In the Ocean of Night

EPILOGUE 2039

They arrived in time for breakfast.

The snowmobile barked and sputtered to a stop and Mr. Ichino came to the doorway of the cabin, surprised, blinking back a shroud of sleep, for he had expected them much later in the day. They unloaded gifts from the hauling sled and brought them inside, carrying a cloud of busy activity with them that seemed to open the cabin and admit the sheen of morning.

They ate around the narrow table. Beef, well marbled; crisp toast; juice. Mr. Ichino was interested in the reports of rapid progress at Marginis, and they described the decoding of the star map, the now orderly dating sequence that pinned the age of the wreck, the unfolding of astronomical data that was going on. Yet for all this activity they had elected to take a brief Earthside holiday and descend into the waning of winter.

Nikka lingered over coffee. Nigel collected the plates and scraped them and returned to the table, thirsty, and stirred the orange juice, thinking.

He whipped the wooden spoon around several times, rattling it against the sides, and watched a pit form itself in the juice, a parabolic hole at the center. He withdrew the spoon. The smooth pit blunted, began to fill in. He thought of angular momentum passing fluidly from the juice, through friction, into the walls of the urn, then spreading into the hardwood table beneath, seeping outward and downward, descending into the earth itself. The yellow pit rippled and slowed. Flecks of rind whirled in the eddies. Down in the tip of it, in the center of the orbiting juice, a white scum formed. The shiny parabola and the angular momentum died together, dynamical twins. A frothy scum spread into a shallow disc.

We may sometimes see ghosts, Nigel thought, but we never see the angular momentum. Or the past.

“I’m afraid it is a bit nippy in here,” Mr. Ichino said. “Um.” Nikka nodded, sipping coffee. She had not removed her jacket.

“I used the last of my wood last night, and the fire didn’t survive until I got up. I’ll go out and chop some more.”

“No.” Nigel waved him to sit down. “I’ll do it. Need the exercise.”

“You’re sure?” Nikka studied him earnestly. “Certain,” Nigel drawled. “Where is it?” “Around on the south face. Under the trees.” “Think I’ll take a few whacks, then.”

When the door thumped shut behind him Mr. Ichino paused a long moment and then said, “Your message was terse.”

“Sorry,” Nikka said. She turned and watched Nigel through the window until he moved out of sight into the enveloping line of trees.

She settled both elbows on the table and looked at Mr. Ichino. “They still won’t let us transmit classified information. Data, that is. But they can’t very well stop Nigel talking, or me, about what happened. Not now, when we’re Earthside.”

“What did happen? Your telegram—”

“I know, I’m sorry. Nigel asked me to send it. I suppose he thought that was all he could get away with. He was probably right, too.”

“I realize you have never met me before, so you may have some reluctance…”

“Oh, it’s not that. I’m sorry, you think I’m holding back, don’t you?”

“If you cannot—”

“Oh, I can talk. But I can’t tell you very much because I don’t really know. No one does. Except Nigel.”

“Know what?”

“What the alien, well, programming was.” “Programming? Or new data?”

“Well, I call it that. Nigel says that’s not the best way to view it. Any more than mountains are trying to program you into seeing the sky, he says.”

“But your note… you read what I wrote to Nigel about Bigfoot?” Mr. Ichino leaned forward, his gaze centered on her and trying to read her precise mood.

“Yes. The business with that fellow Graves is over?” “I hope so.” He grimaced wryly.

“His men came, you said.”

“Yes. There was nothing to find.”

“They threatened you.”

“Of course.” Mr. Ichino lifted his hands lightly, palms cupped to the ceiling. “They had to. But they went away then.”

“Graves may come back.”

“He may.”

“Helicopters and infrared, sonics—Graves can track the Bigfoot down again.”

“It is possible.”

“You don’t think he will.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“He has lost something. His recovery in the hospital took a long time. He is aging. The burn drained him of his false bravado. Still, there remains…”

“You think he’s afraid of Bigfoot now?”

“He knows they have that same weapon.”

“And they’ll be skittish and cautious.”

“I have confronted him only once since. There was that feeling to him. If he’d kept all that evidence, fine— but to face them again? No.”

