Crescent City Rhapsody

First Solo The Radio Astronomer | Southwest Virginia | 2012

Zeb downshifted to take a curve on the two-lane blacktop; the creek had flooded the road, leaving a sheet of ice in the bend. The back wheels of his Ford pickup held steady and after the ice he resumed his previous speed. He had gone into town for a Thanksgiving party and he shouldn’t have.

He would never be able to socialize happily, but a certain excruciating amount of it always seemed to be called for. At least he didn’t go off the deep end anymore; thanks to medication and the hard work of Sally, his older sister and always his champion, his flights of manic intensity had been under control long enough for him to settle into a life of being a professor of astronomy at a rural state university. Not the glittering academic life his parents, dead for many years now, had envisioned for him, pushed him toward; far short of what all indications had been during his adolescence, when all doors were open, when every major university wooed him. The courses he taught didn’t begin to scratch the surface of what he knew; he was an astrophysicist. But it was a predictable life; even, generally, a satisfying life. It had been purchased at the cost of closing the floodgates to the infinite. It was enough. If he was deliberate and firm, there was a reason. He lived with a certain amount of satisfaction at just being able to function predictably. Most people took this state of mind for granted. It was a privilege for which he’d had to fight.

Nobody else was on the road. It was Wednesday night, and everyone had gone over the river and through the woods and were at Grandma’s now. Sally was expecting him for dinner tomorrow in Roanoke, a sixty-mile drive. He was looking forward to seeing Annie, his niece. In her second year of college, she was beginning to be able to ask intelligent questions. She was majoring in nanotechnology. Seemed like a real scattershot major to Zeb, but then he tended to keep entirely immersed in what was happening farther than the eye could see. Annie was a bright kid. Zeb only hoped that she would not suffer as he had, that his genetic weirdness would not be echoed in her.

Across a snowy field that seemed to glow faintly, an old white farmhouse threw patches of colored light onto the snow through a window—an early Christmas tree. Behind the fields rose dark ridges, trees blackly sawtoothed against a slightly lighter sky. Zeb cracked his window and lit a Camel. The blast of cold air felt clean and good.

The party had been stuffy. Zeb stood out, as usual, felt clumsy and big in his heavy boots and plaid wool shirt. He explained to his hostess when he arrived that he was dressed to go up on Angel’s Rest later and check the antenna, but he still felt out of place. He sat gingerly on one of Dr. England’s delicate chairs, wishing he could smoke, while she and her husband passed out eggnog. He didn’t see anyone else smoking, though. England had urged him to drop by when she saw him in the supermarket this morning; probably felt sorry for him, he thought now. He just hadn’t known how to say no. He didn’t want to insult her. Parties with mathematicians and physicists were tolerable, because it only took a few minutes to start a heated academic argument, but these people were all with the arts. They were nice, but he heard snippets of conversations around him filled with concerns he knew he would never be able to fathom. He took a sip of eggnog and looked around, wondering if he could slip into the kitchen and pour it out and wondering how long he had to stay to be polite. He decided it didn’t matter. He would just leave. He stood to go.

Then Terri had come in the door.

She was dressed nicely, as usual, he saw, as Judy England took her coat. A black dress. Pearls.

“Zeb,” she said, seeing him.

“Stay away from the eggnog.” After a long moment, he added, “How are you doing?”

Her eyes were slightly merry at that; a small victory, pulling two whole sentences out of him.

“Fine,” she said. “Wonderful.” Her hair was ashy blond, but he knew that she had it done once a month because a lot of it had turned white when she was thirty. The year she’d married him.

“You look good.”

“Thanks.”

Their talk was small, but it always had been. After three years of marriage, she decided she needed more words. Now she was married to a sociologist. Jim was from New York. He talked a lot.

“Well, I should go.” Zeb gulped the eggnog and frowned. It really was wretched.

She put one hand on his arm. “Take care. Are you still living in that—old house?”

He knew she’d narrowly avoided calling it a decrepit old shack. He nodded.

“And do you still spend all your time studying that radio astronomy data?”

She’d hated that. Apparently, she had thought it some sort of bachelor pursuit that he would outgrow, even though he had been forty when they got married. He didn’t spend as much time looking at the stars through telescopes as she had imagined he would; that seemed much more romantic to her. But stars and space had a lot more to say than could be seen in the visible spectrum. Zeb spent his time online, traveling, or teaching. He had no hobbies or outside interests; he didn’t watch television and he didn’t go to the movies and he didn’t read fiction. He still wondered how two such dissimilar people had ever considered marriage. Then she smiled—just a bit—and he remembered.

“Pretty much.” He looked at his watch. “Tell Jim hi.”

He had hurried out into the cold air gratefully. He took his gloves and hat from his pockets, pulled them on, checked the chains on his truck tires, and got in. The bed was full of sandbags for traction, but he left a little too quickly and the back wheels fishtailed on the icy unplowed side street. That’s right, he thought. Hurry away from your latest failure.

Now, safe in relatively unpopulated territory, he finished his cigarette, tossed the butt out the window, and cranked it up. It had taken him an hour of careful driving to get to the lower slopes of Angel’s Rest. A student’s father owned the field they built their antenna in. It had taken most of the fall to put it up. Zeb had agreed to check the constantly incoming data over the break. Of course he was up there as often as time allowed. He loved the thing. So big, so seemingly primitive, yet the same kind of homemade setup with which the existence of pulsars had been discovered.

He put on his turn signal for no one and swung between two fence posts onto a frozen dirt road beneath an unbroken crust of icy snow. He pushed the four-wheel drive button and shifted into low. The newer trucks did all this on voice command, but he preferred his old dependable model, a real antique from 1971 with no sensitive computerized components, bought for fifty bucks from a widow whose husband had kept it pristine, and repaired it with parts foraged from junked trucks he kept on the slope behind his house. He’d bolted on a global positioning system that put maps on a small screen next to the radio; that was the extent of its modernization.

As the truck labored up the mountain, a doe leaped through his headlight beam, as if she’d been waiting for a car to show her a good crossing. A clump of snow fell from a fir bow and his wipers whirred. If Terri had been here, she would have played classical music, but he preferred the sound of the wheels grabbing the snow, the steady smooth growl of the transmission. The raw data. It had its own poetry. Or, if not poetry, at least a kind of honesty.

Far below he could see the few lights of Pearisburg. The truck slid a bit when it coasted onto the bald, a huge swipe of treeless space at the end of the ridge. He grabbed his wide-beam flashlight and stepped into the profoundly silent night.

The stars arced overhead in vast splashes. He crunched through the snow, which reached midcalf. The dipoles and wire cast long shadows in the moonlight. He experienced mild pride. His students had done almost all the work of getting the grants to finance the project— and the physical work as well.

He grappled in the back of his truck for the push broom he had brought and set the flashlight on the hood. He set to work pushing snow off five large solar collectors. They were tilted, and most likely the snow would melt enough to slide off tomorrow, but he might as well do this now. It took the better part of an hour and was quite a hike in the snow. By the time he finished, he was drenched in sweat.

That done, he walked over to the small prefab recording shack, dialed the combination, and opened the door. He switched on the overhead bulb.

Recording pens powered by solar batteries moved slowly across scrolling paper. One of the many things this project was supposed to do was give the students an appreciation for the raw data, untranslated by any computer program and operated without any computerized components. They had even scrounged old vacuum tubes from ancient equipment. He hoped that this would give his students a greater understanding of the electronics involved. Hands-on experience had helped him immensely, and he had great respect for learning the basics. There was so much fancy software now that a lot of students no longer truly understood how the data was generated in the first place. This setup would be useful in his teaching for many years to come, long after the current crop of students moved on, as long as they could keep it here.

The wind picked up and something outside vibrated in a high whine. The paper folded slowly as it fell into a box beneath the moving pens. He carefully tore off those in the box. He would take all of these records with him for the students to analyze. Glancing through the tiny window, he noted that the valley was dark. Some kind of power failure. He felt a mild ping of smugness. He was a fan of self-sufficiency. His house was heated with wood and his hot water heater and generator were solar-powered. His property looked as if he were operating a full-scale communications empire. Several radio towers and a few more satellite dishes were scattered across his several acres.

He looked back at the pens, which were scribbling wildly. That was odd. He watched, wondering what sort of malfunction might be occurring, knowing that the beauty of the setup was that there were very few interfaces. This was directly from space, this scruff, as it was called.

Suddenly the pens stopped moving. The seconds ticked past and the lines were completely flat. Then the pens scribbled again. Stopped. Each time the interval during which the scribbling occurred was longer. Each data section was not any sort of configuration he had ever seen before. Radio interference from towns was pretty sparse here, but it could happen. He pulled up the lone stool, perched on it, and watched.

He watched for two hours, propping his back against the wall. He dozed off at one point and woke, shivering. He decided he should warm up in his truck; he didn’t know how long this would last.

As he crunched out to the truck, he decided to set up some way to heat the observatory, as they were calling the little shed; someone less self-sufficient than he was might get stuck up here overnight. There was a cell phone, but he liked backups. He was responsible for the students’ safety.

He climbed into the cab. The truck wouldn’t start. He swore, got out, and opened the hood. He hung the flashlight from a hook on the underside of the hood and checked all the connections. Recent tune-up. Water in the battery. Hoses tight. He had just filled the gas tank this morning. Nothing wrong that he could see.

He took the flashlight, slammed the hood, pulled his down bag from behind the seat, and tramped back to the shed. It would be a long, cold night.

When he got back in, he noticed that the radio sky seemed to have returned to normalcy. He watched the pens move in slow sweeps. The lights were back on in the valley. The plastic floor was not long enough for him to stretch out on. Maybe it would be better in the truck. Sighing, he tramped back out to the truck. He turned the key one last time. No luck.

Then he remembered: He had replaced the starter last week with a new solenoid-type starter from the dealer, because he was out of junk starters.

The truck sat at the top of a bowl-shaped depression. Maybe it would jump-start. The worst that could happen was that it would be stuck at the bottom of the hill instead of the top.

He let off the brake. The truck slowly gathered momentum. After a minute, he popped the clutch and the engine caught. It had been the starter. He just didn’t like those computerized components. Too fragile by far.

Gingerly shifting into first, he went into a controlled slide and started up the hill on a different track, hoping that he had enough momentum to get to the top. The truck slid sideways for a few feet, then plowed up the hill. He reached the crest, next to the recording shed, and circled around until he was back in the tracks he had made on the way up.

He took the truck out of gear, set the brake, and turned on the heat full blast. Leaving the truck running, he went into the shed and took the data from each roll, making sure he had the last few hours of information.

After he finished getting the papers, he turned off the light and locked the door behind him. He had already planned to be back on Friday. Now he thought he might return tomorrow.

He stacked the papers in a box on the floor of the truck and climbed into the cab.

His house was on a low ridge halfway between Angel’s Rest and town. It was about 2 a.m. when he turned into the long driveway. His two collies, Pleiades and Zephyr, rushed from the porch to meet the truck.

Exhausted, he staggered into the yard, tilting his head to look at the stars. Puzzled. Intrigued. What the hell was going on? After a few moments, they flashed and twirled like the Van Gogh print Terri had put on their bedroom wall. He felt giddy; euphoric. That was a bad sign. He needed his medication. Sally kept urging him to get one of the new time-release implants, but he was shy of having stuff in his body. It put him in mind of shrapnel.

He and the readouts survived the dogs’ greeting and he crossed the porch and opened the door. The collies rushed past him and bustled around, barking. He turned on lights and set the readouts on a huge heavy table in the center of the living room, pushing aside a stack of books to make room. The ornate Warm Morning Stove he had bought at a junk store in Newcastle was almost out. He stuffed a few newspaper twists, some kindling, and two big logs on top of the still-glowing ashes, closed the door, and opened the dampers. The fire roared and snapped for a few minutes before settling down.

His farmhouse was over a hundred years old. After years of steady work, the house was as habitable and as up-to-date, communication-wise, as he wanted it to be. The living room, where he spent most of his time, had been three rooms. He had taken out the walls and put posts in strategic places. Two old comfortable couches and several big armchairs sat here and there, facing not one another but various flatscreens, some wall-mounted, some stand-alone. Bundles of wires ran every which way beneath various rugs, which made the room look as if it might be infested with large snakes. Electronic gear was stacked on scattered tables, lights winking at seeming random. The walls were covered with books and CDs. The wide plank floor beneath his feet was scarred and dark.

He went into the kitchen, turned on the propane burner, and made himself some coffee, which he drank black. He picked up his vial of pills; put it down. Best to take the next one tomorrow morning, his regular time; that’s what they told him to do if he missed a pill. He scrambled eggs in a cast-iron skillet and carried his snack back into the living room. Bannered across his mail screen was a message from an old friend in Washington: wow!

He heard from Craig at least once a month. They’d done a few papers together, but Craig moved in higher planes than he did; he was internationally known and taught at Harvard for a portion of each year. They’d met at Stanford during the heady year before Zeb had crashed.

Crash was the word for it. He would literally be walking on air for days on end, forgetting to eat, absorbing books, lectures, raw data. He was there on a scholarship, studying graduate physics, though he was only eighteen. He was the darling of the physics department. He spent most of his time submerged in challenges he chose himself, discussing them with heated intensity in the lounge, arguing points, picking up insights. He would come down from a week of this utterly wrung-out, sleep for a day or two, and drag himself out of bed with no energy. The world looked dull and stupid; completely impermeable. He couldn’t understand how he could have been so excited, how it had all clicked so precisely. Then it would start to build again, until he once again was in the realm where he could fill pages and pages, disks and optical spheres, with pure thought. He was lit. He was burning.

And he burned out.

He couldn’t even remember the depth of his despair when the darkness took a long time to lift and then longer and longer. He had cut his wrists. Why? Such an action was completely unimaginable to him today. But back then…

Sally was pregnant then with Annie. She’d still flown out to California. Their parents were dead. She was his only hope. His college HMO would pay for only the most rudimentary of treatments. He lost his scholarship. All was in fragments—not only his thoughts, but his life. He was like two different people. Three. More. They were not finely delineated. But he was, most definitely, mentally ill.

Sally got him back in shape. Brought him home, took him up north to an expensive clinic, talked to people who might have an inkling of what was wrong. Different than simple schizophrenia. Some sort of neuronal firing malfunction, possibly stress-related. Many medications were tried. He was now on medication generations removed from those.

He was satisfied with the path he had taken. Terri had compared him to Rimbaud, some French poet who had burned like the sun and then never wrote again. He felt that comparison was rather unfair. He was still capable of thought. He still published the occasional paper. At first he chafed at the medication, for it was clearly holding him in, barring him from the higher realms he knew existed. But living in this slow way, he could savor life. He was happy. Before, he had never been happy. He had merely been extremely excited.

He eased into a chair. The dogs sat next to him, panting. The room was warm now. He ate his eggs. “Wow,” he directed verbally, and the wow file opened.

He read: what the hell’s going on? why the blackout? got a clue? craig.

Blackout?

He tried to log on to the Internet, but now, apparently, the phones were down. Craig’s message had come through an hour ago—probably about the time he came down from Angel’s Rest.

Clearly some news was called for. “SNN,” he said resignedly.

The alerted screen was filled with static. Satellites must be out.

Zeb found a local station. The announcer cast worried glances toward the camera; her voice quavered at times. “… have radio information broadcast from Washington in the past half hour. An apparent high-altitude electromagnetic pulse of unknown origin has caused communication failures. Many satellites are out of commission. A plane crashed in the fog at National Airport, killing everyone onboard. Emergency crews are working overtime to get phones working. Expect temporary lulls in service and please do not panic. Floyd and Montgomery counties are presently without power.” She paused for a moment as someone handed her a paper. “We repeat: There has been no known hostile action on the part of any country. There have been no reported nuclear explosions. We have just received a—”

Static filled the screen once more. Zeb sat back in his seat. Thinking.

The most likely source of an electromagnetic pulse would be a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere. Depending on the power and location, it could do a little damage to communications and power systems—or a lot. A 1962 explosion of a nuclear weapon over the Pacific blacked out Honolulu for half an hour and triggered burglar alarms. But if there had been an upper-atmosphere nuclear explosion, Zeb thought that there would be a lot more war hysteria.

Zeb constantly monitored and taped radio transmissions from their West Virginia telescope, using a vacuum tube amplifier he built in high school, still perfectly good.

He was pleased that his computer system was still working, but of course it had the best shielding he could afford. He called up the profile of the last few hours of radio broadcasting. That was one advantage of vacuum tubes—they were unaffected by radiation.

He converted that information to a simple time chart; printed it out. He took books from his long table and piled them on the floor to make room to unfold the antenna printout, which he checked against the time chart. Same pattern.

Except that it was reversed. During the times that the little blackouts occurred, his pens had recorded. They had stopped during the brief intervals broadcasting worked.

Something had happened. He saw here evidence of a pattern that would have been washed out by a solar flare.

This was no solar flare. That much was certain. And there had probably been no nuclear explosions.

An intelligent source had created this pattern. There was no way it could happen at random. No way in hell. He could think of two possibilities: humans, which was the more reasonable. Or some interstellar source.

Maybe someone—or something—was communicating with them at last. Or at least communicating in their general direction. The idea of aliens had never excited him much, though; they seemed to him a pulp pipe dream. He was much more interested in the mechanics of time, space, stars, and planets. The information he had here would be fodder for the alien-seekers, certainly. But of course there was another explanation. There had to be.

He was startled awake by the ringing phone and realized that he was stiff and cold. He’d fallen asleep in the chair. The fire was out.

“Phone,” he said. Then: “Hi.”

Sally’s voice issued from the screen, but not her picture. He had picture capability, but few others did. Her voice was pitched higher than usual and she spoke rapidly.

“Thank God you re all right, Zeb! They just got the phones working again. Most of ours are ruined, though. I’ve been so worried!”

“Calm down,” Zeb said. “Is everything okay there?”

Her deep, shaky breath was audible. “Yes. Yes, we’re fine. The power was off for about six hours, but it came back on this morning and I put the turkey in the oven. I hope it doesn’t go out again.” She paused. “Are you still coming?”

“What time is it?” he asked groggily.

She sighed. “I guess you were up all night. That’s no good for you. You need to keep on an even keel. It’s noon. I’m a nervous wreck. Maybe we should stick together. The stores have been ransacked, but I’ve got lots of canned goods.”

“Why don’t you and John and the kids come down here?”

“Down there?”

“This is the best place to be if there’s a problem, Sally. I’ve got heat, the woods are full of deer and wild turkeys…”

“I was thinking you should stay here,” she said rather grumpily.

They were silent for a moment.

Zeb shifted in his chair and a spasm shot through his back. “I’ll be there in about two hours. Then we can decide what to do. Okay? And I’ll bring the dogs in case I have to stay—”

“The dogs? They shed all over everything.”

“Brad will be very happy.” Brad was ten and wanted collies of his own, much to his mother’s dismay. “See you soon, okay?”

He got his stuff together quickly. He looked at the printouts for a moment, then packed them up too. They contained valuable information. In fact, they probably had rare information. Most radio telescopes, heavily computer-dependent, would have been knocked out by the pulse. Apparently a lot of satellites had been knocked out. Except maybe those in the Earth’s shadow, depending on what the source had been. But then they wouldn’t have this information either. As he picked up the box, he wavered. He didn’t really know what conditions were like out there.

Still, it might be best to take them. He looked around and grabbed a Virginia Tech tote bag. He slipped the printouts inside.

He was starting to walk out the door when he remembered Craig. He went back and wrote a message that would be sent whenever traffic allowed, kids made a dipole antenna, pretty interesting footage, strange conclusions, talk to you tonight. He was pleased when the message zipped off.

Both dogs fit in the cab with him. Pleiades got up as close as possible to the window, crowding the dash, staring forward, his brown eye on Zeb’s side, his blue eye on the window side. Zephyr cowered on the floor, preferring to pretend that she was not zooming down the road faster than she could possibly run. He stuffed the printouts under the seat.

He made it to the interstate, then realized he had forgotten his medicine again. “Damn!” he said and smacked the steering wheel with his hand. The dogs looked at him.

He decided to keep going. He was halfway there. There were some old pills in Sal’s medicine cabinet; they were probably still good.

The road was crowded, considering that many vehicles depending on computerized components might well be incapacitated. The pulse’s effects must have varied quite a bit. Both the north and south lanes were bumper-to-bumper, moving steadily but slowly. Emergency flashers lined the road every few miles where wrecked vehicles were being cleared away.

The trees and hills coming toward him assumed a strange, graceful rhythm, entering him in a cadence like music.

The distance between inner and outer dissolved. He was the trees, the traffic, Ironto Mountain, the green exit sign. He was the data; he even had it memorized; he realized, there in his photographic memory, the silences and signals blazing in a strange ratio. Like a message; a signal. Sure, it would happen again. If the ratio of signal to silence held. But not soon. Maybe in another month. If he thought about it, he could work out the exact dates. He was positive.

Damn. Damn. No one knew. Well, a few people probably knew, but not many. And he didn’t really know anything either. He wished he had stayed home so he could mull things over with Craig. His excitement began to grow.

The trees, the cars, the gray sky. Flowing. Drawing him along. Glowing with a lovely light. He sighed. Only twenty more miles. Then he would have to forsake this beauty, this utter, piercing harmony. He would have to take his pill. The doors to the infinite, when they opened, let in such a bright light. It would be nice if it was always this way. But he knew that after a long, trackless time of perfection, which was usually seventy-two hours more or less in the dull, time-bound world, it would all turn to shit.

The sky drifted toward him, in warping skeins of wind-driven flakes. Traffic slowed further. He pushed Pleiades aside and opened the glove compartment, keeping his eyes on the road. He rummaged around until he felt his little recorder. Good. He took it out, clicked it on, started to talk. When he was like this, he had to write, usually equations. Or talk. Talking was the next best thing.

The smell of Thanksgiving dinner filled Sal’s house. The dogs pushed their way inside, and Brad screamed in delight and embraced them, ignoring Zeb. John and Sally and Annie hugged him. There was a fire in the fireplace. It was all one thing: perfection unparsed. What Terri had wanted, maybe, with him. He stared into Sal’s eyes and smiled. A big smile.

She looked at him suspiciously, her long blond hair escaping from her ponytail, her apron spattered. “You need a pill, Zeb.”

He nodded, smiling. “I guess.” Amazing how bright everything was in here; how buzzing with sound and energy.

“Hey, Zeb!” John, his brother-in-law, shook Zeb’s hand vigorously. “Hell of a day for the TV to go bonkers. I was looking forward to the Purdue game.” He rubbed his large bald head ruefully and his ruddy face creased with a half-worried smile.

Then Sally was there with a pill and a glass. “Scotch?” Zeb asked hopefully.

“Water,” she said sternly.

He swallowed it only because he knew it would take several hours to kick in. Several hours of ecstasy. He noticed Annie looking at him thoughtfully. “What’s up?” he managed, his head filled with images, which would translate, if he had a pencil in his hand, to equations that would express the projected periodicity of the signal. He thought, vaguely, that perhaps he should ask for one.

“I was thinking,” said Annie, looking startlingly like her mother at her age, with those clear blue eyes, that curly blond hair, “that right now a DNA-based drug is in the planning stages—”

“A nanodrug, right?” asked Zeb. Everything was prefaced by “nano” in her world. He usually tried not to make fun of Annie’s solemn belief in the coming power of nanotechnology, but sometimes that was difficult.

“Time to eat.” Sally herded them into the dining room.

“We have some serious matters to discuss,” said John as they sat down at the table. “What do you think of the blackout?”

Zeb was not in a cautious mood. “I think that it’s a deliberate manipulation of the electromagnetic field of the Earth by some intelligent entity.”

Brad looked at him. “Do you mean aliens? That’s what all the kids are saying.”

“I told you to stay inside. And don’t feed those dogs at the table,” said Sally.

“I’m not. I dropped it.”

“I’m sure Uncle Zeb meant no such thing,” said John, passing the mashed potatoes.

“He missed his pill,” said Sally.

“Now wait a minute,” said Zeb, getting irritated. He turned to Annie. “What do you think?”

“I think that it’s a good opportunity to stress the development of organic-based nanotech communications, at least for backup. I’m sure my friends would think so too—if the Internet was working better. I just got logged on again when you got here, but I got bumped right away.”

John shook his head, smiling faintly. “She and her friends see the world through a haze of nanotech.”

“What’s wrong with that?” demanded Annie. “Nearly free manufacturing! All you need is the raw materials and everything is assembled. No more factories. And no more poverty. That’s just the beginning.”

“You’re becoming a Marxist,” complained John.

Zeb was beginning to chafe. As he ate, the numbers and ratios began to fade, along with the urgency. He told himself it didn’t matter. He had the data. He could work it out the long way, the hard way, when he got back. And he could also recall it, though it was more difficult under the influence of his medication. The neurons simply didn’t fire in quite the same way. It made a difference. An important difference, he tried to remind himself.

“So everyone is saying that it’s a solar flare,” he said.

“Why do you have this other idea?” asked Annie.

“I have readout data from the antenna my students built up on Angel’s Rest. Remember when you saw it last summer, when they were working on it?”

Annie nodded. “Well, then, how or what do you think is causing this?”

“I really don’t know. I just know it doesn’t fit the profile for a solar event.”

None of them had any idea of how quickly things might change, thought Zeb. They’d had a scare, a small one. But it was over, apparently. Time to forget. Particularly if it was a natural, uncontrollable event. Solar pulses might come in waves, so they would be worried for a while, but that was all. Soon everything would be back up and running, where the damage wasn’t too serious. Some places might take months to get back on track, or longer, but it would all seem as if it was in the natural scheme of things.

