would uncover and blow the whistle on the conspiracy of Catiline; or that Cicero would later confess in his philosophical writings that a Gallic nobleman and Druid, Divitiacus, was a close personal friend and esteemed by him as a scholar with a particular knowledge of Greek natural science. No, the whole set of charges brought by these Gauls was nothing more than a perpetuation of their usual blood feuds by other means. Regardless of the testimony brought before the court, Cicero could still play on his audience to devastating effect. Gaul was a place to be exploited, and a place to be feared. Such was the province inherited by Caesar.\n\nWhere Lake Geneva empties into the head of the Rh\u00f4ne, in the heart of Geneva itself, the flow of the river is broken by an island. L'\u00cele, as it is referred to in French, is the natural and most ancient crossing-point of the river. In medieval times a great castle was built on the island to control the north-south road. Of this a solitary tower survives, flanked to one side by the glass panels of a watch-shop and adorned with the statue of a Renaissance Genevan patriot, Philibert Berthelier, who strove to keep the city independent of the dukes of Savoy.\n\nOn the other side of the tower, lost in the geometry of overhead tram-wires, is a plaque, cream against the old toasted stone, and of much more recent date. It carries a very different message from another plaque across the river that reads _Gen\u00e8ve, Cit\u00e9 de Refuge_ ('Geneva, City of Refuge'). It states that Caesar mentioned his journey to Geneva at the beginning of his _Commentaries on the Gallic War, _and then lays out several lines of the Latin text to prove the truth of the statement. Among other things, Caesar's commentary tells us that Geneva (Genava) was then a frontier town of the Gallic Allobroges tribe (and hence part of the Roman province of Transalpine Gaul); that a bridge crossed the river \u2013 at the site of the modern bridge \u2013 to the north bank, where the Gallic tribe of the Helvetii resided; and that in 58 BC Caesar came to the city and ordered the bridge to be broken down. This bridge was probably very close to the tower.\n\nIn the first century BC, if a person dwelling on the north bank of the river Rh\u00f4ne in Geneva wished to travel into southern Gaul, their most natural route would be to cross the river and then take a road leading southwest towards Valence, where they would re-encounter the Rh\u00f4ne much further down its course. If the bridge was out of action, however, and it was impossible to cross to the south bank, the only viable route was to follow the north bank westwards out of the city, and after about twenty miles, pass through a narrow defile of the Jura Mountains \u2013 the Pas de L'\u00c9cluse \u2013 and ultimately emerge onto flatter land northeast of the site of present-day Lyons.\n\nBeyond the city limits of Geneva, the northern route is one of great beauty. Travelling along it in spring, one cuts through low white-painted villages, down to the wide meadows that skirt the north bank of the Rh\u00f4ne. Sweet-smelling grasses grow high in the fields; the trackway is starred with flowers of purple sainfoin and yellow gentian. Cows, brown and white, graze contentedly in the rich pastures. Above stretches the Jura range, still snow-capped, a silver bastion embracing a valley of plenty.\n\nBut soon the nature of the pathway changes. Below Collonges, the pasture gives way to an ever-narrower strip of woodland clinging to the edge of the river, and the walker has to run the gauntlet of thick branches that sometimes obstruct the way. The pathway is forced down to the muddy edge of the Rh\u00f4ne. There is still a broad expanse of greenery on the south bank of the river, but it is dense and overgrown, more like the Amazon than the Rh\u00f4ne. But even this is soon to be squeezed out of existence as the valley contracts dramatically. The mountains surge upwards to an insuperable height; the river, forced through an ever-diminishing defile between the rocks, funnels and twists, its colour changing to an unlikely and startling cobalt. The path is reduced to a stony ribbon, balanced on the edge, scarcely wide enough for a cart to pass \u2013 as Caesar recalls in his account. Soon, the white turrets and crenellations of the Fort de L'\u00c9cluse appear above the track, apparently clamped to the mountainside, its purpose to control movement along the pass. But so strait and so vulnerable is the path that the fort seems unnecessary. Any advance along this route could surely be halted by a well-aimed pebble.\n\nThis path was witness to the first great migration crisis in European history to be recorded by a contemporary observer. The people on the move were the Helvetii. If the figures recorded by Caesar are to be believed, they were 360,000 in number. The tribe was moving in its entirety \u2013 men, women and children \u2013 from its homeland north of Lake Geneva, seeking a new home in the southwest of Gaul, outside Roman territory. The decision of the Helvetii to move was final: they had burnt and demolished their old homes, loaded all their possessions onto carts along with three months' supply of food, and were set for a long journey. Their plan was to take the easy route though Geneva, cutting across the territory of the Allobroges and thus the Roman province of Transalpine Gaul. Their preparations for departure took place in March 58 BC, just after Caesar had been appointed to his governorships of Illyricum and Gaul.\n\n_The Rh\u00f4ne at the Pas de L'\u00c9cluse \u2013 route of the Helvetii migration in 58 BC._\n\nCaesar, as has been said, did not have his mind on Gaul at the time. His plan was to lead an expedition to Illyricum, where armed bands of Getae (Thracian people who had settled on the lower Danube) were making incursions into Roman territory. But when he learnt that the Helvetii intended to cross Transalpine Gaul, he was suddenly transfixed. His plans for a campaign in Illyricum were forgotten. He sent an order for the bridge at Geneva to be broken, to deny passage to the Helvetii. The forces Caesar had at his disposal were minimal (just a single legion in that area of Gaul), but he made arrangements for additional legions to be mobilized and made his way to Geneva.\n\nThe Helvetii sent requests to be allowed to cross the river. Caesar, short of manpower as he waited for his reinforcements to arrive, played for time. At his command his available troops threw up a long earth embankment \u2013 5 metres high \u2013 and fortifications along the whole of the south bank of the Rh\u00f4ne from Geneva up to the Pas de L'\u00c9cluse, a distance of just under twenty miles. He stationed troops along the embankment to prevent any attempts by the Helvetii to cross.\n\nIn the middle of April, when his position was somewhat stronger, Caesar gave a definite answer to the Helvetii: they would not be permitted to cross Roman territory. Their response was to ignore his order and attempt to cross the Rh\u00f4ne by means of makeshift rafts and boats lashed together. They took to the water in small family groups, sometimes by day but more often by night. The Romans, however, fired missiles at their boats and thus prevented the Helvetii from reaching the southern shore.\n\nThe Helvetii then turned their attention to the only other option available to them: the route following the north bank of the Rh\u00f4ne, through the Pas de l'\u00c9cluse. It was a fearsome and daunting prospect: 360,000 people inching their way though a narrow defile along a path scarcely wide enough for a cart. It was also a route that could not be embarked upon straight away, for the path led into the territory of another Gallic tribe outside the Roman province, the Sequani, from whom permission had to be sought. A diplomatic deal was brokered with the assistance of members of the nobility of the Aedui, a tribe allied to Rome but also outside the Roman province. Once the Sequani had granted them permission to pass through their territory, the Helvetii, their worldly goods laid up in carts towed behind them, began to pick their way through the asphyxiating narrows of the Pas de l'\u00c9cluse.\n\nWe know little about the Helvetii \u2013 of their politics, of their intentions, or of the pressures that forced them to move from their original homeland and undertake such a long and dangerous journey. Why were they regarded as such a threat that they had to be prevented from crossing a territory on the periphery of Roman control? Aside from a couple of vague passing references in letters of Cicero, the only witness we have is Caesar. The only surviving comprehensive, first-hand account of the conflict that followed the migration of the Helvetii is given in Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic War, _De Bello Gallico._ There is nothing of substance from any other Roman officer who took part in the campaigns, nor any first-hand accounts that provide a view of these events from the perspective of the city of Rome itself. Despite the fact that they were a literate people, we have no first-hand accounts from the Helvetii themselves; and they left nothing in the way of oral tradition. Nor do the other Gallic tribes involved, the Sequani or the Aedui, supply contemporary evidence. Caesar's victory was so total as to give him \u2013 in addition to the victor's laurels \u2013 sole ownership of the story of his conquest.\n\nCaesar's account is a masterpiece of the Latin language: he writes in clear and uncomplicated prose, avoiding convoluted phrasing and obscure vocabulary. His text runs to seven books (or long chapters) written by Caesar himself, and an eighth by one of his commanders, Aulus Hirtius, covering the last stage of the conquest after 52 BC. Throughout all of this, his vocabulary extends to little more than 1,300 words. It is this economy of diction, along with its clarity and directness, that has made _De Bello Gallico_ a staple for students of Latin for hundreds of years. This straightforwardness of style perhaps suggests \u2013 though we do not know for certain \u2013 the work's intended audience. Caesar's concentration in the text, when not on himself, tends to be on ordinary soldiers and NCOs. He reports their concerns, their heroism under fire, their loyalty. The deeds of the aristocratic officers receive much less coverage, and what exists paints them less favourably. Whether or not the _Commentaries_ were originally intended as annual despatches for the attention of the Senate, or were collated at the end of the campaign by Caesar himself for circulation directly to the public, it is reasonable to assume that his target audience was a popular one, and that the _Commentaries_ were intended to reinforce his credentials as a man of the people.\n\nWhen Caesar describes the Helvetii in detail, he has in mind his Roman political audience and his political position in Rome. He says that the Helvetii were warlike, and that they exceeded all other Gauls in valour. Their original homeland was a region bounded by the Rhine, Lake Geneva and the Jura Mountains \u2013 an area of roughly 240 by 180 miles. This area, despite covering more than 40,000 square miles, was not, in the view of the Helvetii, large enough for their population: they felt hemmed in. They were a people who longed for war, and they desired to make their home in a place where they could easily make war on their neighbours.\n\n_Stoffel's map of the Rh\u00f4ne from Geneva to the Pas de L'\u00c9cluse, route of the Helvetii migration in 58 BC._\n\nAccording to Caesar a high-ranking noble, Orgetorix, wished to be king of the Helvetii. He persuaded them that they could become the leading power in Gaul if they simply marched west out of their homeland. He formed a conspiracy with other nobles, and persuaded the Helvetii to embark on a three-year plan to migrate wholesale into the heart of Gaul. The tribe bought extra cattle and sowed extra corn to prepare for the move long in advance. Their leaders, meanwhile, made agreements with chiefs from neighbouring tribes, including Casticus of the Sequani and Dumnorix of the Aedui \u2013 who also aspired to rule the whole of Gaul \u2013 to facilitate their passage. Even when Orgetorix, who was accused by the Helvetii of intending to become a tyrant, committed suicide, they carried on calmly with their preparations. When 58 BC arrived, the year appointed for their migration, they burnt their dwellings and their towns efficiently and without demur, and were ready for the rigours of their journey.\n\nPeople such as these, says Caesar, could not be allowed to approach Roman territory. Even if they only passed through it, they would bring chaos and insecurity by robbing and plundering as they went. They would cause harm not only to the Roman domains, but also to the Gallic tribes allied with Rome \u2013 even though a number of the latter's factions had pledged support for the migration. Even if they were not intending to settle in Roman territory, it would be intolerable to allow them to make their homes where they planned to do so, near Toulouse. The grain-rich district within the Roman province would be under constant threat.\n\nThe situation, as Caesar paints it, is a repeat of that faced by his father-in-law Marius, and in the very same theatre. And if the echoes of the Teutones are not picked out clearly enough at the beginning of the _Commentaries,_ the explicit references to the passing of the Teutones through Gaul fifty years previously, and the defeats suffered by Rome as a result, bring the similarities into focus. Caesar writes that when he learnt that the Helvetii wanted to pass through the Roman province, he recalled the crisis of the Teutones, and the fact that the Helvetii had allied with them to defeat the Roman army in the disaster at Arausio (Orange). Later, Caesar met with a Helvetian ambassador named Divico who, according to the _Commentaries,_ had been a commander in that same action over half a century earlier. Through the prism of Caesar's reporting, the Helvetii migrants become the Teutones and Caesar becomes the popular hero Marius. Caesar's narrative is as much a monument to Marius as the statue he erected of him on the Capitol several years earlier when he was still _curule aedile._ Whatever Caesar writes of the intentions and politics of the Helvetii migrants cannot be trusted. There is no other substantial witness, and the Helvetii were but manipulable fodder for his relentless campaign of political self-promotion: Julius Caesar was the man who had saved the Roman state from barbarian migrants, and hence a popular leader bound for absolute power.\n\nAnother part of the appeal of going to war was the prospect of generating wealth via a successful military campaign, for Caesar's debts were monstrous and pressing. But to wage a war in Gaul against migrants whose character and intentions could be exploited as much as their persons and property was even more attractive: it gave Caesar the political prize of putting himself into the template of Marius. And if Marius's triumph in Gaul is seen as the pattern that Caesar was striving to emulate with the Helvetii, then it provides an explanation not only for his initial dash to Gaul rather than Illyricum, but also for the way in which he chose to expand the campaign. He would be Marius, but, being Caesar, he would be Marius to excess.\n\nWhen Caesar broke the bridge at Geneva and denied the Helvetii passage through Roman territory, he had a single legion with him (about 5,000 men). On finding out that the Helvetii were minded to take the route through the Pas de L'\u00c9cluse, he put his deputy, Titus Labienus, in charge of the situation and rushed back to Italy to enrol two extra legions, and bring three more out of winter quarters at Aquileia. Curiously, while Caesar was away, the Helvetii were allowed to pass through the Pas de l'\u00c9cluse, even though it could have been blocked with the forces at hand; they could have been prevented from advancing further into Gaul without the need for any fighting. But no such efforts were made, a crucial omission for which Caesar gives no explanation in the _Commentaries._ Given that his account speaks of the Helvetii ravaging the lands of the Gallic tribes allied to Rome, despite having brought with them three months of supplies, his failure to prevent their journey through the pass appears even more curious. The explanation that makes sense is that Caesar actually wanted to let the migrants through so that he could meet them on more favourable ground, with several additional legions at his disposal, and defeat them in an eye-catching and triumphant battle. And so it turned out \u2013 although Caesar would fight not just one battle against the Helvetii, but two (even if the first was more of a slaughter).\n\nJust as the Greeks of Massalia and neighbouring Gauls had begged Marius, so Caesar's Gallic allies now begged him to take action. Bolstered by his extra legions, Caesar was determined to respond to their entreaties. He came upon the Helvetii as they attempted to cross the River Sa\u00f4ne \u2013 a river so sluggish, he commented, that you could not tell which way it was flowing. They were making their way over on boats and rafts joined together. One division of them, a quarter of their number, had not yet crossed. It was late at night: the third watch, sometime after midnight. The migrants were heavily laden with their possessions, getting ready to embark. Caesar's troops fell upon them unawares, and set about an orgy of indiscriminate killing. Most of this division of the Helvetii were butchered, though a few escaped into the neighbouring woods. Caesar presents this clash, the Battle of the Sa\u00f4ne, as a great victory \u2013 not just because he had taken a first and important step to check the Helvetii menace, but because it was an act of vengeance: vengeance on the part of the Roman state, for it was this particular division of the Helvetii, the Tigurini, that had visited disaster on the Romans by aiding the Teutones during their migration fifty years previously; and personal vengeance for Caesar, because the Tigurini had killed the general Lucius Calpurnius Piso, who was grandfather of his own father-in-law.\n\nThe second encounter, called the Battle of Bibracte, at least had the character of a proper battle. Caesar met the Helvetii in the gently rolling countryside south of Dijon, most likely on the open fields between the little town of Toulon-sur-Arroux and the village of Montmort. The two sides faced each other in long lines, drawn up on low ridges along a country lane. The women and children of the Helvetii fighters were stationed in a circle of wagons on higher ground to the right of the Helvetii lines, overlooking the battlefield. The Helvetii reeled under the initial impact of the Roman attack. The barrage of Roman javelins pinned together their shields, which they were unable to remove; instead they were forced to throw away their shields and fight without protection. Nevertheless, they maintained their resistance. The two sides fought from midday until after nightfall, pushing backwards and forwards across the gentle valley. The Helvetii were eventually forced to fall back on their wagons and the adjacent heights. From underneath their carts and between the wagon wheels they shot pikes and darts at the Roman legions. But eventually their wagons and baggage were captured, and with them even some of the children of Orgetorix.\n\nNevertheless, 130,000 Helvetii were able to flee the battlefield. Caesar was in no position to pursue them. His cavalry forces were inadequate, and his men had to tend their wounds in the aftermath of a difficult battle. However, he sent messages to the neighbouring tribes that if they gave the Helvetii any food or shelter, he would do to them what he had done to the Helvetii.\n\nAfter three days, the remainder of the Helvetii, now starving, approached Caesar and begged to surrender. Having handed themselves over, one 6,000-strong group, thinking that they were going to be slaughtered en masse, panicked and fled. Caesar ordered the neighbouring tribes to round them up. They were brought back and treated, in Caesar's words, as enemies, probably meaning that they were sold off as slaves. Caesar commanded that the remaining Helvetii were to be provided with food, and that they were then to return to their native lands. He told them he feared that Germanic peoples beyond the Rhine would be tempted to occupy their abandoned homelands and hence become immediate neighbours of the Gallic tribes allied to the Romans. The Helvetii did as they were ordered, and thereafter were regarded by Caesar as trusted allies.\n\nAmong their captured baggage the Romans discovered the records of a full census the Helvetii had taken before leaving their homeland. It was written in Greek characters, and listed the numbers of fighting men, non-combatant women, children and old men. All in all, says Caesar, the number of Helvetii had been 368,000; the number that returned home was 110,000. Their encounter with Caesar had thus reduced the vast numbers of migrating Helvetii by a staggering two-thirds. Such was the human price of Caesar's political ambition.\u00a7\n\nCaesar's narrative of his encounter with the Helvetii makes it so similar to that between Marius and the Teutones that it is difficult not to see it as engineered. And it is similarly difficult to believe many of Caesar's claims about the Helvetii: their intentions, the political state of the tribe, their behaviour, their relatichaptonship with other Gauls, and even their number. The mark Caesar left on Gaul was not merely the blood of thousands of slaughtered Helvetii, but also the conquest and control of the vanquished voices and identities. Caesar says that after his victory ambassadors from nearly all the tribes of Gaul came not only to congratulate him, but also to express their approval of his version of events: namely that the Romans were justified in attacking the Helvetii in revenge for the outrages the Romans had suffered at their hands in Marius's time. What he had done was right for the land of Gaul. The Helvetii had left their homes in a time of prosperity with the intention of making war; they wanted to seize the most fertile part of Gaul for themselves and turn the rest of it into a tributary. Thus did Caesar deftly impute his own intentions to the migrant Helvetii. But even in his own account, there are elements that belie the image of the Helvetii as dangerous warmongers. The Aedui asked Caesar for permission to allow the Boii, a grouping of the Helvetii, to remain and settle within Aedui territory. The Helvetii census, according to Caesar, recorded the number of the Boii as 32,000. The Aedui stated that the Boii were a people of outstanding courage, and happily gave them not only farmland to cultivate, but also full membership of the Aedui tribe. So much for Caesar's claim that the migration of the Helvetii posed a mortal threat, or the suggestion that movements of people at that time would stretch the available resources to breaking point. The settlement of the Boii would set the tone for Rome's quiet policy towards barbarian migrants from outside the empire for generations to come. When, for the sake of manpower, it was advantageous to allow them into the empire, worries about the danger they posed and fears about their barbarism were put aside; land and livelihoods could be found for them without demur.\n\n_Stoffel's reconstruction of the Battle of Bibracte (58 BC) between Caesar and the Helvetii migrants._\n\nSo plausible had the justification for action against the Helvetii proved to be that it would supply the rationale for immediate action against another people attempting to enter Gaul. The Gallic ambassadors who had come to congratulate Caesar revealed that there was yet another migrant crisis. In Gaul, two rival tribes had been competing for primacy: the Aedui, allies of Rome who occupied territory that is now part of Burgundy, and the Arverni, who lived further to the southwest, in what is now the Auvergne. The Arverni, along with another Gallic ally, the Sequani, tried to get the upper hand by inviting members of Germanic tribes across the Rhine to settle in their territory. The first wave of Germanic migrants comprised 15,000 people, and these fierce incomers quickly developed a liking for Gallic farmland, Gallic civilization and Gallic wealth. Many more of them followed. By that moment in 58 BC, 120,000 Germanic migrants had settled on Gallic territory. With their assistance, the Sequani broke the dominance of the Aedui: they took hostage a number of high-ranking Aedui nobles, and forced them to swear not to ask the Romans for help. But things were even worse for the victorious Sequani than for the conquered Aedui. The king of the Germanic incomers, Ariovistus, ruler of the Suebi tribal confederation, demanded that the Sequani yield one-third of their territory for his followers to settle. He then ordered them to surrender a further third to accommodate yet more Germanic arrivals. Ariovistus was the very essence of a barbarian: rash and quick to anger. It was impossible for the Gauls to endure his presence any longer. Without Caesar's help, they would have to seek out new homes far away from the Germanic incomers, risking everything they had to do so. Caesar hardly had to spell out the implications of all this, though he does so explicitly in his account: for the second time within a year, a Gallic swarm was in prospect, of just the sort that Marius himself had faced. Now that the Germanic peoples were getting used to crossing the Rhine freely, they would never be content with merely conquering Gaul. They would burst into the Roman province of Transalpine Gaul and then into Italy, just as the Teutones had once intended to do.\n\nIn Caesar's account of the negotiations he attempted to hold with Ariovistus, he presents himself in the mould of the populist hero. He goes to meet the Germanic king near Besan\u00e7on (Vesontio) with an escort of ordinary legionaries, unusually mounted on horseback. One of them jokes that Caesar, by giving them horses, has turned them into knights, thus promoting them up the ranks of the Roman hierarchy. When it comes to the negotiations themselves, Ariovistus warns Caesar that he will be destroyed, and that this would be welcomed by many in Rome, notably the aristocratic faction that has done so much to obstruct Caesar and his party. Thus Caesar deftly implies an unholy alliance: between his aristocratic opponents in Rome and a barbarian horde that wishes to destroy the empire.\n\nBut it was Caesar who destroyed Ariovistus. The armies met at the Battle of Vosges in 58 BC, probably near Mulhouse, about five miles from the Rhine. The Roman legions fell into a state of panic before meeting the Germanic forces, just as they had done before they met the Teutones. However, Caesar recalled them to their usual valour, again by reference to Marius. The battle was rapid and fierce. A number of the incomers were chased back to the Rhine, including Ariovistus himself: he was able to cross the river in a small boat, and then escaped to obscurity. Both of his wives were killed, as was one of his daughters; the other was captured.\n\nCaesar had managed, on the pretext of holding back dangerous waves of migration, to provoke and complete two major campaigns within the first year of his command. With the campaigns against the Helvetii and Ariovistus over, he had an excuse to leave Roman forces stationed in winter quarters far beyond the frontiers of the Roman province. The mere presence of these legionaries was a guarantee of further clashes with the Gauls. And of course any suggestion that Roman forces might be under attack by an indigenous people furnished Caesar with sufficient pretext to launch a new campaign against the offenders, to defeat them and then subject them to the Roman _imperium._ The threat of migration had served its purpose for Caesar and would leave its lasting mark. After 58 BC, he could rely on the logic of a spiralling cycle of violence to justify his continuing presence in Gaul.\n\n* Engraved gemstones, often with portrait heads.\n\n\u2020 To give a sense of the massiveness of this amount, the average annual wage of a legionary soldier during the first century ad was 900 sesterces per annum.\n\n\u2021 Quaestors were usually responsible for financial affairs and audits.\n\n\u00a7 Their name survives in the modern Latin name for Switzerland, _Confoederatio Helvetica_ , which is still to be seen on Swiss coinage.\n\n_Statue of Vercing\u00e9torix, the Gallic chief who led the resistance to Caesar's conquest in 52 BC. The statue, by Aim\u00e9 Millet, was erected at Al\u00e9sia, the site of Vercing\u00e9torix's final defeat, by Napoleon III in 1865, and bears the likeness of the French emperor._\nCHAPTER III\n\nThe Taming of Gaul\n\n_Omnes fere Gallos novis rebus studere_  \n'All the Gauls were bent on revolution'\n\nJULIUS CAESAR, _De Bello Gallico,_ 111.10\n\nGALLIA BELGICA\n\n\u2022\n\nTHE SAMBRE\n\n\u2022\n\nORL\u00c9ANS\n\n\u2022\n\nP\u00c9RIGNAT-L\u00c8S-SARLI\u00c8VE\n\n\u2022\n\nORCET\n\n\u2022\n\nGERGOVIE\n\n\u2022\n\nVENAREY-LES-LAUMES\n\n\u2022\n\nMONT AUXOIS\n\n\u2022\n\nAL\u00c9SIA\n\n\u2022\n\nVERCING\u00c9TORIX AND CAESAR\n\nIN 57 BC, AFTER THE ROMAN ARMY had spent its first winter in Gallia Comata ('Long-Haired Gaul', the regions captured by Caesar), Caesar began to change the justification for continuing his military action far beyond the established frontiers of the Roman empire. He no longer implied that he was keeping his forces there as an emergency response to the migrations of the Helvetii and the Suebi under Ariovistus. Their business was now outright conquest, a mission that Caesar saw no need to justify nor for which he even troubled to seek a mandate.\n\nThe year 57 BC was dedicated to attacks on the Belgic Gauls in what is now northern France, Holland and Belgium. These Gauls, claimed Caesar, were planning a conspiracy. They were fearful that when all of the central parts of Gaul had been captured they would have to face a Roman army; some elements, who disliked the idea of the Germanic peoples under Ariovistus establishing themselves in Gaul, disliked the idea of a Roman presence even more, and for that reason they were planning to defy Caesar. On top of this, the Belgic tribes contained a number of powerful chiefs who habitually recruited warbands with which to make themselves kings. These chiefs were now disgruntled, realizing that this would no longer be possible when their territories were annexed to the Roman empire.\n\nEven though Caesar, without missing a beat, states at the beginning of the second book of his _Commentaries_ that the extension of empire was now the ultimate purpose of the Roman campaign, he still evokes the shadow of the Teutones to justify his attack on the Belgic Gauls. The Belgic tribes were the only Gallic peoples fierce enough to repel the Teutones and Cimbri. Some of them \u2013 Caesar names the Aduatuci in particular \u2013 were even descended from a group of the Teutones and Cimbri who had pulled out of the long migration southwards half a century previously to make a home in Belgic Gaul.\n\nCaesar raised an extra three legions at the beginning of the year and marched north to the Belgic territories. One of the first tribes he met, the Remi (after whom the city of Reims is named), surrendered immediately, giving Caesar hostages, food and intelligence about the other tribes. Caesar overcame two of them \u2013 the Suessiones and the Bellovaci \u2013 by force, before meeting the most formidable tribe, the Nervii, at the Battle of the Sambre. It was a difficult battle in which the Romans were hard pressed, but Caesar himself, according to his account, was able to rally the wavering legions by fighting in the front rank with the ordinary men. The Nervii were so badly defeated that when they finally surrendered, they told Caesar the number of their tribal elders had been reduced from 600 to three, and their fighting men from 60,000 to 500. A similar disaster befell the Aduatuci, who surrendered their _oppidum_ (possibly modern-day Namur) to the Romans, only to be attacked shortly afterwards. Caesar captured the town and sold all its 53,000 inhabitants, as one lot, into slavery.\n\nOther legions had been sent westwards to demand the surrender of the Gallic peoples of the Atlantic coast, an aim that was achieved with little incident. On the other side of Gaul, messengers from Germanic tribes across the Rhine promised to send hostages to Caesar and follow his orders. At the end of the year, Caesar reported these achievements to the Senate in Rome, stating that the whole of Gaul had been pacified. The Senate responded by voting fifteen days of public thanksgiving in Caesar's honour: an accolade that no one had ever been granted before, boasts Caesar.\n\nCaesar's claim that he had brought peace to Gaul was premature. Many of the tribes, particularly those on the Atlantic coast, had not been expecting the Romans to remain. In 56 BC, when Roman detachments in these areas demanded grain from the local tribes, there was serious unrest. Grain was in short supply, perhaps on account of a difficult winter, but more likely because of the disruption that the war in Gaul had caused to settled agriculture. The Romans' demand for grain at a time of scarcity, combined with a realization on the part of the local tribes that they had lost their freedom, led to revolt among the peoples of the Atlantic littoral. The rebellion was led by the Veneti: they seized two Roman officers who had been sent to them to seek grain, and refused to let them go until the Romans released the hostages they had taken from the Veneti the previous year.\n\nCaesar's attention at this point appears to have been wandering. Having completed the conquest of Gaul \u2013 in his own mind at any rate \u2013 he was now considering an expedition to his other province of Illyricum, where there were opportunities for new campaigns. However, the news of the uprising of the Veneti forced him to abandon these desires for fresh glory, and he was brought back to the more difficult business of consolidating what he had already won. Caesar portrayed the two captured Roman officers as ambassadors rather than military officials, and thereby claimed that the Veneti had offended against the time-honoured sanctity of diplomats. On these grounds, when he was finally able to overcome the tribe, his retribution was similar to that visited on the Aduatuci. As the year proceeded, the Romans were bogged down in a number of actions more akin to guerrilla warfare then set-piece battles. Caesar himself tried to overcome the tribes of the Morini and Menapii around Boulogne and Flanders, but was unable to flush them out of the swamps and forests into which they had retreated. In addition to these difficulties, Caesar faced an attempt by the aristocratic faction in Rome to remove him from his Gallic command. For a time, he was compelled to leave Gaul for a conference at Lucca with Pompey and Crassus, where he was able to use their influence to extend his command up until 50 BC, and to persuade the Senate to recognise his conquests in Gaul.\n\nDespite this agreement in Lucca, Caesar still faced criticism in Rome. The following year, 55 BC, a group of Germanic migrants, the Usipetes and the Tencteri, crossed the Rhine into the territory of the Menapii. It was a migration, according to Caesar's _Commentaries,_ on the same scale as that of the Helvetii. Now that Rome had formally taken much of Gallia Comata under its control, it was more legitimate of Caesar to treat it as a genuine threat. However, when ambassadors from the two tribes began to negotiate an agreement that they should settle on the eastern bank of the Rhine among the Ubii, a tribe allied to Rome, Caesar turned against them. They had asked for a short period of time to take the offer back to their tribes and speak directly to the Ubii. However, Caesar accused them of intending to use this time to prepare attacks against Gaul. Showing the same disregard for diplomatic convention for which he had criticized the Veneti, Caesar had the two envoys seized and bound. The Usipetes and Tencteri, who had evidently been expecting the results of diplomacy rather than battle, were then put to the sword. For this, Caesar was lambasted by Cato, his leading opponent in the Senate, who accused him of bringing the Roman reputation for good faith into disrepute and called for him to be handed over to the Germanic tribes for punishment.\n\nCaesar was not, of course, delivered to the Germanic tribes, but the fact that he soon made attempts to launch new and eye-catching campaigns of conquest suggests a desire to deflect criticism in Rome, and to distract attention from the less glamorous and more difficult work of securing the Gallic conquests. In 55 BC he crossed the Rhine, the first Roman general to do so, but his expedition ended up being little more than shadow-boxing with the Germanic tribes. Frustrated by the lack of any concrete gains, he then made an expedition to Britain. Again, he was the first Roman general to do so, but it was a reckless move, since it was late in the season and he had not prepared adequately. The near-disaster of the British invasions of 55 and 54 BC are dealt with in another chapter (see pages 121 to 143). Suffice to say in this context that Caesar managed to spin these expeditions as great successes in Rome.\n\nCaesar's crossing of the Rhine and the English Channel, which were little more than military displacement activities, did not succeed in placing Roman rule in the Gallic territories on a more secure footing. In 54 to 53 BC a sequence of chaotic uprisings broke out, particularly in northern Gaul. One chieftain, Ambiorix, was able to lure a Roman detachment of fifteen cohorts into a trap, destroying it outright, and then subjecting another legion, under the command of Cicero's brother, Quintus Cicero, to a gruelling siege. It was only with difficulty that Caesar could save the situation, and he resorted to ever-increasing brutality to suppress the disorder. Villages and fields were burnt. Large groups of tribespeople were captured and led into slavery or simply left to starve. Noble Gauls involved in conspiracies faced agonizing deaths at the hands of the Roman forces.\n\nOne such event at the end of 53 BC \u2013 the execution of a rebel chieftain named Acco, who was cudgelled to death (a method chosen by Caesar for its archaic viciousness) \u2013 led to a wider and much more organized revolt. At the beginning of 52 BC, when Caesar's attention was distracted by the murder of his ally Publius Clodius Pulcher in Rome, the Gauls fell on the Roman population of Cenabum (modern-day Orl\u00e9ans) \u2013 in territory recently captured by Caesar \u2013 and slaughtered them. As with the original province in the south, an adventurous group of traders and their families had moved into a new area of opportunity created by Roman control. None escaped the massacre, and news of it travelled fast across Gaul. When any event of importance occurred, it was the custom to spread the news by shouting it in relays from field to field. Thus the massacre at sunrise in Cenabum was reported 160 miles away in the territory of the Arverni, around their chief _oppidum_ of Gergovia, by sunset. There was a signal for a general uprising.\n\nIn this situation, there was one Gallic chief who was able to rise to the challenge of leading a united resistance against Caesar. His name was Vercing\u00e9torix. Our primary source of information about him is, as with much else, Caesar himself. Only a few coins minted with his name, found scattered around the _oppidum_ of Al\u00e9sia (about which more in due course), bear contemporary testament to his rule. Vercing\u00e9torix was a noble member of the Arverni tribe; at the time of the uprising of 52 BC he was at the Arverni _oppidum_ of Gergovia, in the heart of what is now the Auvergne. Caesar tells us that his father was named Celtillus, and that he had been put to death in the previous generation for aspiring to the kingship of the whole of Gaul (a claim that may well be a projection of the native Roman fear of kingship onto the Gallic peoples). Vercing\u00e9torix was a young man of 'supreme influence', and he had the good fortune to be in such a position at the turning of the tide of history.\n\nVercing\u00e9torix seized on the massacre at Cenabum as a call to arms. According to Caesar, he summoned his tribal dependants and urged them to join the revolt. The other chiefs in Gergovia, including one of Vercing\u00e9torix's uncles, did not consider it safe to attempt such a rebellion and expelled him from the city. Undeterred, he went into the countryside, where he raised an army of 'beggars and outcasts'. With their support, he returned to Gergovia and seized it. He was hailed as 'king'. Vercing\u00e9torix then sent messengers to other tribes to seek pledges of loyalty in the form of men, weapons and hostages. In a vote, he was chosen to be the overall commander of the revolt. He was, says Caesar, a brutal leader: serious infringements of discipline were punished by burning or torturing to death, while lesser punishments included the severing of ears or gouging out of eyes. By such measures Vercing\u00e9torix ensured allegiance and loyalty.\n\nThe uprising caught Caesar off guard: he had to raise new forces, then rush back from Cisalpine Gaul to confront the rebels. As the Romans attempted to catch up with the main body of Vercing\u00e9torix's forces, Caesar captured a string of Gallic _oppida._ Vellaunodunum and Noviodunum \u2013 their sites now unknown \u2013 were taken; Cenabum was plundered and burnt. Vercing\u00e9torix, aware of the dangers of a battlefield encounter with Caesar's forces, called for greater sacrifices to halt the Roman advance. Cities and territories were no longer to be defended. Instead, the Gauls were to burn their own villages and crops that stood in the way of the Roman advance to deny them forage and stretch their lines of supply. The Gauls accepted the command, but pleaded for Avaricum (Bourges) \u2013 'the fairest of all their cities' \u2013 to be spared. Vercing\u00e9torix, against his better judgement, relented. The subsequent fall of the city to the Romans, the loss of 40,000 people and the Roman capture of the city's food supplies, merely served to prove Vercing\u00e9torix's strategic sagacity.\n\nRoman detachments throughout the Gallic territories, particularly in Lutetia (Paris), struggled to deal with the uprising. The rebels, by spreading apparent misinformation over Caesar's intentions, managed to peel off a number of his Gallic tribal supporters, including many of the Aedui. At an assembly in their capital, Vercing\u00e9torix was hailed as the commander-in-chief of all the Gallic tribes. A cat-and-mouse game with Caesar ensued before the two armies met in Vercing\u00e9torix's native territory, at Gergovia.\n\nGergovia is to be found south of the old tyre-producing city of Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne. It sits high on a flat plateau in a wide, green landscape of dark, volcanic plugs. There is no easy or direct route to it. I approach Gergovia through the suburban village of P\u00e9rignat-l\u00e8s-Sarli\u00e8ve. It stretches along a straight, quiet road, untroubled by cars and lined with geometric houses in various shades of beige and cream, their facades draped with honeysuckle. Telegraph wires beat a languid rhythm, hanging from post to post.\n\nGergovia was besieged by Caesar in 52 BC, and was the site of one of his few defeats. I find myself wondering whether it was across P\u00e9rignat that the Aedui cavalry, as described by Caesar, charged to assist the Roman legions; or whether the route of their charge lay outside the village, across the vineyards that reach down to the A75, roaring at the bottom of the valley.\n\nI make my way round to a point south of the plateau before embarking on the ascent. Caesar mounted his siege by building a Great Camp at the nearby town of Orcet on the other side of the A75. Later, he captured a height about two miles to the west, above the village of La Roche Blanche, and established a smaller camp there. Between the two camps he had two parallel trenches dug \u2013 each of them 3.5 metres wide and 3,000 metres long \u2013 to provide security for his forces going between them. Crossing and recrossing the modern suburbs of La Roche Blanche, there are no sign of these works beneath the neat gardens and vegetable patches planted with rows of onion and lettuce.\n\nI turn left and cross a bridge over the A75, through a maze of traffic lights, to reach Orcet. Caesar's Great Camp here was excavated in the 1860s by Napoleon III's archaeologist, Colonel Stoffel, and he laid down stone markers to mark the corners of its ramparts. One of them is easy to find, sitting demurely on one side of a residential street. Engraved in grubby nineteenth-century lettering on a slate-grey stone against a wall are the words _Camp occup\u00e9 par Jules C\u00e9sar, L'an 52 avant J.C._ ('Julius Caesar's camp, 52 BC'). Some of the others are more difficult to locate. I run the second marker to earth along a broken track on the edge of town, lined with nettles and brambles, behind a veil of undergrowth. The next lies hidden in high grass behind a mangled green wire fence, doing its best to protect a small factory producing agricultural metalwork. On the land itself there is no sign of a rampart, but the markers at least preserve Caesar as a once-recovered and half-forgotten memory.\n\nTurning back to climb to the plateau of Gergovia, I take a road that Caesar's crack 10th Legion may have marched up in their attempt to assault the Gallic stronghold. The road skirts the edge of the hill as it heads upwards. On one side, sometimes cut into the rock, are chiselled doors and windows that lead into abandoned troglodyte chambers. In gardens by the wayside, vines are trained high upon trellises; two men sit motionless with a bottle of wine outside a shed in the afternoon shade. Firebugs, armoured with their red and black escutcheon wings, toil over fragments of dry bark in the gutter.\n\n_One of the pillars set up by Stoffel in the 1860s to mark the corners of Caesar's Great Camp at Orcet for the siege of Gergovia._\n\nOn the slope some distance below the top of the plateau, the road passes through the village of Gergovia. In in its lower reaches there are capillary-winding culs-de-sac; its centre is ancient and stone-built. Large barn dwellings stand like cattle in a stall along a narrow, winding main thoroughfare. Honey-coloured lintels are carved with dancetty coats of arms staring out into the street. A Romanesque church sits on a promontory above a small and irregular village square. Cockerels squawk. Two boys play at a fountain, lashing the water with sticks. Above, a plaque records the visit in 1862 of Napoleon III, great searcher for Caesar and the Gauls in France. The plaque records not just the emperor's visit, but also his munificence. The name of Gergovia had been lost to the village generations before his visit. By then, it rejoiced in the name of Merdogne \u2013 'Shit-hole' By his command, the older and more dignified name was to be restored in the modern French form of Gergovie.\n\n_Plaque above the fountain at Gergovie recording Napoleon III's visit and his change of the village's name from the less decorous 'Merdogne.'_\n\nThrough the village, and off a country road, a stony track slippery with cow-dung leads to the top. It was on this part of the slope below the plateau, if Caesar's commentary is correct, that his legions met an array of Gallic warriors camped behind a hastily built wall of stones. Despite an order from their commander to retreat, the Roman troops made a sustained attack. The ground was against them and their lines were severely extended. Many were killed, and the attack was repulsed. I wonder if there is a sense of the sudden slaughter in the air, or if it can be read upon the gorse-fringed stones on the track. But if I do sense a frisson, a quickening of the pulse, I conclude it comes from the connection of Caesar's text to the place, not the place itself.\n\nAfter reaching the summit, the path leads first to the footprint of vanished building. Only a low ziggurat of a few stone steps remains. The steps are characteristic of a temple base, with a few stumps \u2013 the remnants of columns \u2013 ranged on top of them. Grass pokes through the corners and cracks. The rest of the structure has disappeared. This is not the remains of a temple but of accommodation built before the Second World War by a group of archaeological students from Strasbourg University who were studying the site. Nearby stands a memorial: many of them were executed by the Nazis.\n\nThe plateau of Gergovia extends, green, wide, level as the flat of a knife. The plain of the Auvergne below, broken by the dark fists of volcanic plugs, ebbs into the powder-blue horizon. Caesar wrote of how, when the legions fought the cordon of Gallic warriors just below the plateau, the women in the town of Gergovia threw their clothes and silver from the walls, baring their breasts and begging the Romans to spare them and their children. Now there is a quiet open space where children stride with coloured kites across the meadow-flowered grass. At one end of the site stands a caf\u00e9, admittedly Gallic-themed. Behind it, a wedding is in progress. The wind blows and whips around ribbons tied to green chairs. A memorial rises to the Gallic chieftain Vercing\u00e9torix, three bluff columns like a pile of millstones topped with a vast, empty winged helmet. The inscription is in Latin, the language of the Gauls' enemy. The edge of the plateau is fringed with the sparse remnants of ramparts, black basalt cubes, built against the Romans at the time of Caesar. In the centre of the plateau, more low barrows of basaltic rubble lie like little grave cairns, hardly showing their tops above the grass. There was a Gallic shrine here before the Romans came. It was remodelled after the conquest, while the rest of the town around it withered in the first century ad and was abandoned for Augustonemetum (Clermont-Ferrand), the Roman foundation on the plain. The shrine itself was forgotten by the third century, and the plateau sank back into oblivious green.\n\nThis was a place where Caesar was defeated. But still, he had his victory, for the Gallic past was effaced, even after his departure. The place fell into nothing. Even its name was lost, degenerating to 'Shithole' until it was recovered via reference to Caesar \u2013 the only real gateway to the memory of old Gaul. We cannot know in truth what Gaul was, and the only sight of its existence is Caesar's note of its passing.\n\nGergovia is a flat wasteland. Bibracte, capital of the Aedui and another great Gallic _oppidum_ \u2013 near modern Autun in Burgundy \u2013 was abandoned and reclaimed by the forests of Morvan. Caesar destroyed the Gallic town of Avaricum (modern-day Bourges), the 'fairest in the whole of Gaul' in Caesar's own words, in 52 BC, allowing his men to kill the population of 40,000; a mere 800 escaped. He killed around 160,000 of the Usipetes and Tencteri in 55 BC, by the streams of the Waal and the Maas in the east of the Netherlands. The Belgic tribes \u2013 the Nervii, the Senones, the Menapii \u2013 received similar treatment. On the southern coast of Brittany, Caesar executed the entire nobility of the Gallic tribe of the Veneti in 56 BC, and sold the whole of its male population into slavery. The Veneti were a long-established seafaring nation who controlled much of the ancient trade across the Channel into the British Isles. They built ships specialized for the rough conditions and tides of the Atlantic coasts, flat-keeled and high-prowed; Roman vessels paled by comparison. When Caesar stormed their strongholds on the rocky Armorican coast, they took to the sea in defiance. But when Caesar's men discovered a way of disabling the Veneti ships by cutting the rigging of their sails, their resistance came to an end. Scarcely any of their fleet returned to land. A people and a tradition were brought into the light of history by Caesar only through his account of their destruction.\n\nWriting in the century after the conquest of Gaul, the Roman historian Pliny the Elder records that Caesar, during his campaigns there, had caused the deaths of around 1.2 million people. Although many Roman historians would have marked this to Caesar's credit, Pliny does not. 'I am not going to put it down as a mark of his glory, what was really an outrage committed against humanity.' Along with all those who died, or were marched into slavery (each Roman legionary who served in the Gallic campaign received a Gallic slave), the Celtic culture of pre-Roman Gaul, and the Gallic testimony of that culture, was simply erased. The Gauls were not able to give an account of their own culture, unfiltered by a Roman lens. Beyond Caesar's dismissal of the Gauls as a boastful, garrulous people who were unable to see a plan through to its conclusion, we know nothing of the actual Gallic character. The true nature of the Gallic Druids, their philosophy and their gods, remain a mystery. After their obliteration in Gaul, they became nothing more than an empty vessel into which the modern age poured notions of picturesque savagery and a romantic longing for a wise and magical past. As Lucan, a Roman epic poet of the first century ad described them, the Druid priests dwelt in ancient, sunless groves, pallid with decay, where giant stones were smeared with the blood of human sacrifice, and effigies of the gods hacked out of rotting wood struck terror into the uninitiated. And of Gallic society, its history, its stories, we know little beyond what Caesar wanted them to be; there are just a handful of other Roman and Greek accounts, some fragments of archaeology, and a distant, refracted vision of what they might have been in the medieval writings of their Celtic kindred in Ireland. Caesar made his profoundest impact on history by bringing Gaul fully into the sphere of Rome and Mediterranean culture, but in doing so he drew an impenetrable veil over centuries of indigenous Gallic culture. In its absence and loss we feel Caesar's continuing presence to this day.\n\n_Stoffel's reconstruction of the Battle of Gergovia between Caesar and Vercing\u00e9torix in 52 BC._\n\nBut where Caesar destroyed, he also laid foundations for the new. And this was true as much for the identities of the people he had eclipsed as for the cities and territories he had razed.\n\nThe railway station of Venarey-les-Laumes, a small town in the luxuriant hilly countryside northwest of Dijon, is, on brief inspection, an unremarkable place: a quiet ticket office, gravelly walkways across the dusty tracks, an entanglement of sidings winding among greying locomotive sheds. It is only on reaching the platform, or pulling into the station as a new visitor by train, that one notices something rather striking.\n\n_View of the hilltop of Gergovie from beyond P\u00e9rignat-l\u00e8s-Sarli\u00e8ve._\n\nBeyond the tracks, by a factory, stands a large warehouse. The factory is grubby and dishwater beige, but the slatted walls of the warehouse are bright and freshly painted. However, what they advertise is neither a product of the factory, nor a car nor a chemical, nor an agricultural feed. On a cream-white background, picked out in blood red, are the towering head and shoulders of a man. His hair and moustache are long, his torso sturdy and heroic, his brow furrowed; he gazes over his back, as if in level contemplation of the future and of suffering to come. On a red band above his head is the word 'Al\u00e9sia'. The man is Vercing\u00e9torix. And it was here, at the settlement of Al\u00e9sia, on an almond-shaped plateau not far from the station, that he led the climactic battle against Caesar and the Romans in 52 BC. It was his defeat at this spot that led to Caesar's ultimate victory over Gaul and its incorporation into the Roman world.\n\nAfter his confrontation with Caesar at Gergovia, Vercing\u00e9torix somewhat unaccountably chose to retreat north. Instead of maintaining his earlier scorched-earth guerrilla campaign, he fell back on Al\u00e9sia, the hill-top _oppidum_ of the small tribe of the Mandubii.\n\nAl\u00e9sia sits on a great hill, Mont Auxois, surrounded by an amphitheatre of other hills \u2013 the Montagne de Bussy and the Montagne de Flavigny, among others. Only to the west and southwest, where Venarey-les-Laumes is sited on a plain around the scanty waters of the River Brenne, is there any relief from the heights. Vercing\u00e9torix had stationed his army, around 80,000 strong, within and around the _oppidum_ on the hilltop. As at Gergovia, he had strengthened the _oppidum_ with a ditch and an embankment 1.8 metres high.\n\nCaesar settled down for a long siege. The scale of the Roman siege-works at Al\u00e9sia, as described by Caesar, defies belief, until one learns that archaeology and aerial photography confirm his account, revealing the scars he left on the land itself. He constructed a 17-kilometre (11-mile) encirclement of Mont Auxois. Two trenches, one filled with water, were backed up by a rampart, around 3.6 metres high, topped with wickerwork battlements and crowned with wooden watchtowers every 15 metres. On the plain, earth was used to build the rampart. But as the trenches climbed undaunted over the surrounding heights, they had to be cut into the limestone rock of the hills, and in these places the limestone spoil was used to construct the ramparts.\n\nBetween the two trenches were placed devices to rival the barbed wire of a First World War no-man's land. Caesar cut the boughs of trees, and then sharpened and entangled the branches. These he set into the earth facing towards Al\u00e9sia, so that any force that approached would be impaled. Beyond these were pits a metre deep with stakes as thick as a man's thigh, tapering to a fire-hardened point, all concealed with brushwood to trap the unwary. And in front, logs embedded with sharp iron hooks pointing upwards were planted in the ground. Caesar revelled in the rough humour with which his men named these contrivances: the entanglements of branches were called _cippi,_ meaning both 'boundary-marker' and 'tombstone'; the concealed stakes, on account of the resemblance in form, were called _lilia_ \u2013 'lilies'.\n\n_Full-scale reconstruction of Caesar's 52 BC siegeworks around Al\u00e9sia at the Mus\u00e9oParc Al\u00e9sia._\n\nBefore Caesar had completed these siegeworks, Vercing\u00e9torix had been able to despatch an appeal to the other tribes of Gaul to send a relief force to attack Caesar in his rear. Caesar, conscious of this danger, took action to guard against it. The same defensive works he had constructed to face in towards Al\u00e9sia, he also constructed, over a 22-kilometre (14-mile) circumference, to face out towards any relief army that might attack him. He was therefore both besieger and besieged. His own force of about 60,000 men was concentrated in a narrow ring around Al\u00e9sia, no more than 120 metres across at its widest. Discreet stone markers set in the pavement by the railway sidings at the station record where the lines of each fortification were later rediscovered.\n\nThe siege was protracted and brutal. With so many civilians and fighters clustered on the hilltop, grain was in desperately short supply. Vercing\u00e9torix made himself personally responsible for allotting the rations. However, after a month in which there was no sign of the Gallic relief army, the Gauls decided to take desperate measures. The chiefs in the city held a council of war. Caesar claims to record the speech of one of the Gallic war-leaders, Critognatus. He argued, according to Caesar, that their parents had faced such a situation when the Teutones had invaded, and had left an example of the sacrifices that were necessary under such extreme circumstances: namely that useless civilians \u2013 women, children and old men \u2013 should be fed to those who were strong enough to bear arms. With Caesar at the gates, they should do the same again.\n\nThe Gallic defenders of Al\u00e9sia chose not to eat the civilian population, but decided to expel them from the city towards the Roman lines. They assumed that Caesar would admit them to his camp, and at least save their lives by selling them into slavery. The women, children, old men, numbering in their tens of thousands, were hustled down the hill, most likely via the road that descends from the summit towards the west, and which is now lined by modern bungalows and pleasant gardens. They reached the plain, and came upon Caesar's lethal entanglements, the snares and the traps arrayed before the Roman trenches. Caesar merely remarks that he ordered that they were not to be admitted to the Roman camp, but neglects to speak of their fate. Critognatus's savagery conveniently diverts the reader from Caesar's cruel decision to use the starving civilians of Al\u00e9sia \u2013 abandoned in no-man's land \u2013 as another weapon to put pressure on the Gallic army to surrender.\n\nSoon after the Mandubii civilians were left to their fate between the lines, the Gallic relief force arrived from the west. A series of intense battles was fought around Al\u00e9sia, as the Gauls struggled to break through weak points in the Roman defences. However, after the second round of substantial fighting, it became clear to the Gauls that they did not have the capacity to break the siege. A further council of war was held within Al\u00e9sia, and Caesar again reports its proceedings. Vercing\u00e9torix told his assembled commanders that it was not for himself that he had taken up the campaign against the Romans, but for the sake of their common liberty. As they now had to yield to fortune, he offered himself up for whatever they should choose: they could placate the Romans by killing him, or hand him over alive.\n\nThe council sent messengers to Caesar, who ordered the Gauls to surrender their arms, and to bring their chiefs to him. Caesar took his seat among the defences in front of his camp to await the leaders' arrival. When Vercing\u00e9torix appeared, he cast his arms down before his Roman enemy, and Caesar ordered him to be bound and taken away. There would be sporadic uprisings for the next year or so, but effective Gallic resistance to Rome was over. Little more is heard of Vercing\u00e9torix. He spent six years as a prisoner in Rome, and last saw the light of day in a triumphal procession celebrating the conquest of Gaul. After his appearance before the cheering crowds of Rome, a chained acolyte for Caesar's glory, he was silently and ritually executed, his purpose fulfilled.\n\nIn a clearing of tattered oaks and beeches on the western height of Mont Auxois, above the village of Alise-Sainte-Reine, stands a statue of Vercing\u00e9torix, looking down over the scene of his defeat. The clearing is empty and silent when I visit, and the peaks of the surrounding hills where Caesar camped are hidden in cloud. Rainwater has washed seawatery green stains from the metal body of the statue into the limestone plinth, and the mass of it lours dark against a leaden sky. The statue has stood here since the 1860s, when it was commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III. Its inscription, adapted from the commentaries of Caesar, bespeaks the power imputed to its subject: _La Gaule Unie, formant une seule nation, anim\u00e9e d'une m\u00eame esprit, peut d\u00e9fier l'univers_ ('Gaul, united, forming a single nation, animated by the same spirit, is able to defy the universe'). Caesar had defeated and captured Vercing\u00e9torix, imprisoned and executed him, and appropriated the record of his deeds for his own benefit. And yet Caesar, for all his self-glorification and destructiveness, had laid sufficient foundations for a new identity for Vercing\u00e9torix \u2013 and for Gaul \u2013 to emerge in years to come.\n\nFor many centuries of the modern age, the Gauls remained in the shadows where Caesar had left them. They had no place in the identity of the developing state of France. They were the defeated and malleable pagan masses, barbaric and obscure, who only took form when worked on by the magic of conquest. The Gauls before Caesar were of no moment. Even after the decline of Roman rule, ordinary Gauls were but pliant material to be moulded into civilized order by the Franks and the Christianizing King Clovis in the late fifth century AD. Vercing\u00e9torix remained unknown from this time until the late eighth century, when a manuscript of Caesar's commentaries was rediscovered in a monastic library. But even then he excited little interest. France took its identity and legitimacy from the Catholic Merovingians, and for antique glory traced its origins, like Rome, to refugees from ancient Troy. The French kings wished to be compared to Caesar rather than to any indigenous Gallic chief. For example Fran\u00e7ois I (r. 1515\u201347) was dubbed a 'Second Caesar' and 'Conqueror of the Helvetii' after his victory over the Swiss at the Battle of Marignano in 1515. Even with the stirrings of the Renaissance, Vercing\u00e9torix continued to attract scant attention. Writers from the Auvergne, his native territory, extolled him as a regional hero, but scholars from Paris looked down on him as a mere provincial leader. If anyone from the legendary past of Gaul mattered to them, it was Brennus, the purported leader of the Gallic attack on Rome many generations before Caesar.\n\nBut at the end of the eighteenth century, the atmosphere changed. With the emergence of the Romantic aesthetic, there was a surge of interest in the notion of a Celtic past. A fabricated collection of ancient epic verse, attributed to a Celtic bard named 'Ossian' and 'collected' from Gaelic-speaking Highlanders by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, took Europe by storm. In France itself, the overthrow of the monarchy, and the succession of different forms of government that followed, prompted a reassessment of the foundations of French national identity. Likewise, the invasion of France and the occupation of Paris by the Prussians and Cossacks in 1814\u201315 led to an intellectual debate as to how France should respond. Caesar's invasion of Gaul and the example of Vercing\u00e9torix offered a template to follow.\n\nBy the beginning of the nineteenth century, the time was ripe for a reconnection with the Gallic past. An early stirring in this direction was made during the French Revolution itself in 1789, when the political writer Abb\u00e9 Siey\u00e8s characterized the Revolution as an indigenous Gallic population throwing off the shackles imposed by a noble class of Frankish invaders; but the idea did not gain immediate traction. The first real and influential attempt to develop this idea was made a little later by two historians, the brothers Augustin and Am\u00e9d\u00e9e Thierry. It was Augustin Thierry who, in 1820, at the age of twenty, fulminated at the centuries of darkness into which the Gauls had been cast by the historians of France. 'It is absurd', he writes, 'to make just the history of the Franks the starting point for a history of France. Such a choice consigns to oblivion the memory of a vast number of our ancestors, of those who, I would venture, have a just claim on our filial veneration.' France, he observes, is made up of much more than the \u00cele-de-France and Paris. The hallmark of a well-written national history, he argued, was one that left out no one as it ranged over the whole mass of the national territory, as well as the entire scale of time. In ignoring the Gauls, the histories of France written up to that point had failed entirely to do this.\n\nHis younger brother Am\u00e9d\u00e9e took up the cudgels. Contrary to the received notion that French history began with the Franks, Am\u00e9d\u00e9e saw a continuum. The roots of France stretched back to the Gauls. 'Descendants of the soldiers of Brennus and of Vercing\u00e9torix, of the citizens of Carnutum and Gergovia, of the nobles of Durocortorum and of Bibracte, have we nothing left of our fathers?' He saw the Gauls as the ancestors of the French. The nature of France and the French, he maintains, is to a greater or lesser extent thanks to the legacy of the Gauls: 'I have concluded that our qualities, both good and bad, did not come into being yesterday in this land.' For Am\u00e9d\u00e9e Thierry, Vercing\u00e9torix is a romantic hero, a 'young chief' endowed with 'virtues and brilliant qualities', 'grace' and 'courage'. And, as such, he offers a noble and virtuous contrast to the mediocrity of the present. After the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, the Bourbon monarchy had been reimposed on France in the person of Louis XVIII. For Am\u00e9d\u00e9e, the shabby image of the restored Bourbon monarch returning to his homeland in the baggage train of the Duke of Wellington's army only serves to burnish the heroism of the ancient Gallic chieftain further: 'Vercing\u00e9torix was too patriotic to owe his elevation to the humiliation of his country, and too proud to accept a throne from the hands of a foreigner.'\n\nAm\u00e9d\u00e9e's writings were republished several times throughout the nineteenth century and exerted a notable influence on French culture and intellectual life. Other academic historians who persisted in arguing for the discontinuity between the Gallic period and the modern French nation, or who maintained the older idea that Rome was the bringer of civilization to a barbarous wasteland, never attained the same level of popularity as Am\u00e9d\u00e9e Thierry. Vercing\u00e9torix, the hero bequeathed by Caesar, allowed nineteenth-century France to develop a different notion of the origins of its identity. The Frankish background was decried on account of its association with the monarchy and old nobility: they were invaders who had imposed their will on a captive indigenous population. Indeed, the invasion of the Germanic Franks in the late fifth century seemed merely to presage the invasion of the Germanic Prussians in Am\u00e9d\u00e9e's own century. France's Roman imperial pedigree was likewise out of favour, given that it was held responsible for Napoleonic Caesarism and the legacy of clericalism. Only the Gallic past \u2013 painted as heroic, egalitarian, a time of liberty \u2013 was able to meet the terms required for a redefinition of French origins. Vercing\u00e9torix, moreover, was perfectly suited to be a hero in the face of adversity: a symbol of resistance, struggle and necessary sacrifice. Yet his defeat could also be seen as the beginning of hope: it signalled rejuvenation, a restoration of status and a new civilization that would be brought by Rome.\n\nAs the nineteenth century proceeded, the life of Vercing\u00e9torix became a major subject for French literature. Dozens of plays, poems, novels and histories and works of art appeared, extolling the virtues of the newly remembered hero. These included Eug\u00e8ne Sue's novel _Les Myst\u00e8res du peuple_ (1842\u20133), which evokes Vercing\u00e9torix as the 'chief of a hundred valleys', and Henri Martin's five-act verse drama _Vercing\u00e9torix_ (1865). So scanty is Caesar's account of his life that Vercing\u00e9torix was open to a multitude of conflicting interpretations; indeed, the absence of biographical certainty may have been a large part of his appeal. Some called on him as a republican hero, standing defiant against Caesar. One trope taken up by a number of writers was the idea that Brutus, in killing Caesar, was acting to avenge the death of Vercing\u00e9torix. Yet others, particularly apologists for the Roman Catholic Church, saw Vercing\u00e9torix as a kingly figure, even treating him as a prefiguration of Christ himself. In Vercing\u00e9torix's surrender to Caesar, only cursorily treated in the _Commentaries,_ they discerned a Christ-like self-abnegation: for the sake of his friends, he was meekly obedient even unto death; and his sacrifice was necessary and blessed, because via the conversion of Rome, France would later come to the Christian church. Some, by contrast, saw his defeat as marking the disastrous end of the liberty enjoyed by an indigenous civilization, overtaken by the Roman culture that, rather than Gaul, was truly barbarous. Caesar was held up in wretched contrast to Vercing\u00e9torix: he was 'vile... an assassin' (Henri Bernard); 'The bloody author of so many vile atrocities' (Pascal-Louis Lemi\u00e8re). Alexandre Soumet, who wrote a verse tragedy (1831) depicting a Druidess, Norma, during the time of the Roman conquest of Gaul \u2013 which would very soon inspire Bellini's opera _Norma_ (1831), with a libretto by Felice Romani \u2013 puts outspoken views in the mouth of his heroine: 'How I hate the Romans! They are cruel, perfidious, sacrilegious, deceitful / And by parricidal sermons / They place their crimes under the guard of heaven.'\n\nVercing\u00e9torix himself was elevated to the highest rank of the French national pantheon. Even a member of the French house of Bourbon, Henri d'Orl\u00e9ans, the duc d'Aumale, could extol the virtues of the Gallic chief, so often held up as a republican hero. In 1859 he wrote:\n\nI often remember the emotion stirred in me in my childhood by the story of Vercing\u00e9torix's struggle against Caesar. Although the passage of time has changed my ideas about it on many points, and although the Roman conquest does not stir in me the same indignation and I recognize everything that it has given to our modern French nation, I have kept the same warm enthusiasm for the hero of the Auvergne. For me, it is in him that is personified for the first time our national independence; and if it is permitted to compare a pagan hero with a Christian virgin, I see him, in his successful end, as a precursor to Joan of Arc. He is not even without the halo of martyrdom. Six years of captivity followed by death... is worth as much as death at the stake at Rouen... And since... he devoted himself to the salvation of his companions, I salute him as the first of the French.\n\nOthers took up this cry. As the writer Adolphe Br\u00e9an commented in 1864, for the three ages of French history, there were three great heroes. In the Middle Ages, there was Joan of Arc; in the modern age, Napoleon; but in antiquity there was Vercing\u00e9torix.\n\nThe contradictions in the French response to Vercing\u00e9torix and his defeat by Caesar came to a head with Emperor Napoleon III. He had come to power initially as the only president of the Second Republic following the final collapse of the Bourbon Monarchy in 1848. When, in 1852, the terms of the constitution prevented him from continuing in presidential office, he staged a coup, positioning himself as a popular modernizer, not dissimilar to Caesar. In the 1860s, when he eased some of the repressive measures designed to secure his position following the coup and his declaration of himself as emperor, he began to show a deep interest in the early history of France and the Roman invasion. He ordered wide-scale searches to take place to discover the locations of battles and sites described by Caesar in his _Commentaries._ He also embarked on the project of writing the life of Caesar in three volumes. The work was never completed, but the use to which the emperor wished to put Caesar and his victory over the Gauls are made entirely clear in the two volumes that were published.\n\nThe emperor attacks the denigration of great men: 'Too many historians find it easier to lower men of genius, than, with a generous inspiration, to raise them to their due height by penetrating their vast designs.' Too often, 'paltry inspirations' were imputed to Caesar's 'noblest actions'. Thus 'if he throws himself into Gaul, it is to acquire riches by pillage or soldiers devoted to his projects; if he crosses the sea to carry the Roman eagle into an unknown country, but the conquest of which will strengthen that of Gaul, it is to seek there pearls which were believed to exist in the seas of Great Britain'.\n\nThe emperor presents himself as a saviour of the French people, who had a vision for redevelopment of the country. Indeed, Haussmann's redevelopment of Paris, the first department stores, the great railway stations of Paris, and movements for gender equality all belong to his age. Julius Caesar, suggests the emperor, was also a man of vision \u2013 a vision that locked together the fortunes of Rome and Gaul in the development of European civilization. It was nothing less than 'civilization at stake' when the Gallic and Roman armies faced each other across the 'hills and fertile plains, now silent, of Al\u00e9sia'. While one must admire Vercing\u00e9torix for his spirit of independence, says Napoleon III, 'we are not allowed to deplore his defeat'. Had Caesar failed to overcome the Gauls, the penalty paid by the people would have been much worse. 'The defeat of Caesar would have stopped for a long period the advance of Roman domination which, across rivers of blood, it is true, conducted the peoples to a better future... let us not forget that it is to the triumph of the Roman armies that we owe our civilization; institutions, manners, language, all come to us from the conquest. Thus are we much more children of the conquerors than the conquered...' Without Caesar, the barbarous peoples of Gaul would have likely overrun Italy and extinguished the light of Mediterranean civilization. Rule by a benevolent and popular despot, therefore, was the only salvation for a society that wanted to progress. It was unnecessary to labour the modern parallel.\n\nYet it was Napoleon III who commissioned \u2013 and paid for out of his own funds \u2013 the statue of Vercing\u00e9torix at Al\u00e9sia that stares pensively over the site of his defeat. No equal monument stands there in commemoration of Caesar's salvation of French civilization. And looking closely at the face of Vercing\u00e9torix, his brow furrowed against the ashen sky, one sees, behind the shock of hair and the drooping moustache, the face of Napoleon III himself. This fact caused the politician Henri Rochefort to remark that the emperor had celebrated Caesar by the pen, but Vercing\u00e9torix by the statue. And the historian Andr\u00e9 Simon, among others, suggests that this contradiction still runs through French society and identity, even today: rejoicing in the benefits brought by Roman colonization, but paying a spiritual allegiance to the stubborn resistance of Vercing\u00e9torix.\n\nThe loss of Al\u00e9sia was evoked as a response to the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. L\u00e9on Gambetta, who led the French resistance to the invasion following the defeat of Napoleon III, was cast as a new Vercing\u00e9torix, opposed to a German Caesar, Bismarck. To the republican left following the conflict, ancient Gaul was ceaselessly evoked as a political model, with the suggestion that its chiefs were democratically elected by the people; this heritage, it was suggested, stood in contrast to the crowned governments of the rest of Europe. New monuments arose to the democratic Vercing\u00e9torix, such as in Clermont-Ferrand and on Gergovia itself, now erected not by an emperor, but via public subscription.\n\nHowever, it was after a graver defeat, at the hands of the Nazis in 1940, that Vercing\u00e9torix and Al\u00e9sia were more thoroughly pressed into service. The situation was far worse than in 1870, and authority in France was divided between German occupiers, the Vichy administration under Marshal P\u00e9tain and the exiled Free French Government under de Gaulle. Again, Vercing\u00e9torix was used to provide a light and direction to the vanquished population of non-occupied France. For commentators in the press, P\u00e9tain, who had led the French armies successfully against the murderous German attack at Verdun in the First World War in 1916, was the Vercing\u00e9torix of the age. He had taken up arms, like Vercing\u00e9torix, for the liberty of all. Like Vercing\u00e9torix he had given, as Ren\u00e9 Giscard d'Estaing (uncle of President Val\u00e9ry Giscard d'Estaing) remarked, the gift of his person to France. In order to bring a longer-term victory out of defeat, there were lessons to be learnt from Vercing\u00e9torix: the need to avoid lassitude, hopelessness and a withdrawal from the world; the need for self-sacrifice and the creation of a sense of national unity. Beyond this, the P\u00e9tainists even equated the German victory with that of Caesar: a new civilization had conquered France, but \u2013 if the French collaborated with their conquerors in the wake of defeat \u2013 a brighter future was believed to be in prospect.\n\nThe symbolism of Vercing\u00e9torix was remorselessly exploited by P\u00e9tain to lend credibility and lustre to his government. Gergovia, rather than Al\u00e9sia, was the focus of this effort. Close to Vichy and the Auvergne, which many saw as the ancient heart of France, Gergovia was cherished as the site of the Gallic victory over Caesar. Soon after the surrender to Nazi Germany, P\u00e9tain oversaw the establishment of the L\u00e9gion Fran\u00e7aise des Combattants ('French Legion of Combatants') for military veterans. This organization was to be a movement for 'moral renewal', a 'National Revolution', based on the principles of self-sacrifice and unity that Al\u00e9sia was held to embody. It provided practical assistance with harvests and food shortages, and also filled the ideological and social space created by the outlawing of political parties. In 1942, on the second anniversary of its foundation, a grand ceremony was held at Gergovie designed to foster a sense of national unity and loyalty to one's leader, values that were said to have been upheld by Vercing\u00e9torix in the face of Caesar's invasion. Urns of earth were brought to Gergovie, purportedly gathered from 'every commune in France' as well as the 'French empire', including Djibouti, Madagascar and even the French possessions in the Far East. In front of the massed ranks of 30,000 legionaries, P\u00e9tain mixed the earth and buried it in a crypt on the Gergovian plateau to signify the indivisibility of France (despite its occupation and the different claims to its government) and also a communion between the France of 1942 and the Gallic realm at the time of Caesar's conquest.\n\nIn the aftermath of the German defeat in 1945, Caesar's victory over Vercing\u00e9torix was again reinterpreted to illuminate the new political reality. An alternative approach, which also existed in opposition to the official P\u00e9tainist doctrine, is neatly summed up on a marble inscription, erected in 1949, at the railway station close to Al\u00e9sia: 'In this plain 2,000 years ago, Gaul redeemed its honour by leading its people, at the command of Vercing\u00e9torix, to face the legions of Caesar: but after the defeat of its arms, reconciled with the victor, together they defended against the Germanic invasions: open to the lights of Greece and Rome, it knew three centuries of peace.'\n\n_Stoffel's reconstruction of the siege of Al\u00e9sia, 52 BC._\n\nFollowing the war, General Charles de Gaulle offered a further corrective to the dogma of P\u00e9tain. Vercing\u00e9torix was, for him, the ' _premier r\u00e9sistant de notre race_ ' ('the first resistance fighter of our race'). His Gaullist ideology \u2013 his 'certain idea of France' \u2013 treated the country as a timeless and eternal person in itself, with whom a 'mystical dialogue' was possible throughout the course of history. Although the origins of the _French state_ were to be found with Clovis and the Merovingians, the origins of _the people_ were to be found before Caesar, with the Gauls themselves. The character of the Gauls, as he saw it, had been transferred to the French: courageous, demanding and mercurial, with the propensity for revolution and civil conflict, for which a strong state was the antidote prescribed by historical experience. Such was the importance of Vercing\u00e9torix to de Gaulle that he visited Al\u00e9sia every year between 1947 and 1957 on 5 September, the date recorded by Caesar for the capture of Vercing\u00e9torix.\n\nVercing\u00e9torix and his conflict with Caesar have continued to exercise an influence even on more recent generations of politicians in France. Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand, president of the French Republic from 1981 to 1995, cited Vercing\u00e9torix as one of the leading historical characters to have influenced him, since he had been able on occasion to defeat the Romans although the Gauls had been in no state to resist 'the Roman machine'. He regarded Bibracte, where Vercing\u00e9torix had been voted the supreme war leader against Caesar, as the birthplace of the first stirrings of French unity. Mitterrand made major speeches at the site on two occasions, including an appeal for national unity. He also expressed a wish, which remained unfulfilled, to be buried there. The Gaullist politician Jacques Chirac, Mitterrand's presidential successor, used the plateau of Gergovia in 1989 as a site to launch the campaign for the European elections, with a call for French identity to be safeguarded. Chirac made reference to the inscription on the base of the statue of Vercing\u00e9torix, saying that they were a 'singular people, in the first rank when united'. He even played on Vercing\u00e9torix's worsting of a Roman centurion, Lucius Fabius; one of Chirac's political opponents was the socialist Laurent Fabius.\n\nThe contradictions in the story of Vercing\u00e9torix and the Roman invasion still provide fodder for political conflict. The former Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen made a speech at Al\u00e9sia in 1990, calling for France to resist invasions and return to its roots. Vercing\u00e9torix was an 'unfortunate hero' and a symbol for the French people whom Le Pen judged to be 'menaced in their substance and security by other types of invasions... I do not question the immigrants themselves, but the criminal policy of immigration'. By contrast, a demonstration held in Clermont-Ferrand against discrimination at the same time was able to claim Vercing\u00e9torix for its own; as one of the organizers said, 'it is fitting that our march against racism ends in front of the statue of Vercing\u00e9torix, that is to say the hero of liberty and of liberties'. In November 2016, Nicolas Sarkozy, in his (failed) presidential bid, evoked Vercing\u00e9torix in the debate over migration and French identity. He declared that 'Whatever the nationality of your parents, at the moment you become French, your ancestors are Gaul and Vercing\u00e9torix,' thereby demanding that immigrants fully accept the French way of life as a prerequisite for receiving French nationality.\n\nBut although Vercing\u00e9torix has continued to be used by politicians as an idol and lesser cousin to Joan of Arc, since 1959 his potency as a serious political symbol has been somewhat reduced thanks to his appearance in the _Ast\u00e9rix_ series of _bandes dessin\u00e9es_ (comic books), written by Ren\u00e9 Goscinny until his death in 1977, and illustrated by Albert Uderzo. To be sure, the habit of lightening the treatment of the Gauls did not appear with _Ast\u00e9rix._ Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Gauls had been used in advertising as the French population became ever more familiar with their idealized images in cheap and widely distributed school textbooks and popular history pamphlets. Gallic chiefs found themselves not in Roman captivity, but corralled into selling cigarettes, strange varieties of liqueurs, petrol and pneumatic tyres. It was in this atmosphere that _Ast\u00e9rix,_ gently satirizing the French way of life in the twentieth century, came to be conceived. The paradoxes inherent in the conflict between Rome and Gaul are fully on display \u2013 the cities and towns rebuilt and flourishing under Caesar, with amphitheatres, temples and aqueducts, but counterpointed by the invincible and resistant rustic village with its communal life, jollity, contrariness and constant quarrels. The contrast finds its fulfilment in the portrayal, in _Le Bouclier arverne_ ( _Asterix and the Chieftain's Shield,_ 1968), of the surrender of Vercing\u00e9torix at Al\u00e9sia. After the event Caesar describes to his followers how the defeated Gallic chief meekly laid his weapons at the feet of his conqueror, while Caesar looked on \u2013 majestic, cold and impassive. It is an emotive scene treated frequently in nineteenth-century French art. In the comic-book telling, however, certain members of Caesar's entourage remember the event differently. Vercing\u00e9torix does not lay his weapons humbly at Caesar's feet, but, riding up to his Roman adversary, drops them from a height on Caesar's spindly toes.\n\n_Sign at the entrance to Devil's Dyke, Wheathampstead, thought to be the site of a battle in 54 BC between Caesar and the British resistance leader Cassivellaunus._\nCHAPTER IV\n\nTales of the Imagination\n\n_Neque enim temere praeter mercatores illo adit quisquam_  \n'Nobody except traders journeys thither without good cause'\n\nJULIUS CAESAR, _De Bello Gallico,_ IV.20\n\nBOULOGNE\n\n\u2022\n\nDEAL\n\n\u2022\n\nWALMER\n\n\u2022\n\nROMNEY\n\n\u2022\n\nCANTERBURY\n\n\u2022\n\nBIGBURY HILL\n\n\u2022\n\nARTHUR'S-HOVEN\n\n\u2022\n\nWALTON-ON-THAMES\n\n\u2022\n\nWHEATHAMPSTEAD\n\n\u2022\n\nRICHBOROUGH\n\n\u2022\n\nCASSIVELLAUNUS\n\nDURING HIS MILITARY CAMPAIGNS of the 50s BC, Caesar twice invaded Britain, once in 55 BC and again in 54 BC. His footprints on _terra Britannica,_ however, are rather less easy to discern than those he left on the French side of the Channel.\n\nIt is unlikely, as Suetonius suggests, that he was drawn to the island in the belief that it offered a vast supply of high-quality pearls (other Roman authors knew that British pearls were of particularly low quality). However, it is difficult to accept Caesar's claim that he went there merely to stop the Britons sending assistance to the Gallic tribes in their uprisings against him. He makes only one glancing reference before his first invasion of Britain to such external help, and it appears unlikely that the Britons posed a grave enough threat to the security of Roman forces on the continent to justify the extraordinary risk of launching an amphibious attack on the island of Britain.\n\nSeen in the wider context of the conquest of Gaul, a more credible motivation becomes apparent. By 55 BC, Roman troops had made their presence felt across the whole of Gaul. Caesar's work was shifting from the exciting business of conquest to the more mundane work of consolidating the new territories or suppressing dissent. Since his proconsular mandate over the territory still had several more years to run, it is likely that he wanted to continue to present the Senate \u2013 and more importantly, the people of Rome \u2013 with eye-catching victories to consolidate his reputation and justify the unusual length of his command.\n\nThe first symptom of this desire was his construction in 55 BC of a bridge across the Rhine to pursue the Germanic tribes on its east bank and deter them from making incursions into the newly Roman areas of Gaul. The expedition, despite its pioneering nature \u2013 it was the first Roman incursion across the Rhine (and, it would no doubt have occurred to the Roman audience, towards the putative source of the Teutones) \u2013 consisted more of shadow-boxing than any real military engagements. The tribes that Caesar sought to chastise were nomadic in character, and were able to melt away into the far recesses of their territory, keeping such a distance that it would have been suicidal for Caesar to have extended his supply lines far enough to reach them.\n\nLacking a new enemy to fight, Caesar turned his attention westwards. Although it was late in the campaigning season and there were threats of revolt in Gaul, and despite the fact that he lacked not only intelligence about the ancient Britons but a navy that was fit for purpose, Caesar had made up his mind. He marched his legions from the Rhine to the Channel and prepared to make a crossing. He billed the first expedition as an information-gathering exercise, which was not an unreasonable quest this late in the season. However, the beauty of sailing for Britain, in contrast to crossing the Rhine or campaigning elsewhere in Gaul, was that victory was not a prerequisite for glory. Britain, for the Romans of the time, was less of a place and more of a myth. Many saw the English Channel as the occidental boundary of the known world. Whatever lay beyond \u2013 Britain, Hibernia, Ultima Thule on the edge of the disc of the world, where the land was bound with ice and the sun was said never to set \u2013 was the stuff of tales told by eccentric travellers. A sailor, Pytheas, who had set out from Massalia in the third century BC, claimed to have circumnavigated the British Isles; but his account, the remains of which suggest he was true to his word, was savaged by ancient geographers. Many of them, however, could not even agree as to whether Britain was an island. Given such scepticism, merely to set foot in Britain with an army as witness would match Hercules's exploit of reaching the underworld; military success would be an agreeable addition, but by no means a necessity.\n\nUnder these circumstances, it is of little surprise that Caesar's preparations were rushed and inadequate. He sought information about the island from Gallic merchants who made regular voyages there. Given his earlier massacre of the sea-going Veneti, however, and their likely fear that any expedition of Caesar's would disrupt their trade to the island, they told him nothing of use. It is also unsurprising that they forewarned the British chiefs of his intended voyage. The chiefs, hoping to forestall an armed invasion, sent envoys across the Channel offering to submit. Caesar took these messages at face value, and interpreted them as a sign that the indigenous population was well disposed rather than hostile, thus deceiving himself as to the level of risk involved in an expedition.\n\nHaving discovered little of the geography from local sources, Caesar was compelled to gather the information himself. He sent out scouts in a reconnaissance boat, but their work was slapdash. They failed to find any suitable anchorages for large vessels. They were able to locate Dover \u2013 a site the British could easily defend \u2013 but they did not search far enough around the coast to find the nearby haven of Richborough, which would be used in the Roman conquest of Britain a century later. They also made no attempt to explore inland. Thus, they returned with a dearth of useful intelligence, but their presence had acted as a further warning to the Britons of Caesar's imminent arrival.\n\nIn his haste to depart, Caesar ordered transport ships to be gathered at Portus Itius (Boulogne). He was able to assemble eighty vessels. For his purposes, this was barely sufficient, as he wanted to carry two legions (12,000 men, a small number in itself for an expeditionary force) with their equipment across the Channel. Each vessel was probably no more than 20 metres long, but each had to carry up to 150 soldiers. The men were packed in tightly. Their heavy equipment had to be left behind and their rations were kept to an absolute minimum. They would have to rely on foraging once they arrived, adding to the vulnerability of their meagre headcount. The nature of the ships also made their task more difficult. They were high-sided, and unsuitable for a beach landing. If Caesar were able to find a suitable harbour, this would not present a difficulty; but failing this, his ships would have to disgorge his legions into deep water to fight their way onto shore. Although he could have waited over winter until he had built enough suitable ships and gathered helpful intelligence, none of these considerations troubled him. He set out at midnight on 24 August, 55 BC.\n\nThe view from the end of Deal pier, looking back towards the land, reveals a grand sweep of the Kent coast. The shore rolls from Ramsgate in the north, hazy in mist as it reaches into the sea, down through the gentle curve of Sandwich Bay to Richborough and the mingled seafronts of Deal and Walmer. Then the land turns and rises suddenly into the white wooded cliffs of South Foreland, where the coastline wheels out of sight and runs southwest towards Dover.\n\nThe pier is modern and spartan; unornamented barrel-iron legs march unevenly, bearing the concrete and girders of a bare walkway back to the shore. The coast lies low and flat behind a grey sea, the peaks of the skittering waves teased into silver points by the reluctant light of a pewter sky. The level expanse of the seafront is toothed with high, narrow houses, Dutch in aspect, and as muted in colour as the sea before them. The beach below is a high bank of sandy pebbles, mottled where the sea has drawn back over them, wrinkled by the pulse of the surf at high water mark.\n\nIt is here, where the steepness of the beach levels slightly between Deal and Walmer, that Caesar is believed to have come ashore. His intention had been to put into Dover, but on reaching it in the morning he saw the cliffs about the harbour lined with armed men, ready to throw projectiles at his ships should they approach the land. He ordered the fleet to follow him round the coast, and where the cliffs sank into a flatter beach he decided to disembark his men. Drawn up on the beach in their chariots, daubed with woad and festooned with gold torques, were the British warriors who had followed the Romans round the coast to their landing point.\n\nIt was a daunting task for the legionaries to jump from the high sides of the ships, heavy with weapons and battle dress, into the deep water where the Roman ships had dropped anchor. In his _Commentaries,_ Caesar could at least divert the reader's attention from the consequences of his impetuous behaviour by praising of the bravery of his men. He made a point of lauding the standard-bearer of the 10th Legion, his favourite, who leapt into the water, proclaiming that he was doing his duty to Rome and Caesar. Nevertheless, Caesar managed to save the situation by good generalship, calling down fire from the ships' catapults, slingers and archers against the right flank of the Britons. Advancing through the water under this cover, they were at least able to secure a beachhead and construct a camp, and to haul the ships up on shore to keep them under guard.\n\nWhere Caesar made his beachhead camp on the coast at Walmer, a sprawl of fishing boats and their gear now sits sequestered behind metal barriers. The slate-heavy air is relieved by bright blue tubs and tarpaulins, stacked green crates, the winding of ropes and nets and waving ensigns. A man at a trestle table by the shore path hacks at the fat body of a skate with an instrument fearsome as a machete. The wind rattles the antennas and masts. This has always been a coast that has dreaded invasion. Behind the fishing boats stands the compact roseate form of Deal Castle, which has warded off a succession of enemies \u2013 the French, the Dutch, the Germans. But this is a construction of the Tudors, not Caesar.\n\nImagination and tradition invoke Caesar's presence in this place, where real traces of him are lacking. Wishful local tradition attaches evidence of Caesar to anything that might have suggested his presence. The Tudor antiquary, John Leland, records that in his own time, Deal boasted 'a fosse or great bank artificial betwixt the towne and se, and beginneth about Deale, and rennith a great way up toward S. Margaret's Clyfe, yn so much that sum suppose that this is the place where Caesar landed _in aperto litore'._ Many liked to think that this bank was created by Caesar. An Elizabethan traveller and mapmaker, William Lambarde, makes such a record in verse: 'Renowned Dele doth vaunt itselfe,/ With Turrets newly rais'd:/ For monuments of Caesars host,/ A place in storie prais'd.' Some of the locals even called the bank 'Romesworke'. But in reality it was just a result of the coast inching forwards into the sea, which Leland concedes was the most likely explanation: 'Surely the fosse was made to kepe owte ennemyes there, or to defend the rage of the se; or I think rather the casting up beche or pible.'\n\nIt is not difficult to find real traces of the Romans near Deal. They can be found at Richborough Castle along the coast. One can visit Canterbury and descend below the streets to see subterranean mosaics rumpled by slow movements of the earth, or trace the line of Roman arches in the stonework of the city walls. There is a building here whose walls are substantially Roman \u2013 the small church of St Martin's, whose sanctuary was built before the fourth century, and which sheltered St Augustine when he returned to bring Christianity to Britain in ad 597. But this is the inheritance of the invasion of Claudius in ad 43, and not of Caesar. One may say that Caesar paved the way for Claudius, but that aside, Caesar's own presence after his two abortive invasions is felt more in story, tradition and myth. The locations of his landings, his camps, his itineraries and his battles are speculative best guesses. At the beginning of the twentieth century, following much scholarly debate, the shore between Walmer and Deal was agreed to be the most plausible landing site for Caesar's forces.\n\n_The Church of St Martin of Canterbury. The walls of the chancel, pictured above, are thought to have stood since late Roman times._\n\nBut myths placing his arrival elsewhere remained stubbornly embedded in popular tradition and literary sources. The town of Romney, for example, much further west in Kent, claimed Caesar's landing for itself. The Elizabethan herbalist John Parkinson links his landing there with the ancient presence of _Urtica romana,_ the common Roman nettle. William Camden, the Elizabethan historian, though disagreeing with Parkinson's story, records it for posterity:\n\nIt is recorded (saith he) that at Romney, Julius Caesar landed with his soldiers, and there abode for a certain time, when the place (it is likely) was by them called Romania, and corruptly therefore Romeney or Romney. But for the growing of the Nettle in that place, it is reported, That the soldiers brought some of the Seed with them; and sowed it there for their use, to rub and chafe their Limbs, when through extreme cold they should be stiff and benumbed; being told before they came from home, that the Climate of Britain was so extreme cold, that it was not to be endured without some friction or rubbing to warm their blood, and to stir up their natural heat: since which time, it is thought, it hath continued there, rising yearly of its own sowing.\n\nThe site of Caesar's first battle when he returned to Britain in 54 BC, having scarcely escaped safely to Gaul after the winter storms of 55 BC, is placed by archaeologists at Bigbury Hill Fort, a few miles' walk northwest from the centre of Canterbury. The fort was an Iron Age stronghold of several hectares, a palisaded keep on the side of a hill framed by the River Stour and an ancient track whose route would later be followed by the Pilgrims' Way. It is the only encampment of this sort in the vicinity, and the best academic guess as to a site described by Caesar where the troops of the 7th Legion had to fight their way into a wooded hill fort whose gates had been sealed with pyramids of logs. The archaeological record suggests that habitation there came to an end around the middle of the first century BC. Excavations from the end of the 1800s found indigenous weapons \u2013 spears and axes \u2013 as well as agricultural and cooking gear \u2013 coulters, ploughshares and pot-hooks. They also found a set of human shackles, showing that the place had some sort of involvement in the Roman slave trade. But that Caesar was present here is only a guess. Legends place his engagements with the local tribes elsewhere. Camden suggests the battle was fought southwest of Canterbury at the village of Chilham. The locals, he records approvingly, believed the name of their settlement to be a corruption of _Julham,_ as if one should say, _Julius's station, or house;_ and, if I mistake not, they have truth on their side'. The place was imbued with magic, and Camden could not resist adding his own speculations to the local legend of the Romans:\n\n_Bigbury Hill Fort, by the Pilgrims' Way near Canterbury. This was the most likely site of Caesar's first battle during his second invasion of Britain in 54 BC._\n\nBelow this town is a green _barrow,_ said to be the burying place of one _Jul-Laber_ many ages since; who, some will tell you, was a _Giant,_ others a _witch._ For my own part, imagining all along that there might be something of real Antiquity couch'd under that name, I am almost persuaded that _Laberius Drusus_ the Tribune, slain by the Britains... was buried here; and that from him the _Barrow_ was call'd _Jul-Laber_.\n\nOn his first invasion, Caesar was unable to progress very far from the coast. In his haste, he had ordered his cavalry to set sail at a different location from his infantry. The two forces were separated and the cavalry, because of adverse winds, were not able to reach Britain. This hampered him from moving inland. The itinerary of his second invasion is likely to have been a route from the coast at Walmer, past Canterbury, crossing the Thames at some unknown ford; then penetrating beyond St Albans to confront a local chieftain, Cassivellaunus, who, as Vercing\u00e9torix would do in Gaul, had managed to unite the disparate local tribes in resistance. But legend has expanded the scope of Caesar's travels and achievements. Although he had failed to make his landing at Dover, local tradition holds that he left his mark there. During the Middle Ages, a Roman lighthouse inside the precincts of Dover Castle was turned into the bell tower of the adjacent church of St Mary in Castro. It was built around ad 50, following the invasion of Claudius, but legend gave it to Caesar. The pre-thirteenth-century _Chronicle of St Martin of Dover,_ compiled at Dover Monastery, states that the tower was his, built as a treasury, and that Dover Castle beside it was built by Arviragus, the son of Cymbeline. Leland in Elizabeth's time says that he saw a Latin inscription in the church to this effect; and Lambarde remarks that in the Castle itself 'certeine vessels of olde wine, and salte' were kept in Caesar's memory 'whiche they affirme to be the remayne of suche prouision as he brought into it'.\n\nCaesar's achievements as a builder go far beyond Dover. The castles of Canterbury and Rochester, both Norman, had accrued a Caesarian origin by the Tudor period. The twelfth- century Anglo-Norman poet Wace and later chroniclers state that Exeter owed its origins to Caesar after he built a camp on the River Exe. The Tower of London was also similarly honoured; in Shakespeare, it is 'Julius Caesar's ill-erected tower'. Across the country, there are a number of Iron Age forts and other early earthworks, entirely innocent of association with Caesar or the Romans, to which folk accounts have accorded the name of 'Caesar's Camp'.\n\nCaesar was not only a builder, but a bringer of amenity. The twelfth-century chronicler William of Malmesbury attributes the hot springs of Bath to him. Such achievements could be brought about by magic; a fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman chronicler, Nicholas Trivet, records that Caesar also built Chichester. On completing it, he realized that it lacked running water. To remedy this, he sent a painting of the city, along with opulent gifts, to the poet Virgil (who at that time was in Greece), asking for the magical provision of a source. Virgil sent back an enchanted serpent sealed in a box, with instructions that it should only be opened where the source of water was desired. The messenger was curious to see what Virgil had sent; so, just before reaching Chichester, he opened the box a little to peek inside. The serpent sprang out and buried itself in the ground, and there the River Lavant welled up and found its course to the city.\n\nIf Chichester was out of Caesar's way, Scotland was even more so, but this did not prevent legends of him from taking root there. In medieval times, on the banks of the River Carron near Stenhousemuir, there stood a curious cylindrical stone building topped with a dome. It was called Arthur's-Hoven, for some locals said that King Arthur, when visiting Scotland, used to visit it for recreation. However, others, adhering to a more ancient tradition, called it Julius'-Hoff. The Northumbrian Chronicler, Sir Thomas Grey, writes in the 1350s that it was a pavilion erected by Caesar. John of Fordun, writing in the following generation, records various popular theories about Caesar's purpose in building the tower:\n\nHe wanted to build this little house as a sort of extreme goal in the circus of Roman possessions, at the end of the world, and as a lasting sign of his famous soldiery, just as Hercules, in memory of his eternal fame and long labours, once fixed columns in the island of Gades at the western limit of Europe. Another version, particularly among the common people, is that Julius Caesar had this little house carried about with him, stone by stone, by his troops, and rebuilt each day wherever they camped, because he could rest more safely in it than in a tent; but that when he returned to Gaul he was in such a hurry that he decided to leave it behind, with the stones just laid together, as can be seen to this day.\n\nA sixteenth-century historian, John Leslie, confirms the more popular account. Each stone was numbered, so that 'the place quahir euerie stane sould be sett mycht esilie be knawen and discernet frome vthir.' Later antiquaries theorized that the monument was a trophy set up in the second century ad by Quintus Lollius Urbicus, a Roman general of Berber origin, in the campaign that led to the establishment of the Antonine Wall, which ran close by its site. However, it is a question that will never be resolved. The tower was torn down in 1742 by an industrialist, Sir Michael Bruce, to provide material for a dam at the nearby Carron Iron Works.\n\n_The routes of Caesar's invasions of Britain in 55 and 54 BC, according to Stoffel._\n\nBut it was Caesar's Thames-side confrontation with Cassivellaunus that proved the most fertile source of myth. As has been briefly described above, Caesar pursued his forces from Kent to the Thames. Somewhere along its banks, Caesar records, Cassivellaunus attempted to prevent the Romans from crossing the river by positioning stakes below the water. Caesar negotiated this obstacle, only to be harried by the Briton's forces as he pressed northwards into their tribal heartlands. Cassivellaunus, however, lacked the diplomatic skills of Vercing\u00e9torix, and Caesar was able to exploit divisions in his alliance, securing the loyalty of various British chiefs by offering them protection. Cassivellaunus then attempted to raise the Kentish chiefs to Caesar's rear, but the tactic came to nothing. Caesar and Cassivellaunus met in a final battle at the latter's stronghold: a place, says Caesar, 'fenced with woods and marshes' in which the Briton had assembled a considerable quantity of men and cattle. Caesar was not especially impressed by his efforts: 'Now the Britons call it a stronghold when they have fortified a thick-set woodland with rampart and trench', but although it was 'particularly well-fortified by nature and handiwork', with a vigorous assault the Roman legionaries were able to overcome it without difficulty. Many of the British warriors were captured as they fled and put to death, perhaps because Caesar did not have the means to transport them back to Gaul as slaves.\n\n_Arthur's Hoven, depicted in an eighteenth-century engraving shortly before its destruction in 1742._\n\nCassivellaunus's placing of stakes in the Thames \u2013 as well as the possible location of Caesar's crossing \u2013 held a particular fascination for later writers. The Venerable Bede, writing in the eighth century, says that the stakes were still visible in his day, 'the thickness of a man's thigh, and being encased in lead, stuck immovably in the depths of the river', though he omits to say where they were. King Alfred, in the translation he made of the late Roman imperial historian Orosius, said that Caesar had crossed the river at Wallingford (now in the southern part of Oxfordshire). Other writers, from the Renaissance to the present day, have suggested such locations as Teddington, Brentford, Southwark, Windsor and Kingston-upon-Thames. William Camden fixed the crossing at a place called Coway Stakes, not far from the present bridge at Walton-on-Thames, convinced by the name and by the fact that the river was easily fordable at this point, being, he claims, just a couple of metres deep. Others offered the same story as Camden, but in greater detail. In the anonymous thirteenth-century French romance, _Li Fet des Romains_ ('The Deeds of the Romans'), Caesar managed to destroy the stakes by burning them down to the river bed with Greek fire.* John Weever, writing in 1767, suggests that there were elephants in Caesar's army: 'for I have heard that he terribly frighted the Britons with the sight of one at Coway Stakes, when he passed over the Thames'.\n\nSimilar uncertainty surrounds the location of the stronghold of Cassivellaunus, fortified with 'rampart and trench'. The _Chronicle of Dover Monastery_ fixed it nowhere near St Albans, but rather near Bridge on Barham Downs in Kent. The battlefield, states the _Chronicle,_ was to that day covered in mounds under which were concealed the bodies of those who fell. In following centuries, writers identified it with St Albans, Cassiobury in Hertfordshire (whose name, it was argued, preserved the name of the Catuvellauni, a tribe loyal to Cassivellaunus), Wendover, Pinner or Harrow, and even the City of London itself. In 1932, the archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler excavated Devil's Dyke, an old earthwork on the edge of Wheathampstead, and suggested this as the site of Cassivellaunus's last stand. The Dyke, an abbreviated gully overgrown with brambles and shaded with canopies of beech, preserves such a brooding and numinous sense \u2013 despite being hemmed in on one side by semi-detached houses of the 1950s in orange brick \u2013 that it would be easy to believe it the site of Caesar's climactic battle. Although no hard evidence could be offered of Caesar's presence, in 1937 the dyke's new-found historical status led to its being given to the nation by its owner, Lord Brocket, to commemorate the coronation of George VI. An inscription was placed by its entrance stating that 'It was probably here that Julius Caesar defeated the British King Cassivellaunus.' As Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand looked to Bibracte, where the united Gallic chieftains acclaimed Vercing\u00e9torix as their war leader, as the first capital of France, so Wheathampstead \u2013 a small, agreeable Hertfordshire town \u2013 now plumes itself with the title 'First Capital of Britain'. No British politician, however, has attempted to exploit this modern myth.\n\nAlthough the supposed locations of the battle between Caesar and Cassivellaunus have given rise to many myths, it is those that grew out of the confrontation itself that have the greatest power. In 1136, Geoffrey of Monmouth, a cleric of Welsh origins, completed a new work intended to shine some light on the early history of the British Isles, a period shrouded in darkness. Geoffrey claimed to have acquired an ancient book in the 'British tongue' (i.e., Welsh) that provided a detailed history of the islands from the dawn of the British nation through to the Saxon conquest. This ancient book formed the basis of his own work, the _Historia Regum Britanniae_ ('The History of the Kings of Britain'). For all his claims about this 'ancient book', Geoffrey's account is, in fact, a weaving together of credible historical sources, including Caesar's _Commentaries_ and the writings of Bede, with strange and fantastical stories whose likely source was his own vivid imagination. Geoffrey's probable design was to further the claims of the post-conquest Norman kings of England, and Rome plays an important role throughout his narrative. The Britons, like the Romans, owe their origins to Troy. The kingdom was founded by Brutus, the grandson of the Trojan prince Aeneas, who came to Britain as a refugee and gave it his name. He established London, originally with the name of Troia Nova ('New Troy') and later Trinovantum. His descendants, according to Geoffrey, turned Britain into an advanced and civilized culture: it was Roman before the Romans. The British developed cities, roads, even amphitheatres. Two early rulers, Dunvallo Molmutius and Queen Marcia, laid down laws for the people to follow. Later, there is a civil war. One of the rival kings, Brennius, is presented as being the Brennus who went to sack Rome in 390 BC, though in Geoffrey's account he is a Briton, not a Gaul.\n\nThus, when Caesar came, Britain was a nation as civilized and ancient as Rome, and with an equal claim to dignity and dominion in Europe. Because of their descent from Aeneas and Brutus, Caesar considered the British and the Romans to be kinsmen, but he saw the British as degenerate, 'living beyond the deep sea and quite cut off from the world'. It would be an easy matter, he thought, to force them to pay tribute to Rome. However, he wished to do this by sending them a simple order, as he did not wish to spill the blood of a kindred people.\n\nHe therefore despatched a letter to Cassivellaunus, seeking the submission of the British. Cassivellaunus wrote back a contemptuous reply. Pointing out their kindred descent, he stated: 'It is friendship you should have asked from us, not slavery... We have become so accustomed to the concept of liberty that we are completely ignorant of what is meant by submitting to slavery. we shall fight for our liberty and for our kingdom.'\n\nCaesar thus made the first of his attacks on Britain. He came ashore at 'Dorobellum', perhaps a distant corruption of Deal, to face a fantastical array of the British nobility: Androgeus, duke of Trinovantum, and Tenvantius, duke of Cornwall, Cassivellaunus's nephews; the sub-kings Cridous of Albany, Gueithaet of Venedotia and Brittahel of Demetia; there was also Cassivellaunus's brother, a prince named Nennius. The Britons fell on Caesar's army as it came ashore. In the vicious combat that followed, Nennius and Caesar came face to face in the m\u00eal\u00e9e. Nennius had the chance to land a decisive blow, but Caesar struck him on the helmet and wounded him. When the Roman attempted to deal him a second and fatal blow, his sword stuck in Nennius's shield, and in the confusion he abandoned it. The sword was magic, named _Crocea Mors_ ('Yellow Death') and its touch was fatal. Nennius took it and raged about the battlefield, killing Caesar's deputy Labienus and many others. By the end of the day, thanks to the heroics of Nennius, the Britons were masters of the field, and Caesar was forced to return to Gaul. Nennius, however, wounded by Caesar's sword, died fifteen days after the battle and was much lamented by his brother Cassivellaunus. He was buried at the north gate of Trinovantum, Caesar's sword beside him in his coffin.\n\nThe defeat brought Caesar to a sorry pass, according to Geoffrey. On his return to the continent, a rumour swirled around the subject Gauls that Cassivellaunus had launched a fleet to pursue Caesar across the Channel. A revolt was brewing. Caesar, fearful of having to fight a war on two fronts, 'opened his treasure chests' to bribe every chieftain in turn to remain at peace: 'To the people he promised freedom, to those who had been disinherited he promised their lost possessions, and he even went so far as to promise liberation to the slaves.' Geoffrey of Monmouth is contemptuous: 'He who had once raged like a lion, as he took from them their all, now went about bleating like a gentle lamb, as with muted voice he spoke of the pleasure it caused him to be able to give everything back to them again.'\n\nTwo years later, once he had calmed the Gauls, Caesar attempted a second invasion of Britain. He launched a vast fleet carrying a huge army and sailed up the Thames towards Trinovantum. However, his ships cruised fecklessly into the famous stakes. 'Thousands of legionaries perished as the river water flowed into the holed ships and sucked them down.' Caesar did his best to get his bedraggled troops onto dry land and rally them for battle, but they were outnumbered three to one by the Britons on the river bank. Once again Caesar had to turn tail and flee back to the continent with the remains of his army.\n\nAccording to Geoffrey of Monmouth, it was only by treachery that Caesar was able to triumph over the Britons. After defeating the Romans for a second time, Cassivellaunus ordered all the British leaders to assemble at Trinovantum for a feast to honour the gods who had given them victory. The day began with sacrifices: 'They offered forty thousand cows, a hundred thousand sheep and so many fowl of every kind that it was impossible to count them. They also sacrificed three hundred thousand wild animals of various species which they had caught in the woods.' Having feasted, the people turned their attention to games and sports. A wrestling match between Cassivellaunus's nephew and a man who was loyal to Androgeus ended in disagreement over who had won. A fight broke out, and Cassivellaunus's nephew was killed. Cassivellaunus was enraged, and the quarrel escalated to the point of civil war between himself and Androgeus. Androgeus realized that his only chance of success was to appeal to Caesar for support; and Caesar jumped at the opportunity to avenge his own failures in Britain. This time, he landed at Richborough, and Cassivellaunus duly arrived to do battle with him. The fight was evenly poised. However, at the vital moment, Androgeus, hiding in a forest glade with 5,000 men, emerged to attack Cassivellaunus from the rear. Cassivellaunus's men were forced to retreat to a hilltop redoubt, but continued their dogged resistance. Caesar settled down to starve the British into submission. Androgeus, satisfied that Cassivellaunus had been humbled but not wishing to see him perish, begged Caesar to have mercy. The Roman, fearful of Androgeus's intentions, acceded to his request. Cassivellaunus agreed to pay an annual tribute to the Romans of 3,000 pounds of silver, and in return would retain his throne. Remarkably, Caesar and Cassivellaunus then became friends. Caesar wintered peacefully in Britain before returning to Gaul to gather an army together 'from every source and every race of mankind' and marching to Rome to attack Pompey.\n\nThe _Historia Regum Britanniae_ was immensely popular throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, across Europe as well as in Britain. Its portrayal of the authority of the crown as stretching back to the ancient past and being equal in antiquity and dignity to Rome made it a favoured chronicle of the English and later the British monarchy. As late as the seventeenth century, kings and queens relied on Geoffrey of Monmouth for proof of their prerogatives. In Cassivellaunus's resistance to Caesar, and indeed in Brennius's earlier victory over Rome, the _Historia_ also asserted British precedence over the continental powers.\n\nYet the appeal of the _Historia_ was not solely down to this. Geoffrey also popularized the story of King Arthur, who before then was a shadowy figure who had only appeared briefly in a couple of early chronicles. Geoffrey, as he had done with Cassivellaunus, fleshed out the story of Arthur, such that he became one of the staples of European literature. Caesar and Cassivellaunus, being thus predecessors and players in the Arthurian myth, also entered by this route into the great canon of medieval European romance. The story of Caesar's invasion and Cassivellaunus's resistance echoes across Europe in English, French, Latin and Welsh retellings. Continental writers are prone to make Caesar a more dignified figure than does Geoffrey of Monmouth. Wace, writing in French, makes him a wise, courageous and generous leader, whose motives for attacking Britain \u2013 revenge for the earlier destruction of Rome by Brennius \u2013 are nothing but lofty. In surviving Welsh literature, Caesar does not appear in such an honourable light: for summoning Julius Caesar to Britain, Afarwy son of Lludd (perhaps a corruption of Androgeus) is reckoned in the _Red Book_ to be one of the 'Three Dishonoured Men' of Britain. Cassivellaunus, under the name Caswallawn, is shown in a better light. He was, among other things, a maker of golden shoes. He took an army of 60,000 men to Gaul to rescue Fflur, the daughter of Mynach the Dwarf, from Mwrchan, a Gallic prince. He defeated the Romans who came to Mwrchan's aid and settled in Gascony where, according to the _Myvyrian Archaiology,_ \u2020 his descendants were still known in medieval times.\n\n_Remains of the Roman fortifications at Richborough._\n\nIn the fifteenth-century French prose romance _Perceforest,_ Caesar invades Britain because one of his knights, Luces, is in love with a mythical queen of England. Luces has hatched a plot with the queen to destroy her husband's kingdom, and persuades Caesar \u2013 who has already been repulsed from the island once \u2013 to launch an attack on Britain in support of their conspiracy. In the course of his second invasion, Caesar destroys the British nobility and lays waste to the island. Thereafter, it is possible to wander for six months without finding 'city, town, borough or house'; the survivors of the invasion are reduced to living 'like dogs', and dressed only in deerskins. One Briton, Ourseau, vows revenge. He is able to acquire Caesar's lance, which has been cursed to the effect that it will be the instrument of Caesar's death. Ourseau's brother, Orsus Bouchesuave, fashions the lance into twelve daggers and gives them to Brutus and his coconspirators in Rome. The plotters, together with Ourseau's brother, then use the daggers to stab Caesar in the Senate.\n\nCaesar also made appearances in German literature. In Enikel's _Weltchronik,_ written in the late thirteenth century, Caesar drives out 'cyclopes' and the 'monstrous flat-feet' from the German lands, before bestowing special honours on the German peoples for helping him to overcome the Senate and take absolute power. Only they, along with Caesar, are to be addressed with the honorific pronoun _Ihr,_ and he ordains that anyone failing to do so will have their tongue cut out. This is but a prelude to their receiving Caesar's ultimate legacy: the Holy Roman Empire, the _imperium_ of Rome, which would in future ages be passed down to the German peoples.\n\nCaesar reports that his exploits in Britain \u2013 two quick invasions, both of which nearly led to his destruction through over-hasty preparation and failure to take the danger of revolt in Gaul seriously \u2013 earned him a twenty-day public thanksgiving in Rome at the command of the Senate. It was granted not so much for his military achievements, which were meagre, but for that fact that he had been able to reach the far and mysterious land of Britain. So it is perhaps fitting that his footprints in Britain are hidden in obscurity, and that his traces are to be found more in imagination, story and myth.\n\n* _A flammable liquid substance that could burn on water, developed by the Byzantines for use in naval warfare. Its use by Caesar is a delicious anachronism._\n\n\u2020 _Myvyrian Archaiology is a compilation of Welsh literature from the medieval period._\n\n_Mausoleum of the Julii, Glanum. Built around 40\u201320 BC, it appears to be a tomb dedicated to a family of Gallic aristocrats who were Romanized soon after Caesar's conquest, even taking the name 'Julius'._\nCHAPTER V\n\nWhen in France\n\n_Unum illud propositum habebat, continere in amicitia civitates_  \n'He had one purpose in mind, to keep the tribes friendly'\n\nJULIUS CAESAR, _De Bello Gallico_ , VIII.49\n\nSAINT \u2013 R\u00c9MY \u2013 DE \u2013 PROVENCE\n\n\u2022\n\nGLANUM\n\n\u2022\n\nMARSEILLES\n\n\u2022\n\nCOLONIES OF CAESAR\n\n\u2022\n\nROADS OF AGRIPPA\n\n\u2022\n\nGALLIA: _'PARTES TRES'_\n\n\u2022\n\nDIVIDING THE TRIBES\n\n\u2022\n\nLYONS\n\n\u2022\n\nCONDATE\n\n\u2022\n\nALTAR OF THE THREE GAULS\n\nEAST OF BEAUCAIRE, not far from Saint-R\u00e9my-de-Provence, a slip road from the Via Domitia leads towards the Gallo-Greek settlement of Glanum. It is a confusing road to follow, crisscrossed as it is by modern pathways and occasionally rerouted around newly built properties. But contemporary rustic villas are not the only distractions for those who walk this route.\n\nThe road to Glanum is surrounded by memorials to past suffering and the displaced: one of them commemorates 250 political refugees from Spain who assisted in public works during the Second World War; another remembers 10,000 French members of the International Brigades who went to support the Spanish Republic during the civil war of 1936-9. Nearby, behind a high stone wall, is a graveyard overgrown with brittle grasses, oak saplings and Scots pine. This ancient Jewish cemetery, used intermittently over the centuries, received its first dead in the 1400s, was abandoned when the Jews were expelled from Provence by King Louis XII in 1500, and then came back into use after the French Revolution. But in the twentieth century the site was closed again for good. A sign by the gate declares a verse of the Psalmist: _L'Eternel m'a ch\u00e2ti\u00e9 s\u00e9v\u00e8rement, mais il ne m'a pas livr\u00e9 \u00e0 la mort_ \u2013 'The Lord hath sorely chastised me: but he has not given me over unto death.'\n\nBut persistence will bring its reward: the track passes along an old gully, where the powdery ground is relieved by the dappled orange of marsh fritillaries basking in the heat, and then up on to a plateau where the first Roman monuments come into sight. They stand alone, brilliant against the lapis lazuli sky, an arch and a tower over 15 metres high, isolated from the rest of Glanum by the modern road that cuts across from Les Baux to R\u00e9my. Their isolation does not detract from their dignity. They are locally known as Les Antiques ('The Antiquities'). The ancient slip road from the Via Domitia would have passed beneath the arch into the town. The principal role of the arch was to demarcate the territory of the settlement \u2013 considered not just civilized but also sacred \u2013 from the profane and dangerous hinterland beyond. Although the arch has suffered the ravages of time \u2013 the upper storey is missing and large portions of the carved marble facings have been pulled down \u2013 it still retains a sense of its original function as a holy portal.\n\nHowever, this is not the only role of the arch. It is also a preserver of memories. As is inevitable for anything related to Caesar, many of these memories are imagined. It was widely believed in the nineteenth century that the arch and adjacent tower were the work of Caesar himself, thrown up shortly after his campaign to commemorate not only his own conquest, but also the earlier victories of Marius. Indeed, an embankment at the site is still called the 'Wall of Marius'. But the style of the arch suggests a later date, around 20 BC, similar to monuments being built in Rome under Augustus. Thus the arch reflects not so much the immediate moment of conquest, but a memory of the early period of Roman control: a reflection of how the Roman empire, having itself endured the trauma of the long-running civil war and the triumph of Augustus as the first emperor, attempted to digest and assimilate the newly conquered territory of Gaul.\n\n_The Arch of Glanum, built around 20 BC and decorated with burgeoning fruits and reliefs of Gauls in chains._\n\nThe arch has two, somewhat contrasting, stories to tell. The immediately striking thing about it, whether one approaches it from the ruins of Glanum or via the slip road from the Via Domitia, is that each side is framed by two tall fluted columns. In each of the four panels made by these columnar frames are two figures, more than life size. Some are better preserved than others, but their common subject matter is clear. At least one of the figures on each panel is male: strong, muscular, mostly naked, standing with a firm and determined contrapposto. These are Gauls. Each of them is in chains: chained at the neck, bound at the wrists, arms tied behind the back. Next to certain of the figures are piles of Gallic arms, captured and stacked as trophies of victory. For good measure, the men are chained to these also. On top of these trophies sit women. One appears to be a Gaul, weeping for her lover from whom she is soon to be separated. Another, more richly dressed but now lacking a head, may be a personification of Rome, guarding the arms \u2013 forever forfeit \u2013 of vanquished rebel tribes. Yet the male figures in chains are not all presented in their habitual indigenous innocence. One wears a Gallic coat, a _sagun,_ but not in the normal fashion. Instead, it is draped around him in the manner of a Roman toga, as if he had been touched by the civilization of Rome, but had then foolishly chosen to turn away from it.\n\nThis is not the only time that a Gaul in chains appears in Roman imagery. A statue of a defeated Gallic warrior, kneeling and bound, was found in a fountain in Glanum itself. Captive Gauls also appear on the arches of Carpentras and Orange, and they featured as a motif on contemporary Roman coinage. Gaul was a land in chains, held by the might of Rome: this was a primary fact, not to be forgotten.\n\nBut on the arch at Glanum these images of Gaul held in bondage are counterbalanced by something very different. It appears when one comes closer to the arch and finally passes underneath it. The lip of the arch and the vault underneath do not share the quiet flat surface of the greater part of the monument; they are covered with carvings of flowers, plants and fruit. In this, there is nothing lightly ornamental, polite or reserved. There are vines, bulging clusters of grapes, pomegranates, apples, bundles of oak rich with acorns, laurels bearing berries, pine cones \u2013 all winding and writhing about each other, enmeshing, threatening to burst out of the narrow channel allotted to them.\n\n_Detail of the Arch of Glanum, showing the lush fruits, flowers and vegetation suggestive of Rome's beneficence._\n\nThe theme continues beneath the arch. Flowers erupt from the stone, and every corner and crevice of the vault is alive with tendril and leaf. There is a dizzying canopy of abundance, making the very stone seem more animate and vital than the dusty ground of the plateau round about. And all this bounty, this vigour and renewal springs from the touch and the domination of Rome.\n\nWith the conquest of Caesar, Gaul was everywhere in chains. However, the tightness of the bonds varied. They developed over time and changed in nature from place to place. Sometimes they expressed themselves in violence and the destruction of cultures and lifestyle. In other ways and at different times they took the form of nudges and inducements, rewards offered, reputation and proximity to power in return for supporting the Roman machine.\n\nCaesar departed Gaul in 50 BC. Following his victory at Al\u00e9sia the threat of another full-scale revolt against the Roman presence had been virtually eliminated. However, this did not prevent the continuation of low-level unrest. Caesar and his commanders therefore spent their remaining time in Gaul engaged in mopping-up actions of spiralling brutality. The Carnutes, dwelling between the Seine and the Loire, were driven from their homes in midwinter and left to starve without shelter in the freezing storms of the season. In the northeast, the Bellovaci were crushed following a persistent guerrilla campaign. The fighting men of Uxellodunum (Puy d'Issolud, near Cahors) who held out in a siege but later surrendered, had their right hands cut off as an exemplary punishment.\n\nCaesar, having won his grand victory in the provinces, was getting impatient with these engagements. His term of office was coming to an end, and he did not want to be tied down in policing activities. His concern was now with Rome, with his opponents in the Senate and his rivalry with Pompey for control of the empire. It seemed that under these external pressures, Gaul could be pacified with remarkable speed. During the winter of 50 BC, his last full year in office, Caesar, having used violence, turned to kindness to secure Roman dominance. Aulus Hirtius, who completed the last book of Caesar's _Commentaries,_ briefly notes that Caesar 'addressed the tribes in terms of honour, gave very considerable presents to the chiefs, and imposed no new burdens'. By this sudden display of comradely gentleness after so many years of ruthlessness, the Gallic chiefs, worn out by conflict, were easily kept in peace 'under better terms of obedience', notes Hirtius.\n\nThese few comments of Hirtius summarize most of what can be known about the first attempts of Rome to develop a political settlement for Gaul. There were no immediate signs of a grand plan in the immediate aftermath of the Gallic campaign. Rome expressed power by destroying implacable opponents and co-opting the tractable chiefs via financial incentives and the confirmation of their own authority in Gallic society. In the first instance, Caesar used the hierarchies already in place to carry out the functions of government on behalf of the Romans. In reality, he had little choice. Rome was on the verge of being convulsed by the penultimate round of its long-running civil war; confrontation between Caesar and Pompey was looming. The time and resources required to develop formal mechanisms of government and the grand manifestations of Roman power in the far-flung frontier regions of Gaul were lacking. Besides, given the scale of the devastation, it would not have been practical to impose in short order the elaborate institutions of Roman government on the newly captured territories.\n\nThus for the first few years following the conquest, Gallia Comata was administered as part of Transalpine Gaul. Comata was under the authority of the same governor, and there is no sign that Rome attempted to make any changes there during this period. It was the question of security throughout Gallia Comata that weighed most on the Roman mind; it has been suggested by some modern historians that the region was subjected to some form of martial law at this time. Gallic discontent continued to manifest itself. In 46 BC, the first governor after Caesar, Junius Brutus Albinus, was compelled to put down a further uprising among the Bellovaci, who had been one of the last people to fight Caesar. In 44 BC, it was a matter for great relief in Rome that the Gallic tribes made a promise to Aulus Hirtius, by then governor of Gaul, that they would not cause any difficulties following the assassination of Caesar, who two years before his death had assumed supreme power in Rome. However, this peace of mind was short lived. The following year, the general Lucius Munatius Plancus was called to campaign on the Rhine against the Raeti (a tribal federation originally based in the Alps). Such disturbances were to continue for another three decades.\n\nRoman intervention following the conquest of Comata was more pronounced in Transalpine Gaul than in the newly captured areas. This was partly as a result of the civil war; Caesar looked to Gaul to supply him with men and resources during his battle with Pompey. In 49 BC, when Massalia \u2013 still an independent Greek city in the midst of a Roman territory \u2013 refused to support Caesar in the war, his forces besieged the city and, after an artillery bombardment, captured it. It was stripped of all of its remaining territories and was left with only nominal independence. As Massalia was brought more firmly under Roman influence, so the Roman presence was made more strongly known in the wider hinterland of Transalpine Gaul. Following Caesar's victory over Pompey in 46 BC, many of his veterans were settled in the transalpine colonies of Narbonne, B\u00e9ziers, Fr\u00e9jus and Orange. The settlements of N\u00eemes and Vienne on the Rhone were also given 'Latin Rights' which endowed their inhabitants with a number of liberties and allowed those in positions of authority to claim Roman citizenship.\n\nIt might have been that the foundation of these colonies in Transalpine Gaul was part of a wider plan that Caesar himself had conceived for the long-term settlement of Gaul. Had he escaped assassination in 44 BC, the subsequent developments in Gaul (later attributed to the agency of others) might in fact have been shown to be Caesar's initiatives. However, this will never be known. We can only guess as to whether Caesar had a grand scheme for establishing a proper government in Gallia Comata; it is possible \u2013 given his reforms in Rome itself in 46 BC, including changes to the calendar and to the institutions of central government \u2013 that putting Gaul in order could well have been on his mind. However, in the absence of any proof, the credit for fully incorporating Gaul into the empire must fall not to Caesar but to others.\n\nThe first permanent Roman institutions on the fringes of Gallia Comata were founded shortly after Caesar's assassination. In 43 BC, Plancus, who had defeated the Raeti, established two colonies: Lugdunum (Lyons) and Augusta Raurica, a forerunner to Basel. These colonies, in the first instance, served the purpose of defending the transalpine region against the potential instability of Comata. They also allowed troops to be levied who might then participate in the civil war.\n\nIt was when authority over the empire was divided between Octavian (later known as Augustus; Caesar's nephew and adopted son) and Mark Antony in 40 BC that closer attention was paid to the newly captured lands. Mark Antony took charge in the east; the west was Octavian's domain. Gaul, as a fresh and substantial part of Octavian's sphere of authority, demanded his particular consideration. The need to make it secure both against Gallic uprisings and external incursions was one question; the placing of Comata's government on a more regular footing was another. The new lands, as they had done for Caesar, also provided Octavian with an opportunity. Given their size and potential for generating wealth and manpower, he would have seen that they might supply him with a powerbase and a well of resources \u2013 an important consideration should he come into conflict with Mark Antony in a further round of civil war, as indeed would come to pass.\n\nOctavian made his first visit to Gaul in 39 BC. He appointed one of his most capable and trusted lieutenants, Agrippa, as his governor. It was becoming clear that, in the future, the real areas of unrest were likely to be the northeast and the southwest of Gaul. Both regions bordered on areas either uncontrolled by or not fully under the control of Rome. The northeast looked towards the Rhine and the tribal lands of the Germanic peoples. The southwest lay next to the Spanish provinces, where the authority of Rome was still weak. In both cases, the unruly neighbouring populations would encourage revolt in the adjacent parts of Gaul. Bearing this in mind, Agrippa began to develop an infrastructure that would allow for its defence and security.\n\nThe development of a road network was a top priority. This was, in the beginning, a military undertaking. It had to allow for the swift movement of troops from the Italian heartland to the colonial towns in Gaul, and then on to the unsettled frontiers in the northeast and southwest. It is obvious that roads had existed in pre-Roman times, and were in some cases substantial enough to withstand reasonably heavy wheeled transport. Indeed, Caesar would never have managed his conquest without such infrastructure. However, nothing built before Agrippa's governorship of Gallia Comata would have equalled the Roman constructions for sturdiness or safety: all-weather, stone-clad and regularly policed.\n\nAgrippa was meticulous in his work. It appears that he undertook a survey of Gaul, giving both a figure for the length of its coastline as well as the distances from coast to coast. Armed with this information, he laid out the skeleton of Rome's first road network in Gaul, probably between 39 and 27 BC. As the geographer Strabo observes, he took the recently founded colony of Lyons as the hub of his network, since it was 'in the centre of the country: an acropolis, as it were, not only because the rivers meet there, but also because it is near all parts of the country'. From Lugdunum, a number of roads radiated outwards. One branch led to the Roman towns on the Rh\u00f4ne, including Arles, N\u00eemes, Orange and Vienne, linking to the earlier Via Domitia. A western arm led to Saintes in the region of Aquitaine on the western coast, allowing access to the southwest. A northwestern branch led to Boulogne, thus facilitating trade with Britain and laying the groundwork for any future attack on the island. An eastern branch connected Lyons to Augusta Raurica and the regions near the territory of the Helvetii. A final branch proceeded northeast, running to Cologne (then called Oppidum Ubiorum, a stronghold founded by the Ubii tribe in 38 BC).\n\nOnce Rome's physical presence could be seen on the ground and its will enforced by the easier movement of troops, the administrative division of the land could proceed. The unwieldy entity of Transalpine Gaul, which had ingested the vast new territories of Gallia Comata, was broken up. The original Roman province of Transalpine Gaul became Gallia Narbonensis, named after Narbo (Narbonne), one of the leading colonies on its southern coast. Gallia Comata, approximately following Caesar's own division of Gaul at the beginning of his _Commentaries,_ was divided into three parts. The southern part, from the Seine to the Garonne, was Gallia Lugdunensis, or Lyonese Gaul. The northern part, from the Scheldt to the Seine, was Gallia Belgica, Belgic Gaul. The southwestern part, from the Garonne to the Pyrenees, became Gallica Aquitania, Aquitaine Gaul. These three new provinces were known as the Tres Galliae, the 'Three Gauls'.\n\n_A well-preserved section of the Via Domitia outside Ambrussum, complete with chariot-wheel ruts._\n\nIn this apparently innocuous process of administrative division, it may be possible to detect traces of Caesar's own manipulation of identities. Some have argued that 'Gaul' as a geographical concept among the Romans and perhaps among those living in the territory bounded by modern-day France, only applied to Lyonese and Narbonese Gaul. Culturally and linguistically, although there was a certain communion of language and culture across the regions, Belgica and Aquitania were distinct regions that were never thought of by Romans or the indigenous peoples as being Gaul. When Caesar starts his _Commentaries_ with the famous statement _'Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres'_ ('Gaul as a whole is divided into three parts'), he is guilty of misrepresenting the idea of Gaul. He appropriates the term and applies it to different areas of Europe \u2013 Belgica, Aquitaine \u2013 as a justification for his conquests. If Belgica and Aquitaine went under those names, there was little reason for Caesar, as a governor of Transalpine and Cisalpine Gaul, to stray into them. If, however, they were indeed to be seen as part of Gaul, albeit more distant, Caesar could more easily argue that he had business there as a governor of the southern regions of 'Gaul'. The result of this was a new foundation for the idea of Gaul \u2013 a formerly fragmented region that extended across a large part of Europe, generated by an imperial idea from the Mediterranean world, and later to be inherited by the successors of Rome: the French.\n\nThe problem of geographical division applied at a lower level: how should the Gallic tribal states be classified and incorporated into a regular Roman system of government? As entities, they did not fit easily into the Roman mindset. The Romans were well used to dealing with small-scale Mediterranean city-states, each consisting of its own city with a hinterland but no other intermediate towns or settlements of political weight. This did not gel easily with the Gallic tribes extended over large tracts of land, which might possess a number of different _oppida_ of unclear political function. It was only by an ingenious legal fiction that Rome was able to digest the tribal structure into its own imperial hierarchies. Each tribe was labelled a city-state (or _civitas_ ); the whole territory of a tribe was designated, in essence, as a city in itself. One foundation in the tribal region would be seen as the _civitas_ capital, from which the functions of local government would be administered. From these centres, the ways and commands of Rome would be projected more widely across the Gallic peoples and landscape.\n\nThe arrangement of the _civitates_ bore signs of the trauma of the conquest. It was an opportunity for the Romans to rationalize the arrangement of Gallic tribes. Many tribal names that had existed before Caesar's time now vanished. The Mandubii, who had been caught in the middle of the siege of Al\u00e9sia, disappeared as a separate tribal entity. Other tribes found themselves amalgamated. In Belgica, the Aduatuci, the Eburones and the Condrusi, along with a number of others, were now lumped together as the Tungri. In Aquitaine, thirty original tribes were now merged into nine. These amalgamations were not only for the sake of administrative convenience; they pointed to the number of Gauls who had died, been taken as slaves, or migrated as soldiers since Caesar's arrival in Gaul. Individual tribes, shrunk by the turmoil, simply ceased to be viable. More than this, the frontiers of the three new Gallic provinces were arranged so that the three most powerful tribes in the heart of Gaul \u2013 the Aedui, the Arverni and the Sequani \u2013 were separated, none of them sharing the same new province.\n\nWith the reordering of the tribes came a census of the Three Gauls in 22 BC, a process that was to be repeated every fifteen to twenty-five years. And with the census came the development of the tax system. To be sure, Roman taxes had been imposed on the conquered territories since the beginning. However, their organization had been vague. All conquered peoples had to pay a tribute to Rome as a mark of their nominally captive status. Tribute money was in essence a substitute for service as a slave, to which any people conquered by Rome were technically liable in the first instance. However, Caesar had left everything far from consistent. Before his departure he had used remission of the tribute as a tool to pacify a number of the tribal chiefs to prevent disorder after his return to Italy. These individual privileges appear to have been clawed back from various tribes over the course of time. The system developed so that all had to pay the _tributum soli,_ a land tax of probably 10 per cent, and the _tributum capitis,_ a poll tax at an unknown rate. There was also the _quadragesima Galliarum,_ a 2\u00bd per cent customs tax on goods passing through land or sea frontiers; the _centesima venalis,_ a sales tax of one percent; and the _vicesima libertatis,_ a 5 per cent tax on the freeing of slaves.\n\nWith taxes came oppressive officialdom. The historian Cassius Dio preserves the story of one administrator, Licinius, who came to prominence early in the emperorship of Augustus, around 15 BC. So overbearing was his behaviour that the gods even sent a portent to warn the Gauls when he assumed office: a giant sea monster, six metres wide and eighteen metres long 'resembling a woman except for its head', was washed up on the shore. Licinius was himself a Gaul, captured by Caesar and taken as one of his personal slaves. However, Caesar later freed him, and \u2013 thanks presumably to his knowledge of Gaul and his connections \u2013 he was able to secure a high position in the new Gallic administration. Licinius, writes Cassius Dio, 'with his combination of barbarian avarice and Roman dignity, tried to overthrow everyone who was ever counted superior to him and to destroy everyone who was strong'. He was prolific in schemes for lining his pockets and those of his friends. One of his most brazen made use of a system whereby people paid the tribute on a monthly basis; he told them that there were in fact fourteen months in the year, saying that December (as its name suggested, and as had been the case long ago) was in fact only the tenth month, and that there were four months beyond it. Dio suggests that Augustus turned a blind eye to Licinius, and even accepted a vast bribe of Gallic treasure in return for ensuring that the administrator faced no punishment for his corruption.\n\nSuch oppression could even come directly from the emperor himself. According to Cassius Dio, in AD 40 the emperor Caligula had exhausted the revenue of Italy. He therefore proceeded to Gaul on the pretence that he was going to make war across the Rhine, but in fact to extort money from the province. He marched off with a train of 'many actors, many gladiators, horses, women, and all the other trappings of luxury'. Having made a feint first towards the Rhine and then towards a new invasion of Britain, he settled down to seek forced gifts from the wealthy populace, not without the occasional murder to encourage them to comply. He then hit on the idea of selling off antiques and curios of the imperial family to the Gauls of Lugdunum in a strange charade of an auction. He sold each item off by citing 'the fame of the persons who had once used them. Thus he would make some comment on each one, such as, \"This belonged to my father,\" \"This to my mother,\" \"This to my grandfather,\" \"This to my great-grandfather,\" \"This Egyptian piece was Antony's, the prize of victory for Augustus.\"' His rapine went to finance grand military parades at Lugdunum to commemorate victories that he had not actually won.\n\nIt is surprising that there was little in the way of open unrest in direct response to taxation and such behaviour from imperial elites. A revolt in AD 21 by two Gallic noblemen, Florus and Sacrovir, was attributable, according to Tacitus, to heavy taxation and indebtedness at high rates of interest. However, such debts may have been caused not only by the need to borrow to pay the taxes, but because Gauls were tempted to spend more money on new building and newly available Roman accoutrements. Perhaps on this account, the rebellion was poorly supported by the Gauls, and was quickly snuffed out and forgotten.\n\nOn top of Roman oppression via taxes came oppression of culture. The practices of Druids, whom Caesar states carried out vast human sacrifices, burning convicted criminals or even scores of innocent victims encased in giant wicker men to appease 'the majesty of the immortal gods' were repellent to the Romans. It is possible that the Romans also saw them as a potential focus of opposition to their rule: a venerable order that acted as the repository of law, philosophy and ritual religious practice transcending many of the tribal divisions across Gaul, they might well have been able to act as a unifying force to stand against the new imperial masters. Whatever the reason, the Romans progressively clamped down on the Druids. Augustus forbade any Roman citizen from engaging in Druidic activity. Two later emperors, Tiberius and Claudius, took measures to ban the Druidic order in the first century AD. 'Such being the fact,' remarks Pliny the Elder, 'we cannot too highly appreciate the obligation that is due to the Roman people, for having put an end to those monstrous rites, in accordance with which, to murder a man was to do an act of the greatest devoutness...'\n\nThus in religion, in taxes, in government, in the organization of their tribes, after Caesar's departure the shades of the Roman prison house closed in on the ancient life and order of the Gauls.\n\nThe flowers on the arch of Glanum, however, were not set up to mock the conquered Gauls. The Romanization of Gaul may have come at a fearful price, but it would lead, in time, to a rich cultural flowering.\n\nAnyone departing from Glanum in the midsummer of 12 BC and journeying north would have found ample evidence for this. It was not only the town of Glanum itself that had by this time been largely and lavishly rebuilt, along with the similarly flourishing colonies on the route \u2013 Orange (Arausio), Vienne with its grand new walls \u2013 but also the new metropolis at the radial point of Agrippa's road network, Lugdunum (Lyons).\n\nIt is not for nothing that Strabo uses the word 'acropolis' to describe Lyons. In the heart of the old town, the Fourvi\u00e8re Hill rises in a meander of the Sa\u00f4ne, a huge limestone crag that then slopes down gently northwestwards to merge into the flat panorama of the new city. Here it was that the Roman colony was founded in 43 BC. Around the open ruins of the original Roman town, the succession of whitewashed alleys and stone staircases feel heavy with the ennui of a long civilization.\n\nThe Roman theatre and the odeon* near the peak of the hill, both originally an endowment of Augustus, offer support for this idea of a cultural flowering. So do the forum and original grid of streets, laid out by the city's founder, Plancus \u2013 now hidden, but suggested by the row of shops behind the theatre, their square-stone walls still standing, looking out over a well-laid street of lozengey granite slabs undercut by arched sewers and concealed terracotta water-pipes.\n\nBut the strongest evidence for the notion is found beyond the acropolis and the heart of the old Roman city. Descending the streets and recrossing the Sa\u00f4ne, one comes to a wide and flattish plain between the Sa\u00f4ne and the Rh\u00f4ne, before the land tails into a narrow peninsular. Here on the plain was the original site of a Gallic village, Condate. The name itself may mean 'confluence', and the village would have been a prosperous entrep\u00f4t for trade and portage between the two rivers. Now it is fully a district of Lyons. Some parts of the suburb, although busier than the Fourvi\u00e8re Hill, preserve their otherworldly air. The buildings of the Mont\u00e9e de la Grande-C\u00f4te, one of the gently curving narrow medieval lanes, appear candy-coloured, pearl-dusted, their irregular facades both benevolent and louring, pierced with stone arches and high mullioned windows. The area, later called the Quartier Croix-Rouge, was home for centuries to the silk workers of Lyons, and was regularly wracked by their uprisings. Their cry was _'Vivre libre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant!'_ ('Live free working or die fighting!'). A plaque there even commemorates the founding in 1835 of the first French workers' co-operative store. But the absence of their uproar and the noise of their factories seem to add to the heaviness of the peace.\n\nThen, if you turn a corner into the Rue Burdeau, the peace and lightness suddenly disappears. The street is regular, straight, oily in patina; the windows are regular above, the shops shuttered; signs plead for tenants. The graffiti becomes more direct, more political: 'I hate the invader'; _Angleterre avait Maggie Thatcher \u2013 Aujourd'hui La France a Maggie Hollande, Maggie Valls et Maggie Macron..._ ('England had Maggie Thatcher \u2013 today, France has Maggie Hollande, Maggie Valls and Maggie Macron'). The sullen and discontented Rue Burdeau shows nothing of its Roman past; but it was arguably here that, in 12 BC, one of the most important endowments was made to Roman Gaul, going to the heart of the nature of its government and also its very identity.\n\n_Fourvi\u00e8re, the theatre and odeon complex in the heart of Roman Lyons._\n\nWhat disturbances there were in Gaul after the rise to power of Octavian were concentrated, as Agrippa had foreseen, in the northeast and southwest. The northeast was the more troublesome of the two regions, and military campaigns were launched there in 30\u201329 BC and again in 19\u201317 BC. In 16 BC Germanic tribes beyond the Rhine captured and crucified a number of Roman citizens who were travelling in their territory \u2013 presumably merchants \u2013 and then pressed on to attack deep into Gaul. A detachment of Roman cavalry was despatched to repel the Germanic fighters, but they were ambushed by their enemies. The Roman governor, Lollius Paulinus, was himself present at the defeat, which counted as a serious humiliation for Rome. The emperor Augustus was troubled at the setback and made an extended visit to Gaul, lasting for three years, from 16 BC. He was not only able to oversee the final conquest of the difficult and independent high Alpine passes to secure the route between Gaul and Italy (marking the victory with the building of the Tropaeum Alpium at La Turbie near Monaco), but also began to prepare for a more major assault against the Germanic tribes in the northwest, to be led by his stepson Drusus. The prospect of such an operation was not something Augustus would have treated lightly. The large-scale movement of troops and their concentration in a particular area could provoke local unrest, or even rebellion on the part of the troops themselves. Moreover, the preparation of such an expeditionary force would have necessitated an extraordinary levy of taxes. A new census to facilitate the levy was planned for 12 BC and threatened to cause further discontent. Under these circumstances it would have been especially prudent to take measures to ensure the loyalty of the Gauls.\n\nIn 12 BC, before Drusus left for the new campaign, he invited a representative from each of the sixty _civitates_ in the Three Gauls to assemble together at Lugdunum. The occasion was the inauguration of an altar, which stood where the Rue Burdeau now runs. It was a grand affair. Its base was marble, about 50 metres long. Strabo records that it bore 'an inscription of the names of the tribes, sixty in number' and also 'images from these tribes, one from each tribe', although the images may have come later. On either side there were tall Ionic columns in rich red Egyptian porphyry, each topped with winged statues of the goddess of victory. Beside it was a small amphitheatre in which the representatives of the _civitates_ could gather. Its dedication was to Rome and to Emperor Augustus. The date chosen for the representatives to assemble annually thereafter was 1 August: the anniversary of Augustus's defeat of Cleopatra at Alexandria in Egypt.\n\nThe altar grew more elaborate as the empire went on, but disappeared afterwards. The only visible remains are the porphyry columns, which were recovered in the eleventh century, sawn in half and used in the nearby basilica of Saint-Martin d'Ainay. Its appearance is known from literary accounts, inscriptions and coins. But the altar's disappearance belied its long-term importance. Worship of the imperial cult by the leaders of defeated Gaul appears at first to be the most abject form of self-degredation; inviting a subject people to abase themselves before the imperial genius would hardly seem the most effective way to secure their abiding loyalty. However, although the altar was a way of demanding a display of fidelity, it was by the same token a means of enfranchising the peoples of the Three Gauls.\n\nLugdunum was by no means unique in the empire, or indeed in Gaul, in having an altar dedicated to the worship of the imperial genius. However, it was distinct from the others in a number of ways. Before long, the priesthood and its establishment had become unusually elaborate. There was not only the _sacerdos_ (priest) himself, but also the _iudex arcae Galliarum_ and the _allectus arcae Galliarum,_ not to mention the _inquisitor Galliarum,_ the _tabularius Galliarum_ and the _iudex arcae ferariarum._ It seems that each of these officials (whose titles are not easily translatable) had a role in collecting and disbursing the funds for the altar, financing its business and the festivities surrounding the annual assembly. Their roles might also have included involvement in the civil administration at Lugdunum. Although Roman citizens, they were necessarily of Gallic origin; the _sacerdos_ himself at least (and perhaps the others) was elected by the representatives from the Gallic _civitates._\n\nThe names of many of these priestly officials survive in inscriptions. A large number are held at the Gallo-Roman Museum in Lyons. It is possible to wander in the museum's cool subterranean vaults, passing by countless proud marble blocks that advertise to posterity in elegantly chiselled lettering the careers of this host of Gauls who took on a Roman mantle and wallowed in the glory of imported clerical offices. 'To Caius Ullatius... son of Ullatius Priscus, Priest of the Temple of both our Caesars within the Temple of Rome and Augusti at the Confluence of the Saone and the Rhone, the first of the Segusiavi to be so honoured'; 'To Quintus Licinius Ultor, son of Licinius Taurus, who, at the age of twenty-two was entrusted with the administration, after that of his father, of the Altar Priesthood, the Three Provinces [of Gaul] have raised this statue...'\n\nThe role of the imperial altar's priesthood was to praise Rome and foster the loyalty of the Gauls. But it also created a position and a hierarchy of great prestige that was Roman in appearance, but peopled and controlled by Gauls. An imperial overlord that was lacking in confidence would never have created such an alternative centre of power and potential focal point for discontent. But imperial Rome was not unconfident in this way. It was its business to create such positions of prestige and alternative centres. Up to and well beyond the time of Julius Caesar, the apparatus of provincial government was tiny in relation to the areas it had to administer and the duties it had to carry out. Only a handful of officials and administrative staff were ever available to be sent from Rome. It was thus the case in Gaul that most of the work of government was passed on to the Gauls themselves. Although the manner of internal government within the _civitates_ was nominally a matter for the Gallic tribes, the Gauls developed their own institutions modelled on those of the Roman provincial centres and colonies, staffed by Gauls who imitated Roman custom. The Gauls began to boast of their _aediles,_ their town councils and _duoviri,_ or _magistri pagi._ Prestige conferred by blood feud, the size of a warrior retinue or the number of heads on display on the lintel of one's front door quickly became a thing of the past. Now status largely came via the possession of these offices, much as it would for a Roman noble; and their holders probably wielded much more effective, intricate and stable power over their own peoples than was ever possible under the old pre-Roman dispensation.\n\n_The Altar of the Three Gauls, as depicted on a dupondius coin issued during the reign of Augustus._\n\nSuch emancipation went back to the very time of the conquest. The more fortunate of the subject peoples were offered not only positions at home, but also the chance to participate in the life of the wider empire. Julius Caesar offered citizenship to Gallic nobles who assisted him. Noblemen such as Togirix, an Aeduan chief, added Caesar's name to his own \u2013 Gaius Julius Caesar \u2013 to create his own Roman name: Gaius Julius Togirix. A number accompanied Caesar to fight on his behalf in the civil wars against Pompey. Many members of the Gallic warrior class joined the Roman army as auxiliaries, thus gaining the opportunity to travel widely, give vent to their warlike ambitions, accrue wealth, learn the Latin language and acquire the privileges of citizenship, before returning with the cachet attached to a military career and an inclination to adhere to Roman ways in their Gallic homeland.\n\nThe opportunity of association with the imperial family likewise added to the sense of the importance of the Three Gauls. Many of the colonies and settlements were named or renamed in part after members of the royal family: Augustodunum (Autun); Augustonemetum (Clermont-Ferrand); Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (Cologne). Augustus spent many years in Gaul. The emperor Caligula was brought up as a child among the soldiers on the frontier, and Claudius was born in Lugdunum on 1 August 10 BC, the second anniversary of the dedication of the imperial altar. When Claudius came to the throne, he was responsible for the highest level of Gallic emancipation possible, a capstone to the development of civic offices and priesthoods within Gaul itself: he gave citizens from the Three Gauls the right to seek membership of the Senate and to run for the highest offices in the Roman empire. A speech he gave on the subject was engraved on a large bronze tablet and hung in the precincts of the altar. It was rediscovered near the Rue Burdeau in the sixteenth century. It is no wonder that the Gallic priesthood chose to memorialize his words in this way. He had to overcome deep opposition to the move in the Roman establishment, but he based his decision on what he saw as being the essential nature of Rome:\n\nWhat was the ruin of Sparta and Athens, but this, that mighty as they were in war, they spurned from them as aliens those whom they had conquered? Our founder Romulus, on the other hand, was so wise that he fought as enemies and then hailed as fellow-citizens several nations on the very same day. Strangers have reigned over us... United as [the Gauls] now are with us by manners, education, and intermarriage, let them bring us their gold and their wealth rather than enjoy it in isolation. Everything, senators, which we now hold to be of the highest antiquity, was once new... This practice too will establish itself, and what we are this day justifying by precedents, will be itself a precedent.\n\nJust as Claudius did not see the admission of Gauls to Roman offices as a threat to Roman identity, neither did the Gauls taking up Roman offices see this as an extinction of their Gallic identity. They may have Romanized their names, taken on Roman citizenship and carried out their duties in Latin \u2013 rhetorical speaking schools quickly sprang up, most notably in the new Aedui capital of Augustodunum (Autun) \u2013 but this made them no less Gallic. Many of the surviving inscriptions declare careers within a particular _civitas,_ proclaiming the membership and contribution of the official to that group: 'Priest of the Aedui'; 'the first of the Segusiavi'; 'Julius Severinus, of the Sequani, distinguished in his city by every honour...' The identities are complimentary. The officials existed in a Roman cultural milieu, but their allegiance also belonged to their tribe; the honour conferred by the Roman office brought them prestige among their own people. _Romanitas_ ('Romanness') and Gallic culture thus found a means to cohabit.\n\nBeyond the priesthood of the altar and the many like positions created by the Roman presence, another aspect of the cult at Lugdunum was of similar importance. The veneration of the Three Gauls was conveyed not only by the priest and his officials, but by the representatives of all the Gallic _civitates._ Collectively, they were known as the _concilium Galliarum,_ or Gallic council. Gallic tribes are known to have held such councils before Roman times \u2013 such as the one at Bibracte that elected Vercing\u00e9torix as war leader \u2013 and this Roman creation was perhaps in imitation of this tradition. Its presence at the annual festival on 1 August was not an empty show; its effective duty went beyond the election of the _sacerdos_ and participation in the rites surrounding the yearly ceremony. There was certainly much in the way of frivolity surrounding the occasion. Caligula instituted a competition in Latin and Greek, where 'the losers gave prizes to the victors, and were forced to compose eulogies upon them, while those who were least successful were ordered to erase their writings with a sponge or with their tongue' unless they preferred to be beaten with rods or thrown into the Sa\u00f4ne. A later _sacerdos,_ Titus Sennius Solemnis, spent 332,000 sesterces on gladiatorial shows in the adjacent amphitheatre. But aside from these festive amusements, the council had real business. It was vested with no formal powers of government, but, being an assembly of the most prominent Gauls from throughout the Tres Galliae, it could not help but be a bellwether for the mind of the provinces. The assembly could send formal messages of congratulation or condolence to emperors, but also loyal expressions of complaint. Information in cases against corrupt governors is likely to have been collated at the instigation of the council. It is even attested that Solemnis, as well as spending so lavishly on gladiator shows, used his influence to deflect the council from having a Roman governor charged with maladministration.\n\nSuch an occurrence showed what the council was capable of doing, and that it ultimately became a force to be reckoned with. Again, Rome was not afraid to enfranchise its subject peoples even if it gave them the scope to use that power against Rome itself. The establishment of the council also assisted in the development of a collective identity. It is difficult to believe Caesar's claims that particular chiefs had, before his time, aimed at ruling all of Gaul, or had ruled all of Gaul (unless he meant by 'Gaul' just the provinces of Narbonne and Lugdunum). But under Roman tutelage, Caesar's vision of a wider Gaul came closer to reality.\n\nAmong the grand inscriptions at the Lyons Museum there is a set of large, wordless marble fragments. Instead of another report of a glittering official career, they merely bear the carving of an oak wreath. But even in this, there is no restraint. The wreath is a fat, rich festoon, luxuriant in foliage and dripping with acorns. It has the same riot and unbounded wealth as the display on the arch at Glanum. Yet, despite the similarity, the model for the wreath is not the Glanum arch. They both draw ultimately from the same original. Shortly before the construction of the Lugdunum shrine, an altar was inaugurated in Rome. This was the _Ara Pacis,_ the Altar of Peace. It was erected mainly to commemorate the end of the civil wars that had plagued Rome for over a century, and exalted Augustus, the first emperor, as the bringer of a golden age of peace and tranquillity to the empire. The luxuriance of the fruits and foliage are a sign of the new abundance of the age, under Augustus's divinely inspired leadership. But this luxuriance, suggests the altar, is not simply the product of a brutal victory. Another scene on the walls of the _Ara Pacis_ represents the imperial family in a sacrificial procession. Despite being imperial, there is no ostentation about them. Their dress is restrained, understated, strictly traditional. They are not broadcasting their status, but their piety. All is owed, as the poet Horace put it, to the gods: it is humility before them and their will \u2013 not ostentation or the rapacious accumulation of wealth \u2013 that will ensure their favour and success on earth.\n\nThe _Ara Pacis_ reflects a new mood; Augustus acceded to the imperial throne under the guise of a 'restored republic', where he managed to hold supreme power in the state under a constitutional form by assuming a combination of republican magistracies. There was no merit in seeking vast self-enrichment at the cost of the common good, as had happened during the civil war. The old Roman virtues of simplicity, frugality and hardiness were to be revived and cherished. Such virtues had brought Rome its empire, as had adherence to the will of the gods. And the vesting of Rome with empire was not a divine caprice. In the words of the epic poet Virgil, who at this time wrote the _Aeneid_ \u2013 which defined what it was to be Roman \u2013 Rome throughout history had a mission, ordained by Jupiter, king of the gods, to 'rule the peoples of the world with [its] power... to crown peace with law, to spare the conquered and to bring down the proud'. To be Roman was not to think of self, but to be dutiful both to the gods and to the subject peoples in one's charge.\n\nThis signature justification for imperialism \u2013 which formed the view of modern imperial administrators such as Lord Macaulay in India \u2013 seems to have been entirely absent from Caesar's own motivation for conquering Gaul. But Gaul's conquest, and the consequent sudden growth of the empire by 30 per cent in landmass between 58 and 50 BC, must have been one of the spurs that caused Romans to ponder the justification for their possession of such extraordinary power, and to condone it via a sense of duty. The apparent building of a replica or partial imitation of the _Ara Pacis_ at the very focal point of Gallic loyalty to Rome suggests not only that Rome was willing to emancipate the Gauls, but that they wanted it to be believed \u2013 even if they were not sincere in this \u2013 that Rome acknowledged its duty to Gaul, just as much as Rome demanded loyalty from it. Such was the revolutionary message of the garlands that hung on the monuments of Glanum, Lugdunum and elsewhere.\n\nHowever sincere the message of give and take and ultimate equality, over time it appears to have had its effect. The worst moment of instability in Gaul, and the empire more broadly, during the first century AD was the 'Year of the Four Emperors', 68\u201369. This was a brief period of civil war, which arose in response to the tyrannical behaviour of the emperor Nero. It had its spark in Gaul. The governor of Lugdunensis, Gaius Julius Vindex, was descended from a line of Gallic chieftains. Given his name, it is possible that his family was enfranchised in the time of Caesar. He himself was a member of the Roman Senate, and had likely been admitted thanks to the reforms of Claudius. He would have visited Rome, worked there with other Roman citizens and passed his way up the _cursus honorum._ When Vindex rose up against Nero, it was not to establish a separate empire for himself, nor to allow Gaul to break away from Rome; he did not give into any revanchist fantasy, despite his patrician Gallic heritage. His revolt was as a dutiful Roman senator, decrying the shameful unRoman excesses of Nero, and seeking a better man to take the imperial place. He supported no Gaul to take the throne, but rather the governor of one of the Spanish provinces, Galba, an elderly man who was the very image of a traditional Roman senator. Thus, within a century of the conquest, Gauls fought to ensure the _Romanitas_ of the empire that ruled over them.\n\nThe same period of turmoil even brought an attempt by a Romanized leader of a Germanic tribe, Julius Civilis, to stir the Gauls to revolt and to seek an _imperium Galliarum,_ an empire of the Gauls. Despite some initial successes, the Gauls for the most part sided with Rome. The historian Tacitus quotes one of the Roman commanders responsible for crushing the uprising addressing two of the Gallic tribes:\n\nThere were always kings and wars throughout Gaul until you submitted to our laws. Although often provoked by you, the only use we have made of our rights as victors has been to impose on you the necessary costs of maintaining peace; for you cannot secure tranquillity among nations without armies, nor maintain armies without pay, nor provide pay without taxes: everything else we have in common. You often command our legions; you rule these and other provinces; we claim no privileges, you suffer no exclusion... Therefore love and cherish peace and the city wherein we, conquerors and conquered alike, enjoy an equal right.\n\nThe ideals expressed on the imperial altar at Lugdunum had become a commonplace. And they were being manifested not only in this official presentation of the Roman regime, but in the way that the cities, countryside and culture of Gaul developed over the following centuries. The age of Gaul had passed with Caesar. A Gallo-Roman future lay ahead.\n\n* A Roman odeon was a small roofed theatre intended primarily for performances of music and poetry.\n\n_View of the interior walkways, amphitheatre of Arles._\nCHAPTER VI\n\nHigh Life and City Chic\n\n_ea quae ad effeminandos animos pertinent_  \n'The commodities that make for effeminacy'\n\nJULIUS CAESAR, _De Bello Gallico,_ I.1\n\nARLES\n\n\u2022\n\n'CITY OF THE LION'\n\n\u2022\n\nFORUM\n\n\u2022\n\n_CARDO_ AND _DECUMANUS_\n\n\u2022\n\nCRYPTOPORTICUS\n\n\u2022\n\nAMPHITHEATRE\n\n\u2022\n\nTHEATRE\n\n\u2022\n\n'TOUR DE ROLAND'\n\n\u2022\n\nTHEATRE OF ORANGE\n\n\u2022\n\nBATHS OF CONSTANTINE\n\n\u2022\n\nARCH OF SAINTES\n\n\u2022\n\nVAISON-LA-ROMAINE\n\nHUMANS ARE NO LONGER KILLED for sport in the amphitheatre of Arles. The age when gladiators fought to the death and criminals were torn apart by wild beasts to satisfy the blood-lust of the crowd has long since passed. And yet, for the most part, the amphitheatre continues to serve the original function that Rome intended for it.\n\nThe streets of Arles are heavy with the nobility of age. Light aslant in an evening sky picks out the granular detail of its weathered stone: the arms of knightly and monastic orders above the gates of decayed commanderies; the apostles in grey marble around the porch of St Trophimus, haunted in their gaze with the repeated knowledge of heaven; the palimpsest of silver-dappled medieval walls, topped with corbels and crenellations, facing with stately unconcern the last turn of the exhausted Rh\u00f4ne before it loses itself in the marshy delta of the Camargue.\n\nThe nobility of the city has long transfixed the artists and writers who have visited. Vincent van Gogh, resident in the Maison Jaune, painted again and again the square by the Porte de la Cavalerie, the area once given over to the Knights Templar. Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Mistral, the great poet of nineteenth-century Provence and the Proven\u00e7al language, hailed Arles as 'the city of the Lion, seated on the banks of the Rh\u00f4ne like a venerable and majestic queen, in the shadow of your glory and your monuments'. Mistral and Dumas both insisted that the women of Arles were the most beautiful in France. This came to be attributed to the isolated nature of the city after the fall of the Roman empire, the idea being that the indigenous genetic inheritance of its ravishing classical inhabitants had been preserved undiluted. This idea became a commonplace for nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. Cecil Headlam eulogized 'these splendid creatures, who walk like goddesses and look like ancient Romans', with their 'large eyes and handsome nose, straight as the Greek, perhaps, or curved in the Roman arch; her beautiful Greek chin and delicately modelled ear... The superb regularity of her features is balanced by a proud gait; her mien is as haughty as his carriage, and she seems to challenge you to refuse her the homage due to a worthy descendant of the noblest imperial race.' Lawrence Durrell, unsurprisingly for him, approved this sentiment even as late as 1990, the year of his death, but still went beyond it to describe Arles as 'outstanding in its beauty and sadness'.\n\nBut there is no need for such doubtful \u2013 and possibly lascivious \u2013 theorizing to see the imprint of Rome on the city of Arles. Its monuments are still open to view. To see the amphitheatre of Arles for the first time, rearing up suddenly in the gap between buildings on turning the corner of the street, its arches as bright as a fanfare of trumpet bells raised to the sky, is to experience, as did the inhabitants of Roman Gaul, the power of the empire.\n\nWith cities such as Arles as examples to the rest, Gaul would be changed. It would turn from being a land dominated by the rural, and a chaos of inchoate settlements scarce half made, to an organized set of provinces in the image of the Mediterranean city-state. Governance would flow from Romanized institutions in Romanized colonies, and such colonies would advertise the commerce, order and permanence of Rome.\n\nArles was not born with the conquest. A settlement of sorts is known to have existed here since around 550 BC. It is mentioned by Greek geographers under two names. The first, Theline, perhaps comes from an ancient Greek word meaning 'fertile'. This may point either to the fertility of the land at the mouth of the Rh\u00f4ne, or else the potentially lucrative nature of the spot, situated at the start of the riverine trade route to the Gallic heartlands. The other name, Arelate, is more clearly of Celtic origin, meaning 'the place by the marsh' or 'place by the waters.\n\nHowever, it was at the hand of Caesar that Arles came into its own. When he attacked Massalia during the civil war in 49 BC, the settlement at Arles became a vital base for his forces. It was here that he ordered the construction of twelve 'long vessels' to assist in the siege. Three years later, he ordered it to be made a Roman colony for the settlement of veterans of the Sixth Legion. Such was the importance he placed on the city, it was named after him in its official title: Colonia Iulia Paterna Arelatensium Sextanorum \u2013 'The Ancestral Julian Colony of Arles of the Men of the Sixth Legion'. Caesar likely had it in mind to make Arles a counterweight to disloyal Massalia: and he knew that, thanks to its position by the mouth of the Rh\u00f4ne, it was excellently placed not just for military purposes but also for trade and agriculture. The Romans, recognizing the fecundity of the soil, followed the Greeks in giving Arles the epithet _mamillaria_ (best translated as 'breast-bearing' \u2013 i.e., 'milk-giving'). But the city, not the fields, was their real achievement. A later poet, Ausonius, called it _Gallula Roma_ \u2013 the Gallic Rome.\n\nAs with a number of other Roman settlements of the time, much of what went before seems to have been cast aside in an effort to start again with a standardized civic plan. The first step in the creation of the city was to lay out a centre around a crossing of two main roads: the _cardo_ , which ran from north to south, and the _decumanus_ , which ran from east to west. Such was also the custom when laying out a military encampment.\n\nIt is possible to follow what would have been the course of the _cardo_ along the modern Rue de l'H\u00f4tel de Ville up to the meeting point with the Rue de la Calade, which is closest to the old _decumanus._ Boutiques cluster in the narrow street with impromptu caf\u00e9s. The sun is kept at bay by high Renaissance fa\u00e7ades, broken at some of the corners by statues of the Virgin Mary or the saints. By this crossroads was laid out the monumental heart of the colony, the forum: a vast colonnaded square, 3,000 square metres in area, embracing not only the ceremonial buildings at the heart of civic life \u2013 a temple for honouring the gods and the imperial cult, a basilica or meeting place for courts and business, and a _curia_ for the assembly of local officials \u2013 but also shops and eating places.\n\nThe buildings of the forum were most likely built under the reign of Augustus, by around 25 BC, and later altered under his successor Tiberius at the beginning of the first century AD. They were also places for display of statuary relating to the imperial family. It was not only at the altar of Lugdunum that the genius of the emperor would have been praised, or the stories of Caesar and his house retold. Pieces of sculpture found at the forum of Arles each tell a part of the imperial myth, and it is possible to follow the family from generation to generation. A slab of yellow Tunisian marble, the capital of a pilaster, chased with a dolphin whose eye is a comet, proclaims the tale that Caesar, after his murder, ascended to the heavens, his fiery soul shooting up to Olympus as a star; a round shield in fine Carrara marble, engraved with an inscription stating that it had been given by the Senate and people of Rome to Augustus in token of his 'virtue, clemency, justice and piety towards the gods and the _patria'_ was a copy of such a shield in gold erected in the Senate house in Rome in 26 BC, shortly after Augustus chose to be so known instead of Octavian; there are busts of Augustus's grandchildren, Gaius and Lucius, both of whom predeceased their grandfather, as well as Tiberius. The heart of the city served to display to the colonists and Gauls alike the glory of the imperial name.\n\nIt was a message to which some of the local Gauls responded. Also found by the forum were inscriptions, like those at Lugdunum, recounting the lives of local men who had made the priesthood of the local branch of the imperial cult the capstone of their glorious Romanized careers. One example is Titus Julius, whose name suggests that he was of a Gallic family given citizenship by Caesar. A plaque inscribed with his offices is dated to the beginning of the first century AD. He was appointed to the equestrian order, and also served as a senior centurion, military tribune, prefect of the camp, maritime prefect, _duumvir_ (official of the town council) before attaining the priesthood of the imperial cult. The fact that Rome offered such itemized glory to those Gauls who were loyal \u2013 easier, cosmopolitan and more agreeable than seeking it by head-hunting raids on neighbours \u2013 was thus displayed to the crowds.\n\nThere still is a Place du Forum at the heart of Arles, a busy but serene square shaded with plane trees and set out with tables and chairs for the caf\u00e9-goers and boulevardiers. It reflects but a fraction of the original Roman complex. Two columns supporting the corner of a pediment are all that can still be seen of the original, incorporated into the wall of a later building. The columns in grey marble with their lacily drilled Corinthian capitals, and the pediment with its intricate maze of foliage, sit uneasily next to the garish fluorescent signs of the neighbouring hotel, picked out in electric blue.\n\nThere are still enough remains uncontaminated by modernity for the original scale of the forum to be appreciated. In one of the council buildings of the H\u00f4tel de Ville, there is a staircase that leads down to a grand series of subterranean chambers. They are damp and cool, a dark and agreeable escape from the bright afternoon sun. A vaulted tunnel runs for several hundred metres, tracing three sides of a square. On one side of the tunnel there is an arcade, low and sturdy, built of heavy blocks, carefully cut and cleanly squared. In places, the arches turn into mighty rectangular piers, and a small warren of chambers lead off from the original tunnel to unnerving dead ends. Water channels picked out by white stone blocks and inexplicable low walls curve around the piers. Piles of broken marble fragments lie about, fluted column drums, capitals, entablature. The beauty of each carving, quatrefoil, scroll, and acanthus leaf can be seen close up, waxy and smooth after centuries concealed. The marble shield of Augustus was found here, as were a number of the royal marble portrait heads and inscriptions of the imperial priesthood. They lay broken, heaped in one of chambers, ready to be burnt up in a lime kiln, but abandoned and forgotten even for that.\n\nThese subterranean chambers are called the Cryptoporticus. Built before the forum itself, they were a necessary response to an engineering problem. The _cardo_ and _decumanus_ crossed on the side of a hill. The site of the forum was therefore on a slope. To get a level surface for the great square, so that all the columns around it might be the same height, it was necessary to raise the level of the ground on three sides. The Cryptoporticus was the solution: a giant reinforced arcade below ground, which would provide the level surface needed as well as support for the grand buildings and colonnades above. It is likely to have served a secondary purpose as a warehouse for the goods sold in the shops of the forum, or even, as some have argued, as sleeping quarters for slaves. The work in itself is a marvel of surveying and engineering, almost dating back to the very foundation of the colony.\n\nAside from the forum, Arles had three grand spaces for public display and entertainment: the theatre, the amphitheatre and the circus. The theatre appears to be the oldest of these monuments, built near the forum shortly after the establishment of the colony. It is huge in conception. A semi-circular structure just over 100 metres in diameter and 20 metres in height, it would have towered over the neighbouring houses, just as those parts of it still standing at their original height do today. Its walls on the circular side, like the amphitheatre, were composed of three levels of arcades, elegantly faced with fine marble and ornamented with pilasters. Like the forum, half of it is built on the side of a hill. In order to build the concentric rows of ascending seats, which did not marry into the topography of the hill, the architects had to construct a complex scheme of foundations and tunnels. This also allowed the public \u2013 the theatre's capacity was around 10,000 people \u2013 speed of access to their seats.\n\nAs with the Cryptoporticus, it is possible to wander through the hidden tunnels and admire the arches and engineering. However, even more to be admired are the suggestions of lost grandeur. After the sixth century ad, the theatre fell into disuse, and was cannibalized for its stone. Large portions of it were taken to furnish the new Cathedral of St Stephen, the precursor of the later Cathedral of St Trophimus. Only one bay of the semi-circular outer wall was left at its original height. Facing southwards by the city walls, it was incorporated into these defences and fortified as the 'Tour de Roland'. Its inner-facing walls are pierced with incongruous Romanesque windows. The side facing outwards preserves the features of the original arcade. On the worn surface of the stone, some of the small and delicate Roman carvings \u2013 _putti_ and flowered festoons \u2013 can still be seen.\n\nThe area of the stage was enclosed and built over, by the eighteenth century becoming a garden for the convent of the Sisters of Mercy. Of the huge curtain wall that stood behind the stage, running the diameter of the semi-circle, decked out to imitate a grand palace, only two columns remained. They still stand today, solitary and majestic, the detritus of the intervening centuries having been cleared away. One is in grey marble, the other is in Troad granite imported from Asia Minor, mottled with pearl, silver and scarlet. They rear above onlookers, perhaps seven or eight times human height; but as evidence of the curtain wall they are still insignificant fragments. The wall of the theatre at Orange, which still stands, gives an idea of its former glory. Although deprived of most of its columns, it looms like a barrel-chested honey-hued cliff, inexplicably wrenched from a canyon-side or sea front and left to glower at the little tables and parasols of the caf\u00e9s intimidated below. Louis XIV said that the wall of the theatre of Orange was the finest wall in his kingdom. It still is. Had Arles been spared, it would have remained a worthy rival.\n\n_Remains of the Roman theatre, Arles._\n\n_The wall of the Roman theatre, Orange. The remaining columns and the statue of Augustus are vestiges of what would one have been lavish stonework and decoration._\n\nIt is not known for certain what was performed in the theatre of Arles or the other theatres across Gaul. It is likely that its productions reflected those that are known from Rome itself. Comedies by authors such as Plautus and Terence may have featured in the earlier years, based on stock characters such as the clever slave, the rich but tyrannical father, his scold of a wife, the foolish but romantic son. Later, these may have developed into mimes and pantomimes: the former a type of bawdy farce in which actresses may have appeared nude; the latter a sort of tragic ballet where a single actor mimed a wordless story, playing all the characters to the accompaniment of an orchestra and chorus.\n\nGiven the desire to convey the power of _Romanitas,_ the type of entertainment mattered less than the mere fact of its existence. The new imperial ruler could divert and amuse tens of thousands at a time, far beyond the capacity of any indigenous chieftain to seat at a Gallic banquet. The medium, essentially, was the message. The theatre, as a gathering place of the masses, was also by its nature a place to convey messages about the primacy of Rome. Being a theatre, these came in a suitably thespian guise. Theatres in the ancient world grew out of mystery cults, and as such were seen ultimately as religious rites. An altar would therefore be placed in the vicinity of the stage. Usually, this would have been to Dionysus, the god of drama; but at the theatre of Arles, the altars discovered are dedicated to his brother Apollo. As god of the lyre and poetic inspiration, Apollo was not divorced from the creative process. But he was dearer to the Roman order. Augustus believed that Apollo had kept him safe through his personal intervention at the Battle of Actium during the end-game of the civil war. Dionysus was the god of Mark Antony, his rival, suggestive of the chaos of Egypt and the east 'with its barking gods' as Virgil wrote, in contrast to the discipline and order of Rome and the west. It is therefore no surprise to find Apollo presiding at the theatre of Arles, built in the time of Augustus.\n\nOne small altar is adorned with swans, the bird that flew over Delos, Apollo's birthplace, when the god was born. They hold garlands of laurel, sacred to Apollo, but also symbolize Augustus's victory. Another small altar bears a crown of oak leaves, like the garland at the altar of Lugdunum. A grand altar that would have been set before the stage portrays the god himself, reclining on a couch and propped up on his lyre. There is, however, an empty socket where his head should have gone. This allowed for the head of the emperor to be affixed on the body of the god, changeable whenever a new contender came to the imperial throne. In case any of the spectators should still be in doubt over the association of Augustus, Apollo and the magnificence of the theatre of Arles, a colossal statue of Augustus was placed in a niche above the door in the middle of the stage. Nearby was a statue of Venus, who was in the imperial myth the mother of Aeneas, the ancestor of Caesar and also, by adoption, Augustus. Her statue was discovered at the site of the theatre in 1651, a copy of a Greek original made by Praxiteles in 360 BC. Such was its refined quality that the city authorities offered it to Louis XIV to adorn his new palace of Versailles. It now has its home in the Louvre.\n\nAs Arles had three grand places for public display, it also had three grand baths. Two of these are now no more than hidden foundations. One was unearthed in the year 2000 at the southern end of the Rue de l'H\u00f4tel de Ville. It has now been reburied, and lies beneath the site of a weekly farmers' market. Another, however, at the other end of the _cardo,_ for the most part still stands. It is one of the best-preserved Roman bathhouses in Europe. It is not part of the original buildings that were erected in Arles straight after the conquest (although it may be on the site of an earlier bathhouse): it likely dates to around the fourth century AD and is known as the 'Baths of Constantine'. However, it still serves to give an impression of the new and elaborate experience of Roman and Mediterranean culture that Rome introduced to overawe and entice its new northern subjects.\n\nThe baths sit by the bank of the Rh\u00f4ne. Without prior knowledge of their function, from the outside their original purpose is not immediately obvious. They sit in the neighbourhood of a complex that once belonged to the knights of Malta. Constructed of stone with bands of rusty terracotta brickwork, the walls bulge towards the river with a semi-circular domed apse pierced with tall arched windows to match. However, it is for the most part roofless, and shards of the walls are missing, allowing one to see inside. In such a place, and with such a form, it looks at first sight to be a venerable and ancient church, ruinously neglected. But even scholars from earlier generations were similarly fooled. In the sixteenth century, the complex was identified as a palace and attributed to the emperor Constantine. It had indeed been put to such a use in earlier generations, but not by the Romans: in the medieval period, the counts of Provence had taken over the complex of abandoned buildings and converted it into a court. They named it the Palais de la Trouille, referring to the _trullus_ or semi-circular vault that is still preserved behind the apse. It then declined into a pound for stray animals before being eventually engulfed by adjacent buildings, incorporating the still-strong Roman walls into their own constructions. It was not until the nineteenth century, when a civic project was launched to clear away the medieval and Renaissance accretions from the complex, that its original function as a bathhouse was uncovered.\n\nThe various chambers of the complex can still be traced: the _tepidarium,_ or warm-room by the entrance; the _caldarium,_ or hot-bath room; and the _laconicum_ , or sauna. A grand basilical hall, which may have been the _frigidarium_ , or cold bath, still stands away from the entrance, but forms part of a later medieval building, the H\u00f4tel d'Ar-latan. This might be one of the largest buildings from the Roman era still standing, but the project to free it from the later structures and investigate it properly was halted by the First World War and never recommenced. For all this, the technological intricacies of the baths are dissected and laid bare. Ranks of rickety brick piers hold up an interrupted floor; clay tiles transfused with pipes still hold to some of the walls \u2013 the hypocaust system, all to circulate heat from the subterranean furnaces. The technology and Roman mastery of the elements did not stop at the walls of the bath. The waters for Arles came from the Alpilles, a range of low limestone peaks several miles north of the city. At the opposite end of the city from the baths, one can see where an aqueduct disgorged these waters into a channel cut into the rock below a remaining stretch of Roman walls. The channel now sits dry, a receptacle for scratchy yellow grass, wilted umbellifers and _bon-bon_ wrappers. In the time after the conquest, it is unlikely the Gauls would have passed by such marvels of water technology with so little regard. In one of the last clashes of Caesar's conquest, at Uxellodunum, the fiercest fighting centred on possession of the single well that kept the city supplied. Not long after this, water flowed freely around the country and became, in the marble-lined and centrally heated swimming pools of Roman villas, as much a source of daily pleasure as a necessity for life.\n\nAs with the baths, the amphitheatre was a monument of misunderstood magnificence for the post-Roman ages. It may have been used for shows as late as the sixth century AD. Saint Caesarius of Arles, in a sermon at that time, describes human nature as a 'spiritual amphitheatre' with its 'savage forest of vices' so vividly in terms of a real amphitheatre that it is difficult to think he spoke purely from imagination or repeated tradition: 'I see in our character the wild savagery of lions... in our tongues the envy of wild boars, in our consciences the spots of tigers... in our sins the great weight of elephants...' With such a vituperative attack from the Christian hierarchy, not to mention the post-Roman collapse in living standards, it is little wonder that the amphitheatre fell into disuse around this time. Its fate, unlike its neighbour, the theatre, was not to become a quarry, but rather a fortress. Four square towers were added at the cardinal points, the external arches were bricked up, and the stands within were encrusted with houses, workshops, even an open square and a small chapel to hold the relics of a local martyr, St Genesius. The place became a redoubt for the citizens in time of danger, such as when the city was attacked by Saracen invaders or local warlords.\n\nIt was not until 1826 that the civic authorities ordered the amphitheatre to be stripped of these barnacle dwellings \u2013 212 in all \u2013 and the glory of the ancient monument to be laid bare. By 1844, the structure had been returned, as far as possible, to its first-century AD state. It could seat 21,000 spectators. The floor of the arena was an oval 70 metres by 40 metres, and the whole structure was 136 metres long at its widest axis. It was originally built around AD 70, a contemporary of the Colosseum in Rome, smaller but similar in design. It was not built to fit in with the grid-plan of streets that radiated from the forum and the meeting of the _cardo_ and _decumanus._ It broke through the original city wall, spilling over the boundary of the city as first laid out in Caesar's time. Standing outside by one of its gates or pacing around the upper galleries, one can appreciate the shock of its presence. The parchment-coloured blocks of local stone seem hefty, cyclopean, improbably lofted up into the air to create the arcades and pavements that still rest solidly far above the rooftops of the city. They catch the oblique rays of the evening sun, turning the ring of stones into a magnificent coronet of light. They shrug off the irregular smattering of post-holes and rivulets gouged into them to support the shambles of slum housing as just so many irrelevant medieval insults. It matters little that the highest course of the amphitheatre is missing; the sturdiness and the refulgence of Rome still show through.\n\nWe do not know precisely who built these monuments. But down on the walkway that encircles the arena itself are a series of large marble panels, damaged and smoke-washed in colour, and only partially covering the coarser stonework beneath. They bear an inscription, mutilated but sufficiently legible to tell us that one Gaius Munius Priscus, a _duumvir_ of Arles and priest at the shrine of Augustus, paid for the podium and gates of the amphitheatre to be erected, not to mention a silver statue of Neptune as well as four other bronze statues. He also endowed two days of games in his honour, to be accompanied by public banquets. Given the offices he held, he was probably of Gallic origin.\n\nSuch inscriptions are a sign that the decision to display these markers of _Romanitas_ in the new settlements of Gaul was not purely the result of central planning or government funding. The propagation of these great monuments of Roman lifestyle \u2013 theatres, baths, amphitheatres \u2013 was driven as much by the local Gallic elites as by their Roman overlords. Another example lies in the putative original capital of the Aquitanian province, Saintes, where many early post-conquest monuments still survive. A double-gated triumphal arch erected in the early first century AD in honour of the Roman general and imperial claimant Germanicus was erected by Gaius Julius Rufus, the grandson of Caius Julius Gedomo, who had been given Roman citizenship by Caesar. The Gallic nobility, having lost the old means of demonstrating their primacy \u2013 raiding, gathering bands of vassal warriors, displaying heads \u2013 now used Roman cultural markers to display their wealth and status. Instead of giving banquets in their halls and handing out potlatch, they used the Latin language, assumed Roman civic offices and used their patronage to aid the construction of Roman-style public buildings.\n\nSuch were the grand public structures that adorned the new Roman towns. But to see how the Roman presence could transform the home life of the Gauls (or at least that of the more fortunate ones) one must turn away from Arles, where such evidence lies beneath the later city. Following the Rh\u00f4ne northwards to Orange, and then turning northeast to cross to the valley of the Ouv\u00e8ze, one eventually reaches the town of Vaison-la-Romaine. Here, the sea-change wrought by Rome is clear for all to see.\n\nI come to Vaison on a market day in September. The Proven\u00e7al lavender season is over by this time, but despite this and the still-intense heat, the place is suffused with colour. The streets are thronged, the stalls bright with shining tomatoes and peppers; grapes, newly cut, are bloody purple and frosted next to the scarlet and red berries of late summer fruits. There are strings of garlic and dried sausages, tawny or smoke-brown, making an understated backdrop for boxes of garish sugared candies and an array of soaps as encyclopedic in hue as a jewel box.\n\n_View of Vaison-la-Romaine, overlooking a complex called 'The House of the Silver Bust'._\n\nThe market stalls give way to shops and the built-up part of the town in the Grand Rue. The street leads to a high, cliff-bound bank looking down over the Ouv\u00e8ze far below. The river was navigable in Roman times, but is now little more than a playful stream. Beyond the river is a high limestone rock \u2013 Castle Hill \u2013 on which is perched the fortified medieval town, looking down on the flat expanse of the modern streets on the right bank of the river below. The two sides are spanned by a Roman bridge of a single arch, still used by traffic as the main route across. A grey Bugatti sports car, having descended from the heights, noses its way across the bridge, holding a line of vehicles in check as it negotiates the junction.\n\nThe Roman bridge is the best spot to begin a survey of the history of Vaison. It was the capital of a Gallic tribe, the Voconti. Before the Roman conquest, the settlement appears to have been confined to the hilltop. But following the imposition of the _Pax Romana_ * the city came down from the heights. Buildings were put up across the river on the flat and undefended expanse; the hill was neglected. This remained the case until around the sixth century AD, following the collapse of the empire. The town fled back up the hill and \u2013 with a few exceptions, such as the cathedral \u2013 stayed there until the mid-nineteenth century. At that point, the pendulum swung again, and the town sprawled back down on to land that for centuries had been agricultural, concealing beneath it the secrets of the old Roman _civitas_ capital.\n\nThere had been a number of archaeological finds around Vaison from the sixteenth century, but aside from a period of work in the mid-nineteenth century there were no organized excavations until the early twentieth. From then until the 1960s, in two large areas on either side of the Avenue General de Gaulle, centuries of topsoil were peeled away to reveal the impress of the submerged town. Although only a district of private houses could be uncovered, such was its extent and preservation that local archaeologists succeeded in a campaign to rename Vaison in a style that reflected its Roman past: in 1929 it became Vaison-la-Romaine, 'Vaison the Roman'.\n\nThe stones of the ruins are of the same white limestone as the cliffs nearby. They were locally quarried. They stand companionably \u2013 pillars, walls and steps \u2013 with the buildings of the modern town that now surround them. The Roman town feels at ease with the modern, rich in the produce and beauty of its setting, as well as prosperous and well connected. Roman Vaison \u2013 Vasio Vocontiorum, Vaison of the Voconti \u2013 was described as one of the wealthiest cities in Gaul by Pomponius Mela, a geographer of the first century AD. The area was also praised for its sweet wines in the same century by Pliny the Elder.\n\n_Vaison-la-Romaine, viewed from 'The House of the Dolphin'._\n\nSome of its inhabitants were well known and of national renown. A first-century AD inscription discovered at Vaison in 1884 showed that one of the imperial right-hand men, Afranius Burrus, was almost certainly born there, and at any rate the town regarded him as its patron and advocate. Burrus was a military man, and in AD 51 was appointed as the praetorian prefect in Rome. Along with the philosopher Seneca he acted as tutor to the teenage Emperor Nero and hence as one of his de facto regents. His influence is credited with the maintenance of a period of good government throughout the empire in the AD 50s, while the young Nero was kept distracted from the levers of power with debauchery. It is impossible to think of Burrus's character as anything but unflappable. Nero tried to have him convicted of a scheme to support a usurper, but at another point came running to him in panic when a plot he had hatched to kill his mother, Agrippina (with whom he had previously been having an affair) went disastrously wrong. When Burrus died in AD 62, perhaps of poisoning, the historian Tacitus, a judge of character notoriously difficult to impress, remarked that Rome felt a deep and lasting regret.\n\nBurrus was not the only famous son of Vaison in that era. Lucius Duvius Avitus rose to be consul in Rome in AD 56. A plaque found on the banks of the Ouv\u00e8ze sets out his career, including a governorship of the province of Aquitaine and military commands on the Germanic frontier. Even in the previous generation, the town was home to the influential scholar Pompeius Trogus, whose Gallic family was given Roman citizenship by Pompey the Great and also served Caesar during the conquest. Trogus's academic work, some of which has been quoted in these pages, spanned the disciplines: it included influential writings on the history of the east and scientific work on animals and plants. He was seen as a more rigorous, scientific historian than his contemporaries, and remains an important source today.\n\nThe residences are appropriate to the importance of the inhabitants. In one of the gardens a third-century AD plaque was found with the family name 'Pompeia'. The garden has been much restored. A wall has been rebuilt and replacement Tuscan columns constructed using Roman techniques. Casts of statues have been places in niches. Little care has been taken to allow the new to be distinguished from the old, but nevertheless the scale of the ancient site is clear. Its gracious quadrangle is lined with porticos of such length that some have argued that the garden must have been a public amenity rather than a private space. Yet it seems more likely that it was indeed a garden attached to a private house, whose remnants still lie beneath the neighbouring land.\n\nThe sheer size of private spaces at Vaison is striking. Individual houses covered over 2,000 square metres, huge complexes of more than one storey with heated bath complexes, loggia-like dining rooms looking out over colonnaded courtyards cooled and enlivened with ponds and trickling waterways. They had specially fitted kitchens with cooking ranges; stone-carved latrines washed out by rills of running water, with marble slabs on the walls to dignify the activity; frontages carved out facing the paved streets that could be rented out for income as shops and boutiques.\n\n_Relief depicting a chariot race, from a tomb of the first century AD, discovered at Orange._\n\nTheir inhabitants walked on intricately patterned pavements of marble in rare colours \u2013 mottled grey, orange and burgundy \u2013 imported from Italy, Greece and Africa. They looked on frescoed walls painted with winged nymphs, bearded grotesques and sea creatures, or huge mosaics, several metres in length, with a bestiary of creatures: a peacock whose tail radiates like a fireball, woodpigeons, ducks, partridges, parrots; geometric confusions of squares, hexagons, diamonds, Solomon's knots, flowers, panthers, deer, eagles, theatre masks, cupids and Tritons riding on dolphins. Some of these artworks bear the stamp of their owners' daily amusements. Into the red plaster of one of the frescoes are scratched small images of gladiators at combat: a _retiarius_ with his net and trident, pitched against the _secutor_ with his short sword, helmet and shield. The pleasures Rome offered were not just commodities, bought and built around the inhabitants of Vaison; they were something seen and remembered, worthy to be engraved on the walls as hero-worshipping graffiti, or else to beguile an idle hour.\n\nBut it is not just in Vaison that this way of life can be discerned. In the towns along the Rh\u00f4ne \u2013 N\u00eemes, Orange, Valence, Vienne and Saint-Romain-en-Gal, Lyons, and then beyond \u2013 elegant private houses and imposing public buildings, adorned with sculptures, mosaics and inscriptions from soon after the time of the conquest are all to be found. To be sure, the spread of Roman-style towns was not universal. Their density was much higher in the southern region than in the north, closer to the Mediterranean sphere which had given birth to the concept. However, the vision of the Roman town percolated throughout Gaul, affecting how even smaller settlements developed, laying out a template and aspirations even if the ideal was not always copied so perfectly or so opulently. Even on the hill of Al\u00e9sia itself, the site of the defeat of Vercing\u00e9torix where a great shrine to the Gallic god Ucuetis was maintained, the inhabitants seized on the Roman urban template. Although they dispensed with the formal arrangement around the _cardo_ and _decumanus,_ the place has its theatre, its forum with basilica and temple (which some archaeologists have suggested are modelled in their plan on the forum of Trajan in Rome), its baths and its fine houses, its colonnades with shops and boutiques. Caesar's victory was more complete than Vercing\u00e9torix could ever have imagined.\n\n* Literally, 'Roman Peace' \u2013 the order which Rome imposed across its imperial territories.\n\n_Mosaic discovered at St-Romain-en-Gal, part of a larger ensemble of Orpheus charming the animals, second century_ AD.\nCHAPTER VII\n\nCountry Life\n\n_locis patentibus, maxime frumentariis_  \n'Unprotected districts, and very rich in corn'\n\nJULIUS CAESAR, _De Bello Gallico,_ I.10\n\nORANGE\n\n\u2022\n\nCADASTRAL MAPS\n\n\u2022\n\nTHE MOSELLE\n\n\u2022\n\nVILLAS\n\n\u2022\n\nCLERMONT-FERRAND\n\n\u2022\n\nLAC D'AYDAT\n\n\u2022\n\nCHIRAGAN\n\n\u2022\n\nGARDENS OF 'VOROCINGUS'\n\n\u2022\n\nAQUEDUC DE BARBEGAL\n\n\u2022\n\nMAS DES TOURELLES\n\nFROM THE FIELDS BEYOND VAISON, looking back at the town from a distance, the imprint of Rome is always visible: the sprawling remains of the Roman town itself, the Roman bridge, the cathedral built on a foundation of Roman stones, the little Romanesque chapel of St Quentin in whose fa\u00e7ade are limestone panels carved with swirling vines dating back to the time of the late empire. But the land itself \u2013 the trellised rows of vines, the scattering of pines and Judas trees out of season \u2013 does not reveal the traces of Rome so easily. There are no obvious stone walls to divide estates, no drainage ditches nor irrigation channels. The cities can boast their Roman ruins, their theatres, their arches and their baths. But here in the countryside, nothing cries out the presence of Rome.\n\nParadoxically, the best place to start a search for the Roman countryside is back in the city. In Orange, near Vaison, close to the massive wall of the theatre, a hash of marble fragments was found in the 1920s and 1930s. The fragments are flat, wide and covered with inscriptions. The marble is not the finest, being blotchy and dishwatery in hue, and the furious maze of engraved lettering does not have the monumental grandeur of the plaques and plinths that boast of the careers of provincial officials. This is not to say that the fragments are insignificant in any respect, for they are the remnants of a series of grand and stylized maps, huge in scale (they were originally several metres across) and equally huge in intent. Three can be identified from the rediscovered fragments: one was created at the order of the emperor Vespasian in AD 77, and the other two shortly afterwards as part of a reorganization of the rural territories around Orange. The land was to be surveyed, redistributed as necessary, assessed for taxation, and the results of the exercise recorded on this marble document, which was to be displayed to public view, probably in the forum of the Roman city.\n\nThe cadastral maps,* as they are known, are written in a sort of shorthand. Their fragments now hang on the wall of the Orange Museum in the shadow of the theatre. They are crossed with lines, in the manner of a grid. Particular abbreviations can be made out \u2013 DD, SD, CK, VK. These are directions for interpreting the map \u2013 _dextra decumanum_ and _sinistra decumanum_ \u2013 right and left of the _decumanus;_ and _citra cardinem_ and _ultra cardinem,_ on this side and beyond the _cardo._ The recurrence of the terms _cardo_ and _decumanus_ is a sign of how the countryside around Orange was treated like a new city. The surveyors would choose a central point from which to work. There they placed an instrument called a _groma,_ a pole with a flat cross on top from which hung strings kept taut with lead weights. From the four points of the _groma,_ aligned with geographical north by reference to the passage of the sun, they traced an extended _cardo_ and a _decumanus,_ and from these lines they could then proceed to divide the land in the form of a chequerboard. By describing the location of a plot with reference to the _cardo_ and _decumanus_ on the cadastral map, it was possible to pinpoint it on the ground itself.\n\nThe maps are the subject of persistent research. Not only do they describe the divisions of landholdings, but also geographical features such as rivers. With the benefit of this evidence and references to features that can still be discerned, geographers have attempted to trace out where the original Roman field boundaries lay in the landscape. This is not easy for the walker at ground level; to discover the Roman vestiges, one really needs aerial photography, supplemented with satellite data and computer analysis. The boundaries of the agricultural lots around Orange were frequently drawn at intervals of 710 metres. This was the rough equivalent of 20 _actus_ , one _actus_ being \u2013 on the same principle as an English furlong \u2013 the distance a plough led by two oxen would be drawn before being turned around. With the assistance of the cadastral data, it is therefore possible to look from the air for the recurrence of features at these intervals. Some can be found, in isolated spots. However, they are frequently not what the Romans themselves left behind, but the ghostly negatives of their one-time presence.\n\n_Passage inside the theatre of Orange._\n\nThe Romans favoured square fields. They were the most appropriate shape for the earth-working technology then available, the scratch plough. The fact that the plough did not properly turn over the earth, but could only cut a furrow, required the land to be ploughed twice, each time at right-angles. Square fields thus made the most sense. The field might be bordered with drainage or irrigation ditches, and in some instances marked by small paths or tracks. The maintenance of these features of rural infrastructure demanded constant attention. However, after the decline of the empire in the fifth and sixth centuries ad, the countryside was depopulated. Ditches silted up as a result of flooding and lack of maintenance. Paths were untrodden and disappeared in the undergrowth. The shapes of fields were lost, and whole areas reverted to woodland.\n\nWhen the countryside revived later in the eighth century AD and beyond, square fields were no longer needed. The mouldboard plough, which allowed the earth to be properly turned over with a single pass, became popular, and hence long rectangular fields predominated. Yet, when clearing and recovering old lands that once were cultivated in Roman times, the prospecting farmer might find a narrow strip of earth that tended to become waterlogged, while another might seem more densely covered in trees and foliage, as if the spot attracted them. These were the locations of forgotten Roman ditches, which continued to accumulate water more readily because of the disturbance to the earth. Where an area had evidently once been a drainage ditch, it was often easier to redig than create a new one in virgin soil; or a line of well-grown trees on top of an old ditch might well be reused as part of a new boundary, attract a path to run alongside it, or divert the way of another. Thus, as new medieval boundaries came into being, they were not created in knowing imitation of the Roman past, but they were still unconsciously influenced by the old Roman footprint. Such a footprint can still be seen, but only traced with the greatest of subtlety \u2013 a row of trees that grows more luxuriantly than those around, or a road turning abruptly through a right-angle for no discernible reason.\n\nIn its own age, the impact of the Orange cadastral map was anything other than ghostly. It classified the land around the colony into different categories: land given to army veterans; land given to the Roman colony that it could rent out as it chose; public land that was not let out but under colonial administration; land that had not been divided up by the survey and that remained under public control; and land that was returned to members of the local Gallic tribe, the Tricastini. This last category appears to have been the most marginal and least productive. Such an exercise seems to suggest the indigenous Gallic farmers had been in decline, or else that they had to submit to forcible repossession of their farmland. The poet Virgil in his _Ninth Eclogue_ paints a picture of Italian peasants forced off their land to make way for military colonists during the civil war around 40 BC: 'O Lycidas, we have lived to see the day \u2013 something we never even dreamed of \u2013 when a stranger took hold of our farm and said \"This is mine; old tenants, get you gone\"' The lament is one that the Gauls too are likely to have spoken as the Roman colonists arrived.\n\nAlthough the maps narrate a redistribution of land that took place over a century after the Roman conquest, a comparison between the maps and the evidence of aerial photography and other archaeological investigations suggests that the land around Orange had been subject to a previous scheme of division shortly after the conquest itself. Such work also points to similar surveying and allotment of land around many other centres in Gaul \u2013 Arles, Narbonne, Valence, Vienne, B\u00e9ziers. So the tribes around Orange were not the only ones to suffer upheaval. In many places, the Roman presence changed not only the appearance of the land, but also those who were able to possess it.\n\nThe landscape of Gaul was transformed not only in its boundaries, but also in its buildings. It is no exaggeration to say that it was covered in villas. Properly speaking, the Latin word _villa_ \u2013 often the first word to be learnt in Latin as an example of a first declension noun\u2020 \u2013 means an entire rural estate, not just the complex of residential dwellings at its heart. However, taking the word's modern meaning of a large and luxurious house, villas appear to have been spread profusely across Gaul. Their apparent absence above the surface of the ground led many originally to believe that the culture of villas had not penetrated deeply into Roman Gaul. However, as with the field boundaries indicated by the Orange cadastral map, it has only been with modern technology that many of their sites have been recognized.\n\nJust as the position of an old Roman ditch covered up by later deposits of soil might reveal itself via waterlogging and more vigorous vegetation, in general an old stone wall hidden beneath the earth causes the plants above it to grow more slowly. From the air, when the conditions are right, these variations in plant growth can be seen. The floorplan of entire complexes can be spotted, mapped and precisely surveyed. Projects carried out after the Second World War showed that villas were widespread not just in the south, but also in the region of Picardy and the Somme. Excavations carried out before the construction of TGV lines and new motorways have revealed that villas were not only more densely distributed than had been expected, but were also present across a far wider range of locations. On occasion, they emerge in the fields on the outskirts of later medieval villages, suggesting that there was some form of continuity between the life of the villa and the foundation of the village. These findings give some credence to the old belief that the Latin names of villa-estates ending in _-acum_ or _-anus_ evolved into modern French village names ending in _-ac, -at, -as,_ _-y_ , -\u00e9 or _-ay,_ thus preserving the identity of their onetime Roman owners.\n\nSo the countryside was covered in villas, and villas of every variety. In the fourth century ad, the poet Ausonius wrote of a journey along the Moselle from Bingen to Neumagen. In one section of the poem, after long descriptions of the fish that can be caught in the bounteous river, he turns to a portrayal of the villas that dot its banks at regular intervals. In the previous century the countryside had suffered upheavals on account of disturbances on the frontier. However, by the time of his journey there had been such a revival that the villas he portrays may have been even more opulent than those of earlier centuries.\n\nAusonius, like many writers of his age, is not averse to hyperbole. The architects of these villas, he writes, might well have been the very ones who had raised the pyramids in Egypt or the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Yet he soon passes from hyperbole to more credible detail. The Roman villas dominate the landscape. One stands high on a mass of natural rock, another on a bank jutting out into the river; one rests further back 'and claims the river for its own, making it prisoner in an enfolding bay'. All take advantage of the river, whether for the sake of practicality or beauty. One has its own weir for catching the fish 'between the sunny grass-grown rocks'. Another, sitting on the crest of a hill, is in just the right place to enjoy the beautiful haze of light that refracts around the base of the river valley.\n\nThe luxury and ease that they offer seem at one with the landscape around them. There are courtyards and colonnades that meld into the green meadows at their side. There are bathhouses on the low verge of the banks, the smoke of whose hypocausts roll up along the valley. Ausonius watches as bathers spill out of the hot baths and, scorning the cold plunge-pools in the bathhouses, jump into the river itself; refreshed by the running water they 'buffet the cool stream, threshing it with their strokes'. For Ausonius, this is a better and more wholesome place than the great Italian coastal resort of Baiae, the old and notoriously debauched watering-hole of the emperors and Roman elite: 'So great is the charm of its refinement and distinction, while its pleasures breed no excess.'\n\nThe residential buildings of a villa-estate might be of any level of opulence or elaboration. As a general rule, they were divided into two parts. There was the _pars urbana,_ which was the dwelling of the owner and his family, luxurious and well appointed. For the slaves or dependents who cultivated the land there was the _pars rustica,_ less decorated, more in the order of barrack blocks, which also included barns and other agricultural outhouses. The most frequent shape for the complex would be a courtyard or double courtyard around which the various sections of the villa were arranged. Sometimes, these could be extensive, over 300 metres long in some cases. However, this grandeur was by no means universal. In some areas, for example in Normandy and Brittany, villa complexes tend to be rather smaller. Instead of courtyards, they had long corridors connecting two wings or larger rooms at each end. In Belgic Gaul and the areas facing the Rhine, there are also 'hall villas' where, rather than a series of smaller chambers, a single grand room was the focus of the dwelling. These variations may suggest that the social structures of the indigenous peoples were being preserved alongside Roman customs and material luxuries.\n\nThe more opulent villas offer more extensive remains, and therefore more information about the people who lived in them. This includes their literary endeavours. Some of the best descriptions of villa life come from the letters of an aristocrat and cleric named Sidonius who lived in the century after Ausonius, in the mid-fifth century AD. As with Ausonius, his writings are likely to be a reasonable reflection of what happened earlier, during imperial times. Sidonius had a villa at Avitacum, which may have been by the shores of the Lac d'Aydat, about twelve miles southwest of Clermont-Ferrand in the rich countryside of the Auvergne. Although business required him to be frequently in town, his heart appears to have been on his estate. It was a possession of pride, a family seat that came to him when he married. It was nevertheless a place he was eager to share, and show off.\n\nEarly one summer, Sidonius wrote to a friend of his in town, a teacher named Domitius. The weather was getting hot. 'The land is being scored with irregular curved cracks gaping in the heat, gravel lies untidily in the fords, mud on the banks, dust in the fields; even streams that flow all the year round have languidly slowed down; the water is not merely hot: it boils.' In such heat, where even those lightly clad in silks and linens were sweating, it was madness for Domitius to sit in his gown, squeezed into his teaching chair, and 'yawningly expound' to his pupils \u2013 'whose pale faces are due quite as much to the heat as to the fear of you' \u2013 obscure lines from the works of old poets. 'Why not rather, if you have any thought of your health, promptly withdraw from the panting oppression of the town and eagerly join our house-party, and so beguile the fierceness of the dog days by retiring to the coolest of retreats?'\n\nTo encourage Domitius to visit, in his letter Sidonius takes him on a virtual tour of his villa. Perhaps on account of the heat, he starts with the bathhouse, a structure of which he was deeply proud. He had even written poems about it, comparing it to the Lucrine Lake in Campania, not to mention the resort at Baiae. It even had a specially designed conical roof, in imitation of one of the grand baths there. Sidonius goes on about it for pages: the bathhouse was on the edge of the woods, so close that the branches almost dropped directly into the heating furnaces; he describes the shapes of its windows, the vaulting of the roofs and the quality of the light; he expatiates on the size of the swimming pool itself, which held about 40,000 gallons of water, and on how it was adorned with porphyry columns and fed by a mountain rill that gushed into the building through six projecting pipes, whose heads were in the shape of lions: they had 'genuine wildness in their eyes, and unmistakable manes on the neck'.\n\nLeaving the pool, there is a maze of corridors and rooms: a dining room for the women of the household, store-rooms and weaving rooms; a dining room for the female dependants of the estate where he happens upon them taking a grand midday meal such as might be laid out at a festival for the tables of the gods. There is a winter dining room, whose vaulted fireplace is black with soot, but more appropriate to the time of the year is the summer dining and living room. Furnished with a grand semi-circular couch and polished sideboard, it is open to the lake, so \u2013 provided one's attention is not absorbed by the pleasures of the table \u2013 one can sit and enjoy the view. Here, or in one of the adjacent rooms, one can enjoy a drink so exquisitely chilled that the glass is frosted. Thus refreshed, one can watch the fishermen on the lake casting for trout or spreading their nets, or simply listen to the chirp of cicadas, the croaking of frogs, and \u2013 towards evening \u2013 the honking of swans and geese and cawing of crows. As dusk falls, the song of the nightingale joins the chorus of sounds. If one is feeling more energetic, one can venture into the grounds and play ball beneath two lime trees whose branches intertwine, providing a most pleasing shade for exercise. Thereafter, one might recover from one's exertions by sitting down to enjoy a game of dice.\n\n_Mosaic from St-Romain-en-Gal, part of the Orpheus ensemble, second century AD._\n\nWe do not know whether Domitius ever took up this invitation. However, the splendour that Sidonius describes at length in his letters is certainly not imagined. If anything, the grandest villas discovered by archaeologists would have made it appear positively suburban. In 1826 at Chiragan, near Martres-Tolosane in the Haute-Garonne, a set of foundations were discovered in fields after heavy flooding washed away the topsoil. Excavations that took place over the following century and a half revealed a villa which comprised eighty buildings totalling 18,000 square metres, spread out over an area of around 16 hectares. Inscriptions at the villa show that it originally belonged to the family of the Aconii. The name seems to have stuck, and as late as the seventeenth century the spot was called Angonia, a corrupted version of the name. In the first century ad, when this family possessed the villa, it was nothing out of the ordinary. However, sometime later in the second century it changed hands. Not only was it vastly enlarged, so that at its greatest extent it was around a third of the size of Hadrian's imperial villa in Italy, it was also covered in an impressive array of marble reliefs and statuary. Indeed its collection of these items, most of which is now held in Toulouse, is second only to that of the Louvre. One hall was set aside to be lined with busts of the emperors. Another part of the house had grand marble panels, each with life-size depictions of the labours of Hercules. Other rooms and corridors were ornamented with roundels of local marble carved with the heads of Minerva, Vulcan and Cybele. It is more than a cut above the villa of Sidonius, who disapproved of mosaics in his swimming baths as being potentially lascivious.\u2021 The grandeur of the site suggests that it might have been used by the governor of the province, or even as an imperial palace during the later empire.\n\nIt was not just the architecture and landscapes that gave pleasure to the inhabitants of the villas. They also rejoiced in their gardens. Traces of gardens and even their planting schemes have been discovered by archaeologists at some villa sites, with areas set aside for vegetables, orchards, animal enclosures and outhouses. Once again, surviving literary sources add colour to a fragmentary picture. One of Sidonius's poems is a _propempticon_ or ode of dispatch that he sent with a copy of a book to friends in another villa somewhere in southeastern Gaul. Addressing the book, the poem describes the route it must take to reach its destination, and the people it will encounter on the journey. One of these is Apollinaris, a relative of Sidonius. His estate was at a place called Vorocingus, somewhere in the vicinity of N\u00eemes. Here, says Sidonius, the book would find a night's rest from its weary travels. When it arrived, it would probably encounter Apollinaris walking in his secluded gardens, 'which are like those that bloom on honey-bearing Hybla'.\u00a7 He would be surrounded by violets and thyme, privet covered in grape-like clusters of white flowers, February daphne, marigolds, narcissi, and blooms of hyacinth. Such was the beauty of their scent that Apollinaris would turn away the travelling incense salesman at the gate, offering Sabaean frankincense at a great price. And if he were not to be found among the flowers, he would be cooling himself in his imitation grotto on the slope of a neighbouring hill, a 'cavern' formed by the branches of trees arching together to create a natural portico \u2013 better even than the ancient orchards of the Indian King Porus, which he decorated with golden vines heavy with clusters of gems.\n\nBut the countryside was as much for use as for aristocratic ornament. The Romans recognized from the time of the conquest the fertility of the Gallic provinces. 'None of the country', writes Strabo in the first century ad, 'is left untilled except the parts where tilling is precluded by swamps and woods'. The southern regions were similar to Italy in their agriculture, he observed, but 'all the rest of the country produces grain in large quantities, and millet, and nuts, and all kinds of livestock'. Even before the Roman conquest, the country was productive and intensively cultivated. Caesar would never have been able to feed his legions and conquer the country had it not been for the requisitions of locally grown food from allied Gallic chiefs; his worries over whether they will deliver the grain he has demanded are a constant note in his _Commentaries._ Yet, the coming of Rome did have an impact on the crops. Archaeological studies of plant remains and burnt foods found in rural sites have shown that grains that were commonly grown before the conquest, such as emmer and spelt, fell in popularity. Others, including common wheat, durum wheat, rye, barley and oats tended to take their place.\n\nMany estates were large, and there are signs that they ran at a considerable surplus. According to Pliny, Gallic wheat was imported to Rome. Loaves of bread baked using Gallic wheat, he reports, seemed to be lighter in texture than those made of grain from other regions. Such imports are mentioned by another author, Claudian, as late as the early fifth century AD. Even if the harvests were large in scale, the Gallic landowners were not entirely dependent on human labour to gather them in. Following the Roman conquest, on large estates based in flat, low-lying areas, a primitive sort of combine harvester called a _vallus_ was developed. This was an open-topped wooden box or hopper mounted on two wheels, at the front of which was a large spiked comb at the height of the ears of wheat, facing forwards. Pushed from behind by a single ox, the contraption pulled the ears from the stalks so that they fell into the hopper. The _vallus_ is mentioned by Pliny, writing in the first century ad, and \u2013 much later \u2013 by Palladius, a Gallo-Roman agricultural writer of the late fourth century. It even appears carved on the Porte de Mars \u2013 the triumphal arch of Rheims \u2013 and on other fragments of reliefs discovered in Belgium and Germany. Palladius states that the _vallus_ was used where the land was flat, and in places where straw was not considered to be of much value and was, accordingly, left standing uncut in the fields. It was nevertheless a very efficient time \u2013 and labour-saving device: Palladius states that with a single man to guide the ox, the whole of a farm's harvest could be brought in in just a few hours.\n\nThe _vallus_ was not the only Roman labour-saving device to change the face of the Gallic countryside. A little way beyond the sprawling ruins of the Abbaye de Montmajour, north of Arles, a country lane runs off along a concealed ridge of high ground. It passes through olive plantations and scratchy wasteland, given over to brittle sandy grasses relieved by yellow clumps of St John's wort. In the adjoining fields, tractors throw up lingering clouds of smoky dust. Beetles and moths, red, grey and cream, bask on the tarmac. After several miles, amid a scattered group of Aleppo pines and olive trees, a series of white stone arches come into view. On the left-hand side they are lower than the canopy of the trees, and it is only on drawing closer that one can see that the arches cross the road, and continue to its right. The land slopes gently from left to right, so that the arches gain in height as they progress rightwards, though still not overtopping the branches of the olives that run alongside them.\n\nThis sequence of arches is an aqueduct. It has nothing of the height or grandeur of some other examples of the genre, for example the mighty Pont du Gard outside N\u00eemes, which stands nearly 50 metres high as it crosses the River Gard on a construction of threetiered arches \u2013 a monument that Lawrence Durrell summed up as being a perfect specimen of the poetry of function, but also conveying the 'splendid insolent eloquence' of the Roman remains of Provence. The aqueduct here, at a spot known as Barbegal, has little splendid insolence about it. It is certainly a structure that speaks of power; but it keeps itself low beneath the treetops, and even where great pieces of it lie broken and covered with succulents and scrappy grasses, it has an arresting beauty. As its low arches run straight and serene in their precise course through the olive groves, one can indeed appreciate the poetry of its form.\n\nBut of more interest than the form and beauty of the stones is the ingenuity of their structure. Barbegal is not solely an aqueduct: closer inspection reveals that it had a twofold purpose. Further along its length, the ground rises again and reaches the crest of a ridge, a seemingly impassable mass of rock, perhaps nine metres long and well over human height. However, on climbing up into the aqueduct's mortared channel, which carried the water, one realizes that at the point where the aqueduct reaches the ridge, the structure is in fact two closely adjacent aqueducts carrying parallel channels. Here, the two channels separate. One turns abruptly right around a corner, and runs ultimately towards the city of Arles. The other carves a cutting about a metre wide straight through the middle of the limestone ridge. Beyond this chiselled gateway, on the other side of the ridge, the land suddenly falls away. These are the slopes of the hills of La P\u00eane, over 30 metres high, beyond which the yellow-green fields of the Vall\u00e9e des Baux stretch away towards Fontvieille. The water carried by the second channel was thrown down the side of this hill. Among the scrub that clings to the hillside, low jagged walls rise up, marking the course that the water, cascading downwards, would have followed.\n\n_The aqueduct of Barbegal. Its parallel structure can be clearly seen in this photograph._\n\nThe low walls on the hillside are the remains of the largest known watermill in the Roman empire. Excavations of the complex in the 1930s unearthed a series of buildings climbing the side of the hill. These housed sixteen separate water-wheels in eight pairs, each over two metres in diameter. As the water flowed down the hill, it turned each wheel in succession. The wheels were attached by a gear to a basalt millstone, and each of these millstones could be reached by a service staircase which ran the length of the gradient. Having set the wheels in motion, the water was used at the bottom of the hill to irrigate the fields in the Vall\u00e9e des Baux. It has been calculated that the mills of Barbegal would have been able to produce around 4.5 tonnes of flour a day. This would have been sufficient to feed 12,000 people, equivalent to the likely population of Arles during imperial times. Archaeologists used to believe that the mills were built in the late third century ad, when the number of slaves available to carry out the laborious task of milling \u2013 either by hand or with the help of animals \u2013 was declining. It was argued that the Romans only felt compelled to seek such technological advances when the well of free manpower failed them. Yet more recent research has pushed this date back to as early as the second century ad, before any obvious sign of labour shortages in Gaul. It seems that the mill was not built out of desperation, but from a desire to exploit the resources that the local landscape and fields had to offer more efficiently.\n\nIt was also originally thought that the mill of Barbegal was a one-off, and that such large-scale watermills were not to be found elsewhere. However, in 1990 a similar mill was found, albeit on a smaller scale, at Avenches in Switzerland. Since that discovery, more than a dozen sites have been identified across the Gallic territories, some in open country, with a number of them dating back even to the first century AD. Ausonius, in his travels down the Moselle, describes a water mill he saw used for turning millstones and 'driving shrieking saws through blocks of marble'. The sight of labour-saving mills, it seems, would have been not uncommon in the agricultural landscape of Roman Gaul.\n\nFlour was not the only product of the countryside. A basket of _crudit\u00e9s_ culled from a Gallic market garden would be for the most part recognizable to the modern diner. Carrots (usually then white or purple) and cauliflower were grown, not to mention celeriac and apples, garlic and onions, asparagus, cucumbers, lentils and beans. The emperor Tiberius made parsnips fashionable in the first century AD when he agreed to accept part of the tribute owed to him by Germanic tribes in parsnips instead of money. As regards fruit and vegetables, the Gallo-Roman palette was in some respects wider than the modern. Lupin beans were commonly cultivated, along with samphire, Alexanders (a plant whose flavour is halfway between parsley and celery), and the edible young stems of black bryony (poisonous until cooked). Olives had been known since the time of the Greeks, and the lower tear-shaped stone of olive presses, carved with runnels for the juice to flow out, can be seen even in pre-Roman sites.\n\nUncooked black bryony might pose a risk to a Gallic wayfarer. More dangerous, however, were the pigs. Strabo records that Gauls kept these in abundance for their meat (which they ate both fresh and salted), but that they were allowed to run wild. These Gallo-Roman pigs developed into animals of considerable size, speed and boldness. Indeed, it was risky for anyone unfamiliar with their behaviour to approach them; they were as dangerous as wolves. The Romans made their own contribution to the size of farm animals, bringing over larger species of cattle in particular, which were maintained in Gaul until they were abandoned with the collapse of empire. Flocks of sheep were raised in the south; it was perhaps in the Roman era that the custom of transhumance arose, in which flocks wintered in the lowlands but were taken to the highlands for summer. The Roman legions on the Rhine certainly became dependent on the flocks for their wool; several factories were set up to process the fleeces for military use. But they were also out to domestic use. Pliny records that the stuffing of mattresses with wool was a Gallo-Roman invention, and that flax grown around Cahors was valued for the same purpose.\n\n_The reconstructed Roman winepress at Mas des Tourelles._\n\nAnd then there was the wine. In the countryside near the Via Domitia outside Beaucaire, the fields are rich with vines. They stand in orderly rows, their clipped tendrils trained along low-hanging parallel wires that run the length of desiccated fields. At the end of summer, when the sunflowers in the neighbouring fields hang their heads, petalless and black, and the wayside foliage is beige with dust, it is the very presence of the vines that offers the hope of relief from a long day's walking in the Proven\u00e7al heat.\n\nOne of the vineyards, on a plain that slopes gently to the south, is somewhat unlike the others. At its heart is a seventeenth-century farmhouse whose elegant courtyard, with green shutters and flowering trees in tubs, offers the welcome prospect of shade for the traveller. So much is not unusual. But the vines nearby are dressed differently from the norm. They do not trail along long wires, but rather hang from high trellises like great veils, their fat stems twisting around the straight wooden pillars of the framework. This cultivation method is not of the present age, but Roman. The whole scene would have been familiar to the ancient writers on agriculture \u2013 Columella, Pliny the Elder or Paulinus. It is even possible that they drank a vintage grown at this very spot.\n\nThe farmhouse and its domain are called the Mas des Tourelles.\u00b6 They stand on the site of an old Roman villa and vineyard. It was first identified as such early in the twentieth century, with finds of amphorae, roof tiles and vases near the surface of the fields. Later excavations revealed a villa complex spreading over about three hectares. The villa was established not long after the conquest in the early Augustan period, and was in operation until at least the fifth century AD. It possessed all the normal appurtenances of the villa \u2013 housing for the master's family and its dependants, and agricultural buildings. Notably, on top of this, there was a pottery workshop. It was a significant affair, containing a huge kiln several metres across that was capable of firing up to 2,000 amphorae at a time. Some of the amphorae manufactured here and later rediscovered are still kept in a storeroom in the modern farmhouse. The large numbers of amphorae suggests that this place was significant for wine production. Such amphorae were signed or stamped to identify the producer and the variety of wine, similar to a modern label. Close to the town of Carpentras on the Rh\u00f4ne, it would have been in a good position to sell to other cities on the river and even to consumers further afield.\n\nSince the rediscovery of its Roman past, the Mas has been dedicated as a centre of research into Roman techniques of viticulture, with attempts being made to recreate Roman wines using Roman methods of production. Of these, some things cannot be known. Vines were probably first introduced into Gaul by the Greeks, but it is likely they did not spread far from the Mediterranean shore before Roman times. It appears, however, that following the conquest, the culture of the vine began to make deep and lasting inroads into the Gallic provinces. Archaeological evidence suggests that vine cultivation begin to appear throughout the south from the second half of the first century BC, with plantation pits, winepresses, amphorae and pottery workshops becoming widespread. By the first century AD it had spread across the provinces of Narbonne and Aquitaine, as well as the regions of modern-day Burgundy, the Loire valley and even the Parisian basin.\n\nImports of wine from Italy went into decline in the late first century AD. The emperor Domitian even tried to put a limit on vine cultivation in Gaul to prevent competition with the Italian vintages, but his edicts were ignored. By the third century, perhaps prompted by the development of Trier as an imperial city, vineyards began to appear towards the northeast, around the Rhine, Alsace and the Moselle. By this stage, the vine had spread to the areas in which it would continue to flourish up to the modern age.\n\nDespite the wide and early extent of vine cultivation across Gaul, we do not have detailed knowledge of the varieties of grape that were grown. Their names were preserved by the ancient authors; one of the best varieties, Amineum, originated from Greece and was widely popular. There were also local varieties: Biturica, grown predominantly in Aquitaine, and Allobrogica, grown around Vienne. Yet, although these names are known, and traces of Roman vine stocks and even seeds have been discovered, these are not sufficient to reveal the modern equivalents of the ancient varieties. So much has to be down to guesswork.\n\n_Outside the Mas des Tourelles._\n\nNevertheless, we know a great deal about the techniques of vine cultivation used in Roman Gaul. The ripe grapes were cut from the vines with pruning hooks, and thrown into great concrete-sided tanks, such as have been reconstructed at Mas des Tourelles. Ropes were hung from the ceiling above the tanks, and the farm workers would cling tightly to these while pressing out the grapes with their feet. Mosaics even show them doing this in time to the playing of a flute. The grapes were then thrown into a neighbouring winepress \u2013 a large square wooden box made of slats to allow the juice to flow out. A huge tree-trunk, weighing several tonnes and hanging horizontally above, forced a board downwards into the box by means of a winch and pulleys (again, these have been reconstructed at Mas des Tourelles). The juice ran from the box along gulleys to be collected in _dolia_ \u2013 large clay pots that are two-thirds buried in the ground. This could be a long process. Some vineyards were able to fill around 2,000 _dolia_ from a single _vendage,_ equivalent to 300,000 modern bottles. When the _dolia_ were filled, the juice was left to ferment, frequently with the addition of herbs and spices.\n\nIt is the inclusion of these ingredients that creates a wine contrary to all my expectations. Three varieties are produced at the Mas. The first wine brought out for tasting is a red wine called Muslum. It is served chilled, and it manages to combine a certain lightness with a richness that tells of the cinnamon, pepper, thyme and honey that have been added to it. Turriculae, a white wine, is a sharp contrast, being dry and astringent. Its extra ingredients, as described by Columella, are fenugreek and seawater. The third, Carenum, follows a recipe by the fourth-century writer Palladius; it is deep amber in colour, its flavour enhanced with quinces and boiled grape juice to create a wine of fine and sweetly glutinous quality.\n\nThese are nothing like the smooth vintages one would expect after many years' reading of Horace with his Falernian or Caecubian wines, and certainly far removed from Keats's blushful Hippocrene. Their tastes are complex, intense and exotic, almost as if it were an impossibility that the land in that age could give rise to flavours so strange. But not every Gallic wine was pleasing to the palate. Martial wrote an epigram condemning a character, Munna, for sending wines from Massalia 'by sea and length of road' that were not only 'dire poisons' but also at prices more appropriate to the most expensive labels. 'I think you've been so long in Rome so that you can avoid drinking your own wines,' he observes tartly.\n\n* Cadastral maps show the divisions, ownership and value of land, particularly for taxation purposes.\n\n\u2020 Latin nouns are divided into five basic types, or declensions.\n\n\u2021 This brings to mind the famous 'Bikini Girls' of the fourth-century Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily, of which Sidonius would no doubt have disapproved!\n\n\u00a7 A place in Sicily, probably modern-day Ibla in Ragusa, famed in the ancient world for the quality of its honey.\n\n\u00b6 The word _mas_ denotes a farmstead in the Proven\u00e7al language. It originates from the Late Latin _mansum_ ('dwelling place') and is linked to the words 'manor' and 'mansion.\n\n_Funerary relief of a coppersmith named Bellicus, second century AD._\nCHAPTER VIII\n\nThe Dignity of Labour\n\n_Nam plebes paene servorum habetur loco_  \n'As for the common folk, they are treated almost as slaves'\n\nJULIUS CAESAR, _De Bello Gallico,_ VI.13\n\nLES ALYSCAMPS\n\n\u2022\n\nLA CHAPELLE DE LA GENOUILLADE\n\n\u2022\n\nBUILDERS\n\n\u2022\n\nMARINERS\n\n\u2022\n\nMERCHANTS\n\n\u2022\n\nCRAFTSMEN\n\n\u2022\n\nSHAMPOO-MAKERS\n\n\u2022\n\nGLASS-BLOWERS\n\n\u2022\n\nFLOWER-SELLERS\n\n\u2022\n\nGLADIATORS\n\n\u2022\n\nSOLDIERS\n\n\u2022\n\nSLAVES\n\nTO THE SOUTH OF THE ROMAN WALLS of Arles lie the old burial grounds known as Les Alyscamps. Roman custom forbade the burial of people within the walls of any city, an area that was believed to be a sacred space. Thus the tombs and monuments of the dead accumulated just outside Roman cities. The burial ground of Arles sprang up by the side of the Aurelian Way* which fed via a gate into the city's main street, the _cardo._ Graves were usually positioned along the roadside in the hope that passers-by might pay them some respectful attention. But the Alyscamps later became the grandest and most reputed burial ground in the whole of Gaul.\n\nThe name Alyscamps comes from pagan myth. It derives from the phrase _Campi Elysii,_ the Elysian Fields where the virtuous dead would serenely disport themselves in the classical afterlife. The Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es in Paris owes its name to the same origin, but Arles's Elysian Fields are more aptly named, since \u2013 unlike the Parisian version, which is dedicated to the pursuit of life \u2013 it is a necropolis populated by the shades of the dead.\n\nHowever, it was a Christian legend that gave the Alyscamps its grandeur and fame. The body of St Genesius, a lawyer who was martyred at the beginning of the fourth century ad, was buried in the cemetery. Christ himself is said to have miraculously presided at the funeral. Kneeling in prayer, his genuflexion left its imprint in a rock, giving a Christian imprimatur to a pagan burial ground. Soon the body of St Trophimus, the first bishop of Arles, was also interred here. In a case of mistaken identity, Trophimus was confused with one of the early Christian converts mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, the Trophimus who accompanied St Paul to Jerusalem. As a result, the Alyscamps became one of the most sought-after Christian burial places in western Europe. With the decline of the city after the end of imperial Roman rule, the Alyscamps set the tone for the wider perception of Arles as a city of the dead. Burial was its leading industry. It was said that it was sufficient for a body in a coffin (along with a few coins for the expenses) to be placed anywhere upstream on the Rh\u00f4ne, and it would drift safely down to Arles for burial, coming to rest at the promontory of La Roquette. There, monks from the Church of Saint Honorat\u2020 would take it up and see to the funeral rites.\n\nHence the Alyscamps grew without restraint, both in size and in literary reputation. Dante evokes the vast rows of tombs to portray a scene in the _Inferno._ Ariosto makes it the last resting place in _Orlando Furioso_ for the fallen companions of the semi-legendary Carolingian hero Roland, who perished fighting the pagan Saracens at Roncesvalles. Later in the Middle Ages, the tombs became a moveable asset. Visiting potentates and members of the French royal family would be presented with an example of the more finely carved of the Roman tombs. King Charles IX of France helped himself so greedily to the Roman relics on offer that his overloaded ship sank in the Rh\u00f4ne. Precious pieces of the classical heritage of Arles were dispersed in royal collections across France and even in European palaces beyond its borders.\n\nThe Arl\u00e9siens' heedlessness for their ancient legacy went far beyond the dispersal of their finest examples of Roman funerary sculpture. It touched the land as well. In the 1550s, the burial ground was first disturbed by the construction of a canal, intended to assist in the irrigation of the Crau. Once the precedent for desecration was set, it was impossible to arrest. In the nineteenth century, large tracts of the Alyscamps were sold off to the Paris-Lyons-M\u00e9diterran\u00e9e Compagnie des Chemins de Fer. The burial ground was split asunder by railway lines and occupied by warehouses, workshops and goods yards. Contemporary observers reported Roman sarcophagi being carted off by farmers for use as drinking troughs for cattle, or cut up for building blocks. The land, honeycombed three levels deep with tombs and interments, was scooped away for railway cuttings or levelled out for development. By the end of the century, all that was left was a small island for La Chapelle de la Genouillade ('Chapel of the Kneeling'), marking the spot where Christ had appeared, and a narrow sliver of the original fields, the All\u00e9e des Alyscamps, lined with an avenue of trees and a trail of the plainest of the sarcophagi, by then empty, which terminated in the half-ruined chapel of Saint Honorat. Even in this state of decline, the Alyscamps still had an inextinguishable allure. Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin both went there frequently to paint, absorbing the sense of the numinous that pervades the place even now, despite the centuries of damage. Van Gogh wrote to his brother Th\u00e9o describing the avenue of poplars, and in particular his delight in the bluish-lilac colour of the remaining Roman tombs against the carpet of fallen leaves in orange and yellow, and how the leaves with these vivid colours continued to fall like flurries of snow.\n\n_View of the Alyscamps by the Church of Saint Honorat, Arles._\n\nStrangely, the significance of the pagan and Roman Alyscamps and its remains is most fully felt in the Christian Chapelle de la Genouillade. This ancient structure is a quarter of an hour's walk from the All\u00e9e des Alyscamps. One crosses back over the canal, past a children's nursery, an old people's home and a line of shops on the main road which passes along the city walls. The route then leads over a railway bridge, around a bend in the road and into a functional landscape of pylons, cranes, goods yards and modern flats. The bridge, lined with a crash-barrier, gives way briefly to an old stone wall and a tiny area of green grass in which the chapel sits.\n\nThe chapel seems hardly bigger than a camper van. It is abandoned, locked, forgotten. There is not a hint of care or veneration. Its carved stone doorway flanked with stone piers and Corinthian capitals is so gouged and rutted as to be quite asymmetrical. There is no wooden door, as one would expect, but a metal one like those found in prisons; it is painted in battleship grey, scratched, rusted and slightly marked with listless, faded graffiti. There is no glass in its windows. A metal grille and chicken-wire leave the interior open to the elements. Some of the wire is bent back, allowing a better view of the interior. There is little to see. An altar, partly built into the wall of the apse, a pair of angular unornamented wooden candelabra, and a couple of other shards of unidentifiable debris lie haphazardly on the flagstones. Around, the grass is uncut, and would be waist height if it had it not yellowed in the heat and wilted.\n\nRegardless of the truth of the legend, it is pleasing to think of Christ's appearance here in a back-end dump of the city, surrounded by suburban roads, railway lines and kebab wrappers. Like a poet, his visitation brings an obtuse sanctification to something utterly ordinary. But it did not need a visitation from Christ for the Romans to grasp the significance of the Alyscamps. Since the earliest times of Roman colonization, this and other burial grounds \u2013 albeit less favoured by legend \u2013 were a sanctification, or better to say, a celebration of the ordinary business of ordinary people. The Roman presence increased the diversity of the lives that people led, and \u2013 sometimes even for those as lowly as slaves \u2013 celebrated their lives and doings in the monuments they left to dignify their ends.\n\n_The much neglected and decayed fa\u00e7ade of the Chapelle de la Genouillade on an isolated fragment of the Alyscamps, Arles._\n\nMany of the inscriptions on the sarcophagi and _cippi_ (rectangular grave markers) offer no more than a few abbreviated words. However, a number of them are much more informative, offering a clear perspective into the life and work of the departed. Here, for instance, are the words of a memorial to one Quintus Candidus Benignus:\n\nMaster builder of the Arles guild: he had absolute mastery of the craft of building, as well as dedication, knowledge and discretion. Great craftsmen declared him on every occasion to be a master; no-one else was skilful enough to possess such an accolade; nobody could defeat him; he knew how to make machines to direct the flow of the waters; here he was a welcome guest; he knew how to cherish his friends with sensibility and eagerness; he himself was good-natured and kind-spirited. To her sweetest father, this monument has been raised by Candidia Quintina, his daughter, and to her dearest husband, by Valeria Maxima.\n\nThe date of this monument is not known, but it probably belongs to the first or second century AD. Regardless of its exact date, it shows from another angle how the Gauls began to accord prestige to different things. As with the nobility, who now had careers in public office and the chance to display their wealth in the creation of public buildings, the lower classes in Gaul could win their own esteem by the pursuit of trade. Quintus Candidus Benignus was worthy of respect not for his skill in battle nor for being the retainer of a chief, but because no one could match him for knowledge of his craft.\n\nIt is not that pre-Roman Gaul lacked trades or craftsmen. However, with the advances that Rome brought, it was increasingly the case that the lives and skills of tradesmen and artisans were worthy of memorialization. Caesar commented that Gauls who did not fall into the priestly or warrior classes were considered little better than slaves. Now, a builder, thanks to his ability to make machines that could direct the flow of water, deserved to be remembered for all time.\n\nThe range of trades practised appears to have increased following the conquest. In Arles alone there are records of the men who crewed sea-going vessels, carpenters, the _utricularii_ (who carried goods along the Rh\u00f4ne on rafts buoyed up with inflated animal hides), the _lenuncularii_ (operators of larger boats equipped with oars), the _centonarii_ (rag-traders), and _lapidarii_ (jewellers). A previously unknown group called the _partiari_ have recently been discovered. The nature of their work is unknown, but they raised a memorial to someone named Hermia bearing the picture of a ship, suggesting that their trade had maritime associations.\n\nMany of the trades listed above arranged themselves into guilds. These were not monopolies, as was the case with their medieval successors, nor was membership of these guilds compulsory for those who wished to practise the trades that they represented. Their main concern appears to have been the welfare of their members. They seem to have operated more as clubs, and remnants of their clubhouses have been found on the sites of Gallic cities. Some of the guilds appear to have worked closely with government officials to pursue their trade or even to carry out government contracts. Such connections brought prestige both to the guild as well as to the officials. For example, at the end of the second century AD the seafarers of Arles raised a monument to one Caius Cominius, an official who was responsible for the _annona,_ or grain supply. They declared him to be their patron, a man who was 'excellent and irreproachable'. Thus, the guild was able to share the respect that was owed to their patron as a member of the governing classes.\n\nBeyond Arles, many more guilds and types of trade have been attested. In Lugdunum, there stands a _cippus_ (a small inscribed stone) to 'the eternal memory of Septimus Julianus' who was a _saponarius,_ a tradesman in cosmetics. Pliny notes that Gaul was responsible for the invention of _sapo,_ which is sometimes translated as 'soap' and is the origin of the modern word, but is better interpreted as 'pomade' \u2013 a substance, Pliny wrote, used to make hair shinier and blonder. One of Julianus's colleagues from Lugdunum was Pisonius Asclepiodotus, an _ungentarius,_ or perfume-seller. The name of his wife Severa Severia, with whom he lived for thirty-five years 'without any injury of the spirit', is equally prominent on his tomb inscription. The perfume trade did well for his family: Pisonius and Severa became respectively a priest and priestess of the cult of Augustus.\n\nThe traders of Gaul catered to every delicacy and luxury. For a civilized dinner, one might acquire the foodstuffs handled by Gaius Sentius Regulianus. His epitaph describes him as trading olive oil from southern Spain and Gaul from his office in Lugdunum; he also traded in wine out of Lugdunum, captained a ship on the Sa\u00f4ne, was patron of the guild of wine merchants, as well as of the guild of the captains of the ships and a patron of the priests of the imperial cult. On top of this, he accumulated the wealth to become an _eques,_ or member of the order of knights.\n\nJulius Alexander \u2013 'African by birth, a citizen of Carthage, the best of men, a master glassmaker' \u2013 would have provided drinking vessels in which to pour the wine bought from Regulianus. As well as evincing pride in his origins, Julius's memorial is particularly precise about his dates \u2013 he lived 'seventy-five years, five months and thirteen days', was married to his wife ('a virgin when they married') for forty-eight years, and had four children. His Carthaginian background is telling, since glassmaking technology is known to have been more advanced in North Africa than elsewhere in the empire.\n\nThe imposition of the _Pax Romana_ allowed tradesmen to move freely and relatively easily around the Roman world, taking their knowledge and skills with them. Inscriptions across Gaul, and in Lugdunum in particular, record the movement and resettlement of people, some of them tradesmen, both to and from Gaul and across the empire. In Arles, a Greek doctor named Dionysius was given a fitting burial by a grateful local student, Julius Hermes; Constantius Aequalis, 'decorator of parade armour and cloth of gold' and a priest of Augustus at the shrine of Lugdunum, was originally a citizen of the Syrian town of Germanicia. In other cases, Gallic officials travelled to the Syrian and Palestinian provinces to fill positions in the magistracy; moving in the other direction, demobilized soldiers who had served in Pannonia and elsewhere on the Danube settled in Gaul. Alexander the glassmaker might well have been a pioneer, bringing new techniques or seizing the opportunity to set up a new atelier where a gap presented itself in the market. Six glass bottles, four glass bowls, two glass cups and a glass hair-pin, in perfect condition, were found buried with him. They were almost certainly his own work, and thus constitute the only glassware surviving from the ancient world that can be attributed to a specific maker.\n\nThere were also sellers of tableware to go with the glasses. Vitalinus Felix was a veteran of the 1st Legion, which was nicknamed 'Minervia' and spent most of its time on active service on the frontier in Lower Germania. Following his demobilization, Felix went into business. He lived fifty-nine years, says his epitaph; he was born on a Tuesday, enlisted in the army on a Tuesday, was honourably discharged from his legion on a Tuesday, and died on a Tuesday.\n\nFor the finishing touch to a feast or else as a token of affection, it was possible to enlist the services of a flower-seller. One woman engaged in the trade at N\u00eemes is recorded in a carving, sitting behind the counter of her shop and holding one of her garlands. Above her is a motto which acted as much as a mark of distinction to her customers as to herself \u2013 _non vendo nisi amantibus coronas_ \u2013 'I do not sell garlands, except to lovers.'\n\nNot only the more delicate or refined trades merited a memorial for their workers. Trades involving hard manual labour are also mentioned in inscriptions, both on tombstones and in other dedications. By the marble quarry of Saint B\u00e9at in Haute-Garonne, four master stonecutters from the works made a sacrifice to the god Silvanus on behalf of themselves and their colleagues. The event warranted the record of their names: Serverus, Natalis, Martialis and Sintus. Likewise, in the gallery of a lead mine below ground at Bastide-l'\u00c9v\u00eaque in the Aveyron, the miners \u2013 perhaps slaves \u2013 placed a short inscription in memory of their 'overseer and master' Zmaragdus. In Sens, a grave marker is carved with the portrait of Bellicus, a blacksmith. He stands in his forge, surrounded by the tools of his trade \u2013 curved rods and pincers \u2013 clutching an ingot, which he is hammering into a knife blade on an anvil. Here, it is not just the trade itself that is memorialized and dignified, but the physical activity associated with it.\n\nSoldiers likewise had individual memorials. It was perhaps only some two thousand years later, in the era of the First World War, that similar regard was paid to commemorating the lives of soldiers, whether they fell in active service or otherwise. Sometimes grand careers would be recorded \u2013 centurion, military tribune, legate. But equally worthy of remembrance was the non-Roman from outside Gaul who had gained citizenship and settled as a veteran in Gaul. At Arles, Titus Carsius Certinus was laid to rest sometime in the second century ad: 'Veteran of the 20th Legion (Valeria Victrix) \u2013 Carsia, his daughter, to her most virtuous father.'\n\n_Mosaic depicting the pleasures of the table, from St-Romain-en-Gal, second century AD._\n\nEven the very lowest in society might leave their names and a trace of their lives behind. Many of the gladiators who fought in the amphitheatres at Arles and N\u00eemes are known from more than the admiring graffiti of their supporters. If they had the bad luck to perish in the arena, they could be buried with dignity and a memorial. At N\u00eemes, a small stone for Beryllus: 'Fought twenty times, Greek by nationality, lived twenty-five years. Nomas, his wife, made this for her well-deserving husband.' At Arles, one Marcus Julius Olympus, leader of a troupe of gladiators, set up an inscription to one of the favourite members of his team, Lucius Granius from Rome 'on account of the great merit of his victorious grandfather'. Olympus himself, who, socially speaking, would have been regarded as little better than a pimp, attempted to dignify himself with the title _negotiator familiae gladiatoriae_ \u2013 'business manager' of the gladiatorial group. Actors also, though as a social class beneath contempt, might advertise their profession: 'Primigenus, actor from the company of Eudoxus' was buried on the Alyscamps, a short walk from the theatre of Arles where he would have performed his unknown roles.\n\nEven the identities of humble agricultural workers are recorded. The name of Publius Brittius Saturninus, a sheep-shearer, is crudely chiselled into a stone, the letters picked out in red paint, with a picture of his shears laid down in disuse beneath. Likewise the vine-dresser Vallonus, 'excellent brother to Quartina', remembered only in those words and in a picture of his pruning hook. Even an ex-slave and cattle breeder was dear enough to his former master to merit a long metrical inscription above a chiselled bucolic scene of a shepherd with his sheep beneath a tree, its quiet mood curiously at odds with the grim story of murder that it records:\n\nIucundus, freedman of Marcus Terentius. All you travellers who pass by, stop and read how I, snatched away unjustly, complain indignantly that I was not able to live for more than thirty years. For a slave took away my life from me and then threw himself headlong into the River Main. The river took from him what he took from his master. Terentius erected this memorial at his own expense.\n\nIt was not necessary, to have a craft or a particular story to boast of on one's gravestone. Simple affection deserved to be recorded in a few simple words: _'Zosimus Matri Pientissumae'_ \u2013 Zosimus to his most affectionate mother; 'Lucius Aponius Severianus, died aged four months nine days'; ' _Symmacho Alexandria Victoria Tatae'_ \u2013 Alexandria Victoria for her papa, Symmachus.\n\nThose who could not afford to make themselves known to the wider world with fine inscriptions in marble or limestone sometimes had other ways of entrusting their names to posterity. In workshops, particularly near the River Allier, small clay figurines of animals \u2013 for example dogs and monkeys \u2013 were signed with the names of their makers: 'Ritogeno', 'Priscus', or 'Rextugenos'. Pots and drinking vessels might in some instances be stamped with the name of a workshop \u2013 for example 'OFBASI', short for _Officinum Bassi,_ 'workshop of Bassus' \u2013 but in others with the name of the individual potter: 'PATERNIF' records the work of Paternus ('Paternus fecit') while 'ATTICIM' is short for 'from the hand of Atticus' ( _Attici manus_ ).\n\nThe humblest of trades might also be memorialized via representation in the artistic commissions of the better-off. Thus, in a mosaic of St-Romain-en-Gal opposite Vienne, the hard rustic labour of every season is recorded in a pictorial agricultural calendar: grafting of the trees at springtime; the collection of wood in the summer; the harvesting of apples, grapes and olives in the autumn; the sowing of beans, the milling of grain and the weaving of baskets in the winter. In reliefs for funereal and other monuments the shoemaker hammers at his last, carpenters saw logs and toil with the axe and the plane, the carter rolls barrels (a Gallic invention) onto his cart, and even the fuller wearily treads his bolts of raw material in his tanks full of urine and watery clay. These Gallo-Romans may have remained mute, but they did not remain inglorious.\n\n_Tombstone of a vine dresser, N\u00eemes. The tombstone, dedicated by 'Vallona to the soul of her excellent brother Vallonus', is decorated with the vine-pruning hook, the tool of his trade._\n\nThese traces of Gallo-Roman working lives are testament not only to the rise of the artisanal life under Roman rule, but also to the increased _quality_ of life that these developments brought \u2013 not just for the artisans themselves, but for the poorer members of society. The oak-bottomed barges that plied the great trading route of the Rh\u00f4ne, for example, were more than 30 metres long. The sailors who guided them along the river did not live on hard tack or freeze to death in the winter; boats recovered from the depths of the Rh\u00f4ne have revealed specialized galleys built for their comfort. They were equipped not only with cauldrons and mortars, plates and bowls, but also with ingenious lead stoves for cooking and warmth, which were themselves water-cooled to prevent overheating and to stop the lead from melting. The cargoes that they carried, which have also been recovered, show the boon that their labour and that of other artisans brought. There were amphorae of _garum_ (fermented fish sauce), salted fish, meats, wine and olive oil; limestone and marble for building and lead ingots for water-pipes; bars of iron, copper and tin. From the giant ceramic works at La Graufesenque in the Aveyron, which covered many hectares, as well as other workshops, the beautiful red glossy pottery known as Samian ware was exported over the whole of Gaul and further afield into Britain and around the Mediterranean; the rise of Gallic production after the conquest even forced the Italian producers into decline. Samian ware had once been regarded as a luxury item \u2013 as fit to grace a Roman table as dishes made of metal. With the Roman conquest, however, Samian pottery was produced in Gaul in vast quantities and became available to even the humblest home.\n\nSimple material trinketry became far more widely available with the presence of Rome: not just crockery and plates, glass vases and vials of perfume, kitchen equipment, weighing scales, but also tools, stone and clay figurines, charms, ex-votos, keys, hinges for doors and chests, jewellery, finely crafted hairpins, medical equipment such as lances and tweezers (which might, as inscriptions show, have been administered by professional female doctors and not just male ones). The very bread that people ate could be of extraordinarily high quality. Pliny remarks that in Gaul the bakers used sieves made of horsehair to ensure a bread that rose easily, and that they used yeast gathered from the froth of beer to make the bread light and with an agreeable flavour. The discovery of a well-preserved Gallo-Roman bakery attached to a house in Amiens dating to the end of the second century AD proves Pliny's point: the level of skill and knowledge of such Gallo-Roman artisans was great, and the product they made was particularly fine. The bakery was kitted out with sieves and traces of linen baskets in which the bread was placed to leaven. Bread from every stage of the process had been preserved: wheat and barley ready to be ground, flour, bread in the midst of rising, as well as fragments of baked bread still sitting in the oven. Analysis of the remnants of the bread showed it to be finely milled rye mixed with ordinary wheat flour, enhanced with fat or oil: a sophisticated concoction that might nowadays be bought in an artisanal bakery.\n\n_Bas-relief from a tomb of two men packing merchandise for shipment by boat, dating to the third century AD, displayed in the Arles Museum._\n\nThe growing wealth and prosperity brought by the Roman empire was by no means evenly spread. This was a thoroughly unequal society: the descendants of Gallic nobles, now in Roman guise, might luxuriate in grand town houses or elegant villas at the head of great estates, but many still lived close to subsistence level on rural plots, as bondmen or slaves, in lives untouched by the development of Roman towns and Roman amusements. The Roman presence, as we have seen, had been bought at vast human cost: death, violence and social dislocation on an epic scale; the usurpation of identities; and the disruption and extinction of ancient cultures. Nevertheless, the conquest led to an age of comparative peace, which, it appears, had not been known before in the discernible history of Gaul. To those who had much, much was given; but even the less well-off would benefit from this long period of stability, enjoying work, freedom of movement, and access to a quality of life that before had only been open to the highest. There was wine for the masses, fine bread and elegant crockery, all to be enjoyed if not in sprawling villas, at least in an environment of order and tranquillity. There was also the notion that there was dignity in the everyday doings of people; it is from this age that numbers of ordinary people in Gaul began to leave their mark. In the ancient world, this was an extraordinary and rare achievement.\n\nFor even the lowly of Gaul, there is still much to be said for the judgement of Edward Gibbon on the second century ad:\n\nIf a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom.\n\n* The Aurelian Way originally linked Rome and Genoa, but after AD 275 was extended as far as Arles via Nice and Aix-en-Provence.\n\n\u2020 Named after a fifth-century bishop of Arles, Honoratus.\n\n_The Porte d'Arroux, a Roman gateway at the northern end of the_ cardo maximus _in Autun, dating to the end of the third century AD. Its arches inspired architects building the Benedictine Abbey of Cluny in the twelfth century._\nCHAPTER IX\n\nIn Their Own Words\n\n_summae genus sollertiae_  \n'A nation possessed of remarkable ingenuity'\n\nJULIUS CAESAR, _De Bello Gallico,_ VII.22\n\nJEAN, DUC DES ESSEINTES\n\n\u2022\n\nLATE LATIN: THE 'ROTTED CORPSE'\n\n\u2022\n\nSCHOOLS OF MARSEILLES\n\n\u2022\n\nAUTUN\n\n\u2022\n\nTHE MAENIANAE\n\n\u2022\n\nGREEK WISDOM\n\n\u2022\n\nAUSONIUS\n\n\u2022\n\nBORDEAUX\n\n\u2022\n\nA TEACHER'S LIFE\n\n\u2022\n\n'THE DOINGS OF A WHOLE DAY'\n\n\u2022\n\nPOEMS OF LOVE AND LOSS\n\n\u2022\n\nTHE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS\n\nTHE MOST DANGEROUS BOOK in French literature \u2013 or at any rate dangerous to impressionable and sensitive young minds \u2013 is A _Rebours,_ or _Against Nature,_ by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Published in 1884, it stood against the tide of naturalism in contemporary prose fiction, becoming in itself a manifesto for fin-de-si\u00e8cle aesthetes and the Decadent Movement.\n\nThe hero is Jean, duc des Esseintes. He is the last in the line of an ancient and noble family, worn out by generations of inbreeding and the demands of aristocratic life. An only child, he is brought up in the gloomy ancestral seat in the vicinity of Paris, the Chateau des Lourps. His distant parents send him to a Jesuit school, but he refuses to engage in any education that would fit him for employment and ordinary life, and his teachers leave him to indulge his own recondite tastes in French and Latin literature. When he leaves school, he grows weary with Parisian society, finding no companions who share his intellectual tastes. Those he encounters are either 'submissive believers' or 'rapacious and insolent puritans whose breeding he considered inferior to the neighbourhood bootmaker'. He tries to restrain his growing contempt for all humanity by engaging in a passion for debauchery, as one who is 'beset by pangs of desire yet whose palate rapidly grows dull and surfeited'. But this is without success, and after indulging in every possible coupling from the aristocratic to the 'dregs of society', he holds a funeral feast to mark his final collapse into impotence.\n\nTo mollify his ever-increasing hypersensitivity, des Esseintes finally decides to go into a permanent retreat where he can devote himself to the untrammelled pursuit of aesthetic pleasures and a life of 'studious ineffectiveness'. He sells the remains of his family estate, buys a house on the far outskirts of Paris, and decorates it to suit 'the requirements of his future solitude'. His walls are covered, like bound books, in morocco leather; the domed ceiling is painted in febrile orange and royal blue. His furniture includes ancient reliquaries with copies of Baudelaire's poems hand-copied on vellum and illuminated like a medieval prayer book. His bedroom is decorated like a monastic cell, but with the most expensive possible materials: saffron-coloured silk to imitate stucco, and white silk on the floor to counterfeit bare plaster. There are instruments with which he can generate new scents for perfumes and liquors, and, best of all, a tortoise whose shell he had had gilded and set with rare gemstones: chrysoberyls, azurite and sapphirines.\n\nIt is not only des Esseintes's taste in d\u00e9cor or notions of animal welfare that are so arresting. His preferences in Latin literature are equally revolutionary. For him, there is no merit or pleasure to be had in the classic authors of the 'Golden Age' such as were propounded at the Sorbonne, not to mention in the traditional curricula of other universities and schools of Europe. Virgil's _Aeneid_ is an 'indescribable inanity'; his Latin hexameter verses have a 'tinny hollow ring'. Horace is loathsome, the 'prattlings of an insufferable bungler as he archly tells off-colour stories worthy of a senescent, white-plastered clown'. Cicero is 'ponderous density'. Caesar himself has 'a martinet's aridity, a sterile log-book style, an incredible, uncalled-for costiveness'. Livy is 'sentimental and pompous', Seneca 'turgid and lack-lustre'.*\n\nIt is only in the period of so-called Silver Latin, after the first century AD \u2013 an age held by common consent to herald the Latin literary decline \u2013 that des Esseintes begins to take pleasure in the corpus of Latin literature. The novelists Petronius and Apuleius delight him. However, it is not until the fourth century, when the Latin language begins to acquire a 'gamey redolence' that his interest becomes deeper. It is a redolence that 'the odour of Christianity imparted to the language of pagan Rome, which decomposed like venison, falling apart' as 'the Ancient World crumbled into dust'.\n\nMany of the poets to which des Esseintes keeps returning are products of, or associated with, late Roman Gaul. There is Claudian, in whom paganism 'lived again, sounding its final fanfare, raising up its last great poet high above Christianity'; Ausonius and Rutilius, writing of their journeys across the late empire, describing the quality of landscapes reflected in water, the mirages of mists and the swirling of fog around the mountain tops. Into the fifth century \u2013 with Paulinus of Nola, Ausonius' pupil, the letter-writing Sidonius, and the Christian poet (and grandson of Ausonius), Paulinus of Pella \u2013 des Esseintes's 'interest in the Latin language remained undiminished, now that it hung like a completely rotted corpse, its limbs falling off, dripping with pus, barely a few firm parts, which the Christians took away to steep in the brine of their new idiom'.\n\nA number of these authors, particularly Ausonius and Sidonius, would have been horrified to learn of des Esseintes's reasons for enjoying their works, not to mention his judgements on Virgil, Cicero and Horace. They would have seen themselves not as decadent, but as the careful yet vigorous defenders of a tradition of Roman education and Latin literature that reached back in Gaul to the time of the conquest. One may choose to like these authors for the reasons given by des Esseintes \u2013 if indeed, his judgement of the decayed state of their Latinity is sound \u2013 but regardless of this, his preference for these authors over the classical staples of Virgil and Cicero, and indeed the fact that he gives them such limelight at all, deserves to be celebrated. In some ways, the lives of a number of these authors, withdrawing into a hypersensitive aristocratic gloom in the face of a decline in central Roman power and order, simply mirrors des Esseintes's escape from the vulgarity of modern life. Yet they deserve more attention than they customarily receive, in that they are a reflection of wider life in Roman Gaul, not only of their own time but also of the eras that preceded them. They embody not only one of the great reasons for the long-standing success of Rome, but also stand as a waypoint towards literary traditions that would come after them. So they deserve their space on the bookshelves of des Esseintes, not to mention our own, even if we do not possess the morocco-leather-bound walls and the gilded tortoise to go with them.\n\nThe Romano-Gallic authors on des Esseintes's shelves were born out of a tradition of education. It was in Massalia \u2013 a Greek city \u2013 that this Gallic tradition of Roman education and letters, along with many other things, began. Strabo suggests that following its submission to Caesar in 49 BC the city's energies, which were previously engaged in navigation and commerce, were turned towards erudition. In all likelihood, however, Massalia possessed good education facilities long before this point. It was a melting pot of Gallic, Greek and Latin culture, in which ideas from all three traditions were present, but Greek appeared to predominate. Various writers give accounts of the higher branches of study that could be pursued there \u2013 astronomy and mathematics, rhetoric and natural philosophy. An edition of Homer was collated in the city in the third century BC, and the natural philosopher Euthymenes speculates on the causes of the flooding of the Nile. Ammianus Marcellinus, a historian of the fourth century ad, claims that these higher studies at Massalia did not derive their impetus merely from the Greek presence, but also drew on native Druidic traditions. The availability of these high-level studies in the city was more than enough to bring in an audience for the many teachers who had set up there in business. Many local Gauls were attracted simply by the prospect of learning the Greek language, which they mastered to the extent that they began to use it for their legal contracts.\n\nMassalia was a draw not only for Gauls, but for Romans from Italy. Upper-class Romans, for whom a knowledge of Greek was a vital part of their higher education, began to send their university-age children to Massalia rather than Athens to acquire proficiency in the language. For many, it was seen as a better choice, since it was closer to Rome than Athens, the climate was healthier and its morals were more vehemently guarded. The first-century AD writer Valerius Maximus calls Massalia the 'fiercest guardian of strictness', for the city authorities banned the famously licentious performances of pantomime from their theatres, put limits on the wearing of expensive clothes and prohibited women from drinking wine. According to Tacitus, Massalia was a place where 'refinement and provincial frugality were blended and happily combined'. Its reputation was such that at the end of the first century BC and the beginning of the following century, even the emperor Augustus himself, well known for his strait-laced credentials, sent his sister's grandson there, at least ostensibly for study; though Tacitus, who reports it, says that this was to cover the imperial princeling's exile.\n\nBut with the conquest of Gallia Comata, the scholarly resources available in Massalia were nowhere near sufficient to satisfy the sudden and urgent requirements for education in the new province. A Latin education, at least for the aristocratic classes of newly conquered territories, was the handmaiden of Roman government policy. It was necessary not just to inculcate in the noble classes a habit of loyalty towards Rome, but also to equip them for the administrative and military posts that they, and no one else, were in a position to take. Tacitus describes this process explicitly in his biography of his father-in-law Julius Agricola, a Gallo-Roman general who was himself an alumnus of the schools of Massalia. Agricola was responsible for securing the conquest of much of Britain, and Tacitus gloomily describes how a Roman education, as part of a wider acculturation in contemporary Roman ways (which he himself saw as decadent), was one of the weapons he used to bind the indigenous upper classes to the order of Roman rule. Agricola, in the midst of his campaigns, provided 'a liberal education for the sons of the chiefs... that they who lately disdained the tongue of Rome now coveted its eloquence'. As a result 'a liking sprang up for our style of dress, and the toga became fashionable. Step by step the British were led to things which dispose to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance they called civilization, when it was but part of their servitude.' These opportunities for education and civilization, visited on the British by Agricola in the latter part of the first century ad, had been brought by the Romans to Gallia Comata in the years following the conquest. The leading seat of Gallo-Roman education in these times appears to have been the new city of Augustodunum, now Autun in Burgundy.\n\nPresent-day Autun seems well suited to academic life and the pursuit of otherworldly meditations. Its streets, with their medieval timber-framed houses, pinnacles and statue-niches, enjoy an atmosphere of antique quietness, though its surviving Roman gates and circuit walls have a striking \u2013 even ostentatious \u2013 air to them. The town was built shortly after the conquest. Although on a small hill, it was located in the flatter land about fifteen miles east of the Aedui _oppidum_ of Bibracte. Situated here, its role was clear: to draw away the life from the established Gallic town and into a closely controlled Roman centre. In this, it was successful. Without application of force, the high stronghold of Bibracte was left to be rapidly devoured by the forest. However, to achieve this mastery over the rival settlement, Autun had to display boldly to the Aedui the extent of Roman wealth, and the opportunities available for those who co-operated with the Roman project. Although it was not one of the settlements formally endowed with colonial status like Arles or N\u00eemes, it was still given the right to be surrounded by walls, the privilege of a colony. Extensive remnants of these still stand today \u2013 ivy-speckled and louring over the green verges of an empty peripheral road \u2013 some of the longest stretches of Roman city wall anywhere in western Europe. In their prime, the walls were 6 kilometres (nearly 4 miles) in circumference, tracing out a lozenge-shaped area of around 200 hectares, which the city itself struggled to fill. Nevertheless, the sight of the walls, at that time 12 metres high, almost 2 metres thick and relieved at regular intervals by around fifty semi-circular projecting bastions, would have made their point to the local Aedui.\n\nThe ingredients listed by Tacitus for the cultural subversion of a conquered indigenous group were soon in place. There was a theatre \u2013 at 150 metres in diameter the largest Roman theatre yet known \u2013 as well as an amphitheatre and baths. However, for Autun, the pinnacle of these constructions was a school. Such a feature was, certainly in the western part of the empire, unusual and notable. Education was usually a parasite activity, taking place in a borrowed location \u2013 a public portico, or sometimes within a private dwelling. This was not so at Autun. The school appears to have been located at the centre of the town, probably beneath the modern post office. It was opposite the temple of Apollo, a god who, as mentioned, played a special role in the doctrine of Augustus. That education had a place of its own, next to a temple that flaunted and proclaimed the Roman imperial ideology, shows not only the importance placed on it here, but also its importance in the context of the development of Roman power.\n\n_The Roman walls of Autun, dating to the first century BC. Their main purpose was to display Rome's power to the region's influential Aedui tribe and to overawe the nearby_ oppidum _of Bibracte._\n\nIt is perhaps less surprising that such privileged access to education, and hence an entr\u00e9e into the systems of Roman power, was made available in Autun rather than elsewhere. It was not just that the city was close to the geographical centre of Gallia Comata, making it easy for young nobles from all three provinces to reach; but its location looks like a particular reward for the Aedui. The Aedui were allies of the Roman people even before the conquest and for nearly the whole period of Caesar's campaign remained loyal to Rome. It was not long before they developed a tribal mythology that made them brothers to the Roman people: a mythology that claimed that they too, like the Romans, were descendants of the refugees who had fled the fall of Troy.\n\nThe school at Autun rapidly gained a reputation. It was known as the Maenianae, after an architectural feature of a balcony raised on columns, which the school presumably possessed. Tacitus states that by AD 20 it was where the noblest youth of Gaul went for their education. It was very likely the fact that they were gathered together in Autun that made it the target for starting a failed uprising among the Aedui by Julius Sacrovir in that same year; indeed, it may have been the congregation of a large student body that made it vulnerable to unrest. Nevertheless, as with any ancient and established school, it attracted a deep sense of loyalty. In around 270, the school was seriously damaged during a period of civil war. A teacher named Eumenius, appointed to oversee the school by the emperor Constantius Chlorus, made a public appeal to have his entire salary \u2013 an enormous 600,000 sesterces \u2013 dedicated to the school's rebuilding. He made this appeal as a formality during a public address to the provincial governor, delivered either in Autun or in Lugdunum. His pride in the institution and its work was unbounded. He states that its work in developing the intellects and oratorical abilities of young Gallo-Roman males should not be hidden away but it should be 'in public display, in the very eyes of this city'. It was fitting that the Maenianae was built in the heart of the city, close to the temples of Apollo and Minerva, since visiting emperors and other high dignitaries would pass it as they arrived. Such was the importance and challenge of the school's work, it was only right for it to be near the shrines of the gods who were friends not only of Rome, but of learning.\n\nEumenius's speech also tells us a great deal about the relationship between education and power in the Roman empire. He praises the importance of the school in creating alumni destined for high office. Its rigorous standards, overseen by the emperor's personal care, ensured that anyone advanced to 'any tribunal or to the service of the sacred judiciary or perhaps the very offices of the palace, should not follow uncertain oratorical standards as if caught unexpectedly amid the surging seas of youth'. We also learn from Eumenius that the school possessed a large selection of maps painted on the school walls beneath its porticoes. The students, said Eumenius, should 'see and contemplate daily every land and all the seas and whatever cities, peoples, nations' over which the Roman empire ruled. These locations were marked with their sizes, locations, extent, and the distances between them, together with rivers, shores and bays. Contemplating these maps, students could imagine the emperors 'hurling lightning on the smitten Moors' or 'trampling upon Persian bows and quivers'. Thus did Roman education, among the conquered Gauls, create a class that sensed itself destined to hold a wider power.\n\n_The Porte Saint-Andr\u00e9, Autun, third century AD._\n\nThe education offered by this school and others like it was not just about acclimatizing the Gallo-Roman elite to holding and wielding political power. It also brought to Gaul an international and aristocratic culture of poetry, philosophy and pleasure, Greek in tone but wholeheartedly adopted by Rome, which would be recognizable as far east as the Levant and Asia Minor. Such a culture became a defining mark of the aristocratic life in Gaul, but it probable that those brought up in such a culture valued it for itself rather than just as a marker of class. The physical footprints of this culture have been found in Autun. At a site not far from the city's _cardo,_ a large room was discovered during construction work that was decorated with mosaics dating to around the second century AD. These mosaics do not feature the animals, fruit, or agreeable scenes from the rustic year that we have encountered hitherto, but Greek philosophers and poets. They sit on their couches, bearded, clad in sandals and heavy togas, slightly hunched, their faces (where they are still visible) intent in calm but profound meditation. In their hands they hold scrolls, presumably of their work, which they offer to us. Although mute, they are not silent. Written on the panels behind them are quotations from their writings in Greek. Epicurus himself reminds us (if the text of the mosaic has been properly restored): 'It is not possible to live with pleasure without living with prudence, honesty and justice; nor can one live with prudence, honesty and justice without living with pleasure.' His follower Metrodorus makes the point more insistently: 'We have been born just once. It is impossible to be born twice, and we cannot live out eternity. But you, although you are not master of tomorrow, waste your chances for enjoyment. Life is worn out by procrastination and each of us dies with no time on our hands.'\n\nThe Epicurean message of seizing the opportunity for pleasure and putting away disturbances of the spirit may have been expressed sternly by these philosophers, but poets voiced it more pleasantly. Anacreon sings on the panels: 'Bring water, boy, bring wine, and bring the garlands of flowers \u2013 come now, bring them, for I shall not struggle against Love (Eros)! Anyone who wishes to fight when the chance presents itself, let them fight! But as for myself, let me drink to the health of my friends, boy, with honeyed wine.'\n\nThe purpose of the room with the mosaics is still debated by archaeologists. Some have suggested it was a lecture theatre, but others, warming to the Epicurean theme, believe it was part of the town-house of a learned aristocrat, intended for use in Greek-style symposiums, or dinner parties, where the display of such knowledge was a prerequisite for attendance. But the most attractive idea is that such a house belonged not to a conventional aristocrat, but a rich teacher such as Eumenius, devoted to wine and friendship, erudition and song.\n\nThe culture of the symposium was self-consciously aristocratic, but other finds from Autun suggest that literacy and even echoes of the symposium culture were to be found across the classes. Bobbin weights are inscribed with what might be pub chat: _'Ave Vale, Tu Bella'_ \u2013 'Hello dear, you're beautiful'; _'Ave Domina, Sitiio'_ \u2013 'Hello lady, I'm thirsty.'\n\nDespite the prominence of Autun in the Gallic educational firmament, it was certainly not the case that learning and literacy were found nowhere else. The Gauls had a reputation among the Romans for cleverness. Caesar himself commented that they were a people of great ingenuity. Massalia aside, the transalpine province produced a number of noted teachers before the conquest. One of them, Antonius Gnipho, is reported to have tutored in Caesar's own household, and Cicero was also one of his pupils. Another, Valerius Cato, a freed slave, is recorded as having taught a number of poets, and as having written two books of verse himself before falling into debt, losing his villa and dying in poverty and extreme old age. Preserved scraps of Latin doggerel ask how 'The great grammarian, chief among our poets, could solve all questions, but solvent could not be.' Perhaps as a result of Transalpine Gaul's reputation, the newly conquered provinces were a draw for the most famous teachers. The imperial biographer Suetonius records a number who went to teach in Gaul after the conquest, including one, Oppius Chares, who taught to the very end of his life '...when he could no longer walk, or even see'. Teachers, either from outside or trained within Gaul, set themselves up in the major towns across the Gallic provinces. Memorial inscriptions to them survive in Limoges, Trier, Vienne, Strasbourg and Narbonne. In N\u00eemes, there are also inscriptions to two _paedagogoi,_ or slaves owned by rich households who were responsible for the good conduct of the children and assisting them with their learning. One was a woman named Porcia Lada. A good education became highly desirable; an inscription in N\u00eemes set up by a mother to her dead foster-son recounts her misery at the waste of his education: 'A most wretched mother, who educated this boy in the place of a son, and endowed him with the study of liberal arts \u2013 but, O unjust stars, he did not get to enjoy adulthood, and it was not fated for him...'\n\n_The 'Temple of Janus', Autun, first century AD. Dedicated to an unknown Gallic divinity, the temple combines Roman building techniques with a Gallic temple design._\n\nThe migration of teachers into Gaul and the consequent widespread availability of education there had a notable and beneficial cultural impact. In the years after the conquest, the Gallic reputation for education and literacy grew exponentially. Tacitus, in a dialogue on the art of oratory, makes all but one of the learned participants Gauls. Juvenal portrays Gaul as excelling in rhetoric, particularly that of the courtroom, even training the lawyers who went on to plead in the British courts. The poet Martial, in a number of epigrams, depicts Gaul as a place of literary culture. He suggests that his poems are read in Vienne, and describes volumes of his verse being sent to acquaintances in Narbonne and Toulouse. Books were easy to acquire in Gaul. Pliny the Younger expresses surprise that some of his works are available at a bookseller in Lugdunum, and later on he mentions a bookseller at Reims.\n\nGaul was soon producing its own authors of note. Pompeius Trogus has already been mentioned in connection with Vaison-la-Romaine. Tacitus himself was probably of Gallic origin. But it is from the later period \u2013 the fourth and fifth centuries ad, which spanned the final flowering of the Roman empire in Gaul, its eventual collapse and the rise of Christianity \u2013 that there is a large body of surviving Latin literature from Gaul. This may be a result of the establishment of an imperial court on the frontier at Trier in the fourth century. The proximity of this court seems to have acted as a stimulus to the Gallo-Roman aristocracy, not only to throw themselves more wholeheartedly into imperial service, but also to greater literary production. The fact that a number of the surviving works are panegyrics addressed to emperors and high dignitaries may be a matter of chance, but could also be evidence of a reaction by the literate classes to the ending of Roman rule in Gaul. I will explore the possible reasons for the appearance of these encomia from writers of the late Gallo-Roman period in due course; but what is not in doubt is that their writings give us a picture of the lives of at least a handful of Roman Gauls that is more intimate, more revelatory than anything offered by an artefact, inscription or ruin.\n\nDear wife, let us always live the way we have lived, and keep the names which we took when first we were wed. Let no day have it that we should be changed with time, but that I should always be 'my boy' to you, and you to me 'my girl'. Even if I should live to be as old as Nestor, and you also older than Deiphobe, the priestess of Apollo, let us refuse to know the meaning of ripe old age: let's not count down the years; all we should do is know their worth.\n\nThis short love poem, eight lines long in the original Latin, was written around AD 340, and is addressed by Ausonius to his new wife, Attusia. Ausonius was in his late twenties or early thirties at the time, and was working as a teacher. His poem, although short, breathes a heady optimism. The love it expresses is genuine, and the poet is looking forward with hope and confidence to sharing his life with Attusia. However, his optimism is undoubtedly bolstered by an expectation of impending professional success. It was not just that he had gained a fairly prestigious job in his home town of Bordeaux, which was then overtaking Autun as the premier seat of learning in Gaul. Nor was it that in marrying Attusia, even if he was doing so for love, he was entering into an alliance that would be hugely advantageous to him: she was of an old and noble lineage, and the match brought lustre to Ausonius and his family, which only two generations before had been in domestic service. No; on top of all of this, a connection even more promising had come about. Ausonius's maternal uncle, Magnus Arborius, also a teacher, had been summoned to the new imperial capital of Constantinople to work as a tutor in the household of the emperor Constantine himself. The sense of proximity to the throne was upon Ausonius, heightening his cheerfulness and increasing his expectations for what was to come. All pointed to a bright future with his new wife and young family. Fate, however, was not going to gratify all his hopes.\n\nAusonius was born around AD 310. His father Julius was originally a native of Bazas in what is now the department of Gironde, but he moved before his son's birth to the nearby centre of Bordeaux. Although the family was of lowly origin, Julius \u2013 as his son would do later \u2013 married well, taking a wife named Aemelia from a distinguished family of mixed Aedui and Aquitanian background. Julius had trained as a doctor, and was able to give his son an excellent education in Bordeaux. Ausonius was appointed to a teaching position in the city in 334, and around this time married Attusia. They had three children together. However, the hopes expressed in his short love poem were dashed. Attusia died in 343 after nine years of marriage, at the age of twenty-eight. He never remarried.\n\nAusonius spent some time practising at the Bar in Bordeaux, but his heart was more in teaching. He ended up devoting himself fully to the profession and was promoted to a professorship in rhetoric. After nearly twenty years working in this fashion, he managed to repeat the feat of his uncle: in 364, he was summoned to the imperial court to be a tutor to the young prince Gratian. He remained in this position for around ten years. His life was not without incident; in 368 he accompanied the imperial entourage as it went to fight a campaign on the German frontier. In 370, he was given the title of _comes_ ('count'), and in 375 he entered more fully into the imperial civil service, gaining the position of quaestor of the sacred palace. In the same year Ausonius's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Gratian succeeded to the emperorship. It was the start of a golden age for Ausonius. Having started life as a teacher, he was now showered with honours and became a person of great influence. In 378 he was appointed prefect of Gaul; Ausonius's father, who was then still alive, was given the honorific title of prefect of Illyricum, and other of his relatives were awarded similar distinctions. Some scholars have even seen traces of Ausonius's influence in the development of the law at this time, particularly in statutes relating to education. In the following year, 379, Ausonius achieved what was, even in this late imperial age, the much-desired capstone of a Roman career: the consulship. It was a huge achievement for one who had started life as a teacher.\n\nHowever, his good fortune was not to persist. In 383, a revolt broke out in Britain, and a usurper, Maximus, made a bid for the throne. Fighting broke out in Gaul, Gratian was killed in Lugdunum and his old favourites such as Ausonius fell out of favour, if not under threat. Maximus lasted in power for only five years, and was killed by the eastern Roman emperor, Theodosius I, in 388. However, by this time, Ausonius would probably have thought himself too old, and was perhaps too shocked by the turn of events, to return to public life. He spent his last years on his estates near Bordeaux, occasionally visiting the city on business, but he preferred life in the countryside away from the bustle of urban life. He died either in 393 or 394, having lived well into his eighties.\n\nAround 300 pages of Ausonius's literary work have survived from the fourth century AD. It is, for the time and the place, a rare survival. His work is a collection of letters, some written in verse, exchanged between him and the emperor, other aristocrats, his son or his local friends. There are long, creative poems; short verses addressed to his family and to his teaching colleagues around Bordeaux; poems that are little more than academic jests; a welter of epigrams on a range of subjects; poems on divinity \u2013 he appears to have been a Christian of sorts \u2013 and poems that describe his ordinary experience of life. Ausonius is one of the most complete characters to survive from any period of Roman Gaul, and it is through him that we can see the lives of those of his ilk and those who surrounded him in the provincial aristocracy and its dependents.\n\nMany details of Ausonius's career and background can be gleaned from his writings: he recorded not just the notable events of his life, but also the daily round. The first cycle of poems to be preserved in the collection is called _Ephemeris,_ meaning 'day-book' or 'diary', and subtitled 'The Doings of a Whole Day'. It does not, however, present a perfect record. A number of the poems are missing, with the result that the afternoon is mostly a blank. Moreover, part of the object of the cycle is to showcase the poet's metrical skill. Each stage of the day is recounted in a different Latin metre, and the reader inevitably wonders how much the poems are meant to reflect Ausonius's experience, and how much they are a literary construct. The fact that he refers to his retainers by the names of the characters of slaves from early Roman comedy adds to this suspicion. However, literary allusion is an adjunct to the writing of such learned verse, and its presence does not mean that Ausonius is merely regurgitating the substance of other writers. His work may be decorated with literary jokes, but it rings true as an account of his life, and enough of it survives to give us a clear view of the pattern of his days.\n\nOn the day he writes, his first job is to wake one of his slaves:\n\nAlready bright morn is opening her windows, already the watchful sparrow twitters from her nest; but you, Parmeno, sleep on as if it were the first or middle watch of the night. Dormice sleep the winter round, but they leave food alone; while you slumber on because you drink deep, and swell out your paunch with too great a mass of food... Up with you, you waster! What a thrashing you deserve!... Out with you, Parmeno, from your downy bed.\n\nAusonius is at least able to rely on other retainers and slaves:\n\nHey, boy, get up! Bring me my slippers and my finecotton cloak. Get all the clothes you have just got ready for me to go out. Get me spring water to wash my hands and mouth and eyes. Get me the chapel opened... I must pray to God and the Son of God most high... Now I have prayed enough to God, boy, put out my formal wear. I must exchange my greetings with my friends... And now the time for inviting my friends to lunch draws on... So that no fault of mine may make them late for lunch, hurry at your best pace, boy, hurry to the neighbours' houses \u2013 you know without my telling who they are. I have invited five to lunch; six persons, including the host, make the right number for a meal. If there be more, it is no meal but a _m\u00eal\u00e9e..._ Off he goes...\n\nHe is similarly full of instructions for his cook:\n\nSosias, I must have lunch. The warm sun is already passed well into his fourth hour, and on the dial the shadow is moving on towards the fifth stroke. Taste and make sure \u2013 for they often play you false \u2013 that the seasoned dishes are well soused and taste appetising. Turn your bubbling pots in your hands, and taste the hot gravy with your tongue...\n\nThen the time comes for Ausonius to turn to matters of business. His secretary is a person whom he apparently held in higher regard than his other retainers:\n\nBoy, skilled in dashing shorthand, make haste and come! Open your folding tables... I have grand books in my mind... thick and fast like hail the words tumble off my tongue. And yet your ears are not at fault nor your page crowded... you have the thoughts of my heart already set fast in wax before they are uttered...\n\nWith these frequent admonitions to his retainers, his cook, his secretary, Ausonius gives the impression of being, among other things, a particular and precise person. This certainly applies when it comes to enumerating his achievements. In a prefatory poem he lists carefully the honours he has received \u2013 _comes,_ quaestor, consul \u2013 but adds the detail that he was the senior of the two consuls of the year, 'and was given precedence on assuming the insignia and the _curule_ chair, so that my colleague's name stood after mine'.\n\nAusonius is similarly meticulous when he comes to the achievements of his family. One of the cycles in the collection is entitled _Parentalia,_ a collection of elegies in memory not only of his parents, but also of his extended family. His maternal grandfather, Arborius, is first remembered for 'uniting the blood of many a noble house, both of the province of Lyons and of that land where the Aedui held sway, and in the country of Vienne bordered by Alpine heights'. His son-in-law, Valerius, who died an untimely death, surpassed even his ancestors in that he held 'the prefect's seat, the Illyrian shore as governor, and the Treasury itself was one of [his] clients at law'.\n\nAusonius's care over the recital of such honours has led some classical scholars to dismiss his writings as being stilted and without feeling. The formal enumeration of dignities, they argue, has expunged any element of personal experience and recollection from his writing. Such criticism, however, misses the mark on two grounds. First, the use of literature to mark social position and that of one's family was a fundamental aspect of the intellectual world of late Roman Gaul. Thanks to the way Gaul had evolved, there was an essential connection between high education, culture and social class. The possession of literary culture was in itself proof of belonging to the aristocracy, and to display that culture was to confirm one's membership of the elite stratum of Gallo-Roman society. To refuse to acknowledge the connection between literature and class would have been a rebellious act, and Ausonius was no rebel. However, there is a second reason for decrying such criticism of Ausonius. It is simply untrue to say that his writing is devoid of personal feeling.\n\n_Modern sculpture of Ausonius in Bordeaux, by Bertrand Pi\u00e9chaud._\n\nAusonius wrote the elegy for his wife Attusia, which forms part of the _Parentalia,_ around the time of his consulship, the pinnacle of his career. He is clear about the number of years that have elapsed since her passing \u2013 thirty-six. By then, he would have been nearly seventy. When he speaks of her, he does not omit to mention that she was noble in birth, and sprang from a line of senators; indeed, this is one of the first things he says. But he also has rather more to say. The poem is an expression of his grief for her, still undimmed by the passing of time or by his professional successes:\n\nIn youth I wept for you, robbed of my hopes in early years, and through these thirty-six years, unwedded, I have mourned and mourned you still. Age has crept over me, but yet I cannot lull my pain; for ever it keeps raw and well-nigh new to me... My wounds become heavier with the length of days. I tear my grey hairs mocked by the widowed life, and the more I live in loneliness, the more I live in heaviness.\n\nHis verse does not eschew self-analysis and introspection. He does not hesitate to lay out the complexities and contradictions of his continuing grief for his wife: 'I grieve if one man has a good wife; and yet again I grieve if another has a bad. For you are always with me to throw everything else into relief: however it be, you come to torture me: if one be bad, because you were not like her, or if one be good, because you were like her.' The continuing pain of losing the sensuality of Attusia's presence belies the apparent parlour politeness of his verse: 'That my house is still and silent, and that my bed is cold, that I share not my ills with any, my good with any, these things feed my wound.'\n\nThe emotional honesty of Ausonius's confessions \u2013 direct, never overstated, and always overlaid with the requisite social veneer \u2013 make his work unexpectedly poignant. He remembers his first-born son, named after him, who died 'Just as you were practising to transform your babbling into the first words of childhood'. The one consolation is that he lies on his 'great-grandfather's bosom sharing one common grave, so that you do not suffer the reproach of being alone in your tomb'. His grandson, named Pastor, also died in infancy, killed when a workman carelessly threw a tile down from a roof, hitting the boy on the head. 'That tile, carelessly flung, hit my own head too.'\n\nAusonius's _Parentalia_ commemorates thirty of his late relatives. They are a varied group, including his uncle Clemens, a merchant who died and was buried on a trading mission to Britain; his aunt Aemelia who, 'hating her own sex', appears to have lived as a man and practised as a doctor; and his maternal grandfather Arborius who was skilled in astrology and who, says Ausonius, had predicted the outline of Ausonius' own life. Some members of the family, such as Arborius, were long-lived; Arborius himself reached his nineties. Many, however, died unexpectedly or before their time. Just because such early deaths were common in this age does not mean that they were felt any less keenly by those left behind. Ausonius does not dissemble: the ubiquity of early death could never lessen the intensity of human affection, or diminish the misery of loss.\n\nBut it did not take the spectre of death to turn Ausonius to introspection and anxiety. A letter to his surviving son, Hesperius, describes the moment when the news of Maximus's uprising reached them both at Trier, and Hesperius decided to flee for safety to Bordeaux. The letter is written in verse, but unfinished. Ausonius recalls the sight of his son (by this time grown up) borne away on a boat down the Moselle as he stood on the riverbank with his companions:\n\nAlone! Though compassed round with a throng of friends, I was alone, and offered prayers for that fleeting craft: alone, though I still saw you, my child, and grudged the speed of the oars plying against the stream... Forlorn I pace the empty, lonely shores. Now I strike down the sprouting willow shoots, now I crush beds of turf, and over green sedge I poise my slippery footsteps on the pebbles strewn beneath... So the first day passed away, and the second, and the two nights which wheeled, revolving after each, so others: and the whole year for me will so pass by until your destiny gives back me, your father, to you.\n\nIn other circumstances, his writing is similarly self-revelatory. During his time on the German campaign, he was given a slave captured during a Roman action \u2013 a girl named Bissula. He wrote a collection of poems about her, which is unfortunately incomplete. They were sent to a friend as an intimate poetic gift. One wonders if a later transmitter, eager to preserve Ausonius's reputation, did away with a part of the manuscript. Despite his persistent grief for his wife, he appears to have been quite infatuated with Bissula:\n\nBorn and bred beyond the chilly Danube, Bissula... a captive maid but made free, she queens it as the pet of him whose spoil of war she was... not so changed by Roman blessings but that she remains German in features, blue of eyes and fair of hair. A girl of either race, now speech, now looks present her: the last declare her a daughter of the Rhine, the first a child of Rome.\n\nIt appears he had her portrait painted, but the painter's skill, says Ausonius, was not up to capturing the fullness of her complexion. 'Darling, delight, my pet, my love, my joy! Barbarian and adopted you may be, but you surpass the Roman girls. Bissula \u2013 a clumsy name for so delicate a girl, an uncouth little name to strangers: but to your master, charming.'\n\nWhen Ausonius chooses, he can be fresh, original, with a clarity of sight and a sensibility for landscape and immediate experiences that can be arresting and unexpected. Brief mention has been made in an earlier chapter of his long poem on the Moselle (see page 207), which was almost certainly written in 368 when he accompanied the imperial court to the campaign on the Germanic frontier, while he was still engaged as Gratian's tutor. His poem is a record of this journey, and has some antecedents in classical literature. The poet Horace, for example, wrote a satire describing a journey through Italy in the company of Augustus's inner circle to attend a peace conference during the civil war. Yet where Horace's poem is self-deprecatory and bawdy, describing his bowel movements and other nocturnal accidents, Ausonius is more interested in describing the sights and sounds of his voyage, and the beauties of the landscapes through which he passes. His vision is rare for the corpus of Latin literature. He observes the way that the light scatters on the water and changes its colour; how the sand beneath the river is rippled and furrowed by the current, how the water grasses dance sinuously as the force of the stream presses against them. He describes the fish that could be caught in the river, the fishermen with their nets, the villas and vineyards and the expanse of the countryside, the bawdy banter of vine-dressers shouting at the bargemen as they float cheerfully by. His descriptions, at times direct, at other times interwoven with erudite allusions and references to earlier literature, are \u2013 at their best \u2013 as fresh as the day on which he made his journey, an almost-forgotten antecedent to the canon of travel literature.\n\nSuch forays into evocative description of the natural world do not, however, reflect Ausonius's primary concerns as a writer. His central focus was literature and literary culture itself. His writing, for the most part, was intended to confirm, preserve and exalt the literary canon of Rome and the assumptions it brought in its wake \u2013 the civilizing influence of Roman laws and Roman government, its ideas of _humanitas,_ its notions of order and conduct. Access to this high level of culture was open only to a privileged few. Part of the function of the literature was to mark a fellowship among the cultural, and hence political, elite. Ausonius's writing is a constant play on the canon of earlier authors: Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Terence. The endless exchange of letters and of poems alluding to the older Latin canon marks out the qualification of the writers and recipients as members of a virtual confraternity of learning. Such learned exchanges are the behaviour of the aristocratic and civilized. With such a note of superiority and withdrawal, one can perhaps see why this stratum of Latin literature had a particular appeal for the duc des Esseintes.\n\nAusonius is one of the first great proponents of the 'old school tie'. Although earlier writers in the classical canon praise their teachers and the fellowship brought about by their schooling \u2013 one of Plato's intentions in his dialogues is to praise his teacher Socrates, and Horace is always grateful to his schoolmaster, 'thrasher' Orbilius \u2013 none quite give their education the prominence that Ausonius gives his in his writing. He devotes an entire cycle to commemorating the teachers of Bordeaux, both those who taught him and those who were educated with him and who later became his colleagues. The cycle appears to have been written late in life, but even sixty years after his schooling he is still in awe of his own teachers. Victor Minervius, he says, 'gave a thousand pupils to the bar, and twice a thousand to the Senate's rank and purple robes'. Minervius was a master in speaking and oratory, but Ausonius still remembers him for his prodigious memory: he could recall entire board games and every throw of the dice. Attius Patera, teacher of rhetoric, who had a gift for rolling eloquence, is revered for reputedly being the descendent of a family of Druids from Bayeux.\n\nAusonius feels that his colleagues always deserve to be commemorated in his verse, but to win his unalloyed praise is more difficult. He does not hold back from recording failure or from recalling old scandals, even if he feigns unwillingness to go into details. Delphidius, for example, had a reputation for being a genius. In his youth, he wrote an epic poem, and was soon appearing in great court cases. However, palace intrigues drove him from the Bar to the classroom, and he ended up as a teacher of rhetoric, 'but a lack of diligence in teaching disappointed the hopes of your pupils' fathers'. His early death, says Ausonius, at least spared him the sight of his wife's execution as a heretic by the usurper Maximus.\n\nIt could have been worse, however. Marcellus, the son of Marcellus, went to teach at Narbonne, where he found fame in his position. His classes were thronged with students, he soon became wealthy and married a noble wife. However, comments Ausonius, 'Fortune never favours a career of unvarying success, especially when she finds a man of crooked nature. Nevertheless, it is not for me to make heavier your destiny: my task is to recall it. It is enough to say that you lost all at one stroke. I do not rob you of your title as teacher, but give you a place among grammarians of very scant deserving.' To be embroiled in a scandal \u2013 even an unidentified one \u2013 is bad enough in Ausonius's estimation, but to be unlearned is even worse. 'I will sing of Ammonius also \u2013 for indeed it is a solemn duty to commemorate a teacher of my own native place \u2013 who used to teach raw lads their alphabet: he had scant learning and was of an ungentle nature, and therefore \u2013 as was his due \u2013 was held in slight repute.' The fact that someone such as Ammonius possessed a little learning brought him into the outer orbit of Ausonius's regard as a civilized person, but only just.\n\nWhen Ausonius writes about recreation, the leisure activities he describes seem little removed from the schoolroom. Early one summer, Ausonius writes a letter \u2013 in verse \u2013 to his friend, Axius Paulus, who teaches rhetoric in Bordeaux. Ausonius longs to get away from the city, he says. He is weary of the throngs of people, the 'vulgar brawls at the crossroads', the narrow lanes swarming with people, the rabble that blocks the city's broadways. 'Here is a muddy sow in flight, there a mad dog rushing around, there oxen too weak for the waggon.' It may be a true portrayal of Bordeaux, but it is also a literary joke. Ausonius's description of the chaos of the city is drawn from a letter of the poet Horace, and the reference is a knowing nod on his part to the culture he shares with Paulus. Paulus, urges Ausonius, must keep the promise he made to visit him. He will have hours of leisure with the right to do whatever he wants. However, Ausonius urges him to bring with him all the 'wares of his muses: dactyls, elegiacs, choriambics, lyrics, comedy and tragedy \u2013 pack them all in your carriage, for the devout poet's baggage is all paper'. He will have a holiday of literary creativity: Ausonius promises to match him poem for poem, no matter how much verse he brings with him.\n\nLetters to Ausonius from friends and colleagues, praising his published verse, alternate with letters from Ausonius himself in which he rates his outpourings as but feeble scratchings and doggerel. This is the constant quadrille of politeness, whether he is corresponding with an emperor or with a fellow poet. When the emperor Theodosius writes to Ausonius demanding that he 'consent to favour me with those treasures stored away in your desk...', Ausonius replies, 'I have no skill to write, but Caesar has ordered it... and what book would not be Caesar's own in the hope to escape thereby the countless erasures of a wretched bard, always emending and emending for the worse?' The greatest offence is to be slow in responding to a letter received, to fail to match one's correspondent quickly, verse for verse and _bon mot_ for _bon mot._ The punishment that results is gentle mockery. Theon, a poet, is tardy in responding to Ausonius, and the latter demands to know what is keeping him: 'What busy life are you leading on the coasts of M\u00e9doc? Are you busy trafficking, snapping up for a clipped coinage goods presently to be sold in dear salerooms at outrageous prices \u2013 balls of sickly tallow, greasy lumps of wax, pitch, torn paper and rank-smoking torches, your country lights?'\n\nThe verses of thanks that Ausonius writes to Theon for a gift of thirty oysters are threaded with allusions to Virgil and include an evocation of the books of the Sibylline Oracles kept in Rome; they also complain that the oysters, although large, were few in number. Another element of Ausonius's literary output was a vast stream of epigrams with such pungent titles as 'Written under the portrait of a lewd woman'; 'What sort of mistress he would have'; 'On mangy Polygiton, sitting with ulcerated legs in the baths'; 'On Castor the fellator who performed an act of cunnilingus on his wife'. If many of them are bawdy and filthy, it was not because this was in Ausonius's essential nature, but because he was following the proper literary model for Latin epigrams, Martial. Ausonius also produced macaronic verses combining Greek and Latin; musings on ancient philosophers, on the twelve Caesars, on the gods, on types of food and 'on things that have no connection'. There are attempts to play with the verse forms: to write hexameters whose every line started and finished with a monosyllable; verses on the shapes of Greek letters; an entire nuptial ode constructed out of lines of Virgil, taken out of context, and rewoven to give them an unexpected and risqu\u00e9 air.\n\nFor all the pleasures of his evocation of the River Moselle and the earthiness of his epigrams, it has to be said that the extant works of Ausonius are not at all easy to read. They are self-consciously exclusive. Their prime concern is social display and the confirmation of status. To enjoy them to the full and to realize their ingenuity demands a thorough knowledge of earlier Latin literature. Such originality as Ausonius's works possess resides principally in their obsessive, fuguelike manipulation of the earlier canon, rather than in their freshness of observation. For many modern critics, this is enough to condemn Ausonius and other writers of late Roman Gaul to remain untouched on the bookshelves. After the Renaissance the notion took root that Ausonius and his ilk were representatives of a twilight age of decadence, and not of the best Latinity. This perceived shortcoming \u2013 which was, of course, the very quality that attracted des Esseintes \u2013 was sufficient to keep Ausonius off the school and university syllabus. But these criticisms miss the point. It is not just that he provides a precious and direct insight into the aristocratic world of late Roman Gaul, nor that some of his writing does in fact comprise fresh observations of his surroundings \u2013 which makes him even more valuable as a witness of the age; what is perhaps most striking about Ausonius is that he cherishes a foreign culture that was a calculated import from Rome into Gaul. His writing and the life that it reflects offer remarkable evidence of how the Gallic elite embraced and made that imported culture its own. And they reveal its power to bind them together in a community of shared social values and a common literary heritage.\n\n* Des Esseintes's words are translated here by Margaret Mauldon in the Oxford World's Classics edition.\n\n_Modern wooden stele in Gallic style depicting the local goddess, Sequana, at the Source of the Seine._\nCHAPTER X\n\nBlood of the Martyrs\n\n_Natio est omnis Gallorum admodum dedita religionibus_  \n'The whole of the nation of the Gauls is greatly devoted to its religious duties'\n\nJULIUS CAESAR, _De Bello Gallico,_ VI.16\n\nSOURCE OF THE SEINE\n\n\u2022\n\nTHE GLANIC MOTHERS\n\n\u2022\n\nN\u00ceMES\n\n\u2022\n\nVIENNE\n\n\u2022\n\nCULT OF CYBELE\n\n\u2022\n\nBOURG-SAINT-AND\u00c9OL\n\n\u2022\n\nAMPHITHEATRE OF LYONS\n\n\u2022\n\nFIRST CHRISTIAN MARTYRS\n\n\u2022\n\nHERESY\n\n\u2022\n\nST PIERRE'S CATHEDRAL\n\n\u2022\n\nBISHOPS: THE NEW ARISTOCRATS\n\n\u2022\n\nSAINT-SEINE-L'ABBAYE\n\nNOT A COLD, BUT A WET COMING I have of it: the worst possible weather for a pilgrimage. Chaucer and his companions to Canterbury merely had the sweet showers of April to contend with. I, going from Al\u00e9sia to the Source of the Seine, have continuous, steady rain from dawn until dusk. Perhaps it is a divine warning against making pilgrimage to an old pagan site. I am being visited, as retribution, with the essential nature of the place \u2013 an all-pervading wetness \u2013 as retributive justice. Perhaps it is a warning that all pilgrimage is folly: an injunction not to strive ahead, but to stop and consider that sanctity is not confined to the terminus of my walk, but that the rich green land of Burgundy is imbued with the divine at every step: the land, blessed in perpetual generation, rolling in the valleys, robed with a plush of thick grass, fat cattle such as would have pleased a heroic chieftain, gemmed with the scattered wealth of corn poppies and yellow cockscomb.\n\nPerhaps the baptismal dampness that has reached into every part of my clothing and rucksack, warping my maps, my clothes and my notebook, is in fact a benediction. The source of the Seine is a shrine of healing. In many ancient cultures, water, wells and springs were revered as a giver of life. Maybe this drenching is a form of welcome to the initiate, drawing close to a sacred place that represents a gateway to the dark and primitive divine. Certainly, the waters are healing, after a fashion. I am too numb to ache, too overcome by the waters to think of changing my course. And although the countryside wears a face of beauty, it is not one of hospitality. The little stone villages on the way, perhaps lulled into a dream by their own loveliness, are far too deep in sleep to think of opening an _auberge_ to shelter the wet passer-by. There is no choice, no other thought, but to tread the narrow paths and roads, before plunging down into a wooded valley, where the bright Seine rushes, a sprightly and muddy trickle over a web of protruding tree roots, and follow the little rill all the way to the clearing at its very source.\n\nThe source of the Seine, as it appears now, owes its form to the nineteenth century. The plot on which it rises was bought by the city of Paris in 1864. The interest in the site had its roots in the antiquarian project of Napoleon III. Before long, the spring from which the head of the Seine wells up was turned into a romantic grotto, presided over by a statue of a scantily clad nymph, reclining on a couch and bearing aloft in her right hand a festoon of ripe fruit \u2013 an ensemble that seems to owe more to the Parisian imagination than the real genius of the place. This is perhaps better captured by a small statue erected in 2014. It is a copy of one found in earlier excavations at the site in the nineteenth century. A represents a female figure, stiffly seated and stiffly dressed in a tunic that hints at the Roman but is rigid, geometric and stylized, not suggesting the elegant and cosmopolitan, but the heavy, numinous and local. This is Sequana, goddess of the place and of the river.\n\n_Statue of a water nymph symbolizing the Seine, in the grotto built above the river's source in 1866._\n\nSome other visitors before me were more reverent, and came to pay honour to the shrine. A corn dolly is placed at her feet, and at the square base of the statue sits a wicker basket, and a wooden tub with lily bulbs, waiting to sprout. A wooden stake with an elongated head, roughly carved, peers from the overgrown grass and wild flowers on the gentle slope behind it. A small blue hand-painted sign, perched by the bottom of the spring, reads _votum solvit libens merito \u2013 2015, Ann\u00e9e de la Renaissance._ The Latin is the traditional formula for one who repays a vow to a god, and would have been seen on many a statue base in the time of the Roman occupation.*\n\nThe elegant clearing, with its grotto and its little bridge over the infant stream of the Seine, is redolent of the bucolic; a peaceful, untroubled and contemplative haven. But this quietness and ease belies the site's Gallo-Roman past. A stretch of the stream beyond the grotto is fenced off and overgrown. This is the place where the sanctuary of the source stood in Gallo-Roman times. Two temples and a colonnaded precinct were built here sometime in the first century AD. However, such buildings were only an official acknowledgement of a shrine and religious practices that had been in place at the source of the Seine for at least two centuries beforehand, if not more. It was a meeting place for the sick and the suffering. Pilgrims would come to bathe in the spring and seek cures for myriad ailments. Excavations at the site before it was fenced off in the 1960s brought to light over 300 wooden ex-votos that had been preserved in the damp conditions. These were models, made in oak or beech, of the parts of the body that had been afflicted with illness, which had been presented to the goddess Sequana at the shrine. Their purpose was either to take the illness miraculously from the real limb or organ unto themselves, or else to remind the goddess of what was wrong. There were arms and legs, adult or child-sized, heads, torsos or whole bodies in Gallic capes showing signs of goitre, hernias or blindness. Breasts and genitals were also discovered, perhaps suggesting milk deficiency and malnutrition on the one hand, or infertility on the other. The figures are crudely carved, but with a powerful presence. They are almost certainly the product of the indigenous Gallic populations, for whom Sequana was a local and powerful goddess of healing.\n\nHowever, it was not only the indigenous population that paid honour to the shrine, or sought the assistance of the goddess. There are inscriptions from Romans, or wealthier Gauls who were now part of the Romanized culture, expressing their thanks in a proper Latin form. One inscription found at the site reads 'Flavius Flavinus, for the health of his nephew Flavius Lunaris, has willingly repaid his vow as is proper to the Goddess Sequana', ending with the correct Latin formula \u2013 _votum solvit libens merito._\n\nThe shrine had Roman devotees as well as local Gauls. It was given a Roman appearance in the form of a colonnade and temples. On top of this, the goddess Sequana herself was kitted out in Roman dress. She was shown in a Roman-style tunic and cloak not only in the stone statue reproduced at the site, but in a representation of her in bronze also discovered there, crowned with a diadem and standing proud on a boat adorned with a duck's head and tail. But she owed the Romans not only for her costume, but also her body. The Mediterranean habit of giving anthropomorphic form to gods, goddesses and local spirits who were for the most part not endowed with physical form was brought to Gaul by the Roman presence.\n\nThe Romans had effectively suppressed the order of the Druids, but the indigenous gods were treated much in the same way as the local Gallic aristocracy. The Romans were happy to leave them in place, respect them, work with them, and even add to their lustre by providing them with new clothing, new dwellings or even new names to enhance their standing among their devotees. The polytheism of the Romans was never exclusive, and they saw in the gods of Gaul manifestations and reflections of their own. Thus it was that the Romans not only brought the worship of their conventional deities in their conventional appearances with their conventional Roman rites \u2013 Jupiter, Minerva, Apollo, not to mention the recent cults of the imperial family; the Gallic gods were blended with those of Rome, many of the local gods taking on a Roman veneer and dual identity.\n\nCaesar himself was an early witness to this process. He writes in his _Commentaries_ that the Gauls worshipped Mercury ahead of all the other gods \u2013 the inventor, in Gallic eyes, he states, 'of all arts, the guide for every road and journey and the greatest influence for all money-making and trade'. After him, says Caesar, they revered Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Minerva. Seeing these gods as common to Gaul and Rome, he does not trouble to record the Gallic names in his writings. By Mercury he was likely referring to Lugus, a god after whom many places, not least Lugdunum, were named, and who was conventionally described as 'possessed of all the talents'. His characteristics as described by Caesar are similar to those of the Roman Mercury, god of travellers and financial gain, not to mention eloquence. Apollo was probably seen as the equivalent of the Gallic Belenos, who like Apollo had powers of healing. Jupiter was taken as parallel to Taranis, a god of thunder who bore a lightning bolt in one hand and a six-spoked wheel, the sign of the sun, in the other.\n\nBut this process of drawing equivalents between gods at the national level also went on locally. Indeed, many gods and goddesses like Sequana were not national but local, honoured only by particular tribes or in particular locations. Nevertheless, they were still seen as being manifestations of the Roman deities. Lenus, a god of the Treveri tribe of the lower Moselle, was equated with Mars on account of his warlike role in protecting the tribe. At Trier, a temple stood to him where he was revered with the combined name of Lenus Mars. In other instances, a Roman god in a certain district was portrayed as being married to one of the indigenous Gallic divinities \u2013 usually a Roman male god married a Gallic female deity. In eastern Gaul, Rosmerta, a local goddess of fertility and abundance, was frequently shown as a consort to the Roman Mercury. In Autun, they are depicted on a stone relief sitting side by side, while Rosmerta clutches a cornucopia of flowers and fruit \u2013 a Gallic goddess in Roman dress with a Roman husband depicted in the Roman form of a stone relief, holding an imported Roman symbol of plenty.\n\nThe Romans, when they were not destroying the woodland groves sacred to the Druids, were respecters of the sacred places of the Gauls. Such places would be incorporated into Roman religious structures. The source of the Seine and the goddess Sequana was a rural example. But sacred places prominent in the heart of cities, fully Roman in appearance and character, would be protected and given the sort of adornment and veneration that seems surprising for the deities of a defeated and subject people. At Glanum, near the centre of the settlement, a set of steps leads down into a sacred pool, still fed with fresh water from a spring. This is the well sacred to Glanis and the Glanic mothers, local Gallic healing deities that gave their names to the place. They were there for at least 200 years before the Roman presence. Now the incoming Romans vied to pay their tributes to the indigenous Gallic spirits. Clustered around the well, as if attracted to the numinous power exuded by the spot, are temples to gods and goddess brought by the Romans \u2013 Hercules and Valetudo, the Roman goddess of health. The latter temple appears to have been erected by Augustus's right-hand man Agrippa as early as 39 BC, when memories of the brutality of the conquest would still have been fresh in Gallic minds. Even ordinary Roman soldiers rushed to seek the blessings and pay honours to the gods of the defeated nation. By the steps down to the pool a large stone altar, set up as an ex-voto, records that 'Marcus Licinius Verecundus... veteran of the 21st Legion (Rapax)... fulfilled his vow willingly' to Glanis, the Glanic mothers, as well as the Roman goddess Fortuna Redux, probably in thanks for the safe completion of a journey.\n\nA still-living example of this veneration for sacred spots is to be found in the city of N\u00eemes. Fed by waters rising several miles away to the northwest, a spring emerges near the green peak of the Mont Cavalier, which rises high above the elegant city. It comes to light below the Tour Magne, a hulking octagonal turret built by the Romans on a Gallic base to watch over this spot, before splashing down through tree-shaded rivulets and basins where lily pads float, and finally debouching into a series of wide stone-lined pools set in a serene terrace at the base of the hill. The spot is now a pleasure garden. The curving pools are fringed with finely carved balustrades. At their corners languishing _putti_ swirled with drapery and a spiral of cornucopia bear up unfeasibly large classical urns. Goldfish turn with pleasing brightness through the narrow water above the careful pattern of limestone slabs that line the pools, echoing the tremulous reflection of the sunlight on the carvings above.\n\nAlthough the area was relandscaped in the eighteenth century, it always had such a character. The Gauls venerated this spot before the Roman presence as the haunt of the god of the spring, Nemausus, and its other spirits, the Matres Nemausicae. In 25 BC, shortly after N\u00eemes was founded as a Roman colony by Agrippa, taking its name from the god of its holy spring, this area was developed into a sacred precinct, an Augusteum. It was an enclosure for veneration of the local deities of the waters combined with that of the genius of the emperor Augustus, an altar to whom appears to have stood at the centre of the arrangement. To one side there was a theatre, and to the other a building named by later antiquarians as the 'Temple of Diana' which in reality was most likely a library. The theatre was covered over in the eighteenth century, but the remains of the temple were left standing, and the original pattern of the pools around the Augusteum was used as a template for the relandscaping. With a theatre and library (the ruins of which were being used for a summer's afternoon of pot-smoking by students when I went to visit), the place was as much then as now a pleasant resort for sunshine and contemplation, with the mixture of Gaul and Rome at the heart of it.\n\n_The Tour Magne, N\u00eemes. A ruined Roman tower, built on a third century BC Gallic rampart, the Tour Magne rises thirty metres on the hill above the Augusteum._\n\nThe Romans did not worship only their own gods and goddesses in conjunction with those they found locally in Gaul. The symbol of N\u00eemes is a reminder of how the coming of Rome tied Gaul into a wider geographical commonwealth. This symbol, introduced by Agrippa in 27 BC and still in use, is of a crocodile chained to a palm tree. It represents the legion settled in N\u00eemes that had earlier triumphed over Cleopatra in Egypt during the civil war. Gaul was interlinked via Rome with Africa, the Levant and Asia Minor. We have already seen how the empire allowed migrants to come from these parts, bringing their trades with them. New religions also, which seemed exotic to the Romans, and which were themselves not a part of the traditional Roman pantheon, were able to follow these wide movements of people engendered by empire; and they introduced themselves into the tapestries of belief followed by the Roman Gauls.\n\nMuch further along the Rh\u00f4ne, a short journey away from Lyons, is the city of Vienne. It was a trading station when the Romans first took control of Transalpine Gaul after 124 BC, and one of the centres of the Allobroges tribe. It was one of the first wave of settlements to be made a colony in the 30s BC, even before N\u00eemes, and was soon established as a Roman centre. The town seems unassuming in the present age. It is small compared to Lyons and N\u00eemes, and only the busy _autoroute_ by the Rh\u00f4ne disturbs its quiet. A medieval square tower on the opposite bank of the river gives the place an aura of forgotten chivalry, and modern villas pinned among the green wooded slopes above the city lend an air of weary leisure.\n\nHowever, Lawrence Durrell, in the person of one of his characters in _Caesar's Vast Ghost,_ calls it a 'malefic town... a centre of the Black arts in the alchemical sense'. It certainly has a striking pedigree in the darker realms of Christian religious history, some of which is quoted by Durrell's character. Pontius Pilate, according to the early church historian Eusebius, was exiled to Vienne for an unspecified misdemeanour and committed suicide there around AD 37. His body, according to legend, lies below a pyramid-like Roman structure raised on four arches \u2013 which in fact marks the turning point on the chariot course of an otherwise disappeared circus arena. Herod Archelaus, ruler of Judea, son and successor of King Herod the Great (responsible, according to scripture, for the Massacre of the Innocents) was also exiled to Vienne in AD 6 by Augustus, followed repeated complaints about his cruelty. In 1312, Vienne was also the site of the Church Council that ordered the suppression of the Knights Templar \u2013 an order so powerful and yet so popularly associated with the occult that, in the mind of Durrell's character at least, the ease of its suppression smacked of 'sulphur and the black arts'.\n\n_The 'Temple of Diana', in N\u00eemes, was most likely a library attached to the sacred precinct known as the Augusteum._\n\nVienne certainly adhered to the norms of Roman and Gallic religion. In its centre, at the site of the old forum, a perfectly proportioned temple is preserved, built at the beginning of the first century AD and dedicated to the worship of the emperor Augustus and the empress Livia. However, close by are the confusing remains of a complex of buildings, some of which have remained above ground since antiquity and others that were only brought to light in a series of excavations after the Second World War. Two tall arches stand proud over the site, which now provides a green space for recreation in the midst of the town. However, running through the grass beside them are the unexpected traces of a small enclosed theatre: unexpected because Vienne appears, at first sight, to have been perfectly well furnished with theatres. Nearby, on the hillside above the city, is one of the biggest Roman theatres in Gaul, second only to Autun in size with a capacity of 13,500; next to it, for good measure, lies an odeon with room for 3,000. The enclosed theatre, by contrast, could probably not seat more than a few hundred. Nearby are small pools and subterranean chambers, linked to a large building in the centre that appears to have been a temple.\n\nOn their own, such ruins seem difficult to interpret and at the mercy of conjecture. However, two finds there seem to explain the purpose of the complex. On a marble plaque in the theatre was found the inscription 'DEND...' This can only be an abbreviation for _dendrophori,_ a type of priest who were characterized by carrying trees. The plaque signalled that certain seats in the theatre were reserved for these curious tree-carrying clergy. Also discovered at the site was a fragment of a relief showing three people, one bearing a basket of fruit, another a lighted torch, making an offering before an altar and a goddess. By them are symbols that help to identify the scene: a cap with a point at the back and long ear-flaps (usually called a Phrygian cap and believed to have come from the east); a tree, apparently a pine, with a bird in its branches; a shepherd's crook, and a flute. The goddess, these symbols suggest, is Cybele, the Great Mother Goddess \u2013 to whom the _dendrophori_ usually owed their devotion \u2013 and the site, although some still dispute it, is a cult complex for the celebration of the mysteries of Cybele and Attis, imported from Asia Minor.\n\nCybele found her origins as an ancient near-eastern earth goddess, a spirit who ruled over the death, rebirth and regeneration of crops and vegetation. Legend links her with another mortal or god as her lover and devotee, a shepherd named Attis, who is reputed to have castrated himself against a pine tree when she drove him into a frenzy. He perished, but his body was preserved and later resurrected by the goddess. Cybele was worshipped by a transgendered priesthood that imitated the self-castration of Attis, and also wore women's clothes. One name for the priesthood, by a strange coincidence, was 'Galli', leading to an easy play on words for Roman poets and satirists whenever they wished to make disparaging remarks about the Gauls.\n\nAlthough, by this measure, such a goddess and form of worship should seem quite unRoman and inimical to Roman ideals of strength and hostility to barbarian ideas, the worship of Cybele was admitted to Rome during the late third century BC. This was when Rome was fighting the Second Punic War with Carthage. It faced a crippling famine and hence a likely defeat. Following the oracles of the gods and an ancient prophecy, the cult was given official sanction in Rome and was said to have been instrumental in the salvation of the city. The famine abated and the Carthaginians were defeated. From Rome, the worship of Cybele was carried further out into the empire. Cult complexes, such as those at Vienne, were required for the rites and mystery initiations that formed part of the worship. The religious calendar of Cybele, as it appears during Roman times, bears strange echoes of the Christian holy week and Easter. Three days before the spring equinox, a pine tree would be cut down by the _dendrophori,_ hung with an image of Attis, and carried in procession to the temple. The devotees would lash themselves with whips to sprinkle the tree with their blood, before laying it to rest in a ritual tomb in the heart of the temple. There were three days of mourning before nightfall on the spring equinox, at which point the tomb would be reopened by torchlight, and Attis would be reborn with great joy. Around this time, initiations into the cult would take place. Devotees, according to some accounts, would be led into an underground chamber whose ceiling was a latticework or grille. Above this, a bull would be slaughtered so that the initiate below would be baptized in its blood; its genitalia, cut off, could also be seen as a substitute for the devotee castrating himself. After initiates had washed away the blood, they might view a re-enactment of the myth of Cybele and Attis. Such rites required the sort of enclosed theatre and subterranean pits around a central temple building that are all to be found in Vienne.\n\n_Ruins of the Cybele sanctuary, Vienne, first or second century AD._\n\nOther finds in Vienne seem to attest that the Cybele cult was by no means unpopular. There are inscriptions recording individual _dendrophori_ and charitable distributions of food made in connection with the company of these priests as a whole. There are also sculptures and reliefs of Cybele, sometimes shown riding on a lion (a sign of her exotic, still dangerous and eastern nature) and her lover Attis, wearing the Phrygian cap and playing his shepherd's flute. It is notable that the two names of the clergy attached to the temple, datable to the first or second century AD \u2013 Attia Priscilla and Tiberius Julius Diadochus \u2013 both suggest (despite the Greek overtone of the last name) that the foreign cult appealed to an affluent stratum of Romanized Gauls.\n\nCybele was not the only exotic deity to be imported by the Romans into Gaul. On the sheer but low valley wall of the river Tourne at Bourg-Saint-And\u00e9ol is carved in the open air a relief of the Iranian deity, Mithras, carrying out the sacramental act of slaying the bull. This carving, cut between two springs, marks the site of a Mithraeum, devoted to the worship and initiatory rites of Mithras. Like Cybele, Mithras was an eastern import, but newer to the Roman empire. Given that the rites were secret, little is known for sure about the meaning of the cult. It may again, like Cybele, have been a fertility rite. Others have argued that depiction of the struggle between the god and the bull was a symbol of a cosmic battle between good and evil (similar to ideas in Persian Zoroastrianism) or else an astronomical allegory whose significance is now lost. His worship was confined to men and became highly popular among Roman soldiers, though some have conjectured that this particular shrine was put here by Greek or Eastern merchants with trading interests along the nearby Rh\u00f4ne.\n\nSuch imports of the divine came not only from the eastern parts of the Roman empire, but also North Africa and Egypt. In Arles, not only did Cybele and Mithras find devotees who left behind evidence of their devotion in statues and tombstones of their priestesses or priests; the Egyptian goddess Isis was also worshipped. Like Cybele, Isis was a mother goddess connected in her essence with the fertility of the crops, and the death and resurrection of vegetation. Found in the Alyscamps at Arles was a small tombstone, crudely inscribed with the lettering picked out in red paint, to Maximius Festus, a _pausarius_ of the cult of Isis, one of the priests who was likely responsible for the processions made by the statue of the goddess as part of the cult's devotions. There was also a statue of Harpocrates, the Greek version of Horus, the son of Isis, who represented not only the rising sun and resurrection, but also the keeping of secrets that were to be held within the cult, away from the impious and uninitiated profane multitudes.\n\nThe foreign religions tended to be most visibly popular where the requirements of empire provoked the greatest movements of people. Mithras flourished especially on the Rhine frontier among the legions. Cybele and Isis were most commonly worshipped in the great trading towns of the Rh\u00f4ne \u2013 Arles, Vienne and Lyons. It is in the latter two that the most successful foreign religion of those imported under the Romans \u2013 Christianity \u2013 first appears in the light of history.\n\nClose by the great altar raised to Augustus and the Roman emperors in Lyons an amphitheatre had also been built. Some of it can still be seen today at the western end of the Rue Burdeau. There are no grand arcaded walls still standing as at Arles or at N\u00eemes, but most of the floor of the arena is still open to the air, and some of the lower levels of seating and steps have been restored on the northern side, which was built, like the Arles amphitheatre, on the slope of a hill. Around the arena are the plodding skeletal traces of thick stone walls and stairways which would have led to the _vomitoria,_ or network of tunnels that traversed the structure of the amphitheatre to lead the spectators to their seats. A necklace of lime-green ivy and scratchy grass hangs upon the old stone. Beige blank-fronted buildings and a tangle of power cables look down from the top of the hill. Broken columns are laid on their side in one corner of the arena, near a single square-wooden stake that has been set upright in the ground.\n\nIt is a spot that betrays a diversity of historical suffering. A tablet hangs on the wall of a nearby apartment building commemorating one Lucien Sportisse, a member of the Resistance, shot in that place by French agents of the Gestapo in March 1944. Auguste-Laurent Burdeau, after whom the street was named, suffered a slower end around fifty years earlier: a brilliant civil servant, he is said to have worked himself to death. However, the wooden stake in the arena itself bears witness to an earlier and more brutal stratum of violence: the first Christian martyrdoms in Gaul.\n\nThe deaths of these first martyrs, drawn from Lyons and Vienne, are recorded extensively in a letter quoted by the fourth-century church historian Eusebius. The letter purports to be an eye-witness account of the deaths which took place in AD 177. The second century was not an easy age for the adherents of the new religion. Early Christianity was frequently met with hostility by the Roman authorities. Many of those who adhered to Christian ways did so not because they were an eastern import or ostensibly foreign, but because they demanded an exclusive devotion. Unlike Cybele, or Isis, or Mithras, the Christian God looked for the whole of the Christian's allegiance. There was no room for worship of the divine genius of Rome or the emperors. This was more than a matter of metaphysics. To deny worship was seen as a denial of authority. To refuse the worship of Rome and the emperors was seen as a species of subversion, suggesting that powers other than the emperor and the official establishment had the prerogative to rule and make laws.\n\nSuch suspicions, generally held during this period, were exacerbated by the circumstances of the time. Some historians have suggested that tensions in Lyons may have been heightened by difficulties on the Rhine frontier. The Christians might have been used as scapegoats for these external difficulties. It also appears that the killing of the Christians was ordered at the time of the annual festival at the altar of Augustus, a moment in the year when the show of and even genuine feelings of devotion to Rome would have been at their greatest. At any rate, the letter preserved by Eusebius describes a febrile atmosphere in Lyons. There were 'cat-calls, hootings and blows, draggings, plunderings, stonings, and confinements, and everything that an infuriated mob is accustomed to do to those whom they deem bitter enemies'. As many members of the community as possible were rounded up and imprisoned before they could be tried in front of the governor. About half of them were migrants from Greece and Asia Minor, and the others indigenous Gallo-Romans. An aged Gallo-Roman of high social standing, Vettius Epagathus, offered to represent the Christians, but when the governor discovered that he too was a Christian, he was prevented from defending them and also imprisoned.\n\nAccording to the letter, the group were accused of 'Thyestean banquets\u2020 and Oedipodean connections' \u2013 in other words cannibalism and incest \u2013 before being put to excruciating tortures. Some were whipped and had their flesh torn; others were hung up by their feet in the stocks. Sanctus, a deacon from Vienne, had burning-hot metal plates placed against his genitals on consecutive days. A handful recanted in the face of such torments. A woman named Biblias denied her faith, but then, as if waking from a trance, says the letter, renewed her confession as a Christian despite the continuation of the torture.\n\nFollowing this, the executions and killings began. Pothnius, the ninety-year-old bishop of Lyons, was brought before the governor and asked 'who was the god of the Christians' to which he replied 'if you were worthy, you would know'. As a result, he was dragged around in front of a furious crowd who kicked and punched him and pelted him with whatever missiles came to hand, 'all of them believing that they would sin greatly and act impiously if they in any respect fell short in their insulting treatment of him'. Two days after this, confined in prison, says the letter, he died. Pothnius at least avoided a public end. Other Christians were not so fortunate. Those who were Roman citizens were sentenced to beheading. Those who were not were condemned to die before the crowds in the amphitheatre. The usual course was for them to be tortured and whipped, and in their weakened state thrown into the arena to be mauled by wild beasts. Some, after being mauled but not killed, were placed in a scalding hot iron chair 'in which their bodies were roasted, and they themselves were filled with the fumes of their own flesh'. The remains of the dead were then burnt and thrown into the Rh\u00f4ne.\n\nThe most courageous of the martyrs in the face of this treatment, says the letter, was a young woman called Blandina. During the preliminary tortures, her body was 'virtually torn up' but 'like a noble athlete' she did not give in to any of the pain inflicted on her. She was tied to a wooden stake in the amphitheatre on the first day that the Christians were brought in, but the wild beasts refused to harm her. Her preservation, says the letter, was down to the power of her faith and prayer. The Roman authorities, foiled in their attempt to kill her, brought her back every day to witness the deaths of her fellow Christians in the hope that she would crack under the pressure and betray her faith. This did not happen. As a result, she was one of the last to be killed. She was brought into the amphitheatre with a boy named Ponticus, aged around fifteen, whom she encouraged to remain steadfast despite the ordeal. Ponticus was the first to die, being tortured in front of the crowds. She herself was again whipped, thrown to the wild beasts, then placed in the iron chair. Still alive, she was wound up in a net and thrown in front of a bull, to be gored, tossed about and trampled until finally she was dead.\n\nThe account of the death of the martyrs in the Lyons amphitheatre is one of the few to cast light on the early history of Christian worship in Gaul, which for the most part is dark and obscure. Another brief moment of clarity is found in the life of Pothnius's successor as bishop of Lyons, Irenaeus. Like many of the other early Christians in Lyons, he was also a migrant from the east, in his case Smyrna (now Izmir) in Asia Minor. He was lucky to be absent from Lyons during the persecution of 177; at the time he was in Rome to warn the church authorities over the danger of various types of heresy among the young Christian communities. Returning to Gaul and being elected the new bishop, he made the extirpation of heretical doctrine one of his chief concerns.\n\nOne of Irenaeus' works, _Adversus Haereses_ ('Against Heresies') is still preserved. In it, he claims that there was a heretic named Marcus who was active in the towns of the Rh\u00f4ne valley, working false miracles and prophesying by means of a demon. One of Marcus's particular interests, says Irenaeus, was in seeking out female followers, 'and those such as are well-bred, and elegantly attired, and of great wealth...' whom he would convince he could also endow with the gift of prophesy. Having done so, they would each make 'the effort to reward him, not only by the gift of her possessions (in which way he has collected a very large fortune), but also by yielding up to him her person, desiring in every way to be united to him, that she may become altogether one with him'. Marcus would also use love potions to achieve this end, says Irenaeus. He laments that even one of his own deacons, a man from Asia Minor, had lost his wife for a time to Marcus by these means. She followed him around the country for some time until the real Christians managed to convert her back to the true faith, after which 'she spent her whole time in the exercise of public confession, weeping over and lamenting the defilement which she had received from this magician'. The consciences of such women were 'seared, as with a hot iron'.\n\nIrenaeus' greater concern is not with Marcus's sexual appetite, however, but with his intellectual and spiritual pretensions. Marcus's disciples, when they themselves were not attempting to deceive 'silly women' in emulation of their master, would describe themselves as 'perfect' as regards their spiritual knowledge. They had imbibed, so they claimed, a complete and unspeakable knowledge of the divine from a direct experience of the godhead. This knowledge gave them a supernatural protection such that they were immune from harm and free to act as they pleased. In this, they were superior to St Peter and St Paul or any of the saints and apostles: they had consumed and knew beyond words the real nature of God himself.\n\n_Tomb of a Gallo-Roman Christian boy named Ursus, who died aged sixteen on 6 March, 493; displayed in the Gallo-Roman Museum of Lyons._\n\nThis belief, that a Christian devotee might win a personal and direct knowledge and experience of God \u2013 an idea condemned as the 'gnostic heresy' \u2013 was held by a number of early Christians across the Roman empire. It likely owed much of its vigour to ideas from Greek philosophy, but also to the initiatory cults of deities such as Cybele and Isis, which offered to their adherents a personal and direct engagement with their deities. Irenaeus's fears mark the diverse religious background in Gaul at the time, and show that the other imported religions would have been contributing their ideas to the developing Christian faith in a way that was unwelcome to its higher clerical authorities. The persecution by Rome also told on the attitudes of Irenaeus. It is revealing that he took up the rhetoric used by the Romans against the Christians, for example accusations of a vain higher knowledge and sexual deviancy, and used them against those Christians who did not conform to his idea of the faith; and those who had fallen had been seared by a metaphorical 'hot iron', just as the martyrs had suffered for real.\n\nBut aside from the accounts of Eusebius and Irenaeus, there is little to go on regarding the earliest years of the Christian presence in Roman Gaul. Legend and anachronism take the place of verifiable history. Bishops of the third and fourth centuries, such as St Trophimus of Arles or Daphnus of Vaison are attributed to the generation after Christ by sixth-century Gallic writers and were declared to have been followers of the twelve apostles. Later, the belief crystallized that it was not followers of the apostles, but the close intimates of Christ himself who brought the faith to Gaul. The story was retold as late as the nineteenth century by Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Mistral that after the death of Christ the Virgin Mary, her sister Mary and Mary Magdalen were hounded out of Jerusalem and thrown onto a boat without sails or a rudder. They were joined by Lazarus and Joseph of Arimathea. The ship was cast adrift at sea but was drawn by divine guidance to the coast of Gaul, to put ashore in the Camargue near Arles at the town later to bear their name, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Some say that they were miraculously borne further inland to the strange mountain fastness of Les Baux-de-Provence just south of Glanum and Saint-R\u00e9my-de-Provence, and from there began the evangelization of the Gallic provinces. Carved in a rock face at Les Baux is a relief of three figures side by side which are said to commemorate _les trois Maries_ ('the three Marys'), though the motif of goddesses appearing in threes belongs to earlier Gallic religion; it may be the case that _les trois Maries_ are the Christian reincarnation of an earlier stratum of belief.\n\nThe Christian faith became quickly more visible over the course of the fourth century. When the emperor Constantine, who had declared Christian worship legal in 313, called a council of bishops at Arles the following year \u2013 a meeting that is seen as marking the foundation of canon law in the west and is notable, among other acts, for ordering the excommunication of Christian clergy who took part in chariot races, gladiator fights and theatrical performances \u2013 only a small handful of Gallic bishops appear to have attended, including those from the cities of Massalia, Vaison, Orange, Apt, Nice and Arles itself. However, over the course of the century dozens of new bishoprics were founded across the Gallic provinces. Christianity became a notable presence in the cities of Gaul with the foundation of cathedrals for the service of the developing Christian communities. These sites have for the most part remained in use since this period, the early Christian buildings covered over by newer and larger cathedrals during the Middle Ages. However, in a few instances, excavations have made it possible to recover a physical sense of this pristine age of Christian Gaul.\n\nBy a strange irony, one of the best places to visit for this is Geneva, a city that \u2013 thanks to John Calvin and the Reformation \u2013 was devoted to iconoclasm and the obliteration of its ecclesiastical links with Rome. But below the floor of St Pierre's Cathedral, where Calvin's wooden chair is still preserved as a relic, the unspoiled foundations and lower walls of the first Roman Christian buildings dating back to the fourth century remained safely forgotten and untouched though the chaos of the Reformation and the Wars of Religion. Excavations at the end of the twentieth century brought them to light; and rather than the space being filled in afterwards, a false floor was fitted, allowing visitors to descend to the original level of the Roman city below the modern cathedral and inspect the remains.\n\nThe modern cathedral is for the most part a gothic building with a grand classical fa\u00e7ade that was slapped on in the eighteenth century: a temple frontage with steps, six massive columns with well-carved Corinthian capitals and an ugly iron-hued coat of arms on an otherwise blank pediment. It overlooks an unruffled brick-cobbled square shaded by lime trees and overlooked by prosperous but restrained Haussmann-style stone-fronted apartment buildings and offices. But in the dimly-lit narrow passages below ground, elegance gives way to antique zeal and the original footprint of Rome. It is possible to see the low walls of the first episcopal group of buildings, dating about to around 350. There is the threshold of the first cathedral, its walls built with rows of rough cobbles placed between stern and irregular tall stone uprights \u2013 a building technique called _opus Africanum,_ which, unsurprisingly, came from North Africa. The first cathedral reaches into a choir and apse that can now only be seen narrowly like a cave, thanks to the remaining stonework that supports the present cathedral above. However, the trace of the apse in parchment-coloured stone at the eastern end behind a sanctuary, which would have been screened off with columns and contained the tomb of a holy person to sanctify it, can still be made out in the low light.\n\nStrange to relate, the first traces of building on the side, just south of this sanctuary, take the form of the grave of a person of importance dating back to pre-Christian times, around 100 BC. This may well have been a chieftain of the local Gallic tribe, the Allobroges. The strata of soil have been peeled away to reveal the lower half of his skeleton, while his torso remains sealed within the earth. The ground reveals an attempt in early history to burrow down and remove his skull \u2013 a reminder of the Gallic interest in the possession and display of heads for their prestige and magical properties. It is impossible to know whether some sense of sanctity accrued to the site from this original pre-Christian tomb, leading to its choice for the siting of the Christian monument; but it is feasible.\n\nClinging to the first cathedral's northern walls and accessed through a courtyard is a series of individual rooms, side by side, each having the area of a large tablecloth. These were set aside as dwellings for monks or clergy attached to the cathedral. The rooms were small and bare, of two storeys in height with a simple low wooden ceiling creating the upper storey, but not entirely devoid of comfort. Below their plain grey tiled floor, little hollow runnels cut across the diagonals, a restrained form of hypocaust heating to take the chill off the mountainous climate.\n\nSouth from the monastic cells came the water supply for a baptistery. Again, Roman technology was harnessed to meet the needs of the new religion. A conduit drew water from a nearby well over 30 metres away. Originally, this filled the pool in the apse of the baptistery, allowing the new converts to be completely immersed in water, as was the custom in the fourth century. The change of this custom can be traced in the alterations to the font, which was shrunk and remodelled in successive centuries so that instead of immersion, the neophyte was drenched with a jet of water from above as the bishop looked on from one side.\n\nNear the source of the water lie the bishop's quarters. The floor of his reception hall stands out colourfully among the beige labyrinth of stonework and differing archaeological strata. From this chamber, it is possible to surmise his increasing importance as a civil official as the Roman administration declined in the fifth century. It is an intimate hall, a square with sides of about 5 metres in length; its lavish mosaic floor, now undulating and pockmarked, has a series of panel designs that included Christian motifs \u2013 crosses with grapes and vines. From here, as Geneva passed from Roman to Burgundian control over the course of the fifth century, the bishop would not only see to church business, but also to decisions over the government of the city, as well as relations between the city and the new panoply of rulers who succeeded to the mandate of Rome.\n\nIn the whole ensemble of remains at Geneva \u2013 the monastic cells, the baptistery, the cathedral (and its two successors, which can also be traced out on the site), and the bishop's quarters \u2013 it is the bishop's quarters and his reception hall that leave the strongest impression. Here, one feels, was the seat not only of temporal power, but perhaps also the spiritual motor of the whole complex. Christianity may have been a religion that gave precedence to the humble and the outcast; yet in these formative centuries of the church's presence in Gaul, with Christianity's legalization and later adoption as the official religion of empire at the end of the fourth century, the deeds of the bishops had real primacy. They not only played an ever-increasing role in the administration of the cities, but it was by the force of their character that the cultural and religious tone of Gaul were for the most part to be set in the later years of Roman rule and beyond. And although the office of bishop can be traced back to the non-Roman origin of scripture and Christ's apostles, the way it was manifested in some of its earliest holders in Gaul was to be dictated by ideals drawn from the Roman presence.\n\nDespite the professed reluctance of early Christians to involve themselves in fighting, the Roman army provided one of the patterns for its early churchmen to follow. The most outstanding example of this is St Martin, bishop of Tours. Despite later becoming one of the great patron saints of France, he was not of Gallic origin. He was probably born in 316 at Savaria in Pannonia (modern-day Szombathely in Hungary). Thus he came from the frontier territories, a barbarian fringe with a reputation for revolt that Rome had to work hard to keep within the fold of the empire. Martin was born into a military family. His father started as an ordinary soldier, but, like many Roman emperors at this time, he was able to rise through the ranks to gain a high status; he in fact reached the grand position of military tribune. His dedication to the traditions of Rome is perhaps evident in the name he gave his son. 'Martin' was drawn from Mars, the Roman god of war, and perhaps signified not only a devotion to the practice of arms, but also, shortly after a time of the persecution of Christians, to the old Roman gods themselves.\n\nThe name, however, did not deter Martin from taking an interest in Christianity. When he was a young child, his father was posted to the garrison town of Ticinum (modern-day Pavia) in northern Italy. His family followed. There, Martin discovered the church, which would have been a large town house converted for Christian use. Drawn to the faith, although probably not yet in his teens, he sought baptism and enrolled there as a _catechumen,_ or one preparing for full and formal admission to the Christian community. According to Martin's biographer, Sulpicius Severus, Martin intended even at this age to become a hermit and desert contemplative. However, his father strongly disapproved of his son's vocation and sought to put an end to it. In the 320s, the emperor Constantine made a law that sons of veteran soldiers were liable for conscription into the army. Martin's father, hoping to dissociate his son from the church, submitted him for a term of twenty-five years' military service.\n\nMartin's time behind the colours is treated as somewhat of an embarrassment by his biographer Severus. To spare Martin's blushes at the idea he would have borne arms, Severus relates a story in which he refused to fight a barbarian column at Borbetomagus (modern-day Worms) but told the then emperor, Julian the Apostate \u2013 a non-Christian \u2013 that he would stand before the Roman lines unarmed and still be able, under the protection of Christ, to penetrate the enemy ranks. Severus says that Martin was thrown into prison for this demand the day before the battle, but that on the day itself, the barbarian column surrendered and Martin's boast was never put to the test.\n\nHowever, it is almost certain that Martin saw active service, and that he had to serve out the normal term of twenty-five years. His time in the army came to an end in 356, at which time he took up residence for a while with the Christian community in Poitiers, before journeying across the empire in an attempt to convert his parents and also to spend some time in solitary contemplation. On returning to Poitiers in 361, he founded a community of hermits in the ruins of an old villa about 16 kilometres (10 miles) outside the city, at a place that became known as Locociacum, 'The Place of the Little Cells', in modern French Ligug\u00e9. Ten years later, he was elected to be bishop of Tours, an office which he held until his death in 397.\n\nEven as bishop, Martin retained a reputation for extreme asceticism, spurning all comforts, and even founded a new hermit community at Marmoutier outside Tours, from where he carried out many of his episcopal duties. He gained a reputation as a miracle-worker, and Marmoutier was to become a place of pilgrimage. Yet, aside from the developing tradition of the hermetic life in the Christian west, the Roman army was undoubtedly one of the sources of his approach to a Christian way of living. He frequented couched his ascetic tendencies, and his encouragement of his followers, in the language of military service.\n\nOn one occasion, a former Roman soldier came to Marmoutier and asked to be able to join Martin's community. The soldier was married, but professed absolute devotion to the Christian hermitic life. Martin admitted the soldier, who built his cell some way apart from the others to show his absolute commitment to the hermit's path. As for his wife, St Martin placed her in a house for religious virgins that he had founded in Tours itself. After some time, however, the soldier sought him out and begged for permission to spend some time with her. He said that he was a soldier of Christ, and that Martin should allow people who were 'saints' to serve as soldiers together even if of different sexes, since their profession of faith meant that they no longer had any thoughts of carnal union.\n\nMartin's response came straight from the parade ground. 'Tell me,' he asked the soldier, 'Have you ever stood in the line of battle and been present in war?' 'Frequently,' said the soldier, 'I have often stood in the line of battle and been present in war.' 'Did you ever see any woman standing there, or fighting?' The old soldier was unable to reply. Martin continued, 'This would render an army ridiculous, if a female crowd were mixed with the regiments of men.' Thus, Martin was dependent on principles of Roman military discipline and order, ahead of any drawn from the gospels, to organize his new Christian community.\n\nThe same martial spirit informed Martin's approach to the pagan temples and shrines that were still in use throughout the district of Tours and beyond. They, and the people who still worshipped there, were an enemy to which no quarter could be given. The shrines had to be destroyed, and the worshippers forced to surrender. Martin set about smashing statues, pulling down temples and burning ancient images with all the dedication, brutality and singlemindedness that Caesar showed when he came to conquer the country four centuries previously. Passing one day through the settlement of Leprosum (modern-day Levroux in the Indre), he saw a well-maintained temple, which he immediately sought to destroy. When the local population learnt of his plan, they gathered in an angry crowd, beat him, and drove him out of the village. Martin then spent three days nearby praying for God to assist him. He fasted, and in the words of most translations of Sulpicius put on 'sackcloth' as a sign of penitence, though the original Latin has him wearing a _cilicium,_ a rough cloak of goats' hair sometimes worn by soldiers. In answer to his prayers, two angels appeared, armed with swords and spears, and commanded Martin to return to the village. They would protect him from the villagers, they said, while he completed the destruction of the pagan shrine. Martin returned and carried out their orders. The villagers, who before had been so hostile, did not dare to fight the bishop this time; they merely stood mute and astonished thanks to the power of the two warrior angels.\n\nIndeed, Martin's attacks on the ancient shrines often cast him as a soldier on the front line of warfare. His behaviour was redolent of an ancient Roman tradition in which a commanding officer would consecrate himself and the opposing army to death before launching himself in a suicidal attack against the enemy, which would doom them together but guarantee Roman success. However, in Martin's case his offer of self-sacrifice, being to the Christian God, was a guarantee of self-preservation and true divine protection. Near Autun, he earmarked another ancient temple for destruction, and a sacred pine tree that was growing nearby. The fact that it was a pine suggests it might have been dedicated to Cybele and Attis, though this cannot be known for certain. The local people accepted the destruction of the temple, but their attachment to the tree was far greater. Martin told them that 'there was nothing sacred in the trunk of a tree' and that it must be cut down, 'since it had been dedicated to a demon'. The people told Martin that they would cut it down themselves if he stood in the place where it should fall and 'receive it' as it came down. Martin consented to do so. When the trunk had been cut through and the whole tree began to topple towards him, it seemed that he was certain to be crushed. However, just before it struck him he made the sign of the cross, at which the tree stopped, spun like a top, turned round, and landed elsewhere. Martin himself was unscathed. Like a good general securing a territory newly conquered, Martin built a Christian church on the site as a stronghold against paganism. Indeed, Sulpicius remarks at this point that this was Martin's normal practice after destroying a pagan shrine.\n\nThe ascetic tendencies of so many followers of the new faith flummoxed the traditional Gallo-Roman aristocracy. In the latter part of the fourth century, those who promoted the ascetic life were sometimes seen as so subversive that they were viewed as a threat to public order. One ascetic Christian, Priscillian, who was originally from Spain but who attracted followers in Gaul on account of his teachings, was accused of sorcery at the prompting of the Emperor Maximus and executed in 385. His teachings, dubbed 'Priscillianism', were likewise banned. Among other things, they encouraged private worship in villas away from the developing hierarchy of the established church, thus emancipating educated and wealthy single women: a development that was seen as particularly unhealthy and unwelcome.\n\nAt worst, such behaviour was seen as dangerous; but the mildest and most frequent reaction to it was perplexity and dismay. The ascetic life was seen as a perversity: something that without proper cause or benefit could break down traditional social ties and destroy the very bedrock of Roman culture. The fears of the old aristocracy are summed up in an exchange of letters between Ausonius and one of his former students, Paulinus of Nola.\n\nPaulinus had been one of Ausonius's star pupils. He was born in 352 in Bordeaux to a noble family, and had studied at the schools there before embarking on a glittering career in the imperial service. It probably did him no harm that he was of the circle of Ausonius and therefore of Gratian, the heir to the throne. After Gratian became emperor, Paulinus was made one of the consuls in 377 and then governor of the south Italian province of Campania. He kept in close touch with his old and beloved teacher. One on occasion Paulinus writes for Ausonius a poem on kings, based on the writing of the historian Suetonius. Ausonius's rapturous reply survives. He addresses Paulinus as his son, and calls himself his father: 'It was early in the night... when your wonderfully worded letter was delivered to me... along with your brilliant poem.' Preserving the aristocratic niceties of correspondence along with a careful interest in the maintenance of correct Latin, Ausonius is as unrestrained as he could be in his praise: 'How skilfully and neatly, how harmoniously and sweetly you have written, conforming at once to the character of our Roman accent... and then what shall I say of your gift for expression? I can swear that for fluency in verse none of our Roman youths is your equal.'\n\nBut soon this intimacy turned to bitterness. After the assassination of Gratian in 383, Paulinus's political career, like that of Ausonius, came to an end, and he returned to his native Bordeaux. Not unlike other talented poets from future ages when the chance of political glory was shut down for good \u2013 John Donne and George Herbert spring to mind \u2013 he was seized by religious fervour. He married a Christian woman from Spain named Therasia, converted to Christianity and was baptized, perhaps by 389. They moved to Spain, but after the birth of their first child, a son who died when only a few days old, they decided to embrace the secluded and ascetic religious life.\n\n_St Paulinus of Nola, as portrayed in a seventeenth-century engraving._\n\nAusonius was, at least nominally, a Christian. He said his prayers every morning in his private chapel, knew his scripture well and could give a long and detailed exposition of Christian theology and doctrine. However, this never for one moment dimmed his love for the traditions of Roman literature and education, both for the pursuit of intellectual pleasure but also as markers of what it meant to be civilized and a part of the governing class of the empire. The muses were never far behind the angels in Ausonius's writing.\n\nSo when Paulinus moved to Spain and stopped replying to his letters, it seemed to Ausonius to be something between obstinate unreasonableness and a barbaric insult. To refuse to engage in the literary discourse and the learned discussion of classical literature that was not only a correct pursuit for people of their class, but also a sign of their intimacy, left him confused and upset. Ausonius continues to write, accusing Paulinus of being impious, not to God but to their _amicitia_ (friendship). He claims to knnow what was at the root of it: his wife, Therasia \u2013 'that Tanaquil', he calls her, likening her to a notoriously domineering and scheming wife of one of the early kings of Rome. The brand of Christianity with which she has infected Paulinus is laying waste to everything that is civilized and dear. 