Crescent City Rhapsody

MAJOR TONAL CHANGE Paris Stop Time Artaud and Milan | Paris | 2037

Seven years after Illian’s Prague exhibition, Artaud waited at the tiny café table, tapping a closed matchbook on the marble circle. Though it was winter and the café owners were apparently depending on the body heat of their customers to take the chill off, Artaud was sweating. He shrugged off his overcoat and let it lie over the back of the chair. He removed his hat, a black formal gentleman’s hat, set it on the table, fiddled with the brim, and put it back on. He signaled for another drink.

It was twilight, and the tables of solitary readers were being replaced by noisy crowds of diners. He welcomed the confusion. He would be completely inconspicuous when Illian came in, as she did every evening, for soup and bread and wine. The place was fairly large.

Paris had changed immensely since his last visit. But then everything had. The world had undergone frightening paroxysms of replication surges, thought-viruses called the Information Wars, and the emergence of BioCities.

He had been awakened nine months ago by Brazilian revolutionaries who were freeing relatives being held for ransom by government officials. He had no earthly idea how his rejuvenated body, to which he had closed his eyes in Mexico City years earlier, had become mixed in with this batch of unfortunates in Rio. The complex trail represented by bills of lading an apologetic woman handed him were too complicated to peruse. He was alive. He’d gained a new body. But he’d lost the woman he wished to give it to. A silly thought anyway.

Yet he’d searched what he could find of the art world, taking a ship to Istanbul and attending parties with all his might from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. And he’d finally gotten word of her.

Now he touched the cool, small glass the waiter set before him with his fingertips and ridiculed his caution. She wouldn’t recognize him anyway. Couldn’t possibly.

Even so, yesterday he’d imagined that a pensive look had crossed her thin luminous face, that she’d pushed back the long lock of sand-colored hair that fell forward quite self-consciously; that the two pink patches that colored her cheeks suddenly had to do with his quickly averted stare. He could not think that her large deep-set blue eyes betrayed loneliness, no. That would be new.

But something had touched her. In Prague, before he’d left her, before the world had gone through the wild changes that had so delayed him, she had been vivacious. She had dressed in swirls of rich color. Even her hair had been rainbow-striped. Now her clothes were plain, elegant, dark.

Isolated from the world in the Mexico City Clinic, he had not known that Perdita, Illian’s ad hoc guardian, had dropped dead several months after he left Illian; otherwise, he would have returned to her immediately. But had he not been heavily sedated as part of his treatment, he would have fled anyway. It was nightmarish, horrible. So much had been replaced; changed. It had been a great struggle, one he would have never undertaken had it not been for Illian, and one which he may well have given up many times without her functioning, unknowingly, as his anchor to the world. And then it amused him to think of the voyage his body had gone on, by ship and by train, according to the paper trail. He supposed he was lucky that it had not been shot into space for some unknown reason.

But now he was well. And young.

But still himself? In the first throes of the drink, he blinked away sentimental tears that seemed to arise so easily now at the slightest provocation. He’d been a hardened old man, philosophical, cynical. Had he ever been this sensitive, really, in his younger days? He could hardly credit the thought. Only the few simple, direct works of art that had survived his purge—and that only because they’d been forgotten in a nephew’s attic—betrayed his credulous, childlike, pre-critic nature. He shivered, suddenly chilled again, and pulled on his coat.

She would not recognize him. He had told her that he was going away to track down some obscure artist on the other side of the world. He had thought that she wouldn’t even miss him, wrapped up as she was in the swirl of young admirers and acclaim. She seemed not to care, and promised to keep in touch, but her voice-letters—something in her brain twisted reading and writing—were few. Those of a daughter making the effort to keep in touch, but so involved with her own life that it was hard to remember to take the time. As he’d expected. He was not upset.

Why had he not been honest with her? Because he still had the illusion that some parts of his life were still his own? Because he thought she should not be burdened with the thought that he might well die—why that, when he had seemed so often at death’s door in the years since he’d taken her under his protection? Perhaps because he was afraid of what her reaction might be knowing that he might live.

And might be young again.

The music was cranked up another notch. It was past dinnertime. Bar patrons filled half of the large room, talking loudly. He sighed, put on his hat, and pushed back his chair. He knew where she lived. Had walked past it, gazing up at her window. Why not just go to her flat?

Why this damned fear?

Because he was in love with her. He was in love with her, and he should leave her and never see her again. He should realize that her life was her own and watch over her from afar. Why? Simply because he’d been a powerful influence on her life. Though not, probably, on her person or on her personality. Probably not nearly as much as he feared.

He blinked again, squeezing between tables as he made his way to the door. Now what was wrong with that, anyway? He had been sick—and old enough to be her grandfather. He was still that old, but didn’t look it. His short hair was jet-black once again. Although he had whiskers, his skin was soft and smooth as that of a child. It was frighteningly easy to take his strong, lithe body for granted. He remembered the aches, the recalcitrant joints, the slow-burning pain. But even those memories were fading.

Near the door his coat caught on someone’s chair and he turned his head and apologized. When he turned back, she was holding the door open. Two feet away from him. Staring at him, bright pink staining her cheeks. He tried to turn away, but could not, pegged by her eyes. Tears streamed from them. “Close the door, damn it!” yelled someone at a nearby table. But she stood as if frozen.

“Artaud!” she said.

He was deeply shaken. He’d imagined sitting next to her, talking, getting to know her mind, deciding whether to reveal himself. He wanted to deny it. “I—”

She stepped up to him. She had grown even taller, taller than him, and was as lanky as ever. She slapped him, then hugged him, crying out, “How could you do this to me! Why didn’t you tell me! I thought you were dead!”

Pinioned in her strong grasp, Artaud heard a roar of applause around them, shouts of “Good for you!” and “Slap him again!” The power went off, as it did so often, and only the table candles lit her face, her deep eyes, as she drew back and grasped his hand tightly.

“You’re so beautiful now,” she said with a catch in her voice.

“How did you know it was me?” he asked as a waiter jostled past them and lit the gas lamp in the wall sconce. The golden light danced in her eyes, which were puzzled. “How could I not know? You are you. Your essence. Your… pattern. Artaud, please never, never leave me again. I simply could not stand it.” And she broke down and cried as he held her. He understood that it had something to do with the part of her life she never spoke of, which was all her history before he found her. She had suffered great loss before. Of course. How stupid he’d been.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, and it seemed so natural to touch her face, to brush that lock of hair aside, when he never had before, when he was older, and she was so young. Now they seemed of an age. He had never played father or grandfather to her—only mentor, guarding and nurturing her talent, trying to see that she had friends of her own age, but they all slipped off her smooth surface, never gaining entrance to her soul. And he had not either, though its existence, like a new sun, had so clearly given him life.

Her eyes were frank, adult. All those thoughts and more, assuredly, passed through her quickly.

“Come,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

The walk through sleety streets was like a dream for Artaud. Gaslight made the falling ice into scintillating dashes. She gripped his waist tightly through his thick overcoat and he was overcome by odd shyness. His older self was being washed away on a flood of hormones and life and joy. He let it go. That self was worn ragged, lemon-sour, world-weary. This new self saw everything anew.

She lived, surprisingly, in a small flat in a building with no elevator. “This was built in the 1600s,” she said as she fiddled with the lock. “I think the wallpaper has been there that long too.” She swung open the door.

It was dark, but she kept matches in a metal box attached to the wall next to the door and in the dim light from the window, he saw her pull some out with long fingers. She struck one on a strip of roughened metal and lit one candle after another as she walked through the apartment—and finally a kerosene lamp. “Gas heat,” she said. “These places are in great demand now.”

Unlike himself, she did not seem nervous at all as she bade him sit on a long, low couch with battered cushions. She moved with unhurried grace, spoke perfect French in throaty tones that soothed him, almost as if their roles were reversed now and she was the mentor, the caretaker. The kitchen was a rectangle of flickering light and he heard glasses clink. She emerged with a bottle of Absinth and a liter of water. She smiled and tilted her head as she poured. “Do you disapprove? I have been known to hallucinate with this. It’s a different quality than hashish. But not tonight; just a taste, tonight.”

His mouth burned with licorish flavor. He coughed. He hadn’t had Absinth in—what? Fifty years? He looked around.

“Do you have enough money?” he asked.

She laughed, settling back with her small opaque drink. She pulled a blanket from the back of the couch and wrapped it around her. There were no sounds in the tiny side street, and, through the tall windows, he saw that the sleet had turned to snow.

“I suppose you want me to live in a sleek hotel?” she asked in a teasing tone of voice that was new. The smile left her face. “This reminded me of your—our—place in Amsterdam. It is homey and the neighbors have all lived here for years. They don’t know who I am. I am just the somewhat eccentric young woman from whose studio strong smells of oil paint emanate from time to time. I have been fitting in.” She leaned forward suddenly, her face serious, her eyes intense. “It is so important to me. Fitting in. Having someone—more than one someone—” Her voice broke and he found himself next to her, taking her in his arms, holding her.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t miss you?” she asked, yearning and anger crowding together in her voice. “Oh, Artaud, maybe I never said anything to you—I know I didn’t—I didn’t think I’d have to, and you were going to die, and I would have to go on alone, and it seemed better not to—”

“I know,” he said, somewhat frightened by this breakdown and more words about feelings than she’d ever uttered in all the time he’d known her, first as a sullen girl prodigy, then as a self-absorbed teenager. But she was different now, so different.

She drew back from him then and took his face between her hands. “You look so funny,” she said and burst out laughing. After a second of feeling indignant, he joined her. He knew exactly what she meant. There was a look of comic artificiality about his face. They laughed until he too was weeping and then her mouth was on his and their kiss was long and slow and deep. She loosened his tie and pulled it off, unbuttoned his shirt.

“Don’t think this is my first time by any means,” she said.

He felt as if it were his, and it was—the first time in his new body and the first time in perhaps twenty years. She pulled him into her bedroom, piled high with clothes, armoire and dresser drawers standing open, the bed unmade.

“Don’t say a word!” she said when she saw him taking in the mess.

“It’s quite wonderful,” he said fervently.

Artaud woke wrapped in a delicious jumble of warm blankets. Golden sun poured through tall windows. At first he thought he was at his grandparents’ in Orleans, over the bakery, for he smelled strong coffee and could almost hear the adults laughing in the kitchen, ready to tease him for being such a sleepyhead.

But it was Illian who came through the doorway with a tray of pastries and a pot of coffee, and it was she who laughed at him, her sand-colored hair tousled, wearing a heavy robe, for it was cold.

“I must have worn you out last night. Are you sure you’re really younger?”

He rolled out of bed, took the tray from her hands, and, looking around, saw that the dressers and chairs were mounded with clothing, so he placed it on the floor. Illian watched, a bemused look in her eyes. He untied her robe, pushed it back from her shoulders, looked at her for a long moment, and pulled her close.

They went out later in the day, long after the coffee became cold. The day had clouded over. They bought crepes from a street vendor and strolled down toward the Seine, entwined and blissful. From the Pont Neuf, they watched a rowing race pass beneath them. “This is the most extraordinary day of my life,” said Artaud.

“I may have to scrap my current projects,” replied Illian. “They’re all about loss and loneliness.” She laughed, throwing back her head as she did so, holding on to the railing of the bridge with both hands and leaning back on her heels like a girl so that her long loose hair swung low behind her.

Artaud wondered if it would ever be safe to ask her about her childhood, even wrapped within this new lovers’ intimacy. He decided to wait. Perhaps he would wait forever. It might do her art harm to discharge it in talk. But… would it do her good otherwise?

“Were you ever married?” she asked, startling him.

“Twice,” he said. “Once happily, once miserably. And I had a seven-year-long relationship with a man. He considered us married. I did not. Eventually it became a problem.”

A low rumble filled the air as they continued their stroll toward a flea market on the opposite bank. As Artaud was wondering why the hell he’d waited so long to do this, air raid sirens pierced the air.

The scene before them came alive with people he hadn’t really noticed, hurrying this way and that, diving into doors, reaching into their pockets, shouting. Illian pulled on his arm. “Run!” she said.

But he stood for a moment before taking action and saw the dark cloud coming from the east. “What?”

“Bees,” she shouted, for it was becoming louder, and he heard the hiss of a missile being launched just blocks away. “Bees from the Free Nations. The so-called Free Nations. They are a Slavic affiliation of old countries.”

“What can mere bees do?” he asked, but she just pulled him onward, uncharacteristic panic on her face.

“They can turn us all to fanatics. Oh, how could I have forgotten hoods for us?”

They were running now and Artaud was once more pleased with his new body, at how it moved painlessly, with even a certain joyfulness in motion. At the same time, he recalled seeing posters about keeping a hood close at hand and he also recalled that he had simply paid no attention to them, nor had he even wondered what they were all about. He’d been completely engulfed in his newness, in fear and in anticipation…

Illian pulled him into a small bookshop. Most bookshops were kiosk-sized, since book discs took up very little space. But Artaud, for the second time in the day, was yanked back to his youth, when with his fiery grandmother, he made a daily trek to the bookshop in the town square…

There was no one inside, and Illian was throwing things out of drawers in a frenzy. “Where are they! They have to have emergency hoods! It’s the law!”

“Don’t they have a pipe in here?” Artaud started to look around for the object machine, as small nanotech manufacturing devices were called in France.

Illian’s laugh was sarcastic. “Of course not. Paris has always voted against such corrupting influences. You can go to the socialist-operated object bank and get whatever you want, for free. As long as it’s been approved by the Cultural Committee. This isn’t Prague, you know. Wouldn’t want to have stuff running rampant here.” Artaud heard an edge of hysteria in her voice. She was crouched down in front of an open cabinet. He leaned over, held her shoulders gently, and kissed her on the lips. Her sigh relaxed her shoulders, and she raised her hands to both sides of his head and pushed his hair back, a sad, ironic smile on her face. She rested her head on his chest for a moment and whispered, “What will become of us? Now that we’ve found each other—”

“We’ll always have each other,” replied Artaud. “I promise.”

He knew she would find such a declaration irritatingly romantic and waited for her to laugh. He bit her ear gently. “I do promise.”

“Me too,” she said, surprising him, and her eyes were green as summer trees. Through the open door, the street had filled with a mob, shouting at the sky, brandishing sticks. “Their heads look like onions,” murmured Illian. “With those hoods.”

The roar of the Bees grew louder, and the street grew dark. Gunfire filled the air. A Bee fell down right in front of the window, mangled, legs scrabbling. A woman’s legs stuck out from beneath it. Artaud leaped up.

“No!” screamed Illian, but her hands lost their grip. He was in the street instantly. He and a few other people leaned against one side of the Bee. It didn’t really look like a bee. Sharpish filaments grew in a pattern of three stars on its side, some sort of emblem, Artaud realized, for whatever they stood for.

As they pushed, the man next to him said, “Get away! You have no hood! Hey, careful of that pollen sack!”

“It’s already ruptured,” grunted a woman, and by now Illian was next to him and grabbed him by the waist and dragged him away. He couldn’t understand a word of what she was screaming; it was in some strange language he’d never heard her speak.

By evening, the buildings were changing. Refugees fled, on foot, in cars, in buses that honked and jerked through the mêlée, past buildings that seemed to be ever so slowly melting, then hardening; melting, then hardening.

The civil defense sirens sounded every ten minutes. Illian and Artaud had been making their way toward the Eiffel Tower for hours, fighting the general flow.

“We are trapped,” said Artaud, panicky for the first time. “You must go, Illian. Whatever happened to me when I touched the Bee will not happen to you, right? So—you must go.”

“We stay together,” she said firmly, pulling him along. “There is a plan,” she said. “I read about it in the newspaper. If we’d had hoods, then I’d be for leaving. But without hoods, our best chance is to stay and try and help and see if they can develop an antidote fast enough. The Ministry of Science has the latest evolution banks. The Tower is supposed to be one of the emergency stations.”

Artaud felt a curious mixture of despair and elation as he hiked along matching Illian’s long sure stride, clasping her hand. He wondered if she’d had any attacks lately, but now was not the time to ask. There was so much to talk about, so much he’d intended…

Yet he was here, in a body that functioned free of pain. He had made love with a strange and beautiful woman… how many times? He smiled. He couldn’t even remember.

Illian stopped walking abruptly and gazed at him.

“What?”

“That smile. Your smile. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. It’s… lovely.”

“Then why are you crying?”

It was Illian’s idea to enter the Hive, which had grown in a few hours to fill the space at the base of the Eiffel Tower. Artaud’s heart sank when he first saw it. Emergency station, indeed! Plan, indeed! As evening fell, Artaud watched in wonder and terror the way Paris lit as if every building were outlined with tubes of neon. “It’s too late for you to leave, isn’t it?” he said sadly.

“Leave!” Her laugh startled him. “No. This is the way we must go. Forward, not back. Into… something new. Do you know how hard it is to find something completely, utterly new?” She stared at the Hive, looked up at the glowing Tower with worship in her face as crowds stampeded past and people shrieked in fear. “I have read about these Hives and this whole arrangement, you know, in the fright literature they hand out with the hoods. For instance, those glowing colors—they are interstices, filled with communicative bacteria.”

“Oh.” Artaud supposed that this final newness would be the end of him. He was dizzy, feverish, hungry.

But there was such joy in Illian’s eyes.

“I can use this, Artaud. This is a new medium. Maybe… a new form of consciousness. Please. Please come with me. Change with me…”

“ ‘Change’?” Pervaded by weariness, such a thought was almost beyond him. He had already changed so much…

Illian gripped both of his hands tightly. “Become a Bee. It is possible. I know from what I have read. It was meant to scare us. But it only excites me.”

Her arms went around him. Her kiss electrified him. He thought, I will probably die either way. Why not? In a daze, he allowed her to undress him and he undressed her. They kissed and whirled about as they undressed. There was madness all around in the darkness, and no one seemed to notice as the glow of the Hive illuminated them. “We will share a cell, Artaud. We will make love. To the last. Or to a new beginning.”

That, at least, sounded halfway pleasant.

The hexagonal cells were growing against the side of the elevator, the size of, Artuad could not help but notice, coffins. Illian chose one and climbed in; shivering, Artaud squeezed in next to her.

The cell of the Hive was warm; almost unbearably hot. Its golden glow surrounded them.

She opened her mouth and her body to him. The Hive itself smelled sweet and pleasant and clasped them more tightly together. He had a moment of panic but realized that he could still breathe; he met Illian’s triumphant gaze and then she closed her eyes in ecstasy. He wondered, as the points of consciousness he considered to be him flowed outward, if he was dreaming. Bliss and fear, as one might feel in the presence of angels, swept through him.

Artaud! he heard, and it was Illian’s voice, sounding all around him. It is working… you must come too…

He did not give up his new body easily. But there was no escape. It was as if he were dissolving. In the darkness within his closed eyes, unspeakable memories exploded; memories too complex and too wrenching for words; memories of the painful purging of cells, of a deep and endless nausea, of a shifting of mind from all but the most basic shreds of identity, during which he forgot that it would all be restored. But even that was a memory and he felt that there would be no restoration this time, that it was truly death he was undergoing, a transformation beyond the veil of the possible into the wildness of something beyond human…

But maybe closer to her…

Artaud, my love, Artaud… I am learning the system! She was in his mind, as he had been within her body. Please, oh please, do not give up! I am almost ready…

And then a joining past comprehension. Her being, her mind, so much more complex and at the same time so much more simple than he had ever imagined. Their physical lovemaking had been only the first step, a childish step, compared to what he now experienced via, he realized, this new system of consciousness.

He felt as if he understood the very source of her strangeness, which even she could not comprehend as fully as he now could, just as one never sees one’s reflection clearly. Artaud saw Illian clearly at last, not with his physical eyes, but with the core of his being.

And what he saw was powerful.

Illian reveled in receptored consciousness. Her thoughts found unfettered expression at last, direct and pure, without the intervening muffling barriers of time and matter. She was electric, she was photons, she was light! Light in patterns, in intersecting planes, in revelatory arrangement, flowed through and from her—light programmed through intervals of pain, nurtured by pure natural stretches of radio ecosystem unsullied by artificial human broadcast confusion, when the delicate magnetic-sensitive cells in her brain tuned and rested, tuned and rested, unfurled new connections and linked without end until she was charged with vast, perfect, wordless understanding.

Understanding of time; understanding of distance, understanding of gravity. Understanding of how to join theories of light and gravity; how to harness energy at its source.

Understanding of how to return to her distant heart.

And yet—

Her body was human, imperfect, too delicate a vessel to hold this understanding for very long.

It needed a wider canvas now, one of more dimensions, one which might express that which she had ached to express for so many years.

It needed Paris.

The City of Light.

And Artaud, transformed once again, was her ally, her vessel, her filament of communication. He—or, now, she, since he was no drone but a Queen, because Illian had wrested the power to infuse him with the processes that turned a drone to a Queen—Artaud commanded the city, from the center of… her… transformed being. Artaud translated Illian’s thoughts into pure metapheromonal language; tapped into the roots of her own new form with joy and the exhilaration of freedom; allowed Illian’s essence to flow into the interstices, into the city’s ancient matter, to make of Paris a precisely arranged mapping antenna, mirroring that which was lodged deep within Illian’s mutated genes, deep within every cell.

Artaud fought her way free from the Hive, seeing with her faceted eyes the crowd that had gathered during the hours of their transformation scatter and fall back across the wide piazza. The scene was lit by the Hive, and by the moon, and by lines of colored light that emanated from the Tower.

He—she—was changed. And Illian…

Artaud rose on her new wings and glanced back at the cell from which she had emerged. But she knew that the cell was now empty.

Illian had not been transformed as Artaud had been. But neither did her body lie in the translucent cell.

The stolen program the terrorists dumped on Paris—the program that had found its way to them from Kyoto—was powerful. But it did not function entirely as the terrorists had thought it would.

A stronger will and philosophy than theirs hijacked it. The terrorist-spawned Bees were transformed as well and now ferried the messages of utter newness emerging from Flowers blooming across the rooftops of Paris, a vast garden open to the moon and the stars.

Illian had been subsumed, fully transformed, in the process of understanding the BioCity at its deepest levels. Her brain, her mind, that which had produced such strange and lovely art, flowed through the interstices of the city.

Paris sang with the Signal and its mapping patterning of matter, its revelation too intense, too complex, too different for humans, with their limited senses, to comprehend. Only slowly could they grow toward understanding, and Paris would be their school.

And Illian—

Illian was an adult. Finally. Only she among all of those few frantically created decades before had now traversed, through environmental accident and innate fitness, the rough road to a maturity purely imagined by her distant invisible creators. And even they had known not what might come of it. They had only hoped—if such a concept could be ascribed to them. Illian had taken advantage of this new medium as she had taken advantage of every medium before.

And this time she learned and grew in a tremendous leap.

Illian was an adult such as had never before been seen in the universe, lonely and stretching outward, searching for she knew not what. She still knew not what.

But she yearned with all her expanded being toward a light past human seeing. That light, which had long filled her human ears with pain, was now changed to ecstasy as her mind passed through time’s doorway.

And took Paris with it.

Legal Jive; Briefly Marie | New Orleans | 2037

Sharbell Dighton III, when asked “What are you?”—a question he regarded as being one step removed from being asked if he was Jewish, African American, Iranian, Cuban, or Irish—all unfashionable in the United States at one time or another and all part of his background— generally replied in his calm low voice: “Human being.”

Dighton was a New Orleans mongrel who had made his fortune and reputation the hard way—on his own. Marie counted the fact that Dighton was willing to play in her court as one of her great blessings. He had an aura of quiet power.

He knew how to get things done.

Except, annoyingly, this thing.

“New Orleans cannot secede from the Union, Marie. That’s been tried before.” Dighton was casual today. His beige linen jacket was unbuttoned, and it gaped open as he leaned back in the leather couch opposite her desk and draped one arm over the back. He had not unbuttoned his vest. Marie had never seen him unbutton his vest. He wore a yellow bow tie. On anyone else, it would have looked slightly ridiculous. But on Dighton, it merely worked with all of his other attributes—his black hair cut severely short, his dun-colored skin, his short beard and mustache, and his large brown eyes, somewhat magnified by the narrow glasses he wore. These glasses had, compressed within the DNA computers that comprised the frames, vast legal libraries that could be accessed with controlled glances if one had special implants. Many attorneys preferred audio feeds direct to the cochlea, but they were disallowed in many jurisdictions.

“But things are different now,” said Marie. “And New Orleans isn’t a state. It’s a city.”

“You just want to be able to lay your changes on downtown without FDA approval, right?”

Marie nodded.

“Well, then, I have several other approaches to suggest.”

“Whatever works,” said Marie. “And we have to do it soon. I mean, I think we’ll just do it. The heck with all that nonsense.”

The corners of Dighton’s mouth lifted ever so slightly. “Have you ever thought of just establishing your own country?”

“Many times,” she said. “I’m not kidding. In fact, that’s what I’m doing as we speak.”

“Really.” He didn’t look surprised. He never looked surprised.

In fact, a small band of knowledgeable survivors from Zion’s Freestate were now living on the base of a new floating city, which was being grown using the most advanced techniques nanotechnology could offer.

“Really,” she replied. “But I need New Orleans as a jumping-off place, so to speak.”

“So it’s not going to be here.”

Marie brightened. “Could it be here?”

Dighton smiled slightly. His smiles were always slight. “It would be infinitely easier if it were not here. For example, the necessity of raising an army from that”—he gestured out the tall arched window next to him, indicating the rest of the city’s population, which led lives rather less focused than his—“would never become an issue. I fear their enthusiasms lie elsewhere. As do the enthusiasms of most intelligent people.”

“An army would be no problem,” said Marie.

“I’ve heard about your zombie powers, my dear. Let me go on record as saying that I can think of a thousand ways to pursue you to your death in court should you attempt something like that if I ever knew the particulars.”

“Well. Maybe you’re right.” Marie stood and strolled around the room, hands in her pockets. It was so much fun to rattle Dighton.

But this was serious business.

Marie looked out across the city.

Her new BioCity.

It was quite astonishing.

First, every building in the city had been assessed by molecular intelligence, mapped, and infused with sensory cells. Months of city-wide seminars had taken place to instruct the citizens on the nature of these changes, on what they could expect, and the various levels of understanding they could purchase or be eligible to receive free. Marie had subsidized receptors for anyone who was unable to afford them; the government agents had been astonished at the expense that she was willing to incur. Apparently, their idea of BioCity users did not include anyone below a particular economic or educational level. But there was no proscription against such inclusion in their specs; apparently, they had been counting on sheer economics to maintain social stratification.

The wall of her Canal Street glass tower office now harbored a six-inch-wide stripe on the inner wall.

Marie had gone through the receptoring process. It consisted of swallowing a vial of material containing genetic instructions that tailored themselves to her biology. She had to wear gloves for a week to protect the formation of receptors on her palms and fingertips. The receptors themselves were smooth ovals of skin that contained cells similar to those in the nose and brain that interpreted pheromone information in all humans. These cells, however, were not activated by airborne pheromones. They were only activated when they came in contact with the interstice membrane, which was made of highly specialized material.

The most difficult part of becoming receptored had to do with training. Marie spent hundreds of hours of biofeedback training in which she learned the universal Mindscript being used, which resembled pictographs. Envisioning concepts in Mindscript and learning Mindscript grammar gradually became second nature, since it was a very intuitive language, and drugs were administered that caused the brain to mimic certain aspects of early learning conditions. Envisioning Mindscript caused precise electrical activity in the brain. This was endemic to the individual, but feedback produced the precise focus needed in order to communicate fluently.