Until the next pulse.

Talk turned to other matters. The pleasant clatter of silverware and crystal overtook his efforts to concentrate; Sally allowed Zeb a glass of wine and they grinned at each other.

“A toast,” he said. He looked around at all of them. “To—this.”

“To this,” they said, and Annie raised her water glass, and the dogs, sensing something, scrambled to their feet and watched. Zeb felt himself calming down. Shutting down, the other part of him said sarcastically.

Then the power went off again. John cursed and went outside to bring in more wood for the fireplace, and Sally lit candles.

“Time to go,” Zeb said. The dogs hurried to the door.

“You’re not staying the night?” asked Sally, surprised. “But—it’s snowing, and—”

“I’m fine,” he said, hugging her briefly. She always looked so harried. “Look, this isn’t a new event, or pulse, or whatever you want to call it. It just takes a long time for all the repairs to get done. There was one event in Canada years ago—a solar flare—that took months to clean up. But I want you to promise that if anything happens again, you’ll come to my place, all right? I’m not kidding—everything there is self-sufficient.” Suddenly filled with urgency, he kissed them all good-bye. He looked long at Brad and at Annie; they, more than anyone, would feel the eventual brunt of this.

But—maybe he was utterly, completely wrong.

He fervently hoped so.

The interstate was deserted. The mountains looked strangely primitive without house lights twinkling on the ridges. The radio was blank, but halfway home it flared to life and Zeb found WKBW, a clear-channel AM station broadcasting information about shelters in Buffalo, New York.

He was puzzled as he turned onto his long driveway by tire tracks half-filled with snow. Not his. Who in the world would have come to see him? A student, perhaps?

His headlights showed that whoever had been here had left. But the door stood partly open.

After a minute, he climbed down from his truck. The dogs rushed past him into the house. Then Pleiades came back and stood in the door, as if to say, Aren’t you coming too? Admittedly, his dogs would most likely simply greet an intruder, although they could seem vicious enough at times.

He walked to the house, reached inside the door, turned on the light.

He was stunned. The floor was covered with books; a chair stood upside down; file cabinets had been dumped. He was angry. And puzzled. What could they have been after?

Then he noticed that the few sheets of printout containing data recorded before the phenomenon occurred were no longer on the table. He was sure he’d left them there.

Who knew that he even had them?

Some people at the party knew that he’d been going to the antenna last night, but he seriously doubted that any of them would have given it a second thought or understood the possible significance. Some of the ten students working on the project might have told others about it, but again, that was unlikely to stir up any interest.

He slowly went to his e-mail setup. It had a battery backup, and the Internet was evidently working, but he didn’t know what to say. Finally he just wrote: craig, any news?

After ten minutes, it bounced back. No such address.

He ran a search. It didn’t take long. The results were not entirely conclusive, considering the state of everything, but he was reasonably sure that the information was true.

Craig no longer existed online.

Just past Manassas, Zeb passed the umpteenth all-night church candle vigil he’d seen on his drive up the Shenandoah Valley to Fairfax, Virginia.

He’d listened to the radio all day. There was a lot of talk about the end of the world, sin, and the best way to go about imploring God to reconsider. Very occasionally, he’d hit on some mention of the Emergency Summit that was to begin tomorrow. Astoundingly, from Zeb’s perspective, official talk had changed from the solar flare explanation to “a previously undiscovered quasar,” with occasional mention of an electromagnetic pulse. Excited talk from newscasters, mostly; curiously little from anyone in authority. Sound bites from various heads of state asking for order and doling out calculated phrases of soothing comfort.

Traffic was heavy for midnight. At least Zeb thought so, though he hadn’t been to the D.C. area for about three years. The city must be filling up for the summit, and people weren’t flying if they could help it. Zeb wouldn’t have minded flying. He knew that nothing would happen again until the dates he had dropped off at Sally’s on the way up, with the admonition not to let anyone she knew fly at those times. The first day was three weeks away, but he didn’t know what might happen to him by then.

Ten miles of no vacancy signs prompted Zeb to turn abruptly into the Captain’s Nest, a motel with a green blinking anchor, an artifact from long ago when Route 50 was a major corridor to Delaware beaches. He jumped from the cab into the shock of cold; traffic swished past on the wet road.

“Last room,” said the elderly clerk, sliding a heavy brass key across the worn Formica counter.

Zeb opened #10 and left a copy of his tape beneath the pillow, the tape he had made on the way to Thanksgiving dinner in Roanoke, when he understood it all. He hadn’t had time to reconstruct his reasoning yet. He had another copy in his pocket, had left yet another in an iron box buried on the slope above his cabin. The printouts were still underneath his truck seat.

In another fifteen minutes, he was on a quiet subdivision street. Most of the houses had turned off their holiday lights for the night.

Craig’s wife sent him a Christmas card every year. He had known her in college as Craig’s girlfriend, a quiet girl with long brown hair and heavy glasses, a math major. They had two children, one in college now. He had never met the kids. He had seen Craig fairly often since college at meetings, but had never been to this house.

He turned right onto Swan Lake Drive. He had ascertained that Craig’s house was three houses from the corner on the right. He looked around to see if there were an untoward number of cars parked nearby, but it didn’t look like it. He wondered whether to park farther away and walk and decided that might be a good idea. He thought again that he should have rented a car. Surely whoever had ransacked his house knew what kind of vehicle he had. For all he knew, a satellite had him under surveillance right now.

And, he reflected, he’d even taken his medicine.

He parked down the street. He sat in his truck for a minute after he killed the engine. It was cold; his unreliable truck thermometer showed twenty-one degrees. He hadn’t called ahead. He realized that he had only the vaguest of ideas of what he hoped to accomplish here. A confrontation with Craig? Or maybe he would find that his old friend had suffered the same kind of indignities as he had.

Somehow he thought not.

The good homeowners had duly cleared their walks, but he walked gingerly because of ice. He saw no one. He stepped onto Craig’s small porch and rang the doorbell.

A dog barked inside. He wondered how his dogs were doing at Sally’s and rang again, holding the buzzer down. “Go away,” a voice whispered at his elbow. He started. An intercom.

“I can’t,” he said. “It’s Zeb. I need to talk to Craig.”

“Craig’s not here.” Clara’s voice.

“Where is he? Is he all right?”

There was silence again for a while. He buzzed again. The dog barked.

“Craig really isn’t here,” she said, sounding irritated.

“Look. I’m sorry I woke you up. I’ve just kind of stopped by for a holiday visit.”

“Right.”

He was sure she knew something. “Please. It’s really cold out here.”

He heard a snort. The chain rattled; she ordered the dog away from the door. She opened the door and yanked him inside by the arm. She shut and chained the door swiftly.

She turned, frowning. “I thought you lived without heat.” Her hair was much shorter now and blond. She was not wearing glasses, and her blue eyes were much sharper than he remembered. She was wearing slacks, a turtleneck sweater, and heavy socks. “You look rather distinguished, despite the mountain man getup.”

“Thanks, I think,” said Zeb. “You look great. You were awake, I guess.”

The dog growled. “Quiet, Zeit.”

“Zeit?” Zeb frowned down at him. Zeit was a Doberman. Zeb had never cared for the breed.

“Spare me the jokes,” Clara said. “It was my son’s idea. He was studying German at the time. Come in and sit down.”

Zeb followed Clara two steps down into a den that faced the backyard; a fire burned low in a stone fireplace. Zeit followed at his heels. Clara gestured toward an antique table that served as a bar. “Help yourself. The Dalwhinnie is excellent. That’s what I’m drinking.”

Zeb took a lot of water and a drop of whisky. He and Clara sat facing one another on deep leather chairs. Zeit’s eyes as he assumed an alert pose before the fire did not leave Zeb’s face. “So where is Craig?” asked Zeb.

“I don’t know,” said Clara. She leaned her head back against the cushion and stared straight ahead. “I often don’t.”

“Do you have a clue?”

“No. He just vanished two days ago. I know that he’s safe, but that’s all. He has very high security clearance.” A resentful undertone entered her voice. “For all I know, they took him to one of those holes in the mountains. You know, those places where his family isn’t allowed to go. Sometimes, Zeb, I—ah, what’s the use?” Now she just sounded disgusted. “I don’t know if I’m mad at him or at the government. It’s had the same effect, I guess.” She got up and poured herself another inch of whisky. Zeb noticed that despite her clear speech she swayed alarmingly as she turned from the table, steadied herself, and walked very carefully back to her chair.

“You don’t seem surprised that I’m here.”

She sighed. “Look, Zeb. You may be in danger. Craig expected that you might come and he told me to tell you that—if you insisted. You seemed insistent. Believe me, you’re lucky to get that much. He’s told me nothing else.”

“Not that my house was broken into and data stolen? Data that only he knew about?”

“Since he didn’t break into your house,” said Clara with a hint of anger in her voice, looking at him directly, “it seems clear that someone else knew as well. When was that?”

So she didn’t know. “Thanksgiving.”

“Oh. What was the data about?”

“Want to guess?” Zeb asked in a sarcastic tone.

Clara narrowed her eyes. Her mouth tightened. Zeit growled at him, raising his lips so that sharp teeth showed.

“Just joking,” said Zeb with a faint smile. “I have collies. They’re much better-natured. Look…” He hurried on when her grim expression did not soften. “I’m not sure how much you know about this, so maybe it’s better not to tell you more. Endanger you.”

She laughed briefly, and the dog put his head down on his paws. “Don’t worry about that. I’m just trying to piece things together for myself. I’m sure it has some sort of bearing on what happened the other night. ‘The Incident,’ as they’re calling it in The Washington Post. Craig just went around muttering, ‘Out of the blue’ while he threw things in a suitcase. A car came and picked him up. That’s all I know. Except that he told me to tell you to lie low. Those were his words. Lie low. So whatever you know, you’re right, Zeb. It’s dangerous. For you anyway.”

“And for you if I’m here,” he said, eyeing the dog and rising as slowly as a tai chi practitioner. Zeit sprang to his feet, and Zeb felt lucky the dog didn’t go for his throat.

“You have a place to stay?”

“I’ll be fine. Mind if I leave by the back door?” Clara knelt by the sliding glass door, pulling the curtain over her head, and threw an iron bar on the rug. She stood and slid the door open. “You’re… better?” she asked hesitantly, looking up at him. She remembered, of course, his dramatic breakdown.

He smiled. “More or less.”

He tramped through the snow of four backyards and looked between the houses at his truck. He considered just walking away from it, leaving it there, maybe coming for it in a few days. That’s silly, he thought.

But even though he didn’t turn on his lights at first, he had to— eventually. At that point, the car that nosed out from a space down the block and fell in behind him turned on its lights too. But it turned off before he reached the main road. Got the jitters, he decided. There was nothing he could do anyway.

A man was loading up the newspaper box at the motel and Zeb bought a Washington Post. Inside his room, the heating unit clattered. He shucked his boots and crossed his legs on the bed, shoved a thin pillow behind his back. The paper said that the summit would start tomorrow at a downtown hotel. Next he would get out his computer and log on. He had thought he ought to avoid it at least until he had time to set up some kind of decoy identity, but it didn’t seem to matter now since they—someone—probably knew where he was.

He fell asleep on that thought, sitting up, the light on, fully dressed, clutching the newspaper.

When he opened his door the next morning at ten, he saw that another six inches of snow had fallen. Good. Traffic might be light. The Metro would probably be overloaded. But it was later than he had hoped. He hadn’t set his watch alarm.

It was a gloomy day. He had no time for breakfast, though it wasn’t good for him to skip meals. He thought about putting on his tire chains, but decided to risk going without. He could put them on later if he needed to. He shaved, unzipped his suit bag, and tore the dry cleaning bag off of his suit. He hadn’t worn it since his wedding. He was relieved to find that it still fit. He stuffed eight or nine conference badges, scooped from a drawer on his way out of the house, into his pocket. This event would most likely use some sort of coded signal or bar code scan, but one of these nametags might be useful in a low-scrutiny situation.

He tossed all of his luggage into his truck cab, but didn’t check out. He left the radio off as he pulled onto the four-lane road. The hysteria was wearing after awhile. He stayed on Route 50; it went straight into town. He didn’t hit any congestion until he crossed the bridge. He could get no farther than the Vietnam Memorial and fortuitously snagged a parking place from someone just leaving. He checked his map; the conference hotel was only about ten blocks away. He left his down coat in the car. It didn’t mesh with his present appearance. He put one of the tapes in a pocket and set out, aware that he was probably being followed.

He would have enjoyed the walk were it not for the sense of gravity and responsibility that weighed on him. The gray sky spat flurries that melted on his face. The noise of traffic was muted by the snow, only partially cleared from the streets. Holiday decorations were out in full force, so it all might have seemed quite festive were it not for his worry.

Any astronomer of note knew most everyone else in that small category. Surely they all would have made some effort to get their speculations onto the Internet or to communicate it somehow. That would be anyone’s first impulse.

But perhaps all speculations and speculators—if they came anywhere near the mark—had been dealt with as he had been.

As he walked, he became increasingly agitated about the situation. Maybe he should get a lawyer, even though he had never employed one in his life, not even for his divorce.

He was several blocks from the hotel when serious congestion confronted him. It was like New Year’s Eve in Times Square. He pushed through the crowd. Many people were wearing headphones and then a woman appeared before him and offered him some for fifty dollars. “It’s the summit,” she said.

The tiny earphones nestled in his ears. He pressed onward. He heard that a session was about to start in the Magnolia Ballroom on the second floor.

Finally he squeezed against the brick wall of the building. Next to him was a gray metal door. He tried the handle, but it was locked.

Then it opened, just a few inches. A man stuck his head out and yelled, “Hey, back up, folks!” No one paid any attention, but eventually the man got the door open wide enough so that he and three others managed to slip through it. Just before it shut again, Zeb pried it open wide enough to make it through.

Inside was a corridor lined with ceramic tile. He walked briskly for a short distance, came to a stairway, and climbed to the second floor.

He emerged on red carpeting of oriental motif beneath a crystal chandelier. A lot of people were milling around, but at least there was room to walk. SNN was interviewing a woman about ten feet away; no one seemed to notice him. He grabbed a badge at random from his pocket that said dr. zeb aberly, radio astronomy, virginia polytechnic institute and pinned it to his jacket. He headed toward a ballroom that had one door open; it was standing room only. As he stepped inside, a guard said quietly, “Sir—”

He walked past, ignoring the guard, who followed, grasping his arm and looking at his badge. “Dr. Aberly, I must see your pass.”

He felt in his pockets. “I must have left it in my room. I’ll get it after this session.”

“I must ask you to leave, sir.”

“I’m sorry,” Zeb said, his voice rising in spite of himself. “It is essential that I attend this session.” He walked ahead, but the guard grabbed his arm.

Zeb shook him off and pushed through the standees, hoping to lose the guard, but another guard joined the chase. One of them grabbed his arm again and the other took the other side. Zeb struggled. “Let go of me,” he said. As they pulled him toward the door, he began yelling, “They’re lying! They’re all lying to you! I have some real data!”

Heads turned, but in the eyes of those near him, he saw only irritation. In less than a minute, he was out of the ballroom. One guard kicked the door shut behind him. “Now, look,” he said, “do I have to call a cop and have you arrested?”

Zeb knew he was out of control, but it seemed called for. He yelled again, “There IS NO QUASAR, don’t you UNDERSTAND?” And then the SNN microphone was shoved in his face.

The announcer said briskly, “And here we have… Dr. Zeb Aberly from Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He seems to have become embroiled in a controversy. Dr. Aberly, did you say that there is no quasar?”

“He can’t—” said one guard, but the other gave him a warning look. They released Zeb and stepped back. The announcer looked at him questioningly.

“That’s what I said.” He ran his fingers through his hair, suddenly aware of how rumpled he must look despite his earlier pains.

“And you are a radio astronomer, sir.”

“That is correct. I’m a professor of astronomy. I have data that suggest that an—”

The lights went out.

In the darkness, he was grabbed once again and this time he fought harder. The emergency exit lights came on and a repetitious warning blare sounded. He was dragged bodily to the stairs and as the door closed he saw the lights come on again. The siren ceased. He felt what might be a gun in his side. “I’d suggest that you be very quiet for the next few moments, sir.”

“Who are you?” he asked, but was jabbed again.

He was hurried down the stairs and down a corridor different than the one by which he had entered.

A shabby, dented gray car was in the alley, running. As the men pulled him into the alley, the passenger door swung open. Craig leaned over from the driver’s side and said, “Get in, Zeb.”

Startled, Zeb did so. Craig reached across him and slammed the door and they jounced down the alley, leaving the henchmen behind.

“I tried to keep you out of this, Zeb,” said Craig. He had long ago traded in his heavy black glasses frames for some sleek, urbane, and stylish, but Zeb could only think of him as his old roommate, brilliant yet savvy, politically and socially, in a way Zeb had never been and never cared to be. His face, always somewhat childish, was at last beginning to reflect his true age. He was wearing an expensive-looking black overcoat, buttery kid gloves, and a cashmere scarf. The only mystery, thought Zeb, was why he was driving an old rattletrap.

“Then why did you try to steal my readouts?” he asked. Craig had chosen an alley perpendicular to the hotel and now they were in the clear.

“You still like Chinese food?” asked Craig.

“I guess. I should eat.” Zeb felt in his pocket for his pills and realized that they were in his other pants. Second time in a week. Out of his routine. “What’s going on?”

“Take a wild guess.” Craig cut across three lanes of oncoming traffic. They careened through some scary-looking blocks, then he zipped into an empty parking space. “What luck. The restaurant is on the next block. Didn’t you bring a coat? What kind of a mountain man are you?”

They got out. Zeb set a fast pace to try and keep warm. “Are we at war?” he ventured.

“Good wild guess,” said Craig. “That’s the general impulse, but there’s a problem. At war with whom? Some entity that we have only a brief radio inkling of? Someone who, admittedly, tried to knock out our communications systems and defense satellites and did a damned thorough job of it too. Problem is, they haven’t declared themselves. Now, we don’t know who else besides you has the incoming radio profile. Down here.” Craig steered him down some steps to a door with a half-moon window.

Warmth and the million mingled smells of Chinese food hit him— five spice, frying noodles, roasting duck. He was initially surprised to find the place packed, then realized that it must be lunchtime. An empty booth awaited them, with a small vaguely oriental-shaded light jutting from the wall. Craig didn’t order anything; the waiter seemed to know him and brought tea and then hot and sour soup and then an array of vegetables, lo mein, and duck as he and Craig talked. Everyone around them spoke Chinese. Mandarin, he supposed, not that he could tell.

“I was hoping you’d just stay tucked in the mountains down there,” Craig said, shoveling down noodles with his chopsticks. “I really had nothing to do with your house being ransacked. The word ‘dipole’ was a tag, particularly when the eyes were on every known astronomer.”

“But you know about it.”

Craig didn’t say anything.

“And why are you feeding the public all this crap about a quasar?” Zeb put his ceramic soup spoon down. He never could eat when he was nervous. “Solar flare. Whatever. You and I know that it’s not.”

“You and me and the fence post, buddy,” replied Craig. “And about a hundred people at the Pentagon, and maybe a couple hundred more around the world. Some people in your general situation. Not as many as you might think.”

“Surely there’s some plan to let everyone know—”

Craig shook his head. “Quite the opposite. Use your head. These dumplings are good. With that sauce. Eat, man. Now, just what exactly do you think people would do in the face of actual evidence of… well… just think. Massive civil unrest. Utter chaos. It’s going to be bad enough. Think tanks are going all over the world to try and figure out how to cope once the… quasar… washes things out completely. I mean, who knows what that’s going to be like?” Craig shrugged. “The main thing is to keep communications viable.”

“So that it will be easier to perpetuate massive lies? Seems like what you want is the opposite effect. You have children, Craig. Don’t you think they deserve to know the truth?”

Craig stared at him blankly. “What for? This is a matter of national—and international—security.”

Zeb was flabbergasted. “You can’t keep something like this a secret.”

“Something like what?” Craig asked, his words slow with exaggerated patience. “This event quite resembled a solar flare or a nuclear-caused electromagnetic pulse.”

Zeb nodded. “But it’s what happened during the pulse effect that’s important. The information that I recorded… Look. An electromagnetic pulse—an EMP—does certain things to the ions in the atmosphere. I think that certain elements of the atmosphere were cleared away by the pulse event to make way for whatever was coming in.”

“And what exactly do you think might have come in?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that I have this information—”

“Which you need to hand over to the government. Here’s the deal.” Craig put his elbows on the table; clasped his hands; leaned forward. “We share with you and you become a part of our team. Like you said, this is war. At least, for the moment. An undeclared war, though; that’s what makes it strange. There’s still a chance that this has somehow come from a human source or a completely natural source. We’re not going on the air and saying that an extraterrestrial intelligence caused the pulse. And that that’s not even the whole story—that there was other information incoming at the time that in all probability was not picked up by any kind of receiver that had any kind of computer components in it. As if they only wanted certain… agents… to have it.”

Zeb was getting irritated. “Are you intimating that I’m some sort of alien agent?”

“It’s not me, buddy. It’s the mind-set. It does seem to me that you’re refusing to help. Why? And why should we tell the public anything more at this point? No matter how organized what you call the incoming information seems, that could be an accident. AI cryptology analysis engines need to get working on this pronto.

‘“But putting that aside, there are enough problems of international concern right now without everyone thinking that aliens might land. The technological infrastructure is a wreck. It’s been Balkanized. Listen, Zeb. You’re already marked because of what you did at the conference. So your alternative is to get a real good lawyer—and fast— because Plan B is to take the key and lock you up. Because you’re nuts. There was a quick meeting after they couldn’t find the printouts to decide how to contain you. There’s a certain amount of hysteria in the air, Zeb. I hope it won’t last, but I don’t know. There are a lot of zealots when it comes to this kind of thing. I’m prepared to pull all the strings I possibly can for you. I can vouch for you. I know what you used to be capable of. Even a lot less of that is a powerful resource for us. But you’re going to have to change your attitude. And pretty quickly too. Like in the next sixty seconds. I can convince them that you’ll be useful. Come on, Zeb.” Craig’s eyes were honestly pleading. “Otherwise…”

The muffled buzz of a cell phone sounded from Craig’s overcoat, which he had tossed onto the bench next to him.

“Your phone’s ringing,” said Zeb.

His eyes on Zeb. Craig took it out; flipped it open and shut. “Now it’s not. I am not all-powerful, Zeb. Far from it. Say yes now. Just agree to this, all right? I have a new identity for you. The newshounds are going to be after you after that performance you gave. You are not to be found. One way or another. Do you understand? You can’t contact anyone.”

Many fears gripped Zeb. The overriding fear was deeply related to self-preservation. He knew that the wiser course would be to go along with Craig. Yet he could not. He knew that it wouldn’t last long if he did. If only he could pretend, he could probably do some good—eventually. But he knew himself too well. He would soon begin to bluntly contradict people. This was something that the scientific community should be working on together. He was utterly opposed to the secrecy that Craig implied was so necessary. And if Craig tried to protect him, he would go down too.

“Is there a back door?” He whispered because suddenly his voice would not work.

Tears stood in Craig’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Give us a struggle, all right? I’m going to be in trouble.”

“I’m just going to the bathroom,” Zeb said.

Craig shrugged, pulled a large packet from his coat pocket. He set the packet on the table and tossed his coat to Zeb. “Take this.”

Zeb caught it awkwardly, and as he passed, Craig grabbed his arm and pressed a wad of money into his hand. Zeb stifled an impulse to laugh.

He pushed through the steamy restaurant, turning down a narrow hallway obstructed by boxes with Chinese writing on them.

He exited into a snowy netherworld, gray and shifting, the buildings on the next block obscured by sheets of snow. The heavy utility door slammed shut behind him. He pulled on Craig’s coat, stuffing the money in the pocket without counting it. There was no one in the alley.

In front of him was a church, wire mesh covering soaring stained-glass windows. But the back door was unlocked.

He stepped into the echoing interior. He saw no one, but felt deeply comforted by a presence he had never been able to explain and had never wanted to, which he always felt in churches. Maybe it was just the memory of his mother, who had taken them to church until he had rebelled. A faint scent of incense lingered in the air. He was drawn to a bank of flickering candles. The light of the world. Truth. Knowledge. Transcendence. How far they had come since candles and faith were the only lights in the darkness.

But if Craig was right, they were entering the Dark Ages again. If Craig was right, there were few people who could stem the tide of ignorance. Especially if the government was actively on the side of ignorance and if the Internet was not functioning. He feared he lacked the temperament—the physiology—to be one of those who would become the inevitable underground. Maybe if he could contact them, they could band together somehow.

But already his world was drifting apart. An odd, diffuse, inappropriate joy edged his thoughts, even as he contemplated the bleakness of the situation. He could not contact Sally. He might walk back to his truck later, but it would surely be gone—and his pills with it. He would go to a hospital at some point and try to get more without revealing his identity. He should hurry. Once he passed a certain point, he wouldn’t care.

He felt, as he stood in front of the steppes of candles casting flickering shadows, that the very architecture of the church was drawing his thoughts upward, outward. The abstract glass, dimmed by lack of sun, nevertheless lent definition to light as his neurologic architecture defined reality for him.

A new space of thought hovered round him. Speculations concerning the nature of infinity. What vast time had it taken for the disrupting wave to arrive at the Earth? Or if the origin was close, what vast time had formed up those capable of such a journey? He had grasped the edge of some of the particulars. He had the tape of his speculations—but that would be ruined, perhaps, when the next incident occurred. He also had the periodicity of his computer’s lapses, which in any event would not have been difficult to find elsewhere. Unless somehow it was even now being erased from any kind of unlikely peripheral record such as he himself had unwittingly made.