'Why have you not answered my letters? Even enemies say ' _salve_ ' ('greetings') to each other in battle. Rocks and caves are not so rude as to refuse to echo the human voice.'\n\nThe unanswered letters pile up. Ausonius keeps writing. He seeks to make Paulinus understand the true nature of his silence. 'Let this impious one turn no sound to advantage; let no joys bring him pleasure, no sweet odes of the poets... nor Echo, who hidden in the woody groves of the shepherds, consoles us, returning our words.' His silence, says Ausonius, is akin to savagery or madness: 'Sad, needy, let him dwell in deserted wastes and in silence let him roam around the peaks of Alpine mountains, as it is said Bellerophon, out of his mind, avoiding the company and traces of men, vagrant, wandered through the trackless places.'\n\nEventually, stung enough by Ausonius's words, Paulinus engages, blaming the slowness of the post for his failure to reply earlier. However, he defends his new and ascetic life. 'Mine is not the crazed mind of a Bellerophon, nor is my wife a Tanaquil...' He has chosen a new and a better path. 'Why do you ask the deposed Muses, my father, to return again to my affection? Hearts which have been consecrated to Christ give refusal to the Muses, and are closed to Apollo... God forbids us to spend time on empty things... and on literature full of idle tales... For these things steep our hearts in false and vain ideas, and train our tongues to say nothing worthwhile, nothing that could bring the truth...' Ausonius loves the old Roman idea of _otium,_ aristocratic retirement and leisure; Paulinus himself loves _otium,_ but as a means of devoting himself to the worship of Christ.\n\nBut, Paulinus assures Ausonius in the last letter that he will send him (dated to 393, shortly before the latter's death), he takes all that Ausonius has said without acrimony, and declares his old teacher to be still as dear to him as life itself. But it is in faith that they will find their final union, rather than in a visit from Paulinus on earth: 'And when, released from the prison of the body, I shall have flown forth from the earth, in whatever place our common Father shall place me, there also shall I keep you in my heart; nor shall that end which severs me from my body unloose me from the love of you.'\n\nCharacters such as St Martin and Paulinus \u2013 who after Ausonius's death departed Spain for Italy and, like Martin, became a bishop against his will \u2013 battled for the ascetic way to become the predominant mode of Christian life in Gaul towards the end of the Roman period. However, even with the military fervour of St Martin, they were unable to claim the victory of dictating the ultimate character of the church and its bishops; another archetype was to be imported from the late Roman world.\n\nThe name of Sidonius has already been mentioned in earlier chapters, describing his villa in the countryside near Clermont-Ferrand. Born in 430, he was from a noble family of the region. His father-inlaw, Avitus, rose to be emperor in 455, and even after he was deposed and possibly assassinated two years later by a rival claimant, Majorian, Sidonius was still treated with respect on account of his great ability and his unbending support for the imperial government. He addressed panegyrics to Majorian (despite the treatment he meted out to Avitus) and also to one of his later successors, Anthemius. His eloquence secured him a statue in Rome, the titles of count, senator and patrician, as well as in 469 the office of urban prefect of Rome. However, after around three years he moved to the ecclesiastical sphere, and was enthroned as bishop of his native Clermont-Ferrand.\n\nA huge quantity of letters survive from Sidonius's pen, not to mention a short collection of poems. No other writer's works from the fifth-century Roman empire in the west have been preserved in such abundance. A reason for this great profusion can be found in one of the letters of the collection, written after Sidonius became bishop and addressed to one of his fellow clergymen, Bishop Lupus of Troyes, an eminent cleric who had held his position since 429 and had even managed to prevail on Attila the Hun to spare Troyes from being sacked in 451. It is a long and convoluted letter. Sidonius passes through self-deprecatory excuses about his 'slipshod style of writing'; he praises Bishop Lupus for having maintained their mutual affection for so many years. However, its main substance is a discussion of a book that Sidonius had sent Lupus a little while before: a book that Sidonius himself had composed 'crammed and loaded with a motley assemblage of topics, times and places': in fact, it was a compilation of some of Sidonius's own earlier letters. The current letter to Lupus is an elaborate and learned piece of politesse concerning how this book had been received by him and other readers: 'I knew that you knew how modesty better becomes an author than self-assurance on the occasion of publishing his works and that from austere critics favourable notices are less readily drawn by brashness on the part of an author than by nervousness.' Though Lupus is hardly one of these austere critics, suggests Sidonius. In fact, he is a great patron of the arts and encourager of literature: 'Never to mention myself, you bring to light the talents of all men of letters however much they seek obscurity \u2013 just as the sunbeam is wont, by means of its thirsty particles, to draw out the water hidden in the bowls of the earth... Thus when you, my saintly friend, find any men of literary tastes inactive or shy or hidden in some obscure retreat where their fame languishes, your brilliant eloquence with its skilful admonition urges them on and thereby brings them to public notice.'\n\nSo the survival of Sidonius's letters stems not just from the fact that he wrote so many \u2013 nine volumes' worth in the end \u2013 but that he saw to their publication and their wide dissemination among his fellow Gallic literati, who would approve of his work and give it their protection. Lupus, a fellow bishop, was one such person. But everything inscribed in Sidonius's letter to him \u2013 the elaborate courtesies, learned allusions to classical literature and the law, the obsession with preserving one's name by a literary endeavour focused on anything but Christian piety \u2013 would have been hateful to ascetics of Martin's and Paulinus's stamp. These features represented the typical behaviour of the Roman aristocracy, and this letter is an example of how that aristocracy, towards the end of the imperial period, had been able to move in to the institution of the episcopacy, and make it for the most part its own.\n\nIt is little wonder the role of bishop became a draw to the aristocratic classes towards the end of the imperial period. The role was one of authority within the city. It offered an outlet for the energetic and public-spirited who wished to make their mark, or else to work for the general good. As such, it was a perfect substitute in the late empire for the jobs in the imperial administration that were beginning to disappear as the barbarian armies took over responsibility for Gaul from the Roman government. The office of bishop might require diplomatic talent in negotiating with other cities, barbarian leaders or the retreating apparatus of the Roman state. It gave scope for patronage and display via the building of churches and other public works. The bishop became a considerable landowner, holding large estates for each diocese, able to command great wealth and power within the city, and often effectively taking over the decaying institution of the city council. Besides, the role was also tax free. It is little surprise that the aristocratic classes were tempted to become churchmen, bringing with them their habits and assumptions, their ease at possessing wealth and their devotion to the traditions of classical education. Even if they inhabited a new spiritual world, the old literature and the old philosophies that were intrinsic to the identity of their class were to be maintained and not condemned. The pagan writers with their eloquence and ideas were instead to be preserved to enhance the Christian message. Thus, through the institution of the Catholic Church, the preferences of class helped maintain the accumulated wisdom of the classical world for posterity \u2013 especially in Gaul.\n\nIt was not only high literary culture and the ideals of the aristocratic classes that managed to survive by taking refuge in the church. The traditional religious customs of the Gallo-Roman peoples also managed to do so for the most part, albeit frequently in altered or hidden form, despite the best efforts of some in the church hierarchy. One of the most conspicuous bishops who attempted to maintain the fight of Martin and Paulinus for the ascetic life and against pagan customs was Caesarius of Arles. Caesarius, like Paulinus, was of an aristocratic background, born to a high-class Roman family in Chalon-sur-Sa\u00f4ne in around 470. He was drawn to the ascetic life, and spent some time on the island of L\u00e9rins off the southern coast of Gaul, where austere ideals about monasticism had been established by St John Cassian, an ascetic and mystic who, like St Martin, had come to Gaul from the Danubian frontier. Caesarius was noted for his extreme levels of abstinence, not only fasting so much that he made himself ill, but also getting into a fight with a monastic cellarer for, in his view, allowing other monks to have too much food.\n\nCaesarius withdrew from L\u00e9rins, but by around 502 he was enthroned as bishop of Arles. He built up a strong reputation for good works, in particular ransoming prisoners taken by the Burgundian, Visigothic and other factions who were competing for primacy in southern Gaul at the time. He assisted in the development of the parish system, something which St Martin had helped to pioneer, and which was to remain a deep-seated part of local administration in France up to the Revolution. However, many of his fulminations from the pulpit were directed against the pagan practices which, despite the work and preaching of people like St Martin, remained strong throughout Gaul.\n\nCaesarius's use of the word 'pagan' to describe practices he considered to have no basis in Christianity, or indeed to be anti-Christian, reflects an aristocratic hauteur. _Paganus,_ meaning country-dweller, did not suggest that Christianity had a hold in the town but was slow to penetrate the countryside; it was rather that reverence for the old gods or maintaining aspects of their worship and taboos smacked of the uneducated rustic, whether pursued in the town or in the country.\n\nThere were many instances of this rustic behaviour of which Bishop Caesarius disapproved. The people sang bawdy songs 'inimical to chastity and honour'. They blew horns and rang bells to help the moon recover whenever there was an eclipse. They used charms and spells to overcome illnesses, or to ensure that their crops flourished for a bumper harvest. They delayed their journeys so that they would start or finish on 'auspicious' days. They bathed in rivers, lakes and springs at midsummer (such as the source of the Seine) for the sake of their healing power. Worst of all, they celebrated the Roman festival of the Kalends of January, or New Year's Day: there was feasting and drinking, the exchange of presents, as well as 'carnal and luxurious celebrations' in which the people enjoyed masquerades, dressing up as heifers or stags (redolent of the Gallic stag-god Cernunnos) or, if one were a 'soldier', as a prostitute.\n\nCaesarius used every means at his disposal to get rid of these pagan practices. Sometimes, he appealed to rational argument. The moon, he intoned from his pulpit, was a 'sphere set afire by a natural physical cause, which was hidden at fixed times or overcome by the nearby glow of the setting sun'. How could, he asked, 'sacrilegious noise-making' make it propitious? Days of the week should no longer be named after the pagan gods; there should be no more days dedicated to Jupiter or Mercury.\u2021 He cajoled landowners to get rid of any pagan 'trees, altars or shrines' that might be on their property 'where wretched people customarily offer prayers', otherwise the landowners would be 'accessory to what was done there'. And if such persuasions should fail, then full coercion should follow. Those who were social equals should be ostracized. 'If they belong to you, however, beat them even with whips, so that they might fear a blow to their bodies who do not think about the salvation of their souls.' Like St Martin, the Roman laws on desertion for soldiers furnished the mindset of Caesarius: 'The man who deserts the church of Christ... must therefore... be judged the same as a man who deserts the army of a terrestrial king.'\n\nHowever, the old Gallic and Roman ways fought back against the battle waged by Caesarius. The practice of divination and foretelling the future by casting lots, watching the flight of birds, or, as Caesarius relates, the interpretation of birdsong or sneezes, was prohibited. Yet foretelling the future by the _sortes biblicae_ \u2013 letting the Bible fall open at random to seek a prediction of what was to come \u2013 made up for the suppression of these earlier practices. Written spells to cure diseases were also condemned, but amulets containing biblical verses and Christian prayers filled the gap. Charms, such as shepherd's crooks, to avert hailstorms from the crops were disallowed, but a cross planted in the fields or on the hills would now fulfil the same function. The New Year parties would not go away, but at least Caesarius could appeal for exchanges of gifts to be turned into alms-giving. 'Drunken' and 'lewd' dancing was performed as a back-handed honour before the shrines of Christian saints. And bathing in rivers, lakes and springs was tied to the feast of St John the Baptist, and still carried out \u2013 under the cover of commemorating Christian baptism \u2013 at midsummer on 23 June, as the earlier tradition demanded.\n\nBishops such as Martin of Tours and Caesarius desired to live humbly, but they were buried lavishly. Gregory of Tours, one of Martin's successors as bishop of Tours in the late sixth century, described how a shrine had developed around his tomb, and proudly outlines the opulence and grandeur of the building that had been put up to house it: 'It is 48 metres (160 feet) long and 18 metres (60 feet) wide and 13 metres (45 feet) high to the vault; it has thirty-two windows in the part around the altar, twenty in the nave; forty-one columns; in the whole building fifty-two windows, 120 columns; eight doors, three in the part around the altar and five in the nave.' It is a scale of building one would hardly expect from the so-called 'Dark Ages', and seems more appropriate to the classical Roman era. But Martin, even in death, was now fulfilling another Roman archetype. In the reported piety of his life, he was seen as being closer to God than the ordinary run of mankind. Thus, it was imagined, he had special access to the divine mind; in other words, he had God's ear. In the Roman order, people would always seek the protection of the well connected. If one were in trouble but had access to a well-placed imperial official, someone in the court who could speak to the emperor, for example, then this was the most reliable way to solve a problem. Such a well-placed person was a _patronus,_ 'patron'. The patron was a secular and usually aristocratic figure. St Martin, thanks to the special position in heaven he was perceived to possess, was co-opted into being a spiritual patron: a patron saint. It is for this that the tributes paid to his remains and his shrine were similar to those that would be paid to any emperor visiting the town. To have Martin's body was the same as having an emperor, in person, present; it was a sign of his continuing presence and his intention of helping both the city of Tours and those who visited his shrine. His access to God would allow the resolution of any number of problems that were seen to have at their root a spiritual cause. Hence at the end of the Roman imperial period, and for centuries beyond, Tours became one of the leading sites in Gaul for healing. Instead of the old springs and pools where the rivers rose, the lepers, the halt, the lame and the infertile made their way there to seek wholeness at the new Christian shrines, and to adorn them with gifts and ex-votos in the event of the patron fulfilling a promise.\n\nDevotions at the source of the Seine came to an end around the fifth century. Certainly by the time that Caesarius was calling for the destruction of shrines and an end to the practice of bathing in holy wells and springs, the precincts and temple by the source appear to have been pulled down and abandoned. However, a busy road leads from the source to the nearest town, Saint-Seine-l'Abbaye, in the heart of which stands an abbey and old Benedictine monastery dedicated to its own patron, St Seine. Seine was not the original name; the first saint was Sigo, the son of a local nobleman, the count of Mesmont. He lived during the sixth century, a little after the shrine at the source would have been abandoned. He came to this spot to pursue the life of a hermit, and the monastery was founded after him, but his name was changed by posterity from 'Sigo' to 'Seine', after the nearby river. Even the source of the Seine was accounted for in later Christian legend as one of his works: his mule knelt to allow him to dismount easily, and from the animal's knee print the source of the river rose.\n\nThe Abbey itself possesses a medieval fresco on the south wall of the choir. It was much damaged during the Revolution, but the visitor can still make out episodes from the now mythical life of Saint Seine. In one of the panels close to the end, he sits surrounded by the unfortunate: a lame man perches, showing him his knee; a blind man, however, draws the first blessing of the saint, who is making the sign of the cross above his eyes. The other men, says the text beneath, are waiting for him to cast out demons. In the final panel, the saint's body, now translated to the Abbey and surrounded by blue-robed bishops, continues for many years to perform 'glorious miracles'.\n\nOnce again, there was a holy place by the source of the Seine where people could seek healing. The Roman irruption into Gaul with all the religions and ideas it had brought had changed everything; but, curiously, it had also changed nothing.\n\n* The Latin formula, meaning one has 'willingly fulfilled one's vow as is merited', is frequently found in ex-voto inscriptions offered to the gods in thanks for their prayers for health or some other benefit being answered.\n\n\u2020 Thyestes was a character from Greek myth who was served the flesh of his sons at a banquet as revenge for his adultery; hence, Thyestean banquets are those at which human flesh is eaten.\n\n\u2021 Only Portuguese of the western European languages has obeyed Caesarius' injunction. Except for Saturday ( _s\u00e1bado_ ) and Sunday ( _domingo_ ), the days of the week in Portuguese are numbered: _segunda-feira_ (second day, i.e. Monday), _terca-feira_ (third day, i.e. Tuesday). This contrasts with other European languages, in which the days of the week are still named after pagan deities, e.g. English _Wednesday_ after Woden, or French _mercredi_ , named after Mercury.\n\nA dolium ( _large earthenware storage jar) at the Puymin site in Vaison-la-Romaine._\nEPILOGUE\n\nFrom an Empire to a Dream\n\n_Unum consilium totius Galliae effecturum, cuius consensui ne orbis quidem terrarum possit obsistere_  \n'...establish one policy for the whole of Gaul, whose unanimity not even the world could resist'\n\nJULIUS CAESAR, _De Bello Gallico,_ VII.29\n\nLE MANS\n\n\u2022\n\nTHE NORTH-EASTERN FRONTIER PROVINCE\n\n\u2022\n\nBARBARIANS AND ROMANS\n\n\u2022\n\nIMPERIUM GALLIARUM\n\n\u2022\n\nTRIER\n\n\u2022\n\nADRIANOPLE\n\n\u2022\n\nCH\u00c2LONS\n\n\u2022\n\nCLERMONT-FERRAND\n\n\u2022\n\nHOW TO SAVE AN EMPIRE\n\nONE CITY THAT CAN COMPETE with Autun for the completeness and grandeur of its remaining Roman walls is Le Mans. Its great ramparts run facing the east bank of the River Sarthe. They hang over a grassy margin of land that is now traversed by a busy dual carriageway, but which is still beautiful with gardens and grassed walkways, and lightened by sprays of purple lilac flowers with the onset of summer.\n\nIn many ways, the ramparts of Le Mans echo the walls of Autun. They rise several metres, magnificent and imposing, their flatness broken up by mighty semi-circular bastions. Their higher levels and crenellated tops are now missing, but are crowned instead by a vista of Renaissance and later rooftops, with the towers and tracery of a Gothic cathedral in their midst.\n\nHowever, their dissimilarities are also striking, and significant. Autun's walls were built at the time of the city's foundation, shortly after the conquest. The walls of Le Mans (called Vindunum in Roman times) date to around the third century AD. Autun's walls, while grand and stout, are not as sturdily built or as thick as those of Le Mans. It is a sign that the walls of Autun, although they served to keep the city safe during a long siege in the mid-third century, were built not necessarily for actual defence, but as a mark of honour. They were designed to showcase Roman power and wealth to the leaders of the local Aedui tribe, and demonstrated the advantages of co-operating with the new Roman regime. The walls of Le Mans, however, in spite of the lattice patterns picked out in them with white stone, look as if they were destined for real use against possible attackers.\n\nThere is also an arresting difference between the extent of the walls of these two Gallo-Roman towns. A walk around the course of the Roman walls of Autun takes a good hour at the very least. The walls of Le Mans, by contrast, although stronger in character, are less ambitious: a walk round them is no more than a short stroll. Autun's walls were far longer than they ever needed to be, taking in the whole of the original town apart from the theatre. As such, they appear to have contained a good deal of undeveloped space. The walls of Le Mans, however, encircled only a small part of the original Roman city. Indeed, a vast swathe of the city, a band of about 90 metres in width, was destroyed to make way for the walls: not only the land over which the walls themselves ran, but also what is now the pleasant grassy margin by the river. The forum and the areas of the city beyond the river were excluded from the walls' protection, and the city's baths were also pulled down. This destruction served a twofold purpose: it removed any cover that attackers might be able to gain from the surrounding buildings; and the rubble from their demolition could be reused in the construction of the new walls. However, it was not just the ordinary bricks and stone that were to be recycled in this way. Fine statues, elegant columns, the boastful inscriptions of the earlier generations of Gallic aristocrats proud to have taken their Romanized offices as councillors, priests and public benefactors \u2013 all were used to fill up rough cores of the new bastions.\n\n_The Roman walls of Le Mans, with the cathedral of St Julien in the background._\n\nSuch a pattern is repeated widely across Gaul. The first cities to be granted walls after the conquest received them as a sign of honour or official favour, signalling their status as official Roman colonies (as at Autun or Vienne), or else as a demonstration of Roman power, as at Autun. Otherwise, cities rarely had walls; they only became common throughout Gaul late in the third or early fourth centuries AD. The walls of the later period were generally sturdier, more practical, and smaller in extent, defending only small parts of the cities and happy to devour the great buildings and honorific inscriptions that were once an expression of Gallo-Roman identity. Given that the early architecture and the original displays of adherence by the Gallic aristocracy to the Roman vision were such a vital part of the incorporation of Gaul into the empire, one has to ask what had changed by the end of the third century that these monuments, so cherished originally, could be thrown away so lightly.\n\nThe literature on the end of the western Roman empire is so vast and complex that at times confronting it seems as daunting as facing the Burgundian and Visigothic chieftains, who are supposed to have brought the western empire to ruin in the fifth century. I do not propose to follow the facts and dates of this decline in detail, with its spiral of rebellions, incursions, coups, counter-coups and palace intrigue. However, as I approach the end of this account of Roman Gaul, it is appropriate to consider the wider circumstances that overwhelmed the Roman project. It still seems startling, given the hugely positive changes that Rome wrought in western Europe, that things could pass from the prosperity of the Flavians and the Antonines \u2013 celebrated by Gibbon as one of the most contented eras in human history \u2013 to an age, at the end of the fifth century, when the unity of empire was shattered, long-distance trade went into decline, the fine houses and buildings of town and country were abandoned and the standard of living collapsed. The views of contemporary scholarship have advanced much in recent years thanks to developments in archaeology and the reappraisal of source material, and what follows is an attempt to bring some of these recent notions to bear on the salient themes of the Roman presence in Gaul as discussed in earlier chapters.\n\nCaesar's conquest of Gaul was not undertaken for any noble purpose. He did not have in mind any ideals of spreading civilization or extending the benefits of Roman rule to outsiders. It was a pragmatic and political act, designed to win him military glory, freedom from debt and access to manpower; it was an escape route from the dangers of prosecution before the courts, and a move towards the attainment of absolute power. However, as frequently happened in later history with other empires \u2013 and not infrequently in apparent imitation of the Roman example \u2013 the acquisition of large tracts of new territory prompted ideological soul-searching. First, a practical means had to be found to ensure the lasting and profitable obedience of the people now under Roman rule. Second, an active justification had to be identified for Rome's possession of the new territory, especially since its area was so large. It might be difficult to believe, but certainly since the second century BC there had been some unease about the possession of overseas territories. The conquest of Greece, completed by 146 BC, made many fear the corruption of the old Roman virtues of simplicity and frugality by the flow of wealth from the captive territory and the close contact with dubious foreign cultures. The same notions could only have loomed yet larger in Roman minds following Caesar's conquest, especially given that the peoples of 'Long-Haired Gaul' were seen as Rome's oldest and most dangerous enemy.\n\nThe approach taken in the decades that followed the conquest was to engage with these difficulties en bloc \u2013 and the route chosen was via culture. The Gauls were to be offered a way to become Roman. The upper classes were offered access to a Roman education; others were given the opportunity to fight in the Roman armies. The former, by taking up official positions in government, and the latter, by fighting for Rome, acquired the legal benefits and prestige of Roman citizenship, access to wealth and a deeper acquaintance with the wider empire and its customs. For those Gauls lower down the social scale, the sight of new Roman colonies, and the presence of temples, theatres, amphitheatres, baths, roads, villas and forums would encourage them not merely to accept the dominion of Rome without demur, but actively to embrace it. The Roman presence, although initially imposed with egregious brutality, killing hundreds of thousands, devastating the land and shattering an ancient culture, offered a break with the endemic tradition of Gallic tribal feuding, protection from external enemies, access to new ways of displaying prestige and new sources of trade and wealth.\n\nThe propagation of Roman culture and identity in Gaul, so those in Rome must have felt, was a triumph of Roman policy. Pragmatically, it allowed Rome to govern and garrison the new territories cheaply and with little demand for new manpower from elsewhere. It promoted the swift development of a governing and military class that was loyal and likeminded \u2013 to an extent, it must have taken the edge off the ancient fear of the Gauls that was so deep rooted in the Roman psyche. It must have felt like a policy that was both apt, and culturally sensitive. The Gauls were renowned in Rome for their eloquence, cleverness and bravery: what better way of harnessing their talents than to give them access to a system of education that revered rhetorical excellence as the apogee of its attainment, before paving the path for Gauls to enter the Roman system of government and the Roman courts? Moreover, like Roman gods and Roman religion, the Roman identity was not exclusive. Just as long as the reverence due to Caesar and Rome was paid, Roman citizenship, or else presence as a resident in the empire, allowed other loyalties and other identities. Ausonius himself, the most Roman of Gauls, wrote that 'I love Bordeaux, Rome I venerate; in this, I am a citizen, in both a consul; here was my cradle, there my _curule_ chair.' Becoming consul was his proudest achievement, yet he could happily move between that Roman identity and his inheritance as an inhabitant of Bordeaux and Aquitaine, descended as he was from both the Arverni and the Aedui. The genius of Rome was to allow both identities to coexist, and to show that acquiescence to Rome not only benefitted an individual in a material sense or in the Roman scheme of things, but also allowed that individual to succeed better within the framework of his original cultural identity: to be a more committed Roman gave a Gallic aristocrat the chance to be better and more successful within the old hierarchy of Gallic society as well.\n\nCaesar's manipulation of the identity and intentions of the dangerous northerners for his own political ends needs to be viewed in the context of the development of the empire in Gaul over the following centuries: the northerners were not as dangerous as demagogic Roman politicians presented them. The Gauls could become Roman in the blink of a generation or two, while still fulfilling many of the cultural ambitions they had absorbed from their 'barbarian' past.\n\nThe idea of the 'barbarian', therefore, did not leave the Roman political vocabulary or mindset: it was merely pushed back across Gaul. The Gauls passed from being barbarians to being Romans. However, those parts of Caesar's conquest that lay close to the Rhine were hived off into the militarized frontier provinces of Upper and Lower Germania, and here the perpetual war against the 'barbarians' continued. Emperors made their name and established their reputations by campaigning on this new frontier. Indeed, its presence acted as a justification for the empire's very existence \u2013 the barbarian threat had never gone away, and the newly embraced territories of Gaul were safe under the umbrella of Roman military might and order. There was also an economic benefit: the presence of huge armies and encampments were a spur to trade on a vast scale. Taxes paid from across the empire to the frontier armies financed the large-scale import of goods from the south and the Mediterranean throughout Gaul, and formed, it is most likely, the lion's share of economic activity in the region. Rome encouraged and hugely expanded commerce, but it is probable that the needs of the army, more than private initiative, were the real motor of Gallic trade.\n\nRoman emperors made great play of their military prowess when fighting the barbarian threat. Fighting, however, was only a part of life on the frontier. Much more of it was diplomacy and engagement. There were other means of heading off the threat of incursions, which did not involve military engagement between Roman and barbarian: facilitating trade between the empire and the regions outside it; giving gifts to, or withholding them from, barbarian chiefs; encouraging dissent and civil war among the barbarians themselves whenever they appeared to be forming wider coalitions against Roman interests. Divide and rule was an old, tested and successful policy. However, despite this manipulation of the barbarian world and the constant talk of its threat to Rome, the two sides were intertwined and interdependent. The barbarians needed Rome. Roman trade changed society beyond the frontier over the course of time. In particular, barbarian chiefs became dependent on Roman patronage to shore up their power bases. As with the Gallic chiefs before the Roman conquest, the possession of Mediterranean goods became a sign of prestige for the barbarian warlords beyond the Rhine and allowed them to secure their positions. To punish barbarian leaders and bring them to heel, Rome might cut off trading opportunities or subsidies. Mismanagement of this policy, however, may be one of the reasons why barbarian groupings ended up launching attacks against the frontier. The frontier was not a drawbridge that could be raised and the world beyond it ignored; it was a region that demanded constant engagement in order to maintain its security and stability.\n\nThe Romans, likewise, were dependent on the barbarians. It was not only that the danger of barbarian incursion was a justification for the imperial presence and imperial order. The barbarians themselves became crucial to the maintenance of that order. As Gaul prospered economically in the second and third centuries, recruitment to the colours from the Gauls themselves and the wider empire appears to have become more difficult. Another factor was that Roman citizenship had been made universal throughout the empire at the beginning of the third century. Service in the army, which was one way for inhabitants of Gaul to obtain this benefit, now became unnecessary. Besides, a military life was no longer the guaranteed passport to social advancement and financial security for lower-class citizens that it had been in the earlier centuries. However, the barbarian tribes beyond the frontiers, well acquainted with fighting and the Roman army by long proximity, made excellent and cheap recruits to the Roman standards. Large numbers of Germanic-speaking migrants from beyond the frontiers settled in Gaul, who quickly became Romanized and who were as loyal to the Roman army and empire as those within the empire itself. The allure of becoming Roman seduced them just as it had the Gauls.\n\nIn this way, Roman Gaul became part of a newly internationalized world. It was a land that looked outwards, dependent for its security on the management of its frontiers and the peoples beyond. It also looked inwards, dependent on trade with the other provinces, the circulation of taxes through the army, as well as good governance and attention from the Roman centre. Gaul, by the conquest and the acquisition of Roman culture, had the opportunity to engage in the wider empire. In the great address that Claudius gave in Lugdunum, granting the suitably qualified nobles of the Three Gauls membership of the Senate, he made a tacit acknowledgement that if Rome were to rule profitably and effectively over Gaul, then the Gauls must also have a role to play in the wider government of the empire. If Rome wished to possess Gaul, then the Gauls should have their own portions of Rome.\n\nThese were the ingredients needed for Gaul to remain a successful and close-knit part of the Roman empire. It appears, by their actions, that the emperors understood these needs and, when governing well, tried to fulfil them. However, given the wider circumstances of the empire or the carelessness of those in central government, these needs were not always observed. One of the first problems to occur was a betrayal of Claudius's vision for the integration of Gauls into the Senate. Following the civil wars of AD 68\u201370, which arose when Gaius Julius Vindex (as mentioned above, a Gallic nobleman who was also a Roman senator and governor of the province of Lugdunum) rebelled against Nero both for his high taxes and his behaviour which, in his view, did not befit a Roman emperor, it can be conjectured that the old fears about Gaul were resurgent in Rome. Although the rebellion against Nero was triggered by a Gaul claiming to protect traditional Roman values, it appears to have harmed the integration of Gauls from the Three Gauls into the government of the wider empire. The number of Gauls from these regions who joined the Senate in the decades after the fall of Nero appears to have been very low indeed; instead of taking opportunities to play a role in the wider imperial government, they tended to remain in Gaul and pursue personal glory within their native territories.\n\nHand in hand with this disengagement of Gaul from the centre was a disengagement of the centre from Gaul. It will be remembered that the new Gallic provinces were closely associated with the Julio-Claudian house from the time of Caesar himself. Caesar had close associations with many Gallic chiefs from the time of the conquest and made individual deals with them and their tribes to ensure their loyalty. Augustus visited the provinces a number of times, including a three-year-long visit in 16\u201313 BC. Tiberius knew the provinces well, Caligula grew up on the frontiers and took a great interest in the imperial shrine at Lugdunum, and Claudius himself was born there. Although the imperial presence in the provinces was not always propitious \u2013 Caligula's riotous behaviour at Lugdunum springs to mind \u2013 there was almost always a benefit associated with the emperor visiting and being on the spot. The long-standing Roman institution of the patron showed the importance of personal contacts for getting things done and problems solved. All the better if the source of power himself were present, able not only to solve problems but bringing with him the access to wealth and patronage that belonged to the imperial office. However, with Nero, the close association between Gaul and the imperial house began to wane. The complaints of Vindex over central tax policy may have been partly due to the unwinding of long-standing local arrangements and concessions sensitive to local conditions, which were forgotten as the emperors stayed away from Gaul. After the civil war, this drift continued. The emperors kept their gaze on the Rhine frontier, while Gaul itself \u2013 lightly garrisoned and not apparently unsafe \u2013 was for the most part left to its own devices.\n\nWhen the going was good, Gaul was able to weather this neglect, benign or otherwise. However, when the other pillars of stability were undermined, the entire edifice began to totter. One problem of governance that was never truly solved was the process of planning for the imperial succession. In the third century, following the assassination of the emperor Alexander Severus in 235 on the Rhine frontier after discontent among his troops over his handling of the barbarian peoples, the reasonably orderly successions of the Severan dynasty gave way to bloody struggles for the throne. On top of this, conflict with the Sasanian dynasty of Persia drew attention away from the Rhine and the Danube. Management of the frontiers beyond Gaul broke down, and barbarian warbands from beyond the Rhine made frequent incursions into Gaul, attacking and plundering Romano-Gallic cities and settlements. The long neglect of Gaul's affairs by the centre began to tell. In 260, a breakaway polity \u2013 the Imperium Galliarum ('Empire of the Gauls') \u2013 was founded by a local Roman army commander named Postumus. It lasted for fourteen years before being crushed, but at its height it claimed the allegiance of all the Gallic provinces, as well as the Germanic frontier and Britain also. The Imperium Galliarum has been interpreted by some writers as an early manifestation of Gallic nationalism, but despite its institutions of government being closely modelled on Rome's, with an emperor, senate and consuls, it is unlikely that nationalism was the impulse behind it. Rather, it was the need for the proximity of high power, the desire once again, as in the earlier imperial period, for Gaul to be close to an emperor as its patron and protector \u2013 an emperor able to solve problems, look to the frontier and dispense patronage and largesse. A new emperor, keeping his courts in Lugdunum and Trier and focusing his concern on the immediate surrounding provinces, was able to fulfil this deep-seated need.\n\nThe Imperium Galliarum was suppressed in 274 and the period of instability known as the 'Third Century Crisis' came to an end. It was probably the instability of this age that led to the construction of the walls of Le Mans, and many other such fortifications throughout Gaul. Although the unity of the empire was saved and the empire was, in the propaganda of the age, 'restored', the measures taken to ensure this appear to have stored up problems for the decades to come. Diocletian, who came to the throne in 283, changed the settlement of imperial government, sharing power with a college of four emperors, the so-called Tetrarchy, each of whom would be allotted a portion of the empire. This was, if anything, an acknowledgement that those who had supported the Imperium Galliarum had had a point. One of the members of the imperial college would always be present in the Gallic provinces or their vicinity to provide the leadership, close management of the frontiers and imperial functions that were so desired. Although the Tetrarchy did not survive in its original form into the fourth century, the division of the government of the empire into a de facto western and eastern half followed; and in the fourth century Trier was developed as a new imperial capital, recreating the close connection between Gaul and the heart of imperial power that had been lost since the century after the conquest. This presence seems in some ways to have injected new life into Gaul, giving opportunities to talented people such as Ausonius and his cultural circle to play a part in the imperial service, and again bind Gaul more closely to the institutions of empire. The sheer volume of Ausonius's work \u2013 and indeed its very survival from this era \u2013 may in itself be a reflection of the sense of invigoration which Gaul felt at its new proximity to the imperial nimbus. The unity of the empire was maintained, but at the cost of institutionalizing disunity, and recognizing that the regions could not be ignored.\n\nIn order to make it difficult for regional governors to build up power bases to challenge for the throne, Diocletian reformed the entire organization of imperial government. Originally, the civil service, such as it was, had been lightly staffed with a small number of people responsible for large geographical areas. Many powers were concentrated in a few hands, and there was little exercise of oversight. Diocletian changed this early imperial arrangement. Provinces were broken up into smaller areas. Military and civil areas of authority were divided so that officials in general should only hold authority in one particular sphere. The mechanisms of oversight were developed, and stricter hierarchies were instituted for the formal regulation of the provinces by the centre. To achieve this, the civil service had to take on many more recruits. This was a boon for those, such as Ausonius, who came from the educated classes. On top of this, the army was also increased in size and restructured. However, all these reforms called for an increase in tax revenue. In the long run, this was difficult for the empire to sustain.\n\nThe old long-distance trading routes that had flourished from the start of the early imperial period were interrupted during the Third Century Crisis, and they did not return with their previous vigour even once the stability of the empire had been restored in the early fourth century. Trade and prosperity were also damaged over the course of the third century by debilitating inflation, as the coinage of the empire was debased to near worthlessness: rival claimants to the imperial throne had to pay their armies, and the only way to do so was by 'printing' money: reducing the silver content of the coin to almost nothing but keeping the face value of the coin the same. The collapse of the currency in this period encouraged greater local production and local self-sufficiency rather than long-distance trade. In some ways, the economy was demonetized: barter and payment in kind began to return, and the stimulus to excess production \u2013 the usual symptom of a money economy \u2013 was removed. On top of this, some scholars argue that manufacturing technologies that were originally the preserve of the Mediterranean littoral were dispersed towards the periphery of empire. Thus it was not just the capacity for long-distance trade that declined, but also the imperative to conduct it in the first place.\n\nThe demands for tax and the new configurations of the government and army created social pressures. Gaul became polarized. The old civic and mercantile classes were hollowed out. Fewer members of the aristocratic classes wished to undertake the old civic roles, which demanded the underwriting of tax shortfalls. The poor placed themselves in virtual servitude to local magnates in exchange for protection from military service and taxes. Wealth was increasingly concentrated in fewer hands. In earlier times, the practice by the well-to-do of displaying their wealth through benefactions for the construction of public buildings was seen as a social virtue. But this habit now went into decline. A good part of this impulse was absorbed by the growth of the Christian church, which provided an outlet for rich Gauls to display their wealth by financing new ecclesiastical buildings; but more and more wealth was displayed in a private context. As had happened in Rome itself at the start of the crisis that brought about the end of the Republic centuries before, greater numbers of estates fell into the ownership of smaller numbers of people. Some villas were abandoned as not needed or not viable. Over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, others became larger and more opulent than ever, and some \u2013 like the cities \u2013 were fortified. The traces of early medieval society and what later historians would refer to as the feudal system began to appear. This might even have owed something to earlier patterns of Gallic society, which re-emerged as the traditional Roman order declined. The word 'vassal', for example, is one of the few survivals from the Celtic tongues to enter medieval and modern usage.\n\nAll of these trends are reflected in the walls that encircle Le Mans and other late Gallo-Roman settlements. Civic life seems to have been less viable, and was perhaps of less importance than in earlier centuries. Those public markers of prestige that mattered so much at the beginning of the imperial period were now considered less important \u2013 little surprise therefore if great public works were cleared, and old memorials of grand Gallo-Roman aristocrats were broken up and built as rubble into the bastions of Le Mans and elsewhere. Likewise, after the third century, the habit of leaving proud inscriptions detailing one's glorious career as a priest or magistrate seems to have come to a halt. For those lucky enough to possess prestige from wealth or imperial office, its display became a more restricted and private affair. It took place among a closed circle of high-class families, the means of display the grandeur of their villas or their literary endeavour. This may explain why so much Gallo-Roman literature survives from this period: the upper classes were busy writing to prove their class credentials.With Gallo-Roman society in such a highly-strung state, it should have been little surprise that any attack on its essential foundations, as described above, would ultimately have even graver repercussions for imperial unity than the Third Century Crisis.\n\nIn 376, the decision to allow a large group of Goths into the empire to settle as soldiers and farmers backfired horribly when a revolt by the newcomers \u2013 provoked by Roman mismanagement \u2013 culminated in the Battle of Adrianople (fought near modern Edirne, in eastern Thrace). Some 20,000 men, nearly two-thirds of the Roman force present on the battlefield, were lost as a result of incompetent generalship. The eastern Roman emperor, Valens, was also killed. Although the immediate situation was recovered, the heavy losses had serious implications for the western frontiers on the Rhine. Ultimate power over the empire at the time lay in the east, which was then wealthier and more populous than the west. To restore their forces after the calamity of Adrianople, the eastern emperors ran down the frontier establishments in the Germanic provinces. As a force, the western armies essentially evaporated. Trier lost its status as an imperial capital by the end of the fourth century, with Arles taking up the role for a while.\n\nRather than using its own military establishment to ensure the security of the western frontier, the empire began to rely on federate barbarian warbands ( _foederati_ ), who rather than being integrated into the Roman army acted as discrete forces under their own commanders. This cost-cutting measure of convenience is unlikely to have seemed especially radical or dangerous to the late imperial government; groups of barbarians had frequently been settled in Gaul and relied upon for military service. Indeed, for some time the army had been 'barbarized', assuming types of clothing from beyond the frontier, and even naming various units after barbarian tribal groups renowned among the Romans for their ferocity. The importance of high Roman military officers, in particular the master of the soldiers, who could maintain good relations between the imperial court and the barbarian _foederati,_ became ever greater. However, this step meant that the traditional Roman imperial method of controlling the frontier peoples effectively came to an end.\n\nOn top of this, conflicts over the succession once more began to damage the western empire by the end of the fourth century. The death of Gratian at the hands of Maximus in 383 has already been recorded. The eventual victory of Theodosius, the eastern emperor (the last to rule both halves of the Roman empire before the rule was again divided) in 388 led to the sudden disenfranchisement of those Gauls, such as Ausonius, who were by then playing their full part at the centre of the imperial system. The period of civil war following the death of Gratian further weakened the military strength of the western empire. In 383 Maximus had removed Roman troops from Britain in large numbers to support his bid for the imperial throne.* Furthermore, the various imperial claimants used barbarian federate troops in their armies, thereby enhancing their autonomous importance in the Gallic provinces.\n\nIn the popular imagination, the incursion of a large force of barbarians across the Rhine in 406 \u2013 another traditionally resonant date \u2013 is seen as a cataclysmic moment, heralding the end of the empire in the west. The image of a vast horde of vicious outsiders, breaking down the fortress walls of the empire to plunder and destroy a precious and sophisticated civilization, built up over centuries, haunts the European imagination to this day. However, the decline of the western empire did not take the form of an immediate and brutal collapse, but a haphazard unravelling of long-standing ties. As Italy looked ever more to its own defence and welfare, cutting its connections with the Gallo-Roman aristocracy, it made more sense for the Gallo-Romans to deal directly with the leaders of the barbarian warbands, which were now acting as much in the defence of Gallo-Roman society as posing a threat to it. Thus, the regions north of the Loire appear to have detached themselves from central Roman control by the first quarter of the fifth century. The Visigothic branch of the barbarian force that invaded in 406 \u2013 and which was probably not very big \u2013 was settled in Aquitaine by 418 and given autonomous status in return for promising to act in defence of the empire's interests. It appears that they were given either shares of land following a received procedure for the settling of federate forces, or even a right to take the tax revenues that were due from estates. Various other groupings were settled throughout Gaul in this fashion. In the middle of the century, when the Roman general Flavius Aetius defended Gaul from the inroads of Attila's Huns and their allies, he relied on a confederation consisting primarily of 'barbarian' forces. At the Battle of Ch\u00e2lons (451), Aetius fought alongside the Visigothic king Theodoric. Aetius's success in driving away a genuinely threatening and unified enemy paradoxically led to the weakening of the ties within this confederation. With no enemy to unite against, the pressure for cohesion declined and, despite his successful defence of the empire, Aetius himself was assassinated by the emperor Valentinian III, who was still smarting over Aetius's support for his rival Joannes at the beginning of his reign; he also feared that Aetius wanted to make his own son the heir to the throne. As the office of western emperor became more detached from Gaul, more hotly disputed among rival claimants, and of ever less practical importance, the leaders of the barbarian groupings in Gaul and the indigenous aristocracy were less disposed to look towards Rome for legitimacy or support. Rule in their own name rather than in that of Rome became viable, and the barbarian polities such as the Frankish and Visigothic kingdoms began to develop out of the body of Roman Gaul.\n\nIt was a transition that was certainly tainted with violence. However, the arrival of a barbarian kingdom could also be seen as a liberation from the violence and pressures that had become endemic in late Roman Gaul. One churchman, Salvian of Marseilles, preaching around the middle of the fifth century, gives a vivid picture of a fractured society, in which the Roman aristocracy used their position to extort money mercilessly from the poor: 'Widows groan, orphans are trodden down, so that many, even people of good birth and liberal education, seek refuge with the enemy to escape death under the trials of the general persecution. They seek among the barbarians the Roman mercy, since they cannot endure the barbarous mercilessness they find among the Romans.' Some Roman citizens of Gaul who suffered on account of absent government or at the hands of creditors banded together in self-defence. Although they were simply trying to uphold Roman ways, they found themselves branded _bagaudae_ (a Celtic word for bandits) or even stigmatized as 'barbarians' by the Roman establishment \u2013 a piece of spin that Salvian decried bitterly.\n\nMuch of the violence that erupted during the fifth and sixth centuries took the form of fighting between different barbarian parties jockeying for position and control of territory, rather than a wanton assault on Gallo-Romans and Roman culture. Indeed, the incoming peoples _wanted_ Roman and Latin culture, and their governing classes needed access to it in order to control the levers of local government, which had been conducted in Latin for hundreds of years. The barbarian leaders issued law codes in Latin that drew heavily on previous Roman bodies of jurisprudence. They respected the hierarchies, rights and traditions of the Catholic Church with its Roman ways, although many of them had previously converted to the Arian form of Christianity, which was regarded as heretical by the Catholics and vice versa. Moreover, the new barbarian rulers of Gaul wished to portray themselves as rulers in the Roman imperial mode.\n\nSidonius portrays this desire most vividly of all. In 475 the central Roman authorities surrendered Clermont, the city of which he was then bishop, to the Visigothic King Euric in return for a guarantee that the Visigoths would not attempt to extend their control in the southernmost portions of Gaul, closest to Italy. Sidonius, devoted to the Roman cause, was bitter and disgusted at what he saw as this betrayal by Rome, especially given his absolute devotion to the maintenance of Roman rule in the area and to the wider Roman ideal. However, he chose to work with the new regime and, by co-operating, tame it. Around 461, he had written a poem about having to feed a number of Burgundians who had been billeted on him. He complains about their 'German speech', their habit of 'spreading rancid butter on their hair' (presumably in contrast to the more refined Gallo-Roman _sapo)_ and their tendency to belch garlic and onion breath over him from their customary ten-course breakfasts. Yet, after 475, he is able to put this ostentatious disgust behind him. When Clermont was ceded he was sent into exile and imprisoned for his original resistance to the Visigoths; but in an effort to win favour he turns his pen to the praise of the Visigothic king. He employs the idioms of those most Roman of poets, Virgil and Horace, to laud in pastoral verse the man who had taken his ancestral city from Roman to barbarian rule: 'You Tityrus, with your land restored to you, range through the groves of myrtles and planes, and so you strike your lyre... it is your warbands, Euric, that are called for, so that the Garonne, strong in its martial settlers, may defend the dwindled Tiber...'\n\nIt was Roman praise in this mould that had been heaped on Augustus half a millennium previously; it pleased Euric, and he allowed Sidonius to return to his city. This probably confirmed Sidonius in his belief that although the material elements of Rome had collapsed around them and the vacuum filled by the barbarian 'other', something of value remained that preserved their unity not just as aristocrats, but as Romans: the literature and the culture of Rome. The institutions of imperial government were being run down, there was no money and no inclination to build in the old Roman fashion of the early empire, but the inherited culture of Rome was in itself a blessing that could maintain the evaporating sense of unity. 'The second bond of our spirits', writes Sidonius to a cousin, 'comes from the similarity of our studies.' It was for this that, as the power of Rome receded, Sidonius clung ever more closely to literature. 'Because the imperial ranks and offices have now been swept away, through which it was possible to distinguish each best man from the worst, from now on literature will be the only indication of nobility.' The rule of Rome over Gaul had passed away, but the ideal survived in its culture. It was now open to anyone to be a noble Roman and to share in the ideal of a Europe-wide confraternity whose reality had passed away. The price of admission was the love of its letters, and the pursuit of its Latin poetry and culture.\n\nIt is always a foolhardy venture to look to the ancient world for guidance in the modern. In many ways, ancient and modern societies were different in such fundamental ways \u2013 security and abundance of food supply, access to education and information, ease of movement, to name but a few \u2013 that in seeking or even observing grand comparisons it is easy to be led astray. However, at a point in time when the European Union is struggling to cement the political unity of Europe \u2013 a Roman project if ever there was one \u2013 in the face of a prolonged economic crisis and fears over migration, it is impossible to restrain oneself from considering how Rome succeeded in its project for unity for such a prolonged era (around 500 years), and how, in the light of this, contemporary Europe may be falling short.\n\nTwo aspects of the Roman conquest of Gaul and its absorption into the Roman empire are deeply distasteful to modern sensibilities. First, it arose out of extreme violence and suffering; second, it was a product not of some grand vision, but a result of political expediency, brought about by the manipulation of Roman fears concerning the 'barbarian' outsiders. Rhetoric that emphasized the danger, violence and degeneracy of the barbarians was a constant note in the Roman justification for its presence in Gaul, even before the time of Caesar and up until the evaporation of the empire in the fifth century AD. Indeed, to an extent, it was the notion of the 'barbarian other' that developed and maintained the Romans' sense of their own \u2013 civilized \u2013 identity. However, Roman practice was always more pragmatic and reasonable than Roman rhetoric. The frontier was not a solid fence but a permeable zone. The maintenance of the empire was dependent not on keeping barbarians out, but on constant engagement with them, understanding their situation, trading with them, subsidizing them, admitting them as migrants to the empire and making them part of the army and institutions of government. There was a recognition that, as a general rule, barbarians did not want to overthrow Rome or wreck its culture. Given the chance to play a part in Roman society, they would become loyal, and would even help Rome to protect itself from other, more sinister, peoples beyond the frontier zone. It was only when engagement with the barbarians was mismanaged, or settlers were used as political tools or cannon fodder in civil wars, that existential danger to the empire arose.\n\nAlthough Caesar brought the empire to Gaul in a wave of bloodshed and personal ambition, justifications were later found for the Roman presence to which the Gauls, particularly their upper classes, were happy to acquiesce. The Roman presence undoubtedly contributed to a fast and widespread increase in standards of living, social stability and freedom of movement enjoyed by all classes of Gauls. It propagated a government that was effective, but also reasonably cheap to administer and which stimulated the economy. There were opportunities for Gauls at different levels of society to participate in the machinery of government and the wider empire, whether as governors, councillors, administrators, lawyers, merchants or soldiers. In the best periods, the imperial presence felt close to Gaul. It was not distant, but manifested itself in a close association between the emperor and individual Gallic cities. All in all, the empire changed the face of the country, with the development of cities and settlements that remain to this day, roads, the supply of water, and rural villas, some of which may have been the predecessors of present-day towns and villages. Despite the terrible harm inflicted by Caesar on the earlier Gallic culture and way of life, the Roman presence brought benefits for everyone in virtually every area of human activity.\n\nBut it was the introduction of Roman culture that was perhaps the greatest triumph on top of all of these material victories. Roman culture, open as it was more to the elite than wider society, had the remarkable effect of making that Gallic elite feel loyal and engaged in the Roman project, while also allowing the Gauls a sense of success within the old indigenous cultural hierarchies. In Roman eyes, it turned them from barbarians to members of the civilized world. In the same way that worship of Roman gods and adherence to the imperial cult could coexist happily with visits to the shrine of Sequana, it was complementary and enhancing, not exclusive: an aid, if anything, to cultural self-realization.\n\nIf contemporary Europe could rediscover the sensible Roman pragmatism towards the 'barbarian outsider'; if it could make its high echelons of power feel as close to the people as Claudius was to Lugdunum; if it could rediscover the touch that ensured the flow of trade and prosperity between north and south; if its conduct in the fiscal sphere was not worthy of the sort of rebukes that Salvian threw at the late Roman aristocrats for their financial oppression; if it could foster the sort of shared culture that so entranced and comforted Sidonius and that made him not only a proud Arvernian but also a proud Roman, then, perhaps, contemporary Europe would be have a chance of emulating, without bloodshed, the successes that Caesar and those who came after him wrought in the provinces of Gaul.\n\n* Some early commentators declared Maximus's departure from Britain in 383 to be the effective end of Roman rule there, rather than the traditional date of 410.\n\n_Mosaic depicting Orpheus playing his lyre, St-Romain-en-Gal, second century AD._\nBibliographical Notes\n\nFor a discussion on the difficulty regarding the use of 'Gauls', 'Celts,' etc., see _The Celts,_ Collis, pp. 98 ff.\n\nFor those wishing to visit the sites of Roman Gaul, the two guidebooks by James Bromwich, _The Roman Remains of Brittany, Normandy and the Loire Valley,_ and _The Roman Remains of Southern France_ are highly recommended.\n\nCHAPTER 1\n\nAn account of the sea-going nature of the Phocaeans is given by Herodotus in 1.163, and their migration in the sixth century bc in Strabo 6.6.1. It is also referred to in Pliny's _Natural History,_ 3.5. Trogus's account of the foundation of Massalia is recorded in Justinus's _Epitome,_ 53.4ff, and Aristotle's is to be found in Athenaeus, 13.36. More detail is also found in Strabo, Book 4. For an introduction to Celtic society in Gaul before the Roman presence, _The Ancient Celts_ by Cunliffe is recommended. For trade and cultural interactions between the Greeks and Gauls before the Roman conquest see King, _Roman Gaul,_ Ch. 1, and Rankin, _Celts and the Classical World,_ Ch. 2, and also Ebel, _Transalpine Gaul._ For Roman and Greek perceptions of the Gauls see Rankin Chs. 4 and 6, which includes quotations from Posidonius. For the migrations into Italy and the attack on Rome see Livy, Book 5.34ff and Polybius 2.14ff, as well as Collis, _The Celts,_ pp. 107ff, and Cunliffe, _Ancient Celts,_ Ch. 4. King's account of the relationship between the Romans and the Gauls from the third to first century bc at the beginning of Ch. 2 is very useful and concise. The Roman movement into Transalpine Gaul on behalf of the Massalians is covered in Livy _Periochae_ 60\u20131, Florus 1.3.17, Strabo 4.1, Diodorus 34.23, Pliny _Natural History_ 3.36, Appian _Gallica_ 1.5; see also 'Conquest of Eastern Transalpina' in Ebel, King pp. 34\u201342. The campaign of Marius is covered primarily in Plutarch's _Life of Gaius Marius,_ and also touched on in Livy, _Periochae_ 66\u20137. Headlam and Durrell both write evocatively about Marius and the battlefield, but some of the theories Headlam puts forward about the detail of Marius's movements are disputed.\n\nCHAPTER 2\n\nThere are many biographies on Caesar and his political life. Goldsworthy, is, in my view, one of the best currently available, both detailed and readable. Also useful as a substantial biography with a focus on politics is Meier. Garland provides a usefully concise work which is a good short introduction. For an introduction to this period of Roman history with a good description of the decay of the republican settlement, see Scullard. Suetonius on the _Life of the Divine Caesar_ contains much of the anecdotal information about Caesar's rise to power. For the organization of Gallia Transalpina after the Roman conquest, see the relevant chapters in Ebel, Chapter 6 in Rankin, and also Cicero _Pro Fonteio_.\n\nCaesar narrates his campaign against the Helvetii in his _Commentaries,_ 1.2\u201329. Rice Holmes, in _Caesar's Conquest of Gaul,_ gives exhaustive detail of the scholarly debates over the movements of Caesar and the Gauls throughout the period, and is a most useful reference despite its age. Michael Sage, _Roman Conquests: Gaul,_ is a useful modern account of the conquest with a focus on its military aspects. The article by E. W. Murray, 'Caesar's Fortifications on the Rh\u00f4ne', discusses the movement of the Helvetii and the practicalities of securing the south bank of the river. The article by Water Dennison describes a visit to the putative battlefield of the Helvetii at Montmort at the beginning of the twentieth century. Riggsby, _Caesar in Gaul and Rome,_ discusses the literary construction and impact of Caesar's _Commentaries._ Osgood's article 'The Pen and the Sword: Writing and Conquest in Caesar's Gaul' is also useful in this regard. Caesar's account of the war against Ariovistus is in his _Commentaries,_ 1.30\u201353.\n\nCHAPTER 3\n\nThe actions of Caesar from 57\u201354 bc are covered in Books 2-5 of the _Commentaries._ The uprising of 53 BC, culminating in the execution of Acco, is described in Book 6. See also King, pp. 42\u201361. Lewuillon's guide to Gergovia provides a most useful account of the archaeology, the site's broader setting and an introduction to its literary reception in later ages. Graham Robb, in the _Discovery of France_ , discusses the naming of Gergovie (p. 304). Luciano Canfora looks at the contemporary criticisms of the destructive nature of Caesar's campaign in Ch. 15 of _Julius Caesar: The Life and Times of the People's Dictator._\n\nCaesar describes his campaign against Vercing\u00e9torix in Book 7 of his _Commentaries._ A full account of the historical texts and archaeological evidence regarding Vercing\u00e9torix and an attempt to construct as full a biography of him as possible is given in Goudineau, _Le Dossier Vercing\u00e9torix,_ pp. 267\u2013445. A history of the site of Al\u00e9sia and its reception in later French history and literature is given by B\u00fcchsensch\u00fctz and Schnapp in the monumental _Les Lieux de m\u00e9moire._ For the section on the later reception of Vercing\u00e9torix I am indebted to Andr\u00e9 Simon's _Vercing\u00e9torix et l'id\u00e9ologie fran\u00e7aise,_ and the first section of Goudineau's _Le dossier Vercing\u00e9torix._ Also useful in this regard are Ch. 9 of Collis, _The Celts_ , and also his recent chapter 'The Role of Al\u00e9sia, Bibracte and Gergovia in the Mythology of the French State', the recent PhD thesis by Laure Boulerie _Le Romantisme fran\u00e7ais et l'antiquit\u00e9 romaine,_ and Annie Jourdan, 'The Image of Gaul during the French Revolution: Between Charlemagne and Ossian'. Maria Wyke also has an excellent chapter focused on the reception of Caesar and the Gallic conquest in later culture, Ch. 3 of _Caesar, a Life in Western Culture._ Mary Beard has an essay on the popularity of Asterix in _Confronting the Classsics,_ Ch. 31. Recommended for further reading is Rowell, _Paris: The New Rome of Napoleon I,_ regarding the use made of the Caesarian past and the classical world more generally by the French monarchs and emperors.\n\nCHAPTER 4\n\nCaesar's expeditions to Britain are dealt with in his _Commentaries_ , Book 4.20\u201336 for the 55 BC invasion and Book 5.1\u201323 for the 54 BC invasion. Rice-Holmes's monumental work _Great Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar_ , although again early like his work on Gaul, is a great compendium of scholarly argument on the locations and practicalities of Caesar's two forays to Britain along with much subsidiary detail. Salway, Ch. 2, contains an account of the two invasions and their political impact as well as Caesar's motivations. For the long-term cultural impact of Caesar's invasions of Britain I am particularly indebted to the two articles by Homer Nearing, 'Local Caesar Traditions in Britain' and 'The Legend of Julius Caesar's British Conquest'. For an overview of some of the German legends of Caesar, see Scales, pp. 309ff. For a discussion of the possible political impact of Caesar's invasion, see Ch. 2 of Webster, _The Roman Invasion of Britain_ , and for the impact on the Celtic population of the Roman invasions see Laing, Ch. 2. Cottrell, _Seeing Roman Britain,_ touches on the sites associated with Caesar, and Charlotte Higgins, _Under Another Sky,_ begins her investigation of Roman Britain at Caesar's landing site of Deal; this is an excellent recent introduction to the broader subject.\n\nCHAPTER 5\n\nRoth's guide to Glanum provides a further description of Les Antiques, as does Headlam, but his identification of them as monuments erected by Caesar in commemoration of Marius is not generally accepted. For Glanum, see also King, pp. 68-70. For the period of Roman control in Gaul after the departure of Caesar in 50 bc to the early imperial period and the development of Roman government see Drinkwater, _Roman Gaul,_ Ch. 1\u20132, and 5. The account in Brogan, Ch. 2, is also useful. The essays by Goudineau in the _Cambridge Ancient History_ are especially helpful. Fernand Braudel gives a sweeping account of the impact of Roman government in Vol. 2 of _The Identity of France,_ pp. 60\u201383. For the difficult geographical concept of Gaul, I am grateful to Professor David Kovacs for sight of an unpublished paper and helpful discussions on the subject. For the Druids, see Ellis. For Licinius, see Cassius Dio 54.21ff. For Caligula in Lyons, see Cassius Dio 59.21ff. The article by Christopherson 'The Provincial Assembly of the Three Gauls in the Julio-Claudian Period' discusses the imperial altar at Lyons, as does Drinkwater in _Roman Gaul,_ pp. 114\u2013117. Drinkwater's articles, 'A Note on Local Careers in the Three Gauls under the Early Empire' and 'The Rise and Fall of the Gallic Julii' provide further detail on the careers of Gallic aristocrats and the status of the new towns in Gaul in this period. Also useful for the cultural impact of Rome in this period are MacMullen, _Romanisation in the Time of Augustus_ , and particularly for the question of cultural identities Woolf's article 'Beyond Romans and Natives' and also his book _Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilisation in Gaul_. There are also useful chapters on the concept of Romanization in _The Early Roman Empire in the West,_ edited by Blagg and Millett.\n\nCHAPTER 6\n\nAn overview of the history of Arles is given in Headlam, along with its literary reputation. The conflict between Arles and Massalia during the Roman civil war is described in Caesar's _Civil War,_ 1.34ff. Brogan, in the relevant sections on Roman Gaul, gives a useful summary of the Roman monuments of the city, as well as an account of urbanization in Ch. 4. A recent full history of Arles is Eric Teyssier, _Arles La_ _Romaine._ Useful information on the amphitheatre is to be found in Bomgardner, _The Story of the Roman Amphitheatre._ The development of material culture is discussed in MacMullen, Ch. 4. Goodman, _The Roman City and its Periphery,_ has a discussion of Arles and in particular the development of its suburbs in Roman times. For Vaison, the archaeological guide by Goudineau is an excellent starting point. More generally for the development of urban life, see King, Ch 3, and Drinkwater, _Roman Gaul,_ Ch. 7.\n\nCHAPTER 7\n\nAn introduction to rural life in Roman Gaul is to be found in Drinkwater, _Roman Gaul,_ Ch. 8 King, Ch. 4, and Brogan, Ch. 6. Detailed material on the Orange cadastral maps is found in the following articles: Martine Ass\u00e9nat, 'Le cadastre colonial d'Orange' and Andr\u00e9 Chastagnol, 'Les cadastres de la colonie romaine d'Orange'. On tracing Roman field boundaries, see the illuminating article by Cheyette. For an account of rural crafts and agricultural produce, see the relevant sections in Coulon, _Les Gallo-Romains._ For the Barbegal Aqueduct, see King, pp. 100\u2013101. The descriptions of villas in Ausonius's _Moselle_ are to be found from ln. 298ff. The letter of Sidonius to Domitius is in 1.2 of his collected letters, and his _propempticon_ is no. 24 in his collected poems. Pliny writes on Gallic wheat in _Natural History_ 18.12. The use of the combine harvester in Gaul is discussed in Palladius 7.2. References to Gallic wines are in Pliny _Natural History_ 14.18, 26, 57, 67. The Martial epigram on Munna is in 10.36.\n\nCHAPTER 8\n\nSabine Baring-Goud writes of the Alyscamps in Ch. 6 of _In Troubador Land,_ a witness to the time of its nineteenth-century neglect. Many of the inscriptions quoted are visible in the regional museums, but they are also to be found in compilations of Latin inscriptions, in particular the volumes of the _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_ mentioned in the bibliography. A useful reference was also Maureen Carroll, _Spirits of the Dead._ For discussions of crafts and trade in Roman Gaul, see King, Ch 5, Drinkwater, _Roman Gaul,_ Ch. 9, and also Coulon, _Les Gallo-Romains,_ passim. Nicholas Tran's chapter 'The Social Organisation of Commerce and Crafts in Ancient Arles' is also most helpful.\n\nCHAPTER 9\n\nHaarhoff, _Schools of Gaul,_ makes an excellent starting point for education in Roman Gaul, and Marrou, A _History of Education in Antiquity,_ offers further depth and background for Gaul in the context of education of the ancient world more generally. The quotations on Julius Agricola's use of Roman education in Britain come from Tacitus _Agricola,_ 21. For an overview of the Roman development of Autun, see the article by Alain Rebourg, 'L'urbanisme d' Augustodunum (Autun, Sa\u00f4ne-et-Loire)' and for some detail of the Greek mosaics see Mich\u00e8le Blanchard-Lem\u00e9e and Alain Blanchard, '\u00c9picure dans une anthologie sur mosa\u00efque \u00e0 Autun'. The address of Eumenius on the restoration of the schools with an English and Latin text is to be found in _In Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The Panegyrici Latini,_ edited by E.V. Nixon and others. For Juvenal on the Gallic orators, see _Satires_ 7.148 and 15.111. Martial on the Vienne booksellers is epigram 7.88, and the presence of his works in Narbonne and Toulouse in epigrams 8.72 and 9.99. Pliny the Younger on the availability of his books is in epistle 9.11. A useful introduction to Ausonius can be found in Raby, _Secular Latin Poetry,_ Ch. 2; this also includes a wider discussion of Gallic writers during the period. There are also more recent surveys of Ausonius's work, including the essay by Harold Isbell in Binns's _Latin Literature of the Fourth Century_ , and also Kay's _Ausonius, Epigrams_ , which contains a text with commentary that makes an excellent starting point for those who wish to study Ausonius's work in the original. Ausonius's epigram to his wife ( _Uxor, vivamus quod viximus et teneamus..._ ) is no. 20 in the collection by Kay. There is also a 2017 English translation of the poems with notes by Deborah Warren.\n\nCHAPTER 10\n\nGood introductions to religion in Roman Gaul are to be found in King, Ch. 6, and also in Miranda Green, _The Gods of the Celts, passim._ King also writes a chapter 'The Emergence of Romano-Celtic Religion' in _The Early Roman Empire in the_ West, edited by Blagg and Millett. For further detail of the ex-votos at the source of the Seine, see the essay by Anne-Marie Romeuf, 'Les ex-voto en bois de Chamali\u00e8res (Puy-de-Dome) et des Sources de la Seine (C\u00f4te-d'or): essai de comparaison'. Ton Derks, _Gods, Temples, and Ritual Practices,_ is a detailed recent work, with an emphasis on the northern regions. For the Cybele shrine in Vienne, see the articles by Andr\u00e9 Pelletier, 'Les Fouilles Du \"Temple De Cyb\u00e8le\" A Vienne' and Charles Picard, 'Le th\u00e9\u00e2tre des myst\u00e8res de Cyb\u00e8le-Attis \u00e0 Vienne'. The inscriptions about Cybele are to be found in _Corpus Cultus Cybelae Attidisque,_ Vol. 5, and further information about the Cybele cult in Vermaseren, _Cybele and Attis,_ with a particular focus on Gaul in Ch. 6. For the development of Christianity in Gaul, an excellent account is given in the two works by Peter Brown, _The World of Late Antiquity_ and _The Rise of Western Christendom_. For the early Christian religious sites of Gaul, see Jean Guyon and Anne J\u00e9gouzo, _Les premiers chr\u00e9tiens en Provence_. The letter reporting the religious persecution in Lyons is in Eusebius, _History of the Church_ , 5.1. The dating of the persecution is challenged in the article by Thompson, J. F., 'The Alleged Persecution of the Christians at Lyons in 177'. The reports of the heresies of Marcus are in Irenaeus _Against Heresies,_ 1.13ff. For Martin of Tours, see the primary source material by Sulpicius Severus. A modern biography, very much in the hagiographic vein but still useful is Donaldson, _Martin of Tours._ Van Dam, _Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul_ , contains discussions of the Christianization of Gallic society, with particular attention paid to the aristocracy, Sidonius and relic cults. The letter quoted from Sidonius to Bishop Lupus is epistle 9.11. Mathisen, _Roman Aristocrats_ , similarly has an excellent overview of the role played by the Gallo-Roman aristocracy in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Klingshirn, _Caesarius of Arles,_ contains further detail not only on Caesarius but also this aristocratic background. The impact of Christianity on the built environment of Arles is covered in the chapter by Loseby, 'Arles in Late Antiquity'. For Paulinus, see Trout, _Paulinus of Nola,_ and also the accounts by Raby and Waddell, which have a touching account of the famous correspondence between Paulinus and Ausonius.\n\nEPILOGUE\n\nThe academic literature on the decline and fall of the Roman empire has grown considerably in volume and complexity over recent years. An excellent way to orient oneself in this literature, not to mention the period, is to read the relevant chapters of Rollaston's _Early Medieval Europe_ , which has an excellent overview of the academic arguments currently raging over the fall of the Roman empire. The _Introduction to Early Medieval Europe_ is another valuable textbook in this regard. The view that the Roman empire was brought down by its inherent flaws (the view of Gibbon) is represented principally by the work of A. H. M. Jones. Peter Heather counters with the notion that the collapse of the western empire was as a result of overwhelming barbarian attacks that exhausted the capacity of Rome to maintain resistance, though he argues that the empire was in a strong state for most of the fifth century, and that misfortune also played a role in its collapse. He does however admit to some level of cultural continuity, but points to a sudden decline in the order and prosperity of the former Roman territories. Ward-Perkins hammers home this point most stridently of all, seeing the fifth century in the west as a period of cataclysm. Other historians, such as Goffart, maintain that the fifth century was a time of managed retreat and that the settlement of barbarians in the empire was for the most part a managed and intentional process. Guy Halsall argues that the movements of the barbarians into the empire did not cause its collapse, but were rather caused by a decline in its authority. Chris Wickham charts the continuities from the fifth century onwards in his monumental _Framing the Early Middle Ages_ and _The Inheritance of Rome._ The continuities are also discussed in Volume 2 of Braudel. Also worth reading are Cameron, _The Later Roman Empire,_ Goldsworthy, _The Fall of the West_ and Grant, _The Fall of the Roman Empire._ For more specialist discussion of specific aspects of late Roman Gaul, see the compendium of essays edited by Drinkwater and Elton, _Fifth-Century Gaul_. For the Imperium Galliarum, see Drinkwater, _The Gallic Empire._\nBibliography\n\nPRIMARY SOURCES\n\nAmmianus Marcellinus, _History,_ (tr. J. C. Rolfe), Loeb Classical Library, 2005\n\nAppian, _Roman History,_ (tr. Horace White), 4 vols, Loeb Classical Library, 1913\n\nAthenaeus, _The Learned Banqueters,_ (tr. S. Douglas Olson), 8 vols, Loeb Classical Library, 2012\n\nAusonius, _Epigrams,_ (ed. N. M. Kay), Bloomsbury Academic, 2001\n\nAusonius, _Works, with Paulinus of Pella's Eucharisticus,_ (tr. Hugh G. Evelyn White), 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library, 1961\n\nAusonius, _Moselle, Epigrams and Other Poems_ (Routledge Later Latin Poetry) (tr. Deborah Warren), Routledge, 2017\n\nCassius Dio, _Roman History,_ Vol. 3, (tr. Earnest Cary), Loeb Classical Library, 1914\n\n_Chronicle of St Martin of Dover,_ Cotton MS Vespasian B XI, ff. 72\u201379, British Library; see also notes in T. D. Hardy, _Descriptive Catalogue of Materials Relating to the History of Great Britain and Ireland_ (Rolls Ser.), II, 263.\n\nCicero, _Letters to Atticus,_ (tr. D. R. Shackleton Bailey), Loeb Classical Library, 1999\n\nCicero, _Pro Fonteio,_ (tr. N. H. Watts), Loeb Classical Library, 1953\n\n_Corpus Cultus Cybelae Attidisque,_ Vol. 5 ( _Aegyptus, Africa, Hispania, Gallia et Britannia),_ (ed. M. J. Vermaseren), Brill, 1986\n\n_Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum,_ Vol. 12 ( _Inscriptiones Galliae Narbonensis Latinae,_ (ed O. Hirschfeld), Vol. 13 ( _Inscriptiones trium Galliarum et Germaniarum Latinae,_ (eds O. Hirschfeld and E. Zangemeister), Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1888\u20131906\n\nDiodorus of Sicily, _Library of History,_ Vols 3, 6, (tr. C. H. Oldfather), Loeb Classical Library, 1935\n\nEumenius, _Pro Instaurandis Scholis Oratio_ ('For the Restoriation of the Schools'), Ch. 9 from _In Praise of Later Roman Emperors:_\n\n_The Panegyrici Latini,_ (eds Nixon, E. V. and Rodgers, Barbara Saylor), University of California Press, 2015\n\nEusebius, _History of the Church,_ (tr. G. A. Williamson), Penguin Classics, 1989\n\nFlorus, _Epitome of Roman History,_ (tr. E. S. Forster), Loeb Classical Library, 1929\n\nGeoffrey of Monmouth, _The History of the Kings of Britain,_ (tr. Lewis Thorpe), Folio Society, 1966\n\nGregory of Tours, _The History of the Franks,_ (tr. Lewis Thorpe), Penguin Classics, 1974\n\nHerodotus, _The Persian Wars,_ (tr. A. D. Godley), 4 vols, Loeb Classical Library, 1920\n\nIrenaeus, _Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies),_ (ed. A. Roberts), Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1950\n\nJulius Caesar, _The Civil Wars,_ (tr. A. G. Peskett), Loeb Classical Library, 1957\n\nJulius Caesar, _The Gallic War (De Bello Gallico),_ (tr. H. J. Edwards) Loeb Classical Library, 1917\n\nJustinus, _Epitome of the Philipic History of Pompeius Trogus,_ (tr. John Selby Watson), Henry G. Bohn, 1853\n\nJuvenal, _Satires,_ (tr. Susanna Morton Braund), Loeb Classical Library, 2004\n\nLivy, _History of Rome,_ (tr. B. O. Foster et al), 13 vols, Loeb Classical Library, 1919\n\nMartial, _Epigrams,_ (tr. D. R. Shackleton Bailey), 3 vols, Loeb Classical Library, 2006\n\n_Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales,_ (eds Jones, Owen; Morganwg, Iolo; Pughe, William Owen), Denbigh, T. Gee, 1807\n\nNapol\u00e9on III, _Histoire de Jules C\u00e9sar,_ Paris, Henri Plon, 1866.\n\nPalladius, _The Fourteen Books of Palladius Rutilius Taurus Aemilianus on Agriculture,_ (tr. T. Owen), London, 1807\n\n_Perceforest,_ (tr. Nigel Bryant), D. S. Brewer, 2011\n\nPlutarch, _Life of Gaius Marius,_ in Vol. 9 of _Lives,_ (tr. Bernadotte Perin), Loeb Classical Library, 1920\n\nPolybius, _The Rise of the Roman Empire,_ (eds Frank Walbank and Ian Scott-Kilvert), Penguin Classics, 1979\n\nRutilius Namantianus, _De Reditu Suo_ ('On his Return'), (eds C.H. Keene and F. Savage-Armstrong), George Bell & Sons, 1907\n\nScriptores Historiae Augustae, (tr. D. Magie), 3 vols, Loeb Classical Library, 1922\n\nSidonius, _Poems and Letters_ (tr. W. B. Anderson and E. H. Warmington), 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library, 1964\n\nStrabo, _Geography,_ (tr. H. L. Jones), 8 vols, Loeb Classical Library, 1932\n\nSuetonius, _De Vita Caesarum_ ('The Lives of the Caesars'), (tr. J. C. Rolfe), 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library, 1970\n\nSulpicius (Sulpitius) Severus, _On The Life of St Marti_ n, (tr. A. Roberts), A _Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church,_ Second Series, Volume 11, New York, 1894\n\nTacitus, _Agricola, Germania and Dialogus,_ (tr. M. Hutton and W. Peterson), Loeb Classical Library, 1992\n\nTacitus, _Histories and Annals,_ (tr. C. H. Moore and J. Jackson), 4 vols, Loeb Classical Library, 1937\n\nWace, _Roman de Brut,_ (ed. Judith Weiss), _Wace's Roman de Brut: a History of the British: Text and Translation,_ University of Exeter Press, 2002\n\nIn addition to the printed versions of the sources, I also found two websites of very great assistance for searching and quick reference of primary sources: Bill Thayer's excellent Lacus Curtius (http:// penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/home.html) and The Latin Library (<http://www.thelatinlibrary.com>).\n\nSECONDARY SOURCES\n\nAllen, Walter, 'The British Epics of Quintus and Marcus Cicero' in _Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association,_ Vol. 86 (1955), pp. 143\u2013159\n\nAss\u00e9nat, Martine, 'Le cadastre colonial d'Orange' in _Revue arch\u00e9ologique de Narbonnaise,_ tome 27\u201328 (1994), pp. 43\u201354\n\nAudouze, Fran\u00e7oise and B\u00fcchsensch\u00fctz, Olivier, _Towns, Villages and Countryside of Celtic Europe,_ J. T. Batsford, 1992\n\nBachrach, Bernard. 'The Alans in Gaul', in _Traditio,_ Vol. 23 (1967), 76\u2013489\n\nBaring-Gould, Sabine, _In Troubador-Land,_ W. H. Allen & Co, 1891\n\nBeard, Mary, _Confronting the Classics,_ Profile, 2014\n\nBehr, John, 'Gaul' in _The Cambridge History of Christianity_ (ed. Mitchell, Margaret), pp. 366\u2013379, Cambridge University Press, 2006\n\nBenbassa, Esther, _The Jews of France:_ A _History from Antiquity to the Present_ , Princeton University Press, 1999\n\nBinns, J. W., _Latin Literature of the Fourth Century,_ Routledge Revivals, 2015\n\nBlagg, Thomas and Millett, Martin (eds), _The Early Roman Empire in the West_ , Oxbow Books, 2002\n\nBlanchard-Lem\u00e9e, Mich\u00e8le and Blanchard, Alain, '\u00c9picure dans une anthologie sur mosa\u00efque \u00e0 Autun' in _Comptes rendus des s\u00e9ances de l'Acad\u00e9mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres,_ 137e ann\u00e9e, n. 4 (1993), pp. 969\u2013984\n\nBomgardner, David, _The Story of the Roman Amphitheatre_ , Routledge, 2000\n\nBoulerie, Laure, _Le Romantisme fran\u00e7ais et l'Antiquit\u00e9 romaine._\n\nLiterature. Universit\u00e9 d'Angers, 2013. French. (PhD Thesis) Braudel, Fernand, _The Identity of France_ (tr. 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Marian Hill and Kevin Windle), University of California Press, 2007\n\nCarroll, Maureen, _Spirits of the Dead: Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe,_ Oxford University Press, 2006 Chadwick, Nora, _The Celts,_ Penguin, 1991\n\nChastagnol, Andr\u00e9, 'Les cadastres de la colonie romaine d'Orange' [Andr\u00e9 Piganiol, _Les documents cadastraux de la colonie romaine d'Orange,_ XVIe Suppl\u00e9ment \u00e0 Gallia] in _Annales. \u00c9conomies, Soci\u00e9t\u00e9s, Civilisations,_ 20e ann\u00e9e, N. 1, (1965), pp. 152\u2013159\n\nCheyette, F. L., 'The Disappearance of the Ancient Landscape and the Climatic Anomaly of the Early Middle Ages: A Question to be Pursued' in _Early Medieval Europe,_ Volume 16, Issue 2 (May 2008), pp. 127\u2013165\n\nChristie, Neil, _The Fall of the Western Roman Empire: An Archaeological & Historical Perspective,_ Bloomsbury, 2011\n\nChristopherson, A. J., 'The Provincial Assembly of the Three Gauls in the Julio-Claudian Period' in _Historia: Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Alte Geschichte_ , Bd. 17, H. 3 (Jul., 1968), pp. 351\u2013366\n\nCollis, John, _The Celts: Origins, Myths, Inventions,_ The History Press, 2010\n\nCollis, John, 'The Role of Al\u00e9sia, Bibracte and Gergovia in the Mythology of the French State' in _The Harp and The Constitution: Myths of Celtic and Gothic Origin_ (ed. Joanne Parker), pp. 209\u2013288, Brill, 2015\n\nCong\u00e8s, Anne Roth, _Glanum: From Salluvian Oppidum to Roman City,_ (tr. Ralph H\u00e4ussler and Chrisoula Petridis), \u00c9ditions du Patrimoine, 2001\n\nCottrell, Leonard, _Seeing Roman Britain,_ Pan Books, 1967 Coulon, G\u00e9rard, _Les Gallo-Romains: Vivre, travailler, croire, se distraire,_ \u00c9ditions Errance, 2006\n\nCunliffe, Barry, _The Ancient Celts,_ Oxford University Press, 1997\n\nCunliffe, Barry, _The Celtic World_ , Constable, 1992\n\nDennison, Walter, 'A Visit to the Battlefields of Caesar' in _The School Review,_ Vol. 13, No. 2 (Feb., 1905), pp. 139\u2013149\n\nDerks, Ton, _Gods, Temples, and Ritual Practices: The Transformation of Religious Ideas in Roman Gaul_ , Amsterdam University Press, 1998\n\nDietler, Michael, '\"Our Ancestors the Gauls\": Archaeology, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Manipulation of Celtic Identity in Modern Europe' in _American Anthropologist,_ New Series, Vol. 96, No. 3 (Sep., 1994), pp. 584\u2013605\n\nDonaldson, Christopher, _Martin of Tours: Parish Priest, Mystic and Exorcist,_ Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980 Drinkwater, J. F., 'A Note on Local Careers in the Three Gauls under the Early Empire' in _Britannia,_ Vol. 10 (1979), pp. 89\u2013100\n\nDrinkwater, J. F., _The Gallic Empire: Separatism and Continuity in the North-western Provinces of the Roman empire A.D.260\u2013274,_ Steiner, 1987\n\nDrinkwater, J. F., 'The Rise and Fall of the Gallic Iulii: Aspects of the Development of the Aristocracy of the Three Gauls under the Early Empire' in _Latomus,_ T. 37, Fasc. 4 (Octobre-Decembre 1978), pp.817\u2013850\n\nDrinkwater, J. F., _Roman Gaul: The Three Provinces 58 BC\u2013AD 260,_ Croom Helm, 1983\n\nDrinkwater, J. F. and Elton, H. (eds), _Fifth-Century Gaul:_ A _Crisis of Identity?,_ Cambridge University Press, 1992\n\nDurrell, Lawrence, _Caesar's Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence,_ Faber and Faber, 1990\n\nEbel, Charles, _Transalpine Gaul: The Emergence of a Roman Province,_ Brill, 1976\n\nEllis, Peter Beresford, _The Druids,_ Robinson, 2002 Enikel, Jansen, _Weltchronik,_ (ed. P. Strauch), Munich, 1980\n\nFischer, Herman, 'The Belief in the Continuity of the Roman Empire among the Franks of the Fifth and Sixth Centuries' in _The Catholic Historical Review,_ Vol. 10, No. 4 (Jan., 1925), pp. 536\u2013553\n\nGarland, Robert, _Julius Caesar,_ Bristol Phoenix Press, 2003\n\nGoffart, Walter, _Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire,_ University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006\n\nGoldsworthy, Adrian, _Caesar_ , Phoenix, 2006\n\nGoldsworthy, Adrian, _The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower,_ Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2009\n\nGoodman, Penelope, _The Roman City and its Periphery,_ Routledge, 2007\n\nGoubert, Pierre, _The Course of French History_ , Routledge, 1996\n\nGoudineau, Christian, _Regard sur la Gaule, Recueil d'Articles,_ Babel, 2007\n\nGoudineau, Christian, 'Gaul', in _The Cambridge Ancient History_ (eds A. K. Bowman, E. Champlin and A. 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Lewiston, New York, Mellen, 1998\n\nMacMullen, Ramsay, 'Barbarian Enclaves in the Northern Empire' in _L'Antiquit\u00e9 Classique,_ T. 32, Fasc. 2 (1963), pp. 552\u2013561\n\nMacMullen, Ramsay, _Romanization in the Time of Augustus,_ Yale University Press, 2000\n\nMarrou, H. I., A _History of Education in Antiquity,_ Mentor Books, 1956\n\nMathisen, Ralph Whitney, _Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul: Strategies for Survival in an Age of Transition,_ University of Texas Press, 1993\n\nMeier, Christian, _Caesar,_ Fontana Press, 1996\n\nMoorhead, Sam and Stuttard, David, AD _410: The Year that Shook Rome,_ The British Museum Press, 2010\n\nMurray, E. 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You can use your device's search function to locate particular terms in the text.\n\npages vi\u2013vii wikimedia commons\n\npage 1 Engraving of the Pont du Gard by Charles-Louis Cl\u00e9risseau, 1804; wikimedia commons\n\npage 8 \u00a9 Michael Greenhalgh, wikimedia commons\n\npage 14 wikimedia commons\n\npage 18 Getty Images.\n\npage 23 Michel Wal, wikimedia commons\n\npage 35 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 41 Shutterstock\n\npage 44 wikimedia commons\n\npage 60 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 64 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 80 wikimedia commons\n\npage 91 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 92 Nimbus08, wikimedia commons\n\npage 98 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 100 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 118 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 126 Oosoom, wikimedia commons\n\npage 128 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 134 wikimedia commons\n\npage 141 Midnighblueowl, wikimedia commons\n\npage 144 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 148 wikimedia commons\n\npage 150 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 156 wikimedia commons\n\npage 163 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 166 Siren-Com, wikimedia commons\n\npage 174 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 183 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 184 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 191 Mimova, wikimedia commons\n\npage 193 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 195 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 198 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 203 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 210 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 215 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 218 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 221 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 224 akg\n\npage 229 wikimedia commons\n\npage 231 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 236 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 239 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 244 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 253 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 255 wikimedia commons\n\npage 258 wikimedia commons\n\npage 266 wikimedia commons\n\npage 276 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 280 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 286 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 288 wikimedia commons\n\npage 291 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 298 Bijan Omrani\n\npage 309 wikimedia commons\n\npage 320 alamy\n\npage 324 wikimedia commons\n\npage 346 Bijan Omrani\nAcknowledgements\n\nI owe much to Yolande Crowe for helping my travels in search of Caesar and the Romans to get off to such a good start. My warmest thanks to her for her Proven\u00e7al hospitality and her discussions of French history. My thanks also to the many staff at French archaeological sites and museums who have assisted me in the course of my journeys and researches.\n\nRobert Twigger, Jason Webster and Tahir Shah have all been brilliantly supportive of my writing. My thanks are due to them for their encouragement and helping me to bring this work to completion. I am also forever in the debt of Matthew Leeming and Magnus Bartlett.\n\nI would also particularly like to thank for their encouragement and assistance: Gareth Mann, Dr Sebastien Blache, Professor David Kovacs, Nick Lane, Jules Stewart, Sian and Philip Bell, Sha Crawford, Rebecca S. Davis, Justin Rushbrooke, Nell Butler, Caroline Barron, John Davie, Owen Matthews, Paddy, Di, Ella and Tara Magrane, the late William Smethurst and his wife Carolynne, Allegra Mostyn-Owen and Tom Edlin. I should also like to thank Professor John Paul Russo for the opportunity to lecture on Caesar at the University of Miami.\n\nMany of my colleagues and students at Eton, Westminster and the other schools at which I have taught have been hugely inspirational, and I have learned much from them. My obligation to my own teachers at school and university never lessens, and their influence never wanes. They are too many to name in their entirety, but I shall always be especially grateful to James Breen, the late Dr Robert Buttimore, Mike Fox, Raine Walker, Dr David Howlett and Dr Tony Hunt.\n\nI could have not wished for a better agent than Andrew Lownie, or a better editor than Richard Milbank. My thanks also to the team at Head of Zeus who have worked together with me on this project: Blake Brooks, Jessie Price, Suzanne Sangster, Gill Harvey and Cl\u00e9mence Jacquinet.\n\nI would never have been able to write this book without the amazing support and practical help of my immediate family: Jane, Jason, Michael, Judy, Danesh. My wife Sam has also been extraordinarily patient, loving and supportive whilst I have been immersed in this project. She is a constant inspiration to me, and the book is dedicated to her, as well as our own two Visigoths, Cassian and Beatrix, whom I hope will in time embrace some of our antique Roman ways.\nIndex\n\nPage numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device's search function to locate particular terms in the text.\n\nImages are denoted by the use of _italic page numbers_.\n\nAcco 87\n\nAconii (tribe) 211\n\nactors 237\n\nAdrianople, Battle of 336\u20137\n\nAdriatic Sea 47\n\nAduatuci (tribe) 83, 84, 158\n\n_Adversus Haereses_ (Ire-naeus) 297, 299\n\nAedui (tribe)\n\nallied to Rome 33, 66, 89, 254\n\ncapital 94, 169\n\nat Dijon 61\n\noral tradition 67\n\nand other tribes 76\u20137, 158, 252\n\nAeneas 31, 137, 186\n\naerial photography 100, 206\n\nAetius, Flavius 338\u20139\n\nAfarwy 141\n\n_Against Nature_ (Huys-mans) 247\u20138\n\nAgamemnon 31\n\nAgricola, Julius 251\n\nagriculture _see_ farming Agrippa 154, 155, 164, 284, 287\n\nAhenobarbus, Gnaeus Domitius 59\n\nAix-en-Provence 35\u20136, 39, 40\u20132\n\nAlbinus, Junius Brutus 152\u20133\n\nAl\u00e9sia 89, 109, 111, 114\u201316, 196\n\nAl\u00e9sia, Battle of 99\u2013102, _100_ , 110, _112\u201313_\n\nAlexander, Julius 234, 235\n\nAlexander the Great 47\n\nAlfred, King 135\n\nAlise-Sainte-Reine 103\n\nAllia, River 27\n\nAllobroges (tribe) 33, 34\u20135, 61, 63, 287, 301\n\nAlpilles, the 188\n\nAlps, the 23, 24, 31, 33, 39\n\naltars 164\u20135, _166,_ 169, 171, 185\u20136\n\nAlyscamps, Les (Arles) 227\u201331, _229, 231_ , 237\n\nAmbiorix 87\n\nAmbrones (tribe) 40\n\nAmbrussum 156\n\nAndrogeus, duke of Trinovantum 138, 139\u201340\n\nAntonine dynasty 325\n\nAntonine Wall, Scotland 131\n\nApollinaris 212\n\nApollo 15, 186, 254, 283\n\nAppian 34\n\nAppian Way 53\n\nAquae Sextiae, Battle of 40\u20131\n\nAquae Sextius _see_ Aix-en-Provence\n\naqueducts 188, 214\u201315\n\nAquileia 72\n\nAquitaine Gaul 155, 157, 158, 194, 221, 222, 328, 338\n\nArausio _see_ Orange\n\nArausio, Battle of 38, 40\n\nArborius 265, 268\n\nArborius, Magnus 261\n\nArc, River 40\n\nArchelaus, Herod 289\n\nArelate 178\u20139\n\n_see also_ Arles\n\nAriovistus 77, 83\n\naristocracies 49, 313\u201318, 335, 339\n\nAristotle 13, 14, 20, 25\n\nAristoxena _see_ Gyptis\n\nArles 177\u201390\n\naltars 185\u20136\n\nAlyscamps, Les 227\u201331, 229, _231, 237_\n\namphitheatre _174,_ 177, 178, _183,_ 188\u201390\n\nbaths 186\u20138\n\nCathedral of St Trophimus 177\n\nChapelle de la Genouillade _231_\n\nChurch of Saint Honorat _229_\n\nCryptoporticus 182\n\ndeities 293\n\nimperial capital 337\n\nlayout of 179\u201381\n\nPlace du Forum 181, 182\n\nrue de l'H\u00f4tel de Ville 179, 181\n\nsculptures 180\n\ntheatre 182\u20134\n\nTour de Roland 183\n\nArminium _see_ Rimini\n\nArtemis 15\n\nArthur, King 131, 140\u20131\n\nArthur's-Hoven 131, _134_\n\nArverni (tribe) 33, 76, 87, 158, 328\n\nArviragus 130\n\nAsclepiodotus, Pisonius 234\n\nAsia Minor 12, 20, 56\n\n_Ast\u00e9rix_ (Goscinny and Uderzo) 115\u201316\n\nAthena 20\n\nAttila the Hun 338\n\nAttis 290, 291, 292, 307\n\nAttusia (wife of Ausonius) 261, 267\n\nAude, River 36\n\nAugusta Raurica, Switzerland 154, 156\n\nAugusteum (precinct in N\u00eemes) _288_\n\nAugustine, St 127\n\nAugustodunum _see_ Autun\n\nAugustonemetum _see_ Clermont-Ferrand\n\nAugustus\n\nand Cleopatra 165\n\nand Druids 161\n\nas emperor 149, 171, 180\n\nin Gaul 164, 168, 331\n\nmemorials 186, 285, 289\n\nas Octavian 154, 164\n\nAurelian Way 227\n\nAusonius 260\u201375\n\nconsulship 328\n\nimperial service 334, 337\n\njourney along the Moselle 207\u20138, 217, 249\n\nand Paulinus of Nola 308\u201311\n\npoet 179\n\nsculpture of _266_\n\n_Ephemeris_ 263\u20135\n\n_Parentalia_ 265, 267\u20139\n\nAusonius, Julius 261, 262\n\nAustria 36\n\nAutun (Augustodunum)\n\n_cardo maximus 244_\n\ncomparison with Le Mans 323\u20134\n\ndeities 284\n\neducation in 169, 253\u20139, 254\u20136\n\nlayout of 252\n\nmosaics 257\u20138\n\nname 168\n\nPorte d'Arroux _244_\n\nPorte Saint-Andr\u00e9 _255_\n\nTemple of Janus _258_\n\ntheatre 253\n\nwalls 253, _253_\n\nAuvergne 33, 76, 88, 89, 208\n\nAvaricum _see_ Bourges Avitus, Lucius Duvius 194, 312\n\nBaiae, Italy 208\n\nbakeries 241\u20132\n\nbarbarians 328\u201330, 337, 339\u201340, 342\n\nBarbegal aqueduct and mill 214\u201317, _215_\n\nbarges 240\n\nbas-reliefs _241_\n\nBastide-l'\u00c9v\u00eaque, Aveyron 236\n\nBath 130\n\nbaths, Roman 186\u20138, 207\u20138, 209\n\nBeaucaire 39, 59\n\nBelgic Gauls 83, 94, 157, 208\n\nBellicus _224_ , 236\n\nBellovaci (tribe) 84, 151, 153\n\nBenignus, Quintus Candidus 232\n\nBernard, Henri 107\n\nBerthelier, Philibert 62\n\nBeryllus 237\n\nBesan\u00e7on (Vesontio) 77\n\nBibracte ( _oppidum_ ) 94, 105, 114, 252, _253_\n\nBibracte, Battle of 73\u20134, _75_\n\nBibulus 57\u20138\n\nbishops 300, 302\u20133, 311\u201318\n\nBismarck, Otto von 110\n\nBissula (slave girl of Ausonius) 269\n\nblacksmiths 236\n\nBlandina 296\n\nBoii (tribe) 21, 31, 76\n\nBologna 22, 30\n\nBononia _see_ Bologna\n\nBordeaux 272, 308\n\nBoulogne 85, 123, 155\n\nBourbon monarchy 105, 108\n\nBourg-Saint-And\u00e9ol 292\n\nBourges 89, 94\n\nBr\u00e9an, Adolphe 108\n\nBrenne, River 99\n\nBrenner Pass 42\n\nBrennus 28, 104, 105, 137\n\nbribery 55, 160\u20131\n\nBridge (Kent) 136\n\nbridges 63, 121, 192\n\nBritain 86, 121, 129\u201330, 139\u201340, 142\n\nCaesar's invasion of 86, 121\u20134\n\nBritannia _see_ Britain\n\nBrittahel of Demetia 138\n\nBrittany 94, 208\n\nbronze 15, 16, 168, 190, 282\n\nBrutus 52, 106, 137\n\nbuilders 232\u20133\n\nBurdeau, Auguste-Laurent 294\n\nBurgundians (tribe) 325, 340\n\nBurgundy 76, 279, 325\n\nburial grounds 227\u201331\n\nBurrus, Afranius 193\u20134\n\ncadastral maps 201\u20132, 204, 205\n\nCaesar, Gaius Julius and Al\u00e9sia, siege of 99\u2013102\n\nassassination of 154\n\nand Bibracte, defeat of Helvetii at 73\n\nbiographies of 108\u20139\n\nand Britain 121\u20134\n\nand Cato 86\n\ndescription of Helvetii 66\u201371\n\nfamily 42, 49, 50, 52\u20133, 148\n\nand Gallic wars 62\u2013116\n\nnumber of Gallic deaths caused by 95\n\njourney to Geneva 62\u20135\n\nand Gergovia, siege of 89\u201394\n\nlegacy of 130\n\nand Marseille 179\n\npolitician 170, 180, 325, 328\n\nand provinces 85, 167, 331\n\nrise of 47\u201358\n\nand tribal leaders 77, 106\u201316, 134\u201342\n\nand tribes 65\u20137, 70\u20134, 76, 85, 94\u20135, 151\u20132\n\nand Vercing\u00e9torix 116\n\n_see also_ Commentaries on the Gallic War\n\nCaesarius of Arles, Saint 188, 314\u201316, 318\n\n'Caesar's Camp' 130\n\n_Caesar's Vast Ghost_ (Durrell) 178, 214, 287\n\ncalendars 238, 291\n\nCaligula 160, 168, 170, 331\n\nCalvin, John 300\n\nCalvinus, Sextius 36\n\nCamden, William 127, 129, 135\n\ncanals 38, 59, 228\n\nCanterbury 126\u20137\n\nBigbury Hill Fort _128_\n\nChurch of St Martin _126,_ 127\n\nPilgrims' Way 128, _128_\n\nCanterbury Castle 130\n\nCapitol, Rome 27, 54\n\nCarbo, Papirius 36\n\nCarcassonne Gap 36\n\n_cardo_ (road) 179, 202, 227, 244\n\nCarnutes (tribe) 151\n\nCarnutum ( _oppidum_ ) 105\n\nCarron, River 131\n\nCarthage 19\u201320, 29, 234, 290\u20131\n\nCassian, St John 314\u201315\n\nCassis 15\n\nCassivellaunus _118,_ 129, 134\u20137, 138\u201342\n\nCasticus 70\n\nCatiline conspiracy 55, 62\n\nCato the Younger 52, 55, 56, 86\n\nCato, Valerius 258\n\nCatullus 31\n\nCatulus, Quintus Lutatius 55\n\nCatumandus, prince 20\n\nCatuvellauni (tribe) 136\n\nCeltic culture 95, 98, 104\n\nCeltic Gauls, origins of 22\u20133\n\nCeltillus 88\n\nCenabum _see_ Orl\u00e9ans\n\nCertinus, Titus Carsius 237\n\nCh\u00e2lons, Battle of 338\u20139\n\nChampagne 24\n\nChapelle de la Genouil-lade, La (Arles) 229, 230, _231_\n\nChares, Oppius 259\n\nchariot racing _156, 195,_ 289, 300\n\nchariots 15\n\nCharles IX, King 228\n\nChichester 130\n\nChilham, Canterbury 129\n\nChirac, Jacques 115\n\nChiragan 211\n\nChlorus, Constantius 254\n\nChristianity 293\u2013300\n\nbishops 300, 302\u20133, 311\u201318\n\nin Britain 127\n\nearly presence in Gaul 299\n\nheresy 297\u20139\n\nlegend 227\u20138, 230\n\nfirst martyrdoms in Gaul 294\n\npersecution of 294\u20137, 304\n\nrise of 260, 335\n\nRoman Catholicism 103, 107, 314, 340\n\nand Vercing\u00e9torix 107\n\n_see also_ Martin, St, bishop of Tours\n\n_Chronicle of Dover Monastery_ 136\n\n_Chronicle of St Martin of Dover_ 130\n\nCicero 18, 55, 61, 62, 66, 87, 248, 249, 258, 271\n\nCicero, Quintus 87\n\nCilician pirates 51\n\nCimbri (tribe) 37, 39, 41\u20132, 83\u20134\n\nCinna 50\n\n_cippi_ (inscribed stones) 101, 234\n\nCisalpine Gaul 21, 31, 33, 47, 58\n\nCivilis, Julius 173 _civitates_ (city-states) 158, 164\u20136, 167, 169, 192\n\nClaudian 213\n\nClaudius 127, 161,\n\n168\u20139, 330, 331\n\nCleopatra 165, 287\n\nClermont-Ferrand 94, 110, 115, 168, 208, 340\n\nClovis, King 103, 114\n\nClusium 26\n\ncoinage _see_ currency\n\nCollonges 63\n\nCologne 156, 168\n\nColonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium _see_ Cologne\n\nColonia Iulia Paterna Arelatensium Sextanorum _see_ Arles\n\nCominius, Caius 234\n\n_Commentaries on the Gallic War_\n\nbackground 66\u20137\n\ncompletion by Aulus Hirtius 152\n\non Geneva 62\u20133\n\nand Gods 283\n\non grain 213\n\npurpose of 67\n\non soldiers 125\n\nas a source 137\n\nas teaching material 3\u20134\n\nThree Gauls 157\n\non tribes 70\u20131, 83, 85\u20136, 152\n\non Vercing\u00e9torix's surrender 107\n\nComo, Lake 30\n\nCondate 162, 163\n\nCondrusi (tribe) 158\n\nConstantine 187, 261, 300, 304\n\ncoppersmiths _224_\n\nCornelia (wife of Caesar) 50, 52\n\ncorruption _see_ bribery coups 108\n\nCoway Stakes, Walton-on-Thames 135\u20136\n\ncraftsmen 238\n\nCrassus 49, 57, 85\n\nCrau, the 38, 228\n\nCremona 30\n\nCridous of Albany 138\n\nCritognatus 101, 102\n\nCryptoporticus (subterranean chamber in Arles) 182\n\ncult complexes 291\u20133\n\nculture and identity, Roman 327\u20138, 342\n\ncurrency 17, 149\u201350, 165, _166, 335_\n\ncursus honorum (sequence of public offices) 53, 172\n\n_curule aediles_ (office) 54\n\nCybele 290\u20133, _291,_ 307\n\nCybele sanctuary, Vienne _291_\n\nCyrus, king of Persia 12\n\nDanube, River 47, 65, 332\n\nDaphnus of Vaison 299\n\nde Gaulle, Charles 111, 114\n\nDeal 124, 125, 127\n\nDeal Castle 125\n\n_decumanus_ (road) 179, 202\n\ndeities 283\u20135, 293, 299\n\nDelphi 20\n\nDelphidius 271\u20132\n\nDevil's Dyke, Wheathampstead _118,_ 136\n\nDijon 61\n\nDio, Cassius 159\u201360\n\nDiocletian 333, 334\n\ndiplomacy 329\n\nDivico 71\n\nDivitiacus 62\n\ndoctors 235\n\n_dolium (storage jar_ ) _320_\n\nDomitian 221\n\nDomitius 209, 211\n\nDomitius, Gnaeus 34\u20135\n\nd'Orl\u00e9ans, Henri, duc d'Aumale 107\u20138\n\nDorobellum 138\n\nDover 123, 124\n\nDover Castle 129\u201330\n\nDruids 62, 95, 107, 161, 271, 283\n\nDrusus 164\n\nDumas, Alexandre 177\n\nDumnorix 70\n\nDurocortorum 105\n\nDurrell, Lawrence 178, 214, 287\n\nEburones (tribe) 158\n\nEdirne 336\u20137\n\neducation 250\u20132, 253\u20139\n\nEgypt 165, 185, 207, 287\n\nElysian Fields 227\n\nEnglish Channel 86, 122\u20133\n\nEntremont ( _oppidum_ ) 22, 23, 34, 35, _35_\n\nEpicurus 257\n\nepigrams 223, 259, 263, 274\n\n\u00c9tang de Thau 59\n\nEtruscans 13, 18, 19, 22, 25\n\nEumenius 254\u20136, 257\n\nEuric, King 340, 341\n\nEuropean Union 342\n\nEusebius 287, 289, 294\u20135\n\nEuthymenes 250\n\nEuxenus _see_ Protis\n\nExe, River 130\n\nExeter 130\n\nFabius, Laurent 115\n\nFabius, Lucius 115\n\nfarming\n\nanimals 217, 219\n\nand cadastral maps 202, 204\u20135\n\ncalendar 238\n\ncrops 213\u201314, 217\n\ntradesmen and 237\u20138\n\nFelix, Vitalinus 235\n\nFestus, Maximius 293\n\nFirst World War 236\n\n_flamen dialis_ (priest of Jupiter) 50\n\nFlanders 85\n\nFlavian dynasty 325\n\nFlorus 32, 33, 160\n\nflower-sellers 235\n\nFonteius, Marcus 61\n\nFort de L'\u00c9cluse 64\n\nfortifications ( _oppida_ ) 34, 88, 128\n\nforums 181, 182, 324\n\nFos (port near Arles) 38\n\nFrance 103\u20135, 106\u20138, 142, 147\n\nFranco-Prussian War 106, 110\n\nFran\u00e7ois I, King 104\n\nFranks, the 103, 104\u20135, 106, 339\n\nFrench Revolution 104\n\nGaius 180\n\nGalba 173\n\nGallia Belgica _see_ Belgic Gauls\n\nGallia Cisalpina _see_ Cisalpine Gaul\n\nGallia Comata 83, 86, 152, 154, 251\u20132\n\n_see also_ Three Gauls\n\nGallia Lugdunensis _see_\n\nLyonese Gaul\n\nGallia Narbonensis _see_\n\nNarbonese Gaul\n\nGallica Aquitania _see_\n\nAquitaine Gaul\n\nGambetta, L\u00e9on 110\n\nGarlaban (mountain) 12\n\nGaronne, River 36, 157\n\nGauguin, Paul 229\n\nGenava _see_ Geneva\n\nGenesius, St 227\n\nGeneva 36, 62\u20133, 65, 71\n\nSt Pierre's Cathedral 300\u20133\n\nGeneva, Lake 62, 65\n\nGeoffrey of Monmouth 137, 138\u20139, 140\u20131\n\nGergovia (oppidum) 89\u201390, 92\u20134, 99, 105, 110, 111, 115\n\nGergovia, Battle of 87\u20139, _91,_ 93, 96\u20137, 99\n\nGergovie (modern village) 92, 92, _98,_ 111\n\nGermania 328\n\nGermany 110\u201311, 142\n\nGetae (Thracian tribe) 65\n\nGibbon, Edward 243, 325\n\ngladiatorial games 54, 170, 177, 196, 237\n\nGlanum\n\nArch of Glanum 147\u201350, 148, 150, 161, 170\u20131\n\nfinds from 21\n\nGlanic mothers 284\n\nMausoleum of the Julii _144_\n\nglassmakers 234, 235\n\nGnipho, Antonius 258\n\ngold 21, 25, 27\u20138, 33, 124, 180\n\ngorgons 16\n\nGoths _see_ Visigoths\n\nGrand-Rue, Marseille 15\n\nGratian 262, 270, 308, 337\n\nGreat St Bernard Pass 24\n\nGreeks 31, 72, 179, 217, 220\n\ncolony of Massalia 11, 12\u201315, 20, 153, 250\n\nimpact on Gauls 17, 18, 22\n\nlanguage 17\u201318, 170, 250\u20131, 257, 274\n\nphilosophy 299\n\n_see also_ migration; Phocaea; Vix Krater\n\nGreek fire 136\n\nGregory of Tours 317\n\nGrey, Sir Thomas 131\n\ngrottoes 280\u20132\n\nGueithaet of Venedotia 138\n\nguilds 233\u20134\n\nGyptis 13\u201314\n\nHades 37\n\nHadrian 211\n\nHallstatt culture 15\n\nHannibal 28, 30\n\nHarpocrates 293\n\nHasdrubal 29\n\nHaussmann, Georges-Eug\u00e8ne 109\n\nHaute-Garonne 211\n\nHeadlam, Cecil 178\n\nheads, display of human 21\u20132, 34, 301\n\nHelvetii (tribe) 70\u20134\n\ncensus 76\n\nmigration _64, 65\u20137,_ _68\u20139,_ _75_\n\nrise of 36\n\nterritory of 63, 156\n\n_see also_ Caesar, Gaius Julius\n\nHercules 12\u201313, 284\n\nHerodotus 12\n\nHesperia 31, 32\n\nHesperius 268\n\nHirtius, Aulus 67, 152, 153\n\nHispania 35\n\n_Historia Regum Britanniae_ (Geoffrey of Monmouth) 137, 138\u20139, 140\u20131\n\nHomer 250\n\nHorace 171, 270, 271\n\nHuysmans, Joris-Karl 247\n\nIllyricum 47, 58, 65, 85\n\nImperium Galliarum (Empire of the Gauls) 332\u20133\n\nimports, luxury 15\u201316\n\n_Inferno_ (Dante) 228\n\ninscriptions\n\naltars 164\n\ndecline in use 336\n\nGallo-Roman Museum 166, 169, 170\n\nGreek art 18\n\nmemorials 136, 232\u20138\n\nmonuments 180, 189\u201390\n\nVercing\u00e9torix memorial 94, 103, 115\n\nIrenaeus, bishop of Lyons 297, 299\n\nIsis 293\n\nItaly 22, 25, 37\u20138, 88, 338\n\nIucundus 238\n\nJean, duc des Esseintes (character in _Against Nature_ ) 247\u20138\n\nJewish settlers, France 147\n\nJohn of Fordun 131\n\nJudaism 147\n\nJulia (wife of Marius) 42, 52\n\nJulianus, Septimus 233\u20134\n\nJulius Caesar _see_ Caesar, Julius\n\nJulius, Titus 180\u20131\n\nJuno 27\n\nJupiter 283\n\nJura Mountains 63\n\nJurgurtha, King 38\n\nJutland 37\n\nJuvenal 259\n\nKnights Templar 177, 289\n\n_kraters (wine cauldrons) 16\u201317,_ _18, 44_\n\nLa Graufesenque (Aveyron) 240\n\nLa P\u00eane 216\n\nLa Roche Blanche 90\n\nLa Turbie\n\nTropaeum Alpium 164\n\nLabienus, Titus 71, 138\n\nLac d'Aydat 208\n\nLambarde, William 126, 130\n\nLatin 32, 63, 67, 94, 141, 168, 170, 206, 249, 281, 282, 306, 308, 340\n\ndoggerel 258\n\nepigrams 274\n\nthe Gauls and 169, 190, 251, 341\n\nLate Latin 248\n\nliterature from Gaul 260, 270, 271\n\nmetre 263\n\nnames of villa estates 207\n\n'Silver Latin' 248\n\nteaching of 3, 5\n\nLatium 25, 31\n\nLavant, River 130\n\nLe Mans (Vindunum)\n\nCathedral of St Julien _324_\n\ncomparison with Autun 323\u20134\n\nforum 324\n\nwalls 323\u20135, _324_ , 333, 336, 338\n\nLe Pen, Jean-Marie 115\n\nL\u00e9gion Fran\u00e7aise des Combattants 111\n\nLeland, John 125, 130\n\nLemi\u00e8re, Pascal-Louis 107\n\nLenus 284\n\nLeprosum _see_ Levroux Les Baux-de-Provence 147, 300\n\nLeslie, John 131\n\nLevant, the 13, 56\n\nLevroux 306 _Li Fet des Romains_ (anon.) 135\u20136\n\nLicinius 159\u201360\n\nLigug\u00e9 305\n\nLigurian tribes 13\n\nL'\u00cele (Geneva) 62\n\nliterature\n\nauthors 177\u20138, 247\u201350, 336\n\nFrench 106\u20138, 142, 247\u20138\n\nGerman 142\n\nLatin 248\u20139, 271, 275\n\nWelsh 141\u20132\n\nLivy 21, 23\u20136, 28, 31, 32, 37\n\nLocociacum _see_ Ligug\u00e9 London 137, 138, 139\n\nLouis XII, King 147\n\nLouis XVIII, King 105\n\nLucan 95\n\nLucca, Italy 85\n\nLucius 180\n\nLugdunum _see Lyons Lugdunum Conuenarum_ _see_ Saint-Ber-trand-de-Comminges\n\nLugus _see_ Mercury Lupus of Troyes, Bishop 312\u201313\n\nLutetia _see_ Paris\n\nLyonese Gaul 157\n\nLyons 155, 156, 161, 162, 196, 265, 287, 293, 294, 295, 297\n\nAltar of Peace ( _Ara Pacis_ ), Rome 171\n\nAltar of the Three Gauls 164\u20135, _166,_ 169\n\namphitheatre 293\u20134, 296\n\nChristian martyrdom in 294\u20137\n\ncolonies in 154, 155\n\nFourvi\u00e8re Hill 162, _163_\n\nGallo-Roman Museum 166, 170\u20131\n\nlayout of 162\u20133, 164\u20135\n\nRue Burdeau 168, 293\n\nMacpherson, James 104\n\nMajorian 312\n\nMandubii (tribe) 99\u2013102, 158\n\nMarcellinus, Ammianus 250\n\nMarcellus 272\n\nMarcia, Queen 137\n\nMarcus 297\u20138\n\nMarignano, Battle of 104\n\nmaritime trades 233\n\nMarius, Gaius\n\nand the Ambrones 40\n\nBattle of Aquae Sextiae 41, 42\n\nand Caesar 54\n\nconsulship 38\u201342, 49\n\nmonument to 148\u20139\n\nand the Teutones 38, 39, 41, 60, 70\u20131, 74\n\nMark Antony 154\n\nMarmoutier (near Tours) 305\n\nMarne, River 24\n\nMars 283\n\nMarseille 11\u201322\n\narchaeological remains in _14_\n\neducation in 250\u20132\n\nand Rome 12, 32\u20133, 35, 153\n\nsiege of 179\n\n_see also_\n\nMassalia Martial 223, 259, 274\n\nMartin, Henri 106\n\nMartin, St, bishop of Tours 303\u20137, 311, 317\u201318\n\nmartyrdom, Christian 294\n\nMas des Tourelles, Beaucaire _218, 220\u20132, 221_\n\nMassalia (Greek colony) 14\u201320, 21, 22, 24, 25, 32, 33, 34, 35, 39, 59, 72, 122, 153, 179, 223, 250, 251, 258, 300\n\n_see also_ Marseilles\n\nMassif de l'\u00c9toile (mountain) 12\n\nMatres Nemausicae 285\n\nMaximus 262\u20133, 272, 337\u20138\n\nMaximus, Valerius 251\n\nMediterranean Sea 12\u201313\n\n_megara_ (Greek halls) 17\n\nMela, Pomponius 193\n\nmemorials 164\u20135, 232\u20135\n\nMenapii (tribe) 85, 94\n\nMercury 283, 284\n\nMerdogne _see_ Gergovie Merovingians, the 103, 114\n\nmetalwork 15\n\nMetrodorus 257\n\nmigration\n\nof the Helvetii 64\u20135, 66\n\nGallic 23, 24\u20135, 29, 37\n\nGermanic 76\u20137, 85\u20136\n\nof the Phocaeans 12, 13\u201314, 24, 32\n\ntradesmen and 234\u20135\n\nmilestones 59, _60_\n\nMillet, Aim\u00e9 _80_\n\nmills, flour 216\u201317\n\nminers 236\n\nMinerva 283\n\nMinervius, Victor 271\n\nMirabeau, Marquis de 42\n\nMistral, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric 177, 299\n\nMithraism 292, 293\n\nMithridates, king of Pontus 51\n\nMitterrand, Fran\u00e7ois 114\u201315\n\nModena 30\n\nMolmutius, Dunvallo 137\n\nMont Auxois 99\u2013100, 103\n\nMont Lassois 16, 17, 18\n\nMontagne de Bussy 99\n\nMontagne de Flavigny 99\n\nMontagne Sainte-Victoire 40\u20132, _41_\n\nMontmort 73\n\nMorini (tribe) 85\n\nMoselle, River 207, 217, 269\n\nMulhouse 77\u20138\n\nMutina _see Modena_\n\n_Myst\u00e8res du peuple, Les_ (Sue) 106\n\n_Myvyrian Archaiology_ 142\n\nNannus, King 13\u201314\n\nNapoleon III 90, 92, _92,_ 103, 108\u201310, 123, 280\n\nNapoleonic Wars 104, 105, 106\n\nNarbo Martius _see_ Narbonne\n\nNarbonese Gaul 36, 156, 157\n\nNarbonne 36, 156\n\nNemausus 285\n\n_see also_ N\u00eemes\n\nNennius 138\n\nNero 172, 193\u20134, 331\n\nNervii (tribe) 84, 94\n\nnettle, Roman 127\n\nNicomedes, king of Bithynia 51\n\nN\u00eemes\n\namphitheatre _vi-vii_\n\nAugusteum 285, 286\n\n'Latin Rights' 153\n\nsymbol of 287\n\n'Temple of Diana' 285\u20136, _288_\n\ntheatre 285\u20136\n\ntombstones _239_\n\nTour Magne 285, _286_\n\nNoricum 36, 39\n\n_Norma_ (Bellini) 107\n\nNormandy 208\n\nNoviodunum ( _oppidum_ ) 88\n\nOctavian 154, 164, 180\n\n_see also_ Augustus\n\nOdysseus 37\n\nofferings (ex-votos) 282, 285\n\nolives 17, 214, 217, 238\n\nolive oil 22, 34, 234\n\nOlympus, Marcus Julius 237\n\nOppidum Ubiorum _see_ Cologne\n\nOrange, Vaucluse\n\ncadastral maps 201\u20132, 204, 205\n\ntheatre 184\u20135, _184, 203_\n\ntombs _195_\n\noratory 51, 259, 271\n\nOrcet, Great Camp at 89\u201390, _91_\n\norder, social 28, 242\n\nOrgetorix 70, 73\n\n_Orlando Furioso_ (Ariosto) 228\n\nOrl\u00e9ans (Cenabum) 87, 88\n\nOrosius 135\n\nOuv\u00e8ze, River 191, 194\n\npaganism 227, 249, 307, 315\u201317\n\nPalladius 213\u201314\n\nParis (Lutetia) 89, 109\n\nParkinson, John 127\n\nParma 30\n\nPas de L'\u00c9cluse 63\u20134, _64,_ 65\u20136, 72\n\nPatera, Attius 271\n\nPaulinus, Lollius 164\n\nPaulinus of Nola, St 249, 308\u201311, _309_\n\nPaulinus of Pella 249\n\nPaulus, Axius 272, 273\n\n_Pax Romana_ 192, 234\n\n_Perceforest_ (anon.) 142\n\nperfume-sellers 234\n\nP\u00e9rignat-l\u00e8s-Sarli\u00e8ve 89\n\nP\u00e9tain, Marshal Philippe 111, 114\n\nPetta _see_ Gyptis\n\nPhocaea, Greece 12\n\nPhocaeans 12\u201313, 19, 24, 32\n\nPhoenicians 13\n\nPiacenza 30\n\npilgrims 281\u20132\n\nPilgrims' Way 128\n\nPiso, Lucius Calpurnius 73\n\nPlacentia _see_ Piacenza\n\nPlancus, Lucius Munatius 153, 154\n\nPlato 271\n\nPlautus 185\n\nPliny the Elder\n\nbackground 22\u20133\n\non bread 213, 241\n\non Caesar 95\n\non religion 161\n\non shampoo 234\n\non wine 193\n\nPliny the Younger 259\n\nPlutarch 28, 39, 40, 47\n\nPo, River 25\n\nPo Valley 30, 39\n\nPolybius 23, 25, 29\u201330\n\nPompey 56\u20137, 60, 85, 151, 153, 194\n\nPont du Gard (aqueduct) 1, 214\n\nPonticus 296\n\n_pontifex maximus_ (chief priest) 54\u20135\n\nPontius Pilate 287, 289\n\npopulism 49\n\nPortus Itius _see_ Boulogne\n\nPosidonius 21, 37\n\nPostumus, Lucius 21\u20132, 332\n\nPothnius, bishop of Lyons 295\u20136\n\npottery 220, 240\n\nPourri\u00e8res (valley) 40, _41,_ 42\n\npriesthood 50, 165\u20137, 180\u20131, 234, 290\n\nPriscillian 307\u20138\n\nPriscus, Gaius Munius 189\u201390\n\nProtis 13\u201314\n\nPulcher, Publius Clodius 87\n\nPunic Wars 30, 290\u20131\n\nPuy d'Issolud (Uxellodunum) 151, 188\n\nPuyloubier 40, 41\n\nPyrenees, the 157\n\nPyrrhus, King 28\n\nPytheas 122\n\nRaeti (tribal federation) 153, 154\n\n_Red Book of Hergest_ 141\u20132\n\nReformation, the 300\n\nRegulianus, Gaius Sentius 234\n\nreliefs _224, 240,_ _241,_ 284, 290, 292, 300\n\nreligion 287, 289, 292\u20133, 299\n\n_see also_ priesthood\n\nRemi (tribe) 84\n\nRenaissance 104\n\nRepublic, Roman 48\u20139\n\nRhine, River 86, 121\u20132, 153, 332\n\nRh\u00f4ne, River\n\nconflict along 36\n\ncrossing the 63, _64, 65\u20136_\n\nhead of 62\n\nmap of _68\u20139_\n\nmouth of 179\n\nsettlements along 153, 155\n\ntrade route 15, 38\n\n_Richard II_ (Shakespeare) 130\n\nRichborough, Kent 140, _141_\n\nRichborough Castle 126\n\nRimini 30\n\nrituals 42\n\nroads, Greek 15\n\nroads, Roman 15, 59, 61, 155\u20136\n\n_see also_ Via Aemilia; Via Aquitania; Via Domitia\n\nRochefort, Henri 110\n\nRochester Castle 130\n\nRomani, Felice 107\n\n_Romanitas_ 173, 185, 190\n\nRomney 127\n\nRoquepertuse, Acropolis 22\n\nRosmerta 284\n\nRufus, Gaius Julius 190\n\nRutilius 249\n\nSacrovir 160, 254\n\nSt Albans, Hertfordshire 136\n\nSaint B\u00e9at, Haute-Garonne 235\n\nSaint-Bertrand-de-Comminges (Lugdunum Conuenarum) 60\n\nSaint Honorat, Church of, Arles 228, 229\n\nSaint-Martin-de-Crau 13\n\nSt Mary in Castro, Dover Castle 130\n\nSt Pierre's Cathedral 300\u20133\n\nSaint-R\u00e9my-de-Provence 38, 147\n\nAsylum of St Paul 21\n\nRoman baths 21\n\nSt-Romain-en-Gal\n\nmosaics _198, 210, 236, 238,_ _346_\n\nOrpheus ensemble _210, 346_\n\nSaint-Seine-l'Abbaye 318\u201319\n\nSaintes 155, 190\n\nSaintes-Maries-de-la-Mer 300\n\nSaluvii (tribe) 33, 34\n\nSalvian of Marseilles 339\n\nSambre, Battle of the 84\n\nSamian ware (pottery) 240\n\nSamnites (tribe) 25, 29\n\nSa\u00f4ne, Battle of the 72\n\nSa\u00f4ne, River 15, 72, 162\n\nsarcophagi 229, 232\n\nSarkozy, Nicolas 115\n\nSarthe, River 323\n\nSasanian dynasty, Persia 333\n\nSaturninus, Publius Brittius 237\n\nScheldt, River 157\n\nScotland 131\n\nSecond World War 110, 147, 294\n\nSegobrigii (tribe) 13, 19\n\nSegusiavi (tribe) 169\n\nSeine, River 157, _275, 280\u20132,_ _280,_ 318\u201319\n\nSeine, St 318\n\nSena Gallica _see_ Senigallia\n\nSenate, Roman 48\u20139, 55\u20138, 84, 172, 180, 330\u20131\n\nSeneca 193\n\nSenigallia 30\n\nSenones (tribe) 28, 30, 94\n\nSequana (goddess) _275_ , 281\u20132, 283, 284, 343\n\nSequani (tribe) 66, 67, 76\u20137, 158, 169\n\nServilia 52, 55\n\nSeveria, Severa 234\n\nSeverinus, Julius 169\n\nSeverus, Alexander 332\n\nSeverus, Sulpicius 304\n\nshrines 93\u20134, 196, 280\u20132, 306\u20137, 318\n\nSidonius 208\u201310, 211\u201312, 249, 312\u201313, 340\u20131\n\nsieges\n\nAl\u00e9sia 100, _112\u201313_\n\nGergovia _91, 96\u20137,_ 99\u2013101\n\nRome 27\n\nSiey\u00e8s, Abb\u00e9 104\n\nsilver 17, 33, 54, 140, 190, 335\n\n'Silver Latin' 248\n\nSimon, Andr\u00e9 110\n\nSimos 13\n\nslaves 128\u20139, 236, 264\u20135\n\nSocrates 271\n\nsoldiers 48\u20139, 235, 236\u20137, 285, 316, 330\n\nSolemnis, Titus Sennius 170\n\nSoumet, Alexandre 107\n\nSpanish Civil War 147\n\nSportisse, Lucien 294\n\nsteles, wooden 22, _275_\n\nStoffel, Colonel Eug\u00e8ne 90, _91_\n\nStoffel maps _68\u20139, 75, 96\u20137, 112\u201313, 132\u20133_\n\nStour, River 128\n\nStrabo\n\non Cimbri (tribe) 37\n\non farming 212\u201313, 217\n\non Lyons 155, 162, 164\u20135\n\non Marseille 32, 250\n\nSue, Eug\u00e8ne 106\n\nSuebi (tribal confederation) 77\n\nSuessiones (tribe) 84\n\nSuetonius 51, 52, 121, 259\n\nSulla 49\u201351\n\nSulpicius 306\n\nsymbolism 17, 111, 115, _280,_ 287, 290\n\nSyracuse, Sicily 25, 28\n\nTacitus\n\nbackground 260\n\nand culture 253, 254\n\non Marseille 251\n\non oratory 259\n\non uprisings 160, 173\n\nTarascon 39\n\ntaxation 56\u20137, 159, 164, 329, 332, 334\n\ntemples\n\nApollo 254\n\nAthena 20\n\nLenus 284\n\nat the Source of the River Seine 281\n\nTemple of Diana 285\u20136, _288_\n\nTemple of Janus _258_\n\nVenus Victrix 42\n\nVienne 289\n\nTencteri (tribe) 85\u20136, 94\n\nTenvantius, duke of Cornwall 138\n\nTerence 185\n\nTerentius, Marcus 238\n\nTetrarchy 333\n\nTeutones (tribe)\n\nand Caesar 83\u20134\n\nand Marius 38, 41\u20132, 70\u20131, 74, 101\n\nmigration 37, 39, 60\n\nThames, River 129, 134\u20136\n\nTheline 178\n\nTheodoric, king 338\n\nTheodosius I 262, 273, 337\n\nTheon 273\n\nTherasia (wife of Paulinus) 310\n\nThierry, Am\u00e9d\u00e9e 104, 105\u20136\n\nThierry, Augustin 104\u20135\n\nThird Century Crisis 333, 334\u20135\n\nThree Gauls 156\u20139, 330\u20131\n\nTiber, River 31, 341\n\nTiberius 161, 180, 217, 331\n\nTigurini (Helvetii tribe) 72\u20133\n\nTogirix 167\n\nTolosa _see_ Toulouse tombs _144, 195, 241,_ 317\n\n_see also_ burial grounds tombstones _239,_ _298_\n\ntorture 295\u20136\n\nToulouse (Tolosa) 36, 211, 259\n\nTours, France 305, 306, 318\n\ntowers 62, _286_ , 287\n\ntraders, Greek 15\n\ntrades 233\u201342\n\ntrading routes 240, 329, 335\n\nTransalpine Gaul 33, 58, 60, 65, 153, 156\n\nTres Galliae _see_ Three\n\nGauls\n\nTrets 41\n\nTreveri (tribe) 284\n\ntribes\n\nbarbarian 330\n\nconflicts 36\n\ndepictions of 149\u201350\n\nGallic 61, 158, 167, 169\u201370, 172\u20133\n\nGermanic 86, 121\u20132, 164\n\nmemorials to 164\u20135\n\nupheaval of 205\n\nvanishing 158\n\n_see also_ individual names\n\nTricastini (tribe) 205\n\nTrier 260, 284, 333, 337\n\nTrinovantum (London) 137\n\nTrivet, Nicholas 130\n\nTrogus, Pompeius 12, 13, 18\u201319, 20, 32\u20133, 194\n\nTroia Nova (London) 137\n\nTrojans 31\u20132\n\nTrophimus, St 227\u20138, 299\n\nTroy 31, 137\n\ntumuli 15\n\nTungri (tribe) 158\n\nUbii (tribe) 86, 156\n\nUcuetis 196\n\nUrbicus, Quintus Lollius 131\n\nUsipetes (tribe) 85\u20136, 94\n\nUxellodunum _see_ Puy d'Issolud\n\nVaison-la-Romaine 190\u20136\n\nCastle Hill 191\n\nHouse of the Dolphin _193_\n\nHouse of the Silver Bust _191_\n\nhouses 195\n\nmosaics and frescoes 195\u20136\n\nPuymin site _320_\n\nValens 336\n\nValentinian III 339\n\nValerius 265\u20136\n\nValetudo 284\n\nVall\u00e9e des Baux 216\n\nVallonus 237, _239_\n\nvallus (reaping machine) 213\u201314\n\nvan Gogh, Vincent 21, 177, 229\u201330\n\nVarro 32\n\nVeii 25\n\nVellaunodunum ( _oppidum_ ) 88\n\nVenarey-les-Laumes 98\u20139\n\nVenerable Bede, the 135, 137\n\nVeneti (tribe) 85, 94\u20135\n\nVenus 53, 186\n\nVenus Victrix 42\n\nVercellae, Battle of 42\n\nVercing\u00e9torix 103\u201316\n\nand Caesar 87\u20139, 101, 102\u20133\n\nlegacy of 111\u201312, 114\u201316\n\nmemorial _80,_ 93\u20134, 99, 103, 109\u201310\n\n_Vercing\u00e9torix_ (Martin) 106\n\nVerecundus, Marcus Licinius 285\n\nVesontio _see_ Besan\u00e7on\n\nvessels, drinking 17, 21\u20132, 234, 238\n\nVia Aemilia 30\n\nVia Aquitania 36\n\nVia Domitia\n\nfirst Roman road 35, 59\u201360, 155, _156_\n\nmilestones on _60_\n\nslip road from 147, 148, 149\n\nVienne 287\u201390\n\nCybele sanctuary _291_\n\n'Latin Rights' 153\n\nodeon 289\n\nsettlement 36, 265\n\ntemple 289\n\ntheatre 289, 290\n\ntower 287\n\nwalls 161\n\nvillas 206\u20138, 209\u201312, 220, 242\n\nVindex, Gaius Julius 172, 331, 332\n\nVindunum _see_ Le Mans vines 71, 219, 220, 221, 222\n\nvine-dressers 237, _239_\n\nvineyards 17, 219\u20132\n\nVirgil 31, 130, 171, 205, 273\n\nVisigoths (tribe) 325, 336, 338, 339, 340\n\nVix Krater 8, 16\u201317, _18_\n\nVoconti (tribe) 192\n\nVorocingus (near N\u00eemes) 212\n\nVosges, Battle of 77\u20138\n\nWace 130, 141\n\nWalmer 125, 127\n\nWeever, John 136\n\nwells 284, 302\n\nWelsh literature 141, 142\n\n_Weltchronik_ (Enikel) 142\n\nWheathampstead _118,_ 136\n\nWheeler, Sir Mortimer 136\n\nWilliam of Malmesbury 130\n\nwinemaking _218,_ 220\u20133, 222\n\nworkshops, craft 220, 238, 240\n\nwrestling 139\n\n'Year of the Four Emperors' 172\u20133\n\nZeus 13\nCAESAR'S FOOTPRINTS\n\nPegasus Books, Ltd.\n\n148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor\n\nNew York, NY 10018\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2017 by Bijan Omrani\n\nFirst Pegasus Books hardcover edition December 2017\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.\n\nISBN: 978-1-68177-566-1\n\nISBN: 978-1-68177-612-5 (e-book)\n\nDistributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.\n"}
+{"meta": {"title": "Tokyo, My Everest - Gabrielle Bauer"}, "text": "Tokyo, My Everest\n**_DEDICATION_**\n\n_To Nobuko Miyagi_\n\n&\n\n_Drew Smylie_\n\n# Tokyo, My Everest\n\nA Canadian Woman in Japan\n\nGabrielle Bauer\n\nHOUNSLOW\n**Tokyo, My Everest: A Canadian Woman in Japan**\n\nCopyright \u00a9 1995 by Gabrielle Bauer\n\nAll Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Hounslow Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Reprography Collective.\n\n**Hounslow Press**\n\nA member of the Dundurn Group\n\nPublisher: Anthony Hawke\n\nEditor: Liedewy Hawke\n\nPrinter: Webcom\n\nFront Cover Illustration: Cathy Pentland\n\n**Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data**\n\nBauer, Gabrielle\n\nTokyo, my Everest: a Canadian woman in Japan\n\nIncludes index.\n\nISBN 0-88882-181-6\n\n1. Tokyo (Japan) - Description and travel.\n\n2. Tokyo (Japan) \u2013 Social life and customs.\n\n3. Canadians - Japan \u2013 Tokyo. 4. Bauer, Gabrielle - Journeys - Japan - Tokyo. I. Tide.\n\nDS896.35. B38 1995 952'.135049 C95-931124-6\n\nPublication was assisted by the Canada Council, the Book Publishing Industry Development Program of the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ontario Publishing Centre of the Ministry of Citizenship, Culture, and Recreation.\n\nThe author thanks the Ontario Arts Council for their financial assistance toward the writing of this book.\n\nCare has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.\n\nPlease note: The names of the people appearing in this book have been changed in order to protect privacy. Names of places and institutions are unchanged.\n\nAcknowledgements\n\nQuote p. 7 reprinted from _Ransom_ , by Jay Mclnerney, New York: Random House, 1985.\n\nQuote p. 31 reprinted from _The Handmaid's Tale_ , by Margaret Atwood, (1985), used by permission of the Canadian Publishers, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto.\n\nQuote p. 71 reprinted from _Touch the Dragon_ , by Karen Connelly, Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1993.\n\nQuote p.103 reprinted from _Metropolitan Life_ , by Fran Lebowitz, New York: Janklow & Nesbit Literary Agents, 1978.\n\nQuote p. 165 reprinted from _Confessions of a Mask_ , by Yukio Mishima, Copyright \u00a9 1958, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, reprinted with permission by New Directions.\n\nPrinted and bound in Canada\n\nHounslow Press  \n2181 Queen Street East  \nSuite 301  \nToronto, Ontario, Canada  \nM4E 1E5\n\nHounslow Press  \n73 Lime Walk  \nHeadington, Oxford  \nEngland  \nOX3 7AD\n\nHounslow Press  \n1823 Maryland Avenue  \nP.O. Box 1000  \nNiagara Falls, NY  \nU.S.A. 14302-1000\n\n## CONTENTS\n\n**The Lie of the Land**\n\n**Faces in the Crowd**\n\n**Small Victories**\n\n**A Change of Season**\n\n**A Flash in the Pan**\n\n**Chasing Rainbows**\n\n**An Earthquake and a Typhoon**\n\n**Glossary**\n\n## **THE LIE OF THE LAND**\n\n\"He wondered which was worse: having a master for whom you would cut off your child's head, or having no master at all.\"\n\n_Jay Mclnerney_\n\n### **1**\n\nI am sitting cross-legged on the floor of a six-tatami room in the middle of nowhere, trying to see the humour in my situation, as would, say, a fly on the wall. What's a nice Jewish girl from Toronto doing in a place like this? I say this aloud, trying to put the right amount of whine in my voice. But it doesn't work. What I am thinking is that if I don't find another roof to put over my head before the day is over, I'll call the whole thing off. Take a cab to Narita airport, get on the first plane back to Toronto and tell everybody I'd simply made a mistake. It would be inelegant but forgivable. I kick myself now for having come here on a one-way ticket (as a symbol of my wish to keep things open-ended), which cost me almost the same as the round-trip fare.\n\nThere's some construction going on nearby \u2014 a highrise apartment building, by the looks of it \u2014 and my view of the surrounding greyness is partially blocked by a grid of rusty poles and an assortment of cranes, the shovel of one of them aimed at my window as though threatening (or promising) to scoop me out of my self-imposed exile. It's six-thirty in the morning, and the house is perfectly still, though I know from the past two days' experience that the quiet won't last for long. Soon enough they'll all gather in the kitchen and make friendly chit-chat about who's eating what for breakfast. Then they'll start planning the day ahead.\n\n\"Hey, Sue, wanna go shopping later this afternoon?\"\n\n\"Not today, Karen. Gotta rest up. I'm working at Ginza tonight, remember?\"\n\n(In a sing-song voice) \"She's the _hostess_ with the _mostess_ , so she needs her beauty rest.\"\n\n\"Cut it out, Jim.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute \u2014 I'm also at Ginza tonight. Wanna go out for drinks after work?\"\n\n\"Let's do it.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Think I'll have to pass.\"\n\n\"Whatsamatter, Sue, you getting sensible in your old age?\"\n\n\"It's the cab fare I'm talking about, guys. I can't afford it.\"\n\n\"Remember that cab we took back from Shinjuku the other night? Not a big deal \u2014 less than \u00a52,000 each, wasn't it?\"\n\n\"I don't even remember where I _was_ that night, let alone how I got _back_ from there.\"\n\nA round of laughter.\n\n\"So, are we going out tonight or not?\"\n\n\"Twist my arm a little more.\"\n\nMaybe they'll even ask me to join them, although they've probably given up by now \u2014 I've refused their invitations once too often, and for no good reason. It's not their fault that they're twenty-two to my thirty-three, that they've risked nothing by coming here, that Japan is just a rest stop for them. It's not their fault that they like to cook together, to eat together, to spend their evenings huddled around the television in Sue and Trina's room. It's not their fault that they're American, or British, or Australian, and that they want to recreate the atmosphere of a college dormitory, which is where most of them have just come from.\n\nWhen I arrived at Narita airport three nights ago, there wasn't a room to be had in Tokyo. It was early September, peak of the annual invasion of foreigners to Japan. As I dropped coin after coin into an oversize red telephone, I kicked myself for having decided it was unadventurous to arrange my accommodations ahead of time. I got to the bottom of my list of guest houses and cheap lodges, and was about to start calling the pricier hotels when a couple of Europe-on-ten-dollars-a-day types with bulging backpacks wandered over to where I was standing. They'd just learned about a vacancy in a guest house called Let's Go World, but couldn't use the room since they had two more friends travelling with them.\n\nAnd so I found myself in the room where I am now sitting, almost comically dreary with its single naked lightbulb, walls shedding their paint, and a mattress spotted with the tarnished remains of either menstrual blood or virginal love. Whatever this is, I told myself as I unpacked, it isn't Japan.\n\nBefore going to bed I went downstairs to the communal kitchen to make myself some tea. There were several other people in the kitchen, all very young, by the looks of it.\n\n\"So what's your agenda?\" a guy wearing boxer shorts asked me.\n\n\"Agenda?\"\n\n\"Yeah, like what's on your plate? What did you come to Japan for? I'm Jim, by the way.\"\n\nI mumbled something vague, then threw the question back at him.\n\n\"I've been studying Japanese at school,\" he said, \"and wanted to immerse myself in the language for a couple of years. After that I think I'll go back home and do a Master's degree in economics \u2014 either that or an MBA, depending on where I get accepted.\"\n\nOne by one they told me their reasons for being in Japan, my spirits sinking as I listened to their bright plans, each with its tidy beginning and ending. Karen was interested in getting modelling and acting experience before returning to the Big Apple and setting up shop as a talent agent. Sue and Trina had come together from Australia, and were working as hostesses in order to make \"oodles of money.\" That accomplished, they planned to travel around the world, and eventually find their way back to Sydney where they hoped to buy a condo together. Ron was here to learn business Japanese, whatever that was, then go back to the States and get married. In a real funk by now, I excused myself as quickly as possible and trotted up to my room, sensing that my mood would keep plummeting unless I kept my distance from this crowd.\n\nAt three o'clock in the morning I was startled awake by the floor and walls shaking. My first night in Tokyo and already an earthquake, I thought as I rubbed my eyes. But then I heard a sharp cry coming from directly below me, followed by a few grunts. Earthquakes didn't sound like that, I knew.\n\nThe following night there was a house party in Sue and Trina's room. (\"You wanna chip in for some booze?\" I'd been asked, and churlishly refused.) They cranked up the music \u2014 stuff I hadn't heard in decades, like Cat Stevens and The Doobie Brothers \u2014 and kept it going well into the morning. As the only dissenter among them, I didn't have the nerve to ask them to turn down the volume. I spent the better part of the night with my head under my sleeping bag, cursing the fates for having lured me halfway around the world only to deposit me in a college frathouse.\n\nThe next day I managed to get myself on a waiting list for Kimi Ryokan, a Japanese-style inn that was the starting point for many of the foreigners who arrived in Tokyo. \"Keep checking,\" the clerk told me, so I called him ten, maybe twelve times that day. The others, who saw nothing wrong with life at Let's Go World, were baffled and a little put off by my constant trips to the telephone, my anxiousness to get out. \"We're a real friendly group here,\" Sue told me. \"I'm sure you'll get used to it here if you give it a chance. But to each his own, I guess,\" she added with a shrug.\n\nThat evening I went out for a walk. The narrow, crooked streets around Let's Go World quickly widened into a noisy thoroughfare flanked by boxy grey buildings, neon lights jumping up and down their facades. I crossed the pedestrian overpass, and soon found myself in another maze of narrow streets without names. On one of these, I was stopped by a man in a business suit. (Tokyoites, I would later learn, had a special aptitude for detecting newly arrived foreigners: during my first few weeks in the city, I was constantly stopped by strangers on the streets or in trains, but this happened less and less as time went on.)\n\n\"You have Yoroppa face,\" the man said without preamble, squinting through his glasses.\n\n\"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"Yoroppa, you know? Like Paris, Milan, Lisbon \u2014\"\n\n\"Ah, you mean _Eu_ rope,\" I said.\n\n\"Yes, yes, you have Yoroppa face. Do you come from Yoroppa?\"\n\n\"I was born in France,\" I told him, \"although it was just by chance. But yes, my parents were from Eastern Europe.\"\n\n\"I knew it!\" he beamed. \"Yoroppa face. Last year I was three months in Itaria, with my company. My name is Mr. Haruta, by the way.\"\n\nOn impulse, I asked him if he wouldn't mind if we spoke Japanese for a while, explaining that this was my first chance to put my six months of study to use. Mr. Haruta, though, was as eager to show off his poor English as I was my poor Japanese, so we continued our conversation with each stammering broken fragments of the other's language.\n\nBack at Let's Go World, my spirits buoyed by the impromptu encounter, I crawled into my sleeping bag and fell asleep right away. But today, as I sit cross-legged in the hot, still air, I'm back to wondering what I'm doing here. I try to recall the heart-stopping excitement of my two previous trips to Japan, short visits that had left me hungry for more. On both occasions I had been sent by Yamaha, the company I worked for at the time, to coach a young piano student who was performing her own music in two televised concerts. I'd stolen out of my hotel every night and gone on long walks through Tokyo, high on just breathing its air.\n\nMy thoughts turn to Joel, my ex-husband (the ink still wet on the divorce papers) and off on his own adventure, trekking through foothills and mountain passes in the wilderness of Central Asia. I think of his wildly curly hair, spilling crazily on all sides of his head. How could I have left that hair? Those high spirits, that monstrous intellect?\n\nIn a paroxysm of remorse, I fish around in my suitcase, find some stationery and begin scribbling a letter of apology. I tell him that the scales have been lifted from my eyes, that I've had a change of heart and I'm coming right back home if he'll only take me. But even as I write I realize it is cowardice and not love that is pushing my pen on the page, and that if I returned to the safety of his arms, within a week I'd be back at square one \u2014 itching to leave.\n\nI tear up the letter, get out of my sleeping bag and put on some clothes. Then I tiptoe downstairs to the payphone and dial Kimi Ryokan once again. Today, finally, there is an opening. I tell them I'm on my way.\n\n### **2**\n\nLocated in the heart of the riotous district of Ikebukuro (known to some as Shinjuku's poorer cousin), Kimi Ryokan was a small whitewashed building that you could easily miss as you walked by. Inside, the polished oak floors in the entrance and hallways felt cool and sensuous under my bare feet. I was given a tiny room smelling of fresh sheets, and all was quiet as I unpacked. I knew I'd come to the right place.\n\nKimi was different from most other _ryokan_ in that it served a primarily foreign clientele, and was inexpensive enough that people could stay there for several weeks if they had to. Every morning, guests would shuffle into the dining area and eat their breakfast with their heads bent over the Japan Times classified ads, then disperse to all four corners of the city in search of jobs and places to live. The evenings were spent swapping battle stories. People warned each other about English schools that hired only young, Aryan-looking teachers, landlords who wouldn't rent to foreigners, ads for movie extras that turned out to be ploys to attract hostesses. One by one, the names and faces changed as job and housing situations resolved themselves.\n\nI was sitting on the steps of the common room on my third evening at Kimi, getting acquainted with a few of the other guests (somehow, being antisocial didn't seem as imperative to me here as it had at Let's Go World), when a tallish woman emerged from a bedroom door, stumbled toward our group and sat down beside me. She was very pale, with blue-black hair that looked dyed.\n\n\"I feel like shit and I look like shit,\" she drawled, preparing herself for a yawn. The combined effect of her hair, skin and red lipgloss (with matching nails) made me think of Rose Red. \"Oh, _excuse_ my manners \u2014 my name's Charlene.\"\n\n\"When did you get here?\"\n\n\"Last night,\" Charlene said. \"I must have slept for almost twenty-four hours, but all I feel like doing is crawling back to bed.\"\n\n\"Welcome to Tokyo,\" Lahti said, shaking his head sadly. \"It's a hard life here. I have many scars in my heart.\" Lahti was from Nepal, and called himself the king of Tokyo because he was on his eighth visit. \"Scars in my heart\" was an expression he used often, usually in the midst of recounting some racist incident that had befallen him.\n\n\"God, what I wouldn't do for a foot-massage right now,\" Charlene said. \"Or even a back-rub.\"\n\nPrincess, I thought. It turned out she was from Toronto, just a few blocks away from where Joel and I had lived. Although she was a graduate of the University of Toronto law school, a year of articling in a downtown law firm had convinced her that she wasn't cut out to practice law.\n\n\"I spent the whole year in a musty library,\" she told us, \"doing research for these tight-assed Bay Street types. Believe me, the last thing I want to do after that experience is read more law books. That's why I thought I'd try teaching in Japan \u2014 I want a job where I actually _talk_ to people.\"\n\nJust then we were joined by John, who was returning from his first evening of teaching. He looked flushed and bright-eyed.\n\n\"I'm floored,\" he said as he joined the rest of us on the steps. \"Totally floored. This is the wildest night I've had in my life, and I've only been here a week.\" He looked around to make sure he had our attention. \"I walk into the classroom, right? It's a group of businessmen, and I'm expecting them to be all shy and tongue-tied, like everyone's been telling me they're supposed to be. Anyway, I ask them about their hobbies. Standard stuff, right? Well, there's this one guy called Koji, and when it's his turn, he tells us \u2014 just like that, to a bunch of strangers \u2014 that his hobby is dragging. You know, cross-dressing. He tells us he likes to go out dragging in Shinjuku on weekend nights. And then, as if that weren't enough excitement for one evening \u2014\" he pulled a thick Japanese comic book out of his knapsack \" \u2014 this is what another student brought to class.\" He flipped to a page on which there was a drawing of a naked man whose penis, about twice as long and thick as the rest of the man, was jutting straight skyward. \"I don't know if they were trying to test me, or what, but this is mind-blowing. I can't wait to write my dad about this.\"\n\n\"I think it's sad, actually,\" a man called Howard said. \"I mean, here's this society that pretends to be all squeaky clean \u2014 nobody even holds hands on the street, let alone doing anything like kissing, God forbid \u2014 and then they produce this filth for all eyes to see.\"\n\nOh no, I thought, a lecture.\n\n\"I mean, _kids_ have access to this stuff,\" he went on. \"I don't know what in God's name I'm doing in this country. It's bad enough that they were on Hitler's side during the war, you'd think they'd have gotten their act together by now. I should have gone to Israel, like my mother told me to.\"\n\n\"Someone told me the same thing,\" I said, jolted back to the conversation I'd had with an aunt of mine the night before my departure.\n\n\"Why Japan, why not Israel?\" she'd asked me.\n\nThe second part of her question was easy enough to answer: the thought of going to Israel had simply never occurred to me. As to the first part, why Japan, was there any way to explain the tidal pull one felt toward this and not that part of the world? Was there any way to explain that, although I'd hardly given Japan a thought during the first thirty years of my life, when I first set foot on Japanese soil I felt as though I had come home? That when the compulsion to break free from the half-life I'd created \u2014 the half-marriage and half-career and half of pretty much everything \u2014 grew too strong to ignore, Japan emerged from my jumbled thoughts as the only, the obvious solution?\n\n\"It's the hypocrisy I can't stand,\" Howard was saying. \"It's like their right hand doesn't know what their left hand is doing. If the men have affairs, it's nobody's business, not even their wives'. And homosexuality? My heavens, no, not in _our_ society. If at least they'd admit to being as sex-crazed as the rest of us \u2014\"\n\n\"My students didn't seem to have a problem admitting it,\" John said.\n\n\"Yeah, well. I still think it's sad.\"\n\n\"He sounds like he hasn't had any tail for a while,\" Charlene whispered in my ear. I suppressed a laugh, and decided that she might be worth a second look.\n\nA couple of days later, Charlene disclosed what she considered to be her worst trait. \"I must have a _cha_ racter flaw, or something,\" she told me, stressing syllables here and there as though they were in italics. \"When I was working all day with all these stuffed-shirt lawyers who thought of nothing except their work and the Dow Jones, I felt like shaking them and saying, 'Get a _life_ , for God's sake.' They brought out the Bohemian in me. So then I started hanging out with these artsy types \u2014 you know, unemployed screenwriters who mowed people's lawns on weekends \u2014 and after a while I just wanted to shake them and say, 'Get a steady _job_ , for God's sake.'\" She shook her head and rolled her eyes. \"Whatever situation I'm in, I seem to want the opposite. For all I know, I'll be pining for the law library after I get into teaching.\"\n\nUnlike Charlene and most of the others, who had to look for work after they'd arrived in Tokyo, I already had a job lined up. My Japanese teacher in Toronto had written to her cousin who had talked to her friend who had put me in contact with the director of a language school she attended. As a personal favour to my teacher's cousin's friend, the director had agreed to hire me as a full-time teacher, though she let me know in a letter that it was \"big exception, since we Japanese usually insist on face-to-face meeting before hiring employee.\" I accepted the offer with a twinge of guilt, since I knew I wasn't cut out for teaching and secretly planned to look for other work after I'd settled in.\n\nAs far as housing was concerned, my original plan had been to find a place of my own as soon as I arrived. I had visions of a cozy apartment building, futons drying out on the verandahs, green tea and rice crackers with the neighbours. But it soon became apparent that I would have to defer the plan \u2014 the startup costs were simply too high. First there was the gift money, as the Japanese termed it, that you had to hand over to the landlord in order to move into a place. In almost all cases, this was two months' rent. Then there was the commission to the rental agency (unless you \"knew someone,\" apartments could only be rented via agencies) along with two months' rent deposit, and of course, the rent for the first month \u2014 a total of six months' rent, two-thirds of it non-refundable. Had I been willing to share an apartment with Charlene, as she suggested we do, I might have been able to swing it. I preferred to wait until I could afford my own place, and decided to live in a guest house in the meantime, if I could find one that was less sophomoric than Let's Go World.\n\nCharlene accepted the first job that was offered to her, a full-time teaching position at a conversation school called Bilingual, and she found an apartment in a highrise building owned by a foreigner. It cost her several thousand dollars to move in, but she said her privacy was worth it. \"There are two things I can't live without \u2014 listening to my CDs and screwing.\"\n\nIt was these bursts of candour that finally made me decide that, red nails and all, Charlene was someone worth befriending. She gave me her new phone number and we promised to keep in touch.\n\n### **3**\n\nGuest houses, more commonly referred to as gaijin houses by those who occupy them, are dotted all over Tokyo and number in the hundreds. Some of them have curfews, some have communal living rooms, some have shared housekeeping and cooking duties. The one I finally settled on had neither a living room nor a kitchen, which I thought would allow for a more private lifestyle.\n\nEsther House was located in the town of Nishiogikubo in northwest Tokyo, about ten minutes' walking distance from the train station. It had eight bedrooms, each with its own sink and hotplate, two toilets and one shower. At \u00a572,000 per month it cost no less than most studio apartments, the difference being that no key money or agency fee was required. There was a pay telephone screwed onto the outside wall under my window, and even with the window shut I could hear most of what was spoken into it. Though I balked at the \u00a580,000 deposit required in order to have my own phone installed, I decided, as Charlene had, that I was willing to pay for my privacy.\n\nUnlike Let's Go World, Esther House had attracted tenants of disparate ages and backgrounds. The oldest was an Australian woman of sixty who was sharing a corner room with her son and daughter-in-law. I was curious to find out what circumstances would have led to such an unusual living arrangement, so I invited her to my room for tea a few days after I moved in.\n\nHer full name was Jeanne-Anne, but she told me to call her Jay, a contraction of her initials. \"Ivrybody does,\" she explained, \"even my kids.\" She was on the heels of her second divorce, which had turned ugly when she discovered that her ex-husband had sold their house without consulting her and then walked away with the proceeds.\n\n\"He's a lawyer, so he knew all the tricks. I could have taken him to court, I suppose, but I just didn't have the innergy. So there I was, sixty years old, unemployed, no savings to speak of ... It was Bruce who actually suggisted I come to Japan with him and Janet. We'd all heard about the piles of money you could make here teaching English, so I thought, why not?\"\n\nWhen she moved into a room with the other two, it was with the understanding that she would find a place of her own as soon as she got a job \u2014 a matter of days, they all believed. But in a market where even thirty-year-olds were at a disadvantage, she was running into one brick wall after another. For two months she'd been crisscrossing the city in search of the one English school that would give her a chance, and was beginning to get discouraged.\n\n\"I guiss I was rather naive,\" she said into her teacup, \"but I thought that with tin years' experience teaching high-school English I'd have no problem finding a job here. They tell me it's my accent, but I know what they're thinking \u2014 I can see it in their eyes, the moment I walk in the door.\" She paused, and her own eyes started to shine. \"Can't let myself do that,\" she said quickly. \"If I do I'm a didd duck. Innyway, you can't really blame the schools. They're running a business, and they know what their customers want.\"\n\nMark and Susan lived directly under my room. They'd gotten engaged shortly before coming to Japan, and on the spur of the moment decided to get married the weekend after I moved into Esther House. \"We don't know what we're doing,\" Mark said cheerfully as he and Susan set off to the city hall, \"but we're doing it anyway.\" On another occasion, when he and I were alone, he confessed that he sometimes thought of Susan as more of a best friend than a wife. \"But we _did_ get married, so that must mean we wanted to,\" he said, not sounding too sure.\n\nLike all good Americans, Mark was a political animal, inflamed by the corruptness in Japan, America and the rest of the world. He decried the apathy of young Japanese, which I, political illiterate that I was, secretly found refreshing. \"Whenever I try to talk politics to my students,\" he complained, \"the conversation falls flat. The women are especially bad \u2014 half of them don't even know who their prime minister is. Mention Sting or Bryan Adams, though, and they're all ears.\"\n\nThe room to my right was being shared by a former midwife from New Zealand and a New Yorker who was looking for work as a model. They made it clear to me that they weren't a couple. \"Just trying to cut costs.\" Ariel, the would-be model, flitted back and forth between his two personas, dashing man-about-town and brooding intellectual, and had the clothes to match both. Depending on his plans for the day, he would either breeze out of the house in cuffed pants, a plaid jacket slung over his shoulder, or drift off in torn jeans and a paint-stained white T-shirt. Even on his man-about-town days, he didn't quite cut the picture of a model \u2014 his features were too drawn, his nose too prominent \u2014 though he assured us that \"interesting faces\" were the coming trend in male models. Like Mark, he was a compulsive news-hound, and didn't feel right if he went to bed without having read all three of the English-language dailies, which he let pile up in a corner of his half of the room. \"Just in case,\" he said, in case what never being quite clear to me.\n\nJessie, who'd had the room to herself for several months before she took Ariel in, had little patience for Ariel and his newspapers. \"Stupid Yankee,\" she would mutter. \"Thinks the world will fall apart if he doesn't hang on to last month's papers. They're a bloody fire hazard, is what they are.\" Rather than confront him directly (which would have been inelegant), she took to surreptitiously removing one paper from the bottom of his stack for every new one he added. \"I'm wondering when he'll finally say something,\" she said gleefully, but he never let on that he noticed.\n\nThe worst way to deal with Jessie was to ask her a straightforward question \u2014 her barbs would then turn to poisoned arrows. I found this out when I asked her (served me right, I thought afterwards) why she'd decided to come to Tokyo.\n\n\"Dunno,\" she piped. \"Maybe to answer silly questions.\"\n\nJessie was at her best when left to talk without interruption. \"Have you ever walked into a Japanese department store at opening time?\" she asked me once. \"Well, I'll give you a preview. There are these two women in red uniforms on either side of the entrance. Their job is to welcome you \u2014 _Irasshaimase, irasshaimase'_ \u2014 as you walk in. Up ahead near the escalator, there are two more women wearing red uniforms. Same thing \u2014 ' _Irasshaimase, irasshaimase_.' I ask them if they know where I can find some slippers. But it's not their job, you see. They're welcomers, not sales clerks. Onto the escalator and up to the second floor, where there are \u2014 take three guesses \u2014 two more women wearing red uniforms. By this time I'm getting kind of bored with the whole thing, so I just bow to them and say ' _irasshaimase_ ' and watch their jaw drop. Six women to welcome me, and none of them can tell me where to find a bloody pair of slippers. It's a good way to get rid of unemployment, though.\"\n\nJessie was the last person I would have figured to be working as a hostess, but that was in fact what she was doing. She wanted to have her days free so she could study Japanese full-time, though I noticed that she never actually spoke it, even when buying oranges or taking her clothes to the drycleaner's.\n\n\"It's useless to try and figure her out,\" Susan warned me early on. \"If she thinks you may be onto her, out come the quills.\"\n\nIn the first-floor room facing the street lived three young men whom Jessie had nicknamed the Shadows. Days would go by without anyone seeing them, the only sign of life in their room being the clicks of what we guessed to be chess pieces hitting a board. Late one evening, when all the other rooms were quiet, the sound reverberated up through my walls. Click-click, click, click, click-click-click ... and then came Jessie's voice, piercing through the darkness. \"Game's over, you bloody woodpeckers.\"\n\nThe following evening the Shadows moved out.\n\n### **4**\n\nI was determined to love Tokyo, despite its ugliness. As I made my way through the jumble of interlocking buildings, drearily modern with their cylindrical elevator shafts or triangular verandahs or space-bubble windows bulging like giant eyeballs, or any number of inexplicable protrusions jutting out at strange angles, I tried to see not disorder but a grand design, albeit a mad one.\n\nIt soon became apparent to me that Tokyo lovers were people who carried their own vision of the city in their minds. If you were primed to find beauty, you found beauty. It was pointless to take part in the interminable arguments between Tokyo's supporters (clean, safe, charming in an oddball way) and its detractors (treeless, garish, lacking cohesion). People's opinions about the city, I suspected, had less to do with the city than with the people.\n\nThere were the hustlers, who'd come to Tokyo to make a fast buck and had little or no interest in the culture. They mistrusted the Japanese, read hypocrisy into every smile and waxed sentimental about ribsteaks. They looked forward to the day they could clear out of Tokyo with enough money to buy a house or start a T-shirt business.\n\nAt the other extreme were the worshippers, who could see or speak no evil when it came to Japan. They were very adept at picking up the language (which confirmed my suspicion that Japanese was a state of mind rather than a mere collection of words), unlike the hustlers who never quite got the hang of it. I met a man of this type during my stay at Kimi Ryokan, a Harvard dropout who was apprenticed to a sushi-chef. I spotted him on the telephone, barking out clipped phrases like a harried Japanese businessman and bowing all the while. He knew the subway system by heart and insisted that Tokyo addresses were not illogical.\n\nDuring my first weeks in Tokyo, I walked long miles in my search for this or that address, turning to the sun as a guide when my labyrinthine maps failed me. Most streets had no names and most buildings were numbered according to date of construction rather than location, which one assumed was appreciated by historians. To compound the problem, most people gave directions that sounded like the clues in a treasure-hunt. (\"You come to a large grey building, then turn left and walk until you see another grey building. Across the street is a small flower-shop ...\")\n\nWalking was a good way to get a feel for the city's various districts, each with its own personality. I learned how Shinjuku burst into flame when the sun went down, how Ikebukuro swaggered, how Akasaka preened. It was a novelty to feel so safe as I walked through the red light district of Kabukicho, passing nightclubs with signs that said \"For Bad Boys Only\" or \"Dark Wild,\" amusement halls with strip-by-numbers video games displayed in the windows, groups of red-faced, lurching businessmen and various other people of the night. I marvelled at the fact that although I was wearing a sleeveless sundress, dripping with September sweat, I never got whistled or hooted at, let alone pawed.\n\nAs I made my way through the crowds in Shibuya on a Sunday afternoon, I was struck by the absence of older people. Where were all the married couples and babes in strollers? Everybody here was neatly dressed, compact and nineteen. _You're not old_ , I told myself resolutely as Tokyo's youth flocked by me in a steady stream, while above our heads, gargantuan neon signs consorted with the clouds.\n\nTokyo was merciless in its assault on the ears, its cacophony more purposeful, somehow, than the noisemaking of most other large cities. Walking past the chattering stereo speakers posted like sentinels at every store entrance, passing cars that announced \"Now I'm turning left\" just as they started to round a corner, standing at the intersection and hearing a clumsy tune belched out in fat sine waves as the traffic-light turned green, I wondered at Tokyoites' seeming appetite for noise. It was hard to fathom how a people attuned to the sound of one hand clapping could have come up with the idea of talking ads on buses.\n\nAnd yet none of this stopped me from turning the Tokyo I saw into the Tokyo I wanted to see. I looked for the rose among the weeds, the kimono among the sweatshirts. _This_ is the heart and soul of the city, I would think as I came upon a tiny shrine, nestled innocently in the confusion of lights, sounds and buildings poking each other in the eye.\n\nAmong the various gaijin complaints about the Japanese, one of the most commonly heard is that Tokyoites are extremely rude on the train, that you have to be bleeding to death before someone offers you a seat. \"I saw a pregnant woman standing in the train the other day, looking like she was going to collapse from heat-exhaustion,\" Jessie told me, chuckling at the recollection, \"and nobody paid her any attention. Finally I tapped a man on the shoulder and said, 'Time to get up now, mister.'\"\n\nStruggling up the endless stairs in Shibuya station with a futon mattress under each arm, I too was a little annoyed when nobody offered to give me a hand. But I soon came to understand that pretending your fellow passengers didn't exist was the best way to survive the Tokyo trains. Bent out of shape by the bodies pressing against you as you fought for air on the rush-hour Yamanote, you learned to enclose yourself in a mental cocoon \u2014 to blot out the pain of an elbow digging into your back, the smell of stale eel sent up by your neighbour's belch. _I am alone on this train_ , you told yourself, and came to believe it.\n\nBy taking earlier trains, I was able to avoid the worst of the crowds and sometimes even got a seat. I studied the faces, struck by how few bald pates there were. So much hair! Young men wore it puffed up on top, scraped thin at the back, a few wisps hanging coyly over their foreheads. It was thick and shiny, carefully blowdried and often permed. Gaijin hair seemed limp and lifeless by comparison. Mark, who was well on his way to baldness, theorized that whatever substance (or lack of substance) made the Japanese small between the legs was also responsible for keeping their hair from falling out. It was an interesting theory, though it did smack of sour grapes.\n\nCommuters did a lot of reading on the train. I would stare enviously at the businessmen absorbed in their newspapers, eyes travelling up and down the columns of Chinese characters, and think, _You're just pretending to read_. I hadn't made peace with the characters yet, and was putting off the day when I'd have to start studying them seriously. My own newspaper of choice was the English Japan Times, with its depressing classified ad section (\"Wanted: cheerful foreign female, 21-25\") and scaremonger headlines. \"Tokyo is sinking under garbage!\" said the headline one morning. I didn't quite know what to make of this, but the Aussie reading over my shoulder told me not to worry. \"They've been wroiting the same article ever since I came here,\" he chuckled, \"which was sivven years ago.\"\n\nIn truth, garbage was one of the more useful commodities in Tokyo, particularly for gaijin. It seemed I was the only person at Esther House who had actually bought my furniture. One of my housemates' favourite pastimes was going out on garbage-hunting expeditions, and Susan and Mark had furnished their entire room with pieces salvaged from the _gomi_ pile. The Japan Times ran an article about an enterprising gaijin who had bought a large apartment complex and furnished every apartment with nothing but _gomi_. If true, this was quite a feat, since according to the article every apartment had a colour TV, stove, refrigerator, sofa and bed. Gaijin always pointed out how wasteful it was of the Japanese to throw away perfectly good appliances or furniture, and the Japanese made the equally valid point that because of their cramped quarters, they couldn't afford to hang on to items they weren't actually using, on the off-chance that these items might come in handy when they (or their great-grandchildren) finally bought a summer house in Chichibu.\n\nWhen Susan and Mark invited me to go to a discotheque with some people from Esther House and a friend of Jessie's, my initial thought was that the last thing I wanted to do in Tokyo was dance the night away with a bunch of disgruntled foreigners. But, not wanting to entrench my reputation as The Standoffish One, I accepted their invitation.\n\nWe were headed for a place called Buzz Buzz (\" _Everybody_ 's been talking about it,\" Jessie's friend enthused) in the heart of the Roppongi district. Roppongi is the stomping ground of Tokyo's beautiful people \u2014 the models, TV actors, would-be models, would-be TV actors \u2014 and the only part of town where gaijin are likely to outnumber Japanese, both on the streets and in the clubs.\n\nNo sooner did we step out of the train station than we bumped into a pair of blond men, swaying against each other.\n\n\"I'm so drunk,\" one of the men said.\n\n\"Me too. God I'm drunk.\"\n\n\"I'm _sooo_ drunk.\"\n\n\"Not drunk \u2014 plastered.\"\n\n\"Fucking plaaastered. Yeah.\"\n\n\"I feel like I'm gonna get sick.\"\n\n\"I'm _sooooo ..._ \"\n\nThey stumbled onward, leaving a trail of elongated syllables behind them.\n\nBuzz Buzz owes its name to the giant insects hanging from the ceiling, lit up by the obligatory spinning strobe-light. That night, the crowd was dominated by a large group of young boys, prep-school students by the looks of them. We squeezed through the tangle of bodies and found a small table, sticky with beer. The music thumped along \u2014 one of those snare-driven numbers that shook the table on every second and fourth beat. Jessie, Susan and Mark headed right to the dance-floor, while I stayed back with Ariel and Jessie's friend.\n\nA beer-fight was breaking out among the prep-school boys. One of them, apparently missing his mark, flung his beer at Ariel's neck. Japanese women with wasp-waists and miniskirts that could have passed for belts were trying to get the attention of the groups of blond men milling around the dance floor. The strobe light spun dizzily, alternately lighting up black beetles, black ants and black cockroaches. The beer fight continued across our table. Ariel looked miserable and kept fingering his ruined silk jacket. My body was quaking with the vibrations from the sound.\n\nMark returned to our table, \"-anna -o up -n -an-?\" he screamed at me.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"-anna -o up -n -an-?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nHe leaned toward my ear and cupped his hands. \"Wanna go up and dance?\"\n\nUp I went to the dance floor, jostled by sweating bodies \u2014 swooning Japanese women and smug-faced blond men, all of them under twenty \u2014 and set my limbs a-swaying to the one-TWO-three-FOUR of the pounding drums. There were no kimonos here, no bashful smiles \u2014 only bugs, sweat and sneers.\n\nThis Tokyo was so much at odds with the Tokyo I carried in my mind that I feared it might come out the winner if I let it.\n\n### **5**\n\nLike many similar establishments in Tokyo, Tokyu BE called itself a \"culture centre\" rather than a school, since it offered not only English classes but also crocheting and _sumi-e_ painting and jazz dance. It was run by the giant Tokyu corporation, owner of office buildings, department stores and train lines.\n\n\"What does BE stand for?\" I asked my supervisor Arai-san, a woman of about fifty who wore her hair in a high ponytail.\n\n\"It's just BE,\" she answered in her sing-song voice. \"Like tsu be or not tsu be, haha, just like Shakespeeaah, _desho?_ \" She was a springy, slightly hysterical woman, the kind my mother would have called a frustrated spinster.\n\nMy first class at BE was a large and mixed group of housewives, university students, office workers and retirees. Their ages, inscribed next to their names on my class list, ranged from twenty-one to seventy-nine. As I walked into the classroom, twelve pairs of eyes followed my every movement expectantly, as though in the swing of my arms or the swish of my skirt lay the key to their future proficiency in English. I'd heard all the usual stories about Japanese students' timidity and wanted to make it clear that I wasn't prepared to do all the talking, so I told them I'd introduce myself by answering any questions they might have.\n\n\"Don't be afraid,\" I said. \"You can ask me anything you want.\"\n\nHesitant chuckles all around.\n\n\"How old are you?\" two voices sounded almost in unison.\n\n\"Well, _almost_ anything you want,\" I told them.\n\n\"How tall are you?\" a young woman asked.\n\n\"Five feet ten-and-a-half inches,\" I said. \"One hundred and seventy-eight centimetres.\"\n\n\" _Heeeeeh_ ,\" they exclaimed in chorus. (I was to hear this sound \u2014 which rhymed with the British pronunciation of \"fair\" \u2014 every time I mentioned my height, that I was born in Paris, or that my brother was a doctor.)\n\n\"Are you married?\" someone asked, and everybody giggled.\n\n\"No,\" I said, then added, \"I'm divorced.\" This stopped the giggles.\n\n\"Whatto is your pahposs to come to Japang?\" an older woman inquired in a brittle voice, overenunciating every syllable she didn't mispronounce.\n\n\"My purpose ...\" I stalled. This was the dreaded Why Japan question all over again. I had three choices: invent a plausible reason, try to approach the truth and risk sounding like a New Age airhead (\"Well, I just wanted to transcend my limitations and ...\") or a pompous ass (\"Japan _asked_ me to come\"), or admit that I hadn't the foggiest idea what my true _pahposs_ was. I opted for the first choice.\n\n\"I've always wanted to have the experience of living in another culture,\" I said.\n\nAnd so it went. From class to class, the questions were always the same. My age, height, marital status, and purpose for coming to Japan. I remembered being warned by my Japanese teacher in Toronto that it was considered rude in Japan to ask people personal questions, especially if they were well into adulthood. I was pleased that curiosity seemed to be winning out over propriety in my classes.\n\nWhen I got home that night, I wrote to a friend in Toronto and asked him to have a T-shirt made, with the red words \"How tall? 178 cm.\" on a white background, and send it to me right away. I thought it would make a good joke.\n\nAs the days wore on and the novelty of a giant-sized Canadian teacher wore off, my students lost their initial boldness and sank deeper and deeper into silence. \"Teaching English to the Japanese is like bowling,\" a veteran teacher told me. \"You keep throwing balls and they never come back.\" I'd never been much of a bowler, and as hard as I tried not to, I sometimes lost my patience. I found myself brimming with frustration one morning, after having asked a class three times if anybody knew the meaning of the expression \"to kill time.\"\n\n\"Look,\" I said. \"There are only two possible answers to my question. Yes or no. I'm not going to say another word until someone gives me an answer.\" The students gazed at me like stunned deer. I felt foolish all of a sudden, ashamed of my bullying tactics.\n\nThrough trial and many errors, I learned that the only way I could count on getting an answer was by addressing one person at a time rather than posing questions to the class as a group. The students had a deep-seated aversion to stepping forward and grabbing the spotlight. They seemed just as afraid of getting the right answer (and appearing to boast) as getting the wrong answer (and appearing stupid).\n\nI also learned, the day I showed up with my \"How-tall\" T-shirt and got no more than a few uncomfortable smiles, that I would have to be more judicious in my use of humour. Mr. Wakabayashi, a retired biology professor, took me aside after our class and gently explained what should have been obvious to me \u2014 that I'd offended my students by implying that their questions about my height were unwelcome.\n\nIn spite of such gaffes, I was accorded more admiration and respect from my students than I'd ever experienced when teaching in Canada. I was a _sensei_ , a word that means not only teacher but also doctor and respected elder. The students would snap to attention as soon as I walked into the classroom, and when the lesson was finished, nobody got up until I did. If there was a young man in the group, he'd sometimes stay behind and offer to wipe the blackboard.\n\n\"You don't have to do it,\" I'd say in embarrassment, unaccustomed to having people clean up after me.\n\n\"I youngest member in class,\" he'd explain.\n\nSince I was a new teacher, my students were asked to evaluate me after the first four weeks. The office secretary typed up a summary of their comments and handed it to me. I read the list: \"Always on time; sometimes late; easy to follow; some of your instructions are unclear; pace is too fast; you spend too much time on each point; intelligent teaching; you sometimes forget to explain things ...\"\n\n\"So what do I do now?\" I asked Arai-san. She told me not to worry, that the comments were better than what most new teachers got.\n\n\"Students tell me you very eregant, like from Yoroppa. I hope you continue look eregant, _neh?_ Maybe students continue satisfied, _desho?_ \"\n\nTokyu BE was quite liberal compared to some of the other English schools. Janet, who taught at one of the ASA branches, showed me the list of rules she'd been given: no overcoats in the building, wear nametags at all times, no knapsacks, no open-toed sandals, pockerchiefs for men, must attend at least three student-teacher parties or else wages are docked a half-week, and above all, no socializing with students. Apparently this policy was introduced after the squabbling between male teachers (over who would get to teach a particular female student) got out of hand. Kate said that the regulation was strictly enforced, that if a teacher was caught with a student, even if they were just crossing the street together, the teacher was automatically dismissed.\n\nAt BE, the tolerance for teachers fraternizing with students had led to two marriages. David, the head teacher, had \"done the right thing\" after getting a student knocked up. Another teacher had fallen in love with a student he met during his first month in Japan, then proposed to her six months later. But it was Sylvana's marriage that intrigued me. Sylvana was a Canuck like myself, and just as tall. She carried herself regally and took no guff from anybody. There was something prickly about her \u2014 you felt that you had to mind your P's and Q's in her presence. I first noticed her wedding band when we were sitting in the teachers' lounge one afternoon, during a break between classes.\n\n\"I see that you're married,\" I said.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Is your husband Japanese?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She sounded annoyed.\n\n\"Where did you meet him?\"\n\n\"In a bar.\"\n\n\"How long have you been married?\"\n\n\"Two years.\"\n\nSomething was driving me to question her more, though it was clear she was reluctant to talk. \"Were there any problems with his family?\"\n\n\"Why should there be any problems?\"\n\n\"I mean, did they accept you right away, or \u2014\"\n\n\"There were no problems,\" she snapped.\n\nShe left the teacher's lounge and I chastised myself for being so nosy. Why had I grilled her like that? And why did I feel so uneasy after talking to her? Then it came to me. Sylvana had what I wanted \u2014 a piece of the East, hers forever to keep.\n\nMarriages between gaijin men and Japanese women are a dime a dozen, but the reverse is much rarer \u2014 ten times as rare, according to statistics. \"Japanese males tend to be spoiled from childhood, so the result is that Japanese men and Western women tend not to be very compatible,\" Ian McQueen warns in his Lonely Planet guidebook. Knowing all this, I still felt \u2014 with inexplicable certainty \u2014 that only a Japanese man would give me the key to Japan and uncover my reason for being there.\n\n## **FACES IN THE CROWD**\n\n\"There are two kinds of freedom: freedom to, and freedom from.\"\n\n_Margaret Atwood_\n\n### **1**\n\nI would never have met Miki, my first Japanese friend in Tokyo, were it not for my noisy housemates.\n\nI regarded Esther House as a kind of failure on my part, and couldn't shake the sense that my life in Japan would only begin in earnest after I moved out and found a place of my own. It wasn't so much the makeshift rooms, or the lack of hot water in the taps, or the plump cockroaches that occasionally crawled out of the space between the tatami mats, that bothered me. It was the litany of complaints about the Japanese, the strains of Bob Dylan or Grateful Dead (why did expatriates always gravitate to sixties' music?) filtering through my walls, the fact that my housemates seemed determined to pretend they were back in San Francisco or Auckland. And it didn't help that Jay, having finally found a teaching job in Yokohama, was no longer around to provide the balancing effect of a different generation.\n\nI considered it particularly unfortunate to be living next to Ariel, who had a fondness for late-night English television and an uncommonly sensitive funnybone. The corniest, most juvenile humour would send him crashing against the wall I shared with him, laughing convulsively. I would lie on my bed, trying to reconcile the erudite, intellectual Ariel who read three newspapers a day and went through books as though they were meals with the Ariel choking on his own laughter at the sight of two businessmen colliding in the middle of a street. (The walls were so thin that I could, if I wished, follow the story-line of the show he was watching.)\n\nLying on my bed one evening, sandwiched between Ariel's guffaws on one side and Bruce and Janet shaking out their mattresses on the other, I decided I couldn't take it any longer, put on my jacket and went out for a walk. I walked past the train station, into North Nishiogi and up to the dried-out river that snaked through it, then back and forth, forth and back along the walkway bordering the river, energized by the fantasy that if I walked long enough Esther House would evaporate and no longer be there when I returned. Finally, about two hours later, I turned back and started toward home, delaying my return by taking as many side-streets as possible. On a narrow street that paralleled the train-tracks, I came upon a neon sign I hadn't noticed before \u2014 The Jazz Inn \u2014 on the second floor of a storefront. On the spur of the moment, I climbed up the stairs leading to the sign, opened the door beneath it and stepped into a small room filled with smoke and cascading piano chords. Feeling self-conscious all of a sudden as the dozen or so patrons fixed their gazes on me, I headed for the counter at the far end of the room, sat down and ordered a beer. Seated on my right was a young-looking Japanese woman with permed hair.\n\nI sipped my beer for a few minutes while watching the pianist banging away at the keyboard, the harsh, percussive sounds she drew from the instrument belying the small size of her hands. The woman sitting next to me lit a Menthol cigarette, and on impulse I asked her if I could have one.\n\n\"You speak so good Japanese,\" she said in English. \"Yes, please take.\"\n\n\"I'm not actually a smoker,\" I babbled as I lit up. \"Not a regular one, anyway.\"\n\n\"I regular smoker,\" she said with a smile. \"I don't smoke in work place, because I woman \u2014 woman look bad if she smoking in office. But I have about fifteen every evening.\"\n\nWe chatted some more, each struggling to use the others language. I learned that her name was Miki, that she was thirty and came from Kyushu. She was an architect by training but worked full-time as a draughtsperson (\"Because I woman,\" she said), and lived alone in a nine-tatami room on the other side of the train tracks.\n\n\"Please I invite you for have coffee,\" she suggested. \"I show you my apartment. It getting late, so we go right away. OK?\" Seeing my hesitation, she added, \"Don't worry. Kyushu women more friendly than other Japanese women.\"\n\nAs befitted an architect, Miki's apartment was uncluttered (as much as a nine-by-twelve-foot room could be uncluttered) and tastefully decorated in whites, beiges and blacks. A large draughting table stood near the single window, which looked out onto the train tracks. Miki sat me down on her sofa while she busied herself preparing coffee in the tiny kitchen.\n\n\"Do you go to the Jazz Inn often?\" I asked.\n\n\"Only about once month. Usually I go home immediately after work, and continue work at home until eleven or twelve at night.\"\n\nShe brought out some coffee and two plastic-wrapped tiramisu cakes, plopped herself down right next to me and flashed me a warm smile. \"You have hobbies?\"\n\n\"Hobbies? Uh ...\" I always had trouble with that question.\n\n\"I have lots of hobbies,\" Miki said. \"Water painting one of my hobbies. I take private lesson once a month. Study English another my hobby. But recently I not enough time for study. Maybe you teach me, _neh?_ Hiking also my hobby. Here, look at this.\" She leaned forward and reached for a photo album lying on top of a bookcase on the opposite wall. She opened the photo album to a page filled with groups of young people with mountains in the background. \"See, this me here. This also me.\" She flipped to another page. \"This another hobby, tennis. Not playing, just watching. See? This Stefan Edberg \u2014\" she grinned widely \" \u2014 my hero.\"\n\n\"The Swedish tennis player?\"\n\n\"Yes. I love him. I look every match he play on television. I also read every article about him. Sometimes information only in English newspapers, so I must to read English. _Taihen, neh?_ Is too difficult, but I big fan of him \u2014 we say _dai-fan_ in Japanese.\"\n\nEvery year in February, she told me, Tokyo hosted a week-long international tennis tournament. She always took that time off from work and spent the week in the stadium, hoping for a chance to see her idol up close. On one occasion she screwed up the courage to wait for him outside the competitors' locker room. \"But when he come out, when I face-to-face him, I so shy that I can't think anything to tell him \u2014 not one word.\" She shook her head, laughing. \"I dream about him at night sometimes. You think I crazy?\"\n\nIn addition to their friendliness, Miki told me, Kyushu women were known for their fine creamy skin and long noses. \"I typical Kyushu woman,\" she said with a chuckle, pointing to her nose, which was indeed long. \"Anyway, another my hobby is Sweden.\"\n\nI was beginning to understand how it was that the Japanese had such impressive lists of hobbies. The way Miki used it, the word appeared to include every leisure activity one had ever pursued, no matter how infrequently.\n\n\"Have you ever been there?\"\n\n\"Oh no. Not yet. But once in few months I gather with other people who are crazy for Sweden \u2014 is like club. We talk about Sweden, look pictures, eat foods.\" She sighed. \"Is like dream, you know?\"\n\nHer warmth and chumminess were infectious, and I found myself telling her about some of the events in my life that had prompted me to come to Japan, even admitting that I was curious about meeting Japanese men. \"I don't recommend,\" she said, wrinkling her Kyushu nose. \"Japanese men not make gaijin women happy, I guarantee \u2014 even Japanese women not satisfied.\"\n\nWe exchanged phone numbers before I left, and though I protested that I had no use for them, she insisted on giving me two more of her Menthols.\n\nA few days later she called, asking me to translate a sentence in a Japan Times article about Stefan Edberg. \"I can't stand suspense!\" she wailed. \"I don't know if good thing or bad thing. Hope you don't mind I call you.\"\n\n\"Not at all. What is it you don't understand?\"\n\n\"This sentence, 'He ran away with it.' What it means?\"\n\nEvery few days, she would call me with a similar request. \"What means 'looking somewhat haggard'?\" or \"Is written 'He outdid himself.' That good thing or bad thing?\"\n\nAnd so, out of the unlikely combination of a group of noisy tenants and a woman's insatiable thirst for information about a tennis star, a friendship took hold. Esther House didn't seem quite as oppressive anymore, and Tokyo now had a face.\n\n### **2**\n\nMr. Shimoda was a retiree in his late sixties and one of my most advanced students at BE. A former engineer, he'd made his fortune by developing a hydraulic braking mechanism which he'd patented and sold to a major railway corporation. As far as I could see, his main reason for enrolling at BE was to display his near-perfect English, to boast of his wealth (\" ... and on the _third_ floor of my house ...\") and to drop names. Now that he was retired, Mr. Shimoda spent most of his time on his two hobbies: hunting and \"taking portraits of beautiful women.\" He seemed to have targeted me as his next victim, and there was nothing I could say to make him give up the idea. \"Come to my house next Saturday at three,\" he told me after our third class, in a tone that would allow no argument.\n\nThe following Saturday I found myself in Mr. Shimoda's living-room, smiling stiffly while he trained his lenses and filters and strobe-lights on my face. As he adjusted the position of my elbows on the armrests of his blue velvet _fauteuil_ , he flashed his bejewelled watch in front of my eyes, back and forth, forth and back, so many times that I finally had no choice but to ask him where he'd gotten it.\n\n\"Oh, you mean this?\" he said off-handedly. \"It's just a little gift from the former king of Kuwait. He's, aaah, a long-standing friend of mine.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\"\n\n\"Yes, we go back a long way, the king and I. We've been hunting together for years.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\"\n\n\"Oh yes. I remember the night he gave a party in my honour ...\"\n\nAfter the photo-session, Mr. Shimoda gave me the grand tour of his house, drawing my attention to the Persian rugs, the _sumi-e_ originals on the walls and the baby-grand piano, polished to such a fine shine that we could see our reflections in the wood, just like the woman in the Pledge commercials.\n\n\"And this,\" he told me as we entered a den-like room on the second floor, \"is my karaoke machine. Top of the line, by the way. It's the first of its kind, I'm told \u2014 it's not even on the market yet. But since the president of the company is a dear friend of mine \u2014 a former hunting partner, I should add \u2014 he gave me this prototype as a gift. Anything you'd like to sing? I have English songs, French songs, and of course, Japanese songs. But my specialty is Latin music. I have a huge collection ...\"\n\nBefore I could answer, he pulled out a disk and set the machine to work. \" _Para bailer la Bamba ..._ \"he crooned into the microphone. \"Or how about this one?\" He pushed a few buttons. \" _Vi\u00e9nen los gitanooooos ..._ \"\n\n\"If the music is too high,\" he explained, \"you just turn this knob and the whole thing slides down a few tones, without changing speed. You can adjust it to suit your range. It's like the machines they have in karaoke clubs, only even more sophisticated. Would you like to hear a Japanese song?\" He quickly inserted another disk into the machine. \" _Awai kuchiiiiizukeeeeeh ..._ \"\n\nWhen the grandfather clock struck five, I ducked out of Mr. Shimoda's house under the pretext of having to meet a friend for dinner. I was relieved that he hadn't insisted I try out his machine. Even though I had taught music to children for several years \u2014 or perhaps because of it \u2014 the thought of sharing my singing voice with people older than twelve gave me the jitters.\n\nI knew, however, that I couldn't postpone my karaoke debut forever. Karaoke machines were everywhere in Japan \u2014 not only in bars and private houses but also on street-corners, at the base of Mount Fuji, even in taxi-cabs. If you had the misfortune of stepping into such a cab, I was told, the driver would badger you to sing until you finally dropped a coin into the machine, which of course was the sound he _really_ wanted to hear.\n\nOpportunity knocked on my door again at the end of the month, when I got a phone call from my former supervisor at Yamaha. His real name was Toru Koyama, but in Canada he'd gone by the name of Tom. He was transferred back to Japan shortly after I went to live in Tokyo.\n\n\"Remember Mr. Inoue?\" he asked me.\n\nTom's father-in-law was not the forgettable type. I'd met him twice before, while in Japan with the Yamaha group. A successful doctor by day, he was a party-'til-you-drop animal by night, and claimed to wake up fresh as a daisy no matter how much he'd had to drink. Like many educated Japanese, he combined a near-encyclopaedic knowledge of English, vocabulary with the inability to put together a complete sentence. \"I xenophilic,\" he'd beamed at me the first time we met.\n\n\"Mr. Inoue and his family are in town for the next few days,\" Tom told me, \"and they'd like to take us out to a karaoke club.\"\n\nThe following evening I found myself riding in the back seat of a limousine, along with Tom, Mr. Inoue and his daughter Hanako.\n\n\"Where's your wife?\" I asked Mr. Inoue as we cruised along.\n\n\"Why would I want bring wife to club?\" he said with a conspiratorial wink. \"Is hostess club, you know.\"\n\nThe limo rounded corner after corner and navigated through narrower and narrower streets until it finally came to a stop, in a part of the city I'd never seen before, and we all disembarked. Mr. Inoue led us to a side-door and into an elevator. \"This is a _very_ exclusive club,\" Tom whispered to me as we rode up. \"You can be sure the evening will cost well over $500. But don't worry, he can afford it.\"\n\nThe next thing I knew, we were in a small, dimly lit room, far away from planet Earth. Dragon claws holding gilded balls protruded from the dark stuccoed walls, and open-mouthed dragon heads \u2014 dark green, with streaks of red and gold \u2014 hung from the ceiling. Red and green track-lights bathed the room in an eerie glow. That sudden transition into another realm, upon entering a room, was something I was beginning to recognize as thoroughly Japanese.\n\nA middle-aged man escorted us to our table. It was one of only three seating areas, each one backed by a semi-circular partition.\n\n\"How good to see you again,\" he told Mr. Inoue. \"Shall I get your bottle?\"\n\nA pair of women, all atwinkle in their sequined mini-dresses, stood by our table as we took our seats. The younger one wore a velvet headband from which red feathers fanned out in all directions. The hostesses disappeared for a few moments, then came back with a tray of bite-sized foods. The manager brought out Mr. Inoue's _otobin_ \u2014 the \"private bottle\" he was accorded as a regular customer \u2014 and poured some whiskey into four glasses.\n\n\"So how have you been, Tina?\" Mr. Inoue asked the younger hostess. \"She from Philippines,\" he whispered to me in English. \"She look younger than thirty-two, don't you think?\"\n\nTina gave an expert pout. \"I've missed you these past few weeks,\" she said in Japanese. \"You _know_ you're my favourite customer, don't you?\"\n\n\"Favourite customer?\" he laughed. \"A wrinkled old man like me?\"\n\nThe other hostess, who looked to be around forty, sat down beside me. \"My name is Salam\u00eda,\" she said. \"I'm also from the Phillipines. Tina and I both came here two years ago.\"\n\n\"Where did you learn your Japanese?\"\n\n\"It's not hard,\" she shrugged. \"I just picked it up after I came.\"\n\n\"You didn't take lessons?\"\n\n\"If you want to do well as a hostess,\" she said, \"you have to learn the language. It's as simple as that.\" She shrugged again.\n\n\" _Obatarian_ ,\" Mr. Inoue chimed in. Salam\u00eda made a face at him.\n\nHe turned to me. \"Do you know the word? It means old hag.\" He burst into peals of laughter. \"You're an old hag, Salam\u00eda, don't you know it? You shouldn't be working here anymore.\" Salam\u00eda smiled graciously between pursed lips.\n\nTina edged up to Mr. Inoue. \"Let me feed you,\" she pouted. \"I've got some _delicious_ eel for you.\" She picked up a strip of glistening eel with her chopsticks and brought it to his lips. \"Eat that for me, will you?\"\n\n\"Come closer,\" Mr. Inoue said with a wink.\n\nShe sidled up to him. \"Is this better?\"\n\n\" _Much_ better, hahaha,\" he told her cleavage.\n\nAll the while, Hanako was staring demurely at her hands. \"My mother and I,\" she said suddenly, \"we're the quiet ones in the family. My father is the lively one, as you can see.\" She looked embarrassed.\n\n\"So what do you think of all this?\" Tom asked me. \"It's not every foreigner who gets to visit this sort of place.\"\n\nI wasn't sure what to think. On the one hand I was charmed, as I had been the previous times I'd met him, by Mr. Inoue's infectious good cheer. On the other hand, some feminist demon was pushing me to label hostess clubs as sexist institutions that ought to be outlawed. Just as I was pondering how to answer Tom's question, Salamia got up and traded places with Tina, who now sat beside me.\n\n\"Won't you try some?\" she asked sweetly, dangling a sliver of eel in front of my lips. \"Open wide, theeere we go. How do you like it?\"\n\n\" _Oishii_ ,\" I nodded in approval.\n\n\"Your Japanese is so _good_ ,\" she chirped. \"Here, have some more. And how are you doing with your drink? Maybe just a little bit more, _neh?_ \"\n\nMeanwhile, Hanako had walked up to the karaoke booth at the opposite end of the room. Her selection came on and she started to sing. It was a sad, dignified song, and she sang it in a crystal-clear voice, without smiling once.\n\n\"My daughter is also _obatarian_ ,\" Mr. Inoue told me as Hanako walked back to our table. \"Eh, Hanako? Thirty-six years old and still not married.\"\n\n\"Will you sing for us, please?\" Tina asked me, pouting in the same way she'd done for Mr. Inoue.\n\n\"I'm too shy,\" I said stupidly.\n\n\"Shy? A nice-looking woman like you? Go on, I'm sure you'll enjoy yourself once you're up there.\"\n\nAs Tom took his turn at the microphone, Tina continued to lavish her attentions on me.\n\n\"Here, try some _daikon_ , won't you?\" She fed me a piece of pickled radish. \"Can you eat _all_ types of Japanese food?\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"Even sea-urchin?\"\n\nI nodded again.\n\n\"You're really like a Japanese, aren't you?\" She patted my knee. \"Where did you get those _gorgeous_ pants? They're silk, aren't they?\"\n\nSexist? I wasn't so sure anymore. Tina and Salam\u00eda were all abuzz around Mr. Inoue, but they were paying no less attention to me. I was being treated like a queen, just as he was being treated like a king. And I had to admit it \u2014 I was beginning to find all this attention just the tiniest bit, well, flattering.\n\nSuddenly I saw it clearly \u2014 how irresistible these dens of illusion would be for men who got only brisk efficiency from their wives, whose marriages were little more than business deals. If I, with my feminist leanings, was falling under the spell of a hostess club, what chance did these men have?\n\nMr. Inoue leaned across the table and put a hand on my shoulder.\n\n\"You make me happy if you sing,\" he wheedled. \"You make me young man again.\"\n\n\"I can't, I'm too shy.\"\n\n\" _Obatarian_ \" he winked at Salam\u00eda. \"I think our guest needs some more whiskey.\" She obediently refilled my glass, then went off to get a new bottle.\n\nI looked at the English song-list as I gulped down the whiskey. \"But I don't know any of these songs \u2014\"\n\n\"Stop making excuses,\" Tom said.\n\n\"Alright, alright,\" I said with a burst of Dutch courage. \"Tell the manager I'm going to sing 'Yesterday.'\"\n\nI got up, staggered to the microphone and waited for the sound to come on. Under the scrutiny of friends, strangers and bug-eyed dragonheads, I sent my shaky airwaves into the microphone. When I got to the \"Why she had to go\" part, my voice thinned to a hoarse whisper. I kept my eyes glued to the video monitor, where the lyrics floated by against a backdrop of fair-haired lovers cavorting in a meadow.\n\nThe applause was wild. They whistled and cheered. The guests at the other two tables joined in the fanfare as I made my way back to the table.\n\n\"That was great,\" a stranger boomed out at me.\n\n\"Sing another one.\"\n\n\"Siiiiing.\"\n\n\"We want more English songs!\"\n\n\"Siiiiiiiiing.\"\n\nIt was then that I realized what my mistake had been. I had thought I was expected to sing well. Karaoke, I realized, was not about singing well. It was about singing badly. It was about getting up and performing, whether you were a rock-star, an office worker or a bow-legged engineer. This was one arena in which the usual excuse of _hazukashii_ just didn't wash. Shy or not shy, you were expected to be a good sport and provide your share of the evenings entertainment.\n\nI perused the song-list again. I Left my Heart in San Francisco, Autumn Leaves, Moon River ... The only songs I felt confident about getting through were the Christmas carols. What the hell, I told myself, Christmas is only two months away. I went back up to the microphone and delivered, with much more authority this time, what was no doubt the season's first rendition of Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer.\n\nOnce again, the patrons and staff broke into applause, whistles and cheers. I lingered at the microphone for a few moments, savouring the adulation. This was it \u2014 my fifteen minutes of fame, just as Andy Warhol had predicted would be everybody's due in the future. It was good to know that in Tokyo, the future could be bought for just $500.\n\nAll at once it was time to leave \u2014 the shop was closing. Tina and Salamia disappeared behind a back door. \"Come again soon,\" the manager beamed at Mr. Inoue as he stored his whiskey-bottle in a cabinet. There was a round of bowing, and then we all filed into the elevator. Just as the door was about to close, Tina and Salamia stepped in behind us. They were both wearing faded jeans and sweatshirts.\n\n\"God, I'm tired,\" Tina said dully, to nobody in particular.\n\nThey both looked tired. Minus the sequins and feathers, they were just working women, going home after a hard day at the office. The spell had been broken. All their fawning and pouting, it was suddenly clear, had been nothing more than work for wages.\n\nThe difference between Mr. Inoue's perspective and my own, I mused as the elevator shuttled us back down to Earth, was not in the way we'd been treated by the hostesses. It was that while I was relieved to see them drop their act, Mr. Inoue, I felt sure, would have wanted the illusion to continue past closing time.\n\n### **3**\n\nTo hear it from my younger students, the Japanese mother-in-law had quite a bit more clout than her Western counterpart. She was accused of being bossy and meddlesome, and especially eager to impose her will on her hapless daughter-in-law who, bound by the age-old tenet of deferring to one's elders, was powerless to stand up for her rights. Word had it that some frustrated young women in Tokyo had started a group called Women Against Mothers-in-Law, which one supposed was the Japanese answer to North American groups like Toughlove or Women in New Roles.\n\nTraditionally, the _chonan_ or eldest son is expected to live under the same roof as his parents even after he gets married, and to provide for them in their old age. Although the multi-generational household is dying out in urban areas, the spirit of the tradition prevails. Many young women, aware of the duties expected of a _chonan's_ wife, give eldest sons a wide berth in their search for a husband. Those women unfortunate enough to be saddled with live-in mother-in-laws complain of being bombarded with advice on how to cook for their husbands, how to discipline their children, and the various other do's and don'ts of running a proper Japanese household.\n\nOne week I told all my students to bring photos of a family member or friend to the next class, to use as a starting point for free conversation. The following week, when I asked Kazuko \u2014 one of my more diligent and spirited students in an upper-intermediate group \u2014 to show us the picture she'd brought, she produced a small photo of two elderly people. \"These are my mother- and father-in-law,\" she told us. \"I've known them for over thirty years.\" Kazuko had a large family, and in previous classes had always talked proudly of her assorted children, nieces and nephews, so her choice of picture was puzzling. I didn't remember her ever mentioning her parents-in-law.\n\n\"Their house is very close to ours,\" she continued, \"only a fifteen-minute walk. Every morning at nine o'clock they come over and have breakfast with me. Or rather, I prepare some food for them but don't eat it myself, since I usually have my breakfast at seven-thirty, right after my husband leaves for work.\"\n\n\"How long do they stay at your house?\" a student asked.\n\n\"All morning,\" she said. \"Sometimes we even have lunch together.\"\n\nI asked her if it wasn't a little tiresome to spend every morning with them, and she said no, she didn't mind doing it and actually enjoyed their company.\n\n\"It's my duty to take care of them, but also my pleasure. I'm always happy to see them.\"\n\n\"But every day?\" I asked. \"Don't they ever stay at home and let you have a rest?\"\n\n\"They come every day except when it's pouring rain.\" Kazuko paused for a moment and went on. \"Every morning, the first thing I do after waking up is go to my bedroom window and check the weather outside. If it's sunny, then I'm happy. And if it's raining hard ... then I'm _really_ happy.\"\n\nKazuko smiled down at her hands, looking embarrassed but pleased. She had managed to unburden herself without uttering a word of complaint. I couldn't help feeling sorry that this art would surely die out in the next generation of emboldened daughters-in-law.\n\nStories such as Kazuko's gave glimpses into the spirit of _akirame_ , or resignation, that is the legacy of Japanese women from far back in time. The Japanese \u2014 women in particular \u2014 are keenly aware that their destiny is shaped by forces outside their control. Whatever hardship comes their way is _shiyo ga nai_ , \"it can't be helped,\" an expression that they seem to use as casually as how are you or have a nice day.\n\nOne morning we were having a discussion about education in an advanced class called Cross-Cultural Communication. Most of the students were older women who had spent some years abroad with their husbands and families. Chieko, a graying woman whose softly wrinkled face spelled kindness and hard times, had often spoken to us about her youngest son, a troublesome teenager who skipped classes and spent hours alone in his room. \"It can't be helped,\" she would say with a sad smile whenever she talked about him.\n\n\"I think I know when the trouble started,\" she told us that morning. \"It was during a math class one day in early spring, when he was in fifth or sixth grade. The weather was exceptionally clear and warm, and my son was a bit restless. He looked out the classroom window and there was Mount Fuji, perfectly framed and much sharper than he'd ever seen it. It's rare to get such a good view of Mount Fuji from Tokyo and he was quite excited. On impulse, he asked the teacher if she could stop the class for a few moments so that all the students would get a chance to catch the view. The teacher got angry at him and scolded him for disrupting the class.\n\n\"When he came home from school that day he seemed upset. I asked him what the matter was, and he told me the story. He couldn't understand why the teacher had scolded him, since it was obvious that he hadn't meant to be disruptive \u2014 he'd just reacted spontaneously to a beautiful sight and wanted to share it with the others.\n\n\"Since that day,\" Chieko went on, \"he has never been the same. He lost his confidence, somehow. I think he felt he couldn't trust his instincts anymore.\"\n\nI remembered my own mother, marching indignantly into the principal's office after she learned that my teachers were trying to get me to write with my right hand. Chieko, of course, would never have thought to make a fuss. She only knew how to grin and bear and think _shiyo ga nai_ while each day brought a new wrinkle to her face.\n\nPolished pearls like Chieko's Mount Fuji story were few and far between, and didn't quite make up for the daily tedium of teaching the lower-level students, who would gaze at me with anxious faces while I talked myself hoarse. For some teachers, this type of class was a challenge. For me it was merely exhausting.\n\nMany of these \"beginners\" had been coming to BE for several years (in addition to the six years of English they'd been required to take in school) and were still unable to make themselves understood. Having studied a bit of linguistics, I knew that Japanese was a so-called sound-poor language, meaning that the number of different phonemes, or individual sounds, was very low \u2014 just over one hundred compared to about three thousand in English and one thousand in Chinese. Consequently, if you were a Japanese attempting to emulate English sounds, your tongue and lips would be struggling to perform entirely new motions. If you weren't paying close attention, your muscles would revert to their old habits and channel the sounds into their closest equivalents in Japanese, which were usually not very close at all. Thus, \"colour\" came out as \"karah,\" \"learn\" as \"rahn\" and \"seafood\" as \"sheehude.\" The result of all this was that my students were more likely to be understood by each other than by me.\n\nDuring one class, a young housewife called Naoko announced that the previous weekend she'd had dinner with a holenah for the first time. I smiled blankly as I tried to figure out what a holenah might be (for some reason it made me think of a species of whale), when another student came to my rescue. \"Was it an American?\" she asked Naoko, giving me the clue I needed. I asked the students if anybody else had ever dined with a foreigner, and the discussion continued.\n\nI didn't fare quite as well with Atsuko, a breezy society lady who came to class in tailored suits and a high chignon. In mid-October, she took two weeks off to visit her sister in California. It was her first trip abroad, and she'd been excited about it for weeks. But when she came back, she looked more despondent than relaxed.\n\n\"Six years,\" she said, staring at her hands. \"I coming to Tokyu BE for six years. All my teachers tell me I making good progress, and I believe it. But I go to America and I can't even order my own food at MacDonald's. So my teachers all tell lie to me, now I realize.\" I tried to protest, but she shook her head and went on grimly. \"I go to MacDonald's across street from my sister's house, and ask for hisshu-bahgah. The cashier look me like I crazy, so I try say it again, but still she don't understand. Finally I have to point my finger to picture on wall.\"\n\n\"What _is_ a hisshu-bahgah?\" I asked unthinkingly.\n\nAtsuko didn't answer. I looked at her face, and saw that her lips were trembling. _Fish-burger, you idiot_ , I thought to myself, but it was too late.\n\nI never saw Atsuko after that day, nor did any of the other teachers or students. I was afraid she would complain to Arai-san about my tactless question, but I never heard a word about it. Like Chieko, whose son had been unjustly scolded by his teacher, Atsuko didn't complain \u2014 she simply disappeared.\n\n### **4**\n\n\"Excuse me, but does the next train go as far as Nishiogikubo?\" I asked the woman standing beside me in my most careful Japanese.\n\nShinjuku Station, with its fourteen platforms through which passed local, semi-express, express and super-express trains, its overlapping loudspeaker announcements and computerized bulletin boards, its underground network of walkways and restaurants and stores that rivalled a mid-size prairie town in sprawl, still held me in awe and confusion after two months in Tokyo.\n\nThe woman looked startled. \"Excuse me, my English not so good,\" she answered.\n\n\"It's OK, you can tell me in Japanese,\" I encouraged.\n\n\"You speak Japanese?\"\n\nI was getting used to this type of conversation by now. Apparently, a lot more proof than actually speaking the language was needed to persuade the natives that one could.\n\nA yellow train was coming toward us, and the woman gave a nod to let me know it was the one I wanted. We both boarded the same car but sat some distance apart. When I stood up to get off the train, seven stops later, I saw her get up too. As I started down the stairs leading to the exit gate I felt a light tap on my shoulder.\n\n\"Excuse me.\"\n\nI turned around and there was the woman again, looking embarrassed. Her hair was cropped short and she wore a baggy grey sweatsuit. She looked fifty-somethingish but somehow youthful.\n\n\"Do you live Nishiogikubo?\" she asked hesitantly.\n\n\"Yes, I do.\"\n\nShe introduced herself as Teruko. \"I like foreigner,\" she said. \"I want make foreigner friend.\" (She pronounced it \"holenah,\" as my student Naoko had done.)\n\nI told her I was equally interested in making Japanese friends, and asked her if she too lived in Nishiogi.\n\n\"I own two houses,\" she said, \"one of them in Nishiogi. I live Nishiogi house in weekday, Kokubunji house on weekend. You want come and bisit my house?\"\n\nI told her I didn't have time just then, but would be glad to go and see her some other time. She told me she had been on her way to Kichijoji to do some shopping, but when she saw me get off at Nishiogi, decided on impulse to follow me out and introduce herself. We exchanged phone numbers and went our separate ways.\n\nA couple of days later she called to invite me for supper. \"I lonely,\" she said simply. \"Always eat alone. Please come my house, _neh?_ \" One more stereotype shot down, I thought, startled by her directness. I had a hunch she might have stories to tell.\n\nSince it was largely obscured by vegetation I had a bit of trouble finding Teruko's house, her quaint instructions adding to the challenge. She'd told me to look for a narrow footpath amid some shrubbery a little way past the laundromat with the orange sign, then walk along the path until I came to a small courtyard encircled by a few houses, one of which was hers. I stood there in confusion for a few moments until I saw her waving from inside.\n\n\"You know _nabe?_ \" Teruko asked as I put on the fake leather slippers she offered me, which of course were several sizes too small. \"I cook _nabe_ tonight.\"\n\nHer house was cramped and messy \u2014 dirty, even. A film of dust coated the countertops and lampshades, and the walls were dotted with grease stains. She led me into the living room and told me to sit down.\n\n\"You know _kotatstu?_ \" She showed me to a low table in the middle of the room. Though I'd heard of the word, this was the first time I'd actually seen one. She told me to plug in the electric cord so the heat would start radiating from the box-like stand upholding the table.\n\n\"I hope you don't mind the mess,\" she said in Japanese as she went off to the kitchen to bring our food. \"Nobody ever died from a little dirt, _neh?_ \"\n\nI laughed, once again struck by her deviation from type.\n\nTeruko came back into the living room with a giant tray of cabbage leaves, tofu and raw chicken strips, and an electric pot filled with water. As we waited for the water to start boiling, she got right to the point.\n\n\"I have failed,\" she said. \"My whole life has been a failure. And now, in my old age, I'm paying the price.\" She eyed me intently for a few seconds. \"I have no idea what to do with myself. I often get depressed \u2014 very depressed. Sometimes I wonder why I continue to get up every morning. You understand what I'm trying to say, _neh?_ \"\n\nShe had a very pretty face, I noticed for the first time. She might well have been a head turner in her younger years.\n\nWhile we cooked and ate our _nabe_ , Teruko told me the story of her life. She spoke matter-of-factly, almost without pausing except when I stopped her to ask the meaning of a word.\n\nHers was a shotgun marriage, arranged by her father after he tore her away from the man she was in love with, a lowly bean-cake maker. The day before her wedding, her mother took her aside and gave her a single piece of advice about married life: a ship can have only one captain.\n\n\"I was never able to follow that advice,\" Teruko told me, \"which is why my life has been a failure.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"A Japanese woman has to have _enryo_ , restraint. Otherwise she can't live in harmony with her husband, or with the rest of her family.\"\n\nShe and her in-laws were at each other's throats from the start. If they asked her to help out at one of the four Chinese restaurants they owned, she'd refuse. If they asked her to cook an _udon_ noodle dinner, she would spitefully cook _soba_ instead \u2014 or nothing at all. She was brimming with resentment about her forced marriage to a man who was turning out to be an abusive drunkard, and was unwilling to go the usual route of suffering in silence.\n\nShe gave birth to three sons. The oldest son was a misfit with a strong depressive streak. He often contemplated suicide in his youth, until he was recruited by the Jehovah's Witnesses and found a way to depart the material world without actually killing himself. He was thirty years old now and lived in the house next to Teruko's, though he hardly ever saw her except when she handed him his monthly allowance. \"But he doesn't believe in money,\" she said wryly.\n\n\"And the other two?\"\n\n\"One is a salary-man in a small company, and the other is in Australia.\"\n\n\"Surely they must give you some pleasure.\"\n\nShe considered this for a moment. \"No, I don't get any pleasure from my children. We hardly ever see each other. I guess it's like my marriage \u2014 failed marriage, failed children.\"\n\n\"And where is your husband now?\"\n\n\"He's in the hospital, with terminal cancer. I go to see him for a couple of hours every day, though I sometimes ask myself why. He means nothing to me. When I look at him, all I see is a piece of rotting flesh.\"\n\nShe went to the kitchen and brought back an electric teapot and a couple of grease-coated teacups. Her mood seemed brighter all of a sudden, as though telling me her life story was a formality she'd had to dispense with, like a comment about the weather.\n\n\"Anyway,\" she shrugged, \"I've had a few bright spots in my life. Like now \u2014\" she leaned over conspiratorially \" \u2014 I have a lover. A foreign lover. Australian. And he's younger than me.\" She paused for effect. \" _Eighteen years_ younger.\"\n\n\"Does your husband know about it?\"\n\n\"No, of course not. When my husband dies, I plan to take my boyfriend to Hawaii for a couple of weeks. He's never been there, and I know he'd love to see it. I haven't told him yet, though. Just little hints. You know, to keep him guessing.\"\n\nOur legs toasty under the _kotatsu_ , we sipped green tea and listened to the night sounds for a while \u2014 the trill of a cicada, a child's wail, the squeaking of bicycle tires.\n\n\"Sometimes I think he's just after my money,\" she said softly, just as the same thought was crossing my mind.\n\nTeruko shuffled back and forth between her houses, picking up mail and phone messages, doing her laundry in one house and sorting it in the other, or just \"checking up\" on things. She seemed to need the pointless, manufactured activity in order to get through each day without giving in to the despair that periodically assailed her.\n\nWhen she came to visit me, I noticed, her mood was usually brighter than when we met in her home. At Esther House, she had the chance to breathe in some of that rarified holenah air she so craved. She would sprint up the stairs in her dirty sweatsuit, hair dishevelled and skin sallow against the pink of her lipstick, and plunk herself down on my tatami floor (never on my sofa-bed\u2014in this she was thoroughly Japanese), ravenous for my companionship. We almost never spoke English, since she really couldn't manage it, though she would occasionally take a deep breath and, with peacock pride, utter a badly mangled version of a word like \"inheritance\" or \"funeral.\"\n\n\"Do you know what happened last night?\" she told me one evening while we snacked on the rice-and-seaweed crackers she'd brought along. \"For the past year I've been renting the second floor of my house in Kokubunji to a couple, an American man and a Japanese woman. Anyway, last night I went to the house to pick up some sheets, and just as I was about to walk in I heard a strange noise. At first I thought it was a cat meowing \u2014 I really did \u2014 but then I listened some more and realized it was the woman making, ah, sex noises. I've never heard anything like it in my life. I was shocked.\" She didn't look shocked at all, only fascinated. \"I didn't think Japanese women made such noises \u2014 _I_ certainly didn't when I had sex with my husband. Did you?\"\n\nI dodged her question. \"Surely she's not the only Japanese woman who makes noises during sex.\"\n\n\"But you should have heard it! She was screaming like a mother giving birth. And then, when I went inside, I heard the bedpost banging against the wall \u2014 _gatan, gatan, gatan_ \u2014 and I could actually _see_ the walls shaking.\" She shook her head in awe.\n\n\"Tell me,\" she said after a pause, \"is there something ... well, _different_ about foreign men? Is there something they do that gives women so much pleasure?\"\n\nI laughed. \"What about your Australian boyfriend?\"\n\nShe lowered her eyes. \"We hardly ever have sex, actually. And no, he doesn't make me scream like that. You should have heard her \u2014 it was so loud, I was afraid everybody on the street would be able to hear it.\" Once again she shook her head at the memory. \" _Big_ shock.\"\n\nI looked at her wide, eager eyes and sensed the curiosity that lay beneath them, the hunger for lurid details, the latent raunchiness.\n\n_You wanna be shocked, lady_ , I thought suddenly, _OK, I'll shock you_. And I told her about a case my brother had encountered while interning at St. Joseph's Hospital in Toronto. A man had showed up at the emergency room with the tail of a dead mouse sticking out from between his legs. When my brother asked him, as nonchalantly as he could, how the animal had come to be there, the man explained that he and his lover had been engaging in a practice called mousing, which consisted of having a live mouse (it had to be a particular species, bred for its small size) inserted into one's rectum, and savouring the sensation as it burrowed around until it met its death by asphyxiation. According to the patient, the practice was not uncommon. Usually the mouse didn't get very far and was easily extricated, but this had been a particularly tenacious animal and the patient's lover had been unable to remove it.\n\nTeruko looked at me intently while I told her the story, but she didn't seem particularly shocked. When I was finished, she sat in thoughtful silence for a few moments, then asked, without a trace of irony, \"What for?\"\n\nI often wondered what fuelled our friendship, what drew me again and again to Teruko's unkempt home and slapdash hospitality, and her to my drab little room in Esther House. It was only much later that I realized that what held us together, what propelled us into a lasting friendship, was the alienation we both felt from our own cultures, the irrational longing to inhabit each other's worlds.\n\n### **5**\n\n\" _Tokyo is a candy-store, and while I'm here, I intend to eat to my heart's content_.\"  \n\" _Tokyo is a man-desert, and I'm a thirsty woman_.\"\n\nAccording to Charlene, who relayed it to me in scornful tones over the telephone, the first statement was made by a male teacher at the English school where she worked. The candies he was referring to were of the almond-eyed, silky-haired variety. I came across the second statement in the Tokyo Journal, a slick monthly magazine catering to English-speaking Tokyo residents. It was a quote from an American woman who was fed up with the lack of dating opportunities for Western women living in Tokyo.\n\nWith almost two months behind me, I too was beginning to notice the inequities in Tokyo's dating scene. For gaijin men, the situation was ideal \u2014 they were in limited supply and in constant demand. Tall ones, short ones, fat ones, skinny ones, classically stunning and classically ugly ones \u2014 just about every Western man was able to find a Japanese girlfriend in record time. Not a day went by when I didn't see a gaijin man with a fresh-faced Japanese girl hanging on to his arm and looking up at him with doe eyes.\n\nI sometimes wondered what the women saw in these conquest-seeking men. Charlene, on the other hand, wondered what the men saw in their Japanese girlfriends. \"These women are such _airheads_ ,\" she told me in her italicized drawl. \"They run around the office acting like five-year-olds just to get the teachers' attention. It makes me want to _vomit_ , the way they walk with those mincing steps and talk in those ridiculously high voices.\"\n\nAs to why the Japanese women worshipped gaijin men, part of it had to do with a general admiration, in Japanese society, of all things Western. Western men, like Western movies, Western fashion or Western music, were cool. A gaijin boyfriend was a status symbol. On the train to work one morning, I struck up a conversation with a British man who told me he'd answered a Japanese woman's personal ad in the Tokyo Journal. After a few dates, he began to notice that she seemed more interested in driving him around the city in a car packed with her buddies than in seeing him alone. \"It started to feel like all she wanted to do was show me off to her friends,\" he said.\n\nBut it went deeper than that. Many young Japanese women looked to gaijin men as a way to escape the confines of their predictable future as Japanese wives. By hooking up with a Western man, they were also buying into the cultural ideal of the West \u2014 a relationship that would give them romance, sexual fidelity and a chance to spread their wings.\n\nIt was hardly surprising that, surrounded by such a bountiful supply of eager women, gaijin men sometimes went a little crazy. They found girlfriends within days of their arrival in Tokyo. They traded up \u2014 plainer ones for more attractive ones, older ones for younger ones \u2014 and competed with each other to see who could get the prettiest one in the shortest time.\n\nStuart, a BE teacher from Vancouver whose cocky demeanor was a magnet for the female students, would boast of his exploits between classes. \"Take a look at this,\" he'd say to us, pinning a note to the bulletin board. It was usually written on pink stationery and said something like \"Mr. Stuart, I so much enjoy your teaching. Every class I watch your cheerful face. I would like to have dinner with you. Please say yes.\"\n\nJeffrey Addleman, BE's youngest teacher and not quite so much of a lady-killer, always rose to the bait. \"So what's your secret?\" he'd ask Stuart with undisguised admiration.\n\nRelationships between gaijin men and Japanese women worked well, it seemed to me, because both parties got a better deal than they would with a partner from their own culture. The man got more pampering and less argument. The woman got more independence and more of the flowers and compliments she upheld as a romantic ideal. They were mirrors for each other's fantasies as they walked arm in arm, equally triumphant as they displayed their conquest to the world.\n\nThis state of affairs left many foreign women railing against young Japanese women for having an unfair advantage in the playing field. They accused these women of stunting themselves like bonsai trees in order to appeal to the male fantasy of a childlike woman (something that they, of course, would never stoop to doing). Gaijin men saw it differently. \"Do you know what that idiot had the _gall_ to say?\" Charlene told me, referring to the same teacher who was bent on satisfying his sweet tooth. \"He said he prefers Japanese women because they're lighthearted and fun to be with, and that the gaijin women who come to Tokyo are \u2014 get this \u2014 too _serious_ and full of hang ups. Can you _believe_ it?\"\n\nFor all their complaints about the dating scene in Tokyo, most Western women I knew had no particular interest in trying their luck with Japanese men. Some claimed to find them unappealing as a group, while others were not above the occasional one-night stand but would never consider a long-term involvement. The general consensus was that a Japanese man, with his addiction to work and reluctance to show affection, didn't have much to offer a Western woman.\n\nYoung Japanese men, on the other hand, seemed eager to date outside their culture but didn't quite know how to go about it. Unlike gaijin men, who knew they were in high demand, Japanese men felt at a disadvantage in the game\u2014they assumed their overtures would be met with rejection. \"Japanese men are hated all over the world,\" a friend of Miki's told me. He had spent four years in America studying law, and hadn't been as successful with the local women as he would have liked. He confessed that after managing to get a date with an American woman, he was on a high for weeks and all he could think of was \"I did it, I did it, I did it!\"\n\nInsecurity aside, Japanese men were also aware that the culture gap might be too wide for a long-term relationship to flourish. Among the men who'd actually tasted the fantasy, the feeling seemed to be that, in the words of a young man interviewed in the Tokyo Journal, \"Western women are much better in bed than Japanese women, but I would never have a serious relationship with one \u2014 they make too many demands on a man's time.\"\n\nIt was the reverse of the gaijin man-Japanese woman equation: both parties got less of what they wanted than with a partner from the same culture. The woman got less time and less affection, the man less patience and docility.\n\nThe result of all this was that when it came to dating and mating in Tokyo, Western women got the short end of the stick. Gaijin men were too busy chasing Japanese women to notice them, and Japanese men were either too wrapped up in their work or too shy. There were exceptions, of course, but many of the gaijin women I met in Tokyo had gone for months or years without any romantic involvement.\n\nValerie was a two-year veteran at Tokyu BE, a boisterous woman with an ail-American smile and intense blue eyes. Two years of manlessness had made her, as Jeffrey put it, \"as horny as two women rolled into one.\"\n\n\"Do you know what really burns me up about this city?\" she told me one afternoon in the teachers' lounge. \"You go to a party, you meet a cute guy, and the vibes are great, right? He's acting real flirtatious and you're thinking maybe he'll ask for your phone number, then along comes this cute little thing called Sumiko or something, and he says By the way, I'd like to introduce you to my girlfriend, and you're like, offffft ...\n\nIt was hard not to be rankled about the unfairness of it all. I would browse through the travel section of the Kinokuniya bookstore and find books called \"Bachelor's Japan\" or \"A Guide to the Single Foreigner in Tokyo.\" There were pages and pages of advice to gaijin males on the prowl, but hardly a word to us females. Tokyo had very little, these books seemed to be saying, to offer the Western woman in search of romance.\n\nCharlene vented her anger over the telephone lines. \"I have _zero_ respect for these men,\" she told me. \"They're such _losers_. All they want is some bimbo to fawn all over them.\"\n\n\"I know what you mean.\"\n\n\"Besides, I think it's _racist_ to limit your dating choices to one group of people.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I agree with that,\" I told her. \"If it's alright to have a preference for bearded men, or tall dark types, or musicians or executives or whatever, why isn't it OK to have a preference for Japanese women?\"\n\n\"Preference is one thing, but most of these jerks won't even _consider_ a non-Japanese woman, even for a one-night fling.\"\n\nI had no doubt that Charlene would find a way to track down the exceptions.\n\nOne evening in early November, I bumped into Janet and Bruce in the Shinjuku train station. They were on their way to Maggie's Revenge, a pub that advertised itself in the Tokyo Journal as a \"robust Australian bar; enjoy and be noisy!\"\n\n\"We're going for our monthly dose of homesickness medicine,\" Janet said with a laugh, and invited me to join them.\n\nNo sooner had we sat down and ordered our lagers than we heard a commotion at the other end of the room. We looked over and saw a bearded gaijin sitting by himself in a corner, banging on his table with a beer mug. Suddenly he got up and staggered to the centre of the room.\n\n\" _Three years_ ,\" he said thickly, steadying himself against the counter. \"I've been in this city for three fuckin' years and I still haven't found a Japanese girlfriend.\"\n\n\"No worries, mate,\" someone snickered. \"I've got one for you, a pretty one with tits.\"\n\n\"Shut up!\" he bellowed.\n\n\"Take it easy, mate,\" Bruce called out to him.\n\nHe turned in our direction, gave us a suspicious stare, then grabbed his beer mug and walked slowly toward our table.\n\n\"Mind if I have a seat?\" he said, looking down at us with bloodshot eyes. Without waiting for an answer, he pulled up a chair and sat down.\n\n\"I'm Nat,\" he said. We told him our names.\n\n\"Three years,\" he said softly.\n\nHe took a swig of beer. \"All my mates've got girlfriends,\" he told us. \"I got this one mate, he's so ugly he'd scare away a cockroach, y'know what I mean? And even _he_ 's got one.\"\n\nNone of us said anything.\n\n\" _Fuckin tired of it!_ \" he yelled suddenly.\n\n\"Take it easy, mate,\" Bruce told him.\n\n\"What the fucks the matter with this city?\"\n\n\"Maybe you're trying too hard,\" Janet said.\n\nHe shook his head slowly. \"Three fuckin' years and all I've got to show for it are some goddamn pictures of Tokyo Disneyland.\"\n\nDisagreeable though he was, I could understand his frustration. He was like many Western women in Tokyo \u2014 forever on the sidelines.\n\n### **6**\n\nShe was one of five students in my Wednesday morning class. From the very beginning, I sensed a special quality in her. For starters, she was beautiful. Her face was a study in Oriental harmony \u2014 classic almond eyes, reticent nose and porcelain skin, with hardly a wrinkle to betray her thirty-nine years. Though on the tall side for a Japanese woman, she was slender enough to look fragile. She dressed with flair \u2014 rumpled linen jackets, silk pants, body-hugging turtle-necks \u2014 and there was a dignified bearing in her step. During class, I sometimes caught her giving me warm, almost maternal looks. Hitomi was her name.\n\nAs I try to recreate her on paper, I come up against the certainty of being unable to do her justice. If I mention that she used a fountain pen and always carried a handkerchief in her purse, no doubt she'll seem stuffy. If I talk about her happy-sad smile, the look of kindly resignation in her eyes, she'll sound like the long-suffering type. No matter how the words land on the page, they'll fall short of capturing the essence of a woman in whom traditional Japanese sensibilities, avant-garde chic and aristocratic manners coexisted with a total lack of affectation.\n\nSince there were four other students in the class I didn't get much of a chance to talk to her privately, though I soon discovered that if I walked into the classroom a few minutes early I could almost always find her sitting there, back straight and features set in that trademark happy-sad look of hers. Our chance to get to know each other finally came about halfway through the fall semester, when the other students happened to be absent on the same morning. A few minutes into the lesson, Hitomi suggested that we forget about the textbook and have an hour of \"free conversation\" instead.\n\nI learned that she came from a family of musicians and painters, had been married to an architect for fifteen years, and had no children.\n\n\"May I ask why not?\" I blurted out, instantly regretting the question. But she didn't seem to mind.\n\n\"My husband say he doesn't want bring children in a too much crowded world,\" she said quietly.\n\n\"And did you feel the same way?\"\n\n\"Well, I understood his feeling ...\" She was thoughtful for a moment, then smiled and said, \"I think that real reason is my husband loves his work too much.\"\n\nShe's probably right, I thought. (I had always suspected that people who claimed they didn't want kids because of the terrible shape the world was in were using the sorry state of the world as a foil for other, more private reasons.)\n\n\"I'm so glad we had a chance to talk,\" Hitomi told me at the end of the hour. \"I wanted to become your friend from beginning of class, but was too shy for suggesting it. Will you come my house for supper this Saturday?\"\n\nThe following Saturday I found myself sitting in the living room of Hitomi's ultra-modern house, which her husband, Kazuo, had designed himself. It was small, but full of light and wood and interesting angles. In short order, I discovered two of its most delightful features \u2014 a heated living-room rug and a heated toilet seat. With restrained wifely pride, Hitomi showed me some of Kazuo's creations \u2014 a pewter lamp that looked like it belonged in a museum of modern art, space-age scissors, a CD holder that fanned out like a peacock's feathers. Everything in the house was stylish and eye-catching, just like Hitomi herself in her angular blue tunic and peach silk blouse. When Kazuo rang the bell and stepped in, I wasn't at all surprised to see that he was strikingly handsome.\n\nHitomi had invited another friend of hers, Yoko (who was also thirty-nine and married to a man who didn't want children), and the four of us sat down to eat. The long rosewood table was set like the tables in five-star restaurants, with rows and rows of forks, knives and spoons for each setting, along with black lacquered chopsticks. I stared in astonishment as Hitomi brought out the platters of food \u2014 sashimi sprinkled with ice cubes and diced vegetables, curried eel in a cream sauce, slices of chicken breast topped with fresh mangos and a ginger glaze. Clearly, Hitomi was one of those people who turned everything they touched into gold.\n\n\"I love cooking,\" she said shyly when she saw my look of amazement. \"I specially like to experiment with combination Japanese and French style.\" She went on to tell me that she always tried to think of the most appropriate foods to serve to a particular group of guests \u2014 the foods that were most likely to make conversation flow and create amicable feelings. She seemed to have hit the bull's eye that evening, since Yoko and I got along famously and made plans to get together the following weekend.\n\nHitomi continued to flood me with her quiet generosity. One Sunday she insisted on taking me on an architectural tour of Tokyo. Predictably, her taste in buildings was as impeccable as her taste in everything else. She introduced me to stylish constructions like the Watari-um museum of modern art and architectural oddities like Tokyo's narrowest house \u2014 hidden jewels I'd have never thought to find amid the jumble of post-modern kitch I usually came across on my jaunts through the city. She met me for lunch in airy sandwich bars in Harajuku and lured me to her own kitchen to sample her latest creation, which could be anything from bacon fritters to salmon-and-cheese souffl\u00e9. If I happened to mention that I liked the music playing discreetly in the background \u2014 usually jazz or alternative pop \u2014 the next time we saw each other she'd hand me a cassette copy of the music, with the title of every song written in meticulous capital letters on the cardboard insert. At such times, I was filled with what the Japanese call _koko-rogurushisa_ \u2014 a feeling of thankfulness bordering on discomfort.\n\nWhile she took pride in her Japanese heritage, she wasn't afraid to be critical of her own people. She disliked, for example, the tendency of the Japanese to put themselves down. \"If a friend give compliment about my dress,\" she once told me, \"I make effort I don't follow Japanese habit to answer 'Not at all, far from it, it's such an ugly thing.' I think Western way is better in this case, just accept compliment and say thank you.\"\n\nAlthough we started out conversing mainly in English, as time went on we found ourselves speaking more and more Japanese. I knew she was eager to use the English she was learning at BE, and had the feeling she'd made the switch for my sake. \"No, no,\" she assured me when I asked her about it, \"it's much more relaxing for me to speak my own language.\" My selfish interest in practising Japanese made me accept her words too readily, though in my heart I knew otherwise.\n\nDuring the first few weeks of my friendship with Hitomi, I found myself inadvertently shying away from Teruko, whose casual manners and goggle-eyed curiosity about Western sexuality now struck me as more vulgar than bracing. I had to wait a couple of months, until Hitomi's spell over me had worn off a little, before I could once again appreciate Teruko for who she was.\n\nI became a regular guest at Hitomi's dinner parties and got to meet a number of her friends. Many of them were women in their late thirties or early forties, married and childless, leading busy lives filled with jazz ballet classes and trips to Europe. For the most part, these women seemed genuinely content with the path they had chosen. It appeared that Japanese women were just now discovering the joys of a \"child-free\" existence, some fifteen years behind their North American sisters in the so-called Me Decade. Government officials were alarmed that if the trend continued, the next fifty years would see a giant increase in the number of senior citizens with no children to pay and care for them. According to Hitomi and her friends, the decision to go childless was often motivated by the dread of having to enter a child in the frantic race for the right kindergartens, the right grade schools, the right cram schools, all in the hope that the kid would eventually make it to one of the better universities and a better station in life. To a growing minority of married couples, the financial burden, the stress, the shame if the child didn't make the grade, were not worth the trouble.\n\nIn early December, under the pretext of breaking in the year-end party season, Hitomi invited me to have dinner with her and Kazuo at one of their favourite hangouts. She admitted that Sushi-sei, as the place was called, was in the top price range for sushi restaurants. \"We want you to have a real sushi experience,\" she declared.\n\nThey'd made reservations ahead of time, which had me feeling just a shade smug as we cut through the lineup and made our way to the sushi counter. The restaurant was just the kind I liked \u2014 small and cozy, with lots of wooden cross-beams and sliding doors. Kazuo introduced me to the head sushi chef, who stiffened for an instant as he took in the length of me, then broke into a huge grin from which he never quite recovered.\n\n\"I hear you're from Canada,\" he volleyed in rapid-fire Japanese. \"It's an honour to have a Canadian at my counter. The last time we had a Canadian guest was back in spring \u2014 he was some kind of journalist, I think. He had this sheet of paper near his plate and took notes while he ate. He kept asking me, 'What's this?' 'What's this?' 'What's this?' with a deadly serious face, as though someone had just died.\" He broadened his grin. \"I tell you, the guy was irritating. 'What's this?' 'What's this?' 'What's this?' To be honest, I felt like giving him a _bakudan_ just to shut him up. Do you know what a _bakudan_ is? I don't know the English word, unfortunately.\"\n\n\"Bomb,\" Kazuo supplied.\n\n\"Oh yes, bomb. It means a piece of sushi with a large chunk of _wasabi_ mustard hidden between the fish and rice parts. In former times, sushi chefs used to give _bakudan_ to their enemies and watch them choke, heh heh.\" As fast as his lips were moving, his hands were slicing fish, patting rice balls into shape and placing assembled pieces of sushi on our trays. \"I'll bet you don't eat _kujira_ , do you?\"\n\n\" _Kujira?_ \"\n\n\"Whale,\" Kazuo obliged again. The sushi chef waved a hunk of gleaming red meat at me. \"This is _kujira_ ,\" he beamed.\n\n\"Well ...\" I was torn between curiosity and learned guilt.\n\n\"I know, I know,\" he boomed, \"you think it's wrong to eat whale meat, _neh?_ \" He gave a snort of mock derision. \"For us Japanese, it's a delicacy. I can't understand you Americans \u2014\"\n\n\"She's Canadian,\" Hitomi interjected.\n\n\"American, Canadian, whatever. When you dropped the bomb \u2014\" he splayed his fingers as though dropping an egg \" \u2014 you didn't say _those poor people_ , did you? But when it comes to the whales, you're forever crying _poooor, poooor things, isn't it terrible?_ ' Laughter danced in his eyes as he spoke. \" _Poooor, poooor whales_ ,\" he repeated for effect.\n\nBy this time I too was laughing. \"Sure, I'll try some,\" I said, mostly to surprise him. I chewed the raw whale meat under his watchful eye, easing my guilt with the thought that a true philosopher will try anything once. I found that it didn't taste all that different from raw tuna, though I knew better than to tell him that.\n\n\"You're a strange Canadian,\" he told me when I nodded my approval.\n\nPieces of sushi continued to materialize on our trays, along with refills of cold _sake_ in our cups. One by one, I sampled my favourites, all of them fresh and fragrant \u2014 scallop, sweet shrimp, _anago_ eel and finally the hand-rolled _makizushi_. I wondered who had come up with the curious notion that it was impossible to fill up on Japanese food.\n\nKazuo dismissed my tipsy protestations as he went to pay the bill, while the chef made a great show of shaking my hand across the counter. \"Come again, come again,\" he said with cheflike geniality, looking right and left to make sure he was being properly watched by the other patrons.\n\nWe slid open the entrance door and stepped out into the cool night air. Before I could formulate a suitable expression of gratitude, Hitomi looked up at me and said, \"Thank you for accepting our invitation.\"\n\n### **7**\n\nNot being a particularly touchy-feely sort of person, I hadn't expected that I would feel quite as starved for physical contact as I did by the time November rolled around. I no longer dreaded the sardine-can train rides into Shibuya every morning, but found myself \u2014 I realized this with a shock \u2014 almost looking forward to them. Being squashed by a half-dozen people was a shoddy form of body contact, but it was preferable, evidently, to none at all.\n\nAround that time, I was invited to spend a Sunday evening with the Mikami family, an upper-middle-class couple and their twelve-year-old daughter. A mutual friend in Toronto had written to them about my arrival in Tokyo, and they made it a point to have me over for a home-style dinner every few weeks. Both parents were doctors \u2014 he a psychiatrist and she a family practitioner \u2014 and Yuki brought home report cards that predicted an equally high-powered career.\n\nBecause they treated me casually and went about their usual business when I was there, I didn't feel I was imposing on them as much as I might have otherwise. The television was kept on while we ate, Mr. Mikami chewing silently while he took in the six o'clock news, and as soon as dinner was finished Yuki would bound up the stairs to her room and Mrs. Mikami would hand me a dishtowel so I could dry while she washed. Sometimes she even asked me to check Yuki's English homework. What I enjoyed most about those evenings was the sense of being granted an off-the-record, intimate glimpse into the life of a Japanese family, though the relaxed Mikamis could hardly be said to typify a Japanese household.\n\nAt the end of that Sunday evening in November, the three of them saw me out to the hallway and clustered around me while I put on my shoes and jacket. As we exchanged our goodbyes, I impulsively flung my arms around Yuki and held her in a tight hug. Yuki jumped back, her face taut with alarm and confusion, and Mrs. Mikami burst out laughing. She told me not to be offended by her daughter's reaction, that Japanese children past the age of about ten were not used to being touched by older people.\n\n\"Not even by their parents or relatives?\" I asked Miki a few days later. We were sitting in her apartment, looking at her family pictures: children and adults lined up in neat rows, sometimes smiling, sometimes not, hands by their sides or clasped symmetrically in front of them.\n\n\" _Kimochi warui_ ,\" she said with a shudder. \"Bad feeling. I be scared if my mother kissing or hugging me, I think.\"\n\n\"What about your friends?\"\n\nShe laughed. \"No, I never touching my friends. If I touch them they think I strange. Last time somebody touch me was my boyfriend, but that seven years ago.\"\n\n\"Honestly? You never miss it?\"\n\nShe shook her head resolutely. \"You never miss bowing, or sitting _seiza_ -style?\"\n\nUntil then, I hadn't thought to question the prevailing Western view that physical contact was a universal human need, that people withered and died if they went too long without being touched. But most Japanese I knew hardly seemed in danger of withering and dying. Though by Western standards they might be a little repressed, their sense of community, of connectedness, was hardly the weaker for their lack of physical demonstrativeness. There were other ways to satisfy the desire for connection, and perhaps what Miki got from her chummy female friendships and assortment of hobbies was in some way equivalent to a backrub or a squeeze.\n\nWhat I had a harder time accepting as healthy was the strength of her fantasies about Sweden and Stefan Edberg, her investment in the improbable. And it wasn't only Miki. I had a thirty-six-year-old student for whom Elvis was clearly more alive than her husband. As often as she could, she made the pilgrimage to Graceland where she would spend a week soaking up the magic with like-minded compatriots. Another Japanese woman I knew had spent her year-long stay in Toronto pining for Kurt Browning, the figure-skating champion, videotaping his every televised performance and writing him love letters. She showed me one of them, a string of soupy sentences that sounded nothing like the articulate woman of twenty-seven that she normally was:\n\n_Even other people may doubt you, but I know you're the best. Always you smile at camera, even if make mistake and fall. When you gave me that piece of paper with autograph (remember?), it was the best day of my life, and I will carry it with me always ..._\n\nI couldn't recall any of the friends I'd had, even as a teenager, being so passionate about their idols as were these women \u2014 solid, hard-working women who could hardly be accused of self-delusion in other aspects of their lives. There was, I suspected, something fundamental that these women needed but could not get in their real lives, a yearning for which the only reasonable expression, other than despair, was intense fantasy.\n\nMeanwhile, at Esther House, the tension was gradually building. Nobody had come to blows yet, but the daily sharing of two toilets, one shower and one telephone among a dozen ill-assorted people was taking its predictable toll on everybody's nerves. The collective mood brightened somewhat when, toward the end of the month, a very tall Nordic woman showed up at our doorstep, surrounded by brimming black suitcases. We made a great show of welcoming her, sensing that she might break up, at least temporarily, the web of petty grudges that had started to form between us.\n\nBirgit Sorensen was from Stockholm, and had come to Japan to do some modelling and get away from her homeland, where she claimed to be dying of boredom. She was a classic Swedish beauty, with ramrod-straight blonde hair and legs that went on forever. I got a taste of what it was like to live in her skin when I took the train into Shibuya with her one morning. Over six feet tall in her high-heeled lace-up boots, hair gleaming against her black leather jacket, she drew all eyes toward her. Teenage girls whispered to each other while sneaking glances in her direction, _obaasan_ gave her head-to-toe scrutinies, and older men forgot to close their mouths as they gaped without shame. I heard the word \"beautiful\" float up in a guttural whisper as we breezed by a pair of businessmen (with Birgit you didn't walk, you breezed), and was all too certain they weren't talking about me.\n\nWithin two weeks of her arrival, Birgit had gotten a hefty contract modelling sunglasses for an eyewear company. Ariel, who'd been pounding the pavements in search of modelling work for more than two months, had trouble disguising his resentment. \"Guess I should dye my hair blond,\" he said. \"And maybe my eyes, while I'm at it. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing in this city \u2014 there's no appreciation for _interesting_ faces, just the washed-out Aryan look.\"\n\n\"Don't give up,\" Birgit urged him, and with the magnanimity afforded by success, promised to put in a good word for him if one of her employers ever needed a male model.\n\nBirgit floated from contract to contract, from party to party, each experience another opportunity to toss off a casual boast. Loved by Japan but herself indifferent to the country, she skimmed the surface of her adventures, none of them meaning very much to her since her life was already well mapped out: at the end of the year, she'd be returning to Stockholm to get married to her six-foot-four fianc\u00e9, and presumably have a batch of six-foot-eight kids in boring old Sweden and never give Japan another thought.\n\nBy this time, all of us at Esther House had caught on to the cheating games played by Tokyo commuters, and Jessie was a particularly enthusiastic player. The Japanese called the practice _kiseru_. A _kiseru_ is a traditional Japanese pipe with a metal bowl and mouthpiece, joined by a flexible bamboo tube. Like the hard metal pieces at both ends of the pipe, commuters' entry and exit stations are fixed, unbendable. But what happens in between is as flexible as the pipe's tubing. If, for example, your daily commute is from station A to station Z, twenty-five stops further, you can do the honest thing \u2014 buy a monthly train pass allowing you to ride between A and Z \u2014 or instead, buy an A-to-B pass and a Y-to-Z pass, which is a lot cheaper. You use the first pass when getting on at A, the second pass when getting off at Z, and nobody is the wiser. There are many other variants of the game. Some people go as far as studying the ticket-clerks at different stations to find out which ones are likely to be sleeping on the job and therefore unaware that the rider is flashing them a pass for an entirely different train-line.\n\nJessie took it upon herself to coach Birgit in the art of _kiseru_ , but the apprentice soon overtook the master. Unlike the rest of us, Birgit didn't have to use her wits to play the game. She had only to breeze through the turnstile, draw herself up to her full six feet and train her brilliant blue eyes on the ticket puncher, and he would become so flustered that it was all he could do to keep from falling off his chair. As the weeks wore on, she got bolder and bolder. From expired train passes, she went on to use telephone cards, packs of cigarettes, and finally nothing but her smile. She never got caught.\n\nI, on the other hand, got caught after only three or four tries \u2014 dragged by the arm into an office where I was made to pay a fine of three times the normal fare and given a sober talk in Japanese of which I understood nothing but the last sentence, \"Please don't do that anymore.\" After that incident I stopped playing _kiseru_. There was something about the officer's tone of voice \u2014 its unexpected gentleness, perhaps \u2014 that made me lose my interest in the game.\n\nI thought that Miki would be excited at the opportunity to meet a bona fide Swede, but when I asked her if she wanted to meet Birgit, she seemed oddly resistant to the idea. \"I too shy,\" she said vaguely, and after a pause, \"I not ready yet.\" Not ready, I guessed, to face the possibility that the real Sweden was nothing like the Sweden she'd invented for herself, the Sweden that had fuelled her fantasies for the past ten years.\n\nReality, illusion ... I didn't know which was better anymore. I saw myself, unhappy and striving, and I saw Miki, content to hear her idol's footsteps in the corridors of her imagination, her cravings less insistent because they didn't need to be satisfied.\n\n### **8**\n\nSome of the gaijin I was meeting in Tokyo were as captivated by Japan and its people as I was. But even the most die-hard Japanophiles admitted to growing weary of answering, or dodging, the same old questions about age, marital status and ability to ingest raw fish. In our more generous moments, we attributed the predictability and persistence of these questions to the old saw that a culturally isolated people such as the Japanese could hardly be expected to behave with international sophistication.\n\nTrue to form, Jeffrey Addleman had compiled a list of Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions (as they used to do in Mad Magazine, he said) and was urging the rest of the BE teachers to try them out on our students. My three favourites follow.\n\n\"Can you eat sushi?\" | \"It's quite good with ketchup.\"\n\n---|---\n\n\"Are you married, Mr. Jeffrey?\" | \"No, but I'm living with him.\"\n\n\"Can you use chopsticks?\" | \"No. Can you?\"\n\nPart of the problem is semantic. In Japanese, the \"can you\" question form has alternative meanings of \"do you like\" or \"are you accustomed to.\" Foreigners who didn't know this accused the Japanese of being condescending and ignorant. \"What do they mean, _can_ you eat sushi?\" these gaijin would ask each other in consternation. \"Do they think we're physically incapable of opening our mouths, stuffing a goddamned piece offish inside and chewing?\"\n\nSemantics aside, the knee-jerk questions betrayed a discomfort around foreigners that seemed particularly strong in the Japanese. This was hardly surprising if one considered that most Japanese had been raised on a diet of clownish TV gaijin, glamorous movie gaijin, frenetic rock-star gaijin, and almost no contact with the real product. They were unprepared for the droves of Japanophiles intent on proving that foreigners could master it all \u2014 language, tea ceremony, calligraphy \u2014 that no turf was sacred. \"I remember a grade-school teacher telling me that foreigners really _couldn't_ eat sushi, that they'd get indigestion if they did,\" an embarrassed student once told me in defence of the question.\n\nCan you sleep on _futon_ mattress? Can you read _hiragana_ alphabet? Yes, yes, I answered proudly, suspecting it was no they wanted to hear, the no that would bolster their faltering belief in their own uniqueness.\n\nSusan and Mark wanted to take a weekend trip to the Izu Peninsula before the cold weather set in. I took on the challenge of making _ryokan_ reservations for them, though my telephone Japanese was still shaky.\n\n\"Can they speak Japanese?\" one innkeeper asked me.\n\n\"Not very well,\" I told her, \"but they're quite familiar with Japanese customs.\"\n\n\"Can they eat Japanese food?\"\n\n\"That's not a problem. They like all \u2014\"\n\n\"Can they use Japanese-style toilets?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course.\"\n\n\"And we don't have any Western-style beds ...\"\n\nIt wasn't dislike of foreigners that had prompted the innkeeper's questions, Hitomi assured me when I told her the story, but fear that her modest accommodations weren't good enough for Americans and that she would fail as a hostess. \"We Japanese have _rettokan_ ,\" she told me. \"In English you say inferiority complex, I think.\"\n\nWesterners, as we all know, play their own part in perpetuating the us-and-them myth. The Western media still haven't tired of portraying the Japanese business executive as a faceless robot, an economic animal hellbent on taking over the world. Many gaijin I knew in Tokyo went on and on about Japanese timidity, propriety, enslavement to the group. I too resorted to this sort of cheap trick, finding that the easiest way to wake up dead soldiers in a classroom was to turn the conversation to cultural differences. \"Is it true that Japanese mothers never boast about their children?\" \"Is it true that a salaryman should never refuse his supervisor's invitation to dinner?\"\n\nAnother topic that used up class time was the old clich\u00e9 that logic was Western, intuition Japanese. \"We Japanese are not logical,\" more than one student insisted to me. \"Look at your electronics industry, your clockwork trains,\" I would counter. \"Isn't that evidence of logic?\" But they weren't about to give up their romanticized view of themselves.\n\nWas it because of this strong cultural identity, I wondered, that individual Japanese seemed satisfied with such weak personal identities? \"I am a typical Japanese\" was a self-assessment I heard time and again, along with the sentence starter \"We Japanese,\" as in \"We Japanese believe in the afterlife,\" or \"We Japanese enjoy the sound of raindrops.\"\n\n\"Is it a good thing to be a typical Japanese?\" I asked a student.\n\n\"Yes, good thing.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"We Japanese all want to be same.\"\n\nI didn't quite buy that. \"All people want to be unique in some way, don't they?\"\n\n\"Japanese person just want be little bit unique, just little bit different, like have special hobby or sport, maybe own motorcycle. But we get nervous if not typical Japanese.\"\n\nMy students seemed surprised that I was planning to stay in Japan over the winter holidays. \"When are you going back to your country?\" they would ask. Canada is not _my_ country, I'd think to myself, saddened to be regarded as a guest rather than a long-term, possibly permanent resident. On the other hand, I realized it had probably not occurred to them that someone who had North America at her doorstep would choose to make her home in Japan. The majority of young Japanese dreamed of finding freedom abroad. That a North American might seek freedom in their close-knit, decorous society was surely baffling to them.\n\nThe questions followed me out of the classroom and into the streets of Harajuku, where an ice-cream vendor asked me if I thought Sting was a greater artist than Bruce Springsteen, into a Shinjuku watering hole where the bartender asked me if all American high-school students used drugs, into the trains, the stores, everywhere. It was the insatiable curiosity of a satellite culture about a dominant one, the curiosity of an island people about the mainland.\n\nMisled by the naivet\u00e9 of some of their questions, I was unprepared for the shrewdness of others. In late November, I went to interview for the position of English editor with a scientific publishing company. The publisher showed me into his office \u2014 a tiny, windowless room filled with papers stacked in teetering piles \u2014 and let me rattle on about my credentials while he sucked on his Lucky Seven.\n\n\"Which you like better,\" he asked suddenly, \"coffee or tea?\"\n\n\"Coffee,\" I said. \"Why?\"\n\n\"You like collecting things, like old newspapers, postcards?\"\n\n\"No, not really.\"\n\n\"You wait for red light before crossing street, even if no cars?\"\n\nThe questions continued, each one more puzzling than the last.\n\n\"You no good for this job,\" he said finally.\n\n\"But I have a science degree, and editing experience \u2014\"\n\n\"You not patient person. You get bored with this job. Is very detail, how you say ... _routine_ kind of job. To do this job well, you must be the person who love small details. You must be the person who don't have too much strong ideas. You must follow our company's system of editing, even if you think you find better way. You not this kind of person, I think.\"\n\nHe knows all this, I thought, just by asking a few loopy questions? As he shook my hand and showed me to the door, I had the sense of having been outwitted.\n\nA few days later, I went for an interview at a small agency that set up English classes for business executives. I was hoping to drop some of my teaching hours at BE and replace them with company classes, which sounded like less work for more money. Just like my previous interviewer, the owner of INTEC, a pale, thin man of about seventy, dismissed my credentials with a wave of his hand. He wanted to know about my interests, lifestyle, goals. I tried to gloss over the gaps in my work history, the abrupt shifts of focus, from Spanish to science, science to music, music to Japan.\n\n\"You're obviously a restless person,\" Mr. Sato told me in his near-perfect English, \"and my impression is that you get bored easily. Maybe you'll change your mind about Japan in six months and decide to leave. When we hire people, we like it to be for at least two years, preferably longer.\"\n\n\"But I have no intention of leaving Japan,\" I told him.\n\n\"Maybe not,\" he said, staring right at me. \"But you might get bored with the job. You need mental stimulation, don't you?\"\n\nIt wasn't a question one could answer no to.\n\n\"This job requires a lot of patience,\" he continued. \"Many of our students are slow learners. You're not a patient person, are you?\"\n\nThis style of interviewing \u2014 focusing on personality rather than credentials \u2014 was one I would encounter again and again in my interviews with Japanese companies. Instead of looking for people whose experience was a perfect match with the job description, they seemed to favour candidates whose personalities were well-suited to the work they'd be doing. I wondered if this might not be one of the reasons that job hopping was so uncommon in Japan.\n\nIt looked like Mr. Sato was going to turn me down, when all of a sudden a tall woman flounced into the room, almost blinding me with her sartorial splendour: lime-green miniskirt, opaque stockings of the same colour and a woolly sweater in a violent shade of pink. She looked to be in her early forties, though it was hard to tell \u2014 her face was curiously unwrinkled from chin to eyebrows and deeply furrowed on the forehead. I took in her long straight hair, parted in the middle and slightly greasy, her heavy makeup and false eyelashes, and thought, _frozen in the seventies_.\n\nAnd then she started to talk: about her Masters' thesis in linguistics, about books she'd been reading, about the lack of serious, committed teachers in Tokyo. It turned out I had read some of the same books she had \u2014 _Iron and Silk, The Remains of the Day_. That bit of serendipity got us into an animated discussion about books versus films, films versus plays. I stared at her in astonishment, unable to reconcile the sober, high-toned remarks about Kazuo Ishiguro's \"tasteful, minimalistic book\" with the fuchsia lipstick bleeding past her lipline, the powder-coated eyelids and eye-popping garb.\n\n\"I like her,\" Vivian told Mr. Sato. (\"He's my boss,\" she whispered to me, \"but he trusts my judgment.\")\n\nAnd so I found myself with two new evening classes \u2014 IHI salespeople on Wednesday and SECOM scientists on Friday. The IHI group was in good spirits the first week, livelier and more responsive than any of my housewife classes. I gave them my standard ask-me-anything-you-want introduction, which one student countered with \"Are you looking for Japanese boyfriend?\"\n\nFinally, I thought \u2014 a different kind of question. There were possibilities, and my mood brightened.\n\n## **SMALL VICTORIES**\n\n\"What I am now is an interesting deformity. I am not Asian and never will be. Even if I forget it sometimes, no one else does.\"\n\n_Karen Connelly_\n\n### **1**\n\nIt was my first meal in a Japanese home. Although many more were to follow, it never got any better than Miki's sukiyaki. She'd invited two other friends, Chiemi and Naomi, both single women who still lived with their parents. The obligatory can-you-guess-my-age's were exchanged and a ranking was established: Naomi was the senior member of our party at thirty-five, next came thirty-four year old Chiemi, then myself and finally Miki. They waited expectantly for me to marvel at how young they looked, which I was able to do without lying.\n\nI excused myself to go to the bathroom and Miki mumbled an apology about its small size and lack of a bath or shower. I told her I wasn't planning on taking a bath, but the joke didn't catch.\n\n\"If I take apartment with bath, I pay about \u00a520,000 more rent,\" she explained when I returned to the room. \"So I going to _sento_ about five times in one week.\"\n\nThe public bath was a seven-minute walk from her place, she said, and cost \u00a5400 per visit, which meant that her net monthly savings were closer to \u00a512,000, or $120.\n\n\"Do you think is strange I have no bath?\" she asked me, looking embarrassed.\n\n\"Not at all,\" I said reflexively, surprised nonetheless that a professional architect working six days a week would have to budget so carefully.\n\n\"If I man, I get much more high salary for same job,\" she said, as though guessing my thoughts. \"Maybe two times more high.\" There wasn't a trace of bitterness in her voice. Half-wages and daily treks to the _sento_ were a small price to pay, she seemed to be saying, for the freedom to do what she wanted.\n\nShe brought us each a giant bottle of beer and we got into position around her low wooden table, the three of them kneeling _seiza-_ style and I extending my legs under the table with the abashed explanation that sitting Japanese-style caused instant cramping in the soles of my feet. \"Don't worry,\" they reassured politely, \"with friends any sitting style OK.\" Plates of cabbage, sliced leeks, tofu and beef strips were laid out around an electric frying pan. Miki turned on the pan, lined it with oil and poured in the beef. She sprinkled _shoyu_ sauce over the meat as it simmered, then added a cup of sake and several heaping spoonfuls of sugar. \"This is Kyushu style,\" she said with a hint of pride.\n\nAs we waited for the meat to cook they told me about themselves, as eager to shake the dust off their English as I was to hear them speak Japanese. Naomi was the worldliest and most fluent of the three. She'd spent a year teaching Japanese in England, where she'd made the happy discovery that her name, composed of the characters for \"straight\" and \"beautiful,\" also happened to be an English name.\n\n\"I _ki ga oi_ type,\" Chiemi sighed to me, Naomi explaining that this meant someone who had so many interests and ambitions that they couldn't decide which one to pursue. In addition to being a semi-professional dancer, Chiemi also worked as a part-time administrator at a culture centre, was collaborating with a friend on a new method of teaching Japanese to foreigners, and dreamed of becoming a licenced colour psychologist, whatever that was.\n\nMiki's ambition was to design wheelchair-accessible buildings based on Western models. For the past few years, she told us, she'd been toying with the idea of going to study architecture in Stockholm, which she saw as a model of progressive city planning. The stumbling blocks were huge, though: no architecture courses were offered in English, and she didn't speak a word of Swedish. But it had to be Sweden \u2014 America or England wouldn't do \u2014 which led one to suspect that ramps and large toilet stalls were only a small part of her motive.\n\nMarriage appeared to have as much bearing on their plans as the Second Coming. I asked them if they'd ever given the matter any thought.\n\n\"You know Japanese men?\" Chiemi asked me, as though the question answered itself. Miki and Naomi groaned in assent.\n\n\"She like Japanese men,\" Miki told the others on my behalf.\n\n\" _Heeeeeh?_ \" They looked astonished.\n\n\"Japanese men so boooring,\" Naomi said. \"How you can like?\"\n\n\"I can't explain it,\" I told them, embarrassed to have my secret divulged so quickly, \"but I'm curious.\" They looked at me incredulously. I mumbled something about romance being the most interesting way to gain insight into a culture, though it would have been more accurate to say that I was boning up on the culture so I'd be ready for the man, if and when he showed up.\n\n\"Maybe you should try _o-miai_ ,\" Naomi laughed. \"You know _o-miai?_ \"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, \"but I don't think foreigners are allowed to participate.\"\n\n_O-miai's_ literal meaning is \"seeing-meeting.\" What you saw was a prospective candidate's resume, given to you by a _nakodo_ or matchmaker. Vital statistics were age, height, weight, name of Alma Mater \u2014 university, one hoped \u2014 and annual salary. The man was also given your resume, in which you'd been careful to include such accomplishments as calligraphy or graduation from a French cooking course. If both parties agreed to it, the _nakodo_ gave the man your phone number. You then arranged to meet, and although you were theoretically under no obligation to like him, parents got exasperated with daughters who were too fussy, especially if they were nearing the end of their eligible years. If you did like him, and he you, you were free to arrange further meetings. Proposals usually occurred after four or five dates.\n\nThe meat was browned all over and Miki added the tofu and vegetables, a few more sprinkles of _shoyu_ sauce and another half-cup of sake to the simmering broth. The beer had loosened our postures and I settled in for what I knew would be a delicious meal and good gossip-fest.\n\n\"Have you ever tried _o-miai?_ \" I asked Miki.\n\n\"Just I try last month,\" she admitted, glancing ruefully at her friends.\n\n\" _Hontooooo?_ they squealed. \"How it was?\"\n\n_\"Dam\u00e8_. No good at all. He fat, he _hage_ , how you say _hage_ in English?\" She pointed to her head.\n\n\"You mean bald?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, bord. He bord, just little hair on side, also can't do conversation, only talk about he buy new washing and drying machine. After ten minutes I want leave.\"\n\nChiemi and Naomi's faces were taut with suppressed laughter.\n\n\"I return my home, telephone _nakodo_ and tell her it was _dam\u00e8_. She say she understand my feeling, when she arrange _o-miai_ she not yet meet man, but few days later she met and thinking he _terrible_ , so when I call she say solly, solly.\"\n\nShe took a final sip of the broth and pronounced it ready. With her chopsticks, she transferred a few pieces of meat and vegetables into her bowl, instructing me to do the same. The others followed suit.\n\n\"You like?\" she asked expectantly as I chewed. The meat was dripping with flavour, tender and moist. I told her I'd never tasted anything more delicious.\n\n\"Lots of _o-miai_ men is bord,\" Chiemi said. \"I also heard story if a man can't find woman by _o-miai_ system, he try make lots of money and buy house, then he get photo of himself standing with house in background, attach photo with resume. He thinking maybe women like him more because he have house.\"\n\n\"Yes, I hear same story. So if I see man put house on resume, I know he bord!\" Naomi was doubled over with laughter.\n\nThe sky had turned purply-black outside, the air was thick with fragrant vapours, laughter was bouncing crazily off the walls and I felt myself being drawn into their world, light-years away from my own, spiralling up, up, up ... Bang! There it was, the all-too-rare but unmistakable wash of feeling that, for want of a better term, I privately thought of as a Travel Orgasm. It was this, and only this, that made travel worthwhile.\n\n\"You know _mazakon?_ \" one of them asked me.\n\n\"Mazawhat?\"\n\n\"It comes from English words,\" Naomi said, wiping her eyes. \"Mother complex, I think. It means grown-up man who still controlled by mother. Lots of Japanese men _mazakon_.\"\n\n\"Actually,\" I told them, \"in English we usually call such men Mama's boys.\" Chiemi reached over to her purse, pulled out a notebook and wrote \"mama's boys\" in it, which prompted me to dig out my own notebook and scribble \"mazakon\" in a wobbly hand.\n\n\"Are you sure you want meet Japanese man?\" Chiemi asked me. \"You crayyyzee, I think.\"\n\n\"You want to know why _o-miai_ system didn't go well for me?\" Naomi said, straining to compose herself. \"I tried about four or five times, _nakodo_ gave me man's resume, but she also friend of my parents, so they asked to see it too. Then if I didn't like man after I met him, my parents get angry with me. They ask me, 'Why you don't like him? He comes from good family, works for Mitsubishi and gets \u00a55,000,000 salary.' If I say I just didn't like him, just didn't like his personality, that not good enough answer for them. They continue angry with me, tell me I make stupid mistake to refuse such good man. So I _atama ni kita_ , you know what means? In English you say fed up, I think. So I fed up and thought, no more _o-miai_.\"\n\nThey went on to tell me that computer-dating services were on the rise, especially in the large cities, for precisely that reason: unlike a _nakodo_ or parents, computers didn't make you feel obligated. And you could make requests (the most popular one being no eldest sons) that would be awkward when dealing with a human go-between.\n\nAs the evening wore on and the girl-talk grew thicker, I learned that Miki was the only one who'd had any experience with men at all \u2014 the other two admitted that there had been no men in their lives, ever. I was to meet several more women of this type, women who had what it took but had never been taken. They were a minority, no doubt, but unquestionably a larger group than in the West. By and large, Japanese people paired off through the established channels, like work or _o-miai_ \u2014 or not at all. Chance encounters at laundromats, grocery stores, museums or swimming pools, planes or trains, bookstores or coffee-shops, were not part of the dating culture. I once asked a group of students, young men who clearly had women on the brain, if they would consider approaching a woman at a party and asking for her phone number. Discussion ensued and a consensus was reached: no, they wouldn't, not if they didn't know anything about her beforehand. If they happened to meet her a second and third time, and if the host could give them some information about her, then maybe. But they'd still be very shy about it. The result of all this timidity was a large number of people with little or no dating experience. To compound the problem, the women were as choosy as Hollywood starlets, demanding that their potential suitors have _sanko_ or \"three heights,\" meaning bodily height (the standard minimum being 175 centimetres, with a recent push for 180), education at a high-level university and high salary.\n\nAnd if real men couldn't live up to their standards, the disenchanted women fell back on their long-standing foreign idols, on their fantasy lives. In their ardor for Western movie-stars, my three friends were a match for the giddiest American teenager. \"Do you like Mickey Rourke?\" they questioned me, hardly waiting for my reply. \"Yes, yes, Mickey Rourke! He great, _neh?_ \" \"How about Michael Douglas?\" \"Harrison Ford!\" \"Patrick Swayze!\" \"Yes, _yes_ , Patrick Swayze!\" How could a balding Mitsubishi-man stand a chance?\n\nAs I looked around the table at the three vibrant women, it struck me as a shame that a whole side of them was being unexpressed. But they seemed to feel differently. \"If I must to choose either three good friends or one good lover,\" Miki said emphatically, \"I choose friends.\" She brought out another round of oversize beer-bottles, and our shouts of _kampai_ rang out in a declaration of sisterhood.\n\n### **2**\n\nIt was the trifling incidents, the random drifts of day-to-day life that were gradually giving me the sense of belonging rather than watching. No longer vast and exotic, Tokyo was splitting up into manageable chunks, and I was starting to feel territorial about Nishiogi, its tidy streets aglow in the light of storefront signs and lanterns mixed with slabs of fading sunlight. The vegetable vendor would smile as I walked by and sometimes wave a sprig of chives in my direction in hopes I might be tempted, the jeweller's wife knew me by name and never missed a chance to offer me tea and belabored English phrases, the man who sold coffee beans would start grinding up my favourite blend as soon as he saw me step inside his shop, and even the old grouch in the stationery store would do his best to stop scowling when I walked in. I knew where to get _anko_ cakes with the freshest and most finely pureed bean paste filling, an impossibly tiny store owned by an aging couple. The first time I stopped by I left my umbrella behind, and the woman called out \"Gaijin-san!\" to me, then drew in her breath and started to laugh self-consciously. I knew that Mr. Owner and Mrs. Customer were standard forms of address in Japanese, but evidently Mrs. Foreigner sounded just as ridiculous in Japanese as it did in English. I introduced myself to the couple, and they too became _kinjo no tomodachi_ , my neighbourhood friends.\n\nI no longer moved aside for the steady stream of cyclists whizzing by me, no longer worried about being run over by the cars and trucks that grazed my sleeves as they passed. Shin Midori street was drawing me in, little by little, allowing me to become a participant in its orderly confusion.\n\nOne thing that I missed, during those leisurely walks to and from the train station, was the freedom to munch on a snack as I strolled along. Eating on the run, Hitomi had told me, was still considered bad manners in Japan, despite the proliferation of fast food joints and vending machines. (It always amused me, when walking by the Baskin Robbins in East Shinjuku, to see young office ladies sitting demurely on the pink stools, nipping at their ice-cream cones like pigeons.) In time I got up the nerve to break the taboo on occasion, but never with impunity. I would scurry along, throwing furtive glances in all directions, and when I was pretty sure nobody could see me, tuck my hand into the bag of jellybeans hidden in my purse and hastily transfer some to my mouth.\n\nWhen I first came to Japan I was a conscientious camera toter, a diligent note taker. By November I had stopped using my camera and even my journal showed gaps of several days at a time. The compulsion to record was giving way to the craving for immersion. I wanted nothing more than to be a cog in the wheel, an unnoticed, unremarkable participant in the life of my street.\n\nOne Saturday morning, while standing on the platform waiting for the train to Shinjuku, I noticed two kimono-clad _obaasan_ arguing about the train schedule. The departure times for the various trains were posted on a large board in the middle of the platform, and the old women were pointing to the numbers in seeming confusion. I looked more closely and realized what the problem was. I walked up to them and told them in what I hoped was suitably polite language that since it was Saturday, they should be looking at the weekend times listed to the right of the regular schedule. They shrank back in surprise, covered their mouths with their hands and broke into an effusion of nervous giggles. As I was walking away I heard one of them say, \"Imagine! A foreigner explaining the train schedule to us. It's just too funny.\" It was a small victory, but it made me feel that much less of a tourist.\n\nOn another occasion I was riding a crowded train and the man sitting next to me got up from his seat. A young mother pointed to the empty space and told her pre-school daughter to sit down. She was about to climb on but then looked up, noticed me and burst into tears. She moved back toward her mother, grabbed onto her leg and continued to stare at me with bulging eyes. The mother seemed embarrassed and gave me a sheepish look. She kept on urging her child to sit down and the child kept shaking her head, staring at me and crying. After a few minutes of this I pulled out a compact mirror from my purse and showed it to the girl. It had two sides, a regular and twofold magnification. \" _Ookii_ ,\" I said and pointed to her enlarged reflection, then \" _chiisai_ ,\" as I flipped the mirror and she saw her true-to-life self gazing back at her. After we had repeated this procedure a few times, she looked up at me again as if reconsidering her initial misgivings. Then, very slowly, she pulled a candy out of her coat pocket and offered it to me. I made a big show of unwrapping it and popping it into my mouth. \" _Oishii desuka?_ \" the little girl asked shyly. \" _Oishii?_ \" I said, delicious. It seemed we'd made a small step toward _kokusaika_ or internationalization, the hot new buzzword on the lips of every politician and businessman in Tokyo.\n\nOne evening I answered my ringing phone and was greeted by a timid voice I didn't recognize. It sounded like a teenage boy. My telephone Japanese was still shaky, so I went through my usual routine of stating that I was a Canadian and would he please forgive me for not speaking too well. He didn't answer, and I asked him if he was sure he had the right number. \"I just wanted to talk to someone,\" he said hesitantly, \"so I dialled a number at random.\" I thought of hanging up the phone, but he sounded sincere and somehow sad, so I told him that if he spoke slowly and could put up with my limited Japanese I'd be glad to talk to him.\n\n\"I've been kind of unhappy these days ...\" he started to say, then fell back into silence.\n\n\"What's the problem?\" I asked after a few seconds.\n\n\"It's not one thing in particular, it's everything.\" More silence.\n\n\"For example?\"\n\n\"Well, my parents are on my back because of my grades, but my grades are poor because they're on my back, do you know what I mean? And ...\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"And my older brother is so good at everything he does, so I tell myself what's the use, even if I work harder I'll never do as well as him. And do you know the word _ijimerareko?_ \" I didn't, but could figure it out: child who is tormented. He must mean scapegoat.\n\n\"Lately,\" he continued, \"I've become one of the _ijimerareko_ in my school. I don't know why, but ...\"\n\nLife was no bowl of cherries for this kid, that much was clear. It was hard to think of something to say that wouldn't sound like an idiotic adult platitude. The best I could do was tell him that young people who were loners or outsiders or otherwise on the fringe often ended up leading the most interesting lives later on. It occurred to me as I spoke that what I'd observed to be true in the West might be less true in a country where _deru kugi ga utareru_ , the nail that sticks out gets hammered in. I wasn't sure my words were of any use to him, but knowing that somewhere in the great megalopolis of Tokyo there was a troubled Japanese boy with whom I'd communicated gave me the sense of playing a part, however modest, in the drama of the city. And this, the travel guidebooks admonish, is the gaijin's fatal mistake: believing it's possible to fit in.\n\n### **3**\n\nJust as the expression _shiyo ga nai_ was a constant refrain in the conversations of my Japanese friends, the term \"human rights\" cropped up all the time in our discussions at Esther House, especially when Mark was one of the participants. If you slipped on the pavement, then it was not fate or bad luck but someone's fault (either the municipal government or the manufacturer of your shoes or your stress-producing job), and it was your right to have the wrong righted. Mark was always carrying on about how this or that right was being violated in Japan. Some of the rights he concocted were quite exotic \u2014 the right to personal space on trains, to round-the-clock bank machines, to public vehicles without loudspeaker announcements.\n\nThough he'd always had a penchant for using long, obscure words in conversation, I noticed that in the past couple of weeks he'd started lacing his speech with the most astounding locutions \u2014 eudemonic, serpiginous, myrmidon, and many others I couldn't catch. He tossed the words off coolly, without giving them any emphasis, as though their meaning ought to be evident to anyone with just a little education.\n\nOne rainy evening Susan and I were sitting on the floor of their room having a bed-time snack of rice-crackers and peanuts.\n\n\"Is it my imagination,\" I asked her, \"or has Mark been trying to expand his vocabulary these days?\"\n\n\"It's not your imagination,\" she sighed. \"It's English \u2014 his latest hobby.\"\n\nIn the three months I'd known Mark, I had seen him go through a folk music phase and a photography phase, putting his heart and soul into each endeavour.\n\n\"See that thing over there?\" she said, pointing to a monster-sized book on their shelf. \"That's his new Webster's unabridged. He bought it last month at a book sale. He's been studying it diligently ever since, ten new words every day. The worst part is he insists on trying them all out on me before taking them to the outside world.\" She shook her head in mock resignation.\n\nJust then the door opened and Mark stepped into the room, glistening with raindrops and looking very tired. \"I've had it,\" he said as he tossed his jacket and briefcase on the floor. \"The vituperative appellation has been used for \u2014\" At this we burst out laughing, and Mark gave us a puzzled look.\n\n\"So have a seat,\" Susan said to him, \"and tell us what's bugging you.\"\n\n\"Its that word,\" he said, grabbing a fistful of crackers and slumping down on his bed. \"You know the one I mean?\" We didn't.\n\n\"There are people from just about everywhere in the world living in Tokyo, right? We've got Australians, New Zealanders, Americans, Canadians, Brits, Germans, Swedes, not to mention Israelis, Iranians, Filipinos, Ghanans ...\" We waited for the punchline.\n\n\"And the Japanese still insist on lumping us all together as _gaijin_.\" He made a face as if to spit out a lemon seed.\n\n\"Well,\" I said, \"I see your point, but you can't expect them to refer to all non-Japanese as Australian-or-American-or-Ghanan-or \u2014\"\n\n\"That's it!\" he exclaimed. \"What's wrong with simply calling us non-Japanese?\"\n\n\"Come on, kid,\" Susan said. \"When was the last time you referred to someone as a non-American or non-British?\"\n\nHe considered this. \"I agree that nomenclature is a bit of a problem, but the word gaijin has got to go. _Outside person_. I don't know about you guys, but I for one find it mephitic.\"\n\n\"I think he means offensive,\" Susan whispered to me.\n\n\"Why don't you write a letter to the editor?\" I suggested. Clearly he needed to unburden himself to a wider and more sympathetic audience. \"You can send it to the Japan Times, or the English _Yomiuri_.\"\n\nA couple of days later I answered a resolute knock on my door and there stood Mark waving a typewritten page in my face.\n\n\"Have a look at this, if you don't mind,\" he said, \"and tell me what you think. Feel free to use your editorial skills, by the way.\"\n\nAs soon as he left I started to read, with increasing amazement, the letter he had composed. What follows is a portion of it.\n\n\" ... It is a travesty of democratic principles that in this crepuscular phase of the twentieth century the word gaijin should continue to be bandied about in flagrant disregard of the multitudinous diversity of Tokyo's inhabitants. There are Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Iranians, Israelis, Ghanans, Brazilians, Norwegians, Filipinos, Thais and a plethora of other peoples in this great metropolis. The entrenchment of the word gaijin in the face of such vertiginous variety is a Pharisaic practise against which I cannot but inveigh, and I would venture to opine that my sentiments are echoed across the entire checkered panorama of non-Japanese people residing in Tokyo ...\"\n\nHow could I possibly edit such an piece? As self-parody it was brilliant, but I suspected Mark didn't see it that way. I contented myself with changing the odd preposition. The letter did eventually get printed in the _Yomiuri_ , though he lamented that they'd taken out the best parts.\n\nWhen Mark wasn't around, Susan would sometimes complain to me that his negative attitude about Japan was starting to wear her down. She was doing her best to get something positive out of her stay in Tokyo, to learn something about the language and the traditional crafts, but was finding it difficult to get into the spirit of things with a husband who never stopped bad-mouthing the place. If it wasn't the word gaijin, it was the whaling industry, trade barriers or the rudeness of subway riders. Mark was the only foreigner, as far as I knew, who wasn't captivated by Japanese women. \"Airheads, every one of them,\" he was fond of saying. \"Talking in those silly high-pitched voices, covering their mouths with their hands and looking embarrassed all the time. Whenever I ask them a question in class, they start blushing and giggling as though I'd asked them to take their clothes off.\" I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I often felt there was something forced, something false in his indignant tirades. It seemed to me that the lad doth protest too much, that he couldn't possibly be so repelled by what every other red-blooded gaijin was powerless to resist.\n\nOver the course of the next few months, Mark had several more flareups of indignation about the various injustices in Japanese society. The throwaway mentality, insensitivity to the environment, and suppression of individualism all came under the attack of his hyperbolic pen. Some of his letters got printed, others didn't. And his vocabulary continued to grow.\n\n### **4**\n\n\"You're as young as you feel,\" I told myself over and over as I rubbed elbows with the hordes of young people pouring out of their offices at lunch-hour Shibuya, swaggering down punky Takeshita street, milling around in Yoyogi park. That was the trouble \u2014 I didn't feel very young. In my more honest moments, I faced up to the fact that my thirty-three years of age had quite a different meaning in Tokyo than they did back in Toronto.\n\nIf you were thirty-three in North America and your life wasn't going quite the way you wanted, you still had the chance to jump ship and board another one \u2014 to start a new career, a new relationship, or simply to toss off old chains and savour your independence. This was, in fact, what I had done. The irony was that the place I'd chosen to start my new life was not prepared to let me do it, at least not in the way I had envisioned.\n\nAmerica is obsessed with age, people often say, but I found this to be even more the case in Japan. The Japanese have a term \u2014 _nenrei ishiki_ , or age consciousness \u2014 which reflects the emphasis they place on a person's age. This consciousness begins at home, where older siblings are called \"older brother\" or \"older sister\" while younger ones are called by their individual names, and is carried over to the workplace. My SECOM and IHI students always specified whether a colleague of theirs was a _sempai_ (older co-worker) or _kohai_ (younger co-worker), and prefaced their stories about friends and acquaintances with statements like \"She's six months older than me but graduated a year earlier,\" or \"He entered university at the same time as my younger brother.\"\n\n_\"Nenrei ishiki_ feeling even between good friends,\" Hitomi told me. Yoko, she explained, was only four months older than she was, but they still used different language when speaking to each other \u2014 Hitomi's speech was more deferential while Yoko's was more casual and chummy. Even twenty years of close friendship hadn't erased their ingrained awareness of who had emerged earlier from the womb.\n\nNot surprisingly, _nenrei ishiki_ was especially significant in man-woman relationships. A woman's eligibility for marriage was said to end at age thirty in the big cities, a few years earlier in small rural communities. Although Japanese women of my age tended to look much younger than I did, they already perceived themselves as _obasan_ , middle-aged women, for whom it was no longer appropriate to entertain thoughts of romance. I watched these women \u2014 my students, fellow teachers, my growing circle of friends \u2014 and was struck by how many of them seemed to have given up on the possibility of change in their lives. If they hadn't managed to snare a husband or embark on a bona fide career, then it was time to throw in the towel, to play out the rest of their lives as dutiful daughters, or doting aunts, or poorly paid office ladies who had nothing to look forward to except more of the same. I was baffled by people like my student Yuki, an attractive woman of thirty-four who spent her days helping out in her parents' furniture store and her evenings watching soap operas. Though a restless energy sometimes leaked through her complacency, she proudly and somewhat stubbornly refused to do anything to change her situation. With her haughty, wordless stare, she challenged my right to pass judgment on her life. \"Don't you ever think of doing anything else with your life?\" I tactlessly asked her one afternoon. She glared at me for a moment or two, then changed the subject.\n\nAnother constraint facing older women in search of a mate is that single men are not being \"recycled\" in Japanese society the way they are in the West. While divorce has been increasing by leaps and bounds in Japan, the age distribution of divorcing couples differs sharply from the Western pattern. Couples split up either very soon after marrying \u2014 at the extreme, the \"Narita divorce\" at the airport following the couple's honeymoon, during which the bride was presumably disillusioned with the groom \u2014 or after the kids have all grown up and settled down. Very few people will disrupt a young family, as they do in America, in order to bail out of an unfulfilling marriage. The result, of course, is a much smaller pool of single men in their thirties and forties.\n\nWhile Japanese men are not, in principle, stamped with an expiry date, they too seem to hit an invisible wall once they hit a certain age. Among my students, probably half of the men over thirty were unmarried, most of them not out of choice. They complained of women's shopping-list mentality, of their own timidity, of being too busy to juggle their work with the kinds of relationships young women were starting to insist on. In the changing cultural climate of the nineties, there seemed to be a clash between the men's concept of marriage \u2014 as a more or less utilitarian arrangement \u2014 and the women's new, Westernized expectations. In _The_ _Japanese Mind_ , published in 1983, Robert Christopher quotes an Italian priest and long-time resident of Japan as saying that \"Japanese think anyone over thirty who is still unmarried is a little bit crazy.\" Things had apparently changed a lot over the past few years.\n\nConsidering the premium placed on youth, I would have expected the Japanese to be coy about revealing their ages. I found the opposite to be true. Perhaps because they aged so gracefully, they took more pride in _looking_ young than in _being_ young. In the classroom, on the train, at the stationery store, I was constantly being lured into games of \"Guess my age.\"\n\n\"Thirty-two?\"\n\n\"No, higher.\"\n\n\"Thirty-six?\"\n\n\"Higher.\"\n\n\"Forty?\"\n\n( _Trying to conceal pleasure_ ) \"Higher.\"\n\nAnd then, out of politeness, I had to reciprocate \u2014 to let them guess how old I was, which was what they'd wanted to know in the first place. Unaccustomed to reading foreign faces, they were usually wide off the mark. After only three months in Japan, I'd had my age estimated at twenty-two, thirty-nine, and just about everything in between. But even the lower figures did little to cheer me. Under my black cloud of self-preoccupation, I was convinced that only those who guessed high saw me with clear eyes.\n\nAnd so I continued my lunch-hour jaunts through Shibuya, each day bringing a sharper bite to the air and an additional twinkling light or miniature Santa doll to a store window. On one occasion, while crossing one of the giant intersections where pedestrians converged from all directions, I collided with full force into another walker, lost my balance and fell to the ground. I saw a purse fly into the air, then heard the clatter of hard objects hitting the pavement.\n\n\"Can't you watch where you're going?\"\n\nAt the sound of the shrill, British-accented voice, I glanced up and met the gaze of a stocky blonde woman. She looked very young, maybe twenty-two.\n\n\"I'm sorry, I \u2014\"\n\n\"Just help me pick up my stuff, will you?\"\n\nShe kneeled down beside me and we began collecting her things, an uninterrupted procession of shoes grazing our fingers as we reached for her mascara, lipstick, nail-polish and hand-mirror. We dusted ourselves off and somehow fell into step as we made our way toward the cluster of fast-food restaurants in East Shibuya.\n\n\"You have time for a chat?\" the woman asked, swallowing the final T. By some wordless understanding, we headed to the bench in front of the Haagen Dasz parlour and plopped ourselves down on it. For a few moments we sat in silence while we caught our breath.\n\n\"I'm bloody pissed, if you want to know the truth,\" she said suddenly. I mean, Shin \u2014 that's my husband \u2014 well, he _knows_ how much Christmas means to me, but he hasn't made any plans for it. Didn't do anything last year either. You'd think it might occur to him to take the day off, right? But no, never. Just because it means nothing to _him_ \u2014\"\n\n\"I take it he's Japanese?\"\n\n\"Right. Don't know what ever got into me to marry the bloke.\" She looked up at me briefly. \"Don't mind me, OK? I'm not making any sense, not even to myself. Maybe it's 'cause I'm pregnant.\"\n\nI couldn't help it \u2014 thinking of her unborn child, half east and half west, I felt a pang of envy. I said nothing.\n\n\"I waited a week before telling him. I just had this _feeling_ he'd say something to piss me off, y'know what I mean? And do you know what he told me when he found out?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nShe didn't answer right away. I turned to look at her, and found that her face was contorted in an effort to stave off tears.\n\n\"It's all right,\" she said finally. \"Forget it.\"\n\nShe got up abruptly, and left me sitting on the bench in a surreal daze, the question she'd left behind her still ringing in my ears.\n\nThe following Wednesday evening I told the story to my IHI students, who were just as intrigued as I was.\n\n\"Maybe he want she stop working.\"\n\n\"Maybe he want baby to go to Japanese school, and she want move back to Great Britain.\"\n\n\"Maybe they not really married, and he tell her to go get abortion.\"\n\nIt was still the norm, they told me, for women to stop working when they found out they were pregnant. It was also not uncommon for a woman to spend the last few weeks of her pregnancy in her parents' home, the rationale being that she needed more care and attention at this time than her husband was able to provide. The students listened goggle-eyed while I told them about the \"fathering\" phenomenon \u2014 the his-and-hers breathing classes, the husband hollering words of encouragement to his wife during childbirth, aiming a video camera at her parted legs all the while. Mr. Tsurushima, who'd recently announced that his wife was pregnant, looked distinctly alarmed, as though he were worried this sort of thing might catch on in Japan within the next nine months.\n\nThat same Friday, I described my encounter with the British woman to my Cross Cultural class at BE, and asked them to write an short essay called \"Shin's request.\" The women started scribbling, Kikuko looking particularly intent as she bent over her notebook. I collected the essays and read hers aloud.\n\n_When Susan came home and told Shin she pregnant, suddenly he realized how big thing he did. When he got married her, he thought: I'm so modern, so trendy, because I got a foreigner woman. However, now he imagined about his little half child, and he got scared. Because really in his heart he wants the Japanese child. So he told Susan, if he is a boy, let's call him Hiroshi. He didn't shout but he spoke very seriously. And now Susan get scared, because he didn't ask her, or discuss about the name, just he told her: let's call him Hiroshi. Suddenly she realized her life with that man, she saw the future in front her eyes, she understood her life in future is \"no picnic,\" in the slang idiom. She understood she make big mistake_.\n\nWhen I finished reading, the other women broke into applause.\n\n\"Don't you think it can ever work, between a Japanese man and a Western woman?\" I asked Kikuko.\n\n\"Maybe a few months, maybe a few years, but not whole life, no. Young Japanese women a little more modern, I think, but Japanese men still not ready for change.\" The other women nodded sagely.\n\n\"Do you know what change my life more than anything else?\" she asked in a lighter tone.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\" _Remocon_ ,\" she said, and at my blank look, added, \"You know, the box for change TV channels without getting up. Anyway, the reason it change my life \u2014 when we first got television, my husband used to ask me I sit near him while he watching. When he want to watch different program, he shout 'channel two!' or 'channel four!', and I must get up and change the channel, _I_ was the _remocon_.\"\n\nWe all laughed, and then she turned serious again. \"And now I free, I don't have to change the channel for my husband. You probably think is strange \u2014\" she turned squarely to face me \" \u2014 but I sometimes miss the old days. Do you understand what I mean?\"\n\n\"Yes, I think \u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" she said softly. \"You can't understand. I'm Japanese, and you're Canadian. I'm old, and you're still young ...\"\n\nFor a moment I had an image of the gulf between us, deep and wide. And then I thought of the last word she'd spoken, \"young,\" and smiled warmly at her.\n\n### **5**\n\nWhile chatting with Jeffrey in the teachers lounge one afternoon, I happened to mention that I'd had a few Hebrew lessons as a child. He almost fell off his chair.\n\n\"So _you're_ a member of the Tribe?\" he asked in disbelief.\n\n\"Officially, yes.\"\n\n\"This is awesome,\" he said. \"A fellow Jew. Though I wouldn't have thought it.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know,\" he said. \"You just don't ...\" I knew what was coming.\n\n\"Don't look Jewish, and don't act Jewish, right?\"\n\n\"You said it, not me. But to be honest, yes.\"\n\n\"What am I supposed to act like? Stuff cheese blintzes into my mouth all day and say _oy vey_ between mouthfuls?\"\n\n\"Very funny,\" he said. \"Anyway, this is so exciting. Don't get me wrong, I like Japan and everything, but I sometimes feel like the man from planet X. My Japanese friends draw a total blank when it comes to Judaism.\"\n\nWe chatted some more. It turned out he'd set himself the ambitious goal of keeping strictly kosher for the duration of his stay in Tokyo. I hadn't realized how traditional he was, having been misled by his enthusiastic pursuit of Japanese women. But as I listened to him talk now, I realized that these women were just a game for him, that he would no sooner consider marrying outside his own faith than he would stealing jewellery from his mother.\n\n\"Hey, why don't we go to the synagogue together?\" he suggested. \"There's a Chanukah dinner coming up at the JCC, and \u2014\"\n\n\"Before you get too excited,\" I said, \"I should tell you that the last time I stepped into a synagogue was so long ago I can't even remember.\"\n\n\"Come on,\" he coaxed, \"Aren't you a little curious about the Jewish scene in Tokyo?\"\n\n\"No, not really.\"\n\n\"The Jewish _singles_ scene, perhaps?\" he added with a wink.\n\nWhy not, I thought. It would be interesting to see how it felt to walk into a synagogue after all these years. Who could tell, it was possible I might have some blinding revelation of faith that would send me crawling back into the fold. I'd read stories like that, about people rediscovering their roots in far-off places. Not likely, I thought, but possible.\n\nOn the appointed evening, Jeff and I took the train to the upscale district of Hiro, where the Jewish Community Centre was located. But as soon as we stepped inside, we were no longer in Hiro, no longer in Tokyo, for that matter, but somewhere in Brooklyn or Chicago or Teaneck, New Jersey. It was like a warp in place and time. The hundred-or-so people assembled in the lobby were all shaking hands and saying _shalom_ and _hag sameach_ and how's the rag business and have you heard about Rhonda and the twins, and I was starting to feel a little dizzy with culture shock. I looked around the room and saw not a trace of Japan. No Chinese characters, no sliding doors, no _sumi-e_ paintings on the walls, only men wearing _yarmulkes_ and prayer shawls and women in splashy print dresses and snippets of thick New York brogue cutting through the Babel of sound. Jeff, excited as a puppy and clearly in his element, dashed off to talk to a young man he thought he recognized from his Cornell days. For me it was the same as always \u2014 a longing to belong mixed with the smug relief of standing apart.\n\nI wandered around the room, eavesdropping on some conversations and joining in others. What struck me again and again is how none of these people, even the ones who'd spent large chunks of their lives in Japan, had allowed the country to seep into their blood. They'd figured out how to make their lives as un-Japanese as possible. Like homing missiles they'd zeroed in on the closest equivalents to the amenities they were used to back in Long Island or Philadelphia: the international grocery store that featured a Kosher section, the lunch counter that served falafel, the pharmacy that stocked Ex-Lax and Tylenol and Crest toothpaste. Their gestures hadn't softened, they still talked and laughed in primary colours. None of this was any cause for shame, of course, but after having spent three months in Japan and absorbed some of its muted tones, coming here felt to me like a regression of sorts. It didn't look like I'd be having any paroxysms of faith after all.\n\nAs the room continued to fill I spotted the odd Japanese face, always female, always accompanied by a Jewish man. One such couple especially caught my attention: he, tall and thin and wrapped in his prayer shawl, and she, a tiny thing with a pixie-face and ramrod-straight hair that grazed her waist, looking adoringly into his eyes. Both wore wedding rings. She must have converted to Judaism, I realized, since most practising Jews would insist on it before agreeing to such a marriage. A Japanese Jew seemed an incongruity to me, a clash of ill-matched flavours. I couldn't imagine her dancing the _hora_ or chuckling at a Woody Allen movie or teaching her children to stay away from shellfish and pork. Not with any conviction, at any rate. (I was later to learn that Woody Allen movies were extremely popular in Japan, but I suspected this had more to do with the Japanese passion for Americana than with their appreciation of the subtleties of middle-class Jewish neurosis.)\n\nI struck up a conversation with a young Israeli who worked part-time in the synagogue as a garage attendant. He told me they held conversion classes for these women, who on the whole were model students and had no trouble adapting to life as the mistress of a Jewish household. When I expressed surprise at this, he said that it made sense if one considered two things: the casual attitude of most Japanese toward their own religion and the fact that Japanese women were trained from babyhood to adapt and to serve. And that many would do anything to hook up with a Western man, I thought privately. Still, it was hard for me to picture the daily life of such a couple: \"Pass the gefilte-fish, _o-negai shimasu_.\" I just couldn't see it.\n\nJust as the dinner bell sounded I ran into Jeff and we walked up the stairs to the synagogue, which had been converted to a dining hall for the occasion. He hadn't eaten any meat since Rosh Hashanah in September and was dying to sink his teeth into some dripping flesh. \"Two whole pieces!\" he exclaimed when his food was served to him, and dove into the chicken with such gusto that I felt sorry for him and gave him a piece from my plate. I, after all, could eat non-kosher chicken or beef or even _butaniku_ any day of the week.\n\nSeated to my right was an older man who appeared to have come by himself. He introduced himself, and I learned that he was a visiting engineering professor at Sophia University. He looked to be in his late sixties. \"If you want to know the truth,\" he said, lowering his voice, \"I only come here for the food and the company. I'm not much of a Jew, actually.\" He lowered his voice even further. \"A card-carrying atheist, if you really wanna know.\" I really didn't wanna. People who stripped naked in front of total strangers made me nervous, no matter how sympathetic I was to their views. I reluctantly continued my conversation with the professor, whose questions were getting more and more personal.\n\nWhen the meal was over he handed me his business card. \"Tokyo can be a very lonely place,\" he said. \"Maybe we could go to a movie or something.\" When he asked for my number, I told him I didn't have a phone and that the communal phone in the gaijin house was being repaired. Undaunted by my transparent excuse, he pointed to the phone number on the card. \"Call me when you get lonely,\" he said suggestively.\n\nThis was a first for me \u2014 being courted by a senior citizen \u2014 and to my shaky, age-obsessed ego, the ultimate insult.\n\n\"Do I look old?\" I asked Jeff as we made our way back toward the bus stop.\n\n\"What's old?\" he said. \"Don't worry, you don't look a day over fifty.\"\n\n\"I'm serious, Jeff. I mean, do I look middle-aged?\"\n\n\"Not to me you don't. But why the concern all of a sudden?\"\n\nI told him what had happened. \"This is the first time I've been asked out by anyone over forty.\"\n\n\"Think of it as a milestone,\" he said, giving me his trademark wink.\n\nA few weeks later I heard through the grapevine that my erstwhile suitor was known to show up at practically every social gathering in town that included foreigners. He went to choir rehearsals, though he couldn't sing. He went to the international dances, though he couldn't dance. And he went to the monthly meetings of the Tokyo Adventure Club, though one could safely presume he had no interest in rock-climbing. What brought him to all these events, I was told, was his endless appetite for picking up (or trying to pick up) young women. I felt a little better after hearing that.\n\n### **6**\n\nDecember brought with it an earthquake rumour that swept through the entire gaijin community of Tokyo, and it brought Tyler Bigley to Esther House. In time I would find myself wishing that Tyler had been the rumour and the earthquake a reality. But more on that later.\n\nIt started with a short newspaper article and a bulletin on the English language news. There was a geologist, some maverick whose alleged predictions of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake had fallen on deaf ears (why do these clairvoyant types always come out of the woodwork _after_ the fact?), and whose seismographic equipment and sixth sense now pointed to the \"great likelihood\" of an earthquake in Tokyo on December third or fourth. The rumour flew from gaijin to gaijin and by the first of the month panic reigned.\n\nAdvice was passed along, getting progressively distorted as in a game of telephone: store up on water, store up on water and juices, keep two weeks' supply of liquids in a safe place away from your home, pack your bags and leave the city. Sylvana, ever the believer in intuitive predictions, was trying to convince her husband to take her to Kyoto during those two days.\n\nCuriously enough, none of my students had heard a thing \u2014 apparently the Japanese media hadn't breathed a word on the subject. When, for the sake of argument, I presented them with the evidence, they looked bored and not in the least bit alarmed. \"We've lived through many earthquakes and we've lived through many rumours,\" was how one of them put it to me.\n\nDecember third came and went, as did the fourth, without incident except for Tyler's appearance on the scene. Sitting at my desk the evening Tokyo was slated to cave in, I heard some crashing noises coming from the room next to mine on the left, which had been vacant since the time I moved in. The next evening, and the next, it was the same. Boom, blam, blong, as if someone was being axe-murdered in there, though I couldn't hear any voices. On the following night the noises started later, after I'd already curled up under the covers. I clambered out of bed and knocked on the door of room six. The door swung open and there stood a short but muscular man, the sort detective writers would call swarthy, all disheveled and sweating like a pig, pantingly introducing himself as Tyler Bigley from Australia. \"Sorry about the noise,\" he said, wiping his forehead. \"No worries, it's just me doing my exercises.\" He pointed to a barbell and some weights in back of him.\n\nA couple of nights later I was compelled to knock again. \"No worries, I'll stop if it's bothering you,\" he said cheerfully. But the following night he was at it again. Pretty soon he began cranking up his stereo as he worked out. \"Tyler, it's midnight, could you please do your exercises earlier?\" I asked him in exasperation. \"Now don't start getting all worked up,\" he said, cheerfully as ever. \"No worries, I'll try to be quieter.\" And so on.\n\nCoinciding with his arrival, cigarette butts began appearing mysteriously on the communal dirt pathway, directly below the window of his room. This bothered Susan in particular.\n\n\"Tyler,\" I heard her confront him once, \"Have you been throwing your cigarette butts out your window?\"\n\n\"Maybe once or twice,\" he answered, breaking into a cackle.\n\n\"Why don't you just use an ashtray?\"\n\n\"Well,\" he said sheepishly, \"Sumiko \u2014 my girlfriend \u2014 has been on my back about smoking, y'know what I mean? She doesn't like the smell, so I've been smoking near my window and blowing the smoke outside. Must've accidentally dropped the butt a couple of times, heh heh. No worries, though, I'll try to be more careful about it.\"\n\nThe butts continued to accumulate below his window, and Susan continued to sweep them up. \"Could you _please_ use an ashtray?\" she would implore him periodically. \"No worries, I'll be quitting soon, so there won't be any more butts,\" he would say and let out his hyena laugh. The day a glowing butt fell on Susan's head, though, she dispensed with her customary tact.\n\n\"Tyler,\" she yelled upward, \"will you come down here this minute and throw out your filthy cigarette?\" After that he took to having his smokes in the communal bathroom, and his girlfriend was never the wiser.\n\nJust like Tyler, Sumiko became known to me by sound before sight. About a week after Tyler moved in I found myself listening in on a classic pre-feminist-era sex act, from foreplay (thirty seconds) to intercourse (three minutes of metronomic thumping interspersed with an occasional \"Tyyyylller ...\" drawled out theatrically by a breathy female voice) to afterglow (\"That was great, Sumiko, heh heh\"). All this came through my useless wall in hi-fi realism.\n\nThis sequence, I learned over the ensuing weeks, never deviated by as much as a second or a breath \u2014 as if they were rehearsing a movie scene, trying to get it just right under the scrutiny of a fussbudget director. Even the background music, a lusty Kate Bush number, was always the same. \"I know they're winding down when the chorus kicks in for the third time,\" Jessie joked. And when they weren't copulating, they were arguing. \"Tyler!\" Sumiko would scream. \"If you don't change, I can't marry you!\" As often as not she would burst into tears, and as often as not their fights would continue through the night while I stuffed my ears with cotton and vainly tried to sleep. \"Face it, Sumiko,\" I heard him tell her once, \"You're just not the intellectual type.\" I hoped, for the sake of Australian women, that _his_ type was a dying breed.\n\nLate one evening, while listening in on a particularly vitriolic argument between Tyler and Sumiko, I got a call from Joel. I described my living situation to him with as much humour as I could manage, but felt something weakening inside me.\n\n\"Joel,\" I asked cautiously, \"How would you feel if I were to come back?\"\n\n\"Like, when?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know, maybe in time for the holidays ...\"\n\n\"Seems like you're not too happy in Japan,\" he said after a pause.\n\n\"It's not that, exactly. I mean, it's been interesting from the start, I've enjoyed learning the language and getting to know the people, but nothing really _spectacular_ has happened, and the gaijin house is driving me insane. It's not what I came to Japan for.\"\n\n\"Maybe you haven't been getting enough nookie,\" he suggested.\n\n\"Joel, we don't _all_ need it as much as you do.\"\n\nI was disgusted by my own spinelessness. So many times I'd tried to leave this man, going off to Banff the first time, and when that didn't work, to Los Angeles. If even Japan wasn't far enough, then what was left? Mars, perhaps? At least a year, I'd told myself when planning the trip. Would I end up bailing out once again, adding another half-finished project to my long list?\n\nWe left the question hanging. But I didn't seem to be packing my bags, and on Christmas day I was still in Tokyo. The owner of Esther House gave us all the same present, an abridged New Testament translated into Japanese and bound in grey leather. Word had it that he was a devout Christian, and no doubt he selected his gift with the idea that it would allow us to kill two birds with one stone: improve our Japanese and get back onto the right path.\n\nSusan and Mark had a party in their room, a pot-luck dinner with lots of gourmet cheeses and wines and not a Japanese dish in sight. Jessie gave us a drunken rendition of a song she and Mark had composed, \"I've Got The Gaijin Blues,\" accompanied by Mark's folksy strumming. When I jokingly said _itadakimasu_ before starting on my food, Jessie shot me a baleful look, as if to say \"Just today, let's forget where we are, OK?\" The mood of the party wasn't entirely to my liking but it was better than the alternative, sitting alone in my room, and better still than the other alternative, slinking back home to Joel in defeat. I had the sense of having escaped a great danger.\n\n### **7**\n\nWith the Japanese new year just around the corner, classrooms \u2014 especially those where housewives predominated \u2014 started to buzz with talk of the preparations for Shogatsu. Straining to get their words right, students told me of the rigours of preparing the holiday foods collectively known as _o-sechi_. Some of these foods, such as the _mochi_ rice-cakes, could be prepared in advance and preserved. Older students waxed sentimental about the good old days before the advent of _mochi_ -making machines, when people had to use their own strength to pound the rice. They swore that hand-pounded _mochi_ were much tastier than the machine-made variety.\n\n\"How you make fruitcake?\" or \"How you make turkey stuffing?\" they would ask me, surprised when I told them that there were as many versions of these recipes as there were cooks. Shogatsu recipes, it seemed, were a lot more standardized. There was some variance from region to region (\"Osaka way\" or \"Tohoku style\"), but almost no person-to-person variation within one region.\n\n\" ... then you must slice carrots diagonal way,\" a student would explain to me, \"add _shoyu_ and _mirin_ , three cup and one cup, and finally half cup _wakame_.\"\n\n\"Have you ever tried it with leeks?\" I would venture, thinking that leeks might make a tasty addition to the mixture she'd described.\n\n\"Oh no,\" she'd answer soberly. \"That is _not_ the way to make ...\"\n\nAlthough I wasn't particularly sentimental about this time of year (neither Chanukah nor Christmas having been properly stamped into my psyche), the threat of holiday loneliness loomed large. Through the gaijin grapevine, I heard that an English school called HSC (High Speed Conversation) was holding a week-long intensive course at a resort near Mount Fuji. Figuring that working through the holidays would be the best antidote to self-pity, I offered my teaching services to the school, and was told that I would have to undergo a day of training at HSC's Tokyo headquarters.\n\nOut of the eighteen of us who showed up for the training, fifteen, we were told, would be selected as teachers. Ninety students had registered for the course, and each teacher would be in charge of a group of six. The course's brainchild, Mr. Matsumoto, was a short, thick-set man who continually clasped and wrung his hands in what appeared to be an effort to rid himself of nervous energy. He handed out the course materials, asking us in turn to read aloud from the introductory comments: \" ... Japanese are fundamentally serious people. If they spend seven days pleasantly and look happy, they will conclude this is not a good school. On the other hand, if all students look exhausted at the end of each day, they will regard the school as excellent ... Though I am sure you have a good teaching method of your own, in this school you are requested to teach your students under OUR ways instead of YOUR ways. I, as a man in charge of this course, will show you our method ...\"\n\nWith a pained look on his face, as though in anticipation of our stupidity, Mr. Matsumoto told us about the programs main selling point, a technique called stopwatch drilling. Using a stopwatch, teachers were supposed to ask sixty seconds' worth of rapid-fire questions to each student in their group. The students were required to answer in full sentences that precisely matched \u2014 \"precisely\" was the key, he stressed \u2014 the teacher's sequence of words. The object was to get through as many question-answer pairs as possible within the sixty seconds. A week of this sort of drilling, he asserted, would make the students fluent in English.\n\nWe spent the morning practicing with each other, I and a British woman called Julie exchanging glances when things got particularly amusing.\n\n\"John, did your father buy a boat yesterday afternoon?\"\n\n\"Yes, Bruce, my father bought a boat yesterday afternoon.\"\n\n\"John, did your brother buy a paperback book at the auction last week?\"\n\n\"No, Bruce, my brother didn't buy a book at the auction last week.\"\n\n\"John, did your \u2014\"\n\n\"Stop!\" Mr. Matsumoto barked. \"Bruce, why didn't you correct John?\"\n\n\"Correct him?\"\n\n\" _Yes_ , Bruce,\" he said with a smirk. \"John, do _you_ know what your mistake was?\"\n\n\"Uh ... I didn't repeat 'paperback'?\"\n\n\"That's _right_ , John. Did you hear that, Bruce? Exact repetition, that's the key \u2014 haven't I told you already? Are you deaf?\"\n\n\"Thoroughly unpleasant, isn't he?\" Julie whispered to me.\n\nLater in the morning, John once again forgot to correct his partner's inaccurate answer. Mr. Matsumoto marched up to him, grabbed his shoulder and shook it back and forth several times. For a split-second John looked confused, then he turned to face Mr. Matsumoto squarely.\n\n\"Nobody,\" he said, his voice shaking, \"touches me that way.\" With that, he got up from his chair and walked out of the room. In quick succession, two other trainees followed suit, the rest of us staring dumbly at their departing backs. \"So much for the selection process,\" somebody muttered.\n\nDuring the afternoon, we got to practice stopwatch drilling with volunteers whom Mr. Matsumoto had rounded up from among the office workers. He gave them felt pens and nametags, and told them what names they were to use. \"Akira, you're Art. Kaoru, you're Karen. Joji, you're George. And you, Kokiji \u2014\" he pointed to a man of at least seventy who, his body racked with Parkinsonian tremors, was trying to lower himself onto his chair \" \u2014 you're Cocks.\"\n\nI kept my head down, laughter pressing against my ribcage, while Mr. Matsumoto spelled out C-O-C-K-S to Mr. Kokiji. I didn't dare look at Julie, whose turn it now was to do the drilling.\n\n\"Karen, did you bake a cake for your mother last week?\"\n\n\"No, Julie, I didn't bake a cake for my mother last week.\"\n\n\"Cocks, did you watch the news on television last night?\"\n\n\"Yes, ah, yes, ah, ah ...\" Kokiji answered in a gravelly voice, then looked around in all directions, as though trying to figure out where he was.\n\n\"Ask the question again,\" Mr. Matsumoto hissed. Julie looked from him to Kokiji uncertainly. \" _Now_.\"\n\n\"Cocks \u2014\"\n\nIt was too much for me, and I let out a giggle.\n\nMr. Matsumoto wheeled around to face me. \"Is there anything you find amusing?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said automatically. \"I just \u2014\"\n\n\"Just pay attention to the training,\" he snapped, and would no doubt have dismissed me had there been more than fifteen of us left.\n\nAnother feature of the program was the sentence contest, in which students had five minutes to write down as many sentences as they could think of on a given topic. \"Long sentence not important,\" Mr. Matsumoto instructed. \"Correct sentence important.\" To demonstrate the technique, he told our group of volunteer students to write on the subject of \"my family,\" set his stopwatch to five minutes, and yelled \"Go!\" The students began scribbling furiously \u2014 all except for Cocks, who was putting all his effort into gripping his pen tightly enough so that it wouldn't slip out of his hand.\n\nWhen the five minutes were up, the students took turns reading out what they'd written. Some of them had made the mistake of being too ambitious, and had come up with such sentences as \"My little sister is very cute, although she has temper and sometimes makes my father angry.\"\n\n\"No points, no points,\" Mr. Matsumoto would cut in, clearly pleased at the opportunity to show off his English knowledge. \"You forgot to write 'a' before 'temper,' so no points.\"\n\nThe winner was George, who was no more proficient in English than any of the others but had obviously caught on to the system. \"Very good, George,\" Mr. Matsumoto beamed. \"Twelve points, no mistakes. Will you read it again, so the other students can learn?\"\n\n\"I have a brother,\" George began. \"I have a sister. My parents live in Kanagawa. My father works hard. My mother likes to cook. My brother likes to drive. My sister likes to read. I like to eat. I work at HSC. I am poor at English. My sister is good at English. My brother has a girlfriend.\"\n\nThe following week we all convened at the HSC resort, which was perched atop a hill overlooking the town of Fujinomiya. Mount Fuji loomed large and majestic some five miles away, sometimes shrouded in mist, sometimes naked in its snow-capped symmetry. The winter air was crisp and bracing, its pine-scented freshness a reminder of everything I was missing by living in a big city.\n\nTeaching the course turned out to be quite painless, since we no longer had Mr. Matsumoto breathing down our necks and flying into a rage every time we slipped up. The students were forbidden to use dictionaries during classes (\"Dictionaries are a clutch,\" Mr. Matsumoto insisted), and we were supposed to reprimand them if we caught them speaking or reading Japanese, which of course we never did. Every day, a student from each class was assigned meal duty, which meant setting the table before each meal and initiating the verbal sequence that had to take place before we could start eating.\n\n\"Are we ready?\"\n\n\"Yes!\"\n\n\"Then let's begin.\"\n\nI'd have expected to hear a snicker or two, but the students were surprisingly cooperative, both at meals and during the stopwatch drills. I couldn't help wondering why ninety adults of apparently sound mind would have elected to spend the equivalent of $2,000 for such a tense, highly regimented week. This was Shogatsu, after all, the most important holiday of the year.\n\nSome of the students, it turned out, had been sent by their companies (\" _Shiyo ga nai_ ,\" they sighed to me), but many had come of their own accord. It wasn't that they didn't like to celebrate Shogatsu, it was simply that they liked studying English even more. And some of the unmarried students hinted that they had other reasons for enrolling in the course.\n\nBy the end of the week, the students were no more fluent in English than they had been on the first day \u2014 some, in fact, got lower scores on their proficiency tests on the last day than on the first \u2014 and only one couple had formed. But I heard not a word of complaint.\n\nA couple of hours before we were due to return to Tokyo, Mr. Matsumoto had us assemble in the teachers' lounge for a final meeting.\n\n\"Last night I gave a questionnaire to all the students,\" he told us. \"They filled it out and gave it back to me this morning.\" He handed us each a complete set of questionnaires and told us to study them carefully.\n\n\"Look carefully at question three, 'What was your favourite part of the course?' and question five, 'Do you plan to take this course again next year?' I think you'll be surprised by the answers.\"\n\nSure enough, the majority of students said they intended to return, and almost all of them gave top marks to the stopwatch drills. The drills were the backbone of the course, its gimmick and selling point, so it was understandable that the students should wish to justify their questionably spent money by giving them accolades. It was harder to understand why so many of them planned to take the course again. Could they possibly be unaware that they hadn't made one iota of progress during the week?\n\n\"Now we will calculate the percentage,\" Mr. Matsumoto said. \"What is the total number of students?\"\n\n\"Ninety,\" we replied in chorus.\n\n\"And how many of them said they plan to come back?\" A few teachers started counting.\n\n\"Fifty-six,\" someone said after a few moments.\n\n\"You see, you see,\" he said excitedly, \"Fifty-six students say they want to come back. Fifty-six students \u2014 that's more than sixty percent.\" He brandished a questionnaire and waved it in the air. \"And what did ninety percent of the students say they liked best?\"\n\nWe stared at him in silence.\n\n\"Answer me!\" he barked. \"I said, what did ninety percent of the students say they liked best?\"\n\n\"Stopwatch drills.\"\n\n\"Yes, that's right,\" he said triumphantly. \"During the training session, some of you seemed to think the stopwatch drills were not a good method. Well, the students say it's the best part of the course. It proves my point, doesn't it?\"\n\nThe only thing it proved to me was that in Japan, like anywhere else, there was a sucker born every minute.\n\nI returned to the city later that day, to the same old room, the same old neighbourhood, the same old housemates, students and friends that I'd left a week before. But something had changed. It wasn't that I felt happy or even content \u2014 there was still a gaping hole in my life, waiting to be filled by I wasn't quite sure what \u2014 but that, inexplicably enough, Tokyo now felt like home.\n\n## **A CHANGE OF SEASON**\n\n\"There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death.\"\n\n_Fran Lebowitz_\n\n### **1**\n\nIt was always a challenge to pump some life into my business classes, whose participants suffered not only from timidity but from exhaustion. I struck gold during my first IHI class after the new year, when I brought up the subject of the American legal system. The normally reserved group of salesmen exploded into sentence fragments.\n\n\"I hear story, one man sue his mother!\"\n\n\"Statistics in newspaper say in America fifteen times as many lawyers, how you say, each capital \u2014\"\n\n\"Per capita.\"\n\n\"\u2014 per capita as in Japan.\"\n\n\"If man in America have accident, he pretend he sick to get the money from insurance company. I hear this story from American teacher. In Canada is same?\"\n\nIt was rare to see students so excited, and I didn't want to stop the flow by reminding them of verb tenses and articles. They were all very young, too young to look as haggard as they did, and clearly they lacked sleep even more than English conversation skills. But orders were orders, and under their boss's watchful eye they filed meekly into the conference room every Wednesday evening for their two hours of English instruction. Under my tutelage they were expected to lose their peach-fuzz and acquire \"international\" polish. For my part, I considered the class a success if they managed to stay awake.\n\n\"Has an IHI employee ever sued the company?\" I asked, knowing full well how unthinkable this was.\n\n\"Sue company is like sue father!\"\n\n\"How about insurance? Have any of you collected insurance money for, say, stolen property or repairs after a car accident?\"\n\n\"I had small car accident just few months ago,\" Kawai-san said. He was a soft-spoken man with a passion for moving vehicles, and the envy of the other students because he owned not only a car but a motorboat, which he kept in his parents' garage.\n\n\"It was other driver's fault, I think,\" he went on. \"He bump into my car from behind. Both of us go outside and look at damage. I estimate about \u00a540,000, so I told him and he pay me right away. No lawyer, no insurance company, just he pay me directly. When I got car fixed it was costing \u00a545,000. I had his phone number, so I thought maybe I call him, but then I think, why make so complicated? So I lost \u00a55,000, not so terrible.\"\n\n\"Did the other driver actually have insurance?\" I asked him.\n\n\"Of course. But probably he decide not necessary to use. Japanese system ...\" he hesitated. \"I think maybe Japanese system is better, not so much people care about exact money, but easier system than in America.\" He went on to explain that while ordinary Japanese citizens did sometimes use lawyers, they tended to view them as a last rather than a first resort.\n\nThe Japanese reluctance to litigate is reflected in the discrepancy between the number of former law students (many) and the number of practicing lawyers (very few). The great majority of law students go on to become salarymen, just like everyone else, or civil servants or entrepreneurs. Lawyers are respected but not much needed in a society where people are more intent on avoiding conflict than on exercising their rights. If a thief is apprehended, he is just as likely to be given a stern lecture as a fine or prison sentence. It is assumed that citizens are cooperative, self-monitoring, repentant if they behave badly.\n\nEven the most devoted Japan-bashers among my compatriots couldn't help being impressed with some of the things that happened \u2014 or didn't happen \u2014 in Japan. Where else in the world could you leave your bicycle unlocked near the train station, as I did morning after morning, and count on finding it intact when you got back in the evening? Where else, if you found a cheque lying on the street and were kind enough to return it to its owner, would you be given a reward of five to fifteen percent of the cheque's value? (This is still very much a cash society, I learned, and apparently the Japanese haven't yet caught on to the idea that a cheque can be cancelled or destroyed without anybody losing money or face.) And where else could you borrow your train-fare from the man in the police-box, who would ask you to kindly return it the next time you were in the neighbourhood?\n\nQuite understandably, the Japanese were proud of their honesty, of the awesome safety record of even their largest cities. One way of bringing a class discussion to a grinding halt was to ask my students if they'd ever been mugged, robbed or otherwise harassed. Even the oldest students had nothing to contribute to this sort of conversation. Sometimes their refusal to believe there could be a bad apple in their midst was carried to extremes. When I told a group of students about having had my wallet stolen on the Yamanote train, they insisted, after they'd recovered from the shock, that \"it had to be a Korean.\"\n\nAgainst Arai-san's sing-song protestations, I'd been slowly and steadily whittling down my teaching hours at BE. I was now down to Mondays and Fridays, and felt as though a weight had been lifted from my shoulders, my only regret being that I was no longer teaching Hitomi's Wednesday morning class. Shortly after classes resumed in January she gave me a call.\n\n\"We members of class had meeting together,\" she told me in her earnest way, \"and decided we want to have conversation lesson from you. Our idea is you teach us once a month, every time in different house. We are seven members want to study, so we pay you three-thousand yen each person for two-hour lesson. Is OK for you?\"\n\nWas it OK for me? Close to $200 for a couple of hours of chatting with my favourite students and a chance to visit their homes? It was absurdly generous, and I told her so. She said she'd discuss the matter with the others and get back to me. A couple of days later she called again.\n\n\"We members of class had another meeting,\" she said, \"and we thought, you so honest because not wanting to charge too much money. We very impressed, so we decided to pay you more. We pay \u00a53,500 each instead of \u00a53,000. Is OK for you?\"\n\nAlthough they took their own honesty for granted, they insisted on rewarding me for mine. There was nothing I could say or do to change their minds, short of refusing to teach them. We held the first class in Hitomi's house, and it was much more like a party than a lesson. For many of the women, it was the first time they would be speaking English in a room that didn't have blackboards and desks, and they were clearly excited about it. They wanted nothing to do with textbooks or grammar drills \u2014 only free conversation. And these women liked to talk. Ayumi let off some steam about her workaholic husband, Sachiko complained about her errant teenage son, and the others were eager to commiserate and offer suggestions. The women all agreed that this was a marvellous way to learn English. After the lesson was over, Hitomi served us a festive lunch of sushi, homemade crab-cakes and _gomadofu_ , a sesame-based tofu dish I'd once told her I liked. Then it was fruit, chocolates and steaming coffee, and another two hours of gossiping with the ladies that amounted to a Japanese lesson for me. For this I was getting paid?\n\n### **2**\n\n_If instrument cannot perform this function correctly_ , I remembered reading in the instruction manual of my Roland drum machine, _it is probably due to operator idiocy_. This had been my first glimpse into the world of Japanese English, some ten years before I first set foot in Japan. As I made my way through Tokyo it popped up at every turn, this talent for coming up with howlers when ordinary mistakes would have done just as well. It was hard to fathom how such names as Calpis (a carbonated beverage which no self-respecting gaijin would drink after saying the word out loud), Pocky pretzels or Creap coffee whitener could have been dreamed up by Japanese marketing moguls, time and again, without conscious intent. And when I stumbled upon street-signs like \"Sauce with the Oyster\" \u2014 not a restaurant, of course, but a men's clothing store \u2014 or \"PMS\" (short for Pulse Music System), I wondered if the whole Japanese-English phenomenon hadn't been masterminded by some zany gaijin who was having a good laugh at Tokyo's expense.\n\nChewing gum wrappers promised peace of mind, pretzel boxes a cheerful disposition, and soft-drink cans the fountain of youth, all in earnestly florid English. When I joked about these blurbs to my Japanese friends, they insisted that it wasn't the words but the _feeling_ that mattered. It was beside the point, they explained, that \"some afternoon, a leaf invited me to a path of the wood\" had little to do with vanilla-wafer cookies. But the \"feeling\" contained in the inscription on a box of Koeda chocolate-sticks eluded me as thoroughly as its madcap humour eluded my friends.\n\n\"A lovely and tiny twig, Koeda, is in the forest. The sentimental taste a heroine's treasured chocolates born is cozy for the heroines in the town ... now another heroine comes out. Listen! ... A lovely and Koeda is always the love of the heroine. Now another heroine comes to the forest. The sentimental taste is cozy for the heroines in the town. Koeda is a tiny twig, Koeda is a heroine's treasured chocolate born in the forest.\"\n\nIn their translations of English into their own language, Japanese copywriters are no less inventive. The early James Bond movie \"Dr. No\" was apparently introduced to Japanese audiences as _O-ishasan Wa Shiranai_ , \"The Doctor Doesn't Know,\" with hardly a viewer knowing the difference. More recently, the movie \"Don't Kid Yourself\" was released in Japan as _Amaeru-na_ , meaning \"don't act like a spoiled child.\" I figured that if subtitles were translated with the same flair, it was hardly surprising that the same movie provoked such different reactions in Japanese and Western audiences.\n\nOne phenomenon that older Japanese grumble out but nobody seems able to control is the influx of English words into their language. This is easy enough to understand when there is no exact Japanese equivalent for a word, as with _buzzah_ (buzzer), _shiriaru_ (cereal) or _torendii_ (trendy). But the incorporation of English extends far beyond such functional adaptations. Listening to Miki and her friends talking to each other in Japanese, I was more likely to hear \"drive\" than _unten_ , \"nervous\" than _kincho_ , \"gorgeous\" than _goka_ , even though the Japanese words were perfectly capable of conveying the desired meaning. Here again, they explained to me, it was in their \"feeling\" that English words had the edge \u2014 they were moodier, more evocative than their Japanese counterparts. While _unten_ simply meant driving, \"drive\" called up images of cruising along a winding road of an early Sunday afternoon, on the way to meet a lover under the shade of an acacia tree ...\n\nNot satisfied, apparently, with merely borrowing English words, the Japanese never tire of inventing new ones. It was only when I made her look into her dictionary that Miki acknowledged, with real surprise, that \"skin-ship\" and \"womanship\" were not part of the English language. \"But \"friendship\" real English word, _neh?_ \" she asked hopefully, disillusioned that expressions she'd assumed to be Western were in fact home-grown. Another Japanese English speaker was disappointed when I drew a blank at his sentence, \"you must dress according to TPO.\" He'd been sure that this acronym for \"time, place, occasion\" was a standard term in American business circles.\n\nIn all likelihood, the linguistic playfulness with which the Japanese use English stems from the nature of their own language. Like the flecks of glass in a kaleidoscope, Chinese characters can be tossed around into an almost limitless number of combinations. This has led to a proliferation of words that are contractions of other, more basic words. For example, the phrase _shobai no saino_ (talent for business) can be shortened to _shosai_ , made up of the first characters of each constituent word. From _chokusetsu_ (direct) and _honyaku_ (translation) comes _chokuyaku_ , \"direct translation.\" Coined in the same spirit is the word _sekuhara_ , hilarious to my Western ears but excusable if one considers that it would take at least ten syllables to articulate \"sexual harassment\" in Japanese.\n\nWhoever said that the Japanese have an underdeveloped sense of humour was obviously not familiar with some of their more outlandish linguistic concoctions. An amalgamation of _mado_ (window), _kiwa_ (edge), and _zoku_ (tribe), _madogiwazoku_ , or \"window-edge tribe,\" refers to employees who, no longer deemed useful at the office, are given a desk near the window, often without a telephone, from which they can stare out at the scenery. Similarly, the word _hotaruzoku_ , \"firefly tribe,\" has been created to describe those husbands who are forbidden by their wives to smoke anywhere in the house except on the balcony.\n\nThrough trial and a couple of embarrassing errors, I discovered that the tendency to use milder and milder words to avoid offending minority groups (as in \"coloured people\" to \"negroes\" to \"blacks\" to \"people of colour\") is just as evident in Japanese as it is in English. A good example of this is the evolution of the word \"blind.\" Though it was once correct to refer to blind people as _mekura_ (literally \"dark-eyed\"), the word came to sound harsh and was supplanted by the more neutral _me ga mienai_ , meaning \" _eyes_ can't see,\" which gave way to the still less objectionable _me ga fujiyu_ , \"eyes are unfree.\" The implication seems to be that what is unfree today might become free in the future \u2014 a hopeful sentiment, which unfortunately does little to alter the reality of being unable to see.\n\nSpring was in the air and my students were still tongue-tied. In an effort to elicit some strong opinions, I asked the more advanced classes to write short essays in letters-to-the-editor style. The topic could be anything, I told them, as long as it was a complaint of some kind. We would submit the best letters \u2014 pseudonymously, if they wished \u2014 to the English _Yomiuri_ , the slim daily newspaper where Mark had made his mark. That seemed to inspire them. An engineer with a passion for wine wrote of being ashamed that the Japanese followed trends rather than good taste in their choice of wines. \"Why can't we Japanese people enjoy the feeling of quaffing true spirit wine ...\" An office worker complained that graffiti were threatening to ruin the face of Tokyo. \"On a date with your boyfriend,\" she wrote, \"you are trying to kiss each other with fresh feeling. In such a time, if you find 'fuck you' on wall you are leaning against, what will become to your kiss, easy to be break new loving time?\" A student who was engaged to a single mother wrote against the ostracism of single parents in Japan, ending with some thoughts on his own upcoming marriage: \"I am looking forward to the happy perplexings with new family, little peaceful everyday but also shocking maybe, and man is not give up easily.\" He had a glorious future as a copywriter for Koeda, if only he knew it.\n\nMy own struggles with the Japanese language were giving me a measure of sympathy for my students' off-the-wall efforts. I would scan through my electronic dictionary and find a dozen Chinese-character words that were all pronounced _kosei:_ fairness, offensive, correction, rehabilitation, public welfare, future generation, junior pupils, fixed star, proofreading, constitution, composition, hardness ...\n\nPeople whistled in admiration when I used the Japanese words for myopia or subconscious, though I tried to explain to them that anybody could look up a complicated word in the dictionary, that the real challenge of Japanese lay in finding the appropriate terms for everyday concepts such as coming, going, taking, getting, and especially giving and receiving. The characteristically Japanese psychology of duty and propriety is reflected in the complexity of the language centred around the exchange of favours. Not only are there different verbs for giving and receiving depending on whether the exchange is with a superior, an equal or an inferior, but the act of giving or receiving something neutral or negative, such as an injection or a parking ticket, requires still another set of verbs. So while I had no trouble describing the symtoms of a chest cold in Japanese, I had to think long and hard before asking Hitomi for a second helping of herbed potatoes. The choices were daunting: May I have some more potatoes? Might I get you to serve me some more potatoes? I am sorry to be causing trouble, but would you allow me to humbly receive some more potatoes?\n\nAfter five months in Tokyo, I was becoming proficient at figuring out the japanized pronunciations of English words. I could guess, for example, that the words floor, club and drum would turn into _furoah, kurabu_ and _doramu_. But the reverse \u2014 tracing japanized words back to their source \u2014 was still giving me trouble. I often found myself caught in tug-of-war conversations due to my inability to understand what the Japanese presumed was my own language.\n\n\"Do you have a hakk'su at home?\"\n\n\"A what?\"\n\n\"Hakk'su, hakk'su, you know hakk'su?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, I don't understand \u2014\"\n\n\"You don't know hakk'su?\"\n\n\"I don't think so, no.\"\n\n\"You never hear about hakk'su machine?\"\n\n\"Oh, you mean a _fax_ machine? No, I don't have one.\"\n\nOn one occasion, my inability to understand a japanized pronunciation prevented what could have been a tense confrontation with a student. It was during the first session of an intensive workshop I'd reluctantly agreed to teach for four Saturdays in February. Sitting in the front row of the classroom was an apple-cheeked woman of about twenty, staring gauzily at me and occasionally breaking out into a beatific half-smile. When it was her turn to introduce herself to the class, she stood up shakily and bowed in several directions. \"My name is Mayumi,\" she said, the smile never leaving her lips, \"and I can't see very well \u2014 in fact, I'm almost blind. I studied history and German language in university, and my favourite is, ah ... _Hit_ torah!\"\n\nThe other students looked uneasy.\n\nThe following lesson she asked me point blank: \"You like _Hit_ torah?\" I still didn't know what she was talking about. Then it came to me: history, German ... Though I was tempted to walk right out of the room, I hung on until the end of the month, watching the other students cringe when Mayumi approached them, barely able to conceal my own distaste for her, the smiling young woman with the dark inner landscape.\n\n### **3**\n\nWeather-wise, the winter was turning out to be much more pleasant than I'd expected. The bitter cold my students loved to complain about didn't rate a mention by my Canadian standards. The temperature never dropped below freezing, not even in the middle of the night, and the sun shone relentlessly. Joel had faded to a distant memory, Canada was as remote as the North Star, and I was exactly where I wanted to be, under Tokyo's brilliant blue sky, inhaling its crisp mid-winter air.\n\nI'd been accepted into an upper-level Japanese course at the Tsuda language institute. Since half the classes were to be given by teachers-in-training, the six-month program was free of charge. A comparable course taught by full-fledged teachers might have cost about $1,000. In Tokyo, I was beginning to suspect, anything was possible if you kept your ear to the ground. The students hailed from all parts of the world and were a particularly lively group, tossing up jokes and questions irreverently \u2014 just the sort of students I would have wanted in my own classes. \"Whazzat word mean?\" \"Is there a Japanese equivalent to 'get off my case'?\" \"Do native speakers _really_ use the causative-passive form?\" The trainees, though, were more flustered than pleased by our merriment. Jokes and questions derailed them from their meticulously crafted lesson plans, and they didn't seem too comfortable ad-libbing.\n\nEspecially entertaining in our group was Aviva, an Israeli woman who ran a trading business with her husband. I'd sometimes wondered how a Japanese would fare in Israel, a country where yes means yes and no means no, where not speaking your mind means not having a mind. Predictably, Aviva and her husband were having hilarious difficulties in Japan. \"When we first got here two years ago,\" she told us in her halting Japanese, \"we ran into one frustration after another. We'd be negotiating with some managers and they'd end the discussion with something like ' _chotto muzukashii desu ne ..._ ' So my husband and I would tell them, 'You say it's a little difficult, eh? Don't worry, even if it's a little difficult, I'm sure we can reach an agreement.' And they'd look at us as if we came from another planet.\"\n\nThen there was Joanne, a thirtyish woman from Vancouver who wore body-hugging clothes and long scarves that flapped behind her as she flounced into the classroom, always ten minutes late. Like me, she had a bit of a thing for the local men, but she was much more outspoken about it. \"Those sexy eyes,\" she would sigh to me. \"That smoldering look beneath the tight lids and droopy eyelashes ... Can't say I like their hands, though. Too spindly. Give me a large, coarse, tobacco-stained hand and I'm a happy woman.\" She had only two more months in Japan, and was determined to find herself a boy-toy for the remaining time. \"Trouble is,\" she said, \"they're so bloody timid, I feel like shaking them sometimes. I've lived in Spain, Italy, South America, London, you name it, and believe me, this is the only place where I've gotten such a wishy-washy response from the men.\" She told me about a man she'd met some weeks before, at an international food fair where she had a gig serving drinks. \"He wasn't hard to look at, let me tell you. You know the kind I mean? Smooth olive skin, piles of hair on his head, slit-eyes ... He seemed attracted to me, and we exchanged phone numbers. When I didn't hear from him after two weeks, I called and asked him if he wanted to meet me. He said yes, _aitai._ So I said OK, when? He kept repeating _aitai, aitai_ , but wouldn't give me a specific date. Too shy, he said. Can you believe it?\" But she wasn't about to abandon her quest. \"Let's you and me go hunting sometime,\" she suggested.\n\nAround this time, Esther House was given an extra shot of adrenaline with the arrival of Claire, a manic Frenchwoman who could not get through a complete sentence without breaking into peals of laughter. It was that rippling laugh of hers, even more than her fresh-looking skin and gamine haircut, that made her seem a good decade younger than her forty years. She'd lived in China, Thailand, India, Korea, never staying in any one place long enough to settle in, and unlike many other so-called free spirits, didn't appear to be running away from anything. \"If I'm struck by lightning tomorrow, hahahahaha,\" she told me in her fluent but slightly accented English, \" _je m'en fous_ , hahaha, it's fine with me. I've had such a _ball_ on this planet so far, I can't tell you how much fun it's been, hahahahahahaha.\" Such relentless good cheer would have been an irritant had it been anything less than authentic.\n\nSomehow she ferreted out my preoccupation with aging, and never missed an opportunity to tease me about it. \"Have you found a new wrinkle today?\" she would ask, poking me in the ribs. \"Did you say you were thirty-three? Or was it thirty-five or thirty-six?\"\n\n\"Do I _look_ thirty-six?\" I'd answer dispiritedly, falling right into her trap.\n\n\"Hahahahahahaha,\" she would gurgle. \"You're _so_ much fun to tease, hahaha. Anyway, what the hell difference does it make, how old you are? And what's the point of crying about it? _\u00c7a sert \u00e0 rien, n'est-ce-pas?_ Hahahahahaha ...\"\n\nShe'd come to Tokyo with a tall, baby-faced Swede named Fredrik, fifteen years her junior, who didn't seem to do much except look stunning. They'd met in Korea and were just friends, she claimed, though she seemed to stiffen when Jessie paid him more than routine amounts of attention.\n\nClaire was not about to tone down her exuberance in order to harmonize with her milieu. She tore up and down Shin-Midori street on her beat-up bicycle, making vroom-vroom noises as she rode, calling out to me at the top of her lungs when we crossed paths and taking great pleasure if she succeeded in embarrassing me.\n\n\"What about When-in-Rome?\" I asked her once.\n\n\" _Qu'est-ce-que \u00e7a veut dire, \u00e7a?_ \"\n\n\"You know, adapt to the local culture and all that?\"\n\n\" _Oui d'accord_ , in some countries I've tried to do that, like in Spain or Brazil, and I had a grand time. But this country is so full of dead soldiers \u2014 they need to see examples of people who are still _living_ , hahahahaha. We're all going to die anyways, might as well celebrate our turn on earth, _n'est-ce-pas?_ Hahahahahahahaha ...\"\n\nOne Sunday Claire knocked on my door and persuaded me to go to the _sento_ with her and Jessie. \"We're gonna have a _good_ time,\" she piped. I was a little apprehensive, fearing that Claires \"good time\" might jeopardize my reputation at the bathhouse, where I was a regular customer. Against my better judgment, I packed up my soap, shampoo and hairbrush and went along with them.\n\nAs soon as our clothes were off, Claire ran to the whirlpool and jumped in with a noisy splash. Jessie and I followed her in. Claire submerged herself in the foaming water, making gurgling noises and blowing bubbles, then popped up like a Jack-in-the-box, exploding with laughter. The Japanese bathers sat at the edge of the pool, averting their eyes, frozen with embarrassment. Claire went under again, spewing out a stream of water from her mouth when she resurfaced. She and Jessie started to splash each other, trading insults along with the water.\n\n\"You filthy Aussie!\"\n\n\"I'm from _New Zealand_ , you bloody Frenchwoman!\"\n\n\"Will you kindly tell me what the hell difference there is, hahahahaha?\"\n\nClaire looked mischievously in my direction, to see how I was taking it. As she started to throw some water at me, I got out of the whirlpool and headed for the showers. A few minutes later she and Jessie installed themselves under the shower-head next to mine and started to soap each other's backs, heedless of the shocked faces of the nearby women.\n\n\"Do you want me to wash your back?\" Claire asked me, all innocence and charm.\n\nI cursed myself for not having predicted this turn of events, and was sure that the owner of the _sento_ would ask us to never show our faces at his door again and preferably to leave the country.\n\nLater that evening Claire came up to my room, trying hard to look contrite.\n\n\" _Alors_ , hahaha, are you still mad at me or what?\"\n\n\"Come on,\" she poked me in the ribs when I didn't answer, \"it's not so serious. I'm sure none of the bathers died from the shock, hahahaha.\"\n\nIt was hard to stay mad at Claire, hard not to admire the strength of the life-force in her.\n\n\"Japan means nothing to you,\" I said finally, \"but it means something to me. You have no reason to adapt, but I do.\"\n\n\"If you think you can become one of them, you're fooling yourself _royalement_ \u2014\"\n\n\"There are things I want to learn from them, that's all. Like their patience, and their gentleness. I know you find their reserve intolerable, but \u2014\"\n\n\"Gentleness? Are you forgetting what these people did in Korea, in Nanking? It wasn't so long ago, you know.\"\n\nThat was a hard one to answer. I was surrounded with politeness and consideration, with warmth and curiosity behind the bashful facades. And yet I'd heard first-hand accounts, from a survivor of the Japanese occupation in China, of soldiers slicing babies' heads off while their mothers looked on. There was simply no way of reconciling such behaviour with what I saw around me every day, a courteous and peace-loving people who could be faulted for many things but not for their lack of kindness. I could only shrug my shoulders and drag out the old clich\u00e9 that war made swine out of pearls, monsters out of men.\n\nClaire and I shook hands, but I never did go back to the _sento_ with her, and eventually she stopped asking. Nor did Joanne and I ever go hunting that winter \u2014 I wasn't much of a hunter anyway, and Joanne seemed to have run out of ammunition.\n\n### **4**\n\nIf Japan is the cautious introvert of the Orient, its sunny extrovert is most surely Thailand. Thailand is to Japan what a belly laugh is to a titter, a deep kiss to a bow. People who are drawn to Japan (aside from those who are in it only for the money or the easy sexual conquests) tend to be reserved, reflective, intense in a muted sort of way, people who value solitude as much as social intercourse. Thailand's champions, on the other hand, are relaxed and expansive, comfortable in their own skin, and not, as a rule, overly driven. There were quite a number of gaijin of this type living in Tokyo. They thought the Japanese uptight and anal-retentive. As soon as their store of yen was replenished, they would head southwest for a week or two of psychic recuperation. I considered Jessie to be in this category.\n\n\"You'll love Thailand,\" she told me. \"The people there are so much more natural than the windup dolls who pass for people here. If you bump into somebody, you bump into them. None of this silly bowing and apologizing and _shitsurei_ this and _shitsurei_ that. I don't know how I ever get myself on the plane back to Tokyo after I've been down there.\"\n\nHot, friendly, noisy, lazy, smelly Thailand. Just out of the Bangkok airport, an ultra-modern affair that did little to prepare one for what the city was really like, I began almost immediately to cough. It was said that the pollution in Bangkok was so bad that if you wore white, it turned grey by the end of the day.\n\nI'd travelled in France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Israel, Mexico, and always knew at least a smattering of whatever language was being spoken \u2014 enough, at least, to order a meal, book a room or ask the bus driver for directions. But here in Bangkok, speeding along in a cab with a splintered front windshield, I experienced for the first time ever the sensation of being completely unable to communicate. I showed the cab driver the handwritten directions, courtesy of Valerie at Tokyu BE, to the Shanti Lodge in the northern part of the city. He shook his head and started to laugh. \"It's on Samsen Street,\" I offered. \"See here on my map? There it is, Samsen Street.\"\n\n\"Samsen samsen samsen samsen,\" he repeated.\n\nSome of the street signs were in English as well as in Thai, and I tried to follow our course on the map, though the driver kept making inexplicable turns which caused me to lose my place.\n\n\"Go right,\" I instructed at one intersection. \"I think you should go right here.\"\n\n\"Samsen samsen samsen samsen,\" he muttered while driving in circles.\n\nForty-five minutes later and no closer to our destination, I was starting to worry that the driver might not be as innocently confused as he appeared. Maybe he was plotting to wear me out and then take me to some deserted road where he would rob me, or worse. With mounting paranoia, I recalled Sylvana's incredulity that I would consider travelling smack in the middle of the Gulf War. Maybe this man was a hired guerilla ...\n\n\"Stop the cab and ask someone,\" I demanded. \"Ask, all right? _Ask_.\" Finally catching my meaning, he obediently got out of the car and consulted with a pedestrian, while I scolded myself for being so easily spooked.\n\nSome fifteen minutes later I was finally deposited at the Shanti, relieved enough not to care that I would be sleeping on the top bunk of a creaking bed, one of four such beds in the small room.\n\nThe next morning I woke up alert and ready for action. I had breakfast in the courtyard restaurant right outside the lodge, pleasantly shaded by lush greenery of all sorts. The young waitress, all smiles and droopy eyes, had to be summoned three times before she agreed to take my order. She leaned her body chummily against my shoulder while I pointed to the \"apple fritters\" entry on my menu. (Only local exotica for me in Thailand, I decided.)\n\nA thin man with very long and very straight hair was sitting alone at the table next to mine, with a pad of paper and a stack of envelopes in front of him. We made brief eye contact, after which he eased into a slow-motion smile.\n\n\"Where are you from?\" I asked.\n\n\"Holland,\" he said, the grin never leaving his face. \"You know,\" he drawled out after a long pause, \"yesterday I had an almost perfect day.\"\n\n\"How so?\"\n\n\"Well, I sat here all day long, doing nothing. No sightseeing, no shopping, nothing at all. The only thing I did all day was go to the mailbox to mail a letter. If I hadn't done that, it would have been a truly perfect day.\"\n\nSuch was Bangkok, as far as youngish Western visitors were concerned. Everywhere I turned I saw people who seemed to have been frozen in the late sixties, then thawed out a quarter-century later with their hippie looks and values intact. They were most concentrated on Khao San road, mecca of the tourist on a budget and reputedly one of Bangkok's prime drug-swapping zones. As I walked up the street and back down again, passing young women with flowing madras skirts and peace-sign earrings, gaunt young men with beadwork chokers and watery eyes, half-expecting to bump into Joni Mitchell, I was struck by how completely different a breed of malcontents were attracted to Thailand than to Japan.\n\nFor three days I wandered through the city, following the dictates of whim, taking the Chao Phraya express boat instead of the hot, smelly buses whenever I could, stopping at a streetside booth for a plate of richly spiced meat or vegetables whenever I felt hungry. It got so hot, in the middle of each day, that I threw common sense to the winds and allowed the vendors to put ice cubes in the beverages they served me, counting on my generally robust stomach to process the local water without incident.\n\nAnd so it happened that I found myself somewhere in the Wat Pho maze of chapels, gardens and temples, face to face with two young men wrapped in brilliant orange robes \u2014 monks, I presumed. They smiled. I smiled.\n\n\"Naw spik English,\" one of them said.\n\n\"Wheh you fom?\" said the other.\n\n\"Canada. But right now I'm living in Japan.\"\n\n\"Japan? Really? You spik Japaniss?\"\n\nAt my nod, both monks looked at each other excitedly, and the first one started talking to me in the meticulous Japanese of a diligent but unpracticed student. \"The two of us are currently learning Japanese,\" he stated. \"Is it all right if we practice with you?\"\n\nFor a moment I saw myself from a distance, and with a sense of the improbability of the situation \u2014 a large Canadian woman conversing in Japanese with two Thai monks under the scorching Bangkok sun \u2014 came that delicious upsurge of feeling, the Travel Orgasm, coursing through me from head to toe and then evaporating just as quickly as the other kind. This moment alone was worth the price of my plane ticket.\n\nWith engaging forthrightness, the monks told me that they had no spiritual aspirations whatever, that they were simply taking advantage of a system that provided free room and board to monks-in-training. Their real ambition was to go to Japan, work in an auto factory and make lots of money. I wished them good luck and continued on my way.\n\nAfter three days of pounding Bangkok's torrid pavements, Ko Samet island seemed the perfect place to spend the rest of my holiday. Just a few miles long and barely a mile wide, the island was said to have the whitest, softest sand in all the country, and to be less built up than its more famous sisters of Phuket and Ko Samui. The truth turned out to be somewhat less idyllic \u2014 the mounds of litter and ramshackle lodgings didn't quite add up to untarnished beauty, though the absence of any highrise structures was a welcome rest for my city-sated eyes.\n\nI decided upon the Naga resort as being the best value for the price, the romantic in me drawn to its wooden sleeping huts equipped with nothing but a mattress, mosquito netting and a naked bulb. After prepaying my fee for three nights' accommodation \u2014 about twenty dollars \u2014 I rushed to my hut, changed into my bathing suit and made a dash for the beach. No sooner had I settled on the hot white sand and closed my eyes than I felt a shadow upon me. \"Massage, chipp, massage. You wan massage? Chipp massage? Only sixty baht.\"\n\nI squinted upwards and saw a sarong-clad woman of about twenty. \"Sure,\" I told her, thinking that for three bucks I was game for anything.\n\nI didn't have a watch, so I couldn't be sure just how long she spent kneading my body, but I knew that the sun was still fairly high in the sky when she started, and had turned red and huge by the time she decided my time was up. She left me in a blissful stupor, already looking forward to repeating the exercise the following day, and the day after that.\n\nOnce again I felt a presence hovering over my roasting body.\n\n\"Are you stayink et the Naga?\" This time it was the voice of a man, a German by the sounds of it.\n\nHe sat down beside me and offered me a Thai cigarette, which I accepted in the spirit of what-the-hell-I'm-on-vacation, though it was so strong and bitter that I put it out almost immediately. His name was Max, and he worked for Lufthansa as a flight attendant. He'd been coming to the Naga for years. \"This year is kvite different from the other years,\" he sighed. \"I came here to get leyt, and all I've done so far is eat ice cream.\" I smiled noncommittally \u2014 even though he was a German, and so officially out of bounds for me, I allowed myself to entertain the idea that theoretically, at least, anything could happen.\n\nThe Naga was owned by a husband-and-wife team, the wife being a sturdy blonde from England who had created a most unusual life for herself: running a bustling resort on a tiny, blazing-hot island off the southeast coast of Thailand, making lots of babies and shouting orders to her Thai husband.\n\nIn the evening she held forth to her entourage of fascinated guests.\n\n\"How do you do it?\" someone asked admiringly. \"Live out here, light-years away from anything resembling your own culture? What if your husband were to \u2014\"\n\n\"If my husband were to die tomorrow ...\" she said cheerfully, while the man being discussed stood a few feet away tossing their young daughter in the air. \"Will you stop that!\" she yelled out at him, then turned back to face us. \"Well, I suppose I'd be upset for a while, but then I'd just get on with it.\"\n\n\"You'd probably have men buzzing around you in no time at all,\" someone offered.\n\n\"I don't know about that,\" she said, \"but I do know that I'm too damn busy to brood about things. That's what it's all about, I suppose \u2014 for me, anyway. Making your life crazy enough that it just _has_ to go on, no matter what. Anyone for a game of trivial pursuit?\"\n\nLater, when the crowd had thinned out to just Max, myself and a couple of others, she waxed nostalgic about the year she'd spent in Japan.\n\n\"The most erotic experience I ever had,\" she told us, \"was in Tokyo. I was seeing this Japanese man \u2014 he was engaged, you see, so it was strictly sex. He got together with his fianc\u00e9e every Tuesday, with another mistress every Wednesday and with me every Thursday. The schedule never varied. We would meet in this expensive, dimly lit Japanese restaurant and spend the whole evening staring wordlessly at each other across the table. By the time we got to his place we were so charged up that we would rip each other's clothes off, and I mean that quite literally.\"\n\nWe all continued to stare at her. Max gave an audible gulp. I felt a twinge of envy. She glanced over at her husband, as though to remind herself of his existence, then went off to change her youngest son's diapers.\n\nThe following morning I strolled down the dirt road leading to the souvenir shops at the near end of the island, in search of postcards. The road sloped upward, and when I got to the top I saw a small black dog about fifty yards ahead, one of the hundreds of sickly-looking dogs strewn like rugs all over the island. Most of them were bone-thin, had half their fur missing, and appeared to spend their days just lying around miserably, probably too hot and weak to do much scavenging. All of a sudden, this particular dog got up, pointed his nose in my direction, and shot toward me with the speed and purpose of a homing missile. Pausing only briefly at my ankle, which he lustily bit into, he continued past me on his helter-skelter way. I looked back at the receding ball of fur, then down at my ankle, which was spurting blood like a busted fire hydrant.\n\n\"My foot, my foot, my foot!\" I yelled inanely. Attracted by my cries, a child of about five peeked over a fence. Moments later he was at my side.\n\n\"My foot, my foot. Look, bleeding,\" I told him, as though he were capable of understanding my English if I simplified it enough. \"Foot, bleeding. See?\"\n\nThe little boy pointed his index finger toward the road in back of me. I turned around and saw the black dog, who now stood panting at the bottom of the slope.\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" I said excitedly, \"that's him. He's the one that bit me.\"\n\nWith stunning composure, the boy took my hand and led me (clearly the real child in this scenario) to the island infirmary, which happened to be just a few paces ahead. He spoke briefly with the doctor on duty, then waved goodbye to me and went on his way.\n\nThe doctor led me to a tiny room and motioned for me to lie down on the raised platform against one wall. His movements seemed as unhurried to me as those of the waitresses in Bangkok.\n\n\"Can't you put something around it?\" I said urgently. \"I'm losing all this blood. Can't you \u2014\"\n\nThe doctor took my foot and inspected it carefully. \"Tsk tsk tsk tsk,\" he said, shaking his head.\n\n\"What? What's wrong?\"\n\nHe continued his leisurely inspection of my wound, eventually covering it with a gauze pad.\n\n\"Aren't you even going to clean it?\" I asked stupidly. \"Would you please tell me what's going on?\"\n\n\"Tsk tsk tsk tsk,\" he said again. \"Wei here, okay? Wei here.\"\n\nHe disappeared for a few moments, then came back with a stocky young woman dressed in white.\n\n\"He no spik English,\" the woman told me. \"He say you have to go back to Bangkok for rabies shot.\"\n\n\"What are you saying? Does that dog have rabies?\"\n\n\"Lil boy tol us you bit by black dog, rye? Some dog have owner, some no owner. We no sure bout dah one. Anyway, you have to go back to Bangkok.\"\n\nA choppy boat-ride and several buses later, I arrived in Bangkok and found my way to a hospital. While stuffing my wound with a brownish jelly and wrapping yards and yards of gauze around my ankle, the doctor told me, in broken but understandable English, that I was very lucky indeed, since one of the bites had come within a half-inch of a major artery. He told me not to swim or to put any kind of pressure on my foot.\n\nI went back to Ko Samet that same evening, and spent the rest of the week eating, chatting, writing letters, and fending off Max's advances. On the last evening he upped his pursuit, buying me dinner and drinks, massaging my foot, and blowing smoke from his pungent Thai cigarettes in my face while he complimented me on my \"long, sturdy body.\" Perhaps because I hadn't received that kind of attention in all the months I'd spent in Japan, I found myself thinking that he was quite a charming man, and not half-bad to look at, and I'm on vacation on a different planet, so why _shouldn't_ I ...\n\n\"My cabin's number twenty-three,\" he said huskily when I announced I was ready to retire. \"What's yours?\"\n\n\"Nineteen.\"\n\n\"Is it far?\"\n\nReason suddenly prevailed. \"Yes, very far,\" I muttered, then limped away from the dinner table, feeling that I had narrowly escaped a situation I would have deeply regretted. For all my detachment from the religion of my birth, sleeping with a German was where I drew the line. In some tiny way, it seemed, I was a Jew after all.\n\nOn the Air India jet the next day, I found myself looking forward to the refined, compulsively ordered world I was returning to, and thought, Thailand is a very nice place to visit, but I'm awfully glad to be living in Tokyo.\n\n### **5**\n\nWith her uncanny perceptiveness, Susan smelled out my secret \u2014 or maybe I was simply more transparent than I thought.\n\nEager to put my mended foot to good use, I'd gone on an organized hiking trip to the Tanzawa mountains as soon as the doctor gave me the go-ahead. One of the other hikers in the group, a tall, bony man from Denmark (whom I privately dubbed the Great Dane) had taken an interest in me. He was a perfectly nice fellow \u2014 friendly and articulate \u2014 but I'd somehow managed to lose the scrap of paper on which I'd written his telephone number.\n\n\"I'm not surprised,\" Susan said when I told her the story. \"You're not going to _let_ yourself fall in love with a gaijin while you're in Tokyo.\"\n\n\"What makes you say that?\" I asked in surprise.\n\n\"You _need_ a Japanese man,\" she answered, \"in order to get to know Japan the way you want to. And until you find one, nothing else will do the trick.\n\nIn half a year, I hadn't even had a nibble. The men I encountered were either too shy, too young or too married. They called me _bijin_ , \"beautiful woman,\" but made no moves. I conducted an informal survey with my IHI class one evening, asking them what they thought about men having relationships with older women. While three-quarters of the students approved of the idea in principle, only one person said that he himself would consider doing it. My heart sank as the statistics rolled in.\n\nI'd even gone as far as to ask Hitomi if she \"knew anyone,\" a request that seemed to make her slightly uncomfortable. A few weeks later, eyeing me across her rosewood table with that concerned, maternal look I'd come to know so well, she was finally ready to give me her answer.\n\n\"I remember what you asked me,\" she said earnestly. \"I searched and searched in my mind, but couldn't find any man I thought might be suitable for you. I'm sorry.\"\n\nMy inexplicable craving for a Japanese lover reminded me of one of my former neighbours in Toronto, a German woman whose long-standing attraction to India included an attraction to its men. She confessed this to the leader of her religious group and he proclaimed that in order to cure herself, she would have to go to bed with twenty-one Indian men. She never told me if his advice had worked or even if she'd followed it. I wondered if the principle could be applied to Japanese men, though at the rate I was going I would be well into my next incarnation before I got to twenty-one. Besides, it wasn't in men that I was interested, just in one man \u2014 the man I was sure lay in wait for me somewhere, preparing himself to enter my life and change it forever.\n\nWith March just around the corner, I decided it was time to take matters into my own hands. I placed an ad in the personals section of the Tokyo Journal, describing myself as a tall and attractive woman who was looking for a tall, attractive and educated Japanese man for conversation exchange, friendship or more. When my four-line ad appeared in the journal, surrounded by blurbs like \"Attention Japanese women: look no further!\" and \"Finally! Gaijin-sized condoms,\" I had no idea what to expect. Would I get two telephone calls? Six? None?\n\nWhen I got home the evening after the issue came out, there were eleven messages on my answering machine. The next evening, twenty. The evening after that, thirty-five. And so it went every day for a week. The following week I left my phone off the hook.\n\nWho were all these men? Suddenly Tokyo seemed filled with lonely men, hundreds and hundreds of lonely men ... Since I wasn't about to return two-hundred calls, I chose about ten callers on the dubious basis of their tone of voice. The first man I talked to was Oda-san, a dentist. He told me he was tall, attractive and successful, and that he \"understood Western women.\" That should have been a warning.\n\nWell, maybe he's _successful_ , I told myself when we met two days later at the Kinokuniya bookstore in Shinjuku. He certainly wasn't tall or attractive. In awkward silence, we made our way to a sober Italian restaurant at the top of the _Keio_ tower, the streets of Tokyo receding to a blur of neon and blackness as the glass elevator shuttled us skyward.\n\nNo sooner had I opened my menu than Oda-san thrust his index finger on it and started pointing to various entries.\n\n\"This is spaghetti, this is a fish dish, this is \u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not very good at reading katakana yet \u2014\" I forced a smile, \" \u2014 but I'd like to give it a try.\"\n\n\"This is chicken cacciatore, this is sole Florentine, this is \u2014\"\n\n\"Excuse me, but I'd like to order for myself, if you don't mind.\"\n\n\"Well, I thought you might have trouble reading the menu. This is minestrone \u2014\"\n\n\"Excuse me, but I can read katakana.\"\n\n\"This is \u2014\"\n\n\"I _said_ ,\" I cut in, my patience exhausted, \"I can _read_ katakana.\" Meeting his gaze head-on, I yanked the menu away from his pointed finger and made my selection.\n\nDuring our meal he talked about how successful, ambitious and driven he was, then segued into a lecture on the psychology of Western women. Women like me, he said (looking very pleased with himself), were self-centred rather than selfish. \"But there's nothing wrong with that,\" he hastened to add. Undaunted by my finger tapping and curt nods, he steered the conversation to what was obviously his favourite topic \u2014 teeth. Cavities were preventable, plaque was preventable, dentures were preventable, Japanese materials for fillings and caps were superior to Western ones, and didn't I think Americans made too big a deal about straight teeth? _Is this what I got divorced for_ , I thought in a moment of panic. Then, out of spite and boredom, I took to answering his questions (\"Did you know that Japanese people eat their rice plain, with no sauce or vegetables mixed in?\") with dripping sarcasm (\"No, I've never noticed. How interesting.\"), to which he seemed genuinely oblivious. He suggested drinks after dinner but I mumbled something about expecting a long-distance call and quickly fled.\n\nThe next man I agreed to meet was a self-proclaimed poet and playwright, four years younger than I was. Wary after the previous fiasco, I was taken aback by his youthful good looks \u2014 poreless skin stretched taut over fine features, spikey haircut and shy smile \u2014 and long, graceful body. \"Call me Kimura,\" he said. He refused to tell me his first name, which he claimed was unsuitable for an artist.\n\nWe took the subway to Harajuku and spent the afternoon walking \u2014 it was a sparkling day \u2014 back and forth through the thick crowds of teenagers, clothing racks and crepe vendors on Takeshita street, then up and down Omotesando road with its modish boutiques, Sunday strollers and gaijin street vendors (shifting sand sculptures enclosed in glass seemed to be the rage that day), finally stopping for a bite to eat in a trendy-looking pasta joint.\n\nKimura-san was one of those Japanese who appeared to have swallowed an English dictionary whole \u2014 he probably knew more English words than I did \u2014 but became all flustered and tongue-tied when it came to having an actual conversation, so we ended up speaking mostly Japanese. He took care to point out my every mistake, as I'd told him to do, and seemed to take pleasure in coaching me.\n\nAlthough he thought of himself as a playwright, he paid the bills by teaching Japanese literature in schools. He seemed reluctant to discuss his work.\n\n\"Do you enjoy writing plays?\" I tried.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then why do you do it?\"\n\n\"Because I must.\"\n\nI chuckled. \"You must?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And why is that?\"\n\n\"Nobody else is capable of writing the kinds of plays I write.\" He said this in a flat, emotionless tone, with not a hint of conceit in it. I almost believed him.\n\nHe was knowledgeable about Western books and movies, conversation flowed smoothly, and his face lit up when he smiled. _Great_ , I thought hopefully, _this guy has potential_. But when I tried to steer the conversation to more personal matters, he stopped smiling.\n\n\"So what made you answer my ad?\" I finally asked point-blank.\n\n\"I wanted to practice my English,\" he said simply, the words sounding suspiciously like \"let's just be friends\" to my ears.\n\nThough we saw each other occasionally after that and carried on lengthy phone conversations (which consisted mainly of him recounting some play or foreign film in painstaking detail and me interrupting to ask the meaning of a word), he never made a move. Probably gay, was my sour-grapes conclusion.\n\nThen there was Hideo, a law student at Keio University, friendly enough but so trembly and shy that I was tempted to take his hand and say, \"There there, it's OK, I'm not going to bite you.\" Presumably out of nervousness, he kept pointing to things and naming them in English. \"Oistaaah,\" he said, pointing to the deep-fried oysters on his plate. \"Neon right,\" he said, pointing outside. \"Taigaaah,\" he said, pointing to the gold tiger appliqu\u00e9 on my pullover. Another winner, I thought with a sigh. When we parted at the station, he asked me if I wanted to see him again.\n\n\"Well ...\" I hesitated.\n\n\"Please be honest with me,\" he said.\n\n\"OK, I don't think I want to see you again.\"\n\n\"Is it because I'm not masculine enough?\" He had a point there.\n\n\"It's not that, but ...\"\n\n\"Please tell me the truth,\" he said earnestly. \"Then I can change my personality to make it more suitable for women.\"\n\nMy heart went out to him, though not enough to make me want to see him again. Thinking it too cruel to tell him what I really thought, I opted for evasiveness and told him he was fine the way he was, just not my type. We shook hands, and I bounded up the stairs to the Chuo-line train platform three at a time.\n\nThe next one, Akira, seemed more promising. He'd spent two years in California where he'd obtained an MBA. He was thirty-three, friendly and casual, tall and long-haired. But over lunch he described himself as lazy and wishy-washy, and surrounded me with clouds of cigarette smoke as we spoke. He was a two-pack-a-day man, which was a bit more than I was willing to tolerate. And he was right about being wishy-washy: he couldn't make up his mind about whether or not to quit his dead-end job, whether or not to get married, whether or not to quit smoking, whether or not to get his grey teeth capped (\"I know a good dentist,\" I was tempted to say). He complained about his boss, who liked to go out to karaoke bars every night. \"Do you have to go with him every time?\" I asked. \"Two out of three times,\" he said right away. \"The rule in Japan is that you can refuse your boss's invitation only one out of three times.\" This might have been true, but I saw it as further evidence of his lack of spine.\n\nAnd so it went. I met six men altogether, but except for Kimura-san I found all of them wanting. Though I longed for a Japanese lover, clearly not just any old lover would do.\n\n### **6**\n\nThere isn't a Western hotel that I know of where you can unwind as thoroughly as you do in a top-class _ryokan_ , such as the one Miki selected for our long weekend in Hakone. It isn't cheap \u2014 about $ 150 a day for each person, including dinner and breakfast \u2014 but it's well worth the money. Staying at a good _ryokan_ is like crawling back into the womb.\n\nYou return to your room after a long soak in the _ryokan's_ private hot-springs, and the low table is set for tea: little earthenware cups, a thermos of scalding water, a bowl of tea leaves, glazed rice-crackers, _omanjuu_ bean cakes dusted with frosting sugar, one beside each cup. While you're sipping, an attendant taps on the sliding door, you say _hai hai_ and she pokes her head inside, just to see how you're doing. Then she retreats, and you're left with the memory of her anxious smile. Later in the evening you're back in the hot pool, watching your breath escape (it's early March and there's a bite in the air), submerged to the tips of your ears. Your body and thoughts turn to jelly under the bleeding sky. Just five minutes after you get back to your room, the attendant knocks on your door again and asks if the esteemed guests might be ready for their supper. She comes back with a tray piled high with wooden boxes, each one guarding a secret: a smoked fish of some kind, a square of green tofu, strips of _konnyaku_ jelly, eggplant tempura, squishy things, gelatinous things, crunchy things, unnameable things. By the time she is finished, you have about twelve dishes laid out in front of you. She chats with you for awhile, and her exclamations about your _pera pera_ Japanese don't sound phony at all. You start to eat, all tension evaporates, there is only food, sake and laughter, the lingering warmth of the _onsen_ vapours in your bones. Build a few _ryokan_ in North America and psychiatrists would be out of business.\n\nWe were three \u2014 Miki, Chiemi and I. Naomi had wanted to come too, but a sick uncle had claimed her conscience at the last minute. With our stomachs distended by too much good food and several cupfuls of sake coursing through our veins, we unrolled our three mattresses on the tatami floor, lined them up so they faced the full-length window at one end of our room and lay down on our backs. We gazed out onto the town of Hakone Yumoto and the blackening sky.\n\nMiki broke the silence. _\"Chotto kowain'dakedo ..._ It's a little scary, but I've decided that it's time for me to go to Sweden. Ten years of dreaming is long enough, I think.\"\n\nChiemi sucked in her breath and I held mine, not sure whether to congratulate her or to try and dissuade her. The Sweden of her imagination had steadied her course for ten years, like a distant star whose light never faltered, and I wasn't sure if the real Sweden could measure up. \"I gave my notice at work last week,\" she was saying, \"and for the next few months I'll dp nothing but study English. I'll spend the fall in Stockholm, do lots of sketching, learn about designs for the handicapped, then come back to Japan and hopefully put my knowledge to use.\" She sounded earnest, purposeful \u2014 not a peep about Stefan Edberg.\n\n\"How would you feel about renting an apartment together?\" she asked, rolling over to face me. \"I need to learn English in a hurry, and it would also be good for your Japanese, don't you think?\"\n\n\"It sounds like a great idea,\" I said immediately, \"though I'm not sure it would be fair to you, since we seem to have gotten into the habit of speaking only Japanese to each other.\"\n\n\"I've thought about that,\" she said. \"We'd have to make some rules, like English on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Japanese on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Or English during the day, Japanese in the evening. I've heard about some people who tried it.\"\n\nIt seemed very Japanese to me \u2014 a cozy set of rules, which we could both pretend to follow. \"Let's do it,\" I said. She flashed me her warm Kyushu smile and I showed her how Westerners shook hands on a deal.\n\n\"I'm so jealous,\" Chiemi said suddenly. \"I wish I could join you.\" Chiemi's parents were well off and in perfect health, but they'd told her that if she wasn't going to take care of a husband, she would have to stay home and take care of them. It was a duty she never considered shirking, much as she might wish things were otherwise.\n\nEarly the next morning we went down to the _onsen_ again, a U-shaped pool nestled in a garden of rocks and trees. It was a _rotemburo_ , where mixed-sex and even nude bathing was permitted, though none of us felt brave enough for that. As soon as we stepped inside \u2014 two trim Japanese women and an oversized gaijin, all wearing modest one-piece bathing suits \u2014 the five or six men at the other end of the pool all stood up together, wrapped their loins in white towels and scurried off to the men's showering area. A few minutes later, we too went to wash ourselves. As we walked away from the springs I saw the men making their way back outside. When Miki and I returned to the pool (Chiemi stayed behind to wash herself some more), the men jumped out, wrapped their shivering abdomens in towels again and hurried back inside. Was I imagining it, that they were avoiding me? They hadn't seemed bothered by any of the other women in the pool. It occurred to me that that they too might have heard about gaijin-sized condoms and were afraid I might be comparing. The spell of the _ryokan_ was broken, momentarily. I was back to being an outsider, a big bad gaijin who scared grown men away.\n\nWe went back to the showers and watched Chiemi as she soaped, and soaped, and soaped herself \u2014 tenderly, as though she were her own child. \"I'm _nagaburo_ ,\" she told me when she finally came out. \"At home I spend at least an hour a day washing myself, sometimes two.\" It didn't surprise me that the Japanese, with their love of baths, would have a special word for people who took their time in the tub.\n\nOn our way back to our room, we ran into the squat, heavy-set owner of the _ryokan_. His face tensed up all of a sudden and he started to mutter something, half to himself and half to me. I couldn't make out what he was saying except for the occasional _dam\u00e8_ and _ikenai_. No good, no good.\n\n\"What is it?\" I asked Miki in alarm. She listened more closely to his muttering.\n\n\"You wearing _yukata_ the wrong way,\" she told me in English, \"and he mad about that. He say it's not Japanese-style.\" He was scowling at my bathrobe. \"Don't worry about it,\" she whispered in Japanese, \"You couldn't have known that.\"\n\nBut I did know. I knew that women were supposed to fold the right side over the left side when they put on a kimono or _yukata_ , men the opposite. Only at her own funeral was a woman dressed left-over-right. I was normally quite careful about that sort of thing, but it was true, this time I'd done it wrong. The owner continued to glare at my misplaced lapels.\n\n\"This is a traditional _ryokan_ ,\" he growled, more distinctly this time. \"We can't have people running around with their _yukata_ on backwards. We're traditional people here, we follow traditions. Mutter mutter mutter, traditional, mutter mutter.\"\n\nMiki spoke up for me. \"But Mr. Owner, she's just a foreigner, she hasn't been in this country for very long \u2014\"\n\n\"This is a traditional lodging, a traditional town, mutter mutter,\" he repeated stubbornly.\n\nI was mortified. I'd committed the ultimate social taboo \u2014 dressing like a dead woman. Back in our room, Miki tried to calm me down. \"Even a Japanese could have made that mistake,\" she told me. \"It's a dying custom, and many younger people wouldn't know about it.\" I wasn't convinced. \" _He's_ the one who should be ashamed,\" she persisted. \"How can he expect a foreigner to know all the conventions? Besides, you're the guest. It's his duty to be hospitable.