Marie’s thoughts were then converted into metapheromones within the receptors, which was a hormonal process engendered by an implant. The metapheromones were transmitted to the reengineered DNA of the E. coli within the interstices, which flowed upward and were transmuted into pollenlike analogs held within large genetically engineered flowers. Creatures that looked a lot like bees, but which were as large as a four-year-old child, ferried the information between buildings.

Marie had set up the meeting with Dighton today by using her receptors.

In the future, of course, all of these steps would probably become much more streamlined and require about as much conscious work to learn as breathing.

“Dighton,” said Marie, “you know that we’re subject to constant FDA monitoring. If we can prove that it’s really the FBI that’s using this information—”

“I’ll have to go over the licensing agreement,” he said. “But doesn’t the monitoring fall under the auspices of quality control? They have to be able to shut down the programs to protect everyone in case of some kind of imbalance.”

“That’s just an excuse for them to spy on us. We can hire our own private nanotech engineers to do quality control.”

“That’s definitely disallowed in the licensing agreement. That’s grounds for them pulling the program. And, as I recall—” There was a moment’s silence as Dighton stared at his glasses, aoross which information invisible to Marie flowed. “Yes, here it is. Paragraph twenty-one. New Orleans would still owe them $200 million for the setup. But instead of the city making payments, it would become due in its entirety immediately. I told you that Mayor Ransom shouldn’t sign this, despite the enthusiastic support you whipped up.”

“Everybody’s pretty happy with it,” Marie said. “You have to admit. We haven’t had reliable telephone service for years. And now we can get the news—warped though it probably is. But the problem is, how do we get rid of the government snoops?”

“You mean, how do we steal the program?”

“You got it, Dighton.”

He sighed. “The only thing I have is a headache, Marie.” He stood. “Let me do some research, all right? I’ll get back to you in a few days. But taking this through the courts will probably take years.”

“I’m aware of that, Dighton,” she said. “Come over to the window. Don’t those old-fashioned lilies and roses set off the French Quarter beautifully?”

They gazed down at a bizarre garden, bounded by the brown curve of the Mississippi on one side and Lake Pontchartrain on the other. “I feel as if we’re on the move again. We’re alive again. The blackout was horrible.”

“Yes,” he said. “We’re on the move like the Confederacy was on the move.”

“But we’re on the right side, Dighton.”

“Sometimes that doesn’t matter.”

“It always matters.”

She turned her thoughts to Hugo.

He had been gone for years. Recruiting. The highly qualified people flocking to New Orleans were due to his tireless efforts. But something had happened. She hoped desperately that he was all right. Apparently, horrific changes had recently occurred in Japan. And the latest fitful news had it that some kind of terrorist transformation plague was sweeping through central Europe. These were frightful times. She was glad that at least here in New Orleans one or two eminent scientists or city planners arrived every month. She sent many of them on to the fast-growing floating city.

They were calling it Crescent City.

The last she had heard from Hugo was through Kita. A brief message saying that he had been injured, that he was recovering, and that some unforeseeable problems had occurred. And not to wait up for him. He might not be home for many months. The message was delivered by a bike courier and bore the stamps of the six private mail agencies it had passed through during the month it took to get to Marie.

She wished she had never asked him to leave.

Transformative Syncopations Jason | Los Angeles | 2038

Jason and Abbie danced in golden fields, wheat wind-bent and brushing them as they wove through waist-high grain, information flowering within them, the prepared targets of its broadcast, dictating their every move. No earthly instrument transcribed the precision of the singing in their heads, in their bones, in their blood. Each movement subtly reprogrammed neuronal patterns, and the dance went on and on, long past sundown, and lasted all their lives, as they changed, and changed, and changed again, pulled by light past telling—

Jason sat up and hit his head on the roof of the junkyard trailer in which he slept. The air was thick with the smoke of the smoldering fires that dotted the junkyard and his eyes burned. The dream was always the same. It always woke him with a blaze of light. He always felt tired, hopeless, and discouraged when he opened his eyes. And now his head ached.

He tucked in his shirt, buckled his belt, grabbed his pack, and slipped out of the ruined trailer, leaving the door hanging open. The sky was graying toward dawn as he stumbled through the debris of the junkyard, the flotsam of the previous century, heavily defended against those who tried to reorganize its matter with transformative nan by a fierce—if nonorganized—impromptu army of bums.

Jason had only a few miles to go. He’d been oddly reluctant to venture into the fray of the Festival to End All Festivals and even now wanted to turn back.

But the darkness within drove him on.

Now sunlight colored the haze. A breeze picked up and the sky begin to clear—gradually, at first, and then instantly, fully, as if a light had been switched on. Instead of being swathed in softening oblivion, the crushed, jumbled buildings below, many of them partially submerged in crystalline ocean, were clear in every detail, as if he had hawk’s eyes. Blackened ridges ran down to the sea, having shrugged off their burden of strip malls, roads, and houses in fiery paroxysms that came and went for several weeks, transforming the geography of the West Coast the previous year. Since then, Jason had been staying in one of the relatively undamaged pockets. He felt like he’d passed through the eye of a needle into a season of hell. It was a strangely ambient hell, but a hell all the same, one which he’d just realized might never end. It hadn’t so far.

The morning was now astonishingly clear. Mornings were often astonishingly clear if the winds were just right, for the carbon-monoxide-eating particles were transparent and some claimed lent a sparkle to things after the transformational snap—a very slightly audible crackle when they did their communal stuff all in the same instance—hence their name. When released, five years ago, Snaps were not FDA-approved, but Los Angeles did not care. No one seemed to care about the government in Washington, D.C., anymore, and the farther one got from it, the less people cared. Anarchy was the rule. Los Angeles had declared itself a sovereign nation with all the rights appertaining thereto, and a grand transnational celebration had ensued, Latin in nature, a Day of the Dead writ large.

Jason topped a rise and glimpsed the infant Dome, a hemisphere of light bulging on the mountain’s flank a few miles away. As usual, it seemed to have swelled overnight. He blinked, looking around. He would never get used to the way the air cleared so suddenly—really, an oddly minor detail in the midst of so much change—if he lived a hundred years. He laughed bitterly. Why not? A hundred years of this. He already looked about forty, perhaps, even though he was only twenty-three. After leaving Abbie, he had quickly aged and he did not know if it was something that would have happened to him anyway, given his anomalous biology, or perhaps something Abbie had done to him in those weeks when his doppelganger had vanished and Jason had audibly and frequently hoped that he would be able to survive on his own, when Abbie had insisted, more and more frantically, that Jason2 had been created to die and must be tracked to his death. And if Abbie had done this thing, had it been in revenge for his withdrawal from their plan or had it been to give him protection? Had she changed something vital within him as well? Did this aging mean that he would die soon? He went back to find her, those two years ago, to demand answers, when his fast aging seemed a certainty, to see if perhaps she was changing too, but her whole neighborhood had transmuted to Victorian houses with large porches and big chrome-laden cars parked out front, the way it had been in the late forties.

Jason walked through an empty thoroughfare that zigzagged down the mountain. Suncars littered the streets as if people had been raptured out of them entire; doorways stood open and he could see inside to well-kept living rooms, some of them with activated holograms playing. He’d overnighted in more than one house but had come to prefer the junkyard to the memories of others’ lives that populated each house. They reminded him of his own family—and of his failure to find his mother. This morning would be his last out here. There was no point to it anymore.

This outer ring was relatively empty. Jason could have moved more quickly. He could have gotten into one of the suncars and threaded his way along the road, at least until he came to a serious rumple in the road. The suncars were without value now, at least, right here they were. Just about everything was without value now, at least to looters, since it could be so easily replicated. Those who wanted a lot of stuff had it and lived in heavily guarded enclaves in the hills, preparing for the post-stuff era they believed was coming soon. It seemed to Jason that everyone saw a new age coming soon, all of them spectacularly different. But for most people, the necessity of owning physical things had evolved into an odd mixture of spiritual thirst spiked with the first tang of a variety of available immortalities. Genetic engineering. Which he could probably have—if he cared to bother. On-the-spot gene-repair clinics. Hormonal transformation. And… the Dome.

He approached a short strip of storefronts and saw that a café door stood open. The sign outside read new shipment of brazilian childhood certified pure by our own chemists. An ever-changing sphere of rain forest hanging in the doorway advertised the possible experience that one might have—for several hours or for a dazed lifetime. “Damp,” whispered voices, “Cool, Chlorophyll Vision Guaranteed” amid a lacing of Indian flutes as he passed through it. He bought coffee and a donut, turned down the proffered squirt of “Brazilian Childhood Certified Pure,” suffered the sphere again, and sat on a bench out front, sipping coffee, next to a teenage girl who had a chatting disorder. At least she looked like a teenage girl. She might have been a banker or a grounded astronaut, willingly or unwillingly transformed. It was hard to tell these days.

“It must have been like this when the pioneers came,” she said, her voice breathless. “You know, back in the 1920s. When they started Hollywood and all. When it was nothing but orange groves. It’s hard to believe how primitive it was. Hardly any shopping. Real quiet, like this. Hear those birds? Mmm, smell those orange blossoms!”

Jason nodded, chewed, watched the Dome shimmer, almost invisible as the sun rose higher. The ocean was a brilliant blue. The girl pointed. “My boyfriend is down there. He’s a surfer. They shoot the strip. That’s what they call it: ‘shooting the strip.’ The waves are monster.”

A middle-aged man progressed down the street, dipping a rag in a bucket, rubbing the posts of streetlights, doors, storefronts—every surface within reach. Jason mildly wondered what he was doing—or what he thought he was doing. Life was a circus, and he was weary of it. Other people, whom he was sure resembled celebrities he’d never heard of, made their way toward the café now that the air had snapped, chatting, laughing.

Insane.

Those interested in this slow primitive life outside the Dome were engaged in restoring many of the old neighborhoods, which generated much rancor when discussions of mood and tone became necessary. It was as if an entire city of writers, directors, and mood generators were given their own studios. Unfortunately, territories often overlapped. A carefully engineered noir neighborhood might be superseded overnight by a surprise attack of “I Love Lucy” followed by bitter reprisals of, say, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in blocks previously devoted to “Road Runner” cartoons. Everyone was young and beautiful and went around with snifters of early Eastwood, Monroe, Brando, or Dietrich in their bags, spouting bits of dialogue, striking poses.

Jason noticed that some Flowers were opening atop some sunken downtown buildings, but there were only about three, and the buildings they serviced were partially submerged in swirls of shark-infested currents. Los Angeles’s BioCity days had been cut short by the quake, coupled with the ongoing melting of the polar ice caps. A flyer skittered along the sidewalk and fluttered upward. The girl grabbed it.

“Haven’t you heard that?” Jason asked as her touch generated the embedded audio of Polly Newface’s famous “Dome or Doom” speech:

Jason grabbed the paper from the girl’s hand and tore it to shreds methodically. Polly’s speech became stuttering fragments that floated toward the sidewalk. “Ever.” “Med.” “Indel.” Then the words blew away on the breeze.

“Why did you do that?” the girl asked with more sadness than irritation.

More than one psychic turned in his or her union card after that speech and resigned from the Coalition, claiming that their support had been betrayed. “If everyone knows everything, what’s the point?” they asked. “This is going to put us out of business.” Some of them just couldn’t handle the idea and hove to the hinterlands of Arizona or Oregon.

It all had to do with the earthquake, of course. The earthquake had not only changed the physical face of L.A., leveling the downtown to rubble, shattering the freeways past easy healing, but it had changed the psychological complexion of the city. With so much death and destruction in one’s face, perhaps the only way to respond was to retreat to fantasy, dwell in the false, in the past, to yield to the nanotech storytellers, which would restore one’s past life or any past life one might want to have had. After the fires, strange seeds bloomed in the hearts and minds of the city folk. They were ready for a change. For those who felt that Los Angeles existed in the confluence of mighty rivers of positive psychic forces, no other location would do. For those who had always called it home and wished to re-create it and revisit its every face again and again, there was no other option. Watts, slums, racial tension, all that was folded into the mix too, Jason feared, for it was all human and the Dome would be nothing but human. All human. Human at its best and at its worst. Wholly artificial. It was a great wonder that any Gaians at all would want to condone it. Some said that strange glowing beings from the Silicon Valley had wandered in overnight and started the baby dome, then infiltrated the Psychics, the Gaians, and the Extropians, whose neural architecture would be read into the Dome, become part of its exponentially growing referential power. So much wisdom, they claimed. As if you had lived every life in there. Had access to the memories. Yet you could if you wished retain your node of individuality; maintain the illusion of having a body, a house, any life you might dream of. Every mental experience imaginable was available within, and many more now unimaginable promised. It reminded Jason of nothing so much as the mini-dome he’d seen at Abbie’s.

But there was no point in puzzling about why someone would want to give themselves over to the Dome. At least not for Jason; for him, it seemed marginally more interesting than suicide. It was certain, with the vast changes of the past several years, that no one was looking for Jason, or anyone with his blood type, any longer. He often longed for his father and mother, felt deep grief that he had lost them forever that evening he took off in Dog Leg. His feelings about Abbie were mixed. But still strong. Still abiding.

“Sorry,” Jason told the girl, still holding a shred of flyer that said vitamins, vigamins. vigatoms. vigatace. “Lost my head.” He finished his coffee, rose, and joined the increasing flow of pilgrims.

He’d watched the long lines at the portals, which never shrank, toying with the idea of transformation, wondering what his strange biology might do to the mix. And, he had to admit, half hoping to see his mother there. If she was still alive—and he had some old shreds of evidence that she had come to L.A., long ago, to find him—this was surely where she would come, eventually. But he’d always turned away. Until this morning. He trooped with the rest of them, lemminglike, block after block, turn after turn.

“You gonna do it?” asked a woman who looked like young Judy Garland as she fell in next to him. A little Toto ran along at her feet. Light voices sang, “We’re out of the woods, we’re out of the dark, we’re out of the night—”

Jason wondered vaguely how the sound was generated and nodded.

“It’ll be good, won’t it. I’ve been going to the Church of the Transformation. They say that it’s like St. Anselm said. You remember St. Anselm?”

Jason nodded, though he had no idea who Anselm was. He would have preferred to be alone with his thoughts, but what did it matter?

“He said that God is that which cannot be conceived of by human thought. Or whatever. Something like that, you know. It’s something that you couldn’t possibly imagine, no matter how hard you try. ’Cause everything you imagine is not… grand enough, because you’re human, just one human, and what’s in there is so very many humans, how many now?” Her words mingled with a faint “Over the Rainbow.”

At every portal, a tally was kept: twenty-foot-high glowing numbers, increasing constantly as people fed into the many portals around the Dome.

“I don’t know,” said Jason.

“Well, you don’t seem very excited,” she said, a hurt tone in her voice. “I’m not sure if you’re quite ready. You might…”

“Pollute things?” suggested Jason.

“Well, I didn’t say that.”

They were now walking in the midst of a crowd. As they topped a hill, he stopped and let his companion go on.

And then—

A blond ponytail up ahead, among the barkers, the hucksters, the Tribe of the Gladly Impure, who relieved the pilgrims of all things of value and fed them into their transformers in the Old City where the sea lapped against a breakwater of rubble. Jason’s heart pounded.

He’d seen other blond ponytails and been fooled by them, combing the city streets. He’d returned to Dog Leg, of course, as soon as he dared, and found their house empty, his father’s grave on the mountainside. His mother left an address in Los Angeles for him, but when he got there, she’d been gone for months and the wealthy client barely remembered her. “Oh yes, I let her live in the garden house for a while. She changed my life. What was her name again?”

Jason had posted countless bulletins in the brief BioCity, did whatever he could, but he had never found her.

Still, he ran, pushing through the crowd, calling out, “Mom! Mom!” until he was behind her and she turned—

He stared for an instant into her unmistakable eyes. He said nothing, just hugged her tightly while she said, “Jason?” She pushed him back and stared at him with puzzled eyes, then they both burst out laughing, eyes locked.

“It is you,” she said. “But—”

“And you! I never saw you look this young—”

“Ah,” she said, “there’s no reason to look old now. But you—what happened? Is it—”

“I’m not sure what happened,” he said, chattering madly. “Not at all. It really doesn’t matter. Oh, Mom, I was going to—I was going to get in line today. But now I’m not going to! I’m so happy! I’m so glad to find you alive. Let’s leave. Let’s go somewhere. Anywhere. Colorado. Sedona, even…”

And then they were both overwhelmed by sadness, sobbing in one another’s arms. “How did it happen?” whispered Jason.

“It was just sudden,” she said, drawing back. Behind her the Dome arched away like some massive rainbow. “Your father died in his sleep. I don’t know why. We looked for you everywhere. He was devastated. I was too, but he took it so hard. No—don’t look that way. It wasn’t your fault. You did the right thing. You did what you had to do. Your father didn’t have anything to fall back on, like I did. I knew you were alive”—her voice was fierce—“but he didn’t. He never really believed the same things I did. I think it just wore him out. He didn’t care if he lived or died. He kept going over and over everything. He should have gone into town that day with you. We should have moved overseas when you were little. We should have this, we should have that, until it was about to drive me crazy. But I understood.”

Jason was quiet, remembering his father. How strong he had been. Infusing his life with meaning. Being there when he was sick—and weak. Teaching him how to survive—

“There’s something you need to know, Jason,” said Cassie. “I’ve taken the pledge.”

“You what?”

“I’m a PEG. Fully certified. Ready to go. We get priority, you know.”

Jason struggled with many reactions. Finally he said, “I was ready to go too an hour ago. That’s what I came down here to do.”

Her eyes lit. “We’ll go together, then! I’m sure I can get you in with me—”

“But now I don’t want to go. I only wanted to go because everything seemed so meaningless. So useless. Now that I’ve found you—”

“Jason,” she said gently, “everything has changed for me. This is not something I want to do because I feel hopeless. Quite the opposite. This is all that I’ve ever wanted—besides you being well and normal. It’s transcendence. It will heal the Earth.” Her voice became low, anxious. “I had a vision, Jason. It was… do you know anything about the Great Famine in Ireland?”

“No.”

“Your many-times-great-grandparents were from Ireland, and I read a lot about it when I was young. The land was plucked bare. It was scoured of any possible thing that could serve as food—even grasses. Thistles, nettles, anything. Absolutely bare. And my vision was of the entire Earth like this. Plucked bare. We are part of a galactic ecology, Jason. I know that you don’t believe this, but someday you will. This is something I’ve felt—and seen—since before you were born. And you’re part of it! You’re important in a special way—a way that we don’t understand. I’m convinced of it. Don’t you see?”

“No. I don’t see.”

“If all of us go into the Dome, the Earth can be healed. Maybe with everyone’s shared knowledge, we’ll understand why you’re here. And the galaxies will be rebalanced—”

“What the hell good is the Earth without people? Saturn doesn’t have people. Venus doesn’t have people. So what? People are—are people!” Others were staring at him. He realized that he was shouting. He continued in a lower voice. “We can make a difference out here. We have everything to live for—now!”

“Jason, honey, I’m not dying! I’ll live forever!” Her upturned face was wet with tears.

“How do you know? Has anyone ever come out of there?”

Her face assumed the patient expression he remembered so well. “Those inside can communicate, of course. It’s hard to get them to communicate, though, but there have been reports—”

“Just like death, isn’t it! Like communicating with the dead! Oh, didn’t someone knock? Look, the spirits are spelling b-u-l-l-s-h-i-t on the Ouija board—”

“Jason! I won’t have you talk about my beliefs in that tone of voice!”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Just—just put it off for a while. A day or two. A week. Please. Give me a little time with you. I’ve missed you so.” He was sobbing like a little boy now, holding her shoulders tightly, wanting to fall to the ground and grab onto her legs. His entire heart was in his plea. Mommy, please don’t go.

“I…” she began, her voice doubtful. She looked over at the Dome.

He saw her face light once again with the look he’d seen since he was tiny. Her mark. If one single visage could illuminate one’s hopes and beliefs, one’s core, this was it. She was right. This was truly what she had yearned for—always.

Part of Jason dropped away at that moment. His childhood vanished in a flare of sunlight reflected from the Dome. He took his mother’s hand and held it within both of his.

“I’m sorry, Cassie,” he said. “I love you. I love you with all my heart. Go with my blessing. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. Mother.”

She blinked. Tears overflowed.

“I love you too, Jason. You know that. With my very life and being. When you were a little boy…” She paused for a moment, then wiped her eyes. “I couldn’t have asked for anything more. But now—can you forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive.” His heart quailed within him as he said, “Can I—can I walk you over there?”

He gave his mother over to the portal guards after a long hug. “Stay well,” he said foolishly.

She whispered, “Join us if you can, Jason. I love you.”

He wasn’t sure if they would let him watch, but he didn’t want to.

He turned abruptly and walked blindly into the crowd.

The coast road was still foggy, Jason found as he made his damp way north. The short bitter Snaps War had been fought between the Mid-State Greens and the Los Angelans, limiting by treaty the type of particles Snaps were allowed to transform and their potency. They were designed to disintegrate after forty-eight hours and were pumped from an underground station on the Mexican border. So far, their effects were successfully contained. At any rate, they probably wouldn’t have affected fog, yet the Greens were fearful that heavy fogs, crucial to ecosystem balance, might be subtly changed by some side effects of the Snaps.

Sunset colored the Pacific. There was little traffic here. NAMS— or whatever sections of it had survived the earthquake—serviced the L.A. to San Francisco route. It was, apparently, busily rebuilding itself and would soon go right into the Dome. Jason couldn’t really imagine what that would be like, any more than he could imagine what manner of being his mother was now. He felt like ashes.

His boots trod wavy pothole-filled asphalt, broken away at the edges. He was in no hurry. He had been walking for two days now. Deer foraged nearby on the steep hillsides. Occasionally, driveways led off into the wilderness. He passed signs for old bed-and-breakfasts. It felt good to walk. In his pack, he carried bread, cheese, wine, and candy bars. Late afternoon on the previous day he had made his precarious way down to an outcropping fifty feet above the ocean, and his mind was cleansed by a night of the surfs thunder.

Now the evening chilled in sunset’s afterglow. Jason started looking around for a likely camping spot. He was surprised to hear the sound of a car behind him, far, then closing in. Headlights emerged from the last fold of the highway and they belonged to an old Jeep. It was pulling a trailer full of large metal canisters.

His heart contracted as memories of his Jeep effervesced. Well, it was part of his old life. That life would never return.

The hardtop slowed and stopped next to him. A man of perhaps fifty was driving. “Hop in,” he said. Why not? Jason threw his pack in the back and took a seat.

“Going anywhere in particular?” the man asked. He had a white beard and wore a red plaid shirt beneath overalls.

“San Francisco, I guess.” Jason leaned back in the seat, feeling the muscles in his legs contract.

“Not going that far, but I can get you close,” said the man “Got some methanol to deliver. Make it myself. Well, actually, my good old chickens do a lot of the work. What’s an old guy like you doing hiking to San Francisco?” asked the man.

“Oh,” said Jason, as usual at a loss at the assumption that he had a lot more experience than he actually did. “Just want to see it.”

“What’s left of it, you mean. I guess it’s better off than L.A. Functioning. But I’m just not the type of man to want to crowd into a place like that. Give me my farm, my vegetables, my fruit, my chickens. My own little house. A good strong wind to keep away the goddamned Snaps and anything else might blow up from the city. Don’t want to get mixed up in that nonsense. Got a daughter who went there. Years ago. Haven’t heard from her since. She never was one for keeping in touch. She might still be there. Heck of a thing.” He drove in the center of the road, straddling faded double yellow lines.

He dropped Jason off an hour before dawn as he turned off the coast road. “Here’s where I drop this stuff off. They got a mill here; I’m going to lay in some flour and corn meal. San Francisco is right over that rise.” He laughed. “Can’t miss it! Sure you don’t need a place to stay?”

“Nah,” said Jason. “I got my tent.”

“All right, Captain. Stay good.” The Jeep jolted down the overgrown road and its taillights vanished.

Jason was tired, cold, and hungry. But there was a glow over the horizon. He continued on.

Maybe his future lay here. He didn’t know what his future would be. But he knew that San Franciso had no dome. That was all he cared about right now.

That and learning as much about nanotechnology as he could.

His education had been disrupted since he’d left home. More than the Earth had fractured. A huge fault line divided his life with his parents and his life today, and the whole world seemed to have changed in that time. But it was knowledge, more than anything, that he felt would heal him. He was tired of kicking around on the fringes of things, skulking and hiding, knowing less and less. The motto emblazoned on one of his elementary school notebooks said knowledge is power. He did not particularly aspire to any kind of power, but he definitely did not like being powerless.

He topped the rise and stood still while a strong wind rushed upward and assailed him.

The land plunged away beneath him like darkness itself. Spread out on the hills below was a fairy-tale city.

It glimmered against the coming dawn. Jason picked out the vertical lines of the interstices, through which flowed raw information piggybacked on the DNA of a certain pure laboratory-evolved strain of E. coli. It could be accessed by touch. The interstices ran like neon pinstripes up the sides of the buildings. Above, huge Flowerlike entities, where the information emerged to be carried from building to building, remained open. They seemed to be moving in the wind. That was one of the limitations of Flower Cities—anything moving between the tops of the buildings was subjected to the vagaries of weather. But in an earthquake-prone area, underground pipes were just as impractical. Not only that, central processing centers were necessary for assembling the information; it had a tendency to degrade if the system was too large. Apparently, there was a lot of work being done on moving beyond the Flower model, but for the time being, this prototype seemed to have taken the world by storm, with minor variations, mainly because old-fashioned computers were casualties of whatever was causing radio silence. And they worked. They worked beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

Jason’s receptors were for Los Angeles. He would have to have them modified before he would be able to access the San Francisco system.

He stood for a moment, taking it in. The great bridge had been ruined and lay slanting crazily into the bay. From this distance, it looked like a toy.

He had spent his whole life avoiding people. Avoiding what they might find out about him, avoiding capture. Living with a three-person survival team in the wilderness. He wanted to be a part of something. He wanted to do something, change something. And to do that, you had to know something. This was the nearest place to L.A. where he might be able to do that.

He owed this to his father. And whether she believed it or not, if indeed she was still capable of such things as belief, he owed it to his mother as well.

But mostly he owed it to himself.

He was in Chinatown several weeks later, having tea.

He loved his new receptors. They were small ovals on his fingertips. San Francisco was much more advanced, more complex, than L.A. had been. When he touched an interstice with his receptors, he was flooded with information. At first it had been overwhelming, but then he learned to use his filtering capabilities. He had an address. Anyone could track him, once he touched something. He didn’t care. He was tired of running, tired of hiding.

He sat at a small table, reading, having finished the noodles he’d ordered by tapping the table menu, which switched to a table surface proclaiming it to be the Year of the Horse when he completed his decisions. After about thirty seconds, the Year of the Horse was overwhelmed by swarming, flashing ads, which he ignored. Instead, he pulled up a text on lithium interfaces and studied it, using some of the credit he’d amassed by commanding a layer of the table to loosen. He peeled up his text, which was now embedded in a thin light substance, scooted back into the booth, crossed his legs on the seat, and read by the soft internal glow of the stuff. He was slowly training his brain to absorb information in other ways, but if you did that, you still had a sorting process to go through and he liked reading better. Many people did. He found that he was able to retain a lot of information and build on it. It was quite satisfying. He thought that he would enjoy being an engineer.