There was a muffled thumping at the foot of the door. Nikka leaped up like a coiled wire and flung it open. Nigel paused in midkick, balanced on one foot and with an armload of chopped wood. He clomped into the room, tilted slightly back to take the weight of his load.

“Good job you laid that tarp over the woodpile,” he grunted. “Some snow’s starting to melt. Would be a pity to muck this old wood up—it’s bone dry.”

“I took it from the shacks in the woods around here,” Mr. Ichino said. “This was a retreat during the crisis years.”

“Ah.”

Nigel dumped the wood into its hopper and brushed his sleeves free of fragments of bark. Nikka looked at him questioningly and then turned back to the table, where she spread open the map of the area they had used to find the cabin. She took out a pencil and studied the territory that stretched northward toward Wasco. “You believe they came into this valley because it was a natural route away from the blast?” she said to Mr. Ichino, who nodded.

Nigel smiled.

Too casually she interested herself in the details of geography. He watched her in the growing silence of the cabin as she tucked a strand of her polished black hair back, forming a new layer in the polished cap that was secured at the nape of her neck. With an elegant touch of her middle finger she pushed the pencil deep into the bun of strands, distracted. At this absentminded gesture Nigel’s heart leaped into a high new place.

He arched a speculative eyebrow at Mr. Ichino, who sat with hands folded on the table.

“You can talk to me about it, too,” Nigel said with a warm amusement.

Mr. Ichino said uncertainly, “Ah…I…”

“What happened, I mean.”

“I heard nothing in the news.”

“Infinitesimal chance you would.”

“The NSF hasn’t decided how to handle it,” Nikka said. She folded the map and tucked it away.

“I’ve made it quite precisely clear that they can rumi-nate on handling data, but they can’t handle me,” Nigel said. He put one boot on the table’s bench and leaned on it, arm resting on his raised knee.

“Perhaps because it is so unclear,” Mr. Ichino said delicately.

“True enough.” Nigel smiled. “How did it…”

“Feel?”

“Yes. I suppose that is what I wish to know.”

“At first there was a, a sensation of going away.”

“To something new.”

“In a sense.”

“But now you are back.”

“No. I never have come back.”

“Then you …” Mr. Ichino stopped, puzzled.

“What I knew is scrambled. Or thought I knew.” “And …” Mr. Ichino struggled with some inner inhibition. “… what did you come away with that”—he added hurriedly—“that you can tell us?”

“Oh. You mean facts?” He wiped his hands on his rough trousers and stood erect, leaning backward, peering at the roofbeams and the vaulted space of the cabin above them, at the shadows there. “Delicious facts.”

“Tell him about the aliens,” Nikka said. She had been sitting perfectly still at the table and he saw in her absolute lack of motion a tension she would have to grow through, a private set of concerns he saw now as totally transparent but, for her, entirely necessary, a web of concern for him that, cast wide, enfolded more than she needed to and more than she understood. But that, too, would evaporate with time and leave her bare, the old Nikka, the brisk and urbane, her conversations a smart rattle of wry insights, insider’s jargon, an occasional epigram. The slim and springy Nikka, as he sometimes remembered her, standing in muted phosphor light, hipshot, the cradle of her abdomen tilted, jaunty.

“The aliens,” Nigel said, as if to refresh himself, return himself to this linear world.

“You’ve targeted their origin, I gather,” Mr. Ichino said, prompting, and Nigel wondered at the choice of words. Targeted? That word? For things gone and dead and vacant? He remembered Evers and that fellow, Lewis, with their phrases like combat mission and their ultimately absurd sense of the reality of things, the trunk of departing missiles, the oddly soundless crump as the orange blossom was born, behind the poor puzzled fleeing Snark.

Targeted?

Alien. So alien.

“I found their home star,” he said.

“By figuring out their coordinate system?”

“Yes.”

“How did they find us?”

“A survey craft, I suppose. Automated. They were casting about at random.”

“They couldn’t find anything in the radio spectrum? The same as with us?”

“Yes—it checks with what the Snark said.”

“There were no other—organic races?—alive at the time.”

“Not with technology. So these fellows set out to find what they could—maybe to colonize, who knows? But it didn’t work—and stumbled on us.”

“Created the Bigfoot.”

“No. Made use of him. But that didn’t work very well, either, I gather.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. But Bigfoot was a forerunner, anyway.” “Of what?”