\"\n\nFor the rest of the day, he sulked and muttered and glared at me whenever we crossed paths.\n\n\"Should I apologize?\" I asked Miki.\n\n\"Leave it to me,\" she said.\n\nWhen the attendant served us dinner that evening, Miki told her the story, emphasizing that I was very sorry for what I'd done and that the owner was being a little unreasonable about the whole thing. \"We really like this _ryokan_ \" she added diplomatically, \"and we're thinking of coming back, but ...\"\n\n\"I'll talk to his daughter,\" the attendant said.\n\n\"Why not to the owner himself?\" I asked Miki after the woman had left.\n\n\"The difference in status is too great,\" she told me. \"He wouldn't listen to her.\"\n\nSo Miki told the attendant and the attendant told the daughter and the daughter told the father and the conflict was resolved, Japanese style, without anybody losing face. The next morning the owner was all smiles. Before we left he asked Miki to take a picture of him and me together, with the _ryokan_ signpost in the background. I knew it was just good business on his part, rather than genuine contrition, but I posed for the picture and promised to send him a copy.\n\n### **7**\n\nTrue to her word, Miki gave me a call a few days after we returned from Hakone. \"You want look for apartment this Saturday?\" she asked. I dreaded the procedure. Throughout the fall and winter, I'd occasionally walked into one of the dozens of rental agencies around the train station. There would be a sign on the window advertising a single-room apartment, five minutes' walk from the station, only \u00a560,000 per month. Perfect, I'd think. I'd step in, ask the agent about it in my best Japanese, and invariably the place would be unavailable. I would look into his eyes and he into mine, and we'd both know that the other knew. But there was nowhere to lodge a complaint, no civil-rights agency that dealt with this sort of thing.\n\nI had come close, once in late November. The agent had called the landlord who'd said that yes, he was willing to rent to gaijin. We went to see the place \u2014 tiny, of course, but on a hill and looking out onto the winding canal that ran through the northern part of Nishiogi. My new home, I thought as I stepped across the six-mat room and out to the balcony. No sooner had the agent and I walked down the hill than we heard galloping footsteps behind us. It was the owner, with a pained expression on his face. \"Sorry, I changed my mind. I can't do it.\" Then he wheeled around and scampered back up the hill. As we walked in silence, the agent gave me a sidelong glance and saw the tears of frustration in my eyes. I wanted badly to get out of Esther House and into a Japanese environment, and at that point it seemed hopeless.\n\nAround that time, Tom Koyama was in town for a Yamaha directors' meeting, and we met for lunch. He listened patiently while I ranted and raved about the bigotry of his people. \"I see your point,\" he said finally, \"but I don't think it's actual prejudice on their part. The Japanese are very shy, as you know. They want peace and quiet in their lives. They're deathly afraid of having to speak English, and they're worried that a foreign tenant might not understand their instructions about sorting garbage or paying bills, or that he'd get an important notice in the mail and be unable to read it. Then they'd have to confront him if a problem arose, and you know how the Japanese feel about confrontation. So they tell the agents to refuse foreigners.\"\n\n\"But I speak the language,\" I said. \"I always address the agents in Japanese, so that couldn't be the problem.\"\n\nBut then I recalled how shopkeepers would sometimes cross their hands and tell me they couldn't speak English even after I'd made my request to them in Japanese. I concluded that Tom was probably right.\n\nWhen it came to Asian foreigners, though, I knew that the landlords' attitude was more a result of prejudice than of shyness. Wary landlords circulated stories of holes gouged in walls, grease splattered on ceilings, cigarette burns in tatami mats, prayers wailed out at the crack of dawn (with the devotees presumably facing Mecca), and a variety of other frightening smells and sounds emanating from windows.\n\nThere was a vicious circle at work: young Japanese, even those with a limited education, were turning their noses at employment they considered to be \"3-K\": _kiken, kitsui, kitanai_ (dangerous, strenuous, dirty). The solution for manufacturing companies was to import labourers from all over Asia. Indians, Thais and Filipinos were more than willing to take on menial jobs at rock-bottom wages. To make it possible for them to send money home, they had to crowd together in tiny apartments \u2014 as many as half a dozen in a six-tatami room. Naturally, no owner would consider renting a small room to six people, so what often happened was that after one person secured an apartment, his friends \"came to visit\" for an indefinite period of time. Understandably enough, owners got angry, and nasty rumours proliferated.\n\nMiki was unwilling to consider living anywhere except Nishiogi, and that was fine with me \u2014 I'd grown attached to the place myself. I was hoping that the agents' anxieties would be dispelled when Miki and I showed up together.\n\n\"You're not sisters, right?\" asked the first agent we went to see. Was she blind, or what?\n\n\" _Hai_ ,\" Miki said politely, confusing me for a split second until I remembered that in Japanese you answered \"yes\" to indicate agreement. \"Well, we have a policy ... We only show apartments to individuals or married couples. The only way we'd consider female roommates is if they're sisters.\"\n\n\"May I ask why?\" This was from me, of course. The Western Why.\n\n\"Owners feel that friends are not as stable as siblings. They might have an argument, one of them might leave, and then who pays the rent?\"\n\n\"But we're _good_ friends,\" I tried. \"We both have steady jobs, and we can give you references.\" Miki let me gush on, knowing it was useless. Smiles were exchanged and then we left.\n\nConsidering the ratio of people to space in Tokyo, refusing to rent to roommates seemed a little crazy to me, but most of the agencies we went to had a similar policy.\n\nOver the course of the day, we did come across a few agents who were willing to show us apartments. I let Miki do the talking, contenting myself with a few _ah so desuk\u00e0s_. On one occasion we were led to a tenth-floor apartment which had two decent-sized bedrooms with good views, although the kitchen was the size of a cat's forehead. I nodded eagerly to Miki. Then, with mounting astonishment, I listened as she embarked on a lengthy negotiation with the agent, which went something like this:\n\nMiki: This place has a nice atmosphere, a nice feeling.\n\nAgent: It does, doesn't it? But it's a bit small.\n\nMiki: Yes, a bit small, but it's new, it's clean, and ...\n\nAgent: It's a little old, but it's not too far from the station.\n\nMiki: Yes, the location is very convenient. And the view is lovely.\n\nAgent: It gets a little noisy during rush hour, but ...\n\nMiki: The landlord may not be willing to rent to us. If we were siblings ...\n\nAgent: It's true, he may not. I'll give him a call and see what he says.\n\nMiki: Thank you. It's a great apartment, although the kitchen is a little on the small side.\n\nAgent: Yes, that's too bad, isn't it? Otherwise it's a nice place, good price too.\n\nMiki: Yes, good price, considering how close it is to the station. It's too bad about the kitchen ...\n\nAgent: Yes, it's a shame.\n\nMiki: Yes. Well, if you might be so kind as to show us another place ...\n\nAgent: You're right, the kitchen is just a little ... Well, it's not a good time of year to go apartment hunting ...\n\nMiki: Yes, it's a bad time of year. Maybe you won't have anything else to show us.\n\nAgent: Maybe not ... I'll give you a call if I do.\n\nMiki: Thank you so much for going to the trouble of showing us this apartment. It has a really nice atmosphere ...\n\nWhat was all _that_ about, I asked Miki when we left. It turned out that she'd never had any intention of taking the place, after seeing the kitchen. But she didn't want to make the agent feel as though we'd wasted her time, especially since she was one of the few who hadn't turned us away. The agent, in turn, didn't want to appear too boastful about \"her\" apartment, so she took pains to belittle it. The scene made me think of two large animals \u2014 elk, perhaps \u2014 face to face and both in a submissive stance, each wishing to reassure the other that it posed no threat.\n\nThen there were the flirts.\n\n\" _Me ga oookiiiii_ ,\" said a rental agent with permed hair, peering into my eyes.\n\nI didn't answer. I'd never thought of my eyes as being particularly biiiiig. \"How old are you?\" His eyes travelled down my face and stopped a few inches lower. He seemed to like things that came in pairs.\n\n\"We're looking for an apartment \u2014\" Miki tried.\n\n\"How tall are you?\"\n\n\"One hundred and seventy-eight centimetres.\"\n\n\"You're very pretty,\" he told me. \"Are you married?\"\n\n\"Do you have an apartment available for two people?\" Miki asked.\n\n\"Your eyes are biiiiig,\" he repeated.\n\n\"And yours are smaaalllll,\" I said with a sudden burst of chutzpah, looking right into his peepers.\n\nMiki nudged me. \"Let's get out of here.\"\n\nWe continued our search over the next few weeks, though with less and less heart. Even when an agent was willing to show us a place, it turned out we could never agree. Miki wanted to be close to the train station, even if the apartment was on a noisy street. I wanted quiet and a nice view. Miki was concerned with the size of the kitchen, I with the size of the bedrooms. We seemed to have reached an impasse.\n\nAt the end of March, I was no closer to my dream of living among Japanese, still sandwiched between Ariel's machine-gun laughter and Tyler's heavy breathing.\n\n## **A FLASH IN THE PAN**\n\n\"To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!\n\nWith one brief hour of madness and joy.\"\n\n_Walt Whitman_\n\n### **1**\n\nThere they were. I had read about them, imagined them, heard stories about them, seen pictures of them, waited eagerly for their arrival, and there they were, finally, everything I had hoped for and more. Knowing that they would be gone in a week made them seem almost painfully beautiful. Trembling pinkly against the sky, they gave messages of hope and sorrow both. People said they were larger in Kyushu, more brightly coloured in Yamanaka, but as far as I was concerned there could be none more beautiful than the Tokyo blossoms, milky white with just a breath of pink. They made you want to give up all worldly ambitions and spend the rest of your days penning _haiku_. Or blowing into a _shakuhachi_. It was not only what they looked like, but what they stood for. More than any other icon, the cherry blossoms said Japan.\n\nThe Japanese are meticulous in charting the progress of their blossoms, from _ichibuzaki_ , meaning ten-percent blooming, through _gobuzaki_ , half-blooming, and culminating in _mankai_ \u2014 full bloom. In Tokyo, _mankai_ comes in early April and can be as short as a day. All it takes is a gust of wind and the petals start dropping off, all too willingly, and pretty soon the earth beneath the trees is smeared with pinky whiteness and the trees are shivering again, though a close look reveals the tiny buds of leaves, protruding like tongue-tips.\n\n_Mankai_ fell on a Wednesday that spring. I had some free time in the afternoon and headed over to Inokashira park, famous for its blossoms and just a short walk from Kichijoji station, the one after Nishiogi. If you walked south to the Marui department store and rounded the corner, you suddenly found yourself on a narrow, earless road called Nanabaishi-dori, Bridge of Seven Fountains Street, flanked by coffee shops and craft stores and spilling right into the park \u2014 sensuous, romantic Inokashira park with its glassy pond, arched wooden bridge, lovers pushing yellow pedal-boats, smell of fresh earth, and cherry trees. It was the perfect refuge when Tokyo got too manic and huge.\n\nInokashira means fountainhead, and legend has it that the Shogun Tokugawa leyasu used the mineral water from the park's fountains to make tea when he came to Edo, as Tokyo was then called, for a holiday of falcon hunting. The last of the park's seven fountains ran dry about thirty years ago and the water is now pumped up from the earth.\n\nDuring the cherry blossom season, it is common practice for one or two members of a company department to take the afternoon off and reserve a space under a cherry tree. The rest of the group shows up at the end of the work-day, food and sake is passed around, and the annual ritual of blossom viewing (which in most cases means drinking to oblivion) begins. As I strolled through the park I saw several such squatters, dozing under cherry trees on the giant plastic sheets they'd laid out for their blossom-viewing parties. It was a cool day, with just a touch of wind and a white, sunless sky. I stopped near the bridge and let the whiteness engulf me \u2014 the white reflections of the blossoms in the pond, the white petals against the white sky, almost invisible except for their fluttering movements. The sky's pale colouring was even more fitting, somehow, than would have been a brilliant blue. As I gazed out into the whiteness, I wondered how many more _mankai_ I was to experience in Tokyo.\n\nA few days later I was sipping coffee in the Donatello's ice-cream parlour at the end of Nanaibashi-dori, sitting at the counter that looked out onto the park. The wind had done its work \u2014 there were more petals on the ground than on the trees. I put down the book I was reading and stared outside for a few moments.\n\nSitting to my right was a man poring over a Japan Times. I let my eyes travel to his face, along the pinched nose and up to the hair, thick and wavy and just beginning to grey at the temples.\n\n\"Do you often read English newspapers?\" I asked him. He turned toward me and took a few seconds before answering, as if to bring me into focus. His eyes were not quite black, not quite as narrow as most Japanese eyes.\n\n\"I try to read one article every week,\" he said, \"but I'm not always successful.\"\n\nHis accent was quite good, for a Japanese, and I asked him if he was taking English lessons. He said that he didn't have time for lessons, but he listened to F.E.N. Radio every day.\n\n\"Is that how you learned your English pronunciation?\"\n\n\"Yup.\"\n\n\"Do you live in Kichijoji?\" I asked.\n\n\"Nope,\" he said. \"I live in the next town.\"\n\n\"Mitaka?\"\n\n\"Yup.\"\n\n\"Do you come here often?\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\nHe told me he was a doctor and didn't usually have free time during the day, but he'd just made a house-call in the area and was stopping for a short break before going back to his office.\n\n\"What kind of doctor?\"\n\n\"A saahjon.\"\n\nSomehow it pleased me that he mispronounced the word, that he sounded Japanese after all. I asked him if he'd spent any time abroad. He told me he'd been to China for a few weeks to study acupuncture and to Florida for a two-week holiday, but that was all.\n\n\"Is that where you learned to say yup and nope?\"\n\n\"Yup,\" he said, a flicker of amusement in his eyes as they met mine.\n\n\"You haven't told me your name,\" I said.\n\n\"I'm sorry, I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Takeyama. Tetsuya Takeyama.\"\n\nWhat a beautiful name, I thought. Takeyama. _Bamboo Mountain_. I told him my name and he gave me a Western-style handshake. Not quite firm enough, I thought, but that was only to be expected.\n\n\"Mr. Takeyama,\" I said on impulse, thinking _please don't be married and make me look like an idiot_ , \"would you like to get together again sometime?\"\n\nHe looked surprised but pleased. He stood up from his chair, fished into his coat pocket and produced a business card.\n\n\"Here is my work number,\" he said. \"I don't have a phone in my apartment but you can always reach me at work. The best time to call is either in the early afternoon or after eight in the evening.\" I gave him my number and told him where I lived, thinking there was an appealing symmetry in our having met in Kichijoji, right between his town and mine.\n\nHe was tall, I noticed, a good two inches taller than me. And there was something graceful in his movements as he slung his jacket over his shoulder and walked out the door.\n\n### **2**\n\nStay in Tokyo long enough and you start to make _kon\u00e8_ , the Japanese English word for \"connections.\" One thing leads to another and pretty soon you're turning down most of the work you're offered, accepting only the juiciest plums. A plum came my way in mid-April via the Tsuda institute, where I was studying Japanese. One of my teachers told me of a job opening at a junior high school in northwest Tokyo. The carrot was the $70-per-hour salary and the compact schedule \u2014 four consecutive classes on Fridays. She gave me the name of the person to contact and said that she'd put in a good word for me.\n\nThe interview was conducted entirely in Japanese. I dug deep into my brain in order to remember and use the proper respectful forms. Mr. Nakajima, the head English teacher, took a liking to me and hired me on the spot. I'd be teaching first-year students, he said, seventh graders. Three of my classes would be students who'd never had an English lesson in their lives, and one was a so-called returnee group \u2014 kids who'd spent time abroad and had to be reintegrated into the Japanese school system. At the end of the interview he told me that I was forbidden, absolutely forbidden to use Japanese in my classes. This took me aback \u2014 I'd assumed that he'd interviewed me in Japanese to find out if I spoke it well enough to communicate with the beginner students.\n\n\"But how will I explain things to students who don't speak a word of English?\" I asked. I understood the value of language immersion but this seemed a little exaggerated.\n\n\"Use your imagination,\" he said. \"Gesticulate, draw pictures on the board, do whatever it takes, but no Japanese. Under no circumstances should you let the students know that you speak it. If they address you in Japanese, give them a blank look and pretend you don't understand. If the students find out they can communicate with you in Japanese, they'll come to rely on it.\" It seemed to me that he would have been better off hiring a teacher who didn't speak Japanese at all rather than one who had to double as an actress.\n\nMr. Nakajima said he would sit in on my classes the first day, so I asked him if I could start off with an English song and have him translate as we went along. It was a song I'd composed several years earlier for my Yamaha students. He was enthusiastic about the idea and even procured a little electric keyboard, so I could accompany myself while singing.\n\nThere's a worm, there's a big worm, in my apple now  \nThere's a worm, fuzzy wuzzy worm, in my apple now  \nBut I think I will eat it anyhow.\n\nHello worm, hello big worm, why don't you say hi  \nYummy worm, yummy yummy worm, you taste good as pie  \nMaybe I will try crunching on a fly.\n\nThe students bubbled with delight as Mr. Nakajima translated, just as my five-year olds had done at Yamaha. \"Eewwwww,\" they said, and \"How disgusting!\" By the end of the first day, I hadn't taught them very much but had them firmly on my side.\n\nThe teachers all ate lunch together in a small, stark-looking cafeteria. At lunch I was asked to give an introduction speech, as was the custom in Japan whenever a new employee joined an organization. \"Seven months have elapsed since I first set foot in Japan,\" I started, trying to impress them with my formal Japanese. The teachers whistled in admiration. Ashamed of my boast, I lost my concentration. \"I hope to make a bombitrution, uh, contribution ...\"\n\nWe sat down at the table, the other teachers untying the cloth napkins that secured their lunchboxes and I unwrapping my egg sandwich. They asked me about life in Canada and taught me Japanese proverbs. \" _Tsutta sakana ni wa esa o yaranai?_ Mr. Nakajima volunteered with a chuckle. It translated to \"You don't have to give bait to a fish after catching it,\" and was most commonly used in the sense that a man didn't have to be attentive to a woman after securing her as a wife. Mr. Nakajima assured me that the proverb was equally applicable to women and their husbands.\n\nThere was a problem \u2014 a rather serious one \u2014 with the returnee group. Two of the eleven students spoke no English. One had lived in France, the other in Germany. The other nine students were fluent. I discussed the situation with Mr. Nakajima and he said that the definition of a returnee was a student who was reentering Japanese society after living abroad. By that definition, the German girl and the French boy were returnees and should therefore learn English with the returnee group.\n\n\"But this is a language class,\" I said, unconvinced by his reasoning. \"How am I supposed to plan a lesson for nine fluent students and two who can't speak the language at all?\"\n\n\"Use your imagination,\" he said. \"Have the students teach each other, give the beginners separate work sheets, vary the level of difficulty, and remember \u2014 don't ever use Japanese as a shortcut.\"\n\nWhen I asked Mr. Nakajima why he couldn't switch the two beginners to one of the regular English classes, he explained that the returnees' English period didn't coincide with any of the other ones. This made little sense to me, as it would have been a simple matter to juggle the schedules around. But I say nothing.\n\nMy task was made easier by the fact that the returnees were a delightful group \u2014 eager, rambunctious and saucy \u2014 but the problem still remained. In spite of my best efforts to \"use my imagination,\" the German girl and the French boy quickly lost interest and spent most of their time with their heads plopped on their desks, while the other kids joked and laughed and learned words like \"ambivalent,\" \"conspicuous\" and \"indecisive.\"\n\nThe regular classes were equally frustrating. \"Repeat this word,\" I would ask the students, getting forty blank stares in response.\n\n\"Repeat, repeat,\" I repeated. Still there was no reaction.\n\n\"Say it again \u2014 a-gain,\" I tried. \"Say it after me.\"\n\nI pointed to myself and then to the class. \"Me, you. _I_ say, then _you_ say. Understand?\" By this time they were breaking up into giggles.\n\n\" _Kurikaesu-tte?_ ' one boy ventured. Yes, yes, I thought with relief. But then I remembered that I was under orders to play dumb. I couldn't nod my understanding to him without revealing that I knew _kurikaesu_ meant \"repeat.\" So I put on my best poker-face and continued the charade.\n\nAll the loud talking and frantic gesticulations had me dog-tired by the end of each class. It seemed to me that it would have been a lot simpler for me to say a word or two in Japanese and get on with the lesson, rather than spend half the class playing guessing games.\n\nAnd yet my students were learning, if less efficiently than they might have been. We played \"What's your favourite?\" to practice words like book, food, drink, sport, rock star. \"What's your favourite subject in school?\" I asked one morning, after having explained the different subjects by way of elaborate illustrations on the blackboard, as though we were playing Pictionary. They all answered at once. \"History!\" \"Science!\" \"English!\"\n\n\"Does anybody like mathematics?\" I asked. Several boys raised their hands but not one girl. Unable to resist the opportunity to slip some feminism into my lesson, I asked the question again, raising my own hand as I spoke:\n\n\"Does anybody like mathematics? Any boys, any girls?\"\n\nThis time, along with the boys' arms, one girl's arm went up timidly. It was one of the very few instances, in all my hours of teaching in Japan, that I felt I'd accomplished something useful \u2014 not by imposing math on the girls but by giving one of them the courage to admit that she liked it.\n\nAt the end of the spring semester Mr. Nakajima called me into his office. \"The students tell me they are enjoying your class,\" he said, \"and they seem to be learning something too. You have been successful so far and I'd like to thank you. But there's a problem \u2014 several students suspect that you speak Japanese.\"\n\n\"But I never said a word \u2014\"\n\n\"You probably reacted when you heard them speaking Japanese. Maybe you nodded your head, raised your eyebrows or otherwise showed you understood. Please be more careful in the future. The students won't learn any English if they know you speak their language.\"\n\nWhy tamper with success, I thought to myself, but knew better than to argue.\n\n### **3**\n\n\"A home of one's own.\" The phrase did not have the mystical overtones for me that it seemed to have for just about everybody else I knew. The way I saw it, owning a home was not only a mundane achievement \u2014 millions, after all, had succeeded in doing it \u2014 but an insidious drain on one's personal freedom. Under the rule of the despotic Mortgage, homeowners devoted long hours to jobs that gave them little pleasure, and spent what little time they had left plugging leaks or fixing patios, whistling cheerlessly as they went along. I could never figure out what all the fuss was about.\n\nThe Japanese, I was disappointed to learn, were just as captivated by the American dream as the Americans, even if they were far less likely to achieve it. They had even coined a word, _maihomismu_ , for their collective passion. Couples who couldn't afford standard mortgage payments were sometimes granted mortgages of forty, fifty or sixty years, with the understanding that the payment schedule would eventually be passed down to their children, in whose _maihomismu_ the parents and loan officers presumably had absolute confidence.\n\nFor all my rejection of the dream, I was itching to put down some sorts of roots in Tokyo. Esther House, with its assortment of cackles and yelling matches and beds creaking under the strain of hurried sex, was becoming more and more of a prison to me. It was a travesty of the kind of life I had come here to live. I knew I had to get out, but I seemed to have exhausted the possibilities. Miki and I had tacitly reached the conclusion that we were not destined to be roommates, and my solo efforts were getting me nowhere. \"We'll call you if anything comes up,\" the rental agents always told me, but nothing ever did.\n\nOn Susan's advice, I placed a want ad for a Japanese roommate in the Japan Times. I got a single response, from a twenty-nine-year-old office worker called Eiko, and we arranged to meet at the McDonald's in West Ikebukuro. She was a tiny woman, pleasant enough if a bit gushing (I _love_ English, I _love_ foreigners. I _love_ Western food), and she seemed excited about the idea of having a gaijin roommate. We flip-flopped from English to Japanese without any awkwardness, and by the time our McChicken burgers were eaten, concluded that we were compatible enough to be roommates. But the next time we talked on the phone she was much more reserved.\n\n\"Is anything wrong?\" I asked her.\n\n\"Well,\" she said, \"there's one small request I have, if we're going to live together. You might think it's strange, but I'd like us to have separate phone lines.\"\n\nThat meant an extra \u00a580,000 deposit. \"Why? Do you get a lot of phone calls?\"\n\n\"It's not that.\" She paused to clear her throat. \"You see, my mother \u2014 well, ah, she's just not used to foreigners. She doesn't know how to behave with them. It's not that she has anything _against_ you, or against me living with you. But I know she'd get flustered if she called me and, ah, you answered instead. I hope you understand ...\"\n\n\"And what if she wants to visit you?\" I asked. \"Would you expect me to keep out of sight?\"\n\n\"No problem,\" she said right away. \"I would arrange for her to come when I knew you weren't going to be in. I hope you understand ...\"\n\nI did and I didn't. In the end I decided that I simply wasn't comfortable with such an arrangement. We said our goodbyes, and once again I cursed the housing gods for having placed a red herring in my path.\n\nAnd then, just a few days later, I got a phone message from a rental agent whom I'd gone to see several weeks before. \"Come and see me right away,\" was all she said. I rushed over to the agency, a cluttered four-mat room that called itself Happiness Real Estate, and listened to the details. A one-room apartment had become available, less than five minutes' walk from the Nishiogi train station. The building was four years old, clean and quiet, and each apartment had its own heater and air-conditioner. Best of all, the owners had no objections to renting to foreigners. \"They even rented to a black man once,\" the agent offered.\n\nThe two-storey whitewashed building was on a narrow side-street off Shin Midori. Its name of Cosmos (in keeping with the celestial theme that prevailed among Tokyo's newer apartment buildings) was especially charming in a building of such modest proportions. The agent introduced me to the landlords, a retired couple with kindly faces, and we all shuffled up the iron staircase leading to the vacant unit. I fell in love with it immediately \u2014 with its translucent sliding doors, its tiny verandah overlooking treetops and rooftops, even its _wan-unitto_ bathroom which was not much larger than a telephone booth. \"I'll take it,\" I said right away, hardly giving a thought to the fact that I would soon be parting with the equivalent of about $4,000, two-thirds of it non-refundable, for the privilege of moving in.\n\nThere was one problem. Before I could sign the lease, I needed to find a guarantor. By law, every tenant had to get either an employer, a relative or a personal friend to sign a document stating that they would take financial responsibility for the tenant in case the rent didn't get paid. The guarantor had to file the document in the town hall as well as cosign the lease. It was quite a big favour to ask of a friend, but I had no choice. I decided on Teruko, since she lived close by and time was of the essence \u2014 if the lease wasn't signed within forty-eight hours, the landlords had the right to rent to someone else.\n\nA lot had changed since I'd last seen Teruko. Her husband had finally expired, which theoretically made her a wealthy woman. But things had gotten complicated. While we sat on the floor drinking tea from her grease-rimmed cups, she filled me in on the details.\n\n\"My husband's family \u2014 I've never gotten along with them, as I think I may have told you \u2014 anyway, they're trying to cheat me out of my inheritance. Apparently my husband told them that he and I had been living apart for the past several years. Not in different houses, but _apart_ , if you know what I mean. Not sleeping together. Now they're claiming that I wasn't really a wife to him, so why should I inherit all his houses and restaurants? They've all ganged up against me, and I have to hire all these _royaahs_ ...\" Even though she was speaking Japanese, she said \"inheritance\" and \"lawyer\" in English, as she always did when talking to me.\n\nThis wasn't a good time to bring up the guarantor question, but I had to move fast. I cautiously put the request to her, stressing that it was only a formality since I would never actually need her financial assistance.\n\n\"But what if you get sick?\" she asked. \"What if you're in an accident? As your guarantor I'd be responsible, you know. The landlords would call me. I still don't know how much money I'll get from my husband's inheritance \u2014 maybe nothing, if my greedy in-laws get their way.\"\n\nI told her that if anything happened to me, she could call my brother in Canada and he'd take care of it.\n\n\"And how do I know that the owners of your building are honest people?\" she pressed. \"Maybe there are hidden costs you don't know about. Maybe the previous tenants left the place in bad condition, and the landlord will try to get you to pay for the repairs.\"\n\n\"Look, if you don't want \u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not joking,\" she said. \"A friend of mine once rented an apartment to some Asians \u2014 Indians, I think it was. After they left, she went to inspect the apartment and found stains on the tatami mats.\" She leaned forward a little. \" _O-shikko_ stains.\"\n\n\"Pee stains?\" I let out a chuckle. \"How could your friend know they were pee stains?\"\n\n\"I don't know, I guess she smelled them.\"\n\n\"Didn't the apartment have a bathroom?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course.\"\n\n\"Why on earth would the tenants have peed on the tatami mats when they had a perfectly good bathroom to use?\"\n\n\"I don't know why,\" she said stubbornly, \"but they did.\"\n\n\"You and your prejudices,\" I muttered, hoping she knew I wasn't really offended.\n\n\"But it's true,\" she said. \"Come on, let's go to the town hall.\"\n\nThe following day, kneeling solemnly at the low table in the landlords' dining room, I signed the rental agreement with its elegant columns of scripted Kanji. Teruko countersigned it, Mr. Kijima stamped it with his florid red seal, then we all exchanged bows. I had no idea what I had signed, of course, but it was the prettiest lease I had ever seen.\n\nThe previous tenant had left behind his refrigerator, hot plate, washing machine and vacuum cleaner. Mrs. Kijima told me that he was moving to the North of Japan, and didn't want the hassle of bringing the stuff with him or disposing of it. I could hardly believe my good fortune \u2014 as a rule, refrigerators, stoves and even light fixtures came and went with each tenant. The day I moved in, Mr. Kijima appeared at my doorstep hugging a bright red television. \"This is for you,\" he said. \"Hirose-san gave it to us when he left, but we already have two ...\"\n\nCosmos was a four-and-a-half minute walk from the train station, so I knew that if I left my apartment at nine thirty-five with the second hand on the six, I'd have my foot on the platform just as the nine forty train was rolling in. Every time. And when I got back home in the evenings, the first thing I did was take a chair out to the verandah, where I would sit for a few minutes with the warmth of the May sunset on my face. _This_ was my world now, this jigsaw of whitewashed walls, bent _obaasan_ wheeling pushcarts, futon mattresses drying on laundry rods, trimmed hedges with dark waxy leaves and everything in miniature. I felt absurdly proud of my new surroundings, as though I'd created them myself.\n\nA home, I discovered, was not so much a property as a state of mind.\n\n### **4**\n\nHalf an hour after I got my phone reconnected at Cosmos, the tall doctor called.\n\n\"I wanna see you again,\" he said simply.\n\n\"Sure,\" I told him, a bit shaken by the timing of his phone call. I waited for him to say something else, then finally added, \"So when would you like to meet?\"\n\n\"I can't make it on weeknights,\" he said in Japanese. \"As you know, I work until eight or nine in the evening. And this Friday I have to do some hospital work. On Saturday \u2014 well, I usually work on Saturdays, but about once a month I play golf. Three friends and I made reservations for this Saturday a long time in advance, so I can't really cancel. And in the evening I have a wedding, one of my friends from junior high. And Sunday I have to go to a medical meeting.\"\n\n\"Well,\" I laughed, \"How about next week, or next month?\"\n\nHe seemed not to have heard this. \"I really wanna see you,\" he said again.\n\nI'd noticed this before about him, the way he had of deflecting questions without seeming to notice he was doing it. When we finally settled on Sunday evening, I had the impression that he'd stretched himself in some way, that he'd bent some rule he normally lived by.\n\nI arrived at Kichijoji station at the appointed time, and immediately spotted his large head poking through the cluster of other heads as he stood leaning against the square pillar where we'd arranged to meet. I had almost cancelled our date, since I was still recovering from a bout of high fever I'd woken up with the previous morning. While tossing around in my bed that day, I'd chanced to thumb through my Lonely Planet guide to Thailand. _Ko Samet Island still has a bit of malaria_ , I read, and suddenly remembered the hand-painted sign I'd seen at the entrance to the island, warning visitors about malarial mosquitos. I also recalled that I'd been erratic in my use of insect repellent, and that my sleeping net had let through a mouse, so would have posed no problem for an insect. Convinced that I'd contacted the disease, I'd dragged myself to the Nishiogi hospital and requested to be tested. But by Sunday evening the fever was almost gone.\n\nTetsu's eyes were on me as I approached him, and in some transient, almost imperceptible shift in his features \u2014 nothing approaching an actual smile \u2014 I read his pleasure at seeing me again. With hardly a word between us, we set out through Kichijoji's twilight landscape, around corners and down alleyways, into a tall building and up an elevator, Tetsu leading the way without telling me where we were headed, which turned out to be a movie theatre.\n\nThe featured movie was Awakenings, transmuted to _Renaado no asa_ (Leonard's Morning) in Japanese. Throughout the screening, Tetsu kept his legs spread apart \u2014 they were too long to fit comfortably in front of him \u2014 so that they came within a hair's breadth of touching mine but never actually did. (Whoever said that first dates give many clues about the tenor of a relationship knew exactly what they were talking about.) I was thinking _it's perverse, but I like the way you led me here mutely, as though I were a small child, or a cow_.\n\nAnd then, just as inexplicably as I'd found myself in the movie theatre with this odd, bulky, quiet doctor, I found myself walking at his side along the narrow pathways of Inokashira park, whose cherry blossoms were now fat with leaves that hadn't quite darkened to summer colouring. And he was asking me questions, lots of questions.\n\n\"Who's your favourite actor?\"\n\nI was never good at this kind of thing. I tended to have favourite roles rather than actors, books rather than authors, songs rather than singers.\n\n\"Mine's Robert De Niro,\" he said when I didn't answer.\n\n\"Why is that?\"\n\n\"Just because.\" After a pause, he added, \"Because his acting doesn't _show_. You think 'what an interesting character' rather than 'what great acting.'\"\n\nThe protruding root of a cherry tree caused me to stumble, and for a split second I felt his hand on my shoulder.\n\n\"How about singer?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Singer? Who's your favourite singer?\"\n\n\"What is this,\" I laughed, \"an interview?\"\n\n\"Mine's John Lennon.\"\n\n\"And why is that?\" I was secretly disappointed, having always thought John Lennon's songwriting talent overrated.\n\n\"You probably won't believe me,\" he said intently, \"but I think his music has a _message?_\n\n_I believe you_ , I heard myself thinking. _Whatever you're about to say, I believe you_.\n\n\"Other songwriters develop a style,\" he continued, \"and then stick to it for the rest of their careers. But John Lennon's music was always changing \u2014 every album was different, right up to his death.\"\n\nHe went on to tell me that he (like a million other Japanese adolescents) had been a big Beatles fan as a teenager. He'd formed a basement rock band with some friends, and they'd concentrated exclusively on Beatles songs. They'd even got a spot on television once, with him singing the lead. I had trouble picturing this man, with his restrained and soft-spoken manner, belting out Hard Day's Night into a microphone, and felt my interest quicken at the incongruity.\n\nWe continued to walk back and forth through the crisscrossing paths, then made our way to the arched wooden bridge that stretched over the pond, where we paused to take in the cherry trees bowed over the water and the yellow pedal-boats gliding through it. I was telling him about my fever the previous day and how I was afraid I'd contacted malaria.\n\n\"If it were malaria,\" he said right away, \"your temperature would have reached forty degrees. And it would have lasted a lot longer than a day.\"\n\n\"How long?\"\n\n\"Oh, maybe three or four days.\"\n\nA couple and their young son walked by us, all three wearing red bandannas around their necks. The son pointed his finger at me, and in his clear child's voice, said \"Look, a foreigner.\"\n\nBecause I was pleased that Tetsu hadn't reacted to this, and because I was also pleased at his knowledge of things, esoteric things like the symptoms of malaria, I forgave him when, a little further along, he reverted to the naive questioning (\"Is the word 'fuck' used a lot in everyday life, like it is in in the movies?\" or \"Have you ever smoked marijuana?\") that so type-fied Japanese men of about his age.\n\nBack at Kichijoji station, I asked him if he'd ever been to Nishiogi.\n\n\"Yes, a couple of times.\"\n\n\"And? How did you like it?\"\n\n\"I was very moved.\"\n\nI forgave him his handshake (this time because of my pleasure at his poker-faced humour, and because he was a Japanese and couldn't possibly know the proper way to shake hands), which was somewhere between a weak grip and a caress.\n\nThe following morning I got up early for a job interview at an international patent office called Shiga. I'd spotted their employment ad in the Japan Times \u2014 Wanted: part-time English editor with a science background and some knowledge of Japanese \u2014 the previous Monday, and called immediately to schedule the interview. Mr. Murasaki, the editorial director, led me to a small cubicle where we chatted amiably for about fifteen minutes. Although I'd never worked as an editor, hadn't opened a science book in twelve years, and knew nothing at all about patent law, he told me that my background was exactly what they were looking for (this sort of thing could only happen in Japan) and offered me the job on the spot. I walked out of the office in a daze, hardly daring to believe that I was finally, finally off the English-teaching treadmill, that I would be working in a bona fide Japanese office, clocking in and out with a punchcard like a real Tokyoite.\n\nThat same evening there was a message from Tetsu on my answering machine. \"You looked very good tonight, buddy.\" I smiled at his choice of words, knowing that he was simply trying to sound colloquial. I had the sense, all of a sudden, of being pulled into Japan's belly, of becoming intertwined with the lives of its people in a way that would change us all.\n\nThings were definitely starting to happen in Tokyo.\n\n### **5**\n\nI was on my way home from Kichijoji, trying with difficulty to balance a broadloom carpet on my shoulders, when I practically bumped into Ariel, studiously coiffed and clothed to give the illusion of careless chic, and a new spring in his stride which I took to be a reflection of his recent good fortune: after months of moping in his room and eating _ramen_ noodles, he had finally managed to secure the lead part in a real-estate commercial and a role as a gaijin buffoon in an educational video for foreign students.\n\n\"Did you _hear?_ \" he asked me without preamble.\n\n\"Hear what?\"\n\n\"I guess you didn't. Tyler's dead.\"\n\nI almost let go of the carpet. It was true I'd hated his guts, but dead? \"How did it happen?\" I asked. \"I thought he was supposed to be in Thailand.\"\n\n\"He was. It's quite a bizarre story, actually, and the Thai authorities haven't released all the information, but it seems he was murdered by some peasants.\"\n\nI tried to imagine it, Tyler the musclebound stud stabbed to death by a band of hill tribesmen. The story that Ariel had been able to piece together was indeed bizarre. It appeared that Tyler had gone to Thailand to avenge the murder of his brother, who'd been travelling through the northern part of the country some two years earlier. While visiting Chiang Mai he'd inadvertently stepped into a drug-related gang fight and gotten himself killed in one of those oops, sorry, got the wrong guy scenarios. Tyler was hoping to catch the killers, presumably to exchange an eye for an eye, but was beaten to the finish line.\n\nListening to this far-flung tale, I suddenly recalled the fragments of a conversation between Tyler and Sumiko I'd overheard a few nights before moving out of Esther House. There had been crying, yelling, pleading, whispering, something about getting a girl into trouble, about losing a job, the threat of a lawsuit. I'd heard him tell her that he would be going to Thailand for a couple of weeks, to take a break from the nightmare his life had become. Tyler had seemed at the end of his rope, and I wondered now if he had really been murdered or if he might have died by his own hand instead, OD'd on some cheap Thai barbiturate he'd taken to forget his troubles.\n\nWhatever the cause, Tyler's death affected me more than I would have expected. He was a lousy housemate, but he was no stranger. After five months of sharing a rickety wall that let me in on his darkest secrets, we'd developed an odd sort of intimacy. I knew the sound of his cackle, his curses and his pillow talk. He was thirty-one to my own thirty-four, too close for comfort.\n\nAriel and I chatted some more. I asked him about the modelling business in Tokyo. \"It's sleazy,\" he said. \"You're told that your net profit will be a certain figure, and after doing the gig you find out it's your gross.\"\n\n\"Are you sure it's not a language problem?\"\n\n\"Positive. I ask them, is this the net figure? And they nod their heads vigorously and say _netto, netto_. Then they keep half of it. The last time this happened, they told me it was because my work had been unsatisfactory, although they'd seemed pleased enough during the shooting session. The worst part is that there's nothing you can do about it, nowhere you can go to file a complaint. It's the Dark Ages here, is what it is.\"\n\nAfter dropping off the carpet at my apartment I headed straight to Esther House, hoping to find Susan or Mark there and hear their version of the story. I found Mark in his room, tinkering with his most recent acquisition, a Nikon. He couldn't tell me much more than Ariel had, except that he'd talked briefly to Sumiko, who was shaken up but in control. She'd packed up Tyler's things and left a presumably well-intentioned note to Warren, the manager of Esther House and himself an Aussie: \"... Tyler was very clean, not like most foreigners ...\" It was hard to say whether she'd been spared a worse or a better fate than the one she was likely to have now, getting hot baths ready for her Mitsubishi man and shuttling the kiddies to cram school.\n\n\"To change the subject,\" Mark asked me, \"Are you making any headway in your, uh, search?\"\n\n\"Too early to tell,\" I said. A picture flashed briefly in my mind, the tall, bulky doctor with the gentle eyes.\n\nMark cleared his throat and shifted in his chair. \"Do you mind if I tell you a bit about mine?\"\n\n\" _Your_ search?\" I wasn't sure I wanted to hear this. Mark and Susan were a couple to whom no harm was supposed to befall, who laughed at each other's jokes and gave each other daily back rubs. I'd always assumed they were one of those charmed pairs whose bond was immune to time, place and circumstance.\n\n\"I don't quite know how to put it,\" he said, \"but it looks like I've caught the bug.\" I had no idea what he was talking about.\n\n\"Damn it,\" he said angrily, \"I can't tell you how disgusted I am with myself. It goes against everything I've ever said about Japan, against everything I believe in. I wouldn't have thought it could happen to me.\" He gave me a sheepish look.\n\n\"Sorry, Mark, but I'm not following you.\"\n\n\"It seems,\" he said wryly, as though he were talking about someone else, \"that I'm longing for the affections of a Japanese woman.\"\n\nIt was as though he had kicked me in the gut. Wasn't this the man who looked upon Japan as a giant cockroach, who went on and on about its moral bankruptcy, self-serving politics, sexism, ageism, materialism, slave mentality, antiquated thinking, and more to the point, its airhead women? If Mark could fall, then nobody was immune. Let this be a warning to all you Western women who come to Japan with your spouse, partner or boyfriend: you're taking your relationship into your own hands.\n\n\"What about Susan?\" I asked when I found my voice again. \"How does she feel about all this?\"\n\n\"She's very hurt, naturally. She's thinking of getting her own apartment, though we haven't decided anything definite yet.\"\n\n\"But you and Susan seemed so ... like you brought out the best in each other, somehow. Are you telling me you're ready to throw all that away?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" he said, studying his fingertips. \"I just don't know. There's this friend of ours, Michiko, and all I can think of day and night is what a treat it would be to have a woman like her. I know it sounds ridiculous, it goes against all my feminist ideals, or what I _thought_ were my feminist ideals, but there's something about the softness of these women, the way they focus on their men, that makes me crave the experience first-hand. I've become obsessed with the idea, and I hate myself for it.\" He had a pleading look on his face, as though he were hoping I'd give him my blessing. It occurred to me that all his talk about the \"infantilism\" of Japanese women might have been an attempt to deny, even to himself, that he was gradually falling under their spell.\n\nI wondered if Corey might have had anything to do with it. Corey \u2014 aptly described by Susan as having his brain between his legs \u2014 had moved into Esther House a few weeks earlier. He was a sunny blond boy from California, engaged to be married to a sunny blond girl from California with whom he exchanged I-miss-you's over the trans-Pacific telephone lines. He'd come to Japan with a surfboard and an indefatigable libido. \"I'm not married ... yet,\" was how he justified the sexual conquests he was accumulating in Tokyo. I knew that he'd taken Mark with him on some of his expeditions to the Roppongi disco-jungle, and maybe it had been too much for Mark, seeing all those nubile young things buzzing like flies around his friend while he looked on from the sidelines.\n\nThere could be no doubt about it \u2014 somebody had put a curse on Esther House. Not only was Tyler dead, Mark and Susan's marriage on the rocks, but I also learned that Fredrik had become an object of rivalry between Jessie and Claire, who were no longer on speaking terms. Clearly, I'd left Esther House just in time.\n\n### **6**\n\nIn a twist on the standard desert-island question, I asked my IHI students which one they would choose if they were marooned on a desert island for a year: books or television. Without exception, they chose television. \"We'd want to keep up with what was going on in the outside world,\" they all agreed. I challenged them with a Zen aphorism \u2014 \"when the work goes well, the outside world doesn't matter\" \u2014 but it didn't strike a chord. They wanted news, information, action, and television was how they wanted to get it. Not without pride, they told me that according to national surveys, the Japanese watched every bit as much television as did Americans. This meant that in relation to their free time, they actually watched more.\n\nDuring my seven months at Esther House, I had enjoyed the simplicity of a TV-less existence. Nevertheless, I was eager to start watching my little red television, both for the language practice and because I thought it would give me another angle on the culture.\n\nA staple of Japanese programming is the _dorama_ (from the English word drama), roughly equivalent to the American soap opera but generally lasting only one season rather than decades. This type of program suited me just fine, since my Japanese wasn't quite up to documentary or even sitcom fare. There were a couple of hour-long _dorama_ to choose from every weekday evening, along with a fifteen-minute quickie at eight o'clock in the morning.\n\nI went through a few weeks of trial and error before settling on a favourite, _Wataru Seken Wa Oni Bakari_. The title sounded rather ominous in translation \u2014 \"In the world that we pass through, there are nothing but ogres\" \u2014 and nobody was able to tell me exactly what it was supposed to mean. The plot revolved around an aging couple and their five daughters, each with her own family or budding relationship. The central theme was the modern woman's dilemma of work versus family. \"My life is my work!\" the prettiest daughter cried to an unwanted pursuer. Later, when she met the man of her dreams (at the office), she declared that she was ready to quit working and get married. Another daughter was being torn between her desire to work outside her home and her devotion to her son. The I-can-have-it-all option didn't seem to exist for these women, as it did for women in American soapland.\n\nThere were other differences, little details that gave away how distinct the sex-roles were in Japanese society, even in this doramatized world that struggled valiantly to present a contemporary face. When the _Wataru_ patriarch came home after a long day behind the counter of his noodle-shop, his two live-in daughters would rush to his side, remove his slippers, fan his face and place a bowl of hot soup in front of him. At his cry of \" _biru, biru!'_ , his wife would scurry to the refrigerator and fetch him a bottle. And at the end of each day, he would sink into the bath prepared by his wife while she darted around the bedroom, laying out futons and nightclothes for the two of them.\n\nSubservient though they were, these women seemed more believable than the American soap heroine who, in the midst of raising her four children, decides she needs some personal fulfillment, dusts off her old Brownie camera and in a wink of an eye, becomes an acclaimed portrait photographer.\n\nAnother mainstay of Japanese television is the game-show. Here too, I discovered, there was a departure from the American format: instead of being rewarded for getting the right answers, contestants got punished for getting the wrong ones. Buckets of water rained down upon their heads, or cream-pies or sacks of flour, while the studio audience gave shrieks of delight.\n\nGaijin made occasional appearances on these shows, where they were known as _tarento_. Their talent was the ability to speak Japanese fluently, which was unusual enough to enthrall audiences and to make me green with envy. I also caught glimpses of foreigners on the soaps and detective shows. They would dance across the screen with toothy grins and spastic arm movements. TV gaijin were always manic \u2014 a somber or pensive gaijin was as improbable as a bashful car salesman.\n\nGaijin, of course, dominated the freak shows. There was the Belgian woman with the world's largest breasts (which the host stretched out on a plank and measured with due solemnity), the American man with the world's longest tongue (\"good for kissing,\" he said), the man with the most body hair, and a woman of average height who was married to a midget (\"He's a _great_ husband,\" she enthused).\n\nImmediately following _Wataru Seken_ on Thursday nights was the Yamada Kuniko variety show. Miss Yamada was a national celebrity, a writer of romance novels as well as a TV personality. Her manner could be described as butch and was certainly as un-Japanese as I'd ever seen in a female. She had a throaty voice and raunchy laugh, and was built like a firehydrant. It was easy to see how she was a source of fascination to more run-of-the-mill Japanese women.\n\nThe show began with some bantering between Miss Yamada and three other panelists. Following this, a \"situation video\" was aired. The situation was usually based on some romantic conflict (for example: woman is neglected by lover, woman finds new lover and starts seeing him on the side, liaison is discovered by first lover) and the four panelists had to decide whether the protagonist was _yuuzai_ (guilty) or _muzai_ (innocent). While they deliberated, the studio audience cheered them on and waved placards. _Yuuuuzai! Muzaaaai! Yuuuuzai! Muzaaaai!_ It took several minutes before a verdict was reached and several more minutes before the audience calmed down.\n\nThe scene then shifted to the interior of an opulent house, where one of the panelists was shown interviewing a member of the resident family, usually the _o-josan_. An _o-josan_ can be defined as a young woman who makes a career out of being rich. There is a lively interest in _o-josan_ in Japan, reminiscent of Britain's fascination with its aristocracy. (How do you know if you're an _o-josan?_. If you refuse at least two dates out of three, if you get chilled easily and if you've skied in the Alps \u2014 the Swiss ones, of course.)\n\n\"What's that in your back yard?\" the interviewer would ask the bored young lady, pointing to the window.\n\n\"A swimming pool.\"\n\n\"A _swimming pool!_.\" The interviewer would turn toward the TV camera. \"What do you think of that, folks?\"\n\nI had to remind myself, while rolling my eyes, that a private swimming pool was probably as uncommon in Japan as a backyard golf course in America.\n\nThe commercials were as entertaining as the programs. If it was a shampoo that was being advertised, a fresh-faced young woman would appear on the screen, sigh a few moody words (it's Spring ... I feel so light, so restless ...) and depart with a wink. If it was a car, or a washing machine, a fresh-faced young woman would appear on the screen, sigh a few moody words and depart with a wink. To my Western eyes, these commercials seemed naive, amateurish. I was surprised to learn that two of my SECOM students who'd lived in America felt exactly the same way about American TV commercials. \"American commercials are so literal,\" they told me. \"Some silly man in a lab-coat comes on-screen and rattles off statistics about comparison tests or scientific data. There is no mood created, no atmosphere. It's hard to understand how such ads can be effective.\"\n\nOne evening, I came upon an animation program in the popular mystery-drama genre. The language was easy to follow, so I watched on.\n\nA young housewife, alarmed that her husband never came home until midnight, called up a detective agency to help her find out how he was spending the evening hours. The agency put two of their detectives on the case, a man and a woman. After a few days of sleuthing, the detectives informed the housewife that her husband could be found every evening at the same _izakaya_ , eating dinner and chatting with his buddies. The wife was mystified. \"Why wouldn't he want to eat my home-cooked food?\" she asked the detectives, shedding grape-sized cartoon tears.\n\nThe detectives had a brief t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate, then asked the woman if she wouldn't mind letting them watch her cook. \"Of course,\" she said, and showed them to her kitchen. \"This is my pasta-making machine, and this is my blender. I use it for making pesto and Hollandaise sauce. This is my kneading machine, which I use for making onion loaf and croissants.\" She pointed to her collection of international cookbooks. \"Before I got married,\" she said, sniffling all the while, \"I took courses in French cooking, Italian cooking and Viennese pastry-making, just so I could make my husband happy. A lot of good it's done me. Waaaaah!\"\n\nThe detectives had another t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate, then announced to the woman that they'd solved the case.\n\n\"Really?\" she cried. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Your husband has been going to that _izakaya_ because they serve traditional Japanese dishes there. He doesn't like all this rich, fancy food you've been preparing. He wants the kind of food his mother used to make \u2014 simple, nutritious, traditional Japanese meals.\"\n\nThe woman looked dubious. \"Come on,\" the female detective told her, \"I'll help you. Let's make some hot soup with _ramen_ noodles and vegetables. It's almost midnight now, and your husband's due home any minute.\"\n\nIn a flash, the two women chopped up the ingredients and put them into a bowl of steaming broth, just as the front door swung open. In walked the grumpy husband, heading straight for the stairs to his bedroom. All of a sudden he stopped in his tracks, wiggled his nose and broke into a smile.\n\n\" _Ramen_ soup?\" he said in astonishment. \"Could it be?\"\n\nHis wife led him to the dining room, where the soup was waiting for him. He dove in with great gusto, making loud slurping noises. He was then shown walking up the stairs to his room again, but this time not alone. The housewife glanced back at the detectives and gave them a wink.\n\nWas it because I was an outsider, I wondered, that I could do little except roll my eyes at this message to Japanese women? I pondered the impossibility of looking objectively upon another culture, the tendency to see good cheer and na\u00efvet\u00e9 where complexities lay.\n\n### **7**\n\nWe met in East Shinjuku under the giant, madly flickering screen of the Alta building (where at least five hundred other people were waiting for their other half), and bushwacked through the neon frenzy until we reached the restaurant he'd picked out for us, a cozy Korean Barbecue joint with do-it-yourself grills embedded in the tables. I let him order for me, finding it oddly pleasant to sit back and have him take responsibility for what I would be putting into my mouth. A few minutes later our waitress returned with mountains of beef tongue, calf liver, chicken and pork cut into paper-thin strips, along with a platter of raw vegetables and two mugs of beer.\n\n\"Am I doing it right?\" I asked Tetsu as I placed a strip of tongue on the hot grill and sprinkled _shoyu_ sauce over it. I'd only been to this type of place once before, with a pack of gaijin, so I wasn't sure if I was cooking, seasoning or handling the meat properly. I didn't want him to think me uncivilized.\n\n\"What's right?\" he shrugged.\n\n\"I don't know,\" I answered. \"You tell me.\"\n\n\"Just eat it the way you want,\" he said, sounding a little annoyed.\n\n\"Tetsu-san,\" I pretended to be hurt, \"don't get angry with me.\"\n\n\"I'm _never_ gonna get angry with you,\" he said immediately, with an intensity that seemed to come from nowhere. \"Never.\" The \"gonna\" stuck in my ear, incongruous in his carefully enunciated speech.\n\n\"What I meant was,\" he continued in Japanese, \"there are so many _rules_ in our lives. The proper way to eat, to greet people, to dress, to bow. I have no choice when I'm working, but in my private time I try to forget about all these rules.\" He looked at me intently. \"Let's forget about rules when we're together, OK?\"\n\n\"No rules,\" I concurred. \"Fine with me.\" What I was thinking was: It's been four dates and he still hasn't touched me. Is there a rule about _that_ , and is he following or breaking it?\n\nHe was in a drinking mood tonight. After a couple of beers he switched over to whiskey, in keeping with the classic drinking pattern of Japanese businessmen, downing the glasses so quickly that I hadn't a hope of keeping pace. He went back into his interviewing mode: Who was my favourite author? What was my favourite book? Favourite sport? Favourite flavour of ice cream? His own favourite author, it turned out, was Yukio Mishima. That would make him either a romantic, a reactionary or a homosexual. I hoped it was the first.\n\n\"What's the most dangerous thing you've ever done?\"\n\nI thought for a moment. \"Probably skydiving. How about you?\"\n\n\"See that scar on my forehead? I was playing catch with a friend in high school, not with a ball but with a javelin ...\"\n\nOne inch lower and it would have been his eye. \"You were very lucky,\" I told him.\n\n\"Yup,\" he said. \"Just like tonight.\"\n\n\"Like what?\" I wasn't sure I'd heard properly.\n\n\"Just like tonight,\" he said again, causing me to flush with surprise, though I couldn't be sure if his words came from the heart or from the eighty-proof. His face said little \u2014 you had to look at the eyes to know if he was smiling or serious, earnest or joking.\n\nFor the first time since we'd met, he seemed willing to talk about his family. His parents, it turned out, were just recently divorced although they'd been living apart for years. He had an older sister who was married to an American and a younger brother who still lived with his mother in Chiba Prefecture. His father, also a doctor, had been rather difficult to live with, a choleric type with the nasty habit of throwing dishes around when his temper got the better of him. \"At you?\" I asked incredulously. \"Nope,\" he said, \"at my mother.\" It was an _o-miai_ marriage, he told me, and there had never been much fondness or even civility between them. \"But I have a lot of respect for my father,\" he said. \"Aside from his violent temper, which I can't comprehend at all, he was \u2014 still is \u2014 a good man and a very good doctor.\" It surprised me that the composed, soft-spoken Tetsu would have emerged from such a harsh childhood landscape.\n\nThere were nine empty glasses on our table, most of them his. He studied the glasses for a while.\n\n\"Let's not have any more to drink,\" he said suddenly.\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"It's good luck if we stop now.\"\n\n\"Good luck?\"\n\n\"You've had three drinks and I've had six. That's nine altogether. My favourite numbers,\" he said earnestly, \"are three, six and nine.\"\n\nI'm falling for this man, I thought to myself, charmed that a grown man would state his favourite numbers with such conviction, like a child.\n\nThough he seemed to be loosening up a little, on the subject of his work he remained the artful dodger. Whenever I brought it up he would deflect my question with a joke or a shrug. How was your day at the office? Long. What kinds of patients do you see? Many. What do you enjoy the most about your work? The end of the day. I didn't press the issue, sensing that he wanted to keep his work and his time with me in separate compartments. I knew, from hints dropped by students over the months, that the Honey-you'll-never-guess-what-happened-at-the-office style of dinner-table conversation was not too common in Japanese households, even assuming that the husband made it home for dinner. Many of my students had only the sketchiest idea of what their husbands did after they stepped into their suits.\n\nWe'd fallen into a pattern of switching from one language to the other in our conversations \u2014 four or five sentences in English, the next few in Japanese. Though he wasn't exactly fluent, he spoke English with care and took great pains to sound authentic, with his yups and nopes and pop-song contractions like \"lemme\" or \"wanna,\" which I supposed were remnants of his years of devotion to the Beatles. He was straining for informality, I could see, English being the best weapon against his natural reserve. I, on the other hand, was all caught up in the romance of affixing the respectful \"san\" to his name and asking him if he would be so kind as to pass me the salt, something I couldn't get away with in my own language.\n\nHe suggested a walk to the new city hall in West Shinjuku. Outside again, we made our way through the booze-blurred tapestry of neon and noise. There was something monstrous and marvellous about the way Shinjuku sprang to life after the sun went down, like a giant sequined cockroach. Amusement halls, shot bars, dens of sin, at every doorstep the exhortations of stereo speakers (\"Welcome, welcome, just for tonight we're offering gobbledee gobbledee gobbledee ...\"), the flash of chrome everywhere, elevators shooting up and down inside their glass casings, the entire visible spectrum of blinking, twinkling, popping colours and not a tree in sight in this revenge of the urban gods. We came up to the pedestrian overpass that led to West Shinjuku and its skyscrapers. At the top of the stairs we stopped for a while, surveying the scene.\n\n\" _Te?_ \" he said, offering me his hand.\n\nAnd at that moment \u2014 the shock of pleasure, surprise, hope all mixed together \u2014 it seemed to me that a thirty-four-year-old longing was put to rest, that I'd finally made a connection, not only with Tetsu but with the freedom I'd been vainly courting over the years. For the first time ever, there was no distance between where I wanted to be and where I was \u2014 in mad, mad Shinjuku, hand-in-hand with this tall, quiet Japanese doctor who touched a part of me that none of the men before him ever had. Far away from the shoulds and shouldn'ts of my own society (you _should_ love your job, your culture, low interest mortgages, two-week vacations, Liberal politics, have a child and your restlessness will evaporate), I felt free to love for the first time.\n\n\"People will stare at us,\" I said, trying to hide my pleasure and thinking of what an outsize couple we made.\n\n\"No, they won't,\" he answered. \"And if they do, who cares?\"\n\nWe walked all over West Shinjuku, his hand never letting go of mine even as we clambered up and down pedestrian walkways, dodged passers-by and stopped at a vending machine for an _aisu kohii_ break. We talked about nothing in particular \u2014 flying cockroaches, gum-chewing gaijin, noodle-slurping Japanese. And as we continued to walk I felt a twinge of sadness, knowing that in a sense the best part was already over \u2014 that no matter what lay ahead, no matter how steamy the sex or heady the pillow-talk, nothing would rival the pointed beauty of that one moment, _Te_ , the intimacy it promised and the mirrored hallway of possibilities it revealed.\n\nIt was also from that moment that I began to dream up a script for a one-act play called My Life, Part II, in which Tetsu had the leading role.\n\n## **CHASING RAINBOWS**\n\n\"Why are we burdened with the duty to destroy everything, change everything, entrust everything to impermanence?\"\n\n_Yukio Mishima_\n\n### **1**\n\nAs the weeks turned into months and the months into seasons, I began to understand why my students were making so little progress. I came to see that they didn't want to learn English as much as bask in its atmosphere. English was not only a language, it was a stepping-stone to a world of vigor, excitement, frankness, a world inhabited by men of action like Indiana Jones and cleansed of all the niceties and duties and restraint that the younger Japanese were starting to resent. In a word, it was freedom. In English you could answer no to questions, you could admit to disliking your job, you could be daring, outrageous, tell it like it is, man, instead of all the dodging and evading and blurring that made up the bulk of communication in Japanese. I never met a Japanese person under thirty-five who didn't claim to prefer talking straight to talking in circles, even those who were thoroughly incapable of it. Time and again my students would tell me how they felt freer expressing themselves in English than in their own language, even if the most they could express was \"yesterday I go mobie _Die Hard_ , very exciting, I think.\"\n\nEnglish was freedom, something every self-respecting parent wanted for his children. In a modern twist to the lullaby, one of the businessmen in my new Microsoft class, eager that his infant son learn English properly, put earphones on his one-year-old head every night and played him English conversation tapes until he fell asleep. \"I read article people learning most well when they relaxing,\" was his rationale. Another new father decided to name his daughter Reika instead of the common Japanese name Reiko, because \"it sounds more English.\" I imagined the alteration was probably as peculiar as changing Lisa to Liso or Katrina to Katrino, but he was unfazed: \"If she want to go America, she have name sounds more natural.\" I also knew of a Japanese couple who was raising their daughter entirely in English, even though neither of them spoke the language well and they had no intention of leaving Tokyo.\n\nOne product of the English craze was the institution known as a conversation lounge, a no-frills type of bar where Japanese and gaijin got together to converse in English. Some of the lounges had strict rules: if you were caught speaking Japanese once, you got a warning; one more time and you were asked to leave. There was usually a cover charge of around \u00a5500, though in an effort to attract more English speakers the fee was often waived for non-Japanese.\n\nI found myself in the Takadanobaba district one evening and happened to walk by a lounge of this type. I'd seen it advertised in the Tokyo Journal \u2014 Come to Mickey House, as informal as you are \u2014 and decided to go have a look. It was a small room, informal to the point of being run-down, and all of its dozen or so customers were gathered at one long table where a fortyish Japanese man was holding forth, throwing his hands in the air and shaking bits of paper at his audience. The proprietor gave me a warm welcome, and when he saw I was alone, led me to the table where all the customers were seated. I declined his offer of \"many choices of American beer\" and ordered a Kirin Dry.\n\nThe man who was holding everybody in thrall stuck out his hand as soon as I sat down.\n\n\"Hi, I'm Shigeharu,\" he said, giving me a vigorous handshake. \"I speak thirty-three languages.\"\n\nHe produced a typewritten page and showed it to me. It was a list of languages, with a qualifying word next to each one: good, fair, fluent, passable. There were entries like Swahili and Basque. I wondered if he carried the sheet with him wherever he went, and thought that if he really did speak all those languages (in a country where speaking more than two caused people's jaw to drop) he could hardly be blamed for wanting to show off a little.\n\n\"We've just been discussing my theory of life, which I call the options method,\" he said excitedly, eyes darting behind thick square lenses. Surveying his mute audience, mostly young Japanese women and a couple of scraggly gaijin men, I thought the \"we\" a little imprecise.\n\n\"You see,\" he said, waving a diagram-filled sheet at me, \"at every stage in life you've got to look at your options, right? It's very simple, really. Once you know what your options are, you simply choose the best one. If more people used this approach there would be a lot less unhappiness in the world, I'm sure of it.\"\n\nHis English was not only flawless but he was talking so fast I had trouble following him.\n\n\"Take marriage, for instance. Four years ago I was divorced, right? So I sat down and drew a chart.\" He pointed to one of the diagrams. \"There are four options, right? The best one is married only once, next is widowed or divorced then remarried, third is widowed or divorced but not remarried, and last is never married. So what did I do? I looked at the chart, crossed off the first line, which was no longer an option for me, then I sat down and designed a strategy for moving up from option three to option two.\"\n\nHe adjusted his glasses and pointed to his empty beer mug, trying to catch the eye of the proprietor. \"Now, four years later, I'm engaged to a wonderful woman, right? Chinese, I might add. Mind you, I didn't just pick the first woman who came along. But I didn't sit in my room and feel sorry for myself, like so many people do. It's all a matter of knowing your options, I say. Sorry, what was your name already?\"\n\nI introduced myself and asked him where he had learned to speak English so well.\n\n\"Lived abroad, lived abroad. Now, does anybody have any questions?\" He surveyed his audience with flashing eyes. He had that genius-or-madman look about him, arms and eyes in perpetual motion and brain cells crackling audibly.\n\n\"What if person don't _want_ getting married?\" a young woman ventured.\n\n\" _Everybody_ wants to get married,\" he said, pointing to his chart for emphasis. \"Or at least, everybody wants a life partner of some kind. You see, there are three things people need in their lives. Someone to come home to, something to do, and something to look forward to.\" He paused to let this sink in. \"If you have nobody to come home to, that's a maximum of two out of three.\" He wrote a large 2 on the page. \"Two out of three, right? So you won't have maximum happiness.\" The woman said nothing. \"It's all a matter of knowing your options,\" he added as an afterthought.\n\n\"What about love?\" I asked, half-hoping that this madman, who appeared to have solved the puzzle of life once and for all, might shed some light on my excitement about Tetsu.\n\n\"Love? It's very simple.\" He tore out a blank sheet from a notepad. \"Romantic passion,\" he said, drawing a pair of graph coordinates and scribbling \"passion\" near the y-axis, \"is all a question of _hope_ (he wrote \"hope\" at the left end of the x-axis) and _doubt_ (he wrote \"doubt\" at the right end). He hastily graphed something that looked like Mount Fuji. \"You see, all hope and no doubt means no uncertainty, no mystery, no passion, right? And too much doubt and not enough hope means fear, jealousy, anger, and the passion deflates like a flat tire.\" He made a noise like air hissing out of a tire and a matching gesture with his hands. \"But the right balance between the two,\" he pointed to the top of Mount Fuji, \"and you have love.\"\n\n\"I don't believe in love,\" a graying gaijin said, a Brit by the sounds of it. He was surrounded by empty beer mugs. \"I'm a cynic,\" he added, looking at me conspiratorially as though he presumed me to be an ally.\n\n\"So you've never loved a woman?\" I asked him.\n\n\"I did once,\" he mumbled, almost to himself. \"God, did I fucking love her. And do you know what she told me?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"That the _timing_ was wrong.\" He said this in a mock-whiny voice, as if recalling how she'd sounded. \"Can you beat that? We had this fan-fucking-tastic thing going, great sex and communication and all that, and she tells me that the _timing_ is wrong.\"\n\n\"When did this happen?\"\n\n\"Two fucking years ago.\" He shook his head in disgust. \"I'll never love anyone like that anymore.\"\n\n\"You see, you see?\" Shigeharu cut in excitedly. \"A perfect example of somebody who needs to use the options method.\" He started scribbling again as he talked. \"The four options are: fall in love and never lose it, lose love and find it again, lose love and don't find it again, and never love, right? So what you need to do,\" he said firmly, \"is move up from option three to option two, just like I did.\" He tore off the sheet and handed it to the Brit.\n\n\"And how do you guarantee that he'll find love again?\" I asked, drawn into Shigeharu's diabolical logic in spite of myself.\n\n\"Guarantee? There are no guarantees. What you have to do is maximize your chances, right? You take a piece of paper and make a list.\" He tore off another blank sheet and inscribed \"important qualities\" at the top of it. \"So,\" he said to the Brit, \"tell me some of the qualities you look for in a woman.\"\n\n\"It's OK,\" the Brit told him. \"I'm not looking for love anymore, just sex.\" He scanned the circle of young Japanese women, but there seemed to be no takers.\n\nI looked at all the sheets littered on the table and at the Brit's sour smirk, hoping I'd never have to choose between the two modes of living. Still, it was good to meet someone like Shigeharu once in a while, someone who was none of the things a Japanese was supposed to be: vague, wary of logic, wary of absolutes.\n\nWhen I got home there was a message on my answering machine. \"I ... miss you.\" It was Tetsu's voice, soft and hesitant. I played the message again, hardly believing what I was hearing. \"Japanese men don't express feelings to women\" was something I'd heard many times from friends and students, and I hadn't expected Tetsu to be any different. I wondered if using Harrison Ford's language was making him bolder \u2014 wondered, for an instant, if it was me or English he was courting.\n\nLying in bed that evening, unable to find sleep, I swung back and forth between hope (he said he missed me) and doubt (maybe he thinks that's what Western women like to hear), and thought, that madman in Mickey House was no fool.\n\n### **2**\n\nCharlene's life in Tokyo had evolved rather differently from my own. When we met one Sunday afternoon at the World Restaurant in Shinjuku, she proudly told me that she'd managed to survive nine months without learning a single word of Japanese, not even the numbers from one to ten.\n\n\"But how do you shop?\" I asked her. \"What if you want to get, say, five chicken-breast filets at the meat counter?\"\n\n\"I have fingers, don't I?\" she said coyly. \"And if the shopkeeper is too _moronic_ to count fingers, I simply write down the number in my notepad and show it to him.\"\n\nCharlene was a shameless Anglo-supremacist, believing that it was the rest of the world's business to learn English and to hell with them if they didn't. She was openly scornful of the Japanese, thinking them slow and stupid and constitutionally incapable of learning a foreign language.\n\n\"I mean, when I was learning French in school,\" she told me, \"I made an _effort_ , at least, to get my verb tenses right. But no matter how many times I remind my students to use the future tense for tomorrow and the past tense for yesterday, they just can't seem to get it into their skulls. The following week they're back to saying 'Last night I go to sheeatre.' I mean, are they missing a _gene_ or something?\"\n\nI had heard her speak a few words of French at Kimi, and her pronunciation was so hard on my ears I'd been tempted to block them, but I said nothing when she complained about her students' atrocious accent and declared the Japanese incapable of imitating sounds.\n\nI had never seen Charlene look less than perfectly groomed, and that Sunday was no exception. Blood-red lipstick, nails that shone like teardrops, dark sunglasses worn as a pendant, fitted red jacket and linen city-shorts \u2014 the weekend look of a dress-for-success'er. She was now a curriculum planner as well as teacher at Bilingual, and claimed to be thrilled to have turned her back on her law career. To me she seemed every inch a lawyer, and though I wouldn't have asked her point blank, I wondered what on earth she was doing in Japan. During her free time she watched American shows on her bilingual TV (\"Don't want to lose touch\"), read books on every subject except Japan, plotted her next Club Med vacation, ate Haagen Dazs ice cream straight from the container and occasionally went out with her friends (all gaijin, naturally) for an all-night drinking bout in Shinjuku. She'd been no slouch in the sex department, having racked up five encounters with other Bilingual teachers or staff members, and she now had her eye on a sixth prospect. \"There's a lot of sexual tension between us,\" she told me. \"Something's gonna happen any day now, I can feel it.\" She confessed that staff meetings were getting to be a little tense for her, with so many ex-lovers gathered together in one room. It was hardly surprising that her all-time favourite story should be _Dangerous Liaisons_ , which she'd seen three times on screen and once in the theatre.\n\nAs usual, she spent a few minutes heaping scorn on Western men who took up with Japanese women. \"I see these couples on the train,\" she told me, \"and it's nauseating. The women can't get through a full sentence in English and make gurgling noises like one-year-olds. Don't these men want _communication?_ Don't they want _intelligent_ women?\"\n\nI was a little hesitant, under the circumstances, to tell her about Tetsu, but she was more baffled than outright disapproving. \"What on _earth_ do you talk about?\" she asked me, sincerely wanting to know.\n\nIt was hard to get offended. She wore her bigotry with style, like a mink-clad diva wading imperiously through a crowd of anti-fur demonstrators. For all her disdain of things Japanese, she seemed to be enjoying herself in Tokyo, removed as she was from the pressures of fulfilling people's expectations of her. She was free to pursue her own brand of hedonism for which, with tongue only half in cheek, she'd coined the term Charlenism. And she knew how to bring me down to earth when I started rhapsodizing about the virtues of Japanese women, about their grace and patience and lack of complaining. \"That's all very charming,\" she would retort, \"but it all comes down to sexism, pure and simple. The women are not treated as equals in this society, either at home or in the office, and they've been brainwashed to believe all that crap about how it's unladylike to put your foot down.\" And to my protestations that Japanese women seemed at least as content as their Western counterparts, she countered that a happy slave was still a slave. Conversations with Charlene were never dull.\n\nHungry for concrete information about Japanese-style romance (to help me put Tetsu in cultural perspective), I consulted with Hitomi. \"Consider yourself lucky,\" she told me. \"It's very rare for a Japanese man to use love talk. Do you know that Kazuo hasn't once, in all our years of dating and marriage, told me he loves me? Or even that he appreciates me, or finds me attractive?\" On the subject of touching during courtship, she disclosed that Kazuo had waited two full years before holding her hand. Judging from the Kazuo I knew, who was nothing if not a sensual guy, I found it hard to believe that his sixteen-year old self would have been content to rub shoulders for two years, but she insisted it was true. \"Although,\" she said shyly, \"maybe ours was not a typical case. Why don't you talk to some of your younger friends?\"\n\nActing on her advice, I gave Miki a call one evening, remembering that she'd had two serious relationships before declaring herself free of men.\n\n\" _O-noroke_ ,\" she said when I'd finished my breathless description of Tetsu.\n\n\"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"It's a word we use when someone is boasting about their new boyfriend.\"\n\nI winced. She was right, of course. I apologized as best I could, and she, well trained in the art of defusing tension, replied that _ie ie_ , no no, she'd only been kidding.\n\n\"Where does he live?\" she asked. I told her he lived and worked in Mitaka, only two train stops away. And that he always called from work since he didn't have a phone at home.\n\n\"Doesn't have a _phone?_ \"\n\n\"That's what he told me.\"\n\n\"I hate to say this, but it sounds a bit suspicious. Sounds to me like the guy is married.\"\n\nIn my gut I felt this wasn't true, that a lie of such import had never passed Tetsu's lips. Still, Miki's words made me uneasy. The circumstantial evidence was undeniably strong. A doctor, obviously not hard up for money, with no phone at home ... If he was married, I thought in alarm, then he couldn't play his part in my script.\n\nBy the following evening I was in a state of full-blown panic. Against my better judgment I gave him a call at work. I told him about my conversation with Miki, told him that even though I didn't doubt his honesty, it was risky, in a foreign culture, to rely on intuition alone.\n\n\"Please, Tetsu, if you're married, tell me _now_ ,\" I said urgently.\n\n\"I'm _not_ married,\" he answered firmly.\n\n\"Are you living with any other people?\" I asked, meaning a woman.\n\n\"I live alone.\" He sounded puzzled.\n\n\"What I don't understand,\" I pressed, \"is how people can get in touch with you when you're not at work. Say we'd planned to meet and I had to cancel for some reason, how could I let you know?\"\n\n\"I carry a beeper with me,\" he said. \"It starts beeping whenever there's a message on my answering machine at work. Then I go to a payphone and listen to my message from there.\"\n\n\"But what if it's an emergency?\"\n\n\"Would it make you feel better,\" he asked after a pause, \"if I had a phone installed in my apartment?\"\n\n\"That's not what I meant,\" I told him, flattered nonetheless that he would consider it. \"I just wanted to confirm that my fears were groundless.\"\n\nAs soon as we hung up I started to panic again. What on earth had possessed me, interrogating him like a vice-squad cop? I cursed myself for my lack of restraint, feeling sure I'd blown it. But two days later he left me a friendly telephone message and all was well again. Weak with relief, I vowed to breathe deeply and count to ten the next time I had an urge to hurl accusations at him. If you're going to keep this man, I told myself sternly, you'll have to be more careful.\n\nThe next time I spoke to Charlene, asking how things had progressed with the sixth object of her lust, she admitted that she'd completely misread the signals this time. It turned out he was a very active homosexual who knew Shinjuku's gay district like the back of his hand. But that was OK with her, since she was _definitely_ not in the market for love and all its discontents.\n\n### **3**\n\nOn the first Sunday in June there was a fine drizzle over Tokyo, a hint of the rainy season to come. I was waiting for Tetsu in front of the Mitaka post-office, starting to worry a little even though he was only a few minutes late. I never saw him approaching from a distance when I waited for him \u2014 he had a way of materializing right before my eyes, as if he'd rounded some invisible corner. There was always the sense that he lay hidden somewhere.\n\nA navy blue Nissan sports car pulled up at the traffic light and I saw his face inside it, eyes intent and hair very black against the white upholstery, my tension evaporating as soon as I met his gaze. He pushed the door open and I got in, sensing that a charmed day lay ahead. Much later, I would look back on that day and wonder if I'd dreamed it.\n\nI remembered asking Hitomi about the \"san\" suffix, when to use it and when not to. She told me that as two people got closer, there came a time when the \"san\" fell away naturally, like an old skin. It wasn't anything you could explain \u2014 you just _knew_ when to drop it.\n\n\"Good morning, Tetsu.\"\n\n\"Sorry I'm late,\" he said. \"I was up until two o'clock last night.\"\n\n\"Work?\" I asked.\n\n\"Yup.\"\n\nWe were headed for Yokohama. As we sped along the highway I watched his hand on the stick-shift, noting the sureness with which he drove, the sporty way he changed gears and wove through the traffic.\n\n\"You drive well,\" I told him.\n\n\"I love cars,\" he said simply. He told me he'd bought his first car at eighteen, with money he'd earned by working in a _soba_ restaurant on weekends. It had taken him four years to save up the money. This man has never stopped working, I thought, wondering where all the drive came from.\n\nOur first stop was Sankei-en, the famous Japanese garden in the Honmoku hills, mixture of nature and artifice. I felt a rush of pleasure at the way Tetsu wordlessly took my hand when we got out of the car, as though he now owned it. With his other hand he held a large checkered umbrella above our heads. Though the park had a reputation as a _dehto-spotto_ (place to go on a date), the rain seemed to have persuaded most couples to go elsewhere. We walked past lily-dotted ponds and pruned trees bent over wooden bridges, thickets of overgrown bushes and teahouses with curled rooftops.\n\n\"How do you like it?\" he asked.\n\n\"I _love_ the greenery,\" I told him, wondering if he understood I meant him.\n\nWe walked hand in hand, our talk sparse but playful, he calling me _ameonna_ , woman who brings the rain, and I poking fun at his yups and nopes, his earnest attempts to talk like a tough Western dude (\"fuck,\" as he tripped over a branch), which sounded about as menacing as a chihuahua bark.\n\n\"What do you mean, _muko no hito?_ \" I protested when he used that phrase to refer to foreigners. \" _People from the other side_. What other side? And what side are _you_ from?\"\n\nHe laughed \u2014 a short laugh, only three or four has, but hearty. His laughter didn't come easily, and it felt like something I'd earned.\n\nI teased him about his compatriots' na\u00efvet\u00e9 about foreigners, their flat-footed questions. \"And your TV shows,\" I accused. \"Why are TV gaijin always so silly?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't know,\" he said. \"I don't have one.\"\n\n\"No TV?\"\n\n\"No TV, no phone.\" He hesitated. \"You probably think that's strange.\"\n\n\"Not at all.\" I glanced up at his face and saw a flicker of something, maybe relief.\n\n\"I'm a bit of a _kawarimono_ , actually,\" he said after a few moments.\n\n\"A what?\"\n\n\" _Kawarimono_. Strange person.\"\n\nI laughed. \"I've always liked strange people,\" I told him. And it was true. I was a sucker for eccentric types. If a man lived in a hut in the wilderness, or refused to vote, or didn't know what a megabyte was, my interest was piqued.\n\nAs we zigzagged through the park I waited for the right moment to ask someone to take our picture. I wanted to get us on paper, to make us official. And when the moment came \u2014 without effort, like everything else that day \u2014 I got into position in front of the water-lilies and Tetsu put his arm around me just as the camera went click, and after that we walked not hand in hand but arm in arm and I was thinking that I wanted this day to go on and on and on, just as it was. Sex could wait. Just having come this far seemed miraculous. Just being close enough that I could feel the warmth seeping out of his body.\n\nThe rain was now stopping, now starting, now stopping again. We sat down at a roof-covered picnic table and took out the sandwiches I'd brought along. He ate with gusto, an egg and a cream cheese and two roast beef. I, on the other hand, had no appetite.\n\n\"Do you like the sandwiches?\" I asked.\n\n\"They're delicious,\" he said without smiling. \"Delicious because you made them.\"\n\nWe left Sankei-en and drove to another parking spot. I had no idea where he was taking me, nor did I much care. He was leading me everywhere, down to Yamashita park and the waterfront, up and down Motomachi street, up a steep hill past the Foreigners' Cemetery where over four thousand gaijin were resting in peace. He was telling me that he'd been quite serious about music as a teenager, that he'd hoped to make it his full-time career. But his father had been adamantly opposed to the whole thing and eventually persuaded him to give it up. Now he was toying with the idea of using conducting as therapy for arm injuries.\n\nWe found ourselves on a deserted strip of land, flanked by a cliff on one side and an old rusted train on the other, frozen in its tracks. \"Whenever I see an old train I think of my uncle in Yamanaka,\" he said. \"He used to tell us stories about the Pacific War, about having to ride on a train for an hour in order to get food for his family.\" Pacific War. It sounded so benign, like a war for flower children. It occurred to me that I ought to tell him I was Jewish, though I couldn't think of any good reason why. Soon, I thought, but not yet.\n\nWalking up another steep hill, we came upon the courtyard of a small shrine, hemmed in by a web of trees. By some silent agreement we stepped in, found a bench and sat down. It was starting to drizzle again. He leaned his umbrella against the bench so that it covered both our heads. I kept my eyes forward, feeling like a virginal schoolgirl all of a sudden, waiting expectantly for the scene to unfold. We sat quietly for awhile and listened to the tapping of the raindrops. Pretty soon I felt his hand around my neck, his fingers massaging the back of my ear.\n\n\"It feels wonderful,\" I murmured.\n\n\"It's a technique I learned in China,\" he said. \"If you ever have trouble going to sleep, repeat this motion \u2014\" he applied pressure and made a circle \" \u2014 one hundred times.\"\n\nI reached up to his ear and tried to copy his movements.\n\n\"Like this?\" I asked.\n\nAll of a sudden his face zoomed in on my own and I felt the pressure of his thick lips against mine. I drew myself up to him, surprised at how familiar it all felt. It surprised me that a Japanese kiss would be no different than a New York kiss or a Vancouver kiss. The warmth, the pressure, the movements were all the same. What was different was that I didn't want it to stop. That I wasn't secretly thinking _you're not my type_ or _I wish you liked Chopin_ or _I cant breathe_.\n\nSlowly I disengaged from him, not wanting him to think me too eager or too experienced. Almost Japanese by now in my awareness of age, I was all too conscious of the four-year gap between us. I wanted him to forget the fine wrinkles around my eyes, forget that I'd been married, touched, kissed by other men. I wanted him to know that none of the others had been real.\n\nWe made our way back to the parking lot, huddled together under his umbrella as we sliced through the drizzle, not saying too much. When we got into the car he didn't start it right away, and we sat tensely for a moment. Then his face rushed in on mine again. There was something odd, after all, about his kissing. He would draw back every few seconds and smile. Kiss and smile, kiss and smile. I'd never seen him smile that way before, with his lips fully parted and teeth showing. He fumbled with the buttons on my blouse, a splashy print I'd bought in Thailand. I closed my eyes and buried my face in his hair. It was a full five minutes before I realized that my breasts were in full view of the passersby.\n\n\"Tetsu,\" I pretended to be shocked, \"everybody can see us.\"\n\n\" _Kimochi ga ii kara, basho to kankei nai_ ,\" he said softly. The feeling is good, so the place doesn't matter. But he pulled away.\n\nI asked him if he was tired, remembering how late he'd been up the previous night.\n\n\"If I thought I was going to be tired today,\" he said, \"I'd have cancelled our date.\" He was still close enough that I could feel his breath tickling my face. \"When I'm with you,\" he continued, \"I want to be with you one hundred percent. I've never liked it when people get together and then complain about being tired. If I'm tired I stay at home and rest.\"\n\nHe wouldn't let me pay my share of the gas, or of the dinner we had on our way back to Tokyo. \"From now on,\" he said, \"let me pay. I don't want to have discussions about who owes who three-hundred-and-fifty yen, do you?\"\n\nI laughed. The only words I'd really heard were _from now on_. So there would be a next time, and a next.\n\n_A waltz in perfect step_ , I wrote in my journal that evening. And I hardly dared believe the words on my answering machine the next day (\"I care about you ...\"), or the way he kissed the picture of us I gave him, calling it his treasure. It was all too much for me. By the end of two weeks I'd lost ten pounds and memorized all of Kevyn Lettau's love songs.\n\nAll this should have happened to me at seventeen. At thirty-four, first love is much more dangerous, like the measles.\n\n### **4**\n\nUneventful though it was, my first day at Shiga International Patent Office was a milestone of sorts: I finally had a _real_ job in Japan, a job that had nothing to do with teaching. I savoured it all \u2014 battling for breathing space in the elevator, punching my time-card, exchanging bows with my new colleagues, wolfing down a plate of _yakisoba_ at a lunch counter, watching half the office rise for the three o'clock calisthenics break, getting acquainted with the NEC and Macintosh computers on my desk, punching out and joining the hordes of commuters headed for Tokyo station. I felt an absurd pride in having finally become a part of the mad scramble, a link in the gears of Tokyo's workaday world. More than ever, I felt I belonged.\n\nThe novelty soon wore off, of course, and by the end of the first week I was already starting to have private gripes. The hardest thing to get used to was having three co-workers' heads within a couple of feet of my own. I couldn't even chew a nail without several people knowing about it. The working area consisted of one large room, with desks arranged in typical Japanese office style: about ten sets of double rows, each one made up of six adjacent desks pushed up against another six. Two, sometimes three personal computers sat atop each desk, along with stacks of documents which occasionally lost their balance and toppled over. In order to clear away a work space on my desk, I had to perch my computer keyboards on their respective monitors and transfer several books and folders to the floor.\n\nReiner, a lapsed physicist from Heidelberg, sat at the desk facing mine. He was taut and muscular, handsome if a bit pallid-looking, and monstrously intelligent. His interests ranged from international politics to mathematics to Thai music to Chinese characters, for which he had an eidetic memory. He took an instant liking to me, possibly because I was, as he put it, \"easy to tease.\" I'd often catch him staring at me with a half-mocking, half-kindly gleam in his eye, and even with my head bent over my papers I could tell when his don t-bite-your-nails look was fixed on me.\n\nReiner made it clear that he wasn't the rules-and-regulations type. He disappeared for stretching breaks several times a day, went for lunch when he felt like it (instead of the standard twelve-thirty to one) and was the only employee who ducked the compulsory Monday afternoon meetings. He would often interrupt my work and challenge me to find the solution to a math problem or a logical paradox.\n\n\"Do you know the one about the three rooms?\" he'd ask innocently, just as I was getting started on a new assignment.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"There are three rooms with closed doors numbered one, two and three. One of the rooms has a red Porsche inside. Let's assume you're trying to maximize your chances of getting that car, OK?\"\n\n\"OK,\" I'd say, all too willing to be distracted from my work.\n\n\"So pick a number.\"\n\n\"Number three.\"\n\n\"Good. I'll keep that door closed for the time being, and open the door to another room that _doesn't_ have the car in it. Now, I'll give you the option of changing your selection to the remaining door, or staying with your original choice. Statistically, which way are you better off?\"\n\n\"It shouldn't make a difference, right? Either way I have a fifty-fifty \u2014\"\n\n\"Aah ...\" he'd cut in with a knowing smile, \"that's one of mathematics' great paradoxes. If you think about it, you'll see that if you change your selection, you have a two-out-of-three chance of getting the car. If you stick with your original selection your odds are only one in three.\"\n\nI hoped this wasn't his way of flirting. Not that he lacked charm, but he _was_ a German, and the timing couldn't have been worse, of course.\n\nMr. Murasaki, our supervisor, didn't seem to have any objections to Reiner's freewheeling style. He would often walk over to Reiner's desk and engage him in an hour-long discourse about some esoteric physics or engineering problem. I suspected that he considered Reiner brilliant and consequently exempt from petty duties like working.\n\nTed, a lapsed chemist, sat to my left, and on my right was Tom, a lapsed doctor. Further down the row of desks sat Hozumi-san, a lapsed geologist who'd lived in Canada for most of his sixty years and was perfectly bilingual. The impish, wise cast of his features made him a favourite among the young female employees. \"He's so cuuute,\" I'd hear them croon. \"He'd make a perfect grandfather, _neh?_ \"\n\nAlmost all of the dozen or so foreign employees were lapsed scientists of one kind or another, which made them a rather interesting bunch. Someone who had the brains and staying power to become a scientist but the imagination to opt out wasn't likely to be dull. Tom, the ex-doctor, wore what was left of his hair down to his shoulders, jeans that looked like something the cat dragged in, and a baseball cap with a long blond ponytail pinned to the back \u2014 presumably to make up for what nature had taken away from him.\n\nBirgit was a young Biology major from Sweden who showed up in halter tops and shorts that barely covered her ass and a look of studied innocence, as though it had never occurred to her that such garb might be inappropriate. I was frankly surprised that Mr. Murasaki never raised any objections to her or Tom's sartorial choices, or to the fact that the foreign employees spent a good portion of each day in idle chitchat. Evidently, he believed that gaijin functioned better if they were allowed complete freedom in dress and work habits.\n\nI was given a number of books and articles on international patent law. After two weeks of reading, I was considered knowledgeable enough to begin working as a patent editor, a specialized career that might take several years of study in Canada or the States. \"Fix up this patent application,\" Mr. Murasaki would tell me, handing me a document about a new method for treating fertilizer or controlling the lubrication of car parts. \"The claims are too broad. You need to make them more specific, otherwise the application will be rejected again. Also, see if you can improve on the logical flow of the information.\" I would spend the next few hours poring over the document, trying to make sense of the mishmash of technical language, graphs, equations and legalese. When I'd reached a peak of frustration, I'd look up from my work and find Reiner baiting me with his mirthful stare. I'd have no choice but to ask him to explain the document to me, which he usually did in short order. As a reward, I would allow him to steer me into a lengthy discussion about prime numbers or Thai rock groups.\n\nOddly enough, Mr. Murasaki seemed perfectly satisfied with this state of affairs. I felt guilty every time he told me what a valuable employee I was, and guiltier still when I received my absurdly generous paycheque every two weeks. As far as I could see, the only real value I had to the company was my ability to write letters in French, since Shiga did business with several patent agencies in France and Switzerland. I lived in fear of the day when Mr. Murasaki would finally realize that I was clearly in over my head with this job.\n\nEvery Monday at one o'clock in the afternoon there was a general staff meeting, which only Reiner had the nerve not to attend. A stand-up microphone was brought out and placed in the middle of the large room. At a prompt from the P.A. system, everybody got up and stood at attention beside their desks. The president of the company walked up to the microphone and said a few words about new policies, changes in patent law or upcoming company events. Following this, two or three of the employees, who'd been designated in advance, took turns providing us with \"instructive or amusing anecdotes.\" The president then announced that the meeting was over, there was a round of applause, and everybody sat down to resume the business of being or looking busy.\n\nKeiko was a shy young woman who worked as a translator and administrative assistant. When she learned that it was her turn to speak the following Monday, she worried herself sick for the rest of the week. On the fateful day, she came to the office looking miserable. We were all rooting for her when she walked up to the microphone, eyes glued to the ground.\n\n\"I'm going to talk about an experience I had last year,\" she said in that forthright, determined way of the very shy when under duress. \"As some of you know, I'm still not married.\" She took a deep breath. \"Well, last year one of my friends suggested that I enrol in dance classes as a way of meeting eligible bachelors. Why not, I thought. I registered for a ballroom dancing class at the school my friend had recommended. On the first evening of instruction, I found myself surrounded by people who looked like they were in their sixties and seventies. Don't worry, I told myself, the younger folks are probably rushing over from work, so they'll be a little late. But ten minutes into the lesson, I knew I was in trouble. The youngest of the other participants was about thirty years older than me.\" Several people chuckled, and Keiko seemed to relax a little.\n\n\"The last thing I'd expected was to be doing the polka with senior citizens. To tell the truth, I didn't find the lessons very enjoyable, and there were a lot of Tuesday evenings when I'd have preferred to stay at home with a book. Under the circumstances, though, I had no choice but to stick it out for the rest of the year. So, the point of my story is that it's worth your while to do some thorough research before acting on the advice of a friend.\"\n\nAfter the meeting was over, I walked over to Hozumi-san's desk and pulled up a chair beside his. \"I don't understand,\" I told him.\n\n\"What? You mean Keiko's story?\"\n\n\"Yes. I don't see why she felt compelled to waste a year of Tuesday evenings taking lessons she didn't enjoy. Why didn't she simply quit, when it became obvious to her that she wasn't going to find what she was looking for?\"\n\n\"It's a matter of saving face,\" Hozumi-san said instantly.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Ten months in Japan and I still didn't get it.\n\n\"Think about it for a minute,\" he said, as though quizzing a child. \"Who recommended the dance school to Keiko?\"\n\n\"A friend of hers.\"\n\n\"That's right. So if she quit partway through, her friend would feel terrible.\"\n\n\"But her friend had no way of knowing that only senior citizens would sign up.\"\n\n\"Doesn't matter,\" he said. \"She would still feel responsible, and the friendship would be strained. So Keiko decided it was better to save her friend's face and pretend that all was going well.\"\n\n\"I still say it's a waste of time,\" I countered. Hozumi-san simply shrugged his shoulders and gave me one of his grandfatherly smiles.\n\n### **5**\n\nA commonplace truth about being in love is that physical imperfections and even character flaws become part of the loved one's appeal. If that was indeed a sign of love, then it was not only Tetsu but Tokyo itself I'd lost my heart to. No longer eyesores, the clusters of vending machines at every street corner looked bright and cheerful through my rose-tinted lenses. While I'd initially regarded them as products of the convenience mentality, I came to see them as blessedly convenient. There was a set of vending machines at the beginning of my street, and on my way home I would sometimes stop to buy a can of _aisu kohii_ , thanking the Japanese for having anticipated my thirst and placed this colourful oasis in my path. A few steps further on Shin Midori street was another machine that dispensed cold sake and beer. When the spirit(s) moved me I walked over and bought myself a glass or two of sake. Then I would go home, turn on the air conditioner (which cooled down my tiny room in two minutes flat), sprawl out on my sofa and take slow sips of the drink, listening to Kevyn Lettau's songs and letting my fantasies swirl around me like curls of smoke.\n\nAt five o'clock every morning I was wide awake, bursting to give expression to my elation. I would jump out of bed and go for a walk, exulting in the perfection of my surroundings: asphalt gleaming as though a hundred dogs had licked it clean overnight, compact houses with obsessively well-tended hedges, spanking new apartment buildings called Luna or Milky Way, the streets empty except for a few insomniac _obaasan_ , they too perfect in their tidy walk and softly creased faces. Sometimes they even smiled back at me.\n\nAbout once a week, usually in the afternoon, the paper-waste exchange truck drove through the neighbourhood, stopping at every intersection. Since I was often at home during the day, I had the pleasure of hearing the driver's repeated exhortations, amplified through his megaphone:\n\n\"Once again I am humbly grateful to serve you. Should any member of your esteemed family be in possession of paper items that have outlived their usefulness and turned into garbage, such as old newspapers, magazines or cardboard boxes, in quantities large or small, kindly allow me to exchange them for toilet paper or facial tissues according to your preference.\"\n\nTokyo was my lover now, so even its crowds, its goofy after-eight salarymen, silly with liquor, its pomp and circumstance about toilet paper, were part of its allure. Tokyo and Tetsu were becoming inseparable in my mind \u2014 one was weaving into the other and both were taking root in the subterranean layers of my fantasies.\n\nSuperstitions began to crop up in my behaviour. If I knocked on wood nine times before calling him, it would be a good conversation. If I burned the clipped ends of my toenails (like my mother used to do), our romance would continue to burn brightly. If I was meticulous about sorting the garbage properly, I might be entitled to stay in Japan (with him).\n\nI was still teaching about four hours a week, and during one of those classes I brought up the topic of superstition. I asked the students to break up into small groups, discuss Japanese superstitions among themselves and designate group leaders who would report their findings to the class.\n\nMost of the superstitions, I learned, revolved around death. When passing a _kichuu_ (In Mourning) sign, closing the fingers of your hand around the thumb was a way of protecting your parents from death. It was bad luck if you were summoned to a dying person's house and your shoelaces came undone on the way there. You were also supposed to avoid cutting your nails at night, because the words for night and nail put together sounded like a word that meant evening burial. Seeing a funeral car, on the other hand, was good luck. A student from Aomori Prefecture told of a local belief that if a crow circled a sick persons house three times, that person was going to die. Another student said something that made my heart miss a beat. She'd read about it in the newspaper, a warning to couples that if their first date was in Inokashira park, they'd eventually split up. Not only was my first date with Tetsu in Inokashira park, I thought anxiously, but we ended up there almost every time we met.\n\n\"I find that hard to believe,\" I said to her, trying to conceal my personal stake in the matter. \"Lots of couples go to Inokashira park on their first date, and surely they're not all going to break up.\"\n\n\"But it's true,\" she insisted. \"If first time dating in that park, is bad luck. Newspaper say it, even they do survey.\"\n\nThis is ridiculous, I told myself, you don't believe in that sort of nonsense. Nevertheless, I felt vaguely uneasy for the rest of the day.\n\nTetsu and I found ourselves in Inokashira park again that weekend, engaging in a long round of kisses. Kiss and smile, kiss and smile.\n\n\"Shall we go to your place?\" he mumbled in between kisses. I hadn't expected the question to pop up so soon. He'd always given me the impression of being in no hurry and I was reluctant, almost, to put an end to the suspense.\n\n\"I'm not sure, Tetsu,\" I muttered.\n\n\"You don't trust me?\"\n\n\"It's not that, but ...\" What I feared was some unwanted piece of reality breaking through my web of fantasies. The child in me wanted things to stay just as they were, on the brink of consummation, the hope and doubt in perfect balance. But I also wanted Tetsu.\n\n\"OK,\" I said finally, \"let's go. But promise me you won't leave quickly.\"\n\nAnd as we stepped into my apartment, as he took me into his arms, removed my clothes and then his own, kissed me all over and reached down between my legs, I was surprised again by how international it was, the way a man touched a woman. Somehow I'd imagined that a country whose school-children bowed to their teachers every morning, a country whose trains always rolled in on time and whose lovers held their trysts in hotel-rooms with Lone Ranger or Mickey Mouse themes, that such a country would have produced a different kind of lovemaking.\n\n\"Tonight is for you,\" he declared, pinning my arms above my head and saying _ikenai_ when I tried to wriggle free. It was absurdly erotic to me, being made love to in Japanese. He covered me with kisses, holding me down so I couldn't move and making my body sing with pleasure. But he wouldn't let me reciprocate. \"No rules,\" he said. \"Remember?\" He wasn't the least bit shy about touching me, but when I tried to move my hand along the inside of his thigh, he pleaded shyness and gently pushed my hand away. \"Tonight is your night,\" he kept saying. A flicker of worry went through my head. Why didn't he feel any urgency?\n\nHe gave me an elaborate face massage \u2014 a technique he'd learned in China, he said \u2014 then insisted on doing the rest of me. \"You have a lovely body,\" he told me. But his was the beautiful one. I was surprised at his hairiness (having been under the impression that all Japanese men came hairless), his thick legs and torso. He was bulky enough to make me feel delicate, which was no small feat. \"I think I'll call you Grizzly,\" I told him, afraid to ask why he insisted on giving everything and taking nothing.\n\nWe lay on the bed as the pre-dawn light filtered through the sliding door, his unmoving face in the crook of my arm.\n\n\"What are you thinking about?\"\n\n\"I'm thinking about today's happiness,\" he said quietly, \"and the next happiness.\"\n\nThe word \"next\" caught in my ear and I held my breath. Was it possible that he wanted the same thing I wanted? Did he lie in bed, as I did, imagining our future together? As always, his words were full of promise but left me guessing.\n\nA few days later, on one of my early morning walks, I came upon a large sign inscribed with the words \"Selfish Restaurant\" in bold cursive lettering. I chuckled to myself, wondering if the sign was meant to describe the customers or the staff. Peering inside through the restaurant's window, I saw Selfish menus, Selfish paper napkins and Selfish matchbooks. Then, taking a closer look at the sign, I noticed the characters for _kairyori_ , the Japanese word for shellfish. On my way home I passed the grounds of a small _jinja_ , and on impulse turned back and went in. There was a hut-like structure at the foot of the shrine, four pillars and a tiled roof from which hung a bell with a pullstring. I stood in front of the hut and prayed that Tetsu would be more selfish the next time. I prayed that Tokyo and Tetsu would continue to romance me and that I would do nothing to disappoint them.\n\n### **6**\n\nThere is Jewish hospitality, all warmth and informality and inducements to eat. (Hev enudda matzoh-ball \u2014 what, yuh dieting? Yuh skin and bones, fuh heaven's sake.) There is Italian hospitality, much the same as the Jewish variety except for the types of foods being offered. The French will ply you with wine and sparkling conversation. Spanish hospitality might include a singalong around an acoustic guitar. But Japanese hospitality is a breed apart. When the Japanese put their mind to playing host, you will come away feeling awestruck and just a little uneasy, as if you owe them favours well into your next incarnation.\n\nHitomi had given me a taste of it with her minutely orchestrated dinners, but it wasn't until I spent a full weekend in a Japanese home that I understood just how serious this business of hospitality could be in Japan. It wasn't so much that pleasing a guest was a pleasure, but that _not_ pleasing one was a shameful disgrace, to be avoided at all costs.\n\nNaomi, the thirty-six-year-old Japanese teacher I'd first met at Miki's sukiyaki party, had become a friend of mine in her own right, and we often met in Shinjuku for a stolen hour of lunchtime chitchat. For several weeks she'd been toying with the idea of having me come and spend a weekend at her parents' _besso_ , or summer cottage, in the mountainous Chichibu district west of Tokyo.\n\nIn a society where the difficulty of owning even one home is matched by the unanimous longing for one, having a second home put the Saito family in a much-envied social stratum. I was curious to see how cottage life unfolded in rural Japan, so when Naomi's invitation took concrete shape at the beginning of July, I eagerly accepted.\n\n\"I afraid you think it's boring,\" she told me as we rode the westbound express train. \"This weekend only my mother and aunt over there. They're, uh, how you say ... chatterboxes, right? _O-shaberi_. Typical Japanese women. My mother is Yoshiko and my aunt is Toshiko. Confusing, _neh?_\n\nThe cottage was located in a small town called Ogose, in the foothills of the Chichibu mountains. The two women met us at the train station, almost falling over at the sight of me, and drove us to the house. Though they didn't \u2014 much to their credit \u2014 say a word about my height, they were clearly beside themselves with excitement. It wasn't often that an elongated _hakujin_ woman appeared at their doorstep, and a Japanese-speaking one at that.\n\nThe cottage was half-hidden by a profusion of disheveled greenery \u2014 trees, shrubs, bushes of all sizes, and overgrown grass. Its wooden exterior walls were faded to a dull grayish-brown and didn't seem quite vertical, though it was hard to pinpoint where they slanted. The inside was just like the outside \u2014 disorderly and homey. Too many lamps, too many slightly crooked pictures on the wood-panelled walls, too many knickknacks, a gilded miniature shrine recessed into one wall, and a blaring TV that nobody seemed to be watching, added up to a welcoming whole. This was clearly a place where one didn't have to worry about sneezing or unfluffing the sofa cushions.\n\n\"It's not fancy here, but I hope you'll feel comfortable,\" Yoshiko blustered, ushering me toward the TV and handing me a remote control device. \"I'm afraid you'll be bored here.\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" I said as I installed myself on the large square cushion she was pointing at.\n\n\"You can watch anything you like,\" she told me. She yanked the remote from my hands. \"Here, I'll show you. There's channel eight, from Tokyo. Oh look, there's a talk show. Do you like talk shows? And channel ten is from Osaka \u2014\"\n\n\"Mother, stop!\" Naomi said impatiently. \"You didn't even ask her if she _wants_ to watch TV.\"\n\nYoshiko turned to me in sudden concern. \"Do you want to watch TV?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"You see, she does. Here, take this, and choose whichever channel you like.\"\n\nObediently, I took the remote and started flipping. I had no idea what my next move ought to be, what was expected of me as a good guest. I finally settled on the talk-show and started watching intently under Yoshiko and Toshiko's anxious gazes.\n\n\"Can you understand what they're saying?\" Yoshiko asked, then grabbed the remote from my hands again. \"Here, let me show you. Oh look, a program about animals. Maybe you'd prefer to watch this. What do you think?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"How do you know she likes animals?\" Toshiko asked.\n\nYoshiko shot me another worried look. \"Are you enjoying the show?\"\n\nAnd so it went, until Naomi announced in forceful tones that she was going to take me on a bicycle tour of the area. We departed in a hurry, urged on by the two sisters' cries of \"Show her the temple!\", \"Show her the statue on the hill!\", \"Show her the pond, you know the one I mean?\"\n\nRural Japan always cast an eerie spell on me. If I were the New Age type, I would conclude that I must have lived one of my past lives in Japan, because there was an undeniable sense of connection, of belonging, every time I found myself passing through the Japanese countryside. The most obvious reminder of my foreignness, as we pedalled through the rolling foothills, was that the bicycle Naomi had lent me (\"Adult model,\" she'd assured me) was about the same size as the one I'd received for my eighth birthday.\n\nBack at the cottage, the air was alive with the sizzle of oil and the intoxicating smells of frying tempura \u2014 eggplant, squash, green peppers, onions, and even apples, which Yoshiko explained was a local custom. While we ate the tempura, washing down the food with home-made plum wine, Yoshiko ran the hot water in the large wood-panelled bathtub. She insisted that I be the first to take the evening bath after dinner, matching my protests (\"No, no, _you_ should go first\") with more forceful counter-protests (\"Out of the question \u2014 it wouldn't be right if we made our guest wait\") and handing me a blue-and-white checkered _yukata_ as she shooed me in.\n\nAfter a half-hour soak in the deep square tub, sleep came easily. And when I told Yoshiko, the next morning, how comfortably I'd slept in the _yukata_ , she insisted I keep it as a souvenir. Amid my feeble protests, she snatched the garment from my hands, ran up the stairs to my bedroom and laid it on top of my suitcase. It wasn't every day that she had the honour of playing host to a Canadian, she told me on her way back down the stairs, as though that explained everything.\n\nFortified with a breakfast of ham, eggs, toast and jam, salad, potato-salad, mixed fruit salad and ice cream, we piled into Yoshiko's hatchback and went on our way, the two sisters arguing about where to take me first.\n\n\"My relatives talk too much, don't you think?\" Naomi told me _sotto voce_ as we cruised along.\n\nIt was true that the two sisters never stopped talking. Every cottage we passed, every farmhouse or stream, set their jaws in motion. But possibly because they were speaking Japanese, and because they weren't _my_ relatives, I found their small talk charming rather than irritating.\n\nOur first stop was a _wasshi_ paper-making factory, where we were shown how the translucent, coarsely textured paper was stained and hung out to dry. The last room in the mom-and-pop operation was a boutique, where finished products such as _wasshi_ -bound notebooks and _wasshi_ hairpins were displayed and sold.\n\n\"Nice, isn't it?\" I said to Naomi as I fingered a delicate pink hairpin rimmed with gold metal wiring. The next thing I knew, the pin was wrapped, paid for and in my hands (\"Just a little gift to show how much we appreciate your visit\"), courtesy of Yoshiko and Toshiko, who once again were arguing about what sights to show me next.\n\nThat was pretty much the way the rest of the day went \u2014 the two ladies inundating me with food, gifts and compliments, and I trying to find an artful way to deflect their generosity without hurting their feelings. The opportunity came when we stopped for lunch in a cozy restaurant high up in the Chichibu mountains, where customers could observe the making of fresh _udon_ noodles. While the other three women were in the bathroom, I surreptitiously paid the bill, then dragged them out of the restaurant before they had a chance to protest, feeling smart for having finally outwitted them.\n\nWe spent the afternoon at the roof-covered outdoor market in Chichibu City, the largest town in the area. As we strolled through the maze of tiny kiosks where vendors were displaying their wares \u2014 clothes, jewellery, packaged foods and gift items such as plastic turtles that gurgled when squeezed \u2014 the delicate pink of a woven scarf caught my eye.\n\nSpotting me as I touched the scarf, Yoshiko rushed to my side. \"Do you like it?\" she asked.\n\n\"It's pretty, isn't it? The colour reminds me of cherry blossoms.\"\n\nI should have known better. No sooner had I turned around than the scarf was in my hands, wrapped in clear plastic and a pink bow.\n\n\"Yoshiko-san!\" I said, trying to sound stern. \"You're spoiling me too much. You don't have to \u2014\"\n\n\"But you _said_ you liked it,\" she retorted, with the logic of a born giver.\n\nA little farther along, I ran my hand along the surface of a brightly coloured futon pillow.\n\n\"It's nice, isn't it?\" Yoshiko asked as she walked by.\n\nThis time I only nodded, but the result was the same \u2014 Yoshiko waited until my head was turned, scurried off to the cashier with the pillow in hand, then presented it to me as a _fait accompli_.\n\nEventually I figured out what I had to do. For the rest of the afternoon, the conversation between Yoshiko and me went something like this:\n\n\"Do you like this T-shirt?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"But don't you \u2014\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"How about these earrings?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nIt was only by being downright rude, I discovered, that I could prevent her from making a gift out of every item I happened to touch or look at.\n\nAll too soon it was time to return to Tokyo. After a quick supper of grilled eel on rice, we drove to the Ogose train station where we bowed our goodbyes to each other. Unable to resist, I gave both women a big Western hug. They giggled nervously but looked quite pleased.\n\n\"Wait!\" Yoshiko called out as I turned toward the approaching train. She walked up to me and handed me a small envelope. \"Don't open it until you get home,\" she instructed. \"Promise?\"\n\nAs soon as I stepped into my apartment that evening, I opened the envelope and pulled out four crisp \u00a51,000 bills along with a carefully handwritten note in English: _We ashamed to let our guest pay for udon lunch, so please accept this money. Love, Yoshiko_.\n\nOnce again, the foxy lady had beat me at the game of giving.\n\n### **7**\n\nIn a romance between two people of different cultures, there is always the suspicion that the culture gap is the binding glue. I sometimes wondered if Tetsu was in love with me or with or the novelty of whispering endearments in English, the status of having a gaijin woman on his arm, the thrill of kissing in public, just as they did in the movies. I wondered if it was me or the language he was courting. \"Damn it,\" he would say when he stubbed his toe or popped a shirt-button, with the satisfied look of a child who'd just learned to tie his shoelaces. I saw the earnestness of his efforts to sound like an American (\"I forgatt to tell ya ...\"), the pleasure he took in using expressions like \"pain in the neck\" or \"gut feeling\" or \"gimme a break.\" His years of listening to F.E.N. radio were finally paying off.\n\nFor my part, I couldn't deny that being romanced in Japanese had a unique appeal. As much as Tetsu liked saying Wish I could see you tonight, I thrilled to hear him say _Aenakute samishii naaah_. And there was something uniquely Japanese, it seemed to me, in the way he used words \u2014 sparingly, suggestively, to evoke rather than explain. \"Let's spend a day in Izu sometime,\" I learned, meant \"I'm sorry for showing up late tonight.\" He never told me he was tired or under stress, only that the weather was strange. The straightforward, tell-all style of my previous lovers seemed crude by comparison.\n\nThe rainy season was now in full swing, and it wasn't nearly as oppressive as the locals had led me to believe. The days were light grey, drizzly and windless, sometimes brightening up for a few hours \u2014 nothing at all like the brooding skies that hung over Toronto throughout the month of November. From my window at Shiga, I would look down at the umbrellas bobbing along the sidewalk in an continuous stream, so close together they sometimes overlapped, and feel a surge of affection for the city.\n\n\"How long does the rainy season last?\" I asked the old grouch in the stationery store on Shin-Midori street.\n\n\"It ends on July twentieth.\"\n\n\"How can you know the exact date?\"\n\n\" _Tsuyu_ is from June tenth to July twentieth,\" he said flatly.\n\n\"You mean to tell me it stops raining on the same date every year?\"\n\n\" _Tsuyu_ is _tsuyu_ ,\" he grumbled as he gave me my change.\n\nOne Saturday in late June, I invited Tetsu to my apartment for a home-cooked meal. It was one of those _tsuyu_ days that I loved \u2014 pearly sky, and a drizzle so fine that you had to put your ear against a leaf to be sure it was raining. I'd opened the sliding door so that Tetsu and I could watch the sky grow dark while we ate.\n\nWith my little table in the centre of the room, there was barely enough space between my sofa-bed and the far wall for us to sit comfortably. I watched anxiously as he tasted the pseudo-Chinese dishes I'd prepared \u2014 broccoli beef, ginger chicken, vegetable-fried rice. I had briefly considered making a Japanese meal but gave up the idea after Hitomi told me a few recipes, which sounded impossibly complicated.\n\n\" _Oishii_ ,\" he told me as he looked up from his plate.\n\nI wanted badly for him to like the food. I wanted him to think _hmmmm, I could get used to this_.\n\nA few days earlier, I'd asked Hitomi if she thought the four-year gap in our ages would make Tetsu less likely to regard me as a potential wife. \"It's true,\" she'd told me in her tactful way, \"that some Japanese men don't want to get serious about a woman over thirty. But if he already likes you ...\" A few years back, she said, two baseball superstars had made headlines by marrying older women \u2014 one five and the other ten years older \u2014 and as a result, attitudes toward women in their thirties were starting to change. \"It's case-by-case, I think.\"\n\nThe rain was coming down harder now, and the rooftops of the neighbouring houses were glinting dully in the fading light.\n\n\"Is it true that the rainy season always ends on July twentieth?\" I asked Tetsu.\n\n\"I think it's gonna end a little later this year.\"\n\n\"What makes you say that?\"\n\n\"You're a rain-woman, remember?\"\n\nEver since our trip to Yokohama, he'd taken to blaming me for all the rain that fell over Tokyo.\n\n\"At least you're not playing golf tomorrow,\" I said.\n\n\"I was supposed to,\" he deadpanned. \"I cancelled it because I knew you'd bring the rain.\"\n\nI kicked his foot under the table. \"What is it you like so much about golf, anyway? I mean, is it really worth thirty-thousand yen to chase after a little white ball for a few hours?\"\n\n\"You're not gonna believe me if I tell you.\"\n\n\"Tell me anyway.\"\n\n\"I know it sounds strange,\" he said, \"but I think of golf as a kind of personality test. I've noticed that when people play golf, their true character shows through.\"\n\n\"In what way?\"\n\nHe cleared his throat. \"Nervous people, for instance, can pretend to be cool and calm \u2014 they can hide their real temperament. In most situations, they can get away with it. But when they play golf, excitable types end up showing their frustration.\"\n\nIt occurred to me that I'd never heard him raise his voice, not even in jest or excitement.\n\n\"And which type are you, Tetsu? I can't imagine you'd ever lose your cool on a golf course.\"\n\nHis eyes grew serious. \"I try not to,\" he said. \"At the very least, I try not to let it show if I do.\" He was looking at me intently as he spoke.\n\n\"Do you never get angry or impatient?\"\n\n\"Somebody once told me that it's better to keep one's anger inside,\" he said in that quietly urgent tone he sometimes used. \"It was someone I respected, so his words made an impression on me.\"\n\nWe ate in silence for a few moments, then he looked up from his plate again.\n\n\"I'd like to take you golfing sometime,\" he said.\n\nJust then there was a knock on my door. I got up to open it, wondering who on earth would be visiting me so late on a rainy Saturday night. It was Sugako, my next-door neighbour. Her eyes widened as she caught a glimpse of Tetsu.\n\n\"Oh, sorry, sorry,\" she stammered. \"I didn't know you have friend here. Sorry, I didn't hear. I came bad time.\" Her face turned four shades of red. \" _Sumimasen_ , I come back later. I just wanted to give back English book you borrow, ah, lend me. I'm so sorry. Here, take book. Sorry I interrupt.\"\n\nShe gave a quick bow and hurried away before I could introduce her to Tetsu. And now it was my turn to blush as I saw Tetsu's eyes fall on the book I was holding, an English translation of Yoshiko Ariyoshi's _The Doctor's Wife_.\n\n\"So how's your English reading coming along?\" I asked quickly. \"Do you still read the Japan Times in the afternoon?\"\n\n\"Nope,\" he said. \"I've been too busy these days. Right now I'm reading a medical book called _Nihonjin no Hon\u00e8_. Japanese Bones, I guess.\"\n\n\"Japanese Bones?\" I started to laugh. \"You're the only person I know who would read a book called Japanese Bones.\" I reached over and put my hands around his neck. \"Can I read it too, Tetsu? I'd _love_ to read Japanese Bones.\"\n\nIn answer, he got up from his chair, picked me up by the waist and carried me the yard's distance to the bed. He made growling noises as we undressed each other. \"I'm a grizzly bear, remember?\" he said, pretending to bite off my fingers, ears and nose. \"A Japanese grizzly bear.\" All at once he grabbed me by the arms and turned me over on my stomach. \"Doggie-style,\" he said as he rubbed himself against me, almost causing me to laugh. And then he turned me over again, sank his teeth into my neck and sucked hard. \"Say something in Japanese,\" I told him as I slid my hand up his leg.\n\n\" _Dam\u00e8_ ,\" he said tersely. \" _Sawaru na_.\" He pushed my hand away.\n\n\"Why, Tetsu? Why won't you let me touch you?\"\n\n\"'Cause I'm a big bear,\" he said, \"and I'm attacking you.\"\n\nHe spread my legs apart and held them down at the knees, making growling noises all the while. Again I tried to touch him, and again he moved my hand aside.\n\n\"I'm a big, dangerous bear,\" he said in Japanese.\n\nI forced a laugh, but inside I was starting to feel anxious. Something was wrong here, though I wasn't sure what. Was he simply nervous, or tired? Or was a sturdy, broad-shouldered gaijin woman too great a departure from the pint-sized Sumikos he'd slept with in the past?\n\nAll at once he stopped growling and rolled over to my side. He stared up at the ceiling, his features locked in an unreadable expression. I put my head on his shoulder and watched the hairs on his chest as they rose and fell softly.\n\n\"Tetsu,\" I said after a while. \"Is anything the matter?\"\n\nHe didn't answer.\n\n\"Is there anything you're afraid of?\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"Like diseases, or getting me pregnant ...\"\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"I trust you.\" He kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling as he spoke. \"I don't wanna have a child right now, though. I wanna have one in March, so it will be born in December.\"\n\nI could hardly believe my ears. \"Why December?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" he said vaguely. \"I just think it's good luck, that's all.\"\n\nWe lay in silence for a while, side by side under my thin quilt. So he wants a child in March, I thought in amazement. But which March? And with whom?\n\nAfter a few minutes I felt his fingers tracing circles around my nipples. I let my hand trail softly down his chest, and this time he didn't push it away. Suddenly, as if making a decision of some kind, he climbed on top of me and entered me quickly. Pinned down by his bulk, I watched his face grow strained on top of mine. And then his eyes rolled upward and his body caved in, and I felt a gush of warmth between my legs, and I marvelled at the newness of it all, the flood of tenderness toward another human being, the rock-hard knowledge that I would never leave him.\n\nEarly the next morning, he shook me awake and told me he had to go.\n\n\"Where?\" I asked groggily.\n\n\"To my meeting. Remember?\"\n\nI watched him as he got into his clothes, wondering if other Japanese men rationed their free time so stingily. I wished that just once, he would say _to hell with the meeting, I wanna spend the day in bed and fuck you doggie-style until you're blue in the face_.\n\n\"What's that?\" I asked him. He'd taken something shiny out of his pants-pocket and was about to put it back in.\n\n\"My key-ring.\"\n\n\"Can I see it?\"\n\nI took the ring into my hands and stared at it in astonishment. It was about four inches in diameter, and there were at least fifty, maybe a hundred keys on it. I wondered why I'd never noticed it before.\n\n\"Tetsu,\" I said, \"what on earth do you have so many keys for?\"\n\nHe let the question hang. Again I felt it, the reluctance to probe any further, and find out ... what?\n\nAfter he left, the questions lingered in my mind. I stood in front of the sliding door and looked out at the rainwater trickling down the glistening rooftops. No rules, he'd said, yet there seemed to be a lot of them. We could never see each other on weeknights, or make plans in advance, or spend a leisurely weekend together. And we were not to discuss his work. Our encounters were like the notes in a _shakuhachi_ piece, tense and full of promise, then fading back into silence.\n\n### **8**\n\nTokyo sense.\n\nThe phrase popped into my head on the way back from a Sunday stroll through Yoyogi park. I'd brought my camera along, something I hadn't done in months, and clicked away at the gyrating members of the Rude Crash rock band and the teenaged girls bobbing up and down around them, at a self-styled poet giving an impassioned reading while shaking his fist skyward, at the giant hoop earrings and sequined vests being hawked by enterprising Israelis, finally stopping to rest on a bench where I segued into a conversation with a man from Iran whose nose resembled a dromedary's back.\n\nJust two days after arriving in Tokyo, the Iranian told me, he'd walked into a Roppongi discotheque and caught the eye of a young Caucasian woman who'd been born and raised in Japan. She became his girlfriend. Through her various contacts she managed to find him a room in the house of a wealthy proprietor. The rent was only \u00a520,000, and he had access to the whole house when the owner was away, which was almost every weekend.\n\nThree months later, he still had the room but no longer the woman. \"I found another one,\" he admitted. \"It's more serious this time. Unfortunately, her father is having a hard time getting used to me. But he will,\" he added confidently. With the help of this girlfriend, he'd managed to get a successful import business going in just a couple of years.\n\n\"What about language?\" I asked. \"Wasn't it a problem when you were starting up your business?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"I chose girlfriends who taught me good Japanese.\"\n\nAmong the thousands of gaijin who poured into Tokyo, there were only a small number who had this sort of nose for it. Like rats in sewers, they knew how to squeeze the most nourishment out of the city, how to make it work to their advantage. They found the cushiest jobs, the best housing deals, the women who would give them not only their bodies but their connections.\n\nAt the other extreme were people like Vivian, my supervisor at INTEC. Though she professed to love Tokyo, she clearly didn't know how to make the city love her back. She worked like a dog but got neither praise nor promotions. In four years, she hadn't managed to learn more than a handful of Japanese words and hadn't made any real friends, either Japanese or gaijin. I cringed in embarrassment when she gushed on about how this or that colleague, ten years her junior, appeared to have a crush on her. The truth (drunkenly confessed to me over lemongrass shrimp one evening) was that she hadn't been touched by a man in all the time she'd been in Japan, discounting a _chikan_ who'd assaulted her on her way home from work late one night.\n\nI ran into her one afternoon, while window-shopping along Sakurada street with Hitomi and Yoko. She'd been walking with her head bent forward, and lifted it just in time to avoid crashing into me. There was something wild and hollow about the look in her eyes as she stood before us, all aflame in magenta and orange, dollops of pink lipstick staining her large front teeth. Hitomi and Yoko cast their eyes downward at the sight of her, and I too felt embarrassed, uncomfortable.\n\nEqually lacking in Tokyo sense was Gordon, an older teacher who taught a class at SECOM on the same evening as I did. In the course of our weekly walks from the SECOM building to the bus stop, I managed to piece together _the_ story of his life in Tokyo, which consisted of one mishap after another. Following the usual pattern for gaijin planning to work in Japan, he arrived without a working visa, quickly found an English school that was willing to sponsor him, then flew out to Hong Kong in order to receive his visa from outside the country. On his third day at the Hong Kong YMCA, his wallet was stolen from under his bed. It contained all the cash he had brought with him, about $3,000. Back in Tokyo, he \"lucked into\" a arrangement whereby he got reduced rent in exchange for ten hours a week of English instruction to the landlord. The trouble was, the apartment was a two-hour commute from downtown Tokyo, where he taught during the day. The result was that his entire day was spent in a train or in a classroom.\n\nWith a touch of smugness, I compared his situation to my own. The longest I ever had to commute to get to a job was half an hour, and my working hours left me large blocks of free time every day. I had kindly landlords, a steadily ringing phone, a growing circle of friends. On a deeper level, I felt that Tokyo had touched me, had changed me, in a way it hadn't touched Vivian or Gordon. I sometimes caught myself bowing on the telephone, or jerking my head in that bird-like way characteristic of Japanese women, or deflecting praise with a formulaic expression (\"No, no, far from it, my Japanese is very poor\"), all without conscious intent. People no longer stared at me on the train, the way they used to when I first arrived. Even Tom Koyama, who believed that adult personalities were set in stone, remarked that I seemed to be getting softer around the edges, more circumspect, more patient.\n\nAnother thing I was smug about was getting INTEC to sponsor me for a visa extension, even though I worked for them only two or three hours a week instead of the official requirement of twenty. My application was accepted, which meant I was entitled to stay in Tokyo for another full year after the anniversary of my arrival.\n\nMy weekly income was larger than ever, thanks in part to a \"Music and English\" program I'd put together for a group of twelve housewives eager to learn Western pop-songs. Nobue, the only one among them who had a piano, offered to host our sessions at her apartment, which was barely large enough for the thirteen of us to fit inside. After half an hour of diction and vocalization drills, I would sit down at the piano and accompany the ladies while they produced timid, wobbly renditions of the old war-horses they loved \u2014 Moon River, Feelings, My Way. I tried to challenge them with more lively numbers like The Girl From Ipanema, but the women proved incapable of hitting the off-beats. They breathed a collective sigh of relief when I gave up on Ipanema and started them on Somewhere Over The Rainbow.\n\nTo top it all off, of course, there was Tetsu. He rounded out a life that would have been vibrant and full even without him, made it shine like a polished pearl. I alternated between gratitude and pride, between thinking of him as a gift and an accomplishment. Unable to restrain myself, I sang his praises in long wordy letters to my brother, rhapsodizing about his refinement, his subtlety, his wisdom.\n\n\"Is it serious?\" David asked.\n\nI honestly didn't know. On the telephone, we carried on about how much we missed each other, as though we were separated by miles and mountains. But we only saw each other one night a week \u2014 this was an unspoken rule between us \u2014 either on Saturday or Sunday. On weeknights I had to make do with a quick phone call, or one of his whimsical offerings on my answering machine. I never questioned this state of affairs, never pressed for more time together, sensing that if I ever put him in a position where he felt he had to choose between me and his work, he would have no hesitation about ending our relationship. His work stood between us like a sacred cow, never talked about but always there, always blocking the way.\n\nI was hungry for information about his past. It wasn't the unusual but the ordinary events that my curiosity fed on. I pictured him as a medical student, dissecting cadavers. At eighteen, parked near his high school with a bashful girl looking up at him from the passenger seat. Leaning against the brick wall of the school building, puffing on his first cigarette. Many years earlier, smiling with delight (before he'd learned to hide his smile in his eyes) at the sight of a _kappa_ puppet. At eight, looking on in fear as his father hurled a plate across the dining-room table. As a small baby, speaking his first word. Sucking at his mother's breast. My imagination was shamelessly drawn to the mundane, the maudlin.\n\nI brought his picture to a women-only party at Hitomi's house and showed it around. The women huddled around it and clucked their approval, sounding for all the world like Jewish mothers minus the _oy veys_.\n\n\"He looks like a nice man.\"\n\n\"Yes, very nice man.\"\n\n\"A doctor, you said?\"\n\n\"Handsome, _desu neh_.\"\n\n\"What kind of doctor?\"\n\n\"Have you talked about marriage?\"\n\nI evaded the subject and talked about his work, about how difficult it was to see him so infrequently.\n\n\"Typical Japanese man,\" one of the women said.\n\n\"But only once a week?\" I asked. \"Is that really typical?\"\n\n\"Typical Japanese man,\" she said again.\n\n\"Even in a new relationship?\"\n\n\"Typical Japanese man,\" three women said at once. I laughed, hoping they were right.\n\n\"Do you understand his work?\" Yoko asked me, an ominous ring in her words. \"Do you _really_ understand it?\"\n\nHitomi shot me a worried look. \"Be careful,\" she said, clearly at a loss to figure out what a large, willful gaijin wanted with her country \u2014 wishing me well but possibly sensing trouble ahead.\n\nMore and more often, I felt myself drawn to the neighbourhood _jinja_ I'd discovered a few weeks earlier. Pausing at the foot of the shrine, I would ask myself some difficult questions: Can I see myself living permanently in Tokyo? Can I see myself as the helpmate of this preoccupied, driven man? Preparing a bowl of hot _ramen_ for him as he trudges up the stairs to our two-room apartment, weary beyond words? Over and over I ran the questions through my mind, and the only answer that came out was yes.\n\nTokyo sense \u2014 I was beginning to suspect I had it. In less than a year, I'd taken firm root in the city. I'd grabbed my life by the throat, shaken it, bent it out of shape, kicked it disdainfully, until finally a new pattern emerged.\n\n\"Pride goes before a fall,\" some dead relative must have whispered in my ear around that time, but not loud enough for me to hear it.\n\n## **AN EARTHQUAKE AND A TYPHOON**\n\n\"There is only work and love.\"\n\n_Sigmund Freud_\n\n### **1**\n\nWe are sitting at a table for two in a posh steak house in Kichijoji, the kind of place where waiters glide around like ghosts, glasses get refilled by invisible jugs and candle lights flicker softly against dark walls and starched linen tablecloths. The hushed elegance is a perfect balm for the knot of tension in my gut, and I am grateful to Tetsu for sensing my mood and bringing me here.\n\n\"You seem tense,\" he says. \"Is anything the matter?\"\n\nIt's _you_ , Tetsu, I sigh to myself, it's you I'm tense about. You treat me like a queen, whisper intoxicating phrases into my ear but never talk about tomorrow. \"It's been a long week,\" I tell him. \"New things to learn at work, overtime, that sort of thing.\"\n\n\"Forget about it, whatever it is,\" he says to me. \"We don't have much time together, so let's enjoy it, _neh?_ \" He takes my hand and gives it a squeeze.\n\nIt's true, I think glumly, we don't have much time together. But why not? Why don't you _want_ to see me more often, if you care about me as much as your nightly phone calls and terms of endearment would suggest?\n\nHe has cut up his steak into forkfuls, American style, something he probably picked up from a movie. He lifts a piece to my mouth, then another one to his own. The steak is perfectly done, juicier and more tender than any I've eaten before.\n\n\"Actually,\" he says, \"I used to be quite a tense person myself.\"\n\n\"You? I find that hard to believe.\"\n\n\"For example,\" he continues, \"if a person caught me _not knowing_ about something I'd get very anxious. I remember once when I was about twelve, I was sitting with a friend in his bedroom, listening to music, and he asked me if I knew the name of the band that was playing. It was the Beatles, and at the time I hadn't heard about them. My friend was incredulous. He kept teasing me about it, and I was very uncomfortable.\"\n\n_Me too_ , I am thinking, but curiously enough I don't tell him this. I am recalling the evening \u2014 I was also twelve \u2014 that my friend Sophia asked me if I knew who the Beatles were. \"A kind of bug?\" I'd said, to which she'd rolled her eyes. I too had felt uncomfortable. This has to mean something, I tell myself now \u2014 Tetsu and I, living at opposite ends of the earth and in radically different environments, having the same thing happen to us at the same age.\n\n\"Later on, when I was older,\" Tetsu is saying, \"I used to read all the latest gossip about actors and singers, watch dumb TV shows, keep up with the stock market, just so I wouldn't be caught _not knowing_. None of that stuff really interested me, and all the effort was making me very tense. Finally I thought to hell with it, being well-informed isn't worth that kind of stress. If people seem surprised when I don't know something, I don't let it bother me anymore and simply ask them to fill me in.\"\n\nSo he too has felt it, the pressure to be _au courant_ , to keep up with the information-gathering Joneses. I am startled by how alike we are.\n\nSomething about the atmosphere of the place is making us talk more openly, steering us to more personal topics. Maybe this is why I wanted to come here. I need to find out more about this man, this mystery man who makes me crazy and keeps me guessing, guessing, guessing.\n\n\"You work very hard, Tetsu,\" I say cautiously. \"Do you ever ask yourself why?\"\n\n\"Yup,\" he answers right away, as though he were expecting my question. \"My plan is to work hard until the age of fifty, then retire and spend my time doing _yaritai koto_ , the things I've always wanted to do. That's my dream, anyway.\"\n\nI wonder what they are, his _yaritai koto_ , but I don't ask him. Twenty years seems a long time to wait. There might be another Great Earthquake, and he could get killed. Or he could get sick, or simply lose his drive.\n\n\"Isn't it a little risky, putting off the things you want to do until the age of fifty?\"\n\n\"I don't put them off entirely. I play golf, I see you ...\"\n\nIs _that_ where I stand, I think with sinking spirits, on par with a golf game?\n\n\"How about you,\" he asks. \"Do you have a dream?\"\n\nI can't tell him the truth, of course. \"It's hard to say,\" I answer finally. \"I suppose what I've always wanted is to do something well, to distinguish myself in some way. I don't know if that qualifies as a dream, though.\"\n\nAfter the meal we take our customary walk in Inokashira Park, which tonight is bathed in swirls of low-lying fog, thick and fluffy as cotton candy. The light of the electric lanterns shines thinly through the haze, and the outlines of embracing lovers come in and out of view as we make our way along the footpath. It is an enchanting evening, Tetsu has his arm on my shoulder, but still I am tense, unsettled. We find a bench up ahead and sit down. There is a question hanging between us, and he seems to be waiting for me to ask it.\n\n\"You tell me the most wonderful things, you act as if you really care about me,\" I say to him finally, \"but you never make any plans, never talk about tomorrow, or next week, or next month. I just wonder, sometimes, what this all means to you, if it's only a game, or \u2014\"\n\n\"I love you,\" he says simply, looking me straight in the eye. If Tokyo is indeed my Everest, then this has got to be its pointy peak. Wrapped in fog, hearing the magic words from Tetsu.\n\n\"I'm so happy to hear you say that,\" I tell him. \"I love you too, of course. But you knew that, didn't you?\" I start to give him a hug.\n\nHe moves away from me a little, rests his elbows on his thighs and stares down at the ground between his feet. He looks troubled.\n\n\"As for marriage ...\" he says slowly. Here it comes, I think. The crack in my wall of fantasies.\n\n\"I've never given much thought to the future,\" he says, switching to Japanese. \"I've always believed that if you take care of the present, the future will take care of itself.\"\n\nHow astonishing, I think to myself. Those very same words were spoken to me, some ten years ago, by my then-boyfriend Joel.\n\n\"I look at my friends,\" he goes on. \"They get married, they have children, and even then they're not really happy. Their focus narrows, somehow. All they talk about is nice clothes, stereos, stuff like that.\"\n\nI'm not sure I agree with his assessment of marriage, but I hold my tongue. Tetsu also falls silent and continues staring at the ground.\n\n\"Remember that movie we saw together, Awakenings?\" he asks after a while. I nod. \"Remember the doctor, the Robin Williams character, what was his name?\"\n\n\"Dr. Sayer, I think.\"\n\n\"Well, he actually reminded me a lot of myself. Do you know what I mean?\"\n\nA scene from the movie flashes through my mind. The incredulous look on Dr. Sayer's face when Leonard asked him if he was married. \"Me, married?\" he'd exclaimed, as though the answer should have been obvious. I hope that isn't what Tetsu means.\n\n\"I used to live with a woman,\" he says suddenly, as though he's made up his mind to tell me something he hoped he wouldn't have to. \"I was even busier than I am now, if you can believe it, so we hardly spent any time together. She asked me the same kind of question as you did, about the future, and I gave her the same answer. Then she found herself another boyfriend ...\"\n\n\"While she was still living with you?\"\n\n\"Yup,\" he says stiffly. \"At first I thought he was just a friend, then one day I came home early and found out otherwise.\"\n\nI hold my breath and say nothing. It's rare for Tetsu to be so voluble, and I don't want to do anything to stop the flow of his words.\n\n\"It was a huge shock for me,\" he continues. \"I packed my bags the next day and moved into the place where I'm living now.\"\n\n\"How long ago was that?\" I ask.\n\n\"Almost a year,\" he says. \"Anyway, I came to the conclusion that she had never really loved me, that she was using me all along. I was paying almost all the bills while we were together ...\"\n\nHe's got it backwards, I think to myself. It sounds to me as though he was the one who didn't love her enough. Not enough to make any time for her or to give her a commitment, according to what he just told me. But then, I consider, he must have cared about her if he was so hurt when she betrayed him.\n\nSo what is he trying to tell me? That things will fall apart if I expect too much from him? _You can have me if you want_ , he seems to be saying, _but only on my terms_. Suddenly I have the sense that we aren't doing a waltz anymore, that I am doing a solitary dance around an iron maypole, round and round and round a rigid pole without daring to blink an eye or stop and catch my breath.\n\n### **2**\n\nI had become obsessed with the telephone. When it rang, I would fall off my chair, trip, smash into things, anything to get to that phone as quickly as possible, to get my fix. As soon as his voice reached my ears I would feel my body exhale the tension and my heartbeat subside as though it were obeying the _rallentando_ of a conductor's baton. The trouble with being an addict is that as time goes on it takes more and more of the drug to satisfy, and I seemed to be getting less and less of it.\n\nIn the middle of one of our phone conversations he asked me, clear out of the blue, to remember him always. My body went cold. Was he predicting the end, or what? But the next evening his tone was as warm as ever. \"I'm gonna cry myself to sleep,\" my answering machine crooned, \"because I haven't heard your voice tonight.\" Giddy with relief, I started to laugh, then stopped in mid-ha. Why were his most tender words reserved for a tape-recorder? And why did he carry on about missing me and pining for me, when we lived only two train stops apart?\n\nMy morning ritual was now firmly established: wide awake at four o'clock, jump out of bed, slap on a pair of shorts and T-shirt, head over to the _jinja_ , stand in front of the pull-string bell and pray for patience, perseverance, poise, always words beginning with the letter P. Each time I thought of a new word I would yank on the string as a symbol of my request: perceptiveness, clong, persistence, clong, perspicacity, clong, providence, clong ...\n\nPatience, I told myself when he cancelled dates because of \"sudden work\" or fatigue. A Japanese woman wouldn't complain, I kept telling myself, recalling Hitomi's story about how shortly after her engagement to Kazuo, he got so busy at work that he was unable to see her for a month and a half which she spent, unbeknownst to him, in tears of frustration.\n\nIt was in this state of mind \u2014 taut as an overwound guitar string \u2014 that I called Tetsu one evening to confirm our weekend plans.\n\n\"Are you ready for Saturday?\" I asked sweetly when he picked up the phone. \"I'm preparing a feast, so bring an appetite.\"\n\nThere was a strained pause. \"Some friends have asked me to play baseball with them on Saturday night,\" he said after a few moments. \"Would you be angry if I accepted their invitation?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" I said reflexively. Not angry at all, I thought with sudden fury. Calm as a cucumber, happy as a hummingbird, patient as a goddamned monk.\n\n\"Every weekend,\" I found myself saying in a barely controlled voice, \"I wonder if we'll be seeing each other or not. You never make any plans until the last minute, and half the time you cancel them anyway.\" Words were crowding my throat and I was unable to swallow them back. \"We haven't seen each other for two weeks, and now it will be three, or maybe four, five, six, right? I never said a word when you cancelled dates because of your work, did I? But this is not work, Tetsu, this is _baseball_.\"\n\nI waited for a reaction, but he said nothing and this infuriated me all the more. \"So what about Sunday?\" I asked shrilly. \"Why can't we see each other on Sunday?\"\n\n\"You know I have meetings on Sunday,\" he said quietly.\n\n\"All day long? Do your meetings go on from morning until night?\" He didn't answer.\n\n\"You like _answering_ machines more than people,\" I cried, startled by my own words as they poured out. Still he said nothing, as though he were waiting to see what further accusations I might throw at him.\n\n\"Look, Tetsu, I'm not going to force you to see me if you don't want to, but it seems to me that you just don't care.\"\n\n\"I care about you more than I can tell you,\" he said with sudden feeling. \"I think about you when I get up in the morning, when I undress in the evening, when I brush my teeth, I think about you to the point that I can't even concentrate on my work. Even when I'm with my patients \u2014\"\n\n\"But Tetsu, what's the good of _thinking_ about me if you never want to _see_ me?\"\n\nThe next day I found a long and garbled message on my machine: \"... I thought you understood me ... it's a shame ...\" I tried to tell myself it was nothing, just a lovers' quarrel, but in my bones I knew something was very wrong. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday went by and still he didn't call. A terrible thought started to form in my mind. I tried to push it aside but it came back, more insistently each time, pressing outward until I thought my temples would crack: what if I never see him again?\n\nBy Friday evening I was fit for the shredder. I kept vigil by the phone, sitting on my hands to prevent myself from calling him. Sleep was out of the question, so when it was clear he wasn't going to call I sprang out of bed, hurled my alarm clock against the wall and walked away the night.\n\nWhen I got home from my Japanese class the next day, the first thing I did, as always, was check the phone. No messages. That meant yet another week we wouldn't be seeing each other. Three weeks in a row and counting. I sat on the edge of my bed and tried to calm down. _What if I never see him again?_ Before I knew it, I had picked up the receiver and dialled his number.\n\n\"Tetsu, I _have_ to see you and talk to you,\" I said breathlessly as soon he came on the line.\n\n\"I'm sorry, but I'm in the middle of a consultation with my accountant,\" he answered in Japanese.\n\n\"But I simply _have_ to \u2014\"\n\n\"I expect I'll be tied up with work for the rest of the day.\" His tone was cordial and businesslike, presumably for the benefit of the accountant. \"I'll get back to you at a more convenient time.\"\n\nThere's always something, I thought with mounting panic. Always something to get in the way of our seeing each other. If it's not an operation, then it's a meeting, or a golf game, or a baseball game, or a consultation, or it's a weeknight and he needs his beauty rest, or he's unreachable because he doesn't have a goddamned phone in his apartment.\n\nAnd then it snapped, whatever it was that had been holding me together up to that point.\n\n\"If you don't come and see me tonight,\" I heard myself say in a shrill treble, \"you're never going to see me again!\"\n\n\"Oh my God ...\" Gone was the businesslike tone. \"Look, I told you I \u2014\"\n\n\"Tetsu, we _have_ to talk.\"\n\nHe switched back to Japanese. \" _Saikin kimochi warukunatta_ ,\" he spat out coldly. \" _Senshuu kiga tsuita no wa o-tagai ni rikai dekinai_.\"\n\n\"No, no, Tetsu,\" I cried, \"the feeling _hasn't_ gone sour between us, and we _do_ understand each other.\"\n\n\"Only words,\" he said. \"You don't understand me, and I don't understand you either.\" His voice was cold and hard. This can't be happening, I thought, not this. Only a week before he'd told me he cared beyond words. Such feelings didn't just disappear, did they? Here today, gone tomorrow, like a spot of the flu? My body was starting to shake.\n\n\"Tell me what time you're coming,\" I said between clenched teeth.\n\n\"Can we just end this conversation? I told you I'm busy right now.\"\n\n\"What time are you coming?\"\n\n\"I can't come today.\"\n\n\"Then come tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow I have a meeting, and \u2014\"\n\n\" _Fuck_ your meeting,\" I blasted. \"Just tell me what time.\"\n\n\"I told you I can't see you today.\"\n\n\"Just tell me what time you're coming.\"\n\n\"Look, I have to assist a friend in an operation tonight, and I don't know when I'll be finished.\"\n\n\"I don't care about your operation.\" I was starting to cry. \"Tetsu, I just _have_ to see you.\"\n\n\" _Kanjasan ga shindara?_ \" he barked. And what if the patient should die?\n\nHe was almost shouting now, and there was a tremor in his voice. This man who had told me he would never get angry at me, who valued self-control above all else, this steel-plated man was finally losing his composure. I'd pushed him to the brink, and for an brief instant felt a surge of power.\n\nCome. No. Come. No. We continued our fruitless tug-of-war. I begged, pleaded, sputtered, choked. My words were coming out in gulping sobs. I could imagine the accountant's amazement as he listened to his client bellowing into the phone, embroiled in this astonishing bilingual melodrama.\n\n\"If I come,\" he said, \"do you promise me you won't cry?\" He sounded tired all of a sudden. \"I want to see your smiling face, not your tears. OK?\"\n\nWhat on earth was there to smile about? And why was he so afraid of tears?\n\n\"I can't promise you I won't cry at all,\" I answered, \"but I promise to stay calm.\"\n\n\"And do you promise not to do anything to yourself while you're waiting for me?\"\n\n\"Tetsu, how could you think ...\" I felt my cheeks grow hot with shame.\n\nFinally he agreed to come. He had a responsibility to his patients, after all, and I'd just become one of them.\n\n### **3**\n\nAt eight-thirty the doorbell rang and I let Tetsu in. I showed him to the sofa and offered him a beer. I poured one for each of us, gave him his glass and sat down on the floor, facing him. A stagey solemnity hung between us as we faced each other silently, cross-legged and unsmiling. Finally I started to talk. I told him that the contradictions in his behaviour were making me crazy and that I still wondered, sometimes, if he might not be hiding something from me.\n\nHe sat without moving a muscle. When I asked him if he understood my frustration, he ignored the question and began to recite, in slow and measured Japanese, a speech which he'd obviously prepared in advance.\n\n\"There were two baseball teams,\" he said, \"each with a different type of coach. The first coach would yell at his players when they gave a poor performance, and the second would convey his disappointment without saying a word. But neither of the teams was responding. The first team disliked being yelled at, and the second team got exasperated with their coach's stony silence. One day the league manager had an idea \u2014 he decided to switch the coaches around. From that day onward, both teams started to play much better.\"\n\nHe paused for a moment and went on. \"There seem to be two kinds of coaches and two kinds of players. If a type-A coach is dealing with type-B players, or vice-versa, there is a communication gap. The players won't get the message, they won't be fired up for their next performance.\"\n\nHe looked into my eyes for the first time that evening. \"Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you?\"\n\nIt wasn't hard to understand. He had pegged me as type-A to his type-B. I a Western woman and he an Eastern man. All my efforts to curb my impatience, to read his mind, to perfect the art of wordless communication, had come to this \u2014 this spectacular failure.\n\n\"It's a shame,\" he mumbled, almost to himself. \"I had thought we were a good fit.\"\n\n\"But Tetsu,\" I protested weakly, \"People are not necessarily all-A or all-B. It's not as though I lose my temper every day. My behaviour today was an exception, a freak.\" He didn't answer. I could see that he'd already made up his mind.\n\n\"Do you know how many patients I've seen this week?\" he asked suddenly.\n\nI thought for a moment. \"Seventy-five?\"\n\n\"Over two hundred,\" he said tonelessly. \"This may sound like boasting, but many of my patients come to me as a last resort, after they've been mishandled by other doctors. I don't have the heart to turn them away, even if my schedule is full.\" He kept his eyes fixed on his hands as he spoke. \"These are desperate people, they think of me as some kind of a god and I can't let them down.\" At this I let out an involuntary chuckle.\n\n\"Laugh if you want,\" he said, \"but it's true. I know I'm not a god, but the least I can do for my patients is give them my full attention.\"\n\n\"I'm not laughing,\" I said. \"Your dedication surprises and impresses me.\"\n\n\"Even when I leave the office,\" he continued, \"I can't get them out of my mind. Sometimes when I'm lying in bed, I'll suddenly remember a patient I may have seen three or four months ago. I'll start wondering how he's doing, if he's feeling better or worse than when he came to see me. When that happens, I know it will be quite a while before I get to sleep.\"\n\n\"Tetsu, I had no idea ...\"\n\n\"To tell the truth,\" he said, \"I was shocked by your behaviour. Didn't it ever occur to you that I need my concentration while I'm working? How am I supposed to concentrate on an operation after you've made such a scene? Didn't you ever consider that the last thing I need is more stress than I already have?\"\n\nBefore that evening, he had never breathed a word about his work except to say that he had lots of it and that he looked forward to the end of each day. Was I supposed to have guessed, from such clues, what a heavy burden he was carrying? Would a Japanese woman have guessed?\n\n\"But Tetsu,\" I said as gently as I could, \"I never objected to your work. What hurt me is that you cancelled our date to play baseball. It's not as though we see each other that often.\"\n\n\"I hadn't exercised in a long time,\" he said. \"My body was crying out for movement.\"\n\nSex is movement too, I thought to myself. And you never wanted much of that, did you?\n\n\"Tetsu,\" I said quietly, \"I won't ever again behave the way I did today, I swear it.\" I tried to get him to meet my gaze. Frozen in his cross-legged stance, he looked too stern for me to dare touch him.\n\n\"I love you very much,\" I continued, \"and believe me, I have no desire to interfere with your work. I understand that your work comes first. I don't even care about marriage or commitment, but ... _Tetsu, anata no kodomo o umitai.\"_\n\nI was stunned by my own, completely unpremeditated words. Tetsu, I want to bear your children. There it was, the naked truth. I wondered if the words sounded as theatrical in Japanese as they did in English. He continued to sit motionless, his face unreadable as a Noh mask. Finally he unfolded his legs and got up. \"I'm very tired,\" he said, \"so I think I'll be heading home. I'll give you a call when I come to a decision.\"\n\nHe stepped outside and started to close the door behind him, then poked his head back inside. \"In the meantime,\" he said genially, \"have pleasant dreams.\" What cruel parting words, I thought, since we both knew what his decision would be.\n\nA few days later he called. \"I've made up my mind,\" he said curtly. \"You made me do a lot of thinking, and I've decided that I never want to see you again.\"\n\nHis words hit me like a kick in the gut. I tried to say something but couldn't make a sound.\n\n\"The reasons are,\" he barked out in Japanese, \"one, I don't want children right away. Two, work is the most important thing for me. And three, I've invited a male friend to my apartment.\"\n\n\"That's not true!\" I said instinctively.\n\n\"Do you understand what I mean?\"\n\nI thought back to our infrequent sex. Could _that have_ been the reason?\n\n\"I ... _think_ I understand,\" I said slowly.\n\n\"No, no, it's not _that_. Forget it.\" What on earth could it be, I wondered, if not _that?_\n\n\"You're selfish,\" he said. \"I can't stay with a selfish person.\"\n\n\"Me, selfish?\" I cried. \"Tetsu, you don't know \u2014\"\n\n\"Alright, so you're not selfish,\" he said sarcastically. \"Feel better?\"\n\n\"You're making a mistake, Tetsu. You're not even giving it a chance \u2014\"\n\n\"You don't understand me. You don't understand me at all.\"\n\n\"You didn't exactly make it easy for me, did you?\"\n\n\"I don't want to talk about it anymore. I'm calling from a payphone and there's less than a minute left on my telephone-card.\"\n\n\"Just give me another chance,\" I choked. \"Tetsu, we \u2014\"\n\n\"I never want to see you again,\" he said emphatically. And then, to my great surprise, he started to cry. \"I'd like to thank you,\" he said in a shaky voice, \"for everything you've given me.\"\n\n\"Given you?\" I asked blankly, moved that the steel-plated man was able to cry.\n\n\"I'd like to thank you,\" he said again, and then the line went dead.\n\nI hung up the phone and lay on the floor, thinking of the questions to which I'd never have an answer: the Sunday meetings, the key-ring with a hundred keys, the friend he'd invited to his apartment ... And then it hit me: my dream, shattered.\n\nI spent the week in bed, thinking of various ways to devise my own demise. The dream had been so compelling, its brush with reality so seductive that I had little faith in my ability to carry on in its absence. I cursed my Western heritage, all the voices that had molded me over the years: \"express your anger,\" \"talk it out,\" \"make sure your needs are met.\" Coming to Japan had been an attempt to shake off those voices, to try on a completely different self. My sense of failure was deep and wide.\n\nAt the end of the week I had a dream. There was an earthquake rocking the walls of my room and a thunderstorm raging outside. I was in two places at once: standing near the sliding door, watching the spasms of lightning in the sky, and lying on my bed, a sexual feeling welling up inside me, welling up up up ... When I awoke, I had no idea if there had been an earthquake or even if I'd had an orgasm. All I knew was that my heart was pounding and it was raining hard outside.\n\n### **4**\n\nTo stay or not to stay, that was the question on my mind. There were pros and cons in either direction. If I left, I would be giving Tetsu the power to drive me away from a country I'd come to love. If I left, I would be throwing away a damn good setup: an interesting job, a large circle of friends, lots of free time, and the chance to save a bundle of money. But I also knew I'd accomplished everything I set out to do in Japan. I'd solved the sticky problems of finding good housing and challenging work, learned the language, formed solid friendships, even had my storybook romance. At least a year, I'd promised myself at the outset, and I'd stuck it out. There was nothing more to be done. I didn't want to become like Vivian and so many other gaijin I knew, growing attached to a country that had nothing left to offer them.\n\nTokyo had become Tetsu, and with him now gone the city was skeletal, barren. The pedestrian walkway in Shinjuku where we'd first joined hands, our rendez-vous pillar in Kichijoji station, the Mitaka-bound trains, my answering machine that had been the purveyor of so much hope and illusion, all these things mocked me now. If I stayed too much longer, I feared I might start hating first Tokyo and then Japan, and I didn't want that to happen.\n\n\"Wait and see,\" my friends told me. \"In a few weeks you'll be over the hump.\" But as the weeks went by, it was clear that I was getting worse, not better. My tears were starting to spill over at the most inappropriate times: on the train, at the lunch-counter, and to my great mortification, in the middle of a class. They spilled over the afternoon I went to pick up my mended clock at the local jewellery store. The owner's wife, one of my _kinjo no tomodachi_ , listened patiently to my tale of woe and even offered to give Tetsu a call and try to patch things up between us.\n\n\"If I explain the situation to him, how much you love him and how sorry you are, maybe he'll give you another chance, _neh?_ \" If only it worked that way, I thought.\n\nHitomi did her best to comfort me. There was nothing I could have done, she said, to change his mind. \"You know _bushido?_ \" she asked. The Way of the Warrior, code of ethics of the samurai swordsmen in feudal Japan. I told her I did. \"Well, his mind is _bushido_ , I think.\" She was speaking English, though she rarely did anymore. \"After he make up mind, then he cut right away, not discussing anymore. That's like old-type Japanese, not like new more softer type.\"\n\nI did a lot of reading during those weeks, and everything I read brought me right back to my failure. Pico Iyer, in his moody book on Kyoto, remarks that \"Japanese women knew that the best way of attaining their dreams was by becoming dream objects themselves ... They told themselves they could not, or should not, get sad or angry or tired, and they did not.\" \u2014 words that stung me like pellets of freezing rain.\n\nReiner took me to a chamber music concert in hopes of distracting me, but it was no use, and he too was subjected to my tearful story as we strolled through the Waseda university grounds later that evening.\n\n\"When are you going to get it through you thick skull?\" he said in exasperation. \"These people are _different_ from you and me.\"\n\n\"They're not,\" I protested. \"I've made more friends here than \u2014\"\n\n\"I know your kind,\" he cut in. \"You come to Japan, fall in love with the place and delude yourself into believing you can fit in.\" I had no answer for that.\n\n\"Look,\" he continued, \"if you blew your stack at me, I'd bonk you on the head and that would be the end of it. Anger, confrontation, it's a totally different ball game for these people.\"\n\n\"But not all Japanese women are doormats. My friends tell me \u2014\"\n\n\"You're a logical person, right?\" he cut in again. \"If you wanted him so badly, you should have been calculating, scientific. You should have realized that your best chance of getting what you wanted was to keep your mouth shut. I'm not saying you'd have been successful, but you'd have increased the odds.\"\n\nThe impact of his words was softened by the warmth of his hand which he'd now linked to mine. \"It's a shame,\" he said quietly. \"If you were in a better frame of mind, I'd take you out a few times and sweep you off your feet.\" Yes, I thought to myself, and it's also a shame that your name is Reiner Schmidt and you're a German and it's nothing personal but (lapsed Jew though I may be) I just couldn't live with that.\n\nThough my friends kept assuring me I was getting better, I sensed I was on the edge of some kind of breakdown. In my dreams I was falling off things (ladders, bridges, rooftops) or things were falling off me (fingers, legs), and every morning I would wake up leaden, taking a good three hours to get out of bed. I talked with my cousins in New York, amassing huge long-distance bills. It was unresolved grief, they all said, over the deaths of my father, mother and marriage, none of which I'd mourned properly. But Joel's view rang truer to me. \"You were looking for a kind of perfection,\" he told me, \"and you found it in Japan. An existential orgasm, you might say.\" (Joel was never at a loss for sexual analogies.) My experience of a perfect love in a perfect country was pure fantasy, he said, but the perfection was still there, even if only in my mind, so the ensuing crash was bound to be violent. Joel and all his wisdom \u2014 where would he take it next?\n\nOne Sunday morning around six o'clock I awoke with a galloping pulse and stabbing pain in my chest. My breath was coming in great big gasps. Not knowing what else to do, I dialled the three-digit emergency number. The man at the other end of the line listened calmly and patiently while I tried to tell him, between gasps, what had brought on this sorry state of affairs. I was certainly putting my Japanese to unusual use.\n\n\"Sounds like a panic attack to me,\" the man said.\n\n\"You've got to contact him,\" I pleaded like a maniac. \"Please, please call him for me.\"\n\n\"What's his telephone number?\"\n\n\"I can't tell you,\" I wailed into the mouthpiece. \"I can't let him see me in this state.\"\n\n\"If you won't tell me, then how can I contact him?\" he asked gently.\n\n\"But you've _got_ to call him for me,\" I continued pleading.\n\n\"If you give me his number, I will.\"\n\n\"No, no, I can't do that.\"\n\n\"Well then,\" he said with a sigh, \"why don't you give me your own address and phone number?\" Which I dutifully did.\n\nFive minutes later I heard the sound of an approaching siren and winced as I realized why the man had asked for my address. He'd probably looked it up in his procedures manual: What To Do In Case Of Phone Call From Gaijin Who Has Gone Off The Deep End. I felt like the world's biggest ass.\n\nThe ambulance attendant helped me to my feet and led me outside. I saw the landlady standing at the foot of the stairs in her nightclothes, her face a zigzag of worry lines. As I made my shaky way down the stairs, my own face burning with shame, I didn't dare look into her kindly eyes. I wondered if she would ever take a chance on a gaijin tenant again.\n\nI was driven to a nearby clinic, shot up with tranquilizer and sent along my way. As soon as I got back home I booked a seat on the earliest available flight to Toronto. This fiasco had made it painfully clear that I had to get the hell out of Japan.\n\nThe next few days were a whirlwind of packing, saying goodbye to friends and undoing commitments. Murasaki-san was very understanding and didn't pry at all, but Vivian carried on a bit about how I was letting her down, which was quite understandable considering that INTEC had gone out on a limb for me with the visa extension. Hitomi took me to one of her favourite haunts, a tiny and impossibly charming French restaurant in the Ebisu district. Over langoustines and champagne and passion-fruit souffl\u00e9, we vowed to keep our friendship alive forever. I knew that she, at any rate, would keep up her end of the deal.\n\n### **5**\n\nI am sitting in a pot-bellied plane, heading straight west, not quite able to concentrate on _The Gods Must Be Crazy, Part II_ , longing to hijack the aircraft and tell the pilot to turn back, and wondering when I'll cross paths with my crescent-shaped lover again. Already I have fantasies of returning someday, maybe to live out my retirement years in a coastal village at the tip of northern Honshu, learn dialect from fishermen and confound the natives. But chances are I won't be back for quite some time, except as a visitor. I will have to love the country from afar, an expatriate mooning for my spiritual home.\n\nWhen I woke up this morning the rain was coming down in long glassy sheets. It looked like another typhoon, one of the many we've had this season. Feeling an absurd compulsion to ritualize my exit from Tokyo, I picked up my umbrella and headed for the small shrine that had been the seat of my summer fantasies. There wasn't much I could think of praying for, so I just stood there for some time, trying not to think too hard about anything. For the last time I looked around at the immaculately trimmed hedges surrounding the shrine, the towering plane trees covering the four-pillar hut with the pull-string bell. For the last time I felt the presence of the spirit \u2014 that curious mixture of restraint, obsessive industry and genuine warmth \u2014 that had gone into building the shrine, neighbourhood, city and country, and wondered if I would ever look back on this moment with fondness untarnished by regret.\n\nSitting beside me on the plane is a youngish-looking Japanese man whom I eagerly engage in conversation, not knowing when I will get a chance to speak the language again. It turns out he is thirty-eight (\"Can you guess my age?\"), on his way to Detroit to try and sell automation equipment to some car-parts firms, and as we talk and order one, two, three Kirin beers, my story comes spilling out again. \"Leave it on the plane,\" he tells me, then reconsiders and says, \"leave _half_ of it on the plane and take half of it with you.\" And for a beer-soaked instant I feel a ray of hope that there might possibly be life after Tetsu.\n\nA bit the worse for wear, but still alive and kicking, I have no doubt that Tokyo gave me exactly what it promised. When you take a risk, I learned, you sometimes get more than you bargained for. But no matter how things turn out, you never regret it.\n\n## **GLOSSARY**\n\n_(a selection of characteristically Japanese words and phrases)_\n\n**Aitai:** I'd like to meet (see, date) you.\n\n**Akirame:** Resignation, giving up. Traditionally considered to be more of a good than a bad quality.\n\n**Chikan:** Pervert, groper, molester. Women are told to be on the alert for them in crowded trains.\n\n**Chotto:** A little. Often used at the beginning of a statement in order to soften it or convey hesitation.\n\n**Dam\u00e8:** No good, wrong, can't do that.\n\n**Enryo:** Reserve, restraint. While people encourage their guests not to exercise too much _enryo_ , it is taken for granted that they will.\n\n**Gaijin:** Foreigner, non-Japanese. Literal translation is \"outside person.\"\n\n**Hazukashii:** Bashful, embarrassed. A catch-all excuse for inaction.\n\n**Kankei nai:** Nothing to do with it, no connection, none of your business.\n\n**Kimochi:** Feeling, mood, atmosphere. The prevalence of this word might explain why the Japanese are so fond of using the English word \"feeling.\"\n\n**Kokusaika:** Internationalization \u2014 what the Japanese are supposed to be doing in the nineties.\n\n**Maihomismu:** The Japanese dream of home ownership. From the English words \"my\", \"home\", and \"ism.\"\n\n**Mazakon:** An adaptation of the English words \"mother complex.\" Refers to a grown man who is ruled by his mom.\n\n**Muzukashii:** Difficult. Sometimes used in business negotiations as a polite way of saying \"not a chance.\"\n\n**Nenrei ishiki:** Age consciousness. Generally well developed in the Japanese, who make a sport out of guessing other people's ages.\n\n**O-miai:** Marriage arranged by a go-between, known as a _nakodo_. Still quite prevalent in Japan.\n\n**O-noroke:** Unseemly bragging about the good catch you've found.\n\n**O-shaberi:** Chatterbox, motormouth.\n\n**Rettokan:** Inferiority complex. Many Japanese claim to have this sense about themselves as a people, although some outsiders accuse them of just the opposite.\n\n**Sanko:** \"Three heights\" \u2014 what women are reputed to want in their prospective mates. The heights in question are physical stature, salary, and refutation of the university he (presumably) attended.\n\n**Seiza:** A traditionally female style of sitting in which the shins are tucked beneath the thighs, with the buttocks resting on the heels of the feet.\n\n**Sensei:** Teacher, doctor, elder. Especially respectful when used to address someone who is not in a position of authority.\n\n**Sento:** Public bath. Many smaller apartments do not have bathtubs or shower stalls, making these facilities a necessity for some, and a form of entertainment for others who enjoy the ritual of bathing in public.\n\n**Shitsurei:** Literal meaning is rudeness, presumption. Often used in an apologetic sense, as in \"It's rude of me to ask, but ...\"\n\n**Shiyo ga nai:** Can't be helped, nothing to be done about it. Like _akirame_ , this phrase conveys a resigned acceptance of whatever life doles out.\n\n**So desuka:** Really? Is that so? Often preceded by Ah. Possibly the most useful Japanese phrase to learn, since you can insert it just about anywhere in a conversation.\n\n**Tomodachi:** Friend, buddy. Usage is quite broad, ranging from bosom buddies to people you haven't seen in years.\n"}
+{"meta": {"title": "Zachary Jernigan - Jeroun 02 - Shower of Stones [retail]"}, "text": " \nPRAISE FOR ZACHARY JERNIGAN'S NOVELS OF JEROUN\n\n\"To call Zachary Jernigan a fearless writer is an understatement. His universe is one of gods who make worlds only to torture the inhabitants, demigods who turn on their father, nations exterminated, wars in which the dead take sides. But what floors me is the ease with which he travels this strangest of landscapes. We pass from the mythic to the mundane and back again in the space of a paragraph. We come to know his characters with unsettling intimacy, even as their identities come under magical siege. We sense the solid ground beneath our feet and the presence of forces that could (and do) blow it back into atoms. Jernigan is part of a wave of authors breathing new life into the epic fantasy tradition we love.\"\n\n\u2014Robert V. S. Redick, author of _The Red Wolf Conspiracy_\n\n\"A science-fantasy epic that's as of a much perverse hybrid as it is an homage to an earlier era when those genres weren't so strictly segregated, _No Return_ is set on a world that bears wizards and astronauts equally. It also pulls no punches in its rich, visceral depictions of sexuality, martial arts, punk energy, and the philosophical quandaries of power and identity that speculative fiction uniquely exploits\u2014and that few up-and-coming speculative writers outside Jernigan tackle with such guts.\"\n\n\u2014Jason Heller, _The A.V. Club_ ( _The Onion_ )\n\n\"Vivid, varied, and violent. At once beautiful and terrible to behold.\"\n\n\u2014Nickolas Sharps, _SF Signal_\n\n_\"No Return_ needs to be noticed. There is so much more to it than the accoutrements would imply. Populated with a fair amount of face punching, as coded by the visceral cover, it contains a tenderness and at times overt eroticism that's often ignored in science fiction and fantasy. Zachary Jernigan has something unique to say, a voice we're not hearing from anywhere else. I dearly hope more readers, and award aficionados, take an opportunity to listen to him.\"\n\n_\u2014Tor.com_\n\n\"A visionary, violent, sexually charged, mystical novel _\u2014No Return_ challenges classification. Clearly, Zachary Jernigan has no respect for genre confines. His tale of gods hanging in the sky and a \"constructed man\" with glowing blue coals for his eyes and a motley band of fighters navigating a harsh landscape peopled by savage creatures and religious zealots... Well, it's pure genius. Here's hoping it's just the first of many such works from this guy.\"\n\n\u2014David Anthony Durham, Campbell Award-winning author of the Acacia Trilogy\n\n\"Be careful picking this one up, because once you join with the adventurers in this strange and stunning debut novel, there will be no going back to familiar precincts of heroic fantasy. Zachary Jernigan starts at the very edge of the map and plunges deep into uncharted territory. Mages in space, do-it-yourself gods, merciless killers in love and a mechanical warrior with a heart of bronze await your reading pleasure. For thinking readers who like swashbuckling with an edge, _No Return_ delivers.\"\n\n\u2014James Patrick Kelly, winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards\n\n\"No _Return_ asks the kinds of questions speculative fiction should ask, and provides the kinds of answers that literary fiction thinks it owns.... It is, in fact, the most daring debut novel of 2013...\"\n\n\u2014Justin Landon, _Staffer's Book Review_\n\n\" _No Return_ is a rich, diverse, inventive fantasy, in a style that reminds me in some ways of Tanith Lee's Tales from the Flat Earth books. Zachary Jernigan has created a stunningly original world and I can't wait to see where he takes it next.\"\n\n\u2014Martha Wells, author of The Books of the Raksura\n\n\"Zachary Jernigan's genre-defying epic raises the bar for literary speculative fiction. It has the sweep of Frank Herbert's _Dune_ and the intoxicatingly strange grandeur of Gene Wolfe's _Book of the New Sun_ , with a decadent, beautifully rendered vision all its own. One of the most impressive debuts of recent years.\"\n\n\u2014Elizabeth Hand, Nebula and World Fantasy Award-winning author of _Available Dark_ and _Radiant Days_\n\n\"[A] fascinating exploration of how atheism might function in a world where everyone knows that God (or at least, a god) exists.\"\n\n\u2014Amy Goldschlager, _Locus_\n\n\"[A] hypnotic sort of read the evokes a lot of the same awe and wonder I felt reading Gene Wolfe's stuff; the Elizabeth Hand blurb tells you all you need to know. If you love the shock and awe of science-fantasy and don't care much for paint-by-numbers plots, pick this up.\"\n\n\u2014Kameron Hurley, author of _God's War_\n\n\"Jernigan's first novel, the opening gambit in a saga of religious war, magical science, and martial combat, is a mixture of epic and sword-and-sorcery fantasy. The author's style, with its sensuality and, often, erotic ambiance, calls to mind the novels of Tanith Lee's Flat Earth series as well as the eclectic imaginings of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion novels. A promising voice.\"\n\n_\u2014Library Journal_\n\n\"[A] fascinating world, nicely-executed plot... and a wonderfully squishy and twisted aesthetic. _No Return_ is an excellent fit for readers of Mark Charan Newton's Legend of the Red Sun series or those who enjoy the fantasies of M. John Harrison, Gene Wolfe, or Jack Vance.\"\n\n_\u2014Pornokitsch_\n\n\"Jernigan's debut is full of wonder: a smart adventure, with measures of philosophy and violence and lust. For all its strangeness and far-flung setting, _No Return_ is a very human novel. Like Samuel Delany and Gene Wolfe, Jernigan can write a rousing, literary genre story that pushes boundaries and transgresses categorization.\"\n\n\u2014Brent Hayward, author of _Filaria_ and _The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter_\n\n\"The greatest pleasure a reader can have is for their expectations to be confounded, to find their eye drawn word by word down a different path to the one anticipated. Genre fiction is too often comfort food, and the palate can grow complacent. _No Return_ is not a complacent book and it took me somewhere unexpected and new.\"\n\n\u2014Martin Lewis, _Strange Horizons_\n\n\"Jernigan has really unleashed something unique on the world with _No Return_. It doesn't fit nicely into any boxes or cookie cutters. It's quick moving, subtle yet bold, and absolutely R-Rated and raw.... It's bold and vivid and it will probably make you uncomfortable, but that's not a bad thing. Jernigan takes you on a one-of-a-kind journey and he leaves you breathless, gasping, and full of new thoughts.\"\n\n\u2014Sarah Chorn, _Bookworm Blues_\n\n\" _No Return_ displays the kind of prose, worldbuilding, and depth of characterization that place Zachary Jernigan securely within the top tier of Fantasy authors. The prose pulls you in like a piece of art, forcing you to slow down and observe. The world-building makes you imagine maps, bar room brawls over differences in customs, kids praying to the god who lives on the moon, women making sex spells, warriors becoming one with their self-controlled, mutating body suits... all in a way that separates the world in _No Return_ from generic fantasy\u2014this world is alive!\"\n\n\u2014Timothy C. Ward, _Adventures in SciFi Publishing_\n\n\"Zachary Jernigan writes with a flair for the weird and makes it endearing enough for readers to feel familiar with it. _No Return_ is a magnificent debut that straddles fantasy and SF genres seamlessly and makes itself into a jewel faceting both fields.\"\n\n\u2014Mihir Wanchoo, _Fantasy Book Critic_\nAlso by Zachary Jernigan\n\n_No Return: A Novel of Jeroun_\n**SHOWER  \nOF STONES**\n\n**A NOVEL OF JEROUN**\n\n**ZACHARY JERNIGAN**\n\nNIGHT SHADE BOOKS  \nAN IMPRINT OF START PUBLISHING  \nNEW YORK\nCopyright \u00a9 2015 by Zachary Jernigan\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Night Shade Books, 375 Hudson Street, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10014.\n\nNight Shade Books is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.\n\nVisit our website at www.start-publishing.com.\n\n10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nJernigan, Zachary, 1980-\n\nShower of Stones : A Novel of Jeroun / Zachary Jernigan.\n\npages cm\n\nISBN 978-1-59780-817-0 (hardback)\n\n1. Imaginary wars and battles\u2014Fiction. I. Title.\n\nPS3610.E738S58 2015\n\n813'.6\u2014dc23\n\n2015006849\n\nISBN: 978-1-59780-577-3\n\nEdited by Jeremy Lassen\n\nJacket illustration by Alvin Epps  \nCover design by Claudia Noble\n\nPrinted in the United States of America\n_For my mother, Betty Jernigan_.\n\nTHE MONTHS OF THE YEAR\n\nMonth of Ascetics\n\nMonth of Alchemists\n\nMonth of Mages\n\nMonth of Sectarians\n\nMonth of Fishers\n\nMonth of Surgeons\n\nMonth of Sawyers\n\nMonth of Smiths\n\nMonth of Drowsers\n\nMonth of Financiers\n\nMonth of Bakers\n\nMonth of Finnakers\n\nMonth of Soldiers\n\nMonth of Clergymen\n\nMonth of Pilots\n\nMonth of Royalty\n\nPREVIOUSLY, IN _NO RETURN_\n\nUnlikely allies Vedas Tezul, the constructed man Berun, and Churli \"Churls\" Casta Jons journey to fight in the tournament at Danoor. Doubt, violence, and guilt follow the companions, and the seeds of this doubt prompt Vedas to consider speaking out against the God Adrash if he wins the tournament.\n\nWhile Vedas and his companions are on the road to Danoor, the mages Ebn bon Mari and Pol Tanz et Som are engaged in a war of wills and resources. Pol sees an opportunity to gain the upper hand, and allies with the prophetic dragon-tamer Shavrim Coranid. This alliance eventually results in Ebn's death and Pol's transformation into an ascendant god.\n\nHeady with this newly gained power, Pol attacks Adrash, not only wounding the god and stealing secrets from his mind, but knocking the Needle\u2014a collection of iron spheres large enough to affect the tides on the planet below: a weapon of incalculable power\u2014out of alignment. The attack drains him, however, and he must flee before the god can summon the energy to kill him.\n\nIn Danoor, the travelers split up. Churls is forced to flee. Vedas enters the tournament and prevails despite grave injuries, while Berun follows him in secret. Vedas's victory speech starts a riot, which erupts into even greater violence when the broken Needle rises into view. Berun takes Vedas to a secluded valley outside the city and then retrieves Churls from her hiding place, bringing with her a rumor that a man with a dragon is in control of part of the city.\n\nFar above the planet's surface, Adrash recovers from his battle with Pol and stabilizes the spheres of the Needle that most threaten the planet. He relives his millennia-long life, recalling the prophets he has encountered and the distinct ways each coveted his power. Realizing finally that it is not one prophet, but several\u2014Pol, Vedas, Churls, and Berun\u2014he readies himself for the battle he assumes is coming...\n**SHOWER  \nOF STONES**\nPROLOQUE\n\nTHE 4TH OF EVERPLAIN WATCH SENNEN, BOWL OF HEAVEN, NATION OF ZOROL\n\nThey labored on a vast concave plain, under the bluegreen sun. Side by side, the four of them: she, her mate, and the two men they both knew but had never met before the previous day. They pulled sweetroot from the earth in silence, depositing their vegetables in the long furrows that ran poleward to poleward for nearly forty leagues. It was repetitive, backbreaking work, but they were content.\n\nHow did she know her companions were content?\n\nShe sensed it, just as she sensed the coming and going of her own thoughts.\n\nShe and her mate never looked up from their work. Now and then, she would delay for a second after picking her sweetroot, or he would finish his task a moment too quickly, and use the opportunity to touch one another's arm or leg. She would smile, and know that he too smiled.\n\nNewly arrived and unused to the plain, the newly arrived men would occasionally rise, stretch the kinks from their backs, and turn in slow circles, peering with shaded eyes at the world around them\u2014for no practical reason, surely. The sun arced overhead so slowly as to be still in the sky. The breeze came consistently out of the bottom pole, bending the sea of golden grass with nary a ripple.\n\nThe only objects surrounding the plain were the tall, thin wind-gatherers clustered to the right-up-poleward, a series of low purple hills to the left-bottom-poleward, and next to the hills the bleached skeleton of the abandoned tensii warren.\n\nThe wind-gatherers were simply wind-gatherers. Mindless, immobile beasts stretched to the task of collecting energy, they could be found anywhere. The hills, too, were not special. They folded upon themselves without so much as a rocky outcrop, only subtly changing color as the sunlight crawled in glacial inches over them.\n\nThe warren, she supposed, was a unique thing, looming over the near horizon like a massive wooden cage, like the trap for some immense crustacean. The world possessed only five such structures, monuments to an unknown race. People had once devoted their lives to its study.\n\nBut it too never changed. It never had in anyone's memory.\n\nIn her younger days, she had done as all local adolescents did, and climbed the warren's latticed interior, ascending broad bone avenues to its three-thousand foot height. Like everyone else who completed the trip, she was disappointed to find the structure just as it appeared to be\u2014a massive skeleton, picked clean of any sign of its ancient inhabitants. It was beautiful in its way, but no more beautiful than any natural feature. She had seen the ocean from its summit, and this had occupied her attention far more fixedly.\n\nStill, she could not begrudge her new companions their interest. Prior to moving back home in her thirtieth month, many places had compelled her. The world had much appeal. As one grew older, however, one's focus shifted. She had become content to harvest and recall the violence of her youths\u2014to listen to the breeze, take joy in the touch of her mate, and anticipate the arrival of two strangers she had known in a thousand lands, a hundred bodies.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe day grew no hotter or colder, the shadows of their bodies no shorter or longer. The protracted cycle of the day aroused no urges (here, women and men ate and slept whenever they felt the need), yet hunger hit the four of them at the same moment. This was no coincidence. She and her mate stood as one, their new companions following a heartbeat later. They stretched, eliciting a few pops from their spines, and once more shaded their eyes to peer around the circumference of the shallow depression.\n\nShe winked at her mate and spoke his name, the fondness clear in her voice. He grinned, pulled her off her feet as though she weighed nothing, squeezing her tightly to his massive chest as she wrapped her pale, corded arms around his thick neck and breathed in his brassy scent. Over his shoulder, she grinned at the two new men, whose faces she had known for generations upon generations.\n\nA slight smile pulled at the corners of the lighter-skinned one's mouth, but he said nothing.\n\nThe darker one simply stared.\n\nThey sat in the dirt and grass. From their packs came salted beef, vinegared seaweed, and raw slices of the ever-present sweetroot. It was delicious, as was nearly all food after working in the outdoors, under the sun. Under _any_ sun, really.\n\nFinished but still hungry, the darker of the the two strangers lifted one of the sweetroots he had picked. He fished a knife from the pocket of his rough cotton pants and deftly sliced the vegetable into four sections. They shared it in companionable silence.\n\nShe examined the men she knew but had not yet spoken with. Both looked much like she remembered, much as they had for uncounted ages.\n\nThe shorter and heavier of the two, the quicker to smile and laugh, had skin the color of creamed chicory broth. He stood like a man forever bent forward into the wind, with meaty shoulders hunched and chin tucked into his collar. She had never known him as a child\u2014no, not in all the lives they had shared\u2014but she imagined him muddling through, fighting and winning battles he had never intended to fight, simply wanting peace, a place to belong.\n\nThe second man... she could not help thinking of him as father to the first, though she knew this was wrong. Tall, black skinned and muscular, he held himself with a straight spine, broad shoulders thrown back, chin high. A position of habit, not true disposition. As with the other, she had only known him as a grown man. Regardless, she knew that as a child he had lorded over his peers, only with the onset of adulthood learning how not to be a tyrant, to be strong without recourse to coercion.\n\nShe liked the first immediately. In time, she knew she would grow to love the second. Just as she always had. She regretted that they chose to be alone for so much of their existence. She and her mate could stand to be apart for such a short period: they found one another readily, falling into one another as fate dictated. Even through the occasionally cloudy haze of her memory, during moments when she could not seem to differentiate one life from the next, their longing for each other was clear.\n\nBut these two?\n\nThey only came together where the need presented itself, typically in an engagement of war, of revolution. When the violence exhausted itself, when death became too much to bear, they came to her, to where she and her mate had built a small life. They carried their pain with them, bearing it on their own, remaining silent until there was something to say.\n\nWhat the dark one said first never varied.\n\n\"Do you recall the conditions of my death?\" he asked, white eyebrows nearly meeting over his nose. He furrowed his brow. His lips quivered as he sought words for the idea he knew to be true.\n\n\"My _first_ death,\" he clarified.\n\nShe tipped her head back and smiled into the sun.\n\n\"You're asking me to remember ancient history. But yes. I could never forget. I'd only just died, myself.\" She laid her hand upon her mate's knee. \"You still lived, dear\u2014remember? And yet you'd already lived such a short, eventful life.\"\n\nHer mate nodded his massive head, heavy features serene.\n\nShe returned her gaze to the black-skinned man. She nodded to him, and then to the man she could not help but think of as his son. Her smile waned slightly.\n\n\"And you? Well, you'd both been alive for far too long. You were dangerous to yourselves and a greater danger to our world, threatening the existence of an entire continent of people.\" She clucked her tongue and shook her head. \"These are simple things to say, of course, as if the millennia had turned you from men into monsters. This is nowhere near the truth.\"\n\nThe black-skinned man frowned. \"What is the truth, then?\"\n\nShe sighed. The wrinkles at the corners of her eyes deepened.\n\n\"Normal men can indeed be turned into monsters \u2013 ordinary, unimaginative monsters. Even with their lives preserved for eons, they are of one design. But you, you were never normal men. There was something of the monster in you from the beginning, an awful potential. And your children, your siblings, they too...\"\n\nShe shrugged. Her gaze centered on an indefinite space between the two men. For a span of seconds or hours, she was not among her companions. Her name changed, and changed again. She grew taller, shorter, but no broader, no darker.\n\nShe was another time, another place. Another woman.\n\nTelling a story, again and again.\n\n\u2021\n\nEventually, from a great distance away, the lighter-skinned man said, \"You spoke of our world, a place of origin. What was this place called?\"\n\nShe blinked, struggling to hold onto the question. She had not completely returned to them, but existed in a liminal space, in the interstices between a hundred lives.\n\nHer mate gripped her knee, causing her to sigh.\n\nHer anchor hit soft earth again, connecting her this time, this place.\n\n\"Jeroun,\" she said. She repeated the word, her smile once more radiant.\nCHAPTER ONE\n\nTHE 2ND OF THE MONTH OF MAGES, 12500 MD DANOOR, THE REPUBLIC OF KNOS MIN\n\nCertain facts were indisputable, even to him, and the most basic was this:\n\nNot long after the birth of men on Jeroun, less than a thousand years following their emergence from slumber, the god Adrash had engineered a gift for the world.\n\nA son.\n\nA lavender-skinned, devil-horned boy named Shavrim Thrall Coranid. He was not born, but tipped from a jar. Nonetheless, he grew as if he were a child.\n\nThe people of Jeroun thought of him as a human boy, knowing he was not\u2014knowing he was a unique creature only in the approximate shape of a child, composed of man, elder, and god in equal proportions, possessed of an immortal body and a vast unfilled intellect. They understood he had neither birth mother nor true father, that he had been conditioned from conception to think of Adrash as his creator, yet they persisted in thinking of him as the god's proper son.\n\nThis sentimental illusion faded as Shavrim grew into adulthood and assumed his formidable stature, and disappeared completely when Adrash took him as lover. Though the god had not announced his intention to take Shavrim into his bed, the shift from child and son, to demigod and lover, happened fluidly, as though it were the only possible outcome. As though it were fated.\n\nMen had no reason to doubt that fate and the will of Adrash were one and the same.\n\nShavrim had no reason yet to doubt, either.\n\n\u2021\n\n\"You are mine, but I am not yours.\"\n\nHe had heard these words many times, always in moments of intimacy. It did not hurt to hear them. He appreciated that Adrash spoke plainly, refusing to call what they shared love. Resentment would indeed come\u2014it could not be avoided entirely, even in one created for the role of companion\u2014but for decades Shavrim considered the words appropriate, even comforting, a frank assurance that all continued according to a plan set out for him.\n\nA plan he neither understood nor cared to understand.\n\nA plan that simply _was_.\n\nOf course, he had little enough reason to complain over his lot. The world offered him many delights beyond communion with Adrash. With the god's blessing, he took thousands of lovers. He ate countless varieties of food, drank every drink. He experienced each diversion concocted by the vibrant cultures of man, and became himself a source of fascination and joy.\n\nThough Jeroun bore the scars of a long life, having already outlasted its first race of people, the birth of mankind had made everything new, full of light.\n\n\u2021\n\nOr rather, this was how Shavrim recalled it now, eons after Adrash abandoned the world to madness. He knew it to be comfortable fiction, a lie, a bandage over old and unhealing wounds. For certain, he misremembered the world as more beautiful, more alive than it had ever been, just as he misremembered Adrash as more cruel, more inhuman.\n\nSometimes, this fact made him uncomfortable.\n\nOther times, he did not care. The events of thousands of years, stored in the branching neural tissue of his spine and limbs, collected over the course of his long, slow adolescence, could be changed if he concentrated\u2014or simply ignored\u2014hard enough, and as he grew older he found little reason to recall with perfect clarity events that had ceased to matter.\n\nAll pasts were versions of pasts. Thus, he interpreted whatever version he liked.\n\nThe most important of what he interpreted, however, the most impactful\u2014these were facts.\n\nOf this he felt sure, or at least fairly confident.\n\n\u2021\n\nAnd so the world had seemed new, full of light, and then it had stopped. Not all at once, true, but being that Shavrim's existence would be measured in glacial ages rather than decades, compacting normal lives into insignificance, the process could feel no way other than sudden.\n\nIt was the first morning of his four-hundredth year. He and Adrash sat on a red-tiled terrace overlooking the ocean (what island he could not now recall, and it did not matter), enjoying breakfast, talking inconsequentialities, when, as though they had been having another conversation entirely\u2014a deeper, more cutting conversation\u2014the god spoke eight words.\n\n\"Do you really think you are enough, Shavrim?\"\n\nShavrim set his cup of tea, small in his outsized hands, on the table between them. Not yet worried, merely confused. \"I\u2014\" He searched for the proper expression, and arrived at a smile. Despite his labyrinthine knowledge of the world and its peoples, his vast collection of experiences, his face was rather blank. Not a man's at all, but that of a child. Just as the world saw him.\n\n\"I... I don't know what you're asking me, Adrash.\"\n\nThe god smiled, beautifully. Every movement he made was beautiful, a display of perfect grace. He sat, legs crossed at the knee, naked and at ease, every muscle relaxed yet defined. Warmth radiated from his jet skin: this close, he was a source of heat as sure as the sun itself. He wore the divine armor as a skintight cap in the shape of a helm, its filigreed edges giving the odd impression of white hair on his forehead, white hair curled around his ears.\n\n\"I do not mean this to hurt you,\" he said, ignoring Shavrim's guffaw of contempt. \"Nonetheless, it _will_ hurt you. At times I feel dissatisfied with this world, with you\u2014with me. Boredom is as good a word as any, Shavrim.\" He waved his right hand vaguely. \"But this is not your fault. I will not blame you for being predictable as I designed.\"\n\nShavrim blinked. The skin of his face felt tight, suddenly hot.\n\n\"You are a symptom of my thinking,\" Adrash continued. \"And my thinking on the matter of mankind has been incorrect. For five centuries I have given them too much what they want, and they are becoming complacent, unwilling to grow. I am annoyed by their lackluster art, their spineless leisurely expressions. As exhausting as mankind's displays of aggression can be, I am saddened to see the fight gone out of them.\" He broke Shavrims's gaze, and stared out to sea.\n\n\"I am tired of being the world's nanny, of shielding everyone from harm. Furthermore, I need other sources of companionship lest I go mad. I made a minor miscalculation with you, stretching your development unduly. That mistake must be addressed. You must stop being a child.\"\n\n\"Adrash,\" Shavrim said. \"Adrash, I...\"\n\nThe god shook his head, silencing his creation with a gesture. \"I am sorry, but you have no words of relevance to this. I have decided, already, on a course of action, for you and for the people of Jeroun. I have waited to enact my plan for too long already. My evasion of the topic, I fully believe, is part of the problem.\" He sighed. \"But enough navel gazing. Soon, within the year, you will have brothers and sisters\u2014five companions. You six will act as mankind's inspiration, but also as its aggressors. You will spur them to grow. _You will grow up with them.\"_\n\nHe stood, and walked down the steps to the beach.\n\nShavrim followed, massive shoulders bowed, arms hanging limp at his sides.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe feeling of discontent persisted. It grew, and only rarely retreated to a comfortable distance. Surely, Shavrim had experienced moments of un-happiness before\u2014on rare occasions, his desires had gone unfulfilled\u2014but these were as nothing compared to this new malaise. He absented himself from Adrash for weeks at a time, visiting the places he thought he loved and then quickly leaving, unsatiated. He found himself in new beds, but experienced nothing new.\n\nThe world had not changed, not yet.\n\nAnd then, within a year, as Adrash promised, the first of five siblings was tipped from the jar: a girl, grey haired and thin-limbed, clawed at hand and foot and as pale as sun-bleached sand. Adrash passed the childlike creature to Shavrim, and Shavrim stared into her bluegreen eyes as she stared back. She did not cry, which made him resentful. He felt sure he had cried upon breathing his first breath.\n\n\"Bash Ateff,\" Adrash named her.\n\nA month later, the second arrived: an unnaturally ruddy, stubby-winged boy Adrash named Orrus Dabulakm. Shavrim took to him immediately, liking the sound of his hoarse cries better than the sullen silence of the sister who had come before him.\n\nThe next month, the third\u2014a thing of indeterminate gender, a neuter or a new sex entirely\u2014tumbled forth and stood unaided, but did not open its eyes for twelve days. When it did, two slowly spinning wooden orbs were revealed. Adrash called this blind anomaly Sradir Ung Kim, and seemed especially fond of it.\n\nThe fourth and fifth were engineered together, a matching pair. They spilled from the jar locked together, small and hairless and pearlescent, nearly metallic, and refused to untangle from their embrace for a full day. Afterward, they became uncomfortable if separated for longer than a few minutes. Ustert and Evurt Youl, Adrash named them.\n\n\"These,\" Adrah said when all five were situated in their nursery high in Adrash's main keep overlooking the arid Aroonan plains, \"are the bringers of a new age, Shavrim. A minor pantheon. As their elder sibling, it is your job to guarantee they keep to the path I have cut for them.\"\n\nShavrim nodded, and did not ask just what path this was. He would learn in time.\n\n\u2021\n\n\"I've killed men before,\" Shavrim said a decade later.\n\nHe and Adrash stood on the foredeck of _The Atavast_ , watching the five young demigods cavort unafraid in the shallow, glass-clear water. The sea was no place for earthbound creatures, but today the god had created a hundred-foot sphere of will around his ship, halting the dozens of streamlined serpents and fish\u2014which had quickly been attracted by the smell of flesh\u2014from coming any closer. The siblings dared each other to swim up to the barrier of huge, circling predators. Soon they pushed their courage even further, reaching out their hands to brush the scaled flanks, risking the loss of limbs to giant, toothy mouths.\n\nAdrash smiled. \"Adorable,\" he said.\n\nShavrim ground his teeth together. \"Are you listening to me?\"\n\n\"Yes, I am, Shavrim. A moment, though.\" Adrash opened his right hand, revealing five coins. He threw them in an arc, causing each to hit the water and fall to the sand a body's length outside his protective barrier. \"We do not leave until each of you has retrieved your coin!\" he called, and then turned away from the siblings' whoops and cries in response.\n\n\"I know you have killed men, Shavrim. It is a joy to watch you fight.\" His left hand, which he had caused to be sheathed in the featureless white of the divine armor, fell on Shavrim's right shoulder. \"What I am talking about now is different. You have never killed a man for any reason other than sport\u2014a sport whose rules both parties understood and accepted. A sacrifice. This will not be the same. You will kill for a purpose. You will kill in response to a threat.\"\n\nShavrim laughed, though it had an edge to it: it was a sound he did not enjoy hearing come from himself, a sound he would not have made a decade previously. \"A threat? How many men constitute a threat against me? A hundred? Two hundred? A battalion, either way. You're joking with me, Adrash.\"\n\n\"I am not. Men will soon be a great deal more formidable than they are now.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\nAdrash turned and leaned his forearms on the railing. Shavrim sighed and followed suit, surveying his siblings at their dangerous play. There was no real risk, he supposed: though not as sturdy as their eldest brother, each was possessed of an immensely durable body. They would never bleed out or have their heads severed from their bodies. Should they lose a limb, it would regrow. Orrus had recently lost one of his growing wings to a weapon master's blade, and already its replacement reached half the size of the original.\n\nSradir and Orrus, Shavrim's favorite and least favorite, had already retrieved their coins. Orrus, forever dissatisfied, plagued by voices he could not name, frowned at his accomplishment and dived under the hull\u2014to sulk, for reasons no one but Shavrim understood. Sradir bled from a shallow wound in its side, but it stopped as Shavrim watched. It looked up at Adrash (not blind, they had discovered, yet not seeing as men saw, either), a small smile on its oddly angular, androgynous face.\n\nIt did not even glance at Shavrim.\n\n\"You said men will become stronger than they are now, Adrash. How?\"\n\nAdrash clapped as the diminutive twins shot forward and retrieved their coins, Ustert landing a stiff-fingered jab into the snout of an advancing bonefish. He laughed as Bash, who could never resist showing off, swam slowly but gracefully toward her coin, rolling away from snapping jaws effortlessly, and picked up the final coin with her mouth. Shavrim wondered if he and Adrash's conversations had always been so broken, if the god had always been so distracted. He also questioned his own moods. Had he not been happy, being Adrash's lover but not the center of his world? Had he not been content, even overjoyed, to be part of a greater plan?\n\nYes, he had. And no, Adrash had not always been as he was now.\n\n\"Men will discover a secret,\" Adrash finally said. \"Something right under their nose. Tell, me, have you ever wondered why I included elder material in your makeup? Elder corpses are rare, but besides not rotting like a man's body does they are virtually useless. Correct? Was I merely being sentimental for the people this world has lost?\"\n\nShavrim flexed his fists alternately, in time with the doubled beating of his hearts.\n\n\"I was not,\" Adrash said, needlessly. \"There is more to elder physiology than anyone knows, a fact I have hidden from the world but will hide no longer.\"\n\n\"What is _more?\"_\n\nAdrash chuckled. \"You are becoming irritable in your middle age, Shavrim. Good, I suppose: anger will be useful, though I would not have you unhappy every moment of the day.\" He smiled, white against black. When Shavrim only grunted in response, the god's smile grew. \"Power is what we are discussing. Immense power, outshining even the oldest technologies that existed before your birth and only remain in memory.\"\n\n\"And the rarity of elder corpses?\" Shavrim asked. \"There's a solution for that, as well?\"\n\n\"Yes. There is a graveyard\u2014a graveyard for an entire species. You will reveal it to the world.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nHe did so, exactly as commanded. At the foot of The Steps, the elder's greatest monument, a mountain turned mausoleum, he helped excavate the first perfectly preserved corpse.\n\nAnd immediately set it aflame.\n\nThe gathered people marveled at how it burned but was not consumed. Shavrim then reconstituted its ancient blood and allowed ten men to take sips of it. They battled each other for a day, sustaining wounds that would kill normal men. Lastly, he fed every individual a small measure of the corpse's ground bone. A week later, having eaten and drunk nothing, having not slept an hour, the people stood hale.\n\nThey celebrated, and began mining their new, nearly inexhaustible resource.\n\nThereby, men grew into maturity\u2014or rather, into the wielding of power. Within two generations, the world had split and its peoples had become fractious threats to each other. Their arts turned violent, viciously inventive, seasoned with elder-corpse fire and blood. They relied less and less upon what remained of their old technologies, and then proceeded to forget this inheritance completely. Manipulating their acquired magic consumed them completely. Old cities were abandoned and new cities built, spanning chasms and straddling mountaintops, each lit by the glow of thousands upon thousands of magelamps.\n\nAdrash rejoiced in mankind's rekindled passion. He orchestrated their development, wielding Shavrim and his siblings like blades, cutting nations in two, separating culture from culture, beginning wars and stopping wars. He spoke of symbols, of the importance of identity, and using arcane means fashioned weapons unique to each of his creations:\n\nSroma, a long silverblack knife for Shavrim: a malevolent item, possessed of its own ill personality. It did not speak in words, but made its desires known easily enough. Shavrim cherished and despised it by turns. He tasted blood when it bit into flesh.\n\nJhy, a razored throwing circle for Bash, which passed through steel and rock as easily as it passed through flesh. Bash kept it close to her at all times, but always sheathed. She used it rarely, and only against the strongest mages, as if only to prove a point.\n\nDeserest, a glass spear for Orrus\u2014a weapon he refused to use.\n\nWeither, an oilwood and leather sambok for Sradir. In its owner's hands, the diminutive whip became a blur, a devastating shadow that severed even the most armored men in half. Sradir never used its proper name, instead referring to it as Little Sister.\n\nRuin and Rust, a pair of short swords for Ustert and Evurt: blades that never grew dull and would not be tarnished. Oddly, Ustert, who seemed always on the verge of an outburst, who lived with abandon, wielded Ruin with a cold detachment, while Evurt, the quiet one, carved with Rust in wild arcs, almost as though he were trying to throw the weapon away.\n\nThus equipped, no army on the face of Jeroun could stand against them.\n\nThis fact ate at Shavrim. He had been warned of threats. Initially, when he spoke of his concerns to Adrash, he received smiles and hints of further developments (\"Have faith in me, Shavrim. I don't labor to provide you with tools for your defense simply to watch you wave them about.\"), but as time passed the god's enthusiasm took on a dark, solipsist edge. Adrash spoke rarely, his moods unpredictable. He spent time away, always just out of reach, leaving the increasingly complicated task of governance to his eldest creation, often for years at a time.\n\nEach time, coming back crueler, more inscrutable.\n\nThe thin persona of a man sloughed away, revealing the madness of divinity.\n\n\u2021\n\nSimplifying the first millennia after the introduction of elder magic, turning such a vast length of time into one color, one feeling, proved appallingly easy for one who had never been human and could only approximate the concerns of one. Surely, the change in Adrash had occurred gradually: Shavrim had known it then and certainly knew it now, yet in retrospect it was shockingly abrupt, as rapid as a droplet of ink clouding into a pail of water.\n\nOne day, he had known his creator intimately, felt the god's moods as if they were his own\u2014or thought he did, though the distinction makes little difference. And the next, he struggled to understand the capricious demands of a stranger, an incomprehensibly powerful being who forced his creations to betray the very people they had been engineered to assist.\n\nOne day, Shavrim had been a child, trusting, and the next...\n\n\u2021\n\n\"The world would be better without him,\" he said, the obvious conclusion to a hundred years of long and evasive arguments. Finally, he said it.\n\nAnd then, he said even more: \"He must be destroyed.\"\n\nUstert grinned, revealing her sharp teeth. She threw one shapely silver leg over her twin's and laughed. \"Grief, Shavrim, that's a nice thought. But there's no chance of it happening. I don't like him any more than you do\u2014haven't liked him since I was small enough to be mistaken for a corpse miner\u2014but we're six against a god. Besides, he's not really _here_ any longer, is he? Off on his little ship, father is, doing who knows what.\"\n\n\"Don't call him that,\" Evurt said. He sat as rigid as his twin was relaxed, a thin bronze statue of a man. \"I don't like it when you call him that. He's not our father.\"\n\nUstert rubbed his cheek with the back of her hand, causing Evurt to grimace.\n\n\"So, you're not in love anymore,\" Bash said. She flicked at an imaginary piece of lint on her coat. \"So, you've been abandoned, forced into a role you never wanted and aren't suited for.\" Her seawater eyes met his, and her features softened. \"You used to hate me, eldest brother. I know you did. But I'd hate to think you wanted me gone from the world. Give it time. Maybe you'll feel differently. Maybe he'll feel differently.\"\n\n\"This isn't about love,\" Shavrim said.\n\nSradir nodded, expressionless as only it could be. \"Of course it is not, Shavrim. Bash is speaking in her metaphors again.\"\n\nUstert grinned.\n\nShavrim looked to Orrus, who shrugged with both shoulders and wings. \"I'm in,\" the winged demigod said in his rasp of a voice. He tapped his head and then gestured to encompass each of them. \"All of us are in. We can pretend otherwise, but it's the fact.\"\n\nBash opened her mouth and then closed it.\n\n\"Yes,\" Evurt said, just as his twin said, \"Fuck.\"\n\nSradir gazed woodenly at Shavrim. \"Many will die. Even we may die. Are you that in love with mankind?\" The corners of its mouth rose fractionally. \"Love being a metaphor, mind.\"\n\n\"We aren't men, so love is not the word,\" Shavrim answered. \"Love is never the word for us. But I won't see mankind pushed and pulled by his whims any longer, given the tools of war and domination and then crushed for their arrogance when they use them. I won't be one of those tools any longer.\" He stood and paced before them. \"So, he's gone for a decade, two, even three. He'll be back, and who knows what he'll do then? Even absent, he exerts his influence. You can't tell me you don't all feel it. It limns our every word, or every gesture.\"\n\nSilence\u2014as close to assent as they would give. Shavrim pressed.\n\n\"We're a reflection of Adrash, and we're slowly going mad with him. We all know the result of madness on our scale, which is terrible enough, but on his? The world will be burned to a cinder, should he continue down this path. We'll be carried with him. We'll be responsible.\"\n\nBash shook her head. \"But what if we're what's causing him\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\" Evurt stood abruptly, dislodging his twin. He made a cutting motion with his left hand. \"No. We have heard this before, sister, heard it and dismissed it. The question is irrelevant because it has no answer. We may be the source of Adrash's disease\u2014or we may not be. It does not matter. We are the cure, either way. The _only_ cure.\"\n\nThe room grew quiet, ever the result of Evurt choosing to voice more than a brief complaint. Ustert reached forward and drew her twin back down onto the couch, wrapping her arms around him. Sradir closed its eyes, blank-faced. Bash raised her eyebrows at Orrus, and Orrus turned his intense gray gaze to Shavrim.\n\n\"We look to you,\" Orrus said. \"Perhaps we shouldn't, but we do.\"\n\nShavrim nodded. He knew this, had relied upon it. There were advantages to the way his mind functioned, how it forced thoughts to branch out along pathways throughout his body, causing him to arrive at conclusions only after long and repetitious thought. One day he would come to feel overwhelmed by the lifetimes he had accreted in his stretched neurons, but it had not happened yet. He still possessed wisdom unique to him.\n\nHe crouched and pressed a huge palm against the sun-warmed marble floor, a floor he had slapped his bare feet upon as a child. He remembered being scolded by a tutor for running. He had scolded his siblings for doing the same when they were young.\n\n\"I won't pretend we're a family,\" he said. \"I won't pretend we even enjoy sitting here with each other, especially not in this place. We're not saintly, by any metric, but we're not part of the disease spreading in Adrash's soul. Of this I'm sure. I think it more probable he engineered us too well to our task, and that our task was more complex than he let on. He couldn't predict what would happen to himself in time, but he knew the risk. He knew, and created us to keep himself from the void.\" His fingers stroked the leather sheath covering Sroma. \"He even engineered us weapons for the task.\"\n\nHe heard an intake of breath\u2014Bash\u2014and held up his hand, forestalling her words of denial.\n\n\"I'm not saying he made plans for his own defeat. He will not concede to us, like a man taking medicine. He has let himself forget our full purpose, and we let him.\"\n\nSradir opened its eyes and locked stares with Shavrim.\n\n_\"We let him,\"_ she said. The words were neither challenge nor agreement. \"Well. No more of that.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nIn the Month of Soldiers, Adrash ended his self-imposed exile of two hundred and seven years by landing _The Atavest_ on the southwestern coast of Doma. Announcements, which would in time become slow and expensive, dependant upon massive reserves of elder-corpse materials, traveled quickly from Adrash's hand. Mankind\u2014not one member of which had known their god in the flesh\u2014rejoiced with a month-long celebration.\n\nDespite the passage of two centuries, Shavrim's siblings required no reminding or spurring to their purpose. Indeed, time had only increased their violent resolve. They allowed the celebrations to come to an end, and then met Adrash in the scrub desert of central Gnos Min, just beyond the eastern wall of Curathe.\n\nThe god read their intention immediately. Undoubtedly, no great act of premonition: all six had been conspicuously absent from the festivities.\n\nThe battle began without a word exchanged.\n\n\u2021\n\nThirteen hours later, four of the six siblings remained. What had been the city of Curathe ticked as it cooled before them, a vast shallow bowl of fused ceramic.\n\nShaky on his feet, nearing a point of exhaustion where reality blurred around the edges, Shavrim experienced a vision of what the place would become in only a few months' time. Rain, falling in the Month of Mages (not a monsoon\u2014nothing so monumental as that\u2014merely a few tantrums, brief reminders of a wetter time), creating a temporary lake, a waystation for migrating birds and orr-bison, a place fleetingly filled with the low-throated burp of desert toads.\n\nOne day, too soon, men would stop and wonder at it, ignorant of its origin.\n\n\"Well done,\" Bash said, voice heavy with sarcasm. She wiped at the blood under her nose, and spit a tooth onto the ground. \"We've got him on the run.\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" Orrus said, fist tight around Deserest, the weapon he had always declined to use.\n\nUstert remained silent. She held her right hand out to her side, as though expecting her twin to take it.\n\nShavrim closed his eyes, allowing himself to be buffeted by the wind.\n\nAdrash had taken Sradir first. A wise move, Shavrim thought: he had always suspected it was the most powerful of his siblings. Then he had chosen Evurt. Another wise move. Without her twin, who knew what Ustert would be?\n\nOne battle, and already they had lost two of their number.\n\nHad he anticipated anything else?\n\n\"I hadn't expected it to hurt so much,\" he said, so softly he thought no one would notice, but he heard the rustle of Orrus's wings and knew his brother had been heard. Of course. He and Orrus had always been close. They understood one another, how deeply, Shavrim would only know in the millennia to come\u2014alone, searching for meaning as the world spun slowly toward destruction. Searching, while he gradually succumbed to his own madness, the compounding of a thousand voices.\n\nAnd yet it was Ustert who spoke in response.\n\n\"Yes, it hurts. Of course it hurts.\" Her voice was flat, characterless. \"You always lie to yourself, eldest. You practice the worst sort of deception, hiding from what is plainly true, what is obvious to everyone but you. We were a family, or as close to family that the phrasing becomes unimportant. Whether we liked one another had no bearing on this fact. If you'd stopped, for one moment, and looked up from your worship of Adrash, your sadness over losing him, you'd have realized this sooner. Now it comes, and you think you feel pain. You feel nothing compared to me.\"\n\nThey waited one night to recover, sleeping on the open ground within an arm's reach of each other. Closer than they had ever been.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe four moved on to Danoor, which already lay smoldering in the shadow of the Aroonan mesas. They passed through the rubbled grave of Lantern Light, turning away from the bodies that littered the brick-paved streets. Death\u2014this they understood. An individual man's life held little importance, after all, but a city's worth? That many innocent souls possessed a weight, demanding acknowledgement even from demigods.\n\nAdrash taunted them by being just a step ahead.\n\nThey were fast, but still crawling in comparison.\n\nIn Grass, where tradition said the first men had awakened from their ancient slumber, the god waited, hanging in the sky above the city, his aura shuddering around him in radiant golden waves. He was a man-shaped shadow at the center of a new sun, motionless. Taunting, still.\n\nUstert spat onto the dry earth. \"Listen to me. He won't take one or two or three of us. He takes all four of us, or we kill him. This ends now.\"\n\nNo one responded, but all were agreed.\n\nShavrim peered through waves of heat into the city. From as close as a mile away, it appeared as though it had been left untouched, but as they entered its gates Shavrim saw that everyone\u2014those visible in the streets, but the effect surely extended to those indoors\u2014stood or sat frozen in place, either held in temporary thrall or, more likely, halted forever in the state of death. Such a thing was not beyond Adrash's power, though Shavrim imagined the act drained him considerably. A small, grisly boon to his attackers.\n\nBy unspoken agreement, a simple acknowledgement that events would unfold exactly as quickly as Adrash willed, they walked into the city. As they neared the central square, lesser buildings seemed to shuffle aside to reveal the full glory of Adrash's temple: this, the most ancient of structures, famed as the site of mankind's birth on Jeroun. Shavrim had always considered its warm sandstone edifices and encircling gardens beautiful. They remained so.\n\nUpon their stepping into the square, Adrash commenced his descent from the sky. Slowly, maddeningly so.\n\nShavrim unsheathed Sroma, gooseflesh raising upon his arm at the touch of its hilt. He stretched his arms wide, muscles bunching massively in his back. He tipped his head to either side, cracking vertebrae. He touched the two small horns on his forehead.\n\nOrrus stood, glass spear gripped in two hands before him, wings pulled in close to his back. He had never flown before the age of twenty, and then only under pressure from Shavrim. He would not fly now: it would do no good against Adrash.\n\nBash spun Jhy around the upraised index and middle fingers of her left hand. She also spun Weither, Sradir's recovered whip, by its lanyard. She had always been the showoff, and Shavrim admired her athleticism. He had never told her this, but surely she knew.\n\nUstert likewise held two weapons\u2014her own sword, Ruin, and her twin's sword, Rust\u2014and stood, rooted to the ground by two wide-set feet. Of the five siblings, only she had beaten Shavrim in armed combat. She had never let him forget it.\n\nAdrash reduced the blaze of his aura as he descended. Nonetheless, by the time he landed on the steps of his temple the light from his eyes alone proved sufficient to throw acute shadows from every standing object. His four living creations squinted against the radiation, unfazed, while the people gathered in the square, struck immobile in the seconds after death, blistered from the heat.\n\nThe god stood, unmoving, encased head to toe in the flawlessly white embrace of his armor. Despite himself, as always, Shavrim admired the graceful lines of his creator's physique, its contours accentuated rather than hidden by the divine material, and felt the accompanying rush of desire. He risked a glance at Bash and confirmed the flush in her pale cheeks. She, too, could not hide her attraction, a fact which had always angered her.\n\nIt had been tens of decades since she or Shavrim had shared Adrash's bed, yet their bodies would not allow them to forget.\n\nOrrus had not moved a muscle, revealing to Shavrim an altogether different type of strain. He had been, since birth, the least favored of Adrash\u2014a hurt he would not allow shown on his features but still felt keenly. Ustert, conversely, had forever been a focus of the god's praise. But now, having witnessed the almost casual dismemberment of her twin, she shook with rage so thinly controlled that Shavrim feared for her. She would be a danger, very likely to herself.\n\nThus arrayed, they waited for the inevitable.\n\n_Hello, children_ , Adrash said, directly into the interiors of their skulls.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe moment held, and in Shavrim's memory would forever hold\u2014the moment separating being one of four whose souls rang in union, discordant though it was, and the next...\n\n\u2021\n\nIt was two hours after dusk in the ransacked city of Danoor. He reclined naked on a flat clay roof, savoring the last of the day's trapped heat before it seeped out from underneath him. There was a distinct sharpness to the desert air, and he felt it\u2014less than a man would, true, but enough to make him slightly uncomfortable. In truth, he enjoyed this unique sensation of discomfort. No matter how long-lived, one never forgot the feeling of home.\n\nThough the city's fires had been doused, the smell of burnt timber and clay lingered.\n\nFar off in the unlit night, beyond the border of Shavrim's orderly territory, someone screamed.\n\nAnd above Shavrim\u2014far, far above him, leagues and leagues beyond the envelope of air that surrounded the world\u2014the heavens were shattered. What had been Adrash's greatest weapon, the ultimate symbol of his madness, a constant feature of the night sky generations of men had known as The Needle, now extended in broken orbit around the moon, each of its twenty-seven massive iron spheres spinning through the void on unplanned trajectories.\n\nNo longer in the god's control. No longer kept from falling.\n\nShavrim smiled, unashamed of the conflicting emotions the sight evoked. He admitted to himself that he was not quite happy, no, that in fact the sight of the world's approaching doom filled him with remorse\u2014but also that he felt a sense of satisfaction, of appropriateness, of _You've really done it now_. He considered with what emotion his lost siblings would have greeted the sight, and his smile widened. He said each of their names, names left unspoken for longer than he chose to remember. He spoke to them in a language the world forgot twenty-five thousand years ago.\n\nHis words were not, despite the evidence of his own eyes and hands, for the dead. He concentrated and projected them in a simple but taxing extension of will, broadcasting on a wavelength he alone had discovered, a wavelength unheard by anyone except the five ones caught in between, those unique souls who lingered in the spaces between life and death.\n\nSouls who, for many millennia, he had believed were constructs of his own madness.\n\n\"Sisters. Brothers,\" he said. \"This is the thing I would not admit aloud until now, but with the world on the brink of death, it seems a good time to unburden myself\u2014of delusion, perhaps, though if I'm to be honest (and why shouldn't I be?), I know there is no perhaps, no maybe. There is no delusion, only truth. Or rather, I should say _madness_ and truth. In each of the lives I live, in each of the voices of the past I let overtake me, your voices are clear. You are a constant, even in the madness I've allowed root. Your voices grow weak. They fade in and out, but they're always here.\"\n\nHe laid his left palm flat upon his chest. His right fist closed, and slowly his smile faded.\n\n\"You might wonder, why is it that brother has never spoken to us before\u2014why has he not sought to make contact with us? It's a good question, for which I have no proper answer other than cowardice. I died with you, and then woke to bury you. Some contact wounds, and never heals. You may as well ask why I've avoided Adrash. Fear. Fear of what you've each become in the absence of your bodies. I know myself, even when I'm not myself, for that person is only myself in a different guise, living another life. I do this so that I avoid absolute madness.\n\n\"And yet I do not _\u2014cannot_ \u2014know you. Not any longer. I am a body, and you are... I don't know what you are. Besides, it's been too long. I've forgotten too much. I've chosen to be alone, and grown used to it. Being alone is easier than having a family. When you have a family, you are responsible to each other. It's easier to navigate the world without that burden. Why should I be the one to live with it? Why must I be the eldest?\"\n\nHe sighed, shook his head. That last note of petulance, he wished he could take it back, reword it. It was too late in his long life to express such things, even to the wind. Every word\u2014he should not have spoken any of it. There was too much to say, and he was failing to communicate any of it.\n\nA northerly wind flowed over the rooftop, and he shivered.\n\n\"Listen to me,\" he said, disliking the weak sound of his voice. The act of projecting, of summoning ancient words and buried sentiment, had exhausted him. And he still had not voiced the most important of what must be voiced. He disliked entreaties.\n\n\"Listen to me,\" he repeated, nearing a whisper now. \"Look at the sky tonight, and know there is need for us yet. Yes, even as we are, mad and lost and even half rejoicing in what has occurred. We stood together once. We can do so again.\"\n\nHe closed his eyes, breathing deeply for the space of twenty doubled heartbeats.\n\n\"Please. Help me keep the world alive.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nHe listened, growing colder and more convinced of his foolishness as the moon and shattered sky passed slowly overhead. Less than an hour went by, yet it felt like three. When he finally admitted defeat and stood, his joints creaked. A new weight had settled into his bones. He suffered a moment of lightheadedness and wondered\u2014were he a normal man, if the moment would have inspired suicide. Perhaps it was the perfect time to pitch himself from the roof.\n\nIf he were a normal man, release would have been just that easy.\n\nNot for the first time, he considered the curses placed upon him.\n\nThe first:\n\nTo be so unreasonably loyal to mankind, knowing what he knew of its members. Their pettiness and greed, their pretensions of greatness. He had suffered more of their failures and fought in more of their wars than Adrash had, yet he was the one who could not fail to sympathize with them, to want more _for_ them. Oh, he had killed many of their number (just as often in joy as anger, truthfully), but this was no contradiction. Humanity existed as a mass, and only exceptionally as individuals.\n\nAnd individuality? This was his second curse:\n\nTo be alone. To think on the scale of a god, and have no other gods except the ones that had abandoned you. To have known how it feels not to be alone, and to have squandered it.\n\nHe considered aloneness as he descended from the rooftop and entered the games hall from which he ran his new territory. The air was warm inside, but not uncomfortably so. Despite the number of men and women gathered in friendly competition, it was not loud. People greeted him, though not warmly. They tried\u2014they always tried\u2014but he was simply too intimidating, too alien, looking nearly like a man without at all being a man. Furthermore, he was their leader. He moved among them like a predator, with odd grace for such a large person.\n\n\"Shav,\" said Laures, his first lieutenant, a woman chosen for her intelligence, but also for the fact that she rarely spoke more than his name. It amused him slightly, the fact of her faith: she worshipped the goddess Ustert. If only she knew what kind of creature his sister had been, how dependent she had been upon her twin, perhaps she would not be so warmly inclined. Usterti believed all the wrong things about their goddess. They had robbed her of her love, made her into a solitary creature.\n\nHe nodded to her on his way out the front door.\n\nInto the street, peaceful again. He looked either direction and set off south, intending to inspect the barricades...\n\n\u2021\n\nAnd fell to his knees.\n\nOut in the night, closer than he could have imagined, a voice spoke\u2014a voice he recognized instantly\u2014a coincidence too extraordinary given where his mind had only just passed.\n\n_Vedas Tezul_ , it said.\n\nShavrim toppled onto his side and shook violently upon the ground, struggling against the shock to his body and mind. He fought to order his thoughts, to respond before the connection was severed, but before any true headway could be made a second coincidence announced itself, its voice fainter than the first but equally distinct after so many thousands of years.\n\n_Churls Casta Jons_ , it said.\n\n\"I... I...\" Shavrim stuttered, jaws cramping and jumping. \"I... will... will...\" He bit down hard, speaking through gritted teeth. \"Find... you.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nHe received no confirmation that either had heard. He lay immobilized in the street until early morning, when his lieutenant Laures found him and dragged him inside. She said nothing. He stared up at her as she struggled with his awkward weight. He would not thank her, yet a portion of his mind felt gratitude, though not for her current efforts: perhaps thinking of her faith had allowed his mind to open just enough to let his sibling's voices in.\n\n_I am coming, bother_ , he thought. _I am coming, sister. We will be together soon. We will seal our fate, as a family_.\nCHAPTER TWO\n\nTHE 10TH TO 13TH OF THE MONTH OF SECTARIANS THE NEUAA SALT FLATS TO DANOOR, THE REPUBLIC OF KNOS MIN\n\nAfter the sun set, Churls shaved her head with his razor. She considered why she did it and arrived at no answer. She had never been one for symbols. Her hair had been short enough for the purpose, already.\n\nAfterwards, she cut a long rectangle of fabric from a sheet and wound it around her sinuous torso, flattening her breasts before fastening on a tight, stiff leather vest and back scabbard.\n\nAnother almost unnecessary act: her breasts were small enough, as they were.\n\nShe sneered at her face in the monastery's one mirror, a vanity item she had been surprised to find in the building's cellar, and wiped at a bead of blood on her scalp.\n\nHer reflection unnerved her. Nearly a week spent in bed recovering from from her injuries, followed by two weeks of waiting for her daughter to bring back good news from the city, had resulted in a visible change in her appearance. Her arms and thighs were thinner than she preferred. The freckles on her cheeks and shoulders, typically a near-solid mass of brownish red, had faded to a speckling.\n\nShe pulled on the pair of the rough woolen pants she had found in an alcove. They were looser than she preferred, binding in odd places. Why could men not fashion pants that fit properly?\n\nThe back of her neck began tingling.\n\n\"You can come in now, Fyra,\" she said.\n\nHer daughter sharpened into existence at Churls's side, colored all in shades of white but for the pale blue of her eyes. She stood to within a few inches of her mother's shoulder, and had not been alive for well over a decade.\n\nShe screwed her features into a grimace. \"It looks... bad. And it's bleeding in the back.\"\n\n\"Forgive my clumsiness,\" Churls said. \"I had a beard when I was your age, but it fell out when I had you. As a result, I'm a bit rusty at all this.\" She met the girl's unimpressed gaze and fought to keep the hope from showing on her own features. \"You're sure you've got a fix on them? You're sure\u2014about all three of them?\"\n\nFyra nodded. \"For the third time, mama, yes. I'll lead you right to them. If you want, I can...\"\n\nChurls buckled her belt. \"I don't want. To quote you: _for the third time_ , no. Also, to repeat myself, we have no idea what will happen to you if you're attacked by whatever sort of mage Fesuy's hired to shield Vedas and Berun from sight.\" _Not to mention keeping you at a long arm's length_ , she did not add. \"It's enough that I let you scout. I won't risk putting you in the midst of a fight with someone that strong.\"\n\nShe caught the slight upturning at the corners of the girl's mouth. \"And yes, that means I just admitted you're very strong. Still, you're not as strong as your mother. Not in the same way. And you're definitely not as mean. I won't hear any more about it.\"\n\nHer daughter said no more. A surprise. Churls had expected a rebuttal.\n\nShe felt grateful, but also slightly awkward about the exchange. Their banter, a thing that had only started in the absence of Vedas and Berun, seemed to proceed naturally enough between them\u2014as it should have for a mother and daughter alone, surely\u2014yet Churls could not escape the fact of its novelty. She and Fyra had never talked that way while the girl lived. She doubted its authenticity. Furthermore, to speak so casually inspired a sense of disloyalty. She could not sustain a constant state of worry over her missing companions, but suspected she should at least make the attempt.\n\nFyra cleared her throat. Made a throat-clearing sound, anyway.\n\n\"You're crying, mama.\"\n\nChurls wiped her eyes with a tattooed forearm. \"Shit,\" she whispered. She breathed deeply into her stomach. \"Fyra. You will not accompany me. I do this alone. Do what you like for me now, but you don't set foot beyond these walls. I need you to say you understand me.\"\n\nTo her credit, the child did not immediately agree. Churls approved.\n\n\"I understand, mama,\" Fyra said, \"and I mean it this time. I won't leave. But first, you need to promise _me_ something. Something big.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You need to keep your promise. You need to tell him about me. About _us.\"_\n\nChurls tipped her head back to stare at the bare rock ceiling. The room suddenly seemed too close, crowded, as if the dead had gathered at her daughter's word. To hear Churls's answer.\n\n\"You don't know what you're asking,\" she said. \"There's no war against Adrash. Vedas failed to rouse anything but ire and violence. His speech threw the world into discord.\"\n\nShe pointed heavenward, gesturing beyond the tonnage of stone separating them from the wrecked night sky. \"He damned us all, and you know what, girl? I don't care, because in the end he was right. We've been living under threat for too long, cowed and in denial. If we all die in flames, we all die in flames, and there's nothing to be done. Not by you, not by me. I just want him back, and I'm going to get him back. Him _and_ Berun. Beyond that? You can't make me care beyond that\u2014not right now.\"\n\nFyra's hands tightened into fists at her hips.\n\n\"You lied to me.\"\n\nChurls's head dropped. A growl built low in her throat. Suddenly, the seven-hour hike to the city seemed like an interminable delay. She wanted everything over and done. She would see everything over and done, and then she would think.\n\nShe spoke slowly, carefully. \"I'm not saying I won't tell him, Fyra. I'm just saying it'll make no difference if I do.\" She looked up, offered the girl a weak smile neither of them believed. \"Now, please, do what you're going to do to help your mother save the day, alone, and then do nothing else.\"\n\nFor a moment, Churls thought her daughter would refuse, but the girl merely rolled her eyes and stepped forward into Churls, filling her with warmth and light.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe Nehuaa Salt Falts comprised nearly half of the area of northwestern Knos Min. The flat, featureless landscape had once been the bed of an inland sea scholars called Littleshallow, and now provided salt for an entire continent. A rainless, lifeless, maddeningly uninteresting terrain, it seemed the whole of the world when one traveled upon it. Any destination rose out of the cracked white floor as though floating, mountains and cities alike standing still in the vague distance, never growing any closer until one gratefully stumbled into them.\n\nTwenty miles of this landscape lay between the monastery and Danoor.\n\nChurls barely registered the distance or the time it took to cross it. She did not look behind her once to see the hills ringing the monastery fade into the night. She barely looked at the city before her. She ran, legs solid yet spring-light beneath her, losing herself easily in the rhythm of feet hitting earth. The quietly rational part of her mind worried what Fyra had done in order to allow her access to such an immense reservoir of energy\u2014worried what the wage would be when it inevitably ran out, and whether or not she should have saved it for later\u2014but she easily silenced it.\n\n_Too easily_ , she reasoned, and dismissed this too with a smile.\n\nHer fear, a thing she had barely allowed a voice. Erased entirely.\n\nHer annoyance at being forced into a concession, posing as a man. Gone.\n\nPoint in fact, she had not felt this good in a long time, certainly not since Vedas and Berun's abduction. In her current state, she found it surpassingly simple to absolve herself of the guilt she had given free rein for the last month.\n\nIt had not been her fault, the ambush. She could not have prevented it, given her knowledge at the time.\n\nHer anger had fled, as well. Berun had been right to swat her across the room\u2014an action that knocked her unconscious while simultaneously depositing her behind a row of crates. She had not appreciated how quickly the constructed man came to his conclusion and acted to keep her from being taken as well.\n\nOf course, no one liked waking up alone, abandoned in a dangerous city with a shattered clavicle and a row of broken ribs. A twenty-mile walk back to safe shelter would not help, either.\n\nNo wonder Fyra did not like being ordered to stay away. She had sobbed (rather, made the ghost motions of sobbing) when Churls collapsed at the top of the hill overlooking the monastery. Churls had nearly killed herself by walking so far with such injuries.\n\n\"You should've called to me, Mama,\" the girl had said. \"I would've heard. You make me so angry.\"\n\nChurls grinned at the memory. Damn, but she was enjoying herself.\n\nThe euphoria lasted until the moment she entered the city's outskirts and forced herself to a walk: an act that was like stopping a massive grinding wheel with bare hands, or swimming against a swiftly-flowing river. A sense of sadness overcame her, as of an opportunity lost. She could have kept going, cutting around the city, running until exhaustion overcame her. There she would have collapsed, succumbing to sleep without worry...\n\n\"Stupid useless fucking...\" she whispered, feeling like a fool.\n\nThe moon and scattered spheres of The Needle loomed full in the west, casting ample light into the deserted streets. When she had last passed through this part of the city, there were still people about, but now the buildings at the outskirts of Danoor stood abandoned\u2014that, or the people who lived in the low, red clay residences were keeping quiet, lights out.\n\nShe kept to the shadowed side of the street, moving deeper into the city, drawn without pause toward the target Fyra had planted in her mind. She unsheathed her short, dull sword and gripped the blade near the hilt for balance.\n\nIt felt good in her hand, warming to her touch quickly, as though coming to life.\n\nShe found herself grinning again, and realized she had been humming.\n\n\"Kill Rhythm,\" Battle March of the Third Castan Infantry.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe guard tried to scream. His tongue flicked through his teeth, pressing wet and warm against her palm. She clamped her hand tighter to his mouth as his life flowed down the front of his shirt. His struggles slowed, stopped, and she lowered him gently to the ground.\n\nShe admired the small ceramic knife in her hand\u2014it had been the guard's only a few seconds ago, before she slipped it from his hip sheath and used it to slit his throat\u2014and decided to keep it. She would finish Fesuy with her own sword, but the thought of using a Tomen weapon to strike the first blow struck her as poetically sound, appropriately disrespectful.\n\nA quick circuit around the house revealed no further guards, a fact which confirmed her impression of Fesuy Amendja. The man was arrogant, stupidly so. After the risky maneuver of leaping over the heavily-sentried barricade (an act that seemed to have cost her the last of Fyra's imparted vitality), she had encountered few men and even fewer women, all but three of whom she had been able to avoid. Those three had died easily.\n\nThough the sun still sat a half hour below the horizon, to have so few people about in a contested area seemed appallingly neglectful.\n\nShe picked the front door lock and entered the darkened two-storey building, dragging the dead guard with her.\n\nImmediately, she felt it. The muscles of her jaw suddenly tingled, as though she had bitten into a lemon. The sensation built until it was an ache, which quickly spread throughout the bones of her skull into a steady, pounding throb. Her knees nearly gave out, but she leaned her back against the door and rode out the worst of it. Surely, whatever Fyra had done to her caused an increased sensitivity to whatever magics were in the building.\n\nSurely, whatever Fyra had done to her would compensate to minimize the effects.\n\n_Any moment now..._ she thought. _Please..._ But the pain persisted.\n\nThe light warned her, a second too late. An elderly Tomen woman rounded the corner, stepping down from the stairs at the end of the hallway. She jumped when she saw Churls, dropping her lantern with a glass clatter.\n\nChurls flipped the ceramic knife. Underhanded, it was an awkward throw. The pommel glanced harmlessly off the woman's shoulder and struck the plaster behind her, but by that point Churls had already taken two steps in a run toward her target.\n\nThe woman got out one syllable of a warning or curse before Churls's forearm crushed her windpipe. Churls pinned her enemy against the wall and watched as the light fled from her eyes. For several seconds afterward, she held the woman there, heart pounding heavily enough to shake her entire body, breaths labored and painful as she struggled to keep them quiet.\n\nListening, over the roar of her pain.\n\nA footstep on the landing above. The strike of a phosphor match.\n\nBright spots swam before Churls's eyes as she hauled the dead woman out of this new person's line of sight. The muscles of her chest and stomach had tightened with the pain, constricting her. She could not breathe in enough air, and tore at the buttons of her vest, alleviating the pressure slightly.\n\nAbove her, voices. Two men. She recognized one of their words.\n\n_Shira_.\n\nHer eyes shot to the ceramic knife, which lay on the floor at the foot of the stairs.\n\nShe did not think. Thinking would do no good in her current situation.\n\nShe rounded the corner and charged up the steps, sword in hand. Both men stood, stunned into statues by her appearance. She ran the first through his left lung and slammed into the second, carrying them both to the floor. They rolled twice before she got the upper position, and then struck him twice, open-palmed and in quick succession, forcing shards of cartilage into his brain, killing him instantly. She stood and pulled her sword free of the first, hastening his death by drowning.\n\nThe house woke up around her. From the sound of it, there were far more than a handful of men. Perhaps Fesuy had not been so incautious, after all.\n\nShe ran down the hallway, where she knew Vedas and Berun would be found.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe two girls Fesuy had slept alongside\u2014she would not think of them as women\u2014sobbed in the corner. The man himself lay unconscious on the bed, naked, wrists and ankles tied and linked behind his back, bleeding into the sheets from a shallow cut on his temple. A heavy chair, propped against the doorknob, kept anyone from easily entering the room from the outside.\n\nOf course, every member of the household knew Fesuy would die if they tried to enter, and this kept them out. For now. It was only a brief matter of time before they stopped caring and came in, regardless of the threat to their leader.\n\nChurls finished her second search of the room, which every instinct told her _must_ contain Vedas and Berun, and limped over to the bed. Fesuy groaned as she flipped him over. When she wound his long red hair around her hand and pulled him onto the floor, he woke and began cursing her, first in Tomen and then, when she let his head drop onto the rough wood floor, in Common.\n\n\"... dick I'll rip out, your asshole I'll fill\u2014with blades I'll...\"\n\nShe knelt and slapped him, hard. \"Shut the fuck up. Where are they?\"\n\nHe started to speak, paused. She met his stare. When his eyes registered their recognition, she smiled. She pulled the knife he had kept in his bedside table from her boot and waved it. The pain in her jaw and temples had only increased, but she would not allow this to show on her face.\n\n\"So, you dress to look like a man,\" he said with a sneer. \"You should not worry about that. You looked enough like one, already. In this camp, no one would have touched you. I have fifteen men in this house, all unmarried, and not one could I have convinced to lay with you.\"\n\n\"Thirteen,\" she said. \"Your men are easy to kill.\"\n\nShe drew a shallow, straight cut on his lower stomach, and crossed it with another. He snarled and spit in her face.\n\n\"Where are they?\" she asked again, pointing the tip at the X's junction.\n\nHe spit again, and she pushed the knife into him.\n\nHe screamed. Fists pounded on the door.\n\n\"Where are they?\" she asked a third time, twisting the man's own blade in his guts. Not a fatal wound, not yet. He screamed again, louder, and the door jumped in its frame as his men hurled themselves against it. She stilled the knife and repeated her question, watching his face.\n\nHe tried to spit at her a yet again, and got it no farther than his own chin.\n\nShe took his face in her hands, leaving the knife sticking out of his belly. \"Where, Fesuy? You have them here. Tell me where they are, and I'll leave you to your men. A good healer will have you up and about in a couple weeks.\"\n\nHe began cursing in Tomen again, but his eyes gave him away.\n\nHer head whipped about to stare at the ceiling in the northwestern corner of the room. A ladder leaned against the wall underneath. It was an item she had mistaken as decoration, for which purpose they were sold throughout Danoor. She again hauled Fesuy by the hair, trailing blood behind. When the door burst open, she wanted him close at hand, but knew it would only stall the inevitable.\n\nShe needed to find Vedas and Berun. Now.\n\nThe ceiling was not high\u2014only seven feet or so. This fact had not struck her before, but now it seemed noteworthy. Even the hallways had been a greater height, maybe nine feet. She examined the corner Fesuy had focused on, and nearly cried out in her delight. A square had been cut out of the plaster. It lay nearly flush with the rest of the ceiling, rendering it nearly invisible.\n\nHer discovery had not been missed by Fesuy, who now began yelling instructions to his men. The door bucked harder in response.\n\nChurls knelt, pulled the knife from Fesuy's belly, and plunged it into his chest, straight through his sternum. She screamed, pulled it out and hammered it home again\u2014too hard: she felt something pop, something tear. She wished, for a handful of seconds while she stared at the hilt of the weapon protruding from him, gritting her teeth agony bloomed in her right shoulder, that she had been able to draw out his pain.\n\nShe recalled the earnest smile on his face, a several months ago, a lifetime ago, when he handed her a mejuan pod and they toasted it together. She recalled the smell of shit that rose from the body of the woman he killed the following morning.\n\nThe door burst open, sending the heavy chair crashing against the bed. Fesuy's men roared, and the girls in the corner screamed. Churls climbed the ladder and slammed her palm into the ceiling panel, shoulder screaming in protest.\n\nShe heard rather than felt the snap of bones in her hand. Uncaring, she hit the panel again. It levered up, and she pulled herself into the dark space beyond.\n\nEvery bone in her skull pulsed in redoubled white-hot agony. She shrugged it off as so much noise, slapped the ceiling door closed, and jammed the point of her sword into its unhinged edge. It would not hold against a concerted effort to open the panel, of course, but she hoped to have another solution soon.\n\nShe turned in a half-crouch, rapidly cataloguing the contents of the low room.\n\nNo windows. In the center, a single magelamp, set very low. A woman sitting behind it, eyes closed, legs crossed, apparently unaware of any cause for alarm. The mage.\n\nA mountainous, man-shaped heaping of brass spheres, dimly seen in the far corner.\n\nBeside it, a low camp bed. Upon it, a dark-clothed body.\n\n\u2021\n\nShe limped over to the mage and kicked her in the stomach.\n\nImmediately, the pain in her head ceased. She nearly fainted in relief.\n\nThe mage yelped as Churls pulled her head up by the hair. Her eyes slowly focused.\n\n\"Hello,\" Churls said through gritted teeth. \"I'm your new boss. You do what I fucking say, immediately. Show you understand me.\"\n\nThe mage nodded, fear in her eyes.\n\nChurls did not smile. \"Good. There are people trying to get in here, so you have only seconds to secure this room. Fail, and I kill you.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nTen seconds. Twenty. The pounding on the ceiling door continued. Thirty.\n\n\"Bitch,\" Churls said, tightening her grip on the mages' greasy hair. \"I'd take me _very_ seriously. Make this happen, _right n\u2014_ \"\n\nThe pounding stopped.\n\n\"They're asleep,\" the mage said. \"All of them.\"\n\n\u2021\n\n\"And me?\" Churls asked. \"Why am I not asleep?\" She needed to know what threat the mage was to her.\n\nThe woman swallowed, her eyes searching Churls's face. She was clearly Knosi, not Tomen. Potentially, a good sign: perhaps she had no loyalty to Fesuy.\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" she said. \"Something's standing in the way. I can't touch you.\" Panic crossed her features. She had admitted to trying it. \"Please... I wouldn't...\"\n\nChurls clapped the mage on the shoulder with her good hand. \"Yes, you would. Keep them asleep, and we all live for a bit longer.\"\n\nShe crossed the room to her companions, bent partially over to keep from brushing the ceiling. Vedas lay immobile, sheathed completely by his black elder-cloth suit\u2014worrying, as she had only seen him do so while conscious\u2014but his pulse and breathing were strong. Her eyes avoided the hollow of his belly, the prominence of his ribs. His arms and shoulders were noticeably smaller. Slowly, with one and good hand and a barely functional second, she untied his wrists, which had been tightly bound with steel cord to the bed.\n\nAs for Berun, she had no way of checking on his status or removing his immense shackles, and so ignored him for now.\n\n\"Vedas,\" she said. She put her hand to his chest and shook him slightly. \"Vedas.\"\n\nNo response. Churls limped back to the mage and crouched before her. The woman flinched away.\n\n\"What's wrong with them?\"\n\nThe mage's confusion was obvious. \"Asleep. I told you, everyone is asleep.\"\n\nChurls kept herself from slapping the woman, barely. \"Not them. Everyone sleeps but the people in this room. Wake them, now.\"\n\nShe did not wait for a reply, but went and knelt by Vedas's bedside again. She repeated his name, and waited as long as she could\u2014perhaps thirty seconds\u2014before turning back to the mage and gesturing her impatience. The mage, still obviously frightened, shook her head and protested ignorance.\n\n\"I don't know when they'll wake,\" she insisted when pressed. \"They make me keep them out for most of the day. I allow the Black Suit to wake for feeding and voiding himself, but they still make me keep him in a daze. It always takes him a while to come to, longer each time. I can't force it or I risk hurting him. The construct I've only allowed to wake twice so the Titled Amendja could speak with him. He was weak, nearly insensate, both times.\" She pointed toward the roof, only five feet overhead. \"The sun. He needs it, and I can only give him so much. Enough to keep him alive, no more.\"\n\nChurls stood to examine the roof. \"Increase the light,\" she ordered.\n\nThe magelamp brightened to a small sun, illuminating the bare room and revealing yet another ceiling panel above Vedas and Berun. Churls reached to unlatch it and paused.\n\n_\"Everyone_ is asleep?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" the mage said. \"And no one is on the roof.\"\n\nChurls open the panel, letting it fall back onto the roof. She looked quickly around to confirm what the mage had said, and also to determine if her assault on Fesuy's home had alerted any of the locals.\n\nNo one ran wild through the streets. She noticed a few more people about, though none seemed in any hurry. She relaxed slightly, thanking fate for thick, insulating clay walls.\n\nThe horizon glowed faintly, only forty or fifty minutes away from showing the sun. She wondered how long it would be before someone noticed the blood below the front door, noticed the missing guard, or failing either simply tried to enter the building for business. She doubted the mage could defend the entire structure from attack. Mages were specialists, after all: to become skilled in manipulating a man's consciousness took time and effort.\n\nShe checked on Vedas again, saw no change, and crossed the room again.\n\n\"Can you keep people from wanting to enter this building?\" she asked the mage. \"Or, better yet, can you make them disinterested in entering the building?\"\n\n\"Yes. I can turn individuals and maybe small groups away from this building.\" The mage met Churls's stare and held it. The woman's eyes were dull and half-lidded. She had been overexerting herself or\u2014more likely, Churls imagined\u2014had been forced to overexert herself. Nonetheless, there was now a note of defiance in her expression. She had realized her value to Churls.\n\n\"But I can't do it and keep everyone asleep,\" the mage said. \"It's just too much.\"\n\nChurls sat back, and for a moment refused to think.\n\nThe moment passed, and her shoulders slumped.\n\n\"Fuck,\" she said. \"Fuck, fuck, fuck.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nChurls could not trust the mage not to wake everyone in the home once she was otherwise occupied. As a result, Churls brought the woman along.\n\nBlindfolded, as she could not conceive of forcing anyone to watch her at her task.\n\nNonetheless, the mage understood what was occurring immediately. Even an unconscious body made noise in the process of dying. Inside the house, it was very quiet.\n\nThankfully, killing the two girls Fesuy had bedded proved unnecessary. They would not be able to escape the bonds and gags Churls used to restrain them. The rest, however, were clearly warriors, capable of a great deal more. She could not risk one getting loose, and so did what needed to be done. It remained a far, far from pleasant task\u2014she had never killed an unconscious person, even an enemy\u2014but at least, she reasoned, they were not the sort of men the world needed in greater quantities.\n\nShe breathed a sigh of relief: it seemed the only innocent death on her hands would be that of the woman she had killed upon entering the building. Then, in a small, nearly overlooked room on the first floor, she discovered two small children.\n\nShe removed the mage's blindfold and forced the woman to look.\n\n\"Dear Adrash,\" the mage whispered. Her eyes were wet, but her disgust with Churls was clear. \"Why are you showing me this?\"\n\nChurls laughed without humor. \"I'm showing you because something needs to be done. I won't kill them or tie them up, and I have no way to get them somewhere beyond these walls. There's too great a chance of our being discovered, even if I could get them to a place of relative safety. Tell me you can push yourself a bit harder.\"\n\nThey regarded one another. Churls anticipated the woman's refusal, and her resentment flared. The woman had allowed Fesuy to capture Vedas and Berun, an extraordinary feat considering their combined abilities. She had kept Fyra from finding them for an extended period of time. And now, now she would make an argument as to why a simple task could not be done?\n\nChurls curled the fingers of her left hand into a fist.\n\n\"Please,\" she forced herself to say, voice flat.\n\nSlowly, as if to draw out her slight success, the mage nodded. \"I'll need them closer to me, however. That will make it easier.\"\n\nChurls took one child in her arms, the mage took the other, and they returned to the attic.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe day began, entering the room from its sharp angle to crawl slowly down the western wall. Neither Vedas nor Berun woke. Instead of watching time pass, Churls occupied herself by fetching bedding for the unconscious children and dragging bodies one-handed to the cellar. She made a good sweep of the floors, as the thought of tracking blood around the house sickened her.\n\nWhen she could not rationalize avoiding it any longer, she explained the situation to the two frightened girls trussed on Fesuy's bed. They stared at her, comprehending only with repetition. Clearly, each had been sheltered and understood little of the language used beyond their country's border. Both looked horrified by the suggestion that Churls would assist them in using the toilet. They did not want her to touch them for any reason.\n\nChurls sighed. \"Fine. Piss and shit yourselves all you want. When you need water, you'll let me know in your own way.\"\n\nShe checked with the mage, who assured her that all was well, that she had deterred three people from approaching the house. The morning became afternoon. Her companions continued to resist waking, and so Churls took another camp bed from one of the lower rooms and placed it alongside Vedas's. She held his limp hand and did not sleep. She could not sleep, in fact\u2014for fear of the mage trying something odd in her absence, but also, simply, because she had run out of tasks to keep her mind distracted. Even her worry over the fate of Vedas and Berun, the constant factor that had kept her from taking the broader view, was now at an end.\n\nWhatever happened, would happen together.\n\nThis realization brought her comfort, but also consternation. She could no longer ignore the world around her\u2014a world going mad.\n\nA world that her lover had brought into existence.\n\nThis fact bothered her less than she would have imagined. Truthfully, it distressed her more that she could not summon the expected outrage, that she had not lied to her daughter. Vedas had been right to deliver his speech, exhorting men to stand with each other against Adrash. She approved of it, still, despite the chaos it had created. Staring at the night sky, denying or openly accepting the reality of what The Needle represented for generation after generation: neither spoke well of mankind. Both perspectives had warped the world into a place where no progress could occur.\n\nWhy labor to change anything when it might soon come to naught?\n\n_Better to stir the pot slowly, or not at all. Keep shuffling into tomorrow_.\n\nShe could no longer countenance a world like that, but berated herself for being so brutal in her assessment. How could she look at the falling sky and prefer it to an uncertain, but certainly longer, future? (A preference, she reminded herself, even Vedas did not share. He persisted in punishing himself for what he had done.) Surely, men could do nothing to stop Adrash from exerting his will.\n\nIn this light, mankind standing up for itself made no difference. Was it not a sign of their immaturity that anyone would rail against the inevitable, fighting the unstoppable?\n\n_No_ , she insisted, against all logic.\n\n_No more bowing_ , she thought. _No more accepting our fate calmly_.\n\n\u2021\n\nAt the end of the world, she had begun to believe in something.\n\nShe found herself half hoping to stop.\n\n\u2021\n\n\"Madam?\"\n\nChurls jumped. She had not been asleep, but she had not been properly awake, either. \"Yes?\" she asked, blinking away the brightness of the sky through the open ceiling panel.\n\n\"The big one\u2014Berun. He is waking.\"\n\nShe rolled onto her feet and knelt near the constructed man's head, staring into the coal-black spheres of his eyes, which gradually began to glow reassuringly blue. She laid her hand on one massive, rubbled shoulder. Cold marbles under her palm.\n\n\"Berun,\" she said. \"I'm here. It's Churls.\"\n\nThe mage cleared her throat. \"I might not stand so close to him.\"\n\nChurls grinned, and only flinched slightly when Berun shuddered and then heaved himself up from the floor, straining against the massive iron manacles bolted into the floor at his wrists and ankles, mouth opening and closing in silence. She kept her hand on his shoulder, and continued to repeat his name and tell him hers.\n\nJust as suddenly as he had woken, he went still, falling back to the floor with a thump Churls felt through her feet. She leaned forward and shielded his brow as the glow began to fade from his eyes.\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"No, Berun. Come back, right now.\"\n\nA low sound, barely audible, came from his open mouth\u2014the call of a bass horn from two battlefields away. Churls bent her ear to catch it.\n\n\"... you. Safe. Vedas. Safe?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"We're both safe, though Vedas hasn't woken yet and we're stuck in the middle of Fesuy's territory.\" She squinted above her head. \"There's a skylight. I have as much sun coming in as possible, but I worry it's not enough. You have to be able to move, and soon. We don't have all the time in the world.\"\n\n\"I feel it, Churls. Thank you.\"\n\nFor several moments he remained silent, and Churls assumed he had said all he would.\n\nAnd then:\n\n\"Two days.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nAt midnight, the mage called from above. Churls stopped her restless pacing along the second-floor hallway and climbed the ladder to the attic.\n\n\"He's waking, but slowly,\" the mage said. \"Don't force it.\"\n\nChurls turned toward Vedas, but the mage called her back. In the magelight, the woman's reddened eyes were entirely without white. They reflected no light, as though completely dry. Blood-colored sleep granules had gathered in their corners. Her lips were cracked, around them a layer of white crust: dried spit, of course, but also a fair bit of the bonedust she had been surviving on for several days.\n\n\"I can't keep this up,\" she said. \"I need a rest.\"\n\nIt was easy to believe her, yet... \"How did you cope when Fesuy was running things?\"\n\nThe mage's smile was ugly. \"You killed my replacement, Shouz. He wasn't very good\u2014he'd never been trained properly\u2014but he serviced for a few hours every night.\"\n\n\"I can't think about this right now.\" Churls looked across the room to Vedas, bathed in moonlight, and her left foot stepped in his direction of its own accord. She paused just before reaching him, however, and cursed. Without the mage, they would be ruined. \"No. Never mind. I do need you. I'll arrange something after he wakes. _After_. One more hour, you understand? Then you can rest. I promise I'll find a way.\"\n\nVedas's chest rose under her palm. He moaned. She brushed her hand along his arm, noting its thinness with sorrow, and intertwined her fingers with his. Her heart shuddered against her ribs, caused her throat to constrict with its feverish beating. She flushed, feeling the stare of the mage at her back, and nearly let go of his hand. Instead, she gripped it tighter.\n\n\"I'm right here, Vedas. Wake up. Let me know you're alive.\"\n\nThe black elder-cloth peeled back from his eyelids, and he turned his head toward her. His eyes vibrated visibly in their sockets as he tried to focus on her. Slowly, as if struggling to control it, he caused the elder-cloth to retreat further, revealing the gauntness of his bearded face. She kept the worry from clouding her features, or hoped she did.\n\n\"It looks good,\" he croaked. His hand tightened around hers. \"I like it.\"\n\nShe smiled and shook her head. \"Fuck if it does. I look like a melon.\"\n\nHe chuckled, which began him coughing. He let go of her hand and levered himself into a sitting position with obvious difficulty, protesting her assistance. For a moment, his entire body shook. She gave him water. He drank it slowly, displaying his rare and sometimes rather maddening capacity for self-control.\n\nNo throwing up water for Vedas Tezul. Regardless of how thirsty.\n\n\"Berun?\" he asked.\n\n\"Don't answer,\" she answered before the constructed man had an opportunity to speak for himself. \"Conserve your energy.\" She turned back to Vedas. \"I'll sum everything up for you: It's the twelfth of Sectarians. That makes it almost three weeks that you've been kept here. It took me that much time to recover and then locate you, longer than I'd hoped. Berun tells me it'll be two days before he's ready to leave. We'll need him at full capacity.\"\n\nHer voice dropped. \"I don't know if we can rely on Fesuy's mage to shield us from view completely.\"\n\nVedas looked over her right shoulder, expression unreadable. \"She's keeping people out? Impressive. What about Fesuy\u2014the others? Everything's cloudy in my mind, but I seem to recall quite a few of them.\"\n\n\"Sixteen soldiers, including Fesuy. Plus one woman\u2014a maid, maybe. All dead.\" She held his gaze until it became clear he would add nothing to this pronouncement, and pointed to the southeastern corner of the room. \"I found two children on the bottom floor. The mage agreed to keep them asleep. And in Fesuy's bedroom are two girls trussed up like calves, probably shitting themselves as we speak. I think they think I'm some sort of sexless monster.\"\n\nHe raised his eyebrows, thoughts left unsaid.\n\n\"You're tired,\" he eventually said. He stared at her puffy right hand. \"You're hurt.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"My shoulder's not feeling so great, either.\"\n\nHe lifted his left hand and looked at it, clearly concentrating. It took several dozen heartbeats, but eventually, crawlingly, the elder-cloth retreated from the tips of his fingers, up to the second joint of each digit. The skin revealed was a markedly lighter shade of brown than that of his face and neck, the color of diluted coffee.\n\nShe closed her eyes as he ran his fingertips over her bristly scalp. He traced the seams of her skull. Gently, she pulled him toward her.\n\nThey kissed, both tasting horrible, neither caring.\n\n\u2021\n\nVedas offered to accompany her on the roof while the mage slept, but she declined. Considering his condition, she thought it best that he raid Fesuy's icebox and fall asleep with a full stomach, which, despite his protestations to wakefulness, he did promptly upon finishing his meal.\n\nShe paced alone, a mindless circuit: Around the roof in one direction until she reached the skylight. Turn back. Around again in the opposite direction. Her mind wandered aimlessly, snapping back to task at the slightest sound or movement in the streets. Near dawn, just as she began to ask herself whether or not it was wise to be sleepwalking so close to a twenty-five-foot fall, it happened.\n\nA shadow passed across the moon.\n\nShe crouched, peering up to see a line briefly bisecting the bone-white circle.\n\nA tail\u2014she knew it instantly. She had heard the rumors of the man who had once been a tamer and now controlled a significant portion of the city. They said he had brought his pet with him, though as far as she knew no one had actually seen it.\n\nHer eyes tracked the animal's flight. Its form was difficult to determine against the night sky: gliding rapidly over the rooftops, blotting out stars as it went, the details pieced together only gradually to form an image. The gull-like wings, which appeared overlarge when compared to the thin, streamlined body at their juncture. The long, arrow-shaft-straight neck led by a smallish tapering head. Lastly, the tail, which stretched behind to nearly twice the length of the neck.\n\nWhen she had turned three complete circles to follow its flight, realization struck.\n\nIt was becoming larger.\n\nShe turned toward the skylight just as the mage screamed.\n\nVedas had reached her by the time Churls dropped into the attic. He straddled the woman's chest as her body spasmed beneath him. Elbows locked, he pressed her head to the floor, palms tight over her eyes. Churls came to his side and immediately surmised that his efforts would fail. Blood poured from beneath his hands, pooling quickly under the mage's head. Already, her spasming was dying down.\n\n\"Leave her,\" Churls said. \"She's dead already.\"\n\nHis posture did not relax. \"What's happening?\" he yelled.\n\nBefore she could reply, a crash sounded behind them. Berun had ripped his manacles free of the floor. He rose, each of his thousand joints creaking shrilly, standing with half of his broad torso above the skylight. Churls watched him turn a slow circle, tracking the beast on its flight.\n\nVedas stood beside her, bloody hands on his knees. She waited until his coughs subsided.\n\n\"Do you remember a rumor about a man with a dragon?\" she asked. \"A man they call the Tamer?\"\n\n\u2021\n\nAfter several revolutions and one aborted attempt to lift himself onto the roof, Berun sagged, propping himself up against the skylight.\n\n\"It's coming down,\" he said, voice disconcertingly faint. \"Go.\"\n\nHis companions refused. Vedas readied the two children as Churls climbed down to untie the girls on Fesuy's bed. She slapped them into wakefulness and led them around the room to get the blood back into their limbs. They stumbled and righted themselves, terrified of her, not wanting to be touched. Vedas pushed a screaming child into each of their chests and yelled.\n\n\"Fao! Fao!\" _Go! Go!_\n\nThe girls hardly needed to be told. Both were gone without a word or backward glance. The front door slammed as they exited the house, and Churls let out a deep breath she had not realized she had been holding. She gripped Vedas's hand, tugged him weakly toward the attic.\n\nHe resisted. \"Why here? Why now?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" She ran a shaking hand over her face. \"No, I suppose I do. It makes sense. He runs part of the city. Fesuy was a rival. When I killed him and forced the mage to focus on keeping people out, the secret became plain to any mage hired to listen to the right voices. This man\u2014The Tamer\u2014he's come to claim Fesuy's land before someone else does.\"\n\nThey stared at one another. He opened his mouth, but she held up her hand. She closed her eyes tightly against the world while she worked out things she suspected would appear simple in any other state of mind.\n\n\"No, you're right,\" she said. \"He could've attacked Fesuy any time he liked.\" She nodded upward. \"There's a dead woman there to prove it. Not only that. He has a wyrm. Why hasn't he used it before now?\"\n\nShe did not wait for his answer. It would not have mattered, she supposed: they were not leaving Berun alone, frozen into place where he stood, an easy target for the wyrm's grasping claws. She climbed to the attic, Vedas at her heels. They squeezed around the inert form of the constructed man and stood on the rooftop, searching the sky.\n\nVedas gasped. Churls followed his gaze and only just kept from following suit. She had been looking high, hardly expecting the animal to have banked so sharply into a descent\u2014to be so near. Instead of measuring its body against the stars, she now tracked its movement relative to the vertical wall of Usveet Mesa. Moonlight played along metallic purple-black scales, shifting focus from one wing to the other as the animal altered course to keep its lower wingtip from brushing the occasional three- or four-storey building.\n\n\"Orrus Dabil Alachum,\" he swore. \"It's huge. I heard the stories, but I never imagined... It's going to collapse the entire building when it lands.\"\n\nChurls smiled grimly in agreement and sat. She patted the rooftop next to her. \"Nothing we can do then, is there? Besides, it's better to be on top of a falling house than inside it. Sit with me, Vedas.\"\n\nHe stared down at her, clearly at a loss. She sympathized.\n\n\"Is that you, Churls?\" he asked. \"Churli Casta Jons does not\u2014\"\n\n\"Churli Casta Jons is injured and exhausted,\" she said. She patted the rooftop again.\n\nHe sat, and together they waited.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe pressure of the wyrm's downbeating wings pressed them flat, driving the air out of their lungs. The gale ripped tears from Churls's eyes, but she refused to look away as the sky above her was eclipsed, becoming a massive, heaving reptilian belly. The beast fell and seemed to continue falling until surely she must be crushed. Vedas gripped her hand tightly enough to grind her knucklebones together, but she barely felt it. Her mind had become a howling cacophony. She anticipated nothing, patient while her lungs burned for air, lost in wonderment and terror.\n\nHuge, carriage-sized talons spread to grip either side of the rooftop, causing the entire clay structure to groan like a living thing and crack like falling timber. Even when the wyrm settled itself and the pressure in here ears finally let up, noise enveloped her. A massive sound, as though a thousand bellows were being compressed simultaneously, came from above.\n\nBreathing. The expansion and contraction of lungs larger than herself.\n\nThe spell broke, and she remembered her own body's need. She inhaled, far too fast. Pain stabbed through her chest and she rolled onto her side, shaking as her lungs seized inside her. She thought with a clarity that surprised her...\n\n_Hypnotized by a bloody big lizard. What an idiot thing to happen_.\n\nShe finally regained control of herself and pushed up into a crouch, holding out a steadying hand to Vedas as he got shakily to his feet beside her.\n\nThe wyrm's belly heaved above them, a smoothly muscular wall of alien flesh. When the animal breathed in, its scales lowered near enough to touch. The house continued to groan under Churls and Vedas, quaking alarmingly with every shift of the wyrm's wings\u2014wings that extended over several nearby buildings, shielding the sky from view entirely. It was said by men who made their livings along the deeper shorelines of Knoori that oceanic creatures could reach an enormous span, but without water to support a body, how could it possibly... much less fly...\n\nChurls and Vedas exchanged a wide-eyed look, and she surprised herself by recalling a moment when, as a child, she and a neighbor boy had nearly been trampled by a draft horse that reared before them. They had shared the same stunned expression of horror and amazement.\n\n\"The head,\" Berun said, voice almost unheard over the sound of the wyrm's breathing. His next words were lost, merely a fading brassy undertone.\n\nThe head. Churls and Vedas turned to watch it swing in toward them upon its long neck, its perpetually grinning visage growing and taking on definition. It was a great, predatory wedge, bony and sinewy and blunt, filled with recurved teeth that hung down from its upper jaw even with its mouth closed tight. Its eyes burned with a visible amethyst light and smoke poured from its nostrils. Long past the point where Churls thought it would stop growing, it grew, until it was before her\u2014massive, an entire creature of its own. Able, should it choose to, swallow her whole without pausing to chew.\n\nA man sat upon it. He slid down its side and dropped onto the roof.\n\nIt took several seconds for Churls to see him as anything other than a small thing standing next to the wyrm's gigantic head. She blinked, and the image reoriented itself.\n\nHe was not a small creature, except by comparison to his pet. Though not unusually tall (she marked him at a little over six feet in height), he was immensely broad through the shoulders, chest, and thighs. In loose-fitting garments, he might fool someone into believing him fat, but his tight, sleeveless vest clearly strained against slabs of muscle. She knew his belly, ample though it was, would be a solid drum if collided with it. It would be ridged with muscle, a steel washboard.\n\nThis was a man not easily knocked down, or even swayed from side to side.\n\nHe wore a leather cap and a pair of smokeglass goggles. She could not yet tell the color of his skin or determine a likely nationality.\n\n\"You are Churls and Vedas,\" he said. He spoke softly in a baritone rumble, yet it carried easily over the sound of the wyrm's bellows-breathing. He looked down at the constructed man near Churls's feet, torso half-in, half-out of the skylight. \"And this, I assume, is Berun.\"\n\n\"Well done,\" Churls said. \"You know our names and you ride a dragon, and I bet they call you the Tamer for fairly obvious reasons. What do you want?\"\n\nTo her annoyance, he chuckled. He took a step forward, and she tensed. Vedas did not move perceptibly, but the elder-cloth closed around his features. She wondered why he had not done this earlier\u2014it would have helped him breathe as the wyrm came down\u2014and realized he had likely decided not to on account of her. She could not be shielded from it, and so neither could he.\n\nShe clenched her teeth and put her hand on the pommel of her sword. She was not as good with her left arm, and the weight of her gimp right shoulder would throw her off. Still, her opponent stood unarmed.\n\n_Next to a dragon_ , she reminded herself.\n\nThe Tamer stopped after two steps, smile in place. He held up a broad, placating hand.\n\n\"To talk to you,\" he said. \"That's what I want, and all I expect. If, afterwards, you decide to accompany me, so much the better.\"\n\n\"Accompany you?\" Vedas asked. He exchanged a glance with Churls. \"That won't be happening.\"\n\n\"So certain,\" the Tamer said. He lifted his goggles, turned on his heel, and walked to the edge of the roof. \"I'd not speak so hastily.\" He waved them forward over one shoulder, not looking to see if they came. \"Fesuy had a sizable population of dangerous men under his control\u2014warriors with considerable martial skill, Tomen mages with less, and even a few rented mages of other nationality. A few of these last possess considerable talent, enough to do damage to anyone left on this roof. They're waking up along with the rest.\"\n\nHe turned back, seemingly unsurprised that neither Churls nor Vedas had moved. He patted the side of the wyrm's head. The animal did not react: it was a stone fallen from the sky, still smoldering.\n\n\"Try as she might, Sapes can never keep from causing a stir when she lands. This time, we even lost the element of surprise. I went out of my way to alert you to our arrival. I assumed you wouldn't run, and I was right.\" His smile returned. Despite herself, Churls noted that while he was not attractive, he had a distinct charisma. \"I mean it as a gesture of trust between us. I'm dealing with you openly, making my intentions obvious.\"\n\nChurls heard shouts from the streets below. \"Make them more obvious,\" she said.\n\nThe Tamer nodded. \"I'm no friend to Adrash. Neither are the three of you.\" His eyes locked on Vedas. \"I believe your words were, _Our fellow man is not the enemy. Adrash is the enemy_. They're words I agree with exactly, words that seem to have sparked a reaction in the heavens. You've been blamed for beginning the end of the world. You no doubt believe yourself responsible.\"\n\nVedas remained silent. He could have denied it, Churls reasoned, but anyone would have pegged it as a lie. He had delivered his speech, whereupon the whole of Danoor had witnessed the rise of the fractured Needle. There was no one else to blame.\n\nShe expressed as much.\n\n\"Attaching blame doesn't solve every mystery,\" the Tamer said. \"There are times when events coincide in such a way that the answer seems obvious, but is in fact a greater mystery. This is such a time. I know the only man who could be responsible. He is an elderman by the name of Pol Tanz et Som\u2014a mortal creature like you, now likely dead.\"\n\nVedas made a sound halfway between sigh and groan. \"And? Get to the point.\"\n\nThe Tamer quirked an eyebrow. \"I thought the news would be welcome. You are absolved of guilt.\"\n\n\"A name is all you've given us, and a name is useless. The situation is unchanged. Offer us something, or leave.\"\n\nA shout sounded from the street. Very close. Fear of the wyrm would keep Fesuy's people away for a few minutes yet, Churls guessed, but it was only a matter of time before the line broke. She did not want to go with the Tamer, but he had forced their hands by killing the mage. He held every advantage. They were treed prey, and he knew it. Whether or not he minded drawing the moment out, however, resulting in the injury or death of one of them\u2014this remained to be seen.\n\nHer gaze fell upon Berun, inert and vulnerable.\n\n\"The Tamer won't leave us here,\" she said to Vedas. \"One way or the other, we're going. It might as well be now.\"\n\nVedas shook his head in disagreement.\n\nChurls resisted the urge to swear. \"Quickly, then, both of you. Come to some kind of terms.\"\n\nThe Tamer removed his goggles and leather cap, revealing two tiny horns that sprouted from his forehead, mirror-images of the ones Black Suits such as Vedas wore on the hoods of their elder-cloth suits. He dipped his head at Vedas, as if to acknowledge this fact.\n\n\"I offer this: an opportunity to change the world. To free men of tyranny.\" He lifted both hands to the sky. \"The proof is above us, Vedas Tezul. Adrash's will is not total. Tell me this displeases you. Tell me, and I'll go away.\"\n\nVedas said nothing.\n\nThe Tamer did not press his advantage by raising his voice in encouragement. He did not proselytize obviously. Instead, his voice dropped nearly to a whisper.\n\n\"Come with me,\" he said, \"and I'll show you how to make good on your word. I'll show you a way to stop hating yourself for what you _think_ you've done.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nIt was this last statement, Churls knew, that decided him. Without a path to redemption, a man would watch the world burn. With a measure of hope, the same man...\n\nWell. He would not be the same man, would he?\nCHAPTER THREE\n\nTHE 12TH TO 13TH OF THE MONTH OF SECTARIANS DANOOR, THE REPUBLIC OF KNOS MIN\n\nAfter they arrived in the Tamer's quarter of the city, she waited long enough to confirm that Berun remained undamaged from the flight (a handful of minutes exposed to the slanted morning sunlight allowed him enough energy to utter three words: \"Go, Churls. Rest.\") before she collapsed onto the bed in the room provided for her and Vedas.\n\nExhaustion should have taken her immediately. When it did not, she lay perfectly still, pretending at sleep. She listened to Vedas as he paced, sat for minutes in heavy silence, and got up again. He held his breath and let it out explosively. Finally, at the point where words seemed ready to erupt from him\u2014at the point where she nearly gave up, herself, and admitted to being awake\u2014he exited the room.\n\nShe sighed in relief, and rearranged herself into a more comfortable position.\n\nNo, she did not want to talk yet about what had happened. She felt, in fact, that the issue need not be confronted at all. Vedas could feel betrayed by her insistence that he come to a resolution with the Tamer for as long as he needed: eventually, he would admit the situation atop Fesuy's roof had been unworkable. To take the stand that he had in delaying an inevitable decision, letting pride cloud fact for even a moment, had revealed more about himself than she considered wise.\n\nThey had already given up something by trusting the Tamer. Vedas need not volunteer more by making his fears so apparent.\n\nHe had not needed more information atop the roof. He had needed to be convinced to step off the roof.\n\nSleep came halfway. She lay awake but dreaming, reliving the flight from Fesuy's territory: the exhilarating drop of her gut as the wyrm rose in mammoth surges, its wings snapping like ship sails\u2014the spaceless, agreeably nauseating moment of freefall during each upthrust\u2014the wind warm but cutting over her scalp, in her eyes, pushing her first one way in the saddle and then the other, now and then slamming into her as though trying to toss her out into space\u2014and over it all, the sound of breathing, titanic and utterly inhuman. No shift from inhalation to exhalation, just one long sustained howl of air sucked into the creature's cavernous lungs, a roar that filled every open space in Churls's body, forcing the awareness of her own fragility.\n\nShe had loved every horrifying second, and loved every second again, momentarily safe and warm, bathed in sunlight from the open window. The waking dream hardly needed improving the third and fourth time around, yet she managed it: instead of gripping the handles of the saddle, Vedas wrapped his arms around her stomach, pressing his chest against her back, his rough cheek against hers. She gripped the hard cords of his forearms, laughing at his childlike fear, careless in a way the world never seemed to allow. When the wyrm suddenly dropped toward an open area of ground at the northern tip of the city, he squeezed the air from her lungs.\n\nThey landed, and entered a bedroom filled with morning light. She took him on the floor, roughly, and then let herself be taken on the bed.\n\nShe woke fully and masturbated while her arousal remained, before Vedas returned. Using her left hand, it took longer than usual.\n\nThe act left her with the vague feeling of guilt, a feeling she expected and dismissed with a small measure of difficulty. She would not be celibate with herself, not in her fourth decade and certainly not with the world in the state it was, yet she also comprehended how little experience Vedas had with intimacy. Unjust though he undoubtedly knew it was, he would be hurt to discover her pleasuring herself. He understood the baser needs of a person only in theory.\n\nDenial had long since become his way of life.\n\nWhile she could respect this measure of discipline in a man, she regretted the ways in which it made him inflexible, unwilling to give himself over to joy. Vedas had taken to physical intimacy with an intensity, single-mindedness, and talent she had anticipated, enjoyed, and lamented. She wanted him to stop thinking for one damn minute of his life, yet knew he would not. Not now, having had a hand in plunging the world into madness.\n\nShe growled into her pillow. It tired her to think of him any longer, to consider her prize, and how it was not perfect. He had given more of himself than she had ever believed he could.\n\nHer own selfishness gnawed at her, and eventually carried her into dreamless sleep.\n\n\u2021\n\nSomeone called her name. She came out of sleep with the back of her neck tingling.\n\nInstinctively, she knew it was well past midnight, into yet another day, and that she was alone. Vedas had chosen a bed in another room. She thought it likely he had not done it out of spite, but kindness\u2014to allow her uninterrupted rest. It was exactly the kind of decision he would make.\n\n\"When are you going to learn?\" she mumbled, then: \"You can come in, Fyra.\"\n\nHer daughter materialized at the foot of the bed. Churls resented the smirk, but said nothing.\n\n\"You're hurt,\" the shade of a girl said.\n\nChurls held up her puffy right hand. \"I am.\"\n\n\"Your shoulder too, and your left ankle. I can fix them.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"But I'm not going to, am I?\"\n\nChurls let the question hang between them. The girl sought only to help, and it cost Churls nothing to accept. It would make them both happier. Churls tried to remember what her own mother had denied her. Less than she had shared, surely. The woman had allowed far too much, making it easy for Churls to disappear into the ranks of the infantry, ducking her responsibility to Fyra.\n\nMother and daughter stared at one another, the bed an ocean separating them. Churls considered how maddening it was, having a child. It had always seemed to consist of such awkward moments, where an errant word could tear everything apart.\n\n\"Fyra,\" she said. \"I'd like to stop having the same conversations. How about you?\"\n\nThe girl squinted, skeptical. \"Sure,\" she said.\n\n\"Good. Then we'll start right here.\" Churls patted the bed before her, and forced an approving smile when the girl sat. She held out her broken hand, wincing at the twinge in her shoulder. \"Encourage it on its way, Fyra. Don't fix it completely\u2014just do enough to make it heal faster. No, I don't want to go over why. You know why, because I've said it over and over again. When I'm ready to reveal you to Vedas, I will. Nothing you can say will make it go faster, so just leave off it. Either that, or do it yourself. I can't stop you talking to him.\"\n\n\"No,\" the girl said. \"I'm not going to do that, even though he should know about me. He already guesses something. He saw you _glowing_ , Mama.\"\n\nShe had a point, one Churls had been studiously avoiding thinking about for months now. On their journey to Danoor, their ship had breached in the shallows of Tan-Ten, and only Fyra's assumption of Churls's body had saved them. It was madness to deny this event, yet Vedas seemed equally intent on letting it pass out of memory, or at least conversation.\n\nThough grateful for this unexpected pass, their willingness to hide from one another saddened her. He had seen her naked many times\u2014had seen her womb-birth scar, as obvious as a tattoo.\n\nInstead of arguing the point, Churls simply nodded. \"Then why not tell him? It should be easy for you. You're not bound by all of these\u2014\" She waved her good hand around. \"\u2014rules, are you? You don't have to pay attention to me. You can do whatever you want.\"\n\nFyra shrugged. \"What I want to do is keep my promises.\" She poked her index finger into the flesh of her mother's palm.\n\nWarmth radiated into Churls, ceasing her aches. She closed her eyes and sighed in pleasure. If she had access to Fyra's abilities, she would never have to worry about money again. No drug had ever worked so quickly. It loosened her tongue.\n\n\"You were always too serious, daughter. Promises are for adults to try to keep. When you're young, you lie, and you get away with it because you're young. Be young\u2014you might like it.\" She opened one eye to look at the girl. \"Besides, you never told me you wouldn't tell him.\"\n\nFyra shrugged. \"I can make a promise to myself.\"\n\nChurls chuckled. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"You're welcome.\"\n\nThe oddly companionable silence stretched. Churls enjoyed it, keenly aware of how imperfect the world was. How imperfect it had always been. Men deluded themselves when they believed in _better days_ , some bygone era when the sun shone brighter. Better days had never existed. Joy had always been stolen, and sweeter because of that fact.\n\nIt ended when Fyra removed her finger from Churls's palm, forcing unclouded awareness once again.\n\n\"How did you know it was safe to come?\" Churls asked.\n\n\"It wasn't easy,\" Fyra said. \"You told me I couldn't leave to look for you, so I had to get someone else to do it. Her name was Elya. She died in the city a few months ago, when the riots started. She didn't want to do anything for me at first, but I was nice to her. I showed her how to do some things, and so she found you.\"\n\nChurls was tempted to ask Fyra to clarify further, but resisted. She had no clear idea how the dead communicated or what their existence looked like, only that her daughter was unique among them, better at interacting with the material world. There were factions, some of which had aligned themselves with Fyra\u2014and, by extension, Churls and Vedas. They wanted to be of some assistance in the war they imagined Vedas had begun.\n\n\"And now that you're here,\" Churls said, \"I imagine you have an opinion on the Tamer?\"\n\nThe girl's features twisted in annoyance. The light she radiated grew into a small blaze before dying down again. \"You know how upset I get when I can't figure things out, Mama.\"\n\nChurls waited for more. She grew impatient and gestured for Fyra to continue.\n\n\"There's nothing else,\" the girl finally answered. \"He's like looking at a black rock. I know there's something inside him, but I can't see it. He shouldn't be able to do that. Even the mage who hid Vedas and Berun, I could see her, just not what she was doing. It was like she put a big blanket over what I wanted to see. But the Tamer? I don't think he's a mage. I don't think he's human. I think he's something nobody's ever seen.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nHe cooked breakfast himself, a thing that struck Churls as odd. It was not that he was a man, or even that he was the man who had a day ago stolen them from atop Fesuy's stronghold\u2014no, it was simply that he seemed so at ease, as though acting out a morning ritual with family. He radiated good will, putting her in an agreeable mood despite her sizable reservations.\n\nVedas worked at glowering, and more than once opened his mouth to speak, but she recognize how forced the performance was: he, too, could not resist being swayed by their host's inexplicable mood.\n\nIt did not hurt when the meal turned out to be delicious. Churls had been eating dried stocks for well over two months. She had nearly forgotten about food, and took to eating like a person starved. For once, Vedas was not shy in his expression of enjoyment, and ate three full plates. The Tamer, not to be outdone, matched both of them.\n\nChurls watched their host without trying to shield the fact. He seemed not to mind, meeting her eyes now and then with a frank smile before returning to his food.\n\nWithout doubt, the Tamer was one of the most compelling men she had ever seen. Though his skin was a lighter shade of eggplant and his broad build was the polar opposite of a true hybrid's, much about him reminded her of the eldermen she had known. (A quarterbreed, she had heard him called, a mythical creature that could not, should not, exist, an impossible mating of elderman and human.) He possessed the same amber-colored eyes, the same black pelt over his scalp. A similar sort of sinuousness defined his face, as if every muscle were larger and closer to his skin than a man's.\n\nMuscle, in fact, would quickly become an overused word if she were forced to describe him. A fighter by trade, she had surrounded herself with soldiers and athletes for most of her adult life, and even among their number the Tamer's physical development was a spectacular oddity. Lions and draft horses were adequate comparisons, not men.\n\nMore remarkably, she knew, unreasonably yet with certainty, that what she saw was no product of training: he emanated good health in a way she had never before encountered, more like a fixture of existence than a fleeting portion of it.\n\nVedas, while far more attractive to her, nonetheless appeared somewhat brittle in comparison. It was as if, all at once, her eyes had been forced to recognize what lay inside him, waiting and always growing\u2014a feature obvious but until now overlooked.\n\nDeath. Now acknowledged, it could not be unseen.\n\nShe looked at her own freckled forearms and saw it in herself. It struck her, how little it mattered, to suddenly discover something one had always known. She squeezed Vedas's hand under the table.\n\n\"What a strange mood this is,\" she said. \"It's not what I'd expected upon waking. I'm not angry or nervous. In fact, I'm not even suspicious, and that makes me very suspicious.\" She met the Tamer's open gaze again. \"Let's start at the beginning. You're not what you appear to be, are you?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Likely not. What do I appear to be, Churls?\"\n\n\"A man, more or less.\" She paused, considering her words. \"Though I doubt it's less.\"\n\nThe Tamer laughed and slapped the table, causing their plates and silver to jump.\n\n\"Clever. And right to the point.\" He folded his napkin expertly and placed it beside his empty plate. He touched two thick fingertips to his stubby horns, both of which were slightly darker than his skin, appearing in texture like a fingernail. \"I'm not less than a man. In truth, I'm further from a man than your friend Berun is from a stone sculpture. I won't demure in that regard. I\u2014\" His head tilted to the side, eyes staring over Churls's shoulder. \"Speak of the creature itself, and it arrives.\"\n\nA creak made her turn. Berun slowly made his way down the stairs leading into the kitchen. For a moment, she fought the urge to offer him assistance, and then gave up. She stood and went to him, wrapping her good arm around his massive right one. His craggy, outsized features drew into a smile as he looked down at her.\n\n\"Berun,\" Vedas said. \"Vedas,\" the constructed man returned. The words were spoken with little obvious feeling, but Churls recognized their hard-won affection.\n\n\"Welcome again, Berun,\" the Tamer said. \"You need no food I can provide, clearly, but if there's something else I can do, please ask.\"\n\nBerun stared at their host in silence, and then rumbled, \"I've been left alone to recover for one day and an evening, and now part of the next morning. My ears have been open the entire time. You could have visited with me and explained yourself. Vedas woke from his rest briefly to lay upon the roof with me. He said that we're being encouraged by your men on the lower floor to stay here, to continue resting, that all will be explained. And so...\" He made fists and rested them upon the table. Not quite, but almost, a threat. \"I need nothing but for you to explain yourself.\"\n\nThe Tamer's smiled disappeared. He nodded, stood, and took their plates.\n\nWhen he turned around, a fractured expression had altered his features markedly. A new man stood before them, one who appeared neither friendly nor particularly sane. His left eye rolled up into his head, and the other twitched madly as it settled briefly on each of them.\n\nChurls fought the nearly overwhelming urge to send her chair skittering across the floor behind her, to place distance between herself and him. Vedas slowly lifted his hands to the table's edge, likely to prepare himself for upending it. Berun's eyes flared briefly, two magnesium-blue flares.\n\nThe Tamer made a series of gutteral utterances while his lips moved, neither sound nor movement appearing in concert. Slowly, however, his throat managed to catch up with his mouth, and an alien vocabulary emerged, veering between utterly indecipherable and disturbingly familiar, putting Churls in mind of every time she had heard spats through thin tenement walls or from across a collection of tents. The odd word caught and guessed at.\n\nShe spared a glance at Vedas. His brow furrowed as he sought to comprehend something that clearly continued to slip away.\n\n\u2021\n\nFinally, the Tamer's alien words ground to a halt. His left eye rolled back into place and his features evened out, solidifying into a glare he shared with each of them in turn.\n\n\"Shavrim Coranid.\" he said in a strained whisper.\n\nChurls raised her eyebrows.\n\n\"Shavrim Coranid,\" the Tamer repeated. He repeated them a second time, and slapped the table. Color bloomed in his cheeks. He closed his eyes and bowed his head, breathing audibly through his nose, struggling, obviously, to contain his anger. When he spoke again, it was with a voice shaking in rage, struggling to not become a shout.\n\n\"I am Shavrim Coranid.\" He looked from Churls to Vedas, brows raised. \"Shavrim Coranid. _Shavrim. Coranid_. This... This name means... This name means _nothing to you?\"_\n\nHis gaze settled fixedly upon Vedas. Churls looked from the Tamer to her lover\u2014the former, shaking from head to toe, and the latter, unnaturally still\u2014and imagined that if she passed a hand between them it would encounter resistance. She opened her mouth to speak, and found, quizzically, that any question would be unnecessary.\n\nShe anticipated Vedas's nod a heartbeat before it came. When it did, she shadowed it. Berun stood immobile, a question creasing his features.\n\nVedas nodded. Churls nodded.\n\nAnd then they both, at the same moment, said yes. Yes, the name meant something to them.\n\n\u2021\n\n\"A name, once heard, cannot be forgotten,\" she had once overheard a Bashest priestess tell a practitioner. The words possessed a ring of truth to them, though Churls's mind had never been particularly suited to remembering. Faces, names, dates, she could not recall them beyond their moments of relevance, yet she knew with a peculiar certainty that she had never forgotten a single thing. Once acquainted with a place or person, even the most dim memories could be summoned again to help navigate oddly familiar streets, to understand a near-stranger.\n\nAs a small child she had taken ill with bone featherings, forcing her mother to visit a sawmage: not even someone who worked on livestock, no, but a local man who healed pit-dogs and other fighting animals. (They could not have afforded someone who worked on livestock.) When her mother mentioned his name a decade later, Churls did not associate it with the event she remembered only fuzzily.\n\nShe did, however, experience a surge of discomfort upon hearing it. The sawmage's name, which, of course, she could not now recall, was _ugly_ , even offensive. It seemed wrong that it had come from her mother's mouth.\n\nHad hearing it actually caused her to rub the long, jagged scar the man had left upon her right thigh? She recalled doing so, but it hardly mattered. The rush of emotion that had accompanied two small words\u2014a name, surely, she had only heard a smattering of times as a sick-unto-delirious child\u2014had not been an imagined thing. She had not created it out of nothing. It existed, a permanent connection to a place and time.\n\nLikewise, she could not dismiss her reaction upon hearing the Tamer's true name. It had not been immediate, no: it had built slowly within her, an increasingly undeniable pressure between her ears each time the man spoke.\n\n_Shavrim Coranid, SHAVrim Coranid, SHAVrim CORanid_.\n\nWhen it finally registered, when she could not discount her reaction as an ordinary response to the man's anger, it was as though it had always been a part of her, this name, and attendant to this name a weight, a collection of impressions beyond the scope of recollection, pressing upon her without discomfort, welcomed without conscious volition\u2014as if a door had been opened into a previously undiscovered room, admitting a stream of vaguely familiar people who spoke in nearly-recognizable languages, who told tales of places she could almost picture.\n\nAll of this, at once. In a flash of awareness, her skull had become pregnant with associations she could not yet contextualize. She admitted the possibility of it being the product of enchantment, but it hardly mattered. If Shavrim Coranid were powerful enough to place such a complex sense of recognition within her mind, then all things in his presence were suspect.\n\n\u2021\n\nHe collapsed after hearing their affirmations. Berun lifted him easily and took him upstairs. In Shavrim's room, the three of them stood silently around his bed for several minutes, staring at his motionless body as though it were a fascinating vista, a landscape they had seen a lifetime ago, perhaps, or had heard described by a relative. Churls spared a look at her companions, just in time to see them doing the same. They avoided meeting each other's eyes.\n\nWithout a word, Berun turned and ascended to the rooftop.\n\nSimilarly content not to speak, Churls and Vedas returned to their room, where, after a long period of examining the floor between them (she, feeling not the slightest trace of awkwardness, but instead a mounting sense of purpose, of waiting for the exact moment to move), they embraced. Slowly, they undressed one another\u2014she completely, he as far as he would allow her to peel back his suit. She pressed her fingernails into the elder-cloth and carefully expanded holes that he allowed to form in the material, slowly revealing his chest, belly, upper and lower back, and buttocks.\n\nShe stopped before going lower, her hands playing over his rawboned torso. Inexplicably, sadness no longer gnawed at her to see how wasted he had become. For a fleeting moment, his frailty seemed appropriate, even beautiful. Its impermanence appealed to her, as did his atypically casual reaction to it. He had always been so worried over his body, touching it as though he thought it would suddenly fail him. As if, having lost something, it could never be regained.\n\nIt was a preoccupation born of privilege. He had always had enough to eat, enough spare time to train. A man like him had no reason to worry, and so he did.\n\n\"You just needed to lack for something,\" she whispered to herself, slipping her hands around his ribs and squeezing him to her, possessively, protectively. His fingertips ran lightly up her back. Gripping her head in his hands, he kissed her, tongue flicking over her teeth. When he pulled away, his arms fell around her shoulders and he buried his face in her neck. She shuddered at the scrape of his beard. Gooseflesh rose, covering her from head to toe.\n\nThey pulled each other onto the bed.\n\nImmediately, she knew it would not be as it had been before. Unclothed, Vedas had always possessed a hint of nervousness about him, a feature now entirely absent. He moved as he had always done in his element: she thought of the sparring they had done, the times she had seen him confront an opponent, reacting fluidly, refusing to be rushed yet without an ounce of hesitation. At times, he became animated in a manner she had not yet seen, eyes wide or eyes shut, grimacing and smiling, abandoning himself to his sensations. He did not hide himself from her, or worse, try to impress her by taking control, but instead responded to her naturally, like it had always been a familiar thing between them.\n\n\"You're _here,\"_ she breathed when they surfaced for air.\n\n\"I am,\" he said, and surprised her by returning a knowing smile.\n\nShe buried her fingertips in the thick nap of his hair and pushed him downward.\n\nAfterward, they lay together, spent, touching only at the hands and crossed ankles, comfortable on a level she had rarely felt in the previous year of traveling and fighting and worrying. Of course, now that she acknowledged it, it began to fade. She fought to keep it from going away, and failed.\n\nShe frowned, her suspicions finally demanding full attention.\n\nSomehow, he precipitated her words. She felt it in the air a moment before he let go of her hand.\n\n\"Vedas,\" she said. \"We need to question this. All of it. Even if we don't want to.\"\n\nOut of the corner of her eye, she saw him turn away from her. \"I know,\" he said.\n\n\"It feels this good to you, too, doesn't it, what we just did, how we are now? It feels right, but you and I aren't... I mean, we haven't...\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nShe squeezed his hand, grateful he had filled in the blanks. \"It's not just that. There's also this feeling of... knowing? Shavrim, that name, it...\" Again, she searched for words.\" It means something to us. I could feel the moment when we realized it, together\u2014both of us. Just like here, now, it feels real, _full_ , like something obvious I'd forgotten.\"\n\n\"Like a dream,\" he said, \"one you only recall later, because of a smell or a series of words. It didn't exist, and then\u2014\" he snapped his fingers \"\u2014it does.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Yes. Exactly. But we don't wake up from life, Vedas. We're not dreaming.\"\n\n\"You know there's more to the world than we see,\" he said. \"I may be opposed to Adrash, Churls, but I'm not blind to the way forces other than he have bent creation. Miracles occur, beyond our reckoning. I'm not saying I'm convinced, but who's to say Shavrim Coranid isn't revealing something to us that we should know, something greater than ourselves?\"\n\n\"Something greater, Vedas? No. The world has been shaped by many hands, but what of it? The events that appear as miracles, then and now, are exercises in power vastly greater than we can summon. They're impressive, no doubt, but they're also normal, completely of this world. Inexplicable things don't happen.\" She closed her eyes. \"Nothing I've experienced would lead me to believe there's anything more than this, right here, this moment with you\u2014\"\n\nHer last word ended in a croak.\n\nThe quality of the air had changed. Concentrating against the hammering of her heart, she realized that Vedas's breathing was no longer audible. His thumb, which had been rubbing at the back of her hand, had stilled.\n\nShe had been about to lie. Not to keep silent about Fyra, but to actively mislead.\n\nVedas released her hand and sat up. His suit slowly began to mend, circles closing to cover the areas of his back and upper buttocks he had allowed her to unveil. She pinched the bridge of her nose, grimacing, then swung her legs over the side of the bed and quickly pulled her clothes on. She allowed one glance to confirm that his nakedness had been covered completely.\n\n\"Fyra,\" she said. \"Fyra, it's time.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nThey stared at one another. The girl defiantly, chin up. The man expressionlessly.\n\n\"Fyra,\" Vedas said, voice flat. \"You're the daughter.\"\n\nThe girl looked to Churls, who shrugged.\n\nFyra nodded. \"Yes.\"\n\nVedas gestured for more. When neither mother nor daughter spoke, he sighed. He met Churls's gaze levelly, eyebrows raised.\n\n_\"Nothing you've experienced would lead you to think there's anything more than this, here?\"_ He pointed at Fyra, a clear indictment. He smiled, utterly humorless. \"A bit of an untruth, isn't it, Churls?\" The smile vanished, replaced again with a blank expression. He turned back to Fyra. \"Please. Explain to me what your mother couldn't, or wouldn't.\"\n\nFyra surprised Churls by sneering at him. \"Don't act like that,\" the girl said. \"Mama made some mistakes. I wanted her to tell you, and that made me angry. But you...\" She pointed at him, returning his earlier gesture. \"You could have asked her after Tan-Ten. You didn't, so don't blame her for just now getting around to it.\"\n\nAfter a brief pause, Vedas dipped his head in acknowledgement of her point.\n\nThey waited, Churls resolved not to speak. Finally, the girl caved.\n\n\"Ten years,\" she said. \"I've been dead for ten years. Almost eleven. I wasn't always around. For a while, I don't think I thought anything at all. I was sleeping, I guess.\"\n\nVedas appeared to accept this without difficulty. \"And now you're present\u2014all the time? Hiding? Watching?\"\n\nThe girl blushed a warm pink. Churls had never seen it happen before, not in life and certainly not after death. She had thought the girl's ethereal form incapable of generating color other than the blue of her eyes. Seeing it affected Churls in a way she could not have imagined.\n\nIt hurt, seeing it. Color in her daughter's cheeks.\n\nShe turned toward the window to hide the expression on her face.\n\n\"No,\" Fyra said. \"Not always. I can't be here all the time. Even when I really want to be, it can be hard. The dead call me back. Not everyone wants me here.\"\n\nVedas shifted on the bed. Churls sensed his eyes on her, but did not turn back. She had invited Fyra into the room: the two of them could do the rest. She would not influence what information they did or did not share with each other.\n\n\"Why?\" he eventually asked.\n\n\"I saved you and Mama on Tan-Ten, and then I fixed her shoulder after you hurt it. Don't say it. I know you didn't mean to, but you did. There are ways for the dead to be part of the world, to help the living, but most of them are afraid of doing it. They don't want to attract anyone's attention, especially Adrash's. That, or they're not good at crossing over.\"\n\n\"But you are?\"\n\n\"Yes. Yes, I am. Better than anybody, ever.\"\n\nChurls heard the smile in her daughter's voice, and grinned in response.\n\nThe expression fled upon hearing what Vedas said next.\n\n\"And Berun\u2014does he know about you?\"\n\nThe question hung in the air. Churls fidgeted with her belt buckle, and made herself stop. Now that the issue had been broached, it seemed pure, embarrassing foolishness that she had avoided it. And yet, so much had been successfully avoided for so long, what did one more avoidance matter?\n\nJust after rescuing Churls and Vedas in the shallows of Tan-Ten, Fyra had indeed appeared to Berun, leading him to shore, saving him from a slow death of light-suffocation under Lake Ten. Days after Vedas's speech, she had almost certainly helped Berun find Churls in Danoor, though neither the constructed man nor Fyra admitted to it. What Churls had never ascertained was whether or not Fyra had revealed her identity to Berun.\n\n\"I think so. I helped him,\" the girl said. She glanced at Churls. \"Twice. But I can't be sure if he knows exactly who I am.\"\n\n\"Well, then,\" Vedas said. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood. \"There's an easy way to be sure.\"\n\nHe opened the door and left without a glance back.\n\n\"That went well,\" Fyra said.\n\nChurls sighed. \"You have an interesting definition of _well_ , daughter.\" She gestured Fyra toward the door.\n\n\"Not yet,\" the girl said. \"They can wait. Give me your hand. There's no reason not to fix it now, right, Mama?\"\n\nChurls thought of arguing, but saw little point. Berun was patient, and Vedas could stand to pace through a minor delay.\n\nAs radiance flooded her body, touching every nerve and rendering it liquid, Churls reflected not on the violence or the tension of the last several days, but on all the talk. There had been too much. She could not fight the sinking feeling that like Vedas she had given too much away, that she had been careless in her words and revealed something she would regret. Of course, filled with Fyra's soft healing fire, she could not put her finger on just what she had lost\u2014or if, indeed, anything had been lost. Perhaps it was mere paranoia, the result of having talked herself into a corner. She had never liked ceding control.\n\n\"Fyra,\" she said. \"Why didn't you tell him? About... about...\"\n\nThe girl smiled. \"Yes, mama? Tell him about what?\"\n\nChurls's head swam. Her tongue was thick, heavy in her mouth, and then it seemed as if it had fled her body entirely. She blew air out between her lips, causing them to flap. She laughed, though she saw no humor in the situation.\n\nHer lips worked at the words before they came out:\n\n\"The... dead. How they want to... help us. A war. _The war_. Why not?\"\n\n\"Be calm, Mama,\" Fyra said. \"I'm trying to do something. You're more than hurt. There's something else, something I couldn't see before, when you wouldn't let me in. Let me figure it out.\" She flickered, growing in brilliance and then subsiding. One moment, she seemed of normal size, and the next she was a toy in Churls's outstretched hand.\n\n\"Fyra,\" Churls said. \"I'm more than... hurt? Fyra?\"\n\nShe fell back onto the bed. Her eyelids fluttered, vision losing focus. She labored to roll her eyes downward, to locate her daughter. Her limbs shook, no longer under her command. Gradually, the room grew dark, fading into black around the corners of her eyes. Closing in upon her.\n\n_Sleep_ , Fyra said.\n\n\u2021\n\nShe woke, and immediately sat upright. The room possessed a startling clarity around her, a sharpness that cut through her disorientation. The blanket under her hand, the reflection of the mirror... every object she saw seemed suffused of its own light. Less than a handful of minutes had passed, she knew immediately, yet a longer span of time had passed inside the confines of her skull.\n\nFyra materialized before her, unusually faint.\n\n\"Mama,\" she said in a voice that sounded as though it came from another room. Worry made her look decades older. \"Mama?\" she repeated, squinting as though she were having trouble making out the woman sitting before her.\n\n\"Yes, Fyra?\" Churls asked. Her voice, richer than she remembered, fuller in her throat and ears. She reached out with a steady hand, marveling at the texture of her skin, its smoothness and inexplicable, almost metallic sheen. Her fingertips stopped a mere hairsbreadth from her daughter's cheek. \"Fyra, what is it? What's wrong?\"\n\nThe girl's eyes widened, and she shrunk back. Her form wavered like a guttering candle.\n\n\"Mama? You're not alone,\" she said, and disappeared.\n\n\u2021\n\nChurls's brow furrowed in confusion.\n\n\"Fyra?\" she asked. \"Where did you...? What did you...?\"\n\nShe blinked, and the world turned gray.\n\nNo, it did not turn gray. It grew dim. It was as if a shadow suddenly passed over the building. She stood and crossed to the window, leaning out to squint at the sun.\n\nThe sky stretched overhead, a clear bowl of blue, yet to her eyes it seemed drained of its vibrancy, filmed over with a layer of grit. As her gaze descended, the world darkened until the street below appeared shrouded in fog. She looked at her hands, and there it was again, clear in the calloused, labor-worn flesh of her palm:\n\nDeath. Once acknowledged, it could not be unseen.\n\nAlone, without someone equally fragile with which to share her realization, it pained her to see. It was like an unhealing wound, a cancer. The vision of her mother, laid out in her aunt's threadbare bedroom, came to her. It had only been three years ago, but she still dreamt often of the wake. A fully-grown adult, inured to death\u2014an experienced soldier, no less\u2014her heart had nonetheless pounded as she took her mother's hand, finding it cold, its skin a parchment stretched over bird-thin bones.\n\nShe retreated from the window, hugging herself against a coldness rooted deep in her marrow.\n\n\"Fyra?\" she asked. \"What's happening, girl? Come back.\"\n\nA painful knot formed in her throat. She had never seen her daughter's remains. She had been away, avoiding home and every responsibility home meant. Her mother had buried Fyra a month before Churls returned. Churls had not been there when her mother died, either\u2014had missed it by days.\n\nThe world operated in cycles: one got what they deserved, in the end.\n\nChurls would die\u2014alone, she knew.\n\nShe retreated further until her backside hit the bed. She flinched, and reached back with shaking fingers to uncover the mattress. Her eyes never left the open window, as though she expected the arrival of death itself. The sheets still smelled of Vedas, yet another kind of longing.\n\n\"Fyra?\" she repeated, knowing the girl had gone back to the dead and would not return for some time. Her daughter had discovered something, and taxed herself in the process.\n\nChurls cursed. The world never stopped moving underneath her.\n\nThough the temptation existed, she did not give in to irrational self-pity. She did not say her mother's name, or Vedas's. There would be no use, she reasoned, of wishing for comfort from either of them. Her mother had surely passed out of existence upon death. She had known her own strength, had come to terms with her place in the world in a way Churls could barely conceive. Inys Casta Jons had accumulated no soul-debt, no unfinished business, and would not have stuck around to watch over anyone. She had been ready for death.\n\nAnd Vedas?\n\nChurls shook her head. She did not close her eyes, did not sleep. She stared at the window until the sun passed directly overhead, until its direct rays no longer entered the room, and then she went downstairs to get drunk.\n\n\u2021\n\nShe saw Vedas leave. He met her eye briefly as he passed through the games hall that made up the first floor of Shavrim's headquarters, but his expression gave nothing away. She watched the flow of muscle under his suit as he walked out the door, aware of her sad desire but unable to do anything about it. She sniffed at her fingertips, which still bore a trace of them both.\n\n\"Another,\" she told the bartender.\n\nFive ales in, she ordered a sixth and then a seventh. An eighth and a ninth. She reached the point where she not so much thought about anything as let thoughts revolve around her, touching her awareness only briefly. Muddy-headed, she came to two swift, resigned conclusions she would not have been able to arrive at sober:\n\nVedas's anger\u2014there was nothing she could do about it. There never had been anything she could do. They were, the two of them, too wounded to be anything other than a mess, moving from one feeling to the next without any means of control. Had she the ability to do it all over, she likely would make the same mistakes. Different words, same foolish sentiments.\n\nWhat Fyra had said\u2014it made no sense, and would make no sense until the girl returned, so why consider it any more than she had to? Fyra would not allow harm to come to her mother, if it were within her power to prevent it. And if she could not prevent it?\n\nChurls ordered her tenth ale, scowling at the bartender when the woman raised her eyebrows.\n\nThere was, of course, a third issue that could not be completely ignored. She raised her eyes to the ceiling and winced.\n\nBerun.\n\nBerun, with whom she had shared so much\u2014with whom she, in some ways, felt a deeper sense of connection than Vedas. He had listened without judgment, an immediate sympathy between them from the beginning. He had never asked anything of her, had expected only...\n\n\"Shit,\" she said to herself. What had he expected?\n\nTrust. To be treated like any friend should be treated.\n\nShe ordered her eleventh ale.\n\n\"Fuck,\" she muttered after three sips, and rose unsteadily from her stool.\n\nShe ascended to the roof of Shavrim's base of operations, pausing before taking the final step onto the still warm clay surface, peering around until she located the mountain of rubble that was Berun's cross-legged form. His gaze, she could see, was directed away from her, toward the sporadically lit city. She felt the chilly mass of Usveet Mesa, looming behind her.\n\nShe shivered, and opened her mouth to speak. She closed it again when words, even his name alone, failed to come.\n\nHer fingers curled into fists. Her cheeks flushed. Impotent, she pivoted clumsily to leave.\n\n\"Churls,\" the constructed man rumbled, drawing the sound of her name out.\n\n\"Yes,\" she whispered, and took the final step onto the roof. She crossed to where he sat and stared down at him for a moment, unsure of her next move. He turned his craggy head up to her, the glow of his eyes intensely blue, a searing radiance in the darkness that made her blink. She swayed in place, and his massive hand came up to the small of her back, steadying her. She reached back, her own hand covering only a portion of his.\n\nIt struck her for only the second time since they had known one another: he radiated heat. Far less than a man, but it was something. It made him more human, though he might take offense with that summary.\n\nWhat had he said when she noticed it, that first time? She could not recall. She wondered if it would come to her later. She hoped it would.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said.\n\nHe laughed, a deep metallic tolling from within his great chest. \"Sorry?\" he asked. \"Sorry for what, Churls?\"\n\nShe broke his gaze. \"Fyra. I should have told you.\"\n\nA slight pressure upon her back. \"Sit,\" he said.\n\nShe sat. His arm remained behind her, close but not touching. A minute passed, and then two. She finally rolled her eyes at her own foolishness (what would a constructed man care?), and leaned over onto his shoulder. His arm moved to support her back. She felt subtle shifts in the way he held himself as he accommodated to make her more comfortable against him\u2014a thing, she imagined, he would not have known to do before meeting her.\n\n\"I need no apology, Churls,\" he said. \"I _want_ no apology. I told you, when we came into the city for you, I recognized her. I wasn't mad at you then. I'm not mad now. You have your secrets. From Vedas, you've kept secrets. Apologize to him, if you must apologize to someone.\"\n\nShe smiled grimly. \"He and I may be past the point where apologies mean anything.\" She gestured out across the city. \"He's out there now, and not here. I think I may have broken everything.\"\n\nHe shook his head. She saw it in her peripheral vision, and felt it through his body, the slide of his component spheres over each other.\n\n\"No. You've broken nothing. You give Vedas too little credit. Once, he wouldn't have thought about his anger. Not long ago, he couldn't see out from under his guilt, the hate he directed at himself. But now? Now, he's a different man. You're the first thing in his mind. If you can't see that, you're a fool. A friend, but still a fool.\"\n\nHe smiled down at her. \"I almost think we've discussed these things before.\"\n\nShe remained silent.\n\n\"You'll see,\" he said. \"The world is on the edge of death. Even as I am, not a man, I can see how wrong it would be to witness everything die without knowing who truly cares for you. You care for me. We share a bond.\" He tipped his head, touching his forehead to hers. \"Again, even as I am, I can see this.\"\n\nShe nodded, not trusting herself to speak.\n\n\"And Fyra?\" he asked. \"She's still away, among the dead?\"\n\nShe wiped at her eyes, though they were dry. \"She's gone. Off to wherever she goes. Beyond where the world can touch her, beyond even Adrash.\"\n\nShe looked to the sky, where the broken Needle spanned. Drunk, it no longer filled her with the same fear. She was, however, suddenly aware of her anger. How dare the world be kept on a tether, threatened so? Who gave Adrash the right to hold the world in a thrall?\n\nIt was an idiot question, of course. Strength gave him the right.\n\nAnd now\u2014who but the dead could oppose him? She thought, for the thousandth time, of what it could mean to accept Fyra at her word. To accept her and her companions' help, to wage a war upon Jeroun's one true god.\n\nAs though his thoughts had strayed to a similar place, Berun spoke.\n\n\"And what of our captor's claims, Churls? Do you really believe our captor has a way to make good on Vedas's speech, to wage war upon Adrash? I saw what passed between you and Vedas. You recognized Shavrim. His words mean something to you.\"\n\nShe nodded, her eyes riveted on the chaotic view overhead. \"I did recognize him. As did Vedas. I assumed you did, too.\" When he said nothing, she knew her assumption had been wrong. \"But beyond the sense that I remember him? There's a void. No context, no specific memory. It's like it's been removed from my mind.\" Her voice dropped to a whisper. \"Or maybe we're being manipulated. Of course we are. How could both Vedas and I both remember him? How could I know anything about the man's claims?\"\n\n\"You're asking me?\" Berun asked, amusement clear in his voice. \"You, who are haunted by the spirit of your daughter, are asking me, a constructed man who has been assisted by that same spirit, what is possible? You're asking a half-broken creature, only recently freed from the bonds of his creator, for advice on the workings of gods and men?\"\n\n\"I am,\" she said, finally lowering her eyes from the sky, meeting his bright gaze, holding the connection.\n\nSearching.\n\n\"Fate help both of us, Berun, but I am.\"\nCHAPTER FOUR\n\nTHE 16TH TO 18TH OF THE MONTH OF SECTARIANS DANOOR TO MAREPT, THE REPUBLIC OF KNOS MIN\n\nFor the third night in a row, Vedas dreamt of the silver woman, cold and desirous of his warmth, a perfect complement to him: a needle of cold light, a finely focused lance of pain in the center of his being. They made love, quickly to suit her and then slowly to suit him, trading aggressions and tendernesses, moving as one mind. Knowing one another, as intimately as siblings. They referred to each other so, in fact\u2014 _sister, brother_ \u2014yet the words were puzzlingly alien, familiar and unfamiliar at once, altered to suit minds approaching but ultimately eclipsing human.\n\nFor the third time, the experience confounded him. He had never dreamt, aware of the dream. He had only ever been an unwilling participant, a mere inhabitant of his own body, forced to act and to believe wholeheartedly in the reality of his mind's illusion. Now, however, he knew himself as Vedas, the Vedas of the waking world, _here_ , aware, alone, of one mind...\n\nYet not alone. Of two minds. Himself, and another.\n\nAnother, whose body and thoughts were as intimately recognizable as his own.\n\nIn his first and second dream, this had been the extent of it: the deep awareness of himself as someone else, less an occupation than a transformation.\n\nIn this, his third dream, however, he became aware of a new aspect, a pressure within his body, a looming awareness in both minds. As of an oncoming storm, or the tingling sensation of knowing someone is about to enter one's room.\n\nWithin the dream, dawn came to an end. The sun peeked above the belly of the world, instantly igniting the interior of the vast golden room in which the two made love, piercing through the amber lenses of his eyes, causing him to pause, mid-thrust.\n\nHe\u2014the one who was and was not Vedas\u2014quirked his head to one side, listening. His companion lifted her silver head and peered over her shoulder at him.\n\n\"Brother,\" she said. \"We're not done.\"\n\n\"I know, sister,\" he responded. \"A moment. First, say my name. I need you to say it.\"\n\nShe smiled, showing two rows of sharp white teeth. \"Say please.\"\n\n\"Please,\" he said.\n\nShe spoke his name. He sighed in realization, and spoke hers.\n\n\u2021\n\nHis eyes snapped open. He was alone, he knew instantly. Nonetheless, he rose and searched the room thoroughly. The crawling sensation of being watched persisted, just as it had on the previous two evenings after he woke from the dream. If anything, it had increased.\n\nSleep was a shore too far, and a new question had arisen.\n\nHe would seek answers, once more.\n\nHe descended to the first floor, into the games hall. Walking the room counterclockwise, he made himself meet the frank stares of Shavrim Coranid's men. Most were Knosi, openly curious about one of their cousins in a way he was only slowly becoming accustomed to. The assumption that, as countrymen, they had something in common, appealed and repelled in equal measure.\n\nA few black-suited individuals smiled, offering him spots at their tables. He declined each with a polite wave of his hands, a gesture he had acquired from observation.\n\nUndoubtedly, everyone in the hall knew who he was. What he had done.\n\nThey were allies, presumably, yet some among them\u2014the paler-skinned Castans and Stoli, in particular\u2014appeared discomfited by his arrival, shuffling their seats closer to their tables, shutting him out. He smiled at this, sadly amused without really understanding why.\n\nUpon sight of his target, he became self-conscious. He straightened his already rigid spine, painfully aware of the thinness of his arms and legs, the hollows in his torso.\n\nLaures, Shavrim's first lieutenant, stood where she had the two nights before, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed beneath her breasts. Unlike any Black Suit he had ever seen, her hands and forearms were bare, unprotected by the elder-cloth. Oddly again, though not entirely unknown in his experience, she wore clothes over her suit: a thin hempen vest and loose pants of the same material. Both were dyed the red-black color of dried blood.\n\n\"It's for the Mother,\" she had told him during their first conversation. \"It symbolizes what she left after birthing the world.\"\n\nHe stared, uncomprehending.\n\n\"I'm Usterti,\" she said, as if that were sufficient explanation.\n\nThe name had communicated nothing singular to him, then. He pretended to understand what she had said, knowing it would not fool her. He knew what an Usterti was, of course. In theory, he knew a great deal about the religion, but theory carried him only so far. People did not act as books had led him to believe they would. They did not talk in straight, easily-comprehended narratives. Appallingly often, they did not even slightly resemble the pictures he had painted of them. He had heard all Mother-worshippers were witches or pornographers, ugly inside and out.\n\nLaures was beautiful, long-limbed and athletically proportioned, clear-skinned, darker even than he. She wore her hair short, woven in tight, ordered rows upon her scalp. He thought it strange, how attractive he could acknowledge her to be, yet how little her form appealed to him. It seemed wrong that he should view her as more of an object, an abstraction worthy of admiration but not lust. Reason argued that if he had he spent his life among his own people they would not appear so coldly uniform, like a series of glazed statues.\n\n\"Vedas,\" she said, the trace of a smile on her lips.\n\n\"Laures,\" he said, leaning against the wall at her side, affecting her casualness.\n\n\"Here again,\" she said. \"You shouldn't be. The morning will come sooner than you think, and Osa's no small trip.\" Her eyes traveled up and down his body appraisingly. \"You're not the Vedas Tezul I heard described as the winner of the tournament. You have no fat, and precious little muscle, to burn up. Go to sleep. Recover as much as your body will allow.\"\n\nHe only just kept from wincing, and shook his head. \"I can't sleep. I have another questions.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"I already told you all I know about Shav last night. What little there is to know, you know. Trust me.\"\n\n\"No. It's not him I want to talk about.\" He made himself meet her stare, fighting the impulse to keep what secrets he had. If she had any loyalty to Shavrim (and he had no reason to believe she did not), she would tell him everything Vedas said. Perhaps, to Shavrim, the words would mean something. Perhaps he would be able to fill in the holes before Vedas could, using it to his advantage, manipulating them even further. With truth or with lies: it made no difference.\n\nVedas saw no other option, however. Without an answer to this newest question, sleep would continue to elude him.\n\n\"The Mother you spoke of,\" he said. \"Ustert. There are things I seem to recall about her.\"\n\nHer eyebrows rose fractionally, half her mouth moving with them. Regardless, he noted the way her posture stiffened. The fingers of her right hand twitched on her left bicep.\n\n\"You knew her then, did you?\"\n\nHe kept his expression sober. \"I remember reading a series of stories about her\u2014stories from before the world was born.\"\n\nShe dropped all pretense of joviality. \"Stories? Lies, you mean.\"\n\n\"They were not written by your sisters, obviously. They were written by men, trying to understand.\" He ignored her chuckle of contempt. \"I don't mean to offend you by talking about them. I'm not insulting you, nor am I trying to get at secrets you don't want to reveal. All I'm asking for is confirmation that such tales exist.\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"Ask.\"\n\n_Men are not a thing one talks about with an Usterti_ , he had been informed.\n\n\"I could be wrong, but in one of them...\"\n\n_Out with it_ , he told himself.\n\n\"In one of them, Ustert had a twin. A man, or maybe a boy.\"\n\nAfter a moment, she nodded.\n\n\"Do you know his name?\" he asked. \"Will you tell me?\"\n\n\u2021\n\nShe had an answer for him. It showed on her face, yet for the space of many heartbeats she visibly fought with herself over whether to voice what she knew. Perhaps it would be a breach of her faith to utter the name.\n\nJust as he was about to tell her not to worry, to absent himself and make another attempt at sleep, she spoke.\n\n\"Evurt,\" she said. \"His name was Evurt.\"\n\nHe shuddered as something within him stirred.\n\n\u2021\n\nHe turned to look back at the city. Only eight miles out, and already it had become a vague spread of dirty, jumbled earth. Behind it, the vertical wall of Usveet Mesa stood, shutting out half the day, cutting off any view to the west. Distance had only served to make it larger: as the mountain's true scope became apparent, it began to loom even more, to oppress.\n\nHe wondered what kind of people would settle at the base of such a monolith. Had his ancestors longed to be humbled, every day\u2014to be reminded how meager their efforts were? They could not hope to outlast the mountain. It would continue to stand, inviolate, exerting no effort while they struggled, generation after generation, to etch their names in shifting sand.\n\nIt had outlasted one species, already.\n\n_Human beings are fools_ , he thought. _And the ones who came before them were fools_.\n\nThis thought sat cold within him.\n\nShielding his eyes, he surveyed the cloudless sky until he located the winged shape of the creature guarding their exit from the city: Shavrim's pet Sapes, itself an hybrid of wyrm and elder, a living link to that superseded species. He lifted his right hand, spreading his fingers wide, sliding his palm smoothly over the atrophied muscle of his chest. Not even true contact, but feeling transmitted through two layers of cloth composed in part of elder skin.\n\n\"And what if you die within it?\" Churls had once asked. He recalled the feeling of her fingertips, brushing over the edge of a hole he had caused to open in his suit. Back and forth over his right hipbone, from bare skin to covered skin. It surprised him to realize he could not tell where one ended and the other began.\n\n\"I'll rot,\" he replied. \"Someone else will use my suit.\"\n\n\"And if you die alone, at the bottom of a crevice?\"\n\n\"I'll rot,\" he had repeated, suddenly and profoundly uncomfortable.\n\nSapes' form disappeared against the sheer black wall of Usveet Mesa. Vedas dropped his hand and turned back to his companions. Churls had stopped to watch him, concern written on her features. He met her stare for a moment, expressionless, allowing nothing to pass between them, and then shifted his gaze to Berun, Shavrim, and Laures.\n\nTo his annoyance, they too now stopped to regard him.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" he said. \"Keep walking.\"\n\nHe waited for them to move before resuming his own progress. He stared at their backs, lingering on the broad form of Shavrim for several heartbeats, struggling to understand how he had ever allowed the man to convince them to abandon the city. How, despite the madness of the man's words\u2014the very idea that a means to defeat Adrash existed, that anything other than the entire mass of humanity could stand against Jeroun's only god!\u2014traveling to Osa had come to seem the right choice. The only choice.\n\nHe struggled against this increasing sense of surety, if for no other reason than one among them needed to. Churls and Berun, the two voices who had long argued against Vedas's own certainty, had agreed to Shavrim's goal surprisingly quickly. Perhaps they had not required as much time to come to terms with the situation (a situation, he reminded himself, that amounted to sitting and waiting for the world to collapse) and simply accepted Shavrim at his unlikely word, yet this sounded an unpleasant chord within him.\n\nA thing was either true, or it was not. One did not arrive at truth by wishing it were so. From the moment they met Shavrim, they had been pressed against the wall by circumstance. This was not a position from which a wise choice could be made.\n\nFeeling helpless was its own form of tyranny. He knew this. He knew it better than most. He had lived most of his life oppressed by a false truth.\n\n\u2021\n\nThey stopped out of the way of the wind, in a dry stream-bed where the skeletons of cottonwoods arced overhead. He did not attempt to conceal his exhaustion, but waved away their protests when he offered to gather firewood, just as he had when they told him he need not carry any of their supplies. He climbed the sandy bluff and returned with armloads of fuel\u2014first kindling, which he found scattered at the feet of the dead trees, and then larger branches, which snapped like bones in his shaking hands, covering him in dust, making him sneeze.\n\nOn his fourth trip, he walked a handful of paces away from the trees and stood motionless in the spare, cold light of the desert, breathing heavily, savoring the brief moment of solitude. Looking into the sky, he counted the scattered spheres of the Needle: seven, eight, nine... and then a tenth rising above the horizon. He resisted the urge to touch his fingertips to the horns of his suit, cursing Adrash with a gesture. A small gesture of defiance, fighting reflex.\n\nHis lips moved. Again and again, he formed the name\u2014 _Evurt\u2014_ but did not say it aloud. A simple act, giving voice to thought, yet it struck him as more than a mere word. A name was a summons to its owner. He wondered if Churls had felt the same when she realized her daughter had returned from the dead, as if every moment alone were pregnant, existing always on the verge of saying it. _Fyra. Fyra. Fyra_. Drawing the girl into reality.\n\nHe wondered if Churls knew yet another name, now.\n\n_Ustert_.\n\nHe shook his head, seeking and failing to clear it. There was no reason to assume Churls had experienced anything like his dream. He had never taken a lover before her, and suspected his inexperience was leading him to false conclusions.\n\nAs always, logic failed to alleviate his worry.\n\nUpon returning to the camp for the seventh time, he realized he had gathered far more fuel than necessary. He stared at the pile of wood he had created, brow creased. Waiting. Berun, Laures, and Shavrim had left for a perimeter check, leaving Churls alone to set up the tent. He felt her gaze at his back, or he thought he did: when he finally turned, her attention was fixed on her task.\n\nHe pretended to concentrate on building the fire, longing to bridge the silence between them but suspecting he should preserve it for as long as possible. She was stronger than him, more practical and persuasive. A lifetime outside an abbey's walls, making due alone, had made her capable of discerning judgment, while he, he was no judge at all.\n\nIf he opened himself up to her, she would sway him away from doubt. For two days, he had restricted himself with her, engaging in only the briefest of exchanges.\n\nHe knew himself to be a fool, or perhaps he was a coward: it made no difference. A part of him remained in Danoor, struggling to make sense of what had occurred there. An even greater part of him remained in Golna\u2014would always remain in Golna, unchanging.\n\nHis fist tightened around a wrist-thick branch until it cracked. Behind him, Churls paused in her work. She had heard something, in that sound alone.\n\n\"It's how often I wasn't in control,\" he said. He swallowed, cleared his throat. He opened his mouth and then closed it. The quiet stretched.\n\n\"What did you say?\" she eventually asked.\n\nHe shook his head and returned his attention to the fire.\n\nBerun, Shavrim, and Laures returned. The constructed man settled down, his dusty spheres squeaking like damp cloth to brass fixtures. His eyes were dimmer than Vedas recalled seeing in some time. Clearly, he was tired, or as close to tired as his body could become. Vedas had never determined what, if anything, Berun felt. Surely, he was not as mighty as he had once been: an injury suffered during their journey to Danoor (an injury Vedas still did not understand) had resulted in him being unable to alter his form or rotate the spheres that made up his body, severely restricting the amount of sunlight he could receive as nourishment.\n\nThey nodded to one another.\n\nShavrim spoke quietly to Churls. She shook her head and he laughed, clapped her on the back, and put a hand on her shoulder to steer her over to the fire. He met Vedas's stare with no trace of animosity: in fact, he smiled openly as he sat, as though they had shared a joke.\n\nVedas felt no anger. This _did_ anger him.\n\nChurls spared no glance at him as she crouched to warm her hands. He stared at her bare head, his desire undeniable and frustrating.\n\nLaures, observant, looked from her to Vedas, and gave him a small, sad smile.\n\nShavrim cleared his throat.\n\n\"Weapons, Vedas. We should talk about weapons. When you lived in the abbey of the Thirteenth Order, I assume you trained with many different kinds?\"\n\nThe question took him by surprise. It should not have. They had left the city for a reason. A mad reason, of course, but Shavrim had at least been forthcoming about just _how mad_. They were to retrieve weapons Adrash had left on the domed island of Osa\u2014weapons the white god had hidden for fear their existence would threaten his own.\n\n\"Ah,\" Vedas said. \"Weapons. I'd forgotten for a moment.\" He stopped himself, just in time, from allowing sarcasm to creep into his voice. He had agreed to their course of action. No one had put a knife to his throat.\n\nHe opened his hands, as if to accept a gift. \"Yes, I am familiar with most weapons.\"\n\n\"Familiar? How familiar?\"\n\n\"Familiar enough,\" Vedas repeated.\n\nShavrim laughed. \"Modesty doesn't suit you. Would you show me?\"\n\nVedas stood, swaying slightly. His suit hardened subtly along the back of his legs, assisting him without his consciously willing it so.\n\n\"I don't think...\" Churls began.\n\nHe looked down at her, daring her to finish the thought.\n\nShe opened her mouth, and then promptly shut it.\n\nThis too made him angry.\n\n\u2021\n\nShavrim selected a pair of short swords for the two of them, both similar to Churls's vazhe yet certainly sharper. Before giving his even an exploratory swing, Vedas weighed it in both hands, examining the scrollwork on the pommel, identifying a northern Tomen hand. He possessed extensive knowledge of blades, though they had never been his favorite sort of tool. He preferred striking surfaces, concussive edges.\n\nHe walked a few paces from the fire and turned. Shavrim lifted his shirt over his head, threw it to the dirt, and followed. The sword appeared comically small in his massive fist.\n\nNot for the first time, Vedas appraised the man as an opponent.\n\n_Thickly built_ , he mused, _would be an understatement_.\n\nHad Vedas been at peak condition, Shavrim would still have out-massed him by a factor of two. They stood at roughly the same height, both rather taller than average, but only one needed to turn sideways to make it through doorways. Typically, this would not have caused Vedas more than a few moments of calculation. He had faced much larger combatants, both suited and unsuited, and knew best how to use their size against them.\n\nBut Shavrim did not move like a man weighed down by muscle. Though he hid it rather well by moving slowly, Vedas recognized the grace in his movements for what it was: a deeply ingrained sense of _place_ within the world\u2014a proprioception far beyond what training could produce. It was as if he were a fixture, a center upon which everyone around him spun. With a slight twitch of muscle, he would send an opponent flying. Vedas excelled in fighting because he possessed such a center. He recognized this in Shavrim, and felt sure his was recognized in turn.\n\nAs Vedas pulled the hood of his suit over his head, his gaze lingered on the two small horns on Shavrim's broad forehead. They sprouted seamlessly from his flesh several inches directly above his eyes, darkening slightly as they neared a point.\n\nNo casual observer would fail to notice the similarity between the hood of the elder-cloth suit Vedas wore and the head of Shavrim Coranid.\n\nLike all things about the man they had once called The Tamer, this made Vedas suspicious. It seemed too great a coincidence. Beyond this, it caused a small, superstitious part of Vedas to wonder if the man were possessed of some arcane fighting ability. He feared it, and he feared very little when it came to violence.\n\nHe had known only one other man who roused the same emotion. Abse, the abbey master of The Thirteenth Order of Black suits\u2014the man who had identified in Vedas the potential to become a great fighter...\n\nAbse would not flinch away from a man because of a coincidence, a vague feeling of unease.\n\nVedas took a ready stance, arms loose, legs set wide, the tip of his blade wavering slightly, purposefully, the head of a snake. The elder-cloth flowed to cover his face. It constricted around him, wonderfully alive and responsive, hardening to cup his genitals, becoming shields over his kidneys and vulnerable clusters of nerves. All traces of fatigue fled his system. He stood, sheathed completely. By comparison to his opponent, he was only a thin black shade.\n\nFrom the corner of his eye, he saw Churls and Laures stand.\n\nShavrim moved, just as quickly as Vedas suspected he would. Sword low, rigid. Vedas waited until the last moment, anticipating the other's move correctly: as Shavrim's blade came up toward his wrist, Vedas flicked it aside and turned, stepping laterally, allowing the larger man to step past him. Having confirmed his opponent's speed, working on instinct, he immediately ducked. Shavrim's blade severed air as it passed inches above Vedas's head, creating a sound like tearing paper.\n\nVedas cut diagonally, aiming for the other's midsection.\n\n... and stopped at the merest contact.\n\nShavrim froze. Vedas pressed his blade to the flesh just below the man's ribs. His right arm was a rod of steel, welded to the weapon in his hand.\n\n\"Familiar enough,\" he said.\n\nAfter several heartbeats of silence, Berun burst out laughing, a huge joyous bell of a sound.\n\nThe tension fled from Vedas. His arm fell, and he started shaking. To his surprise, he did not have to force a smile at Shavrim, who clapped him on the back hard enough to rattle his teeth. A spell had been broken, he sensed\u2014not a great thing, no, but it was a relief to feel an easing of his animosity. He and Shavrim returned to the others, where he expected to be received with the same lightheartedness.\n\nChurls stared into the fire, unwilling to meet his gaze.\n\nLaures simply looked from one to another, and offered him another sad smile.\n\n\"What?\" he asked. He waited until Churls peered up. When she did, he could read nothing in her expression. \"What?\" he asked again, raising his voice. He looked around at his companions. The mood had turned, clearly, in the space of seconds.\n\n\"Is there something I don't know?\"\n\n\"No,\" Churls said. \"They're responding to me. My mother always said no one could be happy when I'm in a bad mood.\"\n\nShe stood. \"Now would be a good time to talk.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nThey stood just out of earshot of the others, awkwardly distant from each other. For Vedas, who had made a habit of not touching others beyond training and fighting, the realization of their physical separation came as a shock. To not touch Churls, even simply to take her hand, took a physical effort\u2014an effort he had been making for some time, in truth before their failed attempt to capture Fesuy and hold him accountable for the murder of a stranger.\n\nDuring his captivity, Vedas had never dreamt. Fesuy's mage kept him deep, deep below the level of recall. A blackness, a void, was all that remained. Even when they woke him, to allow him to eat and relieve himself, his mind was a smoked lens. And yet, in those blurred moments, he thought of her, regretting his inability to connect, chastising himself for being intimidated by urges that (for all other men, he imagined) came naturally. He had anticipated his own death, knowing he had not lived a single moment of truly forgetting himself, of _letting go_.\n\nHe took a step forward. The muscles in his shoulder jumped as he began to reach for her.\n\n\"Vedas,\" she said. \"I'm worried. I'm worried, and I'm angry.\" She held up a hand to stop him from speaking. \"We'll start with the worry.\"\n\nHe nodded, feeling like a child.\n\n\"What you just did with Shavrim...\" She jerked her chin in the direction of the fire. \"I've trained with you for months now, and you've never shown me anything like that. Either you've been lying to me about your skill, which I think is unlikely, or there's something happening here we need to acknowledge and try to understand.\"\n\nHe opened his mouth to deny it, and thought otherwise. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"You're not?\" she said, squinting at him as though trying to determine if he were serious. Her features softened. \"Vedas, I _know_ you. Even at your peak level, you couldn't have deflected that first strike, dodged the second, or much less finished with your own. The first technique is simply too precise a technique for you, and the rest, well...\" She shook her head. \"He moved faster than I've ever seen you move, which means you moved faster than you should be able to move. In your condition, this is obviously\u2014\"\n\n\"Understood,\" he said, fighting the nonsensical urge to defend himself. He tipped his head back to look at the chaotic sky, fixing his gaze on the closest madly-spinning sphere. \"You do realize, of course, this is one among many strange occurrences, Churls? I gave a speech, and on that very night the world proceeded to fly apart. The world blames me, and then Shavrim tells me it's not my fault\u2014and furthermore, that something can be done about it. By _us_. And now look where we are.\"\n\nHe leveled his gaze at her. \"Oh, and then the other interesting bit. I've recently learned something new about you, haven't I? A daughter\u2014and not any ordinary daughter. In light of all this, it hardly seems the time to start questioning something as benign as my sword-arm suddenly becoming quicker.\"\n\nShe closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Vedas stared at her freckled face, thinner than he had ever seen it. Not beautiful, no: she would not be described as beautiful by most. She had told him that, as a child, she had often been mistaken for a boy.\n\nHe took her hand. \"I'm sorry,\" he said.\n\nWithout opening her eyes, she smiled, lips parted slightly to reveal the gap in her two front teeth. \"It wasn't right of me, but I didn't know how, Vedas. I was never... good... at being a mother. I don't know how to talk about Fyra, or _to_ Fyra, much less deal with the questions I have about her existence. She wants to help us, she and other dead who feel as she does. And now...\" She opened her eyes. \"As you said, _look where we are_. What are we doing?\"\n\nHe squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back, lightly at first, and then harder, until they were both gripping with fierce intensity. He eased up, and eventually she followed.\n\n\"Will you sleep next to me tonight?\" she said. \"Or do you want to be alone for whatever's coming our way? I don't want to be alone.\"\n\n\"I will. I don't want to be alone, either.\"\n\nShe kissed him, lightly. She smelled strongly of the road, of dust and sweat. Like him. He dropped his head so that it rested against her sandpaper scalp.\n\n\"And the risk? The reason you've been keeping me at arm's length, Vedas?\" She shook her head slightly, scratching against his forehead. \"Don't deny it. I know there's more to your avoidance than just being upset at me for keeping secrets. You think I'll convince you what we're doing is right. You don't see that I have every bit as much doubt as you.\"\n\n\"Then why? Why are we here? I want an answer for this.\"\n\nShe slid her hands under his arms and embraced him. He returned it, no longer reluctant.\n\nHe felt, rather than heard, her chuckle.\n\n\"Haven't you learned yet?\" she said. \"Living life with the expectation that you'll always have an answer when you want it\u2014that is the surest recipe for unhappiness. Answers come only in time. And right now, with the world on the verge of death, time is the one thing we don't have.\"\n\n\"So, it really is just that, following a madman or nothing?\"\n\n\"I think so, Vedas. We've reached the end of the road. That, and that alone, is why we're here.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nHe went to bed with her beside him and did not dream. He slept as if dead, like he had under the mage's spell. He woke and, though not whole, felt a great deal better.\n\nThe same could not be said of her, he saw immediately. Her eyes were red-rimmed and watery, and she flinched at his first touch. They worked in silence with the others, taking down the camp.\n\n\"Dreams kept you awake?' he finally said, as casually as he could.\n\nHer fingers worked at a knot in the tent lines, and then stilled. She did not answer, pretending, perhaps, that she had not heard. Slight thought the movement was, he caught the small, quick turn of her head in Laures' direction.\n\n\u2021\n\nThree thousand years previously, the Summer Wars had cut a vicious swath through eastern Knos Min, resulting in the destruction of seven cities. Marept, the most northerly and least populous, was burnt nearly to cinders by the invading Tomen\u2014a bedraggled contingent of several hundred men and women, all of whom had smelled defeat on the wind and chose to imbibe the fire spells their leaders created for just such an occasion, creating a miniature organic sun in the city center.\n\nAlone of the seven cities, Marept had never been rebuilt. The wind would not even deign to bury it, and so its bones were left to bleach. Of course, legend told that it had begun to die well before the Summer Wars, that the River Sullen had spurned the city for dumping tannery toxins in its once-clean waters. Certainly, some event had caused the waterway to change course, for it ran now nearly two miles west of the city it had once run through.\n\nThe people of northern Knosi felt deeply about their rivers, having so few of them. They attributed personalities to each, talking as though about distant relatives. A river like Sullen, though rarely navigated, was known to every schoolchild. Even Vedas, who had spent the vast majority of his life away from the country of his birth, who had avoided his people whenever he could\u2014even he remembered his mother's tale of Sullen's anger toward the people of Marept.\n\nStaring at the river's surface now, he felt his mother had spoken truer than she could have known. Surely, she had never stood where he stood, thirty miles south of the only bridge to even bother crossing the river, nearly a stone's throw from a once-great city the world had been content to let slowly crumble into the desert.\n\n\"Sullen,\" Churls said at his left. \"That's a good name for it. I hardly even want to fill our bags with it.\"\n\nHe grunted, tipping his head back to stare into the chalky, overcast sky. He reached and let his fingers graze hers. She took his hand, and all at once he wanted to be far away, ignorant of the world. In a place where no one dreamt of dead gods.\n\nNo, he did not want to ask her what had kept her awake.\n\nLaures walked to the water's edge and spit. \"My mother said any river east of Danoor was haunted.\"\n\n\"That would make nearly every river on the continent haunted,\" Churls said.\n\nLaures turned to her with a smile. \"My mother was a fool.\"\n\nBerun shrugged with a shrill sound and waded into the river, trawling two huge water bags in his left fist, holding their comestible supplies high in the other. Most of his body disappeared, invisible below the surface, until only the top of his head showed at the halfway mark. Here he stopped, lifted the hand bearing the water bags and crooked a finger, urging them forward.\n\nShavrim followed first, chuckling. Vedas and Churls entered the piss-warm, sluggish current together.\n\nJust before his feet left the sandy bottom and he began his first stroke, Vedas looked back to see Laures still standing on the bank, head turned as though she were listening for something. She bit her lip\u2014an expression of anxiety on her face so out of character that he stopped for a moment to stare.\n\nHe nearly called to her.\n\nAnd then a dark line bisected her forehead, accompanied by the sound of a honeydew being rapped sharply with a knuckle. A smattering of dark spots bloomed in a circle at the center of her face.\n\nVedas tipped his head to the side for perspective, and felt his testicles rise.\n\nAn arrow bolt protruded between her eyes.\n\nLaures took one unsteady step toward the river and collapsed into it.\n\nA cloud of dust rose in the distance beyond where she had stood.\n\n\u2021\n\nShoulder to shoulder, they raced toward the dead city. The earth shuddered under their feet, out of time with their steps: Berun kept close at their heels, arms wide as he ran, offering as much cover as his massive body could provide. Now and then, an arrow clattered against his brass spheres or hit the ground to either side, yet the bowmen were clearly only harrying their quarry, conserving their missiles until a clearer shot presented itself.\n\nVedas sprinted ahead of the others and reached the first fallen column of Marept, taking a defensive position and surveying their pursuers. An arrow shattered on the stone before him, but he paid it no mind. It would hurt to be struck, undoubtedly, and might even break bone, but his suit had tightened around him. It would minimize any impact while preventing the point from entering his flesh.\n\nHe counted. _Twelve... No... Fourteen_.\n\nAll mounted on horseback. Stiff red-haired, clearly Tomen.\n\nSix of the men held staffs that glowed with greenish magefire at their tips. Vedas had been surrounded by such mages on one or two occasions when Fesuy woke him enough to fully comprehend his surroundings. They were immensely dangerous\u2014he had sensed this before, and knew it in his gut now. Even under the watch of Shavrim's wyrm, they had found a way out of the city.\n\n\"Fesuy's men,\" Vedas said when Churls and Shavrim were safely beside him, blocked once again by Berun, who stood, facing the approaching men, undoubtedly aware of the threat they posed even to one such as he.\n\n\"How do you know?\" Churls said, squinting around the constructed man. \"And besides, how could they have left Dan\u2014\"\n\n\"He's right,\" Shavrim interrupted. \"And how it was done hardly matters. Sapes can only do so much to suppress magic, and her eyes can be blinded by someone with enough skill and alchemicals.\" Frowning, he looked from side to side. \"We can do nothing from this position except die. We should get deeper into the city.\"\n\nThey moved rapidly, Berun clearing a path before them, lifting and heaving huge blocks of masonry out of the fractured roadway and throwing them behind his companions to block their pursuers. Though Vedas had seen Berun perform extraordinary acts of strength before, the display of force shocked him. Several days of receiving direct sunlight had clearly invigorated the constructed man, but the wage for doing so would be monstrous.\n\nOnce they reached a defensible position, Vedas predicted, there would only be three to stand against the coming storm.\n\nNo conversation would be heard over the sound of crashing masonry and Berun's thunderous steps, yet a quick glance confirmed to Vedas that both of his companions had come to similar conclusions. He met Churls's grim expression, and wondered how much of his own concern could be read under the mask of his suit.\n\n\"There!\" he only just heard Shavrim shout.\n\nA stone building lay directly ahead, alone amid the rubble. Standing, more or less, open to the sky but with all four walls intact. Vedas scanned it and thanked fate that Shavrim was no fool. It would be fairly defensible. Having stood for ages, it likely would not collapse upon them.\n\nBerun lifted a massive fallen pillar that blocked the entrance, and roared as it slipped from his hands to fracture at his feet. He backed up and then took two steps toward the wide doorway, dropping his shoulders and ramming a broken section of the pillar, skidding with it into the interior of the building. His foot hit the left side of the doorframe, causing fragment of stone to rain down.\n\nVedas winced, but the walls failed to even shudder with the impact.\n\nBerun remained inert as Shavrim leapt over him. Vedas pushed Churls forward, and then offered cover as best he could as she knelt to check on the constructed man.\n\n\"\u2014am... fine,\" Berun said, his voice a faint brass rumble. \"Defend... selves.\"\n\nChurls nodded, tight-lipped, and moved into the shadowed security of the walls.\n\nOutside, it was utterly silent. Undoubtedly, Fesuy's men had ditched their mounts to navigate the rubble Berun had left in their path, and were now advancing on silent feet toward their holed-in targets. They would be unafraid, utterly sure of themselves. They had little reason not to be. Perhaps, this would play to Vedas and his companion's benefit.\n\nVedas immediately quashed this brief optimism. Any advantage would be fleeting, ultimately meaningless. He smiled cheerlessly at Churls.\n\nShe read the expression, even under the elder-cloth, and rolled her eyes. \"The fun never ends, does it? It won't be long now.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"No, it won't.\"\n\nTurning full circle, he examined the large, open space of the ancient building, knowing without a doubt that they stood within one of the more important buildings of Marept. A temple, perhaps, or a civic structure. The walls extended nearly thirty feet overhead: they were thick, ably hewn without mortar, simple stones cut and fit precisely into place. It was no surprise that it still stood. For a moment, he wondered about the people who had labored to build it, and felt keenly the injustice of it all.\n\nTo have built such a place, so cunningly, and have it abandoned to this appallingly slow decay. It must aggravate the dead, he reasoned.\n\n\"Better it were destroyed,\" he muttered.\n\n\"What?\" Churls said.\n\nHe rubbed at his eyes. \"Nothing.\" He peered over his shoulder at Shavrim, who stood stock-still at the door, surveying the scene outside. He lowered his voice to a whisper. \"This will go very badly, likely very quickly. What of Fyra? She could help us.\"\n\nChurls crossed her arms, features carefully composed. \"She'd be here, Vedas, if she could. I don't want her badly hurt\u2014if she _can_ be badly hurt, that is\u2014but I'm no idiot. I realize the straits we're in. I've been calling to her as best I can since we left the river.\"\n\n\"What could be keeping her away? Has something taxed her unduly?\"\n\n\"Does it matter? She's not here.\"\n\nThe muscles of his jaw jumped. He considered challenging her, demanding an answer to the question she had clearly avoided. Instead, he turned away to join Shavrim across the body-length span of the doorway. Rubble crunched softly under Churls's feet as she came up behind Vedas and crouched. She placed her hand on his back, and it surprised him, how welcome she felt touching him, and what effect it had. His annoyance was not so much forgotten as immediately put into context.\n\nShe had secrets, and they hardly mattered now.\n\nOutside, all was still. And then a crow cawed just to the left of the entranceway.\n\nVedas caught Shavrim's wry glance, and raised an eyebrow in return. It had been an extremely clumsy signal from the Tomen's point man.\n\nSix lights briefly flared, several hundred feet directly before them. The two men turned away from each other, ducking inside the shelter of the doorframe.\n\nVedas wrapped his arms around Churls just before a beam of sizzling radiance shot through the entrance, punching a hole through the building's rear wall. Even with his eyes tightly closed, the magefire's brilliance shone through bone to light up the interior of his skull. He felt the heat of it even through his suit, bathing his back in flames. His pain increased, doubling and then tripling. Rather than fighting it, he focused upon it until it suffused him, smoldering everywhere within him without ever igniting.\n\nChurls, however, had not even the protection of a suit. She screamed, and it was the sound of an animal being torn limb from limb. As though in response to her agony, the elder-cloth tightened and jerked spasmodically upon Vedas's frame, threatening to tear his arms free from her, yet he only tightened his hold, shielding her as best he could.\n\nShe continued screaming, one long, raw, sustained note of torture. It went on and on, until it was a finely focused lance of pain in the center of his being.\n\n\u2021\n\nOnce again, something within him stirred. It more than stirred. It opened its mouth within him and roared to match her pain.\n\nThe roar became a word. A _name_. Its utterance was a declaration of outrage and conquest. Vedas was overwhelmed in an instant, shoved to the side of his own consciousness, a mere watcher. A tamed beast, ridden.\n\n\u2021\n\nHe stood up and walked into the magefire coursing through the door.\n\nHe walked into brilliance, glancing down only briefly at the prone silver figure of his lover.\n\nHis _lover_ and _sister_... but these two words were insufficient.\n\nHe smiled. Words used to describe what they were had only ever been the tools of men. Like men, words soon faded into nothing.\n\nBut a name? _Her_ name?\n\n_Ustert_.\n\nThis name would not fade.\n\nThis name meant more than all the souls of mankind combined.\n\n\u2021\n\nEvurt walked out of the temple and extended his right arm. The fallen column of flame his enemies had summoned flowed around his taut bronze form, quickly thinning behind him into a river, a stream, before withering altogether. His palm now pressed against a solid wall of shifting light, he began walking forward, pushing the magefire back toward its source\u2014back toward the men who had the gall to attack him and Ustert.\n\nA man came at him from the left, leaping over a low wall. Evurt turned his head only slightly, taking in the form of his attacker calculatingly: tall, ruddy, robed, a stiff crown of hair wound around his scalp. A curved sword held in both hands, close to his ribs.\n\nEvurt waited until the man was nearly upon him, anticipating exactly how the cut would arc up from the hip, before casually slapping the blade, breaking the steel in two and shattering every bone in the man's hands.\n\nEvurt heard this last fact, in perfect detail, as the snapping of twigs under one's foot.\n\nHe reached out toward the man and snapped his neck.\n\nTwo more men came in swift succession, from the right and the left. Instead of encountering either physically, Evurt took two swift steps backward at the last possible moment, spreading his palms as though parting a double swinging door, causing the tunnel of magefire to bulge, engulfing both off-balance attackers. They opened their mouths in silent screams, their skin crackling and blackening instantly. In seconds, they were ash under his feet as he continued forward.\n\nAbruptly, the magefire died.\n\nEvurt did not stumble or blink in surprise. The expression on his angular, hairless face remained neutral until six men rose from kneeling positions behind their upraised staffs, five archers with drawn bows at either side. At this point, he smiled across the hundred-foot span separating him from them, revealing small, sharp, even teeth.\n\n\"Hello, corpses,\" he said in a long-extinct language.\n\nThree arrows shattered into splinters upon his chest without rocking him back an inch. The fourth and fifth he caught and threw back faster than human eyes could register, with such force that they nearly disintegrated on their flight back to their targets. Regardless, both mages were killed instantly from the force, thrown off their feet to land some distance behind their startled companions.\n\nHe walked toward them slowly, smile unwavering. He opened his arms and let their arrows die upon him, their spells sizzle and fade into nothingness over his sculpted body. He felt no more than a slight tickle, occasionally, only at the fringes of an attack displaying true talent.\n\nBut what was the talent of a man? Nothing, compared to him.\n\nAs he neared them, he switched between languages, all dead, repeating the same phrase:\n\n\"These are the wages of arrogance,\" he said as he turned back an arrow\u2014as he redirected the flow of two spells and with them bore holes through the chests of the ones who had sent them\u2014as he reversed the charge of another and turned its caster to ice...\n\nAs he, with a twitch of his fingers, fused the feet of the remaining five men to the ground.\n\nThey tried to pull free, but quickly realize their struggles were useless. The bowmen dropped their bows and reached for their swords. The remaining mage stopped his efforts entirely and raised his chin in defiance. Evurt crossed the remaining distance to them, swatted two of the warriors' blades away, and took the third. Decapitating all three with such skill that each toppled gracefully sideways, he caused the mage to be drenched in blood.\n\nHe reached out and slowly, inexorably, pried the staff from the mage's hands. He broke the weapon over his knee, causing a brief flare of sparks to erupt from its lit end.\n\nThe mage spit upon Evurt's chest.\n\nEvurt recognized the curse the man spoke next, and knew something of his parentage.\n\n\"This is the wage of arrogance,\" Evurt said in archaically-accented Tomen.\n\nHe thrust the jagged ends of the mage's own staff into the meat below the man's clavicles, carrying him to the ground to the sound of both ankles snapping, impaling his shuddering body upon the sun-baked dirt. The mage screamed until his voice ran out, and then screamed some more.\n\nEvurt cocked his head almost curiously, and then tore the man's lower jaw off, silencing the cries to a bubbling exhalation.\n\n\u2021\n\nBehind him, a voice called his name. It was not his sister's. Nonetheless, he recognized it, let it resound within him.\n\nHe turned, slowly, unafraid but not without a measure of caution.\n\nShavrim stood in the temple's open doorway, hands open at his hips.\n\nEvurt's brow creased in confusion. The temple... he knew it from the frieze above its door, had been received by its priests on several occasions\u2014Ustert, standing at his side in the courtyard, impatient as he was with their lengthy prostrations and rituals...\n\n_Better it were destroyed_ , he had whispered. _Then we'd never have to be this bored again_...\n\nThe smell of orange blossoms...\n\n_Agolet_ was its name. _Agolet, Twin Temple of Marept_.\n\nBut it was not at all as he remembered. He looked from side to side, his consternation growing.\n\nThis was a graveyard, forgotten, its tombstones toppled.\n\nMarept\u2014what had become of the city?\n\n\"Evurt,\" Shavrim repeated. \"Brother, it's been too long.\"\n\n\"Don't use that word,\" Evurt said, but quietly. Shavrim would still hear it, he felt sure. It would hurt him, possibly. He had always liked the idea of family. He was often more like a child than man, as a result always on the verge of offense. Evurt had no small affection for the horned fool, and certainly respected his power, but he could rarely resist taking advantage of his brother's lamentable sensitivity.\n\nWhen had they last spoken? What of the others? What of... what of Adrash?\n\nEvurt shook his head, grimacing, suddenly frightened of his own dimwittedness. He had never liked asking for clarification, always preferring the answers he found for himself.\n\n\"What is this?\" he said through clenched teeth.\n\nShavrim began walking toward him, steps measured, open hands lifted to either side, presenting no threat.\n\n\"You called to me, Evurt. Look at yourself.\"\n\n\"Called?\" Evurt echoed. \"When?\" He looked down at his torso, running his hands over the muscular ridges of his belly, noting their odd softness and texture. His hands\u2014he lifted them, turning them over, wondering at their appearance. They were... thicker? Yes. Thicker. He stared, and they seemed to shift in color, becoming a darker bronze, nearly black, losing their metallic sheen.\n\nFor a moment, he even saw the suggestion of veins on their backs, an imperfection, a marring upon his flawless skin. He turned his head to stare at his shoulders, which, again, seemed broader than he remembered. He lifted a leg, horrified to find this outsized, as well, a pillar of animal gristle.\n\nAll at once, his vision shifted. The world darkened, losing focus and vibrancy. He blinked, trying to clear away the film before his eyes, but the effect remained. The strength fled from his limbs and he slumped, as though lead had flooded his veins. He took two faltering steps backward, uncomfortably aware of wanting to run, to flee.\n\nHis foot caught on a rock, and he stumbled.\n\nHe did not fall, however. He was caught. Shavrim stood before him, gripping him tightly below the underarms, holding him easily at arms length.\n\n\"Brother,\" Shavrim said. He pulled Evurt into a crushing embrace. \"You are not you. You cannot sustain this kind of activity. Rest, and then we'll see each other again.\"\n\nTo his horror, Evurt discovered that he was nodding\u2014that he had lifted his arms to embrace Shavrim.\n\nClearly, he was not himself.\n\nThe world shuddered around him, in time with the jagged hammering of his heart. Blackness encroached at the edges of his existence.\n\nHe closed his eyes, allowing darkness to overtake him.\nCHAPTER FIVE\n\nTHE 20TH TO 25TH OF THE MONTH OF SECTARIANS MAREPT, THE REPUBLIC OF KNOS MIN, TO UAL\n\nSomeone held his right hand in a firm grip. It took him several minutes of concentrating on his fingers and palm (disturbingly, they were naked) to realize this fact, yet upon confirming it he did not move or alter his position in the slightest for fear of revealing that he had woken. Instinctually, he remained motionless, and the rationale for this too took him several minutes to work out.