“Don’t you think it’s rude to put your feet on the seat?” It was a woman’s voice. It was familiar. He looked up, heart pounding. “Abbie?”

It was questionable. But the sound of her voice had caused him to blurt out her name. In fact, she didn’t look anything like Abbie. Her eyes were black and her eyelids lacked epicanthic folds. Her hair was straight and black. Her skin was somewhat weathered. “Abbie?” he said again, definitely puzzled.

“Yeah,” she said, sliding into the booth opposite him. He set down his text and watched it melt back into the table. Inside he was trembling. Questions seethed.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’d say, ‘The same thing as you,’ but it wouldn’t be true. I’m getting ready to go to China.”

“China? Why?”

“I only came when I found you were here because…” She looked down at her hands for a moment. “I only came because I thought you might want to go too.”

“Why would I want to do that?” Damn her. She generated too many questions. He had a thousand and wanted to shake the answer for each one out of her.

“Because I’ve heard that we’re building a space launch there.”

“We?”

“Yeah. People like you and me.”

“Right.” He swung his feet to the floor and put his elbows on the table. “What am I like anyway, Abbie? How come I’ve aged so much? Why do I think that you know why?”

She cleared her voice and looked nervously from side to side. She sighed. “You’re right,” she said. “I… I was a lot younger then, I guess. I wanted to disguise you. In case the… the other thing didn’t work.”

He slammed his fist on the table and a bottle of soy sauce jumped.

“You might have asked me. I might have wanted in on the decision.” His voice was strangled; it was hard to get the words out. “You have a lot of nerve.”

“I always have,” she said, her voice steady.

“And you’re sure it wasn’t to… to hurt me for not going along with your plan.”

“My plan!” Her narrow eyes widened. “Whose idea was it? You came to me!” Tears glittered in her eyes. “I loved you, Jason. I wanted to hide you—hide us—keep us safe—” She controlled her face with obvious difficulty and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

Jason sighed. He reached over and took her hand. “Oh well,” he said. “I don’t much mind looking like an old fart. You look kind of striking yourself. Having fun?”

She glared at him. “I just thought it would be a good idea to kind of fit in when I got over there. I’m working on my Mandarin.”

“It’s probably not all that hard for you,” he said. He dropped her hand and looked at her keenly.

“No. Actually, it’s pretty easy. Just like everything else. Except you.” After a short pause, she said, “So, you want to go?”

“Run that by me again.”

“People like us—you do accept that there are other people like us, don’t you? It’s true, those things I told you in L.A. About us having expanded capacity for sensing electromagnetic data. We’re kind of like birds in that way. It’s what helps them migrate. We still don’t understand why.”

“It does raise a few questions for me. Where are all the rest of— of ‘us’?”

“Not all of us worked out, Jason. That’s the truth of it. In fact, most of the kids were flawed somehow. A lot of miscarriages. A lot of cognitive mental handicaps. A lot of biochemical problems and insanity. Deaths. But we’re going to take all of us that we can find. Liberate others from government camps. It’s our duty We’re like family. We have to stick together.”

He didn’t know why he was even listening to this nonsense. “How do you know all this?”

“The guy from the government that I blackmailed told me.”

He shrugged. “Well, whatever the problem is, it’s a problem. Done nothing positive for me.”

“We think it might. Eventually. Anyway, there’s a pretty dedicated group of people like us in China and they’re building a spacecraft. At least that’s the plan. It might take decades, considering the state of the world right now. I’m going to be working on the project. In fact, I’m going to have to leave soon.”

“And where is this spacecraft going? Assuming it will fly.”

“I don’t have any doubt about that,” she said. “And it’s going to the source of the Signal.”

“Really.”

“Yes, really. Why do you have that tone in your voice?”

“Because I think it’s all bullshit.”

“I thought so. But it’s not.”

“I think that you’re right about us being unusual. But so what? We have no idea why this has happened. I think it’s just some kind of mutation from a cosmic ray that washed across the Earth at some point—if you really want to know. Genetic mutations are not all that unusual, Abbie. Everything’s such a mess now. Nobody’s looking for us anymore.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“I just want to live a normal human life.”

She burst out laughing. “Oh, Jason. You’re such an idiot. What’s a normal human life anymore?”

“I don’t care,” he said stubbornly. “Normal is what I make it. I don’t want to run away. Everyone’s running away. I want to stay.”

“What do you mean, ‘everyone’?”

He almost told her about his mother. Then he didn’t. It was too recent, too personal. He didn’t want to talk about it to anyone.

“I’m an American. I’m not Chinese. I’ve lived all over this country. Mostly in the West. Where have you ever been, Abbie, besides the West Coast? North America is beautiful.”

“It’s beautiful in China too, I think. And way beautiful in space.” Her eyes shone. “And when I get there, I’ll know.”

He didn’t bother to ask what she’d know. She’d know what his mother knew. Some kind of nonsensical transcendent otherness. “Well, suit yourself.” He slid toward the side of the booth.

She caught his hand. “Please don’t run away, Jason. I’ll be gone soon enough.” Her voice was small and quiet. “I’m sorry.” She looked at him imploringly. “I really am.”

“All right,”he said, standing. “All right, Abbie.”

She rushed into his arms and he embraced her. What now? he thought.

“It was a bad idea, I guess,” Abbie said. She sat up, stared out the window at the steel-gray bay.

Jason ran a finger down her spine. “No, it wasn’t,” he said gently. “I’ve just been through a lot in the past few years. I’m different. And so are you.”

“I always thought we were the same,” she said, her voice stubborn.

“We’re the same in one small way, I suppose. But that’s not enough to base a—”

“A what?”

“A relationship on,” he said doggedly. “We want different things. We’re two very different people. You want to fly away into space somewhere, and…”

“Don’t you?” she asked, turning around and facing him. She pulled a blanket over her shoulders.

“No,” he said, surprised. “It’s never crossed my mind.”

“It’s all I’ve wanted, since I was little. It’s what I was saving for in Los Angeles. I wanted to at least go to the Mars colony.”

“I thought that was abandoned.”

She laughed sarcastically. “You’ll believe whatever they tell you, won’t you? No, it’s still there. Still triangulating. Still transmitting, whenever the signal gets through.”

“What do you mean, ‘triangulating’?”

“I mean, between the Earth, the moon, and Mars, they can calculate exactly where the Signal is coming from.”

Her voice was excited. She’d talked a lot about the Signal in Los Angeles. He’d kind of believed her then. Now he didn’t believe in much of anything or anyone.

“Jason. Don’t you remember when the headaches went away?”

He wanted to say no, but he did.

“And don’t you remember when the music started?”

He sighed. They’d talked about this a thousand times, so eagerly, so excited. He and she called it “music,” automatically. But it was much weirder than anything anyone had the nerve to call “music.”

“I guess.”

“It’s all coming from the Signal. That’s been established.”

“Established by who?”

“Well, the people in China.”

“How do you communicate with these people in China?”

“We send news packets back and forth by clipper ship. Also of course radio when it’s working.” Which was more and more rare. Hardly at all anymore.

Jason pushed himself up and rested against the headboard. “It’s all kid stuff,” he said. “You’ve got to grow up some time.”

“You grow up,” she said, getting out of bed and dressing. “I’ve got too much to do.” She looked at him, sighed, and left the room, closing the door quietly behind her.

He saw her off at the pier a few months later. The China Queen was held fast by thick ropes, and supplies were being carried up the gangplank. Huge bare masts held furled sails.

“It’s pretty strange, don’t you think? Taking a clipper ship so I can fly in a spacecraft?” Abbie held his hand tightly.

“Mm-hmm.” Once again someone was leaving him. He was almost sorry he’d spent the last few months with her. He thought what he was doing here was taking a crash course in engineering. All kinds of engineering. And using it as a basis for understanding BioCities so that he could go into them, work in them, as a civil engineer.

Instead, he realized, the chief thing he’d done in the past few months, though he had certainly done all the engineering education he’d planned and more, was that he’d gotten used to Abbie. He’d forgiven her. He’d gone beyond forgiveness. He’d fallen in love with her again.

But she was a fanatic. He wanted to save her from her fanaticism, and she wanted to save him from his inability to accept his true being. It was a parting of the ways that seemed inevitable.

But he pulled her close and hugged her. “Oh, Abbie, don’t go,” he said.

“Why don’t you come with me?”

But they’d been through all that and its infinite variations a thousand times. He just hugged her more tightly.

“Please,” she whispered. “Change your mind.”

“I can’t,” he said and was surprised that it seemed as if his heart was breaking.

Jason hitchhiked northeast from San Francisco three months after Abbie left. He spent the time completing basic nanotech engineering courses and becoming certified. The city, which automatically and impersonally awarded him his certificate of completion and lodged it within his DNA in the privacy of his own apartment, most certainly had access to his genome. Yet it did not comment on his genetic orientation; no one sought him out; no one came to take him away, though he was, he realized later, braced for that possibility. Of course, San Francisco had a lot of laws concerning individual freedom. Perhaps he wouldn’t be so fortunate elsewhere.

But he had to go elsewhere.

He hitchhiked across rough, dry country in early winter, struck anew by its grandeur and beauty.

The farther he got from the coast, the harder it was to find rides. One day he walked till afternoon. Ten or fifteen vehicles passed him during the day without stopping. Around three in the afternoon, he was jolted by a dopplered honk; a hand holding a pistol emerged from a window of a westbound car and squeezed off several shots directed nowhere in particular. Their reports rang in his ears as Jason watched the car vanish into the distance.

He wasn’t sure what to do. The previous night had brought a light dusting of snow and clouds promised more. He carried his tent and sleeping bag in his pack, but wasn’t particularly excited about striking out across open country to avoid the road. Yet that might be the safest thing to do.

A sign he’d just passed promised that Haven’s Crossing was only six miles ahead; another solar billboard loomed ahead, its battery obviously low, dimly proclaiming the existence of the Western Inn, with restaurant and an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Hyperaware of his surroundings now, Jason half-jogged, his pack snugged close to his back, hoping to get there before dark. He heard a car approaching behind him and veered off toward some rocks. He heard it stop and doubled his speed. A voice called out, “Want a ride?”

He allowed himself a quick glance and saw that it was not the shooter’s car. It was a pickup truck. “I ain’t got all day,” the bearded man yelled. He was wearing overalls.

Jason paused, turned, and walked toward the truck. There was no room in the back of the truck, so he squeezed his pack onto the floor of the cab and climbed in after it.

He saw that his benefactor was perhaps fifty. Jason was starting to look younger. The gray was going out of his hair; his muscles were firming up easily. Abbie. She’d probably done something while he slept. He didn’t like to think about it. But he looked an age with this man.

The driver said, “Name’s Howitz. Yours?” He put the truck in gear.

“Peabody. How far you going?”

“Salt Lake.”

“That’ll do.” Jason leaned back and found the aroma of pipe tobacco pleasant. They quickly arrived at Haven’s Crossing and Jason saw that it was empty too; the windows of the Western Inn were smashed and a small grid of streets seemed to have no sign of life.

“Glad you picked me up,” said Jason. “I was planning on spending the night there.”

“I might not have if I hadn’t seen you run off. If you meant harm, you wouldn’t have tried to hide. I reckon you’ve had a hell of a time getting rides in this part of the country. We’ve been suffering. Some young woman—a stranger—let go a plague there in Haven’s Crossing about six months ago.”

“A plague?”

“Plague of some kind of Shambala nonsense. Think that’s what it was called. Some guru place in Oregon. Had them all walking and talking guruspeak. Must’ve been like the 1960s, what I know about them. They all headed out to Oregon and took anything worth taking. Cleaned out the Seed and Feed and Haven Hardware. Probably laid all that stuff at the feet of Guru Shambala and he’s got them slaving away for him. That’s how we were introduced to the idea of plagues. I tell you it’s a strange, strange world nowadays.”

It was growing dark. Dry snow sifted down across the headlights, blew in wavy lines across the road.

“You taking something to Salt Lake?” asked Jason, nodding at the full bed behind them, covered with a tarp.

“Biodiversity samples. Government’s paying good for them. All kinds of plants and animals and insects, all labeled. Wife and me collect them. Ever since the wheat crop was wiped out last year. We were growing the cloned wheat the government paid us to grow and a virus come along and killed the lot. Every damned plant exactly the same. That’s what got us interested in the project. I kind of want to get one of those nanotech manufacturing boxes I’ve heard about, but the wife, she’s not so crazy about the whole idea. We got a son in Salt Lake, though, and I think he’s about got her talked into it. He’s worried about us living out there so alone with the roads so bad and things getting so dangerous. Wants us to get those receptors and move into the city with him. I don’t know. I think I like it out here better. We’re not alone. We’ve got each other and the whole world around us. If I was to wake up in the morning and not see Crane Ridge, I think I’d go nuts. My son, he says that they can fix it up there so it would be just the same.” Howitz puffed vigorously on his pipe. “I don’t believe him. Where you from?”

“All over.”

“A drifter.”

“I guess. I’m kind of looking for a job in Salt Lake City. Just came from San Francisco. Been learning about the operating systems and all.” He held up his gloved hands. “Finally got receptors in San Francisco. I like them. Seems like a good thing to get into.”

Howitz shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe the best defense is knowing what’s going on. My wife, she’s one of these ham radio nuts. Before the Silence, she had friends all over the world. She still keeps the thing hummin’. Guess it’s important, even though it wastes current. Maybe once every other week, she’ll get a blip. Sometimes even fifteen minutes of stuff. It’s pretty compressed; just some kind of code shorthand these folks thought up because talking’s too slow when your time is so limited. Don’t know as anyone’s got the real scoop anymore. Just swappin’ rumors is all. My son claims to get the news through the train line. I say that the news there is whatever they tell him it is. Can’t trust it. I’ll tell you who we can trust. Our friends and our family. We got about fifteen households where I live, not too close, but we’re there for each other and we get together every Sunday at one of the houses. Rotate the meetings. Trade goods and what we know. It works. It’s enough.”

Jason pulled a candy bar from his pocket. “Want some?”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Little town about two hundred miles west. Emoryville, I think.”

“Sure,” he said. “Haven’t had a Snickers in years. Didn’t know they made them anymore.”

“They might not,” said Jason. “I think these are pretty old.”

He offered to drive after a few hours, but his offer was refused. Tired, he napped until they rumbled to a stop and he jerked awake. “Where are we?”

“NAMS station outside of Salt Lake City,” Howitz said. He opened the cab and got out, pissed on some plants next to the truck.

It looked to be almost dawn. There were two inches of snow on the ground. Jason saw lights in the distance.

Bright lights.

Jason helped Howitz’s son Ed load the biodiversity samples onto the train. Ed was inclined to chat as they made the twenty-minute trip into town, so Jason felt a sense of sweet frustration about getting to know the train, almost as if it were a person. Not only was it fast, but the state-of-the-art ears pulsed with so much news, entertainment, and educational opportunities that he was astounded; the entire inside surface seethed with access invitations.

“I wish Mom and Dad would move to Salt Lake,” said Ed, his feet propped on boxes. On the way out, he’d slagged a few rows of seats down; their matter raised the level of the floor a few inches and that was where they stacked the boxes. “I really worry about them way out there. These plagues are the worst thing, it seems. Back in the 1990s, they had this phenomenon called drive-by shootings. These are about the same. Cook up a belief architecture that can interface with 80 percent of normal brains. Let it loose, sit back, and laugh your head off. Or take charge of your army. Whatever. It’s bad, man. Bad shit.”

“How would you do that?”

Ed looked at him sharply. “That what you came here for?”

Jason shook his head. “No. I’m an engineer. Level one. I just thought it would be good to earn my different levels in different cities. Be flexible.”

“Well, you don’t want to get mixed up with anyone that makes that kind of stuff, let me tell you. Not only is it a local, state, federal, and international crime with stiff penalties, you really have to wonder about people who want to take the volition of others away.”

Jason thought of his mother. It seemed to him that she’d willingly sacrificed her volition. But of course she’d chosen to do that.

“Yeah,” Jason replied. “But don’t you think it’s important that some of the good guys know how to do this stuff? Otherwise, how can it be stopped?”

“Well, you’ve got a point,” said Ed. “Here’s our station. There’s my hands. They’re going to take this stuff to the lab. I’m going to ride back out and spend some time with Dad. Good luck. Look me up if you need anything.”

“Thanks,” said Jason. “And tell Howitz thanks again too.”

After four months in Salt Lake City, Jason was on the move again, but this time he took NAMS.

In Houston, he became a janitor at NASA. No one knew who he was, nor that he had the expertise to access their systems and read information that was classified. Information about the moon and Mars colonies.

Information about the Signal.

Information about the persecution of those like him.

He copied it all.

He heard that New Orleans might be a place of freedom.

When he was on the verge of being discovered, he hitchhiked east.

Crescendo of Light Tamchu | Cambodia | 2038

Tamchu and the General sat at a card table on a long roofed porch perched on the edge of a jungled gully. In front of them was the drill field and, down a steep hill, a slow river. The General had imported all manner of parrots and finches, despite Tamchu’s pointing out that they might upset the natural ecology of the place. “So much the better,” she had said. He realized that “upset” was the wrong word to use as a deterrent. The General lived to upset.

Tamchu was very tired. He’d just returned from one of his routine trips to Bangkok. He was, simply, a spy. He dressed like a businessman and carried expensive businessman accouterments: a Toshiba wrist-phone with a huge roam zone to gobble signals from far off—if there might be signals anywhere. A nose ring which, were it real, would be capable of sensing the fine gradations of metapheromones now often present in the highest levels of government and of business. His was not. Real nose rings passed information up the nasal passage directly into the brain. Wearers underwent intense feedback training so that their brains translated the metapheromones into a new type of language, based on the learning profile of each individual. The level of precision manifested by adult-level grammar was still difficult for most people to achieve, so many messages were in primitive toddlerspeak. The receiver closed his or her eyes and dreamlike visions arose, the speed of which could be controlled by the user. And unlike dreams, such visions would be remembered. One great advantage was that information could be embedded in tablets which, when put into a cup of steaming hot water, could be inhaled and held in a buffer. The information could be saved for extended periods of time.

But when Tamchu mingled in the downtown clubs, he was taken for a high-rolling foreigner, particularly since his Thai vocabulary retained an accent and because the cast of his face—his high Tibetan cheekbones and burnished skin—heightened this effect.

It was assumed that any businessman in Bangkok was there only peripherally for business. It was mostly for sex that they flocked to this vast city, a city that Tamchu found tragic and exhilarating. The poverty was nothing new. That it was so pervasive and that it existed among people who had fought to defend their independence for so many centuries in a land rich with resources depressed him greatly. Was it simply a given of human existence that almost all people were relegated to subsistence living, that they would, generation after generation, be denied the resources of people like the General? When was all this nanotech stuff going to help them? There was a lot of resistance to the kinds of change that seemed to be sweeping other parts of the world.

He looked across the table at the General. She’d adopted a mannish haircut; her straight black hair fell across her eyes. She hardly ever ate and exercised ferociously every day; her body was a thin athlete’s, flat-chested.

Tamchu figured her to be in her early forties. When he had met her, her face was lined and her mouth bracketed by dour creases that had only deepened in the past decade. Her black eyes were quick to see everything, yet introspective, as if they gazed upon atrocities even when the sky was blue and the sun shining. Tamchu suspected that she’d never had an easy moment in her life. She’d worked rice paddies until her parents, a brother, and a sister had died of some unknown plague. The General and her remaining sister had then been sold by their uncle into slavery in the brothels of Bangkok. She stabbed her second client with a knife she hid beneath her pillow—after hiding from the daily injection of calming drugs—and escaped into the streets. It took her a year to find her sister, who had contracted AIDS and was dying of a particularly virulent virus. After her sister died, the teenager went to the airport and walked unseen onto a cargo plane bound for Hong Kong. There she joined the Chinese army, which was taking all comers at that time. They gave her an education that kept extending when they saw what a dedicated pupil she was. She served out her time, fighting in several border skirmishes—perhaps against Tamchu’s own family—and returned to Thailand.

It was then that she declared war on brothels. As a result, the Bangkok brothels had metamorphosed into a floating world, constantly moving. The General was not concerned about high-class call girls who had survived long enough to make their own decisions about their livelihood. Her goal was to free the girls, some as young as ten years old, who sat behind a one-way mirror wearing a number and usually perished within a year or two of their enslavement. The General also had spies working on the supply networks, infiltrating the brothel operatives who went around to the villages in big cars with lots of money. Sometimes parents were promised that the girls would get an education. Her troops regularly ambushed the fancy cars on the way back to Bangkok with their cargo. The General also had a traveling video bus that went to villages and showed raw footage of the lives of the sex slaves, including videos from the morgue.

Tamchu had found that there was death in the past of all terrorists, usually the death of some innocent—a mother, a brother, an old father. He found comfort in this at first. This world of pain and anger was his world. But unfocused rage at the hidden controller who had no feeling for the lives of others made terrorists, in a way, like those they hated. Tamchu was beginning to see this. It was not something he wanted to see. He told himself that there were no innocent victims in his form of protest. But he knew that was not true. He did not understand why the General found it necessary to kill brothel clients. Terrify them, yes. It was the owners who wanted killing, argued Tamchu, not the clients. “You have to put fear into them,” said the General. “Fear of death is the only thing that will ruin the slave trade.” It was all too easy for the General’s army of former victims to be trained to kill with no compunction.

One of the girls brought Tamchu his customary green tea and curried soybeans. He thanked her. Her arms hung at her sides. As she turned and walked away, he noticed that her hands were clenched into fists.

“It is difficult for that one to change,” observed the General, lighting a cigar, pushing her chair back, and putting her booted feet up on the railing. She pushed aside her sparse breakfast of rice, cold steamed fish, and mango half-eaten, as usual. “I’m not sure what to do about her. Some are more sensitive than others.”

“Let her be,” suggested Tamchu. “Not everyone is cut out to be a killer.”

“Of course they are,” replied the General. “In the right circumstances, anyone will kill. And if they won’t, they don’t deserve the gift of life.”

Tamchu thought of Illian. He could not imagine her killing anyone. Ever. “That’s not true,” he said. “In fact, I think that’s a ridiculous statement.”

“When the world is changed, I may agree with you,” she said. “My sisters did not fight. And they died.”

“You’re saying that they deserved to die,” Tamchu pointed out.

She stubbed out her cigar in what was left of the mango. Her movements were never languid. They were always sharp, economical, decisive. She looked at him directly.

“Believe me, if I could find a cure for this condition, I’d support it with all that’s left of my heart. Perhaps it would be better to say, I would support a cure with all my military and organizational skills. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about this morning, in fact. I’ve been in contact with someone in Hong Kong and I’d like you to go and meet him. Find out how much product he can manufacture, how much it will cost. Bargain for it, but get it no matter what. Find out which vectors we must use in order to get the maximum effect.”

“What do you mean, ‘vectors’?” asked Tamchu.

“As in vectors of infection.”

“So this is some sort of sickness.”

She hesitated for a second, and looked away from him. She appeared to be thinking. “No. It is some sort of cure. Yes. It is a cure of this sexual sickness that drives men to victimize women.”

“Oh,” said Tamchu. He was quiet for a minute. “I’m not sure that I want to do this sort of thing anymore.” He was surprised at himself. He had not meant to say so. But he realized that that, in truth, was how he felt. He probably ought not to have said it so baldly. He knew that the General depended on him extensively. He was not afraid of her, but she would certainly not let him go too easily. He knew too much.

To anyone else, she would have appeared to have no reaction at all to his statement—mild, yet heretical because she knew that he usually meant what he said. But her slight brief squint and the sudden wildness of her eyes as she studied the glowing end of her cigar said as much to Tamchu about what she felt as another’s screaming tantrum.

Of course, she continued speaking as if he had said nothing. “I know you object to the word ‘sickness.’ Let me put it another way. I’ve been trying hard to think of this in other ways. Whether or not you believe it, I realize that I have a sickness as well—and that you have the same sickness, but to a lesser degree.”

Tamchu was a bit surprised that the General was able to be so objective about herself. “What other way of thinking about it have you found?”

“Every species has mating rituals and reproductive strategies. The male urge for coupling with young women—and as many as possible— is part of this. But we have more than enough people on this planet already. The male reproductive urge must be stemmed. Women would then be able to have more control over whether or not they ought to reproduce—and the methods of reproduction. Men who really do want to raise children could decide to do so in a rational way, based on their resources and their emotional capacity for doing so. Women could decide to pair with a mate based not on sexual urges but on whether they both have the time, money, maturity, and love to raise a child.”

“Maybe there would be no more children in such a world,” said Tamchu. “Who that is thoughtful would feel capable of raising children?”

The General snorted. She almost never laughed, because she never seemed happy enough or free enough to simply laugh. She snorted, instead, in ridicule. The ridiculous thoughts of others moved her to snort rather often.

“I have my girls; I am raising them,” she replied.

“You have an agenda,” Tamchu pointed out. “You make them into killers. I’m not sure if this is mature. You are using them.”

“Which is exactly what I’m talking about!” she said, as if scoring a point. “Go to Hong Kong and get this substance. We can put it in the water, perhaps. Release it from helicopters.”

“What is it?” asked Tamchu. “Dissolvable compassion? You’d better avoid taking it.”

She was impossible to rile. It was one of the things Tamchu liked about her. She was honest and direct and, though she usually ignored criticism, it didn’t anger her at all.

“You seem to be talking in circles,” he added.

“What I’m doing now is primitive. It doesn’t work. The people in the villages don’t believe my movies. If I paid them enough so that they could afford to keep their girls at home, it wouldn’t matter. They’d keep the money and sell them next month when I wasn’t around. I think that the devaluation of girls is so great that things will never change without some great jolt. Some enormous change.”

“Things aren’t this way in Tibet, in Nepal,” said Tamchu, thinking of his mother, his aunt.

Another snort. “The literacy rate for men in Nepal is 12 percent. For women, it is 3 percent. If what you say is true, it would be the same.”

Tamchu sighed.

“It’s always hard for a man to see things in this way,” said the General. “You’re not bad, for a man.”

“I don’t think it’s the fault of men,” he said.

“Men are as much victims of this as women,” said the General.

Tamchu sat back in his chair. He was often confused when around the General. He had the feeling that he’d gotten involved in a war that was not his own, even though he felt great pity for the girls the General liberated.

“It’s the same system,” she said, zeroing in, as usual, on his thoughts. “The whole human system. This is what killed your sister.”

“Some… strange government policy killed her,” said Tamchu, his thoughts surfacing to language slowly, as usual. Over the past years, he’d allowed the General to convince him that Illian was dead. Still, in his heart, he couldn’t believe it. At first he’d told himself that he was gaining skills that would aid him in locating her. But the General’s corrosive philosophy had a way of extinguishing hope.

“You’ve been wrapped up in this for ages,” said the General, lighting another cigar with a snap of her lighter. “It is a local thing for you. You’ve gotten involved. But what you want is to see the bigger picture. You want to know what killed your sister. I understand.” She took a drag of her cigar and stood. “Go to Hong Kong. Meet this man. Find out about what he has to sell. But ask him other questions. He knows a lot. He knows about things I don’t care about. Maybe he can help you.”