The world would probably not change quite as quickly as he would. He had little to go back to. His dogs were safe with Sally. He would miss them greatly. But he might not be able to care for them very well in this new life.

He realized that he had passed the point of no return. Not because he was too far over the division’s verge to care, but because he was not. He was still capable of making the decision. He would not go back. Not to his old life. Not to his old mind, the parameters of which he had carefully defined over many years to keep the light from flooding in all at once. Let it flood. The world he had staked a place in was gone. Overnight, in a blast of light out of the range of human eyes.

He put a coin in the box and lit a candle with a taper; watched it flare to life. He observed it for a moment: the blue core; the planelike whorling of the corona. There were mysteries in the sky. There always had been. There always would be.

If he hadn’t been so afraid, he would have been elated.

He walked down the aisle of the church, found a door behind the choir pews, and stepped out into the silvering world.

Motive in a Fleeting Key

Late-night television. Condo in Rosalyn; exterior wall a sheet of glass; Key Bridge a necklace of lights spanning the black Potomac and Georgetown receding mounds of glimmering. S. Wayne Tell (the S. is for Sun, the first name he never uses) is thirty-two. A highly educated fellow. Doing top-secret postdoc work in bionan research and development that feeds directly to the National Institutes of Health.

Half-empty bottle of warm cheap Chardonnay; remains of a pineapple pizza in a box on the glass coffee table. He leans back on the couch, flicks between stations. David Letterman. He’s always funny. Ancient now. And taped, not live. Live too undependable now. Wayne turns up the volume. New Year’s, almost.

“Well, it won’t be long now until they get here.” Laugh. Everyone knows who “they” are. The aliens. Dave mugs earnestly at the camera. “What some folks don’t realize is that they’re already here. I have it on the best documented evidence that the following people are aliens. Study their pictures, folks, you can just see it in their eyes, can’t you? President Rolnikov—now look at the way that lock of hair points straight up. He’s either the Gerber baby, a spawn of Satan, or an alien. Now look at—oops, sorry, folks”—a picture of Letterman is shown for five seconds—“that’s top-secret information, classified—” A wave of laughter—

Wayne turns off his television. It’s sickening. People don’t realize. They’re being led to think that it’s all a joke. Even now, weeks after the defining event of Earth’s history. But he’s been to Roswell. He even got a visa to travel to top-secret alien landing sites in Russia, damn it. He knows what he’s seen. Look, there, on his wall. A thousand feet of books about aliens, coverups, conspiracies. Double-stacked. How can there be any doubt? His own father abducted. Died with his own brothers and sisters and even his wife, who divorced him, thinking that he was loony. Wayne was his only friend at the end. Wayne has written letters to countless editors. A letter to the President, even. Everyone online knew the truth; everyone he hung with, anyway, before the Web went to shit.

And luckily, some of them had access to the Pentagon and other important vectors, like the NSA, and those more secret.

He leans forward, cradling the clicker in both hands. He’s done the right thing. Sometimes he doubts it. but things like this make him sure. It had to be done. The momentum must continue. So that his father didn’t suffer in vain. So that more don’t suffer again.

So that everyone knows who the real enemy is.

Blued Duet Marie | Tortola, British Virgin Islands | 2014

As soon as Marie stepped out of the heavy door of the Pink House and shut it ever so quietly, she was drenched in sweat. But she had to get out. She just had to. Alone.

Heat struck her like a solid force as she forsook the cool darkness of the thick-walled old house. Roadtown—on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands—seemed without inhabitants midday in June. Pastel-painted buildings—irregularly shaped, as if formed of white plaster by the hands of a child, then slapped with primary colors and set out to bake—lined the single black road. Missy, their young cook, had told Marie that they replaced a row of wood shacks swept away by a hurricane ten years ago.

In the time between her death and her bionan resurrection, it seemed to Marie that much had been swept away. Petite Marie, Al, and the infrastructure of the whole damned world. At times she felt as if she were clinging tightly to a palm tree, while anything that made sense was carried far from her on a storm surge so powerful that it was past understanding.

And she was still not healed.

Marie watched the ferry from St. Thomas buzz closer, filled with pastel blips which were tourists knocking back complimentary rum, and found herself resenting the fact that they were still alive.

But everyone else in the British Virgin Islands was happy. It seemed that the communication cataclysm sparked a powerful impulse to spend all the money one had on end-of-life-as-we-know-it sailing trips to the sunny Caribbean. They got here via coal-powered freighters or clipper ships with solar-energy-collecting sails.

Beyond the seaward row of buildings, a stony bank, studded with cans and bottles, sloped to a stone-walled waterfront. Bleached cars, missing windows and handles, flowered with rust, rested close to the buildings in exhausted attitudes.

Marie got about twenty yards down the street, which miraged away past Second Street as if more distant parts of Roadtown had been sacrificed to the sun in return for local solidity. She stopped, completely drained of energy, and took in the glorious colors of a half-finished mural on the side of a building. This entertained her for some minutes. With a start, she realized where she was, felt large and dangerously conspicuous, shrugged, and crossed the empty street.

Flies investigated four overripe mangoes in Joe Alinqua’s sparsely stocked wooden fruit bins. He rose from his twisted lawn chair. “Hello, Miss Zena.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it. She was Miss Zena here. Cloak-and-dagger stuff. As if it mattered. It certainly didn’t matter to her.

Which was probably why Hugo didn’t let her out alone.

“Interest you in some mangoes?” His home-rolled cigarette threw off sparks as he sucked on it. He didn’t appear to care that she had been staring at the fruit with the expression of a stunned cow for several minutes. The way the orange splotches faded into green, in a sort of spotty pixillation, was quite fascinating.

“I don’t know, Joe, they look about done for,” she said, poking one. Yup, she was gaining the ability to kick right into conversation again. Big deal. That was some kind of syndrome, she remembered. Inability to speak until spoken to. So damned many ways for the brain to get off-track. “Got any more of those plantains?”

He went to the back of the shack to look. She unscrewed the lid from her plastic water bottle, took a swig, and recapped it. Heat was not good for the bugs in the water. They wouldn’t do any harm if they made their bionan move before they got into her body; they were just useless. She congratulated herself, however, on remembering to bring them along at all. She still wasn’t exactly sure how her appallingly expensive resurrection actually worked. Maybe she had when she ordered it up. She only knew what the results were, and they were strange and unsettling and unpredictable. Not as advertised.

She was supposed to have suffered something as mundane as a heart attack or stroke, but even trauma had been repairable—so those peddling the process claimed. A veritable cocktail of therapies combining the cutting edge of genetics, cell repair and regeneration, and life extension had been promised as an expensive hedge against death.

She squinted against the sun and yanked the wide brim of her straw hat lower, surprised as well that she’d had the presence of mind to grab it on her way out the door. “Yes, we’re just full of surprises today,” she said out loud. Her hair was just starting to grow back and she’d gotten a bad burn on her bald head a few weeks earlier. Missy had been extremely cross with her. “The sun here is very hot. Didn’t I tell you?” she’d scolded in her faintly British-tinged accent. She’d smeared some sort of homemade pounded unguent on Marie’s head. The stuff soothed and actually seemed to work. Aloe. Pointed succulent green spike-bounded tongues…

Her language exercise ceased as Joe emerged with a bunch of plantains. Mastering language was something toddlers excelled in. She’d had to work rather hard on it, but it was finally all snapping back into place. They said that some part of her brain had had to regrow. She couldn’t remember the name for it. “Two dollars,” he said firmly.

When she frowned, Joe shrugged uncertainly. Taking pity on him, she pulled several crumpled dollars from her dress pocket, not remembering when they had been deposited there, and gave him two. “Thanks,” she said.

But that was the extent of her ability to speak—for a while.

She turned and looked down the street. It was dizzying. The buildings—shops and houses mingled—were all at funny angles, leaning into the street or swaying away, but never straight and foursquare. Then the concepts of “street,” “Caribbean.” “resurrection.” “death,” and “recovery” evaporated, leaving her defined only by the blobs of color surrounding her, patches of greeny blue flattened by a straight line on top, filling in between the other blobs of white, red, yellow, purple. It all spun away from her and she was left with darkness—

“Marie!” Her face registered a stinging slap. She gasped, feeling fleetingly proud to have categorized the sensation instantly. The darkness fled, coalescing into colors that once again were clear with the intensity of hallucination.

The shapes became Hugo. She recognized him well enough. She was still standing. One of those irritating momentary seizures… she was able to laugh, though.

“What’s so funny?”

“Didn’t you just blow our cover?” But Joe was now well back into his dark cavern and was probably completely uninterested in all this anyway.

Hugo stooped and picked up the plantains she’d dropped on the dusty road. He straightened. He tilted his head back and glared at her. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

His face was stunningly aquiline; rather rectangular; handsome. His thick black hair was oddly straight, considering that his skin was so dark, but he said that was from the Spanish side of his family. He was a bit less than five feet tall. His shortness, he joked, came from the circus side. His body was top-heavy; his shoulders broad. His legs bore the brunt of his shortness. He was only a few years older than her. She could barely remember being without him; they’d been like brother and sister since she was ten. He was wearing a beautifully tailored linen suit so white that it made her squint. And the red of his sandals leaped right into her brain.

He had spent years trying to dull the intelligence in his startlingly pale green eyes. He wanted them blank and hooded and expressionless like those of Robert Mitchum or characters in espionage books so that, he said, people would underestimate him. She’d seen him practice this effect in the mirror when they were teenagers. At that time, her peals of laughter had not been appreciated.

Now, though, his eyes were not heavy-lidded and blank. Marie observed that he chose to throw away years of training to favor her with a glare brimming with anger, exasperation, and apology.

“Only idiots go out in this heat. Ever wonder why the streets are empty?”

Marie shrugged. “I got restless.”

“Tell me, then. We can go for a sail or something.” Her ketch, guarded by two French-speaking sailors who were very good with automatic weapons, was anchored in the harbor. So far it had not attracted her.

“It’s not like that,” she said and turned back toward the Pink House, rather dizzy.

The Pink House was not fancy. It would have been hard to outdo the other houses in Roadtown. many built during the insurance cash-in after the hurricane to satisfy bizarre sybaritic tastes no doubt previously unsuspected by friends and neighbors. Life-sized, brightly painted statues of the Virgin Mary and assorted saints vied with gilded plaster columns, which in turn might contrast oddly with a glass-and-beam stab at international style several feet away on the next lot.

The Pink House was small, modest, and solid as a rock, squatting several tiers above the main drag behind a high concrete wall with broken glass embedded on top. Easily defended, Hugo said. Bars on the windows. The tiny pool with the fountain in the interior courtyard wasn’t good for much except her long, quiet, medicated soak in the middle of the heat. Everything was strictly to a purpose here.

That was the point. The pool, the thick walls, the privacy, the plainness. All for one purpose. Since coming here a month ago, after the most sensitive cell regeneration procedures of her yearlong resurrection had been completed, she’d gradually remembered scouting out this place five or six years ago. It was like that. Memories surfaced suddenly. She realized now that she’d never truly understood what it would mean to live here. At the time, it had seemed that it might be low-key, romantically local. A tropical vacation. She hadn’t reckoned on an interlude of nightmares and regret. She hadn’t reckoned on how it might feel if she wasn’t able to leave.

She hadn’t reckoned on Petite Marie and Al being dead.

Hugo unlocked the bright purple door and they trooped into the dark foyer. She kicked off her sandals and cool slate soothed her feet.

Hugo shrugged off his jacket, revealing the gun strapped to one side of his torso. The tiny palm trees on his shirt were darkened by patches of sweat.

Marie advanced into the full splendor of the living room. Two tall rattan stools tilted uncertainly in front of a bamboo bar, which had succeeded in shrugging off many large chips of a misguided coat of dull black paint, giving it a piebald mien. A magnificently ugly green Naugahyde couch hunkered on a pinkish terrazzo floor missing many stones, putting Marie in mind of a vast gap-toothed mouth. Facing the couch, in a halfhearted attempt at a conversation group, were two plump, massive red velvet art deco chairs that must have been new in the 1930s. The velvet on the arms was worn smooth, but much remained on the seat and back so one had the choice of sticking to Naugahyde or smothering and itching with the prickly velvet in the heat. A few end tables holding lamps and ashtrays and untidy piles of Hugo’s books completed the picture. It lacked air-conditioning, of course. Hugo, surprisingly, was in favor of this. He said he needed to be able to hear what was going on outside.

Missy rattled some pans in the kitchen, and the smell of sizzling garlic wafted into the living room. Marie wished she could enjoy Missy’s coconut-based delicacies, but food didn’t interest her.

Marie flopped onto the couch. She did feel better inside. It was at least twenty degrees cooler. Things seemed to move along in normal time, rather than pausing for long periods like a damaged video. “I want to go home.”

Hugo went to the bar. She only saw his head over the top, then that too disappeared as he bent to rummage for his noonday beer. “You can’t go home. Not yet. And I don’t see that you’ve changed your appearance any. Wasn’t that part of the plan? Confuse them, keep them guessing?” He hissed open a Greeny Man, local for a Heineken.

She had not foreseen the possibilities very accurately. The old Marie seemed to have had a large blind spot. No one could have predicted the communication breakdown, the pulses, the silence. But those who had sold her this resurrection program had not told her how difficult and painful it would be. She had not been frozen, since her team was available immediately. Instead, though clinically dead, she was immediately put on a heart/lung machine that circulated and oxygenated her blood. Then she was immersed in a cocoonlike bag filled with an organic jelly that seeped into the damaged parts of her body—her liver, her damaged lung. Experimental healers unavailable to the public spread throughout her body, taking from her DNA the necessary information for regeneration, using precise concentrations of enzymes and hormones to facilitate cell growth. She remembered only a continuum of images that, like dreams, had probably been interspersed with long periods of darkness.

Death had not been painful. Living was. And the most painful part of it had to do with the inescapable fact that her dearest ones were dead because of her.

“I think I need a new plan now,” she said—to herself, evidently, as Hugo did not reply, engrossed in the intricacies of whatever was behind the bar.

She caressed the sinelike curve of a huge teal ashtray bearing the stylistic imprint of the sixties, shaped like a cartoon tear. She was supposed to touch and move as many things as possible, to the extent of actually using children’s building blocks. This was spatial/tactile input. Smooth. Cool. Awaiting some long-ago smoker, dead by now, no doubt. As was she, in all ways except one.

A new plan. She wasn’t sure what that might be.

But a signifying gesture seemed called for. “A gin and tonic would help me think.” she said in the most authoritarian voice she could muster.

“Marie, you can’t—” began Hugo, standing next to the television, which only Missy watched, with a book in one hand and a beer in the other. She met Hugo’s frown with what she hoped was a commanding gaze. Seeing it, he sighed, set his book and his beer on the television, and stepped back behind the bar. “Maybe just a Lite?” he asked, raising his eyebrows hopefully.

“HUGO!” It was a roar. A rather pleasing roar. Unusual, but it was quite possible that she was growing a new personality along with a new brain. She’d had nothing alcoholic to drink in the past eight months. Not that she’d ever been a drinker. But right now she definitely felt driven to drink. Wasn’t that what people did in the tropics, people prostrated by the heat, people who had suffered a loss, people who lived and thrived stubbornly, rebuilt and wonderfully new while all those they loved were dead, spattered about the room by a tiny bomb? And who were not found until too late because she herself had died, and things were not all that up-to-date in Paris, and Hugo himself had lain unconscious under rubble for more than a day? Her mouth trembled and she blinked.

No, no, she was through with all that. One could only cry for so long. And then dark loss stretched forever, completely uninfluenced by human pain. She stared out at the pool in the courtyard, through open french doors of incongruous polished mahogany. Beyond, in the small courtyard, bounded by brilliantly muraled plaster walls, the pool of chipped tiles bulged with hypnotically green water, as if its surface was pulled upward by a reverse gravity machine.

She was alive, stubbornly alive, she had to face that. Alive, most likely, for a very, very long time. Others, such as those who had killed Petite Marie and Al, would not be quite so lucky.

She would live, at least, to assure that. It was the only thing that gave interest to her life. A part of her knew it was idiotic and futile and small-minded that the thought of revenge gave her fierce joy. You must broaden your horizons at some point, Marie, she told herself, walking languidly toward the pool and shedding her clothes along the way. Dress, panties, that was all. They fell from a skeleton-thin frame. Tall as she was, she would probably now wear a size three. That is, if she cared to acquire clothes that fit, which she did not.

The hot sun struck her as she left the shelter of the eaves. The concrete burned her bare feet. She stepped down into the pool, which was not cool and not warm, just a soothing envelope filled with healers kept alive by special filters, healers so tiny that they were absorbed through her skin. It was the pool setup that was important about the place. It had been prepared for years, awaiting her, awaiting each new development, each of which was duly incorporated into the system. Awaiting her.

And Petite Marie.

Hugo touched the cold glass to the back of her neck. She gasped and extended her hand. He hunkered down and gave her the gin and tonic. A green cut lime floated in it.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He shrugged, and his lopsided grin did not disguise his look of anguish. With a grunt, he rose, wriggled onto a chaise sheltered by a sharp angle of shade, folded his hands across his lap, and apparently having regained self-control, rehooded his eyes. He could sit like that for hours. Marie had once asked him what he thought about during those times. “Acrostics,” he had replied.

The gin was good. It released her mind. She’d never been very fond of alcohol, though the occasional bottle of fine wine was welcome. People said you drank to forget. That was handy. She hoped to. It might take cases of the stuff. Years. She thought of how ironic it was to have such a clear memory of loss while at the same time she had to work so hard to remember simple words. She took another resolute sip. “Bitter.” “sweet,” and “astringent” described it.

In the mural on the wall opposite black women carrying bananas from a strap around their foreheads and black men scything sugarcane segued into black men and women brandishing large curved swords with which they chopped at pale bland whites cowering in terror behind oddly scaled houses and trees. Haiti, she mused, as she did every day about this time, wondering if—no, hoping that—she was becoming gin-sodden. The previous owner had been Haitian.

“Know anything about voudoun?” she asked Hugo.

“Loas. Legba. Baka. Gad.” His head was full of words.

“The last?”

“A guard,” he said without a trace of irony, “in the form of a brown dwarf.”

“Zombies,” she said thoughtfully. “Maybe I’m a zombie now.”

“I thought you were descended from voudoun queens,” he said.

“Right, and their assembled ancestral knowledge waters my brain. Hugo, I know little or nothing about voudoun. Did you ever see me do anything with chickens except cook them in wine? And leaving a dead goat on the courthouse steps didn’t seem like a very useful addition to all those lawsuits I seem to have been a party to. I’ve been too busy for voudoun. I do know that it’s a real religion, not the cartoon that some people think it is. A mix of Catholicism and African spiritism. A New World hybrid. I seem to have a bit of spare time now. And I seem to be thinking odd thoughts. Funny thing about that. This process is anything but predictable. Anyway, I always thought that the other Marie Laveaus controlled New Orleans because they had the dirt on everybody. I thought voudoun power was just another word for blackmail.” She set the glass on the edge of the pool and submerged her head. The water was deliciously cool on the bald spots. She bobbed back to her seat and took up the glass again. “Maybe there’s more to it.”

“A large part of the human brain seems to be mapped for irrational beliefs.” Hugo took a long pull from the Greeny Man.

Marie gazed at the mural for a few more minutes. She raised one long, thin arm and compared it to the color of the people in the mural. “I want to be darker,” she said.

“Your wish is my command.” Hugo pulled his phone out of his shirt pocket and flipped it open.

“That thing working?”

“Got a green light. How dark?”

“The color of night,” she said. “With a nice bluish sheen.”

“One color of night, coming up.” Hugo ambled inside while he talked. Before, she would have done this herself. Now these whims struck her, and she didn’t care. Have it done, not have it done, what does it matter? Hugo had said something about changing a little while earlier. Maybe this would make him happy.

Hugo returned to the sunlight and took up his position on the chaise. “Done,” he said. “Blackness special delivery. Jetpack, actually. A week, they said.”

“Slowpokes.”

“A lot of the time is going to be taken up by bouncing it around the world. Things aren’t like they used to be. Only a few countries allow jets to fly into or over them now and they’re under a lot of pressure to make it illegal. Flying without instrumentation is pretty difficult for pilots trained on pre-Silence technology, and nobody knows when a pulse will come or if it will cripple a jet in flight. After WorldSpan Flight 101 crashed into the center of Rome, a lot of governments decided that it wasn’t worth the risk.”

“I go away for a while and the whole world falls apart. Who’s doing the skin work?”

“I figured—that lab in Costa Rica.”

“Why not the one in Prague?”

“Some government agency put them out of business.”

“Well. Thanks. How about some Ellington?”

“Oh, you want a party.” Hugo grunted as he pushed himself out of the chaise. “Running me ragged.”

“You need to keep in shape to do a good job,” she said and could have bitten her tongue. Hugo’s depression at losing Petite Marie was even darker than hers and much less accessible. He felt completely responsible.

He did something inside. Strange, haunting strains filled the air. Hugo emerged with bottles of gin, tonic, a tray of cut-up limes, and a bucket of ice. He set them next to Marie. “Knock yourself out,” he said. “I am now your official enabler.”

She concocted another drink. “ ‘Mood Indigo’? But it’s… so muted. Not like that version with Ray Nance and—” She frowned, trying to remember.

“Not bad,” Hugo said. “In fact, I’d say that music therapy is pretty good for you. The version you’re thinking of was done in the fifties. This one is the original 1935 radio recording. It’s so striking because Ellington switched the parts of the trombone and clarinet. Put the trombone up high, the clarinet down low. It was a completely revolutionary use of these instruments. It knocked everybody out.”

Hugo was the jazz expert. He was the one who’d slipped out nights, haunted the nightclubs, the blues palaces, the early morning jams, and more than once, Preservation Hall. Bunch of old fogies playing old fogie stuff, he loudly announced one morning at 2 a.m. swaying at the foot of her bed from too much to drink, then crashing over, waking grandmère who had made a horrified fuss while she and Hugo thought her strange, so very strange, that she would think that they would ever want to have sex with each other, an attitude that had never changed. But Hugo had infused her with something—his love of jazz and an ever-expanding knowledge of an art form that mirrored the changes in humanity that war and science had wrought in the twentieth century.

Marie’s mind filled for a moment with odd fantasy. A retwisting of reality. Maybe it was born of the music itself, arising from the piano arpeggios that sounded tinny on the poor ancient recording, even as its original and stunning newness was still fresh. And the fantasy was analogous.

Maybe she could take knowledge and use it in a completely new way. Maybe she could put people—masters, as these musicians were masters—into a new situation, as the musicians had been thrown into the milieu of Ellington’s environment, and the hothouse evolution of jazz. What emerged might be so new as to be unforeseeable, so powerful that it might be able to use the silences to catapult humanity to an entirely different level. Or solve the mystery altogether.

Why depend on some government to do so?

“This was his first band?”

Hugo nodded. “One of the earliest. Not the first.”

“He had many.”

“Right. Many orchestras, many bands, many trios and conjunctions of artists. But his genius was that he never tried to imprint yesterday’s orchestra on today’s. He used the unique musical talents of each musician in a unique way, accented their strengths. He even said that their limitations spurred his creativity. Sometimes I try to imagine what it must have been like. All those voices at his command, totally dedicated musicians who had made it to the top, people drunk not on liquor, because he had ways of harassing boozers if drinking interfered with work, but drunk on jazz, something utterly new, something the world had never seen before.”

“Something that the world had never seen before,” echoed Marie, her eyes closed, the music rearranging her mind instant by instant, but the instants were all related to each other and lovely, lovely, lovely. Distant in time, yet powerfully present. “That’s the only thing to do, Hugo. Create something that the world has never seen before. Don’t you think?”

“You think for me,” he said companionably, then “Mood Indigo” was over and they moved on through “Take the ‘A’ Train.” “Black and Tan Fantasy.” “Solitude,” and “East St. Louis Toodle-OO.” “Which was actually ‘Toddle—OO,’ but the record company decided that didn’t make sense,” Marie heard from Hugo’s court as the hot afternoon unwound slowly toward evening and the smell of chicken-coconut soup actually began to seem enticing to Marie and when she realized this she knew that Drink had worked; she had Forgotten.

For the moment.

“Why did you let me drink so much?” she moaned to Hugo the next morning as she lay on the couch.

“To teach you a lesson,” he said. He had taken one of the velvet chairs. His legs stuck straight out. Today he was wearing a shirt covered with large orange flowers. They clashed hideously with the red velvet. Marie closed her eyes.

“You’d evidently forgotten the lessons you learned in Chicago. Remember that night you and your girlfriends went down to State Street?”

“Twenty years ago? You know I don’t,” she said. “Sadist.”

“You didn’t even remember the next day,” he said. “And it seems to have worked out all right. The aftermath is keeping you from wandering down the street.”

“Which was more interesting than this,” she said, sitting up. A soggy washcloth fell from her head. “Where’s the system?” Her computer. “I know it’s around here somewhere.”

“You’re supposed to stay away from that stuff.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “I’m ready. I had a hole in my heart, not in my brain.”

“Actually, Marie,” he said softly, “you had a hole in your brain as well. A rather large one, relatively speaking. They used dumdums. That’s why it’s been so difficult for you. They had to re-create embryonic conditions in your brain so that specialized tissue would grow again. And after that everything had to be remapped, relearned. You probably don’t even remember all those months. You had no control over any body functions. They thought that there was a strong possibility that you wouldn’t ever remember who you once were. But apparently some important regions of your brain were damaged only minimally, and one day you just—woke up. Only for a few minutes, then for a few hours a day. During the first pulse, I thought we’d lose you when the power went out. But that’s when you turned the corner. You had lots and lots of music therapy while you were regenerating. Almost nonstop.”