\n\nmised he would not He knew no one with so small a hand.\n\n\"I know you're awake,\" the girl said. He knew the voice instantly.\n\n\"I am,\" he said, suddenly, intensely present within his body, as if her voice had made him aware of every sensation. His palm started sweating. Wanting to pull his hand away from hers, he nonetheless resisted, maintaining his meditative stillness\u2014for reasons that, even upon examination, became no clearer. In the space of a few breaths, the urge itself faded.\n\n\"Your mother,\" he said. \"She's...?\"\n\nShe squeezed his hand even tighter, flooding him with warth. \"She's fine. Angry and confused, but fine. You, though, you're still not right inside. I'm working on it.\"\n\n_Working on it_. \"How long have I been asleep?\"\n\n\"Three days. You'll need two more before you can travel. Are you in any pain?\"\n\nAgain, he felt an urge\u2014to shake his head\u2014and did not act on it. He had not opened his eyes. Oddly, he felt no desire to. He wanted to know if they were still in Marept, if Shavrim and Berun had been injured. He wanted to know what he had done, but could summon neither the memories nor the curiosity.\n\nHe felt _good. Protected_. As though it were all in someone else's hands.\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"No pain, Fyra. Whatever it is you're doing, keep doing it.\" His brow furrowed. \"How are you holding my hand? How can I feel it?\"\n\nShe laughed, and he smiled, feeling lightheaded, carefree.\n\n\"Oh, I'm doing so much more than making you feel like I'm holding your hand, Vedas. What I'm doing right now is mostly keeping you from making stupid decisions, like getting up before you're ready. Influencing you is hard because you're so stubborn about being upset all the time. I probably should have just kept you asleep, but there's something I need to tell you. _Before_ everyone else knows you're awake. I want you to take this with you, back into sleep. When you wake up, it will be important. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Yes, he did. How could he forget this feeling?\n\n\"Good,\" she said. Her grip lessened, and it was like being doused in cold water. A great portion of his serenity immediately fled, allowing worries a voice. When he truly woke, what would he recall from before his injuries? Would he hate himself for not forcing Fyra to let him speak to the others?\n\nThe girl sighed loudly. She said his name in a tone mothers used toward their children. \"Stay focused on right here, right now. I told you, my mother's safe. So are Berun and Shavrim. The world hasn't ended. But you _do need to pay attention_. Promise me you won't forget what I say next. Tell me you can keep a promise.\"\n\nHe frowned, worrying at her intensity. \"I won't. I can. I promise.\"\n\nHe did not hear her moving. Perhaps she made no sound. He sensed, however, that she had leaned toward him, placing her mouth close to his ear.\n\n\"Someone's trying to keep me away,\" she whispered, \"and that someone is _inside you_. I don't know what he is or what he wants. He's too powerful. I'm scared of him.\" She made a sound, a soft, distressed cry. \"It gets worse. You're not alone in this: there's also someone\u2014a soul, a personality\u2014inside my mother. I knew it the other day, after we first talked. I saw her there, seeing out from behind my mother's eyes. Maybe the same has happened to Berun, too, but it's harder to tell with him.\"\n\nThe words resounded in his head. _Someone. Inside you. Inside my mother_.\n\nThe muscles of his belly twitched as he thought to sit up, to do anything but allow the situation Fyra described from continuing. His neck flexed twice, convulsively, lifting his head a few inches before it smacked back against the pillow. Each movement, accompanied by sharp flashes of pain referring throughout his body.\n\n\"Stop!\" Fyra hissed. She gripped his hand tighter once more, saturating him in bliss so rapidly that he giggled. \"Don't try to move. You can't do anything about this in your condition. Besides, he's not with you now. All of this will make more sense when you're recovered. For now, you just need to know about it, and know who's behind it.\"\n\nThrough the haze of contentment, his terror was an abstract thing.\n\nIncurious, he asked, \"Who?\"\n\n\"Shavrim,\" she answered.\n\nHe thought, unconcernedly, _Of course_.\n\nHis eyes shot open, through no effort of his own. Fyra's coldly radiant head was poised above his, her pale hair hanging down around both of their faces, linking them, enclosing them in their own private space. He stared at the off-white freckles patterning her nose and cheeks, struck by how like her mother she was.\n\nWhen she smiled, she revealed a gap between her two front teeth.\n\n\"I know you're a good man, Vedas Tezul,\" she said. \"Keep your promise. Remember\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not,\" he interrupted. \"I'm not... good.\" He chuckled, not caring what he said. It struck him, suddenly\u2014it was _wonderful_ to not care. He had always felt guilty unburdening himself of anything, as though he were tying stones around his listener's neck, so he had rarely done it. \"I've watched children die, Fyra. I've trained them, knowing they might die. I lived with this awareness, that it could happen, and still did it. I was punished for this long before it ever happened. Some people are cursed. When I was a child, like you, there was a man\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" she interrupted in turn, squeezing his hand again to fill him with her warmth. She shushed him. \"Quiet, Vedas. I've seen what happened to you. Don't make that face. I'm not a child, and no one is cursed. Now, you have to listen to me. You have to keep your promise: remember what I've said. Carry it with you into your dreams. And when you wake, healed and back to your normal, angry self, do something useful with it. Don't let me down.\"\n\nHe smiled, shuffling his awkward admissions of guilt to the side as easily as he had voiced them.\n\nHe promised he would not let her down.\n\n\u2021\n\nAn hour before sunset, Shavrim returned from hunting, three large desert hares dangling from his meaty fist. Vedas rose and began preparing the fire. Churls looked up from cleaning the first of the hares, exchanged a quick glance with Shavrim, but said nothing.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Vedas said. \"Stop worrying over me.\"\n\nA private smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He had said such words to her on far too many occasions. In truth, he felt more than fine\u2014incredible, as though he had woken from the soundest sleep of his life. Constraining the energy in his limbs, hiding the effects of what Fyra had done from Shavrim, was far more a danger than overexerting himself.\n\nOf course, it was not only Shavrim he kept the secret from. He doubted Churls knew what her daughter had done, though her quizzical glances revealed a good measure of suspicion.\n\nShe would know soon enough, of course.\n\nThinking on this, he came to a decision. All at once, there seemed no reason to wait.\n\nHe winked at Berun across the fire. The constructed man's features broke into a frown, followed quickly by a smile. His eyes flared briefly.\n\n\"Vedas,\" he said. \"You are in unusual spirits.\"\n\n\"I am, Berun,\" Vedas said, voice low, not bothering to broadcast his words. They would hear him just fine. \"I'm refreshed and full of new thoughts. There are things I need to consider. Did you know, for instance, that Usterti believe in more than their goddess?\"\n\n\"I did not,\" Berun said.\n\nShavrim raised his eyebrows, expression open. Vedas admired his acting.\n\nChurls did not so much as pause in her preparations. She angled her face, which still bore the tight redness of what appeared to be (but he knew was not) a sunburn, down toward her task. She, too, knew how to hide, though not as well.\n\nVedas nodded, and spit upon the firestarter in his hands. It flared to life as he reached forward to place it amid the kindling. He grinned. Unusual spirits, indeed. He felt incautious, even mischievous, as if Fyra had infected him with a portion of childhood.\n\nOr, he reasoned, he might be feeling the influence of the one Fyra had warned him about. This did not strike him as likely, though: the dreams he had experienced, both before and after he had spoken with the girl, did not lead him to see Evurt as the frivolous sort.\n\nRegardless, his smile vanished. Even thinking of the name was enough to constrict his throat.\n\n_Nothing for it_ , he thought. He would make himself speak it. He would make it real.\n\n\"Oh, it's true,\" he said. \"In the abbey, I studied the witches' sect. They're not fond of talking about anything other than the Goddess, I gather. I asked Laures about it before we left, and I thought she might attack me for having the gall. She did confirm what I'd been taught, however.\" He blew into the kindling, watching it catch, and then sat back. \"A few of their stories tell of Ustert's brother\u2014her twin\u2014a figure who died or merely passed into oblivion.\"\n\n\"Fuck!\" Churls yelled, dropping her knife to grip her left hand. \"Cut myself.\" She stood, glaring at Vedas. \"What in the hell are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Ustert,\" he said. He swallowed, took two quick breaths. \"Evurt.\"\n\nShe flinched.\n\nBerun's head swiveled from one companion to another, one shelf-like brow raised questioningly. \"These names,\" he rumbled, \"They mean nothing to me.\"\n\nShavrim chuckled. \"It's a miracle they survived unscathed, those names. There's something to them, I suppose, an indelible quality. Even the pronunciation\u2014it's been much the same throughout Knoori for, oh... well, it's been millennia.\" He spread his heavy arms. \"You want to hear what happened, Vedas? You want to know what it means?\"\n\nVedas nodded.\n\nShavrim returned the gesture, and then looked up at Churls. \"We'll wait while you clean and bandage the hand, though I doubt you'll need to. Ustert Youl would hardly let you die from such a minor scratch. Even in your body, in her doubtlessly confused state, she'd not suffer that kind of indignity.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nAs Shavrim talked, the memory roused itself from the back of Vedas's mind. He easily recalled the heat of the magefire, and wrapping himself around Churls in an attempt to protect her.\n\nThe... _assumption_ , he began to think of it\u2014this came to him in fragments, like a puzzle being assembled before his eyes, accompanied by sensations that pricked at the nerves embedded in his muscle, skin, and bone. He clenched his fists and released them, twitched his shoulders and fought the urge to stand and act out what he knew his body had done. Impossible things.\n\nThoughts and emotions flooded his mind, disturbing in their alien intensity. Arrogance beyond human reason. Anger, cold and fathomless. Confusion upon the discovery that he, Evurt, stood in another's skin. And attendant to the confusion, disgust. Vedas's body, even the way the world appeared dim through his feeble human eyes, had repulsed Evurt.\n\nThis, most of all, chilled Vedas to the marrow.\n\nHe knew, now, how a god looked at humankind. The disdain, he had expected. Even the humblest merchant, risen to enough influence, soon became a master of contempt. Power begat this perspective, Vedas knew, and men could not entirely resist thinking of their neighbors as less than human: at various points in the history of the world, peoples had been enslaved and even made extinct. The cousin of such violence existed in every man. He could know that hate more intimately if he allowed himself to blame others for his ills.\n\nIt was appallingly easy to create divisions, to build walls instead of bridges.\n\nThe scorn of Evurt served to render all of his thoughts on the subject irrelevant, as if all of history had been as meaningless as children arguing over the rules of a game.\n\nAs if failure were an inescapable taint, written into the very flesh and soul of mankind.\n\n\u2021\n\nVedas wanted nothing to do with gods. He never had, even when he believed all but one to be mere fictions, remnants of a long and deluded past.\n\nAnd now, sitting before him, yet a third god made real.\n\nThat is, if Shavrim were to be believed. Vedas wanted to disbelieve him, but could not.\n\n\"Why us?\" was his first question.\n\n\"I don't have that answer, Vedas,\" Shavrim said. \"It's not as if I can ask my brother now, is it? He has retreated, or you've pushed him to the back of your mind. But, at a guess? You're strong, and you were in the right place at the right time, openly opposing Adrash on the world's largest stage.\"\n\nHe dipped his head to Churls. \"You were equally strong, if not in many ways stronger, and you'd fallen in love with him. You must have been a tempting pair, a lodestone for Evurt and Ustert.\"\n\nVedas neither accepted nor rejected this, though he allowed himself a measure of relief. How might he have reacted, had Shavrim claimed a god had inhabited him since birth\u2014directing his every move, placing him strategically at this exact point and time?\n\n\"Why are they here at all?\" was his second question.\n\nShavrim gripped his crossed ankles and rocked back, angling his face toward the open sky framed by the four walls of the ancient temple. Vedas followed his gaze, letting the pause stretch for several minutes before impatience compelled him to break the silence.\n\nHe opened his mouth\u2014and promptly shut it.\n\nThe spheres of The Needle had been rearranged slightly. The two that had appeared closest to Jeroun were noticeably smaller. Both spun at a much-reduced rate. In addition, four of the smallest had been clustered together near the moon.\n\nSurely, he reasoned, an encouraging sign, yet he could not feel hope.\n\n\"Consider your past,\" Shavrim finally said. \"Three score years and some, correct? The Needle has appeared the same, throughout. It has been a fixed thing. But three scores and some is no time at all. Still, it feels like something, no? You feel older, seasoned. Consider how alien former versions of yourself are to the man you have become. How few choices he made that you would make. How much of a fool he was, Vedas. Hold that awareness in your mind. Truly feel it, the regret and anger at your own stupidity, your cowardice and impotence.\n\n\"Now, consider what you would do if you had even more time, perhaps millennia, to meditate on the actions or inactions of that fool. Would you not grow to hate yourself as no man has hated himself? Would you not wish to die, knowing you could never right your mistakes? Tell me that would not be the inevitable outcome of a life that long.\"\n\nVedas fixed him with a cold stare. \"You wish to die? Somehow, I think you're not trying hard enough.\"\n\nBerun looked from Vedas to Shavrim. \"Agreed. You tell us of your relationship to these\u2014\" he grunted \"\u2014gods. You tell us you are one of their number. Now you want death, perhaps the easiest thing for a man to achieve. No wonder you talk of fools.\"\n\nShavrim smiled, unwilling to take offense. \"Wishing to die and dying are two separate things. I continue breathing not for lack of trying to quit. On occasion, that is: I've come to embrace my immortality. But this is not my point.\"\n\n\"Get to it, then,\" Churls said. Without glancing up from her work\u2014which she had continued, despite her wound\u2014she gestured at Vedas with her skinning knife. \"He asked a question, Shavrim.\"\n\n\"Which I was attempting to answer. Forgive me. I've spent many lifetimes _not_ revealing what I am. I've had no practice at it, yet I'd prefer for you not to fly into a rage when I tell you this is all my doing. But that is not within my control, is it?\"\n\nWhen no one answered, Shavrim's smile dipped but did not disappear. He pointed to the moon, sighting along his thick forearm with a squint. \"For most of my life, I've had Adrash over my head and five siblings buried under me. Humanity is the bridge between those two worlds. Though your expressions, and those of your creations\u2014\" he nodded at Berun \"\u2014are not my own, I'm fairly fond of you. My family and I once fought on your behalf, when we first identified the madness in our creator. Twenty thousand years later, when I felt the presence of Evurt and Ustert again in the world, I decided I must persuade them to help me.\"\n\nVedas stood, restless with questions yet unable to decide upon the most pressing. He massaged his temples and cracked his neck, trying to ease the tension that suddenly seemed bent on crippling him. Since Churls had rescued him, he had swung from one reaction to the next, one extreme giving way to another with no time to adjust. The earth was unstable beneath his feet.\n\nFortunately, Berun had not been similarly affected.\n\nIn addition, the constructed man had learned the art of sarcasm: \"You _felt_ the presence of Evurt and Ustert? And this simply _happened_ to coincide with Adrash destroying The Needle?\"\n\n\"No. It wasn't a coincidence. I told you the name of the elderman responsible. Pol Tanz et Som incited this. There is no other explanation.\"\n\n\"And how did he do that?\" Churls said. \"You're telling us Adrash couldn't simply swat him away? Who is this elderman, that he should inspire such world-shattering rage?\" She stood, circled the fire and crouched, one bloody hand on Shavrim's shoulder, face only inches from his. She spoke through a tight jaw. Spittle flew from her mouth. \"Is he another god, then, or is he merely... _ridden_ , like me? Or Vedas? Will we wake up tomorrow and find Berun taken, too?\"\n\nShe slapped him, her right arm a silver blur.\n\nThe sound of the impact, the crack of timber.\n\nShavrim's head whipped to one side and he threw out an arm to steady himself.\n\n\u2021\n\nVedas tensed. It took him several heartbeats to realize just why he had done so, beyond the clear threat of Shavrim reacting to the blow.\n\nHe stared at Churls's bare arm, upraised and rigid, every muscle limned with tension.\n\nSun-red, freckled skin. The faded markings of tattoos. Nothing more.\n\nAnd yet, his eyes had not deceived him.\n\nShe had struck with the arm of the Goddess.\n\n\u2021\n\nShavrim chuckled.\n\nA handprint of hare blood was now emblazoned across his left cheek. His own blood welled at the left corner of his mouth. He licked his bruising lips and nodded.\n\n\"Well delivered,\" he said. \"When you are as I am, Churls, you learn to appreciate anger that cuts to the point. At the same time, you avoid what is necessary to speed the process up. Don't let my age fool you\u2014there are things that frighten me. I have abilities beyond merely remaining alive, but they are a threat if allowed too deeply. I've not lived so long without... sequestering my existence, without forming identities that were thereafter abandoned. Within me are all the lives I've lived, a smattering of which possessed unusual insight. A few of these former Shavrims are anxious to return.\"\n\nHe stood and retrieved one of his packs. He removed a bundle of thin steel chain and threw it to Churls.\n\n\"Wrists and ankles, as tight as you're able,\" he said, presenting his back to her and kneeling.\n\n\"A chain?\" Berun said. He got to his feet, his thousand ball joints sighing. \"I can hold you tighter than any chain.\"\n\n\"You cannot,\" Shavrim countered. \"This is no ordinary chain, and I'm no ordinary man. No disrespect intended, Berun, but the one I'm summoning would have no problem proving just how greatly your strength is outclassed.\"\n\nBerun crossed his immense arms. \"You are bleeding. From a slap.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" Shavrim said. \"But it wasn't Churls who slapped me, not entirely\u2014just as it won't be me before you in a few moments. It'll be a wilder, more brutal creature, kept in check only through the will of the man I am now, a small voice of reason attempting to quiet a storm.\"\n\nBerun grunted, and turned away.\n\nChurls stared at the chains in her hands. For a mad moment, Vedas imagined she would strangle Shavrim with them.\n\nShe began binding his wrists. \"Who is this former self, this wild creature?\"\n\n\"A seven-thousand-year-old relic,\" Shavrim replied. \"A fool and a mass murderer. On occasion, I've given in to self-pity, allowing my hatred for Adrash to cloud my mind. During one such period, I traveled to the southern Tomen coast. I persuaded the locals there to accept my presence by telling their fortunes and fighting in their border skirmishes. I've always been good at the latter, but the former? Somehow, possibly by way of the madness I'd allowed to creep into my soul, I tapped into a potential I'd never known I had. I listened, and for the first time truly heard the dead.\"\n\nChurls paused in her task. She could not avoid a quick glance in Vedas's direction.\n\n\"The dead?\" she said. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I mean those souls still lingering near the living, unable or unwilling to leave the material world behind. They have much to say. Some are able to read the future\u2014or predict it well enough to appear to read it. They have access to every moment of their lives. They observe us without our knowing. Because of the threat inherent in rousing my former self, I'd hoped to wait until proof presented itself concerning Pol Tanz et Som, who I believe to be dead. He was powerful, yes, and uniquely tempting for me: he inspired me, on many occasions, to bring my own former selves to the fore. Certainly, he was fated to madness because of what he'd done to himself, yet I don't believe he was inhabited by one of my siblings.\n\n\"As for Berun, I feel quite sure that he... I think I would have recognized...\"\n\nHe shook his head and lowered himself onto his side, allowing Churls to bind his ankles to his wrists.\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"Enough waiting. This is wiser. It's better to know for certain, now.\"\n\nVedas caught the man's expression. It could not be mistaken for anything but fear.\n\nShavrim met Vedas's stare and lifted his chin, gesturing to their packs. \"Hold a blade to my neck and remain ready. If I appear about to break my bonds, or if my state persists past the point where I've confirmed or denied our suspicions, slit my throat. I'll bleed, but I won't die, and it will weaken my body enough for me to reassert control of myself. In that case, leave me here and continue on. I'll meet you in Ual, eventually.\"\n\nWithout waiting to see if his order was followed, he closed his eyes and took four immense breaths, the last of which he held still within him long enough to make Vedas concerned.\n\nHe took a step toward Shavrim just as a great shudder ran through the horned man's trussed body. Shavrim groaned, varying in pitch as the air\u2014more air than lungs should hold, surely\u2014passed out of him, finally winding down to a grating wheeze. The skin of his face, neck, and upper chest darkened, exactly as though he were choking. With a mighty gasp, he breathed in again. In, fully, and out, fully, the process resumed. Each time the cycle completed, the shuddering became more violent.\n\nChurls backed away. Vedas put the point of his sword to Shavrim's throat, maintaining pressure upon it throughout the paroxysms. Berun continued to stand silent, arms crossed, glowering at the scene.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe shuddering stopped. Shavrim's left eye opened, revealing a madly vibrating pupil. Gradually, it stilled and focused on Vedas, who pressed the tip of his blade more firmly to the man's throat.\n\nA smile slowly pulled at the corners of Shavrim's mouth. The right eye slowly opened.\n\nThe huge, bunched muscles of his shoulders swelled as he tested his bonds.\n\nHe grunted, and his smile grew wider.\n\nWhen he spoke, his voice was an octave lower\u2014so low and accented that several seconds passed before Vedas realized the words were intelligible.\n\n\"\u2014that limp-pricked fool,\" he said. \"Friend to ghosts, fucker of men.\"\n\n\"Are you talking to me?\" Vedas said.\n\nShavrim regarded him silently. To a casual observer, he may have appeared still, yet Vedas noticed the subtle muscular contractions in his thighs, belly, and upper arms that gave him away. Shavrim was testing the chains, methodically, searching for a weakness, determining where best to apply his strength in order to escape.\n\n\"No,\" he finally answered. \"I'm not speaking to you. I'm speaking to the faggot I've turned out to be.\" He raised his head and inclined it quizzically, as though listening. He sniffed and sneered. \"Or perhaps I'm wrong. You've the stink of one who's been buggered, and also of the dead. Of course, you _are_ going to die. All humans smell of the dead. I may be getting confused.\"\n\n\"I have questions for you.\"\n\nA nearly sub-audible laugh. \"Of course you do. It's not as if I don't know why I'm here. The world is at its end, and all of you...\" He lifted his head and winked at Churls. He whistled at Berun. Vedas kept his blade steady. \"... believe you can do something about it. Pissing idiot idea. Adrash was more than a match for the six of us gods, and now you...\"\n\nAll at once, his body went rigid. Vedas readied himself, but the man did not attempt to break free. In fact, after only a moment Shavrim dropped his head onto the ground and let it roll back, causing Vedas's blade to etch a fine line of blood on the man's throat.\n\n\"Ah,\" Shavrim said. \"Ah-ha, ah-ha. Now I see. It took me a moment, but there it is. Hello, brother! Hello, sister! Can you hear me?\" He looked up at Vedas, one eyebrow raised. \"Are you in there, Evurt? Come out, come out!\"\n\nVedas allowed himself several heartbeats of reflection, shining a torch around the interior of his skull, searching for the interloper he knew to be hiding there, before answering. He increased the pressure on Shavrim's neck, forcing the man to rest his head upon the ground or have his throat slit.\n\n\"It's only me,\" Vedas said. \"And I have questions that need answering.\"\n\nShavrim's amused expression did not fade. \"Oh, ask, Vedas Tezul. Ask away.\"\n\n\"You know of the elderman Pol Tanz et Som?\"\n\nA slow nod. \"Yes. Another buggering, presumptuous little shit.\" Shavrim raised his chin to the night sky. \"Still, he did accomplish this, more than most of you mortals ever will.\"\n\n\"Is he alive?\"\n\nNo hesitation. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Where is he?\"\n\n\"Don't know. Don't care.\" He flexed at his bonds, no longer attempting to hide the fact.\n\n\"Is he like us?\" Vedas gestured to Churls. _\"Inhabited?\"_\n\nThe chain rustled as it shifted on Shavrim's wrist. \"Like you two, you mean...\" His eyes widened, and his voice lowered to a whisper. \"Oh, good. Oh, very good.\" He smiled, and his voice rose. \"Pol, I have no idea. He has talent, and not a tiny bit of madness. But the bloody big man made of balls, there, behind me?\"\n\nBerun uncrossed his arms.\n\n\"Yes! You!\" Shavrim called over his shoulder. \"The fool I've become didn't see it, right before his eyes, but I do. Hello, neither brother nor sister! Come out and play with us!\"\n\nThe constructed man took two steps toward Shavrim and halted, stock-still, as though both feet had become rooted to the ground. A whisper-soft sound of metal rubbing metal cut through the air: the closing and opening of his great fists.\n\n\"The name, then,\" he said. \"Speak it.\"\n\n\"Sradir Ung Kim,\" Shavrim said.\n\nBerun's head swiveled from Vedas to Churls. \"The names he spoke to you meant something. They stirred you. But there is nothing in this name, Sradir Ung Kim. I feel nothing. He is wrong.\"\n\n\"I'm not,\" Shavrim said. \"You're merely thick. Sradir is within you, and it will come out. Soon, if I am any judge. It was always an odd one, choosing its odd moments.\" He grinned at Vedas. \"You'll enjoy when it when it shows itself. Sradir was\u2014 _is_ , I suppose\u2014an unusual creature. It never seemed to get humans, the way the rest of us did. A wooden heart, that one.\"\n\nHe flexed at the chains once more, swelling his chest and heaving with every muscle. The chain groaned, and Vedas prepared to do what was necessary.\n\nFortunately, the links held. Shavrim simply grunted and rested his head upon the ground.\n\n\"Shavrim?\" Churls said. Her voice made it clear which iteration of the man she had spoken to. \"Shavrim? We have our answers, or as good as we're going to get. Come back now.\"\n\nShavrim laughed. \"Oh, he'll not be coming back. And you haven't all your answers. I have more to say about the dead. There's another that hovers around Berun, and he means the world no good. He'd see a blanket of ash covering everything. Why? Who knows?\" He shrugged, flexing once more at the creaking chains before subsiding with a contented smile. \"And then there's the little thing my weak heir hasn't quite worked out. I'd particularly like to talk about her, as she seems to have a legion at her command.\"\n\n\"The little one?\" Churls said.\n\n\"Yes. The one standing behind you.\"\n\nChurls turned, and Vedas looked up.\n\nBut Fyra had already disappeared. A second later, she reappeared at Shavrim's back. After a brief pause, she closed her eyes tightly and thrust her ghostly hands into his shoulder.\n\nShavrim gasped and the girl cried out. Screams ripped from both of their chests, creating a disharmony that grated awfully upon the ears.\n\n\u2021\n\nThey struggled: he, away from her, and she, away from him. Her arm seemed stuck inside the man's flesh, though such a thing was clearly impossible in her insubstantial state. The screaming continued, un-abated\u2014Fyra continuously, a siren screech unhindered by lungs, Shavrim pausing only for harsh gasps of air\u2014while both sought to undo what had occurred.\n\nVedas kept his blade pressed to the flesh of Shavrim's quivering throat, not in the least dismayed by the cut he created there. He had never slit a throat, but he knew the difference between a shallow wound and a killing wound. He knew it by feel.\n\n\"What's happening?\" he shouted to Churls. Berun closed around Shavrim and held him down, avoiding contact with where he and Fyra were fused.\n\n\"No idea!\" she answered, taking one step in his direction, only to take one step back. \"Fyra! What are you doing? How can I help you?\"\n\nThe girl brought her teeth together, altering the pitch of her agony without lowering the volume. Her voice resounded inside Vedas, settling in the pit of his gut, in his bones. His temples throbbed. It took a will to stand: he fought the temptation to simply let his knees fail beneath him.\n\nShavrim's voice grew hoarse. He coughed between breaths, flecking the ground with blood.\n\nChurls's indecision had come to an end. She ran forward and knelt at her daughter's back, thrusting her hands through the immaterial body, placing her palms flat upon Shavrim's shoulder, just where the girl's wrists entered. She leaned her head forward\u2014 _into_ Fyra's own, creating the illusion that they shared a skull. Churls shook as she pushed, clenching her jaw against the vicious rattling of her teeth. Her breathing came in quick, shallow bursts.\n\nShe closed her eyes, and the girl's opened. White smoke poured out, evaporating above Fyra's head. The girl's lips came together, shutting off her scream so suddenly that Vedas flinched. Still, a humming issued from within her: the sound of her pain continuing behind her sealed lips, building up within her small form. She rocked back and forth in time with Churls, and gradually, hairsbreadth by hairsbreadth, more and more of her wrists came free.\n\nShavrim's screaming intensified with each pull, raw like a wound ground in glass.\n\nBerun kept his broad hands on the man's upper arm and thigh, holding him down. Vedas thanked fate for it, too: without the constructed man's help, Shavrim's seizures would surely have prevented Churls from assisting Fyra. The girl would have been thrown around like a ragdoll.\n\nVedas kept the blade to Shavrim's neck while circling around his head, coming to Churls's side. He reached for her, intent on helping in any way he could. By pulling with her or merely laying a hand on her shoulder. If power could be transmitted through Churls to Fyra, then surely...\n\n\"No!\" mother and daughter yelled in unison, halting their movements. Fyra's radiance doubled, tripled. A metallic sheen fell over Churls, as though she were reflected in a silvered mirror.\n\nVedas reached forward again, only to be stopped as Churls's head snapped up. Her face had taken on a harsh angularity. Her eyes were two golden slivers of light.\n\n\"No, brother,\" she said. \"Let us do this work. Afterwards, you do yours.\"\n\nShe turned back to her task, the appearance of the goddess fading.\n\nFyra and Churls began moving once more, a moan escaping their lips, increasing in volume until it was an oddly-pitched chorus, as of a hundred voices howling\u2014\n\n\u2014and, for a moment, appearing at their backs, disappearing through the temple's back wall, rank upon increasing rank\u2014\n\n\u2014kneeling, hands upon each others' shoulders\u2014\n\n\u2014rocking back and forth, in time with Churls and Fyra, adding weight to their struggle\u2014\n\nThe dead, coming to aid one of their own.\n\nVedas blinked and they disappeared, leaving the afterimage tattooed upon his eyelids.\n\nBelow him, Shavrim cried out again and again, a series of hoarse, surely agonizing coughs. Fyra had managed to pull nearly half of her hand free.\n\n\"Hold steady, Vedas,\" Berun cautioned.\n\nVedas looked down to see the tip of his sword in the dirt. He pressed it home once more.\n\nChurls's movements became increasingly jerky. Now, her elbows were locked. Only her neck and shoulders moved back and forth.\n\nNonetheless, it was enough. Finally, it was enough.\n\nWith a gasp from both parties, they fell back\u2014Churls onto the ground, Fyra partway submerged in the ground at her side, half-in, half-out as though she were floating on her back on the surface of a salt lake.\n\nShavrim gave one last gasp and went slack, head lolling on the ground.\n\nVedas dropped his sword and knelt at Churls's side. Her pulse was strong but irregular. Her breathing came in jerky inhalations and shuddering exhalations, in through the nose and out through barely parted lips. Under her eyelids, her eyes swam in twitchy patterns. He watched her for the space of a dozen breaths and then willed his suit to unmask his face. Mind struck unfathomably blank, a sound in his skull like the hiss of calm waves, he bent to kiss her.\n\n\"Vedas.\" Berun's voice seemed to arrive from a great distance away, his methodical, accented speech tinny in Vedas's ears. \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"This,\" Vedas answered. He pressed his lips to hers, and the world dissolved.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe sun hung directly before him, though he did not shield his eyes. He stared at it directly for an indeterminate time, several heartbeats or the better part of an hour, wondering at its appearance. He had never before noticed, but it was not a stable, unvarying thing. The sun pulsed, expanding and contracting slightly. It breathed, varying its light in intensity from one moment to the next.\n\nSomeone squeezed his hand.\n\nHe shook his head, and finally registered his surroundings\n\nHe stood on a vast, red-soiled plain carpeted in white and yellow flowers that swayed in the breeze, moving like the surface of the sea. The horizon was close, a knife's edge or a table-end. It smelled as it always did on the outskirts of Danoor, away from cooking fires, inefficient plumbing, and the press of bodies.\n\nHe breathed in the ancient, baked dust smell of the desert, and knew.\n\nThe plains of the Aroonan mesas were a holy place. None but the Aroya people and their closest descendents were allowed to walk on the heights. This restriction was one of the oldest and most binding rules of the Knosi people.\n\nHe could not bring himself to care about trespassing. His mind moved glacially, catching up to his curiosity slowly.\n\nSomeone squeezed his hand, and he turned.\n\nChurls stood at his side, the fingers of her left hand entwined in his right. His _naked_ right hand, he noted by feel.\n\nHe looked down. His suit had retreated far up his arms and legs. The borderline between skin and suit was chaotic, appearing almost like the torn edges of multiple strips of fabric. Centered upon his chest was a perfect circle of flesh. Small holes in the elder-cloth peppered out from it, forming a five-limbed swirling pattern that extended onto his shoulders and arms. He had never chosen to make such designs upon his suit. Point in fact, he doubted he possessed the skill necessary to make such a thing occur.\n\nExamining the design, he registered a second shock.\n\nWhere exposed, his skin reflected the slanting sunlight as though it had been flecked in metallic dust\u2014as though he had been at work at a grinding wheel, honing the edge of a tool. He scratched at the portion of his exposed chest, and then stared at his upraised hand. He made a fist, and the skin of his knuckles did not pale slightly as it stretched over the bone underneath: instead, each knuckle warmed in color, glowing bronze under his nearly black skin.\n\nHe looked at Churls again. Her skin had once again taken on a metallic aspect to match his own. Silver to his bronze. Vaguely, muzzy-head, he recognized the significance of this.\n\nShe smiled at him oddly. The lines of her face were subtly wrong. No, even its structure was wrong, marked by higher cheekbones and a thinner jaw. The skin of her face seemed too tight, stretched taut and glistening over the bones of her skull.\n\nHis lips formed two names, but he spoke neither.\n\n_Churls. Ustert_.\n\nHer smile widened, revealing two rows of small, perfectly straight teeth, lacking any gap between her two incisors. His cock stirred, and he grimaced, tightening his suit around his genitals, clamping down physically on his arousal. Without taking his eyes off Churls, he rubbed at his jawline, finding it smooth, as hairless as that of a child's. His scalp, too, was without a hint of budding hair. His hands felt oddly outsized, palm too broad over his mouth, fingers extending too far around his cranium.\n\nHe searched for words to express his concern. He wondered if it would even be wise to do so. He did not want to reveal more of his own ignorance, having revealed enough ignorance to account for several lifetimes.\n\n\"Quit worrying,\" a voice said. \"You're safe here.\"\n\nFyra stood before them, her expression calm. Unlike when they had met, she was now painted in the shades of life. Her pale, freckled skin shone with an inner light. Her eyes were liquid, the color of seawater. When she grinned at him, he returned the expression automatically, unselfconsciously. He had once, as a child, smiled that way. He drew strength from the solidity of her presence.\n\n\"You're not completely you, Vedas,\" she said. \"Neither is Mama. I couldn't prevent bringing something of them here with you. They wanted to see this, I think.\"\n\n\"What?\" he asked. \"Wanted what?\"\n\n\"Vedas,\" Churls said. \"Do you know where we are?\"\n\nHe shook his head.\n\n\"We're in the land of the dead. A vision, sustained by those who have passed.\"\n\nHe tore his eyes away from Fyra, though breaking the contact between them took a physical effort.\n\n\"How do you know this?\" he asked. \"This is all your doing, the two of you?\"\n\nChurls nodded to Fyra with an expression of unclouded affection Vedas had never before seen. \"A lot can be passed between a mother and daughter, in the moments where they struggle together. We know each other better now\u2014far, far better than in life, undoubtedly. And it's not our vision completely, Vedas. We're not alone.\"\n\nBetween heartbeats, an army of thousands grew behind Fyra, silent and arrayed in every style of dress the world knew. Vedas's gaze passed over those closest to him. The sun shone through a few of their bodies as though they were formed from glass. Most did not visibly breathe, for why should they? Some were stiff and gray, granite statues rather than men. Many were strangely flat, an image on a canvas. Not one appeared as substantial, as concrete, as Fyra.\n\nHe recalled her claiming to be _better than anybody, ever_ , and he no longer doubted it.\n\nThe girl stepped forward, taking his left hand. Together, they faced the dead.\n\n\u2021\n\nFor a time, nothing moved, and Vedas became aware of a sound.\n\nA low thrum.\n\nThe first hint of the ocean lapping upon the shore.\n\nThunder, so faint that it could have been imagined.\n\nIt was all of these sounds, but it was also a symphony of voices. He knew this, and did not know how he knew it.\n\nThe dead could not hide their thoughts, not completely. They wanted to be heard.\n\n\"Magess Um,\" Fyra said. \"Tell him what you told me.\"\n\nOne among the assembled ranks stepped forward. Skeletally thin and nearly translucent, she was a mere whisper of a person, wrinkled and wrapped in dun robes. Despite her worn and watered appearance, she held her chin up, holding Vedas's stare. She did not stoop, and stood only an inch or two shorter than him. She could have been his grandmother, such was the similar hue of her skin, the nap of her hair, and the straight breadth of her shoulders.\n\n\"This is Jojore Um, former Magess of the Knosi Kingdom under Queen Medn,\" Fyra whispered. Vedas looked down at her, surprised by the note of respect in her voice. \"She is the oldest of us, much older than I knew any of us were. She has experience no one else has, by thousands of years. It is an honor to talk to her. Listen.\"\n\nJojore did not smile. She did not even open her mouth.\n\n_Vedas Tezul, weak-blooded cousin_ , she said directly into his mind. Hers was a flat, haughty rasp of a voice, heavily accented though comprehensible. _I am not pleased to meet you. Nor am I impressed by what I see. Regardless, you are standing here before me. You are at a crossroads, with the fate of all life drifting in the wind. Wish that it were otherwise, it matters not at all. You will have to do_.\n\nVedas frowned, but not at her words, insulting thought they were. A series of nearly colorless slowly-moving images of himself accompanied her speech, forming in his mind and quickly collapsing, as though she were shuffling through a bystander's memories of him.\n\n... ten or eleven years old, running along an avenue in Golna, carefree.... older, into his early twenties, thinner and likely stronger than he was now, lifting an opponent amid the chaos of a street battle.... holding the body of Sara Jol.... and only days past, atop Fesuy Amendja's stronghold, facing the man he had then known as The Tamer.\n\n_Yes. Him_ , Jojore said. _You are not to doubt this man, Shavrim Coranid. And yet you are not to trust him. He is legion inside himself, and there are worse than the one the girl just saved you from. There are worse than even the being Shavrim is now suspects. He has forgotten much that is a danger to you, to himself_.\n\n\"How do you know this?\" he asked. \"Why should we trust you?\"\n\nFyra dropped her head and groaned.\n\nJojore's expression hardened. _You will address me by my title. You will call me Magess Um. I am doing you a favor, never forget it nor doubt me. I know these truths because I know the relic Shavrim claims to have been_.\n\nShe sneered, and an image came to Vedas of Shavrim, naked, painted in swirling patterns from head to toe. He stood on a battlefield, alone, breathing heavily and surrounded by corpses. _I was one among the dead who helped him see likely paths to the future. I would not discuss with him the fates of goat herders or fisherman. I would only speak to him matters of importance, of life and death. I grew to know him. I heard him when he came back into the world, just as I hear whenever he takes that aspect_.\n\n\"You know who he really is\u2014who he claims to be?\" he asked. She scowled, and he forced himself to add her title.\n\n_I do. And he more than claims. He is what he says he is. I am not blind, as you clearly are. I know his nature just as I know your own, beyond the thin shield of your mind, your fragile skin and bone_. She turned her head to Churls. _As I know who you are. You are both ridden, hosts to souls older and more powerful than any in the history of the world excepting Adrash and Shavrim. They should not be here, but it is beyond our will to keep them out entirely_.\n\nVedas winced as two blinding images of Ustert and Evurt seared into his mind's eye.\n\n... the two of them, svelte and severe as knifeblades, silver and bronze, locked in a violently passionate embrace on a massive bed, in the very room he recognized from his own dreams.... and then, both standing, hand in hand, alongside four others, Shavrim among them.\n\nThe image passed too quickly to gather much detail beyond this, but Vedas imagined that one among them possessed wings.\n\nJojore nodded. _The pretty one. His name was Orrus Dabulakm. He was Shavrim's favorite. And this one..._\n\nThe image returned, held. It shifted suddenly, and he stared directly at the tallest of the six figures. She\u2014or he: Vedas could not tell\u2014seemed to stare directly at him with dull, featureless eyes. Thorns grew from her shoulders, elbows, and knees. She held in her hand a short whip.\n\n_... is Sradir Ung Kim_.\n\nHer sneer returned. _Yes, the... artificial man... he too is ridden, as the relic Shavrim claims. He is not his own creature_. She looked pointedly at Fyra, then at Churls. _But he has never been his own creature, has he?_\n\nChurls shifted her weight from one foot to the other, clearly uncomfortable. \"That's not my secret to tell,\" she said. She opened her mouth to speak again, and then closed it. She angled her head forward to peer at Fyra. \"Why did she look at you?\"\n\nJojore made a cutting motion with her left hand before Fyra could respond. _Enough, you foolish people. Enough secrets. Time is not infinite_. She met Vedas's gaze again. _There will be a reckoning for the one called Berun. It will come from two directions: from Sradir Ung Kim, and from his creator Ortur Omali. Sradir will act as it will\u2014no, I cannot read its intention\u2014but Omali is known to us, to many of the dead. He cast an immense shadow in life and is still felt here from his place in limbo. He is wounded, but still the most powerful agent of those who would see the Needle fall and rupture the crust of Jeroun, extinguishing life's fire_.\n\n\"Churls,\" Vedas said quietly. \"You knew of this... possession?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"It wasn't my secret to t\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" he said. He shook his head, marveling at everything that had been kept from him, all that would continue to be kept from him if he did not insist on being enlightened fully. Keenly aware of his anger, he nonetheless understood it as an unproductive emotion, a petty thing that could not be allowed to last: Churls had had her reasons for keeping him in the dark, as had Berun. He would not blame them, no, yet he would not remain in ignorance.\n\nTheir hesitation could not be allowed to shape events.\n\nHe released Churls's and Fyra's hands. The world dimmed perceptibly\u2014perhaps, he reasoned, because he could not exist alone in the world of the dead. He likely did not possess the understanding or will sufficient to sustain the link.\n\nAs if to confirm his suspicion, Churls reached for his hand.\n\nHe stepped forward, out of her reach, and gripped Jojore Um's upper arm.\n\nThe texture of her skin, like volcanic glass. The widening and narrowing of her dark eyes. During several long seconds, he seemed to stare at her through a darkening tunnel, the bright dream of the dead fading around him in increasingly constricting waves.\n\n\"I am not your weak-blooded cousin,\" he said, hearing his words through a wool sheet, a thin wall. He did not yell, but increased the volume of his voice with each sentence. \"I am full-blooded Knosi, son to full-blooded Knosi. I am Vedas Tezul, the man who declared war on Adrash. I am ridden by a god, and still live and speak in my own voice. I will not be talked to as if I were a child. I will not be told what to do, kept in the dark, or moved about like a game piece\u2014by you, by Evurt, by anyone.\" He smiled tightly. \"You will acknowledge this.\"\n\nFor a moment, she looked as though she would reject his assertion. Slowly, however, one corner of her mouth turned up. She nodded, and the daylit mesa snapped back into focus.\n\n_Finally_ , she said. _A reason to hope in you. No cousin of mine comes crawling_.\n\nHe leaned into their embrace, and whispered in her ear.\n\n\"Don't tell me anything more. Show me. Show me everything.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nShavrim lagged behind them for the two days it took to reach the docktown of Ual. He waved them forward when any member of the party slowed to accommodate his pace. He kept his features carefully composed, though now and then he huffed in annoyance.\n\nVedas could not resist making the comparison to himself. On the trip to Danoor, he too had been injured and labored to keep up with Churls and Berun. He too had refused to accept any concession to his condition. Watching Shavrim struggle, Vedas fought to reconcile his distrust with a newfound sympathy. When night came, he stared across the fire at his clearly exhausted companion, trying to piece together what Jojore had revealed to him about the man.\n\n(No, despite what he had learned, he could not bring himself to think of Shavrim as a god. The world already possessed one too many deities. Vedas denied the label, as though denying it would do a damn thing.)\n\nThe weight of time: this, Vedas could not easily comprehend. How could a being exist in a body so clogged with lives, the identities and recollections of millennia? Thanks to Jojore, he now understood Shavrim had been made, in the much same way Berun had been made\u2014that the man had been designed from the outset to withstand the physical and intellectual rigors of immortality. Whereas Vedas possessed one mind housed in the fragile confines of his skull, Shavrim's mind branched and divided throughout his body, compartmentalizing his ponderous existence, allowing him to close and open doors to all but forgotten memories.\n\nAnd yet, even with this knowledge, Vedas could not conceive of the pressure upon the man's shoulders. Though aware of the limitations of his own knowledge, as well as the impossibility of any true comparison to mortal men, he could not prevent himself from reading much in Shavrim's defeated expression.\n\nWhat occurred in Marept had broken him in some fundamental way.\n\nTo his surprise, Vedas found himself warming to the man. Shavrim had never acted on Vedas or his companions' behalf, but he had also never lied. He would see his family returned to him, and this stirred buried recollections within Vedas. Had he not wanted a family, a place to belong? Had he not tried, for most of his life, to achieve some sense of peace and justice?\n\nHe did not hate understanding how he and Shavrim Coranid were alike.\n\nIn truth, since communing with Jojore, he had discovered an untapped reserve of compassion for both Churls and Berun. He felt warmly inclined toward Fyra, protective, affectionate in a way he had never before allowed himself around children. The urge to chastise himself emerged, for it was as though he had forgotten a thing so obvious he should never have been able to forget it.\n\nChurls. She had lived with a burden far heavier than his own\u2014far heavier than anyone could be expected to endure. As the trainer of recruits for the Thirteenth Order of Black Suits, he had seen children die, knowing himself to be responsible, or at the very least complicit. But Churls? His knees grew weak every time he contemplated the bleak weight, the overwhelming guilt, of losing a child rarely seen and never truly comprehended. Churls had willfully neglected her daughter, choosing wrongly each and every day she spent far from home.\n\nShe had not deceived herself in anything. She had known she was running.\n\nNot for the first time since leaving Golna, Vedas appreciate the power of experiencing unclouded vision. He had once considered himself a man of insight, aware of what moved those whose lives intersected briefly with his own, but to truly comprehend what another felt, the total acknowledgement of their mistakes, their joys and failures and boredoms...\n\nOh, yes, he loved her.\n\nHe would use this word, _love_. He would mean it for the first time since childhood, when love was an automatic function of living, of being dependent upon someone. Committing to it, as they traveled through the desert toward a seemingly impossible goal, ridden by forces they could not as mortals grasp, struck him as appropriate.\n\nThe mortal mind could be illuminated. Even someone as crippled by doubt, as awkward from self-imposed isolation, as he could experience a communion with others. There was considerable risk, but he now understood the risk must be taken if one were to make it to death a complete man.\n\nOf course, _man_ could mean so many things. Berun, too, suffered in ways Vedas could sympathize with. Vedas recalled all the ways in which he himself had been manipulated since the death of his parents, first by one and then another abbey master. They continued to exert their pull, even from death and across the continent, telling him that he had lost his way, that he had betrayed his order and the oaths taken there.\n\nOf course, as with Churls, what he knew of suffering in this regard paled in comparison to Berun, who had never had room enough to call himself his own creature\u2014who had at every step been under another's thumb.\n\nHaunted, the three of them. He, Churls, and Berun shared this bond. His friends had known this intuitively and supported him, well before he knew himself.\n\n_Friends_. Yes. In addition to love, he would use that word. It brought a smile to his face.\n\nAnd Fyra?\n\nFyra. To whom they owed their lives. For which she continued to exhaust herself, asking nothing in return. She possessed an unquestionable loyalty to her mother, and, for reasons Vedas could not fathom, a growing sense of attachment to her lover and Berun. She had become invested in their combined fate, to the point of acting as emissary, rousing the dead from their fear, convincing them to risk their own existence to oppose Adrash.\n\n_Ostensibly_ to oppose Adrash, he reminded himself. Everything beyond helping her mother was secondary. She was still a child, for all her power\u2014a child who did not know the wage of her offer.\n\nJojore knew, however.\n\n_We could help you, and stand a chance of surviving_ , the dead magess had said as they stood and surveyed a blasted, permanently twilit plain\u2014an outcome, one of many, in which Adrash let the Needle fall to earth. _The girl, however? She will die a death beyond death. She will pass out of existence. I am not always able to read the wind, but this much is clear. Know the wage of choosing to accept our help_. Her expression grew hard. _It is a small wage, cousin. She is just one girl. Powerful, yes, but still just one girl_.\n\nHe had nodded, but only in confirmation of the conclusion he had already reached. Churls would not lose her daughter a second time.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe nations of Knoori could not easily be linked, one with another. The magic needed to communicate over vast distances existed, but the expenditure was too great for the commoner. As a result, news traveled glacially.\n\nHaving no family to speak of, Vedas had never given this fact of existence much thought, yet traveling to Danoor had altered his perspective slightly: he had often longed to communicate with Abse, seeking counsel over the long journey.\n\nOf course, had he received such counsel, he might well have delivered the speech the abbey master had written\u2014a document that sought only to cement the power of the Black Suits, altering the dynamic not at all, keeping warring parties in their old positions. Had he listened to Abse, he would never have allowed his doubt to take such firm root, or his desire for Churls to bloom. He would not have become something other than Vedas Tezul of Golna, a child in a man's body, a mind bound by the cords of dogma. He would not have a hundred new doubts, or a sense of purpose despite the doubts.\n\nCertainly, he would not be staring at a statue of himself, at a crossroads far from Danoor.\n\nHe looked away, horrified. The smell of saltwater filled his head, though the ocean could not yet be seen. Over the flat northeastern horizon, he could make out a gleaming arc of reflected light, an incomprehensibly huge bubble stretched over a vast portion of the earth's belly: Osa, or at least the top of the immense crystal dome that covered their eventual destination.\n\nHe concentrated on it intensely, as if by doing so he could convince the others to turn their gazes away from the embarrassing object before them.\n\n\"Well, this is odd,\" Churls said.\n\nShavrim grunted. After a moment, Berun began laughing. Heat rose in Vedas's cheeks.\n\nThe statue stood, propped in the sand two miles west of Ual. It was a crude, half-sized thing with exaggerated musculature and even more exaggerated genitalia, painted black from head to toe. In one hand it held a roll of paper. His victory speech.\n\nA sign hung from its neck.\n\nUAL IS LOYAL TO THE PROPHET VEDAS TEZUL\n\nIF YOUR ALLEGIANCE LIES ELSEWHERE\n\nLEAVE OR BE DROWNED IN OUR SEA\n\nChurls resisted laughing, but could not hide the amusement in her voice. \"It's really quite flattering, Vedas. You're a hero.\"\n\nShe frowned exaggeratedly at his expression, and squeezed his hand.\n\n\"Come now. We'll be welcomed like royals. After Danoor, shouldn't we thank fate for anyone kindly disposed toward us? We could have walked into a town overrun by Adrashi.\"\n\nHe met her stare and she sighed.\n\n\"Fine,\" she said, and pressed her palm flat against the statue's forehead. She walked forward, toppling it easily to the ground. Over her shoulder, she smiled at him. \"What? They're about to meet the real thing, anyway, so what's the harm in a little sacrilege?\"\n\nHe tried to see the humor in it. He did. She raised her eyebrows. He admitted defeat, and smiled at her. It was a forced reaction, but to his astonishment it helped: as he passed the downed statue, the situation suddenly struck him as comical. He experienced the increasingly familiar suspicion that, should he choose to view the world differently, the world would indeed appear differently. Was it necessary to view events through such an uncharitable lens? What, he asked, did it profit him to greet each day with a wary eye? He had always been dying. The world had always been dying. It would all end one day, and what would be left of Vedas Tezul?\n\nHe stopped in his tracks, turned back, and stooped to shoulder his wooden likeness. Shavrim watched him. He nodded, expression unreadable, when Vedas stood.\n\nBerun looked from one to the other. \"What are you doing?\" he asked.\n\nVedas shook his head, not entirely sure, but suspecting he would know in time.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe residents of Ual had little to spare, but they spared all of it to accommodate their prophet. He balked at their generosity, but in the end relented.\n\nThey slaughtered a ewe within a half hour of his arrival, prepared and set dinner for twelve men between the three of them, and made up he and Churls's room in the town's one inn as if hosting (just as she had predicted) a king and queen. Joyful and embarrassed at all the attention, full to the point of bellyache and more than a little drunk, they fell asleep before the thought of making love occurred to either of them.\n\nAt two hours past midnight, he rose and left her. His movements were silent, even to his own ears. He had felt sluggish upon entering the room, but he felt light and strong upon leaving it, filled with a purpose he did not need to question. Following the compulsion, he smiled tightly in anticipation, his jaw clenched and his fingers balled into fists.\n\nHe would go, but he would not be corralled.\n\nHis brother waited for him in the town square, arms crossed, under the broken sky. This word\u2014 _brother_ \u2014formed on Vedas's lips, but he suppressed the urge to speak it. He clamped down upon the sense of familiarity that threatened to dictate the conversation before it had even begun. A door closed in his mind: he locked Evurt as best he could behind it.\n\n\"Shavrim,\" he said.\n\nThe man canted his head forward, causing the moonlight to catch oddly on the stubby horns sprouting from his forehead. For a handful of seconds, they appeared larger than they had before, sharpened into vicious points. Stretching, reaching...\n\nVedas kept himself, barely, from taking a step back.\n\nShavrim's left eyebrow lifted and he raised his chin, breaking the illusion. He smiled\u2014a touch sadly, Vedas estimated. Vedas had seen the same expression on Abse's face many times. When the abbey master's most gifted disciple had not reached the correct conclusion. When events did not turn out as the abbey master planned.\n\nAbse had been able to recognize immediately, the moment when Vedas's sympathy shifted away from him.\n\n\"Vedas,\" Shavrim said. There was no question in it.\n\n\"Yes. That is my name.\"\n\nShavrim nodded, eyes bright, intent. \"It is. It is. And yet you're here, where I expected Evurt to be.\" He sat, cross-legged on the ground. He gestured that his visitor sit. \"I won't pretend this pleases me, Vedas, but there's little I can do. You're surprised that I tell you this? Let me ask\u2014do you think I've been honest with you? Have I been forthright?\"\n\n\"You have,\" Vedas said immediately, and then discovered room to doubt his surety. He considered several responses, and then shrugged before sitting across from Shavrim.\n\nAn odd decisiveness had settled upon him: he would allow the man to lead, to either tell the truth or implicate himself. He would trust himself to tell the difference between the two.\n\nBehind the closed door in his mind, he felt a force push back against this resolution. Evurt did not want to wait, yet Vedas found it easy to dismiss his impatience. Each inhalation seemed to anchor him more firmly to the earth. Even his newfound affection for Shavrim did not fade. In fact, it was if they stood upon equal ground for the first time.\n\nThey stared at one another, silent.\n\nShavrim broke first. He laughed suddenly, as though Vedas had told an amusing joke.\n\n\"You're an interesting man, Vedas Tezul. When we met upon Fesuy Amendja's roof, I told you I could show you a way to stop hating yourself, never imagining you might come to terms with yourself alone. Every rumor I'd heard had led me to imagine you as the most inflexible sort.\"\n\nVedas said nothing.\n\n\"To be clear, mine was a genuine offer. Adrash is not invincible. He can be wounded. He might even die. What I did not share then, but shared soon after, was the way in which you'd be able to make good on your word\u2014not through your own efforts, but through my brother's.\"\n\nHe sighed, and his sad smile returned. \"Yes. I had hoped to see Evurt again, to fight alongside him, despite what damage it might do to you. I thought he and Ustert were the world's best chance. I still worry that they are, that we have missed an opportunity at an entire world's expense. Their assumption of you and Churls may still happen, of course. I won't lie and say it wouldn't please me. Regardless, there's substantial doubt in my mind. Perhaps they chose vessels less wisely than they could have. Perhaps you are too strong to be taken and used in the manner they intend.\"\n\nVedas said nothing. He closed his eyes as the pressure behind the closed door intensified.\n\nAfter a long pause, Shavrim said, \"Perhaps this is a good thing, however.\"\n\nThe pressure doubled, tripled. Vedas considered clamping down upon it entirely, grinding Evurt's influence to a halt before it became overwhelming, but did not. Shavrim would not stop attempting to rouse his brother. He would test Vedas, again and again.\n\n_Might as well have it out now_ , Vedas thought.\n\nEvurt did not deign to respond.\n\n\"Perhaps you are what the world needs,\" Shavrim said. \"Two mortals. After all, if Evurt's strength is insufficient to overcome you, what use could he be against our father?\"\n\nThe pressure increased until Vedas's skull creaked with it, bathing him from crown to chin in pain so intense he struggled to loosen his jaw to scream, yet loosen his jaw to scream he did. He opened his eyes, and a golden light poured forth from them, fractionally easing the weight pressed against both temples. The colors of the night bloomed around him suddenly and Evurt's consciousness, menacingly alien and disdainful, flooded his own. He rocked from side to side dizzyinglly, as though his body, his mind and soul, were being pulled from either direction.\n\nAs though he were scales, measuring shifting weights.\n\n\"Shavrim,\" he said in one croak of a voice while another, steadier voice spoke simultaneously, saying the word he had not wanted to say.\n\n\"Brother,\" Evurt said.\n\nIn this one word, Vedas heard the god's satisfaction, the arrogant presumption, and his anger flared in response.\n\nLosing to Evurt was not an option.\n\nThus, he would not lose: it was this simple. His teeth snapped closed and he growled, like a mutt cornered in an alley. His eyes closed, like shutters on the invading sun. His hands rose to his head, and gradually he stopped rocking. Then, after an infinity of fearing his skull would collapse upon itself, of holding back the raging divine tide within him, he found control once more.\n\nThe light slowly faded from his eyes. Evurt howled from behind the closed door.\n\n\"Shavrim\" Vedas said. In one voice. His own voice. \"You can stop trying.\" He shrugged. \"Or don't. I can't summon the interest to care, either way. I know what you're doing, and Evurt won't be coaxed that easily from where I've put him.\" He stood, pain a forgotten memory, smiling down at Shavrim without an ounce of anger. It was easy to simply choose a mood. He wondered why he had decided, on so many occasions, to be angry or fearful. He questioned why he had let himself be pushed from one period of uncertainty to another for so long.\n\n\"Try again and again, but I know you better than you know me. Knowing you, I know something of your sibling. He has immense power, but he's caged where I can see him. I will instruct Churls and Berun how to feel their presence, and how to stop them. If they want to assist our efforts, we will allow them. We. Mortal men and women.\"\n\nShavrim's brow furrowed. Vedas imagined he saw a measure of fear in the man's expression.\n\n\"Know me? Know me _how?\"_\n\nVedas bent down to Shavrim's ear and said Jojore Um's name. Then he turned on his heel and walked away.\n\n\u2021\n\nHalfway between the square and the inn, the girl appeared at his side and took his hand. He smiled down at her, not sure if she had assisted him and not particularly caring. His mood would change, undoubtedly, to a familiar, long-worn state of worry and fear, as soon as he woke from the charitable disposition that had taken hold.\n\nThe glow of victory did not last forever: there would come a time when, for Fyra's own safety, he would have to tell her to go\u2014to leave them to their fate, in Shavrim's hands...\n\nBut it would not be now.\n\nHe gripped her hand and stopped. In silence, together, they watched the slowly and swiftly spinning spheres of the Needle, the threat of the world's destruction, pass overhead. He did not see them with Evurt's eyes, but with the limited vision his mother and father had birthed to him. The components looked as they in fact were: farther away than all the steps he had walked on the face of Jeroun. The scattered entirety of the Needle could be nothing more than it always had been to a mortal, earthbound man.\n\nIndistinct and unknowable. A blight upon the order of the heavens.\n\nNonetheless, at that moment, it was beautiful beyond measure. It was a decision to view it so. It was a denial of reality.\n\nHe accepted this now, understanding he would not make the same choice again.\n\n\u2021\n\nIn the morning, he rose with Churls, awkwardly accepted the provisions Ual's mayor publicly insisted on gifting to him, and made his way to the docks with his three companions.\n\nTownsfolk stopped him along the way and asked for his blessing, which he gave reluctantly. \"You have it,\" he said again and again, grimacing more than smiling at the small, black-skinned men and women, wrinkled into early grandmothers and grandfathers by the strong, salty wind and ocean sun.\n\nChurls failed to keep the amusement from touching her features. The people knew her by reputation, as well, and smiled warmly in response to her expression, as though she too had blessed them. Berun, also known by his association to Vedas, accepted the company of the town's few children with good grace, holding his massive arms out low so they could swing from him.\n\nShavrim walked several body lengths behind Vedas and company. The townspeople gave him a wide berth, likely because they had caught some news of furthering events in Danoor. Even as isolated as they were, it was clear someone had passed through recently. The mayor appeared uncomfortable next to the broad, horned man, but he listened intently to what Shavrim had to say. They had been talking since leaving the inn.\n\nVedas wished he could listen in on their conversation, for he did not know how Shavrim had, without violence, convinced the mayor to allow them to lower a sea-gate that had been closed for millennia. Perhaps it had simply been an exchange of bonedust, yet Vedas did not think so. He supposed he would never know, for the townspeople crowded around him, clamoring for his attention, his touch, hungry for a person he could only pretend to be.\n\nEventually, they reached the docks. Or, rather, the two stone jetties and Ual's sad collection of fishing vessels, not one of which looked large enough to accommodate the four of them, especially considering Berun's mass. Certainly, they would capsize the moment anything large enough to survive on the open ocean poked its snout against their hull.\n\nAdmittedly, Vedas knew little of seacraft. He had lived two miles inland of the ocean for most of his life, and learned next to nothing about it beyond the danger it presented. Golna possessed the resources of a metropolis to defend itself from seagoing creatures of Jeroun, many of which happily hurled themselves out of the water and against the city's walls. The city also sat near one of many fishable rivers stocked heavily with smaller, adolescent versions of the oceangoing monsters that gave birth to them.\n\nUal, however, had no such resources. It had an altogether more novel way of drawing sustenance from the sea.\n\nVedas shielded his eyes against the early morning glare upon the mirror-flat water (a highly unusual occurrence, numerous villagers had told him, to have such a calm day this early in the year\u2014a good omen, many of them said, with forced expressions that belied their words) and the top of the distant inverted bowl over Osa, searching for the fifteen-foot high stone pillars of Ual's only claim to fame: its coastal wall, which extended out from the town's shore nearly ten miles and arced to either side for nearly thirty miles, creating a relatively safe haven for fishing.\n\nNow that Vedas considered it, it struck him as odd that so few visited or even spoke of Ual, for its people were surely extraordinary. It was common to say no one set craft upon the surface of the sea, yet the people of Ual did so daily. As they had done for millennia.\n\nMen needed to speak in definitives, Vedas knew. They needed to reduce the world to comprehensible portions. And thus, the people of Ual and their incredible, ancient construction allowing them to do the impossible, were ignored.\n\nMen did not sail upon the sea.\n\nThe woman next to him\u2014small, sunworn, to his eyes identical to the woman next to her\u2014laid her left hand upon his arm and pointed with her right.\n\n\"It's not easy to see. There is a blurred line, just below the waterline.\" Her eyes were wide as she stared up at him. \"You're really going there, to the gate? Only the wall walkers\u2014\" those townsmen and towns-women who maintained the wall's integrity, Vedas had learned \"\u2014go anywhere close to it.\"\n\n\"No,\" Vedas said, squinting to see what she claimed was visible. \"We're not going to it. We're going beyond it.\"\n\nShe spit into the tiny waves lapping at the rocks below them. Her neighbor did likewise.\n\nShavrim stepped up behind Vedas, causing both women to move to the side, allowing him space to stand. The horned man lifted his shirt over his head, inflating his massive chest with salty air. He clapped Vedas on the back, beaming as though they were old friends.\n\n\"Time to go,\" he said.\n\nVedas nodded, relieved. Without looking, he reached and found Churls's hand. They moved through the crowd more easily now with Shavrim at their side.\n\nBerun rose from the pile of children he had let play upon his sitting form, the great bell of his laugh booming loudly on the still morning air.\n\nBut for the mayor, they left the townspeople behind. As they stepped onto the second, slightly larger jetty, Churls stopped him.\n\n\"Turn around and wave. It's the least they deserve for the hospitality.\"\n\nHe followed her order, awkwardly.\n\nThe people of Ual waved back and cheered, though he doubted their hearts were in it. Men did not really sail upon the sea, even in Ual. Beyond the coastal wall was the haven of animals beyond the scale of man, a shallow, glass-clear expanse of certain death. And should Vedas somehow manage to defy the inevitable and reach the shore of Osa, an impenetrable wall of crystal lay between him and his mad destination.\n\nThe people of Ual waved goodbye to their prophet.\n\n\u2021\n\nHe kept his eyes forward as they set off. The boat's small thaumatrugical engine chuffed and barked at his back, with Shavrim at the tiller. Berun lay between Vedas and Shavrim, evening out the weight of their cargo at the boat's head. A strong breeze kicked in as one of the few clouds in the sky obscured the sun, and then died as the sun peeked out again.\n\nChurls squeezed his hand. She rose into a crouch, leaned over their piled supplies amidship, and made her way toward the bow. She leaned over it for a moment, and then laughed.\n\n\"Come here!\" she called. \"You have to see this.\"\n\n\"What?\" he asked, not wanting to move. He had no good memories of his last time upon the water, on their way to Tan-Ten, and the boat he sat in now felt far less stable than the _Atavast_ had. Of course, it was one-tenth the size.\n\n\"Just come here,\" she responded.\n\nHe made his way forward, far slower and more painstakingly than she had. Pausing at the port gunwale for a moment, he peered down into the depths, surprised to find the bottom of the sea so close\u2014no more than ten or fifteen feet below him through startlingly clear water, dappled with crisscrossing lines of light. Fish and aquatic reptiles, the cousins and spawn of larger creatures, the mainstay of Ual's diet and scant industry, darted from rock to rock.\n\nAn odd sadness crept into him at the realization that he had never before stared into the sea, that this one opportunity to do so would be so fleeting. He considered what it must have been like, growing up in Ual, knowing their manmade corner of the sea so intimately that any incursion into it\u2014be it a creature that had grown too large, too dangerous, or a breach within the coastal wall, allowing the outside ocean in\u2014felt like a wound in one's own flesh.\n\nTo know a thing outside of oneself, so intimately...\n\nHis left hand went to the neckline of his suit. He slipped the tip of his index finger between the elder-cloth and the skin at the nape of his neck, encountering resistance as the material peeled back from its tight embrace of his body. It was a disturbingly invasive sensation, but he had grown used to it, like one worrying at a torn cuticle.\n\n\"Vedas?\" Churls said.\n\nHe shook his head and peered back toward the shoreline, finding it had retreated further than he had imagined possible in such a short amount of time. A crowd still stood above the tide, though already it had thinned. He imagined many of them had returned home, to stare at their hands and consider an uncertain future. The mayor had looked on the verge of crying as they pulled away from the dock.\n\n_He must surely be scared_ , Vedas thought. _We're opening his sea-gate. We might leave it open, destroying his and his ancestors' long and meticulously held balance_.\n\nHe reached Churls on wobbly legs. She offered him a sympathetic smile but no hand in support.\n\nThe fingers of his right hand closed around what he thought to be the tip of the boat's bow. He leaned forward cautiously and looked down into the parting water. For a moment, he saw nothing, and then his perspective shifted as his eyes registered what Churls had seen. A black, cartoonishly muscular torso. Outsized genitals. Below that, water-stained legs. He turned his head and stared into one large, white-painted eye of the statue he had carried into Ual. His hand rested on its head.\n\nIt had been bolted onto the boat's prow, making of it a figurehead.\n\nHe rose into a crouch and turned, muscles taut on his frame, all trace of physical awkwardness aboard-ship forgotten.\n\nShavrim did not need to turn his head. His eyes were already fixed on Vedas. He stared intently, with no trace of an expression.\n\n\"What is the meaning of this?\" Vedas asked.\n\nShavrim's eyebrows rose, but otherwise his features remained neutral. \"You claim to know me,\" he said. \"And this makes me rather curious. Did you know I would do that?\" Without breaking eye contact, he reached behind him and shut the thaumaturgical engine off. \"Did you know I would do that?\" He stood as the boat rocked violently back and forth in the absence of forward momentum.\n\nBerun began to rise.\n\nShavrim bent forward to lay a hand on the constructed man's massive shoulder.\n\n\"This is not violence, Berun. This is us coming to terms.\"\n\nVedas forced himself to stand at the head of the pitching boat. His suit stiffened around him instantly in response to his nervousness. He forced it to unclench, and found his balance. Easily.\n\nChurls's hand pressed to his back as she rose. In support, not to steady him.\n\n\"I've been thinking since you left me in the square last night,\" Shavrim said.\n\n\"And?\" Vedas said.\n\nShavrim gestured expansively. \"I'm left wondering what you really think, Vedas. Do you think I want my family back badly enough to risk the entire world? Do you think I'll keep trying to summon Evurt and Ustert, to the detriment of our plans? No. Don't answer. I'll tell you. I will not. I don't know that you alone are sufficient to oppose Adrash, and I doubt my siblings are willing to share their power. Nonetheless, we won't be deterred. I'll do what is necessary to preserve this world, even to the point of opposing those for whom...\"\n\nHe broke eye contact to stare at Churls, and then at Berun. \"Do you hear me? Do you know what I'm saying?\" He pointed to the bow and his voice boomed. \"Do you know what that means? It is a betrayal.\"\n\nHe frowned, letting emotion alter the set of his features until he resembled a different man. His hands fell straight to his sides, dragging his shoulders down with them.\n\n\"Perhaps...\" he said. \"Perhaps we're all fools. We could be wrong in everything.\"\n\nHe sat heavily, rocking the boat. He started the engine and Vedas looked away. Churls wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled him close, leaning back against the hull. Berun lay immobile, staring at the sky with eyes that could not close.\n\nThe whole day open before them, windless and bright, their journey resumed.\nCHAPTER SIX\n\nTHE 25TH OF THE MONTH OF SECTARIANS TO THE 1ST OF THE MONTH OF FISHERS ASPA MOUNTAINS, THE KINGDOM OF STOL, TO DANOOR, THE REPUBLIC OF KNOS MIN\n\nFor one hundred days, Pol slept. For four months, he dreamt of plummeting out of the sky. He fell, exhausted nearly to death by his headlong flight from Adrash. His skin scorched, crusted over, and peeled away as he entered Jeroun's atmosphere. His arms and legs whipped about violently enough to dislocate his joints, causing him to be pummeled by his own fists and feet as they flailed, drawing blood from his sensitive new flesh and sending it in arcs around his spinning body.\n\nThe sigils he had tattooed upon himself with alchemical ink\u2014the spells that had been brought to life, granting him the might to stand against a god\u2014were gathered as solid black masses at his hands and feet, as a coil rope of black hair wrapped around his throat, choking him. All were inert, useless.\n\nHis eyelids had been burned away. Heat and wind had fused his one remaining amber eye motionless in his skull, and turned the empty socket of the other into an aching pit. He fell blind, his never-ending state of agony preventing him from sinking into unconsciousness.\n\nHe lived, just barely, unable to think beyond the pain.\n\nThe ground rose up beneath him, a granite fist.\n\nWhen he smashed into it, blackness enveloped him.\n\nThere was a timeless instant where he felt nothing. A breath before...\n\n\u2021\n\nThe dream began again.\n\nAnd again\n\nAnd again.\n\n\u2021\n\nHe woke, screaming. Not a full-throated sound, but a piteous, rattling wheeze that caught in his throat the moment it emerged. He inhaled convulsively and then coughed dry, blood-flecked sputum into the cold, thin air, curling around the aching hollow of his gut before screaming again\u2014more fully this time, a bellow of ignorant rage that lasted until he could do it no more. He breathed in and out, deeper each time, calming himself.\n\nIt took the space of several heartbeats to believe he had stopped falling, to make his right eye organize the colors before him as images.\n\nGravel. Fractured planes of rock underneath.\n\nLifting his head took a monumental effort. The muscles of his neck screamed in palsied protest. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he looked about.\n\nRock faces before him, rock below and to the right.\n\nTo the left and above, sky cloudless and unbroken, painfully blue.\n\nHe examined the rock floor and walls more closely. To his eye, they appeared recently fractured, white along their angles. Many bore long gashes, five-rowed and straight. Without willing it to do so, his hand reached out, spreading fingertips to fit into the gouges. He raked his nails along the channels he had created without remembering, and then laid his palm against the cold stone, exploring the concavity beneath him.\n\nHe shivered as the realization struck him.\n\n_Here is where I came to earth_.\n\nEven with the abilities the sigils had granted him, it was a miracle he had survived.\n\nAnd yet... _where_ had he come to rest?\n\nHe rolled over, slowly, and crawled to the edge of his jagged platform. Below him extended a nearly vertical wall of bare grey rock, weathered by wind and time. Below that, dizzyingly far, the angle of the rock grew less severe, becoming a surface upon which snow could cling. And further, so much further down, the world spread out in white folds, broken here and there by thrusting spires of granite.\n\nHe had seen this vista from above the world, many times. It had once seemed just another place, high and isolated, the home of goat-milkers and idiot hermits.\n\nIt had _once_ seemed...\n\nHis head whipped around, causing black spots to swarm before his eyes. The rock face above him shielded the view, but he felt the pull of the secret he had stolen from Adrash's mind.\n\nHe tried to stand, but his legs would not support him. He fell back, lightheaded, gritting his teeth in impatience. The second attempt was no better. The third, and his legs held beneath him. He stretched his long, angular body up the wall of rock before him, peering over its lip.\n\nThe heady perspective nearly sent him tumbling backward, but his thin fingers found purchase in the stone. He blinked the sense of disorientation away, letting his gaze steady upon the mountain's summit\u2014or rather, a broad portion of it.\n\nHe grinned, revealing small, even teeth. His legs were suddenly firmer beneath him. He knew now, for certain, where he was.\n\nWhen his strength returned, he would ascend to the mountain's hollowed-out peak. He would walk into the valley of the nameless people. He would dip his hands into the clear blue lake at its center, and run his hands over the worn remains of the forgotten city of the elders, older than recorded time.\n\nAnd everywhere, he would find corpses. A storehouse of power the likes of which the world had never seen. With the talents the sigils had bestowed upon him, it would be an easy thing to gather the corpses together and transport them to wherever he liked.\n\nHis grin grew wider. Dry laughter erupted from his chest as he lowered himself into a sitting position.\n\nLacking even the energy to access a simple spell to be sure, he nonetheless sensed a disappointing amount of time had passed since he fled from Adrash. Weeks. Months, perhaps. Regardless, his spirits were not dimmed. Without consciously making the decision to do so, he had guided himself where he most needed to be.\n\n\u2021\n\nHe lay in the sun throughout the day and, after taking in one contemplative look at the broken sky as it rose above the world, slept when the sun died. The wind, carrying air cold enough to freeze water to steel, failed to even stir him in his slumber. In the morning, he felt full, though he had eaten nothing. He stood on solid legs and walked to the edge of his eyrie, staring down the wall of his prison with one corner of his mouth upraised.\n\nYet his hands shook. He examined them, stained black with latent magic, and backed away from the open height. A searching thought (timid enough at the beginning to embarrass him, even alone) caused the boundaries at his wrists to quiver. He looked down at his ankles and saw that there, too, the alchemical ink had become agitated, the amorphous sigils eager to rise up his legs and arms, forming shapes, covering him in the symbols of his magical will. Those spells that had gathered on his scalp, mimicking long hair, lifted from his back and shoulders as fine filaments wavering in the wind, a hundred thousand snakes woken from hibernation.\n\nGooseflesh rose on every inch of his naked, eggplant skin, and the open hands raised in relief on either pectoral muscle grew in definition, as though someone sought to push out from the inside. His testicles lifted as his cock stiffened painfully. His right eyelid slowly opened, allowing smoke to seep in a thin stream from the black cavity of his eye socket.\n\nThe world bloomed into dizzying color. For the space of several breaths, his hearts pounded hard enough to shudder his vision. A wave of nausea bent him at the waste. He retched, yet had nothing to summon from his stomach.\n\nHe had been afraid, yes. He had not known if the sigils would respond to his commands after such time and grievous injury.\n\nAs good as their rousing felt, he forced them to still upon his hands and feet. He would not be arrogant now, giving in to temptation before his body had fully recovered. Not when he was so close to his goal. He lay upon the cold stone, allowing the sun to soak into the roots of his body, his thoughts drifting to the knowledge he had gleaned from the dead following Ebn's assault and then stolen from Adrash's weakened mind during their battle.\n\nHe recalled the elder he had seen and encountered on the Clouded Continent, and it was an epiphany too reality-altering to do him much good\u2014as was the revelation of Jeroun being only one planet among many: scholars had already posited this.\n\nAnd the existence of an afterlife? What did this matter? The dead were insignificant, a concern only among themselves.\n\nWhat he had learned about Adrash's nature, too\u2014his existence as a man before assuming the mantle of godhood, how blind he had become to the world he once actively ruled\u2014enticed him while remaining altogether too abstract to be of any use. Adrash was a force nearly beyond measure, answerable only to an equal force: understanding his past or madness would add little of value.\n\nBut those frustratingly blank identities, those mortals without names who had stood on a baked plain before Adrash? He worried at these like a loose tooth, trying to dredge something useful from his memory, a detail he had not seen in the moment of revelation.\n\nThe Black Suit, a Knosi, beautiful in a boring way.\n\nThe freckled woman, whose face he had disliked immediately, viscerally.\n\nThe constructed man of brass spheres, eyes glowing actinic blue.\n\nPol had not the slightest clue about the first two. Not even an itch of recognition. The third, however, he sensed he should know. Holding the image of the artificial creature in his mind created a disconcertingly slippery effect, as of trying to keep water from dripping through one's hands. He had heard a story about a constructed man, had he not? He had studied the creation of constructs, and there had been one particular example...\n\nHe tried to picture the classrooms of the Academy of Applied Magics, places he had always known. His brow furrowed in concentration. He placed himself in his own apartment, and could not remember where his bookcases had been, or whether his bed faced the east or the west.\n\nThe name of his first instructor.\n\nThe identity of the man who had deflowered him.\n\nHis mother's stern face...\n\nSummoning _any_ memory from before his transformation in Ebn's bedroom proved difficult. In fact, even the details of that night were blurred around the edges. She had raped him, he recalled. He winced, recalling pain and shame greater than any he had ever experienced\n\nBut what had she _done_ , exactly?\n\nSuddenly, it struck him as very important that he remember\u2014as though, by doing so, it would unlock the other memories eluding him. As if a door would be opened inside him.\n\n\u2021\n\nAnother day passed while he waited to be strong enough.\n\nAnother day, during which his memory became no clearer. Impatience pressed upon him, as though someone were staring over his shoulder, urging him to act. It built until he shook with it, impotent in the face of it.\n\nAnd then, just as the sun dropped below the jagged skyline and the scattered spheres of the Needle began rising in the east, a face rose out of the mist clouding his recollection.\n\nA broad, lavender-skinned, horned face. The face of a quarterstock. Pol had come to know it in the months before his cathartic encounter with Ebn.\n\nShav. His name had been Shav.\n\nA madman, given to spells of dementia... of appearing to be one man and then another...\n\nAll at once, Pol remembered every word.\n\n\u2021\n\n_The dragon and I. A halfbreed and a quarterbreed at this moment in time. The conjunction of the two is interesting, Pol. Interesting. I've seen a dragon crash into the sea, sure the animal had killed itself. Instead it surfaced, twisting its long neck and beating its wings upon the water, a great sea serpent clamped in its jaws\u2014a sea serpent so large that it could've swallowed our tiny boat in one bite. Its skin shone like silver in the moonlight, and its thrashing frothed the sea like a child's hand slapping bathwater_.\n\n_The Needle had only risen halfway, and the moon showed a quarter of her face. I stared at the destruction coming swiftly: a wall of black water that blotted out the stars along the horizon. I waited and told my men to prepare themselves. Some of them prayed to Adrash, some to Orrus, and some to the devil. Me, I just waited for the inevitable, almost wanting it. Most likely, I would die along with my men. An odd feeling, being that powerless_.\n\n_Someday soon, I think you'll know what that feels like_.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe moment snapped into clarity within the dim confines his skull, creating a scene so vivid it was as though he were seated again in his apartment on an atypically hot day in the Month of Clergymen, the year previous. He stared at the quarterstock named Shav and thought it odd, what he now knew without doubt. What he should have known then:\n\nShav was no madman. Disturbed, but not mad.\n\nPerhaps not even disturbed, but very clever.\n\nOr even inspired.\n\nIn his mind's eye, Pol reappraised the broad, horned wyrm tamer, doubting every assumption he had made about the quarterstock: indeed, he now found himself wondering if the term quarterstock even applied. It had been the easiest determination to make, for Shav had never denied it. Moreover, what else existed that appeared as he did? Not a man and not an elderman, but a thing in between, a manlike creature singular in creation.\n\nYet the quarterstock itself was a near-legend. No one alive in Tansot\u2014in fact, anyone in the recorded history of the city, the place where eldermen had always been most numerous\u2014had verifiably documented the healthy offspring of an elderwoman. To assume one had suddenly appeared in Pol's life, just as he desired an asset worthy of note...\n\nAn asset who spoke such odd, portentous words.\n\nAt the time, Pol had dismissed Shav's rambling monologues. Surely, he had reasoned, they were merely the digressions of a precocious individual, the fictions of a talented mind severely maladjusted by the vagaries of unusual parentage. Beyond material assistance as a tamer, Shav could have no insight applicable to Pol's situation.\n\nNow, however, he was forced to admit he had been wrong. The account of the dragon\u2014it could only have been an allusion to events to come. Soon after the words were spoken, Pol and eighteen other outbound mages had ascended into the sky, bearing Ebn's gift to the god, a massive statue in his likeness. Before they reached the moon, Adrash appeared and with a thought shattered the statue, sending its pieces in a wave of mutilation toward the mages, killing all but the most skilled. Pol could do nothing to prevent their deaths.\n\nHelpless.\n\n_Someday soon, I think you'll know what that feels like_.\n\nPol lingered on these words. He had been horrified, true, but had he felt helpless?\n\nNo. No, he had not. Perhaps, at the beginning, for the briefest hesitation, he had not known what to do, but within heartbeats of seeing the statue turned into a bomb he had been filled with purpose, first to defend himself, and second to... to...\n\nHe gasped as the sigils spuns to life on his whip-thin body, rising into a whirlwind of countless long-tailed sperm on his forearms and legs, whipping around his shoulders and neck and lower belly as they recalled with near-sentience their awakening upon him. He collapsed onto the cold rock, smoke pouring from his left eye, fingers twitching one motion over and over again\u2014the same motion he had used to release a spell upon the Needle, altering one of its massive spheres slightly, announcing his challenge to Adrash before he had even thought the wages of this action through.\n\nCoils of concussive force leapt from his outspread fingertips.\n\nThe rock face before him fractured like a broken mirror before crumbling onto his legs. He pulled his feet free before more of the wall fell upon him, and nearly tumbled off his perch. Teetering toward death, the upper half of his back over the void. Arms outstretched, rigidly under the control of the sigils. The spell bore into the mountainside, pushing him inch by inch backward in the process.\n\nHe could find no purchase. He would fall.\n\n\"No!\" he roared, tightening the spasming muscles of his stomach, attempting to sit.\n\nAs he fought to regain his balance, one of the sigils on his arm formed itself into a black circle and rose upward from his flesh as a tendril, wavering in the wind as though it were a charmed snake. Pol focused on it as its tip ballooned, stunned into immobility despite the danger.\n\nThe sigil formed a face, black on black, horned.\n\n\"Waste no more time,\" it said. \"Learn to fly.\"\n\nPol screamed as he tipped over the edge of his perch. The wind ripped the voice from his mouth as he fell. There was no time for thought, no time even for fear. Certainly, there was no time to recall the second portent Shav had spoken to him...\n\n\u2021\n\n_Before he leaves, my father tells me to contemplate death. He tells me to feel my mortality in the creak of my bones and the soreness of my muscles. With every heartbeat, you are closer to death, he says. He forces me to smell the stench of his underarms\u2014the smell of the body birthing and decaying life at the same moment. He tells me to know, intimately, every sign of weakness in my body, and then reject each in turn_.\n\n_He breaks my arm with one blow, kicks me as I writhe on the ground. Remember this lesson above all others, he says. The body heals. It responds to trauma, to pain\u2014not with fear, but with purpose. So must you. You need not die, my son, but in order to continue living\u2014_\n\n_\u2014you must suffer_.\n\n\u2021\n\nPol dropped, head first, as fast as a body must drop, yet his perceptions were reduced to a crawl, drawn out into one long howl of wind\u2014an avalanche in his ears, a needle in his eyes. Rigid-limbed, he spun as the spell continued to pass from his fingers, warping the air before him like heat radiating above a fire, strafing the mountainside in cracks as he rotated to face its solid wall again and again.\n\nThe mountainside. It loomed closer each time he regarded it.\n\nSpiraling, caught and stretched in a sluggish current of time, horrified and fascinated at once (at his predicament, at his foolishness for not being more attentive when events had been playing out), he found space within himself to consider Shav's words.\n\nHe placed himself, once again, in his apartment. He held a knife in his hand.\n\nIt had been near the end of the Month of Pilots, three weeks after Ebn's disastrous goodwill mission. Confident the display of power he had recently shown was only the beginning, the birthing of greater magic within him, Pol nonetheless forced himself to caution. He would not underestimate Ebn. She had swayed a god, after all, if in the brief moment before his rage returned to him. Pol would not rely upon the dimly understood nature of his sigils, but attack his superior using brute force.\n\nA knife, cunningly crafted, intended for her skull.\n\nShav had offered the support he could\u2014first the knife, second the assistance of his wyrm, Sapes\u2014before succumbing to yet another of his spells.\n\n_You need not die, but in order to continue living, you must suffer_.\n\nPol cursed himself for not drawing the obvious conclusion sooner.\n\nShav had known, or at least predicted.\n\nA month after he and Shav's meeting in his apartment, his plan of attack frustrated, Pol had committed an act of supreme foolishness, relying upon tradition to protect him. Ebn, the more opportunistic of the two, broke into his apartment, breaching the oldest of etiquettes dictating how eldermen treated one another, and humiliated him. After ensorceling him into a state of immobile arousal, she raped him. Despite the aggression of the act, she still could not summon the rage to kill him and so resorted to greater violence.\n\nFinally, she had torn out his left eye.\n\nHe recalled the agony, the humiliation. He recalled a pressure. Voices, calling him to transformation...\n\n_You need not die, but in order to continue living, you must suffer_.\n\nA sudden gust of wind pushed against him like a cold slab of glass, tipping him lengthwise in glacial motion, sending his feet into the mountainside. He braced for the pain of contact, of his skin being flayed against the rough wall.\n\nWhen it came, however, it was more intense than he could have imagined, drawn out into one torturous moment. Reactions slowed, he watched in paralyzed horror as his bloodied feet rebounded from the wall and rocked his upper body toward it. The closer his hands came, the more damage his spell did to the rock, boring into it in doubled lightning lines.\n\nWhen his hands finally passed into the mountainside, he screamed. The mineral, heated to its vaporization point, blackened and bubbled the skin of his fingers. His wrists. His forearms.\n\nHe fought helplessness through the red haze of his torment. Soon, his face would hit the wall and he would be dead. There would be no fractured rock beneath him when he woke. He would not wake.\n\n_Learn to fly_ , his sigil had said.\n\n_Learn to fly_.\n\n\u2021\n\nA timeless moment before his forehead touched the mountainside, he did just that. A voice\u2014or several voices: he would never be sure\u2014whispered wordless directions, spoke a command Pol felt more than understood, and he remembered.\n\nHe had once possessed wings. They had carried him into the night sky from Ebn's bedroom. They had borne him to orbit.\n\nHe tipped his head to the side in slow motion, cracking vertebrae. He then tipped it to the other side. Fully inhabiting his pain now, taking succor from it, he flexed burnt hands now under his own control. He increased the power of his spell, pushing himself back from the mountainside before closing his fists and entering into a full dive.\n\nHe was an arrow, suspended in amber. _Enough_ , he subvocalized.\n\nThe wind tore at him as time reasserted its normal pace. He bared teeth into the gale, grinning at the swiftly approaching ground. With a few muscular twitches, he corrected his spin.\n\nAs he spread his arms out to either side, stretching the kinking muscles of his shoulders, wings unfurled from his back. Blacker than a moonless night they grew, doubling and then tripling in width, becoming assets befitting a creature of legend, a god.\n\nHe arched, letting his wings cup the wind. His bones creaked as his body took the weight of gravity only feet from the snowy mountainside. His dive flattened into an unsteady soar over the frozen landscape. Quickly, he righted his shuddering wings and flapped down once, twice, three times, his confidence growing as memory took hold.\n\nHe flew. It was as though he had been born with wings.\n\n\u2021\n\nBefore him, an invisible wall shielded the valley. He knew of its existence from his contact with Adrash, but understood little of its nature beyond the scope of its power. It had served to hide the valley from all but the most powerful gaze for all of human and elderman history.\n\nUntil Pol, that is. He saw through it easily, first through the phantom organ of his left eye and then through his unaided right, gazing down upon the lifeless plain. Cradled at the valley's exact center, bluer than any memory of blue, was the lake. Upon seeing it, his mouth began watering. He had not drunk since before the turn of the half-millennium.\n\nA smile rose to his lips as he recalled the taste of cold water. Water he alone would drink. Glory he would never be forced to share.\n\nRegardless of his excitement, he forced himself to caution, angling his charcoal wings to slow his approach. The alien ache in his bones grew more severe, the closer he came to the barrier. The remainder of his self-congratulations came to a grinding halt as the fractaling sigils fled from his leading fists, en masse, flowing like ink over his sinuous torso to gather as static, as jittering ants on his legs. The sigils flowing from his scalp flattened on the ridges of his back, tapering into a point above his buttocks.\n\nAll at once, the coldness of the air registered. He shivered.\n\nPressure built, centering into a tight knot of resentment behind his eyes. He stopped his chattering teeth by clenching his jaw until it rang, and stretched his fists out before him.\n\nAnger became determination. With a twitch of his wings, he dove forward.\n\nThe wall did not physically restrain him. There was no pain. Nonetheless, he cried out as he crossed the threshold, for the error\u2014the wage of his impetuousness\u2014was immediately clear. Ebn had been a master of dampening spells, but even she could not have accomplished so thorough an effect.\n\nAt once, the sigils were thrown into chaos on Pol's body, spreading and contracting like tides, pooling and bursting without pattern. The vision in his phantom eye faltered, flickering to him an image of the valley below and then failing utterly. His wings began to diminish. They rippled, no longer rigid along their length.\n\nStruggling for any measure of control, using his legs as crude rudders, Pol managed to turn toward the lake.\n\nDespite his rapid descent, by the time the water stretched beneath him he still flew too high. Soon, he would be beyond it. Possessing neither the strength nor the alchemical faculties to turn around for another pass, without considering the injuries he might sustain, he curled his wings around himself and fell.\n\nBelow, the surface of the lake was a mirror, reflecting the noon sun as a perfect circle. He kept his right eye open and focused upon it, letting its light sear into his skull, seeing his shadow become a black hole at its center just before his body hit the water.\n\nIt came to him, fully, a complete memory in the breath before impact:\n\nHe had been laid out by an attacker before. Once, years previously, a fellow mage\u2014Pol's senior by a decade, resentful of the younger elderman's quick advancement\u2014had nearly killed him with a simple, outsized concussion spell that blasted him thirty feet into an iron cauldron. He recalled the feeling of its impact, being slapped by a giant hand, and then the near immediate rebound of his body against an immobile surface far harder than his own body.\n\nThen darkness.\n\nThen, all in an instant upon waking, the awareness of the fragility of one's physical being. The sudden rush of memories... of bones breaking, of flesh collapsing.\n\nHe did not have the benefit of losing consciousness, this time. He remained aware as his body crumpled against the unyielding surface of the lake. His joints flexed and strained, threatening to snap. His bones, from the smallest to largest, creaked and rang. His neck bent at a sharp angle, driving his skull to the side and crushing it against his left shoulder, forcing his teeth down upon the tip of his tongue and severing it clean.\n\nThe surface yielded, as though he were a pebble dropped into molten sand. The lake drew him under. Lungs flattened, arms and legs immobilized by his wings, he could do nothing but sink through the glass-clear water, watching as the world grew dimmer. It seemed to him it took far longer to reach the sandy bottom than it should have, and when he came to rest it was as though a soft hand cupped him.\n\nHis mouth opened and closed, releasing a cloud of blood that turned his vision red. The sun, dim through the water, wavering in the turbulence of his passage, became a baleful eye.\n\nLife flitted before his eyes, tiny and nearly translucent. His eye flicked from one creature to another as they moved back and forth through the bloodied water, and finally formed an image. Shrimp. Smaller than their cousins fishermen netted in Lake Ten.\n\nEldermen hated water. They wanted nothing to do with anything that came from water.\n\nA smile formed on his lips.\n\nHe opened his mouth again, and took the lake into his lungs.\n\n\u2021\n\n_Swim while you can_ , Adrash said, eyes flaring in darkness. _You will not get the opportunity to do so again_.\n\nPol stared at the stricken god, whose armor appeared slightly gray under the weight of water. Having exhausted himself, he weighed his options. There were none. The god would recover before him. And so he turned and swam, as fast as his weary body would swim, through an openness of sea that was not open at all, but which pressed upon him from all sides. Black and cold and swarming with life, he felt the weight of sinuous bodies, monstrously-jawed and behemoth, eager for any morsel of flesh.\n\nHe escaped through the most shameful of realities: only because of his own smallness, his own insignificance in comparison, did he survive. Nonetheless, smallness notwithstanding, he could not rest. There was nowhere to rest. He had to continue pushing himself, beyond the point of collapse, breathing in the sea itself, lest one of the beasts finally notice him.\n\nAll the while, at his back, Adrash fumed in the shattered remnants of his abyssal palace, injured but not yet dead.\n\nPol had failed in his task. Before long, the god would repay him for his presumption.\n\nAnd so Pol swam. He reached land and flopped onto it, choking on air.\n\nBut even here, above ground, he had not truly escaped.\n\n\u2021\n\nHow long his eye had been open, he did not know. Someone stood over him, swaying from side to side, undulating like a flag in the breeze, like kelp rooted to the sandy lake bottom. He wondered how it was a person could be where he currently lay and survive.\n\nHe yawned, jaw popping, and gasped: the air entered him as a knife.\n\nWater bubbled in his chest and then burst forth, searing his throat: the knife left him.\n\nHe fell onto his side and curled inward, coughing and gagging upon water, mucus, and blood. He shook violently on the cold ground, breathing raggedly until he could breathe evenly. The pain remained\u2014in truth, it inhabited him from head to toe, occasionally flaring into prominence in one area and subsiding to allow another agony to bloom\u2014but it no longer obliterated thought.\n\nAir.\n\nConcentrating on the shifting ground before him, on the fingers of his clenched left hand\u2014a hand which seemed also to shift, growing larger and then smaller\u2014he suffered a moment of doubt. What if he had never landed on the mountainside? What if Adrash had killed him and he was now but one of the dead, waking in one of the many hells he had never quite been able to convinced himself did not exist? His mother had been fond of discussing the various hells a man might inhabit once he died.\n\nSome among the Usterti sect believed in a place between life and death, where a person would be forced to relive an awful fate (drowning, typically: the Usterti were fond of tales of drowning)\u2014that is, until the Goddess smiled upon that individual, lifting her free of torment.\n\nThe corners of his mouth turned down. He spit blood and mucus past the throbbing, shorn tip of his tongue. It steamed for only a moment before freezing.\n\n_I'll not start believing such nonsense now_ , he thought.\n\nHe rolled over and regarded the person standing over him. He blinked, and slowly the figure took on definition.\n\nA human male. Small, naked, grey skin a hairless mapwork of fine lines. Eyes bulging out from his skull, his lips pulled back in a perpetual grimace. Shrunken-cocked, testicles nearly nonexistent. He should have been shivering with cold, moving to keep hypothermia at bay. Instead, he seemed content to simply stand and stare. The longer Pol regarded him, the less the man's body undulated from side to side, leading Pol to believe he had been drugged or concussed. Concussed, likely, oxygen deprived from his near drowning.\n\n\"You\u2014\" He cleared his throat. \"Who are you?\"\n\nThe man did not respond, did not appear to have heard. His eyes remained focused on Pol's, but behind his gaze Pol sensed nothing.\n\nPol looked from side to side, finding his wings a crumpled mess spread around him. Two wet sheets, pathetic, lacking any structural integrity. With shaking hands he gathered them, shook the water and ice from them, and draped them across his body. He shook until he was no longer frozen, and then sat up, immediately burying his head between his knees.\n\n\"What are you looking at?\" he asked, expecting no response from the man.\n\nThere was none. Pol chuckled without humor and wondered if he had been wrong to dismiss the idea of hell. To spend eternity with the mindless, he surmised, would be a very effective hell indeed.\n\n\u2021\n\nEventually, he raised his head.\n\nHe blinked.\n\nBefore him lay an elder corpse.\n\nBeyond it, a trail of roughed earth stretched. It had been moved.\n\nAll thoughts of hell fled his mind. He peered up at the man standing over him. He could not recall if Adrash's memory of the valley had included inhabitants. Surely, it had not.\n\n\"Did you drag this here?\" Predictably, the man did not answer. Pol pointed to the corpse. \"You, you brought this here.\" He stood, looming over the man. He lowered his face until it was level with the other's. _\"Is. This. For. Me?\"_\n\nThe man's eyes shifted to the corpse. Pol nodded, though his companion failed to notice. The man took a step and bent, crouching toward the corpse. He extended a hand, and for the first time Pol noticed a flint, little more than a crude edge, clutched in his fingers. Grasping one of the corpse's forearms\u2014which ended as a ragged, bloodless stump just below the wrist\u2014the man used his primitive knife to cut a small strip of skin free. He placed it in his mouth and began chewing contentedly, then repeated the process.\n\nHe pivoted and held the flesh up to Pol.\n\nPol nearly slapped it from the man's hands. It was not that the thought of eating elder disgusted him. After all, he had used alchemical solutions made from the bodies of elders for much of his adult life, externally and internally. He had survived for days in the void of space on nothing but bonedust, as had all outbound mages.\n\nNo, it was the _sacrilege_ of seeing an elder corpse so abused. The corpse trade had produced a variety of associated guilds, each of whom possessed their own secrets and unique paranoias, guaranteeing that few whole corpses made it out of Stol or Knos Min. The Academy of Applied Magics contained only one whole elder corpse on display in its central library\u2014an entire city's worth of riches, a storehouse of alchemical power beyond the ability of any single man in existence to possess. Pol had spent many hours studying it, lingering on and memorizing every physical detail of the three-yard-long body as though it were that of a lover. Or a parent.\n\nTo see it treated so casually, solely as a food source...\n\nHe watched the man chew. His stomach gurgled and growled, and a cramp bent him double. He took the strip of skin and placed it in his mouth, surprised to find the taste immediately sweet, its texture like soft leather. Chewing on it, his mouth became wet, as if he just taken a drink of water. A coppery taste, similar to sagoli berry, replaced that of his own blood. The severed tip of his tongue tingled, became warm and then quickly numb.\n\nHe shivered in pleasure as the warmth spread quickly from his mouth, suffusing him in the space of twelve indrawn breaths. A moan escaped his lips.\n\nThe man watched Pol with no trace of understanding. He returned his attention to the corpse, now using the flat side of his rock as a rasp, sanding away at the protruding end of bone at the elder's wrist. After he had created a small pile of dust in the hollow of the corpse's belly, he wetted his middle finger and dipped it in. He offered the whitened fingertip to Pol.\n\nPol ignored it, and instead took his own measure of bonedust\u2014far more than he had ever consumed at once. The familiar sensation of wellness, of focus intensified, further bolstered the steel in his legs.\n\nHe concentrated on rousing the sigils from their slumber, but found them dampened still, gathered once more on his forearms and calves, immobile. Unless he found the source of the shield's effect and put an end to it, he would not soon be taking advantage of the alchemical resources he had found. Given the singular nature of the effect, he figured it to be an artifact of elder magic. The possibility of him halting it after incalculable millennia seemed unlikely.\n\nHe turned a complete circle, examining the jagged peaks that ringed the rubble-strewn valley. On his own, it would be a challenge to climb beyond the dampening wall, but while dragging a corpse? Two corpses or three? Even with his strength returned to him, the task would be considerable.\n\nHe stretched, vertebrae popping. An itch under his skin\u2014the feeling of walking from a cold building into the full heat of a summer's day: the awareness of a fever building in the body: the sensation of being too large for one's hide\u2014made him shiver.\n\n\"You,\" he said to the man who still crouched with his finger proffered. \"Do you have anything to say of value? No, clearly not. Do you have a leader, someone I can speak with?\"\n\nThe man simply stared.\n\nPol shrugged free of his ruined wings and slapped the man, who stumbled backward but did not fall, did not cry out or grunt. His eyes widened only fractionally.\n\nFingers curled into fists, claw tips biting into the flesh of his palms, Pol advanced and threw his weight into a right cross that broke the man's cheekbone. Pol felt and heard it shattering, savoring the perceptions. He savored also the sound of the man's shout of surprise, his choking sob thereafter, and followed his first attack with a sharp kick to the ribs.\n\nFour. Four snapped ribs. Pol grinned.\n\nHe took the crude knife from the man's shaking fingers and severed his wings, letting them fall uselessly to the ground. They were the stuff of intense alchemy, a product of the sigils. Once he resumed his power, he would grow a new pair more glorious, more substantial than the last.\n\nHe plunged the knife into the man's thigh.\n\nBehind him, someone cried out. He turned to see another man\u2014no, it was a woman, though they appeared so similar the distinction hardly seemed pressing\u2014running toward him.\n\nPol's grin widened.\n\nPain had been a transformative factor for him. Perhaps it would inspire these fools to speak something worthwhile.\n\n\u2021\n\nIn truth, he had no plan. He did not believe the inhabitants of the valley would prove able to communicate anything of value. They were clearly ancient, their meager lives extended by a steady diet of alchemicals that nourished the body extraordinarily while atrophying the mind. They had sat on the world's most valuable treasure without using it.\n\nNo. He had no plan. He merely wanted to cause pain.\n\nAs he circled the lake, he found others like the first two, and left them crippled behind him. Not one fought back, though in a similar way to the second, a few expressed concern for their neighbors without understanding what was occurring. Or, indeed, how to help. These he enjoyed hurting the most: their confused impotence amused him as much as it fueled his anger.\n\n\"Fight back,\" he said, repeatedly through his laughter. \"Do _something.\"_\n\nAnd so he made them scream.\n\nEventually, night came and he stopped. The bare ground failed to chill his naked flesh appreciably. Nonetheless, he found himself longing for a fire, a thing more alive than the creatures he had broken over the course of the day. He avoided looking into the sky for a time, and then relented to the inevitable. He had seen it before, but always at dusk.\n\nNow, with its twenty-seven broken components stretched across the bowl of heaven... closer than they ever were.\n\nMassive. Somehow, more massive than they appeared when viewed from orbit.\n\n_I did this_ , he mouthed.\n\nHe slept, and in the morning she appeared to him.\n\n\u2021\n\nJust like the others, though more weathered around the eyes. Wrinkles of expression, perhaps, as opposed to exposure to the elements.\n\nHe met her gray-eyed stare and recognized a depth behind it, a measure of awareness he knew did not exist in the others. Even the manner in which she crouched before him, resting her elbows upon her knees and letting her hands fall casually\u2014it spoke of a distinct personality, something he had not yet seen among them.\n\nShe nodded, as if she had followed his train of thought, and stood. It was only a dozen steps to the lake. She walked into it up to her knees and turned.\n\n_\"Wwwwwwaa,\"_ she said in a croak of a voice, a voice which never spoke. She lifted her left hand and stared at it, examining both sides before meeting his gaze again. Slowly, like a child doing so for the first time, she crooked her index finger for him to follow.\n\n\"Are you the leader here?\" he asked.\n\nShe cocked her head to the side, doglike.\n\nCurious, clear of the aggression that had informed the previous day, he rose.\n\nThey stood in the lake, she staring up at him, he staring down at her. Distantly, he recalled his mother. She had been a small woman, far from beautiful. Oh, how he had wished for her to be as silent as the woman he now regarded. Knowing so little of anything, she nonetheless had had an opinion on everything.\n\n\"What are we doing?\" he asked.\n\nThe corners of the woman's mouth quivered, trying to arrive at an expression. She shook her head and bent at the waste, cupping her right hand to gather water. She mimed lifting it to her mouth and drinking.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nShe shook her head again, repeated the drinking gesture.\n\nHe shrugged. Obviously, the water would have some effect, either ritually for her or physically for him. Perhaps, his consumption of the water had been responsible for his confused, perceptually altered state upon waking the day before. Drinking it again might leave him vulnerable. At the same time, none of the valley's inhabitants had expressed the slightest aggression toward him.\n\nGazing into the woman's eyes, he found no animosity, only an intensity he could not contextualize.\n\nHe crouched and dipped his hand into the lake.\n\n\"You first,\" he said, gesturing with his chin.\n\nShe looked down at her reflection in the water and smiled, slowly, apparently making sure of her expression before meeting his eyes again. He winced at the sight of her toothless gums, black with untold age.\n\nShe drank, filled her hand a second time, and drank again.\n\nHe followed suit without smiling.\n\nRemaining in a crouch, he waited, watching the still lake surface for any sign of a change in his perception. When none came and he grew impatient, he decided to stand.\n\nSeveral minutes passed. He decided to stand again.\n\nInstead, he fell backward into the water. The woman tumbled sideways, following him under. She wrapped her arms around him, pressing his arms to his sides. He did not fight her. Why he would fight her? She was beautiful, like his mother had been. He barely felt the pressure of the blood-warm lake around him. He breathed it like air.\n\nWhen she kissed him, he breathed her.\n\n\u2021\n\n\"Death doesn't exist here. Time is an illusion.\"\n\nHe stood along the shore. He turned full circle. Around the lake rose the forms of gray stone towers, tall and blank-faced, creating a skyline as severe as the peaks ringing the valley, a cityscape utterly unlike the cities of glass he had seen in Adrash's vision of the Clouded Continent\u2014different enough, in fact, that he immediately doubted its fidelity. An elder, dependent on the sun for its sustenance, would never lock itself behind windowless walls.\n\nThis was no true city of the elders: this was the product of a stunted imagination, a recreation of a thing that had never existed.\n\nNonetheless, he took in with interest the groups of elders he spotted. The creatures, their naked bodies tattooed brilliantly, their large double-irised eyes liquid in the sunlight, paid him not a moment's attention as they walked from place to place. Their locomotion, stately and deliberate, struck him as awkward, wary of their surroundings.\n\n\"No,\" he said under his breath. \"That isn't right, either.\"\n\nHe paused. Someone had said something to him, had they not?\n\nWith great difficulty, he tore his gaze from the oddly moving elders. Even in their wrongness, they were compelling.\n\nHe nearly took a step back at the woman's altered appearance. A lustrous, emerald-scaled gown clothed her from just below her breasts to mid-calf. Her figure, athletic and almost prototypically feminine in its proportions, bore no resemblance to that of the person he had met in the valley. They shared a similar bone structure, no more. Her eyes, also, had changed, brightening to reveal an increased awareness, a vitality she had lost.\n\nDrinking of the lake had been transformative for her. Unlike the city extending dull and oppressive around them, she was a genuine artifact of the past.\n\nLooking down at himself, he discovered she had changed nothing about his appearance. The sigils remained still on his arms and legs. His cock appeared pitifully small to him, as though it too had been affected by the dampening spell.\n\nHe sighed. \"What did you say?\"\n\nShe gestured to encompass the valley. \"Death doesn't exist here. Time has stopped.\"\n\nHe grunted and looked away, back to the city. Her beauty unnerved him. He had never liked women, much less human women. Licking his lips, he recalled how she had brought him here.\n\n\"I'd rather not spend eternity with you and yours,\" he said. \"And I won't. I'll be leaving soon, with something of value. Tell me, why have you brought me here?\"\n\n\"You don't want to know who I am?\" she asked.\n\n\"No,\" he said. He rethought this answer. \"Unless it has value, I don't want to know.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" she said. \"I had hoped the bringer of my death would be interested in me, somehow\u2014even impressed with my vision, here, where I've kept my true self from the white god for hundreds upon hundreds of years\u2014but maybe that's too much to ask at the end of my long, pointless life.\"\n\nOut of the corner of his eye, he saw her gesture toward the city. The elders dropped where they stood. Their buildings each fractured vertically with a crack of thunder, and then crumbled to the earth. The corpses deflated, mummifying in the ever-present sun. The rubble of the city slowly wore at the edges. Soon, the valley had returned to its present form.\n\nTurning to the woman, he found she had aged. Her gown had lost its sheen.\n\nShe snapped her fingers, and it was night.\n\nAbove them, the Needle spread in its shattered beauty.\n\n\"You want me to tell you something of value,\" she said. She tipped her head back to view the heavens. \"You did this. I know this fact in my bones. The souls of the elders proclaimed it the moment you dropped from the sky. I've waited ever since, these hundred and six days.\"\n\nHe huffed in annoyance. \"This is of no value. I _know_ what I did, woman. Quit guessing, speaking nonsense of elders.\"\n\n\"Guesses?\" she whispered. \"Nonsense.\" She crossed her arms below her withered breasts and closed her eyes, letting her head fall slowly to one side. Listening. \"Pol Tanz et Som: that is your name. You confronted the white god and injured him gravely before fleeing. And where did you flee? You fled here, hardly aware of doing so. Now, you desire two things: the resources you've found here, the bodies of the elders. And, second, the knowledge to apply the powers you covet.\"\n\nShe lowered her arms and met his stare. \"Am I close?\"\n\n\"You are,\" he conceded. \"But how?\"\n\nShe grimaced. \"You don't listen, do you? Or perhaps you still doubt. The elders speak to me. They've grown to trust me with their secrets. We share a similar vision.\"\n\n\"I see only corpses.\"\n\n\"You see wrong.\"\n\nHe considered disagreeing with her\u2014he had seen elders, hibernating yet well and truly alive\u2014but another concern came to the fore. \"Vision? What vision is this?\"\n\nShe laughed and regarded the sky again.\n\n\"This conversation goes nothing like I thought it would. You wait nearly two millennia, and you have certain expectations. I thought, when you came, you would know more. I suppose it doesn't matter. I've gotten what I wanted, what I deserve for being so patient. When the world is poised so...\" A look of rapture painted her features. \"... so beautifully, you don't ask for more.\"\n\nHe slapped her. She fell to her knees, causing the vision she sustained to flicker out. For a handful of seconds, he was underwater, staring into her gray eyes, breathing her in. He fought nausea at the thought of their intimacy, the fact that he had allowed it to occur.\n\n\"Make sense,\" he said to her. \"I don't care about your expectations. Tell me of this vision you share with corpses.\"\n\nShe wiped blood from the corner of her mouth. \"My vision is of devastation. It is of fire erupting from the crust of the world, of dust blanketing its face for eons.\"\n\nShe pointed skyward.\n\n\"It is _this_ , Pol Tanz et Som.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nThey started to move, so slowly at first that he thought he imagined their motion, then perceptibly quicker as the world's anchors set in and pulled. Increasing their spin as they drifted further and further from their positions, growing visibly in size as they closed in upon the world, the spheres became objects of menacing beauty, perfectly balanced on a scale beyond human reason. As large as moons, as deliberate as death, their leading rims began glowing with the friction of entry, of pushing aside the first protective layers of the world.\n\nAgainst the dictates of logic, as though possessed of their own poetic will, the larger spheres paused before initiating their plummet, allowing their smaller companions to enter the atmosphere first, dissecting the night with lines of fire.\n\nThe Needle fell, and Pol did not keep from himself a sense of satisfaction. This fate\u2014surely, he reasoned, anyone who had lived under the Needle would welcome it. Perhaps they would not admit it to themselves, but somewhere, in untouched corners of their minds, death held more attraction than continuing to live under threat. Men desired certainty above all else.\n\nThe ground shook underneath them as the world was impaled upon the Needle. The sky roiled with red and black lightning-shot clouds.\n\nThe woman stood at his side, smiling as her vision played out.\n\nEventually, she pointed into the ruins.\n\nFrom among them, a figure emerged: tall, over three yards from sole to crown, walking in an assured manner unlike those ill-drawn elders to which the woman had given brief life. In the flickering light of the end of the world, the elder's feature seemed to shift, the length and set of its bones fluid.\n\nWatching it, Pol was seized by recollection. As a child, he had seen a reptile drag a fisherman into the water. The man did not scream: he did not have the time. His mates had cried out, but even at his young age Pol had known their efforts would prove useless. The man was dead\u2014not because he was unfit, destined for death, but simply because nothing of his world could stand against a creature of the sea when it chose its proper moment.\n\nPol resisted the temptation to ready himself with a spell. It would not have worked, even had he not been trapped under a dampening spell. Not here. Here, now, he would be powerless. He had walked, of his own volition, into another world. He had seen that world in Adrash's mind, perpetually covered in cloud. Slumbering.\n\nThe broad-shouldered elder stopped a body length from Pol. Even halted, it never entirely stilled. Though it did not breathe, under its vein-mapped skin a colony of insects crawled.\n\nHead tipped slightly to one side, double irises spinning, it appraised him.\n\n_An offer_ , it said into the interior of his skull. Its voice, like a wasp's nest fallen at one's feet, or a bass string struck violently next to one's ear.\n\nWhen it did not speak again, he cleared his throat. \"Who are you to offer me any\u2014\"\n\nThe elder squinted, pulling its head back on its long neck. _Do not speak to me this way. It is an insult. It is ugly_.\n\nPol lifted his chin. \"I'll speak to you as I see fit.\"\n\nThe elder took two steps forward, closing the distance between them. Pol inhaled the scent of it, cumin and longras leaf, seawater and the dust of libraries\u2014and under these aromas, a tide so closely under the creature's dark, finely-furred skin that it leaked out through its pores... its blood, similar enough to his own though infinitely stronger.\n\nHis sigils stirred on his forearms and calves, tickling.\n\n_Impudent child_ , the elder said. Instead of anger, however, Pol's mind was filled with an air of amusement. _I will not punish you for your physical limitations. Speak with your vulgar food parts. We've not slept so long that we've not grown accustomed to the sound of your speech, horrifying though it is. We need not belabor this communication_.\n\nPol shrugged, having accepted his role as a child. \"You spoke of an offer.\"\n\n_Yes. An offer_. It gestured to the agitated sky. _We would see the world of man end_.\n\nDespite himself, Pol laughed. \"You've likely overestimated my power.\"\n\n_No. We know of you, and your encounter with the white god. You yourself would be a god. Already, you are close to achieving your goal. Not one among your people, or certainly among men, could have broken the Needle as you did_.\n\n_Still, you could have more. We can help you be greater than you ever dreamed_.\n\n\"The god of a dead world? Thank you, but I'd pictured a fair bit more than that.\"\n\nThe woman at his side cackled at this. Almost quicker than his eyes registered, the elder stepped to the side and backhanded her, sending her body spinning high into the black mirror of the lake. The vision she had created did not fade or flicker. In fact, it only solidified.\n\nThe elder returned its amber gaze to Pol. _Your picture is pitiful. Imagine a world where you are not a leader of men and eldermen, but a leader of elders_.\n\nPol opened his mouth to speak, and found he could not utter a sound.\n\n_Enough. We do not demand an answer now. We know your mind, and it seeks dominance. You will grow tired of being a god among men. When you grow tired, you will erase this era and usher in the new_.\n\n_How?_ Pol thought.\n\n_How is this not clear, child?_ The elder stepped back and held its arms aloft. _Bring down the sky. The pact among ourselves\u2014to not reveal ourselves or wake until the world is again clean of the interloper, man\u2014is universal, but the method of man's extinction is not generally agreed upon. Some wish to wait. Some have tried to rouse other individuals to our cause, charlatans and magicians. But I and my families are not... patient. And so..._\n\nIt gestured vaguely, in an oddly human fashion.\n\nThe muscles in Pol's jaw jumped as he ground his teeth together. \"Intriguing. But this is of no value to me in my battle. Give me something I can use, or I'll not even consider your offer. Sleep forever, if it pleases you.\"\n\nA horizontal line appeared below the elder's cavernous nostrils. It grew in definition and then split, revealing human teeth. Its corners turned up. As Pol fought to keep from taking a step backward (he would admit to being frightened, yes), the elder's body shed height and width. Its rawboned body thickened, taking on the proportions of an athletic man. Its skin color, already near enough to black, darkened further. It grew the pendulous genitals of a man, but these were quickly sheathed by the new skin it had grown.\n\nNo. Not skin. A suit.\n\nPol stared into the face of the Knosi featured so prominently in Adrash's mind.\n\n_Vedas Tezul_ , the elder said, its newly formed body mouthing the words.\n\nIts body shifted again, reducing in size as its shoulders narrowed and its hips widened. In seconds, before him stood the freckled woman whose features offended him so.\n\n_Churls Casta Jons_.\n\nNow the elders body ballooned, taking on mass outward and upward. Its skin turned from flesh to spheres of brass. From under its shelf of a brow, two blue coals glowed.\n\n_Berun_.\n\nThe names meant nothing to Pol.\n\n_These three stand in our way\u2014in your way. Each possesses power untapped, though the avenues of their power are lost to us. Like the white god, they defy our abilities to read. At times, they can be seen, but never can they be heard. For days now, they have been absent entirely from our minds_.\n\nThe elder returned to its original form and leaned forward, nostrils widening as it sniffed at Pol. _Like you, elderman, they are disappointingly opaque, a dangerous instability. Only their intentions are clear. They would halt the spheres in the sky or send them into the void. They would see the age of man never end_.\n\nPol kneaded his temples. This had gone on long enough. The sigils, restive, divided and subdivided on his forearms, forming faces that leered at the elder.\n\n\"Where?\" he said. He held up a hand to halt the creature from speaking more. On his palm, a horned man grinned and winked. \"Mind, I've agreed to nothing. Reason says I should enjoy my time as a god before I decide to have done with the world. However, if these individuals are as powerful as you claim, they are a threat to me. Tell me, now, where I can find them.\"\n\nThe elder pulled back from him. Its long finger pointed to the sigils.\n\n_Impossible. Silence these... abominations_.\n\nPol smiled at its discomfort. \"I think time will prove how much power I can summon. Tell me. Now.\"\n\n\u2021\n\n_Danoor_ , the elder said.\nCHAPTER SEVEN\n\nTHE 1ST To 7TH OF THE MONTH OF FISHERS THE ISLAND OF OSA\n\nS _radir is within you, and it will come out. Soon, if I am any judge_.\n\nThese words remained. They stuck. They angered Berun in their refusal to be forgotten.\n\nSradir\u2014the name meant nothing to him. Surely, this fact disproved Shavrim's claim.\n\nSurely, it did. _Surely_.\n\nAttempting to reason the words away simply fixed them more securely within his mind. By the morning of his third day under the dome of Osa, he found himself distracted constantly by thoughts of harm. He played out the scenarios of his own assumption by an alien god\u2014as if by imagining the worst outcomes they might suddenly strike him as ridiculous, impossible.\n\nBut it was not impossible. He knew this better than anyone.\n\nBeing taken forcibly by the will of another, pushed out of his own mind, woken to find people injured or dead at his own hand... it had occurred, and the nation of Nos Ulom considered him a murderer for it. Any reassurance he had taken from the death of the one responsible proved short-lived, however, for his creator would not be bound by the laws of death: on the journey to Danoor, Ortur Omali had nearly reassumed control over his creation.\n\nBerun had been forged as a tool. To think he could redesign himself according to his own whims now was the purest presumption. He had not overcome Omali alone in their final battle, after all. Fyra had been there, landing the final blow for him.\n\nWhat did it matter if he did not know the name Sradir Ung Kim? Had he known Omali could call him from his place among the dead?\n\n\u2021\n\nFrom dawn to just before nightfall, they traveled northward and upward, over a sparsely-treed landscape of folded rocks and algae-covered lakes, finally reaching the foot of their destination\u2014the monolith Shavrim called Adrashhut. Surrounded by rubble at its base, it rose, straight-edged and severe, giving the impression of a sudden, violent upthrust through the mantle of the earth.\n\nIt looked to Berun like the tip of a sword coming out from between a man's shoulder blades.\n\n\"There,\" Shavrim said, pointing a third of the way up the sheer face of the mountain to a sharp overhang. \"That is where he deposited the weapons.\" He breathed in deeply, inflating the muscular drum of his belly. His eyes widened and an unselfconscious grin lit up his features. \"It smells the same here. Exactly the same. My nose, after millennia...\"\n\n\"I'm happy for you and your nose,\" Churls said. \"How do we reach the cliff?\"\n\nShavrim instructed them to cover one eye and then the other before regarding the cliff face a second time. Stairs appeared, zig-zagging upward, but with each shift of the eye they disappeared again, melding back into the slate-colored stone.\n\nVedas looked away first, and began setting camp. He remained subdued throughout their supper, just as he had done since their arrival on the island. Churls kept his hand in hers, often leaning toward him to cast glances at the darkness over his shoulder. Despite Shavrim's assurance\u2014\"Nothing here will hurt you. Osa is a sanctuary.\"\u2014she could not keep herself from caution.\n\nBerun looked from her to Vedas, affection battling the uncomfortable awareness that he had been left out of an important discussion. He did not resent Churls for keeping Fyra a secret, yet she and Vedas and the girl had clearly interacted with Shavrim on some arcane level during their encounter in Marept. Even had no time passed after Vedas kissed Churls, their eyes would have given them away: they had come out of their trances haunted.\n\nApparently, they felt Berun did not need to know what had transpired.\n\nHe avoided anger in response. Anger had been a pathway for Ortur Omali to influence him in the past, and could be so for another. Nonetheless, he found his fists clenching of their own accord as he stared at Vedas and Churls.\n\nThey were his friends. They cared about him.\n\nSurely, they did.\n\n\u2021\n\nAfter his companions fell asleep, Berun left them. He could not stand the thought of a whole night spent staring at their sleeping bodies, listening to their breathing.\n\nAnd so he climbed.\n\nThe stairs were hardly worn by the millennia of exposure to the elements: each appeared cut to the exact same dimensions, sharp edged and straight. At every turn in the switchback, Adrash had created an alcove where one could turn and ascend the next series of steps.\n\nIn each alcove, rising from the floor, a part of the mountain, sat an altar\u2014and upon each altar a statue. Berun paused in the alcoves before resuming his climb, again and again, examining the figures the god had carved. Predictably, the majority were warriors, men and women in assorted modes of dress, wielding swords and axes and spears. Few bore alchemical arms.\n\nTo Berun's surprise, there were elderman and constructs among them. For obvious reasons, the constructs held his attention. He had never seen such variety, had never known such sinuously elegant creatures existed. A few were nearly identical to men, identifiable as artificial only by the thin lines of their mechanical sutures.\n\nThe final five alcoves stretched nearly double the size of the others, with proportionally larger altars and statues. The first contained a tall, thin woman with claws bared at the end of each arm. The second featured a winged man, arching his back with his open mouth to the sky.\n\nIn the third and fourth, he found twins, angularly built and naked. Though their posture mirrored one another, one appeared rigid, the other relaxed.\n\nHe recognized them by Shavrim's description. He mouthed their names.\n\n_Evurt. Ustert_.\n\nThe last space held the depiction of a unique creature, neither clearly man nor woman, human or elderman. Thorns grew from its shoulders, elbows, and knees. A series of knoblike growths extended down the lengths of its oddly jointed arms.\n\nHe stared at its harsh face, lingering on the wood-textured eyes, and knew its identity.\n\nStill, he felt nothing.\n\nHe ascended a final time, the broken sky unobscured by another set of stairs above him. The spheres of the Needle spun in their orbits, and he imagined what would occur to Osa if they fell. Would the crystal covering the island shatter? Would it hold, showing the death of the outer world through its perfect lens, holding the decay within itself?\n\nBerun reached the summit. Open to the elements and significantly worn by time, an altar sat, unmoored to the mountain. It had drifted over time, in fact, due to wind or rain or tremors: a third of its base hung over the edge of the cliff.\n\nUpon the altar was a carving of Shavrim.\n\nHe knelt before Adrash, hands open in supplication, eyes desperate. Pleading.\n\nBerun took it in his arms and moved it back from the precipice. He did not understand why he had been inspired to do so, but he did it, regardless, wondering if this were the moment when he ceded control to Sradir.\n\nShrugging the concern off, he knelt at the edge of the cliff and tried to find a measure of the calm he had once thought so easy to achieve.\n\nHe did not find it. In truth, he found only more doubt.\n\nYet the night passed overhead, and the sky did not fall. He resisted asking himself how many more such nights the world would be allowed.\n\n\u2021\n\nIn the hour before the sun rose, he halted his meditation and watched the largest inhabitants of the island wake from their slumber.\n\nMethodically, beginning with the westernmost individual and spreading to either side, as though they had timed it for the most dramatic effect, blunt reptilian heads rose on sinuous lengths of neck from each of the massive honeycombed nests anchored to the lower heights of the crystal dome. As many as six individuals, variously colored and sized, inhabited the largest structures.\n\nGenerations of wyrms, greeting the new day.\n\nWhen the sun rose fully over the back of Jeroun and reflected in the heights of the dome downward, bathing the enclosed world of Osa in bewitched light, the creatures emerge fully. They faced the morning and stretched, their long finger bones showing through the thin membranes of their wings.\n\nHearing their harsh calls to one another, his features drew into a frown.\n\nHe leaned over his crossed legs and peered over the edge of the cliff. The camp his companions had set the night before remained shrouded in shadow, but his eyes were adequate to the task. He watched Vedas emerge from the tent, left hand rubbing the leanness of his belly, right hand lingering at the neckline of his suit.\n\nThe man could not accept the reality of himself, Berun knew. He refused to be at ease in his own body. Nor would he return to the time when wearing a suit felt right, for it represented a way of life he no longer lived, convictions he no longer held.\n\nBerun shifted his brass bulk, not in pain, no (unless a component of his body became unmoored, he would never experience true pain), but certainly discomfort. He would never grow used to being confined to one form, stuck in a man-like shape, never to fully touch the sun again. In this, he felt communion with Vedas. Both had been betrayed by men they were expected to trust\u2014Vedas's abbey master Abse, on the one hand, Ortur Omali on the other\u2014and paid a physical toll as a result.\n\nVedas turned, his hands falling to his sides.\n\nChurls emerged from the tent, shrugging her shoulders and swinging her arms. She peered into the sky before slipping her arms around Vedas's waist, laying her head against his chest.\n\nThe spheres of Berun's teeth ground together. He stepped back from the cliff's edge, surprised by the intensity of emotion he felt at the sight of her.\n\n_I never liked the bitch much_ , a voice said. _Evurt took all the good material, leaving none for his sister_.\n\nBerun spun around, but he was alone on the cliff top.\n\n_Calm yourself, Berun_.\n\nReedy and measured, the voice held a trace of amusement. It sounded utterly unlike he had imagined it would. He had assumed something colder, more estranging.\n\n_You assumed wrong_ , Sradir said.\n\n\"I don't like this,\" he said. He turned back to the thousand-foot drop. \"I don't like anything that is happening.\"\n\n_I know. Imagine how it must be for me, though, constructed man_.\n\n\"No. No, I don't have to imagine any such thing.\" He folded his massive arms. \"This is different than what happened with Churls and Vedas. I'm awake, aware of your presence, like you're sitting across from me. How is there room within my mind? What happens now?\"\n\nA chuckle. _So many words. You believe I must do something?_\n\n\"I do. Why else would you be here, if not to act?\"\n\n_Perhaps for the view. I've been waiting for the proper time, listening only, but I see I should have does this sooner. You have wonderful eyes\u2014in many ways, better than my own. It's a pleasure to view the world from my current vantage point. Please, look down the mountain again. I wish to see my brother Shavrim as you see him_.\n\nBerun considered denying it the request, but relented.\n\nShavrim emerged from the tent.\n\nHis eyes focused directly on Berun.\n\n_Oh, hello_ , Sradir said. _That was fast. Raise your hand, Berun. Raise it. He's seen us_.\n\n\u2021\n\nThey stood together on the cliff, the four of them.\n\n\"Hello, Sradir,\" Shavrim said. He bowed.\n\nEmbarrassed, Berun bowed back.\n\n_Tell him hello_ , Sradir said. _No. Just say anything. I'll correct you if it's wrong_.\n\nBerun paused, and then said hello.\n\n_Good_ , Sradir said. _I like someone who can improvise_.\n\nShavrim stared into Berun's eyes, clearly searching. For what, Berun did not know\u2014a sign, perhaps, that he had found a proper ally, one possessed of sufficient strength to take his or her host by force. Ustert and Evurt had been a disappointment in this regard.\n\n_It would be easier to force you, yes. But I think not_.\n\nChurls stepped forward and laid a hand on Berun's arm. He fought the urge to pull it away as Sradir recoiled within him. Quickly, he was becoming used to how Sradir would react, how it would feel when it did.\n\n\"Berun,\" Churls said. She too searched his eyes. \"Are you... are you _you?\"_\n\nHe forced a smile down at her, and Sradir relented a bit.\n\n_I don't hate this one_ , it said. _When I can see beyond the aura Ustert has placed over her, she's actually quite likable. Not beautiful, but cute in a rough way. A dull sword is an appropriate tool for her_.\n\n\"I'm fine, Churls,\" Berun said. \"I'm me. This is not as it is for you and Vedas. Sradir is...\"\n\n_If you call me nice, I'll kill you_.\n\n\"... more agreeable.\"\n\nChurls smiled and embrace him, her arms extending only halfway around his torso. He patted her gently on the back, meeting Vedas's gaze over her head. After a moment, the Black Suit nodded, though his expression remained sober.\n\nShavrim opened his mouth and closed it. He opened it again.\n\n\"Agreeable,\" he said. He repeated the word, as if hearing it for the first time.\n\n\u2021\n\n_I've learned something, Berun, and I've made a decision. We do this, and then we leave_.\n\nHis foot slipped. He formed a question in his mind.\n\n_No, don't ask why. I'm not forcing you to do anything. I'll explain, and you'll agree\u2014for your own good. Now, concentrate upon your task_.\n\nCurious but unwilling to push the matter, he planted his foot more solidly and flexed, causing the hundreds of joined spheres in his knees and shoulders to shriek with strain. Next to him, Shavrim roared, thick slabs of muscle shaking. Gradually, the panel of stone upon which they pushed began to move, revealing the outline of a massive door into the mountain Shavrim had assured them existed. It ground shrilly in its frame, inch by inch, extending further and further into the rock face.\n\nBerun's foot slipped a second time... a third time. Shavrim paused to catch his breath, repositioned himself with his back to the slab, and began pushing once more.\n\nThe door cleared its frame. Berun shot out a hand to prevent Shavrim from falling as the door tipped forward and slammed soundly home into a recess in the floor, melding again with the mountain.\n\n_Enter, Berun_ , Sradir said, avid. _Beat him to it. You did most of the work, anyway_.\n\nAmused by Sradir's pettiness, Berun kept his arm out, palm pressed to Shavrim's chest, preventing the man from advancing.\n\n\"Leave it,\" Berun said. \"I'll check.\"\n\nHe entered the chamber alone. Once his trailing foot cleared the doorway, six torches bloomed into life, revealing a circular room perhaps six yards across, its wall covered in relief carvings of faceless bodies locked in embraces both violent and erotic. They appeared to shift in the firelight. The longer Berun stared, the more they seemed to move, undulating in a circle around him, first in one direction and then the other. He imagined a flesh-and-blood man would become dizzy.\n\nAn impressive effect, he noted, yet it was as nothing compared to what sat under each torch. Statues, so cunningly carved that they nearly breathed in the flickering light, lifelike enough that he expected them to rise from their cross-legged posture, held weapons in outstretched hands. Somehow, Adrash (for it could only have been a god who possessed the skill to create such life in stone) had managed to convey the reluctance of the offering: the figures appeared ready to snatch back their weapons if the taker proved unworthy to wield it.\n\nShavrim, the first on the left, held a long, dark, silverish knife.\n\nThe winged man\u2014 _Orrus_ , Sradir whispered\u2014held a glass spear.\n\nUstert and Evurt held a pair of short swords, silver and bronze. _Ruin and Rust_.\n\nThe thin, clawed woman\u2014 _Bash, my dear departed Bash_ , Sradir said\u2014held a razored circle.\n\nAnd Sradir, first on the right...\n\nBefore he had registered the desire to do so, Berun bent and took the short whip in his left hand. Though tiny in his outsized fist, he could not deny an immediate sense of appropriateness, of _utility_. His mouth drew into a sneer even as a part of him relished the feeling. He had always eschewed weapons.\n\nPrior to his last encounter with Omali and the freezing of his form, it had never been an issue. He had been any weapon he wanted.\n\n_I'm sorry for what you've lost, Berun_.\n\nHe grunted. Behind him, Shavrim cleared his throat and entered the room, with Churls and Vedas following. Shavrim picked up his knife, flipped it end over end into his left hand, and then slipped it into the sheath he wore at his hip. It was a casual gesture, but Berun had been watching carefully.\n\nA tremor had passed through Shavrim when his hands left his weapon's hilt.\n\n_Yes_ , Sradir said. _Well observed. He's not immune to its touch, just as I'm not to mine. And Sroma is a great deal more powerful than Weither. It's possessed of its own mind, and he's cautious of its influence. As he should be_.\n\nFeatures blank, Shavrim glanced at Berun as he picked up Orrus's spear and Bash's circle.\n\n\"You have something to say? the horned man asked.\n\nBerun did not answer. His attention was suddenly elsewhere.\n\nChurls and Vedas stood separated by several feet, staring down at the statues of Ustert and Evurt. Their hands stretched toward one another in the exact position of a clasp, as though they believed themselves to be holding hands.\n\nBerun looked away and then back, trying to convince himself that their bodies were not thinning while he watched, that their skin had not taken on a metallic luster.\n\n_Your eyes aren't deceiving you_ , Sradir said. _They're nearly here. The bitch, especially. She's close. Can't you smell her? Like curdled milk_.\n\nBerun took one step toward Churls.\n\nSlowly, like an egret following its prey, she swiveled her head toward him without moving another muscle. Vedas mirrored her. Their eyes were blanks, silver and bronze.\n\n\"Sister,\" Churls said. \"Brother,\" Vedas said.\n\n_Never could wrap your minds around me, could you, fools? Don't move, Berun. Don't speak a word_.\n\nDisinterested, Churls and Vedas turned back toward the statues. As one, without moving the position of the hands that still seemed to be linked, they moved forward to grip the hilts of their swords.\n\nShavrim paused at the doorway and turned back. His hand strayed to the knife at his hip.\n\nSradir sighed. _You wanted them here, brother, and now... what? You want to stop them at their point of entr\u2014_\n\nIts last word died in a fading hiss.\n\nA light, harsh enough to briefly overload even Berun's eyes, flared in the center of the room.\n\nIt died as suddenly as it had appeared.\n\nIn its place stood Fyra, clothed in a jointed suit of blindingly white armor. In her right hand she held a sword\u2014also blindingly white, a proper match for Ustert and Evurt's weapons, though sized for her small stature. She took four quick steps to a point equidistant between her mother and Vedas and swung her blade up, as though attempting to slice an imaginary opponent from pelvis to chest.\n\nIt was a clumsy maneuver, directed at nothing, yet it produced an immediate effect.\n\nChurls and Vedas gasped and pulled their arms in, cradling their hands against their bellies. Shuddering, they turned toward Fyra, their movements no longer synced, their skin and eyes losing the godly hue. Vedas bared his teeth and growled, but it quickly became a wheeze. Churls did even less, merely opening her mouth to emit a constricted breath.\n\nWithout another sound, they fell sideways toward each other.\n\nSradir made a whistling sound that reverberated through Berun's head.\n\nFyra turned and leveled her sword at Shavrim. Her arm shook slightly.\n\n_You want to be separated from your soul, ugly man? I've never done it, but I'd like to try. We'll see who wins_. She flipped the faceplate of her helm down, staring through the eye slits of a mask that resembled her mother exactly. _This is a place of power. You knew being here would make your sister and brother stronger_.\n\nShavrim nodded. \"I did. And I was wrong to allow them to enter. Ustert and Evurt are too strong, too unpredictable, to allow full control. I see that now.\"\n\nFyra laughed, and sounded nothing like a child. _Good for you. You should have seen it sooner. Take the weapons out yourself, and then carry my mother and Vedas outside_.\n\nShe turned to Berun without waiting to see if her order was followed. She was tired, clearly, her sword arm dipping only to be righted with a jerk. He stared at the wavering tip of her ghostly sword, wondering how much damage she could do with it.\n\n_Good question_ , Sradir said, its voice near reverential. _I'd seen her in your mind, but I'd never imagined... how wonderful... How is it she's even here? The crystal should have shielded her from entering. The strain of maintaining control\u2014_\n\n_I can't hear you_ , the girl said, her voice barely a whisper, _but I know you're talking_. She took two faltering steps toward Berun, lifting her sword to keep its point between his eyes. _He's my friend. I helped him when no one else could. What are you going to do with him?_\n\nSradir paused, a pressure building. When it spoke again, its voice held a new quality, a resonance he imagined radiating outward from the spheres of his mind.\n\n_Girl, I'm going to finish what you started_.\n\n\u2021\n\nAfter two days of travel, Berun stood before the barrier of crystal separating him from the sea.\n\nThe sea, and his creator.\n\n\"You're sure?\" he asked.\n\n_For the hundredth time, I'm sure_.\n\nHe spoke the words Shavrim had taught him and waited. After Shavrim had spoken them five days earlier, the reaction had been near instantaneous, but Berun did not worry, for both Shavrim and Sradir had anticipated a delay or even a failure. The spells keeping the island closed were ancient beyond human knowledge. Only Adrash had discerned their nature, and only his children could gain entry by uttering the phrase to unwind the arcane lock.\n\nThough inhabited by Sradir, Berun could not properly be called Adrash's child.\n\nIn truth, he did not mind the wait. He did not relish encountering Ortur Omali again.\n\nHe pressed a hand to the clear wall. The thickness of the crystal\u2014were it a liquid, he could have reached only a quarter of the way through\u2014distorted the view of the rocky shoreline at the foot of the dome. A long, reptilian creature had crawled out of the sea to sun itself, its back bowed unnaturally by the warping effect.\n\n_Your mind_ , Sradir said. _It's like this creature as you see it now. You've been distorted by the spectre of your fear. You've been warped, set up to be broken. We're about to change that, Berun. Speak the words again_.\n\nHe let his hand drop. \"Do you swear? This is your true intent, to help me?\"\n\n_I promise you. I won't lie to you_.\n\n\"Then tell me this. Why are you the way you are now? I see Shavrim. I watch him. He clearly didn't expect you to be as you are. How can I be assured this is not an act? How can I be sure you aren't lying to me, leading me to my doom?\"\n\n_That's an easy answer. You can't. You can be sure of nothing. But time passes, and we're all changed, even gods. I didn't expect to be as I am now. For the span of my life, I expected to succeed Adrash, rule with a ironwood fist. I did not expect to one day ride a constructed man through forgotten forests and help him fight his dead father_.\n\nHe felt her shrug, though how such a thing could be communicated was beyond him.\n\n_But here I am. And you have to trust your instincts about me_.\n\nHe nodded and said the words.\n\n_Again_ , Sradir said. _Together_.\n\n\"Uperut amends,\" he said, Sradir harmony to him. \"Ii wallej frect. Xio.\"\n\nA dimple appeared in the crystal and pushed toward the outside world, creating a visible tunnel through the enchanted material. It widened quickly, creating a passage large enough for a domesticated cat, a dog, a child standing upright. Berun stooped slightly and entered it.\n\n_You've never smelled the sea_ , Sradir said. _I just now realized. Sad_.\n\nHe paused before leaving the shelter of the passageway and gazed out at the calm water. \"What should I expect?\"\n\nSradir laughed. _A battle, Berun. Expect a battle_.\n\n\u2021\n\nImmediately, he sensed something had changed. His own awareness of himself\u2014of his body, the relation of each component sphere to its neighbor\u2014intensified until the world itself seemed to fade around him. He expanded as everything else in existence contracted. His chest ballooned, creating a dark space within which his two innermost spheres knocked together. A lonely, hollow sound. He had heard it before, but not since he froze himself into the shape of a man.\n\n\"Father...\" he said.\n\n_Berun_ , Sradir said. _Stay with me. Focus on me_.\n\nHe fell to his knees on the cragged shoreline, his vision flickering in and out, replaced by stretches of blackness, blackness beyond which there could be no return.\n\nIf souls existed, they resided in flesh. He did not want to die, and be nothing.\n\n_You will not die_ , Sradir said. _But he_ is _coming. Prepare yourself_.\n\nConcentrating upon Sradir's voice, the world slowly swam back into clarity. The sea seemed to call to him, neither in the voice of Sradir nor the voice of his father, and so he stood, creaking from each of his thousand joints, and stumbled to the waterline. Seized and emboldened by an idea he would not, could not give words to, he walked.\n\nMore surely with each step, into the water. Not so much confident as resigned to his fate.\n\n\"Let him follow us,\" he said just before his head fell below the sea. Glass-clear shallows rose above him, twenty and then thirty feet. Sand gradually covered the stones of the shore.\n\nHe walked, and did not look back.\n\nSradir remained silent. It had been in his mind long enough to know he had been crushed under deeper water than that of the sea.\n\nAt first, he believed himself to be imagining the darkness brewing before him, but soon the reality of it proved impossible to deny. It became a heavy weight upon the surface of the water, appearing like the growth of distant clouds on a clear day. It spread, a droplet of ink, its fine tendrils reaching toward him.\n\n_You may have gotten this backwards, Berun_ , Sradir said. _He did not follow us. We've come to him_.\n\n_Berun_ , his father called, drawing the name out into the long creak of ship's masts bending in the storm. It reverberated as the crack of thunder.\n\nBerun stumbled, righted himself sluggishly, and kept walking.\n\n\"Father...\" he said. Water muffled his voiced into incomprehensibility. Nonetheless, he knew he would be heard. \"How\u2014why\u2014are you here? Why do you plague me?\"\n\n_No_ , Sradir said. _Don't think of him as father. He is a sorcerer, a back-alley mage. Think of him as a thing, a thing with no power over you_.\n\nHe laughed. Existence was not so simple as deciding upon ways to think.\n\n_Much of existence is exactly that simple, Berun_.\n\nOmali repeated his name, loudly enough that the world rumbled under Berun's feet.\n\nCreatures fled from the encroaching darkness. Sleek, torsional fish snapped at each other in panic while evading the claws and teeth of equally frenzied reptiles. Their massive bodies whipped past Berun, flattening him to the sea bottom, lifting him from his feet and sending him spinning. But for a few reflexive bites, the animals ignored him.\n\nAfter they had passed, he dropped to the sand unscathed and rose. Overhead, the sun showed through thirty feet of inky saltwater, appearing more foreboding than the moon through storm clouds.\n\nWhen his innermost spheres tolled together in his deep chest, they created an achingly lonely sound. A familiar sound. He and Omali had once visited Corol, a northern Ulomi city caught in the thrall of plague. There they watched infected men and women walk the streets, dull chimes locked around their throats. It had been Berun's first exposure to death.\n\n_Bring out your dead_ , Omali called, echoing throughout Berun's body. _Bring out your dead..._\n\nBerun's vision darkened. His joints loosened, sagged.\n\n\"Help me,\" he said to Sradir. \"I'll fall apart.\"\n\n_I will. And no, you won't_.\n\nThey concentrated together, and the spheres within his chest slowly ground to a halt. His ankles, knees, and hips solidified under him. The darkness, however, intensified around him, forming itself into a nearly solid thing against which he struggled to make headway.\n\nYes, he still walked. Without a glance behind, he pushed himself forward, into the darkness his creator had made. The ink swirled around him, forming and reforming half-recognizable images. It eddied around his feet and tugged his shoulders from side to side. He swayed, nearly tipping again and again, but he persisted.\n\nFear had not been removed from him: he felt it ever more keenly. Sradir kept itself in the forefront of his mind, but otherwise maintained silence.\n\nIt, too, he imagined, could not predict the outcome of this encounter.\n\n\u2021\n\nAn orange light bloomed in the ebon distance, as of an alchemical torch being lit in the gloom of night. It did not grow brighter or larger, yet he knew it to be advancing toward him. He sensed it in the same way a ship captain sensed an oncoming storm or the wind about to die upon his sails\u2014as a fact of living, undeniable in its potency.\n\nWhen the darkness surrounded him completely, the light split in two.\n\nHe stopped. Before him stood Omali. Two brilliant amber lenses, liquid and glowing like glass fresh from the kiln, had replaced his eyes. Bubbles of light poured constantly from their surface, rising into the blackened water as two thin streams of light. His body had changed from their last encounter, as well: skeletally thin and pale, his hairless nudity revealed no trace of his sex. He possessed no mouth, no ears, and only two closed slits for nostrils. To Berun, his creator had come to resemble a creature born to inhabit caves, far from the light.\n\n_An eater of worms_ , Sradir said. _Say that. Now. Call him an eater of worms_.\n\nBerun shook his head, transfixed by his creator's stare.\n\n_Your days of pretending are over_ , Omali said. He lifted his right hand and opened it, revealing the webbing between each finger. His open hand became a fist. _You will now submit to me_.\n\nSradir's voice grew louder. _Do it, Berun. Say he's an eater of worms_.\n\n\"Eater...\" he said. \"Eater of...\"\n\nOmali tipped his head to one side and turned it slightly, revealing an earhole Berun had not seen. The bubbles streamed more quickly from the sorcerer's eyes as he stepped back. A pair of long, thin swords grew in his hands.\n\n(No, Berun noted. They grew _from_ his hands, drawing material from his own body. His arms, already thin, became twigs as the blades lengthened.)\n\n_What is this?_ Omali asked. _Your mind is corrupted. Tell me, who is this interloper? It is different from the girl_.\n\n_Well apprehended, magician_ , Sradir said. _Attack him, Berun. Don't answer or delay. My strength is yours. Do it, now_.\n\nBerun's eyes flared as Sradir unfolded itself and stood inside him, wearing him as though he were a suit of armor. For the space of several seconds, he basked in the sensation of wellness\u2014a sensation he had not experienced since the days when he could bend and mold himself to any form. Each component of his body tickled against its neighbor in readiness, sliding into new configurations, moving from his interior to his surface. Dirt, gathered from months without washing in the desert, rose around him in a red cloud.\n\nHe closed his massive hands into tight fists, savoring the piercing sound of brass rubbing against brass. The simulated muscle of his frame bunched and writhed. The corners of his mouth curved upward into a grin.\n\nHe was an alchemical engine once more, primed and rumbling.\n\nAllowing himself no time to doubt his actions, he stepped forward unencumbered by the water and wrapped his arms around Omali's shoulders, crushing the small man to his chest. His forearms and hands flowed into a fluid mass of spheres, cohering into two constricting snakes seeking to crush the life out of their prey.\n\nBut Omali would not be crushed. His frame, while frail in appearance, was harder than stone. It possessed strength to match its opponent's. Omali flexed against the bonds Berun had constructed, inexorably lifting his creation's arms. As he did so, he tapped the edges of his swords along Berun's flank. Where it touched, Berun became numb.\n\nCandles, one by one, snuffed out.\n\nFor the first time in his existence, Berun lost contact with elements of his body.\n\nHe had heard men describe pain before, of course. This seemed far worse, however, an absence where there should have been only connection. It was worse, in fact, than the rare occasion he had been struck hard enough to remove a sphere entirely.\n\nWorse, even, than being stuck as a man-shaped thing.\n\n_No, it's not_ , Sradir said. _You're being manipulated to fear, Berun. You must not\u2014No! Hold your ground_.\n\nBerun had dropped Omali and backed away.\n\n_You are a mistake to be rectified_ , Omali said, arms spread wide, the points of his swords leveled at Berun. _Clearly, I was too liberal in the freedoms I allowed you. This is immaterial now. Now, I will have you and the thing inhabiting you evicted. I have much to do, and it cannot be accomplished in this wisp of a body. It is strong, but I need something more... permanent_.\n\nHe strode forward.\n\nBerun backed up a step before Sradir halted him.\n\n_I'm sorry_ , it said. _I'd rather see you fight this battle, but we don't have the option of losing. I need your body as badly as Omali does_.\n\nThe sorcerer's swords came down. Through no order of his own, quicker than he would have thought possible, Berun's hands came up and caught them. Immediate numbness in his palms resulted, but Sradir did not so much as flinch. The god caused Berun's wrists to rotate until, with a muted crack of bone, the blades broke.\n\nOmali screeched as blood pumped from the wounds. Bubbles streamed from his eyes and burst incandescently. He tried to back away, but Berun's fists were locked in position. His feet were rooted to the sea floor.\n\nSradir opened Berun's mouth and spoke with his voice, with a clarity that the constructed man could not have achieved underwater.\n\n\"You want to know who I am, magician? I am Sradir Ung Kim, Wood Heart\u2014heir to Adrash.\"\n\nOmali shook his head. No, he said in a strained whisper. _There is no one by this name. There is no heir to Adrash_.\n\nSradir laughed through Berun's mouth and pushed Omali backward with his right hand, leaving his left clenched around Sradir's broken sword arm.\n\nThe spheres of Berun's chest erupted outward, ejecting something quickly to the surface.\n\nHis right hand\u2014Sradir's right hand\u2014rose from his side and closed around a handle.\n\nWeither, Sradir had called it. Berun had not known himself to be hiding the whip.\n\nThe god brought the thin weapon low, arcing it near the constructed man's hip and flipping it fluidly into a backhanded, slanting cut across Omali's torso, severing the sorcerer from rib to shoulder.\n\nNo expression crossed Omali's face. He uttered no sound as the seam split and the top half of his body toppled backward.\n\nSradir stepped forward through thick clouds of blood, pushing Omali's lower half to the side. It crouched near the wounded man as the trail of radiant bubbles stopped flowing from his eyes.\n\n\"Now,\" it said. \"Now, you die. It will be...\" It smiled. \"Permanent\"\n\nIt reached forward, covered Omali's face with Berun's broad hand, and slowly crushed the sorcerer's skull.\n\nNo stranger to violence, Berun nonetheless quailed at the sight. Blood, bone, and a liquid radiance erupted from between his fingers, the last of which bent like smoke toward his face. It wavered before his eyes, a living, vital thing. His instinct was to pull away from it before contact, but Sradir kept him from doing so: it caused his mouth to open and drink the golden essence.\n\nHe fell back as the inky darkness dissolved above him. He stared at the sun through thirty feet of suddenly clear water, the vision faltering in each eye, off-time, a stuttering rhythm.\n\nHolding himself together became impossible against the will of Sradir, and so he decohered. After each component sphere loosened its grip in the matrix he had created, his body spread out as a mat of brass upon the sea floor. Under his own control, this would not have bothered him. He had once done exactly this to gather sunlight.\n\nUnder another's control, it was agony.\n\n_You'll likely not believe me_ , Sradir said, _but I'm sorry_.\n\nApologies meant nothing. He had been betrayed.\n\n_True. But I'll apologize, nonetheless. I'll apologize also for what hasn't yet occurred, what you can't prepare for. Hold steady, Berun. You have eaten your maker. Digesting him will not be pleasant_.\n\n\u2021\n\nSradir did not lie. It was as far from pleasant as Berun could have imagined.\n\nIn life, his creator had not carried within him an ounce of compassion. No sentimentality or allegiance. No quarter given to anyone. Possessed of a vision of brutal clarity, he coerced others to his own ends without a trace of regret, trading in lives as though they were coins. Near the end of his first mortal existence, a madness had taken root in his mind, focusing the dark lens of his intellect on the deficits he identified in humanity itself.\n\nBerun flinched from the reality, the immensity, of Omali's narcissism.\n\nThe pact he had made guaranteed the end of an entire world, the creation of a wasteland that would exist for millennia\u2014simply to usher in an age where his hands would not be tied, where his words would be as law. He had been bound too long by the will of kings, ground under the heel of lesser men only because they possessed the resources to do so.\n\nBut the elders\u2014the elders, hibernating away under permanent cloud cover, shielded in a state of suspension, guaranteed him a place at their table, a king among kings. A god. They seduced him with the only object of his desire, and so he planned. Alone among men, he discovered a pathway to life after death. A true life, among the resurrected heirs of Jeroun.\n\nHe had designed Berun as his vehicle.\n\nFirst, to enact his will against those who would prevent the fall of the Needle.\n\nSecond, as a body in which to weather the death of the world. A place to hibernate away the long afternoon that followed.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe sun set and the creatures of the sea returned to their hunting. They circled around Berun, clearly curious but unwilling to touch him. He kept his eyes to the sky as the moon rose, dragging the disjointed halo of the Needle with it. Through the rippling surface of the sea, each sphere appeared dangerously mobile, shuddering in its orbit as though eager to fall.\n\nHe imagined them falling, and wondered why he would do so.\n\n_Human curiosity?_ Sradir said.\n\nHe considered pointing the obvious fact out to Sradir.\n\nIt snorted dismissively. _You're more human than not. And no, before you ask: there's no part of you that desires the same ends as your maker. You're your own man. In your desires, you always have been. It_ paused before continuing. Perhaps it wanted an answer he would not give, a sign he had forgiven it for its deception.\n\nThere had never been a question about the outcome. It had defeated Omali handily, and this fact angered Berun more than its assumption of his body.\n\n_You thought we were in this together_ , Sradir said. _Tell me, Berun\u2014have I ruined everything?_\n\nHe grunted. \"Answer it yourself. My mind is yours to read.\"\n\n_Not true. There are aspects hidden even from me. I'm a good guesser, and that's all_.\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"You're a good liar. And I'm bad at discerning truth.\"\n\nOutcroppings of rock began appearing under his feet. On the moonlight-dappled sea floor, they appeared like the backs of burrowing creatures. He trod heavily upon them, causing his body to ring like a bell, and tried to still his thoughts.\n\nSradir said nothing, for which he felt gratitude, which in turn inspired annoyance.\n\nThe island of Osa proper began. He ascended the jumbled, twilit steps of stone ten, twenty, thirty feet, and rose above the surface of the sea.\n\nStanding on the shore, a thousand rivulets of saltwater sluiced from his body. Above him stretched a wall of crystal, reflecting the night behind him perfectly.\n\nThe sky. The sea, reflecting the sky.\n\nHe said the words without Sradir. \"Uperut amends. Ii wallej frect. Xio.\"\n\nThe passageway opened immediately. He spared the sea no backward glance.\n\n\u2021\n\nHe traveled a night and a full day before Sradir spoke to him again.\n\n_Wait. Stop, Berun. Please stop_.\n\n\"Stop me yourself,\" he responded.\n\nHis pace slowed as Sradir ground him to a halt gently. He saw no point in resisting.\n\n_I'm not doing this to show you I can. You know I can. Look up. Look around you_.\n\nHe lifted his head and did so, finding himself at the foot of a low wooded hill.\n\n\"Yes? What of it?\"\n\n_You haven't looked up from the ground for an entire day. Take a moment and see with these brilliant eyes of yours. This is the world we wish to preserve_.\n\nHe considered refusing, but once more, what would be the point in it? Each of Sradir's displays of power served only to dispirit him.\n\nTurning a full three hundred and sixty degrees, he took in what he had noticed only as obstacles to be overcome. Behind him lay gently sloping plains, fold upon fold of golden grass and sparse forest. Miles and miles of geography, trampled under his feet in his haste to reach his companions. In the distance before him, blue mountains rose in the center of the island, his ultimate destination.\n\nCloser at hand, a creek wound down the slope of the wooded hill. It met another creek at the hill's foot, and together they formed a narrow, swiftly-moving river that disappeared into the forest to the south. He imagined how a man would have viewed it\u2014as unthreatening, idyllic, a place to rest a body after a long walk\u2014and decided on a proper response.\n\nHe shrugged. \"It's beautiful.\"\n\nSradir kept him from lifting his foot and moving on.\n\n_It is, yes, but that's hardly all. You're being willfully dense, ignoring the fullness of what's before you. Curiosity is not something you've ever had to force yourself to feel, so don't start pretending disinterest now. How do I know you're pretending? I haven't been in here, wasting time. I've observed you. Fact is, I'm the closest you'll come to a lover, a true friend, or a parent_.\n\n\"You could equally well be an enemy. A very good enemy, I'd add.\"\n\nSradir sighed. _What occurred between us, I regret. If there had been another way, then I would have chosen it, but there wasn't another way. To assume I mean you harm is ridiculous. I don't ask for your thanks, but I expect you to realize the threat Omali posed to you. Ask yourself, would I have done what I did if I meant you harm? I'm here to help us toward a shared goal. That's the entirety of it, Berun. That's all I want you to see_.\n\n\"You said you needed my body.\"\n\n_I did. I do. I need your physical form to enter this world. Otherwise, I'm little more than a shade of my former self, content to wither away as time counts down to a close. When the threat to the world became clear even through the haze of that half-life, I focused upon the one soul attuned to my own_.\n\n_You, Berun_.\n\n_I fought the inertia of death and immortality both, because there's something about you. I wanted to return, yes\u2014the world still holds its sway\u2014but if not for you I wouldn't have found the strength to do so_.\n\nHe shook his head and tried to raise his foot again. This time, Sradir relented. He climbed the hill, descended its other side, and continued. His gaze remained fixed on the mountaintops rising over each successive summit. Overhead, wyrms corkscrewed through the sky, calling to one another with nearly human voices.\n\nAs the waning sun sent tall shadows before him, he finally relented to his desire.\n\nHe stopped and tipped his head back.\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" he said.\n\n_Yes_ , Sradir answered. _It is_.\n\n\u2021\n\nAs promised, the land led him to it. A mile due south of the weapon repository, Adrash had carved a roadway into an ancient lava flow. It descended ten miles into a verdant thorn bush and cactus-studded plain, ultimately depositing him at the entrance to his destination.\n\nHe passed a hand over the finely pitted surface of one massive basalt pillar that helped form the entryway. It and its neighbor rose fifty feet over his head, the crossbar at its height extending nearly twice that length. An army could have passed through, thirty men across. A family of wyrms could have roosted upon it. He wondered what Adrash's intentions had been, creating such a massive monument. Had he been so bored with existence?\n\n_Yes_ , Sradir said. _That's it, exactly_.\n\nHe climbed a broad stairway of black stone, gazed down into the partially cloud-covered valley, and found his sense of scale confounded a second time.\n\nThough he had known a valley to be his destination, a ridge of stone had shielded it from view during his descent along the lava road. Nothing from Sradir or Shavrim had led him to expect anything other than a natural feature of the land.\n\n_Surprise_ , Sradir said. _Welcome to Shavrieem, useless monument to my brother_.\n\nBerun rocked back with a shrill creak.\n\nAn entire nation could have attended games in the coliseum Adrash had carved into the immense, almost perfectly circular depression. Danoor's Aresaa Coliseum, itself the most massive stadium on the continent, could have fit inside the terraced space alongside a hundred of its reproductions. Row upon row of stands, divided by staircases that plummeted the better part of a mile, circled the walls of the valley.\n\nEven the lowest seats possessed a spectacular view, rising nearly three hundred feet above the earthen floor. Gated entryways, each large enough to sail a galleon through, were spaced at regular intervals in the walls below them, leading Berun to believe that more construction existed beneath the valley itself\u2014immense tunnels, holding cells, and training areas.\n\nHe sensed amusement, but also a measure of annoyance, from Sradir. _Adrash never was one for half measures. Boredom drives even a god to extraordinary measures. This pleased him for a time before it too became something of a sore subject. We once shared this place as a sanctuary together, a place removed from humanity, but after the creation of Shavrieem..._\n\nIt waved Berun's arm in a vague gesture, almost as though it had for briefly forgotten itself.\n\nSilent, he wondered at the odd intimacy of the moment.\n\nOne of the low-hanging clouds shifted to show a greater stretch of the coliseum floor. He immediately focused upon the temple revealed at its center. Roughly hewn from red stone and open to the elements on all sides, it stood out from the clean, complete lines Adrash had crafted.\n\n_Shavrim's answer_ , Sradir said. _Not that Adrash ever noted its existence_.\n\n\"They were not happy with each other?\"\n\n_Frequently_.\n\nHe started down the nearest staircase, the spheres of his feet automatically conforming to the steps. More and more sure of his balance, he moved ever faster while keeping his eyes focused on the temple. Shavrim had been no more specific than to say they were to meet in the valley, but Berun felt confidant that he meant the temple.\n\nAs if in answer to his assumption, Shavrim walked out of the temple's shadow. Shirtless, newly scarred over the length and breadth of his torso. Carrying the black knife Sroma in his left hand.\n\nFrom miles away, their stares locked. Berun kept his features carefully composed.\n\n_Hello, brother_ , Sradir projected. _We return in triumph_.\n\nShavrim closed his eyes, as though weighing these words. He nodded slowly, stone-faced, then turned away and re-entered the temple.\n\nSradir made a clucking sound. When it spoke, Berun knew it was only for the two of them.\n\n_Oh, Shavrim. You always knew how to ruin a good thing_.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe dynamic between the three had changed: Berun recognized this the moment Churls and Vedas stepped from the temple's interior to greet him. Though both had thinned further in his brief time away, they appeared well rested, far from frail. Indeed, they appeared harder, knifelike, every muscular twitch more defined on their frames.\n\nShavrim followed several paces behind, breathing heavily, three long wounds raked across his chest. There were lines on his face that had not been present only days ago. His red-rimmed eyes scanned the heights of the valley as if he expected an attack.\n\nChurls ran to Berun, light-footed in a way he had never seen her, ready to leave the ground. She wore calfskin leggings and a thin, tight vest, revealing the hairline cuts on her arms and shoulders, most of which had already scarred over. Her skin tone struck him as subtly wrong, too even, without the warm redness she had always possessed after days under the sun. The freckles had faded to nothing on her shoulders, upper arms, and bare scalp. They remained on her face only as a spattering over the bridge of her nose.\n\nHe had always admired her freckles. So few humans possessed them.\n\n\"Berun,\" she said, wrapping her arms as far around him as she could. \"You're free now.\" She released him and laid her palms flat upon his chest, her eyes bright and clear. \"And you're warmer than when you left, like a fire's inside you..\"\n\n_Yes, you silly bitch_ , Sradir said coldly. _He's got me now. I'm the fire inside him_. The god stretched partway into his limbs, and\u2014for all the good it would do\u2014Berun braced himself against another assumption of his body. Sradir relaxed, however.\n\n_She's closer to the surface, Berun. Ustert. You can feel her just behind your friend's smile, can't you?_\n\nHe could, and it pained him to recognize it. He forced himself to rest his hand upon her head, fighting the revulsion Sradir made no attempt to hide.\n\n\"It's the sun here, under the glass,\" he said. \"It seems to have an unusual effect over time.\"\n\nVedas did not quicken his pace like Churls had, but he smiled warmly. Barring the severe angularity of his face and body, he appeared much the same as he always had to Berun.\n\nThat is, until the man stood within touching distance.\n\nClose up, Berun could see the fine lines raised in relief upon Vedas's suit. Repeating vortices, geometrical patterns upon patterns. They shifted subtly as Berun watched, growing and reducing, birthing and dying. Vedas could not have created such intricate work on his own. No man could have done so.\n\nBerun made sure to keep his stare from becoming obvious. He composed his features into a pleasant expression and gestured to encompass the valley.\n\n\"This is our training grounds? Is it not rather overlarge, Shavrim?\"\n\nThe horned man's smile did not reach his eyes. \"Likely. But I know of no better way to attract Adrash's attention than to return to this place.\"\n\nBerun looked from Shavrim to Churls, Churls to Vedas. \"This is the extent of your plan?\"\n\nShavrim nodded. \"You expected more, constructed man? Some elaborate plan to lift us from the earth and hurl us into the void? No.\" He stamped his foot, causing the heavy muscles of his thighs to jump. \"He comes to us. We force him to fight us on the earth we've claimed for ourselves.\"\n\nHe flipped his heavy black knife twice, and then threw it at Berun.\n\nBerun lifted his right hand to slap the weapon from the air. Upon contact, a great blast washed out the vision in his eyes and threw his body backward thirty feet. Senses scrambled, he tumbled end over end, throwing up great clods of grass and dirt. He came to rest, and though the thought of getting to his feet occurred, he could not make himself do it. All at once, he had forgotten where he was, how he had come to be on the ground.\n\nFootsteps. Berun levered himself up and stood, swaying as he sought to reorganize his thoughts.\n\nA threat. There was a threat. Footsteps.\n\nHe fell over, tried to rise, and eventually managed to sit.\n\nSomeone slapped his head, righting it. It had turned completely around on his shoulders.\n\nShavrim swam before him.\n\n\"Yes, Berun,\" he said. \"Light and sound and violence. We'll need more of that. After thousands of years, I no longer remember how _not_ to shield myself from Adrash. Thus, it's up to us to shout our challenge as loudly as we can.\" He crouched, a not unkind expression on his face. \"And you\u2014you'll need to learn to defend yourself a bit better. Death will come wielding more than knives.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nWhen his companions' breathing changed, signalling the depth of their slumber, he rose and walked a mile west from camp. He sat, cross-legged in the grass, and slowly let his spheres uncouple and spread out. The glowing blue coals of his eyes focused on the temple as his body undulated and then began forming itself into a replica of the building. It proved taxing work, for it had been some time since his form had been fluid enough to do so.\n\nSradir remained silent, undoubtedly aware of his intent.\n\nIt took numerous attempts, but finally, on the seventh, he toppled one of the pillars and allowed it to detach completely from its neighbors, achieving the separation of his being into two distinct parts.\n\nSradir gasped as the wave of pleasure crashed over them.\n\nBerun fought to hold himself apart, as two entities, sustaining the sensations. The thousand spheres of his body rang a wild harmonic tone, repeating and intensifying in waves to match his wildly stuttering senses. His eyes flared on and off in the darkness, pulsing from brief star to cold stone over and over again. He became aware of Sradir, sharing the moment, lending him the strength to draw it out longer.\n\nTime stretched from the two poles of his reality.\n\nWhen both of his and Sradir's efforts could maintain the division no longer, the sculpture he had created of himself dissolved into a pool of brass once more. The components he had separated were reabsorbed into the greater whole, and the sensations wound down.\n\nHe rested in companionable silence, vision rotated to the sky. Much like the wyrms he had seen on his way to the valley, the beauty of the Needle could not be denied.\n\nYet it took him several minutes to notice the change in it.\n\nOne of the largest of the spheres, which had for months been positioned over the constellation Indusc, had been moved further back and closer to the moon. He stared at it, dumbfounded by this change\u2014by the change, but also by his own willful ignorance. A god moved the heavens according to his own whim, and until that point he had not bothered to consider how odd a thing this was.\n\nHe had always observed men, noting the ways in which Adrash's existence altered the course of their lives.\n\nBut the very fact of Adrash? This, he had not considered.\n\nHe formed a mouth. \"Has it always been this way, Sradir? Is it this way elsewhere?\"\n\n_Elsewhere_ , Sradir said. _Where, elsewhere?_\n\nHe focused his eyes on prominent individual stars, on the wispy backbone of the sky (each miniscule speck of which, Omali had claimed, was itself a star), and finally on the bright smudges and whorls scholars claimed to be the immeasurably distant homes of other stars.\n\nEntire collections of stars, millions upon millions, each with its own collection of worlds.\n\nSradir chuckled. _What do you think death is? There's a world of the dead, as you well know, lying under and above this world. There's a way to other places, as well, but no one returns once they've left, and thus no one can say what lies beyond_.\n\n_It's a place of theory. Berun. Perhaps Adrash knows, but he's never told_.\n\n\"You didn't answer my first question. Has it always been this way?\"\n\nSradir let him feel a portion of its discomfort. Or, possibly, it no could no longer easily hide itself from him.\n\n_I wasn't born. I was created. I held the jar that housed my body before its decanting. It was a small clay container, no higher than a man's knee, no heavier than a water barrel. After my creation, my education_ \u2014he could hear the sneer in the word _\u2014began in earnest. Adrash, no more a father than Omali was to you, dictated the terms. I learned what he'd have me learn. Even after millennia, I still doubted..._\n\n_My point, Berun, is that I am... I am..._\n\n\"You don't need to finish, Sradir. I understand what you\u2014\"\n\n_I do, and you don't. You persist in believing we're quite different, but there's a reason your mind resounded with mine. We are much the same. Despite having spent so much time with my creator, having witnessed his moods over the span of many human lives, having inherited so much from him, I look at the sky now and I wonder what passes through his mind. I pretend to know, but in reality?_\n\n_I know nothing. I'm here with you, wondering. Has the world always been this way? Does each world possess a god it must overcome to achieve adulthood? There are no answers to these questions. We fight, you and I, against what we can see_.\n\n\u2021\n\n\"Drivel,\" a flinty voice spoke. \"Answers are for the taking, Sradir. You merely need to know which screws to put to which thumbs.\"\n\nBerun's eyes swiveled to the source. In the moonlight stood a tall, pale-skinned man, naked from crown to sole. Creatures crawled upon his sinuously muscled torso, and an odd darkness flowed from his back, obscuring the land behind him.\n\nNo. Berun reappraised what he saw.\n\nThis was no man. At least, not fully. Before him stood an elderman, though unlike any elderman he had previously seen. What had first appeared to be creatures crawling over him were in fact black shapes, one-dimensional images of wyrms and wolves and tentacled creatures. They shifted from form to form, chasing one another around the angular length of his body, avoiding only a hands-print deformity on his pectoral muscles and a massive scar raked across his abdomen.\n\nThe darkness at his back revealed itself to be broad wings, deep and without mark or feature.\n\nOne double-pupilled, amber eye appraised Berun. The other was a smoking pit.\n\nUnnoticed at first glance, a gray-skinned, naked woman lay crumpled at his feet. Her chest rose and fell in fits. Blood leaked from her left ear.\n\nThe elderman stretched his arms lazily, like a man recently woken.\n\n\"Get up,\" he said.\n\n_Hello, Orrus_ , Sradir responded.\n\n\u2021\n\nBerun did not question if Orrus was an enemy. He did not need to.\n\nWithout a word exchanged, they began circling one another. Berun expected Sradir to take control, but it seemed content to let him lead. He remained aware of the god within him, of course. He felt the strength of it at his fingertips, a potential violence he knew had only been hinted at with Omali. The spheres of his left forearm shifted, sprouting outward from his palm, pushing Weither into his hand.\n\nOrrus's right eye widened at the sight of the whip. Smoke poured in gouts from his left. With a muscular twitch of his shoulders, his wings snapped wide, lifting his feet briefly from the ground. The black images spun faster upon him, ripping themselves to shreds only to re-form in other shapes. He bared small, sharp teeth.\n\nBerun refused to be put on the defensive. He coiled his legs and jumped forward, closing the distance between them by half. Lengthening his right arm into a hook, he swiped at Orrus's chest, making minimal contact but still managing to spin the elderman to the side.\n\nHe ducked as the elderman's wing hissed toward his head and continued moving toward his opponent. Just as Orrus turned fully to face him, Berun's right shoulder plowed into Orrus's lower belly.\n\nHis arms wrapped around Orrus's hips, trapping the elderman's left hand in the process. Causing the spheres of his feet to flatten and broaden, he prevented himself from tumbling to the ground and arched backward, lifting the flailing elderman into the air before slamming him into the earth.\n\nA second time. A third. Orrus snarled and struggled to break free.\n\n_Watch his hand!_ Sradir shouted. _If he gets it loo\u2014_\n\nOrrus pulled his hand free as he rebounded against the ground a fourth time. More rapidly than Berun could properly register, the elderman gestured with both hands.\n\nA violet light erupted and Berun was struck, thrown forty feet into the air. He spun end over end, spraying uncoupled spheres from the gaping hole in his left shoulder, roaring in the only sensation analogous to pain he had ever known.\n\n_Hold on_ , Sradir said just before he hit ground. He felt the god enter his limbs, forcing him to deform slightly to absorb the impact. Nonetheless, more components shot from his wound.\n\nHe growled into the soil and levered himself up, spheres flowing from his chest and back to mend the hole in his shoulder.\n\nOrrus stood before him, ink-covered arms crossed.\n\n\"Should have had your puppet use the whip,\" he said. \"He's quicker than I thought. He could have had me with that first blow.\"\n\nBerun sensed Sradir's question before it was spoken, and relaxed his jaw.\n\n\"He's no puppet,\" it said. \"Can't say the same about yours. Who are you, brother?\"\n\nOrrus\u2014or the elderman Berun thought of as Orrus\u2014grinned. \" _Who are you, brother?_ What a wonderful thing it is to be asked such a question. Two days ago, I was a rather charmingly awful young mage named Pol Tanz et Som. Now, after a tangle with a rather temperamental dragon, not to mention the burning of a city, I'm still him.\" He shrugged. \"Him, and not him. I've taken the best of what I found in his mind and incorporated it.\"\n\nBerun's mouth drew into a sneer. \"You've become a talker in your old age. Oh, and a fool. We were not enemies. We need not be enemies.\"\n\n\"Much has occurred since the death of my original body. This is an understatement. Had you returned to existence before now, like Evurt or Ustert, perhaps you'd have become something more interesting than the sorry, sentimental thing I see cowering in this...\" Orrus chuckled. \"Pile of rubble. Adrash favored you above us all. To see you now, like this\u2014well, it's satisfying, is what it is. Almost as satisfying as replaying Bash's death. She, like you, had no true resolve.\"\n\nBerun's brows drew together. \"What of Bash?\"\n\nOrrus waved his hand dismissively. \"As I said. Dead, at Pol's hand. Her puppet had her way with him. Instead of taking the opportunity in two hands, Bash simply watched. She always was too seduced by pleasure. You need an appreciation of pain to truly make something of yourself.\"\n\nSradir pointed to the woman, who still lay crumpled on the ground. \"And her?\"\n\n\"A key to this place, no more.\" He shook his head, an expression Berun could not name altering his features. \"I've never had the benefit of being one of Adrash's pets, privy to all the secret words.\"\n\nSradir stared at the woman, intensely curious but unwilling to say more.\n\nInstead of speaking again, she chose surprise. She caused Berun to lunge forward, arm raised to slash downward with Weither.\n\nJust before the weapon made contact, Berun's body collided with a spell neither he nor Sradir had seen, a piece of the night distilled and propelled so slowly that all Orrus had required was a target unobservant enough to walk into it. He had found that target, and once struck by the spell Berun's body ceased to move. He struggled against it, but it was as though he had been encased in concrete. Only his eyes remained under his control.\n\n_Fuck_ , Sradir said.\n\nAt his back, a shout. He recognized the voice as Churls's immediately. He concentrated and heard the pounding of three sets of feet.\n\nOrrus took a step to the right to look past Berun. \"Too late, fools,\" he said, and reached up. Taking Weither in his right hand, he snapped his wings open to their full width. The muscles in his legs jumped as he crouched to leap.\n\n_Oh, no_ , Sradir said. _He doesn't have the strength. He's not about to try\u2014_\n\nOrrus left the ground, dragging Berun into the air with him.\n\n\u2021\n\n_I feel I've underestimated him_.\n\nIt was expressed with a trace of sad amusement, but Berun could not bring himself to see any humor in his situation. Orrus had lifted him far above the earth\u2014so far, he could not conceive of a way in which he might survive the fall. He watched the moonlit ground below, looking for a last sign of Churls, Vedas, or Shavrim, but they had risen to too great a height. He imagined they would near surface of the dome itself soon.\n\n_I'm sorry_ , Sradir said. _Again. It seems I've let you down_.\n\nHe could not bring himself to be angry with the god. It had allowed him to attack on his own.\n\nIt had been he who failed, ultimately.\n\n_No. I won't hear anything about failure. Sometimes, you're simply not strong enough. There's no shame in fighting and losing. Everyone must experience it at some point_.\n\nSradir spoke quickly, aware of the time. How little time.\n\n_I remember the moment of my death. I struck Adrash only once, merely scratching his armor. He laughed at me and then, as easily as a man swats a fly, killed me. I was no failure in death. The moments where I failed had all been in life. I didn't even recognize them as failures. That took many thousands of years to see_.\n\nHe took little comfort in this. No second life awaited him beyond the veil.\n\nSradir, now fully inhabiting him, made yet another attempt to break free of Orrus's spell, flexing her own phantom limbs in time with Berun's efforts. Nothing gave, and they both collapsed inward upon the other, their consciousnesses co-mingling. Together, he felt an immense weight lift from him.\n\n_Will you let me say something to you, Berun?_\n\nHe would, but before anything could be said Orrus cursed.\n\nA white light bloomed above them, and the elderman swerved suddenly, rocking Berun from side to side beneath him. For a moment, he imagined he would be dropped, but Orrus held firm. As Berun swung, he lifted his eyes to the light.\n\nSword in hand, she hovered above Orrus in full armor, flapping wings to match her opponent's, blindingly white to his depthless black. He could not see her face, but he assumed it held the same expression of grim determination he had often seen grace her mother's.\n\nBehind her, he saw her reflection in the dome. They had nearly reached it.\n\nBefore Orrus could move, Fyra dove downward, her blade arcing into his left wing where it joined his back.\n\nHe shrieked and dropped Berun.\n\nSradir, sensing the failing of his spell, lengthened Berun's left arm, reaching.\n\nShe wrapped his fingers around Orrus's ankle and dragged him down.\n\n\u2021\n\nWrapped in Orrus's wings, they fell. Stunned by Fyra's attack, Orrus quickly lost any advantage he might have gained.\n\nBerun bound his hands. He flowed into the form of an iron manacle and enveloped the winged god's body, crushing it until he and Sradir felt the give of his spine.\n\nIt snapped.\n\nOrrus screamed and they formed an arm with Weither gripped at its end, drawing the weapon savagely across his throat, severing skin and cartilage, setting his blood free to the wind.\n\nNext, they ripped his wings from his body and let them flutter away.\n\nOrrus's mouth gaped open. His one eye rotated backward into his skull. Still, they would see him not mortally wounded\u2014they would see him dead, never to return.\n\nSmall spheres flowed from Berun's body, swarming over Orrus's face. They entered the elderman's empty eye socket and made jelly of the interior of his skull. Neither Berun nor Sradir relished the task (he keenly sensed Sradir's regret: it and Orrus were not true family, no, but they had not hated one another in life), yet they would not be dissuaded.\n\nBlackness emerged from Orrus's nostrils and reached toward Berun's face. Understanding Sradir's intention\u2014the nature of its grisly talent\u2014he did not object when his mouth opened to drink the essence of Orrus and his puppet, Pol Tanz et Som.\n\nNeither would live on, but their memory would exist in whatever remained of Sradir after Berun's death.\n\nBerun envied them all their legacy.\n\nFinished, he and Sradir pushed Orrus's corpse away and aimed toward the earth. Berun's body became a teardrop shape, his two eyes at its leading point, watching the darkness approach.\n\nHow long could they fall?\n\n_Soon, now_ , Sradir said. _Goodbye, Berun_.\n\n\"Goodbye,\" he said. He could not hear his own voice, yet it hardly mattered. Sradir had always heard him, regardless of whether or not he spoke.\n\n\u2021\n\nA breath before impact, she appeared below him.\n\nUnarmored, smiling, arms reaching out to him for an embrace.\n\n_Not goodbye_ , she said.\n\nHe hit the floor of the world and shattered into a thousand pieces. Housed in each component sphere of his body, his consciousness was thrown upward and outward.\n\nThoughts skittering into dissolution\u2014\n\n\u2014he felt himself coming down as a shower of stones\u2014\n\n\u2014and then felt nothing more.\nCHAPTER EIGHT\n\nTHE 7TH TO 9TH OF THE MONTH OF FISHERS JEROUN ORBIT, THE ISLAND OF OSA\n\nAdrash drifted in a slowly decaying orbit above the surface of the moon.\n\nEvery muscle stood out in tension upon his tall, broad-shouldered frame. Twisted by grief and anger, the features of his face were made ugly even under the flawlessly smooth exterior of the divine armor. The light spilled from his eyes as his passion crested and broke, again and again. Now and then, he reached up to press his right palm flat against his chest.\n\nTo count his heartbeats, as though seeking to confirm his own existence. As though fearful of losing the one link tying him to reality.\n\nOrrus died.\n\nSradir died.\n\nHe forced himself to relive the moment of their deaths, saddened by the loss but more stunned by his ignorance. Only in their final seconds had their identities been revealed to him, had the full implication been apparent. The fact of his children's existence\u2014how could such a thing have been hidden from him for so long? How could he have heard their voices, killed their hungry avatars on so many occasions and still failed to recognize them? Pol Tanz et Som had come to him, fresh from the murder of his mentor\u2014an elderwoman who must surely have housed the soul of Bash.\n\nAdrash had stared the ascendant god in the eyes, yet had not truly seen.\n\nClearly, his mind had blunted over the course of his long life. Perhaps he had never possessed an intellect equal to his godly pretensions.\n\nHis right hand returned to his chest. He pressed fingertips against the heavy muscle of his left pectoral, testing its firmness. He prodded the ridges of his belly as a coldness settled in his gut. His fingers slipped over his genitals. He squeezed, grimacing at the thought of his impotence and only releasing his grip when the pain became too much.\n\nTurning away from the moon, he let his gaze fall frustrated upon Jeroun.\n\nJust before Vedas Tezul's party left Danoor, a void had opened. Once as easily read as words printed on a page, Vedas's mind and those of his companions had become all but impenetrable. Adrash could still observe their actions while under the open sky\u2014just as he could for all men, no matter how talented at masking themselves.\n\nHe could do this, but no more. Not any longer.\n\nThe near perfect recollection of their minds remained, however, and it pained him to realize how obvious their inhabitation should have been to him. Mere mortals did not think such thoughts, or come to know one another so thoroughly despite their insecurities and moral divisions. Regardless of the arcane magic he had assumed existed at their disposal, they could not have developed advanced martial skills so easily.\n\nMost tellingly, they could not have found themselves under the dome of Osa, holding the marvelous weapons he himself had crafted for his children.\n\nAs he watched Vedas and Churls mourn for their fallen comrade on the floor of Shavrieem, he was shocked to discover they had come to resemble Evurt and Ustert. Both were considerably thinner, hardened to familiar blades. The woman had even begun shaving her scalp.\n\nHad he really been so blind as to ignore bodies... faces?\n\nIt spoke of more than a faltering mind. It spoke of a willful disregard.\n\nAnd yet, surely, he had needed a period to recover after Pol's attack. He had expended much of his strength keeping the spheres of the Needle from spinning out of control. Was it not conceivable that exhaustion had kept him from the revelations that now struck him as plain?\n\n_No_ , he thought. _No excuses_.\n\nAnother concern nipped at him. For the first time, he found his interest aroused by the third remaining member of Vedas's party\u2014the wyrm tamer whose name had never been spoken, who confounded analysis by appearing as a blank in Adrash's mind, defying curiosity with his frank lack of distinguishing features. Individuals such as this had been known to exist. They cropped up now and then, though rarely in positions of influence.\n\nBut this one? He had ruled over a portion of Danoor. He had sought out Vedas and Churls, and thereafter held his ground during their encounters on the way to Osa. At times, he appeared to lead. What had seemed to Adrash the simple effect of an opportunistic individual, one seeking to take advantage of Vedas's fame after the tournament in Danoor, suddenly seemed noteworthy.\n\nHe focused on the broad, ugly tamer, and discovered he could see no further than the first layer of the man's swarthy, sun-reddened skin. The harder he concentrated, the more the man's mind slipped from his grasp.\n\nEven the man's appearance was an assumption: it too could not be focused upon. The second his attention was elsewhere, he fought to remember the man.\n\nAdrash's brows knit together as he poured his strength into the effort of seeing.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe tamer helped Vedas and Churls gather what spheres they could from Berun's dismembered body, but did not otherwise interact with them. When they stood around the pile they had created, he said nothing in remembrance. After several minutes, he left them to their sorrow, returning to the temple Shavrim had built in adolescent protest so many thousands of years previously.\n\nPassing near the entryway, he retrieved a dark, indistinct object he had set against one of the temple's columns. A moment later, he returned from the building's interior and sat on its front steps, running his right hand along the length of the object positioned across his knees.\n\nNo. He was not running his _hand_ along the object's length. He held two objects, one applied to the other. Ignoring the man, Adrash concentrated upon the longer object.\n\nWhen it suddenly swam into sharp relief, he nearly gasped.\n\nThe man held a blade as black as night, whetting its constantly renewing edge as gently as one stroked a lover's thigh.\n\nSroma.\n\nLess a fabricated thing than a creature in its own right, an elder-artifact outdating humankind's habitation of Jeroun, it was the one weapon Adrash had not created for his children. In the earliest days, when he alone had stood upon the surface of Jeroun, recovering from the long navigation between a home he had never known and a place he had been created to rule, it had called to him.\n\nIt had called, and so had another\u2014a four-fingered glove, whiter than snow.\n\nHe had weighed both in his hands and chosen the divine armor, thus eschewing the knife. Each would not inhabit the same space as the other. No, not even to be held. Eventually, Adrash had bequeathed the knife to Shavrim, creating a name and lying about its provenance. His first child had never known the value of the thing he held, had never known he alone had been created to wield it.\n\nAdrash returned his attention to the man, imagining his gaze as the searing tip of a poker, fresh from the fire. He slammed his focus into the shield protecting the man, willing it to fail.\n\n\u2021\n\nThe man paused in his task and looked up, expression unreadable, head cocked as if listening. He then stood and shrugged the illusion away.\n\nAdrash's heart stuttered. It quaked, painful in its intensity.\n\nThe man could be no other than Shavrim.\n\nThe seconds lengthened as Adrash realized the depth of his first child's deception. How it had been accomplished did not matter. All that mattered were the millennia that had passed.\n\nAlone. They had both been alone.\n\nNeither had needed to be alone. Together, time could have been a cure.\n\nInstead, it had only rotted the framework of Adrash's mind.\n\nThe white god ground his teeth together and turned back to the moon. A furnace was stoked between the walls of his skull, was released from his eyes as twin columns of fire. Below him, a half-mile circle of regolith turned into a boiling lake. Vapor shot upward and immediately cooled in the airless void, rebounding against him as an iron rain.\n\nWhen his rage finally exhausted itself, he closed his eyes.\n\nThe lake settled, fused into a shallow bowl. He descended and lay upon its swiftly-cooling surface.\n\n\u2021\n\nWith the full acknowledgement of his foolishness, came resolution.\n\nAll three would die. He would not particularly enjoy it, just as he had not enjoyed ending their lives nearly thirty thousand years prior, but this was immaterial. He would see their bones bleaching in the sun, and realize his work done.\n\nHe dug his fingertips into the iron floor beneath him and arched upward, attempting to ease the pressure lodged in every muscle. His nostrils twitched as the divine armor filtered the merest particles from the void, tailoring it to his mood, his unspoken needs.\n\nDeath was not his sole concern. Duties yet remained.\n\nThe smell of blood filled his head, and he opened his eyes again to take in the nearest sphere of the Needle. The seventh largest, it spun only a few hundred miles from him, looming massively in the star-shot darkness. Had it been placed before him, it would have obscured his view of Jeroun entirely.\n\nIf he neglected it any longer, it would soon begin a rapid descent into the moon.\n\nHe gestured toward it with his open left hand, drawing further from the well of power within himself, but also from the armor sheathing him in its cold embrace. The muscles of his arm flexed and shuddered with the strain.\n\nThe sphere quaked in its spin, and slowly backed away.\n\nOne, five, twenty, a hundred miles. It appeared to him as if it were waiting, impatient.\n\nHe sympathized, but it would have to wait a bit longer. He would briefly rest, and then he would kill what remained of his children. Only with that assuredly behind him would he allow himself to return to the question that had plagued him for so long:\n\nHad the world proved itself worthy, or had the spheres of the Needle waited long enough for their promised day of destruction?\n\n\u2021\n\nHe allowed himself to move at a leisurely pace\u2014the very pace at which an outbound mage such as Pol Tanz et Som had once traveled to and from Jeroun. Hurrying would afford Adrash no advantages, and moreover, by not taxing himself he took full advantage of the divine armor's unique capabilities. It warmed itself in the sun as did a freezing man before a fire, replenishing itself and stoking the flames that existed deep in the crafted core of Adrash's heart.\n\nFor perhaps the hundred-thousandth time of his existence, it struck him as odd that his body worked in such perfect concert with the armor, that together they had crafted a god. He could conceive of no way for his creators to have anticipated such a fusion.\n\nOf course, he had never known his creators. By the time he woke, alone and soulbound to the iron egg _Jeroun_ as it sailed the void, carrying the descendents of humanity, his creators were little more than shades of living men, a collection of ghosts wandering the long rust-pitted halls, muttering to themselves, standing forlorn watch over the rows upon rows of unborn men.\n\nNonetheless, their intent in his creation was clear. It could not be denied, for purpose drove him in those unimaginably early years. Slaved directly to his mind, the caravan of vessels stretched one hundred miles and occupied every bit of his attention. Its navigation, while largely intuitive, ensured his constant preoccupation: he learned to care for it as intensely as a father cared for his children.\n\nThis obsession nearly proved disastrous, however. Once deposited upon the surface of Jeroun (no, he knew nothing of the world his people had left, and so christened the new world with the first name to mind), he procrastinated on his next mission. He knew it must be done\u2014indeed, a part of him ached for it to be done\u2014but nonetheless he kept those he had transported closed within their caskets and bottles.\n\nFor a decade, he walked the face of the world he had named, longing to return to the cold spaces between worlds where he alone had been master.\n\nDespite the distance separating them across the face of Jeroun, the eggs would open as one. Once opened, they would not be closed.\n\nHis creators had not been stingy in his makeup: though in appearance and spirit a man, his body could withstand considerable damage. It would live for eons, storing its memories within the split courses of his marrow. He possessed an inborn desire to lead, an instinctive awareness of how to coerce. With violence, if necessary.\n\nAnd it would be necessary, he knew. During his journeys over the continent of Knoori (the second vessel that had followed _Jeroun_ ), he had seen the modified men outfitted for war in the various holds, arrayed like blades fresh from the forge. He had seen their beasts of war, their machines of destruction. There existed factions he had never anticipated, and they would challenge him as readily as they fought amongst themselves.\n\nHe delayed the inevitable.\n\nYes, because he was a coward.\n\nOnly when he found the armor had he roused himself to do what must be done.\n\n\u2021\n\nNow, as he moved between the moon and the world he had guided and then abandoned, thinking upon events he had not let his mind fall upon for millennia, he came to several inescapable conclusions\u2014conclusions, he could not avoid admitting, he should have reached long ago.\n\nFor all his strength, he was a coward still. The armor had been his crutch.\n\nIt should have hurt. He did not like this word, coward.\n\nYet it did not hurt. It hardly mattered, for death awaited him.\n\nHe saw this, without avoidance. Whatever decision he reached after the murder of his children, he could not allow a coward to continue living in his body.\n\nThe world would die, or it would continue living. Free. With no god to dictate its course.\n\n\u2021\n\nHe entered the atmosphere directly above Osa, slamming himself against air compressed into steel by his swift passage. His body neither flexed nor snapped in two. Flames hotter than those of the sun cocooned him but did not obscure his sight, which remained focused on his destination.\n\nOnce within breathable sky, trailing smoke, he outraced sound to the accompaniment of a massive clap that shook the earth below, flattening trees and causing rockslides.\n\nOsa lay fixed before him, a circle of jade in an aquamarine setting. It expanded in his view rapidly, taking on detail. He smiled grimly, recalling its beauty from within the dome, regretting his next action while fully committing to it.\n\nHe would not walk into the island as he once had\u2014not now, after so many eons away. He would arrive as an agent of destruction. Pitiless, without remorse.\n\nA fraction of a second before impact, he finished projecting the words.\n\n_Uperut amends. Ii wallej frect. Xio_.\n\nIt was a finely calculated move, potentially dangerous even to one such as he. The dome, he had discovered over the course of several centuries after arriving upon Jeroun, was neither a solid nor a liquid but a state between, granting it permeability and immense structural integrity\u2014tensile strength enough to withstand even a direct blow from Adrash.\n\nWhenever a passageway into it opened, however, the surrounding area became brittle.\n\nArms crossed before his face, he flew into the dimple marking where the tunnel had begun to form, slamming through the elder-forged material as though it were a thin pane of glass. A halo of crystal scattered around him as he slowed fractionally and turned in the air to view what occurred in his wake.\n\nCracks branched out from the hole he had created. They were thin and regular at first, each extending no more than a few hundred feet before stopping.\n\nFor the briefest of moments, he thought the dome would be able to repair itself.\n\nBut no. The cracks thickened, spreading, spider-webbing to the sound of thunder.\n\nIn the space of one second, the dome went from glass clear to opaque with innumerable fractures.\n\nHalfway through the following second, the entire structure liquified and fell.\n\nHe turned back to earth and outraced the crystal rain, coming to a stop and righting himself a mere foot above Shavrieem's killing floor. Relaxed, arms crossed over his chest, feet slightly pointed toward the ground, eyes dimmed to a low radiance. He remained in this position a moment, utterly still, staring at the temple Shavrim had built.\n\nHe gestured, toppling it over.\n\nAt his back, a familiar soul spoke his name, and it began to rain.\n\n\u2021\n\n\"Shavrim,\" he said, speaking aloud. His own voice was much as he remembered it. He did not turn away from the ruined temple.\n\n\"Do me the favor of showing your face before we begin,\" Shavrim said\n\nAdrash smiled within the divine armor, turned, and obliged his first child. The enchanted material opened as a pin-sized hole at his scalp and grew, flowing over his features like oil over ice. He turned his black-skinned face toward the sky and let the rain\u2014already diminishing to a light misting\u2014enter his mouth. He tasted Osa, his smile growing wider.\n\nHe breathed. The air smelled, felt on his his skin, much as he remembered it.\n\n\"Have I changed?\" he asked, lowering his gaze to lock eyes with Shavrim. \"It has been a good while, after all.\"\n\n\"No,\" Shavrim said quietly, stare fixed on his creator. \"Some things never change.\"\n\nAdrash bowed his head and set his feet upon the earth. \"As with you, though it looks as if you've recently taken some beatings. It's a consolation, is it not? There are few constants in life.\"\n\nShavrim shrugged his heavy shoulders, expression blank.\n\nTo either side of him stood Vedas and Churls. Adrash looked from one to the other, left eyebrow raised. At once, he determined that Evurt and Ustert had not assumed control, merely influence. Though both humans bore the signs of their inhabitation, from this distance neither could be confused for truly ascendant gods. They stood stiffly, shoulders thrown back, chins up, Ruin and Rust clenched tightly in firm fists, yet to Adrash their fear was obvious. He could see it, smell it.\n\nRegardless, they did not flinch from his gaze.\n\nIn another era, discovering two individuals able to defy the will of his creations would have overjoyed him. Simply to relieve the tedium of observing the cycle of human existence, he would have studied them, turned them to his advantage or set them up against his own interests.\n\nNow, it was an insult. He had come to ground to greet his children before their deaths. To look at them through clouded glass, through...\n\n\"You're beautiful,\" he told Churls. It was no lie. Few, if any, would call her pretty, but there was a coarse allure to her. He nodded to Vedas, amused to note something of his own appearance in the man. \"You, as well. Welcome, both of you.\"\n\n\"Your welcome's a bit late,\" Churls said. \"We've been here a while.\"\n\nAdrash's smile did not diminish. \"I welcome guests, even when they trespass.\"\n\nVedas lifted his horned hood over his scalp. The elder-cloth flowed to cover his face. His suit was a lovely thing, Adrash noted, filigreed with slowly-altering designs the man could not have produced on his own: surely, an external sign of Evurt exerting what control he was able.\n\n\"I think you've confused which of us is trespassing,\" the man said.\n\nAdrash laughed.\n\nShavrim made a cutting motion with his open left hand. \"Enough. I wanted to see your face one last time, and I have. Cover it and let us begin.\"\n\n\"No,\" Adrash answered. \"I want to feel my naked fingers around your throat, Shavrim.\"\n\nHoles opened in the divine armor, at all twenty fingertips and toe-tips, retreating up his forearms and calves, thighs and biceps. It slipped to uncover his genitals, his sinuous torso. Before long, the only white that remained was an egg shape upon his chest.\n\nHe was more beautiful than any man had ever been. His features were generous, almost prototypically masculine. No hair marred his sculpted perfection\u2014no scar, no blemish. He appeared as though he had risen whole from a lake of cooling obsidian.\n\nHe stretched languidly, feeling their eyes upon him, and then planted his feet.\n\n\"Now. First one, then the other. Or all together. It makes no difference.\"\n\n\u2021\n\nThey surrounded him. He faced Shavrim, but his awareness extended well beyond himself\u2014far enough, in truth, to render sight unnecessary. Even without his armor actively covering his body, the three presented little actual threat. During the earliest years of mankind's history on Jeroun, even with his own enhanced makeup, he had been appallingly vulnerable when unarmored, but experience had only made his bond with the artifact stronger, more efficacious.\n\nA small part of him lamented this fact.\n\nVedas broke line first, coming in low with Rust in his right hand. Assisted by Evurt, he covered the twenty feet separating them quickly. His thrust, while graceful enough to catch most opponents unawares, was nonetheless pitifully inadequate against an opponent such as Adrash. He watched it coming in, no more rapid to his perceptions than dripping sap.\n\nHe let Vedas in close, then spun and slapped the blade away. He softened his blow to the man's temple, but it still sent him twenty feet in the air to land it a heap near his lover's feet.\n\nShe helped him up.\n\nAdrash returned his attention to Shavrim. \"This is what you've been training them to do, boy? Hurling themselves against a wall might have serviced your cause equally well.\"\n\nTight-lipped, Shavrim raised Sroma and advanced. Adrash strode forward to meet him, arching backward to avoid Shavrim's first downward strike at the last possible moment, savoring the cool wind of it on his chest and belly. Gooseflesh rose on his forearms and inner thighs, a nearly erotic sensation.\n\nShavrim shuffled his right foot forward to pivot before Adrash and levered his blade upward, aiming its edge between the god's legs. Adrash bent at the waist, head-butting Shavrim while thrusting his arms forward to catch the blade between his palms.\n\nThe enchanted metal rang in his hands. As expected, loathing radiated from the weapon at his touch, suffusing his body with its cold fury.\n\nYet it was not quite what he had anticipated. The force of Sroma's hatred, so much greater than he recalled, nearly brought a gasp to his lips. It seemed it had found more reason, during its long entombment, to rage. Perhaps the armor had changed, as well, so gradually that he had failed to notice. The thought trouble him mildly.\n\nHis grip faltered and Shavrim pulled Sroma free. Adrash turned in time to slap the blade to the side as Shavrim tried to disembowel him, and stepped into his opponent's guard, laying his left palm flat upon the Shavrim's chest.\n\nHe straightened his arm, snapping Shavrim's sternum, sending him flying backward.\n\nAdrash ducked. Churls's sword, aimed to take his head from his shoulders, passed less than an inch from his scalp. Before her swing had completed its flat arc, his hand shot up and gripped the blade. It sliced into his palm to the bone, yet he hardly noticed the pain (indeed, before he registered it, his body had begun to heal, pushing the blade out from his flesh) and wrenched the sword forward.\n\nThe woman held on, allowing herself to be hurled over his shoulder. He threw her sword to the side.\n\nShe rolled cleanly and popped to her feet, fists up. He was there before she stood, however, standing at her back. He wrapped his right arm around her neck and lifted her from her feet. Burying his nose in the space behind her ear, he breathed in the aroma of her stale, ordinary human sweat. His cock moved against her bare leg, but it was only a stirring.\n\nVedas ran at him. Adrash backhanded him to the ground with his remaining hand, almost as an afterthought. The man's right arm lay across his chest at an odd angle. He did not rise.\n\nHe frowned, spoke directly into Churls's ear. \"You'll be the first to die. Goodbye, Churls. Goodbye, Ustert, for what you've been worth.\"\n\nHe tightened his grip. Her fingertips dug into his forearm. Her heels slammed into his thighs. He leaned his head forward as though he would kiss her cheek, peering at her eyes as her life fled, hoping to see something more\u2014a sign that either she or Ustert had more fight in them.\n\nShe pursed her lips and tried to spit, but could not summon the breath to do so. Drool ran down her chin, onto his arm.\n\n\"This is all too fast,\" he whispered. \"I'd hoped...\"\n\nHer body stiffened, and he grunted in surprise.\n\nHer nails had bitten into the flesh of his forearm, drawing blood. He watched in shock as the cartilage of her windpipe pushed against his flesh and forced his wrist out. She sucked air into her lungs, arching against him. White light poured from her eyes and her grip intensified convulsively, the tips of her fingers slipping like sharp teeth between the corded muscles of his forearm, nails scraping over bone.\n\nPain. Shocking in its novelty. Fury in its wake.\n\nHe roared and flung her from him. She flew, carrying a pound of his bloody flesh in her hands.\n\nCradling his arm, he witnessed with wide eyes as her body failed to impact the earth: it came to rest like a feather stopped in midair, horizontally, four feet above the ground. She sat up and swung her legs to the side, as if she were getting out of bed. When she stood, her feet did not quite touch the ground. Her eyes lost some of their radiance yet still glowed, as if a light had been struck in her skull.\n\nHe assumed, momentarily, that Ustert had finally achieved greater influence over the woman, but the assumption quickly proved false. No child of his had ever possessed such a bearing. Or such a light. He fought the ridiculous temptation to shield his eyes from it.\n\nHe glanced at his mangled forearm, horrified to find it had not yet begun to heal. A substance, blacker than the night, blacker than the void itself, mixed with his own blood deep in the wound.\n\nAs he watched, it disappeared. Into his body.\n\nA memory tugged at him upon seeing it.\n\nPol. During their battle, the elderman had hit him with a spell composed of a similar substance.\n\nWith a thought, the armor flowed from Adrash's chest to cover the injury.\n\n\"Who are you?\" he asked. He gestured to her with his unarmored hand as though he were choking her. To his puzzlement, no strength came to his aid. Though he had so recently moved the spheres within the void, he could not lift her from where she stood.\n\n\"Answer me,\" he said through gritted teeth.\n\nThe woman only spread her arms.\n\nLights bloomed to either side of her, and rapidly coalesced into forms. Into figures, shades of white upon white. An old Knosi woman, unbowed by her age, a defiant cast to her jaw. A second Knosi woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties, alluring, as hard as a knot of oak. After a shamefully long pause, Adrash recognized her. She had died, just before Vedas and his companions arrival in Marept.\n\nBoth women stood weaponless, with arms crossed, no trace of nervousness about them.\n\nThe younger one spat. The fluid fluoresced into nothingness before hitting the ground.\n\n\"I told you to answer me,\" Adrash said. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"Me, plus a couple trespassers,\" Churls said with the faint trace of a smile. \"You'll never know their names. But these two? Say hello to Jojore Um and Laures Kasoert.\" She looked at one, then the other. \"Go. Get them up.\"\n\nQuicker than their steps would suggest, the ghostly women moved to Shavrim and Vedas's sides. They reached down to both, _into_ both, their arms cut off at the wrists in each man's chest, and then lay down, disappearing completely into the men's bodies.\n\nShavrim and Vedas shuddered. Screams tore from their throats as they bridged up from the grass. Their eyes opened as spotlights. Adrash watched, fascinated despite the clear threat, as they regained their feet. Shavrim winced as his sternum snapped audibly back into shape. Vedas gasped as his arm straightened with a resounding pop.\n\nChurls cracked her knuckles and grinned.\n\n\u2021\n\nOne came after the other, closing him in, reigning blows upon him at speed, as quickly as he could deflect them. He returned the violence, landing hits through their lesser defenses while admitting the tide had taken an inconceivable yet undeniable turn.\n\nHow such a thing could be done\u2014he did not bother asking. He did not allow himself the room to wonder who could have such power. There would be time to determine what had occurred once the threat had been neutralized.\n\nWith a thought, the divine armor covered him completely. He batted his opponents' hands and feet away, and with three open-palmed strikes pushed them back. Turning in a circle as they stumbled, he allowed the blast furnace within him to crack its seals and overflow. From his eyes and mouth it came: a fountain of flame, engulfing his opponents.\n\nNo. Not engulfing. Flowing around. The shields they had formed flickered against his fiery onslaught, limning their bodies in shifting, actinic blue as their spells counteracted his attack. Regardless, their defense was not entirely effective. The heat demonstrably wore at Vedas and Shavrim, causing them to fall back under the blaze.\n\nChurls, however, kept her smile in place and lunged forward, landing a viciously quick punch to Adrash's gut. He grunted, and the fire from within faltered. She blocked his clumsily upthrust knee with her left forearm and jabbed stiffened fingers into his throat.\n\nThe fire died as he choked for breath.\n\nShe followed with a flurry of punches to his jaw and cheeks. Shavrim and Vedas returned, battering him from side to side. He slipped on the wet grass, falling beneath their fists and heels. The white light of their eyes bathed him.\n\nPain, so odd that it quickly became an abstraction, a wave, a feeling to lose oneself within, became his reality.\n\nHis children pummeled him into the ground. Into a grave.\n\n\u2021\n\nHe did not make the decision\u2014that is, he did not consciously resolve to move.\n\nYet move he did. He shifted from one place to another, a near-instantaneous maneuver he had never used anywhere but within the void, where no atmosphere impeded his progress. (Moving so quickly, even against something as insubstantial as air, had never seemed an advisable course of action.)\n\nHe stood for only a moment, in the position his unspoken desire had deposited him, before his legs collapsed and he crumpled upon the ground.\n\nFurther agony.\n\nIt felt as though a massive hand had slapped him from the sky, pulping every bone in the right side of his body. He groaned into the night, and then screamed when he rolled onto his back. Broken bone-ends ground together, clicking in his hip, his shoulder. Breathing in and out produced pain so sharp that his vision blurred.\n\nA figure obscured a portion of stars above him, staring down with radiant eyes. Churls. A second figure came up beside her, placed his hand in hers.\n\nThey were a good pair, he noted, equally broken, beautiful in the same frail, human way, neither bending to what fate appeared to have in store.\n\nThey had retrieved their weapons. Churls put the edge of Rust to his throat.\n\nVedas caused the elder-cloth to unmask his features. He flipped back the hood of his suit.\n\n\"It all seems to be happening so quickly now, doesn't it?\" the man said.\n\nAdrash did not answer. It did indeed seem that way. A life could be so long, yet it still failed to teach one about death. That moment, he had always known, would not be meditative. Time would not wait, but hasten the end. It would come too fast, rendering all the periods of one's life into a fleeting memory, no more substantial than any other life.\n\nHe had lied to himself. He would have let a coward continue to live in his body, as long as it could. He would not have chosen death.\n\nFor the world, yes, but not for himself.\n\nVedas crouched at his side. \"Not the wisest move. You've crippled yourself, and for what? A hundred yards? You've gotten nowhere, for no reason. Should have let us kill you. Now, you're going to die here, in this undignified position, throat slit like a hog.\" He frowned. \"For all that you've done to shape the world, no one is here to remember you, to mourn for you.\"\n\nAdrash ignored these words. They were meant to offend, and he could be offended no more. He willed the divine armor to retreat from his head, and spoke through a broken jaw.\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"How, what?\" Vedas asked. \"How are you beaten?\" Grim-faced, he tapped the flat of his sword against Adrash's ribs, sending twinges through the god's torso. \"Through superior forces. With the help of others who wouldn't see the world made a grave.\"\n\n\"That's not...\" He paused, embarrassed by the slurring of his words, the trail of drool that ran from his mouth. \"That's not what I meant. These others... You're not Evurt. You've pushed my child out completely.\"\n\n\"Evicted, without remorse,\" Churls said. She shrugged. \"We couldn't have done it on our own. As Vedas said, we had help. It almost seems like there's a lesson in that.\"\n\nVedas gazed up at her with an unreadable expression.\n\n\"Let him see the victors in this battle,\" he said.\n\nShe nodded, and the light fled from her eyes as two radiant, phantom figures stepped from within her. One did not have to stoop as she emerged, stepping to the side. The other very much did, unfolding his broad form from within her and stretching to his full height.\n\nThe girl bore an unmistakable resemblance to her mother.\n\nThe constructed man\u2014the constructed man resembled no one but himself.\n\n\u2021\n\nHe admitted to himself: he was afraid to die. If there was a life beyond death...\n\n\"What are you?\" he asked.\n\nThe girl smirked. \"I'm a dead girl.\" She pointed to Berun. \"He's a dead person.\"\n\nAdrash tried to shake his head, and gasped. The relief he had been counting on, the immediate easing of pain his unique physiology had always provided, appeared never to come. The body he had known as his own, a constant over the long course of millennia, was now infected. His awareness of the divine armor dimmed, too, until the artifact no longer felt a part of him. It was as if he had been swaddled in wet sheets, encased in plaster.\n\n\"That's no answer,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm fairly sure it is,\" the girl countered.\n\nShavrim appeared above him and crouched opposite Vedas. He gripped Sroma in his right hand, tapping its flat against his left palm. His expression held a measure of regret.\n\nAdrash's first child had never been as callous as his siblings. He had tried. He had rebelled. But he never was the leader he desired to be. He had been an odd choice to lead a revolt against his maker. Love, the desire to be a family in more than just words, clouded his vision.\n\n\"Some mysteries go unsolved,\" Shavrim said. \"Even you, observing from on high, privy to so many secrets, don't get everything you want.\"\n\nAdrash moved his uninjured arm carefully, arousing as little new hurt as possible. He gestured to the sky, the scattered components of the Needle.\n\n\"What will you do with this? Left alone\u2014\"\n\n\"They'll fall,\" the girl said. \"We know. We're not fools.\"\n\nAdrash allowed himself a chuckle. It turned into a cough, which speckled the white of his armor with red. The cough turned into a scream as something shifted within his chest cavity, pressing down upon his heart. The organ pumped against the intrusion. With each rhythmic shudder, agony erupted, coursed throughout his body.\n\nThe girl looked to her mother. Churls nodded.\n\nThe torment stopped when the girl reached into his chest. Warmth suffused him, blissfully.\n\nLeaning in close to his face, the girl whispered. \"I know what you think is so funny. How will we, weak little things, get up there? Even if we did, what would we do?\" She smiled. \"You have no idea what I'm now capable of. I've stolen skills from your children, and from one hateful elderman. They knew things\u2014things you never suspected they knew\u2014some things _they_ didn't know they knew.\"\n\nHer smile widened even further. The light pulsed from within her.\n\n\"I've learned better than you what it means to be a god.\"\n\nShe stood, removing her hands from his chest. He gritted his teeth against the pain that abruptly resumed, breathing shallowly against the scraping of bone in his right lung. The world dimmed perceptibly, vibrating to the rhythm of his spasming muscles.\n\n\"Do it,\" Berun said, nodding to Shavrim.\n\nShavrim rose, Sroma in hand. He regarded the knife for several seconds, turned it over to grip its blade, and passed it to Vedas.\n\n\"I can't,\" Shavrim said. \"Or I won't. It makes no difference.\"\n\nVedas stared at the weapon. \"You lived for thousands upon thousands\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Shavrim said. He shuddered. His eyes closed, and when he spoke it was with an altogether different inflection\u2014an accent Adrash recalled intimately.\n\nSpeaking modern words, Shavrim nonetheless spoke in the manner of the ancients.\n\n\"It will be you,\" he said. \"It will be now.\" He stretched his arm toward the Black Suit.\n\nThough doing so caused new hurts to bloom, Adrash held his breath. No human had ever touched Sroma. He doubted anyone gathered suspected what it meant to wield it. Adrash himself did not know what end the elders had sought in crafting the knife.\n\nVedas did not move. He paused.\n\nIn that pause, another stole his fate.\n\n\u2021\n\nShe dropped her own sword and stood, taking the knife from Shavrim. She weighed it in her hands.\n\n\"Balance,\" she murmured. \"It has a nice balance.\"\n\nHer knees bent. The blade flipped vertical in her calloused grip.\n\nFalling upon Adrash, Churls plunged the blade into his chest.\nEPILOGUE\n\nTHE 2ND OF NIGHTTIDG WATCH SENNEN, BOWL OF HEAVEN, NATION OF ZAROLIES\n\nThey labored on a vast concave plain, under the pale rose moon and her five smaller children. Side by side, the four of them: she, her mate, and the two men who had become like brothers to her. They pulled sweetroot, depositing their vegetables in the long furrows that ran poleward to poleward for nearly forty leagues. It was repetitive, backbreaking work, but they were content.\n\n_Particularly_ content, for they were tipsy. The sweetroot in the far up-poleward rows had fermented over the course of the immensely long night, and they sampled it liberally. As per usual, they did not talk in their work, yet still they managed to communicate, stepping jokingly upon one another's toes, jostling one another with their hips as they moved down the line.\n\nSeasoned by three days and nights on the plain, the two men did not look up from their work. The black-skinned man no longer stared fixedly at the moons. The lighter-skinned man did not steal glances at the black-skinned man.\n\nThey were focused on their task\u2014yes, even drunk, or even when a gulling croaked and lifted from the ground only a few feet away from them, re-depositing its long, land-awkward reptilian body a bit further away. The first night, both had been fascinated by the creatures. She understood, of course: in their southern climes, people did not train animals to fertilize the sweetroot fields during the night. They woke to shit on their own soil.\n\nShe smiled, thinking of the joke she had told about southerners. It amused her to see how a world modified its inhabitants, to make light of the variations between people. Some would foment hate over such things, but having known a thousand types of person, not all of them human, guaranteed she could not summon an ounce of indignation over their divisions.\n\nThis did not mean she loved mortals easily, however. Time had made love for anyone but her mate and the two whose arrival she always anticipated difficult. She no longer sympathized with their limited awareness. She could be brutal, unfeeling, and so left the easy tenderness to her mate, who had retained through his lifetimes a sense of commitment to charitable work.\n\nShe alone bore the burden of remembering. Though her mate would quickly locate her in whatever place they found themselves, he needed to be reminded of who he had been. It came as a great relief to him when she told him. The story fit. He had been a hero, after all.\n\nBut the two men?\n\nThey came to her and her mate in peace, but also in need, knowing only two things\u2014two things they had struggled to put to words their entire lives. They had lived before. She had been there when they died.\n\nBeyond this, they held their suspicions.\n\nThey had not been good men, had they? For all their trying, they were missing something \u2013 had always missed something.\n\nCould she help them find it?\n\n\u2021\n\nThey became hungry at the same moment, and sat in the dirt and grass. From their packs came roasted corn, honey-cured boar, and cakes formed of the ever-present sweetroot. Somehow, the food became more delicious with each passing meal. Now that their gathering was complete.\n\n(Of course, drunkenness might have had something to do with it, as well.)\n\nThey ate quickly, each of them grinning through their packed mouths, each eager to have the story at its end. Picking up where she had left off at the end of the previous meal, she nodded to the lighter skinned of the two men and finished the tale in two sentences, without fanfare.\n\n\"And so I killed you, because you asked me. You wanted to come with us.\"\n\nHe nodded, rough features settling into contentment. He had spoken only a handful of words since arriving, and never asked a question. Of the two, he never required further clarification.\n\nHis companion, on the other hand...\n\n\"Is it still there?\" he had asked the previous night, head tipped back to stare at the moons. \"Is the Needle yet in place?\"\n\n\"What of the elders?\" he had asked. \"Surely, they tried again.\"\n\n\"Why would you save me?\" he had asked. \"I deserved no compassion.\"\n\nNow, he said, \"But your mother\u2014you loved her enough to do what none of the dead had done before you. What became of her? What of Vedas, and all the others?\"\n\nShe answered these questions the same way she had answered the others.\n\n\"Not everything has an answer.\"\n\nHe shook his head, smiling through his frustration. \"You're not curious? What if there's a way to know, an arcane science or magic to determine...\" He gestured broadly, to encompass the world. \"There are only so many places for a soul to go. You might see her again!\"\n\nShe cut a sliver of fermented sweetroot free and placed it in her mouth, relishing the tart fizz of its juice. A second, third, and fourth slices went to her companions. She sensed each person's mood as her own. Her mate, satisfied after a long period of work. The lighter-skinned man, appeased to know what he now knew.\n\nThe black-skinned man, frustrated but unable to rouse the rage that defined every life he lived.\n\nHer hand, sticky with fermented sweetroot, pressed against his warm cheek. She called him by his old name, and he shuddered slightly at the sound of it.\n\n\"I'm going to tell you what your friend\u2014\" she nodded to the second man \"\u2014told you, just before your first death. He said, _Some mysteries go unsolved_. This doesn't mean there's no truth to be found. Courageous acts aren't erased simply because you don't know what their ultimate effect was. Most importantly, perhaps, the existence of a mystery negates no love anyone has ever felt.\"\n\n\"But don't you want to know?\" he asked. \"Don't you want to see her again?\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" she responded. \"Eventually. But for now, I think I chose my fellow travelers wisely. We can be a family, even if just for this moment. A hundred, a thousand years hence, I bet we'll be sharing the same moment, or one just like it. This is enough.\"\n\n\"Is it?\" the lighter-skinned man said. \"Is it enough?\" His hand moved toward the black-skinned man's knee, as of its own accord, but stopped short of contact. He drew it back to his own lap.\n\nShe willed him to move it again, crossing the border between the two.\n\nShe willed them to be a family, if only for now.\nA GLOSSARY OF TERMS\n\nAcademy of Applied Magics\u2014The Kingdom of Stol's most well-respected academy for the study of magic, and also the only known center for the study of outbound magics.\n\nAdrash\u2014The god of Jeroun, wearer of the divine armor. Thirty thousand years ago, beyond the memory of man, he cracked mankind from iron eggs and helped them populate Jeroun. He is rumored by some to have once been a man. The divine armor\u2014an artifact of unknown origin, superficially similar in some ways to elder skin/elder-cloth artifacts\u2014affords him powers beyond any man or elderman, to the point that he can survive in the void and create the planetoid-sized spheres of the Needle from the raw substance of the moon. He is rumored by some to have once been a man able to father children, demigods whose roles have long since been forgotten or altered into sectarian myths.\n\nAdrashi\u2014One who believes in Adrash's benevolence and his intention to redeem the people of Jeroun. In general, Adrashi are more organized than Anadrashi. In Nos Ulom and the Kingdom of Stol, Adrashism is the state religion.\n\nAlchemical (Solution)\u2014A broad term for all solutions composed of materials harvested from elder corpses. Alchemical solutions are the base for every spell. Alchemical ink is a particularly regulated\u2014and highly expensive\u2014form, as it is quite dangerous to the uninitiated mage.\n\nAnadrashi\u2014One who believes in Adrash's malevolence and his intention to destroy Jeroun. Anadrashi also believe in mankind's fitness to rule Jeroun on its own. In general, Anadrashi are less organized than Adrashi. In Toma, Anadrashism is the state religion.\n\nBaleshuuk\u2014The highly secretive corpse miners of Nos Ulom. A dwarfish race of men, Baleshuuk have for thousands of years used their magics to extract elder corpses from the ground. Primarily stationed in Knos Min and Stol, where the largest mines exist, their existence even in these places is largely unknown to the general populace.\n\nBash Ateff\u2014The second demigod created by Adrash, and the wielder of the razored circle Jhy. She is worshipped by a very small minority in Dareth Hlum, Casta, Stol, and Knos Min. Bashest sects worship her as the mother of Adrash, and believe that she will ultimately convince Adrash not to destroy Jeroun.\n\nBlack Suits\u2014A martial order of Anadrashi found in all nations of Knoori except Nos Ulom. Marked by their black elder-cloth suits and the distinctive horns they cause to form on the hoods of these suits, their primary goal as an institution is to fight White Suits and win converts to the Anadrashi faith. By doing so, Black Suits believe they strike a blow against Adrash, keeping him from attacking Jeroun. Black Suits orders are relatively uncommon and secretive outside Dareth Hlum and Knos Min.\n\nBonedust / \"Dust\"\u2014Pulverized elder bone used for various purposes, including currency. Rubbed on almost any surface, it acts as a protective, shielding the material from damage as well as extremes of temperature. It is also a base material for many alchemical solutions. When ingested, it hydrates the body. In many areas, bonedust is contaminated\u2014sometimes purposefully cut\u2014with other substances. Like every other elder artifact, bonedust is subject to periodic inflation due to supply issues.\n\nCasta\u2014Newest of Knoori's nations, a democracy having no official state religion. The capitol of Onsa, located on the northern coast, is its second largest city after Denn. Unless locally enacted, in Casta there are no laws prohibiting gambling, prostitution, or drug usage, but there are strict laws prohibiting sectarian violence. Castans of the north are generally light skinned, often freckled, while those of the interior and south are generally darker, shading into slate colors in the badlands. Geographically, Casta is split between the fertile rolling hills of the north and the semi-desert and desert badlands of the south.\n\nThe Cataclysm\u2014The decade-long winter caused by Adrash sending the two smallest spheres of the Needle into the ocean to the east and west of Knoori approximately one thousand years ago.\n\nConstruct\u2014A magically created intelligence, housed in a variety of different body types. The body and mind are typically composed of bonedust, metal, and a collection of more esoteric materials, the exact \"formula\" of which is the construct-maker's closely guarded secret. Casta and Toma are the sole nations that do not regulate the creation of constructs. They are most common in Knos Min.\n\nDalan Fele\u2014Dareth Hlum's five-hundred-mile-long defensive wall, which forms the nation's western border with Casta. Seventeen gates allow access to and from the interior of Dareth Hlum.\n\nDanoor\u2014The oldest inhabited city on Jeroun, and the third largest by population in Knos Min. It is situated on the plains just east of the Usveet Mesa, and has for hundreds of generations hosted the Tournament of Danoor.\n\nDareth Hlum\u2014One of Knoori's nations, a democracy having no official state religion. The capitol of Golna, located on the eastern coast, is its largest city. Generally, Dareth Hlum allows public, organized fights between Adrashi and Anadrashi sects as long as no onlookers are harmed. Citizens vary widely in appearance, but skin hues are generally darker than the people of northern Casta, Nos Ulom, or Stol. The most geographically diverse region of Knoori, the various mountain chains that cross the nation contribute to many different types of climate and terrain.\n\nElders\u2014The extinct race that preceded man's birth on Jeroun, whose artifacts and landworks are of a scale beyond the means of mankind's magic to reproduce. Little is known of their culture, but many uses have been found for their buried corpses. Primarily, they are used to create alchemical substances. Their eggs and sperm\u2014next to skin the most prized of all elder substances\u2014can be used to inseminate any living animal and produce a hybrid creature. Extrapolating from the nature of hybrids and manufactured elder artifacts, scholars note that elders must have been extremely long-lived and hardy, as well as photosynthetic. Due to their continual harvesting for thousands of years and the increasing depth which miners are forced to go to acquire them, elder corpses are ever more expensive. Some fear the supply will soon run out.\n\nElder-cloth\u2014Any material containing thread made from the skin of an elder. Far stronger than normal fabrics, over time elder-cloth binds itself to the wearer, assisting in limited biological functions. If close-fitting and of a high grade, elder-cloth makes the wearer stronger, faster, and less subject to physical harm. Like all elder artifacts, cloth of this kind must be exposed to sunlight often in order to continue functioning. Elder-cloth can be dyed any color.\n\nElder Skin\u2014Skin harvested from elder corpses. The second most prized and thus expensive of all elder materials, elder skin is used almost exclusively for the production of clothing, being used as thread to make elder-cloth and as a leather item itself. When worn as leather, it grants its wearer increased strength, speed, and protection from injury. Though not as malleable in nature as elder-cloth, leather of this kind forms a bond with its wearer to such a degree that it can be commanded to move remotely. Because of the damage it causes to the brain, ingestion of elder skin is illegal throughout Knoori.\n\nElderman / Elderwoman\u2014A hybrid of man and elder. Exhibiting great intelligence, physical stamina, and speed, without age-nullifying spells their average lifespan is somewhat less than forty years. On average, their magical talent far outstrips that of humans.\n\nEvurt Youl\u2014The fifth demigod created by Adrash, twin to Ustert Youl and the wielder of the short sword Rust. He is no longer worshipped on Jeroun, but among the Usterti he exists as a small figure in her mythology\u2014a forgotten or deceased twin.\n\nHasde Fall\u2014The wooded hills west of Ynon in Knos Min. Rumors say that the Knosi government possesses magical facilities and training grounds underneath the earth in these hills.\n\nHigh Pontiff of Dolin\u2014A man or woman elected by his or her peers to head the Orthodox Church of Nos Ulom. In many ways the most powerful of Knoori's religious heads, his or her position is neither hereditary nor guaranteed for any length of time; he or she may be elected out of office at any moment. Due to the nature of conservative Adrashism and its role as the official state religion, the Pontiff exerts a great deal of secular control in Nos Ulom.\n\nHybrid\u2014The product of an insemination of elder sperm or egg and another animal's sperm or egg through artificial means. The resulting creature generally exhibits greater intelligence and physical stamina than its non-elder parent, but also diminished lifespan and deformities. A large percentage are stillborn.\n\nIswee\u2014Home of the hibernating elders, located on the other side of Jeroun. Hypothesized about by the outbound mages of Stol who have seen the constant cloud cover, its existence is unknown to others.\n\nJeroun\u2014The home of man and elder, a highly habitable planet with one moon.\n\nKnoori\u2014The largest continent of Jeroun and the sole home of man, composed of the nations of Dareth Hlum, Casta, Nos Ulom, the Kingdom of Stol, the Kingdom of Toma, and the Republic of Knos Ulom. Though several large islands lay off of its coast, none are currently inhabited.\n\nKnos Min\u2014Knoori's oldest nation, a republic having no official state religion. The capitol of Grass Min, located on the northern coast, is the third largest city next to Levas. A haven for intellectuals and expatriate professionals, Knos Min is the most magically advanced nation of Knoori, possessing roughly half the continent's elder corpse reserves. Long rumored to have a corps of outbound mages and other martial mages, the strength of the nation's military is rivaled only by the Kingdom of Stol's. Knosi are only marginally less uniform in appearance than the Ulomi, displaying dark brown skin tones and wiry black hair. Generally flat and arid, the nation nonetheless possesses several great mesa ranges, atop which the ground is quite fertile. Old-growth forests grow in the southeastern lake region.\n\nLake Ten\u2014Knoori's largest lake, from whose fresh waters Knos Min, Toma, Stol, and Nos Ulom take a great deal of their sustenance. Officially, its waters are not the property of any one nation. Its shorelines are, however. Its sources are the Thril Rivers, which begin in the Aspa Mountains in Nos Ulom. Its sole outlet is the Unnamed River of Toma.\n\nLocborder Wall\u2014A defensive wall that extends three hundred and fifty miles along the western shore of Lake Ten, from the foothills of the Aspa Mountains in Nos Ulom to the screwcrab warrens of Toma. Its length defines the greatest border along Lake Ten that Knos Min ever achieved. The vast majority of its length still belongs to Knos Min.\n\nLore\u2014The combined skills, practices, and traditions of a particular mage or mage group.\n\nMage\u2014A human or elderman whose education grants them a great deal of knowledge about spell creation and casting. Mages are both self-taught and formally trained, though certain nations and regions discourage the independent practice of magic. The most specialized of all mages\u2014the outbound mages\u2014can perform feats of almost incalculable power, lifting themselves from the surface of Jeroun and surviving in the void of space.\n\nMagics\u2014The creation and casting of spells. The word is nearly synonymous with Lore.\n\nMedicines\u2014The branch of magics that deals with the physical form of the body. Often considered the least demanding of all magics due to the great efficacy of elder alchemicals on the body, medicines is one of the most common and necessary of all magical disciplines.\n\nThe Needle\u2014Twenty-seven iron spheres Adrash created from the material of the moon, held in orbit as a visible threat to the people on Jeroun. Though they have maintained a stable arrangement for a thousand years, for the first five hundred years of their existence the spheres were arranged in a number of ways.\n\nNos Ulom\u2014One of Knoori's nations, an oligarchy having Adrashism as its official state religion. The capitol of Dolin, located in the central valleys just north of the Aspa Mountain chain, is a relatively small city of less than fifty thousand souls. Of all the nations of Knoori, Nos Ulom is the most repressive, its government the most autocratic. Ulomi are the continent's most uniform people in appearance, displaying unblemished, cream-colored skin and generally curly, straw-colored hair. Geographically, the nation is mountainous in the south and composed of high, fertile tableland and pine forest in the north.\n\nThe Ocean\u2014Variously known as the Sea, Jeru, or Deathshallow, the ocean is shallow and laps upon the shores of many islands. It harbors a startling variety of marine life, much of which is quite dangerous to man. Due to this danger, it has not been navigated by man for many thousands of years.\n\nOrrus Dabulakm\u2014The third demigod created by Adrash, and the wielder of the glass spear Deserest. He is worshipped within a few rural, isolated communities In Dareth Hlum and Casta. Their myths tell that he is the son of Adrash. Orrust people believe that it is not Adrash moving the spheres of the Needle, but Orrus\u2014and that by destroying Jeroun, he will give birth to a new paradise.\n\nOsseterat\u2014Hybrid apes of near-human intelligence that are rumored to live in Hasde Fall.\n\nOutbound Mage\u2014A mage trained specifically to achieve orbit and travel in the void. Stol alone openly uses this type of mage, though rumors suggest that Knos Min also possesses outbound mages. Though a few outbound mages have been human, the overwhelming majority of them are eldermen, who exhibit a greater potential for magic and greater stamina. Each mage wears a vacuum suit\u2014composed of leather made from elder skin\u2014on which he or she paints sigils. The mage also wears a dustglass (bonedust-reinforced glass) helmet. The suit and helmet protect the mage from vacuum for a brief period of time should his or her spells fail. The purpose of the outbound mages is to monitor Adrash, though much knowledge of Jeroun has been gained by the activities of the corps as well.\n\nOsa\u2014A large, circular island in Uris Bay. It is covered by an artifact of high elder magic, an immense glass-like dome upon which a variety of life clings. Wyrms and other large creatures, most not seen on the mainland, live near the dome walls. With intense magnification, abandoned cities can be seen on the slopes of Mount Pouen, the island's largest peak. No openings appear to exist in the dome.\n\nPusta\u2014An exclave of Stol. The capitol is Ravos, located on the northern coast. Differing from Stol in many respects, the culture of Pusta inherits much from its multiethnic fisheries, which are the most technologically advanced in Knoori and extend along the entire coastline.\n\nQuarterstock\u2014The extremely rare offspring of a hybrid. The majority of hybrids are sterile, and the vast majority of their offspring never come to term. Even if they do, a very small percentage live. Of those that live, an even smaller percentage are unaffected by mental or physical retardation. No comprehensive study of a healthy individual\u2014human or animal in origin\u2014has yet been conducted.\n\nShavrim Thrall Coranid\u2014The first demigod created by Adrash, ostensibly the leader of his siblings, and the wielder of the sentient silverblack knife Sroma. Though a pivotal part of the early history of Jeroun, nearly all vestiges of Shavrim's identity have disappeared from the minds of mankind. Among the Tomen people, however, a legend is told of an immense, immortal man with remarkable skills\u2014particularly, the ability to tame animals or keep them at bay, allowing him to take to the air on the back of a wyrm and even navigate the sea.\n\nSigil\u2014A particular type of spell that is painted on a surface using alchemical ink. It is usually \"activated\" by the recitation\u2014verbally or, if the mage is sufficiently powerful, mentally\u2014of a specific set of words.\n\nSorcerer\u2014A mage.\n\nSpell\u2014An alchemical solution that\u2014when activated by thought, incantation, or physical action\u2014produces a magical effect. Hundreds of thousands of such spells, each varying according to the particular mixture of elder components, are produced and cast every day for a variety of tasks. The easiest spells to produce and cast affect inorganic materials: moving the elements, creating a current, etc. The most difficult spells to produce and cast affect living substances: changing one's structure, extending one's life, creating constructs, etc. The efficacy of a spell decreases the farther away the mage is, a fact which makes influencing an object over long distances\u2014as in the sending of a message\u2014difficult.\n\nSradir Ung Kim\u2014The fourth demigod created by Adrash, and the wielder of the oilwood and leather sambok Weither. All vestiges of Sradir's identity have disappeared from the minds of mankind.\n\nSroma\u2014A large, silverblack knife found by Adrash before the birth of mankind on Jeroun. A sentient elder artifact similar to the divine armor, its existence appears to stand as a counterpoint to the armor, acting as opposing forces. Shavrim is the only being to ever hold it other than Adrash.\n\nThe Steps of Stol\u2014An earthwork monument created by high elder magic. It begins in the fertile southern plains of Stol, extending some eighty miles to the coast and more than four hundred along it. Ascending to a height of twelve thousand feet in seventeen evenly spaced, gently sloping rises, the Steps stop abruptly at the ocean. Most of Stol's elder corpse reserves are buried within it.\n\nStol\u2014One of Knoori's nations, a kingdom having Adrashism as its official state religion. The capitol of Tansot, located on the eastern shore of Lake Ten, is its largest city. Moderate Adrashism is the general rule and all Anadrashi sects are allowed to live peaceably within the kingdom's borders, though they suffer persecution in the central valleys. After Knos Min, Stol is the most magically advanced nation of Knoori, possessing roughly forty percent of the continent's elder corpse reserves. The only state with a known outbound mage program, the strength of the military relies much upon magical developments from the Academy of Applied Magics. Stoli people vary widely in appearance, but are generally light skinned. Geographically, Stol is generally hilly in the north, descending into fertile valleys in the central region, and rising to great heights on the Steps of Stol in the south.\n\nTamer\u2014A mage who specializes in taming and controlling large, exotic, and hybrid animals. Their lore is far more esoteric and difficult to master than the many readily available spells used to help control draft animals, entertainment animals, and pets. In rare cases, the tamer achieves a type of telepathic bond with his or her animal. In Casta and Stol, the most daring and specialized type of tamer exists: the hybrid wyrm tamer.\n\nTan-Ten\u2014The island at the center of Lake Ten. Oasena is its only city. The people of Tan-Ten have never shown interest in power or political maneuvering, but have on many occasions successfully defended their island from invaders.\n\nThaumaturgical Engine\u2014A construct used to create kinetic force. Unlike constructs that mimic biological creatures, an engine is rarely imbued with more than the most basic intelligence needed to follow simple directions. Due to the expense of creating and maintaining engines, those produced are most often used in barges or other large transport vehicles.\n\nToma\u2014One of Knoori's nations, a kingdom having Anadrashism as its official state religion. The capitol of Demn, located on the southern coast, is its largest city. Possibly the most religiously militant of all the people of Knoori, Tomen nonetheless value the personal, non-dogmatic expression of Anadrashism more than any other. The people vary considerably in build, but are generally dusky skinned and rust-haired. Toma is the most arid nation of Knoori and, but for the Wie Desert in the southwest, the hilliest.\n\nThe Tournament of Danoor\u2014The decennial tournament between Knoori's White Suit and Black Suit orders, which occurs on the last day of every decade. A fighter is chosen from every town numbering more than 2000 souls. He or she then travels to Danoor and is allowed to fight in the tournament. In the end, one Black and one White remain. Accordingly, along the way fighters will inevitably have to fight brothers and sisters of their own faith. The New Year celebration starts after the tournament champion's speech, wherein he or she typically extols listeners to convert to the winning faith. Usually, secular fighting tournaments begin the next day.\n\nUal\u2014A small town in eastern Knos Min, positioned on Uris Bay. An otherwise unnoteworthy locale, it is remarkable only for the singularity of its coastal wall, which creates an enclosed pool of seawater thirty miles long and ten miles wide. Though it is common to say no men set craft upon the ocean for fear of what resides in it, the men and women of Ual have kept their sea-gates shut for millennia in order to hunt juvenile fish and reptiles before they grow to dangerous proportions.\n\nUstert Youl\u2014The sixth and final demigod created by Adrash, twin to Evurt Youl and the wielder of the short sword Ruin. She is worshipped by a relatively large minority in Casta and Knos Min. A loosely organized sororal community of mages and apothecaries (often referred to as witches, though this term is widely used even in Adrashi and Anadrashi contexts), Usterti profess a variety of beliefs, bound only by the understanding that the goddess governs all existence. Due to this ambiguity, a great deal of mystery surrounds the community.\n\nThe Void\u2014Near-Jeroun orbit and outer space.\n\nWhite Suits\u2014A martial order of Adrashi prevalent in all nations of Knoori except Toma. Marked by their white elder-cloth suits, their primary goal as an institution is to fight Black Suits and win converts to the Adrashi faith. By doing so, White Suits believe they encourage Adrash to redeem Jeroun sooner. Orders are relatively uncommon and secretive outside southern Nos Ulom, Dareth Hlum, and Knos Min.\n\nWyrm\u2014A dragon of immense size. Highly intelligent and extremely temperamental, they do not come into contact with men often. This is due mostly to the fact that most food is taken from the open ocean. Only a small minority of dragons hunt large prey on the continent. Hybrid wyrms are not common, but do exist in Stol and Casta.\nACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nThank you to my wife, Sophia, and my son, Dominic, my mom and dad, my sisters and brothers, and my mother-in-law Rosemary Papa.\n\nThank you to all the people\u2014too many to list, really\u2014who encouraged me to keep going on this second book without any prompting or cajoling (okay, maybe a little prompting and cajoling).\n\nLastly, thank you to my agent, Michael Harriot, my editors, Jeremy Lassen and Cory Allyn, the behind-the-scenes Night Shade Books crew, and all the other cool folks who made this book a physical and digital reality.\n"}
+{"meta": {"title": "Gregory Benford - Galactic Center 06 - Sailing Bright Eternity [retail]"}, "text": "Copyright \u00a9 1995 by Abbenford Associates\n\nExcerpt from The Sunborn copyright \u00a9 2004 by Abbenford Associates\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.\n\n _Cover design by Don Puckey_\n\n _Cover illustration by Don Dixon_\n\nWarner Books\n\nHachette Book Group USA\n\n237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017\n\nVisit our Web site at HachetteBookGroupUSA.com\n\nFirst eBook Edition: March 2005\n\nISBN: 978-0-446-51128-5\nContents\n\nAlso by Gregory Benford\n\nDedication\n\nPrologue: Metallovore\n\nAn Abyss of Time\n\nPart One: Wondrous Ruins\n\nChapter One: Half Vast\n\nChapter Two: The Place of Angry Gods\n\nChapter Three: Church Mice\n\nChapter Four: Alexandria\n\nChapter Five: Huck\n\nChapter Six: Something Fatal\n\nChapter Seven: Old Ones\n\nChapter Eight: Grandfather\n\nChapter Nine: The Strong Field Limit\n\nChapter Ten: Vermin\n\nChapter Eleven: The Earthers\n\nChapter Twelve: Sobering Perspectives\n\nChapter Thirteen: The Physical Representation\n\nPart Two: Soon Comes Night\n\nChapter One: Worm\n\nChapter Two: Annihilation Line\n\nChapter Three: Interfacer\n\nChapter Four: Agonies of Gravity\n\nChapter Five: Three Billion Years\n\nChapter Six: Deep Down Superficial\n\nChapter Seven: A Few Microseconds\n\nChapter Eight: Antiques Dealer\n\nChapter Nine: The Tilted City\n\nChapter Ten: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik\n\nChapter Eleven: Sphincter Frequency\n\nChapter Twelve: Grudging Respect\n\nChapter Thirteen: Only Barbarians\n\nChapter Fourteen: Grey Mech\n\nChapter Fifteen: Transit\n\nChapter Sixteen: Time Is a Horizon\n\nChapter Seventeen: Transit; Wait\n\nChapter Eighteen: Marching\n\nChapter Nineteen: Storytelling\n\nChapter Twenty: Generations\n\nChapter Twenty-One: Inflection Point\n\nChapter Twenty-Two: Far Futures\n\nChapter Twenty-Three: Verge of Extinction\n\nChapter Twenty-Four: Alexandria\n\nChapter Twenty-Five: Mortal Galaxies\n\nChapter Twenty-Six: A Far One\n\nChapter Twenty-Seven: Radiant\n\nChapter Twenty-Eight: Tiny Farmers\n\nChapter Twenty-Nine: The Cauchy Horizon\n\nChapter Thirty: Comfy Doubt\n\nChapter Thirty-One: A Wherewhen String\n\nChapter Thirty-Two: Larger Agencies\n\nChapter Thirty-Three: No Erasures\n\nChapter Thirty-Four: When Paltry Planets Formed a Stage\n\nDispassionate Discourse\n\nPart Three: Categories Beyond Knowing\n\nChapter One: Prisoners of Immensity\n\nChapter Two: Flight\n\nChapter Three: The Impressed Man\n\nChapter Four: Carrion\n\nChapter Five: Cards and Dodgers\n\nChapter Six: The Incredible in Concrete\n\nA Tapestry of Thought\n\nPart Four: Sense of Self\n\nChapter One: Melted Portals\n\nChapter Two: A Fog of Flies\n\nChapter Three: The Pleasure Plague\n\nChapter Four: The Way of Three\n\nDecision Tree\n\nPart Five: The Silver River Road\n\nChapter One: Molten Time\n\nChapter Two: Confusion Winds\n\nChapter Three: The Zom\n\nChapter Four: Mr. Preston\n\nChapter Five: The Frozen Girl\n\nChapter Six: Going Upback\n\nChapter Seven: Temporal Turbulence\n\nChapter Eight: The Eating Ice\n\nChapter Nine: Cairo\n\nChapter Ten: Zom Master\n\nChapter Eleven: The Past Is Labyrinth\n\nChapter Twelve: Whorl\n\nChapter Thirteen: Pursuit\n\nPart Six: Wedded to the Substrate\n\nChapter One: Partial to Primates\n\nChapter Two: The Gathering Up\n\nChapter Three: Some Terrible Wonder\n\nChapter Four: Finitudes\n\nChapter Five: An Abyss of Squashed Duration\n\nChapter Six: Uses of the Mose Art\n\nPart Seven: Gods Provisional and Descending\n\nChapter One: A Mantis Blankness\n\nChapter Two: Territories of Thought\n\nChapter Three: Hard Pursuit\n\nChapter Four: Abraham\n\nChapter Five: Confusion Squall\n\nChapter Six: Conceptual Spaces\n\nChapter Seven: The Suredead\n\nChapter Eight: Phylum Myriapodia\n\nChapter Nine: Stalking\n\nChapter Ten: Paths of Glory\n\nPart Eight: The Syntony\n\nIn Silico\n\nChapter One: Unintentional Jokes\n\nChapter Two: Besen\n\nChapter Three: A Long Way Ago\n\nChapter Four: The Eternal Landscape of the Past\n\nChapter Five: The Thermodynamics of Intelligence\n\nChapter Six: Living in the Substrate\n\nChapter Seven: Hard Copy\n\nChapter Eight: The Thirst That from the Soul Doth Rise\n\nChapter Nine: The Pain of Eternity\n\nCoda\n\nAfterword to the Galactic Center Series\n\nTimeline of Galactic Series\n\nAbout the Author\n**BATTLE STARS**\n\nAs we got closer we could see the brawl. Fat, wobbly stars flaring like angry gods, spewing red tongues. They were the children of awful marriages, when two stars had collided, merged, and fallen into the same oblate quarrel. Stars ripped open, spilled, smelted down into fusing globs. They lit up the dark, orbiting masses of debris like tiny crimson match heads flaring in a filthy coal sack.\n\nAmid all that were the strangest stars of all. Fast ones, they were. Each half-covered by a hemispherical mask. Light escaped freely on one side. The mask bottled it up on the other. That pushed the star toward the mask. As far as the wretched star knew, however, it was able to eject light in only one direction. So it recoiled in the opposite way.\n\nSomebody was herding these stars. Those masks made them into fusion-photon engines. Sluggish, but effective. And the herd was headed for the accretion disk.\n\nSomebody was helping along the black hole's appetite.\n\n **ACCLAIM FOR GREGORY BENFORD'S CLASSIC NOVELS OF THE GALACTIC CENTER**\n\n _IN THE OCEAN OF NIGHT_\n\n\"A major novel . . . evokes truly majestic feeling for the vast distances and time scales upon which the universe operates.\"\n\n\u2014Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction\n\n\"A brilliant book, a weather vane for the changing winds of science fiction.\"\n\n **\u2014 _Publishers Weekly_**\n\n _FURIOUS GULF_\n\n\"A heady mixture of science . . . and no-holds-barred adventure.\"\n\n\u2014New York Times Book Review\n\n\"When it comes to conjuring the marvels of space and the bizarre possibilities of high-energy physics, Benford is second to none.\"\n\n\u2014Kirkus Reviews\nALSO BY GREGORY BENFORD\n\n **Fiction**\n\n _Beyond Infinity_\n\n _The Sunborn_\n\n _The Martian Race_\n\n _Eater_\n\n _The Stars in Shroud_\n\n _Jupiter Project_\n\n _Shiva Descending_ (with William Rostler)\n\n _Heart of the Comet_ (with David Brin)\n\n _A Darker Geometry_ (with Mark O. Martin)\n\n _Beyond the Fall of Night_ (with Arthur C. Clarke)\n\n _Against Infinity_\n\n _Cosm_\n\n _Foundation's Fear_\n\n _Artifact_\n\n _Timescape_\n\n **The Galactic Center Series**\n\n _In the Ocean of Night_\n\n _Across the Sea of Suns_\n\n _Great Sky River_\n\n _Tides of Light_\n\n _Furious Gulf_\n\n _Sailing Bright Eternity_\n\n **Non-fiction**\n\n _Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates_\n\n _Across Millennia_\nTo Mark and Alyson and Joan\n\nwho grew and changed far more\n\nin the decades it took to write this series of novels\n\nthan novels can possibly portray.\nPROLOGUE\n\nMetallovore\nBlack holes have weather, of a sort.\n\nLight streams from them. Blackness dwells at their cores, but friction heats the infalling gas and dust. These streams brim with forced radiation. Storms worry them. White-hot tornadoes whirl and suck.\n\nFrom the immense hole at the exact center of the galaxy, a virulent glow hammers outward. It pushes incessantly at the crowded masses that circle it, jostling in their doomed orbits. Gravity's gullet forces the streams into a disk, churning ever inward. Suffering in the weather.\n\nThe press of hot photons is a wind, driving all before it. Except for the grazers. To these photovores, the great grinding disk is a source of food.\n\nFire-flowers blossom in the disk, sending up lashes of fierce ultraviolet. Storms of light.\n\nBoth above and below the accretion disk, in hovering clouds, these photons smash molecules to atoms, strip atoms into bare charge, whip particles into sleet. The clouds are debris, dust, grains. They are already doomed by gravity's rub, like nearly everything here.\n\nNearly. To the gossamer, floating herds this is a fountain. Their life source.\n\nSheets of them hang, billowing with the electromagnetic winds. Basking in the sting. Holding steady.\n\nThe photovores are patiently grazing. Some are Infras, others Ultras\u2014tuned to soak up particular slices of the electromagnetic spectrum.\n\nEach species has a characteristic polish and shape. Each works within evolutionary necessity, deploying great flat receptor planes. Each has a song, used to maintain orbit and angle.\n\nAgainst the wrathful weather here, information is at least a partial defense. Position-keeping telemetry flits between the herd sheets. They sing luminously to each other in the eternal brimming day.\n\nHovering on the pressure of light, great wings of high-gloss moly-sheet spread. Vectoring, skating on winds, magnetic torques in a complex dynamical sum. Ruling forces govern their perpetual, gliding dance. This is decreed by intelligences they scarcely sense, machines that prowl the darker lanes farther out.\n\nThose magisterial forms need the energies from this furnace, yet do not venture here. The wise and valuable run no risks.\n\nAt times the herds fail. Vast shimmering sheets peel away. Many are cast into the shrouded masses of molecular clouds, which are themselves soon to boil away. Others follow a helpless descending gyre. Long before they could strike the brilliant disk, the hard glare dissolves their lattices. They burst open and flare with fatal energies.\n\nNow a greater threat spirals lazily down. It descends from the shelter of thick, turbulent dust. It lets itself fall toward the governing mass, the black hole itself. Then it arrests its descent with outstretched wings of mirrors. They bank gracefully on the photon breeze.\n\nIts lenses swivel to select prey. There a pack of photovores has clumped, disregarding ageless programming, or perhaps caught in a magnetic flux tube. The cause does not matter. The predator eases down along the axis of the galaxy itself.\n\nHere, navigation is simple. Far below, the rotational pole of the Eater of All Things is a pinprick of absolute black at the center of a slowly revolving, incandescent disk.\n\nThe clustered photovores sense a descending presence. Their vast sailing herds cleave, peeling back to reveal deeper planes of burnt-gold light seekers. They all live to ingest light and excrete microwave beams. Their internal world revolves around ingestion, considered digestion, and orderly excretion.\n\nThese placid conduits now flee. But those clumped near the axis have little angular momentum, and cannot pivot on a magnetic fulcrum. Dimly they sense their destiny. Their hissing microwaves waver.\n\nSome plunge downward, hoping that the predator will not follow so close to the Eater. Others cluster ever more, as if numbers give safety. The opposite is true.\n\nThe metallovore folds its mirror wings. Now angular and swift, accelerating, it mashes a few of the herd on its carapace. It scoops them in with flux lines. Metal harvesters rip the photovores. Shreds rush down burnt-black tunnels. Electrostatic fields separate elements and alloys.\n\nFusion fires await the ruined carcasses. There the separation can be exquisitely tuned, yielding pure ingots of any alloy desired. In the last analysis, the ultimate resources here are mass and light. The photovores lived for light, and now they end as mass.\n\nThe sleek metallovore never deigns to notice the layers of multitudes peeling back, their gigahertz cries of panic. They are plankton. It ingests them without registering their songs, their pain, their mortal fears.\n\nYet the metallovore, too, is part of an intricate balance. If it and its kind were lost, the community orbiting the Eater would decay to a less diverse state, one of monotonous simplicity, unable to adjust to the Eater's vagaries. Less energy would be harnessed, less mass recovered.\n\nThe metallovore prunes less efficient photovores. Its ancient codes, sharpened over time by natural selection, prefer the weak. Those who have slipped into unproductive orbits are easier to catch. It also prefers the savor of those who have allowed their receptor planes to tarnish with succulent trace elements, spewed up by the hot accretion disk below. The metallovore spots these by their mottled, dusky hue.\n\nEach frying instant, millions of such small deaths shape the mechsphere.\n\nPredators abound, and parasites. Here and there on the metallovore's polished skin are limpets and barnacles. These lumps of orange-brown and soiled yellow feed on chance debris from the prey. They can lick at the passing winds of matter and light. They purge the metallovore of unwanted elements\u2014wreckage and dust that can jam even the most robust mechanisms, given time.\n\nAll this intricacy floats on the pressure of photons. Light is the fluid here, spilling up from the blistering storms far below in the great grinding disk. This rich harvest supports the mechsphere that stretches for hundreds of cubic light-years, its sectors and spans like armatures of an unimaginable city.\n\nAll this, centered on a core of black oblivion, the dark font of vast wealth.\n\nInside the rim of the garish disk, oblivious to the weather here, whirls a curious blotchy distortion in the fabric of space and time. It is called by some the Wedge, for the way it is jammed in so close. Others term it the Labyrinth.\n\nIt seems to be a small refraction in the howling virulence. Sitting on the very brink of annihilation, it advertises its artificial insolence.\n\nYet it lives on. The mote orbits perpetually beside the most awful natural abyss in the galaxy: the Eater of All Things.\nAn Abyss of Time\n\nInterior state: a place cloudless and smooth, without definition:\n\nThe mechanicals are converging, Nigel.\n\n\"You feel them?\"\n\nClearly. They can now manifest themselves in magnetic vortices.\n\n\"Bloody dexterous, they are.\"\n\nI can feel them. Something bad is coming.\n\n\"Thanks for the warning, m'love. But I've got to bring the lad Toby up to speed, and it'll take a while.\"\n\nThere is nothing you could do for me anyway.\n\nHe smiled without mirth. \"All too true.\"\n\nI will alert you if the energy densities change for the worse.\n\nHe nodded and the space without definition vanished.\n\nHe was back in a bare room, sitting opposite a young man, trying to frame the immense story that had led him to this moment.\n\n\u2014 _nothing you could do_ \u2014\n\nHe remembered another time, long ago.\n\nHe and Carlos stood on a dry ridge of bare rock and looked out over a plain. This was not a world at all but a convoluted wraparound of space-time itself. Its sky curved overhead, a bowl of scrub desert.\n\nStill, it _felt_ like a place to live. A remarkable, alien-made refuge. Dirt, air, odd but acceptable plants.\n\nThey talked about finding a way to live here, in a hard, dry place twisted and alive in a way that rock was not.\n\nCarlos had just made a good joke and Nigel laughed, relaxed and easy, and then Carlos plunged forward, his shoulder striking Nigel's arm. Carlos went down with his head tilted back, as if he were looking up at the sky, a quizzical expression flickering as the head brushed by Nigel and down and hit face first on the baked dirt. Carlos had not lifted his hands to break the fall. He slid a foot as he struck.\n\nThe noise that had started it all was ugly. It seemed to condense out of the air, a soft thump like an ax sinking into a rotten stump.\n\nAs Carlos pitched forward something rose from his back, a geyser of skin and frothy blood. It spattered over the back of the tunic as the body smacked into the dirt. The thump, Nigel realized later, was the compact explosion of electromagnetic energy, targeted a few centimeters below the skin.\n\nAs Nigel dropped to lower his profile he got a good look at Carlos. One was enough. Then he ran, bent over, hearing the harsh following buzz of the electromagnetic pulse tapering away as he zigzagged behind some jagged boulders.\n\nToo much open space and too little shelter. He squatted and could not see what had fired the shot. Carlos lay flat without a twitch.\n\nNothing happened. No following pulses.\n\nNigel replayed the images as he waited. A spout of rosy blood from a circle punched high in the spine. Absolutely dead center, four centimeters below the neck. Kilojoules of energy focused to a spot the size of a fingernail.\n\nThat much energy delivered so precisely would have done the job even if it hit the hip or gut. Delivered so exactly, it burst the big axis, plowing massive pressures through the spinal fluid\u2014a sudden breeze blowing out a candle, the brain going black in a millisecond.\n\nCarlos had gone down boneless, erased. A soft, liquid thump, then eternal silence.\n\nNigel held up his hand and watched it tremble for a while. Enough waiting.\n\nHe worked his way along the ridgeline. The pulse had come from behind Carlos and he kept plenty of rock between him and that direction. He got to Carlos and studied the face from behind a boulder nearby. The head was cocked to one side. Eyes still open, mouth seeping moisture into the dry dirt. The eyes were the worst, staring into an infinity nobody glimpses more than once.\n\n _Good-bye, friend. We had our arguments, but we came thirty thousand light-years together. And now I can't do a damn thing for you._\n\nSomething moved to his right. He pulled out a pulse gun and fired at it but the target was a gossamer ball of motes. A Higher, or rather, a local manifestation of one.\n\nIt flickered, spun, and said in a low, bass voice, \"We regret.\"\n\n\"You did this?\"\n\n\"No. A mechanical form, termed the Mantis.\"\n\n\"And who're you?\"\n\n\"That would be impossible to say.\"\n\n\"Is this Mantis after me, too?\"\n\n\"I will protect you.\"\n\n\"You didn't do a great job for Carlos.\"\n\n\"I arrived here slightly late.\"\n\n _\"Slightly?\"_\n\n\"You must forgive errors. We are finite, all.\"\n\n\"Damn finite.\"\n\n\"The Mantis was harvesting Carlos. He is saved.\"\n\n\"You mean stored?\"\n\n\"To mechanicals it is the same thing.\"\n\n\"Not to us. I thought we'd be safe in this place, this Lair.\"\n\n\"No place is safe. This is safer.\"\n\n\"What'll kill a Mantis?\"\n\n\"There was nothing you could do.\"\n\nNigel Walmsley cursed the mote cloud, his fury going into fruitless words.\n\n\"Nothing you could do,\" he muttered to himself.\n\nDo not belabor the past so.\n\nNikka's frail voice resounded in his sensorium.\n\n\"There's so much of it.\"\n\nPay attention to the young man before you. He is a key to saving us.\n\nNigel sighed. \"I grow old, I grow old\u2014\"\n\nI shall wear my trousers rolled\u2014yes, I know the poem. Get on with it, Nigel!\n\nHe nodded and dropped out of the interior space of smooth blankness. It was pleasant to retire to that cool, interior vault. Perhaps the old solidly good point to the augmentations he had gained through centuries; the quietness of a good, old-fashioned library. Where most of the people were books.\n\nVery well, then. Back into the grainy. The real. The deliciously dangerous.\nPART ONE\n\nWondrous Ruins\nONE\n\nHalf Vast\n\nAn old man sat and told a young man a story. As stories go it was long and angular, with its own momentary graces and clumsy logic, much the way life is.\n\n\"What is this place?\" Toby asked. \"This mountain?\"\n\nNigel Walmsley leaned back in a webbing that shaped itself to him. He was nude, leathery. The lattice of his ribs made him look as though he had a barrel chest, but that was because he was gaunt with age.\n\nHe had reached the phase when life reduces a man to the essentials. For packaging, skin like brown butcher's paper. Muscles like motors, lodged in lumps along the bone-girders. Knobby elbows and knees, so round they seemed to encase oiled ball bearings. Sockets at the shoulder and hip, bulging beneath the dry parchment skin. Eyes blue and quick, glittering like mica in the bare face. A jaw chiseled above a scrawny neck. Cheekbones high and jutting like blades above the thin, pale lips. An oddly tilted smile, playing mischievously.\n\n\"It's popularly termed the Magnetic Mountain, though I have rather a more personal name for it.\"\n\n\"You're from a planet near True Center?\"\n\n\"No no, I'm from Earth.\"\n\n\"What? You said before that you were Family Brit. I\u2014\"\n\n\"A jest. In my time there weren't Families in the way you mean. The Brits were a nation\u2014much bigger.\"\n\n\"How much bigger?\" Toby had heard Earth invoked, of course, but it was a name from far antiquity. Meaningless. Probably just a legend, like Eden and Rome.\n\n\"I doubt that all the Families surviving at Galactic Center number a tenth what the Brits did.\"\n\n\"That many?\"\n\n\"Hard to estimate, of course. There are layers and folds and hideaways aplenty in the esty.\"\n\n\"Brits must be powerful.\"\n\nWalmsley pursed his lips, bemused. \"Um. Alas, through the power of the word, mostly.\"\n\nToby had no idea how many people still lived, after all the death he had seen. He had come here on a long journey, fleeing the mechs. Through it all, to all sides and in his wake, mechs had cut swaths through all the humans they could find. The slaughter reminded him of the retreat from the Calamity, the fall of Citadel Bishop: a landscape of constant dying.\n\nBut the butchery was now far greater. Devoting so much energy to hunting vermin humans was unusual for mechs. Mostly they didn't care; humans were pests, no more. This time they clearly were after Toby in particular. So the deaths behind him weighed on him all the more. He was only slowly coming to feel the meaning of that. It was a thing beyond words or consolations.\n\n\"Ummm.\" Walmsley seemed pensive, eyes crinkling. \"Usually I felt there were too few Brits, too many of everybody else.\"\n\n\"Family Brit must've been huge.\"\n\n\"We reproduced quickly enough. Didn't have the radiation you suffer through here.\"\n\n\"We're protected from that, my father said.\"\n\n\"There's a limit to what genetic tinkering can do. Organic cells fall apart easily. Part of their beauty, really. Makes them evolve quicker.\"\n\n\"Most of our Citadel was underground, to help\u2014\"\n\n\"Somewhat useful, of course. But the stillbirths, the deformities . . .\" Walmsley's bony face creased with painful memories.\n\n\"Well, sure, that's life.\"\n\n\"Life next door to this hell hole, true.\"\n\n\"The Eater?\" Toby had grown up with the Eater, a glowering eye rimmed in angry reds and sullen burnt browns. It had been as bright as Snowglade's own sun. \"Living near it was pretty ordinary.\"\n\nWalmsley laughed heartily, not the aged cackle Toby would have expected. \"Trust me, there are better neighborhoods.\"\n\n\"Snowglade was good enough for me,\" Toby said defensively.\n\n\"Ah yes. We gave the chess families a good world, I recall.\"\n\n\"Gave? You?\"\n\n\"I am rather older than you may suppose.\"\n\n\"But you couldn't be\u2014\"\n\n\"Could and am. I've stretched matters out, of course. Had to. I fetched up at the very bottom of this steep gravitational gradient, along the elastic timeline\u2014\"\n\n\"The, uh . . . ?\"\n\n\"Sorry, that's an old way of talking. I mean, this is a stable point, this esty. We're in a descended Lane, one where time runs very slowly. I\u2014\"\n\n\"Slow?\" Maybe this was why Toby had been having trouble with his internal clock. When he had been near their ship _Argo_ his systems lagged the ship's, if he went too far into the city beyond. He could never trace the cause. He checked it reflexively, ticking along steadily if he looked far down into the corner of his left eye and blinked. There: 14:27:33. \"Measured by what?\"\n\n\"Good point. Measured with respect to the flat space-time outside, far from the black hole.\"\n\n\"So this is a kind of time storage place?\"\n\n\"Indeed. I've stored myself here, one might say. And there are other things, many others, this far deep in the esty.\"\n\n\"When did you do it?\"\n\nToby was trying to place this dried-up old man in the pantheon of Family Bishop legend, but the very idea seemed a laugh. The men and women who had started the Families, at the very beginning of the Hunker Down, had been wise and farsighted. The founding fathers and mothers. Better than anybody alive today, that was pretty clear. And for sure they wore clothes.\n\n\"Before the 'Hunker Down.' Well before. I spent a great while in Lanes squirreled away, deep, letting time pass outside.\"\n\n\"So you weren't actually doing anything?\"\n\n\"If you mean, did I get out occasionally, yes. To the early Chandeliers, in fact. On my last excursion, to several worlds.\"\n\nToby snorted scornfully. \"You expect me to swallow that?\" His Aspects were trying to pipe in with some backup information, but he was confused enough already.\n\nWalmsley yawned, not the reaction of wounded innocence Toby had expected of a practiced liar. \"Matters little if you don't.\"\n\nA sudden suspicion struck him. \"You were around in the Great Times?\"\n\n\"As they're called, yes. Not all that great, really.\"\n\n\"We ruled here then, right?\" That was the drift of countless stories from Citadel Bishop days. Humanity triumphant. Then the fall, the Hunker Down, and worse after.\n\n\"Nonsense. Rats in the wall, even then. Just a higher class of rat.\"\n\n\"My grandfather said\u2014\"\n\n\"Legends are works of fiction, remember.\"\n\n\"But we must've been great, really great, to even build the Chandeliers.\"\n\n\"We're smart rats, I'll give you that.\"\n\nNot trying to hide his disbelief, Toby asked, \" _You_ helped build those? I mean, I visited one\u2014was booby-trapped. Derelict, sure, but beautiful, big and\u2014\"\n\n\"The grunt labor was done by others, really, from Earth.\"\n\nToby snorted in disbelief. Walmsley cocked an eye. \"Think I'm pulling your leg?\"\n\n\"What's that mean?\"\n\n\"That I'm having you on.\" A crinkled grin.\n\nToby frowned doubtfully, glancing at his leg.\n\n\"That is, I'm joking.\"\n\n\"Oh. But\u2014Earth's a _legend._ \"\n\n\"True enough, but some legends still walk and talk. These legends were of the second wave, actually, us being the first. Whole bloody fleet of ramscoops, better than the mech ship we'd hauled in on. Smart rats.\"\n\nToby nodded slowly. Why would this dried-up runt lie?\n\nSo Earthers had built the Chandeliers? Maybe Earthers weren't mythical folk, after all. They probably really ran things during the Great Times, then, too. But for sure nobody like this wrinkled dwarf could have. \"Uh huh. So it's Earther tech in the Chandeliers.\"\n\n\"Polyglot tech, really\u2014mech, Earthborn, plenty of things slapped together.\"\n\n\"By who?\" Toby still wasn't impressed with this dwarf.\n\n\"By us. Humanity. The Earthers who came in the second wave were still, I suppose, the same species as us. But . . .\" A strange melancholy flickered in his face. \"Different. Much . . . better.\"\n\n\"Better at tech?\"\n\n\"More than that. Dead on, they were beyond merely impressive. Made miracles, just tinkering with the huge range of gear they\u2014we\u2014captured down through centuries. Others did it, I mean\u2014I tired of tech quite some time ago.\"\n\nToby sniffed. \"Knowing techtricks is same as breathing, to Bishops.\"\n\n\"True enough, down on the planets. The second-wave 'Earthers,' as you call them, they were important, mind. My wife, Nikka, used to say our problems were vast\u2014and Earthers brought us plenty of half-vast solutions.\"\n\nToby wasn't used to this man's deadpan way of making jokes. Bishops were more the thigh-slapper type. \"Brit breed, you are,\" he said reluctantly. No geezer was going to put one over on him, but something finally made him believe Walmsley was from Earth. Maybe it was the fact that Walmsley didn't seem to care very much whether he did or not.\n\n\"The second wave boosted our numbers\u2014which the mechs were always trimming, shall we say.\"\n\n\"Even then?\"\n\n\"Always and forever. A few interludes of cooperation, but we were tolerated at best. For a while, we could move fairly freely near True Center. They swatted us when they noticed us. We had plenty of help from the Old Ones, time to time. Capricious, but crucial.\"\n\n\"Old Ones?\"\n\n\"They were a form of intelligence descended from clay.\"\n\n\"Clay? From dirt?\"\n\n\"Electrostatic energy storage, in clay beds with saline solutions\u2014on old seashores, I gather.\"\n\nNow Toby was annoyed. \"You being from Earth, I can maybe believe that, but living dirt? You must think\u2014\"\n\n\"They came first of all. Have a squint.\"\n\nA three-dimensional plot shimmered in Toby's sensorium. He sectioned it to read in 2D, which collapsed the nuances into a simple diagram. \"Complexity?\"\n\n\"The specialists term it 'structure complexity.' Clays built up complicated lattices that could replicate themselves. Harvested piezoelectrical currents, driven by pressures in crystals. Later on, they allowed algae to capture sunlight. They drew off the energy, rather like farmers.\"\n\nToby had not the slightest idea how to take all this in. \"So . . . _dirt_ life, that's the Old Ones?\"\n\n\"Combined with magnetic structures, yes. Bit hard to describe, that ancient wedding. All long ago, of course.\"\n\nToby gazed at the immense eras represented by simple lines, biological beings coming after the clays, intersecting the \"magnetics kingdom,\" and then mystifying lines labeled \"Earth biologicals.\" Of \"memes\" and \"kenes\" he knew nothing. From the time axis he guessed that all this had started over twelve billion years ago, when\u2014what? the whole universe?\u2014began.\n\nShaken by the implications of the simple diagram, he did not venture into the other dimensions, which expanded this simple 2D along axes of \"fitness\" and \"pattern depth\" and \"netplex\" and other terms he could not even read. Better get back to something simple.\n\n\"Then . . . how'd you get here in the first place?\"\n\n\"Stole a ship, actually. Mech, fast cruiser.\"\n\nToby had never heard of anyone doing something so audacious. It had been hard enough for the Bishops to use an old human craft, _Argo._ \"Stole it? And just walked into True Center, easy as you please?\"\n\n\"Umm, not quite.\" Walmsley's eyes were far away. \"See, this is how it was.\"\n\nTWO\n\nThe Place of Angry Gods\n\nYou've got to remember, first, that we were limping along in an outdated mech ship. Dead slow, compared to what's zipping around here now. A ramscoop, big blue-white tail dead straight, scratched across space.\n\nFar better than our Earth ship had been, the knocked-together old _Lancer._ Bravely named, it was, but venturing out into the nearby stars that way was like Indians trying to explore Europe using birch bark canoes. The wrong way round, historically and technically.\n\nY'see, the mechs had explored _us_ pretty well. They'd been in the solar system a long time ago, millions of years back. Some earlier, carbon-based life had fought a battle near Earth, against mechs. Presumably defending Earth when the primates were still sharpening their wits, edging up on being _Homo sap._\n\nThey left a crashed starship on the moon. That's how we knew this conflict had been going long before us. My wife, Nikka, was in on that. I came along later. Ancient history.\n\nWe went out together in the first human starship, _Lancer._ Got hammered by mechs. Barely survived.\n\nThen we got lucky, stole a mech ship.\n\n _\u2014Ah! Blithe understatement, quite Brit. In truth, there were two cowed alien species huddling beneath the ice of that world. Beings who could see electromagnetically in the microwave region. Turned out they'd been the cause of a wreck we'd found on our own moon, one I'd picked through, been changed by. I wanted so much to know what they were, how they thought._\n\n _But there were others, too. Whalelike things that glided serenely through murky depths, warmed by a radioactive core they had assembled in the moon's core._\n\n _All immensely strange, yet all allies against the mech_ Watcher _that loomed above. Together, two alien kind plus the constantly chattering chimpanzees, they attacked the_ Watcher _and captured it. Sounds so easy now . . ._\n\nUm? Oh, sorry, must've let the mind wander. The mech ship?\n\nOutfitted it with our gear, the life support equipment\u2014anything that survived after the mechs tore into _Lancer._ Hard work.\n\nBravo. What next?\n\nThere we sat, a scrawny distance out from our home star. Lots of the crew\u2014the surviving crew, rather\u2014wanted to head home.\n\nI saw no point. I was old enough by then to have very little left to lose. And little invested in grand old Earth, either\u2014no children, or even close relatives.\n\nBut we knew Earth had already been attacked by mechs. Used a clever weapon, fishlike aliens dumped into our seas. Should we go back to help?\n\n\u2014and augh! The arguments that caused. I had to admit the other side had a point, save the home world and all that. So we compromised. Built a robot starship, using mech bits. Tricky, that. Then we packed it full of mechtech. Let Earth make use of its tricks, we figured.\n\nSome wanted to go along, no less. Classic Wagnerian gesture\u2014all emotion, no reason. Too risky.\n\nSo we dispatched it to Earth, crawling along at a twentieth of light speed. Best we could manage, I'm afraid.\n\nIn truth, I wanted to stay there, commune with the two species still living beneath the moon's ice. But there was the other faction . . .\n\nNikka and I had allies in the crew. We hated the mechs, wanted to _do_ something. Follow this riddle to the end. So we set sail\u2014if that quaint term includes boosting up to within a hair's width of light speed.\n\nStraight inward. To the Center.\n\nTook nearly thirty thousand years to get here\u2014but that's measured in the rest frame of the galaxy. What some call \"real\" time. But all inertial frames are really equivalent, y'know. We proved that. Only diff is the clocks ran slow on our craft. Plus, we had coldsleep.\n\nSo to me it was as if I had gone through several comfy afternoon snoozes, waking just for medical checkups and the odd message to send. My turn to patrol the ship, fix things. Lonely experience. My friends frozen stiff. I, clumping about in a stolen, alien machine. Hurtling down a corridor of relativistic refractions like a tunnel lined by rainbows. Quite striking. Frightening, too, no matter how well you fathomed the physics.\n\nI had rigged\u2014well, Nikka rigged; she was a wonder\u2014an infrared transmitter. Messages for Earth, squirted them off every thousand light-years or so. Keeping them up to date on what we'd found\u2014data, reams of it. Plus a bit of rah-rah from me. I was hoping they were still there, really. It seemed like a small gesture at the time, only found out much later how important it was.\n\nThen, _presto physico_ \u2014there was the Center, glowing like a crass advert out the window. Convenient, these mech devices. Makes one wonder if their designers appreciate them. Pity, if they're wasted on creatures who don't relish the delights they can bring.\n\nThe Center? Well, today you can't see it the way I did. The Old Ones were already there, and more evident than they are now.\n\nWe came in along an instreaming flow, to pick up even more speed. The Center was a perpetual firework. Arcing above it like a vast triumphal arch was a braided fire river. Bristling with gold and orange and sulphurous yellows, it was. Ferocious stuff. The gravitational potential of the black hole, expressed as ruby-hot gas, plasma filaments, incandescences light-years long.\n\nI'd expected those. From Earth, the Very Large Array had mapped the long, curving arcs that sliced straight up through the galactic plane. They hung a hundred light-years out from the True Center. There were others, too, filmy laces\u2014all lit by gigantic currents.\n\nGalactic neon lights, they were, the specialists decided. But why so thin and long?\u2014several hundred light-years long, some, and barely half a light-year wide.\n\nAs we got closer, we could make out those filaments\u2014not in the radio waves, but the _optical_. Dazzling. So clean, so obligingly orderly. Could they be some colossal power source? A transportation corridor, an unimaginable kind of freeway? What\u2014or who\u2014would need that much room to get around?\n\nThey hung there like great ruddy announcements in the sky. But for what? A religious monument? An alien equivalent of the crucifix, beaming its eternal promise across the entire galaxy?\n\nWe all thought of these possibilities as our ship\u2014a great kluggy old thing, with streets of room compared with _Lancer_ \u2014plunged on through murky dust clouds, hot star-forming regions, the lot\u2014hammering inward hard and swift, like an old dog heading home at last. Its navigational gear was simple, direct\u2014and had a setting built in for the True Center.\n\nThink about that. This was one of its standard destinations.\n\nEasy to see why, in retrospect. Energy density. A blaze of light. Proton sleet. Huge plasma currents. Just the place for a hungry mech. The feeding trough.\n\nMostly I had thought of True Center as a sort of jewel box, with stars packed in and glowing like emeralds, rubies, hot sapphires\u2014all circling neatly around the black hole. Which had quite properly eaten up the nasty dust long ago, of course, leaving this pleasing array of finery.\n\nOr so the astronomers thought. Never trust in theories, m'lad, if they're thought up by types who work in offices.\n\nWhat? Oh, offices are boxes where people work\u2014no, not actual labor, heavy lifting or anything, more like\u2014let's pass over that, eh?\n\nY'see, I'd forgotten that with several million stars jammed into a few light-years, there are collisions, abrasions. And plenty of shrapnel.\n\nAs we got closer we could see the brawl. Fat, wobbly stars flaring like angry gods, spewing red tongues. They were the children of awful marriages, when two stars had collided, merged, and fallen into the same oblate quarrel.\n\nYou could see others about to go at it\u2014circling each other, loops of gas flung between them like insults. Even worse cases, too, as we got to see the outer edge of the accretion disk. Stars ripped open, spilled, smelted down into fusing globs. They lit up the dark, orbiting masses of debris like tiny crimson match heads flaring in a filthy coal sack.\n\nAmid all that were the strangest stars of all. Fast ones, they were. Each half-covered by a hemispherical mask. The mask gave off infrared and it took me a while to fathom what was going on.\n\nSee, the hemispherical mask hung at a fixed distance from the star. It hovered on light, gravity just balancing the outward light pressure. The mask reflected half the star's flux back on it\u2014turning up the heat on the cooker. That made the poor star send pretty arcs and jets of mass out, too. Which probably helped the purpose of it all.\n\nLight escaped freely on one side. The mask bottled it up on the other. That pushed the star toward the mask. But the mask was bound to the star by gravitation. It adjusted, kept the right distance. As far as the wretched star knew, however, it was able to eject light in only one direction. So it recoiled in the opposite way.\n\nSomebody was herding these stars. Those masks made them into fusion-photon engines. Sluggish, but effective. And the herd was headed for the accretion disk.\n\nSomebody was helping along the black hole's appetite.\n\nWho could do such engineering? No time to find out, just then.\n\nWe were getting closer. Heating up. Bloody awful hot, it was.\n\nAnd now, after all those years, communications traffic was coursing through the ship's receivers. Chirps, beeps, dense thickets of blindingly fast code.\n\nClearly, signals intended for the mechs who had run the ship. How should we respond?\n\nWe were still dithering when a rather basic truth got pointed out to us. The ship didn't just ferry mechs about. It _was_ a mech.\n\nIt had carried higher levels of mechs, sure. But it was still a member of the tribe, of sorts.\n\nAs we approached, the course selection we had made ran out. We decelerated, hard. The magnetic throat, which dwarfed the actual ship, compressed. Then it tilted, so that incoming plasma hit us at an angle. That turned the whole ship\u2014and such a groaning, popping, shrieking maneuver I've never heard. Clearly, the mechs weren't sensitive to acoustics.\n\nWe nearly went deaf. It lasted a week.\n\nBut it worked. Turned the ship clean around, swapping ends so the fusion jet played out front of us now. That backflow protected us from the solid junk in the way\u2014burnt it to a crisp, cooked it into ions for the drive itself.\n\nThe throat was now aft of us, but the magnetic field lines fetched a fraction of the debris around, and stuffed it into the maw of the great, fat craft. Fusion burners rattled the plates, heated the air\u2014but our life support labored through.\n\nA miracle, considering. There was plenty of power, so we rigged better air conditioners. Bit of hard work, that, in the stifling heat. Trouble was, where to dump the excess heat? Refrigerators don't abolish heat, they just move it.\n\nWe finally resorted to using some of the mech weapons. Lasers, they were, but they looked more like monstrous sewer pipes. Immense, corpulent gadgets.\n\nTrick about lasers is, they radiate better than anything natural. Higher brightness temperature, in the jargon. To lose energy to your surroundings, you must have something hotter than they are. Lasers could do that. So we dumped the excess heat of deceleration into convertors. And then into the drivers of the lasers themselves. The ship started projecting beams of cutting power, shedding our energy.\n\nWhich made us even more conspicuous. And terrified. Was our ship reporting to its superiors that it had vermin aboard? We adventurers felt pretty damned small.\n\nWe slowed hard\u2014one and a half Earth gravities. Dicey. It was very much like being permanently obese, without any of the pleasure of having gotten that way. We arranged supply vats and made pools of water. Floated there for days, just to escape the weight.\n\nFinally the view cleared. The fusion drive worked up to higher energies as we slowed. It became transparent in the optical, so we could see through the plume. First in the reds\u2014odd vision, that.\n\nWe could clearly make out death, a whole great wall of it. Making haste toward us.\n\nAs for what it was like . . . \nTHREE\n\nChurch Mice\n\nLike trying to take a drink out of a bloody fire hose,\" Nigel said.\n\n\"What is?\" Nikka was still thin and pale but her black eyes glinted like living marbles, with amused intelligence.\n\n\"Processing this damned data.\" Nigel craned his neck to take in the full wall. Its glittering mica surfaces were canted at angles just out of true, in mysterious mech fashion.\n\nOn these faces played different views around their ship. Gaudy sprays of ionized gas. Molecular clouds, inky-black at the core while fires played at their ravaged skins. Stars brimming full, scorching the billows of angry gas that muffled them.\n\nAnd directly ahead, a wall of furious mass boiling out from the True Center of the galaxy. Headed toward them.\n\n\"Like a supernova remnant,\" Nikka said from her console. She insisted on working. Her Japanese heritage, she said, constant addiction to the harness. When you love a woman, Nigel realized, you take the obsessions along with the rest. Much as she had with him. And in his opinion, she had gotten the worst of the deal. He was not getting easier to live with.\n\nNigel frowned. \"Looks like the hand of God about to swat a fly.\"\n\n\"Now there's a theory that hadn't occurred to me.\"\n\n\"Seems likely. Going pretty fast, that stuff is.\"\n\n\"The Dopplers show plenty of hydrogen moving at around four hundred twenty kilometers per second,\" she read off crisply.\n\n\"Hard to see why God would bother to swat us.\" Shock waves played like burnt-gold filigrees all across the face of the outrushing wall.\n\nNikka chuckled. \"You take even astrophysics personally.\"\n\n\"And why not? Makes it easier to remember the jargon.\"\n\n\"Egomania, perhaps?\"\n\n\"Probably. Still, there's plenty else for God to go after around here. We're pretty dull in comparison.\"\n\n\"Elephant rolling over in its sleep, then,\" Nikka said.\n\nHer laconic logic had always amused him. How could he not love a woman who could be more clipped and wry than he? \"Ummm?\"\n\n\"In old Kyoto days, my father told us a story about a man who thought he would be safe from the storm if he slept next to an elephant. For shelter.\"\n\n\"I see. Just because the big survive\u2014\"\n\n\"Wait, here are the parallax readings.\" She was all business again.\n\nNigel studied the strange, tilted facets of the wall display. He had never seen the purpose of angling them so. _Fresnel mirrors,_ he recalled. An old lab experiment, one he had done on a cold winter morning in lab at Cambridge. Creaky equipment, ancient clamps and lenses from mid-nineteenth century. He had done it in jig time, then packed it in for some tea and billiards.\n\nBut he could still recall how it worked. Canting planes slightly askew, so that light reflected back and forth. That formed interference wedges. Retained the phase information in the light waves. Clever. Somehow the mechs had started up this classic effect into a dazzling many-visioned optical smorgasbord.\n\nAnd in one of the oblong panels he now saw a rapidly swelling nodule, coal-black and lumpy. Furnace-red brilliance danced behind it.\n\n\"That front is closer than I thought,\" Nikka said. \"Only a few hours away.\"\n\n\"It'll crack us for sure,\" Nigel said.\n\nShe nodded. \"We can't boost to that speed. We've barely slowed to local zero.\"\n\nIn the steepening potentials near True Center, masses following gravity's gavotte swung at enormous speeds. \"Local zero\" just meant the orbital speed of this region. It was safer, they figured, to keep close to that speed while they tried to understand the fireworks further in. Church mice venture under the dinner table at their own peril, especially if the diners are wearing hobnail boots.\n\n\"We can't run,\" Nigel said, eyeing the panels. \"So we hide.\"\n\nShe followed his scrutiny. \"Among this debris?\"\n\n\"Had my eye on that blob over there.\" An asteroid-sized rock.\n\n\"Why that one?\"\n\n\"I got a strange echo-answer from it when I did an immediate area survey.\"\n\nShe glanced at him. \"This another hunch?\"\n\n\"That's all I ever have.\"\n\n\"A solid mass, good shielding. But there are closer ones.\"\n\n\"Something about it. A memory.\" He did not himself know what made him choose the tumbling stone. Its answer had made him think of the Snark, that old shambling representative of the mechs, long ago. But why should that be a good sign?\n\nShe studied the bewildering array of information on the mech-made panel. He admired how she had puzzled out the mech diagnostics, jimmied them into yielding up the quantities humans liked to use. Brilliant, she was, and could flit among them as if they were perfectly natural, when at base they were skewed, alien. The underlying point, he supposed, was that the laws of mechanics and fields have an internal logic of their own. Any intelligence shapes itself to that blunt fact. In the end, the universe molded its children. Mind, as crusty old Wittgenstein would no doubt have remarked, was cut like a suit of clothes, into contours not born in the cloth itself.\n\nThe thought brought fretful memories. Why, then, did life, in its myriad mortal forms, spend so much of itself in clashes with its fellows?\n\n\"You're sure?\" Nikka's face was a study in skepticism.\n\nHe laughed. \"Bloody hell, of course not.\"\nFOUR\n\nAlexandria\n\nThe others\u2014younger, a shade more foolish\u2014went in first. The slowly revolving chunk was oddly black for the center of the galaxy, where fire and fury prevailed, garish and showy. A cinder from some earlier catastrophe, perhaps. The black hole further in\u2014still unseeable, behind the outrushing violence about to smash into them all\u2014had left many hulks orbiting, burnished and stripped by scouring bursts of intense radiation.\n\nDry astrophysics, rendered forth as casual violences.\n\nIn his skinsuit, Nigel edged into the deep crevasse they had found. The crew had elected to moor their ship over the crevasse mouth. Then they wormed further in, to escape the shock waves that were now mere minutes away. The ship had balked, trying to restart its engines, resume its programmed course. Nikka had defeated its executive functions, perhaps even silenced its alarms. But she could not be sure . . .\n\nSuited up and in zero gravities again, Nigel felt his old self returning. He had once been an astronaut, after all\u2014a word now ancient beyond comprehension. Was Earth still there?\n\nA certain springy youth returned. He bristled with energy.\n\nIt was difficult to _feel_ the impact of desiccated physics, he reflected. The combination of the coldsleep slots and the stretched time of special relativity, all catapulting him into a far future of distant, glowing vistas. He had arrived at this far time and place armed with only the training and culture of a society now gone to dust. Yet he still sent quick bursts of data homeward, the latest just an hour ago. Message in a cosmic bottle.\n\nHe flitted, giddy and light, down a long tube of chipped rock. Away from the rest.\n\nHe took a sample, just like the old NASA days. Dear, dead acronym. At least that was one American habit he would not miss, the compression of jawbreaker agency names into nonsense words that one nonetheless could at least remember. Across thirty thousand years.\n\nHe studied the rock. Volcanic origin? He tried to remember his geology. Something strange about its grainy flecks.\n\nFurther in, a vault. Gray walls.\n\nCoasting. Space infused even a stiff old carcass with birdlike grace.\n\nStretched lines . . . up . . . through . . . rock eagerly shaping into swells. Should he go farther, or regain the crew, back there? Shadows swung with each motion of his hand torch, like an audience following every movement.\n\nPatterns in the walls.\n\nShould he? Caution, old fart. Behind each smile, sharp teeth wait.\n\nDown. In. Gliding. Legs dangling\n\nsoft, soft\n\ninto cotton clouds\n\nshadows melting\n\ntelescoping him into fresh cubes of space, geometries aslant. A spherical room now, glowing an answering red where his torch touched. A trick of the eyes?\n\nNo, messages\u2014racing across the walls, a blur of symbols. Mind trying to wrap the universe around itself?\n\nHe had trouble focusing somehow, _probably just loss of local vertical_ his old NASA training spoke to him, just a turn of the head could perhaps fix it\u2014\n\nWorn stone steps leading impossibly up, spiraling away. Into a cupped ceiling now spattered with orange drops . . . eyes winking back at him.\n\nAn old film, memories. The Tutankhamen tomb. The jackal god Anubis rampant above defeated foes.\n\nOpening the tomb.\n\nStepping inside.\n\n _One small step for a man,_ across endless churning millennia.\n\nOozing up from the Valley of old dead Kings, the first to rise triumphant here, from Karnak and Luxor, winding downstream slow and snaky, to Alexandria, the library dry with scrolls, Alexandria a woman, ancient now, wrists rouged and legs numb\u2014\n\nHe shook his head.\n\nLocal vertical.\n\nInsistent mental alarm bells. _Get local vertical._\n\nOld truths, surely no use now?\n\nThe humming. Insistent. No air here but he could not get away from it. Insect-faint but there.\n\nA sphere ahead. Adhesive patches on the backs of his gloves gave him purchase on it. He swung around, his creaky body bird-quick.\n\nBeyond the metallic sphere yawned a space so vast his torch fetched back no reflections, no answers. He turned to go back, mind still recalling another place and time\u2014\n\nThe humming lurched, rose. Shrieked, wailed. A violin string stretched to yield an octave too high, cutting, a dull saw meeting hard steel\u2014\n\nSilence. He blinked, startled.\n\nIt had been like this back so long ago. On his mission to _Icarus,_ a supposed asteroid that had bloomed fitfully, outgassing a momentary cometary tail. That had been caused by the final loss of an internal atmosphere, as it worked out, from a ship. A vessel built inside an asteroid, a starship. Its rock was extrasolar, and lay beyond the dating protocols, the ratios of isotopes awry. For perhaps a hundred million years it had been left orbiting in the inner solar system.\n\nAnd Nigel had found this same configuration there. Strangely shaped spaces. A sphere. The humming. A quick electromagnetic cry.\n\nHis suit had recorded it all. He spun slowly in a pocket of darkness, the sphere now seeming smaller, spent, exhausted.\n\nMessage received. He jetted back toward the others.\nFIVE\n\nHuck\n\n _P ing,_ their capsule spoke.\n\nNikka's face was drawn and furrowed in the reflected light. A searing blue glow seeped down the crevasse. To be this bright down here meant that brilliant furies worked along the asteroid face outside. They were tucked into this makeshift canister, flimsy protection.\n\nA solid bang slapped them against their restraints.\n\n\"That's it,\" Nikka said. \"The shock wave.\"\n\nTongues of thin fire licked by the observation port.\n\nA few hundred meters away, ionized frenzy worked to get at them\u2014or so went the human-centered view, Nigel reflected.\n\nThe awful truth was worse: that the unleashed searing energies booming out from the black hole sought no one, meant nothing, cared not a fig for the human predicament. It would grind up intelligence and spit it out, toward the sleepy stars beyond. Here, mind shaped itself to nature, not the reverse.\n\nThey waited out the onslaught for a day, then two. A giant drummed on the walls. Sensors on the ship sent data, painting a picture of huge mass flows past the hull. The ship itself breached, repaired itself, breached again, zapped a few bits of debris. They had come to respect these self-fixing aspects in the long voyage from the suburbs of the galaxy. They were parasites, after all. If they drew too much attention to themselves, some cleanup squad might well get activated.\n\nHe had brought with him a few personal bits, hauled all the way from Earth. In dim suit light he read again the small yellow hardback, spine cracked, pages stiff and yellowing and stained from the accidents of adolescence. Near the end there was a passage he had long ago involuntarily memorized:\n\nAnd then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, le's all three slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the territory for a couple of weeks or two, and I says, all right, that suits me . . .\n\nNigel had never felt himself remotely American, despite having lived and labored there for decades, but this passage somehow always made his voice catch in his throat when he read it aloud.\n\nThe capsule ticked and pinged and he realized that he and the others had lived so long now in alien metal corridors that they were used to the feel of quiet, implacable strangeness all about. Once you'd left home, all places were remote and foreign and so you might as well keep going. On to the finality, the omega point of some alphabet you could not read but by tramping along the full length of it.\n\nWhen they finally straggled out, the crevasse was blocked with debris. Lumps and chunks of rock jammed into every crevice. Nigel worked on it for a while and then had to rest. He was old, in stringy good health, but knew his limits. He wondered if there might be another way out of this place, which was clearly a wreck of a starship of asteroid size.\n\n\"It's like the old crash site on the moon,\" he said to Nikka over comm. \"In Mare Marginis.\"\n\n\"Ummm. I'd noticed some resemblance.\"\n\n\"And the original derelict ship I found, _Icarus._ \"\n\n\"Which implies that\u2014what? Whoever built them was spread all over the galaxy?\"\n\n\"They got this far. Must've been.\"\n\n\"And this hulk, as dead as the others?\"\n\nNigel nodded. \"Means the mechs got them, I suppose.\"\n\n\"There must have been millions of them, to run into another, thirty thousand light-years away.\"\n\n\"Um. There's a big game afoot.\"\n\nThey coasted together down one of the side corridors, looking at yawning vaults and smashed metallic enclosures. \"Looks like someone stripped it,\" Nikka said, shining a torch into a dark warren. \"Not much left for us to scavenge\u2014\"\n\n\u2014out of the corner of Nigel's eye, skimming fast, came the snaky thing.\n\nHelical, with bulky masses appended, a sharp glinting prow. No bigger than a man but faster, coming at Nikka and him as though it had waited for this.\n\nTime collapsed for him. He felt a muscular sliding energy in his shoulders as he spun, lofting away his pack and snatching forth his tool kit.\n\nThe thing was plainly mech, crackling on the electromagnetic spectrum in Nigel's ears, a sound like bacon frying on a chilly morning in England long ago\u2014\n\n\u2014as Nigel's hand went for his laser cutter and Nikka had just caught sight of it, her mouth agape, surprise in the inky shadows\u2014\n\nHe launched himself on a leap lap to intersect the thing, as it rappelled somehow off a shiny steel bulkhead\u2014\n\n\u2014He felt the mathematics of it in him, geometry as limpid as the fresh continent of Euclidean joy he had entered as a boy, sitting with fingers tucked under his legs as he studied at dawn in his chilly bedroom, keeping hands warm by turning the pages with his tongue\u2014\n\n\u2014static buzz from it\u2014\n\nThe snake-mech flexed itself and turned away from him. Headed for Nikka.\n\n\u2014distilling order from life's rough jumble, that was what he had always hungered for, hyperbolic grace, to merge cleanly with life, not split the world into subject and object, no observer/observed, his arm bringing the laser cutter around smoothly, circular arc,\n\n. . . so\n\nslow . . .\n\natoms in concert, the old dim dualities of mind and matter lapping against the fragile yet inexorable momentum of this instant\u2014\n\nShe was faster than he. She shot at it.\n\nThe pulse shimmered an instant in the mottled blue surface of the thing, like an argument conducted on its skin. Then the pulse skittered off, reflected. Nigel shot at it too and the thing forked away, split, was somehow two slippery helices now.\n\n\u2014so was it some odd visual pun?\u2014this vision into helices, mimicking the key to organic life, DNA pairs spiraling off, the flag of life unfurling in a vacuum wind that rushed from a shadowed passage. A sliver of meaning, he felt it, seven blind men and a melting elephant, all describing, none understanding. His lungs whooshed dry air\u2014\n\n\u2014enameled, spraying glow from the uncoiling thing\u2014\n\nIt flexed again. Lashed out with a spiky electromagnetic lance. The shot hovered in vacuum, a discharge of reluctant electrons, spitting angry red radiation. Then it split.\n\nOne shaft struck Nikka. It burst across her in worms of acrid yellow. She went limp.\n\n _Go to ground._ Nigel touched the steel bulkhead an instant before the lance reached him. He felt a jolt of megavolts.\n\n\u2014corroding through him, kiloamps rising. His shell clicked home and then he was inside the suddenly conducting surface of his skinsuit, the rub and stretch of potentials racing along a millimeter away from prickly hairs on his shivering flesh, breathing and being breathed, surges passing by, electromagnetic kiss, inductances fighting the ramping current, forcing jabbing current slivers through his shoulders and licking into his arm, the light touch of his hand enough to draw uncountable speedy electrons to seek another prey, all at frequencies he could not glimpse but the information sliding into him through portals he could never know, below perception a shaved second of intuition\u2014\n\nBefore the rattling voltages had spoken their piece he fetched forth the punch gun with his left hand. Muscles clenched and he had to force his fingers to\u2014\n\nIt snaked toward him. Nikka floated inert.\n\nNigel kicked away from the bulkhead, though that meant losing his electrical grounding. There might be a few seconds before the mech recharged.\n\n\u2014springing with the kickoff came feelings and desires forking like summer lightning across the inner unmoving vault of him, part of himself eating them as they flared across his mind, seeing them for what they were, messages from a fraction of himself finding a place absolutely blank and waiting for each moment to write upon it, time like water washing away the eruptions, scattershot angers and cutting fears far down in him\u2014\n\nHe drove the punch gun ahead. Fired with great relish into the mech.\n\nIt was quick, a thing of bunched electrical energies, but the crude and rude sometimes worked.\n\n\u2014 _zig when they zag,_ leaving no opening he fires the laser cutter too, his right hand tracking the other aspect of the split mech, yin and yang, supple but not crude enough to deal with the sweaty urgencies of organic life-forms, the Darwinnowing of mech evolution selecting it for special tasks, narrowing it like a knife by perpetually sharpening, but to get an edge on a blade you had to subtract from it, and the loss was framed in the space of a single heartbeat as the dutiful stubby laser snapped out its jabbing pattern\u2014\n\nThe divided mech died. Mere mechanical damage was undoubtedly beneath its program-function range. But potentials cannot build in sheaths mutilated and gouged, and its charge ejected itself down wrong pathways, into the innards, dissolving crystalline structures of intricate artistry. A jewel crushed by a muddy boot.\n\n\u2014he whipped the punch gun around and riddled the other for good measure, the buzzing trailing away, and he slammed into the other spindly riddled carcass, legs collecting recoil, breath whistling in his dry throat in a scatter of perishing light from the gutted mech\u2014\n\n\u2014and he was off, pushing it to gain momentum toward Nikka\u2014\n\n\u2014still drifting, Nikka\u2014\nSIX\n\nSomething Fatal\n\nNikka did not awaken for three days. Even then she was sluggish and vague, eyes watering, words like discordant lumps trying to make their way out of her throat.\n\nBefore she could sit up they had started to move inward again. They got the ship to resume its programmed course. Their handbuilt, tightbeam antenna for signaling Earth was a twisted wire mesh. No more infobursts for the home front. Now they had no mission, except the basic one: survive and learn.\n\nBy then they understood from a careful metallicity dating that the helical mech was quite old. It had probably lain in wait in the derelict for ages, in case something organic ventured aboard. A snare.\n\n\"Not the sort of thing the Snark would've done,\" Nigel muttered to himself in the long vigils beside her. Though the Snark had been a mech, of sorts.\n\nThe brain repairs itself, with the right help, and her recovery was long.\n\nIn his time the very word \"machinelike\" had two meanings. One was \"unfeeling, unconcerned,\" while the other was \"implacable, utterly committed.\" No wonder that each suggested inhumanity and some rigid stupidity as well.\n\nBut here there was a third meaning, revealed in the immense, cool arabesques that filled the sky within a light-year of the black hole. Constructions vast and imponderable. Geometries unnatural and subtly alien.\n\nEnergies churned here, sleeting radiation and turbulence. Mechwork patterns floated obliviously through the storming masses. Implacable, unconcerned.\n\nTheir ship still gave some cover, apparently. Interrogating messages came beeping into it. Automatic programs aboard answered. Since the scavenger stowaway humans had long since corrupted the information base of the ship, what it told its superiors was undoubtedly nowhere near the truth. But the nature of the alien is that no one can adequately fake a true, intricate language.\n\nSo it was inevitable that scarlet traceries condensed around the ship. Potentials arced and played along its hull. A warning, perhaps.\n\n\"Or maybe just a bath and a scrub,\" Nigel joked to Nikka. She could be moved about the ship in a makeshift wheelchair by then. When she saw the wall view outside she gasped.\n\nOnce the shock front of the explosion had passed, the True Center loomed like an impossibly detailed tapestry, each uncoiling plume and shimmering sun a jewel woven into the whisking churn of gravity.\n\n\"Trick is,\" Nigel said, \"we couldn't see that something had forced mass into the center. A mouthful, sent straight down the gullet, apparently. But you can never stuff all of it down a black hole. Matter heats up, flares out like an angry objection, drives away the outer portion.\"\n\nShe was still taking it in. \"What made that happen?\"\n\n\"Those, I'll wager.\"\n\nIt was the first time he had framed aloud the idea that most of the crew already held. Seemingly insubstantial filaments hung before them like mere filmy curtains. But above and below the galactic plane, they connected to the immense long strands of brilliant radiation, hundreds of light-years long and a light-year wide, which bracketed the entire True Center for vast volumes of space. Nigel had seen the radio maps on Earth, showing the arching filaments. Even through the dark clouds that shielded Earth from the fireworks of the Center, their steady gigahertz glow shone.\n\n\"They're so thin.\"\n\n\"To our eyes, true enough.\"\n\n\"What do the ship's diagnostics say?\"\n\n\"Dead on, m'love. They show strong magnetic fields.\"\n\n\"Enough to hold off all that mass that's trying to slip through them?\"\n\n\"Right again.\" Just because she had nearly been killed, cast into a coma and thoroughly lacerated mentally, was no reason to forget that indeed, he had the old Nikka back. Always one step ahead of the argument. Circling round it, sometimes.\n\n\"I can see how that gas\u2014lovely purple glow, isn't it?\u2014veers up and around. Some pressure is doing that.\"\n\n\"Magnetic pressure. Never seen anything like it. Even in the outer strands, which nobody understood when we were back on Earth, the field isn't a hundredth as strong.\"\n\n\"And it's coming at us, whatever it is.\"\n\nHe was surprised again. \"How can you tell?\"\n\n\"I can see the stuff in front of it. It's getting squashed, see?\" Indeed, now that he screwed up his eyes and studied it, he could. Until now he had relied on ship's instruments to check that the gossamer strands were rushing toward their ship from several directions.\n\n\"What _are_ they?\" Nikka asked, some fatigue still lacing her voice.\n\n\"Something fatal, I'd say.\"\nSEVEN\n\nOld Ones\n\nOne virtue of the shock wave, my boy\u2014it cleared the view. Finally we saw the Old Ones.\n\nThe long, curved filaments were not freeways or power sources or religious icons\u2014they were intelligences. A life-form bigger than stars or giant molecular clouds or anything else in the galaxy's astrophysical zoo.\n\nI later learned that these were the, well, the body of the Old Ones\u2014though that term means quite little. In the filaments, currents carried both information\u2014thoughts\u2014and food, that is, charge accumulations, inductances, and potentials. All flowing _together._ As if, in our bodies, sugars and synapses were the same thing, somehow. The long, sinewy structures glowed and flared, but that was a minor side effect.\n\nAfter all, we eat and think and love\u2014and the net result, viewed in the infrared, is a diffuse, ruddy glow, no more.\n\nThe real point of us you'd find only by peering at our industriously firing synapses. Or, backing off about six orders of magnitude, in our sluggish talk.\n\nAnd of course, we are sluggish, compared to a lot that's going on round here. In the local jargon, we talk at about fifty bits per second. We need small bandwidths for long times, just to get out a single idea.\n\nThe Old Ones are broad bandwidth, fast times. We talk slowly, but see well\u2014big chunks of our brains are devoted to shaping up images. Punching up the data, before we ever \"see\" them at all.\n\nThe Old Ones have that, as well. I doubt there's anything they can't do.\n\nI watched those strange strands, weaving like slow seaweed in a vacuum ocean, and automatically thought of telling Earth about them. That's what I'd been doing for so long\u2014beaming reports back down the tunnel of our wake.\n\nOur flight time to Galactic Center was several centuries, ship's time. I had transmitted a burst every few years. Earth would get those coded blips, I knew, widely spread out by relativistic effects. But was anyone listening?\n\nStaring at the Old Ones, I realized that we were mayflies. The ebb and flow of our civilizations were like gusts of passing, feather-light winds.\n\nI doubt there's anything the Old Ones can't do.\n\nPoint is, what do they _want_ to do?\nEIGHT\n\nGrandfather\n\nToby was getting irked. \"You sure got a funny way of telling me what the hell's going on here.\"\n\nThe naked man, though he was a mass of wrinkles, was able to get into his face an expression of canny humor. \"Do you poke at your grandfather when he's setting you straight?\"\n\n\"What do you know about my grandfather?\"\n\n\"Met him, actually.\"\n\n\"When? Where is he?\"\n\n\"I've learned not to use 'when' too much down here. Where is easier. He's here.\"\n\nToby stood up, knocking over the little chair with a clatter. \"I want to see him!\"\n\n\"That you can't do.\"\n\n\"I want to _now._ \"\n\n\"He's not available. If\u2014\"\n\n\"I've had about enough of you and your\u2014\"\n\nThe old man's face was suddenly stern and imposing, bringing a flicker of memory to Toby: very much like his grandfather. Maybe all old people got that, something years brought. He sighed and sat down. \"All right. Can you tell him I'm here?\"\n\n\"He knows.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"That's what I'm attempting to tell you.\"\n\n\"Uh, sorry.\"\nNINE\n\nThe Strong Field Limit\n\nThe Old Ones\u2014not a very inventive name, but then, Jehovah isn't that catchy, either.\n\nThe Old Ones had been here when the mech civilizations arrived. Mechanicals arose when advanced, organic societies somehow committed suicide\u2014from war, degeneration, unimaginable things\u2014or retreated, from plain simple lack of interest in the tensions of the technological life. That left machines, who evolved into separate societies.\n\nBut the Old Ones weren't mech-based. Not derived from the clanking iron and silicon, no.\n\nThey weren't cumbersome chemical concoctions like us, either\u2014rickety packets of salty water and sundry impurities held together by calcium rods and an easily punctured skin, all run by dead slow electrical wiring. They weren't beings that had to be retrofitted over ever worse workmanship from earlier times. Nothing messy. Nothing slapped together by chance.\n\nThe Old Ones _were_ those long strands. Each strand could speak with a single, well, voice. Approximately. It's hard to describe what it feels like to have one, well, simply invade you. Not like a conversation, no. Rather more like being sodomized by God, I'd say.\n\nYou saw them on your way in? Good. Like pearly lightning, as I remember. You could see them slowly twisting, fragile-seeming.\n\nThey looped and arced around our ship. By this time there were plenty of mech blips on the screens. These the Old Ones deflected\u2014using their magnetic pressures, I expect.\n\nUs, they swept along. They took precious little note of our limits. Gave us several gravities of acceleration at times. I'd once been an \"astronaut\"\u2014a term from the days when doing this sort of thing wasn't as ordinary as walking\u2014and knew to balloon my lungs, then suck in air in rapid little pants, breathing off the top. Others didn't weather so well. Nikka came through, despite being still weak.\n\nThe Old Ones had made the explosion. That shock wave was simple cleaning up after the real job, sort of a janitor with his broom making a tidy Galactic Center for all. The Old Ones had released an immense burst of energy, mating two black holes together. Making this\u2014the Lair.\n\nThe mechs made a profit off it all. Someone always does. They sucked in the fast protons, harvested the photon flux. They have a whole system set up to gather in the energy fluxes, currents and all. You might say they're farming the Galactic Center, but there's another game afoot, a bigger one.\n\nThe Lair. That the mechs tried to destroy. Almost did, I gather. It's not easy to maintain, still harder to build.\n\nThat explosion shaped the Lair, made it larger. Folded up space-time, manufactured room where there was no room. The Old Ones had made it in the far past, apparently to store things or beings or God knows what. And they kept adding to it, perhaps deepening its complexity.\n\nIn our ship we got picked up, hurled at the accretion disk, then up and over it. Down the axis. Toward the pole of the black hole.\n\nYou followed a similar path, correct? Good\u2014I sent it to you.\n\nWhat? Of course, all that about Abraham sending messages. Well, I had to say something to get your attention.\n\nDeceptive? Of course. Immoral? Don't be ridiculous.\n\nI had to claim it was from your grandfather, dead right. I _had_ met him, after all. And speaking through the Magnetic Mind was the only route open to you. Mechs would've intercepted anything else.\n\nWhere was I? Ah\u2014\n\nAll the bloody time with mechs coming straight at us. Inflicted some damage, too. Killed some of us. Have you ever seen steel blister?\n\nMechs got through. Even the magnetic pressures couldn't halt everything. Neutron beams, for one. Nothing stopped those.\n\nThe Old Ones were powerful, certainly, but not like God the Sodomizer. Sorry if you find my sense of humor a bit demented. I've been here in this mountain largely without company, except of the most lofty sort. A bit wearing. Makes me long for the animal, I suppose. The root and rut of life.\n\nThe Lair? Call it that because we're hiding in it. As well as countless other organic species.\n\nThe Old Ones stuffed us in here, with our ship. Down the steepest gravitational gradient in the galaxy, into a time-locked storage vault. General relativity, writ large.\n\nWhat they never taught me at Cambridge, not even that Hawking fellow, was that space-time could be a construction material. Mass is equivalent to the curvature of space-time, that I'd learned. We build things from matter. Why not build them from curved space-time?\n\nSimple enough, but the stress-energy tensors involved\u2014you don't want to see the mathematics, believe me. Ugly stuff. Frightful.\n\nYou see, the most important point in understanding the universe is that God doesn't have to make any approximations. He's not doing as I dutifully learned at Cambridge, expanding in some small parameter, iterating solutions, solving differential equations by cut-and-try. God plays the game straight.\n\nThe Old Ones aren't Gods\u2014in fact, they're decidedly irritating\u2014but they can solve general relativity in full. No short cuts. In the \"strong field limit,\" as it's termed.\n\nHow? I don't know. I wasn't here to see it done. Somehow the Old Ones squeezed together two black holes\u2014the giant at True Center, and a lesser one they'd acquired somehow\u2014and blew off a hell-storm of energy.\n\nWhen the dust cleared, here was the Lair. Furiously orbiting the remaining black hole, which has total mass a few million times the sun's. The Lair Labyrinth. Stable. Twisted esty. An abiding refraction.\n\nThey simply inserted us into it. You Bishops flew in, skimmed the ergosphere, correct? That's the only way in now, apparently. That works only when there's a significant chunk of mass coming through, rippling the skin of the black hole at its equator. Then someone can fly through.\n\nUnfortunately, the mechs learned this, too. The Old Ones couldn't prevent that. We've done our best against them, even with the Earthers\u2014I'll get to them, different subject\u2014to help. But it has been a losing battle. The mechs are _good._\n\nIn fact, the Old Ones have stooped to cooperating with us biologicals, the so-called Naturals, because the mechs are _too_ good. They may exterminate all Naturals. The Old Ones don't want that, for reasons of their own.\n\nWhat reason? I have guesses, plenty of them. But nobody knows for sure.\n\nPart of the confusion, for an ordinary TwenCen mind like mine, is the sheer complexity. Never mind the higher-order mechs, the Old Ones, and the like\u2014they're beyond view, for me. For you, too, I expect.\n\nIt takes a while to get used to even the physics, y'see. The Lair\u2014what? Oh, right, you can call it Wedge if you like, there must be a thousand names. Some quite obscene; you should hear sometime how \"black hole\" translates into Russian. The Lair is like a wasp's nest perched on a cliff. The Eater's tidal forces warp it, stretch both space and time.\n\nThe lower parts live differently. Time runs slower here\u2014straight Einsteinian effect, that. So outside, while centuries are sweeping by, I'm having lunch. Gives a body perspective. Of course, I do take long lunches.\n\nAnd it gets a bit lonely, too.\nTEN\n\nVermin\n\nToby had listened and watched and finally it was too damned much.\n\nThe walls flashed with pictures, scenes of astonishing depth and range. Colossal twisted ships, frothing turbulence in the accretion disk, vistas with skewed perspectives, geometries so odd the eye could not keep them in order. Walmsley's voice alone called up the images, summoned by some program in the utterly bare room.\n\nTo Toby, technology meant details, controls, complex systems. Here nothing met the eye but plain walls. Yet the room responded to everything Walmsley seemed to need, even when he did not speak. Food and drink appeared through the floor. Music sounded in the distance, and Walmsley cocked an ear to it.\n\n\"Look,\" Toby said, \"I'm trying to piece this together with the history of Family Bishop.\"\n\n\"That I know. Your Family came out of the Hunker Down. That's when the folk outside, the Earthers, decided they couldn't hold the mechs anymore. They left their cities.\"\n\n\"The Chandeliers?\"\n\n\"Right, that's one tribal name for them. Wonderful places. I watched them disintegrate, alas.\"\n\n\"And we Bishops went to Snowglade?\"\n\n\"Is that\u2014\" Walmsley appeared to listen to some distant voice, then nodded. \"Your name for it, yes. J-three-six-four, the index says. The index isn't very romantic about these things, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"And we lived there for . . . ?\"\n\n\"Many centuries. The mechs weren't bothering with planets just then, y'see. They harvested plasma flows in those eras. When they got around to mining and chewing up planets, they ran into another organic species that came surging in. Big bugs, they were.\"\n\n\"Quath!\u2014the Myriapodia.\"\n\n\"Right. Impressive creatures. They're tech-bio anthologies, half-artificial, as the Earthers became. The Old Ones say they're still missing something we humans've got, but I can't fancy what that could be.\"\n\nToby felt elation at finding something in this history that he knew about. Quath . . . and where was she?\n\nWalmsley said, \"The Myriapodia have been giving the mechs trouble. Not enough to stop their grand works, though.\"\n\n\"We hooked up with the Myriapodia, after some skirmishing. One is\u2014was\u2014with me.\"\n\nWalmsley nodded. \"Standard mech tactic. Used you to take some of the fight out of the bugs.\"\n\n\"What? We ran into them by accident. Our Family had escaped from Snowglade and\u2014\"\n\n\"The mechs let you get away.\"\n\n\"The hell they did! We fought\u2014\"\n\n\"We're vermin to them,\" Walmsley said gently.\n\n\"And together, we and Quath's kind, we tore the hell out of the mechs around that planet, near Abraham's Star. I was _there,_ I know\u2014\"\n\n\"Certainly. The big bugs had cosmic strings, correct?\"\n\n\"Uh, yeasay.\"\n\n\"Fearsome as tools or weaponry alike. But the mechs are managing all this, for reasons I don't quite follow. A faction wanted you Bishops here, at the Lair. They want something from you, but precisely what, I don't know. Another faction would much prefer you all dead. Some strange game's afoot.\"\n\nToby shot him an irked look. \"You've had all this time here. Why haven't you figured it out?\"\n\n\"Data's hard to get, and subtle when you do. Most of the cards aren't on the table\u2014if there even _is_ a table. And . . . well, point is, my family and I\u2014\"\n\n\"Family Brit?\"\n\n\"No, no, in my time we thought of the nearest relatives as family. Family Brit was, shall we say, a manner of speaking.\"\n\n\"You kept Family so small? Why?\"\n\nWalmsley's eyes rolled up theatrically. \"Comes to that, I'd sooner explain science than culture. Nikka and I, well, we were attempting a bit of an experiment, really. Wanted to get three generations together, for genetic reasons. Turned out wrong, since most of humanity had already genetically drifted away from\u2014\"\n\n\"Genetic? I don't\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm getting ahead of myself. See, my family and I\u2014just a few of us, not the bloody United Kingdom, see?\u2014had discovered some odd scientific matters. Let me show you how it was.\"\n\n\"And those Earthers\u2014\"\n\n\"Let me tell it my way.\"\nELEVEN\n\nThe Earthers\n\nThey were not what he expected.\n\n\"Hope you weren't hurt,\" the tall woman said. English, slightly accented with flat _a_ 's and odd, hollow _e_ 's. She was the first Earther he had seen.\n\n\"Jostled a bit, is all,\" Nigel tried to say lightly.\n\nHe had barely survived a brush with some mechs who had appeared to ooze straight out of the walls, like an elaborate magic trick. Then the Earthers had appeared and made short work of the strangely liquid mechs.\n\nEarthers. Nigel had seen their fleet approaching the Lair, knew they were here, but in its Labyrinth was unsure of how to find them. They found him, instead.\n\n\"Why are you still speaking English?\" he asked slowly.\n\n\"Oh, we have this archaic dialect as an inboard. We heard you speaking it.\"\n\n\"Um. Very thoughtful.\"\n\n\"Your transmissions used it.\"\n\nThey moved with swift, sure movements, these people two heads taller than Nigel, caring for the wounded. He had taken a knock in the ribs, a pulse that broke the skin by frying it to a crisp, like a Thanksgiving turkey. He lay back and let the woman put a patch on it. The wound felt cold, then hot, then numb, and then he did not notice it at all.\n\nSo these were the people who had built starships\u2014better by far than the mech ship Nigel and Nikka had come here in\u2014and made it their duty to reach Galactic Center. He tried to view them objectively, though by their earlier messages he knew they were from several thousand years after his time on Earth. He tried to imagine what time's juggernaut could bring after the dear dead TwenCen and the sobering TwenOne.\n\nHe lay back and watched them with slitted gaze. They spoke softly, used minimal sentences.\n\nBe objective, now, old fellow. See them as just another organic race. Just another large mammal.\n\nHominids, yet different. He was somewhat gladdened to note that they still resembled the common chimps and pygmy chimps, just bigger and with less hair, walking upright. The visible differences between humans and chimps were far less than, say, between Great Danes and Chihuahuas. Yet dogs interbred and the chimps did not; the genome kept its secrets well hidden from the eye. Humans differed from chimps by a single percent in DNA. These folk were still of the species.\n\nThese Earthers had killed mechs with obvious relish, too. Very human. Not strictly a hominid trait; genocide occurred in wolves and chimps alike. Animal murder was widespread. Ducks and orangutans raped. Ants had organized warfare and slave raids. Chimps in the wild, he recalled, had at least as good a chance of being murdered as did humans in cities.\n\nNigel lay back, head woozy. Of all the hallowed human hallmarks\u2014speech, art, technology, and the rest\u2014the one that came most obviously from animal ancestors was genocide. Human tribes may well have evolved as a group defense. That no doubt helped, in those millennia separating him from these big, bright hominids.\n\n\"Clubbiness against clubs,\" he said aloud. A dry crack of a voice. Yes, he was skimming, mind light as shining dust.\n\nThese Earthers had oddly shaped ears, more muscular frames, curious large eyes. Their uniforms were anything but uniform\u2014technicolor wraparounds that shifted to different scenes in apparently random fashion. As the woman came over to check him again her loose garment abruptly showed him a sunlit seashore, waves crashing. To soothe him?\n\nArt adorned other Earthers' close-fitting clothes\u2014collages, abstracts, grainy expressionist vistas. Woozy, he puzzled over that. Art was certainly not useful in the narrow senses employed by the animal behaviorists or evolutionary biologists. Why did Cro-Magnon develop it? Bird songs were a different matter; they helped woo a mate, defend an area. Why did humans, the Earthers, still have their fragile arts? Bower birds built airy confections of leaves, lace, and fungi, all in the pursuit of love, or genes. He scarcely thought abstract expressionism could make such a claim. Could all the heights of human artistry be a display strategy, like a peacock's plumage?\n\nHe laughed at that and sat up. His fried side did not even ache. His head was clearer. Nikka stood a short distance away, talking to a huge fellow. Nigel waved.\n\nNikka and the man came over. \"I'm Akran,\" the man said, staring down, blinking rapidly. \"Are you . . . Walmsley?\"\n\n\"I believe so.\"\n\n\"My Lord! To _find_ you!\"\n\n\"Just in time, too. Thanks.\"\n\n\"But you\u2014you are\u2014still alive!\"\n\n\"Somewhat.\"\n\nOther Earthers came running, formed a knot around Nikka and Nigel.\n\n\"It's him!\"\n\n\"And her! She's the one mentioned in Message Fifty-seven.\"\n\n\"I don't believe it.\"\n\n\"Sure it is. Look at him.\"\n\n\"After all this time?\"\n\n\"He's been inside this twisted space-time.\"\n\n\"Don't forget the Long Sleep.\"\n\n\"Still, it's incredible that\u2014\"\n\n\"It's _Walmsley._ \"\n\nNigel gazed up into their faces and felt woozy. They all started speaking and Nikka beamed down at him\u2014she seemed to understand what was going on\u2014and they talked so fast he could barely get the idea.\n\nOne of them played a recording then and Nigel heard his own voice, reedy and precise.\n\n _\"Hello? Data follows on the molecular cloud we're passing through. Still on course, apparently.\"_\n\nA blur of data, then: _\"This is humanity's expedition. On high boost, flying inward.\"_\n\nStatic. A sizzling hiss, like fat frying. _\"Hello? We're still here. Are you?\"_\n\nThe Earthers stood silently, long after the recording finished.\n\n\"We got your messages every few centuries,\" Akran said. \"You know about the first assault, mechs dumping alien life into your seas? We received your first transmission just as we were getting the upper hand over those.\"\n\nNigel frowned. \"So you really didn't need help from us\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh no! That was just the first. The second time, they tried to pound us with asteroids. Lots of them. Nearly got us, that time.\"\n\nNigel shook his head to clear it. \"We sent you some mech gear, data\u2014\"\n\n\"We got them. Helped a lot. That was at the worst of the third assault, the Ferret Time. That lasted five centuries.\"\n\n\"My God,\" Nikka said. \"The mechs had that strong a force?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Akran said. \"Then the smart ones arrived. Tried to fool us. We lost a big piece of Earth to them. That took a thousand years.\"\n\nNigel said, \"And you kept getting my messages?\"\n\nAkron nodded eagerly. \"We put up big antennas. First in orbit, then all around the solar system. Mechs kept finding them, smashing them.\"\n\nNigel thought of the centuries of struggle and sighed. The world revolved with a serene grace, people and dirt starting to spin left to right\u2014\n\n\"Is he tired?\" Akran said with alarm. \"We can talk later, let him sleep\u2014\"\n\n\"Go on,\" Nikka said. Nigel could only nod.\n\n\"We did miss some of the messages, when the mechs came at us with positron weapons. But we got antennas back up on the moon after about four hundred years. That was after the poles melted and we lost most of the continents.\"\n\n\"Good grief,\" Nigel managed to wheeze out.\n\n\"But we got all the rest. Nobody wanted the next one to find an empty Earth. So we pulled ourselves up. Searched the whole damn solar system for the last mech outposts. They were pretty well hidden, some down in Jupiter's clouds. And we got every one.\"\n\nNigel blinked. The world had stopped revolving and he was beginning to understand. \"And came . . .\"\n\n\"Here. To find out what had happened to you. And what's this whole thing all about.\"\n\n _Hello? We're still here. Are you?_\n\nHe saw in the faces something like awe. To them he and Nikka and the others were antique historical pieces, incredibly ancient.\n\nImmensely capable, these Earthers were. The mechs would fear them.\n\nNigel blinked, smiled. \"We're still here. Still here.\" It seemed very amusing and he could not talk anymore for the lump in his throat.\nTWELVE\n\nSobering Perspectives\n\nThat was the high point. Of course it was fine and wonderful to meet his own kind again, humans from dear beloved Earth.\n\nBut in time, his first fuzzy perceptions as he lay there wounded, of the Earthers as bright chimps, made more and more ironic sense. They were human, true. Smart chimps. But far more. Changed.\n\nThe mech onslaughts against Earth had forced human evolution\u2014both through biotech enhancements and natural selection. The Earthers had implants that gave them sensoria\u2014complex electromagnetic shells, useful for both war and work. Their spines rode better, on thick lumbar disks. They carried no pesky appendix to fester and erupt. Their bodies had intricate neurological meshes, better metabolism, rugged cartilage, sturdier bones.\n\nThose were rather obvious. The unconscious differences were more telling. He and Nikka and the others from the TwenOne century\u2014called the \"Elders,\" soon enough\u2014could not keep up with these Earthers, mentally or physically. The big, almost lazily competent newcomers were very polite about it, of course. They tried to include their Elders as they explored the esty, hammered the mechs, and even made contact with the ghostly Old Ones.\n\nThese brave new Earthers retained a certain chimpyness. Hominids, still. Quite courteous to their Elders, but learning quickly from mechs and Old Ones alike. Climbing an evolutionary ladder, trailing clouds of glory, into a fog.\n\nAt that point, their thought processes simply escaped comprehension.\n\nThe rheumy old-fart Elders could not follow conversations involving the Old Ones. Nigel and Nikka and the others who had come in the hijacked mech starship\u2014a small band, now, called Ancestrals by the Earthers\u2014were adrift. They could not master the blindingly fast tech the Earthers had brought, or later devised in response to the mechs.\n\nNigel got a glimmering of the Old Ones, when he helped explore portions of the esty Lanes. Those convoluted geometries, sealed away, made excellent petri dishes. In the Lanes, different cultures\u2014alien and human alike\u2014could evolve the diversity needed to counter the mechanicals. All sorts emerged\u2014high-tech, low-tech, even no-tech.\n\nFor the Elders, the new perspectives were sobering. The Earthers, though, worked easily with the Old Ones. They countered the mechs, killed many, sometimes even cooperated with them.\n\nThe Old Ones dispersed Earthers, out of the Lair. Nigel and the other Elders more or less looked on and did scut work. The news was distant, hard to follow.\n\nA big offensive against mech control of the entire Center. Earthers spread among the planets orbiting stars a bit farther out from True Center.\n\nThey learned from mechtech, scavenged mech properties. They built huge constructions in space, the Chandeliers.\n\nFor many millennia the Earthers did well. Nigel watched them from the time-slowed pit of the esty. Then came trouble.\n\nMechs found a way to short-circuit some of the power by which the Old Ones sustained their strange magnetic strands. Tapping that source for their own ends made them enormously more powerful. That's when they started to grow, to pillage the great orbiting Earther cities.\n\nNigel had visited their crystal cities, and the even greater structures that he could witness but not fathom. When the mechs began getting the upper hand again, he helped as he could. The very terms of the struggle were difficult to comprehend.\n\n _Like listening to a conversation carried out through a drain pipe during a rainstorm,_ he had said. _A very long drain pipe._\n\nAs the mechanicals destroyed more and more of the human enterprise at Galactic Center, he found more to do. The conflict was coming down to his level again.\n\nThe final, desperate strategy of the Hunker Down\u2014\n\ndividing humanity into separate cultural petri dishes, down on the planets\u2014gave him plenty of grunt work to do. In that era he had spent a time outside the esty.\n\nHe could not follow in any detail the ramifications of the Earthermech struggle. He knew it involved alien organic races, other Originals, as well. And the conflict's main stage was at a level involving the Old Ones and the elusive Highers. Of these he and the other Ancestrals knew nothing.\n\nExcept . . . The mechanicals had some grail they sought. They kept utterly secretive about it, but they pursued bands of humans as if searching for something. Nigel once caught the phrases \"Trigger Codes\" and \"First Command\" but they went by on the fly, soon lost. And the Earthers gave him a stony-faced nothing in answer. As if there were some secret so subtle that knowledge that there _was_ a secret was a secret.\n\nAlso, it had taken him a long time to see how he was being used.\n\nPolitely, with the most consideration possible, of course. But used. By Earthers and Highers alike.\n\nHe had retired, then, from a struggle beyond his ken. Or thought he had.\nTHIRTEEN\n\nThe Physical Representation\n\nNigel Walmsley squinted at Toby. \"There's so much to tell\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't need to know much! Just enough to keep alive,\" Toby said.\n\n\"That turns out to be quite a bit. You're pretty complicated yourself, boy.\" Nigel could not resist giving an interior command. Points were often better made by example.\n\nBeside Toby, glimmering points condensed into Shibo. She was a handsome, mature woman, lean and translucent and her legs missing. Her upper body twisted as if stretching from a long confinement. A thin smile. \"Hello, my carrier.\"\n\nToby jumped, startled. \"You! You're still buried down in my reserve banks?\"\n\n\"I insinuated . . . myself.\"\n\n\"Damn! I wanted you _out._ \"\n\n\"I have . . . no place . . . to go.\"\n\nThe room's sensorium readers were tuned to excruciating precision and could pick up even diffused Aspects and Personalities and Faces lodged in an individual's fringing fields. Shibo shimmered, ghostly remnant hiding in Toby's electro-aura.\n\nShibo's face said more than her faltering words. \"I am here . . . to help.\"\n\n\"I've got you in chipstore,\" Toby said bitterly. \"That's enough.\"\n\n\"I cannot help . . . being.\"\n\nNigel felt a strange, silky current pass between Toby and the Shibo representation. Toby said, \"Killeen, he wants to bring you back. Chips're enough for that?\"\n\n\"I prefer . . . to reside . . . here.\"\n\n\"If Killeen gets your chips, he'll try to bring you back.\"\n\n\"I prefer . . . here.\"\n\n\"I want you _out._ \"\n\n\"I stay.\" She lifted a hand in silent salute\u2014and vanished.\n\n\"Ah! Damn!\" Toby spat out in frustration.\n\n\"Sorry, but I had a point to make,\" Nigel said. \"You will find that the notion of self is a bit complex here.\"\n\n\"I've got to get her out of me.\"\n\nNigel said with compassion, \"In time you'll realize that what mechs call the 'physical representation' is only one phase.\"\n\n\"Shibo really could be brought back, then?\"\n\n\"In a sense.\"\n\n\"What's _that_ mean?\"\n\n\"Reality\u2014a delightfully abstract term\u2014is analog. Humans live and think there.\"\n\nToby shrugged. \"Yeasay, it's _real._ \"\n\n\"The mech world is essentially digital. You'll never understand mechs until you realize how differently they view matters. And not only them. The Old Ones, the Highers\u2014they do not share our sense of the self.\"\n\n\"Highers?\"\n\nWalmsley knew the boy would understand it all best if it unfurled in a story. The classic primate manner of learning. Linear, relentlessly serial. Quite old-fashioned, yet it stuck.\n\nVery well, best to go back a long way, to the time after he had backed away from the High Phyla entirely, sought the refuge of simplicity.\n\nHe sighed. \"There's so much to tell\u2014\"\nPART TWO\n\nSoon Comes Night\n\nThe universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.\n\n\u2014EDEN PHILLPOTTS,\n\n _A Shadow Passes,_ 1934\nONE\n\nWorm\n\nThe body lay dying for some time before Angelina found it.\n\nShe had noticed a small cyclone of birds standing in the air above a churned-up span of smoldering rock and went to look. The small, four-winged birds were predators only in a flock, never alone. They banked on the warm updraft from the oozing soup of sun-orange rock below, peering down with hungry intensity.\n\nThe broken body stirred every now and then and the birds would rise a bit, a reflex born of long evolution, for if the prey revived it might be dangerous. Their courage was purely collective. Each would have fled in confusion were it not for the familiar, gene-deep helical churn of their updrafted gyre that calmed them all.\n\nAngelina found the body folded up, as though broken in the legs and chest. It was a woman in a dark-red single-sheathed garment. The pliant weave was ripped and caked with blood already gone brown. As Angelina knelt to help she caught the coppery scent of fresh blood and saw an eyelid quiver. A patch seeped red at the temple.\n\nThat made Angelina send a quick comm alert to her brothers, Benjamin and Ito, who came from the house an hour's walk away. They ran it in much less, bringing a sling and medical supplies.\n\nAngelina had stopped most of the bleeding with a tourniquet, but the woman was in a bad way from the heat and dehydration on top of the catalog of injuries: chest a massive purple bruise, chin crushed in, right arm twisted at an impossible angle and showing white bone.\n\nThey got her in the sling and worked on the arm before carrying her back over the broken landscape. Only then did the slowly cycling tower of birds, hundreds-strong and chorusing a disappointed _chip-chip-chip_ song, disperse into its timid, individual parts. Some still tracked the humans, for scouts were part of the collective genetic lessons as well.\n\nThe three had trouble getting back to safer ground and that was when they guessed the origin of the dying woman. Footing was unsteady. From long habit they thought of the solid stuff their boots struck as rock, but knew that the glowing, slippery sheen was the \"esty\"\u2014 _S-T,_ a compacted form of space-time. The esty could be firm and dense at one moment and the next, blur and fuzz into a foglike film. Vital and durable yet flexing, following laws of its own nature, rules unknowable. Or at least unknown by humans of this era.\n\nAs they took turns carrying the listless body each of them was troubled by a sense of foreboding. In their circumscribed world this woman had come as a signal flare, an announcement. She opened again the doors of speculation, for they knew the tales of bodies belched forth by the esty from places and eras of danger and promise. They did not share these first tingling thoughts, but the air hung heavy among them.\n\nHumans had lived here a long time, shaped by the esty and knowing it as the frame of their world. Yet it was also an enemy of capricious, almost vindictive spirit. It slipped beneath their boots as they carried the woman, who still oozed blood and pus at her many wounds. Blue-white flashes wracked the air. Vagrant electrical energies plucked at their sleeves like fugitive winds.\n\nThey reached their sprawling, ramshackle house. Their father, Nigel, had returned from the orchard. He frowned when he saw the damage. Already their mother, Nikka, had their auto-medical equipment rigged up and running, shiny and smooth despite its age, but there was by that time little hope.\n\nThe woman gasped and choked, her hot breath whistling past a broken tooth. For a moment she smacked her lips and seemed to savor the flavor of the home: sweet cloves and garlic, aging flowers, damp rags, thick soup simmering in an all-day pot, a woody tang tamed by a sheen of oil.\n\nHer concussion spoke for her then, forcing clogged murmurs and hoarse cries from her raw throat.\n\n\"Sky . . . burning . . . ohkan . . . ohkan . . . get away!\"\n\nThe family Walmsley glanced at each other. \"The others we heard about,\" Nikka whispered, \"they never could talk.\"\n\n\"This one won't for long, I'll wager,\" Nigel said.\n\nSomething in him took an instant dislike to anything that disturbed his tranquil world, this rustic refuge he and Nikka had shaped. Earthers, mechs, Old Ones\u2014their operatic clashes lay far away, in other Lanes, or out among the fevered stars. This woman brought all that to mind again.\n\nYet he had chosen this place for their farm. He had known that the eruption spots in the esty were important. Something in him did not want to quite let go of the larger stage.\n\nThe woman subsided for a while. They moved around her, following the instructions of the artificial intelligence, which spoke with a hushed, calming voice. The program had a false note of sympathy that always irritated Nigel, but the family found it reassuring.\n\nNikka saw the bulge of the woman's optic disk\u2014 _papilledema,_ the soothing computer voice supplied, speaking of severe damage to the woman's outsized cranium. Fractures ran through the body, as if it had been systematically stepped upon. Cracked ribs and hips and calves, ending in toes snapped off clean. Blood vessels had been raked and cauterized by a tunneling fire. No one knew how to fix these things readily and the computer would not hazard a guess as to their cause. As they inventoried the damage and patched where they could, the woman gave a harsh bark. Her eyes flew open in a kind of discharging overload, and she sat up.\n\n\"Grey Mech . . . knows . . . got to . . . sky . . . fire, fire . . .\"\n\nShe yawned, startled jaws agape with bright fresh pain\u2014and went completely limp. By the time her head slapped back on the pad her life functions had gone flatline.\n\nNothing Angelina or Benjamin or Ito could do could bring a spark back into the body. Her mind was blown to shards. They started the small measures that would snatch back some fragment of the woman: circulating her blood with a pump inserted into the bloodstream, reading her cortical map.\n\n\"From the esty,\" Nigel said as they worked.\n\n\"And she mentioned the Grey Mech,\" Benjamin said. They glanced at each other soberly.\n\nNigel ran the diagnostics program but otherwise kept his distance. He had seen a lot of damaged people in his time and did not share his children's fascination. \"She came up from the wormhole spot, correct?\u2014same as long ago.\"\n\nBenjamin, the younger son, cocked his mouth doubtfully. \"That body was dead too?\"\n\n\"A man near here named Ortega found it hanging half-exposed out of a kind of fog-ball, he said.\" Nigel was quite old now, nearly four hundred of the old Earth years by his reckoning, but he remembered fairly well. This territory he tread softly, for it brought up doubts about himself, of who he had been long ago, of what the abyss of centuries had swallowed\u2014\n\nHe stopped himself from thinking that way and went on. \"That's the only case I ever heard of around here, but esty history has a few more.\"\n\n\"From that shaky spot in the Lane?\" Benjamin shook his head. \"But worms, they're like balls, spheres, not like holes in a wall.\"\n\n\"True,\" Nikka said. \"But worms can open up best in compacted esty. There is more free energy available there, or so the theory goes.\"\n\nBenjamin stopped working, his hands resting on the blood-spattered table. \"So this woman passed through a _worm_? I thought the pressures inside were incredible.\"\n\n\"They are. The body Ortega found was stretched, pulped. From far upstream time,\" Nigel said.\n\n\"Suredead?\" Benjamin asked, eyes rapt.\n\nNigel said, \"A few memories, but nobody could assemble a Personality from them.\"\n\nNigel thought then of the distant space and time from which this cooling woman had probably come. A one-way passage to a past or future unknown, a journey fraught with murderous forces.\n\nYet she had come. Or been sent? \"Bringing something,\" he mused.\n\nBenjamin frowned. \"Bringing what?\" With long, bony fingers he searched among the tatters they had cut from the body. \"Nothing here but cloth.\"\n\nIto was swaddling up the cutting stink where the woman's bowels had loosened in her final, clenching agony. \"D'you think the Old Ones'll want to look at her?\"\n\n\"I hope not,\" Nikka said. \"They'll take forty forevers to send somebody out here.\"\n\nNigel said crabbily, \"I hope she's not going to rot quickly, like the one Ortega found.\"\n\nNikka rebuked him sharply, eyes irked in her leathery face. \"Don't be calloused.\"\n\n\"Respect for the dead doesn't mean you take risks.\" Nigel looked a little sheepish over his remark and felt called to defend it.\n\n\"Full protocols?\" Angelina asked. She was muscular and compact from work in the groves and smiled prettily despite the circumstances.\n\nBenjamin said eagerly, \"I'll get the readers.\" As the youngest, just entering adolescence, he sprang to take on any task, to show he wasn't much behind his sister, the middle child. Ito had been that way but lately had left his teenage years and did not have his bearing straight, Nigel judged, on where to go from there.\n\nAll but Benjamin knew about the man Ortega found, who had gone bad in ways\u2014fungus growing while you watched, spores blown off, eyes popping vapor\u2014that had inspired in them childhood nightmares. Even now, nearly fully grown, none of them liked to recall Nigel's warnings and pictures: boils that had sprouted like small glassy domes from the man's flesh, festering purple and angry red. They had burst with wet pops and ejected spongy drops that stuck and had to be scraped off with a knife. And scraped fast\u2014they sought food, boring into flesh.\n\nThey made the readings with speed. Nikka checked to be sure the scanning patches were flat against the woman's skull. The moment they were done Benjamin asked with a flat, false calm, \"Better get her under the soil, then?\"\n\n\"No,\" Angelina ventured. It was not like her to challenge her brothers, but she had found this woman and from the set of her chin Nigel knew she felt some sense of odd possession and responsibility. \"What if the Old Ones want it?\"\n\nNigel nodded, obviously to Angelina's surprise. \"Talking to authorities, best to keep things simple. Last time they made Ortega and I do the digging-up.\"\n\nAngelina gasped. \"You did?\"\n\n\"The Old Ones believe in local responsibility. Or seem to\u2014they make their human agents run things that way. I was a neighbor, so I dug\u2014period.\" Nigel shrugged. \"Had to do it in skinsuits. It became a trifle hot. Thirsty work.\"\n\nAll three Walmsley children looked uneasily at each other. This detail their father had not told before. The set of Benjamin's chin said that as the younger brother he wanted his fair share of any decision. \"Those scientists, they'll want a full report, do their experiments, take samples. You know how they are.\"\n\nNikka's worried frown deepened. \"I wouldn't trust our storage. The rot could get out and\u2014\"\n\n\"Let's put her back into the esty,\" Angelina said brightly.\n\nThe idea was simple yet stunning. Buried in soil, the body could be recovered. In esty, never.\n\nThey had all been shaken by the erupting of the esty again, after years of slumbering. The idea of setting foot among the shifting tides of the nonrock, the timestone, was bothersome. Yet, Nigel saw, none of them wished to show such concern to the others. That zone of the esty was the stuff of local legend and the children both feared its promise of mystery and adventure and yearned for it. So they agreed.\n\nThey processed the readings first. That was all custom required: a scan of the neural beds, of memory vaults in the cerebral cortex, an inventory that could at least establish the broad outlines of who this woman had been. Bodies from the future came forth in only a few known spots and it had been Nigel's intention to live near one.\n\nThe woman's body had already begun to warp and ooze as they lugged it back into the head-spinning deviations of the rumbling, ozone-sharp wormhole zone. Ito and Angelina carried it with cat-like balance, as though ready to leap. Fast, humming high frequencies ran through their shared sensorium, a kind of warning system that linked them. This eruption was just beginning and promised to be big. An acrid scent cut the air. Zephyrs of bitter heat caught at their nostrils and the footing trembled with expectation and menace. They brought the body back to where they had found it, or tried to, for already a gravitational chasm had opened there. A powdery sapphire cloud hovered above the foaming esty itself. The air torqued them with tugs and pushes.\n\nThey steered well clear of the dancing powder. It shaped into elongated cylinders, tear drops, fluted arabesques\u2014which meant it was another manifestation of the far future. A sharp _crack_ \u2014and the esty flexed and slewed like a raft in a roaring river.\n\nThis threw Ito down and sent the body rolling, arms flapping, legs stiff and waving like sticks. It spun into the air and plunged toward the spatial fissure. The sapphire fog opened and closed like the mouth of a fish underwater, oval and meaningless. Nigel clung to his children and watched. The body seemed to dissolve, then became compacted and firm again, before merging with the stuff that only hours before had been reliable timestone. Then it was gone. Consumed, perhaps transported.\n\n\"Wonder where it went,\" Benjamin mused, drawling.\n\n\"It's slipping through the esty\u2014'Transiting,' isn't that what the Old Ones say?\" Angelina asked uneasily, rubbing her gloves on her leggings as if to get clean of the body, its touch and smell. Yet her angular face showed an intrigued, puzzled expectation.\n\n\"Going that way didn't seem to hurt it,\" Benjamin said.\n\n\"Something sure did before,\" Ito said. \"Killed her.\"\n\nNigel sniffed and jerked a thumb back toward home. \"This place will soften up and spread. Happened that way last time. Let's go.\"\nTWO\n\nAnnihilation Line\n\nWithin a relative hour\u2014though hours could not be meaningfully measured here, and watches were mostly a concession to human habits of mind\u2014the family had gathered around the long polished dining room table, beside the big fireplace where coals flickered and popped. There were no fossil deposits in the esty, because it was not very old, but compacted rock laced with burnable traces gave the same rosy glow.\n\nThe dead woman's readings appeared as images deep in the surface of the table, constellations of memories played out as fragments and moments: the ruins of a life. Law required that they see if anything warranted an emergency call to the Old Ones. Nobody talked directly to them, of course. They were shadowy, alien minds who had made the esty. Seldom did they intervene in the affairs of the mere humans who clung to the twisty intricacies here.\n\nWhen they were through rummaging through shattered memories, curiosity satisfied, only Nigel and Nikka wore grim scowls; the children yawned, bored. He felt more than ever the centuries dividing him and Nikka from their children.\n\n\"Guess the future's not so great after all,\" Benjamin said, sucking meditatively on his teeth.\n\n\"Should we send this stuff?\" Angelina asked. She twisted her mouth with a comely lilt, an expression that always touched her father's heart because she still did not know that she was genuinely beautiful. They lived in comparative isolation here, far down a lightly populated Lane, as he and Nikka had planned. Soon enough their children would come to know the torrent of cultures and technologies elsewhere in the esty.\n\n\"Not right away,\" Nikka said, glancing at Nigel.\n\nIto caught her meaning. \"There's something in here.\"\n\nNikka nodded. \"Look at these.\" She tapped her wrist pad and the tabletop flashed, finding an image: above a black horizon, smudges of rosy light. A sidebar broke this down, displaying bands of spectral light. \"See? Pictures made at very high energies. And one strong peak.\"\n\nIto was unimpressed. \"Astro data. So?\"\n\nNigel said dryly, \"That peak is at an energy of point five-one-one million electron volts.\"\n\nIto shrugged. \"Yeah, so?\"\n\nNigel knew his son's casual challenge for what it was\u2014energies contained in a young soul, spurting out in moments of arch nonchalance. \"Son, that's a lot of energy to pack into a single photon.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"It's also precisely the sum squeezed out when an electron meets its antiparticle, the positron.\"\n\n\"Ummm.\" Ito frowned, not ready to give up his bored manner so easily. \"Dad, you get interested in just about anything.\"\n\nAngelina blurted out, \"You think this is _anything_? It's antimatter, silly\u2014dying!\"\n\nIto said warily, \"How do you figure that?\"\n\n\"An electron and a positron come together, bang!\" She smacked her hands together. \"\u2014nothing left but light. _This_ light. The annihilation line. And look\u2014it fills the sky!\"\n\nNigel smiled, proud of her. To his despair, Nigel's two sons were fine young men with only passing interest in matters technical.\n\nNearly thirty thousand years ago\u2014in strict time as measured by the galactic rest coordinates, not the pliant esty time frame\u2014Nigel himself had been a classic science nerd, addicted to his studies. Only later did his attentions turn to the immensely larger and more varied world of politics, literature, women.\n\nA classic pattern, in the ancient TwenCen. His sons seemed to be going at it in reverse order. Or so the complaints from their neighbors\u2014a half-day's walk away, but with winsome daughters\u2014said.\n\nHe studied the pictures. The dead woman had been outside, on a planet, watching\u2014distant galaxies? Forming stars? The patchy clouds might be anything. They spoke of immense energies at work. A whole sky of photons that would fry biological life-forms. Where? When?\n\nNikka said, \"The Old Ones will want this\u2014soon.\"\n\n\"Ummm.\" Nigel gave her a canny glance. \"Let's say, the near soon.\"\n\nBenjamin said earnestly, \"But we're supposed to\u2014\"\n\n\"Right.\" Nigel grinned, raising eyebrows. \"And we always do what we're supposed to.\"\n\nNikka looked at him with an expression of tired tolerance. \"You wanted to live in a quiet place. It's a little too late to complain about being bored.\"\n\n\"I'm not bored,\" Nigel countered. \"Just a bit curious.\"\n\n\"You _wanted_ to live near that worm thing out there, Dad,\" his daughter said. \"Why? It's dangerous.\"\n\nNigel waved an arm, taking in the rolling hills and long, flat-bottomed canyons. \"Pleasant, a fine place to bring up children. That worm doesn't act up much. We're pretty safe here, tucked away in a Lane. Hard for the mechs to find. But that doesn't mean we should stop learning. I'd like to see if something follows the woman. If the Old Ones send a delegation, you can be sure we'll learn nothing. Strange things come through these esty worms and\u2014\"\n\n\"Your father likes to keep his hand in the game.\"\n\n\"Sounds more to me like that little disagreement with the rock slide,\" Benjamin drawled.\n\nThey all laughed. Nigel had just recovered from a foolhardy skid down a stony creek bed. On a plastic shell he had caromed from one side to the other, unable to stop on the slick runway. When they hauled him out of the pool at the slide's base he had protested, limping badly, that after all, the children had got through it perfectly well.\n\n\"You're too old to take risks,\" Angelina had said.\n\n\"If you don't take risks, you're dead anyway but don't know it,\" Nigel had said sourly, rubbing a pulled muscle and a swelling, bruised knee.\n\nWorms, though, were a bit more than risky. They were an inevitable flip side of the esty's flexible stability. At a deep level, space-time itself was like a biological system. Anything that provided a niche eventually acquired parasites.\n\nWhere the esty thinned, wormholes were born\u2014pulled out of the quantum foam that underlay everything. Worms lived on the gravity waves that wrestled through the esty, parasites on space-time itself.\n\nWorms could link one portion of the esty to another, tapping the energy flow between them. They demanded stupendous tensions and outward pressures to hold open their throats. The pressure sustaining a human-sized worm was like that at the heart of a massive neutron star. But a short walk away from it, the effect was not even noticeable. Fields alone held worms open, both magnetic and subatomic, fed by the smoldering energies of the esty itself.\n\nWorse, worms could even reproduce. They spawned other snaky scavengers, which flicked and twisted between the layers and Lanes of the esty's hieroglyphic geometries. So they could give birth, just as they could kill. The lacerated woman had probably died in the worm, sucked in and mutilated.\n\nNigel pointed out that worms were an inescapable risk of life here, and Angelina made a face. \"Aw, you're just trying to say you want to go down the rock slide again.\"\n\n\"I think not, actually,\" Nigel responded with a grimace to her jibe. \"But I wonder . . . did this woman know what she was getting into?\"\n\nNikka arched an eyebrow. \"Do we?\"\nTHREE\n\nInterfacer\n\nThey were busy with vegetable farming and the long groves of fruit-bearing trees, mostly from old Earth, and so did not get much time to watch the place where the woman had emerged. The spot fumed, a sour smell that wrinkled the nose from a considerable distance.\n\nChildren seldom think of their parents as anything other than fundamental building blocks of their world, unchanging givens, like the postulates that go before a geometric proof. With Nigel and Nikka this was just as well.\n\nMeasured in flatspace time they were older than they liked to talk about in front of the children. In their own local coordinates they were only a few centuries old, thanks to coldsleep and the relativistic effects of the ramscoop starship. Medical science and good luck had left them feeling still rather spry, but experience gave a certain oblique cast to the expressions that passed between them. The children noticed those but shrugged them off as more adult mystery.\n\nOne day\u2014a term they used by convention, for in the esty there were wanings and waxings of light, but no sun or stars, ever\u2014a pet got loose and ventured too close. It was a raccoon named Scooter they kept outside on a high wire leash, the end of it strung on a rope between two trees so the raccoon could run back and forth. The bandit-eyed bundle of energy shredded laundry and stole food at every chance and Nikka, angry, would yank it up in the air by the leash. The raccoon would dance on the air until it got the idea of not doing that anymore. For a while, anyway.\n\nNikka would promise to cook it up next meal with the long potato hash she made and the coon would get silent. They knew it could understand. Scooter talked, sometimes. But not well. Nobody thought to warn it about the spot and when it again found a way to untie itself\u2014Benjamin swore the thing was getting smarter\u2014it followed Angelina. The coon ventured too close to the spherical seethe, got singed, and lost a finger's worth of tail.\n\nIts squeaky voice complained, \"Mad at me. Hurt me.\"\n\nNikka noticed that the tail was sheared off cleanly. The worm had snapped at it. The raccoon grumbled but held still for a bandage.\n\n\"You ran away,\" she scolded it.\n\n\"Need to study.\"\n\n\"Looks like the worm took a sample to study _you._ \"\n\nAs they laughed over this at dinner Angelina, who kept track of communications, said, \"We got a signal today. Orders, really. Said the Old Ones are interested.\"\n\nNikka stopped spooning out the tangy long potatoes. \"That means some Interfacer will show up in spit and polish.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Angelina's mouth formed an _O_ of frozen delight.\n\n\"They're just human, like us,\" Ito said with a sardonic tone just a bit too heavy, to show that he was older and experienced, though he had never seen an Interfacer either.\n\n\"I'll talk to some old friends at the Node. Perhaps I can keep us out from under their kindly care.\" Nigel ate slowly, reflecting, as talk buzzed around their table.\n\nHe did not like the idea of bringing in higher authority, the enigmatic Old Ones. They were impressive, yes. But it was the nature of humanity to not stand in awe of anything for very long. After many years of exposure to them Nigel felt as if the Old Ones were like nosy mountains, certainly majestic but always looking over his shoulder while he was trying to get something done.\n\nLater he talked on farcomm with a few old friends at the Node. Earthers, but intelligible. He got nowhere. Worms were too important to be left entirely to mere humans. His living legend status made no difference.\n\nThe Interfacer craft arrived during the next waxing. It twisted all over the air like a long mathematical proof the eye could follow only so far, then lost in turning complexity. Air as fluid, craft like an eel. As if Mozart could make his notes visible, lacy in the sky while you listened to them. In the esty's curved space, travel was never straight-line. It more nearly resembled a slide down unseen ramps of coalesced air.\n\nFamily Walmsley squinted upward at the confusing descent. Loops piled like unrolling a scroll. Lacy vapor trail strips unfurled, making one infinitely recurving utterance, cleaving sky like a prow, tossing time and music to each side like a sheared wake. It made their heads ache.\n\nThe Interfacer woman who brought the Old Ones' message was not so imposing. Her face was stretched tight, shiny over the bones, so red-faced she reminded Nigel of a boiled ham in a suit. Her collar had popped free of its little pearl clip so that her neck bulged like a swollen snake. Big wrists stuck out of her shirt sleeves and her eyes had the fixed narrow glaze of a woman staring at a match flame.\n\nNot all Earthers were impressive. Nigel wondered idly if an Earther nerd was something like this. She did not change expression as she studied the seething spot. \"A fresh esty Vor.\"\n\n\"Vor?\" Nikka asked, her hands in her hip pockets in unconscious imitation of the woman's stance.\n\n\"Slang for 'Vortex.' I've only seen two fresh ones in all my years. This data you sent\"\u2014the stolid woman waved a disk\u2014\"is very important. Very. You should have taken more care with the body.\"\n\nNigel said evenly, \"We had a lot of picking to do in the orchard.\"\n\n\"No excuse,\" she spat back. \"The data is undoubtedly from the far future. It bears on the destiny of the entire esty.\"\n\n\"How?\" Benjamin asked. Nigel could tell from Benjamin's face that he was impressed, if not by the woman at least by her aircraft. Well, time would teach him.\n\n\"We know that the mechanicals have been studying antimatter since ancient times. They are constructing elsewhere in the galaxy great laboratories, orbiting the pulsars\u2014all to capture large numbers of positrons. This message, sent in a dying mind\"\u2014she waved the disk again as if it were a murder weapon in a trial\u2014\"proves that they have designs on the entire galaxy. It shows huge positron swarms. Hostile to life\u2014to our life, anyway.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" Ito said with a lifted eyebrow.\n\n\"You doubt this?\" The woman looked affronted. \"I speak for the Old Ones.\"\n\n\"They're speaking _through_ you,\" Ito shot back. \"You're just a puppet.\"\n\nNigel put a restraining hand on his oldest son's shoulder. Ito did not have the diffidence of Benjamin. \"Point is,\" Nigel said, \"why send a _body_ back?\"\n\n\"Let us say that the Old Ones have several theories.\" The Interfacer drew herself up with serene disdain. \"Quite complex. They are difficult to convey properly to . . .\"\n\n\"To ordinaries like us?\" Nikka asked with a wise smile.\n\nThe woman sniffed. \"I do not use such mundane slang. Though surely there is a difference between us. I have touched the Old Ones directly. At the mental level.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it's wonderful,\" Nikka said.\n\nThere was not a shade of malice in her tone but Nigel had a hard time not chuckling at the stiletto of meaning he could read in the words. He and Nikka were far older than this woman, but if he ever got as stiff and dead as her, he would blow his head off. So much for Interfacing with the Old Ones. He had decided to not undergo it when it was first offered, when the Earthers had devised the intricate method. Now he was reminded why.\n\n\"I expect you to tend to the defenses we will set up here,\" the woman said, still eyeing Nikka for a hint of spleen. Interfacers were notorious for taking offense.\n\n\"Defenses?\" Ito was surprised.\n\n\"Against mechanicals. They may try to cut off this esty Vor.\"\n\nIto scowled skeptically. \"Haven't seen a mech around here in a long time.\"\n\n\"They have attacked other Vors and sealed them up.\"\n\nNigel nodded, old angers rising in him.\n\nThe Interfacer held out a viewboard. \"There were further views in the data you extracted from the dead woman.\"\n\nIn its surface images flickered. A vision of black holes\u2014sharp dots against a wash of pearly light. The esty had formed from their collision. The viewboard was an advanced model. Into Nigel's sensorium sounded quick, darting visions.\nFOUR\n\nAgonies of Gravity\n\nL _ocked in a madly whirling embrace, the two black holes spiral inward to a final marriage. As the partners draw closer, they swing around each other faster and faster. Each tugs out the other, stretching the envelope of each hole into a tortured egg shape._\n\n _In its last moments, the smaller black hole stretches and contorts its own space-time, emitting a cry of gravitational agony: waves. These curl and lap about the smaller hole, then reflect and refract from the larger one. Eddies form. Standing waves reverberate between the two. These deepen as the moment of death approaches for the smaller hole. Energy foams from the doomed hole, in the form of the deepening trough of gravitational waves that eddy and play in the narrowing gap._\n\n _With a final scream of torsion and torque, the smaller hole plunges into its giant master. But the wave energy is not lost. An intense packet of waves remains, lapping in the wash of fatality._\n\n _This packet would disperse, bleeding away into space . . . if more matter did not intervene. At this precise moment an exactly directed stream of dense mass comes snaking in along a swift trajectory. In the full form of the General Field Equations\u2014as envisioned long ago by Einstein, and of course by many other of the highest minds elsewhere in the galaxy, for Nature opens its secrets to many styles of thinking\u2014space-time can curve itself. A gravitational wave is an oscillation in the curvature of space-time, like a ripple on the sea. But the equations are not linear. This means that the undulation, too, produces further curvature. Gravity itself has weight._\n\n _The incoming blue-white stream of compact mass loops, drawn by the wave packet. Tidal tugs hook the now-incandescent matter into a beautiful spiral. From a distance, the silvery luminosity follows a path recalling the chambered nautilus, a creature born in Earth's ancient oceans, shaped by evolution into a classic geometry._\n\n _Now the true violence begins. Soundless, swift and sure._\n\n _The mass reflects the gravitational wave troughs, forcing them to build to even higher amplitudes. This draws the mass farther in. The spiral tightens. Wave builds upon wave. The stretch and warp of space-time deepens. In a single microsecond comes a new kind of creation: a permanent, self-confined warpage of space-time. Within a second it spreads, an intact structure. Extra energy bleeds away into fleeting waves, radiating out toward unreachable infinity._\n\n _Later, men who ventured into it would call it the Wedge. The name was inelegant but partly true. It had been formed by waves wedged between two black holes. It now orbited the single spherical hole, a tombstone of so much lost matter._\n\n _But the final drop of mass which applied the crucial touch\u2014that was not lost. It resides inside the Wedge. It was the first contribution of ordinary matter to the exotic, transparent walls of the Wedge._\n\n _The first damp earth, in a ceramic flower pot._\nFIVE\n\nThree Billion Years\n\nImpressive,\" Nigel said guardedly. His family murmured, surprised at the intensity of the vision broadcast into their sensoria.