She patted him on the shoulder and descended the balcony stairs. Cigar smoke lingered, mingled with the scent of flowers. Girls drilled below, shadows shortening as the sun gained midsky. They marched, turned sharply, halted, inspected their weapons. Their faces were as free of emotion as that of the General’s. She walked out into the wide green drill field next to the river. They saluted and snapped their heels together. The General saluted them back. Her commands rang out in the languid jungle air. The girls turned. They marched. They scattered to the trees, to begin the guerrilla part of the morning.

Tamchu decided to go to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong gathered Tamchu in with gaudy embracing arms and he tried vainly to remain aloof. It is all a fantasy, he reminded himself, yet he kept forgetting in the thrall of multisensual stimulation and cursed the General for sending him here.

He found that he had to do business via a virtual booth, which did not please him. The booths were 3-D, networked, and ran on some sort of new juice, juice because Hong Kong now operated on information-carrying liquid that was piped throughout the city. This was a tentative step toward converting entirely to BioCity mode.

An hour later, he stumbled, dazed, into the streets of Hong Kong. He had bought whatever it was that the General wanted, described by the code name Black, after a flurry of fierce bidding by unseen parties.

To him it was like any of a hundred transactions he’d facilitated for her, from weapons to trucks to explosives. The only difference was that this was astoundingly expensive. He wondered where the money had come from, wondered if perhaps she was sharing the cost with other groups who would then share this mysterious substance she praised so highly. The object he had bought was zipped inside his money belt. He had gained no information about Illian, but he was not surprised. He had not really expected to.

Two blocks from the parlor, a brown dwarf and a Japanese woman fell in beside him. The dwarf said, “We can’t offer you a lot of money for what you have. But we can offer you a chance to do the right thing.”

Two mornings later, Tamchu got off the express maglev in Bangkok and decided to stay overnight before catching a local train north, where the fast trains did not run. He was tired and wanted to rest before meeting the General, and he felt safe in this city. Of course you do, he told himself. You hold their life and death in your hands. You are the invisible gnat with power over them all.

He was not happy that this was so. But the dwarf and Japanese woman had told him that he was in possession of something far more dangerous than the General had led him to believe. The woman seemed terribly agitated and Tamchu would not have listened to her for a second. But the dwarf, in contrast to the con men and liars Tamchu was accustomed to dealing with, was calm, certain, embued with a moral energy that reminded Tamchu, rather oddly, of his mother. Besides, the amount of money the dwarf considered not a lot was almost twice as much as he had paid for… for whatever he had.

But Tamchu had turned down their strange offer. The General depended on him and he would not betray her. Yet the dwarf’s assertions bothered him.

He decided to stay in a hotel in the district he usually frequented. He welcomed the heat as he stepped from the train station and hailed a runner. Noisy polluting tuk tuks had been replaced years ago by bicycle cabs or pedicabs.

A few minutes later, as he waited in his pedicab for a signal to change, he realized that a Buddhist nun in diaphanous orange robes was looking straight at him. She stood at a bus stop only a few feet away, holding a green sun parasol. Her old brown face was drawn into a fine network of wrinkles. She had no hair, and on her forehead spun a moving tattoo, a prayer wheel. She was probably of Tibetan extraction.

Their glances mingled. He was too tired to even look away, as one generally would when catching a stranger’s eye.

The Buddha sprang forth.

A force resided within her being. He had not encountered this force since leaving Kathmandu, but his memory gave back all the associations built up during a childhood where Buddhism was common as air, and he was flooded with the realization that this force existed as surely as the cab in which he sat.

This energy flowed into him, scoured him, revealed his shabby excuses for what he did and who he was. Shame at having called himself a Buddhist for so many years caught fire and flared, incandescent as a burning magnesium wire. The nun’s gaze was calm, deep, certain, and showed no surprise at what was happening. In her eyes, Tamchu saw certainty and understood that she contained and directed this energy, much as the banks of a klong contained and directed the flow of water. She briefly sketched a mudra in the humid air with her free hand, never breaking the current of their gaze.

The runner jolted forward as the signal changed and all that Tamchu saw—the long avenues filled with seething crowds, the occasional tree, the haze at the ends of the streets—seemed filled with this inner cleansing fire. It continued with him, spread through everything, changed everything, much as the dwarf had claimed what he carried in his belt would change things. He saw all this without wonder, without judgment. The universe mutated for him in that moment. He did not know what it meant. He did not know much of anything, except that a light issued from all beings, the pure light of the Buddha.

Arriving at the hotel, he paid the runner and entered a cool dark lobby, rich with intricately carved woods. The clerk apologetically told him that they could have a room ready in half an hour.

He went back out on the street and wandered into an expensive gallery. He glanced around, restlessly eyeing paintings and sculpture. As he turned to leave, he passed a glass shelf containing smaller objects, none larger than a bowl. He was almost out the door when his brain finally processed what he’d seen and shouted at him to go back. He turned on his heel, wondering why.

On the shelf was a small delicate butterfly cage of metal sticks, welded together at crazy angles. The sticks were not safely contained at the ends but extended past one another, giving the piece a bristly quality.

He picked it up and examined it, heart pounding, reminded of the cages Illian had made for him all those years ago. The same size, the same basic construction.

Trapped inside, loose but unable to fit through any of the gaps, was a tiny metal girl.

Tamchu’s first thought was that he was so tired that he was dreaming and didn’t know it. Or that perhaps he was still trapped within the virtual network of Hong Kong and that the dwarf and the Japanese woman and the long train trip and the nun and the light, which still burned here, were all part of the same manipulations inflicted on him by some unknown dream master.

But no. He was awake, in the flesh, and holding this butterfly cage in hands that trembled.

Eagerly, he turned it around and around, hungry for whatever information it might yield. It was some strange fluke—some bizarre coincidence—that such an object should exist. Surely it could have no connection to Illian.

But there. On one of the metal sticks a small indented Roman numeral I was etched into the metal. Or perhaps… it was the letter i. i for Illian. Her signature. And paris.

His throat tightened and he felt tears. A strange sensation; he had not cried once during all his years with the General.

And he could not buy it. For years, he had depended completely on the General and had no material needs that were not filled. The hotel, the train, the ship, his clothing, everything was paid for with her account.

He did not want to use her account of death to buy this thing. This cage was alive, and the light within all objects now revealed to him that he was not. His life was not his own.

He lived, he realized suddenly, to wreak havoc on anyone the General deemed unfit to live. He lived at her pleasure. He was her tool. He’d given up his own thoughts, his own life.

He’d given up.

Now, suddenly, he wanted to reclaim his life with a fierceness that took him by surprise. The urge to do, the urge to be, the urge to think for himself filled his mind and being, wiping away his fatigue. In fact, perhaps this feeling was joy. Joy such as he had never experienced in his entire life.

Illian lived! He had not sent her to her death!

He looked around. The attendant was occupied with a Japanese man. He wished he could ask her about the artist, but she probably would not know anything.

He walked out the door holding the cage; holding, he felt, his life. Behind him he heard an alarm; imagined that alerted guards pursued him. He made no undue haste. He simply slipped into the crowd. He’d been doing such things for so many years that he didn’t even think about it. He returned directly to the train station.

When the train pulled up to the platform in the Cambodian village, it was late afternoon. Tamchu had decided it was best to face the General and tell her he was leaving. They did, after all, have a long relationship. And she had paid for whatever was in his belt. The dwarf said that whoever owned it would have the world at his feet. That he could demand any ransom, for it could unmake the world. But why should he trust a dwarf he did not know over the General?

To his surprise, she was waiting on the concrete platform, next to the small ticketing kiosk. He saw her as the old train—an anomaly in this age of nanotech wonders—squealed to a halt. She looked harried, Tamchu noted with tenderness, as he appraised her through the dirty window, sealed to hold in barely functioning air-conditioning. She must have come every day on the chance that he might arrive, something she had never done before.

She did not look at the windows, but only at the door, as she smoked her cigar with jerky, agitated gestures. She seemed unlike herself; she was usually unperturbed and in control.

She stamped out her cigar and scowled. She tried to light another, but her hand shook so badly that she tossed the match down in disgust and searched her pockets frantically, finally finding a lighter.

Tamchu knew at that instant that all the dwarf had told him must be true. He carried in his belt some terrible substance with which she could wreak untold havoc. She would not be satisfied until all men were dead, including himself, and all women who did not believe as she did. It was, as she said, a sickness. But he did not carry the cure she’d promised. He carried only that which would feed it.

He could not move from his seat.

At the last moment, as the train began to move ponderously, she looked up, scanned the windows, caught his eye.

She tossed down her cigar and ground it out with her boot. Like the Buddhist nun, she held his gaze without blinking.

Her eyes were not filled with light, but with darkness.

She became small in the green afternoon, straight and stiff and dressed in black.

Then the train rounded a curve and she was gone.

A minute later, the brown dwarf came down the aisle. The Japanese woman was behind him.

Tamchu was not surprised to see the dwarf and the Japanese woman. They approached him, holding on to seats as they swayed down the aisle, with the inevitability of dream, replacing the General as the phenomenon requiring his immediate attention. Perhaps, he reflected, the Buddhist nun had wiped surprise from his universe and replaced it with this new sensation of inevitability, coupled with an intimation that his inner stance might possibly make a difference. There was also a sense that it was necessary to put himself at the disposal of the universe, without even hoping that this might bring him redemption.

He wasn’t at all positive, however, that the dwarf was his path to implementing his dim memory of the four noble truths.

The dwarf and the Japanese woman sat across from him. Sunset angled down a brilliant green valley and brightened the face of the Japanese woman, as if she were being pierced by a sword of light. The ancient train jolted onward toward the next tiny station, a mere ten miles and twenty minutes away.

Finally the dwarf—whose name, Tamchu recalled, was Hugo—said, “You have made the right choice.” His big square face was solemn.

“Maybe,” said Tamchu.

“Are you now coming with us to New Orleans?”

“No,” said Tamchu. “I am going to Paris.”

“That’s on the way.” Hugo wiggled back into the threadbare seat. The Japanese woman curled up in hers. She looked weary.

“How did you find me in Hong Kong?” asked Tamchu.

“I am a spy,” replied Hugo.

This pronouncement struck Tamchu as hilarious, though he gave no sign of this. The eyelids of the self-proclaimed spy were stuck at half-mast in a ridiculously studied fashion.

Hugo continued, “You must be very careful with what you are carrying. I’m not the only person who knows about it.”

“I am carrying nothing with me,” said Tamchu. “I stored it in Bangkok.”

Hugo just looked at him.

He elaborated on his lie. “In the hotel safe.”

Kita said, “Do you mind if I smoke?”

Tamchu shook his head and she lit a cigarette.

“We didn’t want only what you’re carrying or we’d have taken it from you as soon as you got it,” said Hugo. “Perhaps even earlier. We wanted to know who intended to buy it. We’ve been tracking it for months. It was stolen from Kyoto. I was seriously injured there and it took me a while to recover. By then the trail was difficult to pick up. You’ve heard about Kyoto, haven’t you?”

“I don’t know,” said Tamchu. “Yes, perhaps. Some kind of disaster.”

“Some kind,” said the Japanese woman, her eyes sad and distant.

Hugo continued, “An agent of the International Federation cartel stole it. We received intelligence that a lone terrorist managed to flee Kyoto with the prototype you carry. He sold other important Kyoto information to an Eastern European group with retro politics. He was holding out for some very high bidding to conclude in Hong Kong. But we were just on the verge of finding his booth in the virtual arcade and he panicked, switched venues to throw us off, and sold it to you, even though I don’t suppose you offered anywhere near what it was worth. Had you attempted to give it to that woman back there, we would have intercepted it instantly.”

“Why didn’t you take it earlier?” asked Tamchu. “It would have saved you a return trip to Bangkok.”

“Because we wanted to see where you were taking it. And because what we want more than anything is you. We need you to help change the world.”

This drew a reaction from Tamchu in spite of himself—a thin snorting laugh that might have issued from the General herself. “I had something that could destroy the world, but I am more important? There is nothing important about me.”

“You have connections to every terrorist organization in Asia,” said Hugo. “You have information about their plans, how they could be circumvented. They know and trust you.”

“Trust is not something that any of them practice,” said Tamchu.

“Your boss paid a huge sum for what you have,” said Hugo.

“I am curious,” said Tamchu. “Why did this substance not destroy its container?”

Kito stubbed out her cigarette. Her face was not quite as pale as that of most Japanese women, but she had the same fineness of complexion and her cheeks were tinged pale peach. Her black eyebrows made thin perfect arcs above her black serious eyes, and she was tiny and dressed in jeans, boots, a T-shirt, and a dark blue tailored silk jacket. She spoke excellent English in a sharp and nervous voice.

“Inside your belt is a flexible sealed assembler lab containing molecular-scale softwear. When plugged into practically any late-model DNA computer, it is capable of giving directions for molecular assembly of virtually any substance. Including directions for a substance that will progressively change everything it comes in contact with—unstoppably—forever. It is the first and only one in the world. A prototype. Its very creation is against international law. It was being tested at my company’s headquarters.” Her hands shook as she pried a crushed cigarette package out of her jeans, and pulled another cigarette out.

The train was squealing to a halt. “Better light that later. We need to get off here,” Hugo said, as if it were an afterthought.

“That’s probably a good idea,” conceded Tamchu. He’d allowed himself to be distracted and the General would surely be on his trail. “But then what?”

“Trust me,” said Hugo and grinned, his eyes completely open and perhaps even a bit excited. The woman rose a bit unsteadily. She was new at this game. Hugo quickly led the way to the platform between the cars. The station was visible just ahead.

One by one, they jumped from the slow-moving train and stumbled into a narrow verge of dense vegetation. Tamchu pushed through it cautiously and found that it was only about ten feet wide. The concealing shrubbery ended at a narrow gravel road. They were crouched about fifty feet from the tiny station.

Hugo and Kita joined Tamchu. Hugo pulled a candy bar from his pocket. He tore off the bright red wrapper, offered it around silently, and was declined.

Tamchu heard shouted orders. He parted the leaves and saw a dozen empty Jeeps parked helter-skelter down by the station. Hugo bit into his candy bar, dropped the wrapper at the road’s edge, and yanked Tamchu into the center of the screening bit of jungle.

Tamchu turned and peered back at the train through a tiny opening.

Thin young girls marched resolutely up and down the aisle of the car next to them. Two of them pulled a trunk from the luggage rack; he could not see more but imagined them breaking it open to see if he might be curled inside. Their faces were fixed in the habitual grim expression mandated by the General. Other girls jogged engineward atop the car, their heavy boots pounding a hollow tattoo. These were the fifteen-year-olds—in Tamchu’s opinion, the most terrifying age of the General’s troops. Some, when they got older, questioned their mission, but at this age they relished their apparent power and reported any infractions of their fellow soldiers with tremendous dogmatism.

They would find him soon.

Tamchu removed his belt and handed it to Hugo. Hugo nodded, pulled his own belt from the loops, and threaded Tamchu’s through. He handed his old belt to Tamchu, who put it on. He took a step toward the road. Hugo grabbed his arm. Very tightly. “I told you the truth,” Hugo whispered in his ear. “We need you.”

Tamchu was puzzled. He’d given the man what he wanted. For some reason, he believed in Hugo, trusted him. This man truly did want to save the world; Tamchu was certain of it. Not just young Cambodian and Thai women. All people.

There was madness in the world and Tamchu had been a part of it. But perhaps, if Tamchu gave himself up, Hugo could be gone before the General discovered that he did not have her doomsday weapon and killed him out of irritation. He opened his mouth to tell this to Hugo when he heard the crunch of tires on gravel.

A brown delivery van paused at Hugo’s candy wrapper, its open door flush against the foliage. Hugo nodded to Kita. She rose and slipped into the truck; Hugo gave Tamchu a little push and he followed. They huddled in the dark interior as the truck continued on. “It’s so nice when things work out as planned,” Hugo remarked. The bitter shouts of the still-searching General and her officers faded behind them.

It was now dark. Hugo and Kita stretched out on the floor and slept. Tamchu did not understand how they could sleep, but after an unsuccessful attempt to converse with the driver, he too dozed off.

They were delivered at dawn to the Bangkok train station. As they trundled through Bangkok, Hugo disguised Tamchu, much to his consternation, as a monk, draping yards of saffron gauze around him with a practiced air, instructing Kita to fling the end over Tamchu’s shoulder. When the truck stopped, they shaved his head. Tamchu was worried about tickets but Hugo apparently had several first-class passes and reservations.

They had to pass through the station to get to the train. Kita went first, Tamchu next, and Hugo brought up the rear; they were seemingly unrelated as they wove through the crowd in the tremendous echoing room.

Tamchu almost faltered when he saw a phalanx of the General’s girls halfway across the station. They were scanning the station systematically. He thought he saw one of them point to him, but did not hasten. Before anyone could do anything, if indeed the soldiers suspected him, they climbed onto a westbound bullet train and entered a private suite with drawn shades. Hugo locked the door and tied it shut as well with a piece of thin rope that he pulled from his pocket, then checked every inch of the compartment quickly but with a thoroughness that Tamchu admired. Then they collapsed on deep, comfortable seats.

“Why do you want to go to Paris?” asked Hugo.

Tamchu opened the bag into which Kita had thrust his clothing. He had kept a careful eye on it at all times. He pulled out the sculpture. “To find the girl—the woman—who made this.”

Hugo and Kita both looked at it in their turn, Kita murmuring appreciatively. Tamchu noticed that the train was under way only after the speed appeared next to the time and date on a small console.

“Who is she?” asked Hugo.

Tamchu told them the story of his life.

Tamchu watched the plains of India pass by, remembering the bandit he’d seen so many years ago. He’d accepted her invitation, it seemed, to the ruination of his being. He’d thought he was doing the right thing. Or, at least, he had done the thing that had felt right. He hadn’t realized then that there might be a difference.

He often pulled out the small cage and looked at it.

He imagined that he saw Illian’s features on the face of the girl, even though it was so tiny. Trapped like a butterfly in that German cage. Or maybe it was a larger cage now. Everyone was caged in some way. He looked over at Hugo, who was asleep. Take this woman of whom he spoke, Marie Laveau. Laveau seemed to exercise a lot of control over Hugo’s life. But perhaps Tamchu wasn’t seeing the whole picture. Hugo did not seem the type to be controlled.

Kita devoted a lot of attention to making sure that her cigarette supply was ample. She’d taken a liking to a certain Indian brand that gave off a wretched smell. She didn’t say much. She did say that she hadn’t smoked until a few months earlier. Apparently, she hadn’t known Hugo then either. Tamchu could tell they were lovers, though they’d barely touched one another in his presence.

Gradually, Tamchu learned about Marie’s floating city. It seemed to him that he’d heard glimmers of it before. Apparently, it was not finished. It had experienced setbacks and was itself the target of terrorists. Tamchu decided that perhaps this was why he was wanted—to anticipate possible weak points.

They began hearing about Paris as far away as Yugoslavia. Something strange, something transmutational, had occurred after an attack by Bees governed by a terrorist coalition.

But when they finally crossed the French border, one bright early morning, Tamchu fancied he could feel a difference in the air. Fields of yellow flowers sloped down to a deep blue sea, for their train had taken a southern route. They were on a tourist line that hugged the coast, as the direct line northwest into Paris was not open. Tamchu had grown a beard and felt relatively safe. As they breakfasted elegantly on caviar—Tamchu had found that Hugo had extravagant tastes, but then he was one of the exploitative elite Tamchu had devoted a lifetime to destroying—Kita worked in a notebook. Tamchu gradually learned that she was a noted bionanologist. That, in fact, she was responsible for a vital pheromone breakthrough that had made BioCities possible.

Tamchu had been to a few BioCities, but always under duress. Beijing had been most impressive, though he’d felt that his temporary receptors somehow distorted his vision. Life couldn’t really be as strange as it seemed in that vast place. And he felt as if nothing was really private there. This was not optimal for the terrorist mode.

He had no idea how to find Illian—if indeed she was in Paris. Hugo had sworn to help, though, which was comforting. He had not relied on anyone in this way since his mother had died. It was as if all his years of suspicion and isolation were but a brittle shell that shattered upon finding Illian’s sculpture. Daylight had flooded in—and with it trust.

It seemed that everyone on the train spoke French. Tamchu noticed that as they drew closer to Paris, excitement mounted. Hugo translated for him. “They are like pilgrims. They say it’s Paris as it was always meant to be. Everything that makes it Paris is still there— the Arc de Triomphe, the Pompidou, Notre Dame, even medieval neighborhoods that have been restored. But the most exciting thing is that it is now a work of art in and of itself. It is in fact so strange and different that most people cannot stand to be there for very long, its beauty is so intense. Probably some other aspects too.”

“Like its concentration of myrcene,” said Kita, writing, without looking up. “That would be my suspicion.”

“Is that unusual?” asked Tamchu.

Kita looked up, but gazed into the distance, not at him. “All of these new developments are unusual, of course. These new cities are biological organisms. They can mutate, and they can do so fairly rapidly. It is one of the problems that the International Standards are supposed to prevent.”

“Why?” asked Tamchu, his throat tight. “What could have changed it?”

“They’re saying that it’s a woman named Illian,” said Hugo. “The Sun Queen.”

Tamchu could not remember ever being this excited in his entire life. The glow of Paris, even in daylight, was intense, visible from afar.

Everyone on the train received temporary receptors. Kita, apparently, was already deeply transformed and only required a brief initiation to orient her system. Hugo assented to the temporary receptors, as did Tamchu—grudgingly.

Then the train pulled into the Paris station.

Even as he held on to the escalator railing, Tamchu was flooded with information. Ads for pensions, enticing restaurants, plays.

Kita looked thoughtful as they left the escalator and pushed into the street, which was hot and crowded with people. “There is something very strange about Paris,” she said.

“What?” asked Tamchu.

“I am not a mathematician. But it seems, as a whole, to embody certain relationships. To manifest them, even.”

“It was laid out mathematically by L’Enfant, during a latter-day transformation,” said Hugo. “I imagine that there are certain Pythagorean proportions to everything.”

“It’s more than that,” said Kita. “Deeper. In fact, I wouldn’t mind spending a month or so here and acquiring the capacity to really understand it. I didn’t know this was possible. It’s very exciting.”

“What is possible?” asked Hugo.

“Well, look. Let’s go in here.” They entered a café and ordered coffee. As they sat down, Kita wiped her hand across the table, causing its surface to light up. Tamchu removed his cup, but Kita said, “It’s okay. It knows that’s just a cup. Now let me see if I can give you a taste of this.” She used her finger to tap through various visuals on the awakened tabletop, her straight black hair spilling in a perfect curtain following the line of her cheekbone. She looked up, her eyes more eager than Tamchu had seen them thus far. “Okay, I want you to touch that picture of the Eiffel Tower. That’s where it’s coming from.” She even smiled. “What a surprise.”

Reluctantly, Tamchu touched the picture of the Eiffel Tower.

First it was as if he could feel all his bones, as if his consciousness radiated through them. Then it was the other networks in his body— nerves, hormones, muscles, blood. But this was utterly fleeting, as if it were just being laid down as a foundation.

The grid of the city assumed the same sensation for him, as if it were his own extended body. He expanded upward, into the air, high and low depending on the architecture, slipping through the pheromonal interstices and conduits of Paris. He tasted the immensity of light, the pulse of the thoughts of others, transforming instant by instant to new form.

But there was more. Paris itself seemed to generate spectra previously invisible to him, a sculpture of light. It too pulsed, changed… directed; called.

Tamchu jumped up and ran from the café. Hugo, behind him, yelled, “Wait!”

He knew which bus to catch; felt each street, imprinted, it seemed, upon his nervous system.

He felt the mind of Illian: bright, strange, powerful.

“She really is alive!” he shouted. “Illian!”

Kita and Hugo panted on a seat next to him. An old woman sitting across from him, carrying a string bag of oranges and two cheeses, nodded and smiled. “Illian,” she agreed and filled the air with French words.

“What did she say?” asked Tamchu.

Kita said, “You can get a translation by—”

“What did she say?” demanded Tamchu.

“She says that Illian is like the sun. Illian is the new Sun Queen.”

They got off the bus at the plaza of the Eiffel Tower. Tamchu looked upward, his arms upraised. “She’s there!” he said. “Illian!”

Bees were much more evident here than in other parts of the city. Paris was abloom. A vine of purple deadly nightshade wound around the Eiffel Tower, which seemed to pulse and fill the very air with power. Gazing at the Tower, Tamchu was reminded of Illian’s match-stick construction. She had not invented this. But it seemed made for her.

He ran toward the base of the Tower, Hugo and Kita trailing him. “An elevator!” he shouted. Next to it was a bank of what looked like a huge… beehive…

A guard stopped him. “I’m sorry, sir, but you do not have clearance here.”

Hugo said, “You must let him in.”

The guard looked down at Hugo with a supercilious expression. “You are an American.”

“An American with money,” said Hugo, pulling some bills from his wallet.

“Your money is worthless here,” said the guard.

“Then I’m an American with a gun,” said Hugo, pulling it out.

The guard stepped back, clearly surprised.

In that instant, Tamchu rushed onto the elevator.

The door closed behind him.

As it slowly rose through the lacy ironwork, Tamchu felt increasingly as if every facet of his mind and being were drawing together, echoing the inevitability he had felt after seeing the nun. He pulsed with light and joy. He experienced a thrill of vertigo as the ground receded. “Illian!” he whispered, putting his hands to the glass and staring down at her city.

“I’m here,” said a voice.

Tamchu spun around. He was alone in the elevator. “Illian! Where are you?”

She was silent for a moment. Then she replied in the Tibetan they’d shared in her childhood, “Everywhere.”

This frightened him. The elevator climbed higher.

“What do you mean?”

“I am… preparing for something.” The elevator reached the top. The door opened. He stepped out onto the platform. The wind was cold. The Tower still glowed.

A woman appeared before him. She seemed to condense at the center of the platform. At first she was translucent, but she gained solidity and finally smiled.

“Tamchu!” She walked toward him and flung her arms around him. He could not feel them. She seemed to be weeping. “I didn’t know if you were alive or dead!”

He realized that this tall graceful blond… ghost… must be Illian.

The apparition was dressed in a long, tight yellow gown that hugged… her body?… but she had no body…

But it was her. Somehow. His words burst forth. “Illian, where have you been all these years? I followed you to Germany and you were not—you were not at the clinic—they told me you were dead—”

“Let’s sit over here.” She led him to an empty glass-enclosed café. It seemed as if no one else had been there for a long time, though all the tables were dressed with white linens and a full battalion of plates and silverware. They sat down.

At least, he sat down. She only appeared to sit down, he realized. She gave him the same disorienting sensations as did the holograms of Hong Kong. Perhaps she was one herself and able to manifest wherever she wished.

But her eyes looked directly into his, and her smile transformed her, for a second, to the girl he had loved so dearly.

“I ran away from the clinic. They used all kinds of probes and needles on me and kept me in a room that made me sick and crazy. I tried to get the others to run away with me, but none of them wanted to. They seemed stupid. But maybe they were just drugged, and I wasn’t drugged enough yet. I had to fight hard and smashed a chair against that doctor. He told the guard to shoot me, I remember, but the guard refused. I escaped and made my way to Amsterdam eventually. Artaud took me in.”

“Artaud?” asked Tamchu, feeling a pang of jealousy.