“A lot of Ellington?”

Hugo grinned. “I guess there was a heavy concentration of Ellington and jazz in general. It stretches the mind. The therapists got in as much classical as they could slip past me. They had a lot of studies backing them up. Pretty ordered stuff and that’s what you needed. But even they could see that the jazz made your brain activity jump for joy, as it were. Sorry. Bad joke.”

“Jump for Joy” was an Ellington piece.

After a long pause, Marie asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Doctor’s orders. You had enough to deal with. You’ve been doing pretty well for three or four weeks now. You’ve been deemed stable enough to do without an army of technicians and nurses.”

Marie flopped back on the couch. Her stomach roiled. It had not been necessary to seal her in a metal cylinder to await the regenerative power of future technologies. She imagined being sealed in the metal cylinder. She sat up.

“We have to bury Petite Marie.”

She thought she could hear his heart beating from across the room. Finally he said, “Why don’t you wait, Marie? When you’re better, you can decide.”

“She’s dead, Hugo. I can’t bear to think of her being in that cylinder. Whatever’s left.” By the time Hugo had regained consciousness in the hospital, what was left of Petite Marie had been intercepted, finally, by Marie’s Paris team. Not knowing what to do, they had put her in the cylinder and filled it with the fluid that would sustain life. But this was only supposed to work if the individual had been dead for less than forty-five minutes and was relatively whole. What had happened was a horrific travesty. Al had not wanted any part of it for himself. Per his wishes, Al had a funeral in Paris, attended by his mother, his three sisters, countless friends, and many hangers-on who were bitterly disappointed when his will was read.

“You might want the genetic material,” said Hugo, and she knew it was an effort for him to keep his voice steady.

She wiped tears from both cheeks with the palms of her hands. “I’ve thought about it a lot, Hugo. Really I have. Sure, I could have some zygotes created. I could carry one of them to term. And then I’d have a baby that looked like Petite Marie. But she wouldn’t be her. She would never be her. Petite Marie is dead, Hugo. If ever I have another child, I don’t want her to have… my dear one’s face. It wouldn’t be fair to the new child. Don’t you see?”

She looked up and saw tears tracking Hugo’s face. Marie rose. The washcloth fell from her lap to the floor. She sat on the wide arm of the chair and leaned over, awkwardly embraced him, rested her head against his as he cried at last.

Petite Marie’s funeral took place two months later in New Orleans. It was just herself, Hugo, and the priest in the small old church on a November evening. Faint rock music from a block away came in through the open windows. Hugo had ordered vast banks of flowers, and the scent was overwhelming. The priest’s intoning spiraled outward, echoed from the cool stones.

Her own death certificate was filed in the courthouse. Petite Marie’s death certificate was in the courthouse as well. To her mind, the date on both of them was correct.

And Hugo was right. She couldn’t come back yet. For one thing, her killers were still at large and did not know that she had lived. But even if that were settled, she realized, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to return. She didn’t even want to slip inside the town house in which she’d spent her entire life, though a secret visit would have been easy to arrange. It was the home of another person, another Marie, and was being kept for that dead person by one trusted housekeeper dusting, polishing, watering the plants.

The ride to the cemetery was cool, inside the black bulletproof hearse. It seemed to Marie that she was riding through a foreign country, though she knew every inch of the route by heart. Or someone she had once been did. Hugo stared out the window. Marie reached over and took his hand. He sighed and looked at her. “Stop blaming yourself,” she said. She squeezed his hand, which sat dry and still within hers. She was aware that, against her wishes, Hugo had indeed saved the DNA of Petite Marie. It was stored, frozen, against the time when he, apparently, thought she might change her mind. She had decided not to tell him she knew. It was his way of dealing with his grief. Petite Marie had meant as much to him as she had to her and Al.

During the time leading up to the funeral, Marie tried to get interested in the workings of her city once again. Hugo had overseen them as best he could during her months in the South American clinic. Everything, from garbage collection to online public school education, was in an uproar. At Hugo’s insistence, she got in touch with her lawyer, Dighton, the only person in New Orleans who knew she was alive, and together with Hugo set up some lines of command that would force order into the system and allow her to keep track of things from a distance. Dighton pointed out to her that there had been a hue and cry from certain quarters that if only Marie Laveau were still here, the pulse-caused pandemonium would not be so overwhelming. Not only that, her enemies were gaining power and dismantling all the good she had done for the city, taking advantage of the problems generated by the Silence; exacerbating and profiting from them.

She listened with distant interest. Her mind was elsewhere. What difference did her city—her past—make now? She read her obituary with satisfaction. Only one thing was on her mind. Revenge.

Yesterday afternoon had been fruitful after a week of frustration. On a quiet side street, deserted in midday, the painted wooden sign said madame nightwing, costuming. Hugo entered without knocking; Marie followed.

It was dark inside, so as to keep the fine silks and satins from fading. Bolts of fabric made the narrow stairway almost impassable. Everywhere she looked, magnificent stripes and patterns, brilliantly dyed, were piled from ceiling to floor on sagging shelves. Hugo interrupted Madame Clarissa Nightwing, an ancient, massive woman, as she stood at a drafting table sketching.

Hugo did all the talking. Marie stood well back in the doorway, her face covered by a fine veil, her hair free, her bare arms the color of night, with a tiny white spot on her forearm, like a reverse freckle. Nightwing gasped on seeing Marie and crossed herself. Marie never spoke a word, but gave herself an inner nod of satisfaction. The rumors would begin—now.

Hugo took out his wallet, flipped it open, and slowly counted out a large sum of money; set it on the table next to Nightwing’s drawing. In a low husky voice, Nightwing answered his questions concerning who had commissioned the clown suits; how much they had paid. She did not know their names, but she had observed them quite closely. One had a scar across his cheek, the other wore a necklace with a scorpion carapace sealed inside.

She had been threatened with death by those men after the detail of the clown suits had come out in the paper, but that was nothing to her, she said with a toss of her head. They had told her not to talk. Did they think she had never stared death in the face before in this rough town, in her long life? Legba protected her. She stared knowingly across the room at Marie when she said this. She had not, of course, had any idea what the suits were to be used for. Mon Dieu! But she had not, she admitted, breathed a word to the police. Hugo said something in a sympathetic tone about there being certain lines one could not cross. Nightwing nodded emphatically and scooped up the money.

Hugo worked the streets.

The men were apparently hiding out somewhere in the Caribbean. Even those who had commissioned the hit might find this information difficult to come by. Marie’s network was fine-tuned, based on a delicate web of gris-gris that stretched back for a century. Subtle, knowing pressures from Hugo worked through the system, forcing their aliases to the surface.

But that was all they had.

The limo bumped into the St. Louis #1 Cemetery and squeezed through the narrow roadways. It could not make the last turn. The driver opened her door and she stepped out. There, around the corner, was the Laveau mausoleum.

“I am the resurrection and the life,” the priest said before they slid the small coffin inside, next to those of Grandmère and her mother. Marie thought, I am resurrected; I am alive, but what does it matter? Life must be filled with something to be of any interest or importance at all, and that was something that she did not have. Give me that, she called out to the invisible stars, to an invisible God. Give me that!

They slid the coffin inside. Marie turned and walked away, Hugo by her side.

BREAK The Washington Post, May 4, 2013 Metro Section

The phone was down for the fifth time this month when Willie Smith dialed 911. He was unable to call the police or an ambulance when he needed them. As a result, he is suing Southern Bell for injuries he sustained during an armed robbery of Pawn-a-Rama, the T Street shop he has owned for twenty years. “I pay my phone bill,” said Smith. “I expect service.”

This is one of many such lawsuits clogging court dockets all over the country. Phone companies are increasingly using the defense that the interruptions are “an act of God.”

Mr. Smith has also filed a suit against his HMO, which refused to provide him with nanotech devices that might knit the shattered bones of his hands and face in one-quarter of the time nature might take. The HMO, MidSouth Services, claims that these devices have not been fully approved by the FDA and that their efficacy is presently in doubt.

Mr. Smith’s lawyer, Endine Singer of Candillio, Sweat, Bean, Magnifico, and Crumbed, alleges in a separate suit that HMOs are putting pressure on the FDA to slow the approval process, and that certain components that might help Mr. Smith have indeed been approved. “These little buggers are going to be expensive as hell. There’s plenty of money on the move under certain tables in Washington to assure that they are. You can quote me on that.” Ms. Singer’s suit alleges kickbacks from HMOs in return for a slowing of the approval process.

Diminuendo in D.C. Zeb | Washington, D.C. | 2014

The Post Office steps were magnificent. Zeb often stood at their foot for a time, as he did today, allowing a slow rearrangement of his perspective. Glowing white marble fanned out at street level and narrowed to an apex promising a concentration of energies, like a sort of lens. It was stimulating to let his wide thoughts flow upward and then focus at doorways dwarfing humans.

It was an excellent, crisp winter morning; the air so cold that he could not smell the smog; the sky intensely blue behind the white, white building. Yesterday it had rained and he spent the day in the library reading astronomy and physics journals curiously empty of any information relevant to the Silence. Still, they had sparked some thoughts.

Zeb drew his small notebook from the inner pocket of Craig’s overcoat and tried to extract a pen or pencil from his shirt pocket, where he kept his enormous found collection. But his pocket would only hold so many and he’d stuffed them in tightly. When he pulled on one of them, they all came out and bounced across the sidewalk. He let them lie, like so many pickup sticks, and began to write.

He stood writing for well over an hour. Behind him at the bus stop, many buses had come and gone. He finished with a sense of release and accomplishment and closed the notebook. He had an impulse to climb the steps and look at the boxes, as he often did, rows of glass-fronted boxes with brass frames. Each the same, but with different contents. He was getting hungry. He reached into his pants pocket and felt the dollars some woman had given him. Enough for some coffee and a grilled cheese at a greasy spoon down the block. He woke up about once a month with a good deal of money in his pocket. Each time he thought he must have forgotten where it came from. Either that or someone was putting money in his pockets while he slept, which seemed to him an ironic twist on the paranoia he tried to fight when he was able to notice it.

He heard the idling of another bus behind him, and someone grabbed his arm. Come on, he heard, and he was pulled toward the open bus door.

“Hey!” He turned angrily.

“Get on, I said. Now!” It was Craig, his face tense.

“I’m not sure I want—”

Craig pushed him up the steps and the driver closed the door. Craig stuffed some money into the box and said, “Back of the bus.” There were only a few people onboard, sitting behind the driver. He and Craig sat facing each other on some seats in the back.

“Now, look—”

“How did you find me?” asked Zeb.

Craig pulled a knife from his pocket, unfolded it, and before Zeb knew what he was doing, sliced the top button off the coat he’d given Zeb. He folded his knife, slipped it into his pocket, lowered the window, and tossed the button out. “Did you think I’d just let you go? I figured that you probably wouldn’t like my offer.”

“Any more of that stuff here?” asked Zeb, holding out his arms and looking at his sleeves.

“Not any more.”

“Would you tell me?”

“Yes.”

“Who else knows about it?”

“Nobody. We all operate in a pretty insular manner. And even if they did, I convinced most everyone that you’re just a harmless idiot.”

“Thanks. I guess. That means I don’t have to be afraid of trying to get my job back? It would be real nice to have better access to up-to-date information.”

“Then you wouldn’t seem like a harmless idiot anymore, would you? Furthermore, without a dependable Internet, telephones, and transportation, not to mention the fact that each pulse sizzles the computer components in the big telescopes, there really isn’t much up-to-date information. How many pulses since the first—three? But I don’t have much time. Just listen. I’m trying to organize a countermovement. This is getting out of hand. You were right. I was wrong. The hysteria is growing. Something terrible has happened.”

“What?”

“A hotel where an international radio astronomy conference was taking place was blown up.”

“What?”

“Yes. Supposedly they were preparing a press statement about the incoming information. The information that you presumably got from your dipole antenna. That information proves, much more than the fact of the pulses, that this is being caused by an intelligent source. It’s extremely organized; clearly a code.”

“That’s so. But… I just don’t understand. About this suppression.”

“When is the next pulse going to happen?”

“Next Tuesday.”

“How do you know?”

Zeb opened his notebook and reached for a pencil.

“Just kidding,” Craig said. “We don’t have time. But how do you know?”

“Because the incoming information sets it up. The information that I recorded. It’s not a secret I want to keep, you know. Want me to call The Washington Post and tell them?”

“No!”

“But why not?”

“Hoo! Top-secret classified, buddy. They’d be all over you. The problem is that they don’t know what to make of it.”

“That’s a bunch of crap.”

“No. Swear.”

Zeb shrugged. “Well, especially if they’re killing off everyone who might have a clue. Are you sure these people that are trying to keep this from getting out aren’t just buying up stock in rail, steam, and zeppelin travel?”

Craig looked out the window for a few beats. “All right. I’m going to be honest with you. In my opinion, something very strange has been happening in my division. Not that we all know each other or anything. We’re actually scattered throughout a lot of government agencies and a lot of us are abroad as well. Moles. But there’s a kind of bizarre hysteria. A kind of Earth-first xenophobia. What makes people so nationalistically nuts? So that they tear apart whole countries based on ethnic background? This is kind of the same effect, it seems to me. The sacred ground of our ancestors we were here first mindset. Racheted up to intense levels.”

Craig leaned forward, put his elbows on his thighs, and clasped his hands. His mouth tightened and he shook his head back and forth a few times. His face was drawn and weary-looking; his eyes had a bleak cast. “I—well, actually, I’m sorry to say that I have proof that a small cadre of people in our government actually was responsible for the deaths of those astronomers. That’s why I’m afraid.”

The bus stopped and the door hissed open. Craig tensed and stared at the middle-aged woman who took a front seat. He kept watching her as he continued. “I began to suspect a few months ago. It was getting to be pretty clear that most everyone else shares a mind-set that I wasn’t relating to. They were even developing their own slang. Anyway, don’t think this is all necessarily your government doing this stuff. Well, it is in a way, I suppose. They have a lot of powerful resources at their command. They don’t even have to put anything in writing. Carte blanche; national security at stake.”

Zeb watched gray stone buildings give way to a block of small shops and restaurants. He tried to understand what Craig was telling him. “You know, I never said that aliens were coming. Did I? I think that I just said an intelligent source was strongly indicated. And who knows how far away they might be? Think about it. Whatever has reached us was probably sent ages ago.”

“Yes, well that’s your weak alien theory. Aliens might be fun and interesting. They might reveal something about the universe, something about ourselves. To these folks, especially now, that resembles the dilemma of the daughter of a fundamentalist Jewish sect deciding to marry the son of a fundamentalist Moslem sect. An open-minded attitude must be prevented at all costs. And a surprise attack would suit them. Mobilize the world. Remember Pearl Harbor? Rumor has it that Churchill knew what was going down. He didn’t tell us because he needed us in the war. There might be a lot of idiotic scientific types who want to figure out what this intelligent source is, right? Try to communicate with them. Give those nasty extraterrestrials the upper hand. Give too much away. In fact, they have a plan to try and make the real picture seem like complete bunk. It will probably work unless there’s something definitive and powerfully convincing opposing it. Verifiable.”

The bus jerked to a stop. The woman got off and two men got on and took separate seats toward the middle of the bus. Craig leaned closer and spoke so quietly that Zeb lost some of his words.

“I have a small network. Very small. I’ve been trying to link up with others. They must be out there. It’s not easy when everything is down. I wish now that I’d spent less time doing physics and more time playing golf.” His maniacal laugh startled Zeb. Craig extricated a thick envelope from a pocket and tucked it into Zeb’s coat pocket. “Least I could do. On short notice. Like I said, a lot in the pot. Don’t go back to the Post Office. You go there at least twice a week. You might consider changing your habits somewhat too. Move to a different city, even. One of the ploys they might use is to try and put out the information that anyone who has the kind of information you have must be one of the aliens.”

“What?”

“Sure. Witch hunt. Why the hell would you set up that antenna? Pretty damned clever the way you pretended from way, way back that you were nuts, eh? You just had to get to that particular part of the world and get your setup ready at the right time. You’ve been planning this for a long, long time, Zeb. I mean, we don’t know how long you live, how long you’ve been here…”

Zeb stared at Craig.

“They’re military for the most part, Zeb. They’re not scientists. Money is pouring into their pockets. Plenty to siphon off without anyone noticing. Or even caring. And I’ve made myself part of it too, I guess. Take care. And save the other stuff. It’s important. Wish I had more time, but I’ve got to go. Keep well. Hang in there.” He rose, grabbed the overhead bar, clapped Zeb on the shoulder. The bus shuddered to a halt. The doors hissed open. Craig turned back. “And Zeb—”

He hesitated for a moment, looked at Zeb as if he had something important to add.

But he didn’t. He dashed from the bus and into the door of an office building.

Zeb leaned back in the plastic seat, stunned, as the bus pulled away. He was not all that surprised, he told himself. Yet it was amazing. You’d think that “they,” whoever “they” were, would want all the information they could get. Instead, they were suppressing it.

He jolted, unseeing, to the end of the line. The bus driver changed off, tapping him on the shoulder before he left. “Great day for a nice long ride, eh?”

Zeb wangled a transfer from the new driver, which was a minor miracle, and changed buses. He rode to a new part of the city. New for him, anyway, in his new mode of living. Near the zoo. He’d always liked Rock Creek. He stepped out amid a swirl of exhaust at the Sheraton Hotel. It was dark. Leftover Christmas lights shone out from restaurants and bars.

Everything was in a spin. New territory. New agenda. More danger. And he held some kind of key that could be deadly to him? The world seemed highly absurd.

He was tired, dizzy, dirty. He reached inside his coat, felt the envelope, teased it open without taking it out, and pulled a couple of bills from it. He stared at them. They were hundreds. He walked into the lobby and asked for a room. When the clerk told him they had no rooms available, Zeb put the three bills on the counter. He and the clerk, a young man with hypergroomed hair and too-stylish glasses, looked at each other. Zeb made his face say, I am an important academic. A bit eccentric, perhaps.

The young man did not seem to understand what his face was saying. Maybe it would be best to talk.

“I know I look terrible.” He tried to smile. “My BMW broke down in Maryland last night and I had a heck of a time having it towed and getting here.”

The young man nodded and slid him a key card. “How many nights?”

“Just one.”

“You get change then.”

Zeb had been showering in shelters with little privacy. He soaked in the tub for a long time. He looked at his filthy clothes lying on the floor. He couldn’t believe he’d been wearing them. He couldn’t bear to put them on. He ordered some from the lobby store and had them sent up. He wore pretty standard sizes, but these hung big on him and he had to send the pants back for a smaller size. He asked the boy who brought the clothes if they could spiff up his coat. The boy looked at it doubtfully, then said, “We’ll try.” Zeb had emptied the pockets already and handed it to him.

He had a large fine meal in his room. Lobster and steak. What had happened with Craig? Had Craig jolted him back to reality? What an odd reality to be jolted into. Hunted as a possible alien.

Finally he opened the fat envelope Craig had given him. He found $9,700 inside. A bum could live on that for a long time if he didn’t waste it like he was tonight. He could buy a small business. A used car to sleep in. A trip to Paris.

A bus ride to the Valley to see his dogs and Sally.

There was a small packet of thin brown paper, folded. Zeb unfolded it and three diamonds slid onto the quilt. At least it they looked like diamonds. Maybe they were something else. Some kind of new information technology. That was the most probable thing. He re-wrapped them and stuck them in the envelope.

Zeb considered getting a job. He felt unusually clearheaded. Maybe he just hadn’t been eating right. But wouldn’t he need a new Social Security number? Maybe he could just wash dishes somewhere or something. Some kind of cash job where people didn’t ask questions. He really needed to think about everything. Maybe he should go to a clinic, get some medicine. Tomorrow he should call Sally, let her know he was all right. Enough of this hocus-pocus. Craig must be mistaken about all that nonsense. Maybe Craig was going nuts too. Or maybe he’d hallucinated everything Craig had told him. He flipped open his notebook, paged through all of his work. What did it matter?

His coat came back, mended and cleaned, with a new button, around midnight. He was impressed, but the boy said they had a lot of international travelers and everything was open twenty-four hours. “Even the barber shop,” he said pointedly, looking at Zeb’s clean, but lanky, shoulder-length hair.

Zeb lay down to sleep, but tossed restlessly for an hour. Then he got up. The sensation was familiar. Things were building again. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. But he had to walk.

He dressed in his new clothes. Mighty fancy for the street. But they seemed as if they would be sturdy; wool. Damned expensive. He looked at the tag he’d torn off and read that they were embedded with some kind of dirt-eating microbe. He laughed. They certainly wouldn’t go hungry. His boots were still all right. He rolled up the extra pair of socks he’d bought and stuck them in his coat pocket, along with his notebook and the packet.

He sat on the edge of the bed and flipped on the TV. A replay of the midnight news. From reading newspapers, he knew that when broadcasting wasn’t working, people could go to centers to hear and see taped news or subscribe to a taping service.

He saw a fire in Northwest, a murder in Maryland, a robbery on Wisconsin Avenue, and then heard “Police are investigating the death of a homeless man found on a bench at Dupont Circle last night at 10:48.” The camera panned a gurney; the emergency crew shouted angrily at the cameraperson. “Hey, lady, the dead deserve some dignity!” But they’d gotten a distant shot of someone who looked a bit like Craig. It was hard to tell. But then the newscaster said, “He has been tentatively identified by police as one Craig Sinclair. The weather tomorrow—”

Zeb found it hard to breathe. He couldn’t move. It had to be a nightmare. He had to be dreaming. The objects in the room became distant. Then they became menacing. The colors were bright but disconnected from objects, flat planes intersecting here and there. A black box, in front of him, with flickering pictures. A doorframe brightly lit from within. A pattern of interlocking snakes at his feet.

Why was he sitting here in these clothes? Where had they come from? He touched one hand with the other. Were they both his hands? But those were his boots. Yes.

He stood, shucked his coat, tore the strange shirt off, ripping buttons. He pulled off his boots and peeled off his trousers, kicked them aside. He found his real clothes on the bathroom floor with a sense of tremendous relief. Who had put them there? He was so dizzy. There wasn’t enough air in the room. What was he doing here anyway? He dressed hurriedly and pulled on his boots without tying them. Maybe there was a fire in the building; that was why it was so stuffy. He grabbed his coat and ran out the door. He had to take the stairs because there might be a fire. That was what you were supposed to do.

He pushed the emergency bar on the ground floor and burst onto the street, hearing an alarm go off, sharp and loud, behind him. He saw that the police were half a block away, blue lights flashing, at the lobby entrance. Was that the clerk from the haberdashery shop they were questioning?

Zeb plunged off the sidewalk and stumbled down into the roaring darkness of the Rock Greek ravine. Holding on to a tree, he vomited. Maybe he had food poisoning. He washed his mouth with creek water and spit it out. If he wasn’t sick before, he’d be sick now for sure.

He crawled up under the bridge, onto the concrete apron. It was a very high bridge, and the thunk of traffic as cars left the bridge and dropped down half an inch soothed him, along with the running of the river over winter rocks. He buttoned his coat, pulled a rock beneath his head, and fell asleep.

The next morning he walked into a convenience store ten blocks away. He warmed up a biscuit in the microwave and poured some coffee. He hoped they wouldn’t be suspicious of the hundred-dollar bills he’d found in his coat, but he automatically felt in his pocket and pulled out a ten, change from the hotel.

He stopped and stared at the National Inquirer headline:

There was a picture of a big-headed bald child next to the headline, captioned:

The woman behind him, holding a quart of malt liquor and a package of gummy spiders, nudged him. “People never get tired of believing in aliens, do they? Kinda like Santa Claus for adults.”

“Mmm.” Zeb patted his notebook, crammed into Craig’s inner coat pocket. His picture of the transformed radio sky.

Was it the only one?

Tuesday morning did not so much dawn as develop, slowly, in tones of black and white. Zeb watched white breath puff in front of him as he walked over the Rock Creek Bridge, felt the bump and sway of the bridge through his feet as traffic passed him. The cold burned exhalations of cars smelled ashy. The rocks below had delicate skirts of white ice.

He did not have a watch. But it would not be long. Better to be out walking than inside the stuffy shelter. The sky released its first fat flakes of snow as he stepped off the bridge, headed south toward downtown.

He thought about the diamonds. He was hoping that they contained ionization information. The pulses and incoming information would have created a unique ionization situation in the upper atmosphere, which would yield a lot of clues about the nature of the transmission. Surely the diamonds were read-only. But how to read them?

The few lights burning in the windows of the massive brick apartment buildings edging Connecticut all went out at once.

By the time he got to S Street about twenty minutes later, Connecticut’s wide swath was clogged with stopped vehicles. A cacophony of horns was a measure of the frustration index. Pedestrians swarmed around the cars. The door of a health food store stood open; inside Zeb saw that the shelves were empty. At a gas station a few blocks from Pennsylvania, he saw a man pull a gun from his pocket and wave it around as he exchanged shouts with another man wielding a crowbar like a baseball bat; Zeb crossed the street and continued his walk. He thought that it might be a good day to spend at the Library of Congress—if they didn’t close it down.

But by the time he passed the World Bank, the streets were thick with stalled cars, people, and rapidly accumulating snow. Zeb’s hatless head was soaking wet. A woman nearby pounded a pay phone with a rock. Coins gushed out, but she ignored them. “Fuck!” she yelled each time she bashed it.