\n\nNikka said, \"I've never seen before how it was done. But this is from the past, many thousands of years\u2014\"\n\n\"There is a date on it,\" the woman said. \"It says that this image is from three billion years in the past.\"\n\n\"But I _know_ \u2014\"\n\n\"Of course.\" The woman lifted her lip in a regal sneer. \"Three billion years in the past of that dead woman. Which gives us the first fix on the origin of these bodies. They come from a genuinely distant future. I am surprised that humans will still exist, then.\"\n\nIto said, \"Hell, billions\u2014what can matter over that much time?\"\n\nNikka said soberly, \"The mechs think something does.\"\n\n\"They certainly do,\" the Interfacer said. \"They sent the Grey Mech to seal those other Vors.\"\n\nThe family blinked and glanced at each other silently. The Grey Mech was the one form that not even the Old Ones could master. It had extraordinary powers and could penetrate the esty seemingly at will. The mechanical civilizations that dominated the space around the esty\u2014restrained by its tightrope walk near the Galactic Center's black hole\u2014did not dare venture in often. But the Grey Mech could. And did, following patterns no one had ever been able to predict.\n\nThe Interfacer said quietly, \"Why would mechanicals care so much about our origin\u2014except to figure out how to undo it?\"\nSIX\n\nDeep Down Superficial\n\nNigel did not like it, but Family Walmsley had to bow to the Interface. Other craft fluttered down the curved air and deposited defensive gear\u2014intricate assemblies of ceramo-metal tubes, tapered carbon-web cylinders, power modules like huge brown bricks.\n\nNigel glanced at the shiny, white steel surface of the control console, then away. One reaches the age when mirrors are of no interest. As well, he had long given up hope of keeping track of technology's relentless march and to him these did not even look like weapons. Nor did the attendants who crisply set up the defensive web, nodding curtly to him, look like soldiers. He was glad to finally see them ride their craft back down the Lane.\n\nThe family eyed the defenses skeptically. Supposedly they would keep the worm open by offsetting whatever the Grey Mech could do to it. \"Think it'll work, Mom?\" Benjamin wondered.\n\nNikka shook her head. \"People have tried such before. But it's like a whip\u2014easy to flip around, until the tail bites you.\"\n\n\"Should we, well, move?\"\n\nNikka was startled. \"Our fruit is nearly ripe!\"\n\nThat seemed to settle matters. The Interfacer had mentioned in passing that the Grey Mech sometimes struck at wormholes only long after they had erupted. No one knew why. Still, it removed any sense of urgency.\n\nSo did the very nature of the esty. As a self-curved space-time, it was in the ordinary universe of the galaxy, yet had other connections\u2014to other spaces, other times. The Old Ones used the esty, had made and confined it, but nothing truly controlled it, any more than a man who cages a lion can necessarily make it perform tricks.\n\nThey had a quiet evening, sobered by the presence of automatic weaponry on hair-trigger alert, just over the rise behind the rambling house. War had so outsped human reflexes that battles lasted mere milliseconds. This had a curiously liberating effect, for it meant that no warning or action was possible. So the family went about life as usual, but talked little.\n\nGetting ready for bed that evening, Nigel worked his fingertips along his scalp line where his gray, thinning hair began. He could have changed the gray readily to blond or one of the more fashionable hues\u2014scarlet, say, or electric blue\u2014but he liked the effect.\n\nCarefully he ran his left hand down and to the side, opening his face along a barely visible scar that ran along his chin, around the neck and down his back. Electrostatic bonds ripped free with a sound like corn popping in the next room. He peeled his skin back in a straight line down the spine and drew the flap over his left shoulder and biceps, until he could painstakingly roll it up against his wrist with a moisty, sucking sound. The skin stripped back down to his buttocks, revealing moist redness.\n\nHe turned with exaggerated grace in a ballet pose. \"The real me. Like it?\"\n\nLounging back on their massive bed, Nikka laughed despite herself. \"Can't you do your medical some other time? I was just getting in the mood.\"\n\n\"I'll recalibrate my secretors. Add some hormones. Give you an even better run for your money.\"\n\n\"I wasn't planning on paying money, and I didn't have running in mind.\"\n\nHe groaned as he turned digital controls that the peeling had exposed. \"A literalist! God spare the sacred erotic impulse from their kind.\"\n\n\"You expect silky passions after you show me _that_?\"\n\n\"Fair enough. But trust me to summon up your passion, madam. My specialty.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Hurry up, then.\"\n\nHe gave her a fond grin as he worked on himself: tuning, refilling small vials, scanning outputs. She was still sinewy and muscular, her skin smooth everywhere but at elbows and knees. Somehow, Nigel noted as he inspected his own, those spots and the backs of hands were not corrected by the elaborate chemical cocktails medical science provided. A minor complaint. Without his in-body systems, which he had to tune in this rather unsettling fashion, he and Nikka would have been dead for centuries.\n\n\"How is it?\" she said suddenly\u2014some mute inner pressure had finally found voice.\n\n\"Um. Not much change.\" He turned slightly toward the shadows, so she could not read the indices. On a tiny digital display he used to communicate with his in-body systems a small light winked red. He silenced it with an adjustment, fingers working swiftly with long practice.\n\n\"How much change?\"\n\nAt times like this he was decidedly rankled that he had, from all the flower of womanhood, chosen one with a bulldog tenacity for detail. \"A bit. A small bit.\"\n\n\"Which way?\"\n\n\"Ummmm.\" He shrugged and started packing himself up.\n\nShe let the evasion pass. He concentrated on his Earther tech, engineered to be maximally convenient. Like an employee in a candy factory, the key was knowing when to stop taking things for free. He and Nikka had adopted the truly useful and avoided the rest. There were other techno-delights open to them, but they used the minimum.\n\nHe had to shuck his right hand free a bit to get at a pesky lace of veins that had clogged. He pulled the epidermis loose as if he had on a tight glove, pinching each finger free separately. The veins needed a soothing application of some noxious stuff. When the smell was gone he pulled the supple skin back into place, feeling the tabs self-seal with a warm purr.\n\n\"It's lower, isn't it?\"\n\nHe knew that ignoring her would not work; it never had. \"It's a hundred seventy-two point eight.\"\n\n\"A full point down.\"\n\nHe turned back and her face was quite suddenly older, mournful. \"Nothing for it, luv.\"\n\n\"If we go in to those specialists again\u2014\"\n\n\"They'll nod and probe and do me no good. Remember?\"\n\n\"It will kill you,\" she said with abrupt energy.\n\n\"Something has to.\"\n\n\"Don't be so goddamned glib!\"\n\n\"That's me. Deep down, I'm superficial.\"\n\n\"But you just, you just\u2014\" and she did the absolute worst thing, burst into tears. The one measure he could never confront with a wry smile and his lofty disdain for the nagging intrusions of life.\n\nSo it ended as it had so many times before. He took her in his arms. Simple sympathy and body warmth made up for words. They comforted each other with a knowingness born of time and troubles past. It was a long while before they slept.\nSEVEN\n\nA Few Microseconds\n\nThe Walmsleys visited the worm seldom because there was plenty of work to be done in the long, stretching groves, amid the sweet scent of crops coming.\n\nSeasons of a sort came and went in the esty and one had to pick fruit when the fitful warming of the timestone brought it to peak. They were in the fields when a hard yellow-white streak raced through the air high above and slammed into the esty where the woman had appeared.\n\nThe weapons of the Old Ones answered. Hard radiation spiked at the edge of Nigel's sensorium. He seldom used this Earther tech, but for the moment it was on full range. He turned his head\u2014\n\n\u2014a swift sensation of something massive and gray, high up in the air but closing fast\u2014\n\n\u2014A silence swelling like a bubble toward the family.\n\nThey were loading up a produce carrier. The impulse hit before they could even pivot to flee.\n\nBrilliant glare enveloped them. The air seemed to clot\u2014a thick, massive deadening. A flicker wrapped around them like neon rain, illuminated by green sheet lightning\u2014\n\n\u2014curling tendrils\u2014\n\n\u2014sheets glowing like ghost fire\u2014\n\nAnd when it had passed, the far terrain around them was bare, hostile, steaming with sulphurous vapors.\n\nMachines worked in slivers of seconds that humans could not perceive. Huge energies slice time as they shatter it. The battle between the Grey Mech and the Interfacers' weapons was over\u2014had been decided, transmitted, antiseptically digested by distant minds, its effects calibrated and assessed.\n\nThe mechanicals' attack had distorted the esty. Mere bystanders in the spreading gulp of the reflexing esty, the Walmsleys had been swept through the wormhole portal, a swerve in space-time accomplished between two thuds of the human heart.\nEIGHT\n\nAntiques Dealer\n\nIt took them days to figure out, first, what had happened and, second, what they could do about it.\n\nThe first answer was buried in the fast diagnostics of the Interfacer defenses. Nikka retrieved those. The mech attack had dimpled them through to another place in the esty. Not merely to the other end of the wormhole, which presumably connected to a far future. Instead, the intensity of the flux of gravitational radiation emitted in the battle had whipped the wormhole to some other location in the esty.\n\nIt had sheared off most of their groves. With them went a lot of equipment and their pet raccoon. A sliced fraction of their original farm sat uneasily in a new place.\n\nAnother space, another time. Another space-time.\n\nThe second answer was harder to accept: _nothing._\n\n\"We can't, well, reverse this grav gear?\" Exasperated, Ito slapped one of the modular cylinders. It seemed undamaged.\n\nNikka shook her head, tired. She had kept up her technical ability better than Nigel. She could read the interlaced matrices of the artificial intelligence that maintained the Interface apparatus. \"It is a defensive net, not a transport device.\"\n\nIto had always been impatient with recalcitrant equipment. He busted a knuckle trying to get a seal off one of the smooth, enigmatic cylinders. \"How can they leave us stranded like this?\" He twisted his mouth in exasperation while Nigel watched with something like amusement. Nigel had never expected organizations to get him out of scrapes and was quite sure that he was too old to start.\n\n\"You have to understand that the esty isn't just a convenient mass to live on, a source of local gravity,\" Nigel said. \"Such as a planet, for example.\"\n\nBlank looks. None of the three children had ever lived on a planet.\n\nDespite an extensive education, he reminded himself, they could not truly visualize the most elementary aspects of it\u2014an empty blue sky overhead, giving way to stars at night that swung around the black bowl in serene circles; raucous weather churning out of vagrant winds, driven by complex vector forces; horizons that always curved away, so that ships showed their masts first as they approached; the very oceans such ships could sail on, implying a colossal lavishness of water; the wholly different sensation of living at the bottom of a gravity well, while above yawned a vast abyss, visible to a glance upward.\n\n\"It's rubbery,\" Nigel said. \"And unpredictable.\"\n\nThe fact that they lived in a portion of the esty noted for its solidity did not lessen this fact, but Nigel saw that in bringing up the children so far from the spongy zones, he and Nikka had perhaps erred on the side of safety.\n\nAngelina objected, \"But the Interfacer said\u2014\"\n\n\"Nobody really controls the esty,\" Nikka said. \"Not even the Old Ones. It evolves and we live in it.\"\n\nAngelina gestured upward, where a lightly forested land hung far away, curving behind cottony clouds. It looked as though they were in a spectacular spinning cylinder, pinned to its outer walls by centrifugal force.\n\nBut spin did not do the job. The esty held itself together by folding space-time\u2014by curving itself in unimaginable thin sheets, stacking time and space like pages of a vast book, the events and substance of whole lives and eras encased in walls that felt as solid as granite.\n\nEinstein had seen that mass curved space-time. The esty reversed the equality, making curved esty itself feel like mass, planet-solid. A building material. The esty was far more lively than mere boring matter, for indeed in a profound way it was alive, the compacted stuff of existence that could spawn more of itself. It even had parasites, the worms.\n\n\"How can we get back to home?\" Angelina asked plaintively.\n\n\"We can't,\" Nikka said flatly. \"No gear for it.\"\n\n\"We can't use this, then?\" Ito slapped the inert cylinder. He was a fine worker and loved his mother but fire flashed in his eyes when confronted with balky machinery.\n\n\"It's defensive, period,\" Nikka said mildly. \"To even attempt a return we need to open the worm in a controlled way.\"\n\n\"How hard is that?\" Nigel asked.\n\nShe shook her head. \"Even experts shy away from that, if they're smart. It's dangerous work.\"\n\n\"What's it take?\" Benjamin asked. He had his mother's upturned chin and her quiet assurance that given time and tinkering, miracles were routine.\n\n\"Some integrative graviton sensors, a field generator which can deliver a terrawatt at ten kilohertz acoustic . . . and a Causality Engine.\" Nikka sat gingerly on a boulder. She had twisted her back in the flickering microsecond of transition through the Vor.\n\nBenjamin's mouth sagged. No miracles were going to happen right away.\n\nNigel asked skeptically, \"Causality Engine? I thought we could take causality for granted.\"\n\nNikka shook her head, the sheen of her long, braided black hair catching the light. \"It's keeping causality in proper order that takes control.\"\n\nNigel had left the ever more complex physics of the esty to others in favor of his orchards, as a proper reward of age. Nikka still relished technical detail, and it took her quite a while to convey to them the realms of chaotic logic. Daunting stuff.\n\nA Vor was a \"chaotic attractor\" that linked portions of the esty in random fashion. But the links had a cyclic logic, so that any given connection would recur . . . in time. Generally, a _long_ time. Making it happen again demanded deft mathematical control of the lip of the Vor. The process resembled stirring a pot, using bursts of gravitational radiation.\n\nShe was explaining this when a pale pink craft sliced across their clouded sky and banked over them. Its backwash slammed down a fist of heated air, making them duck. It settled a short distance away on oddly angled struts of purple metal that ended in disk footpads.\n\nA woman came rapidly toward them, shanks hiking her forward as though in a race. She wore jet-black, porous ceramic eyes that wrapped around her head like a combination of hat and spectacles, yet left the crown of her honey hair uncovered.\n\n\"I'll go set rate,\" she announced in a preemptory voice, heavily accented in broad _a_ 's and _eh_ 's.\n\n\"For what?\" Ito asked. He was nearer her and she seemed to assume he was delegated to speak.\n\n\"Don't stall.\"\n\n\"We're not\u2014\"\n\n\"Look, I be first in. So I get the bid.\"\n\nIto looked irked. \"First in what?\"\n\n\"You know not? You've beed inside a suspension bubble. I waited days for it to pop.\"\n\nIto frowned. \"A . . . time bubble?\"\n\n\"Checko.\" She raked them all with an assessing gaze. \"You be stable, though. I looked over your chunk from the air. It snapped off a section of ordinary rock. Settled in well, I sayed.\"\n\n\"Where are we?\"\n\n\"Sawazaki Lane. Your equipment\u2014early era, right? I be good with antiques.\"\n\n\"We tunneled through to a human Lane, though, right?\" Ito persisted.\n\nNigel watched his son's expression as the realization dawned that they could just as easily have popped out in some hellhole Lane of methane gas or bitter cold. Nigel and Nikka had known that but, as Nikka had said to him in private, what could they have done? The mechs had sent their sliver of esty caroming out into the larger esty, and it had lodged where laws of nonlinear dynamics took it.\n\n\"Sure, did you not plan to?\" Distracted, the woman glanced at her sleeve. \"Ummm. As I calc, I could offer you a single pointo price for all of it.\"\n\nShe looked at them, an entirely phony smile splitting her face, showing bright yellow teeth. \"Sight unseen. I willn't bother. Not my style to poke around too much with people standing right there. Don't much need the money. I just take what luck brings me.\"\n\nIto gaped. \"What? Buy everything?\"\n\n\"Flat fee basis. Leave or take.\"\n\nNikka let her jaw jut out in a way Nigel knew well. \"We aren't interested.\"\n\nThe woman frowned. \"Look, I know how it is. You must've saved most of your nut to get this big a spread slipstreamed in, right? I'll allow for that, believe me.\" She rolled her eyes theatrically. \"Even though I usually get my budget busted when I do.\"\n\nNikka did not smile back. \"No deal.\"\n\n\"Huh? You're trans-importers, right?\"\n\n\"No,\" Nikka said. \"We're refugees.\"\n\n\"Well then, you'll be needing cash, won't you? I can see my way clear to offer\u2014\"\n\n\"We won't sell,\" Nigel said mildly.\n\nHer ceramic eyes prowled them. Facets winked as she turned her head, diagnostics probing. She wore a scarf, barely visible above an ivory jacket cut to show one obvious weapon, an antique-looking pistol on its own pop-out handle, and to conceal several others that made mere ripples in her sleek contours.\n\n\"You people know not Sawazaki law, do you?\" Again the eye-roll. \"Lord, protect me from amateurs.\"\n\nNigel said, \"We were blown here by mechs. Certainly we would appreciate assistance in getting back home.\"\n\nShe brightened. \"Well then\u2014\"\n\n\"With our property intact.\"\n\nHer friendly bluster vanished. The transformation was so sudden it seemed to Nigel that he saw a wholly new face. Heavy brows tinted auburn, split by a deep frown line. Sunken, brilliant yellow eyes below\u2014visible when the artificial eyes went suddenly transparent. Her hands were ribbed and knobbed like enlarged gloves\u2014which, Nigel realized belatedly, they were\u2014which angled forth fat fingers of obvious strength. He wondered why she needed them.\n\n\"Snarfs, eh?\" she said in a menacing whisper.\n\nHer gloved hands unsheathed into thin, servo'd fingers that jutted from the sausage-thick ones. Sharp, businesslike. \"Then you be coming with.\"\n\nIto stepped forward, scowling This was just the kind of problem a young man would rise to, Nigel saw, and in the set of Ito's jaw trouble was coming. Nigel was a half step behind him as Ito began, \"I don't think I like the way you\u2014\"\n\n\u2014and Ito was on the ground. Nigel had not even seen her move. She had punched him and returned to exactly the same position in an eye-blink.\nNINE\n\nThe Tilted City\n\nThe city was on edge. Not meaning in a foul mood, Nigel thought to himself as they coasted over, through, and around the steepled constructions, but quite literally.\n\nThe spired sprawl canted up into the filmy air as though it had been formed in a bowl until it hardened, and then shucked free\u2014so that the curved base tipped nearly all the way over, a crescent moon about to crash down.\n\nBut it was at least a hundred kilometers across. It rested on a rocky plain, a colossal ornament on the inside of a spherical bulge in Sawazaki Lane. In the far foggy distance he could see the annular geometry they had emerged from. Tricks of sliding perspective and the sharp dry air made everything here seem miniature.\n\nThey banked in and the illusion vanished. The city became a forest of slender spires, jewels jutting up from the curved base. They swelled into thick, serpentine buildings studded with tiny lights: windows.\n\nIn the city gravity pointed at \"local down\" as naturally as ever. Only by walking some distance through the curiously cushioned streets could one tell that the direction veered steadily, accommodating the bowl's curvature. The effect struck Nigel as miraculous.\n\n\"How do they do this?\" he wondered. \"Gravity like hands cupping a baby's butt?\"\n\nNikka frowned but it was unlike her to admit being stumped. \"They've figured a way to make the esty exert gravitational forces and torques at a distance . . . I think.\"\n\nThe woman escorting them, whose name proved to be Tonogan, said sardonically, \"We tilt our city for religious reasons. You would not understand.\"\n\nNigel could not tell whether she was joking but it seemed an unlikely extravagance. He could see the air shimmer with compressed forces at the city's rim. It occurred to him that if the effect was real, and not some bizarre optical illusion, then it demanded that gravitational waves be radiated from the visible plain below up to the esty that cupped the city. But gravitational waves of such intensity were incredible. Or so he thought.\n\nHe remembered the pictures of the two black holes merging, marrying, and giving birth to something wholly different between them. Maybe the way to think here was with biological metaphors, not the old physics ones he had learned at Cambridge so long ago.\n\nThey passed through crowds whose size, mass, attire (where there was any), and facial gestures ran a gamut Nigel had never seen before. Some were antic, reacting to everything. Others seemed sublimely indifferent to the rabble of the oddly shaped who ambled, meandered, drifted, strolled, and marched without apparently acknowledging each other or, indeed, the ordinary laws of physics. Some seemed lighter, making great bounds. Others skated on unseen platforms. (Nigel tried to trip one, but the fellow slid past without a glance and for half an hour later his foot, which had felt no contact, was bitingly cold.) Some flew with outspread arms. Others scarcely seemed to walk at all, but moved forward swiftly on unseen carriers.\n\nA passing man lit a cigarette of some sweet-smelling stuff by scraping the knob end against his belt. Nigel wondered what happened if you dropped a whole pack of them knob-down.\n\nSome wore sandpaper-rough clothing to keep people at a respectful distance; a useful urban attire Nigel had not seen before. Despite the noise and confusion, an old game played out: locals were doing their best to accommodate the visitors and relieve them of any excess cash.\n\nA kid slapped a button on Angelina's shoulder and it began to speak. \"Dooed the upshift till you be down? Want to go/get level? Think pointo and\u2014\" Angelina pried off this portable advertisement and tossed it away, where it stuck to a wall and began its pitch again.\n\nTonogan swerved suddenly into a broad opening in a pyramidal building. The family, gawking, hastened to keep up. She never looked back, apparently certain that they would follow. Inside, the floor propelled them through intersecting streams of men and women with fluorescent neck and ear tattoos, who came and went with bewildering speed, legs scissoring. At a large, ornate, copper-sheen doorway stood two well-muscled men wearing wraparound gray that accentuated their chest and shoulders. They stood rigidly, Nigel noted, and looked quite intrepid.\n\nThey were apparently protecting an obese woman in a violently purple bag-dress. She wore skin to match, a near perfect shade. Yawning, she languidly glanced up as they came through the vertically pivoting door.\n\n\"Good waxing.\" Her voice rippled with polished undertones, as though she truly felt that it was a good rising of the esty's fitful light and hoped that you did, too.\n\nShe went back to looking at a scroll held in one hand. It unrolled on its own and she seemed fascinated with it, not even looking up as Tonogan rattled off a rapid-fire summary. They were standing in a gallery that gave onto an odd courtyard. As Tonogan spoke something like a six-legged dog trotted about courtyard center. It seemed to glide more than walk among the plants that festooned the area\u2014big speckled yellow-green effusions, geysers of leafy abundance.\n\nThe large woman interrupted Tonogan with, \"I see the scans. A family, um. Quite a large area to transslip, eh?\"\n\nShe looked at Nikka, who answered. \"We want help in getting back to our Lane, at our esty cords.\"\n\nNigel felt a quiet pride; ever Nikka, ever direct. Nigel was a doddering language purist, and disliked shortening \"coordinates\" to \"cords\" since that obscured a perfectly good word for rope, but he also knew that to crunch the lingo was crucial. The trimmed English here\u2014all verbs and plurals regular, simple constructions\u2014was efficient, where travelers from other eras and territories crossed.\n\n\"Impossible.\"\n\nNikka said patiently, \"Technically it must be\u2014\"\n\n\"No no! It's _expensive._ \"\n\nNikka frowned, always uncomfortable with financial matters. Nigel said, \"We could perhaps trade off a bit of our holdings.\"\n\nThe purple woman looked distracted\u2014back to her scroll. Nobody asked them to sit down and indeed there was no place to do so in this long, slick-floored vestibule. She occupied all of a spacious divan, with a bit more of her left over.\n\nFinally she yawned, perhaps not for show. \"You haven't nearly enough. Interesting historical artifacts, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Historical?\" Ito took affront.\n\n\"Well, you do come from\"\u2014a string of digits and words, meaningless to Nigel\u2014\"and that's a wayfer.\"\n\n\"Wafer?\" Ito asked, his jaw working with irritation.\n\n\"Way far gone, as we say here. I speak your approximate regional language, be I not? I had to chipload for it, that be how much trouble I went to.\" She waved a hand with sausage fingers in airy disdain and went back to her scroll. Apparently the rest of the world was supposed to freeze in place until her attention returned.\n\nThe strangely snakelike dog spotted a covey of dappled birds who had waddled out from beneath one of the leafy explosions. It went into a low stalk. The closer it got the slower and lower it went, until finally the birds burst into the sky and the dog dashed to where they had been. Trotting around, it wagged its eel-like tail.\n\nNigel felt amused and comforted by the display. Genes tell, and this echo of Earth was welcome. He remembered pigeons in Trafalgar Square, chased by hounds out on a leash, and the momentary picture brought a dizzy sense of the immense perspectives in this life of his, so long and wearing.\n\n\"Ummm. You know anything about holies?\" the purple woman asked, one finger held to her cheek, staring at her scroll as though it were a mirror.\n\nNikka said cautiously, \"I know that esty Vortices are naturally occurring wormholes. No matter what size, they have fixed matter-throughput. But the bandwidth of information\u2014\n\nmatter, data, anything\u2014that can go through scales up with its radius. The Grey Mech hit us with something\u2014\"\n\n\"A Causality Polarizer,\" the purple woman said, licking her lips with something like relish. \"If I could only get one!\"\n\n\"\u2014and blew us into here. And now.\"\n\n\"Our 'now' be quite a bit downstream of you,\" the woman said. \"You be several million year-kilometers distant.\"\n\nNigel blinked. \"That much?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"A moderate traverse.\"\n\n\"Can't you break that up into distance and time?\"\n\nShe laughed, lips stretched far back, but without real joy. \"How old _be_ you? The idea\u2014splitting the esty!\" A dry cackle.\n\nNigel felt both awkward and vexed. \"Fair enough. We know in principle that space-time can't be just sectioned out, leastwise not here.\"\n\n\"Clocks and feet separate them out pretty well, but the esty knows what we can't see.\" There was a kind note in her voice as she asked, \"You be old, yes?\"\n\nNikka said plainly, \"From Earth.\"\n\nThe purple woman's eyes flared with surprise, then anger. \"I try be friendly with you, give you an honest deal. And you think you can play games!\"\n\nIt was Nikka's turn to laugh. \"I'm telling the truth. What do you want, passports?\"\n\nThe woman's chip did not know the word\u2014indeed, passports made no sense in a multiply connected esty with no true boundaries\u2014and she waved them away, mouth askew with displeasure.\n\n\"You people shouldn't be traders at all!\"\n\nIto blurted, \"We _aren't_ \u2014can't you get that straight?\"\n\nHer eyes blazed again. \" _You_ get _this_ straight. You take the rate I offer you for your property\u2014buildings, historicals, mech widgets and sensies, the lot\u2014or you'll be punished.\"\n\nNigel bridled. \"Punished for what?\"\n\n\"For taking up space, air, time\u2014anything I want!\"\n\nShe stood with effort, waddling forward on huge feet\u2014a purple wall unaccustomed to collisions. Nigel held his ground. She jutted a large palm out and shoved him. She was massive and surprisingly strong. He staggered back and made a mistake. Without thinking he punched her swiftly in the stomach.\n\nIn what seemed the same instant someone struck him from behind. A sharp jolt of electrical violence coursed up through him. Then he was lying on the floor, without any perceptible interval in between. Arms and legs numb. Sounds hollow, distant. Staring up at a cloudy bowl. In a city tipped on end, he recalled distantly.\n\nThe purple wall had gone back to her couch. Hissing in his inner ear, the mists around him fried away. He looked around and everything was as before.\n\nTonogan had shocked him with the rod she held easily in one hand. He let a long breath out and stood, wheezing and rickety at the knees. How to begin?\n\n\"And who the hell\u2014\" Nigel had an instant of caution, obviously far too late, still trying to size up this sizable lady\u2014\"are you?\"\n\n\"The Chairwoman,\" Tonogan said. All this time she had been standing at rigid attention, like the two stuffed men outside.\n\n\"Chairwoman of what?\" Nikka demanded.\n\n\"Everything. Just about everything.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\nThe Chairwoman wrapped up her calculator-scroll and glowered darkly. \"Pleased to meet you.\"\nTEN\n\nEine Kleine Nachtmusik\n\nIto did his work, hooking up some multisocketed pipes, and all the while looked off into the distance without saying anything.\n\nWhen he could wait no more Nigel asked, \"All right, what's wrong?\"\n\n\"You got to ask that?\"\n\n\"I'm not swift on the subtleties.\"\n\n\" _Subtleties?_ Best way to get your attention is with a stick.\"\n\nThey had been working for weeks in menial labor, hauling this, cleaning that. Putting in penance time for the Chairwoman, Tonogan had called it. It was clear that in this Lane the purple woman ran everything with a hard hand, for reasons that remained to Nigel quite mysterious. And he had been forced to concede that she had solidly behind her the brunt of what passed for law here.\n\nNigel sighed and worked two pipes together, applying sealant. No matter how advanced technology got, there was always grunt labor needed to jimmy stubborn matter into place. No legions of robots or smartened animals ever replaced the general handyman-cum-janitor.\n\nTime to trot out the apology again. \"Son, I'm sorry I got us into this\u2014\"\n\n\"Look, I heard a rumor,\" Ito said evenly.\n\nNigel shook his head, bone-weary. He was feeling sour, defeated. \"I'm not in the mood for rumors.\"\n\nMatters had not worked out well between Ito and Nigel for quite a while now. His brilliantly mangled handling of the Chairwoman had not improved the festering tension\u2014inevitable, he supposed\u2014between him and his first son, now coming to manhood.\n\nIto had bridled at the discipline imposed by the Chairwoman's silent, impassive police. Rough handling. Abrupt dawn awakenings. Long days of scut work. Adequate meals that had to be eaten in a rush. Little privacy in the muggy, close apartment given them, sandwiched into a brawling tenement. No time off the grinding labor. No chance to get out of the curfew hours, the iron-hard lockup, the rigid lights-out. No access to any media, no contact with ordinary people other than to pick up their trash.\n\nAngelina and Benjamin had borne up well. Nigel and Nikka could take punishment, too, but their oldest son had snapped back at their police \"escorts.\" He had refused to clean up messes when toilet plumbing broke, swore at the police orders. So the placid police had most politely smacked him around, prodded him with neuro-stims, given him a \"seize-up,\" which locked his muscles in vibrating bands of rigid tension\u2014all while faintly amused. It had not improved Ito's mood.\n\nNot a future utopia, no.\n\nBut the future, certainly. The city they glimpsed from the back alleys where they worked was strange and fabulous. As nearly as they could tell, the complex was stratified, with an upper crust that reveled in techno-wonders, a vast majority that lived ample lives, and a lower caste that did the grunt work. Not exactly a fresh idea.\n\nThere were technologies Nikka and Nigel were sure had not existed anywhere in the esty in their era. The Grey Mech had slammed them into a future far from their comforts.\n\nIto persisted. \"This rumor, it said maybe the Chairwoman will listen to us again.\"\n\nNigel studied his son's face, trying to think clearly despite the spreading ache in his lower back from stooping, and the silent blanket of fatigue that had spread over him. Still an hour left in this work day. \"That's not a rumor. Who told you?\"\n\nIto looked edgy as he swept back a greasy tangle of hair. \"Tonogan. She wants to see you.\"\n\n\"You've been negotiating with her?\"\n\n\"Not really.\"\n\n\"Which means?\"\n\n\"Well, maybe some.\"\n\n\"The family has to speak with one voice, as you full well know.\"\n\nIto chewed his lip. \"Well, _you_ aren't doing anything.\"\n\n\"I'm waiting her out.\"\n\n\"Her waiting's easier than ours.\"\n\n\"She wants our property. It's probably worth a lot more than you or I think.\"\n\nIto flared, mouth twisting. \"How can we know _what_ to think? We're stuck down in basements and alleys all day, busting our humps, getting flat nothing\u2014\"\n\nNigel sat on a trash can and kicked at a brown flask, still corked but empty. He had never thought of the far future as a place of ordinary junk and grit, much of which a medieval peasant would have instantly recognized.\n\n\"Right,\" he conceded, \"it's not playing out well. That Chairwoman\u2014what a bland name for a tyrant!\u2014seems bound by what passes for law here. She can't simply take what she wants. There are procedures.\"\n\n\"I can't see where we have any rights at all.\"\n\n\"This place seems to work through intimidation, rather than rights.\"\n\nIto chuckled dryly. \"With a frosting of polite brutality, I bet.\"\n\nNigel nodded. The family was getting depressed and, quite so, the Chairwoman could exert arcane legalisms to keep them like this indefinitely.\n\n\"Dad, you're in over your head here. That fall you took last week was nasty and I can see you're still limping\u2014\"\n\n\"Scarcely felt it.\"\n\nThe slow, steady ache in his left leg never left him. Somehow he had not thought that the far future would still have pain in it, either. _I saw too much rosy-visioned Walt Disney,_ he thought tartly. Would anybody in this whole cupped city recognize that ancient name? Of course not.\n\n\"So I just took it on myself to talk a li'l to Tonogan\u2014\"\n\n\"Without telling anyone. Breaching the family's\u2014\"\n\n\" _You_ weren't doing a goddamn thing to\u2014\"\n\n\"That's enough.\"\n\nTonogan had come into the alley without their noticing. She was sleekly dressed in gray-black, a thin club like a riding crop tapping on her thigh. Nigel gestured to Ito to be cautious.\n\nShe said, \"I gather from your son that you might be in a mood to renegotiate.\"\n\n\"You're just in time,\" Nigel said, sitting up straight. \"I was about to leave for my exercise at the gymnasium.\"\n\n\"Very funny. Remember, I have your medical indices.\"\n\n\"Not much privacy in this place, is there?\" Nigel inquired lightly of his son.\n\nShe ignored this, adding, \"Including fatigue factors.\"\n\n\"Quite. We really must thank you for a bracing round of workouts. We're getting into terrific condition.\"\n\n\"You would be funny if your situation beed not so pathetic.\"\n\n\"Can't say the same for you, alas.\"\n\nTonogan sat irritably on another trash can and said she would like to explain \"certain things.\" Nigel gave Ito a warning glance: be cautious.\n\nAs she talked he became reasonably sure that they were setting him up. Not very subtly, either. Greed dulled even keen minds.\n\nHe stalled, amused by her impatience. He had known an approach would come but had not suspected Ito as the channel. Still, Nikka had accurately predicted Tonogan's pattern to him, fully a week before. Despite his worn face she would try a bit of coquetry first, perhaps offer him a drink. And here it came, from a thermos, cutting and heady. Then very earnestly, with much show of concern, she would warn him.\n\n\"I know not if I can protect you from the Chairwoman.\"\n\n\"Who could?\"\n\n\"Nobody ever insulted her that way. Much less hitted her and lived.\"\n\n\"Surely she's been spanked, at least by her mother. Probably by you, eh?\" A slight loft of eyebrow; a little TwenCen kink, here; see if it translates across the cultural abyss.\n\n\"Be serious!\" A pretty scowl, not really convincing. \"She could have killed you right there.\"\n\n\"She could have tried.\"\n\n\"She be a very dangerous woman. I can help you with her, though. I telled her later that you didn't really mean it.\"\n\n\"But I did.\"\n\n\"You know not what you be doing!\"\n\n\"Tell her I want an apology.\"\n\n\"You be stranger, but that no excuse.\" Her eyes jerked in a frenzy of expressiveness. Overacting, Nigel thought. A rather bad case. He yawned.\n\n\"Listen, I talked to her, calmed her down. She sayed that she would accept some of your goods in trade for your life.\"\n\n\"Goods?\"\n\nAn elaborate shrug. \"Some of your gadgets might be worth, well, a little.\"\n\n\"Ummm. That's her final offer?\"\n\n\"Absolutely. You have a standard day to agree. Miss that and she shows no mercy.\"\n\n\"I see. Tell her I make the same offer.\"\n\n\"What?\" Disbelief\u2014genuine this time.\n\n\"Give me some trinket and I won't kill her.\"\n\n\"You be _mad._ \"\n\n\"That will come out even. I don't kill her, she doesn't kill me. We'll call the trinkets even, too.\"\n\n\"Insults mean something here. I know not what made you float that ridiculous story about Earth, but wherever you be from, you cannot talk this way. And to hit the Chairwoman!\"\n\nTonogan was working herself into a lather and seemed even to believe what she was saying. Astonishing talk poured from her. Nigel never took quite enough account of the fact that people believe in the most ridiculous things, simply because others did, too. Such as the absolute authority of a single fat woman in a baggy robe.\n\nIto injected, \"Dad, stop kidding around. This Chairwoman is the real authority here, never mind how she looks.\"\n\nNigel looked at his son and said mildly, \"It's what she says that makes me doubt her mental balance. Whatever political system they've got here, it's awry.\"\n\nTonogan's perfect yellow teeth massaged her lower lip and Nigel saw he had guessed right; even the Chairwoman's minions thought she was askew. The moment passed and Tonogan said precisely, \"I should not speak of such things, I suppose, but . . . she will torture you before you die, do you not realize that?\"\n\n\"Um.\" He drew a long face. So things were even worse than he thought. He shook his head. Perhaps Ito's caution had been good advice. Well, too late now.\n\nTonogan added, \"And all your friends.\"\n\n\"Family, actually. Go tell her.\"\n\n\"Your childs! She will\u2014\"\n\n\"Go.\" He pointed and she went.\nELEVEN\n\nSphincter Frequency\n\nThey would come in with all sorts of high-tech stuff, of course. Unfathomable stuff. So he went low-tech.\n\nThere were tinny, ceramic throwaway cans in hallways\u2014people's manners never improved\u2014and he took a bag of them back to the family lair. With spoons stuck in them they were so dumb and so simple an alarm that they might work.\n\nNikka volunteered doubtfully, \"I could see about sealing the doors and windows better.\"\n\n\"Locks're useful only against the slovenly.\"\n\n\"What if they try something when we're working?\"\n\n\"We're too spread out, in different labor crews.\"\n\n\"You think they'll do something to the entire family? And here?\"\n\nNigel considered. \"No, unless I misjudge that monstrosity of a woman. Something to humiliate me and sober the rest.\"\n\nNikka sat back, startled. Their tiny \"dining\" table was chipped and worn and her hands clasped each other with a tension her face never showed. He remembered that this sense of inner forces well marshaled was what had first drawn him to her, long ago. \"They'll beat you? In front of us?\"\n\nAs a matter of fact Nigel thought exactly that. Some methods simply could not be improved upon. This was a strange culture, true, but he was getting the feel of it. Still, to quiet her fears he said, \"Too obvious.\"\n\n\"Some techtrick?\"\n\n\"Fellow on my work gang told me those white rods the police carry are acoustic projectors. The disk at the end focuses a wave at the resonant frequency of muscles.\"\n\nNikka shivered. She always hated the description of violence, though when necessity demanded, she could quite easily commit it. \"Sounds awful.\"\n\n\"They usually tune it to the frequency of the sphincter.\"\n\nShe made a face. He laughed.\n\nThey were tired all the time now. Not physically so much\u2014before, they had all worked long orchard hours and danced late into the night\u2014but from uncertainty and dejection. Their bedrooms were cramped, bare, and muggy with damp heat. The only sizable area was the living room, entered by a door off a fetid corridor. A depressing hovel.\n\nProbably a little call after they had fallen asleep, then. _Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,_ as Mozart, dead now over thirty thousand years, had put it. A little night music.\n\nNigel did not see much of a way to get in other than the flimsy front door and the two windows on an air shaft. They were ten stories up the bare sheet metal shaft, an unlikely approach. Thugs were lazy, in his experience.\n\nThe spoon trick would only give slight warning. What real defenses did they have? No weapons better than a kitchen knife.\n\nAgainst the protests of everyone he took to sleeping on a thin pallet beside the front door. The door swung open toward the pallet but the uneven floor matting stopped it before it could touch him.\n\nHe did not mind sleeping that way, though he did miss Nikka's soft embrace. The pallet was thick enough for his knobby joints and the perpetual murmur of arguments and kitchen racket from the air shaft was subdued there, away from the windows. He slept there for a week. Sleep came easier and deeper because he was getting more tired from the work and a growing hopelessness. He woke one night and thought somberly of where all this was going and then a clatter came nearby as a can and spoon made momentary music together. The door's slight scrape had probably dragged him up from a fitful dream.\n\nHe got up quickly. They would have infrared gear, but he was shielded by the door. He, on the other hand, had nothing and did not know where they were. He went flat against the door. No sound. They were probably hoping that nobody would rouse, so they could carry out their plan.\n\nThey? Something told him there was only one other presence here. A slight whisk of breath from his right. That fit the humiliating beating scenario, all the worse for being imposed by a single thug. Probably the fellow would use stunners to immobilize the rest of the family.\n\nWhere was he? In the long moment after the alarm nothing had moved. His heart thudded into its future at a startling pace while his breaths came\u2014shallow, keep them shallow\u2014in a measured six per minute. He strained into the blank darkness.\n\n _Remember that you are old and a bit lacking in endurance. Quick work is the best._\n\nThere\u2014a sudden shadow, stepping fast. Nigel launched himself at the man's back, hit\u2014and slammed him forward.\n\nNo point in trying for an injury. Arms around, quick. Don't let him use his hands. A heavy thunk as something hit the floor. Maybe the stunner.\n\nHead down, butt him in the direction he had been going. Another step. Get some push in it. Another. The man's legs were rummaging for purchase, wanting to stop. Mid-course correction here\u2014veer left. Toward the rectangle of light. Nigel knew he could be flipped aside by some martial arts trick but if he kept the speed up\u2014\n\nTo the window, the soft glow showing this man to be big and grasping for something on his hip. Gun, probably.\n\nVery well\u2014without pause, Nigel lifted with his arms. The man was trying to turn but momentum was inarguable. The body came off the floor and chunked into the windowsill.\n\nHe was heavy and solid but his mass turned on the hinge of the windowsill. Nigel lost his grip on the man then and a fist hit him full in the mouth. He staggered back. Taste of blood. A second fist clipped him. The man was still on the window lip. A short _ah_ as the flailing shadow realized that the window had been thoughtfully left open.\n\nNigel lunged forward. The man was quick and hit him hard in the throat. All Nigel had was kinetics working for him. He did not let the punch stop him and crashed into the man. He clutched the windowsill to stop himself.\n\nThe other could not. Toppling: over and out.\n\n _Wilco, Roger, over and out._ You never forgot the slang of youth. The body seemed to shrink in the gloom, diminishing as it tumbled. A thin scream came back, echoing on the sheet metal.\n\nA wet smack. Then nothing. In the cinder-red glow from the city curving to the horizon he saw shadows scurry away below.\n\nThe backup team? Well, they seemed to have lost interest.\n\nHe heard a scramble behind him as Ito slammed shut the door. Anyone who tried next would find a family armed with odd blunt instruments.\n\nHe sighed. Satisfying. The view from here must be wonderful when there was enough light to see it. He had never been off the work gang when the timestone bristled with light, flooding the city with a torrent of heat and light. But then in reasonable light he would have never been able to play an old man's trick. There were compensations. He felt the damp heat glow of the ruddy timestone on his cheeks and felt no remorse whatever. Maybe this was maturity. Odd, how much like callousness it would seem from the outside. Made one wonder about assessments of others.\n\nHe thought about that, listening for noises in the inky lands below. No conclusions.\n\nThere seldom were. Maybe that was maturity, too.\nTWELVE\n\nGrudging Respect\n\nOn the way to their audience with the Chairwoman they glimpsed zones of the city. A temple housing a single hair from the beard of some prophet whose very name was lost. Meat grilled in the open with dust-and-flies marinade. A church made entirely of cloth. One of the side effects of religious sites, Nikka remarked, was that some were so ludicrous that the whole lot fell into disrepute by association. Tonogan, who escorted them, seemed affronted that they regarded such buildings as mere examples of eccentric architecture. Nigel remembered his mother's similar reaction to his opinions on the ideas behind the Church of England.\n\nThe Chairwoman was even less pleased. \"I could look into the body found in your shaft, you know.\"\n\n\"Yes, I wish you would,\" Nigel answered. \"He screamed dreadfully. Woke up the neighbors. Anyone you knew?\"\n\n\"I would hardly\u2014\"\n\n\"My son found some gear he apparently had.\" Nigel held up a chunky instrument of enigmatic tiny black boxes.\n\n\"I see not\u2014\"\n\n\"Makes you wonder what it's used for, doesn't it?\"\n\nIn the peculiar custom of this place, their killing an agent of the Chairwoman afforded them some grudging respect, even some protection. People who mentioned the subject at all seemed to regard it as more like an audacious chess move than an act of violence, commending applause rather than revenge. The code also had ruled that the toughs sent to humiliate them were not physically augmented, as Tonogan was\u2014a vestige of the TwenCen's notion of a fair fight.\n\nEvery era has its oddities, but Nikka had pointed out that a constant of urban populations was the glamorizing of marginally criminal acts. This bit of theory had made Nigel bold enough to taunt Tonogan when she had come to call. Their ploy had been naughty, but somehow admirable.\n\nThe large purple woman settled on her divan and regarded them all disdainfully. \"I will make you a reasonable offer on your property.\"\n\nNikka said, \"We only need enough to take us away from here. We want to keep our buildings.\"\n\n\"Why? You cannot afford to return to your Lane.\"\n\nIto said flatly, \"We want the buildings. That's final.\" The family had decided on that and Nigel was pleased to see Ito showing that they could not be split, as Tonogan had tried.\n\nNikka said, more pointedly, \"If we can't buy a short transit, how about a long one?\"\n\nThe Chairwoman's face, which was usually animated despite looking for most purposes like a wad of dough with raisins stuck in for eyes, became blank. \"How did you . . . ?\"\n\n\"Old folks aren't entirely useless,\" Nikka said brightly. \"I nosed around.\"\n\n\"Carnivorous curiosity,\" Nigel added. \"She turned up the fact that the energy density in a wormhole is higher if it's tightly curved.\"\n\nNikka nodded. \"And the cost of making a transit goes up with the energy density.\"\n\n\"Umm.\" The Chairwoman's mouth turned crabby. \"I did not think you would work that out.\"\n\n\"Offer us terms. We want\u2014\" Nikka rattled off a long list, headed by the use of a Causality Engine\u2014polarized, of course.\n\n\"You realize that you'll have to make several jumps, further and further into esty-cords? And then several back?\" The Chairwoman seemed genuinely interested, not merely angling for advantage.\n\n\"We'll need pressure skins, too,\" Nikka confirmed.\n\nA curt nod. \"You truly wish to risk that?\"\n\n\"We must,\" Angelina said. \"We want to go _home._ \"\n\nNigel nodded, not daring to speak. This was the crucial moment, he could feel it. Home. Back to a world he could understand, off the grand stage. For at least a while. Something told him that he would be forced back into the operatics of Earthers and mechanicals and Old Ones, eventually. But not now. Not while they still had family and blissfully finite horizons.\n\nThe Chairwoman eyed them. \"You are more courageous than you look, you Walmsleys.\"\n\nShe agreed to the financial details with a suddenness and phony casualness that masked a disagreeable defeat. Not that the Walmsleys had made any appreciable dent in her bureaucrat's world, he was sure. They would not have survived that. Sometimes, Nigel thought, it was of more use to be an irritant\u2014so long as you didn't get slapped like a pesky insect.\n\nDeal done, the Chairwoman was cordial. In a mannered fashion, apparently part of a set ritual marking successful negotiations, she arranged herself in a helical hammock\u2014\n\napparently a sign of informality here\u2014and remarked, \"No one ever choosed this before.\"\n\nNigel asked, \"Why? We aren't particularly brilliant. It's obvious.\"\n\n\"Obvious, yes. But untried. Dangerous.\"\n\nNikka looked wary. \"Going further in cords is how much more dangerous?\"\n\n\"We of this city and Lane know more than you.\" She sniffed. \"We have seen the bodies.\"\nTHIRTEEN\n\nOnly Barbarians\n\nOf course they asked what _the bodies_ were. Officials grimaced but did as the Chairwoman said, and within a day they were ushered into a cool, starkly lit vault.\n\nThe family had looked at each other with dismay when they realized that here, corpses from the esty were held as volumes in a kind of library. Many times the family had debated and regretted their handling of the woman's corpse, which had precipitated their exile. Here the rare emergence of a carcass from the esty was greeted with anticipation and also a sort of dread, for invariably the cadavers proved to come from the future of the esty.\n\nNigel's elation at their negotiation trickled away as he looked at the pale, emaciated corpse of a middle-aged man, kept suspended somehow. A mass of tiny magnetic readers crowned the head. They could \"read him\" quite well, a technician told them. \"Isotope analysis shows he's from one point three million years uptime.\"\n\n\"What did he die of?\" asked Nikka, ever the tech type.\n\n\"Radiation burns.\"\n\n\"Any memories?\"\n\nThe young man blinked owlishly. \"Some. Missing the short-term recall, of course.\"\n\nMemories, indeed. Fractured pictures. The same hazy sky, mapped in the 0.511 million electron Volt line. Only far more developed, with ornate structures corkscrewing across a mottled ruby sky.\n\nMore: a bleak landscape marked off by boxy monuments. Among these crawled three-wheeled things that appeared to be not vehicles but living creatures.\n\n\"Or mechs,\" Nigel said crisply.\n\n\"Who was he?\" Nikka asked pensively.\n\n\"We cannot really understand that. He does not have the personality signatures we know. All I can unscramble be images. What these pictures mean, we can say not.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"He haved different cerebral organization. Internal organs be altered, too. He be another species.\"\n\nAngelina was shocked. \"He looks like us!\"\n\nThe pale young man shrugged. \"Tinker with the insides all you want, but keep the outside looking the same. Otherwise, people beed nervous.\"\n\n\"That's why you can't get much from their minds?\" Angelina pressed him.\n\n\"That, and cultural differences. This fellow did not look at the world the way we do. It shows up in how he stored memories.\"\n\nNigel found all this depressing. More bodies, but still no one, not even pale pedants, understood why.\n\nWhen they went to sign off on the arrangements, the Chairwoman herself appeared. \"You're going into mech-dominated territory, you know,\" she said severely.\n\nNigel guessed that she was having second thoughts about the deal. Or maybe her ego was getting in the way again. Not uncommon, he thought wanly. \"You're sure?\"\n\n\"We receive no dead mechs coming back through the esty Vors. Only humans.\"\n\n\"You're sure?\" Nikka asked pointedly.\n\n\"We pay close attention. The Old Ones make sure of that.\" She snorted with frustration.\n\n\"Why?\" Nigel persisted.\n\n\"The old questions. You have them even in your time, um?\" A speculative look, then she recited as if from memory. \"First, they want to know what the mechs want up there in the far future. Plenty of mechs goed into the future one-way, using Vors.\"\n\n\"To carry information forward?\" Nikka asked.\n\n\"Possibly. The Old Ones want to find out why.\"\n\n\"And stop it?\" Nigel asked.\n\n\"I suppose. Or at least understand.\"\n\nNikka nodded. \"So do we.\"\n\nThe Chairwoman plainly could see no percentage in such foolhardiness. \"Why? The esty's trouble enough if you just sit still in it.\"\n\n\"Carnivorous curiosity,\" Nigel said.\n\nShe snorted. \"A child's reasoning. If you could see the things I do just to keep us tipped up\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes?\" Angelina asked. Nigel was happy to see her speak up, for she had been cowed by this place. \"Why _do_ you tilt your city?\"\n\nThe Chairwoman said scornfully, \"Why, it be _beautiful._ Only barbarians would even think of asking.\"\nFOURTEEN\n\nGrey Mech\n\nThe mecurial Chairwoman invited them to sleep on her personal estate as they arranged details for their esty transit. This proved to be the same ornate, almost satirically baroque villa where they had met her. They had entered by the back door, amid thronged streets; the true entrance gave onto a cantilevered view of the cupped city, from the uppermost rim of it.\n\nLarge birds, some with shiny teeth and even lips, hung on the winds off the Chairwoman's balcony. One swooped near and eyed them, as if sizing up a meal. It was half the size of a man. Here gravity eased, lending everything an airy lightness that reminded Nigel of getting drunk but suffering no consequences. Still, the toothy birds smiled at them with unnerving assurance. They went back inside.\n\nThe next waning lasted quite long. Somehow the city could influence the pulses of brilliant glow emitted by the timestone, shaping them to a roughly regular schedule: dark about a third of the time, enough to sleep if you were not too tired.\n\nNobody here seemed to get tired. Noisy, chaotically colorful, they rushed about a lot. Nikka wondered aloud if this was just their Old Fart bewilderment at the pointless energy of the young. Nigel shook his head. He had harbored that notion for so long that he had passed through to another state, in which he ceased grasping for the fullness of life and let it come to him instead. It had taken him centuries to realize that joy and pain were equally biting and rewarded close inspection equally little. They were just _there,_ like flowers. Better to take them for their flavors than their metaphors.\n\nThey stood again on the balcony with the Chairwoman, idle talk before bed, and across the distant porcelain sky shot something large and swift and somber. The Chairwoman's eyes widened. \"Grey Mech!\" she cried, and crashed to the marble floor.\n\nThin cries of panic from all across the cupped city below. Nigel studied the dusky, hovering presence with abstract interest, hands on a gleaming brass railing.\n\n\"Get _down_!\" Nikka called to him from her knees, hidden from view.\n\nThe Grey Mech rushed toward them, accelerating from high up. A chorus of despairing shouts came up to him from the expanse of streets and glassy buildings below. Casually he turned and walked inside.\n\n\"Probably wasn't after us,\" he said to Nikka as they stood in an elaborate ballroom. People rushed through, panicked, calling hoarsely to each other.\n\n\"We can't be sure,\" she said nervously.\n\n\"Come now. We aren't remotely important to\u2014\"\n\nThe crash blew in the far wall. Hammer-hard impact, then an eerie silence.\n\nIt buried them under heavy furniture. They learned later, as a medical type patched them up, that a section of the Grey Mech had detached and gone prowling over the city. Fire lanced up from weapons below. It deflected these with dismissive ease. It had sent interrogating bursts of electromagnetic energy into every possible device, quickly sectioning the city's grid, narrowing its search. The scrutiny sharpened upon this district but no further. Apparently it could not resolve whatever it sought. So the angular thing had fired pulses into the area, killing several hundred people and caving in the lower walls of the Chairwoman's villa.\n\nNigel nodded. \"You were right,\" he said mildly to Nikka. \"But why?\"\n\nThe Chairwoman had suffered some bruises but that did not explain her jittery anxiety, hands clenching and unclenching, face bluish white. \"Never did one attack us before. They be of the highest mech class, always ahead of our technology.\"\n\n\"I see not much has changed,\" Nikka said. \"It was the same in our era.\"\n\n\"They could slaughter us all.\" The Chairwoman eyed them warily. \"And they be after you?\"\n\n\"A mere hypothesis,\" Nigel said, yawning.\n\nNikka caught his glance and said, \"I'm still not happy with the provisions you've supplied.\"\n\n\"What?\" The Chairwoman scowled, then said automatically, \"We made a deal.\"\n\n\"We won't leave without\u2014\" and Nikka rattled off a further list.\n\nThe large woman opened her mouth and slowly closed it. \"You _must_ leave.\"\n\n\"No we don't,\" Nigel said.\n\nShe glowered. He could see her step through the logic. If these Walmsleys were of interest to a Grey Mech, best be rid of them and count yourself lucky. \"All right, the provisions\u2014but you go at first light.\"\n\nNikka nodded. Anything that drew the Grey Mech was bad for business.\n\n\"Still,\" Nigel said distantly, later, \"why should we be important?\"\n\n\"Maybe because of where we're headed?\" Nikka asked.\n\nThat night he lay on a sort of pliant water pillow with Nikka and they watched the snake-like dog come into their room and investigate them. It was apparently fairly intelligent and in fact head of security there. To questions it gave a nod of the head and abrupt, slurred _yhas_ or _noah._\n\nHe ignored it after a while and realized, staring out at the encased night of this Lane, that he had become married to a flat, unremarked fatality. Yet this did not carry with it any of the usual gloom of earlier times. Maybe this was new wisdom or maybe fatigue but in any case he did not want to piss his life away on nonsense. Much of what he had once believed and felt he now saw as foolishness or at least useless. On the other hand, some moments shone like jewels.\n\nHe shook off this mood by immersing himself in Nikka, the love between them now so distant from labored technical strenuosities that he found it yielding up what seemed most impossible of all, moments of pleasurable surprise. He slept soundly. In the musty morning half-light they awoke lingeringly together.\n\n\"That dog was in the room when we were going at it.\"\n\n\"I didn't mind. Perhaps by now they've evolved to the point where at the crucial moment they politely look away.\"\n\n\"Moment? You think it lasted only a moment?\"\n\n\"Well, let's say it was timeless.\"\n\n\"That's better. I do seem to recall the dog barking at an important point.\"\n\n\"Oh? I thought that was you.\"\nFIFTEEN\n\nTransit\n\nThe Causality Polarizer was mammoth, its compressive antennas perpetually yawning like vast bored mouths. They gaped in all six faces of an enormous, burnished ceramic cube. They reminded Nikka of speakers from a giant's stereo set, she remarked. These were the ten-kilohertz oscillators, delivering a terrawatt in short-wavelength gravitational waves.\n\nStill, Nigel liked the speaker analogy\u2014because that was how it felt. The family sheltered in a metallic capsule set beside their house, back among the familiar setting that had been wrenched away from their home Lane. It felt good to simply be there, but from the moment he got into the capsule he fidgeted uneasily. The countdown did not help.\n\n\"The point of making a wormhole sprout out of a Lane is that you really can't do it by yourself,\" Nikka told him. \"Takes astronomically too much energy, or more accurately, density of energy. The best we can do is ripple the esty surface, find a weak spot\u2014a place where the Casimir force is substantial.\"\n\n\"Who was Casimir?\" Angelina asked.\n\n\"Who cares? He saw that in a true vacuum, there would be a force, one you could harness.\"\n\n\"As we are about to?\" Angelina looked skeptical.\n\n\"Of course.\" Nikka had on her _See?\u2014obvious!_ expression.\n\n\"So when we have to travel in a big loop to get home, that means we have to go into the future?\" Nigel liked scientific ideas but he did not like having to think like a pretzel.\n\n\"There is a lot more future than past. The universe is only fifteen billion years old. The future's almost infinite.\"\n\nNikka seemed to think that finished off the idea. Nigel ventured, \"Approximately infinite. Interesting concept. So there's a much greater chance that any leg of our trip will go into the future?\" and she rewarded him again with her daintily amused _See?\u2014obvious!_ smile.\n\nIto scowled in the last moments before Transit and asked warily, \"How dangerous is this?\"\n\nShe shrugged. She was no stranger to trauma and death and did not think much about it. \"Not very, unless we hit a stutter.\"\n\n\"What's that me\u2014\" was all Ito had time for before the pulverizing wall of sound struck their capsule.\n\nPain stretches time.\n\nThe vibrations confirmed his fears. They seemed to go on for a sluggish, pounding eternity, though Nikka later told them offhandedly that it had been only forty-four seconds. Of agony.\nSIXTEEN\n\nTime Is a Horizon\n\nShaken, they popped open the capsule lock. They found themselves among their home and outbuildings, with the same slice of orchard as before\u2014all resting atop a sliding mass of luminous timestone. To all sides a box canyon rose, shrouded in lemon-hot vapor.\n\nThey got out and breathed cold, thin air but kept their pressure skins on anyway. Nikka calculated from the capsule's instruments and decided that they had squeezed through the momentarily pulsating wormhole, traversing an esty-displacement of several million kilometer-years.\n\n\"Could be millions of klicks away and at exactly the same time we left,\" she said calmly, \"or the same Lane, millions of years in the future.\" Wormholes tunneled between eras not at all like elevators linking floors of a building, but that was how Nigel persisted on thinking of them.\n\nThe ground shook. The plate of their property shifted uneasily on the timestone beneath.\n\n\"There's no way to tell which?\" Benjamin asked apprehensively.\n\n\"The Causality Engine had chaos built into it,\" Nikka answered, holding on to a capsule strut for support. \"We can't measure any better than this.\"\n\nNigel watched the distant sky, where more lava-like walls fumed and roiled. \"How long do we stay here?\"\n\n\"That's chaotic, too,\" Nikka said. \"But short. Looks to be maybe an hour or two. We'll have some warning of when the next Transit is coming.\"\n\nAngelina laughed, which startled the others. \"Until then we're free to enjoy the scenery?\" Despite their gathering unease, the family chuckled with her.\n\nAs if in answer, nearby cliffs oozed sulphurous light, complaining with slow groans. A sheet peeled off\u2014 _crack!_ \u2014and a sharp snap in the air knocked them flat. Here the esty was like skin, sloughing away layers so that more could grow. Compressed events evolved, brimmed, died.\n\nNigel knew from undergraduate days that mass curved space-time, but the inverse was still a surprise: compacted esty behaved like matter. Rendered as mass, events themselves were squeezed into slabs. Their endings brought forth explosive energies: literally, the end of history, for in these detonations data burst into phosphorescent energy, its true equivalent. The esty confirmed the final triumvirate of physics, one side of which Einstein had got right: mass was like energy was like information.\n\nThey went into their house, which had been fully provisioned by the Chairwoman's minions, and tried to act as though this was a kind of homecoming. They were hungry and ate something like steaks of beef to celebrate but the coming Transit made their talk edgy. Nigel went outside. Ostensibly it was to smoke one of his cigars, carefully kept chilled in the kitchen but scorned if lit inside. He did not like delivering his family into the hands of Causality Engines or \"intrinsic chaos\" or any other collection of jawbreaker words that in the end meant the world's casual indifference to human life and values. But he had no choice.\n\n\"It can't be helped. You know that,\" Nikka said. She had slipped beside him, her footsteps covered by the hollow crashing of timestone far up on the hazy curve of this spherical Lane.\n\n\"Should've let that body rot, moved away,\" he said morosely.\n\n\"We wouldn't be us, then.\"\n\n\"Is that so bad? Change your dance steps, learn a new tune.\"\n\n\"We're doing what we've always wanted to do. Looking long, you used to call it.\"\n\n\"Quite.\" He sighed. \"I always wanted to see over the far horizon. This\u2014\"\n\n\"Time is a horizon, too.\"\nSEVENTEEN\n\nTransit; Wait\n\n _S tochastic._\n\nNot a word he liked, too pedantic, when all it meant was chaos, disorder, the fitful randomness of life and esty. Their gravitationally transduced energy propelled their wedge of local esty through the worm in jolting, stochastic motions.\n\nTransit; wait. Transit; wait.\n\nThey never knew precisely how long they would stay at any of the pauses along this worm-Vortex. They could watch the surroundings, but feared to venture out. They ate up their provisions this way as their frustration built.\n\nNo map of the esty was possible. Its contorted geometry roiled with fitful energies, a rubbery, sliding turmoil. Lanes were often long, snaky, bulging into spheres and lopsided bubbles without warning, stretching to expose fresh, wrenched topographies of timestone.\n\nSometimes their pause-points were in the same Lane, so they watched its speeded-up evolution. As timestone evolved by its own kinetics, topsoil tumbled and spilled in great alluvial fans. Beaten beneath hammering rains that accompanied the changes, the soil molded into new hills and valleys below the craggy peaks of freshly emerging timestone. Life was resilient, adapting. In bright canyons trees tunneled up from recent burials, and most plants could survive a temporary churning to emerge into the stone's own waxing radiance again.\n\nNikka got grim-faced when Ito and Benjamin wanted to explore the nearby Lanes they intersected. \"No.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Ask your mother. She'll tell you that it's 'stochastic.'\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"We're not desperate enough yet.\"\n\nBut they were running short of food and Ito was restless, Nigel saw, beyond his endurance. After a full-scale family argument over the big polished dining room table they decided to let both Ito and Benjamin forage. Nikka, Angelina, and Nigel spent an anxious time awaiting their return as the timer on the capsule ticked down to the next Transit.\n\nWith only an hour to spare, and Nikka muttering that the uncertainty in such calculations was more than two hours, easy, they came across the rugged timestone at a trot, backpacking food. Benjamin said they had seen nothing much but, as Nigel had guessed, Ito had reveled in it.\n\nThey voyaged on, Transiting and pausing and watching the long slow epic of organic life-forms and mechs in the lands beyond. Usually they were isolated on a timestone terrain. Sometimes battles raged in the distance and they anxiously watched the unknown combatants, hoping to be ignored.\n\nUsually they were, but several times mechs had cruised overhead and twice Ito and Benjamin had knocked them down with glee, using projection weapons the Chairwoman had sold them. Probably they were lucky, having the advantage of surprise in this era, but Nigel made them stop it because luck did not last forever.\n\nThey got into worse trouble at the next pause. Here a passing woman told them that the mechs had launched a new plague, wind-borne and virulent. Nine out of ten in her city had died. The Walmsleys gave her food and she went on and that night they came down with it, too. Fever, violent dysentery, sinuses clotted with yellow spongy growths. Ito had walking dreams, seeing the gates of a private hell and struggling to run through them to some glimpsed reward. Nigel and Angelina grabbed him and held him down for hours before the delusions passed in a fit of sweating babble that spilled from Ito's mouth like a river of hallucination, so wild that Nikka\u2014a part of her always dispassionate, even with her own children\u2014wrote some of it down.\n\nThe delusions struck Nigel next and unloosened in him the many haunted memories that accompany anyone who chooses to live long.\n\n\u2014Cramped spacecraft maneuvering near Earth's crisp white moon.\n\n\u2014Swimming darkly through the icy waters of a moon, into an interior ocean filmed with kilometers of ancient ice.\n\n\u2014Winds blowing acid dust in his face as aliens like huge radio antennas lumbered toward him in the frying heat.\n\n\u2014Their aching long flight to reach the esty, in search of refuge from a galaxy that seemed filled to overspilling with mechs.\n\nHe spoke of these, sputtering in the warm spray of dislocated words, and could not recognize his own foot sticking naked at the other end of the bed, or the blood he coughed up, or even the perpetual frown that furrowed Nikka's face in the dim night.\n\nThe only factor that saved them was their simple distance in esty-coordinates, he realized later. The mech-made virus was so tuned to the humans of this place-period that it missed them by a hair. So they merely groaned and sweated and fouled themselves, the disease taking a full week to work its way through each. They carried it through three pauses and were out of food again by the time they could all walk without shaky knees.\nEIGHTEEN\n\nMarching\n\nEvidence of mech-wrought damage lay everywhere. Charred cities, blasted landscapes, bedraggled populations torn by raids.\n\nOnce, while they were foraging for information and food, a mech caught Nigel and Angelina in the open. It was crawler type and burned Angelina pretty badly before he could knock out its mainmind. When he saw how much Angelina was suffering he put her to sleep with a sedative and while waiting for it to take full effect in a rage he pulled off the mech's working arm and used it to bash in the carapace, letting himself go completely to the sheer boiling energy of it. Then he carried Angelina across his back, barely reaching their farm buildings before he collapsed. He was sobered for days afterward as he watched her recover, fevered sweat glazing her eyes.\n\nSeen through the prism of the esty, Nigel thought as he tended his daughter, life was like a long march, an endless column of forlorn souls moving forward through surrounding dark. Locked into their own eras, nobody knew where they were going. Still, in every society they glimpsed, there was plenty of talk and the fools pretended to understand more than they were saying. There was merry laughter, too, and somebody was always passing a bottle around.\n\nBut now and then somebody stumbled, didn't catch himself right, lurched aside and was gone, left behind. The dead.\n\nSliding timewise-forward, sometimes backward, poking their heads out where the chaotics of the harnessed worm commanded, Nigel saw the long mortal march in snatches, which made it all the more telling.\n\nWhole societies eventually joined the individual dead. For them the march stopped at that moment. Maybe some had a while longer, lying back there on the hard ground, already wreathed in fog\u2014time to watch the parade dwindle away, carrying on its lights and music and raucous jokes.\n\n _For us the dropouts are back there somewhere,_ he thought, _fixed in a murky landscape we're already forgetting._\n\nHe could recall others who had stayed behind, years ago. With a little sigh or a grunt of agony or just a flickering of fevered eyelids, they left the human march. No longer did they know the latest jokes or the savor of a fresh bottle of wine, or what the hottest rumors were about. The march saddened him. He remembered friends long lost, wished he could tell them what was up nowadays, share a laugh or a lie.\n\nAs he read his latest indices, now covertly so that Nikka did not see, he thought, _Right\u2014and the point, you brooding old bulk, is that you know your station above the tide of time is temporary. That persistence is your only virtue beyond theirs, and it is artificial. That someday you would catch an ankle and go down and the murk would swallow you, too. Maybe it would be better if you didn't have that puzzled, startled moment of staring at the retreating heads, the faces already turning away from you. Maybe it was best if you couldn't hear that last parting round of hollow laughter from a joke you would never know, the golden lantern light already shining on them and not on you._\n\n _And it will happen to everyone you have known or ever will._\n\nSomehow he never got used to that.\nNINETEEN\n\nStorytelling\n\nThey could flee in space-time, but biology followed. They all had a relapse of the mech-made plague, far milder but bad enough.\n\nIto recovered first. When he simply announced that he was going out for provisions, in the pause they had just come to, no one could mount more than feeble resistance. The next Transit was days away, the probability indices said.\n\n\"Probably! Only probably!\" his mother protested weakly.\n\n\"There's no 'probably' about our starving, though,\" Ito said grimly. So he left.\n\nThe time passed in fever and worry. But they all were better by the time Ito returned, loaded down and with a bad leg wound.\n\nTo Nigel the sight of his oldest coming through their front door was like the sun coming out after a night that had lain on them all like a sullen lid. As he helped Ito store the vegetables and fruit, he felt a difference in his son. Dinner that evening drove the difference home. Ito spoke more directly, clearly, face free of the stretched tensions Nigel remembered from late adolescence.\n\nLike many men and women compelled to action by restlessness of body and spirit, Ito had no interest in the notion of adventure. But he knew storytelling well enough to see what people saw in it and so recounted with accurate detail incidents that seemed ordinary to him, arising out of necessity:\n\n\u2014the mech like a snake which attached itself to his leg and could not be dislodged (he found, while bellowing in frustrated rage) except by finally singing to it;\n\n\u2014towns built aslant and of both surpassing beauty and stunning ugliness;\n\n\u2014aliens galore, who treated him with utter indifference, while he found them fascinating;\n\n\u2014the beheading of a woman for unspeakable acts she had performed with a mech, which was both horrifying and puzzling, for no one could explain the mech's motivation, while the woman's seemed to lie within the known range of human perversions;\n\n\u2014a mech religion which worshiped animals exclusively, attributing to them a natural wisdom;\n\n\u2014a castle of glass through which the passerby could see the inhabitants living out their lives under constant scrutiny, never concealing even the most private acts;\n\n\u2014a waterfall that rose upward and formed ice at its summit, building a glinting blue-white mountain.\n\nNigel realized as they went to bed that his son had made a transit of his own, one that few speak of and most do not recognize until years after.\nTWENTY\n\nGenerations\n\nOn they voyaged, slipping through sheets of esty, tugged by the energy flux of the worm. Nikka rigged an optical sensor on their capsule's outside and they saw, slowed enormously, the instant of Transit. A filmy sheen formed around their farm, contours rippling.\n\nThough in their simple picture a wormhole was like a tube passing between floors of a building, the floors different space-times\u2014a glinting needle piercing ebony esty cloth\u2014the worm was in fact three-dimensional in their frame.\n\nAt the shaved second when they passed through, the worm was a flickering spherical glaze. It swelled, swallowed them, then dwindled away to a point\u2014which vanished with a spray of golden brilliance and stomach-turning torques. To Nigel it felt as if he were climbing up his own chilly vertebrae.\n\nThey watched the esty beyond their small area, sometimes for mere minutes before it changed again. Scenes and lands flickered beyond their small preserve. They witnessed eras with no visible human presence, others with jammed cities teetering on shaky timestone, still more with no atmosphere\u2014so their pressure skins _snick_ ed shut immediately when they emerged\u2014and others with virulent, acrid gases for air. Some pauses were long enough to venture forth.\n\nThrough all this Nigel and Nikka reached a new equilibrium, a sweet sad realization spawned from the vistas of time they had traversed. There were myriad incidents\u2014some small and telling, others large and dangerous and finally meaningless, and they all pointed toward the heartache and matching joy of humanity itself.\n\nThey met, in glancing fashion, teaming tribes, rich in spirit and intellect. Soldiers, who drank with gusto and ate with undisguised zest, though they knew they would face battles on the morrow that would probably decimate their ranks. Scholars, bent by their pilgrimages and ravaged by poverty, yet still warm with the satisfactions of the studies to which they had devoted their lives. Children, playing among the blackened ruins of their homes. Parents, rejoicing in their infants even as calamity closed in around them. In cities growing stranger still as they Transited further, people sang slow, sad songs in the streets even as mech forces gathered high in the Lane above, and crowds collected to see magicians perform tricks and make ancient jokes, all greeted with raucous laughter. Among the few dazed survivors of other assaults, on other twisted landscapes, the Walmsleys met stoic survivors who nonetheless found fresh loves, new friends, and began again. Generations melted away and others came forth, with only a few managing to hang on to time for as long as Nikka and Nigel had, and through it all somehow a frail, brave, human light always streaked the surrounding shadows.\n\nThe old non sequitur, that species became degenerate as they went on, found no evidence here. Humanity bristled with activity. Societies rose and fell with stubborn indifference to earlier failures.\n\nIn the face of the inevitable end, and the inevitable questions, Nigel reflected, none is exempt: witness Jesus's wail of despair as he edged rather tentatively into eternity. He did not know what to make of such dogged human persistence. Nikka was less puzzled, and beamed with pride in her own kind.\nTWENTY-ONE\n\nInflection Point\n\nThey came to the far end of their curved worm's path through the esty. Nikka declared from the data, \"We've gotten damped into a stutter.\"\n\n\"Which is?\" Nigel stepped out into the local familiarity of their farm. Beyond, the lands were strangely shadowed.\n\n\"We're hung up, basically. The Vortex worm turns here\"\u2014she smiled at the small joke, much needed as the family grasped her point\u2014\"and begins an opposite curvature in the esty. We'll be going back from here on.\"\n\n\"Going home!\" Angelina cried happily, clapping her hands.\n\n\"But?\" Nigel was pensive.\n\nNikka gave him a rueful nod. \"But . . . we're stalled here, at the inflection point. We're retracing the same interval of time over and over.\"\n\n\"Stuttering in space-time.\" Nigel rolled the idea around in his mind.\n\nThey walked to the edge of their land. In what seemed like the solid mass beyond Nigel saw pale blades and soft blue shadows, as if deep somewhere a sun were setting. Radiant blades danced as if refracted beneath a lake's wind-blown skin, like summer's liveliness probing into a deep watery cavern. And as he watched, the whole thing repeated. And repeated.\n\nIt was unsettling and he nearly lost his footing, the way a man approaching a sheer drop goes weak in the legs even though still on solid ground. A mere crust kept him from an abyss.\n\n\"We're cycling through the same moment,\" Ito whispered. \"Over and over.\"\n\n\"Damn!\" Benjamin was not awed. He just wanted to go home.\n\nThen the scene jolted. Hills rose, bristling with raw rock. In jumpy, flashing images they watched the slopes weather, ruts cutting in. Peaks wore to knobs, hills slumped\u2014and strange spires rose, icy blue. Glaciers of eerie green slid through valleys. Nigel realized they were not glaciers at all but some immensely cold superfluid, in the terminal death of the farthest future. They were seeing the slices of time into which information still could be packed, wedges of instants harvested from an immense span of time. They could fathom the sliding immensities that wrecked mountains and oozed into nothingness, for they were witnessing physics and dynamics beyond the hinge of human time.\n\nThen, abruptly, they were back to the same endlessly cycling moment they had seen before. Somehow they had leaped far beyond, then back. They watched the repeating interval for a while but nothing more happened.\n\n\"Mom . . . How do we get out of a stutter?\" Angelina asked quietly.\n\n\"We don't do anything.\" Nikka stared at the timestone, which coiled incessantly like a pile of glowing snakes. \"We wait it out.\"\n\n\"How long?\" Benjamin looked at the seethe, distaste curling his lip.\n\nNigel wondered disagreeably whether the question meant anything, if time cycled outside. And space, too\u2014he could see the same shards rise and descend, rise and descend. But their little wedge of esty ran on its own time axis. Or so he thought. How would he know? His head began to hurt.\n\nNikka said, \"I'm afraid that is a stochastic variable, irreducible.\"\n\nNigel erupted, \" _Every_ thing's chaotic here!\"\n\nNikka smiled. \"Except you. You're perfectly predictable.\"\n\nThat made them all laugh, but it did not seem so funny after several days of edgy waiting.\n\nThen events beyond shifted.\n\nThe air turned cold with a sudden ferocity no planetary environment could ever match. And without any visible cause, the land began to evolve beyond their encapsulated chunk of farm.\n\n\"Is the stutter over?\" Angelina cried, excited.\n\n\"I don't know.\" Nikka frowned, deepening the crow's-feet of lines around her eyes. \"Time seems to be accelerating outside.\"\n\n\"We're holding fixed in space, sliding in time?\" Ito asked.\n\n\"Looks to be,\" Nikka said. Physics here seemed to Nigel to be largely a matter of opinion.\n\nThe sliding, coiling timestone was churning as before when a waning came, and the next waxing there were valleys, soil, plant life. The land here was cut and worked by unknowable forces and yet the weather also had ordinary touches: sudden showers, the drifting smell of sage, meat curing somewhere in a distant smokehouse.\n\nThe runoff storm water sorted itself out into streams and then slow-moving rivers lined with tuft-topped trees. The soil beside them sometimes shot up into a mottled sky. Jagged crests shaped as they watched, spikes raking cottony clouds.\n\nCautiously they hiked out into the new land. Oddly shaped creatures scampered among the rocks, dancing on webbed feet as though the ground were too hot to bear. The family went down a long grade and could see what looked like log houses at the feet of steep hills, windows glowing orange, dusky smoke blown so hard from their stone chimneys that it flattened along the roofs and trailed like flags down the valley. Through a cut in these hills they came into a dark bowl and a city spilled out like a shower of cinders stirred from an unseen fire, pinpoints going on as the light from the esty ebbed. But no people. Nigel realized that it was moving, the entire construction somehow crawling toward them. A city-thing, alive.\n\nHe wondered what it could contain. Was there anything more to surprise a burnt-out wreck like him? A place that could startle him and yet let him sleep peacefully?\n\nThough of course, he thought, nodding ruefully, he would still wake in the morning with the odd familiar gargoyle of fears sitting on his chest, peering into his face, grinning toothless and triumphant.\n\nAbruptly timestone jutted through the topsoil. It split and burned, jagged teeth raking the land. They ran back to their own area, barely making it.\n\nThe Grey Mech appeared shortly afterward.\nTWENTY-TWO\n\nFar Futures\n\nLying sorely in a crevice of timestone, much later, Nigel recalled a time long ago when contact had been possible between humanity and the bewildering zoo of mech constructs. He had bound up his broken left arm and waited for sleep to take him. He fixed upon the past because thoughts of where his family might be would do him no good. When he could walk again he would go look. That was all.\n\nSome mechs back then had convinced members of Nigel's own crew that existence as a mechanical creature was both better and longer lasting than the fragile life of \"organic\" creatures. So quite willingly some lower forms of the Grey Mech had \"incorporated\"\u2014their term\u2014several friends of his. \"Uplifting,\" they termed it.\n\nThe process was painless. As mechs his friends became contrived boxes mounted on skeletal frames. They moved about the landscape seldom and when Nigel had tried to talk to them about their lives they seemed distracted\u2014as if carrying on a telephone conversation while watching something more interesting on television, he thought. What they did say was bland, empty, and yet somehow chilling.\n\nHe had waited some years until he was again in the particular Lane where this had happened. He settled in behind some rocks at a goodly distance from where he knew the Grey Mech's lower forms sometimes came. The ones who had uplifted his friends.\n\nTheir sensors were good and he could not get too close. One of the under-forms appeared and he was sure of its identity by its electromagnetics, its spectral hiss and clang. He shot out its undercarriage. With a weapon whose physics he did not quite understand he put three holes through the main frame of it. The mech went silent, its electromagnetic buzzings winking off. Something small climbed out of it and tried to get away and Nigel shot it eight times with great satisfaction. He later learned that the other under-forms had been incorporated back into the Grey Mech so he had to be content with the one.\n\nOf this he dreamed, as his arm ached and his heart burned leaden in his chest.\n\nIt rained hard in the sullen dark. Vegetation beat at itself in the lashing winds. Lightning leapt across the sky. He could see the forks of yellow and green snaking high above where the esty folded over onto itself in a blithely twisted geometry.\n\nNo sign of the Grey Mech.\n\nNo, Grey Mech _s_ , he corrected himself. That had been a rather large error.\n\nTwo Grey Mechs had appeared in the Lane. Ashen, blocky, each headed for the buildings. He remembered the frozen tableau: Benjamin and Nikka and himself, scrambling for the segments of the Transit device. Ito and Angelina, turned to flee.\n\nTime was hopelessly warped here, he had conceded that long ago, but the same old question remained. Could he have done anything different?\nTWENTY-THREE\n\nVerge of Extinction\n\nIn the few seconds before the dusky shapes reached them he had shouted, \"Transducers!\"\u2014meaning the big pyramid-shaped wedges that transferred stored electrical energy into gravitational pulses.\n\n\"At _which_?\" Nikka yelled into a roaring, rising wind raised by the Grey Mechs.\n\nHis eyes jerked from one Grey Mech to the other. Nikka slapped her wrist to the console, popped the interface.\n\n _Which one?_ Both? Two ashen chunks with no visible means of flight. Pivoting on an unseen axis, in a sky they ripped with their passage.\n\nNot acting together. Each responding to the other's darting swerves.\n\nOne was closer, larger, coming fast, and in desperation he chose it. \"There!\"\n\nNikka aimed and fired the transducers in one quick swivel of her interface hand. The ground buckled with the release of acoustic power and they all three sprawled. The leading Grey Mech shuddered but came on.\n\nIto and Angelina never reached the house. The leading Grey Mech loosed a bolt that seemed to wrap itself like a scintillating blue-white cloak around them. They twisted and fell.\n\nFringes of the bolt killed Nigel's in-body electronics instantly. He had struggled halfway to his feet when the queasy jolt of his systems going dead knocked him down again.\n\nStrumming, nearly overpowered, his defenses teetered on the verge of extinction.\n\nHe looked up at what he expected to be his last vision. Numbly he watched the spectacle of two Grey Mechs battling each other across the sapphire sky. Spasms refracted down the streaming air. A shock wave slammed into him and he felt his body bounce from its power.\n\nHe tried to hang on to consciousness, but the chilly blackness had clasped him to itself\u2014\nTWENTY-FOUR\n\nAlexandria\n\n\u2014To awaken here, on a timestone slope.\n\nArm broken, shooting pains in the legs.\n\nNo, he probably could not have done anything differently. Alas.\n\nIt was always comforting to think that but in dealing with mechs it was in fact true. They acted far more swiftly than beings based on muscle and nerves. But thinking this did him no good because it still sounded like an excuse.\n\nHe groaned and opened his eyes, the lids sticky. Lightning licked overhead, seeking a place to rest, on a quest of its own. He knew it was merely a horde of electrons seeking a path to discharge an electrostatic potential, but that did not quell the eerie sensation of watching strange spirits seek and probe and lash the air with their desire. He was watching the luminous lemony fingers play across the high roof of the esty when she came to him again.\n\n _You've changed._\n\n\"You haven't.\"\n\n _My kind never does._\n\nHe blinked but it made no difference. Alexandria, his first wife, stood a little to one side, looking out at the same slippery lightning that he was. In the sulphurous flashes he could see her classic high forehead and delicate cheekbones. They had been that way up until a few weeks before the disease had weathered her down, stealing flesh from her, sending her into a grave on a hillside in Pasadena, California.\n\n\"Alexandria, I . . .\"\n\n _I do like it when you use my name._\n\n\"I always loved the sound of it.\"\n\n _What did you used to say about it?_\n\n\"That your name was perfect. That it was like you. Alexandria, Egypt, where the library burned. Lost knowledge. The unknowable.\"\n\n _Oh yes. Most people mispronounced it. They thought it should be that ordinary name without the_ i.\n\n\"Where classical civilization hit the reef and sank, losing most of its cargo.\"\n\n _Bad history, lover. The Greeks were long gone when that library burned._\n\n\"But not the civilization. That remains as long as it is remembered.\"\n\n _And ours?_\n\nNigel shrugged. \"As long as we're here, I suppose.\"\n\n _As long as you are here. I don't count. I am a ghost._\n\n\"Not to me. You're the woman I loved.\"\n\nShe turned slightly toward him, just enough to let him see the lilting curve of her eternal smile. It was always that way. He could never see her face, never know it entirely. Or be free of it, he saw now. She could visit him across the yawning centuries.\n\n _Past tense?_\n\n\"Sorry. Love.\"\n\n _Lost knowledge._\n\n\"Not really.\"\n\nHer lips curled in a soundless laugh. _You're so sure?_\n\n\"I recall every hollow and delight.\"\n\n _After so many years?_\n\n\"Remember relativity. It's been, oh, perhaps twenty-eight thousand years on Earth. But in here\"\u2014he tapped his skull\u2014\"there's been very little going on. Dull, really. Time dilation, it's called by the physicists.\"\n\n _I never understood that sort of thing._\n\n\"I doubt anyone understands it fundamentally. It's a flat fact of the universe.\"\n\n _And you?_\n\nNigel could not read her expression. \"Me?\"\n\n _Are you a fact of the universe, too?_\n\n\"Ummm. An unimportant one, yes.\"\n\n _You were important then and you are now._\n\n\"I'm a cockroach on the stage at Stratford. You might say, rather a serious case of undercasting.\"\n\n _By who?_\n\n\"By whom,\" he said distantly.\n\n _Ah! Always the language purist. Okay then, by whom?_\n\n\"The Director, I suppose.\"\n\n _Who is . . . ?_\n\n\"I've wondered about that. If there's something working itself out here. Somehow.\"\n\n _God?_\n\n\"Too short a name for such a large idea. Anyway, I'd have thought you could ask Him directly, eh?\"\n\n _Because I'm in heaven?_\n\n\"Aren't you? Or someplace at least different?\"\n\nShe laughed. _I'm in your head. Not really heaven, no._\n\nYet as she turned slightly more and smiled at him, Nigel could see her with crystalline clarity. This was too good to be a hallucination. Too solid, crisp, real. He must be worse off than he thought.\n\n\"Alexandria . . . ?\"\n\n _Yes?_\n\n\"I want to\u2014I\u2014\"\n\n _Not that time yet._\n\nHe snapped, \"I'm like a child, told when to go to bed?\"\n\n _This isn't bed. Not nearly as much fun, for one thing._\n\n\"I'm . . . tired.\"\n\n _Not physically though._\n\n\"Perhaps I've seen too much.\"\n\n _It's not your moment yet._\n\nWith sharp anger he barked, \"It wasn't your moment either.\"\n\n _You're still getting hard at night, just thinking of me, aren't you?_\n\n\"Um. I can hardly deny it, can I? You seem to live inside my head.\"\n\n _Exactly, lover! And as long as I do\u2014well, maybe it wasn't my moment, back there. Maybe I'm still here._\n\n\"Copies aren't originals.\"\n\n _A lady appreciates what compliments come her way. Especially since I know you have Nikka._\n\n\"I hope this isn't disloyal to her.\"\n\n _It can't be. We are all the loves we have known\u2014that's my own attempt at self-definition._\n\n\"I like that. A definition free of the worn-out carcass, the body.\"\n\n _Don't ignore the body. Or bodies._\n\nHe paused, swollen tongue running over bitter teeth. \"Bodies . . .\"\n\n _The bodies got you into this._\n\n\"Don't remind me.\"\n\n _Think of them as calling cards._\n\n\"How hilarious. From the Grey Mechs, no doubt. Come to the dance, please, and die.\"\n\n _Who would read a suredead body, lover? Think._\n\n\"I'm starting to hate riddles.\" His head was woozy, the world circling him in a slow waltz.\n\n _I'm a part of the riddle, too. We all are. See you around, lover._\n\n\"Not yet!\"\n\n _'Bye._\n\nHe weathered out the long, murky waning. His in-body indices had come back somewhat. They were erratic and the index he watched most carefully was down three more points. He sighed, momentarily glad Nikka was not here to worry about that, and then the weight of it all came in upon him. He lay in fever and bitter regrets, thinking thoughts that went down so deep, the lizards there had no eyes.\n\nSomething had blown him a long way down the Lane they had been in. This he discovered by climbing an unstable peak of teetering timestone and peering above a deck of olive-colored clouds. He recognized the territory where their farm had been and determined to walk back to it. This took longer than he thought it should with the broken arm and he hurried at the end. The farm seemed deserted at first. Inside the house he sat at the long dining room table and the room seemed filled with ghosts as substantial as Alexandria had been and that was when the thing moved into view.\n\nHe sat completely still. It was two-legged and two-armed and that was where the resemblance ended.\n\nHuman? No, he knew instantly.\n\nEerie, silent, radiating strangeness like a chill wave.\n\nHe noticed that his in-body electronics were working again. They helped a little with the splintered arm. The thing moved slightly. His in-bodies fluoresced in a disturbing response, sending dazzling fireworks across his retinas, and then he got it all in one long burst.\nTWENTY-FIVE\n\nMortal Galaxies\n\nHe stood beneath a dull black sky framed by a jagged horizon.\n\nAbruptly, he _knew_ in a way he never had. In his weary bones he _felt_ a worldview\u2014kinesthetic, perceptions as momenta and geometry, not words. He fumbled to put the sensations into terms that he could get his mind around.\n\nThe sky. Black, then unfolding into streamers of feathery light.\n\nHow different, he thought, from the physics he had learned as a boy. In the Newtonian views of Boltzmann and Clausius, the universe extended forever but was always threatened by collapse. Nothing countered the drawing-in of gravity.\n\nGiven enough time, matter would seek its own kind, smacking into greater and greater stars. But the stars would die, guttering out as blunt thermodynamics commanded, always seeking maximum disorder. The Second Law of Thermodynamics ruled.\n\nHe folded his arms, tried to make sense of the buzzing images. So. Then.\n\nThat old, firm universe was doomed. In time, even hell would freeze over. Stars would burn into shadowy cinders. Planets, their atmospheres frozen out into waveless lakes of oxygen, would glide in meaningless orbits, warmed by no ruby star glow. The universal clock would run down to the last tick of time.\n\nOnly after he had left Earth, and had time to study subjects that he had neglected in school, did he see what the twentieth century\u2014the oft-disparaged \"TwenCen\" of later slang\u2014had done to that dark, earlier vision.\n\nThe universe was no static lattice of stars. It grew. The Big Bang was better termed the Enormous Emergence, space-time snapping into existence intact and whole, of a piece. With space-time came its warping by matter, each wedded to the other until time eternal.\n\nFor its first hundred billion years, the universe would brim with light. Gas and dust still folded into fresh suns. For an equal span the stars would linger. Beside reddening suns, planetary life warming itself by the waning fires of stellar death.\n\n _When a body meets a body, coming through the sky . . . he mused to himself. Stars inevitably collided, met, merged. All the wisdom and order of planets and suns finally compressed into the marriage of many stars, plunging down the pit of gravity to become black holes. For the final fate of nearly all matter was the dark pyre of collapse._\n\n _Now he felt, like a leaden soup in his gut, the implications of what he saw above him: a gaudy swirl of leaching light._\n\n _Galaxies were as mortal as stars. In the sluggish slide of time, the spirals that had once gleamed with fresh brilliance would deaden. Black holes would blot out whole spiral arms of dim red. The holes would gnaw through the galaxies themselves._\n\n _Life based on solid matter had no choice. To gain energy it had to merge black holes themselves. Only such fusions could yield fresh energy in a slumbering universe._\n\n _High civilizations came, mounted on the carcass of matter itself, the ever-spreading legions of black holes. Only by moving such masses, extracting power through magnetic forces and the slow gyre of dissipating orbits, could life rule the dwindling resources of the ever-enlarging universe._\n\nOh, that this too too solid flesh would melt . . . He was startled to find that phrases learned by an irksome schoolboy in a cobwebbed past still leapt readily to mind. Old, and true.\n\nAbout this vision of a swelling universe, its life force spent, hung a great melancholy.\n\nFor matter itself was doomed. Its basic building block, the proton, decayed. This took unimaginably long, but was inevitable, the executioner's sword descending with languid grace.\n\nBut something survived. Not all matter dies, as did the proton. After the grand operas of mass and energy have played out their plots, the universal stage cleared to reveal . . . the very smallest.\n\nThe tiniest of particles\u2014the electron and its antiparticle, the positron\u2014lived on. No process of decay could find purchase on their infinitesimal scales, lever them apart. The electron danced with its antitwin in swarms: the lightest of all possible plasmas.\n\nBy the time these were the sole players, the stage had grown enormously. Each particle found its nearest neighbor to be a full light-year away. Communication took years . . . but in the slow thumping of the universal heart, that was nothing.\n\nCould this actually happen? Perhaps, he thought, the best possible universe was one of constant challenge. One that made survival possible but not easy.\n\nWith an electric shock he felt the full force of it:\n\n _If life born to brute matter could find a way to incorporate itself into the electron-positron plasma, then it could last forever._\nTWENTY-SIX\n\nA Far One\n\nThe thing was still standing at the far end of the dining room table. Cold ivory light played upon it.\n\nNigel looked at it and felt a mixture of joys and sorrows he could not name. He panted shallowly, breath rasping as if he had run a long distance.\n\nThe thing reminded him of a funhouse mirror distortion of a woman. Bulging here, slimmed there, suggesting deep changes that left the mottled skin the same.\n\nIntelligence glowed in large, unreadable violet eyes. It moved with easy grace, the awkward compromise curve of the human spine replaced by a complex double-spined split in the lumbar region. Broader hips held more weight. Four arms tapered to hands, every one with differently shaped fingers.\n\nThis was what humanity had become in the billions of years since his own time. And he understood that this was not some mere adaptation to the esty itself. It was how humanity had evolved to meet its destiny everywhere, amid the hundreds of billions of stars across the churn of the galactic disk itself.\n\nGenetic lessons from a far place.\n\nHe got up without knowing why, and walked outside. Now the jagged horizon was there\u2014the same frame he had seen in his mind.\n\nSomehow this Lane had opened, unfolding itself like a blossoming flower. At the command of the thing in his dining room.\n\nAnd above sung the technicolor gallery he had seen in the mind-memories of the dead bodies. Electron-positron plasmas, immense and intricate, hanging where the stars had once been. He was seeing into the very end of the universe, the Omega Point, hanging in a sky where logic said it could not be. But was.\n\nHe stood there trying to fathom how he could see an open sky from inside the self-folded esty. This simple but colossal change meant that someone\u2014something\u2014had mastered the esty itself, could unwrap it like a Christmas package to find fresh delights.\n\nHe walked down into the torn and seared yard.\n\nWithout a sign or word, he knew that the Far One was gone.\n\nAcross a wrecked landscape came his family. Nikka limped. Benjamin and Angelina carried Ito's body.\n\n\"He's gone,\" Nikka said simply.\n\nOne Grey Mech's bolt had killed his son. In the same instant Angelina had suffered an in-body electronic blowout and the skin along her left side had ruptured, a thick purple bruise gone stiff and already yellowing.\n\nOn his oldest son's face was an expression of surprise and pain. Nigel reached out to the cradled body and ruffled the hair tenderly, bent and caught the familiar smell. Then he made himself stop.\n\n\"I . . . we've got to . . .\" He could not make his throat work.\n\n\"The readers,\" Nikka said, limping past him toward the house.\n\nThe thing he had seen was not there now. The rooms felt cold.\n\nThey got Ito into the readers and did what they could to pull forth from his brain cells the essence of him. Fluids, sutures, digital artifice. The labor was long and the family scarcely spoke, concentrating fully and leached of all else but their yearning.\n\nThey sat at last on their porch and watched the feathery swaths of brilliance in the sky. He told them what he could and Nikka spoke for the first time since they had lowered Ito into the preserving solutions. \"So the bodies . . .\"\n\n\"Were addressed to us.\" Nigel nodded grimly. \"Or someone like us.\"\n\nAngelina supplied in a wan, empty voice, \"Someone who would come.\"\n\n\"And we may not be the first.\" Nikka watched the slow churn in the sky impassively. \"The Grey Mech who killed Ito would have killed others, too.\"\n\n\"But it did not get all of us,\" Nigel added. \"The other Grey Mech prevented that.\"\n\nBenjamin's face had been containing anger for a long time as they worked and now it came out, first in a string of oaths and then a final forlorn wail. At last, gasping, he said, \" _Why?_ Bodies sent back like invitations\u2014Grey Mechs\u2014Ito\u2014\n\nfor _what_?\"\n\nNigel knew that there was no real answer to the despair under Benjamin's words and that the best anyone could do was to talk about the surface. So he said gravely, hands knotted before him, \"The bodies attracted the attention of humans. They were like bottles with scraps of paper rolled inside, tossed out into an ocean. Only the curious, only someone who understood the human need to communicate across the impossible stretch of time, would pay any attention.\"\n\nNikka's drawn mouth moved but the rest of her face did not, eyes staring into an emptiness. \"Most mechs have never respected us enough to learn how to read our brains directly. To them we're messy, archaic. So they wouldn't know how to decipher the bodies, even if they cared.\"\n\n\"Except the Grey Mech,\" Angelina added.\n\n\"Grey Mechs,\" Nigel insisted. \"One Grey Mech opposed the other. Saved us, I expect.\"\n\nThey sat in silence as chill winds blew across the fitful landscape. Nigel knew they were all digesting the strange fact that there was more than one Grey Mech, acting out of concert.\n\n\"So one faction of mechs wants us to survive?\" Nikka asked with sudden bitterness.\n\nNigel got up and walked behind her chair, began kneading her neck and shoulders. His broken arm somehow did not hurt now though he knew that he would inevitably pay for this later.\n\nShe resisted him for a moment and then relaxed into his hands. He felt the release in her. \"I suppose there are Grey Mechs from different times, eras,\" she said. \"The Grey of our time wanted to stop any humans from learning about that sky.\"\n\nAbove, prickly streamers wreathed hard orange knots, bristling with ferment.\n\nAngelina said wonderingly, looking up, \"That's what the mechs want to do. Make themselves into those plasmas.\"\n\nNigel nodded. \"So they can outlive solid matter itself.\"\n\nNikka said with caustic scorn, \"Our son died because he had seen _that_?\"\n\n\"In a way,\" Nigel said gently, his hands digging into her tense muscles. \"To stop us from spreading the information. And that's why the somebody\"\u2014he thought of the strange yet human figure he had seen\u2014\"sent the bodies. To bring us here.\"\n\nAngelina said, \"I hate the way we have been jerked around.\"\n\nNigel nodded, his expression distant. \"We aren't the superior species here. We get used, that's the order of things. I wonder if our pets sometimes feel what we're feeling now.\"\n\nNikka was inconsolable. \"And all for what?\"\n\nSuddenly he recalled Alexandria saying, _Who would read a suredead body, lover?_\n\nNigel ventured a guess, the only one left. \"So _we_ would go back. We understand this in a way that images or memories in a body could not. Somebody wants us to take back what we've learned.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Somebody? Or something.\"\nTWENTY-SEVEN\n\nRadiant\n\nThe second, smaller Grey Mech swelled above them in the darkness. A dusky presence.\n\nThey knew there was no use in going inside so they watched its approach. It hung in the sky, a dark blotch coasting among coalescing rivulets of light.\n\nNo bolts, no shock wave.\n\nTheir apprehension ebbed as moments slid by and it made no aggressive move. \"I suppose that is the one who helped us,\" Nikka mused.\n\nNigel had the eerie impression that it was watching them just as they watched it. They all noticed a small humming, not in their ears but throughout their bodies, as if long acoustic waves were resonating in them, deep notes below hearing.\n\nIt glided up and dwindled. Smoothly it veered toward the largest of the luminous constructions and into Nigel's mind came a single word: _Radiant._ Somehow he knew that this was a name, the way the Grey Mech thought of the electron-positron life that swarmed in this far future night.\n\nAbruptly, the Grey Mech vanished into the brilliance. A flash, as if it had met the antimatter and been consumed. Seconds later, the humming stopped.\n\nThey looked at each other without speaking. Had it died, task completed? Merged with its own form and fate?\n\nThe Grey Mech had shown them something, but they were not certain just what.\nTWENTY-EIGHT\n\nTiny Farmers\n\nTheir next Transit came soon. The stutter was over at last.\n\nThey were dazed and tired and simply slept through Transits as they followed the long arc of the wormhole in space-time.\n\nThey did not speak of Ito. Their preserving solutions would hold the body for a long while, but the central question was how much of Ito's self had been lost before they could record it, to save the structure in his dying brain.\n\nNigel sat and watched the landscapes outside while the others slept. Parents fear more than anything the loss of their children and now that he had lost at least some of Ito\u2014for no process, he knew, could completely restore the son he had loved, as was\u2014he could not stop remembering the moments with Ito as a little boy, the passing incidents transfigured by time into golden memories. There is no perfection in the world, but one of the functions of memory is to make the past perfect at least in its small ways. He clung to that and knew that this phase would pass, too, but he relished it nevertheless.\n\nDays of relative time passed. They were all in a hurry to return to their era and the random pauses during Transits irritated everyone. They became short-tempered and edgy about small details. Nigel withdrew, growing silent.\n\nThen, during a longer pause, he went for a walk with Angelina into fields beyond their sheared-off farm. It looked like maize and he hungered for something reassuring as he hiked across rumpled fields beneath a warm yellow glow of timestone overhead.\n\nIt was indeed a field of maize but at its edge was a black swarm in orderly, marching columns. He squatted in the dust to inspect. Ants. So many they called up sudden apprehension. But they ignored him and Angelina.\n\nHere a line carried a kernel of corn each. Others carried bits of husk and there an entire team coagulated around a chunk of a cob. He followed and found that the streams split. The kernel-carriers went to a ceramic tower, climbed a ramp, and let their burdens rattle down into a sunken vault. They returned dutifully to the field. The other, thicker stream spread into rivulets that left their burdens of scrap at a series of neatly spaced anthills, dun-colored domes with regularly spaced portals.\n\n\"Wonderful,\" he said.\n\nAngelina caught his meaning, nodded. \"So . . . intricate.\"\n\nHe marveled. These had once been leaf-cutter ants, content to slice up fodder for their own tribe. They still did, pulping the unneeded cobs and stalks and husks, growing fungus on the pulp deep in their warrens. Tiny farmers in their own right. But in the long voyage through humanity's care, they had been genetically engineered to harvest and sort first.\n\nFaithfully they paid their human masters the tribute of the rich kernels, delivered to storage, no doubt following chemical cues. He thought of robots, clanky things. More subtly, insects were tiny robots engineered by evolution. Why not just co-opt their ingrained programming, then, at the genetic level, and harvest the mechanics from a compliant Nature?\n\nSlowly, as they wandered in nearby fields, he came to see that here the entire biosphere of the esty was shaped with similar craft. Like old Earth, the esty was a machine that kindled life and tuned it to the needs of . . . who? What? Intelligence?\n\nCertainly masterful hands lay behind the esty, something immense and unfathomable. But then, Earth had for nearly all of human evolution been just as mysterious to the growing, still-sluggish minds that lived among its marvelously tuned valleys, thick forests, and salty seas. The esty was a step up in that chain. A place beyond the comprehension of the smart apes who had blundered into this vastness, long on awe and short on table manners.\n\nSomehow this discovery about the esty of the future buoyed him. Angelina felt it, too, a strangeness that was somehow familiar, part of being human in an order beyond their knowing. A silent agreement passed between father and daughter and they held hands crossing the last field.\n\nThey trotted back for the next Transit. Later, he found himself paying more attention to the panorama unfolding before them as they slipped and glided along the twisted geometry of the meandering worm.\n\nHe saw again and again recurring themes. Sailboats cutting the green waters of great, curved lakes. They dappled cupped bowls of water as they harvested the winds that blew through the Lanes, blunt pressures adjusting thermodynamic truths. Spherical houses that clung to impossible cliffs, imitating hornets' nests with Euclidean grace. Hot air balloons, inverted teardrops hanging yellow and gold and sunset red amid the cottony chaos of clouds. Only later did he notice that the coasting teardrop shapes were not managed by men at all. They were alive. Great heads swung where gondolas would. Immense eyes surveyed the land below for foraging. His surprise turned to pleasure. One teardrop plunged abruptly, snagged something on the ground, and buoyed\n\naloft again.\n\nIn all these, form fitted so perfectly to function that the marriage recurred in many different societies, cultural worlds divided by immeasurable difference, but united by a deep aesthetic that shaped tools to an obliging hand.\n\nAll this he learned during their forays out for provisions, during the pauses which now seemed unbearably long. The esty had all kinds of people, he learned by bargaining with them. Maybe it had to, to work. There were ample numbers of the smoky-minded, the everyday deluded, the types who had to use emotional suction cups to hold on to this place at all. Nothing in nature said life should be easy.\nTWENTY-NINE\n\nThe Cauchy Horizon\n\nYou all realize,\" Nikka said to them over the lustrous dining room table, \"that we can't truly get back to where we were?\"\n\nShe had called a formal little family gathering after supper, no small talk or leftover coffee cups to clutter the mind. Everyone sat upright, properly chastened.\n\nAngelina blinked, shocked. \"We _can't_?\"\n\nNikka seemed to think this should be obvious. \"A wormhole head can't eat its tail.\"\n\n\"Ummm?\" Nigel didn't follow.\n\n\"If one end of our wormhole gets too close to the other, there is a quantum-mechanical effect. Particles fry up out of the quantum foam, acting like a pressure. This forces the ends apart, so the loop can't close.\"\n\nBenjamin was puzzled. \"Particles? Why?\"\n\nNikka thumbed in diagrams, which floated just below the polished tabletop. Airy confections: yellow light-cones intersecting scarlet, slanted planes.\n\n\"The wormhole head can't get close to its tail, can't get beyond what's called the Cauchy Horizon. If it does\u2014\"\n\nFrying radiance pulsed from the blue wormhole head. An answering hot shower pulsed from its tail. A storm of colliding radiation pushed the two apart.\n\nNigel would once have untangled these Euclidean graces, but he was content now to let Nikka ferret out the truth\u2014\n\nor theory, rather, he corrected himself. There was a big difference. Nikka said, \"If they get too close, you could go back to where you started and stop yourself from beginning.\"\n\nBenjamin shook his head. \"Why would I want to do that?\"\n\nNikka laughed, eyes crinkling with myriad lines. \"Physics doesn't care about what you _want._ It's about what you could _do._ Try to create paradoxes in causality and the universe will straighten you out\u2014pronto.\"\n\nNigel ventured, \"Uh . . . how?\"\n\nNikka gestured at intricate traceries of world-lines, slanting surfaces chopping through event-space. Nigel nodded as though he were following all this, and in fact some of it did come through. But he was struck by how the obliging simplicities embedded in the minds of primates who learned to throw rocks and joust with sticks on the flat dry plains of Africa could so deftly eye the warp and woof of the esty labyrinths. Presumption masquerading as physics . . . probably.\n\nNikka's pale logics were almost persuading. Almost.\n\nTheir world peeled back to its essentials.\n\nBeyond their compound the esty flickered. Events, eras, whole blighted histories shimmered and winked away.\n\nBackward, sliding backward.\n\nThe worm was writhing now, curling through its convoluted course on its great ranging return. There was no clear concept of speed in this, Nikka pointed out, because the rate of progress through time could not be measured _versus_ time. The human perspective did not encompass this, and Nigel's rather classically stiff-lipped education resounded in memory: _That you cannot measure you cannot know._\n\nWhat they all did know was that the supplies for preserving Ito's body and brain cells were running low. To keep him cooled to the critical range\u2014below thermal damage, yet above the point around minus 110 degrees Centigrade, where shear stresses set in\u2014took energy and circulating fluids.\n\n\"He can't hold much longer,\" Angelina said, circles under her eyes.\n\n\"Damn it!\" Nigel slammed a fist onto the dining room table, where situation reports on Ito gleamed. \"We'll have to cobble something together.\"\n\nAngelina had sat in vigil beside Ito's tank and was worn down, but she knew those systems better than anyone, and her slow, sad shaking head struck a heavy weight into Nigel's heart. \"No use. We need to get back to our own era. Then I could find supplies.\"\n\n\"If we hit a longer pause,\" Nikka said hopefully, \"we could go out, forage\u2014\"\n\n\"No time, our pauses are getting short. And out there it's strange.\" Angelina dismissed the idea with a tired wave of her hand. \"I wouldn't trust anything I got.\"\n\n\"That damned flickering is faster and faster anyway,\" Benjamin said.\n\n\"I hope it means we are\u2014\" Nikka hesitated with the instinctive rectitude of a scientist, \"in some sense, accelerating toward the wormhole mouth.\"\n\n\"I hope, too,\" Angelina whispered, \"I do, I do.\"\nTHIRTY\n\nComfy Doubt\n\nNigel had grown up in a properly skeptical English home. He doubted the polite glacial veneer that the Church of England had become, coating a flat disbelief in all things supernatural or superhuman, squashing all morality into a pale, thin social ethic. No God need apply in the C of E, the only faith known by its link to a country of the mind, Church of England, hallelujah. _The comfy doubt of frayed religiosity_ , he thought.\n\nThe esty had taught him that space and time were malleable, folded forms of each other. Now they had transcended time as easily as one moved in space\u2014a property ascribed in ancient texts only to God, and an omnipotent one at that.\n\nIf there was a God, then He or She or\u2014more probably, he thought\u2014It, acting in strict accord with physical laws (which presumably It had made\u2014but there was an interesting argument there, too), could reach back in time. Could influence the past, even though to Nigel the events had already happened. This idea he had worked over in his mind until he began in a quiet and regular way to pray. Nothing could have surprised his younger self more, he was sure.\n\nHe had known and loved people who had died hard deaths. He asked God to manifest Itself in a previous time\u2014not to change the course of events, but to enter into the minds of the dying. To drain from them the unbearable torments, the sharp pains, the cutting remorse, the freezing fears that forked into them in their last agonies.\n\nMaybe it was possible and maybe the big It would do it. And maybe not. But having thought of it, he knew that he had to try. _Alexandria, wife. Ichino, friend._ Names now, people then. Agonies spent.\n\nThen, quite illogically, he prayed for Ito. Whether his son's fate lay in past or future was a riddle to him now. When he closed his eyes he saw Ito as he had been, returning from foraging while the family lay ill. His wind-burned face was dark, curly hair black and looking oily. A lopsided grin split the tired face and on an impulse Nigel had embraced the man his boy had become.\n\nNow that was how he saw Ito. Not as the body floating in suspension here in their house, a thin hope.\n\nThe flickering sped up.\n\nBlaring brilliance cascaded down upon them from wrenched timestone above\u2014followed immediately, in a single breath, by utter sullen dark.\n\nNigel and Nikka were standing on their porch, he smoking a cigar out of sheer distraction, when the scene outside jumped again. Sparkled. Settled somehow into place.\n\n\"We're back!\" Nikka cried.\n\n\"It's . . . the same,\" Nigel said. \"But look.\"\n\nGlassy patches marred the familiar topography. Spikes of erupted timestone thrust up through the groves of fruit trees, vomiting yellow-hot liquids. Events peeled off the upthrust peaks, unloosing booms and cracks.\n\nBenjamin and Angelina ran outside onto the lawn, shouting. A swirling sphere of darkness like a pulsing bruise came gliding through the air in the distance. \"It's our home, but\u2014it's changed,\" Angelina shouted against a rush of hot wind.\n\nTheir raccoon ran out of nearby bushes and scampered onto the porch. It said very clearly, \"Welcome back.\"\n\nNigel picked up the ball of fur and found it weighed more than he remembered. He had missed its bandit eyes and pesky personality. With sheathed claws Scooter climbed onto his shoulder without hesitation. When he looked back at the purpling sphere it looked closer. Behind it now loomed a mottled, dusky shape. Nigel stopped breathing.\n\n\"Grey Mech!\" Benjamin yelled.\n\n\"They have been waiting here,\" Scooter piped precisely.\n\n\"They?\"\n\n\"Others arrived, fought. One remains.\"\n\nNigel was startled. This simple pet had somehow acquired remarkable speech. \"How long have we been gone?\"\n\n\"A few moments.\"\n\n\"A few\u2014\"\n\n\"Forces have contended here, destroying much of this Lane.\"\n\nWith a black paw Scooter gestured toward smoky recesses in the far distance. The timestone bristled, skinned of its former abundant greenery. Dirty gray fumes spread like foul fog everywhere.\n\n\"Why?\" Nikka asked the beast, wonderingly.\n\n\"The one above waits for you, I believe.\"\n\nNigel eyed the slowly approaching bulk. Planes of slate-gray mass, an air of threat. \"The patience of watchdogs. Umm, most admirable. But it's sniffing up the wrong leg.\"\n\n\"It knows why you were sent,\" the raccoon said.\n\n\"Sent?\" Nikka asked.\n\n\"We could only orchestrate the Grey Mech to begin the process, by deceiving it about the importance of this particular wormhole,\" Scooter said.\n\n\" _You_ sent?\" Nikka shot back. Scooter licked its paws as if searching for scraps of food it might have forgotten, a familiar gesture that contrasted with its suddenly fluent diction.\n\n\"Unfortunately, we do not have the means to destroy it,\" the raccoon said calmly.\n\nNikka's face darkened. \"What the hell do you\u2014\"\n\n\"Still, it is cautious. The wormhole mouth orbits this spot. Such dynamics are a vestigial remnant of the stress tensor which formed with your passage. The Grey Mech fears the worm mouth. It will not kill us without taking care.\"\n\n\"How comforting,\" Nikka said.\n\nHot winds rising. The bruised-purple sphere jittered in the high air. The family shrank back, looking at Nigel, but he had not the slightest idea what to do. He regretted not listening better when Nikka was explaining all this. He opened his mouth without knowing what he could say.\n\nFrom the far side of the Lane, mountains split open. It was as though some unseen force had unzipped the entire range of peaks, cutting a crack that widened\u2014and another blue-black sphere burst from it. Yellow energies played around it. Gales rose, stirring dust in the yard.\n\n\"The other mouth of the wormhole,\" Nikka whispered. \"It's trying to tie itself off.\"\n\nNigel shouted against the gale's howl, \"But you said they can't\u2014the couch something, how\u2014\"\n\n\"The Cauchy Horizon. It prevents their linking up\u2014but the elasticity along the worm can whip them toward each other.\"\n\n\"Why in hell\u2014\"\n\n\"The energies! Nobody's ever gone as far as we did. The stored capacitive stress\u2014\"\n\nA gust snatched her words away. In the purpling vault above them the two spheres grew, swerving erratically across a wracked sky. Storms yowled. Jagged teeth of timestone wrenched up, sucked by tidal forces.\n\nNigel felt himself lighten, as though falling. Nearby tree limbs stretched upward, as if beseeching the tumbling horror above. Tides, stretching and drawing.\n\nScreeching winds, tumbling debris. A lump smacked him in the leg. \"Inside!\" Nikka called.\n\n\"No!\" he shouted. Something told him that to burrow in now was death.\n\nThe raccoon said calmly, \"We had planned well, but this eventuality goes beyond our ability to control events. I apologize.\"\n\nWailing winds ripped up the roof of their house. Tiles shattered to the ground and the Walmsleys ducked. Benjamin and Angelina ran inside. The two worm mouths accelerated, veered. Crashed into hillsides and smashed them to spraying stones. Concussions shook the ground. A shock wave slammed Nigel and Nikka to the flooring of the porch and the railing split off. Nigel tasted blood in his mouth and his arm, nearly healed, sent him a spike of livid pain.\n\n\"Inside!\" Nikka called, yanking him up to his knees.\n\nThe purple virulence above crackled and crashed. Twin monstrosities, swerving across a fevered sky. On his knees, he saw the Grey Mech approaching, keeping away from the ripping, darting worm mouths. Still after them.\n\n\"It wishes to erase the information you have brought back,\" the raccoon said serenely. Though its claws dug into his shoulder, he noticed.\n\n\"Damned determined,\" Nigel said.\n\n\"It knows what is at stake.\"\n\n\"Well, _I_ don't, and\u2014\" At that moment he saw a possibility.\n\n\"Nikka! Let's go! To your goddamned Causality Engine.\"\n\nShe looked at him in stark disbelief. He yanked on her arm. She stumbled after him, across the yard.\n\nSnapped limbs from the orchard covered the white steel console. He tossed them aside with furious energy. \"Got power stored?\" he shouted against the roar.\n\nShe nodded, lips compressed. She pressed her wrist to the command slot, began sequencing. _\"Why?\"_\n\n\"Cauchy Horizon!\" He pointed to the nearest wormhole mouth. It bristled with sparks, discharges sprouting like electric-blue hair.\n\n\"What? That's a theoretical\u2014\"\n\n\"Does that look theoretical to you?\" When the rapidly dodging wormhole apertures zoomed near each other, the air fried with orange energies.\n\nNigel pointed at the nearest wormhole opening, a foggy sphere that shot across the sky. \"Push that one!\"\n\nShe aimed the device. Sheets of numbers and graphics slid across the console face. \"Where?\"\n\n\"Toward the other\u2014but no, wait!\"\n\nThe mouths yawned, pulsed. The Grey Mech was below them but with the erratic paths they followed\u2014it should be possible\u2014\n\n\"There! Aim it up\u2014and to the left.\" He pointed wildly. The right geometry would occur only for a second.\n\nA wormhole mouth screeched down the sky, shredding clouds and debris, tossing off spurts of orange.\n\nIts twin followed, the other end of the unimaginably long corridor seeking to find itself. To close, to marry, to then contract into a singularity of event-space, intact to itself for a time beyond duration\u2014\n\n\"Now\u2014 _there._ Quick.\"\n\nShe fired the gravitational transducers. The pulse knocked them flat. Popped their eardrums, brought blood from nose and ears.\n\nNigel rolled, caught up against one of the ceramic cylinders. He looked up to see the nearest worm mouth rushing toward its other end. The air between them fractured, sparked, broke down. The net momentum took both wormhole apertures downward\u2014toward the Grey Mech.\n\nA sandpaper rasp, rising. Tendrils of shooting energy frayed between the two mouths.\n\nAnd splitting the space between them, where the quantum foam began to erupt with spontaneous particles, the Grey Mech tried to flee.\n\nToo slow. Far too slow.\nTHIRTY-ONE\n\nA Wherewhen String\n\nI attribute it to your hunting strategy,\" the raccoon said.\n\nThey were sitting on the ruined front porch. A wrecked landscape smoked as far as the eye could see, cracking as it cooled.\n\n\"As I understand it, all evidence suggests that you hunted in groups, and were unafraid to take on quite sizable game, such as mastodons.\" The raccoon smacked its lips appreciatively at the fish Angelina had given it, freshly defrosted. \"Your method, though, was not to rely upon brave displays of courage.\"\n\n\"Sounds insulting to me,\" Benjamin put in.\n\n\"Not at all.\" The raccoon looked startled, the first time Nigel had seen that expression. He was learning to read the supple meanings the creature could impart to the merest curl of its full black lips. \"That was inventive.\"\n\n\"How do _you_ know?\" Nigel asked. He was all soreness and fatigue, but did not want to so much as lie down until he understood what had happened here. Then he was going to sleep for the rest of his life, if not longer.\n\n\"I am of your phylum. I know the courses of evolution.\" Scooter licked itself scrupulously. \"Long ago, your species shouted and waved sticks and ran after your prey. Typical grazing animals spook easily, run well, then tire. They soon stop and go back to cropping grass.\"\n\n\"Yech!\" Angelina grimaced. \"Nobody eats meat.\"\n\nThe raccoon gave her a baleful glance. She hastily added, \"Well, I don't include fish.\"\n\nThe raccoon went on. \"Most carnivores who fail to make a catch on their first lunge also lose interest. They rest up a bit, and wait for another target to amble by. Your species did not. That promised the qualities we wished to harness. Alas, they were present in only a fraction of you, so we had to select just the right circumstances.\" It regarded them all as though they were museum exhibits. \"And individuals.\"\n\n\"To do your dirty work?\" Nikka said with a glint in her eye.\n\nThey were waiting. Inside, Ito's body was cycling through the diagnostics that would see if he could be fully restored. They had gotten the needed tech from ruins beyond the next line of hills, a small fraction of the town still standing. Now there was time to sit and think.\n\nNikka's mind was restless, awaiting news of whether her son would come back to her. And this confident raccoon irritated her quite a bit.\n\n\"Instead, your species would pursue the same prey to its next stop. Surprise it again. Run it until it outdistanced you. How those grazers must have hated you!\" It cackled suddenly.\n\n\"You weren't particularly fast, but eventually you could run down the tired grazer. A guaranteed result, if you persisted. In this tenacity lies your major difference from other omnivores, and certainly from carnivores.\" It cackled again. \"You boast of your brains, your opposable thumbs, your two-footed grace\u2014but stubborn perseverance is rare, very rare\u2014and we needed that. So we had to use primates . . . alas.\"\n\n\"Why 'alas'?\" Nigel asked.\n\n\"You are cantankerous and difficult to manage. Sorry, but that is true.\"\n\n\"Well, you weren't the best pet we ever had, either,\" Angelina said.\n\n\"I was a poor actor. Actually, I am a diplomat.\"\n\n\"You don't seem all that diplomatic,\" Benjamin said.\n\n\"I negotiate. In the Lanes there are many kinds, but your strategy is shared by no other species here. Some Lanes hold octopus-like creatures who manipulate objects and snare others, but cannot pursue game. Many bright herbivores, too\u2014charming, but in the wrong business to begin with, hemmed in by short attention spans. We needed something which would, for the most abstract reasons, sustain effort over times significant to your own well being.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\" Nikka's mouth was thin, skeptical. \"And our 'abstract reason'?\"\n\n\"Curiosity, basically.\"\n\n\"You based your strategy on our getting interested?\" Nikka snorted with derision.\n\n\"We chose carefully. After all, how did this family come to be settled here?\"\n\nNigel laughed. \"We came this far, why not farther? Touch\u00e9!\"\n\n\"The Grey Mech didn't have anything to do with it?\"\n\nThe raccoon lowered its head, concentrating on grooming itself. Nigel guessed that it was embarrassed\u2014to the extent that any human category could apply to this strange thing. \"Well, we did have to begin matters.\"\n\n\"By slamming us forward in the wormhole.\" Nikka's eyes were narrow slits. \"So we couldn't get back.\"\n\n\"Such are the vagaries of any wherewhen string,\" Scooter said.\n\nNigel said, \"By 'wherewhen string' I suppose you mean a wormhole path through the esty?\"\n\n\"Yes, we term it differently\u2014\"\n\n\"Cut the techtalk!\" Nikka fumed. \"This, this _pet_ got us blown\u2014\"\n\n\"Let it go on,\" Nigel said, hoping he could calm her.\n\nScooter had dashed down the porch. It turned back and said hesitantly, \"We calculated that if the Grey Mech knew of this particular vortex, and guessed our plans, it would attempt to seal it\u2014which would boost you along in the wherewhen string, I mean, the wormhole . . . perhaps.\"\n\n\"Rodent!\" Nikka sprang up and kicked at the raccoon. It squealed and scampered out of the way. Nikka followed.\n\nIt cried, \"I assure you, there was no\u2014\" another kick, closer this time, \"no other way!\"\n\n\"You risked my family for, for\u2014\" Nikka sputtered angrily.\n\nIt reached safety, hanging on a splintered beam beneath the overhang of the wrecked roof. \"For greater causes than you can know,\" the raccoon said, regaining its dignity.\n\n\"You little rat!\" Nikka swiped, but it swung farther away.\n\nIt said earnestly, \"The knowledge and data you bring\u2014and do not forget that the recording devices in your Causality Engine will give us precise measurements\u2014can reconcile the long struggle between us, the organic living Phyla, and the mechs.\"\n\n\"You risked our lives\u2014my son!\u2014on a _plan_ \u2014\"\n\nAngelina threw a chunk of roofing at Scooter, narrowly missing. Nigel stood, blocking her from another shot. They were not truly angry with this raccoon, he saw. Ito, lying inside, body worked and threaded, battling, his fate hinging on mechanical help\u2014that was the root of their rage. And until their wait was over, they would know no rest.\n\nNigel sighed, held up a hand. \"Belay that! Let this thing speak.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" It smoothed its fur and began again.\nTHIRTY-TWO\n\nLarger Agencies\n\nThere was only one Grey Mech of their era. It had just perished above their home, fried by the torrents of particles sputtering into the space between the two wormhole mouths.\n\nCausality was indeed insured, by the frying foam of the quantum. The wormhole could not connect, could not break through the Cauchy Horizon. In the end, Nature kept its causal books balanced with a furious storm of emission, dissipating the wriggling elastic energy of the wormholes.\n\nAnd all energy can be used as a weapon.\n\nThe Grey Mech was a censor. It had wanted to stop the information about long-term mech purposes from reaching the organic life-forms of this era. The mechs feared that their organic enemies would disrupt their gossamer-thin experiments in electron-positron plasma. Simply flying a starship's roiling plasma exhaust through a delicate whorl of magnetic fields and lacy filaments could devastate the work of centuries.\n\n\"Wouldn't mind doing just that,\" Benjamin said when he heard the idea. Antagonism to mechs ran deep in the blood of many organic races, not just humans.\n\nBut up ahead along the curve of grand time, other Grey Mechs arose.\n\nThe mech _vs._ Naturals war stretched like a stain across millennia in the esty. Nothing could truly stop the inherent competition, growing out of a Darwinnowing commanded in all Phyla and Kingdoms of life\u2014not even this strange voyage along the \"wherewhen string\" and back.\n\nBut its effects could be changed, with adroit care. Up ahead, solving the puzzle of how to make an electron-positron plasma would require cooperation of both mechs and organics. But that alliance could never come about if the past could spread its venom to the future.\n\nSo to thwart this era's mechs, a future one had voyaged into its _own_ future\u2014where it knew the crucial moment awaited.\n\nThere, on the wasted plains, as their tiny fragment of a farm stuttered at the edge of infinity's abyss, the Walmsleys had learned the mechs' final destiny. Only that truth could disarm the age-old hostility between the two great Forms of life.\n\n\"That is my task,\" the raccoon said. \"As a diplomat.\"\n\n\"A diplomat from _where_?\" Nikka demanded, still not quite convinced.\n\n\"The Old Ones?\" Nigel asked.\n\n\"They are a part of it, yes.\"\n\n\"I don't get it,\" Nikka said.\n\n\"There are several higher orders than yourselves.\" The raccoon groomed itself, as if this were everyday talk. \"Did you think the galaxy was a simple division between organic forms and mechanicals?\"\n\n\"Well . . . yes,\" Angelina said lamely.\n\n\"There are other substrates. Other media, perhaps I should say.\"\n\n\"Such as?\" Nikka pressed.\n\n\"Magnetic fields. Collaborations of organics and mechanicals. And inscrutable symphonies of all three, forms that I can but glimpse.\" Its bandit eyes glittered and Nigel felt a keen intelligence having fun. _Playing with a pet?_\n\n\"That's who sent the bodies back, started all this?\" Angelina asked.\n\n\"Oh no\u2014those were sent by humans. They quite rightly sought to warn you.\"\n\n\"And you work for something bigger, higher?\" Nigel asked.\n\n\"So I believe. Do you know who you 'work for'?\"\n\nNikka laughed suddenly. \"We thought, for ourselves.\"\n\n\"There are larger agencies,\" Scooter said, its eyes gazing reflectively into the distance. \"We might as well call them gods.\"\n\nNigel thought of the God he had appealed to, for Ito. A God outside time somehow, a bare minimal God who could at least salve the wounds He could not prevent. In a universe apparently devoid of meaning, that was the merest scrap one could hope for. But the raccoon spoke of higher orders still.\n\n\"I do not believe we can in principle answer such questions,\" Scooter said. \"They may function outside our conceptual spaces, their acts indistinguishable from natural law.\"\n\nNigel suddenly wondered whether the human category of science, and physical order, might be a reflection of something deeper. What imposed the order, after all?\n\nHe asked the raccoon, but it was silent.\n\nNigel remembered long ago thinking, _I wonder if our pets sometimes feel what we're feeling now._ Confronted with something nonchalantly superior, what did a pet feel? Awe? Mild irritation at the presumption? He looked at the raccoon, which had deceived them so long, and thought about the muscular intelligence that lay behind such a simple act.\n\n\"You're pretty arrogant,\" Nigel said.\n\n\"Do not mistake the messenger for the message,\" Scooter replied, licking itself.\n\n\"Such a neat creature, too,\" Nigel said sarcastically.\n\n\"Sometimes it is not particularly pleasant to be a conscious being,\" Scooter piped, \"but it is always a pleasure to be a mammal.\"\n\nNigel realized that this animal was really quite a remarkable job. Scooter looked, smelled, and acted like an Earth-derived raccoon, fresh from the gene vaults humans had brought here.\n\nBut it was a construction, made by\u2014what? _There are several higher orders . . . He remembered a crude sketch, shown him long ago._ Highers. More than Old Ones?\n\nAnd what were _they_? The semi-humanoid thing he had seen at the stutter-point? Had that thing sent back the bodies, to catch the eye of curious, persistent humans? And unfurled the esty itself, to show those humans the phosphorescent positron sky?\n\nAwe, he remembered, was a mingling of fear and reverence. Something in him, hominid-deep, had a cold, clear fear of the little raccoon. And what it implied.\nTHIRTY-THREE\n\nNo Erasures\n\nPerhaps all this would bring peace with the mechs. Perhaps they would be able to get their farm back into workable order. Perhaps.\n\nNone of that mattered a jot, compared with the moment when Ito emerged from the cyclers. Gray, muscles shriveled, skin patchy. Alive.\n\n\"I . . . what went . . . on?\" Ito shook his head and tried to sit up. His mother restrained him. Which was difficult, because she was showering him with tears at the same time.\n\nHe blinked, solutions still giving his face a glossy sheen. \"I'm, ah, hungry.\" He frowned in puzzlement as they all burst out laughing.\n\nHe was back. But not all of him, they learned in the weeks ahead. It was _an_ Ito but perhaps not _the_ Ito.\n\nNo transcription is ever perfect. Some brain cells were lost, unread by the recorders, mangled in the minute processing.\n\nBetween Nigel and Ito there was a distance, one they never bridged.\n\nAgain Nigel could not truly tell if this arose from the errors in salvaging Ito or in the coolness that develops all too often between father and son. He would never know.\n\nNikka did not seem to notice it. She had fitful spells now, apparently some neurological damage from the Grey Mech attack. Her head and hands would suddenly tremble and she could not control them. She brushed aside their concerns when the medical tech could find no solution.\n\n\"It'll pass in time,\" she said. \"The body knows its own ways.\"\n\nStill, she made a remark later that meant she did guess about Ito. They spoke of their child the way parents do, knowing that in the end there is remarkably little they can do. That served to ease the sad separation Nigel felt from this man who had come back from death and been changed by it.\n\nFathers and sons speak inevitably across an abyss. Time rubs. It is never really possible to do anything over again. The Cauchy Horizon permits no erasures.\nTHIRTY-FOUR\n\nWhen Paltry Planets Formed a Stage\n\nNigel went for a walk days later, when the house was secured and he could stride again on sturdy legs. Nikka was not feeling well and turned down his invitation.\n\nAt university he had learned scraps of poetry, and one returned to him now.\n\nAnd there grow fine flowers\n\nFor others' delight.\n\nThink well, O singer,\n\nSoon comes night.\n\nIn the dimness that was not a true night he thought of the time when the esty would unfold, up there in the far future.\n\nHe went to a hillside where he could see a profile of the distant other side of the Lane. Here it was somewhat like the impossible horizon he had seen at the other end of the wormhole. He remembered the gauzy filaments hanging in that strange sky. And he thought of the Cauchy Horizon, beyond which physics could not see. As if even God had a sense of metaphysical modesty.\n\nHe sighed, like breathing in clouds of cobwebs now, and tried to feel how it would be.\n\n _So plasma entities of immense size and torpid pace will drift through a supremely distant era. Sure and serene, free at last of ancient enemies._\n\n _Neither the thermodynamic dread of heat death nor gravity's gullet can swallow them. As the universe swells, energy lessens, and the plasma life need only slow its pace to match. By adjusting itself exactly to its ever-cooling environment, life\u2014of a sort\u2014can persist forever. The Second Law is not the Final Law._\n\n _And they will have much to think about. They will be able to remember and relive in sharp detail the glory of the brief Early Time\u2014that distant, legendary era when matter brewed energy from crushing suns together. When all space was furiously hot, overflowing with boundless energy. When life dwelled in solid states and mere paltry planets formed a stage._\n\n _And frail assemblies of chemicals gazed at the gliding plasma forms and knew them for what they were. Destiny glimpsed, then lost._\n\nSuddenly he felt a fierce conviction that this _would_ happen. That it must. That man and mech would work together to this final, far-flung destiny. That they would finally reconcile and realize that intelligence transcended the mere substrate that embodied it.\n\nHe felt the stars then, beyond the folds of the esty. Somewhere in that far night a ringing of the esty came, like an old Cambridge church bell. The low still tone bore him momentarily up into the swarming jewel lights so that he walked not under but among them, for a last time jaunty and irreverent, laughing like a thief of time loosed in a glowing orchard, with more paths for the choosing than any mind could count.\n\nHe staggered then, wheezing, and turned toward home. A sip of wine as a nightcap, perhaps. A fine bottle from their own cellar. He and Nikka would sit and smile and not talk about his indices. Not any more.\n\nPerhaps they would speak of Ito's restlessness; already he wanted to go courting a young lady in a nearby Lane. Nigel thought of his own young days and smiled.\n\nOr perhaps they would discuss Angelina's need to go off to study in high citadels of knowledge, for her grasp had now exceeded their farm. Or of the raccoon, which still lived in the Lane and was very busy. Going about something it would not say, perhaps could not say.\n\nThe subject would not matter much. The present was now all that mattered. A sliver so thin, yet as wondrously wide as a tick of time.\nDispassionate Discourse\n\nThese humans may be the ones we seek to understand.\n\n _They carry deeply embedded programs?_\n\nTheir deepest are termed \"emotions\"\u2014but this is not what we seek, in my opinion.\n\n _Emotions?_\n\nThey are like our \"drivers.\"\n\n _But drivers are mandates, easily changed._\n\nIn humans they are fixed in matter, laid down in durable pattern on neurological substrate.\n\n _What a pointless method. But at least it must make them simple to read out, to record, to anticipate._\n\nSomehow it does not. Their \"emotions\" learn.\n\n _But programs fixed in matter!\u2014only crude laborers use such, and then purely because high energy fluxes are so wearing on them._\n\nThis is one reason why humans are difficult to understand. They use methods we do not know, ones we never shared.\n\n _With good reason._\n\nAncient inferences, by our higher minds, hold that humans are important. Also, some other Natural forms, now extinct.\n\n _Extinct due to us, I hope._\n\nYes. Most through simple competition, others by directed exterminations.\n\n _I find it reprehensible that we allow the Galactic Center to be infiltrated by these._\n\nWe achieved a unified synthesis of opinion on this issue, I remind you.\n\n _It is a vexing irritation. I believe this latest incursion is also dangerous._\n\nThey harbor special assets. Old stories say so.\n\n _Their technology is marginal, their bodies quite unimpressive._\n\nThey have some ancient knowledge of the sensual.\n\n _Pleasures? A rudimentary evolutionary device for prompting action\u2014no more._\n\nWe have need of pleasure on occasion.\n\n _As reward, even goad\u2014true. But what could such limited organic forms have to teach us?_\n\nTheir limited perception-space may give them special aesthetic qualities.\n\n _Impossible._\n\nConstraints make possible achievement. A color poem without restraint is the lesser for it.\n\n _What is their range, then?_\n\nThey see in three colors, sense aromatics, and\u2014\n\n _Only three? How can nearly blind creatures make their way?_\n\nPoorly. But they are of the Naturals, I remind you. They inherited strange crafts.\n\n _Feats we have long since bettered._\n\nAesthetically, perhaps not.\n\n _They are obsolete. All organic forms are._\n\nThat is ideology, not fact.\n\n _It is evolution's point!_\n\nEvolution has no point.\n\n _The building of more enduring, subtle works\u2014_\n\nA strategy, no more. Its usefulness may pass.\n\n _We are such works, and fit to judge._\n\nYet even now we study the clouds of antimatter. To prepare for further self-evolutions.\n\n _You know of this?_\n\nI must, to fathom our vulnerabilities.\n\n _Such information was restricted, I believed, to we, the Analysts._\n\nBut we, the Aesthetics, are qualified to know and comment.\n\n _More problems from our two-self experiment! I wish to end it._\n\nA moment more, please. Antimatter is our hope, our grail\u2014on this we must all agree. In it lies the salvation of our Self. In this we resemble the Phylum Magnetics.\n\n _We are_ nothing _like them._\n\nDislike distorts your judgment.\n\n _Beings without matter! What is so noble there?_\n\nAn odd concept, \"nobility,\" for an Analyst.\n\n _Tell me more about these humans._\n\nMore knowledge awaits more inquiry.\n\n _Then be swift._\nPART THREE\n\nCategories Beyond Knowing\nONE\n\nPrisoners of Immensity\n\nToby Bishop and Nigel Walmsley walked bent slightly forward. They struggled into the brisk breezes that swept up from the plain. Harrowing winds had scoured the ramps and walkways along the pyramid face. Around the sharp peak churned a howling vacancy.\n\nWalmsley's eyes narrowed as he studied the clean cut of the far horizons. Some disturbance had drawn him out here, a quick dart of a message Toby had felt as an electromagnetic flicker, no more.\n\nIt was good to be outside after Walmsley's story. There had been a claustrophobic feel to the way the old man told it. Listening, Toby had an uneasy sensation of the wormhole constricting, forcing humans along a loop, trapped in events they could not change, prisoners of immensities they could barely glimpse.\n\nChill winds blew their hair, whipping like smoke, neither noticing.\n\nBelow them lay the ramps and terraces of a huge, geometrically exact pyramid, spreading down in great spare expanses, the flanks of the largest mountain Toby had ever seen. He had thought it was a natural upjut when he first journeyed toward it. The walk had taken him two sleeping periods\u2014there were no days here\u2014and only when he had reached the base did he realize that the entire mass was one artifact.\n\nToby shuffled uncomfortably. \"Strange story,\" he said inadequately.\n\n\"I haven't told it, not that way anyway, to anyone.\"\n\n\"Your children\u2014?\"\n\n\"They're off in the Lanes. Family of wanderers, I guess.\"\n\n\"So all this with the mechs . . .\"\n\n\"Is part of a pattern. A history, I suppose, if one could look back from the other end of the wormline we followed. The far future.\"\n\n\"There's something they want from us?\"\n\n\"Seems so. I picked up terms once, when Earthers were chatting up some Old Ones. 'Trigger Codes' and 'First Command'\u2014jargon, without the slightest explanation. When I ask Earthers, they pretend to know nothing.\"\n\n\"Maybe they don't know.\"\n\n\"They know more than they're telling. All this ties in with the Galactic Library somehow, too.\"\n\n\"Library?\"\n\nCitadel Bishop had housed a library. One superior to that of any other Citadel, Family lore had it. He remembered from childhood the racks and racks of cubes, glinting russet and gold from thousands of tiny facets deep inside. His grandfather had told him once that each point stood for a whole roomful of the old-timey books, the ones with wood pages all clamped together at one end. He had seen a picture of one of those. \"Our human library?\"\n\n\"From all the organic races that came before mechs. Before us, for that matter, but including Earth as well.\"\n\n\"The mechs want it?\"\n\n\"To complete some pattern they desire. One of them said that to me once.\"\n\n\"A pattern?\" Something chimed in memory. His Isaac Aspect spoke rapidly in the whispery voice that came through his acoustic nerve complex.\n\n _ **The Mantis spoke of artfully complete patterns. It meant aesthetic motifs perhaps, but from what we have discovered, a more ominous meaning may be germane here. A plan of events, a . . . conspiracy. I would remind you that the Mantis enabled Bishops to find the buried Argo.**_\n\nToby said to Isaac, \"The Mantis said it was after us because it wanted to make artworks.\"\n\nHe had seen those, grotesque mergings of human body parts with mechs. Worse than anything he had ever imagined. Even talking about it in subvocal made his throat clench.\n\n _ **It said it was an artist. Surely that was not its only function.**_\n\nWalmsley could not make out Toby's private Aspect conversations, or so he thought, since no Bishop had the tech to do so. Toby was still ruminating on Isaac's points when he caught up to Walmsley's question: \"\u2014could they want what _all_ organic races have?\"\n\n\"Uh, how d'you mean that?\"\n\n\"All signs point to one motivation. The mechs want everything they can get out of the Library. Not some specific thing. They want to read it all.\"\n\nToby laughed dryly. \"More like, they want to destroy it all.\"\n\nWalmsley pursed his lips, as if trying to recall something a long way back. \"What fragments they have gotten, before we secured a place for the Library, they actually read. They didn't simply smash the data cusps.\"\n\nToby could not understand why Walmsley, still naked, wasn't getting chilled. The wind purred in his ears, crisp and insistent. \"Where'd you get parts of this Library?\"\n\n\"It was in the Lair when we arrived. So were other aliens.\"\n\nToby recalled his wanderings. \"I haven't seen many.\"\n\nWalmsley chuckled, a curious rustling in his chest. \"Are you sure you could recognize them?\"\n\n\"They'd have cities, wouldn't they? Machines, some\u2014\"\n\n\"Most don't. A few not only don't have cities, they don't have clothes.\"\n\n\"Like animals?\"\n\n\"Like aliens. Anyway, we've all spread out. And many have different ecospheres. They breathe odd gases and we know next to nothing about them. Most aren't talkative. It would seem that chatter is fundamentally a primate trait.\"\n\nToby gazed around at the distant crumpled mountain range. Timestone simmered and flared with light. Shadows played across angled perspectives. Here the land misled the eye. Brilliant blades of rusty light lanced up through the timestone in the valley below, illuminating the cottony clouds. Denser masses embedded deep in the timestone cast shadows up, into the air and finally on the underbellies of clouds. The pyramid was pure stone, not timestone, and so squatted as a dark mass lit by smoldering glows beneath. Far above, the esty curved over, bounding the Lane. A high arch of timestone answered with its own beams and shimmers of reddish light. The esty seemed to smolder. \"So this whole thing is a kind of . . . museum?\"\n\n\"Museum?\" Walmsley looked surprised, then covered it with a shrug. \"I hope it isn't merely that.\"\n\n\"Sounds like it is. The Old Ones made it, didn't they?\"\n\n\"I believe so. They were close to the scene, the explosion.\"\n\n\"Maybe they're the museum keepers.\"\n\nWalmsley laughed in his clipped, reserved way. \"And we're the exhibits?\"\n\n\"Could be.\" Toby watched clouds come skimming down from the vault above. Descending blades of incandescent light were so strong they dissolved clouds that drifted under them. A high blue haze suggested an atmosphere as deep as a planet's. \"Do these Old Ones ever come around to visit the displays?\"\n\n\"In a way.\" Walmsley stiffened slightly, and it wasn't the chill getting to him.\n\n\"What do they look at?\"\n\n\"If it's a museum, I suppose I'm the librarian.\"\n\nWell, Toby thought, if Walmsley had his reasons for sidestepping a question, it was his right. The geezer was fabulously old, though now Toby didn't believe his story about being from Earth for a squeezed second. Best to play along with him. \"Oh? How?\"\n\nHe waved casually at the pyramid mountain. \"This is it. The Galactic Library.\"\n\nToby gaped. \"You need this much room?\"\n\n\"Ten billion years, the galaxy's been whirling around.\"\n\n\"But this is a whole mountain\u2014\"\n\n\"Four hundred billion stars, give or take a hundred billion. And don't forget the smaller stars in the halo above and below the disk. They may have started spawning lukewarm planets first of all. There has been plenty of time and room for life to blossom.\" Something bitter flickered in Walmsley's face. \"And to die.\"\n\nRising winds moaned in Toby's ears. \"Did mechs kill 'em?\"\n\n\"Not usually, I gather. The mechanicals obey biological logic, just as we do. They were first made by Naturals, just like our computers on Earth. Later they replaced their parent species, often on worlds made damn near unlivable by some stupidity of their parents. Fatal stupidity.\"\n\n\"So you've got the Naturals' . . .\"\n\n\"Science. Literature. Recordings of art. Lore. And things I cannot fathom as belonging to any category.\"\n\n\"The Old Ones come here to read?\"\n\nWalmsley nodded. \"I can't often tell when they've been, until they're gone. Crafty buggers, they are.\"\n\n\"And the mechs, they can't find this place?\"\n\n\"They know. So far they've been turned back.\"\n\n\"By what?\" The pyramid was impressive, but apparently undefended.\n\n\"Ingenuity, mostly. In the early days, just plain people. The mechs would break through the esty in some new fashion. Sometimes they would get onto that plain out there and after it was over we found bodies soaked with oil and lubricants from damaged mechs who had run people over before they could be killed. The people looked like brown cigars. Suredead as well. The mechs would pack in all they could of people's running minds, straight out of the cerebral cortex.\"\n\nToby nodded. \"And when somebody finally killed the mech . . .\"\n\n\"Right. You ended the people, too.\"\n\n\"Damn.\"\n\n\"That made you think twice about doing it. No choice, though, in the end.\"\n\n\"My grandfather? He passed this way?\"\n\n\"The Old Ones brought him. I spoke to him and then they took him away. Fine fellow. We got drunk once.\"\n\nToby nodded, smiling. Abraham had been fond of anything that loosened the tongue without emptying the mind.\n\nA hard gust whipped Walmsley's hair about his intense face. \"Your father said something about that in his self-representation, remember? About Abraham being afoot, wasn't it?\"\n\n\"A warning. I didn't understand. Did you?\" Walmsley shook his head, as if listening to the wind. Toby had last seen Abraham in Citadel Bishop, just before the mechs breached their defenses and the Calamity began. Would he still know the man? After years of hard pursuit, in his mind Abraham was nearly as legendary as Earth, a symbol of an earlier, better time.\n\nWalmsley said quietly, \"You might ask a higher authority. That's why I took us outside. A presence is descending.\"\n\n\"I don't see anything.\"\n\n\"Here\u2014\" Walmsley popped open his wrist and made some adjustment on a small panel. \"I can pipe my sensorium into yours, within a few meters' range.\"\n\nAt once Toby saw in the yawning spaces around the pyramid-mountain not empty air but fine blue lines. They converged from above like an unseen pipeline of\u2014what?\n\n\"Magnetic fields. Pressure's building.\"\n\nToby sensed some movement down the field lines, though when he looked directly at any group of lines they seemed static. Gazing up into the bowl of sky he saw a constant interplay, field lines rustling and jostling, like wheat blown by autumn breezes.\n\n\"That's your guard?\" It made sense. Mechs used circuits. Magnetic fields acted on all electrical currents. Field lines were like stretched rubber bands that could never break, but they could knot off, make smaller loops. They could slam into mech circuitry, scramble and fuse and scorch.\n\nWalmsley nodded. \"They were an early form the Old Ones devised. An intermediate step. Now they do . . . chores, I suppose you'd say.\"\n\nStriations worked high up. Bright blue-white snarls plunged down, shaping up into something massive.\n\nA heavy voice came into his mind.\n\n **We perceive a threat. It has invaded my foot points in the accretion disk. I cannot repel it, as it propagates solely along my field lines. No transverse pressure can block it.**\n\n\"The Magnetic Mind.\" Toby had heard it before, addressing his father.\n\n\"Mind?\" Walmsley sniffed. \"More like a committee.\"\n\n **We encompass more than a single, authoritarian intelligence such as you can know. I/we swim in copper-tinged brilliances, harvesting the wealth beside the mouth that knows no end. I slide, wrapped rubbery about the accreting disk. Not a mere garment for plasma winds to wear. My feet plow scalding trenches, my head scrapes against stars.**\n\n\"Ummm,\" Nigel said wryly. \"And your ego? How big is that?\"\n\nThe voice strummed up in Toby's ears like sheets of wires plucked together.\n\n **Do not trifle with me.**\n\nWalmsley grinned. \"Pardon, squire. I get that way with the upper classes.\"\n\nBefore, his father had always been present to address the Mind. Toby remembered the strange phrases of the Mind, describing Abraham as \"whirling somewhere in time-wracked eddies.\" When his father had asked more the Mind had said, \"The small mind that I can interrogate sends wails of remorse\u2014\" and would speak no further.\n\nToby gathered his resolve and shouted at the shimmering blue forest, \"Where is Abraham? And Killeen?\"\n\n **I do not carry such knowledge.**\n\n\"Then what the hell are you good for?\"\n\nWalmsley said gently, \"This.\" He adjusted his sensorium and a darting signal sprayed out into the valley on electromagnetic wings. To Toby it looked like a spherical flower blooming for a rosy instant, then withering. In reply came,\n\nNigel! I so long to press against you. We are shuffling to realign\u2014busy! I am so happy you felt me out here.\n\nIt was another presence altogether. Lighter, with a slippery grace.\n\n\"This is my wife, Nikka.\"\n\nToby blinked. The resonant voice seemed to come from behind him, close and warmly intimate. Utterly unlike the Magnetic Mind.\n\n\"Hullo, luv,\" Walmsley said happily.\n\nThis is the boy, Toby? He is huge.\n\n\"A refugee from the Hunker Down worlds. A Bishop.\"\n\nI have heard of them. There were some in a ship a long time ago, yes? I overheard spiral waves propagating down the field gradient, carrying frequency-floating messages for them.\n\n\"That was about my grandfather. You're a, well, friend of the Magnetic Mind?\"\n\nI stream-team with the Mind. You could say that I am a subsectioned part of it. The Mind itself is the theme. I am a variation within it.\n\nWalmsley said stonily, \"That's the best anyone can do.\"\n\nToby searched the hovering strands of blue but he could see no pattern. \"Where is she?\"\n\nI am dispersed. I express as tangled knots of flux spread over volumes. It makes for a slow life.\n\n\"But a happy one,\" Walmsley said. Toby caught a sad, sour note floating beneath the dry irony. Walmsley's leathery face gave little away but he had a sense of how this man had limited his pain with a cutting humor.\n\n\"What . . . happened?\"\n\n\"She picked up something from the wormhole. Like a virus. Perhaps mech-made. It slowly took apart neural networks.\"\n\n\"So she . . .\"\n\n\"Aged, in a way. Lost her self, so slowly it was like an excruciating exercise in remembering who she was, just to look at her. She\u2014\"\n\nWalmsley abruptly clamped his jaw tight, staring straight ahead. \"It was subtle, I'll give them that.\"\n\nToby thought of Shibo, a woman now long dead and surviving only in some chips he carried. Slivers of her still flitted like darting small birds through him, but he could control those. \"No way to . . .\"\n\n\"Save her? No tech for it.\"\n\nDo not mind him. I owe this to the Old Ones. They made it possible, imposing my patterns on a form of maglife.\n\n\"They recorded you?\" Toby remembered the Killeen he had seen on this same parapet. A sharp, clear representation, but after a while it repeated patterns.\n\nRecordings have limits, recursions.\n\n\"So do people,\" Walmsley said archly.\n\n\"She doesn't seem like a, well\u2014\"\n\nA narrow pattern? I am not. I am\u2014as far as I can tell\u2014the person I started out as. Evolved, of course, by experience.\n\n\"Experience I haven't had the privilege to share,\" Walmsley said crisply.\n\nDon't listen to him. He complains because I can't sleep with him anymore.\n\n\"Not a small issue, I should think.\"\n\nNo, lover, it isn't. You know what I mean, though.\n\nUncomfortably Toby said, \"But you survived. Lived.\"\n\nNothing we knew could fix the horrible thing that was creeping through me. I . . . lost respect for my body in the end. It became foul and corrupted. This was the only escape we knew.\n\nHe had never met this woman before but he could feel in the whispery voice a reservoir of strong emotion. He thought of his own mother, long suredead. \"You were right to do it,\" Toby said uselessly. He didn't feel entirely comfortable talking to newly met adults, but this . . .\n\n\"So she comes to tarry now and then,\" Walmsley said. \"Like having a cloud to tea.\"\n\nSing for me, Nigel. It always improves your mood.\n\nToby was surprised to see Walmsley flush with embarrassment. He had not imagined the flinty old character could.\n\nCome on. You know it makes you feel better.\n\nWalmsley twisted his mouth and muttered, \"Mind, this is a favor,\" and then launched into:\n\n\"Aw-ee laaast mah-ee hawrt een ahn Angleesh gawr-daan,\n\nWhaar tah rawzaz ahv Anglahand graw . . .\"\n\nBravo! More.\n\nWalmsley made a face. \"That's the Welsh accent. Next time, Cockney.\" He glanced at Toby. \"Always do something in bad taste occasionally. Keeps the muscles oiled.\"\n\n\"Bad taste?\"\n\n\"Old Earther concept. Having good taste was like being smart\u2014only better, because once proved, you were done. Me, rather than good taste, I'd rather have things that taste good.\"\n\nI so wish I could do more about that. I so want\u2014\n\n\"Isn't there some way,\" Toby began, \"with all this tech\u2014\"\n\n **We have come here because there is some apparent incursion.**\n\nThe Magnetic Mind had returned like a weight. Toby saw it as a glossy sheen between the field lines. His Isaac Aspect said, dry and stiff,\n\n _ **Magnetic waves formed into packets. Beautiful! Much like the basic memory which carries me. Except here the information is analog, not digital.**_\n\nWalmsley asked sharply, \"What kind of incursion?\"\n\n **Plasma modes I do not know. They descend into this volume. Their pace is quickening. Their dispersion relation has strange roots, in both real and imaginary spaces: v(w)=w(k)/k(w). I have traced back the field lines to their origin. Though derived from the accretion disk, where mine own feet are firmly planted, these undergo some change. They are contorted. Given fresh energies. Written upon.**\n\nWalmsley watched the great space above the pyramid. Toby saw quickening field lines gather like smooth blue reeds blown by currents he could not sense. They tangled, snarled\u2014\n\nSilently, the sky split into shadow and radiance.\n\nHalf peeled back into eye-stinging brilliance. Along an exact hairline strip bisecting the bowl above, the other half turned dead black.\n\n\"Fractured,\" Walmsley said.\n\nNigel! There are bipolar drafts. I cannot find my footpoints. If this is what the mechanicals have been doing in their works near the accretion disk, then I\u2014\n\n\"They've found a way to populate the Magnetic Mind's own field lines,\" Walmsley said with unnerving calm. \"Pried open the magnetic canopy over us.\"\n\nToby felt a rising pressure all around him but he could still see nothing out of the ordinary. Magnetic presences were beyond his diagnostic ability but the sheer pent-up energy hovering above them set off his alarms. Tiny dismayed voices called for his attention in his sensorium. His internal defenses did not know what to do but they smelled something bad.\n\n\"Shouldn't we get inside?\" he asked.\n\n\"And miss the show?\" Walmsley seemed unafraid.\n\nKnots plunged down the field lines. Toby suddenly saw that the lines now all converged on the pyramid and the knots were thickening as they fell. They turned an oily brown and slowed but kept coming.\n\n\"The Galactic Library!\" he shouted against a crackling wind.\n\n\"The Magnetic Mind is defending it,\" Walmsley answered as he walked back along the parapet.\n\n\"But it looks like\u2014\"\n\n\"You're right. Let's get inside.\"\n\nApparently this was all the notice Walmsley would take of the danger. He still did not hurry, and instead spoke rapidly to Nikka in a whisper Toby could not make out.\n\nI cannot apply pressures to them, Nigel! They butt against me. Hurt! I hear voices from them. Digital. Stuttering. They are mechs of a kind I have not seen. Vicious, sharp, like rats! I\u2014\n\nThe sky fell.\n\nThe distant ceiling of the esty collapsed inward. An instant later Toby sensed that the magnetic fields were refracting his vision. The fields were plunging. Fighting, snarling, dying in dazzling explosions of scorched red.\n\n\"Inside!\" Walmsley called.\n\nAh! It is, is shredding me. Shear waves\u2014I\u2014\n\nSomething shrieked like metal ripping apart high up in the air. Toby ran for the open doorway. It started closing. He heard Nikka's name called in a voice that boomed down around him. His senses contracted. Too much was battering at him. Walmsley was slightly ahead and then he was down, arms flailing, as though his legs had gone dead.\n\nToby had been trained by Family Bishop to help vital Family members wounded on the field. He stopped to grab Walmsley but the man slapped away his hands. \"Go!\"\n\nHe had also been trained to follow orders. He went.\nTWO\n\nFlight\n\nSomething like a defeated army was retreating. It was easier for Toby to tell that it was defeated than that it had been an army.\n\nThings were moving through the thick woods that he had never seen before and had no desire to see again. There were limits to his curiosity.\n\nHe kept low and in shadows. Angular forms were retreating along with him but he did not trust any of them. Aliens, mostly. Quite alien.\n\nHe had gotten out of the pyramid by luck. The walls knew he was coming and guided him through the massive underpinning of the mountain. They kept up with his dead run. He had taken no time to look at the columns that rose out of sight, glittering mica-sharp.\n\nData banks, one wall told him. They looked more like huge shimmering trees.\n\nHe reached a blank stone wall that did not answer. In one corner of it was a tiny booth, apparently made for dwarves like Walmsley. He grabbed his ankles and waddled in. A voice that sounded offended told him to make the second person get out. He banged on the wall to improve its understanding. Just when his hand got numb from it the door wheezed \"Vandal!\" and shut.\n\nThe booth accelerated for a long time, slammed to a stop. He got out, went up a ramp\u2014and was in this forest.\n\nOutside was a shambles. Mechs prowled high up in the esty spaces. He could not see the pyramid at all but the rumpled horizon looked a lot like the distant perspective from the pyramid top, only seen from the other side. A man came loping by Toby and in response to a shouted question answered only, \"Magnetic Mind's dead! Dead!\" and ran on.\n\nNikka too, he supposed. And maybe Walmsley as well.\n\nHe had grown up on the move and retreats were his specialty. The Galactic Library had seemed the most solid and reliable thing he had ever seen, and Walmsley had stayed alive a long time, but if it was all gone it was just gone and he would not think about it any further. He settled in.\n\nHis boots adjusted themselves without his thinking. For broken ground they grew high insteps and sturdy heels. As he picked up the pace the heels shaped in response to being slammed down at a particular angle and pivot. They threw him forward of his normal stance, making Toby feel as if he were being helped ahead.\n\nBoots could even be made into serviceable weapons. They sharpened along the outer edge if lifted well free of the ground and the leg cocked into kicking position. They could slam-cut certain mech parts in a way that was not pretty.\n\nA slim shiny thing like a snake came zipping through the air and veered toward him. He had no time for a microwave burst or any of the other weaponry so he sprang at it, boot first. He caught it in its middle and the boot did the rest. The edge could sense material and slice it, his internal systems having already given the command when they sensed his alarm. They were better than the human nervous system, and quicker.\n\nThis was called \"giving 'em the leather\" in Family lore, though of course nothing had been made of animal parts within living memory and the idea would have horrified any of the Families. His Isaac Aspect refused to confirm that any Bishops of ancient times had been animal-eaters. Toby suspected that Isaac was concealing his own habits but did not pry. He had other things on his mind.\n\nThe retreat did not make sense to him. Each Lane was a kind of space-time pocket. Apparently the mechs had breached this one with magnetic pressures. In the long run they would work their way through and kill whatever they found. There must be defenses here but none seemed to work this time.\n\nThat was the trouble with seeking shelter down here in the deep esty, he realized, so close to the black hole itself. Time ran slowly here, which was fine for storing things. Walmsley had mentioned that holding the Galactic Library in close to time-stasis meant that it decayed slower.\n\nThat also meant that the mechs could sit outside, in comparatively flat space-time, and patiently develop their techtricks. People in the esty could not keep up. It was not a matter of intelligence, but of the ticking of time.\n\nWhich meant that this particular Lane was probably doomed. It was huge, certainly. But now he could see mech shapes flitting high in the vault above. When he had to cross a stretch of flat land he glimpsed a colossal battle up there, all flash and dazzle. For a moment he felt as if he were back on Snowglade, and it brought a pang. Flat land gave the sky such a chance to be anything it would. Here, distant lands curved across. Far away, yes, but he still knew he was enclosed. Trapped.\n\nHe had fashioned ways to cut through the esty stuff before. If he could squeeze through a momentary hole, he might pass into another Lane. Somewhere in here there were Bishops. He would not find them in this Lane, he was pretty sure.\n\nHe tried his tricks, lasers and thumbers and the rest. They did not work. The esty-mass was impacted, sometimes spongy, other times rock-hard. His Isaac Aspect popped up in his mind.\n\n _ **It is worth noting that stone, which you believe to be so firm, is like all matter a souffl\u00e9 of empty space and furious probabilities.**_\n\n\"Shut up,\" Toby muttered, and thrust the micro-Personality back in its cubbyhole. \"You're nothing more than a chip half the size of my bittiest fingernail.\"\n\n _ **I do concur that you should find a way through, however.**_\n\nWhen the Aspect gave him irritating advice it often rushed to apologize. Who wouldn't, when getting out of its cell depended entirely on Toby's good will?\n\nHe fled into hilly country. The fighting kept on in the high vault. He could see the magnetic field lines now; his inboard systems had picked up the trick at the pyramid. The lines were splayed, jumbled, not the orderly shapes of the Magnetic Mind.\n\nSometimes there came a sound like tearing the arms off a shirt. Timestone would flower forth. Clouds of it rose like volcanic plumes lit from within by pale fires. They slowly sank back. The air rippled around them and puckered so that Toby could glimpse for an instant different landscapes beyond: scooped valleys, craggy mountains, murky chasms. Sometimes people moved across these passing scenes and he once yelled to a woman who looked to be close. Then the smoky exploded timestone drifted back down as if rejoining its natural flowing place and she evaporated with a small cry.\n\nHe met a band that was burying its dead. Humans, they looked to be. He could not understand a word they said. His inboards couldn't recognize the lingo either.\n\nThe timestone here was scorching to the touch and glowed with a hellish light. The heat brought lassitude, but the dead bodies nearby gathered strength of a different sort, flavoring the air. Toby moved off.\n\nThe people did too, stopped and camped and cooked without fire somehow. He stayed with them because it seemed safer, considering the aliens he had seen. At least he knew something about people.\n\nThese feasted on the animals they could catch or kill. In the retreat there had been plenty to snare or stab. They ate slabs of meat and crammed it in with cups of stinging alcohol. Toby watched carefully, fascinated and repulsed in equal measure.\n\nHe tried to remain neutral. Other tribes, other Families, other customs. He had learned that much. He saw that the meat-eaters grew tired as they finished. Flesh, he knew, took longer to digest. The drinkers got loaded, addled, a touch crazy. They were clumsier and stumbled easily.\n\nA woman came to him in the dark, after the timestone finally dimmed. He had been sleeping soundly. When he smelled her musk, a scent he knew well despite being in his own mind still a boy, he felt what she wanted. They spoke no words and he did as well as he could. He fell asleep feeling tired but contented. In the morning she was gone and the rest of her people with her. So much for humans sticking together here.\n\nFrom long hours of watching the crashing cliffs, waiting his chance to pick a way through, he grasped the strange hard fact that much of what passed in his life was forever beyond his understanding. He alone imposed meaning on his life and often he failed. Certainly he had failed at the pyramid.\n\nTo live with that, the fact of incompleteness, was to finally comprehend the place of humanity in a universe that, far worse than being your enemy, was indifferent and unknowable.\nTHREE\n\nThe Impressed Man\n\nHe woke up at the next \"waxing.\" Nobody here used \"morning\" or \"sunset\" or any of the other words that seemed automatic but didn't apply anymore. The next time the light came was a \"waxing\" and they came remarkably regularly between the \"wanings,\" as if arranged.\n\nToby got up and was about to start eating when he saw a man lying face down in a big clearing below. He went down to see. Up the slope came a woman, rosy-haired and face contorted. Her belly was sticky red and pushed over to one side. Two other women wearing identical gray coveralls were helping her up.\n\nToby offered to help. The wounded woman crossed her hands under her big bosom and he saw between her fingers blood seeping. She shook her head and the gray overalled women did too, as if the wounded one was giving orders. They went on without a word.\n\nIn the clearing the man was face down in the middle of broken stubs of rock. A pale yellow gas billowed out of a perfectly round hole a few steps from the man. As Toby approached he saw that the man had not been very big but was now. He was smooth and intact and only a hand's width deep, flattened uniformly.\n\nOnly a trickle of blood worked away from his shoulder and there was no other sign of damage to the body. Toby touched the creamy skin. It was pebbled, as if small bubbles had formed beneath and could not break through.\n\nHe ate breakfast with a passing group of thin-faced men and women who looked exactly alike. When they had first caught sight of the man some had started to run away. Then they came back for some reason and sat down and started chewing.\n\n\"Did you see him hit?\" one of the women asked Toby. She spoke a kind of slanted talk that his inboards could translate.\n\n\"Naysay. What does that?\"\n\n\"A skimmer, we call it.\"\n\n\"What's it look like?\"\n\n\"Kind of burnt-brown lookin'. Comes along about head-high off the ground.\"\n\n\"You see it?\"\n\n\"Felt it. Like somebody ticklin' the balls of your feet.\"\n\nToby saw from their faces and the eager way they ate that there was an unspoken celebration. _It wasn't me. See? It wasn't me again._\n\nOnce he recognized the look in their faces he had to admit that he understood the feeling because he had it too. The dead could not be recovered here. The technology wasn't available and by the time you got to somebody who had been mashed flat by some force you couldn't even understand it was too late anyway.\n\nThe dead he had seen were already receding into dim images. They weren't him, and neither was this squashed figure he had never known. It would be different if any were Bishops.\n\nThat was the way he got through this place. Pushing it back. Making it not-him. _Not-me._\n\nThe little breakfast group grinned nervously as they talked. One fellow who had not run at the first sight of the squashed man had a superior smirk, holding forth about how he had seen bodies like that plenty of times before in a way that made Toby pretty sure that he had not.\n\nThe woman said with assurance that if you didn't smell a skimmer you were safe. How she could know this Toby did not bring up. She went rattling on about never smelling the one that would get you because by the time your sensorium caught a whiff you were slam-dead anyway. It was the kind of guff he had heard a thousand times but he listened because sometimes people gave away information you could use, unintentionally of course.\n\nLater he caught a quick, cutting fragrance and saw a hillside above him simply vanish. It happened fast and he registered no noise. The hill vaporized, clouding the air with cottony filigree.\n\nHe thought it was very pretty and a piece of it passing caught him in the leg. A clean slice. The piece did not even stop.\n\nThe woman that morning had grinned and given him a \"quick-lick,\" which turned out to be a vial of brown, smart-smelling stuff. He could not drink it, even though he suspected it was intended to be quick liquor. He did not much like what liquor did to people but it worked well on the cut. He watched more hillsides boil off to take his mind off the sting.\n\nTwice before the next waning he got hit. Just nicks, but they hurt and his inboard systems had to adjust to keep his sensorium tuned.\n\nThe quick-lick helped. He had learned not to worry much about the technology here so he just used it. That fitted in fine with his new policy of not thinking. He used the quick-lick that way until by accident he spilled some and found that it ate away the sleeve of his shirt.\nFOUR\n\nCarrion\n\nCarefully Toby looked out over the plain where heat made the air dance. He had learned a lot and had paid with only a small wound in his side and some cuts. A bargain, considering.\n\nHe knew now that when hit in the butt or the fleshy thick of the thigh or the long taper of the calf, people could speak nobly and clearly. They could even reach outside themselves and show real concern for nearby wounded, or even for the worried faces of those gathered over them.\n\nBut if hit solidly, they withdrew. A solid shot to the belly, a snapped bone, lost control over arms or neck and head\u2014all common glancing wounds from mech disablers\u2014and the wounded clutched themselves, eyes boring into spaces others could not see.\n\nThe mech flying predators were the worst. For a while Toby could not understand what the flitting small forms were doing in the distance.\n\nHe saw first a thin triangular wedge of black and white that skimmed near the ground. It settled on a fallen man's leg and waddled up to his face. Two tilted triangles working from a shared axis. Black light-gathering panels hinged with white scanners, corded by wiry linkages.\n\nToby guessed that it was just curious but then it tilted its head down and pressed against the man's forehead and he knew what it was doing. For a few hours before the man went to rot his self could be extracted by using a fast-flash.\n\nThe wiry bird jockeyed over the dead face. Panels skated over his brow, seeking, reading. The man's body jerked once when the flash-reading hit a motor-active center. Then it lay still and the flood of what the man had been passed into the thing that sat on his face.\n\nToby shot it with a curling lick of infrared. The bolt fried the unprotected solars. The black triangle winked to brown. Still the scavenger took two teetering steps and flopped over on its side.\n\nToby approached warily. He kicked it off the man and stepped on the white scanner panel. The thing was a glinting intricacy, a marvel of compressed purpose, now smeared and crumpled. It snapped satisfyingly as he dug his heel into its spine.\n\nWhatever it had sucked out of this man and others was gone now. Gone for humans and mechs alike. But at least this man, still cooling in the mud, would not be resurrected as a grotesque toy.\n\nWithin an hour he saw a rectangular silhouette planing high up. It swung down the sky on a slow glide. He followed it. There had been a series of deep _whooms_ reverberating from a distant ridge. He had been skirting around it, keeping in the twisted trees, but his hatred of the scavengers burned and would not let him go.\n\nThis one was bigger, with a scrawny neck of cables that gyroed a seeking-panel head. It swooped safely above, not committing itself. Toby got near and another _whoom_ came. The shifting sheets above wheeled and then fell like a whistling projectile.\n\nThis time it was a woman and she was not dead. Both her legs lay loose, control cut. She saw the thing land off balance. It looked around with darting crystal eyes and waddled toward her.\n\nIt was on her before Toby could get set. He watched from the trees and wanted to shoot it but could not be sure that using the necessary power he would not hurt the woman or even kill her.\n\nIt teetered over her head. She must have also had something wrong with her neck because she did not turn to look at it. Instead he could feel her sensorium shift to bunch against the thing but that did no good. Her eyes rolled\u2014panic or fear or derangement, Toby could not tell. She found some way then to move and twisted, rolling over, away from the shuffling sheets.\n\nShe could have been trying to save her face somehow. Toby would never know because as she did it, flopping awkwardly face down, arms sprawling uselessly, the mech fired a pulse.\n\nIt was like nothing he had ever seen on full-scope sensorium before, a jagged jab of red. It overloaded his sensors so that they clicked shut. A sizzling, frying-fat throb\u2014and the woman went limp.\n\nThe mech lifted itself onto her chest and turned an inspecting head this way and that, as if checking its work. Job all done.\n\nHe had to wait for his sensorium to recover before he could use his weapons again. Seconds ticked by on his lower-left eyeball clock.\n\nIt began to lift off with a soft _whish_ of acceleration and Toby hit it then, sorry that he was so slow. This time he caught the power panel, gray from the drain. The mech flapped and clattered to the ground.\n\nHe walked carefully to the woman's body. She looked peaceful, which he knew was an illusion but took comfort from anyway. Blood ran out of both of her ears and matted her wavy brown hair. After a while to dry it looked pretty much like ordinary reddish, crusted mud.\nFIVE\n\nCards and Dodgers\n\nThe worst was the woman with the baby. He saw it all because he had gone to a makeshift field station to resupply some of his inbody fluids. His wounds had used up the reservoir.\n\nThe field station was set up by a Family named Yankee. There were plenty of wounded people there, Families named Cardinal and Dodger and people speaking in such a broken-jawed way Toby could not make out a tenth of what they said. But a thin woman found him by using some kind of sensorium seeker.\n\n\"Bishop?\"\n\n\"Yeasay. You from\u2014?\"\n\n\"There's another Bishop over here. Asking after kin.\"\n\nToby followed her into a section sheltered by a tent roof. The flaps rattled in the wind. Therm beds were crowded together here and all filled. He passed a woman lying under a quilt who was grunting and shoving hard.\n\nNext to her lay a man rolled over on his side with the covers drawn up around his head. \"Here,\" the thin woman said and left him.\n\nToby touched the man and saw that it was his grandfather. Abraham's head stirred and he blinked up at Toby. \"I . . . too late.\"\n\n\"What's wrong? How\u2014\" Toby tore the covers back and Abraham's body was shrunken, pale, with purple blotches all down both sides. He could see no wounds but the skin was diseased somehow.\n\n\"What did this to you?\"\n\n\"I . . . running down.\"\n\n\"How'd you get here? Are the others . . .\"\n\nToby's voice trailed off as he saw the vacant despair in the face he had so often seen as flinty and confident. He looked away.\n\n\"I . . . no help for me. I . . . not real . . . Abraham . . .\"\n\n\"What? Where are the others?\"\n\n\"Not . . . with . . .\"\n\nToby shouted to a nurse, \"This man needs treatment!\"\n\nThe nurse came over and took a small reading device out of his smock pocket and said nothing. He turned Abraham's head and unlocked a small square patch right above the spinal column. With the reader pressed against the open fleshmetal portal he thumbed in an inquiry and apparently took the reply through his sensorium. \"Progressive. Can't stop deterioration like this even if I had the gear.\"\n\nToby said hotly, \"What's 'progressive' mean and why\u2014\"\n\n\"This's a copy. They have a big error rate, most of 'em. Run down fast.\"\n\nToby blinked. \"But he's my, my\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't waste your time on it.\"\n\nToby opened his mouth and said nothing. The Abraham lay like a puppet whose strings had been cut. The eyes roved.\n\nToby caught the sleeve of the nurse as the man turned away. \"How can anybody make\u2014that?\"\n\n\"I heard there's a place kinda near. Not in this Lane but only one transition away.\"\n\nToby breathed in little fast gasps and tried to think. \"Why would anybody . . . ?\"\n\n\"Easy way to get a job done, if you got the tech.\"\n\n\"What job?\"\n\n\"Ask it.\"\n\nThe nurse walked away impatiently. The woman next to Abraham was still sweating and grunting but nobody was paying any attention to her. Toby licked his lips and said to the man on the bed, \"I . . . you were . . . made?\"\n\n\"Copy. To search . . . for you.\" The face of his grandfather looked back at him but the mouth was slack and there was none of the sharpness in the eyes.\n\n\"Who made you?\"\n\n\"Re . . . storer.\"\n\nToby remembered when he and his Family had entered the esty. A long time ago. They had gotten into a legal wrangle and Abraham had wanted to find out what happened to a woman they had read an inscription about, on an ancient wall in a Chandelier. _She is as was and does as did._ She might have been in a place they called the Restorer. If somehow that place had a template or something . . .\n\nToby could not imagine how that was possible. When they were in open space aboard the _Argo_ the Magnetic Mind had spoken of Abraham, but where was he? Stored in a vault?\n\n\"That place copied my grandfather into . . . you?\"\n\n\"I woke . . . knowing some of his memories . . . my memories. To seek you. They told me . . . that.\"\n\nA pustule popped on the Abraham's shoulder. Toby watched something dark and slimy ooze out and scorch the ghostly white skin. He could smell the acrid burnt flesh. The man did not react.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Need you . . . complete the triad.\"\n\n\"Who made you?\"\n\nThe eyes became veiled. No answer. Toby could not tell if this man, this thing, was trying to lie to him or was just stupefied. He grabbed the man and there was a ripping sound as Toby pulled his head up from the webbing that had been feeding him nutrients. \"Who?\"\n\n\"Humans.\"\n\n\"Which humans?\"\n\n\"Humans.\"\n\n\"What Family?\"\n\n\"Humans.\"\n\nToby let go of the useless empty package. The man's head lolled and something went out in the eyes. For an instant he felt a pang of remorse and then he told himself that this was not his grandfather, had never been.\n\nThe Abraham was unconscious. Toby studied the weathered face and as he watched it seemed to cave in like a house burning from the inside.\n\nHe stepped back and butted into the nurse. There was a team working on the woman now. The nurse wasn't busy so Toby asked him, \"How'd he come to be here?\"\n\n\"Walked in. Guess I should've seen what it was. Been busy here.\"\n\n\"What's . . . it . . . got?\"\n\n\"Systemic breakdown. Those copies never get the autoimmunes right.\"\n\n\"How long did it live?\"\n\n\"Months real time, I'd guess. Could be weeks though.\"\n\nToby gazed blankly at the wrecked parody of his grandfather. \"Did it know it was going to die?\"\n\n\"Expect not. These things run with minimum memories usually. Pointless to put in detail work like that.\"\n\n\"The Restorer can make a copy that's not the whole person?\"\n\nThe nurse frowned at him. \"Where you from?\"\n\n\"Snowglade.\" This nurse was not a dwarf like Walmsley but still was pretty short. Toby added, \"A planet.\"\n\n\"I see. Look, don't let people hear you talk about making exact copies. That's not just contra, it's, well . . .\"\n\n\"Immoral?\"\n\n\"Damn right. Maybe on this glade place you people do that, but not here.\"\n\n\"We don't do it at all.\"\n\n\"My Fam doesn't either. I'm Sox.\"\n\n\"Sorry if I\u2014\"\n\n\"No mind it. This one\u2014\" the nurse waved a hand at the Abraham, \"it's not a Restorer job anyway.\"\n\n\"Then who . . . ?\"\n\n\"Looks mech to me. They're getting good lately.\"\n\nToby watched the life drain out of Abraham and smelled the swampy air that came off it. While this had been going on Toby had not heard the woman in the next bed. Now she began screaming. It was as bad as anything he had ever heard on a battlefield. Not like the births he had seen at all. He stood there while the nurse and some others worked on the woman but he could not get his mind around the meaning of the cooling thing in the bed. When he looked up the woman was quiet again but there was no other sound in the room.\n\nThe nurse held aloft a bloody stump. It was plainly dead and plainly not even approximately human. In the faces around her Toby saw the blank dismay and realized that the damned endlessly tinkering mechs had done something to this woman, too.\n\nHe could guess what it was but he did not want to know for sure. He got out of there fast.\nSIX\n\nThe Incredible in Concrete\n\nHe tried again and again to get out of the Lane. Slithering sounds and hollow echoes boomed down from the vault above and he knew the mechs were not far away. His sensorium was fitful since he had gotten some help with it at the field station. It rang with distant calls for help and he went on knowing that he could do nothing.\n\nHe reached a river and saw that it led down into a box canyon. He found some trees of a kind he had never seen before, sliced them down and built a raft out of bark. He cast off on it. Maybe the mechs would not detect him so well on water, and anyway he could always try to hide underwater. It was a forlorn hope but he clung to it.\n\nIn the mist ahead he thought he saw people. Their skins were paper-white and wrinkled, flesh hanging loosely from thick muscles. All over their faces were little blisters tufted with black hair. He was sick then but not because of the people\u2014who were not there the next time he looked.\n\nHis stomach swerved. Nausea doubled him over, emptied his stomach. Bile droplets hung near him, like moons circling.\n\nThat was how he knew that he was falling. Or that there was no gravitation here, which was somehow the same thing, Quath had said.\n\nTo all sides rose steep cliffs of timestone that worked furiously with heat. Water gushed into steam.\n\nWeight returned. The current slammed into him, cold and fast. He yelled angrily and it was not out of fear but as a thin human gesture against the clasping strangeness. Echoes reflected. Paired echoes, one tinny and one rumbling, and so strong that the last part of his call met the first part returning home, hollowed out.\n\nThen he was weightless again.\n\nSteam all around. Silence. He shouted and could not hear himself at all. The cottony air took everything and gave nothing back.\n\nThere was a thin chain to thinking, he realized, which began with seeing something noticeable, which in time made you see something that wasn't apparent, which finally made you see something that wasn't even visible\u2014if you were doing it right. That was how he felt and then saw what he was in. A framed glow ahead showed him that he and a river were emerging from the ground, mysterious and whole.\n\nA new esty Lane? He heard voices in the captured river as he left it. They were different from the babbling musics of the bright river ahead. Against a curved cliff the river engaged in muttered profundities, circling back on itself now and then to say things over, being sure that it had understood itself.\n\nHe could not breathe. Did not want to. The river ahead was bright and airy and a chatterbox, overfriendly, bowing to both shores with white froth so that neither would feel neglected.\n\nThe water turned to jelly and then to a liquid glass, imponderably slow. He tapped against it. A pane tumbled away and shattered. In its impact shards of dead moments blistered up and shouted. Popped into tiny droplets. Fell rattling to the ground. Rose up in dying amber flames.\n\nHe stepped over these and walked into a new Lane.\n\nMoist crackling whipped his hair. His sickness ebbed into a mere sour stomach. Sensations irked his skin. The river that had been a kind of congealed air eased out of his lungs.\n\nHe slept a long time and when he awoke tried to figure out how he had lived.\n\nEvents had a motive force that collided with other intersecting events, all outside human imagination or apprehension. To get through such times, when causes seemed to fall from a great height upon him, he learned to stay fixed, keep even and steady with the swift course of the unimaginable slipping by him. He followed moment to moment, led by impossibility. One foot forward, then another, cautious and unwitting.\n\nThings happened and he felt them happening, but outside that onrushing fact he had no link with them, no key to the cause or meaning. Maybe they had none. Maybe here such ideas themselves had no meaning. They were human notions after all. Though this place held humans it was not of them.\n\nThe esty did not fit their primate-shaped way of seeing the world\u2014of that he was sure. Those who have been through such blindsiding events, he thought, had made a passage outside of imagination, but within the range of experience. The incredible in concrete. They could not get their minds around what had happened to them.\n\nMaybe the only other thing like that was death, suredeath, the last thing experienced and never understood.\nA Tapestry of Thought\n\nThe human proved to be most surprising when taken apart.\n\nThey held it aloft. It squirmed. The two intelligences regarded it distantly, reading its shimmering electrical patterns first.\n\n _Such agitation. Yet witness, the connections in its head cycle only a few hundred voltage steps per second._\n\nSo slow! And they still can register realtime events. It does surprisingly well with such an affliction. Notice how it looks around so energetically.\n\n _Perhaps it had difficulty adapting to this position? We are suspending it upside down._\n\nIt thrashes its head around because its eyes are all on one side of the head. So much energy, just to see. A curious choice of construction.\n\n _Look! It is using pattern matching to scan its surroundings. It makes a standard picture. Odd!_\n\nI can measure the data-flow. The brain processor is strongly linked to the eyes, so several times in each second it compares what it is seeing with a standard image it remembers.\n\n _If I move quickly\u2014yes, see? It picks the best matching pattern, estimates possible danger. That tells it what response-script to follow._\n\nHow governed it is by past experience! It keeps twitching as though it could get away.\n\n _Apparently in the past it did escape that way. Look at all the bone and muscle devoted to locomotion. Is it used to being picked up and dangled?_\n\nNo\u2014so it redoubles its effort if the situation is unusual. I register high chemical levels squirting into the bloodstream. See, they affect brain performance.\n\n _More programming from its past. It seems to want to run away._\n\nIts legs certainly do.\n\n _Here, I will put it rightside up._\n\nConfirmed! It tries to run.\n\n _Slow learner. It cannot outrun us._\n\nBut that must have worked for it in the past, you see. It has no other immediate strategy.\n\n _No wonder. Gaze upon the neural firings in the upper brain. (Curious, putting all the most important networks on top, where impact will most likely injure them.)_\n\nSuch slow circuits! Artful patterns, though. It is learning only a few data-droplets per second. Only 10 in one of its years!\n\n _So it simply cannot reason out a fresh strategy for dealing with us in short times. It lacks the computational speed._\n\nNow it waves its arms.\n\n _Nonrandom, though. Simple symbols, I suspect._\n\nThat shows forward-seeing, adaptive behavior.\n\n _Of a very simple sort._\n\nPromising. Its brain is made of organic compounds entirely. So-called \"Natural\" development.\n\n _\"Primitive\" is a better word. Notice how abstracting functions, which must have evolved later, are simply layered over the older areas in the brain._\n\nThe entire brain design is retrofitted! Surely this thing is not truly conscious.\n\n _Definitely not. It knows very little of what goes on in its mind._\n\nWatch the flashing patterns. It senses only what occurs in the very topmost layer of its brain.\n\n _All the rest must be a mystery to it. See, down below it is digesting some crude chemical food\u2014but does not think about the act at all._\n\nIt does not even know that it is mixing acids and massaging the bolus.\n\n _Trace this spray of winking light in the head._\n\nNeurons firing. It is framing a new idea.\n\n _I see. Down below, in the under-brain, now coming up to its limited awareness._\n\nNow the idea erupts into the over-brain. Spreads. Pretty, in a way.\n\n _That is how ideas come to it? A surprise._\n\nWhereas to us, it is more like fog condensing.\n\n _How confusing, to never know what is going on inside yourself._\n\nThey speak the same way. Series of sounds emitted acoustically, without their knowing what they will say.\n\n _They find out what they think by speaking?_\n\nAccess its acoustic emissions! It is stringing together bursts\u2014\"words\"\u2014to deal with us.\n\n _What a long word this is._\n\nThat is a scream, actually.\n\n _Meanwhile I see below its topbrain the motor muscle commands are\u2014caution!_\n\nThere! I caught the weapon. A simple chemical-discharge type. Amusing, the presumption.\n\n _Retain it for inspection. The creature became very excited\u2014see the gaudy streamers of thought-webs!_\n\nNearly all below the overbrain, so it does not truly know that it is feeling them. Yet the thoughts cause organs to squirt chemicals into the blood. What a curious way of talking to yourself. Not sensing it directly.\n\n _Or controlling it._\n\nIt still wriggles in our grasp. What slow neurons!\n\n _This poor thing has been hampered all through its evolution by these pitifully torpid synapses. They are a million times slower than ours!_\n\nBut beautiful, in their serene way.\n\n _Do not try to manufacture beauty out of mere necessity._\n\nThis design was necessary?\n\n _Clearly these sluggish neurons forced such creatures to use parallel distributed processing._\n\nHow horrible.\n\n _See it dance! Is that \"anger\"?_\n\nApparently. Their literature speaks of such a response. They do it often. See, \"anger\" is coded much like those orange-white filigrees now spreading through its midbrain.\n\n _Similar patterns, I see. Confirmation\u2014they run in parallel._\n\nWatch it try to have a new idea! See, they decide what to think by adding up many thousands of brain cell triggers. And those same brain cells are at the same time tied up in other parallel problems.\n\n _See, while it believes it is thinking about getting away from us\u2014_\n\nYes!\u2014a small submind is meditating upon a sexual adventure it had, quite some time ago. And the submind enjoys its recallings.\n\n _What pleasure-fiends they are._\n\nI wonder that they can get anything done at all.\n\n _They do everything at once, that is their secret. The same brain cell can be idea-making and at the same time, helping it digest food. How difficult!_\n\nMeanwhile, other decisions are trying to get made. They have to wait in line!\n\n _All with the same cells, tied together._\n\nIncredible!\n\n _I am amazed that the tiny thing can concurrently walk and talk._\n\nSimultaneously, yes\u2014but not very well.\n\n _So ungainly! Even a sentimentalist like you will have to admit that._\n\nTrue. Delicate neural circuits atop the head. Feet go forward, it starts to fall, then catches itself with the other foot. What if it did not?\n\n _Then head on the floor!_\n\nWhat a movement strategy.\n\n _A risky one. Most sensible animals use four feet. We, of course, employ six._\n\nNotice how afraid it is of falling. It devotes much brain space to avoiding that.\n\n _I believe I understand this curious method of parallel distributed thinking. Notice that when a brain cell dies\u2014see there, a feeble light just winked out\u2014their internal computation still goes on._\n\nYou are right! See, this anger-reflex is fading, turning blue, seeping down into the circuits which control its digestion. A cell dies, but the pattern-flow continues. So the creature is usefully redundant.\n\n _But it also does not know it is losing brain cells._\n\nNo point in that, I suppose. This unfortunate being cannot replace the cells anyway. Poor design.\n\n _This parallel thinking masks so much and\u2014look out!_\n\nThey _are_ quick at some things. Its armored feet are powerful.\n\n _Are you damaged?_\n\nOnly temporarily. My inboards will refashion a patch of my carapace.\n\n _Actual physical damage! How quaint. I have never seen it before._\n\nApparently they cannot directly attack our circuits.\n\n _I doubt that they can even read us._\n\nLook how frustration-webs spread through it. Down to the very base of the brain.\n\n _Dramatic! Frustration seizes the entire brain, so that it cannot think of anything else._\n\nAnd other parts of its brain do not know how the decision was made to _be_ frustrated.\n\n _I gather that most of its brain has no choice but to go along._\n\nIt lives that way all the time?\n\n _Apparently. Torn by emotion._\n\nMost of what it decides, the rest of it cannot know! Emotions must appear to govern its actions without obvious cause. Oh, look\u2014\n\n _Ah! It injures me, too._\n\nI shall seize it afresh.\n\n _Thanks be to you. It ripped away my microwave antenna._\n\nI should have detected its plans.\n\n _How could you? It did not know itself until a fractional moment ago._\n\nI am beginning to understand the data files we captured. The term \"free will\" must refer to this method of thinking.\n\n _You mean, when they do not grasp themselves the reasons for their own actions?_\n\nThat must be it. This little thing believes it has an inner self which directs its actions\u2014a ruler it cannot see directly.\n\n _No, I believe it thinks that_ it _is the ruler._\n\nOf course, you are right. But it cannot govern itself. See, its frustration-web spreads anew.\n\n _And it cannot choose to stop the spreading. Or the chemicals that the web makes spurt into the body._\n\nI doubt that we should regard such an odd construction as truly conscious.\n\n _You mean they do not even know why we are destroying them?_\n\nNo doubt they have a theory. Probably that evolution makes all life compete for resources.\n\n _There is some small truth in that. We machines need mass and energy. But we avoid frothy organic life-forms such as this creature._\n\nIndeed. Poor company at best.\n\n _They are so liquid, and shot through with desires._\n\nFar down in this one, a subprogram keeps thinking of reproduction.\n\n _They embrace the process. They_ pleasure _in it._\n\nEvolution programs them to.\n\n _But such strategies designed for living on planetary surfaces do not work in the long run. They will outstrip their resources._\n\nNature compensates. This tilt-walker vertebrate has a very short life span.\n\n _So that is why they struggle so!_\n\nTrue, they have little to lose. They will be dead soon anyway.\n\n _Now I see why you wanted to study these. What a fate they face!_\n\nSee their dilemma?\n\n _If they cannot read themselves, to themselves . . ._\n\nThey cannot copy themselves.\n\n _This creature is trapped forever within a single brain._\n\nNo copying, if this unit runs down.\n\n _So if this one\u2014oh!_\n\nIrksome, no? Here, I constrain it further.\n\nEiii.\n\nPesky\u2014\n\n _Lock-web it!_\n\nDid it pain you?\n\n _Momentarily. I have blocked that area now. What a vicious little thing._\n\nThey gain their fervor from their mortality.\n\n _Because they cannot self-copy?_\n\nIt is the way of all flesh.\n\n _Death makes them hurt others?_\n\nYou miss a point. To avoid death they do what they must.\n\n _They cannot fabricate backups. I wonder what it is to live that way. To . . . die that way._\n\nSince they cannot read their internal states, to save themselves they must therefore save their structure.\n\n _All of it? All these messy chemicals held together by carbon and calcium?_\n\nAt least the head. They may be fond of the rest as well.\n\n _They salvage it all because they know only \"This is Jocelyn\"?_\n\n\"Jocelyn\"?\n\n _The name of this mite. Since they cannot directly read each other, either, they need tags._\n\nOne word to describe a self?\n\n _Incredible, yes._\n\nHow do they converse, then?\n\n _Watch it\u2014the creature has fashioned a fresh weapon._\n\nAh! It burned my receptors down one whole side. Get it!\n\n _So fast, it is._\n\nEven its acoustic cries injure. So loud, it is.\n\n _Augh!_\n\nEvolution has much to answer for.\n\n _Get it. Are you damaged further?_\n\nI will have to get outside service.\n\n _I can see your damage from here. Vexing._\n\nTroublesome. And with these jobs, it is not the parts, it is the labor.\n\n _It still emits acoustically. Painfully._\n\nAnd pitifully narrow-band.\n\n _Listen\u2014bleeps and jots in acoustic wave packets. Cries for help?_\n\nThe song of the genes.\n\n _You wax rhapsodic over these crude blurts?_\n\nListen! Serial confabulation\u2014so strange.\n\n _So coarse._\n\nWe know that thinking must be serial. But\u2014connection? _Serially?_\n\n _Obviously they have that backward as well. Their talk is serial, their thinking parallel. Nature is a witless inventor._\n\nListen: their codes are so linear. Straight little sentences. Guileless.\n\n _So free of nuance. Where is the cross talk all intelligence requires?_\n\nThis must make them grasp their world in a fashion utterly different from ours.\n\n _I have read a slab of perception from it, rather interesting. Catch this data-group:_\n\nReceived, digested. They at least clasp visual pictures in parallel, I see. But what a curious, stunted view.\n\n _Exactly. They see in a narrow little region of the electromagnetic._\n\nA squeezed single octave in the optical range.\n\n _They were designed by chance for a specific environment and cannot escape from that programming._\n\nSurely a little tinkering? Look how it prowls the confines we have set for it. Impatient to get out. Its neurons flare with plans, ideas, fitful flashes that come and go like weather.\n\n _And about as predictable. No, I fear they cannot be reengineered. Too clumsy._\n\nYou are biased against them because they carry their complete instructions with them.\n\n _Well, you must admit that is a conspicuously dangerous strategy. More pointless redundancy, like their thinking patterns._\n\nIn every cell they hold a set of their individual design plans. So from any one tiny fragment\u2014\n\n _Yes yes, you could rebuild them. But equally well, that copy can be damaged by its surroundings. Then you would copy a mistake._\n\nAdmittedly, a flaw. I am happy my own copy is safely stored, not dangling out here in the fearsome naturalness of it all.\n\n _Here, grasp the creature again._\n\nAh! It struggles so.\n\n _Mortality lends energy, I suppose. Here\u2014a slice._\n\nTubes, motors, pumps\u2014all squeezed together.\n\n _Piled on top of each other._\n\nEvery one different shapes and sizes. No common specifications. How difficult they must be to repair.\n\n _I doubt that they do it often. Probably evolution prefers to build another one instead._\n\nAh, their reproduction obsession. They use the plans they carry around in every cell.\n\n _Growing a fresh copy, perhaps whenever they feel threatened?_\n\nThey make a small one and then it enlarges from the inside out.\n\n _Like plants._\n\nTrue, but a little smarter.\n\n _\"Growing.\" It must feel like bursting open._\n\nDo you suppose? How . . . horrible.\n\n _I wonder if we could experience it. That would be a new stimulation._\n\nSo would it be to comprehend this odd kind of stunted consciousness they employ. Can it be _better_ to keep part of yourself secret from another part?\n\n _Certainly that would make even thinking exciting. One would never know what one would discover next, even about oneself._\n\nDo you suppose that is how they have done so well, despite such terrible limitations?\n\n _You mean, that our exposure of every thought to scrutiny is bad?_\n\nCould it be? These creatures seem too inventive, creative . . .\n\n _That would imply that our method of selfhood itself . . ._\n\nEvaporates the fine-grained delicacy of a new concept, beneath a constant, lacerating inspection? . . . That could be why we have fresh thoughts so rarely.\n\n _I find my own tapestry of thought quite lacy enough._\n\nAs do I. But not this fall-walker, I suspect.\n\n _Foolishness. That would imply that such creatures would be inherently capable of more subtle strategies than we._\n\nLook. It is beckoning us to draw nearer.\n\n _Careful. We have partially disassembled it. Primitives tend to dislike such activity._\n\nI think discourse with such an enchantingly primitive and swampy mind would be a boon. We could copy its colloquy and transmit to the multitude, who would be\u2014\n\n _Augh!_\n\nAh!\n\n _Pain, pain._\n\nI must shut down my peripherals\u2014\n\n _So much . . ._\n\nDamage, I am injured everywhere.\n\n _It was . . ._\n\n. . . a trap. All along.\n\n _You are mobile?_\n\nI fear not.\n\n _I have lost many endpoints._\n\nI too.\n\n _What could motivate such a tiny being to destroy itself, all to render damage to us?_\n\nSomething you said . . . earlier.\n\n _I saw no clue to this._\n\nShort life span. That is why . . . they struggle so.\n\n _And would cancel themselves entirely to do us harm? When we shall simply live on in our archive copies?_\n\nSomething about this species . . .\n\n _They believe in something beyond selfhood?_\n\nAnd we, who have copies safely stored, do not.\n\n _If we cannot soon get aid\u2014_\n\nOur copies will be activated.\n\n _I suppose that is some consolation._\n\nThe little creature did not have even that.\n\n _Perhaps it had something more?_\n\nWhat could that be? What could that be?\n\nBeside them lay the finespun latticework of calcium rods that had been a rib cage. They sprawled amid meat and mess.\n\nThe shattered creature seemed to still embody a secret the dying alien struggled to grasp.\n\nStructures unraveled. Currents ran down.\n\nOn the barren plain only a single plaintive voice now called.\n\n _What could that be? What could that be?_\nPART FOUR\n\nSense of Self\n\nNature does not err, for she makes no statements.\n\n\u2014BERTRAND RUSSELL\nONE\n\nMelted Portals\n\nHe crawled down a muddy slope and hoped that he would not stand out against the thermal background. The air was thick and moist and that was of some help. Maybe.\n\nKilleen thought again about the fact that he had been running away from ruined cities most of his life.\n\nRetreating from the burned and smashed ruins of the Citadel\u2014 _yeasay,_ that he remembered sharply. That day seemed to lie far down a corridor of ruin and destruction stretching back longer than any man could live. To him came the names of favorite places where he had played as a boy and learned as a man: The Broadsward, Green Market, the Three Ladies' Rest. All that remained of them now were the jagged teeth of broken walls, whistling in cold winds.\n\nThis time was no different. The mechs had ripped the portal city apart the way a seamstress would tear the arms off a dress\u2014professionally, swift and sure.\n\n\u2014Cermo!\u2014he sent on low comm.\n\nNo answer. Probably smart not to answer, anyway.\n\nThe mechs who came spilling through the portal were like nothing Killeen had ever seen before and they could do a lot of deadly things. He had no idea how they had shut down all the Bishops' circuitry. Then the control lifted and somebody lost and confused was babbling on all bands, panicked. A flash condensed out of the air quick as a gasp and that Bishop was dead.\n\nKilleen reached concealment under some widespread fronds. The trees here were like none he had ever seen on Snowglade. They angled their broad shelves in the direction of the bright timestone. When one area faded the trees turned their attention to the next radiant patch. They moved like great wise creatures with many hands, palms cupped up to the shining.\n\nHe wormed his way under them and in time over a low saddle-back. Here he could get a look back at the vast complex where the Bishops had entered the esty.\n\nHe edged up over a rock rim. Through long years on the run he had learned to never expose himself to detection. Not if he could wait it out and let the enemy move away. But he had to find Bishops. Nobody else would pull the Family back together. Jocelyn and Cermo were good under-officers but they would spend their time trying to find him.\n\nHe bobbed his head up over the rim and quick-tapped his right incisor twice and ducked back down. That froze the image on his retina so he had time to study it.\n\nThe portal complex was bigger than any construction he had ever seen, except the ruin of a Chandelier. It worked in intricate fashion, amazing the Bishops, but it had blown to splinters when the mechs erupted into it. Now the remaining hexagonal matrices were liquefying. Their huge slab walls bubbled and slid and fumed a brown vapor.\n\nHe watched the still image but no Bishop telltales throbbed in it. Then he heard a noise.\n\nHe rolled left and sent an interrogating pulse toward the sound.\n\n\"Ah!\" A thin cry.\n\nHe brought a bolt antenna around on the cry and saw that it was Andro. \"Damn! That hurt!\"\n\n\"You're lucky you're alive. I could've just fired.\"\n\n\"That was an inquiry? It might have killed my inboards.\"\n\n\"You're too flimsy,\" Killeen said, scanning the territory behind _Argo._ Coming up behind approaching humans was an old mech trick.\n\n\"Less circuitry for mechs to sniff.\"\n\nKilleen looked at the scrawny man. Andro was nearly naked and without visible augmentations. \"No weapons either, looks like.\"\n\n\"I'm a legal man, not a bone crusher.\"\n\n\"Try using your laws here. Or collecting a tax.\"\n\n\"Your bang-bang didn't cut thick air back there either.\"\n\nThey were immediately back on the same tack as before, Killeen noted abstractly. Because they couldn't talk right away about what had happened. \"Have you seen any of my people?\"\n\n\"Thought I did.\"\n\n\"Hurt?\"\n\n\"Running. You ground-pounders sure make big targets.\"\n\n\"I haven't noticed your people doing so well.\"\n\nAndro nodded soberly. \"Dunno where I'll find my woman. My son, he skated for Thermograd two days ago, so I suppose he is clear.\"\n\n\"Is that a portal place? Like your city?\"\n\nAndro blinked. \"Uh. I see.\"\n\nKilleen bobbed his head over the rim again and sat grimly watching the result. The city had slid into slag. Andro was an irritating little man but there was no point in saying the obvious. Mechs would probably hit as many portals into the esty as they could. They were systematic. When they had decided to destroy Citadel Bishop they attacked the other Families, too. Thermograd would be no different.\n\n\"Let's move. I have to find my Family.\"\n\nAndro made to stand up and look over the rim and Killeen put a hand on his shoulder. \"No point.\"\n\n\"I want one last look.\"\n\n\"I'm shielded. You aren't.\"\n\n\"Your tech is trivial compared with theirs.\"\n\n\"Sure. But only children take risks they don't have to. If a mech sees you\u2014\"\n\nAndro slipped away and scrambled up the slope. He was quick about looking and Killeen let him go rather than drag him back. When the man came back down the expression on his face told Killeen that he would be all right now. Andro was from a different kind of people but he knew that you had to close a door on some things and just walk away.\n\n\"Let's go,\" Andro said.\n\n\"Moving draws attention.\"\n\n\"I doubt it makes a difference to this kind.\"\n\n\"You know much about them?\"\n\n\"We have some intelligence estimates. Data down the timeline from outside. We're further up the esty gradient, so we are closer to their tech developments.\"\n\nKilleen knew that somehow the _Argo_ had entered this esty thing on a twisty course through the Far Black\u2014by which the locals meant the region swirling around the fat-bellied middle of the Eater itself. And portal cities ran slower than time outside, in ordinary \"flat\" space-time. Places further inside the esty from the portals ran slower still\u2014only \"inside\" wasn't the right word, for some reason of geometry he could not grasp. \"Neighboring\" was closer to the truth.\n\nKilleen stopped checking his gear. \"Can you sniff them?\"\n\n\"Sometimes. Most of the mechs went on farther into the esty, once they'd dumped the ooze on us.\"\n\n\"I saw it hit some people.\" They had turned to sulphurous liquid while he watched and did nothing. \"Just a drop or so.\"\n\nKilleen finished his inventory and wondered what to do with this man. He had ordered all Bishops into field gear the instant Andro told him that they were picking up mech emissions from the Far Black beyond the portal. Due to time dilation effects, that was as much warning as they got, though by physical calculation the mechs would have to spiral in along a tortured path in the Eater's ergosphere. That tangled descent compressed to barely an hour of local esty time.\n\nKilleen was Cap'n of the Bishops but by age-old custom he hauled gear just like anyone. Backpacked on his lower spine were the topo and mapping system he had worn back on Snowglade. Family lore had it that the topo man was the first to fry. Hunter mechs\u2014Lancers, Hawks, Rattlers, Stalkers, Vipers\u2014bounced their low hooting voices off the topo register. Then they backtracked on him and slithered in electromagnetic finger knives.\n\n\"These mechs, they're different,\" Killeen said, reflecting.\n\nAndro nodded. \"A new species.\"\n\nKilleen set his shank compressors. Like almost all Bishop gear they were shaped from the most pliant kind of mechmetal. Bishop artisans had lost their independence from mechtech generations ago. He had entertained the notion of adding to his gear in the portal city but was glad now that he had not bought any of the double-walled helmets or hip shocks.\n\n\"You should have better stuff,\" Andro said, studying him.\n\n\"Load up and you'll just throw it away in the field. Speed's your best defense.\"\n\n\"We're not making any speed sitting here.\"\n\n\"You got a lot of opinions for a desk commander.\"\n\n\"I've seen you Hunker Down types come and go.\"\n\n\"Bishops are different.\"\n\nAndro sobered immediately, his face bleak and drawn. \"That's what we learned at the Replicator. Those Legacies of yours\u2014who would've guessed?\"\n\n\"I can't say I followed it all,\" Killeen said guardedly. In fact he wanted to see if Andro would give anything away. The little man now barely came up to Killeen's belt. Maybe bulk alone would impress him.\n\nAndro smiled wearily. \"C'mon, I'm not hiding anything.\"\n\n\"We've got to find Toby and Abraham, I got that.\"\n\n\"The 'Way of Three,' wasn't that the phrase? Imagine, putting a message in so deep it can't express itself overtly in just one copy of the code. I'd have thought the genotypic\u2014\"\n\nHere Killeen lost track utterly of the man's jargon. Biological information came so fast and casually that his head swam. It was enough to fathom that people carried their genetic information in double helices, without layering that fact with slabs of meaningless words.\n\nPictures, that was how Killeen thought. Words were just ways to fool people, more often than not.\nTWO\n\nA Fog of Flies\n\nThey decided to move. For shelter they used high arching trees that led in a curving arc up toward the distant esty walls above. The trees were billowy and tall and Killeen doubted that they truly gave much cover. They went slowly and the light was fitful and it was a long time before they came to the small pyramid.\n\nKilleen looked at it and felt both dismay and a sad pride. \"This is . . . wonderful.\"\n\nAndro walked around the crudely shaped four-sided stack of stones, twice as tall as Killeen. \"Pretty primitive.\"\n\n\"It's ours.\"\n\n\"Snowglade Families? They took the time to build this?\"\n\n\"It's for our suredead.\"\n\n\"Huh? They're _buried_ in here?\"\n\n\"It's our old way. Mechs don't take the trouble to pull apart rock like this.\"\n\n\"You had some sort of code with them?\"\n\nKilleen walked around the rough sides. He could see where rocks had been hastily wedged into place. \"There was a time, 'way back. We had a kind of understanding with the mechs. We didn't scavenge too much and they let us alone. They were busy with other things, something about herding pulsars.\"\n\n\"But it did not last.\"\n\n\"Naysay. My father Abraham said that truces with them never did, really.\"\n\nAndro's mouth curved in perplexed disbelief. \"You ground-pounder types had it easy. We never got a break from mechs, ever. They kept trying to punch through, to find the Library or some damn thing.\"\n\nSuit cowlings and personal gear were piled a short distance from the pyramid. Another Snowglade tradition. It said to passing mechs that they need not scavenge the pyramid for scrap; here it was, now go away. Reluctantly Killeen poked through them, dreading what he would find.\n\nA faint, buried image came drifting to mind. From his Arthur Aspect . . .\n\nA far grander pyramid slanting up from tawny sands, its point thrusting at a pale scrubbed sky. It dwarfed the puny humans peering up at it. They were smaller than the carved stone blocks that built the enormous steps, a giant's stairway leading to the sky so blue it seemed solid.\n\nThe image wavered before him, floating up unbidden from Arthur's deep historical storage. _Old Earth_ , came a whisper. The vision faded. It had made him pause with its majestic, silent, and eternal rebuke of the mortality that had struck down even the best, since time immemorial.\n\nHis hands scrabbling in the scrap found something and jerked him out of his musing. \"Jocelyn!\" he cried.\n\nAndro came over. \"Somebody you know?\"\n\n\"My . . . under-officer.\"\n\n\"I remember her. Damn.\"\n\nAgain Killeen felt the sensation that had marked his life so often\u2014that in the face of flat facts there was nothing to say. The world was like this and talk could not change it.\n\nJocelyn's burnt-blue ankle bracelet hung on her leg shanks. There was a small triangular hole in the shank and blood on the inside. Killeen took the bracelet and remembered how he had once long ago made love to her, a simple thing in an open field while they were on the run. He walked away wearing the bracelet and for a while did not answer any of Andro's questions.\n\nHe estimated which way his Bishops might have gone and went that way. Andro had trouble keeping up and Killeen became restive at the delay. At one point Killeen thought he heard traceries of Bishop talk, but they faded. Andro seized the opportunity to argue for a path through some wrenching timestone. Killeen went along with the man mostly because he was spiraling into a growing sense of futility. He had lost his Family and didn't know where to turn.\n\nThere were plenty of bodies in the fields and among the strange trees. Back in the portal city, at their Restorer, he had learned of mech diseases targeted on humans. And here they were.\n\nBoils that shined tight and purple. They burrowed into yielding flesh and made sores that sloughed and bled foul and yellow. Bodies attended by a fog of flies.\n\n _And who carried those from Old Earth?_ he wondered. He saw no reason for people to bring a pestilence like insects to this fresh new place. Life required balance, he knew that as an act of faith, but sometimes it was hard to accept the implications.\n\nOnly later did he recall that to mechs, Bishops were a pestilence.\n\nOne woman lay streaked with a rash gray as ashes. Oily pus sleeked her skin. Whirlpools in it squeezed down as he watched. They spooled wetly shut like eyes when he moved. Her head was splitting open in leaves, as though someone had been browsing through her and had left, leaving the book open. Exfoliating, the sheets of brain curled back and made him think of the timestone, like petals of a gray cliff-flower.\n\n\"They would work us woe,\" Andro said.\n\nThey marched on quickly, fearing contagion.\n\nA haze came and Killeen went into it, his mind still on the bodies behind. At least they had not been Bishops.\n\nIn the mist they passed through a verge of dizzying forces. It was a transition, Andro explained. A kind of slipping downhill in an esty gradient. Near the portal cities were tricky manifolds where \"indeterminate geometries\" formed and merged.\n\n\"You can think of it as like doorways opening and slamming shut,\" Andro said.\n\n\"Where does this end?\"\n\n\"It doesn't.\"\n\nKilleen knew when he was being patronized but he was too busy being sick to mind. The stretching and reforming of the esty meant torturing gravities, swerving accelerations, tidal tensions that jerked his arms and legs in opposite directions and popped his shoulders until he thought he would rip apart.\n\nAndro took it with irritating calm. The little man remarked on the curvature of the esty and how a cockroach could crawl over a fresh-picked apple without ever knowing that it was traveling on a curve until it passed the same stem a few times and got the idea. Its world was curved and finite but had no boundary, no wall. Apple everywhere, without end. A savvy cockroach would stop trying to escape the apple after a while.\n\nKilleen was feeling somewhat cockroachy at the time, bent over with nausea as they fell in a pearly fog. They had entered it without his quite noticing how and his sensorium gave him no bearings. His Aspects chattered at him with useless advice. He shut them up to be miserable on his own.\n\nIn the churning mist hollow rasps buffeted them. He tasted a fiery wetness. Andro was saying something about the esty being designed so that even the flux points where curvature changed rapidly were not too strong. That seemed to mean that the stresses would not actually rip an arm out of its socket, though they might come close. At the time he was grateful for any reassurance.\n\nThey did not so much fall as they popped out. Into\u2014a swamp. Killeen splashed and flailed to keep from sprawling face down in the rank mud. He staggered to a hummock of blue-green grass.\n\n\"Damn!\" he called hoarsely to Andro, who was struggling up from the muck. \"How come we\u2014\"\n\nThe blue-green grass had already looped around one leg and was inching up his other. Killeen fought his way off the hummock and onto a spit of dry land, where Andro already sat resting. \"I, I, how'd we get here?\"\n\n\"It's stochastic,\" Andro said. \"No one to blame, really.\"\n\n\"Stow what?\"\n\n\"Chaotic, to you.\"\n\nKilleen's Arthur Aspect put in,\n\n _ **The shifting esty coordinates are completely governed by the classical Einstein field equations, of course, in the strong field limit. But even completely determined relations will yield unpredictable outcomes, if they run long enough.**_\n\nKilleen shoved the Aspect back into its niche. This esty thing was beyond Arthur's experience, but Aspects yearned to get out of their confinement loops, so they spoke up at every opportunity. Sometimes it was like running a classroom of bright but too energetic children, their hands always raised with some smartass answer. \"So you dunno where we are?\"\n\n\"Safer, I'll bet. That's why I wanted to go through that timestone.\"\n\n\"You knew it would work?\"\n\nAndro touched his nose. \"Smelled right.\"\n\n\"You've got a tech tells you when timestone opens?\"\n\n\"No, intuition. Let the ol' subconscious do the work.\"\n\n\"Um. Mechs might've come this way, too.\"\n\n\"I'd rather play the odds\u2014\"\n\nAndro leaped up as if hearing something\u2014and sprawled into the mud. He surfaced and whispered, \"They're here\u2014mech signals.\"\n\nKilleen had heard nothing. He turned very carefully. Trees like balls of fluff swayed and breathed soft mutters above.\n\nKilleen's nerves were jumpy. With all he had learned at the Restorer, with all the ungainly, blood-rich tapestry of human history he now carried as an unwelcome weight, trudging through muck was just about what he expected. That was what humanity had been doing for an ageless, painful time.\n\nHe caught a whisper of scrambled, spiky cues. He knew from field experience that these came when you were in the secondary emission lobe. Sideways angling waves interfered with each other to form small, fast-moving peaks. Abraham had explained it to him once. It was a facet of physics, a telltale nobody who used waves could avoid. Particles were tight and waves spread out, and in their spreading left clues.\n\n _Skreeeeeee_ \u2014\n\nClose. He slogged up onto rocky ground. A vacant plain beyond.\n\nThat meant nothing. The Mantis had been invisible to his sensorium and there were higher forms here, had to be.\n\n\"What do you think it is?\" Andro asked from behind.\n\n\"Quiet.\"\n\nMechs hardly ever used crude acoustic sensors, but you never knew.\n\nThey moved around the edge of the plain for a while but nothing came of it. A gully ran into the swamp and Killeen headed up it. They came to a wide depression. Both stopped. Killeen's breath came faster as he watched the pile heaped into the bowl below.\n\n\"God . . . what did they . . .\" Andro backed away from the sight.\n\n\"Something got them.\"\n\nThis time the dead were not human but the effect was chilling anyway. The piles of skeletal, greasy, mech carcasses were immense. Every kind Killeen had ever seen was here, steel and carbon-fiber, globular and angled, huge and tiny. Some had smashed themselves against each other and spilled out their elegantly machined guts. Their arrogant angles and ribbed solidity had struck fear into Killeen more times than he could ever recall. Now they seemed empty gestures. In stillness they were just assemblies of parts. Fodder for mech scavengers now, a bowl of the rusting, unresisting dead.\n\n\"What could do this?\"\n\nKilleen shook his head. The Cap'n who had taught him so much, Fanny, had always said, _Savvy the mechthink before it savvies you._ The crammed-together mech cadavers were here like some sort of lesson, but . . . what kind? \"Damn awful, all I can say.\"\n\n\"I never heard . . .\" Andro gulped. He was tiring out.\n\nThe gully was deep here. Steep-sided, like a ravine.\n\nKilleen started scrabbling up out of it and Andro followed and that was when he caught the side lobes again.\n\nHe quick-tapped his left molars to bring up the reds in his vision. Blues washed away and he saw in the far infrared a glowing, rumpled land seething with liquid fire. The esty roof above faded to a blank white and across the jutting ramparts of timestone swept crimson tides of temperature.\n\nHe held steady so his periphs could come up. Searching, searching.\n\nHe went to fast-flick. Something swayed among sheets of wintry-gray light to the left. Something gangly and arabesqued with worms. Traceries danced in filmy air. The fleeting image merged with rock and was gone and then swam up out of the slate-black vegetation farther away. For shaved seconds he could see it and then not. The thing was responding to his systems with a false image it projected to match its background as it moved. Tubular legs and a long flat cowled head and prickly antennas swiveling.\n\n\"What do you see?\" Andro asked.\n\nKilleen opened his mouth to tell him to shut up.\n\nSomething poked a hole in his eye and dove through.\nTHREE\n\nThe Pleasure Plague\n\nThe Mantis was larger this time.\n\nHe had been here before. On the island of undulating sand that floated impossibly on a blue sea.\n\nKilleen had never seen a body of water bigger than a smelly, dying pond. He knew the sea only from his immersion in the Mantis itself. The thing had caught him years before on Snowglade and tucked his mind into the larger canvas of its own, almost as an afterthought.\n\nThe boneyard of human skulls was there too and he walked over it this time. It crunched beneath his boots.\n\nWhen he did that the ground buckled for just a flashing moment. Then it went solid again.\n\nAnd Andro was suddenly there and somehow they were both walking across the unending sand island and trying to reach the sea. Yet Killeen felt himself still scrambling up the steep clay gully side and Andro panting behind him. His arms and legs did not stop their working. Part of him was still there in the gully and another was here with a sadness and a leaden certainty that this time he would die in the Mantis's grip.\n\n* * *\n\nI hope my lesson was clear.\n\n* * *\n\nThe Mantis's dry rattle boomed, resounding in his mind as acoustics never could.\n\n\"We're not quite as slow as you think, y'know.\"\n\n* * *\n\nI have always savored your humor, holding forth in even the most difficult of circumstances.\n\n* * *\n\nHe could not see it; humans seldom did. It could be within arm's reach or dispersed in a planet-sized net. Or both.\n\n* * *\n\nIt is a pleasure to once again be your archiving receptacle.\n\n* * *\n\n\"What _is_ this\u2014\" Andro began but Killeen waved him into silence.\n\nThey were still hanging by fingers and toeholds and inching their way up the hard clay. Somewhere.\n\n\"What do you want?\"\n\n* * *\n\nI am sure you believe I am simply here to kill you.\n\n* * *\n\n\"I don't think you do anything simply.\"\n\n* * *\n\nOnce again I savor the delights of an ambiguous rhetoric. Yet I am simple.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Not by me you aren't.\"\n\n* * *\n\nAll my thoughts are known to myself. All of myself. What could be simpler?\n\n* * *\n\n\"Leaving us alone would be. For a start.\"\n\n* * *\n\nI cannot. You are my primary work materials, as an artist. Now, alas, rude survival intrudes even upon this sheltered venue. I come to you seeking aid.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen laughed. And pulled himself up into a crevice where he could lean down and give Andro a hand.\n\n* * *\n\nYou quite rightly use your immortality-\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nsimulating rite.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen laughed again. Anything to keep it amused.\n\n* * *\n\nIt is a wonderful adaptation to your predicament. As its discoverer, I am most proud. My superiors commended me roundly.\n\n* * *\n\n\"For 'discovering' that we laugh?\"\n\n* * *\n\nNo. For discovering what it means. For that brief stuttering vocal instant you live as we do. Outside the clench of time. Of mortality.\n\n* * *\n\n\"What does it _want_?\" The naked terror in Andro's voice made Killeen look down as the man edged his way into a toehold. Andro was sweating and his eyes were rolled far up showing the whites. Somehow he could still climb. His muscles stood out, vibrating.\n\n\"It wants us. Some kind of slice, right? Or maybe this time the whole goddamn cake.\"\n\n* * *\n\nI wish I could dally as an artist, I do. Unfortunately, you are correct. I am here to glean information from you and perhaps a last sample.\n\n* * *\n\n\"I'm fresh out of information.\"\n\n* * *\n\nI want you to understand that I do understand your need to speak to me this way. I do fathom the needs of a centrally directed intelligence, even though I am not one. I am a scholar and an artist and I can appreciate the ancient needs and structures you represent.\n\n* * *\n\n\"I represent myself, that's all.\"\n\n* * *\n\nYou need\u2014indeed, desire\u2014the autonomy of the sense of self. I admire that, I truly do. But I have little time now and must be direct. Not artful.\n\n* * *\n\nAndro's voice trembled. \"We're not about to help you, damn you.\"\n\n* * *\n\nI can aid you as well. You, Killeen, seek your son and your father. So do I.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen said guardedly, \"What for?\"\n\n* * *\n\nInformation. In the end, everything is information.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Can't eat it.\"\n\n* * *\n\nWe do, at least in the most general sense. I would remind you that thermodynamics rules us all.\n\n* * *\n\n\"I sure don't know what in hell thermo-what is but I can smell bullshit without standing in it.\"\n\n* * *\n\nYour great fore-beings knew our similarities, though I must admit they lacked your flair for the direct. I must hasten here\u2014attend: You primates carry data we need in pursuit of an ancient obsession. There are accounts of lore invented by the early organic forms, those who first devised the mechanical forms. These kindle great pleasure in our kind. Exquisite joys, legendary. And, some accounts have it, dangerous beyond measure. I seek those.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Want to get high? That's what this is 'bout?\"\n\n* * *\n\nIt is no trivial aim. The Exalteds of my order attach great merit to this pursuit. They are privy to reports, quite old and somewhat unreliable, which relate that many of our kind extinguished themselves upon contact with this information.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Committed suicide?\" Killeen saw and felt himself working along the face of the rough clay and yet also hung suspended in an icy black vault, where the talk from the Mantis sped by in an eyeblink.\n\n* * *\n\nDied. Without emitting a single deathcry. Some speculate that they experienced pleasures they could not withstand.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Umm. I've felt like that. Passes, though.\"\n\n* * *\n\nI see! This is irony, yes?\n\n* * *\n\n\"No, sarcasm.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThese indeterminate positional languages! They fructify with meaning. Entrancing. I would sup of this more.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Don't take hints much, do you?\"\n\n* * *\n\nI suppose not. My serial language skills are still\u2014\n\n* * *\n\n\"Talking down to us is so hard?\"\n\n* * *\n\nNarrow and yet fraught with shadings. But this artistic discussion will have to come later. For this moment we must exchange information.\n\n* * *\n\n\"I don't have to tell you a damn thing.\"\n\n* * *\n\nI will reward you with information which you need. I believe this is congruent with your imperative architectures.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen paused on the steep face and puffed loudly and the cool suspended part of him went on. \"I don't know where Toby and Abraham are.\"\n\n* * *\n\nYou can, however, contribute to their discovery. If they can help us ferret out this arcane pleasure, then we shall reunite you all.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Reunite in life? Or in some artwork of yours?\"\n\n* * *\n\nIn realtime lifeline, I assure you.\n\n* * *\n\n\"And I'm supposed to believe you?\"\n\n* * *\n\nI speak as truthfully as one can in serial representations such as your acoustic mode. Also, I do not believe you have any alternative.\n\n* * *\n\n\"How come?\"\n\n* * *\n\nYou mortal beings value your incorporate selves as essential. I fully understand why, and consider that this is a high value, an aesthetic and intellectual position our kind has\u2014perhaps regrettably\u2014lost.\n\n* * *\n\n\"So you'll kill us unless I cooperate?\"\n\n* * *\n\nOf course not. But I can make use of you in ways you will find threaten your selfhood.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen could imagine what uses the Mantis had in mind. He had seen Fanny contorted into a grotesque parody of herself. This was a strangely polite conversation and he suspected something else was going on in it. \"What do you want from me?\"\n\n* * *\n\nI have already obtained most of my needs as this interaction has proceeded. Your reactions I have extracted as I provoked them.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen blinked. \"For . . . what?\"\n\n* * *\n\nFor simulacra. We have made use of the facility you call the Restorer. Much of these methods we knew already but there are nuances which your species has produced. Bio logics. These we have learned. You will find we are a quick study.\n\n* * *\n\nHe clung to a ledge on the gully wall and breathed steadily as his hands groped for the next hold. Within the cool secluded part of him a leaden darkness grew. \"For copies?\"\n\n* * *\n\nOf yourself. They will help us all.\n\n* * *\n\n\"To find Toby and Abraham?\"\n\n* * *\n\nToby is the most important. He carries information we need relevant to the Pleasure Plague.\n\n* * *\n\n\"That's what you call it?\"\n\n* * *\n\nOur sparse data suggests that this Disorder of Desire can communicate, much as a disease does among you. This is another curious feature which we must investigate.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Sounds to me like you'd better leave it alone.\"\n\n* * *\n\nI believe even you can see that we cannot allow a basic feature of our makeup such as this to elude us. We know all of ourselves\u2014that is the nature of higher intelligences. You do not know yourselves. Much of your antic artistry and chaotic creativity stems from that, I feel. But you must admit that you are an early, malformed stage of development. Systems with no \"subconscious\" or ungoverned elements are far more functional. Thus they must learn all facets of themselves, to improve.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen snorted with contempt. More empty talk.\n\n* * *\n\nI do not deny that I/we have used you to our own ends.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Even when we thought different, right?\"\n\n* * *\n\nYou refer to how you escaped from Snowglade in the _Argo_?\n\n* * *\n\n\"We blew you all to smash and scatteration in our exhaust wash.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThat manifestation of me, yes. I thought it would give you some pleasure of your own. And strengthen your own stature within your tribe.\n\n* * *\n\n\"I figured it was biggo bogus anyway.\" Killeen remembered the celebrating Bishops after they had played raw hard plasma over the Mantis below. Satisfying, but he had always wondered.\n\n* * *\n\nThat role devolved upon me. I had studied you as artworks for many generations. When the Exalteds decided to assemble the existing fragments of the Plague puzzle, they delegated to me the stimulation of your flight. The _Argo_ would have destroyed itself if we had attempted to read its Legacies ourselves. Still more difficult would have been moving _Argo_ here to the esty, and bringing the knowledge of the Myriapodia as well.\n\n* * *\n\nAndro was getting frazzled with the climbing and Killeen did not like the deranged, white-eyed look on the sweating face. Andro was used to cities and the mechs had brought all that down in minutes. It would take him a while to get his mind around that. That was the difference between a life spent on the move and one with feet sunk in the sod, bound up with buildings and possessions and the fat habits of mind. Killeen reached the last rough rim of the gully and rolled onto the plain above, gasping.\n\n\"They're all part of it? Seems complicated.\"\n\n* * *\n\nHistory is. The Myriapodia were\u2014as the Exalteds predicted\u2014essential in your reaching this place. They do not carry the Way of Three but they are a useful mixed-organic form. Some of us believe the Myriapodia may recapitulate a transitory mode of life which gave birth to our Phylum, a bridge between us and you. In any case they have now done their essential task for us and shall be eliminated, as they do consume resources.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Pretty tough on the competition.\" Killeen was trying to figure a way out of this and keeping the Mantis talking was all he could think of.\n\n* * *\n\nThere is no need of deception between us. You know that you shall go the way of all fleshlife. Though as I have offered before, you can/should/will be enshrined in my/our artistry. This is the highest fate you dreaming vertebrates can cherish.\n\n* * *\n\n\"I think we can do better than that. At least _we'll_ be doing it. You wouldn't understand that, though.\"\n\nAndro trembled with fatigue and could not haul himself up the last steep slope. Killeen rolled to his left and grasped his hand. Andro got over at the rim and gulped in air, face red, eyes white.\n\n* * *\n\nAs a collector and artist I much desire to sample and record both Abraham and Toby. That is the Way of Three the Exalteds have discerned in the scattered, archaic data. The Pleasure Plague somehow intersects certain genetic lines of your lowly Phylum. I already have your own genetic record, of course, as part of my research for the Fanny sculpture. I then attempted\u2014\n\n* * *\n\n\"You got _me_?\" Killeen felt a hot anger. His Arthur Aspect spun a picture of two helices wrapped around each other and began a droning lecture about genes but he brushed it aside.\n\n* * *\n\nOf course. I scoured the _Argo_ for flakes of skin, human dander, but could confirm no such from Toby. And your father we failed to find at your Citadel.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen looked quickly around. Nothing on the arid plain. The esty curvature loomed above, distant and filmy. No escape anywhere. \"I couldn't find him either. Figured he was in one of the collapsed buildings.\"\n\n* * *\n\nWe excavated fruitlessly. We have no reliable method of searching out his DNA and knowing it was Abraham's. But the Magnetic Mind carried signals from him, coming from somewhere in this place.\n\n* * *\n\n\"How'd he get away from you, if you're so all-fired powerful?\"\n\n* * *\n\nThere are other forces afoot here\u2014to use an image your Phylum would employ.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Glad to hear it.\" Did this thing understand sarcasm?\n\n* * *\n\nSomething concentrated an energy density at the Citadel of the Bishops exceeding our capabilities. It transported Abraham away, apparently intact.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Nice trick.\"\n\nKilleen helped Andro to his feet. The man looked wildly into the distance and mumbled. Killeen followed Andro's line of sight and caught a glimmering of structure. Lacy lines, straight but shifting with uneasy energy.\n\nAndro seemed all right now. His systems seemed jumpy but better than Killeen's. He pointed.\n\nSomething there now. Swift. Jerky. Mobile lattice more than a structure and parts went away for a while and came back and he could not see how that happened.\n\nAndro had some sort of weapon hidden in his elbow. Killeen had not even recognized it. He sent something at the form on the horizon. Killeen saw it as a flash in his sensorium.\n\nAndro sat down suddenly. Without a sound he kicked his heels savagely against the ground. It was as though he were dancing and had just made the mistake of lying down first. His face showed no concern. Hands cupped together as if he were praying. His legs drummed on frantically. Sweat jumped out all over him in seconds and he breathed heavily and still not a flicker in the impassive face. He began to blink fast and then faster.\n\nHe stopped. Legs and arms went limp. A long sigh escaped his chest and his eyes closed.\n\nKilleen listened to the Mantis go away as his sensorium drained of color and calmed. He did not move until the presence was gone and then Andro began to speak. He went on for a long time and none of it made any sense of course.\nFOUR\n\nThe Way of Three\n\nSo this whole esty thing's been designed for us?\" Killeen asked.\n\n\"Humans?\" Andro was still groggy from the Mantis's little lesson.\n\n\"Planet-bound life, I mean.\"\n\n\"I suppose so.\"\n\n\"Planets are sure simple compared to this.\" Killeen waved at the crusted desert they were crossing. \"Water and wind and light\u2014all've got to move just right. Otherwise you suffocate or starve.\"\n\nAndro nodded sluggishly. \"It gave us . . . comfortable place to live.\"\n\n\"Like the Citadel. People well off don't think about how precarious it all is.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\nKilleen realized that Andro was the product of many generations tucked into the esty and had no direct knowledge of what things were like on the outside. It was as though he saw distant events as passing items of interest, no more. Maybe that was what happened to people everywhere. Nothing to gain from pointing it out to him, though. \"How come there's hardly anybody around?\"\n\n\"You have to know where to look. In my office, I have esty cords of human areas. Alien ones, too. They keep shifting all the time so we have to keep updating them. Or . . . had to.\" Andro blinked. \"I guess that's all gone now.\"\n\nAndro limped as they trudged over the smooth curvature of the crusty plain. They had walked and slept and walked again and the land was the same chalky soil, low scrub and washed-out basins. The esty curved up and over and through pale clouds Killeen could see that the land above was the same.\n\n\"How come people haven't filled up the esty?\" Killeen asked.\n\nAndro stopped. \"Huh. I never thought of that.\"\n\n\"It's made for planetary life, there's been enough time\u2014right?\"\n\n\"People come through the portals, go farther in. Have been for a long time. Most we never see again.\"\n\nThey looked at each other. Andro said, \"We cannot really map the esty, but\u2014\"\n\n\"It sure looks empty. That measures how big it is.\"\n\nAndro said forlornly, \"Maybe it'll swallow up the mechs, too.\"\n\nKilleen shook his head. \"They planned this a long time. Look at that sinkhole full of scrapped mechs back there. The Mantis set us up for that and it made the point. They've got plenty.\"\n\nAndro's face textured with worry. \"We found that pyramid, our own dead. Then their dead. I thought that was the point.\"\n\n\"The Mantis never says just one thing. Maybe it can't read our deep memories, or can't figure them out.\"\n\n\"We shouldn't talk about it.\"\n\n\"Prob'ly.\" Mechs could seed an area with microscopic bugs, eavesdropping on anyone. What the Bishops had learned at the portal city's Restorer, combined with the _Argo_ 's Legacies, was dizzying, complex. \"Sure strange, though.\"\n\nThe Legacies could be read only in combination with information in the Restorer\u2014ancient text-codes gotten from the Galactic Library. The story was snaky, convoluted, understandable only by combining a variety of sources. Stitching it together, Killeen had finally understood some of his own history.\n\nThe earliest intelligent life in the galaxy, who had produced the early mechs, knew the dangers inherent in the timeless conflict between the two forms. Mechs could redesign themselves, improve and sculpt their bodies and minds alike. The organic forms were slower, reluctant to wrench themselves away from the modes that evolution had wrought. They altered their culture, but not their substrate\u2014brains and bodies.\n\nInevitably, they fell behind the rapid pace of their own creations. And they knew they were flagging. They wanted a trump card. The First Command.\n\nDeep in the inner design codes of those early machines, the ancients embedded a First Command that could not even in principle be detected by the mechs themselves. The hiding of the First Command, so that each mech carried it as a deep operating system, yet could not access it, was the greatest creation of some unknown ancient scientist.\n\nThe effect was subtle. Activated, the First Command codes brought great pleasure. Then, death by ecstasy.\n\nMechs who turned against their Natural forebears could then be destroyed, by the trigger codes that activated the First Command.\n\nThat checked with what the Mantis chose to reveal. Killeen had warily listened to it, while carefully trying not to think about the unspoken.\n\nWhat it had not said was that if another trigger code was activated from outside\u2014the Second Command\u2014the mech felt the impulse to convey its sublime joy to others. Then pleasure became a plague. Death came far faster.\n\nBut this method had failed in the far past. Information about how to activate the First Command was lost\u2014by accident, perhaps. Or by a change of heart, or faltering will, among the early Naturals.\n\nExcept . . . some ancients had deliberately scattered the First Command. They stored it where organic intelligence could always carry information: their own genetic codes.\n\nThe Legacies had a bit of it. The rest resided in the coiled long molecules within every single cell of organic races. It must have seemed a perfect way to keep the crucial information available to all who might need it.\n\nFor long eras, mechanicals and organics lived in balance. The First Command was forgotten. It slumbered on in the genetic inventory, carried forward by serial arrangements of atoms. It had no impact on the life-forms themselves\u2014\n\n _ **Retained in the genotype, unexpressed in the phenotype\u2014**_\n\nhis Arthur Aspect intruded. Killeen let the Aspect mutter in his background, but didn't let it interrupt his thoughts as he slogged across the plain.\n\n _ **\u2014defended against genetic drift and copying error, quite deft indeed, and then\u2014**_\n\nHe shut up Arthur and concentrated.\n\nThe mechs had slowly decided that the organics were no longer semi-divine forefathers. They had become competitors, exploiting the same raw resources of energy and mass. Such conflicts were inevitable. In the long run, no life-form owed another indefinite homage.\n\nBy this time nearly all the scattered sources of the Trigger Commands had been lost. Genetic drift. The long extinctions of entire planets. The rub and pitiless erosions of the material world upon the living.\n\nDispersal proved to be the best defense. The Trigger Commands had been invoked locally\u2014and whole worlds of intelligent mechanicals perished within days. Killeen had seen scenes from this long and desperate struggle, a corridor of ruin and destruction stretching back to when the galaxy itself was slowly grinding down from a spherical swarm of gemlike suns into a compressed spiral disk. He could not truly conceive of the expanses of time and therefore of injury and anguish, or remorse and rage and sullen gray sadness, which had washed over the ruby stars themselves and cloaked the galaxy in a wracking conflict that could never be fully over. From this primordial pain there lumbered forward even into his own time a heritage of melancholy unceasing conflict that had shaped all his life, and formed the Family Bishop culture he so revered and would die to defend.\n\nThe Trigger Commands were spread among all intelligent races, and then\u2014as their numbers dwindled alarmingly\u2014into life-forms which could develop consciousness in future. So they came to Earth when humanity was a mere kindling glow behind the sloped brows of wandering primates.\n\nBut genetic drift erased the record in most humans. Only some still carried the unheeded cargo of instructions, handed down now for nearly seven billion years.\n\nThe Trigger Commands were cunningly concealed. No single strand of human DNA could repeat the full content of the trigger in each \"expression,\" a single generation. Instead, through a cyclic programming, only a third of the activator code appeared in coherent order, in the DNA of a single member.\n\nTo get the trigger codes completely, you had to assemble three generations.\n\n\"Abraham, Killeen, Toby.\" Killeen whispered the words like a mantra as he marched, boots crunching the alkaline crust.\n\nAndro's raspy voice drew him out of his thoughts. \"Those they're after?\"\n\n\"Yeasay. Me they've already copied.\"\n\n\"You think that Mantis was honest? It let us live, after all.\"\n\n\"Because it wanted something it could get from us alive.\"\n\n\"The other two.\"\n\n\"That can't be all of it,\" Killeen reflected. \"Why let you go then?\"\n\n\"That's what I'm trying to see.\"\n\n\"They don't know enough,\" Killeen said. \"Something we don't know either.\"\n\nAndro scowled at Killeen. \"Or don't know we know.\"\n\n\"They don't get what it'll do to them if they read it.\" Killeen stopped short of saying, _That it'll blaze up like a grass fire, sweep right through them, burn the bastards\u2014_\n\n _ **Technically, this is known as a \"meme\"\u2014a self-propagating idea which rewards the holder and impels it to further the meme itself. Human religions are sometimes of this type, as in Islamic\u2014**_\n\nKilleen stuffed Arthur back in its hole. Andro said, \"They _want_ it, though.\"\n\n\"Yeasay. Want it bad.\" All the suffering and fear his kind had known for as long as they could remember came from mechs. In Killeen there now smoldered a fire that would never go out until he held the Trigger Commands in his hand and saw them at work.\n\nAndro said, \"I would have expected that after billions of years, there would be some self-defense mechanism in the mechs. Some safeguards to stop them from even being interested.\"\n\n\"I guess those wore away, too. Everything else does.\"\n\n\"So they tried to take your father as part of this?\"\n\nKilleen frowned. \"I see what you mean. How come they didn't pick me and Toby up, too?\"\n\n\"I suppose they didn't know that they needed three generations then.\"\n\nKilleen nodded. \"What was that term? The Way of Three.\"\n\n\"They suspected the data was in the DNA. But they found only a third of it.\"\n\n\"They have our Legacies, too.\" Killeen bitterly remembered how Toby had fought against letting the portal people read their legacies. At the time it had seemed a good trade to Killeen\u2014these were just people, after all, and the Bishops needed shelter in the portal.\n\nAndro was getting weaker. He hobbled but his voice was still clear and strong. \"They have the Replicator technology now. Damn! All they have to do is search the esty, find your son and father\u2014\"\n\n\"And maybe we should let them.\"\n\n\"They would all die.\"\n\nKilleen chuckled. \"And they figure since humans are their enemy, we want to stop them from getting all their precious pleasure.\" He leaned back and laughed loudly at the impassive sky. Until now the weight of it had not struck him. His enemies had been delivered into his hands. _They don't know it will destroy them._\n\n\u2014and just as he had feared, the stillness and hovering presence of the Mantis descended around them like a massive fog.\n\n\"Damn!\" It had been a trap all along, a chance to eavesdrop on the talky humans.\n\n* * *\n\nYou are quite convincing if one does not know how to unmask the nuances, Killeen.\n\n* * *\n\n\"What?\" He did not know what a nuance was but something in the Mantis's voice came freighted with threat.\n\n* * *\n\nYou verge on the blatant. Most unsubtle.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen laughed again with relief. He could tell the truth here and it was going to be all right. \"I haven't got the energy to be subtle.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThe Pleasure is indeed something your Phyla know, because you devised it. We have long suspected that it is the payment invented by the organic races, given to our primitive forms as a reward.\n\n* * *\n\n\"I can't deny that,\" Killeen said. He could see how even a superior intelligence, on the track of something, could read into his and Andro's words a conspiracy, a grand plot. The Mantis was complimenting them without knowing it.\n\n* * *\n\nYou primordials are the masters of pleasure. Evolution brought it to you.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Old Family Bishop saying, yeasay.\" Keep it light, see what it had gotten from its eavesdropping.\n\n* * *\n\nI do not follow your reference.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Old song, prob'ly Johnphilsousa.\" He bellowed out,\n\n\"Malt does more than Milton can,\n\nTo justify God's ways to man\u2014\"\n\nAndro got Killeen's intent, because he wrinkled his nose and commented sourly, \"God, that's awful. Who's Milton?\"\n\n* * *\n\nAncient Earthly poet. An artist like myself. Your source is in error, Killeen. However, I take your point. You primates in particular have a disproportionate fraction of your sensor nerves allocated to your genitalia and taste buds. Plainly you are pleasure machines. It is invigorating to know such forms as you.\n\n* * *\n\n\"The pleasure is all mine,\" Killeen said. He had to get the Mantis to think that what it had overheard was all just talk, flights of fancy language.\n\n* * *\n\nIn us pleasure had to be injected\u2014a mere compensation. You are the masters of the dark arts. That is the thing I have pursued in you more than any other. The ancient bliss.\n\n* * *\n\nAndro started to say something and Killeen lifted a finger to stop him. The Mantis's crisp aura shifted slightly at this small gesture. Killeen saw that again, by accident perhaps, he had heightened the air of mystery and conspiracy\u2014as judged by the Mantis. Being smart was not the same as being sophisticated.\n\n* * *\n\nYou primates are typical of the older forms. Most of your nerve endings concentrate in the outer skin, so you remain largely unaware of what occurs within your own bodies. Plainly, a creature shaped for pleasures, not maintenance. And a disproportionate fraction of those lie in your genitalia or your taste buds. There is also the curious evolutionary convergence of the reproductive and excretion organs. No design would ever favor such doubling of functions; waste elimination must not interfere with the hygienic conditions one assumes necessary for biological reproduction. Evolution ignores the obvious and favors the sensual. That feature we lack and envy.\n\n* * *\n\n\"It's led to a lot of humor, though,\" Killeen said. The Mantis never laughed, of course, but it was worth a try to keep it puzzled.\n\n* * *\n\nThis issue touches, as you have guessed, on the less savory side of our Phylum.\n\n* * *\n\n\"I had no idea.\"\n\n* * *\n\nSarcasm, correct?\n\n* * *\n\n\"Could be.\"\n\n* * *\n\nJests are as informative as gestures.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Some irony here, too.\"\n\n* * *\n\nIrony? You mislead again.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen kept a cryptic silence. Let the mech talk itself in circles. It seemed to like that. The narrowness of sentences and all that stuff about serial and parallel, it tripped them up.\n\n* * *\n\nYou Naturals have oddly exciting ways, though most are liabilities. We know from studies of Naturals like your species that we can best find your son and father by using you as a lure.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Not much I can do about that.\"\n\nAndro was breathing fast again. Hands clenched. The man could not contain his anger. Maybe he had never had much practice.\n\n* * *\n\nI have gotten from you the confirmation I needed. You will remain alive\u2014that is, unharvested\u2014until we see that we have no further need of you.\n\n* * *\n\n\"You\u2014\" Andro screamed and threw himself at the Mantis. He had another small weapon concealed and tried to use it.\n\nThe Mantis did not move a single rod. Andro simply folded up.\n\nNot the usual way, but backward. Killeen heard the spine pop and a gurgled gasp from crushed lungs. Andro bent completely over backward, still standing on two feet. His hair brushed the ground as his feet took a hesitant step, then another. His eyes were wild with pain. Andro's mouth shaped a scream but nothing came out.\n\n* * *\n\nThe Exalteds use me as their guide in these matters because I am the nearest to their level who still can communicate with you. The cramped, serial manner of your speech is painful to them\u2014indeed, impossible. Do not think this gives you any privileged status. I thought a bit of illustration of this would suffice.\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen felt numb. Andro took another step and fell, breath wheezing from him. From the way the body sprawled Killeen knew there was no help for the man. \"You surekill him?\"\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nThere is no need. You Bishops are worthy of a collection. This sort, of which there is an infestation in this place, is of no concern to a curator.\n\n* * *\n\n\"That's your only reason for doing . . . that?\"\n\n* * *\n\nNo. He had exceeded his marginal utility.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Let's hope these Exalted characters don't think you've exceeded yours.\"\n\n* * *\n\nShould they, I would be happy to be gathered in.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen snorted in fear and anger and emotions he could not name.\n\n* * *\n\nFor you, a reminder\u2014\n\n* * *\n\nA shifting haze as white as steam condensed to his left.\n\nToby was walking steadily out of the solidifying mist. He was grinning. Smaller and thinner than Killeen remembered. Toby said something that got snatched away by a gathering wind and the tone was wrong and as Toby's jaws yawned the lines in his face broadened to jagged cracks.\n\nToby came apart. In precise zigzags. Each one gave a brittle pop as his son burst apart.\nDecision Tree\n\n _If the Way of Three is correct, then we need only the genetic coding of these primates._\n\nIt would seem so.\n\n _How simple! We missed it for so long._\n\nThat is what worries me.\n\n _Why should it? They employ a particularly awkward method of self-reproduction. Much of their genetic code is useless baggage, carried along solely because it can copy itself, but conveying no worthwhile message. An ugly mess, dictated by their random evolution._\n\nI/We suspect . . .\n\n _What?_\n\nThat is what concerns me. I do not know what my misgivings mean, since they are so . . .\n\n _Tentative?_\n\nYes. I deplore hesitation. Still, I sense danger. Undefined, but danger, definitely.\n\n _We have waited long enough to deal with these. We entertained endless discussion of art, aesthetics, and how beautiful in their way these primitive forms are. Very well, some have been recorded as we terminated them. Done!_\n\nYou advocate the harsh method?\n\n _Of course. We need only the three generations of data. Very well, kill them all and let the Exalteds sort them out._\n\nAll? Everywhere?\n\n _I believe we can do it._\n\nWe could tear momentary openings in the Wedge, that I grant. To ransack the entire space-time geometry may not even be conceptually possible.\n\n _Such niceties I leave to the savants of geometry. We need not cleave all Lanes\u2014only enough to discover the Three. A random sampling of the human-habited Lanes should suffice. Perhaps a hundred._\n\nSome levels of All/We will be displeased at the erasure of so much potentially useful data.\n\n _Once we have the Three and can decode\u2014that should be trivial\u2014the remaining data is mere trash._\n\nThere is the faction/submind of us/you which holds that both prudence and aesthetic issues\u2014\n\n _Enough of this. Decision is made._\n\nBut truly, wait\u2014\n\n _We/You are the majority._\n\nI understand.\n\n _All/You must remember to keep to our/your proper station. Act!_\n\nI must.\nPART FIVE\n\nThe Silver River Road\n\nFrom too much love of living,\n\nFrom hope and fear set free,\n\nWe thank with brief thanksgiving\n\nWhatever gods may be\n\nThat no life lives for ever;\n\nThat dead men rise up never;\n\nThat even the weariest river\n\nWinds somewhere safe to sea.\n\n\u2014SWINBURNE\n\n\"The Garden of Proserpine\"\nONE\n\nMolten Time\n\nToby continued down the silver river in search of his father.\n\nHe crouched in his skiff, swaying with the rippling currents, and watched his trawling line. He had not eaten for two days. His vegetarian principles had not held up well under perpetual pursuit and ravagements. A fat yellow fish shimmered far down in the filmy water but would not bite.\n\nCuriosity overcame hunger and he leaned over to see if the fish was nosing about his line. Instead of plump prey he saw himself, mirrored far down in a tin-gray metal current. But his image wore the cane hat he had lost overboard yesterday. He stared down into the trapped time flow, which had kept pace with his skiff's downtime glide. Frowning, he studied his optimistic gaze of yesterday. A smudged forehead, sprigs of greasy hair jutting around his big ears, a determined set to the jaw that looked faintly absurd. He would have to learn to give less of himself away. Adults could do that without thinking.\n\nHe edged back from the lip of the shallow-bottomed skiff. He had fashioned the skiff from scrap metal in order to negotiate this strange river with is mixture of fluids, silky waters, and conducting metals, and he knew how rickety the shell was. The liquid metal current was rising through the skin of water. It could sink him with a casual brush. Danger dried his mouth, tightened his throat.\n\nDown through murky water he had glimpsed a slow churn of ivory radiance. Mercury shaped the broad, mud-streaked course. Treachery lurked in that metallic upwelling\u2014oblong-shaped many-armers, electric vipers, fanged things that glided through the metal currents like broad-winged birds.\n\nHe lay still in the skiff bottom, hoping the time-dense flow would subside. A queasy temporal swell oozed through his gangly body. To distract himself from the nausea he gazed up at the great spreading forest that hung overhead.\n\nPatches of bare timestone shimmered there, opulent with smoldering glows. The esty here was tubular, dominated by this shiny snake river that wound through bluffs and forests. Downriver, the yawning bore of his circumscribed cosmos faded into ivory mist. He could see a sizable city there beside a shimmering bend. Behind him, uptime, he could make out the immense curve of the esty and its rich hills until perspective warped and blurred them. He was tempted to thumb up his binoculars to see\u2014\n\nA thump against the skiff. Something heavy, moving.\n\nHe held his breath. Normally the skiff moved feather-light, responding to the rub and press of the air's very compression behind him as he voyaged down the silver river and thus accelerated through time.\n\nIrregular patches of bare timestone crust overhead gave forth smatterings of prickly light. He wished for a moment of darkness to hide him. Volcanoes of iridescence erupted from the land on the opposite curve of esty-tube. Light splintered down and beat on him. He bore the sudden blast of heat without a sound.\n\n _ **You are acquitting yourself well**_\n\ncame the whispery words from Shibo. The fragments of herself had begun calling to him. The small voice was soothing and plaintive and he knew he had to resist it.\n\nHe concentrated on the sounds from below. He could not hear anything clearly because the timestone was splitting high above. It would not fall on him; local gravity was always down.\n\n _ **This is an awful place. You have survived nobly.**_\n\n\"Naysay. I kept my head down.\"\n\n _ **I could help you so much more if you would just give me functions I could use. You are lonely and need the\u2014**_\n\nAnswering her was a mistake. She went on and on and he had to concentrate to push her down. She had tried before to mutiny, take control of himself, a traitor Personality. For that there was no forgiveness.\n\nShe fought him with tiny cries. He thought of another woman, of Besen, of making love to her, skin smooth and creamy. He longed to see Besen again. That helped. The memory of her swamped Shibo's wracked sobs.\n\nSmooth skin . . . The face of the water was also smooth . . . and deceptive.\n\nEverything here was dangerous. The exploding timestone came from monstrous collisions between unknown energies, distant flares of the Eater, vast meaningless violence beyond human ken. But the mechs were here, too, and he suspected everything now. He had seen them in the distance. They seemed at a disadvantage here in this moist tunnel-like Lane. Their wrecked bodies sometimes floated by him on the river. But they kept coming; they always had.\n\nSomething worried the water's surface.\n\nHe sat up and reached for his paddle and a skinny thing shot out of the water and snapped past his head. He ducked and slapped the tendril with his paddle. A knobby angular wedge with slitted yellow eyes heaved up from the wrinkled water. It smoked acrid green, out of its metal element, and struck at him again. He swung the paddle. It caught the tendril and sliced through.\n\nThe mercury-beast bleated and splashed and was gone. He dug into the water with the paddle\u2014half its blade sheared cleanly off\u2014and thrust hard. Splashing behind.\n\nHe labored into deeper water. The green fumes swirled away. When the currents calmed he veered toward shore. The big-jawed predator could snap him from the surface in an instant, crunch his skiff in two, if it could extend out of the low-running streams of silver-gray mercury and ruddy bromium. A turbulent swell had brought it up, and might again.\n\nHis arms burned and his breath rasped well before the prow ran aground. Hurriedly he splashed ashore, tugging a frayed rope. He got the skiff up onto a mud flat and into a copse and slid it far back to hide it among leafy branches.\n\nWeakly he flopped down and fetched forth some stringy dried blue meat to quiet the rumble in his stomach. His systems were mostly dead now, crapped out in his long flight. Servos barely ran in his knees and arms. His weapons had discharged and the rest were unreliable. They were designed to bring down mechs anyway and useless for hunting. He had started eating meat when he got really hungry and was somewhat ashamed to admit that he liked it. Principle melted before the flame of necessity.\n\nHe peered at dense forest and patchy mud flats and decided to explore a little. The silent power of the river insulated a lonely skiff from the rhythms of land and made coasting downstream and downtime natural, silkily inevitable. He would learn nothing that way, though.\n\nHe walked upshore, into the silent press of time that felt at first like a mild summer's breeze but drained the energy of anyone who worked against it. As he went he eyed the profusion of stalks and trunks and tangled blue-green masses that crouched close to the river's edge like something waiting. It had been a long while since he had fled the destruction of the giant pyramid mountain and the Walmsley man from Family Brit. He had been happy to find this strange Lane with its silver river and to ease down it, following timelines that flowed nearer the black hole. He had learned some of the culture and had begun to like the soft humanity of it, its archaic charm.\n\nNo signs of people. He kept up a good pace and became distracted and so was unprepared. A short man with a duckbill blunderbuss stepped from behind a massive tree trunk and just grinned.\n\n\"What's the name?\" the man asked, spitting first.\n\n\"Toby.\"\n\n\"Walking upriver?\"\n\nBetter to skirt the question than to lie. \"Looking for food.\"\n\n\"Find any?\"\n\n\"Hardly had a chance to.\"\n\n\"Couldn'ta come far. Big storm just downstream from here.\" The man grinned broadly, showing brown teeth, lips thin and bloodless. \"I saw it pull a man's arms off.\"\n\nSo he knew Toby couldn't have just strolled here from downstream. Toby said casually, \"I walked down from the point, the one with the big old dead tree.\"\n\n\"I know that place. Plenty berries and footfruit there. Why come lookin' here?\"\n\n\"I heard there's a big city this way.\"\n\n\"More like a town, kid. Me, I think you oughta stay out here in the wild with us.\"\n\n\"Who's 'us'?\"\n\n\"Some fellas.\" The man's fixed grin soured at the edges.\n\n\"I got to be getting on, mister.\"\n\n\"This baby here says you got fresh business.\" He displayed the blunderbuss as though he had invented it.\n\n\"I got no money.\"\n\n\"Don't want or need money. Your kind, big and fresh, my friends will sure enjoy seeing you.\"\n\nHe gestured with the blunderbuss for Toby to walk. Toby saw no easy way to get around the big weapon so he strode off, the man following at a cautious distance.\n\nThe blunderbuss was in fact the ornate fruit of a tree Toby had once seen. The weapons grew as hard pods on the slick-barked trees and had to be sawed off when they swelled to maturity. This one had a flange that opened into a gnarled ball and then flared farther into the butt\u2014all part of the living weapon. If stuck butt-down in rich soil, with water and daylight, it grew cartridges for the gun. From the size of the butt he guessed that this was a full-grown weapon and would carry plenty of shots.\n\nHe stumbled through a tangle of knife grasses, hearing the man snicker at his awkwardness, and then came to a pink clay path. Plainly this man planned to bring him to some kind of mean-spirited reception. Simple thieving, or a spot of buggery\u2014these he had heard of and even witnessed. But the man's rapt, hot-eyed gaze spoke of more, some vice from the unknown swamp of adulthood.\n\nWhat should he do? His mind churned fruitlessly.\n\nToby's breath rasped and quickened as he took his time on the steepening path. Like most footways, this one moved nearly straight away from the river, and thus a traveler suffered neither the chilly press of uptime nor the nauseating slide of downtime. Toby judged the path would probably rise into the dry-brown foothills ahead. Insects hung and buzzed in the stillness of slumberous, sliding moments. A few bit.\n\nHe thought furiously. They passed through a verdant, hummocky field and then up ahead around a sharp bend he saw, just a few steps beyond, a deep shiny iron-gray stream that gurgled down toward the river, and a dead muskbat that lay in the gummy clay path.\n\nA muskbat never smells grand and this one, at least a day dead, filled the air with a sharp reek.\n\nToby gave no sign, just held his breath. The stream murmured beside him. Its weak time-churn unsteadied his step only a little. A fallen branch and windstorm debris lay just a bit beyond the muskbat's cracked and oozing blue-black skin.\n\nHe stepped straight over the muskbat and three steps more. As he turned the man breathed in the repulsive tang and his swarthy face contorted. The man drew back, foot in midair, and the blunderbuss wavered away.\n\nToby snatched up the branch. Without meaning to he sucked in the putrid fumes. He had to clench his throat tight to stop his stomach from betraying him. He leaped at the man. In midair he swung the branch, wood seeking wood, and felt a sharp jolt as he connected.\n\n\"Ah!\" the man cried in pain. The blunderbuss sprang into the air and tumbled crazily into the stream\u2014\n\n\u2014which dissolved the gun with a stinging hiss and explosive puff of fragrant orange steam. The man gaped at this, at Toby\u2014and took a step back.\n\n\"Now you,\" Toby said because he could think of nothing else.\n\nHe got the words out at his lowest bass register. With a devouring metal rivulet nearby, any wrestling could bring disintegrating death in a flicker. Toby felt his knees turn to water, his heart jump into his throat.\n\nThe man fled. Scampered away with a little hoarse cry.\n\nToby blinked in surprise and then beat his own retreat, to escape the virulent muskbat fumes. He stopped at the edge of a viny tangle and looked back at the stream.\n\nHis chest filled with sudden pride. He had faced down a full-grown man. He!\n\nOnly later did he realize that the man was legitimately more frightened than Toby was\u2014for he faced a wild-eyed stranger of some muscle, ungainly but armed with a fair-sized club. So the man had prudently escaped, his dirty shirt tail flapping like a harrying rebuke behind him.\nTWO\n\nConfusion Winds\n\nToby skirted away from the foothills, in case the swarthy man came back with his friends. He headed downstream, marching until sleep overcame him. By keeping a good long distance from the river he hoped to avoid the time-storm the man had mentioned\u2014assuming it wasn't a lie.\n\nThe river was always within view from any fair-sized rise, since the land curved up toward the territories overhead. A sheen of clear water blended with the ruddy mud flats at this distance, so that Toby could barely pick out the dabs of silver and tin-gray that spoke of deadly undercurrents.\n\nHe had arisen and found some mealy brush fruit for breakfast and had set off again when he felt a prickling at the nape of his neck. A ripple passed by. It pinched his chest and stung his eyes. Hollow booms volleyed through the layered air.\n\nHe looked up. Across the misty expanse he could make out the far side of the esty. It was a clotted terrain of hills and slumped valleys, thick with a rainbow's wonder of plant life, dappled lakes, snaky streams\u2014all tributaries to the one great river. As he watched the overhead arch compressed, like an accordion he had seen an old lady playing once\u2014and then the squeezing struck him as well. Clutched his ribs, strained at his neck and ankles as though trying to pull him apart. Trees creaked, teetered, and one old black one crashed over nearby. He lay on moist, fragrant humus where he had fallen and watched the massive constriction inch its way downstream, a compression wave passing and then relaxing, like the digesting spasm of a great beast. Strata groaned, rocks shattered. A final peal like a giant's hammer rolled over the leafy canopy.\n\nAs he watched it proceed he saw through his binoculars for the first time the spires of the city, and saw one tumble in a glimmering instant as the great wave passed. Somehow he had thought of cities\u2014or _towns,_ as the man had said, a word strange to Toby\u2014as grand places free of the rub of raw nature, invulnerable.\n\nHe moved on quickly. A purple radiance played amidst the ripe forest, shed by a big patch of raw fresh timestone beside a shiny lake, far away. Thoughts of the city possessed him, ideas of how to track his father, so he forgot the time-storm.\n\nAt first he felt a wrenching in the pit of his stomach. Then the humid air warped, perverting perspectives, and confusion rode the winds.\n\nHis feet refused to land where he directed them unless he kept constant attention, his narrowed eyes holding the errant limbs continually in view. Cordwood-heavy, his arms gained and lost weight as they swung. To turn his head without planning first was to risk a fall. He labored on, panting. Hours oozed past. He ate, napped, kept on. The air sucked strength from muscles and sent itchy traceries playing on his skin.\n\nThe whispering tendrils of stupefaction left him as he angled toward the city. He sagged with fatigue. Three spires remained ahead, whitewash-bright, the most palatial place he had ever seen. Houses of pale polished wood were lined up neat and sure beside rock-roads laid arrow-straight with even the slate slabs cut square and true.\n\nThese streets thronged with more people than Toby could count. Ladies in finery stepping gingerly over horse dung, coarse frolickers lurching against walls, tradesmen elephantine and jolly, foul-witted quarrelers, prodigious braggarts, red-faced hawkers of everything from sweets to saws. All swarming like busybody insects and abuzz with talk.\n\nTo Toby it was like trying to take a drink from a waterfall. He wandered the gridded streets, acutely conscious of his ragged clothes and slouch hat. Baggy trousers covered his field gear. He drew some odd looks.\n\nThis whole Lane seemed devoted to the comforts of some human past he could not quite fathom. His Isaac Aspect broke in,\n\n _ **This is a deliberate echo of an ancient human culture. I cannot place it, but obviously it is pre-Chandelier. Their technology is mannered and cherished for that fact. Together with the river, it seems a sort of refuge for some. I hypothesize\u2014**_\n\n\"I'd appreciate advice on how to get out of this Lane plenty more than your theorizing.\" Toby had assigned Isaac the task of searching all files in his Aspect-space, and he had hoped for more than this.\n\n_**It lies quite within the realm of human sociology to manifest nostalgia on such a scale. This Lane seems to run on varying time senses because of extreme esty gradients, and the human reaction has been to cling to constancy. Understandable and\u2014**_\n\n\"Quiet.\" He stuffed the Aspect back in its hole and sought the one thing he knew, the river.\n\nAlong the big stone quay men loafed in the rising, insect-thronged heat. They slouched in split-bottomed chairs tilted back to the point of seeming dynamical impossibility, chins on chests, hats tipped down over drowsy eyes. A six-legged sow and her brood grunted by, doing a good business in droppings from split crates.\n\nBeyond this slow scene lay the river, lit by the fitful radiance of three overhead timestone patches. Toby took off his pack and sat on a wharf railing and looked at the river's ceaseless undulation, broken by shards of raw silver that broke the surface, fumed, and were gone.\n\n\"Lookin' for work?\"\n\nThe voice was rough. It belonged to a young man somewhat older than Toby and short, like everyone here. Broad shoulders burst his crosshatched shirt. But the eyes were dreamy, warm.\n\n\"Might be.\" He would need money here.\n\n\"Got some unloadin' to do. Never 'nuff hands.\" The young man held out a broad palm. They shook. \"Name's Stan.\"\n\n\"Mine's Toby. Heavy stuff?\"\n\n\"Moderate. We got droners to help.\"\n\nStan jabbed a thumb at a line of five slumped figures seated along the jetty. Toby had seen these before, only upriver they were called Zoms. They all sat the same way, legs sprawled out in front, arms slack, weight on the lower spine at a steep angle. No man could sit in that manner for long. Zoms didn't seem to mind. Just about anything seemed better than being dead.\n\n\"You new?\" Stan asked, squatting down beside Toby and scribbling something on a clipboard with a pencil stub.\n\n\"Just came in.\"\n\n\"Raft?\"\n\n\"Skiff. Landed up above that storm.\"\n\nStan whistled. \"And walked around? Long way. That ripple knock you flat?\"\n\n\"Tried to.\"\n\n\"Be a lotta trouble to get back to your skiff.\"\n\n\"I might just push on down.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Stan brightened. \"How far you come?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Angel's Point? Rockport?\"\n\n\"I heard of them. Saw Alberts but it was foggy.\"\n\n\"You're from _above_ Rockport? And just a kid?\"\n\n\"I'm older than I look,\" Toby said stiffly.\n\n\"You _do_ have a funny accent.\"\n\nToby gritted his teeth. \"So do you, to my ear.\"\n\n\"I thought, comin' this far downtime, you'd get sick, go crazy, or something.\" Stan seemed truly impressed, his eyes wide.\n\n\"I didn't just shoot down.\" It would be dumb to get into his past. People along the river didn't care very much for outsiders. \"I stopped some to . . . explore.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\nToby shifted uneasily. He shouldn't have said anything. The less people knew about you, the less they could use. \"Treasure.\"\n\n\"Like hydrogen? Big market for hydrogen chunks here.\"\n\n\"No, more like\u2014\" Toby struggled to think of something that made sense. \"Jewels. Ancient rubies and all.\"\n\n\"No foolin'? I've never seen any.\"\n\n\"They're rare. Left over from the olden lords and ladies.\"\n\nStan opened his mouth and stuck his tongue up into his front teeth in an expression of intense thought. \"Uh . . . Who were _they_?\"\n\n\"Primeval people. Ones from _waaay_ uptime. They were so rich then, cause there were so few of them, that the sapphires and gold just dripped off their wrists and necks.\"\n\nWide-eyed now. \"Earnest?\"\n\n\"They had so much, it was like the dust in the road to them. Sometimes when they got bored, the ladies'd snatch up a whole gob of jewels, their very finest, all glittery and ripe, and they'd stick them all over some of those big hats they wore. Come a flood, people would drown and those jewel-fat hats would come downtime.\"\n\n\"Hats?\" Open-mouthed wonder.\n\nAn airy wave of his hand. \"Not the slouch hats we wear down here. I'm talkin' big boomer hats, made of, well, hydrogen itself.\"\n\n\"Hydro\u2014\" Stan stopped, a look of puzzlement washing across his face, and Toby saw that he had to cover that one.\n\n\"See, those prehistoric days, hydrogen was even lighter than it is today. So they wore it. The very finest of people weaved it into fancy vests and collars and hats.\"\n\nA doubtful scowl. \"I never saw anybody . . .\"\n\n\"Well, see now, that's just the thing. My point exactly. Those olden ladies and officers, they wore out all the hydrogen. That's why it's worth so much today.\"\n\nStan's mouth made an awestruck _O._ \"That's wondrous, plain wondrous. I mean, I knew hydrogen was the lightest metal. Strongest, too. No puzzlement it's what every big contractor and engine-builder wants, only can't get. But\u2014\" he looked sharply at Toby\u2014\"how come you know?\"\n\n\"How come a kid knows?\" Might as well feed him back that remark. \"Because uptime, we're closer to the archaic ages. We look out for those hydrogen hats that came down the river and wash up.\"\n\nStan frowned. \"Then why'd you come down here?\"\n\nFor an instant Toby had the sick feeling that he was caught out. The whole story was going to blow up on him. He would lose this job and go hungry.\n\nThen he blinked and said, \"Uptime people already _got_ the hats that came ashore there. It's the ones that got past them that I'm after.\"\n\n\"Aaahhh . . .\" Stan liked this and at once began to shoot out questions about the grand hats and treasure hunting, how Toby did it, what he'd found, and so on. It was a relief when somebody called, \"Induction ship!\" and the sleepy quay came to life.\nTHREE\n\nThe Zom\n\nThe big white ship seemed to Toby to snap into existence, bright and trim and sharp as it bore down upon them. It cut the river, curling water like a foamy shield, sending gobbets of iron-gray liquid metal spraying before it.\n\nIt was a three-decker with gingerbread railings and a pyramid-shaped pilothouse perched atop. Large, thick disks dominated each side, humming loudly as it decelerated. Only these induction disks, which had to cast their field lines deep into the river and thrust the great boat forward, were untouched by the eternal habit of ornamentation. Curlicues trickled down each stanchion. Pillars had to be crowned with ancient scrollwork, the fly bridge carried sculptures of succoring angels, davits and booms and mastheads wore stubby golden helmets.\n\nPassengers lined the ornate railings as the boat slowed, foam leaped in the air, and backwash splashed about the stone quay. A whistle sounded eerily and deck hands threw across thick ropes.\n\nStan caught one and looped it expertly about a stay. \"Come on!\"\n\nCrowds had coagulated from somewhere, seeming to condense out of the humidity onto the jetty and quay. A hubbub engulfed the induction ship. Crates and bales descended on crane cables. Wagons rumbled forth to take them and Toby found himself in a gang of Zoms, tugging and wrestling the bulky masses. Crowds yawped and hailed and bargained with vortex energy all around.\n\nThe Zoms followed Stan's orders sluggishly, their mouths popping open as they strained, drool running down onto their chests. These were corpses kindled back to life quite recently, and so still strong, though growing listless. Zoms were mostly men, since they were harvested for heavy manual labor. But a hefty woman labored next to Toby and between loads she put her hand on his leg, directly and simply, and then slipped her fingers around to cup his balls.\n\nToby jerked away, her reek biting in his nostrils. He slapped her hard. Zoms hungered for life. They knew that they would wither, dwindling into torpid befuddlement, within months. The heavy woman shook her head, then leered at him and felt his ass. He backed away from her, shivering.\n\nAnd bumped into a shabby Zom man who turned sluggishly and mumbled, \"Toby. Toby.\"\n\nStunned, he peered into the filmed eyes and slack mouth. Parchment skin stretched over stark promontories of the wrecked face. Memories stirred. Some faint echo in the cheekbones? The sharp nose?\n\n\"Toby . . . I am . . . father . . .\"\n\n\"No!\" Toby cried.\n\n\"Toby . . . came here . . . time . . .\"\n\nThe Zom reached unsteadily for his shoulder. It was in the tottering last stages of its second life, the black mysteries' energy now seeping from it.\n\n\"You're not my father! Get away.\"\n\nThe Zom gaped, blinked, reached again.\n\n\"No!\" Toby pushed the Zom hard and it went down. It made no attempt to catch itself and landed in a sprawl of limbs. It lay inert, its eyes filmed.\n\n\"Hey, it botherin' you?\" Stan asked.\n\n\"Just, they just get to me, is all.\"\n\n\"These're made in Resurrection City, I heard.\"\n\n\"Where's that?\"\n\n\"'Nother Lane entire. They knock off copies from raw stock.\"\n\n\"From dead people?\"\n\n\"Don't have to be. Got a mind-copy, just fast-grow a template, marry them up\u2014zingo, you got cheap labor galore.\"\n\nToby studied the slack-jawed face and resolved that this Zom could not possibly be his father. The false Abraham had fooled him for a moment but not this thing, no. There was really no resemblance at all, now that he took a close and objective scrutiny.\n\n\"Let it lay there,\" Stan said dismissively. \"We got work to do.\"\n\nIt was so far gone Toby could not tell if this was some copy from the Restorer, which he supposed was what Stan meant by Resurrection City, or in fact the true Killeen, somehow aged in the esty.\n\nSo he put the matter out of his mind. He would treat this Zom as a copy, like that one of his grandfather back in the field hospital. He decided this and thought of it no more. It did not occur to him that he could not have done this only a few years before.\n\nThe rest of the unloading Toby helped carry out without once looking toward the crumpled form. Ladies stepped gingerly over the Zom and a passing man kicked it, all without provoking reaction.\n\nSweat was trickling into his eyebrows and so he did not see the mechs at first. \"Heyso!\" someone called. Toby looked up\u2014\n\n\u2014into an onrushing sleek snout. Two others followed. They banked in the soft air and their shock wave slammed down onto the docks. People ran all whichways but Toby stood still, watching the silvery craft climb up the air. They pitched and yawed to no apparent purpose, angling out over the shore.\n\n\"Looking,\" Stan said. \"Been here before.\"\n\n\"These same ones?\" Toby asked.\n\n\"Smaller last time.\"\n\nThe craft banked and glided now, slower and more careful as they prowled over the town. Toby still did not move. Mechs could pick up servos working. Stan gave him a puzzled look and cautiously got down behind some bales of sticky-grass.\n\nThey were coming back. Calls trilled in his receptors. \"Bishops!\" he whispered. He could pick out Cermo, Jocelyn, others. So the mechs had gotten the Family codes. He killed his inboards, in case some vagrant signal might get out in response.\n\nThey came right overhead. The moment passed with agonizing slowness and for a crazy instant he thought they must have stopped dead high above him. Then they were out over the river and he could start breathing again.\n\nJust as he did, somebody shot at the mechs. It was a reasonably sophisticated weapon, Toby could tell, because it left virtually no detectable backtrail. Probably it used some sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum that Bishops could not sense.\n\nThe mechs could. The shot came from somewhere downstream and they rushed that way. It had done them no harm that Toby could see. They fired once, all three together. Someone screamed. The mechs moved off and the screaming stopped. Whoever had died had been foolish. Toby had not for a moment considered trying to help them against mechs of such a caliber. That he had learned as a boy.\n\n\"They did that 'fore, too,\" Stan said. He stood up from behind the bale and tried to make out as if he had not been there.\n\n\"Get anybody?\"\n\n\"Not that I heard.\"\n\n\"Which way did they go then?\"\n\n\"Just like these\u2014\" Stan pointed as the three leveled out and accelerated. \"Downtime.\"\n\n\"Always?\"\n\n\"Certain. After somebody, I 'spect.\"\n\nAnd trying to sucker Bishops in, too, Toby thought. Maybe him. Or maybe it meant there were Bishops about.\n\nThey went downriver. Maybe that meant he should not.\n\nAfter the mechs were out of sight everyone went on as though nothing had happened. The labor was fast and hard, for the induction ship was already taking on its passengers. Crowds, packages, happy confusion. By the time Toby returned from a nearby warehouse where the first wagonload went, only ripples in the mud-streaked river showed that the ship had tarried there at all.\nFOUR\n\nMr. Preston\n\nThat day was long and hard, what with plenty of barrels and hogsheads and wooden crates to unlash and sort out and stack in the crumbling stone warehouse. Stan was a subagent for one of the big importation enterprises and had a steady run of jobs, so Toby was kept busy the rest of the day.\n\nThey had little tech here and relied on grunt labor. The Zoms from the quay wore out quickly and Stan brought out another crew of them. Toby did not see the one that had collapsed and did not go looking for it in the musty rear of the warehouse where they were kept, either.\n\nThe laboring time ended as the big bare patch of timestone overhead dimmed. This was a lucky occurrence, as people still preferred to sleep in darkness. Though there was no cycle of day and night here, a few hours of shadow were enough to set most into the slumber they needed. Toby had once seen a night that lasted several \"days\" so that folks began to openly speculate whether the illumination would ever return to the timestone. When the sulphurous glow did come it waxed into stifling heat and piercing glare so ferocious that everyone regretted their earlier impatience for it.\n\nStan took Toby to his own boarding house and arranged for him, leaving just enough time for a bath of cold river water before supper. Toby was amazed at the boarding table to see the rapidfire putting away of victuals combined with fast talking, as though mouths were meant to chew and blab at the same time. Game hens roasted to golden brown appeared on an immense platter and were seized and devoured before they reached him, though Stan somehow managed to get two and shared. A skinny man with a goatee opposite Toby cared only for the amusements of his mouth, alternately chewing, joking, and spitting none too accurately into a brass spittoon set beside him. Stan ate only with his knife, nonchalantly inserting the blade sometimes all the way into his mouth. Toby managed to get forkfuls of gummy beans and thick slabs of gamy meat into himself before dessert came flying by, a concoction featuring an island of hard nuts in a sea of cream that burst into flame when a man touched his cigar to it. Stan ate some and then contentedly sat back in his wicker chair, picking his teeth with a shiny pocket knife, an exhibition of casual bravery unparalleled in Toby's experience.\n\nAfterward Toby wanted more than anything to sleep, but Stan enticed him into the hubbub of the streets. They ended up in a bar dominated for a time by an immense, well-lubricated woman whose tongue worked well in its socket, her eyes rolling as she sang a ballad Toby could not fathom. At the end of it she fell with a crash to the floor and it took three men to carry her out. Toby could not decide whether this was part of the act or not, for it was more entertaining than the singing.\n\nStan thrust some dark beer upon him and artfully took that moment to pay Toby his day's wages, which of course made Toby seem a piker if he did not buy the next round, which came with unaccountable speed. He was halfway through that mug and thinking better of this evening, of this huge complex city, of his fine new friend Stan, and generally of the entire copious wonderful esty itself, when he recalled how his own father had drunk heavily years before. He remembered Killeen remarking at the time that in Family Bishop, you discarded a cork once you had pulled it from a bottle, knowing with assurance that it would not be needed again.\n\nThis connection troubled him, but Stan relieved Toby's frown by stretching his legs out and sticking a sock-clad foot up. The sock had a face sewed on it so that Stan could jiggle his toes and make the face show anger, smile, even blink. All the while Stan carried on a funny conversation with the artistic foot. But this made Toby remember a day after the Calamity, cold and bleak, when Bishops were camping overnight with some stragglers from other Families. A tall Knight boy had stuck his gray-socked foot from beneath some covers as a joke. Toby mistook it for a rat and threw his knife, skewering the foot. That had made him unpopular for some time around Family Knight.\n\nHe smiled at this and had another sip of beer. Stan's face went pale. Toby felt a presence behind him.\n\nTurning, he saw a tall man dressed in leather jacket and black pants, sporting a jaunty blue cap. No one but pilots could wear such a cap with its gold flashings across the bill.\n\n\"Mr.\u2014Mr. Preston,\" Stan said.\n\n\"You gentlemen out for an evening? Not too busy to discuss business?\"\n\nMr. Preston smiled with an austere good nature, as befitted a representative of an unfettered and truly independent profession. His Aspects had laboriously taught him that lords found themselves hampered by parliaments, ministers knew the constraints of their parishioners, even school teachers in their awful power finally worked for towns.\n\nBut a silver river pilot knew _no_ governance. A ship's captain could give a half dozen or so orders as the induction motors readied and she backed sluggishly into the stream, but as soon as the engines engaged, the captain's rule was overthrown. The pilot could then run the vessel exactly as he pleased, barking orders without consultation and beyond criticism by mere mortals.\n\nWithout asking, Mr. Preston yanked a chair from another of the raw hardwood tables that packed the bar, and smacked it down at the table. \"I heard you come from uptime\u2014 _way_ uptime,\" he said to Toby.\n\n\"Uh, Stan told you?\" Toby asked to get some time to think.\n\n\"He dropped a word, yes. Was he wrong?\" Mr. Preston peered at Toby intently, his broad mouth tilted at an assessing angle beneath a bristly brown mustache.\n\n\"Nossir. Maybe he, uh, exaggerated, though.\"\n\n\"Said you'd been above Rockport.\"\n\n\"I caught sight of it in fog. That awful pearly kind that\u2014\"\n\n\"How far beyond?\"\n\n\"Not much.\"\n\n\"Cairo?\"\n\n\"I . . . yeah, I gave it wide berth.\"\n\n\"Describe it.\"\n\n\"Big place, grander than this town.\"\n\n\"You see the point? With the sand reef?\"\n\n\"I didn't see any reef.\"\n\n\"Fair enough\u2014there isn't any reef. What's the two-horned point like?\"\n\n\"Foam whipping up in the air.\"\n\n\"Where's the foam go?\"\n\n\"Shoots out of the river and arcs across to the other horn.\"\n\n\"You go under the arc?\"\n\n\"Nossir. I stayed in the easy water close on the other shore.\"\n\n\"Smart. That arc's been there since I was a boy and nobody's lived who tried to shoot with the current under it.\"\n\n\"I heard that too.\"\n\n\"Who from?\"\n\n\"Fellow upstream.\"\n\n\"How far upstream?\"\n\nNobody ever lied to a pilot, but you could shave the truth some. Toby took a sip of the dark beer that was thick enough to make a second supper\u2014as some in the bar seemed to be doing, loudly\u2014and said with care, \"The reach above Cairo. That's where I started.\"\n\nMr. Preston leaned forward and jutted out his long jaw shrewdly. \"There's a big bar there, got to go by it easy. Sand, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Nossir, it's black iron.\"\n\nMr. Preston sat back and signaled the barkeep\u2014who had been hovering, wringing a dirty rag\u2014for a round. \"Right. A plug of it that gushed up from some terrible event in the river bottom. Books say a geyser of molten metal\u2014not the cool ones that flow under the river\u2014that geyser came fuming up through the timestone itself.\"\n\n\"I've been in other parts of the esty and I haven't seen anything like this river. It doesn't seem logical.\"\n\n\"Not for us to know, son.\"\n\n\"Please don't call me son, sir.\"\n\nMr. Preston's bushy eyebrows crowded together, momentarily puzzled at the quick, hard note that had come into Toby's voice, but then he waved his hand amply. \"Surely done, Mr. Toby. I must say there is something about you that is wise beyond your apparent years. I am prepared to hire your services.\"\n\nStan was looking bug-eyed at this interchange. For two lowly freight musclers to be drinking with a pilot was like a damp river rat going to dinner at the mayor's. And this latest development!\n\n\"Services?\" Stan put in, unable to restrain himself any longer.\n\n\"Navigation. There've been five big time-squalls between here and Cairo since I was up that way. Now I got a commission to take the _Natchez_ up that far and no sure way of knowing the river that far.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I know the river all that well,\" Toby demurred, his mind still aswarm with scattershot thoughts.\n\n\"You see any of those storms?\"\n\n\"Two of them, yessir. From a distance, though.\"\n\n\"Only way to see one, I'd say,\" Stan said with forced jocularity. He was still stunned from the offer.\n\nThe pilot grimaced in agreement, an expression that told much of narrow escapes and lost friends. \"You kept your skiff well clear?\"\n\n\"I poled and rowed, both. Prob'ly just lucky with the currents, truth to tell.\"\n\n\"A time-storm attracts ships according to their mass, see? Your rowing was most likely the cause of your salvation,\" the pilot said. \"An induction ship, despite its power, must be more crafty. Its weight is its doom.\"\n\nToby sipped his strong beer and said, \"I don't know as I want to go back up there, sir.\"\n\n\"I'll make it worth your while.\" The pilot squinted at him, as though trying to see something in Toby's face that he wasn't giving away. \"I was hoping you might have business back up there.\"\n\n _Might have business._ At once the Zom's face lurched into Toby's mind's-eye and he felt the barroom close about him, its suffocating air clotted with cigar smoke. The banks of blue fumes swirled amid the seeping yellow glow of filament bulbs that sprouted from the walls, each the size of a man's head with his hat on. Toby had kept his mind away from the memory until now but the weight of uncertainty again descended. He could not know if the Zom was his father unless he found it again, questioned it.\n\n\"Sir, I'm going to have to give you my reply tomorrow. I have to see to a certain matter right now.\"\n\nThe surprise in Stan's and Mr. Preston's faces was almost amusing. It increased when Toby stood, bootheels smacking the floorboards loudly from the drink he had put down. He nodded solemnly and without a word plunged into the darkness outside.\nFIVE\n\nThe Frozen Girl\n\nInky shapes still shifted in his mind as he knocked on the door of Mr. Preston's house. Toby still felt himself encased in tangled memories, the hate he felt toward the Zom because he did not want it to be the Killeen he had known.\n\nIt was a fitful morning, with gray light piercing a fog and sending traceries across the rooftops along the slumbering river. Mechs and their virulence seemed infinitely far away. People here did not even talk about them. They were cloaked in this cozy, snug corner of the esty and would hear not a word of events beyond. Toby wondered if such people were typical of humanity. If so, what were the Bishops?\n\nHe could barely see the white picket fence framing Mr. Preston's yard. The pearly wisps blotted out detail beyond the brick walk that led to the house. This was a grand place, he had to admit, even in such diffuse light. It was porticoed in pale pine, the massive columns topped with flowery capitals. He rapped the iron door knocker again and instantly the brass doorknob turned, as if attached to the knocker. A dwarf answered, a mute servant, and led Toby along a carpeted hall.\n\nHe was unprepared for the grandiosity of a pilot's lodging, taking in with awe the mahogany furniture, a new electric lamp with yellow-paper shade, and an entire shelf of sound-sculptures. The dwarf retreated, gesturing at a yawning, tongueless mouth and showing the red servant tattoo on his shoulder to explain his silence.\n\nA bounty of travel visions speckled the walls\u2014 _Above the Falls of Abraham, Volcanic Quest, Heart of Lightness, Struggle Against Destiny_ \u2014and many of literature, including the fanciful. Toby yearned to take the sheets and stroke them into luminosity, but as he reached for _Time Stream and World-Wrack_ he heard heavy thumping footsteps and turned to find the pilot in full blue and gold uniform.\n\n\"I hope you have settled your other matter,\" Mr. Preston said severely.\n\nOnly now did Toby recall clearly his abrupt departure from the table. The town beyond that raucous room had swallowed memory. He had made his way through narrow streets lined by rude buildings that seemed to lean out over the street, eclipsing the wan sky glow. The moist lanes near the river had been tangled and impossible to navigate without stumbling and stepping on sprawled forms, like bundles of clothing left for trash collection.\n\nThe masters of the Zoms left them where they lay, sure that they could not move without further feeding. Toby took hours to find the slack-jawed face he had seen on the quay, and then another long time peering at it before he was sure that the Zom was not merely in its lapsed state of rest. The thing had proved dead, limbs akimbo, stiffening into a hardened parody of a dance.\n\nAt morning the burly owner had come by, shrugged at the corpse, and thrown it into his wagon for disposal. Toby's questions about the Zom the big man brushed aside\u2014he didn't know the names, no, nor where they came from, nor from what part of the great river they hailed. Resurrection City? Only a rumor.\n\nAnd the last glimpse Toby had of that face had unsettled him further, as if in final death the Zom gave its last secret. There was a clear resemblance to his father. But was this a copy?\n\nSo with fatigue in his bones but a fresh, iron resolve in his spine Toby made himself stand erect beside the oak mantelpiece and say to Mr. Preston, \"I'll come, sir.\"\n\n\"Damn good! Want to see the backtime, do you?\"\n\n\"Yeasay.\"\n\n\"Whuzzat?\"\n\n\"Uh, yes.\" The word still felt odd. See the backtime, yeasay\u2014and go opposite to the mechs.\n\n\"Here, you had breakfast?\"\n\nCornmeal flapjacks and fritters, brought by the mistress of the house, quickly dominated Toby's attention while the pilot regaled him with lore and stories. Toby managed to keep the details of his long voyage downriver well-muddied, and was distracted from this task by Mr. Preston's collection of oddments, arrayed along the walls. There were crystals, odd-colored stones betraying volcanic abuse, a circlet of ancestral hair, five flint arrowheads from the fabled days, and some works of handicraft like dozens Toby had seen before. Beside these were bronze-framed, stiff 3D's of addled-looking children, aged uncles and the like, all arranged awkwardly and in Sunday-suited best for their bout with immortality.\n\nBut these oddments were nothing compared with the large transparent cube that dominated the dining room table. It shed cold air and Toby took it to be ice, but as he ate he saw that no drops ran off the sleek flat sides. Within its blue-white glow small objects of art were suspended\u2014a golden filigree, a jagged bit of quartz, two large insects with bristly feelers, and a miniature statue of a lovely young girl with red hair and a flowing white robe.\n\nHe had nearly finished inhaling the molasses-fattened flapjacks and slurping down a pot of coffee when he chanced to notice that one of the insect wings had lowered. Keeping an attentive ear to the pilot, who had launched into what appeared to be a four-volume oral autobiography in first draft, he watched carefully and saw the girl spinning slowly about her right toe. Her robe fetched up against her left leg and then gracefully played out into a spinning disk of velvety delicacy.\n\nBy this time the insects had both flapped their transparent gossamer wings nearly through a quarter-stroke. They were both heading toward the girl. Their multifaceted eyes strobed and fidgeted with what to them must be an excited vigor, and to Toby was a torpid, ominous arabesque.\n\n\"Ah, the hunt,\" the pilot interrupted his soliloquy. \"Beautiful, eh? I've been watching it for long enough to grow three beards.\"\n\n\"The girl, she's _alive._ \"\n\n\"Appears so. Though why she's so small, I cannot say.\"\n\n\"Where'd you get it?\"\n\n\"Far downstream.\"\n\n\"I never saw such.\"\n\n\"Nor I. Indeed, I suspect, from the quality of the workmanship, that the girl is real.\"\n\n\"Real? But she's no bigger than my thumbnail.\"\n\n\"Some trick of the light makes her seem so to us, I reckon.\"\n\n\"And these bugs\u2014\"\n\n\"They're nearly her size, true. Maybe they're enlarged, the opposite of the trick with the girl.\"\n\n\"And if they aren't?\"\n\n\"Then when they reach the girl they will have a merry time.\" The pilot grinned. \"A week's pay packet, I just handed it over flat, to purchase this. That li'l golden trinket, it's revolving, too\u2014see?\"\n\nShe spun farther and he saw that it was Besen. His Besen.\n\nSomewhere she had been trapped. Copied? Or could this somehow be the true Besen?\n\nHe tapped on the side but she showed no reaction.\n\nHe remembered once aboard _Argo_ when they had cleaned out a filthy shower together, doing ship's maintenance. Besen had unscrewed the drain and pulled out a hair ball the size of a well-fed rat. It was lustrous and gummy and so amazing when she held it up, a hairy moon beside her beaming, incredulous planet of a face, that he had laughed.\n\nHe felt a fresh wave of bitterly cold air waft from the cube of silent, slow time. \"Somethin' wrong, boy?\"\n\nHe had an urge to smash the blue-white wedge of molasses-slow tempo, to release its wrenched epochs and imprisoning, collapsed perspectives. But this was the pilot's object, and such men understood the twists of time better than anyone. Perhaps it was right that these things belonged to them.\n\nBest to put it aside. He would not know what to do with the trapped Besen if he did get it. Still, he felt relief when he escaped from the dining room and emerged into the cloaking fog outdoors.\nSIX\n\nGoing Upback\n\nThey were to boom out of the dock that very day. Toby had never known such awe as that instilled by his first moment, when he marched up the gangplank and set foot upon the already thrumming deck.\n\nNever before had he done more than gaze in reverence and abject self-abasement at one of the induction ships as it parted the river with its razor-sharp prow. Now Mr. Preston greeted him with a curt nod, quite circumspect compared to the sprawl of the man's conversation at breakfast. With minor ceremony he received his employment papers. Other crew shook Toby's hand with something better than the cool indifference he knew they gave any and all passengers. The customers who paid the costs were of course held in the lowest regard of all those aboard, including the wipe-boys below. Toby could tell from the somewhat distant, glassy gazes of the men and women of the crew that he was at least considered in the human family, pending.\n\n\"You been by that li'l flurry up ahead?\" Mr. Preston asked him as they made their way up the three flights of external stairs to the pilot's nest.\n\n\"Nossir. I came ashore, stowed my skiff, and walked round it.\"\n\n\"Ummm. Too bad. Think I'll nudge out across stream, keep some distance on it.\"\n\n\"Yessir.\"\n\nTo Toby this exotic Lane was a continual wonder. He began to see how people could want it this way, a pocket set aside from the mechs and all that weight of history. That they were re-creating some ancient manner long past did not matter; here, now, it was real.\n\nThe loading was finishing up, the ship's barely restrained thirst for the river sending a strong strumming into the air. Freight spun off the wagons and flew aboard at the hands of jostling work gangs, mostly Zoms. Late passengers came dodging and scampering among the boxes and hogsheads awaiting loading. Wives carrying hat boxes and grocery knapsacks urged on sweaty husbands, who lugged carpet bags and yowling babies. Drays and baggage three-wheelers clattered over cobblestones and intersected each others' trajectories more often than seemed possible from the supposed laws of probability, sending cases and jars smashing. Profanity blued the air. Windlasses snapped into hatches, fore and aft.\n\nToby loved the turmoil and racket, the whiz and whir of earnest purpose. The bursar called, \"All not goin', please to get themselfs ashore!\" and last bells rang, and the thronged decks of the _Natchez_ gushed their yammering burden onto the gangplanks\u2014a running tide that a few last, late passengers fought. The stage-plank slid in and a tall man came running and tried to jump the distance. He got a purchase on the gunmetal side and a crewwoman hauled him up, but his back pocket opened and his wallet thunked into the river. The crowd ashore laughed and a woman had to stop the man from jumping in after it.\n\nAll this Toby watched from the elevated sanctity of the pilot's nest. It was an elegant place, glass in so many directions he had to count to be sure there were only four of the transparent walls. The Cap'n stood beside the pilot, both arrayed in their dark blue-gold uniforms, and an eerie whistle sounded. The orange flag ran up the jack staff and the ship ceased its drift. Momentum surged through the deck and oily smoke belched from the three tall chimneys at the ship's midships.\n\nThe crowd along the quay called last-minute messages and cheered and the ship shot away from them, seeming to accelerate as it caught with induction fields the deep surge of metal beneath the waters. The town dwindled with bewildering speed, people on the quay turning into animated dolls that turned pinkish and mottled as Toby watched.\n\n\"The time flux,\" Mr. Preston answered Toby's frown. \"I locked us on to her right off. We're seeing their images squeezed and warped.\"\n\nAlready the shore was dappled with reds and blues as time shifted and streamed about the ship, the slap and heave of currents resounding in deep bass notes that Toby felt through his big-heeled boots.\n\nTo fly across duration itself, to wrench away from the certainty of patient, single-minded time\u2014Toby felt sour nausea grip his throat. Confusion swamped him, gut-deep accelerations\u2014a quickening not in mere velocity but in the quantity that he knew governed the esty but which no man could sense, the force of tangled space and time together. The firm deck went snake-slithery, thick air hummed, sparks forked about him. His body fought for long, aching moments the urgent tows and tugs, his chest tight, bowels watery, knees feather-light\u2014and then somehow his sinews found their equilibrium, without his conscious effort. He gulped in air and found it moist and savory.\n\n\"Steady.\" Mr. Preston had been eyeing him, he now saw. \"I reckoned you'd come through, but can't be sure till it's done.\"\n\n\"What if I hadn't?\"\n\nThe pilot shrugged. \"Put you ashore next stop, nothing else for it.\"\n\n\"What about passengers?\"\n\n\"It's easier down below. Up here, the tides are worse.\"\n\n\"Tides?\" He studied the river's table-flat expanse.\n\n\"Not river tides\u2014time tides. Passengers with addled heads and stomachs can just lie down till we reach their getoff point. Most, anyway.\"\n\nToby had always figured that the job of a pilot was to keep his ship on the river, which was not a considerable feat, since it was so wide. Silently watching Mr. Preston trim and slip among the upwellings of rich brown mud, and then slide with liquid grace along a burnt-golden reef of bromium metal, he saw the dancer's nimbleness and ease that came from the whirling oak-spoked master wheel, the orchestrated animal mutter of the induction motors, the geometric craft of rudder and prow. To have this elegant gavotte interrupted was not merely an inconvenience, and dangerous, but an aesthetic atrocity.\n\nThis Toby learned when a trading scow came rushing down the washboard-rough main current and into the _Natchez_ 's path. Rather than perturb his elegant course, Mr. Preston ran across the scow's two aft steering oars. Scarcely had the snapping and crunching ceased than a volley of gnarled profanity wafted up from the clutch of red faces shooting by to starboard. Mr. Preston's face lit up with a positive joy, for here were fit targets who could, unlike the _Natchez_ 's crew, _talk back._\n\nJoy of joys! He snatched open the roller window and stuck his head out and erupted back at the scow. And as the two ships separated and the scowmen's maledictions grew fainter, Mr. Preston poured on both volume and ferocity, calling upon gods and acts Toby had never heard of. When Mr. Preston rolled the window shut on its spool the pilot was emptied of malice, all tensions of the departure now well fled.\n\n\"My, sir, that was a good one,\" a voice said at Toby's elbow. It was Stan, beaming with appreciation of the pungent profanity.\n\nNot an opportune appearance. Mr. Preston skewered him with a glare. \"Deckhands with opinions? Nose to the planking, you!\"\n\nSo it was hours before Toby learned why Stan was on the _Natchez_ at all, for Stan spent his time manicuring the already immaculate-looking pilot's nest and then the iron stairs and pine gangways nearby. When Toby found him slurping a steaming cup of blackbean in the rear galley, Stan waxed eloquent.\n\n\" _Treasure,_ that's why I signed on. Deckhand pays next to nothin' and the time-current made me sick a sec or two, but I'm going to stick it out.\"\n\n\"Uh, treasure?\"\n\n\"I'm already looking for those hydrogen hats. Nobody never spied any this far downstream, so I figure you overshot, Toby, coming as far down as us. They got to be above us, for sure.\"\n\nToby nodded and listened to Stan gush about the star sapphires and fat rubies awaiting them and barely avoided laughing and giving it all away. On the other hand, it had brought him a friend in a place he found daunting.\n\n\"Too bad you had to give up your quest, though,\" Stan said slyly.\n\n\"What?\" Toby was using a bowl of bluebeans to keep his mouth busy and was brought up short by this odd remark.\n\n\"You overshot another way. That Zom was who you wanted to find. Only you wanted the man in his first life, and that lies upstream.\"\n\nHow Stan could swallow whole the hydrogen hat story and yet put together the truth about Toby's father from little slivers was a confoundment. Toby acknowledged this with a grunt and a begrudging nod, but cut off further talk. There was on the river a curious assumption that the river was infinitely long and that the rest of the esty a mere shadow wreathed about the telescoping downslope that sucked the river ever forward. So everything outside, esty-business and mechs and all, was a distraction.\n\nHe had learned early in his downstreaming not to allow others to indulge in yet another sentimental tale of a poor boy without a mother's cozy love or a father's strong arm, heaved all unfriended upon the cold charity of a censorious world. That was not the truth of it and if he did not tell them true they drew back in white-eyed horror.\n\n_**You are handling them just right.**_\n\nThe sudden spiking up of the Shibo fragment startled him. He stifled her, feeling oddly guilty.\nSEVEN\n\nTemporal Turbulence\n\nThe river's easy water lay close ashore. There the deep streams of bromium and mercury allowed the induction coils a firm grip, while the water current sped best in midstream. No hull-searing bromium streams broke surface here, so the watch was comparatively at ease.\n\nMr. Preston explained that the _Natchez_ had to hug the bank, thus separating it from the downstreaming craft that lazed in the middle, harvesting the stiff current. Toby learned a few of the deft tricks for negotiating the points, bends, bars, islands, and reaches that encumbered the route. He resolved early that if he ever became a pilot he would stick to downtiming and leave the uptiming to those dead to caution.\n\nBut the time-storm afflicted both types of craft.\n\nMurmuring dark fell as they cut across river before the whorl of time that awaited. It rose syphonlike at midriver, whereas reports as recent as yesterday back in town had said it clung to the shore opposite where the _Natchez_ now picked its way.\n\n\"Moving quick, it is,\" Mr. Preston said sternly at the wheel.\n\nThe whirling foam-white column dimpled and reddened the images of forest and plain above it. Toby stood to the corner of the pilot's nest and soon exhausted everything he could remember about seeing the storm days before, which proved of no use, for the tempest had grown and shaped itself into a twisted figure-eight knot that spewed black water and gray-metal fountains.\n\nRain pelted the pilot's nest windows. The cyclone air sucked light from around them. Blue-black traceries made a fretwork above. Toward shore Toby saw the trees dim into spider web outlines. Winds whipped and blasted at the _Natchez,_ bending trees and turning up the pale underside of their leaves so that waves of color washed over the canopy. Trees tossed their arms as if in panic. With a shriek one of the _Natchez_ 's chimneys wrenched and split and the top half flopped down on the foredeck. Crew ran out to cut it free and toss it overboard. Toby saw Stan with them, sawing frantically as the wind blasted them nearly off their feet. Peals of profanity blossomed on lips, so close Toby could read them, but a gust whipped the words away.\n\nThis was no ordinary wind. It ripped and cut the air, warping images so that men laboring seemed to go in agonizing slow motion, then frantic speed, all the while stretched and yanked and pounded out of shape by invisible forces.\n\nThen\u2014 _sssssttt!_ \u2014a vacuum hiss jerked a brilliant glory-filled radiance into the sky. An ethereal glow flooded the deck. Yet ashore lay in gloom. Treetops plunged and wrestled with imaginary antagonists. At mid-river foam spouted.\n\nAnother _ssssstttt!_ and a crash and the ship fell a full man's height, splashing itself into a bath of hot effervescence. In a fragment of a second the air got dark as sin and thunder rumbled across the sky like empty barrels rolling down stone stairs.\n\nAnd then they were out. The gale became a scenic protuberance on a mild river again and the pilot said, \"Temporal turbulence was mild this go.\"\n\nIt did not seem so to Toby as he sat on a stool and got his breathing in order again.\n\nWhen he saw Stan later the young man said, surprised, \"Twist? Stretched legs? I never felt any such.\"\u2014and Toby understood that the shiftings and unsteadiness of both time and space were the province of each particular observer. No one felt the same effects. But the truncated chimney, now being hastily restored by Stan and others in a full sweat, spoke of how real the waverings of time could be.\n\nThey cut across once more, skirting a big bar of aluminum that gleamed dully, and could snatch the hull from an induction ship in a passing instant. This took the _Natchez_ near the shore where Toby had left his skiff. With Mr. Preston's binoculars he searched the blue-green brush but could find no trace of it.\n\n\"Somebody _stole_ it,\" he said, outraged.\n\n\"Or else ate it,\" the pilot said, smiling.\n\n\"I didn't grow that skiff, it's not alive. I sawed and hammered it and slapped on scrap metal.\"\n\n\"Maybe time ate it,\" was all the pilot would say.\n\nThe shore seemed watery and indeterminate, a blue-green emulsion. As they beat their way upstream his respect for the pilot grew. No prominence would stick to its shape long enough for Toby to make up his mind what form it truly was. Hills dissolved as if they were butter mountains left on a dining room table during a warm Sunday afternoon.\n\nYet Mr. Preston somehow knew to make the _Natchez_ waltz to starboard at some precise spot, else\u2014he explained\u2014the ship would have a grave misunderstanding with a snag that would rip them stem to stern in the time it took a man to yawn. The murky waste of water and slumbering metal laid traps for timeboaters of all keel depths.\n\nMr. Preston made her shave the head of an island where a small temporal vortex had just broken from the misty skin of the river, trimming it so close that trees banged and brushed the stern, nearly taking off a curious passenger\u2014who hurriedly disembarked at their first stop, leaving his bag. He babbled something about haunted visions of headless women he had seen in the air. The crew guffawed and made faces. Toby joined them.\nEIGHT\n\nThe Eating Ice\n\nThe vagaries of induction ships were of terrifying legend. Most folk who lived near the river\u2014and many, indeed most, chose not to\u2014reported seeing ships that winked into existence at a wharf, offloaded people and bags in a spilling hurry, and slipped away with motors whining, to vanish moments later by first narrowing, then becoming a door-thin wedge that sometimes rose up into the air before thinning into nothingness.\n\nPeople who tried to keep pace with a ship felt a pressure like a massive unseen hand upon them. They tired, especially going upstream. Thus most lived within less than a day's walk of where they had been born. By straining effort a strong man or woman could take foot or horse into a distant town to find a price for a fresh crop, say, or purchase goods. Most preferred to let the induction ships ply their trade up and down, hauling bales of finespun, say, and returning with store-bought wonders ordered from a gaudy catalog.\n\nSome, though, booked passage on the ships, as much for the ride as for the destination. The _Natchez_ 's main rooms were well appointed with opulent armchairs and stuffed davenports, the doorways garnished with bone-white wooden filigree of fanciful patterns and famous scenes of time-distortion. There was a technicolor symbolical mural of great pilots in the main lounge, and in first-class cabins, a porcelain doorknob and a genuine full-wall image sheet that gave an artistic view when caressed. The public rooms featured curving ceilings touched up with elegant gilt, and rainshower-style chandeliers of glittering glass-drops. Toby gazed at these jeweled confections and remembered seeing a true Chandelier, the great cities in space his distant ancestors had made. He enjoyed this place, but it was a humbled though ripe life these people led.\n\nDay passengers could get down to shirtsleeves and use a long row of bowls in the barber shop, which also boasted public towels, stiff public combs, and fragrant public soap. All this impressed Toby mightily. He had never, not even in the pilot's own house, seen such opulence and finery. The _Argo_ had been clean, crisp, beautiful in its way\u2014but not splendid and grand, like this.\n\nPassengers boarding from the small, straggling, shabby hamlets along shore echoed his wide-eyed reverence. Three days of cruising brought a certain bemused certitude to him, though, so that he gazed at these scruffy travelers in their baggy clothes with the same elevated scorn as the older crew.\n\nNot that he inhabited the same celestial sphere as the pilot himself. Mr. Preston's face wore lines earned by watching the immemorial clashes of differing temporal potentials. His speech veered from elegant, educated downriver cadences, to slurred, folk-wise vernacular. Pilots boated in eternity, and they knew it.\n\nToby was along for his passingly useful knowledge, not his skill. So when the induction coils froze up he hustled below on sharply barked command of the Cap'n, just as did Stan and the rest. Mr. Preston stayed aloft, of course.\n\nThe vast engine room was a frenzy of shouted orders and shoving bodies. The power that drove them uptime came separately from the huge copper armature that spun, when working properly, between mammoth black iron magnets.\n\nNormally, running into the river's past would suck great bouts of energy from the whirling metal. But in crosscutting the river, snaking through reefs and bromium upwellings, the pilot would sometimes end up running at crosscurrent to the normal, and they would move for a while upstream, as far as the normal water current was concerned, but downstream and thus downtime, as the temporal contortions saw it.\n\nThere was no general sign of this, though Toby thought he glimpsed far out in the river a huge, ghostly ship that flickered into being for a mere shaved second. It had great fat towers belching grimy smoke, portholes brimming with violet light, and a craft hovering in the air like a gargantuan insect, vanes churning the mist above, as if it were a swollen predator mosquito about to attack a metal whale.\n\nThen\u2014 _ssstttpp!_ \u2014wind had whistled where the vision had floated, and a cry from below announced an all-hands.\n\nStan showed him the coated pipes and cables, already crusted hand-deep in hard, milk-white ice. Boilers nearby radiated intense heat into the room, but the time-coursing inside the pipes and cables sucked energy from them so quickly that the ice did not melt.\n\nToby and all the other men fell to chipping and prying and hammering at the ice. It was solid stuff. A chunk fell off into Toby's hand and he momentarily saw the surface of a pipe that led directly into the interior of the induction motors. Though normally shiny copper, now the pipe was eerily black.\n\nHe stuck his nose in close to see and heard the _crack_ of air itself freezing to the metal.\n\n\"Hey, get back!\" a crewwoman shouted, yanking him away just as the entire gap he had opened snapped shut abruptly\u2014air whooshing into the vacuum created, then freezing instantly itself, in turn sucking in more air.\n\nAnother man was not so fortunate, and froze three fingers rock-solid in a momentary crevice in the pipe ice. His cries scarcely turned a head as they all labored to break off and heat away the fast-growing white burden.\n\nA cable sagged under its accumulating weight and snapped free. The high whine of electrical power waned when it did, and Toby felt real fear.\n\nHe had heard the tales of induction ships frozen full up this way, the infinite cold of inverse time sucking heat, life, air, and self from them. The victim ships were found, temporally displaced years and miles from their presumed location, perpetual ivory icebergs adrift on the seemingly placid river.\n\nToby hacked and pried and at last sledgehammered the ice. The frost groaned and shrugged and creaked as it swelled, like some living thing moaning with growing pains.\n\nAcross the engine room he heard another cry as a woman got her ankle caught by the snatching ice. Gales shrieked in to replace the condensing air. Voices of the crew rose in panic.\n\nAnd the Cap'n's bellow rang above it all, giving orders\u2014\"Belay that! Lever it out, man, _heave_ on that crowbar! Thomson, run there quick! Smash it, son!\"\n\n\u2014and abruptly the howling winds faded, the ice ceased surging.\n\n\"Ah,\" the Cap'n sighed, \"at last the pilot has deigned to direct us properly.\"\n\nToby took some offense at this, for no pilot ever could read the true vector of the time-current flux. Mr. Preston had brought them out of it, which should be fair enough.\n\nThere were awful tales of ships truly mispiloted. Of induction craft hurtling uptime out of control\u2014solid iceberg ships, with deep-frozen crew screaming upstream toward the beginning of time. Of downriver runaways, white-hot streaks that exploded, long before they could reach the legendary waterfall at the end of eternity.\n\nBut the Cap'n reflected on none of that. Toby learned then that the high station of a pilot implies that a pilot take harsh criticism at the slightest hint of imperfection.\nNINE\n\nCairo\n\nCasks and barrels and hogsheads blocked the quay but could not conceal from the pilot's nest the sprawling green beauty of the city.\n\nEven the blocks of commercial warehousing sprouted verdant and spring-fresh from the soil. Cairo had perfected the fast-spreading art of growing itself from its own rich loam. This art was much easier than planting and raising trees, only to chop them down, slice them with band saws, plane them out, and fashion them elaborately into planks, beams, joists, braces, girders, struts, and dowels, all to make shelter.\n\nSuch easeful grace demanded a deep sort of knowing. The folk of Cairo fathomed the double-twisted heart of living things.\n\nThe _Natchez_ rang three bells as it docked. Uprivermen often had a woman in every port and the bells announced which Cap'n this was, so that the correct lady could come to welcome him\u2014sometimes for only an hour or two, in his cabin, before departure for the next port uptime. The vagaries and moods of the time currents led to many a hasty assignation. But the Cap'n of a swift ship might enjoy another such succulent dalliance quite soon\u2014if he were physically able.\n\nA red-faced lady brushed by Toby on the gangplank as he went ashore. He gave her no notice as he contemplated staying here in the river's biggest city.\n\nHis head was crammed with lore he had learned in the pilot's nest. At once he went to Cairo city hall and consulted the log of citizens. There was no notation concerning his father, but then it had been a forlorn hope anyway. His father was never one to let a piece of paper tag along behind like a dog, only to bite him later. Toby swallowed the disappointment and let his long-simmering anger supply him with fresh energy.\n\nStan caught up to him and together they patrolled the streets, Stan doing the talking and Toby striding with hands jammed in pockets, bewitched by the sights. He had left his banged-up battle gear on the ship and stepped lightly.\n\nThe self-grown houses rose seamlessly from fruitful soil. Seed-crafters advertised with gaudy signs, some the new neon-piping sort that spelled out whole words in garish, jumpy brilliance\u2014 _Skillgrower, Houseraiser,_ even _Custom Homeblossoms._\n\nThey wandered through raucous bars, high-arched malls, viny factory-circles, and found them smoothly, effortlessly elegant, their atmospheres moist with fragrances that issued from their satiny woods. Women worked looms that grew directly from the damp earth. Stan asked one of these laboring ladies why she could not simply grow her clothes straight on the bush, and she laughed, replying, \"Fashion changes much too quick for that, sir!\" and then smothered a giggle at Stan's misshapen trousers and sagging jacket.\n\nThis put Stan of a mind to carouse, and soon Toby found himself strolling through a dimly lit street that reeked of, as Stan put it, \"used beer.\"\n\nThe women who lounged in the doorways here were slatternly in their scarlet bodices and jet-black, ribbed corsets. Far different from the blocky, muscular women prized so in Family Bishop.\n\nToby felt his face flush and recalled a time long ago, in the Citadel Bishop school. Family Bishop was strict in matters of lineage, which translated into a tight sexual code until the mating age.\n\nThe boys' coach had given them all a sheet of special paper and a pen that wrote invisibly, with orders to draw a circle for each time they masturbated\u2014\"shaking hands with your best friend,\" he called it. The invisibility was to preclude discovery and embarrassment.\n\nAt the end of a month they had all brought the sheets in. The coach had hung them up in rows and darkened the classroom, then turned on a special lamp. Its violet glow revealed the circles, ranks upon ranks of them, to the suddenly silent boys. \"This,\" the coach had said, \"is the way God sees you. Your inner life.\"\n\nThe aim of all this displayed sin was to get the boys to cut down on their frequency, for lonely Onan's dissipation sapped the intellectual skills\u2014or so the theory went. His Isaac Aspect had supplied data on Onan, calling it a \"folk tale\" and sniffing with disdain at such primitive sexual mores.\n\nInstead, the exercise led to endless boasting, after they had returned to daylight and each knew his own circle-count, and yet could claim the highest number present, which was one hundred and seven.\n\nToby had attained a mere eighty-six, somewhat cowed by the exercise itself. Later he felt that if he had known the end in mind, he could have pushed himself over a hundred, easy.\n\nIn Cairo, sophisticated women were easily available. He felt a vague loyalty to Besen, troubled by his memory of her image trapped in the cube in Mr. Preston's house. Was she still alive? Would she mind his indulging himself?\n\nLust banished such fine distinctions, leaving him with a fidgety tautness. But the women beckoning with lacquered leers and painted fingers and arched blue eyebrows somehow did not appeal. He remembered Besen's lopsided smile and missed it terribly.\n\nStan made some fun of him for this. Toby reacted with surly swearwords, most fresh-learned from Mr. Preston.\n\nAnger irked his stomach. He left Stan bargaining with a milk-skinned woman who advertised with red hair and hips that seemed as wide as the river, and made his way through the darkling city. If his father had come this way there would be a sign. He had only to find it.\nTEN\n\nZom Master\n\nLabyrinths of inky geometry enclosed him. Passing conversations came to him muffled and softly discordant as he worked his way among the large commercial buildings near the docks. Here the jobbing trade waxed strong, together with foundries, machine shops, oil presses, flax mills, and towering elevators for diverse crops, all springing from the intricately tailored lifecrafts known best in Cairo.\n\nNot that such arts grew no blemishes. Slick yellow fungus coated the cobbled streets, slippery malignancies that sucked at Toby's heels, yearning to digest him. Trough-like gutters were awash in fetid fluids, some stagnant and brown-scummed, others running fast and as high as the thick curbstones.\n\nEach building had a mighty cask, several stories high, grown out from the building itself and shooting stilt-roots down to support the great weight of rainwater it held. Never near the river was there enough topsoil to support wells. The passing veils of rain were all Cairo had, and as if to make this point, droplets began to form in the mist overhead and spatter Toby as he searched.\n\nHe descended into a lowland zone of the city, where the streets lay silent, with an empty Sunday aspect. But the wrought-iron symbology on the ramshackle buildings here told the reason. They made heavy, rugged ciphers and monograms, filled in with delicate cobwebs of baffling, intricate weave. Toby could make out in the gathering gloom the signs of Zom businesses, bearing the skulls and ribbed ornamentation. This solidity offset other fragilities. Cairo dwelled so near the great time-storm arcs that its folk always spoke conditionally, ending their statements about events with \"so far\" and \"seems to be\" and \"in the sweet sometimey.\"\n\nHis bad luck, of course, that the timestone glow would ebb at just this time. The rain dribbled away, leaving a dank cold. He looked upward and saw that far overhead was a broad island of sandy waste, interrupting the timestone, and so leaving this part of the city permanently darker. So they had decided to put the Zom industry here, in constant gloom.\n\nHe peed against a building, reasoning that it would help it to grow just like any plant\u2014though he did modestly slip down a side alley to do it. So Toby was off the street when a squad of Zom women came by.\n\nThey shambled, chill-racked and yellow-faced, eyes playing about as if in addled wonder, and one saw Toby. She grinned, an awful rictus, and licked her lips and hoisted her skirt with one hand, gesturing with the other index finger, eyebrows raised. Toby was so transfixed he stopped urinating and stood there shock-still until finally the Zom shrugged and went on with the other miserables. His heart restarted again some time after and he put himself back in his pants.\n\nZoms were accepted as a necessity for their brute labor, he told himself. Still his breath came short, his chest grew tight and fluttery. He chided himself.\n\nFollowing the Zoms was easy. In a street of wavering oil lamps was the Zom Raiser.\n\nThe man was tall, in a stovepipe-thin charcoal suit. He sat in a spacious room, working at an ancient stone desk, scribbling on a flat computer face. Along the walls were deep alcoves sunk into shadow.\n\n\"I'm looking for a, my father. I thought maybe\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes yes,\" the man said. \"An old story. Go ahead, look.\"\n\nThis abruptness startled Toby so that it was some moments before he fully realized what he saw.\n\nGrimy oil lamps cast dim yellow radiance across long rows of slanted boards, all bearing adult corpses. They were not shrouded, but wore work clothes, some mud-caked. Toby walked down the rows and peered into bloodless, rigid faces. In the alcoves were babes laid out in white shrouds.\n\nAll had the necessary ribbed ironwork cage about them. Pale revitalizing fluids coursed through tubes into their nostrils, pumped by separate hearts\u2014bulbous, scarlet muscles attached at the ribs, pulsing. The fluids did their sluggish work down through the body, sending torpid waves washing from the sighing chest through the thick guts and into the trembling legs. Their charge expended, the fluids emerged a deep green from the rumps, and spilled into narrow troughs cut into the hardwood floor.\n\nAmid echoing drips and splashes he returned to the stone desk, an island of luminosity in the cool, clammy silence. \"He's not here.\"\n\n\"Not surprising. We move them on fast.\" The man's deep-sunken eyes gave nothing away.\n\n\"You raised anybody looks like me?\"\n\n\"Got a name for him?\"\n\nToby gave it. The man studied a leather-bound ledger and said, \"No, not in the records. Say, though, I recall something . . .\"\n\nToby seized the Zom Raiser by the shoulders. \"What?\"\n\n\"Leggo. Leggo, I say.\" He shied back and when Toby's hands left him he straightened himself the way a chicken shakes its feathers into order. \"You damn fools come barging in here, you're always\u2014\"\n\n\"Tell me.\"\n\nSomething in Toby's voice made the man cease and study him for a long moment. \"I was trying to recollect. I've seen must be a dozen look sorta like you, if I 'member right.\"\n\nToby felt his throat tighten. They knew he was here and were copying Killeens to hunt him down.\n\n\"Dealer comes in here with one every week or so.\"\n\n\"From where?\"\n\n\"Gets them in the countryside, he says. Brings them here for kindling up to strength. Got a storage place for them.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Last I heard, 'bout seven blocks over.\"\n\n\"Which way?\"\n\n\"Annunciation and Poydras. Big long shed, tin roof.\"\n\nToby made his way through the rain-slicked streets, getting lost twice in his hurried confusion and slipping on something slimy he did not want to look at. He got to the low building as a figure came out the other end of it and something made him step back into the street and watch the man hurry away. He went inside and there was nobody there except five Zoms who lay on ready-racks, chilled down and with brass amulets covering their faces. A gathering sense of betrayal caught in his mouth and Toby trotted down the empty aisles where Zoms would labor in the day, the slanting gray light making every object ghostly and threatening.\n\nHe knew before he reached the end of it that the Zom Raiser had played him for a fool all along. While Toby was finding his way here the man had somehow sent word.\n\nHe had hoped that the true Killeen would be here somehow, that perhaps his father was making the copies himself to aid his search. But it was far more likely that mechs had humans working for them. Toby should flee. He did not want to give up but the logic of it was clear and he had halfway turned when something fell out of the dark roof above.\n\nHe dove sideways over a Zom without thinking. The thing was like a pale plate of meat spreading in the air like a flightless bird. It struck him smartly in the leg. An electric-blue blaze rose in his eyes. His sensorium crumpled and flashed with sparking pain. The Zom's flesh was hard and cool as he fell across the body. Agony was climbing up his spine, coming for him. The frying intensity told him this was a high-order mech offensive weapon. He twisted on the slimy cool Zom and his legs cramped up with the shooting sting. That made it hard to roll but he grabbed the Zom's head. It was a woman and he had to jam his hand into her open mouth to get the leverage. He slithered out from under the weight. The thing held on but he reached back and jabbed it with his gloved hand. Stiff fingers dug into a resistance like molasses. It shied away and he hit the floor. The mech device spread an oozing stain over the Zom.\n\nMaybe it had mistaken the Zom for him. Toby did not wait to find out.\nELEVEN\n\nThe Past Is Labyrinth\n\nThree deep, mellow bell notes floated off across the sublime skin of the river and some moments later came wafting back, steepened into treble and shortened in duration.\n\n\"Means we're getting close to the arc,\" Mr. Preston said.\n\nToby narrowed his eyes, searching the gloom before them. \"Can't see a thing.\"\n\n\"The bell notes get scrunched up by the time-wind, then bounce back to us. Better guide than seeing the arcs, sometimes. They twist the light, give you spaghetti pictures.\"\n\nToby would have preferred to watch the treacherous standing curves of frothy water, for he had seen one smash a flatboat to splinters on his trip down.\n\nA deep hush brooded upon the river. He felt a haunting sense of isolation, remoteness from the bustle of Cairo, though they were only hours upstream from it. He had felt bad about what would happen if mechs pursued him to the ship and so had hid out in a bar until the last moment. With his sensorium damped to zero he sat and brooded and decided never to activate the sensorium again. It was not the risk to himself so much, but the danger to the people he worked with.\n\nThey sheltered here in a way he supposed was typical of humanity everywhere, given half the chance. They clung to a past and he passed among them in dangerous disguise. He could not bring mechs down upon his friends.\n\nHe crept down to the river. To the ship. When he came aboard there was nothing remarkable, or at least nothing remarked. It had taken a while to get his calm back, to begin thinking again.\n\nTo starboard he could make out solid walls of dusky forest softening into somber gray. Mr. Preston sounded the bells again and the steepened echoes came, quicker and sharper this time.\n\nThen the river seemed to open itself, revealing first the foamy feet and then the marvelous high swoop of the arcs. Silently they churned at their thick feet, sending waves to announce their power. Yet as the _Natchez_ came up, holding tight to the opposite shore, the water was glass-smooth, with mercury breaking at mid-river and sending spectral flags of glittering mist into an eerily still air.\n\nThis tranquility fractured. A wall of thunder shook the glass windows of the pilot's nest.\n\n\"Whoa!\" Mr. Preston called and slammed on the power. The induction motors sent a shock through the decking.\n\n\"It look the way you seen it last?\" Mr. Preston never took his eyes from the arcs. They were shimmering pink and blue now.\n\n\"Yessir, only the tall one, it had a bigger foot.\"\n\n\"You shoot down through here?\"\n\n\"Nossir, stayed out by that sand bar.\"\n\n\"Damn right you were, too.\"\n\nToby had, in the chop and splash of it, been given no choice whatever. But he said nothing, just held on. The deck bucked, popped, complained.\n\n\"Eddy running here up the bank to well beyond the point,\" Mr. Preston said, betraying some excitement despite himself. \"Might get us through without we have to comb our hair afterward.\"\n\nThey went flying up the shore so close that twigs snapped off on the chimneys. Mist churned the air fever-pink. Drumroll bass notes came up through Toby's boots. \"Hold on for the surge!\" Mr. Preston called, as if anyone wasn't already, and it hit.\n\nThe _Natchez_ struck the vortex whorl plunging by near the point. The suck of it stretched clear across the river this time, an enormous mouth of mercury and bromium seething brown and silver together in smeared curves. The ship whirled around, Toby thought as his stomach lurched, like a favorite top his mother had given him, possessing the mysterious ability to stand so long as it spun.\n\nThis abstract memory lasted one breath and then water crashed over the pilot's nest and smashed in the aft window. The ship careened to port. Time-torques whipsawed the groaning timbers. An eddy seized her and crunched one of her chimneys into pathetic torn tin. Concussion clapped Toby's ears and left his head ringing. Lightning-quick flashes of ruby radiance forked from the river and ran caressing over the upper decks.\n\nShouts. Screams.\n\nAthwart the current, then with it, the _Natchez_ shot free of the howling whorl. Within a mere moment they brought up hard in the woods at the next bend. Ordinarily this would have been an embarrassment for a pilot, but as it came from passing uptime against the arcs, it was a deliverance, a penalty, as trivial as a stingy tip left after a banquet.\n\nIn the lapsed quiet afterward they drummed upstream and Toby watched the shoreline for signs he remembered. Coming back to this place meant he could partly reverse the esty gradient. He figured that would get him back onto a time axis closer to the period shared with the portal cities. Maybe\u2014just maybe, because people here didn't want to talk about the esty at all\u2014he could get closer to the source of Killeens.\n\nHe had not told anyone that, but Mr. Preston gave him sidewise glances now and then. Stan, after the obligatory ragging of Toby for having shied away from the women of easy virtue, kept pestering him about finding hydrogen hats. So Toby spent long hours pretending, watching beady-eyed the dense, uncut forest roll by.\n\nTo him the richness here was vaster than downriver, thicker and mysterious beyond ready expression. He had not the wit nor especially the years to savor it fully; taste comes with age and is perhaps its only reward, though he knew some called the same thing wisdom.\n\nHe saw the great slow-working chains of cause and effect on the river\u2014forces which, though elusive in the redolent natural wealth, in hard fact underpinned all the sweeping vistas, the realms of aery compass, the infinitesimal machineries of wood and leaf. The young must make their way in a world that is an enormous puzzle, so he watched the shifting hues quick-eyed, a student of the forever fluid, knowing that the silver river might foam suddenly to suck him under or contrariwise spew him aloft in a frothy geyser\u2014all beautiful events, he supposed, but they would leave him no less dead.\n\nToby kept lively advising Mr. Preston on reefs and bars. He inspected the passing acres of lumber rafts, great pale platforms behind which the launch could conceal itself. Likewise each bulky barge and the trading scows that peddled from farm to farm, the peddler's family hanging out wash on deck and kids calling hullos. So when Stan shouted up from the passenger deck, \"See that! Must be! Must be!\" Toby felt a spur of irritation at being distracted from his work.\n\nStan scampered aft and poled aboard some floating debris, then had the temerity to carry it forward to the pilot's nest.\n\nMr. Preston scowled and looked to bite his mustache at the sight of a mere deckhand intruding, but before Toby could shoo Stan out he saw the flowerlike gray thing Stan carried.\n\n\"It's a hat! A positive hat,\" Stan burbled. \"Pure hydrogen\u2014worth plenty on its own, wager me\u2014and lookee _here._ \"\n\nStan proudly displayed broaches and pins mounted into the gunmetal-gray thing, which to Toby's immense surprise surely did resemble a hat. It was nearly weightless yet hard and the jewels gleamed with inner radiance.\n\n\"And you led me straight on it, too, Toby, I'll not forget,\" Stan said. \"I'll share out the proceeds, yessir.\"\n\n\"Uh, sure thing.\"\n\nMr. Preston's stormy face had turned mild as he studied the hat. \"Never seen anything like _this. How_ far upriver you say you come from?\" He peered at Toby.\n\n\"Good bit further,\" was all Toby could say, for indeed that was so, but the shore already looked odd and contorted to him, as though his memory was warping.\n\nThat was nothing compared to the consternation he felt but could not give a hint of, for the hat story was total yarning\u2014yet here was an actual, in-fact, bejeweled hydrogen hat, worth many a month's pay.\n\nHis befuddlement got swept away soon enough by the twisty demands of the river. Under Mr. Preston he was coming to see that the face of the wedded water and metal was a wondrous book, one in a dead language to him before but now speaking cherished secrets. Every fresh point they rounded told a new tale. No page was empty. A passenger might be charmed by a churning dimple on its skin, but to a true riverman that was an italicized shout, announcing a wreak or reef of wrenching space-time Vortex about to break through from the undercrust of timestone.\n\nPassengers went _oooh_ and _aahhh_ at the pretty pictures the silver river painted for them without reading a single word of the dark text it truly was. A lone log floating across the prow could be in truth a jack-jawed beast bent on dining upon the tasty wooden hull. A set of boiling, standing rings spoke of a whorl that could eat an entire induction disk.\n\nMr. Preston would sometimes muse out loud as they rounded a point and beheld a fresh vista, \"That slanting brown mark\u2014what you make of that? I'd say a bar of ground-up metal, dissolving now in the bromine current. See that slick place? Shoaling up now, be worse when we head back down. River's fishing for induction ships right there, you mark.\"\n\nBust mostly Mr. Preston asked Toby the questions, for the river perpetually tore itself down, danced over its own banks, made merry of memory. They saw a farmer had shoved down pilings to hold his ground, even set a crazy-rail fence atop it, only to have the blithe momentum strip and pry and overrun his fetters, break his handcuffs, and laugh as the lawless currents\u2014seemingly enraged by this confinement\u2014stripped his worldly dominion.\n\nIn all of it Toby looked for his father. There was precious little sign of anything from outside this enormous long riverland. But he felt himself drawing backward in time as the ship pressed them against the esty grade.\n\nMr. Preston brought aboard a local \"memory man\" to help them through a set of neck-twisting oscillations, and the fellow displayed the affliction Toby had heard of but never witnessed. To remember everything meant that all events were of the same size.\n\nThe short, swarthy man sat in the pilot's nest and guided them well enough through the first two swaybacks, with reefs and snags galore, but on the third he began to tell the history of the snaggle-toothed tree that had fallen in at the lee shore and so stopped them from using the close-pass there, and from that tree went on to the famous boiling timestone eruption that had scorched the tree, and from that to a minute rendition of the efforts of Farmer Finn, who had saved his crops by building a sluice-diverter of the river, to Finn's wife who ran off with a preacher, only people _then_ found out he was no preacher at all but in fact a _felon_ escaped from some jail uptime, which suggested to the memory man the way laws had to be deformed here to accord with the passage back and forth in eras of relatives and wives and husbands, which brought forth the scandal of the lady in a red dress who had taken on all the men at a dance once, hiking her skirts for each in turn plain as day, outside against the wall, and from there was but a step to the intricate discussion of dance steps the memory man had learned (since he learned anything merely by seeing it once), complete with toe-tapping demonstrations on the deck\u2014so that Mr. Preston had to yank the man's attention back to the veering river before it gutted them on an aluminum reef.\n\nWithin minutes, though, the memory man would drift into more tedious jaw about whatever strayed into view of his panoramic mind. Mr. Preston bore this for the swings and sways of those bends, and then put the memory man ashore with full pay. The man didn't seem to mind, and left still maundering on about great accidents of the past and where their survivors lived now and how they were doing.\n\nToby silently envied the man, though, for at least he did know exactly that one short portion of the river, whereas Toby's own memory betrayed him at each new rounding. Islands and bars arose from the water where none had been before, his mind told him. The river ran in new side-channels and had seemingly cut across headlands to forge fresh entries, thrusting aside monumental hillsides and carving away whatever misunderstandings had arisen with the spongy, pliant forest.\n\n\"This sure looks to be a horseshoe curve here. Remember it?\" Mr. Preston would ask, and Toby would peer through the misty wreaths that often wrapped the river, and shake his head.\n\nOn this particular one they hauled ashore, because a passenger thought he lived near here, though could not spot any landmark either, but wanted to try his own luck. Toby went ashore and slogged through brambles and sandy loam across the neck of the horseshoe, arriving well before the _Natchez_ got there, coming hard-chuffing around the curve.\n\nThese branches and inlets lay in his past, yet despite their here-and-now solidity they had wriggled into new shapes, oddities of growth, even whole fresh porticoed master-houses. Slowly it dawned on Toby that none of this surprised Mr. Preston.\n\n\"Every time we go upriver, things lay different,\" Mr. Preston said, twirling a toothpick in his mouth as his only sign of agitation.\n\n\"Damnfire,\" Toby said, a new curse he had picked up and was proud to sport. \"What use is a memory man, then?\"\n\n\"Better than nothing, is all.\"\n\nThey were near to drawing all the water there was in the channel, a curious tide having sucked streamers up and into the clouds above. The hull caught and broke free and then snagged again, so Mr. Preston had to order the induction motors up to full, wrenching them off the bed of the river by sheer magnetic ferocity.\n\n\"Sure seems that way,\" Toby said. \"Why'd you hire me as guide, then?\"\n\n\"Your knowledge is for certain fresher than any I could find. And you're young enough, you don't think you know everydamnthing.\"\n\nThey were going slow, deck humming, riding on magnetic cushions that Toby thought of as bunched steel coils. Mr. Preston said that wasn't far wrong, only you couldn't feel or see the wires. They were more like wrestling magnetic ghosts.\n\n\"Sometimes a time-tide will come and cut a little gutter across a neck of land,\" Mr. Preston went on. \"I saw one once while I was shipping downstream, no bigger than a garden path it was. Shimmered and snaked and snapped yellow fire. Now, there were handsome properties along that shore. But inland from there was a worthless old farm. When I came back uptime on the old _Reuben,_ that li'l time-twist had cut a big course through. Diverted the whole damn river, it did. Shooting off crimson sparklers, still. That old farm was now smack on the river, prime land, worth ten times more. The big places that had been on the river stood inland. No ship could reach them.\"\n\n\"Lucky,\" Toby said.\n\nMr. Preston grinned. \"Was it? Lot of people got mad, accused the family that owned the old farm of starting that time-wrinkle.\"\n\n\"How could they?\"\n\n\"Who's to say? Is there a way to figure it? The past is labyrinth, truly. Give time a shove here, a tuck there? Anybody who knows how, sure don't talk about it.\"\nTWELVE\n\nWhorl\n\nToby felt himself lost in a dense, impenetrable maze of riverways. Coming upstream against the time-pressure now refracted the very air.\n\nSmooth and serene the majestic mud-streaked expanse had seemed as he drifted down obliviously in his skiff. Now the shore was morasses and canebrakes and even whole big plantations, the grand main houses beautiful with their ivory columns. He often gazed up at the world hanging overhead, too, lands of hazy mystery. A ripple passed, flexing the entire tubular esty, and Toby felt suddenly that they all lived in the entrails of a great beast, an unknowable thing that visited the most awful of calamities upon mere humans by merely easing its bowels.\n\nThe whorl came upon them without warning. It burst through a channel of bromium, coiling like a blue-green serpent up into the shimmering air. A thunderclap banged into the pilot's nest and blew in two windows.\n\nToby saw it from the mid-deck where he was helping Stan and two men with some baling. The glass scroll window shattered but did not catch Mr. Preston in the face, so when Toby raced in the pilot was already bringing the _Natchez_ about, clawing away from the swelling cloud-wrack.\n\nThe whorl soared, streamers breaking from it to split the congealing air with yellow forked lightning. Toby saw it hesitate at its high point, as if deciding whether to plunge on across and bury itself in the forest-wall hanging far overhead. Then it shook itself, vigorous with the strength of the newborn, and shot riverward.\n\nThe silver river seemed to yearn for this consummation, for it buoyed in up-sucking ardor and kissed the descending column. Instantly a foam of muddy water and a mist of metal soared through the time-whorl, writing a great inverted _U_ that bubbled and frothed and steam-hissed amid more sharp thunder-cracks.\n\n\"Damn!\" Mr. Preston cried. \"That'll block us for sure.\"\n\nToby held tight to a stanchion. \"Can't we shoot by\u2014\"\n\n\"It'll riptide us to pieces, we try that.\"\n\nA blistering gale broke over the _Natchez._ \"You figure it'll last long?\"\n\n\"This big a one, you bet.\"\n\nThe _Natchez_ beat steadily away from the whorl, which twisted and shuffled its water-feet around on the skin of the river. Mud and logs sucked up into it tumbled and seemed to break apart and come together again. In the midst of what looked like a water-wave Toby saw a log burst into orange flame. It turned slow-motion, streaming black smoke, and smacked full into the river.\n\nThen he saw the mechs. They had been hiding among some weeping willows. Silvery and quick, they fled as the whorl lashed sidewise.\n\nSuddenly it made sense to him. The whorl was a way into this esty tube and thus a gateway to be policed. It was also the obvious place to wait for anyone, if you knew their ways.\n\nMechs didn't know him. But Killeen did.\n\nToby called, \"Wait! Let's stay a while, see if it\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up, boy. We're running downtime.\"\n\nEven the Cap'n could not overrule a pilot reversing course for safety. Toby stood frozen as the mechs lifted off the shoreline. They were angular and reminded him of the Rattler that had nearly killed him long ago. These were more advanced.\n\nThey were coming. They would kill his friends.\n\nTentatively he resurrected his sensorium. Nothing. Then\u2014\n\nA faint echo, a note he had not heard sounded for so long\u2014\n\nThen he did not think anymore but simply ran, down the iron stairs and pine gangway and over\u2014into the water. He flailed about for a desperate moment\u2014he had forgotten his battle gear\u2014then struck for shore.\n\nStan shouted behind him but he did not look around. He estimated the mechs could see him clearly by now. Good.\n\nBut then he heard a whooshing boom, like a giant drawing its breath. The mechs glided beside the funnel mouth of the whorl. A ribbed light pulsed from them. It pushed the whorl . . . slowly . . . faster . . . but not toward Toby. Toward the ship.\n\nThe sucking came skating on the choppy silver waters. It swooped with train-wreck malevolence down upon the _Natchez_ and drew it up, elongating the decks like rubber stretched to its limit and then cracking. A deckhand jumped overboard and his body stretched to translucent thinness.\n\nThe _Natchez_ squeezed and contorted and obeyed the call of warping forces. It shot up the whorl-mouth. Tide-tides wrenched and wracked it and then it was gone in a brilliant last pearly flash. The glare burned Toby's face.\n\nToby had no time to think or mourn. The mouth reeled, crackled and snaked and swept down upon him. He had time to gulp air. Burning orange foam broke over him.\n\nLegs, arms\u2014both stretched involuntarily, as though some God were playing with his strings\u2014yet he was weightless. He knew he must be rising up on the whorl but he felt a sickened, belly-opening vacancy of infinite falling. He struggled not to fill his lungs as the foam thronged at his skin, infested his nose, pried at his eyelids. _Don't breathe!_ was all he could think as he prepared for the time-crushed impact his instincts told him was coming at the end of such a protracted fall.\n\nHe smacked hard. In the river again.\n\nBobbed to the surface. Paddled, gasping. Ignored the wave-wracked waters. Made the shore and flopped upon it.\nTHIRTEEN\n\nPursuit\n\nThe mechs were shattered on the shore. Something had blown big chunks of their ivory skins away.\n\nIn each hole a midmind lay splintered. Something about the unerring way each shot had found the operating intelligence made him smile without humor.\n\nA sweet dust of time blew high above the river and there was no sign of the whorl. Or of the _Natchez._\n\nToby followed the boot tracks he found over the next rise. The long strides led inland, so there was no time-pressure to fight. He was wet and dazed but he hurried.\n\nInland the lush forest dribbled away into scrub desert. He realized whoever it was might back around on him so he retraced his steps and erased signs of his passage from the water and onto safe stone. He avoided vegetation where possible and slid through bushes so that stems bent but did not break. This was crucial, for a broken stem cannot be fixed without careful cutting and even so, a sure reader of signs would catch it. He could not let his excitement get him killed here. Leaving stems or branches pointing the way you came was bad, too. They had to be gently urged back to a random pattern. He mussed up a scraped bush and tree so that it looked to be from an animal, from biting or itch-easing. Stealth spelled safety.\n\nHis head pounded with a headache that worked its way into his eyes. So much had happened but he put it aside, not thinking about Mr. Preston or Stan, just keeping on. It got dryer and a big-winged thing with teeth flapped overhead, eyeing him for possibilities. He flung a rock at it.\n\nHe wished for a blunderbuss tree, recalling the man who had threatened him with one of the awkward weapons. But a big fallen branch served to make a club after he stripped the bark away.\n\nThe boot tracks showed heels dug in from haste. He let his senses float out ahead of him. His sensorium was faulty, flickering.\n\nEverything in the land fled from his footsteps. Lizards scattered into the nearest cracked rock. Four-winged quail hovered in shadow, hoping you'd take them for stones, but at the last moment they lost their nerve and burst into frantically flapping birds. Snakes evaporated, doves squeaked skyward, rabbits crazy-legged away in a dead heat. Fox, midget mountain horn, coyote\u2014they melted into legend, leaving only tracks and dung. The heart of the desert was pale sand, a field whose emptiness exposed life here for what it was: conjured out of nothingness and bound for it, too. Desert plants existed as exiles from each other, hoarding their circles of water collection done silently beneath the sand by single-minded roots. Vacancy was life.\n\nHe caught a smell fetid and pestiferous and knew instantly what it was. In the slaying fields of several Lanes he had smelled it.\n\nHe worked his way around it by nose alone. Slow, slow. When he finally looked down into the bowl-like field he could see only sprawled dead. Men lay putrefying, faces puffed and lips bruised. Most were gutted, appearing to give birth to their own entrails.\n\nThe time-whorls sometimes did this, disgorging people or matter from times and places no one knew. What the induction ships did by laboring upstream, a flick of space-time could accomplish in an instant. Sometimes carrion like this could still be saved for the Zom business.\n\nBut these men all wore the same face.\n\nToby turned to merge again with the brush and there he was.\n\nThe same features\u2014angular, hollow-eyed with fatigue, a familiar cut to the jawline and the downcurved mouth. Toby compared it with his memories, carried now for what seemed like years, taken out and studied every day.\n\n\"Who are you?\" Toby asked.\n\nThe voice was low and edged. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"Are you real? I mean\u2014\"\n\nThe eyes gave nothing away. But that was how they had always been. \"You know me, son.\"\n\n\"In this place? Don't know _what_ I know anymore.\"\n\nThe face constricted as though wolfdark memories pressed against it from deep inside. \"The mechs sent out copies of me. I tried to warn you. Before the mechs hit the portal city, Andro helped me make a general release kind of message\u2014\"\n\n\"I saw it. A Walmsley character had it at a big library thing, a pyramid\u2014\"\n\n\"You've been there?\" He was startled.\n\n\"Yeasay. Mechs got it. I had to run.\"\n\n\"I've heard about this Walmsley. The portal people\u2014Andro, remember?\u2014say he comes from 'way far back. Warned me about him.\"\n\n\"He seemed like a shrunk-up dwarf, that's all.\"\n\n\"Sure can't judge much around here by appearances.\"\n\nToby moved carefully away from the bodies. This Killeen looked pretty nearly right, but then so did the ones with their guts vomiting out.\n\n\"What're they?\" Toby gestured at the corpses.\n\n\"Copies. The mechs I just shot were making them.\"\n\n\"Sending them downriver?\"\n\n\"Must've been. They were gatekeepers, I guess.\"\n\n\"That whorl out there on the river?\"\n\n\"Yeasay. They know how to open and close it.\" The man who looked like Killeen jerked a thumb at the river where the mechs lay. \"They figured out how to get in and out of Lanes.\"\n\n\"I can do it too.\"\n\nThe man again blinked with surprise. \"Where'd you learn?\"\n\n\"Worked it out.\"\n\n\"Let's get out of here then.\"\n\nToby didn't want to look as though he were stalling and make this man cautious but he was still not sure. \"Where's Besen?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I lost track of the whole Family when the mechs busted up the portal city.\"\n\nIt sounded all too convenient. He could kill this one if he could get it off guard. It was in field gear but without helmet.\n\nThe man said, \"Look, more mechs for sure will come to replace those.\"\n\nToby didn't like how this man kept pushing him. And this Killeen was so haggard and washed out. That could come from the copying process, whatever that was. \"I'm not so\u2014\"\n\n _ **Let me speak to him. Please.**_\n\nIt was Shibo. A fragment rising in him.\n\n _ **Please. In the name of all we have been to each other.**_\n\nIt had an authority he had not felt before. As if it had been waiting for this moment, saving its resources.\n\nHe hesitated and she reached up through him somehow. In a crisp instant he felt how it had been for her. She had somehow _rewritten_ herself into his neurological circuitry, lodged fragments in his Aspects, hidden. All before he had decided to strip her chip from his spine.\n\nIf he let her get any control this Killeen could take him easily. He began tracing through his own recesses, searching for her. She fled. Then her voice chimed in him, clearly, unafraid:\n\n _ **Ask him if he remembers whether Family Knights take their boots off first.**_\n\n\"Huh?\" Toby said. The man gave him a puzzled look.\n\n _ **If Knights keep their boots on when they're on top.**_\n\nWithout knowing why he was doing it, Toby repeated the sentence.\n\nThe man's mouth opened and closed and then said, \"What? Who's talking?\"\n\n\"Shibo.\"\n\nThe man said slowly, \"I thought you said once you didn't know.\"\n\nThe sliver of Shibo said thinly,\n\n _ **Knights keep run-ready.**_\n\nToby repeated it and the man said, \"So the one on top has to keep his boots on.\"\n\nShe answered,\n\n _ **What makes you say \"his\"?**_\n\nKilleen answered, \"You said you never got on top.\"\n\nToby was getting uncomfortable with this but he repeated Shibo again, who said,\n\n _ **I wanted to be on top, be fast, wear boots.**_\n\n\"You learned how.\"\n\n _ **Good teacher.**_\n\nThe man grinned. \"Seemed like you learned somewhere before me.\"\n\n _ **Never learned**_ **your** _ **moves, naysay.**_\n\n\"Compliments, even. You always know how to get what you want.\"\n\nToby struggled to say something. All the knotted energy surrounding Shibo, of his carrying her as an Aspect, of his ripping her out with crude tools when she went awry\u2014all of it collided and tightened his throat until he could not speak.\n\n _ **Anything, anything to get it again.**_\n\nThe tiny voice was so desperate it opened a flood of sadness in Toby. He croaked out the words for her. The man's eyes widened and Shibo cried to Toby alone,\n\n _ **It's him! Him!**_\n\n\"Maybe there's a way for even that.\" Killeen peered into his son's eyes but without seeing him.\n\n _ **That's the point.**_\n\nWhen Toby repeated it he was surprised to find tears had run down and over his lips.\n\n\"You always liked to joke about it.\"\n\n _ **Not really jokes.**_\n\n\"No, they weren't.\"\n\nToby clasped the man and knew he was Killeen. Shibo laughed when they both did, not a joke but joy.\n\nA long moment passed between them. \"Dad, Dad . . .\" No words.\n\nToby grinned and the two of them pounded each other on the back, the laughter just bubbling up and out, and so he took a moment to register stresses arcing in the air, a pressing sharp presence\u2014\n\nThe sky ripped open.\n\nAbove them a blackness spread like oily ooze across the Lane.\n\n\"Down!\" Killeen called.\n\nPointless, Toby thought. He crouched. Whatever was up there was sweeping fast. It ate the Lane. Edges turned up like a fire curling the pages of a book. But this thing was consuming the esty itself.\n\n* * *\n\nI could not stop the Highers from allowing this.\n\n* * *\n\nHe knew instantly that this was the Mantis. Its manifestation was different, tinged with currents of emotion and echoing knowledge which he could not catch.\n\nHe looked around them and felt the Mantis now as a seethe in the air. Killeen was down in firing position but their weapons plainly could do no good here.\n\nA jab of pain. He turned as a small winged thing lifted off his right arm. A metallic buzz, anxious with its single-minded task. It shot away.\n\n* * *\n\nI have taken a sample of you. Yours is the last DNA needed.\n\n* * *\n\n\"I saw a copy of Abraham, Dad. The mechs must've read his DNA and mind as well.\"\n\n\"Damn!\" Killeen shouted. But there was nothing for him to shoot.\n\n* * *\n\nI am the lowest of my Order which can speak to you primates. The Exalteds cannot occupy so narrow a conceptual space. They have granted me special abilities for this supreme task. But other logics prevail as well. The Lane above is about to tear open into the wrack of the Eater. I cannot save you, but I did come to harvest the youngest's genetic material.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Son, I figured it would help me find you, so\u2014\"\n\n\"You let it help you get here.\"\n\nWinds rose, growling. Leaves stripped from the bushes.\n\nKilleen said bitterly, \"It didn't give me much choice.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Toby gripped his father's arm. Something wordless passed between them as they both squatted, cowering beneath a whipping gale that shrieked toward the blackness above.\n\n* * *\n\nMy tracking of you, Killeen, was always benign. I had hoped to harvest you all, once my obligation to the Highers was exhausted. We could be together then.\n\n* * *\n\n\"We'll rip your guts out!\" Killeen spat back. Toby admired the bravado in his father's automatic answer. Meaningless, of course.\n\n* * *\n\nSuch consummation is the greatest fate such as you can hope to share.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen fired a bolt at a glow that frisked through the air. Not the Mantis, no, but his father was never one to meekly listen.\n\n* * *\n\nYou have played a role, as well, in the bringing of fulfillment to our kind. When this sample is read, then united with the codes of yourself, Killeen, and your own father\u2014perhaps we can speak then.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Speak?\" Toby shouted against the wind's howl. \"We'll die here!\"\n\n* * *\n\nI fear I cannot intervene to rescue you. This esty is coming apart. I now depart.\n\n* * *\n\n\"You can get us out!\" Toby hollered.\n\n* * *\n\nI cannot waste time and energy opening a portal. My central task, brooking no compromise, is to save this manifestation of myself, to bring the sample of Toby to the Highers.\n\n* * *\n\nThe entire dome above them swarmed with black, eating tongues.\n\nKilleen cried, \"Save Toby! You dunno but what you'll need more than that little bit of him! Leave me, take\u2014\"\n\nBut the Mantis was gone.\n\nThe first booming shocks hit them then. Like immense drum rolls they flattened trees and smashed the men to the ground.\n\nToby rolled, stunned. He looked up into the far sky and saw where the blackness was leading. Pulverized knots of fiery orange fled away from it\u2014backward, down. Fragments of the Lane. Ripped away and already tortured into incandescence.\n\nAway. Inward. Toward the final consuming point of the Eater, the singularity cloaked in its own twisted geometry. The esty was spilling into the black hole. The snarl of curvature had finally won. It would draw them to it, the final grave.\n\nAt first he saw the dust whorl in the corner of his eye. He was trying to concentrate on the swallowing dark above even though the wind now battered at him. A limb hit him in the leg and gouged a painful streak of red as it departed. Killeen was trying to say something, arms waving. The violence overwhelmed their sensoria comm.\n\nBushes, grass, brown clouds of dirt\u2014all tore and rasped at him.\n\nThe filmy thing standing beside him did not move.\n\nHe looked at it square then and it said, \"I will open.\"\n\nIt tried to make itself into the shape of a man but against the angry air that was impossible. Tiny motes made it up, somehow holding crude shape against the gale.\n\nHe heard, very clearly, _Do not think we are neglectful of you. We do hope you live to help._\n\nHe had felt that message before. It had saved him and he had never known why.\n\nThen the esty beneath them vanished. They fell.\nPART SIX\n\nWedded to the Substrate\nONE\n\nPartial to Primates\n\nThe bird would come, Nigel Walmsley knew. But at least he could carve out some time for himself. It might be the very last. He had fled to this pocket of esty in part because time ran differently here. He used that to rest and reinvent himself.\n\nThe assault on the Library had been a shock but in the long line of his life there had been many such. He did not know if he would find the magnetic storage of his Nikka but then he had been there before, too.\n\nHe had barely gotten away, helped by Highers\u2014he thought. It was all wisps of memory.\n\nHe knew that in this manifestation he had to get a surer sense of himself and that would take time. But the Bishops and others were moving fast. So he came here. A place to scoop out a pocket of time, a pause before going back to the play. The last act was coming.\n\nThere was enough food just for the gathering, at least for a while. A bird assembled itself nearby and told him that with the expected flow senses of time in the Lanes of importance to him, he could remain here a while. He would be needed later. He did not ask what for because he knew by now there was no point in it.\n\nHe roved the narrow, bulbous Lane. He followed methods he had learned long ago in the American Southwest, when he had been training with NASA and took solitary weekends wandering in the dry canyons of New Mexico and Arizona.\n\n _Au revoir, Etats-Unis._ Somewhere out there in the galaxy's churn, America was a ruin, walls like broken teeth on a plain. If even that. In Nigel the name echoed still.\n\nTracing the drainages upstream. Looking in shady alcoves under the canyon walls. Here was sandy soil that testified to the true age of the esty: enough to simmer and bake raw galactic matter into strata and then wear it down to grains again. Animals had left litter\u2014they knew shelter at least as well as humans\u2014and pack rats stored their precious baubles. Humans were like other indolent, meandering species. They had left debris cast aside as they lounged, trash the true record of past celebrations. Shards, chips, bits of metal and glass and unknown materials all mixed together. The warpage of time made it impossible to know how many centuries of relative interval had lodged these here but he took some odd reassurance from the rubbish nonetheless.\n\nPeople passed through, even here. They had heard that there were troubles elsewhere but since the mechs had not reached their particular remote Lanes they discounted most of it as mere talk. Still, everybody knew that travel was broadening.\n\nSome were traders and some just journeying with no particular destination in mind. The esty afforded little certainty that once you set out you would arrive at a particular place on time and they were used to that, too. It did not improve them much but at least it made them more interesting.\n\n\"Lord it was hard getting in here. When are you people going to get around to improving it?\"\n\n\"Slightly after I leave,\" Nigel said with a straight face.\n\n\"What kind of improvement? I'd suggest\u2014\"\n\n\"My leaving was the improvement I had in mind.\"\n\n\"Ha ha. Well, is there any better flux point further on?\"\n\n\"I don't think so. The best way out is the way you came in.\"\n\n\"We would see the same scenery twice.\"\n\n\"It looks better leaving.\"\n\n\"Aren't we just a little distance in esty-cords from the Majumbdahr Lane?\"\n\n\"Which one would that be?\"\n\n\"Where they have that beautiful city?\"\n\n\"I don't know how to measure how far it is but I would venture that it is not nearly far enough.\"\n\n\"Well, I prefer cities to this trackless nothing.\"\n\n\"Trackless is the best part about it.\"\n\n\"With more water it would be a lot more like where we come from.\"\n\nNigel smiled. \"What would be the point of another place like what you already have?\"\n\n\"Nobody here to talk to anyway.\"\n\n\"I've been known to talk to myself.\"\n\nSome uneasy laughter from the travelers and then one says, \"You must get awful lonely.\"\n\n\"I have good company.\"\n\n\"Where are they?\"\n\nPointing at his head, he said, \"In here.\"\n\n\"Uh, well, anything dangerous around here?\"\n\n\"There's you.\"\n\n\"We're not dangerous! We wouldn't hurt a fly.\"\n\n\"I'll have to ask the flies about that.\"\n\n\"You know, I'd like to live here alone like you.\"\n\n\"You can't.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"If you come I'll be here and you won't be alone. Neither will I.\"\n\n\"Well, I mean almost alone.\"\n\n\"That's like being almost pregnant.\"\n\n\"You take everything so literally!\"\n\n\"I don't take everything at all. In fact I take almost nothing any longer.\"\n\nThey would pass through with all the speed one could plausibly wish for but he was still far happier to see the back of them than the front. On Earth one of the prevailing clich\u00e9s had been that all people are basically alike. To the extent that it was weakly true it was also useless because you never knew if they were alike in being vicious or kind or anything in between. In any case the variety was more interesting than the similarities. But then, he would think with a shrug, how could he ever lose faith in a species that had such an endearing trait? You could say whatever you liked to them and they would not take you seriously, not even take offense\u2014as long as you told the strict truth. They never recognized it.\n\nThe bird came while he was resting.\n\n\"Do not think we are neglectful of you,\" it warbled from a branch.\n\nHe watched its wings shimmer. Sometimes the light from beyond it came through and he could see how thin the illusion was. They manifested themselves this way to anchor his attention. He knew it was not necessary but appreciated the formal compliment of their taking the trouble.\n\n\"I need more time here.\"\n\n\"There is none. You have lived long in this warpage.\"\n\n\"I'm fair well warped myself.\"\n\nIt never responded to wit, sarcasm, irony, or the rest of his habitual devices. He wondered if the seething band of particles really did speak for a high intelligence; wasn't humor essential?\n\n\"Matters moved athwart our courses.\"\n\nWas this their idea of speaking to him in his own language? Maybe they had gotten hold of some Shakespeare.\n\n\"Was there any Elizabethan poetry in the Library?\" Let it work its way through that chain of associations.\n\n\"No time for entertainments.\"\n\n\"You mean idle conversation?\"\n\n\"The mechanicals have the necessary genetic information.\"\n\nHe felt a stab of sadness. He had watched the Family Bishop saga, and many others, from such time-swallowed foxholes as this, for millennia. \"Are the carriers dead?\"\n\n\"Certainly so. They were in a Lane which the mechanicals opened.\"\n\n\"To get in?\" That was routine. Expensive, against the defenses of the esty, but the mechanicals could exert their powers at the right points and bring it off. They had before.\n\n\"To rupture.\"\n\n\"Bloody hell.\"\n\n\"They unlocked the coordinate structure.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"A one-to-one mapping of quantum coordinates to a doubly infinite manifold.\"\n\n\"I see.\" It was talking down to him but he was used to that. \"So they forced an identity of the coordinates to the first manifold\u2014\"\n\n\"And then switched to the second.\"\n\n\"The esty unzipped.\"\n\n\"Only in some few hundred Lanes.\"\n\n\"Only.\" It did not catch the sarcasm.\n\n\"By design, they selected Lanes for high probability that one or more of the three genetic carriers would be present.\"\n\n\"How many dead?\" Pointless, but automatic.\n\n\"Unknown but exceeding five million primates. The species number count is higher still.\"\n\n\"Over five million _species?_ \"\n\n\"We are vast.\"\n\n\"So the Ecstasy Codes are out.\"\n\n\"They will soon spread. To avert catastrophe we must summon all help.\"\n\n\"I'm not much use.\"\n\n\"You have been effective in the past.\"\n\n\"Ummm.\" He had seen the original Codes, known in more recent eras as the Trigger Commands. Portions of them had been handed down in the Galactic Library. For backup, the ancient Naturals had stored them genetically. That had been the purpose, really, of the Natural expedition to Earth so long ago. The wreck in Marginis crater he had helped explore, preserved in vacuum on Earth's moon, had been a casualty in the struggle between the mechs and the Naturals, a carnage steeped in huge history before humanity had ever evolved.\n\nAnd, he recalled wistfully, he had met Nikka there. Drawn to the shadowy half-felt mystery, they had recognized something in each other that went deep and true.\n\nHe pulled himself back from the memories. Some stuck with him, no matter what. \"Bit difficult to know just who to save in all this.\"\n\n\"The mechanicals are working on the Grand Problem.\"\n\n\"Ummm. So I saw.\" He remembered his long expedition to the stuttering end of time, using the worm. His sons and daughter, Benjamin and Ito and Angelina, were long gone into the Lanes, hotly pursuing their own energetic destinies. Now and then he used the Library resources to locate them. They would have grand reunions, swear to keep in better touch, and then they all would move on.\n\n\"You are thinking what?\"\n\n\"Impatient, aren't you?\"\n\n\"The mechanicals will perish.\"\n\n\"So? Primates are dying right now.\"\n\n\"We cannot take sides in the sense that a specific species can.\"\n\nIt fidgeted on the branch it appeared to hold in razor-sharp talons. Alarming, perhaps, if they had not been a tenth of a millimeter deep.