“Yes. He was an art critic. He’s my lover now,” she said proudly. “She, actually. He was changed into a Bee.”

“Oh.” Tamchu tried to understand this bizarre revelation. The years reeled through him. He had done so much killing in her name. How could he tell her?

“Tamchu, why are you crying?” She reached over and rested her light-hand on his. He felt a slight warmth and was surprised.

“Because I am a terrible person.” He covered his face with his hands. “I have done terrible things. I—you would not want to know me now.”

“I want to know you now, Tamchu. I love you. I have always loved you. You tried your best to help me. You worked very hard for me in Kathmandu. I have always been grateful for that—for knowing that you loved me. At first, when I escaped, I tried to get back to Kathmandu, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t even know where it was. I was afraid the doctor would find me. A few years ago, I went back briefly and tried to find some of your relatives. I did find a cousin of yours, but he said that you had disappeared. Whatever you have done, Tamchu, whatever you are now, I know the heart of you. You are a good person.”

Tamchu picked up a cloth napkin and wiped his face, blew his nose. “Do you really think so?”

“Yes,” she said quietly, firmly. “I know it.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “But what are you? Why are you… this ghost thing? Why do they call you the Sun Queen?”

She sat back in her chair, her face serious. “It would be more correct to say Suns Queen. There are so many stars, you know. I have made Paris into a new art form. It’s so hard to explain. It is made… to experience. It is the explanation. There are no other layers to it, outside of itself. You must be it.”

“But—try and help me understand. What makes you want to do this? How were you able to do it?”

She frowned slightly. “Even now, I don’t know how I did it. Just as I was never sure how I did a painting. Artaud and I were in a situation to which there was no way out. So we turned around and faced the peril directly. And once I did that, I discovered that I had the power to transform the situation. I had the power to change Paris into this… this art. I am still learning.”

“But what about all these people?” he asked. “Why do they adore you so?”

Her grin was the old one he remembered. “They have fallen in love. Not with me. With my idea. But anyone who wants to is free to leave Paris. If they do, they receive a huge credit that would enable them to live in excellent style anywhere. If they stay, they contribute to the life of Paris, but they can remain as separate as they please or merge with the vision as much as they want to. As to what I’m doing… I’m not really sure. What is—that? Inside your jacket?” She reached forward and touched his lapel, gave him an apologetic glance. He realized that she could not move the jacket and he pushed the lapel aside, revealing the sculpture he now kept on a chain around his neck.

She stared at it. “Where did you find this?”

“In Bangkok. That’s when I knew you were still alive. But Illian, what is it?”

She looked up at the sky. “I don’t just want to communicate with other people. I want to communicate with the universe. With something out there. I feel as if I have something to say. That everyone does. That we are all saying it together, but that I am providing the framework. That”—she gestured toward the sculpture—“that is a small rough image of… the shape of my thought. It’s light art. Radio art.”

“And everyone here is being this? I too can be this ‘radio art’?”

Her face was lit by a huge smile. “You are, dear Tamchu. You are now, just sitting here with me. And you have made me very, very happy.”

Then she effervesced away.

Tamchu was not surprised. Nothing surprised him any more.

He gazed across Paris. The sun was setting and trees and buildings were burnished orange. The heat of the summer day had subsided, and a slight breeze stirred the air, carrying a perfume that perhaps came from the enormous flowers, which he saw—fully—for the first time.

From his high point, Paris looked like a garden for giants, laced with lights that intensified as the sky darkened. These lines of lights went everywhere, at angles that gave him a sense of rhythm. He stood, he saw as he looked directly below, on a framework of light.

No matter where went in Paris, he would be with Illian, even though he could not see her.

That was all that mattered.

He was free.

Kita insisted on spending day after day in Paris and commanded Hugo to stop pestering her to leave. “There is something stunningly important happening here.” She sat at the café table she’d had dragged into their apartment. She parked herself there almost twenty-four hours a day, looking at her data, trying to stop her ears against Hugo’s frantic mutterings.

Now he said, “What could be more stunningly important than whatever’s happening now in New Orleans? Kita, I’m beside myself. They could all be… wiped away—or whatever—by now. My contact in Hong Kong told me that she was positive that the Kyoto weapon, or plague, or whatever you want to call it, is now in the hands of the International Federation worldwide. The latest news from the United States is that Atlanta is under siege and that the Army is moving toward New Orleans—”

Kita withdrew her thoughts from her work with great difficulty. It was as if she was running down ten avenues simultaneously with glowing wires of powerful thought, braiding them together in a precise sequence, seeing the endpoint way out there in the distance. And then it was gone.

It was apparently necessary to make some kind of impression on Hugo. She pushed back her chair, stood, and slammed her fist down on the pheromone table. A rainbow washed chaotically across the tabletop. She allowed the stern voice of her mother to make itself useful for a change. “Let me try to explain one more time. Paris was attacked with the same plague that was loosed on Kyoto. By now, it has disseminated around the world through terrorist groups who probably have very little idea of what to do with it once it has had an effect. Apparently, this so-called International Federation falls into this category—a once-legitimate entity now governed by thinly disguised hoodlums and thugs who took over in a well-plotted international coup. Illian, the so-called Sun Queen, has rescued Paris.”

“Who is Illian anyway?” asked Hugo impatiently. “She reminds me of the Wizard of Oz.”

“I’ve never read that book,” said Kita. “Americans seem very excited about it.”

“Well, you never hear or see the great and powerful Oz until the end, and then you find that he’s just an ordinary human being.”

Kita laughed. “Illian is not an ordinary human being. For one thing, she has the unusual DNA sequence that has cropped up here and there around the world since the Silence. That might be pretty significant, though no one has ever seemed to figure out why, and I don’t know a lot about it myself, only that it exists. But what is astonishing to me is that she allowed herself to be read, cell by cell, into the information system of Paris. This is a process people have been talking about since before the millennium—preserving consciousness by transforming it into another medium. Not into a dead record, like a book, but into a living entity—like a BioCity—in which the individual can continue to function mentally. It was very brave of her. Theoretically, I can see that it’s possible, yet I would certainly never do it unless, maybe, I was about to die anyway. I’m not at all sure how she knew that this was possible. From what I gather, it was an intuitive endeavor, since the original Illian was an artist, not a scientist. During the initial transformation of Paris, it was even more plastic than it is now and much more vulnerable to such an act. She just seized the opportunity. But that’s not the only unusual thing about Illian. By sacrificing herself to this transformation, she has done something to the city that protects it. Paris is not like Kyoto. Paris is free, vibrant, powerful.” The memory of Kyoto drove Kita. When she was able to sleep, she often woke from a nightmare of Kyoto, where all minds were silenced, awaiting directions from whomever knew the key to providing them. “If I have any chance of saving New Orleans, the best way to go about it is to figure out what has happened here. Why has Paris been spared the fate of Kyoto?”

Hugo nodded as she spoke, obviously impatient for her to finish. “Well, have you figured it out? How much longer will we have to stay?”

“ ‘Well, have you figured it out?’ ” Kita mimicked. “Yes, of course I have, Hugo! Days ago. But I’m just enjoying my trip to Paris so much—” Again her mother’s sharp nagging voice.

It’s my voice now, Kita realized. And that’s just fine.

“Look, Hugo. If you will just leave me alone, this might not take much longer. It has taken me a long time to understand how to access everything. But I believe that the key lies in rhythm.”

“Rhythm?” Hugo’s eyebrows shot up.

That, along with his new pin-striped shirt with rounded collar and bow tie, gave him a comical look that refreshed Kita immensely. Hugo was not a dull man.

“Yes. You know that Illian has proclaimed this a city of radio art, a city of cosmic light. She has configured much of the conduitry and other large metal objects, like rail tracks and so on, into a huge receiving array. She is also sending a signal toward space. I have no idea if the signal makes it out past the ionosphere. I don’t know if it gets transmitted anywhere. However, she has spread this rhythm everywhere in the city. Everywhere you go in the city, musicians are playing music based on it. It all sounds different, because there are different instruments, different moods. But underneath, it’s the same. She has set up flashing light displays everywhere. She screens movies in the theaters with this rhythm flashing subliminally.”

“Quite a woman,” said Hugo. “Or maybe, quite a monster.”

“Well. A benign monster. A benevolent dictator? You might have some firsthand experience—just kidding!” From what Hugo had told him about Marie, she seemed to fit the same description. “Anyway, this rhythm stimulates a particular growth sequence in the brain. A chemical environment is set up. Musical thought in particular is a powerful environment for growth of dendrites, for facilitating new connections in the brain. Jazz musicians called on to improvise, for example, were observed long ago to use their brain in a different way than those musicians who simply read music and repeat what they see on the page. I am pretty sure that this particular rhythmic sequence is intimately tied to the release of certain brain chemicals. This constant inundation prevents the plague-inducing chemicals from locking in and proliferating. To use a rough analog, stressful exercise releases naturally produced opiates, called endorphins, which connect to receptor sites in the brain. This engenders an experience of bliss. Some people even report mild hallucinations.”

“Sounds rather exhausting.”

“Well, it is. I mean, if one were to keep dancing to this rhythm. It may even be that dance—have you noticed that Paris is full of dance halls and that Parisians are constantly dancing, Hugo?—also ties into the endorphin chemistry. But at some point the chemical environment needs to be locked into the brain, so to speak. Through what medium? Vitamins? Hormones?”

“Um… I think you’re teasing me. Let me guess, Kita. Pheromones?”

“Exactly! But which ones? What combination? I’ve been running simulations until I feel as if my mind is turning to mush. But there is most definitely an airborne chemical process that can lock in this state of mind—this freedom from coercion, this strength of individuality. And that’s what I need to find.” Kita dropped back into her chair. “Could you please bring me some more coffee?”

“Sure. And when you find this bit of illumination, you’re going to give it to Illian? Assuming that, as you say, she is doing all this… intuitively.”

Kita was startled. “Illian? She could not care less. Freedom is not her goal here. It is just a side effect. I’m not really sure what her goal is. Her influence is very powerful within this system. I’m sure that she has the capacity to know much more now than she did when she was entirely human. I have never had such close contact with such an unusual being. I’m not sure if we could actually communicate with each other very effectively. It would probably be like a cat and a dog trying to agree on the nature of reality. I run into traces of her all the time within the system. Kind of like a flavor. Of course I will share it. I guess it would be like showing someone how their brain works. I’m not sure that she wants it. She is just generously allowing me to use these resources here. I really hope to be finished soon. I’m working as hard as I can. It would help if I were bothered a bit less.”

Hugo said, “Sorry. I’m just pretty worried. I might be able to find a fast diesel sailboat on the black market to get us to New Orleans. We can’t risk flying. Is that all right?”

“Whatever you want, Hugo. Just leave me alone, all right?”

Kita’s eyes burned, despite her most chemically advanced efforts to stave off the effects of sleeplessness.

She jerked awake, hearing someone snore.

Oh. It was her. There was no one else in the dark room.

Her table glowed solid blue, in suspended mode. She must have been asleep in her chair for at least twenty minutes. This would not do. She tried to ignore the way her heart began to beat more quickly, the way her stomach tightened. If only she were smarter! It would be stupid to go on to New Orleans without taking advantage of this opportunity to understand the mechanism of Paris’s salvation, but she was tired of getting nowhere.

She felt very much alone. Though Hugo, in theory, knew what they had taken from Tamchu, she was not sure that he truly understood its full import.

It was like the Holy Grail. Or the philosophers’ stone; whatever that European medieval idea had been called. The alchemist’s quest for a substance that could turn dross into gold—or something very much like it—had at last been achieved. It was the power humans had sought and lusted after for thousands of years, but it had not been discovered. It had been deliberately developed, created, in a wholly artificial and godlike process.

And Kita was convinced that it was something that humanity would need time to learn how to control. It held the potential of reassembling the world into bounty. At the same time, it was more dangerous than the atomic bomb.

And it could not, without more wisdom than could be scraped from a billion pages of philosophers’ ramblings, reassemble the human mind so that it would know how best to use this power.

Perhaps that might be the worth of Marie’s city-on-the-sea, her Atlantis, mused Kita. It might be a safe haven where we might, at last, reach to the roots of understanding where we have come from, what we have become, and where we might possibly go.

Kita got up, went to the sink, bathed her face.

“Are you making progress?”

Kita turned at the ethereal yet familiar voice. “Hello, Illian.”

She saw a thin woman sitting on the kitchen bar that divided the room. She wore a yellow sheath dress, a red brocaded shawl, and had her blond hair pulled up in a French twist. Her legs were crossed, and she gripped the edge of the bar with both hands.

Kita could see right through her.

She looked around involuntarily, trying to find portals in the walls that might project laser beams. The wall was covered with flocked wallpaper. Lasers had long been reduced to almost quantum-sized beams, and the projectors could easily be embedded, in a city such as this transformed Paris, in every surface. Rearrangement at a molecular level was swift and precise, and wherever Illian wished to manifest, she could no doubt command the quick assembly of hologram projectors. Kita was still awed by the powers of Paris and wished again that she did not have to leave.

But she had responsibilities.

Illian continued, “I was thinking that perhaps I could help you. I heard you talking to the dwarf a few hours ago. There are things of great beauty in the databanks of the city. I know that I do not see them as you do. I use them in different ways. But look.”

The wall near the sink lit up. Kita saw swirling nebulae and a running table of numbers scrolling down the right side of the image. Something about a magnestar and starquakes. Kita sat and watched them for a moment. “I don’t know anything about astronomy. Where is this picture coming from?”

“These are old images from the Paris Observatory, from just before the first Pulse. They enchant me. But then—let me see—perhaps the chemical information from my hives. I have seen you come very near to accessing it, but something always holds you back. I think that it’s some kind of identification code. The city does not recognize you as being fully vested. There is a great stubbornness about it; it knows that you are not French.” She grinned. “I have managed to fool it completely in that regard. Here. Will this help?”

New information appeared on the wall.

Kita leaned forward. This made sense. She tried to study the chemical equations, but they blurred before her tired eyes. “Is there a way to convert this information into a bar graph?”

“Well, I don’t know. I suppose.”

The colors on the wall reassembled into a bar graph showing metapheromone concentrations in various quarters of Paris and their history since the Kyoto plague rained down on the city.

Kita leaned back, suddenly quite alert. It was like seeing a clear blue sky after weeks of storm. She wrote rapidly in her notebook for several minutes, suffused by relief.

Finally she looked up. She wasn’t finished, but she was well on her way to understanding. “Thank you very much, Illian. This will do quite well. I have another question.”

“I will try and answer.”

“All of the physiological information from your previous physical body is in the city’s memory banks and there is something very unusual about it.”

“What?” asked Illian with a touch of eagerness.

“Many organisms have been shown to create magnetic maps as part of their development. They receive magnetic orientation information via the magnetoreceptors—which are basically comprised of magnetite and often intertwined with the same nerve receptor system used to sense pheromones. They are then sent to another part of the brain and compiled. I have studied honeybees extensively and they have this sense, as do many fish, birds, and even mammals. These organisms all use naturally generated magnetic fields for navigation. It is a learned process. I’m not sure if you know this, but the learning process—brain growth—can sometimes be very tumultuous and create a lot of strange symptoms. Your trigeminal nerve—a nerve that runs from near the nasal passage to the the anterior part of the brain—was magnitudes larger than that of normal humans, and this is the nerve used by most organisms to transmit magnetic information from the magnetoreceptors to the brain. The information is apparently gathered by the superficial ophthalmic ramus. In fact, your body contained a lot more biogenic magnetite than most humans.”

Illian’s voice was thoughtful. “That is interesting. I know that I am different from most people. I know that the lab that I ran away from when I was much younger was engaged in trying to analyze people like me. I was often very sick when younger, but Artaud helped me. My art helped me. And now the city of Paris is helping me.”

“But what are you doing, Illian?”

“I don’t really know. I didn’t know what I was doing when I did my art on a more personal scale. I only knew that it was necessary and gave me a sense of satisfaction. It was like going down one path and finding darkness, then going down another path and finding light. I learned to take the path to light. This is where it has led.”

“I wish that I could stay longer,” Kita said. “There is much to learn here. But the information you’ve shown me about the metapheromone concentrations in Paris and the pathways you used to take the Kyoto Plague to a manageable level is what I need now. Hugo is very anxious to leave. Maybe at some point I will be able to return and learn more about the magnetoreceptors. I think that the fluctuations in broadcasting must have had a profound effect on you as you grew up.”

Illian’s laugh was much more hearty than Kita would have expected. “To say the least,” she said and vanished.

Chromatic Passing Note New Orleans | 2039

A knock sounded at the door of Marie’s headquarters. Surprised, Marie walked over and hesitated a moment before opening it. “Who is it?”

The reply was muffled by the wood. “Jason Peabody. These guys checked me out.”

She opened the door a crack. Neely, one of her trusted bodyguards, nodded. She opened the door fully.

A young white boy stood there. Well, young by her standards. Maybe twenty-five. He wore jeans, a T-shirt, hiking boots. His hair was almost white, burnt by the sun, she surmised, for he had a dark tan and his face was peeling.

“Texas is pretty damned big,” he said, “and NAMS is blocked around Dallas. I had to walk fifty miles in the sun before I could catch a ride.” He grinned. “Jason Peabody, certified nanotech engineer. I’m looking for a job.”

It was a quiet day in New Orleans. The Crescent City project— the floating city—was progressing as planned. Many of the nanotechnologists, engineers, and other scientists that had shown up in response to Marie’s ad were there, but she also had a respectable coterie of highly qualified people installed in the towers that lined Canal Street. One of the most glaring holes in the Crescent City plan was the fact that they had no space program. A small faction was constantly on her case about finding someone to establish a space agenda.

Marie had lunch with the young man so that she could check him out: raw oysters, caviar, and beer. These were wild oysters Marie bought from the same oyster supplier her grandmère had used. “At least the food programs are running pretty well,” Marie mused. “The caviar is completely manufactured.”

“Outstanding,” enthused Jason. His pile of shells was much larger than hers.

“Thanks. But right now I’ve got a few problems to deal with.” Marie pushed her plate aside. “Where are you from again?”

Jason shrugged. “All over, I guess. In the past few years, I’ve been in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and Houston.”

Marie leaned forward, a frisson of excitement brushing her spine. “What’s going on in Houston? I’ve heard rumors that the space program is taking a strange turn there.”

Jason nodded, blotting his sweating forehead with a napkin. “They’re planning a launch.”

“A launch!” This was news, though not entirely a surprise. The International Federation insisted that all space programs were dead, crippled beyond repair by the lack of communications capabilities. But everyone hoped that the remnants of NASA were carrying on. Cape Canaveral had been hit by a killer hurricane ten years earlier and launches had been discontinued. The serious spacers had taken over NASA operations in Houston about that time, with, if rumors were true, all kinds of advanced nanotech capabilities.

“A lightship,” he said gravely. “It will be their first launch ever at the new launch site. It’s a gorgeous thing, really. Stage after stage of deployment and development right up to the time that it finds the source of the Signal. It evolves. That is, if it’s ever completed, it will.”

So. Jason was the real thing. He was informed and intelligent. Marie took in the young man’s face—serious, excited, troubled. “This means a lot to you.”

Jason nodded.

“And how close were you?” asked Marie.

“I was a janitor. I programmed the cleaning nan for the Space Center. The previous janitor had top clearance, but he’d died suddenly. Of course, they were terrified. It’s kind of funny how important such a lowly job would be. I’d just mustered through two top-rated engineering training programs.” His face was flushed; exhaustion showed in his eyes. “And while I was at it, I managed to figure out a way to hide my…” He stopped.

Marie opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. She didn’t want to spook him with too much quizzing. “So you had something they needed.”

“Yes. Very much.” He leaned forward. “I managed to get the—”

Once again, he paused. “Is New Orleans everything that people say it is?”

And less, she thought. “What do you mean?” Marie wondered what he had managed to get. Something quite interesting, no doubt.

“Free. That’s what people are saying. That’s the rumor. That’s why I came. Everywhere else, I ran up against barriers. They’re embedded in the structure of every BioCity I trained in. I tried discussing them with my mentors and with other engineers and they all were of the opinion that these limits and barriers are necessary to enable the city to run smoothly.” He leaned back; furrows appeared between his eyes. “The whole approach reminded me of something I saw as a child. Maybe I didn’t go there myself, I don’t remember; maybe it was some kind of educational thing. Yes. It must have been. Because I was walking around in a very dangerous place and my parents never would have let me do that. It was in Los Angeles, I guess. The people were really mean. They would kill you in an instant. Or you might get killed just by accident if you got in the way of something going down. That happened to a lot of people. A lot of children. And the thing was that at one time it was a really nice place. The people there owned stores and businesses and their own houses and knew all their neighbors. A lot of families had lived there for generations. Then some city planners came in, put through a freeway. They had the best intentions in the world, but didn’t take into account human nature. They relocated people to kind of okay housing, but in the process tore up the web of relationships. In twenty years, everything was chaos. The freeway enabled people to live outside the city but come in to work. It funneled foreigners through the old neighborhood and cut everything into a good side and a bad side of the highway. I kind of felt like that in these cities. There’s a good neighborhood—kind of an artificial place, created at the expense of… well, of full information. They can only function by pretending that certain kinds of knowledge don’t exist. It’s like a textbook that ends at some point or those old maps of the world that just had sea monsters beyond a certain point. Like true knowledge of nanotech would be too messy, too much for the common people that get receptored in to handle. To me, it seems like the perfect opportunity to increase the mass of knowledge—if there is such a thing. To have a society where knowledge keeps growing and growing. But that isn’t what’s happening in most of the BioCities. People in them accept the limits in order to have… well, whatever they feel they’re getting. A good life, by their definition. Like they’ve been trained to never expect more.” He gulped down his second pint of beer and slammed the mug onto the table. “Sorry. I mean, I don’t care if that’s how they want to live. I feel sorry for them. They don’t have any choice and that’s not right. Of course, they all voted to change to BioCities. Again, without full information. And they had to pay for it all to boot. They’re still paying.”

He gazed blearily at Marie. A goofy half-drunken smile flitted across his face. “There are rumors about New Orleans all across the country. I had to get around all kinds of military action to get here. The International Federation has got you locked up pretty tight. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a good sign. You must be pretty dangerous.”

Marie planted her elbows on the table and rested her head in her hands for a long moment. Then she looked into the boy’s… no, the valuable young man’s eyes. “I have to be honest with you. We have the same problem here. That’s the plan, what you were talking about. That’s what I want. But it hasn’t worked out so far.” She pushed back her chair, got up, and started pacing.

“We had to get the original package from the government. We couldn’t have afforded it otherwise. No one can. It was really stupid of me. I was counting on getting information from one of the original designers of metapheromones.”

“From Japan, you mean.”

She smiled, well-pleased. “Yes.”

“I’m pretty smart. Maybe I can help.” He spoke in a neutral and informative tone that amused her. He wasn’t bragging, just offering information. Marie had no way of vetting his credentials except by his results.

He was very young. But he seemed solid, committed, and, above all, extremely knowledgeable. He had fathomed the dark places where government programming lurked.

“I think we can use you here,” she said. “And eventually I think we will create the kind of place you’re dreaming of.” She leaned across the table and looked into his eyes. “I’ve been dreaming of it too.”

Marie clung to the bow of the Erzulie, filled with the effervescent joy a visit to Crescent City always brought. The navy blue of the deep sea lightened to translucent green as they entered a canal that cut through the breakwater surrounding the city. The breakwater was covered with lush orchards of papaya, mango, and citrus and rose in elevation until they were traveling in a narrow canal bounded by fifty-foot-high walls. Then the height of the walls descended rapidly and the canal opened into a vast lagoon, one of many that ringed the central towers. Schools of fish darted beneath the boat, and Marie saw that on the next lagoon over, spirulina harvesting was taking place.

The floating city was hexagonal in shape, comprised, like a bee-hive, of hexagonal sections. Thermal energy converters generated electricity via heat exchange, a process that had been perfected in the last few decades. Nitrogen thus brought to the surface nourished the spirulina farms, which in turn fed a growing web of life. The structure itself grew modularly around the buoyant converter towers, of which there were now five, providing twenty million square feet of living area, for each tower was fifty-five stories high.

Still, this was only enough space for a population of about ten thousand, since it had to supply all of their needs—indoor and outdoor, public and private spaces. She hoped to have enough room for at least fifty thousand people before beginning full-scale settlement. That would take about another year, according to their constantly revised timetable. Until then, she had to put up with the increasing instability of the mainland.

Marie had tried to squelch a rumor that some kind of Marcus Garvey island was being grown in the Caribbean, but three more rumors popped up in its place. Garvey, a visionary, had galvanized and divided the African American community in the first part of the twentieth century with his campaign to raise money for the project of establishing a Black Star Line to unite the black diaspora throughout the world and help former slaves to return to Africa if they so wished. Perhaps there was some kind of distant analogy between Garvey’s effort and her wish to provide an environment free of government manipulation, but she could not claim so proud a lineage, philosophy-wise. Still, the spirit of the rumor pleased her.

But she feared Crescent City becoming a target for pirates, soldiers, or radicals. Right now about three thousand people lived here, but they were not trained in defense. They were the scientists, technicians, and sociologists that were making it work.

She looked up at the towers, blue-tinged against the blue sky, and envisioned the gardens and rooms within. On one of the highest levels, there was even a terraced coffee plantation, misted and cooled. Marie didn’t know the name of the bacteria that lived on the red coffee berries, but she did know that it had some kind of important medicinal potential. She knew only a bare fraction of what the city was all about—an overview, seen from the perspective of a distant manager.

The Erzulie headed toward a sparkling white sand beach fringed with coconut palms, then cut toward a marina, almost readied for the process of loading the spirulina, cultured pearls, and seafood they would export in order to defray the cost of the city.

Kalina greeted Marie with her usual disdain as Cut Face and Shorty, now seasoned crew, brought the boat to dock. Four years at Harvard, a hallowed enclave protected from social uproar with a hefty dose of old money, had given her a sophisticated intellectual gloss. Her glorious black hair was pulled by the sea breeze as she tied off the Erzulie’s bow line and nodded curtly to Marie.

Harold, her chief engineer, had no such reservations. A short middle-aged man with a bald pate and a salt-and-pepper beard, he stood on the landing grinning, well tanned and wearing only shorts. A survivor of the Freestate disaster, he was the overseer of the entire project—knowledgeable and competent. He also had an unshakable faith in Crescent City.

He grabbed Marie’s hand, pulled her onto the landing, and gave her a quick hug. “Hey, babe, welcome home. What kept you?”

“Problems, Harold,” They walked down the dock beneath a cooling overhang.

Crescent City was stunningly beautiful. Too attractive by half, she thought. The ascending pavilions, filled with empty apartments and blossoming gardens, were a vacuum waiting to be filled.

“Things are tough all over,” Harold said.

“I’m all ears.”

After drawing pints of home-brewed wheat ale, they sat in an open cafeteria that one day would be brimming with the citizens of Crescent City. Now the wind blew through the empty space, bringing with it the scent of plumeria blossoms.

“One of the programs seems to have gone bad,” Harold told her, both elbows on the table as he clasped his beer, his pale blue eyes focused on hers. “We’re not generating enough manganese to bond with the magnesium and form the alloy necessary to finish the final segment. I think we’ll need some hefty shipments of manganese in order to keep on schedule.” He frowned. “Damned if I know how this happened. According to our records, our natural production should have been much higher in the last three months. Sorry I didn’t catch this sooner.”