“Of us,” Nigel said, surprised. “We’re the point, you see.”

“The… programming?”

“Ah.” Nigel chuckled, leaned over and put his arm around Nikka. “I see you’ve been talking to my little friend, here. Programming—it misses the whole thing.”

“Why did they do it?” Mr. Ichino narrowed his eyes, as though at a loss.

“The—what did Snark say?—the universe of essences. Organic life can have it, machines can’t. The aliens came to be sure we got it, in time for the—well, the Aquila thing. Whatever’s moving toward us.”

“They knew about it then!” Mr. Ichino rapped a knuckle on the hardwood finish. “When you sent me that star chart I wondered if you’d gone off entirely.”

Nigel gave him a crinkling of the eyes, a merry smile. “How are you sure I haven’t?”

To the look of momentary consternation on Mr. Ichino’s face Nigel gave a barking laugh. “No, no, old friend—I haven’t. What has happened to me I can’t quite say.”

“You seem different.”

“I am different.”

“And the Marginis wreck—they came to give us this? For defense?”

“I don’t know,” Nigel said. “You mustn’t think I understand everything. They came for contact, knowing about Aquila. Knowing all organic life is fragile. But hoping there was some kinship, yes.”

“And something stopped them.”

“Themselves, I expect.” Nigel sighed, shifted his feet, stood with hands in hip pockets. “War. Wasco had weapons. There was probably some conflict within them that eventually caused all that. Why bring nuclear death from the stars?”

“A defense against Aquila?”

“Maybe. Or against some other faction of themselves.”

“We can find that out, perhaps.”

“Can we? I wonder. And anyway—who cares? The causes are dead—we have only the results.”

“The results?”

Mr. Ichino frowned and Nikka lifted her head in interest. The chill of the room had dulled as the diffuse glow of the sun sent shafts of light through the two southern windows. Nigel relaxed. He now needed to be out of this place, beyond this unsatisfying round of explanations, so he tried to compress it.

“It’s really a lot of learned tricks, you know, our past. We learned pair bonding, social mechanisms. Then big game hunting. When that ran out—all planets are finite— there was agriculture. From that came technology, computers, an information rate to match our storage rate. But the world isn’t just that—there’s where the computer civilizations run aground. They’re right, really—we are unstable. Because there’s a tension in us that comes out of how we evolved. Computers don’t evolve, they’re developed. Planned—to be certain, safe, secure. That’s the way they stay, if they survive the suicides of their organic forefathers. But the thing in Aquila is a computer society that opted for the preemptive strike—to stop organic forms before they can spread among the stars, find the domesticated computer worlds, and inevitably destroy them.”

Nigel paused. The cabin held an airless expectancy. “Then we …” Mr. Ichino began.

“We have to become better than we are,” Nigel said. “But, hell, that’s really not it. We can have more power than that blundering bunch of robots in Aquila. By entering into …” Nigel laughed, shrugging. “You’ll see it, you will. The universe of essences. The place where subjects and objects dissolve.”

“The New Sons …” Nikka began. “They talk about…”

Nigel raised his hands, chuckled. “They’re the flip side of an old record—fear of death plus the accumulation of things.”

He turned and looked at the yawning fireplace. “We need more wood,” he said.

As he feels in his pocket for his gloves he finds a coin. Elated, he tosses it up, carving the air. He catches it between his fingers adroitly and lifts it, a brassy circle. The coin, held to the yellowing sun, eclipses it. Perspective defies the innate order. The handiwork of man blinds even this awesome furnace that hangs in the sky.

Nikka said, when the cabin door closed behind him, “What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“You knew him before. Has he changed?”

“Of course.”

“He says he can’t really communicate it.”

“No one has ever been able to.”

She frowned. “I don’t follow.”

“When I knew him before there was a tension. That’s gone now,” Mr. Ichino said. “Before, he was always looking for something. Some answer.”

“Has he found it?”

Mr. Ichino’s face relaxed, became smooth and unwrinkled about the eyes.

“I think he has found that the looking is better than the finding,” he said.