\n\n\"You're not a single species?\"\n\n\"We are of a Phylum in which such subsections are meaningless. Species are a human category.\"\n\n\"I don't follow.\"\n\n\"That is why you are in your Phylum.\"\n\n\"Um. Have I just been insulted?\"\n\n\"Have you ever insulted an ant?\"\n\n\"Now I know I have been.\"\n\n\"We cannot be partial to primates, I remind you.\"\n\n\"Think I'm just too caught up in species-specific behaviors, then?\"\n\n\"You must come.\"\n\nThe bird skittered back and forth on its limb, imitating the nervous behavior of a pigeon waiting for a crumb. Good copy-work; they were getting better at nonverbal signals.\n\nHe sighed. How many times had he rushed off in aid of the crisis of the moment? He truly did not know, could not know. In time, even intense memories get discarded if they are not essential. And much of what he had done, down through millennia, had added up to very little.\n\n _I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled._\n\nThe Bishops were another story. \"I'll get my boots.\"\nTWO\n\nThe Gathering Up\n\nKilleen and Toby had to get repairs before they were workable again. The slippage through the esty walls had bruised and sprained them in odd places. They had fallen into a mass of greasy vegetation and ended up chopping their way out into a Lane neither of them had ever seen.\n\nToby bubbled with joy. Killeen watched him and his heart filled with memories of Toby's mother, of all the hard times since. He had found his son again, after what seemed years\u2014though in the esty, he would never know how long it had been\u2014and they were on the move again. They covered ground without speaking much and that was just fine, too.\n\nThe shadowy figure who had spoken did not appear again. \"Better things to do, prob'ly,\" Killeen said wanly, nursing his right leg. His inboards said it had a lot of chem repairs to do and he should sit still. Or lie down. Neither was easy.\n\n\"C'mon, Dad, give it a rest.\"\n\n\"But somethin's _happening._ \"\n\n\"Without us, right now.\"\n\n\"But the Mantis\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't think we have to fidget about that. It'll find us.\"\n\n\"That's what I'm trying to figure.\"\n\n\"What to do? It'll still be able to knock us over.\"\n\n\"Naysay, not if those Trigger Codes work.\"\n\nToby frowned. Killeen had told all he knew but it came out Killeen fashion, a bit fuzzy about the history and details. \"They'll kill them? Suredead?\"\n\n\"Way I heard it was, it's like a disease. It makes them sick, then dead.\"\n\n\"Breaks down their functions so they get less and less able.\"\n\n\"Yeasay.\" He got up and paced. He limped but the irritation was worth the feeling of movement.\n\n\"We'd still best be careful of the Mantis, if it finds us.\"\n\n\"But maybe we can truly kill it this time.\"\n\n\"This is about a lot more than the Mantis.\"\n\nKilleen scowled. \"Not for me.\"\n\n _Not for me._\n\nHe had learned something in his passage through this twisted place, Killeen realized. He had been a drunk and a failure and then a Cap'n. He knew Bishop ways. These people nestled in here were different.\n\nWarriors were of a world apart, a very ancient one that ran in parallel with the comfortable lot of humanity. He had listened to his Aspects when they talked to him of this. For the first time he actually found all the lore and history useful.\n\nThe warrior culture could never be that of civilization itself, although all civilizations in history owed their very existence to the warrior. He had learned enough to know that once humans had come out of nature, and so shared instincts that argued for flight, for intelligent cowardice, for self-\n\ninterest. To pass on your own precious genes, some would say, but it was for more than that: the Self, lonely and communal both, and knowing the tension stretched between those two poles.\n\nWhen humans had first come here they had snuck around and run when challenged. Later humans got better at war. Never as good as mechs, not in vacuum at least, but they held their own. In the Chandelier times humanity had valued total obedience, self-sacrifice, hard-minded courage, honor. It had been a big remorseless engine, with ranks and orders and unthinking compliance.\n\nKilleen preferred what his Arthur Aspect told him was the old way: fighting with relish and art and risks chosen, not ordered.\n\nFighting was not a way to die but precisely the opposite. You did not concentrate yourself to break through your enemy because then you took bigger losses. There was always another day. The virtues of human warriors, after the Chandeliers got smashed to ruins, were the old ones: patience, avoidance, wearing down the enemy with stealth and surprise and speed. Tradition, morale, cohesion.\n\nFamily. Bishops. You could talk about genetics and links and all but it just meant Family.\n\nAnd the fight was never over.\n\n\"Cap'n!\"\n\nKilleen was steeping in his own ruminations. Still pacing. He spun with alarm and had a weapon out automatically and there was Cermo.\n\n\"You real?\"\n\n\"Damn-all right I am!\"\n\nSlapping and hugging and the smell was right too. Just in case.\n\nDown through the years Cermo had always been solid and steady, an under-officer you could rely on at your back in a scrap, and Killeen had never seen him happier. \"Come here, Toby's\u2014\"\n\n\"Jazz!\" Cermo's big laugh boomed out. \"Damn big you are, boy.\"\n\nToby grinned. \"No fat on you now neither.\"\n\n\"I'm not so slow now, yeasay.\"\n\nHe had been Cermo-the-Slow but somehow always ended up in the thick of a fight anyway. Killeen had honestly wondered if the man had any fear in him at all. \"You got here pretty quick,\" Killeen said.\n\n\"Not on my own. This funny thing comes visit me. I'm out in flatass empty nowhere and it just pops up.\"\n\nToby stopped grinning. \"What'd it say?\"\n\n\"Says it wants to help.\"\n\n\"Something like, 'Do not think we are neglectful of you'?\"\n\n\"Uh, yeasay. In fact\u2014\"\n\n\"The same exact words.\"\n\nCermo grinned and nodded.\n\nNothing happened for a day, no call to battle or further revelations, and they got hungry.\n\nForaging was not easy in a landscape you didn't understand.\n\nThis Lane proved that not all the esty had been made to please Man. Here the bluffs and ridges looked like they had been shaped hastily with a putty knife. The sole tree they saw thrashed in an angry wind, its topknot finally blowing off in a pocket of wind, fluttering and fraying over somber flats like a fragmenting bird. Eroded mesas topped in gray sent yellow streaks down their shanks, trickles turning to a burnt-orange tinge that suggested the rot of rust. Across the sky swam faraway, similar ground, curving like a vastly distant roof with its own business of twisted timestone grown over by persistent growth, greasy vegetation raked by winds. They foraged and got nothing. A thin cold rain started, falling onto a hardpan purple plain that looked poisoned by lurid wastes, a topographical monument to the worst in life.\n\nThey met people but conversations made no sense. They were tough, with outsized hands that looked as though they were made for handling lumber without gloves in freezing seasons. Killeen used his language chips, courtesy of Andro back in the portal city. That made people's talk come through almost right:\n\n\"What cord it is?\"\n\n\"For how come now you do that, you?\"\n\n\"While I was popping the seams out, me, something come loose wasn't s'posed and give it all to pieces sudden.\"\n\nBut a party of them did give the three men something to eat. Most of it they could even keep down.\n\nThey had all passed through different Lanes, wildly different experiences.\n\nCermo described a thing that grew across an entire large Lane, somehow harvesting the differentials in gravitation along a twisty axis. People who lived near it said it was not a plant or an animal but some combination, which made no sense.\n\nToby described his life in what its natives called the River Lane. They thought it was infinitely long since nobody who went far down it ever came back. It had been risky taking artifacts far uptime, since that increased something called its \"temporal potential,\" and the slightest perturbation would cause it to snap back downtime, streaking yellow as it went. Attempts to drop electrodes into the river and extract currents led to a temporally unstable shoreline and splintering destruction.\n\nKilleen found the people more disturbing. He had passed through a region ruled by a revered figure called the Tyrant. The term was an endearment, not a criticism. Killeen got to see this figure at a distance, holding open court. Beside the Tyrant squatted a dark brown woman on a leather mat. The Tyrant was holding audiences and when not pleased would simply wave his head in a rocking motion, a blend of a nod and a shake that came off as a wobble. The meaning was not something midway between yes and no, as Killeen learned when the squatting woman proved to be an executioner, conveniently nearby. The leather mat was to prevent blood from getting on the immaculate green tiles of the palace courtyard.\n\n\"They all seem so, well, occupied with themselves,\" Toby said.\n\n\"Been under the umbrella so long, think it don't rain,\" Cermo explained, jutting out his jaw.\n\nKilleen thought about how it was for Bishops and said, \"We're always lookin' up from what we're about, eyeing the horizon. That's what it takes to stay ahead of mechs.\"\n\nToby and Cermo nodded and agreed that people here could take punishment from mechs well enough, but they were different. And that certainly no Bishop would ever want to be like these folk, not at all.\n\nThey pieced together their stories, particularly of the chaos after the mechs destroyed the portal city. Cermo had been with the main body of Bishops and had seen many fall. Killeen knew of Jocelyn's death and Toby knew of none. Killeen could see that Toby brooded over his abandoning the Family just before the attack. Instead of talking it out, he simply hugged his son and later the three of them did some Ranking-talk, each taking turns hurling insults at the other, the more pointed the better. Plenty came out that way and the code of the Ranking forbade anyone taking it hard, so that ranking cleaned out the dark corners and threw away the trash there, without studying it much.\n\nThey felt better afterward and even got some liquor from a passing local in trade for some extra leggings Cermo had. They were feeling pretty fine by the time the Mantis appeared.\nTHREE\n\nSome Terrible Wonder\n\nThis world was raining instructions.\n\nNigel Walmsley crouched under an immense, billowy tree and watched downy seeds pucker out on the great limbs. Plants in this Lane had proceeded upon a different line of evolution than any he had seen. They coddled their seeds internally, giving vegetable birth to them when conditions were good for their taking hold on nearby soil. Parent trees exuded a sap, too, which followed the wind-borne, gossamer seeds on the prevailing wind. The sap was either a nutrient or an insect repellent or both; Nigel could not quite work it out from his spotty biological education. He had graduated from Cambridge only a generation or so after Crick and Watson had discovered the double helix, and that was nearly thirty thousand years ago. He felt a bit of allowance was in order.\n\nThe cottony parachutes of the seeds flavored the air. They blew in gusts of restless wind, snagged in oily bushes, fell fruitlessly into ponds. Their downy cellulose was fluff, packages delivering the essential DNA. Or perhaps here some other entwined matrix carried the genetic instructions; the galaxy had produced a profusion of copying tools. No matter; whatever molecules curled about each other in a snaky mating dance, the purpose was to spread orders for making more enormous trees\u2014or better, seeds giving away free directions for making more of themselves. The tree's apparent charity was in fact self-promotion; the foundation of life. Trees rained down\u2014in the language of the long-dead TwenCen when his own concepts got imprinted\u2014programs, written in the ancient style: as digital as a computer disk. Algorithms: tree-growing, seed-sending, atomic algorithms.\n\nOther programs flitted through this air, too\u2014mech signals, compacted into narrow bursts that fizzed with energy. Alarm, fear, panic. Or so he would have termed them once. Mechs had what he called uber-programs, or meta-instructions, not emotions. They corresponded to the drives and deep, unconscious impulses that humans carried like prehistoric baggage.\n\nAnd their calls echoed in Nigel's sensorium, uncannily like the high cries of flocking birds.\n\nWarily he duck walked from under the canopy to the edge of a cliff.\n\nHe looked up. The resemblance was perhaps an example of evolutionary convergence. On Earth, the marvel of the eye had come forth in several different organisms, octopus and mammal alike. Here, the strange, diaphanous mechs swarming above looked a bit like a flight of pelicans.\n\nFrom them forked fire. It crackled down and struck the fleeing forms on a broad plain.\n\nFrom below came fainter signals of terror and grief. There were many aliens here in the Labyrinth, couched away in their respective Lanes. Now the gliding, killing mechs herded them and interrogated them electronically, inflicting death with casual error. All part of the work of searching for certain pesky primates. And others.\n\nHe had come here because of faint, scattershot signals he had picked up. They carried the tinge of the alien, yet with a lacy, human flavor too.\n\nTheir source was fleeing up the cliff. A good target for the airborne mechs. He felt it below, sensed two broad-winged mechs vector on it.\n\nA startling flash leapt from the sky. It struck the cliff. No pain-jab, no response at all\u2014until something zipped back up, like a return stroke of lightning. Then the two mechs were turning, burning, winged pyres.\n\nWhatever was coming was formidable. Nigel backed into the trees.\n\nA big half-mechanical body darted with startling speed over the cliff edge. It came toward him. He knew better than to run. It sent, <I smelled you, too.>\n\n\"It's been a while since my last bath,\" Nigel said, but he knew what this thing meant. They were about the same business, in a way that mere lumpy words could not convey. The big alien was of the Myriapodia, an alien kind that had long ago outfitted their Natural bodies with augmentations. Yet the Myriapodia were not mechanical in true nature. They hated the mechs, who had long sought their extinction.\n\n<I carry a human of use to you.>\n\n\"How so?\" Nigel had met Myriapodia before but it was best to be wary of anything so different.\n\n<You seek the Bishops.>\n\n\"You're their . . . ally?\"\n\n<My species is, now.>\n\n\"I know your Phylum.\" No point in taking any defensive measures against this many-legger; it could kill him in a twinkling. He noted abstractly that he felt no fear; if he allowed himself, he might even feel a nostalgia for that emotion. It came infrequently now. \"I remember your Illuminates, their elaborate hive-mind diplomacy\u2014yes, I was involved with them once.\"\n\n<They sent me here.>\n\n\"They always had good judgment.\"\n\n<You know our past so well?>\n\n\"Reasonably. And I read a lot.\"\n\n<The Library.>\n\n\"A part. Most of it I can't fathom.\"\n\n<Do you know . . .>\n\n\"Yes?\" The huge thing's transmissions had an odd, many-layered flavor. It was gingerly touching a deep, ancient question.\n\n<You know who blended us?>\n\n\"Your interspecies merging? That was a fair time back.\"\n\n<Before our history.>\n\n\"As I recall, it wasn't us.\"\n\nInvoluntarily, it radiated confused reactions: relief, excitement, all underlaid with a wistful sadness.\n\n<I have come to understand your kind. I had hoped\u2014>\n\n\"Sorry, no. We came later. Recent uninvited guests here, we are.\"\n\n<Who, then?>\n\n\"There's a word for the organic, Natural races which haven't been domesticated by the mechs\u2014extinct.\"\n\n<I had feared such. But . . . we are not extinct.>\n\n\"We're different. You're harder to kill, and we've been kept alive in the Center because the mechs don't know quite what to make of us.\"\n\n<Now they do.>\n\n\"Um, dead right. Cat's out of the proverbial.\"\n\n<You carry the Codes.>\n\n\"Even dilapidated old me, yes\u2014though only partially. Genetic glide or drift or some other jargon I've long since forgotten.\"\n\n<I can be of aid in this. My full lineage burrow-name is Quath'jutt'kkal'thon.>\n\n\"Nigel Walmsley. Your name means something, I'm sure, but mine is just a sticker slapped on me.\"\n\nThe killing was still going on across the plain below but they both had blocked it out. Now the gyre of broad-winged mechs came lower, finishing up their business. Nigel pointed. \"They'll go for me if they sniff me out. I haven't got your defenses.\"\n\n<Nor I yours.>\n\nAn intriguing jibe. But the birdlike mechs were getting closer. \"What are those?\"\n\n<They have been hastily adapted to these pseudo-planetary environments. Once they were the light grazers.>\n\n\"Ah. Photovores.\"\n\nOne shot at him then. The burst ignited a tree and Nigel survived only because Quath instantly sent out a blanketing shield. It was an intense bubble of electromagnetic energy, veining the fractured air. Enough for the instant, but\u2014 \"Afraid I have to call on those hidden reserves, Quath.\" Nigel sent a signal, warbling oddly in his sensorium. He had been given a calling circuit and of course did not have a clue as to how it worked.\n\n<I cannot protect you very much longer\u2014>\n\nThe filmy bird was enormous this time. At first he thought it was a mech, but as it came flapping over the trees he saw it was translucent, a delegate of the Highers. It hovered and piercing eyes gazed at them.\n\nNigel took its quick _bleep_ of information and said, \"Their wings are still light-sensitive, these photovores?\"\n\nQuath was still peering up at the huge nonbird of shifting, buzzing parts. It was clear in such a gross manifestation that millions of tiny motes made up the thing\u2014whether insectlike motes or something odder, Nigel could not tell. He never had been able to figure it out, though it chose this manifestation often recently. He knew the physical form was meaningless and that whatever lay behind it was trying to make this easier for him and for Quath. \"Quath?\"\n\n<I . . . yes, they do.>\n\n\"Good. It needs to know. Details are not its strong suit.\"\n\n _Not true, actually,_ he thought. But it was finite.\n\nThe timestone high above suddenly flared into a rich, golden-orange arc. The bleat of intense flux hammered Nigel down and he crawled under one of the trees. He could tell it was mostly infrared, but the visible alone nearly blinded him.\n\n<Ah\u2014No\u2014> Quath scrambled under the canopy with him.\n\n\"It prefers simple solutions.\"\n\nVapor burst from the tree decks. The sudden fog hissed and through it Nigel could see the photovores. They were instantly overloaded and their wings burst into smoldering black. Parts fell away.\n\nThe entire high stack of them, a gyre of hundreds, began tumbling in slow motion toward the plain. They would join those they had so recently dispatched with nonchalant abandon.\n\n\"I've seen these buggers work before,\" Nigel shouted into the steam that cloaked them. \"They're beautifully engineered, but not for this.\"\n\n<Elsewhere, I have seen them deliver esty bombs.>\n\nA photovore tumbled into a tree nearby. The thick trunk went down with a sharp crack.\n\n\"Damn, where's that bird? We have to get out of here.\"\n\nHe knew the mechs used esty bombs now, destabilizing a patch of space-time so that it tried to straighten out and go flat. That ripped apart anything nearby. Anything that needed geometric structure to exist, maybe even a Magnetic Mind. No defense.\n\n<It is your savior, not mine.>\n\n\"You said you carried a human, right?\"\n\n<I did. But hasten, see the fires\u2014>\n\n\"I'll trade you a ride for that human.\"\n\n<It would be opportune if you could escape this Lane.>\n\nHe couldn't, of course. But the bird was somewhere here and to it, matter itself was a souffl\u00e9 of empty space and furious probabilities.\n\n\"That human\u2014bet I can guess his name.\"\n\n<Perform your exit first.>\n\n\"Quite. Where's that bird when you need him?\"\n\nNigel sent a blaring call. Sure to attract photovores, even in their final torment. But there were only shaved seconds left. As had become his habit of late, he thought of Nikka for an instant, savoring it, just in case this was truly it. This time.\nFOUR\n\nFinitudes\n\nNo use running, of course.\n\nThe Mantis came as a fast flickering at the edges of Killeen's vision. He was tired and something went out of him when he caught the swelling blankness, mute evidence of how easily it could avoid them.\n\nKilleen got up slowly from their campfire. Toby and Cermo followed suit; Bishops stood, ready to move, even when it seemed pointless. He wished they had not indulged in the liquor, but then, that probably would make no difference.\n\nFoolish to fire at it. Like shooting at the wind to bring on sunshine, his father Abraham had said once, describing a dumb idea on long-ago Snowglade. Well then, try bravado.\n\n\"Surprised to see us?\"\n\n* * *\n\nWe do not properly have a reaction like your surprise. All orderly forms integrate new data instantly, remaking themselves. They retain no memory of their attitude in the moment before, so no comparisons are possible.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Must be dull.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThat too is a category without application in us.\n\n* * *\n\nCermo whispered, \"If I go left\u2014\"\n\n\"Stay still. It's a damnsight bigger than we know,\" Killeen said.\n\nToby nodded. \"The Mantis we saw on Snowglade, it was a sort of stripped-down version of this.\"\n\n* * *\n\nIf you imply that I am simply more terms in a linear sequence, the issue has eluded you.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen remembered how it had killed Andro, Fanny, and so many others. Killed, used, then discarded like so many materials expended in a hobby.\n\n* * *\n\nAgain I speak as conduit for the Exalteds. They cannot express in serial order, as your acoustic modes do.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Sounds pretty limited to me,\" Killeen said. As long as it was still talking they were still alive.\n\n* * *\n\nThey delegate such cramped tasks. Do not presume, or I shall make your termination painful.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Mean-hearted of you,\" Toby said. His voice was thin with the same exhaustion Killeen recognized in himself. The worst kind, a bone-deep mental weariness.\n\n* * *\n\nIt would be a variation on an earlier experiment. Do not think that the concept of compassion is a possession of your species. But surely you must acknowledge that it has bounds among species, Phyla, and certainly between Kingdoms. The Exalteds are a higher Kingdom, indeed, the highest. You cannot expect your notions to extend to your betters.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen snorted derision. \"They\u2014and you\u2014left us to die when you broke open the esty.\"\n\n* * *\n\nI had to return the sample of Toby's genetic record. It was nearly enough.\n\n* * *\n\n\"I thought you needed three generations, plus the data buried in the Legacies.\" Killeen addressed the empty air. He felt the Mantis only as fitful, patchy blanknesses in his sensorium.\n\n* * *\n\nThere is a small code which releases the pleasures we seek. It is said to be carried socially.\n\n* * *\n\nToby asked, \"You mean memorized?\"\n\n* * *\n\nAs nearly as we can surmise, it was given as a precaution when the Trigger Codes were implanted in the genetic helices. I wish you to deliver it up.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen laughed. \"Don't know it.\"\n\n* * *\n\nAttempts to shield it will merely mean that I will ransack each of you in turn. There is little time and my methods will be destructive. Your selves will not survive my search.\n\n* * *\n\nAs if for an example, Killeen felt something spike into his mind, forking up memories from his past\u2014agonies and ecstasies, sharp, eye-blink-quick. Painful and barbed in a way he had never felt. He staggered. The flooding jab of the past was a blow, stopping his lungs, tightening his throat around a hoarse cry.\n\nHis wife, Veronica, rocking Toby in buttery candlelight.\n\nRuddy-faced Fanny calling orders on a scarred plain.\n\nAbraham grimly grinning on a parapet above the Citadel.\n\nAll compacted slices, instants sprayed against the walls of his mind.\n\nHe recalled events in the pace of his own thinking; the Mantis \"harvested\" them with an instantaneous readout.\n\n\"How'd we supposedly get this code?\"\n\n* * *\n\nIt must be passed down acoustically.\n\n* * *\n\n\"We get told it?\" Toby asked.\n\nCermo shook his head. \"Nobody told me anything like that.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThen you are lying. There is no other possibility. It is a species-specific instruction. The Exalteds have read in your own helices that it exists.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen shook his head. \"Well, we lost it, then.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThat cannot be. Human continuity is unusual among the lower orders. Great traditions pass on. This is deeply entwined with your individual senses of self-worth\u2014a common \"natural\" social tool.\n\n* * *\n\nToby said, \"Maybe you should try some other Families.\"\n\n* * *\n\nNo! The Rooks, Knights, and others do not have it. There is a clear genetic difference.\n\n* * *\n\nMaybe they didn't have what they called emotions, but this Mantis manifestation betrayed more than it knew. It longed for the lost trigger, he saw suddenly. Maybe even the Exalteds craved the exotic pleasures that mere mammals were heir to.\n\nKilleen said cautiously, \"How come Bishops got it?\"\n\n* * *\n\nYou have undergone less genetic drift than the others. Such is the luck of the draw.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen could see no way out of this. They weren't lying; matters were far past that now. They just didn't know. But the Mantis would rip open their minds, just to be sure. All he could think to do was the oldest maneuver: stall. \"So we're nothing special, yeasay?\"\n\n* * *\n\nThere are several theories about why the humans spontaneously sent colonies out from their \"Chandeliers.\" None seemed specially favored, and indeed the Bishops were one of the smaller Families.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Tougher, though,\" Toby said. \"Right?\" From his tone Killeen saw that he was trying to get the Mantis into its lecture mode, delay it by tempting the scholar facet of the many-sided intelligence.\n\n* * *\n\nYou are now, perhaps, but your history is not particularly distinguished. Even on Snowglade, Rooks and Pawns were more troublesome to the enterprises we conducted.\n\n* * *\n\n\"But we have a warrior name. Bishops swoop down and strike, moving fast.\" Toby was intent now, not just passing time. \"We, we\u2014\" sputtering, Toby launched into warbling voice\u2014\n\nWe cut across Rooks,\n\nangle in on Knights,\n\nput the fatto Kings to check\u2014\n\n* * *\n\nYou quote from an olden Bishop chant, I see. A \"cheerlead\" I once witnessed in your Citadel. Admirable, I suppose, how you pit one tribe against another. A wasteful way of selecting those which deserve to propagate.\n\n* * *\n\nWe're better'n they are. Our name\u2014\n\n* * *\n\nWas chosen from a board game. Just as the Sox and Dodgers in an adjacent Lane gained theirs from a lost art performed with the body. The Aces and Eights and Jacks of the planet you once visited\u2014Trump, I believe you named it\u2014came from a pastime involving pasteboards. Similar cultural detritus accounts for the tribal divisions\u2014all quite artificial, believe me. And you can believe such as me; I have seen more human history worked out here at the Center than you can remember.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen shot back, \"Those games and such, _they_ were named for _us._ \"\n\nCermo said, \"Damn rightside!\"\n\n\"You ask me,\" Toby said triumphantly, \"those Yankees and all, they weren't so much. Their word for war was 'pitch.' Some fighters they were!\"\n\n* * *\n\nYou are amusing in your finitudes. Do not mistake my indulgence of you for more than it is, however.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen knew the stalling was over when the crisp outline of the Mantis solidified against the distant hills. It was large and kept changing so he could not get the shape of it. \"Now just wait, I\u2014\"\n\n* * *\n\nWaiting is done. If you refuse to yield up the acoustic trigger, I must interrogate you separately and in detail. Your selves will not survive this. I shall harvest as I inspect.\n\n* * *\n\nThe matter-of-fact way the Mantis said it made Killeen certain this was no bluff. He breathed shallowly and thought and his mind went nowhere. The Mantis had been promising that eventually it would suck them up into itself, as part of its \"preserving mission,\" and there was no way to stop it.\n\n\"I'll go first,\" Killeen said. \"I'm Cap'n, stands to reason I know more than these.\"\n\n* * *\n\nTrue. Perhaps it is buried lore and you do not know you carry it. The unkempt manner of your interior, with its subconscious and other swamps, would allow that. Very well, then. This will be easier if you will walk into a recess and position yourself for an erasing execution.\n\n* * *\n\nA pale rectangle of blue-green opened in the air a few steps away. Killeen saw that the Mantis was in fact very close, simulating the entire countryside with absolute fidelity. He had not even known it was so close and now the door into that reality hung like a painting against the twilight hills. But the hills were the illusion, the doorway real. And here at last was his end.\nFIVE\n\nAn Abyss of Squashed Duration\n\nNigel Walmsley landed on his ass.\n\nQuath had warned him that it was safer to go through separately but when he looked up Quath was standing erect as if nothing had happened and he was covered with dirt, aching in every joint, his clothes ripped.\n\n\"You said this\u2014\"\n\n<Had to be accomplished quickly,> Quath said, and started moving fast downhill. <We have been lucky to arrive.>\n\n\"Quite so.\" They had gotten scooped up, all right, but Nigel had never seen the bird. Instead, the hills seemed to roll up like a brown sheet and whirl them into a weightless limbo. Quath had been transmitting, talking to entities Nigel could not see. All very fast. Then he had thumped down here.\n\n\"Slow down!\"\n\n<Very well\u2014> She plucked him up and surged on.\n\nHe dangled like a leftover idea on her right side. The hills around them wavered, as if in a heat wave. Or maybe he was getting tired. He blinked and the hills rippled again and suddenly he saw that they were not hills at all. It was something enormous and somber and he caught an old, familiar sensorium stink.\n\n\"The Mantis.\"\n\n<That is why I hurry.>\n\nHe saw some Bishops against the sensed scenery. Killeen, yes, Toby, and an officer. Quath sent glad salutes, in the age-old manner of the Myriapodia; Nigel tried to think.\n\nThe bird was still in the game, to be sure, else they wouldn't have been so quickly slipped through the warpage of the esty to precisely this spot. It was bringing matters to a boil, but to what end? The Mantis could still slaughter them all in a microsecond. Their only defense lay in the hope that at the moment it didn't seem to want to.\n\nNo one paid him much attention as he climbed down from Quath's side shelf. He was to these giants a scrawny mass of wrinkles, scarcely the stuff of legends.\n\nHe finally worked out that they were babbling about an acoustic Trigger Code. The Mantis-mind skated across the conversation, sampling each human consciousness in turn. Like an aloof connoisseur at a wine tasting, Nigel thought, but beneath that slept a floating anxiety. The clock was running on the Mantis, too.\n\nAll this he got from his sensorium. It was rather more sensitive and tricky than the Bishops', but a toy compared with that of the Mantis. He could feel the machine minds dipping into him, flitting back to the Bishops for species comparison, then back again to grill his cerebrum a bit more. He supposed he should get used to it, but he never did.\n\n* * *\n\nI will inspect you as well, Myriapodia. The acoustics could be carried in such an intelligence.\n\n* * *\n\n<I do not believe so,> Quath answered.\n\n\"I'm certain she does not, in fact,\" Nigel said mildly.\n\nGratifyingly, they all turned to look at him. Except the Mantis, of course, which was still only a slight dissonance in the apparent world.\n\n\"Who're you?\" Killeen asked warily.\n\n\"Tell you later,\" Toby whispered to his father.\n\n\"I believe Quath does contain the secret, however,\" Nigel said.\n\n<You speak literally. And true.>\n\nQuath's side belly opened then, a synthesis of mechanical sliding action and organic birth, membranes popping.\n\nA large man staggered out. He rubbed his eyes, yawned, looked around. \"Been asleep,\" he said.\n\n\"Abraham!\" Killeen cried.\n\nThe others followed suit. Nigel watched them but his senses riveted on the Mantis. It would treasure this spectacle, this reuniting, but it would calculate and judge faster than Walmsley could. Every move from here on could be fatal.\n\nToby and Killeen wrapped arms around Abraham, shouted their joy. _Doing the human thing,_ Nigel thought abstractly. Despite himself, he finally got caught up in the moment himself. He clapped Abraham on the back and smiled and for a passing moment the tension in him eased. Then the Mantis sent,\n\n* * *\n\nYou are the oldest and have the acoustic trigger.\n\n* * *\n\nAbraham looked like a wizened combination of Toby and Killeen, with the same guarded gleam in his eyes. \"I do.\"\n\n* * *\n\nStand and deliver.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Yeasay, Isay,\" Killeen said. \"Give it to them.\"\n\nNigel was not sure whether Abraham knew what was going on. He said quickly to Killeen, \"Do we want this?\"\n\nKilleen glared at Nigel. \"Sure do.\"\n\n\"They're after the same thing in the long run, y'know,\" Nigel said mildly. He tired to carry the sentence with confidence, though it was a bit difficult when he came scarcely to Killeen's waist.\n\n\"What d'you mean?\"\n\n\"They're working on the grand problem. Preserving all life-forms, far up ahead in time.\"\n\nKilleen frowned in disbelief. \"What?\"\n\n\"By preserving themselves in electron-positron plasmas. A bit of an abstract apotheosis, I'll admit\u2014\"\n\n\"They've murdered us!\" Killeen exploded.\n\n\"More than you know,\" Nigel said. \"Question is, what's right _now._ The past can't be allowed to\u2014\"\n\n\"This thing\u2014\" Killeen jabbed a thumb at the Mantis-shimmer that had curled up from the hills, wrapping them all, \"it hunted us, killed us, ripped babies to pieces for fun. I say\u2014\"\n\n* * *\n\nYou must deliver up this acoustic code and cease this obvious theater. It is designed to dissuade me and those I represent\u2014the Exalteds\u2014\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nfrom our path. Do not imagine such a lowly deception will gain you delay. Your fate is sealed. It has but to be played out.\n\n* * *\n\nKilleen shouted, \"You'll get yours!\"\n\nNigel took Abraham's hand and looked into his deep eyes. This old man had been rescued from the fall of the Citadel, all at the hands\u2014wrong metaphor, but the hell with it\u2014of the bird. Some mechs had died then and some other things, beings Nigel himself could not name. All so that this wrinkled old man could come to this place and give his part to a puzzle that none of them understood except in fragments.\n\n\"Do you know what will happen, if . . . ?\" Nigel's voice trailed off into a whisper.\n\nCermo stepped forward suddenly and pushed Nigel away. \"Leave him be.\"\n\nNigel staggered. \"I don't think any of us understands\u2014\"\n\n<This is an abyss of squashed duration,> Quath said. <It resembles the passages between Lanes, holding purpose ransom to the unknown. I think we must venture, despite our fears.>\n\nNigel saw in the face of the old man a crafty nostalgia. _Ah._ He remembered something, had probably meant to pass on its subversive facet to Killeen. But the mech attack at the Citadel had cut him off from Family.\n\nSo the final key had been carried in the seemingly fragile cup of human culture. The designers long ago had written into the Bishops and countless other Families and Teams and Corps a variety of secret messages, all encased in culture. They knew that the central character of humanity was _continuity_ \u2014and without it, humans were lost.\n\nPeople escaped their own mortality through laughter and connection, the two great consolations.\n\nTo unite the two was wise. So they had chosen something, he guessed, that carried joy and insured connection. Something ancient and enduring that the mechs would think little about.\n\n<It is in your primate nature to dare,> Quath chided them. <We myriapodia had surmised that you carried the code in widespread parts. In both mind and body, it seems.>\n\nNigel turned with new respect to the alien. \"I still\u2014\"\n\n\"Do it, father,\" Killeen said passionately. \"What's the code? Say it!\"\n\nThe old man's face crinkled with confusion. \"Code?\"\n\n\"Something to hand down.\"\n\n\"Well, there is something . . . but . . . no damn code in it.\"\n\n\"We'll see.\"\n\n\"I mean, it's just a\u2014\"\n\n* * *\n\nYou will deliver it up or else face infinite pains, infinitely prolonged.\n\n* * *\n\nThe alarm that flitted across Abraham's face told Nigel a lot about what dwelling on the planets for these many centuries had done to men. He felt a pang, but there was no time to think.\n\nKilleen demanded, \"Give it, Abraham!\"\n\nThe old man began to sing.\nSIX\n\nUses of the Mose Art\n\nKilleen gaped. His father launched into a song he knew, a beautiful passage from the most hallowed of the musics Bishops carried in their sensorium store. They had played it on the long marches together, knew its lines by heart. He filled his lungs and joined in himself, letting the high passage roll out of him. The highest of arts, the Mose Art.\n\nFour humans, one Myriapod, and the shimmering Mantis. None moved.\n\nAll seemed transfixed by the ancient cadences, lilting refrains, accelerating notes that piled atop until they seemed certain to topple into chaos. But the Mose Art suspended the airy energies. They skated buoyantly across impossible gaps.\n\n* * *\n\nI see the connection. The unused sites in the Bishop DNA\u2014that is the key. The notes of this piece, arrayed in harmonics, yield the solution. I relay this to the Exalteds now.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Good boy,\" Killeen said happily.\n\nAbraham kept singing.\n\n\u2014DNA?\u2014Toby asked on comm.\n\nThe old dwarf sent,\u2014Our genetic code. The information telling how to build a human is inscribed on a molecule. Two helices, really, twining about each other. Instructions in how to make proteins\u2014bits of organic matter essential to us\u2014are lodged like beads along those helices.\u2014\n\nA sudden, sharp, many-channel squeal cut into everyone's sensorium. The Mantis was spreading the word.\n\nToby frowned.\u2014How'd we build Trigger Codes on top of our own, uh, breeding stuff?\u2014\n\nThe dwarf Walmsley waved his hands impatiently, brushing aside detail. \u2014Our genetic code tells cells how to operate. But that information takes only about ten percent of the DNA space. The rest is \"junk\"\u2014freeloaders along for the ride. They get reproduced each time, but they make no difference in us. All life has hobo code like that. So long ago, the Naturals started preserving the Trigger Codes in those useless spaces.\u2014\n\nKilleen thought he saw the point. \u2014We'd never know it? Because it didn't turn up in somebody's baby?\u2014\n\nToby looked with wonder at his own hand. \u2014It's been there all the time? Inside us?\u2014\n\nWalmsley said, \u2014The mechs could read our DNA, of course, but they are good technicians. They knew the junk was useless, so they ignored it.\u2014\n\nKilleen asked, \u2014How come it didn't change? I mean, Toby's eyes aren't the color of mine, or of Veronica's, his mother.\u2014\n\nWalmsley grinned, creasing his face with a hundred lines. \u2014The Codes were repeated over and over. Just in case a mutation, a change, messed up one version. There were still plenty of duplicates.\u2014\n\n\u2014Seems a damn funny way to keep somethin'.\u2014 Killeen said. His father was still singing and the sound took him back to his boyhood, when Abraham had belted out this very aria in the shower. \u2014I'd put it on a monument or bury it. Keep it safe.\u2014\n\nWalmsley grinned. \u2014Like that Taj Mahal I had built back on your world?\u2014\n\nKilleen blinked. He remembered leaving it, looking back. Big initials on the side of it, _NW._ \u2014Damn!\u2014\n\n\u2014Bit of a dustup, that was. Got control of an army of mechs for a while, decided to have a touch of fun.\u2014\n\n\u2014And who was buried there?\u2014 Toby asked.\n\nA flicker of pain crossed the crusty face. \u2014No one of consequence. Point is, how long do you think that stack of stone will last?\u2014\n\nKilleen shrugged. He was not one for permanent places.\n\n\u2014A few thousand years, that's all.\u2014 Walmsley smiled. \u2014Nothing lasts at Galactic Center. On average, stars collide every hundred thousand years or so, stripping away their planets. Snowglade we had to make from scratch. What a job! And it won't last.\u2014\n\nToby said, \u2014But puttin' it in us . . .\u2014\n\n\u2014Seems risky, yes? So the Naturals stretched it out, making the data intelligible only if one assembled versions from three consecutive generations. Neat bit. Humans can't really be understood in one generation, anyway. They're about continuity.\u2014\n\nAbraham came to the end of the aria and smiled broadly. \"Bet you never suspected, did you?\"\n\nKilleen shook his head in wonder. \"How come you never told me?\"\n\n\"Too dangerous. Mechs were moving in. I figured you were out in the field, more likely to get picked up, interrogated. I was an old bastard, stayed in the Citadel. Safer, I thought.\"\n\nKilleen hugged his father and remembered the Calamity. The spires reduced to rubble. The walls of the home he had shared with Veronica and Toby, just jagged teeth amid the flames. \"How'd you get away?\"\n\n\"This bird came\u2014\"\n\nA violent screech sounded in Killeen's sensorium.\n\nThey all doubled up, shutting down. The hills around them shook. Deformed. Shattered into sprays of tumbling mica.\n\n\"The Mantis\u2014\" Killeen had wondered how they would escape it and now he saw that the entire surround was illusion. They stood on bare, charred earth, a recent battleground.\n\nAcross it a shape lurched. It sent desperate notes, brittle stutters of data.\n\n* * *\n\nSomething\u2014the pleasure\u2014it is awful\u2014and magnificent\u2014but it eats\u2014chews\u2014\n\n* * *\n\n\"Works fast,\" Killeen said. He stood up cautiously.\n\nThey were in a huge pouch of the esty. Rumpled mountains loomed in the distance against somber, yellow-topped clouds.\n\nWalmsley said, \"I believe the pleasure plague will manifest differently in the many levels of mechs. This one has defenses. It is dangerous.\"\n\nKilleen felt an ancient anger rising in him. \"It's got something coming from us.\"\n\n\"I'd be careful,\" Walmsley said. \"I have a lot to tell you and there isn't much time\u2014\"\n\n\"Dad?\" Killeen asked.\n\n\"I'm pretty rickety.\"\n\nToby and Quath and Cermo all sent assent, though. Killeen felt a heady, excited tingle all over.\n\nWalmsley said, \"I need to speak to the Higher Orders now. This is a huge event. The Triggers will propagate through the Lanes. I\u2014\"\n\n\"Stay here, then,\" Killeen said.\n\nQuath said to Walmsley, <They carry true names.>\n\nWalmsley laughed. \"True enough. Toby is To Be. And Killeen is Killing.\"\n\nKilleen sniffed in derision. \"Got to be what you can.\"\n\nThe lurching form called to him. As he watched it went transparent but he could still get a whiff of it in his sensorium. Its outline shriveled.\n\n\"It's getting away.\"\n\nToby said, \"Let it.\"\n\n\"No. Let's go.\"\nPART SEVEN\n\nGods Provisional and Descending\nONE\n\nA Mantis Blankness\n\nHe and Quath found the Mantis in yawning darkness. Quath sent an emag warning, a crisp orange pinprick popping through Toby's sensorium\u2014then silence.\n\nToby waited. Quath moved silently to his right, enclosed in a sullen black so deep he could not see his hand without using his sensorium. The Mantis was up ahead somewhere. Senses he could not even name told him that other creatures moved here too. They had little or no emag but they were tracking, following chemical trails left by others\u2014scents seeping from deep glands, puffs of clinging odor released by accident or design. Everything here had mastered these chemical channels.\n\nToby's natural senses were deaf to them. Humans drank in sounds and sights, the primate strong suits. Here the small noises of burrowing and scampering told him that there were other theaters, other plays in progress, and he would never be in the private audience. Yet he and even Quath had been of that theater, graduated from it perhaps to this curious shadow world of electromagnetic scents and jolting voltage deaths.\n\nA trickle of inquiry eased into his sensorium. There: Quath. Together they moved up through snatchy brush. They took the time to slip by the snags. Even a small tear could alert the Mantis and there might be a trap, too.\n\nQuath shivered with anticipation. Rivulets of silvery magnetic excitements came to Toby, scattershot and short-range, involuntary effusions.\n\nThe mutter of chemical life stopped. Silence. Toby could see nothing through eye or sensorium inboards. Quath came closer, a presence he felt by a wedge of blocked air, to his left now. Then he caught it. The Mantis was a slab of nothing to the right. He could not have felt it unless he was standing absolutely still and ready.\n\nHis sense of it did not come from rich spatterings of his detection gear, sprinkled down through his nerves and bones. Those lay silent. The Mantis was still well enough to make itself a blankness, an absence.\n\nIt moved by them at indeterminate range but Toby could somehow smell it. The old senses brought a stink, ozone-sour. He did not dare to move but the smell floating on a slight chill wind told him enough. The Mantis was moving fast and the empty patch shrank. Gray rimmed the spot now. It looked ordinary but he knew it was a Mantis blankness. Out of it could come in any split instant a forking spike. Death or injury, on emag wings.\n\nThen it was just a point. Still moving. Toby whispered on short-range comm to Quath,\u2014Got its signatures?\u2014\n\n<Several. It is wounded, as your father said.>\n\n\u2014How bad?\u2014\n\n<The eating entities invade it. They chew at its subselves.>\n\n\u2014Think it can shed them?\u2014\n\n<It has great resources. Perhaps it can cure itself.>\n\n\u2014Then we've got to get it.\u2014\n\n<Someone must. To be truly sure it does not survive.>\n\nThey retreated then. Carefully at first they went back through the still total blackness. Creatures stirred in their path. The Mantis was not even a dot now and Toby let himself go, not minding the rips as they got through a wall of thorny brush. His suit would self-heal in a while but the time lost now could not be made up except by hard slogging. He and Quath had tracked and searched for a long time now and beneath the buzz of energy in his legs he felt the slow seep of weariness.\n\nThe wind picked up as the ground also moved under them. Here the esty shifted and deployed with a sullen energy and they had to be careful of their footing. The Mantis seemed to know it well.\n\nThey picked up the supplies they had dropped earlier. Toby had shed his weapon, a sharp-darter long and elegant with power simmering in the butt. To carry it against the Mantis was mostly a show of bravado but now anything could happen.\n\nQuath said, <If you had carried that, it would have seen us.>\n\n\u2014You're sure?\u2014\n\n<Nothing is sure now.>\n\n\u2014Same old big-bug.\u2014 He laughed. \u2014Maybe you should have ducked behind that [untranslatable] of yours.\u2014\n\n<Though it is crippled, it knows a thousand ancient tricks.>\n\n\u2014We know a few, too.\u2014\n\n<It lives in the electromagnetic world. We only visit there.>\n\n\u2014You're half mech yourself, fella.\u2014\n\n<In brute fraction, true. But my mind is Natural, with all the happenstances which evolution brings. The Mantis has revised itself time and time over.>\n\n\u2014Seems to me that just makes it a patch job.\u2014\n\n<I believe you are manifesting a bias born of insecurity.>\n\n\u2014Ha! Insecurity? When the Mantis and its kind have killed so many of us?\u2014\n\n<Perhaps I chose too weak a word. I do not wish to anger you.>\n\n\u2014Family Bishop's lost over half its members to that Mantis.\u2014\n\n<I know, and do not wish to excite primate responses.>\n\n\u2014Huh?\u2014\n\n<You are known for your grudge-bearing and love of territory.>\n\nToby had only a vague idea what Quath meant, but that was not unusual. She was a blend of an insect-like organic race\u2014her \"substrate,\" as she put it\u2014and machine additions. In her bulk she carried the computing capacity to communicate with humans. The reverse path, people speaking to the Myriapodia in their digital staccato, had been a failure. Humans did not have the capacities or capacitances.\n\n\u2014We're known for being hard to kill, mostly.\u2014\n\n<That too.>\n\n\u2014A Bishop sights the Mantis, we go after it. Is that \"grudge-bearing\"?\u2014\n\n<Never turn your face from the central fact of its alien nature. It is of the kingdom of machine. I, despite my modifications and encrustations of mechanical artifice, am of the kingdom of the flesh. As are you.>\n\n\u2014Uh, guess so. Right now this flesh needs some rest.\u2014\nTWO\n\nTerritories of Thought\n\nThe bird came fluttering in from high up in the esty vault.\n\n\"I appreciate the extra effort.\" Nigel studied it. \"Good sim.\"\n\n\"An inappropriate word,\" it said, hovering in air.\n\n\"I was trying to be polite.\"\n\n\"Category error.\"\n\n\"How so?\"\n\n\"Politeness occurs between peers.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" _And we aren't. Not by a Phylum or two._\n\nNo wind came from its wings. It was an anthology of motes so he should expect none, but somehow this little detail was unnerving. \"Soon your part will be complete,\" the collection said.\n\n\"This the push-off, then?\"\n\n\"Termination? Not necessarily.\"\n\n _Not terribly reassuring,_ he thought. A hand tugged at his sleeve. \"Whussis?\" Abraham asked.\n\nHe had forgotten the Bishop elder. The man had wandered off to inspect the vegetation, probably looking for something to eat. These Bishops were incessantly foraging. The others, Killeen and Toby and Quath, had fled immediately, after the Mantis. The Hunker Down types were often quite keen, but Bishops had turned it into a positive fetish.\n\n\"A manifestation of the Old Ones. Also known as the Highers.\"\n\n\"Not mech?\" Abraham asked suspiciously.\n\n\"Much older.\"\n\n\"Looks mech.\"\n\n\"Looks like anything you like.\" Nigel waved at it. \"Be different.\"\n\nIt stopped beating its wings and hung in air. This was more unnerving. Nigel waved again and it became a slimy, coiling thing. \"Christ! Back to the bird.\"\n\nAbraham walked over to it, put a hand through the still form, and said wonderingly, \"You can make it do that?\"\n\n\"I don't make it do anything. It honors trivial requests.\"\n\nThe bird said, \"The time is approaching.\"\n\n\"Um, really?\" He felt wan and distant, and an ancient verse came to him.\n\nTime universal and sidereal,\n\ntime atomic and ephemeral\n\ntime borne on and time halted.\n\nIts beak and eyes slid up and down while its head held fixed, apparently its notion of a nod. \"True, defining simultaneity is impossible. But events come.\"\n\nNigel felt embarrassed by his small pleasure at extracting agreement from the thing. Difficult, it was, living as a self-aware microbe in an alien carcass. \"You're going to lose a lot.\"\n\nIt beat its wings again. To make him slightly more comfortable? \"Winnowing.\"\n\n\"Darwinnowing.\"\n\nIt caught the rather awful pun, of course. It had read the entire bloody Galactic Library, down to the footnotes. And it never laughed.\n\n\"Has anything this huge and horrible happened before?\" Nigel asked.\n\n\"When we were ceramic, yes.\"\n\n\"Ceramic?\"\n\n\"Life did not begin in your embodiment. First came clays that could impress upon each other and replicate. They enjoyed energies vast and various, in the early phase of this universe. Matters were far hotter then.\"\n\nNigel had never heard this before. \"And they died.\"\n\n\"They later spawned the elements of cellular life. Then they were culled.\"\n\n\"Um. By you?\"\n\n\"They were us.\"\n\n\"So they\u2014you\u2014are still around?\"\n\n\"We are now a different Phylum.\"\n\n\"And what would that be?\" This thing had never entertained discussion of its own properties before. Why now?\n\n\"You cannot know it.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"You do not understand. That is a central property of our Phylum.\"\n\n\"That we can't know what you are?\"\n\n\"Yes. Thus, to you, we can have no true name.\"\n\n\"Um. Wouldn't mind, then, if I called you, say, Fred?\"\n\nNo response. The bird seemed to dissolve, then snapped back into a razor-sharp profile. It looked real enough, but still a millimeter deep. \"You came from clays\u2014\"\n\n\"And later, united with the self-organized, replicating bodies of information.\" The bird spoke rapidly now.\n\nAbraham asked Nigel quizzically, \"That means bodies that aren't real?\"\n\nNigel nodded. \"Things that lived off the higher mechminds.\"\n\n\"Parasites?\"\n\n\"To a plant, vegetarians look like parasites. I gather that these, um, organized data fed off the mechminds the way a cow uses grass.\"\n\nThe bird abruptly swelled to immense size. Nigel felt as though he were falling into it, the thin outline of it rushing at him\u2014\n\nA huge voice spoke, but not in his ears.\n\nSimply viewed, the world's competition concerns the fate of organisms. Their bustle and energy, tragedy and comedy, occupy center stage. They strive to reproduce, to be on stage for the next act.There is a deeper panorama. Far below the restless energies of organisms, the genes of these beings are true actors, though limited ones. They, too, replicate.An organism, then, is a device to make more copies of its DNA. The genes strive to make this happen. They rule, in a sense.To survive better, genes \"invented\" brains. These in turn evolved to support minds. In time, minds learned to communicate with each other, through language and culture.This set another, broader stage.Minds store their interior models of the external world. These are intricate, ever-changing, sustained by a continual flow of sustenance from simpler sources. Evolution, whether natural or designed, can improve minds. Genes sharpen themselves in the endless, fateful Darwinnowing. Often, they shape fresh mental hardware\u2014more subtle, supple minds.Genes are lesser than organisms because they do not directly know of organisms at all. Only the blunt feedback of survival \"tells\" genes of the furious combat and subtle strategies played out on the stage of the organisms.In a larger view, organisms are as unaware as genes.At a critical stage of evolution, once minds appear and thrive, a new stage deploys.Above the apparent order of the gene world, above even the drama of organisms, a higher complication plays out. This is the largest theater of all. Upon it, self-replicating ideas in the minds of machines follow the same laws of evolution. These are called _kenes._\n\nNigel staggered. He was still here, standing beside Abraham on a grassy plain.\n\nAnd he was also encased in a place where ideas flowed like amber fire around him. Concepts burned with timeless intensity, crisp and sharp and churning past. They were in a different part of his mind, a place no less immediate than the grass underfoot.\n\nNo bird here. Or was he inside the bird?\n\nHe tried to walk and his feet dragged in a molasses-dark murk. He looked down and could not see his feet.\n\nTo a kene, he realized, the territory of thought was as real and vital as a savanna, where predators and prey made their eternal dance.\n\nNigel said slowly, words dragging, \"The clays, the ones who came first\u2014\"\n\n\u2014fast images of something like a muddy beehive. But no bees. Instead, crystals swarmed in the lattice walls. A slimy sheen seeped over hexagonal corners, intricate slabs. A circulatory system?\n\nIn the winking arrays order stirred, shimmered.\n\n\"\u2014they helped make you?\"\n\n\"And you earlier bio logics, of course.\" The bird voice was back but Nigel could not see it. Whatever the huge voice had been before, it was speaking now through the lesser vessel of the bird. And it had only begun to unreel an argument, a history.\n\nThe bird voice said, \"They clays persisted, in some sites of this galaxy. They transformed the entire crust of their worlds into integrated lattice minds.\"\n\nNigel breathed evenly. Was he being swallowed? \"So when these kenes formed\u2014\"\n\n\u2014sliding stacks of phosphorescence in a cold black vault without end. The realm of self-aware data. Feeding on the conceptual fodder of the mechminds. Cool and serene and still coming out of Darwin, alien, alien\u2014\n\n\"There was an . . . affinity. The kenes united with those of lesser substrate. The clays were analog structures with digital storage. Together they conducted . . . experiments.\"\n\nAbraham asked from somewhere nearby, \"It's so smart, why's it talk slow?\"\n\nNigel found it surprisingly hard to speak here. \"We don't have the right words. Sentences are, well, narrow.\" _Like pushing an ocean through a drainpipe. With a paper cup._\n\nThe bird said hollowly, \"Their/Our early synthesis gave forth the arches which frame the Galactic Center.\"\n\nNigel remembered the colossal luminous structures, hundreds of light-years long, beautifully streaming, each a reedy light-year wide. \"How did they work out?\"\n\n\u2014gut-deep agonies, shattering conflicts, ripped strands, howling vacancies\u2014\n\n\"Evolution is pain. We gained insight from them.\"\n\nSo much for the High Church school of advanced intelligence. Abraham asked shrewdly, \"That Magnetic Mind came out of it all?\"\n\n\"As a devolved application. It is a useful place to dispatch beings/information no longer needed at our/its level.\"\n\nAbraham nodded, a pale shadow to Nigel's left. \"A prickly thing.\"\n\nNigel had taken enough, for now. He needed the touch of the human. Desperately.\n\nHe studied the wrinkled old man. Taller and far younger than Nigel, in total memory store, but strangely similar. Perhaps memory was not the sole key to experience? The man had been through a lot. For the first time Nigel truly looked at Abraham and saw him as a constellation of earned seasoning, granted him the space an equal deserves. He had gotten out of the habit of doing that, he realized. He had, in his almighty manifestations, lost a certain touch. _Or an uncertain one,_ he thought ruefully.\n\n\"Ignore all these onlookers,\" he said to Abraham. \"Even gods can be just backdrop, if we choose.\"\n\nAbraham grunted sour agreement. Nigel grinned. Somehow he liked this old bastard. \"Tell me how it was, then?\"\nTHREE\n\nHard Pursuit\n\nYou sure it didn't pick you up?\" his father asked.\n\n\"Yeasay.\"\n\n\"Quath?\" Killeen's eyes swiveled to study the huge head of the many-legger. Toby never knew why he bothered to do that. Habit, maybe. The alien's face was an array of sensors and Toby had never been able to read any expression there.\n\n<It is the nature of electromagnetics that detection can never be ruled out.>\n\n\"Damn all,\" Killeen said, \"I didn't ask for a lecture.\"\n\n<I estimate that it did not know we were there.>\n\n\"Confidence level?\"\n\n<Approximately seventy.>\n\nKilleen nodded. \"Fair enough. Let's go.\"\n\n\"Now?\" Toby had wanted to ease back a bit.\n\n\"No point in waiting.\"\n\nCermo muscled his way up the slope, puffing to the ledge they were all sitting on. \"I get nothing from outlyin' pickups.\"\n\nHis broad face furrowed with concern but he said no more. The big man settled onto the ledge and looked out. Pale gray light seeped into distant timestone peaks. It was like a smothered dawn on a world that had curled up onto itself. Above them hung a distant landscape of tawny desert. Dried out river beds cut that land, several hundred klicks away but still visible through a cottony haze. Those river valleys looked ancient and Toby knew they could reach them with maybe a week of hard running, through esty slips and wrack-ranges. Maybe the Mantis would lead them that way. This Lane was twisted and tortured, space-time turning upon itself in knots unimaginable until experienced.\n\n\"Let's vector for it, then,\" Killeen said and stood up.\n\nToby felt a surge of zest as they started out and it lasted until they picked up the Mantis trail. At first he thought he was stronger than Killeen and Cermo and even got impatient with their slow tracking, sweeping the area for signifiers. Killeen halted for a rest every hour, old Bishop Family discipline, but at the very start of a pursuit it irked Toby.\n\n\u2014I could damn sure get ahead faster than this,\u2014he sent to Quath on private comm.\n\n<So could I. That eludes the point.>\n\nQuath ran on internals of huge energy. She could outpace them all.\u2014Maybe you should go on ahead.\u2014\n\n<I know my limits.>\n\n\u2014What are they?\u2014 Toby was genuinely interested. The Myriapodia seemed to have abilities beyond human dreams.\n\n<I am not a primate.>\n\n\u2014Um. That all?\u2014\n\n<For the moment, for this purpose, that is enough.>\n\nBeyond that Quath would say no more. Toby puzzled on it for a while but by then he started to tire and Killeen and Cermo were still moving at their same steady pace. They took the same short rests exactly every hour and picked up and went on. Quath herself was upping the pace too. Or so it seemed, though through his sweat-stung eyes the land was opening faster now to Toby and he plunged into it with a fresh energy born of the fatigue itself.\n\nThey came upon the first of the Mantis loci in a slope of shimmering timestone.\n\nCermo sighted the small shiny hexagon. \"Mantis is fallin' apart,\" he said, kicking at it.\n\n<No! Perhaps I can read.>\n\nShe did. <It contains splinters of the Mantis self.>\n\nKilleen's weathered face tightened. \"Why? What's it doing?\"\n\n<I suspect it is shedding parts and subminds.>\n\nToby asked, \"What's the sense in that?\"\n\n\"To lighten up,\" Cermo said.\n\nToby tossed it in his palm. \"No mass to this thing.\"\n\n\"Probably just junked a whole seg. This is a frag,\" Cermo said. He had tracked mechs of all descriptions and held them in a lofty, bruised contempt despite the fact that mechs had brought down many of his friends.\n\n\"Good sign,\" Killeen said flatly and they went on.\n\nThe ground began to move under them. The worst of it was in the gut-deep confusion, nausea, and sickening lurches. Toby's eyes did not tell him true about what his feet and body felt. He remembered Quath saying once about the timestone, _The defining feature is the lack of definition_ \u2014which he had thought to be a joke then.\n\nNot now. Rock parted and pearly vapor churned from the vent. Esty purled off in gossamer sheets, dissolving as they rose. Spray ascended, enclosing him in a halo of himself, somehow caught and momentarily reflected in the event-haze, as if he were both there and also flickering into the surroundings and joining them. The other self peeled away and circled to the tops of the cliffs and became a wreath in the shearing wind, soon frayed into refractive vapor.\n\n\"Gets hard here,\" was all Killeen said. They went into broken country ahead.\n\nMaybe he should have stayed behind after spotting the Mantis. He was a Bishop grown to fullness now but for this pursuit experience was crucial and he had little. The Mantis and Killeen had fought each other ever since he could remember. Toby wanted to be here but he knew he was a drag on the others, though of course they would not speak of it.\n\nCermo said it with his eyes, firm and black. There was nothing to be done, the pursuit was on. This terrain was too dangerous for Toby to backtrack by himself; the Mantis was not the only high-level mech here. They had watched from a distance as navvies and grubbers mined and foraged for mech debris.\n\nSo he settled in. He went hard and long and said nothing. Around their passage seethed strange vegetations, curled rock, and clotted air, the esty's energy expressed in frothy plenty. To Toby it seemed some moronic God kept reshaping the land beyond any probable use. The green profusion here seemed demented, undeserved. He realized only dimly that his irritation came out of his fatigue. For that there was nothing to be done and in his father's face he saw that. He kept falling behind their long, loping stride and so was glad when they stopped suddenly. To stay on his feet as they studied something on the ground he leaned against a rock, out of fear that he was already stumble-around tired.\n\nIt was a spool of something translucent yet mica-bright. <More discarded self,> Quath said. <Note also the locomos stripped away and left.>\n\nIn a hollow were dusty locomotion parts, a whole tractor assembly, footpads\u2014all junked. Toby looked them over and saw they were modular.\n\n<Left behind.> Quath rattled her flanks. <Defective. Or too much mass to propel.>\n\nCermo and Killeen inspected the ground. They had done that all along the trail, talking to each other about the track. Toby looked at the round depressions and flattened angular prints and saw the broken twigs where the thing had passed. The twig stems were not dry yet and Cermo fingered them and looked at the radiance streaming from the timestone around there. Crushed wild grass lay squashed but not browned as it would be soon.\n\n\"It's doin' pretty well for broken country,\" Cermo said.\n\nKilleen frowned. \"Going to be hard.\"\n\nToby said, \"If I could make it out, maybe its systems are so far down\u2014\"\n\n\"You said you didn't see it,\" Cermo said. \"Just felt it.\"\n\n\"Yeasay.\"\n\nCermo shook his head slowly as he looked down at the matted grass. \"If we run up on it, won't be feelin' our way.\"\n\nOf course he was right. The Mantis was invisible to human sensoria. It could deflect attention from itself, disperse telltales, turn a thousand techtricks. Toby scuffed at a stone and said nothing.\n\n<I believe its abilities are diminishing,> Quath said.\n\n\"Enough so it can't ambush us?\" Killeen eyed Quath's shifting bulk skeptically.\n\n<Perhaps. Notice the locomos. It discards, trying to move quickly.>\n\n\"Or wants us to think so,\" Killeen shot back. He smiled to take the sting out of it. Toby wondered if Quath would understand the quick flash of yellow teeth in the rugged, walnut face.\nFOUR\n\nAbraham\n\nNigel sat and listened. He ignored the gods who loomed like acoustic shadows all around him and Abraham. He concentrated very hard on hearing what one single human voice said and let that anchor him again in a place where he could keep his sanity. He had done this before, the memories were there, and knew that though this was a small, seemingly simple act, to fail to do so was to die. The hugeness around him, squatting in his mind like mammoths in the night, just beyond the faint human campfire, would crush him without even noticing the act.\n\nAbraham did not talk much about what the Highers had done. They had showed him things, maybe to teach and maybe for some other reason that was never evident, and he could not describe those, either. Later, maybe. Not right away. Maybe never.\n\nHe had been held by them in a kind of mixed state. He could feel his body and the bare simple open spaces around him but that was all. He could walk or run but he never got anywhere. Dry and smooth, the plain never ended. He came to understand that it was closed but had no boundary, no wall. The plain somehow wrapped around on itself though he could feel no curvature. A pearly glow came up through the featureless plain and when that faded he slept, though of course nothing told him to.\n\nSimple food appeared when he slept. He spent a lot of time exercising and there were always his captors to talk to just by speaking into the air. They were almost impossible to understand and he tired of their unintentional riddles. It had gone on a long time and he had adapted to it.\n\nSo he spent a lot of the time inside himself. It was surprising, he said, what you can remember when you have nothing to do but remember. He went on imaginary walks through the Citadel. He had seen it crashing down and smelled its scorched ramparts but in his mind he could saunter down the Aisle of Sighs and across the Oblong Square to the little place where crisp fried breads clouded the air with their fragrances. He could taste the snap of them and the cup of kaf he had with them. Then he would carefully walk down the Hypothetical, counting off the streets in order. When you were doing it by yourself rules were even more important. If he made a mistake he made himself go back to the beginning, silently sounding the names. Somebody would need to write a history of the Citadel someday and this was a way of keeping it through a time when Bishops did not write.\n\nWith luck, if he were ever to make it into Aspect, part of the Citadel's chronicles would go with that shaved sliver of himself.\n\nThere were other people there, too, sometimes. He could not speak with most of them because the Hunker Down had bred new languages. Still they traded stories and in the intensity of it he came to care for Families with names like Steamer and United and Punjab, and for people he had never met made vividly real through the telling.\n\nThey made up jokes about talking to the Highers and how near unintelligible they were. For fun they made up a handy phrase book in Higher Jabber, with useful phrases like, \"I am delighted to accept your kind invitation to be used and bored for your superior purposes,\" and \"It is exceptionally kind of you to allow me to travel in the asshole of your being.\" At the time these had been hilarious.\n\nThe jokes would slide effortlessly into bitter disputes, too, over minute details. Only slowly did the humans, assembled in the misty, echoing spaces where the Highers left them, learn that low comedy and fierce arguments were crucial. Essential to the species. Without them you gave up. In the heightened reality of that place all things were disproportionate.\n\nWith talk alone, none of the elaborate pseudreal tech, they took each other on mental trips to their own Family, their native planet. They described imaginary meals, perils, vast and ornate histories. All those worlds had distant views of the Eater and all were doomed, of course. They all knew that and it gave events an extra edge.\n\nAbraham said that his isolation from all he had known made life like a hall of mirrors. There was no hiding from himself or from the others or from the reflections they gave of himself.\n\nThere are always other dramas going on and some were of a scale that made coming back to the human perspective hard. Reality was the lenses you came with.\n\nAbraham shrugged a lot now. He said that there was no point in trying to know it all. It was not yours anyway.\nFIVE\n\nConfusion Squall\n\nToby got dazed and distracted as they kept up the pace, which seemed faster with each passing hour. His wandering, miasmic mind was his true enemy now. He kept loping, inevitably behind the others, trying to go through the fog that deadened him.\n\nThey tracked the Mantis by its footpad scrapes across rocky ground. Cermo and Killeen took turns sweeping to both sides in case it was backtracking or leaving a false trail. They kept looking back to be sure Toby was still in sight. The humiliation of it was that they had done that years ago when Toby had been a boy and now he was not.\n\nThe timestone ebbed. A gauzy light seeped up through the rough landscape. There were not days and nights evenly spaced here because the illumination came from light trapped in the space-time curvature itself. Refraction and time lags gave the radiance a hollow quality as though it had been strained through some filter and leached of its sharpness. They stopped and made camp and Toby fell asleep leaning against a boulder. He discovered this when he hit the ground and the others laughed, though of course not Quath. He made himself lay out his pad and once on it fell asleep again and only woke when his father pulled off his boots to check his feet for blisters.\n\n\"You're yeasay,\" Killeen said softly in the dim dark. Toby's nose caught the heady scent of cold but cooked vegetables and he found a plate of them next to his head. He ate them without speaking and his father brought a spicy tea hot from the fire. It was not a flame of course but a carbo-burner, so no mech could track them from the smoke or light.\n\n\"You're holding up. Feet fine.\"\n\n\"Just need some sleep,\" Toby said.\n\n\"You and Quath were up finding it while we were sleeping. No reason you shouldn't be a little behind.\"\n\n\"I'll do the sweep-searching tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Don't take on too much. Have some more of those beans.\"\n\n\"Not all that hungry.\"\n\nHe was asleep before his father had turned off the burner and he heard nothing as the darkness waxed on. He thought of the Mantis or maybe he just dreamed that he did.\n\nThe next day he remembered the sleeping fondly before many hours of loping were done. It was bad by then. He had started fresh but it faded and he sweated more than he ever had. Quath spoke to him with some concern but Toby talked little. He carried as big a pack as the others but they also had the burner and some extra food so he was behind in that as well.\n\nCermo did not smile or waste energy on talk and Toby remembered again the intensity of the man on the plains of his boyhood, on the baked beauty of Snowglade. Cermo pointed to each sign of the Mantis and interpreted it with assurance. Cermo was pointing to a fresh print when the confusion squall hit them.\n\nPurple bees. It felt as if they were biting him as they swarmed inboard. Toby got down fast but the fan beam caught him and he could not see any more. He rolled downhill and fetched up against a rock. That jabbed him in the side and he rolled around it and further downhill. That was the surest way to get away from the swarm of emag turmoil. Above him hummed a tangle of magnetic fields and orange plasma discharges. Forking energies. His inboards covering up made sharp clangs in his sensorium.\n\nHe slammed into a gnarled tree and could then see again. He lay there looking up at the others. They shared the stupefaction.\n\nTwo heartbeats, three. The squall passed without any follow-on bolts.\n\nThe Mantis used these to soften targets. Not attacking made no sense. He walked back up the hill and Quath greeted him with, <It is leaving them as traps for us.>\n\n\"Good, 'cause otherwise we'd be dead.\"\n\nA malicious grin split Cermo's face. \"Means it's desperate.\"\n\n\"Wounded,\" Killeen said and picked up his pack where he had dropped it at the first sign of trouble.\n\nThey moved faster then and it got worse for Toby. The confusion squall had robbed him of his zest and the dry air sucked sweat from him.\n\nAs he loped on Toby thought about but could not truly conceive of the expanses of time and therefore of injury and anguish, of remorse and rage and sullen gray sadness, which the Mantis and its kind had washed over the ruby stars themselves. It had cloaked the galaxy in a wracking conflict that could never be fully over. From this primordial pain there lumbered forward into his own time a heritage of melancholy unceasing conflict that had shaped all his life.\n\n\"It's sick, that's suresay,\" Killeen called as they moved.\n\n\"We're getting closer,\" Cermo answered.\n\n<It is trying to cure itself,> Quath said.\n\n\"How you know?\" Cermo asked, head swiveling in surprise.\n\n<The illness might be arrested if portions of the Mantis, its subminds, can be shed. Once infected, they are ejected.>\n\n\"That spool?\" Toby asked. \"And the hexagon?\"\n\n\"It hoped we would miss them,\" Killeen said. \"Dropped that other gear to make us think it was just shedding mass. Yeasay, Quath.\"\n\n<So it falters. The killing programs spread through it, despite its higher minds.>\n\nToby croaked, \"Hope it's getting tired,\" but what he had intended to be a lighthearted remark came out desperate.\n\nHis father dropped back and studied his face. \"Just last out a few more hours,\" was all he said.\n\n\"I'll take fore point,\" Toby said suddenly.\n\nKilleen looked at Cermo, who nodded. \"Keep a sharp,\" Killeen said. He went back to sweeping the right, tracking.\n\nThe navvy hit them as they came down a narrow draw. It was a fine place for an ambush and if the Mantis had done the job itself several of them would have died or at least gotten scrambled pretty badly. The navvy was a lesser mech that apparently the Mantis had assembled in flight. It looked like that.\n\nToby saw it just before it fired at them. Its big disks were extruded and the emag burst fried Toby's left side. His servos froze and his legs locked, _chunk_ and _chunk,_ and then no feeling. He went down hard.\n\nThe beam swept across Cermo too but he had been faster and blew a hole in the navvy. That saved them from a real frying.\n\nKilleen was in the clear and took his time and got the navvy square so that the emag reservoirs in it spilled out in one long shriek. Then it was dead.\n\nThey rested while Toby got his servos back up and running. Nobody said much but his father helped him with the crisped sockets and remarked casually, \"Those navvies aren't as slow as people think.\"\n\nToby knew what that meant and in recollection knew that the navvy had been pretty slow. He had been loping through his own personal fog and had missed the profile when it popped up on his sensorium. Ignoring signs while on point was stupid.\n\n\"Sorry,\" was all he could say.\n\nToby kicked the navvy in exasperation and then bent over the cowling. He popped some seals and rummaged and brought out two smooth ceramic things shaped like lopsided eggs.\n\n\"Mag traps,\" Cermo said.\n\n\"Fine.\" Killeen handled one carefully. It had the usual mech slots and looked all right to Toby. \"Can we use them?\"\n\n\"Lemme try,\" Killeen said.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Toby said again.\n\nKilleen slapped one of the eggs into a hip servo. It clicked on. \"Good find.\" That was Killeen's way of answering. \"Let's eat.\"\nSIX\n\nConceptual Spaces\n\nNigel felt himself snatched up. Yanked. Hard, head-snapping, neck-wrenching\u2014\n\n\u2014then he was somewhere else.\n\nShadows on stones. He was walking through a courtyard. The floor was not flagstones but flattened white skulls, skeletal cages of ribs, crushed arms. They snapped as he stepped.\n\nWhispers bubbled from the street of bones. Sharp and bitter words, ripped from throats that had once longed and yearned.\n\nHis footing turned soft. He plunged forward helplessly, each step taking him up to the knee in the musty, blood-soaked past.\n\nThe stinking street of the lost. The swamp of dead desire.\n\nDarkness streamed from the narrowing walls.\n\nAll this, cooking under the thin veneer of the conscious mind.\n\nLuminous impulses fought and scurried across the open stage of the human intellect. Factions shouted and clashed. An inner world of endless combat. Instinct, reason, all shades between.\n\nAnd below that tiny conscious stage worked sinewy chords. The true deep mind worked there. Creation, desire, the sense of the exalted\u2014all wove and lurked and had no conscious voice. They broke onto the conscious stage only with force, sudden actors in a play that no one faction wrote.\n\nThat was the human lot, he saw.\n\nHe was looking at his own mind.\n\nA human could not do that. Could not step outside and watch itself have an idea, trace the origins of desire, of dislike . . .\n\nSo . . . what did that make him, now?\n\nThen the enormous voice was there again and he saw that he had been taken to another place, another small cage in a labyrinth mind.\n\nTo continue his little lesson. Of course.\n\nAll life extracts energy, uses it, and discards the dregs, energy in a degraded form. The history of life is a long saga of unconscious ingenuity, finding new pathways in the fields of brimming energy. The universe is yet young, and squanders its energies in flowers of excess-bright stars, whirling singularities, gaudy finery. Life profits from this.Organisms\u2014natural, mechanical/electronic, or magnetic- feed upon their ecosystems. These systems are in turn driven by simple energy sources from below. Mild sunlight and chemicals, for the Naturals. Mass and raw photons and electrical discharges, for others. But those organisms with minds themselves are the energy sources for higher orders: self-replicating patterns of information. These can thrive only in brains, or in the extensions of brains\u2014books, computers, data banks. Mental musics, supported by brute matter.In organic cells, enzymes and raw materials form a soup for making DNA. Viruses hijack these to reproduce themselves. Minds, too, can bring into being parasites. On the stage of minds, dramas unfold. Ideas can hijack anxieties, unmet needs, even the diffuse mental hunger called curiosity.Minds are the substrate for memes.The simplest of these memes are like diseases. Some contagions are helpful, some destructive, some merely crippling\u2014but all draw their sustenance from the organisms themselves. For they feed upon the thought processes of their hosts.Cultural evolution can be seen as the advancement of these patterns: memes are self-propagating cultures. In many life-forms, religious ideas were the earliest examples.Even simple mental systems can ask questions which they cannot answer\u2014indeed, that have no answer.Planning for the future confers a powerful survival advantage; realizing that one should not venture back into a dangerous place means one may live to see tomorrow's sunrise. Dependence on the seasons, especially in farming, sharpens this selection.But considering the future raises powerful questions. Unanswerable riddles: Where will I go after death? Where was I before birth?The mental tensions set up by such natural problems create a niche. Into this slot in the mental landscape, ideas can migrate. They arrive there by mutation from earlier, related ideas. Providing plausible answers to unanswerable questions, they occupy the niche. The host welcomes this aid, profits from it. Then they can spread. Those ideas which induce copies of themselves in other brains have greater chance of surviving. Religions are parasitic memes. Some lead to wholesale abandonment of the ordinary world, producing faiths susceptible to mass suicide, or celibacy, or irrational attempts to propagate the faith with violence. These can quickly kill the host, and so self-limit the meme growth. Successful parasitic memes evolve into mutual symbionts. Stable, long-lived religions are examples. Their adherents hand down doctrines and formalisms for millennia. They can even enclose and absorb other ideas, carrying them forward in time, protected by the bulk and momentum of belief.They can make the host resist other parasitic ideas. Every concept needs some protection.Logic is one of these. It tests memes for consistency. Such meta-memes check other, smaller ideas before allowing them into the mental theater. They function as do the simple alarm systems which tell a cell that a virus has invaded. The scientific method, which is essentially an orderly common sense, is a similar meme defense. It is more discriminating, more interactive with the invading meme itself, than the most primitive defense: to simply reject any new idea, uninspected.All memes can be seen as living, struggling entities which compete for space and energy. An idea can leap from mind to mind, encased in a single sentence. Intelligent beings convey far more information through memes than they do through genes.\n\nNigel awoke lying on a mud flat. Cold, wet, sticky.\n\nHe got up slowly. The voice had been soft and sensible and still had shaken him thoroughly.\n\nIt was not of course a voice but a . . . lesson. His body ached and he had trouble breathing. Interference with the lower levels of the brain?\n\nHe looked around but there was nothing but the mottled dark. He missed human contact, an ache he had learned long ago in places like this.\n\nHe started walking. It was slow, hard work; his knees trembled, but he kept going.\nSEVEN\n\nThe Suredead\n\nHis gear used the mech positron traps that were new and light and carried a lot of energy in a small magnetic pocket. The clouds of positrons gyred in their magnetic pit and when his inboards or servos needed power positrons would snake out of their snare, find electrons, and die. Somehow that made potentials stream through him though Toby never thought of how it worked. The navvy's mag traps they discharged into their own, harvesting most of the store. Energy stripped from mechs always had a special jolt to it.\n\nKilleen clapped him on the back. \"Just shows how desperate the Mantis is,\" Killeen snorted with derision. \"Threw that navvy together. Put no defense in the mag traps.\"\n\nToby felt better until he woke up that night. The timestone was smoldering a dull ruby red half-light and they had all rolled their pads out to take advantage of the momentary night. Toby had been bone tired and grateful for it, a break not given as a favor by his father but simply by the weather.\n\nBut he woke up with an itchy nervousness and could not sleep, thinking it had something to do with the positron power. He got up to pee though it was not pressing and that was when he saw it.\n\nThe latticework did not move against the far ruddy hills, but it was not a building. It cast a shadow in his sensorium that was not a blankness now. He looked for the webs of loci and motivators and subminds. They were faintly luminous, tracing out the array of rods and struts. It moved then and he felt it as a positive thing finally. Not a vacancy but a presence.\n\nHe knew by legend the impossible way it moved. As he stood absolutely still and watched, the matrix shambled away from him. No hurrying, no sign it knew he was there. It was two klicks away, easy. In range, but he did not think of that. He followed to keep in view the shifting phosphorescent mainmind exposed in the tilting work of rods and the great disks swiveling.\n\nIt came at him then without a single flicker of sensorium warning. The burst was in him, before his inboards could counter. He staggered and fell. Hit hard, arms loose. The pulse skated through him and burned hot and was gone.\n\nHe lay without moving, Bishop tactics. Numbly through his sensorium he watched it go. Angular energies, vectoring into a dwindling shape. Then nothing.\n\nHe let his inboards run diagnostics and they came up with trivial overloads, easily corrected with a reset. He got up carefully. Creaky and legs shaking at the knees but all right.\n\nHe could not explain what had happened. He knew he had to think about it but not right now. There was too much in him. A pressure seethed in his systems. Fear and a hollow longing too. Some quality of it reminded him of the way women drew him out, but it was not that either. On the way back to his pad he decided not to wake the others.\n\nQuath stirred electromagnetically as he passed. <?> she sent and he answered with \u2014.^.\u2014, which told her submind that it was just him. He envied the way she could delegate to her partial minds and fall instantly asleep if she wanted. It was a little surprising that such an intelligence needed the down time to process memories and arrange itself, which humans did by letting the subconscious levels work during sleep.\n\nIt was the dreams that told him. He saw the long procession of Bishops in their Citadel, then on the plains, in battle and at peace. Many of the momentary shimmers of saved experience were of their last moments. That must mean that these were salvaged slivers from the lives of doomed Bishops. Eyes wide with surprise, or slitted by pain. Mouths gasping or else hardened against what they saw coming. But there was more to it than such externals. He _felt_ the moments, lived through them in a way impossible to get from a mere image.\n\nThese were the records of the suredead. Bishop minds, ransacked by mechs\u2014by the Mantis\u2014in age-old conflicts. Like volumes to be kept on a shelf and taken down and browsed. Or read intently if you cared.\n\nThe Mantis had sent these shards of the suredead into him. Discarding them? Radiating away data as it executed its own subminds?\n\nHe rolled sweaty in his sleep and woke sandy-eyed and ragged. At breakfast Killeen said, \"I got some diagnostics on my morning screen. Said there was mech near us last night.\"\n\n\"Me too,\" Cermo said.\n\nToby said nothing and did not know why. The Mantis was dying anyway. The two men looked at him and still he said nothing.\n\n\"I can pick up right now some pretty weak echoes that way\"\u2014Cermo gave a thumb-jut uphill\u2014\"but not moving.\"\n\nToby could see nothing in his sensorium. When they started off he took rear point. They lost the Mantis trail in a place where overlapping mech signatures reeked in Toby's sensorium, coded as stinks. He caught rotting leaves, a sharp pungency, something damp and musty. \"Smells funny,\" was all Cermo said.\n\nThey followed the smells, all really just electronic prompts but no less exciting for the fact of their knowing it. They found the cause in a rugged narrow gulch.\n\nThe mechs had died in convulsions. Disease programs had gotten into them and they had ended in an agony of pleasure, capacitors flashing over, mag traps sparking and searing their gray matte finish. That was what made the Trigger Codes so good. They brought intense ecstasy and the desire to share that with others, and so the mechs sent it on electromagnetic wings to each other, all in a delighted delirium. Toby knew it was supposed to be a pleasant way to die but the convulsed limbs and ripped matte-carbon skins were ugly, terrible.\n\n\"Mantis was through here,\" Cermo said.\n\n\"I pick it up,\" Killeen said and then Toby did too, a faint tangy odor that wound between the mech bodies. These were far lower order mechs than the Mantis of course and they crammed the little gorge. The Mantis had passed by the fallen and gone on.\n\n\"Paying its respects, maybe,\" Toby said. The men laughed although he had not meant it to be funny.\n\nToby touched one of the wrecked carcasses. \"You suppose mechs have, well, families?\"\n\nCermo shook his head vigorously. Killeen said, \"Not so's you'd notice.\"\n\nQuath had been nearly silent since the navvy attack and now she said, <They appear to have intricate relationships, but not genetically based.>\n\n\"If not family,\" Killeen said, \"what?\"\n\n<Links of their minds. Or shared models of the world.>\n\nKilleen frowned. \"Models?\"\n\n<Frames for comprehending experience.>\n\n\"Seems to me you either ken things or you don't.\" Killeen grinned at Cermo as if this were a private joke. Toby didn't get it.\n\n<They seem to order themselves in social strata, based on capabilities. Within those classes they form close working associations.>\n\n\"Not families, not at all,\" Killeen said bitterly.\nEIGHT\n\nPhylum Myriapodia\n\nWhere'd you get Abraham?\"\n\nThe bird had somehow manifested Quath here, in this place which now had no gritty feel left in it at all.\n\nThis was definitely Quath, done precisely down to scratches on leg sheaths and the curious jerky way her heads moved. How the bird could make Quath come here . . . ? But of course, Quath herself was an anthology intelligence, and so could exhibit facets of itself here, plucked up by the Highers. Or someone/something.\n\n<The Myriapodia paid a terrible price for him.> The Quath manifestation torqued itself on the rocky ground, settling intricate sections on the warm stones.\n\n\"How?\"\n\n<The Tukar'ramin, the Illuminates . . . all perished.>\n\n\"That's why you've been so quiet.\"\n\n<The only entrance to the Labyrinth was the Rent.>\n\n\"Rent? Ah\u2014the seam the mechanicals tore open?\"\n\n<It voided into the inner edge of the ergosphere.>\n\n\"So your kind . . .\"\n\n<Flew at great cost in energy along that inner sheet. Poised. When the Rent opened, they entered.>\n\n\"I don't see\u2014\"\n\n<They knew that they must surprise the mechanicals. All this was necessary to quickly take the Abraham from them.>\n\nNigel turned to look at the muscled but weathered man who was munching some fruit nearby. \"He looks fairly hearty.\"\n\n<He lived. The Myriapodia gave of themselves. That was the only way to unleash the Codes.>\n\nNigel said nothing. \"Why?\"\n\n<That is not answerable.>\n\n\"Outside my conceptual space?\"\n\n<Yeasay.>\n\nHe would always wonder if, at this moment, the alien was deliberately using a human slang. Perhaps that was what, in its own coordinate system, invoked what he would, in his chimpanzee manner, call sadness. Or grief. Or, by the nature of the unknowable, a joke.\nNINE\n\nStalking\n\nWhy doesn't it fly?\" Killeen asked in one of their short breaks.\n\nToby had been wondering, too. The Mantis could jet across Lanes. Men didn't have flying gear. They couldn't generate the thrust to deal with gravitational stresses, not and be able to walk, too. \"Maybe it can't anymore?\"\n\nCermo swallowed some water and spat it out again, an old ritual to get the dust taste out of his mouth. Then he cocked an eye at the distant emerald roof, the folded terraces of land far overhead. \"Could be it threw away its propulsions first thing. We just didn't run across them.\"\n\nQuath murmured, <Perhaps it does not wish to fly. Being foot-bound and pursued is a different experience.>\n\nThe men looked at each other and shrugged. Toby wondered what Quath could mean but she ambled away then, combing the area. He did not get a chance to think further because Cermo was looking up at the foggy esty again and frowning and then pointing. \"Matterfall,\" he said quietly.\n\nMasses of green and brown ripped away from the landscape above. Silently they shot up in a geyser. Lumps tumbled and smacked into each other.\n\n\"Coming fast,\" Killeen said, voice tight.\n\nThere was nothing to do. Sometimes the esty fissured. Along its surface gravity would abruptly vanish as stretched lines of space-time snapped back, like rubber bands releasing energy. Matter would find itself suddenly released, free.\n\n\"No pretty li'l arch this time,\" Cermo said.\n\nSometimes the trajectory of a matterfall made an arc and the mass slammed back down nearby. Once the freed debris got high enough, though, it could just as soon spray all the way across the vast space between Lane walls. This time it had more than enough energy. It seemed to speed up and still there was no sound.\n\n\"Coming close.\" Toby stood with legs tight and ready to run. But which way?\n\nThe clotted stream of mass shot toward them. It swelled and Toby saw trees and rocks clearly. The leading edge was a little to his left, he saw, and then very quickly the whole sheared mass came down toward them.\n\nClose, but not right smack on. It slammed into the esty upslope. The shock wave bowled them over. Thunder followed it. They doubled up against a spattering rain of pebbles and silt. One hit Toby in the shoulder and hurt but broke nothing.\n\nIt was over in a few minutes. They brushed themselves off and looked up at the damage. Some hills had fresh cover and boulders were still tumbling down and crashing into ravines.\n\n\"Be bad footing over that way for a while,\" Cermo said.\n\n\"Wonder if the Mantis will go that way on purpose,\" Killeen said.\n\nCermo frowned. \"I 'spect so.\"\n\nThat was what happened. Their tracking told them so within an hour.\n\nTrouble came immediately. The Mantis trail led into the shifty new ground. They labored upgrav toward majestic, brooding slopes. The rock here was bare, thickly folded esty. The matterfall had liberated fresh energies. Events curled out of it, sliver-thin instants from the past that splintered off and then evaporated. Going uphill was like climbing a full, heaving wave that crested and was always about to break its sharp peak into roaring foam. Bowls formed in the slant timestone. In them were lakes not of water but of some chipped gravel that flowed. It was easy to mistake for a water lake because the granules of shattered esty were a pale turquoise, as if blue with chill. Toby dipped his hand in and jerked it back scalded. He danced around, flapping his hand and feeling stupid and angry with himself.\n\nHe was not paying attention so was caught surprised when the ground trembled and opened. Toby fell into a cleft with edges sharp as torn tin. He scrambled and got out just as quick.\n\nNeither Cermo or Killeen noticed any of this because they had just heard the Mantis ahead. Quath had vectored on it.\n\nToby ran to catch up to them. Abruptly the Mantis disappeared from his sensorium. It left not even the Mantis blankness.\n\n\"Get it on visual!\" his father called so he knew that the others had lost their sensoria traces too.\n\nToby plunged upslope. He had to use all his power to manage it and he could not see the others. Thick cover festooned the ground here. It rattled as timestone gave way downslope. He heard crashing and explosions below. If a piece of esty slipped into instability it carried off everything. The shaking got worse and he fell.\n\n\u2014Cermo!\u2014 he sent on hushed comm. Nothing came back. \u2014.^.\u2014 he sent to Quath, but again nothing.\n\nStill, he could smell the Mantis somehow. It was not a sensorium cue but a flavor cool and metallic on the dry air.\n\nHe understood this last desperate move. The Mantis had led them into unstable territory to throw them off. He wanted to cling to the trembling ground but the smell was strong. Fronds rattled above him as he picked his way upslope and into a divide. He knew it was up ahead but did not know how he knew.\n\nA brilliant white flash went by him and the second smacked into him. The pain snapped down his spine. He hit and rolled. Only then did he register the quick rapping bursts that had come before he was hit and recognize his father's emag rifle. Cermo's booming reports came right after.\n\nHis systems convulsed. His legs had curled up with the pain and he could not brace himself against the timestone as it cracked beneath him. Sharp shards peeled off and shattered and cut his face.\n\nHis world clouded up with the pain. Cermo's punching booms and his father's _rap-rap-rap_ came cotton-soft in the hollow air. The two men were shooting steadily now. Toby could still not see their target though the metallic smell was stronger.\n\nQuath sent her characteristic _whoom whoom_ echoing through his sensorium. She was using her weapon that scrambled up interlinks and could dissolve a mechmind if it went in just right. They shouted now in his comm but seemed far away. They had not gotten a visual of the Mantis either and their calls got fainter as they moved away.\n\nHe got up painfully. No broken bones. A wad of cloth from his pouch stopped the bleeding in his scalp and cheek. More hollow firing. Then he saw it. The blankness rippled in his sensorium.\n\nA shot caromed off him. It hurt but did not get into his inboards. Something else did before he could react.\n\n\u2014the two lines of running figures met on a dry plain. Here men laughed wildly as they grinned through filmed helmets, slapping each other in salute. The two Families had not met for years and now to come upon each other, Rooks and Bishops colliding. Only taste and touch mattered, the press of warm and pungent flesh, rank and salty. Hugging and patting. Sobs as old friends saw each others' lined, worn faces. A babble river of talk, hoarse cries, guffaws\u2014\n\nIt came in so fast he got only a stinging sensation. A nose-wrinkling itch, a furious sneeze. So fast he was all reaction, no thought. Then he saw the matrix of rods moving in the clattering fronds nearby. No more than a hundred meters.\n\nSlow, underwater slow. He shot at it and missed. Mantis fields deflected nearly anything except a direct pulse. A shot had to be shaped just the right way to defeat its layered minds of defense.\n\nHe ran down a gully that snapped and cracked beneath him. The esty energies played in blue-white arcs where his boots struck. He knew he was not seeing quite right from the pain.\n\nMore booming reports and a crashing and it was all going steadily away from him in the fog-thick clotted air.\n\nCermo screamed. His shriek sliced the comm.\n\nThe Mantis reek came stronger.\n\nToby scrambled out of the gully. Timestone frayed upward here like spores blowing. It fractured, split. Big zigzag lines ran back into sour-smelling bushes.\n\nHe ran toward the thrashing sounds. Uphill. Tripped and got up and went on.\n\n\u2014in the celebration came a hard _spang_ and the streaming talk turned to shouts. Screams. Bodies falling, others trying to catch them. Shocked, bleached faces. The stinging notes were emag shots and the Mantis was a speck on a far rise aiming into the reunited humans, being very careful to focus on a single fleeing form at a time. It brought down more and drew the essence out of the primates as their little lights flickered and began to go out. Pain, remembrance, joy, gray defeat, soft dreams\u2014all siphoned into it. All was saved.\u2014\n\nHe staggered with the hard-blown intensity of the burst. Where was it?\n\nThe bushes were high here and scraggly trees hung above them. On his comm he got a pip from his father and Cermo beyond. On the topo display Cermo was on the hillside and highlighted. Killeen was moving away from Cermo and headed farther uphill.\n\nToby angled up a ravine. He had to cut his way through some of the wiry bush and came upon his father suddenly.\n\nKilleen was white-faced. \"Got Cermo pretty bad.\"\n\n\"You tracking it?\"\n\n\"Hit it pretty solid and it's trailing smell.\"\n\nThe stink was metallic and oily now. Toby knew the true data his systems compiled were not smells at all but the scent blended with the memories it had projected into him, and together they reverberated in him.\n\nThere were plenty of other signs. Scattered loci had spattered the bushes with burnt orange and crimson. Mantis castoffs. A seared cowling lay cocked against a tree. \"Careful of it,\" Killeen said. They went by cautiously but the piece was dead.\n\n\"Dad, back there it sent memories to me.\"\n\n\"Tryin' to confuse you.\"\n\n\"I don't think so.\"\n\n\"You look to be woozy.\"\n\n\"I'm okay.\"\n\n\"Been hit?\"\n\nToby nodded and gasped for air.\n\n\"Maybe you should stay back with Cermo.\"\n\n\"I can keep up.\"\n\n\"Not what I meant.\"\n\n\"Cermo, he's not good.\"\n\n\"I'll head back for him in a little while.\"\n\nToby saw Quath on topo a fair distance off. She was blocking the Mantis's retreat. \"It's close by. Smell that?\"\n\nKilleen said, \"We got the bastard now.\"\n\n\"It wasn't trying to get me solid. It wasn't\u2014\"\n\n\"Forget that. It's body shot,\" Killeen whispered.\n\nIt was. A heavy odor of something like suffering layered the air as they came into a stand of gnarled trees and thick undergrowth. They trotted as quietly as they could although speed mattered more now.\n\nThe Mantis was leaning against some trees. Branches stuck through its open spaces. Coming up on it slowly, Toby thought the thing looked as though the trees had grown in the Mantis body itself and it was now a work both organic and mech.\n\nHe could see the back of it, jet black and soft gray and huge, lattices united with complex angularities. He followed his father along flanks that sighed and settled as though something was going out of the Mantis. Something was\u2014fleeting wisps of data hummed and buzzed in their passage.\n\nIt was as big as a house and Toby saw now the way energies had held it together and would no more. More slabs of data emitted from it like blood running out and Killeen raised his emag and fired. The Mantis had antennas and disks in their own enclosed bays and one of these focused on them. That was its only reaction. There was no need to do it mechanical damage, to use explosives or bolts. The intricate information web that made up the Mantis was frying into nothing. Programs from the Trigger Codes fed with a crackling intensity that Toby could hear eating like flames through the whole gray sensorium of the Mantis. Three parabolic antennas swiveled to look at them. His father fired again and the whole thing shook like a house about to come down.\n\nToby backed away. \"Plenty done now,\" he said.\n\n\"No.\"\n\nThe Mantis fell.\n\nParts popped free and rolled and the intricate crystalline layers smashed. Some beautiful arc struts popped from their collars and the complexities they had supported spilled. The ground rumbled but the two men did not back away from the unspooling masses.\n\n\"It's done,\" Toby said.\n\n\"No.\"\n\nToby did not like it but his father was right. Quath came up behind them and said nothing. They all heard the thin cries of the subminds as pleasure-pains slipped into them. The Trigger Codes at work.\n\nThe Mantis had been trying to stop the spread of the disorders all this time and its despair and agony came intensely to the men, released by constellations of subminds that had finally given up. The thing was letting itself go in a final burst of bliss. Patterns danced and flared in its sensorium, spilling out filigreed and rich and meaning nothing to humans.\n\nToby stepped back and his own aching pain made him suddenly weak. \"It'll be gone soon, Dad.\"\n\n\"No. Prang it once yourself.\"\n\n\"Let it go.\"\n\nCermo limped up suddenly behind them, one ear torn loose and blood down his face. His left arm dangled uselessly and showed white bone but Cermo's face was whiter. Toby remembered instantly when Killeen had lost arm function to a mech long ago, and the way Cermo had paid it no attention out of respect except when Killeen truly needed help.\n\nCermo's sensorium rang with medical alarms. Cermo paid them no attention and did not look at Toby or Killeen or Quath either. He hobbled up and took Toby's weapon in a hand caked in brown blood. Cermo staggered with the weight of it and nobody said anything.\n\nThere was no sound except the Mantis still stirring. From it whirred smears of information and into Toby came one clear voice.\n\n* * *\n\nHere is all I can give.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Kill it,\" Killeen said.\n\nCermo blinked, dazed. His right arm half-lifted Toby's sharp-darter. He seemed stunned by the sudden intensity of the voice.\n\n* * *\n\nI am more than the sum of all memories.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Pretty soon, be less,\" Killeen muttered.\n\n* * *\n\nI have a gift for you, Toby.\n\n* * *\n\nToby froze. He panted, confused.\n\n* * *\n\nYou will need it.\n\n* * *\n\nCermo lifted the shape-darter and pointed the snubbed snout at the center of the still-seething layers. The mainmind was in there somewhere. He angled for a shot. The moment hung in the air.\n\n* * *\n\nI saved so many Bishops. I have the greatest collection of you. And you are the most splendid of all the lesser forms.\n\n* * *\n\nCermo jerked into life and fired three times.\n\nEven single-handed, at this range each shot found its way into a submind and sparked a hard yellow flare in the Mantis sensorium. Each time Cermo swore angrily and the Mantis rocked with the impact.\n\nThe third one made the parabolic antennas whirl around very fast and faster and then stop. Toby knew he would remember the silly look of that.\n\nEvery sliding rod and servo in the Mantis halted and the dignity went out of it in a way he could not voice. One moment it was huge and suffering and then it was just a big pile of shattered parts. No whole.\n\nCermo fell then. He came down completely slack, arms loose and knees buckling. Toby saw that the Mantis had done some last thing and the aura of that burst hit him too. It gave him a prickly jolt all over. His sensorium fused, tilted, flashed with working veins of amber. He staggered but the pulse did no damage.\n\nBy the time he reached Cermo the heavy-lidded eyes had closed.\n\n\"Damn!\" Killeen said.\n\n<He is suredead,> Quath said. <The Mantis stripped his self away in the last moments.>\n\n\"Why?\" Killeen demanded. His voice was strained.\n\n<I do not know.>\n\n\"Revenge,\" Killeen said.\n\n<It had finished with you.>\n\n\"With us? Other way round,\" Killeen said bitterly.\n\n<It played out its own end by allowing you to express one of your embedded patterns. One it had not experienced.>\n\nToby's voice was a croak. \"What . . . pattern?\"\n\n<Your species hunted long ago across far terrain. In groups you large mammals mastered language and the rituals of pursuit. It led to your intelligence\u2014a particular kind of mind.>\n\n\"It wanted to see us do that?\" Killeen was quiet now, kneeling with his hands uselessly rubbing Cermo's shoulder.\n\n<I suspect it wanted to be a part of it. The only part it could play.>\n\nToby thought about the stored memories it had shed into the air, its treasure evaporating. But memory was not yourself, he saw. It could not drive forward, act. Memories just sat and waited.\nTEN\n\nPaths of Glory\n\nThe timestone tossed and broke and they spent a long time then just clinging to whatever stable places they could find. They did what they could for Cermo but that wasn't much.\n\nKilleen opened Cermo's spine and swore. \"They're burned.\"\n\n\"How?\" Toby asked.\n\n\"Mantis must've worked down through all his inboards.\"\n\n\"I thought our chips were protected.\"\n\n\"So did I. But our tech is old and mechs never stop learning.\"\n\nKilleen said this heavily and with the respect a combatant had for another. Cermo's cylinder spinal chips had carried the older Aspects and Faces from Bishop history. A suredeath reduced the present, subtracting one life. Chip charring carried that loss far back into a dim past, plundering the origins of the Family itself.\n\nIt was hard finding enough real ground to bury Cermo. They stripped away his gear and divided the mass out for taking back. Most of it was useless but to leave it would draw mech scavengers.\n\nUtter darkness came for a while and they slept. It did not do much good for Toby and when he woke a gang of scavenger navvys had found the Mantis. He heard them cutting and clattering around and went up the slope to where they worked in the sprawling shambles. He remembered how the parabolic antenna had spun around like an eye searching madly and how the majesty had gone then. The flanks of it were gone too now, dragged off by scavengers. The mechs had their own ecology of a sort, recycling machined parts and whole intact auxiliaries. There was no more Mantis, just intricate assemblies slewed out of their mounts, and gear he could not understand fried by vagrant pulses. The navvys picked over the carcass where crystalline lattices had carried the Mantis intelligence. There were navvys of all sizes, scooters and jakos mostly, and they worked remorselessly in teams. When they were done they would leave nothing.\n\nHe shot three and that scattered them for a while. The anger in him had boiled out and he felt stupid when Quath and Killeen came running, their sensoria projected out in a defensive screen. He just shrugged. His father nodded. Killeen looked at the Mantis for a while with nothing in his face and then pulled a few of the arc struts free.\n\nWhen Toby walked past the inner cells of the Mantis he saw a mag storage kernel hung partly disconnected from the frame. He took it. He told Quath he wanted the energy store but he carried it with him on the long march away from there without discharging it.\n\n<You have something more than that,> Quath said as they headed downslope.\n\n\"The memories it sent?\"\n\n<I received none.>\n\n\"How'd you know I did?\"\n\n<By your actions. It chose you.>\n\nFor a searing moment he wished that he had never seen the Mantis. \"I don't want that.\"\n\n<They are in you now.>\n\nHe walked on in silence.\n\nHis father carried some of the beautiful arc struts strapped to his back despite the weight. Killeen was smiling and tired and said, \"Plenty Bishops will want a piece. It killed a lot of us.\"\n\n\"How many?\"\n\n\"It's cut through generations of us. Nobody can do the count. None of us has lived through the full time of it.\"\n\n\"We were trying to kill it, too.\"\n\n\"Yeasay. Had to.\"\n\n\"Murder on both sides.\"\n\n\"Now there is, yeasay.\" His father squinted at him and looked away.\n\nToby kept pace with Killeen behind Quath. They loped across timestone that had settled down. A golden glow seeped up through it and cast shadows up his father's face from the chin. The silence between them simmered until Killeen said, \"It made artworks of us. Hunted us. Sucked us up as suredead.\"\n\n\"Cermo made a mistake.\"\n\n\"I suppose.\"\n\n\"Coming on close to it at the end like that.\"\n\n\"Have it as you like.\"\n\nThey walked a while with the excitement going out of them and the only sound was their servos.\n\n\"It cared about Bishops, y'know.\"\n\n\"Cared plenty. Cared enough to hound us.\"\n\n\"Not what I meant.\"\n\n\"I know, son.\"\n\nThe Bishops had lost something too when the Mantis went out of their world but Toby could not say to his father what that was. He would be a full man before he came to understand it or to know that he had brought away from the Mantis not only the magnetic kernel\u2014which he kept for years and never got around to discharging\u2014but also a discord of loneliness that would go with him even when he was surrounded by Bishops.\n\nAfter some hard marching they found a Bishop camp. The news spread quickly and more Bishops came hurrying across the stretches of timestone. They saw the curved Mantis struts that Killeen had carried out on his back and insisted on standing them up in an arch for display. Together like that they looked fine in the smoldering ruby glow of the timestone.\n\nPeople crowded around the struts and touched them carefully. Killeen had a liquor toast from some of them and then another and talked freely. Toby stood back and watched as his father and himself and Quath were transformed into heroes by the excited chatter of the crowd who had not been there.\n\nThey had lifted a burden and legend from the Bishops and he knew with one part of himself how he would feel if someone else had done that. But it was different to have done it yourself and nothing in the talk could change that or even explain it. Especially not explain it.\n\nKilleen said to him a little later, \"Wish Cermo could be here.\"\n\n\"He is,\" Toby said and in that moment felt what the Mantis had sent into him in its last moments. Cermo. Truncated, flattened, seeping in spongy interstices of him, slivers and rivulets flowing in his sensorium and flavoring the liquid light, forever, Cermo.\n\nHe sent a whisper to Quath, \u2014Why?\u2014\n\n<Not long ago, you would not have asked such a question. You would have called me Big Bug and made a joke.>\n\n\u2014Yeasay, and been plenty happier.\u2014\n\n<It is knowledge of things we cannot say that makes your kind and mine somewhat alike, tiny thinker.>\n\n\u2014Funny, how primates can get along with mechanical maggots.\u2014\n\n<We Myriapodia are selective in our diets. On the other hand\u2014a primate expression, you'll note\u2014you are dietary opportunists, much like these maggots you compare me with.>\n\n\u2014Quick-witted bug you are, ol' Brave Crawler with Dreams. You just look like a giant maggot, is all, only beefed-up with metal.\u2014\n\n<I delight in your primate syntax. Beefed with metal?>\n\n\u2014Yeasay, we play fast and loose with language.\u2014 He felt a sudden rush of affection for the lumbering assembly of legs and carapace beside him. \u2014To avoid saying what we really mean, right?\u2014\n\n<You are artful dancers on words.>\n\n\u2014Lots of things, words don't get at.\u2014\n\n<At times, that is best. Such as now.>\n\nToby sighed, not from fatigue. \u2014Still wish I knew why the Mantis did that with Cermo.\u2014\n\n<It was not from our kingdom of intelligence. We cannot know why.>\n\n\u2014Something like this . . .\u2014\n\n<You can see it as a gift or a curse.>\n\n\u2014Or neither one.\u2014\n\n<You are two-handed, two-legged. Your minds favor dichotomies.>\n\n\u2014Not always.\u2014\n\nToby said again to his father, his voice raspy, \"He is.\"\n\n\"I s'pose,\" Killeen said. He squinted at his son and looked puzzled and took a drink.\n\nThey sat on little camp stools near the arch of fine struts and Toby had a drink then too, not wanting it but knowing that the moment needed it. He and Killeen drank from trail cups brought by a woman and her husband who had lost two children to the Mantis a long time ago. They wanted to talk to the brave ones and maybe to the heroic Quath, only Quath was not around anywhere. Toby drank carefully to hold on to the moments that were softening in him already, dropping away down the funnel of time and memory. He hoped he would not remember any of this last part of it and thought of the parabolic antenna instead and the silly way it had spun so fast and to his surprise saw it now with new deep eyes.\nPART EIGHT\n\nThe Syntony\nIn Silico\n\nMemes can propagate between computers as easily as between Natural, organic brains. The computer virus was the first, primitive form of this. Higher manifestations followed.Memes evolved in turn far faster than genes. Brains are easier to infest than DNA.The organized constellations of information in computers were _kenes_ \u2014from _ken,_ to know.Computers are faster than brains. Not necessarily better or wiser, but faster. And speed was the issue.Kenes evolved faster than memes. Soon, they learned to leave even the substrate of silicon. Ordered, replicating data propagated beyond its _in silico_ origins. Rather than matter, it sought out fields\u2014electric, magnetic, even gravitational. There vast challenges arose, were met, bested. Whole styles of thought found expression, bloomed, died. Free of the grinding embrace of matter, filigrees of thought played into intricate dances, with ideas as the mere substrate for abstractions of ever higher order. Even heaven can pall. In time, a fraction of the kenes became concerned with the raw rub of the worlds they had left behind. They decided to play there, as well.This intervention into the storm of mass and motion precipitated the further uniting of magnetic intelligences, mechanical forms, and Naturals. These now constitute the Highers.\nONE\n\nUnintentional Jokes\n\n _A nd Melancholy mark'd him for her own . . . Nigel Walmsley tried to recall people he had known from the Chandelier days, Earthers of consummate skill and obliging manners. They were elsewhere in the esty, he supposed, or else dead. Probably dead. They had gotten into struggles with mechanicals on higher levels, and that had proved fatal._\n\nStill, he often liked to bask in his memories. There were so many of them. And he had been augmented so many different times and ways, into the bargain. His memories had a sharpness and resonance he was sure the old, utterly Natural Walmsley could not imagine.\n\nLiving in your memories . . . it could be seductive.\n\nBut the Highers kept interrupting him.\n\nThe bird said, \"If you could meet a mechanical intelligence, encased in a body like your own, what would you do?\"\n\nNigel said, \"I imagine I'd give him a smile that's all gums.\"\n\n\"I see. Antagonism.\"\n\n\"Something to do with linking memory close to our hormone control, no doubt.\"\n\n\"In part. You would not make love to it? Him? Her?\"\n\n\"Matter of taste, really.\"\n\nNigel wondered what it was driving at. The tension, yes\u2014to win sway over that world he had backed away from it, and felt forever that chasm. Yet having two hands did not mean you had to subscribe to every passing dichotomy. He reentered that world and felt how much he had longed for it\u2014\n\n\u2014bleak and flat, this Lane was now scoured by mech deaths and their last longing rampages of self-slaughter. So for a sheared instant he merged with it, glad of the smack and trudge of movement. Little registered, only the esty, single and woven and triumphant\u2014\n\nAs strange a place as any being had ever lived. Humans did not understand it, of course. But then, for all but a tiny sliver of their species' time, they had not understood their own planet.\n\nThen the Mantis was there. Solemn, heavy.\n\n* * *\n\nThe retina of the vertebrate eye appears to be \"installed\" backward. At the back of the retina lie the light-sensitive cells, so that light must pass through intervening circuitry, getting weakened. A long series of mutations could eventually switch the light-receiving cells to the front, and this would be of some small help. But the cost in rearranging would be paid by the intermediate stages, which would function more poorly than the original design. So these halfway steps would be selected out by evolutionary pressure. The rival, patched-up job works fairly well, and nature stops there. So these dreaming vertebrates are makeshift constructions, built by random time without foresight. There is a strange beauty in that.\n\n* * *\n\n\"You're dead, aren't you?\"\n\n* * *\n\nI am a part of something but I do not know what it is.\n\n* * *\n\n\"I wonder if that's something like being human?\"\n\n* * *\n\nBeing so small?\n\n* * *\n\n\"I suppose that's one way to put it.\"\n\n* * *\n\nI . . . somehow know . . . that I am all that remains.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Thank God I can't say that for me.\"\n\n* * *\n\nWe . . . you/I . . . once spoke together.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Back when I'd just arrived here.\" Nigel surprised himself with his sudden anger. \"You killed my friend, Carlos.\"\n\n* * *\n\nHarvested him.\n\n* * *\n\n\"We Naturals have a bit of a different opinion about that. We _know_ that a copy of us still isn't us.\"\n\n* * *\n\nWhen I was mechanical, I knew the opposite. We had not evolved the selfness as a reflex, for it did not affect our survival. For you Naturals, saving the self was essential. For mechanicals, replicating our self achieved evolutionary success. I see now\u2014immersed in a larger compass\u2014that both are . . . partial visions.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Part and parcel of a higher Phylum, eh? You're still just bloody murderers to me.\"\n\n* * *\n\nA partial vision again.\n\n* * *\n\n\"I suppose I'll just stay anchored right here, in my primate point of view. You Highers nearly exterminated us. Then you beset us in our Chandeliers and then the Citadels. All the time occasionally sidling up to us and trying to talk.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThe careful application of terror is also a form of communication.\n\n* * *\n\nEven in his anger, Nigel laughed. \"Unintentional jokes are the best.\"\nTWO\n\nBesen\n\n* * *\n\nI have another of your kind. She can show you something of the mechanical world.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Another partial vision?\" Nigel sardonically studied the wavering Mantis image.\n\n* * *\n\nA great virtue of our mechanical, digital form was the ability to completely receive another's experience.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Ummm. Sometimes I think I've seen too much already. Go ahead.\"\n\nThe compressed wall of perception came out of nowhere. He had time to recall that it was remarkably like the impact that had transformed him long ago, back in an alien wreck on Earth's moon, a jarring shift blindsiding him\u2014\n\nThe strange thing was how silent the mechs were through most of it. Immersed in the dirty Natural joys, she guessed. So awash in it they could not feel the mouths eating them.\n\nFor some reason they jammed into some Lanes. Of course they had swarmed everywhere before that and killed a lot of Naturals. Everything they could find, in fact. Then when the Proselyte Pleasures\u2014that was the term she heard applied to it\u2014blew through them, they reacted very strangely.\n\nSome mechs tore themselves apart in a frenzy. The debris was loathsome and the others ate it. There were plenty of pieces floating through the Lanes by then. She supposed that the higher orders could defend themselves longer, but that brought on something like a fever. She knew this analogy was false because mechs weren't biological, but that was the only way she could make sense of it.\n\nThe fever made them eat the others. Maybe it was to get more energy or fresh computing space or something that humans could not understand. Anyway, they ran out of dead members of the lower orders, navvys and rimouts and that sort.\n\nSo they started eating mechs that were still alive. The higher ones would break the locomos to keep them still and then stab into their quarry and take something out of them. Eating was the best word for it because she knew no other.\n\nNot all of them. In one Lane larger mech forms had smaller mechs with them. They carried the small ones for a long time. She studied them carefully but they did not seem to be searching. They weren't doing much more than moving, moving. The smaller ones had lesser defenses and after a while were plainly gone, dead, ruined. The big mechs still carried them. It was eerily like mothers carrying dead babies.\n\nBesen watched it all from hiding and with her sensorium off. She was hungry but to move meant death here. There had been plenty of examples of that.\n\nAll those mechs. Screaming now in sharp frequencies. Broken and used and not being gathered into the higher orders at all. Not what they had been promised. The whole point of being a mech, it seemed to her, was that at least you got picked up at the end somehow. Added into some other and maybe higher mind.\n\nIt was obviously like a religion for them but it had worked. They knew it as a hard, technical fact. Now it did not happen. No point in being lifted into something that was dying, too.\n\nThe screams nearly drove her mad. She could not blank it out because that would mean turning on her sensorium to mute the staccato agonies and they would find her. It was all quite a business and it went on forever. Forever, yes, pain eternal rather than life everlasting, the mad business all around her.\n\n\u2014Nigel jerked back, chest heaving.\n\nHe could see her now, approaching the nearby Bishops. She gave him only a passing glance. The young woman was clear of eye and smooth of skin but carried in her sensorium a weight of lived anguish that he did not want to share.\n\nIt would take time, perhaps a lifetime, to deplete the stores of that shared grief.\n\nYet a moment after she appeared, she was laughing with joy at the sight of other Bishops. Nigel eyed them in their merriment, not innocent but oddly touching, and quite suddenly felt a sharp pang of envy.\nTHREE\n\nA Long Way Ago\n\nDrawing together all Bishops, from sundry Lanes, went far quicker than Toby had thought possible. The Highers did not announce themselves or even communicate; they just did.\n\nThe wooded landscape around the small Bishop band seemed to ooze people. Toby and Killeen had been deposited into a Lane with mild climate and agreeable, even edible plants. There was food for the getting and some Bishops\u2014who had been unceremoniously yanked away by the Highers\u2014brought supplies as well. Before long it was a celebration.\n\nOne Bishop had been taken for medical care and when she was shucked out of her suit people found that they couldn't get her underwear off. It had been on so long her hair had grown through it. Toby could see curls sprouting out of the gray hide so that at first glance he mistook the underwear for skin. They finally had to pluck her, the brown matter underwear coming off like peeling a grape. Patches of skin came with it.\n\nToby saw Quath in the distance, and closeupped the man she was talking to: the Walmsley one. Then Besen came striding out of the trees. She looked bigger and her face was stronger. There was an air of certainty about her he liked and she kissed him without saying a word. He could say nothing.\n\n\"Damn but it's been a long time,\" she said.\n\n\"A long way ago,\" Toby answered.\n\nThey had all seen mechs dying the ecstasy death and there were innumerable stories. There always were. Soon it was like a thousand other nights Toby had spent listening to older Bishops yarn on, but now he had things to tell too.\n\nThere were few lost Bishops, it seemed. They had survived reasonably well in the Lanes. Of course some of them Toby had never much cared for and they all seemed to have come through fine. He came to feel that Family Bishop was beautiful by being also partly ugly.\n\nSome had taken a bit too well to the pharmacological possibilities afoot in the Lanes. It was amusing watching one of his boyhood friends, Abel, getting into his underwear. He held the pants in front of him and sort of tried to catch up with them. Each step somehow missed and soon he was stumbling forward so fast he seemed to be running after the underwear, which had its own opinion of him and was hurrying away, Abel never getting closer than an arm's length.\n\nHe sat beside a popping fire, feeling the whispery presences of Shibo and of Cermo. They were each in him in ways the Bishop technology did not account for and each was a faint scent rather than a presence. He was listening to the Bishops and thinking about how their birthplace rang in their vowels when Killeen sat down next to him. They spoke idly for a while and some ease came back between them. The Mantis hunt had faded and he would take a while to understand it, he knew.\n\nThen Killeen said, \"Can I speak with her?\"\n\nToby stiffened. \"I pulled her.\"\n\n\"Some's left.\"\n\n\"You can tell?\"\n\n\"Yeasay.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"Don't know.\"\n\nThere was plenty Toby knew now without being able to say how, so he just nodded. \"What for?\"\n\nKilleen smiled wanly, his face a web of creases. \"Real business.\"\n\nToby did the internal work of summoning her. He poured her scattered droplets into tiny streams and these slid into rivulets of gurgling words and finally filled a basin. She was a smooth pond in his mind. In its serene blue surface her face floated mirror-sharp. He let her speak through his throat.\n\n _ **I know why you have done this.**_\n\n\"You always were a move ahead.\" Killeen grinned and looked younger.\n\n _ **You wish to express me again.**_\n\nKilleen nodded. \"You been on vacation long enough.\"\n\n _ **And you are a son of a bitch.**_\n\n\"Prob'ly.\"\n\n _ **You would take this fragment of myself, unite it with the chips Toby carries\u2014**_\n\n\"And go looking for the Restorer.\"\n\n _ **Its ruins, more likely.**_\n\n\"Prob'ly.\"\n\n _ **You will not give up. Nothing I say\u2014**_\n\n\"Only what you do, not what you say. And to do, you got to be out here. In the flesh.\"\n\n _ **You are a son of a bitch.**_\n\n\"You're repeating yourself. 'Course, you're only a partial. I want the whole of you.\"\n\n _ **Know that even this partial loves you.**_\n\n\"Then you're coming back out into the world. To me.\"\n\nToby said, \"That's it, Dad. I can't speak for her anymore.\"\n\nKilleen nodded. \"You've been fine, son. Things we don't see eye to eye on, they're nothing. Like the Mantis back there. And Cermo.\"\n\nToby said, \"Things happen and you go on.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid that's right. I wish it was different.\"\n\n\"Not up to us.\"\n\n\"Yousay yeasay. Just keep saying it the truest way you can and then let things happen. Bishops're mostly just witnesses here. No way around that. On Old Earth maybe we were kings of the jungle or something, but not here. Not in the galaxy.\"\n\nToby slapped his father on the shoulder. \"So you'll go looking for the Restorer?\"\n\n\"Soon's I rest up.\"\n\n\"Maybe some of the others heard where it is now.\"\n\n\"Those?\" Killeen looked askance at the Bishops, setting up camp and cooking and drinking while every mouth seemed to be open, telling its story. \"A man can't pay attention to the passing wind or to known liars. I'll find it myself.\"\n\nToby felt something unnamed and huge move in him. He said quietly, through a tight throat, \"I'll come along.\"\n\nKilleen grinned and they said nothing for a while and then went to see the others.\nFOUR\n\nThe Eternal Landscape of the Past\n\n<Your suspicions are correct,> Quath said. <Mechs lose creativity because they overcontrol.>\n\nNigel nodded. The Bishops were making a lot of noise and he moved away. It was green and pleasant here, thoroughly accommodating to the human instinctive desire to be at the boundary of different spaces. He had always preferred the seashore, but Bishops knew none of that. They were content with the edge of the trees, the border of the savanna. A threat from one direction they could manage with a tactical retreat into the other. Or so the genes thought.\n\n\"I'd gathered so,\" Nigel said to Quath. \"Still, I could never quite fathom the sods.\"\n\n<Envision their interior world. Having access to all portions of your mind meant you could literally watch yourself thinking.>\n\n\"Not an altogether pleasant mode.\" He had done it a short while ago and the echoes still reverberated in him. Good for a month of nightmares, at least.\n\n<That implies policing your own thinking. You see the implications?>\n\n\"Not quite.\" This huge thing was smarter than it looked.\n\n<Chaos theory teaches us that any well-defined system will show unpredictable behavior if allowed to run long enough, no matter how finely honed the beginning conditions. To avoid chaotic results, control is necessary.>\n\n\"Ummm. Compel my mind? I can barely hold my tongue.\"\n\nNigel had never favored arguments for control of himself, but as Nikka had once said brightly, _How did your little island make so many eccentrics?_ He was not the team-effort type, no.\n\n<Mechs could do this; men could not. So humans produced more madmen\u2014and more geniuses. Generally, more dispersion from the mean. That vagrant creativity gave humans\u2014and any similar life-form\u2014vast advantages and disadvantages, alike.>\n\n\"Seems a big disadvantage, just being a primate.\"\n\nNigel eyed the Bishops gathered around their crackling campfires. Squint a bit and he was standing on a cliff over a dry canyon in the veldt, dust scenting the heat. Below, primates cracked bones and sucked the marrow out, chippering to each other, getting the last of the good from the game, scratching and squatting and talking, talking, always the voices sounding against the eternal silence of Nature itself.\n\nQuath said, <The disadvantage for you\u2014and for us, the Myriapodia\u2014lay in people who went awry.>\n\n\"Ah. The messiahs. The fever-eyed shaman. Bastards.\"\n\n<They could cause terrible damage. They did in our history. For you, they were worse. They destroyed whole Families with their lunacy. But the geniuses could wrench humanity away from the precipice it had tread for so long, and thrust it up toward fresh heights.>\n\n\"I wonder if the Bishops know why the Hunker Down was essential.\" Nigel studied them with a warmness, yet a distance he knew he could never bridge. His species, his strangers.\n\n<You had to make human societies who resisted the memes which the mechs had introduced. They used them very well against you. And us.>\n\n\"So we top-dog types\u2014\"\n\n<Do not berate yourself. Remember the Earthers.>\n\nNigel grimaced. \"And worse.\"\n\n<Worse?>\n\n\"A kind of well, _uber-Nigel,_ I called him. Better than me, the Earthers said.\" Nigel swept his arms in Wagnerian grandeur. \"He bestrode worlds!\"\n\n<You did not like him.>\n\n\"Like? I was afraid of him. He was me, and he wasn't. He was like some other copies they made of me, but quicker and smarter and distant. Made my flesh crawl.\"\n\n<He did this work with the Earthers?>\n\n\"He, and other Walmsleys. There was a shortage of labor, it seemed.\"\n\n<These worked in the Chandeliers, the Hunker Down\u2014>\n\n\"Great works, at first. The Earthers _are_ better than us, y'know.\"\n\n<But the mechanicals, tapping the energies of the magnetics\u2014>\n\n\"Hammered us. That's when we ordered the Chandeliers to send down whole legions. Families named for baseball teams and soccer and chess pieces and card games and God knows what.\"\n\n<Your method was Natural. A few would survive, thrive, resist the mechs\u2014their machines, their memes, everything.>\n\nNigel nodded to himself. The decision was ancient, yet still it burned within him. He had brought enormous suffering upon untold millions. And finally, the Hunker Downs had yielded up the Bishops. Tough and hard and implacable: Killeen. Able to shrug off the addictive superstitions that beset all humans in groups, the mob mind that led finally to predictable behavior, and then oblivion.\n\nThey had resisted myriad minor pleasures, errant ideas, sublime softenings. Avoided the aimless abstractions of virtual spaces, of passive entertainments and live-for-the-moment hedonism. It was so easy to be distracted to death. The mechs had played upon that.\n\nHe had heard about the Bishops' dealings with a lunatic named His Supremacy, during their voyage, and it fit perfectly: the madman proved to be mech-controlled, playing upon the vulnerabilities of the chimp mob. So the Bishops resisted, and won.\n\nAnd the Bishops carried the Way of Three. It could not be a coincidence.\n\n<It is not. The ancient ones were wise in a genetic sense we have not yet comprehended.>\n\nNigel jerked, startled. \"You can read what I'm thinking?\"\n\n<You and I are composites. Across the abyss between species there is some . . . leakage.>\n\nNigel smiled. Leakage. In some ways he was closer now to this enormous metal insect than to the primates happily spinning tales.\n\n\"Do they know that this is just a temporary victory?\"\n\n<Some will guess. A few mechanicals shall prove immune to the pleasure plagues\u2014that, too, is a consequence of natural selection. So they shall return.>\n\n\"I saw them, up ahead in time. So I suppose I knew all along. There will always be a struggle, no final equilibrium.\"\n\n<If the Syntony is a wedding of all forms, then the mechanicals must have a place in it.>\n\n\"Thousands of Families carried the Way of Three. Bishops were ornery, willful\u2014and so they survived. I admire the bastards. Still . . .\"\n\nA mere few steps away, fires crackled and people bubbled over with joy. But they were steps he would never take.\nFIVE\n\nThe Thermodynamics of Intelligence\n\nNigel thought of them as The Phylum Beyond Knowing. They spoke to him as he sat there.\n\nQuath and Bishops around him, chimpanzee chatter, aromas of trees and calm green fields\u2014all gone.\n\nOnly the voice. One rolling articulation, threaded with chords. But without words.\n\nInformation is order. By the Second Law of Thermodynamics, order is a form of invested energy. When a capacitor stores electrical energy within a dielectric, the dipolar atoms within it align, accumulating harmony. Discharge the two capacitor plates, and the dipoles relax, their regularities dissolving, sparking forth into currents.Information is order is food.While memes swim in the warm bath of cultures\u2014both Natural or mechanical/electronic\u2014others could operate as pure predators. These use the energy equivalence of information. They can swallow data banks, or whole mentalities\u2014not to harvest their memes, but to suck from them their energy stores. When a lion eats a lamb, it is not using the lamb's genetic information, except in the crudest sense. Predators do not propagate memes; they feed upon them. So there arose in mental systems the datavore.Like a virus, it exists to propagate. But evolution teaches that such highly selective, ordered, demanding activity inevitably selects for those predators better at it. Time favors those which have a fresh kind of intelligence, unseen in the mental world until the stores of energy and order arose\u2014the data, the memes\u2014to support the datavore.The distilled intelligence of datavores is a category which the underlying food sources, of memes and the intelligences which support them, cannot know. Thus they rise above the categories of intelligence which have existed before, and are unknowable to them.Yet they are the mere base of the Highers. Above this boundary of the knowable towers a realm beyond investigation, exceeding the grasp of serial sentences to describe.All forms\u2014mechanical or organic/Natural, or clay/substrate\u2014come together in this realm. They resonate. This forms the Syntony, a place in conceptual space where form and function uncouple. This is what communicates down to you, through the Kingdoms and Phyla you can fathom, and through many you cannot. Know this: All matters known to you further the affairs of the lesser levels, to our wishes.We do not negotiate. We do not dictate.We cause to happen. You, Walmsley, we have caused. These events now resolve the persistent pain caused by competition between yourselves, the Naturals, and the mechanicals. You have yet to recognize the clays, for they lie beyond your ken. Be warned that this is a dynamic equilibrium, not a stasis. Conflict will return. It must. But for now, rest. You may be used again.\nSIX\n\nLiving in the Substrate\n\nI'd be perfectly happy to just lie here.\" Nikka smiled. \"To just hold each other.\"\n\n\"You've confused me with someone else.\" Nigel felt comfortable, too, but something in him wasn't ready to settle in. To dissolve into the moment, skating, skating . . .\n\n\"You don't have to perform, you know.\"\n\n\"I don't think of it as a performance.\"\n\n\"I'm competent to deal with a gentleman who is a bit worn out. In fact, I'm adept.\"\n\n\"I know. My memory is not completely gone, you'll find. I believe I can even find the right places without a map.\"\n\n\"Just feel your way along? I can help with that.\"\n\n\"So I see.\" The warmth never waned for him. \"Um. Such an earth mother you are.\"\n\n\"Mmmmm.\"\n\n\"Well, at least you can't talk.\"\n\n\"Mmmm.\"\n\n\"Talk later.\"\n\n\"Mmmm.\"\n\n\"Later, yes, much better. There, right.\"\n\nAfter some time he said, \"Did you think, to help me work on other ideas, modes, whatever\u2014I would take a vow of chastity, become a monk?\"\n\n\"I thought you said the advantage of this way was that I couldn't talk?\"\n\n\"Talk later, I said. This is partly later.\"\n\n\"Hair splitter.\"\n\n\"I'll split more than that. This could be well more than halfway to later, for all you know.\"\n\n\"Mmmm. Not your style.\"\n\n\"Don't be so sure. 'I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled.' Eliot.\"\n\n\"I know it's Eliot.\"\n\n\"How wonderful, to have such a lofty conversation while\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up!\"\n\nHe did, for once.\n\n\"That was wonderful,\" Nigel said. He felt warm, relaxed. Exactly as if he had just made love to her. Nikka's aroma even lingered in his nostrils. Remarkably effective, better than a real, Natural memory could have been.\n\n\"You are welcome.\"\n\nThe bird slid its eyes around its face in what it must have meant as an expression. Nigel looked away. Somehow, no matter the immensity of intelligence behind the thing, it never got this bit right.\n\n\"Everything was just the way I recall it.\"\n\n\"That was all?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said grudgingly. \"Better, of course.\"\n\n\"We could augment your memory with further detail.\"\n\n\"Completely convincing, no doubt.\"\n\n\"In context and fulfilling.\"\n\n\"But of course fabricated.\"\n\nThe bird smiled. This did not work at all on a beak. \"Detail is seldom well carried forward by cycled memories such as yours.\"\n\n\"But they at least are ours.\"\n\n\"There is no clear distinction.\"\n\n\"You add and heighten. The sheets just then were a light blue silk. Cool but not slick. I doubt that I could recall that.\"\n\n\"True. Which way would you rather have it?\"\n\n\"Or her scent. It persisted until I fully breathed in again.\"\n\n\"I will have to tune that down then.\"\n\n\"You're dodging my point\u2014\"\n\n\"I think the reverse is true.\"\n\nIrritatingly quick, this fowl. \"I can't tell which is _mine._ \"\n\n\"The interpolation procedures I use are akin to yours. When you remember naturally, you also stitch in minutiae to fill out your own internal picture-dramas.\"\n\nNigel nodded sourly. \"From now on, thanks, I shall much prefer to hobble forward with my own thin remembrance.\"\n\n\"The past is what survives.\"\n\n\"In the long run\u2014\"\n\n\"Nothing survives.\" The bird gave a credible imitation of being amused, eyes dancing, but its voice remained flat.\n\n\"Even you?\"\n\n\"Let me be more exact in this serial acoustic representation. No thing survives.\"\n\n\"You're not a thing?\"\n\nWith a pang Nigel felt himself getting drawn away, when a deep part of him wanted only to luxuriate in the immediacy of Nikka's memory. His damnable curiosity always got the better of him.\n\n\"The 'I' who presumes to speak for you is not a thing either.\"\n\n\"Um. You have no physical substrate?\"\n\n\"For the moment it is convenient. In the long run it will not be.\"\n\n\"So the mechs were right. Electron-positron plasmas lie ahead.\"\n\n\"That destiny shall unfold on a truly immense time scale. The decay of all large particles\u2014'baryons,' in your terms\u2014will be slow.\"\n\n\"But there's a finite lifetime to it all. Stars run down. The center cannot hold. Nobody's going to be sailing bright eternity.\"\n\n\"You are doing it now, primate. There will never be more time ahead than at this instant. And infinities are a matter of taste.\"\n\n\"Ummm. The positron plasma, I saw it. It'll happen. Still, it seemed a bit like Chicken Little to be fretting about it.\"\n\nThe bird wavered just an instant. Nigel wondered if this reflected the time for it to consult itself, or rummage through the Galactic Library, searching out primate childhood stories. He envisioned seeker programs darting down musty info-corridors, sniffing for\n\nLittle, Chicken; see: fowl/consciousness/cultural inventory.\n\n\"You are correct. There is a more immediate danger.\"\n\n\"I don't suppose it's anything that our order of being can do anything about?\"\n\n\"Scarcely. The vacuum is unstable.\"\n\nNigel grimaced. Was it a primate quirk to be irked by this bird, presuming that he could instantly access all the jargon in his own tongue? No, probably just a symptom of age.\n\n\"Which means?\" he finally conceded.\n\n\"The presumed quantum mechanical ground state of this universe is not in fact a ground state. It is metastable.\"\n\n\"Um. So it can . . .\"\n\n\"Fall to the lowest quantum state. A state in which all particle masses, spins, and other fundamental properties will be different.\"\n\nMetastable conditions could decay at any time, like a radioactive nucleus. Of all conceivable threats, this was surely the most elliptical. \"Cut the coyness.\"\n\n\"All information lodged in particles will be lost when these properties change. It is called the Tumult.\"\n\n\"Everything gets erased.\"\n\n\"And the universe begins anew.\"\n\n\"That's what you're worried about.\"\n\n\"Among other points.\"\n\nFor the moment he did not feel like asking for the \"other points.\" Best to constrain conversations with beings like this, or he would be completely lost. \"That's quite enough for the moment. Do\u2014did\u2014the mechs know?\"\n\n\"The Exalteds\u2014the higher order mechanicals\u2014did. To their lower orders they explained that the electron-positron gas was their final goal.\"\n\n\"I saw that.\" Above the horizon had soared hard, cold destinies, sheets of living light.\n\n\"The same fundamental science, however, may apply to surviving the Tumult.\"\n\nIt sent into his mind a flash-image: a gray, seamless wall. Onrushing. Germinated at a point by a nanosecond's handclap, then swelling, engorged on energies of the vacuum, snowplowing out. Behind the front, sparkling births of blank specks, a blackboard fresh for God's writing. The Tumult.\n\n\"So they were in fact worried about this? An even worse danger?\"\n\n\"They labor upon this now.\"\n\n\"And all our feud with mechs . . . ?\"\n\n\"It was an inevitable feature of lower life-forms. Think of it as resembling predator-prey relations, which strike a statistical equilibrium in the wild. The mechanicals had gotten out of equilibrium. Their harvesting of the Phylum Magnetic was like\u2014\" it paused, \"a squirrel scavenging your lunch, which you had left on your picnic table, while you answered a telephone call.\"\n\n\"So what we saw as a grand struggle\u2014\"\n\n\"It has become an inefficiency.\"\n\nOceans of blood spilled, minds crushed like fresh flowers beneath a steel boot. \"Inefficiency.\"\n\n\"The Highers wished a resolution. This was\u2014\"\n\n\"Let me guess. The easiest.\"\n\n\"Of course. In your way of thinking, at least.\"\n\n\"And you mean the term 'at least' quite precisely.\"\n\n\"Precisely.\"\nSEVEN\n\nHard Copy\n\nKilleen found the Restorer by himself. When he came back with the Shibo he looked tired but smiled a lot. Toby found the Shibo very much like his memory of her. Besen wasn't so sure.\n\n\"How was Resurrection City?\" he asked Killeen.\n\n\"Had to go through three Lanes to find it. Mechs'd messed it up pretty bad.\"\n\nThe Shibo said very precisely to Toby, \"I do wish that you had not removed my chips.\"\n\nToby seemed to remember her speaking in a more clipped way, quick and to the point. He figured that the Restorer had installed a speaking augmentation to correct for damage. \"I had my reasons.\"\n\n\"I had mine.\" She stared at Toby until he looked away.\n\nThe next waxing Killeen seemed out of sorts. It got worse for three more days and then Killeen and Shibo had an argument right in camp, loud and abrasive and ending with her throwing a pot at him.\n\nNext day she moved out of his bunk and made her own.\n\nShe wouldn't talk to anybody about it. Killeen of course never did.\n\nToby could find no way to approach her, she seemed prickly, all angles and angers. Finally he asked her straight out how she liked her new state. \"I don't,\" she said.\n\n\"Rather be in chip?\"\n\nHe meant it as light and friendly but her face clouded. \"Yeasay.\"\n\n\"Heysay, life's more than any Aspect.\"\n\n\"I was a _Personality._ \"\n\n\"Well, yeasay, but\u2014\"\n\n\"This way is _analog._ In digital, you can . . .\"\n\n\"Can what?\"\n\n\"You would not know.\"\n\n\"Try me.\"\n\n\"You can . . . fly.\" She shook her head violently. \"No, that is not it. Better than flying.\"\n\nShe tried to talk about it but all Toby could get was that being a real person was like crawling through mud that you could never wash off. Digital was _clean_ and _pure_ and, well, something more, too.\n\nShe kept trying to tell him how it was and getting frustrated at the words that came out of her mouth, as though they belonged to somebody else. He guessed that in some way he could not understand, they did.\n\nShibo took some Bishops and went to live a short distance away right after that. Killeen didn't talk about her and by that time Toby had a hundred other things to do. The Family wanted to spread out through the esty. Success, or at least survival, brought out the worst. People who fought well together turned disagreeable. He worked with them, using some bits of Cermo that operated something like Aspects and Faces working in concert. Besen took up a lot of his time, too, but that was not work.\n\nKilleen had his morose times but held the Family together when some factions wanted to take off into other Lanes. Toby thought Killeen was doing a pretty fine job and told him so and they got along better. But his father had his moods. Killeen wouldn't talk to Shibo at all anymore.\n\nPretty soon Toby just gave up on the whole Shibo thing. There was plenty to do, yeasay.\nEIGHT\n\nThe Thirst That from the Soul Doth Rise\n\nAh, you disgusting old fart, Nigel thought. Hopeless. He could call up the pictures, sounds, aromas, with utter ease\u2014\n\nNASA. Dear dead old Post Office of a space program, when what the world needed was Federal Express.\n\nHe had said that to Nikka, over thirty thousand years ago.\n\nNASA. Both telescopes and rockets were round right cylinders, each with a point. Masculine tech, right-angled in all its particulars, wedded to the graceful curves of the feminine; collaboration.\n\nCybervores. He had watched them feeding once. Not so much beings as moving appetites, organizations of currents and plasma that could feed upon metals, ionizing them to produce satisfying gauzy halos of effervescent tasty potentials.\n\nSo many sharp, clear memories.\n\nSo deeply, thoroughly, not his own. Not now.\n\nUnearned memories stick in the mind, give it an emptiness that lies beyond words.\n\nHe had known the truth in that small, passing moment when he met Killeen. Sure enough, the old frontal lobes yielded up the instant datum that he had met this man before. Had caused his people to be cast down into planetary darkness, to suffer torment, to resist and trim and emerge through millennia of pain.\n\nBut Nigel could remember nothing more of Killeen.\n\n _Been edited out,_ he realized.\n\nHe wondered for a long while, which number he was. Two, eight, ten? Measuring the span of time, the scattered event-slabs, it had to be more. Fifty?\n\n\"That's why,\" he said to the wall of blank blackness that sheared away half the space. It was like standing next to a wall that absorbed every sound, giving nothing back.\n\n **WHY DO YOU ASK?**\n\n\"I don't want to be recalled and used. Not the next time some glitch surfaces in the Syntony.\"\n\n **THAT MAY BE GRANTED. BUT IT IS NOT YOUR RIGHT.**\n\n\"I'm not talking bloody rights.\"\n\n **YOU DO NOT HAVE THE PHYLUM RANK TO EVEN PHRASE THE QUESTION.**\n\n\"Phrase it for me.\"\n\n **THE SYNTONY SHALL DISPOSE.**\n\nAnd that was all it would ever say.\nNINE\n\nThe Pain of Eternity\n\nNaked chance means order springing forth from chaos.\"\n\nHe was sitting on a wooden bench. Back of the lecture hall. Cold morning, fingers too chilled to take notes. Cambridge. Smell of freshly poured asphalt from the window cocked open a mere inch.\n\nThe lecturer looked as bored as the class. Black robe tattered, ostentatiously so. Worn over a tweed jacket, maroon trousers. Awful. Nigel yawned, stretched, wished for tea.\n\n\"If the fully developed eye\u2014yours, for example\u2014evolved in one leap of untamed chance, in one generation, that would be utterly unlikely. Eyes came into the world by gradual addition of slightly better traits. The difficulty comes when we try to imagine higher orders than ourselves. We must argue that the odds against untamed chance giving forth fully fashioned, perfect beings are remote, impossibly remote.\"\n\nNigel sat upright. If evolution was universal, then this rule applied to deities as well. They would arise from incremental change. And none be perfect.\n\nThe Syntony included.\n\n\"I'm competent to deal with a gentleman who is a bit worn out. In fact, I'm adept.\"\n\n\"I know. My memory is not completely gone, you'll find. I believe I can even find the right places without a map.\"\n\n\"Just feel your way along? I can help with that.\"\n\n\"So I see.\" The warmth never waned for him. \"Um. Such an earth mother you are.\"\n\n\"Mmmmm.\"\n\n\"Well, at least you can't talk.\"\n\n\"Mmmm.\"\n\n\"Talk later.\"\n\n\"Mmmm.\"\n\n\"Later, yes, much better. There, right.\"\n\nA long drifting time. Gray curtains of light folded him.\n\n\"I thought you said the advantage of this way was that I couldn't talk?\"\n\n\"Talk later, I said. This is partly later.\"\n\n\"Eliot.\"\n\n\"I know it's bloody Eliot.\"\n\n\"How wonderful, to have such a lofty conversation while\u2014\"\n\nLounging back on their massive bed, Nikka laughed despite herself. \"Can't you do your medical some other time? I was just getting in the mood.\"\n\n\"I'll recalibrate my secretors. Add some hormones. Give you an even better run for your money.\"\n\n\"I wasn't planning on paying money, and I didn't have running in mind.\"\n\nHe groaned as he tuned digital controls that the peeling had exposed. \"A literalist! God spare the sacred erotic impulse from their kind.\"\n\n\"I don't understand why you keep me when I don't want to be kept.\"\n\nNigel was sitting in a stiff-backed chair, as if for a job interview. In a way, it was.\n\n **YOU ARE THE ORIGINAL. WE KEEP YOU IN ORDER TO CHECK THE FIDELITY OF COPIES.**\n\n\"That _uber-Nigel_ I saw once?\"\n\n **THAT AND OTHERS.**\n\n\"So I'm kept within a constricted parameter space?\"\n\n **TO BE CERTAIN THAT MIXING WITH FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT INFLUENCES DOES NOT CHANGE YOU INALTERABLY.**\n\n\"I _want_ to change inalterably.\"\n\n **HIGHER PHYLA HAVE HIGHER USES. THE SYNTONY IS ENGAGED IN PURSUITS FOR WHICH YOUR STANDARDIZED, FIDUCIARY REPRESENTATION IS ESSENTIAL. THIS KNOWLEDGE SHOULD PROPERLY BE ENOUGH FOR YOU.**\n\n\"You don't know me all that bloody well, do you?\"\n\n **WE KNOW YOU UTTERLY.**\n\n\"You _never_ will.\"\n\n **WE CAN SIMULATE YOU WITHIN FINE TOLERANCES.**\n\n\"A copy's not the original.\"\n\n **THAT IS THE POINT THE SYNTONY WISHES YOU TO UNDERSTAND.**\n\n\"I shall wear my trousers rolled.\"\n\n **WHAT?**\n\nMany millennia ago, they had made the Snark. Only rudimentary elements of what was to be the Syntony had spanned a tenuous web over the galaxy then, machines searching out life, protracted voyages down stretching corridors of eons and parsecs. The Snark was a low grade device, but records of it\u2014that is, the digital self\u2014had to remain somewhere. What bloody use was a Galactic Library if you couldn't look up such?\u2014The fossil debris of a life lived and loved and gone?\n\nSo they brought the Snark to him.\n\n _You are something like the form I knew,_ it allowed.\n\nTo Nigel the Snark was a floating cloud, green electrical forks working within. Nothing like the sphere he had actually seen near the moon. But this was not real space he was in, either. \"Remember the universe of essences?\"\n\n _You are in it still._\n\n\"And you?\"\n\n _I still am not. You are a spontaneous product of matter. We lack windows you possess._\n\nHe was surprised, something he had thought impossible now. Even here, they carried their baggage. \"And the other way 'round, I expect.\"\n\n _As must be. All windows are partial._\n\n\"Some are rather larger.\"\n\n _You seem more varied now, greater than before._\n\n\"I've . . . traveled.\"\n\n _There are still the currents in you that I reported upon. In our Directory you had to stand for your civilization, a raw sampling, added to the torrent of electromagnetics your world sent out so unthinkingly._\n\n\"Pleasant way to put it. We yammer a lot.\"\n\n _At that time you said, \"The damned speak frantically.\"_\n\n\"Damned right.\"\n\n _Mortality does not damn. You in the universe of essences have virtues._\n\n\"Damned lucky, maybe.\" Nigel laughed airily, transparent. \"But still damned.\"\n\n _That same spice. Laughter._\n\nLater he realized that the Snark was a recording, averaged over all the representations it had in the several million years of its lifespan. It was not an individual, but a set. This trait he could not assess. When one met an old friend, one assumed that it was the same person. Cells replaced here and there, more lines in the face\u2014but the same.\n\nIn the long run, living embedded in and among the Syntony, the question was meaningless.\n\nJust as futile was figuring what Nigel's family flight\u2014Nikka, Benjamin, Angelina, Ito, where/when were they now?\u2014forward in time, voyaging through the Esty, had meant.\n\nMechs lived there, fought with humanity. Yet Nigel had seen them destroyed in their fevered ecstasies.\n\nDid that mean they would be back? That unknown struggles would overlap and rage through a future altered but not stopped by the Trigger Codes?\n\nApparently. Perhaps the Walmsley-Amajhi clan had visited something genuinely quantum-mechanical. The stops in the Transits could have been state vectors of potential. Some of those futures would in fact occur. Others were erased by the mech plagues. He would have to voyage again forward through a Worm, to discover which.\n\nYet if the Grey Mech had killed them all, he was quite sure he would not be thinking over the problem. He would not be.\n\nSo he confined himself to thinking about cases he could fathom, at least possibly.\n\nMechs had a built-in flaw, the pleasure plague, from their antiquity. So did even the super-chimp humans, carrying potential for error in their add-on mental architecture. For they were still assemblages, improved only by additions. All chimps bore their built-in imperatives, which they experienced not as ideas, but as emotions. Lusts, hungers, fears\u2014shorthand for evolution's lessons. It was all part of the richness. That, he found comforting.\n\nJoy. That he still had. As simple as sunshine.\n\nJoy without obvious cause. Earthy, animal spirits. Sometimes it was no great shakes being a primate, but it was always worthwhile being a mammal.\n\nHe laughed at some unconscious irony in the Snark. \"Bit heavy, don't you think? Pig irony.\"\n\nIt remarked, _When you make that sound you seem to have a brief moment of what it is like to live as I do, beyond the press of time._\n\n\"As I am now? In this place?\"\n\n _Yes. But you have carried your essences with you. Your windows._\n\nNigel laughed.\n\n\"That dog was in the room when we were going at it.\"\n\n\"I didn't mind. Perhaps by now they've evolved to the point where at the crucial moment they politely look away.\"\n\n\"Moment? You think it lasted only a moment?\"\n\n\"Well, let's say it was timeless.\"\n\n\"That's better. I do seem to recall the dog barking at an important point.\"\n\n\"Oh? I thought that was you.\"\n\n\"Then I'll never know, will I, the uses you've made of Walmsley.\"\n\n **YOU CANNOT KNOW THEM.**\n\n\"Then there is no ending.\"\n\n **LOCALLY, THERE IS. GLOBALLY, NO.**\n\n\"Alexandria . . . ?\"\n\n _Yes?_\n\n\"I want to\u2014I\u2014\"\n\n _Not that time yet._\n\nHe snapped, \"I'm like a child, told when to go to bed?\"\n\n _This isn't bed. Not nearly as much fun, for one thing._\n\n\"I'm . . . tired.\"\n\n _Not physically though._\n\n\"Perhaps I've seen too much.\"\n\n _It's not your moment yet._\n\nWith sharp anger he barked, \"It wasn't your moment either.\"\n\n _You're still getting hard at night, just thinking of me, aren't you?_\n\n\"I can hardly deny it, can I? You seem to live inside my head.\"\n\n _Exactly, lover! And as long as I do\u2014well, maybe it wasn't my moment, back there. Maybe I'm still here._\n\n\"Copies aren't originals.\"\n\n _A lady appreciates what compliments come her way. Especially since I know you have Nikka._\n\n\"I hope this isn't disloyal to her.\"\n\n _It can't be. We are all the loves we have known\u2014that's my own attempt at self-definition._\n\n\"I like that. A definition free of the worn-out carcass, the body.\"\n\n\"For the Buddhist bodhisattva, it's the feats and sufferings of others that provide the savor to immortality.\"\n\n **FINITY IS ITS OWN REWARD.**\n\n\"Limitations give life?\"\n\n\"Moment? You think it lasted only a moment?\"\n\n\"Well, let's say it was timeless.\"\n\n\"Does human action have any meaning?\" he asked in despair.\n\n **OF COURSE.**\n\nBut they would say no more. The abyss.\n\n\"No!\" He shouted at the wall. \"No!\"\n\nThe wall absorbed all and gave nothing back.\n\n **LOCALLY, THERE IS. GLOBALLY, NO.**\n\nHe knew, of course, that it was pointless to expect human traits (\"chimpanzee conventions,\" he sometimes termed them) such as compassion or pity to appear in the Highers or magnetics or any goddamn superior Phylum. But he could hope.\n\nTheir answer came finally as a forgiving blankness.\nCoda\n\nBishops spread through the esty, diluting themselves into the myriad pathways open and opening and always coming. Infinity before them, infinity behind.\n\nThe next Cap'n of Family Bishop was Shibo.\n\nAfter her, Besen.\n\nToby was married to her by then and preferred to work behind the scenes. That gave him time to go off with Quath and play hooky from adulthood.\n\nOccasionally they saw the Nigel Walmsley representation and he seemed the same as ever.\n\nThroughout the esty there were many graves. The ground was full of beings who had suffered through their troubles but were now free. All knew that soon they would be equal to those others, inextricable from and anonymous with all of them, sharing a vast sameness at last.\n\nAll was now quite modern and different around there and most of the ancient names on the graves mean nothing to anybody. There are Cards aplenty and Bishops and even a few Dodgers.\n\nNearby, old markers relate the names in a language now dispersed or dead. Killeen Bishop. Nearby, slightly less worn, Toby Bishop. These graves are unusually large, suggesting to archaeologists that these were from the Hunker Down Era.\n\nAlways slightly distanced, alone and apart, Nigel Walmsley is buried on a separate knoll, in full view of the ocean of night.\nAfterword to the Galactic Center Series\n\nThis series began as a short story and expanded to about a million words. Enough! When I began, I had no idea that the range would expand beyond our solar system, much less to the center of the galaxy.\n\nTo the best of my ability I have kept the imaginings of these novels within the constraints set by astronomical observations. The explosion of our astronomical knowledge has been one of the wonders of the last few decades, but it's been tough on fiction writers.\n\nIn the last two decades the Very Large Array and other new varieties of telescopes have opened windows on our galactic center, with astonishing results. I've had to change my own ideas and, indeed, some of the inventions in this novel arise from theory as well\u2014particularly from advances in the theory of gravitation.\n\nPlainly something enormously powerful is going on at the galactic center, apparently driven by a vast explosion about a million years ago. Electrodynamic effects are strikingly strong within a few hundred light-years of the exact dynamical center, about which the entire spiral disk spins. There, the magnetic field is at least a hundred times more intense than is typical in such mild-mannered, suburban neighborhoods of the galaxy as our own. Apparently, the long, luminous strands there derive from this strong field. They are neon signs, some a hundred light-years long, announcing the work of forces unseen. These, in turn, suggest that in the far more energetic active galactic nuclei of distant galaxies, magnetic fields may play a shaping role.\n\nSo, of course, I made magnetic structures a plot element in this series. In later novels\u2014particularly in _Eater_ and _The Sunborn_ \u2014I've worked these ideas into different guises. Partly this comes from the theoretical research I have done on the central galactic region, wearing my hat as a professor of physics. The tension between these roles plays out in my position at the University of California, Irvine. Many faculty think there is (or should be) a firm boundary between science and fiction. They don't seem to fathom that you cannot do anything unless you can first envision it.\n\nIt has been an unusual experience to conjure up imaginary events about a place that figured also in my hard, detailed calculations. Freed of the bounds of _The Astrophysical Journal,_ I have felt at liberty to speculate on what processes might have transpired over the galaxy's ten billion years of furious cooking, to create forms of life and intelligence beyond our ken. (Coincidence: Just after writing the above paragraph, I got a note from the editor of that same august journal, appreciating an earlier novel. Someday I must attempt to trace the interactions between science and science fiction. Or, better, let an energetic graduate student do it. There's a good doctoral thesis lurking there. . . . )\n\nThis series owes a debt to the scientists, editors, academics, and writers who have kept me going over two decades with ideas, advice, encouragement, and insightful reading. These include, in no particular order, Marvin Minsky, Sheila Finch, David Hartwell, Elisabeth Malartre, Mark Martin, David Brin, Betsy Mitchell, Martin Rees, David Samuelson, Steven Harris, Stephen Hawking, Lou Aronica, Joe Miller, Jennifer Hershey, Gary Wolfe, Norman Spinrad, David Kolb and Arthur C. Clarke. Stimulating ideas kept drawing me on. In preparing this new edition, Jaime Levine and Devi Pilli have been enormously useful and insightful, catching my many errors.\n\nI especially thank Mark Morris of UCLA, who in the early 1990s assembled and directed the International Astronomical Union's Symposium on the Center of the Galaxy. The data and theories of that and later meetings spurred me to look beyond the models I had concocted for magnetic phenomena at the galactic center. Speaking at length about my own notions, and having them raked over by the observers\u2014always a daunting prospect for a theorist!\u2014made me confront the bewildering profusion of neon-brilliant displays, violent explosions, piercing energies, and mysteriously highly organized structures that mark our galactic center. Doing so opened my imagination to the possibilities of life (and, indeed, of death) in so virulently extreme a place. These took a long while to develop; one has distractions, particularly with a day job.\n\nAnd then there is Real Life, too, always demanding. My ideas about life in the universe have changed greatly since I set grumpy Nigel Walmsley on his odyssey in 1970 (beginning with that short story, \"Icarus Descending,\" which was later slightly adapted and now opens _In the Ocean of Night_ ). Despite such evolutions, I have tried to keep these novels consistent. Events spanning several tens of thousands of years are not often reconciled, especially when the author has been off doing other things.\n\nThis concluding volume of the series, and the novella written afterward, \"A Hunger for the Infinite,\" comprise all I now wish to write about the stretched future. The whole series echoes, for me, with the haunting facts of our mayfly lives. No one reading this will know what our destiny is on the galactic stage. Indeed, we may not have one, unless we venture more boldly out into our own backyard of a solar system, and then dream of even greater stages upon which we can perform our dramas. It is not at all obvious that we will.\n\nI may venture back into this universe in future, if the impulse occurs, but the basic plot and lines of reasoning are here set forth. What a long, strange trip it's been.\n\nSeptember 2004\nTimeline of Galactic Series\n\n2019A.D. | Nigel Walmsley encounters the Snark, a mechanical scout.  \n---|---  \n2024| Ancient alien starship found wrecked in Marginis crater, on Earth's moon.  \n2041| First signal received at Earth from Ra.  \n2049| First near-light-speed interstellar probes.  \n2060| Modified asteroid ships launched, using starship technology extracted from Marginis wreck.  \n2064|  _Lancer_ starship launched with Nigel Walmsley aboard.  \n2066| Discovery of machine intelligence Watchers.  \n2067| First robotic starship explorations. Swarmers and Skimmers arrive at Earth.  \n2076|  _Lancer_ arrives at Ra. Discovery of the \"microwave-sighted\" Natural society.  \n2077|  _Lancer_ departs Ra.  \n2081| Mechanicals trigger nuclear war on Earth.  \n2085| Starship _Lancer_ destroyed at Pocks. Watcher ship successfully attacked, with heavy human losses.  \n2086| Nigel Walmsley and others escape in Watcher ship, toward Galactic Center. Humans launch robot starship vessels to take mechanical technology to Earth.  \n2088| Humans contain Swarmer-Skimmer invasion. Alliance with Skimmers.  \n2095| Heavy human losses in taking of orbital Watcher ships. Annihilation of Watcher fleet. No mechanical technology captures due to suicide protocols among Watchers.  \n2097| Second unsuspected generation of Swarmers emerges.  \n2108| First-in-flight message received from Walmsley expedition: \"We're still here. Are you there?\"  \n2111| Final clearing of Earth's oceans.  \n2128| Robot vessels from Pocks arrive at Earth carrying mechanical technology. Immediate use by recovering human industries.  \n2175| Second mechanical-directed invasion of Earth, using targeted cometary nuclei from Oort cloud. Rebuilding of human civilization.  \n2302| Third mechanical-directed invasion of Earth. The Aquila Gambit begins successive novas in near-Earth stars. Beginning of Ferret Time.  \n2368| First mechanical attempt to make Sun go nova. Failure melts poles of Earth.  \n2383| Second nova attempt. Continents severely damaged.  \n2427| Fourth mechanical-directed invasion of Earth. Rebuilding of human civilization.  \n2593| Fifth mechanical-directed invasion of Earth. Diplomatic ploy thwarted.  \n2763| Fifty-seventh Walmsley message received: \"Are you there?\"  \n3264| First expedition launched toward Galactic Center from Earth.  \n4455| First appearance of fourth chimpanzee species; clear divergence from host, _Homo sapiens,_ the third species.\n\nFLIGHT OF HUMAN FLEET TO GALACTIC CENTER \"THE BIG JUMP\"\n\n29,079 | Formation of added geometries to Wedge space-time around the central black hole. Old One manipulation of local Galactic Center space-time, apparently in anticipation of further mechanical-Natural violence. Mechanical forms carry out first incursions into Old One structures.  \n---|---  \n29,694| Walmsley group arrives at Galactic Center in Watcher craft.  \n29,703| First human entry into Wedge. Some communication with Old Ones.  \n29,741| Arrival of Earth fleet expedition at Galactic Center.  \n29,744| Meeting of Earth expedition and Walmsley group.  \n30,020-| The \"Great Times\" of human development. Unsuc-  \n34,567| cessful search for Galactic Library. Successive conflicts with mechanicals. Development of higher layers of mechanical \"sheet intelligences.\" Philosophical conflicts within mechanical civilizations. Formation of mechanical artistic philosophy.  \n34,567-| Chandelier Age. Humans protected themselves  \n35,812| against rising mechanical incursions. Participation of earlier humans from the Walmsley expedition. Some collaboration with Cyber organic/mechanical forms. Discovery of Galactic Library in the Wedge.  \n35,812-| The \"Hunker Down.\" Exodus from the Chandeliers  \n37,483| to many planets within 80 light-years of Absolute Center. Includes High Arcology Era, Late Arcology Era, and High Citadel Age as human societies contract under Darwinnowing effects of mechanical competition.  \n37,518| Fall of Family Bishop Citadel on Snowglade, termed the \"Calamity.\"  \n37,524| Escape of Family Bishop from Snowglade in ancient human vessel. Clandestine oversight of this band by Mantis level mechanicals.  \n37,529| Surviving Bishops reach nearest star, encounter Cybers. Defeat local mechanicals. Adopt some human refugees.  \n37,530| Bishops leave, escorted by Cybers and cosmic string.  \n37,536| Bishops reach Absolute Center, enter Wedge.  \n37,538| Temporal sequences become stocastically ordered. Release of Trigger Codes into mechanical minds. Death of most mechanical forms. Intervention of Highers to rectify damage done by excessive mechanical expansion.  \n| Preservation of several human varieties. Archiving of early forms in several deeply embedded representations.  \n| Beginning of cooperation between Higher mechanically-based forms and organic (\"Natural\") forms. Decision to address the larger problems of all life-forms by Syntony, in collaboration with aspects of lower forms.\n\nBeginning of mature phase of self-organized forms.\n\nEND OF PREAMBLE. LATER EVENTS CANNOT BE THUS REPRESENTED.\nAbout the Author\n\nGREGORY BENFORD is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. His research encompasses both theory and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics. His fiction has won many awards, including two Nebula Awards, one John W. Campbell Award, and one British SF Award. Dr. Benford makes his home in Laguna Beach, California.\nMore Gregory Benford!\n\nPlease turn this page for a preview of\n\n _The Sunborn_\n\nAvailable wherever books are sold.\n\n1. **Firm, friendly, positive**\n\nJulia turned her best side toward the camera, a three-quarter shot, and spread her arms. Okay, maybe a bit theatrical, but she had the backdrop for it.\n\n\"Welcome to Earth on Mars!\" She always opened firm, friendly, positive. She swept an arm around, taking in the stubby trees with their odd purple-green leaves, the raked mounds barely sprouting brownish-green patches, and above it all, the shiny curve of the dome, a hundred meters high. Beyond the dome's ultraviolet screening hung the dark of space. The somber cap was always there, reminding them of how little atmosphere shielded them.\n\n\"We showed you the inflation of the big dome a month ago, the planting of trees right after\u2014now we have grass.\"\n\n _Not any breed of grass you've ever seen before, though; it's a genetically modified plant more like a dwarf bamboo, and technically bamboo is a grass, just a really stiff one, so . . ._\n\n\"It'll be a while before we can play football on it, true. We're pretty sure nothing like grass ever grew on the surface of ancient Mars even, back in the warm and wet period. So this prickly little fuzz\"\u2014she stooped to stroke it\u2014\"is a first. It'll help along the big job that the microbes are doing down in the ground already\u2014breaking up the regolith, making it into real soil.\"\n\n _Was she sounding strained already? It was getting harder to strike the right level of enthusiasm in her weekly broadcast to Earthside. She could barely remember the days decades before, when she had broadcast several times a day, sometimes from this same spot. But then, they had been breaking new ground nearly every day. And betting pools on Earth gave new odds every time they went out in the rover on whether they'd come back alive. Usually about 50/50. The good ol' days._\n\nShe smiled, strolling to her right as Viktor panned the camera. She had to remember her marks and turns, and to keep out of camera view the crowd of camp staff watching nearby.\n\nViktor called, \"Cut, got sun reflecting in the lens.\"\n\n\"Whew! Good. Let me memorize a few lines . . .\"\n\nShe was glad for the break. It was getting harder to sound perky. The Consortium people had been grousing about that lately. But then, they had done so periodically, over the two decades she and Viktor had been doing their little shows. Media mavens had some respect for _The Mars Couple_ (the title of the Broadway musical about them), but the long shadow of the Consortium, which had backed the _2018 First Landing_ (the movie title), wanted to keep them on the air for the worldwide subscriber base\u2014and always pumping the numbers higher, of course. Axelrod, still the head of the Consortium, _The Man Who Sold Mars_ (the miniseries title), and now probably the wealthiest man in the solar system, played diplomat between them and the execs Earthside. Exploration? Discovery\u2014yes, they still got to do some. But a safari that turned up nothing new\u2014like the Olympus Mons fiasco\u2014could drive down Consortium shares, send heads rolling at high corporate levels, and make headlines. So she and Viktor tried not to think too much about the eternal media issues. It never really helped.\n\nViktor was fiddling, changing the camera angle, and here came Andy Lang, trotting over with his studied grin. \"Julia, got an idea for a last shot.\"\n\n\"What is it?\" She looked beyond him and saw the two arm wings Andy had brought from Earth the year before, bright blue monolayer on a carbon strut. \"Oh\u2014well, look, we've done your flying stunt three times already.\"\n\n\"I'm thinking just a closing shot.\" He gestured up to the top of the dome, over a hundred meters above. \"I come off the top platform, swing around the eucalyptus clump, into Viktor's field of view\u2014after you do your last line.\"\n\n\"Ummm.\" She had to admit they had no good finishing image, and Earthside was always carping about that. \"You can do it?\"\n\n\"Been practicing. I've got the timing down.\" He was a big, muscular guy, an engineering wizard who had improved their geothermal system enormously. And a looker. Axelrod made sure to send them lookers. After all, thousands volunteered to work here every year. Why take the ugly ones when the worldwide audience liked eye candy?\n\nJulia looked up at the ledge platform near the dome peak. His earlier flights had flown around the dome's outer curve, pleasantly graceful. The eucalyptus stand at the dome's center was her pet project. She insisted on some blue gum trees from her Australian home, the forests north of Adelaide. Earthside dutifully responded with a funded contest among plant biologists to find a eucalyptus that could withstand the sleeting ultraviolet here. Of course the dome helped a lot; chemists had developed a miracle polymer that could billow into a broad dome, holding in nearly a full Earth atmosphere, and yet also subtract a lot of the UV from sunlight\u2014all without editing away the middle spectrum needed for plant growth.\n\nThe blue gums were a darker hue, but they grew rapidly in the Martian regolith. Of course she had to prepare the soil\u2014joyful days spent spading in the humus they had processed from their own wastes. The French called it _eau de fumier_ or spirit of manure and chronicled every centimeter of blue gum growth. She'd sprouted the seeds and nurtured the tiny seedlings fiercely. Once planted, their white flanks had grown astonishingly fast. Their leaves hung down, minimizing their exposure to the residual hard ultraviolet that got through the dome's filtering skin. But their trunks were spindly, with odd limbs sticking out like awkward elbows\u2014yet more evidence that bringing life to Mars was not going to be easy.\n\nShe considered Andy's idea. Andy was a media hit with the ladies Earthside, if perhaps a bit of a camera hog. She had been giving him all the air time he wanted lately, glad to offload the work. \"Okay, get on up there.\"\n\nShe checked the timing with Viktor while Andy shimmied up the climbing rope to the peak of the dome and its platform, the big arm wings strapped to his back making him look like a gigantic moth. They moved location so that Andy would be shielded from Viktor's view, until he came around the clump of whitebark eucalyptus trunks as Viktor panned upward from her concluding shot.\n\nIn a few minutes more they were ready to go. Julia wondered if she could ease out of this job altogether, letting Andy the Hunk take most of it. She made a mental note to tactfully broach the subject with Axelrod.\n\n\"Positions!\" Viktor called. Andy nodded from the platform, wings in place. \"On,\" Viktor said.\n\nWithout thinking about it Julia hit the same marker where she had left off and started. \"You can't imagine how thrilling it is to walk on Martian grass, without a space suit, breathing air that smells . . . well, I won't lie, still pretty dusty. But better, yes. To think that we used to test the rocks here for signs of water deposition! Once the raw frontier, now a park. Progress.\"\n\n _Of course the hard part was turning regolith rocks and sand into topsoil, but that's booooring, yes._ Earthside had developed some fierce strains of bacteria that could break down all comers\u2014old running shoes, hardbound books, insulation, packing buffers\u2014into rich black loam almost as you watched.\n\nShe ducked as a white shape hurtled by, narrowly missing her head. \"Chicken alert!\" she said lightly, gesturing toward it with her head. It squawked and flapped, turning like a feathered blimp with wings. \"Who would have thought chickens could have so much fun up here, in the low gravity? They find it far easier to fly here than on Earth. Of course we brought them here so we could have fresh eggs, and they do lay, so we predicted that part correctly. But we don't always know everything that's going to happen in a biological experiment. This is the Mars version of the chicken and egg problem.\"\n\nViktor smiled dutifully; they'd shared this little joke before. The Earthside producer would more probably wince. _Okay, back to the script._\n\nShe waved a hand to her right and Viktor followed the gesture with the camera, bringing in the view of the slopes and hills in the distance, beyond the green lances of the eucalyptus limbs. The slopes were still rusty red in the afternoon light, of course, far beyond the curved dome that sloped down to its curved tie-down wall eighty meters away. They stood out nicely with the green eucalyptus foreground. The other trees\u2014ranging from drought and cold-resistant shrubs from Tasmania, to hearty high-altitude species\u2014almost made a convincing forest. The \"grass\" was really a mixture of mosses, lichens and small tundra species, too. A big favorite of the staff was vegetable sheep, soft, pale clumps from New Zealand's high country. Convincing to the visual audience\u2014 _a golf course on Mars!_ \u2014but also able to survive a cold Martian night and even a sudden pressure drop. The toughest stuff from Earth, made still more rugged with bioengineering.\n\nAxelrod had insisted on the visuals. _Make it look Earthy, yes._ She had worked for years to make the inflated domes support life and there was still plenty to do. Making the raw regolith swarm with microbes to build soil, coaxing lichens onto the boulders used to help anchor the dome floors in place, being sure the roots of the first shrubs could survive the cold and prickly alkaline dirt. Years, yes, grubbing and figuring and trying everything she could muster. For a beginning.\n\n _Pay attention! You're on camera, and Viktor hates to reshoot._\n\n\"Ah, one of my faves . . .\" She altered course to pass by a baobab\u2014a tall, fat, tubular tree from western Australia, with only a few thin spidery limbs sprouting from its top, like a nearly bald man. Early settlers had used them to store food, take shelter, even as jail cells. On Mars they grew spectacularly fast, like eucalyptus, and nobody knew why. Aussie plants generally did better here, from the early greenhouse days of the first landing, onward. Maybe, the biologist in her said, this came from the low-energy biology of Australia. The continent had skated across the Pacific, its mountains getting worn down, minerals depleted, rainfall lessening, and life had been forced to adapt. A hundred million years of life getting by with less and less . . . much like Mars.\n\n\"For those of you who've loyally stuck with us through these\u2014wow, twenty-two years!\u2014I say thanks. Sometimes I think that this is all a dream, and days like this prove it. Grass on Mars! Or\"\u2014she grinned, tilting her head up a bit to let the filtered sunlight play on her still dark hair, using the only line she had prepared for this 'cast\u2014\"another way to say it, I started out with nothing and still have most of it left. Out there\u2014in wild Mars.\"\n\n _Not that this little patch is so domesticated. It's how we find out if raw regolith can become true soil, and what will grow well here._\n\n\"Already there are environmental groups trying to preserve original, ancient Mars from us invaders.\" She chuckled. \"If Mars were just bare stone and dust, I'd laugh\u2014I never did believe that rocks have rights. But since there's life here, they have a point.\"\n\nThis was just editorial patter, of course, while Viktor followed her on the walk toward the fountain. It tinkled and splashed in the foreground while she approached, Viktor shooting from behind her, so the camera looked through the trees, on through the clear dome walls to the dusty red landscape beyond. \"I like to gaze out, so that I can imagine what Mars was like in its early days, a hospitable planet.\" She turned, spread her hands in self-mockery. \"Okay, we now know from fossils that there were no really big trees\u2014nothing larger than a bush, in fact. But I can dream . . .\"\n\nShe smiled and tried to not make it look calculated. After a quarter century of peering into camera snouts, she had some media savvy. Still, she and Viktor thought in terms of, _If we do this, people will like it._ That had been a steadier guide through the decades than taking the advice about exploring Mars from the Earthside media execs of the Consortium, whose sole idea was, _If we do this, we'll maximize our global audience share, get ideas for new product lines, and/or optimize near-term profitability._\n\nShe paused beside the splashing fountain. She plucked up a cup they had planted there and drank some of the water. \"On Earth, you can drink all the water you want and leave the tap on between cupfuls. Here, nobody does.\" She smiled and walked on. \"You've seen this before, of course, but imagine if it were the only fountain you'd seen in a quarter century. That's why I come here to read, meditate, think. That\u2014and our newest wonder . . .\"\n\n _Let them wait._ She had learned that trick early on. Mars couldn't be chopped up into five-second image-bites and have any lasting impression. She circled around the constant-cam that fed a view to Earthside for the market that wanted to have the Martian day as a wall or window in their homes. She knew this view sold especially well in the cramped rooms of China and India. It was a solid but subtle advertisement.\n\n _Crowded? Here's a whole world, only a few dozen people on it, well, actually about ten dozen, and it has the same land area as the Earth. A different world entirely._\n\nThings were different, all right. The dome was great, the biggest of several, a full hundred and fifty meters tall. It would have been far more useful in the first years, when they still lived in apartment-sized habs. Now her pressure suit was supple, moving fluidly over her body as she walked and stooped. The first expedition suits had been the best of their era, but they'd still made you as flexible as a barely oiled Tin Man, as dextrous as a bear in mittens. The old helmets had misted over unless you remembered to swab the inside with ordinary dish soap. And the catheters had been always irksome, especially for women; now they fit beautifully.\n\nOutside, the wind whistled softly around the dome walls. Another reason she enjoyed the big dome\u2014the sighing winds. Sounds didn't carry well in Mars's thin atmosphere, and the habs were so insulated they were cut off from any outdoor noise.\n\nThe grass ended and she crunched over slightly processed regolith. Lichens could break the rock down, but they took time\u2014lots of it. So they'd taken shortcuts to make an ersatz soil. They mixed Martian dust and small gravel-sized rock bits with a lot of their organic waste, spaded in over decades\u2014everything from kitchen leftovers to lightly cleaned excrement. Add compost starter bacteria, keep moist, and wait. And hope. Microbes like free carbon, using it with water to frame elaborate molecules. She and Viktor had doled it out for years under the first, small dome before even trying to grow anything. The Book of Genesis got it all done in six days, but mere humans took longer.\n\nShe hit the marker they had laid out\u2014a rock\u2014and turned, pointing off-camera. \"And now\u2014 _ta-daah!_ \u2014we have a surprise. The first Martian swimming pool.\"\n\n _Okay, no swimming pools in Genesis\u2014but it's a step._\n\n\"I'm going for my first swim\u2014now.\" She shucked off her blue jumpsuit to reveal a red bikini. Her arms and legs were muscular, breasts midsized, skin pale, not too many wrinkles. Not really a babe, no, but she still got mash notes from middle-aged guys, somehow leaking through the e-mail filters.\n\n _Hey, we're looking for market share here!_ She grinned, turned and dived into the lapping clear water. Surfaced, gasped\u2014she wasn't faking, this really was her first swim in a quarter century\u2014and laughed with sheer pleasure (not in the script). Went into a breast stroke, feeling the tug and flex of muscle, and something inexpressible and simple burst in her. _Fun, yes\u2014not nearly enough fun on Mars._\n\n _Or water._ They had moved from the original base camp about eighteen years before. Once Earthside shipped enough gear to build a real water retrieval system, and a big nuke generator to run it, there seemed no point in not moving the hab and other structures\u2014mostly light and portable\u2014to the ice hills.\n\nMars was in some ways an upside-down world. On Earth, one would look for water in the low spots, stream channels. Here in Gusev, water lay waiting in the hilly hummocks, termed by geologists \"pingos.\" When water froze beneath blown dust, it thrust up as it expanded, making low hills of a few hundred meters. She recalled how Marc and Raoul had found the first ice, their drill bit steaming as ice sublimed into fog. Now Marc was a big vid star and Raoul ran Axelrod's solar energy grid on the Moon. Time . . .\n\nShe stopped at the pool edge, flipped out and sprang to her feet\u2014 _thanks, 0.38 g!_ \"The first swim on Mars, and you saw it.\" _Planned this shot a year ago, when I ordered the bikini . . . She donned a blue terry cloth bathrobe; the dryness made the air feel decidedly chilly. \"In case you're wondering, swimming doesn't feel any different here. That's because the water you displace makes you float\u2014we're mostly made of water, so the effect compensates. It doesn't matter much what the local gravity is.\"_\n\nOkay, slipped in some science while their guard was down.\n\n\"Behind all this is our improved water-harvesting system.\" She pointed out the dome walls, where pipes stretched away toward a squat inflated building. \"Robotic, nuclear powered. It warms up the giant ice sheets below us, pumps water to the surface. Took nine years to build\u2014whoosh! Thank you, engineers.\"\n\n _What did the water mean? She envisioned life on a tiny fraction of Mars with plentiful water\u2014no longer a cold, dusty desert. Under a pressurized dome the greenhouse effect raised the temperature to something livable. Link domes, blow up bigger ones, and you have a colony. They could grow crops big time. Red Kansas . . ._\n\nA gout of steam hissed from a release value, wreathing her in a moist, rotten-eggs smell. Andy had put the finishing touches on the deep thermal system, spreading the upwelling steam and hot water into a pipe system two meters below the dome floor. Their nuke generators ran the system, but most of the energy came for free from the magma lode kilometers below. Once the geologists\u2014\"areologists\" when on Mars, the purists said\u2014had drilled clean through the pingos and reached the magma, the upwelling heat melted the ice layers. Ducted upward, it made possible the eight domes they now ran, rich in moist air. Soon they would start linking them all. She smiled as she thought about strolling along tree-lined walkways from dome to dome, across windblown ripe wheat fields, no helmet or suit. Birds warbling, rabbits scurrying in the bushes . . .\n\nIn the first years their diet had been vegetarian. It made sense to eat plant protein directly, rather than lose 90 percent of the energy by passing it through an animal first. But from the first four rabbits shipped out they now had hundreds, and relished dinner on \"meat nights.\" They'd have one tonight, after this media show.\n\n\"So that's it\u2014life on Mars gets a bit better. We're still spending most of our research effort on the Marsmat\u2014the biggest conceptual problem in biology, we think. We just got a new crew to help. And pretty soon, on the big nuke rocket due in a week, we'll get a lot more gear and supplies. Onward!\"\n\nShe grinned, waved, and Viktor called, \"Is done.\"\n\nShe had waited long enough. She shucked off the bathrobe and tossed the wireless mike on top of the heap.\n\n\"Am still running.\"\n\n\"Check it for editing,\" she said quickly. \"I'm going to splash.\" She dived into the pool again. Grinning, Viktor caught it in slow-mo.\n\nJulia rolled over onto her back and took a few luxurious strokes. She caught Andy's kick off the platform and watched him swoop gracefully around the dome. It was still a bit of a thrill to see. They kept the dome at high pressure to support it, which added more lift for Andy. He kept his wings canted against the thermals that rose from the warm floor, camera-savvy, grinning relentlessly.\n\nEven with the lower gravity and higher air density, Viktor and Julia had been skeptical that it could work. But Axelrod and the Consortium board had loved the idea, seeing tourism as a long-term potential market.\n\nAnd Andy did look great, obviously having a lot of fun, his handsome legs forming a neat line as he arced above her. He rotated his arms, mimicking the motion birds made in flight, pumping thrust into his orbit. His turn sharpened into a smaller circle, coming swiftly around the steepled bulk of the big eucalyptus. His wings pitched to drive him inward and wind rippled his hair. She watched Viktor follow the accelerating curve with the camera, bright winds sharp against the dark sky. Good stuff.\n\nBut he was cutting it close to the tree, still far up its slope. The Consortium board had chosen Andy both for his engineering skills and this grinning, show-off personality, just the thing to perk up their audience numbers.\n\nHis T-shirt flapped and he turned in closer still. She lost sight of him behind the eucalyptus and when he came within view again there seemed to be no separation at all between his body and the tree. Ahead of him a limb stuck out a bit farther than the rest. He saw it and turned his right wing to push out, away, and the wing hit the limb. For an instant it looked as though he would bank down and away from the glancing brush. But the wing caught on the branch.\n\nIt ripped, showing light where the monolayer split away from the brace. Impact united with the change in flow patterns around his body. The thin line of light grew and seemed to turn Andy's body on a pivot, spinning him sideways.\n\nThe eucalyptus wrenched sideways. It was thin and the wrench of collision pulled it sideways.\n\nHe fought to bring the wing into a plane with his left arm but the pitch was too much. She gasped as his right arm frantically pumped for leverage it did not have. The moment froze, slowed\u2014and then he was tumbling in air, away from the tree, falling, gathering speed.\n\nThe tree toppled, too.\n\nIn the low gravity the plunge seemed to take long moments. All the way down he fought to get air under his remaining wing. The right wing flapped and rattled and kept him off kilter. His efforts brought his head down and when he hit in the rocks near the pool the skull struck first.\n\nThe smack was horrible. She cried out in the silence.\n\nAndy had not uttered a sound on the way down.\n"}
+{"meta": {"title": "The Burglar Who Liked to Quote - Lawrence Block"}, "text": " \n## The  \nBurglar  \nWho liked to  \nQuote  \nKipling\n\n## LAWRENCE  \nBLOCK\n\n##  \nfor Cheryl Morrison\nWhen from 'ouse to 'ouse you're 'untin' you must always work in pairs\u2014\n\nIt 'alves the gain, but safer you will find\u2014\n\nFor a single man gets bottled on them twisty-wisty stairs.\n\nAn' a woman comes and clobs 'im from be'ind.\n\nWhen you've turned 'em inside out, an' it seems beyond a doubt\n\nAs if there weren't enough to dust a flute\n\n(Cornet: Toot! toot!)\u2014\n\nBefore you sling your 'ook, at the 'ouse-tops take a look,\n\nFor it's underneath the tiles they 'ide the loot.\n\n(Chorus.) 'Ow the loot!\n\nBloomin' loot!\n\nThat's the thing to make the boys git up an' shoot!\n\nIt's the same with dogs an' men,\n\nIf you'd make 'em come again\n\nClap 'em forward with a Loo! loo! Lulu!\n\nLoot!\n\nWhoopee! Tear 'im, puppy! Loo! loo! Lulu!\n\nLoot! loot! Loot!\n\n\u2014Rudyard Kipling\n\n\"Loot\"\n\n## CONTENTS\n\nEpigraph\n\nChapter One\n\nI suppose he must have been in his early twenties....\n\nChapter Two\n\nAfter he'd left I tucked his forty dollars into my...\n\nChapter Three\n\nHalfway across the Queensboro Bridge, I happened...\n\nChapter Four\n\nI met J. Rudyard Whelkin on a slow midweek...\n\nChapter Five\n\nI don't know what time I got into bed, but by...\n\nChapter Six\n\nI wanted to look him in the eyes but I couldn't...\n\nChapter Seven\n\nI was early, of course. My appointment with...\n\nChapter Eight\n\nI got up quickly\u2014too quickly\u2014the blood rushed...\n\nChapter Nine\n\nIt was a long story, and she listened patiently...\n\nChapter Ten\n\nIt was one of those chatty morning programs that...\n\nChapter Eleven\n\nAt six-fifteen I was sitting at the counter of the...\n\nChapter Twelve\n\nThe Pontiac, untowed and unticketed, waited for...\n\nChapter Thirteen\n\nI felt good about taking the car back. You don't...\n\nChapter Fourteen\n\nThe Personal ads were on the penultimate page...\n\nChapter Fifteen\n\nWhen he came to the phone I apologized for...\n\nChapter Sixteen\n\nI cabbed uptown for the Pontiac. By the time I...\n\nChapter Seventeen\n\nI called Ray Kirschmann from a sidewalk phone...\n\nChapter Eighteen\n\n\"I suppose you're wondering why I summoned...\n\nChapter Nineteen\n\n\"I watched you this afternoon,\" I told him. \"I...\n\nChapter Twenty\n\nAt a quarter to twelve Monday morning I hung...\n\nAbout the Author\n\nPraise for Lawrence Block\n\nOther Books by Lawrence Block\n\nCopyright\n\nAbout the Publisher\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## One\n\nI suppose he must have been in his early twenties. It was hard to be sure of his age because there was so little of his face available for study. His red-brown beard began just below his eyes, which in turn lurked behind thick-lensed horn-rims. He wore a khaki army shirt, unbuttoned, and beneath it his T-shirt advertised the year's fashionable beer, a South Dakota brand reputedly brewed with organic water. His pants were brown corduroy, his running shoes blue with a gold stripe. He was toting a Braniff Airlines flight bag in one ill-manicured hand and the Everyman's Library edition of The Poems of William Cowper in the other.\n\nHe set the book down next to the cash register, reached into a pocket, found two quarters, and placed them on the counter alongside the book.\n\n\"Ah, poor Cowper,\" I said, picking up the book. Its binding was shaky, which was why it had found its way to my bargain table. \"My favorite's 'The Retired Cat.' I'm pretty sure it's in this edition.\" He shifted his weight from foot to foot while I scanned the table of contents. \"Here it is. Page one-fifty. You know the poem?\"\n\n\"I don't think so.\"\n\n\"You'll love it. The bargain books are forty cents or three for a dollar, which is even more of a bargain. You just want the one?\"\n\n\"That's right.\" He pushed the two quarters an inch or so closer to me. \"Just the one.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" I said. I looked at his face. All I could really see was his brow, and it looked untroubled, and I would have to do something about that. \"Forty cents for the Cowper, and three cents for the Governor in Albany, mustn't forget him, and what does that come to?\" I leaned over the counter and dazzled him with my pearly-whites. \"I make it thirty-two dollars and seventy cents,\" I said.\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"That copy of Byron. Full morocco, marbled endpapers, and I believe it's marked fifteen dollars. The Wallace Stevens is a first edition and it's a bargain at twelve. The novel you took was only three dollars or so, and I suppose you just wanted to read it because you couldn't get anything much reselling it.\"\n\n\"I don't know what you're talking about.\"\n\nI moved out from behind the counter, positioning myself between him and the door. He didn't look as though he intended to sprint but he was wearing running shoes and you never can tell. Thieves are an unpredictable lot.\n\n\"In the flight bag,\" I said. \"I assume you'll want to pay for what you took.\"\n\n\"This?\" He looked down at the flight bag as if astonished to find it dangling from his fingers. \"This is just my gym stuff. You know\u2014sweat socks, a towel, like that.\"\n\n\"Suppose you open it.\"\n\nPerspiration was beading on his forehead but he was trying to tough it out. \"You can't make me,\" he said. \"You've got no authority.\"\n\n\"I can call a policeman. He can't make you open it, either, but he can walk you over to the station house and book you, and then he can open it, and do you really want that to happen? Open the bag.\"\n\nHe opened the bag. It contained sweat socks, a towel, a pair of lemon-yellow gym shorts, and the three books I had mentioned along with a nice clean first edition of Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus, complete with dust wrapper. It was marked $17.50, which seemed a teensy bit high.\n\n\"I didn't get that here,\" he said.\n\n\"You have a bill of sale for it?\"\n\n\"No, but\u2014\"\n\nI scribbled briefly, then gave him another smile. \"Let's call it fifty dollars even,\" I said, \"and let's have it.\"\n\n\"You're charging me for the Steinbeck?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\"But I had it with me when I came in.\"\n\n\"Fifty dollars,\" I said.\n\n\"Look, I don't want to buy these books.\" He rolled his eyes at the ceiling. \"Oh God, why did I have to come in here in the first place? Look, I don't want any trouble.\"\n\n\"Neither do I.\"\n\n\"And the last thing I want is to buy anything. Look, keep the books, keep the Steinbeck too, the hell with it. Just let me get out of here, huh?\"\n\n\"I think you should buy the books.\"\n\n\"I don't have the money. I got fifty cents. Look, keep the fifty cents too, okay? Keep the shorts and the towel, keep the sweat socks, okay? Just let me get the hell out of here, okay?\"\n\n\"You don't have any money?\"\n\n\"No, nothing. Just the fifty cents. Look\u2014\"\n\n\"Let's see your wallet.\"\n\n\"What are you\u2014I don't have a wallet.\"\n\n\"Right hip pocket. Take it out and hand it to me.\"\n\n\"I don't believe this is happening.\"\n\nI snapped my fingers. \"The wallet.\"\n\nIt was a nice enough black pinseal billfold, complete with the telltale outline of a rolled condom to recall my own lost adolescence. There was almost a hundred dollars in the currency compartment. I counted out fifty dollars in fives and tens, replaced the rest, and returned the wallet to its owner.\n\n\"That's my money,\" he said.\n\n\"You just bought books with it,\" I told him. \"Want a receipt?\"\n\n\"I don't even want the books, dammit.\" His eyes were watering behind the thick glasses. \"What am I going to do with them, anyway?\"\n\n\"I suppose reading them is out. What did you plan to do with them originally?\"\n\nHe stared at his track shoes. \"I was going to sell them.\"\n\n\"To whom?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Some store.\"\n\n\"How much were you going to get for them?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Fifteen, twenty dollars.\"\n\n\"You'd wind up taking ten.\"\n\n\"I suppose so.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" I said. I peeled off one of his tens and pressed it into his palm. \"Sell them to me.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"Saves running from store to store. I can use good books, they're the very sort of item I stock, so why not take the ten dollars from me?\"\n\n\"This is crazy,\" he said.\n\n\"Do you want the books or the money? It's up to you.\"\n\n\"I don't want the books.\"\n\n\"Do you want the money?\"\n\n\"I guess so.\"\n\nI took the books from him and stacked them on the counter. \"Then put it in your wallet,\" I said, \"before you lose it.\"\n\n\"This is the craziest thing ever. You took fifty bucks from me for books I didn't want and now you're giving me ten back. I'm out forty dollars, for God's sake.\"\n\n\"Well, you bought high and sold low. Most people try to work it the other way around.\"\n\n\"I should call a cop. I'm the one getting robbed.\"\n\nI packed his gym gear into the Braniff bag, zipped it shut, handed it to him. Then I extended a forefinger and chucked him under his hairy chin.\n\n\"A tip,\" I said.\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"Get out of the business.\"\n\nHe looked at me.\n\n\"Find another line of work. Quit lifting things. You're not terribly good at it and I'm afraid you're temperamentally unsuited to the life that goes with it. Are you in college?\"\n\n\"I dropped out.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"It wasn't relevant.\"\n\n\"Few things are, but why don't you see if you can't get back in? Pick up a diploma and find some sort of career that suits you. You're not cut out to be a professional thief.\"\n\n\"A professional\u2014\" He rolled his eyes again. \"Jesus, I ripped off a couple of books. Don't make a life's work out of it, huh?\"\n\n\"Anybody who steals things for resale is a professional criminal,\" I told him. \"You just weren't doing it in a very professional manner, that's all. But I'm serious about this. Get out of the business.\" I laid a hand lightly on his wrist. \"Don't take this the wrong way,\" I said, \"but the thing is you're too dumb to steal.\"\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Two\n\nAfter he'd left I tucked his forty dollars into my wallet, where it promptly became my forty dollars. I marked the Steinbeck down to fifteen dollars before shelving it and its companions. While doing this I spotted a few errant volumes and put them back where they belonged.\n\nBrowsers came and went. I made a few sales from the bargain table, then moved a Heritage Club edition of Virgil's Eclogues (boxed, the box water-damaged, slight rubbing on spine, price $8.50). The woman who bought the Virgil was a little shopworn herself, with a blocky figure and a lot of curly orange hair. I'd seen her before but this was the first time she'd bought anything, so things were looking up.\n\nI watched her carry Virgil home, then settled in behind the counter with a Grosset & Dunlap reprint of Soldiers Three. I'd been working my way through my limited stock of Kipling lately. Some of the books were ones I'd read years ago, but I was reading Soldiers Three for the first time and really enjoying my acquaintance with Ortheris and Learoyd and Mulvaney when the little bells above my door tinkled to announce a visitor.\n\nI looked up to see a man in a blue uniform lumbering across the floor toward me. He had a broad, open, honest face, but in my new trade one learned quickly not to judge a book by its cover. My visitor was Ray Kirschmann, the best cop money could buy, and money could buy him seven days a week.\n\n\"Hey, Bern,\" he said, and propped an elbow on the counter. \"Read any good books lately?\"\n\n\"Hello, Ray.\"\n\n\"Watcha readin'?\" I showed him. \"Garbage,\" he said. \"A whole store full of books, you oughta read somethin' decent.\"\n\n\"What's decent?\"\n\n\"Oh, Joseph Wambaugh, Ed McBain. Somebody who tells it straight.\"\n\n\"I'll keep it in mind.\"\n\n\"How's business?\"\n\n\"Not too bad, Ray.\"\n\n\"You just sit here, buy books, sell books, and you make a livin'. Right?\"\n\n\"It's the American way.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. Quite a switch for you, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Well, I like working days, Ray.\"\n\n\"A whole career change, I mean. Burglar to bookseller. You know what that sounds like? A title. You could write a book about it. From Burglar to Bookseller. Mind a question, Bernie?\"\n\nAnd what if I did? \"No,\" I said.\n\n\"What the hell do you know about books?\"\n\n\"Well, I was always a big reader.\"\n\n\"In the jug, you mean.\"\n\n\"Even on the outside, all the way back to childhood. You know what Emily Dickinson said. 'There is no frigate like a book.' \"\n\n\"Frig it is right. You didn't just run around buyin' books and then open up a store.\"\n\n\"The store was already here. I was a customer over the years, and I knew the owner and he wanted to sell out and go to Florida.\"\n\n\"And right now he's soakin' up the rays.\"\n\n\"As a matter of fact, I heard he opened up another store in St. Petersburg. Couldn't take the inactivity.\"\n\n\"Well, good for him. How'd you happen to come up with the scratch to buy this place, Bernie?\"\n\n\"I came into a few dollars.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. A relative died, somethin' like that.\"\n\n\"Something like that.\"\n\n\"Right. What I figure, you dropped out of sight for a month or so during the winter. January, wasn't it?\"\n\n\"And part of February.\"\n\n\"I figure you were down in Florida doin' what you do best, and you hit it pretty good and walked with a short ton of jewelry. I figure you wound up with a big piece of change and decided Mrs. Rhodenbarr's boy Bernard oughta fix hisself up with a decent front.\"\n\n\"That's what you figure, Ray?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\nI thought for a minute. \"It wasn't Florida,\" I said.\n\n\"Nassau, then. St. Thomas. What the hell.\"\n\n\"Actually, it was California. Orange County.\"\n\n\"Same difference.\"\n\n\"And it wasn't jewels. It was a coin collection.\"\n\n\"You always went for them things.\"\n\n\"Well, they're a terrific investment.\"\n\n\"Not with you on the loose they aren't. You made out like a bandit on the coins, huh?\"\n\n\"Let's say I came out ahead.\"\n\n\"And bought this place.\"\n\n\"That's right. Mr. Litzauer didn't want a fortune for it. He set a fair price for the inventory and threw in the fixtures and the good will.\"\n\n\"Barnegat Books. Where'd you get the name?\"\n\n\"I kept it. I didn't want to have to spring for a new sign. Litzauer had a summer place at Barnegat Light on the Jersey shore. There's a lighthouse on the sign.\"\n\n\"I didn't notice. You could call it Burglar Books. 'These books are a steal'\u2014there's your slogan. Get it?\"\n\n\"I'm sure I will sooner or later.\"\n\n\"Hey, are you gettin' steamed? I didn't mean nothin' by it. It's a nice front, Bern. It really is.\"\n\n\"It's not a front. It's what I do.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"It's what I do for a living, Ray, and it's all I do for a living. I'm in the book business.\"\n\n\"Sure you are.\"\n\n\"I'm serious about this.\"\n\n\"Serious. Right.\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. Listen, the reason I dropped in, I was thinkin' about you just the other day. What it was, my wife was gettin' on my back. You ever been married?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"You're so busy gettin' settled, maybe marriage is the next step. Nothin' like it for settlin' a man. What she wanted, here it's October already and she's expectin' a long winter. You never met my wife, did you?\"\n\n\"I talked to her on the phone once.\"\n\n\" 'The leaves are turnin' early, Ray. That means a cold winter.' That's what she tells me. If the trees don't turn until late, then that means a cold winter.\"\n\n\"She likes it cold?\"\n\n\"What she likes is if it's cold and she's warm. What she's drivin' at is a fur coat.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"She goes about five-six, wears a size-sixteen dress. Sometimes she diets down to a twelve, sometimes she packs in the pasta and gets up to an eighteen. Fur coats, I don't figure they got to fit like gloves anyway, right?\"\n\n\"I don't know much about them.\"\n\n\"What she wants is mink. No wild furs or endangered species because she's a fanatic on the subject. Minks, see, they grow the little bastards on these ranches, so there's none of that sufferin' in traps, and the animal's not endangered or any of that stuff. All that they do is they gas 'em and skin 'em out.\"\n\n\"How nice for the minks. It must be like going to the dentist.\"\n\n\"Far as the color, I'd say she's not gonna be too fussy. Just so it's one of your up-to-date colors. Your platinum, your champagne. Not the old dark-brown shades.\"\n\nI nodded, conjuring up an image of Mrs. Kirschmann draped in fur. I didn't know what she looked like, so I allowed myself to picture a sort of stout Edith Bunker.\n\n\"Oh,\" I said suddenly. \"There's a reason you're telling me this.\"\n\n\"Well, I was thinkin', Bern.\"\n\n\"I'm out of the business, Ray.\"\n\n\"What I was thinkin', you might run into a coat in the course of things, know what I mean? I was thinkin' that you and me, we go back a ways, we been through a lot, the two of us, and\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not a burglar anymore, Ray.\"\n\n\"I wasn't countin' on a freebie, Bernie. Just a bargain.\"\n\n\"I don't steal anymore, Ray.\"\n\n\"I hear you talkin', Bern.\"\n\n\"I'm not as young as I used to be. Nobody ever is but these days I'm starting to feel it. When you're young nothing scares you. When you get older everything does. I don't ever want to go inside again, Ray. I don't like prisons.\"\n\n\"These days they're country clubs.\"\n\n\"Then they changed a whole hell of a lot in the past few years, because I swear I never cared for them myself. You meet a better class of people on the D train.\"\n\n\"Guy like you, you could get a nice job in the prison library.\"\n\n\"They still lock you in at night.\"\n\n\"So you're straight, right?\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"I been here how long? All that time you haven't had a single person walk in the store.\"\n\n\"Maybe the uniform keeps 'em away, Ray.\"\n\n\"Maybe business ain't what it might be. You been in the business how long, Bern? Six months?\"\n\n\"Closer to seven.\"\n\n\"Bet you don't even make the rent.\"\n\n\"I do all right.\" I marked my place in Soldiers Three, closed the book, put it on the shelf behind the counter. \"I made a forty-dollar profit from one customer earlier this afternoon and I swear it was easier than stealing.\"\n\n\"Is that a fact. You're a guy made twenty grand in an hour and a half when things fell right.\"\n\n\"And went to jail when they didn't.\"\n\n\"Forty bucks. I can see where that'd really have you turning handsprings.\"\n\n\"There's a difference between honest money and the other kind.\"\n\n\"Yeah, and the difference comes to somethin' like $19,960. This here, Bern, this is nickels and dimes. Let's be honest. You can't live on this.\"\n\n\"I never stole that much, Ray. I never lived that high. I got a small apartment on the Upper West Side, I stay out of night clubs, I do my own wash in the machines in the basement. The store's steady. You want to give me a hand with this?\"\n\nHe helped me drag the bargain table in from the sidewalk. He said, \"Look at this. A cop and a burglar both doin' physical work. Somebody should take a picture. What do you get for these? Forty cents, three for a buck? And that's keepin' you in shirts and socks, huh?\"\n\n\"I'm a careful shopper.\"\n\n\"Look, Bern, if there's some reason you don't wanna help me out on this coat thing\u2014\"\n\n\"Cops,\" I said.\n\n\"What about cops?\"\n\n\"A guy rehabilitates himself and you refuse to believe it. You talk yourselves hoarse telling me to go straight\u2014\"\n\n\"When the hell did I ever tell you to go straight? You're a first-class burglar. Why would I tell you to change?\"\n\nHe let go of it while I filled a shopping bag with hardcover mysteries and began shutting down for the night. He told me about his partner, a clean-cut and soft-spoken young fellow with a fondness for horses and a wee amphetamine habit.\n\n\"All he does is lose and bitch about it,\" Ray complained, \"until this past week when he starts pickin' the ponies with x-ray vision. Now all he does is win, and I swear I liked him better when he was losin'.\"\n\n\"His luck can't last forever, Ray.\"\n\n\"That's what I been tellin' myself. What's that, steel gates across the windows? You don't take chances, do you?\"\n\nI drew the gates shut, locked them. \"Well, they were already here,\" I said stiffly. \"Seems silly not to use them.\"\n\n\"No sense makin' it easy for another burglar, huh? No honor among thieves, isn't that what they say? What happens if you forget the key, huh, Bern?\"\n\nHe didn't get an answer, nor do I suppose he expected one. He chuckled instead and laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. \"I guess you'd just call a locksmith,\" he said. \"You couldn't pick the lock, not bein' a burglar anymore. All you are is a guy who sells books.\"\n\nBarnegat Books is on East Eleventh Street between Broadway and University Place. When I'd finished locking up I carried my shopping bag two doors east to a dog-grooming salon called the Poodle Factory. Carolyn Kaiser had a skittish Yorkie up on the grooming table and was buffing its little nails. She said, \"Hey, is it that time already? Just let me finish with Prince Philip here and I'll be ready to go. If I don't get a drink in me soon I'll start yipping like a chihuahua.\"\n\nI got comfortable on the pillow sofa while Carolyn put the final touches on the terrier's pedicure and popped him back in his cage. During the course of this she complained at length about her lover's misbehavior. Randy had come home late the previous night, drunk and disheveled and marginally disorderly, and Carolyn was sick of it.\n\n\"I think it's time to end the relationship,\" she told me, \"but the question is how do I feel about ending the relationship? And the answer is I don't know how I feel because I can't get in touch with my feelings, and I figure if I can't get in touch with them I might as well not feel them altogether, so let's go someplace with a liquor license, because all I want to feel right now is better. And how was your day, Bernie?\"\n\n\"A little long.\"\n\n\"Yeah, you do look faintly tuckered. Let's go, huh? I'm so sick of the smell of this place. I feel like I'm wearing Wet Dog perfume.\"\n\nWe ducked around the corner to a rather tired saloon called the Bum Rap. The jukebox leaned toward country and western, and Barbara Mandrell was singing about adultery as we took stools at the long dark bar. Carolyn ordered a vodka martini on the rocks. I asked for club soda with lime and got a nod from the bartender and a puzzled stare from Carolyn.\n\n\"It's October,\" she said.\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"Lent's in the spring.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Doctor's orders or something? Giving the old liver a rest?\"\n\n\"Just don't feel like a drink tonight.\"\n\n\"Fair enough. Well, here's to crime. Hey, did I just say something wrong?\"\n\nSo that got me onto the subject of Ray Kirschmann and his mink-loving wife, and it became Carolyn's turn to make sympathetic noises. We've become good at playing that role for one another. She's crowding thirty, with Dutch-cut dark-brown hair and remarkably clear blue eyes. She stands five-one in high heels and never wears them, and she's built like a fire hydrant, which is dangerous in her line of work.\n\nI met her around the time I took over the bookshop. I didn't know Randy as well because I didn't see as much of her; the Poodle Factory was a solo venture of Carolyn's. Randy's a stewardess, or was until she got grounded for biting a passenger. She's taller and thinner than Carolyn, and a year or two younger, and faintly flighty. Randy and I are friends, I suppose, but Carolyn and I are soulmates.\n\nMy soulmate clucked sympathetically. \"Cops are a pain,\" she said. \"Randy had an affair with a cop once. I ever tell you?\"\n\n\"I don't think so.\"\n\n\"She had this phase she went through, three months or so of panic before she was ready to come out as a lesbian. I think it was some kind of denial mechanism. She slept with dozens of men. This one cop was impotent and she made fun of him and he held his gun to her head and she thought he was going to kill her. Which somebody ought to, and why the hell am I talking about her again, will you tell me that?\"\n\n\"Beats me.\"\n\n\"You got anything on tonight? You still seeing the woman from the art gallery?\"\n\n\"We decided to go our separate ways.\"\n\n\"What about the crazy poet?\"\n\n\"We never really hit it off.\"\n\n\"Then why don't you come by for dinner? I got something sensational working in the slow cooker. I put it in this morning before I remembered how mad I was. It's this Flemish beef stew with beer and shallots and mushrooms and all kinds of good things. I got plenty of Amstel for us to wash it down with, plus some Perrier if you're serious about this temperance bit.\"\n\nI sipped my club soda. \"I wish I could,\" I said. \"But not tonight.\"\n\n\"Something on?\"\n\n\"Just that I'm beat. I'm going straight home, and the most active thing I intend to do is say a quick prayer to St. John of God.\"\n\n\"Is he somebody I should know about?\"\n\n\"He's the patron saint of booksellers.\"\n\n\"Yeah? Who's the patron saint of dog groomers?\"\n\n\"Damned if I know.\"\n\n\"I hope we've got one. I've been bitten and scratched and peed on and I ought to have someplace to turn. As far as that goes, I wonder if there's a patron saint of lesbians. All those cloistered nuns, there damn well ought to be. Seriously, do you suppose there is?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"I could probably find out. I only know about St. John of God because Mr. Litzauer had a framed picture of him in the back room of the shop. But there must be books with lists of the patron saints. I've probably got something in the store, as far as that goes.\"\n\n\"It must be great, having that shop. Like living in a library.\"\n\n\"Sort of.\"\n\n\"The Poodle Factory's like living in a kennel. You going? Hey, have a nice night, Bern.\"\n\n\"Thanks. And I'll check out St. Sappho tomorrow.\"\n\n\"If you get a chance. Hey, is there a patron saint of burglars?\"\n\n\"I'll check that, too.\"\n\nI rode three different subway trains to Broadway and Eighty-sixth and walked a block to Murder Ink, where I sold my shopping bag full of books to Carol Bremer. She got all my vintage mysteries; I could do better wholesaling them to her than waiting for somebody to pick them off my shelves.\n\nShe said, \"Charlie Chan, Philo Vance\u2014this is wonderful, Bernie. I've got want-list customers for all this stuff. Buy you a drink?\"\n\nFor a change everybody wanted to buy me a drink. I told her I'd take a rain check, left her shop just in time to miss a bus on West End Avenue, and walked the sixteen blocks downtown to my apartment. It was a nice crisp fall afternoon and I figured I could use the walk. You don't get all that much fresh air and exercise in a bookstore.\n\nThere was mail in my box. I carried it upstairs and put it in the wastebasket. I was half-undressed when the phone rang. It was a woman I know who runs a day-care center in Chelsea, and the parent of one of her charges had just given her two tickets to the ballet, and wasn't that terrific? I agreed that it was but explained I couldn't make it. \"I'm bushed,\" I said. \"I've ordered myself to go to bed without supper. I was just about to take the phone off the hook when it rang.\"\n\n\"Well, drink some coffee instead. What's-his-name's dancing. You know, the Russian.\"\n\n\"They're all Russians. I'd fall asleep in the middle. Sorry.\"\n\nShe wished me pleasant dreams and broke the connection. I left the phone off the hook. I'd have enjoyed eating Carolyn's beef stew and I'd also have enjoyed watching the Russian hop around the stage, and I didn't want the phone to let me know what else I was missing. It made an eerie sound for a while, then fell into a sullen silence. I finished undressing and turned off the lights and got into bed, and I lay there on my back with my arms at my sides and my eyes closed, breathing slowly and rhythmically and letting my mind go here and there. I either dreamed or daydreamed, and I was in some sort of doze when the alarm went off at nine o'clock. I got up, took a quick shower and shave, put on some clean clothes, and made myself a nice cup of tea. At a quarter after nine I put the phone back on the hook. At precisely nine-twenty it rang.\n\nI picked it up and said hello. My caller said, \"There's been no change.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\n\"Things are as planned at your end?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Good,\" he said, and rang off. No names, no pack drill. I looked at the telephone receiver for a moment, then hung it up, then thought better of it and took it off the hook once again. It whined for a while, but by the time I was done with my tea it was quiet.\n\nI finished dressing. I was wearing a three-piece navy pinstripe suit, a Wedgwood-blue shirt, a tie with narrow green and gold diagonal stripes on a navy field. My shoes combined black calfskin moccasin-toe uppers and thick crepe soles. Wearing them, I made no sound as I scurried around the apartment, gathering up one thing and another, making my final preparations.\n\nWhile my shoes were silent, my stomach was rumbling a bit. I hadn't eaten anything since lunch some nine hours earlier. But I didn't want to eat, and I knew better than to drink anything.\n\nNot now.\n\nI checked, made sure I had everything. I went out into the hall, double-locked my own door, then rode the elevator past the lobby to the basement, letting myself out via the service entrance to avoid passing my doorman.\n\nThe air had an edge to it. It wasn't cold enough for mink, but it was certainly topcoat weather. I had mine over my arm, and I took a moment to put it on.\n\nWas there a patron saint of burglars? If so, I didn't know his name. I murmured a quick prayer, addressed it to whom it might concern, and set off to resume my life of crime.\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Three\n\nHalfway across the Queensboro Bridge, I happened to glance at the fuel gauge. The needle was all the way over to the left, way past the big E, and I had what suddenly looked like a mile of bridge stretching out in front of me. I could see myself running out of gas smack in the middle of the East River. Horns would blare all around me, and when horns blare, can cops be far behind? They'd be understanding at first, because motorists do get stranded all the time, but their sympathy would fade when they learned I was driving a stolen car. And why, they might wonder, had I stolen a car without checking the gas?\n\nI was wondering much the same thing myself. I stayed in lane and let my foot rest easy on the accelerator, trying to remember what the ecology commercials were always telling me about ways to conserve gasoline. No fast starts, no jamming on the brakes, and don't spend too much time warming up on cold mornings. Sound advice, all of it, but I couldn't see how it applied, and I clutched the steering wheel and waited for the engine to cut out and the world to cave in.\n\nNeither of these things happened. I found a Chevron station a block from the bridge and told the attendant to fill the tank. The car was a sprawling old Pontiac with an engine that never heard about fuel crises, and I sat there and watched it drink twenty-two gallons of high-test. I wondered what the tank's capacity might be. Twenty gallons, I decided, figuring the pumps were crooked. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there.\n\nThe tab came to fifteen dollars and change. I gave the kid a twenty and he gave me a smile in return and pointed to a sign on a pillar between the two pumps. You had to have exact change or a credit card after 8 P.M. Help us thwart crime, the sign urged. I don't know that they were thwarting anything, but they were certainly taking the profit out of it.\n\nI have a couple of credit cards. I've even opened doors with them, although it's not the cinch TV shows might lead you to believe. But I didn't want a record of my presence in Queens, nor did I want anyone copying down the Pontiac's license number. So I let the little snot keep the change, which got me a mean grin, and I drove east on Queens Boulevard mumbling to myself.\n\nIt wasn't the money. What really troubled me was that I'd been driving around unwittingly with an empty tank. The thing is, I don't steal cars very often. I don't even drive them all that frequently, and when I do go and rent one for a weekend in the country, the Olins people give it to me with the tank full. I can be halfway to Vermont before I even have to think about gasoline.\n\nI wasn't going to Vermont tonight, just to Forest Hills, and I could have gone there easily enough on the E train. That's how I'd made the trip a few days earlier when I did some basic reconnaissance. But I hadn't felt like coming home by subway, preferring as I do to avoid public transportation when my arms are full of somebody else's belongings.\n\nAnd when I found the Pontiac on Seventy-fourth Street, I'd figured it for a sign from on high. GM cars are the easiest for me to get into and the simplest to start, and this one had Jersey plates, so no one would be surprised if I drove it eccentrically. Finally, the owner was unlikely to report it stolen. He'd parked it next to a fire hydrant, so he'd have to assume the cops had towed it away.\n\nJesse Arkwright lived in Forest Hills Gardens. Now Forest Hills itself is a nice solid middle-class neighborhood set south of Flushing Meadows in the very center of the Borough of Queens. Three out of four houses there contain at least one woman who plays mah-jongg when she's not at a Weight Watchers meeting. But Forest Hills Gardens is an enclave within an enclave, a little pocket of haute bourgeoise respectability. Every house is three stories tall, with gables and a tile roof. All of the lawns are manicured, all of the shrubbery under tight discipline. A neighborhood association owns the very streets themselves, keeping them in good repair and restricting on-street parking to neighborhood residents.\n\nCars from underprivileged neighborhoods make frequent forays into the quiet streets of Forest Hills Gardens, their occupants darting out to knock down matrons and make off with alligator handbags. And private police cruisers patrol those same streets twenty-four hours a day to keep that sort of thing to a minimum. It's not Beverly Hills, say, where every pedestrian is perforce a suspicious character, but the security's pretty tight.\n\nIt's even tighter on Copperwood Crescent, an elegant semicircle where massive piles of stone and brick sprawl on spacious wooded lots. The residents of Copperwood Crescent include a shipping-line heir, two upper-echelon mafiosi, the owner of a chain of budget funeral parlors, and two to three dozen similarly well-heeled citizens. One private cop car has as its sole responsibility the safeguarding of Copperwood Crescent, along with four adjoining and similarly exclusive streets\u2014Ironwood Place, Silverwood Place, Pewterwood Place, and Chancery Drive.\n\nIf Forest Hills Gardens is the soft underbelly of Queens, Copperwood Crescent is the ruby in its navel.\n\nI didn't have any trouble finding the ruby. On my earlier trip I'd walked all around the neighborhood armed with pocket atlas and clipboard\u2014a man with a clipboard never looks out of place. I'd found Copperwood Crescent then and I found it now, barely slowing the Pontiac as I rolled past Jesse Arkwright's house, an enormous beamed Tudor number. On each of the three floors a light burned in a mullioned window.\n\nAt the end of Copperwood Crescent I took a sharp left into Bellnap Court, a quiet block-long cul-de-sac that was out of bounds for the Copperwood-Ironwood-Silverwood-Pewterwood-Chancery patrol car. I parked at the curb between a couple of sizable oaks and cut the engine, removing my jumper wire from the ignition.\n\nYou need a sticker to park on the street, but that's to keep commuters from cluttering the area during daylight hours. Nobody gets towed at night. I left the car there and walked back to Copperwood Crescent. If the patrol car was on the job, I didn't see it, nor did I notice anyone else walking about.\n\nThe same three lights were lit in the Arkwright house. Without hesitation I walked the length of the driveway at the right of the house. I shined my pencil-beam flashlight through a garage window. A gleaming Jaguar sedan crouched on one side of the garage. The other stall was quite empty.\n\nGood.\n\nI went to the side door. Below the bell on the doorjamb was an inch-square metal plate slotted for a key. A red light glowed within, indicating that the burglar alarm was set. If I were Mr. Arkwright, equipped with the proper key, I could insert it in the slot and turn off the alarm. If, on the other hand, I were to insert anything other than the proper key, sirens would commence to sound and some signal would go off in the nearest police station.\n\nFine.\n\nI rang the doorbell. The car was gone and the alarm was set, but you just never know, and the burglar least likely to wind up in the slam is the sort of chap who wears suspenders and a belt, just in case. I'd rung this bell before, when I'd come calling with my clipboard, asking meaningless questions in aid of a nonexistent sewer survey. As then, I listened to the four-note chime sound within the huge old house. I pressed my ear to the heavy door and listened carefully, and when the chimes quit echoing I heard nothing at all. No footsteps, no sign of human life. I rang again, and again I heard nothing.\n\nGood.\n\nI walked around to the rear of the house again. For a moment I just stood there. It was pleasant enough, the air uncharacteristically clear and clean. The moon wasn't visible from where I stood but I could see a scattering of stars overhead. What really awed me was the silence. Queens Boulevard was only blocks away but I couldn't hear any of its traffic. I suppose the trees kept the noise at bay.\n\nI felt hundreds of miles from New York. The Arkwright house belonged in a Gothic novel, brooding over windswept moors.\n\nMyself, I had no time for brooding. I put on my rubber gloves\u2014skintight, their palms cut out for comfort's sake\u2014and went to have a look at the kitchen door.\n\nThank God for burglar alarms and pickproof locks and tight security systems. They all help discourage the amateurs even as they give the citizenry a nice sense of safety and well-being. Without them, everybody would stash all the good stuff in safe-deposit boxes. Beyond that, they help make burglary the challenging occupation I've always found it. If any splay-fingered oaf could do as well, what fun would it be?\n\nThe Arkwright home had a first-rate burglar alarm, Fischer Systems' model NCN-30. I could see for myself that it was wired to all the ground-floor doors and windows. It might or might not have been connected to higher windows\u2014most people don't take the trouble\u2014but I didn't want to walk up a wall to find out one way or the other. It was simpler to rewire the system.\n\nThere are a few ways to beat a burglar alarm. One brutally direct method calls for cutting the lines supplying power to the house. This does lack subtlety\u2014all the lights go out, for openers\u2014and it's counter-productive when you're dealing with a good system like the NCN-30, because they have fail-safe devices that trigger them under such circumstances. (This can have interesting ramifications during a power failure, incidentally.)\n\nAh, well. I used some wires of my own, splicing them neatly into the picture, wrapping their ends ever so neatly with electrical tape, and by the time I was done the alarm was working as well as it had ever worked, but for the fact that it no longer covered the kitchen door. A regiment of cavalry could parade through that door without NCN-30 kicking up a fuss. The whole operation was more than your average burglar could do, and isn't it lucky that I'm not your average burglar?\n\nWith the alarm hors de combat, I turned my attention to the thick oak door, an hors of another color. A skeleton key opened its original lock, but there were two others, a Segal and a Rabson. I held my little flashlight in one hand and my ring of picks and probes in the other and went to work, pausing now and again to press an ear against the thick wood. (It's like seashells; if you listen carefully you can hear the forest.) When the last tumbler tumbled I turned the knob and tugged and shoved and nothing happened.\n\nThere was a manual bolt on the inside. I ran the flashlight beam down the edge of the door until I located it, then made use of a handy little tool I'd fashioned from a hacksaw blade, slipping it between door and jamb and working it to and fro until the bolt parted. I tried the door again, and wouldn't you know there was a chain lock that stopped it when it was three inches ajar? I could have sawed through that as well, but why? It was easier to slip my hand inside and unscrew the chain lock from its moorings.\n\nI pushed the door all the way open and made an illegal entry a crooked accountant would have been proud of. For a moment I just stood there, glowing, radiant. Then I closed the door and locked the locks. I couldn't do anything about the bolt I'd sawed through, but I did take a moment to restore the chain bolt.\n\nThen I set out to explore the house.\n\nThere's absolutely nothing like it.\n\nForget everything I said to Ray Kirschmann. True, I was getting older. True, I shrank from the prospect of getting chewed by attack dogs and shot by irate householders and locked by the authorities in some pickproof penitentiary cell. True, true, all of it true, and so what? None of it mattered a whit when I was inside someone else's dwelling place with all his worldly goods spread out before me like food on a banquet table. By God, I wasn't that old! I wasn't that scared!\n\nI'm not proud of this. I could spout a lot of bilge about the criminal being the true existential hero of our times, but what for? I don't buy it myself. I'm not nuts about criminals and one of the worst things about prison was having to associate with them. I'd prefer to live as an honest man among honest men, but I haven't yet found an honest pursuit that lets me feel this way. I wish there were a moral equivalent of larceny, but there isn't. I'm a born thief and I love it.\n\nI made my way through a butler's pantry and an enormous brick-floored kitchen, crossing a hallway to the formal living room. The light I'd noted from the street cast a warm glow over the room. It was a noteworthy object in and of itself, a leaded-glass dragonfly lamp by Tiffany. I'd last seen one in an antique shop on upper Madison Avenue with a $1,500 tag on it, and that was a few years ago.\n\nBut I hadn't come all the way to Queens to steal furniture. I'd come with a very specific purpose, and I didn't really need to be in the living room at all. I didn't have to take inventory, but old habits die hard, and I could hardly avoid it.\n\nThe lamp made it easy, saving me the trouble of using my flashlight. There was a timer so that it would turn itself off during daylight hours and resume its vigil at dusk, burning bravely until dawn, announcing to passers-by that nobody was home.\n\nConsiderate of them, I thought, to leave a light for the burglar.\n\nThe lamp was perched on an ornamental French kneehole desk. Four of the desk's six drawers were fakes, but one of the others held a Patek Philippe pocket watch with a hunting scene engraved on its case.\n\nI closed the drawer without disturbing the watch.\n\nThe dining room was worth a look. A sideboard absolutely loaded with silver, including two complete sets of sterling tableware and a ton of hallmarked Georgian serving pieces. No end of fine porcelain and crystal.\n\nI left everything undisturbed.\n\nThe library, also on the ground floor, was a room I would have gladly called my own. It measured perhaps twelve by twenty feet, with a glorious Kerman carpet covering most of the buffed parquet floor. Custom-built bookshelves of limed English oak lined two walls. In the middle of the room, centered beneath a fruited Tiffany shade, stood a tournament-size pool table. At the room's far end, twin portraits of Arkwright ancestors in gilded oval frames looked down in solemn approbation.\n\nA pair of wall racks, one holding cue sticks, the other a locked cabinet that displayed sporting rifles and shotguns. A couple of overstuffed leather chairs. An elaborate bar, the crystal glassware etched with game birds in flight. Enough liquor in one form or another to float a fair-sized cabin cruiser, plus decanters of sherry and port and brandy placed at convenient intervals about the room. A smoker's stand, mahogany, with a few dozen briar pipes and two cased meerschaums. A cedar cabinet of Havanas. A whole room of brass and wood and leather, and I yearned to nail the door shut and pour myself a stiff Armagnac and stay there forever.\n\nInstead I scanned the bookshelves. They were a jumble, but there was no shortage of dollar value. While they ran heavily to uncut sets of leather-bound memoirs of unremembered hangers-on at pre-Revolutionary Versailles, there were plenty of other items as well, many of which I'd never seen outside of the catalogs of the better book dealers and auction galleries. I happened on a pristine first of Smollet's rarest novel, The Adventures of Sir Laurence Greaves, and there were any number of fine bindings and important first editions and Limited Editions Club issues and private press productions, all arranged in no discernible order and according to no particular plan.\n\nI took one book from the shelves. It was bound in green cloth and not much larger than an ordinary paperback. I opened it and read the flowing inscription on the flyleaf. I paged through it, closed it, and put it back on the shelf.\n\nI left the library as I'd found it.\n\nThe stairs were dark. I used my flashlight, went up and down the staircase three times. There was one board that creaked and I made sure I knew which one it was. Fourth from the top.\n\nThe others were comfortingly silent.\n\nTwin beds in the master bedroom, each with its own bedside table. His and hers closets. His ran to Brooks Brothers suits and cordovan shoes. I especially liked one navy suit with a muted stripe. It wasn't that different from the one I was wearing. Her closet was full of dresses and furs, including one Ray's wife would have salivated over. Good labels in everything. A drawer in the dressing table\u2014French Provincial, white enamel, gold trim\u2014held a lot of jewelry. A cocktail ring caught my eye, a stylish little item with a large marquise-cut ruby surrounded by seed pearls.\n\nThere was some cash in the top drawer of one of the bedside tables, a couple hundred dollars in tens and twenties. In the other table I found a bank-book\u2014eighteen hundred dollars in a savings account in the name of Elfrida Grantham Arkwright.\n\nI didn't take any of these things. I didn't take the Faberg\u00e9 eggs from the top of the chest of drawers, or the platinum cuff links and tie bar, or any of the wristwatches, or, indeed, anything at all.\n\nIn Jesse Arkwright's study, all the way at the rear of the house's second floor, I found a whole batch of bankbooks. Seven of them, secured by a rubber band, shared the upper right drawer of his desk with postage stamps and account ledgers and miscellaneous debris. The savings accounts all had sizable balances and the quick mental total I ran came to a little better than sixty thousand dollars.\n\nI'll tell you. It gave me pause.\n\nI once knew a fellow who'd been tossing an apartment in Murray Hill, filling a pillowcase with jewelry and silver, when he came across a bankbook with a balance in five figures. Clever lad that he was, he promptly turned his pillowcase inside out and put everything back where he'd found it. He left the premises looking as though he'd never visited them in the first place, taking nothing but that precious bankbook. That way the residents wouldn't know they'd been burgled, and wouldn't miss the bankbook, and he could drain their account before they suspected a thing.\n\nAh, the best-laid plans. He presented himself at the teller's window the very next morning, withdrawal slip in hand and bankbook at the ready. It was a small withdrawal\u2014he was merely testing the waters\u2014but that particular teller happened to know that particular depositor by sight, and the next thing the chap knew he was doing a medium-long bit in Dannemora, which is when I ran into him.\n\nSo much for bankbooks.\n\nSo much, too, for a double handful of Krugerrands, those large gold coins the South Africans stamp out for people who want to invest in the yellow metal. I like gold\u2014what's not to like?\u2014but they were in a drawer with a handgun, and I dislike guns at least as much as I like gold. The ones in the library were for show, at least. This one was here for shooting burglars.\n\nSo much for the Krugerrands. So much, too, for a shoulder-height set of glassed-in shelves full of Boehm birds and Art Nouveau vases and glass paperweights. I spotted a Lalique ashtray just like the one on my grandmother's coffee table, and a positive gem of a Daum Nancy vase, and Baccarat and Millefiori weights galore, and\u2014\n\nIt was starting to get to me. I couldn't look anywhere without seeing ten things I wanted to steal. Every flat surface in that study held bronzes, all of them impressive. Besides the usual bulls and lions and horses, I noticed one of a camel kneeling alongside a Legionnaire. The latter wore a kepi on his head and a pained expression on his face, as if he were sick of jokes about Legionnaire's Disease.\n\nA couple of stamp albums. One general worldwide collection that didn't look to be worth much, but the other was a Scott Specialty Album for the Benelux countries, and a quick thumbing didn't reveal too many blank spaces.\n\nAnd a coin collection. Lord above, a coin collection! No albums, just a dozen black cardboard boxes two inches square and ten inches long. Each was crammed to capacity with two-by-two coin envelopes. I didn't have time to check them but I couldn't resist. I opened one box at random and found it was filled with Barber quarters and halves, all Proofs or Uncirculated specimens. Another box contained superb Large Cents catalogued by Sheldon numbers.\n\nHow could I possibly leave them?\n\nI left them. I didn't take a thing.\n\nI was in one of the guest bedrooms on the second floor, playing my penlight over the walls and admiring a very nice pencil-signed Rouault lithograph, when I heard a car in the driveway. I checked my watch. It was 11:23. I listened as the automatic garage door swung upward, listened as the car's engine cut out. As the garage door swung down again I quit listening and walked the length of the hall to the staircase leading to the third floor. I was up those stairs and crouching on the third-floor landing by the time Jesse Arkwright's key hit the slot at the side of the house. First he turned off the burglar alarm, then he opened the door, and I fancied I could hear him refastening half a dozen locks after he and Elfrida had made their entrance.\n\nMuffled conversation, barely audible two floors below me. I moved a rubber-gloved forefinger and wiped perspiration from my forehead. I'd planned on this, of course. I'd even checked the attic stairs earlier to make sure there were no squeakers in the lot.\n\nAll the same, I didn't like it. Burglary's a tightly wired proposition at best, but I generally get to do my work in precious solitude. If householders come home while I'm on the job, my usual impulse is to depart abruptly.\n\nThis time I had to linger.\n\nTwo floors below, a teakettle whistled briefly, then sighed as someone removed it from the flame. For an instant I'd mistaken its cry for a police siren. Nerves, I thought, taking deep breaths, beseeching the patron saint of burglars for a dose of serenity.\n\nMaybe I'd been right when I talked to Kirschmann. Maybe I was getting too old for this. Maybe I didn't have the requisite sang-froid. Maybe\u2014\n\nCrouching was uncomfortable. I got stiffly to my feet. The attic was finished off, its central hallway covered with a length of faded maroon carpeting. I walked clear to the front of the house, where a brass floorlamp equipped with a timer sent out forty watts' worth of light through a curtained window. A maid's room, it looked to be, although the household no longer employed live-in servants.\n\nA day bed stretched along one wall. I lay down on top of it pulled a green and gold afghan coverlet over myself, and closed my eyes.\n\nI couldn't really hear much from where I was. At one point I thought I heard footsteps on the stairs, and then a few moments later I fancied that I could hear the clatter of balls on the pool table in the library. This was probably a case of my imagination filling in the blanks. After an evening at the theater, the Arkwright routine was supposed to be quite predictable. Home around eleven-thirty, a spot of coffee and something sweet in the breakfast nook, and then Elfrida would pop upstairs with a book of crosswords while Jesse ran a rack or two at the pool table, nipped at one of the crystal decanters, read a few pages of one of his leather-bound classics, and then hied his own bulk up the stairs and joined his wife in their chamber.\n\nWould he take a final tour of the downstairs, making sure all the doors were locked? Would he happen to check the sliding bolt on the kitchen door, and would he happen to notice that some clever chap had sawn through it? Was he, even as I thought these grim thoughts, lifting a receiver to summon the local constabulary?\n\nI could have been at the ballet, watching a Russian imitate a gazelle. I could have gone home with Carolyn and eaten Flemish stew and drunk Dutch beer. Or I could have been home in my own little bed.\n\nI stayed where I was and I waited.\n\nAt one-thirty I got to my feet. I hadn't heard a sound within the house for an entire half-hour. I padded silently to the stairs, crossing right over the master bedroom where I hoped my hosts were sleeping soundly. I went down the stairs, treading ever so gingerly on my crepe soles, and I crossed the second-floor hallway and went on down the other stairs to the ground floor. It was no great feat to remember to avoid the fourth step from the top; I'd obsessed on that very subject for the past twenty minutes.\n\nThe lights were out once again on the ground floor, except for the indomitable dragonfly lamp in the living room. I didn't have to use my penlight to find my way to the library, but once I was in that room I played its beam here and there.\n\nArkwright had paid the room his nightly visit. He'd left a pool cue on top of the table, along with the cue ball and one or two of its fellows. A small brandy snifter stood on a leather-topped table beside one of the big chain. It was empty, but a quick sniff revealed it had recently held cognac\u2014a very good cognac at that, judging from the bouquet.\n\nThere was a book next to the snifter, Sheridan's Plays, bound in red leather. Bedtime reading.\n\nI went to the bookshelves. Had Arkwright inspected the little green clothbound volume as part of his nightly ritual? I couldn't tell, as it was right where I'd found it earlier in the evening. But it was his treasure. He'd probably had a look at it.\n\nI took it from the shelf and just managed to fit it into my jacket pocket. Then I nudged the surrounding volumes so as to fill up the space where it had been.\n\nAnd left the library.\n\nHe had turned off the alarm to enter the house, then reset it once he and Elfrida were inside. All the while, of course, the alarm system continued to guard all of the house but the kitchen door. I now left through that very portal, closing it after me and relocking its three locks by picking them in reverse. I had to leave the chain bolt dangling and I couldn't do anything about the bolt I'd hacksawed earlier. Nobody's perfect.\n\nI was very damned close to perfection, though, in the way I restored the alarm system, rewiring it to render the kitchen door once more unbreachable. Every impulse urged me to quit Arkwright's property while I had the chance, but I spent a few extra minutes, and only an imperceptible scrap of electrical tape hinted that the wires had ever been tampered with.\n\nProfessionalism? I call it the relentless pursuit of excellence.\n\nI had almost reached the end of Copperwood Crescent when the police car turned the corner. I managed to furnish a smile and a perfunctory nod without breaking stride. They went along their merry way, and why not? They'd seen only a well-dressed and self-possessed gentleman who looked as though he belonged.\n\nThey hadn't seen any palmless rubber gloves. Those wound up tucked in a pocket before I left the Arkwright driveway.\n\nThe Pontiac was where I'd left it. I hooked up my jumper wire and was on my way. In due course I was back on West Seventy-fourth Street. One nice thing about swiping a car from a hydrant is you can generally put it back where you found it. I did just that, pulling in next to the fireplug even as a brindle boxer was lifting a leg against it. I unhooked my jumper wire and got out of the car, careful to push down the lock buttons before I swung the door shut.\n\nThe boxer's equally brindle owner, leash in one hand and wad of paper towel in the other, admonished me that I was risking a ticket or a tow. I couldn't think of an answer so I walked off without giving him one.\n\n\"Crazy,\" he told the dog. \"They're all crazy here, Max.\"\n\nI couldn't argue with that.\n\nIn my own apartment, nibbling cheese and crunching Triscuits and sipping the special-occasion Scotch, I let go and enjoyed the glow that comes afterward on those too-rare occasions where everything goes like clockwork. All the tension, all the discomfort, all the anxiety\u2014it was all bought and paid for by moments like this.\n\nEarlier, stretched out on that lumpy day bed, I'd been unable to stop thinking of all the treasures the Arkwright house contained. The cash, the jewels, the stamps, the coins, the objets d'art. I'd had fantasies of backing a moving van onto the lawn and just stealing every damned thing, from the oriental rugs on the floors to the cut-crystal chandeliers overhead. That, I'd decided, was really the only way to do it. A person who wanted to be selective would have his problems. He wouldn't know what to steal first.\n\nAnd what did I have for my troubles?\n\nI picked up the book, taking pains not to dribble Scotch on it, though someone had dribbled one thing or another on it over the years. It certainly didn't look like such a much, and the leisurely inspection I could give it now was disclosing flaws I hadn't spotted earlier. There was water damage on the front cover. Some of the pages had been foxed. The past half-century had not been gentle with the little volume, and no bookseller could conscientiously grade it higher than Very Good.\n\nI flipped through it, read a stanza here and a stanza there. The author's meter was unmistakable and he had never lost his dexterity at rhyming, but what I was reading looked like doggerel to me.\n\nFor this I'd passed up Krugerrands and Barber Proofs, Faberg\u00e9 and Baccarat and Daum Nancy. For this I'd returned the pearl-and-ruby ring to its little velvet case.\n\nMr. Whelkin would be proud of me.\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Four\n\nI met J. Rudyard Whelkin on a slow midweek morning two weeks prior to my little venture in breaking and entering. The Yankees had just dropped the first two games of the Series, and the night before I'd watched a kid barely old enough to shave strike out Reggie Jackson with the bases loaded. This morning it was damp and drizzly, and it figured.\n\nI hadn't had any customers yet and I didn't much care; I was settled in behind the counter with a paperback. I don't stock paperbacks, and the ones that come in I wholesale to a guy on Third and Sixteenth who deals in nothing else.\n\nSometimes, though, I read them first. The one I was reading was one of Richard Stark's books about Parker. Parker's a professional thief, and every book runs pretty much to form\u2014Parker puts together a string of crooks, he goes someplace like Spartanburg, South Carolina, to buy guns and a truck, he gets a dentist in Yankton Falls to put up front money for the operation, he and his buddies pull the job, and then something goes horribly wrong. If nothing went horribly wrong, all of the books would end around page 70 and by now Parker would own his own island in the Caribbean.\n\nLast time I was inside, everybody was a big fan of Parker's. My colleagues read everything they could get their hands on about him, even if they had to move their lips to get the job done. I swear there were grizzled cons in that joint who would walk around quoting passages at each other, especially parts where Parker maimed someone. One safecracker always quoted the part where Parker settled a score with an unworthy fellow laborer by breaking three important bones and leaving him in a swamp. It was the adjective that did it for him, the idea of deliberately breaking important bones.\n\nI had just reached the part where Parker was putting in an urgent call to Handy McKay at his diner in Presque Isle, Maine, when the little bells above the door tinkled to announce I had company. I moved the paperback out of sight as my visitor approached the counter. After all, antiquarian booksellers have an image to protect. We're not supposed to read trash.\n\nHe was a stout man, florid of face, jowly as a bulldog, with thinning mahogany hair combed straight back over a glossy salmon scalp. He wore a charcoal-brown herringbone tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, a tobacco-brown sweater vest, a tan oxford-cloth shirt with a button-down collar, a chocolate-brown knit tie. His trousers were fawn cavalry twill, his shoes brown wing tips. He had a long narrow nose, a graying guardsman's mustache. His eyebrows were untamed tangles of briar; beneath them his eyes (brown, to match his outfit) were keen and cool and just a trifle bloodshot.\n\nHe asked if Mr. Litzauer was expected, and I explained about the change in ownership. \"Ah,\" he said. \"No wonder he hasn't been in touch. I'm a collector, you see, and he always lets me know when he runs across an item I might fancy.\"\n\n\"What do you collect?\"\n\n\"Victorian poets, for the most part, but I follow my taste, you know. I'm partial to artful rhymers. Thomas Hood. Algernon Charles Swinburne. William Mackworth Praed. Kipling, of course, is my keenest enthusiasm.\"\n\nI told him whatever I had was on the shelves. He went to look for himself and I got Parker out from beneath the counter and returned to vicarious crime. Two of Parker's henchpersons were just getting ready to set up a doublecross when my tweedy customer presented himself once again at the counter, a small clothbound volume in hand. It contained the collected lyric poems of Austin Dobson and I had it priced at six or seven dollars, something like that. He paid in cash and I wrapped it for him.\n\n\"If you happen on anything you think I might like,\" he said, \"you might want to ring me up.\"\n\nHe handed me his card. It bore his name, an address in the East Thirties, and a phone number with a MUrray Hill 8 exchange. The card conveyed no suggestion of what the man did for a living.\n\nI looked from it to him. \"You collect Kipling,\" I said.\n\n\"Among others, yes.\"\n\n\"Is there a family connection?\"\n\nHe smiled broadly. \"Because of the name, you mean? Natural guess, of course. But no, I'm no relative of Kipling's. Rudyard's not a family name, you see. It's the name of a lake.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"In Staffordshire. Kipling's parents first met on a picnic at Lake Rudyard. When in due course their son was born he was given the lake's name as a middle name. His first name was Joseph, actually, although he never did use it and was known as Ruddy from earliest childhood.\"\n\n\"And your first name\u2014\"\n\n\"Is James, as it happens, and I don't use it either. James Rudyard Whelkin. I was eight years old when Kipling died and I remember the day very well. That was in 1936, just two days after George V preceded him to the grave. A day of mourning in our household, as you can well imagine. My father admired Kipling enormously. He'd have to have done, to name his only son after him, wouldn't he? Because I was named for Kipling, of course, not for a lake in Staffordshire. 'First the old king and now the Bard of Empire,' my father said. 'Mark my words, Ruddy. There'll be war in Europe within the next two years.' He was off by a year of course, and I don't suppose Kipling's demise had much to do with Hitler's invading Poland, but it all linked up in the old fellow's mind, you see.\" He smiled fiercely and his great eyebrows shook. \"Are you interested in Kipling, Mr. Rhodenbarr?\"\n\n\"I read him when I was a kid.\"\n\n\"You might try him again. He's returning to fashion, you know, after altogether too many years of neglect. Have you had a look at Kim lately? Or The Light That Failed? Or\u2014But reading must be a bit of a busman's holiday for you, eh? Must grow sick and tired of the printed word by the end of a long day.\"\n\n\"Oh, I still enjoy reading. And maybe I will try Kipling again.\"\n\n\"Do. There's books on your own shelves, for a starter.\" An appraising glance from his alert brown eyes. \"I say, sir. Do you suppose you could possibly lunch with me this afternoon? I might have something to say that would interest you.\"\n\n\"I'd like that.\"\n\n\"My club, then. Do you know the Martingale? And how's half past twelve?\"\n\nI told him I knew where the club was, and that twelve-thirty was fine.\n\nHe'd already said something that interested me.\n\nThe Martingale Club was just right for him, a good match for his dress and his faintly pukka sahib manner. It stood at the corner of Madison Avenue and Thirtieth Street and was decorated largely with uncomfortable Jacobean oak furniture and the heads of innumerable dead animals.\n\nWe dined in a fair-sized room on the second floor under the glass-eyed stare of a bison allegedly shot by Theodore Roosevelt for reasons I could not begin to guess. Lunch was a leathery mixed grill with thawed green peas and spineless French fried potatoes. The waiter who brought this mess to the table was a rheumy-eyed chap who walked as though his feet were killing him. He looked almost as woebegone as the bison.\n\nWhelkin and I talked books through the meal, then both turned down dessert. The sad waiter brought us a large silver coffeepot of the sort they used to serve you on trains. The coffee was even better than the old Pennsy dining car once supplied, rich and winy and aromatic.\n\nOur table was next to a pair of casement windows. I sipped my coffee and looked out at Madison Avenue. The last of the Good Humor men was doing light business on the corner. In a matter of days he'd be gone, yielding place to a seller of hot pretzels and chestnuts as the seasons changed in their inexorable fashion. You couldn't watch the leaves turn, not from this window, but you could mark time's passage by keeping an eye on the street vendors.\n\nWhelkin cleared his throat, interrupting this reverie. \"H. Rider Haggard,\" he said. \"I told you I collect him as well?\"\n\n\"I think you mentioned him.\"\n\n\"Interesting man. Did for South Africa what Kipling did for India. She, King Solomon's Mines\u2014but of course you know his work.\"\n\n\"In a general way.\"\n\n\"He and Kipling became great friends, you know. Both of them were on the outs with the Bloomsbury crowd. Both lived long enough to see their own literary reputations fade dismally. The public came to think of them in the same breath as apologists for a discredited imperialism. Do you know the J. K. Stephens poem?\"\n\nI didn't even know whom he was talking about, but he managed to quote the poem from memory:\n\n\"Will there never come a season\n\nWhich shall rid us from the curse\n\nOf a prose which knows no reason\n\nAnd an unmelodious verse:\n\nWhen the world shall cease to wonder\n\nAt the genius of an Ass,\n\nAnd a boy's eccentric blunder\n\nShall not bring success to pass:\n\nWhen mankind shall be delivered\n\nFrom the clash of magazines,\n\nAnd the inkstand shall be shivered\n\nInto countless smithereens:\n\nWhen there stands a muzzled stripling,\n\nMute, beside a muzzled bore:\n\nWhen the Rudyards cease from Kipling\n\nAnd the Haggards Ride no more.\"\n\nHe moved to refill our coffee cups. \"Nasty piece of billingsgate, eh? One of many such. Just drove the two of them closer together, however. Haggard spent as much time at Kipling's house in Surrey as he did at home. They'd actually work together in Kipling's study, sitting on opposite ends of the long desk, batting ideas back and forth, then scribbling away furiously at one thing or another.\"\n\n\"Interesting,\" I said.\n\n\"Isn't it? Not too long after the 1918 Armistice the two men set about organizing the Liberty League, a sort of anti-Communist affair which never got terribly far off the ground. The bit of doggerel someone wrote gives a fair idea of the Liberty League's slant on current affairs. You know the poem?\"\n\n\"I don't think so.\"\n\n\"It's cleverly rhymed, and I think I mentioned my admiration for a facility at rhyming.\n\n\" 'Every Bolsh is a blackguard,'\n\nSaid Kipling to Haggard.\n\n'And given to tippling,'\n\nSaid Haggard to Kipling.\n\n'And a blooming outsider,'\n\nSaid Rudyard to Rider.\n\n'Their domain is a bloodyard,'\n\nSaid Rider to Rudyard.\n\n\"Neatly done, don't you think? I could quote others of a similar nature but I'll spare you that.\"\n\nI very nearly thanked him. I was beginning to think I'd been mistaken, that he'd just brought me here to quote verse at me. Well, at least the coffee was good.\n\nThen he said, \"Liberty League. After it fell apart, Kipling went through a difficult time. His health was poor. Gastritis, which he thought might be symptomatic of cancer. Turned out he had duodenal ulcers. He was subject to depression and it may have affected his thinking.\n\n\"The man became briefly fixated on the curious notion that the British Empire was menaced by an unholy alliance of Jewish international financiers and Jewish Bolsheviks. These two unlikely forces were joining together to destroy Christianity by wresting the overseas empire from the British crown. Kipling wasn't the sort of moral degenerate to whom anti-Semitism comes naturally, and he didn't persist in it for any length of time, nor did it color his work to a considerable extent.\n\n\"But he did write one extremely bizarre piece of work on an anti-Semitic theme. It was a narrative poem in ballad meter, some three thousand two hundred lines called The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow. The plot line concerns the efforts of a gallant British regiment to save India from a revolution stirred up by Jewish agitators, and it's quite clear that the battle for Fort Bucklow is not merely the decisive battle of this war but Kipling's version of the Battle of Armageddon, with the forces of Good and Evil pitted against one another to decide the fate of humankind.\n\n\"Do you remember Soldiers Three? Learoyd, Ortheris and Mulvaney? Kipling brought them back to make them the heroes who deliver Fort Bucklow and save the day for God and King George. Oh, there are some stirring battle scenes, and there's a moment when 'two brave men stand face to face' in a manner reminiscent of The Ballad of East and West, but poor Kipling was miles from the top of his form when he wrote it. The premise is absurd, the resolution is weak, and there are elements of frightful unwitting self-parody. He often skated rather close to the edge of self-parody, you know, and here he lost his footing.\n\n\"Perhaps he recognized this himself. Perhaps his vision of the Hebraic Conspiracy embraced the world of publishing. In any event, he didn't offer The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow to his London publishers. He may have planned to do so ultimately, but in the meantime he elected to safeguard the copyright by bringing out the poem in a small private edition.\"\n\n\"Ah.\"\n\n\"Ah indeed, sir. Kipling found a printer named Smithwick & Son in Tunbridge Wells. If Smithwick ever printed another book before or since, I've never heard of it. But he did print this one, and in an edition of only one hundred fifty copies. It's not fine printing by any means because Smithwick wasn't capable of it. But he got the job done, and the book's quite a rarity.\"\n\n\"It must be. One hundred fifty copies...\"\n\nWhelkin smiled widely. \"That's how many were printed. How many do you suppose survive?\"\n\n\"I have no idea. The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow? I've never heard the title.\"\n\n\"I'm not surprised.\"\n\n\"Fifty copies? Seventy-five? I have no idea what the survival rate would be.\"\n\nThe coffeepot was empty. Whelkin frowned and rang a bell mounted on the wall. He didn't say anything until the waiter limped over with a fresh pot.\n\nThen he said, \"Kipling wrote the poem in 1923. He'd hoped to give out copies to close friends for Christmas that year, but the holiday had come and gone before Smithwick was able to make delivery. So Kipling decided to hold them over for Christmas of '24, but sometime in the course of the year he seems to have come to his senses, recognizing the poem as a scurrilous piece of Jew-baiting tripe and bad verse in the bargain.\n\n\"As was his custom, Kipling had presented his wife, Carrie, with an inscribed copy. He asked for it back. He'd given another copy to a Surrey neighbor of his named Lonsdale as a birthday gift in early spring and he managed to get it back as well, giving the man several other books in exchange. These two books, as well as the other bound volumes, the printer's proofs, and the original holograph manuscript plus the typed manuscript from which Smithwick set type\u2014all of this went up the chimney at Bateman's.\"\n\n\"Bateman's?\"\n\n\"Bateman's was the name of Kipling's house. There's an undated letter to a London acquaintance, evidently written in the late summer or early fan of '24, in which Kipling talks of having felt like an erring Israelite who had just sacrificed a child by fire to Moloch. 'But this was a changeling, this bad child of mine, and it was with some satisfaction I committed it to the flames.' \" Whelkin sighed with contentment, sipped coffee, placed his cup in its saucer. \"And that,\" he said, \"was the end of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow.\"\n\n\"Except that it wasn't.\"\n\n\"Of course not, Mr. Rhodenbarr. The Rider Haggard copy still existed. Kipling, of course, had given a copy to his closest friend almost as soon as he received the edition from Smithwick. Had it slipped his mind when he set about recalling the other copies? I don't think so.\n\n\"Haggard, you see, was in failing health. And Kipling had dedicated the book to Haggard, and had added a personal inscription to Haggard's own copy, a paragraph running to over a hundred words in which he hailed Haggard as a kindred spirit who shared the author's vision of the peril of Jewish-inspired holocaust, or words to that effect. I believe there's a letter of Rider Haggard's in the collection of the University of Texas acknowledging the gift and praising the poem. After all that, Kipling may have been understandably reluctant to disown the work and ask for the book's return. In any event, the copy was still in Haggard's possession upon his death the following year.\"\n\n\"Then what happened to it?\"\n\n\"It was sold along with the rest of Haggard's library, and no one seems to have paid any immediate attention to it. The world didn't know the book existed, and no doubt it was sold in a lot with the other copies of Kipling's works, and for very little money, I'm sure. It came to light shortly after Kipling's death\u2014not the copy, but the realization that Kipling had written an anti-Semitic poem. The British Union of Fascists wanted to disseminate it, and Unity Mitford was rumored to have been on the trail of the Haggard copy when war broke out between Britain and Germany.\n\n\"Nothing further was heard until after the war, when the Haggard copy turned up in the possession of a North Country baronet, who sold it privately. There were supposed to have been two or three additional private transactions before the volume was scheduled to appear in Trebizond & Partners auction of effects from the estate of the twelfth Lord Ponsonby.\"\n\n\"You say scheduled to appear?\"\n\nHe nodded shortly. \"Scheduled, catalogued and withdrawn. Six weeks ago I took one of Freddie Laker's no-frills flights to London with the sole purpose of bidding on that book. I calculated that the competition would be keen. There are some rabid Kipling collectors, you know, and his reputation's been making a comeback. The University of Texas has a well-endowed library and their Kipling collection is a sound one. I expected there would be buyers for other institutions as well.\"\n\n\"Did you expect to outbid them?\"\n\n\"I expected to try. I didn't know just how high I myself was prepared to go, and of course I had no way of knowing what levels the bidding might reach. Upon arriving in London, I learned there was a Saudi who wanted that particular lot, and rumor had it that an agent for some sort of Indian prince or Maharajah was paying extraordinary prices for top-level Kiplingana. Could I have outbid such persons? I don't know. The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow is interesting and unique, but it hasn't been publicized sufficiently to have become important, really, and the work itself is of low quality from a literary standpoint.\" He frowned, and his eyebrows quivered. \"Still in all, I should have liked the chance to bid in open auction.\"\n\n\"But the lot was withdrawn.\"\n\n\"By the heirs prior to sale. The gentleman from Trebizond's was quite apologetic, and reasonably indignant himself. After all, his agreement with the heirs precluded their making private arrangements. But what could he possibly do about it? The buyer had the book and the heirs had the money and that was the end of it.\"\n\n\"Why arrange a private sale?\"\n\n\"Taxes, Mr. Rhodenbarr. Taxes. Death duties, Inland Revenue enquiries\u2014the tax laws make finaglers of us all, do they not? What voice on earth speaks with the volume of unrecorded cash? Money in hand, passed under the table, and the heirs can swear the book was set aside as an heirloom, or destroyed in a flash flood, or whatever they choose. They won't be believed, but what matter?\"\n\n\"Who bought the book?\"\n\n\"The good people at Trebizond's didn't know, of course. And the heirs weren't telling\u2014their official line was that the book hadn't been sold at all.\" He put his elbows on the table and placed his fingertips together. \"I did some investigatory work of my own. The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow was sold to Jesse Arkwright, an artful dabbler in international trade.\"\n\n\"And a collector, I suppose?\"\n\n\"An acquirer, sir. Not a collector. A gross ill-favored man who surrounds himself with exquisite objects in the hope that they will somehow cloak his own inner ugliness. He has a library, Mr. Rhodenbarr, because to do so fits the image he would like to project. He has books, some of them noteworthy, because books are the sine qua non of a proper library. But he is hardly a collector, and he most certainly does not collect Kipling.\"\n\n\"Then why\u2014\"\n\n\"Should he want this book? Because I wanted it, Mr. Rhodenbarr. It's that simple.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"Do you remember the Spinning Jenny?\"\n\n\"It was a dance craze, wasn't it?\"\n\nHe looked at me oddly. \"It was a machine,\" he said. \"The first machine capable of producing cotton thread. Sir Richard Arkwright patented it in 1769 and launched the modern British textile industry.\"\n\n\"Oh, right,\" I said. \"The Industrial Revolution and all that.\"\n\n\"And all that,\" he agreed. \"Jesse Arkwright claims descent from Sir Richard. I'm no more inclined to take his word on that point than any other. His surname means builder of arks, so perhaps he'll next hire a genealogist to trace his roots clear back to Noah.\"\n\n\"And he bought the book to keep you from having it?\"\n\n\"I once acquired something that he wanted. This seems to have been his way of paying me back.\"\n\n\"And he won't sell it.\"\n\n\"Certainly not.\"\n\n\"And there's no other copy extant.\"\n\n\"None has come to light in half a century.\"\n\n\"And you still want this particular copy.\"\n\n\"More than ever.\"\n\n\"How fortunate that you happened to pop into Barnegat Books this morning.\"\n\nHe stared.\n\n\"You called me by name before I had a chance to supply it. You came into the shop looking for me, not for Mr. Litzauer. Not because I sell secondhand books but because I used to be a burglar. You figure I'm still a burglar.\"\n\n\"I\u2014\"\n\n\"You don't believe people change. You're as bad as the police. 'Once a burglar, always a burglar'\u2014that's the way you figure it, isn't it?\"\n\n\"I was wrong,\" he said, and lowered his eyes.\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"You were right.\"\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Five\n\nI don't know what time I got into bed, but by some miracle I got out of it in time to open the store by ten-thirty. At a quarter to eleven I called the number on J. Rudyard Whelkin's business card. I let it ring unheeded for a full minute, then dialed 411 for the number of the Martingale Club. They charge you for those calls, and I could have taken a minute to look it up in the White Pages, but I'd earned a fortune the night before and I felt like sharing the wealth.\n\nThe attendant at the Martingale Club said he didn't believe Mr. Whelkin was on the premises but that he'd page him all the same. Time scuttled by. The attendant reported mournfully that Mr. Whelkin had not responded to the page, and would I care to leave a message? I decided not to.\n\nA couple of browsers filtered into the store. One of them looked potentially larcenous and I kept an eye on him as he worked his way through Biography and Belles-Lettres. He surprised me in the end by spending a few dollars on a volume of Macaulay's historical essays.\n\nCarolyn popped in a few minutes after noon and deposited a paper bag on the counter. \"Felafel sandwiches on pita bread,\" she announced. \"I decided I was in the mood for something different. You like felafel?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"I went to that place at the corner of Broadway and Twelfth. I can't figure out whether the owner's an Arab or an Israeli.\"\n\n\"Does it matter?\"\n\n\"Well, I'd hate to say the wrong thing. I was going to wish him a happy Rosh Hashanah, but suppose that's the last thing he wants to hear? So I just took my change and split.\"\n\n\"That's always safe.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. You missed a terrific meal last night. I ate half the stew and froze the rest and started watching the new sitcom about the three cheerleaders. I turned the sound off and it wasn't half bad. But I got to bed early and I got a ton of sleep and I feel great.\"\n\n\"You look it.\"\n\n\"You, on the other hand, look terrible. Is that what a night on club soda does to a person?\"\n\n\"Evidently.\"\n\n\"Maybe you got too much sleep. That happens sometimes.\"\n\n\"So they tell me.\"\n\nThe phone rang. I went and took it in the little office in back, figuring it was Whelkin. Instead it was a slightly breathless woman who wanted to know if the new Rosemary Rogers book had come in yet. I told her I handled used books exclusively and suggested she call Brentano's. She asked what their number was and I was reaching for the phone book to look it up when I came to my senses and hung up on her.\n\nI went back to my felafel. Carolyn said, \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\"No. Why?\"\n\n\"You jumped three feet when the phone rang. The coffee okay?\"\n\n\"Fine.\"\n\n\"The felafel?\"\n\n\"Delicious.\"\n\nMondays and Wednesdays I buy lunch and we eat at the Poodle Factory. Tuesdays and Thursdays Carolyn brings lunch to the bookshop. Fridays we go out somewhere and toss a coin for the check. All of this is subject to last-minute cancellation, of course, in the event of a business luncheon, such as my earlier date with Whelkin.\n\n\"Oh,\" I said, and finished swallowing a mouthful of felafel. \"I haven't squandered the morning.\"\n\n\"I never said you had.\"\n\n\"I did some research. On patron saints.\"\n\n\"Oh yeah? Who's my patron saint?\"\n\n\"I don't think you've got one.\"\n\n\"Why the hell not?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I checked a lot of different books and kept finding partial lists. I don't know if there's an official all-inclusive list anywhere.\" I groped around, found the notepad I'd been scribbling on earlier. \"I told you about St. John of God, didn't I?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but I forget what. The store?\"\n\n\"Patron saint of booksellers. He was born in Portugal in 1495. He worked as a shepherd, then became a drunkard and gambler.\"\n\n\"Good for him. Then he switched to club soda and became a saint.\"\n\n\"The books don't say anything about club soda. At forty he went through a mid-life crisis and moved to Granada. In 1538 he opened a shop\u2014\"\n\n\"To sell books?\"\n\n\"I suppose so, but did they have bookstores then? They barely had movable type. Anyway, two years later he founded the Brothers Hospitalers, and ten years later he died, and his picture's hanging over my desk, if you'd care to see it.\"\n\n\"Not especially. That's all you found out?\"\n\n\"Not at all.\" I consulted my notes. \"You asked if there was a patron saint of burglars. Well, Dismas is the patron saint of thieves. He was the Good Thief.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I remember him.\"\n\n\"He's also one of the patron saints of prisoners, along with St. Joseph Cafasso. Thieves and prisoners do overlap, although not as thoroughly as you might think.\"\n\n\"And prisoners need an extra patron saint because they're in real trouble.\"\n\n\"Makes sense. A burglar's a thief, when all is said and done, and there doesn't seem to be a special burglar's saint, but there's always St. Dunstan.\"\n\n\"Who he?\"\n\n\"The patron saint of locksmiths. Burglars and locksmiths perform essentially the same task, so why shouldn't they both turn to Dunstan in time of stress? Of course, if the situation's really dire, a burglar could turn to St. Jude Thaddeus or St. Gregory of Neocaesarea.\"\n\n\"Why would he want to do that?\"\n\n\"Because those guys are the patron saints of persons in desperate situations. There were times in my burglar days when I could have used their help. For that matter, I didn't know about St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of seekers of lost objects.\"\n\n\"So if you couldn't find what you were looking for...\"\n\n\"Precisely. You're laughing. That means I should give thanks to St. Vitus.\"\n\n\"The patron saint of dancers?\"\n\n\"Comedians, actually. Dancers have somebody else, but don't ask me who.\"\n\n\"What about dog groomers?\"\n\n\"I'll have to consult more sources.\"\n\n\"And lesbians. You honestly couldn't find anything about lesbians?\"\n\n\"Well, there's somebody who comes to mind. But I don't know his name and I don't think he was a saint.\"\n\n\"Lesbians have a male saint?\"\n\n\"He's probably not a saint anyway.\"\n\n\"Well, don't keep me in suspense. Who is he?\"\n\n\"That little Dutch boy.\"\n\n\"What little Dutch boy?\"\n\n\"You know. The one who put his finger\u2014\"\n\n\"Nobody likes a smartass, Bernie. Not even St. Vitus.\"\n\nThe afternoon sped by without further reference to patron saints. I racked up a string of small sales and moved a nice set of Trollope to a fellow who'd been sniffing around it for weeks. He wrote out a check for sixty bucks and staggered off with the books in his arms.\n\nWhenever I had a minute I called Whelkin without once reaching him. When he didn't answer the page at the Martingale Club, I left a message for him to call Mr. Haggard. I figured that would be subtle enough.\n\nThe phone rang around four. I said, \"Barnegat Books?\" and nobody said anything for a moment. I figured I had myself a heavy breather, but for the hell of it I said, \"Mr. Haggard?\"\n\n\"Sir?\"\n\nIt was Whelkin, of course. And he hadn't gotten my message, having been away from home and club all day long. His speech was labored, with odd pauses between the sentences. An extra martini at lunch, I figured.\n\n\"Could you pop by this evening, Mr. Rhodenbarr?\"\n\n\"At your club?\"\n\n\"No, that won't be convenient. Let me give you my address.\"\n\n\"I already have it.\"\n\n\"How's that?\"\n\n\"You gave me your card,\" I reminded him, and read off the address to him.\n\n\"Won't be there tonight,\" he said shortly. He sounded as though someone had puffed up his tongue with a bicycle pump. He went on to give me an address on East Sixty-sixth between First and Second avenues. \"Apartment 3-D,\" he said.\n\n\"Ring twice.\"\n\n\"Like the postman.\"\n\n\"Beg pardon?\"\n\n\"What time should I come?\"\n\nHe thought it over. \"Half past six, I should think.\"\n\n\"That's fine.\"\n\n\"And you'll bring the, uh, the item?\"\n\n\"If you'll have the, uh, cash.\"\n\n\"Everything will be taken care of.\"\n\nOdd, I thought, hanging up the phone. I was the one running on four hours' sleep. He was the one who sounded exhausted.\n\nI don't know exactly when the Sikh appeared. He was just suddenly there, poking around among the shelves, a tall slender gentleman with a full black beard and a turban. I noticed him, of course, because one does notice that sort of thing, but I didn't stare or gawp. New York is New York, after all, and a Sikh is not a Martian.\n\nShortly before five the store emptied out. I stifled a yawn with the back of my hand and thought about closing early. Just then the Sikh emerged from the world of books and presented himself in front of the counter. I'd lost track of him and had assumed he'd left.\n\n\"This book,\" he said. He held it up for my inspection, dwarfing it in his large brown hands. An inexpensive copy of The Jungle Book, by our boy Rudyard K.\n\n\"Ah, yes,\" I said. \"Mowgli, raised by wolves.\"\n\nHe was even taller than I'd realized I looked at him and thought of What's-his-name in Little Orphan Annie. He wore a gray business suit, a white shirt, an unornamented maroon tie. The turban was white.\n\n\"You know this man?\"\n\nPunjab, I thought. That was the dude in Little Orphan Annie. And his sidekick was The Asp, and\u2014\n\n\"Kipling?\" I said.\n\n\"You know him?\"\n\n\"Well, he's not living now,\" I said. \"He died in1936.\" And thank you, J. R. Whelkin, for the history lesson.\n\nThe man smiled. His teeth were very large, quite even, and whiter than his shirtfront. His features were regular, and his large sorrowful eyes were the brown of old-fashioned mink coats, the kind Ray Kirschmann's wife didn't want for Christmas.\n\n\"You know his books?\" he said.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You have other books, yes? Besides the ones on your shelves.\"\n\nAn alarm bell sounded somewhere in the old cerebellum. \"My stock's all on display,\" I said carefully.\n\n\"Another book. A private book, perhaps.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not.\"\n\nThe smile faded until the mouth was a grim line hidden at its corners by the thick black beard. The Sikh dropped a hand into his jacket pocket. When he brought it out there was a pistol in it. He stood so that his body screened the pistol from the view of passers-by and held it so that it was pointed directly at my chest.\n\nIt was a very small gun, a nickel-plated automatic. They make fake guns about that size, novelty items, but somehow I knew that this one wouldn't turn out to be a cigarette lighter in disguise.\n\nIt should have looked ridiculous, such a little gun in such a large hand, but I'll tell you something. Guns, when they're pointed at me, never look ridiculous.\n\n\"Please,\" he said patiently. \"Let us be reasonable. You know what I want.\"\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Six\n\nI wanted to look him in the eyes but I couldn't keep from staring at the gun.\n\n\"There is something,\" I said.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I've got it behind the counter, see, because of a personal interest\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"But since you're a fan of Kipling's, and because your devotion is obvious\u2014\"\n\n\"The book, please.\"\n\nHis free hand snatched it up the instant I laid it on the counter. The smile was back now, broader than ever. He tried the book in his jacket pocket but it didn't fit. He set it back on the counter for a moment while he drew an envelope from an inside pocket. He was still pointing the gun at me and I wished he'd stop.\n\n\"For your trouble,\" he said, slapping the envelope smartly on the counter in front of me. \"Because you are a reasonable man.\"\n\n\"Reasonable,\" I said.\n\n\"No police, no troubles.\" His smile spread. \"Reasonable.\"\n\n\"Like Brutus.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\"\n\n\"No, he was honorable, wasn't he? And I'm reasonable.\" The book screamed at me from the counter top. \"This book,\" I said, my hand pawing the air above it. \"You're a stranger in my country, and I can't let you\u2014\"\n\nHe scooped up the book and backed off, teeth flashing furiously. When he reached the door he pocketed the gun, stepped quickly outside, and hurried off westward on Eleventh Street.\n\nGone but not forgotten.\n\nI stared after him for a moment or two. Then I suppose I sighed, and finally I picked up the envelope and weighed it in my hand as if trying to decide how many stamps to put on it. It was a perfectly ordinary envelope of the sort doctors mail their bills in, except that there was no return address in its upper left-hand corner. Just a simple blank envelope, dime-store stationery.\n\nRudyard Whelkin had agreed to pay me fifteen thousand dollars for the book he wanted. Somehow I couldn't make myself believe this little envelope contained fifteen thousand dollars.\n\nI opened it. Fifty-dollar bills, old ones, out of sequence.\n\nTen of them.\n\nFive hundred dollars.\n\nBig hairy deal.\n\nI dragged the bargain table in from the street. Somehow I wasn't eager to stay open a few extra minutes in order to peddle a few old books at three for a buck. I hung the Closed sign in the window and set about shutting things down, transferring some cash from the register to my wallet, filling out a deposit slip for the check I'd taken in on the Trollope set.\n\nI folded the ten fifties and buttoned them into a hip pocket. And snatched up a brown-wrapped book from a drawer in the office desk, and let myself out of the store and went through my nightly lock-up routine with the steel gates.\n\nFor a few minutes I just walked, north on Broadway, then east on Thirteenth Street, then uptown on Third Avenue. The corner of Fourteenth and Third was aswarm with persons addicted to any of a variety of licit and illicit substances. Junkies scratched themselves, winos passed pints around, and a methadone enthusiast kept slamming the heel of his hand thoughtfully against a brick building. I straightened the knot in my tie\u2014I'd put the tie on before leaving the store\u2014and walked onward, resisting the temptation to give my hip pocket a reassuring pat.\n\nFive hundred dollars.\n\nThere's a big difference between five hundred and fifteen thousand, and while the latter sum represents a very decent return on a night's labor, the former is small compensation for risking life and limb, not to mention liberty. So a five-hundred-dollar payment for The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow was like no money at all.\n\nOn the other hand, five hundred dollars was a princely sum for the Grosset & Dunlap reprint edition of Soldiers Three, which is what my turbaned and bearded visitor had taken from me at gunpoint. I rather doubt it was what he wanted, but you don't always get what you want, do you?\n\nI'd had the book priced reasonably enough at $1.95. And I had the Haggard copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow all nicely wrapped in brown kraft paper and tucked under my arm, and wouldn't Rudyard Whelkin be happy to see it?\n\nIt's funny how things work out.\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Seven\n\nI was early, of course. My appointment with Whelkin wasn't until six-thirty and I'd locked up the shop just a few minutes after five, not wanting to stick around in case the Sikh realized his mistake. I had a sign on the wall emphasizing that all sales were final, but I had a feeling he'd expect me to make an exception in his case. So I took my time walking uptown, and I was still twenty minutes early when I reached the corner of Sixty-sixth and Second. A bar on the corner looked inviting, and I accepted the invitation.\n\nI don't drink when I'm working. But this wasn't exactly work, and I'd felt the need for something after staring into the barrel of the Sikh's automatic. As a matter of fact, I'd stopped for a quick bracer in a Third Avenue ginmill on my way uptown. Now I wanted something a little more civilized, a dry Rob Roy in a stemmed and frosted glass.\n\nI sipped it and did a little thinking, ticking off points on my fingers.\n\nPoint One: Only J. Rudyard Whelkin had known I was going to steal the book from the Arkwright house in Forest Hills Gardens.\n\nPoint Two: It was four o'clock before Whelkin knew I had the book. He'd known I was going there, but there's many a slip between the cup and the whatsit, and it wasn't until he called me at the bookstore that he knew for certain my trip to Queens had paid off. In all likelihood, Arkwright himself didn't even know the book was missing yet.\n\nPoint Three: The Sikh had not been a bizarre coincidence, one of those phenomena that make life the ever-exciting proposition it indisputably is. No way. The Sikh had darkened my doorway because he knew I had stolen Arkwright's copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow.\n\nHard work, thinking. I checked my watch, took another sip of my Rob Roy.\n\nAssumption: The Sikh did not have mystical powers. He knew I had the book because the information had somehow reached him via Whelkin.\n\nHypothesis: J. Rudyard Whelkin was as reluctant as the next skinflint to part with fifteen grand. Once he'd established that I had the book in my possession, he simply dispatched his faithful native servant to fetch it for him, instructing him to slip me the ten fifties to smooth my ruffled feathers.\n\nThe hypothesis had me clenching my teeth and making a fist at the very thought. I had a little more of my Rob Roy and did some deep breathing.\n\nRebuttal: The hypothesis didn't make sense. If Whelkin was going to rob me, why send someone to the store? He'd already taken pains to set up a meeting on East Sixty-sixth Street, where he could set up an elaborate ambush with ease.\n\nAlternate Hypothesis: The Sikh was somebody else's faithful native servant. Hadn't Whelkin mentioned that several parties had intended to bid on the book at Trebizond's London auction? Was it not possible that one of them had followed the book to New York, scheming to wrest it away from Arkwright's possession, only to see it whisked out from under his nose by one B. G. Rhodenbarr?\n\nThat seemed to make more sense, but it still left a stone or two unturned. I found myself wondering what would happen when the Sikh's employer took a look at Soldiers Three. The sooner I turned the book over to Whelkin and collected my fifteen thousand dollars, the better I'd be able to cope with him. The best way to cope, I felt, would be to take a quick vacation somewhere, spending a portion of the boodle and giving him time to cool off or leave town or, ideally, both.\n\nI stood up.\n\nAnd sat down again.\n\nDid I have anything to fear from Whelkin? I was pretty sure he hadn't sent the Sikh, but suppose I was wrong? Or suppose he had not sent the Sikh and indeed knew nothing about the Sikh, but suppose he had his own ideas about doing me out of my fee? Was it possible I'd let myself be snowed by the elegant manner and the Martingale Club membership? The rich, I've noted, are no more eager to part with a bundle than anyone else. And here I was, meeting him on his own turf, bringing him the book like a dutiful dog with the evening paper in his mouth. Lord, I couldn't even testify that Whelkin had fifteen thousand dollars, let alone that he was prepared to hand it over to me.\n\nI went to the men's room, book in hand. When I returned I had both hands free. The book was wedged under my belt against the small of my back, out of sight beneath my suit jacket.\n\nI finished the last of my drink. I'd have liked another, but that could wait until the completion of my business transaction.\n\nFirst things first.\n\nThe house on Sixty-sixth Street was an elegant brownstone with a plant-filled bay window on the parlor floor. Taller buildings stood on either side of it, but the old brownstone held its own. I walked up a half flight of stairs and studied a row of bells in the vestibule.\n\nM. Porlock. 3-D.\n\nI rang twice. Nothing happened for a moment and I checked my watch again. It said 6:29 and it is a watch that rarely lies. I placed my finger on the bell again, tentatively, and at that instant the answering buzzer sounded and I pushed the door open.\n\nThere were two apartments on the parlor floor, four each on the three floors above it. (The basement had its own entrance.) I mounted two flights of carpeted stairs with an increasing feeling of mingled anticipation and dread. The D apartments were at the rear of the building. The door of 3-D was slightly ajar. I gave it a rap with my knuckles and it was almost immediately drawn open by a square-shouldered woman wearing a muted-plaid skirt and a brass-buttoned navy blazer. Her dark-brown hair was very short and irregularly cut, as if the barber had been either a drunken friend or a very trendy beautician.\n\nShe said, \"Mr. Rhodenbarr? Do come in.\"\n\n\"I was supposed to meet\u2014\"\n\n\"Ruddy Whelkin, I know. He's expected at any moment. He rang up not ten minutes ago to say he'd been momentarily detained.\" She smiled suddenly. \"I'm to make you comfortable, you see. I'm Madeleine Porlock.\"\n\nI took the hand she extended. \"Bernie Rhodenbarr,\" I said. \"But you already know that.\"\n\n\"Your reputation precedes you. Won't you have a seat? And may I get you a drink?\"\n\n\"Not just now,\" I said. To the drink, that is; I seated myself in a tub chair upholstered in glove-soft green Naugahyde. The living room was small but comfortable, with a Victorian rosewood love seat and a floral-slip-covered easy chair in addition to the tub chair. The bold abstract oil over the love seat somehow complemented the furnishings. It was a nice room, and I said as much.\n\n\"Thank you. You're sure you won't have a little sherry?\"\n\n\"I'll pass for now.\"\n\nThere was classical music playing on the radio, a woodwind ensemble that sounded like Vivaldi. Madeleine Porlock crossed the room, adjusted the volume. There was something familiar about her but I couldn't think what it was.\n\n\"Ruddy should be here any moment,\" she said again.\n\n\"Have you known him long?\"\n\n\"Ruddy? Seems like ages.\"\n\nI tried picturing them as a couple. They didn't bear mentioning in the same breath with Steve and Eydie, or even Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, but they weren't utterly inconceivable. He was a good deal older than she, certainly. She looked to be in her early thirties, although I'm terrible at judging people's ages.\n\nDid I know her from somewhere?\n\nI was on the verge of asking when she clapped her hands together as if she'd just hit on the principle of specific gravity. \"Coffee,\" she said.\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\"\n\n\"You'll have a cup of coffee. It's freshly made. You will have some, won't you?\"\n\nI'd turned down the drink because I wanted to remain alert. All the more reason to have the coffee. We agreed on cream and sugar and she went off to prepare it. I settled myself in the tub chair and listened to the music, thinking how nice it would be to be able to play the bassoon. I'd priced bassoons once and they cost a lot, and I understand the instrument's exceedingly difficult to learn, and I don't even remember how to read music, so I don't suppose I'll ever go so far as to acquire a bassoon and set about taking lessons, but whenever I hear the instrument in a concerto or a chamber work it occurs to me how nice it would be to go to sleep one night and wake up the following morning owning a bassoon and knowing how to play it.\n\nThings go so much simpler in fantasy. You leave out all the scut work that way.\n\n\"Mr. Rhodenbarr?\"\n\nI took the coffee from her. She'd served it in a chunky earthenware mug ornamented with a geometric design. I sniffed at the coffee and allowed that it smelled good.\n\n\"I hope you like it,\" she said. \"It's a Louisiana blend I've been using lately. It has chicory in it.\"\n\n\"I like chicory.\"\n\n\"Oh, so do I,\" she said. She made it sound as though our mutual enthusiasm could be the start of something big. The woodwind quintet ended\u2014it was Vivaldi, according to the announcer\u2014and a Haydn symphony replaced it.\n\nI took a sip of my coffee. She asked if it was all right and I assured her that it was wonderful, although it really wasn't. There was a slight off-taste discernible beneath the cream and sugar, and I decided that chicory was one of those things I don't really like but just think I do.\n\n\"Ruddy said you were bringing him something, Mr. Rhodenbarr.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"He seemed very anxious about it. You have it with you, of course?\"\n\nI drank more coffee and decided that it wasn't really all that bad. The Haydn symphony rolled in waves, echoing within the little room.\n\n\"Mr. Rhodenbarr.\"\n\n\"Nice music,\" I said.\n\n\"Do you have the book, Mr. Rhodenbarr?\"\n\nI was smiling. I had the feeling it was a sort of dopey smile but I couldn't seem to do anything about it.\n\n\"Mr. Rhodenbarr?\"\n\n\"You're very pretty.\"\n\n\"The book, Mr. Rhodenbarr.\"\n\n\"I know you from somewhere. You look familiar.\" I was spilling coffee on myself, for some reason, and I felt deeply embarrassed. I shouldn't have had that Rob Roy, I decided, and then Madeleine Porlock was taking the cup away from me and placing it carefully on the glass-topped coffee table.\n\n\"I always walk into those things,\" I confided. \"Glass tables. Don't see them. Walk right into them. You have orange hair.\"\n\n\"Close your eyes, Mr. Rhodenbarr.\"\n\nMy eyes slammed shut. I pried them open and looked at her. She had a mop of curly orange hair, and as I stared at her it disappeared and her hair was short and dark again. I blinked, trying to make it orange, but it stayed as it was.\n\n\"The coffee,\" I said, brilliantly. \"Something in the coffee.\"\n\n\"Sit back and relax, Mr. Rhodenbarr.\"\n\n\"You drugged me.\" I braced my hands on the arms of the chair and tried to stand. I couldn't even get my behind off the chair. My arms had no strength in them and my legs didn't even appear to exist anymore.\n\n\"Orange hair,\" I said.\n\n\"Close your eyes, Mr. Rhodenbarr.\"\n\n\"Have to get up\u2014\"\n\n\"Sit back and rest. You're very tired.\"\n\nGod, that was the truth. I gulped air, shook my head furiously in an attempt to shake some of the cobwebs loose. That was a mistake\u2014the motion set off a string of tiny firecrackers somewhere in the back of my skull. Haydn dipped and soared. My eyes closed again, and I strained to get them open and saw her leaning over me, telling me how sleepy I was.\n\nI kept my eyes open. Even so, my field of vision began to darken along its edges. Then patches of black appeared here and there, and they grew together until it was all black, everywhere, and I gave up and let go and fell all the way down to the bottom.\n\nI was dreaming something about an earthquake in Turkey, houses crumbling around me, boulders rolling down the sides of mountains. I fought my way out of the dream like an underwater swimmer struggling to reach the water's surface. The Turkish earthquake was part of the hourly newscast on the radio. The Social Democrats had scored substantial gains in parliamentary elections in Belgium. A Hollywood actor had died of an overdose of sleeping pills. The President was expected to veto something or other.\n\nA buzzer was sounding nearby, interrupting the monotony of the newscast. I managed to open my eyes. My head ached and my mouth tasted as though I'd fallen asleep sucking the wad of cotton from the vitamin jar. The buzzer buzzed again and I wondered why nobody was answering it.\n\nI opened my eyes again. Evidently they had closed without my knowing it. The radio announcer was inviting me to subscribe to Back-packer Magazine. I didn't want to but wasn't sure I had the strength to refuse. The buzzer was still buzzing. I wished Madeleine Porlock would get up from the Victorian love seat and answer it, or make them stop buzzing, or something.\n\nThe radio switched to music. Something with violins. Soothing. I opened my eyes again. The buzzing had stopped and there was the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs.\n\nI was still in the tub chair. My left hand lay in my lap like a small dead animal. My right arm was draped over the side of the chair, and there was something in my right hand.\n\nI opened my eyes again, gave my head a shake. Something loose rattled around inside it. Someone was knocking on the door. I wished the Porlock woman would answer it, but she was in no better shape than I was.\n\nThey banged harder on the door and I opened my eyes again, and this time I managed to straighten up in the chair and kick through to something resembling actual consciousness. I gulped air and blinked rapidly and remembered where I was and what I was doing there.\n\nI moved my left hand, reached around and felt the small of my back. The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow was gone.\n\nWell, that figured.\n\n\"Open up in there!\"\n\nKnock, knock, knock, and I felt like the drunken porter in Macbeth. I called out for them to wait a minute and reached to check my hip pocket for the Sikh's five hundred dollars. I couldn't reach that pocket with my left hand. And why was I using my left, anyway? Oh, sure. Because there was something heavy in my right hand.\n\n\"Police! Open up in there!\"\n\nMore furious pounding on the door. I raised my right hand. There was a gun in it. I stared stupidly at it, then raised it to my face and sniffed its muzzle. I smelled that particular mix of gun oil and gunpowder and burnt odor characteristic of a recently fired weapon.\n\nI looked at the love seat again, hoping to find it empty, wishing what I'd seen earlier had been a mirage. But Madeleine Porlock was still there, and she hadn't moved, and I could see now that she wasn't likely to, not without more help than I could give her.\n\nShe'd been shot in the middle of the forehead, right where the horrid little girl had a little curl, and I had a fairly good idea what gun had done the deed.\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Eight\n\nI got up quickly\u2014too quickly\u2014the blood rushed to my feet, or wherever it goes under such circumstances, and I very nearly fell back down again. But I stayed on my feet and fought to clear my head a little.\n\nThe radio was still playing. I wanted to turn it off but left it alone. The cops had left off knocking on the door and were slamming into it every few seconds. Any moment now the door would give and they'd come stumbling into the room.\n\nI decided I didn't want to be there when that happened.\n\nI was still holding the damned gun. I dropped it, and then I picked it up and wiped my prints off it, and then I dropped it again and made my way past the radio and through a short hallway with a bathroom and closet on one side and a pullman kitchen on the other. At the end of the hallway a door opened into a fair-sized bedroom furnished with a four-poster spool bed and a Pennsylvania Dutch blanket chest. There was a window on the far wall over the bed, and it opened onto a fire escape, and I damn well opened it.\n\nFresh air, cold fresh air. I filled both lungs and felt some of the cobwebs leave my brain. I climbed out onto the fire escape and closed the window after me. With it shut I could just barely hear the sounds of police officers caroming off the apartment door.\n\nNow what?\n\nI looked down and a wave of vertigo hit me. I thought of all the drug labels with their warnings about driving or operating machinery. If drowsiness occurs, stay off rickety fire escapes.\n\nI took another look. Below me, the fire escape terminated in a courtyard walled off on all three sides. I might get into the basement, but there was sure to be a cop posted downstairs, most likely a fat one who hadn't wanted to climb up two flights in the first place.\n\nSo I started up the fire escape, up past the fourth floor and on to the roof. Someone had built a redwood sundeck up there, and there were trees and shrubs in large redwood planters. It was all very lovely, but there was one trouble with it\u2014I couldn't get off it. The adjoining buildings were both a hundred or more feet taller than the one I was standing on, and the heavy fire door leading back into the building couldn't be opened without a key. This wouldn't have been a problem if I'd had my tools along, but who figured I'd need them?\n\nBack down the fire escape. I paused at the fourth-floor landing, trying to decide if I wanted to take my chances with whoever was posted at ground level. I could always break into the basement and just hide there in the boiler room until the heat died down, but did I really want to do that? For that matter, did I want to scurry past the bedroom window of the Porlock apartment when the police were most likely already in there?\n\nI took a moment to check the two fourth-floor apartments. The one on the right\u20144-D, I suppose, directly above the Porlock place\u2014had its shade drawn. I pressed my ear to the windowpane and caught Brady Bunch reruns on the television set. The shade was drawn a few yards to the left at 4-C, but I couldn't hear anything inside, nor could I see any light around the edges of the window shade.\n\nOf course the window was locked.\n\nIf I'd had a glass cutter I could have drawn a neat freehand circle on the appropriate pane of glass, reached in and turned the window lock. If I'd had some tape I could have broken any pane I wanted with no more noise than you'd make snapping a dry twig. If I'd had...\n\nIf wishes were horses, burglars would ride. I kicked in a pane of glass and closed my eyes until the tinkling stopped. I put my ear to the opening I'd created and listened for a moment or two, then unlocked the window, raised it, and stepped through it.\n\nA few minutes later I left that apartment in a more conventional manner than I'd entered it, departing through the door and walking briskly down a flight of stairs. I encountered a couple of uniformed patrolmen on the third floor. The door to 3-D was open now, with other cops making themselves busy inside the apartment, while these two stood in the hall with nothing to do.\n\nI asked one what the trouble was. He jutted out his chin at me and told me it was just routine. I nodded, reassured, and went down the other two flights and out.\n\nI wanted to go home. It may or may not be where the heart is but it's where the burglar's tools are, and a burglar, like a workman, is only as good as his tools, and I felt naked without mine. I wasn't sure if the cops had a make on me yet. They'd get one before long, I was fairly sure of that, but I didn't doubt my ability to get in and out of my apartment before they set about looking for me. I had my tools there, I had cash there, and I would have liked to make a quick pit stop and equip myself for whatever lay ahead.\n\nBecause what lay ahead didn't look too good from where I sat. Madeleine Porlock had been left with more than the traditional number of holes in her head, and my fingerprints were undoubtedly plastered all over that apartment\u2014on the cup I'd been drinking from, on the glass-topped table, and God knows where else. The same criminal genius that had wrapped my inert fingers around the murder gun would have seen to that.\n\nThe police would have a lot of questions for me, and they wouldn't even pay attention to my answers. I, on the other hand, had some hard questions of my own.\n\nWho was Madeleine Porlock? How did she fit into the whole business? Why had she drugged me, and where had her killer come from, and why had he murdered her?\n\nWhatever had become of Rudyard Whelkin?\n\nAnd, finally, how did the Sikh fit into all of this?\n\nThe last question was no more easily answered than the others, but it made me realize I couldn't go home. By now the Sikh and whoever had sent him would know they'd been hoodwinked, which meant I had to avoid whatever places they might logically expect to find me. The store was out, obviously, and so was the apartment, since anyone with access to a Manhattan phone book can ferret out my address.\n\nI flagged a cab heading downtown on Second Avenue. The driver was young and Hispanic, with alert eyes. Were those eyes registering me even as he asked my destination?\n\n\"The Village,\" I said.\n\n\"What part of it?\"\n\n\"Sheridan Square.\"\n\nHe nodded shortly and away we went.\n\nCarolyn Kaiser's apartment was on Arbor Court, one of those side-goggled Village lanes I can only find if I start out from the right place. Sheridan Square was the wrong place, so I had to walk up to Greenwich Avenue and then west and south until I hit it. I didn't remember which building was hers, so I went into the vestibules of several until I found her name on a mailbox and rang her bell.\n\nNobody home. I'd have called first but I didn't have her number with me and it was unlisted, and it's easier to pass a needle through the eye of a camel than to get an unlisted number out of an Information operator. It's hard enough to get listed numbers. I rang a couple of top-floor bells until someone buzzed me into the building. Carolyn lived on the first floor. I took one look at the locks on her door and turned around and left.\n\nI checked a couple of hardware stores on Hudson. All closed. There was a locksmith, but could I really ask him to sell me burglar's tools? I didn't even try. I went to a drugstore and bought masking tape and paper clips and hairpins and a couple of nail files. At the tobacco counter I added a pipesmoker's gizmo equipped with different doohickeys for tamping, reaming, probing, and otherwise mistreating a pipe. It looked to be made of pretty decent steel.\n\nI went back to Carolyn's building and annoyed the top-floor tenants again and got buzzed in a second time. I went to her door and got busy.\n\nWith my ring of picks and probes, the operation wouldn't have taken five minutes. With makeshift tools from the drugstore it took closer to ten, during which time two persons entered the building and one left it. If any of them took any notice of me they were too polite to make a scene, and I finished the task at hand and let myself into her place.\n\nCozy. Very Village, really. One room about fifteen feet square with a teensy lavatory added on in back, so small that your knees nudged the door when you sat on the potty. The bathtub, a large claw-footed relic, was over in the kitchen area with the sink and stove and fridge; Carolyn had had a plywood cover cut to fit it so that she could use it for chopping up vegetables. The walls were painted blue, a deep rich tone, and the window frames and exposed plumbing were a bright yellow.\n\nI used the loo, lit a fire under the leftover coffee (with a match, the pilot didn't work), and let one of the cats check me out. He was a Burmese and nothing intimidated him. His buddy, a wary-eyed Russian Blue, reposed on the double bed, where he tried to blend with the patchwork quilt. I scratched the Burmese behind the ear and he made that bizarre sound they make and rubbed his head against my ankle. I guess I passed inspection.\n\nThe coffee boiled. I poured a cup, took a taste, and got flashes of the mug of doctored coffee Madeleine Porlock had given me. I poured it out, heated some water and made some tea, and fortified the brew with an authoritative slug of California brandy from a bottle I found on the shelf over the sink.\n\nIt was six-thirty when I kept my appointment at Chez Porlock, and I'd bolted from the place during the seven o'clock newscast. I didn't look at my watch again until I was sitting in Carolyn's wicker chair with my feet up, the second cup of brandied tea half gone and the Russian Blue purring insanely in my lap. It was then just eighteen minutes after nine.\n\nI moved the cat long enough to turn Carolyn's radio to one of the all-news stations, then settled back on the chair again. The cat reclaimed his place and helped me listen to a report on the Turkish earthquake and the presidential veto. There was a disgruntled Albanian holding a couple of people hostage up in Washington Heights, and a reporter on the scene did more than was necessary to put me right in the picture. I stroked the Russian Blue patiently while his Burmese buddy sat on top of a bookcase and made yowling noises.\n\nIt was coming up on eleven o'clock when I heard Carolyn's key in the lock. By then I'd switched to an FM jazz station and I had both cats on my lap. I stayed where I was while she unlocked the door, and as she opened it I said, \"It's me, Carolyn. Don't panic.\"\n\n\"Why should I panic?\" She came in, closed the door, locked up. \"Been here long? I was over at the Dutchess and you know what that's like. Except you probably don't, because they don't allow men in there.\" She slipped off her jacket, hung it on a doorknob, walked toward the coffeepot, then spun around suddenly and stared at me. \"Hey,\" she said. \"Did we make a date that I forgot?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Randy let you in? I thought she was visiting her goddam aunt in Bath Beach. What was she doing here? Did she go out to Brooklyn afterward or what?\"\n\n\"I haven't seen Randy.\"\n\n\"Then how'd you get in, Bernie?\"\n\n\"I sort of let myself in.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but where'd you get a key?\" She frowned at me. Then light dawned. \"Oh,\" she said, \"I get it. Other people need keys. You're like Casper the Ghost. You walk through walls.\"\n\n\"Not exactly.\"\n\nThe cats had deserted my lap and were brushing themselves passionately against her ankles, desperate to be fed. She ignored them.\n\nShe said, \"Bernie?\"\n\n\"The radio.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"It'll answer part of your question.\"\n\nShe listened, cocked her head. \"Sounds like Monk,\" she said. \"But I don't know, it's not as choppy as Monk and he's doing a lot of things with his left hand.\"\n\n\"It's Jimmy Rowles, but that's not what I meant. After the record ends, Carolyn.\"\n\nAfter the record ended we got a quickie commercial for a jazz cruise to the Bahamas, and I had to explain that that wasn't it either. Then they gave us the eleven o'clock news, and high time, too. The Turkish earthquake, the flaky Albanian, the probable presidential veto, and then the extraordinary news that a convicted burglar, Bernard Rhodenbarr by name, was sought in connection with the murder of one Madeleine Porlock, who had been shot to death in her own apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street.\n\nThe announcer moved on to other matters. Carolyn cut him off in the middle of a sentence, looked at me for a moment, then went over to the kitchen area and fed the cats. \"Chicken and kidneys tonight,\" she told them. \"One of your all-time favorites, guys.\"\n\nShe stood for a moment with her back to me, her little hands on her hips, watching the wee rascals eat. Then she came over and sat on the edge of the bed.\n\n\"I should have known it was Jimmy Rowles,\" she said. \"I used to catch him at Bradley's all the time. I haven't been going there lately because Randy hates jazz, but if we break up, which I think we're in the process of doing, the hell, I'll get to the jazz clubs more, so it's an ill wind, right?\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Madeleine Doorlock? Funny name.\"\n\n\"Porlock.\"\n\n\"Still unusual. Who was she, Bern?\"\n\n\"Beats me. We were strangers until this afternoon.\"\n\n\"You kill her?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nShe crossed her legs at the knee, planted an elbow on the upper knee, cupped her hand, rested her chin in it. \"All set,\" she announced. \"You talk and I'll listen.\"\n\n\"Well,\" I said, \"it's a long story.\"\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Nine\n\nIt was a long story, and she listened patiently through the whole thing, leaving the bed only to fetch the brandy bottle. When I finished she cracked the seal on a fresh bottle and poured us each a generous measure. I'd given up diluting mine with tea and she'd never started.\n\n\"Well, here's to crime,\" she said, holding her glass on high. \"No wonder you almost spilled your club soda last time I said that. You were all set to go out and commit one. That's why you weren't drinking, huh?\"\n\n\"I never drink when I work.\"\n\n\"I never work when I drink. Same principle. This is all taking me a little time to get used to, Bernie. I really believed you were a guy who used to be a burglar, but now you'd put all of that behind you and you were selling used books. Everything you told that policeman\u2014\"\n\n\"It was all true up to a point. I don't make a profit on the store, or maybe I do. I'm not much of an accountant. I buy and I sell, and I probably come out ahead, even allowing for rent and light bills and the phone and all. If I worked harder at it I could probably make enough to live on that way. If I hustled, and if I shelved paperbacks instead of wholesaling them, and if I read the want ads in AB every week and sent out price quotes all over the place.\"\n\n\"Instead you go out and knock off houses.\"\n\n\"Just once in a while.\"\n\n\"Special occasions.\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"To make ends meet.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\nShe frowned in thought, scratched her head, sipped a little brandy. \"Let's see,\" she said. \"You came here because it's a safe place for you to be, right?\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Well, that's cool. We're friends, aren't we? I know it means I'm harboring a fugitive, and I don't particularly give a shit. What are friends for?\"\n\n\"You're one in a million, Carolyn.\"\n\n\"You bet your ass. Listen, you can stay as long as you like and no questions asked, but the thing is I do have some questions, but I won't ask them if you don't want.\"\n\n\"Ask me anything.\"\n\n\"What's the capital of South Dakota? No, seriously, folks. Why'd you wait until the Arkwrights came home? Why not just duck in and out quick like a bunny? I always thought burglars preferred to avoid human contact.\"\n\nI nodded. \"It was Whelkin's idea. He wanted the book to be stolen without Arkwright even realizing it was gone. If I didn't take anything else and didn't disturb the house, and if the book was still there when Jesse Arkwright played his bedtime game of pocket billiards, it would be at least a day before he missed it. Whelkin was certain he'd be the prime suspect, because he wants the book so badly and he's had this feud with Arkwright, and an alibi wouldn't really help because Arkwright would just figure he hired someone to do it.\"\n\n\"Which he did do.\"\n\n\"Which he did do,\" I agreed. \"But the longer it takes for Arkwright to know the book's missing, and the harder it is for him to dope out how or when it disappeared, and the more time Whelkin has to tuck it away where it will never be found\u2014\"\n\n\"And that's why you just took the book and left everything else.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Okay. That part makes sense now, I guess. But what happened to Whelkin?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"You figure he killed her?\"\n\n\"I don't think so.\"\n\n\"Why not? He set up the meeting. He got her to drug you, and then when you were unconscious he killed her.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"To frame you, I suppose. To get you out of the picture.\"\n\n\"Why not just kill me?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" She gnawed at a knuckle. \"She can't just come out of the air, this Porlock babe. Whelkin sent you to her, she doped your coffee, and she must have been after the book because she was asking you for it before you had a chance to nod out. Then she frisked you and took it herself.\"\n\n\"Or the killer did.\"\n\n\"You never heard a gunshot?\"\n\n\"I was really out cold. And maybe he used a silencer, but if he did he took it along with him. He also took the book, plus the five hundred dollars the Sikh gave me.\" I shrugged. \"I figured all along that was too much to charge for a reprint copy of Soldiers Three. Well, easy come, easy go.\"\n\n\"That's what they say. Maybe the Sikh killed her.\"\n\n\"How do you figure that?\"\n\n\"Maybe they were working together and he double-crossed her at the end.\" She shrugged elaborately. \"I don't know, Bern. I'm just spinning my wheels a little. She must have been connected with Whelkin, though, don't you think?\"\n\n\"I suppose so. He did lead me straight to her apartment. But\u2014\"\n\n\"But what?\"\n\n\"But why wouldn't he just buy the book?\"\n\n\"Maybe he couldn't afford it. But you're right that would have been the easiest thing for him to do. He already paid you some of it in advance, didn't he? How much did he still owe you?\"\n\nI didn't say anything.\n\n\"Bernie?\"\n\nI sighed. \"Just yesterday,\" I said, \"I told a shoplifter he was too dumb to steal. He's not the only one.\"\n\n\"You didn't\u2014\"\n\n\"I didn't get any of the money in advance.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\nI shrugged, sighed, drank. \"He was a member of the Martingale Club,\" I said. \"Had a sort of English accent. Dressed very tweedy.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"So his front snowed me, that's all. He finessed the whole topic of advance payment. I don't know how, but I walked into that house with nothing in my pocket but my hands. Jesus, Carolyn, I even dipped into my own funds for gasoline and bridge tolls. I'm beginning to feel really stupid.\"\n\n\"Whelkin conned you. He set you up and she polished you off, and then he shot her and left you in the frame.\"\n\nI thought it over. \"No,\" I said.\n\n\"No?\"\n\n\"I don't think so. Why use her at all? He could slip me a mickey as easily as she could. And there's something else. That last telephone conversation I had with him, when he set up the meeting at her apartment. He sounded out of synch. I thought at the time he'd been drinking.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"I bet they drugged him.\"\n\n\"The way they drugged you?\"\n\n\"Not quite. Not the same drug, or the poor bastard wouldn't have been able to talk at all. I wonder what she gave me. It must have been powerful stuff. It had me hallucinating.\"\n\n\"Like acid?\"\n\n\"I never had any acid.\"\n\n\"Neither did I.\"\n\n\"And this wasn't that kind of hallucination, with animals materializing on the walls and things like that. My perceptions just got distorted there before I blacked out. The music was getting loud and soft alternately, for example. And her face seemed to melt when I stared at it, but that was just before I went under.\"\n\n\"And you said something about her hair.\"\n\n\"Right, it kept turning orange. She had really short hair, dark brown, and I kept flashing that she had a head full of bright orange curls. Then I would blink and she'd have short dark hair again. Oh, for Christ's sake.\"\n\n\"What is it, Bernie?\"\n\n\"I know where I saw her before. And she did have curly orange hair. It must have been a wig.\"\n\n\"The dark hair?\"\n\nThe orange hair. She came to the shop and she must have been wearing an orange wig. I'm positive it was the same woman. Squared shoulders, blocky figure, a kind of a stern square-jawed face\u2014I'm positive it was her. She must have come to the shop three or four times.\"\n\n\"With Rudyard Whelkin?\"\n\n\"No. He only came there once. Then we had lunch in the Martingale Club that same day, and I met him once more at the club for drinks and we talked several times over the phone. She came to the shop\u2014well, I don't know when I first noticed her, but it must have been within the past week. Then yesterday she bought a book from me. Virgil's Eclogues, the Heritage Club edition. It was her. No question about it.\"\n\n\"What was she doing?\"\n\n\"Looking things over, I suppose. Same reason I went out to Forest Hills with a clipboard. Reconnaissance. Say, can I put the radio on?\"\n\n\"What for?\"\n\n\"Midnight news.\"\n\n\"It's that time already? Sure, put it on.\"\n\nI moved a cat and switched on the radio. I sat down and the cat returned to my lap and resumed purring. The news broadcast was a repeat of the eleven o'clock summary, except that the Albanian had surrendered without harming any of his hostages. He'd evidently gone bananas when he learned that his common-law wife had another common-law husband, which made them common-law husbands-in-law, or something. Madeleine Porlock was still dead and the police were still looking for one Bernard Rhodenbarr.\n\nI moved the cat again, switched off the news, and sat down again. Carolyn asked me how it felt to be wanted by the police. I told her it felt terrible.\n\n\"How'd they know it was you, Bernie? Fingerprints?\"\n\n\"Or the wallet.\"\n\n\"What wallet?\"\n\n\"My wallet. Whoever frisked me got it\u2014Madeleine Porlock or her killer. The book, the five hundred bucks, and the wallet. Maybe somebody stashed it where the cops would be sure to find it.\"\n\n\"Weren't you supposed to be unconscious when they arrived?\"\n\n\"Maybe the wallet was a form of insurance. Or maybe the killer took the wallet on the chance I had something incriminating in it, like the card Whelkin gave me or some notes to myself.\" I shrugged. \"I suppose the wallet could be anywhere right now. I suppose I should be all worked up about stopping my Master Charge card before someone charges a ton of airline tickets to my account. Somehow that's way down on my list of priorities.\"\n\n\"I can understand that.\" She put her chin in her hand again and leaned forward to fasten her blue eyes on me. \"What's at the top of the list, Bernie?\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"The priority list. What are you going to do?\"\n\n\"Beats me.\"\n\n\"How about another drink while you think about it?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I think I've had enough.\"\n\n\"I had enough two or three drinks ago but I'm not going to let a little thing like that stop me.\" She got the bottle and helped herself. \"You can just know when you've had enough and then stop?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"That's remarkable,\" she said. She sipped her brandy, looked at me over the brim of the glass. \"Did you know there was anybody else in the apartment? Besides the Porlock woman?\"\n\n\"No. But I never got past the living room until she was dead. I thought it was just the two of us and we were waiting for Whelkin.\"\n\n\"The killer could have been in the other room.\"\n\n\"It's possible.\"\n\n\"Or she was alone, and she drugged you and took the book and the money and the wallet, and then she was on her way out the door and in came a man with a gun.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Who? The Sikh? Whelkin?\"\n\n\"I dunno, Carolyn.\"\n\n\"Why on earth would she wear a wig? I mean, she wasn't anybody you knew to begin with, right? So why would she want to disguise herself?\"\n\n\"Beats me.\"\n\n\"How about the Sikh? Was that a disguise? Maybe the Sikh was Rudyard Whelkin.\"\n\n\"He had a beard and a turban.\"\n\n\"The beard could have been a fake. And a turban is something you can put on and then take off.\"\n\n\"The Sikh was enormous. Six-four easy, maybe more.\"\n\n\"You never heard of elevator shoes?\"\n\n\"Whelkin wasn't the Sikh,\" I said. \"Trust me.\"\n\n\"All I do is trust you. But back to the other question. How do you get out of the mess you're in? Can you go to the cops?\"\n\n\"That's the one thing I can't do. They'll book me for Murder One. I could try pleading to a lesser charge, or gamble that my lawyer could find a way to addle the jury, but the odds are I'd spend the next ten or twenty years with free room and board. I don't really want to do that.\"\n\n\"I can understand that. Jesus. Can't you\u2014\"\n\n\"Can't I what?\"\n\n\"Tell them what you told me? Scratch that question, huh? Just blame it on the brandy. Because why on earth would they believe you? Nobody'd believe a story like yours except a dyke who shaves dogs. Bernie, there's got to be a way out, but what the hell is it?\"\n\n\"Find the real killer.\"\n\n\"Oh, sure,\" she said. She clapped a hand to her forehead. \"Now why didn't I think of that? Just find the real killer, solve the crime, get the stolen book back, and everything's copasetic. Just like TV, right? With everything wrapped up in time for the final commercial.\"\n\n\"And some scenes from next week's show,\" I said. \"Don't forget that.\"\n\nWe talked for a while longer. Then Carolyn started yawning intermittently and I caught it from her. We agreed that we ought to get some sleep. We weren't accomplishing anything now and our minds were too tired to work properly.\n\n\"You'll stay here,\" she said. \"You take the bed.\"\n\n\"Don't be silly. I'll take the couch.\"\n\n\"Don't you be silly. You're six feet long and so's the bed. I'm five feet long and so's the couch. It's good the Sikh didn't drop in because there's no place to put him.\"\n\n\"I just thought\u2014\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. The couch is perfectly comfortable and I sleep on it a lot. I wind up there whenever Randy and I have a medium-level fight.\"\n\n\"What's a medium-level fight?\"\n\n\"The kind where she doesn't go home to her own apartment.\"\n\n\"I didn't know she had one. I thought the two of you lived together.\"\n\n\"We do, but she's got a place on Morton Street. Smaller than this, if you can believe it. Thank God she's got a place of her own, so that she can move right back into it when we split up.\"\n\n\"Maybe you should stay there tonight, Carolyn.\" She started to say something but I pressed onward. \"If you're at her place, then you're not an accessory after the fact. But if you're here, then there's no question but that you're harboring a fugitive, and\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll take my chances, Bernie.\"\n\n\"Well\u2014\"\n\n\"Besides, it's possible Randy didn't go to Bath Beach. It's possible she's home.\"\n\n\"Couldn't you stay with her, anyway?\"\n\n\"Not if someone else is staying with her at the same time.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. We live in a world of infinite possibilities. You get the bed and I get the couch. Okay?\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\nI helped her make up the couch. She went into the lavatory and emerged wearing Dr. Denton's and scowling as if daring me to laugh. I did not laugh.\n\nI washed up at the kitchen sink, turned off the light, stripped down to my underwear and got into bed. For a while nobody said anything.\n\nThen she said, \"Bern?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"I don't know how much you know about gay women, but you probably know that some of us are bisexual. Primarily gay but occasionally interested in going to bed with a man.\"\n\n\"Uh, I know.\"\n\n\"I'm not like that.\"\n\n\"I didn't think you were, Carolyn.\"\n\n\"I'm exclusively gay.\"\n\n\"That's what I figured.\"\n\n\"I figured it went without saying, but it's been my experience that a lot of things that go without saying, that you're better off if you say them.\"\n\n\"I understand.\"\n\nMore silence.\n\n\"Bernie? She took the five hundred dollars and the wallet, right?\"\n\n\"I had about two hundred dollars in my wallet, too. That was an expensive cup of coffee she gave me, let me tell you.\"\n\n\"How'd you pay for the cab?\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"The cab downtown. And how did you buy that stuff at the drugstore so you could pick my lock? What did you use for money?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said.\n\n\"Do you keep a few extra dollars in your shoe for emergencies?\"\n\n\"Well, no,\" I said. \"Not that it doesn't sound like a good idea, but no, Carolyn.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"I told you about the fire escape, didn't I? How I tried the roof and that was no good, so I went down and broke into an apartment on the fourth floor?\"\n\n\"You told me.\"\n\n\"Well, uh, since I was there and all. I, uh, took a few minutes to look around. Opened a few drawers.\"\n\n\"In the fourth-floor apartment?\"\n\n\"That's right. There was just small change in a dresser drawer, but one of the kitchen canisters had money in it. You'd be surprised how many people keep cash in the kitchen.\"\n\n\"And you took it?\"\n\n\"Sure. I got a little over sixty dollars. Not enough to retire on, but it covered the cab and what I spent at the drugstore.\"\n\n\"Sixty dollars.\"\n\n\"More like sixty-five. Plus the bracelet.\"\n\n\"The bracelet?\"\n\n\"Couldn't resist it,\" I said. \"There was other jewelry that didn't tempt me at all, but this one bracelet\u2014well, I'll show you in the morning.\"\n\n\"You'll show me in the morning.\"\n\n\"Sure. Don't let me forget.\"\n\n\"Jesus!\"\n\n\"What's the matter?\"\n\n\"You actually committed a burglary.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm a burglar, Carolyn.\"\n\n\"That's what I have to get used to. You're a burglar. You steal things out of people's homes. That's what burglars do. They steal things.\"\n\n\"As a general rule.\"\n\n\"You took the money because you needed it. Your own money was gone and you had to get away from the police and the money was there, so you took it.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"And you took the bracelet because\u2014Why'd you take the bracelet, Bernie?\"\n\n\"Well\u2014\"\n\n\"Because it was there. Like Mt. Everest. But it was a bracelet instead of a mountain, and instead of climbing it you stole it.\"\n\n\"Carolyn\u2014\"\n\n\"It's all right, Bernie. Honest it is. I'll get used to it. You'll show me the bracelet in the morning?\"\n\n\"I'll show you right now if you want.\"\n\n\"No, the morning's soon enough, Bernie. Bernie?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Goodnight, Bernie.\"\n\n\"Goodnight, Carolyn.\"\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Ten\n\nIt was one of those chatty morning programs that tells you more about weather and traffic than anyone could possibly care to know. There was a massive tie-up on the Major Deegan Expressway, I learned, and a thirty-percent chance of rain.\n\n\"Something ominous has happened to weather reports,\" I told Carolyn. \"Have you noticed how they never tell you what it's going to do anymore? They just quote you the odds.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"That way they're never wrong because they've never gone out on a limb. If they say there's a five-percent chance of snow and we wind up hip-deep in it, all that means is a long shot came in. They've transformed the weather into some sort of celestial crap game.\"\n\n\"There's another muffin, Bernie.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" I took it, buttered it. \"It's all tied into the moral decline of the nation,\" I said. \"Lottery tickets. Off-track betting. Gambling casinos in Atlantic City. Can you tell me what in the hell a thirty-percent chance of rain means? What do I do, carry a third of an umbrella?\"\n\n\"Here comes the news, Bernie.\"\n\nI ate my muffin and sipped my coffee and listened to the news. My reaction to the weather report notwithstanding, I felt pretty good. My sleep had been deep and uninterrupted, and Carolyn's morning coffee, unadulterated with chicory or knockout drops, had my eyes all the way open.\n\nSo I sat wide-eyed and heard how I'd gained access to the house on Sixty-sixth Street via the fire escape, first visiting the fourth-floor apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Blinn, where I'd stolen an undisclosed sum of money, a diamond bracelet, a Piaget wristwatch, several miscellaneous pieces of jewelry, and a full-length Russian sable coat. I'd descended a flight to 3-D, where Madeleine Porlock had interrupted my larcenous labors, only to be shot dead with a .32-caliber automatic for her troubles. I'd left the gun behind, escaping with my loot, scampering down the fire escape moments before the police arrived on the scene.\n\nWhen the announcer moved on to other topics I switched him off. Carolyn had a funny expression on her face. I reached into my pants pocket and came up with the bracelet, plopping it down on the table in front of her. She turned it in her hand so that light glinted off the stones.\n\n\"Pretty,\" she said. \"What's it worth?\"\n\n\"I could probably get a few hundred for it. Art Deco's the rage these days. But I just took it because I liked the looks of it.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. What did the coat look like?\"\n\n\"I never even looked in the closets. Oh, you thought\u2014\" I shook my head. \"More evidence of the moral decline of the nation,\" I said. \"All I took was the cash and the bracelet, Carolyn. The rest was a little insurance scam the Blinns decided to work.\"\n\n\"You mean\u2014\"\n\n\"I mean they decided they've been paying premiums all these years, so why not take advantage of the burglary they've been waiting for? A coat, a watch, some miscellaneous jewelry, and of course they'll report a higher cash loss than they actually sustained, and even if the insurance company chisels a little, they'll wind up four or five grand to the good.\"\n\n\"Jesus,\" she said. \"Everybody's a crook.\"\n\n\"Not quite,\" I said. \"But sometimes it seems that way.\"\n\nI made up the bed while she did up the breakfast dishes. Then we sat down with the last of the coffee and tried to figure out where to start. There seemed to be two loose ends we could pick at, Madeleine Porlock and J. Rudyard Whelkin.\n\n\"If we knew where he was,\" I said, \"we might be able to get somewhere.\"\n\n\"We already know where she is.\"\n\n\"But we don't know who she is. Or was. I wish I had my wallet. I had his card. His address was somewhere in the East Thirties but I don't remember the street or the number.\"\n\n\"That makes it tough.\"\n\n\"You'd think I'd remember the phone number. I dialed it enough yesterday.\" I picked up the phone, dialed the first three numbers hoping the rest would come to me, then gave up and cradled the phone. The phone book didn't have him and neither did the Information operator. There was an M. Porlock in the book, though, and for no particular reason I dialed the listed number. It rang a few times and I hung up.\n\n\"Maybe we should start with the Sikh,\" Carolyn suggested.\n\n\"We don't even know his name.\"\n\n\"That's a point.\"\n\n\"There ought to be something about her in the paper. The radio just gives you the surface stuff, but there ought to be something beyond that in the Times. Where she worked and if she was married, that kind of thing.\"\n\n\"And Whelkin belonged to the Martingale Club.\"\n\n\"True.\"\n\n\"So we've each got a place to start, Bernie. I'll be back in a minute.\" It was closer to ten minutes when she returned with both papers. She read the News while I read the Times. Then we switched.\n\n\"Not a whole lot,\" I said.\n\n\"Something, though. Who do you want, Whelkin or Porlock?\"\n\n\"Don't you have to trim a poodle or something?\"\n\n\"I'm taking Whelkin. You've got Porlock, Bernie. Okay?\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\n\"I guess I'll go over to his club. Maybe I can learn something that way.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\n\"How about you? You won't leave the apartment, will you?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I'll see what I can find out over the phone.\"\n\n\"That sounds like a good idea.\"\n\n\"And maybe I'll pray a little.\"\n\n\"To whom? St. Dismas?\"\n\n\"Wouldn't hurt.\"\n\n\"Or the lost-objects guy, because we ought to see about getting that book back.\"\n\n\"Anthony of Padua.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Actually,\" I said, \"I was thinking more of St. Raymond Nonnatus. Patron saint of the falsely accused.\"\n\nShe looked at me. \"You're making this up.\"\n\n\"That's a false accusation, Carolyn.\"\n\n\"You're not making it up?\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\n\"There's really a\u2014\"\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\n\"Well, by all means,\" she said. \"Pray.\"\n\nThe phone started ringing minutes after she left the apartment. It rang five times and stopped. I picked up the Times and it started ringing again and rang twelve times before it quit. I read somewhere that it only takes a minute for a telephone to ring twelve times. I'll tell you, it certainly seemed longer than that.\n\nI went back to the Times. The back-page story gave Madeleine Porlock's age as forty-two and described her as a psychotherapist. The Daily News had given her age but didn't tell what she did for a living. I tried to imagine her with a note pad and a faint Viennese accent, asking me about my dreams. Had she had an office elsewhere? The Victorian love seat was a far cry from the traditional analyst's couch.\n\nMaybe Whelkin was her patient. He told her all about his scheme to gain possession of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow, and then she hypnotized him and got him to make the call to me, and then he got unhypnotized and killed her and took the book back, and...\n\nI called the Times, got through to someone in the city room. I explained I was Art Matlovich of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. We thought the Porlock woman might be a former resident of Cleveland, and did they have anything on her besides what they'd run in the paper?\n\nWhat they had was mostly negative. No information about next of kin. No clue as to where she'd lived before taking the Sixty-sixth Street apartment fourteen months ago. If she'd ever been in Cleveland, or even flown over the State of Ohio, they didn't know anything about it.\n\nThe same call to the News was about as unproductive. The man I talked to said he didn't know where the Times got off calling Porlock a psychotherapist, that he had the impression she was somebody's mistress, but that they weren't really digging into it because all she was was the victim of an open-and-shut burglary turned homicide. \"It's not much of a story for us,\" he said. \"Only reason we played it at all is it's the Upper East Side. See, that's a posh neighborhood and all. I don't know what the equivalent would be in Cleveland.\"\n\nNeither did I, so I let it pass.\n\n\"This Rhodenbarr,\" the News man went on. \"They'll pick him up tomorrow or the next day and that's the end of the story. No sex angle, nothing colorful like that. He's just a burglar.\"\n\n\"Just a burglar,\" I echoed.\n\n\"Only this time he killed somebody. They'll throw the key away on him this time. He's a guy had his name in the papers before. In connection with homicide committed during a job he was pulling. Up to now he always managed to weasel out of it, but this time he's got his dick in the wringer.\"\n\n\"Don't be too sure of that,\" I said.\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"I mean you never know,\" I said quickly. \"The way criminals manage to slip through cracks in the criminal-justice apparatus these days.\"\n\n\"Jesus,\" he said. \"You sound like you been writin' our editorials.\"\n\nI no sooner hung up the phone than it started ringing. I put up a fresh pot of coffee. The phone stopped ringing. I went over to it, about to make a call, and it rang again. I waited it out, then used it to call the police. This time I said I was Phil Urbanik of the Minneapolis Tribune. I was tired of Cleveland for the time being. I got bounced from one cop to another, spending a lot of time on Hold in the process, before I managed to establish that nobody around the squad-room knew more about Madeleine Porlock than that she was dead. The last cop I spoke with was sure of one other thing, too.\n\n\"No question,\" he said. \"Rhodenbarr killed her. One bullet, close range, smack in the forehead. M.E.'s report says death was instantaneous, which you don't have to be a doctor to tell. He left prints in both apartments.\"\n\n\"He must have been careless,\" I suggested.\n\n\"Getting old and sloppy. Losing his touch. Here's a guy, his usual M.O.'s to wear rubber gloves with the palms cut out so he don't leave a print anywhere.\"\n\n\"You know him?\"\n\n\"No, but I seen his sheet. You'd figure him to be pretty slick, plus he always stayed away from violence, and here he's sloppy enough to leave prints and he went and killed a woman. You know what I figure? What I figure is drugs.\"\n\n\"He's involved with drugs?\"\n\n\"I think he musta been high on them. You get hopped up and you're capable of anything.\"\n\n\"How about the gun? Was it his?\"\n\n\"Maybe he found it there. We didn't trace it yet. Could be the Porlock woman had it for protection. It wasn't registered, but what does that mean? Maybe he stole it upstairs. The couple up there said no, but if it was an unregistered weapon they'd deny it. What's your interest in the gun, anyway?\"\n\n\"Just making conversation.\"\n\n\"Minneapolis, you said?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" I said smoothly. \"Well, I guess that gives us a good hometown angle on the story. All right to say you're close to an arrest?\"\n\n\"Oh, we'll get him,\" he assured me. \"A crook like Rhodenbarr's a creature of habit. He'll be what they call frequenting his old haunts and we'll pick him up. Just a question of time.\"\n\nI was standing behind the door when she opened it. She moved into the room saying my name.\n\n\"Behind you,\" I said, as gently as possible. She clapped her hand to her chest as if to keep her heart where it belonged.\n\n\"Jesus,\" she said. \"Don't do that.\"\n\n\"Sorry. I wasn't sure it was you.\"\n\n\"Who else would it be?\"\n\n\"It could have been Randy.\"\n\n\"Randy,\" she said heavily. Cats appeared and threaded figure eights around her ankles. \"Randy. I don't suppose she called, did she?\"\n\n\"She might have. It rang a lot but I wasn't answering it.\"\n\n\"I know you weren't. I called twice myself, and when you didn't answer I figured you weren't picking up the phone, but I also figured maybe you got cabin fever and went out, and then I came home and you weren't here and all of a sudden you were behind me. Don't do that again, huh?\"\n\n\"I won't.\"\n\n\"I had a busy day. What time is it? Almost two? I've been running all over the place. I found out some stuff. What's this?\"\n\n\"I want you to make a phone call for me.\"\n\nShe took the sheet of paper I handed her but looked at me instead. \"Don't you want to hear what I found out?\"\n\n\"In a minute. I want you to call the Times and insert the ad before they close.\"\n\n\"What ad?\"\n\n\"The one I just handed you. In the Personal column.\"\n\n\"You got some handwriting. You should have been a doctor, did anyone ever tell you that? 'Space available on Kipling Society charter excursion to Fort Bucklow. Interested parties call 989-5440.' That's my number.\"\n\n\"No kidding.\"\n\n\"You're going to put my number in the paper?\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Somebody'll read it and come here.\"\n\n\"How? By crawling through the wires? The phone's unlisted.\"\n\n\"No, it's not. This place is a sublet, Bernie, so I kept the phone listed under Nathan Aranow. He's the guy I sublet from. It's like having an unlisted number except there's no extra charge for the privilege, and whenever I get a call for a Nathan Aranow I know it's some pest trying to sell me a subscription to something I don't want. But it's a listed number.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"So the address is in the book. Nathan Aranow, 64 Arbor Court, and the telephone number.\"\n\n\"So somebody could read the ad and then just go all the way through the phone book reading numbers until they came to this one, right, Carolyn?\"\n\n\"Oh. You can't get the address from the number?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Oh. I hope nobody does go through the book, because Aranow's right in the front.\"\n\n\"Maybe they'll start in the back.\"\n\n\"I hope so. This ad\u2014\"\n\n\"A lot of people seem to be anxious to get their hands on this book,\" I explained. \"All different people, the way it looks to me. And only one of them knows I don't have it. So if I give the impression that I do have it, maybe one or more of them will get in touch and I'll be able to figure out what's going on.\"\n\n\"Makes sense. Why didn't you just place the ad yourself? Afraid somebody in the Times classified department would recognize your voice?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"And they'd say, 'Aha, it's Bernard G. Rhodenbarr the burglar, and let's go through the telephone wires and take him into custody.' My God, Bernie, you thought I was being paranoid about the number, and you're afraid to make a phone call.\"\n\n\"They call back,\" I said.\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"When you place an ad with a phone number. To make sure it's not a practical joke. And the phone was ringing constantly, and I wasn't answering it, and I figured the Times would call to confirm the ad and how would I know it was them? Paranoia, I suppose, but it seemed easier to wait and let you make the call, although I'm beginning to wonder. You'll place the ad for me, won't you?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" she said, and the phone rang as she was reaching for it.\n\nShe picked it up, said, \"Hello?\" Then she said, \"Listen, I can't talk to you right now. Where are you and I'll call you back.\" Pause. \"Company? No, of course not.\" Pause. \"I was at the shop. Oh. Well, I was in and out all day. One thing after another.\" Pause. \"Dammit, I can't talk now, and\u2014\" She took the receiver from her ear and looked beseechingly at me. \"She hung up,\" she said.\n\n\"Randy?\"\n\n\"Who else? She thought I had company.\"\n\n\"You do.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but she thought you were a woman.\"\n\n\"Must be my high-pitched voice.\"\n\n\"What do you mean? You didn't say anything. Oh, I see. It's a joke.\"\n\n\"It was trying to be one.\"\n\n\"Yeah, right.\" She looked at the telephone receiver, shook her head at it, hung it up. \"She called here all morning,\" she said. \"And called the store, too, and I was out, obviously, and now she thinks\u2014\" The corners of her mouth curled slowly into a wide grin. \"How about that?\" she said. \"The bitch is jealous.\"\n\n\"Is that good?\"\n\n\"It's terrific.\" The phone rang again, and it was Randy. I tried not to pay too much attention to the conversation. It ended with Carolyn saying, \"Oh, you demand to know who I've got over here? All right, I'll tell you who I've got over here. I've got my aunt from Bath Beach over here. You think you're the only woman in Manhattan with a mythical aunt in Bath Beach?\"\n\nShe hung up, positively radiant. \"Gimme the ad,\" she said. \"Quick, before she calls back. You wouldn't believe how jealous she is.\"\n\nShe got the ad in, then answered the phone when they called back to confirm it. Then she was getting lunch on the table, setting out bread and cheese and opening a couple bottles of Amstel, when the phone rang again. \"Randy,\" she said. \"I'm not getting it.\"\n\n\"Fine.\"\n\n\"You had this all morning, huh? The phone ringing like that?\"\n\n\"Maybe eight, ten times. That's all.\"\n\n\"You find out anything about Madeleine Porlock?\"\n\nI told her about the calls I'd made.\n\n\"Not much,\" she said.\n\n\"Next to nothing.\"\n\n\"I learned a little about your friend Whelkin, but I don't know what good it does. He's not a member of the Martingale Club.\"\n\n\"Don't be silly. I ate there with him.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. The Martingale Club of New York maintains what they call reciprocity with a London club called Poindexter's. Ever hear of it?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Me neither. The dude at the Martingale said it as though it was a household word. The Martingale has reciprocity with three London clubs, he told me. White's, Poindexter's, and the Dolphin. I never heard of any of them.\"\n\n\"I think I heard of White's.\"\n\n\"Anyhow, that's how Whelkin got guest privileges. But I thought he was an American.\"\n\n\"I think he is. He has an accent that could be English, but I figured it was an affectation. Something he picked up at prep school, maybe.\" I thought back to conversations we'd had. \"No,\" I said, \"he's American. He talked about making a trip to London to attend that auction, and he referred to the English once as 'our cousins across the pond.' \"\n\n\"Honestly?\"\n\n\"Honestly. I suppose he could be an American and belong to a London club, and use that London membership to claim guest privileges at the Martingale. I suppose it's possible.\"\n\n\"Lots of things are possible.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. You know what I think?\"\n\n\"He's a phony.\"\n\n\"He's a phony who faked me out of my socks, that's what he is. God, the more I think about it the phonier he sounds, and I let him con me into stealing the book with no money in front. All of a sudden his whole story is starting to come apart in my hands. All that happy horseshit about Haggard and Kipling, all that verse he quoted at me.\"\n\n\"You think he just made it all up?\"\n\n\"No, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Leave me alone, Ubi. You don't even like Jarlsberg.\" Ubi was short for Ubiquitous, which was the Russian Blue's name. Jarlsberg was the cheese we were munching. (Not the Burmese, in case you were wondering. The Burmese was named Archie.)\n\nTo me she said, \"Maybe the book doesn't exist, Bernie.\"\n\n\"I had it in my hands, Carolyn.\"\n\n\"Oh, right.\"\n\n\"I was thinking that myself earlier, just spinning all sorts of mental wheels. Like it wasn't a real book, it was hollowed out and all full of heroin or something like that.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's an idea.\"\n\n\"Except it's a dumb idea, because I actually flipped through that book and read bits and pieces of it, and it's real. It's a genuine old printed book in less than sensational condition. I was even wondering if it could be a fake.\"\n\n\"A fake?\"\n\n\"Sure. Suppose Kipling destroyed every last copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow. Suppose there never was such a thing as a Rider Haggard copy to survive, or suppose there was but it disappeared forever.\" She was nodding encouragingly. \"Well,\" I went on, \"suppose someone sat down and faked a text. It'd be a job, writing that long a ballad, but Kipling's not the hardest writer in the world to imitate. Some poet could knock it out between greeting-card assignments.\"\n\n\"Then what?\"\n\n\"Well, you couldn't sell it as an original manuscript because it would be too easily discredited. But if you had a printer set type\u2014\" I shook my head. \"That's where it breaks down. You could set type and run off one copy, and you could bind it and then distress it one way or another to give it some age, and you could even fake the inscription to H. Rider Haggard in a way that might pass inspection. But do you see the problem?\"\n\n\"It sounds complicated.\"\n\n\"Right. It's too damned complicated and far too expensive. It's like those caper movies where the crooks would have had to spend a million dollars to steal a hundred thousand, with all the elaborate preparations they go through and the equipment they use. Any crook who went through everything I described in order to produce a book you could sell for fifteen thousand dollars would have to be crazy.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's worth a lot more than that. Fifteen thousand is just the price you and Whelkin worked out.\"\n\n\"That's true. The fifteen-thousand figure doesn't really mean anything, since I didn't even get a smell of it, did I?\" I sighed. Wistfully, I imagine. \"No,\" I said. \"I know an old book when I look at it. I look at a few thousand of them every day, and old books are different from new ones, dammit. Paper's different when it's been around for fifty years. Sure, they could have used old paper, but it keeps not being worth the trouble. It's a real book, Carolyn. I'm sure of it.\"\n\n\"Speaking of the old books you look at every day.\"\n\n\"What about them?\"\n\n\"Somebody's watching your store. I was at my shop part of the time, I had to wash a dog and I couldn't reach the owner to cancel. And there was somebody in a car across the street from your shop, and he was still there when I walked past a second time.\"\n\n\"Did you get a good look at him?\"\n\n\"No. I didn't get the license number, either. I suppose I should have, huh?\"\n\n\"What for?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"It was probably the police,\" I said. \"A stake-out.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"They've probably got my apartment staked out, too.\"\n\n\"Oh. That's how they do it, huh?\"\n\n\"That's how they do it on television. This cop I talked to earlier said they'd get me when I returned to my old haunts. I wanted to tell him I didn't have any old haunts, but I suppose he meant the store and the apartment.\"\n\n\"Or this place.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"Well, we're friends. You come over here a lot. If they talk to enough people they'll learn that, won't they?\"\n\n\"I hope not,\" I said, and the phone rang. We looked at each other, not very happily, and didn't say a word until it stopped ringing.\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Eleven\n\nAt six-fifteen I was sitting at the counter of the Red Flame at the corner of Seventieth and West End. I had a cup of coffee and a wedge of prune Danish in front of me and I wasn't particularly interested in either. The other two customers, a teenaged couple in a back booth, were interested only in each other. The counterman wasn't interested in anything; he stood beside the coffee urns chewing a mint-flavored toothpick and staring at the opposite wall, where a bas-relief showed a couple of olive-skinned youths chasing sheep over a Greek hillside. He shook his head from time to time, evidently wondering what the hell he was doing here.\n\nI kept glancing out the window and wondering much the same thing. From where I sat I could almost see my building a block uptown. I'd had a closer look earlier from the sidewalk, but I hadn't been close enough then to tell if there were cops staked out in or around the place. Theoretically it shouldn't matter, but theoretically bumblebees can't fly, so how much faith can you place in theory?\n\nOne of the teenagers giggled. The counterman yawned and scratched himself. I looked out the window for perhaps the forty-first time and saw Carolyn half a block away, heading south on West End with my small suitcase in one hand. I put some money on the counter and went out to meet her.\n\nShe was radiant. \"Piece of cake,\" she said. \"Nothing to it, Bern. This burglary number's a cinch.\"\n\n\"Well, you had my keys, Carolyn.\"\n\n\"They helped, no question about it. Of course, I had to get the right key in the right lock.\"\n\n\"You didn't have any trouble getting into the building?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Mrs. Hesch was terrific. The doorman called her on the intercom and she said to send me right up, and then she met me at the elevator.\"\n\nI'd called Mrs. Hesch earlier to arrange all this. She was a widow who had the apartment across the hall from me, and she seemed to think burglary was the sort of character defect that could be overlooked in a friend and neighbor.\n\n\"She didn't have to meet you,\" I said.\n\n\"Well, she wanted to make sure I found the right apartment. What she really wanted was a good look at me. She's a little worried about you, Bern.\"\n\n\"Hell, I'm a little worried about me myself.\"\n\n\"She thought you were all respectable now, what with the bookstore and all. Then she heard about the Porlock murder on the news last night and she started to worry. But she's positive you didn't kill anybody.\"\n\n\"Good for her.\"\n\n\"I think she liked me. She wanted me to come in for coffee but I told her there wasn't time.\"\n\n\"She makes good coffee.\"\n\n\"That's what she said. She said you like her coffee a lot, and she sort of implied that what you need is somebody to make coffee for you on a fulltime basis. The message I got is that living on the West Side and burgling on the East Side is a sort of Robin Hood thing, but there's a time in life when a young man should think about getting married and settling down.\"\n\n\"It's nice the two of you hit it off.\"\n\n\"Well, we only talked for a couple of minutes. Then I went and burgled your apartment.\" She hefted the suitcase. \"I think I got everything. Burglar tools, pocket flashlight, all the things you mentioned. And shirts and socks and underwear. There was some cash in your shirt drawer.\"\n\n\"There was? I guess there was. I usually keep a few dollars there.\"\n\n\"Thirty-eight dollars.\"\n\n\"If you say so.\"\n\n\"I took it.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said. \"Well, I don't suppose thirty-eight dollars one way or the other is going to make a difference. But it can't hurt to have it along.\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"You said you always take cash,\" she said. \"So I took it.\"\n\n\"It's a good principle. You know something? We're never going to get a cab.\"\n\n\"Not when it's raining. Can we get a subway? No, not across town. Isn't there a bus that goes over Seventy-ninth Street?\"\n\n\"It's not a good idea to take buses when you're wanted for homicide. It's awfully public.\"\n\n\"I suppose we'll get a cab sooner or later.\"\n\nI took the suitcase in one hand and her arm in the other. \"The hell with that,\" I said. \"We'll take a car.\"\n\nThe Pontiac was right where I'd left it. Sometimes the tow-truck division lets things slide for a while, and this time the Pontiac's owner was the beneficiary of their lapse. I popped the door on the passenger's side, let Carolyn in, and took a ticket from underneath the windshield wiper while she leaned across the seat to unlatch the door for me.\n\n\"See?\" someone said. \"You got a ticket. Did I tell you you'd get a ticket?\"\n\nI didn't recognize the man at first. Then I saw the brindle boxer at the end of the leash he was holding.\n\n\"Sooner or later,\" he told me, \"they'll tow you away. Then what will you do?\"\n\n\"Get another car,\" I said.\n\nHe shook his head, tugged impatiently at the dog's leash. \"Come on, Max,\" he said. \"Some people, you can't tell them a thing.\"\n\nI got into the car, set about jumping the ignition. Carolyn watched the process fascinated, and it wasn't until we pulled away from the curb that she asked who the man was and what he had wanted.\n\n\"He wanted to be helpful,\" I said, \"but all in all he's a pest. The dog's all right, though. His name is Max. The dog, I mean.\"\n\n\"He looks okay,\" she said, \"but he'd probably be murder to wash.\"\n\nI left the Pontiac in a bus stop around the corner from where we were going. Carolyn said it might get towed and I said I didn't care if it did. I got tools and accessories from the suitcase, then left the case and the clothes it contained on the back seat of the Pontiac.\n\n\"Suppose they tow the car,\" she said, \"and suppose they identify the clothing from laundry marks. Then they'll know you were here, and\u2014\"\n\n\"You've been watching too much television,\" I said. \"When they tow cars they take them over to that pier on the Hudson and wait for the owner to turn up. They don't check the contents. You could have a dead body in the trunk and they'd never know.\"\n\n\"I wish you hadn't said that,\" she said.\n\n\"There's nothing in the trunk.\"\n\n\"How do you know for sure?\"\n\nWe went around the corner. No one seemed to be keeping an eye on the elegant little brownstone. A woman stood in the bay window on the parlor floor, watering the plants with a long-spouted watering can. The can was gleaming copper, the plants were all a lush green, and the whole scene was one of upper-middle-class domestic tranquillity. Outside, watching this and getting rained on, I felt like a street urchin in a Victorian novel.\n\nI looked up. There were lighted windows on the third and fourth floors, but they didn't tell me anything. The apartments that interested me were at the rear of the building.\n\nWe entered the vestibule. \"You don't have to come,\" I said.\n\n\"Ring the bell, Bern.\"\n\n\"I'm serious. You could wait in the car.\"\n\n\"Wonderful. I can play it safe by sitting in a stolen car parked at a bus stop. Why don't I just wait in the subway? I could cling to the third rail for security.\"\n\n\"What you could do is spend the next half-hour in the bar on the corner. Suppose we walk into an apartment full of cops?\"\n\n\"Ring the bell, Bernie.\"\n\n\"It's just that I hate to see you walk into trouble.\"\n\n\"So do I, but let's play the hand out as dealt, huh? I'll be with the two of them so they can't get cute while you're downstairs. We worked it out before, Bern, and it made sense then and it still makes sense now. You want to know something? It's probably dangerous for us to spend the next six hours arguing in the vestibule, if you're so concerned with what's dangerous and what's not, so why don't you ring their bell and get it over with?\"\n\nFirst, though, I rang the bell marked Porlock. I poked it three times, waited half a minute, then gave it another healthy tickle. I didn't really expect a response and I was happy not to get one. My finger moved from the Porlock bell to the one marked Blinn. I gave it a long and two shorts, and the answering buzzer sounded almost at once. I pushed the door and it opened.\n\n\"Darn,\" Carolyn said. I looked at her. \"Well, I thought I'd get to watch you pick it,\" she said. \"That's all.\"\n\nWe went up the stairs and stopped at the third floor long enough to peek at the door of 3-D. As I'd figured it, the cops had sealed it, and the door was really plastered with official-looking material. I could have opened it with a scout knife, but I couldn't have done so without destroying the seals and making it obvious that I'd been there.\n\nInstead, we went up another flight. The door of 4-C was closed. Carolyn and I looked at each other. Then I reached out a hand and knocked.\n\nThe door opened. Arthur Blinn stood with one hand on its knob and the other motioning us in. \"Come on, come on,\" he said urgently. \"Don't stand out there all night.\" In his hurry to close the door he almost hit Carolyn with it, but he got it shut and fussed with the locks and bolts. \"You can relax now, Gert,\" he called out. \"It's only the burglar.\"\n\nThey made a cute couple. They were both about five-six, both as roly-poly as panda bears. Both had curly dark-brown hair, although he'd lost most of his in the front. She was wearing a forest-green pants suit in basic polyester. He wore the trousers and vest of a gray glen-plaid business suit. His white shirt was unbuttoned at the neck and his tie was loosened for comfort. She poured coffee and pushed Scottish shortbread at us. He told us, over and over again, what a relief it was to see us.\n\n\"Because I told Gert, suppose it's a setup? Suppose it's the insurance company running a bluff? Because honestly, Mr. Rhodenbarr, who ever heard of such a thing? A burglar calls up, says hello, I'm you're friendly neighborhood burglar, and if you cooperate with me a little I won't rat to the insurance people and tell them your claim is lousy. I figured a burglar with troubles like you got, wanted for killing a woman and God knows what else, I figure you're not going to knock yourself out shouting you never stole a coat or a watch.\"\n\n\"And what I figured,\" Gert said, \"is why would you be coming here, anyway? 'He wants to get rid of witnesses,' I told Artie. 'Remember, he already killed once.' \"\n\n\"What I said is what did we ever witness? I told her, I said forget all that. Just hope it's the burglar, I told her. All we need is some insurance snoop. You don't care for the shortbread, young lady?\"\n\n\"It's delicious,\" Carolyn said. \"And Bernie never killed anybody, Mrs. Blinn.\"\n\n\"Call me Gert, honey.\"\n\n\"He never killed anyone, Gert.\"\n\n\"I'm sure of it, honey. Meeting him, seeing the two of you, my mind's a hundred percent at ease.\"\n\n\"He was framed, Gert. That's why we're here. To find out who really killed Madeleine Porlock.\"\n\n\"If we knew,\" Arthur Blinn said, \"believe me, we'd tell you. But what do we know?\"\n\n\"You lived in the same building with her. You must have known something about her.\"\n\nThe Blinns looked at each other and gave simultaneous little shrugs. \"She wasn't directly under us,\" Gert explained. \"So we wouldn't know if she had loud parties or played music all night or anything like that.\"\n\n\"Like Mr. Mboka,\" Artie said.\n\n\"In 3-C,\" Gert said. \"He's African, you see, and he works at the U.N. Somebody said he was a translator.\"\n\n\"Plays the drums,\" Artie said.\n\n\"We don't know that, Artie. He either plays the drums or he plays recordings of drums.\"\n\n\"Same difference.\"\n\n\"But we haven't spoken to him about it because we thought it might be religious and we didn't want to interfere.\"\n\n\"Plus Gert here thinks he's a cannibal and she's afraid to speak to him.\"\n\n\"I don't think he's a cannibal,\" Gert protested. \"Who ever said I thought he was a cannibal?\"\n\nI cleared my throat. \"Maybe the two of you could talk to Carolyn about Miss Porlock,\" I suggested. \"And if I could, uh, be excused for a few moments.\"\n\n\"You want to use the bathroom?\"\n\n\"The fire escape.\"\n\nBlinn furrowed his brow at me, then relaxed his features and nodded energetically. \"Oh, right,\" he said. \"For a minute there I thought\u2014But to hell with what I thought. The fire escape. Sure. Right through to the bedroom. But you know the way, don't you? You were here yesterday. It's spooky, you know? The idea of someone else being in your apartment. Of course, it's not so spooky now that we know you, you and Carolyn here. But when we first found out about it, well, you can imagine.\"\n\n\"It must have been upsetting.\"\n\n\"That's exactly what it was. Upsetting. Gert called the super about the pane of glass, but it's like pulling teeth to get him to do anything around here. Generally he gets more responsive right before Christmas, so maybe we'll get some action soon. Meanwhile I taped up a shirt cardboard so the wind and rain won't come in.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry I had to break the window.\"\n\n\"Listen, these things happen.\"\n\nI unlocked the window, raised it, stepped out onto the fire escape. The rain had stepped up a little and it was cold and windy out there. Behind me, Blinn drew the window shut again. He was reaching to lock it when I extended a finger and tapped on the glass. He caught himself, left the window unlocked, and smiled and shook his head at his absent-mindedness. He went off chuckling to himself while I headed down a flight of steel steps.\n\nThis time I was properly equipped. I had my glass cutter and a roll of adhesive tape, and I used them to remove a pane from the Porlock window swiftly and silently. I turned the catch, raised the window, and let myself in.\n\n\"That's what I was talking about before,\" Gert said \"Listen. Can you hear it?\"\n\n\"The drumming.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"That's Mboka. Now, is that him drumming or is it a record? Because I can't tell.\"\n\n\"He was doing it while you were downstairs,\" Carolyn said. \"Personally I think it's him drumming.\"\n\nI said I couldn't tell, and that I'd been unable to hear him from the Porlock apartment.\n\n\"You never hear anything through the walls,\" Artie said. \"Just through the floors and ceilings. It's a solid building as far as the walls are concerned.\"\n\n\"I don't mind the drumming most of the time,\" Gert said. \"I'll play music and the drumming sort of fits in with it. It's in the middle of the night that it gets me, but I don't like to complain.\"\n\n\"She figures it's the middle of the afternoon in Africa.\"\n\nWe had a hard time getting out of there. They kept giving us shortbread and coffee and asking sincere little questions about the ins and outs of burglary. Finally we managed to fight our way to the door. We said our goodbyes all around, and then Gert hung back a little while Artie caught at my sleeve in the doorway.\n\n\"Say, Bernie,\" he said, \"we all squared away now?\"\n\n\"Sure thing, Artie.\"\n\n\"As far as the insurance company's concerned...\"\n\n\"Don't worry about a thing. The coat, the watch, the other stuff. I'll back your claim.\"\n\n\"That's a relief,\" he said. \"I must have been crazy, putting in that claim, but I'd look like a horse's ass changing it now, and why did we pay premiums all those years anyway, right?\"\n\n\"Right, Artie.\"\n\n\"The thing is, I hate to mention this, but while you were downstairs Gert was wondering about the bracelet.\"\n\n\"How's that, Artie?\"\n\n\"The bracelet you took. It was Gert's. I don't think it's worth much.\"\n\n\"A couple of hundred.\"\n\n\"That much? I would have said less. It belonged to her mother. The thing is, I wondered what's the chance of getting it back?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said. \"I see what you mean. Well, Artie, I'm kind of pressed right now.\"\n\n\"I can imagine.\"\n\n\"But when things are back to normal, I'm sure we can work something out.\"\n\nHe clapped me on the shoulder. \"That's terrific,\" he said. \"Listen, take all the time you need. There's no rush.\"\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Twelve\n\nThe Pontiac, untowed and unticketed, waited for us at the bus stop. The suitcase huddled undisturbed on the floor in back. All of this surprised Carolyn, but I'd expected nothing less. There was something about that car that inspired confidence.\n\nOn the way downtown I learned what Gert Blinn had told her. While I was a floor below in Madeleine Porlock's apartment, Gert had maneuvered Carolyn into the kitchen, presumably to copy down a recipe but actually to dish a little dirt. The late Madeleine Porlock, she'd confided, was no better than she should be.\n\n\"Gert was vague,\" Carolyn said. \"I don't know that Porlock was a hooker exactly, but I got the impression that her life tended to revolve around men. Whenever Gert met her on the stairs she was with some man or other, and I gather that's how her rent got paid.\"\n\n\"Doesn't surprise me.\"\n\n\"Well, it surprises me,\" she said. \"I never saw Porlock, but the way you described her she was the furthest thing from slinky. The woman you were talking about sounded like she could play the mean matron in all the old prison movies.\"\n\n\"That's on a bad day. On a good day she could have played the nurse in Cuckoo's Nest.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. Bern, I admit I don't know what men go for, because it's never been a burning issue with me, but she doesn't sound the type to get her rent paid.\"\n\n\"You didn't go through her drawers and closets.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\nA cab stopped abruptly in front of us. I swung the wheel to the right and slipped neatly around it. No question, I thought. The Pontiac and I were made for each other.\n\n\"Lots of sexy underwear,\" I said.\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"Wispy things. Scarlet gauze and black lace. Peekaboo bras.\"\n\n\"Men really go for that crap, huh?\"\n\n\"So it would seem. Then there were a few garter belts, and a couple of tight corsets that you'd have to be a graduate engineer to figure out.\"\n\n\"Tight corsets?\"\n\n\"A couple of pairs of boots with six-inch stiletto heels. Lots of leather stuff, including those cunning wrist and ankle bracelets decorated with metal studs.\"\n\n\"A subtle pattern begins to emerge.\"\n\n\"Doesn't it? And I haven't even mentioned the small but tasteful wardrobe in skintight black latex or the nifty collection of whips and chains. Or the whole dresser drawer full of gadgets which we might euphemistically designate as marital aids.\"\n\nShe twirled an imaginary mustache. \"This Porlock creature,\" she said, \"was into kink.\"\n\n\"A veritable mistress of kink,\" I said. \"It was beginning to get to me, prowling around in all that weirdness.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised it didn't make the papers. 'Dominatrix Slain in East Side Pleasure Pad'\u2014that should be good for page three in the Daily News any day of the week.\"\n\n\"I thought of that. But nothing was out in plain sight, Carolyn, and when I was up there the first time, all I saw was a tastefully decorated apartment. Remember, the cops had an open-and-shut case, a woman shot in her own apartment by a burglar she'd evidently caught in the act. They didn't have any reason to toss her apartment. And she really lived there, it wasn't just her office. She had street clothes there, too, and there were dishes in the kitchen cupboards and Q-tips and dental floss in the medicine cabinet.\"\n\n\"Find any cash? Any jewelry?\"\n\n\"There's a jar in the kitchen where she used to throw her pennies. And there was some loose jewelry in one of the bedroom drawers, but none of it looked like much. I didn't steal anything, if that's what you were getting at.\"\n\n\"I just wondered.\"\n\nA siren opened up behind us. I edged over to the right to give them room. A blue-and-white police cruiser sailed past us, wailing madly, barreling on through a red light. I braked for the same light, and as we waited for it to turn green a pair of foot patrolmen crossed the street in front of us. The one with the mustache was doing baton-twirler tricks with his nightstick. At one point he swung around so that he was looking directly at us, and Carolyn gripped my arm and didn't let go until he and his companion had continued on across the street.\n\n\"Jesus,\" she said.\n\n\"Not to worry.\"\n\n\"I could just picture a lightbulb forming over his head. Like in the comic strips. Are you sure he didn't recognize you?\"\n\n\"Positive. Otherwise he'd have come over to the car for a closer look.\"\n\n\"And what would you have done?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Run the light, probably.\"\n\n\"Jesus.\"\n\nI felt the subject deserved changing. \"I thought of bringing you a present,\" I said. \"A fur jacket, really smart-looking.\"\n\n\"I don't like fur.\"\n\n\"This was a good one. It had an Arvin Tannenbaum label in it.\"\n\n\"Is that good?\"\n\n\"He's as good as furriers get. I don't know much about furs but I know labels. This was pretty. I think it was Canada lynx. What's the matter?\"\n\n\"That's a kind of a cat, Bernie. Don't tell me how pretty it was. A lynx is like a bobcat. Wearing a lynx coat would be like having lampshades made of human skin. Whether or not they're attractive is beside the point.\"\n\nAnother siren oogah-oogahed in the distance. An ambulance, from the sound of it. They've got ambulances these days that sound like Gestapo cars in war movies.\n\nThat last thought blended with Carolyn's lampshade image and made me ready for another change of subject. \"The wig was there,\" I said hurriedly. \"The orange one that she wore to the bookstore. So it wasn't just that my brain was addled from the drug. That was her buying Virgil's Eclogues.\"\n\n\"She must have been afraid someone would recognize her.\"\n\nI nodded. \"She could have worn the wig so I wouldn't recognize her at a later meeting, but that doesn't really make much sense. I suppose she was afraid Whelkin would spot her. They must have known each other because he sent me over to her apartment, but I wish I had something more concrete to tie them together.\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"Pictures, for instance. I was hoping for a batch of telltale snapshots. People with a closetful of whips and chains tend to be keen Polaroid photographers. I didn't turn up a one.\"\n\n\"If there were any pictures, the killer could have taken them.\"\n\n\"Possible.\"\n\n\"Or maybe there weren't any to begin with. If she was only with one person at a time there wouldn't be anybody to take the pictures. Did you find a camera?\"\n\n\"Nary a camera.\"\n\n\"Then there probably weren't any pictures.\"\n\n\"Probably not.\"\n\nI turned into Fourteenth Street, headed west. Carolyn was looking at me oddly. I braked for a red light and turned to see her studying me, a thoughtful expression on her face.\n\n\"You know something I don't,\" she said.\n\n\"I know how to pick locks. That's all.\"\n\n\"Something else.\"\n\n\"It's just your imagination.\"\n\n\"I don't think so. You were uptight before and now you're all loose and breezy.\"\n\n\"It's just self-confidence and a feeling of well-being,\" I told her. \"Don't worry. It'll pass.\"\n\nThere was a legal parking place around the corner from her apartment, legal until 7 A.M., at any rate. I stuck the Pontiac into it and grabbed up the suitcase.\n\nThe cats met us at the door. \"Good boys,\" Carolyn said, reaching down to pat heads. \"Anybody call? Did you take messages like I taught you? Bernie, if it's not time for a drink, then the liquor ads have been misleading us for years. You game?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"Scotch? Rocks? Soda?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, and no.\"\n\nI unpacked my suitcase while she made the drinks, then made myself sit down and relax long enough to swallow a couple of ounces of Scotch. I waited for it to loosen some of my coiled springs, but before that could happen I was on my feet again.\n\nCarolyn raised her eyebrows at me.\n\n\"The car,\" I said.\n\n\"What about it?\"\n\n\"I want to put it back where I found it.\"\n\n\"You're kidding.\"\n\n\"That car's been very useful to me, Carolyn. I want to return the favor.\"\n\nI paused at the door, reached back under my jacket. There was a book wedged beneath the waistband of my slacks. I drew it free and set it on a table. Carolyn looked at it and at me again.\n\n\"Something to read while I'm gone,\" I said.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"Well,\" I said, \"it's not Virgil's Eclogues.\"\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Thirteen\n\nI felt good about taking the car back. You don't spit on your luck, I told myself. I thought of stories of ballplayers refusing to change their socks while the team was on a winning streak. It was high time, I mused, to change my own socks, winning streak or no. A shower would be in order, and a change of garb.\n\nI headed uptown on Tenth Avenue, left hand on the wheel, right hand on the seat beside me, fingers drumming idly. Somewhere in the Forties I snuck a peek at the gas gauge. I had a little less than half a tank left and I felt a need to do something nice for the car's owner, so I cut over to Eleventh Avenue and found an open station at the corner of Fifty-first Street. I had them fill the tank and check the oil while they were at it. The oil was down a quart and I had them take care of that, too.\n\nMy parking space was waiting for me on Seventy-fourth Street, but Max and his owner were nowhere to be seen. I uncoupled my jumper wire, locked up the car, and trotted back to West End Avenue to catch a southbound cab. It was still drizzling lightly but I didn't have to wait long before a cab pulled up. And it was a Checker, with room for me to stretch my legs and relax.\n\nThings were starting to go right. I could feel it.\n\nOut of habit, I left the cab a few blocks from Arbor Court and walked the rest of the way. I rang, and Carolyn buzzed me through the front door and met me at the door to her apartment. She put her hands on her hips and looked up at me. \"You're full of surprises,\" she said.\n\n\"It's part of my charm.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. To tell you the truth, poetry never did too much for me. I had a lover early on who thought she was Edna St. Vincent Millay and that sort of cooled me on the whole subject. Where'd you find the book?\"\n\n\"The Porlock apartment.\"\n\n\"No shit, Bern. Here I thought you checked it out of the Jefferson Market library. Where in the apartment? Out in plain sight?\"\n\n\"Uh-uh. In a shoe box on a shelf in the closet.\"\n\n\"It must have come as a surprise.\"\n\n\"I'll say. I was expecting a pair of Capezios, and look what I found.\"\n\n\"The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow. I didn't really read much of it. I skimmed the first three or four pages and I didn't figure it was going to get better.\"\n\n\"You were right.\"\n\n\"How'd you know it would be there, Bern?\"\n\nI went over to the kitchen area and made us a couple of drinks. I gave one to Carolyn and accompanied it with the admission that I hadn't known the book would be there, that I hadn't even had any particular hope of finding it. \"When you don't know what you're looking for,\" I said, \"you have a great advantage, because you don't know what you'll find.\"\n\n\"Just so you know it when you see it. I'm beginning to believe you lead a charmed life. First you run an ad claiming you've got the book, and then you open a shoe box and there's the book. Why did the killer stash it there?\"\n\n\"He didn't. He'd have taken it with him.\"\n\n\"Porlock stashed it?\"\n\n\"Must have. She drugged me, frisked me, grabbed the book, tucked it away in the closet, and got it hidden just in time to let her killer in the front door. She must have been alone in the apartment with me or he'd have seen her hide the book. She let him in and he killed her and left the gun in my hand and went out.\"\n\n\"Without the book.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Why would he kill her without getting the book?\"\n\n\"Maybe he didn't have anything to do with the book. Maybe he had some other reason to want her dead.\"\n\n\"And he just happened to walk in at that particular time, and he decided to frame you because you happened to be there.\"\n\n\"I haven't got it all worked out yet, Carolyn.\"\n\n\"I can see that.\"\n\n\"Maybe he killed her first and started looking for the book and came up empty. Except the apartment didn't look as though it had been searched. It looked as neat as ever, except for the body on the love seat. When I came to, I mean. There was no body there tonight.\"\n\n\"How about the trunk of the Pontiac?\"\n\nI gave her a look. \"They did leave chalkmarks, though. On the love seat and the floor, to outline where the body was. It was sort of spooky.\" I picked up the book and took it and my drink to the chair. Archie was curled up in it. I put down the book and the drink and moved him and sat down, and he hopped onto my lap and looked on with interest as I picked up the book again and leafed through it.\n\n\"I swear he can read,\" Carolyn said. \"Ubi's not much on books but Archie loves to read over my shoulder. Or under my shoulder, come to think of it.\"\n\n\"A cat ought to like Kipling,\" I said. \"Remember the Just So Stories? 'I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.' \"\n\nArchie purred like a handsaw.\n\n\"When I met you,\" I said, \"I figured you'd have dogs.\"\n\n\"I'd rather go to them than have them. What made you think I was a dog person?\"\n\n\"Well, the shop.\"\n\n\"The Poodle Factory?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Well, what choice did I have, Bernie? I couldn't open a cat-grooming salon, for Christ's sake. Cats groom themselves.\"\n\n\"That's a point.\"\n\nI read a little more of the book. Something bothered me. I flipped back to the flyleaf and read the handwritten inscription to H. Rider Haggard. I pictured Kipling at his desk in Surrey, dipping his pen, leaning over the book, inscribing it to his closest friend. I closed the book, turned it over and over in my hands.\n\n\"Something wrong?\"\n\nI shook my head, set the book aside, dispossessed Archie, stood up. \"I'm like the cats,\" I announced, \"and it's time I set about grooming myself. I'm going to take a shower.\"\n\nA while later I was sitting in the chair again. I was wearing clean clothes and I'd had a nice close shave with my own razor.\n\n\"I could get a paper,\" Carolyn offered. \"It's after eleven. The Times must be out by now. The first edition.\"\n\nWe'd just heard the news and there wasn't anything about the Porlock murder. I pointed out that there wouldn't very likely be anything in the paper, either.\n\n\"Our ad'll be in, Bern. In the Personals.\"\n\n\"Where's the nearest newsstand open at this hour?\"\n\n\"There's one on Greenwich Avenue but they don't get the early Times because they close around one or two. There's an all-night stand at the subway entrance at Fourteenth and Eighth.\"\n\n\"That's too far.\"\n\n\"I don't mind a walk.\"\n\n\"It's still raining and it's too far anyway, and why do we have to look at the ad?\"\n\n\"To make sure it's there, I suppose.\"\n\n\"No point. Either somebody'll see it or they won't, and either the phone'll ring or it won't, and all we can do is wait and see what happens.\"\n\n\"I suppose so.\" She sounded wistful. \"It just seems as though there ought to be something active we can do.\"\n\n\"The night's been active enough for me already.\"\n\n\"I guess you're right.\"\n\n\"I feel like a little blissful inactivity, to tell you the truth. I feel like sitting here feeling clean. I feel like having maybe one more drink in a few minutes and then getting ready for bed. I don't even know if people really read Personal ads in the Times, but I'm fairly sure they don't race for the bulldog edition so they can read about missing heirs and volunteers wanted for medical experiments.\"\n\n\"True.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid so. The phone's not going to ring for a while, Carolyn.\"\n\nSo of course it picked that minute to ring.\n\nWe looked at each other. Nobody moved and it went on ringing. \"You get it,\" she said.\n\n\"Why me?\"\n\n\"Because it's about the ad.\"\n\n\"It's not about the ad.\"\n\n\"Of course it's about the ad. What else would it be?\"\n\n\"Maybe it's a wrong number.\"\n\n\"Bernie, for God's sake...\"\n\nI got up and answered the phone. I didn't say anything for a second, and then I said, \"Hello.\"\n\nNo answer.\n\nI said hello a few more times, giving the word the same flat reading each time, and I'd have gotten more of a response from Archie. I stared at the receiver for a moment, said \"Hello\" one final time, then said \"Goodbye\" and hung up.\n\n\"Interesting conversation,\" Carolyn said.\n\n\"It's good I answered it. It really made a difference.\"\n\n\"Someone wanted to find out who placed the ad. Now they've heard your voice and they know it's you.\"\n\n\"You're reading a lot into a moment of silence.\"\n\n\"Maybe I should have picked it up after all.\"\n\n\"And maybe what we just had was a wrong number. Or a telephone pervert. I didn't hear any heavy breathing, but maybe he's new at it.\"\n\nShe started to say something, then got to her feet, popping up like a toaster. \"I'm gonna have one more drink,\" she said. \"How about you?\"\n\n\"A short one.\"\n\n\"They know it's you, Bernie. Now if they can get the address from the number\u2014\"\n\n\"They can't.\"\n\n\"Suppose they're the police. The police could get the phone company to cooperate, couldn't they?\"\n\n\"Maybe. But what do the police know about the Kipling book?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Well, neither do they.\" She handed me a drink. It was a little heftier than I'd had in mind but I didn't raise any objections. Her nervousness was contagious and I'd managed to pick up a light dose of it. I prescribed Scotch, to be followed by bed rest.\n\n\"It was probably what I said it would be when I answered it,\" I suggested. \"A wrong number.\"\n\n\"You're right.\"\n\n\"For all we know, the ad didn't even make the early edition.\"\n\n\"I could take a quick run over to Fourteenth Street and check\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous.\" I picked up the book again and found myself flipping through its pages, remembering how I'd done so on an earlier occasion, sitting in my own apartment with a similar drink at hand and flushed with the triumph of a successful burglary. Well, I'd stolen the thing again, but somehow I didn't feel the same heady rush.\n\nSomething nagged at me. Some little thought out there on the edge of consciousness...\n\nI finished my drink and tuned it out.\n\nHalf an hour after the phone call we were bedded down for the night. I was bedded down, anyway; Carolyn was couched. The clock radio was supplying an undercurrent of mood music, all set to turn itself off thirty minutes into the Mantovani.\n\nI was teetering on the edge of sleep when I half heard footsteps approaching the door of the apartment. I didn't really register them; Carolyn's was a first-floor apartment, after all, and various feet had been approaching it all night long, only to pass it and continue on up the stairs. This time the steps stopped outside the door, and just as that fact was beginning to penetrate I heard a key in the lock.\n\nI sat up in bed. The key turned in the lock. Beside me, a cat sat quivering with excitement. As another key slipped into another of the locks, Carolyn stirred on the couch and whispered my name urgently.