Marie pulled her attention back from the beautiful greenness of the artificial lagoon with an effort. “Espionage?” she suggested.

Harold shrugged. “Could be. There are precisely four ways in which we ought to have known about this, and it looks like all of them failed. We got enemies?”

She laughed. “Plenty. Get me some figures on what you need, how much, and when. I’ll see about getting it shipped to New Orleans as soon as we get back. One of the main NAMS lines was bombed by terrorists a few weeks ago, but I think it should be repaired soon.”

“And after that, you can just buy a few thousand slaves to mine whatever we need, right?” asked Kalina, stepping up behind Harold. “Got the whole world in your hands, don’t you? A new world a-comin’, right?”

“Why are you so rude to your mother, kiddo?” Harold asked.

“She’s not my mother.”

“Oh. Well, that explains it.” Harold laughed.

“Listen, Harold,” Marie said. “You—or someone here—need to start thinking more seriously about security. You tell me who and I’ll have a talk with them. I want something heavy-duty in place pretty quickly. There’s a lot of… trouble… out here. Zealots and terrorists just aching to find a place like this.”

“Yeah, Marie.” Kalina held her hair in one hand to keep it from blowing across her face. “Let’s set up a standing army on the City of the Future. I think that would be the ideal basis to your ‘pure democracy.’ Kind of like, you know, a South American dictatorship. Get it off to the right start.”

“At least a start,” said Marie, pushing back her chair. “Harold, mind giving me the inspection tour?”

Harold gulped the rest of his beer. “Let’s have at it.”

A metallic clank woke Marie that night. In an instant, she was kneeling on her bed, looking down out her window onto the landing below.

A long low boat was tied up in the shadows. Two men unloaded a large black box from their fifty-foot-long flash boat and set it on the landing.

Her bare feet made no sound on the seacrete floor. Her nightgown flowing behind her, she hurried out the door and down the steps. She was not sure where the others were sleeping. She tried to tamp down the rage she felt. She’d waited too long to insist on tighter security. But it was her own fault. There was just too much to do…

Marie was pretty sure the box contained weapons—or perhaps explosives. She was angling for a better view when someone grabbed her from around the waist from behind and put a hand over her mouth.

She bit the hand and punched her elbow into her assailant’s groin. She backed up and stomped on his foot. He cried out and she wrenched free, turning. They stared at one another, panting. He had his gun out.

“Who are you?” she said loudly.

“Who are you?” Then he stepped back. He was a white man with a shaved head. Tattoos writhed across his scalp. “I recognize you. Marie Laveau.”

“That’s ridiculous.” She heard running feet.

He grinned. “Hell yes! It’s really you, Miss black-as-the-ace-of-spades Voodoo Queen herself. Hoo!” He reached out and grabbed her heart stone, yanked it so that the chain broke, and examined it, shaking his head. She smelled his sweat. “Some idiots say your power comes from this. Some kind of cheap trinket, eh?”

She did not pause to tell him that her power came from the fact that she had nothing to lose. She kicked his gun from his hand and dashed for it as it skittered across the landing. She grabbed it as Kalina came around a corner. The dock lights glared on suddenly.

The man, still holding Marie’s heart stone, pulled a derringer from his belt and took a step toward Kalina, who looked at her mother with fear-filled eyes.

Marie took careful aim at the man’s chest and squeezed the trigger.

Blood spurted across the landing as he staggered backward, gasping, and toppled into the sea. Marie saw his flailing hand, trailing the chain to her heart stone, as she rushed to the ledge. Then it vanished beneath the dark surface of the choppy ocean. There was nothing below for almost a mile, except the heat-exchange towers and sea anchors.

Kalina screamed.

Marie saw that Cut Face and Shorty were scuffling with the other men. Several more shots were fired, muffled by surf pounding the nearby beach. “There may be more on the boat,” she yelled, as Harold and a crowd of younger men and women arrived. They just stood and stared as Marie herself marched down into the boat and flushed out a cowering man in a black wetsuit. On the back of his hand she noticed a tattoo of two intertwined c’s.

She prodded him onto the landing with the gun she still held and climbed out, her nightgown blowing against her. “What’s going on?”

The man glanced around wildly. “There’s not supposed to be anyone at this landing.”

“Says who?”

The man pointed to a man sprawled on the landing. “Him.”

Harold knelt at the man’s side. “Callihan. Shit. He’s dead. I fired him six months ago. Smart guy, but… I had a funny feeling about him. I wonder if he had anything to do with the bonding problem.”

“Open that box,” Marie directed the man with the tattooed hand.

“No!” He stepped back.

“Lift that box back into his boat,” she directed Cut Face and Shorty. “Very carefully.”

They did so, settling it behind the console.

“You,” she told the man. “Get in the boat.”

“But—”

“Now!”

“I’ll tell you where I’m from—”

“I know where you’re from. You’re from New Orleans, you have ties to a terrorist group called the Caribbean Confederation, and you planned to take over this place by killing everyone. Now get in.”

He climbed down into the boat.

Marie looked around. “And you.” She waved in two injured men with her gun. “That’s everyone? Start up the engine and leave. And you! Behind me! Go! Now!”

She waved the gun wildly and everyone retreated beneath the overhang.

Marie untied the boat and shoved it away from the landing.

The tattooed man looked doubtfully at Marie. “Turn the key,” she directed.

He started the boat, turned it seaward, and opened the throttle, heading at full speed toward the breakwater.

After five seconds, Marie took aim and fired.

Her third shot hit the boat and it erupted in a tremendous geyser of water and flame.

Kalina stared at Marie.

Marie could not fathom her expression. Disgust? Admiration?

Or was she simply stunned at what she had just seen her mother do?

Marie dropped the gun on the landing and walked away.

She found an elevator and took it as high as it would go. She stepped out into a vast hall filled with shadowy shapes and walked toward the enormous arched window. Above was one of the new water-filled skylights, and it cast rippled moonlight on the floor.

Marie leaned out and watched the shards of fire out in the lagoon until they were extinguished.

For some reason, all that she could think about was the aching absence of the heart she had worn around her neck for all those years.

Agwe’s heart.

Two weeks later, Marie, in an anomalous state of uncertainty, stood beneath a black umbrella in the pouring New Orleans rain. The chill darkness of the late-November afternoon seemed apropos. Her immortality had been precipitously withdrawn.

The reflection of the red neon acme oyster bar sign shimmered in the street, pocked by raindrops. Marie walked slowly toward the oyster bar, heedless of puddles, shook off and furled her umbrella beneath the overhang, and stepped inside, almost tripping over a huge burlap bag of oysters.

The old man pulled the sack behind the bar. He cut it open, grunted as he heaved it up, and spilled the rough gray oysters into a scarred wooden trough. He rapidly opened half a dozen and set them on a white plate, which was whisked away by a waiter. He turned his attention to Marie. “What can I get for you?”

Marie hoisted herself onto a stool. Her hat brim deposited drops of water on the bar, but she left it on. “Half dozen and a draft. Ale.”

The ale was cold and bitter. The clatter and din of the room seemed to expand in rough increments. She watched raindrops trace the window with crooked, red-limned trails.

“I’ll not mince words,” Dr. Weinstein had told Marie. They sat in her office. A poster for the Louis Armstrong Centennial illuminated the wall behind her, called forth from the city’s memory. “You’re dying.”

“Hmm.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

Marie nodded. “I thought so. How about that!”

“It may be difficult for you—”

Marie stood up and slammed her fist on the desk. “Damn it! So fix me! I’m too fucking busy to die!”

“Ah, that’s better.” Dr. Weinstein’s frizzy black hair was pulled back in a tight bun, but much of it escaped around her light brown face. “You do have options.”

“Go back in the tank, right?”

“Not exactly. But it will involve some downtime. Probably about ten months.”

“Can’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“I have a bit of work to do.”

“I rather thought so.” Weinstein’s voice was needling. “Well, then, it’s a good day to die.”

“Give me my alternatives.”

Weinstein tapped the cube that held Marie’s medical tests. “As we suspected, your nerves are atrophying at a pretty rapid pace. There is an underground regenerative drug available.”

“You’ve done your homework.”

“Enough to know that it’s a quick fix, and dangerous, and that it works short-term.”

“How short?”

“We don’t know yet. You’d be one of the first test cases.” Weinstein leaned forward, and her clasped hands slid across the desk toward Marie. “Use the tried-and-true method, Marie. You don’t have nine lives. You’d be out for six months, max, and back on the road after four months of rehab, better than ever.”

Without Hugo, there was no one to pick up the reins, no one she could trust to oversee New Orleans, the Crescent City Project— everything! Except…

Kalina was too young. And Marie was not at all sure that she had any interest in her mother’s plots and plans.

Crescent City itself was coming along. On her last visit, Harold had proudly shown her the lineaments of what would be a truly revolutionary place to live, to survive, to ride out the rising chaos, and to perhaps find a way to go forward into a new era for all people.

But the next six months would be crucial.

Still, for the first time, Marie had doubts. Must she sacrifice herself for her city? “The technology for brain replication is not quite ready. I gather?”

Weinstein’s laugh was sharp and short. “You really do live in a fairy tale. Although I’ve heard that you could try Los Angeles if you’re interested in that sort of thing. Laveau, it’s time to fish or cut bait My advice is to cut bait.”

The Acme Oyster bar man said, “Ma’am? Miss Laveau?”

“What?” Marie looked up sharply.

“You think you’re invisible?” His eyes were sympathetic. “What is it? You remember me, don’t you? Your grandmère use to come in here. Fine woman. I really appreciate what you have done for me and my family.” He was a handsome man, his white beard contrasting with dark brown skin. He continued to shuck oysters as he spoke.

“Oh.” Marie tried to remember but couldn’t. She did remember that the factors that had dragged her in here were the redness of the sign, the necessity of eating and drinking. She looked at her ale, now at half-mast. “How many of these have I had?”

“Three.”

“What have I—what have I done for your family?”

“Don’t be modest. I went to Louisiana State. A lot of good it did me. When I was a young man, I couldn’t find any job except this. I’ve left it many times, but I always came back. I shouldn’t have majored in theater, I suppose.” His laugh was deep; Marie could see him onstage easily. “I did a lot of local television commercials in the old days. In a few weeks, I’ll be starting another stage production. So I’m happy, even though my wife wasn’t all that excited about my career choice over the years. What I’m talking about is that my daughter and her husband and my three grandchildren have those receptors. I don’t know what the world is coming to. But whatever is coming, I think they’re prepared for it.” He flipped out his wallet and leaned his elbows on the bar. Their pictures lit as he pressed the scroll key with his thumb. “Tunishia. She’s my little doll. Only six. Already doing geometry. And Ellis. He’s ten. He’s working on some kind of cell design project. I do thank you, Miss Laveau. You have cared enough to make sure that their education is uniquely suited to their talents. I’m sorry that you’re so troubled.”

She gazed at the children for a moment before he flipped the wallet shut and returned it to his pocket. She was left with a vision of them perishing when homeless angry hordes swept into the city or when subversive elements from the government—or those pretending to be from the government—took over the city by overriding the frail protections she had put in place.

The news was not good. Outside of the cities, the country was becoming increasingly Balkanized. People routinely took justice into their own hands. The frail social contract that depended upon at least some forms of commonality had deteriorated, and great fear—fear of nanoplague contamination carried by food, water, or even by air— was rampant.

Marie took another gulp of ale and accessed the jukebox with a tap of her finger and flicked through the enormous library of sound now available in practically every space in New Orleans. The bar took her fingerprint, one of the many ways the city kept track of profit and loss. This was constantly analyzed by an algorithm that would tell her, eventually, whether this particular social experiment, this venture into a strange blend of capitalism and socialism, was working. She touched the dime-sized green light on the bar’s surface with her finger. This prompted the appearance of a small screen on the bar’s surface, via which she paid her bill, added a large tip, and found “Mood Indigo.”

Its haunting strains insinuated themselves into the air and brought back stories of its era of composition, stories her grandmère had told her about when she was young and piloting boats to and from Cuba, eluding the Feds. About how Churchill’s gathering cloud seemed very real and dark, pressing down on the world, extruding frantic, powerful art, and migrations fraught with fear.

This era seemed the same, except there was no safe haven, no country to which to flee, shorn of everything save bare life. El Silencio blanketed all, and on the horizon loomed the cloud of nanotech running amok and dismantling everything. The time was ripe for wild preachers, grave predictions, harbingers of doom. Rumor had it that the moon and Mars colonies were both lost—to aliens, to nanodeath, to El Silencio.

Marie finished her ale and Ellington continued. The powerful percussive opening of A Drum Is a Woman, a piece based on African rhythms, brought forth Agwe, and Agwe saw the golden city far on the horizon.

Agwe bought a pack of cigarettes and lit one. Agwe slid off the stool, left the Acme Oyster Bar, strode three blocks through the rain, slammed soaking wet into Dr. Weinstein’s office, and demanded the potion that might prove deadly to Marie, the potion that might truly end her life forever after six months, a year, two years.

But it was Marie, in a warm dry robe, head cleared easily of hangover only half an hour later, thanks to a patch slapped on by Weinstein, who read all of the material, signed a release, and downed that which would heal and perhaps kill her.

And it was Marie who woke the next morning filled with energy, clear memory, full coordination, and urgency, who set her eyes on mothering the city that would preserve civilization for a new millennium.

Hard Bop Rip, Slow Spill Zeb | Washington, D.C. | 2039

Zeb could tell it was hot by the way others looked at him as he strode down Twelfth Street, his—Craig’s—overcoat swinging open and flaring out behind him like a cape. He liked its frayed weight. It actually seemed to cool him if he wore it this way, without a shirt. At the shelter, he had been forcibly sprayed with a permeable sheen of UV filters, which allowed him to bare skin to a presumable breeze that today did not exist. Zeb could barely see five blocks ahead; the trees were an unmoving sculpture of haze-dimmed green; gray buildings simply blended together as if in a hot fog.

He loved this weather.

Drenched in cooling sweat, admiring the colors of the wall next to him, on which an advertisement for domed Los Angeles danced, he failed to see a Social Snitch dart from a doorway and fasten her intensely sensitive hand on his arm. Thus pinioned, he was too startled to move while she flattened her other hand on his bare chest.

“Sir, you belong in Sector Five,” she scolded. “I knew you weren’t one of mine. You just turn around and march back to G Street where you belong.”

“ ‘This is my country, land that I love,’ ” belted Zeb in a cigarette-roughened voice. He never knew when such impulses might well up. He wished he remembered more of the words. Must be something he learned in elementary school. He loved being in this mood. He grinned at the Snitch.

“As long as you refuse to register,” said the Snitch, “this is not your country. But I’d be happy to register you.” She dropped her hand and wiped it off on her flowered skirt. Her face was shadowed by a large blue bonnet.

Zeb pushed the bonnet back and looked into her eyes. “I don’t remember voting for you. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” He almost meant it. Her eyes were a lovely shade of pre-haze blue, punctuated by indigo triangles that wheeled around the irises in a pulsing rhythm. Hypnotic.

As they were meant to be. He jumped back as she pulled her right hand from her pocket and again tried to touch his chest, knowing that her palm held annealing that he refused as his constitutional right. Her swipe went wild and she yelled, “We’ll see about you, mister!” as he walked down the street, once more savoring the flare of his coat. He took a deep breath of thick haze, said, “Ahhh!” and remarked to a man as he passed, “Lovely day, isn’t it?”

It was lovely to be up to be alert to be full and happy and hazy and plus. Multiplied was better but for now plus would do. Minus was the bad part and he wouldn’t think of it, not today. Traffic pulsed next to him, constitutionally filling the streets—a court-proven right to drive singly in a private vehicle—and all around him were concealed constitutional weapons and it was grand—grand—to be in a constitutionally correct area of mind. Since the International Federation had sent soldiers to the United States, the Constitution was much on everyone’s mind. “I am constitutional!” he heard himself yell. It was never as if he actually slathered or spat or danced, but he heard and felt o yes, he tasted and saw…

A great splat of music held him stationary. From a door, like a cone expanding outward, dense and woven and fraught with a strange positivity. A solid cone, then gone. Then there again—blam—roaring through his brain and leaving it twenty degrees cooler than the weather, clearer, cleansed.

He ran his hand along the flat bar by the door, top to bottom, and his hand read the hopscotch bar in the instant before he was once more rearranged by sound. He combed his beard and hair with his hands for a second noticing in the glass reflection that he wore no shirt and, shrinking with embarrassment, that he was ugly-bearded and unwashed and oh scary too, bushy eyebrows he wanted to turn and run and apologize to the Social Snitch, but instead another blast of music drew him in like a million hands pulling on his neurons. Like space. Like…

Suddenly calm, he stepped into the cool dark of the Hopscotch Bar and merged with the intervals he’d so long ago discerned and memorized. They blended into him like silence, matching so perfectly that they almost made the world and time and space vanish so that he was no longer Zeb but everything at once and absolute and perfect, a clarity of matter.

The moment passed as the music lunged forward in exhilarating stupendous constructions apparently generated by a woman in a corner of the room, surrounded by gel-speakers, pressing madly on buttons and brushing various glow-colored pads with elbows, nose, and toes, part of a dance she did, long skirt twirling and contributing to the overall effect as it too brushed ankle-high sensing pads with fishing weights, tennis balls, a mad swirl of objects attached to the hem. With a flourish of her head, she produced a hail of tones with the ends of her braids, and all vibrated gradually into silence. She stood still, her face sweat-sheened, panting. Ten feet away, the bartender rubbed the bar with a cloth. Light rectangled through small high slit windows. Zeb clapped loudly for a long time and no one clapped with him, for he saw as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light, there were no other patrons. She smiled broadly, bowed lightly, and squeezed out through the enveloping array of sensing panels with a clatter of assorted amplified sounds, stepped down off the stage, and slipped into a pair of waiting sandals.

“Can I buy you a drink?” she asked. She was pale brown, with rosy cheeks and lively, large brown eyes. Her voice was like a cultured pearl, smooth and deep-toned. She was not very tall. Perhaps five feet three inches—and skinny.

“I don’t know,” said Zeb, at a loss. “I should buy you one.” He felt in his pockets for nothing and she laughed a hearty three-toned laugh.

“Sit down,” she said and pulled out a rickety chair for herself. “This is my bar. I’ll treat you. This isn’t a show yet. I’m just practicing.”

“Meditating,” said the bartender as he set large glasses of iced water in front of them, a reverent tone in his voice. “Miss Ra be meditating. What can I interest you in, sir?”

“This is fine,” said Zeb, cooling his hands on the glass, marveling at how he’d been physically stunned by sound out of his morning’s manic frenzy. In the dark quiet of the place, the buzz of his mind receded. “That Social Snitch outside almost got me.”

“ ‘Social Snitch’?”

“Sure. You know. They touch you and know you’re out of place and send you back to your sector…” He was silent for a minute. The fan above rotated slowly. Finally he said, “There aren’t any Social Snitches, are there?”

“They call me ‘the Healer,’ ” Ra said. She lifted her glass and upended it, poured water down her long throat, which undulated as she gulped. She set it down and took a deep breath. “I could sense you—sense you—walking down the street and needing healing. In case you were wondering about how good you feel right now.”

Zeb said nothing. The word “nonsense” circulated weakly through his mind for a moment, then vanished, replaced by powerful paranoid thoughts that paralyzed him. How could they follow him everywhere? How did they know? Who were they; what did they want? They wanted, of course, everything he’d thought for the past fifteen years. They were damned clever. The Social Snitch, of course, and then they set this thing up pretty fast…

He was startled by Ra’s laughter. “I’ve got your mind going in circles for sure. I can see you’re not a Believer. We can fix that.”

“Do you have a first name, Miss Ra?” managed Zeb. It was the polite alternative to getting up and walking out, but he could see that would be useless as an elusive ploy.

“Sun,” she said.

“Sun Ra is the reincarnation of, you know, Sun Ra,” called the bartender from his post. “A reinterpretation.” Dusty light rayed out over the age-darkened pine floors as he spoke, as if with the mention of Sun Ra the sun itself had awakened.

“Sun Ra?” asked Zeb. But Ra, or Sun, said nothing. She leaned back in her chair and stared at Zeb. After the span of about two traffic light changes, she spoke. “It doesn’t matter.” She sighed, stood, rested her arms on the back of the chair, tilting the two bones of her arms against one another so that her elbow appeared strangely indented. She narrowed her eyes at Zeb. He’d never felt so closely examined.

“Excuse me,” she muttered. Her eyes focused on the door so strongly that Zeb turned his head, but there was no one there. She started to walk back toward the stage. Zeb watched her cross the room as if it were a time-delayed movie. He realized that he couldn’t stand hearing those intervals again. They brought back the pain of the past few years too clearly. How many years? That was the question.

“Why is this the Hopscotch Bar, then?” he asked.

She turned, a smile in her eyes, and the weights and tennis balls and… all manner of junk tied to the hem of her skirt whirled out and around, reversed direction twice with momentum, then finally stopped. She hopped twice on one leg, bounced forward on two, went back to one, letting the skirt speak its piece about physics. Zeb continued to watch her. Finally she pointed down to some chalk lines on the floor and said, “Hopscotch.”

“Oh,” he said.

“And the bar,” she said. She walked behind the counter and rummaged around. The bartender said, “It’s over there,” and she straightened, holding a block of wood, a rectangular prism. She brought it over to him and sat at the table. “Here,” she said, pressing it into his hand.

It was smooth. There was no sharpness to it, though he imagined when new it must have been painted or varnished. It was about three inches long and two inches wide and in its center was a cylinder of metal that rattled dully when he shook it. “What is it?”

“A hopscotch bar,” she said, a patient tone to her voice. She took it back, crouched on the floor by the hopscotch drawing, rubbed the bar back and forth a few times, and sent it sliding.

He did not shrug, but he felt like it.

She took two long strides and caught it up. “You slide it to the number you’re supposed to hit next. Then you have to go and scoop it up and bring it back. If you miss, you lose your turn. Heaven’s at the end.”

“Where did you get it?” Zeb asked.

“Stole it,” she said. “When I was seventeen. I went back to my elementary school. I wanted to get my records and this man yelled at me for coming into school barefoot. I was pretty pissed and went out on the playground down these huge wide steps and the same lady was sitting there as when I was little. She had white hair and wore a white blouse and blue slacks. She sat on a wall next to a stone lion bigger than she was. She always kept watch over us when we were on the playground. She blew her whistle and it was time to go in. The kids ran inside and I walked around the playground and I saw that somebody had left this hopscotch bar outside. I should have taken it inside, but I didn’t. I put it in my pocket.” She grinned. “It’s probably why I haven’t been able to save the world yet. Not pure enough. Not as pure as I used to be.”

“Pure enough,” said the bartender from his ever-moving post, clanking glasses, as if participating in a call-and-response revival meeting.

“Why did you play what you played when I came in?” he asked. She had to be some kind of government agent.

“I just thought of it,” she said. “My goal is to save humankind. I know it sounds corny, but there it is. You, for instance. You have such… bright edges. But then everything does. Have bright edges. So bright.”

“Tell him,” said the bartender. “You got to tell him. It’s the pure thing to do.”

She blinked and sighed and shrugged. She walked over to her squeezed music alcove and slithered inside to a low random cacophony as parts of her touched the sensing devices. A synthesized assonance lingered as she grabbed a piece of paper and squeezed back out. She walked over to the table and handed it to him.

He blinked. It was a narrow flyer. Ranged down it like Morse code were the intervals. Lines, bars, and dots. Repeated three times. That was all.

She took it from his hand and sat down, smoothed it out on the table. “You have to admit it has a lovely rhythm. I fell in love with it when I saw it.”

“Where did you get it?” he asked.

“From you,” she said. “You were passing them out in the park last week. Throwing them at people, actually, big wads of them like confetti. You were yelling stuff about the secret of the universe. I guess you don’t remember. Of course you don’t. You were in a state. I was dragging the flowerpots out this morning when I saw you coming down the street.” She giggled. “I admit it. I ambushed you. I wanted to surprise you. It’s just so sublime. It’s not quite finished. I was going to go find you when it was. I’ve seen you around for the past year or so. We even had coffee once in the old People’s Drug store.”

“People’s Drug?” asked Zeb.

“Ra and me, we been around for a long, long time,” said the bartender. “They call it something else now.” He did something behind the counter and all manner of glowing lights came on—lines of purple and red that zipped around the crown molding, lights on the table listing pale rhino red, capital ale, and other local microbrews. “Tales of the City,” a locally produced twenty-four-hour soap, appeared on screens around the room silently, paired with the replicator races that were the big betting draw nowadays.

Zeb smoothed the paper several times. Its texture did seem familiar. He did not quite believe her, though.

Some people came in the door—young people, laughing, asking for beer. More sounds and lights. Zeb looked at the form calling herself Sun Ra, a pattern of information. The pattern swept toward him, outward, he saw, like a wave, enveloping him, so he was once again in his familiar field, that of information.

He heard her voice as he rose from his chair and walked toward the booming light of the door, but did not stop.

Once outside, he raised his hand, holding the crumpled paper, and continued his interrupted stroll down the street. “The secret of the universe!” he heard a voice declaim, and it was his.

But he did not own it.

It was pleasant at the Hopscotch Bar. He could drop in any time he liked and Ra would make sure he had something to eat. Her patrons liked the Star Man too, and he regaled them with speculation, often using the one intelligent table she had to illustrate his points with diagrams or mathematical explanations. In fact, Zeb found that the Hopscotch Bar sufficed quite well as a work environment for him.

That fall and winter passed in a new fashion for Zeb. Ra gradually convinced him to spend a night at her house, then another; they became lovers. This was a new experience for Zeb and he moved into a state of gladness, amazed at Ra’s insightfulness, her beauty, and by the fact that she’d used free clinics and university experimental programs without fear to keep her seeming physical age at a steady forty years old.

Most of all, she shared his passion for space. Like the original Sun Ra, she believed that “Space is the Place” and often had that motto running around the frieze of the Hopscotch Bar. She believed in him deeply. She believed everything he said. She did not think he was mad.

In January, Washington filled with even more soldiers. They were preparing for some sort of assault to the South, where Atlanta and New Orleans were defying the authority of the International Federation. Occasionally, they came into the Hopscotch Bar and sat sullenly, drinking alone, for no one liked them. Their English was often atrocious, for it depended on imperfect translation programs, and everyone was suspicious of them and of their intent. About once a week in the newspaper, Zeb read a story about how an International Federation unit had been wiped out in a surprise attack by a homegrown militia that believed they were the emissaries of a One World Government. Around Washington, they were known as the Bug Police, after the slang for nanotech devices, “bugs.”

Then Zeb read that Atlanta and New Orleans had seceded from the Union and that New York would be next. Home rule for the District advocates gained new fuel, and riots were frequent. The United States was a member of the North Atlantic Nanotech Organization; NANO’s treaty called for severe crackdowns on any nonlicensed use of nanotechnology. Such as was now occurring in Atlanta and New Orleans.

The mood of the city, and of the country, and probably the entire world, was ugly.

Zeb opened his eyes and did not know why. The clock said it was 3:48 a.m. But he felt uncomfortable.

That was not too unusual. He still was not used to sleeping inside, even though he had been with Ra for months. He missed the breeze, the flow of traffic; even, Ra teased him, the crash of breaking bottles. At first he didn’t stir, not wanting to disturb Ra. He was capable of lying still for many hours, just thinking.