Zeb sighed. Not the best day for a thoughtful stroll.

BREAK The Washington Evening Star, January 15, 2015 Guide to Top Stories

Divine Horsemen Glissando Marie | Haiti | 2016

The messenger came at dawn, but Marie had been awake for hours.

Several years after Petite Marie’s death, Marie’s ketch was tied up at Port-au-Prince Harbor, home to Jean and Jacques, her French terrorist bodyguard/chefs.

She and her crew had not been in Haiti long. The trail of Petite Marie’s killers, cold for a very long time, had been suddenly revived through a small carelessness that only someone as relentless as Hugo would have noticed. And it led to Haiti.

She generally slept little and lightly, and at 4 a.m., a beep alerted her that the Internet was available, which was quite rare in this post-Pulse world. She opened her eyes but did not move from the tattered couch where she had fallen asleep. Rain pattered on the tin roof of the mountain shack she had lived in for the past month, waiting for Hugo to cook his information. Or his informants.

Marie was not happy about being in Haiti. She had at last put the murders, which divided her life into before and after so much more powerfully than even her resurrection or the Silence, behind her. Because of her own nature, because of her heritage and because of her position, she should never have had a child. It had been deeply irresponsible. Hugo reminded her that her mother and her grandmother had both seen fit to have children. Marie said that they’d lived in different times and Hugo snorted, remarking on Grandmère’s rum running.

Now anger and guilt consumed her once more.

The computer beeped again. A gust of wind rustled the thick tropical forest surrounding the shack.

She sighed. It would be wasteful not to use this opportunity.

Turning her left wrist upward, she pushed hard on what looked like a small tattoo of a snake, though she couldn’t see it in the dark room. Beneath the snake was a hormonal delivery system that she was trying not to use. But if she didn’t, she was not functional. She was either exceedingly angry or else she didn’t give a damn.

It would take a few minutes to kick in.

She sat up and fumbled for matches; lit a kerosene lamp on the table next to the couch. In its soft glow, she unrolled her scrolled computer and pulled the touchpad into a suitable shape; made the screen portion a nice-sized square and snapped it with her finger to stiffen it. She touched the icon that would connect her to whatever satellite system had suddenly become operant and leaned back on the tattered couch.

Web work was now a privilege of the very rich. Marie was an investor in SignalCycle, a company that continuously readied satellites in order to replace those that fried each time a pulse shot through the atmosphere. The pulse-sensitive components were kept in exceedingly pricey shielded boxes until needed. This effort provided only a sheer lacework of communication time, expensive and effervescent compared to the former powerful gridwork that was the glory of the recent millennium. But it was better than nothing—if you could afford it.

Regular telephone service was just as rare. Municipalities waged a constant battle against the Silence—El Silencio—but constantly replacing melted computer chips and transformers was terribly expensive.

The search was on for organic alternatives. And nanotech alternatives. Or, possibly, both combined: bionan. The changing tides of technology had shifted little in Haiti, which had exceedingly low levels of technology to begin with. It was an island—before and after—with rationed electricity and running water only for the rich. Its only wealth was a surfeit of anger at whoever was in power.

But Marie and Hugo weren’t here for the stability.

Marie leaned backward and cranked open the wooden jalousies, amplifying the roar of a nearby waterfall. Though basically a diva of information, she didn’t feel very divalike this morning. Still, she knew more about the silences than most civilians. Over the years, during active communication phases, she had ferreted out any number of interesting snippets from dedicated networks and from her international transcriptions of intercepted cellphone conversations. The collected information was shot through with spiders that responded to the frequency with which certain words were repeated. It did not take the word “alien” to trigger the spider’s frenzy. Innumerable code words were being used. One thing in particular that had caught her attention was the attempted roundup of all children born nine months after the first pulse. This action was hotly protested and litigated by parents in the United States, though it received curiously little coverage in the news. Hardly any at all, in the fact, even considering that news services were in tatters.

Marie hated censorship.

A few bars of Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” issued from her computer and she hunched over the screen.

Her spiders scored a hit, matching up a positive percentage of necessary attributes, and the opening page of Dento, Inc., a Japanese government-linked nanotech research lab, appeared. A list of the matches scrolled down the right side of her screen: nanotech, biotech… and Kita Narasake.

This astounded Marie.

She remembered Kita. A fellow student in Chicago many years ago, with whom she had traded e-mail, hence the record of her name carried through generations of computer changes. What was Kita working on?

After a second, the answer appeared.

Marie frowned.

Bees? Why the hell would she be spending so much time on bees?

Marie glanced through the jalousies. The rain had ceased, and drops of water with the brilliance of jewels clung to the eaves. On the opposite side of the ravine, the ridge top flared with sunrise, which illuminated a line of pink flowering trees threaded through the dark forest. Her heart was filled with happiness—at least it seemed so; a certain feeling effervesced and infused life with what she could only think of as a steady glow. She was just barely able to remind herself that this state of intense joy was promoted by the hormones. Knowing this did not put a dent in the joy itself. Life was utter perfection. Precisely ordered hormones from Advanced Endocrine Research, Inc., urged her to believe that she was the target of the forces of goodness in the universe. They were her window into the amazing world of brain chemistry. Could she imbue herself with the overwhelming desire to paint, or sing, or write? Or torture, maim, and kill? Food for thought.

And fodder for investment. Something to add to her portfolio, along with a goodly share of the technology for creating the government-mandated solar roads and cars that would soon replace gasoline-based cars, and the land she had bought along the routes of the proposed North American Magrail System—NAMS. Perhaps the way in which she procured the classified NAMS maps could be described as illegal—marginally illegal, maybe, but lawyer Dighton said that the legality was debatable and he was willing to debate it for his usual exorbitant fees should anyone bring it up. Marie was at the edge of a cresting wave of new technologies. She had nothing to lose; she was fearless. The only thing she lacked, Hugo had once told her, was a moral footing. “You’re like the mafia everywhere in the world, Marie. The end justifies the means.”

“I’m hurt, Hugo,” she’d replied with a slight smile and eyes cast down.

“Like hell,” he had rejoined.

Marie reminded herself, with an effort, that no godly fingers pulled wisps of mist upward from the valley in tendrils, and looked back at the Dento, Inc., screen, which was covered solidly with chemical equations. Her spiders had searched beyond the smooth surface of the site and found another private Dento network that apparently spanned the world. She was in. She said, “Tell me what these equations mean,” and a box on her screen obligingly appeared, containing the word pheromones. It was odd that the waterfall was getting so much louder—

She jumped from the couch, heart beating, and reached beneath the cushion. The cold, heavy Luger felt reassuring. She crouched and peered through the jalousie slats.

A vividly painted ancient VW bug erupted over the rim of the steep driveway into the packed-dirt yard and halted. A tall thin teenager got out. Dreadlocks escaped from the red baseball cap jammed crookedly on his head. He looked around, walked toward the porch, set an envelope on the top step, jumped back in his car, and drove back down the mountain.

As per Hugo’s instructions.

Marie wiped away the sudden sweat of fear, wryly reflecting that perhaps her hormones were not too strong after all. She had not imagined that a golden chariot had alighted in front of her house or that an angel had left a box full of miracles.

She stepped onto the dew-damp porch. Tiny yellow orchids, drooping from an overhanging tree, flailed in a sudden gust of wind. She tore open the envelope and read the note: special delivery package in town. meet me at noon.

Hugo had found Petite Marie’s killers at last. Or at least, the final clue.

Marie stumbled back into the house.

In the small kitchen, little more than a lean-to addition, she fired up the propane burner. She put on distilled water for tea and fumbled for the ceramic lid to the tea canister, but after lifting it up, she hurled it to the floor. It shattered in a very satisfactory fashion and she heard her own paroxysm of hysterical laughter rather distantly. Reaching into the jar, she grasped a handful of yerba mate and dropped it into the boiling water and wrenched the knob that turned off the gas. The water quieted. The clean scent of mate mingled with the rainwater air. She closed her eyes and Petite Marie danced in the blackness.

She strained the mate into a thick pottery cup with no handle and carried it to the bedroom, where she dropped cross-legged onto the straw mat covering the uneven wooden floor. From beneath the net-draped iron bed she pulled a stainless-steel briefcase. She touched index fingers to circles on either side of the latch, whispered “Open sesame,” and the latch sprang open.

Rain thrummed anew on the roof. She surveyed the small stainless-steel vials strapped in neat rows inside the briefcase, then touched a pad in the center of the case and accessed a screen called descriptions.

They were doing amazing things with brain chemistry nowadays. Not many of such things were legal. Marie funneled money into small labs throughout the world through obscuring interfaces, in hopes of eventual paybacks. But the lab that had distilled #19 was not hers. She had come to possess #19 through a complicated trade. The function of the contents had to do with imprinting and ducks. God knows it was a very bad sort of stuff. It had only been mammal-tested on rats and on one adult lion, whose original wild mien had undergone an amazing change. Might there not be a market for completely docile large cats? The ability to coexist happily with humans would certainly create the ready cash to bring them back from the verge of extinction. Slightly altered, of course, but then nothing was perfect. Her contact claimed that its effect on humans remained a mystery.

Not for long. She smiled and pulled open the Velcro straps, took out #19, closed the case, and slid it back beneath the bed.

Balancing the bottle on the dresser’s wavy veneer, she wrestled with a stuck drawer and pulled out a dress she thought of as formidable. Tight on the top, with a nice flamenco flare that started below the hips to allow for kicks. She pulled it on and looked at herself in the pocked mirror. Hugo was wrong. She was gaining weight. Practically all muscle. She worked out several hours a day with free weights.

She pulled her many long braids up into a twist and secured it with a silver comb of concentric hearts; sat on the bed and slid her feet into high heels. She clasped her hands and bowed her head.

Was this right? No jury, no trial?

What cared she? Petite Marie had had none either.

Slipping the vial into her pocket, Marie walked down the rickety porch steps, climbed into the Jeep, and headed down the mountain, narrowly avoiding two showy fighting cocks strutting in the rutted road two switchbacks below her shack. She waved to an old man on a porch as she jounced past, and he waved back. Sunlight broke through the mist, illuminating the valley. She crossed the tiny bridge at the bottom of the mountain and got on the main road to town, a two-lane blacktop with no painted lines. She drove very fast.

She parked on the edge of the market and made her way through it. In the colorful madness, she was little noted; in fact, she looked positively sober and conservative compared to everyone else. Little did they know, she thought, what madness danced within her brain. She felt it to be madness. It was not even a slippery slope. It was a cliff. She was poised on the edge, wings strapped on.

Embracing the new was another way to put it. Semantics were so useful.

The neighborhood near the market was growing raucous, even though it was before noon. Wild cries, even gunshots, were not apt to be particularly noted. She turned down a cobblestone alley. Her French terrorist chefs, lounging on dilapidated lawn chairs, sharing a bottle, appeared not to notice her and she appeared not to notice them. She turned in at the open door they bracketed and climbed narrow stairs to a third-floor apartment. Knocked in the silly code she and Hugo had devised when children. How far we’ve come together, she thought. He opened the door.

“Bring on the clowns,” she said.

He grimaced at her terrible joke and jerked his head sideways, locking the door behind her.

The room held a folding chair, a battered couch, two chairs with ripped upholstery, and a massive iron table with a man chained to each end.

They sat on the floor and leaned against the furring strips of a wall that had lost most of its plaster. The tall one had a new red slash across his face. The short one had a cast on one arm. Both were heavily bruised. Neither could contain his shock at seeing her. The tall one shifted as if to jump and run and was restrained by the chain. The short one looked longingly at the window.

“Release them,” she told Hugo.

Displaying no emotion, Hugo felt in his pocket and manipulated the radio key. Their fetters sprang open. “Don’t even think about it,” said Hugo.

“Make yourselves comfortable.”

They looked at each other, rose, and slouched to the chairs. They were both sweating heavily. The hand of the tall one as it sat on the arm of the chair began to tremble. He clasped it on his lap within his other hand.

Marie said, “You know who I am.”

Silence. Marie grinned slightly, though she felt as if she was falling into a bottomless pit. “No?” She strolled across the room, yanking the heart comb from her braids and tossing it to the floor, lowering her head so that her braids curtained her face. She clasped her hands behind her back. “Picture me… a different color. Somewhat lighter— perhaps—oh, all those descriptions are so tiresome. Like coffee with a lot of cream. And not only that.” She stopped, turned, and whipped her braids back with a toss of her head. “Picture me standing… on a balcony… yes?”

The eyes of the short one widened. “But—you are”—he choked—“dead.”

The tall one spoke more firmly with a deep, raspy voice. “It not be her. Not Marie Laveau. We kill her t’ru and t’ru. Though it be a mistake…” His voice trailed off as she continued to stare into his eyes.

“What do you mean, a ‘mistake’?” snapped Marie.

“We supposed to…” The short one glanced at the man with the scarred face.

“Speak up now,” she said, her voice like a whip.

“In the killing of Marie Laveau.” said the cut-faced man, clearing his throat. “That we have admitted to that dwarf there. But that is all that we say.”

“Oui,” muttered the short one.

“I am indeed Marie Laveau.” Marie was practically hissing and they shrank back at the way she leered at them with, she hoped, her most ominous expression. “You did kill me.” She straightened. “But I have certain… powers.” She tapped her foot.

Both of the men looked alarmed.

“You killed me. And you know who killed my husband and daughter.”

The cut-faced man swallowed hard.

“Well?”

“Yes, ma’am,” they both admitted after Hugo shifted from one foot to another and cleared his throat in a suggestive manner.

She dropped onto the folding chair and stared at them. “I am of a mind to kill you both.”

They said nothing. The short one picked some small thing from his pants leg and examined it.

“Do you agree that I would be within my rights?”

They glanced around.

“Well?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the short one with a Haitian accent, earning an evil look from his companion. “But—”

“But nothing!” She rose. Her dress swirled around her. She paced the floor, her heels clicking. “Do you dare to plead for your miserable lives?” She turned back, touched her cheekbone where the snake was. At least she hoped it was; she didn’t exactly remember which side she’d put it on. “I am impossible to kill.”

The short one looked away. The tall one said, “I do not believe in voudoun.”

“You don’t have much time left to believe in anything,” Marie replied. “Enjoy your freedom of opinion. How about you?” she asked the short one.

He made the sign of the cross. She grinned. “Wise, but useless, I’m afraid.”

The tall one jumped from his chair and she kicked him across the face. He fell to the floor on his back. That took about ten seconds. Hugo had his gun out.

“Get back to your chair,” she said curtly. The short one was breathing in gasps. The tall one resumed his chair. He wiped away the blood that trickled into his eye from his freshly broken wound with the hem of his T-shirt.

“I want to try something new,” said Marie. “Consider yourselves unimaginably blessed.” She pulled the vial from her pocket, the vial containing Potion #19: imprinting.

Hugo knew better than to disagree with her in front of the killers, but she could feel his shock. He recognized the vial, of course, as coming from the briefcase of bionan experiments, but he didn’t know what it was. Just that, in general, it was something that could wreak strange changes.

“I’ve been told that you wouldn’t say anything about who hired you,” she said.

“Our names be mud we be talking,” said the tall one defiantly.

“You will be mud shortly if you don’t cooperate. This is a kind of truth serum.” She tossed the vial up and down.

Hugo sighed loudly.

“Are there any glasses in this dump?” she asked.

“Some used Styrofoam coffee cups in the trash,” said Hugo. “Next to the kitchen sink.” His voice might sound neutral to their roommates, but she heard cold disapproval. Get rid of the scum now. As soon as we know their bosses. Wasn’t that the plan? Don’t play this game.

She strode into the kitchen and retrieved two cups from the garbage. She stood on squares of green linoleum peeling up from the floor, which was strewn with yellowed newspapers. An attempt to pry the porcelain sink from the wall had been abandoned, leaving it awry. Brownish water spluttered from the faucets into the cups. She poured several drops from the vial into each one, then stared out the kitchen window at the wooden wall across the alley, thinking of nothing. Blank, she thought. Joy gone. Dose getting low.

Should she?

She crossed her arms tightly, bowing her head. She could no longer imagine any love, any nonchemical joy.

But she was still alive. She would step into this new future. She would find new alternatives. She would be a player. She would take control as much as possible. To see the alternatives and then not make a choice was a choice in itself, the choice of passive acceptance. The world was changing very quickly.

So would these two killers. She picked up the cups, made herself tall, swept back into the other room.

“Drink all of this,” she told them. “The only thing that I can guarantee you is that it will not kill you.” A lie. “But he will in an instant if you spill a drop.”

She handed a cup to each man. Nervously, both gulped their portion. Marie resumed the folding chair. She didn’t really know how long this would take. For that matter, she didn’t know if they would fall to the floor convulsing and die. She didn’t really care. And Hugo would be ever so happy if that happened.

“Look at me,” she commanded. “I want to hear the story of your life. The whole story. You first, Shorty.”

Shorty licked his lips.

“Now,” she said. “And call me Boss.”

It was a bit of a stab in the dark. But the lab animals dosed with #19, or so said the sketchy abstracts that accompanied it, had developed a quick and enduring loyalty to the experimenters who interacted with them during the first few moments after they ingested the potion. It worked along the lines of genetic engineering, but rapidly, due to a combination of various enzymes, so that the brain chemistry situation that allowed ducklings to imprint on their parents would be—if this black market stuff worked—replicated in the brains of these criminals.

Let them think it voudoun if they preferred, and let them think the science that had resurrected her voudoun as well.

Shorty’s voice shook when he started but soon smoothed out as he became lost in the telling. She was not surprised at the tale of poverty and beatings; the inclusion and power of finally belonging to a gang. “Look at me when you talk,” she reminded him several times. “And you too,” she said to Cut Face. His story was essentially the same, though he was from Jamaica, not Haiti.

But an odd thing happened as he finished his telling; stuttered out the names of his employers and all he knew about their network. His face worked; he began to cry. He fell to the floor and crawled toward Marie.

She was taken aback. Hugo sprang forward and kicked him in the side. “Get up,” he commanded.

Instead, Cut Face moved swiftly as a snake and kissed Marie’s shoe.

“Queen,” breathed Shorty, as Hugo mauled an unresisting Cut Face back to his chair.

“Boss,” reminded Marie, disconcerted. She stared down at the wet mark on her shoe.

“Boss,” they both echoed, tears flowing. Shorty blew his nose on his shirttail. “Boss Queen,” said Cut Face, his once blank eyes imploring as those of a punished child, “I and I deserve to die. Put mercy on we. We be talking now. We be telling Boss Queen de trut’.”

“We are,” Shorty agreed vehemently with sharp nods of his head. “You check this out, you will see. We are sorry. Sorry for the killing. But the little girl, she was not our fault. We cannot be in two places at one time. Not like you, Boss Queen. We will help to find them. We only know a name. Bensonberg. From Copenhagen. And you—you were a mistake—”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “A mistake. You said that before. What do you mean?”

There was no pause this time. Cut Face said, “You, dey just be wanting to scare, to warn. Den dey would tell you—whatever dey want. We don’t know what dey be wanting to tell you. But dey be killing… your daughter, your husband, so dat you be obeying them. We don’t know how you be displeasing them. But the signal, the siren, it came out wrong. First siren sound is test. Den, dey supposed to call you, threaten you. If you don’ listen, siren plays. We t’ot we had the order for to kill you. Please, Boss Queen—”

“They died—” Her voice shook now. “They died as a warning to me?”

Petite Marie—innocent, beautiful, completely unaware, and not a threat to anyone—was dead. As was Al, a wonderful, intellectual, loving man. Because of their organization. Because they wanted to warn her…

A sudden flare of rage woke every memory and flashed through her body like lightning, beyond her control. She understood in an instant the fury that caused people to slam fists through walls, the fury that caused unpremeditated murder.

Shaking, she turned and went to her bag, which was slumped on the floor by the couch. She opened it and pulled out her photoscreen. “There!” she said, in a low voice “Look! My little girl. Marie. Look, I tell you!”

She stretched the photoscreen larger with trembling haste. “See? There she is. Playing in the garden. There she is.” Her words were staccato as she changed the image with a touch of her finger. “LOOK at her!” Her shriek was hysterical. “Here. Here she is at her first Communion. And there—there—” Her hands shook so hard she knew they saw very little. “With her father in Jackson Square. He’s dead too. They’re both dead, you vicious scumbags.” She collapsed onto the couch, sobbing.

Hugo gently removed the photoscreen, touched the shrink tab, put it back in her purse.

“We be sorry,” said Cut Face.

Marie looked at Hugo. “You got all the information you need from them?”

He nodded. “Bensonberg is enough. I’ve had dealings with him before.”

“I think I will kill them now.”

“Good. But Marie—”

“Give me your .44. Put the silencer on it.”

“Marie, we can have someone—”

“I want to do it myself.”

“Please, Miss Laveau,” said the short one. “I be doing anything for you. But if you want to be killing me—”

“I do,” she snapped.

The man with the cut face bowed his head. “Your will be da main thing.”

Marie aimed at the man’s head. At the last instant, her hand jerked.

A scream like that of a wild animal sliced the air. Blood spattered the wall, the floor, the tattered chair, and flowed out onto the floor. Marie staggered backward, shifting the gun to her left hand and shaking her right. A burnt smell lingered. Her ears rang.

Hugo hurried forward. “You hit his calf. I think I see bone.” The man had passed out and was slumped forward. Blood pooled beneath his leg.

The short man stared at his companion, an expression of horror on his face. He looked back at Marie. His eyes were wide and pitying.

“You do da right thing. We deserve to die.” Tears wet his round face. “Here. Shoot me too. She was a beautiful li’l girl. Not’in but a baby.” He knelt and lowered his head to the floor. “Kill me.”

Marie kicked him in the head—hard. He sprawled to one side, groaning. She kicked him again, again, again, until Hugo caught her arms from behind and twisted her away.

She was panting in hoarse gasps. She went and leaned against the scarred wall, looked through a window lined with jagged teeth of glass to the street. No one seemed to have noticed the shot or, more likely, no one cared. Or they were afraid.

She doubled up and hugged herself while harsh sobs ripped through her. “Why did I live? Why? Is there some kind of reason?” Hugo took her hand and led her to the couch.

“We all make our own reasons, Marie.” Hugo squeezed her shoulder gently. “Maybe… maybe we’ll find a reason again.”

After a few minutes, she went into the kitchen, washed her face, and came back out dripping and cool with her head empty as a Tuesday church. Everything looked far away. The bodies of the injured men, the blood, slow-seeping now; the splattered table, chairs, and wall. “Let’s go.”

She kicked aside the silver heart-shaped comb, still lying on the floor. Then she closed the door behind her.

As they jounced back up the mountain in the dark, Hugo was royally pissed and made no bones about it.

“Why don’t you just tell me what we’re up to, Marie, before you pull these stunts? And slow down. I’m going to bounce out of the damned Jeep.”

“Put on your seat belt,” said Marie, splashing through a small creek that cut across the road. Another dose of hormones had done her a world of good. That was why she mistrusted them so. “You could tell me about your stunts, you know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Petite Marie. I know that you saved her.” Marie was glad it was dark. Hugo couldn’t see the tears that suddenly welled in her eyes.

“You’re changing the subject,” said Hugo, his voice rough. “What are we going to do with those… those zombies you created back there? I’m not sure that the one you shot will die. Furthermore, we have no idea how long the effects of that potion will last. What if they come to their senses at the wrong time?”

“Then their death will have been delayed for a while, that’s all. They will have had time to enjoy life’s splendors a little longer.”

“Do I detect an undertone of irony?”

“You can if you want to.” She sighed and downshifted to climb a steep muddy hill. A shower had passed, and clouds blew swiftly through the night sky, revealing a brilliant full moon. “I’m not sure I have a plan. Without those hormones, I wouldn’t give a damn about anything.”

The wet jungle shone to their right in the moonlight. The sweet scent of jasmine pervaded the air. Across the valley near the ridge, a fire burned.

“What’s over there?” Marie reached a flat place and turned off the engine. The sounds of the jungle rose about them—the faint, distant roar of the falls; the whistles and chirps and occasional whoop of unseen, unknown creatures; the wind in the trees.

“No houses on the survey map,” he said. “It looked to me as if the ridge is too steep to build on. But there are trails. Some kind of…” He stopped.

“Voudoun ritual,” Marie said thoughtfully.

“Bunch of kids out drinking.”

They stared at the small flickering orange light.

“Do you think—?” started Marie.

“Whatever it is, I doubt that strangers are welcome.”

Marie spun the wheel and caused the Jeep to roar back down the mountain, careening around the switchbacks. “Damn it, Marie, slow down or let me out,” yelled Hugo. The headlights illuminated a narrow swath of dripping jungle as they arced wildly. Marie slowed gradually, downshifting, and then they were at the bottom of the mountain.

“Here’s where it gets tricky,” she said.

“Oh,” said Hugo. “It hasn’t been tricky yet?”

The main road curved to the left, where it crossed the stream via a rickety bridge and headed into town. Marie turned to the right, where a wide path that might have been a road at one time vanished into the wall of forest. She shifted into first gear and cautiously advanced. Wet branches bent away from the windshield and whipped behind them.

Then the road bent to the left, to a small muddy beach. The headlights illuminated what looked like small whitecaps in a broad swift cut of water. Marie gunned the engine and the Jeep plowed through the creek, raising wings of water, then swiftly ascended the steep bank. Marie let out a triumphant yell.

“Yeah, we’re alive,” panted Hugo when they reached the top of the bank and turned onto the narrow track that led back into the valley. “But hey, I guess that doesn’t matter to you much.”