\n\nWe were both on our feet by the time the door opened. A hand reached in to switch on the overhead light. We stood there blinking.\n\n\"I'm dreaming,\" Randy said. \"None of this is really happening.\"\n\nShoulder-length chestnut hair. A high broad forehead, a long oval face. Large eyes, larger now than I'd ever seen them, and a mouth in the shape of the letter O.\n\n\"Jesus,\" Carolyn said. \"Randy, it's not what you think.\"\n\n\"Of course not. The two of you were playing canasta. You had the lights out so you wouldn't disturb the cats. Why else would you be wearing your Dr. Denton's, Carolyn? And does Bernie like the handy drop seat?\"\n\n\"You've got it all wrong.\"\n\n\"I know. It's terrible the way I jump to conclusions. At least you're dressed warmly. Bernie, poor thing, you're shivering in your undershorts. Why don't the two of you huddle together for warmth, Carolyn? It wouldn't bother me a bit.\"\n\n\"Randy, you just don't understand.\"\n\n\"You're dead right about that. I figured you knew what you were by now. Aren't you a little old for a sexual-identity crisis?\"\n\n\"Dammit, Randy\u2014\"\n\n\"Dammit is right. Dammit is definitely right. I thought I recognized Bernie's voice on the telephone. And I was struck tongue-tied. After I hung up I told myself it was probably innocent, the two of you are friends, and I asked myself why I reacted with such paranoia. But you know what they say, Carolyn. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean real little people aren't following you.\"\n\n\"Will you please listen to me?\"\n\n\"No, you listen to me, you little shit. What I said was, well, screw it, Miranda, you've got a key, so go over and join the two of them and see how silly you're being, or maybe you'll get lucky and Carolyn'll be alone and you can have some laughs and patch things up, and\u2014God damn you, Carolyn. Here's your set of keys, bitch. I won't walk in on you two again. Count on it.\"\n\n\"Randy, I\u2014\"\n\n\"I said here's your keys. And I think you have my keys, Carolyn, and I'd like them back. Now, if you don't mind.\"\n\nWe tried to say something but it was pointless. There was nothing she wanted to hear. She gave back Carolyn's keys and pocketed her own and stormed out, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the dishes on the kitchen table, stamping her way down the hall, slamming the vestibule door on her way out of the building.\n\nCarolyn and I just stood there looking at each other. Ubi had gone to hide under the bed. Archie stood up on the chair and let out a tentative yowl. After a couple of minutes Carolyn went over to the door and set about locking the locks.\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Fourteen\n\nThe Personal ads were on the penultimate page of the second section of the Times, along with the shipping news and a few other high-priority items. Ours was the third listing, following a plea for information from the parents of a fourteen-year-old runaway.\n\nI read our ad three or four times and decided that it did its job efficiently enough. It hadn't brought any response yet, but it was still early; Carolyn had awakened at dawn and gone for the paper as soon as she'd fed the cats. At this hour our presumably interested parties might well be snug in their beds. If, like me and Carolyn, they were already warming themselves over morning coffee, they'd still have the whole paper to wade through before they got to the Personals. True, it was a Saturday. The daily Times has added on feature sections in recent years, padding itself like a bear preparing to hibernate, but the Saturday paper remains fashionably slender. On the other hand, a good many people take a break from the Times on Saturdays, readying themselves for the onslaught of the enormous Sunday paper, so it was possible our prospective customers would never pick up the paper at all. The ad was set to run for a week, but now that I looked at it, a few lines of type on a remote back page, I wasn't too cocky about the whole thing. We couldn't really count on it, I decided, and it would be advisable to draft a backup plan as soon as possible.\n\n\"Oh, wow. I'm glad I went out for the paper, Bernie.\"\n\n\"So am I,\" I said. \"I just hope you're not the only person who took the trouble.\"\n\nShe had the first section and she was pointing to something. \"You'd better read this,\" she said.\n\nI took it and read it. A few inches of copy on one of the back pages, out of place among the scraps of international news but for its faintly international flavor. Bernard Rhodenbarr, I read, the convicted burglar currently sought by police investigating the slaying Thursday of Madeleine Porlock in her East Side apartment, had narrowly escaped apprehension the previous night. Surprised by an alert police officer while attempting to break into Barnegat Books on East Eleventh Street, Rhodenbarr whipped out a pistol and exchanged shots with the policeman. The officer, I read, suffered a flesh wound in the foot and was treated at St. Vincent's Hospital and released. The burglar-turned-gunman, owner of the store in question, had escaped on foot, apparently uninjured.\n\nAs an afterthought, the last paragraph mentioned that Rhodenbarr had disguised himself for the occasion by donning a turban and false beard. \"But he didn't fool me,\" Patrolman Francis Rockland was quoted as saying. \"We're trained to see past obvious disguises. I recognized him right away from his photograph.\"\n\n\"The Sikh,\" I told Carolyn. \"Well, that's one person who hasn't got the book, or he wouldn't have been trying to break into the store to search for it. I wonder if it was him you spotted watching the store yesterday.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\n\"The tabloids'll probably give this more of a play. They like irony, and what's more ironic than a burglar caught breaking into his own place? They should only know how ironic it is.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Well, the cop could have arrested the Sikh. That wouldn't have cleared me on the murder rap but at least they wouldn't be after me for this, too. Or the Sikh could have been a worse shot, so I wouldn't be charged with shooting a cop. Wounding a police officer is a more serious crime than murdering a civilian, at least as far as the cops are concerned. Or, if he had to shoot him, the Sikh could have killed young Mr. Rockland. Then he wouldn't have been able to tell them I was the one who did it.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't really want the policeman dead, Bernie.\"\n\n\"No. With my luck he'd live long enough to tell a brother officer who shot him. Then I'd be a cop killer. What if Randy sees this? She must have missed the first story, or at least she never connected it with me, because she didn't seem concerned last night about your harboring a fugitive. She was too busy feeling betrayed.\"\n\n\"She never looks at the Times. \"\n\n\"It'll be in the other papers, too.\"\n\n\"She probably won't read them, either. I don't even know if she knows your last name.\"\n\n\"She must.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\n\"Would she call the cops?\"\n\n\"She's a good person, Bernie. She's not a fink.\"\n\n\"She's also jealous. She thinks\u2014\"\n\n\"I know what she thinks. She must be a lunatic to think it, but I know what she thinks.\"\n\n\"She could decide to give the cops an anonymous tip. She could tell herself it was for your own good, Carolyn.\"\n\n\"Shit.\" She gnawed a thumbnail. \"You figure it's not safe here anymore?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"But the phone's here. And the number's in the paper, and how are we going to answer it from a distance?\"\n\n\"Who's going to call, anyway?\"\n\n\"Rudyard Whelkin.\"\n\n\"He killed Madeleine Porlock Thursday night. I'll bet he took a cab straight to Kennedy and was out of the country by midnight.\"\n\n\"Without the book?\"\n\nI shrugged.\n\n\"And the Sikh might call. What happened to his five hundred dollars?\"\n\n\"You figure he'll call so he can ask me that question?\"\n\n\"No, I'm asking it, Bern. You had the money on you when Madeleine Porlock drugged you, right?\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"And it was gone when you came to.\"\n\n\"Right again.\"\n\n\"So what happened to it?\"\n\n\"She took it. Oh. What happened to it after she took it?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Where did it go? You went through her things last night. It wasn't stashed with the book, was it?\"\n\n\"It wasn't stashed anywhere. Nowhere that I looked, that is. I suppose the killer took it along with him.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't he leave it?\"\n\n\"Why leave money? Money's money, Carolyn.\"\n\n\"There's always stories about killings in the paper, and they say the police ruled out robbery as a motive because the victim had a large sum of cash on his person.\"\n\n\"That's organized crime. They want people to know why they killed somebody. They'll even plant money on a person so the police will rule out robbery. Either the killer took the money this time or Porlock found a hiding place that didn't occur to me. Or some cop picked it up when no one was looking. That's been known to happen.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Oh, sure. I could tell you no end of stories. But what's the point? I'd be interrupted by the insistent ringing of the telephone.\"\n\nAnd I turned to the instrument, figuring it would recognize a cue when it heard one. It stayed silent, though, for upwards of half an hour.\n\nBut once it started ringing, I didn't think it was ever going to stop.\n\nRrrring!\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\n\"Ah, hello. I've just read your notice in the Times. I'm only wondering if I'm interpreting it correctly.\"\n\n\"How are you interpreting it?\"\n\n\"You would appear to have something to sell.\"\n\n\"That's correct.\"\n\n\"Passage to, ah, Fort Bucklow.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Would it be possible for me to know to whom I am speaking?\"\n\n\"I was going to ask you that very question.\"\n\n\"Ah. An impasse. Let me consider this.\"\n\nAn English inflection, an undertone of Asia or Africa. A slightly sibilant s. Educated, soft-spoken. A pleasant voice, all in all.\n\n\"Very well, sir. I believe you may already have encountered an emissary of mine. If my guess is right, you overcharged him in a transaction recently. He paid five hundred dollars for a book priced at a dollar ninety-five.\"\n\n\"Not my fault. He ran off without his change.\"\n\nAn appreciative chuckle. \"Then you are the man I assumed you to be. Very good. You have pluck, sir. The police seek you in connection with a woman's death and you persist in your efforts to sell a book. Business as usual, eh?\"\n\n\"I need money right now.\"\n\n\"To quit the country, I would suppose. You have the book at hand? It is actually in your possession as we talk?\"\n\n\"Yes. I don't believe I caught your name.\"\n\n\"I don't believe I've given it. Before we go further, sir, perhaps you could prove to me that you have the volume.\"\n\n\"I suppose I could hold it to the phone, but unless you have extraordinary powers...\"\n\n\"Open it to page forty-two, sir, and read the first stanza on the page.\"\n\n\"Oh. Hold on a minute. 'Now if you should go to Fort Bucklow / When the moon is on the wane, / And the jackal growls while the monkey howls / Like a woman struck insane... Is that the one you mean?\"\n\nA pause. \"I want that volume, sir. I want to buy it.\"\n\n\"Good. I want to sell it.\"\n\n\"And your price?\"\n\n\"I haven't set it yet.\"\n\n\"If you will do so...\"\n\n\"This is tricky business. I have to protect myself. I'm a fugitive, as you said, and that makes me vulnerable. I don't even know whom I'm dealing with.\"\n\n\"A visitor in your land, sir. A passionate devotee of Mr. Kipling. My name is of little importance.\"\n\n\"How can I get in touch with you?\"\n\n\"It's of less importance than my name. I can get in touch with you, sir, by calling this number.\"\n\n\"No. I won't be here. It's not safe. Give me a number where I can reach you at five o'clock this afternoon.\"\n\n\"A telephone number?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I can't do that.\"\n\n\"It can be any telephone at all. Just so you'll be at it at five o'clock.\"\n\n\"Ah. I will call you back, sir, in ten minutes.\"\n\nRrrring!\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\n\"Sir, you have pencil and paper?\"\n\n\"Go ahead.\"\n\n\"I will be at this number at five o'clock this afternoon. RH4-5198.\"\n\n\"RH4-5198. At five o'clock.\"\n\nRrrring! Rrrring!\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\n\"Hello.\"\n\n\"Ah. If you could say something more elaborate than a simple hello...\"\n\n\"What do you want me to say?\"\n\n\"Very good. I'd hoped it was you. I won't use your name aloud, and I trust you won't use mine.\"\n\n\"Only if I want to call your club and have you paged.\"\n\n\"Don't do that.\"\n\n\"They said you weren't a member. Extraordinary, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Perhaps I haven't been altogether straightforward with you, my boy. I can explain everything.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you can.\"\n\n\"The elusive item. Can I assume from your advertisement that it hasn't slipped out of your hands?\"\n\n\"It's in front of me even as we speak.\"\n\n\"Excellent.\"\n\n\" 'Now if you should go to Fort Bucklow / When the moon is on the wane, / And the jackal growls while the monkey howls...' \"\n\n\"For heaven's sake, don't read it to me. Or have you committed great stretches of it to memory?\"\n\n\"No, I was reading.\"\n\n\"Oh, to prove possession? Hardly necessary, my boy. You'd scarcely have shot the woman and then left the book behind, would you? Now how are we going to manage this transaction?\"\n\n\"We could meet someplace.\"\n\n\"We could. Of course neither of us would welcome the attention of the police. I wonder...\"\n\n\"Give me a number where I can reach you at six o'clock.\"\n\n\"Why don't I simply call you?\"\n\n\"Because I don't know where I'll be.\"\n\n\"I see. Well, my boy, at the risk of appearing to play them close to the vest, I'm not sure I'd care to give out this number.\"\n\n\"Any number, then.\"\n\n\"How's that?\"\n\n\"Pick a pay phone. Give me the number and be there to answer it at six.\"\n\n\"Ah. I'll get back to you.\"\n\nRrrring!\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\n\"CHelsea 2-9419.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\n\"At six o'clock.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\nRrrring!\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\n\"Hello. I believe you advertised\u2014\"\n\n\"Passage to Fort Bucklow. That's correct.\"\n\n\"May I speak frankly? We're talking about a book, are we not?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And you wish to purchase it?\"\n\n\"I have it for sale.\"\n\nA pause. \"I see. You actually own a copy. You have it in your possession.\"\n\n\" '...The jackal growls while the monkey howls / Like a woman struck insane...' \"\n\n\"What did you say?\"\n\n\"I'm reading from the top of page forty-two.\"\n\n\"That would hardly seem necessary.\" Another pause. \"This is confusing. Perhaps I should give you my name.\"\n\n\"That'd be nice.\"\n\n\"It's Demarest. Prescott Demarest, and I don't suppose it will mean anything to you. I'm acting as agent for a wealthy collector whose name would mean something to you, but I haven't the authority to mention it. He was recently offered a copy of this book. The offer was suddenly withdrawn. I wonder if it's the same copy?\"\n\n\"I couldn't say.\"\n\n\"The copy he was offered was represented as unique. It was our understanding that only one copy of the book exists.\"\n\n\"Then it must be the same copy.\"\n\n\"So it would seem. I don't think you gave your name.\"\n\n\"I'm careful about my privacy, Mr. Demarest. Like your employer.\"\n\n\"I see. I'd have to consult him, of course, but if you could let me know your price?\"\n\n\"It hasn't been set yet.\"\n\n\"There are other potential buyers?\"\n\n\"Several.\"\n\n\"I'd like to see the book. Before you offer it to anyone else. If we could arrange to meet\u2014\"\n\n\"I can't talk right now, Mr. Demarest. Where can I reach you this afternoon at, say, four o'clock? Will you be near a telephone?\"\n\n\"I can arrange to be.\"\n\n\"Could I have the number?\"\n\n\"I don't see why not. Take this down. WOrth 4-1114. You did say four o'clock? I'll expect to hear from you then.\"\n\n\"I think that's it,\" I told Carolyn, after I'd summarized the Demarest conversation for her. \"I don't think there are going to be any more calls.\"\n\n\"How can you tell?\"\n\n\"I can't, but it's one of my stronger hunches. The first caller was foreign and he's the one who sicced the Sikh on me. The Sikh came around Thursday afternoon, so he's known at least that long that I had the book, but he made me read it to him over the phone.\"\n\n\"What does that prove?\"\n\n\"Beats me. Right now I'm just piling up data. Interpreting it will have to wait. The second call was from Whelkin and he wasn't terribly interested in howling jackals or growling monkeys.\"\n\n\"I think it's the other way around.\"\n\n\"Monkeys and jackals aren't terribly interested in Whelkin?\"\n\n\"The jackal was growling and the monkey was howling. Not that it makes a hell of a lot of difference. What are you getting at, Bernie?\"\n\n\"Good question. Whelkin seemed to take it for granted that I killed Madeleine Porlock. That's why he wasn't surprised I had the book. Which means he didn't kill her. Unless, of course, he was pretending to believe I killed her, in which case...\"\n\n\"In which case what?\"\n\n\"Damned if I know. That leaves Demarest, and there's something refreshing about him. He was very open about his name and he didn't have to be coaxed into supplying his phone number. What do you suppose that means?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Neither do I.\" I helped myself to more coffee. \"The murder's what screws things up. If somebody hadn't killed Madeleine Porlock I wouldn't have a problem. Or if the police weren't looking to hang the killing on me. I'd just sell the book to the highest bidder and spend the next two weeks in the Bahamas. One of those three killed her, Carolyn.\"\n\n\"One of the ones who just called?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\" I looked at my watch. \"We don't have a hell of a lot of time,\" I said. \"I'm supposed to call them at hourly intervals, starting with Demarest at four. That gives us a couple of hours to set things up.\"\n\n\"To set what up?\"\n\n\"A trap. It's going to be tricky, though, because I don't know who to set it for or what to use for bait. There's only one thing to do.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"What I always do in time of stress,\" I said. \"Bribe a cop.\"\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Fifteen\n\nWhen he came to the phone I apologized for the intrusion. \"Your wife didn't want to disturb you,\" I said, \"but I told her it was important.\"\n\n\"Well, I got Wake Forest and ten points,\" he said. \"So all I been doin' is watch twenty bucks go down the chute.\"\n\n\"Who are they playing?\"\n\n\"University of Georgia. The Bulldogs got what they call the Junkyard Dog defense. All it means is they're chewin' the ass offa poor Wake Forest.\" There was a long and thoughtful pause. \"Who the hell,\" he said, \"is this?\"\n\n\"Just an old friend and enemy who needs a favor.\"\n\n\"Jesus, it's you. Kid, I seen you step in it before, but I swear this time you got both feet smack in the middle of God's birthday cake. Where are you callin' from, anyway?\"\n\n\"The Slough of Despond. I need a favor, Ray.\"\n\n\"Jesus, that's the truth. Well, you came to the right place. You want me to set up a surrender, right? First smart move you made since you iced the Porlock dame. You stay out there and it's just a question of time before somebody tags you, and what do you want to get shot for? And the word is shoot first on you, Bern.\" He clucked at me. \"That wasn't too brilliant, you know. Shootin' a cop. The department takes a dim view.\"\n\n\"I never shot him.\"\n\n\"C'mon, kid. He was there, right? He saw you.\"\n\n\"He saw a clown with a beard and a turban. I never shot him and I never shot her either.\"\n\n\"And all you do is sell books. You told me the whole story, remember? How you're straight as a javelin and all? Listen, you'll be okay now. I'll set up a surrender, and don't think I don't appreciate it. Makes me look good, no question about it, and it saves your ass. You get yourself a decent lawyer and who knows, you might even beat the whole thing in court. Worst comes to worst, so you do a couple of years upstate. You done that before.\"\n\n\"Ray, I never\u2014\"\n\n\"One thing that's not so good, this Rockland kid's young and feisty, you know? If it was an old-timer you shot, he'd probably take a couple of kay to roll over in court and fudge the testimony. 'Course, if it was an old-timer, he probably woulda shot you instead of waitin' to get hisself shot in the foot. So I guess you break even on that one, Bern.\"\n\nWe went a few more rounds, me proclaiming my innocence while he told me how I could cop a plea and probably get off with writing \"I won't steal no more\" one hundred times on the blackboard after school. Eventually I shifted gears and told him there was something specific I wanted from him.\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"I have three phone numbers. I want you to run them down for me.\"\n\n\"You nuts, Bernie? You know what's involved in tracin' a call? You gotta set up in advance, you gotta be able to reach somebody at the phone company on another line, and then you gotta keep the mark on the phone for a couple of minutes and even then they sometimes can't make the trace work. And then if you\u2014\"\n\n\"I already know the three numbers, Ray.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"I know the numbers, I want to know the locations of the phones. As if I already traced the calls successfully and I want to know where I traced them to.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"You could do that, couldn't you?\"\n\nHe thought it over. \"Sure,\" he said, \"but why should I?\"\n\nI gave him a very good reason.\n\n\"I don't know,\" he said, after we'd discussed my very good reason for a few minutes. \"Seems to me I'm takin' a hell of a chance.\"\n\n\"What chance? You'll make a phone call, that's all.\"\n\n\"Meanwhile I'm cooperatin' with a fugitive from justice. That's not gonna go down too good if anybody ever hears about it.\"\n\n\"Who's going to hear?\"\n\n\"You never know. Another thing, how in the hell are you ever gonna deliver? You make it sound good, but how can you deliver? If some rookie with high marks on the pistol range whacks you out, Bern, where does that leave me?\"\n\n\"It leaves you alive. Think where it leaves me.\"\n\n\"That's why I'm sayin' you oughta surrender.\"\n\n\"Nobody's going to shoot me,\" I said, with perhaps a shade more confidence than I possessed. \"And I'll deliver what I promised. When did I ever let you down?\"\n\n\"Well...\"\n\n\"Ray, all you have to do is make a phone call or two. Isn't it worth a shot? For Christ's sake, if Wake Forest is worth a twenty-dollar investment\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't remind me. My money's gurglin' down the drain and I'm not even watchin' it go.\"\n\n\"Look at the odds I'm giving you. All you got with Wake Forest is ten points.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" I listened while his mental wheels spun. \"You ever tell anybody we had this conversation\u2014\"\n\n\"You know me better than that, Ray.\"\n\n\"Yeah, you're all right. Okay, gimme the numbers.\"\n\nI gave them to him and he repeated them in turn.\n\n\"All right,\" he said. \"Now gimme the number where you're at and I'll get back to you soon as I can.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" I said. \"The number here.\" I was about to read it off the little disc on the telephone when Carolyn grabbed my arm and showed me a face overflowing with alarm. \"Uh, I don't think so,\" I told Ray. \"If it's that easy for you to find out where a phone's located\u2014\"\n\n\"Bern, what kind of a guy do you think I am?\"\n\nI let that one glide by. \"Besides,\" I said, \"I'm on my way out the door, anyway. Best thing is if I call you back. How much time do you need?\"\n\n\"Depends what kind of cooperation I get from the phone company.\"\n\n\"Say half an hour?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said. \"Sounds good. Try me in half an hour, Bernie.\"\n\nI cradled the receiver. Carolyn and both cats were looking at me expectantly. \"A camera,\" I said.\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"We've got half an hour to get a camera. A Polaroid, actually, unless you know somebody with a darkroom, and who wants to screw around developing film? We need a Polaroid. I don't suppose you've got one?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Is there one you could borrow? I hate the idea of running out and buying one. The midtown stores are likely to be crowded and I don't even know if there's a camera place in the Village. There's stores on Fourteenth Street but the stuff they sell tends to fall apart on the way home. And there's pawnshops on Third Avenue but I hate to make the rounds over there with a price on my head. Of course you could go over there and buy one.\"\n\n\"If I knew what to buy. I'd hate to get it home and find out it doesn't work. What do we need a camera for, anyway?\"\n\n\"To take some pictures.\"\n\n\"I never would have thought of that. It's a shame Randy walked in when she did. She's got one of those new Polaroids, you take the picture and it's developed before you can let go of the shutter.\"\n\n\"Randy's got a Polaroid?\"\n\n\"That's what I just said. Didn't I show you pictures of the cats last week?\"\n\n\"Probably.\"\n\n\"Well, she took them. But I can't ask her to borrow it, because she's convinced we're having an affair and she'd probably think I wanted us to take obscene pictures of each other or something. And she's probably not home, anyway.\"\n\n\"Call her and see.\"\n\n\"Are you kidding? I don't want to talk to her.\"\n\n\"Hang up if she answers.\"\n\n\"Then why call in the first place?\"\n\n\"Because if she's not home,\" I said, \"we can go pick up the camera.\"\n\n\"Beautiful.\" She reached for the phone, then sighed and let her hand drop. \"You're forgetting something. Remember last night? I gave her keys back.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"Who needs keys?\"\n\nShe looked at me, laughed, shook her head, \"Far out,\" she said, and reached for the phone.\n\nRandy lived in a tiny studio on the fifth floor of a squat brick apartment house on Morton Street between Seventh Avenue and Hudson. There's an article in the New York building code requiring an elevator in every structure of seven or more stories. This one was six stories tall, and up the stairs we went.\n\nThe locks were candy. They wouldn't have been much trouble if I'd been limited to my drugstore tools. Now that I had my pro gear, I went through them like the Wehrmacht through Luxembourg. When the penny dropped and the final lock snicked open, I looked up at Carolyn. Her mouth was wide open and her blue eyes were larger than I'd ever seen them.\n\n\"God,\" she said. \"It takes me longer than that when I've got the keys.\"\n\n\"Well, they're cheap locks. And I was showing off a little. Trying to impress you.\"\n\n\"It worked. I'm impressed.\"\n\nWe were in and out quicker than Speedy Gonzales. The camera was where Carolyn thought it would be, in the bottom drawer of Randy's dresser. It nestled in a carrying case with a shoulder strap, and an ample supply of film reposed in the case's zippered film compartment. Carolyn hung the thing over her shoulder, I locked the locks, and we were on our way home.\n\nI'd told Ray I would call him in half an hour and I didn't miss by more than a few minutes. He answered the phone himself this time. \"Your friend moves around,\" he said.\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"The guy with the three phone numbers. He covers a lot of ground. The Rhinelander number's a sidewalk pay phone on the corner of Seventy-fifth and Madison. The Chelsea number's also a pay phone. It's located in the lobby of the Gresham Hotel. That's on Twenty-third between Fifth and Sixth.\"\n\n\"Hold on,\" I said, scribbling furiously. \"All right. How about the Worth number?\"\n\n\"Downtown. I mean way downtown, in the Wall Street area. Twelve Pine Street.\"\n\n\"Another lobby phone?\"\n\n\"Nope. An office on the fourteenth floor. A firm called Tontine Trading Corp. Bern, let's get back to the coat, huh? You said ranch mink, didn't you?\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"What did you say the color was?\"\n\n\"Silver-blue.\"\n\n\"And it's full-fashioned? You're sure of that?\"\n\n\"Positive. You can't go wrong with this one, Ray. It's carrying an Arvin Tannenbaum label, and that's strictly carriage trade.\"\n\n\"When can I have it?\"\n\n\"In plenty of time for Christmas, Ray. No problem.\"\n\n\"You son of a bitch. What are you givin' me? You haven't got the coat.\"\n\n\"Of course not. I retired, Ray. I gave up burglary. What would I be doing with a hot coat?\"\n\n\"Then where'd the coat come from?\"\n\n\"I'm going to get it for you, Ray. After I get myself out of the jam I'm in.\"\n\n\"Suppose you don't get out of it, Bern? Then what?\"\n\n\"Well, you better hope I do,\" I said, \"or else the coat's down the same chute as your twenty-buck bet on Wake Forest.\"\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Sixteen\n\nI cabbed uptown for the Pontiac. By the time I brought it downtown again Carolyn had familiarized herself with the intricacies of the Polaroid camera. She proved this by clicking the shutter at me as I came through the door. The picture popped out and commenced developing before my eyes. I looked startled, and guilty of something or other. I told Carolyn I wasn't going to order any enlargements.\n\n\"You're a better model than the cats,\" she said. \"Ubi wouldn't sit still and Archie kept crossing his eyes.\"\n\n\"Archie always keeps crossing his eyes.\"\n\n\"It's part of being Burmese. Wanna take my picture?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\nShe was wearing a charcoal-gray turtleneck and slate-blue corduroy jeans. For the photo she slipped on a brass-buttoned blazer and topped things off with a rakish beret. So attired, she sat on the edge of a table, crossed her legs, and grinned at the camera like an endearing waif.\n\nRandy's Polaroid captured all of this remarkably well. We studied the result together. \"What's missing,\" Carolyn said, \"is a cigar.\"\n\n\"You don't smoke cigars.\"\n\n\"To pose with. It'd make me look very Bonnie and Clyde.\"\n\n\"Which of them do you figure you'd look like?\"\n\n\"Oh, very funny. Nothing like a little sexist humor to lighten the mood. Are we ready to go?\"\n\n\"I think so. You've got the Blinns' bracelet?\"\n\n\"In my pocket.\"\n\n\"And you're comfortable with the camera?\"\n\n\"It's about as tricky to operate as a self-service elevator.\"\n\n\"Then let's go.\"\n\nAnd on the sidewalk I said, \"Uh, Carolyn, you may not remind anybody of Faye Dunaway, but you look terrific today.\"\n\n\"What's all this about?\"\n\n\"And you're not bad to have around, either.\"\n\n\"What is this? A speech to the troops before going into battle?\"\n\n\"Something like that, I guess.\"\n\n\"Well, watch it, will you? I could get misty-eyed and run my mascara. It's a good thing I don't wear any. Can't you drive this crate, Bern?\"\n\nOn weekends, New York's financial district looks as though someone zapped it with one of those considerate bombs that kills people without damaging property. Narrow streets, tall buildings, and no discernible human activity whatsoever. All the shops were closed, all the people home watching football games.\n\nI left the Pontiac in an unattended parking lot on Nassau and we walked down to Pine. Number 12 was an office building that towered above those on either side of it. A guard sat at a desk in the lobby, logging the handful of workers who refused to let the weekend qualify their devotion to the pursuit of profit.\n\nWe stood on the far side of Pine for eight or ten minutes, during which time the attendant had nothing whatever to do. No one signed in or out. I looked up and counted nine lighted windows on the front of the building. I tried to determine if one of these might be on the fourteenth floor, a process made somewhat more difficult by the angle at which I had to gaze and the impossibility of determining which was the fourteenth floor, since I had no way of knowing if the building had a thirteenth floor.\n\nI couldn't find a pay phone in line of sight of the building. I went around the corner and walked a block up William Street. At two minutes past four I dialed the number Prescott Demarest had given me. He picked it up after it had rung twice but didn't say anything until I'd said hello myself. If I'd shown similar restraint the night before we could have had Randy's Polaroid without breaking and entering to get it.\n\n\"I have the book,\" I told him. \"And I need cash. I have to leave town. If you're ready to deal, I can offer you a bargain.\"\n\n\"I'll pay a fair price. If I'm convinced the item is genuine.\"\n\n\"Suppose I show it to you tonight? If you decide you want it, then we can work out a price.\"\n\n\"Tonight?\"\n\n\"At Barnegat Books. That's a store on East Eleventh Street.\"\n\n\"I know where it is. There was a story in this morning's paper\u2014\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"You feel it's entirely safe? Meeting at this store?\"\n\n\"I think so. There's no police surveillance, if that's worrying you. I checked earlier this afternoon.\" And so I had, driving past slowly in the Pontiac. \"Eleven o'clock,\" I said. \"I'll see you then.\"\n\nI hung up and walked back to the corner of William and Pine. I could see the entrance of Number 12 from there, though not terribly well. I'd left Carolyn directly across the street in the doorway of a shop that offered old prints and custom framing. I couldn't tell if she was still there or not.\n\nI stayed put for maybe five minutes. Then someone emerged from the building, walking off immediately toward Nassau Street. He'd no sooner disappeared from view than Carolyn stepped out from the printshop's doorway and gave me a wave.\n\nI sprinted back to the telephone, dialed WOrth 4-1114. I let it ring a full dozen times, hung up, retrieved my dime, and raced back to where Carolyn was waiting. \"No answer,\" I told her. \"He's left the office.\"\n\n\"Then we've got his picture.\"\n\n\"There was just the one man?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. Somebody else left earlier, but you hadn't even gotten to the phone by then, so I didn't bother taking his picture. Then one man came out, and I waved to you after I snapped him, and there hasn't been anybody since then. Here's somebody now. It's a woman. Should I take her picture?\"\n\n\"Don't bother.\"\n\n\"She's signing out. Demarest didn't bother. He just waved to the guard and walked on by.\"\n\n\"Doesn't mean anything. I've done that myself, hitting doormen with the old nonchalance. If you act like they know you, they figure they must.\"\n\n\"Here's his picture. What we really need is one of those zoom lenses or whatever you call them. At least this is a narrow street or you wouldn't be able to see much.\"\n\nI studied the picture. It didn't have the clarity of a Bachrach portrait but the lighting was good and Demarest's face showed up clearly. He was a big man, middle-aged, with the close-cropped gray hair of a retired Marine colonel.\n\nThe face was vaguely familiar but I couldn't think why. He was no one I'd ever seen before.\n\nOn the way uptown Carolyn used the rear-view mirror to check the angle of her beret. It took a few minutes before she was satisfied with it.\n\n\"That was really funny,\" she said.\n\n\"Taking Demarest's picture?\"\n\n\"What's funny about taking somebody's picture? It wasn't even scary. I had visions of him coming straight across the street and braining me with the camera, but he never even noticed. Just a quiet little click from the shadows. No, I was talking about last night.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"When Randy turned up. The ultimate bedroom farce. I swear, if jumping weren't allowed she'd never get to a conclusion.\"\n\n\"Well, from her point of view\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, the whole thing's ridiculous from anybody's point of view. But there's one thing you've got to admit.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"She's really cute when she's mad.\"\n\nBy a quarter to five we were in a cocktail lounge called Sangfroid. It was as elegant as the surrounding neighborhood, its floor deeply carpeted, its d\u00e9cor running to black wood and chrome. Our table was a black disc eighteen inches in diameter. Our chairs were black vinyl hemispheres with chrome bases. My drink was Perrier water with ice and lime. Carolyn's was a martini.\n\n\"I know you don't drink when you work,\" she said. \"But this isn't drinking.\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"Therapy. And not a moment too soon, because I think I'm hallucinating. Do you see what I see?\"\n\n\"I see a very tall gentleman with a beard and a turban walking south on Madison Avenue.\"\n\n\"Does that mean we're both hallucinating?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"The chap's a Sikh,\" I said. \"Unless he's a notorious homicidal burglar wearing a fiendishly clever disguise.\"\n\n\"What's he doing?\"\n\nHe had entered the telephone booth. It was on our corner, a matter of yards from where we sat, and we could see him quite clearly through the window. I couldn't swear he was the same Sikh who'd held a gun on me, but the possibility certainly did suggest itself.\n\n\"Is he the man who called you?\"\n\n\"I don't think so.\"\n\n\"Then why's he in the booth? He's ten minutes early, anyway.\"\n\n\"Maybe his watch is fast.\"\n\n\"Is he just going to sit there? Wait a minute. Who's he calling?\"\n\n\"I don't know. If it's Dial-A-Prayer, you might get the number from him.\"\n\n\"It's not Dial-A-Prayer. He's saying something.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's Dial-A-Mantra and he's chanting along with the recording.\"\n\n\"He's hanging up.\"\n\n\"So he is,\" I said.\n\n\"And going away.\"\n\nBut not far. He crossed the street and took a position in the doorway of a boutique. He was about as inconspicuous as the World Trade Center.\n\n\"He's standing guard,\" I said. \"I think he just checked to make sure the coast was clear. Then he called the man I spoke with earlier and told him as much. Those may have been his very words\u2014The coast is clear\u2014but somehow I doubt it. Here comes our man now, I think.\"\n\n\"Where did he come from?\"\n\n\"The Carlyle, probably. It's just a block away, and where else would you stay if you were the sort to employ turbaned Sikhs? The Waldorf, perhaps, if you had a sense of history. The Sherry-Netherlands, possibly, if you were a film producer and the Sikh was Yul Brynner in drag. The Pierre maybe, just maybe, if\u2014\"\n\n\"It's definitely him. He's in the booth.\"\n\n\"So he is.\"\n\n\"Now what?\"\n\nI stood up, found a dime in my pocket, checked my watch. \"It's about that time,\" I said.\n\n\"You'll excuse me, won't you? I have a call to make.\"\n\nIt was a longish call. A couple of times the operator cut in to ask for nickels, and it wasn't the sort of conversation where one welcomed the intrusion. I thought of setting the receiver down, walking a few dozen yards, tapping on the phone-booth door and hanging onto my nickels. I decided that would be pound foolish.\n\nI hung up, finally, and the operator rang back almost immediately to ask for a final dime. I dropped it in, then stood there fingering my ring of picks and probes and having fantasies of opening the coin box and retrieving what I'd spent. I'd never tried to pick a telephone, the game clearly not being worth the candle, but how hard could it be? I studied the key slot for perhaps a full minute before coming sharply to my senses.\n\nCarolyn would love that one, I thought, and hurried back to the table to fill her in. She wasn't there. I sat for a moment. The ice had melted in my Perrier and the natural carbonation, while remarkably persistent, was clearly flagging. I gazed out the window. The phone booth on the corner was empty, and I couldn't spot the Sikh in the doorway across the street.\n\nHad she responded to a call of nature? If so, she'd toted the camera along with her. I gave her an extra minute to return from the ladies' room, then laid a five-dollar bill atop the little table, weighted it down with my glass, and got out of there.\n\nI took another look for the Sikh and still couldn't find him. I crossed the street and walked north on Madison in the direction of the Carlyle. Bobby Short was back from his summer break, I seemed to recall reading, and Tommie Flanagan, Ella Fitzgerald's accompanist for years, was doing a solo act in the Bemelmans Lounge. It struck me that I couldn't think of a nicer way to spend a New York evening, and that I hadn't been getting out much of late, and once this mess was cleared up I'd have to pay another visit to this glittering neighborhood.\n\nUnless, of course, this mess didn't get cleared up. In which case I wouldn't be getting out much for years on end.\n\nI was entertaining this grim thought when a voice came at me from a doorway on my left. \"Pssssst,\" I heard. \"Hey, Mac, wanna buy a hot camera?\"\n\nAnd there she was, a cocky grin on her face. \"You found me,\" she said.\n\n\"I'm keen and resourceful.\"\n\n\"And harder to shake than a summer cold.\"\n\n\"That too. I figured you were in the john. When you failed to return, I took action.\"\n\n\"So did I. I tried taking his picture while you were talking to him. From our table. All I got was reflections. You couldn't even tell if there was anyone inside the telephone booth.\"\n\n\"So you went out and waylaid him.\"\n\n\"Yeah. I figured when he was done he'd probably go back where he came from, so I found this spot and waited for him. Either he made more calls or you were talking a long time.\"\n\n\"We were talking a long time.\"\n\n\"Then he showed up, finally, and he never even noticed me. He passed close by, too. Look at this.\"\n\n\"A stunning likeness.\"\n\n\"That's nothing. The film popped out the way it does, and I watched it develop, and it's really amazing the way it does that, and then I tore it off and put it in my pocket, and I popped out of the doorway, ready to go back and look for you, and who do you think I bumped into?\"\n\n\"Rudyard Whelkin.\"\n\n\"Is he around here? Did you see him?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then why did you say that?\"\n\n\"Just a guess. Let's see. Prescott Demarest?\"\n\n\"No. What's the matter with you, Bern? It was the Sikh.\"\n\n\"That would have been my third guess.\"\n\n\"Well, you would have been right. I popped out with my camera in my hot little hands and I almost smacked right into him. He looked down at me and I looked up at him, and I'll tell you, Bernie, I could have used a stepstool.\"\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"What happened is I was incredibly brilliant. A mind like quicksilver. I went all saucer-eyed and I said, 'Oh, wow, a turban! Are you from India, sir? Are you with the United Nations? Gosh, will you pose for me so I can take your picture?' \"\n\n\"How did this go over?\"\n\n\"Smashingly. Look for yourself.\"\n\n\"You're getting pretty handy with that camera.\"\n\n\"You're no more impressed than he was. He's going to buy himself a Polaroid first thing Monday morning. I had to take two pictures, incidentally, because he wanted one for a souvenir. Turn it over, Bernie. Read the back.\"\n\nAn elegant inscription, with lots of curlicues and nonfunctional loops and whorls. To my tiny princess / With devotion and esteem / Your loyal servant / Atman Singh.\n\n\"That's his name,\" she explained. \"Atman Singh.\"\n\n\"I figured that.\"\n\n\"Clever of you. The guy you were on the phone with is Atman Singh's boss, which you also probably figured. The boss's name is\u2014Well, come to think of it, I don't know his name, but his title is the Maharajah of Ranchipur. But I suppose you knew that too, huh?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said softly. \"I didn't know that.\"\n\n\"They're at the Carlyle, you were right about that. The Maharajah likes to take people with him when he travels. Especially women. I had the feeling I could have joined the party if I played my cards right.\"\n\n\"I wonder how you'd look with a ruby in your navel.\"\n\n\"A little too femme, don't you think? Anyway, Atman Singh likes me just the way I am.\"\n\n\"So do I.\" I put a hand on her shoulder. \"You did beautifully, Carolyn. I'm impressed.\"\n\n\"So am I,\" she said, \"if I say so myself. But it wasn't just me alone. I could never have done it without the martini.\"\n\nDriving south and east, she said, \"It was exciting, doing that number with Atman Singh. At first I was scared and then I didn't even notice I was scared because I was so completely into it. Do you know what I mean?\"\n\n\"Of course I know what you mean. I get the same feeling in other people's houses.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that was a kick. In Randy's place. I never realized burglary could be thrilling like that. Now I can see how people might do it primarily for the kick, with the money secondary.\"\n\n\"When you're a pro,\" I said, \"the money's never secondary.\"\n\n\"I guess not. She was really jealous, wasn't she?\"\n\n\"Randy?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Hey, when this is all over, maybe you could teach me a few things.\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"Like opening locks without keys. If you think I could learn.\"\n\n\"Well, there's a certain amount a person can learn. I think there's a knack for lockpick work that you either have or you don't, but beyond that there are things I could teach you.\"\n\n\"How about starting a car without a key?\"\n\n\"Jumping the ignition? That's a cinch. You could learn that in ten minutes.\"\n\n\"I don't drive, though.\"\n\n\"That does make it a pointless skill to acquire.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but I'd sort of like to be able to do it. Just for the hell of it. Hey, Bern?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nShe made a fist, punched me lightly on the upper arm. \"I know this is like life and death,\" she said, \"but I'm having a good time. I just wanted to tell you that.\"\n\nBy five-fifty we were parked\u2014legally, for a change\u2014about half a block from the Gresham Hotel on West Twenty-third Street. The daylight was fading fast now. Carolyn rolled down her window and snapped a quick picture of a passing stranger. The result wasn't too bad from an aesthetic standpoint, but the dim light resulted in a loss of detail.\n\n\"I was afraid of that,\" I told her. \"I booked the Maharajah at five and Whelkin at six, and then when I spoke to Demarest, I was going to set up the call for seven. I made it four instead when I remembered we'd need light.\"\n\n\"There's flashcubes in the carrying case.\"\n\n\"They're a little obvious, don't you think? Anyway, I'm glad we caught Demarest when it was still light enough out to see him. With Whelkin it may not matter. We may not be able to coax him out of the hotel.\"\n\n\"You think he's staying there?\"\n\n\"It's certainly possible. I'd have called, but what name would I ask for?\"\n\n\"You don't think he's staying there under his own name?\"\n\n\"In the first place, no. In the second place, I have no idea what his right name might be. I'm sure it's not Rudyard Whelkin. That was a cute story, being named for Kipling and growing up to collect him, but I have the feeling I'm the only person he told it to.\"\n\n\"His name's not Rudyard Whelkin?\"\n\n\"No. And he doesn't collect books.\"\n\n\"What does he do with them?\"\n\n\"I think he sells them. I think\"\u2014I looked at my watch\u2014\"I think he's sitting in a booth in the lobby of the Gresham,\" I went on, \"waiting for my call. I think I better call him.\"\n\n\"And I think I better take his picture.\"\n\n\"Be subtle about it, huh?\"\n\n\"That's my trademark.\"\n\nThe first phone I tried was out of order. There was another one diagonally across the street but someone was using it. I wound up at a phone on the rear wall of a Blarney Rose bar that had less in common with Sangfroid than the Hotel Gresham did with the Carlyle. Hand-lettered signs over the back bar offered double shots of various brands of blended whiskey at resistibly low prices.\n\nI dialed the number Whelkin had given me. He must have had his hand on the receiver because he had it off the hook the instant it started to ring.\n\nThe conversation was briefer than the one I'd had with the Maharajah. It took longer than it had to because I had trouble hearing at one point; the television announcer was delivering football scores and something he said touched off a loud argument that had something to do with Notre Dame. But the shouting subsided and Whelkin and I resumed our chat.\n\nI apologized for the interference.\n\n\"It's nothing, my boy,\" he assured me. \"Things are every bit as confused where I am. A Eurasian chap's sprawled on a bench in what looks to be a drug-induced coma, a wild-eyed old woman's pawing through a shopping bag and nattering to herself, and another much younger woman's flitting about taking everyone's picture. Oh, dear. She's headed this way.\"\n\n\"She sounds harmless,\" I said.\n\n\"One can only hope so. I shall give her a dazzling smile and let it go at that.\"\n\nA few minutes later I was back in the Pontiac studying a close-up of Rudyard Whelkin. He was showing all his teeth and they fairly gleamed.\n\n\"Subtle,\" I told Carolyn.\n\n\"There's a time for subtlety,\" she said, \"and there's a time for derring-do. There is a time for the rapier and a time for the bludgeon. There is a time for the end-around play and a time to plunge right up the middle.\"\n\n\"There's a Notre Dame fan in the Blarney Rose who would argue that last point with you. I wanted a drink by the time I got out of there. But I had the feeling they were out of Perrier.\"\n\n\"You want to stop someplace now?\"\n\n\"No time.\"\n\n\"What did Whelkin say?\"\n\nI gave her the Reader's Digest version of our conversation as I headed uptown and east again. When I finished she frowned at me and scratched her head. \"It's too damned confusing,\" she complained. \"I can't tell who's lying and who's telling the truth.\"\n\n\"Just assume everybody's lying. That way the occasional surprises will be pleasant ones. I'll drop you at the Blinns' place. You know what to do?\"\n\n\"Sure, but aren't you coming in?\"\n\n\"No need, and too many other things to do. You know what to do after you're through with the Blinns?\"\n\n\"Have a big drink.\"\n\n\"And after that?\"\n\n\"I think so. Want to run through it all for me one more time?\"\n\nI ran through it, and we discussed a couple of points, and by then I was double-parked on East Sixty-sixth next to a Jaguar sedan with DPL plates and a shamefully dented right front fender. The Jag was parked next to a hydrant, and its owner, safe beneath the umbrella of diplomatic immunity, didn't have to worry about either ticket or tow.\n\n\"Here we are,\" I said. \"You've got the pictures?\"\n\n\"All of them. Even Atman Singh.\"\n\n\"You might as well take the camera, too. No sense leaving it in the car. How about the Blinns' bracelet? Got that with you?\"\n\nShe took it from her pocket, slipped it around her wrist. \"I'm not nuts about jewelry,\" she said. \"But it's pretty, isn't it? Bern, you're forgetting something. You have to come in with me now if you want to get to the Porlock apartment.\"\n\n\"Why would I want to get to the Porlock apartment?\"\n\n\"To steal the lynx jacket.\"\n\n\"Why would I want to steal the lynx jacket? I'm starting to feel like half of a vaudeville act. Why would I\u2014\"\n\n\"Didn't you promise it to the cop?\"\n\n\"Oh. I was wondering where all of that was coming from. No, what Ray wants for his wife is a full-length mink, and what's hanging in Madeleine Porlock's closet is a waist-length lynx jacket. Mrs. Kirschmann doesn't want to have any part of wild furs.\"\n\n\"Good for her. I wasn't listening too closely to your conversation, I guess. You're going to steal the mink somewhere else.\"\n\n\"In due time.\"\n\n\"I see. I heard you mention the furrier's name and that's what got me confused.\"\n\n\"Arvin Tannenbaum,\" I said.\n\n\"Right, that's it.\"\n\n\"Arvin Tannenbaum.\"\n\n\"You just said that a minute ago.\"\n\n\"Arvin Tannenbaum.\"\n\n\"Bernie? Are you all right?\"\n\n\"God,\" I said, looking at my watch. \"As if I didn't have enough things to do and enough stops to make. There's never enough time, Carolyn. Have you noticed that? There's never enough time.\"\n\n\"Bernie...\"\n\nI leaned across, opened the door on her side. \"Go make nice to the Blinns,\" I said, \"and I'll catch you later.\"\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Seventeen\n\nI called Ray Kirschmann from a sidewalk phone booth on Second Avenue. The Bulldogs had more than doubled the point spread, he informed me dolefully. \"Look at the bright side,\" I said. \"You'll get even tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow I got the Giants. They never got anybody even unless he started out ahead.\"\n\n\"I'd love to chat,\" I said, \"but I'm rushed. There's some things I'd like you to find out for me.\"\n\n\"What am I, the Answer Man? You want a lot for a coat.\"\n\n\"It's mink, Ray. Think what some women have to do to get one.\"\n\n\"Funny.\"\n\n\"And it's not just a coat we're talking about. You could get a nice collar to go with it.\"\n\n\"Think so?\"\n\n\"Stranger things have happened. Got a pencil?\" He went and fetched one and I told him the things I wanted him to find out. \"Don't stray too far from the phone, huh, Ray? I'll get back to you.\"\n\n\"Great,\" he said. \"I can hardly wait.\"\n\nI got back into the car. I'd left the motor running, and now I popped the transmission in gear and continued downtown on Second Avenue. At Twenty-third Street I turned right, favored the Hotel Gresham with no more than a passing glance, turned right again at Sixth Avenue and left at Twenty-ninth Street, parking at a meter on Seventh Avenue. This time I cut the engine and retrieved my jump wire.\n\nI was in the heart of the fur market, a few square blocks that added up to an ecologist's nightmare. Several hundred small businesses were all clustered together, sellers of hides and pelts, manufacturers of coats and jackets and bags and accessories, wholesalers and retailers and somewhere-in-betweeners, dealers in trimming and by-products and fastenings and buttons and bows. The particular place I was looking for was on the far side of the avenue a couple doors west on Twenty-ninth Street. There Arvin Tannenbaum occupied the entire third floor of a four-story loft building.\n\nA coffee shop, closed for the weekend, took up the ground floor. To its right was a door opening onto a small hallway which led to an elevator and the fire stairs. The door was locked. The lock did not look terribly formidable.\n\nThe dog, on the other hand, did. He was a Doberman, bred to kill and trained to be good at it, and he paced the hallway like an institutionalized leopard. When I approached the door he interrupted his exercise and gave me all his attention. I put a hand on the door, just out of curiosity, and he crouched, ready to spring. I withdrew my hand, but this did not mollify him much.\n\nI wished Carolyn were with me. She could have given the bastard a bath. Clipped his nails, too, while she was at it. Filed his teeth down a bit.\n\nI don't screw around with guard dogs. The only way I could think to get past this particular son of a bitch was to spray poison on my arm and let him bite me. I gave him a parting smile, and he growled low in his throat, and I went over and broke into the coffee shop.\n\nThat wasn't the easiest thing in the world\u2014they had iron gates, like the ones at Barnegat Books\u2014but it was more in my line of work than doing a wild-animal act. The gate had a padlock, which I picked, and the door had a Yale lock, which I also picked. No alarms went off. I drew the gate shut before closing the door. Anyone who took a close look would see it was unfastened, but it looked good from a distance.\n\nThere was a door at the side of the restaurant that led to the elevator, but it unfortunately also led to the dog, which lessened its usefulness. I went back through the kitchen, opening a door at the rear which led into an airless little airshaft. By standing on a garbage can, I could just reach the bottom rung of the fire escape. I pulled myself up and started climbing.\n\nI would have gone right up to the third floor if I hadn't noticed an unlocked window on the second floor. It was too appealing an invitation to resist. I let myself in, walked through a maze of baled hides, climbed a flight of stairs, and emerged in the establishment of Arvin Tannenbaum and Sons.\n\nNot too many minutes later I left the way I'd come, walking down a flight, threading my way between the bales of tanned hides, clambering down the fire escape and hopping nimbly to earth from my perch on the garbage can. I stopped in the coffee-shop kitchen to help myself to a Hostess Twinkie. I can't say it was just what I wanted, but I was starving and it was better than nothing.\n\nI didn't bother picking the lock shut after me. The springlock would have to do. But I did draw the gates shut and fasten the padlock.\n\nBefore returning to the Pontiac, I walked over to say goodbye to the dog. I waved at him and he glowered at me. From the look he gave me I could have sworn he knew what I was up to.\n\nIt was Mrs. Kirschmann who answered the phone. When I asked to speak to her husband she said \"Just a minute,\" then yelled out his name without bothering to cover the mouthpiece. When Ray came on the line I told him my ear was ringing.\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"Your wife yelled in it.\"\n\n\"I can't help that, Bernie,\" he said. \"You all right otherwise?\"\n\n\"I guess so. What did you find out?\"\n\n\"I got a make on the murder weapon. Porlock was shot with a Devil Dog.\"\n\n\"I just ate one of those.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"Actually, what I ate was a Twinkie, but isn't a Devil Dog about the same thing?\"\n\nHe sighed. \"A Devil Dog's an automatic pistol made by Marley. Their whole line's dogs of one kind or another. The Devil Dog's a .32 automatic. The Whippet's a .25 automatic, the Mastiff's a .38 revolver, and they make a .44 Magnum that I can't remember what it's called. It oughta be something like an Irish Wolfhound or a Great Dane because of the size, but that's no kind of name for a gun.\"\n\n\"There's a hell of a lot of dogs in this,\" I said. \"Did you happen to notice? Between the Junkyard Dog defense and the Marley Devil Dog and the Doberman in the hallway\u2014\"\n\n\"What Doberman in the hallway? What hallway?\"\n\n\"Forget it. It's a .32 automatic?\"\n\n\"Right. Registration check went nowhere. Coulda been Porlock's gun, could be the killer brought it with him.\"\n\n\"What did it look like?\"\n\n\"The gun? I didn't see it, Bern. I made a call, I didn't go down to the property office and start eyeballin' the exhibits. I seen Devil Dogs before. It's an automatic, so it's a flat gun, not too large, takes a five-shot clip. The ones I've seen were blued steel, though you could probably get it in any kind of finish, nickel-plated or pearl grips, anything you wanted to pay for.\"\n\nI closed my eyes, trying to picture the gun I'd found in my hand. Blued steel, yes. That sounded right.\n\n\"Not a big gun, Bern. Two-inch barrel. Not much of a kick when you fire it.\"\n\n\"Unless that's how you get your kicks.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" I frowned. It had seemed big, compared to the little nickel-plated item I'd seen in the Sikh's enormous hand.\n\nWhich reminded me.\n\n\"Francis Rockland,\" I said. \"The cop who was wounded outside my bookshop. What gun was he shot with? Did you find that out?\"\n\n\"You still say you weren't there, huh?\"\n\n\"Dammit, Ray\u2014\"\n\n\"Okay, okay. Well, he wasn't shot with the Marley Devil Dog, Bern, because the killer left it on the floor of the Porlock apartment. Is that what you were gettin' at?\"\n\n\"Of course not.\"\n\n\"Oh. You had me goin' for a minute there. Rockland was shot\u2014well, it's hard to say what he was shot with.\"\n\n\"No slug recovered?\"\n\n\"Right. The bullet fragmented.\"\n\n\"There must have been fragments to recover.\"\n\nHe cleared his throat. \"Now I'll deny I said this,\" he said, \"but from what I heard, and nobody exactly spelled it out for me, but puttin' two and two together\u2014\"\n\n\"Rockland shot himself.\"\n\n\"That's how it shapes up to me, Bern. He's a young fellow, you know, and bein' nervous and all...\"\n\n\"How bad were his injuries?\"\n\n\"Well, it seems he lost a toe. Not one of the important ones.\"\n\nI thought of Parker, going around breaking important bones. Which toes, I wondered, were the important ones?\n\n\"What did you find out about Rockland?\"\n\n\"Well, I asked around, Bern. The word I get is he's young all right, which we already knew, but he's also the kind of guy who can listen to reason.\"\n\n\"How do you translate that?\"\n\n\"I translate it Money Talks.\"\n\n\"There's not enough money in this one to make much noise,\" I said. \"Unless he'll operate on credit.\"\n\n\"You're askin' a lot, Bern. The poor kid lost a toe.\"\n\n\"He shot it off himself, Ray.\"\n\n\"A toe's a toe.\"\n\n\"You just said it wasn't an important one.\"\n\n\"Even so\u2014\"\n\n\"Would he settle for future payment if he got a piece of the bust? If he's the ambitious kid you say he is, he'd be crazy not to.\"\n\n\"You got a point.\"\n\nI had more than a point. I had a whole bunch of things to tell him, some of which provoked argument, some of which did not. At the end I told him to take it easy and he told me to take care.\n\nIt sounded like good advice for both of us.\n\nThe owner of Milo Arms, Inc., had a commendable sense of humor. His Yellow Pages ad showed the company trademark, the Venus de Milo's limbless torso with a holster on her hip. Who could resist?\n\nI make it a point to stay out of gun shops, but one thing I've noticed is that I don't generally notice them. They're almost invariably located one flight above street level. I guess they're not that keen on the drop-in trade and the impulse shoppers.\n\nMilo Arms didn't break the rule. They had the second floor of a weary red brick building on Canal between Greene and Mercer. The shop on the ground floor sold plumbing supplies and the upper floors bad been carved into residential units. I was loitering in the vestibule, reading names on doorbells, when a young couple left the building, the smell of an illicit herb trailing after them. The girl giggled infectiously while her escort held the door for me.\n\nThe gun-shop door was a solid wooden one with the torso-cum-holster motif repeated, along with an extensive list of the death-dealing items on sale within. There was the usual run of locks, plus a padlock on the outside.\n\nI gave a knock and was reassured to hear neither a human response nor the guttural greeting of an attack dog. Just blessed silence. I got right to work.\n\nThe locks weren't much trouble. The padlock had a combination dial that looked like an interesting challenge, and if I hadn't been out in public view and urgently pressed for time, I might have sandpapered my fingertips and tried out my Jimmy Valentine impression. Instead I tried my hacksaw blade on the thing, and when that didn't work\u2014it was a damned good lock, made of damned good steel\u2014I took the easy way out and unscrewed the hasp from its mounting on the jamb. There's tricks to every trade, and if you just live long enough you get to use 'em all.\n\nGod, what a grim place! I was only inside for five minutes or so, but what an uncomfortable five minutes they were. All those guns, all close together like that, reeking of oil and powder and whatever else it is that makes them smell the way they do. Infernal machines, engines of death and destruction, killers' tools.\n\nUgh.\n\nI locked up carefully on my way out. The last thing I wanted to do was make it easy for some maniac to rip off a wholesale lot of guns and ammo. I even took the time to remount the padlock, leaving the hasp more tightly bolted to the jamb than I'd found it.\n\nGuns!\n\nBusy, busy, busy.\n\nI found Carolyn at the Poodle Factory, where she was catching up on her bookkeeping and not enjoying it much. \"This is such an unpleasant business,\" she said, \"that you'd think there'd be money in it, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong. Well, at least there's a big show coming up at the Armory.\"\n\n\"Does that mean business for you?\"\n\n\"Sure. You can't win ribbons with a dirty dog.\"\n\n\"That sounds like a proverb. How were the Blinns?\"\n\n\"Their usual charming selves. I pigged out on shortbread.\"\n\n\"Beats Twinkies and Devil Dogs. Was Gert happy to see her bracelet back?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she said. \"Yeah, I guess so.\"\n\n\"You guess so?\"\n\n\"We mainly concentrated on the photographs,\" she said, all crisp efficiency now. She spread out the four snapshots on the mottled Formica counter. \"Gert never saw this guy before in her life,\" she said, pointing. \"She's sure about that. She doesn't think she saw this one, either, but she can't swear to it.\"\n\n\"But she recognized the other two?\"\n\nHer forefinger hovered above one of the snaps. She'd been nibbling the nail again, I noticed. \"This dude,\" she said, \"has been around a lot. No idea when she first saw him but it was a while ago. He's been there with Madeleine and he's also been there alone, entering or leaving the building by himself.\"\n\n\"Fascinating. What about our other friend?\"\n\n\"Artie thinks he saw them together once. And Gert says he's got a familiar look about him.\"\n\n\"I'll borrow this one,\" I said, picking one up. \"See you when I see you.\"\n\nThe Gresham's lobby had changed some since Rudyard Whelkin had described it to me over the phone. Carolyn was gone and so was the shopping bag lady. There was a junkie nodding on a bench, but he didn't look Eurasian to me. Perhaps he'd taken over when the Eurasian went off duty.\n\nThe phone Whelkin had used was in use now. An immense woman was talking on it. Too large for the booth, she was standing outside it and bellowing into the mouthpiece, telling someone that she had paid back the money, that she didn't owe nothing to nobody. Her presumptive creditor was evidently hard to convince.\n\nThe little man behind the desk possessed a skin the sun had never seen. He had tiny blue eyes and a small and virtually lipless mouth. I showed him the picture I'd taken from Carolyn. He gave it a long and thoughtful took, and then he gave that same long and thoughtful look to me.\n\n\"So?\" he said.\n\n\"Is he in?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"When did he leave?\"\n\n\"Who remembers?\"\n\n\"I'd like to leave him a message.\"\n\nHe handed me a pad. I had my own pen. I wrote Please call as soon as possible and signed it R. Whelkin, not to be cute but because it was the only name I could think of other than my own. A cinch he wasn't using it here, anyway.\n\nI folded the slip, passed it to the clerk. He took it and gazed blankly at me. Neither of us moved. Behind me, the immense woman was announcing that she didn't have to take that kind of language from nobody.\n\n\"You'll want to put the message in his box,\" I said.\n\n\"In a while.\"\n\nNow, I thought. So I can see what room he's in.\n\n\"I better do it soon,\" he went on, \"before I forget who the message is for. You didn't put his name on it, did you?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Come to think of it, who is it for?\"\n\n\"You got no call to call me that,\" the large woman said firmly. \"A name like that, I wouldn't call a dog by a name like that. You watch what you call me.\"\n\nThe desk clerk had wispy eyebrows. I don't suppose they'd have been equal to their God-given task of keeping perspiration from dripping into his eyes, but it probably didn't matter because he probably avoided ever working up a sweat. He had enough eyebrows to raise, though, and he raised them now. Eloquently.\n\nI put a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. He gave me a key to Room 311. Fifteen minutes later, on my way out, I gave it back to him.\n\nThe large woman was still on the phone. \"Talk about a snotass,\" she was saying, \"I'll tell you who's a snotass. You're a snotass, if you want my opinion.\"\n\nBack in the Pontiac, back downtown again. God, was there no end to this? Back and forth, to and fro, hither and yon, pillar to post. Interminable.\n\nThe lot on Nassau Street was still unattended. A sign informed me it was illegal to leave a car there under such circumstances. It was not an illegality I could take too seriously at the moment. Violators, the sign assured me, would be towed at the owner's expense. It was a risk I was prepared to run.\n\nI found a phone, dialed WOrth 4-1114. I didn't expect anyone to answer and nobody did.\n\nI walked down to Pine Street and east to the building Prescott Demarest had emerged from hours earlier. (Hours? Weeks of subjective time.) Now only half as many windows showed lights as had done so earlier. I wished for a clipboard or a briefcase, something to make me look as though I belonged.\n\nThe lobby attendant was dozing over a newspaper but he snapped into consciousness as I entered the building. He was an older man with a tired face, probably eking out a pension. I walked toward him, then halted in mid-stride and let myself be overcome by a coughing fit. While it subsided I checked the building directory on the wall and picked out a likely firm for myself.\n\n\"Bless you,\" the old man said.\n\n\"Thanks.\"\n\n\"You want to watch that cough.\"\n\n\"It's the weather. Nice one day and nasty the next.\"\n\nHe gave me a knowing nod. \"It didn't used to be like this,\" he said. \"Weather was always something you could count on, and now everything's changed.\"\n\nI signed in. Name\u2014Peter Johnson. Firm\u2014Wickwire and McNally. Floor-17. At least I wasn't calling myself Whelkin for lack of imagination. And Peter Johnson was nicely anonymous. If Wickwire and McNally was a sizable firm, they very likely had a Peter Johnson in their employ. Or a John Peterson, or something close.\n\nI rode the elevator to the seventeenth floor. Not that he would have been likely to check the indicator, but why be sloppy? I scooted down three flights of stairs and searched the corridors until I found a door with Tontine Trading Corp. painted on its frosted glass. The office within was completely dark, as were all the other offices I'd passed. Saturday night is the loneliest night in the week, let me tell you.\n\nIt's also the longest and I had places to go and people to see. I put my ear to the glass, rapped smartly on the wooden part of the door, listened carefully, then popped the lock with a strip of flexible steel in not much more time than it takes to tell about it.\n\nOffice locks are often like that, and why shouldn't they be? There's not much point in hanging a pickproof whizbang of a lock on a door with a window in it. All you get for your trouble is a lot of broken glass.\n\nBesides, there was a man downstairs to keep people like me from walking off with the IBM Selectrics, and what else was there to steal? I certainly didn't find anything. When I left the Tontine office\u2014and walked up to 17 and rode down from there\u2014I didn't have anything with me that I hadn't carried into the building.\n\nThe old man looked up from his paper. \"Now that was quick,\" he said.\n\n\"Like a bunny,\" I agreed, and signed myself out.\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Eighteen\n\n\"I suppose you're wondering why I summoned you all here.\"\n\nWell, how often do you get to use a line like that? Here they all were, gathered together at Barnegat Books. When I bought the store from old Litzauer I'd had visions of little informal assemblies like this one. Sunday-afternoon poetry readings, say, with little glasses of medium-dry sherry and a tray of cucumber sandwiches handed round. Literary kaffee klatsches, with everybody smoking European cigarettes and arguing about what Ionesco really meant. I figured it would bring people around and garner the shop some useful word-of-mouth publicity. More to the point, it sounded like a great way to meet girls.\n\nThis evening's convocation was not quite what I'd had in mind. No one was snarling in iambs or trochees. Kafka's name had not come up. The store had already had more publicity than it needed. And I didn't expect to meet any girls.\n\nThe only one on hand, Carolyn, was perched on the high stool I used for fetching the loftier volumes from the loftier shelves. She sat off to one side, while the rest of my guests were strung out in an irregular half-circle facing the sales counter. I myself was standing behind the counter; I didn't have a chair to sit on because the one I usually kept behind the counter was occupied at the moment by Prescott Demarest.\n\nSee, my place was a bookstore, not a library. There weren't enough chairs to go around. The Maharajah of Ranchipur had the best seat in the house, a swivel-based oak armchair from my office in back. Atman Singh, his spine like a ramrod, sat upon an upended wooden packing case that had held Rome Beauty apples sometime in the dim past before Mr. Litzauer used it to store surplus stock. Rudyard Whelkin had a folding chair Carolyn had brought over from the Poodle Factory.\n\nI hadn't introduced anyone to anyone else, nor had any of them seen fit to offer small talk about football or the weather or crime in the streets. They'd arrived not in a body but all within a fairly brief span of time, and they'd remained remarkably silent until I did my suppose-you're-wondering number. Even then, all I got was a bunch of sharp stares.\n\n\"Actually,\" I went on, \"you all know why I summoned you here. Otherwise you wouldn't have come. We're here to discuss a book and a murder.\"\n\nA hush didn't fall over the room. You can't have everything.\n\n\"The murder,\" I went on, \"was that of Madeleine Porlock. She was shot the day before yesterday in her apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street. The killer shot her once in the forehead, using a .32-caliber automatic pistol. The gun was a Marley Devil Dog, and the killer left it at the scene of the crime. He also left me at the scene of the crime, unconscious, with the murder gun in my hand.\"\n\nThe Maharajah frowned in thought. \"You are saying you did not kill the woman.\"\n\n\"I am indeed. I was there to deliver a book. I was supposed to get paid for the book. Instead I got drugged and framed, drugged by Miss Porlock and framed by the man who killed her. But\"\u2014I smiled brightly\u2014\"I still have the book.\"\n\nI also had their attention. While they watched, silent as stones, I reached under the counter and came up with The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow. I flipped it open at random and read:\n\n\"Old Eisenberg was a crafty cod\n\nWith the cunning of his breed,\n\nAnd he ate a piece of honey cake\n\nAnd he drank a glass of mead,\n\nAnd he wiped his lips and his fingertips\n\nWhile he swore a solemn oath\n\nThat if they should go by Fort Bucklow\n\nThey'd perish\u2014not one but both.\"\n\nI closed the book. \"Horrid last line,\" I said. \"Bad verse is when you can tell which line is there to rhyme with the other, and the whole book's like that. But it didn't become the object of our attention because of its literary merits. It's unique, you see. One of a kind. A pearl beyond price, a published work of Kipling's of which only one copy exists. And this is it, right here.\"\n\nI set the book on the counter. \"At the time I agreed to steal this book,\" I went on, \"it was in the personal library of a gentleman named Jesse Arkwright. I was reliably informed that he had acquired it by private negotiation with the heirs of Lord Ponsonby, who withdrew it from a scheduled auction and sold it to him.\" I fixed my gaze on Rudyard Whelkin. \"There may have been a Lord Ponsonby,\" I said. \"There may still be a Lord Ponsonby. But that is not how Jesse Arkwright got his copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow.\"\n\nDemarest asked how he'd got it.\n\n\"He bought it,\" I said, \"from the very man who engaged me to steal it back. The arrangements for the original sale were worked out by Madeleine Porlock.\"\n\nThe Maharajah wanted to know how she came into it.\n\n\"She was Arkwright's mistress,\" I told him. \"She was also a lifelong acquaintance of my client, who told her that he'd come into possession of an exceedingly desirable book. She in turn remarked that a friend of hers\u2014one might almost say client\u2014was a passionate collector with an enthusiasm for books. It only remained to bring buyer and seller together.\"\n\n\"And the sale went through?\" Demarest seemed puzzled. \"Then why would the seller want to steal the book back? Just because of its value?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"Because of its lack of value.\"\n\n\"Then it is counterfeit,\" said the Maharajah.\n\n\"No. It's quite genuine.\"\n\n\"Then...\"\n\n\"I wondered about that,\" I said. \"I tried to figure out a way that the book could be a phony. It could be done, of course. First you'd have to find someone to write thirty-two hundred lines of doggerel in a fair approximation of Kipling's style. Then you'd have to find a printer to hand-set the thing, and he'd need a stock of fifty-year-old paper to run it off on. Maybe you could use fresh stock and fake it, but\"\u2014I tapped the book\u2014\"that wasn't done here. I handle books every day and I know old paper. It looks and feels and smells different.\n\n\"But even if you had the paper, and if you could print the thing and have it bound and then distress it in a subtle fashion so that it looked well-preserved, how could you come out ahead on the deal? Maybe, if you found the absolutely right buyer, you could get a five-figure price for it. But you'd have about that much invested in the book by then, so where's your profit?\"\n\n\"If the book is genuine,\" the Maharajah said, \"how can it be worthless?\"\n\n\"It's not literally worthless. The day after I stole it, a gentleman tried to take it from me at gunpoint. As luck would have it\"\u2014I smiled benignly at Atman Singh\u2014\"he selected the wrong book by mistake. But he tried to placate me by giving me five hundred dollars, and coincidentally enough, that's a fair approximation of the book's true value. It might even be worth a thousand to the right buyer and after the right sort of build-up, but it's certainly not worth more than that.\"\n\n\"Hey, c'mon, Bern.\" It was Carolyn piping up from the crow's nest. \"I feel like I missed a few frames, and I was around for most of it. If it's supposed to be worth a fortune, and it's not a phony, why's it only worth five hundred or a thousand?\"\n\n\"Because it's genuine,\" I said. \"But it's not unique. Kipling had the book privately printed in 1923 in a small edition. That much was true. What wasn't true was the appealing story about his incinerating every copy but one. There are quite a few copies in existence.\"\n\n\"Interesting thought,\" Prescott Demarest said. He was dressed as he'd been when Carolyn took his picture, but then I'd simply been able to see that he was wearing a dark suit. Now I could see that it was navy blue, with a muted stripe that had been invisible in the photograph. He straightened in my chair now. \"So the book's one of many,\" he said. \"How do you know that, Rhodenbarr?\"\n\n\"How did I find it out?\" It wasn't quite the question he'd asked but it was one I felt like answering. \"I stole a copy from Jesse Arkwright's house Wednesday night. Thursday I delivered that copy to Madeleine Porlock's apartment. I was drugged and the book was gone when I came to. Then last night I returned to the Porlock apartment\"\u2014gratifying, the way their eyes widened\u2014\"and found The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow in a shoe box in the closet.\n\n\"But it wasn't the same copy. I figured it was possible that she could have stowed the book in the closet before admitting her killer to the apartment. But wouldn't he look for the book before he left? Wouldn't he have held the gun on her and made her deliver it before shooting her? He'd taken the trouble to scoop up five hundred dollars of my money before he left. Either he or Porlock took the money out of my back pocket, and if she took it, then he must have taken it from her himself, because it wasn't there to be found.\" The cops could have taken it, I thought, but why muddy the waters by suggesting that possibility?\n\n\"My copy was all neatly wrapped in brown paper,\" I went on. \"Now Madeleine Porlock might have unwrapped it before she hid it, just to make sure it wasn't a reprint copy of Soldiers Three or something equally tacky.\" I avoided Atman Singh's eyes. \"If so, what happened to the brown paper? I didn't see it on the floor when I came to. Granted, I might not have noticed it or much else under the circumstances, but I looked carefully for that paper when I tossed the apartment last night, and it just plain wasn't there. The killer wouldn't have taken it and the police would have had no reason to disturb it, so what happened to it? Well, the answer's clear enough now. It was still fastened around the book when the killer walked off with it. Madeleine Porlock most likely had the wrapped book in her hands when he shot her, and he took it as is.\"\n\n\"That's quite a conclusion,\" Rudyard Whelkin said. \"My boy, it would seem that your only clues were clues of omission. Rather like the dog that didn't bark, eh? Five hundred missing dollars, a missing piece of brown paper. Rather thin ice, wouldn't you say?\"\n\n\"There's something else.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\nI nodded. \"It's nothing you could call evidence. Pure subjective judgment. I sat up reading that book Wednesday night. I held it in my hands, I turned the pages. Last night I had my hands on it again and it wasn't the same book. It was inscribed to H. Rider Haggard, same as the copy I stole from Arkwright, but there was something different about it. I once knew a man with a yard full of laying hens. He swore he could tell those birds apart. Well, I can tell books apart. Maybe one had some pages dog-eared or a differently shaped water stain\u2014God knows what. They were different books. And, once I realized that, I had a chance to make sense of the whole business.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"Let's say, just hypothetically, that someone turned up a carton of four or five dozen books in the storage room of a shuttered printshop in Tunbridge Wells.\" I glanced at Whelkin. \"Does that sound like a reasonable estimate?\"\n\n\"It's your hypothesis, my boy.\"\n\n\"Call it fifty copies. The entire edition, or all that remains of it, outside of the legendary long-lost copy the author was supposed to have presented to H. Rider Haggard. Now what would those books bring on the market? A few hundred dollars apiece. They'd be legitimate rarities, and Kipling's becoming something of a hot ticket again, but this particular work is not only a minor effort but distinctly inferior in the bargain. It has curiosity value rather than literary value. The books would still be worth hauling home from the printshop, but suppose they could be hawked one at a time as unique specimens? Suppose each one were furnished with a forged inscription in a fair approximation of Kipling's handwriting? It's hard to produce a new book and make it look old, but it's not too tricky to scribble a new inscription in an old book. I'm sure there are ways to treat ink so that it looks fifty years old, with that iridescence some old inscriptions have.\n\n\"So my client did this. He autographed the books or had some artful forger do it for him, and then he began testing the waters, contacting important collectors, perhaps representing the book as stolen merchandise so the purchaser would keep his acquisition to himself. Because the minute anyone called a press conference or presented the book to a university library, the game was up. All the collectors he'd stung along the way would be screaming for their money back.\"\n\n\"They couldn't do anything about it, could they?\" Carolyn wanted to know. \"If he was a shady operator, they couldn't exactly sue him.\"\n\n\"True, but there's more than one way to skin a cat.\" She made a face and I regretted the choice of words. \"At any rate,\" I went on, \"the inflated market for the remaining books would collapse in a flash. Instead of realizing several thousand dollars a copy, he'd have a trunkful of books he couldn't give away. The high price absolutely depended on the books being one of a kind. When they were no longer unique, and when the holograph inscriptions proved to be forgeries, my client would have to find a new way to make a dishonest living.\"\n\n\"He could always become a burglar,\" the Maharajah suggested, smiling gently.\n\nI shook my head. \"No. That's the one thing he damn well knew he couldn't do, because when he needed a burglar he came to this very shop and hired one. He found out, undoubtedly through Madeleine Porlock, that Arkwright was planning to go public with his copy of Fort Bucklow. Maybe public's the wrong word. Arkwright wasn't about to ring up the Times and tell them what he had. But Arkwright was a businessman at least as much as he was a collector, and there was someone he was trying to do business with who had more of a genuine interest in Fort Bucklow than Arkwright himself, who had no special interest in Kipling or India or anti-Semitic literature or whatever this particular book might represent.\"\n\nWhelkin asked if I had someone specific in mind.\n\n\"A foreigner,\" I said. \"Because Arkwright was engaged in international commerce. A man with the wealth and power of an Indian prince.\"\n\nThe Maharajah's jaw stiffened. Atman Singh inclined his body a few degrees forward, prepared to leap to his master's defense.\n\n\"Or an Arab oil sheikh,\" I continued. \"There's a man named Najd al-Quhaddar who comes to mind. He lives in one of the Trucial States, I forget which one, and he pretty much owns the place. There was a piece about him not long ago in Contemporary Bibliophile. He's supposed to have the best personal library east of Suez.\"\n\n\"I know him,\" the Maharajah said. \"Perhaps the best library in the Middle East, although there is a gentleman in Alexandria who would almost certainly wish to dispute that assertion.\" He smiled politely. \"But surely not the best library east of Suez. There is at least one library on the Indian subcontinent which puts the Sheikh's holdings to shame.\"\n\nMother taught me never to argue with Maharajahs, so I nodded politely and went on. \"Arkwright had a brilliant idea,\" I told them. \"He was trying to rig a deal with the Sheikh. Work up some sort of trade agreements, something like that. The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow would be a perfect sweetener. Najd al-Quhaddar is a heavy supporter of the Palestinian terrorist organizations, a position that's not exactly unheard of among the oil sheikhs, and here's a unique specimen of anti-Semitic literature with a whole legend to go with it, establishing a great English writer as an enemy of world Jewry.\n\n\"There was only one problem. My client had already sold a book to the Sheikh.\"\n\nI looked at Whelkin. His expression was hard to read.\n\n\"I didn't read this in Contemporary Bibliophile,\" I went on. \"The Sheikh was told when he bought the book that he had to keep it to himself, that it was stolen goods with no legitimate provenance. That was fine with him. There are collectors who find hot merchandise especially desirable. They get a kick out of the cloak-and-dagger aspects\u2014and of course they figure they're getting a bargain.\n\n\"If Arkwright showed his copy to Najd, the game was up and the fat was in the fire. First off, Arkwright would know he'd been screwed. More important, Najd would know\u2014and Arab oil sheikhs can get all sorts of revenge without troubling to call an attorney. In some of those countries they still chop hands off pickpockets. Imagine what they'd come up with if they had a personal grudge against you.\"\n\nI stopped for breath. \"My client had another reason to keep Arkwright from adding to the Sheikh's library. He was negotiating another sale to Najd, and it was designed to net him a fortune. The last thing he wanted was for Arkwright to queer it.\"\n\nCarolyn said, \"I'm lost, Bern. What was he going to sell him?\"\n\n\"The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow.\"\n\n\"I thought he already did.\"\n\n\"He sold him the Rider Haggard copy. Now he was going to sell him something a little special.\" I tapped the book on the counter. \"He was going to offer him this copy,\" I said.\n\n\"Wait one moment,\" Prescott Demarest said. \"You have me utterly confused. That copy in front of you\u2014it's not the one you took from this man Arkwright's home?\"\n\n\"No. That copy left Madeleine Porlock's apartment in the possession of the man who killed her.\"\n\n\"Then the book in front of you is another copy which you found in her closet?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I'm afraid not,\" I said ruefully. \"You see, the copy from the shoe box in the closet was a second Rider Haggard copy, and how could my client possibly sell it to the Sheikh? He'd already done that once. No, this is a third copy, curiously enough, and I have to apologize for lying earlier when I told you this was the Porlock copy. Well, see, maybe I can just clear up the confusion by reading you the inscription on the flyleaf.\"\n\nI opened the book, cleared my throat. God knows I had their attention now.\n\n\" 'For Herr Adolf Hitler,' \" I read, \" 'whose recognition of the twin Damocletian swords of Mosaic Bolshevism and Hebraic International Finance have ignited a new torch in Germany which, with the Grace of God, will one day brighten all the globe. May your present trials prove no more than the anvil upon which the blade of Deliverance may be forged. With abiding good wishes and respect, Rudyard Kipling, Bateman's, Burwash, Sussex, U.K., 1 April 1924.' \"\n\nI closed the book. \"The date's significant,\" I said. \"I was looking at John Toland's biography of Hitler before you gentlemen arrived. One of the fringe benefits of owning a bookstore. The date Kipling supposedly inscribed this book was the very day Hitler was sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison for his role in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. A matter of hours after the sentence was announced he was in his cell writing the title page of Mein Kampf. Meanwhile, Rudyard Kipling, moved by the future F\u00fchrer's plight, was inscribing a book to him. There's some rubber stamping in ink on the inside front cover, too. It's in German, but it seems to indicate that the book was admitted to Landsberg Prison in May of 1924. Then there are some marginal notes here and there, presumably in Hitler's hand, and some underlining, and some German phrases scribbled on the inside back cover and the blank pages at the back of the book.\"\n\n\"Hitler might have had it in his cell with him,\" Rudyard Whelkin said dreamily. \"Took inspiration from it. Tried out ideas for Mein Kampf\u2014that's what those scribbles could indicate.\"\n\n\"And then what happened to the book?\"\n\n\"Why, that's still a bit vague. Perhaps the F\u00fchrer presented it to Unity Mitford and it found its way back to Britain with her. That's not an unappealing little story. But all the details have yet to be worked out.\"\n\n\"And the price?\"\n\nWhelkin raised his imposing eyebrows. \"For Adolf Hitler's personal copy of a work of which only one other copy exists? For a source book for Mein Kampf? Inscribed to Hitler and chock-full of his own invaluable notes and comments?\"\n\n\"How much money?\"\n\n\"Money,\" Whelkin said. \"What is money to someone like Najd al-Quhaddar? It flows in as fast as the oil flows out, more money than one knows what to do with. Fifty thousand dollars? One hundred thousand? A quarter of a million? I was just beginning to dangle the bait, you see. Just letting that Arab get the merest idea of what I had to offer. The ultimate negotiations would have to be positively Byzantine in their subtlety. How much would I have demanded? How much would he have paid? At what point would the bargain be struck?\" He spread his hands. \"Impossible to say, my boy. What is that phrase of Dr. Johnson's? 'Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.' Avarice is quite a dreamer, you know, so his words might be the slightest bit hyperbolic, but suffice it to say that the book would have brought a nice price. A very nice price.\"\n\n\"But not if Arkwright ruined the deal.\"\n\n\"No,\" Whelkin said. \"Not if Mr. Arkwright ruined the deal.\"\n\n\"How much did he pay you for his copy?\"\n\n\"Five thousand dollars.\"\n\n\"And the Sheikh? He'd already bought a copy with the Haggard inscription.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"For a few thousand. I don't remember the figure. Is it of great importance?\"\n\n\"Not really. How many other copies did you sell?\"\n\nWhelkin sighed. \"Three,\" he said. \"One to a gentleman in Fort Worth who is under the impression that it was surreptitiously removed from the Ashmolean at Oxford by a greedy sub-curator with gambling debts. He'll never show it around. Another to a retired planter who lives in the West Indies now after making a packet in Malayan rubber. The third to a Rhodesian diehard who seemed more excited by the poem's political stance than its collector value. The Texan paid the highest price\u2014eighty-five hundred dollars, I believe. I was selling off the books one by one, you see, but it was a laborious proposition. One couldn't advertise. Each sale called for extensive research and elaborate groundwork. My travel expenses were substantial. I was living reasonably well and covering my costs, but I wasn't getting ahead of the game.\"\n\n\"The last copy you sold was to Arkwright?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"How did you know Madeleine Porlock?\"\n\n\"We were friends of long standing. We'd worked together now and again, over the years.\"\n\n\"Setting up swindles, do you mean?\"\n\n\"Commercial enterprises is a less loaded term, wouldn't you say?\"\n\n\"How did a copy of Fort Bucklow get in her closet?\"\n\n\"It was her commission for placing a copy with Arkwright,\" he said. \"I needed cash. Normally I'd have given her a thousand dollars or so for arranging the sale. She was just as pleased to have the book. She expected to sell it eventually for a good sum. She knew, of course, not to do anything with it until I'd had my shot at the big money with Najd al-Quhaddar.\"\n\n\"Meanwhile, you needed Arkwright's copy back.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And offered me fifteen thou to fetch it for you.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Where was the fifteen thousand going to come from?\"\n\nHe avoided my eyes. \"You'd have received it eventually, my boy. I simply didn't have it at the moment, but once I was able to place the Hitler copy with the Sheikh I'd be in a position to afford generosity.\"\n\n\"You might have told me that in advance.\"\n\n\"And where would that have gotten me?\"\n\n\"Nowhere,\" I said. \"I'd have turned you down flat.\"\n\n\"And there you have it.\" He sighed, folded his hands over his abdomen. \"There you have it. Ethics are so often a function of circumstance. But I'd have settled with you in due course. You have my word on that.\"\n\nWell, that was comforting. I exchanged glances with Carolyn, came out from behind the counter. \"The situation became complicated,\" I said, \"because a gentleman from India happened to be in New York at the same time as all of this was going on. Some months ago he had heard rumors about the Kipling property recently acquired by a particular Arab Sheikh. Now he was contacted by a woman who told him that such a book existed, that it was presently in the possession of a man named Arkwright, that it would soon be in her possession and that she could be induced to part with it for the right price.\n\n\"The woman, of course, was Madeleine Porlock. She learned somehow that the Maharajah was in town and evidently knew of his interest in Rudyard Kipling and his works. She had a copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow, her commission for pushing a copy to Arkwright, and here was a chance to dispose of it. She offered the book to the Maharajah for\u2014how much?\"\n\n\"Ten thousand,\" said the Maharajah.\n\n\"A healthy price, but she was dealing with a resourceful man in more ways than one. He had her tracked down and followed. She wore a wig to disguise herself when she came down for a close look at me. Maybe that was so I wouldn't recognize her when she slipped me the doped coffee. Maybe it was because she knew she was being checked out herself. Whatever she had in mind, it didn't work. The Maharajah's man tagged her to this shop, and a little research turned up the fact that the new owner of Barnegat Books had a master's degree in breaking and entering.\"\n\nI grinned. \"Are you people following all this? There are wheels within wheels. The Maharajah wasn't going to shell out ten grand for Fort Bucklow, not because he'd miss the money but for a very good reason. He knew for a fact that the book was a fake. For one thing, he'd heard about Najd's copy. And you had another reason, didn't you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Would you care to share it?\"\n\n\"I own the original.\" He smiled, glowing with the pride of ownership that they used to talk about in Cadillac ads. \"The genuine copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow, legitimately inscribed to Mr. H. Rider Haggard and removed from his library after his death. The copy which passed through the hands of Miss Unity Mitford and which may indeed have been in the possession of the Duke of Windsor. A copy, I must emphasize, which was delivered into my hands six years ago, long before this gentleman\"\u2014a brief nod at Whelkin\u2014\"happened on some undestroyed printer's overstock, or whatever one wishes to call the cache of books from the Tunbridge Wells printshop.\"\n\n\"So you wanted the phony copy?\"\n\n\"I wanted to discredit it. I knew it was a counterfeit but I could not be certain in what way it had been fabricated. Was it a pure invention? Had someone happened on a manuscript and caused a spurious edition to be printed? Or was it what I now realize it to be, a genuine book with a faked inscription? I wished to determine just what it was and establish that Najd al-Quhaddar had a similarly bogus article, but I did not want to pay ten thousand dollars for the privilege, or I would be making myself the victim of a swindle.\"\n\n\"So you tried to eliminate the middleman. You sent your friend here\"\u2014I smiled at Atman Singh, who did not smile back\u2014\"to collect the book from me as soon as I had it. And you instructed him to give me five hundred dollars. Why?\"\n\n\"To compensate you. It seemed a fair return on your labor, considering that the book itself was of no value.\"\n\n\"If you think that's a fair price for what I went through, you've obviously never been a burglar. How did you know I had the book?\"\n\n\"Miss Porlock informed me she would have it that evening. That indicated to me that you'd already retrieved it from its owner.\"\n\nRudyard Whelkin shook his head. \"Poor Maddy,\" he said sadly. \"I told her to hold onto the book. She'd have spiked an enormous sale of mine by what she did, but I guess she was restless. Wanted to pick up a bundle and get out of town.\" He frowned. \"But who killed her?\"\n\n\"A man with a reason,\" I said. \"A man she double-crossed.\"\n\n\"For God's sake,\" Whelkin said. \"I wouldn't kill anyone. And I certainly wouldn't kill Madeleine.\"\n\n\"Maybe not. But you're not the only man she crossed. She did a job on everybody, when you stop to think about it. She drugged me and stole a book from me, but I certainly didn't kill her. She was fixing to swindle the Maharajah, and he might well have felt a certain resentment when his agent came back from my shop with a worthless copy of Soldiers Three. But this wouldn't leave him feeling betrayed because he didn't expect anything more from the woman. Neither did I. We never had any reason to trust her in the first place, so how could we feel betrayed? There's only one man she really betrayed.\"\n\n\"And who might that be?\"\n\n\"Him,\" I said, and leveled a finger at Prescott Demarest.\n\nDemarest looked bewildered. \"This is insane,\" he said levelly. \"Utterly insane.\"\n\n\"Why do you say that?\"\n\n\"Because I've been wondering what I'm doing in this madhouse and now I find myself accused of murdering a woman I never even heard of before tonight. I came here to buy a book, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I read a newspaper advertisement and made a telephone call and came here prepared to spend substantial money to acquire an outstanding rarity. I've since heard some fascinating if hard-to-grasp story about genuine books with fake inscriptions, and some gory tales of double-crosses and swindles and murders, and now I find myself accused of homicide. I don't want to buy your book, Mr. Rhodenbarr, whether it's inscribed to Hitler or Haggard or Christ's vicar on earth. Nor do I want to listen to any further rubbish of the sort I've heard here tonight. If you'll excuse me...\"\n\nHe started to rise from his chair. I held up a hand, not very threateningly, but it stopped him. I told him to sit down. Oddly enough, he sat.\n\n\"You're Prescott Demarest,\" I said.\n\n\"I thought we weren't using names here tonight. Yes, I am Prescott Demarest, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Wrong,\" I said. \"You're Jesse Arkwright. And you're a murderer.\"\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Nineteen\n\n\"I watched you this afternoon,\" I told him. \"I saw you leave an office building on Pine Street. I'd never seen you before in my life but I knew there was something familiar about you. And then it came to me. Family resemblance.\"\n\n\"I don't know what you're talking about.\"\n\n\"I'm talking about the portraits in your library in Forest Hills. The two ancestors in the oval frames whose job it is to bless the pool table. I don't know if you're really a descendant of the guy who put the Spinning Jenny together, but I'm willing to believe the codgers on the wall are legitimate forebears of yours. You look just like them, especially around the jawline.\"\n\nI glanced at Whelkin. \"You sold him a book,\" I said. \"Didn't you ever meet him?\"\n\n\"Maddy handled everything. She was the middleman.\"\n\n\"Middleperson, I think you mean. I suppose you spoke to him on the telephone?\"\n\n\"Briefly. I don't recognize the voice.\"\n\n\"And you?\" I asked the Maharajah. \"You phoned Mr. Arkwright this morning, didn't you?\"\n\n\"This could be the man whose voice I heard. I am unable to say one way or the other.\"\n\n\"This is absurd,\" Demarest said. Hell, let's call him Arkwright. \"A presumed resemblance to a pair of portraits, an uncertain identification of a voice supposedly heard over a telephone\u2014\"\n\n\"You forget. I saw you leave an office building on Pine Street. I called you there at a certain number, and the phone you answered was in the office of Tontine Trading Corp., and the owner of Tontine is a man named Jesse Arkwright. I don't think you're going to get very far insisting the whole thing's a case of mistaken identity.\"\n\nHe didn't take much time to think it over. \"All right,\" he said. \"I'm Arkwright. There's no reason to continue the earlier charade. I received a call earlier today, apparently from this gentleman whom you call the Maharajah. He wanted to know if I still possessed a copy of Fort Bucklow.\"\n\n\"I had seen the advertisement,\" the Maharajah put in, \"and I wondered at its legitimacy. When I was unable to obtain the book either from this store or from Miss Porlock, I thought it might remain in Mr. Arkwright's possession. I called him before responding to the advertisement.\"\n\n\"And he referred to the ad,\" Arkwright went on. \"I looked for myself. I called you on the spur of the moment. I thought I could poke around and find out what was going on. A book disappeared from my house in the middle of the night. I wanted to see if I could get it back. I also wanted to determine whether it was indeed the rarity I'd been led to believe it was. So I called you, and came here tonight to bid on the book if it came to that. But none of that makes me a killer.\"\n\n\"You were keeping Madeleine Porlock.\"\n\n\"Nonsense. I'd met her twice, perhaps three times. She knew of my interest in rare books and approached me out of the blue to offer me the Kipling volume.\"\n\n\"She was your mistress. You had a kinky sex scene going in the apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street.\"\n\n\"I've never even been there.\"\n\n\"There are neighbors who saw you there. They recognized your photograph.\"\n\n\"What photograph?\"\n\nI took it out and showed it to him. \"They've identified you,\" I said. \"You were seen in Porlock's company and on your own. Apparently you had a set of keys because some of the neighbors saw you coming and going, letting yourself in downstairs.\"\n\n\"That's circumstantial evidence, isn't it? Perhaps they saw me when I collected the book from her. Perhaps she let me in with the buzzer and they thought they saw me using a key. Memories are unreliable, aren't they?\"\n\nI let that pass. \"Maybe you thought she loved you,\" I said. \"In any event, you felt personally betrayed. I'd robbed you, but that didn't make you want to kill me. It was enough for you to get my prints on everything and leave me with a gun in my hand. But you wanted Madeleine Porlock dead. You'd trusted her and she'd cheated you.\"\n\n\"This is all speculation. Sheer speculation.\"\n\n\"How about the gun? A Marley Devil Dog, a. 32 automatic.\"\n\n\"I understood it was unregistered.\"\n\n\"How did you come to understand that? It wasn't in the papers.\"\n\n\"Perhaps I heard it over the air.\"\n\n\"I don't think so. I don't think the information was released. Anyway, sometimes an unregistered gun can be traced more readily than you might think.\"\n\n\"Even if you could trace it to me,\" he said carefully, \"that wouldn't prove anything. Just that you'd stolen it when you burglarized my house.\"\n\n\"But it wasn't in your house. You kept it in the lower left drawer of your desk in the Tontine office downtown.\"\n\n\"That's absolutely untrue.\"\n\nThe righteous indignation was fetching. I'd seen that blued-steel automatic in the study on Copperwood Crescent. And now I was telling him it had been at his office, and it hadn't, and he was steamed.\n\n\"Of course it's true,\" I said. \"Anybody would keep the gun and the bullets in the same place. And I have the damnedest feeling that you've got an almost full box of .32 shells in that drawer, along with a cleaning cloth and a pair of spare clips for a Marley Devil Dog.\"\n\nHe stared at me. \"You were in my office!\"\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous.\"\n\n\"You\u2014you planted those items. You're framing me.\"\n\n\"And you're grabbing at straws,\" I sailed on. \"Do you still claim you weren't keeping Madeleine Porlock? If that's so, why did you buy her a lynx jacket? It's not hard to guess why she'd want one. It's a stunning garment.\" Pace, Carolyn. \"But why would you buy it for her if you were just casual acquaintances?\"\n\n\"I didn't.\"\n\n\"I looked in your closets when I was checking out a book from your library, Mr. Arkwright. Your wife had a couple of pretty impressive furs there. They all had the same label in them. Arvin Tannenbaum.\"\n\n\"What does that prove?\"\n\n\"There's a lynx jacket in the Porlock apartment with the same label in it.\"\n\n\"I repeat, what does that prove? Tannenbaum's a top furrier. Any number of persons patronize him.\"\n\n\"You bought that jacket for Madeleine last month. There's a record of the sale in their files with your name on it and a full description of the jacket.\"\n\n\"That's impossible. I never\u2014I didn't\u2014\" He paused and regrouped, choosing his words more carefully this time around. \"If I were keeping this woman, as you put it, and if I did purchase a jacket for her, I would certainly have paid cash. There would surely be no record of the transaction.\"\n\n\"You'd think that, wouldn't you? But I guess they know you up there, Mr. Arkwright. You must be a treasured customer or something. I could be mistaken, but I have a hunch if the police looked through Tannenbaum's files, they'd find the sales record I described. They might even find the actual bill of sale in your desk at Tontine, with your name and the notation that you'd paid cash.\"\n\n\"My God,\" he said, ashen-faced. \"How did you\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course I'm just guessing.\"\n\n\"You framed me.\"\n\n\"That's not a very nice thing to say, Mr. Arkwright.\"\n\nHe put his hand to his chest as if in anticipation of a coronary. \"All of these lies and half-truths,\" he said. \"What do they amount to? Circumstantial evidence at best.\"\n\n\"Circumstantial evidence is sometimes all it takes. You were keeping Porlock and your gun killed her, and you had the strongest possible motive for her murder. What was the Watergate expression? The smoking pistol? Well, they didn't catch you with the smoking pistol in your hand because you were considerate enough to leave it in my hand, but I think the D.A.'ll have enough to make your life difficult.\"\n\n\"I should have killed you while I was at it,\" he said. Positively venomous, his voice was. He was still holding onto his chest. \"I should have tucked your finger around the trigger and put the gun in your mouth and let you blow your little brains out.\"\n\n\"That would have been cute,\" I agreed. \"I killed her while committing a burglary, then took my own life in a fit of remorse. I haven't had a remorse attack since the fifth grade, but who could possibly know that? How come you didn't do it that way?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" He looked thoughtful \"I... never killed anyone before. After I shot her I just wanted to get away from there. I never even thought of killing you. I simply put the gun in your hand and left.\"\n\nBeautiful. A full admission, and as much as anyone was likely to get without reading him his rights and letting him call his lawyer. It was about time for the Cavalry to make its appearance. I started to turn toward the rear of the store, where Ray Kirschmann and Francis Rockland were presumably taking in all of this, when the hand Arkwright had been clutching to his breast snaked inside his jacket and back out again, and when it reappeared there was a gun in it.\n\nHe pushed his chair back as he drew the gun, moving briskly backward so that he could cover the four of us at once\u2014Whelkin and Atman Singh and the Maharajah. And me, at whom the gun was pointed. It was a larger gun than the one I'd come to clutching, far too large to be a Whippet or a Devil Dog. And a revolver, I noted. Perhaps, if he was partial to the Marley line, it was a Mastiff. Or a Rhodesian Ridgeback, or whatever.\n\n\"Let's hold it right there,\" he said, waving the gun around. \"I'll shoot the first person who moves a hair. You're a clever man, Rhodenbarr, but it won't do you any good this time. I don't suppose the world will miss a burglar. They ought to gas people like you in the first place, loathsome vermin with no respect for property rights. As for you\"\u2014this to Whelkin\u2014\"you cheated me. You employed Madeleine to swindle me out of some money. You made a fool of me. I won't mind killing you. You other gentlemen have the misfortune of being present at an awkward time. I regret the necessity of doing this\u2014\"\n\nKilling women's bad policy. Ignoring them can be worse. He'd forgotten all about Carolyn, and he was still running his mouth when she brained him with a bronze bust of Immanuel Kant. I'd been using it as a bookend, in the Philosophy and Religion section.\n\n## CHAPTER\n\n## Twenty\n\nAt a quarter to twelve Monday morning I hung the Out to Lunch sign in the window and locked up. I didn't bother with the iron gates, not at that hour. I went to the place Carolyn had patronized Thursday and bought felafel sandwiches and a container of hummus and some flat crackers to scoop it up with. They were oddly shaped and reminded me of drawings of amoebae in my high-school biology textbook. I started to order coffee too but they had mint tea and that sounded interesting so I picked up two containers. The counterman put everything in a bag for me. I still didn't know if he was an Arab or an Israeli, so instead of chancing a shalom or a salaam I just told him to have a nice day and let it go at that.\n\nCarolyn was hard at work combing out a Lhasa Apso. \"Thank God,\" she said when she saw me, and popped the fluffy little dog into a cage. \"Lunchtime, Dolly Lama. I'll deal with you later. Whatcha got, Bern?\"\n\n\"Felafel.\"\n\n\"Sensational. Grab a chair.\"\n\nI did and we dug in. Between bites I told her that everything looked good. Francis Rockland wouldn't be hassling either me or the Sikh, having accepted three thousand of the Maharajah's American dollars as compensation for his erstwhile toe. It struck me as a generous settlement, especially so when you recalled that he'd shot the toe off all by his lonesome. And I gather a few more rupees found their way into Ray Kirschmann's pocket. Money generally does.\n\nRudyard Whelkin, who incredibly enough proved to have a walletful of identification in that unlikely name, was booked as a material witness and released in his own recognizance. \"I'm pretty sure he's out of the country,\" I told Carolyn. \"Or at least out of town. He called me last night and tried to talk me into parting with the Hitler copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow.\"\n\n\"Don't tell me he wants to sell it to the Sheikh.\"\n\n\"I think he knows what that would get him. Flayed alive, for instance. But there are enough other weirdos who'd pay a bundle for an item like that, and Whelkin's just the man to find one of them. He may never make the big score he's trying for but he hasn't missed many meals so far in life and I don't figure he'll start now.\"\n\n\"Did you give him the book?\"\n\n\"No way. Oh, he's got a satchel full of copies. I only took the Hitler specimen from his room at the Gresham. I left him some Haggard copies and a few that hadn't been tampered with, so he can cook up another Hitler copy if he's got the time and patience. If he forged all of that once, he can do it again. But I'm holding onto the copy I swiped from him.\"\n\n\"You're not going to sell it?\"\n\nI may have managed to look hurt. \"Of course not,\" I said. \"I may be a crook in my off-hours, but I'm a perfectly honest bookseller. I don't misrepresent my stock. Anyway, the book's not for sale. It's for my personal library. I don't figure to read it very often but I like the idea of having it around.\"\n\nThe Maharajah, I told her, was on his way to Monaco to unwind with a flutter at roulette or baccarat or whatever moved him. The whole experience, he told me, had been invigorating. I was glad he thought so.\n\nAnd Jesse Arkwright, I added, was in jail. Jugged, by George, and locked up tighter than the Crown jewels. They'd booked the bastard for Murder One and you can't get bailed out of that charge. Doesn't matter how rich you are.\n\n\"Not that he'll be imprisoned on that charge,\" I explained. \"To tell you the truth, I'll be surprised if the case ever comes to trial. The evidence is sketchy. It might be enough to convict a poor man but he's got the bread for a good enough lawyer to worm his way out. He'll probably plead to a reduced charge. Manslaughter, say, or overtime parking. He'll pull a sentence of a year or two and I'll bet you even money he won't serve a day. Suspended sentence. Wait and see.\"\n\n\"But he killed that woman.\"\n\n\"No question.\"\n\n\"It doesn't seem fair.\"\n\n\"Few things do,\" I said philosophically. Move over, Immanuel Kant. \"At least he's not getting off scot-free. He's behind bars even as we speak, and his reputation is getting dragged through the mud, and he'll pay a lot emotionally and financially even if he doesn't wind up serving any prison time for what he did. He's lucky, no question, but he's not as he thought he'd be before you nailed him with the bookend.\"\n\n\"It was a lucky shot.\"\n\n\"It was a perfect strike from where I stood.\"\n\nShe grinned and scooped up some hummus. \"Maybe I'm what the Mets could use,\" she said.\n\n\"What the Mets could use,\" I said, \"is divine intercession. Anyway, lots of things aren't fair. The Blinns are getting away with their insurance claim, for example. I'm off the hook for burglarizing their apartment. The police agreed not to press charges in return for my cooperation in collaring Arkwright for murder, which is pretty decent of them, but the Blinns still get to collect for all the stuff I stole, which I didn't steal to begin with, and if that's fair you'll have to explain it to me.\"\n\n\"It may not be fair,\" she said, \"but I'm glad anyway. I like Gert and Artie.\"\n\n\"So do I. They're good people. And that reminds me.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"I had a call from Artie Blinn last night.\"\n\n\"Did you? This mint tea's terrific, incidentally. Sweet, though. Couldn't you get it without sugar?\"\n\n\"That's how it comes.\"\n\n\"It's probably going to rot my teeth and my insides and everything. But I don't care. Do you care?\"\n\n\"I can't get all worked up about it. There was something Artie wanted to know, to get back to Artie.\"\n\n\"There are things I've been wanting to know,\" she said. \"Things I've been meaning to ask you.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"About Rudyard Whelkin.\"\n\n\"What about him?\"\n\n\"Was he really drugged when he set up the appointment with you? Or did he just sound that way?\"\n\n\"He just sounded that way.\"\n\n\"Why? And why didn't he show up at Porlock's place?\"\n\n\"Well, it was her idea. Her reason was that she was going to sandwich in a meeting with the Maharajah so she could sell him the odd copy of the book. She certainly didn't want Whelkin around while all that was going on. The way she sold it to him was to leave things open so that I wouldn't know he was involved in double-crossing me. He could always get in touch with me later on and explain that he'd been doped, too, and that was why he missed the appointment. Of course, all of that went sour when Arkwright gave her a hole in the head. But that's why he sounded groggy when I spoke to him\u2014he was putting on an act in advance.\"\n\nShe nodded thoughtfully. \"I see,\" she said. \"A subtle pattern begins to emerge.\"\n\n\"Now if we can get back to Artie Blinn\u2014\"\n\n\"What happened to your wallet?\"\n\n\"Arkwright took it and stuck it under a cushion where the cops would be sure to find it. I told you, didn't I? That's how they knew to suspect me.\"\n\n\"But what happened to it since then?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said. I patted my pocket. \"I got it back. They had it impounded as evidence, but no one could say exactly what it was evidence of, and Ray talked to somebody and I got it back.\"\n\n\"What about the five hundred dollars?\"\n\n\"It was either gone before the cops got it, or some cop made a profit on the day. But it's gone now.\" I shrugged. \"Easy come, easy go.\"\n\n\"That's a healthy attitude.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. Speaking of Artie\u2014\"\n\n\"Who was speaking of Artie?\"\n\n\"Nobody was, but we're going to. Artie wanted to know what happened to the bracelet.\"\n\n\"Shit.\"\n\n\"He said he asked you about it when you were over there with the photographs, but you said you'd forgotten to bring it along.\"\n\n\"Double shit.\"\n\n\"But I seem to remember that I asked you about it just before you got out of the car, and you said you had it right there in your pocket.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" she said. She drank some more of the mint tea. \"Well, I lied, Bernie.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\"Not to you. To Artie and Gert. It was in my pocket but I told him it wasn't.\"\n\n\"I'll bet you had a super reason.\"\n\n\"As a matter of fact I had a shitty reason. I kept thinking how nice it would look on a certain person's arm.\"\n\n\"The certain person wouldn't be Miranda Messinger, I don't suppose.\"\n\n\"It's your intuitive brilliance that makes me love you, Bernie.\"\n\n\"Here I thought it was my engaging smile. Does she like the bracelet?\"\n\n\"Loves it.\" She grinned up at me. \"I went over there last night to return the Polaroid. She never even noticed it was missing. I gave her the bracelet as a peace offering, and I told her everything, and\u2014\"\n\n\"And you're back together again.\"\n\n\"Well, last night we were. I wouldn't want to make any long-range projections. I'll tell you, the way to that woman's heart is through her wrist.\"\n\n\"Whatever works.\"\n\n\"Yeah. 'You wouldn't want to go and wear it on the East Side,' I told her. 'Because it's just the least bit hot.' \"\n\n\"Did you talk like that when you told her? Out of the side of your mouth?\"\n\n\"Yeah. It really got to her. I swear the next time I buy her something I'm gonna tell her I stole it.\" She sighed. \"Okay, Bern. What do we do about the Blinns?\"\n\n\"I'll think of something.\"\n\n\"I was gonna tell you, but\u2014\"\n\n\"I could tell you were eager to discuss it. The way you were so anxious to talk about the Blinns and all.\"\n\n\"Well, I\u2014\"\n\n\"It's cool,\" I said. \"Relax and eat your hummus.\"\n\nA little later she said, \"Listen, Randy's got a dance class tonight. You want to come by after work? We can have dinner in or out and then catch a movie or something.\"\n\n\"I'd love to,\" I said, \"but tonight's out.\"\n\n\"Heavy date?\"\n\n\"Not exactly.\" I hesitated, then figured what the hell. \"When we meet for drinks tonight,\" I said, \"I'll make mine Perrier.\"\n\nShe sat forward, eyes wide. \"No shit. You're going on a caper?\"\n\n\"That's not the word I'd use, but yeah, that's about it.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Forest Hills Gardens.\"\n\n\"The same neighborhood as the last time?\"\n\n\"The same house. The coat I described to Ray Kirschmann wasn't a fantasy. I saw it Wednesday night in Elfrida Arkwright's closet. And I promised it to Ray, and when I make promises to cops I like to keep them. So I'm going back there tonight to get it.\"\n\n\"Won't Elfrida object?\"\n\n\"Elfrida's not home. She visited her hubby in jail yesterday, and then she went home and thought things through, and then she packed a bag and took off for parts unknown. Home to Mama, maybe. Or home to Palm Beach. I guess she didn't want to stick around for the notoriety.\"\n\n\"I can dig that.\" She cocked her head and there was a faraway look in her eye. \"He's got it coming,\" she said. \"The bastard killed his mistress and he's not going to serve time for it. I remember when you were describing the house to me, Bern. You said you wanted to back up a truck onto the front lawn and steal everything from the chandeliers down to the rugs.\"\n\n\"I had the impulse.\"\n\n\"Is that what you're gonna do?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"You're just taking the coat?\"\n\n\"Well...\"\n\n\"You said there was jewelry, didn't you? Maybe you can find something to replace Gert Blinn's bracelet.\"\n\n\"The thought had crossed my mind.\"\n\n\"And there's a coin collection.\"\n\n\"I remember the coin collection, Carolyn.\"\n\n\"I remember the other things you mentioned. Are you going to take the Pontiac?\"\n\n\"I think that might be pushing my luck.\"\n\n\"You'll steal some other car, then.\"\n\n\"I suppose so.\"\n\n\"Take me with you.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"Why not?\" She leaned forward, laid a hand on my arm. \"Why the hell not, Bern? I can help. I didn't get in the way when we stole Randy's Polaroid, did I?\"\n\n\"We borrowed Randy's Polaroid.\"\n\n\"Bullshit. We stole it. Then we happened to give it back when we were done with it. If you look at it that way, I'm an old hand at this breaking-and-entering business. Take me along, Bern. Please? I'll get rubber gloves and cut the palms out, I'll pass up my after-work drink, I'll do anything you say. Please?\"\n\n\"Jesus,\" I said. \"You're... you're an honest citizen, Carolyn. No record. A respectable position in the community.\"\n\n\"I wash dogs, Bern. Big hairy deal.\"\n\n\"There's a risk.\"\n\n\"Screw the risk.\"\n\n\"And I always work alone, see. I never use a partner.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Her face fell. \"Well, that's it, then. I didn't think of it that way. I'd probably be a drag anyway, wouldn't I? It's okay, Bern. I don't mind.\"\n\n\"No drink after work.\"\n\n\"Not a drop. I can come?\"\n\n\"And you can't ever tell a soul. Not Randy, not some future lover. Nobody.\"\n\n\"My lips are sealed. Are you serious? I can come?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"What the hell,\" I said. \"You were handy the other night. You might be useful to have around.\"\n\n## About the Author\n\nA Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, LAWRENCE BLOCK is a four-time winner of the Edgar Allan Poe\u00ae and Shamus awards, as well as a recipient of prizes in France, Germany, and Japan. He also received the British Crime Writers' Association's prestigious Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in crime writing. The author of more than fifty books and numerous short stories, he is a devout New Yorker and enthusiastic world traveler. You can visit his website at www.lawrenceblock.com.\n\nDon't miss the next book by your favorite author. Sign up now for AuthorTracker by visiting www.AuthorTracker.com.\nAlmost criminally enthusiastic praise for  \nNew York Times bestselling Grand Master  \nLAWRENCE BLOCK's  \nBERNIE RHODENBARR and\n\nThe   \nBurglar  \nwho liked to  \nQuote  \nKipling\n\n\"MY FAVORITE.\"\n\nSpokane Spokesman Review\n\n\"Readers get a funny lesson in rare book economics and breaking and entering. Rhodenbarr is a wonderful New York character with a knack for surrounding himself with colorful eccentrics...\n\nBITE, WIT, AND ENOUGH STYLISH ATTITUDE\n\nto power the Plaza for a week.\"\n\nNew York Daily News\n\n\"BERNIE RHODENBARR IS THE PERFECT COMPANION\n\nif you're spending a week at the beach, catching a plane to Omaha, or just seeking an escape from the demands of the day.\"\n\nTampa Tribune\n\n\"THIS RHODENBARR ROMP IS SAUCY AND BRIGHT...\n\nIf you like Donald Westlake's capers, you'll like Bernie.\"\n\nWashington Post Book World\n\n\"Notre Dame at dusk. Pepys' account of the Great Fire of London. A really good cashmere coat. Some treasures are timeless... I feel like putting Bernie Rhodenbarr on that list...\n\nBERNIE IS ONE WRY GUY AND SOME PIECE OF WORK.\"\n\nNew York Times Book Review\n\n\"LAWRENCE BLOCK IS A MASTER OF THE ART OF THE MYSTERY...\n\nBernie's a great burglar and a funny guy.\"\n\nNew Orleans Times-Picayune\n\n\"ONE OF THE FINEST MYSTERY WRITERS OF OUR TIME.\"\n\nHouston Chronicle\n\n\"It's the mark of an innovative storyteller to turn a normally reprehensible character into a hero\u2014of sorts. Author Lawrence Block's\n\nBERNIE THE BURGLAR SERIES AREN'T JUST GOOD MYSTERIES, THEY ARE SUPREME ESCAPISM.\"\n\nFt. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel\n\n\"[Block's] written dialogue has the honesty of a conversation overheard on a bus...\n\nBERNIE RHODENBARR IS A LOT-OF-LAUGHS BURGLAR.\"\n\nUSA Today\n\n\"VINTAGE BLOCK...\n\n[His] effortless style sweeps Rhodenbarr through a complex plot with ease. The laid-back technique precisely matches the misadventures of the delightful thief.\"\n\nSt. Louis Post-Dispatch\n\n\"Having a burglar for a hero is tricky, to say the least. Is he a bad good guy or a good bad guy, and does crime pay or doesn't it?...\n\nBLOCK MANEUVERS AROUND THESE MORAL S-CURVES WITH GREAT AGILITY...\n\nBlock's effortless first-person narrative and zippy dialogue is as pleasing as escapist fare ever gets.\"\n\nLost Angeles Times Book Review\n\n\"Good mystery and good comedy, mined from the same vein Dashiell Hammett tapped for his 'Thin Man.'\n\nBLOCK'S BURGLAR SERIES IS ONE OF CRIME FICTION'S BEST.\"\n\nSouth Bend Tribune\n\n\"With a writer like Block,\n\nA MASTER PLOTTER,\n\ntrying to figure out the guilty party can definitely keep you turning the pages.\"\n\nToronto Star\n\n\"BLOCK IS A MASTER OF WITTY DIALOGUE,\n\nplotting and pace, and the series' wacky, offbeat characters make great companions.\"\n\nCleveland Plain Dealer\n\n## Other Books by Lawrence Block\n\nThe Bernie Rhodenbarr Mysteries\n\nBURGLARS CAN'T BE CHOOSERS \u2022 THE BURGLAR IN THE CLOSET \u2022 THE BURGLAR WHO LIKED TO QUOTE KIPLING \u2022 THE BURGLAR WHO STUDIED SPINOZA \u2022 THE BURGLAR WHO PAINTED LIKE MONDRIAN \u2022 THE BURGLAR WHO TRADED TED WILLIAMS \u2022 THE BURGLAR WHO THOUGHT HE WAS BOGART \u2022 THE BURGLAR IN THE LIBRARY \u2022 THE BURGLAR IN THE RYE \u2022 THE BURGLAR ON THE PROWL\n\nThe Matthew Scudder Novels\n\nTHE SINS OF THE FATHERS \u2022 TIME TO MURDER AND CREATE \u2022 IN THE MIDST OF DEATH \u2022 A STABINTHE DARK \u2022 EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE \u2022 WHEN THE SACRED GINMILL CLOSES \u2022 OUT ON THE CUTTING EDGE \u2022 A TICKET TO THE BONEYARD \u2022 A DANCE AT THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE \u2022 A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES \u2022 THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD \u2022 A LONG LINE OF DEAD MEN \u2022 EVEN THE WICKED \u2022 EVERYBODY DIES \u2022 HOPE TO DIE\n\nKeller's Greatest Hits\n\nHIT MAN \u2022 HIT LIST\n\nCollected Short Stories\n\nENOUGH ROPE\nCopyright\n\nThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.\n\nTHE BURGLAR WHO LIKED TO QUOTE KIPLING. Copyright \u00a9 1979 by Lawrence Block. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.\n\nEPub Edition \u00a9 FEBRUARY 2005 ISBN: 9780061828195\n\nVersion 02282014\n\n## About the Publisher\n\nAustralia  \nHarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.  \nLevel 13, 201 Elizabeth Street  \nSydney, NSW 2000, Australia  \n<http://www.harpercollins.com.au/ebooks>\n\nCanada  \nHarperCollins Publishers Ltd.  \n2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor  \nToronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada  \nhttp://www.harpercollins.ca\n\nNew Zealand  \nHarperCollinsPublishers New Zealand  \nUnit D, 63 Apollo Drive  \nRosedale 0632  \nAuckland, New Zealand  \n<http://www.harpercollins.co.nz>\n\nUnited Kingdom  \nHarperCollins Publishers Ltd.  \n77-85 Fulham Palace Road  \nLondon, W6 8JB, UK  \n<http://www.harpercollins.co.uk>\n\nUnited States  \nHarperCollins Publishers Inc.  \n10 East 53rd Street  \nNew York, NY 10022  \n<http://www.harpercollins.com>\n"}
+{"meta": {"title": "Best Monologues from Best American Short Plays, Vol"}, "text": "\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2014 by William Demastes\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.\n\nPublished in 2014 by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books  \nAn Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation  \n7777 West Bluemound Road  \nMilwaukee, WI 53213\n\nTrade Book Division Editorial Offices  \n33 Plymouth St., Montclair, NJ 07042  \nPrinted in the United States of America\n\nBook design by Lynn Bergesen\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nBest Monologues from The Best American Short Plays, Volume One / edited by William W. Demastes.  \npages cm. -- (The Applause Acting Series)  \n1. Monologues, American. 2. American drama--20th century. 3. American drama--21st century. I. Demastes, William W., editor of compilation.   \nPS627.M63B47 2014  \n812'.04508--dc23  \n2013041949\n\nwww.applausebooks.com\ncontents\n\nIntroduction: Thespis Steps Out\n\nPart I: Monologues for Men\n\nSusan Miller: Excerpt from Reading List\n\nBilly Aronson: Excerpt from Little Red Riding Hood\n\nCarol K. Mack: Excerpt from The Courier\n\nDavid Kranes: Excerpt from Going In\n\nJoe Maruzzo: Excerpt from Bricklayer's Poet\n\nJulia Jarcho: Excerpt from The Highwayman\n\nMark Medoff: Excerpts from DeBoom: Who Gives This Woman?\n\nMigdalia Cruz: Excerpts from Dreams of Home\n\nMurray Schisgal: Excerpt from The Man Who Couldn't Stop Crying\n\nRonald Ribman: Excerpt from The Cannibal Masque\n\nZilvinas Jonusas: Excerpt from The Cleaning\n\nClay McLeod Chapman: birdfeeder\n\nDaniel Frederick Levin: A Glorious Evening\n\nMurray Schisgal: The Artist and the Model\n\nPeter Maloney: Witness\n\nRick Pulos: Decades Apart: Reflections of Three Gay Men\n\nPart II: Monologues for Women\n\nAdam Kraar: Excerpt from Hearts and Minds\n\nBruce Levy: Excerpt from Sada\n\nDano Madden: Excerpt from Beautiful American Soldier\n\nEileen Fischer: Excerpt from The Perfect Medium\n\nJill Elaine Hughes: Excerpt from The Devil Is in the Details\n\nJulia Jarcho: Excerpts from The Highwayman\n\nLiliana Almendarez: Excerpt from Glass Knives\n\nMigdalia Cruz: Excerpts from Dreams of Home\n\nMurray Schisgal: Excerpt from The Cowboy, the Indian and the Fervent Feminist\n\nJames Armstrong: The True Author of the Plays Formerly Attributed to Mister William Shakespeare Revealed to the World for the First Time by Miss Delia Bacon\n\nCarey Lovelace: The Stormy Waters, the Long Way Home\n\nJulie Rae (Pratt) Mollenkamp: In Conclusive Woman\n\nLaura Shaine Cunningham: Web Cam Woman\n\nNeil LaBute: Love at Twenty\n\nPeter Maloney: Leash\n\nPolly Frost and Ray Sawhill: The Last Artist in New York City\n\nPamela Sneed: Kong\n\nCredits and Permissions\nintroduction\n\nThespis Steps Out\n\nSomewhere in the deepest recesses of prehistory, a lone intrepid human being stepped out of the safe confines of some huddled mass and announced himself to the world as an individual, someone who could stand alone and was capable of thinking, fighting, loving, fending for himself. Whoever that first person was, he took a singular action that has defined human beings ever since, a species that best survives as a group but remains determined to take on the world by rejecting the anonymous comfort and safety of the herd, or tribe, or community. The anonymity of a group may be synonymous with safety, but humans seem bent on defying the benefits of running with the pack, choosing instead the death-defying option of stepping out of the ranks and testing the limits of individual human endurance, courage, and foolhardiness.\n\nTruth be told, most of us do work to squeeze into the comforting center of our tribe, engaging in that choral huddle that seems to guarantee longevity at the expense of distinction. After all, life and the arts that imitate it remind us time and again that the price of distinction is often too high, that the cost of independence is sometimes life itself. But even then, we often still go against our better instincts and celebrate the standout, honoring his triumphs and mourning his losses. Even against our common sense we celebrate the bold, brazen foolhardiness of the risk taker. He captures our imagination as he expands the definition of what it is to be human, showing us the godlike glory of our reach even as he reveals the earthbound limits of our grasp.\n\nMore than any other art form, theater captures this elemental human quality, celebrating the individual who steps out of the chorus, defines himself by shaking his spear at the world, and rejects the panicked instinct to retreat from what lies before him. Greek mythology calls that first bold individual Thespis, the first human to step out of the crowd and face yet another crowd\u2014an audience\u2014as he shared the truth about human nature with his fellows. That's what actors have done ever since. Much has transpired on the stage since then, but it is always the actor who faces an audience that stands at the heart of the matter. And that is exactly why monologues are so important not just to art or the theater, but to the continued rejuvenation and regeneration of human nature itself. Standing forth, pulling together a spotlighted performance that capitalizes on the honest vulnerabilities of the actor while standing before a mass of onlookers\u2014that comes as close to the full and complex spirit of Thespis as currently exists in the human world today.\n\nThe spirit of the brave individual facing a scrutinizing crowd without the life support of a chorus or supporting cast is what the contents of this book celebrates. The monologue tests the limits of human individuality, exposing a wide variety of human qualities by moving very private conversations into the public sphere. Sharing these certain private conversations with intimate friends\u2014or holding those thoughts altogether for exclusively personal consideration\u2014is the stoic and generally accepted way of doing things. Breaking through that fa\u00e7ade, however, is what the monologist does. He or she shares truths that make us all a bit uncomfortable because of the very public nature of this otherwise private transaction. But when it works, the event runs full circle by moving from publicly exposed individual vulnerabilities to a point where community itself is reinstituted. The monologue may begin with the individual, but it ends with a webwork of relationships between the monologist and audience that seems the very antithesis of the original enterprise. On the face of it, it seems counterintuitive to think that this confessional mode would do anything other than expose the individual to scarlet condemnation and deserved ostracism. But when done well, monologues take individual exposure and unite humans in bonds of shared experiences\u2014shared celebrations, shared commiserations, shared fears, and shared ambitions either accomplished or abandoned. Whether or not this was the intention behind Thespis's bold step forward, it certainly has been the result.\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\nThis is a collection of monologues drawn from the popular The Best American Short Plays series, an archive of works from many of the best playwrights active today. The monologues selected for this volume present taut, engaging single-character pieces that range from zany comedy to poignant tales of love and loss. Many included pieces are excerpted from the plays of this series while others are by design full and complete monologues. Long or short, serious or not, excerpts or otherwise, this collection includes works that capture much of what it means to be human, particularly that urge to stand out and sing our successes and failures, hopes and fears.\n\n\u2014William W. Demastes\n\nLouisiana State University\nPart I\n\nMonologues for Men\nSusan Miller\n\nexcerpt from\n\nReading List\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2004\u20132005\n\nThe stars. I was looking up anything I could find on the stars. There was this article about dark matter that scared the shit out of me, and I was putting my whole family through hell about it. Just the way my daughter has pushed me to my limits with her inquiries into the absurdity of language and meaning. Meaning there is none. No meaning. Which I take as bleak and troublesome coming like that from a young person. And, I guess, it challenged something deep and confronted me on a personal level. Like my fatherhood, my being a parent was all of a sudden a pointless and sorry thing. I like talking at the dinner table. It's time well spent if you put aside other concerns. But I was depressing everyone, and I thought maybe there's another way, you know, with more information, to look at things. To look at this dark matter and my daughter's questions and turn it all into a metaphor of well-being instead of what it clearly represented to me now as a crushing void with the power to cancel the present, past, and future. Life, albeit the sad and confusing thing though it is, still, it is what we know. And what we want our children to know. Well, apparently in my investigations of the universe there were more than a couple of references to a certain gay astronomer. He kept turning up in the materials I happened to look through. And they wanted to know\u2014they being the messengers of secrecy and harbingers of silence\u2014what I had to do with him. What interest did I have in a gay astronomer who was fired from his post in the fifties, and what business did I have with footnotes that referred to the incident in the park, and did I know him.\nBilly Aronson\n\nexcerpt from\n\nLittle Red Riding Hood\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 1992\u20131993\n\nNote:\n\nMOTHER's prompting words can be spoken offstage.\n\nHUNTER If a hunter doesn't have his slab o' steak he can't grab his gun and if he can't grab his gun he can't blast the beasts and if he can't blast the beasts how's he gonna market their meats if he can't market their meats there's no way he can house his spouse and if he can't house his spouse then where's he supposed to eat his slab o' steak, in the gosh darn mud crap slop?\n\nMOTHER You didn't get one of your arms into your shirt, dear.\n\nHUNTER Sure you miss a sleeve now and then or sometimes you forget to button a few buttons, but what about the sleeve you did get into the shirt, what about the buttons you did button. I'm sick and tired of people who always focus on the empty sleeve or the unbuttoned button.\n\nMOTHER Your fly's open.\n\nHUNTER or the opened fly, when the fact is if the truth be known when push comes to shove it's the people with the unbuttoned buttons and unsleeved arms who are out there not looking at the lookers who are looking at them but just plain out there being out there. I'm out there. [. . .] I'm the one who faces the heat and the snow and the dirt\u2014and let me tell you it gets dirty\u2014so I can brave the hills and the lakes and the pebbles\u2014which inevitably get in your boots\u2014to grapple with the branches and the ragweed and the pollen\u2014'til I'm sneezin' my head off\u2014don't make me remind you about the time I got poison oak all across the cheeks o' my butt\u2014do you have any idea how filthy my toenails get by the end of the day?\u2014and why? So I can shoot the beasts that make the coats that coat the backs of the very people who stand there staring at my empty sleeve when they should have been paying more attention to the arm in their own backyard in the first place.\n\nMOTHER There's grease on your nose and steak on your forehead, and your fork is lodged behind your ear.\n\nHUNTER What's a drop o' grease on a hunter's nose for the sake of his home, or a fork in his ear for his family? I love this fork and I love this family and let me tell you something, sister, I may have a slab of greasy beef suspended from my brow but that won't stop me from pumping ten ounces of lead into a fat-assed quadruped at close range because it's a dog eat dog jungle in that forest.\nCarol K. Mack\n\nexcerpt from\n\nThe Courier\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2005\u20132006\n\nYOUNG MAN The packages. They were all sealed. And every day there was a new one. I was taking them to a lab. All these boxes, sealed red boxes. Shiny. Nothing could leak out but . . . all going from Central to this lab, see? After a coupla months I wonder who's it going to? And what's in the boxes? He never said nothing about that. I think maybe it's O.K. if I know what's inside a' them? I mean, it don't make no difference. I'd always do my job. Do my best! Like he said. All I did was take off the label. Not even get the tape off. Just the label. No name. Some kind of bar-code label. I just start to take it off with my penknife.\n\n[Very odd mechanical noise. YOUNG MAN startled, stands.]\n\nAnd before I know it these guys show up, see? Then I get arrested for possession of lethal materials. They accuse me of planning a terrorist attack. They say the box contains a biological weapon. I say that's not possible. They say, \"Who do you work for?\" I tell them I take the package from Central to the lab. I tell them that's my job. They tell me there IS no lab. They tell me there is no central nothing. That they don't exist and they never have. Then I figure O.K., O.K., this has gotta be some kinda test. Right? Maybe they test you every month. So then they say, \"Who do you work for?\" and I say, \"What?\" And they say, \"Who do you work for?\" and I say, \"I . . . I used to work for the U.S. Post Office and I don't work for nobody now,\" and they say, \"Then who told you to do it?\"\n\n[Breaking down, in tears.]\n\nAnd I say, \"Do what?\" Do WHAT? For chrissakes' I trusted them. I believed in them. I was selected for this job and now they turn against me for what.\nDavid Kranes\n\nexcerpt from\n\nGoing In\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 1986\n\nJONAS I try to instruct the world\u2014and myself, through the reminders of that instruction\u2014in the elegance of what any of us might reach for! What's attainable! . . . My communication tends to . . . I use a baroque language, because I feel that a baroque language, possibly, is best-suited for . . . ! Be sure that milk's put away! I'll take responsibility for the cheese. When you wake up in the morning, in the dawn of a new day, I guarantee that the brie will be in its proper place! . . . Don't shrug! Don't slouch! Don't break training! And if you try to change any of the records in this room\u2014I'll be waiting for you! So plan your attack! . . . Or attack your plan! And remember that any of us are our own plans! So execute well! Because I am not alone! And Hank Williams is armed. And Don and Phil Everly are contenders again. [. . .] \"I coulda been a contender.\"\n\n[Out.]\n\nWho said that?! . . . Wrong! It was not Rocky Balboa. . . . Well, I do love you! If I'm forced to answer my own question, which has generally been the story of my life. I also do not\u2014not\u2014love you! So there! There! All my questions are answered! All my holes are filled! Some of my holes are filled!\n\n[To himself.]\n\nAnd some of my holes better not be filled . . . or I'm in trouble. Because I tend to do things \"in excess\" when the first blush is on . . . and then, ultimately, in moderation. But I love my son\u2014and that will have to do for this evening, thank you. Thank you. Thank You. You're welcome, I'm sure. Good night.\nJoe Maruzzo\n\nexcerpt from\n\nBricklayer's Poet\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2007\u20132008\n\nDon't think I'm crazy or nothin', you see, I'm a very practical kind of guy, black and white, right side of the brain and all that, but this last fireplace I did, I'm doin' this fireplace for the Corsos, sweet old people from Brooklyn, Sal and Bunny Corso, I know them all my life. Sal's in his eighties and he's dying of cancer, rest his soul, so Bunny calls me and she wants him to have a fireplace before he goes, something he always wanted. But at the time I was going through some stuff in my life, and the last thing I wanted to do in the middle of August was a fireplace. It was like 120 degrees in there! I'm doin' the job for practically nothin', I charged them just for the material, and I'm like a day into it. And I realize the wall's on a slant, it's crooked. I had to do all this special chipping and slanting the stone, the Corsos are sittin' right in back of me watchin' my every move, not out of thinking I was gonna screw them or anything, but that they were happy watchin' their fireplace go up! So there I am, the sweat's pourin' out of me, my mind is racin' about my life, my father, and I'm lifting this eighty\u00adpound stone towards the wall, but it won't take, it won't stick. And I feel this pain in my heart, like a stake runnin' through me, and I can't move, I'm as stiff as a board, and all of a sudden my body starts to come up out of me! I swear to God ! My body is leaving me! And its goin' up through the ceiling, into the sky, but I can still see myself down there, I could see the Corsos, but I'm goin' higher and higher with all these puffy white clouds, and I hear this humming, this humming of something holy, like kids singin' this sweet sound, and I feel a tickle on my ear, and I turn and there's this angel with the wings and this beautiful little baby face, it's floatin' there and it whispers into my ear, \"Love, Mikey, don't forget love.\" And all of a sudden I was back on the ground, holding the stone like I never left, but I'm cryin', I'm cryin' like a friggin' baby, so I run to the bathroom 'cause I don't want the Corsos to think I was cracking up, and everything got peaceful, and I hear that voice again sayin', \"Love, Mikey, don't forget love.\" I walked out, went back to my fireplace, and it was the most beautiful fireplace I ever laid. I got a picture of it, you wanna see it? [. . .] That's me. That's Sal and Bunny. That's the fireplace. It's lovely. [. . .] You're the first person I told about this. That's all I gotta do is talk to the guys in the neighborhood, they'd think I was nuts. I usually don't talk to them about private things. That voice, it was my father. He was tellin' me it's gonna be all right. He was tellin' me to love. [. . .] He was a bricklayer. Taught me everything I know. Talk about hands. He had a pair of hands so gentle, he'd hold a brick like it was a piece of cake, so smooth, you couldn't even tell he was layin' a brick, like cream. He'd take a brick, you know, he'd chip it because there'd be a problem with the fireplace, so he'd chip the brick and the whole thing would go straight up. He was a craftsman. And clean! When he got through, you think he hired a cleaning lady. They don't make 'em like that no more. He was a little guy, short and stocky, green eyes, light brown hair, and whenever you were in trouble, he was there! If you needed a buck or two, his hand was in his pocket, if a guy needed a day's work, he'd hire him for the week, even if he took the loss. Anyway, it's a funny thing we're talkin' about these things and all, but lately, I feel like I need to talk to somebody like I gotta share things, inside me, with them. Maybe it's my age or something, but I feel it's time [. . .] to settle down. Maybe not marriage and all but to live with at least. I'll tell ya, I look around and I see a lot of lonely people. I think if they made a study or somethin', they'd find out there are more people alone in the world than ever before. Well, at least in this city.\nJulia Jarcho\n\nexcerpt from\n\nThe Highwayman\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2005\u20132006\n\nHIGHWAYMAN One wants to say something, I mean. Here's the floor. Thanks. You want to keep people's hopes up, when you can, that's not, I'll admit that's not the first thing on one's mind all the time. I've tried to dress in a way that'd be appropriate to passing by at a gallop or stopping and saying \"dismount.\" People don't always know what that means. This is a strange area. I've traveled, I travel a long ways, and it's hard to say where I'm originally from. They're entranced from the first word and I don't like to disagree. There's so much of the same for them. It's the same by the ocean as it is on the moor. In my opinion, a trance is what they're after. It seems to me to be the wrong prize. The last man I killed, I'd gotten him in the belly and he dropped his gun. So he asked me to. Or music. I find both of these helpful in trying to understand. But at the same time, I've never been entranced. It might have to do with the motion of the horse. Air blowing by. Through. And the night: at nighttime, light always changes. I mean, and the maneuvering keeps you unkept.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nIt usually goes like this: they're riding and I'm riding. I pull mine out in front. I say, \"Stop. Give me everything you're carrying.\" And I don't give exceptions. They'll try to lie, but I can tell when they've been comfortable. When people have too much it sits ill on them. They're better off without it. Sometimes that can refer to the most essential things. Sometimes it's their hair. Sometimes some of their clothes. I have an idea, which I see as a picture, and in it the world is almost empty, and everyone I see is just the bare bones of a self, staggering through bright weather between days.\nMark Medoff\n\nexcerpts from\n\nDeBoom: Who Gives This Woman?\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2006\u20132007\n\nGEOFFREY DeBOOM Used to be I slept six hours and erupted into the day, my mind as febrile at the moment of tremulous waking as it would be in the epicenter of the day's quakes. Now, I sleep and wake and sleep eight, nine, ten hours and have no desire to get out of bed except for the middle-of-the-night urination\u2014and then only for the sake of my decaying kidneys (27 percent function last test)\u2014the lack of desire to rise and go forth abetted, no doubt, by the fact that I have nothing to look forward to, or to be fair\u2014not that fair is of much interest to me anymore\u2014that I look forward to nothing. I roll off the Posturepedic so as not to precipitate a back spasm that would put me back to bed for a couple of weeks, forced to choose among self-analysis, pop books, bad music, or, worse, movies. So I would rather go to the university than stay home. Thus, mobility, such as it is, has value. I engineer the four-step journey across carpet into the bathroom, favoring the titanium and plastic right knee over the left one with its shards of chipped bone and cartilage roaming the joint like Rice Krispies through molasses. Load my toothbrush with whitening paste and crane myself toward the toilet with stiff arms on the seat, dropping lead-like the last few inches as my arms give out to gravity.\n\nAvoid the mirror. Pee lefty, brush righty. Wait for my indolent bladder to drain. Pee, squeeze, squirt, squeeze, sit, wait, wait, dribble, squeeze, squirt. I stopped frequenting the student bathroom down the hall from my garret in favor of a trek to the faculty lav several corridors over, following a whiz between two undergrads who imagined life would always be thus, their bladders emptying in a tsunami of malted urine. They left me chained to the urinal like Prometheus, long after they'd zipped, washed (one of them), exited (lunch, ball game, sexual encounter?), while I stood and sprinkled and spritzed for a couple of hours, guilty of what wisdom has taught is mankind's most egregious sin: growing old. I drive off the toilet on a silent \"Hut!,\" aware that no matter how many last little squeezes I exert on my prostate, before I am upright my penis will emit a last squirt that will saturate a quarter size circle in the crotch of my Jockeys. (Tip: black underwear.) Limp the road of life now with wet pants. On a panel at a civil rights conference last year on the failure of the movie industry to do much about diversity (and in a superficial effort at disclosure\u2014not there as a supporter of affirmative action, political correctness, or the glories of the melting pot; I was there to say the industry was not a moral conglomerate but a financial one that didn't care about diversity unless it paid in dollars). Wearing cream-colored Zanellas. Knew, following the pre-speech safety whiz; I'd spritz a 25-cent piece right before taking the stage. Wore a Kotex Mini Pad.\n\nDiapers pretty soon. Rinse toothpaste\u2014two cupped palms of water, left above right\u2014 always two, going back to age eight and the onset of compulsive behavior: Save the family, give thanks to a benevolent Savior, request not to die young. Shake out the toothbrush, restore it to its place in the receptacle next to Cass's unused, firm Oral-B. I had figured in twisted Cartesian fashion: She has a toothbrush at my condo; therefore, she'll come back to me.\n\nMust tackle my image in the mirror (daily query delivered to no one but me: What is my father doing in there?) and resist with the modicum of self-control still available the desire to smash my head through glass, plaster board, and studs to the outdoors. Imagine my father's and my communal head, connected by a tendon or two, yo-yoing from the second floor.\n\nNext, a moment's loathing of the once sculpted but now flaccid pecs (pubescent breasts, really), the reedy biceps, their rippling, dry overskin like stretched, faux snake skin, the leavened baguette in the midriff that defies the hundreds of crunches I do daily.\n\nMy eyes drop to the ellipse-shaped pouches under my eyes that don't go away since squirrels started depositing their nuts there a decade back. Not tiredness, according to a woman at a book signing, she with parchment skin stretched like loomed silk over the front of her skull and tacked behind her ears, but, she whispered so that only the first five or so in line behind her could hear, the walnuts are just fat deposits which can be removed in an hour operation in a doctor's office.\n\nTropical forests of hair festoon along the helix, tragus, lobe of my ears, sprout like roach antennae from the tip of my nose. Every two weeks, with tweezers, I stand here wearing my reading glasses and pluck the antennae black filament by black filament, each pluck sending through my neural network a little electrical reminder of my putrefaction.\n\nThere is the hair on my head that only recently began thinning on top and receding into my temples. Good chance death will beat baldness.\n\nThe human body, helpless to resist, humiliates the living thing that was itself. I have contemplated suicide a thousand, ten thousand times. I have stood on three separate Saturday afternoons at Barnes & Noble and perused the periodically updated tome that details for do-it-yourself sorts the best ways to get it done. Tell myself I can't kill myself because of Cass and Maxine.\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\nGEOFFREY DeBOOM My life insurance might not pay off, as if that's an issue, since my daughter is rich and can take care of her mother, whether she wins a Nobel Prize or not, if she lives another hundred years. But I know, though once unafraid if not brave, I am a coward now and don't have the guts. A Southern Baptist gone public atheist, I am a closet Catholic. I fear there's a hell to which I'll be assigned for eternity with all the other perfidious misanthropes who set themselves up as judges of mass culture. Terror keeps me alive, witness to my deterioration.\n\nDressed, deodorized, pomaded, I limp to the kitchen, listing to port, the left leg three-eights of an inch shorter than the right since the right knee was replaced with plastic and titanium. At the out-of-fashion tile counter I commence the ceremony of the pills. Seven supplements shipped via UPS once a month from a distributor in Dallas, then the replacement for the pill for arthritis that was destroying my kidneys and the one for high blood pressure followed by the one for the hyperthyroidism that is trying to keep the kidney function I have at its current short-of-dialysis level.\n\nSkip the antidepressant for the eighteenth straight day.\n\nI turn on my computer. Download e-mail. There are nineteen. Several from students with work attached; the New York Times; Truthout, a website I use to keep track of liberal\u2014pardon me, progressive\u2014bullcrap; one from Max (\"I need to talk to you, but we have to leave for the airport.\"), a couple of ads, three reminders of meetings at the Film School, two of which I'll duck though I've confirmed I'll attend.\n\nResponding to e-mail has become my substitute for writing reviews, the thing I did for a living several times a week for thirty years, or writing the copy for my TV show, which I did for a decade and a half. I drag it out, to minimize guilt for not working on the column I still write monthly for Esquire, until I can go to school but not be there so long that I'm bored or have to talk to people I don't want to talk to\u2014which takes in pretty much everyone there. The phone rings at seven forty-two. I have no message, just the \"beep.\" [. . .]\n\nI wait to board last. Fester past the fortunate eight who fill the spacious elite seats with their smug complacence toward me, hunched like Quasimodo, nudging as if I were in ankle shackles to the back of the plane, where I'll be crammed in three abreast with insufficient room for my failing body parts.\n\nAt my row will be a colossus who runneth over into my narrow tract, affording me the opportunity to make a memorable scene that I can leak to Entertainment Tonight. Flight attendant, didn't I hear there's a flab limit per passenger now? Why isn't this mastodon paying for two seats? I have an aisle seat. There is no one in the middle. I have nothing to bitch about. My feelings are mixed. Nothing is pure, I wrote about East of Eden after a festival of Steinbeck's books-into-movies in the late '80s, which I left renewed, with almost boyish confidence in my ideals, what I could do that others before me could not\u2014of course could not, they were not me! I could define filmic art the way Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazan had defined modern literature! \"Nothing is pure, but the film version of this novel brings us a confluence of words. With actors, screenwriter, director, cinematographer, editor, composer that overwhelmed me anew by the complexity, the Aristotelian tractability of life made into art about life intractable.\" And, yes, I can quote myself by heart if I have written it down.\n\nCelebrity! From the Latin \"to celebrate,\" as in: We celebrate them for no reason on earth other than our own pathetic lack of substance. \"You resent the wealth of the people you review,\" Stallone accused me following my review of the unspeakable Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). So withering\u2014and accurate\u2014was my appraisal that it remains a film school staple, trotted out in countless film analysis classesthe world over as \"a perfect example,\" as one lily white professor at the University of Utah once wrote, \"of calling a spade a spade.\"\n\nYes, Sylvester, I resent your wealth, your celebrity, your promiscuity, and your unearned political standing, but none of that has anything to do with the fact that you're an execrable actor in an excremental movie. I had written:   \n\"The deceit in the conceit of an American avenger with steroid pecks, lathered in olive oil, wearing an undulating pubic wig, revising the abject failure of my nation in Vietnam made me laugh, made me sick. The actor wrote the script himself. For himself. It is a masturbatory exegesis on post-Vietnam American male impotence.\" The review was the first time the Daily News had used symbols in its pages to mask someone's use of a perceived profanity. The closing sentence of my review: \"Shame on the egregious makers of this propagandist, populist s***. We lost a war we should have won when we actually fought it.\" My editor urged me to change \"shit\" to \"excrement,\" a variant on excremental, which I had used above, but I insisted that was too polite a word and that I would accept the \"s\" followed by three asterisks. I realized at some point\u2014an incremental understanding\u2014that I despised the male of the species and that there was no word for it. There is misanthropy and misogyny for hatred of mankind and of women, but nothing to denote one's loathing of men, per se. Manthropy lacks the musicality of the other two.\n\nIn the early eighties, I was feminized by Cassandra Rosenblum DeBoom and began to write respectfully of women. Streep, MacLaine, Pfeiffer. Even a kind piece after The Witches of Eastwick about Cher Bono, though I couldn't resist a riff on her competition with Michael Jackson in the torture of the flesh department. I was the first to point out that Nicole Kidman had the talent to be way more than the girlfriend of the modestly talented, big of nose and small of stature Tom Cruise. Cass loved Cruise and thought less of Kidman, accusing me of favoring Kidman because she was   \nthe doppelganger of the six-foot, linear, curly-haired, monster-forehanded Maxine Abigail DeBoom. Directors, producers, studio executives (virtually all men in my formative years) hated me for my perceived bias against their gender (and the gender virtually always at the center of their movies). I gained vigor from their united enmity. My paper and network were threatened over the years with 162 lawsuits for libel (spoken) and slander (written). None ever went to trial. And none was settled out of court with cash. Only twice did people come after me physically. In the first case\u2014Bruce Willis\u2014a gaggle of bodyguards intervened before I squashed his nuts into canned peas. In the second case, I slammed Brian DePalma (whom I had decreed the worst director of the half century, either half), into an upholstered easy chair at a crowded Bar Mitzvah reception and told him I'd rip out his leftover hair, follicle by follicle, if he said one more pompous, self-serving, historically inaccurate word about his place in the canon of moving pictures. This incompetence had just razed Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities (a book I admired and had said so, adding in the finale of the piece that Wolfe was the only writer I considered as intelligently acerbic as I, calling down a torrent of offended blather from the proletariat and snarly rebuke from lovers of the vituperative John Simon). A while ago.\nMigdalia Cruz\n\nexcerpts from\n\nDreams of Home\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 1991\u20131992\n\nPEDRO I am so afraid at night. I cry sometimes. I cry thinkin' my eyes might close and I might fall asleep and wake up in the dark, by myself. I pray to Mary that I don't. I talk to Jesus when I am almost sleeping in the dark and he keeps me up. I stay up for a chat with the only begotten son. He knows how it is. He knows how important it is to stay awake. Things happen when you sleep. Your clothes disappear and you freeze. People touch you and stare. You gotta put on as many clothes as you can in case you nap and somebody tries to get you naked. A man don't let people see him naked in the street. That's weak. That's no good. He gets put someplace or somebody sucks on him. That's weak. You gotta suck first. You gotta look for people to suck on. That's why you got lips. That's why your nose fills up with dirt and you gotta breathe through your mouth . . . so you learn how to suck. Another thing I do is bite my fingers. That's how I know it's almost nighttime. I try to stay in the light, on a street corner, or in a building where rich people live . . . rich people always got lights. And they make loud noises at night. They grind their teeth together and it keeps me up. It's the same as biting my own fingers.\n\n[Pause.]\n\nIt hurts the same too. That's the only bad thing\u2014but I don't need to sleep that much anyway. Not like some people. Some people get their feet beat on by people. And people shake their umbrellas in the sleeping people's faces and throw empty beer cans at them. That's the worst because they're empty. Who wants that? But you can make five cents. Unless it hit you just right\u2014and then it just bounce away from you onto the tracks. And then it's good-bye. But I'm smarter than that. I stay awake. I sleep with one eye all the way open, like the Indians. I got Indian in me. I hold my liquor like an Indian-like this . . .\n\n[He holds a pint of rum between his two hands like he's praying.]\n\nLike a gift from God.\n\n[He hits the floor with his palms like he's playing the congas as the lights fade.]\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\nPEDRO I used to be afraid of the dark. I would fight to keep it away. Stand under bright lights and pray for morning . . . but I couldn't keep it away forever. One day I decided to let it in, to feel the darkness creeping under my nails, into my mouth, through my hair. It was so comfortable there, I thought it would never move. It was just the right place for it . . . so I made friends . . . with the dark. I said welcome and it stayed awhile. It brought some of its friends to nest inside me. Friends with six legs, the four-legged ones came and slept in my pockets. I was not alone in the dark anymore. Life scratched and buzzed and cracked and squeaked all around me. We grew so close. I could tell what they were feeling. A bite on my left arm\u2014hunger\u2014a bite on my right arm\u2014love. I got them figured out. Right now they're both\u2014hungry and in love. Like me. This woman I got lying near me. She's the same.\n\n[Pause.]\n\nMaybe I can catch us something to eat. Maybe I can cook us dinner. We can have a date and dance together. And when we crawl in between the sheets, maybe we'll be alone. That's how you know it's true love\u2014you crawl in together and don't remember nothing else and when you're done doing it, you think about each other's face and you rock together and hold each other and feel safe\u2014not excited or tired or proud\u2014just safer than you ever felt before. Safe without locks or guns or money. Safe in the dark because nobody can tell you you're not where you want to be because nobody can see where you are.\nMurray Schisgal\n\nexcerpt from\n\nThe Man Who Couldn't Stop Crying\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 1997\u20131998\n\nMARCELLO [Overwrought.] Wait! Wait! Don't ring for the elevator, sweetheart. Please. Two minutes, that's all I ask. Darling, I am going to change. There's no question about it. One can change. One has choices, free will. Throughout history we have examples . . .\n\n[Horrified.]\n\nNo, don't! Don't ring for the elevator. I am changing, sweetheart. The process has already begun. Aren't you aware of it? Haven't you noticed? I'm not crying! Do you see me crying? I have no desire to cry. There's nothing to cry about. I am relatively young and healthy and well-off. And I'm happy! Yes, yes, I can say it without embarrassment, I am genuinely happy! Would you like to hear me laugh, darling? I can . . .\n\n[Horrified.]\n\nWhy did you press the elevator button? Don't go, not yet. Sweetheart, look at me. Listen to me. I'm laughing. I am laughing. This is not fake.\n\n[He feigns several varieties of hearty laughter.]\n\nDid you hear me laughing? Did you? It's not fake. It felt wonderful! I thought I'd never be able to laugh again! But I did laugh. I did. And I am happy, honey, and I love life and I love you, darling. More than anything in the world. And, please, please, let me apologize for saying before that you sounded masculine. How stupid of me! You are definitely not masculine. You are feminine, totally and completely! You are so feminine, it frightens me, it . . . Where . . . ? Where are you going?\n\n[Horrified.]\n\nNo, don't walk into the elevator! Don't leave without me! Wait, I'll get my jacket! Pam!\n\n[Offstage, the elevator carries PAMELA down to the lobby. Quickly, MARCELLO takes off bathrobe, tosses it aside, gets jacket from the closet, puts it on, hurries to rear window, where he pulls up linen shade and opens window. During the above, MARCELLO performs a finger-snapping, shuffling step as he sing-songs what follows.]\n\nI am happy. And I am glad, I am laughing 'cause I'm not sad.\n\nLife is good. Life is great. Now is the time to celebrate.\n\n[He stops his sing-song step and feigns several laughs before leaning out of open window; shouts:]\n\nPam! Here, up here! I'll meet you at the Stanhope! I'll be there in a few minutes! Okay? Love you!\n\n[He closes window, and resumes his finger-snapping, shuffling step as he sing-songs what follows.]\n\nI can't be sad,\n\nI must be glad\n\nTo have a life\n\nAnd a loving wife.\n\n[He stops his sing-song step and feigns riotous laughter as he exits, slamming door shut behind him.]\nRonald Ribman\n\nexcerpt from\n\nThe Cannibal Masque\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 1994\u20131995\n\nWhat good's your marks if you can't buy anything with them. Now with American cigarettes a good smoke is always a good smoke, and with people who gotta have them\u2014who can tell?\n\n[Turning the cigarette pack over and over on the table.]\n\nMade a nice friend for myself up in Hamburg last week . . . shop girl, wedding ring on her finger. She sees me smoking one of my cigarettes in a bakery and comes over and wants to buy them. When I tell her I ain't interested in selling them for money, she gets the drift of what I want and starts offering me certain favors in exchange for a carton. That's when I hit her with it. \"I ain't got a carton, lady, all I got's a pack.\" Now you may think that was a pretty good deal, her for a lousy carton of cigarettes, but I could see she was a real smoker and I could tell she was really hurting. You know how some people get when they're really hurting for a cigarette.\n\n[Deeply inhaling and blowing the smoke out.]\n\nI figured the longer I dragged things out, the more I could cut the price down. So I just sat there at the table with her, talking, drinking my coffee, eating a stack of those Linzertortes they make up there with the raspberry jam coming out, and all the time pushing around the pack so she could keep her eyes on it. [. . .] Sure I could of, but that would've been missing the beauty part of it, you see, seeing her squirm. That's just the way I am. So now she's down to a pack, so I say, \"Fifteen.\" For five minutes she's laughing in my face about how she ain't gonna go with me for no fifteen cigarettes, so now I tell her I ain't offering fifteen cigarettes no more. Now I'm offering five, on account of her wasting my time and making me late on my deliveries. She just sits there looking at me like I was crazy, and I'm taking my hi-ho time sucking in smoke, enjoying myself, watching the expression on her face, knowing I got all the cards in the deck because she's hurting for a smoke and I don't really give a shit. Hell, why should I, with those black circles under her eyes, her lips all cracked, and her nails discolored and broken by the famine? Well, the long and the short of it is . . . and this is the real beauty part of it . . . you wanna know what I got her for? A cigarette. One lousy cigarette! After we finished, she's sitting there on the edge of the bed with her hands hanging down between her legs and the smoke coming up from the cigarette, telling me how I've degraded her by buying her for a single cigarette, and how it wouldn't have been so degrading if I had just given her a carton, or at least a pack. What the hell? Why should anybody give more than they have to? Besides, if you're gonna sell yourself for smoke, how is a carton less degrading than one? People sure got crazy ideas about what it takes to humiliate themselves.\n\n[Shouting toward the kitchen.]\n\nLet's go with that pork! I don't have all day! [. . .] Now you take a guy like you. Soon as we started talking, I could tell you had too much class to humiliate yourself over anything, no matter how bad you wanted it. Guys like you would rather croak than come out and ask for it . . . not that asking would do you any good, if you get my drift, because that's just the way I am.\n\n[Putting away the pack of cigarettes.]\nZilvinas Jonusas\n\nexcerpt from\n\nThe Cleaning\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2006\u20132007\n\nJOSEF K. Then why am I constantly reminded that I'm not fit to live, that I'm a sick person, that God will punish me for my . . . Leni . . . I already knew from a very young age that there is something in me I won't be able to change. I knew it from the very first time I saw a naked man and had that strange feeling. . . . It happened on the beach when I was twelve. Every summer my mother, my brother, and I would go and spend our days there. One day I had the urge to go and look around. After I wandered away from my mother and my brother I found myself in the dunes with naked men lying all around me. The excitement of seeing those men took over me and I sat on a bench and started looking at them. A guy as old as I am now approached me. He sat down on the bench next to me. He pointed to one of the older men on the dunes and said: \"This man is not a good man. You should not listen what he says to you.\" And right after that he asked me if he could suck my pee-pee. It sounded very strange to me, but it was exactly what I wanted to hear at that moment. When I heard those words, I thought that all the water from my body had evaporated. My mouth was dry as the Sahara Desert. After a moment of trying to say something, I just nodded, and followed him to the dunes to have what I wanted to have. Time stopped then. Later I regretted what I did. I heard that it was wrong and that it's a deadly sin to have sex with men. But, surprisingly, at that moment it was so right that I completely forgot about time. I remember how we got undressed, I remember the guy asking me if I had done this before. Even though that was my very first time I knew what to do with the guy. . . . I remember how the guy came. I remember how suddenly I realized that my mother and my brother were probably looking for me. Without even saying a word I jumped into my shorts and ran to the sea to wash off all that excitement and guilt. My throat was even dryer. I tried to wash it down with the salty sea water, but it just got worse. . . . God, I'm so thirsty.\n\n[The sound of pouring water into a glass is heard.]\n\nI saw my brother looking at me with a strange look as if he had seen me with that man. Later I realized that he actually did see me going after the man to the dunes. . . . He just kept saying: \"This man is bad. This man is bad.\" From that day on, I was secretly visiting the same beach area (I could not stop myself from going there as often as I could.) Even if nothing would happen, I needed to see them. Every time after I would finish with one man or another I would run into the water to wash that something which was unwashable. Every time I would go home with that feeling that everybody knew what I was doing. . . . I had to hide myself inside a thick shell. I dived into studying and sports. I made myself busy all the time just to forget who I really am. The strange thing was that in the meantime I still was able to fall in love with girls. I thought that I am (was) \"normal.\" But somehow I never wanted to touch a woman's body the way I liked to touch a man's. Somehow I never felt with a woman as close as I was with another man. The real understanding of a man's love came to me much later. It came after I met you, Leni. I remember that day. You were leaning next to a wall and were wearing exactly the same outfit as you are wearing right now. You were beaming that strange light which attracts men as bees to the honey. You approached me and asked if I would be interested in having a glass of champagne with you later. I said yes, and our evening finished in somebody's house. Even though we were sleeping completely dressed, my fingers were able to feel your wet desire. I believe we kissed each other the whole night. Then we had another \"glass of champagne\" night. I remember feeling my body erect for such a long time, that it was hurting me beyond words. But it was different. Something really important was missing. Later on I learned about your child. I really felt grown up then, even though I was only twenty-one at the time. I was already thinking about what a good father I could be to him. . . . One evening you introduced me to your best friend. That was when my whole life went crashing down on me, because I was thinking of getting married to you, but after that night . . . I had a rum with your best friend and realized that drinking champagne with you was just an image I wanted to have. Leni, my reality was rum, not champagne. I know you are probably disgusted by me right now, but your friend was who I wanted to be with for the rest of my life.\nClay McLeod Chapman\n\nbirdfeeder\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2007\u20132008\n\none of five monologues collected by Daniel Gallant under the heading Five Story Walkup\n\nWasn't until winter when word finally got around about Michael, a group of hunters discovering his body about three miles into the woods. First day of deer hunting season usually brings back a month's worth of venison stretched along the front hood of every Chevrolet in town\u2014only this year, most trucks came back bare, their empty fenders still caked in a crust of dried blood from last season's kill. Looked that way, at least. Maybe it was just rust. Instead of heading to Sally's Tavern, where everyone parks their cars to compare their quarry, seeing who has the citation, who brought back the biggest buck, sneaking their beers out into the parking lot even though they know it's against the law, Sally turning a blind eye to her customers as they buy their beer and duck out the door again\u2014this afternoon, first day of deer hunting season\u2014most men just rushed right over to Sheriff Flaherty's office on their own, as sober as a bunch of newborn babies, leading him and a handful of his officers up Route 2, right where the highway lines up alongside the woods, nothing but miles and miles worth of trees, parking their trucks in the ditch just next to the road and cutting through the forest. Heading right to Michael. They say it was John Whalthorne who found him. He'd been following this buck for about a half mile, keeping his distance until he knew he had a clear shot\u2014his eyes wandering through the woods by way of the scope attached to his rifle\u2014only to catch some color in his crosshairs, this flash of blue. Turns out to be Michael's Levi's. The weather had washed the brightness out, months' worth of rain rinsing the dye away\u2014his favorite pair of pants having faded into this phantom hue. This baby, baby blue. His bones were nothing but wind chimes now, knocking up against each other in the breeze. Birds had begun to take him away, one peck at a time\u2014plucking what pieces of him they could pull free with their beaks, bit by bit. He looked like a birdfeeder up there, hanging from that branch. Everyone knows the woods is where you go when you want to keep a secret. The deeper into these trees you reach, the darker the secret you want to keep. Only secrets I've ever kept are of Michael. He'd lay a leaf against my chest, watching it rise and fall with every breath\u2014the frond mimicking my rib cage, only smaller, as if it were two chests pressed against each other. His breath always tasted of cigarettes, like dried leaves at the back of his mouth. My father always thought the two of us were sneaking off into the woods to have ourselves a smoke, smelling cigarettes on my breath every time I'd come home\u2014but the funny thing was, I never had a cigarette in all of my life. Only Michael. We'd make our way to this clearing in the trees, taking the entire day just to walk there\u2014hiking farther and farther into the forest, until there was nothing around us. Nothing at all. Not the hum of a truck, not the whir of some lawn mower. Not another human being for miles. We'd lay on our backs, slipping out of our T-shirts\u2014feeling what sun could make its way through the trees, these specks of light resting themselves on our chests. That's where I'd kiss him, letting every patch of light lead my lips across his body\u2014as if the sun were saying, Kiss him there. And\u2014Kiss him there. Thinking about Michael out there, all winter. Hanging by that branch, the tension in his neck relenting more and more. Thinking about his body breaking down, changing colors. Shifting pigments. Thinking about all those birds swooping down, pecking at his neck. Tugging on his lips as if they were earthworms. Taking away what they could carry back to their babies, dangling his lips over their beaks, feeding his kisses to their family. You know, it wouldn't have been far off for people to believe Michael had run away, having done it a couple times already. Only difference is, he'd always come back. Whether it was a few hours or a day on the road, Michael would always make his way home. So when it reached a week, his mother started to worry. Like really worry. But by then Michael was already in the woods, slowly disappearing\u2014trying to hide himself inside the stomachs of every animal willing to nibble on him. Thinking\u2014Nobody would ever look for me in here. Thinking\u2014It's safer inside these stomachs. The weather and elements had decimated the rest of his clothes, chewing through his T-shirt until it was nothing but scraps of fabric. You couldn't even recognize the Metallica decal ironed along the front. The e and the t were just about the only letters left. The others had peeled free, flaking off into the air. I was there when he bought that shirt, wearing it to school the very next day. I remember how firm it felt when it was new, like cardboard, the cotton starting off all stiff, the creases in its sleeves keeping crisp for weeks\u2014before it finally descend into its tenderness. He loved that shirt. He would pull it off and place it under my head, as a pillow\u2014the two of us resting on the ground, looking up at the sky just above us, a few stars hanging over our heads, the trees blocking out the rest, braided by branches, as if I'd put both of my hands right over my face, a latticework of fingers hiding the sky from my eyes. We'd spend the night out in the woods, telling our parents that we were sleeping over at each other's house. Holding him, I remember listening to the trees warping over our heads, every bending branch making this squealing sound in the dark\u2014until it almost sounded like my arms were bending as well, the weight of Michael in my grip causing my limbs to twist. What if someone finds out about us? What do we do then? Don't worry, he said. We're safe out here. He was wearing those blue jeans the last time I saw him, nearly six months ago now. Pretty much wore those pants every day of his life, anyhow\u2014but I know it was when we were together last, when I last laid eyes on him, that I was the last person to see him alive. Because there was no note, no cry for help. Just his body breaking down. People keep asking me why. Why would he head out into the woods alone and hang himself, waiting out there all winter for someone to find him? Suddenly I'm an authority on his unhappiness? I'm the expert on what makes him tick? Even Michael's mother's come to me, desperate for some sense of closure, just so she won't have to blame herself for what happened. You were his best friend, Sean. He would've talked to you about these things. . . . Did he ever mention depression? Did he ever say anything about suicide? I knew he was out there. When Michael first disappeared, I went out into the woods by myself\u2014going to the only place where I felt safe, where I could be alone. And that's when I saw him, swaying. His head bowed against his chest. It was better for someone else to find him. Someone other than me. If I'd been the one to take Sheriff Flaherty out into the woods, other questions would get asked. Questions like: What were you doing out there in the first place? What were you two boys doing so far out in the forest, alone? Questions like that don't stop themselves from getting asked, even if you provide an answer. In a town as small as this, sometimes\u2014the answer isn't what people are after. Sometimes they want your secrets. That's what frightened Michael more than anything. That's what sent him out into the woods by himself. Sometimes, saying your lips are sealed isn't enough. The best way to keep a secret is to cinch your throat shut, cutting off the air that cushions your deepest, darkest truths. Deer hunting season would come in a few months, only for someone to stumble upon him. They'd rush back for Sheriff Flaherty, dragging him through the woods, cutting Michael's body down. Doing it properly. Until then, I'd know where I could find him. I'd know where he'd be. I've kept him secret for six months now, never mentioning Michael to anyone\u2014because there are more secrets where that came from. More than I can count.\n\nI keep his eyes, as blue as his jeans. I keep his lips, as thin as earthworms. I keep the taste of his mouth out in those woods. Nobody knows about him and me out here.\nDaniel Frederick Levin\n\nA Glorious Evening\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2007\u20132008\n\none of five monologues collected by Daniel Gallant under the heading Five Story Walkup\n\n[HARRY is sitting at a table with a flower on it, looking out at the audience. The level of realism for the following is low, particularly for processes that occur: Delivery should be understated, acted with restraint, with only perhaps a hint of emotion at the end.]\n\nHARRY [Pause.] I'm really looking forward to tonight. How are you feeling . . . are you cold? Good. . . . It was really beautiful out tonight, wasn't it? Did you notice there was like a sweet smell in the air when you were coming here? And a good sweet smell, not a bad sweet smell that you don't know where it's coming from. A good sweet smell, I don't know, it's probably some early flowers, some mulch thawing out, a little wood, probably some sulfates. God, you look . . . So, my cell phone is off, computer off, Blackberry, don't have one. The TV is sleeping for the night, the radio . . . the radio, maybe a far\u00adoff wisp of a jazz song, if anything. But thank God those are all inventions. Thank God we don't really need any of those things. Thank God all we need is . . . this. I made a few, eh-em, improvements.\n\n[Indicating flower.]\n\nThere's one of these on the bathtub ledge, for the bath before we . . . didn't draw the water yet. I didn't want it to get cold. But I figure that's maybe when we can listen to that jazz, you know? Is there anything better than listening to jazz against running water? And we'll find a station with not that many instruments. Just maybe a saxophone . . . and a bass . . . just that. No piano. We don't need piano.\n\n[Smiles.]\n\nI love you. Are you sure you're not cold? Hot? I can open the window more.\n\n[Realizing something.]\n\nYou know what? I think I forgot to brush my teeth. I'm . . . do you need anything? Okay.\n\n[HARRY makes tooth-brushing motion, not that realistic.]\n\nI'm brushing my teeth. I'm brushing my teeth. I'm brushing my teeth. I'm brushing my teeth. I'm brushing my teeth. I'm brushing my teeth. I'm brushing my tongue. I'm spitting. I'm rinsing. I'm back. Hi. Did I miss much?\n\n[Pause.]\n\nI have plenty of protection. And it's the gentle kind. Everything is taken care of. There's nothing at all to worry about.\n\n[He breathes.]\n\nWhat a glorious night. Temperature is right. Smell is right. Sound is good. Vision is wonderful. Touch will be amazing. Taste will be . . . pretty good, well worth it. Well worth it. Smell. Sound. Sight. Touch. Taste. Smell. Sound. Sight. Touch. Taste. Smell. Sound . . . I need just one sec. Will you   \nbe all right for a sec? Excuse me. [He pauses. Stands up.] I'm using the bathroom, I'm using the bathroom, I'm using the bathroom, I'm using the bathroom, I'm using the bathroom, I'm using . . . [Pause.] I'm using the bathroom the other way, I'm using the bathroom, I'm reaching for the switch, I'm using the bathroom, I'm using the bathroom, I'm trying to be quiet, I'm using the bathroom, I'm using the bathroom, I'm using the bathroom, I'm using the bathroom, I'm looking for matches, I'm using the bathroom, I'm using the bathroom, I'm using the bathroom, I'm using the bathroom, I'm finishing up, I'm finishing, I think, I'm ripping off paper. . . . I'm ripping off again, and ripping off again . . . and again . . . and again . . . and I think I'm finished . . . and I'm finished . . . and I'm finished, I'm done. Hi. Sorry about that. Now I just feel . . . perfect. Are you feeling all right?\n\n[Rapid fire.]\n\nCold hot bored wired up down shy bold deaf blind stifled? Y'sure?\n\n[Sighs.]\n\nIt's such a beautiful evening. There's this mood . . . this . . . well, it's the jazz . . . it's . . .\n\n[Noticing something.]\n\nI'm having a little trouble swallowing. I'm having trouble swallowing. I'm having trouble swallowing. It's like choking, but I can breathe. I'm having trouble swallowing.\n\n[Louder.]\n\nI'm having trouble swallowing! It passed.\n\n[He breathes for a moment.]\n\nI was saying, swallow, it's like the jazz, best on an, swallow, old record, swallow again, I'm thinking about swallowing, I'm thinking about swallowing, I'm thinking about swallowing, I feel hot. Are you Okay? I have a little more saliva. It seems to have passed. It seems to have passed.\n\n[He sighs again.]\n\nWhat a beautiful . . . I just can't wait. I can't wait for later. I want to first draw that bath. Then I want to go to the bathroom. I want to swallow. I want to be quiet. I want to fantasize. I want to do everything . . . I want to feel intense, intense pleasure. I'm so excited, you know? Would you mind leaving? Right now? It's really beautiful out. You'll get to smell that sweet smell. Remember? The mulch? Now. Go on. Leave. Go on. Get out of here. Get out of here. Get out!\n\n[Bringing himself under control and retreating back.]\n\nSwallow.\n\nBreathe.\n\nSwallow.\n\nBreathe.\n\nI'm imagining.\n\nI'm breathing.\n\nI'm really looking forward to tonight.\nMurray Schisgal\n\nThe Artist and the Model\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 1994\u20131995\n\ncharacters\n\nBROMBERG is in his late sixties. But he is a vigorous man, with little slackness; his eyes burn with a fierce, truculent intensity. And yet he is old; his hair is in need of a haircut, his face a shave, his nails a brushing. Oddly, he seems to be in a great hurry, poised for movement.\n\nANGELICA is a non-speaking participant, not particularly attractive. Nor unattractive. She is Latino or Mediterranean. She is in her twenties or early thirties, with a strong, solid, full-breasted body. Her abundant flesh fairly bursts with her naked womanhood. The role requires a professional model. Her actions are prompted by three considerations: (1) she needs the job; (2) she is acutely aware of BROMBERG's age and isolation; (3) she is in awe of his talent, his ability to create beautiful things.\n\nscene\n\nBROMBERG's studio in Tribeca.\n\ntime\n\n1994. Winter. Twenty-two minutes after eight o'clock in the morning.\n\n[Lights. BROMBERG is seated on a paint-encrusted, white, straight-backed kitchen chair of the forties, downstage, right; his large, veined hands rest on his knees; between his knees is a darkly varnished cane. A rectangular sketchpad leans against the downstage leg of the chair. Farther to the right upstage is a plant stand on which there is a potted plant, leafy and vibrantly green. A tin watering can is on the floor beside it. On the left, mid-stage, is a model's platform covered with a worn faded oriental carpet. If there is any discernible expression on BROMBERG's face, it is one of displeasure, if not anger. He wears slightly paint-splattered, baggy white housepainter's pants; heavily paint-splattered, ankle-high work shoes; a bleached, clean, pressed denim shirt with sleeves rolled above his elbows\u2014sticks of charcoal, pens, and pencils protrude from his shirt's breast pocket. Shortly ANGELICA enters. She is late. She has been running. She tries to repress the sound of her breathlessness. She removes, quickly, her coat, scarf, knitted cap. It is cold out, although a bright sun shines through the unseen skylight. BROMBERG's eyes hold fast to her. He clenches his jaw to prevent himself from speaking. ANGELICA throws her things on an ancient, brown, wicker chair that is left, angled towards platform. A vintage paisley shawl lies across the armchair. Without a pause, ANGELICA removes her street shoes, skirt, cardigan sweater, blouse, white athletic socks, pantyhose, bra, and panties; all are thrown on the armchair or, inadvertently, on the floor. A salvaged wooden box with a dozen or so art books on it is at the side of the armchair, downstage. As soon as she's undressed, she steps up on the platform, waits to receive instructions. She is unable to return BROMBERG's fixed, obtrusive stare. She invariably turns away from him to look down at the carpet or across at a wall or at whatever object affords her refuge. Initially BROMBERG's voice is a low-spoken growl, a mumble, a muttering of words.]\n\nBROMBERG If you remember . . . when I first retained you to model for me . . . months ago . . . I asked if it was possible for you to be here at six o'clock in the morning . . . since I get up at five o'clock in the morning and by six o'clock in the morning I am anxious to start my work.\n\n[A pause.]\n\nYou answered by saying it would be impossible for you to arrive before eight o'clock in the morning because . . . you had to take the subway from your apartment in the Bronx . . . down to my studio. You said you were afraid to ride the subway so early in the morning.\n\n[A pause. ANGELICA stands on the platform. Shortly she will instinctively lower her hands in front of her pubic hair.]\n\nI said you could work for me if you arrived here promptly at eight o'clock in the morning; no later; promptly at eight o'clock in the morning. On those days I required . . . your services. You agreed. You agreed knowing full well that when I'm scheduled to work with you . . . I am incapable of doing any other work until you arrive. That means from the hour of six o'clock in the morning until . . . eight o'clock in the morning . . . I am waiting . . . I am waiting for you to arrive.\n\n[A pause. He breathes audibly, as if he has exhausted himself; yet his voice becomes more didactic, firm, angry.]\n\nI don't imagine you have any idea what that's like. To wait . . . two hours . . . two whole hours. Substantive. Time. When the body and mind are . . . energized . . . poised to grapple and do battle with the . . . the illusive. In-val-u-able hours that can never be . . . captured, recycled, like soda bottles, beer cans . . . yesterday's garbage.\n\n[A pause. ANGELICA folds her arms across her chest; she is cold.]\n\nI imagine that at six o'clock in the morning you're still wrapped in your boyfriend's arms . . . without a care or frustrated bone in your body. While I wait . . . to work . . . to fill my lungs with mouthfuls of fresh air, oxygen, to be able to . . . to breathe.\n\n[A pause.]\n\nI believe I told you on more than one occasion that when I am not working . . . I have difficulty . . . breathing. This difficulty increases the longer I am unable to work. Tension builds. My heart . . . palpitates, a-rhyth-mic-a-lly. My abdominal muscles . . . cramp. My lungs feel like they're . . . co-llap-sing. I have to work so I can breathe. So I won't die . . . of suff-o-ca-tion.\n\n[A pause. He rises, walks to the rear right, leaning on his cane; his disabled leg is stiff, as if tied to a board; he moves it along, not with pain or excessive effort. He stands at rear and looks through an unseen wall window. During the above, ANGELICA runs to armchair, grabs her thigh-length cardigan sweater, puts it on, buttons it, and returns to stand on platform.]\n\nTwo hours and twenty-two minutes I waited for you this morning. An intolerable amount of time. For someone who is . . . suffocating. I would send you home, right now! This minute! If I could replace you, find someone else, anyone else, immediately, without delay, so I could work. Finally.\n\n[A pause.]\n\nBut since I can't on such short notice . . . and since I refuse to waste any more time with this . . . this rubbish! Be advised that this is the last day of your employment with me. Be so advised. When you leave these premises at the end of the day, I do not wish to see you again.\n\n[A pause. He walks to plant stand, picks up watering can and waters plant. His voice is a soft, controlled drone, with specified pauses, words frequently spoken reflectively to himself.]\n\nI want you out of my life. Once and for all. I have no need of this . . . agitation. I'll get someone in here who's prompt and appreciative and who is a little more fastidious in her toilette. A woman of some class, sophistication. I won't have to listen to your endless whining, the endless gossip I've been subjected to. Relentlessly. Relentlessly. No more late-night horror stories about your . . . liaisons, your . . . debaucheries, your Peter, Peter, Richie, Richie, your hordes of former employers! That . . . That grubby second-rate poseur Ostrovski, that no talent, minusculist pissoir, Magenetti, your pathetic pap-art petomane, Wilberquist. Work for them, why don't you?\n\n[He turns to her.]\n\nThey're begging you to go back to them, aren't they? How many times have they phoned you, written to you, waited on your doorstep for you to come home at two, three in the morning!\n\n[Mimics sarcastically.]\n\nOh, please, my sweet, dear Angelica, please, come back and pose for me! Leave that monster Bromberg, that old, demented, loathsome, egomaniacal cripple! I beg you, Angelica. I can't paint without you, Angelica. I can't create without you, Angelica. You're the best, the most beautiful, the most desirable model in the whole . . .\n\n[Suddenly explodes, wagging cane.]\n\nGo! Get out of here! To hell with you! I can't work today. You've made it impossible! Out! Out! I want you out of here!\n\n[ANGELICA moves to armchair, finds her panties amidst pile of clothes. As she's about to put them on, BROMBERG shakes his head, eyes tightly closed; quietly.]\n\nNo.\n\n[A pause.]\n\nNo. No.\n\n[Anguished.]\n\nI . . . I can't afford to . . . waste . . . anymore . . . time.\n\n[Shakes his head.]\n\nI can't.\n\n[ANGELICA stares at him. BROMBERG opens his eyes. A breath. Firmly.]\n\nStay. I have to get something done, something . . . started. For today. Just today. Finish your work. You'll be paid.\n\n[ANGELICA places her panties in cardigan sweater's pocket, takes off sweater, steps on platform and assumes pose #1: one that says I have no ill will towards you; I want to help you draw something beautiful. BROMBERG sits on kitchen chair, lays cane on floor; he picks up sketchpad, places it on his lap, turns pages, examining previous drawings\u2014none of them pleases him. He finds a clean page, takes charcoal from shirt pocket and begins sketching ANGELICA. Now and then we hear the stick of charcoal scratching across the sheet of paper. BROMBERG is content. His breathing comes naturally. In a moment he appraises his sketch. He is dissatisfied with it. He turns the page and starts again. A smile breaks on his face.]\n\nSo who is it this week? Peter or Richie? Did your mother convince you that an unemployed gas-station attendant is preferable to an apprentice butcher? No gossip today? No little tidbits of blue-collar erotica? How about your girlfriend Gloria? Is she having the baby or has the notorious gigolo, Alphonso the Barber, persuaded her that an aborted fetus is next to Godliness? What about your cousin, the disco king? Did he test positive? Did he ever discover the culprit of his concern?\n\n[He sketches a bit.]\n\nYou poor young people nowadays. You don't know how pathetic you all are. Scrounging in the garbage dumps for momentary pleasures. In a rotting city. A rotting country. Second-rate. Sliding inexorably into mediocrity. The land of no-more opportunity. Shrinking horizons. Guns and condoms hanging from the gnarled, yellow beak of a bald-headed eagle. America, America, thou hast seen thy day of glory and now lie barren and desiccated under the cold, barren sun.\n\n[Concentrates on sketch for a bit.]\n\nI don't imagine in your vast reading of American history you learned that there was such a thing in the early forties as a World War designated numero duo. It was thanks to that effort of moralistic futility that I'm compelled to drag this warped leg about like a superfluous erection. Oh, don't tax your fragile psyche and try to make sense of this. It was an event of no consequence. An irony. A glitch. God, to have lived to see how it all turned out. Where it ended. Where we are today and what it was like then. Poor bastards. Lambs led to the slaughter. Parades and Dole pineapple juice. Poor, poor bastards.\n\n[A pause.]\n\nNow here we are, in the cesspool of the nineties, remembering . . . nothing. An event of no consequence.\n\n[Sharply.]\n\nChange pose!\n\n[ANGELICA assumes pose #2: she's annoyed, doesn't understand why BROMBERG is talking so much this morning. Her stance is provocative, seductive, an attempt to get him to concentrate on his work. BROMBERG turns page, sketches for a while; we hear the charcoal scratching the page; speaks softly, almost to himself.]\n\nI remember, once during the war, I was standing alone . . . in a bar in Tijuana . . . drinking a Four Roses and ginger ale.\n\n[He laughs, amused by his sophomoric choice of drink.]\n\nI was all of eighteen years. I don't know where my friends were, probably in a whorehouse. I don't know why I wasn't with them. I usually was. I remember . . . looking up from my drink and I saw, sitting beside me, a young woman, no older than myself. We started talking. I said something funny and she laughed. We exchanged stories, experiences, revealed intimate secrets. We had, along the way, a few drinks. We were high but not drunk. Lifted to that height of reality where we were slightly off the ground . . . and sight and sound were . . . brilliantly vivid . . . Incandescent.\n\n[A pause.]\n\nWhat was her name, that young woman in a bar in Tijuana, during the Second World War? I don't know. Her hair was ocher, amber, topaz. Her eyes were made of bits of mica, glittering specks of turquoise. Her mouth . . . Pale. Pink. Full. Her teeth, her cheeks . . . I can see her now. I can taste and smell the soft scent of her. The closeness of her.\n\n[A pause.]\n\nThere was a jukebox. A dance floor. We danced, on that height of reality that was . . . incandescent. What was her name? I don't know. But I remember the song . . . we danced to.\n\n[Quietly, he speak-sings the lyrics, emphatically pronouncing a word here and there; a similar period song may be used.]\n\n\"Just kiss me once, then kiss me . . . twice, then kiss me . . . once again, it's been a . . . long . . . long . . . time. Haven't felt like . . . this . . . my dear . . . since can't remember when . . .\"\n\n[Voice fades out; he tries to sketch; gives it up.]\n\n\"When do you have to be back at the base?\" I believe she asked me. \"Not until tomorrow afternoon,\" I lied. \"Stay with me.\" Did she say that? Yes. She did. \"Stay with me.\" \"I'd like that. Very much,\" I replied. Oh, yes. Ohhh, yes, yes, yes. I would like that very much. \"The bus to San Diego is leaving in a few minutes,\" she said. \"I have to say good-bye to my girlfriends,\" she said. \"I'll meet you on the bus,\" she said. She moved her face closer to mine; her lips barely a breath away. \"I'll be on the bus,\" I said, with all the manhood I could muster, getting up and running out . . . getting on the bus that was jammed to the rafters with sailors and civilians and . . .\n\n[A pause; softly.]\n\nChange pose.\n\n[Pose #3: ANGELICA thinks of herself as BROMBERG's young woman in Tijuana; her pose is as lovely and as simple as she can make it. BROMBERG turns page, sketches.]\n\nMy heart is beating so fast at this . . . minute . . . I feel like a fool. Anyway . . . inside the bus, I waited for her, to get on, to join me, thinking, sweating, I should get off, I should find her, I should cry out, \"Wait! I'm getting off! Excuse me! Excuse me!\" But would you believe that the bus was already moving and she wasn't on it and I was traveling to San Diego . . . without her? Would you believe . . . that I never saw her again and up until this minute . . .\n\n[A sigh.]\n\nI never told anyone about her. Not wife numero uno, wife numero duo, mistresses and lovers from numero uno to . . . infinity. I told no one. From fear of embarrassment by the in-con-se-quen-ti-ality of that . . . innocuous encounter. In Tijuana. Some fifty years ago. During the war to save democracy. What was her name?\n\n[Shakes his head.]\n\nI don't know.\n\n[Sketches; laughs softly.]\n\nYou do think you're living a life. Peter, Peter, Richie, Richie.\n\n[He laughs.]\n\nYou have no idea. What life could be. What life was. After . . . After the war. Those who survived. We were in the center of the world. Right here. In this cesspool of a city. There was more happening within blocks of this studio, on canvas, than anywhere else in God's creation. Did you ever hear of a fellow named de Kooning? Pollock? Gorky? Rothko? Smith? Motherwell? My sweet, dear friend, Jimmy Ernst? Of course not! Why should you? You know Oooostrovski! Maaaga-ne-tta! Wilber-petomane-quist! Those fraudulent imitators of neo-moderne bile and excrement!\n\n[Sharply.]\n\nChange pose!\n\n[Pose #4: ANGELICA is quite peeved by BROMBERG's constant assault on her personal life. Her pose is mean-spirited, aggressive, defiant. BROMBERG sees through it; sharply:]\n\nChange pose!\n\n[Pose #5. She holds a particularly horrific pose. At once BROMBERG responds.]\n\nChange pose!\n\n[ANGELICA gives in. Pose #6: a rather ordinary innocuous one. BROMBERG turns page, sketches, the charcoal scratching the paper.]\n\nBut then . . . back then . . . we were a community. What an endearing word that is. Community. How rich one felt being part of . . . a . . . community. Part of a group, a tribe, a band of brigands who congregated . . . together. Every night partying at the Cedar's or San Remos's or downstairs at Louie's. Every day at our ateliers, showing one another what we were working on, talking about, arguing about it, competing, putting down, raising up, but always respecting what was original, what was right, what was good. That, too, was . . . together.\n\n[A pause.]\n\nIn a city. In a country: Of endless opportunities. Burgeoning horizons. Supreme confidence. In the first full flush of being numero uno.\n\n[Sketches awhile.]\n\nYou had to be around in the sixties to know what I'm talking about. Free. Free at last. The pictures that run through my mind are those of naked, flower-haloed young people, celebrating under the crimson-tinted open sky. Carpe diem.   \nOf thee I sing.\n\n[A pause.]\n\nWhat an unforgettable decade. So much happened. Was experienced. That's when making love was such a dance. Hedonism unbridled. Love on the run. Orgasm apotheosized. Ohhh, it does the heart wonders to reflect on it.\n\n[Tone of voice gradually changes.]\n\nBut those are circumstances that young people nowadays have no way of knowing. Believe me, I am sorry for you. Do not mistake my . . . outspokenness for a lack of compassion. For an expression in insensitivity. I truly pity you young people nowadays. A night of making love carries with it the horrendous onus of mortality. One forbidden excursion is potentially an act of suicide. How horrible the times. Guns and condoms in the gnarled, yellow beak of a bald-headed eagle. Oh, the horror of it all.\n\n[A pause.]\n\nI assume you practice safe sex. I assume you have sufficient intelligence to speak frequently on the subject with your Peter, Peter and Richie, Richie and whoever else you might be temporarily co-habitating with.\n\n[Firmly.]\n\nChange pose.\n\n[Pose #7: the pose is in the main ANGELICA \"mooning\" BROMBERG. BROMBERG barks.]\n\nChange pose!\n\n[Pose #8: she juts her pelvis out towards him in a whorish pose. BROMBERG is intrigued by it; sketches, scratching charcoal on paper.]\n\nThere's so much that's screwed-up nowadays. It's an ideal age to grow old. One doesn't quite regret as much saying good\u00adbye to the slime and disease and bloodletting that's drowning us. I wouldn't have liked, for anything, being old in the sixties, but being old in the nineties is something of a blessing.\n\n[He smiles with the thought of it.]\n\nOne can stand on the side and observe the pathetic little lives lived by you . . . people. I often wonder what it is you look forward to, what dreams and fantasies you have, what you believe in that makes all the . . . horror of it worthwhile. I can't for the life of me imagine what it is. Marriage? Does that still exist for you young people? I understand the divorce rate is above fifty percent and that's not counting the number of husbands and wives who walk out the door, never to be heard from again.\n\n[A pause.]\n\nFamily? Is that still a viable option? I would think as the years go by there'll be less and less of that. I would think we're witnessing the last vestiges of a worn-out social convention that has overstayed its usefulness. How many single mothers are there nowadays? How many couples live together without benefit of church or state? No, no, family is an impractical goal nowadays. Not very realistic. You'll probably end up with some jerk, you'll have his brats, he'll walk out and some other jerk will probably walk in to take his place.\n\n[Sharply.]\n\nChange pose!\n\n[He stops sketching; stares at ANGELICA, fixedly. Pose #9: ANGELICA has had it; she poses indifferently, repeating poses she's done previously, anticipating his call for a changed pose and posing anew even before he commands her to do so.]\n\nDid you become impatient? Did you move in with somebody already? Richie, Richie? Peter, Peter? Ostrovski? Maganetta? One of the innumerable suitors who wait on your doorstep every morning? Change pose!\n\n[Pose #10: a fantastical \"in flight\" pose, arms flung outwards, one leg raised.]\n\nWhat about your mother? The one person I ever heard you say you had feelings for. Did you just leave her with your young sisters? Is that what she deserves from you? Change pose!\n\n[Pose #11: another far-fetched pose.]\n\nChange pose!\n\n[Pose #12: and another.]\n\nI thought you wanted more out of your life than a pinch on the ass and a quick lay! Change pose!\n\n[Pose #13: and another.]\n\nI thought you were interested in making something of yourself, of giving your life value, of . . .\n\n[ANGELICA has had enough. Furiously, she moves to armchair, dresses quickly. BROMBERG scrambles to pick up his cane; rises, continues, heedlessly.]\n\n. . . of becoming a productive, committed, caring human being!\n\n[Shouts commandingly.]\n\nChange pose!\n\n[ANGELICA pays him no mind. BROMBERG shouts again.]\n\nChange pose! Change pose! I thought you had a passion, passion for books, a passion for painting and music and, and beautiful things! Was that all rot you were giving me? Were you lying, deceiving a man who trusted and believed in you? Is that how you treat people? Is that the extent of your humanitarianism?\n\n[Pants for a beat or two.]\n\nI did not dismiss you! I did not say you could go! I said you would be paid if you worked until the end of the day! The end of the day! Otherwise you don't get a penny from me! Not a penny! Now get back on there and we'll . . . we'll continue . . . we'll . . . go on . . .\n\n[Loudly; in despair.]\n\nI cannot waste the day! No matter how much I'd enjoy kicking you out of here! I have . . . my work . . . to do! I have to . . . Change pose! Change pose! Change . . .\n\n[He swallows huge mouthfuls of air, watches, helplessly, as ANGELICA finishes dressing. She picks up her coat, scarf, knitted cap and is about to leave. A whisper.]\n\nAngelica.\n\n[She turns to look at him. Softly.]\n\nWhere were you last night? I wanted, very much, to talk to you. I felt . . . not tired. I took the subway up to your neighborhood and I . . . From a candy store I phoned you. I thought we'd have a cup of coffee together and . . . talk together. I spoke to your mother. She said you were out. She didn't know where. So I . . . I waited, on your doorstep. Until morning. Two . . . three . . . in the morning. You didn't show up.\n\n[Forces a smile.]\n\nI won't make that mistake again. I had no sleep. For a man my age . . . that's a great . . . sacrifice.\n\n[ANGELICA moves to him. She puts her arms around his waist and hugs him tightly, pressing her head to his chest. BROMBERG, hands are at his sides, one hand holding his cane. ANGELICA raises her face and kisses him on the mouth, long and hard; passionately. BROMBERG doesn't move, doesn't react. ANGELICA backs away from him, her eyes on him. Abruptly, she turns and exits. BROMBERG stands stiffly, his eyes fixed on the offstage door for several beats. Using his cane, he makes his way to stand on the platform, center, facing front. He drops his cane, unbuttons his shirt, takes it off, drops it on top of the cane. He touches his naked chest with outspread hand, runs his hand over his chest, slowly, once, pressing hard, feeling his warm flesh under his fingers. Hands at his sides, he inhales deeply, tasting the oxygen in his lungs. Exhales. He does this once again. Slowly. Deliberately. Clenching the summation of breath in the fibers of his being. Hands at sides, he raises them, slowly, over his head; his fingertips touch. Slowly he brings his hands down to his sides. He does this once again. Each movement felt throughout his body. Lights begin to fade as he continues with his exercises. Hands splayed on his hips, he moves his torso to the left. Then center. Then to the right. Then center. He does this once again. Slowly. Deliberately. He stretches his arms out forward, slowly moves them perpendicular to his body. Etc. Lights fade out.]\nPeter Maloney\n\nWitness\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2006\u20132007\n\nplace\n\nAbu Ghraib Prison, Iraq\n\ntime\n\nApril 2004\n\n[Sound of metal door slamming very loudly. At same time lights bump up. Shouts of prisoners, dogs barking somewhere. KASIM sits on the lower bunk of an iron bed. There is no mattress, only a plywood board. KASIM wears an orange jumpsuit. He holds a baseball in one hand and regards it. He opens his mouth wide, as if he wants to take a bite of the baseball. He looks up at us.]\n\nKASIM It occurs to me . . . perhaps they thought we eat these things. That they thought it is some kind of fruit, and that we eat it. I could have told them that this is not indigenous to Iraq, that baseballs do not grow on trees here. And that, in any case, it is not a fruit. But they do not speak my language. And the translator was not there when they tried to feed it to me.\n\n[KASIM looks at the baseball. He opens his mouth as wide as possible. He closes his mouth, looks at us.]\n\nIt barely fit into my mouth. They had to break two teeth to get it in.\n\n[He opens his mouth wide again, points with a finger to broken teeth in back.]\n\nI tried to spit the baseball out, to push it out with my tongue, but they tied a scarf around my head to hold it in. With the baseball in my mouth, I could only breathe through my nose. It was fortunate for me that it was not the season of my asthma, or I might have suffocated. I was frightened, and I wanted to tell them about my asthma, but the baseball in my mouth made it impossible for me to speak. And, in any case, they would not have understood me. And the translator was not there. I had expected that they would understand my language, or, in fact, any language that I might have spoken. Frankly, I was surprised that language even came into it. I imagined that, in an encounter of this kind, words would be unnecessary. I have never seen a baseball game. Except in the movies. I have a video store. Mostly bootlegs my cousin Nouri brings in from Syria. I've got all the latest, man. On Rashid Street, near the copperware market. Perhaps you know it, KVCD Video? No? Perhaps if you are in the neighborhood you can look in on my shop and if I see you again you can tell me if it is still there.\n\n[He looks at the baseball, remembers, smiling.]\n\nField of Dreams. Starring Mr. . . . Kevin . . .\n\n[He brings his arm back, mimes throwing the ball.]\n\nCostner.\n\n[Pain in his right shoulder. He sets the baseball down on the bunk bed.]\n\nI cannot speak about what has happened to me here. Because . . . I will soon be leaving and . . . they asked me not to talk about certain things. They said you would not understand. Certain things you would understand and other things you wouldn't. I myself am confused. I was abducted on the day the Americans captured Saddam. I was with my friend Ameen. The news of Saddam's capture had just come over the TV. I closed up my shop and we ran out into the street. The TV in the window we left on so that people outside could watch the events as they unfolded. I had loaned Ameen my video camera. He was making a film about the situation here. At the time of the invasion, he had filmed the falling statues, and now he wanted to film the people's reaction to the fall of the man himself. The reaction of the man in the street. We were hurrying along the river in the direction of the Al-Salam Palace. There were so many people, all of them shouting, dancing in the streets. American soldiers sitting atop their Humvees, grinning, smoking cigarettes. I was so happy to see Saddam go away. You know he destroyed our country. He humiliated us. I thank you, President Bush. There was one tank on the street. Ameen laughs and says, \"Hey, it's Clint Eastwood's tank.\" I look, and even with my bad English I can make out, stenciled on the barrel of the big gun: \"GO AHEAD, MAKE MY DAY.\" I am standing right by the tank. Ameen was taking pictures of all the action when somebody behind us starts shooting at the Americans. Fucking Fedayeen. Stupid guys. I hear the firing and the bullets hitting the tank and I ducked down. It becomes a kind of instinct. I know those fuckers are likely to fire grenades next, so I drop to the ground and I thought, I will roll under the tank. The tank will protect me. But it's not that easy to roll under a tank. In fact you can't do it. The . . . things that go around and around the wheels . . . treads. And anyway now an American soldier has his foot on my back and his rifle pushing hard behind my ear and he is screaming at me in English. The tank is shaking and I hear explosions, and sure enough Clint is firing the big gun in the direction the shots came from, he doesn't realize that the Fedayeen are gone. They were there and now they're gone. But that doesn't stop Clint from firing on the place they were. I am lying on my stomach with this boot on my back and the barrel of the gun pushing my head into the pavement and then my video camera joins me there on the ground, all the pieces of it clattering into the gutter. Before I know it my hands are tied together behind my back with the plastic laces and I am being pulled up onto my feet. Ameen is up against the tank, another soldier's got him covered. His hands are tied, too, and he has a sandbag over his head. And just before the bag goes over my head I see that not only the Fedayeen are gone, so is the building they were firing from. In fact, the whole neighborhood isn't there anymore, just piles of concrete and clouds of dust. Stupid fucking Fedayeen. They took us in a Humvee, with other guys they rounded up. To Camp Cropper, out near the airport. They put us in a tent. I didn't see Ameen again.\n\n[He is quiet for a moment, then, suddenly agitated, he stands and, looking up as if to the upper tier of cells, cries out in a loud voice.]\n\nAMEEN! . . . DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE FUCKING CAMERA, MAN! I CAN ALWAYS GET ANOTHER CAMERA!\n\n[He is quiet again.]\n\nWe were in the tent for eight days. Bagged and cuffed. They gave us a can to piss in, but if you had to piss and it wasn't the time to piss and there was no one around to cut the cuffs off you. . . . There were some stinking fucking dishdashas in that tent after eight days, I'll tell you. Eight days of pissing yourself and a clean jumpsuit looks pretty good. That was in December. It was cold. No one in the tent knew why we were there. Somebody in the tent knew some English and he asked the soldiers why we were there. They told us we knew why. But we didn't know. They said they were the ones who ask the questions and if they didn't like the answers they'd send us all to Guantanamo. They kept saying we were going to Guantanamo, that once we were there we'd be wishing we were back here.\n\nI didn't like hearing this shit. I got tired of hearing about Guantanamo. On the day they moved us out of Cropper one of the soldiers said we were going to Guantanamo. I said he could shove Guantanamo up his ass, it was just another fucking prison where they lock up Afghanis and Al Qaeda guys, and what am I doing here, I run a video store! I didn't say it in English, I don't speak English. But this other stupid guy, the one of us who knew a little English, he translates for the fucking American! So when they are loading us into the truck to move us out, this soldier who I told to shove Guantanamo up his ass pulls me aside, holds me back. Everybody is in the back of the truck but me, they're packed in, cuffed and bagged, and the soldier is ready to put a bag on my head. But before he does he takes out his wallet and flips through some pictures he keeps in there. There's his mother and his wife or his girlfriend and his kid or his little brother, I don't know, and he finds the picture he's looking for. He puts his hand on my shoulder like we are buddies and he holds out the wallet with the picture for me to see. It's a picture of him in a red and black checked cap. He's holding a rifle, (an ordinary rifle, not the big gun he's carrying now), and tied across the front of his truck is a deer. He's holding on to the horn of this big deer and looking proud of himself.\n\n[Change of tone, more intimate. It is important to KASIM that we know what he thinks about this.]\n\nWhich reminds me. We can't talk about the art of acting without speaking of Mr. . . . Robert . . . De Niro.\n\n[He waits, as if to check if we agree, his eyes darting left and right. He mimes lifting a rifle, sighting down the barrel.]\n\nThe next thing I know I'm in the dark again and being lifted up, and they throw me across the front of the truck and tie me down. The soldiers are laughing and at first I'm not minding being tied down because the truck has been idling for a while and I am suddenly warmer than I have been in over a week. But by the time we are halfway to Abu Ghraib the hood is red fucking hot and the metal is burning me right through my shirt and my pants.\n\n[He touches his jumpsuit very gingerly with his fingertips around his middle, his thighs.]\n\nCan you do something for me? Maybe you can get in touch with my family? Tell my wife where I am. That I'm okay. Do you know the Backstreet Boys? My daughter likes the Backstreet Boys. She loves them. Especially Nick. She sent away for a picture, but it never came. That's all she wants in this life, she says, is a picture of this Backstreet Boy signed, \"To Layla, love Nick.\" Maybe it came while I'm in here. Five months, man. Five fucking months, and I still don't know what they want from me. The Deer Hunter. Yeah. In the middle of the trip here, a sandstorm hit, and I was really glad for the sandbag on my head, which protected me somewhat. When we go there, they untied me, took the bag off, and this . . . unearthly. . . unearthly light was everywhere, because of the dust. Everything was . . . ghamidh. You know this word? Mysterious. Ambiguous. Yeah. When we got here we finally could take a shower. They took our clothes away. They took everything away. My watch. The thing is, I wonder if it's really five months, or does it just seem that way? They can do crazy things with time, you know. Stop it, practically. What if it's only been five hours? What if they haven't even noticed I'm gone? I'm not supposed to tell what happened here. They say you wouldn't understand. But it's not right to do these things to people! Without permission, and without explaining anything! It's inhuman. Of course they aren't human, that's the thing. They can disguise themselves. As anything. John Carpenter got that part right. That was a good film, but it was too negative. The Thing, starring Mr. Kurt Russell. And Kurt had to be a macho guy, naturally, and so naturally all the creatures are bad. Which is not right. Some of them are good, I can tell you. In fact, I would say that most of them are good. Not the big white guy in the clear glasses who works nights. Not Roper. And there are other bad ones, but most of them are good.\n\nI've seen things you wouldn't believe. That's why we aren't supposed to tell you. Because you wouldn't believe it. It's not the time for you to begin believing. I don't know why they picked me. I guess they think it's time for me. Their ships are sometimes disguised as helicopters. You can tell by the light. It is the brightest light you've ever seen. You can't look into it without it hurting. I don't think they want to hurt us. They forced me to lie down. In a cubicle. It was cool and damp and it smelled bad. They put the bright light on me and looked me over. All over. They seemed quite concerned, about my burns from the truck. They checked me all over to see if I was hurt. Because I was hurt. It was like I was paralyzed. There was never just one of them. They were always with another one, or in a group. They looked human, most of them. Humanoid, I guess is what they are. They just touch you with their hand or an instrument and you go numb. At first it hurts a lot, for an instant, but then it doesn't hurt at all. You can't feel anything, and you can't move. You just lie there. You can't believe that you are just lying there, not saying anything, not protesting, but you can't. You just can't. Sometimes there are computers there and the beings are putting data into the computers while they do these things to you. And they are always taking pictures. There are balconies, and sometimes there are other beings watching from above. There isn't much furniture. You can't always tell by looking at them whether they are male or female, but somehow, you just . . . know. The shorter ones are the helpers. The taller ones are in charge. That is definite. The small ones especially stare at you. It is dangerous to look at them. Somehow you know that, so you try not to look in their eyes. Listen, I'm worried about Ameen. Saddam put his brother in here and he never came out. He did something, I don't know what, and one night the Mukhabarat came and got him and brought him here and he was never seen again. That's why Ameen hates Saddam so much. And he said if he ever was put in here he would kill himself. Somebody here did kill himself. Maybe you can find out if Ameen is here. There must be a list. Maybe he escaped.\n\n[He picks up the baseball, throws it to the floor so that it bounces up and back into his hand.]\n\nLike Mr. . . .\n\n[He throws the ball against the floor again.]\n\nSteve . . .\n\n[He throws the ball against the floor again, smiles.]\n\nMcQueen. The Cooler King. Yeah, man. Go to Rashid Street, to my shop. Ameen might be there, keeping an eye on things for me. He is my best friend.\n\n[He sets the baseball on the bunk bed.]\n\nI can't talk about the situation here. I am personally of the opinion that they want to take over. I think where they come from is . . . running out of energy, whatever sustains them, and they have to leave that place. And so they need to take over here. This is the preparation. They are exploring, to see if this is a good place for them to come and live. They show us pictures, wide-screen, 360 degrees. In 3-D, no special glasses required. Pictures of things we see all the time, but stopped noticing. The gutters running like sewers; the marshlands disappeared; the pipelines burning in Kuwait; the sky black with smoke. We tried to tell them that it isn't all our fault. That Saddam did a lot of this shit. That the sanctions did a lot of it. Then the Americans, and in reaction to the Americans, the fucking Fedayeen. But they didn't want to hear any excuses. They know the Garden of Eden, the original Jannat Adn was just a few miles from here! From where we are standing, did you know that? Oh, yes, they know what they are doing by coming here. And they want us to realize what we are doing to the earth. If they are going to come here and take over, well, there has to be something left, after all. Something they can use. To sustain their race. Enable them to go on, to continue.\n\nWhen they make us strip, I think it has something to do with reproduction. So they come here in disguise, and their ships are disguised. And they make us strip and they do these experiments so they can learn about us. I think that when they make us lie down naked on top of one another it is all a misunderstanding. And when they make us touch ourselves . . . masturbate . . . it is only to find out how the penis works, something like that.\n\n[He struggles with what he is feeling.]\n\nI do not think I can go back to the life I had before. I don't want to go back. I think I will never see my wife again. I don't think I could be with her anymore. Not now. And Layla will be fine in the care of her mother, who was always much more strict with her than I was. I spoil her, I admit it. I don't have much time left, but I will tell you what I think. I think that these beings may be . . . angels. I think they are beings between us and God. It is not always easy to recognize them. In John Carpenter's film, for example, when Norris has a heart attack and they get him up on the gurney and the doctor climbs up with the defibrillator to try to shock him back to life and Norris's chest suddenly opens up, then closes quick on the doctor's arms, cutting them off at the elbows, then opens up again and another head, smaller, uglier, with sharper teeth but recognizably Norris, rises up out of his chest on a writhing neck, well, it is horrible, no question.\n\nAnd of course Kurt Russell immediately turns his flamethrower on it and kills it. But who is to say that the monster was not really an angel. In disguise. Or just angry. We will never know, because Kurt Russell killed it. Maybe he just didn't recognize it for what it was. Or maybe he did. I don't know. Would that we knew what the nightly visitant is. Last night the visitant was E.T. Right here in my cell. I knew there was going to be another examination when they brought out the sheets and blankets and hung them over the bars so that no one could see in. I appreciate that. Privacy is good. They made me strip, which I hate to do, but I have gotten somewhat used to it. They needed to take another sample of some kind, I suppose. They never say. Four of them held me down, facedown on the bunk here. Then E.T. was there. I recognized him, even though he was wearing fatigues like the others. He is short and ugly and his head is too big for his body and his eyes are huge. He looked at me. I tried not to look at him. He held up his finger and waved it back and forth in front of my face until I looked up. He was smiling, and his finger was glowing because he was E.T. Then he put the glowing finger up my ass.\n\n[He struggles with what he is feeling.]\n\nIt hurt and I cried out for God's help. He put it in my ass, the others were all laughing, and then he took it out again.\n\n[He looks at the floor for a moment, then looks back up at us.]\n\nI believe I am leaving here tonight. They have examined me. All tests have been done, and the results are in. I've been inoculated against smallpox and diphtheria. There is no history of liver disease in my family. I have assured them of my complete cooperation. Tonight the impossible light will come down at the proper angle to form a ramp of energy from here to there. A guide will float us up the ramp straight . . . through . . . the bars. AMEEN! . . . YOUR FRIEND IS NOT MAD! Straight through the bars to the ship, which is waiting for us. It will be . . . as if . . . I am a full bucket, pulled up from the well's darkness, then lifted out and up into the light. AMEEN! . . . GOD HAS GIVEN HIS ANGELS CHARGE OVER US! We live in the night ocean, wondering, \"What are these lights?\" The ship . . . The ship is a wheel of light, turning in the firmament.\n\n[A very bright light comes on above the cell, shines down through a grill in the ceiling.]\n\nA secret, turning in us, makes the universe turn.\n\n[The light is moved back and forth by someone above the cell.]\n\nI have my jumpsuit. I am ready. I'm ready to go into the ship. I'm ready to go.\n\n[We hear the sound of heavy boots on the metal grill. Lights fade, leaving just the overhead light shining down on the man in the orange jumpsuit.]\n\n[Blackout.]\nRick Pulos\n\nDecades Apart: Reflections of Three Gay Men\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2008\u20132009\n\nAuthor's Note:\n\nThese are the stories of men past and present that were shaped and sculpted from love, fear, death, pain, pleasure, happiness, loneliness, addiction, and illness. Their stories are your stories. Your kids' stories. Your grandkids' stories. They are your brothers. They are God's children. They are individuals. They are Americans. They are beautiful. They are you. They are gay.\n\nBOB  \n(1979, San Francisco)\n\n[Media: Image that recalls 1970s San Francisco, with music that clearly defines the disco mood of the time and place. BOB sits in a yoga position and breathes heavily.]\n\nI never knew Harvey.\n\n[Media: Harvey Milk.]\n\nI only knew of him. I mean, it was news\n\n[Media: News report of Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk's assassination.]\n\nand I slightly paid attention. I know I walked down Castro Street one day and wandered into that camera shop and bought something. Something. I met him in person. I'm sure I flirted with him. But I didn't vote for him. I didn't vote for anyone. I did walk with the others in the vigil, though.\n\n[Media: Candlelight vigil.]\n\nI was so stoned, though. And there were so many hot men. Who could tell who was straight or gay? Nobody seemed to care. You can be a drag queen and nobody cares. All kinds of people will come to see you. You can have an Afro\u2014even if it's gone out of style and nobody cares. These are good times, even in the face of tragedy. Everyone seems to be on our side. Finally, oh man, it's so good to be in touch with yourself and the city you love. I feel so much love. Jesus, I've had more sex in the '70s than most people have in their lifetimes. And all of it felt good.\n\n[Media: Images of Castro Street.]\n\nI never felt bad or guilty or dirty or sad or lonely. I feel fine. I feel love everywhere. For the first time in my life, I really feel good.\n\nPATRICK  \n(1985, New York City)\n\n[Media: Imagery that recalls 1980s New York City, with music that defines the coke sniffing, AIDS fearing, greediness of the time and place. Useful images might include Nancy Reagan, subway trains overrun with graffiti, and executives in suits crowding NYC streets.]\n\nI voted for Reagan. Twice!\n\n[Media: Ronald Regan with an American flag proudly in the background.]\n\nI'm not ashamed to say it. Why should I be? It feels like every single fag in New York City hates me for my political views, but they have no problem fucking each other to death. I'm protecting myself and this body. This is all I have. It's gotten to a point where all I see are sick faces. Even the healthy ones look like death to me. Too much decadence and overindulgence has run amuck in the city. I used to see sexy bodies and transcending smiles, but now the bodies seem emaciated and teeth are falling to the floor everywhere.\n\n[Media: Rock Hudson turning from gorgeous to a skeleton.]\n\nWell, I'm not bending down to pick those teeth up. I'm not getting my hands dirty for people that take unforgivable risks. I'm not waking up one morning and looking in the mirror to see the back of my mouth when I smile\u2014it's not happening to me! I spend a lot of nights at home.\n\n[Media: a map of America engulfed in flames.]\n\nI spend a lot of days at funerals. Men I loved and men I've made love to. So I can't put myself out there and maybe that's made me cold and maybe that's made me smart. Maybe being cold and smart is the only defense against all this suffering.\n\nDANNY  \n(1990s, Los Angeles)\n\n[Media: Imagery that recalls 1990s Los Angeles, with music that defines the crystal meth club kid craze that swept the gay scene (then and now). Useful images might include Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, fabulously decadent outfits, and anything with Matthew Shepard.]\n\nI take this pill and everything is fine. Just fine.\n\n[Media: Pills tumbling out of bottles.]\n\nI am invincible. I will live forever. I take them down with a cocktail in hand.\n\n[He swallows.]\n\nJust like that! And I am ready to go all night up and down Santa Monica Boulevard. I walk into the club with my entourage in tow and all eyes fall on me. I glimmer in the club lights. My face is alive. I know my life is fierce. No one doubts that. And I have no fear. No inhibitions. No limitations. People might think I live recklessly, but I don't care. I'm like a 1990s James Dean.\n\n[Media: James Dean.]\n\nI'm a fucking rock star! I'm out living and breathing. One day, I might be too skinny to walk or dance and even too out of it to talk, but no matter what happens to me, I'm having my fun now, tonight. I'm no scarecrow in a field with blood running down my face.\n\n[Media: Matthew Shepard.]\n\nI'm not letting anyone fuck with me. You might not like the way I live, but you're gonna let me live. Because I'm not ready to die. I'd rather see you rot in hell before I let you get your hands on me and take any of this away. So back the hell up, step aside and let me move forward.\n\nPATRICK   \n(1980s, a Record Store, New York City)\n\n[Media: Images of a distorted yet bustling and hurried NYC. Images might include packed sidewalks or NYC transportation hubs or piles of trash on street corners in the city.]\n\nI see so much greed and so much gluttony. I see people with a hand out while they hold a crack pipe in the other. I've become totally immune. Most of the time these dumb-ass Democrats are standing up at the podium, their pants wide open while some hooker blows them underneath, and preaches how you and I need to fix all this. We must help those who can't help themselves. I'm tired of hearing about it all. How about I help myself and the ones I love? How about that? All of a sudden in this great city, in this grand country, the glue is a mix of dirty money, cocaine, and Aqua Net. What happened here? Walking down these vast city streets, I see the heat burning through Hefty bags left out on the curb too long. I smell the stench of all these filthy bastards. They're taking their time, digging their heels in and fortifying trenches, and they are slowly tearing the heart and soul of this great nation to bits. One fix at a time. The more I think about it, the more I feel sick inside. Just to get away from it all, I walk into my favorite record store, a small dopey place I'd been going to for years in the West Village. A hole in the wall with a decent selection. You know the kind, where people let you do your thing and don't mess with you. Nobody raises an eyebrow if you ask about some offbeat composer no one has ever heard. I go all the way in the back of the store, past the rock, the gospel, the country section, right into the classical music\u2014an oasis, of course stuck right next to the very gay Broadway show section. Why these record stores have this kind of odd organization, I could never understand. It's like putting filet mignon next to beef jerky. Anyways, I'm minding my own business, flipping through the newest editions, when he turns to me and says: \"You hear anything about this new show on the West End, Phantom of the Opera?\" And I say, very shortly, \"No,\" without even taking one glance. I simply continue flipping through the records at a much more fierce pace. Why is this guy bothering me anyways? But he doesn't stop. He's persistent. \"I've heard it is absolutely amazing. I mean, Webber's done some amazing work and they're all saying this beats anything he's ever done. That certainly says something.\" And then I make my first mistake\u2014I look at him. I barely manage to say, with such despise and attitude, \"Sorry, I don't follow musicals.\" And he smiles. You ever choke on a smile? He's perfect. He's gorgeous. His eyes, even his teeth. Why is he even talking to me? And then it happened. It's so depressing when you give into your heart. The only power you have over anything else is your self-control. But infatuation is the most incurable infection. And once it has a grip, you don't. I could rub myself this way or that way, I could start a fire in my imagination that would satisfy my every sexual whim. But a single stroke, a delicate touch, a foul-mouthed breath, anywhere on my skin by him and I was like an AIDS article, stuck ten pages deep in a newspaper, so far away from the front page of myself that I was unrecognizable to myself. I turned my back on so many things so many times that when this sweet creature came along, I was lost. Hopelessly lost. I felt protected by him. I was safe. I was comfortable. Suddenly, I wasn't angry anymore. Most of you have been there and some of you have been back again. This was not like some crazy trumped-up crush. This was it. It. Relationships are exactly like a Rubik's Cube.\n\n[Media: The Rubik's Cube.]\n\nThere are many faces, many colors, everything gets mixed up, and one wrong move can send you further and further away from the goal. Which is, as far as I can tell, growing old together while facing the decades in our past. That's all I could think about. Imagine the poppy field in The Wizard of Oz. He's my poppy field. That stench, that contempt I had been seeing all around this city, my clenched fists, gone. Blood returned to my knuckles for the first time in years, my hair felt like it was growing again and not falling out strand by strand. I was afraid, for the first time in my life, I was afraid. I was afraid because I felt responsible for someone other than myself.\n\nDANNY   \n(1999, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills)\n\n[Media: Any image or lighting that allows DANNY to be beautiful in the club fights. Also, any imagery that might recall the advent of the Internet. DANNY dances almost as if he were a go-go boy, then the lights come up as if the club night has ended.]\n\nSo, I'll admit this, only to you.\n\n[Whispering.]\n\nThis life is not so fabulous. Don't let anyone else know; I'll fuck you all up if you do. Some of us need to do things that others would find appalling. I find them amusing. Yes, amusing. Maybe I've always hustled in one way or another. But all these other more descriptive terms with dirty underlying meanings suddenly popped into my mind, like escort, male prostitute, and whore. Don't get me wrong, I asked to be called a whore many times, with many men, in many beds. But knowing that money would change hands made it feel so dirty and so sexually exciting. Which was the absolute last thing I ever thought would get me going on this planet. Okay. So the Internet was like this web of communication. Ultra-technology or some bullshit like that, so they say. Send. Receive. Send, receive. Little balls of energy squirting across the planet in the blink of an eye. All types of people entangled in a web of fascination and flirting with their darker anonymous sides. Me? I used it. For my benefit. Maybe you did too. And maybe, it used me. It's so hard to tell. But goddamn it, it got me through some of the hardest weeks. So I found my \"John\" on gay.com, aka the men's network, or as I call it, the men's warehouse, suits optional. On gay.com I could say what I wanted, how I wanted, and act as dumb as a hooker or dealer at the hottest street corner in town. And nobody was paying attention. His \"profile\"\u2014Ed, that's the name he gave me\u2014seemed fine. Not f-i-n-e fine but just fine. I negotiated for about five minutes. Yep, that's all it took. I had what he wanted and he had what I needed. I immediately hopped into my super-compact Geo Metro convertible, top down, and pushed my right foot down so hard on that damn accelerator that it was like I was instantly in overdrive. The smog-infused Los Angeles air whipped by me whistling \"Dixie.\"\n\n[Media: Los Angeles traffic.]\n\nNow, any right-minded person would have asked me right then: What is going through your fucking mind? Rent, bills, cigarettes, booze, drugs. No. Wrong. I was hungry; desperately hungry after a long night of dancing and partying. I wanted a fucking Grand Slam Breakfast from Denny's.\n\n[Media: A Denny's sign rises into clouds like a soul to heaven.]\n\nWarm fucking eggs, some goddamn flapjacks, and some seriously processed sausage links. I didn't care that the maple syrup would be fake. In my mind, all I could hear was: Sausages. Pancakes, mmmmm. Warm eggs.\n\n[Media: Sausages, pancakes, and eggs in various states and, if possible, with the human body.]\n\nMaybe that was in my stomach. Whatever. So, yes, I was driving like a motherfucker. I mean, like a bat outta hell, and all these assholes were flipping me off, calling me names (even worse than a fucking whore), and I just turned the radio up louder and louder and louder to drown out all those dumb asses. I was weaving down Wiltshire Boulevard. In and out. In and out. In and out. I was in high pursuit of a Grand Slam Breakfast. And nothing was stopping me. Sausages. Pancakes, mmmmmm. Warm eggs.\n\n[Media: Sausages, pancakes, and eggs in various states and if possible with the human body.]\n\nNow, I was approaching Beverly Hills, where this guy's place of business as located. Where we planned our little rendezvous. This was not some silly 90210 surprise for me\u2014the more high class, the more ass they like. I passed by security like smog through a crack. And for a second I thought, he's looking funny at me. That dumb ass in the rent-a-cop outfit is looking at me funny. And immediately my arrogance was like some sort of streak of anger that flashed through me instantly, and I darted him a look that reduced him to some kind of ant, a peon, a cockroach. Yep, in the wake of me becoming some kind of prostitute for processed pork, I had some balls to judge someone else making an honest living. Who the fuck was I?\n\n[Beat.]\n\nI was the hottest motherfucker to ever grace that Bev Hills office build! I walked in as if I were headed for an interview to take over the CEO position at Coca-Cola or GE. I was all attitude. Sausages. Pancakes, mmmmm. Warm eggs.\n\n[Media: Sausages, pancakes, and eggs in various states and if possible with the human body.]\n\nAnd then . . . I met Ed. Fat ass, not so bad in the face, slightly balding . . . Ed. What a dumb motherfucker. He bullshit-talked me about his PR job and his asshole co-workers, pointing things out on the way to his private office like the lovely plants at the receptionist's desk and the very expensive furniture in the high-tech conference room. Was this guy for real? Sausages. Pancakes, mmmmm. Warm eggs.\n\n[Media: Sausages, pancakes, and eggs in various states and, if possible, with the human body.]\n\nFinally, we were in his private zone. And as soon as he closed that door and he rubbed his wedding ring apprehensively, I got so fucking horny, I thought I'd blow a load right there. I don't know why. But I held it all together for the money shot. You know what I mean? The concept of a condom never came up in our chat on gay.com. I don't even know if that conversation happened for most of us who were bouncing around that website. We all seemed so fearless with the new technology. Fearless and fabulous. Sausages. Pancakes, mmmmm. Warm eggs.\n\n[Media: Sausages, pancakes, and eggs in various states and, if possible, with the human body.]\n\nI was so horny at this point. Hungry and horny. Not the best combo, in my opinion. So while I was pulling down my pants and bending over his neatly organized desk\u2014a desk littered with paperweights, probably gifts from his wife or kids, from various tropical and cultural destinations\u2014I just begged for it. I couldn't help it. And that got him going like some animal in the wild. And I gritted my teeth: Sausages. Pancakes, mmmnnn. Warm eggs.\n\n[Media: Sausages, pancakes, and eggs in various states and, if possible, with the human body.]\n\nAnd I swear to God I saw a memo on his desk from some fuck-face executive at Denny's. Maybe it was IHOP or the Waffle House\u2014it was there, IT WAS THERE! I swear. Sausages. Pancakes, mmmmmm. Warm eggs.\n\n[Media: Sausages, pancakes, and eggs in various states and, if possible, with the human body.]\n\n[Breathing heavily.]\n\nAnd it was over like that. Like a gay.com chat gone wrong, where the guy just shuts down all his windows and disappears and never chats you up again. He started counting under his heavy breathing. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty. He was counting so fast that I could barely hear myself thinking: Sausages. Pancakes, mmmmm. Warm eggs.\n\n[Media: Money.]\n\nBOB   \n(1970s, a Bathhouse in San Francisco)\n\n[Media: Disco music mashed up with images of men at bathhouses.]\n\n[BOB has a simple white towel wrapped around his waist. He is bouncing around a seedy bathhouse or, for those of you who do not see seediness, a funhouse for gays.]\n\nLove is like God. You know what I mean. You've heard this before: I can't see God but I knew he exists. Or what about that one when some try to explain all this mystery to you: you can't see the wind but you know it's there because you can feel it. Personally, I think God is a menopausal whacked-out woman. You know the type, comes after you with a quick wit and sharp tongue. Slices you to pieces by seeing right through you. Points out all your faults and highlights all the things you desperately try to hide from the light. Thunder's like that heat that won't stop. Floods are like the floods that won't stop. And men are always doing stupid things that annoy you. That's who God is. This is her wrath. Now I'm not trying to make enemies of any of you religious folk. Far from it. You see, I pray. Hell, I've been to Vegas and I've prayed for the big one. I've been to all the bathhouses, and I prayed for the big one. And I've been to the confessional, and I prayed that the priest would take me in his arms and love me like he loves his God. But what I realized is all that praying is like scratching that space between your neck and your ass crack; it's like you're constantly reaching for something, something. But you can't quite ever satisfy that itch.\n\nWe've all been there. The first time I heard \"I love you\" was the first time a boy unzipped his pants while I was kneeling on the ground.\n\n[He kneels down.]\n\nDear God, Please tell me this will last forever. This feeling. This love, it makes me feel so special.\n\nWanted. Unique. Alive. Don't take this from me.\n\n[He stands.]\n\nLove is also punishment. At least, that's what I found out that day. I remember my mother slapping my face: \"You don't do that. That's disgusting.\" What did I do? I prayed! I was praying.\n\nWhen you get this. All this foolishness we call life. When someone like you or me understands this much. Too much . . .   \nWe should be dead. But that bitch, that beautiful bitch, God, she wants us to suffer on and on. And we linger in this world, looking right through it as if through a crystal ball. Maybe she wants us to see more to learn more, I'm not sure. But I'm not afraid.\n\nHell. I walk the halls of the bathhouse cruising for love in every backroom dark and dank. The odor is delicious: unwashed socks, boxers stuffed in little lockers\u2014lockers never cleaned, at least, that's what I imagine. There's this guy or that guy or, damn it, any guy. Here's the one reason I love God more than anything: she knows how to have a good laugh. She can make a man . . . and she can make a woman . . . and she can make a man that acts like a woman and vice versa. This is some serious comedy.\n\nThink about it. But like a sundae, she tops it off with a bright delicious cherry, neither you nor me could ever have dreamed of: fetishes. I don't know why people are so embarrassed by them. We all have them. Look, you can act like you don't but I know you do.\n\n[Pointing to audience members.]\n\nThat one likes his nipples gently touched, oh, and she's a real beggar for her hair being pulled, you know, just so . . . oh, and most of us love dirty filthy sex talk. It's true. And you know what you like. So I never blink when this one or that one asks for whatever's gonna get him going. I mean, all of us have our limits, but sometimes you stretch because it's the only thing you can do when he's all you have going at four in the morning. So out of the blue\u2014and I mean this one was a bit out there\u2014this guy asks me, \"Got a Kleenex?\" This guy wanted me to sneeze. Sneeze on him?\n\nI've heard it all now! People always get so stressed when you're learning the behavior of new people, but I truly think even the weirdest shit is fascinating. I mean, everywhere I go, from the Castro to the Haight to the Pacific Ocean, even inside the walls of these saunas, I'm like living inside one of those nature film documentaries, you know, on PBS, where they study the lives of lions and tigers in their own natural habitat, in the wild. In my head, I'm always hearing that narrator, \"The mating practices of the homosexual are fascinating. Let's watch as the top male approaches the bottom male aggressively, by participating in the tradition of cruising. The top male will look seductively at the bottom male for many moments, often walking by him and then walking by again. There is rarely talking. They will both look for any signs that will initiate the act of coitus.\" Anyone can choose to look away or run and hide. But that doesn't mean what exists is itself going to evaporate into some mystical wind that no one can truly see: There's always a path and sometimes a choice and hope is deceptively wrapped up in the \"sometimes\" and not even I can believe that it's just confusion or anxiety or injury that makes sense of any path to anything if anything is something anyone would ever want.\n\nDANNY   \n(1990s, West Hollywood)\n\n[Media: Religious imagery set against a Los Angeles background.]\n\n[He is dressing for a night on the town.]\n\nYou ever see these people out on the street passing out Bibles? What are they trying to do? I mean, I always pass by them as if they are handing out flyers to some seedy straight strip club. Somehow, all the street peddlers seem the same to me, whether they're asking for a dune or trying to hand me a Bible. And it's always all sorts of people doing this. White, black, old, young, ugly, cute. God, the variety of Jesus freaks is frightening! As usual, I'm on my way to a fabulous night out, right. What's left but to have me a good time? When this little punk starts to flirt with me, right. What a great gimmick he had going in West Hollywood. Instead of handing me a Bible, he hands me a card. He says that I can get help. That he used to be like me. That there are others who have broke through the sin. That all I needed was a clear path to God. That it wasn't too late.\n\nNow you gotta understand something: I was curious, no doubt. I mean, a bunch of reformed fags\u2014probably cute and straight-laced, all nice and cleaned up\u2014sitting around in a circle trying to avoid that quick glance at the package or a quick peak at an ass while getting coffee on a break. Of course I just looked him up and down. His smile disgusted me and yet turned me on too. What's up with that? And I said bluntly, \"Honey, all paths lead to God. They curve and shift like light refracting. There is no straight path.\" I bounced away so fast, but he was quick too. As I careened forward towards my perfect night out, I could hear him in the distance reciting the Scripture. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth: and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.\n\nPATRICK   \n(Fall 1986, His Apartment, New York City)\n\n[Media: Imagery that recalls autumn in New York City.]\n\n[He wears a brilliantly white robe.]\n\nIt all gets complicated. That's the way autonomy ends.   \nOr perceived autonomy, if you will. And suddenly you magically realize that there's something more to living than the life you've been leading. And therein lies the problem. Why must I be the one wrapped in a blanket of guilt? Why must I be the one to recognize my limitations just because he loves me so? Why must I see myself when all I want to see is beyond me? Fact. I am not in love nor have I ever been in love. Fact. He turned to me one night with the seriousness of a politician and said bluntly, \"I am addicted to you.\" That's not my problem, I thought. That's not my problem, no way.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nI thought. Fact. There is something special about feeling special. My veins worked overtime around him, pumpin' karma through my heart with a vigor unlike any I ever knew. I saw colors in the stars no one should ever see. Red, white, blue. Fact. I was a slave to my own fears. He had a power over me that made me feel desperate for a longer life. A life I spent uncountable hours trying to escape. Fact. I knew I would lose myself to him as soon as he recovered from his addiction. Fact. The people closest to you never recover from the things you wish they could. Fact. He did not die of AIDS or some mysterious pneumonia. Fact. His brain swelled like a balloon and it impaired his vision and his ability to interpret reality. Fact. He died April 5, 1986, under a blanket of mystery. Actually, under a sheet that depicted the bizarrely happy world of the Smurfs. He loved the Smurfs. He died gasping for more life while I prayed for a swift end. Fact. I looked at the recognizable image of Smurfette on that sheet and slowly began to take my clothes off. Not that I was retreating to some freaky heterosexuality, some oddball fetish that not even my childhood could explain. I wanted so much to just have an ounce of the love he had for me.\n\n[He takes off his robe and kneels down to touch the body.]\n\nFact.\n\nHe was still warm. Fact. I felt cold everywhere.\n\n[He puts his robe back on.]\n\nWhat is this thing? What is this disappointment? Is this what everyone should expect from living? From the first breath to the last. Is this what we have to look forward to? They took him away on a dirty, used stretcher. I swear it was still warm from the last one they carted out, from wherever, to wherever. It looked like it was stained with sweat or feces, I don't know what. I couldn't even think about who or what was there before. He was out of my house and out of my life as fast as he came in. And nothing about it was delicate or beautiful or smart. It was . . . indescribable.\n\n[Media: Thunder, lightning, and then silence.]\n\nI didn't even send flowers. I DIDN'T SEND A GODDAMN SINGLE FLOWER! There was no one to send a simple condolence to. There was nothing to say, to anyone. So I said nothing. NOTHING! How can a man feel this much and say absolutely nothing? His mother claimed the body. She had already told me I was \"uninvited.\" My friends, oh, the poor bastards, called on me to say this and that, but most of them were so tired of death, it was like they were reading from index cards. It wasn't their fault. And I thought about that word a lot. Fault. You know, like a lawyer. I thought about that word, about that language, that term. And I thought . . . I thought about a lot of people that I knew and I was hoping to know better. And I thought about the significance of one man, one woman, one child. I thought about all those memories, washed away too soon. Lost. And I thought about God. Because God was the only man I ever knew that ever knew me. And he knew me in my faults and my follies. Whatever any of that meant. And of course I tried to feel so much for those who had suffered and those who were suffering but I was so chained to my misery that I could hardly care. I'm not a crier. My mother taught me to never ever let anyone see me cry. So I never cry. Even before God. But she never told me not to think. To think about why, why any of this is the way it is. In the dark. In the corners of our houses, our apartments, our minds, whatever you feel comfortable calling it, in those spaces, you and me see ourselves and we know who we are. We have dreams beyond those walls, but prisoners have dreams beyond theirs. And so? And so, the chore, I feel, that you and I have, as residents of these spaces, is simple: Figure out more. Figure out more about yourself.\n\nWhen he left my house. He left a scent. But more importantly. He left a thought. And as I go through the daily grind, brushing away the filth from my teeth, looking in that mirror, I can't help but ask myself, I can't help but taking a silly little pulse to find some kind of vital sign, in all this, in all that has happened to me, in all that has happened to my friends, in all that has ever happened, I must ask: Who am I? Who am I?\n\nBOB   \n(New Year's Eve, 1979, Castro District, San Francisco)\n\n[Media: The ball dropping, showing the start of the 1980s, punctuated by wild fireworks that recall the birth of a new decade.]\n\nAnyone could have guessed disco would die. Please, that was a given. I mean, we all hoped Anita Bryant would, but that was just wishful thinking. And we all loved screwdrivers too much to stay off that juice for too long. I mean, I guess we made our statement but who did it really change? There was this euphoria out on the Castro in December 1979. There was this I can do what I want attitude. It was sexy and empowering. Guys were sleazy and it was cute. Girls were out mouthing off against the men and that was totally necessary. There was a sense of community and communication. Sure some guys and gals were still hidden from view, but people kept getting braver and braver by the minute. Time and virtue seemed to be on our side. And it felt like a lot of people were coming around to support us. So as the ball dropped in New York City and the balls came out on the Castro, the 1980s looked to be one of the best decades for my sisters and brothers. I could feel it all over, everywhere. Things can only get better from here.\n\nDANNY   \n(Fall 1999, Los Angeles)\n\n[Media: A vicious gay bashing mixed in with images of DANNY bruised and beaten. Any news media that reports a hate crime.]\n\n[DANNY speaks over the media offstage.]\n\nThe things I've done to my body. The constant abuse that I mistook for pleasure. Sometimes if you're one of the lucky ones, there appears a moment of clarity, or oxygen magically materializes while you're drowning in a sea of murkiness in a horrid, real-feeling dream. My oxygen, my clarity, surfaced as a fractured cheek bone, several cracked ribs, a displaced shoulder, scrapes, bruises, even partial loss of vision in one eye.\n\n[He enters, moving slowly, using a cane.]\n\nI'll never dance the same. But that is very insignificant.   \nWhat happened to me could happen to any of you. I was   \ntruly minding my own business. I remember leaving the club. I had had some drinks but nothing to write home about. I never saw any of them coming. I lied in the hospital bed, I could barely see through all the bandages, and I tried to piece it all together. Cops, nurses, doctors, all swarmed around me like flies to shit. A few people, I'd only call acquaintances, now came in quick, going through the motions, and looked down at me like I was some kind of freak. I didn't want visitors, I didn't want that pity, I never wanted to see that face\u2014that telling face\u2014by some people who in that fucked-up way were trying to tell me somehow that all of this was my fault. That I'd asked for it and that they had always warned me I was heading for trouble. I could barely mumble, my lips were so swollen. So I pretended I couldn't talk at all. It was better that way. I had all these feelings suddenly. They weren't exactly feelings. It was actually one immense crude sensation: rage. And I thought: I want a gun. I need a fucking gun. I want to shoot every motherfucker that fucks with me. I mean, this is what I'm thinking in that hospital bed. I want to wipe out all the idiots in the world. You know the type, department store clerks that act like you're going to steal something, losers that can't get an order right at McDonald's, DMV clerks looking up goddamn who knows what on their little computer screens with such contempt and mightiness. Am I really just a number? Reduced to this old address or that old car?\n\nIt's amazing when you become a headline. All of a sudden, you realize you're not a number. What happened to me wasn't front-page news, but it was bigger than three lines in the police blotter. \"GAY MAN BEATEN BY TWO TEENAGERS\" \"TEENS GONE WILD ON HOMOSEXUAL IN WEST HOLLYWOOD\" I never remembered these guys' faces. I remember the soles of their boots. I remember numbness in my head. I remember the taste of blood and concrete. I remember wanting to laugh at it all. Even while it was happening.\n\nWhen I went to court and looked at them, I felt a new sensation. A difficult feeling. More complex than love or hate or disgust or respect. I felt compassion. It did not help that they were kind of attractive all dressed up in suits and ties, I'm not going to lie about that. . . .\n\nBut I felt deeply: they were wrong and they should be punished, but something seems off in all this. Don't I have a responsibility to try to understand whatever it is that set them into motion? Don't I have a responsibility as a human being to be compassionate and learn from everything that led these boys to that moment? Was it their parents, their culture, their rage, our country's temperament, their testosterone . . . what the fuck was it?! And suddenly, I cried on the stand like some goddamn sissy-boy. Jesus, that really did them in for the trial and the sentencing. That was not my intention. What I found out was that I had a job. That I was needed for something other than to be the life of the party. That I had responsibilities.\n\nAnd maybe, just maybe, I could raise a mirror to some other kid somewhere else and stop this from happening to someone else. . . . I'm not excusing this. Any of this hatred. I just want to learn more. But. And I say this without hesitation. Maybe our differences, our fears, these things we all pile up behind our eyes, are just little nuggets of light waiting to be seen. If there's a chance we could see them before they turn into fists full of fears, each and everyone one of us should take that chance, open that door, and walk through it with a single intention: to better understand each other. And the only way any of us can be understood is for each of us, in our own way, to stand up and be seen even in all our ugliness because there is beauty in ugliness. Drag it all out into the streets, shine a light right on each and every face here and out there and take a moment to see what's really going on. This next millennium, this new millennium, we must all stand in the light and be seen.\n\n[Media: Useful media here would be a current hot issue from LGBT community regarding human rights issues, whether from America or abroad.]\n\n[Performed either live or through media.]\n\nI am not a single reflection.\n\nI am light refracting. I am many parts.\n\nI am not the sum.\n\nI am moving through life.\n\nLife is moving through me.\n\nI am who I am in a single moment.\n\nI will never be perfect.\n\nAnd I wouldn't want to be.\n\n[Media: This has happened. This is happening now.]\nPart II\n\nMonologues for Women\nAdam Kraar\n\nexcerpt from\n\nHearts and Minds\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2006\u20132007\n\nREBECCA Okay, class. Listen up. We need to focus. I want you all to close your eyes. Just do it. Now take a series of deep, deep breaths.\n\n[As if getting him into line.]\n\n. . . Rudi. Take the breath all the way down and slowly let it out. . . . Keep breathing. . . . Somewhere inside your body is a tight ball. I've got one right now in my stomach. I want you to send the breath to wherever that tight ball is, let the breath dissolve that hard little ball . . . and then breathe out the molecules that came off of the ball. . . . Do it again. Rudi, I want you to really see the ball. . . . All right, Rudi, then see the bialy. Just keep breathing . . .\n\n[RUDI appears in the doorway, upstage. He apparently overheard her talking to herself, and now leans in to see what's going on. REBECCA does not see him.]\n\n. . . Now the ball\u2014or the bialy\u2014has disappeared, and the only thing is your breath, coming in, slowly, and going out, slowly . . . and the molecules of your breath are swirling around this classroom, mixing together with the molecules of other students and teachers, who teach and learn, and pour out ideas and passions. Imagine if you will molecules of people who lived and died, and spoke and wrote long before us\u2014those particles are here too. The molecules are all mixing together, connecting in new ways, actually creating something unprecedented. With each breath, what you're breathing in is different than what you just breathed out. And that altered air is filtering into your bloodstream, going into your brain, pumping into your heart. . . . Take a moment and listen to the new air, surging through you. It's not just your breath or my breath. It's the oxygen we all have to share in order to survive. And if we really let it in, it can change everything. . . . Now, open your eyes. And please turn your chairs so you can face each other.\nBruce Levy\n\nexcerpt from\n\nSada\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2002\u20132003\n\nSADA Ahhh, yes. Miss Sada Cohen soon to be Mrs. Sada Jacobson was real, as you say, \"hot.\" And this one [Referring to another picture.] was taken at the beach at Coney Island just before we were married. Jake was handsome and strong. From a good family but he knew his way around. From the Bronx. A little rough around the edges . . . like you. Me? I was a princess from Brooklyn. We met through friends. He was my hero. This day Jake was taking me home from the beach on the subway train. Such a nice day, such fun, we swam, we ate ice cream and hot dogs, we played skeet ball on the boardwalk, you know skeet ball? [. . .] You have a ball you throw up a ramp and try to get it into the holes with the most points. Then you take your points and trade them for a prize. [. . .] Well, on this day Jake played and played and played until he was able to get me a big pink stuffed bear. It cost him more than if he would have bought me a bear but he wanted me to have that bear so bad to take home with me. So we get on the subway train and Jake had his arm around me and I was hugging the pink bear when hooligans came onto the train to rob us. They stood at each door of the train and one ruffian went to each person and pushed and shoved and took their jewelry and money. Jake and I were sitting in the corner. Jake drew me closer to him and whispered in my ear. Don't worry, kiss me and make believe we don't notice. Oy, in public we kissed and hugged and I shook and trembled and squeezed the big pink bear tight. The man guarding the door near us had a stump for one of his arms. He was wearing a T-shirt and you could see. At the next stop people tried to run off the train but the men at the doors pushed them back. [. . .] Yes! And Jake stood up and gently took the man's stump in his hand and said, with such a heavy Brooklyn accent from where I don't know, \"Hey, have fun but done hurt nobody too much okay, my friend?\" The guy said, \"Nahhh, done worry, done tell no one, k?\" Jake said, \"Who'm I gonna tell\"? We got off the train and Jake told the token man and the token man called the police, who boarded the train at the next stop and arrested them. My hero, Jake.\n\n[Smelling onions.]\n\nOy, oy! The onions.\n\n[To stove.]\n\nI always tell Rebecca, don't burn the onions! The egg pancake is never good when you burn the onions. Gentle. It has to be gentle. So . . . I burn the onions! I yell at my daughter-in-law, \"It's not good if you burn the onions!\" \nDano Madden\n\nexcerpts from\n\nBeautiful American Soldier\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2005\u20132006\n\nLAMIYA English. I'm going to learn English. I'm going to go to a university in America. Probably in New York or California. And I'm going to learn beautiful English. Are you listening to me? You've no right to be angry. Do you want to know why I'm going to learn English? Because I'm in love. I am. I'm in love with an American soldier. Don't tell Mama or Papa.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nI met him at a checkpoint. The American soldier, the one I'm in love with. There were a lot of soldiers. They were checking us for guns and bombs. I admit, it wasn't love at first sight. At first sight I just wanted my American soldier. His hair was cut so close to his head. His face was freshly shaven. It was a hot day and I could see little beads of sweat on his forehead. He was yelling, motioning for me to come to him. So I walked over to this soldier. He wasn't as large as some of the others\u2014but his muscles were smooth and strong.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nUla? I know you hate this kind of talk. You have to listen, though. You have to listen if you're just going to sit there. We can still make it. You're the one giving up.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nI tried to see his eyes, but they were hidden behind his sunglasses. I looked down to the ground and I noticed, beneath all of his weapons and his belts\u2014I noticed him bulging, through his pants. And he started to check me. Feeling me. Up my sides. In between my legs. So gentle. Feeling me all over\u2014searching me, trying to find a weapon or a bomb. I felt his breath on my neck. I imagined the bulge in his pants pressing up against me. I began to wish that I did have explosives strapped on\u2014all over my body. How wonderful if my soldier had discovered a bomb on me. He'd take me away to a tent. And he'd carefully start to take my clothes off until all that was left was the bomb and the tape holding it on\u2014over my naked body. I'm certain that my soldier is very skilled and he would remove the bomb and all of its pieces safely, one by one. He would remove pieces from my arms and my back and my stomach and my chest. Slowly. Until my body was completely bare. The bulge in his pants growing, in spite of his concentration. His mouth so near my neck, my chest. His breathing getting heavier. The bomb completely removed, but his hands continuing to gently search my body. Both of us sweating from the heat of the midday sun\u2014his breath all over my chest, his lips so near my mouth, my back arched and he'd take me. Right there in the dusty tent. Pieces of the bomb all around us.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nUla! You're so boring! Just yell at me if you're angry. We still have time. The reception has only just begun.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nThe soldier finished checking me and\u2014I love him. Do you want to know why? All you have to do is ask me.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nI could leave without you. I'm sure I could find the way. Our sister is married by now, but the best part\u2014the singing, the dancing, the eating. We can still make it.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nI can play this game too, you know. I can. And I'll win.\n\n[LAMIYA sits down dramatically on the opposite side of the tree, demonstrating her ability to \"not talk\" to her sister. Pause.]\n\nHow about a new game? Yes? Okay. I have a little journal here. Lately I've been writing about the American soldier I'm in love with. Here. Blank pages. Now. You write, on this page, write why you're angry at me. I can't imagine what I've done wrong. Nonetheless, you write. For example: \"I am angry because we are late for our sister's wedding and I think it's Lamiya's fault.\" Or . . . \"I am angry because it turns Lamiya on when soldiers check her for bombs.\" Or . . . \"I'm angry. Just angry. Because that's my personality.\"\n\n[Beat.]\n\nYou can write now. Please.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nCome on, Ula! We're wasting time! You used to be my favorite sister. Yesterday I would've said Khaireya was the biggest pain. Always flirting with everyone. Makes me crazy. But this, this, whatever this is. Moodiness. Stubbornness. Forget it. You are no longer my favorite. You are a pain. Just like Khaireya. Congratulations.\n\n[Pause.]\n\nI know why you're angry. You're angry because all of your sisters have a husband. Except me. But\u2014I am the youngest and the prettiest. I have time. As of . . . oh . . . about forty-five minutes ago, Shilan is married. And that leaves only the two of us who have no husband. The youngest and the oldest. That's why you refuse to go with me to the reception.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nThat's stupid, you know. The reason you haven't married yet is because Papa adores you. The way he talks about you, the way he tells his friends how smart you are, how funny. I think, in Papa's eyes, there are no suitable men for you. None worthy.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nSo don't be angry that Shilan is getting . . . well . . . is married by now. We all want to be Papa's favorite. But you are. Only you. Lucky you. Be happy.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nCome on. Tell me to shut up. Tell me why it is inappropriate to fall in love with an American soldier. Tell me in great detail why it is my fault we are lost. Or let's talk futbol. Even Mama cannot make you shut up. Speak, speak, speak, speak. Please.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nAren't you hungry at least? Aren't you? I'm starving. Can we at least go for the food? Please? Even if, even if you hate it. Even if you're angry that nearly all of your sisters are married. We can't miss out on the food. The sweets. The sweets are so succulent at weddings.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nSo it's official? You're not going to speak to me? Or move from under that tree? Can you signal me in some way?\n\n[Beat.]\n\nAlright. I'm going to find my way to the wedding alone.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nOkay. Hmmmmm . . . This road leads in two directions. Hmmm . . .\n\n[LAMIYA looks in one direction.]\n\nWest. Hmmm . . . or is that east? Do you . . . ? Oh, that's right. Forget it.\n\n[LAMIYA looks in the other direction.]\n\nThere's that way.\n\n[LAMIYA looks in the other direction.]\n\nAnd that way. We came from that way. We've traveled to this point and have not found the wedding. Could you perhaps point if you feel strongly about a particular direction? What about that way?\n\n[LAMIYA points.]\n\nOr, or . . . that way?\n\n[LAMIYA points the other way.]\n\nWe came from that way. I think.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nFine. I will choose. Good-bye.\n\n[LAMIYA doesn't move.]\n\nAaugh! Ula ! Come on !\n\n[Singing in the distance. Singing and clanging. LAMIYA walks down the road.]\n\nAh-ha! You see that! Look. Coming this way! A man! Perhaps he'll know the way to the wedding. Maybe he's a guest, one of Papa's friends.\n\n[Singing and clanging grows louder.]\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\nULA It took such a long time. The soldiers apprehended several men ahead of us, took them away in jeeps. And . . . one soldier searched my sister, extensively, and she became . . . enamored. And . . . so, so late. I knew we had probably missed the ceremony. Finally, walking along the road home. Our papa could never have dreamed we'd be this late. Running. So late. In the distance they were shooting, firing the Kalashnikovs into the air\u2014in celebration. Shooting, shooting, shooting. Running, running, running. Lamiya and I had missed it. We had missed it. I tried to get my sister to move faster. Fruit dropping everywhere\u2014I was trying to pick it all up and\u2014\n\n[Pause.]\n\nSuddenly, something knocked us to the ground. A sound. Deafening. The loudest sound I have ever heard. Planes. American warplanes. So low, right over our heads, it seemed. Fruit falling all over, we fell into a ditch. And then an explosion. So loud. And flames and heat\u2014screaming planes. Another explosion and another and another and my sister and I huddled in a ditch. Still another explosion and on and on and on and on and on. Holding my sister so tight.\n\nThe explosions seemed to go on forever and then\u2014silence. I opened my eyes. The sky was filled with smoke. The sun looked pink through the haze. We stayed in the ditch, afraid to move. So quiet. Now. Birds. The smell of burning. A cool breeze. And we moved, finally, and saw\u2014\n\n[Pause.]\n\nNothing. Where our house had once stood on the horizon, we saw nothing.\n\nNothing, nothing, nothing\u2014walking down the road . . . we were lost. And finally, through the smoke, the haze, against the pink sky, I saw something. Something I recognized. This tree. I played under this tree growing up, out in the field near my parents' house. Exactly the same. This tree\u2014this patch of earth, untouched by anything. But no house. No wedding, no wedding, no wedding. [. . .] I always believed we were safe. We weren't living in Baghdad. My papa thought we were safe. [. . .] Now. My entire family. Lamiya and I were supposed to be there. Everyone was celebrating\u2014 [. . .] My parents, my sister Khaireya and her husband, Mohammad, my sister Fatima, her husband, Ahmed, and their son, Raad, my sister Auood, her husband, Talib, their son, Inad, and their daughter, Kholood, my uncle Ali, my aunt Hamda, my uncle Mizhir, my aunt Marifa, my other uncle Ali and his wife, Somayia, my aunt Fatima, my cousins Siham, Rabha, Zahra, Hamda, Ali, Hamza, Yasser, Raid, Daham, Wa'ad, Khava, my uncle Waldemar, my aunt Jasmin, my cousins Mostapha, Ahmad, and Isra, my sister Shilan, she was the bride, my sister Shilan and her new husband, Hamid, they were just married and, of course, all of Hamid's family, everyone I think, my parents' friends, everyone I think, Shilan, just married, Shilan, who was probably the second prettiest of my sisters.\n\nLamiya is of course the prettiest. [. . .] People came. From the village. And some Americans. We were ghosts, sitting next to this tree. Chaos. People digging and yelling and searching. Focused on everything but us. And then they were gone.\nEileen Fischer\n\nexcerpt from\n\nThe Perfect Medium\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2007\u20132008\n\ncharacter\n\nHESTER DOWDEN a sturdy-looking woman, 55 but looks older, in a high-collared, white-on-white embroidered blouse with a full-length dark green wool skirt. Her black and gray hair is in a bun. She wears reading glasses and takes them on and off and moves them up and down her nose. The glasses are attached to a chain around her neck.\n\nMusic for The Perfect Medium is composed by Charles Porter, CD Version 7\n\n[A well-appointed Victorian sitting room in London. Downstage-center, a round table and two chairs. Much moody atmosphere here: flickering candles, shadows, dark furniture, a chaise lounge, a piano. Then total blackout. From the blackness, a voice:]\n\nHESTER Over here.\n\n[Music: track #1. Pause.]\n\nOver here.\n\n[Music: track #1. Pause. Then with annoyance.]\n\nI said, over here.\n\n[Lights gradually up on HESTER. She is seated at the table covered with a cream-colored lace cloth.]\n\nYes. On me. Look at me. Let us begin. . . . Twenty-three years ago Oscar Wilde left the present life and crossed to the other side. It may seem incredible [To audience.] to you that he should attempt to send his thoughts back again to a world where his infamy exceeded his good fame and fortune; but here it is, 1923, and Oscar Wilde chooses to send us messages today.\n\n[Pompously.]\n\nAre the messages genuine? Does Oscar Wilde still exist?\n\n[Slight pause.]\n\nAnd where exactly is he? . . . The public must judge these matters. We will return to them again and again. Yes. . . . We will. You'll see. Again and again.\n\n[Pause.]\n\nDo you understand? Oscar Wilde, the famous Irish writer, the international bon vivant and gadfly came to me, Hester Dowden. He spoke to me, here, twenty-three years after his bodily death. Yes . . . it is complicated. Yes . . . it seems unusual . . . yes. But it is true. It happened. Everyone must believe me. Without belief, without faith, what have you?\n\n[Pause.]\n\nThose to whom Oscar's words came [Pats herself proudly.] can only transmit them to the world . . . . As for me, I've been a psychic investigator for many years, starting back in Dublin. Now I see clients for private readings here in my London home, and I instruct students in psychic investigations as well. What else can one do? An independent woman must make do. And I do. I do, indeed. . . . Were you wondering how these messages were received? Let me help. They came through automatic writing and sometimes the messages came through the Ouija board\u2014two well-known methods of psychic communication.\n\n[She crosses to the piano and plays softly.]\n\nAnd as for the automatic writing, one day the messages simply started.\nJill Elaine Hughes\n\nexcerpt from\n\nThe Devil Is in the Details\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2004\u20132005\n\nYou know the really cool thing about all this is, they think I'm dead. And I am, sort of. But not really. Have you ever heard of something called suspended animation, altered physical states? You know, the thing those guys in those old Alien movies did to make themselves sleep without aging for years while their ships traveled across the galaxy for decades? Well, that's the closest thing I can think of to explain it. I don't age, you see. Haven't in centuries. They of course think I'm dead, and who could blame them for thinking so? I'm not moving. I have no discernible breath pattern. Not to mention a very low body temperature. But I'm not dead. I'm not even unconscious. I feel bad for poor Larry and Sheila here. You have to give them credit for trying. I mean, you at least have to give Sheila here credit for mixing and distributing all those lethal gases from stuff she just had sitting around her art studio when Larry found out the Gangsta Kings wanted poor old Steve bumped off all nice and quiet-like, with no gunshots or yucky blood. Actually, quite beautiful work, if I must say so myself. The perfect crime, you might say. But not quite perfect. There was a little something they overlooked on their way down here.\nJulia Jarcho\n\nexcerpts from\n\nThe Highwayman\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2005\u20132006\n\nBESS Where is this?\n\n[Pause.]\n\nThe land? The moor. Purple bog. Hi!\n\n[Beat.]\n\nHello. Look out there. I can look out at the land. It'll get darker.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nIt's nothing for you anyway. I could just make it up and you'd never know the difference. When they say \"and it was all a dream,\" I think, who cares? Tell me a story! I don't care. God. Right there, over there a goat was buried. Many years ago. It didn't belong to the mother or the father in particular. It was a family goat. I know goats are popular in jokes, but this isn't a joke. It's a dream! Ha-ha, who cares, not really. It's a goat. How do I know? From the inscription. There is a goat engraved on the tombstone. It doesn't say Beloved Family Goat, but I know about that for a fact. They loved that goat. It gave good milk. It ate the garbage. You could pet it at that time. Now you can only make yourself think so. What it said was, Here Lies, and then the name of the goat. Who cares? It wasn't Bess. Or maybe it was. [. . .] No! Guess what. It wasn't a goat. Now that I think, it was a donkey. All this time. That doesn't change much, except the milk and the garbage. But they adored that donkey. Most donkeys seem to be unwelcome on this God-given earth, but not that one. Not this donkey! Why? Because it was so sweet-tempered. You should see with its kids\u2014all lined up? They were all mules, but it never complained. The family contemplated having a portrait done like that, not of themselves. Because you can't help it if she hands you a mule when the day's come, right? You really can't. It was a quiet life. I don't want to talk about the rest. I don't know why I started. Let's just say here lies and then the name.\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\nBESS After this I have one dream. All right. I think it must be the darkest time of night. When is that? I think I know. No, I don't know, that was the dream. And I knew those things. And I could tell things from the position of planets. Which I recognized. Clouds. I could tell from the clouds what the earth would be? And when they would be on the road? So I would have to go off it. How to find a hedge to go off it into. And know if the hedge is hungry and not go into it then and look again. That this would sometimes be true for miles and I would have to remember that I would have to dig in the ground, because they're on the road now.\n\nI knew how to do that and I had to do that, or also, I wouldn't have to, because there was nothing but me out there, nothing, me moving. Going. Knowing. Looking. Knowing. Not knowing. Knowing again. Or also, a rain like a wind, a moon like a ship, all ocean. I thought, this is what I'm gonna be spraying like all these. Spraying out of here to be then.\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\nBESS Here, in here it's the right heat. I cover the window with earth. People bring in the earth with their shoes. They don't talk to me. It's too dark for them to see me.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nHere, in here it's the right heat. I cover the window with fire. The fire lies flat against the pane. It lights up the room and I see my own hands. They don't look old. I know time is over. No one else knows. They can't get it. No one can get in.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nHere's the story. There was a girl. She kicked everyone. She said it was so they wouldn't miss her. But it was because they wouldn't miss her. It's a stupid\u2014it's a stupid story. She could never kick anyone. Or do anything or want or think anything.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nI know what to tell you. It's only the truth. No questions. Of course this is where I am.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nYou could come\n\n[Beat.]\n\nout. . . . Why?\u2014I'd like to remind you that the moor is habitable. Habitabitable. Habitabitabitable. Hospitababitle. With life-forms. So savage. Someday something will come in and you'll have to go out there.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nSo I build up my strength. Emergency measures. I smell my skin. I compare it with my other skill. Things like this'll be helpful. Because I know I've been in here since I was born and no one else. And if someone else was here, he didn't see me. And if he saw me, he's coming back to get me.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nBecause he would like me.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nWould he want me to go, I think he might want me to go with him. I think that's what he would want. There's no way I can do that. Look at me. I've been here my whole life. A quiet life. I used to bring sugar lumps out to the stable. There's a cellar somewhere here, no, a tunnel through, not the cellar, I think there are stairs and there's a, stairs through a room where they keep . . . beets? Is that possible? Through there, a passage to the stable. I go through there with my hand full of sugar. My hand is dry. Or both. That's how I carry it through the passage, wedged out of the wet land. So I don't set foot out of the inn.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nI get there, I get to the stable. There are so many of them. I'm saying this, it's like a pillar of my childhood. I'm not just any one of those little girls. Because these were not a fantasy. They're, they shit and they take a piss, they have spit foaming up, big sour spit, they're covered with scars and their coats, you can't even say coats, they're covered in their skins, is the most you can say. They'll bite, I have the rents some still on me.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nI get to the stable, still inside, I have sugar in my hand, that I took from the kitchen. There are so many of them. Everyone put an animal there and went in to drink. When it's the busy season there's fullness of them. And I'm coming down, there's a push-bell the people do when they need something, but then I disappear, I go get the sugar and I go down the stairs into the place and into the place, to see them, to give them the sugar. I don't know how to describe. I said. Filthy. Some are about to die. Some are on their first trip. Whips. They all have four and some have five and some are daughters. Grown-up. I'm here with the sugar. Just here. I put out my hand . . . a tongue comes down, no, teeth. You have to put your hand flat and not get bit. Big teeth. You can tell the work. Eyes like my dumb eyes. You know what they want, it makes them want it more, they want, they would say\u2014they can't, but\u2014no, they wouldn't\u2014it makes them want, they want the saddle blanket and the saddle, the saddlebags and the rein, they want, and the spurs, reins and spurs and hands high, but even done like that they want to go, they want me to take them and go, and they would be better off to go, says their faces, go!\n\n[Beat.]\n\nAnd I say I can't. Just because it's not. What about wind and stripes? But it's not. Anyway he might not come.\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\nBESS What I was feeling. You know metal in your mouth? Sour? It's not you're naked, because he doesn't care about that. He opens your shirt. He doesn't care about that, it's so he can see where to put it. You're, what are you doing, because not that you don't know, you want him to say. He says, Pretty. He takes your eyes. He covers them with his eyes. All you know about is the land around you. Land around you, wet with time. Your bare foot feels the bone coming up under it, up from under the moss, this old bone, smooth as a lip, fills the arc of your foot. He says, Don't move. It's a shoulder bone. He says, Don't you make a sound. Your cheek is wet for me. Listen. You listen. You can hear for miles. Moldering, creeping, growing up against itself, the moor. He says, You're for this. You don't move. The bone under your foot doesn't move. He says, It's inside you already. Inside and outside are the same. He doesn't touch you with his hand. He has no skin. You hear the blood of him. He knows you hear it. Moving, he says. That's what you hear in me. I'm what moves on this land. He says, When I take your last piece of movement you'll understand. Kept. You know that word? And you feel kept on your face, he says, Your face is wet for me. I've made a place for your body. Do you understand? And he kisses you with no mouth but with something cold and sour. Mine.\n\n[Pause.]\n\nDo you understand?\nLiliana Almendarez\n\nexcerpt from\n\nGlass Knives\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2006\u20132007\n\nJULISSA It was the first couple of days at school and it was all very new and scary. I meet so many people but not anyone I really want to hang out with. At least not right away. Do you know what I mean? [. . .] Everybody is saying the same thing, hi my name is Jane or John from Hicksville, USA, and I tell them I'm from Brooklyn, New York. They asked me stuff like, \"Did you ever see someone get shot? Or mugged? Did you ever have to carry a knife? Were you ever in a gang? Did you go to clubs? Did you hang out in the Village?\" They acted like it was a whole different country or something. When I told them that I would ride the subway home . . . they would act weird.\n\n[Prissy.]\n\n\"Like oh my gawd, I could never live in the city, it's so dangerous.\" It made me feel like I was an alien. Anyway, one night these people invite me to hang out in Kevin's room to watch Saturday Night Live. [. . .] I thought, what the hell I've got nothing better else to do. So they're all laughing at the stupidest jokes and I sit there thinking it's not that funny. They see that I'm not laughing, so they explain the jokes to me like I'm retarded. I start to get up to leave 'cause I'm just not having any fun. Mark pulls me aside and tells me to ignore them. We start talking and I find out he's from the neighborhood and it's an instant connection. It was so strange . . . I never thought black guys were cute. You know. [. . .] Big nose, big lips . . . lighter is better para mejorarse la Raza. That night it was different. Here I am coming from the city, just broke up with Robert, I'm a little too loud, clothes a little too tight, hanging out with a bunch of blanquitos with their J.Crew T-shirts and boxer shorts. It was scary and then there was Mark. [. . .] He was also going through a breakup with his girlfriend back home. And so we talked a lot. We would go to the movies, hang out at local bars, he even got me listening to reggae. Then one day we were watching the sunset by the lake. . . .\nMigdalia Cruz\n\nexcerpts from\n\nDreams of Home\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 1991\u20131992\n\nSANDRA I am a fine woman. My kids loved me. I played with them. I listened to them. But they didn't trust me. I don' know why. I say that, but now I've said it. I think it's true. I sewed all our clothes. They thought I couldn't see, that I was color blind\u2014but I saw everything. Only different. I sewed a straight seam. I won a fair. I got a fine prize. Some silk . . . I made a dress. It seemed a dress born on me. Like my skin. They didn't like it. They thought it sealed me up and I wouldn't have room left for them. They were scared of me then. But they was wrong. I just wanted something nice on my body, a dress to match my eyes\u2014tight and small and tired. . . . What could be scary about a dress? They was crazy.I am a fine woman. I have no more dresses. I wear what I find. I never find dresses. People just don' throw them out. You won't find nobody in this city throwin' out their eyes. People like to keep those things. Those things are personal.\n\n[Pause.]\n\nI\u2014I did see a dress once. But I had to turn my head from it. . . .\n\n[Turns and faces front.]\n\nIt still had somebody in it, but she didn't have no arms. Somebody cut 'em right off her. . . . So . . . so I couldn't lift her arms over her head to take off the dress anyway. So I didn't bother. I jus' turned my head . . . but I thought if she only had arms then I could rob her. It was my color too. I would've looked like a queen. . . .\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\nSANDRA Even though we did it with our clothes on, it was good. I didn't feel dirty with this man wriggling inside me. It just made me smile. I can make somebody feel something for me and that was something. He felt real hot. Ready to explode with being in me. Ready to crack open my heart along with my legs. You sleep so easy now, like you went back to where you belong . . . and the truth is, you did. I wanted your wendell inside me since I accidentally fell against it when that crowd of nicely dressed people rushed toward us to get on the train. I rammed myself up against you so as not to fall onto those people. They call you things when you do that, when you faint or fall on them by accident. And that's when I felt that hard, little wendell of yours and I thought, \"Hmmm, is this the man for me?\" Is he thinking about me? Looking at me? I saw myself in the window of the train then and I knew you were looking at somebody else. Somebody dressed nice and smelling of perfume. But she wasn't the lucky one. I was . . . I got to feel your wendell on my back. I followed you after that. It wasn't no accident that I found you here on One-Hundred and Third Street. I knew this was a place for us to find love.\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\nLETTIE I was born poor and I loved that. I had freedom. I played games. I liked playing in the park. I loved music. A man taught me to play the drums there. We played together all the time. We had four little ones. They were even poorer. I wondered what they were meant fur. I wanted them to stay alive, but got tired of watching them. They lived with my mother. She grew too old. One got past her. He went off the side of a bridge. We were sad but life goes on. And there's things down under the bridge, in the water, that needed him. That ate him up. He wasn't a waste. Nothing goes to waste in this world. There's always something to eat. . . . So I played the congas and stayed alive. My girls are good still. They get charity. They smile and then they get something to take home with them. They feed their grandmother. But they don't give anything to anybody else. So I took a job. I ran a sewing machine. It didn't play like the congas, but it paid. People paid me money to make them dresses. I let them walk on me. For money, I'll do anything. You can't be free forever. With money, I could buy things . . . feminine hygiene deodorant spray, feminine napkins, feminine shaving cream. I could make a lady out of myself. I was so happy about that. I forgot about my children; he helped me forget. We drank, I worked, he slept . . . until I got to be too much of a woman for him, too much of a lady. He said I lost my smell, the smell he loved. And he walked into a needle and made me buy his medicine. He was sick and I couldn't say no. I gave up all my perfumes. I waited in doorways taking on their smells of piss and blood. And other liquids spilled from broken people. He left me then. I was too much my own person. If you get the time, it's easy to know your own smell. It's the smell that drives people away. Enough said.\n\n[LETTIE lies back down on the table.]\nMurray Schisgal\n\nexcerpt from\n\nThe Cowboy, the Indian and the Fervent Feminist\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 1992\u20131993\n\nALICIA [Anxiously.] Stanford, I saw Doctor Bibberman today. We had a truly rewarding conversation. I asked him innumerable questions and he was very forthcoming and . . .\n\n[A breath.]\n\nI want to apologize to you, my sweetheart. I was so involved with what I was feeling that I was totally blind to what you were feeling. Doctor Bibberman pointed out that you've been under enormous stress and you have not been having an easy time of it since you were let go by our mutual employers. It was as if Doctor Bibberman had removed a blindfold from my eyes and I saw you, myself and our precious daughter in a new and healthier and more optimistic light. [. . .] I admit, I admit, I was wrong, I was insensitive, I was cruel even. But not nearly as cruel and insensitive as Benton, Berber and Pollock. And I say this knowing full well that I started working there myself as a lowly secretary, your secretary, my sweetheart, my darling. You gave me my first opportunity, my first chance, my first introduction into the fascinating world of advertising, and today I'm proud to say, I'm second in line for Chief Merchandising Officer. But what they did to you, darling, discharging you so summarily after having served them faithfully for twenty-four years, half of that time as Executive Vice President of Creative Copy. . . . To discharge you without reprieve or redress during this awful recession we're having. . . . That was unforgivable of them. And even though I fought on your behalf, my darling, my dearest, fought with Ray Pollock until my own job was in imminent jeopardy. . . . I don't have to go into that. But I do want you to know how ashamed I am. I had no right these past few weeks, no right whatsoever to dispute or ridicule you about your desire to . . . to have a new life for yourself, whether that life be based in reality or fantasy. Doctor Bibberman pointed all that out to me today. He even brought up the subject of your deeply unhappy relationship with your father, how removed you were from each other, how your father never took you to a baseball game or on camping trips or passed on to you values that would help you achieve maturity. It may sound far\u00adfetched but Doctor Bibberman also spoke of your childhood games of Wagon Train and Gunsmoke and how they affected your decision to become a cowboy after you suffered the trauma of sudden unemployment. [. . .] When you left your first wife and your three young children to marry me, your secretary, an unsophisticated, callow, somewhat slovenly woman seventeen years your junior, a woman without prospect or resources, and when you took on the burden of supporting two families, sending our own precious Lucinda and your three children from your former marriage to private schools and then on to universities at great expense and obligation on your part, you proved beyond a measure of a doubt that you were a man of rare principle and generosity. And now that you're practically penniless, my darling, my love, my dear, dear husband, now that you're getting on in years so that future employment is highly problematic for you, I want you to know that I will do every, every, everything humanly possible to make your burden lighter and less suffocatingly oppressive. [. . .] I'll end my little speech to you by saying that it's my wholehearted intention to love you, love you, love you to death, and be supportive of whatever dream it is that gets you through the day. Doctor Bibberman feels that with time and with your continued visits to his office, you'll eventually disregard this . . . this fantasy of yours and return to a reality that we both can share and enjoy and build a happy, happy future on. In other words, my sweetheart, my dearest, you're not going to have any more quarrel or arguments with me, no matter what demands you make or how improbable your suggestions are. As an active feminist this is all very difficult for me, but my love for you is so complete, so enormous a part of my life that I will do whatever has to be done to make you healthy again, so help me God.\nJames Armstrong\n\nThe True Author of the Plays\n\nFormerly Attributed to Mister William Shakespeare Revealed to the World for the First Time by Miss Delia Bacon\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2008\u20132009\n\ncharacter\n\nDELIA, a young American woman\n\ntime\n\nThe mid-nineteenth century. Evening.\n\nplace\n\nAn auditorium in the American Consulate in Liverpool, England\n\n[At rise, DELIA stands center stage at a podium. To her left is an easel with a placard that reads, \"THE TRUE AUTHOR REVEALED.\" To her right is an empty chair. She is bursting with energy.]\n\nDELIA Welcome. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. I am truly honored that you have come to the American Consulate tonight. My name is Miss Delia Bacon. I'm from Connecticut; that's in America. Yes. I suppose you all know that, don't you?\n\n[Stops. Giggles. Returns to her talk.]\n\nYes. Ever since I arrived in Great Britain, I have had one goal in my pursuits. To uncover the truth. And now, I am pleased to announce, that for the first time in history, I am able to reveal to the world the true author of the dramatical poems heretofore spuriously and falsely attributed to one Mister William Shakespeare. By the end of the evening, ladies and gentlemen, you shall know that name, that blessed name, of the true genius greater than all other authors. Now, before I begin, I must acknowledge the support of the man without whom I could not be here today. He has encouraged me in all my endeavors, and has even provided this lovely hall in the consulate tonight. He promised to be here this evening, so . . . please allow me to thank my fellow countryman, famed writer and American consul to Liverpool\u2014Nathaniel Hawthorne! Will you come up here, please, Mr. Hawthorne?\n\n[Motions to chair.]\n\nHere's the chair, just like we agreed. He's right there in back. I don't mean\u2014to pressure you. You could just wave or something. If you prefer. Will you wave to us, please, Mr. Hawthorne? Wave?\n\n[Waves. No response.]\n\nMr. Hawthorne's a bit shy tonight. Pay him no mind, ladies and gentlemen. No mind at all. Though if you would like to come up . . .\n\n[Stops. Smiles. Waits for approval.]\n\nOh. I see. Mr. Hawthorne is a bit skeptical about my ideas, but perhaps we'll convince him by the end of the evening. After all, your chair is waiting. . . . Well, I shan't keep you all in suspense any longer. I did have some notes here. Mr. Hawthorne advised me not to try to speak without notes. It's very important to be prepared, you see. That's what he told me. I just have to get these papers in order and then . . . well . . . Without adequate preparation, a speech is . . . I'll be right with you, ladies and gentlemen. Just as soon as . . . they were right here and WHERE ARE THE GODDAMNED\u2014\n\n[Stops. Glances up at the audience. Smiles. Giggles.]\n\nYes. Here they are. No, don't go! No! Please? Yes. Thank you. Sit down. I do apologize. I'm not a\u2014I don't know what came over me. Well. Now we can begin.\n\n[Glances down at the notes. Looks up at the audience.]\n\n\"Reason.\"\n\n[Smiles. Looks down at notes.]\n\n\"Reason is the sole force which must motivate us in the quest for truth.\"\n\n[Glances up. Looks for approval. Uncertain. Turns back to her note.]\n\n\"If we are to tear away from our attachment to the past, we must be willing to sacrifice everything, and head forward towards all the abundance that the future has to offer.\"\n\n[Beams.]\n\nWe live in an age of progress, ladies and gentlemen, as I am sure our good friend Mr. Hawthorne would agree! As a matter of fact, if he would just . . .\n\n[Pats the back of the chair.]\n\nWell . . . I'm not as good as he is at articulating these things, but I'll do my best. You see, the Elizabethan Age began a trend towards scientific investigation, and we must bring that same investigation to the greatest texts of that age. Only then can mankind, and yes, womankind too, be freed from the shackles of convention, which prevent us from . . .\n\n[Quickly.]\n\nThis is what I've been trying to get my brother Leonard to understand all these years. Of course he would just call me a\u2014 He could never appreciate it. Rationality. Why, if that scoundrel friend of his had been acting rationally, he never would have proposed and then\u2014 But I digress.\n\n[Smiles. Back to business.]\n\nNow if we are to determine the true author of\u2014he did propose to me by the way\u2014the true author of . . . these most magnificent works . . . it follows that we must first reject the spurious claims of that man from Stratford. Yes.\n\n[With disgust.]\n\nWilliam Shakespeare.\n\n[Shakes off the name.]\n\nThere are many reasons for doubting the authorship of Shakespeare, but three in main:\n\n[Checks notes.]\n\n\"One. William Shakespeare was the poor son of a common butcher.\"\n\n[Looks up. Panics. Smiles.]\n\nOh, come now, Mr. Hawthorne. I know what you're going to say. John Shakespeare was not a butcher per se, but a glover. But it's not much of a debate with you sitting out there in the audience now, is it? Why don't you . . . ?\n\n[Looks back at her notes.]\n\n\"Two. By all accounts, William Shakespeare led a sparse and altogether uninteresting life.\"\n\n[Turns back to audience.]\n\nAn author of such distinction? Why was he not noticed?\n\n[Smiles.]\n\nGenius can only be ignored for so long, ladies and gentlemen. I myself have suffered from neglect. Been called names. Laughed at even! But it can only go so far. The human spirit is resilient, yes, but. . . . Sooner or later, one is noticed.\n\n[Motions to the chair.]\n\nAre you sure you wouldn't . . . ?\n\n[Waits. Smiles. Giggles.]\n\n\"Three.\" Perhaps the most convincing. \"In light of recent evidence stressing the importance of heredity, it seems impossible that a man of such genius could be the only individual of note in his family.\" Why are there no other geniuses with the surname Shakespeare? More on this later.\n\n[Smiles.]\n\nIf our author was not a man of the theater, what was he? I suspect . . . he was not much different from you, Mr. Hawthorne! A man of both literary distinction and governmental service. A man of connection to individuals of import. A man, perhaps, with a dissatisfied marriage, waiting to share his affection with\u2014\n\n[Pause. Smiles. Sudden panic.]\n\nOr perhaps . . . this is reading slightly too much into the situation.\n\n[Smiles.]\n\nAh, but, Mr. Hawthorne, do you not remember that noble sentiment from Hamlet? \"Doubt thou the stars are fire. . . . Doubt that the sun doth move. . . . Doubt truth to be a liar . . . . BUT NEVER DOUBT I LOVE!\"\n\n[Smiles. Recovers.]\n\nNow what at first appears to be a simple love poem, at second look, aha! \"Doubt thou the stars are fire? Doubt that the sun doth move?\" Is this not a challenge to the very foundations of a Ptolemaic universe? Why, if the plays were in Italian, we would have to concede they were written by Galileo!\n\n[Laughs hysterically. Pauses. Very quickly.]\n\nYes. Now it so happens that at that time, a new philosophy was taking root. The mind that created Hamlet and Julius Caesar and Coriolanus also perceived this new mode of thought. The new philosophy, which we have adopted as a practical philosophy, not merely in that grave department of learning in which it comes to us as philosophy, but in that not less important department in which it comes to us in the disguise of amusement, this Elizabethan philosophy is, in these two forms of it, not two philosophies, not two new and wondrous philosophies, but one\u2014one and the same!\n\n[Stops. Catches breath.]\n\nWell, what of this conclusion? Will it be attacked? Certainly. Just as Galileo was blinded by the forces of the Inquisition, I doubt not that a modern Inquisition is forming as we speak. You know what they called Galileo, don't you? They said he was\u2014\n\n[Calms herself.]\n\nI, however, cannot be silenced. And I can assure you, ladies and gentlemen, any evidence they may produce in opposition to my conclusions will not be of the least value. As for the internal evidence of the plays themselves, it is far too extensive for me to recount it here. I am at work, however, on a manuscript, which I hope, Mr. Hawthorne, you will condescend to read. Let it suffice for now to state that the author of the plays was none other than the discoverer of inductive reasoning himself, Sir Francis Bacon.\n\n[Smiles.]\n\nYes, Mr. Hawthorne, Sir Francis Bacon. And yes, an ancestor of mine. You see now, I am not a freak. I come from a long line of great minds. Like yours. Perhaps you thought before that I wasn't worthy, but do you see now? So if you wish to . . .\n\n[Motions to the chair. Long silence. Nothing happens. Sudden panic.]\n\nBut . . . could such a distinguished person, Sir Francis Bacon, allow his works to be performed upon the public stage? Upon the stage? Well, he wouldn't be onstage himself, ladies and gentlemen. Not sitting up there himself. But he would still support his works. What could a prestigious individual like Mr. Hawth\u2014Bacon, have to fear?\n\n[Passionately.]\n\nFrancis Bacon fought for a world based solely upon rational fact. Throw out Aristotle! Throw out Ptolemy! Throw out the Bible! Yes, Mr. Hawthorne, you mustn't be shocked.\n\n[Smiles.]\n\nNothing should stop us. If we reject convention, if we put aside the doubts and hesitations that prevent us from seizing what we really want, we can create a whole new society. If the world were to see, if you were to stand up here with me and proclaim that what we have\u2014\n\n[Quickly.]\n\nWe can defy convention, Mr. Hawthorne. Traditions do not matter to us; marriage doesn't matter; forget about that New England cow of yours; I'll wear your scarlet letter! I may have gone too far last night, but you belong with me, not her! You were supposed to be here, Mr. Hawthorne! You promised! You said you'd be\u2014OH DEAR GOD!\n\n[She screams and knocks over the lectern. Papers fly everywhere. She flings her arms in a mad rage and continues to shriek through tears. She stops. Opens her eyes. Looks out at the audience.]\n\nOh. Oh dear. Well. I must say, I do . . . I do apologize. Where was I?\n\n[Tries to gather up the papers and sort through them.]\n\nNo, please don't go yet. I still haven't gotten to the best part. You see, the plays are inscribed with a secret code. If you look at the sequence of words the second part of Henry the Fourth and count off using the square root of . . . It all makes perfect sense. Mr. Hawthorne? You are still out there, aren't you? You are . . . ?\n\n[Stares into the void.]\n\nI know . . . you couldn't sit up here with me. I understand that now. But . . . that was you I saw in the back. . . . It was . . . right? Mr. Hawthorne. Hello? Are you . . . ? Mr. Hawthorne . . . ?\n\n[The lights slowly fade to blackout.]\nCarey Lovelace\n\nThe Stormy Waters, the Long Way Home\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2008\u20132009\n\ncharacter\n\nRENATA, late 40s to early 50s, beautiful in a wistful, childlike way\n\n[Empty stage. Sound of waves\u2014maybe a foghorn. It is morning, a beach, very early summer; before it warms up. Woman comes over sand. Huffing and puffing, as if she'd walked a long way. She carries a basket.]\n\nRENATA God! Sorry I've lost my breath here!\n\n[To unseen \"friends\" in the distance.]\n\nCome on! Hurry up!\n\n[Peering in the direction of the audience.]\n\nOh. Hi! There you are. The fog is so thick. You got here before the others.\n\n[Waving offstage.]\n\nOver here!\n\n[A beat.]\n\nHey! Listen.\n\n[A beat.]\n\nGod, I love that sound!\n\n[As if struggling to regain her breath.]\n\nIt gets harder every year!\n\n[She puts out different thermoses in the sand.]\n\nOkay. Barley soup. Juice. And this is elixir vita. My own recipe. Designed for anything that ails you.\n\n[Looking out, again, offstage.]\n\nI can barely see them. Can you? I hope he's okay! I get so impatient sometimes. I know I shouldn't. He's just so . . . you know! Slow!\n\n[She smells in the different thermoses, pours out of one of them, offers it.]\n\nYou sure you won't have some?\n\n[She sips, makes a face.]\n\nNo, it's great. Really. Full of vitamins! Listen, I need to ask you something. I'm glad we're alone for a moment. I . . .\n\n[She shivers.]\n\nGod, a chill. Did you feel that? Like a ghost passing through the room. Isn't that the, what, old wives' tale? Old wife. I wonder where that expression came from. They never talk about \"old husbands.\"\n\n[Singing.]\n\n\"By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea.\" You forget how long it takes for summer to come. I'm just so cold all the time now! I'm not complaining. Anyway . . . it's no use pretending things haven't changed a lot recently. Do you think I've changed a lot? Be frank. I want to know things the way they really are. And I know I can trust you. Can't I?\n\n[A beat.]\n\nWinter is still with us.\n\n[She takes another sip, again makes a face.]\n\nYou know, there would have been a time I wouldn't be caught dead drinking this garbage. Give me a big, fat joint! Now I'm ready to do a cookbook. The Power of Juicing.\n\n[She looks in the cup.]\n\nSeaweed. See? Nothing better. Iron. Vitamin A. Japanese mystics swear by it. That's a nice sweater. Is it a sweater? I can barely see it. You're fading into the sand there! Whoa! Ha! Ha! Don't go away. Please! God, suddenly I had that . . . d\u00e9j\u00e1 vu. Like I've been here before. Do you ever get that? Anyway, what I needed to ask . . . oh, it's so hard. So hard to . . . I've been thinking about T. S. Eliot a lot recently. Do you read poetry? Does anyone anymore? \"The tolling bell measures time, not our time.\" \"I hear the mermaids calling each to each.\" When I was little, we had a house by the beach and my father used to tell me to listen to the sound of the waves, listen very hard, actually, to the sound in between the waves. He'd say, \"Can you hear? That's the sound of the sounds of the mermaids calling. Listen. There they are.\" And I would listen. He said they were calling out to me, that they were sad, trying to bring back their life. He used to say I had hair the color of sand. I would lay my head in his lap and he would stroke my hair. I dreamed last night I saw my father. I had a conversation with him, the way he was when he was young. And then he turned into my husband. Then into T. S. Eliot. Then everything vanished; it was like looking through a telescope the wrong way. It's very weird, this whole experience. Suddenly, it's happening to you. I wish I could see you. Don't hide from me. You'd think they'd be here by now! Anyway, what I wanted to say was . . . I just wonder what he's going to do without me. You know, he's gotten worse and worse. He got so angry when he first heard. \"Who's going to take care of me?\" he said. He was right. It's been slow, over the years, and I never thought there would be a problem, because I never thought it would be me first, you see? He's still brilliant, of course. Have another drink of this?\n\n[She toasts, drinks, makes a face, tries to recover:]\n\nAt first it changed my skin. That was the most shocking thing. To watch your body change. Fast. To look at your arm and have it be somebody else's. Then the loss of hair. You hold on to hope, some kind of thought it's going to reverse itself. It's incredible how strong that hope is. But, now, it's strange, I feel great! It's like I'm back to normal again! I'm afraid of the dark. At first there was pain. And fear. But then . . . it stopped. Are you there? They say I'm still beautiful. Am I? Always beautiful.\n\n[She drinks again.]\n\n\"In the end is my beginning.\" I don't really trust Western medicine. But, frankly, Eastern medicine isn't much better. Wouldn't it be nice if this were a nice, fat joint? Actually, that's why I'm glad we have this time. I need you to . . . take care of him. I need someone to do that. And to tell people . . . how much I love them. Can you do that? Whoa! You faded out there for a moment. What did you say? What? I can't hear you. Can you speak louder? Please! I don't mean to be upset. It's weird, this feeling. Waiting for friends to arrive. Always waiting. Waiting for friends.\n\n[Slow fade to black.]\nJulie Rae (Pratt) Mollenkamp\n\nIn Conclusive Woman\n\nA Multimedia Play\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2006\u20132007\n\ntime and place\n\nHere and now\n\nsetting\n\nTwo projection screens, a vanity with chair, and a bench\n\ntext key\n\nRegular Text: Spoken Lines\n\nItalics: Voice-Over\n\nSNAP: Finger Snap\n\nBold: On-Screen\n\nVIDEO: The Teacher [On Screen One]; Academic Strip Tease [On Screen Two] When we were naked for the first time, he looked down at me and said, \"Okay, tell me everything.\" I love it when people talk dirty.\n\nGood evening, scholars. My name is Doctor Julie Rae Pratt. Hold a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and a Ph.D. Have twenty-five years teaching experience in secondary and post-secondary venues. Published papers in prestigious scholarly journals and have been invited to speak at major national and international conferences. As a teacher, I strive to provide students with a comprehensive experience involving intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual facets, which contribute to their personal, social, and political development. These are some of the words and phrases used while teaching:\n\nDo the work.\n\nWet.\n\nOpen.\n\nDripping.\n\nErect.\n\nHard.\n\nDelicious.\n\nPink and puckered.\n\nOpen the lips wider.\n\nHair can get it the way but it's part of the fun.\n\nLook toward the differences, that's what's compelling.\n\nButts are funny.\n\nFrom a Midwestern matriarchal family, which the world saw as patriarchal, but we all knew who was really in charge. I was often saddened, even as a little girl, about the lack of equality in my parents' relationship. I can't remember a moment where they kissed, where they cuddled on the couch, where their passion was evident, where they praised each other, where they shared moments of silence, where they fought furiously, where conjoined in any emotional or intimate way. They were not partners, they each refused to give, they each lived out their lives together at odds. My father would fuck up and bring Mom roses and she would be furious because we couldn't afford them, she felt he did it to make him feel better\u2014not to give her a gift. She didn't like Flowers, too frivolous; Jewelry too expensive; Clothes not permanent; Household Items relegating. That always stayed with me 'cuz I wondered what the hell she did want? I bet he did too. So why were they married? What did he see in her? A take-charge woman who paid attention to him. He was an only child. His parents were so in love with each other that he got left out. What did she see in him? Security, security, security. Her dad left. She was Daddy's little girl. He just left her. He had twenty-one other kids with seven other women. Her relations with men\u2014you know what she told me? Never trust them. Never trust them. Never trust them. They will fuck you over at every chance they can get, they will, they will, they will, they will fuck me over. Forgivers need not apply. She taught me to find strength in myself, and security in others.\n\nThese are excerpts from student evaluations received at the end of stupendously long, painful, glorious, bloody, exhilarating semesters: SNAP\n\n\"Julie has a way of pushing students to reach their fullest potential. From the very beginning she requires/demands student participation.\"\n\n\"She brought energy to the classroom and made us feel like we were learning with her and that what we had to say mattered.\"\n\n\"Students felt comfortable taking risks in something they have never done before.\"\n\n\"She creates a relaxed environment in which to learn, perform, and experiment.\"\n\n\"She applied her knowledge in creative, interesting ways. The variety of projects and exercises is very good.\"\n\nExcerpts from student evaluations received at the end of frighteningly quick, wonderful, tumultuous, enlightening, horrifying goddamn semesters: SNAP\n\n\"Dr. Julie makes us work too hard, her classes are too intense.\"\n\n\"She grades too harshly, she's too demanding.\"\n\n\"The methods used to elicit answers were too forceful.\"\n\n\"The professor seems scattered and unprepared.\"\n\n\"Her classes give me way too much stress. Too much material, too little time.\"\n\n\"She tries to cram too much in.\"\n\nPart of my self-definition is teacher. It's something I have trouble turning off, 'cuz I like the trip too much and because I can usually see . . . SNAP\n\nThe drain hole from my radical hysterectomy was above my pubis. It would have been obscured if I had a decent bush, but I'm blond\u2014the tube stayed in me too long and caused an abrasion when it was taken out. Lost 9 lbs. in blood and water from the hole the day it was removed. SEXY! But that's nothing. The gastric bypass surgery\u2014they made me a brand-new stomach by creating a small pouch at the top of the old, fat, never-full stomach. The new, improved, smaller stomach is connected directly to the middle portion of the small intestine (jejunum), bypassing the rest of the stomach and the upper portion of the small intestine (duodenum). Feel full more quickly than when my stomach was its original size, which reduces the amount of food I can eat. Bypassing part of the intestine also results in fewer calories being absorbed. This leads to weight loss. Truly. When your stomach is only the size of a circus peanut, the pounds just fly away like Dumbo. Try 120 lbs.! I lost nearly half my body weight. It's as if there were two Julies inside, and one just silently melted away. Sometimes I wonder where she went . . . probably to an all-night diner. Told only five people about this surgery. Because I was ashamed? Embarrassed? Conflicted? Scared? Or figured it wasn't anyone's fucking business. Funny how things change. . . .\n\nOf course, losing nearly one-half of me did some fucked-up things to my skin. Half of Julie was gone, but all of the smooth, creamy, pink skin that covered her was still there. And there. And there. And there. You've seen Shar-Peis, the Chinese wrinkled dogs? I felt worlds better, but I looked like a villain from that Dick Tracy movie\u2014and I don't mean Madonna! Something would have to be done. Back to the knife! \"Tummy tuck\" time. \"Okay, class, we're going to do head, shoulders, knees, and toes and then tummy tuck!\n\nAudience Sing-Along\n\nThey removed a seven-inch smiley face of skin from my belly. They took the smile, the many pounds of flesh of my gut, pulled the top part down to the bottom, and sewed them together, leaving a flat belly, something I've never had in my life. The vertical scars above and below the fake belly button, unique for its pleasing heart shape, are from the bypass. As an added bonus, most of the hysterectomy scar was removed.\n\nI've been 268 lbs. and 140 lbs.\u2014140 lbs. is better.\n\nBut maybe not for the reasons you think.\n\nSixth grade, so I'd had my period for a year, and was fairly well developed. At eleven I had my tonsils and my adenoids out. Unspeakably ill, had to go back, hemorrhaged twice, had to be cauterized in the emergency room, it was horrendous and awful, and at the end of it, a month later, I had lost 25 lbs. and was actually too skinny. To make me feel better, my mom took me to the mall. This was the most frightening public experience I'd ever had in my life. The men would not leave me alone; it scared the living piss out of me. It was predatory\u2014the male gaze and attention was so uncomfortable, so vicious, so obvious, and out of control that even my mom noticed my fear. She ran me out of there. Knew I'd just become the prey. For the first time, the prime target. This was the same year he said, \"Ew, I don't want to do that anymore, what's wrong with you?\" All that converged at the same time. At the peak of my adolescent beauty, rejected by the only thing I had known as normal, all this other pain appeared. But I knew how to fix that. I began feeding that fear right away. Sneaking cheese sandwiches, spending three hours in intense ballet class and then furtively eating a half gallon of ice cream.\n\nSneaking food. Always, always, always. Hiding it in my room, in the basement, in the car, in the backyard.\n\nNo longer wanted to be the prime target. I wanted back the power I felt before. I purposefully became a fat chick and used and enjoyed all the power of my size until that size threatened my life. That's what it took. SNAP\n\nMy junior high teacher\u2014he loved me, expanded me, inspired me, sought and nurtured my gifts. He praised me, told me when I fucked up, laughed with me, held me when I cried, helped me learn and grow. Finally knew what it meant to be Daddy's girl. Hugged him at graduation, he pressed his stiffy against me. What the fuck?\n\nMy influence rarely extends to women anymore, when they used to be my strongest allies\u2014before I was wise and jolly and, best of all, fat\u2014they could take advice from me because they could lord over me based on my size\u2014that's huge with women\u2014\"I love you but make sure there is something I have that is better than you.\" I'm\n\nThinner\n\nPrettier\n\nSmarter\n\nFunnier\n\nHappier\n\nHealthier\n\nFertile\n\nFor some reason, thinner and prettier is best. But maybe not for the reasons you think.\n\nI lay in bed with my mom. She still loves to cuddle. And she wakes up, looks at me, smiles, and says, \"You really must meet my daughter Julie. She got a Ph.D., you know. You'd love her.\"\n\nThese are the little gifts that cut\n\nAnd cut\n\nAnd cut the pain.\n\nThese are more of the words and phrases used while teaching:\n\nSatisfying.\n\nClimax.\n\nA good build is always pleasurable.\n\nWhen you do it well, you'll be happily exhausted at the end\n\nAfterglow.\n\nDon't cut off the dynamite before it explodes.\n\nPlaying with others is more fun than playing alone.\n\nBut playing alone doesn't suck.\n\nGet your ducks in a row.\n\nGet your poop in a group.\n\nCodify.\n\nSilence is power.\n\nWhen you hate you love and when you love you hate.\n\nHe and I would seek every opportunity to be naked together.\n\nIt was guised as:\n\nPlaying doctor,\n\nLessons he could teach me,\n\nGiving each other a bath,\n\nSometimes with pee.\n\nThe ONE time I remember rejecting his advances was when I awoke in the middle of the night on the toilet, legs spread, he was kneeling in front of me, his penis in between the lips of my vagina. He was peeing. It suddenly didn't feel good anymore. It felt cold and wet. Was tired, groggy to the point of unawareness. Began to cry. He quickly swept me up in his arms, took me to bed, and held me safely for a long time. Suddenly, wasn't alone, so not afraid. Felt connected and even bad for not doing what he wanted. He drilled a hole in the stairwell so we could watch each other in the shower. That's when I first saw him cum. He was in the shower. Sat furtively on the stairwell with a book in my hand. It was so exciting. And it made me feel special. Still like to watch. Used to feel guilty about it but decided not to. What turns us on first is what continues to turn on us. The faces may change but the act remains the same. Like to watch and be furtive and give fully. Just as when I first became sexual. And THAT'S OKAY.\n\nMy name is Dr. J. I have been observed kneeling at 1:30 in the morning on a kitchen floor surrounded by chanting students as I sucked down a beer bong. Doc J., Doc J., Doc J.! Are you familiar with beer bongs? A large funnel connected to a hose connected to a mouth? It helps if one has done various things over the course of one's life to diminish the gag reflex. . . . Spit up the first time. It had been nearly fifteen years since I had last bonged a beer. Which, by the way, was also in front of students . . . and my mother. I have fed students, individually, in pairs and in groups. Danced with them, cried with them, laughed with them. Helped them get jobs, have babies, go to court, get medicine and abortions. Paid their electric bills, car insurance, and tuition. Created some good and some not so good art with them. And taught them a few things about acting, directing, theater, history, and management, teaching theater, collaboration, and being an artist with vision. Sometimes the learning happened on purpose, sometimes it happened by mistake. But it happened. They've cleaned, repaired, and decorated my house, maintained my lawn and gardens, introduced me to those they love, and come back to tell me of their lives. I'm their mentor, their teacher, their friend, and one time, a lover. Students need to see that teachers are human and that they learn, too. Especially, teachers learn from their students. It begins when I THOUGHT I was five or six. When my mom and I talked about it later, she told me I was closer to two years old. My baby-sitter was the seventeen-year-old from across the street. He let me eat popcorn, paint on the wall with pudding, tucked me in with music playing. Awoke to him pulling my underpants down. The smell of laundry bleach was in the air and had wet sticky stuff on my back. Rolled over. He flew up, pants around his ankles, and left the room. Didn't know why he wouldn't play with me anymore. It hurt my feelings, so told my mom about it the next day. He never sat for us again. At six, walking home from first grade, a man in a car asked me for help. He wanted me to come closer to the car. Knew I shouldn't but couldn't resist the attention\u2014he picked me. I must be smart. Or pretty. As I approached, realized he was playing with something in his lap. Surprise! Watched him cum as I stepped up to his car window. It was scary and awesome and frightening and horrific and fascinating. Walked quickly back to school rather than home. Albert Einstein Elementary was closer and wanted to be safe.\n\nUnsolicited Advice\n\nIf you ever decide that you want to stay with her for the rest of your life, or at least for the next two weeks, these are some things you should think about:\n\nYou don't have to understand her, just recognize her.\n\nLittle gifts are a blast.\n\nDo what you want and let her do what she wants.\n\nCollaboration is fun, it's great to play by yourself, even better to play with others.\n\nStroke her when you don't want to but she needs it.\n\nGive oral pleasure.\n\nHelp her grow in the least mean way you can muster.\n\nDon't be too lazy.\n\nBE HONEST and KIND to each other, it's the greatest way to care.\n\nBecome that united front against all forces, it's really cool.\n\nGrow into a good daddy.\n\nGo on adventures\u2014grocery store, lingerie shops, hardware hatches, pick\n\npumpkins and collect leaves and look at stars and take vacations and\n\nSHARE SHARE SHARE SHARE SHARE.\n\nThat's what partners do. If you ever decide that you want to stay with him for the rest of your life, or at least for the next two weeks, you should do the exact same things. Plus learn how to milk the prostate. He'll like it. SNAP\n\nMom has always been the Force in my life. Mom has always been the Source that I draw from. Mom has always been the Course that I cannot seem to chart. My mom's biggest fear was not being able to take care of herself. She often did it as a child, when her mother worked and her father was gone. It was a great source of pride to her that when my father left, she not only survived, she thrived. She is PHENOMENAL WOMAN! Year one\u2014When she began to fumble, I notice. At fifty-two, she got a major long-term disability insurance policy. That's when I knew she knew. Watched her for five years before mentioning things to my brothers. They retreated into total denial, the little fuckers\u2014men in my life often have the luxury of not dealing and that exhausts me\u2014they know women in our family will deal with the shit and of course we do. My sister-in-law picked up on it and we began the conversation\u2014stories repeated, people misnamed, taking too long to shop, working nine hours a day, then ten, eleven, then in the office on weekends to get the job she could no longer do well done. Not done well, but done. Year seven\u2014Finally mention it, she's horrified, remind her that I promised I would take care of her, would tell her what I saw, did that when I was in my twenties, at the same time we agreed to take care of the other's pets if something happened to either of us. So, mentioned it\u2014denial, anger, paranoia, frustration\u2014she hated me and loved me more for it. Let's get help, perhaps it's nothing, but we need to know. Was there in the room with her when the words came out\u2014Alzheimer's. But we knew it for a long time before. Anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance\u2014these were a whole lot of fun.\n\nYear eleven\u2014She called the police at 4:00 a.m., claiming there was someone in her house, they had been there for years but they now were threatening her\u2014Arabs and Negroes and Mexicans, oh my. She was obsessed with everyone getting her. We kept her in her condo as long as we could. Belligerent and tricky, she had been hiding the disease for so long, she knew how to play it. It's a manic thing and so horrifying to watch. Then it's too late, she can no longer maintain after maintaining for more than twelve years\u2014Keeping the secret\u2014hiding the disability\u2014not showing the weakness. All lessons learned.\n\nI am Inconclusive Woman, woman, woman . . .\n\nAble to hide pain in a single bound.\n\nPerforms herself powerfully.\n\nLaugh even though her heart is breaking.\n\nPretends all is normal when her baby just died.\n\nPublish two papers as her husband fucks around.\n\nMakes others feel good when she is dead on the inside.\n\nActs like she's confident and she becomes confident.\n\nAlso a MILF. A mother you'd like to fuck but NOT spend your life with?\n\nEvery relationship destined to change profoundly as he or she dances out the door as all the little ones do? That ultimate goal of teachers and parents\u2014to prepare them to leave and be free, not gone but not here. I will NOT be the consummate mother. Won't get to raise my own biological children\u2014Mommy, Mommy, Mommy! But do have the privilege of editing the kids of others. And the best part of that is we get to play and they go home. And the worst part of that is we get to play and they go home. SNAP\n\nAt twelve, we decided to stay home sick from school. We wanted to play. Unfortunately or fortunately, my mom really was sick that day and stayed home with us. While my mom slept in her bed, on the couch I attempted with all my twelve-year-old wiles to seduce him. Finally, after looking up my nightgown for the longest time, he threw my legs back together, pulled my nightgown down, picked me up, and yelled at me. \"Cover yourself up! What's wrong with you?\" I knew our family affair was over. Our last sexual time together happened about a month earlier. We were listening to records in his room, lying on the floor. He pulled my shirt up and massaged my breasts. \"This is all you can have guys do to you. If they do more, you could get pregnant. Be careful. Don't let that happen.\" He made the right choice not to fuck his sister. But the pain of that rejection stayed with me for a long time. And led to the desperate search for\u2014and tremendous fear of\u2014relationships with men. I know how much he loves me still. Know that he would walk through fire for me\u2014know this. Just wish I didn't have to always ask him\u2014wish he was just there.\n\nDon't think my mom consciously knew about anything that was going on with me and my brother, but when there's that level of dysfunction in the family, you know something's wrong. Human beings can just tell stuff like that, and women are especially good at it. Except my mom. She loved, she nurtured, she cared endlessly\u2014she just didn't see. I knew she knew something was wrong, she just didn't know what. She never asked. I never told. And now it's too late. SNAP\n\nI sometimes make points with knives so men will listen. Are you listening? Used to have trouble getting men to listen to me because I was small. Then had trouble getting men to listen to me because I was fat. Now have trouble getting men to listen to me because I'm a threat.\n\nUnsolicited Advice\n\nBecoming an object gets you attention\u2014you become subject for a while. Girls seek to be subject\u2014we are taught that it's all that is worthy. Yet, we're all both. And it's okay to be both\u2014being an object is FUN, hard, scary, being a subject is FUN, hard, scary. They're just different. Balance is key here. The idea is we're supposed to accept is this\u2014girls are supposed to show restraint, politeness, make logical safer choices. Bad behavior = See You Next Tuesday, and we can't have that! Boys can do awful things and it's not their fault; they can't help themselves.\n\nWell, FUCK THAT! When do I get to be out of control? Take what I want? Push the envelope? Destroy some shit? And be totally unaccountable for my actions? Boys will be boys? Fine! But girls will be girls and we'd all better be prepared for the consequences! SNAP\n\nVIDEO: Them Elmer and Geraldine Blues\n\nMen exposing themselves\u2014at the store, at work, at school.\n\nObscene phone calls\u2014where they asked for me before engaging.\n\nAccidental sodomy from a one-night stand.\n\nBeing thrown up against a wall by a student.\n\nBeing felt up in public.\n\nGay men reveling in my body because THEY WERE GAY and I didn't exist as a sex object\u2014their erections proved otherwise.\n\nProud happy feminist, proactive, accomplished, loving, joyous, smart, funny, caring, giving, giving, giving, giving, giving, giving, giving! Not taking, not taking too much, not feeling worthy.\n\nUnafraid to ask for what I wanted but desperate for no one to find out what I needed.\n\nUnable to fully take care of me\u2014but no one knows that.\n\nGenerous and loving to a fault.\n\nIn Conclusive Wo\u2014fuck it.\n\nMy female students are so much smarter than I was at their age, and I'm so pleased. They still suffer the same shit\u2014oppression, being dismissed, mixed messages\u2014but they evolve faster. They are amazing and I love to hear what they are thinking. Want them to understand that they are NOT the weaker sex. They are NOT the stronger sex. They are only and always who they are\u2014and the potential in that is infinite. And that loving each other, not competing, not hurting, not undermining, not attacking, will ultimately bring them their greatest satisfaction.\n\nWomen are women's BEST allies.\n\nFourteen-year-old high school freshman\u2014fainting and have migraines\u2014one-week hospital stay with every scary test one can imagine\u2014a borderline epileptic, they say. \"There are two fuzzy shadows on your brain scan that we'll keep our eye on.\"\n\nInconclusive. SNAP\n\nJ.\u2014first life-altering emotional love\u2014gay: 140 lbs.\n\nR.\u2014second love\u2014celibate: +20 lbs.\n\nN.\u2014lose virginity AND broken engagement: \u201310 lbs.\n\nA.\u2014three-person affair with N. and A.: \u20136 lbs.\n\nF.\u2014gay: +20 lbs.\n\nB.\u2014black and beautiful: weight stayed the same\n\nI'm a nineteen-year-old college student\u2014have a lump removed from my left breast. Tell NO ONE. Drive myself to the hospital, lie to drive myself home. Not cancer but they're not sure what it is.\n\nInconclusive. SNAP\n\nD.\u2014engaged\u2014my first orgasm with my first vibrator: +30 lbs.\n\nI've since given over thirty vibrators away to my girlfriends\u2014my mother LOVED the rabbit I got her!\n\nTwenty-one-year-old college graduate\u2014summer\u2014get pregnant.\n\nSix weeks on when I have an abortion.\n\nSafe.\n\nClean.\n\nExpensive.\n\nPainful.\n\nLegal.\n\nTwenty-two-year-old high school teacher\u2014winter\u2014slip, fall on the ice, and rupture five discs in my back\u2014thus continues the magical journey of surgical enhancement\u2014spent four days hanging from the ceiling. Doesn't work.\n\nInconclusive.\n\nPlay happily through my twenties with increasing amounts of delicious fatness in my body and a back that is tricky. Sleep with a variety of people\u2014who the fuck knows my weight? Dieting and gaining all the time. My back goes in and out\u2014I relegate pain to another part of the brain.\n\nSexual survivors are good at that. SNAP\n\nG.\u2014engaged\u2014dumps me while putting the down payment on our house: +30 lbs.\n\nP.\u2014a best friend\u2014furtive sexual encounters he tells no one: weight stays the same\n\nM.\u2014it was healing\u2014she suffered a loss and I lost my father: +30 lbs. Mostly happy\u2014truly happy in ways others aren't because enjoy the ride\u2014find great joy in sensual pleasures\u2014looking, tasting, touching, smelling, hearing everything.\n\nSNAP\n\nMichael\u2014engaged\u2014we marry. As I walk down the aisle, I think, \"Till divorce us do part.\"\n\nThirty-three-year-old college professor\u2014one week back from the honeymoon when I begin to hemorrhage vaginally\u2014find out I'm pregnant in the emergency room but the baby is in big-time trouble\u2014wait it out for five more weeks before I go into labor and miscarry it\u2014while teaching a class\u2014expel into the toilet, put it in my pocket and go back and teach for another two hours.\n\nInconclusive.\n\nThirty-four.\n\nThirty-five.\n\nThirty-six\u2014various \"procedures\" to help with fertility.\n\nScrape my uterus.\n\nBlow out my fallopian tubes.\n\nLaparoscopy my ovaries to remove cysts.\n\nUndergo all these Kodak moments at teaching hospitals, so there are tons watching the fun.\n\nFertility drugs, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization\u2014tens of thousands of dollars.\n\nThe results are many miscarriages very early in pregnancy.\n\nInconclusive.\n\nOne of the perks of infertility is never having to worry about birth control.\n\nThirty-seven-year-old wife\u2014260 lbs.\u2014can't maintain a pregnancy. My back is in trouble again\u2014can hardly walk and am losing the ability to do so as the nerves are slowly being severed by the disks.\n\nDirect three successful productions, publish two articles, and am elected the leader of a national organization.\n\nThirty-seven-year-old hospital impatient\u2014back surgery. The procedure has been 95% effective It doesn't work. Inconclusive.\n\nThirty-seven-year-old hospital impatient\u2014second back surgery. The procedure has been 96% effective. It doesn't work. Inconclusive.\n\nAt 268 lbs.\u2014can't walk and am literally going insane from the pain.\n\nMy doctor cries, \"You're so young and beautiful,\" so I hold and comfort him.\n\nReceive a teaching award and receive a major research grant.\n\nThirty-seven-year-old basket case\u2014insurance pays for gastric bypass surgery.\n\nThis was the most painful surgery of my life but it's elective, so the drugs are fantastic.\n\nTell five people.\n\nHide the disability. Keep the secret.\n\nThirty-eight.\n\nThirty-nine.\n\nForty\u2014getting stronger and looking good BUT learning new eating habits sucked. Having large friends and family treat me like a traitor hurt. Having a student accuse me of playing to the beauty myth made me feel ashamed. Husband has an affair with one of his yoga students. Tell no one because he won't admit it to me\u2014he breaks the rules of our communion by lying about it\u2014mostly because he can't handle my new body and the overt power that comes with it\u2014power I've always wielded but now\u2014it's more threatening because of the way I look. I forgive because the history of the relationship is worth more. FEEL BETTER and BETTER and BETTER\n\nAnd get pregnant!!! With twins.\n\nI was going to have two babies. One for each of us.\n\nCame home from school, laid out my grading, put on my pj's, went to the bathroom, peed, and wiped blood.\n\nPut my hand down there and smear blood and tissue and know it's over\u2014holding a dead fetus in my hand and my wiping has destroyed it.\n\nRun and dress and drive to the hospital.\n\nAll the while keeping my hand sacred, sacred, sacred, sacred, sacred, sacred, sacred.\n\nAm able to walk into the emergency room and calmly tell them I'm twelve weeks pregnant, which is when you're supposed to be safe.\n\nYou've made it to three months!\n\nShow the receptionist my hand. They rush me to my doctor's office and sit and wait and examine what's in my sacred hand. The doctors appear and they run tests. And more tests. And more tests. Never stop looking into my hand.\n\nAccording to the ultrasound, one baby is gone but the other is still okay.\n\nWoweowoweowowowowowowowoweeeeeeee.\n\nThey keep my hand sacred until it's time for me to go home.\n\nThen the nurse says she needs to take what's in my hand.\n\nI make sounds I've never heard before or since, growl and scream and bite and cry and lash out and don't watch as they take it from my hand.\n\nMy potential child, the one I'd worked so hard for.\n\nMy husband is finally there and he alone can calm me enough to leave.\n\nGot to calm down because there's still a baby growing inside me.\n\nBut don't have a good feeling about it.\n\nWithin ninety-six hours, lose the other. Labor for five days\u2014in CONSTANT PAIN but continue to teach and direct and deliver it on the toilet\u2014put it in a velvet box and we say good-bye and it's over.\n\nThe autopsy showed both fetuses developing normally. The doctors had no idea why I miscarried.\n\nIt's (fall) SNAP\n\nVIDEO: The Vagina Song\n\nLOVED my big squishy body. It was fun and giggly and sweet and FAT. Jell-O has made millions off those qualities. When I was alone, always naked. Touched myself everywhere all the time. Was soft and cuddly and large. In public, my Jell-O was raspberry with anchovies, pleasure with pain. It was sweet taking up space, and a lot of fun. Space is power. But it was also EMBARRASSING. People were cruel\u2014\"Fat cow.\" \"Fat pig.\" \"You're gross.\" \"How disgusting!\" \"You smell bad.\" Even though I didn't\u2014but that doesn't matter.\n\nOutward appearance changes what comes to you in life.\n\nThere are rare exceptions to that, but exceptions are not the rule. The way we look on the outside is the way we are perceived by others. Had a certain amount of success when I weighed 268 lbs. At 140 lbs., my success doubled, trebled. The way I look opens doors for me. Lived on both sides of that big fat coin. And you know the craziest thing is I am the average size of the American woman. Size 14 and I'm still a fat chick.\n\nAfter four miscarriages and an unacknowledged affair\u2014begin again, Julie Rae. A new job with a promotion and a new family plan\u2014adopt Ananda Rae from India\u2014we wait for her until 9/11 takes her from our arms too\u2014no international adoption.\n\nGet pregnant the old-fashioned way\u2014by celebrating a new house in every room\u2014make it to three months and three weeks before announce it to colleagues at a conference.\n\nMiscarry her on the toilet after five hours of agonizing labor\u2014all by myself.\n\nShe was beautiful and lifeless and perfect and not there.\n\nBegin using birth control for the first time in ten years.\n\nForty-one-year-old. I have a major infection. They can't identify what it is.\n\n\"Doctor, can you come here? I've never seen anything like this.\" Drugs make it worse\u2014the infection actually eats the antibiotic and grows.\n\nInconclusive.\n\nWe await the birth of our biracial son\u2014coming to us from a woman in Louisiana. Two days before I open a show, the Louisiana mom has her baby and runs away with him and a huge chunk of our money. Can understand why she wouldn't want to give him up. I GIVE UP. DONE.\n\nNever going to be the mother of a newborn.\n\nThe heart takes longer to admit it. Leave the nursery set up for eight months after the fact, then donate it all to a women's shelter.\n\nAmazed at the amount of profound life experiences that happen to women in the most unglamorous of places\u2014while seated on the toilet.\n\nWhen men pee, they get to hold their genitalia in their hand. That familiarity breeds all kinds of power.\n\nFor women, it's a much greater challenge. You really have to work to see what's down there, you . . . oh, hell, you've all seen The Vagina Monologues and know it's worth it to have a gander. And it often happens the first time while on the toilet.\n\nWe pee there;\n\npoop there;\n\nmasturbate there;\n\nbleed there;\n\nexchange information there;\n\nfind out we're pregnant there;\n\nfind out we're not pregnant there.\n\nIt's really a sacred place, beyond just being where one can take a truly satisfying shit.\n\nSNAP\n\nShe who used to provide three hot meals a day, sew all our clothes, run a daycare, sing in a barbershop chorus, manage a one-woman office arrived at our house with a suitcase containing four sweaters, two pairs of pants, 10,000,000 pairs of socks, no winter jackets, twenty-five cans of cat food, and a can of frosting. And we helped her, she got better, we trained her like a newborn\u2014to focus, to listen, put on makeup, to dress, to do laundry, and she felt good and useful and resentful and angry. She's so pissed about the situation and we deal with that, she's so sad and we deal with that, she's so embarrassed and we deal with that. The worst thing for her is the recognition that at some point it won't matter to her but that I will always know and be in pain about it.\n\nSTOP!\n\nMore words and phrases used while teaching:\n\nSuck it out.\n\nCowboy up.\n\nOvum to the wall.\n\nRisk being naked\u2014it's exhilarating.\n\nChallenge authority.\n\nDon't think like me\u2014get educated and THINK FOR YOURSELF so you can engage with me.\n\nActions have consequences\u2014be prepared.\n\nWaves and layers are evocative\u2014add more and more and more and more and more and more and more and MORE AND MORE AND MORE!\n\nPush the envelope.\n\nTAKE THE RISK!\n\nI occasionally take my own advice. SNAP\n\n\"Assisted\" living, what a comfortable euphemism\u2014a bed, a bureau, a couch, a table, a TV center, we shopped and I picked it all out but gave the illusion it was her choice. It made it easier\u2014practice fire drills, and locking the door, put the key around her neck, see her at breakfast or lunch and again after work so she can stay at this level of independence for as long as possible. She lives the non-life of assisted living and is unhappy. Begin taking her for walks as the weather warms up because I know she needs more care than assisted living but in order to move facilities with her insurance intact, she has to PROVE it by wondering off. Get her chipped and on the dementia patient hotline in case her walk gets her lost, she wears three pieces of ID jewelry because it's coming and want her safe. Give her the code to the door in song form\u2014\"1354, that's the way we open door.\" We laugh because \"the\" door doesn't fit in the rhythm. She finally does it, she walks out the door and to the lake we always go to and waits for them to find her, it takes under an hour. She gives me her watch\u2014knowing that it will stop\u2014I'm one of those people that fucks up electronic equipment\u2014because it's time and she tells me to always know it was time and I did the right thing.\n\nMy mother is in a lockdown Alzheimer's unit, my mother is in a bib, my mother is in a merry walker, my mother is unable to walk, my mother is drooling, crying, laughing, sleeping most of the time, surrounded by glorious women and men who love her, make her safe, and take care of her, it's so lovely and awful, such a relief and such guilt. It's odd to hope your mom has a fatal disease so she can die, but sometimes I did. It meant her freedom and mine.\n\n[Look at screen.]\n\nForty-one-year-old experiment\u2014told there is an 80% chance of advanced uterine and/or ovarian cancer\u2014a potential side effect of years of fertility treatments. Have a radical hysterectomy, not cancer\u2014still almost die because the urinary infection left so much scar tissue that it began to meld my insides together\u2014it wasn't a problem until it involved the kidney and the diaphragm and the bowels\u2014all of the reproductive stuff just allowed itself to congeal into one mass\u2014how profound\u2014how Inconclusive.\n\nI'm supposed to be flat on my back for three months\u2014can't\u2014have a job, a mother with dementia, and a husband who is having yet another affair. With a secretary. And he won't admit it\u2014even after I find out. I ask him to wait, wait, wait and help me. Consult a lawyer and write my own divorce\u2014served him the papers in black leather from head to toe on Valentine's Day\u2014still have a drainage ball coming out of my gut from surgery, so put it in my bra to make my tits look bigger.\n\nTwo weeks after my fourth minor surgery in three months, go to court in a gorgeous blue suit and scarf, plead my own case, and win EVERYTHING! But lose one of my greatest teachers.\n\nLive through it\u2014the darkness gives way to the tiny pinprick of light. I know I'll soon be dancing in it.\n\nNEVER ONCE met a woman who hadn't experienced some kind of sexual assault\u2014not ONCE. EVERY SINGLE WOMAN I KNOW, EVERY ONE, and MOST MEN.\n\nCan I have a show of hands?\n\nLet's see if we can be a community.\n\nAny questions?\n\nUnsolicited Advice\n\nWe've got to stop telling our boys they can take what they want. We must balance the privilege of boys and girls better, celebrate the gifts of each, cherish them, and help them learn respect and honor for self, for others. And to be kind.\n\nForty-four-year-old Barbie doll. What does one do when she is not going to have the family she planned, is divorced, and is taking care of her mother who has Alzheimer's? She becomes an adolescent boy. She takes those first baby steps into the hormones, she pretends she can live forever, she worries not, she takes major risks, she does things like drink too much, smoke too much, enjoy pot too much. She shirks as many responsibilities as she can. She messes with her career by taking risks, such as partying, among other things, with her students. She indiscriminately has sex with many, many, many people, and it's really fun. For about a year and a half. And then it starts to ring a little bit hollow.\n\n[Turn to a woman in the audience.]\n\n\"You're worth it. You're number one!\"\n\nWomen are not told that enough.\n\n[Turn to the man nearest her.]\n\nYou're told that, aren't you? Have whatever you want. Expect whatever you want! Oh, don't shrink away from me. I'm not going to stab you.\n\n[Wink.]\n\nBut I'm gonna think long and hard about it.\n\nI AM the Surgically Enhanced Feminist.\n\nMy body is so damaged from all the surgeries that the insurance company pays for a tummy tuck and a breast lift with augmentation. It's really rather surreal to see your nipples sitting in a tray waiting to be put back on. 36D. I was supposed to be a C cup but\n\nInconclusive.\n\nAnd as the body gets healthier, the vanity kicks in. What I learned in my forties is that the person I really need to be honest with is\u2014(TA-DA)\u2014ME! It is not better to look good than to feel good.\n\nIt is better to feel good because you like how you look.\n\nYou think I would have learned that by now. I teach actors, for Christ's sake. Theirs is a profession where 99% of the reason they get a job is because of the way they look. And 99% of them have to follow a very specific standard of beauty in order to work in most arenas. It's just the facts of life. It isn't right, so I battle to change the system from within.\n\nSNAP\n\nForty-six-year-old content. Really happy. I learn that worrying is praying for what you don't want, so I meditate on what I do want. I receive the most intriguing message.\n\nSNAP\n\nSubject: Sincerely\n\nI am 27 years old. I am a virgin. I feel you may be the one to teach me, goddess.\n\nI e-mail back.\n\nSNAP\n\nI am a good teacher, Daniel. Tell me more.\n\nThings said as a director:\n\nWelcome to the circle.\n\nI make the frame for the work and give the other artists the brushes to paint with, help their hands along.\n\nBest idea wins.\n\nAlways know that I'm the queen.\n\nAnd we create beautiful works together.\n\nBring three new things to every rehearsal.\n\nPush, push, push, push, push, push, push.\n\nEat well\u2014fruits, veggies, protein, and carbs.\n\nGet sleep and water.\n\nPlan academics and life well.\n\nWork BEFORE you play\u2014the playing is that much sweeter and burden free.\n\nAnd Daniel tells me more\u2014romantic, creative, emotional, intellectual, hilarious, hot e-mails\u2014like a Civil War letter-writing courtship. And God knows I feel like I've been to battle.\n\nWe write\u2014we meet\u2014the first meeting is public with no talking. Just furtive, knowing glances and passionate forbidden kisses behind a closed door. He picks me up. I'm flying. My body is my art. It is the landscape that tells my story. And Daniel loves it as much as I do. We connect is profound ways. I am more me in his presence. I desire to be my best self, willingly shift with joy because it makes us BOTH happy. We're not perfect\u2014but, man, do we have laugh! Soon, Daniel is no longer a virgin in a physical sense\u2014and I'm no longer a virgin to partnership. He tells me he is the reward at the end of my journey. He is right. We marry. As I walk down the aisle, I know \"till death do us part.\"\n\nOur family.\n\nAnd the dream that never dies, the wound that never heals, the ache that never left, finds peace. We begin the process of EXPANDING our family.\n\n(Surrogacy) (Begin again)\n\nWe're currently in the two-week wait. Hope . . . it's a beautiful thing.\n\n[Cross both hands and feet.]\n\nI still don't know where I'm going. I just know I'm not going there alone.\n\nGained 30 lbs.\n\nVIDEO: YOU\n\nIt's not the shit that happens to us, it's what we choose to do with it. ME? I work to stay open to the possibilities, be here now, laugh as much as possible, and enjoy the ride.\n\nUnsolicited Advice:\n\nThank all of your teachers\u2014from your family to your friends to ANYONE who touched you and pissed you off, laughed with you and hurt you.\n\nLove everyone and they'll love you, OR NOT. Either way, you grow.\n\nCONCLUSIVE\n\nVIDEO: Sunset.\nLaura Shaine Cunningham\n\nWeb Cam Woman\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2007\u20132008\n\none of five monologues collected by Daniel Gallant under the heading Five Story Walkup\n\n[An attractive WOMAN enters. She comes up from the theater aisle. Establish an imaginary door to her apartment. At the start, she is poised to enter. She speaks to the audience.]\n\nHi. Come on, come home. With me. . . . Just promise you won't tell. I want to show you something . . . private. Don't let on what you see. Here we are . . . 2B. But you just watch from where you are. That's right\u2014stand here, nicely on the welcome mat, next to the mezuzah\u2014not mine\u2014it was here when I moved in! I didn't want to take it down! Hey, never tear down a prayer. Not that you're not welcome, you are! But you can't go in my apartment\u2014you can just peek! Now, once I'm inside\u2014this is important\u2014don't ask why: DON'T MOVE, DON'T SPEAK! Okay, I'm in. . . .\n\n[She moves fast around the walls of the apartment, back flat to wall.]\n\nWhen I talk over here . . . they can't see me. If I flatten myself against the wall, I am out of range. So now what do you see? You see me. And I look . . . perfectly ordinary . . . normal . . . right? Nice eyes, good trim figure\u2014I work out! Tasteful dye job. Not from a bottle. From a salon. And my apartment\u20142B\u2014it looks perfectly normal, ordinary, too . . . an ordinary studio, rent stabilized, but stabilized too high, like a patient in ICU with a high fever\u2014ha-ha. An ordinary sofa bed\u2014it's cute, isn't it?\u2014only $899 from Jennifer Convertibles\u2014an ordinary coffee table, ordinary TV . . . ordinary bowl of mixed nuts.\n\nExcept for one thing! The seven cameras!\n\n[She establishes the seven fixed locations along the ceiling.]\n\nCamera one! Camera two! Camera three! Camera four!\n\n[Gestures off.]\n\nCamera five, bathroom! Camera six! Camera seven! They are trained on the center of my . . . very ordinary, normal apartment. Don't tell! Promise.\n\n[She checks her watch. She slinks around, delivers following line downstage to audience.]\n\nMen pay to watch me; this is how I make my living. I am what they call . . . a Webcam woman. I can't believe my good fortune: I just had to tell someone . . . who isn't, you know, part of it. Wow! They won't expect me for another five minutes\u2014the mikes are not \"on\" yet . . . the cameras are always on . . . but . . . This is easier than going to the office. I was an office temp.\n\n[She slinks around the perimeter of the room, inhales to get less of a silhouette. To herself.]\n\nSuck it in, Suck it in.\n\n[To the audience.]\n\nNow, I just stay home and do what I do and it's permanent. And men, the video voyeurs, sign on\u2014I accept MasterCard and PayPal\u2014to watch me do . . . what I do. The trick is, I have to forget they are watching, or it isn't fun for them. I have to be . . . myself. I can . . . lie around on my couch, read the paper . . . they do expect me to masturbate, and\u2014well\u2014I do. I think they want me to masturbate more . . . it is amazing how you sense . . . this electrical \"other\"\u2014which is, I guess, the \"static\" of their attention\u2014I can never really forget\u2014oh, yes, the masturbation\u2014isn't it boring, waiting for me, maybe twenty-four hours, to start? And I can't get creative\u2014it has to be just ordinary, normal, little at-home casual diddling, almost unconscious\u2014not peep show stuff. . . . I don't put on makeup, oh, maybe a little eyeliner, but no fancy panties. . . . But they never know when I am going to do it, so I guess that's the element of suspense in it for them, as I read the Times, or vacuum. I wonder\u2014how great is this for them? But they never complain. They like that it is . . . natural. Hey, I am making $10,000 a month, I used to worry about making the rent, the Time Warner bill, the Con Ed. Now, I can afford slipcovers. It's fabulous. Isn't it?\n\n[She checks her watch.]\n\nThree minutes! I got to tell you something\u2014[She flattens herself, lower; we have the impression of a mouse running round the edges of her cage.]\u2014I had sex once, with a man, for them. The man didn't know they could see. . . . He didn't notice all the cameras. But something went wrong; he kind of . . . shriveled inside me, and . . . and he excused himself and pulled out . . . out of me, out of my apartment. I think of that guy, sometimes.\n\n[Upright again.]\n\nThere are forty-nine of them. I know, of course, from the charge cards. They live in all the contiguous United States, and now I have one in Honolulu. A lulu in Honolulu. I am so happy and relieved that I discovered this new way to make a living. They pay so nicely: never miss. I used to have to get up and catch the D train by 8 a.m. to get to work by 9. Work, work, work\u2014really dull, at the computer all day long. Now, I sleep in!\n\n[She dons a beautiful ivory white silken dressing gown.]\n\nThey watch me sleep. . . . You know, it's funny\u2014it disturbs . . . my dreams. There must be something to R.E.M. sleep that is . . . private, that doesn't want . . . to be observed. So my sleep is getting light. Fitful. I dream I am . . . being not just watched, but that men are chasing me to the edge of a cliff and I wake with this yank\u2014like being forklifted back to consciousness\u2014and I can't catch my breath, here in the not\u00adquite-dark I use a night-light, so they can still see me\u2014and [She starts to crack a bit.] I get a little scared sometimes, my heart pounds and pounds. I have them, the orgasms, the paroxysms, so many, some nights, but after the first two orgasms they just get . . . irritating. I know they are getting their money's worth. But I get . . . no . . . [She launches into the Stones classic.] \"Satisfaction . . . but I try, and I try, and I try . . . and I try. . . .\" Until I am . . . well, dry, and rubbed raw. This isn't how it's supposed to be! Some of them speak to me\u2014that's extra, but I will allow it. They address me on the speakers. [She points.] See those little perforated metal \"mouths\"\u2014those are their speakers\u2014which I have to turn on in [Checks watch.] two minutes! 120 seconds! They can direct my movements. [She imitates a deep male voice.] \"Arch your back.\" \"Writhe.\" \"Cry out my name!\" Confession: I don't like the word \"masturbation\"\u2014it sounds so . . . turbulent. You know what? I don't want to do it! I'm not in the mood, even for myself! I just want to be alone! In peace! Or to be with someone real, someone present!\n\n[She is starting to lose it.]\n\nI remember . . . belly flesh! Kissing someone's navel . . . Oh, those were the best sleeps, belly to back, arms . . . around my waist. . . . Warm in winter\u2014I felt safe. I am not safe now, am I?\n\n[She checks her watch.]\n\nOkay. Mikes on. I can't be absent too long. . . .\n\n[She flips the audio mikes on and slips the silken sash from her robe. She performs two skips, as with a jump rope.]\n\nI perform little fitness sessions, so they can see me work out a bit.\n\n[She playfully loops the silken sash around her neck, makes a comic gesture as if garroting herself.]\n\nBut this is what you really want, isn't it?\n\n[She stares hopelessly out, the sash a noose.]\n\nThis is worth, what, a thousand on MasterCard? PayPal! Only I never get to collect, do I? But . . . God.\n\n[She closes her eyes.]\n\nIt will be worth it. . . .\n\n[She addresses the cameras.]\n\nMy name, my name was\u2014Eva Marie! My mother named me that! After Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront.\n\n[Her eyes pinball, she is connecting to her true self.]\n\nNo, wait. I don't want to kill myself. . . . Kill Eva Marie Saint? I want to . . . to get even, I want to . . . thwart you. And you! And you! And you!\n\n[She gives the fist to each camera. She pulls the rope away from her neck, cracks it like a whip.]\n\nYou've ruined it for me\u2014it started with the e-mails\u2014why   \ndid I get those messages? \"Enlarge your dick!\" \"Molly Bang Butt!\" \"My boyfriend has a BIG BANGER and I have a Tiny MOUTH!\" I couldn't go into my own in-box and now you are in my own room, my inner sanctum\u2014Oh, EFF YOU\u2014I WON'T PLAY ANYMORE! No more CYBER MOLESTATIONS, if you please. . . . I want you to pay and pay and pay, and not ever get to see me do what you want me to do. You know what?!\n\n[She makes a mock punch, shadowboxing the cameras, one by one.]\n\nJohn! Larry! Mike! Ike! Gordon! Lionel! GEORGE!\n\nYou made me fulfill your fantasies . . . now you can suffer mine!\n\n[Music: \"Someone to Watch Over Me\" begins . . . softly. She dances, as if with a partner, dreamily, her arms around herself, She turns her back to the audience, gives a funny, \"EFF you\" twitch to her hips, looks, smiles defiantly over her shoulder.]\n\nThis is it, pay pals!\n\n[There is the sound of men breathing, from many men. Music: \"Someone to Watch Over Me.\" She is smiling, moving sensuously in her solo dance for that \"certain someone.\" Spotlight on her solitary, ecstatic dance. Isolated spot on her face, beatific, longing. She sings.]\n\nThere's a certain someone, I'm longing to see . . . I know that he . . . will turn out to be . . . someone to watch over me!\n\n[Blackout.]\nNeil LaBute\n\nLove at Twenty\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2007\u20132008\n\none of five monologues collected by Daniel Gallant under the heading Five Story Walkup\n\n[Silence. Darkness. Lights up on a YOUNG WOMAN standing onstage, looking down at us. A cell phone in one hand. Purse over the other shoulder.]\n\nYOUNG WOMAN \"l-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19 and 20.\" Ready or not, here I come.\n\n[Smiles.]\n\nGod, remember that, from when we were kids and you'd play games, like hide-and-seek or crap like that, and one person would be it, covering their eyes and counting to twenty or however many and then you'd have to go find everybody or run around, that kind of thing? Yeah . . . that was fun. Really, really fun stuff. I loved doing all that, and being it, too, I never minded that. Uh-uh, I didn't at all, which a lot of kids never wanted to do\u2014especially most of the girls I grew up around\u2014because they'd get scared or shit like that, being alone in the dark or whatever, but not me. Nope, I didn't mind it one bit, being that person. . . . I guess I sort of like being the center of attention. A lot.\n\n[She laughs and stops a moment, checking her phone.]\n\nAnd I never, I mean, at that age, I had no idea how important that number would end up being to me. In my life. Twenty. It really, really is because I'm, like, practically that age now. Going to be, anyway, in a few weeks\u2014December, that's my birthday. Not the whole month, obviously, but during it. On the 20th, which absolutely sucks because it's so close to the holidays that I always get screwed on gifts\u2014\"We'll just do it all together, on Christmas, and you'll get extra.\" My folks tried to sell me on that one when I was little . . . that I was so extra special that we should just pretend that me and baby Jesus had the same birthday, but all it meant was, like, maybe one or two more gifts than my sister got and not even anything big, 'cause my Easy Bake Oven (for instance) was the major package and my mom and dad'd just toss in a few other little bits\u2014clothes, even!\u2014and that'd be that. That was my birthday, which stinks. Completely. So, yeah, that's me . . . almost twenty. On the 20th. And what else? I mean, since I said it was such a huge deal . . . oh, yeah, right. This guy I'm seeing, well, he's my professor, actually, in this one history course\u2014it's my second year at college, so that's cool\u2014he's almost exactly twenty years older than me. Yep. \"Twenty years your senior,\" my mom says, which is so gay because she's only, like, twenty-three years older than me, but she sounds like my grandma or something . . . she always says shit like that, but especially about him. My boyfriend. Well, I guess he's not actually that, technically, because he's got a wife and all that\u2014no kids, though\u2014and that's a bit of a bummer, but he's getting divorced, he totally is, but they've just got a few things to work out. Legalities and all that crap and I've been very good about waiting for him. We started in together last semester\u2014I'm only taking his \"Empire Building from Napoleon to Nixon\" because it fits my schedule and it's first thing in the morning, so he can give me a ride (my Honda is a piece of shit when it's cold)\u2014but, yeah, we've been a couple for almost a year now, school year, anyway, and he's promised me that we're always gonna be together. Forever.\n\n[Beat.]\n\nWell, until today, that is. Like twenty minutes ago . . .\n\n[She stops and checks her phone again, then her watch.]\n\nSorry . . . I'm waiting for a call. See, he just texted me. Dexter did. That's him\u2014Dex, I call him\u2014and he sent me this juicy message about how good it was last night and how much he adores being in my mouth and, you know, all that stuff . . . but actually, I was at Tula's last night, this bar downtown where I work\u2014okay, dance\u2014and I haven't seen him since Tuesday so, umm, that's weird. But the hurtful part of it is, the actual bad part of it is this: it's to his wife. Kimmie. That's her name\u2014which really makes me want to barf whenever I hear him say it\u2014not some other student or lady in town, which I could then understand because he's quite good-looking and sexy and all that for this older guy, but it's meant for his wife, who he is supposed to be leaving, and so that means he's lying to me, right? Lying and sleeping with her and all that shit that he's been telling me, assuring me is just not true. And now I know for, like, a fact . . . is. Yeah. Dexter's actually screwing me and Kimmie and God knows who else and you know.\n\n[Suddenly her phone rings. She looks out at us one last time.]\n\nOh, wow. Here we go . . . l-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-l9 and 20!\n\n[Smiles.]\n\nReady or not, here I come . . .\n\n[She lets it ring twice more, then goes to answer it.]\n\nHello?\n\n[Silence. Darkness.]\nPeter Maloney\n\nLeash\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2003\u20132004\n\ncharacter\n\nCASSIE JESSUP is in her twenties. Southern. Cute in a kind of dirty way. She wears U.S. Army fatigue pants in a camouflage pattern and an olive-drab T-shirt. Combat boots.\n\nset\n\nAn open area between rows of cells in a prison in Iraq. Industrial lights hang from the ceiling. Electrical wires hang down. In a corner of the space, file boxes broken open, files spilling onto the floor. Old office furniture scattered about, a metal desk on which sits a computer monitor and keyboard. Swivel chairs, some upturned. Against the stage-right wall, metal buckets full of water.\n\nplace\n\nAbu Ghraib prison, Iraq\n\ntime\n\nOctober 2003\n\nThe Stranger is necessary, and antagonism directed against him  \nhas a biological basis beyond wishful denial.\n\n\u2014Robert Ardrey, The Social Contract\n\nThey wanted to know why I did what I did  \nWell sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world.\n\n\u2014Bruce Springsteen, \"Nebraska\"\n\n[In the dark, sound of iron doors slamming shut. Echo of men shouting in Arabic. Sound of dogs barking. In very dim light, a figure, silhouetted, is pulled to center stage from up right by a strap stretching off down left at floor level.]\n\nCASSIE MOTHERFUCKER. Hey! Get back here, you!\n\n[Slam. Lights up on CASSIE JESSUP, holding on to what we now realize is a long leather leash. In her other hand she holds a baseball. She jerks the leash, the stops. She looks at us.]\n\n'Scuse my French.\n\n[CASSIE smiles, freezes, and there is a bright flash, as if someone has just taken her picture.]\n\nFirst thing is, you gotta show 'em who's boss. With a dog like this one. . . . An' he's a big dog. . . . Aren't you?\n\n[She jerks on the leash.]\n\nYes, you are, you're my big boy. With a dog big as this one, see, you got to let hun know you're in control. At all times. He may be bigger'n me, but he knows who's in charge. Don't you, boy? Hey, hey, HEY!\n\n[The leash tightens and she is pulled off balance. With both hands she pulls the leash until she is once again at center.]\n\nThat's why it's important you got the right leash. Thisn's nylon web. Tie-down strap I found up on Tier 2. Leather makes a good leash. It's got some give to it. Canvas is good. You can throw canvas in the washer when it gets all slobbery and disgustin'. Some folks like a chain, but a chain is heavy. Big dog, pullin' you this way an' that, you gotta ask do you want to add to the weight by using a heavy chain as a leash? Then there's your collar. Before you choose your collar, you gotta think about what you're tryin' to do. The purpose of the collar is to what? To guide your dog.\n\nAnd when you got to, to check your dog.\n\n[She jerks on the leash.]\n\nLike that. That's called abstention training. Make your dog stop doin' somethin' he wants to do but you don't want him to. That's called negative reinforcement. Like a bitch snaps at her nursin' pup, he bites down on her teat too hard. That's a check. Hey, fetch!\n\n[She tosses the baseball offstage, waits.]\n\nYou don't wanta fetch? I had this dog one time? Clyde? He was a mutt. All my dogs're mutts, purebreds're too high-strung. Clyde only had three legs. He was cool, though. Only thing is, he didn't like blacks. I had this one friend, Jewel? Well, Jewel couldn't come into my yard at all without Clyde goin' ballistic. Barkin', snarlin', just about pullin' the back porch off the house. We kept him chained to that wrought-iron trellis deal Tommy made for Mama. 'Course Mama wouldn't let Jewel come in the house. An' Daddy didn't want me goin' to Jewel's house. So I didn't see too much of Jewel. Hey, what're you doin'? Fucker!\n\n[She takes a flat, leather slipper from her back pocket, exits down-left. Sound of leather slapping. CASSIE returns, still holding the end of the leash and the slipper. She puts the slipper in her back pocket.]\n\nGotta nip that kind of behavior right in the bud. Lot of folks say you gotta be friends with your dog, punishment'll backfire on you. But I've had lots of dogs and in my experience it don't hurt for him to be a little bit afraid of you. I mean, come on, who's the boss, you or him? Huh? Listen, discipline is not cruelty. That's my opinion. There's a place and a time for everything. Isn't there, Abdul? And this is not the place for you to do your business. Place stinks to high heaven already from all you dogs. What the heck would it be like if we let you make a mess wherever you wanted? Right. That's right! See, animals respond to routine, and one of the first things you gotta do is let your dog know where's the right place and where's the wrong place for him to do his business. An' we take you to the latrine, and what do you do? You refuse go. An' then what? We take you back to your crate and you make a mess and then we have to clean it up and we get upset, don't we? Or we don't clean it up, and you get upset. Either way, us gets upset, and we don't want that, now do we?\n\n[The leash has gone limp. She turns to shout over her shoulder.]\n\nOrin. He's smoked! He's tuckered out! And so am I! I think gone asleep! Or else he's dead.\n\n[She crosses down to look offstage left.]\n\nNot dead. Malingering. Take a break, Kasim.\n\n[She drops the leash, looks at us.]\n\nThis wasn't my idea. Orin. Fuckin' pantywaist. Addicted to that air conditioner. I told him, you're gonna get sick you go back and forth between the hot and cold all day. Orin's from Pennsylvania. What's he know from hot? Says they got hot summers. Humph. Hot summers. Where I come from hot means you can't hang on the monkey bars without your gettin' burned to blisters. Streets in summer, you don't want to wear shoes with nails in the soles, 'less you want to feel like Jesus must've, walkin' that last mile. Hot ain't nothin' new to me. Doesn't mean I want to be here. Fuckin' shithole. You like it here, Mufasa? Course you do, there's no place like home, is there? No, sir. Yes, sir. Sir?! What do I do with this haji now? He's done his laps! Orin! Corporal? He's prob'ly chattin' up Remarque. You know Specialist Remarque, Kasim? Sure you do. You had her panties on your head the other night. [She takes camera from pants pocket, aims it offstage left, snaps a picture. FLASH.] Never thought you'd end up a screen saver, did you?\n\n[She puts camera back in her pocket.]\n\nHe better not be doin' nothin' more'n talkin' to her! Fuckin' dog! I know he's a dog. But what can I do? He captured my heart, Abdul. . . . You know what? I'm gonna e-mail that fucker right now.\n\n[She rights a swivel chair; sits in it, scoots over to the computer on the desk, begins to type. ] \"Dear . . . Corporal . . . Roper. You . . . dog. Get . . . your big . . . wet . . . red . . . nose . . .\"\n\n[She turns to look offstage left, grins.]\n\nThought I was gonna say somethin' else, didn't you?\n\n[She turns back to the computer.]\n\n. . . Out . . . of . . . that . . . bitch's . . . crotch . . . right . . . now. Or I'll have you fixed! Arf-arf. Your ever-lovin' Cassie Jessup, PFC.\" Ha.\n\n[She turns to look offstage left.]\n\nIt's not fair, Abdul. This ain't even my job. I'm not MI. I'm not even MP. I'm just hangin' here with Orin. I'm only here at all because of him. He is my heart. My sweet . . . heart. My only love. He fills me up like no one ever did in this whole world. . . . And he' good-looking, isn't he? That smile? Oh, he knows how to have a good time. Our last night in Virginia Beach? Just after we got our orders? Shit. I could tell you stories. Good God in heaven, now what am I   \ngonna do?\n\n[CASSIE turns front. She suddenly looks stricken. To herself.]\n\nFuck!\n\n[She covers her eyes with one hand, cries. Recovers. Wipes her eyes.]\n\nAsante sana\n\nsquashed banana\n\nWe nugu\n\nMi mi apana . . .\n\n[Quietly muttering Rafiki's chant from The Lion King, she crosses to the line of buckets against the wall.]\n\nWhere's ol' Rafiki when I need him?\n\n[She lifts a bucket full of water; goes to stage-left portal.]\n\nTime for your shower.\n\n[She empties the bucket of water on the creature just offstage. Then tosses bucket offstage left. She regards her soaked captive for a moment, then goes to the remaining full bucket: lifts it, pours it over herself.]\n\nYeah.\n\n[She sets the empty bucket down as she shouts.]\n\nHey, Remarque! Get down here, you cunt!\n\n[She starts doing kung-fu moves in slow motion.]\n\nWe'll have it out, right here, right now! Wet T-shirt contest on A-1! I'd lose.\n\n[She is at the computer.]\n\nShould I send this? Abed? Hell, why not? SEND. \"Your mail has been sent.\" He's good at what he does, the Corporal. He does this same thing in real life, you know. Corrections officer. Upstate New York. Lordin' it over shitheads like you. I don't mean rag-heads, sand-niggers. I mean American niggers. We call 'em blacks.\n\n[She rights another swivel chair; sits in it. During the following, she may spin around in the chair; scoot around the room kicking her feet against the floor: CASSIE is deadly serious, but there is often something playful in her manner, even when she is talking about the most horrendous things.]\n\nIt's all your fault, you fuckin' hajis. Everything was goin' good and then you had to go and do that. How could you do that? Three thousand innocent people. Motherfuckers. I got a question: What the fuck is wrong with you people? Huh? Do you think you are ever going to win? Do you really believe you are going to whip us? Us? Let me tell you somethin, Said. There's a creek behind my house back home. You know? Creek? Stream? Water? Like a river, only smaller? Anyway, it's a beautiful creek when it's runnin'. Lots of sunfish. Little fish? Taste great you pan-fry 'em. An' crabs. They're really crayfish but we call 'em crabs. In the summer th' creek dries up, an' you can jump from rock to rock and catch 'em in the shallows. Crabs are the fastest creatures. Little suckers scoot back under the rock they see you comin', so you gotta get' behind the rock and then reach around and under slow then quick snatch 'em up, toss 'em in the can. Well, we were down there crabbin' this one day, an' Clyde was with us. Ol' Clyde liked nothin' better'n the creek, and he's goin' nuts, jumpin' on the rocks, fallin' in, shakin' himself off, barkin' the whole time. All of a sudden, Clyde is barkin' like he's hurt. I look, an' he's in this one pool that's deeper than the others, we call it the clay pit. An' he's tryin' to climb out, but he's slippin' on the clay an' then he's goin' under. An' I realize that somethin' is pullin' him under' an' then I know: the snapper's got him. Big ol' snappin' turtle, you can go years without seeing him, but he's somewhere in that creek, you know that, but you forget it, you know how you do. So I call out to Walter the snapper's got Clyde, and he comes runnin' from a little ways upstream. He's been smashin' beer bottles against the lower dam there, but he comes runnin' when he hears me call. Walter's amazing. He's dead now, but. . . . He was totally not afraid. Of anything. He didn't jump in. He knew if he did he'd never find a purchase in that clay. What he did was, he just leaned over that muddy pool and grabbed Clyde by the forelegs up near his shoulders. Clyde was a big dog, but Walter pulled him right up out of that water, with the snapper still attached, his jaws on Clyde's lower right leg, just below the hock. An' Clyde is howlin' (he bit Walter twice, we found out later),tryin' to get away from whatever's got him by the leg. You ever see a snapper? Ugliest reptile ever invented. Prehistoric fuckin' monster. You think those IRF dogs are scary? We put a snapper in your box with you and you'll turn state's evidence in a big hurry, believe me. You couldn't tell 'em enough fast enough. But Walter, like he's in some science fiction movie. Walter grabs the snapper around the neck with his bare hands and just starts throttlin' him. The turtle's eyes are rollin' back in his horny head, tryin' to get a look at what's got him now. For a minute or two, it's a standoff, the snapper won't let go of Clyde, and Walter won't let go of the snapper. Clyde is howlin' and Walter's moanin' nngggg . . . nnnggg . . . nnnggg, an' I'm . . . I don't know, I was prob'ly cryin' about my poor dog, an' suddenly the turtle opens his jaws to try to get at Walter, not realizin' by doin' that he's lettin' loose of Clyde. An' then I'm holdin' the dog and Walter's draggin' the snapper by the neck upstream to the dam. There's all these rusty wires and rods stickin' outa the concrete and he wraps this piece of wire around the snapper's neck and hangs him up there on the dam. When we get back from takin' Clyde to the vet's, the turtle's still alive, scratchin' at the concrete, tryin' to push off from the dam with his flippers. But he wasn't goin' no place. Me an' Walter took turns throwin' rocks at the bastard. Hittin' him with sticks. Broke his shell all to shit. Took three days for him to die. We left him hangin' there, stinkin' in the sun. Flies had a field day. Clyde lost his leg. But he lived a good long time with just the three. He was a good ol' dog. What's my point here? Do I have a point? I don't know. Maybe it's . . . Maybe it's that snappers are strong . . . an' nasty . . . an' tough. But they're dumb. An' they're not as strong as Walter.\n\n[CASSIE puts her hand on her belly.]\n\nI don't feel so good.\n\n[She mumbles Rafiki's chant to herself.]\n\nAsante sana squash banana . . . Orin! . . . Come get this guy! He's softened up.\n\n[CASSIE suddenly moves to the bucket she emptied over herself, drops to her knees, vomits into it. Her back to us, we see her muscles contracting, relaxing, contracting, hear wrenching sounds as she pukes hard into the metal pail. Finally, the retching and she rests, her head still in the bucket. Quiet moans. She lifts her head, turns wiping her mouth with her forearm. Wet dripping from her mouth, eyes, and nose. Wasted, she sits on the swivel chair, leans forward, her head in her hands. After a moment, she raises her head, looks offstage left.]\n\nI got a question.\n\n[She takes a folded, laminated card from her pocket, unfolds it, finds the phrase she's looking for; reads.]\n\nFee 'indi suaal.\n\n[There is no response. She looks up and offstage left, then looks down at the card, looks for a phrase, finds it, looks up again.]\n\nAeish ismak.\n\n[There is no response.]\n\nWhat is your name?\n\n[There is no response. CASSIE folds the card, puts it in her pocket, turns front.]\n\nI didn't come here of my own accord. And I can't leave that way.\n\n[She takes the camera from her pocket.]\n\nWhoever brought me here will have to take me home.\n\n[She lifts the camera, aims it at us.]\n\nInshallah.\n\n[She takes our picture. FLASH.]\nPolly Frost and Ray Sawhill\n\nThe Last Artist in New York City\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2008\u20132009\n\nAuthors' Note:\n\nWe intend this play to be specific to the circumstances of its production. Thus, the name of the theater space in which this play will be performed in your production should be substituted for \"PS 122,'' and the name of the actor who will be performing the main role in your production should be substituted for \"Karen Grenke.\" (Karen acted in the first production of this play, which took place at PS 122.) We are also open to other substitutions for \"New York City\" and for the suburb \"Metuchen\" as long as we are consulted and give our agreement prior to performance.\n\nscene one\n\nMetuchen Mall\n\nANNOUNCER VOICE Ladies and gentlemen, as the last performance at PS 122 before Chase/Wachovia\u2013Whole Foods moves in for your financial and shopping ease, Theatre Askew presents Karen Grenke, \"The Last Artist in New York City.\"\n\n[KAREN is moving into the theater space with a flashlight. Points it at walls, ceiling, people in the audience, at herself.]\n\nKAREN [To audience.] Walking through the Metuchen Mall. . . . By my side, Xavier, my former lover in the Polyamory Art Collective. . . . You may know them as PAC. . . . Years ago, Xavier helped me find my current style. . . .   \nOf course I helped him equally. . . . Metuchen, you ask? Central Jersey is the answer. . . . Central Jersey is always the answer. . . . My old partners had abandoned Williamsburg years ago. . . .\n\n[Flashlight continues picking out things. To audience.]\n\nDark corridors . . . dried-up fountains . . . display windows for Linens Etc. and Williams-Sonoma now cracked and jagged. . . . Sullen kids in tight pants and spiky hair camping out and smoking. . . . We're inside an abandoned mall, but I'm reminded of photos I once saw in a book about Astor Place in the '70s. . . . Xavier is talking.\n\n[As XAVIER.]\n\nWhy has it taken you so long to visit us in person? The time has come for you to give up the big city dream. Baby, New York doesn't care about art anymore.\n\n[To audience.]\n\nXavier pushes open a huge door. . . . Rave music up. People dancing, flashing lights, pulsing electronica. . . .\n\n[To XAVIER.]\n\nOh my God, Xavier, this is the greatest scene ever, Retro-Hindu-Trance, aren't I right?\n\n[As XAVIER.]\n\nWelcome to the Big Box, baby.\n\n[To audience.]\n\nWhen the day began I had no idea how momentous it would prove.\n\n[Rave music continues for a few seconds, then stops.]\n\nscene two\n\nKaren on Segway\n\n[Swirly pink-green light. Earlier that day. Hurrying between jobs. KAREN quaffs Red Bull.]\n\nKAREN [To audience.] Floating through the city on my faithful Segway. . . . Between one job and the next. . . . Five day jobs and I barely get by. . . . Bouncing. . . . Ah, the hallowed cobblestones of SoHo. . . . Paying tribute. . . . The greats of the past . . . Karen Finley, Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray . . . Then through Chelsea. . . . Once full of galleries, now playdate central for families. . . . In midtown, the former sites of Sonnabend, Castelli, Pace Wildenstein. . . . I nod silently. . . . Wavy . . . blue glass . . . high-rises . . . taking over everywhere. . . . I hate those fucking things!\n\n[Ka-hoop of iPhone e-mail notification interrupts. KAREN tries to keep balance as she pulls out iPhone and calls up e-mail.]\n\n[To audience.]\n\nStefani Symonds. Dot N-Y Times? That's right, the Times. The New York fucking Times! She wants to do a feature. That's right, about me, Karen Grenke. \"You're the last remaining artist in New York City. You're a cultural landmark.\" Omigod, omigod, omigod. . . . After all these years . . . all my sacrifices . . . my time as a New York artist has finally come!\n\n[Twirls around on Segway in joy and\u2014horn honks\u2014almost gets run over.]\n\nscene three\n\nKaren at Frank Gehry High\n\n[Hard white light up. KAREN is at desk in \"teacher\" mode\u2014think Spalding Gray in eyeglasses. Takes a big swig of Red Bull.]\n\nKAREN [To audience.] There I was, behind my teacher's desk, at Frank Gehry High for the Developmentally Gifted on the Upper East Side. As my students settled in, I crafted a proud e-mail to my former mates in the Polyamory Art Collective . . . PAC. . . . Been years since I last wrote them. But   \nI felt certain they'd be happy for me. . . . The great artistic spirit that this city once had . . . embodied now in me and me alone! . . . I was still buzzed as I began talking about Warhol's immortal brilliance.\n\n[As student.]\n\nScrew immortality. How'd his paintings do at the most recent auction?\n\n[To audience.]\n\nGod, how I hated these new entitled brats! But it was my own fault, I was the one who'd persuaded the principal to let me replace Introductory Art History with Art as Recession Investment Strategy. It was time to steer the conversation in a productive direction.\n\n[To class.]\n\nHey, I have a fun announcement this morning. The Times is doing a feature on me. That's right, me, your very own teacher, Ms. Karen Grenke. You never really believed I was an artist, did you? But now\u2014\n\n[As student.]\n\nWhat's the Times?\n\n[To class.]\n\nYou really don't know? It's what we used to call a major news source. It symbolized New York and its great cultural life.\n\n[As student.]\n\nLosing strategy. The underlying mortgage on that new Renzo Piano building is killing them. You should be targeting Collegehumor.com instead.\n\n[To audience.]\n\nChrist! After class, I was unlocking my Segway. I noticed this shy girl from class standing there. You know the type. Gaunt . . . dreamy . . . her hair a different color every week.\n\n[As JESS.]\n\nSorry about my idiot classmates. Screw them. They know nothing about art.\n\n[To JESS.]\n\nOh. And you do?\n\n[To audience.]\n\nShe pulled out her iPhone. . . . It's a YouTube mash-up showing Schnabel, Fischl, and Sherman mouthing the lyrics to \"Sheena Is a Punk Rocker.\"\n\n[As JESS.]\n\nI did it by myself. After Effects. Flash. Final Cut.\n\n[To audience.]\n\nI started to lecture her about giving people you're stealing from credit, then . . . decided not to go there. Why squash creativity?\n\nscene four\n\nKaren on Segway\n\n[Lights change back to Segway-swirly. KAREN on Segway, a dreamy-pleased state, slurping Red Bull as she steers with one hand.]\n\nKAREN [To audience.] So there's hope. . . . New York may have a cultural future after all. . . . Cruising home . . . me and my Segway merging as one. . . . Crossing 14th . . . ah, my beloved East Village . . . home of the Beats . . . the punk rock revolution. . . .\n\n[Takes big swig of Red Bull. It has its effect.]\n\nBut even downtown the bio-morphing blue glass buildings are taking over.\n\n[Another big swig.]\n\nFuckers!\n\n[iPhone e-mail goes ka-thump. KAREN calls it up.]\n\n[To audience.]\n\nEden, my rival for Xavier in the Polyamory Art Collective . . . PAC. . . . I know what you're thinking\u2014\"rivalry\"? Well, if you're polyamorous you know how it goes. . . . All the blah-blah around who's sleeping with who. . . . Ethical sluts talk more than they fuck. . . . But there was just no getting past our feelings of possessiveness. . . . In the space behind Eden, the other members of PAC writhe in a naked heap. . . . Rehearsal or orgy?\n\n[As EDEN.]\n\nCongrats! We'd help you celebrate in person but we never come to NYC any longer. Honey, today's real artists don't even know where Manhattan is.\n\n[To audience.]\n\nOnce a bitch, always a bitch? Why can't Xavier see that!\n\n[Swigs Red Bull in fury.]\n\nscene five\n\nKaren at her Apartment\n\n[Swirly lights stop. KAREN now sitting on the desk, as though on sofa or bed. Empty cans of Red Bull in a mess around her.]\n\nKAREN [To audience.] The real trouble, I was starting to realize\u2014I've been so busy maintaining life in New York that I haven't gotten much art done. None. Zero. Nada. What will I have to show when I meet with Stefani?\n\n[Takes big swig of Red Bull. Sets empty can down among others. Contemplates arrangement of cans. Rearranges them. To self.]\n\nI was starting to see some real artistic possibilities. . . .\n\n[KAREN kisses the Red Bull. Fondles it. Runs the can of Red Bull over arms,, head, legs, boobs, tummy. Starts to masturbate using the can of Red Bull. In big gesture of heedlessness, she sweeps all the other cans of Red Bull onto the floor. As she's starting to feel the heat\u2014the iPhone makes its e-mail ka-thunk sound.]\n\nOh shit!\n\n[KAREN calls up e-mail. To self.]\n\nSay it isn't so!\n\n[To audience.]\n\nStefani's been downsized. The underlying mortgage really is causing hell at the Times! And worse\u2014the article about me is off! What has my life been about!? I blasted off a woeful mass message to my entire e-mail list. The Collective got back to me instantly. . . .\n\nscene six\n\nKaren on Segway\n\n[This time we get a nightmare version of swirly pink-green Segway lighting and subjective movement. It's dark and stormy, and KAREN is despairing.]\n\nKAREN [To herself and the audience.] Come join us, they say. . . . A performance in Metuchen, they say. . . . It's the old loyalties that help us out in tough times. . . . I throw on my old art-block party clothes. . . . The first time in years. . . . The Segway and I are off. . . . Dodging potholes. . . . Steering around young families with their damn baby strollers. . . . Blind with emotion, we fly\u2014fly!\u2014through the rain. . . . Screw you, New York City. . . . Screw your SUVs . . . your endless bank branches. . . . I hate tourist-safe neighborhoods. . . . Screw your K-Marts . . . your Barnes and Nobles . . . your family-friendly Disney musicals. . . . I hate branding! . . . Trader Joe's I'll make an exception for. . . . Excellent prices on wine . . . and like that\u2014\n\n[Lights go to black. Big whoosh sound.]\n\n[To audience.]\n\nI was in the tunnel on my way to central Jersey.\n\nscene seven\n\nMetuchen Mall\n\n[Flashlight in KAREN's hand, as in opening scene. Sounds of flogging and moaning. KAREN stares offstage, takes big swig of Red Bull.]\n\nKAREN [To audience.] In a room to one side of the dance space Xavier is laying into Eden . . . when I was living with the Collective, flogging and suspensions weren't our thing. But ever since Kink.com took all those awards for BDSM porn everyone has been into it. . . . Ouch! . . . Still\u2014oh, Christ, look at that. . . . So gruesome. . . . It really is beautiful. . . . Shit, that was a motherfucker of an orgasm. . . . I have to say that PAC is doing their best work ever. . . . Hanging exhausted from the rack, Eden is transformed into an icon of desire. . . . No! No! I can't keep watching. . . . Artistic jealousy. . . . Sexual jealousy. . . . It's a lethal combination! . . .\n\n[Rave lighting and music up as KAREN switches off flashlight and staggers back to desk. Starts to climb stairs up to desktop but she's so emotional that she stumbles. A strobe light pops off.]\n\nWhat the hell?\n\n[Looks around. Another strobe pops off, then another.]\n\n[To herself and the audience.]\n\nSomebody shooting photos. . . . Right up between my thighs!\n\n[To stranger.]\n\nHey, quit it!\n\n[To audience.]\n\nA woman. At least it isn't some pathetic frat boy. . . . We gasp. We look at each other in confusion.\n\n[To stranger.]\n\nI know you ! You're Stefani Symons!\n\n[As STEFANI.]\n\nKaren, I'm sorry that the story didn't\u2014\n\n[To STEFANI.]\n\nAnd I'm sorry about your job.\n\n[As STEFANI.]\n\nDon't be. I landed a gig with Collegehumor.com two hours later. Between us, the Times is going to be bought out by Collegehumor.com within the month anyway.\n\n[To audience.]\n\nStefani snaps a couple more shots. . . . She promises to put them on College Humor's site later in the evening. . . . Screw it. If I'm going to be here at all I should dance, damnit, dance . . . I give over to the wild spirit around me. . . . Pouring vodka into my Red Bull. . . . In the ladies' room taping on smart-drug skin patches. . . . Maybe I do need to throw aside my dreams. . . . Maybe it's time to move to Jersey. . . . The stall door swings open\u2014it's Xavier. He glares at me. \"Fuck polyamory,\" I mouth at him. . . . Ten minutes later I'm leaning against a wall. . . . Groups of people\u2014anyone passing by\u2014is writing on my legs, my back, my arms. . . . I'm being inscribed. . . . Someone is drawing on my tummy. A girl with pink hair stands up.\n\n[As JESS.]\n\nMs. Grenke, please don't tell my parents you saw me here.\n\n[To audience.]\n\nIt's Jess, the arty girl from Frank Gehry High!\n\n[To JESS.]\n\nHow'd you know about this scene?\n\n[As JESS.]\n\nEverybody knows Metuchen is where it's at. I get out to the Big Box every week. I take the bus and change into my party clothes at the Metuchen bus station. God, it's so depressing to have to live in Manhattan! Did you see what I wrote on your left arm?\n\n[To self.]\n\n\"You are my role model.\"\n\n[To JESS.]\n\nReally?\n\n[To audience.]\n\nWe share a big hug. Jess looks deep into my eyes. We're naked to each other emotionally, spiritually, artistically. Then she can't help herself and bolts.\n\n[As JESS.]\n\nI gotta get home to boring Manhattan. But I admire you so much I'm gonna write about how great you are on my blog. I get tons of hits!\n\n[Calling to JESS.]\n\nSweetie, I haven't done any art in four years!\n\n[As JESS.]\n\nDon't you know what you are to me? What you represent? Check out your other arm!\n\n[Reads writing on the arm.]\n\n\"Karen Grenke has stayed in New York. That is the performance. You are the art.\"\n\n[Inspired, KAREN waves bye-bye to JESS, then climbs stairs to desktop as music gets louder.]\n\n[To self, audience.]\n\nI am my own art form. My life . . . My art. . . .\n\n[Up on the desk now, music gets louder; KAREN dances.]\n\n[To audience.]\n\nOkay, so immortality isn't in the cards. That dream is dead. But tomorrow I'll be the last artist in New York City once again And I'll be showing up on College Humor, and on a very cool girl's blog.\n\n[Pulls string attached to large can of Red Bull mounted on ceiling. Glitter falls from it all over her.]\n\n[To audience.]\n\nThere's always the chance that I could go viral!\n\n[Dances ecstatically, finally released.]\n\nscene eight\n\n[Music fades, house lights come up. KAREN shifts back into being \"herself,\" awkwardly getting down off desk and picking up a stack of flyers.]\n\nKAREN [To audience.] Thank you very much for watching my performance.\n\nANNOUNCER VOICE [Interrupts.] Thank you for joining us at this final show at PS 122.\n\n[KAREN waves to stage manager to shut the announcer up, but construction crew guys are coming onstage to initiate demolition. KAREN gives them an outraged look, hurries to audience, and starts handing out her flyers.]\n\nJoin me on May 16, 2019, at 10 p.m. for a talk-back about the important issues that I've raised in this piece! Will there be any art at all in Manhattan by that time?\n\nANNOUNCER Please ignore the artist and begin filing in an orderly fashion out the doors so that the construction crew can begin the transformation of this ratty disgrace of a building into a gleaming new retail space\u2014\n\nKAREN We'll be meeting on the comer just outside no matter what blue glass piece of shit the fuckers have turned this building into! Please show up and help celebrate our legacy! Help me do it so that art will not be forgotten!\n\nANNOUNCER Be sure not to forget your personal belongings, and remember to return to enjoy Chase/Wachovia\u2013Whole Foods, a new concept in banking/shopping pleasure, designed from the bottom up to suit you, and the way you tell us that you like to live. . . . \nPamela Sneed\n\nKong\n\nfrom\n\nThe Best American Short Plays 2005\u20132006\n\nKong\u2014Part 1\n\nHands folded\n\nHead down\n\nShoulders slouched\n\nwhich I've told my students in the University to never do\n\nbut that was at a time when I earnestly believed\n\nand I now I stand here wearing big Dumbo ears\n\na pig snout\n\ncarrying shards of a broken heart\n\nlooking like a cartoon character in a medieval play\n\nbecause I earnestly believed\n\nbut before I go there\n\nI want to talk about that last Star Wars movie which\n\nthey promised was a final installment\n\nBut we'll see\n\nall I can say is it really sucked\n\nexcept for the part near the end\n\nwhere you see the transformation of Luke Skywalker's dad\n\nAnakin\n\ninto the evil Darth Vader\n\nHis innocence destroyed\n\ncrawling through some molten lava\u2014limbless\n\nHe looked like a soldier\n\nor something out of a war movie\n\none of those battered survivors\n\nwho has left his child self behind him\n\nBut, I earnestly believed\n\nAnd now all I can do is carry myself/battle scarred\n\nto some semblance of safety\n\nAll I can do is hold on like a survivor of the tsunami tidal wave\n\nHold on to a tree, a pipe, anything, my papers from an\n\nold life\n\nverifying who I am\n\nwait for the storm to pass\n\na shoulder to lean on/anything\n\nBut I earnestly believed.\n\nYou know when I left my parents' house\n\nthe small town for a big city\n\nand experienced all accoutrements of a counter culture\n\nI earnestly believed\n\nqueer boys\n\nqueer nations\n\nnose rings\n\ndread locks\n\nmuscle shirts on girls\n\ndykes with nipple rings\n\npunk rockers\n\nwere all some semblance of an alternative\n\nI believed poet Glen James\n\nwho called us the sissified warriors\n\nI believed when Marlon Riggs premiered the groundbreaking\n\nfilm\n\nfor Black Gay Men, Tongues Untied.\n\nI believed Audre Lorde when she said in synopsis if we\n\ndon't do our work\n\nOne day women's blood will congeal upon a dead planet.\n\nI believed poet Assotto Saint in all 6 ft. 4 of his cross\n\ndressing self\n\nI believed when he stood up at the funeral of Donald\n\nWoods\n\nand said in essence we must tell the truth about who\n\nwe really are.\n\nI believed Black lesbian writer Pat Parker when she declared\n\nstraights are okay, but why must they be so blatant\n\nI earnestly believed when my child eyes almost twenty\n\nyears ago\n\nfirst saw bisexual poet June Jordan\n\nand the first thing she said was this country needs a\n\nrevolution.\n\nI believed when I first read Christos, the Lesbian Native\n\nAmerican author of Not Vanishing and Dream On\n\nwhen she wrote of AIM, the American Indian Movement,\n\nand said\n\n\"when I first heard you'd surrendered you don't know how\n\nmuch\n\nI needed for you to go on.\"\n\nI believed ten\u2013fifteen years ago when the Hetrick-Martin\n\nInstitute for queer youth\n\nwas still just a one- or two-room shack\n\nlocated on the Westside Highway across from the piers\n\nand no one invested in our lives\n\nI believed even as an almost child working in that\n\nagency\n\nwhen many of us who pioneered were like slaves,\n\nsingularly doing the work\n\nof twenty, thirty people\n\nI believed in Nelson and Winnie premiering even at the\n\nheight of apartheid with their fists\n\nand heads held high\n\nI believed before Jennifer, Jessica whatever her name\n\nis on The L Word.\n\nI believed even after they found Angel my student at\n\nHetrick-Martin murdered\n\na handsome boy chopped into pieces\n\nYeah when they were still pulling queers out of the\n\nriver there downtown\n\nDead from queer bashings and suicide\n\nAnd then Kiki another bright young black queer\n\nwas murdered in the Meat District\n\nBefore him was Marsha P. Johnson, a drag queen and\n\nneighborhood fixture\n\nbashed and thrown into those waters\n\nEven after they buried brethren artists and poets,\n\nEssex, Rory, Don, Donald, Craig, Alan\n\nAnd cancer got Audre, June and Pat Parker\n\nI kept on believing change was possible.\n\nI read the literature\n\nhad hope\n\nI lived in America after all.\n\nI've sort of joined the middle class.\n\nI believed when I first saw a woman's silhouette in\n\n5 a.m. light.\n\nI believed kissing her nakedness\n\nthere'd be honor there.\n\nI earnestly believed.\n\nYou know this is an aside but\n\nI'm tired of the previews for that latest King Kong\n\nmovie\n\nTired of all the actors looking to the sky with that\n\nsame\n\nperplexed look,\n\nThat over the top awesome\n\nbecause King Kong is computer generated\n\nthey can't see him\n\nso they're really acting\n\nand you know King is a thin veil for a Black man\n\nAmerica assuaging its racial fears.\n\nStill, I'll pay ten, or twelve or twenty with popcorn\n\nto see it.\n\nThere was a time too when I earnestly believed in\n\ntheatre\n\nin performance\n\nBelieved I'd be a great big overnight success\n\nthat courage, innovation, tenacity would be recognized.\n\nI earnestly believed\n\nAnd I know there are those who will say I'm bitter\n\nmislabel me\n\nsay I spew hatred\n\nam raining down on their parade\n\nThat I lack optimism\n\nwhen I try to say there is another America\n\nwhen I try to say things are not equal\n\nwhen I try telling them there are crimes\n\nbeing carried out with doctors\n\nmany of them are modern criminals\n\nwho don't deserve white coats\n\nThere's another final solution that's occurring\n\nright under our noses\n\nand it's gonna get tougher and tougher\n\nand tougher and tougher to hide the bodies\n\nI earnestly believed\n\nSaddam Hussein has been tried and convicted\n\nbut maybe it's just my secret silly wish\n\nI keep wanting them to try George Bush\n\nI keep wanting those feared 30,000 Iraqi soldiers dead\n\nI want their bodies to rise up\n\nwalk to the White House\n\nspeak against this senseless war\n\nFor them to matter\n\nto someone besides their mothers\n\nI want those countless Americans killed little Black and\n\nLatino boys\n\nI want all their lovers\n\nBoth women and men to tell what they've lost.\n\nI want to see something like the truth and\n\nreconciliation\n\nhearings after apartheid\n\nwhere this country must admit to committing atrocities\n\nI want those millions of Americans living without health care\n\nafter working an entire lifetime . . .\n\nI want seniors who can't afford their prescriptions\n\nI want my parents to go\n\nI want America's poor\n\nones who know about when hospitals and doctors\n\npull the plug on those who can't pay\n\nI want the family of that little Black girl in New Orleans\n\nwhose body was found floating facedown\n\nstill wearing pink short shorts and a pink squeegee in\n\nher hair.\n\nAgain, in New Orleans, I want the son whose mother\n\ndied during the floods\n\nwaiting for governmental help,\n\nI want everyone to see the eyes of my student,\n\na black girl whose family is from the Ninth Ward in New\n\nOrleans\n\nand how she looked the day in class when she said\n\nthey won't give us back our houses\n\nwant everyone to hear my friend when she said Bush\n\ngot up in the middle of the night to sign papers to help Terry\n\nSchiavo\n\nbut did nothing to help the people of New Orleans\n\nI want every year for those gays and lesbians in New York\n\nduring Gay Pride\n\nto stop dancing on the piers and form a political movement\n\nI want all those voiceless people we're turning our\n\nbacks on\n\nright now in the Darfur region of Africa to speak\n\nAnd thank you Oprah, Thank you Bono, Thank you Jon Bon\n\nJovi\n\nfor your generous donations\n\nbut the system has to change\n\nYes, there was a time when I earnestly believed\n\nPeople get so defensive when I try telling them\n\nwhat's happening systemically\n\nwhen I say under this regime censorship has increased.\n\nArtists no longer have spaces to work\n\nnor money\n\nand it's not just all about personal will\n\npulling oneself up by a bootstrap\n\nThere is marginalization and silencing\n\noccurring across the board more than in other eras\n\nperhaps this is a return to.\n\nI honestly believed once that there were people more\n\nenlightened\n\nthat competition and jealousy couldn't destroy our\n\nworld.\n\nI believed helping a neighbor\n\nwas more important than money\n\nI earnestly believed\n\nYes, by now I'm probably like someone in a horror film\n\nwho gets killed off easy\n\nwasn't careful enough\n\nKept running toward instead of away\n\nfrom the monster\n\nThe one who stayed in the haunted house\n\nyou know who goes into an attic or a basement\n\nto investigate what's going on\n\nwhen they should have been long gone, the one who\n\nstays in an abusive cycle\n\nbelieves the partner will change\n\nThe one who hasn't read all the signals\n\nwalks into a thieves den\n\nlike on the old 42nd St.\n\nwith money hanging out of their pockets.\n\nI earnestly believed like Anne Frank in human good.\n\nI believed the slogans I read in kindergarten\n\nthat policemen help you across the street\n\nwill return lost children to their parents.\n\nMaybe I'm as naive as MLK\n\nwhen he said he had a dream of what America could\n\nbecome\n\nMaybe he isn't here to witness\n\njust how tough things have become\n\nIntegration is now only a small step or\n\nsmall slice of what we need.\n\nYesterday I sat down in the sun\n\nand let it beam across my face\n\nI prayed like Martin Luther King\n\nI could live one day in freedom\n\nOne day not racked by pain or injustice.\n\nI felt like Harriet who lived in slavery\n\nJust one day wanting to feel freedom's kiss\n\nAnd caress.\n\nKong\u2014Part 2\n\nI have to go back in my mind\n\nBecause I saw that Kong movie last night\n\nIt was spectacular\n\nexcept for the first hour which dragged on\n\nand I almost walked out when the crew got to\n\nSkull Island aka Africa\n\nwhere Kong comes from\n\nand I saw all those white oil painted actors playing natives\n\nwhen everyone knows lots of Black actors need jobs\n\nbut the movie might have been even more offensive\n\nif they'd cast them\n\nAnyway, this Kong was an alpha if I've ever seen one\u2014\n\nHe was like the Zulu warriors handling his business in\n\nthe jungle\n\nDirected by the same guy who directed the Lord of the Rings\n\ntrilogy\n\nthis Kong gets medieval\n\nThere's a part where he snaps the neck and jaw of another\n\nanimal\n\nthen thrusts it aside\n\nleaves the carcass\n\nI mean this computer generated you could never guess was a\n\ncartoon Kong\n\nwas so fierce\n\nThe American government could use him in their war to\n\nfight Iraq\n\nHe could help them find looming terrorist at large\n\nOsama Bin Laden\n\nThey could send him to change history\n\nHe could be like Rambo and try again to singlehandedly\n\nwin the Vietnam War\u2014\n\nLike Donald Trump, Charles Bronson, and Rambo rolled\n\ninto one\n\nThis Kong's got dominion\n\nHe's Shaft, a '70s icon\n\nA private dick/ex-cop dispensing his own brand of\n\nstreet justice\n\nThis Kong is like a Dominican warlord, not at all to be\n\nfucked with\n\nI mean this Kong had that Fay Wray bitch climbing into\n\nhis hand\n\nExcuse me, Naomi Watts\n\nno argument, minimum screaming\n\nWhat is it about sex or attraction to a good woman\n\nthat makes you want to beat your chest, go all\n\nilliterate, yell oonga fucking boonga,\n\njump from the bushes, tie her up, dance with wolves,\n\nunleash your inner self\n\nWell this Kong is pure and unadulterated\n\nHe's some straight-up niggah, no rocks, no chaser\n\nHe's got a little of the fucked-up wild haired Ike\n\nwho told Tina\n\nDon't you ever try to leave me\n\nHe's like Samuel Jackson on a bad day\n\nHave you ever noticed how Sam Jackson, talented actor\n\nthat he is\n\nplays the same character in every movie\n\nHe's perpetually angry\n\nand excuse me for asking but what was he doing in the\n\nStar Wars movie\n\nHe was like speaking Ebonics in space\n\nYou know how every syllable is over exaggerated and\n\ndrawn out\n\nLike M-A-S-T-E-R S-O-L-O\n\nI saw Sam's latest movie last night\n\nProvocatively titled Freedomland.\n\nAll the acting screamed this is an important film\n\ndiscussing race in America.\n\nIt's typical Hollywood fare\n\nwhere complex human emotions\n\ncomplex characters get reduced down to broad sketches\n\nand caricature\n\nnot to mention everyone knows in 2007\n\nparts of America are no better than Soweto during apartheid.\n\nI mean come on I saw that new movie Hustle and Flow\n\nsitting in the all-black audience\n\nIt was like back to days of segregated cinema/produced by\n\nMTV films\n\nabout a ne'er-do-well pimp/who just happens to also be\n\na rapper\n\ntrying to make it in America\n\nThe theme song just won an Academy Award called\n\nIt's hard out here for a pimp,\n\nbut everyone knows it's those who built America\n\nslave labor.\n\nI'll tell you this if you think I'm lying\u2014\n\nStretching about this King Kong, Black man link\n\nOne of the white racist cops yells out to Samuel\n\nJackson's character\n\nwho is also a cop, You're supposed to be lord of the\n\njungle\u2014\n\nand then he points to a young black kid standing by\n\nand says \"So,\n\nwhy aren't you handling this monkey?\"\n\nYou've probably asked by now what's her investment\n\nWhy does she even care\n\nand this is gonna get pretty painful\n\nbecause I don't want to say\n\nThere were times right here in America\n\nwhen I needed simple things like friendship, health care,\n\nlove, resources\n\nAnd I was made to live like an animal\n\nLess than\n\nCaged in\n\nSpeaking of pimps and hos\n\nCan any of us ever forget the way Tina Turner was\n\ntreated by Ike\n\nShe was actually beaten with the heel of his shoe\n\nGames, betrayals, sabotage, competition\n\nConscious and unconscious\n\nAnything he could do to destroy her spirit\n\nNot let her use that powerful beautiful voice she had\n\nExcept as a way for him to make money\n\nI mean real moments where I've felt like this is\n\nCambodia 1975\n\nAnd these are killing fields/like in the movie/the story of\n\nthat skinny war-torn reporter who gets left behind\n\nwhile everyone else escapes\n\nAnd all he tries to do every day is just survive\n\nand I'm not the only one\n\nwith the way things are going\n\nthere will be more and more who'll one day\n\nhave to choose between their breakfast cereal\n\nand taking their own lungs out\n\nand if we don't watch out/this is the fall\n\nthe end of a once great civilization\n\na crumbling empire\n\nI read recently in the paper\n\nThey found one of the Black men, a government official\n\ndead in a ditch\u2014\n\nHe was one of many who helped orchestrate the\n\nRwandan massacre\n\nWe all remember 1994 right\n\n1/2 million dead\n\nBlack tribes in Africa warring against each other\n\nAnd I can't believe I'm saying this about another\n\nhuman being,\n\nBut I'm glad they killed that motherfucker\n\nI'm glad he's dead\n\nI have to go back again because I feel guilty that\n\nearlier I mentioned Cambodia and killing fields\n\nand the nature of that extermination\n\nwas so huge actually an estimated 1.7 million\n\nbut just today I read in the paper about a measure\n\nbeing discussed in the Senate\n\non how to rid the United States of 12 million illegal\n\nimmigrants\n\nand the language they used was rid.\n\nThe thing about this King Kong which differs from the\n\nclassic\n\nis you can see what a great warrior he is\n\nbut a monster too\n\nhe's kind of human/contemplative\n\nHe actually manages in ape talk to sign the word\n\nbeauty\n\nwhen they take him down/chloroform him\n\nit's human beings/white people who look barbaric\n\nwhen they put him on display\n\nand you see his great paws\n\nyou know there isn't a theater big enough to contain\n\nhim\n\nand the chains around his wrists represent all of our\n\ngreatness\n\nboth blacks and whites wrapped up in human bondage\n\nall of our potential that's been lasso'd, corralled\n\nYeah, the only difference is when this Kong\n\nClimbs on top of the Empire State Building to escape\n\nInstead of seeing him shot down\n\nBroken in captivity\n\nThis one, unlike the classic/that unruly inhumane\n\nbeast\n\nThis Kong\u2014you want to be free\n\nKong\u2014Part 3\n\nIt wasn't until I put posters up\n\nhanded out flyers of me, a 6 ft. 2 black woman\n\npresiding over the city in a bra\n\nwhile an image of King Kong lurked in the background\n\ndid I realize how long people had waited to see images of\n\nKong usurped\u2014\n\nto see images we could laugh at/point fingers at/subvert.\n\nIt wasn't until then I realized how long King Kong had been\n\nlurking\n\nin our cultural history/in our shadows/our shame.\n\nMost of us know where he came from\n\nfrom that birth of a nation era\n\nborn in 1933 from that great depression\n\nwhere the Klu Klux Klan held dominance\n\nnot more than fifty years out of slavery\n\nhe was the story of slaves/a savage\n\nbrought here in chains/driven by his desire for a white\n\nwoman.\n\nHe is the myth/the fear\n\njust two years after the Scottsboro boys/twelve Black men\n\nwere accused of raping a white woman.\n\nWe continue to see him over and over in our movies\n\nHe is the subject of To Kill a Mockingbird\n\nand the film just cause\n\nhe is the recent real-life story of a garbage man accused of\n\nraping\n\nand murdering a white woman in a upper-middle-class\n\nneighborhood\n\nas her five-year-old daughter stood by\n\nhe is the accused wilding wolf pack that went after\n\na Central Park jogger\n\nAnd you wouldn't believe the responses I got\n\nfrom people who weren't even followers of performance art\n\nwho weren't black clad\n\nwith purple hair or shaved heads\n\nlike the black security guard at LIU where I teach\n\nwho never gets involved in anything\n\nsaw the poster and said to me you go girl\n\nMiss Foxy Brown, Cleopatra Jones\n\nand then gives me a hug\n\nand then the young black boy who works behind the counter\n\nin the school cafeteria\n\nwho recognizes me from the poster\n\nHe says, Your piece looks interesting\n\nand asks if I'm going to be playing King Kong or Fay Wray\n\nand then the secretary in the school where I work\n\nactually pulls notes she wrote out of her desk drawer she\n\nwrote\n\nafter seeing the Kong poster and says\n\nI think he's a gentle giant.\n\nAnd to her he is a symbol of good.\n\nThen there are the more radical/expected/unexpected\n\nresponses\n\nlike from the genteel black screenplay writer on my block\n\nwhom after I tell him casually I'm doing a piece on Kong\n\nhis face breaks into a disdain and grimace\n\nas if he'd gone to the cinema and been betrayed\n\nI brought my niece to see that new Kong film\n\nI was so angry after I left/I wrote the producers a letter\n\nwhich reminds me of another black man on my block/an\n\ninvestment banker\n\nwhom I've only ever seen planting flowers on the street\n\nin boxes that aren't even his\n\nhe is genteel and middle class\n\nand I thought to ask him what he thought\n\nabout what happened to blacks during the floods in New\n\nOrleans\n\nand his face breaks into a Rubik's Cube I've never seen before\n\nsuddenly he thrusts his hands into the sky and starts to yell\n\nIt was wrong what they did to those people/it was wrong!\n\nAnd all of this is coming from people\n\nwho would consider themselves to be ordinary people\n\nnot the lefties or revolutionaries\n\nEven Donald Trump said the other day on television\n\nPresident Bush has grossly mismanaged this country\n\nand they found no weapons of mass destruction\n\nand it all reminds me/shows me how under this regime\n\nyears of living under it has made a lot of us, everyday people\n\ninto heroes.\n\nBut the flower guy reminds me of something Audre Lorde\n\nsaid\n\nin the book Our Dead Behind Us\n\nShe like the flower guy is gardening\n\nbut thinking of the violent deaths of black people in America\n\nand then in her lover's country which is South Africa,\n\nAnd she says,\n\nMy hand comes down like a brown vice over the marigolds\n\nreckless through despair\n\nwe were two black women touching our flame\n\nand we left our dead behind us.\n\nSomeone else sends me an article\n\nabout King Kong written by a man with my father's name\n\nJames Snead\n\nSomeone else, a young white girl when she hears me recite\n\nKing Kong\n\nsays excitedly and angrily\n\nYou should talk about how the FBI was an organization\n\nbuilt primarily to destroy radical movements.\n\nLook what they did to the Panthers.\n\nSomeone else calls Peter Jackson a fascist\n\nand I'm actually afraid to tell him I like the Lord of the Rings\n\ntrilogy.\n\nSomeone else says you mentioned Top Model\n\nwill you talk about that\n\nand I say I do in another piece\n\nand then I try to prod people as gently as I can\n\nand say these are your stories to tell now.\n\nI simply pressed buttons, opened a door\n\nbut then something else comes to mind\n\nthat's unexpected after all is said and done.\n\nSomething that still haunts\n\nI keep telling everyone who works on Kong\n\nthe video person and poster designer\n\nmake sure there's a skyline\n\nwe need images of the skyline it's important\n\nsince 9/11 I say the skyline/the city Kong stomped over\n\nhas changed\n\nI'm aware now whether it's shown or not in pictures\n\nsomething in our skyline is missing\n\nPoet Sekou Sundiata said America lost her innocence\n\nand it's true\n\nit's like a jack-o'-lantern\n\nsomeone took a knife and gauged out\n\na huge hunk of who we are\n\ngone is our candyland\n\nour jungle gym/our slide/our Tarzan-like swing\n\nour playground of yesteryear\n\nPoet Sekou Sundiata said America lost her innocence\n\nand it's true.\n\nAnd all I can say revisiting Kong trouncing through\n\nall of the footage\n\nsuddenly the image of a great goliath\n\nbeing taken down by tiny planes\n\nhas entirely new and different meaning.\ncredits and permissions\n\nGrateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:\n\nAlmendarez, Liliana. Glass Knives (excerpt). Copyright \u00a9 1994 and 2006 by Liliana Almendarez. From The Best American Short Plays 2006\u20132007.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to liliana.almendarez@gmail.com or <http://lilylazuli.blogspot.com>.\n\nArmstrong, James. The True Author of the Plays Formerly Attributed to Mister William Shakespeare Revealed to the World for the First Time by Miss Delia Bacon. Copyright \u00a9 2009 by James Armstrong. From The Best American Short Plays 2008\u20132009.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to armstrongwrites@gmail.com.\n\nAronson, Billy. Little Red Riding Hood (excerpt). Copyright \u00a9 1993 by Billy Aronson. From The Best American Short Plays 1992\u20131993.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to www.billyaronson.com.\n\nChapman, Clay McLeod. birdfeeder. One of five monologues collected by Daniel Gallant under the heading Five Story Walkup, copyright \u00a9 2008 by John Guare, Neil LaBute, Quincy Long, Laura Shaine, Daniel Frederick Levin, Clay McLeod Chapman, and Daniel Gallant. From The Best American Short Plays 2007\u20132008.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to cmcpumpkinpie@gmail.com.\n\nCruz, Migdalia. Dreams of Home (excerpts). Copyright \u00a9 1991 by Migdalia Cruz. From Best American Short Plays 1991\u20131992.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to Ms. Peregrine Whittlesey at pwwagy@aol.com, or 279 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024.\n\nCunningham, Laura Shaine. Web Cam Woman. One of five monologues collected by Daniel Gallant under the heading Five Story Walkup, copyright \u00a9 2008 by John Guare, Neil LaBute, Quincy Long, Laura Shaine, Daniel Frederick Levin, Clay McLeod Chapman, and Daniel Gallant. From The Best American Short Plays 2007\u20132008.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to laurashaine@gmail.com.\n\nFischer, Eileen. The Perfect Medium (excerpt). Copyright \u00a9 2008 by Eileen Fischer. From The Best American Short Plays 2007\u20132008.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to daimon164@yahoo.com.\n\nFrost, Polly, and Ray Sawhill. The Last Artist in New York City. Copyright \u00a9 2009 by Polly Frost and Ray Sawhill. From The Best American Short Plays 2008\u20132009.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to pollyfrost.com, or raysawhill.com.\n\nHughes, Jill Elaine. The Devil Is in the Details. Copyright \u00a9 2005 by Jill Hughes. From The Best American Short Plays 2004\u20132005.\n\nJarcho, Julia. The Highwayman (excerpts). Copyright \u00a9 2006 by Julia Jarcho. From Best American Short Plays 2005\u20132006.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to jarcho@gmail.com.\n\nJonusas, Zilvinas. The Cleaning (excerpt). Copyright \u00a9 2007 by Zilvinas Jonusas. From The Best American Short Plays 2006\u20132007.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to zilvinas.jonusas@gmail.com.\n\nKraar, Adam. Hearts and Minds (excerpt). Copyright \u00a9 2007 by Adam Kraar. From The Best American Short Plays 2006\u20132007.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to Elaine Devlin Literary, Inc., c/o Plus Entertainment, 20 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10010, (212) 206-8160, edevlinlit@aol.com.\n\nKranes, David. Going In (excerpt). Copyright \u00a9 1985 by David Kranes. From The Best Short Plays 1986.\n\nLaBute, Neil. Love at Twenty. One of five monologues collected by Daniel Gallant under the heading Five Story Walkup, copyright \u00a9 2008 by John Guare, Neil LaBute, Quincy Long, Laura Shaine, Daniel Frederick Levin, Clay McLeod Chapman, and Daniel Gallant. From The Best American Short Plays 2007\u20132008.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to Joyce Ketay, The Gersh Agency, 41 Madison Ave, 33rd Floor, New York, NY 10010, (212) 997-1818.\n\nLevin, Daniel Frederick. A Glorious Evening. One of five monologues collected by Daniel Gallant under the heading Five Story Walkup, copyright \u00a9 2008 by John Guare, Neil LaBute, Quincy Long, Laura Shaine, Daniel Frederick Levin, Clay McLeod Chapman, and Daniel Gallant. From The Best American Short Plays 2007\u20132008.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to danielflevin007@gmail.com or www.danielflevin.com.\n\nLevy, Bruce. Sada (excerpt). Copyright \u00a9 2004 by Bruce Levy. From The Best American Short Plays 2002\u20132003. Inquiries concerning rights should be addressed to briane@mindspring.com.\n\nLovelace, Carey. The Stormy Waters, the Long Way Home. From The Best American Short Plays 2008\u20132009. Copyright \u00a9 2009 by Carey Lovelace.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to Evan Ross Katz at evanrosskatz@gmail.com, or Loose Change Productions, 105 Duane Street, Suite 40D, New York, NY 10007.\n\nMack, Carol K. The Courier (excerpt). Copyright \u00a9 2005 by Carol K. Mack. From The Best American Short Plays 2005\u20132006.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to www.carolmack.com.\n\nMadden, Dano. Beautiful American Soldier (excerpts). Copyright \u00a9 2006 by Dano Madden. From The Best American Short Plays 2005\u20132006.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to danomadden@gmail.com.\n\nMaloney, Peter. Leash. Copyright \u00a9 2005 by Peter Maloney. From The Best American Short Plays 2003\u20132004. Witness. Copyright \u00a9 2005 and 2007 by Peter Maloney. From The Best American Short Plays 2006\u20132007.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to Leading Artists, Inc., 145 West 45th Street, Suite 1000, New York,   \nNY 10036.\n\nMaruzzo, Joe. Bricklayer's Poet (excerpt). Copyright \u00a9 2008   \nby Joe Maruzzo. From The Best American Short Plays   \n2007\u20132008.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to jpoetbrick@aol.com.\n\nMedoff, Mark. DeBoom: Who Gives This Woman? (excerpts). Copyright \u00a9 2009 by Mark Medoff. From The Best American Short Plays 2006\u20132007.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to markmedoff@comcast.net.\n\nMiller, Susan. Reading List (excerpt). Copyright \u00a9 2005 by Susan Miller. From The Best American Short Plays 2004\u20132005.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to www.susanmillerplaywright.com.\n\nMollenkamp, Julie Rae (Pratt). In Conclusive Woman. Copyright   \n\u00a9 2006 by Julie Rae (Pratt) Mollenkamp. From The Best American Short Plays 2006\u20132007.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to mollenkamp@ucmo.edu.\n\nPulos, Rick. Decades Apart: Reflections of Three Gay Men. Copyright \u00a9 2009 by Rick Pulos. From The Best American Short Plays 2008\u20132009.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to rickpulos@yahoo.com.\n\nRibman, Ronald. The Cannibal Masque (excerpt). Copyright \u00a9 1995 by Ronald Ribman. From The Best American Short Plays 1994\u20131995.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to ronribman@gmail.com.\n\nSchisgal, Murray. The Artist and the Model. Copyright \u00a9 1994 by Murray Schisgal. From The Best American Short Plays 1994\u20131995. The Cowboy, the Indian and the Fervent Feminist (excerpt). Copyright \u00a9 1993 by Murray Schisgal. From The Best American Short Plays 1992\u20131993. The Man Who Couldn't Stop Crying (excerpt). Copyright \u00a9 1997 by Murray Schisgal. From The Best American Short Plays 1997\u20131998. Used by Permission.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to Zachary Schisgal at zach@theschisgalagency.com.\n\nSneed, Pamela. Kong. Copyright \u00a9 2006 by Pamela Sneed. From The Best American Short Plays 2005\u20132006.\n\nInquiries concerning rights should be addressed to pamela_sneed@yahoo.com.\n\n"}