But… this was something different. He got up, picked up his pants from the chair and his cigarettes from the bedside, and went into the living room, shutting the door behind him.

Pulling on his pants, he lit a cigarette and went into the kitchen to make some coffee. Coffee always calmed him down. He’d calmed remarkably since moving in with Ra two months earlier. He was not sure why. It made no sense. He still had long stretches of utter insanity, but they did not come as often. He was grateful to Ra, though, for all that she had done for him. She was a wonder.

As he flicked on the machine, thinking that he might have to switch batteries, he remembered.

Rumors had flown all day at the café. Ra’s performance had drawn a packed house, for her apocalyptic views seemed particularly of the moment. She’d been exhausted afterward, but more than that: grim. A lot of people were leaving town. “See if they tell us little people what’s up,” she grumbled as she toiled up the stairs only an hour earlier. “I don’t know, Zeb. Want to leave?”

“I don’t care,” he told her truthfully.

He poured his coffee and went back to the living room. Car lights traversed the walls and ceiling in a constant flow. He pulled aside the curtain and looked down on a street mobbed with vehicles and people carrying backpacks and suitcases. The evacuation must be well under way.

Evacuation from what?

But he woke her. With little discussion, they left.

The streets were filled with madness. Zeb pushed through the static crowd as best he could, trying to break a path for Ra, but after an hour, of it he was shaky and the mood was beginning to scare him.

Fireworks filled the sky—bottle rockets set off from rooftops and all manner of illegal fountains and bursters. Children leaned from open windows in the chill spring night, holding sparklers, screaming with delight. Behind him Ra shouted out some sort of song that continued to form as she walked. Abandoned cars blocked traffic; many had been pushed onto the sidewalks and caused massive bottlenecks. They had passed two mobbed Metro stations, scenes of fighting and, at the last one, two gunshot deaths.

Zeb turned and leaned against the rough bricks of a town house. He heard one man say as he pushed past, “I heard it jumped to Anacostia.” He wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. His hand was shaking.

“You okay, honey?” asked Ra. She appeared to be miraculously unruffled. Zeb realized that compared to her nightly performances this had about the relative tension of a lullaby. “Only about another mile, don’t you think?”

“You go on,” he said, forcing the words out. “I’m slowing you down.”

“I’m in no hurry.” She swung her pack to her other shoulder and took his arm. “Now you sing along with me—‘I’m the Star Man, I got star vibrations’—that’s right—louder. It passes the time. I want all you to sing with me. Come on!”

And she had them all chanting and tramping. Amazing woman.

Zeb felt the pressure of her arm linked through his and flowed along like a dog at heel. His weariness vanished. The chanting was a great strong song, a river, and the fireworks flowers against the black night, in which he could see no stars. So this was it. This would be it. And it wasn’t coming from the stars. It was coming from his fellow humans. He laughed, and no one noticed. Why had they been so worried about what might come from space? “We’re worse than anything we might possibly imagine!” he shouted, and for a few minutes, some others took up the words as a descant.

Traffic was moving, just barely, by the time they reached Memorial Bridge. Ra stared up at the huge brass horses, glinting with dawn. Zeb stopped with her. He felt as if he might just fall asleep on his feet, standing there.

“Boost me up!” she said, and he obediently formed a step with interlocked fingers. Her bootstep was light and he gave a heave, hoping at the last minute that she wouldn’t be hurt.

She grabbed the horse’s neck and pulled herself up. In a minute, she was standing balanced on his broad back, head thrown back, singing. He could not hear what in the roar of the traffic.

A pickup stopped next to him. A woman rolled down her window.

“Zeb?”

He turned. “Do I know you?”

The look she gave him shook him, though he did not know why. “I’m Annie.” She set the brake and got out. People behind her cursed and honked. She opened the passenger door and pushed everything out onto the road. “Get in. Now!” she shouted.

“Ra!” he yelled. “Let’s go!”

He caught her legs as she slipped down and carefully lowered her. She grabbed her pack and jumped into the front seat of the truck next to Zeb and slammed the door.

“I’ve always wanted to do that,” she said. She leaned forward so she could see around Zeb. “I’m Ra. Sun Ra.”

“I’m Annie.”

Zeb leaned forward and punched the cigarette lighter.

“Zeb, where are your manners?” asked Ra.

“She knows my name,” said Zeb, lighting a cigarette with a shaking hand.

“That’s nice,” said Ra with a puzzled look. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Zeb, his voice filled with despair.

They got across the bridge. Annie rolled up the windows and closed the vents. She turned toward Rosalyn and passed Roosevelt Island. She downshifted behind a bank of glowing red taillights. “Don’t look now, folks,” she said, eyeing the rearview mirror, “but I think our nation’s capital is about to become history.”

Zeb turned his head as best he could. He saw a flash shudder across the distant buildings. The Washington Monument glowed briefly, then darkened. That darkness seemed to roll outward, then to cross the bridge, to creep up over the riverside verge…

“Hold on,” said Annie and drove off the highway onto a deeply slanted greensward. She was not the only one, but she drove faster than most, bouncing down beneath a highway ramp, gunning the engine to send the truck flying over a curb into a parking lot.

A dark alley angled away from the parking lot. She careened down it and crossed three lanes of traffic, leaning on the horn. “I think we’re heading into the wind,” she said, her voice hoarse. “If we can just outdistance it…”

She turned into a dark suburb that was deserted; no cars were on the street except for a van, which someone was putting something in. “Looters!” she laughed.

Ra held tightly to the sissy bar above the door, her eyes fixed on the road. “Police up ahead,” she said.

“Right,” said Annie. She drove even faster, smashed through a barricade, ignored the sirens.

“You’re crazy,” said Zeb. “Who are you?”

“Your niece,” she said.

“Oh.” Zeb was quiet for a minute. He lit another cigarette. “Maybe there’s some reason we shouldn’t go this way?”

“Hell yes, there’s a reason. It’s a reserved emergency route for government officials, the assholes. But they probably all left days ago.”

“How do you know this?” asked Ra.

“Because I’m a fucking government official, that’s why,” Annie laughed. “Only I thought I might be able to fix things, so I stayed. Not to the last, though. Not to the last.” Her voice was defeated. “It’s pretty damned strange out here, from what I’ve heard. NAMS is down from here to Atlanta because of terrorist activity. Our soldiers, under the command of the International Federation, are laying seige to New Orleans. But I’ll take my chances out here. By now, everyone in the District has changed into a zombie.”

“You’re talking about like when a nanotech program takes over their minds, right?” said Ra.

“Yeah,” said Annie sadly. “That’s right.”

Ra got them lost sometime after midnight. After they got past Manassas, they drove on the smallest roads that they possibly could, and by the stars, with which Zeb helped. One of the reasons he’d hated to move in with Ra was that he deeply enjoyed the nights spent lying on his back outdoors, watching the stars reel through the night sky. He generally fell asleep at dawn. Even though he was in a city, he’d been able to seek out the darker places, see what there was to see, and fill in the rest from memory.

The old roads, vestiges of wagon roads, roads that had been carved before the Revolutionary War through mountain passes, did not run by the compass, as did the roads of the Eisenhower Revolution. They cut down a mountain’s flank like a surfer angling a wave’s face and dove into small rills with switchbacks. Old metal signs were defaced with paint and bullet dings, so Ra’s map-reading capabilities were strained to the utmost. “Hold that lightstick still!” she ordered Zeb every few minutes.

They drove through night-quiet Mount Jackson, perched on the river cliff, twice before Annie realized the mistake. Then she pulled over and they slept in the cab, Annie with her head on a sweater wadded up on the steering wheel, Ra held within Zeb’s arm. He did not sleep, but stared at the small white town as the river roared below. Two or three cars passed them but did not slow. Annie woke with a start at dawn, slid out of the truck and peed behind a bush, let off the brake, and jump-started the truck as it drifted down Main Street, waking Ra, who said, “Oh!” Zeb saw the blue-gray line of the Shenandoahs, far across the Valley, and memory pierced and startled him. Zeb Aberly. Born down the Valley. The heart of the mountains his heart.

His lost heart. Lost because of some radio waves from space. That was it. But then, as Annie passed out baloney sandwiches for breakfast and poured coffee from a thermos, he lost that thread.

As morning progressed, Zeb sat by the open window of the pickup truck and the hot summer wind blew his hair back. It seemed to him that the wind was greenness itself, the very essence of the hedgerows and trees that crowded close to these little-used roads that traversed the Blue Ridge parallel to I-81 in the valley’s floor. From time to time, they had a view of it, ten miles away, the cars seemingly unmoving, seemingly endless. Long brambled stalks of tiny hot pink wild roses sometimes whipped his arm, so close to the edge Annie drove, steering the wavy road with reckless speed, a look of distant concentration on her face.

Ra had a map propped on her knees and read out distances and the names of small towns as they came and went. “New Hope. Euphoria in six miles.” There was usually a single white-steepled church, perhaps a general store, often nothing at all. A century had passed without leaving a mark.

“How come there’s no subdivisions out here?” asked Ra.

“No work,” said Annie.

Zeb let the years wash through him, wash from him. He realized that he was sitting in his own truck and this startled him, not the least because it had taken him so long to know it.

“Are we heading anyplace in particular?” asked Ra.

“New Orleans.”

“Ah,” said Ra with deep satisfaction. “I can handle that.”

“Why?” asked Zeb.

“You don’t know?” Annie leaned forward and looked over at him with amusement in her harried blue eyes and Zeb saw only Sally for a moment. Sally, laughing at her little brother. “I think it will be your kind of town, Uncle Zeb. Our great good government has no toehold there. Not anymore. It seceded from the Union. In fact, it’s under siege. Some weird character has gathered all kinds of people there, from all over the world, to work on… now what did that damned thing that dropped out of the sky say?”

“ ‘Consilience through information,’ ” quoted Ra. “Seems they could have made it snappier.” Someone had floated a blimp over D.C. a few weeks ago that had been shot down as soon as it was determined that it had no permit. The liquid within rained across a narrow swath of the city, briefly manifesting information in most mediums it touched. Sidewalks blossomed with the names of people who had come to New Orleans. People you might have thought were dead. Pictures of quaint streets combined with slogans like “Creating the next wave.”

“ ‘If you’re interested in freedom,’ ” quoted Annie and grinned bleakly.

Zeb sat back in his seat, closed his eyes. It seemed to him as if he remembered something about riding a raft down a river. Heading toward freedom. He laughed.

“Well, anyway,” continued Annie, “I thought we could help. Or they could help us. We’ve been hearing a lot about how subversive they are down there. Trying to sabotage our grand plans for keeping the universe intact. Ra, are we getting close to that red dot?”

“If that was Canna Crossroad we just passed, it’s about two miles. I think.”

“Good. We’re cutting it close. Now here’s the drill, kids. You guys are from my office. Top security, that’s all you have to say. If they ask. Zeb, get that .44 out of the glove compartment and load it, please.”

Zeb pushed the button. The glove compartment flopped open and he indeed saw a .44 and a box of ammunition. Zeb dutifully loaded it. “I used to be a good shot, didn’t I?”

“The best—with a rifle,” said Annie. “Wild turkey and venison. Just slip that in your pocket. I have no idea how you can wear that nasty coat in this heat. I wish you’d throw it away. Only not right this minute,” she added hastily.

“Where are we going?” Ra cleared her throat in a nervous fashion.

“The gas station.” Annie’s freckles stood out on her pale skin, and her straw-colored hair, pulled back with a rubber band, straggled around her face.

A faded billboard for moon pies sat off to the right of the road, almost obscured by kudzu. “This is it, I think. Gee, all those late-night memory sessions are sure coming in handy. I am so proud of my government.”

“ ‘Hail Columbia!’ ” sang out Ra unexpectedly, and Annie laughed. Then she became serious. “Listen, guys, if anything happens—anything—you head for New Orleans. Don’t look back. I mean it. Agreed?”

Ra and Zeb were silent. “I take that as a promise,” said Annie. “It’s very important. Believe me.”

They came to a rusted gate with a cow guard. Annie had Zeb get out and open the gate. “Leave it open,” she yelled out the window. They were on a narrow dirt road that smelled of damp earth and honeysuckle. “Keep in mind that the good guys might not be in charge,” Annie said as he got back in.

“It’s all relative,” said Ra. “Is that thunder? Sky’s clear.”

They all listened over the wrenching squeaks of the ancient truck. As they topped a rise, the sky’s tenor changed, darkening toward the south and giving the air an eerie glow. The wind picked up.

They rounded a curve and the road widened out into a meadow. A concrete wall ran crosswise, and in it an iron gate stood open.

“Hmmm,” said Annie. As she approached, a thin teenage boy stepped out from behind the gate. He had a rifle trained on them. Zeb reached into his pocket. Annie said, “Wait.”

The boy approached. He shouted, “Ya’ll aren’t from the govenment, are you?”

“I heard there was gas here,” shouted Annie. “Any chance we could buy some?”

He lowered his rifle. “What you got?”

“What do you want?” asked Annie. “How about a watch for a fill-up?”

The boy walked over to the truck. He shaded his eyes and looked at Zeb and Ra suspiciously. “Where you from?”

“Roanoke,” said Annie.

“Oh,” said the boy. “What you doin’ up here?”

“Came up to visit Gramma. Thought we might take her back down in the Valley. She wouldn’t come. Stubborn old lady.”

“Yeah, they get that way,” the boy said.

Annie unstrapped her watch and showed it to him. He smiled. “This’ll do. Come on in.”

No one said anything as they passed through the checkpoint.

Inside the walls were two rows of black sedans and a tank. A bunker jutted up out of the ground. Heavy steel doors stood open, revealing elevator doors.

“Are those like, cannons, sticking out there, next to the elevator?” whispered Ra. A few heavy splats of rain hit the windshield.

“Pretty much like,” said Annie, looking around.

“There they are,” said Zeb, pointing to the pumps.

“Okay,” said Annie. “Now I want you to stay real alert while I pump gas. I’m going to fill up all those cans in the back too.”

She slid out of the cab, slim in her jeans. She fiddled with the pump and started to fill up the truck. A man emerged from the shadows of the bunker a couple of hundred yards away and walked toward them, his open shirt flapping in the wind. Annie finished with the truck, closed the cap, got back in the truck, and turned the key as thunder boomed.

“You’re not going to fill the cans?” asked Zeb.

“Hold on,” said Annie.

She drove straight at the man at top speed and he dove to the ground. She brought the truck around in a cloud of dust and careened back past the sedans. A heavy report behind them shook the ground. “Missed,” said Annie as they zipped through the gate and down the dirt road, rapidly turning to mud in the downpour.

The boy was leaning against the concrete wall, his rifle propped next to him, shielding his new watch from the rain with his shirt and holding it in both his hands. In the noise of the storm, he seemed to notice them only at the last moment, looking up.

They squealed out onto the main road and Annie said, “Okay, Ra, I’m taking the next left. Tell me where it goes.”

Her hands shaking, Ra squinted at the map. “I can’t—okay. It’ll be County Road 73.”

“Here it is,” said Annie. “Now, what’s the next right?”

“Eleven.”

“Too big. I’m taking… this one.”

The truck careened around another corner, onto a narrow trace. It was paved, though, and hugged the ridge. “Hope we don’t meet someone coming the other way,” said Annie.

“What was that all about back there?” asked Zeb.

“I just didn’t like his looks,” said Annie. “They’ve obviously taken over the place. Can’t say as I blame them. They’ve got a real gold mine there. Cars. Enough fuel to drive them all around the world. Provisions.” She laughed. “Nanotech secrets. If they can figure them out, they’ll have a little kingdom there. The works.” She glanced in the mirror. “Shit.”

Zeb woke soaking wet in a bed of brambles. His whole body ached. It appeared to be dawn. He groaned as he staggered to his feet.

His right arm was the worst. The sleeve of his coat was singed to charred rags and his skin was blistered and red. His head pounded. But he could still walk. He pushed through the briars, stumbling downhill because it was easier than going uphill. Then he caught a tree and stopped himself, staring through a skein of trees across fields of corn. Beyond, blue ridges rose like lines portraying lyric information in swaying rhyme, echoing one another, converging, parting, rising, falling. Above, the sky, so blue and plain, wiped clean of cloud.

It had been a fireball. His hands were burned. Something that the people following them shot at the truck, then zoomed past as Annie lost control and the truck careened off the road.

He’d pulled her and Ra out of the flaming truck in the pouring rain. He remembered that. But he didn’t remember anything else.

He turned and made his way back up the mountainside. It was almost impossible to get through the brush. His hands were bleeding and he was terribly weak. He came to a small run and bathed his face and hands. Blackened skin sloughed off into the bubbling creek. He tried to scry his face, but the water did not mirror him, so quickly did it swirl. It carried leaves and sticks along with firm rapidity.

Nothing here was stuck. No rocks were positioned in such a way that stale eddies formed, keeping the stream’s traffic of sticks and leaves from moving.

Despite the horror of the previous day, Zeb felt that he’d broken free at last. Not that his freedom would be mirrored in any sense by the outer world. But memories surged in, awakening his heart from its long sleep like a maiden’s kiss.

He stood, dripping with sweat from his mad climb and cool creek water. He smelled the stink of the ancient coat he wore and cast it from him, leaving it in a black muddle next to the stream. He stopped, stepped back, rummaged through it, and took the gun from one pocket and his fat ragged notebook from another. Holding one in each hand, he trudged upward. It was easier here. He walked through a vale of bluebells.

Then he broke through to narrow black road and overhanging trees. The road was potted and unlined. He looked to the right and saw a bare curve. He looked to the left and saw the truck, its cab licked with soot. He trudged toward it, heart thudding.

He saw no bodies.

He walked around the truck. The cab was more or less intact. The bed was empty of whatever Annie had been keeping there. Must have been looted.

He spent several hours ranging up and down the road; climbing down from it, climbing up. Both sides of the road were wooded with scrub and blooming lilac. He wandered through the remains of an old farmstead, the tattered barn crazed and gray, the house just a brick foundation covered with morning glory vines.

He sat in the cab for over an hour, sunk in blackness, trying to go over the possibilities in his mind. Annie and Ra were both gone. Someone had found them and taken them to a hospital—obviously. Or somewhere.

He turned the key, pushed in the clutch. The truck worked.

He got it backed out of the ditch. He had to go forward a mile or so and then was able to turn around. For another hour, he drove around trying to find the place they’d gotten gas, almost in tears from tiredness and frustration. It dawned on him how very sick he was. The hair on his chest was white. He’d been relatively young when he last drove this truck. Now he was an old man. He didn’t even know how old. He didn’t even know if he’d remember thinking this an hour from now. His carefully delineated routes, the streets he’d come to love in Washington, surrounded him no longer. He was out in the country, out in the world.

Finally he gave up. He had to believe that whoever had taken Annie and Ra meant them well. Otherwise, they just would have left them to die.

It was late afternoon by the time he turned southwest again, following the line of the Valley. The gauge showed three-quarters full, and he could only drive the truck until he ran out of gas or until he found more. He doubted that he would find more.

He felt immensely stupid and helpless as he drove past deserted farms and short spurts of deserted strip malls. He fought down fear constantly until he dripped with sweat from sheer nervousness. Wind hot with another evening’s storm rushed in through the open windows. Seeing another vehicle on his road sent him into a state of terror. That meant they were probably gasoline-powered, which meant that they might try and take his remaining fuel by force. He tried to summon up memories of how this state of things came to be and was frustrated by their sketchiness. Protests when gasoline-fueled cars were prohibited from production. The promise of dedicated solar roads that collected energy and constantly propelled your vehicle from below without the need for carrying heavy fuel or a combustion engine and so many magrails above and below ground that there would be no need for private transportation. Public outrage when such cars proved to be incredibly expensive and those holding the train patents edged the price too high for them to tendril into all the suburbs and small towns.

Most of the cars and trucks he saw were independently solar-powered; some were steam, homemade contraptions that worked nonetheless.

The long ridges on both sides of him seemed comforting, protecting. They paced him through the day, firm and radiating a palette of blues and greens, flat luminous planes pieced together and arching skyward. His life in the city had been one of rapidly changing scenes, as if sets were placed around him—colorful, loud, and distracting— leading him here and there, until he’d become a skittering manic idiot devoid of any kind of sustained focus. He’d been working, yes. One part of him, also manic, had filled a thousand notebooks with the abstract ravings of a lunatic. The settled unmoving mountains gave him momentary perspective. He had no idea how long it would last, but it was like a beacon in a dark night. For the first time in a long time he yearned for healing, yearned for normalcy. He was sick of whatever bizarre understanding, like abstract hallucinatory impossible shapes dancing in his brain demanding voice, had taken over his life.

The storm broke as he coasted into the outskirts of another small town. Ramshackle mansions in need of paint lined Main Street. An old man waved at him from the sidewalk. Zeb quenched the urge to yell out to him that aliens were coming and realized with a start that it was his standard greeting. Darkness washed over him. If they were coming, where were they? His whole life had been a tragic mistake. Out here, away from the sweat and distraction of the city, it suddenly seemed easy to see. At least for the moment. He knew that he’d forget this small realization. A small grocery store had its lights on and Zeb’s stomach rumbled. But he had no money. The truck ran out of gas just as Zeb spotted a deserted gas station on the right. He pulled in, engine quiet, truck squeaking and clanking to a stop.

Zeb got out beneath the shelter of the gas pump overhang. Rain sheeted down around him; thunder boomed. Lightning streaked down and seemed to hit two blocks over. The station, with large letters that said JIFFY M RT above the door, was empty, and the door stood open. Zeb dashed through the rain and went inside, hoping against hope that a lone cigarette might have survived, but the metal shelves were empty and covered with a heavy layer of dust. He went back outside and, drenched, tried all the pumps, but if there was any gas in them, which he doubted, the pumps had no power anyway.

Zeb stood by the gas pumps, hands on his hips, and breathed deeply of the early summer air. It was cleansed; pure, with a chilled edge. The rain slackened and ceased. Out past town, he could see that the storm had cleared the ridge, leaving it blue-green, sunset glowing in a thin line sandwiched between upraised land and slate-blue thundercloud. Purple thistles sprouted next to the gas pumps.

He turned and got his notebook out of the truck. He unclipped the pen and wrote in large letters on the front new orleans. That’s where he ought to go. He knew that now, but might forget soon. Annie had been going there. If she and Ra were all right…

He was cold. He wished for a moment that he’d kept the coat.

Then he set out walking and was glad that he had not.

Zeb walked as evening deepened through a million mingled scents, brought out by the rain, that took him back to his youth. He hoped to catch a ride, but realized that he’d most likely have to get over to I-81 in order to do that. No vehicles passed him for an hour. He thought that as long as he kept walking, he wouldn’t get too cold.

The depth of the darkness, without city lights, startled him. Just as the intense blue twilight vanished over the western ridges, he thought he saw a campfire up ahead. His pace quickened.

Long shadows loomed against a tiny—almost toylike—church. The moon broke free of clouds, golden and huge, and Zeb saw that the churchyard was full of milling figures. A large flatbed truck was parked nearby. He approached cautiously, but was hailed with friendly gestures and shouts and pushed near the fire.

“You’re soaked,” scolded a woman wearing a bedraggled business suit. “Don’t you have enough sense to stay out of the rain?”

Zeb was confused. He looked around and saw that most of the men and women were dressed similarly, in business clothes. “Where are you from?”

“Annandale,” said the woman. “My name is Sylvia. Our office had this truck set up and ready just in case. Kind of like an air-raid shelter.” She giggled in a hysterical fashion. “I guess we didn’t really take it seriously, but the other morning we were glad we did it. We gathered at the checkpoint and took off. Are you from around here?”

“No,” he said. He looked at them more carefully. They were all young adults. “Where are your kids?”

A silence descended over the group. Finally Sylvia said, “That’s kind of a strange question.”

Zeb tried to feel his way into the situation, but couldn’t grasp it. Had their children been trapped in a school somewhere? He sensed tragedy. “Why?”

“He’s too old,” said one of the men.

“Yeah, but—”

“I’m a bum,” said Zeb bluntly. “I’m not well. I don’t know what’s been going on. For years.”

“Oh,” said Sylvia. “Well, a good number of adults in the D.C. area are sterile. And a lot of other cities too. Anti-population-growth terrorists put something in the water that mutates eggs and sperm. The Gaians took responsibility,” she said, her voice bitter.

A quiet voice broke into their conversation. “I can heal you.”

A woman dressed in black stood just outside the fire. Her jeans were black, her long-sleeved shirt was black, her boots were black. White hair stood out around her head, but her face seemed unlined.

“Who are you?” asked one of the men.

“Jonnie Cash,” she said, and they all laughed. She smiled slightly. “I’m protesting injustice in the world. And I am the minister of this church. It is the New Pentecostal Church of the Valley. I welcome you to the grounds. Stay as long as you want. You may call me Mother Cash.”

“We’ll be leaving in the morning,” said one of the men nervously. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I would like to invite you inside for a service.”

They muttered and yawned and said that it was late, they’d been traveling all day, it was time to crawl into their tents and get some sleep.

The woman looked hurt. Zeb said, “I’d be pleased to come to your service, ma’am. If you don’t mind having it just for one.”

Her face brightened. “One soul saved is worth a million services.”

As he followed her into the small white church, he read the marquee next to the door. He remembered from his past life that these signs sat out front of practically every church, with witty sayings that were changed weekly. This one read:

He stepped inside.

There were twelve oak pews in the tiny plain church, washed by candlelight from wall sconces. The floor was scarred and sagged in the center. An oak table covered with a flowered tablecloth sat in the front of the church, below a plain wooden cross that hung from one of the beams that crossed the room beneath the narrow sharp-peaked ceiling, shadowy above. Zeb almost expected to see an apple pie on this homely altar, but instead saw a torn loaf of homemade bread and a silver goblet.

“We will sing ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus.’ You know it?” Mother Cash asked anxiously. She opened a hymnal for him and he squinted in the flickering light, following her lead, the tune coming back to him as he sang. She then told him to open the prayer book. The service was copied by hand into a small bound book and decorated with pictures of angels and demons. The demons frightened Zeb. He felt dizzy with hunger and hoped he wouldn’t faint in the middle of the woman’s service. It seemed so important to her.

As she spoke, her voice lost its quaver, became sure and strong. She allowed him to sit while she delivered a short sermon on the state of the world and how he must prepare his soul for the coming Armageddon, which would take place because of humanity’s impurities.

“I do not have the power to pardon your sins,” she said. “You must make your own peace with God. We will have a moment of silence.”

To Zeb’s surprise, memories tumbled forth. How he’d left Sally, and how she had searched fruitlessly for him. The death of Craig. The disappearance of Ra and Annie, both of whom had loved and protected him in their own ways while he tottered like a baby through life, trailing death in his wake through his own irresponsibility. He began to weep. He watched distantly as Mother Cash poured wine into the goblet from a dusty bottle she uncorked with some difficulty, set the wine bottle down, and picked up a small vial of cut glass that sparkled next to the bread and wine. From it she poured a few drops into the goblet and said firm words of blessing. Then she walked over to him and grasped his hand tightly. “Come forth, Son, and partake of Communion. I see that the Spirit is working through you. God will forgive you.”