Marie smiled wickedly at Hugo. “You’re signed up too, sweetheart, don’t forget.”

“After seeing how it’s affected you, I am seriously considering taking my name off the list,” said Hugo.

The weeds between the wheel tracks were a foot high, but they were definitely on a road. The jungle receded as they passed through what might have been, at one time, someone’s cleared field.

They could no longer see the fire, but the road began to climb the side of the mountain. Marie was surprised to find her heart beating hard; what—afraid of death? She laughed.

“Keep in mind there’s no door over here,” said Hugo. He leaned forward, gripping the bar in front of him. Their progress was tanklike, slow and grinding. After five more minutes, the road widened out. Around a curve, perhaps fifteen cars were parked.

“Wouldn’t have thought those would make it up here.”

“Maybe they came before the rain,” said Marie.

“It’s never before the rain.”

Marie turned the Jeep around and set the brake. “Ready for some action?”

“It’s been kind of a long day for me.” But he got out and followed her.

The wind freshened as Marie hurried up the narrow moonlit road, jumping water-filled ruts, feeling a lift in her spirit with the rising of the wind. The sound of drums came from the forest ahead, complex and deep. She ought to be afraid, she thought, but instead she almost felt like dancing, as if she were a child again, running down the street toward the sun-gleamed, barge-roughened Mississippi.

“You know, Hugo,” she said somewhat breathlessly when he caught up to her, “it was rather nice of me to spare those two men today, don’t you think?”

Hugo grunted. “You and I seem to have different value systems. Either that or your vocabulary is way too limited.”

They rounded a turn, and suddenly the fire was visible through a skein of branches about fifty feet away. A very large man stepped out in the road and said something in Creole. Marie spoke French, but couldn’t really understand his strange accent and grammar.

Hugo replied, gesturing at Marie. The man raised his bald head and stared at Marie thoughtfully with deep-set eyes that gleamed in the fitful light. He tilted his head. Then he gestured for them to follow.

“What did you say?” whispered Marie.

“I told him that you were Marie Laveau,” said Hugo. “You know, that famous Voodoo Queen we’ve all heard so much about.”

“Shit,” said Marie. “They’ll be expecting something from me. And stop smiling that way.”

“What way?”

“That wicked way.”

“This is an entirely innocent smile. Good God. Will you look at that?”

They crossed an invisible threshold into a scene of, Marie thought—despite her native skepticism—sacred beauty.

A banyan of mythic proportions was at the center of a clearing. It was surrounded by candles planted in the ground. To the beat of the drums, women and men dressed in white moved counterclockwise around the tree, casting long shadows.

To one side sat three drummers on camp stools; their drums were of different sizes and spoke in a complicated, intoxicating rhythm. Rising out of that rhythm was song.

An old woman with brilliant white long hair topped by a white kerchief and wearing a long white dress stood next to the drummers, resting her weight on a cane. She flung out lines of chanting in a powerful croak, throwing her whole body into her delivery, swaying on the fulcrum of her cane, making Marie fear that she would topple over each time. The dancers echoed her. The woman took a gourd from a young man standing next to her, sipped from it, and sprayed it from her mouth in the direction of the dancers. Behind her was a table made from a board resting on two plastic milk crates.

She saw Marie and motioned to her.

Marie stood as if rooted to the ground.

Hugo gave her a little push and she stumbled forward. She turned to glare at him, but he was staring at the treetops, smiling, his arms clasped behind his back.

Marie consciously straightened herself, held her head high, and stepped forward.

The old woman was quite as tall as Marie. Light glinted off her deep black face; high cheekbones and large eyes gave her fierce beauty. Despite the white hair, Marie saw no wrinkles. She regarded Marie. The drums slowed. She pushed down on Marie’s shoulders and forced her to kneel in the dirt.

Marie felt two hands clasp her head firmly. Just the touch of another’s hands can be soothing, she reminded herself sternly, but despite herself memories of Al shot through her like an explosion of light and she found herself sobbing uncontrollably. And angrily. It was as if a neurologic firestorm flared through her, creating the lost connections between her lost emotional past and her present life. She tried to struggle away, to free herself from the intensity, from the grief, but the woman’s hands pressed ever more firmly and then a warm liquid was poured on her head. She tasted it. Rum, mixed with salt tears. Some sort of baptism?

Two men came to her side and helped her rise. Another came to her with a gourd and bade her drink. The old woman stared at her and Marie dared not disobey. She was reminded of her grandmère and of having her legs switched with a branch from the lilac bush. Men had not an ounce of power over her, but an old imperious woman… mon Dieu! She drank it all because they would not let her stop, swallowing the raw egg floating in what seemed to be rum.

The old woman assumed a bent-legged stance, her back straight, and began moving slowly round the circle. One of the men stared meaningfully at Marie and she imitated the woman, strutting behind her. She realized that but for the rum she would be paying more attention to the wearying aspect of the posture, but the drums carried her along. When the woman began to move her shoulders back and forth, she did so as well, and when the dance moved into a new and more active phase of shouting and leaping, she heard words coming from her mouth for a long time as her voice hoarsened.

She stopped thinking about anything except the sky and the tree and the circular motion. She danced around an inner ring of delicate white designs that some of the dancers were creating around the tree, letting flour trickle through their hands in a thin stream, shapes that reminded her of the intricate wrought iron of New Orleans.

Home. Al, never a guardian, always a companion, a partner, beckoning her to join him, as if through an open door in the sky. Petite Marie, descending through wreaths of stars. Her ancestors—her mother, grandmère, men and woman she’d never known, stretching in an ancient chain back to humanity’s roots, to Africa. Though all around her seemed a spinning, pounding frenzy, she felt calm and expansive, as if she herself were an Eye seeing through unimaginable time and space, floating in it as if held within a warm phosphorescent sea, rising and falling on the waves, radiating power from her head, her hands, her hips, and every drumbeat pushed her through a transformation as precise as the unseen calculations that drove her computers.

She woke with a sneeze. The ground was hard and she was soaking wet with dew. She moaned and pushed herself upright. Sunlight spilled through the jungle. The clearing was empty. Except for Hugo. He sat with his back against the banyan. He had an acrostic look on his face.

“What time is it?” she asked. “Shit.” She grabbed her aching head with both hands. “I can’t believe I fell asleep on the ground.”

“Passed out is more like it,” said Hugo. He glanced at his watch. “It’s about eight-thirty. Hungry?”

“Not exactly. Stop smiling that way. You’re giving me a headache.”

“I’m so sorry. I guess I don’t know my own power. You were quite a hit. Too bad you can’t remember all the fun you had. You have an invitation to visit the old lady.”

“I’m not sure I want to see her again.”

“Sure you do. She gave me her card.” Hugo pulled it from his shirt pocket. On it was a hologram of one of the delicate heart-shaped designs that still surrounded the tree.

“Nice artwork.”

“Those are called veve,” Hugo told her.

“It’s too early in the morning to be such a know-it-all,” Marie said. “Besides, there’s no address.”

“She told me where she lives. I thought you didn’t know anything about voodoo.”

Marie sighed. She pushed herself back to a large rock and leaned against it. Her stomach roiled. Her head pounded. “Grandmère took me to a ceremony on Lake Pontchartrain once. I’d forgotten all about it, to tell the truth. I must have been very little. I remember seeing a lot of legs dancing around before I fell asleep. I don’t know. It was actually… well, not fun last night. But satisfying. In a strange sort of way. I guess I was in a trance. That’s never happened before.”

“Probably something else in the rum. Maybe a touch of hallucinogens,” said Hugo.

“But the drums made a difference too,” said Marie. “What do you think about that?”

“Surely rhythm organizes neuronal firing,” said Hugo, getting to his feet and dusting off his pants. “What would your brain have looked like being scanned last night?”

Marie let Hugo pull her up. “Like a fireworks show,” she said. “It seemed as if I were in touch with—this is going to sound silly, but it seemed as if I could feel Al, and—and Petite Marie. As if they were still alive somewhere, as if they still had some sort of presence.”

Hugo coughed at that, but said nothing. He fell silent as they walked back toward the Jeep, and his silence had a strange quality. Marie knew it had to mean something.

She stopped walking and let him go ahead.

The jungle leaves made a music of their own in the wind. Through a gap in the trees, Marie could see other ridges off to the south, like lush green waves, stopped in their motion for a moment, and beyond them the deep blue line of the Caribbean. She had been talking about Petite Marie…

“Hugo?” she said.

Hugo stopped, and turned back to look at her. She read it in his face. Apologetic. Stubborn.

“You didn’t,” she said.

“Marie, please. I had to. Not only for myself. For you.”

“And who did you choose to… to…” Words failed her.

“Missy,” said Hugo.

“Why? Why?”

“To make you care again,” he said.

“Did it. Ever. Occur. To you. That I don’t want to care?” Marie sank to the ground. She knelt in the mud, bent over in pain, gasping, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. Hugo came and stood by her side uncertainly. Then he put his hands on her head, as had the old woman the night before.

This time she felt no lightning, no brilliant burst of timelessness.

She only felt his hands trembling a bit. She heard that his breathing was ragged.

She reached up and grasped one of his hands tightly. She turned to look up at him.

“It’s done, then,” she said, her fury gone. She did not own the stuff of Petite Marie. It had come from her and Al, another of the unique creations of life. “It’s all right, Hugo. It’s all right. Only… she’ll have to be yours, I think. Your responsibility. I couldn’t stand it. I’m no good at raising children.” She hugged him, rested her head against his chest, heard his heart pounding.

Yellow and green birds flashed across the road as they drove into town for breakfast.

The next afternoon Marie fought the steering wheel as she and Hugo jolted along the rutted mud road on the coast. They were going to see the old woman. As they passed through each tiny village, a storm of raggedly dressed children ran alongside the Jeep, yelling, hands outstretched.

Even a day after the ceremony, all seemed strangely luminous to Marie. Her hangover had been cured by a dose of her hormones. But this was deeper than that somewhat artificial joy.

And therefore more dangerous. She would have to remind herself daily that this new child was not Petite Marie. She was Hugo’s child. Period. She had told Hugo to think of a name. She had instants of dread, thinking of all that might go wrong. Cloning humans was still relatively rare, despite thousands of successes. All, of course, illegal from start to finish. And she didn’t want to see the girl. They ought to have no links to one another. Hugo had given her the details. He had taken Missy to a clinic in New Orleans. She was three months pregnant and back in the Pink House in Tortola. She was very excited.

Hugo touched Marie’s arm. “I think this is where we stop.”

The cries of the children were high and sharp like birdcalls. Tin roofs glittered in the sun, and the shacks of scrap wood were small and crooked. The village had, perhaps, fifteen or twenty such houses. A tiny grocery boasted a faded pink Coke sign. Marie wondered what they did to make a living here. The foot of the mountain was scarred, scraped clean of vegetation. Steeper cliffs rose beyond, precluding cultivation. She pulled off the road on the ocean side and stopped the Jeep. Children crowded around.

“It’s still about a mile away,” said Hugo. “I think it’s off that road to the left, out on the peninsula.” The sea was luminous green close in and met the sky in a dark blue band. Ahead a gleaming white crescent of sand edged the road in mile-long sweep; beyond, she saw waves crashing against a cliff in a repeating flare of white foam.

“Maybe they fish,” she said, getting out. The sun was hot on her bare arms and legs. She wore light shorts and shirt, a straw hat, and hiking boots. She surveyed the children. “Line up,” she said in her best Creole, which was slow and awful. They giggled, but to her surprise, understood and obeyed.

She saw open-faced young boys of six and seven, their ribs plainly visible. Girls—some in ragged dresses, others in faded shorts—looked at her expectantly, their hair braided and clipped with plastic barrettes.

She went down the row and gave each of them a five-dollar coin, much more valuable than gourdos. She’d brought a lot for this purpose. A chorus of mercis enveloped her and the children rushed off exuberantly, yelling.

Marie looked back the way they’d come. She saw the other poor villages strung out along the curved coastline, could pick them out by their tin roofs throwing back sunlight. “This is such a waste,” she said. She rummaged in the back of the Jeep and pulled out a heavy canvas bag.

“Others have tried to help,” Hugo said, a warning tone in his voice as they began their walk down the faint grassy road that led onto the peninsula. The smells of salt and dried grasses mingled in the heat.

“Corrupt governments that had no intention of giving power to the people,” she said contemptuously.

“Not anyone nice and smart like you,” said Hugo.

“I’m not nice,” she said. “I’m worried. Do you remember the Rasta we saw at breakfast yesterday?”

“It’s not so long ago,” said Hugo, because, Marie supposed, he couldn’t say anything without being a smart aleck.

He had been sitting at the next table, eating cereal and fruit. He looked up, seeing Marie staring at his reddish dreadlocks as they stood waiting for a table. He motioned for them to join him. After a few minutes, Marie felt sufficiently emboldened to ask him what being a Rasta was all about.

He was very thin, as thin as the children in this ragged village. In an odd blend of Brooklyn- and British-tinged English, he said he was from Jamaica. His father had been Haitian. He had been born in New York City, but then his mother returned alone to Jamaica, where he grew up. He had come to Haiti to find his father, and still had not. But Port-au-Prince had been his home for five years now.

“We as Rastas are destined to free all life-forms. We have been reincarnated through seventy-seven bodies. We soon will free all beings. We are engaged in a jihad, a holy war.” His eyes were serious. “It is a war against poverty and ignorance. We want to free those alive on Earth now. Not in some future heaven after death.” He drank the last of his coffee, pulled a large spliff from his pocket and lit it. They were in a tiny restaurant on a side street with few customers. No one even glanced at him. He offered some to Marie and she toked. He offered some to Hugo and Hugo shook his head.

“How is this different from voudoun?” she asked.

He frowned. “Voudoun worships the past. It is ancestor worship. We live in the present. We hurt no living thing. We make no sacrifice. We will save all of life. I am a vegetarian, you see. We are all conquering lions doing God’s work.”

“Except that you have to be a man?” suggested Marie.

The Rasta shrugged. “I do not believe that. I am a teacher. I hold a classroom every weekday morning on Prince Street. I teach girls as well as boys to read and write. Good English. I would teach them good French too, but I do not know French. You look like a rich lady. Come by sometime and see what we do. Maybe you could give us some money, eh? Some books? Pay the electric bill, give us some computers?” He smiled faintly. “You think I am a hustler. But come by and see.” He handed her a card. Hugo took it and put it in his pocket.

Now, as he walked the dirt road’s fringe, Hugo said, “His name, according to his card, is Zion. Rastafarianism is a millenarian movement. It’s not messianic. They don’t believe that one of God’s manifestations is going to save them and take them to heaven. I mean, Bob Marley said he felt like bombing a church once he knew that the preacher was lying. They are Marxist in their belief that organized religion is just a tool to oppress the masses, to make them feel as if being poor and downtrodden is a virtue and they’ll be rewarded for their suffering in heaven. The Rastafarians believe there’s going to be a golden age here on Earth. Like he said. And they really try to do something about that. You have to respect them for it. We can drop by his school—if that’s what you’re getting at.”

They drew close to the old woman’s house, which sat alone on the low headland. It was neat, though small, and painted with a faded mural. The most striking part of the mural was a tree whose branches twined around the corner. Instead of leaves, large pink hearts hung from the branches. An unpainted fence surrounding the house contained some chickens. In a pen of sagging wire fencing, several goats bleated. A large battered generator sat on bare dirt beneath a corrugated green fiberglass roof. Next to it were three red plastic gasoline containers. Surf surged across nearby rocks and filled the rusted remains of a car, leaving foam that drained back into sea.

Marie stepped up to the house and stood in the doorway. She knocked lightly on the frame and peered inside.

As her eyes adjusted, she saw hearts: hearts beaten from tin, hearts within hearts, in so many mediums that Marie was overwhelmed. Hearts cut from the multicolored newsprint of comics; hearts cut from plastic milk cartons. What seemed like a hundred heart-shaped stones, set on shelves and tiny tables, of salt and pepper granite; hearts struck from slate and shining in planes of flaked silicone. She saw a heart that was the knot of a tree, chain-sawed flat on the bottom so that it sat only slightly tilted on the green-painted wooden floor. And the woman who lived within this wealth of hearts had a heart-shaped face, as dark as Marie’s, eyes alight, white hair like a lion’s mane about her face. The heart woman looked even older than Marie had imagined as she advanced through the kitchen into the light.

“Come in,” she said, her voice dry and papery as a discarded snakeskin. She wore a T-shirt that said something in Japanese and shorts that revealed strong sinewy legs. Her feet were bare.

Marie ducked beneath the low lintel. She took two bottles of very good whisky from her canvas bag and put them on the table next to a shell ashtray. The woman turned the bottles and squinted at the labels, then nodded to Marie to take a seat.

“I am Adele. Would you like something to drink? Lemon soda? Diet Coke?”

“Diet Coke, thanks.” Marie pulled out a wooden chair and sat at the sea-green kitchen table, from which Formica peeled, and accepted the can of Diet Coke Adele took from a waist-high refrigerator. The old woman moved slowly, with a precision that Marie realized was pain-generated. It was hard to believe that she had danced with such vigor the other night.

Adele sat and pushed aside two copies of The Journal of Jungian Studies that lay on the table. She plunked down two small glasses and struggled to open one of the whisky bottles. Finally she grimaced and handed it to Marie. Marie twisted it open and handed it back. Adele plopped whisky into the bottom of each glass; shoved one toward Marie. She took a pill from her pocket and washed it down with whisky. “Arthritis medicine. I do not think it does much good. So— you are from New Orleans?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you come to Haiti?”

“Because my daughter was killed. I was looking for her murderers.”

“Did you find them?”

“No. But I found those who worked with them.”

“And do they still live?”

“In a fashion.” Marie took a sip of whisky, then a sip of Diet Coke. She could hear the sea through the white-curtained window. She felt as if she had never been so far from home. She was startled at a movement on the kitchen counter. It took her a moment to register that the slow steady slide was that of a white boa, longer than what she could see since the end of him turned a corner, and big around as her thigh.

“What happened to me the other night?” Marie wanted to act nonchalant, but couldn’t help staring at the snake.

“You were rid’ by a l’wa. Agwe. God of the Sea. He spake through you.”

“What did I—what did Agwe say?”

Adele looked thoughtful. She took a cigar from a box on the table and lit it. The smoke drifted out the window. It smelled good to Marie.

“He said that a golden age comes. A golden age and a golden city. Like Jerusalem. He wants to make this place. For all peoples. With the power of the heart. With the power of his lover, Erzulie. We celebrated the Silence that night. The Silence is good. Wipes everything clean.”

“What does this have to do with me?” Marie leaned forward and the chair creaked. “I know that my friend told you that my name is Marie Laveau. And it is. But those Maries, those were my grandmère, my great-great aunts. They are not me. I know nothing of voudoun.”

“Blood knows.”

Marie looked around the room. Even inside, plants grew in great profusion, with huge deep green leaves and brilliant orange and purple blossoms. The walls were dense with scenes that Marie thought Adele must have painted herself. A three-foot-high chipped plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, her heart painted red with a golden cross in the center, stood next to the stove, staring at Marie with eyes of flat blue love. Photographs of children were lodged around a mirror frame. A veve of shells and stones gave off a dull white glow on a warped dark oak table. Marie knew that they were supposed to have some kind of power.

“Your world is alive,” Marie said. “My world is not.” She was surprised to hear despair in her voice.

Adele reached over and grasped her hand with a strong grip. “Our worlds are the same world,” she said. “Remember that. It is you who need to let life flow into your heart. It is waiting. It is all around you, the Being of the world, the gods and goddesses who come into us. It is stronger than anything. It is stronger than death. Love swallows death like a snake swallows eggs.”

As she had the other night, Marie felt the current of the old woman’s life flowing into her. She squeezed Marie’s hand hard, as businessmen in New Orleans did, as if she were sealing a deal, and let go.

Marie did not buy this love swallowing death crap. It was all aching and empty and ragged.

Even with the new baby on the way. More so, perhaps.

She looked up to see Adele’s shrewd eyes watching her. Beyond her, through the window, was the green line of the sea. Chickens clucked outside. “What are the sacrifices for?” asked Marie.

Adele became grave. “Christ bade us sacrifice in praise and thanksgiving. They are for love. All sacrifices are for love.”

Marie decided not to engage in theological argument. “Who are these… these l’wa?”

“When they come to you, when they mount you, you change. You let go. You are empty and they move you. They speak through you.”

“How do you know that I was—who?”

“Agwe. Because of how you looked, how you moved. Serious. You cried, but your face did not move. Ghede sometimes comes, for instance. Death.” The woman sat straight, crossed one leg loosely over the other, let the cigar dangle from her lip. Her entire countenance changed. Then just as suddenly she was the old woman again. “Myself, I am a servitour to Erzulie. The Goddess of Love.”

She rose and went to a small bookshelf; pulled out a well-worn book. She opened it, searched through some pages, handed it to Marie.

Marie flipped back to the cover: Dancing Spirits: Rhythms and Rituals of Haitian Vodun, the Rada Rite by Gerdes Fleurant. She read aloud, “ ‘The dance in honor of Agwe produces a state of ecstasy, a release of emotional conflict in contact with superior beings. Dunhan shows rightly that the lwa are beneficent forces in nature, and in Rada there are no bad lwa or evil magic as those concepts are understood in Western Society.’ ”

“ ‘No evil magic?’ ” Marie closed the book, holding the place with her thumb. “What about zombies?”

Adele shook her head. “Sorcerer stuff. People believe that evil magicians create them to do work, to pay debts. I have a ceremony to release them if such an act is claimed. I never have attempted to create them.”

“I have zombies of my own.” She thought of the two men. She thought of her memories of Petite Marie.

She thought of herself.

“Then you must release them to free yourself.”

Marie shifted uncomfortably. Hate rose within her. It was not swallowed by the hearts.

“Let it go,” said the woman in a cautioning tone. She rose, went to a low table arranged altarlike with various candles, pictures, pieces of lace. She picked up something, murmured some words that blended with the distant hush of waves, pressed it into Marie’s hand, closed her fingers over it. It was cool and hard and smooth. As she brushed close, Marie inhaled her spicy scent. Marie opened her hand and saw a heart-shaped rock, and within the heart another heart stood revealed: a fossil whiteness, small but of certain shape.

“Find your own heart,” the woman whispered. “Swallow death and live again.”

This is too much, thought part of Marie.

But the new part of her considered the advice seriously. She knelt before the woman and kissed her hand, much as she’d been taught to kiss the ring of the Catholic priest.

“Thank you,” she said and walked out into the strong sunlight.

That evening Marie walked down a long wooden dock in Port-au-Prince Harbor on the way to her boat. She’d cleared out of the mountain shack. Her business in Haiti was almost at an end.

Hugo was at her side. The mountains swallowed the last glow of sun. The wind was still and limpid water reflected boats, masts, and docks with smooth blobby distortions. Spray from a fisherman hosing down his boat drenched her right side; the coolness felt good before it was obviated by heat the next instant. Slow beats of Bob Marley, more of a god than ever, trudged through the humid air from several competing tape players. “Sucking the blood of the sufferers day by day.” The chant of the centuries’-owned.

As she turned a corner and neared their slip, she stopped.

“Hugo. What’s that on the dock?”

“Looks like a person. Asleep, maybe.”

“Is he in front of our slip?” She walked faster.

Hugo pushed ahead. By the time she got there, he was leaning over Cut Face.

His leg was bandaged with a torn shirt. His eyes were closed and his face was beaded with sweat. Next to him lay a makeshift crutch of nailed-together lumber scraps.

Shorty was perched on the ketch’s cabin.

“What are you doing here?” demanded Marie.

“We serve you now.” Shorty’s voice was matter-of-fact. “We do everyt’ing you say.”

“How did you get here?”

“We follow da guards. Not dere fault. Dey talk about killing us, but dey let us come. Dey say you decide.”

“Shit,” said Marie. “I don’t want you around. Just jump in the drink, all right?”

Shorty slid down from the cabin onto the deck of the boat. He made his way to the back and leaped into the harbor, where he began treading water.

“Is this some kind of joke?” Marie said to Hugo.

“I think the joke’s on you.”

Marie had hired some painters to change the name of the boat to the Erzulie. Below the name was Erzulie’s veve, a delicate heart design. “Not bad.” She stepped onto the deck. “Get me a glass of wine, please,” she said when Jean emerged from the cabin. “Why are those guys here?”

“Want us to get rid of them?”

Marie glanced over at Shorty, who was panting and sinking below the surface now and then.

“If he lasts two hours, fish him out.”

“What about the other one?”

Marie was at a loss for a minute. Then she shrugged. “Just leave him there.”

The next morning Cut Face was still alive, so she reluctantly allowed Hugo’s doc to look at Cut Face’s leg. He shook his head and said the fibia was broken. He took Cut Face to the small local hospital and had the surgeon put a pin in his leg, without consulting Marie. Medical care was utterly minimal on Haiti, so Marie figured she was giving Petite Marie’s killer deluxe treatment and hated herself for it. Cut Face returned five days later, crutching along the dock, a big smile on his face. “I be back, Miss Marie.”

Marie decided to work them to death. The next day she gave Cut Face money and told him to go to the market and lay in a supply of food. She watched him crutch down the dock and hoped that it was painful; his face told her that it was. He returned after eight hours pulling a wagon of packages roped to his waist. Shorty spent three days scrubbing every imaginable surface on the boat. She planned to have him strip down all the teak with 0000 steel wool. She avoided them. The sight of both men made her ill.