The frosted land yields itself to him, a clear washed tapestry. He exhales a cloud of smoke into it. Snow crunches, crisp air cuts in his throat, joyful singing love forever, leaping soaring flying dying, he cracks the crusted snow at every footfall, sinking into the cottony embrace below, the supple world obligingly lowering him to itself at the completion of each step, homeward, toward the center of the forgiving earth.

trickle of stinging warm sweat down his wrinkled neck the sun burning behind the veiled sky

a vast blue ocean alive with flapping bird life

—pours over and through him—

“I’m worried for him,” Nikka said. Her knotted hands on the table trembled.

“Don’t be,” Mr. Ichino said. “You’ve already told me that Nigel has done things no one else could fathom. He decoded the star chart. He can see into the patterns that others—”

“Yes, yes. If I could only be sure he is all right.” “You know, Nikka, when I was a boy I had a two-stroke scooter. My parents gave it to me. I needed it to get to school.”

“Yes?”

“There is a point to this.” He put out a comforting hand to her. Through the hazed window he saw Nigel hefting the ax and plodding through the deep late-winter snow toward the wood pile. The square window framed it like a depthless Sumaro woodblock print.

“I waited a week before I used it,” he went on. “I was that afraid of the thing. It had 150 cc’s and I was very surprised when I jumped on the kick starter and it chugged into life, the first time. I jumped on and rode proudly up and down my home street, waving at my parents, waving at my neighbors. Then the engine died. I couldn’t restart it for the life of me. I had to wheel it home.”

He lifts the ax and brings it down swack clean and true biting into the sectioned log. The wood splinters, splits, and Nigel feels his taut muscles come to completion in the act, converging on the downward curve of his back as he follows through and the blade bites deep toward the singing earth, pins him loving to the day.

It melts.

And he stands on the high shelf, a ledge of folded and grainy rock. Watches the pounding dance of hairy forms in the valley below as the booming cadence coils up to him enfolding him and at once he dances, splitting wood with a glinting piercing ax and coming down into a rhythmic hammering of leaping soaring flying dying, primor-dial plane of wood crashing down as he feels in this one passing instant the connection of the act and the origin of that tensing pleasure at sheer physical work, the joy of movement—

—he lifts the ax, the thunk of yielding wood still in his ears and he is into another instant—

It melts.

“So I checked to be sure fuel was reaching the carburetor and the spark plug was working okay. I cleaned the jets and kicked the starter and she took off again, with a nice sputtering roar. So obviously I’d gotten a piece of fluff, from a cleaning rag or something, into a narrow fuel passage.”

Nikka nodded.

“So I took her out again and after about two minutes she sputtered and coughed and stopped again.”

—and yet, and yet he sees that this howling dance and muscular ecstasy is a piece but not all that he is and drawing back on the ax, feeling it loft high into the gravitational potential well of the consuming earth he remembers work of long ago in remote, gray England, erewhonderful isle, of flexing rhythms set up amid the coal gangs who loaded tan sacks of it on chilly bleak mornings, a thin dusting of snow on the immense black piles of coal being gnawed by trucks and men, Nigel working for money alone, to buy him the rare serenity of hours at home, warm and reading in the yellowish light as the brittle mathematics unfolded before him, a fresh tongue with a promise of lifting him up into a new continent of Euclidean joy, the transcendent wedding of economical and clean thought to the underlying rhythms of the world, distilling order from the rough jumble of life, yet in that spinning instant to merge with life, not split the world into subject and object but to clasp it, merge, the ax hyperbolically propelled by the atoms of skin on his hands as they sink into the molecular lattice of the wooden handle, all essences extracted out of the same finespun stuff, no interface, the old dualities lapping aimlessly at the granite mass of the yea verily one self-consistent mathematical solution that gives the universe, joyful singing love forever, and through this lens he sees the desert, the Snark riding back behind his pressing eyes and opening him to a fraction of this but poor dim dead Snark not merging it, not simmering in it, no, only frags, splinters knifing through the sea of categories that was the old Boojum Snark and pinned it forever to the pigeonholed world of subjectobjectlivingdying—

“I had a similar thing once,” Nikka said. “Did you check for water in the fuel?”

Mr. Ichino nodded and lifted his lukewarm cup, the coffee swaying like a black coin within it. “I rechecked everything and then set her against the alley wall and fired her up. She ran smoothly for as long as I’d wait. So I jumped on and went two blocks and she throttled down and died on me again.”