She asked him to kneel in front of the altar, and he swayed on his knees and grasped the edge of the table. She gave him a small chunk of bread and he chewed gratefully, wanting to grab the whole loaf and stuff it down. She tipped the goblet to his lips and he took a large swallow of sweet wine.

His mouth burned with it. It seemed to pour into his head and illuminate it. He saw a bright flash of light and passed out.

He woke in the morning stretched out on the floor next to the altar. What now? he thought, opening his eyes to stained sunlight patterning the white wall opposite him. He sat up, rubbed his eyes. He felt uncharacteristically clearheaded.

He wondered what she’d put in the wine.

He stood and looked into the cup, but it was clean and shining. The bottles were nowhere to be found. Even the bread, which he would have gladly breakfasted on, was gone. Even the crumbs.

He noticed that his burned arm was no longer blistered.

He walked out into the sunny morning. The truck and the unredeemed Annandalians were gone.

As was Mother Cash.

Later that morning, Zeb caught a ride with a man heading to Roanoke with a solar truck full of corn. He split the lunch his wife had made for him, a huge roast beef sandwich and some Cokes. “I trade hard for these Cokes,” he said, jouncing along as he shifted gears. “Hear tell something strange has happened to Atlanta. Cokes are scarce. These here come out of a plant in Chattanooga.”

Zeb was utterly grateful for the meal and just as grateful that the man had picked him up, shirtless and bedraggled as he was. He could scarcely believe how normal he felt, how good. The world did not waver and mutate. It did not give him the sensation of distant music, nor fill him with fear, nor with the urge to rant. He grasped the armrest on the door gratefully, feeling the omnipresence of matter. Matter was always here, always dependable, completely undemanding. A surge of appreciation engulfed him. He almost said, “Matter is the most wonderful thing about life, isn’t it?” But he was able to realize that it was a strange thing to say and that it would mark him in this man’s eyes as strange. Perhaps he would for the first time in his life achieve a balance. Perhaps he would be able to understand whatever it was he was born to understand without being overwhelmed by whatever chemical anomaly allowed this understanding.

Or maybe he was too old for all that. Maybe he’d left whatever genius he had behind in the gutters of Washington, D.C. Maybe it had evaporated along with steam from the winter grates.

No matter. He was going home.

It took him two more days of hitchhiking and walking to get to his farm.

He almost didn’t recognize it. The trees and the gravel road were gone. The outlines of his old house were there, augmented by an addition that jarred him. The land was cleared and fenced and grazed by sheep. Hundreds of sheep, apparently. And recently. The grass was eaten down to the nub.

But they all lay dead, scattered across the hill. There was an awful stench in the air and a billion flies.

A sign hung at the turn: angel’s rest farm, natural and organic wool.

Two collies ran down the road to meet him.

He knelt and hugged them. They seemed happy to see him, though they didn’t even know him. Collies were a happy breed, friendly and near-useless as watchdogs, though Zeb guessed that they’d be pretty good at herding sheep. They liked to tell people and each other the right and wrong of things.

Yet something was amiss here as well. The dogs were shaggy, their winter undercoats trailing them in great white gobs. He pulled some off thoughtfully. Anyone with a minute could keep them combed out in a rudimentary fashion. And beneath their fluffy coats, they were too thin.

He stood. The sign, tasteful in tones of cream and green, accented with a white stylized ewe, was cracked and peeling. The verge by the driveway was grown up in blackberry brambles, and the driveway was full of potholes.

Without the trees, the lay of the land seemed foreign to him, as if his past had been wiped clean. Even his antennas were gone. If it weren’t for the collies, he would have had half a mind to pass the place by. It haunted him, and he was afraid. Afraid that his was only a temporary lull from madness, and that any kind of stress could bring it raging back. It always did. A sick feeling tightened his stomach.

He walked up the long driveway. It seemed strange to be able to see the low ridge behind the house cleared to the ridgeline. It was like seeing a loved grandmother naked.

He used the large brass sheep’s-head knocker to raise a ruckus. No one came to the door. A small windowpane was broken out. The door frame was rotten, and paint peeled from the door. He knocked again, then tried the knob.

The collies followed, pushed around him, and hurried inside. Heavy curtains swathed the interior in darkness. “Hello?” he yelled. “Anyone home?”

He heard a sound and wheeled.

In the dim light, he heard the click of a rifle being cocked. “Get out of here!”

“I’m sorry,” said Zeb. “I was looking for someone named Brad.” His heart began to pound hard.

“This is my house, my name is Brad, and I’m about ready to blow your damned head off.”

“I’m—Brad, I’m your Uncle Zeb.”

He heard heavy breathing and wanted to leave badly, but was afraid to move. The voice was incredulous. “Zeb? You’re a damned liar. Zeb died years ago.”

“I didn’t,” said Zeb. “Though I might as well have. I’ve been—well, I’ve just been a bum.”

“My mom spent years—years—looking for you.” His voice was almost hysterical now. “She was always gone. Then she died. It was your fault.”

“I’m sorry,” said Zeb. “I’m terribly sorry, Brad.” He paused. “How come all the sheep are dead?”

“You just want your farm back, don’t you? After all the work I’ve done. Well, take it, then! The place is ruined. Stuff fell from the sky. Sheep died. Dogs went nuts. Most of ’em run off.” In the dim light, Zeb saw him lower the rifle. He sat heavily in an easy chair.

“I don’t want it back.” Zeb saw the dim outlines of a room heaped with dirty dishes, clothes, and books. Brad—tall and thin—had a ragged untrimmed beard and shaggy hair. “How long ago did this happen?”

“Last week. Week before. Don’t remember.”

Zeb sat gingerly on the edge of an ottoman. “How long have you been sick?”

“I’m not sick.”

“Don’t try and kid me.” Even now he wanted to run from the house, as if it might be catching, as if he’d just been imagining the surcease he’d been granted. “You’re not too bad, really.”

“The dogs kept me going,” said Brad. “And then the sheep. I had to take care of them. Every day, no matter what. There was always work to do. After Mom died, Dad didn’t do much. He died two, three years later. Annie was out of school, had that hot job in Washington. She didn’t care. I went to the doctor; he gave me the news. But he was lying. I don’t know why he wanted to lie to me like that. All the doctors do. Even the one at the county clinic. I thought she was my friend.”

Zeb’s eyes were adjusting to the gloom. He saw more clearly the room of his debacle, long-buried emotions coming suddenly to the fore—his failed marriage, the job and the life that he’d refused in favor of madness.

Now this lost boy sat here in his place. He frightened Zeb; frightened him with his own image. “There’s medicine you can take, Brad.”

“Why should I take medicine if nothing’s wrong with me? Dad got me some of that shit once. I threw it away.” He raised the rifle he still held vertically in his left hand and rammed the butt on the floor a few times. “Don’t try and tell me what to do. In fact, you can just get the hell out of here. I know you really want your house back. It’s what you came for. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” He laughed. It was an ugly sound. “Yeah, I did okay for a lot of years. Sold lots of stuff through mail order. Gave work to all the neighbors. But all this nanotech stuff—I had to let my workers go. I had to take the wool to Roanoke myself to ship it off because my old shippers said it would take a while to get their delivery systems back up to speed after gasoline was regulated and they had to change over to solar. Guess nobody cared about delivering things anymore because they’re starting to manufacture things on site with those little nanotech ovens. Real manufactured organically grown wool!” He cackled again. “I was still doing all right until they killed the sheep. Bunch of us started a network of Saturday markets where we could trade. I reworked the trucks and made them pure solar. None of this shit that only runs on their roads. That’s the problem with this nanotech stuff. Big goddamned bottleneck.” He fumbled around on the table next to his chair with his right hand and came up with some kind of bound packet. “I give out my booklet on Saturdays too.” He tossed the packet over to Zeb and small heavy booklets fell out of their rubber band and rained to the floor.

Zeb picked one up and held it up to the sliver of light coming through a slit in the window, aliens living on mars for thousands of years read the cover. He opened it.

Inside was an amazingly intricate map of the alien colony, as well as detailed pictures of their appearance. Their habits, their physiology, the society from which they sprang, and their ships were all there— down to the last tentacle and knob. The print was so tiny that Zeb really couldn’t decipher it.

“You… thought this all up?” asked Zeb.

“No, damn it. I didn’t make it up.” Brad was on his feet, shouting. “It’s true! I would have expected you to understand! Isn’t that what you thought?”

“I… I had evidence of some kind of organized signals from an intelligent source. That’s all. I drew no other conclusions.”

“Some people came around about ten years ago,” said Brad, still standing. “At first they thought I was you. I had to prove to them who I was. Great country. They told me the truth about the aliens while they were at it. Guess they thought they’d scare me into admitting that I was you. After they knew I wasn’t you, they threatened me. Said they thought you were alive and that I was hiding you. I could only remember that Thanksgiving dinner before you disappeared. That’s what you said.” Brad was panting. “It’s true, I tell you. They killed my sheep because of this pamphlet. And it’s all your fault! Everybody can just stay away!” He sobbed angrily between shouts.

He bent swiftly and swooped his rifle up off the floor. Before Zeb could move, he cocked the rifle and fired. The window shattered.

Zeb dove for the open door. He sprinted toward the two trucks he’d seen near the house. Brad continued shooting at him and screaming.

Zeb leaped into the first truck, feeling around frantically to find a method of starting it. There were no keys, but he found and flipped the big red on switch and a quiet hum purred through the truck. He backed out, ducking, and drove as fast as he could up to the driveway. He heard a bullet ping into the back of the truck. He looked in the mirror and saw that the collies were running along behind, tongues out.

After turning out of the driveway, he stopped, opened the other door, and let the dogs scramble inside. He looked to see whether or not Brad was following him in the other truck, but he seemed satisfied with merely driving him away.

Zeb simply drove numbly for a while, past the familiar countryside, past the Zimmers’ old house, past the turnoff for his antenna. He thought about going up, but the awkward step van wouldn’t make it up there and no doubt it would just be an empty field now.

The dogs sat next to him, alert; panting. One was a tricolor, and one was slightly merled at the tips of her ears. He reached over to pet them and they crowded toward him, slipping on the slick floor as the truck jounced along the old deteriorating road.

Zeb drove for twenty-four hours, stopping only to get the dogs water and to let them go for a run. He drove on small back roads he remembered from his years in the mountains and was amazed that memory seemed undamaged, as if it were a pearl nestled beneath crushing layers of muck. In southwest Virginia, he drove right toward a man who stood in the middle of the road with a rifle trained on him; the man jumped aside at the last minute. In Tennessee, he picked up a middle-aged woman hitchhiking on a hilly road. She climbed in, thanked him, and pulled food from her pack that she shared with him.

“Where are you going?” Zeb asked.

She shrugged and split off a bit of sandwich for the dogs. “Away. I don’t know. Maybe it’s better to go north now. But Sister’s in Atlanta.”

“Why would it be better in the North?”

“Reason it’s so hot is that a cold front up north is keeping this hot air down here. Along with the plagues.”

“What plagues?”

She looked at him as if she found him odd. “You know. All the plagues. That make you believe one thing or another. Got loose from the Pentagon, they’re saying. They’ve been developing them all along. With our tax money. Lord knows what they were going to do with them.”

“I’m sorry,” said Zeb. “I’ve been kind of—out of it for a long time. I’ve been a bum. A woman at a church up near Lynchburg healed me somehow, I think.” He remembered talk in the Hopscotch Bar about these rumored plagues, about how they were testing them out on unsuspecting people. Whenever someone acted a little off, the joke was they must have a plague. “So what do these plagues do—exactly?”

“The paper said that they can make you believe certain things, whatever plague it is.”

“Oh. I think I’m remembering.” A night at Annie’s apartment? When? And where was her apartment? All he had was that isolated night. When she talked about how they were developing plagues. “But why would they do such a thing?”

“Who knows why the government does anything?” she asked. She pulled a packet of cigarettes from her purse. “Smoke?”

She lit one and handed it to him. She leaned back and propped her booted feet on the dashboard. “Paper said some of them were developed as educational tools. Right. Nice of them to think of us.”

Zeb let her drive after it got dark; he lay down on the van floor and used his arm as a pillow. It was a jolting ride, but he fell asleep quickly and didn’t wake until he felt her shaking him. “Look!”

He sat up groggily. “What?”

“It’s Atlanta. I’m not sure what to do.”

Zeb made his way to the front of the van.

They were stuck in a river of vehicles. “Are we on the interstate?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I got on at Chattanooga.”

Well, he hadn’t told her not to.

They were on a rise overlooking Atlanta, less than ten miles away. He looked at the sky and judged it to be about 4 a.m. People stood on the pavement and sat on a hill next to the road; it was obvious that these cars were not going to move for a long time.

“It’s burning,” said the woman.

“You’re right,” said Zeb after a moment.

He saw that the city seemed to be surrounded by a golden wall. Above towered buildings that nagged at his memory.

Again, he realized that he’d seen them with Annie on that strange, singular night.

They were eerily beautiful, as if designed by a grandiose, slightly mad architect.

The flames licking them were probably huge, he thought.

Dark shapes rose from the buildings, like dragons, like…

“The Bees!” shouted the woman. “I’ve never seen them. Only heard about them. I’ve got to find Sister!” She started running toward the burning city, her boots pounding on the pavement. Zeb tried to catch her, but she quickly vanished in the crowd.

A wailing siren sounded behind him. People began screaming. When he turned, he saw that huge caterpillar blades, apparently attached to tanks, were laboriously advancing, pushing cars off the road as they approached. “CLEAR THE ROAD,” a voice said over a loudspeaker. “THIS IS A GOVERNMENT EMERGENCY ROUTE. CLEAR THE ROAD.” But the tanks did not pause to allow anyone to try and retrieve their vehicle.

Zeb leaped back to the truck and yanked open the door. The dogs rushed out. He grabbed the woman’s pack and fled, climbing the guard rail and dropping onto the grass on the other side. The screech and crunch of smashing metal filled the air, along with the smell of smoke.

He clambered down into a small gully; he and the dogs drank from the culvert at the bottom and climbed the concrete side. There he found a small twisting road that rose about a hundred feet above the other road, from which it gradually diverged. It was lined with huge dark warehouses. The dogs kept pace with him, panting, their nails clicking on the pavement. At one point, the road dead-ended and Zeb kept on in the same direction, using the stars. He passed through a thin stand of woods before striking another road, this one lined with strip malls. He went into a fast-food restaurant where lights still burned and found half-eaten meals on the tables and a row of wrapped hamburgers beneath warming lights. He fed the dogs and filled the woman’s pack with hamburgers and containers of orange juice. During the balance of darkness, Zeb watched spectacular explosions light the sky and wondered what was going on. He decided that he must have led an active life in Washington, for he was not very tired; the hike seemed only to invigorate him.

Just past dawn, the road angled down into a neighborhood with large houses set in graciously landscaped yards of flowering bushes and trees. To his surprise, it was not deserted.

The first house he passed was white. A profusion of roses diffused a strong perfume. A man in a tuxedo and a woman in an evening gown sat in the front yard at a wrought-iron table, bathed in early morning sunlight. It looked to Zeb as if they were playing cards. He was cutting across the yard to talk to them when sprinklers came on. He retreated to the sidewalk. The man and the woman continued to hold their cards and to play them, prying them apart from one another as they got soaked. Zeb watched for a moment, decided he would get little information from them, and continued on.

Two blond children, a boy and a girl, rode tricycles toward him. He prepared to greet them, but had to jump out of their way. “Hey!” he yelled, but their faces were blank and they appeared not to have heard him. He ran after the boy, stepped in front of him, and held the handlebars of the trike steady. The boy just stared ahead and tried to move the pedals. When he found he couldn’t, he stopped pushing but left his feet on the pedals. “Hello,” said Zeb. He lightly shook the boy’s shoulders, but got no response. Suddenly afraid, he stood. He let the boy go and watched him follow the girl down the street.

After that, Zeb walked more quickly. He saw a bicycle leaning against a tree in a yard and took it, jumping on and speeding away. The dogs ran next to him, stretching out in a fluid gait that looked like flying.

After about two miles, he got out of the subdivision and turned onto an empty main road. Below was a huge parking lot filled with cars, and in the center was a low building that said nams.

Zeb found his way down to the building and left the bike behind. The dogs followed him down an escalator that was not working, though lights were on down below. He studied a map and saw that he was on the green line that went into Atlanta. Two stops away, the train connected with the NAMS line to New Orleans.

Excited yet wary, Zeb waited for a train. After ten minutes, the lights on the platform began to gently glow; he heard the rumble of the advancing train. The door opened.

One lone old woman was in the car. She shrank back into her corner, training a pistol on Zeb as the door closed.

“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you.” Zeb sat facing forward, his back to her. He wasn’t in the mood for conversation and neither, apparently, was she. The dogs lay flat on the floor, seemingly exhausted.

He and the dogs got off at the second stop; he turned and said, “Good luck.” He saw that he had forty-five minutes to wait until the train to New Orleans stopped. If, indeed, it would. He sat on a concrete bench, but feared he would fall asleep. So he prowled the platform and found a newspaper kiosk stocked with two-day-old papers. The headline read: atlantans flee plague

A stampede of people anxious to leave the city collided with the wave of refugees from Washington, D.C., heading south yesterday evening. Rumors of an approaching Pentagon plague spurred the escalation of the use of the popular Gone With the Wind program, which nanotech engineers have tried in vain to remove from the city’s program menu. One city official, who asked not to be named, said that he believed that Revolutionary Independence, Inc., with the sworn goal of making Atlanta a sovereign country, developed and disseminated this program.

The International Federation has joined the National Guard in an attempt to contain Atlanta’s Bees, which have the capacity to spread the program to the countryside, using any means necessary.

This action was not welcomed by Atlanta, which declared independence three months ago from what a Bill of Secession termed “an illegal and unconstitutional alliance between the United States and international powers.” Mayor Jackson urged everyone to join the effort to defend Atlanta and her Bees, which are the property of the city, by use of the civil defense programs that every receptored citizen has access to. “If we all work together, we can keep Atlanta the beacon of civilization it has become in the past five years, since it voted to join the spreading ranks of BioCities throughout the world. If we fail, we fail ourselves and all others who believe in civilization.” For the receptored, a hyperlinked version of this article is found at atlantaconstitution.org.index.nationalguard.37459.

If you have no receptors, the mayor reluctantly recommends evacuation. “We will not be able to take in any refugees, much as we might like to,” she concluded.

The train was coming. Zeb felt a whoosh of air as it emerged from the tunnel; he hurried to the edge of the platform.

The first car was filled with people, but the door did not open. He pounded on it and was ignored. He ran to the next one; those doors slid open and he slipped through, holding the doors for the dogs. The car was full of black men, most of them asleep.

“Hey,” said one of them. “I thought you were holding the door button, Nance.”

“Must’ve dozed off,” said the accused, looking at Zeb. “You’ll have to get off at the next station.”

“I’d be happy to pay for a ticket,” said Zeb, and they all laughed, slowly waking and stretching. He noticed that several musical instruments were scattered around the car, which was long and luxuriously appointed. “That’s not the point,” said the first man.

“He looks harmless,” said another. “I vote we let him stay.”

There was some grumbling, but they finally assented. “Want something to eat?” Zeb asked. He opened his pack. “I have some hamburgers.”

There was another roar of laughter.

A very good-looking man approached him, wearing tailored pants, suspenders, a buttoned-down shirt from which an untied bow tie dangled, and two-toned shoes. He had a thin mustache. Zeb looked at him for a long moment, then smiled. “You’re Ed Street,” he said.

The man tilted his head. “Are you sure?” he asked in a smooth, melodious voice.

“I’m sorry,” said Zeb. “You’re Duke Ellington.”

The men applauded and Duke shook Zeb’s hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr.—?”

“Aberly. Zeb Aberly.”

“Would you like some eggs Benedict? I was just preparing to breakfast.”

He led Zeb into the next car back. A double row of tables covered with white tablecloths was occupied by black men and women eating breakfast. The air was filled with companionable talk and the sound of silverware ringing against china. “Coffee?” asked Street—Zeb was determined to think of him as Street—as they sat. The dogs lay down behind him.

Zeb nodded, thinking, Who’s the crazy person here?

“So this train is going to New Orleans?” asked Zeb.

“If we can make it through,” said Street soberly. “We’re on a mission. Someone there asked for us.”

It was as if a chime went off in Zeb’s head.

“Is her name Marie?” he asked.

Street tilted his head and nodded, his warm luminous eyes curious.

Zeb said, “She asked for me too.”

Zeb dozed intermittently in the club car as the orchestra rehearsed. He supposed it was rehearsing, but after a while it began to seem as if it was more like a creational effort shared by Street and the musicians. Zeb, sitting next to a sax player, watched as a sheet of e-paper registered notes; each chord or note jumped to life as played. Zeb realized that only their own orienting skeleton appeared on each orchestra member’s page; otherwise, the paper would have had to have been huge.

Street was in charge of deciding what was saved and what was tossed. They worked out a movement during the afternoon. He began with a melodic idea, noodled out for them on an electric keyboard, and assigned measures and themes to various players. There was room for solos. It was fascinating to hear the piece evolve. A trombone or clarinet might play ten measures or so and then play the same interlude with two other instruments. Once in a while, someone would laugh in derision or say “C’mon, Duke, you can do better than that!”

After a while, Zeb slept. He dreamed that he was expanding through space in particular, very precise intervals. His body assumed impossible geometries; geometries that violated their own laws of existence; he knew and felt them to be impossible, yet there he was, being them. There was a target; a goal; he could reach it; it was a kinetic progression…

Suddenly he was wide awake and in the midst of rich, powerful blasts of sound. “That’s it!” he yelled. “That’s the way!”

“Right on, man,” the clarinetist sitting next to him, awaiting his next entrance, said. “Jazz is the way!”

They played on. Street was Duke Ellington—suave, worldly-wise orchestra leader, directing; in control.

How did they know? Zeb wondered. How did they know these intervals, these relationships that he had beheld so long ago, when on the snowy bald? Even more fully than Ra, Ellington had woven them into music that held the core of Zeb’s new understanding of the universe; contained the new thought that had reached the Earth twenty years before.

The piece stopped abruptly. Though the train was cool, everyone was sweating. They mopped their faces with handkerchiefs, pulled on bottles of beer, sat back.

“Nance, I want you to come up a little more quickly next time.” Street alone looked cool and unruffled. “I see our guest is awake. How did you like it?”

Zeb, pulled back to the mundane world, managed to say that he liked it indeed.

“It’s embryonic right now, but I think that it’s what Marie wants. I think that it will reach a fuller evolution, once we spend a bit of time in New Orleans. Feel its pulse. She wanted me to incorporate certain information into it having to do with rhythm and tempo; I have found it an intriguing challenge. Not only that, but she has certain themes which she wanted me to express that run parallel to my own development as a composer; themes uniting history with the future. We both agree that it be called Crescent City Rhapsody.”

Street didn’t seem to require any comment from Zeb. He turned back to his podium and started moving e-notes around with something that looked like a pen. Changes appeared on various musicians’ pages. Someone groaned and asked for a break; Street reluctantly agreed to one.

They filed out front and aft, while Zeb watched the flat plain landscape of Alabama roll past.

Zeb started awake as the train screeched to a halt. For seconds, he had the sensation of drifting through space; then, facing backward, he slammed into the airbag his seat back emitted. Instruments flew through the air.

Dazed, he watched as blue-uniformed soldiers paced next to the train. Row on row, they passed and finally stopped and turned sharply toward the train. A woman with short curly hair stared at him impassively, one out of a row that stretched forward and back as far as his angle of vision permitted him to see. Behind her ranged more like her, to a depth of about twenty-five soldiers.

Then in a bizarre wave each soldier turned to the soldier on her west and pressed palm to palm, both hands, as if playing a bizarre game of patty-cake, or the more complex hand chants, such as “A Sailor Went to Sea Sea Sea,” described rather graphically in corrupt form by Ra one night as they lay in bed. As the wave passed eastward, a calmness seemed to settle upon them.

Inside the train, all was pandemonium. Ellington’s cultured soothing voice cut through the chaos. “Sit still, sit still. The train will repel them.”

The man sitting next to Zeb moaned, “It’s the end, man. The living end.” He laughed hysterically.

“Why?” asked Zeb, rubbing the back of his head.

“Look! Look! They’re goddamned zombies.”

“What?”

“They got the power to take this train apart molecule by molecule. Watch! Oh no—”

The line of soldiers advanced toward the train, holding out both hands, which glowed neon-green in patches.

“They do look determined,” said Zeb. “But how can they—”

“You shittin’ me?” The man’s thin brown face turned gray. He choked out another hysterical laugh. “Hell. Might as well spend my last few minutes outlining how we’re going to die. They have… I think that they’re some sort of DNA computer embedded in their hands now. They passed the information up the line just now. It can sense the molecular composition of the shell of the train and turn it into its elements. It will kind of… melt.”

“Really?” asked Zeb. “That’s amazing.” He leaned for great interest. “And then I suppose we too shall be decomposed in like manner?”

“You’re kind of on the edge.” The man sat quietly. “Maybe we’ll get to be like them.” The rest of the car was pandemonium: people using instruments to try and smash open the windows and trying to open emergency exits. But nothing was responding. They were trapped.

Zeb stared into the eyes of the approaching woman, smiled, and waved. For an instant, he thought he saw startlement, an almost imperceptible stumble.

Then blue flames licked the sides of the train.

The line of soldiers shied back. The woman threw one arm up before her eyes. Her hair caught on fire. The rest of the soldiers were rolling on the ground. Those not engulfed in flames were—

Melting.

“No!” shouted Zeb, leaping up and pounding on the window.

“Damn,” said his seatmate. The train began to move forward slowly. Water ran down the windows and steam hissed outside. Zeb imagined it was almost hot enough on its own. Well, that was an exaggeration. The outside temp monitor had only climbed to 99 degrees Fahrenheit so far today, and it was about noon. But the previous day had peaked at 101 degrees. Zeb sat back in the seat, battling the urge to jump up, scream, and try to join the soldiers. At least they weren’t trapped inside this tube of velocity and music.

“Did you see that?” asked his seatmate excitedly. “On their foreheads.”

“Blue letters,” agreed Zeb. “What did they say? ‘IF’? And a star?”

“International Federation,” said the man with anger in his voice. “The star is their icon. Trademark, probably. The new world army. They got the right by treaty to come here. Here! Into the United States! Hell if I know what they’re up to anymore. Dollars to donuts, they don’t either. They just get bigger and bigger. And everybody was saying in Atlanta before we left that there were a lot of zones here.”

“ ‘Zones’?”

“Yeah. Where you been, on the moon?” The man laughed bitterly. “Wish to God I was. They say there’s a bunch of revolutionaries there. Peacenik revolutionaries. Won’t have nothing to do with us. Lucky them. Yeah, zones. Just plagues, that’s all. You never know. Columbus, Ohio, had some kind of James Thurber Plague. Just whatever.” The man began to laugh hysterically again, bending over in his seat until doubled.

Zeb pushed past him and made his way toward the smoking car.

Behind him Ellington was commanding everyone to start again from the top. It was hot and stuffy. Out the window, to the south, smoke billowed from an unseen fire. They rolled through a flat rural land. Zeb saw in the distance a lone white shack as he settled into a smoking chair and ordered a cigarette of particular chemical composition from the table in front of him. After thirty seconds, it rolled down a small chute. Zeb lit it via a red-hot spot on the table, which then vanished. He drew smoke into his lungs and wondered why he was here.