The next day they paid a visit to the Rasta school. Marie followed Hugo through narrow streets in which the sun’s power was magnified by the corrugated aluminum used frequently as a building material, supplemented by flattened tin cans, rotting plywood, and cardboard. Through jagged holes in the metal, around which sharp points of bent aluminum splayed like dangerous flowers, she glimpsed naked children playing on dirt floors. Skinny men, shirtless but wearing old dungarees, perched on the edges of tires that lay in fetid puddles, smoking cigarettes and gossiping. The air smelled of rotting fish and every corner held a compost of garbage.

Marie was completely soaked in sweat. Hugo, ahead of her, kept wiping his forehead with the white handkerchief he always carried, his jacket slung over his shoulder and held with his left thumb, his gun quite public. “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” she asked.

“I think it’s about two more blocks then we turn west,” he said.

“ ‘Blocks’!” she hooted. “How do you figure blocks? This is a warren.”

Hugo turned west when they came to a break in the shanties, onto a road of hard-packed dirt. Frame houses lined both sides, clad with distant memories of paint. Tilting second-floor balconies held ramshackle chairs and potted plantain trees heavy with green bunches. A few people sold rice, cold coconut milk, or homemade sweets from their porches.

“Here it is,” said Hugo.

“I’m astonished.” This house, though far from square, was freshly painted. A narrow cobblestone patio separated the front door from the street, shaded beneath the overhanging porch. The voices of children issued from inside. Next to the door, a neatly painted sign, bolted to the bricks, read new era school.

Marie and Hugo stood in the open french doors.

Sunlight was tempered by lowered bamboo shades, and the air was stirred to a semblance of coolness by ceiling fans. The walls were thick plaster and the floors flagstone. Children of all colors and ages flowed through the large room. A small group was gathered around something on the floor nearby; Marie stepped closer and saw they were assembling a map of the Caribbean, laying the islands on a piece of oilcloth on which their outlines were traced, putting labeled names next to each bit of land. She bent over a bronze-skinned girl with long red dreadlocks and said, “What’s that?”

“That little dot?” She looked about six years old. “That’s Freestate.”

Zion rushed up to Marie, his face beaming. “Welcome! I am so happy that you took the time to come! We are working on square roots over there and I had to finish the lesson.”

“What’s Freestate?” asked Marie. It sounded vaguely familiar.

Zion looked at her in disbelief. “You have not heard of Freestate? It is an artificial island about a hundred miles west of here. They are growing it from sea water. Here, we have a lot of schoolwork having to do with it. The entire sequence of growing the island, how it functions, how we are going to be able to colonize space from it…”

“Colonize space?” asked Hugo.

“Let us see how we can impress you.” Zion looked around. “Michel? You have been studying sea cement? Tell our guests about it, please.”

Michel wore only a pair of faded shorts. He greeted them with a wide smile. His English was, as Zion had bragged, very good. “Well, the colonization of space won’t happen for a long time. Right now Freestate is slowly growing from materials from the ocean. Current is conducted by sea water between an anode and cathode, and minerals form on the cathode, starting a web of material. Here, I can show you a chart of how it happens.” He went to a blackboard on the wall and started sketching. “See, the magnesium here is created by this reaction.” He began a flurry of letters and numbers. Marie watched, fascinated, her knowledge of chemistry resurfacing.

“What’s the next stage?”

“I’ll tell you what the final stage is,” said Zion, watching the boy with obvious pride. “It’s a brotherhood—and sisterhood,” he added hastily, “of in… humankind.”

Marie smiled. “Did you teach them all of this?”

“No.” He spread his hands flat in a self-deprecating gesture. “Someone from Freestate comes every few weeks and expands the curriculum. They have not been here for… well, a few months. We have missed them, but they are very busy, and after all they are doing this for free. We are trying to raise enough money for a field trip to the site.”

“Tell me more about Freestate.”

“It was started about fifteen years ago by a group that put all of their money together. The original plan was formulated in the late twentieth century, and many people contributed to the foundation. It helped that several of them were very wealthy and had strong opinions about taxes and governments. They preferred to use their wealth to create a country where they could see their taxes at work more readily. These are not ordinary people. There are several Nobel laureates and all their families. Most of them are very technologically adept.”

“Does it involve nanotech?”

“I believe that there has been a lot of debate about that in Freestate. So far, it does not, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they adapt some kinds of nanotech applications very soon.”

“What were you talking about, going into space?”

“There are many stages to Freestate. Their ultimate goal is to be able to travel into space, and for that they need to learn how to live independent of outside support. The whole thing unfolds in different stages. One stage finances the next. There are lessons to be learned too. They are as isolated as they can possibly be because they wish to simulate the experience of space travel. They had already begun Freestate before the pulses, but since then their mission has become more urgent.”

“I will take you on your field trip,” said Marie, wondering in the next moment what possessed her to be so impulsive. Then she felt the l’wa stone in her pocket. Maybe it did have some strange effect on her after all.

“Oh!” Zion smiled. “Thank you!”

Hugo cleared his throat. “What?” asked Marie.

“May I offer a humble opinion?”

“I doubt it.”

“I think we ought to check it out first. I really wouldn’t want to be responsible for these children otherwise. Have you ever been there?”

“No,” admitted Zion.

“Well?” asked Hugo.

“You’re right,” said Marie.

“I will forever treasure that singular statement.”

“Get out of town.”

Marie had lunch with Zion at the school, sitting at a small table in an alcove at the back of the building. The children had a garden in the small courtyard using, Zion said, French intensive methods. They ate a salad of sweet onions, basil, and tomatoes grown from it and made by the children. She was also served a glass of green liquid. Zion told her it was spirulina algae in fruit juice. “They bring it in from Freestate. They grow it there. It’s full of protein. We drink it every day.”

Marie smiled, suppressing her initial grimace, as she swallowed the thick liquid.

In the classroom, now set up as a lunchroom, the children ate lunch with no need of supervision, and some of them were in the kitchen cleaning up. “When we take the children, we will need to get permission from the parents,” she told Zion, and he looked grave.

“Madam, the few of them that have parents who actually care for them, I will ask. Most of them live with distant relatives, and some with older brothers or sisters. Many of them live upstairs here.”

“I didn’t know you were running an orphanage too,” said Marie.

“I never really thought of it that way.” Zion shrugged. “It just happened. Where else do they have to go? What else do I have to do? I’m sure that the children do not think of it as an orphanage. That makes them sound pitiful. Instead, they are to be admired. We have a communal household. It has evolved gradually. They all have work that they do to make things run smoothly, even the youngest. We iron out problems at our weekly meeting.” His smile was wry. “Sometimes the meetings are not much fun. I must say that I often take the role of benevolent dictator. They would probably leave out the word ‘benevolent.’ It is true that it doesn’t work out for everyone. I feel as if I am always nagging. I have had to throw some children out. But it is an interesting experiment. It is the best way to build a new world. But a very hard way.”

“It’s curious, Marie,” said Hugo, sitting on the side of her cabin bunk two mornings later, waking her from a sound sleep.

“I’m not,” she said, rolling over.

“The people responsible for Petite Marie’s death.”

She sat up. “What time is it?”

“The right time to get up. For circadian healthiness. Five-thirty a.m. on a lovely bright morning—”

“I’m sorry,” she said, rubbing her eyes and pushing herself back against the headboard. “What did you say?”

“I sent out feelers a couple of weeks ago after Cut Face and Shorty gave us that information. Of course, I had no idea whether or not it was true.”

“And?”

Hugo shifted on the bed, frowning. “It seems that this goes to the highest level of international intrigue. Of course, most governments are pretty tightly tied to global corporations.”

“Go on.”

“There’s a company called Small Minds in Sweden. They specialize in artificial intelligence.”

“Cute name.” Marie was beginning to feel sick to her stomach.

“The thing is that even though we can find the person who gave the orders and set things up, he was working—unbeknownst to him— for a conglomerate that was doing top-secret work for the U.S. government.”

“In Sweden.”

“All over the world. You scared them, Marie. Seems that every time some obscure new patent was filed, every time some new product came out, you were there. Buying up shares. Getting control.”

“They couldn’t know,” said Marie in anguish. She rested her head against the yacht’s mahogany woodwork, felt the vibration of someone walking up on the deck. Through the open window she heard the sounds of the harbor awakening—metal clanging, seagulls crying, even the sizzle of bacon from the galley of the ketch next door, only a few feet away. “There are… certain individuals that are responsible?”

“A few,” said Hugo. “The people that set up the… situation in Paris. We’ve got their number. A man in Zurich. Some sort of broker for that kind of thing. And a woman in Sweden. But basically, Marie, you were meddling in some kind of power play. They wanted you under their control. They wanted to use you to further their own ends.”

Marie touched the heart stone she now wore around her neck on a chain. She’d had it set in silver and it had just been delivered the day before. The voice of Adele came back to her. Let it go.

“They still think that I’m dead.”

“So far. Probably.”

She did not hesitate. “Kill them.”

“I’ve already sent Cut Face and Shorty to do just that.”

She stared at him.

“I told them that it was your order. They left a few hours ago. Eager to do your bidding. Cut Face limping like a trouper. I hope that stuff doesn’t wear off midtrip. I have to admit I was upset about it at first. Now I think it’s just dandy.”

“How—”

“I sent Jean with them.”

Marie sank back against the pillow. “Why do I feel so—so strange about it?”

Hugo glanced at her heart stone and smiled very briefly. “Maybe that thing is working. Luckily, I don’t have one.”

“Hugo?”

“Yes?”

“I want to go home.”

“But what about the visit to Freestate?”

“We can arrange to help them. There are children in New Orleans too.” Marie had not mentioned the forthcoming child again, and neither had Hugo. Her initial excitement had vanished, and she was left with an emotional vacuum that she hoped would disappear at some point. She had cut way back on her hormones, and intimations of God in the Works had subsided entirely. Enough of illusions. The events of the last few days had jolted her out of her idiotic artificial euphoria. “I’ve been away too long.”

Hugo said quietly, “Yes, you have.”

A ketch stopped briefly at a secluded dock at Algiers, just across the river from New Orleans. A brown dwarf and a very tall, very black woman debarked, walked across an expanse of concrete to the ferry terminal, and bought tickets; the ketch continued upriver.

The dwarf wore a suit impeccably tailored of Caribbean-pink linen. The woman wore shorts and a halter top. She carried a large leather bag; her face was half-hidden by a wide-brimmed straw hat.

As the couple approached the ticket booth, she said to the dwarf, “This is ridiculous.”

He said, “Specialty of the house.”

The woman selling tickets was white. She looked up from her book briefly, made change, caused tickets to issue with a mechanical clank. “It’ll be another twenty minutes.” She returned to her book. But after a bit she looked over at the two, sitting in the glare of the dock light. The woman seemed oddly familiar. Maybe it was just that she was so striking. The ticket clerk found her place again. Then she remembered who the woman looked like and glanced back over at them. But the ferry was at the dock, and they had apparently boarded.

It was only a four-block walk from the ferry terminal to Marie’s old town house. The night was hot and the streets were full of drunks and revelers. Live music blared from every doorway, a cacophony of dull bass runs mingling with tired dixieland. A woman vomited while holding on to a tree. A couple yelled at each other across the street.

“It’s good to be home!” said Marie fervently.

They turned down a cobblestone street. Marie shuffled in her bag for a key, unlocked a wrought-iron gate, passed through the vestibule, and unlocked a green door. She pushed it open. After a moment, Hugo took her hand. “You have to go in,” he said gently.

Two days later, the Times-Picayune gossip section reported that Marie Laveau, whose death certificate was filed in the courthouse, had been seen at the Café Monde on Saturday morning, eating beignets. “This is the third sighting of Marie this week, though the woman is clearly not Marie. Yet the resemblance is close enough to make people look twice. The EAR is offering a fifty-dollar reward—no, the EAR just checked its expense account. Better make that a cup of coffee on the EAR for information leading to pinning this impostor down!”

The police cordoned off her street for a few days until the crowd died down. Her apartment appeared to be inhabited. White curtains blew from open windows.

Sales in voudoun paraphernalia shot up.

Marie was not seen again for quite some time.

SECOND SOLO Japanoiserie Kita | Kyoto | 2016

Kita leaves the room whenever her assistants centrifuge insects. Bees, ants. Bees, this time. Having lived with insects for so many years, trekking through jungles and across savannas with various mentors while holding the initial pristine vision clear, she tries to think of something else when she knows their lives are ending in such unexpected velocity. She gets a can of coffee hot out of the machine, hides in her cubicle, catches up on six weeks of the exploits of Nan Girl, her favorite comic, which is about the only thing she has her news program automatically save and file, during its sporadic activations— but she usually ends staring unseeing at the screen, her mind filled instead with the past.

The London Zoo. A model hive of bees. Billions of them, crawling over one another, massed in pulsing, buzzing globs of gold and black. Her mother tells her not to be afraid, they are behind glass, but Kita has no idea why she ought to be afraid. She is eight, not a baby. The occasional sting of a honeybee when she runs barefoot through the grass is merely an annoyance. Elephants, giraffes, puffins, most of them nearly extinct in the wild, pale before this alien spectacle. The interactive says that they can see light waves that humans cannot. Their eyes—faceted. They attack enemies, contract with one another and grow their hives, based on something called pheromones, chemical communication cells precise and imperative. How? She remains pressed to the glass until her mother says we have to meet your father and sister now and pulls her away.

She remembers nothing else about that particular London trip.

A green light on her watch glows, no larger than a flea. It’s over. She always sets the timer and it seems to help relax her, knowing that the bees are slurry, beyond it all. She touches it with her right forefinger and blots it out.

She walks down the hall, nodding at the guard, always stern and unsmiling. Security is tight at Dento, Inc., a thinly disguised node of government research. Her anticipation rises as she walks. No matter how many computer simulations one runs, there’s nothing like getting your hands into the real stuff and mucking around. Leave it overnight accidentally and spawn a new industry. And time seems short. So very short. There are many communication alternatives underway, worldwide. Probably thousands, labs hoping to cash in with the next big thing. She only, and always wanted only, to save the round blue planet that contains her beloved jungles with endemic orchids, species of insects still undiscovered, miles of ants marching from here to there oblivious to human realms.

Until she kills them.

The lab door slides open. Her assistants share amused glances as they always do at her squeamishness. She is a bit different from them. Japanese, of course, but raised all over the world. She stands outside of their idea of one big happy Japanese family. Sometimes she feels a bit dishonest. They accept her. She benefits from this, was wooed from Copenhagen with this plush job offer. But she doesn’t buy into their invisible social contract blindly, like they often seem to.

But… she loves Kyoto. It’s good to be home. Easy.

Briskly, she says, “Well, are we ready?” Another day of trying to simulate pheromones that interact with an artificial medium—gel, liquid, gas, she still doesn’t know what will be most efficient. But she knows there’s something there. Something important.

Jump Joint Break Kita | Kyoto | 2016

It was late afternoon. Kita hurried down a corridor at Dento, Inc. She needed to talk to Sui, but couldn’t remember his code. She came to a widening in the corridor, expecting to see a secretary at his desk, but he was not there.

Kita dropped into his seat and ran her finger down the code chart on his desk, searching for Sui’s number.

A man in a dark suit, wearing a visitor’s pass, peeled off from an entourage and leaned on the desk. He smiled broadly.

“Do you speak English?” His accent was American.

Kita nodded absently, perusing the chart.

“How about dinner tonight?”

“I’m busy,” she said and stood up.

“No, please. I’m all alone here in Kyoto. You’re not married, are you?”

“No, but—”

“Well, come on. I want to see that new place—what is it? That pheromone bar place I read about in the guidebook.”

In fact, Kita was a bit intrigued about it herself. She had been thinking about going soon anyway. The guy looked innocuous, and she’d had practice taking care of herself all over the world, practically since she’d been born. “All right.”

Kita upended a vial of clear liquid and swallowed it. Too sweet. She grimaced as she set the vial down on the bar. A driving rhythm blasted from the huge flat speakers that formed the walls. The room was packed with dancers looking like models in a wind tunnel, hair blown this way and that. Kita touched the bar and got the wind information again.

Fans are not just an ambient quirk it read, in an attempt to translate Japanese to English, they blow the pheromones generated by your mind-release™ to the synthesizer panels, where they are constantly combined with the pheromones of your fellows and synthesized into music. this is music direct from your mind! trip happy! remember that to continue to have input you must continue to drink. we happily will mix mind-release™ into your favorite cocktail.

Kita wryly reflected that if she’d added her shot of Mind-Release, for which she’d paid the equivalent of fifteen American dollars, to a cocktail she might be enjoying herself more. She leaned against the bar and surveyed the scene.

The walls pulsed with psychedelic color. As the colors changed, so did the music, gradually, supposedly reflecting the group mood of the people in the bar. A mad little riff ran through it all, which she could have interpreted as her skepticism, had she not been too skeptical to believe that she wasn’t at something analogous to a flim-flam show. She was irritated by the almost religious look on the faces of the others there. Luck of the draw, really—some of these bars were raucous, some were violent, and they were springing up everywhere, the latest fad.

But the ghost of her work was in that bar. In fact, she wondered if her company was somehow involved, making money on some of the components. Perhaps some node she knew nothing of had developed those wall panels. Maybe that was why this guy Jack wanted to check it out. His company, apparently, was interested in entering some kind of relationship with Dento.

And maybe the effect was real.

It gave her a glimpse of the future as a mood, a collective event intimately keyed to processes lodged deep within humanity.

It made her uneasy. She did not want to live in a hall of mirrors, in a world that intimately reflected unfiltered thought so quickly. The speed of technological progress was far outrunning their headlights, a scary phenomenon she’d observed during her single college date, years ago, with a Chicago guy who drove too fast down dark twisty roads. The next curve might end in a cliff.

A crashing chord startled her. She laughed.

Well, then, she would experiment.

She danced out on the floor to test the system, pulling Jack with both arms, putting her hands on his hips, and started a Congo snake.

In five minutes, most of the people in the bar danced in a line behind her to a syncopated beat, and the music pulsed accordingly. Maybe, she thought, it’s kinesthetic somehow, monitoring movement rather than, or in addition to, pheromones. She broke free, swirled outward, and a lone melody fought and loosened the tight rhythm. The line fractured and new rhythms emerged. Kita imagined a jazz ensemble, improvising madly, knowledgeable enough to control their own feedback, professional enough to be real musicians, cooperative enough to weave the result to new levels.

She leaned against the wall, breathing hard. She felt better now, her sense of doom somewhat dispelled. At least the tedious rock beat was gone.

Her date touched her arm. He had to yell to be heard. “Ready for dinner?”

“Quite ready,” she shouted.

Half an hour later, they were in an overpriced Western-oriented hotel restaurant. The menu was in English, German, French, and Japanese. Jack hadn’t bothered to ask her advice about where to go. Well, he was the one who was getting ripped off, but she wasn’t exactly sure why she was here anyway. She found him irritatingly flirtatious. Maybe all Americans were like this. She hadn’t paid much attention to men when she was an undergraduate in Chicago years earlier. Her father had just vanished—maybe to start a new life with a woman who didn’t know he had a family, or maybe he had just jumped off a bridge and not bothered to leave a note—and she was grieving and angry and singlemindedly devoting herself to study. Her sister had married an American and kept pressing her to move to Portland. But Kita turned out to be a homebody, after all her travels and international job stints at various research facilities. Her English was excellent; that wasn’t the problem. She just found it wearing to be constantly immersed in a world of foreigners. Her sister found it exhilarating, but their personalities were different.

Jack had longish straight brown hair that kept falling across his blue eyes. He wore a dark, rich-looking tie. She didn’t have any idea whether an American woman would consider him attractive. He made her uneasy. Maybe it was just the loudness of his voice after a few drinks—which would not have disturbed her, had he been Japanese. A few tables away a group of Japanese businessmen, entertaining a German, were completely overwhelming the music. But Jack kept staring straight into her eyes and she just didn’t like it.

Their orders came. Jack was on his third vial of sake. She politely sipped her first cup. The service was quiet and included more bows than was strictly necessary.

“Do you like to travel?” he asked.

“Who doesn’t?” It was all she had done her first thirty years.

“I mean, would you like to travel a lot? On business?”

“I suppose it would depend on the business.”

“On how much you were paid?”

“What are we talking about?”

He coughed and rice fell from his chopsticks onto the table. “Sorry. Nothing, really. Do you live alone?”

“No,” she lied quickly. “I live with my sister.” In fact, she lived in a teeny apartment—a small kitchen/living area and a tiny bedroom. She had a sliver of the ocean for a view. She loved her little place. She was beginning to find Jack incredibly rude.

“What does your sister do?”

“She’s a teacher.” In Portland, Oregon. “Mr. Erickson, what in particular do you want to know about us? We are not a large company, but we are considered to be very good at what we do.”

“I know,” he said, looking at her thoughtfully, as if he were suddenly not drunk. “I told you three times; call me Jack.”

“And your company—is it very large?”

“No,” he said. “Our company too is small.”

“And what does your company do?”

“We make stainless-steel containers. We bid on providing Dento with a custom-made stainless-steel piping system with permeable membranes where specified. ‘Permeable’ means that certain types of molecules can pass through it.”

“Oh. I will have to add that word—‘permeable’—to my vocabulary.” She did her best to giggle.

Now she knew what was going on. Quite well, in fact. She had instructed one of the work groups under her to design such a system. She’d briefly reviewed it two months ago. Apparently the project had been put out to bid. She suddenly wondered if they had generated a genuine bid and if Jack’s company was even real. Jack struck her as being somehow off. Yet if there was something not right about him, why was he being so obvious about it? Surely he didn’t consider her an idiot. Of course, he did seem to have the impression that she was a secretary, and she’d said nothing to disillusion him.

“I can make you an offer—” he began.

“For what?”

“We can discuss that later. It depends on if you might be able to access some information at your job—I’m sorry, did I say something funny?”

Kita squelched her smile. He obviously had no idea of what she did at Dento, Inc. She had access indeed. “Mr. Erickson, you’ve been very kind to take me out tonight, but I’m afraid you have been misled. I really have no idea what is going on at Dento. My clearance is very low, you see. I am just a secretary.” She paused. “But you will still pay for my dinner? I’m not sure that I could afford it.”

She truly enjoyed seeing Jack scowl down at his plate and say, “Of course.”

BREAK WITH FOUR SECTIONS

THIRD SOLO Dissonant Swing Jason | Sedona | 2018

Spring in Sedona was just a softening of the air, and a season of floods as high snow melt swelled rivers. For Jason, the spring of his fifth year was a season of screaming fits and seizures, a season of doing things like smashing the drywall of the small cabin his parents were building, so they could move out of their trailer, with a drywall ax.

The day afterward he lay spent and occasionally sobbing because of his headache on a foam mat, watching his mother and father unroll fiberglass webbing and slather gobs of patch on the walls. He was in what would be the kitchen, and they were in the living room, next to the big stone fireplace. It was chillier up here than in the valley. They had bit into the red rocks with a pointed metal bar and set six by six posts. The view was one of sloping, intersecting lines washed with slashes of green pine and shadows. His mother claimed that it was a holy spot, an unfound vortex. They had bought the land before he was born.

Jason curled up on his side and put his thumb in his mouth. He hardly ever sucked his thumb except at times like this, when everything hurt so bad. He began to replay last night, when they sat by the fire, sparks shooting upward into the vast dark. It soothed him, this story his mother told, and he was able to see it and hear it quite clearly. Remembering his Story kept away the pain.

“My name used to be Julia,” she always began. “But now it is Cassiopeia.” Speaking in the low gentle voice she used on her hypnosis clients, Cassie leaned forward on her camp stool and clasped her hands; her blond hair fell forward in a curtain made bright by the light of their campfire so he could not see her face.

Jason was snuggled in his sleeping bag and rested against his father’s knees.

“Why did you change your name?” he asked on cue.

“Good question,” interjected his father. “My name has always been Mike. Never thought of changing it.”

“The story unfolds on its own.” Jason could tell that his mother was smiling by the sound of her voice. “It was Thanksgiving eve, and I was at the Airport Vortex, giving a tour. There was supposed to be a meteor shower.”

Jason was impatient. “But really it was the night of the first Silence! And now you have to say why the vortexes are important.”

“And don’t forget to tell us why there are male and female vortexes,” added Mike. They both knew he was teasing, as usual, and ignored him.

Cassie continued, “There are certain places of power on the Earth. Some people say that they have something to do with what they call magnetic lines of force. I really don’t know. But here in Sedona, there seems to be a lot of places like that. Holy places. Where you can feel the power. The Anasazi, the people who are gone, lived here for centuries and knew about these holy sites.”

Jason liked it when she kind of started to chant. He had gone on one of her vortex tours once. She used a microphone on the bus and her voice was even more powerful. One woman that she used to counsel when she worked for the Psychic Network, before the phones got so bad, still called her whenever phone service was available and talked for hours. “Did you tell Nervous Nellie when it was auspicious to use the bathroom?” his dad would tease when Mom hung up. “And for free? Gosh, Cassie, you had such a good racket going. A hundred and twenty an hour after taxes!” Sometimes Mom laughed, but usually she said something like, “You’ll believe it too, when you’re ready. Each soul awakens in its own time.”

“What happens at a vortex, Mom?”

She stared into the fire, a slight smile on her face. “Your father will just make fun of me.”

“I won’t! Tell me about the infinite, and the word—what is it? Yeah, the word—less—ness. What about that night at the Airport Vortex?”