“Irritating.”

“Yes. There’s that old joke—‘Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.’ So did this.”

“You looked for an intermittent electrical fault?” “Yes, all the conventional diagnostics.”

“And?”

“It wasn’t any of them.”

—yet Snark had a piece of it, they all had a sliver of detail seven blind men and a melting elephant Snark must’ve known in ancient ferrite cores that he/it/she came from the computer civilizations that smashed the Icarus vessel, broke the eggshell now lying in Marginis, cut off that attempt to transfer knowledge to the beings that would/could become man. Those ancient living beings who made the Marginis wreck and Icarus—flitting image of reptiles, of gleaming claws that closed like hands—did they collapse into war? Were their home worlds destroyed by the machine intelligences? Life swarmed in the galaxy. The computer civilizations could not wipe out all biospheres, they must’ve triggered an inherent instability, something that reached to this outpost swinging around Sol and snuffed out Icarus, immense starship, ponderous and certain, and the Marginis wreck, all when the reptiles were so close, so near to some connection with Bigfoot. So the machine societies knew the ancient reptilian call signals, felt the tremor that the Icarus hulk spewed out, its death rattle triggered by bumbling Nigel, Snark arrowing in on the electromagnetic scream, its circuits only numbly remembering what to look for, perhaps a dim wanting to erase Icarus and the moon wreck, but the Snark was confused deep within, whimpering in that great night that enclosed it, a wolf let in from the cold swinging in for a pass by the moon to drop a fusion capsule, make a fresh sun bloom over Marginis if the wreck responded, but then unable to approach, Nigel a gnat in its eye, Nigel dumb to eternity washing up a gray sea on the lunar shore—

He pauses. Sinks the blade into a securing log and turns, walks to the bare hillside nearby, lungs whooshing the dry air, legs clenching snow crunching prickly pine scent tickling at his nose as enameled light flickers through tall evergreens, trees stretched tall by cruel competition, a thin whisper of a breeze churning them and stirring a tiny whirlwind a few meters away, a circular presence outlined by its cargo of whirled bits, dirt, flakes, a swirl of ice. It sucked at the ground and he entered it, felt the brush of its wind and by so measuring its tiny world destroyed it, churned it forever into minor eddies, the circle consumed and reborn.

At the brow of the hill he felt the full chilling lance of the wind and abruptly, across the crystal gap of the valley, caught a microscopic movement in a far clearing, a dark dot framed in the ellipse of trees, the speck now freezing as he watched, head turning, the two of them pinned to each other along the line of sight as across the millennia an eternal wash of light encased them and fleeting dabs of perception spattered over him, of rank fresh clods of dirt on forest floors, of hymns sung below the edge of human hearing amid the cathedral trees, a grunting ample life plucked from the flooding embracing forest, and through it the curve of the newborn moon speaking of other underlying senses, the same framing order as darted into being along the descending parabolic lines of a tossed stone, of flickering emerging structure that, seen for an instant, ached inside and thrust Bigfoot forward into man, and as this spark passed between them the shaggy troubled dot raised a hand, hesitantly groping upward in the layered air and paused, the timid fears seeping back into the gesture, for one suspended moment, the hand came down and the old being skittered away, angling into the sheltering tree line, Nigel’s filmed eyes following the shadow and knowing this new facet and face of the world—

—which, now absorbed and altering him— —melted—

“In time I eventually understood,” Mr. Ichino said. “The seat had springs under it for cushioning. The springs were too soft. They let the seat ride down too far. The rubber fuel line was under it, on top of the carburetor. By sitting on the seat, I pressed the fuel line down and kinked it off, eventually.”

“With no fuel the cycle stopped,” Nikka concluded. “Yes. There wasn’t anything wrong with the cycle itself—only in my relation to it.”

Nikka furrowed her brow.

“The same is true of the way most of us look at the world,” Mr. Ichino went on. “We can’t solve problems because we are disconnected from the world, always manipulating it as though we were using tongs to stir a fire.”

“And you think what’s happened to Nigel…”

“It’s no accident that he has done so much original work at the Marginis wreck. He has learned to merge with the cycle.”