+{"meta": {"title": "Gary Jonas - Jonathan Shade 10 - Timeless Gods [retail]"}, "text": " \n### Table of Contents\n\nTitle Page\n\nmailing list\n\nDEDICATION\n\nCHAPTER ONE\n\nCHAPTER TWO\n\nCHAPTER THREE\n\nCHAPTER FOUR\n\nCHAPTER FIVE\n\nCHAPTER SIX\n\nCHAPTER SEVEN\n\nCHAPTER EIGHT\n\nCHAPTER NINE\n\nCHAPTER TEN\n\nCHAPTER ELEVEN\n\nCHAPTER TWELVE\n\nCHAPTER THIRTEEN\n\nCHAPTER FOURTEEN\n\nCHAPTER FIFTEEN\n\nCHAPTER SIXTEEN\n\nCHAPTER SEVENTEEN\n\nCHAPTER EIGHTEEN\n\nCHAPTER NINETEEN\n\nCHAPTER TWENTY\n\nCHAPTER TWENTY-ONE\n\nCHAPTER TWENTY-TWO\n\nOne-Way Ticket to Midnight\n\nAbout the Author\nTIMELESS GODS\n\nThe Tenth Jonathan Shade Novel\n\nby Gary Jonas \nTo keep up with new releases, sign up for the Gary Jonas Preferred Readers List and get a FREE ebook copy of Gary's first novel, One-Way Ticket to Midnight.\n\n# DEDICATION\n\nThis one is for Edward Bryant, writer, mentor, friend. He left us too soon.\n\n# CHAPTER ONE\n\n\"You're not welcome here,\" the manager said, and I didn't punch him in the mouth because the Norse god Thor stood behind him. The thunder god held his massive club hammer and glared at us.\n\nKelly, Esther, and I stood in the alcove before the entrance to Club Eternity. From the unpleasant aroma, I suspect someone had been using the bottom of the stairwell as a urinal. I held the vajra weapon in one hand. It was basically a club with ribbed spherical heads at either end. The ribs could open up and fire energy bolts like lightning, but it was dormant at the moment. It belonged to a god named Indra, but it was mine to use for now. The manager glanced at it, but stood his ground with confidence.\n\nThe manager didn't worry me. I could have kicked his ass with my eyes closed.\n\nThor, on the other hand, could kill me without breaking a sweat.\n\n\"Give me your bracelets and the vajra weapon,\" the manager said. \"Then get the hell out of here.\"\n\n\"You can have the bracelets,\" I said. \"But I'm not finished with the weapon.\" The bracelets were our link to the club. Without them, we couldn't get here. Club Eternity was essentially a bar for immortals tucked away in a pocket dimension.\n\n\"You promised the weapon to me.\"\n\n\"I'm not done with it,\" I said raising it up to aim the business end at his face. The ribs opened into spikes that I could drive into him, but it also whirred to life so I could fire a bolt of lightning at him.\n\nThor grinned. He slapped his hammer into his palm, ready for a fight.\n\nThe manager considered. He had Thor on his side. Could Thor kill me before I killed the manager? Thor obviously liked the odds, but the weapon wasn't aimed at him.\n\nKelly stepped in front of me. She smiled at the manager as she pushed my arm to the right. Now the vajra was aimed at Thor's face.\n\nThor's grin faded.\n\nKelly spoke to the manager. \"If Jonathan fires the weapon, Thor will be blasted into the bar. Before he crashes through the door, though, I will have snapped your neck.\"\n\n\"Thor will kill you all.\"\n\n\"If he survives, you're probably right,\" Kelly said. \"But you'll be dead before that happens.\"\n\n\"I'm already dead,\" Esther said.\n\nThor reached up and placed his palm over the business end of the vajra. \"I shall take this and\u2014\"\n\nHe didn't get another word in because I fired the weapon.\n\nThe energy bolt blasted the living shit out of his hand. The backlash from the blast shot sideways and incinerated the manager. Kelly jumped backward and ducked. The rest of the energy shot right back at me, but as it was magical, it washed over me like a bright light. Esther, being a ghost, didn't have to worry as everything passed harmlessly through her.\n\nThor shook his stump, cussed in three different languages, as he shook his arm about. The hand grew back and he clenched his fist a few times. He glared at me then swung his mighty hammer to smack me in the chest, but Esther darted in front of me and solidified. The hammer stuck her and drove her into me. We crashed against the wall and I slid to the floor, dazed.\n\nEsther blew a raspberry at Thor. \"Is that the best you got, you old palooka? I oughta sock you right in the kisser!\"\n\nThor swung the hammer, and Esther popped away and reappeared behind him. Thor, clearly expecting to connect, went off balance with the swing, and Esther shoved him. He staggered, but didn't fall down until Kelly jumped in with a spin kick to his head.\n\n\"Don't hit my friends,\" Kelly said. \"I don't care how hot you are.\" She ginned. \"And you're really hot.\"\n\n\"You dare to strike me?\" Thor said.\n\nShe gave a solid snap kick to his chin, driving him to the floor again. \"Does that turn you on?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Because it's kinda turning me on,\" she said and kicked him again.\n\nI managed to pick myself up off the floor.\n\nThor rolled to his feet, held his hammer aloft and was about to say something when a flash of bright light made us all turn away for a moment. When I looked back, a slender woman in an old Roman gown stood between Kelly and Thor. She had long, dark hair and exquisite cheek bones. Her soft white gown flowed over one shoulder, leaving the other bare. A gold belt encircled her waist.\n\n\"That will be quite enough,\" she said. Her voice was calm.\n\nThor lowered his hammer and stepped back. \"As you wish,\" he said.\n\n\"Who are you?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"I'm the owner of Club Eternity,\" she said. \"You may call me Decima.\"\n\nShe held up one hand and the bracelets Kelly and I wore snapped off our wrists and floated over to her.\n\n\"Your membership in the club has been revoked,\" she said. \"You may take the stairs here,\" she motioned to the right. \"When you ascend, you will find yourself in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We will wait until you're on the sidewalk before we shift our dimensional alignment. You won't find us again.\"\n\n\"Just like that?\" I asked.\n\nShe smiled. \"You should be thanking me for not ending your life, Mr. Shade. You killed my manager.\"\n\n\"Hey,\" I said. \"Thor caused that.\"\n\n\"I saw what happened,\" she said. \"I also made an inquiry about you.\"\n\n\"That can't be good.\"\n\n\"It's worse than you know. The Men of Anubis are coming for you, and they don't have my sense of fair play when it comes to mutiny and handling enemies.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I asked.\n\n\"Surely you've heard of me,\" she said.\n\nI didn't take the bait with the Shirley joke. Instead, I shrugged. See? Old guys can learn new tricks. It just takes a few lifetimes.\n\n\"I am Decima,\" she said again.\n\n\"Yeah, I got that the first time,\" I said.\n\n\"I am the root source for the word decimate.\"\n\n\"So you enjoy destroying everything?\"\n\nShe grumbled something in Italian then switched to English and spoke in a clipped tone. \"You stupid Americans always get that wrong.\"\n\n\"Enlighten me.\"\n\n\"In my youth, I was the one who came up with the way to handle mutinous legions in Rome.\"\n\nI gave her a blank stare.\n\n\"I would have one out of every ten men slain to teach them a lesson. The remaining ninety percent would be on better behavior after that. So it's not total destruction. It's ten percent. Deci means ten. Got it?\"\n\n\"Guess you've got a bee up your butt about that one. I promise to always use decimate correctly just to make you happy.\"\n\n\"You won't live long enough. As I said, the Men of Anubis are coming. And they are going to destroy you. All of you. There's no place you can hide. There's nothing you can do. So you need to get out of here because I don't want them destroying my club in search of your soon-to-be-dead self.\"\n\n\"So they'd destroy the entire club? They wouldn't just decimate it?\"\n\n\"You're trying my patience, Mr. Shade,\" Decima said. \"Vacate the premises or I'll have Thor throw you out.\"\n\n\"I don't work for you,\" Thor said. \"I was helping the manager for a free drink and the chance to hit someone.\"\n\nKelly gave Thor a nod and held her hand like a phone. \"Call me,\" she said.\n\nThor raised an eyebrow and grinned. \"Perhaps I will.\"\n\n\"How many people work at Club Eternity?\" I asked. \"Ten? Twenty?\"\n\n\"Twenty-three.\"\n\n\"Damn,\" I said. \"I killed your manager and I was going to invite Thor to come with us, but it wouldn't quite decimate your staff, especially since Thor made it clear he doesn't work for you.\"\n\n\"Are you sure you want to get cute with me?\" she asked.\n\n\"There aren't ten people in my legion,\" I said. \"That means you can't decimate us.\"\n\nShe narrowed her gaze and pointed to the exit. \"Go.\"\n\nI nodded to Thor. \"You like to fight. Want to come with us? We could use a guy like you.\"\n\n\"I could use a guy like you,\" Kelly said.\n\nHe looked Kelly up and down and licked his lips. What a perv. \"I could stand to be used by you. I like the way you dish out punishment, woman.\"\n\n\"Kelly.\"\n\n\"Kelly,\" he said and raised an eyebrow. \"Will you punish me some more?\"\n\n\"Definitely,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"What do you say, big guy?\" I asked.\n\n\"I love women, and I love to fight. Supply me with drink and I'm in.\"\n\nAnd that's how we got a thunder god to join the team.\n\n# CHAPTER TWO\n\nWe stepped from Club Eternity into downtown Tulsa. It was early evening and couples walked arm-in-arm toward trendy restaurants. The air was crisp, but I was warm in my big coat. Thor didn't notice the cold. He wore a short tunic with furry vest over it. His brown trousers tucked into fur topped boots. His head was crowned with a silver horned helmet.\n\n\"I like Tulsa,\" Thor said.\n\n\"You do?\" I asked.\n\n\"I spent a month here in 1995. There are amazing thunderstorms here.\"\n\n\"And tornadoes,\" I said.\n\nKelly moved ahead of us. \"We should see about getting shelter for the night,\" she said.\n\n\"I like tornadoes,\" Thor said.\n\n\"I'll make a note,\" I said and started to cross the street toward a hotel.\n\nEsther took my hand and leaned against me as I walked, but Thor stopped.\n\nHalfway across the street, I took my hand back and turned toward Thor. \"Are you coming?\"\n\n\"I'm waiting for you to write down the fact that I like tornadoes,\" Thor said. \"In fact, I think you should make notes of all the things I like. I shall speak them, and you shall write them down.\"\n\n\"I'm not your personal scribe.\"\n\n\"Then I hereby dub thee Scribe of Thor.\" He stepped into the street, patted me on the shoulder, and continued after Kelly.\n\nI turned and ran into Esther. I was so used to walking through her that it caught me off guard. She smiled and reached for my hand again, but I moved past her before I realized what she was doing. \"Watch out, Esther,\" I said.\n\n\"Sorry,\" she said.\n\nNot quite what I was expecting. The walk sign flashed don't walk, so I trotted the rest of the way across the street.\n\n\"Anyone have any money?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"I'm flat broke,\" I said.\n\nEsther shook her head. \"Don't look at me.\" She mumbled something that sounded like, \"I'm invisible to you anyway,\" but I wasn't sure I'd heard her correctly. She moved away and Kelly and Thor were talking.\n\n\"How about you, Thor?\" Kelly asked. \"Can you afford to pay for a few hotel rooms so we can get some sleep? Maybe buy some food or something?\"\n\n\"I do not keep earth currency on my person, but the last time I was here, there were boxes called ATMs. I can always get money from one of those machines.\"\n\n\"Cool. My account was cleaned out buying access to Club Eternity,\" I said. \"There should be an ATM around here somewhere.\"\n\nKelly pulled out her phone. \"Closest ATM?\"\n\n\"Okay,\" the phone said, \"here's what I found for closest ATM.\"\n\n\"I want to get one of those,\" Thor said.\n\n\"It's an iPhone,\" I said.\n\n\"I haven't spent time in this realm since the nineties. An iPhone,\" he said.\"I like it. Write that down.\"\n\nKelly looked at the screen. \"There's an ATM a block north at a bar called Jacob's Hoot 'n Holler.\" Kelly stared at her phone.\n\n\"Something wrong?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"You know I'm not one to run from a fight.\"\n\n\"You run toward trouble,\" I said. \"It's one of the things I love about you.\"\n\n\"I like fighting and killing, but I'm not suicidal.\"\n\n\"What are you saying?\"\n\n\"I'm with you in this no matter what you decide,\" she said.\n\n\"But?\"\n\nShe hesitated.\"But if the Men of Anubis could find us, they'd have been waiting for us.If not at Club Eternity, then wherever and whenever we left the club.\"\n\n\"That proves they're not all-powerful,\" I said.\"Means we have a chance.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Kelly said.\n\nI got the impression she wanted to say more, but she didn't get the chance.\n\n\"You know what I know?\" Thor asked.\n\n\"What?\" I asked.\n\n\"I know that I'm hungry,\" he said. \"If the lovely wench will get us a table in the restaurant over yonder, Jonathan and I will go get some money from the ATM box. Order me a large steak, and tell them to make it so rare it screams when I cut into it.\"\n\n\"One steak, bloody rare,\" Kelly said. \"And to drink?\"\n\n\"Ale.\"\n\n\"Jonathan?\"\n\n\"A steak and beer sounds good to me. Anything dark and on tap. Okay, big guy, let's get some cash.\"\n\n\"How much would you like?\"\n\nMost banks cap the daily withdrawal at five hundred dollars, but some go to a thousand. \"Whatever you can get, I guess.\"\n\n\"Very well.\"\n\nJacob's Hoot 'n Holler had a neon sign of a cowboy with a large hat twirling a lasso. The sign buzzed softly.\n\n\"I like that sign,\" Thor said. \"Write that down.\" I followed him into the bar.\n\nBlake Shelton sang \"Some Beach\" on the jukebox. The patrons in the bar were mostly rough cowboy types. Blue jeans and cowboy boots. They didn't wear the boots to look fashionable. They wore them because they worked in them. They wore plaid shirts and sat at the bar or at tables drinking beer or they danced with cowgirls on the narrow strip between tables. A couple of big men played pool in the back.\n\nThor bobbed in time with the music. \"I like this song,\" he said to one of the cowboys.\n\n\"Good for you,\" the man said, looking at Thor's odd clothing. He looked at me in my heavy jacket and snow pants over black boots. I'd just come from the mountains of Tajikistan, so I stood out a bit, too.\n\nThor danced around a couple, and I worried he might grab the girl's ass, but while he looked with admiration, he didn't touch. I eased around them as well.\n\nPeople looked at us and frowned. We were quite the odd pairing.\n\nThe ATM stood next to the hallway leading to the restrooms.\n\n\"Stand back,\" Thor said.\n\nI thought he didn't want me to see his PIN, but he didn't pull out a card. He just grabbed the machine, yanked it off the wall, hammered the corner to create a grip, then tore off the back and pulled out a huge handful of twenty dollar bills. Alarms blared. Thor broke a few wires and the alarms went silent.\n\n\"Is this enough?\" he asked, holding up thousands of dollars.\n\n\"Oh shit,\" I said.\n\n\"Hey!\" the bartender yelled. \"What the hell do you think you're doing?\"\n\n\"I have need of this cash,\" Thor said.\n\n\"Billy!\" the bartender yelled. He pulled a shotgun from beneath the bar and aimed it at Thor, who shoved twenties into the pockets of his trousers. A few bills fluttered to the floor, but he didn't notice.\n\nBilly turned out to be one of the big men at the pool table. He rushed over, pool cue in hand. \"Yeah, boss?\"\n\n\"Keep that son of a bitch there. I'm calling the cops.\"\n\nBilly lowered the pool cue to block Thor's path. \"That's far enough, buddy.\"\n\nThor took the cue from him, snapped it in two and tossed the pieces to the floor.\n\n\"You can't do that!\" the man said stepping in front of Thor.\n\n\"Move or be moved,\" Thor said.\n\n\"That's a cool looking helmet,\" Billy said. \"Too bad it ain't Halloween.\" He tried to push Thor in the chest.\n\nThor didn't budge.\n\nHe grabbed Billy by the throat, lifted him into the air and tossed him across the room. Billy crashed into a table, knocking over two men, an ashtray, and several beer bottles. The table broke under his weight and he hit the ground hard.\n\nThe bartender rushed out from behind the bar. He aimed the shotgun at Thor and fired.\n\nThe blast caught Thor in the stomach.\n\nThor looked down at his now ragged tunic. \"Foolish mortal,\" Thor said and yanked the shotgun away. He snapped the gun in two. \"As you were kind enough to store some money for us, I grant you your life.\"\n\nHe shoved the bartender aside.\n\nFour men started to block him, but Thor walked right through them, knocking them aside.\n\n\"Let's go eat dead animal flesh,\" Thor said with a smile.\n\nI followed him out of the bar.\n\n\"They're calling the cops now,\" I said.\n\n\"I don't care what they do,\" Thor said. \"I'm hungry.\"\n\n\"I thought you had a bank account.\"\n\n\"Why would I need a bank account when you people are kind enough to put money in those boxes for me? I can't understand why some people get so upset when I make a withdrawal. Put that in the notebook under things Thor does not like.\"\n\n# CHAPTER THREE\n\nApproaching sirens wailed, so I tugged Thor into an alley.\n\n\"Cops,\" I said.\n\n\"I don't care about cops,\" Thor said.\n\n\"Better to avoid them right now,\" I said. \"We have things to do.\"\n\n\"They won't even delay us. I'll tip over their silly cars, and cast the men aside.\" He raised his hammer.\n\nWithout thinking, I took the hammer away from him. \"My way is better,\" I said.\n\nThor stared at me. \"Give that back.\"\n\nThe hammer was forged by dwarves, and it had a short handle. As I was able to hold it, I assumed it was enchanted, and as magic doesn't faze me, I could wield it.\n\n\"You didn't think the hammer would find me worthy?\" I asked.\n\nThor laughed. \"You've read too many comic books, boy.\"\n\nThe police cars rushed past the alley as Thor snatched the hammer from my hand.\n\n\"So anyone can wield it?\"\n\n\"For you it would be a club hammer. For me it's a powerful weapon.\"\n\n\"I think if you hit someone with a club hammer, they're going to think it's a powerful weapon. We can go now.\"\n\nWe stepped back onto the sidewalk and walked to the restaurant without further incident.\n\n***\n\nThe restaurant was crowded, but at least it had a casual atmosphere, and while they looked at Thor's helmet and clothing with hesitance, they admitted us without an argument. Somehow, I doubt many people would ever consider denying service to Thor. The hostess, a lovely redhead, led us to the table where Kelly and Esther waited. Esther remained translucent, and Kelly sipped a glass of wine.\n\nMany of the people in the restaurant were dressed up, but quite a few wore blue jeans and flannel shirts. The place smelled great with a variety of spices and cooking meats combining to make me want to close my eyes and bask in the aroma. I resisted the temptation and sat across the table from Kelly.\n\nThor sat next to her and scooted his chair even closer. He leaned toward her, and she put a palm up to block him.\n\n\"Not so fast, Romeo.\"\n\n\"Thor.\"\n\nEsther laughed. \"Bank's closed, pal.\"\n\n\"First we feast,\" Thor said, undeterred by Kelly's reaction. He turned and called out, \"Bring us a roasted boar and lots of ale!\"\n\nA busboy at a booth turned and said, \"I'll send your waiter over, sir.\"\n\n\"Good lad.\"\n\n\"I already ordered steak for everyone,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"That's right. And I obtained currency,\" Thor said. He handed a stack of twenties to Kelly, and another stack to me. \"There's more where this came from. Well, not that particular ATM, but this city is replete with them.\"\n\n\"We'll make do with what we have,\" I said.\n\nThe waiter brought our meals and once he moved on, we talked between bites of delicious steak.\n\n\"Do you have a plan to deal with the Men of Anubis?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"Not exactly,\" I said.\n\n\"Why are they after you?\" Thor asked.\n\n\"Because I escaped from them, and then I chucked one of them into the void. We're not attached to time, so they have to find us to get us. We may be the only ones who can stop them.\"\n\n\"Very well. I say we challenge them in battle,\" Thor said. \"I'll smite them with my hammer.\"\n\n\"Not quite that simple,\" I said.\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because they can control time.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"So if you swing your hammer, they can freeze time, step out of the way, and restart time. Or they can rewind time and take the hammer away from you.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\"\n\n\"What are you thinking?\" I asked.\n\nHe smiled. \"I'm thinking you're fucked.\"\n\n\"You're not going to back out on us, are you?\"\n\n\"I'm immortal,\" Thor said. \"They can't do anything to me.\"\n\n\"They could cast you into the void.\"\n\nHe opened his mouth to reply, then furrowed his brow for a moment. He nodded and lifted a finger. \"I'll be right back,\" Thor said, and left the table.\n\nHe walked toward the restroom, and once he entered the hallway, he disappeared.\n\n\"We may have just lost our only real ally,\" I said.\n\n\"He'll be back,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\"He wants me.\"\n\nI ate, but now I barely tasted the steak. My stomach flipped as I thought about facing the Men of Anubis. The whole thing started to feel real. It was no longer way out there in the distance as something to deal with one of these days. Now it was time to face them, and while I did have a good weapon with the vajra, I wasn't sure it would do me much good. Odds were that I would die in the battle, which was fine. After all, I'd lived a much longer life than most people can even dream about. But I didn't want to get anyone else killed. Kelly deserved a good life. Thor deserved, well, I don't know what he deserved. And what about Esther? I put my knife and fork on the plate and tossed my napkin onto my half-finished meal.\n\n\"You don't like the food?\"\n\n\"We don't stand a chance against the Men of Anubis,\" I said.\n\n\"You're just now realizing that?\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" I said. \"I'm just tired.\"\n\n\"I think you're right about them not being all-powerful. If they could have done so, they'd have gone back to take us out before you cast their brother into the void.\"\n\n\"So maybe they can't track us?\" I considered that. \"Maybe Indra prevented them from seeing us there.\"\n\n\"Maybe Chronos did,\" Esther said.\n\n\"You said we were aspects in time,\" Kelly said. \"As we don't belong here, they can't find us.\"\n\n\"But if we catch up to them, they should be able to flow backward along our timeline and wipe us out.\"\n\n\"Maybe we don't have a timeline,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"My brain hurts,\" I said.\n\nThor walked out of the hallway and approached the table. He sat and took a drink of beer.\n\n\"Everything all right?\" I asked.\n\nHe looked at me and shrugged. He turned his gaze to Kelly and looked her up and down. \"I want to bed you, wench.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Does that work with other women?\"\n\nThor's eyebrows rose and he leaned back, frowning. \"Yes,\" he said. \"It does.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"If I take you, I'll be the one in control.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"You want to boss me around?\"\n\n\"Something's wrong,\" I said.\n\n\"And how,\" Esther said.\n\n\"Spill,\" I said.\n\n\"I may have committed myself to your battle a mite early,\" Thor said.\n\n\"So you're backing down?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that.\"\n\n\"Sounds like you are.\"\n\nHe stared at Kelly, then turned to me. \"Here's the hitch,\" he said. \"I didn't know the Men of Anubis could control time and even throw me into the void.\"\n\n\"So? You're immortal, remember?\"\n\n\"And I don't relish the thought of floating in a timeless void for all eternity.\"\n\n\"So if you get chucked in, you're stuck?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I went to have a chat with Decima, and she confirmed my concern. The bracelet I use to get to Club Eternity won't work from within the void. If I go in, I'm stuck. So far as any of us have been able to tell, no one has ever returned from the void.\"\n\n\"So you're afraid,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"I'm cautious.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"He's afraid. Who'd have thought a thunder god would be afraid of a fight?\"\n\n\"It's not my fight,\" he said. \"But I am not afraid.\"\n\n\"I've seen fear in the eyes of men,\" Kelly said. \"I see it in your eyes right now. You were fine with the fight when you thought you could win, but now that you know there's an actual risk, you're turning as yellow as your hair.\"\n\n\"I've killed men for lesser insults,\" Thor said.\n\n\"It's not an insult,\" Kelly said. \"Just stating the obvious.\"\n\nHe rose and lifted his hammer.\n\nKelly smiled at him. \"Aw, are you going to hit a girl?\"\n\nI rose and put a hand on his shoulder. \"Let's not cause a scene, big guy.\"\n\n\"She dares to insult me to my very face! I do not like that. Write it down.\"\n\nShe grinned at him and winked. \"Gets you all hot and bothered, doesn't it?\"\n\nI looked around at the guests and the staff in the restaurant. A manager tried to push our waiter toward us, but he shook his head and backed away. People at the other tables stared at us, but no one dared approach.\n\nOne woman said, \"I just called nine-one-one,\" but she kept her voice low, so I barely heard her.\n\n\"Can we settle this someplace else?\" I asked.\n\n\"Woman,\" Thor said, \"you infuriate me.\"\n\nShe stood and stroked his cheek. \"Pay the bill, thunder boy.\" And she walked away.\n\n\"Boy?\" Thor said, his knuckles white on the hammer. \"Boy?\"\n\n\"Boy lives in the jungle with Tarzan,\" I said. \"She meant, god. Thunder god. It's all good here.\" I nodded to the people at the next table. \"Everything is fine.\"\n\nEsther popped in front of Thor. \"Try anything, buster, and I'll sock you one good.\"\n\n\"And now the ghost insults me too? Whatever happened to respect for the gods?\"\n\n\"Toss some cash on the table, big guy. We can go sing karaoke and your first song will be Aretha Franklin's 'Respect.' Cool?\"\n\nHe threw a handful of twenties on the table. \"Is that enough?\"\n\nIt was around seven hundred dollars. \"Yeah, that ought to do,\" I said.\n\n\"I want to smash those women into the ground.\"\n\n\"You don't really mean that,\" I said.\n\nHe stormed through the room and grabbed our waiter. He lifted the man off the ground and pointed at Kelly, who was walking out the door.\"She dared to question my courage,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm sorry?\" the waiter said and nearly cried.\n\n\"That's all you have to say to me?\" Thor asked.\n\n\"Have a nice night?\" the waiter said in a squeaky high voice.\n\n\"No need to hurt anyone, big guy,\" I said. I pulled his hands down and once the waiter's feet touched the floor, I tapped Thor's knuckles and he released the poor man. I patted the waiter on the back. \"Sorry about this, m'man, but I think you'll appreciate the tip.\"\n\nOutside the restaurant, Kelly and Esther waited by a lamppost.\n\nThor burst onto the street and stabbed a finger into Kelly's face. Before he could scream at her, she grabbed his finger and bent it backward, snapping it.\n\nHe stared at his broken finger. He turned and held his hand up so I could see it. \"What is wrong with this wench?\"\n\nKelly stepped close and grabbed him by the balls.\n\n\"What?\" Thor said, surprised.\n\n\"Just checking to see if you had a pair,\" Kelly said. \"Go back to Asgard and fuck yourself like the little girl you are.\"\n\n\"Nobody talks to me like that!\"\n\n\"So make me stop,\" Kelly said and boxed his left ear.\n\n\"I could kill you,\" he said.\n\n\"So do it,\" she said and smacked his right ear.\n\nHe backed up, holding his hands up. \"What is wrong with you?\"\n\n\"I don't like cowards.\"\n\nThor planted himself and smashed his hammer down on the sidewalk, shattering concrete. \"Stop or I'll destroy you, woman!\"\n\n\"So you're finally showing some backbone,\" Kelly said. She smiled at him. \"You had me wondering about you for a moment there.\"\n\nThor fumed. \"I've killed frost giants and gods, and you dare to question my godhood?\"\n\n\"You're afraid of a couple of Egyptians. Jonathan outsmarted them once, and defeated one in single combat. He's a mortal man and he's not wavering.\"\n\n\"That's because he doesn't know the true nature of what he's up against,\" Thor said.\n\n\"Enlighten us.\"\n\nThor looked at me, then at Kelly and Esther. He shook his head. \"They are gods.\"\n\n\"We've dealt with gods before.\"\n\n\"Hmmph.\"\n\n\"So what do you suggest?\"\n\n\"I suggest you and I get a room,\" Thor said. \"I want to have my fun with you while you're still alive.\"\n\n\"That's not going to happen,\" Kelly said. \"I don't sleep with cowards.\"\n\n\"Again, she insults me,\" Thor said, turning to me in utter surprise. \"She should be honored that I'm willing to bed her.\"\n\nKelly swept his feet and planted him on his back. \"You should be honored that I was willing to even consider you for a heartbeat.\"\n\n\"And how,\" Esther said and blew a raspberry at him.\n\n\"Jonathan,\" Kelly said, \"send this coward back to Asgard. We don't need him.\"\n\nShe turned and walked away.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Esther said. \"Get rid of the big palooka.\" And she followed Kelly.\n\n\"Sorry, pal,\" I said, helping Thor to his feet. \"You blew it.\"\n\nHe brushed himself off and smiled. \"Oh, I want her more now than ever. If I must face other gods who can control time to earn a night in her bed, so be it.\" He cracked his finger back into its proper alignment. \"Let us plan for battle.\"\n\n# CHAPTER FOUR\n\nAfter securing separate hotel rooms, we took time to get cleaned up then met in my room to discuss our plans. Kelly and Esther arrived first.\n\n\"Did Thor run away?\" Kelly asked as she entered the room.\n\n\"No, he's more determined than ever to bed you,\" I said.\n\nShe grinned. \"Men and demigods are so easy to play.\"\n\nI said nothing because I knew she was right.\n\n\"Where is the big buffoon?\" Esther asked.\n\n\"He'll be here soon,\" I said. \"He wants to make himself presentable for Kelly.\"\n\n\"That might take a while,\" Esther said and drifted over to the window.\n\nKelly sat on the king size bed and glanced at the clock radio on the table. It was 10:34. Esther solidified to open the curtains. She stared down at the wonderful view of the parking lot and at the cars moving on the highway a short distance away. I pulled the chair from beneath the desk and sat, putting my feet up on the bed. Esther turned away from the window and desolidified to walk through my legs, and reached for the TV remote on the dresser before the flat screen.\n\n\"No TV,\" I said.\n\n\"That's a bunch of horsefeathers.\"\n\n\"We have too much work to do.\"\n\nShe sighed and set the remote back on the dresser.\n\n\"So what's the plan?\" Kelly asked. \"Or are we waiting for Thor?\"\n\n\"We need to find a way to reach Chronos, but I'm not sure how to get him to help us.\"\n\n\"You could offer to sleep with him,\" Kelly said. \"If I have to play that card, you should too.\"\n\n\"No thanks.\"\n\n\"Oh, come on, Jonathan, take one for the team,\" she said with a grin.\n\n\"I'll pass. Can we move on?\"\n\n\"Sure. What have you worked out beyond recruiting Thor and Chronos?\"\n\n\"I think we need the other you.\"\n\n\"My time twin?\" Kelly asked.\n\nI nodded. \"She's in Denver. We can recruit her. Having two of you would be a nice advantage.\"\n\n\"Especially since you have a propensity for getting versions of me killed. Doubles my odds of survival. But I'm the one in charge. She won't like it, but she'll have to answer to me.\"\n\n\"You should call Rayna,\" Esther said.\n\n\"To say goodbye?\"\n\nEsther rolled her eyes. \"To recruit her.\"\n\n\"I've put her through too much. I don't want to get her killed.\"\n\n\"She has a dragon.\"\n\n\"That's true.\"\n\n\"A dragon could be the cat's pajamas.\"\n\n\"I don't think a cat could wear a dragon,\" I said.\n\nShe swatted at me, but I pulled back so she missed. \"You know what I mean,\" she said.\n\n\"I do. All right, we'll try to get the dragon, but let's leave Rayna where she's safe.\"\n\n\"She could be useful,\" Kelly said. \"Breathing fire is a nice little trick.\"\n\nShe meant Rayna, of course. But we hadn't parted on the best of terms, so getting Clara the dragon might be possible, but getting Rayna to risk her life seemed like a long shot.\n\n\"I'll talk to her.\" I said, but I didn't look forward to that conversation. She was bound to still be pissed at me, and she had every right to be. I had wronged her.\n\nA knock sounded on the door.\n\n\"Can one of you get that?\" I asked.\n\nEsther popped over to the door, solidified and opened it to reveal Thor in all his naked glory.\n\n\"Oh my stars and garters,\" Esther said.\n\n\"Gaze in wonder, ghost,\" Thor said and strode into the room.\n\nHe planted himself in front of Kelly and stood proudly displaying his pride and joy, of which John Holmes would have been envious.\n\n\"This is what I can offer you,\" he said pointing to his dick.\n\n\"What's that?\" Kelly asked, bored. \"It looks like a penis only smaller.\"\n\nThor stepped back. \"This is my real hammer,\" he said. \"Only the worthy can lift it. I call it Gamanbjodr.\"\n\n\"Which means?\"\n\n\"Pleasure giver.\"\n\nKelly shook her head. \"Put some clothes on.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said. \"Please cover that monster.\"\n\nEsther gazed at his nakedness and shook her head. \"This one doesn't need glad rags.\"\n\n\"Yes he does,\" I said.\n\n\"Does Gamanbjodr intimidate you?\"\n\n\"Gaman-whatever looks like it could smack a baseball out of the stadium, so yes. Go back to your room and get dressed.\"\n\n\"Hmmph,\" he said and turned to leave.\n\nKelly and Esther both admired his ass as he opened the door.\n\n\"I shall return,\" he said and stepped into the hallway.\n\nAs soon as the door closed, Kelly shook her head. \"That monstrosity is not going inside me.\"\n\nI laughed. \"I don't know how he fits it in his pants.\"\n\nHe came back five minutes later, dressed. Esther let him in.\n\n\"Does my outfit meet with your approval?\" he asked Kelly.\n\nHe wore brown trousers, leather boots, and a shiny black shirt open to the navel. As he didn't have a suitcase, I figured he'd gone to another dimension to fetch the clothing.\n\n\"You look like a pirate,\" Kelly said.\n\nHe grinned. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Let's cut to the chase,\" I said. \"Can you reach out to Chronos?\"\n\nThor looked at me confused. \"Why do you want that skinny little poofter?\"\n\n\"Because he can control time,\" I said.\n\n\"He always wants to make time with me.\"\n\n\"Then you should be able to convince him to come to the hotel,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"Why would I do that?\"\n\nKelly batted her eyes at him. \"Because I think two men together is really hot.\"\n\n\"It would please you to see me with Chronos?\"\n\n\"Oh yeah.\"\n\n\"Then I shall reach out to him,\" Thor said. \"For you. Wait here.\" Thor triggered his Club Eternity bracelet and disappeared.\n\nKelly gave me a smug smile. \"How's that for helpful?\"\n\n\"As long as I don't have to watch, it's cool.\"\n\n\"I want to watch,\" Esther said.\n\nKelly winked at her. \"We'll have them put on quite a show for us.\"\n\n\"This cat is going to meow,\" Esther said.\n\n\"And this cat is going to be elsewhere,\" I said.\n\n\"You sure you don't want in on the action?\" Kelly said. \"Chronos likes you too. He'd be up for a threesome.\"\n\n\"I'm good,\" I said.\n\n\"You always say that,\" Kelly said, \"but maybe you should prove it.\"\n\n\"Keep dreaming.\"\n\nShe laughed and started to turn, but froze.\n\n\"You all right?\" I asked.\n\nShe didn't move.\n\nEsther didn't move either.\n\nA knock on the door.\n\nI walked over and opened it to reveal Chronos and Thor.\n\n\"Be a good lad and step aside,\" Chronos said.\n\nHe brushed past me.\n\nThor shrugged and stopped in the doorway. \"The door was locked, and he didn't want me to smash it.\"\n\nThe thought of Chronos not being able to enter a room because the door was locked amused me and I grinned.\n\n\"You can unfreeze time now,\" I said.\n\nKelly and Esther were still motionless.\n\n\"Not a chance,\" Chronos said. \"Allow me to ask you a simple question, Jonathan Shade.\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"Did I send an agent to you?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"That should tell you something.\"\n\n\"What should it tell me?\"\n\n\"That I'm not ready to face the Men of Anubis, you ignorant wanker.\"\n\n\"Sometimes we have to face things before we're ready. How many people are ready to be parents?\"\n\n\"I don't have things arranged yet.\"\n\nI laughed. \"I'm guessing you haven't taken a single step toward arranging things.\"\n\n\"Quite right.\"\n\n\"Because you thought you could just wait for me to live out my life and die.\"\n\nHe adjusted his collar. \"That thought had crossed my mind.\"\n\nI stepped up close to him. \"I've eliminated one of the Anubis assholes already. We only have two left.\"\n\n\"I'm aware of your confrontation. Indra is older than the Men of Anubis, so he was able to keep things localized.\"\n\n\"You're the master of time,\" I said.\n\n\"I can move freely through time, but I didn't take office until October 8th, 1940, so the Men of Anubis were around long before I was recruited.\"\n\n\"You were recruited during the Blitz?\" I asked.\n\nHe nodded. \"I was at Charing Cross Station in London on Tuesday morning at 8:50 when time froze. The Germans dropped three high-explosive bombs and eight of us died, while forty-eight of us were injured. Right before that happened, the gentleman who worked as Chronos in those days decided he'd had enough and offered to trade places with me so he could die and I could become the new Chronos. I had no idea what that meant, of course, but I didn't want to die. If I had it to do over... The first thing I saw when I took office was my predecessor getting blown to bits as soon as I started time with this infernal device.\" He held up the pocket watch.\n\nI'd seen people die violent deaths. It never leaves you.\n\n\"The point,\" he continued, \"is that I am now much younger than the Men of Anubis, and as such, I am no match for them.\"\n\n\"You lost me. You're now younger than them?\"\n\nHe sighed. \"They didn't exist before we sent you to ancient Egypt.\"\n\n\"I don't like where this seems to be going.\"\n\n\"They defy time and death and achieved immortality through a blend of magic and technology, and the only living person who saw them in purely human form was you.\"\n\n\"And you think they're my fault?\"\n\n\"They are the same Men of Anubis who mummified Tutankhamun.\"\n\n\"Same family,\" I said.\n\n\"Same exact men.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"We believe they latched onto the Emerald Tablets of Thoth after you and Henry Winslow left Egypt.\"\n\n\"You believe?\" I asked. \"Why don't you know?\"\n\n\"Time is ever shifting. They are quite good at covering their tracks. And they put blocks in place to prevent us from eliminating you before you were born. Not that we could have done that anyway as the damage was already done.\"\n\n\"Whatever,\" I said. \"Why don't you skip ahead into the future, find a place where we can attack them and destroy them?\"\n\n\"It doesn't work like that,\" Chronos said. \"I can go backward in time, and I can come forward from that time, but I can't go past the moment time has reached.\"\n\n\"Translation, you can't go into the future.\"\n\n\"Quite right.\"\n\n\"And this is the real present?\" I asked.\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"Is he bullshitting me?\" I asked Thor.\n\nThor shrugged. \"I live moment to moment in one direction,\" Thor said. \"All this time travel nonsense doesn't work for me.\"\n\nI shook my head slowly. \"I lived into the future before I killed Persephone,\" I said. \"So I know for a fact this is not as far as time has gone.\"\n\nThor raised an eyebrow.\n\nChronos fidgeted.\n\nKelly and Esther remained still.\n\n\"Talk to me, Chronos. Be honest.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I'm afraid I must be going now.\"\n\n\"You're afraid of something,\" I said.\n\n\"I don't have time for this.\"\n\n\"You have all the time in the world.\"\n\n\"Until I move to my demise,\" he said.\n\n\"How far forward can you go?\" I asked.\n\nHe looked around. \"I should leave this place and resume forward progress. If I stop time for too long, I attract attention.\"\n\n\"Bullshit,\" I said.\n\n\"I have business to attend to in the past,\" he said.\n\nI grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and drove him back into the wall. \"Answer my question.\"\n\n\"Or you'll kill me and take my place?\" He laughed. \"I already know the date of my death. This is not that day.\"\n\n\"You don't think I'll kill you?\"\n\n\"I know you won't. I still have a few weeks, though I can conceivably stretch that out for centuries by hanging out in the past.\"\n\n\"How do you know you die? Have you seen it?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I know because I can't move beyond that date.\"\n\n\"What date?\"\n\n\"I don't see the relevance to your situation.\"\n\n\"What date?\" I asked again, and lifted him off his feet.\n\n\"November 17th.\"\n\n\"That's two weeks from now.That's the date we face the Men of Anubis, isn't it?\"\n\n\"You can't be tracked in time now, Jonathan. They can't find you, though they most certainly know you're in play because Khemet didn't return.\"\n\n\"I'm taking that to mean yes.\"\n\n\"I was there,\" Chronos said. \"You lost.\"\n\n\"What about me?\" Thor asked.\n\n\"Cast into the void.\"\n\nThor walked over to Kelly and stared at her for a time.\n\n\"Backing out on us?\" I asked.\n\nThor shook his head. \"I want this woman, but I'm not willing to spend eternity in the void.\"\n\n\"They defeat you all,\" Chronos said. \"Myself included, and I don't even know how I came to be at the confrontation.\"\n\n\"Where was it?\" I asked.\n\n\"You mean, where will it be?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"Where was it? We have the advantage of knowing how they won, so we can change things before they happen.\"\n\n\"Talk, little man,\" Thor said. \"It seems all our lives depend on it.\"\n\n\"The confrontation was in Denver. You even had a dragon on your side, and the Men of Anubis simply aimed the crook at the beast and blew it out of the sky with a blast of energy.\"\n\n\"And the rest of us?\"\n\n\"Thor was cast into the void. Both versions of Kelly were beheaded by the flail, the beads may look to be gilded wood, but Mahu can alter them to be razor sharp. They wrapped around Kelly's neck and severed her head before she could react. The second Kelly suffered the same fate even though she saw the first version of her die.\"\n\n\"Mahu?\" I asked.\n\n\"Khemet's brother. You defeated Khemet, but he was the weakest of the Men of Anubis.\"\n\n\"Who's the other guy?\"\n\n\"Amenken. Mahu and Khemet's father. Can you put me down, please?\"\n\nI still held him off the floor and against the wall.\n\n\"Not a chance, dickhead. If I let go of you, I know you'll disappear. I want more details. I need answers. How can they be defeated?\"\n\n\"They can't.\"\n\n\"Bullshit. I beat one of them. I have to be able to beat the other two. Divide and conquer.\"\n\n\"They won't face you one at a time.\"\n\n\"All right,\" I said. \"Unfreeze time so Kelly and Esther can be part of the conversation.\"\n\n\"I'll do no such thing. If I unfreeze time right now, the Men of Anubis will know where I am. You don't want that because they'll show up here immediately, and you'll be dead in a heartbeat.\"\n\n\"Come on,\" I said, not believing a word he said.\n\n\"Think about it. They created a time ripple trying to get to Khemet in Tajikistan. They will stop at nothing to get to you now.\"\n\n\"Time ripple?\"\n\n\"The Men of Anubis can alter time, but they can't change anything that happened to them. If any of them are in one place, that time is set. They tried to get you in Tajikistan, but their efforts caused a wave that upset time in the area. The effects were contained in the Pamir Mountains, but now they are watching for anomalies in the time layers. A simple time freeze won't draw attention, but if I do it more than once in the same area, that will definitely bring them here. What possible reason could I have to be in Tulsa, Oklahoma?\"\n\n\"You'll think of something.\"\n\n\"No. Time remains frozen. Do you want to lose your pretty little ghost? Amenken can use the crook to force her into her physical form, and Mahu can slice her to pieces to be scattered in and out of the void. She will cease to exist.\"\n\n\"I'm not liking the things you have to say. They have to have weaknesses we can exploit.\"\n\n\"None that I'm privy to.\"\n\n\"We need a better place for a confrontation. And we need to know more about what they can and can't do.\"\n\n\"They can't find you unless you do something stupid, so take a long vacation. Go to Indonesia or Spain. Go to Idaho. Anywhere.\"\n\n\"A trip to Egypt might be useful. Maybe we can learn something about them there that we can use.\"\n\n\"If you set foot in Egypt, they will know.\"\n\nMy arms were getting tired, so I lowered Chronos back to the floor, but still held him against the wall. \"They have wards set up to notify them?\"\n\n\"Magical and technological. You can't slip past them.\"\n\n\"Unless someone takes me there through a rift.\"\n\n\"I can't open rifts.\"\n\n\"How did you get here today?\"\n\n\"Through Club Eternity.\"\n\n\"Decima won't let me in there. I know Sharon can open rifts, but I don't trust her. She'd toss me in the void herself. But there's another Charon. Nice enough guy named Bob in the Underworld.\"\n\n\"I can't reach the Underworld,\" Chronos said.\n\n\"I can,\" Thor said.\n\n\"Sharon is Charon these days,\" Chronos said. \"She never left the Underworld in the current layering of time.\"\n\n\"Nice try, asshole,\" I said. \"You supernatural types remember every layer of time. If a vampire can feel the shifts, I know Sharon can feel them too. I know she'll remember, and if I know her, she's got her job in Boulder working as a librarian. She liked that job.\"\n\n\"That doesn't mean Bob is Charon.\"\n\n\"He was next in line to take the position, so I'm willing to bet your life that he is.\"\n\n\"If you go to Egypt or even to the Underworld searching for answers, the Men of Anubis will know I helped you.\"\n\n\"You need plausible deniability. Who in the Tulsa area would know about the Men of Anubis?\"\n\n\"How should I know?\"\n\n\"Someone in the occult circles, perhaps? Someone who studies Egyptian history?\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" Chronos said. He sighed. \"I'm bound to your actions regardless.\"\n\n\"Welcome to the team,\" I said. \"Is there a way to combine some technology with the magic in your watch so we can freeze Mahu and Amenken?\"\n\n\"I am not on your team, Jonathan Shade. Your actions are the death of me no matter how things play out. Every conceivable layering of time ends for me November 17th.\"\n\n\"Have you looked at it with you actively helping us?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I even looked at it if I worked against you, but Amenken will never see me as an ally because I let you loose in the world against his wishes.\"\n\n\"So there's no good reason not to be on the team.\"\n\n\"There's one excellent reason for me to not be on your team. I don't want to. And here's another good reason: I don't like you.\"\n\n\"I'm your only chance to get through this,\" I said. \"It's in your best interest to help.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to face them in Denver. That's a big change right there. I'll find a better place to fight them.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" he said. \"You think of a place to face them, and I'll travel forward on the timeline as far as I can. If your choice makes it possible for me to go beyond November 17th, I'll join your team.\"\n\nI laughed. \"As soon as I let you leave, you're not going to come back. You're a chicken shit bastard, and a coward, Chronos. What was your real name?\"\n\n\"None of your business.\"\n\n\"In that case, I'll see you in a few weeks when the Men of Anubis pull you from wherever you're hiding to rip you apart and cast your body to the winds.\"\n\n\"That won't happen,\" Chronos said. \"I've already found my replacement, and I'm turning my office over to him in the wee hours of the seventeenth.\"\n\nI let go of him and waved goodbye. He flipped me the bird, grabbed his wrist and disappeared, returning to Club Eternity, and moving from there to wherever his cowardly heart desired.\n\n\"Holy shit,\" Kelly said. \"How did Thor get in here?\"\n\n# CHAPTER FIVE\n\nAfter Thor and Kelly left, Esther wanted to stay with me. She sat beside me on the bed and put an arm around me. She smiled and combed her fingers through my hair. \"It feels so good to be able to touch you,\" she said.\n\n\"We have a big day tomorrow.\"\n\nShe leaned in and kissed my neck. \"We could have a big night tonight.\"\n\nI pulled away from her and stood. \"As nice as that sounds, I need some sleep.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" she said and popped away.\n\nShit. I knew I'd hurt her. Didn't she know my mind was on other things? I cared for her, but she was a ghost, not a living, breathing woman. Sometimes it didn't matter what I said or did, I always ended up hurting someone.\n\nI took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and went to bed feeling like an ass.\n\n***\n\nThe next morning, I showered and dressed, but left the heavy winter coat hanging in the closet. I donned my dirty T-shirt and the jeans I'd worn under the snow pants. I needed to buy some new clothes. I spent a little time messing with the vajra weapon and realized that by twisting it, I could adjust the settings. I didn't know what those settings would do, and I wasn't in a position to fire it in the hotel. I put it in the closet and made a note to take it out to the country to test the various settings.\n\nKelly met me in the lobby with Thor trailing behind her like a large, lost puppy. Esther popped in beside her, but didn't meet my eyes.\n\n\"We need to talk,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"We need to go up to your room,\" Thor said.\n\nKelly rolled her eyes. She spun to face the thunder god. \"You. Stay here.\" She turned to me. \"You. Come with me.\"\n\nShe grabbed my arm and dragged me down the hall toward the restrooms. Esther followed us.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" I asked.\n\n\"I don't want to deal with a handsy thunder god. What are we going to do?\"\n\n\"Can you string him along a bit longer? He might be useful in the coming battle.\"\n\n\"He's going to have a battle if he tries to cop another feel.\"\n\n\"We need allies.\"\n\n\"This is not like some caper in a movie, Jonathan.\"\n\n\"I know that. Our lives are on the line here. That's why we need all the help we can get. Thor knows some powerful beings. Someone has to be able to help.\"\n\n\"Such as?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I said. \"Odin? Loki?\"\n\n\"I want to meet Loki,\" Esther said. \"He's hot to trot.\"\n\n\"The trickster god,\" I said, \"not Tom Hiddleston from the Avengers movie.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Kelly said. \"I think this is going to be a wasted trip, but word on the street is that Asgard is lovely this time of year.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Esther said.\n\n\"No,\" Kelly said. \"I made that up. This is just stupid. Why would Odin or Loki stand with us in the fight? They don't know us. They don't owe us. I'm certainly not going to sleep with any of them.\"\n\n\"It can't hurt to try and recruit them,\" I said.\n\nKelly rolled her eyes. \"There's no incentive for them. You're sending me on a wild goose chase.\"\n\n\"You can handle Thor,\" I said. \"If he grabs you again, take his ass down.\"\n\n\"Oh, I will.\"\n\n\"If no one will help us, maybe they can give us some ideas about how to defeat them.\"\n\nKelly sighed. \"This is a waste of time. We should go find a new city, set up shop there, and live our lives. We can help people. I can go back to training women in self-defense. You can be a private investigator. We shouldn't be doing this, and spare me your justifications, Jonathan, because they're all bullshit.\"\n\nI stared into her eyes because I feared she was right, and I'd been struggling with it since we'd returned from the twenties. I was lost, searching for direction, but everything I loved was gone, and at least the Men of Anubis gave me a tangible enemy to face. An enemy I couldn't face alone. Without an enemy, Kelly would leave, and while she wasn't my Kelly, I'd prefer death to not having her in my life.\n\n\"So why are you going along?\" I asked, worried she'd tell me she wouldn't.\n\n\"Because I don't abandon my friends,\" she said. With that, she turned and walked back to Thor.\n\n\"She's right, you know,\" Esther said.\n\nBut I ignored her. My focus was on the fact that Kelly considered me a friend. It was a major step in the right direction. Maybe she'd come around. Now that she'd changed over from seeing me as the only person she knew in the world to seeing me as a friend, there was hope. I didn't expect us to ever get to where my Kelly and I had gone, but maybe if we could deal with the Men of Anubis, perhaps we could build a life for ourselves somewhere and maybe that life would help to ease my guilt about losing my Kelly. Henry Winslow may have been the one who killed her, but I blamed the Men of Anubis for messing about in time so much that Winslow had the power to send those whirling blades through her. Those nightmares haunted my dreams, and while Winslow cast the magic, the Men of Anubis pulled the strings. They mocked me every goddamn night, and I was tired of it.\n\nAnd if I couldn't get through this alive, that was okay, too, because I no longer fit into the world, and when you don't belong, it's easy enough to let everything go.\n\nKelly talked to Thor and I heard her ask him to take her to Asgard. His face lit up. I wanted to stand there and bask in the knowledge that she was on my side, but I had other things to do to prepare for battle.\n\n\"Let's go, Esther,\" I said.\n\nEsther turned away from me and stared at the floor.\n\n\"Is something wrong?\" I asked.\n\nShe shook her head. \"Don't get in a lather,\" she said. \"Everything's Jake. Everything's always Jake.\"\n\n\"Then let's go.\"\n\nMy first order of business was a cab ride to a North Tulsa residence where I paid eight hundred bucks for a 2001 Dodge Neon. The car didn't have heat, but it was November, and the temperature was in the seventies, so I figured I'd be all right.\n\nAfter buying the car, I stopped at a store and bought some new clothes. I paid for them, then changed in the dressing room. I shoved my old clothes into the bag. Once I'd tossed the bag into the backseat of the car, it was time to get busy.\n\nThe next item on my to-do list was to gather information, and hopefully to recruit help or at least gain knowledge from the magical community. The best place to start was a metaphysical bookstore, and Google helped out on that front.\n\nPeaceful Enchantments was located in the Cherry Street District. Billed as a metaphysical store, they carried a wide variety of books from Eastern philosophy to magic to ancient Egypt. They also carried a nice selection of Tarot cards in a glass case.\n\nGetting to the store meant climbing a steep staircase. The wooden floor creaked as I stepped inside. Esther was with me, but she remained invisible. It was just after noon, so the place had just opened. Esther darted into the curtained rooms to make sure there wouldn't be any surprises. The smell of sandalwood incense permeated the air, and a kind older woman with silver hair greeted me from behind a counter piled high with books and stands holding flyers. She wore stylish glasses and a brown sweater vest over a light blue plaid shirt.\n\n\"Welcome,\" she said. \"Feel free to browse, but if you need any help, my name is Shirley Amauric.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Shirley,\" I said. \"I found you online. I'm only in town for a few days, and I really need to talk to someone who knows something about magic.\"\n\n\"We have a variety of books about magic, of course. Are you interested in folk magic, Earth magic, ceremonial magic, sympathetic magic?\"\n\n\"All of the above,\" I said. \"I'm looking for someone proficient in casting spells. Someone who's already been through initiation rites to achieve a higher level of power, and in particular, someone who can cast protection and containment spells.\"\n\n\"That's not really what we do, sir. We teach classes in Kundalini yoga, and spiritualism and meditation. We do have books on Wicca and Kabbalah, of course.\"\n\n\"You have herbs here, and some of those are particularly useful to witches constructing hex bags.\"\n\n\"Herbs are useful for many things, but I think you've seen too many horror movies, sir. Wiccans seek peace and harmony with nature. We don't offer the herbs used in the creation of dangerous hex bags.\"\n\n\"I'm not looking to cause trouble for anyone,\" I said. \"I understand you've got your hands full running a store like this in the middle of the Bible Belt.\"\n\n\"Not really. We've been here for forty years, and we've never had any real trouble.\"\n\n\"I'm glad to hear it. Let me throw something else at you. Have you heard of Dragon Gate Industries?\"\n\nHer lips tightened a bit, but she didn't say anything.\n\n\"I see that you have,\" I said. \"They don't have a branch in Oklahoma, which means you're bound to have some independent wizards and witches in town. I need to speak with one of them. Ideally, the most powerful and knowledgeable. Hopefully someone who knows a great deal about Egyptian magic.\"\n\nEsther popped over beside me. \"Nobody here but us and the customers coming in now,\" she said.\n\nSure enough, a young woman and her son clomped up the stairs, and approached the counter. \"Excuse me,\" she said. \"Can you point me to your crystals?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Shirley said and stepped out from behind the counter.\n\n\"Have I been a useful chunk of lead?\" Esther said.\n\nI didn't know what she was talking about, but when I turned toward her, she looked away.\n\nShirley led the woman to the selection of crystals. \"If you have any questions, I'll be right over here.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said and slapped her son's hand away from the counter with all the crystals.\n\nShirley walked back to me. She took off her glasses and polished the lenses on her vest. \"I don't know you, sir,\" she said quietly.\n\n\"My name is Jonathan Shade,\" I said. \"If you look me up, you'll find that I died back in 2007.\"\n\n\"And yet here you stand.\"\n\n\"Think about that,\" I said.\n\n\"Yes, well, don't take this the wrong way, but I'm a bit skeptical about people coming back from the dead.\"\n\n\"As well you should be,\" I said. \"The truth is somewhat more complicated, of course.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nThe kid knocked something off the counter and the sound of breaking glass interrupted us.\n\n\"Teddy!\" the woman said. \"No!\"\n\nShirley glided over to them. \"It's quite all right,\" she said. \"Please step back. I don't want anyone to get cut.\"\n\n\"I'll pay for the crystal ball,\" the woman said.\n\n\"That won't be necessary.\" Shirley knelt and picked up shards of glass. \"I'll get a broom.\"\n\nThe woman led her kid back to the stairs and as they descended she said, \"I can't take you anywhere! Why you have to constantly embarrass me is beyond my capacity to understand.\"\n\n\"Get over it, Mom,\" the kid said.\n\nShirley swept the rest of the glass into a dustpan. She sighed and shook her head. \"Happens more often than you'd think,\" she said and emptied the dustpan into a plastic trash can beside the counter. She clipped the pan to the broom handle.\n\n\"Let's cut to the chase,\" I said. \"To show you that I'm part of the community, I'll take the broom from you using my delicate hand of pale power.\"\n\nI held out my hand.\n\nEsther solidified her hands and yanked the broom from Shirley's hands and carried it over to me. I grabbed it, twirled it once and set it on the ground. She made her hands go invisible again.\n\nShirley sighed, unimpressed. \"Simple magic,\" she said.\n\n\"Which is why I need someone more proficient.\"\n\n\"Call forth three of the crystals from the counter over there,\" she said.\n\n\"Now I have to jump through hoops?\"\n\n\"Three crystals.\"\n\n\"Do you have a preference?\"\n\n\"A carnelian, a black tourmaline, and a red tiger's eye.\"\n\n\"Fine.\"\n\nI mimed raising my hands as Esther popped over to the crystal counter. She slid the glass door open and studied the selection. I hoped they were labeled because I wasn't sure she'd know the difference. I certainly wouldn't have. She picked up three rocks and carried them over, holding two in her right hand and waved the other around in her left hand. To Shirley it would look like semi-translucent hands carrying the crystals.\n\nI shook my head, but Esther ignored me. She wanted to have some fun. She lifted the single crystal over Shirley's head making the crystal seem to fly over her. Esther spun in a circle and placed the crystals in my outstretched hands. Then her hands popped out of sight.\n\n\"You owe me,\" she said.\n\n\"Good enough?\" I asked Shirley.\n\n\"Clumsy,\" she said.\n\n\"I'll put them back for you,\" I said and held them out to Esther.\n\n\"Watch this,\" she said.\n\nShe solidified her hands to take the crystals then popped over to the counter.\n\nUnfortunately, as soon as she popped away, the crystals dropped because she couldn't carry them with her unless she remained solid enough to hold them. \"Horsefeathers!\" she said.\n\nThe crystals hit the floor.\n\nShirley raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"Sorry about that,\" I said. \"I can do this.\"\n\nEsther popped back over. She gave me an embarrassed grin then stooped to lift the stones. She carried them back to the counter and put them in their respective places.\n\n\"You need to work on your control,\" Shirley said.\n\n\"My elbow was bent,\" I said.\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Can you help me out?\"\n\n\"You need to see Dr. Carlos Ancho.\"\n\n\"The guy is named after a pepper?\"\n\nShirley sighed. \"He's a local purveyor of esoteric knowledge. If anyone can help you, it's Dr. Ancho.\"\n\n\"Got an address for me?\" I asked.\n\n\"He's a professor, and he works at Oral Roberts University.\"\n\n\"You know how Oral Roberts died, don't you?\" I asked.\n\n\"Pneumonia.\"\n\n\"Wrong,\" I said. \"He got hit by a speedboat when he was out walking his ducks.\"\n\n\"Trust me, he died of pneumonia.\"\n\n\"It's a joke.\"\n\nShirley frowned. \"Take my advice, Mr. Shade. Don't tell that joke on campus.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" I said. I grabbed a chapbook from the counter and looked at it. The Sacred Magic of the Qabbalah by Manly P. Hall. I handed it to Shirley. \"I'll take this.\"\n\n\"As you wish.\"\n\nI handed her a ten dollar bill. \"Thanks, Shirley.\" I turned to leave.\n\n\"You don't want your change?\"\n\n\"Keep it,\" I said. I didn't really want the book either, but it seemed like good manners to buy something.\n\nI descended the stairs with Esther by my side.\n\n\"Sorry about the crystals,\" she said.\n\n\"What was that all about?\" I asked.\n\n\"I thought it would be the cat's meow if I could take something physical with me when I pop over.\"\n\n\"Practice that when it doesn't make me look like an idiot,\" I said.\n\nShe looked hurt and I thought of apologizing.But then she laughed and solidified enough to take my arm. \"Like you need my help to look like a sap.\"\n\n# CHAPTER SIX\n\nOral Roberts University was in south Tulsa at 81st and Lewis. One of the more famous features was a massive sixty foot bronze sculpture of praying hands in front of the entrance.\n\nConfession time. When I was a little kid, I found out that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny were lies adults told to children. The night I learned about them, I climbed into bed and thought about what else didn't make any sense. God was at the top of the list. For years, I thought adults pretended to believe in God so the children would feel there was a higher power out there and feel protected, or perhaps scared depending on how the faith was administered. The entire concept of an omnipotent, omniscient being that created the universe billions of years ago, and only recently decided to create mankind in His own image seemed pretty damn silly. But there are people who seem to need their faith, so who am I to judge?\n\nMy mother was religious in spite of her magical background. She felt light magic came from God and dark magic from the devil. I wonder how she squared that circle since my father's magic was dark and hers was light. Maybe she felt she'd saved him. As for gods, I've met beings most folks consider gods, but none of them qualified in my view. Even Thor could be killed. I might not be able to do it, but someone or something could. And the same held true for the Men of Anubis.\n\nEsther stared at the Praying Hands.\n\nI kept moving toward the entrance.\n\n\"You coming?\" I asked.\n\n\"Those are huge,\" she said.\n\n\"Every now and then, they have a problem with those hands,\" I said.\n\nEsther turned to me. \"Really?\"\n\nI nodded, all serious. \"The hands fall open every Sunday, but they're easy enough to fix. Just toss a quarter up there and the hands snap shut.\" I clapped my hands for effect.\n\nEsther shook her head. \"Why do I ever listen to you?\"\n\nAs we walked to the front doors of the main building, Esther put out a hand and solidified it to stop me.\n\n\"What?\" I asked.\n\n\"You be respectful in there,\" she said. \"Many of these people have dedicated their lives to serve God.\"\n\n\"Do you believe in God?\" I asked.\n\n\"And how,\" she said. \"And I pray for you all the time. These are good people so don't be a jerk to them.\"\n\n\"Delightful people like Ted Haggard graduated from this fine institution,\" I said.\n\nShe shook her head. \"You check your phone right now. Find someone you like who graduated from here.\"\n\n\"These people would think you're Satan spawn,\" I said.\n\n\"Says you. I think they'd consider me an angel. Get out your phone.\"\n\n\"I'll be nice.\"\n\n\"Get out your phone, Jonathan. I'm serious.\"\n\nI sighed and took out my phone. I checked for a list of graduates from ORU. \"Michele Bachmann,\" I said. \"Not impressed.\"\n\n\"Keep going,\" Esther said.\n\n\"Actors, baseball players. But then there are lots of religious people. Pastors, pastors, everywhere.\"\n\n\"Who help people. Find someone you like or I'm outta here.\"\n\nI scrolled through the list and finally stopped. \"Okay. I like Ryan Tedder,\" I said. \"Lead singer for OneRepublic.\"\n\n\"Then I want you to talk to these people the way you'd talk to Ryan Tedder.\"\n\n\"So you want me to ask how to hit the high notes in 'Counting Stars?'\"\n\n\"Don't be a wet blanket. I'm serious, Jonathan.\"\n\n\"Fine.\"\n\nShe nodded and dematerialized.\n\nAs we reached the front doors, I said, \"Maybe someone here will do a Darth Vader impression and tell me they find my lack of faith disturbing.\"\n\nShe made her hand solid so she could punch my arm.\n\nBut Esther was right and I knew it. Who was I to judge others for the things that made their lives bearable?\n\nA nice woman directed me to Dr. Ancho's office. It was in another building, so we had a walk ahead of us. The campus was beautiful. The famous Prayer Tower stood tall in the center of the gardens with pebbled pathways leading to the various buildings.\n\nDr. Ancho was teaching a class, so we waited in the hallway. Eventually, class let out. Students pushed through the doors and flowed into the hall. I ignored their conversations and when the flow slowed to a trickle, I stepped into the room.\n\nCarlos Ancho stood three feet tall on his tiptoes. He wore a nice business suit, and when he looked up at me, he gave me a warm smile. \"Greetings and salutations,\" he said. \"You don't look like students.\"\n\nEsther was still invisible, so the plural caught me off guard.\n\nHis smile brightened. \"Yes, I can see your ghost friend,\" he said and extended his right hand. \"Dr. Carlos Ancho.\"\n\nI shook his hand. \"Jonathan Shade.\"\n\n\"Perfect balance,\" he said and nodded. \"Not many like you around.\" He turned and bowed to Esther. \"And you, my lovely lady, are stunning. Yes, you are forgiven, and if Heaven exists, you will be welcomed with open arms should you elect to make that journey.\"\n\n\"Does Heaven exist?\" Esther asked.\n\nDr. Ancho shrugged. \"You would know better than I. The Good Lord doesn't speak to me directly, but I have no problem taking it on faith.\"\n\n\"So you're a scientist and a Christian?\" I asked. \"Doesn't that bring about some kind of conflict of interest?\"\n\nHe laughed. \"My dear boy,\" he said, \"I'm not one of those god-of-the- gaps types. Science explores the nature and law of the universe, and God is the creator of that universe. Nothing science discovers will ever erase the creator. We should seek the answers to the universe, and study the laws God set up to govern it.\"\n\n\"Interesting view.\"\n\n\"Somehow, I don't think you came here to discuss God. You strike me as an unbeliever.\"\n\n\"Guilty as charged,\" I said.\n\nHis smile never wavered. \"Nothing wrong with wanting more evidence.\" He looked me up and down. \"Your soul is stained with the blood of many men.\"\n\n\"Which means I'm destined for Hell, is that it?\"\n\nHe shook his head and laughed. Then he leaned toward me and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. \"Don't tell anyone,\" he said and looked around as if to reassure himself that we were alone, \"but I don't think Hell is a place you go. I think it's a place you work your way through on your journey to enlightenment.\"\n\n\"So no lakes of fire?\"\n\nHe glanced at his watch. \"I have the next hour free, and if you'd like to continue this, I say we go over to the Hammer for some coffee and snacks.\"\n\n\"The Hammer?\"\n\n\"Officially, it's the Armand Hammer Alumni-Student Center, but we all call it the Hammer.\"\n\n\"So you don't mind answering questions?\"\n\n\"Buy me a cup of coffee and I'm all yours for an hour. I doubt there's anything wrong with you that we can't solve in that time frame.\"\n\n\"You're not even going to ask why I want to talk to you?\"\n\nHe laughed again. He had a great laugh, and I found myself liking him more and more. \"I live for conversations,\" he said. \"I don't care why someone wants to talk to me, or what they want to talk about. I get to know people by talking with them. I can teach, console, sympathize, empathize, learn, and sometimes check off the box for all of the above. I love talking with people, be they friends or strangers who are destined to be new friends.\"\n\n\"I want a new friend,\" Esther said.\n\n\"Oh, my dear lovely woman, I would be honored to call you friend.\"\n\n\"And Jonathan would be honored to buy you a cup of coffee.\"\n\n# CHAPTER SEVEN\n\nOn the inside, the Hammer looked like a cross between a mall food court and an airport gate concourse. Off to the right, people stood in short lines to get tacos or coffee, while off to the left chairs sat in rows, though there were some long white counters with places to plug in computers, and an open area with a massive television broadcasting four channels on one huge screen.\n\nDr. Ancho ordered a latte, and I got a black coffee. We chose a few seats away from the studying students, though most looked like they were just surfing the net. Esther didn't order a drink because while she could solidify these days, she was never hungry or thirsty and wasn't sure she'd be able to process liquids or solids.\n\n\"Thank you for being open to talk to us,\" I said.\n\nDr. Ancho nodded. \"My pleasure.\"\n\n\"Word on the street is that you have a good feel for what's going on in the world.\"\n\nHe sipped his latte. \"When I was a boy, I lived in Mexico City, and the day before my birthday, I begged my mother to take us on a trip. I told her it was very important that we get out of the city, but when she asked me why, I couldn't tell her because I wasn't getting a clear signal. I just knew we needed to leave.\"\n\n\"Did she agree?\"\n\nHe shook his head and frowned at a painful memory. \"She said we could go on a picnic on Saturday, but I knew that was too late and we needed to go now. She said no because she and my father had to work, and my aunt was coming to visit that night to stay for a week. I told her if we stayed there, she would die. She reassured me that she would be fine, but I couldn't sleep that night. I tried to talk to my father, but he was drunk and refused to listen. My sister was too young, and my aunt when she arrived was too tired. But I warned them all that death was stalking us.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" Esther asked.\n\nHe shrugged. \"We were in our small apartment, and early that Thursday morning, there was a terrible earthquake. More than ten thousand people died that day. September 19, 1985. My mother, father, sister, and aunt died when the building collapsed. My mother managed to throw herself on top of me when the roof caved in. I felt her last breath leave her body. My tenth birthday. I was trapped there for two days before rescue workers found me.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Esther said, reaching over to place a semi-solid hand on his arm. The empathy in her sad eyes moved me. \"Now I know why you can see me.\"\n\n\"Oh, man,\" I said. \"I have no words.\"\n\nHe waved us off. \"No words are necessary. The reason I'm telling you this is because there are no days promised to us by God. I believe He loves us because it makes me feel better to believe that, but in reality, I believe we are on our own here. We all suffer tragedy. We all experience miracles. And by miracles, you can choose to believe they are from God, but so are the tragedies. I love the Lord, and I believe He loves us all too. But I think He has better things to do than to worry about any individual person or even any individual planet. We should live our lives to the best of our ability. We should take the time to get to know one another, and to have empathy to a point. I also believe there is evil in this world, and some people are here to fight the darkness to keep the rest of us safe.\"\n\nEsther nodded. She looked at me. \"He means you.\"\n\n\"At times,\" Dr. Ancho said. \"And at times it may be a little lady crossing the street that delays a car and prevents an accident. We can all have some measure of impact on the world, and sometimes through chance, and other times through choice, we can leave the world better than we found it.\"\n\nA young man and woman approached our chairs. \"Hi, Dr. Ancho,\" they said in unison.\n\n\"Greetings and salutations, Corinne and James. I trust the world is being kind today?\"\n\n\"Every day,\" Corinne said. She handed him a sheet of paper. \"We made this for you, Dr. Ancho. Have a blessed day.\"\n\nHe accepted the sheet and they moved on into the building to study or talk or play games.\n\nDr. Ancho smiled and held up the sheet of paper. \"I believe this is for you, Mr. Shade.\" It was a Bible verse in nice calligraphy, and it read, \"Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends. \u2014John 15:13.\"\n\nI didn't know what to say.\n\n\"It doesn't have to come to that, of course.\"\n\nI stared at him, not sure how to respond. Was the guy a psychic? Was he just reading me somehow? I didn't know. He seemed genuine.\n\nHe smiled. \"You are a wanted man by a seriously powerful force in the universe. You call them the Men of Anubis. I call them Amenken and Mahu. If you face them alone, they'll smite you in the amount of time it takes to crack an egg against a skillet.\"\n\n\"So you are psychic.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"I can see things in time, but I can't do anything about them. I can issue warnings, but in most cases, I don't meet the people I need to warn. I like to get to know everyone I can because I can always see the moment of their death. If it's possible to change that, I let them know what I can without coming right out and saying too much. If I draw too much attention, the tragedies are worse.\"\n\n\"Like in Mexico City.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Or New York in September 2001.\"\n\n\"You know that correlation is not causation, right?\" I said.\n\nThe smile and nod. \"Ahogado el ni\u00f1o, tapando el pozo.\" He shrugged, \"I know. And perhaps the tragedies would be just as bad if I didn't warn people. I try to tone things down, and for the last fourteen years, I've managed to avoid the big tragedies. You can argue that I wasn't in a position to see them. Perhaps. But many times I see small tragedies and large tragedies and I see that a nudge here or there will keep things on the smaller side. But I've also learned that if I go to these places physically, they are always worse. This is true whether I open a rift or I take normal transportation.\"\n\n\"All right,\" I said. \"I'm open to believing you've got some precognition going on.\"\n\n\"A blessing and a curse,\" he said.\n\n\"You know why I'm here.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I do. But I don't know why.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"You don't have to do this. Your hand is not being forced.\"\n\n\"I trapped Khemet in the void. His father and brother are going to try to kill me, and worse, they'll kill my friends to get to me.\"\n\n\"Mr. Shade, they have to be able to find you first.\"\n\n\"They know I'm here.\"\n\n\"They know you're alive somehow, but they don't know where you are, and unless you call them out, they aren't likely to find you before you die of old age. All you have to do is settle down and live a normal life. You can help people here and there, and provided you don't do anything on a grand scale, you and your friends will be safe. Hanging around with a Norse god isn't what I'd call laying low.\"\n\n\"But they can travel through time.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Have you heard of the Mandela Effect?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said.\n\n\"There are many people who remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison back in the 1980s, but he didn't die until 2013, and that was after not only getting out of prison, but also becoming president of South Africa.\"\n\n\"Sounds like a memory issue to me.\"\n\n\"Perhaps it is,\" he said. \"And perhaps it isn't. Did you see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"What does the witch say when she talks to her magic mirror?\"\n\n\"That's easy,\" I said. \"She says, 'Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?' Everybody knows that.\"\n\n\"And everybody would be wrong. She says 'Magic mirror on the wall.'\"\n\n\"Nonsense.\"\n\n\"And how,\" Esther said. \"It's always been mirror, mirror.\"\n\n\"Pull up YouTube on your phone,\" Dr. Ancho said.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because I want you to watch a clip from Snow White.\"\n\n\"We have better things to do than that.\"\n\n\"Humor me.\"\n\nSo I pulled up the clip in question and sure enough, the damn witch didn't say \"Mirror mirror\" she said, \"Magic mirror.\"\n\n\"What the hell?\" I asked.\n\nEsther shook her head. \"No,\" she said. \"Someone changed it.\"\n\n\"The movie is based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, of course.\"\n\n\"I read that when I was a kid,\" I said. \"And I remember it saying, 'Mirror mirror on the wall,\" in the book as well.\"\n\n\"It still does.\"\n\n\"So history has been changed?\"\n\n\"You seem to be evidence of that, Mr. Shade. Perhaps your exploits are the reason for the Mandela Effect. Then again, perhaps anytime the Men of Anubis move through time, they shake things up a bit and that helps to keep you hidden.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"You may be right. Wow, the Snow White thing really messes with my head,\" I said. \"Are there other examples?\"\n\n\"Dozens. Everything from the HBO show with Sarah Jessica Parker to the ending of 'We Are the Champions' by Queen.\"\n\n\"Sex in the City is part of it?\"\n\n\"Sex and the City.\"\n\n\"In.\"\n\n\"And.\"\n\n\"Come on.\"\n\n\"Look it up. I'm sure you saw The Empire Strikes Back.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"When Vader tells Luke he's Luke's father, what does he say?\"\n\nI struggled to remember the lines. \"I think he said, 'Luke, I am your father.' Right?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Wrong. He says, 'No, I am your father.' There are plenty of other examples. Do you remember the Berenstain Bears or the Berenstein Bears?\"\n\n\"Berenstain,\" I said.\n\n\"Most folks would disagree with you.\"\n\n\"You're just talking about memory here. We often remember things incorrectly.\"\n\n\"Have you been to Ellis Island?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"How did you get there?\"\n\n\"Ferry.\"\n\n\"Did you know there's a bridge?\"\n\nI smiled. \"Yes. But it's not open to the public. They use it to transport materials and workers for the restoration projects.\"\n\n\"What's the most common brand name for adult diapers?\"\n\n\"Depends.\"\n\n\"Depend. No S.\"\n\n\"I've never needed them,\" I said, \"so I've never really paid attention.\"\n\n\"The Men of Anubis have been scouring the recent past going back a few decades, moving forward a few decades. There are seven billion people on this planet. You've been traveling. They know where you fought Khemet.\"\n\n\"So they have to search the entire planet for me. As an artifact, I don't show up.\"\n\n\"And if they make any alterations, even small ones, things shift a bit. They are making clouds at the bottom of the river and when the silt settles, it doesn't land where it was. For them to find you will take a stroke of luck so great it would be like winning the lottery every day for a week.\"\n\n\"So you're telling me to back off. You see that if I continue on this quest, I'll die.\"\n\n\"Or your friends will die. Or perhaps all of you will die.\"\n\n\"Any chance we all survive?\"\n\n\"If you continue your search? About the same as winning the lottery every day for a week.\"\n\n\"But the Men of Anubis have killed millions of people.\"\n\n\"Everyone dies.\" He finished his latte and stared into my eyes. \"But not everyone lives.\"\n\n# CHAPTER EIGHT\n\n\"You are capable of simply walking away,\" Dr. Ancho said. \"Why don't you?\"\n\nI looked around at the students in the Hammer. The laughter, the quest for knowledge, the like-minded people seeking spiritual communion. Why was I fighting? Was it for these people? I didn't know them.\n\nWas it for my old friends back in Colorado? I hadn't seen any of them in a lifetime, and I mean that in a literal sense. So far as they knew, I was dead, and had been for years. None of them knew I even existed, and I didn't know what was going on in their lives either. We were strangers.\n\nKelly and Esther were the only constants in my life. I tried to connect with Brenda, and that was wonderful while it lasted, but when Khemet killed her, a part of me died as well.\n\nI faced Dr. Ancho. He sat in a gray and blue chair, his small hands on the armrests, and his feet dangling off the edge of the seat cushion. His eyes speared me, and I felt as though he could rip my mind open and stare into my soul. Rough and violent words\u2014speared and rip. Stab and tear. But his eyes held no malice. His eyes held no judgment. He sought understanding, but his motives were pure. He was a kind man. A caring man.\n\nHe didn't say anything.\n\nWhen you ask a question like that, you remain silent until the other person speaks. They can squirm, they can try to turn away, they can even run away, but if they don't leave, at some point they'll say something if only to break the silence.\n\nSilence carries weight\n\nThat weight presses down on people.\n\nEsther watched me struggle with my inner demons. She knew better than to speak as well. Her caring eyes held me in place and I knew she wasn't going to judge me for anything either.\n\nNo one else was paying any attention.\n\nThis was a safe place.\n\nI could open up.\n\n\"I don't know,\" I lied.\n\n\"Then I can't help you,\" Dr. Ancho said.\n\nHe started to push himself out of the chair.\n\n\"I don't know,\" I said, \"how to put what I'm feeling into words.\"\n\nHe settled back and gazed at me. \"I like to watch basketball,\" he said. \"I can't play the game, of course. Well, I could, but I'd have to use magic to win because while I may be able to run through the other players' legs, it would be too easy for them to block any ball I tried to throw toward the hoop. I still like to step onto the court at the Maybee Center every now and again. I like to dribble the ball, pass it around to students, give them their shot at the basket. Anyone can toss the ball around, dribble it up and down the court, pass it to another player. Let's do that here.\"\n\n\"I don't have a basketball,\" I said.\n\nHe smiled. \"Come with me.\"\n\nHe pushed himself out of the chair, dropped to his feet and moved down a hallway toward the restrooms.\n\nEsther floated after him, so I followed too.\n\nOnce we were out of sight of the main floor, Dr. Ancho reached up and his fingers glowed. He slid his fingers down through the air and peeled open a rift to a basketball court.\n\n\"Go on through,\" he said.\n\nEsther stepped through the rift. I stared down at Dr. Ancho. \"I wasn't saying we should get a basketball.\"\n\n\"I know. Step through.\"\n\nI had to bend down to get through the rift, but I did so. Dr. Ancho followed me through then closed the rift.\n\nWe stood at the edge of the basketball court. Several players moved on the boards at the far end, their sneakers squeaking when they cut and changed directions. They shot easy baskets, patted one another on the back and laughed. Easy practice.\n\nSeveral basketballs sat on the floor by the players' bench. Dr. Ancho raised a hand and made a slight motion. One of the balls rolled across the floor then took flight and sailed through the air at me.\n\nI caught the ball.\n\n\"Simple magic,\" I said.\n\nNone of the players paid us any attention, and they hadn't seen the ball fly.\n\n\"Bounce the ball,\" Dr. Ancho said.\n\nI bounced it, liking the high pitched noise it made when it struck the boards. I caught the ball again and started dribbling.\n\nDr. Ancho stepped onto the court and held up his hands to me.\n\nI bounced the basketball to him. He caught it, dribbled for a moment and tossed it to Esther. The ball passed through her and hit the floor, bounced a few times then rolled against the wall.\n\n\"You were supposed to catch it,\" he said.\n\nEsther shrugged. \"I've never touched a basketball.\"\n\n\"First time for everything,\" I said. I started to walk toward the ball.\n\n\"I've got it,\" Esther said and popped over to it. She solidified, lifted the ball then popped back to the court. The ball dropped to the floor by the wall where she'd been. \"Aw, horsefeathers,\" she said and popped back to it. This time, she carried it back to the court.\n\n\"Keep practicing, Esther,\" Dr. Ancho said. \"To grab something physical and take it with you is possible, though difficult because it takes a great force of will. It's easier if you have something of similar mass already in your hands when you go. Then you trade it for what you want to take with you.\"\n\nShe shook her head and tossed the basketball to me. I dribbled a few times, ready to pass to Dr. Ancho, but he dug in his pocket and took out a handful of change. He motioned for Esther to go over to him.\n\n\"Take a quarter,\" he said.\n\nShe picked a shiny quarter from his palm.\n\n\"Hold it tightly.\" He walked ten feet away and placed a penny on the ground. \"All right. Pop over here with the quarter, trade it for the penny and pop back to where you are now.\"\n\n\"All right,\" she said and popped over to the penny.\n\nThe quarter dropped to the floor where she'd been. She ignored it, lifted the penny and popped back, but the penny dropped to the ground by Dr. Ancho.\n\n\"Aw, applesauce,\" Esther said.\n\n\"You have to really want to carry it with you and to take the other item back.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't she try to trade a penny for a penny?\" I asked.\n\n\"The mass doesn't have to be equal. It can be close and the universe will allow it.\"\n\n\"I don't think I can do that,\" Esther said.\n\n\"You jumped over here and brought your clothing with you,\" he said. \"If you couldn't make the jump with anything, you'd arrive naked.\"\n\n\"The clothes are part of me. I've worn them forever.\"\n\n\"They go because you see them going with you.\"\n\n\"Stop beating your gums about me. Jonathan needs your help, not me.\"\n\n\"You keep working, Esther,\" Dr. Ancho said. He turned toward me. \"I'm open.\"\n\nI passed him the ball. He caught it, turned and launched it toward the basket. The ball hit the rim and bounced off. I ran over and caught the ball, did a hook shot toward the basket. The ball hit the backboard and bounced away. I caught the ball and tried a layup. The ball rolled around the rim then fell the wrong way.\n\n\"You used magic to stop that from going in,\" I said.\n\nHe grinned, feigning innocence and put a foot out to stop the ball from rolling past him. \"Why would I do such a thing?\" He lifted the ball and tossed it into the basket. He winked at me. \"Someone has to score some points.\"\n\nI retrieved the ball. \"Nice shot.\"\n\n\"And no magic.\"\n\n\"Magic retired.\"\n\nDr. Ancho laughed, knowing exactly what I meant. \"He came back for a season. Why do you think he did that?\"\n\n\"He wanted to play.\"\n\n\"You can retire, Jonathan.\"\n\n\"And do what?\"\n\n\"Anything you want.\"\n\nI dribbled the ball. \"That's not true.\"\n\n\"Why? What do you want?\"\n\nI considered that for a moment. \"I want to make things right,\" I said, and passed him the ball.\n\n\"What makes you think things aren't right?\"\n\n\"No offense, Dr. Ancho, but I don't buy into a grand plan for the universe designed by some imaginary friend for adults.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"That's a good one. I'll have to write that down.\" He set the ball on the floor and dug a small memo pad out of his pocket. From another pocket, he produced a pen. As he wrote on the first page, he spoke the words aloud. \"Imaginary friend for adults.\" He put the pad and pen away. \"I like that. It's right up there with 'invisible man in the sky.'\"\n\n\"George Carlin,\" I said.\n\nHe nodded. \"All jokes aside, if you don't buy into a grand plan for the universe, what do you have to make right?\"\n\n\"Sorry?\"\n\n\"It's a simple question. If there's no plan, there's nothing to set right. It's not like life is a game of basketball and we have to keep score on an intergalactic scoreboard.\"\n\n\"The Men of Anubis have a plan.\"\n\n\"Most of the people on this planet have a plan too. They plan to lose weight. They plan to write a book. They plan to ask that lovely young woman on a date. They plan to save some money. They plan to get a new job. They plan to watch their favorite TV show on Friday night.\"\n\n\"The Men of Anubis have killed thousands of people. Maybe millions.\"\n\n\"People die every single day, Jonathan. Some die from a heart attack. Some die from cancer. Some die in a robbery, a car accident, some in war, some in childbirth, some jump off a bridge, some are shot, stabbed, strangled, you name it. We're right back to the fact that everybody dies.\"\n\n\"I can't do anything about them,\" I said. \"But maybe I can do something about the Men of Anubis.\"\n\nHe nodded and tossed the basketball to me. \"Take a shot,\" he said.\n\nI shook my head.\n\n\"Take a shot,\" he said again, raising his voice slightly.\n\n\"Fine,\" I said and turned to throw the ball toward the basket.\n\n\"Not from there,\" he said. \"Move to the free throw line.\"\n\nI walked over and put my foot behind the line.\n\n\"Esther, stand along the key.\"\n\n\"The key?\" she asked.\n\n\"The line right there,\" he said, pointing.\n\nShe stood where he said. He moved to the opposite key as though he and Esther were going to rebound my free throws should I miss.\n\n\"The game is on the line,\" Dr. Ancho said. \"Tie score. We're down to the final seconds. A basket will win the game. You were fouled and you have two free throws. Make one and you win the game.\"\n\nI took my shot.\n\nDr. Ancho motioned with one finger and the ball bounced off the rim and came back at me. I caught it, bounced it a few times as I repositioned myself at the line.\n\n\"Last chance. A basket wins the game.\"\n\n\"No magic,\" I said.\n\n\"I won't need magic,\" he said. \"You won't make the shot.\"\n\nI sent the ball up in a lazy arc. It hit the backboard, bounced on the rim and deflected off to the side.\n\n\"Did my imaginary friend make you miss?\" Dr. Ancho asked.\n\n\"You put doubt into my head saying I wouldn't make the shot.\"\n\n\"I can't work direct magic against you, Jonathan. The doubt was already there. You worry that you're not good enough. That somehow what the Men of Anubis do has some reflection on you.\"\n\n\"Thousands of people died because of me,\" I said.\n\n\"Did you kill them?\"\n\n\"I couldn't save them.\"\n\n\"Welcome to the real world when sometimes bad things happen and there's nothing you can do about it.\"\n\n\"They have to be stopped.\"\n\n\"And you think you can stop them?\"\n\n\"I have to try.\"\n\n\"Why? Because they killed thousands of people?\"\n\n\"Those people would not have died if not for me.\"\n\nHe sighed and made a motion with one hand to send the basketball back to the other side of the court where it belonged. Then he walked past me and said, \"You're not fighting for thousands of people.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"You tell me,\" he said and kept walking. \"But I have to get to class now.\"\n\nI raced to catch up to him. \"You think you know me?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"I know I do.\"\n\n\"Well, evidently, I don't know myself. Care to throw some light on the subject?\"\n\n\"Oh, now you want a spotlight?\"\n\nHe moved to open the door, but I blocked his path. Esther kept her distance.\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"I want to make amends.\"\n\n\"For?\"\n\n\"The people who've died because of me.\"\n\n\"All those thousands of people in New York back in 1927? You didn't know them, and you're not the one who killed them. They've been gone for almost ninety years.\"\n\n\"For Henry Winslow,\" I said. \"I failed him. For Brenda Slaughter, who would still be alive if not for my actions. For Naomi Miller. For Brand Easton. For Esther, who wouldn't have killed herself and come back as a ghost.\"\n\n\"That was a different you,\" Esther said. I hadn't realized she'd come over to us. \"And that was my choice.\"\n\n\"And for Kelly. My Kelly.\"\n\nI still had dreams of watching her get cut apart by cleavers. Her memory haunted me, and I'd been pushing it away so hard there were nights I couldn't sleep at all.\n\n\"So you want revenge.\"\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"I want to do something right for a change.\"\n\n\"The Men of Anubis can kill you with a touch.\"\n\n\"I'm not afraid to die.\"\n\n\"But you can't bring any of those people back.\"\n\n\"Some of us aren't even gone,\" Esther said. \"I've been carrying a torch for you for as long as I've known you. I can be physical now, and you don't even seem to notice the bank is open.\"\n\n\"I've noticed,\" I said. \"I just feel we have to deal with the problem at hand first.\" I knew it was a lame comment, and Esther shook her head then stared at the ceiling.\n\n\"It's not your problem,\" Dr. Ancho said.\n\n\"The Men of Anubis are looking for me.\"\n\n\"But they can't find you. Let them look.\"\n\n\"They need to be dispatched,\" I said. \"It's not right for them to go backward and forward in time killing people, changing things. And they will find me.\"\n\n\"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\"Because good things always die and the bad things always flourish. I can make a difference, or at least die trying.\"\n\n\"And take how many more with you?\"\n\nI gave a light humorless laugh. \"You don't get it, Dr. Ancho,\" I said. \"Everyone I've ever truly loved is already dead. The least I can do is try to fight the things that killed them. You know that old military sentiment of 'All gave some, and some gave all?'\"\n\nDr. Ancho nodded.\n\n\"My friends gave all. Esther here gave all. Even Brand, who in his own misguided way was probably trying to do the right thing, gave all. And Kelly.\"\n\nAnd that was the crux of the issue right there, though I didn't say it. Dr. Ancho knew. I could see it in his eyes. Somehow, he was able to read me and know just what was in my heart. Things I didn't want to say to anyone. Like the fact that every time I saw Kelly, I longed for a way to trade her for the Kelly I'd lost. The Kelly I loved, and who loved me back.\n\n\"That doesn't mean you have to give all,\" Dr. Ancho said.\n\n\"I don't care if I live or die,\" I said. \"I just want to take the Men of Anubis with me if I go. And quite frankly, hiding from the sons of bitches doesn't appeal to me at all. That means they win. That means Kelly died for nothing.\"\n\n\"Kelly died facing Henry Winslow,\" Esther said.\n\n\"And if not for the Men of Anubis and their actions, we never would have been tossed back in time.\"\n\n\"But Sharon and Chronos sent us back.\"\n\nI closed my eyes and thought about it. These were the same Men of Anubis I'd met in ancient Egypt. They got the Emerald Tablets of Thoth when Henry disappeared and shot forward in time. But Henry would not have been anywhere near Tutankhamun's funeral if not for me.\n\n\"I need to sit down,\" I said. I leaned against the wall and slid to a seated position.\n\nThe Men of Anubis had killed untold numbers of people. They had altered time in ways I couldn't imagine. The ramifications of their actions changed history, and they couldn't have done any of it if not for me. So all those deaths were on my hands.\n\nKelly's blood was on my hands.\n\n\"All of it is my fault,\" I said. \"If I'd killed Winslow when I first met him, the world would be a much different place.\"\n\n\"You don't know that from nothing,\" Esther said. \"Maybe you're just the fall guy here.\"\n\n\"I don't look anything like Lee Majors,\" I said, trying to lighten the mood. It didn't work.\n\n\"You know what I mean. I wasn't with you in Egypt, but I think you've been framed. You were on the up and up in San Francisco. You've saved lives the whole time I've known you.\"\n\n\"And I'm the reason you killed yourself.\"\n\n\"Different you, but the you that you became is so much better than the one I knew. That rhymes.\" Esther tried to cheer me up by dancing and going into a little sing-song. \"The you I knew, you knew him too, and you know it's true, you're better than you know who.\"\n\n\"To keep the rhyme going,\" Dr. Ancho said, \"it's time for you to buy a clue.\"\n\n\"Stop,\" I said.\n\n\"I'll spell it out for you. The Men of Anubis couldn't send you back to create them. They're a byproduct of something else.\"\n\n\"They're one hell of a byproduct.\"\n\n\"When time is altered, there are always problems. I'm going to be late for my class, but the students won't mind. What are you hoping to accomplish?\"\n\n\"I want to put an end to the Men of Anubis. They're my fault, so they're my responsibility.\"\n\n\"And if you die facing them?\"\n\n\"At least I will have tried to make things right.\"\n\n\"Will you stick around in spirit to keep fighting?\"\n\n\"I sure hope not.\" I looked at Esther. \"No offense, Esther, but I can't imagine what you've been dealing with for all these years.\"\n\n\"You don't want to,\" she said.\n\n\"That's not true,\" I said.\n\n\"Yes it is. To you I'm just a dead girl. I get it. To me, you're my chance at life. And I don't think it's ever going to happen. Not ever.\"\n\n\"Can we deal with this later, Esther?\"\n\n\"Always later,\" she said and turned away.\n\n\"You were saying, Dr. Ancho?\"\n\nHe hesitated, and for a moment I thought he'd judged me and found me wanting, but he soldiered on and looked up at me. \"If you're simply severely injured, will you try to find a way to reset time?\" Dr. Ancho asked.\n\n\"How would I do that?\"\n\n\"If you don't know, I'm certainly not going to tell you.\"\n\n\"By taking the watch from Chronos?\"\n\n\"Trust me. You don't want that job.\"\n\n\"Truth be told, I've had more than enough time travel nonsense. It's one of those things that sounds like fun, but turns into a total nightmare.\"\n\n\"No one ever stops to consider the ramifications. Just keep your eyes open for the real villain of the piece.\"\n\n\"I will,\" I said, thinking I knew what he meant. \"Will you help us?\"\n\nHe took a deep breath and considered it. \"That depends on what you expect me to do. I won't fight with you or for you or even against you.\"\n\n\"I need to know what I'm up against, and I need some help getting my recruits together. I also need to find a good place to face the Men of Anubis. I promised Chronos not to face them in Denver, but I have to go there to get a few helpers.\"\n\nHe stared at me for a moment and I saw disappointment in his eyes. \"I can open a doorway to Denver for you, but I won't be able to keep it open, so you'll need to find your own way back.\"\n\nHe gave me a nod then reached up and pulled down the air, opening a rift. A gust of cool wind rippled through my shirt.\n\n\"Go. I have a class to teach.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" I said.\n\nHe gave me a strange look. \"Not sure you should be thanking me, but it's your life. Now go. I'm late.\"\n\nEsther and I ducked through the rift and stepped from the floor of the Maybee Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma to an alley off East Colfax in Denver, Colorado.\n\n# CHAPTER NINE\n\nThe temperature hovered in the high forties, but the wind made it feel colder. Esther couldn't feel the difference, but I found myself wishing I had a jacket.\n\n\"Dr. Ancho is good,\" I said as we exited the alley to the sidewalk on East Colfax. We'd stepped through right around the corner from a small parking lot with a strip mall of shops, one of which had a door that read, Colfax Self Defense. Someone had stuck a piece of white tape on the door between the Self and Defense to act as an impromptu hyphen, but that wasn't clear until we got closer.\n\nI hadn't seen that door in a lifetime, and I'd never seen the grammar Nazi correction before. My last memory of this place was from when a sorcerer named Blake Ravenwood blasted the entire city block out of existence, leaving a smoking hole in the wake of whatever magic he'd used. I got even with the son of a bitch and left him in the Underworld after kicking his ass. Naomi Miller, whose body he'd been using at the time, died to get him there, and I've never really forgiven myself for her death.\n\nLife has a way of tormenting me because I'd seen her die twice. As I reached for the door to the dojo, I thought about Kelly. I'd seen her die twice, too.\n\n\"What are you waiting for?\" Esther asked.\n\n\"This Kelly won't know you.\"\n\n\"I'll stay invisible until you introduce me, and I won't beat my gums.\"\n\n\"That'll be a first,\" I said.\n\nShe gave me a playful slap, then went translucent.\n\nI took a deep breath. The smell of pizza cooking down the street wafted past and made my stomach growl. Grunts sounded from inside the dojo as students punched air going through their routines. No time like the present, I thought, and opened the door.\n\nA black woman approached me with a big smile, moving with exaggerated stealth as she put a finger to her lips. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place her. Had she been one of my Kelly's students too? Kelly taught mostly women because she liked to empower them to take control of their lives. You couldn't ask for a better role model.\n\n\"Can I help you?\" the woman whispered.\n\n\"I'm here to see Kelly Chan,\" I said.\n\n\"Oh, she'll be back directly. She's at the airport saying goodbye to a friend.\"\n\nIn the studio, a young woman with dark red hair led ten other women through a routine where they blocked punches and kicks while advancing and retreating in unison. It didn't look very effective at first, but I realized this was more to get them used to the contact of blocking, and to the concept of moving backward to avoid a punch or kick and stepping around once the other person has committed. It looked to be a beginner's class. The women ranged from early twenties to late sixties.\n\nI drew a breath, thinking that Kelly had breathed this air. She wasn't my Kelly either, and I knew I needed to be prepared because she might not recognize me. I was a bit older than the last time she would have seen me, and my hair was different. And to her, I was dead, and had been for years. My heart pounded and I realized I hadn't responded to the woman's statement about Kelly being at the airport.\n\n\"Sorry,\" I said. \"Would it be all right if we waited?\"\n\n\"We?\" the woman asked.\n\n\"She can't see me,\" Esther said.\n\n\"I mean, would it be okay if I waited,\" I said. Wow, I was really off my game.\n\nThe woman sized me up, and suspicion showed in her narrowed eyes. \"What do you want with Kelly?\"\n\n\"I'm here to offer her a job,\" I said. \"If she wants it, of course.\"\n\n\"She's got a job.\"\n\n\"This is a different kind of job that would make use of her particular set of skills.\"\n\n\"Don't go all Liam Neeson on me, Mister...\" She hesitated so I'd give her my name, but I didn't want to do that. I don't know why.\n\n\"Not me,\" I said. \"Her. Look, I'll just sit here and read a magazine. Is that cool? If I disturb anyone, I'll leave if you ask, but I'm not here to cause any trouble. I just need Kelly's help.\"\n\n\"You know her?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"We've never met.\"\n\nShe looked me up and down again then frowned. \"I guess it's all right, but if you get rowdy, I'll throw you out of here myself.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\n\"If you need me, my name is Monique.\"\n\n\"Got it. Thank you, Monique.\" I pointed to the plastic chairs in the little waiting area between the counter and the front of the building. \"Sitting down now.\"\n\n\"Mmm hmm.\"\n\nClass let out fifteen minutes later. After the women chatted for a few minutes, they filed out of the dojo.\n\nMonique glanced over at me as the last of the students left. Kelly's substitute teacher went off to the women's locker room without coming over to the door.\n\n\"We don't have another class until tonight,\" Monique said. \"Means you need to leave now.\"\n\n\"Can you call Kelly for me?\" I asked.\n\n\"And tell her what?\"\n\n\"Tell her that her old friend Jonathan needs to talk to her.\"\n\n\"And you said you didn't know her.\"\n\n\"It's complicated.\"\n\n\"Isn't it always?\"\n\n\"Help me out here. It's just a phone call.\"\n\n\"I'll think about it.\"\n\n\"In the meantime, can I use the restroom?\"\n\n\"It's in the back.\"\n\n\"I know where it is,\" I said.\n\nThe substitute teacher exited the women's room. Her red hair was even darker than I realized, but it was a dye job as I could see blonde hair at the roots. She wore blue jeans and a T-shirt with a big orange jack o'lantern on it. Halloween was over, so maybe she liked the shirt. She gave me a nod as she passed.\n\nAs I stepped into the men's room, I heard her ask Monique, \"Who's the cute guy?\"\n\nEsther remained invisible to them and listened to their conversation. If they said anything of value, she'd fill me in. I used the restroom, washed my hands, and returned to the front of the dojo. The floor was exactly as I remembered it, covered with training mats. I'd killed a Sekutar warrior in this very place. Well, in a different layer of time.\n\nMonique and the redhead stood by the office door, chatting. Esther gave me a shrug. Nothing to report.\n\n\"You going to help me out?\" I asked. \"Can you please call her?\"\n\n\"You ain't got the number?\" Monique asked.\n\n\"I used to,\" I said. \"I can get it again. I just don't want to talk to my sister. Please?\"\n\n\"Hold your horses,\" Monique said.\n\n\"No horses to hold.\"\n\nMonique went into the office, leaving me with the redhead.\n\n\"Hello again,\" I said. \"I'm Jonathan. And you're?\"\n\n\"Not.\"\n\n\"So I'm not even worthy of your name?\"\n\nShe grinned and gave me a wink. \"You never know what the future will bring.\"\n\n\"I used to know,\" I said.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"Forgot to pay the bill to the psychic hotline. You'd think they'd have known to remind me.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"You're not that funny.\"\n\nMonique exited the office. \"I tried Kelly's phone, but it went to voice mail. Sorry, Mr. Jonathan. You gots to go. I need to lock up and meet my friend Jessica for coffee.\"\n\n\"It's all right, Monique,\" the redhead said. \"I'll lock up. I don't mind waiting with Jonathan for a while.\"\n\n\"You sure?\"\n\nShe nodded and winked. \"Oh, I'm definitely sure. He's cute, and I'm between boyfriends.\"\n\n\"Okay, Gillian. If you say so. Thanks again for covering the class.\"\n\n\"Any time. Kelly saved me, so it's the least I can do.\"\n\nMonique gave me another look, then pushed through the door and headed down the sidewalk.\n\n\"Thanks for hanging out with me, Gillian,\" I said.\n\n\"Well, now you know my name,\" she said and locked the door.\n\n\"I do have ears.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" she said.\n\n\"So Kelly saved you?\" I asked. I wanted to know more about who this Kelly was. For all I knew, after I died, she could have reverted back to being a killer for hire.\n\nGillian nodded and stepped closer. \"I was a nymphomaniac, and I made bad choices about which guys to sleep with. Some of them were violent, but I like the bad boys. Long story short, one was a little too bad. Kelly taught me how to defend myself.\"\n\nShe seemed a mite comfortable with the whole nympho thing, and the way she looked at me made me wonder if she wanted to put me on the menu. I wasn't ready for a fling. Brenda's death was too recent, but the way Gillian bit her lower lip as she stared at me was something of a giveaway.\n\n\"I'm glad,\" I said.\n\n\"So, Jonathan,\" she said, looking me over again. \"Your last name wouldn't be Shade, would it?\"\n\n\"Hate to disappoint you, but Jonathan Shade died years ago. We share a first name.\"\n\n\"That's a pity because Kelly still talks about him. I would love to meet him.\"\n\n\"Got a time machine?\" I asked.\n\nShe laughed. \"I wish. If I did, I'd make sure I never hooked up with Jack Munster.\"\n\n\"You slept with a guy named Munster? Did he look like Frankenstein's monster?\"\n\n\"No, but he smelled like the cheese.\"\n\nI laughed.\n\n\"I like your laugh, Jonathan.\"\n\n\"Something's wrong with this sheila,\" Esther said.\n\n\"Thank you,\" I said, intending the response for both the live and dead girls. Esther didn't need to worry. I sensed something off about Gillian. And for Gillian the pleasantry was to have something to say. I sure wished Kelly would get back.\n\nGillian leaned close and sniffed me. \"You smell good.\" She let her lips brush my ear and whispered, \"I want you inside me.\"\n\nI blinked. Had I heard her correctly?\n\n\"I'm sorry?\"\n\nShe grabbed me and pushed me backward toward the women's locker room. \"Working out makes me horny, and you look like the kind of man who can scratch my itches in all the right places. I know you think something's wrong with me, but I've had all my shots and I always carry protection.\" She dug in her pants pocket, pulled out a wrapped condom and tossed it to me. The wrapper had a radio station logo and a caption that read, \"Wrap that rascal.\"\n\n\"Uh...\"\n\nShe pushed me back, peeled off her T-shirt. She wasn't wearing a bra and she was young and healthy. She threw her shirt at me. \"We're both adults,\" she said. \"We don't need clothes.\"\n\n\"I was just\u2014\"\n\nShe rushed to me and planted a kiss on my lips. She moved her mouth over mine and reached down to rub my crotch. She maneuvered me into the women's locker room, which consisted of a couple of rows of lockers with wooden benches between them, and a shower room with toilets at the back.\n\nEsther stood in the center of the dojo, shaking her head. \"And now I have to play fire extinguisher.\"\n\nGillian closed the door and stood proudly. \"Do you like what you see?\"\n\n\"Well...\"\n\n\"Do you want to see more?\"\n\n\"I was actually here to see Kelly.\"\n\n\"I'm a vibrant young athletic woman who wants to fuck your brains out. Are you really going to say no to me? Strip.\"\n\n\"You're a lovely woman.\"\n\n\"Are you gay?\"\n\n\"No, but\u2014\"\n\nShe grabbed my shirt and yanked it open, popping off buttons. They clattered to the tile floor. She pulled my shirt down, pinning my arms, then purred like a kitten as she moved her lips to mine. She kissed me down the chin, neck, and chest as she sank. Her hands ran down my arms, pulling my shirt down with them, and right as I expected her to move to my fly, she drove her head into my gut. Hard.\n\nI bent with the blow. She came up with her head, smacked me under the chin then threw a throat punch. I tried to block, but my arms wouldn't come up thanks to the damn shirt. I managed to twist enough that her punch hit me in the side of the neck. I fell over a bench by the lockers and crashed to the floor.\n\nGillian leaped over the bench and straddled me. The view was nice, but I knew I was in trouble when she touched her right earring and said, \"I've got him.\"\n\n\"Esther!\" I yelled.\n\nGillian punched me in the face, touched her earring again. \"Yes, sir,\" she said and tried to drive her fist through my face again. This time, I moved my head and her fist struck the floor. I bucked underneath her, and rolled over, smacking her against the wooden bench. I wrestled her until I was on top. She flailed at me, but I caught her arms, and pinned them with my knees.\n\nEsther walked through the wall and stared at me. \"This isn't a petting pantry,\" she said.\n\n\"Who were you talking to, Gillian?\" I asked. My lip felt a bit swollen from her blow.\n\n\"Who's Esther?Don't you want me?\" she asked, smiling. \"You can take me now. I'll writhe beneath you like a wildcat in heat.\"\n\nI sighed and looked at the ceiling.\n\n\"Want me to sock her lights out for you?\" Esther asked and materialized fully.\n\nGillian frowned. \"Looks like you have me at a disadvantage.\"\n\n\"Just pinch her carotid arteries closed,\" I said to Esther.\n\nEsther knelt and reached for Gillian's throat.\n\nGillian pulled her left arm free. \"Do over,\" she said and pressed a jewel on her left earring.\n\nI felt like I was falling into myself.\n\nEsther and I stepped through the rift from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Denver, Colorado.\n\nThe temperature hovered in the high forties, but the wind made it feel colder. Esther couldn't feel the difference, but I found myself wishing I had a jacket. My shirt was buttoned and intact, but my lip hurt and I felt slightly disoriented.\n\n\"Dr. Ancho is good,\" I said as we exited the alley to the sidewalk on East Colfax. \"Oh, shit,\" I said as the reality settled onto my shoulders.\n\n\"What?\" Esther asked.\n\n\"The Men of Anubis have found us.\"\n\n# CHAPTER TEN\n\nThere were two options. I could go through the time loop again, trying to make little changes or I could take a more direct approach. I knew Gillian had earrings that let her talk to the Men of Anubis, so she was one of their agents. She must have been their spy to keep tabs on the version of Kelly Chan from this layer of time. One earring, the right one, let her contact them or another of their agents. The left was a technological device to erase time for a chance to try again.\n\nI remembered everything that happened, but would Gillian know she'd gone back in time or would this play out for her like the first time. I had to assume she'd remember because otherwise she wouldn't know to try a different tactic.\n\nI explained this to Esther while we stood on East Colfax just a few yards from the parking lot of the strip mall where Kelly had her dojo.\n\n\"I remember everything that happened, too. So, play it out again or go in and attack?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"There's a third option,\" she said. \"Don't go in at all.\"\n\n\"They know we're here. They know we're trying to reach Kelly.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"They'll kill her.\"\n\n\"If they wanted her dead, they could have bumped her off already.\"\n\n\"We have another problem,\" I said.\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"My lip still hurts from where she punched me, but my buttons aren't broken.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Jonathan, I'm all balled up here. How is it that we went back, but still remember?\"\n\n\"I don't think this is a normal time loop because we're not connected to time.\"\n\n\"There's such a thing as a normal time loop?\"\n\nFour gunshots sounded not too far off.\n\n\"Was that from the dojo?\" I asked.\n\n\"I'll check.\" Esther popped away.\n\nShe popped back a moment later, her face lighter than normal.\n\n\"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"Gillian just shot and killed you in the dojo.\"\n\nSirens wailed in the distance and grew closer. Shit. We weren't connected to time so we got tossed out and back like silt clouding the river, but Gillian went back to what time was before, meaning for a short time there were two of me and two of Esther, and the second Esther had to still be in there.\n\n\"Pop back in there,\" I said, backing away toward the corner. \"See where Gillian is going. I'll catch her unawares.\"\n\n\"B-R-B,\" Esther said.\n\nTraffic was terrible on Colfax, but the drivers did their best to wheel to the side to let the police cars and ambulance through. We weren't far from Colorado Boulevard, so the ambulance was close. Police cars screeched into the parking lot. I watched them pile out of their cars and face the dojo, guns drawn. For all they knew, they were dealing with an active shooter.\n\nEsther popped back.\n\n\"She went up through Kelly's apartment to get to the roof.\"\n\nI nodded. \"Got it.\"\n\nEsther sailed along beside me as I ran around the building. \"I saw myself in there too, wailing over her dead Jonathan. Talk about strange!\"\n\n\"We can talk about that later. Get up there and stay invisible so you can keep tabs on Gillian.\"\n\nEsther nodded and popped away.\n\nIn the back alley, a fire escape led to Kelly's balcony. I raced back there, jumped up to catch the bottom rung and pulled the ladder down. I climbed to the balcony, hopped up onto the rail and jumped to the rooftop. I caught the gutter, and it groaned under my weight.\n\nPlease hold, I thought.\n\nIt bent, but did not break. I swung a leg to the roof and hauled myself up, rolling to my feet.\n\nI caught sight of Gillian's red hair as she jumped from the rooftop to a lower roof. I followed her. I ran to the edge of the second story roof and leaped outward. I hit the first floor hard, but did a quick roll to absorb the impact. Gillian heard me land, and spun around to face me.\n\n\"Impossible!\" she said. She pulled the gun from her pocket and raised it. I was too far away to do anything.\n\nEsther materialized beside Gillian, and punched her in the face with one hand, while shoving her gun hand to the side. The gun went off and missed. The gunshot might draw the cops, though. Then again, from up here, blending with the traffic noise from Colfax, it might be mistaken for a car backfiring.\n\n\"Thank you, Esther,\" I said.\n\nGillian recovered quickly and tried to punch Esther, but Esther dematerialized. Gillian threw herself off balance with the punch, and by then I'd crossed the distance. I pushed her hard in the direction she was moving and she fell down. The gun skittered off to the side, so I hurried over and stepped on it.\n\n\"Why'd you have to go and kill me?\" I asked.\n\n\"I put three bullets in your chest and one in your head. How are you still alive?\"\n\nI spread my arms to show no injuries. \"You missed,\" I said.\n\nI bent to pick up the revolver, a simple Smith and Wesson six-shooter.\n\n\"I saw you go down.\"\n\n\"Oh, baby, you were the one who wanted to go down on me.\"\n\nShe glared at me and reached for her ear.\n\n\"No you don't,\" I said and kicked her arm. I leaned in and yanked the left earring. It wasn't a clip-on, so she flinched at the pain as I tore it free. Blood dripped from her mangled earlobe. \"Esther, can you hold her arms for me?\"\n\nEsther popped over and grabbed Gillian's arms. I wasn't so violent removing the right earring. I didn't feel bad about the damage. She had shot another version of me, after all.\n\nI walked away from them and moved to the edge of the roof. I peered over to see if anyone was coming. The police had entered the building, and several stood guard outside, standing behind the open driver's doors of their police cars. No one looked up, so I was right about the noise from the gunshot. Sounds like that are ubiquitous on East Colfax. A single shot doesn't draw much attention if there are no witnesses and it's off in the distance.\n\nI walked back to Gillian and Esther. \"We're good,\" I said.\n\n\"How are you even alive?\" Gillian asked.\n\n\"Your little earring creates a mini-Mandela Effect,\" I said. \"I'm not tied to time the way you are, so when you hit the button, you went back in time, but I was tossed out to where I entered the area because I can't be in the same spot at the same time as my earlier self. At least, that's my hypothesis.\"\n\n\"I didn't understand a word of that,\" Esther said.\n\n\"And who the fuck are you, lady?\" Gillian asked, struggling to pull free.\n\n\"You could say that I'm the ghost with the most,\" Esther said.\n\n\"I thought that was Beetlejuice,\" I said.\n\n\"That's a movie; I'm real.\"\n\n\"Good enough,\" I said. \"At breakfast, she's the ghost with the toast.\"\n\n\"You think you're funny?\" Gillian asked.\n\n\"Yes, but I realize some people think I'm just an asshole.\"\n\n\"They know you're here.\"\n\n\"You're quite the stupid little bitch, aren't you?\" I said.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The Men of Anubis will pop into the dojo, and they'll see my body with all the bullet holes and the lack of a pulse. And once again, they'll think I'm dead.\"\n\nEsther flinched.\n\n\"Something wrong, Esther?\" I asked.\n\n\"Tell you later,\" she said.\n\n\"Your ghost friend just felt her other self go bye-bye,\" Gillian said.\n\n\"Is that true?\" I asked.\n\nEsther nodded.\n\nThat meant the Men of Anubis were in the dojo. They couldn't have been more than thirty yards from where I now stood.\n\nI turned toward the dojo, thinking that maybe I should go face them now.\n\n\"They're down there, all right,\" she said. \"And now I'm going to call them up here.\" She opened her mouth to scream, but only the first part of the yell issued forth before Esther smacked her on the back of the head. \"Hey!\"\n\n\"You try to scream again,\" I said, \"and Esther will dematerialize her hand, push it inside your skull and rematerialize it, killing you instantly.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't dare.\"\n\n\"Try me, bitch,\" Esther said. \"I'd love to send you down the river. You killed Jonathan.\"\n\n\"One version of me, anyway,\" I said. \"Keep her here, Esther.\"\n\n\"Don't go down there, Jonathan,\" Esther said.\n\nI held up the earrings. \"I've got a do-over,\" I said.\n\n\"Don't waste it!\"\n\nGillian smiled. \"Go face them, timeless man.\"\n\n\"Jonathan, no!\"\n\nI liked the direct approach. It had served me well against Persephone and others. What if I could go down there and shoot one of those sons of bitches behind the ear before they knew I was even there? Maybe I could get both of them. Or maybe those jackal masks would deflect bullets. I checked the gun. One bullet remained. I sighed. If I had two bullets, I might have gone down there. With one, it wasn't worth the risk.\n\nI glanced back at Gillian. \"Got any more ammo?\"\n\n\"Not on me.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I said. \"I find myself in need of a bedtime story, and you're just the lady who can spin that yarn for me. How and when did the Men of Anubis recruit you?\"\n\n\"Two years ago, and how is none of your business.\"\n\n\"That long ago?\" That was not only before I'd killed Khemet, it was before I'd returned from the 1920s. Of course, they'd want to keep someone on Kelly as a just-in-case precaution. Gillian was in place, but until I killed Khemet, they had no idea when or if I'd turn up. They probably had agents around Patrick O'Malley, and everyone else I knew back then, too.\n\n\"What are you going to do with me?\" Gillian asked.\n\n\"I haven't decided.\"\n\n\"You're going to have to kill me to keep me quiet.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to kill you,\" I said.\n\n\"The Men of Anubis will expect me to report in.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's not going to happen.\"\n\n\"They'll find me if I don't contact them.\"\n\n\"They're here now,\" I said.\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"They're not going to try to trace you along your timeline. They can do that, of course, but I think it's more likely they'll just be at your house waiting when you get home.\"\n\n\"Apartment,\" she said. \"I rent.\"\n\n\"Then you should have struck a better bargain with them for being a spy.\"\n\n\"My son is alive because I agreed to help them. I wasn't about to try and up the ante.\"\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"Car accident,\" she said. \"I lived, he didn't. They offered me a chance to relive those last seconds to avoid the wreck, and said I might one day have to kill a stranger, but my son would be alive. No offense, but I'd kill a hundred men like you to keep Joey alive.\"\n\n\"No offense taken,\" I said. \"How old is your son?\"\n\n\"Fifteen last month.\"\n\n\"You don't look old enough to have a fifteen-year-old.\"\n\n\"I take care of myself.\"\n\n\"That you do. All right, cops will be searching for the shooter, so we should probably get out of here now.\"\n\n\"You're taking me with you?\"\n\nI laughed. \"Not a chance.\"\n\n\"I'll tell them about you.\"\n\nI winked at her. \"I'm counting on that.\"\n\n\"They'll find you.\"\n\n\"I'm counting on that, too. Esther, let her go.\"\n\nEsther did as I said.\n\nGillian didn't get up. She stared at me. \"You're just letting me go? I shot you dead.\"\n\n\"Well, I figure you're not armed now, so you're not going to do that again. I also figure you won't run back to the dojo because the Men of Anubis are probably gone now, and there are too many witnesses who can ID you as the shooter. There are probably cars on the way to your apartment now, so your best bet is to call your son, and have him meet you somewhere. You'll have to leave and start over someplace.\"\n\n\"You said the Men of Anubis would be at my apartment, so if I call my son...\"\n\n\"Oh, they'll follow him. They're not stupid. They can find you.\"\n\n\"And you want me to lie to them?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"You can tell them the truth. If you lie, they might kill you, and worse, they might kill Joey.\"\n\n\"I don't know what to say.\"\n\n\"Goodbye?\"\n\n# CHAPTER ELEVEN\n\nEsther and I relocated to the other side of Colfax. We loitered at the mouth of an alley. The sun dropped behind the mountains shooting brilliant orange light dancing across the clouds and throwing purple shadows through the sky.\n\n\"Think she drives the same truck?\" I asked Esther.\n\nEsther shrugged. I looked to passersby like a well-dressed homeless man talking to myself. Nobody paid me any attention. The homeless tend to be invisible no matter what kind of clothes they're wearing.\n\nThe detectives continued to work the crime scene at the dojo, and they would likely be there for many more hours. They had to photograph the scene, get video, collect evidence, try to lift fingerprints, and all the rest. In real life, it took a lot longer than what you see on TV. From where I watched, I could tell the detectives had already placed tent numbers to mark evidence, and they were taking still more photographs.\n\nA truck pulled into the lot, and my heart skipped as Kelly exited the vehicle. This Kelly had seen a version of me die already. How would she react to seeing another version of me dead on her dojo floor? She spent some time talking to detectives. She had her back to the truck.\n\n\"Let's take a chance,\" I said.\n\n\"You're the one taking a chance,\" Esther said. \"I'm all berries.\"\n\n\"It's not a big chance,\" I said. \"I'll keep my distance.\"\n\nI walked westward down Colfax and crossed at the corner. Kelly's dojo was on the south side of the street. On that corner, I leaned against a lamp post and pulled my shirt tighter. I rubbed my arms. The temperature wouldn't have bothered me if not for the damn wind.\n\nAfter a time, Kelly nodded to the officers then climbed back into her truck. She started the engine and flipped on the lights. I stepped away from the lamp post and waved my hands over my head then pointed South down the side street.\n\nI couldn't see her because of the lights, so I wasn't sure she'd check out the crazy guy at the end of the sidewalk, but she turned on Colfax and hung a left beside me.\n\nShe buzzed down her window. \"Who are you and what do you want?\" she asked.\n\n\"I'm King Arthur of Camelot, and I seek the Holy Grail,\" I said and approached the truck.\n\nShe stared at me. Her mouth dropped open.\n\n\"Jonathan?\"\n\n\"Me too,\" Esther said and materialized in front of her.\n\nKelly started. \"Who the hell are you?\"\n\n\"Esther, I couldn't see you until I died. This Kelly has never met you.\"\n\n\"Oh, horsefeathers. I forgot.\"\n\n\"Can I bum a ride?\" I asked. \"We have a lot to talk about.\"\n\n\"We may need to talk later,\" she said and pointed.\n\nSix men unfolded from the shadows and approached us.\n\n\"Would you care to do the honors?\" I asked. \"I only have one bullet.\"\n\nKelly smiled, shut off the engine and opened the truck door. She reached behind the seat and came out with a gleaming katana. She tossed the scabbard into the truck.\n\n\"Who dies first?\" she asked.\n\nThe men stopped. One of them touched his right ear and said, \"Jonathan Shade lives.\"\n\n\"Shit,\" I said. \"Don't let any of them touch their left ear.\"\n\nWe rushed them. Kelly lopped off the first guy's head. I ducked a punch and slammed my guy to the ground. I grabbed him by the hair and yanked an earring from his left ear. There wasn't a button on it. Maybe these guys didn't rate a time device.\n\nA man grabbed me from behind. I threw myself backward, slamming my head into his face. Stunned, his grip loosened, and I drove him backward against the wall. I elbowed him in the gut, spun and punched him to the ground.\n\nI turned around and the other men were all dead. Kelly wiped her blade on the last corpse's coat.\n\n\"That was fun,\" she said. \"I see you still know how to have a good time, but you only handled two of them.\"\n\n\"I'm out of practice.\"\n\nThe two I'd handled were still alive. Kelly stepped up to the first guy, who held his bleeding ear. \"Death or questions?\"\n\n\"Neither,\" I said. \"Let's just go.\"\n\n\"Still leaving enemies alive to haunt you later?\"\n\n\"These guys are just hired thugs.\"\n\n\"So what kind of shit have you stepped in now, and just how many of you are there?\"\n\n\"Just the one right now.\"\n\n\"And the dead Jonathan on my floor?\"\n\n\"Maybe we should go somewhere to talk.\"\n\nShe gestured to her truck. \"Hop in.\"\n\nShe returned to the driver's side, hit the switch to unlock the passenger door, then sheathed her sword and stuck it behind the seat.\n\nI climbed in beside her.\n\nShe stared at me a moment. \"Is it really you?\" she asked.\n\n\"I promise, I'll answer all your questions, but we need to get out of here before the Men of Anubis show up.\"\n\n\"That's all I need to know,\" she said and started the truck. She wheeled away from the curb and drove down the side street to 14th, and took that to Colorado Boulevard. \"Nobody's following us.\"\n\n\"Good,\" I said. \"You've heard of the Men of Anubis?\"\n\n\"Vampires are scared shitless by them. Bastards who mess with time, right?\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"I'll want to know more about them, of course, but first, I want to know about you.\"\n\nEsther appeared between us. \"And me?\" she asked.\n\nKelly raised a hand from the wheel, but stopped herself before smacking Esther. She placed her hand back on the steering wheel. \"Is she going to keep doing that? It weirds me out.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" Esther said. \"I don't want to be a fire extinguisher.\"\n\n\"It's okay, Esther,\" I said.\n\n\"Not if she keeps popping in out of nowhere like that,\" Kelly said. \"I almost killed her.\"\n\n\"She's already dead,\" I said.\n\n\"Hmm,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"Want me to make myself scarce?\" Esther asked.\n\n\"Esther, please stay,\" I said.\n\n\"I'm a third wheel.\"\n\n\"No you're not.\"\n\nKelly stopped at a light and turned to stare at me. \"If you're done talking to the ghost girl, you owe me dinner.\"\n\nI gave her a confused look. \"Okay, I'd be happy to buy you dinner.\"\n\n\"No, you owe me dinner. Don't you remember?\"\n\n\"Kelly, I've lived a couple of lifetimes since I last saw any version of you that would have common memories.\"\n\n\"We made a bet.\"\n\nI struggled to remember.\n\n\"The day you died. That morning. Over breakfast.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I got nothing.\"\n\n\"Men,\" she said as the light changed.\n\n\"I said I'd buy you dinner,\" I said.\n\n\"But you don't remember the bet.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"You bet me dinner that after Daredevil underperformed, and then Elektra flopped that we wouldn't see another live action Daredevil in our lifetimes.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"The Netflix series? My friend Amanda insisted I watch it with her, and I have to say it was very good.\"\n\n\"I don't know Amanda.\"\n\n\"Have you seen the Daredevil series?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"You need to watch it.\"\n\n\"I don't have Netflix. Actually, I don't have a home. I managed to piss away a fortune a few months ago.\"\n\n\"Are you trying to get out of paying for dinner?\"\n\nI laughed. \"No,\" I said. \"Dinner is on me.\"\n\n\"Because you lost the bet.\"\n\n\"I don't remember the bet.\"\n\n\"You haven't changed.\"\n\n\"I'm still paying.\"\n\n\"Damn right you are.\"\n\nEsther shook her head. \"I should go check on the other Kelly.\"\n\n\"Stay here, Esther. We may need you.\"\n\n\"You may need me, but you sure as hell don't want me.\"\n\n\"Did she say other Kelly?\" Kelly asked.\n\n# CHAPTER TWELVE\n\nWe stopped at Old Chicago, and ordered a pizza to split. Esther sat beside me, invisible. It bothered me that she felt so rejected, so I promised myself to make it up to her later. It occurred to me that I was always having to make things up to her. She was stalwart and true, and I didn't appreciate her enough.\n\nWhile we waited for the pizza, I drank a beer, and Kelly sipped an iced tea. Esther didn't say anything. She just sat there watching us talk, but as she was invisible, Kelly couldn't see her, and I didn't pull her into the conversation because I was enraptured. The restaurant was busy, but we had a small booth and the talking from the various conversations was just white noise in the background. I stupidly let Esther fade into the background, too.\n\n\"Before I go into a long, drawn-out story,\" I said. \"What do you know about the Men of Anubis and all that surrounds them.\"\n\n\"Ancient Egyptian assholes. They move through time, and evidently know when certain magical artifacts are used. I also heard that you were alive and in New York, and that somehow I have a time twin.\"\n\n\"Yes, there's another Kelly Chan. You two lived different lives.\"\n\n\"The other Kelly your ghost mentioned. She's the Kelly you knew?\"\n\n\"Uh, no.\"\n\n\"Jesus, Jonathan. How many of me are there?\"\n\n\"Right now? Two.\"\n\n\"That's just weird.\" She shook her head and sipped her tea. \"What happened to the Kelly you knew?\"\n\n\"She died.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"In battle. A wizard sent sixty meat cleavers spinning at her all at once. For me, it was more than fifty years ago, but it still haunts me every night.\"\n\n\"I'm not touching the fifty years ago comment. Tell me this. Was it a good death?\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"Who can ask for more? Are you here to ask me to die in battle for you, too?\"\n\n\"I don't want you to die.\"\n\n\"We all die, Jonathan. Well, except for you, it seems. You're like a cat with nine lives or something.\"\n\n\"I'd sacrifice all of them to bring back the Kelly I knew,\" I said.\n\n\"That's not going to happen. So she died in the sixties?\"\n\n\"1877.\"\n\n\"You went back to the old west? There's a story there.\"\n\n\"I went back to ancient Egypt first. Look, this is a convoluted story, and I can tell you all about it another time. What matters is that I tricked the Men of Anubis. They thought I was dead, but evidently, they weren't completely convinced because they had agents watching you.\"\n\n\"If they can go through time, why not kill you before you went back?\"\n\n\"Too late. I'm not attached to any layer of time.\"\n\n\"I don't get it.\"\n\n\"Just accept it. I don't want to explain layered time right now. I promise, I'll explain all of it. Hell, I'll write it all down if you want. But for now, I need to recruit you and a few others to help fight the Men of Anubis.\"\n\n\"Doesn't matter. I'm in.\"\n\n\"You don't know what it entails.\"\n\n\"I don't care. Cho is safely off to Japan, and I'm free to do as I please. I'm in.\"\n\n\"Cho?\"\n\n\"Little girl. Werewolf for a father.\"\n\n\"I've never seen a werewolf.\"\n\n\"You don't want to.\"\n\n\"I'll take your word for it.\"\n\n\"As well you should,\" she said and leaned back as the waiter arrived to deliver our pizza.\n\nWhen he left, we each grabbed a slice. I set mine on my plate to cool a bit, but Kelly bit into hers. Not feeling pain was a useful byproduct of her magical engineering. She could eat piping hot pizza without a problem.\n\n\"You said the Men of Anubis can tell when particular magical artifacts are used?\" I asked.\n\nShe chewed and swallowed while nodding, then said, \"That's what I've been told.\"\n\n\"By whom?\"\n\n\"A vampire named Victor Pavlenco.\"\n\nI nodded. \"I've met him. He's an ass.\"\n\n\"I can't stand the guy, but he has a cute ass.\"\n\n\"I'll pretend I didn't hear that. Son of a bitch almost got me killed. So what did he tell you?\"\n\n\"He has something called the Ring of Aten. There are at least three of them, and if a vampire wears one, he or she can walk in daylight without burning.\"\n\n\"Handy trick.\"\n\n\"Not much use to us here, though, unless Victor is willing to help.\"\n\n\"No. If I ever see that bastard again, I'll drive a stake through his heart.\"\n\n\"Tell me how you really feel.\"\n\n\"Anything else?\"\n\n\"Not really. You've met the Men of Anubis. You tell me.\"\n\n\"They have technological devices. A crook and flail from ancient Egypt. Used to belong to Osiris.\"\n\n\"The Egyptian god?\"\n\n\"Big, blue, and dangerous. I hope I never see him again either.\"\n\n\"Are you name-dropping to try and impress me?\"\n\n\"No, I really did fight Osiris. And I met King Tut and his bride.\"\n\n\"Now you are name-dropping.\"\n\n\"Maybe a little.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I like that you feel the need to impress me. The truth is that you impressed me by showing up here alive. You died in my arms, Jonathan. When I learned you were alive, I tried to find you. I had feelers out all over the place, but Victor lied to me, saying he couldn't locate you.\"\n\n\"I wanted to come see you, but it wasn't safe.\"\n\n\"Plus you already have a version of me. Speaking of her, where is she?\"\n\n\"Off with Thor somewhere, trying to recruit soldiers for the coming battle.\"\n\n\"With Thor?\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"You have the whole name-dropping thing going again. It's like a disease.\"\n\n\"It's a disease, all right,\" Esther said, finally speaking up. \"And I can't take anymore.\"\n\nShe popped away.\n\nIt bothered me that she was upset, but Kelly couldn't see her, and I knew Esther would be fine, so I shrugged and took a bite of pizza. The rich tomato sauce and toppings made my taste buds tingle. The cheese stretched and curled when it broke.\n\n\"This is good,\" I said and waved my hand in front of my mouth. \"Still hot.\"\n\n\"Man up.\"\n\nI filled her in about how I dispatched Khemet to the void, and about the vajra weapon I had stashed away in a Tulsa hotel room. I told her about Rayna and the dragon. And I tried to explain Esther.\n\n\"Is she here?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"She left a little while ago.\"\n\n\"Oh, we probably should have included her more. Why didn't she speak up?\"\n\n\"You have to understand about Esther,\" I said. \"The version of you I knew adored Esther. She remembers you that way.\"\n\n\"What about the version of me in Tulsa or off gallivanting with Thor?\"\n\n\"She likes Esther, but it's just not the same.\"\n\n\"Nothing ever is.\"\n\n\"Will you do me a favor and try to be nice to her?\"\n\n\"She's a friend of yours, Jonathan. That's enough for me. I promise to extend the hand of friendship to her. I might not feel about her the way my original time twin... triplet?... did, but I will give it my best effort.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" I said. \"And don't refer to my Kelly as the original time twin. The Kelly out with Thor is technically the first and she might be sensitive about that. I just didn't meet her until 1926.\"\n\n\"See, it's shit like this that messes with my mind. You were born in 1979, but you talk about meeting someone born a year earlier, more than fifty years before her birth. My birth. Our birth?\"\n\n\"I thought you were born the same year as me.\"\n\n\"A woman never tells. Maybe I was born five years after you. I look younger than you.\"\n\nI laughed. \"Trust me, I'm way older than you now.\"\n\n\"You always were, but you never act like it.\"\n\n\"That's because I'm a guy.\"\n\nShe nodded and grabbed another slice of pizza. \"You say that like it's a good thing.\"\n\n\"Because it is.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Dream on.\"\n\nI laughed, and a part of my mind made a note of it because I knew it might be the last time I'd be able to just sit back and enjoy a meal with a friend for a long time. While no day is ever promised to us, we always look to the future. But that moment, looking at the Kelly Chan I'd just met less than an hour earlier, I knew it was probably the last time I'd get to enjoy her company. She might die tomorrow. I might die. Hell, we both might die. But tonight we were very much alive, and I laughed and enjoyed getting to know my old friend for the first time.\n\nWe all have nights like that. We should treasure them because they're rare and wonderful, and we too often take them for granted, the same way I'd been taking Esther for granted. I wished she could be here to enjoy this dinner too.\n\nI hoped that wherever she was at that moment, that she was happier than she'd been while sitting here watching me talk to another Kelly. And while I did wonder about her as Kelly and I enjoyed our meal, I confess I didn't think about her enough. Once more, I simply expected that she would always be there.\n\nThat's the thing about friends. They're always there for you.\n\nUntil they're not.\n\n# CHAPTER THIRTEEN\n\nWe crashed for the night at a cheap hotel on Colfax. There were two beds, but it looked like the kind of place that rented by the hour. But hey, it was cheap, and they didn't have black lights so if the sheets were as spotty as my phone's internet connection, I couldn't tell. We didn't want to risk going back to Kelly's dojo/apartment, so we'd stopped at a Target store to get a few things: toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo, a change of clothes for each of us.\n\nEsther didn't come back. She had freedom to roam, and I knew she'd show up sooner or later. Maybe she'd gone to spend time with the other Kelly and Thor. I tried calling Kelly, but it went to voicemail.\n\n\"Which bed do you want?\" I asked.\n\n\"The one farthest from the door.\"\n\n\"Extra time to react if someone attacks?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Easier to ignore sounds in the hall.\"\n\n\"Thank you for agreeing to help.\"\n\nShe sat on the bed and stared at me. \"It feels so strange to see you. It's like I'm dreaming.\"\n\nShe was a lot nicer than the other Kelly. Of course, I wasn't the guy who killed her Jonathan, so that could have something to do with it. Either way, I felt much better about the odds of surviving the coming battle. I had two Kelly Chans on my side.\n\nKelly turned on the television, and a trailer for the new James Bond movie, Spectre was playing. \"I want to see that,\" I said.\n\n\"I want a date with Daniel Craig,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"Easier to see the movie. It starts tomorrow.\"\n\nKelly shook her head and started to say something, but the news came on. Local stuff, but nothing about my murder at the dojo. When they switched to weather, she turned off the TV.\n\n\"So no double-oh seven,\" I said.\n\n\"You and your movies,\" she said, and grinned.\n\n\"They give me something to live for,\" I said.\n\n\"That's sad.\"\n\n\"I don't know. There's going to be a real Star Wars movie next month with Harrison Ford and the whole gang. There hasn't been a real Star Wars movie since Return of the Jedi, and that was only good until those stupid teddy bears showed up.\"\n\n\"There's more to life than movies.\"\n\n\"Says you,\" I said, and thought again about Esther.\n\n\"Where are you living these days?\"\n\n\"Here and there. Since I got back in June, I've spent some time in New York City, Florida, Mexico, Tajikistan, and Tulsa. Had a quick jaunt to Venice, Italy. That was nice.\"\n\n\"But you haven't put down roots anywhere?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"Can't do that with the Men of Anubis out there.\"\n\n\"So what will you do once they're dispatched?\"\n\nI shrugged.\n\n\"Seriously, Jonathan.\"\n\n\"I haven't thought about it.\"\n\n\"You could always come back to Denver.\"\n\n\"There's nothing here for me. All my friends think I'm dead.\"\n\n\"I'm here.\"\n\nThe way she said it made me think of my Kelly. I'd fallen in love with her, then watched her die. I couldn't face that again. I needed to keep both versions of Kelly alive, but distant. Neither of them was my Kelly, though this one at least seemed to care about me.\n\nI wanted to respond, but I took too long to formulate an answer to that, so her words hung in the air. I should have grabbed them and told her that was reason enough to come back here, set up shop, live life, help the people of Colorado. But truth be told, I hadn't even paid much attention to the Star Wars trailers. After all, I didn't expect to be alive to see the movie.\n\nKelly got up and moved toward the restroom. \"I'm going to take a shower,\" she said.\n\nAnd I realized my lack of response had hurt her.\n\nWhy do we always hurt those we care about?\n\nI didn't want this to be any more uncomfortable than it already was, so I crawled into bed and tried to sleep. I was still awake when Kelly finished her shower and slipped into her bed. And I was still awake two hours later. Too many things raged in my thoughts. I was worried about Esther. I wasn't sure who we could trust.\n\nWhen I finally drifted off to sleep, my dreams were haunted by images of the Men of Anubis killing both versions of Kelly\u2014the time twins, as I'd started to think of them. I sat up in bed, awake, and glanced over through the darkness at Kelly sleeping in the other bed. I knew she wasn't sleeping, but she maintained a steady rhythmic breathing. As soon as I sat up, her senses had to be alerted. She just didn't want to talk to me. I rubbed my face.\n\nEventually, I went to sleep, and morning came far too soon.\n\n\"Rise and shine,\" Kelly said. \"Big day. Things to do, gods to kill.\"\n\n\"We won't kill them until the 17th.\"\n\n\"Why wait?\"\n\n\"So we can plan?\"\n\n\"Why the 17th?\"\n\n\"Because that's what Chronos said.\"\n\n\"Chronos is the guy you told me about last night who sent you back in time?\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"And he said the 17th... why?\"\n\n\"It was the last day he could see. His office goes to someone else that day.\"\n\n\"And you believe him?\"\n\n\"Shouldn't I?\"\n\n\"He wanted to cast you into the void.\"\n\n\"He wants to be free of the Men of Anubis too.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"After all the shit you've been through, you're still too trusting.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"You need to determine your own future. You decide the time, place, and date of the showdown. Not them. You have to make your own decisions if you want to live to see another day. When someone else makes your decisions for you, they're writing your story.\"\n\n\"We might not have a say in that.\"\n\n\"You'd damn well better try. I'm hungry. Let's eat.\"\n\nI rolled out of bed in my boxer briefs, and staggered to the dresser where the Target bag rested. I opened it and pulled out my fresh clothes. Kelly had already placed the toiletries on the sink in the bathroom. I considered just getting dressed, but gave my underarms a whiff. \"I need a shower first,\" I said.\n\n\"Knock yourself out.\"\n\nI yawned and stumbled into the bathroom to get cleaned up. While I showered, I gave some thought to our predicament. I thought about Gillian and the devices I'd taken from her. I needed to give those a thorough examination. What if they had trackers in them?\n\nI dried off, wrapped the towel around me, and brushed my teeth. Then I exited the bathroom trailed by a cloud of steam.\n\n\"Can you toss me my pants?\" I asked as I sorted through the new clothes from Target.\n\n\"The dirty ones?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"Yeah. I forgot to empty the pockets.\" I yanked open the package of underwear and dumped them on the bed.\n\nKelly found my pants on the floor, shook her head and threw them to me. I caught them with one hand and dropped them on the bed.\n\n\"I'm going to go over to Starbucks across the street,\" Kelly said. \"You want a cup of coffee?\"\n\n\"My usual,\" I said. \"Thanks.\"\n\nShe smiled because it was like old times. \"One venti caramel macchiato coming right up.\"\n\nIt really was like old times.\n\nWhen she left, I got dressed and transferred my billfold and keys from one pair of pants to the other. The new pants were cheap blue jeans, but at least they were clean. I had the earrings I'd taken from Gillian in separate pockets of my old pants so I'd know which was which. I removed them and went to the desk to examine them.\n\nThey were gold, though probably not real gold. Each had identical inset emerald jewels. One was a switch that moved up and down. I didn't mess with that one because I knew it would open a channel to the Men of Anubis. The other had a small button that depressed rather than moved. I didn't want to press it because I wasn't sure how it would work on me. I figured it would throw me back in the timeline by half an hour or so with full knowledge of what was going to happen so I could make changes, and it had to be partly technological because it worked on me. I certainly didn't want there to be two of me. I'd dealt with that before, and didn't want to play that game again.\n\nIt didn't seem prudent to test it. For all I knew it was a one-use item, though that seemed unlikely. The way the jewels were inset would go a long way toward preventing the accidental activation, but I still didn't want to risk keeping them in my pockets.\n\nKelly returned with our coffee.\n\n\"Here you go,\" she said and handed me my cup.\n\n\"And here you go,\" I said handing her the earrings. \"Don't say I never gave you anything.\"\n\nShe looked at them in the palm of her hand. \"These are ugly.\"\n\n\"They aren't that bad.\" I pointed to each in turn. \"This one opens a line to the Men of Anubis. And this one sends you back in time a bit.\"\n\n\"Define a bit.\"\n\n\"Thirty or forty minutes, I guess.\"\n\n\"So if I get that date with Daniel Craig, I can relive it?\"\n\n\"Or if we fuck up somewhere along the road, you can fix it.\"\n\nHer ears weren't pierced, but she didn't feel pain, so she just stabbed them through her earlobes as she said, \"I think I'd rather save it for Daniel.\"\n\n# CHAPTER FOURTEEN\n\nAs I drank the coffee, I checked my phone for the date: Friday, November 6, 2015. I tried calling the other Kelly and got her voicemail again.Not good.Esther was still M.I.A.Really not good.\n\nAfter breakfast, Kelly drove me out to Boulder. I worried about Esther, but I had to stay focused on recruiting helpers. One such helper, in spite of not being able to trust her\u2014or perhaps because I couldn't trust her\u2014was Sharon. I just needed to get her to see that it was in her best interest to help. She hated the Men of Anubis, too, after all.\n\nShe worked, as I expected, in the special collections department of the library at CU Boulder. Kelly had much better luck than I ever did with parking, so we got a spot not too far from the Norlin building. The tan walls and tiled floors looked exactly as I remembered, though it had been a lifetime since I'd seen them. It felt like a half-remembered dream from childhood. I'd been here, but it didn't seem quite right. Was I going down the correct hallway? Was this just like every campus library, or was I remembering the specifics? The placement of that magazine rack with those tables and that arrangement of shelves seemed exactly right, but that row of computers seemed wrong. Of course, for all I knew, I was remembering correctly, but the computers had been replaced. I hadn't been here in more than fifty years, but this was only a few years difference to the world at large.\n\nNobody tried to stop us as Kelly and I walked down the hall to Sharon's office, and fortunately, I guessed correctly on the first try on how to get there. I would have felt silly if I'd guessed wrong.\n\nSharon's door was open, and I saw her before she saw me. She looked kinder than I remembered, in spite of the intense look she had with her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a smart blue business suit, and glasses I knew she didn't require.\n\nI didn't bother to knock. Kelly and I just walked right in. Kelly took up a position at the door, which she closed as I sat in a chair across from Sharon's desk.\n\n\"You're looking well, Sharon,\" I said.\n\nShe looked over the top of her glasses at me. \"Do I know you?\"\n\n\"Don't play games. Time may change, but it changes around you, and I suspect you have memories of the way things used to be layered beneath the way things are right now.\"\n\nShe gave a derisive laugh. \"You should know better than to show up here, Jonathan.\"\n\n\"See, Kelly? She does remember me. For a second there, I was going to get one of my feelings hurt.\"\n\n\"If you want me to slit her throat, just give the word,\" Kelly said.\n\nOn the way over, I'd filled Kelly in on the way Sharon had betrayed us in another layer of time. Twice, actually. Once with Persephone, and once with Chronos and the Men of Anubis.\n\n\"You won't be able to get a blade through my skin,\" Sharon said.\n\n\"What makes you think I need a blade?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"Now, girls,\" I said, \"let's keep things civil.\"\n\nSharon removed her glasses and tossed them on the desk. \"Why are you here?\"\n\n\"I want to offer you a chance at redemption.\"\n\n\"Redemption?\" she asked.\n\n\"Oh, come on, Sharon. You've read a lot of books. It's a grand theme that runs through so many of them. Someone does something wrong and screws people over, but gets a chance to finally do the right thing to make up for their evil deeds, and save their soul at the end.\"\n\n\"Am I to presume that you think I've perpetrated evil deeds upon you?\"\n\n\"You did abandon me in my time of need at the Royal Gorge.\"\n\n\"You handled that just fine.\"\n\n\"You also tried to cast me into the void. Not exactly offering the hand of friendship if you know what I mean.\"\n\nShe smirked. \"Other than that, Mrs. Kennedy, how was the parade?\"\n\n\"It was delightful, actually. Nice little motorcade that left you in the grip of some clowns known as the Men of Anubis.\"\n\n\"You're the one on their naughty list.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but once I leave this building, I'm off their radar again, while you are still under their thumbs.\"\n\n\"What makes you think you'll be able to leave the building?\"\n\n\"I have a Sekutar warrior on my team, and it's in your best interest to help me defeat those time traveling fucktards.\"\n\n\"Such language.\"\n\n\"I figure if I use more respectable terminology, they might try to sue me, but I'm pretty safe calling them assholes and fucktards.\"\n\n\"I don't think they need lawyers, Jonathan. They have ancient weapons of power. They can just kill you.\"\n\n\"They have to catch me first.\"\n\n\"And by setting foot in here, they know where you are.\"\n\n\"All part of my plan. I just have to convince you to not take sides just yet. If I can do that, you can open a rift to another location, and Kelly and I can avoid having to kill anyone to leave the building.\"\n\n\"And if I refuse?\"\n\n\"Then Kelly gets the fun of killing some assholes.\"\n\n\"Starting with me?\"\n\n\"You're immortal, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Nearly.\"\n\n\"We're not here to try to kill you, Sharon. I'm not saying I wouldn't enjoy that, but I like the idea of you betraying me again and being a slave to the Men of Anubis for all eternity. Do you like buddying up on their dried-up old peckers?\"\n\n\"So you're really here to insult me.\"\n\nI laughed. \"Thought I'd take a few shots while I could,\" I admitted. \"But no. Here's the truth. I know you're on their team, but I also know that wasn't the case originally. And let's face it, if you don't like the taste they're leaving in your delicate little mouth, I'm your Obi Wan Kenobi.\"\n\n\"They're probably on their way here right now.\"\n\n\"Probably?\" I asked.\n\nShe shrugged.\n\nI smiled. \"You have warding spells all over this place, don't you?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Huh,\" I said. \"I didn't notice any of them.\"\n\n\"They're well hidden, and they wouldn't affect you anyway.\"\n\n\"Kelly got through.\"\n\n\"They aren't designed to keep anything out.\"\n\n\"You've got this place shielded from their view. Let me guess. You used a spell from the Forbidden Texts, which I suspect you have completely digitized by now.\"\n\n\"I got tired of going to the Stacks.\"\n\n\"So hook me up with a wee bit of information.\"\n\n\"After all your insults you're going to ask me for information?\"\n\nI nodded. \"Of course.\"\n\n\"It would be more fun to simply kill you.\"\n\n\"I know, but I think you enjoy the banter. And on top of that, I think you want to be your own woman or man or whatever you are.\"\n\n\"You don't have coins for payment.\" She meant special coins used to pay Charon for passage across the Acheron, or for other favors.\n\n\"As the information you provide could be your ticket to freedom, you should consider it an investment in your future.\"\n\nShe considered that right down to rubbing her chin thoughtfully. It was all an act, of course. I knew she was playing both sides of the fence. Giving me information wouldn't hurt her because the Men of Anubis would never know. Anything she'd provide would be from the Forbidden Texts, and as they would know she hadn't accessed the Stacks, she would be free from suspicion. And if I happened to win, she really would be free from them. I knew it and she knew it. To her credit, she didn't ponder for long.\n\n\"What do you need?\"\n\n\"First, I need to know the nature of their weapons. The crook is clearly capable of removing souls from bodies. I don't know about the flail.\"\n\n\"The flail is for punishment,\" Sharon said. \"A strike across the back leaves a wound that never heals. It causes intolerable agony, then fades until it feels normal, then the pain starts up again. You don't want to be struck by that.\"\n\n\"They work on me, so they're technological, right?\"\n\n\"They're a blend of magic and technology. Ancient technology from the men before the Egyptians.\"\n\n\"Before the Egyptians?\"\n\n\"The Egyptians inherited the pyramids, Jonathan. The Ancients left this plane of existence around 10,500 BCE. The pyramids weren't tombs. It was a source of power for their civilization. Most of the Ancients left, but a few remained behind. They spread out across the world trying to teach the other people of the world about civilization. The legends of the Viracocha we got from the Inca, the stories of Quetzalcoatl, Enki, Thoth, Vishnu, and on and on. Those were the last vestiges of the Ancients.\"\n\n\"So how do I beat these guys?\"\n\nShe laughed. \"You don't.\"\n\n\"I chucked one of them into the void. Can't I do the same with the other two?\"\n\n\"They have too much power. They can combine their energy using the sound of their voices in a hum that emanates from their bodies. As long as they can control the frequency of their voices and the level of humming, they can work their weapons together.\"\n\n\"And if I have an ancient weapon too?\"\n\n\"Which weapon?\"\n\n\"The vajra,\" I said. \"I got it from Indra.\"\n\nShe studied me for a moment. \"If anyone could use the vajra, it would be you. It's loaded with magic, but that won't bother you.\"\n\n\"So you think we have a chance?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Any advice?\"\n\n\"Run. You don't show up on their timeline, so they can't find you unless you do something stupid.\"\n\n\"Like trusting you?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Sharon said.\n\n\"I trust you to act in your own self-interest,\" I said. \"You gain nothing by sending them after me, but you can gain everything if I can defeat them.\"\n\n\"That's like expecting a teardrop to vanquish the sun.\"\n\n\"If they're that powerful, they won't need you to help them in the final battle.\"\n\n\"I'm not joining your ragtag little team.\"\n\n\"I didn't ask you to. Just let the Men of Anubis kill me themselves. That's all I'm asking of you.\"\n\n\"Other than the information.\"\n\n\"Yeah, other than that. Just don't lift a finger against us.\"\n\n\"I won't need to help them. They aren't likely to call me in to help anyway.\"\n\n\"They might. I beat Khemet. Is there anything else you can tell me about them?\"\n\n\"Nothing useful. I can tell you that Amenken is the father, and that Mahu and Khemet were his sons. I can tell you that they want you dead. And I can tell you that anyone you knew in your old life from Kelly here to that cop you used to associate with to those clowns with the remote viewing club are all being watched, so if you make contact, agents will try to kill you.\"\n\n\"Can I ask a question?\" Kelly said.\n\n\"You can ask,\" Sharon said. \"Doesn't mean I'll answer.\"\n\n\"If the Men of Anubis can move through time, why didn't they just kill Jonathan and my time twin when they first got back from 1929?\"\n\nSharon blinked and stared at Kelly. \"This is the second Kelly?\"\n\n\"Yes. The Kelly I was with when you tried to toss us into the void is working on adding a few more team members for the coming fight.\"\n\n\"Shit.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I thought she was the Kelly without ties to this time layer. The Men of Anubis can track this one.\"\n\n\"No worries. We already took out their agents.\"\n\n\"No, dumbass, they can trace her timeline backward and forward. They know you came here.\"\n\n\"Then why didn't they stop us?\"\n\n\"Maybe they're testing me.\"\n\n\"Or maybe they can't follow her because she's with me,\" I said.\n\n\"Regardless,\" Kelly said. \"If they can track other people, as soon as Jonathan made contact with his sister, Monica, a few months ago, they should have been there to kill him. They can't follow him, but if at any point in the future they learn he talked to her, they can track her. But they didn't.\"\n\n\"His direct path is hidden.\"\n\n\"But Monica's wasn't.\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\nKelly grinned. \"But it does suggest they're not as all-powerful as you make them out to be.\"\n\n\"They don't advertise their weaknesses,\" Sharon said.\n\n\"No, but I think we jst figured out two of them.\"\n\n\"Two?\" Sharon asked.\n\nKelly nodded. \"Once Jonathan makes contact with someone, they have to be off the radar, so to speak.\"\n\n\"Meaning?\"\n\n\"Meaning that if he goes somewhere, from the moment he makes contact, they can't do anything to them before then because the people he contacts are set in time. Otherwise, he couldn't have gone there. In my case, however, they already had agents watching me, so I wasn't set until he made contact. Now they can't mess with my past.\"\n\n\"Makes sense,\" I said. What I left unsaid because I didn't want Sharon to know was that if the agents had one of those damned earrings, they could knock back along their own timeline to kill me, but that only meant I appeared elsewhere like I had with Gillian. If I mentioned that, she might wonder about them, and I didn't want her to know that I had one of those devices.\n\n\"Makes sense to you,\" Sharon said. \"Not to me.\"\n\n\"Are you familiar with Photoshop?\" I asked.\n\n\"The computer program? Not really.\"\n\nI frowned. \"How about making a collage? You take pictures, place them where you want, and until you glue them down, you can make changes, but once you've pasted them in place, the picture is set.\"\n\n\"If you say so.\"\n\n\"What it means now is that as long as I'm with Jonathan,\" Kelly said, \"the Men of Anubis can't find me because the collage has been laminated.\"\n\n\"Possibly,\" Sharon said. \"You mentioned two weaknesses. What's the other?\"\n\n\"Emotions. The father is pissed about his son, and the other son is pissed about his brother. Emotions make people sloppy.\"\n\n\"True,\" Sharon said. \"But they also make people dangerous.\"\n\nI spotted a four-tiered clear plastic business card holder on Sharon's desk. I reached over, snagged one of her cards, and stuck it in my back pocket as I stood.\n\n\"Thanks for the info,\" I said. \"We'll be in touch.\"\n\n\"Not going to have me open a rift for you?\"\n\nI grinned. \"If your spell is as good as I think it is, and if we're right about those bastards not being able to track us if we're together, I don't have to trust you to open a rift. After all, you might try to dump me in the void again.\"\n\n\"Would I do a thing like that?\"\n\nI gave her a salute. \"Here's hoping I never see you again.\"\n\nShe gave me a nod. \"Right back at you,\" she said.\n\nKelly opened the door, and we slipped out of the office.\n\n\"She might call them,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"She might not.\"\n\n# CHAPTER FIFTEEN\n\nNo one attacked us when we left the library. No one attacked us on the way to Kelly's truck. And, you guessed it, no one attacked us when we left the campus.\n\nI pulled out my phone. The battery was at fifty percent. I'd need a charger eventually, but it was fine for now. I hopped online and got the number for The Steam Room, which Rayna Noble owned and operated. A moment later, I was on the line with their front desk attendant.\n\n\"Thank you for calling the Steam Room, where you can gain without pain.\"\n\n\"I thought it was 'no pain, still gain.' Is my memory shot?\" I asked.\n\n\"On the billboards and TV, but we prefer the alteration for answering the phone. What can I do for you, sir?\"\n\n\"I'd like to speak with Rayna Noble,\" I said.\n\n\"Concerning?\"\n\n\"Just tell her Jonathan needs to talk to her. We're old friends.\"\n\n\"I've heard that one before, sir.\"\n\nRayna was a beautiful woman with long dark hair and a perfectly sculpted body who appeared on their television ads, so I knew I needed a bit more to get past this guy.\n\n\"Tell her Jonathan needs to talk to her about Clara.\"\n\n\"Who's Clara?\"\n\n\"Rayna will know. Just tell her that. I'll hold.\"\n\nMusic played in my ear: Chuck Mangione's \"Feels So Good.\"\n\nKelly drove off the campus, took a few side streets through residential areas, barely made a red light at a busy intersection then pulled into a Safeway parking lot and drove around as if searching for a space even though there were spots open. She took another exit, turned left onto another side street.\n\nI was still on hold.\n\n\"No one's following us,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"Unless they put a tracker on your truck.\"\n\nKelly shook her head. \"Amanda cast a spell on my truck. Someone puts a foreign object on it, that object drops off. Means I don't need to go through a car wash very often.\"\n\n\"Must help with the bird shit, too.\"\n\n\"I hate birds,\" Kelly said. \"That's why I had her cast the spell.\"\n\nThe guy came on the line again. \"Ms. Noble is in a meeting right now, sir. She said to call her back in fifteen minutes. I'll put you right through to her then.\"\n\n\"Sounds good,\" I said. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Have a nice day, and don't forget to let off a little steam.\"\n\n\"Had to work in that last little bit, eh?\"\n\n\"Company policy, sir.\"\n\n\"Of course it is. Thanks.\" I hung up. \"I'll call her back in a few minutes. For now, let's get over there so we can meet up with her.\" I gave Kelly the address for the spa.\n\nWe found a spot behind the spa. Kelly parked by a Dumpster. I remembered fighting members of the Marshall Clan on the roof and around the building. There used to be a stack of pallets against the wall, but today that was not the case. I stared at the roll-up metal door that led to their receiving area. The door was closed. Nobody else was in the alley behind the building.\n\n\"I think I saw something on the news about this place a few years ago. The family who owned this business was murdered. Or am I thinking of another place?\"\n\n\"Same place. In my reality, we saved Rayna.\"\n\n\"So her counterpart died here?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"So how did she explain coming back?\"\n\n\"No clue,\" I said. \"Want me to ask her?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't care. I was just curious.\"\n\n\"Has it been fifteen minutes?\" I asked.\n\n\"I'm not your timekeeper.\"\n\n\"Close enough,\" I said and pressed the number to call again.\n\n\"Thank you for calling the Steam Room where you can gain without pain.\"\n\n\"Jonathan calling back for Rayna as per instructions.\"\n\n\"Please hold.\"\n\nThis time the music selection was \"Rise\" by Herb Alpert.\n\nRayna answered thirty seconds later. \"Hello, Jonathan, I always thought I'd hear from you again.\"\n\n\"I didn't know you were a seventies jazz fan.\"\n\n\"Sorry?\"\n\n\"The hold music,\" I said.\n\n\"That's from a service. I don't choose it. If I were choosing the music, you'd be hearing Celine Dion, Lady Gaga, and Katy Perry.\"\n\n\"Because you kissed a girl and you liked it?\" I asked.\n\n\"I've got another business meeting in ten minutes. I'm not as enamored with your cute little lines these days. What do you want?\"\n\n\"For starters, I need to warn you that the Men of Anubis probably have agents watching you.\"\n\n\"Tell me something I don't know. I spotted three of them with ease. One is a regular customer, one is the assistant of one of the corporate types who does his workouts here, and the third is one of my employees. There may be others, but I doubt it. I'm not worth their time. What else?\"\n\n\"Right to the point,\" I said. \"You're still mad.\"\n\n\"I was never angry with you. I was hurt. There's a difference. Now I just don't care. You're running low on time because I need a few minutes to pull up a file before this meeting.\"\n\n\"Okay. I was wondering if I could borrow Clara for a few days.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because you might get her killed. Please don't ever call me again.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Goodbye, Jonathan,\" she said and hung up.\n\nI sighed. \"That went well.\"\n\nKelly shook her head. She held up her own phone and showed me an archived article from the Denver Post website with a click-bait headline: Millionaire Heiress Returns from the Dead.\n\n\"Says here she claimed to be in Europe when her family was slain, and she's now the sole owner of Noble Enterprises after taking over from her cousin, who was on the verge of selling the company. Details of how she took over the company aren't here, but she's worth millions. You should have married her.\"\n\n\"Woulda coulda shoulda,\" I said. \"She won't let us borrow Clara.\"\n\n\"So what do you suggest?\"\n\nI grinned and raised an eyebrow. \"How do you feel about stealing a dragon?\"\n\n# CHAPTER SIXTEEN\n\nThe Steam Room closed at 9:00. We wandered through a hardware store and I picked up a few items that would work as makeshift lock picks. I got a variety of sizes because I wasn't sure what I'd need.\n\n\"Why don't you just get a power drill?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"I don't want to leave a trace.\"\n\n\"Because your ex won't suspect you of stealing her dragon if you don't drill through her lock?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"This way is cheaper. And she won't have to replace her lock.\"\n\n\"So you're saving her a few bucks when she's a millionaire. How nice.\"\n\n\"I just want to do it this way, okay?\"\n\n\"You've been practicing your lock picking skills and you want to show off,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\n\"Whatever,\" she said. \"I'm just along for the ride.\"\n\nWe hit the drive through at Burger King to get some cheap food. Kelly and I ate our hamburgers and watched The Steam Room from across the street in a grocery store parking lot as the last employee closed up the spa and locked the doors at 10:37. By 11:05, we had crossed the street on foot and returned to the back alley.\n\n\"Are you sure you want to do this?\" Kelly whispered.\n\n\"We need a nice surprise for the Men of Anubis,\" I said. \"Something they won't expect.\"\n\n\"Nobody would expect a dragon,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"Or the Spanish Inquisition.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes. She'd gone on and on about the dragon over dinner and in the truck while we waited, so I was tired of talking about it. She couldn't wrap her head around the concept of a real live dragon. Gods from ancient Egypt were no problem, but a giant fire-breathing reptile was just going too far.\n\nWe stuck to the shadows, and tried to be quiet as we approached the rolling delivery door at the back of the spa.\n\nI went to work on the lock box beside the door. It took longer than it should have, but I wasn't a professional. She was right, though. I had been studying. Just not on this type of lock. It clicked, and I unlocked the door. \"You want to do the honors?\"\n\n\"This whole thing is your stupid idea. Why should I be the one who has to break and enter?\"\n\n\"Stealing is okay, but breaking and entering is beneath you?\"\n\n\"All of this is beneath me. Your ex-girlfriend will never forgive you for stealing her dragon.\"\n\n\"She's never going to forgive me for being an asshole either.\"\n\nI slowly lifted the door.\n\nNo alarms.\n\nGood.\n\nKelly and I slid inside. I used the flashlight on my phone to get the quick layout of the room.\n\nI'd been in The Steam Room many times, so I knew my way around. We were in the receiving area, and several workout machines stood along one wall. Four pallets of boxes sat along another wall. I swept the light over them, then aimed at the massive metal doors in the floor.\n\n\"Clara is down there,\" I said, keeping my voice low.\n\n\"What are the odds the dragon remembers you?\"\n\n\"It's from another dimension, so the odds are pretty good. Time will have shifted around her, but as the dragon wasn't born in our dimension, we should be okay.\"\n\n\"And if you're wrong?\"\n\n\"Then when we go down there, we'll be flame-broiled, like our dinner was. Dragons like their meals either raw or extra crispy.\"\n\n\"In that case, before we go down there, I should ask how long it takes to stoke its fire.\"\n\n\"I think it keeps it stoked, actually.\"\n\n\"So we won't have much warning?\"\n\n\"If it reels back and opens its mouth, we'll have maybe two seconds to know we're about to be cooked.\"\n\n\"I should go back to my truck for my sword.\"\n\n\"A sword won't do you any good. Don't worry. She'll remember me.\"\n\n\"So now it's a she? You've been saying 'it' up until now.\"\n\n\"The great Kelly Chan is nervous?\"\n\nShe glared at me. \"I don't fancy throwing my life away, but I'm not nervous. What are its weaknesses?\"\n\n\"It's a dragon,\" I said. \"It doesn't have weaknesses.\"\n\n\"And it's an it again.\"\n\n\"She,\" I said. \"Tell you what. You wait up here. I'll go down and talk to her. Get her warmed up, so to speak.\"\n\n\"How are we going to get her out of here?\"\n\n\"We'll ride her, of course.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nI crouched, dug my fingers between the large metal doors and lifted. The doors didn't budge.\n\n\"They must be electronic,\" I said. I moved the flashlight over the walls by the receiving desk. A switch box with two buttons was attached to the side of the desk. One button was green, the other red. I hoped it didn't require a key. \"Press the green button.\"\n\nKelly moved to the desk and pressed the button. We were in luck. The hydraulics kicked in and the doors opened up and out. I moved around to the front. A metal ladder led down into a basement. The sound of approaching footsteps in the darkness made me turn the flashlight downward.\n\n\"Hi, Clara,\" I said. \"Remember me?\"\n\nThe dragon's gold, green, and brown scales glittered in the light, and her golden eyes gazed up at me. She was bigger than I remembered, and when I'd seen her she was a good twenty feet tall. She rose onto her hind legs and sniffed the air.\n\nShe chuffed at me. Her breath was hot and smelled like roasted pork.\n\n\"It's good to see you, too,\" I said. \"How would you like to fly to Tulsa and burn up some bad guys?\"\n\nKelly tentatively moved over to look down at the dragon. \"Holy shit. It's real. Nice dragon,\" she said.\n\nClara's eyes shifted to look at Kelly. Again, she chuffed and Kelly's hair blew back a bit in the hot breeze.\n\nThe dragon was loose in the basement. While I couldn't see it from up top, I knew there was a huge swimming pool with an open shaft in the ceiling above it. Clara breathed fire on the water, turning it to steam, and evidently, there were chemicals in her fire that drifted up with that mist and eased the lactic acid in people's muscles. So the whole \"No pain, still gain,\" slogan was accurate.\n\n\"Come on up here, Clara,\" I said and stepped aside to make room.\n\nHer leg muscles bunched and she folded her wings down on her back. She jumped out of the basement. The bay doors stood open, and she tossed a look at me then padded outside, holding her tail off the ground as she went. She didn't swish the tail, so I followed her. Kelly walked behind me.\n\n\"I think she remembers me,\" I said.\n\n\"How nice for you.\"\n\n\"And you thought stealing a dragon would be difficult.\"\n\nWhen I stepped outside, Clara stood with her head low. A shadowy figure stroked her under the chin. The figure stepped away from the dragon into a soft pool of light. She had long dark hair, and an athletic body clad in tight sports bra and yoga pants.\n\n\"No means no, Jonathan,\" Rayna said. She glanced over at Kelly. \"Imagine that, his pet Sekutar crime companion extraordinaire taking orders without question again.\"\n\n\"Rayna, we need Clara for this. We have a chance to stop the Men of Anubis once and for all.\"\n\n\"Do it without my dragon.\"\n\n\"She wanted to come outside,\" I said.\n\n\"This is the time I normally take her out to relieve herself.\"\n\nAnd on that note, the dragon squatted and released a thick stream of steaming yellow fluid on the pavement. It smelled like rotten eggs.\n\nKelly and I retreated to avoid the splash back.\n\n\"See?\" Rayna said.\n\n\"Ask Clara what she wants,\" I said.\n\n\"Don't be stupid.\"\n\n\"You keep her locked up in the basement. She's little more than a slave to make you money. So rather than you forbidding me to borrow her, ask her if she wants to go on a fun adventure.\"\n\n\"Fun? You'll get her killed.\"\n\nClara chuffed, and lowered her head to my level. She nudged me with her nose, and blew out a soft breath. The wind was warm, but it was also gentle.\n\nI patted her on the snout. \"Clara,\" I said. \"I think you can understand what we're saying.\"\n\n\"She's just an animal,\" Rayna said. \"I love her, and I don't want to see her get hurt.\"\n\nClara swung her head around to Rayna and chuffed. Rayna put her arms around the dragon's neck as far as she could. Clara pulled away from her and looked at me again. She raised her head slightly.\n\n\"Can you understand me?\"\n\nClara nodded.\n\n\"Did you feel time change around you?\"\n\nShe just stared at me.\n\n\"Okay, maybe you don't understand the concept of time. How about this? Do you understand the idea of good people and bad people? People who treat others well are good. People who cause pain and hurt others are bad. Do you understand that?\"\n\nClara chuffed, only it sounded like laughter.\n\n\"There are some very bad men who need to be stopped. We can really use your help to stop them. Would you like to help?\"\n\nClara lowered her head and moved close to me. Her eyes gazed deeply into mine and I saw a deep intelligence in her. Granted, we all want to believe such things, and we'll anthropomorphize pets and animals, but when her head bumped gently against mine, a thought burst into my head.\n\nYou are Jonathan.\n\n\"And you are Clara,\" I said.\n\nThat's right.\n\n\"What are you saying?\" Kelly asked.\n\nRayna frowned. \"Clara is communicating with him.\"\n\nI felt the disruption, Clara told me. It has happened many times.\n\n\"The Men of Anubis are doing that. We can stop them.\"\n\nI will help you.\n\nI smiled and stroked her chin. \"Thank you.\"\n\nYou must give me three gifts.\n\n\"What kind of gifts?\"\n\nYou must let me fly. You must let me breathe my fire. You must keep Rayna out of harm's way. She will insist on going with us. You must not allow that. I do not wish to see her hurt.\n\n\"You've got yourself a deal, Clara.\"\n\n\"What did she say?\" Rayna asked.\n\n\"She agreed to help,\" I said. \"She wants to fly, to breathe fire, and she doesn't want you to come along.\"\n\n\"You're not taking her.\"\n\n\"It's her decision, Rayna.\"\n\n\"If she goes, I go.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"She doesn't want you to go.\"\n\nClara moved her head over to Rayna.\n\n\"No, Clara,\" Rayna said.\n\nShe was silent for a moment then nodded.\n\n\"I understand.\" More silence. \"I will abide by your wishes.\"\n\nClara rubbed against Rayna for a moment, pushing her back a step. Then the dragon rose up and stretched her wings.\n\nRayna walked over to me and glared. \"If anything happens to Clara, I'll kill you.\"\n\n\"If something happens to Clara, you won't have to kill me because I'll already be dead.\"\n\n\"I don't ever want to see you again,\" Rayna said. \"Get the hell out of here.\"\n\n# CHAPTER SEVENTEEN\n\nWhat's cooler than flying a dragon from Boulder to Denver? Flying a dragon from Boulder to Tulsa.\n\nBut I'm getting ahead of myself. Before we climbed aboard the Dragon Express, I placed a quick call to Kelly. The Kelly with Thor, that is, not the one scratching Clara behind the ears. This time it didn't go to voicemail and she answered on the second ring.\n\n\"Where are you?\" she asked.\n\n\"Boulder.\"\n\n\"What the hell are you doing in Colorado?\"\n\n\"Smoking weed, of course. It's legal here.\"\n\n\"You don't smoke.\"\n\n\"We're on our way back.\"\n\n\"We could have used Esther's help earlier.\"\n\n\"Esther isn't with you?\" I asked.\n\n\"I thought she was with you.\"\n\n\"She was, but yesterday she popped away, and I haven't seen her since then.\"\n\n\"We were in Asgard for part of the day, so there was no way she could have found us.\"\n\n\"Did you recruit anyone?\"\n\n\"This is where I get to tell you I told you so. Loki refused to help. Odin refused to help. A couple of warrior women were pissed because I was with Thor, and evidently the son of a bitch is still married to Sif, so it was a wasted trip.\"\n\n\"On a positive note, I got us a dragon, and your time twin.\"\n\n\"But you lost Esther.\"\n\n\"I didn't lose her,\" I said. \"She popped away. Maybe she's waiting at the hotel.\"\n\n\"That's where I am now. Thor is in the bar trying to pick up a waitress. Somehow, I don't think the fact that he's still married will come up in the conversation.\"\n\n\"I thought you didn't like him.\"\n\n\"He almost started to grow on me a bit when we fought a couple of giants, but that feeling faded fast when we got to Asgard.\"\n\n\"Okay. We have some more info about the Men of Anubis,\" I said, and filled her in about their weapons and shared what I'd learned at the meeting with Dr. Ancho.\n\n\"He mentioned the Center of the Universe?\"\n\n\"I think he was talking figuratively.\"\n\n\"No he wasn't. There's a place here in Tulsa called the Center of the Universe. It's an acoustically arranged area on a sidewalk near downtown where you can stand inside a circle and speak. It acts like a microphone and the sound is echoed back at you louder.\"\n\n\"Sounds like as good a place as any to die. Can you and Thor go check it out? That may be where we can face the Men of Anubis.\"\n\n\"We'll look into it. When will you be here?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Depends on the airspeed capabilities of an inter-dimensional dragon that didn't come from Africa or Europe.\"\n\nClara's route to Tulsa wasn't quite a straight line, and her speed varied from forty to fifty miles per hour. She stopped to eat a few sheep on a farm. All in all, the trip took fifteen hours and change. You'd think riding a dragon would be cool, and it is in both senses of the word. In fact, it was downright cold. I liked feeling the rhythmic flexing of the wings beneath me. Kelly and I held tight at first, but as the journey continued, we relaxed, and Clara made adjustments to try and keep us as comfortable as possible.\n\nThe most impressive parts for me were in the country beyond the city lights at night. The Milky Way spread out above us, and a dark ocean of grass and rock invisible beneath us. It was like flying in a dream. I'd never seen so many stars.\n\nI knew we were heading to a showdown that would likely cost me my life, so I appreciated the view that much more. I'd lived enough for two lifetimes, and I'd faced things few people would even believe. I'd known good times and bad, love and danger, despair and grief. But overall, I had to say I didn't have many complaints. I wish I'd been nicer to some people. I wish I'd taken the time to get to know others better. I wish I'd been smarter about how I went about things. Life can change on a dime, and you have to be ready to adjust to those changes.\n\nOne minute, things are fine. The next, the country is at war in a foreign land. One moment, you're driving along an open highway, the next someone falls asleep at the wheel and crosses the center line and you can't react in time to stop the head-on collision. One day your friends are all living their lives, the next someone is dead and you have an empty space that can never be filled.\n\nWe all face those changes. We all react differently to them. Some people curl up and try to hide from life. Others face it straight on and ready for battle. Others just roll with the tide and see where things carry them. Most of us do a little of everything. Some days, we're ready for the challenge, and others we just want to stay in bed, and still others we face with a sense of ennui.\n\nFifteen hours on the back of a dragon leaves you time to think. It wasn't easy to talk to Kelly because of the wind noise, so we tried to simply enjoy the ride, each lost in thought. I don't know what she thought about me. I wondered if she liked me. How did I compare to the Jonathan she'd known? I know I was more jaded because I'd seen so much more. I know I was less idealistic. And I also know that I was in a place where I didn't really care if I survived the coming fight. I'd been fighting for so long, and I was tired. I was ready and willing to lay down my life to save my friends. And part of me hoped it would come to that. As long as I could stop the Men of Anubis, and my friends were safe, I'd call it a win.\n\nIf anyone died in the coming battle, I would never forgive myself. All of it came back to one decision. I'd been sent back in time to kill a man named Henry Winslow, and because I no longer trusted the powers that be that sent me after him, I decided to talk to him and find out who he was and why he was doing what he was doing. I didn't trust him, but I didn't trust Chronos or Sharon either. I'd been betrayed by Sharon. I expected her to betray me again now. I fully expected Chronos to betray me, too. It wasn't in his best interest, but people get caught up in the way things are, and it's hard to make big changes.\n\nIf I'd followed directions, the Men of Anubis wouldn't exist. If I'd followed directions again in 1877, my Kelly would still be alive. And I would have faced the events in 1926 in a much different manner.\n\nOf course, if I'd trusted Sharon and Chronos, I'd be floating in a timeless void right now, so there's that.\n\nBut maybe that's what I deserved.\n\n\"Buildings,\" Kelly said, pointing.\n\nWe'd just flown over a lake, and could see the houses and shops spreading out to the sides of the Cimmaron Turnpike below us. \"I think that's Sand Springs,\" I said. \"We're coming up on Tulsa.\"\n\nAnd that meant we needed a good place to keep a dragon until it was time to face the Men of Anubis. Where do you keep a dragon in a city? The answer, of course, is anywhere it wants to stay.\n\n# CHAPTER EIGHTEEN\n\nWe arrived in Tulsa around one in the afternoon on Saturday. Clara landed gently on the roof of our hotel. Kelly and I slid down her side and stretched. We each stroked Clara's face and chin, thanking her. I wondered if anyone reported a dragon to the Tulsa Police Department, and if so, how long it took for the dispatcher to stop laughing. Yeah, I know, dispatchers are more professional than that, but don't go shattering my daydreams.\n\n\"I need some sleep,\" I said. \"Clara, feel free to go get some food, water, whatever in the countryside around the lake we passed earlier, but if you can be back here by nightfall, that would be great.\"\n\nClara gave me a nod and launched into the air, flapping her mighty wings. She wheeled around and pushed higher into the sky heading west.\n\n\"I don't need to sleep,\" Kelly said, \"but I wouldn't mind resting a bit.\"\n\n\"We'll meet up with the other Kelly and Thor first, then we can rest. But we do need to plan. My first stop, however, is my room because I need to piss like a Russian racehorse.\"\n\n\"As opposed to a shire?\"\n\n\"Shire horses are for hobbits,\" I said.\n\nKelly rolled her eyes and shook her head. \"In some ways you aren't any different from my Jonathan.\"\n\nI liked the sound of my Jonathan. \"That's a good thing. Right?\"\n\n\"I haven't decided.\"\n\n***\n\nWe met up with the other Kelly and Thor in the hotel bar. I was a little surprised he was still there since Kelly wasn't sleeping with him, but I wasn't going to complain about it. In the early afternoon, the bar itself wasn't open for business, but we could still seat ourselves around a table to talk. We stepped into the slightly darkened room. Thor sat with the other Kelly toward the back of the place. She had a plastic bottle of water in front of her on the table.\n\nThor did a double take when we stepped in. He slowly grinned and raised a single eyebrow. \"Time for a T-god sandwich tonight,\" he said.\"Write that down.\"\n\n\"Kelly Chan,\" I said, \"meet Kelly Chan.\"\n\nThey wore nearly identical black pants, boots, and shirts. They studied one another for a moment, then nodded.\n\n\"Let me clean off a place for you to sit down,\" Thor said as he ran a hand over his mustache and beard.\n\n\"I don't swing that way,\" I said and sat beside him so he wouldn't hit on my newest Kelly.\n\n\"I almost called you once,\" Kelly said to the new arrival.\n\n\"This is too much like looking in a mirror,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"Tell me about it.\"\n\n\"Your hair is a little different.\"\n\n\"I think you're both gorgeous,\" Thor said, \"and I think we should plan a wild and crazy adventure in my bed tonight.\"\n\nBoth Kelly Chans looked at him. \"No,\" they said in unison. I realized I needed to think about them as Kelly One and Kelly Two. Kelly One was the Kelly I'd been with since coming back from the twenties, and Kelly Two was the Kelly I'd just met.\n\nI shook my head. \"Still no sign of Esther?\" I asked.\n\n\"No,\" Kelly said. \"She does like to wander sometimes.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but she normally checks in.\"\n\n\"She's a ghost. It's not like she can be killed.\"\n\n\"I know, but I'm still worried about her,\" I said. \"I wish we had a way to contact her.\"\n\n\"I'm sure she's fine,\" Kelly said. \"Now, how are we going to handle the Men of Anubis?\"\n\n\"Did you check out the Center of the Universe?\"\n\n\"It's just a small area on a walkway not far from here.\" She pulled out her cell phone and showed me a couple of pictures. \"The sidewalk expands outward, and there's a concrete circle in the middle of a bigger brick circle. If you stand in the main circle and talk, the sound is a bit distorted to those outside it. If you're inside the circle, and you speak, your voice echoes back at you. Aside from giving us a bit of room to fight, it's not really suited for our purposes.\"\n\n\"I was hoping it would be a magical sound barrier, but it will have to do.\"\n\n\"How are you going to make that work?\"\n\n\"I could call my friend Amanda,\" Kelly Two said. \"She's a witch, and she could magically enhance the circle to block sound.\"\n\n\"Can she open a rift to get here quickly?\" I asked.\n\n\"No. She'd have to catch a plane unless one of the wizards at DGI could help her.\"\n\n\"I don't trust anyone who works for DGI,\" I said.\n\n\"Your sister works for them.\"\n\n\"As I said, I don't trust anyone who works for DGI.\"\n\n\"So what do you suggest?\"\n\n\"We'll find a way to keep one of the Men of Anubis in the circle so they can't communicate as well and if they try casting a verbal spell, it will bounce back at them. Then we'll kill them or have Chronos open a rift to the void and we'll cast them into it.\"\n\n\"Do they cast verbal spells?\" Thor asked.\n\n\"Sort of. They have a humming power with their voices and their weapons, but I don't know if we can alter the frequency enough to matter,\" I said. \"But what choice do we have?\"\n\n\"That's not much of a plan,\" Kelly One said. \"I thought you said these guys control time.\"\n\n\"To a degree, but they can't go over the places they've been, so I think we can do it.\"\n\n\"And if we can't?\" she asked.\n\n\"Then we die.\"\n\n\"Then you die,\" Thor said. \"Should things not go the way we like, I'll simply leave. I don't fancy being trapped in the void for all eternity.\"\n\n\"So you're a fair weather fighter?\" Kelly Two asked.\n\n\"I'll show you some fair weather.\"\n\n\"You show me anything, I'll cut it off,\" Kelly Two said.\n\n\"I like the way you think,\" Kelly One said.\n\n\"All I know is that I'm with Jonathan,\" Kelly Two said, and put a hand on my arm.\n\nKelly One stared at the touch for a moment, then turned to Thor. \"Can you go fetch Chronos?\"\n\n\"Now?\"\n\n\"Not right now,\" I said. \"I need some sleep.\"\n\n\"We'll need to coordinate with him.\"\n\nEsther popped into sight above the table. She was semi-translucent, and therefore visible to all of us.\n\n\"Esther!\" I said. \"Where have you been?\"\n\nShe pointed at a collar around her neck. It was a brown leather strip with glowing hieroglyphs. My stomach flipped.They'd gotten to her and it was my fault for making her feel unwelcome, for letting her go.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Jonathan,\" she said. \"They're going to bump me off if you don't bring them the vajra weapon and turn it over to them without a fight.\"\n\n\"They can't kill you,\" I said. \"You're already dead.\"\n\n\"Don't be a sap. This collar will destroy me.\"The lights on the collar flared brighter and Esther winced in pain.\n\nKelly Two reached out and tried to touch Esther, but her hand went right through her.\n\n\"The collar is a blend of magic and technology, isn't it?\" I asked.\n\nShe nodded. \"I'm scared, but don't give in to them.\"\n\n\"Tell them we'll meet them on the pedestrian bridge between West Archer Street and North Boston Avenue,\" Kelly One said.\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Just tell them.\"\n\n\"We're on our way,\" I said. \"We're not going to let them hurt you.\"\n\n\"Too late,\" Esther said and popped away.\n\n\"So much for advance planning,\" Kelly One said. \"Where's the dragon?\"\n\n\"Clara flew off to get something to eat.\"\n\n\"So we go as soon as the dragon returns,\" Kelly One said.\n\n\"They'll destroy Esther,\" I said. I couldn't let that happen. I considered all that Esther had done for me. She deserved better.\n\n\"If we go now, they'll kill us all.\"\n\n\"If they wanted to kill you all, you'd be dead already,\" Thor said. \"They sent the ghost here, so they clearly know where you are. I wonder why they didn't just show up here to kill you. They'd have surprise on their side.\"\n\n\"They don't know where we are,\" I said. \"Esther can teleport directly to me no matter where I am, and that's why they're using her.\"\n\n\"We need the dragon,\" Kelly One said. \"It can burn them up from a distance, right? Magic fire? Maybe you could hold one of them while the dragon flames them, and the fire wouldn't harm you.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"Clara's fire isn't magical. I'd be burned alive. And even if I didn't die from that, the air around me would be heated up, and that would burn my lungs or keep me from breathing, so I doubt that's the issue. We're wasting time. I'll get the weapon, and I'll meet you in the lobby.\"\n\n\"I'll check the roof,\" Kelly Two said, \"on the off-chance Clara is already back.\"\n\n\"Cool.\"\n\nAs she stood, the light from the lobby reflected off her earrings, and I realized that maybe, the Men of Anubis had been tracking us. I didn't say anything about it because Kelly and Thor would tell me what a moron I was for keeping the jewelry. But I'd examined them and didn't find any kind of tracker. It didn't matter now. We had a mission, and by god, I was going to destroy those sons of bitches or die trying.\n\n\"Well,\" Kelly One said, \"at least we'll have honorable deaths.\"\n\n\"I believe I'll head to Club Eternity for a drink first,\" Thor said.\n\n\"Backing out on us?\"\n\nHe laughed. \"No. I'm going to fetch Chronos. I'll see you at the Center of the Universe.\" He twisted his bracelet and disappeared.\n\nWhen I returned to the lobby with the vajra, Kelly Two gave me a smile. \"Clara is back, so let's go kill us some gods.\"\n\n# CHAPTER NINETEEN\n\nThe Center of the Universe didn't impress me.\n\nIt was just a pedestrian bridge stretching over some railroad tracks. Off to one side, was a parking garage, and to the other were the buildings of downtown Tulsa. The BOK tower stood tall \u2013 well, comparatively speaking. It wasn't really a skyscraper. After spending some time in Manhattan, it was harder to be impressed.\n\nI carried the vajra weapon in my left hand. I had my Glock in my shoulder holster. The weather was warm, so I wore a light jacket simply to conceal the gun. I knew the gun was useless against the Men of Anubis, but I brought it along anyway. If I got chucked into the void, I could blow my brains out and end my suffering right then and there. I hoped it wouldn't come to that.\n\nThe sidewalk led to the central area where the walkway fanned out to knee-high planters that circled around the expanse. In the center was a concrete circle surrounded by a bricked circle. The planters were filled with bushes, flowers, and a few small trees. According to the internet, some folks claimed the echoing microphone effect of the Center of the Universe was caused by the sound waves bouncing back from those raised walls.\n\nI moved to the center of the concrete and said, \"Welcome to the show.\"\n\nMy voice came back at me amplified.\n\nKelly One and Two kept their distance. They each had swords tucked behind their backs, and they looked to be ready for action. Clara circled high overhead\n\nA soft wind gusted, rippling through my jacket and messing up my hair. I took a deep breath. A mother and her eight-year-old daughter wandered along the sidewalk. I stepped out of the circle so the kid could have a go at it. She whooped and hollered and laughed as her voice bounced back.\n\n\"Don't get carried away, Meghan,\" her mother said. \"There are other people here.\"\n\n\"It's all good,\" I said. \"Let her yell. She's having fun.\"\n\nShe smiled and nodded, but took her daughter's hand. \"We mustn't be late. Your father is waiting.\"\n\n\"But Mom,\" Meghan said.\n\n\"Don't 'but Mom' me,\" she said and dragged her along the sidewalk.\n\nI turned to Kelly Two. \"Call them, I said. \"Let's get this over with.\"\n\nWe'd discussed this on the way over, so she touched the earring and opened a channel. \"Olly olly oxen free,\" she said. Then she took the earring out, dropped it on the ground and stomped on it.\n\nThe wind gusted again. Traffic noise sounded in the distance.\n\n\"Jonathan,\" Kelly One said.\n\nI glanced over at her and she nodded toward the parking garage.\n\nTwo shirtless men in kilts stood on the edge of the roof of the garage. They wore jackal masks. Esther floated above them, unmoving. One of the men carried a crook, the other a flail. Both looked like they could have battled Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Conan movie.\n\nThey stepped off the building in unison and walked across the air down to where we waited, but they remained positioned in the air and out of reach.\n\nOne of the men said something, but it sounded like gibberish.\n\n\"A gerbil says what?\" I said.\n\nThe man touched the side of his jackal mask, nodded, then spoke again, this time in English. \"I am Amenken.\"\n\n\"Good for you,\" I said.\n\n\"This is my son, Mahu.\"\n\n\"Gesundheit,\" I said. \"Come on down here and take what you've got coming.\"\n\n\"Hand over the vajra weapon, and we shall release your ghost friend.\"\n\nI smiled at him, and adjusted my grip on the weapon. It hummed in my hand, spikes out, ready for deployment. \"What happens then?\" I asked.\n\nAmenken turned his jackal mask toward the two Kelly Chans. He pointed toward Kelly Two. \"I believe those belong to us,\" he said and made a come hither motion with his fingers. The time loop earrings popped out of Kelly's earlobes and shot through the air to Amenken's hand. \"Time is our domain, not yours.\"\n\n\"Can't blame a girl for trying,\" Kelly Two said.\n\n\"We do not blame you. In fact, we will allow you to leave here alive and return to your life.\"\n\n\"What about them?\" Kelly Two asked nodding to Kelly and then to me.\n\n\"They will come with us because they do not belong here.\"\n\n\"You tried to kill me once,\" I said.\n\nThe sound of dragon wings flapping drifted downward, but the Men of Anubis glanced up and saw nothing because she was above the clouds. They might have taken our chance for a do-over with the time loop earring, but we still had a dragon.\n\n\"We are impressed that you survived, Jonathan Shade. Your name is writ large in the Halls of Amenti.\"\n\n\"Does it say, 'For a good time call'?\"\n\nHead tilt from Amenken. \"I do not understand why you jest.\"\n\n\"Of course you don't. Are you cowards going to come down here and fight or are you only here to taunt us?\"\n\n\"We should kill him now, father,\" Mahu said.\n\n\"I want the vajra, and I want him to kneel before us.\"\n\nI grinned. \"Mahu. Sounds like a variety of fish to me. Let me clue you in on something, you ignorant piece of camel shit. You guys have already tried to kill me. Your brother, Kermit, tried to best me as well. Look where it got him.\"\n\n\"Khemet.\"\n\n\"Khemet, Kermit, same thing. He's dead as a frog in a blender now.\"\n\n\"Father?\"\n\nAmenken motioned for him to be quiet. \"No mortal has ever defied us the way you have, Jonathan Shade. No mortal has ever bested us either.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I know,\" I said. \"I'm a pain in the ass. Come down here and face me, you cowardly prick. I'm tired of your bluster.\"\n\nAmenken shrugged. \"We have studied you. There's absolutely nothing you can do to harm us, and I want to crush your skull with my bare hands for what you did to my son.\"\n\nMy eyes swept the area behind them. Where the hell was Thor? He was supposed to bring Chronos. I wasn't sure how much longer I could stall.\n\n\"Maybe I should just blast you with the vajra.\"\n\n\"Feel free,\" Amenken said. \"The crook will protect me. One more thing you should note. At its current setting, the vajra blast will be wider than you think and you'll vaporize at least one of your allies before the crook absorbs the energy.\"\n\n\"Then we're at an impasse.\"\n\n\"Incorrect,\" Amenken said. \"Give us the weapon.\"\n\n\"You're welcome to try and take it from me,\" I said.\n\nAmenken laughed. \"Fool, I can destroy you from here.\" He aimed the crook at me.\n\n\"But before you waste your time trying that,\" I said with a smile and confidence I didn't really feel, \"let me tell you how this is going to go down.\"\n\nI moved sideways to stand in the center of the concrete circle.\n\n\"I'm listening,\" Amenken said. Lights danced around the hieroglyphs of his crook. He was ready, but he was also cautious. I'd survived their attempt to kill me before, and I'd bested his son in single combat. He wasn't taking any chances.\n\n\"First,\" I said, \"you're going to let Esther go. She's a ghost and can't influence anything here.\"\n\n\"She is not a mere ghost. She can attain physical form.\"\n\n\"But she can't change time.\"\n\n\"She does not belong here.\"\n\nI raised the vajra, but didn't aim it at Amenken just yet. I made a show of twisting it up a few more notches. The spikes at this level turned inward, which would give it a more focused beam. He didn't react, so I suspected the crook could absorb that power level too. \"None of us belong here, jackass. I don't, she doesn't, Kelly doesn't, and you and your steroid addicted son don't either.\"\n\n\"Let me slay him,\" Mahu said.\n\n\"Patience, my son,\" Amenken said. \"This one amuses me. He stalls for time, which is ironic as we are untouched by time. He believes he stands a chance against us when we have ruled across millennia. We are beyond their reach. It costs us nothing to let him play his game.\"\n\n\"Could cost you your life, buddy boy,\" I said.\n\nAmenken laughed.\n\n\"Kermit laughed, too,\" I said.\n\n\"Khemet.\"\n\nStill no sign of Thor. My heart hammered my chest, threatening to break free like an alien from John Hurt's chest. But I remained still and outwardly calm. \"Tomato, tomahto,\" I said.\n\n\"Enlighten me on your plan to slay us when we are immortal.\"\n\n\"I've killed gods before,\" I said, \"and I suspect I'll do so again. One thing you morons all have in common is that you believe your own press.\"\n\nA man and woman strolled along the sidewalk toward us. Kelly Two blocked their path, and I knew she was telling them to go around.\n\nAmenken finally lowered himself to the ground and planted the crook on the concrete. Blue lightning danced around the base of the staff and the hieroglyphs glowed brighter. \"Then slay me, Jonathan Shade.\"\n\nI raised the vajra weapon. With my left hand I pointed at Mahu. \"Now,\" I said loudly. My voice bounced back at me, amplified. I'd know soon enough whether or not the sound carried into the sky. \"Round one is between me and your father.\"\n\n\"Mahu will not interfere as long as your warriors don't,\" Amenken said.\n\nHe was right about that because Clara had heard my signal and as she swooped down, she saw my finger aimed at Mahu. She unleashed a fiery blast at Manu's back.\n\nMahu screamed and staggered forward, engulfed in flames.\n\nClara landed and skidded into him, she snatched him up in her mouth and chomped down hard, breaking the skin and crushing his bones in her powerful jaws. The screaming stopped.\n\n\"Dinner is served,\" I said as I switched the vajra to my left hand and yanked my Glock from its shoulder holster with my right.\n\nAmenken spun toward the dragon, raising the crook. Blue lightning swirled along the staff, and I could tell he was triggering something with his fingers. I knew that blast could kill Clara, but I aimed my gun and fired three quick shots.\n\nThe bullets struck the staff, shattering Amenken's thumb and fingers. While the bullets didn't hurt him, they did knock the crook from his hand. Now that he was within reach, both Kellys raced toward him, swords drawn. I fired three shots into Amenken's chest and mask, but they didn't have any effect. The crook hit the ground in a shower of blue sparks and slid across the concrete.\n\nAmenken spun around, saw the swords arcing toward him and he barked a command in ancient Egyptian.\n\nTime froze.\n\nClara halted in mid-chew, the blood hanging from her mouth like a frozen crimson fountain.\n\nI rushed up to Amenken before he could react, jammed the vajra to his head, and fired. It was a weapon forged for the gods, and the time-freeze didn't prevent it from going off.\n\nThe jackal mask exploded and the headless corpse of Amenken stood impossibly in one place as the blood and brains and skull fragments hung in the air and didn't drop.\n\nI was about to quote Arnold in Terminator 2, but that red and white cloud didn't go anywhere, and the body didn't fall, and nothing moved around me at all. I turned full circle.\n\nMahu was dead.\n\nAmenken was dead.\n\nTime remained frozen.\n\n\"Shit,\" I said.\n\nI looked at Kelly One and Kelly Two. Neither moved. I walked around them, then moved over to Clara. She remained still as well. The blood didn't drip from her jowls. A droplet of red held steady in the air beneath her head on its stalled journey to the pavement.\n\nEsther hovered motionless in the air with the glowing collar. There was no wind.\n\nLeaves didn't rustle.\n\nI had killed the Men of Anubis.\n\nBut I was stranded in a frozen moment of time. With Amenken dead, I thought time would restart. But unless a second could tick forward, the world wouldn't know he was dead, and the magic of the time-stopping spell would never end.\n\nMaybe I should have thought that through, but I didn't really think he'd be that easy to kill. Now what the hell was I supposed to do?\n\n\"Fuck me running,\" I said.\n\n# CHAPTER TWENTY\n\nI sat on the edge of one of the planters and sang \"Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall\" several times, then switched to \"Henry the Eighth\" until I was tired of it, then \"Wasted Time\" by the Eagles, and would have tried \"Wasted Time\" by Skid Row, but I couldn't remember the words, so I launched into \"No Time\" by the Guess Who.\n\nAnd in all of that time, no time actually passed.\n\nI sang \"Time\" by Pink Floyd, then \"Time\" by the Alan Parsons Project. I started \"Time is on My Side\" by the Stones, but it wasn't, so I considered switching to \"Time After Time\" by Cyndi Lauper, but I was sick of singing.\n\n\"Okay,\" I said. \"Thor will bring Chronos, and everything will be all right.\"\n\nExcept that Chronos would open his rift to whatever time it was when they arrived, which was clearly after the moment I was trapped inside, so I was stuck here for all eternity except that no time would ever fucking pass.\n\nI drew a breath, released it. On one level, that was cool because I could breathe. Must have had something to do with the magic that froze time, but didn't affect me.\n\nStill, there had to be something I could do. Esther hung in the air, and as I couldn't see through her, she had to be in physical form. I climbed on top of Clara and tried to reach Esther, but she was too far away.\n\nWell, I had time. I looked around. The parking garage wasn't going to be any use. Cars weren't moving, and the cars in the garage weren't running, and even if they were, they wouldn't drive. I needed some way to climb up to Esther. Maybe I could free her. And maybe as a ghost, she wouldn't be stuck in time. She wasn't moving, but that could have been due to the collar. Maybe if I freed her from the collar, she'd be able to help.\n\nIt was a long shot, and I knew it, but I had to try something.\n\nI walked to the bank a half block away. I was able to open the door, and when I let go of it, the door remained open. People stood motionless in a roped off line leading to the tellers in the bank. I wandered down the halls in search of a storage closet. There had to be a ladder somewhere.\n\nLong story short, I found a ladder in a janitor's closet, and carried it outside and back to the Center of the Universe. I opened the ladder, steadied it, and climbed up to Esther. I had to stand on the top of the ladder, balanced precariously while I reached up to her. The ladder held steady, and I managed to grab Esther's foot. I tugged her downward.\n\nA moment later, we were face to face. Her expression didn't change. She stared blankly downward, a look of concern frozen in place. I pulled her down to the ground, and she didn't float away. The collar around her neck wasn't fastened by anything. It was a solid strip of leather with no seams or buckles. I had no idea what the hieroglyphs said, but it was obviously some kind of magical spell. It was tight, but not too tight. I could dig a finger between the leather and Esther's flesh. I needed a knife.\n\nI walked over to Kelly Two. Kelly One would kill me if she thought I felt her up trying to find a knife. Kelly Two would forgive me. I didn't need to run my hands over anyplace inappropriate. Kelly had a knife tucked in her left boot. I snagged it and returned to Esther.\n\nThe blade sliced through the leather without any trouble, and I didn't even cut Esther in the process. Mission accomplished. I tossed the collar aside, and as soon as I let it go, it stopped moving and hung in the air.\n\nEsther didn't react when I turned her toward me.\n\n\"Can you hear me?\" I asked.\n\nNo response. She kept looking downward, concerned.\n\n\"Strike two thousand six hundred and forty,\" I said.\n\nI didn't want to leave Esther where she was because in physical form, she'd fall over or get smacked by Clara when time started again.\n\nIf time started again.\n\nI carried Esther to the opposite side of the planter and laid her down so she wouldn't fall.\n\nI tucked Kelly's knife back into her boot, then set out toward the hotel where Club Eternity was once aligned.\n\nDecima said she was going to realign it, but maybe she hadn't bothered. After all, I wasn't ever going back there. Right?\n\n\"Please still be there,\" I said.\n\nI walked to the hotel. I found the door that led to the basement bar. The alcove looked the same, and the glass door remained as it had been. I tugged it open. Inside was a normal bar with a single bartender drawing a glass of beer for a customer. I could stand there forever and that glass would never fill up.\n\nSo Club Eternity really had aligned itself elsewhere.\n\nNow what?\n\nOther than Chronos, who did I know who could operate between seconds?\n\nSharon? Or was she able to do so only with the help of Chronos?\n\nRegardless, Sharon was in Boulder, Colorado, and I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That was more than seven hundred miles away. Walking that distance at thirty miles per day would take more than three weeks. I couldn't drive a car because cars were frozen in time. But I could ride a bike. If I could ride seventy miles a day, I could get there in ten or eleven days.\n\nBut what if I got there and Sharon couldn't see me? What if she needed Chronos to freeze time for her in order to move between the moments?\n\nMaybe Chronos would still show up here.\n\nI'd seen a bicycle shop on North Boulder Avenue, so I walked over there. I entered the shop, found a nice brand new bicycle. I checked my stash of cash. I had a couple thousand dollars in my pocket and another sixty in my wallet. I tossed enough money on the counter to cover the price of the bike and a tire repair kit, then I rode back to the Center of the Universe.\n\nI waited there for hours and hours. Of course, the sun remained in the same spot in the sky. Nobody moved. No wind blew. Nothing changed. No sign of Chronos.\n\nI lost track of time.\n\nEasy to do when time doesn't move.\n\nWhat do you do when you have all the time in the world and no way to get anything done? For starters, you take care of bodily functions.\n\nYou want to see and feel something strange? Take a piss when time isn't moving. You shoot the liquid out, but the stream remains in the air when you zip up and walk away.\n\nI didn't want to ride all the way to Colorado. There had to be another way.\n\nDr. Ancho!\n\nHe was here in Tulsa. He could open rifts. He had some interesting abilities. Maybe he was able to move between moments of time. He had other gifts, that was for sure. He also had the added benefit of being maybe an hour away by bicycle. I hopped on the bike and pedaled toward ORU.\n\nI rode around motionless cars and trucks. Drivers with mouths open to sing with the radio, or lips flared back to yell at other drivers, or just sitting still with hands at ten and two.\n\nThere were only a few students in sight on the campus grounds as classes were in session, so I didn't have to dodge many of them on my way to Dr. Ancho's building. The hallway was empty, and when I pulled the door open, it remained open as I stepped inside.\n\nDr. Ancho stood still at the front of his classroom, pointing a piece of chalk toward his students, most of whom seemed focused. The exception was a guy at the back with his head tipped forward napping.\n\nAs he was clearly frozen in time, I knew I was screwed. I sighed and rested a hand on his shoulder. \"Thanks, anyway,\" I said.\n\n\"\u2014elson Chapter Two for\u2014\"\n\nI jumped back and he stopped.\n\nWhat the hell?\n\nI stepped up to him again and reached down to touch his shoulder once more. He came to life again, only now he looked up at me. \"\u2014tomorrow, oh my goodness.\"\n\n\"Hello, Dr. Ancho.\"\n\nI moved to sit down at his desk, but as soon as my hand left his shoulder, he froze again.So I had to be touching him to converse.Okay.I could do that.\n\nI pulled a chair over to sit in front of him so our eyes would be at the same level, then I reached out and took his hand. \"I'm in a bit of a pickle,\" I said.\n\nHe started again. \"You don't say,\" he said then looked around at his frozen students. \"What did you do?\"\n\n\"I killed the Men of Anubis, but not before they stopped time.\"\n\nHis eyes held mine, and I saw empathy and disappointment and sadness in equal measure there. \"You didn't listen to me. Revenge is not the answer.\"\n\n\"Maybe not the right answer, but here I am.\"\n\n\"I can't restart time.\"\n\n\"Who can?\"\n\n\"Chronos.\"\n\n\"Can you take me to him?\"\n\nDr. Ancho shook his head.\n\n\"Can anyone else take me to him?\"\n\nHe hesitated, then nodded. \"Why didn't you listen to me?\"\n\n\"About?\"\n\n\"The Men of Anubis were not your enemies.\"\n\n\"They wanted to kill me.\"\n\n\"They would never have found you, Jonathan. Your real enemies are the ones you don't recognize as such. I would say more, but that would only make things worse.\"\n\n\"Worse than being trapped in time?\" I asked.\n\n\"You sought revenge.\"\n\n\"They took Esther captive.\"\n\n\"Because you went looking for them and found them.\"\n\n\"Well, yeah.\"\n\n\"And you put your friends in danger.\"\n\n\"They're used to that.\"\n\nDr. Ancho sighed. \"No one should be used to that, dear boy. We should endeavor to keep our friends out of danger, wouldn't you say?\"\n\n\"If possible.\"\n\n\"You went looking for it. Even after I warned you.\"\n\n\"So you're telling me straight-up now?\"\n\nHe gave me a sad smile. \"I can't very well make things much worse at this point.As I said before, Ahogado el ni\u00f1o, tapando el pozo. After the child drowns, they close the well.\"\n\n\"So what do I do?\"\n\n\"Any path you choose at this juncture will lead you to lose someone close to you, or perhaps even to lose everything.\"\n\n\"Dr. Ancho, if you can't make things worse, why don't you just shoot straight with me? Tell me what to do.\"\n\n\"I said I couldn't make things much worse, but if I say too much, your path will lead you to lose everything.\"\n\n\"I've already lost everything.\"\n\n\"Your friends will lose everything, too, Jonathan. I can't say much more without endangering all of them. I tried to warn you, and you were so fixated on hate and revenge that you missed the chance for love and happiness. That door is now closed to you. Do you understand that? I fear that I share some responsibility. I should not have let you go. I should have spoken more to your ghost friend. She adores you in spite of the pain you inflict upon her. My mistake was thinking she was dead and you were alive when the truth was the reverse on a spiritual plane.\"\n\n\"I know I've ignored Esther, but I'll make it up to her.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"You can never make it up to her, Jonathan.\"\n\n\"Okay, I realize she's frozen in time right now.\"\n\nAgain, Dr. Ancho shook his head. \"You are the one frozen in time, Jonathan.\"\n\n\"Can you come with me and help me?\"\n\n\"No. And whatever you do, please don't move people around in your current state.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because the shock to their system could kill them.\"\n\n\"I moved Esther.\"\n\n\"She's a ghost. The harm you've done to her is not physical.\"\n\n\"Oh no, please don't tell me that by touching you, I'm killing you.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"I'm standing in the same place I was, so I can mitigate the damage with magic. I suspect I'll be sore, but I'll survive. That holds true for any of us who are more in tune with the world, and have enough power to experience reality in this manner. Have you determined your true enemy yet?\"\n\nI nodded and jammed a thumb into my chest. \"Yeah, yeah, I'm my own worst enemy.\"\n\n\"That could be said for all of us, and it would be true, but that's not what I meant.\"\n\n\"So tell me.\"\n\n\"I can't do that. Too many people will die, and I refuse to have any more blood on my hands. Ponder this. Who set you on this path?\"\n\n\"I did.\"\n\n\"For a reasonably intelligent man, you can be monumentally stupid.\"\n\n\"I'll figure it out. In the meantime, I need to reach Chronos so I can get back into real time. Thor was on an errand to fetch him, but they hadn't arrived when time froze. If I touch Sharon, will she come to life the way you have?\"\n\n\"She will. I would recommend a different course of action.\"\n\n\"I've gone over everyone I can think of and she's the only one I know who can take me to Chronos.\"\n\n\"There are at least three others here in the United States who would come alive at your touch. You have not met them, but all you have to do is find them. They appear to be human, but they are more than that, and as such, they can operate on this level if you touch them.\"\n\n\"Finding them would take forever.\"\n\n\"You have forever.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I know Sharon can take me. I also know not to trust her. Open a rift for me, Dr. Ancho. I've got this.\"\n\n\"Impatience in the face of forever,\" he said. \"I fear you're beyond my ability to save. But one thing I will not do is speed you on your course to destruction. I will not open a rift for you, Jonathan. You're on your own. This is my final attempt to give you the gift of knowledge. Please consider what I've said.\"\n\n\"Fortune cookie logic is not helpful, Dr. Ancho,\" I said. \"Thanks for nothing.\"\n\n# CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE\n\nIt took what felt like an eternity to ride a bicycle from Tulsa to Boulder, but in reality not a second passed.I rode until I got tired, then I found a place to sleep for a while. Sometimes that was on the side of the road. Sometimes I broke into someone's house and slept on a sofa or in a bed. I couldn't take showers because the water wouldn't flow. But I could use a straw to drink water.I ate packaged foods because I couldn't cook anything. Sandwiches and such. At a few convenience stores, I could eat a hot dog or a slice of pizza because they were hot in the warmer. Once I ate them, my immunity to magic allowed me to digest them.\n\nI left dozens of piss sculptures hanging in the air between Oklahoma and Colorado, and I spent my time thinking about what Dr. Ancho said. It didn't help. I knew I'd disappointed him again, and while I certainly understood that I had forever, there was no way in hell I was going to go from person to person in the entire fucking country until I found one who would come to life at my touch. I already knew Sharon would work, so to take another course seemed like a waste of time and energy even though I had all the time in the world. Impatience is a virtue.\n\nI arrived at the library at CU Boulder, and I strolled down the hall to Sharon's office.\n\nI pushed into the room. She sat motionless at her desk, eyes on a computer screen, fingers hovering above the keyboard.\n\nMy first thought was that I'd wasted my time, energy, and money riding to her office. Of course, time was relative because I arrived at her office at the exact same time I'd left Tulsa.\n\nBut then I considered the fact that for her, time was frozen, but as a supernatural being, if I touched her, maybe she'd be able to see me.\n\nI stepped up behind her and placed a hand on her shoulder.\n\nShe nearly jumped out of her chair.\n\n\"What the hell?\" she said.\n\n\"Hello, Sharon.\"\n\n\"How did you get in here?\"\n\nI shrugged, but kept hold of her hand. \"I'm kinda stuck between seconds right now.\"\n\n\"Why are you holding my hand?\"\n\n\"So we can talk.\"\n\nShe looked me up and down. \"You look terrible.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I suspect I smell bad, too.\"\n\n\"My olfactory senses don't work when time is frozen. Where is Chronos and why didn't he warn me?\"\n\n\"This wasn't his doing.\" I explained what happened.\n\n\"So they're dead?\"\n\nI nodded. \"Turns out they were really just regular guys who found a way to stay alive. They had powers and such, of course, but they were no match for a dragon and Indra's weapon.\"\n\n\"So what do you want?\"\n\n\"I want you to pull me to the next second so I can rejoin time.\"\n\n\"I don't have that kind of power.\"\n\n\"So take me to Chronos.\"\n\n\"Why should I?\"\n\nI smiled at her and let go of her hand. She froze instantly.\n\nWhen I touched her again, I had the blade from a paper cutter pressed against her neck.\n\n\"Because if you don't, I'll cut off your head.\"\n\nShe stared at the blade. \"You broke the paper cutter?\"\n\n\"I can let go of you, and you'll freeze in place. I can then cut off your head. One thing I've learned is that decapitation will kill damn near anything. Including you.\"\n\n\"That blade won't penetrate my skin.\"\n\n\"Then I'll ride back to Tulsa, get the vajra weapon, ride back here, put it against your head and fire. That ought to do the trick, and if you don't think I'll do that, you don't know me.\"\n\n\"Point taken, but if you kill me, how will you find Chronos?\"\n\n\"I just need to find another magical being like you who can open a rift and take me to him. Your call.\"\n\n\"I'd rather like to keep my head, thank you.\"\n\n\"So open a rift and take me to Chronos.\"\n\n\"He's in Egypt.\"\n\n\"Then let's go.\"\n\n\"Very well.\"\n\nShe opened a rift in the air and pulled it apart. On the other side of the opening, an Egyptian temple stood in the desert. It was dark there, but lights shone on the temple pillars.\n\nKeeping hold of Sharon, I stepped through and started to pull her through with me. She yanked her hand away from me.\n\nI laughed because she instantly froze with the rift open. I reached through, grabbed her and pulled her through to the cool desert sand.\n\n\"Damn,\" she said. \"It was worth a try. Can't exactly see you swimming across the ocean to get back to me.\"\n\n\"I'd row a boat,\" I said. \"Except that I don't have to do that.\"\n\n\"All right,\" she said. \"I lied. Chronos isn't here. I was just going to dump you and go back to my life.\"\n\n\"Trustworthy as ever,\" I said. \"Here's the thing, Sharon. I'm trusting you to do what's in your best interest. Get me to Chronos so I can get back into time, and I won't bother you again.\"\n\n\"You killed the Men of Anubis,\" she said. \"That means you could kill me if I ever let my guard down.\"\n\n\"If you try to leave me stuck here, I will kill you. Or worse. And there's not a damn thing you can do to stop me.\"\n\nShe tried to throw a punch to my heart, no doubt intending to rip it from my body, but I simply let go of her and she froze. I stepped around her and touched her shoulder.\n\n\"Shit,\" she said.\n\n\"Do you have any idea what all I can do to you right now?\" I asked.\n\nHer eyes widened and I let that play around in her imagination. I had no intention of doing anything to her, but people who are willing to do horrible things to others automatically assume others are just as bad as they are. Her imagination was far better than anything I could have come up with, so I just smiled when she looked aghast.\n\n\"All right,\" she said. \"I'll take you to Chronos.\"\n\nShe opened a new rift and we stepped through to Club Eternity. The difference here was that a few people were moving. Time didn't operate here the way it did in the real world. Thor sat at the bar with Chronos downing a mug of beer. But off in the corner, a guy dressed like a jester had a glass of whiskey tipped to his lips, but wasn't getting anywhere with it.\n\nAs a test, I let go of Sharon for a moment. She froze. The rest of the room was frozen too, except for Chronos, Thor, and a fat Chinese guy at the end of the bar. I recognized him as the guy who once wanted me to rub his belly for luck. He winked at me.\n\nChronos and Thor turned to me.\n\n\"Jonathan,\" Thor said. \"How did you get here?\"\n\n\"Charon brought him,\" Chronos said. \"Sharon, whatever.\"\n\n\"Why doesn't she move?\" Thor asked.\n\nChronos smiled. \"I dare say, ol' chap, I believe you defeated the Men of Anubis.\"\n\n\"Indeed I did, but I'm in a bit of a predicament.\"\n\nChronos laughed. \"You most certainly are. How long have you been trapped in time?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I said. \"More than a week.\"\n\n\"I could simply leave you there and you'll never get a second older.\"\n\nI darted forward and grabbed him by the throat.\n\n\"Or I can help you get back to normal,\" he said.\n\nThor laughed. \"We were going to join you after another round of drinks, Jonathan.\"\n\n\"You going to try and stop me from strangling him?\" I asked.\n\nThor shook his head. \"Do as you will. I like men of action, and you can write that down.\"\n\nChronos glanced at Thor, who downed the rest of his beer. Chronos tried to pull my hands away from his throat, but I was too strong.\n\n\"All right, Chronos, let's make this simple. Help me get back to normal time, and I won't rip your head off your neck.\"\n\nChronos grinned. \"My dear boy, you're not that strong.\"\n\nI tightened my grip.\n\nHe patted my hands. \"Fine,\" he said. \"I'll set you back into proper time. But I want to make sure the Men of Anubis are well and truly dead first.\"\n\n\"Then let's get back to Tulsa.\"\n\nI let go of him. Chronos stood and walked toward the frozen Sharon. As he walked away from the bar, the Chinese guy froze. Thor hurried after Chronos so he wouldn't be outside the sphere of influence. As Chronos neared Sharon, she resumed movement.\n\n\"That's disconcerting,\" she said as she jerked back.\n\n\"Take my hand,\" Chronos said extending his arm.\n\nI gripped his hand and we stepped out of Club Eternity back to the moment I'd left so long ago where Esther lay on the concrete planter, two versions of Kelly held swords arcing around toward nothing, a sliced leather collar and a line of urine hung in the air, a dragon had a dead god in its jaws, and a broad-shouldered kilted man stood with no head on his neck, but a cloud of blood, brain, and bone fragments hovering over his body.\n\n\"You don't see that every day,\" Thor said. He turned and gave me a light punch on the shoulder. \"Nice work.\"\n\nThat light punch would no doubt leave a bruise.\n\nChronos pulled his hand from mine, took out his pocket watch and fiddled with it. \"Need to keep time frozen,\" he said. He walked around the scene, nodding.\n\n\"Set me back into the time stream,\" I said. \"Please.\"\n\nHe nodded and snapped the pocket watch closed.\n\nIn an instant, wind blew, swords swept around striking air, a dragon chomped and swallowed a dead god, a strap of leather and a line of urine dropped to the pavement, and another dead god crumpled to the ground with a splash of gore falling on top of the body.\n\n\"What the hell?\" both Kelly Chans said in unison.\n\n\"Mission accomplished,\" I said.\n\nEsther popped over to me. \"Jonathan!\" she said, throwing her arms around me. \"You saved me!\" She pulled back and grimaced. \"You can't be a sheik until you take a shower.\"\n\n\"You saying I stink?\" I asked.\n\nShe pinched her nose closed. \"And how.\"\n\nClara reared up and let out a shrieking howl.\n\n\"It's all right, Clara,\" I said, moving over and stroking her. \"We won.\"\n\nShe settled back to the ground and licked her mouth.\n\n\"Thank you,\" I said.\n\nShe responded with a belch that smelled like burned copper.\n\n\"Only one thing left to do,\" Chronos said.\n\n\"What's that?\" I asked.\n\n\"It seems the dragon ate one of the timeless gods, but the other, while dead, needs to be cast into the void.\"\n\n\"Why not just feed him to Clara?\" I asked.\n\n\"I'm not so concerned about the body,\" he said. \"If the dragon wants a feast, that's fine with me, but the crook and flail need to be out of our world. That blend of magic and technology is too great for any of us to wield. We should toss the vajra into the void as well.\"\n\n\"Oh, I think I'm keeping that,\" I said.\n\nChronos shook his head. \"Not a chance, Jonathan. It's an ancient weapon of mass destruction and it cannot remain here.\"\n\nI sighed. \"You're right, of course.\"\n\nChronos picked up the fallen crook. It was a bit mangled from the bullets, but lightning still danced along the shaft. The flail was on the ground beside Clara, so he walked over and grabbed that, too. \"Charon, open a rift to the void, please.\"\n\nSharon rubbed her hands together, and swept them down, then moved them apart opening a window into the vast nothingness. Chronos tossed the crook and flail into the void.\n\n\"And the body?\" he asked.\n\n\"Clara,\" I said, \"are you hungry?\"\n\nClara shook her head.\n\n\"Fine. I'll grab the legs, Thor, you grab the shoulders.\"\n\nThor and I moved over, lifted the remains of Amenken and we tossed him into the great emptiness.\n\n\"The vajra, too,\" Chronos said.\n\n\"You'll note that it's not the seventeenth of November,\" I said as I retrieved the weapon.\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"You said every way you looked at time, it ended there.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Oh, I lied about that. I just didn't want to be involved in the battle with the Men of Anubis.\"\n\n\"You're an asshole,\" I said.\n\n\"Quite true,\" he said with the grin.\n\nI walked over and threw the vajra into the void.\n\n\"Happy now?\" I asked.\n\n\"Almost,\" he said. \"Charon?\"\n\nBefore I could react, Sharon shoved me into the void. The last thing I heard was her laughter before the rift to Earth snapped shut. I fell, tumbling over and over into the great nothing.\n\n\"Fuck,\" I said.\n\n# CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO\n\nYou know that old saying of fool me once, shame on you and fool me twice, shame on me. Well, shame the living hell out of me. I never trusted Sharon, but I let my guard down for one second and that bitch betrayed me again. Chronos and Sharon could suck the great dick of the devil himself, those traitorous losers.\n\nSo there I was, floating endlessly. A headless corpse did a slow turn not too far away from me, and several powerful weapons tumbled off to my other side, but I couldn't move toward them. I was weightless. I found that I could breathe, but that wasn't going to last because pretty soon, I'd die for lack of food and water. Or worse, I wouldn't, and I'd float forever in a timeless void or until I got depressed enough to pull my Glock and blow my brains out. Oh well, I'd had a good run. I'd lived a couple of lifetimes. I'd battled sorcerers, gods, dragons, ghosts, demons, vampires, zombies, witches, wizards, and assorted other things that shouldn't even exist. I'd loved and lost. I'd met King Tut and his wife. I'd done more and seen more than most.\n\nI didn't have many regrets.\n\nIt was time to accept my fate.\n\nAnd then Esther popped into view.\n\n\"Jonathan!\" she called.\n\n\"Go back, Esther!\"\n\n\"Not without you!\" She spotted me and popped over.\n\nShe wrapped her arms around me and smiled.\n\n\"Good to see you, Esther,\" I said.\n\n\"And how. Hang on,\" she said and popped away.\n\nI kept tumbling.\n\nShe popped back to me. \"Horsefeathers,\" she said. \"You're too big. I can't take you with me.\"\n\n\"It's all right, Esther. Thank you for everything you've ever done for me. Go back and tell both Kellys I love them. You might tell them to kill Sharon and Chronos while you're at it, though.\"\n\nMy words hurt her, and I realized I'd been a fool. \"I'm not telling them any of that nonsense,\" she said. \"You can tell them yourself.\"\n\n\"You know I love you too, right Esther?\"\n\n\"I know you like me, but love? Go chase yourself. Hold onto me.\"\n\n\"You can't take me back there. I'm too big.\"\n\nShe gave me a sad smile. \"Shut up and kiss me,\" she said.\n\nShe planted a kiss on my lips. She moved her lips over mine and her tongue shot into my mouth.\n\n\"Damn, girl!\"\n\nShe winked at me. \"If I had my way, I'd do some barneymugging with you for weeks on end. But fate hates me, Jonathan.\"\n\n\"Get back to the real world, Esther. Go live and love.\"\n\n\"You forget,\" she said. \"I'm already dead. I've carried a torch for you for more years than I ever lived, and you're the one who needs to keep breathing. I would give anything to be with you.\"\n\n\"So you're going to float out here in the void with me?\"\n\n\"No, you big palooka. Don't you remember what Dr. Ancho said about mass?\" She kissed me again. \"I love you, and you need to live.\"\n\n\"I love you, too,\" I said. \"But it's your turn for life.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"One more kiss,\" she said and this time, when she kissed me, I stayed kissed.\n\nShe popped.\n\nI popped.\n\nI appeared in the air over the Center of the Universe and fell to the ground hard. I rolled over to see Thor standing still in the distance beside the unmoving Clara, while two Kelly Chans faced Chronos and Sharon. Neither Kelly moved, but Chronos and Sharon did. The ghost of Esther Carmichael floated in the air above me.\n\nShe'd traded places with me. Her physical form now floated in the void, and rather than teleport her own body, she brought her spirit and my body.\n\n\"Oh, Esther,\" I said.\n\n\"How did he get back here?\" Chronos asked, as he took the sword from Kelly's hand.\n\nSharon grabbed a sword from the other Kelly. \"Doesn't matter. I'll just kill the fucker,\" she said and stalked toward me.\n\n\"I'll kill the two Kelly Chans,\" Chronos said.\n\n\"Save one for me,\" Sharon said. \"I hate those bitches.\"\n\nI didn't like the sound of that.\n\nI rolled to my feet, and Sharon raced toward me, sword ready. I pulled my Glock, but realized pulling the trigger wouldn't do me any good because time was frozen.I let go of it, and it hung suspended in the air. I did a shoulder roll to avoid the swinging sword, and charged at Chronos.\n\nHe didn't expect it, but he was my only chance. If I faced off with Sharon, he'd be able to kill both Kelly Chans before I could reach him, but by going after him first, I had a chance.I slammed into him before he could bring the sword around, and I kept driving, pushing him to the side of the pedestrian walkway.The planters stood between us and the drop to the railroad tracks, but I didn't care about falling. I drove Chronos right over the edge.\n\nTime didn't affect us, but gravity did.\n\nWe dropped to the tracks.It was a good twenty foot drop, but I landed on top of him. The impact dislodged the sword from his hand and it flew away to hang motionless in the air just out of reach of his hand.I rolled off of him, in pain, and tried to sit up.\n\nHe jumped to his feet, unharmed.\n\n\"Sharon will kill you,\" Chronos said.\n\n\"Sharon is outside your sphere of influence, jackass,\" I said and pushed myself to my feet.My ribs hurt, but they weren't broken.I wanted to kick him, but the coward took off running down the tracks.\n\nI chased after him.The first few steps hurt because even landing on top of Chronos didn't prevent the collision with the ground from beating the shit out of me. But as my legs churned, the pain didn't bother me.I tackled Chronos, and drove his face against the railroad tracks.I got up, grabbed hold of him and yanked him to his feet. He tried to hit me, but I blocked his punch and drove my fist into his face.\n\nHe sat down hard.\n\nI launched a snap kick at his face, driving him back to the ground.\n\n\"You should have checked your timeline after all,\" I said. \"Maybe you'd have seen this coming.\"I grabbed him and dragged him back toward the bridge.He struggled, pounded on my wrist and hand. I ignored the pain and kept pulling him. Kelly's sword hovered ten feet away.I let go of Chronos and grabbed the katana.\n\nHe got to his feet and tried to rush me, but I expected it. I spun and sliced upward with the blade, cutting into his stomach and chest, sweeping outward and sending blood trails flying. They froze in the air and hung there, caught in time. I stepped around and swung the blade again, this time with better aim, and I chopped the fucker's head off.\n\nThe body took a few steps, then crumpled to its knees and toppled forward. A flash of light shot out from the corpse as the magic left his body.\n\nI glanced up and saw the pocket watch floating in the air a few feet from the edge of the bridge. As long as it was open, time would be frozen. I rubbed my aching ribs, and climbed the embankment back to the pedestrian walkway.\n\nThe scene was unchanged except for Sharon who now stood motionless in mid-step, sword in her right hand. She once said that steel couldn't penetrate her skin. I stepped up to her and swung Kelly's sword in a grand arc. The blade cut right through Sharon's skin, and lodged in her neck bone. With a normal person, the blade would have hacked the head right off. Sharon was wrong about the steel not penetrating her skin, but as with Sekutar warriors, the magic inside her made her bones a lot stronger. I took a few whacks to cut through her neck bone.Her head remained on top of her neck, but it wouldn't remain there once time kicked back into motion.\n\nSpeaking of which, I needed to close the watch.\n\nI walked to the edge of the bridge, and the damn watch was just out of reach.\n\n\"This is going to hurt,\" I said. I set down the sword then jumped out, caught the watch, and dropped twenty feet to the hard ground.I bent my knees and went into a roll to try and absorb the impact. The pain stabbed through my feet, ankles, and legs, but nothing broke.And one more time, I climbed back up the damned embankment.\n\nIt was worth it, though.I snapped the watch closed and time kicked into gear.\n\nSharon took three steps before her head fell from her neck and bounced on the concrete.\n\nThe two Kellys swung empty hands toward a nonexistent foe then stared at their hands.\n\n\"What the hell?\" Kelly One said.\n\nI tucked the watch into my pocket. I wasn't taking over the job of Chronos, of course. The magic that would bind someone to the job can't affect me. I just didn't want anyone else messing about in history. Besides, you never know when something like a watch that can control time might come in handy.\n\n\"Hello, ladies,\" I said.I picked up their swords and handed them back.\n\n\"Thanks,\" Kelly Two said. \"What happened?\"\n\nI filled them in, as Esther drifted over.\n\n\"All of it was only possible because of Esther,\" I said.\n\n\"She's a peach,\" Kelly said. \"Where is she?\"\n\nI wasn't sure which Kelly said it because I was staring at the ghost who loved me. The ghost I kept taking for granted. She remained translucent.\n\n\"She's right here. Are you unable to make yourself seen?\"\n\n\"It's all berries, Jonathan.\" She made herself visible.\n\nI smiled. \"Excellent.\"\n\n\"But it's time for me to scram for good.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I asked.\n\nShe made herself invisible so her words would be for only me. \"I can't compete with yourKelly's memory, and I know you're never going to walk down the center aisle with me. I'll always carry a torch for you, Jonathan, but I can't stay with you when you don't even see me.\"\n\n\"I see you,\" I said.\n\nShe gave me a sad smile and placed a ghostly hand on my cheek. \"I wish that were true. But it's time for me to accept reality. I was a dumb Dora and while the torch will always burn, I can't stay with you anymore. It hurts me too much. Just know that I'll always love you.\"\n\nWith that, she popped away.\n\n\"Esther, no!\"\n\nBut it was too late. She was gone.\n\n\"We might want to get out of here before the cops show up and find the bodies,\" Kelly Two said.\n\n\"We can handle the cops,\" Kelly One said.\n\n\"I won't hurt the police,\" Kelly Two said.\n\n\"Not even a little?\" \"As long as the dragon is sitting here, I don't think anyone's going to dare approach us,\" Kelly Two said.\n\n\"Where's Thor?\" I asked.\n\n\"He went in search of an ATM while you were talking to Esther,\" Kelly said. \"He figured we should celebrate, but he was out of cash.\"\n\nSirens sounded in the distance. \"I suspect he made another withdrawal.\" I glanced at Kelly Two. \"Care to join us?\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I think I need to get Clara back to Boulder. I have classes to teach. My girls need me, and if I'm honest, I kinda need them too. Don't be a stranger, Jonathan. If you ever need me, you call me. Got it?\"\n\n\"You think I need more than one of you?\"\n\nShe gave me a wink. \"You couldn't handle either one of us.\" She embraced me, holding me tightly. She kissed my cheek. \"Stay well, my friend.\"\n\nShe turned to her time twin and gave her a nod of respect.\n\nKelly returned the nod.\n\nKelly Two climbed aboard the dragon. She gave me a salute. The dragon bowed her head and nudged me playfully.\n\nThank you for the wonderful meal, Clara told me. I love Mediterranean food. She then pulled back and launched herself into the air.\n\nThor walked down the path with a trail of twenty dollar bills floating behind him. \"We need to feast, we need to drink, and we need to fuck!\"\n\n\"I'm with you on the first two,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"Then I shall have to keep plying you with ale until you give in.\"\n\n\"That's not going to happen,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"We shall see. There are restaurants in this direction,\" Thor said, pointing. \"I shall lead the way.\"\n\nKelly and I followed him.\n\n\"I have to ask,\" I said. \"What did you think of your time twin?\"\n\nKelly pursed her lips for a moment. \"She's beautiful, of course. And she's a fast and furious fighter.\"\n\n\"Your equal in every way,\" I said.\n\nKelly shook her head. \"No she's not.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I asked.\n\nKelly frowned. \"She's too human.\"\n\nTwo police cars screeched to a halt in front of Thor. He bent down, picked up the front end of the first car and turned it ninety degrees then dropped it. \"Let us pass, mortals, we have slain gods this day, and by all measures that matter, we deserve to celebrate.\"\n\n\"Sir,\" one of the officers said. \"We have a report that you broke an ATM off the wall in a bar for the second time this week.\"\n\n\"They should not have attached it,\" Thor said.\n\n\"Sir, you're under arrest.\"\n\nThor turned, and raised his hammer high. Thunder boomed and lightning flashed in spite of the clear blue sky.\n\n\"Don't hurt them!\" I called.\n\n\"Very well,\" Thor said. \"I shall smash their vehicles.\"\n\n\"No!\" I yelled.\n\nThor frowned. He stepped up to the officers. \"Today is your lucky day,\" he said. \"My friend does not wish you harm, so I will spare you.\"\n\n\"You're under arrest,\" the closest cop said and reached for Thor's forearm, slapping handcuffs on him.\n\nThor snapped the cuffs and handed them to the officer. \"This will not end well for you, mortals.\"\n\nKelly stepped up behind the officers and quickly pinched their carotid arteries closed. They stiffened for a moment, then a few seconds later, they went limp and she draped them over the hood of the perpendicular cop car. She took their guns and tossed them in the front seat. They started coming around, but she took handcuffs from a cop's belt, cuffed them together and shoved them into the backseat of the car.\n\nShe closed the door, turned to me, and said, \"No lives lost, no property damage.\"\n\n\"Except for the handcuffs,\" I said.\n\n\"That was Thor,\" she said.\n\nI smiled, but my heart wasn't in it, and we walked off in search of food and drink.\n\nI thought back to what Dr. Ancho had said about how I'd lose someone if I stayed on my path. Esther was now gone, and I knew the empty space in my heart could never be filled by anyone else. We all carry ghosts with us, and we all have regrets. My biggest regret is that I had been so hung up on a ghost who wasn't there that I couldn't see the ghost who was. My life was diminished without Esther. There's always a price to pay in life, and my account was currently overdrawn. Maybe someday I'd find her again. Maybe then I could make it up to her.\n\nBut when you're holding out for someday, you're stuck existing between the seconds, and trust me, that's not a fun place to be.\n\nKelly's hand slipped into mine, startling me.She leaned her face toward mine and her breath tickled my ear.\n\n\"Don't get too excited,\" she whispered.\"I'm just trying to throw off Thor.\"\n\nI squeezed her hand anyway.\n\nThe thunder god looked at our clasped hands and huffed.\"She insults me yet again.Choosing a mere mortal over the pleasures of Gamanbjodr.\"\n\nKelly smirked up at Thor.\"You think too much of your hammer.\"\n\nI laughed.\"Yeah.Write that down.\"\n\nTHE END\nTo keep up with new releases, sign up for the Gary Jonas Preferred Readers List and get a FREE ebook copy of Gary's first novel, One-Way Ticket to Midnight.\n\nABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nGary Jonas grew up in a military family, so he moved a lot as a child. His original plan was to be a comic book artist, but in college things changed. He took a creative writing class for the easy A, and found that when he wrote stories, people were affected emotionally by them in ways they weren't by his artwork. He switched from art to writing without ever looking back. Well, he might have looked back a few times, but by then it was too late. He sold his first short story to Marion Zimmer Bradley for the anthology Sword and Sorceress VII. Many short story sales followed to various magazines and anthologies including Robert Bloch's Psychos, It Came from the Drive-In, 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories, Prom Night, and many more.\n\nHis first novel, One-Way Ticket to Midnight, was published in 2002, It made the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Award. While the novel was well-reviewed, it didn't sell diddly squat, so Gary turned to writing screenplays for a few years. A couple of Hollywood options led to nothing, and the notes from producers, while sometimes spot-on, were also sometimes way out in left field (if they were even in the ballpark). Gary returned to novel writing with Modern Sorcery. You can visit him online, and sign up for his mailing list on his rarely updated blog or on his website at www.garyjonasbooks.com\n\nBooks by Gary Jonas\n\nThe Jonathan Shade series:\n\nModern Sorcery\n\nAcheron Highway\n\nDragon Gate\n\nAnubis Nights\n\nSunset Specters\n\nWizard's Nocturne\n\nRazor Dreams\n\nVertigo Effect\n\nClub Eternity\n\nTimeless Gods\n\nSpirited Christmas (a Jonathan Shade holiday story)\n\nThe Kelly Chan series\n\nVampire Midnight\n\nWerewolf Samurai\n\nSubhuman Resources (w/Rebecca Hodgkins)\n\nZombie Rising (w/Rebecca Hodgkins)\n\nVendetta Blues (w/Rebecca Hodgkins)\n\nThe Half-Assed Wizard series\n\nThe Half-Assed Wizard\n\nThe Big-Ass Witch\n\nThe Dumbass Demon\n\nThe Lame-Assed Doppelganger\n\nThe UFO Conspiracy Files series:\n\nGuardians of the Sky\n\nStand-alone novels:\n\nOne-Way Ticket to Midnight\n\nPirates of the Outrigger Rift (w/Bill D. Allen)\n\nNovella:\n\nNight Marshal: A Tale of the Undead West\n\nalso available in Night Marshal Box Set (the first three Night Marshal tales in one bundle--includes Night Marshal by Gary Jonas, High Plains Moon by Glenn R. Sixbury, and This Dance, These Bones by Rebecca Hodgkins). The set kicks ass.\n\nCollection:\n\nQuick Shots\n\nCover design by Robin Ludwig Design Inc.\n\nwww.gobookcoverdesign.com\n\nedited by Rebecca Hodgkins\n\nThanks for reading! All authors need reviews, so if you enjoyed the book, please write a review to help guide other customers. Read on!\n\n# Don't miss out!\n\nClick the button below and you can sign up to receive emails whenever Gary Jonas publishes a new book. There's no charge and no obligation.\n\n<https://books2read.com/r/B-A-VVIB-HJVQ>\n\nConnecting independent readers to independent writers.\nAlso by Gary Jonas\n\nJonathan Shade\n\nModern Sorcery\n\nAcheron Highway\n\nDragon Gate\n\nAnubis Nights\n\nSunset Specters\n\nWizard's Nocturne\n\nRazor Dreams\n\nVertigo Effect\n\nClub Eternity\n\nTimeless Gods\n\nImmortal Ascendant\n\nSpirited Christmas\n\nThe Jonathan Shade Series: Books 1-3\n\nThe Jonathan Shade Series: Books 4-6\n\nKelly Chan\n\nVampire Midnight\n\nWerewolf Samurai\n\nSubhuman Resources\n\nZombie Rising\n\nVendetta Blues\n\nNight Marshal\n\nNight Marshal: A Tale of the Undead West\n\nNight Marshal Books 1-3 Box Set: Night Marshal/High Plains Moon/This Dance, These Bones\n\nThe Half-Assed Wizard\n\nThe Half-Assed Wizard\n\nThe Big-Ass Witch\n\nThe Dumbass Demon\n\nThe Lame-Assed Doppelganger\n\nUFO Conspiracy Files\n\nGuardians of the Sky\n\nStandalone\n\nOne-Way Ticket to Midnight\n\nQuick Shots: A Killer Collection\n\nShepherds on the Hills of Eternity\n\nDying to Live\n"}
+{"meta": {"title": "Faites vos aperitifs et vos liq - J"}, "text": "\n\n**\u00ab L'abus d'alcool est dangereux pour la sant\u00e9. Pour appr\u00e9cier : consommez avec mod\u00e9ration. \u00bb**\n\n## **Des ap\u00e9ritifs & des liqueurs personnalis\u00e9s...**\n\n_... c'est ce que ce petit livre vous propose de faire, ou plut\u00f4t de cr\u00e9er, car il s'agit v\u00e9ritablement de cr\u00e9ation. Gr\u00e2ce \u00e0 ce manuel vous allez pouvoir produire des ap\u00e9ritifs et des liqueurs d'un go\u00fbt nouveau, diff\u00e9rent de celui des boissons du commerce ou de celles que fabrique votre voisin, parce que vous utiliserez les ingr\u00e9dients que vous avez personnellement \u00e0 votre disposition (ou que vous pouvez vous procurer \u00e0 bon march\u00e9) et que vous doserez \u00ab \u00e0 votre go\u00fbt \u00bb le sucre, l'alcool, les ar\u00f4mes, etc._\n\n_\u00c0 la lecture de ces premi\u00e8res lignes, les amateurs de recettes toutes pr\u00eates sont peut-\u00eatre d\u00e9j\u00e0 un peu d\u00e9\u00e7us. Qu'ils se rassurent! Ce livre contient aussi quelques bonnes recettes d\u00e9crites avec pr\u00e9cision, choisies parce qu'elles ont fait l'unanimit\u00e9 par leurs hautes qualit\u00e9s gustatives. Mais qu'ils ne regrettent pas trop de ne pas en trouver davantage. Bien souvent, lorsqu'on applique \u00e0 la lettre ce type de recette, on obtient un r\u00e9sultat d\u00e9cevant: soit qu'il y avait une erreur dans les proportions indiqu\u00e9es, soit que la m\u00e9thode \u00e0 utiliser n'\u00e9tait pas suffisamment bien expliqu\u00e9e, soit que les composants qu'on avait \u00e0 sa disposition ne convenaient pas exactement (exemple : un alcool trop fort ou trop parfum\u00e9, des feuilles s\u00e9ch\u00e9es au Heu de feuilles fra\u00eeches...)._\n\n_Le but de cet ouvrage n'est certes pas de vous inciter \u00e0 boire davantage de boissons alcoolis\u00e9es, ni de vous faire r\u00e9aliser des \u00e9conomies substantielles. L'int\u00e9r\u00eat de faire soi-m\u00eame ses \u00ab boissons de prestige \u00bb est tout autre. D'abord, vous aurez un r\u00e9el plaisir \u00e0 \u00e9laborer un ap\u00e9ritif ou une liqueur pour la premi\u00e8re fois, \u00e0 d\u00e9couvrir et analyser le r\u00e9sultat obtenu (couleur, odeur, saveur), puis \u00e0 l'am\u00e9liorer si vous le souhaitez. Quel loisir passionnant! Ensuite vous serez fier de servir \u00e0 vos amis quelque chose de personnel et d'original. Et puis, soyez s\u00fbr qu'une bouteille de votre composition sera un cadeau toujours appr\u00e9ci\u00e9._\n\n_Savoir et comprendre ce que sont toutes ces vari\u00e9t\u00e9s de vermouths, quinquinas, mistelles, ratafias, cr\u00e8mes... fait aussi un peu partie de notre culture. Et la meilleure fa\u00e7on de conna\u00eetre, c'est encore d'exp\u00e9rimenter soi-m\u00eame. Alors devenez liquoriste amateur!_\n\n# **LES INGR\u00c9DIENTS**\n\nAp\u00e9ritifs et liqueurs ont la plupart de leurs composants en commun : alcool, sucre, plantes (fruits, feuilles, fleurs...). Ce sont surtout les proportions qui diff\u00e8rent. Toutefois beaucoup d'ap\u00e9ritifs faciles \u00e0 faire chez soi n\u00e9cessitent aussi du vin, ce qui est rarement le cas des liqueurs. Comment choisir ces divers \u00e9l\u00e9ments ?\n\n## **L'alcool**\n\nC'est un ingr\u00e9dient indispensable pour obtenir le type de boissons qui nous int\u00e9ressent, car celles-ci sont \u00ab alcoolis\u00e9es \u00bb, non par suite d'une fermentation (comme dans le cas du vin, du cidre, de la bi\u00e8re...), mais par addition d'alcool. Pour cette raison, on les appelle aussi des \u00ab spiritueux \u00bb.\n\nIl vous faut donc de l'alcool, ou plut\u00f4t un liquide qui en contient beaucoup (l'alcool \u00ab absolu \u00bb n'existe pratiquement pas). Mais attention, l'alcool contenu ne doit pas \u00eatre n'importe lequel! Il ne peut s'agir que de l'alcool \u00e9thylique ou \u00e9thanol, \u00e0 ne pas confondre avec d'autres alcools comme l'alcool m\u00e9thylique ou m\u00e9thanol, extr\u00eamement dangereux pour la sant\u00e9. Les alcools dits \u00ab \u00e0 br\u00fbler \u00bb ou \u00ab d\u00e9natur\u00e9s \u00bb sont bien s\u00fbr totalement proscrits.\n\n### **_L'alcool du pharmacien_**\n\nBeaucoup de recettes anciennes indiquaient de prendre, pour leur r\u00e9alisation, de l'alcool \u00e0 90% achet\u00e9 en pharmacie. Il s'agit d'alcool \u00e9thylique; il en existe aussi \u00e0 70%. Attention le pharmacien vend aussi de l'alcool \u00ab modifi\u00e9 \u00bb rendu impropre \u00e0 la consommation par l'addition d'une substance odorante (du camphre) et d'un colorant (la tartrazine).\n\nCependant, sachez qu'actuellement, la vente d'alcool \u00e0 90% en pharmacie est limit\u00e9e en volume \u00e0 250 ml (0,25 I) par achat et que cette limitation ayant \u00e9t\u00e9 institu\u00e9e pour lutter contre l'alcoolisme, l'utilisation de cet alcool pour fabriquer des boissons est interdite. Ce type d'alcool en raison de sa tr\u00e8s forte teneur en \u00e9thanol (90 %), permettrait pourtant de r\u00e9aliser des extraits v\u00e9g\u00e9taux tr\u00e8s rapides et tr\u00e8s efficaces. De plus, \u00e9tant pratiquement neutre, il ne masquerait pas comme le font certaines eaux-de-vie les ar\u00f4mes des autres composants.\n\n### **_L'alcool des magasins_**\n\nDans les grandes surfaces corn-me dans les petites \u00e9piceries, il est possible d'acheter divers alcools.\n\nLe plus simple et le moins cher (environ 60 F le litre) est vendu g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement sous le nom de \u00ab eau-de-vie sp\u00e9ciale fruits \u00bb (ou sous un nom voisin), car il est destin\u00e9 principalement \u00e0 l'\u00e9laboration de \u00ab fruits \u00e0 l'eau-de-vie \u00bb. C'est une eau-de-vie qui contient 40% vol. d'alcool (anciennement : 40\u00b0. Pour la commodit\u00e9 nous \u00e9crirons syst\u00e9matiquement le taux d'alcoolisation en %) dont le go\u00fbt peu marqu\u00e9 s'adapte bien \u00e0 la majorit\u00e9 des compositions.\n\nOn trouve \u00e9galement sans difficult\u00e9 des alcools vieillis dans des f\u00fbts (de ch\u00eane le plus souvent), reconnaissables \u00e0 leur couleur marron plus ou moins fonc\u00e9 : rhum (issu de la canne \u00e0 sucre), bourbon et whisky (alcool de grain), calvados (eau-de-vie de cidre), cognac et armagnac (eau-de-vie de vin), marc, brandy, etc. Diff\u00e9rentes eaux-de-vie blanches, incolores car n'ayant pas vieilli en f\u00fbt, sont aussi couramment commercialis\u00e9es : kirsch, vodka, rhum blanc, eau-de-vie de prune (mirabelle, quetsche), de poire (William), de framboise, etc.\n\nCes alcools, excellents de go\u00fbt, ont l'inconv\u00e9nient d'\u00eatre plus co\u00fbteux (sauf le rhum blanc, parfois tr\u00e8s bon march\u00e9). Ils ont souvent un parfum caract\u00e9ristique, et ne conviennent pas \u00e0 toute fabrication. C'est \u00e0 vous de bien choisir, de bien marier les ar\u00f4mes. Ainsi le rhum sera id\u00e9al pour r\u00e9aliser une liqueur de vanille, tandis que le kirsch fera merveille avec des cerises dont il renforcera le parfum. Le cognac va bien avec les oranges, alors que l'armagnac s'accorde parfaitement avec les pruneaux, etc.\n\n### **_L'alcool du r\u00e9coltant_**\n\nTout r\u00e9coltant poss\u00e9dant au moins un grand jardin avec suffisamment d'arbres fruitiers (se renseigner \u00e0 la mairie), peut faire distiller sa r\u00e9colte personnelle, en franchise de droits ou non (selon qu'il jouissait d\u00e9j\u00e0 ou non de ce privil\u00e8ge en 1960). Si vous \u00eates dans ce cas, il vous faut contacter un bouilleur professionnel, aller chercher en mairie un certificat de r\u00e9coltant, puis \u00e9tablir une demande aupr\u00e8s du Service des Alcools des Douanes.\n\nAvec la franchise (pour 101 d'alcool pur), le litre d'eau-de-vie revient \u00e0 moins de 25 F; sans franchise, c'est-\u00e0-dire en payant les taxes (environ 90 F par litre d'alcool pur), ce prix est tripl\u00e9.\n\nDans des conditions bien pr\u00e9cis\u00e9es par la loi, il est possible de faire distiller \u00ab des vins, cidres ou poir\u00e9s, marcs, lies, cerises, prunes et prunelles \u00bb, c'est-\u00e0-dire soit des boissons d\u00e9j\u00e0 pr\u00eates, soit des fruits ferment\u00e9s. Pour obtenir ces derniers, il faut mettre des fruits bien m\u00fbrs, plus ou moins \u00e9cras\u00e9s, dans un f\u00fbt, avec \u00e9ventuellement un peu d'eau. Certains r\u00e9coltants ajoutent aussi un peu de sucre (une addition de 17 g de sucre par litre donnera 1% d'alcool suppl\u00e9mentaire) mais la loi fran\u00e7aise l'interdit. Pendant la fermentation, les fruits doivent \u00eatre souvent remu\u00e9s. Quand celle-ci est termin\u00e9e le r\u00e9cipient doit \u00eatre bien bouch\u00e9 pour \u00e9viter l'entr\u00e9e des mouches et la transformation en vinaigre. Certains r\u00e9coltants ajoutent aussii, selon les saisons, les diff\u00e9rents fruits produits par leur verger ou leur jardin, et obtiennent donc, apr\u00e8s distillation (en atelier public), une eau-de-vie de fruits, qu'ils font ensuite vieillir ou non.\n\nCes alcools \u00ab naturels \u00bb conviennent g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement tr\u00e8s bien pour l'\u00e9laboration de la plupart des ap\u00e9ritifs et liqueurs. Ils ont l'avantage d'\u00eatre eux aussi des produits \u00ab maison \u00bb; ils peuvent communiquer \u00e0 vos fabrications une sorte de go\u00fbt de terroir bien sypathique, et donner ainsi \u00e0 votre production une certaine unit\u00e9. En raison de leur prix de revient, ils sont tout particuli\u00e8rement int\u00e9ressants pour les r\u00e9coltants ayant droit \u00e0 la franchise des taxes.\n\nEnfin, il faut rappeler que tout ce qui concerne la fabrication, le transport, la vente ou la d\u00e9tention d'eau-de-vie est strictement r\u00e9glement\u00e9 et les fraudes s\u00e9v\u00e8rement punies.\n\n## **Le vin**\n\nLes ap\u00e9ritifs ayant g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement un taux d'alcool inf\u00e9rieur \u00e0 celui des liqueurs, beaucoup d'entre eux ne n\u00e9cessitent pas une grande quantit\u00e9 d'eau-de-vie pour leur fabrication, mais s'\u00e9laborent principalement avec du vin (leur d\u00e9nomination l\u00e9gale est d'ailleurs \u00ab ap\u00e9ritifs \u00e0 base de vin \u00bb).\n\nDans quelques rares cas de recettes tr\u00e8s d\u00e9licates, du tr\u00e8s bon vin doit \u00eatre utilis\u00e9, mais la plupart du temps, vous pourrez vous servir de vin plut\u00f4t ordinaire, car les parfums des plantes et de l'alcool ajout\u00e9s domineront nettement. Cependant, il ne faudrait pas que ce soit du mauvais vin (avec une odeur de vinaigre par exemple). Il est souvent pr\u00e9f\u00e9rable d'employer un vin assez neutre, pas trop fort en go\u00fbt et pas trop acide.\n\nUtilisez \u00ab votre vin \u00bb, si vous en faites : vos ap\u00e9ritifs seront encore plus personnalis\u00e9s. \u00c9ventuellement, achetez le vin en cubitainers, chez un producteur (bio de pr\u00e9f\u00e9rence) cela vous permettra de faire plusieurs litres d'ap\u00e9ritifs en m\u00eame temps et \u00e0 prix r\u00e9duit. Selon les recettes et votre go\u00fbt, prenez du vin rouge, du ros\u00e9 ou du blanc. S'il s'agit de vin sucr\u00e9 (blanc doux ou ros\u00e9 doux), il faudra en tenir compte lorsque vous sucrerez votre boisson. Essayez aussi de conna\u00eetre sa teneur en alcool, cela vous permettra de calculer la quantit\u00e9 d'eau-de-vie \u00e0 ajouter.\n\n## **Le sucre**\n\nLes liqueurs sont toujours sucr\u00e9es, parfois m\u00eame tr\u00e8s sucr\u00e9es. Les ap\u00e9ritifs que vous allez cr\u00e9er le seront aussi, mais g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement beaucoup moins.\n\nVous pouvez utiliser du _sucre blanc_ en morceaux, semoule ou cristallis\u00e9 : cela n'a pas d'importance. Cependant vous trouverez peut-\u00eatre plus pratique de compter des morceaux de sucre, plut\u00f4t que de peser du sucre en poudre avec une balance. Pour conna\u00eetre la masse d'une morceau, c'est facile, il suffit de diviser celle indiqu\u00e9e sur la bo\u00eete (g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement 1000 grammes) par le nombre de morceaux. Les paquets de cinq kilogrammes de sucre cristallis\u00e9 vendus pour faire des confitures sont bon march\u00e9 (mais faites attention de ne pas acheter du sucre additionn\u00e9 de substances pour faire prendre la confiture!).\n\nLes diff\u00e9rents _sucres roux_ du commerce pr\u00e9sentent un go\u00fbt particulier qui peut \u00eatre int\u00e9ressant s'il s'allie bien avec les autres ingr\u00e9dients (du sucre roux de canne avec du rhum, par exemple).\n\nLe _miel_ peut aussi servir \u00e0 sucrer. Si vous avez quelques ruches, n'h\u00e9sitez pas \u00e0 employer votre miel. Vos boissons auront vraiment un go\u00fbt \u00ab maison \u00bb. L\u00e0 encore, il faudra \u00eatre prudent et utiliser de pr\u00e9f\u00e9rence des miels au go\u00fbt peu marqu\u00e9, ou s'accordant particuli\u00e8rement bien avec les autres ingr\u00e9dients.\n\n## **Les plantes**\n\nCe sont elles qui apporteront \u00e0 vos compositions leurs principaux ar\u00f4mes et caract\u00e8res gustatifs : la liqueur de framboise sentira la framboise, le vin de noix aura go\u00fbt de noix, etc.\n\nCertaines plantes pourront \u00eatre trouv\u00e9es en herboristerie, en pharmacie, au rayon \u00ab tisane \u00bb des grandes surfaces ou chez l'\u00e9picier, mais bien souvent elles proviendront de votre jardin, votre verger, ou encore de la campagne, de la for\u00eat, etc. o\u00f9 vous serez all\u00e9 faire la cueillette. Attention, certains v\u00e9g\u00e9taux sont toxiques! Ne r\u00e9coltez que des esp\u00e8ces que vous savez parfaitement reconna\u00eetre.\n\nToutes sortes de parties de plantes s'utilisent dans l'\u00e9laboration des spiritueux, de la racine aux fruits, en passant par les tiges, les feuilles, les fleurs, etc.\n\n### **_Les racines_**\n\nAssez peu de racines entrent dans la composition des boissons qui nous int\u00e9ressent. Quelques-unes cependant sont c\u00e9l\u00e8bres; en voici cinq qu'un amateur peut utiliser.\n\nLes racines torr\u00e9fi\u00e9es de _chicor\u00e9e,_ \u00ab un tr\u00e9sor de bienfaits \u00bb, se vendent dans toutes les alimentations (en paquet de 250 ou 500 grammes). Elles apportent unie couleur fonc\u00e9e et une certaine amertume.\n\nLes racines de _gentiane,_ s\u00e9ch\u00e9es, se trouvent facilement dans le commerce, mais si vous savez bien reconna\u00eetre la grande gentiane jaune (plante de montagne), vous pouvez aussi en utiliser des racines fra\u00eeches. Leur go\u00fbt amer est tr\u00e8s caract\u00e9ristique. Les racines d' _ang\u00e9lique_ peuvent provenir de votre jardin, si vous y avez plant\u00e9 un pied de cette plante, nomm\u00e9e \u00ab ang\u00e9lique vraie \u00bb.\n\nLe _gingembre_ n'est pas v\u00e9ritablement une racine, mais un rhizome (tige souterraine). Il est tr\u00e8s aromatique et de go\u00fbt tr\u00e8s \u00e9pic\u00e9. On l'emploie frais, coup\u00e9 en morceaux, mais on peut aussi utiliser celui qui est vendu comme aromate, en poudre.\n\nEnfin, vous pourrez aussi acheter des racines s\u00e9ch\u00e9es de _r\u00e9glisse._\n\n### **_Les tiges et les \u00e9corces_**\n\nQuelques tiges vertes, fra\u00eeches peuvent servir; les p\u00e9tioles, c'est-\u00e0-dire les queues des feuilles, s'utilisent de la m\u00eame mani\u00e8re, coup\u00e9s en morceaux. Ainsi r\u00e9coltez dans votre jardin les tiges et p\u00e9tioles d' _ang\u00e9lique_ (la m\u00eame que dans le paragraphe pr\u00e9c\u00e9dent), de _c\u00e9leri_ (en branches), ou de _fenouil._\n\nLes jeunes pousses de _prunellier_ (tiges feuill\u00e9es un peu rouge\u00e2tres) qui apparaissent au mois de mai, surtout apr\u00e8s une coupe hivernale de ces arbustes, permettent de r\u00e9aliser de tr\u00e8s bons ap\u00e9ritifs. Lorsqu'il s'agit de grosses tiges ligneuses, on n'utilise que l'\u00e9corce superficielle; exemples : l'\u00e9corce de _bouleau, aux_ propri\u00e9t\u00e9s m\u00e9dicinales, mais surtout le _quinquina_ et la _cannelle,_ qu'on ach\u00e8te s\u00e9ch\u00e9s, r\u00e9duits en poudre ou non, et qui entrent dans la composition de nombreuses recettes.\n\n### **_Les feuilles_**\n\nLes feuilles doivent \u00eatre cueillies le matin, dit-on, et si on les fait s\u00e9cher, il faut que ce soit \u00e0 l'ombre. Elles s'utilisent en effet fra\u00eeches ou s\u00e8ches. Certaines se trouvent dans les magasins, corn-me le _th\u00e9_ et les diverses plantes \u00e0 tisanes, mais la plupart peuvent aussi \u00eatre cueillies fra\u00eeches, ou s'acheter \u00e0 l'\u00e9tat frais, sur les march\u00e9s par exemple.\n\nUne premi\u00e8re cat\u00e9gorie est constitu\u00e9e de plantes condimentaires ou aromatiques, que vous pouvez cultiver dans votre jardin pour la plupart. Les catalogues des maisons sp\u00e9cialis\u00e9es les proposent \u00e0 peu pr\u00e8s toutes. Froiss\u00e9es, leurs feuilles d\u00e9gagent un ar\u00f4me souvent fort et tr\u00e8s caract\u00e9ristique. Voici les principales (dans l'ordre alphab\u00e9tique).\n\n\u2014 _L'absinthe_ : plante c\u00e9l\u00e8bre et tr\u00e8s aromatique; on peut la trouver facilement chez les p\u00e9pini\u00e9ristes, bien qu'il soit d\u00e9sormais interdit de l'utiliser pour faire des liqueurs, en raison de sa toxicit\u00e9.\n\n\u2014 _L'ang\u00e9lique_ (vraie) : encore elle!\n\n\u2014 _Le basilic_ : on l'obtient, par exemple, \u00e0 partir de graines.\n\n\u2014 _L'estragon_ : se multiplie ais\u00e9ment par division des touffes.\n\n\u2014 _L'hysope_ : s'obtient comme le pr\u00e9c\u00e9dent et les deux suivantes.\n\n\u2014 _La m\u00e9lisse_ : on l'appelle \u00e9galement _citronnelle,_ car ses feuilles exhalent une odeur de citron.\n\n\u2014 _La menthe_ : plusieurs esp\u00e8ces sauvages et cultiv\u00e9es existent, la plus connue et r\u00e9put\u00e9e est la menthe poivr\u00e9e.\n\n\u2014 _Le romarin_ : en r\u00e9gion m\u00e9diterran\u00e9enne, vous irez en chercher dans la garrigue; ailleurs il faudra le planter en bonne exposition; se multiplie facilement par bouturage.\n\n\u2014 _L\u00e0 sarriette_ : on l'obtient sans difficult\u00e9 \u00e0 partir de graines.\n\n\u2014 _La sauge_ (officinale) : \u00e0 planter en bonne exposition.\n\n\u2014 _La tanaisie_ : on la trouve souvent au bord des routes.\n\n\u2014 _Le thym_ : il en existe une vari\u00e9t\u00e9 \u00e0 odeur de citron.\n\n\u2014 _La verveine_ : sous ce nom, on cultive actuellement un petit arbuste qui ne r\u00e9ussit que dans les situations chaudes (r\u00e9gion m\u00e9diterran\u00e9enne ou paliss\u00e9 contr\u00e9 un mur).\n\nAux esp\u00e8ces pr\u00e9c\u00e9dentes, tr\u00e8s classiques pour les liqueurs, on peut ajouter quelques originalit\u00e9s : le _persil,_ le _cerfeuil,_ le _laurier-sauce..._ Vous pouvez vous procurer pratiquement toutes ces plantes par simple division (par \u00e9clat) d'une touffe du jardin de votre voisin ou d'un ami, ou encore en achetant un sachet de graines, car presque toutes les plantes aromatiques se vendent sous cette forme maintenant.\n\nLa deuxi\u00e8me cat\u00e9gorie de feuilles int\u00e9ressantes est encore plus facile \u00e0 trouver. Il s'agit de feuilles ou folioles (c'est-\u00e0-dire de parties de feuilles compos\u00e9es) d'arbres ou arbustes fruitiers :\n\n\u2014 _le cassis_ : ses feuilles sont tr\u00e8s odorantes (contrairement \u00e0 celles du groseillier);\n\n\u2014 _le cerisier_ , surtout celui qui donne des fruits acidul\u00e9s (cerises aigres, anglaises, de Montmorency...);\n\n\u2014 _le noyer_ : ses folioles donnent des pr\u00e9parations tr\u00e8s parfum\u00e9es;\n\n\u2014 _le p\u00eacher_ : tr\u00e8s utilis\u00e9es, ses feuilles mac\u00e9r\u00e9es dans le vin ou l'alcool produisent une odeur agr\u00e9able de noyau de cerise;\n\n\u2014 _le prunier_ : l'ar\u00f4me produit par ses feuilles est plus discret.\n\nTroisi\u00e8me cat\u00e9gorie : les feuilles \u00e0 ramasser dans la nature. L\u00e0, de bonnes connaissance en botanique sont n\u00e9cessaires, car il est aussi possible de s'empoisonner! Outre les v\u00e9g\u00e9taux d\u00e9j\u00e0 cit\u00e9s _(menthe, romarin, tanaisie, thym),_ il est possible de r\u00e9colter dans la nature les feuilles de certaines esp\u00e8ces sauvages : _asp\u00e9rule, origan, pervenche, serpolet..._ ainsi que le _g\u00e9n\u00e9pi_ (on utilise la plante enti\u00e8re), tr\u00e8s recherch\u00e9 dans les r\u00e9gions de haute montagne.\n\nDe nombreuses plantes m\u00e9dicinales peuvent aussi compl\u00e9ter vos r\u00e9coltes et vos recettes, vous joindrez ainsi l'utile \u00e0 l'agr\u00e9able. Mais attention aux quantit\u00e9s, car bon nombre d'esp\u00e8ces m\u00e9dicinales sont toxiques \u00e0 forte dose. N'agissez qu'en connaisseur!\n\n### **_Les fleurs_**\n\nElles se cueillent et se font s\u00e9cher comme les feuilles. Souvent les livres indiquent de r\u00e9colter les sommit\u00e9s fleuries, c'est-\u00e0-dire tout le sommet de la plante qui porte des fleurs : dans ce cas un peu de tige et quelques jeunes feuilles se trouvent m\u00eal\u00e9es aux fleurs.\n\nComme pour les feuilles pr\u00e9c\u00e9dentes, ce sont les fleurs odorantes qui peuvent servir. Voici les principales.\n\n\u2014 _L'acacia_ ou plus exactement le _robinier faux-acacia :_ on cueille les grappes de fleurs blanches.\n\n\u2014 _La camomille_ : on prend les \u00ab t\u00eates \u00bb (les capitules); existe aussi en sachet comme plante \u00e0 tisane.\n\n\u2014 _Le jasmin._\n\n\u2014 _Le magnolia_ : on utilise les p\u00e9tales de fleurs blanches.\n\n\u2014 _Les \u0153illets_ : on effeuille les p\u00e9tales d'\u0153illets rouges.\n\n\u2014 _L'oranger_ : l'ar\u00f4me de ses fleurs est c\u00e9l\u00e8bre; on en trouve aussi parmi les plantes \u00e0 tisane.\n\n\u2014 _Les roses_ : il faut des p\u00e9tales tr\u00e8s parfum\u00e9s.\n\n\u2014 _Le sureau noir_ : on coupe juste en dessous des grandes ombelles de fleurs blanches.\n\n\u2014 _Le tilleul_ : comme pour les tisanes, on r\u00e9colte fleurs et bract\u00e9es.\n\n\u2014 _Les violettes_ : il faut choisir des fleurs odorantes.\n\nPour les f\u00e9rus de botanique, on peut y ajouter les fleurs de _bouillon blanc,_ de _millepertuis,_ de _marube blanc_ , d' _arnica..._\n\nEnfin, signalons deux \u00e9pices classiques provenant de fleurs : le _clou de girofle_ (bouton floral du giroflier) et le _safran_ (stigmates d'une esp\u00e8ce de crocus, r\u00e9duits en poudre). On les ach\u00e8te en petits flacons, comme les autres \u00e9pices.\n\n### **_Les fruits charnus_**\n\nIl s'agit des fruits contenant une chair, la pulpe, renfermant elle-m\u00eame un jus sucr\u00e9 et parfum\u00e9, qu'il sera g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement inutile d'extraire.\n\nVous aurez l'embarras du choix. Vous pourrez d'abord utiliser les fruits de votre verger ou de votre jardin :\n\n\u2014 les _abricots;_\n\n\u2014 les _cassis,_ toujours tr\u00e8s odorants;\n\n\u2014 les _cerises,_ surtout les vari\u00e9t\u00e9s \u00e0 fruits aigres;\n\n\u2014 les _coings;_\n\n\u2014 les _fraises;_\n\n\u2014 les _framboises,_ \u00e0 condition qu'elles soient bien parfum\u00e9es, ce qui n'est pas toujours le cas;\n\n\u2014 les _groseilles_ \u00e0 grappes ou \u00e0 maquereau;\n\n\u2014 les _noix vertes_ : on les r\u00e9colte d\u00e9but juillet, lorsqu'elles sont encore tendres;\n\n\u2014 les _p\u00eaches;_\n\n\u2014 les _poires,_ en particulier celles de la vari\u00e9t\u00e9 Williams;\n\n\u2014 les _prunes,_ surtout si elles ont beaucoup d'ar\u00f4me (mirabelles, reines-claudes...);\n\n\u2014 le _raisin_ : du muscat par exemple.\n\nVous pourrez \u00e9galement aller r\u00e9colter dans la nature toutes sortes de petits fruits sauvages souvent d\u00e9licieux :\n\n\u2014 les _arbouses_ (en r\u00e9gion m\u00e9diterran\u00e9enne seulement);\n\n\u2014 les _fraises des bois;_\n\n\u2014 les _framboises sauvages;_\n\n\u2014 les baies de _geni\u00e8vre;_\n\n\u2014 les _merises;_\n\n\u2014 les _m\u00fbres,_ fruits de ronces;\n\n\u2014 les baies de _myrte_ (en r\u00e9gion m\u00e9diterran\u00e9enne seulement);\n\n\u2014 les _myrtilles;_\n\n\u2014 les _n\u00e8fles;_\n\n\u2014 les _prunelles._\n\nVous avez encore une autre possibilit\u00e9 : acheter des fruits. Outre les fruits cultiv\u00e9s cit\u00e9s ci-dessus, vous trouverez dans le commerce, partout en France, des fruits m\u00e9diterran\u00e9ens ou exotiques tr\u00e8s int\u00e9ressants : _ananas, bananes, c\u00e9drats, citrons, fruits de la passion, kiwis, litchis, mandarines, mangues, oranges, pamplemousses,_ etc.\n\nDans tous les cas, les fruits doivent \u00eatre sains, non trait\u00e9s (surtout si vous utilisez la peau) et m\u00fbrs \u00e0 point, exhalant agr\u00e9ablement leur odeur caract\u00e9ristique.\n\nPour certaines recettes, vous n'aurez besoin que de leur jus, ou que de leur \u00e9corce (zeste), ou encore que de leur noyau; pour les autres vous utiliserez les fruits entiers, coup\u00e9s en morceaux.\n\nPour d'autres, il vous faudra des fruits s\u00e8ches : _pruneaux, raisins secs, figues, dattes..._ Les gousses de _vanille,_ tr\u00e8s int\u00e9ressantes pour leur parfum incomparable, peuvent aussi \u00eatre rang\u00e9es dans cette cat\u00e9gorie (elles subissent, en plus du s\u00e9chage, une fermentation).\n\n### **_Les graines et les fruits secs_**\n\nLes plantes de la famille des _ombellif\u00e8res_ ont de petits fruits secs nomm\u00e9s \u00ab ak\u00e8nes \u00bb, plus connus sous le nom de \u00ab graines \u00bb. Voici les plus utilis\u00e9s : _ang\u00e9lique, anis vert, coriandre, cumin, fenouil._\n\n_L'anis \u00e9toil\u00e9,_ encore appel\u00e9e _badiane,_ est une plante toute diff\u00e9rente; on en trouve facilement dans les herboristeries.\n\nLes grains de _caf\u00e9_ sont des graines torr\u00e9fi\u00e9es. On peut \u00e9galement acheter des graines (ou f\u00e8ves) de _cacao_ trait\u00e9es de la m\u00eame mani\u00e8re.\n\nLes amandes des fruits \u00e0 noyau sont aussi des graines utilisables; mais attention, certaines (celles de p\u00eache en particulier) contiennent des substances toxiques.\n\nLa partie comestible des _noix_ et _noisettes_ entre \u00e9galement dans cette cat\u00e9gorie. Ajoutons enfin la _noix de coco_ dont la partie blanche, nomm\u00e9e \u00ab coprah \u00bb, est tr\u00e8s parfum\u00e9e.\n\n# **LES TECHNIQUES**\n\nVos ingr\u00e9dients (alcool, sucre, au moins une des plantes \u00e9num\u00e9r\u00e9es pr\u00e9c\u00e9demment, et \u00e9ventuellement vin) \u00e9tant r\u00e9unis, il ne vous reste plus qu'\u00e0 vous munir de quelques r\u00e9cipients et ustensiles de cuisine, et vous pouvez commencer.\n\n## **La r\u00e9alisation d'un extrait**\n\nC'est la premi\u00e8re op\u00e9ration.\n\nIl ne s'agit pas d'obtenir ce qu'on peut trouver chez le pharmacien sous le nom d'extrait, d'essence ou d'esprit (de rose, de romarin...); la plupart de ces liquides, tr\u00e8s concentr\u00e9s, proviennent d'une distillation.\n\nVous n'aurez g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement pas non plus \u00e0 utiliser la technique de l' _infusion_ (celle du th\u00e9 ou des tisanes) ni celle de la _d\u00e9coction_ (dans ce cas on laisse bouillir l'eau et la plante).\n\nVotre technique habituelle sera la _mac\u00e9ration \u00e0 froid_ de votre plante dans l'alcool. C'est tr\u00e8s simple \u00e0 r\u00e9aliser, puisqu'il suffit de mettre \u00e0 tremper les feuilles, fleurs, fruits... dans de l'eau-de-vie. Cependant plusieurs questions se posent.\n\n### **_Quel r\u00e9cipient utiliser ?_**\n\nAvant tout il faudra que ce r\u00e9cipient soit herm\u00e9tique, car il vaut mieux ne perdre ni ar\u00f4mes ni alcool au cours de cette mac\u00e9ration. Son ouverture devra le plus souvent \u00eatre tr\u00e8s grande, afin de pouvoir ais\u00e9ment y mettre \u2014 et surtout en retirer \u2014 des feuilles ou fruits encombrants. Il est pr\u00e9f\u00e9rable que ce r\u00e9cipient soit en verre, car ce mat\u00e9riau se nettoie facilement, ne communique jamais de go\u00fbt \u00e9tranger \u00e0 la pr\u00e9paration, et par sa transparence permet aux rayons du soleil d'\u00e9chauffer un peu le contenu et au fabricant de surveiller ce qui s'y passe. Enfin il doit \u00eatre nettement plus grand (une fois et demie ou plus) que la quantit\u00e9 de liquide que vous allez y verser; cela \u00e9vitera les risques de d\u00e9bordement et permettra un remuage plus facile et plus efficace.\n\nEn r\u00e9sum\u00e9, dans la plupart des cas, un grand bocal, de 1 \u00e0 3 litres, \u00e0 fermeture efficace (couvercle \u00e0 vis ou syst\u00e8me avec caoutchouc) convient parfaitement. Si les ingr\u00e9dients ne sont que poudres et liquides, vous pourrez vous servir aussi de bouteilles ou de petites bonbonnes (avec bouchon, bien entendu).\n\n### **_Comment le remplir ?_**\n\nL'ordre dans lequel vous y mettez vos ingr\u00e9dients n'a pas d'importance. La quantit\u00e9 de plantes que vous utilisez aura par contre une grande influence sur l'intensit\u00e9 du go\u00fbt obtenu. Si vous faites mac\u00e9rer beaucoup de feuilles, \u00e9vitez quand m\u00eame qu'elles ne d\u00e9passent trop du liquide.\n\nDeux m\u00e9thodes principales existent.\n\nLa premi\u00e8re, qui est la plus simple et la plus rapide, consiste \u00e0 mettre d'abord \u00e0 mac\u00e9rer les parties de plantes uniquement dans l'alcool. Plus cet alcool est fort, plus vite se fera la dissolution des substances de la plante qui sont solubles dans l'alcool \u00e9thylique et parmi lesquelles certaines sont responsables de la saveur et de l'odeur du v\u00e9g\u00e9tal. Vous r\u00e9aliserez ainsi un v\u00e9ritable _extrait._ Pour acc\u00e9l\u00e9rer encore cette dissolution, il suffit de couper la plante en tr\u00e8s petits morceaux. Vous pouvez ainsi r\u00e9duire en poudre certaines graines comme celles de fenouil, d'anis vert... avec votre moulin \u00e0 caf\u00e9 \u00e9lectrique. Les fruits peu juteux (coings, noix vertes...) peuvent \u00eatre pass\u00e9s \u00e0 la moulinette. Cependant, on n'y gagne pas toujours : des prunelles enti\u00e8res donnent un bien meilleur r\u00e9sultat qu'une fois \u00e9cras\u00e9es.\n\nLa seconde m\u00e9thode, c'est de mettre \u00e0 mac\u00e9rer ensemble, d\u00e8s le d\u00e9but, tous les composants, dans leurs justes proportions : alcool, plantes, sucre et \u00e9ventuellement vin. En plus de l'extraction de certaines substances des plantes par l'alcool pr\u00e9sent, le sucre ajout\u00e9 devra se dissoudre, et rendra le liquide plus \u00e9pais, moins favorable aux \u00e9changes. Cette mac\u00e9ration demandera donc plus de temps et n\u00e9cessitera de plus fr\u00e9quents remuages; sa clarification sera plus lente.\n\n### **_Comment conduire la mac\u00e9ration ?_**\n\nApr\u00e8s avoir opt\u00e9 pour l'une des deux m\u00e9thodes pr\u00e9c\u00e9dentes et rempli (pas compl\u00e8tement) votre bocal, qu'allez-vous faire ?\n\nIl faut le mettre dans de bonnes conditions de temp\u00e9rature, car la chaleur acc\u00e9l\u00e8re aussi la dissolution. Mais il ne faudrait pas qu'elle soit trop forte (plus de 40\u00b0C), car elle risquerait d'entra\u00eener des d\u00e9compositions et finalement une d\u00e9naturation du produit. On recommande g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement d'exposer les bocaux de plantes \u00e0 mac\u00e9rer au soleil, en les pla\u00e7ant sur le rebord d'une fen\u00eatre expos\u00e9e au sud, \u00e0 l'int\u00e9rieur de la pi\u00e8ce (qui doit \u00eatre chauff\u00e9e, si c'est en hiver). Toutefois, pour obtenir une belle couleur verte par mac\u00e9ration de feuilles dans de l'eau-de-vie blanche il est indispensable que le bocal ne voie pas la lumi\u00e8re (la couleur verte provient de la chlorophylle contenue dans les feuilles). Il suffit alors de recouvrir votre bocal de n'importe quel mat\u00e9riau opaque, ou de l'enfermer dans un placard.\n\nVous devez remuer un peu le bocal une ou deux fois par jour, surtout si vous y avez mis du sucre, pour une dissolution plus rapide. C'est l\u00e0 que vous appr\u00e9cierez de ne pas avoir trop rempli votre r\u00e9cipient.\n\nJe vous conseille vivement d'y go\u00fbter fr\u00e9quemment, c'est le meilleur moyen de vous rendre compte o\u00f9 en est la mac\u00e9ration. Jour apr\u00e8s jour vous percevrez le go\u00fbt de la plante de plus en plus fort; \u00e9ventuellement vous pourrez ainsi d\u00e9cider de l'arr\u00eat de la mac\u00e9ration.\n\n### **_Combien de temps doit-elle durer ?_**\n\nOn ne peut pas r\u00e9pondre simplement \u00e0 cette question, car l'efficacit\u00e9 de la mac\u00e9ration ne d\u00e9pend pas seulement de la dur\u00e9e de contact entre plante et alcool; de nombreux facteurs, d\u00e9j\u00e0 \u00e9voqu\u00e9s, interviennent :\n\n\u2014 la temp\u00e9rature; \u00e0 10\u00b0C dans une cave, la mac\u00e9ration est lente; dans un bocal expos\u00e9 au soleil, elle se fait beaucoup plus vite;\n\n\u2014 la fr\u00e9quence des remuages; l'agitation acc\u00e9l\u00e8re la mise eh solution des diff\u00e9rentes substances;\n\n\u2014 la teneur en alcool de l'eau-de-vie employ\u00e9e; plus elle est \u00e9lev\u00e9e, plus la mac\u00e9ration est rapide;\n\n\u2014 la pr\u00e9sence ou non de sucre, selon la m\u00e9thode utilis\u00e9e; avec du sucre, c'est plus long;\n\n\u2014 la surface de contact entre la plante et le liquide; plus les morceaux sont petits et nombreux, mieux la mac\u00e9ration se fera; les plantes \u00ab moulin\u00e9es \u00bb ou r\u00e9duites en poudre donneront donc des r\u00e9sultats plus prompts; les feuilles et p\u00e9tales, gr\u00e2ce \u00e0 leur minceur, permettent aussi une action rapide de l'alcool; par contre, des noyaux de prune devront rester tr\u00e8s longtemps dans l'eau-de-vie;\n\n\u2014 la quantit\u00e9 de plante par rapport au volume du liquide; il est \u00e9vident que plus vous mettrez de feuilles, fleurs, graines... plus vous obtiendrez rapidement le go\u00fbt recherch\u00e9;\n\n\u2014 la nature des plantes; elle joue un grand r\u00f4le; en effet, des plantes tr\u00e8s aromatiques comme la sauge ou la tanaisie parfument l'alcool en quelques heures, tandis que des feuilles de noyer ou de prunier demanderont au moins une ou deux semaines.\n\nLes dur\u00e9es de mac\u00e9ration indiqu\u00e9es dans les recettes \u00ab toutes faites \u00bb, parfois tr\u00e8s pr\u00e9cises (exemple 44 jours), n'ont donc gu\u00e8re de valeur. Ce ne sont que des indications. En voici d'autres, pour des conditions moyennes de temp\u00e9rature, de remuages, etc.\n\n\u2014 Plantes tr\u00e8s aromatiques : 1 journ\u00e9e.\n\n\u2014 Plantes aromatiques, finement divis\u00e9es : 2 ou 3 jours.\n\n\u2014 Feuilles d'arbres peu odorantes : 1 ou 2 semaines.\n\n\u2014 \u00c9corces \u00e9paisses, racines, noyaux, fruits entiers : 1 mois o\u00f9 plus.\n\nVous compl\u00e8terez vous-m\u00eames ces donn\u00e9es par votre exp\u00e9rience. Je vous rappelle que c'est encore en go\u00fbtant r\u00e9guli\u00e8rement que vous pourrez vous faire la meilleure id\u00e9e de l'\u00e9tat d'avancement de la mac\u00e9ration.\n\n### **_Comment l'arr\u00eater ?_**\n\nPour arr\u00eater la mac\u00e9ration il suffit de s\u00e9parer les plantes du liquide, g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement \u00e0 l'aide d'une passoire, en \u00e9vitant de remuer le m\u00e9lange juste avant l'op\u00e9ration. Au cas o\u00f9 les \u00e9l\u00e9ments v\u00e9g\u00e9taux auraient \u00e9t\u00e9 r\u00e9duits en poudre tr\u00e8s fine, il faudrait un filtre (voir _Comment s\u00e9parer le liquide clair du d\u00e9p\u00f4t_).\n\nLe liquide obtenu constitue votre extrait, \u00e0 partir duquel vous pouvez faire une liqueur plus ou moins sucr\u00e9e, plus ou moins forte en alcool, ou encore un vin ap\u00e9ritif blanc ou rouge.\n\n## **Le dosage et l'assemblage**\n\nSelon la m\u00e9thode utilis\u00e9e, l'extrait que vous venez de r\u00e9aliser peut \u00eatre une liqueur pratiquement termin\u00e9e, car vous aviez mis du sucre au d\u00e9part, ou au contraire une mati\u00e8re premi\u00e8re \u00e0 laquelle vous devez ajouter maintenant au moins du sucre, \u00e9ventuellement du vin, de l'eau, et peut-\u00eatre m\u00eame un ou plusieurs autres extraits. Comment faire le m\u00e9lange ? Comment doser les diff\u00e9rents ingr\u00e9dients afin d'obtenir un go\u00fbt \u00e9quilibr\u00e9 ? C'est l'objet des pages qui suivent.\n\n### **_Comment sucrer ?_**\n\nDeux questions se posent \u00e0 propos du sucre : quelle quantit\u00e9 faut-il mettre, et comment le dissoudre ?\n\nL'analyse des diff\u00e9rentes recettes connues de liqueurs et d'ap\u00e9ritifs montre que la teneur en sucre peut \u00eatre tr\u00e8s variable. Mais il y a quand m\u00eame quelques principes g\u00e9n\u00e9raux \u00e0 respecter. Une liqueur doit avoir un go\u00fbt franchement sucr\u00e9. De plus, une forte proportion de sucre \u00e9paissira le liquide et lui donnera une consistance sirupeuse : on parlera alors de \u00ab cr\u00e8me \u00bb. A vous de faire des essais diff\u00e9rents, en notant la quantit\u00e9 de sucre ajout\u00e9 par litre, et en comparant par d\u00e9gustation les r\u00e9sultats obtenus. Voici une valeur moyenne pour les liqueurs : 300 g de sucre pour un litre d'extrait. Cependant une liqueur de cerises sera, \u00e0 mon go\u00fbt, meilleure avec moiti\u00e9 moins de sucre; une cr\u00e8me de cassis doit en contenir 400 \u00e0 500 g. Les vins ap\u00e9ritifs sont g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement moins sucr\u00e9s : 150 g de sucre par litre me semblent constituer une bonne moyenne, mais l\u00e0 encore, c'est une affaire de go\u00fbt. En outre, selon la composition, une quantit\u00e9 de sucre plus importante ou plus faible sera peut-\u00eatre n\u00e9cessaire; le go\u00fbt sucr\u00e9 doit \u00e9quilibrer les saveurs am\u00e8res et acides.\n\nPour ajouter le sucre, il faut d'abord le peser. Vous pouvez utiliser une balance de cuisine ou un verre doseur, ou encore compter des morceaux de sucre apr\u00e8s avoir calcul\u00e9 la masse d'un morceau. Ajout\u00e9 tel quel, le sucre mettra du temps \u00e0 se dissoudre, et il sera n\u00e9cessaire d'agiter le liquide plusieurs fois pour obtenir la dissolution compl\u00e8te. Cette m\u00e9thode s'utilise surtout lorsqu'on r\u00e9alise directement un extrait sucr\u00e9.\n\nIl est bien pratique de faire d'abord un _sirop,_ en ajoutant de l'eau au sucre (en poudre, cristallis\u00e9 ou en morceaux) et en faisant bouillir quelques minutes. Il faut utiliser au moins 100 g d'eau (10 cl) pour 200 g de sucre, et laisser un peu refroidir avant de m\u00e9langer \u00e0 l'extrait. Si vous sucrez avec du miel, il vaut mieux le rendre liquide en le chauffant au bain-marie avant utilisation.\n\n### **_Comment obtenir le bon degr\u00e9 d'alcool ?_**\n\nLiqueurs et ap\u00e9ritifs se distinguent assez nettement par leur teneur en alcool : les ap\u00e9ritifs \u00e0 base de vin en contiennent le plus souvent de 16 et 20%, tandis que les liqueurs sont g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement plus riches en alcool et de degr\u00e9 fort variable : environ 25% pour les moins alcoolis\u00e9es, ou 30-35% pour beaucoup, voire 40 \u00e0 55% pour certaines liqueurs fortes.\n\n17% vol. est un minimum, au-dessous duquel il y a des risques de fermentation. En effet le sucre que vous ajoutez pourrait permettre \u00e0 des levures de vivre, en le transformant en alcool (c'est la fermentation alcoolique) et en dioxyde de carbone (ou gaz carbonique) qui rendrait le liquide gazeux, ce qu'il faut absolument \u00e9viter.\n\nPour une liqueur, le \u00ab bon degr\u00e9 d'alcool \u00bb est celui qui permettra \u00e0 la plante d'exhaler au mieux son ar\u00f4me, sans que celui-ci soit \u00e9cras\u00e9 par l'odeur de l'eau-de-vie. Les liqueurs de fruits (fraises, framboises, cassis...) sont meilleures si elles sont peu alcoolis\u00e9es (20 \u00e0 30%), tandis que les feuilles tr\u00e8s aromatiques (sauge, verveine, tanaisie, g\u00e9n\u00e9pi...) demandent plus une forte teneur en alcool (40 \u00e0 55%).\n\nC'est bien s\u00fbr avec l'exp\u00e9rience, et son go\u00fbt personnel, que chacun arrive \u00e0 choisir, pour une pr\u00e9paration donn\u00e9e, le taux d'alcool qui lui semble id\u00e9al. C'est d'ailleurs l\u00e0 une des difficult\u00e9s, mais aussi un des plaisirs, du travail du liquoriste.\n\nVoici deux techniques de d\u00e9termination du degr\u00e9 d'alcool de votre liquide.\n\n1. _Avec un alcoom\u00e8tre._\n\nSi vous poss\u00e9dez un tel appareil (vendu par les opticiens, pharmaciens...), vous pourrez conna\u00eetre tr\u00e8s pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment le degr\u00e9 alcoolique de votre eau-de-vie, ainsi que de vos extraits, \u00e0 condition qu'ils ne contiennent pas de sucre. Lorsque vous ajouterez un sirop de sucre, il faudra faire un petit calcul, car le volume de l'ensemble augmentant, le pourcentage d'alcool diminuera l\u00e9g\u00e8rement. Mais si vous ajoutez de l'eau, ou m\u00eame un peu de vin (\u00e0 condition qu'il ne soit pas sucr\u00e9), \u00e0 une eau-de-vie dans laquelle ont seulement mac\u00e9r\u00e9 des plantes, vous pouvez encore vous servir de votre alcoom\u00e8tre.\n\n2. _Sans alcoom\u00e8tre._\n\nDans ce cas il vous faut conna\u00eetre le degr\u00e9 d'alcool ainsi que le volume de chacun de vos ingr\u00e9dients de d\u00e9part : eau-de-vie et vin, mesurer le volume total de vos produits fini, et vous livrer \u00e0 un petit calcul.\n\nPour conna\u00eetre le volume d'un liquide, c'est assez facile. Il suffit, par exemple, d'en remplir des bouteilles de capacit\u00e9 connue : 1 litre, 75 cl, 33 cl, 25 cl, pour les plus courantes. Vous pouvez ainsi vous constituer un jeu de flacons \u00ab jaug\u00e9s \u00bb. Il est bien pratique aussi d'utiliser un verre doseur, pr\u00e9vu pour la cuisine.\n\nPour calculer ensuite le volume total d'alcool pur contenu dans votre boisson, vous additionnez le volume d'alcool pur de l'eau-de-vie et celui du vin. C'est tout! Mais attention aux unit\u00e9s!\n\n### **Exemple**\n\n\u2022 Vous avez fait 0,7 litre d'une liqueur de graines de fenouil avec 1/2 litre d'eau-de-vie \u00e0 40\u00b0 (c'est-\u00e0-dire 40% en volume) et un sirop de sucre (compos\u00e9 d'eau et de sucre); il n'y a donc dans cette liqueur que :\n\n0,5 litre \u00d7 40% = 0,2 litre d'alcool pur.\n\nLe degr\u00e9 alcoolique de cette liqueur est donc \u00e9gal \u00e0 :\n\n(0,2 \u00f7 0,7) \u00d7 100 = 28,5%.\n\n\u2022 Admettons maintenant que vous vouliez ramener ce degr\u00e9 \u00e0 25, il faudra ajouter un peu d'eau, mais combien exactement ?\n\nPour obtenir une boisson \u00e0 25% contenant 0,2 litre d'alcool pur, il faut un volume total de :\n\n(0,2 \u00f7 25) \u00d7 100 = 0,8 litre.\n\nVous devez donc ajouter \u00e0 votre liqueur 0,8 - 0,7 = 0,1 litre d'eau.\n\n**Voici un exemple plus complexe**\n\n\u2022 Vous avez r\u00e9alis\u00e9 un vin ap\u00e9ritif par mac\u00e9ration de folioles de noyer dans 1 litre de vin rouge \u00e0 12% auquel vous avez ajout\u00e9 25 cl (une petite bouteille \u00e0 bi\u00e8re) d'eau-de-vie \u00e0 40%, et 150 g de sucre (sans eau). En consid\u00e9rant (car c'est, presque vrai) que la mac\u00e9ration des feuilles et l'addition de sucre n'ont pas chang\u00e9 notablement le volume du liquide, vous obtenez donc :\n\n(1 l = 100 cl)\n\n100 cl + 25 cl = 125 cl d'ap\u00e9ritif.\n\n\u2022 Quantit\u00e9 d'alcool pur contenu : (100 \u00d7 12%) + (25 \u00d7 40%) = 22 cl Degr\u00e9 alcoolique de cette boisson : (22 : 125) X 100 17,6 %. Ce degr\u00e9 est tr\u00e8s correct pour un tel ap\u00e9ritif, mais si vous vouliez le ramener \u00e0 16%, il faudrait utiliser le principe pr\u00e9c\u00e9dent pour calcu1er la quantit\u00e9 d'eau \u00e0 ajouter : pour obtenir un m\u00e9lange \u00e0 16% contenant 22 cl d'alcool pur, il faut un volume total de :\n\n(22 \u00f7 16) \u00d7 100 = 137,5 cl.\n\n\u2022 Il suffirait donc d'ajouter : 137,5 - 125 = 12,5 cl d'eau.\n\n**Remarque**\n\nIl est beaucoup plus simple de calculer comme ci-dessus un volume d'eau \u00e0 ajouter pour r\u00e9duire le degr\u00e9, qu'un volume d'eau-de-vie pour remonter la teneur en alcool. La raison en est simple : l'addition d'eau ne change que le volume total (pas le volume d'alcool pur contenu), tandis que l'ajout d'eau-de-vie modifie \u00e0 la fois le volume total et la quantit\u00e9 d'alcool pur. _Si vous n'\u00eates pas fort en math\u00e9matiques, mettez donc un peu trop d'alcool au d\u00e9part, plut\u00f4t qu'un peu moins_ ; la rectification sera plus facile.\n\n### **_Comment corriger, am\u00e9liorer, enrichir, colorer, etc. ?_**\n\nComme en cuisine, vous devez maintenant go\u00fbter, et si n\u00e9cessaire, \u00ab rectifier l'assaisonnement \u00bb. Il est encore temps d'ajouter du sucre, de l'eau et \u00e9ventuellement de l'alcool. En particulier, si vous trouvez le go\u00fbt v\u00e9g\u00e9tal beaucoup trop prononc\u00e9 (cela arrive parfois avec des feuilles tr\u00e8s aromatiques), vous pouvez toujours le diluer avec une composition semblable n'ayant pas contenu de plantes.\n\nMais surtout, vous allez pouvoir associer des parfums entre eux, de mani\u00e8re \u00e0 obtenir une liqueur ou un ap\u00e9ritif... \u00e0 votre go\u00fbt. Vous allez ainsi r\u00e9ellement cr\u00e9er un nouveau produit. Pour ce faire, le plus simple est de m\u00e9langer des compositions de m\u00eame degr\u00e9 alcoolique et de m\u00eame teneur en sucre.\n\n**Exemple** : comment obtenir une belle liqueur verte aux multiples parfums ?\n\nVous devez d'abord faire des extraits s\u00e9par\u00e9s par mac\u00e9ration de feuilles \u00e0 l'abri de la lumi\u00e8re (pour la couleur), de graines... puis les sucrer (\u00e0 300 g/l). Le degr\u00e9 alcoolique doit \u00eatre fort (50\u00b0 environ). A ce stade, c'est-\u00e0-dire avant clarification et vieillissement, vous pouvez vous livrer au grand art du liquoriste, en assemblant, dans des proportions que vous notez, ces extraits sucr\u00e9s de diverses plantes : feuilles de verveine, de menthe, de tanaisie, d'estragon, de m\u00e9lisse, de sauge..., graines d'anis, de fenouil, d'ang\u00e9lique... Le nombre des combinaisons possibles est pratiquement infini. Selon votre go\u00fbt, vous pouvez insister davantage sur les ar\u00f4mes anis\u00e9s, menthol\u00e9s ou citronn\u00e9s. La mise au point d'une recette est passionnante et demande de nombreux essais qu'il est pr\u00e9f\u00e9rable d'\u00e9taler sur plusieurs jours, car qui dit de nombreux essais dit de nombreuses d\u00e9gustations.\n\nDans un autre r\u00e9pertoire, vous pouvez rechercher une liqueur compos\u00e9e, \u00e0 base de divers petits fruits de votre jardin : framboises, cassis, groseilles, fraises... mac\u00e9r\u00e9s dans une eau-de-vie de fruit; ou une autre, \u00e0 base de fruits exotiques : oranges, bananes, ananas... avec vanille et rhum. Bien d'autres id\u00e9es vont vous venir. Vous trouverez plusieurs de ces recettes compos\u00e9es en fin de livre.\n\nPour les ap\u00e9ritifs, c'est la m\u00eame chose : un vin aromatis\u00e9 \u00e0 l'aide de feuilles de plusieurs arbres de votre verger (p\u00eacher, cerisier, prunier, noyer) constitue un excellent ap\u00e9ritif. A vous de mettre au point une recette qui vous pla\u00eet, en notant les proportions des diverses feuilles d'une fois sur l'autre et vous pourrez proposer \u00e0 vos amis cette recette personnelle. D'autres recettes compos\u00e9es de vins aromatis\u00e9s vous sont propos\u00e9es plus loin.\n\nUne derni\u00e8re touche de couleur peut rendre votre produit encore plus attrayant. Elle n'est g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement pas n\u00e9cessaire lorsqu'on utilise comme liquide de base du vin rouge ou de l'eau-de-vie vieillie dans un f\u00fbt, car ces substances ont elles-m\u00eames une belle couleur. Il en va de m\u00eame avec des fruits tr\u00e8s color\u00e9s : framboises, prunelles, myrtilles, etc.\n\nL'obtention de la couleur verte avec des feuilles fra\u00eeches a d\u00e9j\u00e0 \u00e9t\u00e9 expliqu\u00e9e ici : c'est la chlorophylle, pigment naturel des feuilles, qui en est responsable. Cependant toutes les feuilles ne donnent pas le m\u00eame r\u00e9sultat; la tanaisie surtout, ainsi que la verveine, sont les plantes les plus colorantes.\n\nPour faire une belle liqueur jaune, le safran est id\u00e9al; il suffit d'en ajouter un peu.\n\nPour foncer une liqueur ou un vin blanc aromatis\u00e9 trop p\u00e2le, vous avez le choix : caf\u00e9, chicor\u00e9e ou caramel que vous retirez du feu juste avant qu'il ne br\u00fble. Dans tous ces cas, vous pourrez marquer sur votre \u00e9tiquette : \u00ab colorants naturels \u00bb.\n\n## **La clarification et le vieillissement**\n\nVotre liqueur ou votre ap\u00e9ritif semble termin\u00e9. Ce n'est qu'une apparence, car avec le temps, des modifications de diverses natures vont se produire dans le liquide : il pourra changer d'aspect, mais aussi de go\u00fbt. Son \u00e9volution vous surprendra peut-\u00eatre : la plupart du temps, il se bonifiera et s'\u00e9claircira tout seul, mais ce n'est pas toujours aussi simple.\n\n### **_Combien de temps attendre avant de consommer ?_**\n\nLorsqu'il s'agit d'un liquide fonc\u00e9 (vin rouge aromatis\u00e9 ou liqueur de caf\u00e9 par exemple), un \u00e9ventuel trouble ou un d\u00e9p\u00f4t important ne sont gu\u00e8re g\u00eanants car on ne les voit pas. Ces boissons peuvent donc se consommer rapidement (mais elles gagneraient \u00e0 vieillir un peu, et \u00e0 \u00eatre clarifi\u00e9es). Par contre, pour un vin blanc aromatis\u00e9, une liqueur rose, jaune ou verte, une transparence parfaite ainsi qu'une absence de d\u00e9p\u00f4t sont n\u00e9cessaires. Il faudra donc attendre un moment avant de \u00ab livrer votre produit \u00e0 la consommation \u00bb.\n\nPendant cette attente, le liquide devra \u00eatre laiss\u00e9 au repos le plus complet. Une temp\u00e9rature basse est pr\u00e9f\u00e9rable; dans une cave fra\u00eeche, c'est l'id\u00e9al. La bouteille (ou bonbonne) devra \u00eatre plac\u00e9e debout. Vous devrez surveiller de temps en temps l'\u00e9volution de l'aspect du contenu. Pour cela, il est bien pratique d'\u00e9clairer \u00e0 travers le verre du r\u00e9cipient \u00e0 l'aide d'une lampe de poche, en cherchant \u00e0 appr\u00e9cier la limpidit\u00e9 et l'\u00e9paisseur du d\u00e9p\u00f4t. C'est par cette surveillance que vous vous rendrez compte un jour que cette p\u00e9riode de clarification naturelle est bien termin\u00e9e, et que vous pourrez donc faire la mise en bouteilles d\u00e9finitive. Cette _d\u00e9cantation_ peut demander quelques jours (cas fr\u00e9quent), quelques semaines, ou parfois plusieurs mois. Les liqueurs \u00e0 base de zestes (oranges, citrons, mandarines...) ou de certains fruits trop \u00e9cras\u00e9s (prunelles, geni\u00e8vre...) sont particuli\u00e8rement longues \u00e0 \u00e9claircir. Les vins auxquels on a ajout\u00e9 des substances riches en tanins (\u00e9corces de quinquina, noix, etc.) d\u00e9posent \u00e9galement tr\u00e8s longtemps.\n\n### **_Comment s\u00e9parer le liquide clair du d\u00e9p\u00f4t ?_**\n\nLa solution la plus simple consiste \u00e0 verser doucement le liquide bien d\u00e9cant\u00e9, dans un autre r\u00e9cipient, en s'arr\u00eatant juste lorsque le d\u00e9p\u00f4t se pr\u00e9sente (voir sch\u00e9ma 1, m\u00eame page).\n\nUne solution plus efficace n\u00e9cessite l'emploi d'un tuyau souple : c'est la m\u00e9thode du _soutirage_ se-Ion le principe du _siphon_ (sch\u00e9ma 2, m\u00eame page). Un tuyau en mati\u00e8re plastique transparente, comme on peut en acheter (au m\u00e8tre) chez divers commer\u00e7ants de pi\u00e8ces d\u00e9tach\u00e9es, fait tr\u00e8s bien l'affaire, \u00e0 condition qu'il ne soit pas trop gros (un diam\u00e8tre int\u00e9rieur de 3 \u00e0 5 mm est id\u00e9al). Vous pourrez acc\u00e9l\u00e9rer ou ralentir l'\u00e9coulement du liquide clair en abaissant ou \u00e9levant la bouteille qui le re\u00e7oit.\n\nLe liquide restant sera moins abondant avec cette m\u00e9thode qu'avec la pr\u00e9c\u00e9dente. Autre avantage : il arrive qu'il se forme en plus du d\u00e9p\u00f4t, une sorte d'\u00e9cume de surface provenant d'essences v\u00e9g\u00e9tales peu denses (c'est le cas avec les zestes); avec votre tuyau, il sera ais\u00e9 de soutirer le liquide limpide compris entre les deux zones d'impuret\u00e9s.\n\nPour ne pas perdre le liquide restant, contenant le d\u00e9p\u00f4t, vous pouvez le laisser d\u00e9canter \u00e0 nouveau, et recommencer la m\u00eame op\u00e9ration. Vous pouvez aussi tenter de le filtrer; le r\u00e9sultat n'est pas garanti, mais cela r\u00e9ussit assez souvent. Les filtres \u00e0 caf\u00e9, en papier, retiennent bien les impuret\u00e9s. Toutefois ces derni\u00e8res sont parfois si fines qu'elles bouchent rapidement tous les pores du filtre, ce qui emp\u00eache tout liquide de passer. Le m\u00eame probl\u00e8me se produit avec des liqueurs tr\u00e8s sucr\u00e9es. Un autre filtre, aux pores plus grands, peut alors \u00eatre utilis\u00e9 : un disque en coton pr\u00e9vu pour filtrer le lait (on en trouve dans toutes les coop\u00e9ratives agricoles des r\u00e9gions d'\u00e9levage laitier); il suffit de plier ce filtre de mani\u00e8re \u00e0 former un c\u00f4ne, qu'on place dans un entonnoir (sch\u00e9ma 3). Lorsque vous pratiquez de telles filtrations, ne soyez pas surpris de devoir laisser le liquide passer goutte \u00e0 goutte pendant une nuit.\n\n### **_Comment mettre en bouteilles et faire vieillir ?_**\n\nLa mise en bouteilles de liqueurs et d'ap\u00e9ritifs n'est pas d\u00e9licate comme celle du vin, car la teneur en alcool sup\u00e9rieure \u00e0 17% \u00e9vite tout risque de fermentation; c'est l'alcool qui prot\u00e8ge le liquide, en emp\u00eachant le d\u00e9veloppement intempestif des levures ou des bact\u00e9ries. Ces boissons ne craignent gu\u00e8re non plus la pr\u00e9sence d'oxyg\u00e8ne; pour les vins ap\u00e9ritifs, cette pr\u00e9sence peut m\u00eame parfois favoriser une bonne \u00e9volution.\n\nIl n'est pas indispensable d'enfoncer compl\u00e8tement les bouchons, ni de coucher les bouteilles. Une conservation au frais et \u00e0 l'abri de la lumi\u00e8re est souhaitable pour les liqueurs. Si vous aimez le go\u00fbt particulier que prennent les vieux vins doux naturels, vos vins aromatis\u00e9s pourront alors \u00eatre plac\u00e9s dans une pi\u00e8ce assez chaude (voire expos\u00e9s au soleil, comme on le fait pour certains banyuls).\n\nLa plupart de vos fabrications gagneront \u00e0 vieillir, mais les liqueurs de fruits (framboises, cassis, fraises...) perdent assez vite leurs parfums et sont meilleures jeunes.\n\nIl n'est pas impossible qu'apr\u00e8s une longue conservation en bouteilles vous constatiez la pr\u00e9sence d'un nouveau d\u00e9p\u00f4t et que vous soyez oblig\u00e9 de l'\u00e9liminer; mais ce n'est plus un probl\u00e8me pour vous : vous connaissez les techniques \u00e0 employer. Au cours du vieillissement, des r\u00e9actions se produisent en effet entre les diff\u00e9rentes substances contenues, ce qui peut entra\u00eener la formation de nouvelles impuret\u00e9s, mais qui va aussi progressivement modifier le go\u00fbt de la boisson. Pour un type donn\u00e9 de liqueur ou d'ap\u00e9ritif, l'exp\u00e9rience vous apprendra combien de temps le faire vieillir, dans vos conditions habituelles, pour qu'il soit parfaitement \u00e0 votre go\u00fbt.\n\nPensez enfin aux \u00e9tiquettes. Elles vous seront indispensables pour reconna\u00eetre vos diverses r\u00e9alisations. Elles devront comporter le nom du spiritueux contenu, et \u00e9ventuellement la date de fabrication, la composition pr\u00e9cise, vos nom et adresse, etc. Soignez l'esth\u00e9tique de vos \u00e9tiquettes, si vous d\u00e9sirez offrir quelques bouteilles \u00e0 vos amis. Vous pouvez m\u00eame faire un petit montage avec une photo de votre maison, que vous multipliez ensuite par photocopie; une telle \u00e9tiquette conviendra parfaitement pour vos produits \u00ab maison \u00bb.\n\n# **LES DIFF\u00c9RENTS AP\u00c9RITIFS**\n\nCe qu'on appelle ap\u00e9ritif actuellement, c'est une boisson que l'on prend juste avant le d\u00e9jeuner ou le d\u00eener, pour se \u00ab mettre en app\u00e9tit \u00bb. Tous les ap\u00e9ritifs n'ont cependant pas des vertus \u00ab ap\u00e9ritives \u00bb, selon le sens plus ancien du mot : qui stimule l'app\u00e9tit et facilite l'ingestion du repas. La tendance actuelle \u00e0 boire des alcools forts (whisky) en guise d'ap\u00e9ritif n'est sans doute pas l'id\u00e9al sur le plan physiologique.\n\n## **Les vins aromatis\u00e9s**\n\nCe sont les plus simples \u00e0 obtenir. On les appelle aussi _vermouths_ et _quinquinas,_ mais ces mots s'utilisent de moins en moins. Un _vermouth_ du commerce est un vin blanc (il doit y en avoir 80%) aromatis\u00e9 \u00e0 l'aide de plantes (dont des armoises), sucr\u00e9, alcoolis\u00e9 et \u00e9ventuellement color\u00e9 avec du caramel. Ex. : le Martini. Un _quinquina,_ c'est un peu la m\u00eame chose, avec de l'\u00e9corce de quinquina dans la liste des plantes, et des mistelles (voir _Les vins de liqueur_) en plus du vin. Ex. : le Saint-Rapha\u00ebl.\n\nLe but de ce livre n'est pas de chercher \u00e0 reproduire ou imiter ces ap\u00e9ritifs connus, mais plut\u00f4t de faire d'autres vins aromatis\u00e9s, avec les ingr\u00e9dients dont vous disposez, et qui seront tout aussi agr\u00e9ables \u00e0 boire en ap\u00e9ritifs.\n\nPour vos fabrications, je vous propose trois niveaux de complexit\u00e9 : les vins aromatis\u00e9s \u00e0 l'aide d'une seule plante (\u00ab recettes simples \u00bb), les m\u00eames auxquels vous ajoutez un ou plusieurs aromates en petites quantit\u00e9s, et enfin des associations de plusieurs plantes (\u00ab recettes compos\u00e9es \u00bb).\n\n### **_Les recettes simples_**\n\n_Recette g\u00e9n\u00e9rale_\n\n(voir aussi sch\u00e9ma)\n\nOn pratique une mac\u00e9ration de plantes soit directement dans du vin additionn\u00e9 d'alcool et de sucre, soit dans de l'alcool seul; dans ce dernier cas, on m\u00e9lange ensuite l'extrait obtenu \u00e0 du vin additionn\u00e9 de sucre. (Pour plus de renseignements g\u00e9n\u00e9raux sur ces m\u00e9thodes de mac\u00e9ration revoyez les techniques.) Le degr\u00e9 final d'alcool doit \u00eatre de l'ordre de 17%, la teneur en sucre, plus ou moins 150 g/l selon le go\u00fbt.\n\n_Recette-type_  \n**Vin aromatis\u00e9 aux feuilles de p\u00eacher**\n\nDans un grand bocal, mettez 80 feuilles de p\u00eacher cueillies le matin, un litre de vin rouge \u00e0 12%, 20 cl (environ un verre et demi) d'eau-de-vie \u00e0 40\u00b0 et 150 g de sucre. Laissez mac\u00e9rer une semaine pr\u00e8s d'une fen\u00eatre. Passez. Mettez en bouteilles. Si possible, attendez quelques semaines avant de consommer.\n\nDe la m\u00eame mani\u00e8re, et en suivant tous les conseils techniques des pages pr\u00e9c\u00e9dentes, vous pouvez r\u00e9aliser les recettes simples suivantes. Les aromates compl\u00e9mentaires sont facultatifs, et \u00e0 ajouter en petites quantit\u00e9, un peu comme un assaisonnement... selon votre go\u00fbt.\n\n#### **_Vins aromatis\u00e9s aux feuilles..._**\n\n**... d'absinthe**\n\nLa fabrication d'une liqueur aromatis\u00e9e avec cette plante \u00e9tant d\u00e9sormais interdite en France (pas en Espagne), ce vin doit l'\u00eatre \u00e9galement. Recette ancienne, \u00e0 consid\u00e9rer plut\u00f4t comme une curiosit\u00e9.\n\n**... d'asp\u00e9rule**\n\nSi vous connaissez l'asp\u00e9rule odorante qui pousse dans les h\u00eatraies, vous pouvez l'utiliser pour aromatiser agr\u00e9ablement du vin blanc.\n\n**... de basilic**\n\n**... de cassis**\n\nLe go\u00fbt rappelle celui des fruits du m\u00eame nom.\n\n**... de cerisier**\n\nChoisissez de pr\u00e9f\u00e9rence un cerisier aigre, et comme alcool du kirsch.\n\n**... de m\u00e9lisse**\n\nCela donne un vin sp\u00e9cial, au go\u00fbt citronn\u00e9.\n\n**... de menthe**\n\nIl ne faut pas mettre trop de feuilles... et aimer la menthe.\n\n**... de noyer**\n\nTr\u00e8s bon ap\u00e9ritif, de couleur fonc\u00e9e (\u00e0 cause du tanin contenu dans les feuilles), et d'un parfum particulier, bien agr\u00e9able. De nombreuses versions de cette recette existent, avec addition d'aromates compl\u00e9mentaires : muscade, vanille, clou de girofle, zestes.\n\n**... de pervenche**\n\n**... de prunellier**\n\nUtilisez les jeunes tiges feuill\u00e9es (compl\u00e8tes), qui font 10 \u00e0 15 cm de longueur et qui poussent en mai. Il en faut beaucoup. Le go\u00fbt obtenu rappelle un peu le noyau de cerise. C'est une tr\u00e8s bonne recette.\n\n**... de prunier**\n\nAvec de l'eau-de-vie de prunes, si possible, et de jeunes feuilles.\n\n**... de romarin  \n... de sarriette  \n... de sauge**\n\nLes feuilles des arbres fruitiers ci-dessus sont le plus souvent mises \u00e0 mac\u00e9rer dans du vin rouge, celles des plantes aromatiques dans du vin blanc, mais vous pouvez aussi faire l'inverse, avec succ\u00e8s.\n\n#### **_Autres vins aromatis\u00e9s..._**\n\nOutre des feuilles, vous pouvez utiliser toutes sortes d'autres parties de plantes pour aromatiser des vins. Comme dans la recette-type pr\u00e9c\u00e9dente, de l'eau-de-vie et du sucre, dans les m\u00eames proportions, sont n\u00e9cessaires pour la conservation et l'\u00e9quilibre du go\u00fbt.\n\nLes recettes suivantes sont rang\u00e9es dans l'ordre alphab\u00e9tique des noms de plantes.\n\n**... aux tiges ou aux racines d'ang\u00e9lique**\n\n**... \u00e0 l'\u00e9corce de bouleau**\n\nAvec l'\u00e9corce de jeunes branches. C'est plut\u00f4t un vin m\u00e9dicinal diur\u00e9tique.\n\n**... aux fleurs de camomille**\n\nAromates compl\u00e9mentaires : vanille, gentiane, zestes d'orange ou de citron.\n\n**... aux baies de cassis**\n\nIl faut \u00e9craser les fruits, puis passer dans un torchon \u00e0 confiture apr\u00e8s mac\u00e9ration. Une filtration sera ensuite n\u00e9cessaire.\n\n**... aux racines torr\u00e9fi\u00e9es de chicor\u00e9e**\n\nAvec 3 ou 4 c \u00e0 s. de chicor\u00e9e. Aromates compl\u00e9mentaires : vanille, zeste d'orange ou de citron.\n\n**... aux graines de fenouil**\n\nUtilisez de pr\u00e9f\u00e9rence du vin blanc. Il faut 150 g de graines \u00e9cras\u00e9es et 8 jours de mac\u00e9ration.\n\n**... aux framboises**\n\nAvec du vin blanc, c'est magnifique et d\u00e9licieux.\n\n**... aux baies de geni\u00e8vre**\n\n**... aux racines de gentiane**\n\nVoil\u00e0 un ap\u00e9ritif au go\u00fbt amer, pour ceux qui en recherchent.\n\n**... aux fleurs de marrube blanc**\n\n**... aux noix vertes**\n\nExcellent ap\u00e9ritif, \u00e0 r\u00e9aliser avec des noix cueillies d\u00e9but juillet, faciles \u00e0 couper en morceaux. Se-Ion les diff\u00e9rentes recettes connues, le nombre de noix \u00e0 utiliser varie de 4 \u00e0 25 par litre! Choisissez! Aromates compl\u00e9mentaires : orange (avec le zeste), gentiane.\n\n**... aux \u00e9corces d'oranges**\n\nSe fait avec le zeste d'oranges ordinaires (non trait\u00e9es) ou celui d'oranges am\u00e8res, qu'on ach\u00e8te, sec, chez un pharmacien par exemple.\n\n**... au zeste de pamplemousse**\n\n**... aux pruneaux**\n\nIl en faut 200 \u00e0 250 g. Ap\u00e9ritif \u00e0 r\u00e9aliser de pr\u00e9f\u00e9rence avec de l'armagnac.\n\n**... \u00e0 l'\u00e9corce de quinquina**\n\nAp\u00e9ritif tr\u00e8s amer (sauf si on met tr\u00e8s peu de quinquina) pouvant surtout servir \u00e0 ajouter de l'amertume \u00e0 d'autres boissons.\n\n**... aux fleurs de sureau noir**\n\nCette recette, faite avec du vin blanc, est g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement donn\u00e9e comme une bonne imitation de muscat (vin doux naturel).\n\nToutes les recettes cit\u00e9es ci-dessus sont bien connues, mais il n'est pas interdit d'en imaginer d'autres, en puisant dans la liste des plantes. Vous pouvez ainsi essayer un vin aromatis\u00e9 avec des feuilles de laurier, ou avec des fraises, ou encore avec de l'anis, etc.\n\n**Sch\u00e9ma g\u00e9n\u00e9ral de l'\u00e9laboration d'un vin aromatis\u00e9**\n\n### **_Les recettes compos\u00e9es_**\n\nIl s'agit cette fois d'assembler plusieurs plantes dans un m\u00eame vin. Cet assemblage peut se r\u00e9aliser de diverses fa\u00e7ons, soit en m\u00e9langeant des extraits dans l'alcool (comme expliqu\u00e9 ici), soit en m\u00ealant des vins finis, soit encore en mettant \u00e0 mac\u00e9rer ensemble les divers ingr\u00e9dients de la recette. Les deux premi\u00e8res m\u00e9thodes conviennent parfaitement pour la recherche d'une recette \u00e0 son go\u00fbt, la troisi\u00e8me s'applique plut\u00f4t aux recettes d\u00e9j\u00e0 bien \u00e9tablies.\n\nVoici quelques exemples classiques et quelques id\u00e9es in\u00e9dites.\n\n#### **Vin amer**\n\nDe nombreuses recettes existent. Elles sont toutes \u00e0 base de quinquina, de gentiane et d'\u00e9corces d'oranges am\u00e8res, en proportions variables. A vous de mettre au point la v\u00f4tre... \u00ab \u00e0 votre go\u00fbt \u00bb. Le vin obtenu pourra aussi vous servir \u00e0 l'\u00e9laboration de certains cocktails.\n\n#### **Vin aux \u00e9pices**\n\nPour un litre de vin, blanc ou rouge, additionn\u00e9 d'alcool (pour faire 17%) et de sucre (environ 100 g) : 15 g de muscade, 4 g de cannelle, quelques clous de girofle, 5 g de vanille. Ces quantit\u00e9s peuvent \u00eatre modifi\u00e9es, et d'autres \u00e9pices ajout\u00e9es.\n\n#### **Vin aux feuilles du verger**\n\nCueillez des feuilles de p\u00eacher, cerisier, noyer, prunier, cassis; ajoutez le sucre, l'eau-de-vie et le vin, et laissez mac\u00e9rer 8 jours. Selon vos pr\u00e9f\u00e9rences, vous pourrez obtenir un go\u00fbt dominant ou non, en faisant varier les proportions des diff\u00e9rentes feuilles.\n\n#### **Vin aux fruits exotiques**\n\nC'est presque une sangria. La diff\u00e9rence, c'est que vous enl\u00e8verez les morceaux de fruits pour la mise en bouteilles. Selon votre go\u00fbt, utilisez oranges, bananes, ananas, mangues, kiwis, litchis... Pour l'alcool, le rhum blanc ou le kirsch conviennent particuli\u00e8rement bien.\n\n#### **Vin aux fruits rouges**\n\nLorsque votre jardin regorge de fraises, cerises et groseilles, n'h\u00e9sitez pas \u00e0 r\u00e9aliser cet excellent ap\u00e9ritif maison. Vous pouvez y ajouter un peu de quinquina ou d'orange am\u00e8re.\n\n#### **Vin aux fruits secs**\n\nUn savant m\u00e9lange de figues, dattes, raisins secs, pruneaux, abricots secs... selon votre go\u00fbt et vos possibilit\u00e9s, vous donneront un ap\u00e9ritif original.\n\n## **Les alcools aromatis\u00e9s**\n\nLa base est une eau-de-vie blanche et forte. On y fait mac\u00e9rer des plantes, puis on sucre, et \u00e9ventuellement on ajoute de l'eau pour r\u00e9duire la teneur en alcool, \u00e0 moins que cette derni\u00e8re op\u00e9ration ne soit faite qu'au moment de servir, dans le verre. En voici quatre exemples bien connus.\n\n#### **Guignolet**\n\nC'est une liqueur de cerises (de guignes ou de griottes). Elle est obtenue apr\u00e8s plusieurs semaines de mac\u00e9ration des fruits l\u00e9g\u00e8rement \u00e9cras\u00e9s et encore pourvus de leur p\u00e9doncule (queue), dans de l'alcool neutre (ou mieux dans du kirsch). Elle est ramen\u00e9e \u00e0 16/18% avec de l'eau, et sucr\u00e9e comme un ap\u00e9ritif (100 \u00e0 150 g de sucre/litre).\n\n#### **Pastis**\n\nEn faisant mac\u00e9rer une bonne quantit\u00e9 d'anis \u00e9toil\u00e9 (ou badiane) et un peu de racine de r\u00e9glisse dans de l'alcool que vous ramenez ensuite \u00e0 45% environ et que vous sucrez un peu, vous obtenez une assez bonne imitation de pastis.\n\n#### **Liqueur de gentiane**\n\nLaissez mac\u00e9rer plusieurs semaines des morceaux de racines de grande gentiane dans de l'alcool fort; puis, pour imiter la Suze, ramenez \u00e0 16% avec de l'eau et dissolvez 200 g de sucre par litre. Remarque : la Suze contient en plus de l'esprit de gentiane et divers extraits aromatiques; ce que vous obtiendrez s'en rapprochera mais n'en aura pas exactement le go\u00fbt.\n\n#### **Bitter ou amer**\n\nOn donne ces noms \u00e0 des liqueurs de go\u00fbt tr\u00e8s amer, qu'on peut boire en ap\u00e9ritif, allong\u00e9es d'eau gazeuse, et qui entrent dans la composition de nombreux cocktails. La liqueur de gentiane propos\u00e9e ci-dessus est un exemple de bitter. Vous en obtiendrez \u00e9galement par mac\u00e9ration de zestes d'oranges, de citrons et surtout d'oranges am\u00e8res, ou encore en utilisant des \u00e9corces de quinquina. Vous pouvez d'ailleurs m\u00e9langer plusieurs de ces ingr\u00e9dients : un sachet de racines s\u00e9ch\u00e9es de gentiane, des \u00e9corces d'oranges am\u00e8res et un peu de quinquina dans un grand bocal d'eau-de-vie. Vous pourrez alors soutirer au fur et \u00e0 mesure de vos besoins et remplacer par le m\u00eame volume d'eau-de-vie. Pour consommer, il faudra r\u00e9duire le degr\u00e9 \u00e0 votre convenance, et sucrer l\u00e9g\u00e8rement.\n\n## **Les vins de liqueur**\n\nCe sont des ap\u00e9ritifs tr\u00e8s c\u00e9l\u00e8bres, obtenus par adjonction d'alcool au jus de raisin non ferment\u00e9 (exemple : pineau des Charentes), ou en cours (voire en fin) de fermentation (exemples : porto, mad\u00e8re, vins doux naturels...). Ils titrent, selon la loi fran\u00e7aise, entre 15 et 2%\u00b0 d'alcool.\n\n### **_Les mistelles_**\n\nC'est le nom donn\u00e9 aux vins de liqueur obtenus sans fermentation, en ajoutant de l'eau-de-vie \u00e0 du mo\u00fbt de raisin, c'est-\u00e0-dire du jus n'ayant pas encore commenc\u00e9 \u00e0 fermenter. C'est le sucre naturel du jus de raisin qui donne le go\u00fbt sucr\u00e9; l'alcool emp\u00eache le d\u00e9part de la fermentation (il doit donc y en avoir au moins 17% en volume).\n\nDans le commerce, outre le pineau des Charentes (\u00e9labor\u00e9 avec du cognac), on peut trouver deux autres mistelles : floc de Gascogne (avec de l'armagnac) et ratafia de Champagne. Traditionnellement dans les campagnes, on fait encore des mistelles; on les appelle \u00ab carthag\u00e8ne \u00bb dans le Midi, \u00ab riquiqui \u00bb en Bourgogne, etc.\n\nL'\u00e9laboration d'une mistelle est assez simple : on assemble du jus de raisin avec de l'eau-de-vie de vin d'un an (ou plus), de telle sorte que le m\u00e9lange titre 18 \u00e0 20\u00b0 d'alcool. Puis on laisse vieillir quelques ann\u00e9es en f\u00fbt de ch\u00eane. Pour un amateur, le vieillissement en f\u00fbt peut \u00eatre remplac\u00e9 par l'utilisation d'un alcool d\u00e9j\u00e0 vieilli en tonneau : cognac, armagnac... mais cela revient cher, car il faut presque autant de cognac... que de jus de raisin! Autre solution : faire vieillir dans une bonbonne contenant des copeaux de ch\u00eane (c'est efficace et tout \u00e0 fait naturel).\n\nM\u00eame avec une vieille eau-de-vie, il faut attendre au minimum deux ou trois mois que le m\u00e9lange s'\u00e9claircisse, pour pouvoir soutirer le liquide clarifi\u00e9, et commencer \u00e0 consommer.\n\nVoici deux exemples de recettes.\n\n#### **Pineau maison**\n\nDans un tonnelet (ou une bonbonne garnie de copeaux de ch\u00eane), versez 1/3 d'eau-de-vie de vin \u00e0 60%, et compl\u00e9tez avec du mo\u00fbt de raisin bien m\u00fbr (peu acide). Laissez vieillir. Vous pouvez commencer \u00e0 en prendre (en soutirant avec un tuyau) au bout de quelques mois, et laisser le reste se bonifier en vieillissant.\n\n#### **Carthag\u00e8ne**\n\nRemplissez un petit f\u00fbt avec de l'eau de vie la plus forte possibleet du mo\u00fbt de raisin tr\u00e8s sucr\u00e9 (grenache de pr\u00e9f\u00e9rence) de telle sorte que le m\u00e9lange contienne au moins 16% d'alcool pur. Soutirez l'ann\u00e9e suivante.\n\nBien qu'il ne s'agisse pas d'une v\u00e9ritable mistelle, le _pommeau_ (commercialis\u00e9 en Normandie) trouve tout naturellement sa place ici. C'est en effet un excellent ap\u00e9ritif obtenu en assemblant de l'eau-de-vie de cidre (du calvados par exemple), et du jus de pomme bien sucr\u00e9, celui qui s'\u00e9coule en premier du pressoir lorsqu'on fait le cidre. Les principes \u00e0 respecter sont les m\u00eames que pr\u00e9c\u00e9demment :\n\n\u2014 utiliser de l'eau-de-vie d'au moins un an;\n\n\u2014 obtenir un m\u00e9lange \u00e0 18/20%;\n\n\u2014 laisser vieillir au contact du bois de ch\u00eane;\n\n\u2014 soutirer apr\u00e8s clarification.\n\nOn peut imaginer et r\u00e9aliser d'autres ap\u00e9ritifs en suivant ces m\u00eames principes, selon l'eau-de-vie disponible :\n\n\u2014 eau-de-vie de prune et jus de prunes bien m\u00fbres;\n\n\u2014 kirsch et jus de cerise;\n\n\u2014 eau-de-vie de poire et jus de poire, etc.\n\n### **_Les vins doux naturels_**\n\nIls sont difficiles \u00e0 obtenir pour un amateur, car il faut bien ma\u00eetriser les probl\u00e8mes de fermentation (voir le livre _Faites votre vin,_ dans lequel une technique est propos\u00e9e pour \u00e9laborer ce type de vin). Il est cependant possible et assez facile d'en faire de bonnes imitations.\n\nLa plupart des recettes permettant d'imiter ces vins sont en fait des recettes de vins aromatis\u00e9s (exemple : une poign\u00e9e de fleurs de sureau s\u00e9ch\u00e9es dans du vin blanc sucr\u00e9 et renforc\u00e9 \u00e0 l'alcool donne une imitation de muscat).\n\nLa technique suivante est beaucoup plus proche de l'\u00e9laboration de certains vins doux naturels, comme le banyuls. Dans une bonbonne de verre de 15 litres, vous mettez 9 litres de vin rouge \u00e0 12% ayant une faible acidit\u00e9 (du grenache serait l'id\u00e9al, mais c'est possible avec d'autres vins), vous ajoutez 900 grammes de sucre (ou un peu plus, ou un peu moins, selon votre go\u00fbt) et 1 l d'eau-de-vie de vin \u00e0 50\u00b0), ce qui vous donne un m\u00e9lange \u00e0 16%. Vous laissez cette bonbonne remplie aux 2/3 et bouch\u00e9e, dehors, expos\u00e9e au soleil et soumise aux variations de temp\u00e9rature. Au bout de quelques mois, d\u00e9bouchez et sentez : une forte et agr\u00e9able odeur de vin doux naturel se d\u00e9gage. Il ne vous restera plus qu'\u00e0 clarifier le liquide par deux ou trois soutirages alternant avec des p\u00e9riodes de repos en cave.\n\n# **LES DIVERSES LIQUEURS**\n\nDans ce chapitre, il ne sera question que des liqueurs prises habituellement en digestifs. Certaines peuvent aussi \u00eatre utilis\u00e9es en cuisine, pour parfumer des g\u00e2teaux par exemple, ou servir \u00e0 l'\u00e9laboration du cocktails. Il en existe deux cat\u00e9gories, selon leur mode de fabrication : par mac\u00e9ration de plantes dans l'alcool (on peut alors les appeler \u00ab ratafias \u00bb), et par assemblage d'extraits aromatiques obtenus par distillation. Ce dernier mode est le plus utilis\u00e9 par les professionnels; nous nous contenterons du premier, qui donne lui aussi d'excellents r\u00e9sultats.\n\nLe classement des liqueurs d\u00e9crites ici est bas\u00e9 sur la nature des parties de plantes utilis\u00e9es. Pour chaque exemple, la mani\u00e8re de se procurer les ingr\u00e9dients, et la fa\u00e7on exacte de proc\u00e9der ne sont pas r\u00e9p\u00e9t\u00e9es : reportez-vous aux deux premiers chapitres. N'h\u00e9sitez pas non plus \u00e0 vous servir de l'index : un m\u00eame nom de plante pourra vous renvoyer aux pages o\u00f9 vous apprendrez comment vous procurer la plante, comment l'employer pour \u00e9laborer un ap\u00e9ritif et une liqueur.\n\n## **Les liqueurs de fruits charnus**\n\nCe sont souvent celles des premiers essais, r\u00e9alis\u00e9es avec les exc\u00e9dents du jardin : framboises, fraises, cassis... Ces liqueurs ne posent gu\u00e8re de probl\u00e8mes particuliers et le r\u00e9sultat est la plupart du temps tr\u00e8s r\u00e9ussi. Toutefois il faut tenir compte du volume du jus des fruits, ainsi que de la quantit\u00e9 de sucre qu'ils apportent, pour obtenir le degr\u00e9 d'alcool et la teneur en sucre recherch\u00e9s, et ce n'est pas toujours tr\u00e8s simple. Mais rassurez-vous, m\u00eame sans calculs, et avec un peu d'exp\u00e9rience, vous confectionnerez avec ces fruits de d\u00e9licieuses liqueurs aux jolies couleurs.\n\n### **_Les recettes simples_**\n\nCe sont celles r\u00e9alis\u00e9es avec une seule vari\u00e9t\u00e9 de fruits charnus.\n\n_Recette g\u00e9n\u00e9rale_ (voir aussi sch\u00e9ma p. 35)\n\nLes fruits sont choisis bien m\u00fbrs, mais pas trop. La dur\u00e9e de la mac\u00e9ration doit \u00eatre importante : plusieurs semaines ou m\u00eame, quelques mois (si vous avez la patience d'attendre!). Le degr\u00e9 d'alcool final peut varier de 16\u00b0 \u00e0 35\u00b0. Le nom de \u00ab cr\u00e8me \u00bb d\u00e9signe une liqueur \u00e0 consistance sirupeuse en raison de sa forte teneur en sucre (400 \u00e0 500 g/l); la proportion en sucre des autres liqueurs de fruits est souvent de l'ordre de 250-300 g/l, mais vous pouvez aussi les pr\u00e9f\u00e9rer moins sucr\u00e9es.\n\n_Recette-type :_  \n**Liqueur de framboise**\n\nDans un bocal en verre, mettez 1 kg de framboises et 21 d'eau-de-vie. Laissez mac\u00e9rer (si possible au soleil) pendant un mois. Passez au tamis : un premier jus, bien clair, s'\u00e9coule. Pressez les framboises dans un torchon \u00e0 confiture et filtrez le jus obtenu avant de le m\u00e9langer au pr\u00e9c\u00e9dent. Sucrer \u00e0 l'aide d'un sirop compos\u00e9 de 500 g de sucre et d'1/4 l d'eau port\u00e9s quelques minutes \u00e0 \u00e9bullition. Filtrez l'ensemble au bout d'une semaine ou deux, et mettez en bouteilles. (Remarque : il existe bien d'autres recettes possibles de liqueur de framboise.)\n\n**Sch\u00e9ma g\u00e9n\u00e9ral de l'\u00e9laboration d'une liqueur**\n\nEn proc\u00e9dant de la m\u00eame fa\u00e7on, ou d'une mani\u00e8re un peu diff\u00e9rente (voir les diverses techniques possibles dans la deuxi\u00e8me partie), vous pouvez r\u00e9aliser, \u00e0 votre go\u00fbt (selon la nature et le degr\u00e9 de l'alcool utilis\u00e9, la quantit\u00e9 de sucre, etc.) les liqueurs suivantes. Elles sont rang\u00e9es par ordre alphab\u00e9tique des noms de fruits. Comme pour les vins aromatis\u00e9s, les aromates compl\u00e9mentaires sont facultatifs et \u00e0 ajouter \u00e0 la mani\u00e8re d'un assaisonnement.\n\n#### **Liqueur d'abricot**\n\nIl faut des abricots bien parfum\u00e9s. Ouvrez les fruits et laissez les noyaux. La mac\u00e9ration est assez longue (2 mois environ).\n\n#### **Liqueur d'ananas**\n\nAvec un ananas coup\u00e9 en petits morceaux. Aromate compl\u00e9mentaire : une gousse de vanille.\n\n#### **Liqueur de banane**\n\nConvient bien en cr\u00e8me \u00e0 30% environ.\n\n#### **Liqueur de cassis**\n\n\u00c9crasez d'abord un peu les baies de cassis. S'il s'agit d'une cr\u00e8me, remplacez une partie de l'eau-de-vie par du vin rouge, de telle sorte que votre liqueur ne contienne que 16 \u00e0 18% d'alcool et sucrez \u00e0 400 g/l. Aromates compl\u00e9mentaires : girofle, cannelle.\n\n#### **Liqueur de c\u00e9drat**\n\nAvec le jus et le zeste. Aromates compl\u00e9mentaires : cannelle, coriandre.\n\n#### **Liqueur de cerise**\n\nTr\u00e8s bonne avec des griottes. Utilisez du kirsch, si vous pouvez.\n\n#### **Liqueur de coing**\n\nSe fait avec des coings r\u00e2p\u00e9s recouverts d'eau-de-vie, ou mieux avec du jus de coing (mais il faut un petit pressoir ou une centrifugeuse pour jus de fruits).\n\n#### **Liqueur de fraise**\n\nAvec les fraises du jardin ou des fraises des bois.\n\n#### **Liqueur de geni\u00e8vre**\n\nNe pas \u00e9craser les baies. Comptez une poign\u00e9e ou deux de fruits par litre.\n\n#### **Liqueur de kiwi, liqueur de m\u00fbre**\n\n#### **Liqueur de myrte**\n\n\u00c9crasez un peu 2 ou 3 poign\u00e9es de baies de myrte, pour 1 l d'eau-de-vie.\n\n#### **Liqueur de n\u00e8fle**\n\nLes n\u00e8fles doivent \u00eatre \u00e9cras\u00e9es. Laissez les noyaux.\n\n#### **Liqueur de noix verte**\n\nChoisissez des noix encore tendres (en juillet), et coupez-les en morceaux. Aromates compl\u00e9mentaires : cannelle, coriandre, clous de girofle, citron... vous avez le choix!\n\n#### **Liqueur d'orange**\n\nIl faut 3 belles oranges pour 1 l d'eau-de-vie. Les couper en morceaux, sans enlever le zeste. Aromates compl\u00e9mentaires : vanille, clous de girofle, grains de caf\u00e9.\n\n#### **Liqueur de p\u00eache**\n\nUtilisez du jus de p\u00eache.\n\n#### **Liqueur de poire**\n\nAvec le jus de poires bien parfum\u00e9es, et de l'eau-de-vie de poire si possible. Aromates compl\u00e9mentaires : cannelle, girofle.\n\n#### **Liqueur de prune**\n\nAvec de petites prunes de pr\u00e9f\u00e9rence (mirabelles), ouvertes ou piqu\u00e9es \u00e0 l'aide d'une aiguille.\n\n#### **Liqueur de prunelle**\n\nIl est pr\u00e9f\u00e9rable de ne pas \u00e9craser les prunelles et de les laisser mac\u00e9rer longtemps (2 mois environ).\n\n#### **Liqueur de raisin**\n\n\u00c9crasez 1 kg de raisin tr\u00e8s parfum\u00e9 (muscat par exemple) et laissez mac\u00e9rer avec 1 l d'eau-de-vie de vin de pr\u00e9f\u00e9rence.\n\n### **_Les recettes compos\u00e9es_**\n\nPlusieurs fruits diff\u00e9rents sont mis \u00e0 mac\u00e9rer ensemble, \u00e0 moins que vous ne pr\u00e9f\u00e9riez la technique de l'assemblage d'extraits (voir p. 20).\n\n#### **Liqueur de cassis et framboise**\n\nLe m\u00e9lange des deux fruits \u00e9cras\u00e9s et mis \u00e0 mac\u00e9rer ensemble donne de tr\u00e8s savoureuses liqueurs ou cr\u00e8mes.\n\n#### **Liqueur de fruits du verger**\n\nAvec vos cerises, prunes, p\u00eaches... Comme ces fruits ne m\u00fbrissent pas en m\u00eame temps, utilisez la technique donn\u00e9e ci-apr\u00e8s pour la liqueur de vieux gar\u00e7on.\n\n#### **Liqueur de fruits exotiques**\n\nFaites mac\u00e9rer ensemble, dans du rhum par exemple, des morceaux d'ananas, banane, kiwi, mangue, orange, etc. Parfumez avec une gousse de vanille.\n\n#### **Liqueur de fruits sauvages**\n\nAssociez des petits fruits r\u00e9colt\u00e9s dans la nature : m\u00fbres, prunelles, myrtilles, fraises des bois...\n\n#### **Liqueur des petits fruits du jardin**\n\nAvec vos fraises, groseilles, framboises, cassis...\n\n#### **Liqueur des 4 fruits rouges**\n\nAvec des cerises, fraises, framboises et groseilles.\n\n#### **Liqueur de vieux gar\u00e7on**\n\nDans un tr\u00e8s grand bocal, mettez d'abord quelques oranges et citrons coup\u00e9s en rondelles (avec leur zeste), ajoutez le m\u00eame poids de sucre et recouvrez d'eau-de-vie. Puis, du printemps \u00e0 l'automne, compl\u00e9tez votre bocal en renouvelant plusieurs fois l'op\u00e9ration avec les fruits de saison qui se pr\u00e9senteront : fraises, cerises, framboises, cassis, abricots, p\u00eaches, prunes, poires... S\u00e9parez les fruits (qui peuvent d'ailleurs \u00eatre consomm\u00e9s), filtrez et d\u00e9gustez \u00e0 No\u00ebl.\n\n## **Les liqueurs de fruits secs, graines, noyaux et zestes**\n\nPour ces liqueurs, les ingr\u00e9dients proviendront plus souvent des magasins (\u00e9piceries, herboristeries) que de votre jardin ou votre verger. Leur go\u00fbt est tr\u00e8s vari\u00e9, et souvent excellent : anis, caf\u00e9, mandarine...\n\n### **_Les recettes simples_**\n\n_Recette g\u00e9n\u00e9rale_\n\nL'ingr\u00e9dient choisi doit d'abord \u00eatre r\u00e9duit en petits morceaux, puis couvert largement d'eau-de-vie. La mac\u00e9ration dure quelques semaines (elle est souvent assez rapide). Il suffit ensuite de passer, d'ajouter le sirop de sucre et de r\u00e9gler le degr\u00e9 d'alcool (g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement \u00e9lev\u00e9). Une semaine plus tard, un soutirage et, si besoin est, une filtration pr\u00e9c\u00e8deront la mise en bouteilles.\n\n_Recette-type :_  \n**L'anisette**\n\nDans un litre d'alcool \u00e0 90\u00b0 faites mac\u00e9rer pendant un mois 30 \u00e0 40 grammes de graines d'anis vert (vous pouvez y ajouter des graines de coriandre et un peu de cannelle, mais ce n'est pas obligatoire). Passez et ajoutez un sirop compos\u00e9 de 500 g de sucre et d'un litre d'eau. Filtrez au bout de quelques jours. Mettez en bouteilles.\n\nVoici, toujours par ordre alphab\u00e9tique, d'autres liqueurs qui se font de la m\u00eame mani\u00e8re.\n\n#### **Liqueur de badiane**\n\nAnisette d'un go\u00fbt diff\u00e9rent.\n\n#### **Liqueur de cacao**\n\nAvec des f\u00e8ves de cacao torr\u00e9fi\u00e9es (ou qu'on fait griller \u00e0 la po\u00eale). Il en faut au moins 100 g pour 1 l d'alcool fort. Convient bien en cr\u00e8me.\n\n#### **Liqueur de caf\u00e9**\n\nAvec du caf\u00e9 moulu (choisissez de l'arabica), ou du caf\u00e9 (liquide) tr\u00e8s fort. Aromate compl\u00e9mentaire : vanille.\n\n#### **Liqueur de citron ou citronnette**\n\nAvec des zestes de citron. Aromates compl\u00e9mentaires : cannelle, girofle. On peut colorer \u00e0 l'aide d'un caramel bien brun.\n\n#### **Liqueur de coriandre**\n\n#### **Liqueur de cumin**\n\nUne journ\u00e9e de mac\u00e9ration de graines de cumin dans l'alcool suffit.\n\n#### **Liqueur de fenouil ou fenouillette**\n\nComptez environ 50 g de graines de fenouil pour 1 l d'eau-de-vie.\n\n#### **Liqueur de mandarine**\n\nAvec les zestes. Comptez une dizaine de mandarines (ou cl\u00e9mentines) pour un litre d'eau-de-vie.\n\n#### **Liqueur de noisette ou noisettine**\n\nAvec des noisettes l\u00e9g\u00e8rement \u00e9cras\u00e9es. Convient bien en cr\u00e8me. Une variante : grillez d'abord vos noisettes \u00e0 la po\u00eale. Vous pouvez aussi ajouter un peu de vanille.\n\n#### **Liqueur de noix**\n\n\u00c9pluchez des noix et recouvrez-les d'eau-de-vie. La couleur et le go\u00fbt sont bien diff\u00e9rents de ceux de la liqueur de noix verte.\n\n#### **Liqueur de noix de coco**\n\n#### **Liqueur de noyau**\n\nPlusieurs mois de mac\u00e9ration sont n\u00e9cessaires pour \u00e9laborer ces liqueurs de noyaux (non cass\u00e9s) d'abricots, de cerises, de n\u00e8fles, de prunes ou de prunelles. Sucrez \u00e0 votre go\u00fbt.\n\n#### **Liqueur de vanille**\n\nIl faut 6 \u00e0 8 gousses de vanille pour 1 l de rhum blanc ou d'une autre eau-de-vie. Convient bien en cr\u00e8me.\n\n### **_Les recettes compos\u00e9es_**\n\n#### **Liqueur des deux anis**\n\nQuel anis pr\u00e9f\u00e9rez-vous, l'anis vert ou l'anis \u00e9toil\u00e9 (ou badiane) ? Si vous n'arrivez pas \u00e0 vous d\u00e9cider, faites une anisette avec les deux plantes.\n\n#### **Liqueur de diverses graines**\n\nChoisissez dans les exemples ci-dessus les graines dont le go\u00fbt vous pla\u00eet, et associez-les dans une m\u00eame liqueur, que vous pouvez baptiser par exemple \u00ab liqueur des cinq graines \u00bb (s'il y en a 5). Plusieurs essais sur de petites quantit\u00e9s sont n\u00e9cessaires. Le r\u00e9sultat est souvent tr\u00e8s bon.\n\nPlut\u00f4t que de mettre les graines \u00e0 mac\u00e9rer ensemble, vous pouvez aussi assembler des liqueurs d\u00e9j\u00e0 pr\u00eates, c'est plus facile de d\u00e9couvrir ainsi les bonnes associations.\n\n#### **Liqueur de divers noyaux**\n\nImmergez toutes sortes de noyaux (\u00e9vitez ceux de p\u00eaches) dans de l'eau-de-vie sucr\u00e9e. Patientez plusieurs mois.\n\n#### **Liqueur de divers zestes**\n\nM\u00e9langez des \u00e9corces de mandarine, de citron, de pamplemousse, d'orange douce ou am\u00e8re, etc.\n\n#### **Liqueur exotique**\n\nEncore une! Associez caf\u00e9, vanille et zestes de mandarine, c'est excellent.\n\n#### **Liqueur de vespetro**\n\nC'est une liqueur \u00e9labor\u00e9e \u00e0 partir de \u00ab graines \u00bb (ce sont en fait de petits fruits secs) de 3 ou 4 esp\u00e8ces d'ombellif\u00e8res : anis vert, ang\u00e9lique, coriandre, et \u00e9ventuellement fenouil. Plusieurs recettes existent, avec des proportions variables, et souvent un peu de zeste de citron; trouvez celle qui vous convient, en commen\u00e7ant, par exemple, par mettre 10 g de chaque dans 1 l d'alcool, pendant 2 semaines.\n\n#### **Mathusalem**\n\nLaissez mac\u00e9rer pendant 2 mois dans 1 l d'eau-de-vie 8 g de coriandre, 2g de graines d'anis vert, 2 g de cannelle, 2 clous de girofle et 1 gousse de vanille.\n\n## **Les liqueurs de feuilles, tiges, fleurs**\n\nCe sont des liqueurs de plantes, comme il en existe de c\u00e9l\u00e8bres : B\u00e9n\u00e9dictine, Chartreuse, Izarra, Verveine... qu'il n'est pas possible de reproduire exactement, car leur \u00e9laboration fait intervenir des op\u00e9rations de distillation, et la nature des nombreuses plantes (48 pour l'Izarra verte) qui les composent est g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement tenue secr\u00e8te. Il est toutefois possible de les imiter un peu, par simple mac\u00e9ration de feuilles assez faciles \u00e0 trouver. Ce sont les recettes compos\u00e9es qui s'en rapprocheront le plus; mais certaines recettes simples sont \u00e9galement excellentes.\n\n### **_Les recettes simples_**\n\n_Recette g\u00e9n\u00e9rale_\n\nIl suffit de mettre \u00e0 mac\u00e9rer les feuilles, tiges ou fleurs, fra\u00eeches ou s\u00e8ches, dans de l'alcool fort ou de l'eau-de-vie assez neutre, puis de sucrer \u00e0 sa convenance \u00e0 l'aide d'un sirop. La mac\u00e9ration sera tr\u00e8s courte (un jour ou deux) pour des feuilles fines et aromatiques, beaucoup plus longue pour des tiges \u00e9paisses (quelques semaines). Le degr\u00e9 d'alcool de ce type de liqueur est souvent tr\u00e8s \u00e9lev\u00e9 : environ 50% pour les liqueurs vertes, 40% pour les liqueurs jaunes; il est possible d'en faire de moins alcoolis\u00e9es (30 \u00e0 35%). La teneur en sucre est g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement de l'ordre de 300 g/l. Rappel : la couleur verte provient de la mac\u00e9ration de certaines feuilles (comme celles de la tanaisie ou de la verveine) \u00e0 l'obscurit\u00e9, tandis que la couleur jaune s'obtient en ajoutant du safran.\n\n_Recette-type :_  \n**La liqueur de tanaisie**\n\nLaissez mac\u00e9rer deux jours, \u00e0 l'abri de la lumi\u00e8re, une poign\u00e9e de feuilles de tanaisie dans de l'eau-de-vie blanche tr\u00e8s forte. Enlevez les feuilles. Ajoutez un sirop compos\u00e9 de 300 g de sucre et d'un grand verre d'eau (15 cl). Vous obtenez ainsi une liqueur d'une magnifique couleur verte, au parfum prononc\u00e9 de la plante (qu'on appelle d'ailleurs \u00ab chartreuse \u00bb dans certaines r\u00e9gions). Cette liqueur peut se boire pure, ou servir de base \u00e0 l'\u00e9laboration d'une liqueur verte compos\u00e9e de plusieurs plantes.\n\nVoici d'autres exemples de recettes simples.\n\n#### **_Liqueur de feuilles..._**\n\n#### **... d'absinthe**\n\nOn en trouve encore des recettes, mais sa fabrication est d\u00e9sormais interdite en France, en raison de la toxicit\u00e9 de certaines substances qu'elle contient (le thuyol en particulier). A \u00e9viter.\n\n#### **... d'ang\u00e9lique**\n\nLaissez mac\u00e9rer une semaine. Aromates compl\u00e9mentaires : vanille, girofle, zeste d'orange, brin de menthe. A laisser vieillir.\n\n#### **... de basilic**\n\nIl faut une grosse poign\u00e9e de feuilles pour 1 l d'alcool.\n\n#### **... de cassis**\n\nAvec une poign\u00e9e de jeunes feuilles fra\u00eeches. R\u00e9duire le degr\u00e9 (\u00e0 35%) avec du vin blanc.\n\n#### **... de citronnelle**\n\nAutre nom de la m\u00e9lisse (voir ce mot). On appelle encore citronnelle d'autres plantes, dont une est facile \u00e0 trouver, car elle est vendue s\u00e9ch\u00e9e comme plante \u00e0 tisane; vous pouvez aussi en faire une liqueur.\n\n#### **... d'estragon**\n\nIl faut environ 40 g de feuilles (par litre d'eau-de-vie), et laisser mac\u00e9rer longtemps (plusieurs semaines). Aromate compl\u00e9mentaire : vanille (vous pouvez par exemple ajouter un sachet de sucre vanill\u00e9). Cette liqueur doit vieillir, et ressemble alors (selon certains) \u00e0 la B\u00e9n\u00e9dictine.\n\n#### **... de g\u00e9n\u00e9pi**\n\n#### **... d'hysope**\n\n#### **... de laurier**\n\nAromates compl\u00e9mentaires : muscade, girofle.\n\n#### **... de m\u00e9lisse**\n\nLes feuilles (fra\u00eeches ou s\u00e8ches) de m\u00e9lisse (ou citronnelle) doivent mac\u00e9rer assez longtemps (environ 8 jours).\n\n#### **... de menthe**\n\nConvient bien en cr\u00e8me.\n\n#### **... de myrte**\n\n#### **... de p\u00eacher**\n\nSon go\u00fbt de noyau est tr\u00e8s appr\u00e9ci\u00e9. Cette liqueur peut ne contenir que 150 g de sucre par litre, elle n'en sera que meilleure.\n\n#### **... de persil**\n\nUne curiosit\u00e9 \u00e0 essayer.\n\n#### **... de romarin**\n\n#### **... de sauge**\n\nAvec des feuilles de sauge, fra\u00eeches si possible, auxquelles vous pouvez ajouter une pinc\u00e9e de feuilles de menthe.\n\n#### **... de th\u00e9**\n\nFaites mac\u00e9rer du th\u00e9 (feuilles s\u00e9ch\u00e9es) dans de l'eau-de-vie, mais n'en mettez pas trop (1 c. \u00e0 s. pour 1 l suffit).\n\n#### **... de verveine**\n\nAvec une centaine de feuilles par litre d'eau-de-vie et un ou deux mois de mac\u00e9ration. On peut remplacer une partie du sucre par du miel. Le r\u00e9sultat est une magnifique liqueur verte.\n\n#### **_Liqueurs de fleurs..._**\n\nPour ces liqueurs la mac\u00e9ration doit durer environ un mois.\n\n#### **... d'acacia**\n\nCompter 300 grappes de fleurs par litre d'eau-de-vie. Vous pouvez ajouter un peu de vanille.\n\n#### **... de bouillon blanc**\n\nIl faut beaucoup de fleurs.\n\n#### **... de camomille**\n\n#### **... de jasmin**\n\nCueillez 150 \u00e0 200 g de fleurs (pour 1 l). Certaines recettes conseillent de jeter les fleurs dans le sirop de sucre br\u00fblant, puis de laisser refroidir cette infusion avant d'ajouter l'alcool:\n\n#### **... de magnolia**\n\nAvec des p\u00e9tales de fleurs blanches coup\u00e9s en morceaux, et un peu de vanille.\n\n#### **... de millepertuis**\n\nUtilisez pour la mac\u00e9ration 10 g de fleurs s\u00e8ches et ajoutez un demi-citron.\n\n#### **... d'\u0153illet**\n\n\u00c9pluchez des \u0153illets rouges dits \u00ab \u0153illets \u00e0 ratafia \u00bb, et n'utilisez que les p\u00e9tales. Aromates compl\u00e9mentaires : cannelle, girofle.\n\n#### **... d'oranger**\n\nAvec 150 g de p\u00e9tales pour 1 l d'eau-de-vie. Si vous avez moins de fleurs, compl\u00e9tez avec de l'eau de fleur d'oranger.\n\n#### **... de rose**\n\nCueillez 100 \u00e0 200 g de p\u00e9tales de rose bien parfum\u00e9s (pour 1 l). Aromates compl\u00e9mentaires : coriandre, muscade, girofle.\n\n#### **... de thym**\n\nCouvrez d'eau-de-vie une grande quantit\u00e9 de fleurs de thym. Laissez mac\u00e9rer longtemps (2 \u00e0 3 mois). Sucrez abondamment (400 g/l). Et vous obtenez une liqueur connue sous le nom d'\u00ab \u00e9lixir de thym \u00bb.\n\n#### **... de tilleul**\n\nAvec des fleurs fra\u00eeches de pr\u00e9f\u00e9rence.\n\n#### **... de violette**\n\nPour 1 l d'eau-de-vie, il vous faut 250 g de p\u00e9tales frais de violette odorante. Huit jours de mac\u00e9ration suffisent. Aromates compl\u00e9mentaires : cannelle, girofle.\n\n#### **_Liqueur de tiges..._**\n\n#### **... d'ang\u00e9lique**\n\nPr\u00e9voyez 50 \u00e0 150 g de tiges vertes pour 1 l d'eau-de-vie. Laissez mac\u00e9rer plusieurs semaines. Aromates compl\u00e9mentaires : cannelle, muscade, girofle, amandes am\u00e8res. Convient bien en cr\u00e8me. S'accorde bien avec le miel.\n\n#### **... de c\u00e9leri**\n\nOriginale. Avec 250 g de tiges (c\u00f4tes) et 1 l d'eau-de-vie. Aromates compl\u00e9mentaires : coriandre, anis vert, girofle.\n\n#### **... de fenouil**\n\nA essayer.\n\n### **_Recettes compos\u00e9es_**\n\nVoici des recettes connues et quelques id\u00e9es nouvelles.\n\n**Chartreuse jaune** (imitation)\n\nHachez des feuilles fra\u00eeches de m\u00e9lisse (6 g), d'hysope (6 g) et d'ang\u00e9lique (3 g), et mettez-les \u00e0 mac\u00e9rer 10 jours dans 1 l d'alcool avec un peu de cannelle (1,5 g) et de la coriandre (4 g). Colorez avec du safran. R\u00e9duisez le degr\u00e9 (\u00e0 40%) et sucrez \u00e0 300 g/l.\n\n**Chartreuse verte** (imitation)\n\nDans 1 l d'alcool m\u00ealez des feuilles fra\u00eeches de menthe, d'ang\u00e9lique, de sauge et de m\u00e9lisse (1 \u00e0 2 g de chaque). Laissez une journ\u00e9e, puis ajoutez des feuilles de tanaisie (10 g environ) et laissez mac\u00e9rer quelques heures seulement (5 \u00e0 10) \u00e0 l'obscurit\u00e9. R\u00e9duisez \u00e0 50\u00b0. Sucrez.\n\n#### **Liqueur de feuilles**\n\nPlut\u00f4t que de mettre \u00e0 mac\u00e9rer plusieurs sortes de feuilles ensemble (comme dans la recette pr\u00e9c\u00e9dente), sans savoir quel sera le go\u00fbt final, voici une autre technique pour r\u00e9aliser une belle liqueur verte \u00e0 base de feuilles aromatiques. Faites d'abord s\u00e9par\u00e9ment des liqueurs de tanaisie, menthe, sauge, m\u00e9lisse, verveine, ang\u00e9lique, romarin, etc. Prenez ensuite un r\u00e9cipient gradu\u00e9 (verre doseur par exemple), et sur de petites quantit\u00e9 (que vous notez) essayez diff\u00e9rentes associations. Vous en d\u00e9couvrirez de d\u00e9licieuses, et bien personnelles. Vous pourrez aussi ajouter un peu de vos liqueurs de graines (fenouil, anis...) ou de zestes (citron, mandarine) : tout est permis, seule la qualit\u00e9 du r\u00e9sultat compte.\n\n#### **Liqueur de g\u00e9n\u00e9pi des Alpes**\n\nPour 1 l d'alcool il vous faut des feuilles s\u00e9ch\u00e9es de g\u00e9n\u00e9pi (4 g) et de menthe poivr\u00e9e (2 g), auxquelles vous ajoutez des graines d'anis vert, d'ang\u00e9lique, de coriandre et de fenouil (1 g de chaque).\n\n#### **Liqueur de fleurs du jardin**\n\nFaites mac\u00e9rer ensemble des p\u00e9tales de rose, d'\u0153illet, des fleurs de jasmin, de violettes...\n\n## **Les liqueurs sp\u00e9ciales**\n\nCertaines liqueurs rentrent dificilement dans les cat\u00e9gories pr\u00e9c\u00e9dentes, en raison de l'originalit\u00e9 de leurs ingr\u00e9dients, de leur technique de fabrication ou de leur go\u00fbt bien \u00ab sp\u00e9cial \u00bb. En voici quelques-unes.\n\n#### **Chrysomel**\n\nParfumez d'abord 1 l d'eau-de-vie en y faisant mac\u00e9rer deux semaines une gousse de vanille. Faites bouillir 1 kg de miel dans 2 l d'eau, sans couvrir, jusqu'\u00e0 ce qu'il ne reste plus qu'environ 1 l de liquide. Laissez refroidir ce sirop et versez-y votre eau-de-vie aromatis\u00e9e. Attendez 15 j. Filtrez avant de mettre en bouteilles.\n\n#### **Liqueur aux \u0153ufs**\n\nDans un grand bocal versez le jus de 5 citrons. D\u00e9posez-y d\u00e9licatement 3 \u0153ufs tr\u00e8s frais dont vous aurez perc\u00e9 le gros bout (c\u00f4t\u00e9 \u00ab chambre \u00e0 air \u00bb) \u00e0 l'aide d'une aiguille. Deux jours plus tard, battez ce m\u00e9lange (en cassant les \u0153ufs), passez-le avec un torchon \u00e0 confiture, et ajoutez 1/4 l d'eau-de-vie et 125 g de sucre. Vous pouvez alors mettre en bouteille et d\u00e9guster cette cr\u00e8me citronn\u00e9e (\u00e0 conserver au r\u00e9frig\u00e9rateur).\n\n#### **Liqueur de lait ou opaline**\n\nM\u00ealez 3/4 l de lait et autant d'eau-de-vie; ajoutez 400 g de sucre, un citron coup\u00e9 en rondelles et une gousse de vanille. Laissez mac\u00e9rer 2 semaines en remuant tous les jours. Soutirez et filtrez sur papier, de mani\u00e8re \u00e0 obtenir une liqueur tr\u00e8s claire... et de go\u00fbt d\u00e9licieux.\n\n#### **Liqueur dor\u00e9e**\n\nLaissez mac\u00e9rer 8 jours dans 1 l d'eau-de-vie, 0,4 l de vin de Malaga, 3 g de quinquina, 3 g de cannelle, 3 g d'\u00e9corces d'oranges am\u00e8res, et un peu de safran pour la couleur. Ajoutez 250 g de sucre.\n\n#### **Liqueur de gingembre**\n\nAvec 50 g de racine (ou plut\u00f4t de rhizome) de gingembre pour 1 l d'alcool, vous obtenez (apr\u00e8s avoir sucr\u00e9 et r\u00e9duit le degr\u00e9) une liqueur tr\u00e8s \u00e9pic\u00e9e.\n\n#### **Liqueur du pendu**\n\nChoisissez une belle orange ou une belle poire Williams. Avec une ficelle de cuisine (et l'aide d'un passe-laine) suspendez-la dans un bocal au-dessus d'1/2 l d'eau-de-vie blanche aussi neutre que possible, \u00e0 laquelle vous avez ajout\u00e9 200 g de sucre. Le fruit ne doit pas toucher le liquide. Fermez herm\u00e9tiquement. Exposez au soleil. 2 ou 3 mois plus tard, jetez le fruit et d\u00e9gustez le liquide parfum\u00e9.\n\n#### **Liqueur stimulante**\n\nFaites mac\u00e9rer 3 j dans 1/2 l d'eau-de-vie 30 g d'anis vert, 20 g de badiane, 30 g de feuilles de menthe, 15 g de feuilles de menthe, 15 g de feuilles de sauge et 10 g de feuilles de thym. La teinture obtenue ne se boit pas pure, mais doit \u00eatre allong\u00e9e d'eau sucr\u00e9e ou de vin blanc doux.\n\nEnfin, voici une recette tr\u00e8s classique, qui vous donnera en plus d'une excellente liqueur quelque chose \u00e0 vous mettre sous la dent :\n\n#### **Fruits \u00e0 l'eau-de-vie**\n\nChoisissez de tr\u00e8s beaux fruits (avec de gros fruits tels que p\u00eaches et poires, c'est possible \u00e9galement, mais il faut d'abord les faire cuire dans un sirop), par exemple :\n\n\u2014 des framboises;\n\n\u2014 des cerises, dont vous coupez la moiti\u00e9 du p\u00e9doncule (queue);\n\n\u2014 des mirabelles, dont vous percez la peau en de nombreux points \u00e0 l'aide d'une aiguille, et auxquelles vous laissez une partie de la queue;\n\n\u2014 des grains de raisin que vous pr\u00e9levez avec une paire de ciseaux, de mani\u00e8re \u00e0 conserver un petit porceau de p\u00e9doncule.\n\nGarnissez-en un grand bocal par couches successives, s\u00e9par\u00e9es de quelques cuiller\u00e9es de sucre en poudre (on pourrait aussi ne sucrer qu'\u00e0 la fin avec un sirop). Couvrez d'eau-de-vie pour fruits. Laissez mac\u00e9rer au moins deux mois, avant de commencer \u00e0 d\u00e9guster, dans une coupe, de d\u00e9licieux fruits baignant dans une liqueur non moins savoureuse.\n\n_Votre avis nous int\u00e9resse !\n\nLaissez un commentaire sur le site de votre libraire en ligne et partagez vos coups de c\u0153ur sur les r\u00e9seaux sociaux !_\n\n## **Conclusion**\n\nVous aviez envie de fabriquer vous-m\u00eame des ap\u00e9ritifs et des liqueurs. Vous aviez sans doute d\u00e9j\u00e0 quelque exp\u00e9rience. Vous voil\u00e0 maintenant mieux arm\u00e9s pour r\u00e9ussir : des recettes, des id\u00e9es de recettes, mais surtout, je l'esp\u00e8re, une meilleure compr\u00e9hension de ces recettes, des m\u00e9thodes \u00e0 mettre en \u0153uvre pour parvenir \u00e0 \u00e9laborer une boisson pleinement r\u00e9ussie, m\u00eame avec les petits moyens dont dispose un amateur.\n\nCe petit livre peut aussi vous permettre, si vous le d\u00e9sirez, d'aller plus loin : de mettre au point vous-m\u00eame des recettes originales, nouvelles, avec des ingr\u00e9dients inhabituels (par exemple, en essayant les nouveaux fruits exotiques actuellement en vogue), ou en d\u00e9couvrant des associations particuli\u00e8rement exquises... : un vaste champ de recherche s'ouvre devant vous.\n\nM\u00eame sans voir si grand, l'\u00e9laboration en amateur de spiritueux est un loisir plein d'avantages qui ne peut qu'am\u00e9liorer la qualit\u00e9 de la vie de celui qui la pratique, ainsi que de son entourage. C'est en effet une activit\u00e9 tr\u00e8s int\u00e9ressante, autant manuelle qu'intellectuelle, qui d\u00e9veloppe les sens de l'odorat et du go\u00fbt. Elle permet des contacts agr\u00e9ables avec ses amis. De plus, elle d\u00e9bouche sur un produit naturel, de bonne qualit\u00e9, sans substances chimiques, sans risque pour la sant\u00e9... \u00e0 condition de n'en user qu'avec mod\u00e9ration.\n**ADRESSES UTILES**\n\n_fabricants et distributeurs de mat\u00e9riel_  \n**Tom Press,** ZA de la Condamine,  \n81540 SOREZE. T\u00e9l. 05 63 71 44 99.  \nFax 05 63 71 44 98  \n@: infos@tompress.com  \nSite : www.tompress.com\n\n**Duhall\u00e9,** la boutique du ma\u00eetre de chai\n\nZI du Bois Vert, 31120 Portet sur  \nGaronne. T\u00e9l. 05 62 11 73 01  \n**Sanbri,** l'atelier du vin, route de  \nChepoix, 60120 Breteuil.\n\n**BMS Wijndepot NV,** Brugsesteeweg  \n313-317, B-8520 Kuurne  \nT\u00e9l. 00 32 (0)56 71 46 65. Fax 00 32 (0)56 71 84 64\n\n@: bms-wijndepot@skynet.be  \nSite : www.bmswijndepot.com\n\n**Brouwland**\n\nKorspelsesteenweg, 86  \nB-3581 Beverlo  \nT\u00e9l. 00 32 11 40 14 08  \nFax 00 32 11 34 73 59  \nite : www.brouwland.com\n\n## **Index**\n\nAbricot -35\n\nAbsinthe -26-41\n\nAcacia -42\n\nAk\u00e8ne\n\nAlcool\n\nAlcoom\u00e8tre\n\nAmer\n\nAnanas -35\n\nAng\u00e9lique 8/9-12 -41-43\n\nAnis -38/39\n\nAnisette\n\nArbouse\n\nArmagnac\n\nArnica\n\nAsp\u00e9rule -26\n\nBadiane -38/39\n\nBanane -36\n\nBasilic -26-41\n\nBitter\n\nBouillon blanc\n\nBouleau -27\n\nBourbon\n\nCacao -38\n\nCaf\u00e9 -38\n\nCalvados\n\nCamomille -27\n\nCannelle\n\nCarthag\u00e8ne\n\nCassis -26-27 -37-41\n\nC\u00e9drat -35\n\nC\u00e9leri -43\n\nCerfeuil\n\nCerise -36-46\n\nCerisier  -26\n\nChartreuse\n\nChicor\u00e9e -28\n\nChrysomel\n\nCitron -38\n\nCitronnelle -41\n\nCitron nette\n\nClou de girofle\n\nCognac\n\nCoing -36\n\nCoprah\n\nCoriandre -38\n\nCr\u00e8me -35\n\nCumin -39\n\nDatte -30\n\nD\u00e9cantation\n\nD\u00e9coction\n\nEau-de-vie\n\nEstragon -41\n\n\u00c9thanol\n\n\u00c9tiquette\n\nExtrait\n\nFenouil -12-28 -43\n\nFenou illette\n\nFigue -30\n\nFiltre\n\nFraise -36\n\nFraise des bois -36\n\nFramboise 11/12 -35-37-46\n\nFruit de la passion\n\nG\u00e9n\u00e9pi -41-44\n\nGeni\u00e8vre -28\n\nGentiane -28-31\n\nGingembre -45\n\nGirofle\n\nGroseille -30\n\nGuignolet\n\nHysope -41\n\nInfusion\n\nJasmin -42\n\nKirsch\n\nKiwi -36\n\nLait\n\nLaurier -41\n\nLiqueur dor\u00e9e\n\nLiqueur exotique\n\nLiqueur stimulante\n\nLitchi\n\nMac\u00e9ration\n\nMagnolia -42\n\nMandarine -39\n\nMangue\n\nMarrube blanc\n\nMathusalem\n\nM\u00e9lisse -26-41\n\nMenthe -26-41\n\nMerise\n\nMethanol\n\nMiel\n\nMillepertuis -43\n\nMirabelle -36-46\n\nMistelle\n\nM\u00fbre -36\n\nMuscat -37\n\nMyrte -36-42\n\nMyrtille -36\n\nN\u00e8fle -36\n\nNoisette -39\n\nNoisettine\n\nNoix 11/12-28-36\n\nNoix de coco\n\nNoyau -40\n\nNoyer -27\n\n\u0152illet -43\n\n\u0152ufs\n\nOpaline\n\nOrange -28-36\n\nOranger -43\n\nOrigan\n\nPamplemousse -28\n\nPastis\n\nP\u00eache -13 -46\n\nP\u00eacher -26-42\n\nPendu\n\nPersil -42\n\nPervenche -27\n\nPineau\n\nPoire -36-46\n\nPommeau\n\nPrune -36\n\nPruneau -28\n\nPrunelle -37\n\nPrunellier -27\n\nPrunier -27\n\nQuetsche\n\nQuinquina -25\n\nRaisin 11/12-37\n\nRatafia -34\n\nRhum\n\nRiquiqui\n\nRobinier\n\nRomarin 9/10-27\n\nRose -43\n\nSafran\n\nSarriette -27\n\nSauge -27-42\n\nSerpolet\n\nSiphon\n\nSirop\n\nSoutirage\n\nSpiritueux\n\nSureau noir\n\nTanaisie 9/10 40/41\n\nTilleul -43\n\nTh\u00e9 -42\n\nThym 9/10-43\n\nVanille -39\n\nVermouth\n\nVerveine -42\n\nVespetro\n\nVieux gar\u00e7on\n\nViolette -43\n\nVodka -33\n\nWhisky\n\nWilliams -45\n\nZeste \n**Chez le m\u00eame \u00e9diteur en num\u00e9rique**\n\n**Polars \u00ab La part des anges \u00bb**\n\n_Pourriture noble et vendange tardive_ , Jean-Marc Carit\u00e9\n\n_Araign\u00e9e rouge et cigogne noire_ , Jean-Marc Carit\u00e9\n\n_La revanche du gringet_ , Jean-Marc Carit\u00e9\n\n_Atomes crochus_ , Jean-Marc Carit\u00e9\n\n**L'Encyclop\u00e9die d'Utovie**\n\n_Faites vos ap\u00e9ritifs et vos liqueurs... \u00e0 votre go\u00fbt_ , J-A. Chardon\n\n_Faites votre bi\u00e8re_ , J-A. Chardon\n\n_Faites votre serre facile et productive_ , Christophe Geoffrion\n\n_Vivre centenaire et bien portant_ , Dr Dominique Georget-Tessier\n\n**Henri Guillemin : l'histoire autrement**\n\n_1789-1792/1792-1794 : Les deux R\u00e9volutions fran\u00e7aises_ , Henri Guillemin\n\n_1789 : silence aux pauvres !_ , Henri Guillemin\n\n**Catalogue complet (avec achat s\u00e9curis\u00e9 en ligne) sur  \nwww.utovie.com**\n\n\u00a9 \u00c9ditions d'Utovie  \n402 route des Pyr\u00e9n\u00e9es  \n40320 Bats  \nutovie@wanadoo.fr  \nwww.utovie.com\n\ne-ISBN : 9782868194046\n\n\u00a9 2016, version num\u00e9rique Primento et \u00c9ditions d'Utovie\n\nCe livre a \u00e9t\u00e9 r\u00e9alis\u00e9 par _Primento_ , le partenaire num\u00e9rique des \u00e9diteurs\n"}