She picked up the story. “It was an auspicious night. The stars were out, just like tonight. But Heather Crystal, the movie star, lived in Sedona then. Vortex Tours had an agreement with the airport that they would try to allow very few flight plans to be filed whenever we had a special night event. Because the owner of the tour company had a friend on the airport board—or something like that. Most everybody respected that, since most people who live in Sedona—”

“Are kind of nutty,” Mike interjected.

Cassie continued calmly, “—believe in the sanctity of the vortex experience. But Heather never cared. She flew in and out whenever she pleased. So her private jet was revving up and I was really irritated. It’s hard to be soothing when you feel that way. All the people on the tour were standing around a medicine circle, holding the sacred rocks that they had chosen.”

“Say it, Mom.”

“All right. ‘Feel the power coming up through the earth, through the soles of your shoes, into your feet. That’s right. Just feel it. It is like an arrow of warm, loving light. See the light coming into your solar plexus. Now the light is blossoming in the center of your chest. Some of you might see it as a flower, a golden lotus. Feel the energy, the love. You are part of the earth. You were born of the earth. You evolved from the earth. The earth is your mother’ ”—here she bent down and pressed her hand against the ground—“ ‘the sky is your father. Feel the energy shoot up your spine. The top of your head is like a blue light.’ ”

“Like the damned airport lights!” said Jason. “That’s what you were thinking, because of the jet being so loud—”

His mother pretended she hadn’t heard him say “damn.” It was so hard to make her mad that it wasn’t any fun. “Then you had everybody lie down on their backs and watch the sky.”

“Yes.” His mother was sitting straight now, her eyes closed, as if she was feeling the vortex right now.

Jason snuggled more deeply into his sleeping bag and stared into the fire. “And just when you were in the vortex—”

“Just when I had completely merged with earth and sky, become wholly one with Gaia, and thinking in the back of my mind that I wished Gaia would make Heather’s jet stop—”

“It stopped!” Jason shouted. He loved this part.

“Just a coincidence,” Mike said as usual.

“But everything stopped. The Internet, and telephones, and a lot of cars—it was the first Silence. And Mom knew that I was inside her, for the first time. Growing.”

“She did do a test before she went out that night,” Mike always pointed out, as if that made a big difference.

“Yes,” Mom said. Her voice was firm and happy. “Yes, that was when I knew that you were there and that you were very special. I was in a trance. I didn’t wake up until your father came up and found me.”

“He was mad.”

“I was worried. Irritated that the driver just left your mother up there alone when he couldn’t shake her awake and took the tour back down to town. All that idiot could say was ‘I respected her trance. She’s a holy woman.’ ”

“Are you, Mom?”

Cassie laughed. He saw by the firelight that her eyes were serious, though. “We all are holy in our own way. And that was your special night, Jason. It was a special conjunction. A message from the stars.”

“ ‘A message from the stars,’ ” Jason whispered, just to himself, pulling his thumb from his mouth to say it, then sticking it back in. He felt a little better. And it was good that there was a vortex here, though he had never felt it. His dad hadn’t either, but he really liked the view. Because of the radio problem, Dad couldn’t make as much money as he used to, so they’d had to build slowly. Sometimes Dad went away for weeks at a time for something he called “projects,” and when he came back they would build some more. Sometimes Mom talked about completing a master’s degree, whatever that was—something to help her make more money.

When he was a baby, Jason had spent more time than most babies screaming. When he could talk enough to say that his head hurt, many inconclusive scans were done. Things had only gradually come into kilter for him, vision-wise. He was not kinetically sophisticated. He fell, he crashed, he bumped—much more, they said, than he ought to.

He turned over and looked east, where an eagle etched the brilliant blue sky. At least when he was lying down, he wouldn’t fall down. A few years ago, he had smashed the television; luckily, he had not punctured the tube but only battered the control buttons with a hammer. His mother said, “We won’t get another one. They’re hardly useful now, anyway.” He almost felt as if it made her happy that the television was gone, although his father made it abundantly clear that such acts were not to be repeated.

He thought he was too old for that kind of thing. That’s what his parents told him about the incident yesterday.

But lying on the floor, looking at the spaces and colors arranged by horizontal and vertical lines, he knew that he was not. He wanted to smash the radio.

He would—right now. Only it hurt his head to move. Everything seemed so much worse than ever before. His stomach hurt too. He was feeling very bad and he had used up his story. The radio was playing what his dad called “silly space stuff” from the Sedona station.

Midsong, it stopped playing. That wasn’t unusual. His parents paid no attention.

Jason’s headache vanished.

He sat up cautiously. The throbbing in his head did not resume. He blew his nose on a tissue.

His mother turned around. “Lie down, Jason. Rest.”

She turned back to her plastering. His father continued his steady pace. Jason remembered being locked within his strong arms yesterday, his legs pinioned between his father’s, as he screamed and screamed and screamed. That was after he had ruined the wall in a frenzy of pain.

He scooted backward until he was leaning against a post. The french doors salvaged from a remodeled house in town stood open. He felt around for his sunglasses, then realized that he didn’t need them today. The sunlight wasn’t causing him pain.

Instead, it was causing music.

Not really music, he supposed, but something like it. Broad low tones that filled him as if he were air. Laced through those tones were high thin sounds, vibrating against one another in varying counterpoint; merging, diverging, rapturously, he thought, his vocabulary quite large enough to encompass such a word. He had heard his parents talk about having him “tested” and they always decided not to. They seemed afraid of something. They wouldn’t tell him what it was.

“Mom?” he said.

“Hmmm?” She didn’t turn around, but bent and scooped patch onto her broad knife, stood and swooped it onto the wall, where it gleamed wet and blue-white. He wanted to help them fix it, but they wouldn’t let him get up.

“I can hear it.”

“Hear what, honey?”

“The vortex. I can hear it.”

She turned and he wondered why there were tears in her eyes. “Rest now, all right?”

He sat absorbed in the music, sometimes dozing off. Now that the pain in his head had receded, he realized that his whole body ached. He really was tired. It was a lot of work to smash a house. He wished it hadn’t happened.

The sounds calmed at sunset, but the moon was a single high pure note as his father scooped him up to carry him back to the trailer, and even though the path was lit by the Coleman lantern his mother carried, he could still hear the stars, their distant songs bursts of color inside his eyelids when he closed them, lulled by his father’s long, steady stride.

He hoped the music would last.

“We’ve got to have him tested.”

Jason opened his eyes. He was in his small bunk, which folded down out of the ceiling of the trailer and had its own tiny window that was cranked open, letting in the scent of pine and earth damp from spring melt. A model space station dangled near his feet, black. A few luminous stick-on stars and planets shone from the ceiling, inches from his eyes.

“You know how I feel about that.” His mother’s voice.

“It’s not fair to him. You can see that, Cassie. It might be curable. And it’s dangerous. I think we should take him to Flagstaff tomorrow.”

“But Ed—”

“Ed is not a real doctor, Cassie.”

“He has his MD,” said Cassie, a stubborn tone in her voice.

“But he’s veered off into the stratosphere since then. He didn’t pass his boards. Herbal medicine, crystals… Didn’t he say that he thought that aliens had implanted crystals in his body? And he has some kind of hocus-pocus theory about why they don’t show up on X rays? Because they’re made of alien materials—pretty convenient. Anyway, you can see that his treatments aren’t helping at all.”

“He found out that Jason was mineral-deficient and needs a lot more minerals than most people, didn’t he? Maybe he’d be worse without the treatments.”

“Maybe he could get better. Cassie, there’s a world of science. This is your child. How can you deny him the opportunity to get better? Can’t you see how he suffers? If you won’t come with me, I’ll just have to take him by myself. First we’ll have to find a doctor in Flagstaff and see what kind of referrals we can get. The last time I went to Los Angeles we had an Internet pulse and I downloaded a ton of stuff. I don’t think that he’s an isolated case. There are kids his exact age all over the world with the same cluster of symptoms. Not many. But some.”

Symptoms. Jason lay on his back, watching his stars. That’s what all these headaches and rages were. Symptoms. But symptoms of what?

He was afraid.

“I know,” said his mother, her voice weary. “You told me all this when you got home.”

“That was a month ago. We’ve waited far too long. We need to go. Tomorrow morning. You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

“The doctors didn’t help my brother any.”

“Cassie, he had a very serious cancer. And that was years ago. We have to try all we can. Look at organized medicine as a kind of theory, just like all your organic theories. It’s a Western theory, that’s all. Next time he could hurt himself. Or others.”

A sigh. “All right. I always wonder if it might have something to do with that virus I had. That bad cold. There are a lot of viruses that affect the fetus. They can even be something the mother got when she was a child—”

His father’s voice, gentle. “Don’t be silly.”

“I’m just at my wit’s end.”

“I know, honey, I am too.”

The sliver of light in the open doorway vanished, and Jason drifted into sleep.

The next afternoon his parents were filling out forms in a clinic. His mother’s face was drawn, her eyes worried. Jason was looking at some of the children’s books in the waiting room, but they all seemed a little silly. At home he was reading Kidnapped. “Put your father’s address,” she whispered to his dad.

“How will they get in touch with us?” he asked.

“He can forward things to us,” she said. “It won’t take much longer.”

“Cassie,” his father said in an exasperated tone of voice, but he shrugged and Jason could tell that Dad would do it. Jason liked this; it was kind of like being in a spy book. They stayed in a motel that night. Jason watched his dad pay the man with cash. They never used credit cards like other parents. The next morning Jason had a lot of tests done. He had to drink thick liquids that tasted bad. He had to lie still in a white tunnel while they did brain scans. They took blood out of him with a needle. They took him to McDonald’s, which his mother usually didn’t allow. They stayed another day. After that they went into an office and the doctor said that although they hadn’t found anything wrong so far, it had been necessary to send some of the information away. The results wouldn’t be back for a few days, so Jason and his family could leave. They’d be in touch.

“Are you happy now?” asked Cassie as they got on the interstate and headed south.

“Not really,” Mike said, “but I feel a little more comfortable.”

As they climbed gravel roads and nosed along the ridge that led to their house, the view reminded him of the grand snow-covered peaks they’d visited last summer. Simultaneously, he thought about something else he’d been learning about with his educational programs.

“Prime numbers are important because they’re the only real numbers,” he said with excitement, leaning forward and sticking his head between his parents’.

“Why do you say that?” asked Cassie.

“Because you can destroy all the other ones. You can reduce them. They’re not really themselves. They’re made up of other numbers. Prime numbers. And prime numbers can only be… um…”

“Factored?” suggested Cassie.

“Yeah. Factored by one and themselves. So they’re the only real numbers. You can take all the other numbers apart. You can’t take primes apart. You can’t make them any smaller. They’re real solid. They’re themselves. Say you look out over all the numbers in existence. The primes stand taller. They’re like mountain peaks. If you could look at them in a different way—like from an airplane or something—they’d form some kind of pattern.”

“Nice,” said Cassie. “I’d never thought of it in that way.” She reached back and ruffled his hair. “I’m glad you’re feeling better, honey.”

In a week, a forwarded letter arrived in their box. Jason ran into the post office and got the mail, as he usually did, and pointed it out to his dad when he got in the car. “It says it’s from the U.S. government.”

His dad opened it carefully with his pocket knife.

“What does it say?” asked Jason after a few moments of silence.

“It says that we’re to report to a special clinic in Denver for further testing,” he said. “But it doesn’t say why.”

“It doesn’t say what’s wrong with me?”

“No. I expected to get the test results. If we wanted to, we could just take them to someone here. And we’d have them for your records. But this doesn’t say a damned thing about them.”

Jason was surprised. His father didn’t swear often.

Ascending Triplet Zeb | Washington, D.C. | 2018

Ellie Pio sat in her small office in the Naval Observatory, contemplating very tall stacks of papers. They were interspersed with very tall stacks of books. She did not want to do anything with these stacks. Looking at them made her feel very tired. One should not have to deal with tall stacks on a bright midmorning in May.

The knock at the door behind her was a welcome relief. She rotated her chair. There he was, the bum in his shabby designer overcoat. His long gray hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and unlike so many bums who went around stubbled, he had a thick white beard trimmed neatly between short and long. His fingernails were always clean and he never smelled of alcohol. She liked his eyes—brown, restful to look into, filled with an intelligence that belied his appearance. “Come in,” she said. “Sit down.”

He settled into the wooden chair in front of her desk.

“I was just getting ready for my lunch,” she said.

“Kind of early for lunch, isn’t it?” His voice was quite lovely. A bit of a Southern accent. At times he said “y’all.”

But it was his obvious intelligence that was most at odds with his appearance. He came about once a week. He talked about interstellar physics, the radio problem, general astronomy. He’d read an article of hers in Physical Review and looked her up; he said he was just an interested layperson, but she did not believe him for a second. She’d had him cleared in permanently after his first visit, when a secretary had buzzed her doubtfully. He seemed half-familiar to her, as if she’d seen him somewhere before. A favorite uncle of hers had disappeared into the streets—an alcoholic—many years ago, leaving a family and an executive position. It broke her heart when her mother had disowned her brother and refused to see or help him. She sensed that this man’s grasp on reality was tenuous. She was glad he kept returning.

She unwrapped her peanut butter and jelly sandwich and handed him half. He accepted with a nod. “Coffee?” she said. She rose and poured them both some syrupy stuff into cups of doubtful cleanliness.

“Thanks.”

He visited often, and their friendship grew.

A year after he met Ellie Pio, Zeb made his way up a narrow debris-strewn stairway in a poorly kept Anacostia apartment building. When he reached the fourth floor and walked down the hallway, a door opened. Someone peered past the chain suspiciously, then slammed the door.

Zeb pulled a matchbook from his pocket and opened it; turned it so that he could read the number by the dim ceiling bulb. He continued down the hallway until he reached the end and knocked on the door of #423.

Again, the door was opened cautiously, but this time the chain was unhooked and he was pulled into the room. The door was shut quietly behind him.

“Hey, it’s the old guy,” said a young man with a roll-up keyboard in his lap. “Nice to see you again.” About ten people were in the room, sitting on the floor or on the bed.

“Let me take your coat,” said Dr. Pio, the door guard. “You’ve missed several meetings. We’ve been worried about you.”

“That’s okay,” said Zeb, responding to the coat question by putting his hands in his coat pockets possessively. The room smelled of stale carpet, burned coffee, and cigarette smoke. The windows had aluminum foil taped over them. A large cable snaked through one of them, though, attached to abandoned satellite dishes or other antennae on the roof. All their rooms were the same; they moved every month or so. “I mean, sorry I missed the meetings. I didn’t know.” Someone at P Street Beach, where he’d been sleeping under the bridge, had given him some money today, offered him a cigarette, lit it with a match from the book, and pressed the matchbook into his hand. Maybe it was the same bum who sat and chatted with him every month or so late at night, and maybe it was the same bum who liked to look at his notebooks every once in a while. He didn’t know. Zeb had a dim memory of a heavy beard, sunglasses, a stocking cap pulled down to the eyebrows even in summer, and a voice roughened by cigarette smoke or a perpetual cold.

“Look,” said Pio, dressed as usual in drab greens and browns, “I apologize for last time.”

“Last time?” he asked, puzzled.

She sighed. “Exactly.”

“She took you to a clinic, Zeb,” said one of the women. “You ran away.”

“Oh,” he said and tried to grin. “No wonder I didn’t come back.”

“You pushed one of the techs down before she could even get you checked in,” said Pio in a disapproving tone. “She didn’t seem very upset, though. She said it looked as if you were having a panic attack.”

“Oh, that’s right,” he said. “And then—somehow I blamed the whole thing on the shelter, Pio. That’s why I didn’t go back. Didn’t you tell me we were just going out for a cup of coffee? I must have blanked the rest out.”

Pio threw up her hands. “Like I said, I apologize. You can return to the shelter with complete impunity.” The shelter gave everyone an evening meal and one of many cots in a large room. The shelter did not ask for names. If someone left, driven, say, by an urge for drugs or alcohol, they were not readmitted that night. Zeb never left. But ever since that incident, he’d been wary of the building, turning back when a couple of hundred yards away, even when his buddies yelled at him, “Come on, Star Man! We miss you!”

“We’re moving this week,” said a young woman sitting in front of a flatscreen hung from a nail.

“Well,” said Pio briskly, “let’s get started.” She went around the room and distributed papers to everyone. She wore white gloves. “The Very Large Array had all of its fused chips replaced for the umpteenth time and is operating. But the atmospheric blackout is complete about 90 percent of the time, as you can see, and the chips need to be replaced so often that it’s hard to get a decent baseline. The military takeover of every kind of telescope, radio or otherwise, is complete. I’ve heard rumors that the military has also taken over all three space hotels, the moon base, and the private Mars colony. As always, I need to emphasize that if any of you ever tell where you got this, I’ll be in deep shit.”

“The United States military?” asked one of the women.

“Yes,” said Pio, “although they’re working out information and responsibility sharing protocol via treaties.”

“But… the Mars colony was tiny. And multinational. Wouldn’t all those other countries protest? Or at least the stockholders or something?”

Pio shrugged. “What good would it do them? Besides, our news of them is quite limited. They are very far away and essentially incommunicado much of the time now. They’re sitting ducks. Not much we can do about it. Who knows, the U.S. military might even now be waging a battle against aliens in the tunnels of Mars.”

A young woman laughed nervously.

Zeb sat hunched over on an old bureau. He tilted the shade of the lamp next to him and studied the papers one by one, setting each one aside after perusal. He had not removed his coat. He hoped the water was turned on. Sometimes the rooms were paid for, but most often the club just squatted during the hours they used the rooms. In this part of town, people weren’t very nosy. They just wanted to be left alone. He planned to take a shower after everyone left; it was his habit to do so after each meeting in each temporary room—if possible.

He wasn’t exactly sure how to take these people. Enthusiastic SETI members, they were convinced, like him, that some sort of intelligence lay behind the silences. But unlike him, they had concocted a veritable encyclopedia of probable traits of the perpetrators. Zeb had no idea what they might look like and didn’t care. He was much more interested in how they thought. He was pretty sure that he couldn’t possibly comprehend it.

“Well?” asked the young man in glasses. “What do you think, Star Man?” No one used their real names here.

Zeb finished with the last paper and shrugged. “Not enough information. I do think this is a deliberate and planned effect not necessarily aimed at us. We could just be in the way. It has resulted in a huge backsliding in our ability to communicate with one another. But that may be just a flukish side effect.”

“You mean you think that these beings might not have intended this.”

“It may well not have been their primary goal. Why assume that it was? Why assume that they share anything about our mind-set, including the idea of war? Maybe we just happen to be in the path of some communication they’re sending.”

“But see?” said the woman, jumping up with excitement. “Just the fact that they probably exist is so stunning!”

“I agree,” said Zeb.

“We’re not alone!”

“Perhaps not. But they could well be so far away that it makes no real difference to us. It could be that this is some side effect of what they’re doing and it’s all we’ll ever know of them.”

“But wouldn’t you like to—like to travel out? Meet them?”

Zeb laughed. “That seems rather far-fetched.”

“It’s not!” said the woman fervently. “With nanotechnology we’ll be able to grow near-light-speed ships and power them. And we’ll be able to use various technologies to keep ourselves viable until then—”

“Yeah. Maybe even upload our minds into the ships.”

“Ah yes,” said Zeb, sliding down from the bureau, half-wishing they would leave so that he could take his shower. “I’m afraid that I’m too old for that.”

And suddenly he thought of Annie. Annie, Sal’s daughter, getting her degree in nanotechnology. That last Thanksgiving dinner… how long ago? A few years? And his self-exile.

It was like this sometimes. Things kept coming back. Those diamonds he kept in his coat. Maybe Ellie would know what to do with them. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of asking her before. But maybe he had.

And with that he remembered that Craig was dead. Dead because of all this.

“Hey, Star Man.” The woman patted his back. “Don’t cry. What did I say? I’m sorry. Ellie…”

“All of you clear out now,” Ellie said amid grumbles that the meeting had hardly begun. “And remember that by next week this place has to be vacated. We’ve been meeting here for too long.” Zeb heard murmured goodbyes and a bit of chatter about how they would get the night’s information to the national and international SETI network.

Ellie sat on the battered couch with Zeb and held his hand for a long time as he stared straight ahead. Finally she rose, put on her coat, and pulled him up. “You’re coming home with me,” she said.

“No, I can’t.” Panic rose in him.

“Nonsense. Let’s go down and get a cab. I promise I won’t try any funny stuff.”

“No clinics.”

“No. But why not? I’m telling you, Zeb, it’s really upsetting to see the way you get sometimes.”

“Because…” They were walking down the dark hallway now, and he tried to put it into words. “Because that puts out the lights. The medicine. I’m so normal that I can’t think.”

Ellie sighed.

Everything looked so strong to him. The faded Victorian women on the wallpaper, the snaking pattern of the carpet, the machined carvings on the wooden frame of the cracked mirror at the end of the hall. They would overwhelm him if he let them. It was better if things were distant and weak. These details pressing into his vision filled the field of thought with too much information. He reached into the right pocket of his coat, thrust his thumb and fingers through the hole in the bottom, used his left hand to bring the coat’s hem upward. His fingers grasped the envelope that rode with him everywhere, safe in the coat’s silk lining. He worked it out through the hole.

“I have something to show you. You might know what it is.”

He opened the packet within the envelope. The money was long gone. He unfolded the translucent brown paper and revealed the diamonds.

“Where did you get them?”

“Prom a friend of mine. I think he had something to do with intelligence. I remembered him tonight. I don’t always remember. He said that they were important. I think that they might contain classified astronomical information. But how would you read them?”

Pio held one up to the dim bulb hanging from the ceiling. She put it back in the paper.“You may be right. I don’t know of any machine that would read this. Is it all right if I keep one?”

Zeb shrugged. “I have a feeling that if I showed them to a jeweler, he might be instructed to call the police. They might have some kind of identifying marks. It might not even look like a diamond, close up. I want to know what’s in it. I don’t think my friend would have just handed me some diamonds for no reason. If they’re real, they’re probably not worth much. They grow them by the ton now and you can’t tell the difference.”

Ellie dropped one into her coin purse. As Zeb descended the stairs behind her, he said, “So information is still coming in during the silences, right? That’s what those readouts show. But very high-frequency.”

“What do you think about that?”

“It means something, of course, to someone. But it would take a lot more recordings of it to figure out what that might be. To break the code. If it’s not too complex for human brains.”

“Zeb, do you really think—”

“Although as a human I must say I can’t help but admire our abilities, I also can’t help but realize that they might be somewhat limited.”

They reached the ground floor and stepped into the lobby, floored with a cracked, dirty pattern of black and white porcelain tiles. A fanlight and glass doors admitted light from the street, but the overhead light was burnt out.

They walked out onto the concrete stoop. Cars passed occasionally. Most of the streetlights were out, and both sides of the street were lined with town houses, many of them completely dark. Downtown, traffic cops directed traffic most of the time now, but in Anacostia drivers were on their own. Ellie waved her arm for a cab.

It was a month later. The weather was lousy; it was raining ice.

But Zeb walked through a rain of perfection.

Perfection, like the sleet of buildings crowding toward Zeb; like the sleet of trees all heading toward him like arrows of truth. He was perfection’s target, its organizer, its conscious and delighted focusing eye. He trod a favorite path through a park, soaked, the precious packet from Ellie sealed in plastic, and approached the gorgeous Episcopal National Cathedral on the hill. The surrounding oaks, huge and black and leafless against the dark midmorning sky, were slashed like him by truth, a truth like sleet that melted into his intellect sharp and wakening. He turned toward the Cathedral, not having intended to go there but thinking now there was no better place to unwrap the dangerous wonder.

He pulled open a heavy door and was welcomed by candles and incense; High Episcopal. A boy’s choir sent practice echoes beating back from a hundred feet above. A tour group scuffled past, listening to their guide’s talk diffuse into tones of varying pitches. He walked an aisle and came to a cross, turned left, ducked into a tiny chapel with four pews and an altar decked with cloth, unlit candles, and flowers.

He reached into a pocket and took out a scratched, recycled Ziploc bag, picturing, with an instant’s tenderness, Ellie rinsing it at her kitchen sink and setting it to dry on the drainboard. She had given it to him, then whispered that he should leave and never return to the Observatory. Her face was pale. She showed him out a back door.

Inside was a thin object resembling a book, which he opened.

Ellie had gotten it through a friend of a friend of a friend. Apparently, this procurement could be interpreted as a treasonous act. One of the “friends” might well trace the diamond. Zeb wished Ellie had told him all this earlier, but maybe she hadn’t known the danger until too late; at any rate, this thought darkened Zeb for a moment. Then he explored.

Inside the left leaf, he saw that the diamond was sealed within a shallow well, which probably read the information.

He touched the on pad of the right leaf, which was a screen.

Warnings of top secrecy flashed in bright red. He bypassed them and continued to the menu. A screen asked for a code word, but it was automatically supplied when Zeb tried enter, thanks to Ellie’s friends.

He took a deep breath and dipped into the information… a y-shaped neutral sheet region was identified when the third (axial) component of the merging field was zero (null heliocity merging) or very small… an important relationship was discovered for delta, the thickness of the y-shaped sheet…

Zeb sat with the boys’ voices sleeting into him, along with the light-figures on the screen; they blended and infused him with increasing joy. Made of matter, he also comprehended matter, and matter’s motion, and what it might mean, glimmering down a path he could only see the beginnings of. They all stood only on the first step of the path, and it stretched infinitely far. Matter could modify matter again and again and consciousness and understanding could grow boundlessly.

Or it could be shut down forever.

He pushed that thought away. It was not one he wanted to entertain at this moment.

It was worth it. The losses, the blackened streaks of time, the weeks of stumbling stupidity. If the darkness was payment for this light.