—he makes his way back to the woodpile, rough fabric of his work clothes rub and scratch at his skin, and judges that he has been right about the chattering in the sky, it swoops closer now angling downslope toward the valleyward face where the bristling trees thin and now as he turns his head it looms over the ridgeline, tilted slightly forward moving at top speed to gain surprise, a plump gorged shape in a looping descending gyre now banking into a smoothed cycloid as Nigel stamps through clinging snow toward the clearing pressing down tightly after breathing in the brisk air that binds and combines, then whoosh, out, loosens and completes.

The hammering sound from above broke through their words. Nikka sprang up and whirled about, seeking its source. Mr. Ichino reached the window first. In the rectangular framing he picked out the whirring dot, a point that seemed like an angry fly trapped in a box as it lowered and was swallowed by the tree line.

“Graves,” he said. “He has come back. There is another man with him.”

Nikka bit her lip. They began to struggle into their coats.

Nigel reaches the clearing, an upward tunnel in a lapping sea of trees, he steps from the evergreen shelter into the open tube of air that connects earth to the chattering voice above, cranes his neck back and imagines how Big-foot saw it, a mad beating of spinning wings, Graves firing down from the hovering fury, the remnant band scattering in panic, eyes wide, Graves and machine grinding after them above the densely packed trees until he could no longer see them, then Graves following on foot yes and Nigel feels something tick over inside him as the whirring rotors near and the shiny skin of metal splits to show its maw, a man appearing at the mouth and jumping in one fluid motion into the snow, an arm coming up stiffly as his knees bend with impact, arm and rifle together swiveling left right, catching sight of Nigel, coming around, the man running forward in a crouch beneath the slowing blades whose shadows fan, fan across him and Nigel stops, sensing something more as another figure appears from behind the fat sheen of the copter, older man bundled against the cold stepping into view while the young man stalks forward holding the rifle easily, his smooth features focused on the line that connects the rifle bore to Nigel’s chest, heavy black eyebrows knotted in concentration, boots squeaking in the compacted snow “Keep it on ’im” as the older man strides closer. “He’s not the one but, I dunno—” grizzled face twisted in puzzlement, stops and hands on hips studies Nigel “Seem to know this fella from som’ere” as Nigel feels himself piercing the sky in readiness, feet rooted to the earth so he hangs threadlike through the space between “maybe Ichino called him in to” the wand of the rifle drifting in slow circles as the younger man’s face flushes with excited angry patches, hand pressing at the steelblue metal to coax roaring life from it “help him out” rotors grinding to a stop “Look fella, aren’t you a little old to be foolin’ aroun’ out here, you and your friend Ichino? Might be nice if you’d just kinda” Nigel catching the first shred of a distant exclamation, Nikka’s thin high voice, he says “Old? I’ve already outlived Mozart and Anne Frank, yes, but we’re all old here” as he sees the young man’s next step will take him within range but now triangulates the position of the silvery voice behind him and senses that if the rifle spoke as he snatched it the bullet would go in that direction, toward the cabin, so slides back into breathing, breathing and being breathed, Graves shaking his head grimacing “You’re not gonna talk your—hey—”

Nikka and Mr. Ichino came around the stand of evergreens together and Graves caught sight of them. They stopped, puffing clouds, and surveyed the clearing. When Mr. Ichino noticed the rifle his first impulse was to leap back into the shelter of the trees, but at that instant Graves shouted brusquely, “Hey, you two. Come over here.” A pause. “No foolin’ aroun’, now.” He glanced at Nikka, and she at him. Slowly they walked the last fifty meters to where Graves and a sallow-faced man stood confronting Nigel. The younger man appeared edgy and yet he did not move jerkily. Rather, he kept the rifle weaving in a steady progression from Nigel to Nikka to Ichino and back. Ichino recognized this as a dangerous pattern for them all, should one of the three make an unexpected move while the rifle was pointed elsewhere; a reflex yank of the trigger could—

“I didn’t get much satisfaction last time I was here,” Graves said, hands still on hips. “So I brought a little persuasion. I know you’ve got that film of mine.”

“I don’t—” Ichino began.

“No lyin’ now.”

“I destroyed it, as I told you.”

“You’re gonna tell.”

“There is nothing—”

as though sprung from nowhere feelings and desires forked like summer lightning across the unmoving vault of him and to dispel them growing like fresh corn he entered into mersion with them, sucked them into himself to see them for what they were and integrated the flickering so that it became a drowsy blur which faded into the continuing murmur of the world, a place absolutely blank and waiting for each moment to write upon it, time like water molding itself to event “—nothing—” as Graves takes a step forward and his arm comes up, hand growing rigid in flight to crack across Ichino’s face backhanded, the small man jerking backward at the last moment and taking it full on the left cheek, feet losing their purchase and the body turning as it falls to cushion the impact, white crystals leaping up where it broke the crusted snow and Graves following through, head turned to watch Ichino’s fall, the young man keeping the rifle steady on Nigel as the moment passes Nikka gasps Nigel sees the rifleman turn steady and on guard leaving no opening

Mr. Ichino squinted up at Graves and tasted blood.

“Y’know, you think I’m so dumb I don’t see what’s goin’ on here. You and your”—casual wave—“friends here are gonna make a bundle outta this. That’s what you’re thinkin’, isn’t it? Or else you figure these things that damn near killed me deserve to live.” Graves’s pinched face seemed to fill the sky above him.

“They do. Please try to understand. I simply do not want them destroyed by the attention you would bring. In time they can be studied. But not by the methods you will bring about.”

Graves’s voice narrowed to a rasp. “You’re lyin’ again.”

time squeezes down to infinitesimal frozen moments, the rifle bears to the left as Ichino struggles up to lean on one hand braced behind him, the movement covered and Graves stepping back making a flicking gesture with a finger to the other man, the rifle butt rising as the sight focuses on Ichino’s left kneecap and the clearing is cloaked in layers of filled silence, waiting waiting “I think you’re in the wrong fairy tale” Nigel says for distraction, the first word beginning to register on the trigger finger which clenches slightly in the clear light, the man bracing his bones working like a lattice of calcium rods each muscle straining, as Nigel whips his right foot up into the man’s elbow feeling his bootheel catch the tip as his weight comes forward, the man’s hands clench at the sacred metal and momentum collapses his form, breath whistling from him through dry pipes as the rifle deflects in a scatter of light, Nigel’s heel slipping from the elbow and onto the gleaming brown wooden rifle stock as the man’s stem of a neck jerks to the side and his hands clutch for a last redeeming moment with the trigger which lurches back under the slipping finger and the muzzle spits a clap of bright noise into the crystalline space exhaling a blue cloud toward the trampled snow, burying a node of lead in the receiving earth

By the time Mr. Ichino had scrambled to his feet Nigel had the rifle and Graves was backing away, blinking, palms cupped toward Nigel.

The younger man was still face down in the snow, where he had fallen after Nikka tripped him. If she had not leaped forward, Nigel might not have had time to recover the rifle. Nigel cradled the weapon now, worked the bolt and left the breech open. The man got up on his hands and knees in the snow and looked around him, somewhat dazed, as though still unable to accept where he was. No one had spoken.

“I’d like a word,” Nigel said to Graves. He took the man by the arm and led him off a few meters.

They spoke, their words inaudible. Mr. Ichino watched Nigel, wondering at a facet he could not quite define. There was no hint of tension in Nigel, and in his relaxed manner was the very essence of his power. When Graves turned back from the conversation, Ichino was shocked by the change in the man’s expression. There was a new calm in the heavy-lidded eyes and at the same time the face carried a distant sadness, as though Graves had learned something he would rather have not known. Mr. Ichino knew they would not meet again. Nigel clapped the man on the back. Graves spoke haltingly to the younger man and together they trudged back to the copter. They climbed aboard and in a moment the rotors began to turn.

loved the lifting sweep as a misty dust of snow sprang up beneath the machine like chiming crystals attempting to fly anew—farewell—this unflagging energy of the mind he loved the most as each sense in turn made a fresh grab at the greased pig which was the world even as he waves upward at the veiled white faces receding, his gesture a line scratched across the space between them, Ichino beginning to speak but Nigel cutting him off saying no, he has work to finish, seeing though that later they would chew over this moment by a crisp fireside, crunching popcorn, drinking heated cider, for this instant it would be like a stomach irked by spent whiskey, no, later was soon enough and all in good solvent time smoothing the edges of events he leans back into the bracing air and takes the rifle by its long and ignorant snout flings it up butt cleaving the jeweled nitrogen into the trees where thunk it strikes an encrusted trunk deadening the sound, this motion releasing a merry oil that spreads across the faces of Nikka Ichino rising in concert to watch the stupid tube on its parabola its crash punctuating an end to their worry, Ichino turning to watch the dwindling copter as it thrashes through the brightening air Nigel murmuring the world sinking away as he listens to the fading chop with half an ear and a muzzy connection forms, a dawning realization humming, he feels the sentence leave him and in the saying knows it for the first time “Graves made his future before he came here” for indeed yes the man was free had been free the sum was his

“—before he came here,” made Mr. Ichino turn, in the midst of framing his thanks, turn and find the stirring dot as it skated over the tree tops toward the ridge. The puffy clouds had lifted and sunlight streamed fitfully through them. As the copter neared the ridge it entered a blade of sunlight. Tilting, a facet of its slick skin caught the light and there was an odd optical effect, a brilliant yellow twinkling. Mr. Ichino saw a burning spark leap up from the trees and envelop the copter in a sputtering orange globe. He blinked and the vision went away, leaving only a fuzzed afterimage on his retina. The copter was gone. He listened for its dull clatter. Nothing was audible above the sighing of wind in tree tops. Had the copter slipped over the ridgeline that quickly? He could not tell. He turned to ask Nigel but the other man had already.

above all Graves’s monomaniac insistence, the whole laughable business with the rifle, Graves’s last meeting with Bigfoot an eternal instant ago, recalled the poor dear desk calculator civilizations cowering up there amid the stars, afraid to use radio for fear the young organic races will seek them out and rip them up for scrap iron, yet even a desk calculator can turn vicious when cornered, destroy the suckling animal cultures before they develop, ah what an old sod of a galaxy this was pissing away its energy a kilobuck per nanosecond like poor gone Graves, right action in part but wrong sense of the warp of things, no feel for the joyful lofting song all this meant, so much like the old dimly remembered Nigel, so tied to events by ropes of care each sank him tugging him below the waves, Alexandria Snark dear dead Dad, yes Nigel sees how he felt that way but now he slaps his pockets in mock surprise, brings up his hands spread wide to the world, empty, his past pilfered from him, free of the baggage of what he was, it melts he laughs free and awash in this universe of essences and ready for Aquila yes he laughs—

As the two came back into the warm cabin, their boots making loud thumps in the room as they stamped away the snow, Nikka said, “I doubt you’ll be seeing more of that one.”

“No. Everyone learns from experience,” Mr. Ichino replied, thinking of Bigfoot. He went over to the window and saw Nigel through the square Western window. The crosshair of the four panes centered on him for a moment. Beyond Nigel was the opening bowl of the sky and the sun still hiding behind patches of haze. Nigel, hefting his ax, moved at the center of a round universe.

lungs panting with the effort he pauses and looks back toward the crosshair window and sees it as blowing him out, the inverse of the young lad’s leaden shot, out into a billowing swack the blade bites into a rotten seam, wood frags showering up around him tumbling faceted a crash of crystal orbiting asteroids carving the cold, muscles clenching melting, heels biting the compacted snow as earth holds him in its fierce ageless grip of which he himself is a part, he has his own gravitational field, and thoughts flit like summer lightning through the streaming wash of feelings that float him through each moment, melting. Above was the galaxy, a swarm of white bees, each an infinite structure of its own, a spinning discus slicing space with its own definition. Nigel unable to see who threw the discus and uncaring, for there was enough here at the fragile axis of earth, each new truth melting into the old as their fraction of the world flowed through him, le’s slide out of here one of these nights as continents butted against each other an’ get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns chopping wood, trisecting Andromeda over the territory Oregon to Aquila for a couple of weeks or two all moments going, as he touched them, to smash and scatteration and I says, all right, that suits me—

And it melts “Nigel!” Nikka’s voice comes. “Have some more coffee.”

the cabin steaming melting with renewal

“Of course,” Nigel calls. “I’ll be there.”

Eternally, it melts yes he turns and yes it melts and he falls through it melting and turning yes and yes eternally, it melts